Resolved, To Believe The Best About Other Believers

I’ve been pretty critical of the preachers at Resolved (with one exception) – and I’ll have more by way of critique next week when I share some thoughts on fundamentalist churches as “bonding” communities – but I want to wrap up my series of reflections on this conference by highlighting the best of what I learned about the people there:

• 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

Resolved, To Embrace Christ as the Embodiment of Healing and Hope

I have to admit, although the people at Resolved had been a pleasure to interact with, by Saturday evening I was resigned to be continually frustrated by the preaching. Thus far I’d found the messages to be pedantic, fallacious, and repressive – not so much in content, but in the way the story of Christ had been conveyed and applied.

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

Resolved, Not To Think Too Rigorously About Jesus

I’ve interacted with literally hundreds of people at Resolved and I have to say that everyone has been wonderful. People are kind, upbeat, and demonstrate a singular passion for learning about God and worshipping fervently – and I appreciate the hospitality that has been shown by the event crew.

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

Resolved, To Not Think Wrongly About Jesus (But To Speak Uncharitably About Our Enemies)

I honestly feel I’ve approached the Resolved conference with an open mind. I’m not saying I had no bias – my initial post made that bias quite clear. But honestly, as each speaker has taken the stage I’ve found myself inwardly excited about the possibility of hearing something true, edifying, and spirit-filled. After all, these are some of the most highly acclaimed preachers in this particular evangelical camp.

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

Resolved, Not To Wear a Bikini

(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

Conference Blogging From Resolved This Weekend

Well, this should be interesting.

This weekend I’ll be attending the Resolved Conference in Palm Springs, hosted by John MacArthur’s Grace Community Church. Some of you will know that my theology is at significant odds with much of what is (vehemently) preached by John MacArthur and others in his camp. It’s safe to say that my understanding of the gospel will be in many ways subtly, yet significantly, different than many of the 3000 or so people expected to be in attendance.

Still.

These folks are my brothers and sisters (I’m pretty sure women are allowed at the conference). They proclaim Christ and they are singularly devoted to understanding Christ accurately and living and preaching that understanding faithfully. That means that I have the most important thing possible in common with them; it means that we are united by one Spirit. I mean that in all seriousness.

Of course, I’m not sure many of them would agree – especially if they discover that I’m a Fuller student…or a charismatic, an egalitarian, or an anarchist Anabaptist for that matter. I guess we’ll see : )

I will be blogging through the course if the weekend with some of my thoughts on the conference. Speakers include, John MacArthur, Al Mohler, C.J. Mahaney, and Steve Lawson.  It’s been a long, long time since I attended something like this, so I’m likely to experience a bit of culture shock at the outset.

Technorati Tags: John MacArthur, Resolved Conference