We all try to make sense life, what the meaning of life is, asking what is my purpose here, what is a good life, at least for myself?  And we all seem to get one shot at this life, one chance to take all that we are and invest it into our best answers to those questions.  At this time in history, and even when I was younger (I know it was some time ago), life seems about competition, survival of the fittest, and doing to others before others do it to you. Or as my gentle white haired grandma used to say, ‘take care of yourself grandson, because in this life I’ve learned no-one else will’.

It’s not that we don’t want life to be about more than this, it’s just that in our fast paced consumer world, being successful, getting ahead, looking out for yourself, is what our friends and family and so often we default to.  And even if you wanted to, you can’t jam the system, there is no way to opt out of the juggernaut for getting ahead in life. It’s the way things are, so either drop out, or get stuck in.

And the effort and investment to get ahead, is kept alive and made worth while by the prize of what we think life is about, maybe a great career, great family, holidays, living somewhere cool, and retiring early.  Where we live, what job we do and what relationships we have reveal the answers to what we really think the meaning and purpose of life is about, they are the real investments we are making, daily with all we are.  It’s our life, we are kings of our kingdom with our decision and choices, as we decide who and what we are, and what we bring into our lives, as we make a life.

Jesus was someone who understood what life was about, and decided to invest his life very differently. Instead of getting ahead, he said he had come to serve others, that his investment was into a different reality and economy, which he called ‘The Kingdom of God’. That life, this life was about investing all we have, time, energy and money, our heart, soul, body and mind in a different reality. He said that jobs, where we live and relationships are very important, we’ve got that part right, but how we invest ourselves for those aspects of life is very different.

He even told us not to worry about all these things, that the reason we worry is because we fear losing things we shouldn’t be putting our heart and soul into in the first place.  And he did more than talk about this new reality, he lived it.  Every day, every breath, every step, he invested his life in helping others see that life was about knowing God, and entering into the plans God has for us. Using our gifts, and skills, passions and interest to invest in God’s economy.  And he said that if we do that, God will give the best life we could ever have.  And he said that if we practice this life investment, our lives will continue, after death into eternity.  Jesus brought a warning too, reminding us to take care.  That where we invest our lives determines who we become now and forever, so choose wisely.

Jesus invitation seems so impossible, it was as impossible 2,000 years ago as much as it is now.  In fact people intent on investing in a way of life much like ours today, eventually put him on a cross and killed him. And as they looked at him dying with no friends, no job, no career, no success, and no status they asked him, ‘where is your God and this way of life now’?

I was 17 the first time someone explained to me who Jesu was and is, and why it mattered, and maybe if I tell you what that friend told me, it will sum up what I’m trying to say here?  My friend said that, investing my life in Jesus, taking all that I am and giving it to Him, might not make my life easier, in fact in lots of ways it would be much harder.  But he promised me that, I would have something to live for and something to die for, that there wouldn’t be a day when I wouldn’t know meaning, adventure and purpose.

I chose to make that investment, and 24 years later, I have experienced the most amazing life, with all of that and more.  The depth and richness of discovering who I am, the most amazing experience of life with others, as I daily try to invest all I have in Him, has been stunning.  I’d love to tell you more about that sometime. Choosing Jesus was the best investment I ever made with my life.  Where are you investing yours?

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Jason Clark (www.deepchurch.org.uk) is British, recently turned 40, and lives on the SW edge of London, UK. He has three teenage kids, and is celebrating 20 years of marriage to Bev later this year. He is midway through a PhD in theology at Kings College London, holds a D.Min from George Fox Seminary, and is the senior pastor of a Vineyard church that he started with his Bev 13 years ago, having been involved in Vineyard churches for 23 years in total.

Technorati Tags: 3 Questions About Jesus, Gospel, Jason Clark, Stories

I was in front of my home taking down twinkle lights one year just after Christmas when I saw a young girl walking down the street towards me. She was too young to be walking alone and I noticed tears streaming down her cheeks. I ask if she needed anything two times. And two times she turned me down. She paused at the end of my driveway and I asked a third time. This time she responded with a yes. She used my phone to call someone to come get her.  Over the next hour I learned that she had run away from home the night before. Then my door bell rang. A man stood desperate at my front door. He was singularly focused, “where is my daughter!” I invited him in and watched as the two were reunited. I stood in the kitchen, giving them space and trying to keep myself composed as I was invited into this very intimate event of a relationship being restored. It was beautiful and powerful.

A friend had an old piece of furniture. It was cracked, paint was peeling and it was literally falling apart at the hinges. He didn’t see the dilapidated mess which I saw, he saw what it was originally designed to be. Over the next few months he spent hours restoring this piece of furniture. He poured over it with love, sweat and patience. Then one day I got the call, he had finished. I stopped by his home and before me was a beautiful, masterpiece. The once old chest of drawers was fully restored to its original design and it was beautiful.

Both of these stories speak of Jesus. He restores broken relationships. He restores people, like my friend restored that chest of drawers, He restores us to our original design. He restores us in our misguided beliefs and He constantly is making old things new again. Jesus, He is the one who brings restoration to this planet and to all people everywhere and His restoration is perfect and we, you and I get to share in it. It is powerful and beautiful and it constantly invites others into restoration as well.

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Cari lives in downtown San Diego, Ca where she founded The 11:29 Project. An initiative that seeks to connect people to the rest and restoration found in Jesus and advocates for the marginalized. She blogs a carijenkins.wordpress.com.

Technorati Tags: 3 Questions About Jesus, Cari Jenkins, Gospel, Jesus Christ, Stories

I kicked off the series with last week’s installment. This week’s guest is Jesse Schroeder.
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Jesus is a person I know. If I tried to describe him, I would fail to capture what I know. Instead, I’m going to share some events in which I’ve connected with Jesus. My hunch is that maybe you’ve connected with Jesus too.

In high school, I was really angry. My questions were bigger than any proposed solutions. But “something” from “somewhere” compelled me to “believe” that Jesus is real, and that he loves me.

Later in life, when I became a teacher, I would talk with my students about their lives, and sometimes I would pray for them. Jesus was with us, and in fact some of the words I would say were actually coming from him, not me.

Sometimes my students and I would spend a Saturday cooking breakfast and playing games with neighborhood kids. If I would step back and look around the room at the smiling faces and the running feet – I could see and hear Jesus.

Before she turned 18, one my students became pregnant. She decided to keep the baby, and I was at the hospital when Landon was born. Jesus was there too.

I visit Guatemala every year. I meet children, parents, pastors and workers. We mix concrete, build homes, sing songs, and share meals. Jesus is definitely there with us too.

Most weeks, I meet with a small group of friends and we talk about life, share questions about God, and ways we can try to help each other. I definitely feel Jesus when we get together.

I’ve had many experiences with Jesus, but I will tell you about only one more. One night in college, I told Jesus that he had to show me that he was real. The next evening, I went to church, and for an hour Jesus and I talked about life. There was never another doubt that Jesus is a real person who is sharing life with me.

That’s just a few. Maybe some of those stories sounded familiar to you. I can’t describe him very well, but I know I’ve lived my life with Jesus.

_______________________________________________________

Jesse Schroeder is a teacher who lives in the Columbus, Ohio area with his wife Kel. He has been involved with the Central Ohio Emergent Cohort since 2007 and blogs at Moving Away From the Mirrors.

Technorati Tags: 3 Questions About Jesus, Jesse Schroeder, Jesus Christ

One obvious aspect of gender tension in the Church is the prejudice toward men in roles of authority. I was raised in a church grounded in a fundamentalist-leaning hermeneutic. Hence, high levels of leadership – pastoral position, adult teaching positions, eldership, board members – were reserved for men. This mantle of authority trickled down the hierarchical ladder to the family as well. Men were taught to be the “spiritual leaders” of their households and women were taught to be generally supportive and submissive. In my experience this is usually perceived to mean that, ideally, the man should be the initiator and director of the spiritual activities of the home and that all family business decisions are ultimately made by the husband. (Neither of these ideas has any grounding in biblical teaching or actual reality.)

In Pentecostal churches I observed more flexibility – women commonly operated in “prophetic” roles, and, less commonly in preaching roles, but typically were still instructed to defer to their husbands in matters of governance in church and the home. Even in mainline churches where women have been ordained for many years I’ve observed a kind of “lame duck” status for a woman pastors. One woman I know pastors a Methodist church in Ohio and her congregation largely ignores her attempts to lead. While it’s extremely difficult to separate her frustration from other factors – such as the culture of Methodist churches, the personality of that particular church, and the tendency of older congregations to resist change – she herself suspects her difficulties are due partly to gender bias.

One last example: My wife is on staff at a Jewish retirement community where the rabbi is a woman and she has observed similar tensions.

Let’s face it: the single greatest obstacle to gender barriers between men and women in churches is the Bible. Ancient scripture clearly reflects a traditional patriarchal culture – and by “patriarchy” I mean male dominance by excluding women from the seats of power through various means of force (shame, restriction from education, exclusion from property ownership, restriction from representation, and, of course, violence). Moreover, while biblical attitudes toward women may be relatively liberating (compared to the beliefs of their day), compared to Modern social mores they are clearly archaic. It does not help to pretend this isn’t so.

I think a difficult yet important question for Postmodern Christians is this: Is everything affirmed in the bible universally transcendent, or is scripture (like its authors) to some extent captive to the context in which it was formed? I’m convinced of the latter.

What are some of the gender tensions you’ve noticed in churches? How does the Bible help or hurt in these situations? How do you decide which attitudes and postures affirmed in scripture are universal and culturally transcendent, and how do you decide which are culturally-bound?

Technorati Tags: Authority, Gender, Scripture, Sexuality, The Bible

Jesus is the one true God who came to suffer and die in your place so you might avoid the eternal conscious torment of hell, and to think any other way about Jesus is to resign yourself to condemnation.

I’m sure each of those preachers would be delighted to know that’s what I heard. However, not only does this narrow message contain propositions that are legitimately debated in Christianity, it neglects important nuances about the teaching and work of Jesus and ignores the massive implications of Christ as the inaugurated future of hope and redemption.

Most of all, though, the way it was presented transformed the gospel from a message of liberation to one of fear and escape. Accordingly, Jesus ceases to be the person who empowers humanity to finally live into its incredible promise as the image of God, and becomes the ultimate conqueror who puts you in your place…because he loves you.

There were other ways this parochialism was constantly reinforced:

• Jesus is coming back as a “dominant and domineering” savior who will wipe out his enemies
• If you do not have a strong man preaching this message to you every week then you are in danger of failing in the Christian life and should find a new church
• If you cease to believe this message then you demonstrate you never really knew God in the first place and were always bound for hell
• If you are a woman, showing too much of your body in public is a significant betrayal of your duty to represent Jesus
• “Right doctrine is the litmus test for your life”
• God’s wrath is not only satisfied by death, but by suffering too
• People who reject penal substitution and the divinity of Christ are among the most radical and perverse members of society. L. Ron Hubbard was quoted as an example, and immediately described as, “…a man who exhibited many of the markers of pedophilia.”
• You must be able to understand and agree with an abstract concept of God (the Trinity) and a specific technical role for Jesus (penal substitutionary atonement) to be saved from hell: “You can get [the question about who Jesus is] nearly right and still end up in hell.”

Consider what kind of affect these statements might have on someone who is deeply afraid of disapproval and rejection. Or, consider how appealing they might seem to someone seeking to dominate or control others.

Preached this way, Christ and Christianity become a powerful means of keeping people in their place. This has its advantages. Forming a community around fear and guilt creates tremendous bonds among its members, even between those who are in control and those who are being controlled. The disadvantage is that it requires force and hostility to maintain, which takes its toll on the members and sets your community at odds with other communities.

During my time at the conference I read Peter Block’s book Community, and while I can’t endorse everything in it, he makes some insightful and helpful observations:

[Robert Putnam and Lewis Feldstein in their book Better Together] distinguish between “bonding” and “bridging” social capital. Bonding social capital are networks that are inward looking, composed of people of like mind. Other social networks encompass different types of people and tend to be outward looking – bridging social capital [...] As Putnam and Feldstein put it, “A society that has only bonding social capital will…be segregated into mutually hostile camps.”

Block goes on to insightfully point out that the only way to maintain this sort of bonding community is through retribution, law, and force.

At every level of society we live in the landscape of retribution. The retributive community is sustained by several aspects of the modern community conversation [...] the marketing of fear and fault, gravitation toward more laws and oversight, an obsession with romanticized leadership, marginalizing hope and possibility, and devaluing associational life [freely chosen voluntary associations] to the point of invisibility.

That’s fundamentalism in a nutshell.

The gospel, on the other hand, is about Christ’s eradication of barriers. Now, the Resolved preachers would agree – but they would likely say the barrier Christ eradicates is the one between the individual sinner and God. I would say it includes that, but extends pervasively to all other barriers as well – those between men and women, between races and religions, between ideologies, between humanity and the earth, etc.

Ironically, these preachers often quoted Paul’s condemnation of “another gospel” in Galatians 6 as a defense of penal substitution, (which is not the subject of that letter), but their messages were very similar to the one Paul rejected: one that creates an externally approved and exclusive religious group. Christ, on the other hand, doesn’t merely create a new and better conclave of exclusive religious adherents. That would just be another form of ancient Judaism. Christianity isn’t just a better form of Judaism. Rather, it is what God always intended to accomplish through Judaism on a cosmic scale: liberation from the destructive power of death in our everyday lives and from the paternalistic bonds of law and religion through the creation of a new and unified humanity:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.  ~ Galatians 3:28 (ESV)

This is what Galatians – and the gospel itself – is all about. Not fear from danger or protection within a closed community or tightly constructed system of beliefs, but liberation from such fear, isolation, and retribution. Moreover, this is accomplished not by separating us from others, but by being a people who are distinctive because they are sent to eradicate such barriers and become what Peter block calls a “bridging community.”

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. ~ Galatians 5:1

Technorati Tags: Bondage, Fundamentalism, Jesus Christ, Liberty, The Gospel

• They were some of the most thoughtful Christians I’ve ever encountered: That’s not to say that they’re more thoughtful than, say, Emerging Christians, but I’ve heard plenty of people paint fundamentalists as mindless automatons. That was definitely not true of the people at Resolved. These are smart folks who know their stuff – they’re just committed to a different perspective of Jesus and the faith than I am.
• They were some of the most reverent Christians I’ve ever encountered: I was genuinely moved by the level of seriousness with which they engaged worship, fellowship, and their own self-education in the faith. Admittedly, this kind of religious reverence can be inappropriate and fake – and it can be fear-based – but that’s not what I sensed last weekend. These are people who genuinely admire God, and seek to honor God. That’s a good thing.
• They believe and preach what they do out of a deep care and concern for one another: This plays into some of what I’ll write next week regarding fundamentalist communities. Based on what I observed, both in the lobby and on the stage, the people at Resolved interpret the Bible they way they do because they believe the world is dangerous and humanity’s condition is a serious threat. Hence, the message they preach is a message of warning about danger and escape toward the safety of the community. If that sounds too much like a critique, then let me add this: they preach this message because they’re deeply concerned for one another. It’s like they’re screaming about a fire in a crowded theatre or sternly rebuking a child for reaching toward a hot stove. If the preachers on the stage weren’t ministers they would have been firemen, or policemen, or soldiers – because fundamentalist theology is primarily a hermeneutic of forceful, heroic rescue.

So, for my part, I’ve decided to reaffirm a posture of first believing the best. It’s too easy to throw stones at caricatures of the Christian faith. Easier still when the targets of my projectiles disagree with me. I still have strong disagreements with them that I will continue to point out, and it’s not that I think all their motives are virtuous – nobody’s are. But it’s hard to continue judging people once you’ve met them in all their sincerity and complexity and see a small bit of yourself, and more than a fair bit of Christ, in them.

Technorati Tags: Criticism, judgment, Resolved Conference, Reverence

For a brief few hours that all changed Saturday night when C.J.Mahaney took the stage.

I was taken by surprise when he began by drawing attention to a woman and daughter he had met in the airport. They were finally able to attend the conference after being held back for several years due to the degenerative illness of the husband/father. Sadly, he had recently died and, though grieving, they decided to attend the conference this year in his honor. C.J. was deeply moved by their story and in front of 3000 people honored their loss and offered them comfort. It was the first display of compassion I’d seen thus far at Resolved. It was a genuinely powerful moment.

He then began his message, titled “I wish I’d been there,” launching into the first truly expositional teaching of the weekend. He read from the story of the Gadarene Demoniac in Mark Chapter 5, effectively immersing us into the social fabric of the time, the interpersonal tragedy of the affliction, and the inherent suffering and triumph of the story itself. He spoke with sincerity and expressiveness, with humor and creativity, and with a powerful sense of dramatic suspense. He was the only great storyteller of the weekend.

He addressed the obvious difficult subject – whether or not Christians can be demonically afflicted – handling it constructively and reasonably, without ridiculing opponents or propping up straw men. He did not try to scare us into believing he was right. In fact, quite the opposite: his tone and tenor he made it clear that standing with Christ was the safest possible place to be, and that nothing need be feared in the light of the gospel.

It was nothing short of a tour de force of gospel preaching.

Mahaney pointed out how this amazing story of deliverance demonstrated Christ’s authority to save people from all manner of sin and oppression; how we are all – like the demoniac – ruled by the prevailing powers that work death and destruction in our lives through our own brokenness; and, most importantly, how the infective mission of the liberating gospel was there too, in Jesus’ commission to send the man back to his own town to be a witness of this new, liberating Kingdom.

It was the gospel and it was all there in the story, plain as day and easy to see. C.J. was there in the story as well – he pointed himself out several times in the image of the demoniac – but I was there too…and so were you. Indeed, Mahaney started his message by saying, “I wish I’d been there,” but by the time he was finished we all had been. Each and every person in that room had just seen Jesus – the living embodiment of the healing, hope, and power of the Kingdom of God – and we would never be the same. It was now clearer that through Jesus all bonds could be broken, all wounds could be healed, and the distant and long-suffering promise of a truly good and liberating life had rushed in from the future, crashing headlong into the powers of death and oppression.

I had been sitting in a kind of lobby area, listening over the sound system and taking notes on my laptop, but halfway through I was compelled to get up and walk into the main hall so I could see for myself what was happening on stage. I was transfixed for the next 30 minutes or so. The message he gave us wasn’t merely audible. He actually seemed to bear the weight of it on his person and so preached it with his whole being. The experience changed me.

There was nothing resembling an alter call, and I don’t really even believe in alter calls anymore, but afterward it was all I could do to keep from rushing toward the stage and falling on my face before God in gratitude. It took all my powers of restraint to keep from disturbing the conference at the renewed and deeper realization that the Kingdom had come in the person of Christ.

Now anything was possible.

Technorati Tags: C.J. Mahaney, Gospel, Jesus Christ, Mark, Preaching, Resolved Conference

Saturday afternoon’s speaker was Steve Lawson. I’d never heard him before and I was anxious to shed my frustration from the morning session with Al Mohler.

It was not to be.

I’ll admit up front that Steve’s rhetorical style bothered me from the start. He’s an old-time preacher that likes to build a crescendo by saying the same thing, sentence after sentence, in a slightly different way in order to drive a point home. As in:

“Jesus is the image of the invisible God. The trinitarian ikon. The divine logos. The incarnated deity. Fully God and fully man. Not 50% God and 50% man. Not 100% God. Not 100% man. 100% God and 100% man!”

You get the picture. It’s like listening to a live version of the Amplified Bible. I can’t stand the Amplified Bible. As my friend Jason Dougherty once said, “It’s a poet’s nightmare.”

But that’s just a matter of taste. Some people like that style, and as far as that style goes, Steve is very skilled. His topic was “Who is Jesus Christ?” and his approach was to rifle through the various claims made about Jesus in scripture. Not a bad approach. And, honestly, I wholeheartedly agreed with everything he said about Jesus – until he decided to get defensive about challenges to Jesus’ divinity.

Steve offered the following 5 irrefutable “proofs” of Jesus’ divinity:

• Divine attributes: Jesus possesses the incommunicable attributes of God
• Divine works: Jesus performs the works that only God can perform
• Divine names: Jesus is called by names reserved only for God
• Divine worship: Jesus receives the worship that only God can receive
• Divine quality: Jesus is doxologically referred to as God by the NT writers.

Let me be clear: I believe each of these statements constitute genuine knowledge about Jesus and I believe they are true. However, they are not facts and they do not constitute “proof” of anything other than a certain measure of internal consistency in Christian scripture. Yet, Steve Lawson postured them as irrefutable proof that Jesus Christ was and is, in fact, the incarnate God of the universe.

There are a few problems with this kind of foundationalist approach to preaching. First, it imparts a feeble epistemology – which could explain why so many college-bound evangelical Christians lose their faith. If you’ve been told your whole life that Jesus is God because the Bible says so then you’ll be unable to compete in a marketplace of ideas steeped in the worldview of empirical data. Christendom is over. The Bible is just another book as far as the world is concerned, and there’s no compelling reason to take its claims at face value.

In response, fundamentalism attempts to play the empirical game by dressing up doctrinal beliefs as empirical data. The exact opposite is needed. We must openly admit what any rational person can see – that faith claims are not facts – while faithfully demonstrating that empirical data is not the only valid form of true knowledge. Just because faith must be subjectively tried and tested doesn’t mean it isn’t genuinely powerful knowledge.

And therein lies the cruel catch: the power of faith is found in its ability to liberate people toward a life of divinely ordained possibilities, but that power cannot be experienced without being tested – a process that involves stages of frustration and doubt. Yet, most people won’t risk this if they’ve been told – under threat of ridicule, ostracism, and eternal damnation – that they must unquestioningly accept faith claims as irrefutable facts. By doing so, we impose constricting limitations on people rather than create horizons of freedom and possibility.

Author and organizational consultant Peter Block speaks to this in his excellent and provocative book, Community. speaking of the power of stories in our lives, he says:

The stories that are useful and fulfilling are the ones that are metaphors, signposts, parables, and inspiration for the fullest expression of our humanity. They are communal teaching stories. Creation stories, wisdom stories, sometimes personal stories that have a mythic quality, even if they come from a person sitting next to me [...] Limiting stories are the ones that present themselves as if they were true. Facts.

What Peter Block is describing here is the difference between how law and grace work in the imagination of a community. Law tells stories that restrict us; stories of fear and the need for boundaries in order to be safe. Grace tells stories that liberate us; stories of possibility and assurance that inspire us to take risks. Often the difference is not in the content, it’s in the telling. Even though all his content was true, Steve Lawson told a story of fear, restriction, and law rather than one of grace and freedom.

I was beginning to think the whole weekend would be an exercise in frustration…until C.J. Mahaney took the stage. I’ll tell you about that tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: Foundationalism, Fundamentalism, Jesus Christ, Knowledge, Peter Block, Resolved Conference, Steve Lawson

However, I spent the majority of Saturday rather disappointed.

First up was Al Mohler, who chose to preach on Jesus as the high priest and mediator of a new and better covenant. Mohler stressed the Holy requirements of God and the desperate need for a perfect substitute to satisfy the wrath that resulted from the human failure to meet those requirements. It was clear from the beginning that Mohler wasn’t really there to speak about Jesus, so much as to press a particular – and for most people, obscure – agenda about Jesus’ death: namely, penal substitutionary atonement. Towards the end he hammered his point home:

“The shortest summary of the gospel in the NT is, ‘He saves.’ Jesus is our savior. We all desperately need a savior. He is the high priest who brings salvation. This is the doctrine of penal substitution and without it there is no gospel.”

In other words, to put Mohler’s teaching as precisely as I can, faith in Jesus isn’t the defining marker of salvation – rather, it is the ability to understand, agree with, and articulate a particular kind of technical belief concerning how and why Jesus died. This theme of salvation hanging on the apprehension of a technicality is one I would hear several more times throughout the conference – although, interestingly, not always in relation to theories of the atonement. Apparently, according to some of the Resolved preachers, there are several finely nuanced abstract constructions one must think about properly in order to be “saved.”

Mohler never explicitly defined what he meant by “salvation,” but in listening to his message it becomes quite clear that according to him what we’re saved from is God (meaning God’s wrath).

It’s not that I disagree with the notion that we must strive to have a proper conception of God. Actually, I do agree. I just don’t agree that thinking wrongly about God eternally condemns us. If it does, we’re all buggered. Making doctrinal purity salvific is the fundamentalist equivalent of Pentecostals making mystical encounters salvific. Both camps say that in order to be saved we must “know” God. Fundy’s make such “knowing” about doctrinal assent, while Pentecostals make it all about having a sensory relationship with God. (I’ve pointed out before that Jesus didn’t say we have to know him in order to be saved, but rather that he must know us).

My problem with both camps is, either way, they’ve made “God” and faith and salvation into boundaries of division rather than bridges of reconciliation.

A good example of this tendency to divide in Al Mohler’s preaching was his constant use of insults and fallacious rhetoric, which he aimed at his ideological opponents. For example, he unfairly caricatured liberal Christianity by referring to some feminist theologians who declared Christ’s crucifixion was an example of “divine child abuse.”

Again, it’s not that I completely disagree. Such extreme theologies are silly and absurd. My problem is that pointing to the most extreme versions of liberalism doesn’t accurately portray the vast, legitimate spectrum of differing theological opinions. He’s not engaging other’s views, he’s hen-picking the worst examples of his opponents and painting all “liberals” with that brush. In doing so he effectively creates an “us vs them” posture for this community. He did the same thing with the Catholic practice of mass. Rather than honestly engage with Catholic theology on this point (which would have been off topic) he merely took a cheap opportunity to vilify all Catholics in a snide tone that communicated not only disagreement, but disdain.

(He also engaged in a rather bizarre rant about P.E.T.A. and the necessity of the animal sacrifices in the OT to cause real and extended suffering for the animals involved. He seems to believe that mere sacrifice wasn’t enough for propitiation; suffering was also required (how much suffering Mr. Mohler?). With this strange and completely unfounded argument he seemed to be going for a hat trick: defending penal substitutionary atonement, legitimizing eternal conscious torment in hell, and associating the opponents of those two beliefs with radical animal extremists.)

Let’s face it: It’s easier to rally people around the differences they have with others than it is to rally them around the commonality we all share. He’s protecting the boundaries of fundamentalism because it’s easier than ministering reconciliation. This kind of technique is simply a manifestation of violence, and hence, a total affront to the gospel. His tactics were fear, shame, and coercion; the gospel, on the other hand, is about Christ, the God-man who totally abdicated such tactics.

What really bothered me was that all I’ve ever heard about Al Mohler is how brilliant the guy is. After all, he has a Ph.D. in Systematic and Historical Theology from Southern Baptist Seminary. I would expect an awful lot more intellectual even-handedness and charity from a Christian scholar. At the very least, I’m quite sure he’s a hell of a lot smarter than I am, so I honestly expected someone who was reasonable, intellectually honest, and frankly, utterly convincing.

Instead, I was saddened and disappointed by what I heard.

Technorati Tags: Al Mohler, Atonement, Gospel, Penal Substitution, Resolved Conference

(My apologies for being late on my posts. There is no wifi access at the convention center and the connection here at the hotel is spotty, at best.)

In many ways Resolved is Grace’s version of a young adult conference – and it shows. The burgeoning crowd is overwhelmingly twenty-somethings peppered with boomer-age stalwarts ready to pass the torch. As I mixed with the crowd I met people from southern California, the Pacific Northwest, the deep south, and even a few folks from overseas: The U.K., New Zealand, and Canada (Canada feels like it’s overseas doesn’t it?).

Friday night Rick Holland was the featured speaker and he introduced this year’s conference theme: “Jesus.” I liked how Rick spoke of the “problem of God” in terms of the tension between transcendence and immanence. He effectively gave voice to the frustration experienced by those trying desperately to connect with God, and he did so by first visiting the book of Job and then introduced Christ as the concrete “confluence” of the abstract streams of transcendence and immanence.

Nicely done. I think directing our theological imaginations toward the incarnation is the right direction to go and Rick did a nice job of pointing us toward the inherent vistas of possibility birthed with Jesus as the eternal God-man. I mean this sincerely: I think overall Rick preached a fine message about the unique role of the incarnation and I appreciated it.

However, there were a few bewildering moments for me. For example, Rick took one small passage in Job and used it to pronounce that the book wasn’t an indictment of God concerning unjust suffering at all, but rather the account of one sinful man’s inability to connect with a transcendent Holy God. In other words, Job simply demonstrates the need for atonement (ahem…someone’s penal substitution is showing). Rick also made the curious statement, “Most of what Job’s friends tell him is theologically true – just insensitively applied,” summarizing Job’s freind’s as saying, “God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked – a truism!”

This is what happens when you’re a slave to systematics. When everything in the bible, according to your theological prejudice, by necessity must harmonize perfectly as a factual representation of God’s revealed perfect will, you lose the ability to see the trees for the forest and the biblical narrative becomes a limitation on humanity rather than a liberating story of possibility. The problem with this summary of Job is that there is no harmonizing Job with, say, Proverbs because these writings are at odds with each other – and its best to leave them that way. We’re not just at odds with the consequences of our foolish sin (Proverbs in a nutshell), we are also at odds with a world and a God that frequently makes no sense to our sensibilities (Job in a nutshell). The fact is, the unjust do often suffer and the unrighteous do often prosper. That’s exactly why we have alternative wisdom like Job and Ecclesiastes – to give cathartic lament to the reality of an unjust world and, yes, to indict God for it.

To ignore this is to ignore not only the obvious content of these writings, but to ignore the historical and cultural context of them as well. Job is a semitic version of a well-known Babylonian writing: “The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer,” the point of both is clearly to question the conventional wisdom of divine blessings and curses. Even more tragically, whitewashing the indictment of God in Job effectively silences the voice of those who cry out to God in lament.

Which brings me to my biggest objection from Friday night.

The most egregious thing I heard Friday wasn’t in Rick’s message, it was in his opening welcome tot he conference attendees. After giving a rundown of what to expect from the weekend, Rick made a plea to “watch your witness.” Palm Springs would be watching, Rick said, and we are to be ambassadors for Christ. Then Rick chose one specific thing to hammer home:

“Ladies, when you’re swimming at your hotel pool, please show modesty.”

This nicely demonstrates my problem with fundamentalist-leaning evangelicalism: it is a system of fear, shame, and control. When given the opportunity to put flesh and blood on what it means to be a Christian before a watching world to 3000 young adults, Rick chose to focus on the inherent sin of being a woman and the resulting need for women to be under the control of parochial sensibilities. The more distant implication (and I don’t think this is unfair given his comments about Job) is that when women are the victims of inappropriate sexual attention they aren’t really victims at all, because, as he later said in his message, “God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked – a truism!”

So, never mind being ambassadors of Christ by serving the people of Palm Springs. Never mind brining a message of reconciliation or meeting the needs of the poor in town. Never mind prophetically indicting the powers of conspicuous wealth so grotesquely displayed all around town. After all, it’s hard to find displays of wealth unjust when your theology has fundamentally baptized wealth as an indication of God’s approval. It’s even harder to have compassion for the poor – and there are poor here – when your theology has fundamentally vilified them as a demonstration of God’s just judgment.

No. Being an ambassador for Christ means that women musn’t show too much skin.

Technorati Tags: Fundamentalism, Job, justice, Resolved Conference, Rick Holland, Sexuality