After SVS 2010: Jared Boyd, Naming Injustice: Doing Theology That Does Something

After SVS 2010 is an extended dialogue with presenters from the first annual Society of Vineyard Scholars conference, held Feb 11-13, 2010. Monday through Friday until March 26th we’ll profile an SVS presenter and dialogue with them around their paper. Click here for a brief intro and link directory of the series. Full text of papers are available to SVS members.
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Jared Boyd: “Naming Injustice: Doing Theology That Does Something”

Abstract
The topic of social justice has recently become popularized within evangelicalism. While there are churches that have adopted a few key issues of injustice and work is being done toward eradicating these injustices, the conversation about “social justice” is still rather general. Much of the theological dialogue has been directed at convincing slow adopters that the work of social justice is work to which the church must turn.  In this essay I propose that part of the agenda in doing theology that supports the work of social justice in the church, will include doing theology in a way that names specific injustices in the world while providing robust theological justification as to why these specific injustices fall within the work of the kingdom of God. When injustices are named with certain intentions about how a community of faith should respond (regarding both belief and practice), the act of naming can in fact become the first act of doing justice. By providing a short overview of Speech Act theory and providing a context by which we might view the act of doing theology as a speech act, I provide a way for theologians to view their work as an act of doing justice.

Interview with Jared

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: My topic is actually the result of some thinking I have been doing about issues of Food, Farming, and Justice within the context of the people God. This seems a bit of a stretch, but my paper, which is about a specific articulation of “doing theology” and the way that relates to “doing Justice,” really grew out of my desire to raise awareness within the church regarding issues of sustainable agriculture and the spirituality of “eating.”   I began to think how I might articulate, theologically, my desire to see the sustainable/local food movement reach those who really need it the most—that is, those who don’t typically have access to fresh vegetables and fruits. I began to become excited about the possibility of convincing communities of faith that food is an issue of social justice to which we ought to turn, and an opportunity to welcome the kingdom of God. Then, I began to wonder whether my “naming” this issue as an issue of social justice could in fact contribute to long-term change (it turns out it can). For better or worse, my paper is a secondary project that I pursued in order to find how my primary project (the issues around food) could be situated in a theological context and do robust theological work. So in short, my topic is just to provide a context for the specific issues of injustice that I would like to “call out.” My background in philosophy became a helpful handmaiden in helping me provide the context for which I was looking. I’m still working on the primary project but doing the philosophical work has certainly helped inform the work I’m doing now.

Q: How do you think your paper is relevant to the Vineyard movement at large?

A: The Vineyard is a kingdom of God movement. this means we are constantly looking for what God might be doing and where he might be doing it so that we might join Him there. It also means, however, that we might look for places where we would like to see the kingdom come, but where the “not yet” seems to be ruling the day and the only aroma of the coming kingdom is within us. What I hope to have communicated in my paper, is that pointing our finger at the “not yet” and saying on behalf of God (with reference to Abraham Kuyper): “MINE!”—could in fact be the first step toward inaugurating a little more eschatology. I think the Vineyard, with our theological categories and our predisposition toward taking some risks, is in a unique situation to imagine all sorts of places and things that God might want to do. It seems to me that there are a lot of places and contexts that aren’t currently on the radar of how we have traditionally imagined the church operating in the role of “being the people of God—for the world.” I think that part of the Vineyard’s next move could be helping the church re-imagine herself operating in places we have yet to consider as possibilities. So in my case, with my interest in the justice issues surrounding food inequality (as an inequality of opportunity), I’m trying to imagine the church as the hands of Jesus in the soil growing food for the poor. Maybe we should have farmers on the pastoral staff of churches?

Q: What do you think might be the practical implications of what you’re exploring?

A: I suppose I started touching on this in the last question. God is a creative God and so are his people. I think if we could embrace the reality that there are kingdom coming ideas in all of us, and that God has placed them on our hearts for a reason, then we might also understand that we are incubation points for something really big that God is trying to shape within his new creation. I suppose the theological way of saying this is that “god has poured out his spirit upon us.” What I imagine as a practical implication is thoughtful people explaining where they see a need for new creation and kingdom work to happen—-explaining to communities of faith who are empowered to take action (see Walter Brueggemann’s Prophetic Imagination). As I make clear in my paper, the act of naming something as unjust in the context of a community of faith who understands the implications upon them to take action and to work toward the eradication of the injustice, could in fact be the first act of justice; it could be the first domino. Practically speaking, we just need to start thoughtfully (and theologically) “naming” where we see injustice. The example I use in my paper is pointing to the reality that a low-income urban neighborhood in (insert any city)  has less access to fresh produce than does a suburban middle and upper class neighborhood in (the same city). Calling this out as an injustice and then working toward bringing God’s kingdom to bear upon it is what I have in mind by way of practical implication.

Jared will be available for further questions and dialogue in the comments

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Jared Boyd lives in Columbus, Ohio and is a bi-vocational pastor at Central Vineyard Church. His interests are in 20th Century American Culture and religion, in the spirituality of food and eating, and in the Rule of St. Benedict as a potential cure for all that ills. Jared is also the Director of a  non-profit organization (Justice Gardens) that is working toward expanding the boundaries of the sustainable food movement into low-income and under-served communities. He is married to Jaime and they have 3 girls (ages 6, 4, and 2).

Technorati Tags: Agriculture, Injustice, Jared Boyd, Social Justice, Speech Act Theory, SVS

After SVS 2010: Ryan McAnally-Linz, The Problem of the Contested Center

After SVS 2010 is an extended dialogue with presenters from the first annual Society of Vineyard Scholars conference, held Feb 11-13, 2010. Monday through Friday until March 26th we’ll profile an SVS presenter and dialogue with them around their paper. Click here for a brief intro and link directory of the series. Full text of papers are available to SVS members.
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Ryan McAnally-Linz: “The Problem of the Contested Center”

Abstract
Over the last several decades, numerous churches have begun to think of themselves in the terms of ‘centered-set ecclesiology’. Based on the work of missiologist Paul Hiebert, this type of ecclesiology defines the sets ‘Christian’ and ‘church’ based on the orientation of individuals toward a common center, namely, Jesus. Centered-set ecclesiology is a conscious move away from defining Christian communities in terms of acceptance of particular doctrinal statements or participation in particular rites, such as the Eucharist. This move, I argue, brings with it a number of benefits. It reduces harmfully exclusive definitions of the community, emphasizes relational metaphors, accords with the biblical themes of following God and Jesus, and frames community membership in terms of process, rather than a once-for-all decision.

Centered-set ecclesiology does not, however, come without its own complications. Chief among these is what I term ‘the problem of the contested center’. Put simply, the center toward which a community orients itself has to have some content in order to be meaningful, and community members may well agree on the name of the center (e.g., ‘Jesus’) while disagreeing about its content. For centered-set Christian communities, this problem is inescapable. Because such communities claim to be oriented toward a person, and because persons are inherently mysterious, the center of those communities always remains in some sense surprising and unpredictable. Moreover, because humans are finite, our knowledge (even our knowledge of Jesus) is always finite, making incompleteness and error in our understanding inevitable.

In response to the problem of the contested center, I offer several counsels for churches that think in the terms of centered-set ecclesiology. First, the task of wrestling with the problem is an ongoing process of discernment, not a simple matter of logical deduction. Second, centered-set communities must seek to foster truthfulness as a way of life in order to mitigate the problems that arise from self-ignorance and self-deception in the pursuit of the common center. Third, this process of discernment should be a community process in which a prima facie commitment to remain in community in spite of disagreement is the rule. Fourth and finally, the community discernment process should return repeatedly to the foundational stories of its faith because Scripture is the most reliable witness we have to the character of the person who we want to make the center of our life together.

Interview With Ryan

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: As a student at Yale Divinity School, I read Paul Hiebert’s chapter on set-theory for a class on Theologies of Christian Community. It just so happened that this assignment followed closely on the heels of a sermon at Elm City Vineyard that made heavy use of centered-set ecclesiology. In my reading, I found myself responding positively to the general idea of a centered-set approach to Christianity and the church, but I had the nagging feeling things were in fact more complicated than Hiebert made them look. Since the final paper for the course was meant to be an analysis of an issue relevant to a concrete Christian community, I decided to develop more fully that sense about the complexity of centered-set ecclesiology.

Q: How do you think your paper is relevant to the Vineyard movement at large?

A: Since many Vineyard churches, following John Wimber’s lead, think of themselves as centered-sets, I would hope that my paper is directly relevant for their community lives.

Q: What do you think might be the practical implications of what you’re exploring?

A: As laid out in my paper (and the abstract above), I think any community that thinks of itself as a centered set faces the problem of the contested center. There’s no getting around it, and there’s no solving it once and for all. Consequently, the practical implications are a set of commitments and practices that, I think, will help such communities navigate the issue of discerning their center together.

Ryan will be available for further questions and dialogue in the comments

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Ryan McAnally-Linz is an MA student at Yale Divinity School and a resident of New Haven, CT, where he has attended Elm City Vineyard since January, 2009. He intends to pursue a PhD in Theology, focusing on the relationships between Christians’ theological/doctrinal beliefs and their social, political, and economic visions, as well as constructive political theology. Before moving to New Haven, Ryan lived for two years in Latin America and worked on a number of community development initiatives. His wife, Heidi, continues to work in international development.

Technorati Tags: Centered-set, Paul Hiebert, Radical Middle, Ryan McAnally-Linz, set-theory, Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS, Vineyard Community of Churches

After SVS: Orion Edgar, Justice and the Kingdom of God: Atonement and New Creation

After SVS 2010 is an extended dialogue with presenters from the first annual Society of Vineyard Scholars conference, held Feb 11-13, 2010. Monday through Friday until March 26th we’ll profile an SVS presenter and dialogue with them around their paper. Click here for a brief intro and link directory of the series. Full text of papers are available to SVS members.
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Orion Edgar, Justice and the Kingdom of God: Atonement and New Creation

In this paper, I take up George Eldon Ladd’s The Gospel of the Kingdom, a founding text of Kingdom Theology. Drawing out some key insights from Ladd, I propose to address two key questions: first, what is the kingdom of God? And second, how do we enter it? I show how Jesus’ conception of the kingdom of God holds together the eschatological and the ethical, proposing that Jesus is drawing on a vision of God’s rule with ancient precedent in Jewish thought, associated with the rule of the priestly Davidic kings. I introduce and outline the work of Old Testament theologian Margaret Barker, which shows how an understanding of Christ’s work of atonement can be deeply enriched by seeing it in terms of the ancient temple rites of the Jewish day of atonement, confirming the author of Hebrews’ view that Jesus is the culmination and perfection of the Jewish tradition. This ancient understanding of atonement involves making good of the effects of sin, which restores human beings to relationship with God, one another, and the earth by which God sustains all life, and involves a vision of the rule of God is always informed by man’s original calling in Genesis, to till and to keep the garden. These words have complex resonances in their Hebrew form which allude to serving God in worship, and serving humanity and all creation by maintaining a just order. The work of atonement, in the ancient ritual which prefigures Christ, depends on the priests’ transformation in the presence of God, which leads to the priests’ being sent out as a representative of God to lovingly govern the creation.

I relate this understanding of the kingdom of God to the comprehensive vision of justice given in Isaiah, drawing briefly on the work of N.T. Wright on eschatology. I conclude by drawing together these insights to show that Jesus’ conception of the kingdom involved a comprehensive transformation of human life, and that as such our understanding of entering the kingdom involves both being transformed, and joining in the work of transformation to which this vision calls us, of restoring human relationships with God, with each other, and with the rest of the created world. All this is participation in the vision of a kingdom whose fulfillment is the final creation of a new heavens and a new earth announced in Isaiah and Revelation.

Interview with Orion:

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: In my philosophical work I have been thinking through the implications of a recovery of the deeply embodied point of view which is at work in the Hebrew background to Christian thought, and which remains a crucial aspect of a view of the world that allows that God could become a human being. I came across the work of Margaret Barker on the implicit theology of the Jerusalem temple, in which she sees ancient roots of many Christian ideas (the trinity, atonement, incarnation) which she argues were suppressed by later Judaism. Her work depends on very detailed investigation of many ancient extra-biblical texts, but it also seems to be fundamentally in accord with many of the canonical sources which are important for kingdom theology, especially second and third Isaiah, so I decided to research the kingdom motif in Barker’s temple theology and attempt to explain the significance of the ancient Jewish tradition with the help of the viewpoint represented in Isaiah, which understands justice and worship as fundamentally intertwined with one another.

Q: How do you think your paper is relevant to the Vineyard movement at large?

A: What I hoped to draw out of it is an appreciation how deeply liturgy and church structures embody a world view. I have a feeling that we have to ask what sort of thing we think a human being is and what a human being is for, and how we provide implicit answers to those questions in the way we do church.  To go a bit deeper than that, I think several global problems at the moment (the credit crisis, climate change, our vulnerability to oil prices / availability, and persistent global economic imbalances) are results of our inability to correctly understand what a human being is. Consumerism has become ontological, as it were, and I think that we need to learn to tell a story about God transforming human beings into what human beings really are and are meant to be, which is not consumers but something like priestly guardians of creation.

Q: What do you think might be the practical implications of what you’re exploring?

A: Hmm… I’m not sure. I take seriously the thought that theology of this kind should be exploratory without always needing to look for ‘practical applications’ – partly because thought is often most honest and so most fruitful in the long term when it is driven by a desire for truth rather than by a practical goal. In many ways I hope theology is an exercise in allowing God to question and change our practical agendas, rather than finding solutions to our problems. If there are any practical applications of what I have said someone who has experience of running a church would probably be better positioned to speak about that than me. But, if I need to have a stab, I think a practical implication is that we need to work hard on making our liturgy (for example our songs, and the words we use to explain our celebration of the eucharist) really speak out of a deep and comprehensive understanding of what it means for human beings to be priests, to govern the creation. Barker speaks of the ‘high priesthood of all believers’, because in Christ our calling is to enter the holy of holies, to be transformed, but we have to participate in the work of atonement by going out into the world and making peace, doing justice, bringing life where there is death. I’m afraid I’m not really answering your question very well!

Orion will be available for further questions and dialogue in the comments

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Orion Edgar is a PhD student in Philosophical Theology at the University of Nottingham, investigating the theological significance of philosophical approaches to embodiment, with a particular interest in theological approaches to food and eating. He joined the Vineyard thirteen years ago, and has recently moved from Nottingham to the mountains of North Wales with his wife, Sharon.

Technorati Tags: George Eldon Ladd, Margaret Barker, NT Wright, Orion Edgar, Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS

After SVS 2010: Elisa Berry: Beauty and the Practice of the Kingdom of God

After SVS 2010 is an extended dialogue with presenters from the first annual Society of Vineyard Scholars conference, held Feb 11-13, 2010. Monday through Friday until March 26th we’ll profile an SVS presenter and dialogue with them around their paper. Click here for a brief intro and link directory of the series. Full text of papers are available to SVS members.
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Elisa Berry: “Beauty and the Practice of the Kingdom of God”

Abstract
The Protestant tradition has as its heritage an iconoclasm that rejects the idolatry of religious images and symbols in favor of seeking God in God’s Word and in direct experiences of God. This reaction to imagery, instigated by real problem facing the church of the 16^th century, fails to address the issues facing the church today. As we recontextualize the message of Christ for this time and place, our churches are much more likely to face the pitfalls of the unreflective adoption of the values of consumerism, or, conversely, the use of tradition for tradition’s sake. In this paper I explore how the theological reflections of Saint Bonaventure, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards can help us avoid these pitfalls without ignoring God’s Trinitarian communication of Godself through beauty, creation and the senses. My discussion of the thought of these theologians is framed by Jean-Luc Marion’s distinction between the idol and the icon. Marion describes the idol as a mirror that can only reflect back the scope and power of the gaze that looks upon it. While an idol fails to point the gaze beyond itself, an icon is a mirror consumed by divine glory, through which the gaze transpierces the visible to behold the invisible. This metaphor of the mirror is also used by John Calvin an St Bonaventure to describe the God’s self-revelation through the beauty of creation. Creation is a mirror of God’s generative wisdom. The world is made through Christ, the Wisdom of God emanating from the Father. For Jonathan Edwards creation happens as the result of an overflowing of Trinitarian love that God desires to communicate to creatures. God draws us as creatures to Godself through ravishing beauty, not allowing us to rest in the senses, but ultimately drawing us to the crucified and incarnate Christ. As we wait for the ultimate fulfillment of God’s kingdom, we encounter God’s love in the senses through the body of Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit. For all of these theologians, God promises to be most fully present to our senses in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper through which as a community we encounter the fullness of God’s presence.

Interview With Elisa

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: As both an artist and a Christian, the question of the role of beauty and the senses in our relating to God has  been present in my mind for quite awhile. It was one of the questions that led me to divinity school, where I explored the intersection of theology and art and encountered the theologians that appear in my paper. It was during divinity school that I first became involved in a Vineyard church plant and was designated the “aesthete” in our planning meetings.

Q: How do you think your paper is relevant to the Vineyard movement at large?

A: In my anecdotal experience in the Vineyard, there is an apathy toward visual beauty and the role it plays in our relating to God.  I think that we live in a society that is hungry for lasting beauty, and also attuned to respond to beauty. We are constantly visually stimulated, and the church must search for responses and alternatives to the inundation of visual stimuli. I also think that as Christians we will remain impoverished if we fail to be formed by the resources of the historical theological tradition. Theologically, beauty is important because through beauty and creation God is present to us, drawing us, and communicating to us.

Q: What do you think might be the practical implications of what you’re exploring?

A: The Vineyard churches in which I have participated transform preexisting structures into their worship spaces and during the rest of the week powerfully encounter God in the intimate settings of people’s homes. I think that that is a beautiful picture of the way in which God’s kingdom breaks into the most unlikely places and redeems all the parts of our world. Visual and sensorial beauty are important ways that God draws us to Godself, and so as followers of Christ we might attend to God’s communication to us through beauty and the senses in our worship, in our spaces, and in one another, just as we value creativity and skill in music and preaching (as well as hospitality,  compassion, prayer etc). I also hope that in the Vineyard the celebration of communion, in a way that acknowledges what Christ has done for us, will be central to our communities as we gather to worship and encounter God.

Elisa will be available for further questions and dialogue in the comments

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Elisa Berry (www.elisakariberry.com) lives in St Paul, MN and is in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Minnesota with a concentration in sculpture. Her art most often focuses on found objects, collage, light, spaces, and experiences of nature. She also obtained a Masters of Religion and Art from Yale Divinity School in an attempt to grasp the relationship between theology and aesthetics. She attends Mercy Vineyard Church in Minneapolis and prior to this was part of the Elm City Vineyard Church in New Haven, CT.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, Beauty, Elisa Berry, Society of Vineyard, SVS, Vineyard Churches

After SVS 2010: Jason Coker, The Begging Bowl, Toward a Kingdom Economy of Gifts, Power, and Justice

After SVS 2010 is an extended dialogue with presenters from the first annual Society of Vineyard Scholars conference, held Feb 11-13, 2010. Monday through Friday until March 26th we’ll profile an SVS presenter and dialogue with them around their paper. Click here for a brief intro and link directory of the series. Full text of papers are available to SVS members.
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Jason Coker: “The Begging Bowl: Toward a Kingdom Economy of Gifts, Power, and Justice”

Abstract
Western Christianity has leaned heavily on the coercive economics of Modern marketplaces in fiscal stewardship and distribution of power, but scripture prefers a gift economy. Paul interprets the manna narrative of Exodus 16 as a gift-economy for producing needs-based equality and establishes it as our normative economic paradigm (2 Cor 8). This gift-economy is demonstrated in Acts, eradicating poverty in the Church (Acts 2 and 4). Paul applies this economics of equality to the distribution of power through “gifts” of the Holy Spirit as well  (Rom 12 and 1 Cor 12). Hence, whether the resources are food, property, or power, the gift-economy of Exodus 16 is applied as the defining economic narrative of the Bible, challenging the Modern doctrine of the autonomous self and leading Christians to embrace the “poverty of the gift” whereby each person risks becoming poor through gift-giving so the group might become wealthy. This is the economy of faith, what Thomas Merton called, “the begging bowl.”

Similar practices are observed in ancient gift cultures through the ethnographic work of Marcel Mauss who showed that alms were a subversive redistribution of resources from those who hoard to those who lack, turning mercy into an expression of God’s just vengeance. Seen through this lens of re-distribution and mercy-vengeance, Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion are an act of subversive gift-power whereby he became poor so that we might become rich (2 Cor 8:7), conquering all through the gift of mercy-vengeance. Moreover, being “in Christ” re-locates the boundaries of the self beyond the the individualized body and into the sphere of Kingdom relationships grounded in Christ (Gal 2:19-20). This new Kingdom self can reciprocate gift-power through the transcendence of Christ and Kingdom  without the usual corruption of self-serving reciprocity (Matt 6:4,6,18).

This kind of Kingdom gift-economy requires three paradigm shifts:

• From individualized wealth-building to Kingdom gift-giving: The gift must always  move to the area of greatest need. This should challenge Modern ecclesial power-structures.
• From scarcity to limited abundance: Ex 16 teaches neither the total scarcity of Modern economics nor the radical abundance of naive economics, but the daily limited abundance that requires communal cooperation.
• From altruism to transcendent reciprocity: The Modern charity characterized by altruism is unilateral and often retains socio-economic boundaries, but the group reciprocity depicted in Ex 16 and 2 Cor 8 strives for equality.

Interview With Jason

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: I’ve always been intrigued by the economic practices depicted in Acts 2 and 4. In my early twenties, when I started taking the Bible seriously, I was shocked to discover communal practices in scripture, and, in my naiveté, equally distressed that we weren’t emulating those practices in our church. Whenever I pointed it out to pastors and elders I was given the standard “those were different times” speech, which never satisfied me. In the spring of 2007 I was the outreach and evangelism pastor at the Grove City Vineyard in Columbus, Ohio and we were planning a 40-day outreach campaign. The senior pastor challenged me to come up with something different, so I pitched the idea of creating an online expression of Acts 2, where people would freely give to each other out of their extra stuff. He loved the idea and Twoshirts.org was born. That experienced re-birthed this interest in me, and gave me an excuse to explore it deeper. But it wasn’t until I started reading the ethnographic data from archaic societies that I began to see scripture very differently. Sometime during that 40-day campaign someone dropped a copy of Mauss’ book “The Gift” in my office inbox. To this day, I have no idea who gave me that book, but I’m grateful. Reading it launched me into the rather deep world of gift-thinking, from Mauss to Levi-Strauss in sociology and anthropology, to Hyde in the realm of art and literature, to Derrida, Marion, and Caputo in philosophy and theology. It’s a rather deep, interdisciplinary well and I’m just scratching the surface. There are so many similarities to ancient Jewish economic practices that I became convinced that we tend to read these passages through the lens of Adam Smith and Modern economics, when so much of Jewish faith and practice reflects the reciprocal economic thinking of archaic agricultural gift-giving societies.

Q: How do you think your paper is relevant to the Vineyard movement at large?

A: The Vineyard has always been conspicuously oriented toward expressions of mercy, and is currently coming through a period of significant wrestling with issues of equality in leadership practices, particularly concerning gender and race. Given those factors, I think the Vineyard is a perfect place for rethinking the theology behind our economic practices, whether that manifests in caring for the poor, living sustainably, or striving for equality in positions of power. I think the Church at large needs a theology of equality that is inter-testamental and holistic, which empowers an eschatologically-rooted embodiment of that equality now. The prevailing Christian approach to mercy and charity – while it does a great deal of good – is ultimately a dead-end because it doesn’t represent a sustainable equality, it only patches the holes in one direction, from rich to poor, or from majority to minority. What we see in Acts 2, Acts 4, and 2 Cor 8 is something that theoretically should be sustainable given a society of mutual (transcendent) reciprocity, and I think the Vineyard, because of it’s core value for mercy and commitment to Kingdom theology, is potentially a good incubator for experimenting with what a modern day “society of equality” could look like.

Q: What do you think might be the practical implications of what you’re exploring?

A: It could be as simple as cultivating a community garden, starting a ride-sharing group, or having a church that shares common possessions like tools and equipment. Or it could be as complicated as a networked system of micro-lending and church-to-church budget-sharing networks where prospering churches make up for the struggling churches (which would be an exact duplication of 2 Cor 8). I think there’s tremendous room for experimentation, and I think virtually every church already does something along this kind of continuum, but, in my opinion, seeing these practices in terms of a gift-economy whose goal is needs-based equality versus mere “charity” changes the potential depth and scope of these practices dramatically, especially by deeply challenging our notions of individual autonomy and private wealth in a debt-based, consumer society. Personally, I can’t think of a more timely topic in America. What if, during the greatest economic crisis since the great depression, people could say of our churches that “there were no needy persons among them” (Acts 4:34) because our counter-cultural economic practices had simply eradicated poverty in our midst?

Jason will be available for further questions and dialogue in the comments

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Jason Coker (www.pastoralia.org) is an M.A. student at Fuller Seminary where he studies intercultural leadership. He and his wife Jenell have been leaders in the Vineyard Community of Churches since 1996, spending thirteen years on staff with churches in Park City, Utah and Columbus, Ohio before returning to California in 2008 to finish his degree and plant a church in Oceanside. Jason and Jenell have four children, Chris, Savannah, Judah, and Alannah.

Technorati Tags: 2 Corinthians, Acts, economy, Equality, Exodus, Gift-Economy, gifts, Jason Coker, justice, Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS, The Cross, The Gift, Vineyard Churches

After SVS 2010: Jason Clark: Consumerism, Social Imagination, & Ecclesiology

After SVS 2010 is an extended dialogue with presenters from the first annual Society of Vineyard Scholars conference, held Feb 11-13, 2010. Monday through Friday until March 26th we’ll profile an SVS presenter and dialogue with them around their paper. Click here for a brief intro and link directory of the series. Full text of papers are available to SVS members.
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Jason Clark: “Consumerism, Social Imagination, and Ecclesiology”

Abstract:
This paper suggest that a previous freedom within mission for understanding the nature of church, has given rise to a situation where it is the imagination of consumer for life, that often determines the forms of church life. Where previous forms of church became captive to the nature of market forces, new emerging forms of church are seen as further captive to this logic. This paper, traces the emergence and nature of this western individualism and agency, and it’s self creating nature, seeing identity free from commitments to any others. Examples of this are shown with:

1. Blueprint Ecclesiologies:  where idealised models of church are made, that are never realised
2. Any understanding of Church becomes pathological, where Christians form church life around ideas of what is wrong with Church, with no confidence in Scripture or mission
3. The naive belief that church can be non-instutional, when what is needed is not the absence of institutions, but an articulate institutional imagination
4. The imaginations for any of these forms of Church are often taken from consumer culture
5. What is called ‘revolution’ is often not revolution at all, but a pandering to consumer ‘authenticity’
6. And the collapse of Church into the creation of private God spaces within which people make their own isolated meaning of God, that do not lead to new christian conversion

It is suggest that the solution to this problem is to re-discover the ‘giveness’ of church life, that Church is something that is necessary to Christian identity and formation.  And that is best found in a scriptured and traditioned understanding of Church organisation, life and mission.

Interview With Jason

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: Through the planting of a church, and by doing some theological reflection on the power of consumer imaginations of what life is about, and how that shapes what people give themselves to and expect the Church to support. Also through the day-to-day in pastoral life, seeing people have prayers answered and have experiences of God that seemed to lead to God becoming just one resource amongst many to get the consumer dream. In this way, you might have Oprah, but I have Jesus and he trumps Oprah to get me the life we are both trying to pursue: that is, the consumer dream. I wanted to explore what was it about consumerism that causes all of life, including the Christian life so often, to be bent around those ends. Finally, after 10 years of seeing many friends explore that dynamic by moving away from any form of Church at all, it seemed that the new post-church forms of church were pandering even more to that problem, and continuing to enable people to use Christian resources not for mission but for consumer life identities and constructions. I began to ask: Was there anything in theology and church history to help respond to this problem?

Technorati Tags: Church, Consumerism, ecclesiology, Jason Clark, Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS

After SVS 2010: Steven Hamilton, Signs & Wonders: Wisdom & the Reign of God

After SVS 2010 is an extended dialogue with presenters from the first annual Society of Vineyard Scholars conference, held Feb 11-13, 2010. Monday through Friday until March 26th we’ll profile an SVS presenter and dialogue with them around their paper. Click here for a brief intro and link directory of the series. Full text of papers are available to SVS members.
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Steven Hamilton, “Signs and Wonders: Wisdom and the Reign of God”

(Incidentally, Steven was snowed-in at the Baltimore airport during SVS, so he was unable to present as scheduled. I’m pleased to be able to remedy that somewhat by profiling his paper here.)

Abstract
In New Testament studies, the topic of Wisdom has gained real momentum recently, after many years of neglect. Yet as most scholarship has seemingly focused in the areas of Wisdom Christology, conventional Wisdom in James, the interaction of sapiential and apocalyptic thought in other New Testament literature, and the issues surrounding sophia in 1 Corinthians, there are many areas to which a wisdom-orientation can be brought to bear. What of Wisdom and the heart of Jesus’ message: the Reign of God?

The wisdom-orientation has a surprisingly significant impact in terms of the theology and praxis of the Kingdom of God.  This consideration will explore the frontiers of wisdom, seeking to understand how insights from the Hebrew corpus can be brought to bear in our present New Testament context of the Kingdom being both ‘now’ and ‘not yet’. While biblically-speaking, we access wisdom through an encounter with God rooted in awe and reverence, humility and worship, wisdom is not only found in the realms of religious gatherings, but all of life. The Reign of God is holistic, and as we experience the powers of the age-to-come inaugurated in Christ Jesus, the wisdom-orientation can aid the consideration of the Reign of God in our lives at our most charismatic as well as our most mundane.  In fact, the way of wisdom, much like that beheld in Job, is sought fervently, encountered with His Presence in surprising, satisfying ways, and then further shaped through interaction, devotion and contemplation.

Utilizing James Crenshaw’s point of departure –hokma as a shared paradigmatic approach to reality – we contemplate three major issues that a wisdom-orientation brings to the foreground: (1) a Trinitarian perspective vis-à-vis wisdom and how theologian-practitioners and scholars in the Vineyard movement may be uniquely positioned to explore our somewhat atrophied but burgeoning understanding of a Wisdom Pneumatology; (2) the shaping-nature of Wisdom and the Spirit connected to an underlying and holistic spiritual formation; and (3) how this wisdom-orientation dwells in the tension of ‘both/and’, bringing to the foreground our perspective and experience of the ‘now-and-not-yet’ of God’s Reign.  The Transcendent and Immanent modalities of wisdom are considered along with convergences of the sapiential, prophetic and apocalyptic in scripture, in Christ and in the Church.  Brief explorations of the further implications of a Wisdom Pneumatology on other areas like missiology, charismatology and ecclesiology are briefly considered.

Interview With Steven

Q: How did you become interested in your topic

A: I was studying Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Civilization at the Baltimore Hebrew University.  I had a really great graduate group there with lots of great explorations and exchanges.  My advisor was Barry Gitlen, one of the lead archaeologists at the Philistine Ekron dig site and an expert in Philistine material culture and the 10th century, which is the time period of the rise of the monarchy under David.  This was a time when the ‘Wisdom’ perspective and tradition emerged as fairly distinctive in the history of Israel.  This emergence of the role of the Sage and Scribe can be seen to have had a rather significant impact on history, especially on the writing and transmittal of our ancient scriptures. I think that is where my deep interest in wisdom first took hold.

Q: How do you think your paper is relevant to the Vineyard movement at large?

A: I think a fuller Trinitarian aspect has been lacking in scholarship, the neglected third being Wisdom Pneumatology and I think the Vineyard – loaded with Kingdom theologian-practitioners and scholars – is primed for a major contribution to this field. I also think the wisdom-orientation recommends itself to the Vineyard as a ‘radical middle’ perspective that brings to the fore our Kingdom theology and praxis, especially the ‘both/and’ and ‘now-and-not-yet’ perspectives. I would even say that it dwells in this tension to the point of clarifying that this Kingdom tension is inherent to our place in this present aeon. Genuine Wisdom moves toward the essence of the musterion of the gospel of the Kingdom of God in Christ Jesus. I think the Vineyard has gathered a lot of wisdom from the praxis of the Kingdom of God, and applying that to the formational aspect in the theology of the Reign of God might be fairly helpful to the larger movement.  I have the feeling that this is a ‘Wisdom’ season for the Vineyard, not just in terms of leadership and culture, but in a distinctive way that Caleb Maskell outlined in his perspective at the UK and Ireland Vineyard National Leaders conference. Caleb even recommends Peter Leihart’s book Solomon Among the Postmoderns to the pastors and leaders in order to reach out to understand this emerging generation…and this book is essentially a commentary on Wisdom. Thus, I think that further explorations into the depths and riches of the biblical wisdom-orientation has much to recommend itself to the Vineyard movement.

Q: What do you think might be the practical implications of what you’re exploring?

A: Holistic Spiritual Formation. A balance that includes our most charismatic experiences and our most mundane.  Too often, I think many people think of their spirituality in a limited way, that the Kingdom really only breaks through in ‘prayer ministry times’ or when they can feel the Presence of God or even just on Sunday’s.  The wisdom-orientation can help us discover the transcendent and immanent aspects of the Kingdom, and also that we are ‘formed’ via these experiences, really all experiences, since spiritual formation happens as the Holy Spirit uses everything we experience to form us toward Christ; which includes our best and our worst, the felt Presence and Absence of God, our easiest and our most difficult seasons

Cross-training. I think a wisdom-orientation can help us bring issues together that have mostly been considered ‘either/or’ and bring them into a ‘both/and’ perspective. This experience just might propel us into new horizons vis-à-vis the theology and praxis of the Kingdom. For instance, a few years ago I was in Cincinnati at a small gathering and ended up in a group with Rose Madrid-Swetman talking about bringing together the charismatic and contemplative.  I have been trying to do this with a series of spiritual formation cohorts at our church, and the results have really been surprising and challenging, with real depth and new possibilities emerging for ministry, devotion, and experiencing God.

Steven will be available for further questions and dialogue in the comments.

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Steve Hamilton (www.verveandverse.blogspot.com) lives in Annapolis, Maryland and is married to Chaundra; they have three lovely girls together. A bi-vocational leader at the Central Maryland Vineyard, member of the Justice Response/VAST national leadership team with VineyardUSA and also a founding member of the Maryland Human Trafficking Task Force, he has spent almost 20 years in diverse endeavors as a civil servant with the U.S. government. He has studied bible and ancient near eastern civilization at the Baltimore Hebrew University and spiritual direction at the Sustainable Faith School of Spiritual Direction.

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Society of Vineyard Scholars, Steven Hamilton, SVS, Vineyard, Wisdom

After SVS 2010: David Kushner, Echoes in Scripture

After SVS 2010 is an extended dialogue with presenters from the first annual Society of Vineyard Scholars conference, held Feb 11-13, 2010. Monday through Friday until March 26th we’ll profile an SVS presenter and dialogue with them around their paper. Click here for a brief intro and link directory of the series. Full text of papers are available to SVS members.
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David C. Kushner, “Echoes in Scripture: Joel in Acts 2″

Abstract
In Acts 2 Peter cites Joel 3 (2:28-32) as his preliminary text. Joel 3 is mis-quoted, and appears to be related only as a proof-text. The contention of this paper is that Joel echoes throughout the context, theological concerns and imagery of Acts 2, which itself outlines the over-arching themes of Acts. The sum result of the Joel 3 citation is an overlay of complementary contexts that enables readers to appreciate the development of early church theology, hermeneutic, nascent pneumatology of the Spirit’s role and power in the kingdom of God, and the groundwork for how God’s justice will be meted out through the community of faith.

A literary-theological investigation of the context of Joel, reveals an expectation of the Day of Yahweh signaled by the outpouring of his Spirit, which establishes justice, calling the faithful out from among the nations.  Joel portrays Israel in the midst of exile, experiencing alienation internally, spiritually and from foreign forces. Joel 3 functions as a crux for the parallel structures of the book, and centralizes the outpouring of the Spirit as the inauguration of the re-establishment of Israel as Zion, which is concomitant with Yahweh’s justice among the nations. As in the case of the Exodus, the calling of the faithful from among the nations brings both salvation to those who call upon the LORD, and judgment upon those who defy him. Furthermore, evidence suggests that some prophetic thinking (Joel and Ezekiel) envisions the Spirit being directly related to the dispensation of justice within Zion and outward to the nations (as in Numbers 11).

Acts 1-2 embeds the events of Pentecost in the context of the exodus.  Israel still awaits for the completion of her exile to be signaled by the installment of God’s Messiah on Jerusalem’s throne and the eradication of Roman domination. The theophanic imagery of God’s Spirit upon the disciples signals the return of God’s presence from Exile and “the last days” (ie, the day of Yahweh).  The citation of Joel, whose own context expects the day of Yahweh to be signaled by the outpouring of the Spirit and the subjugation of hostile empires to God’s righteous kingdom, allows all of these themes to be brought to the reader’s attention, without requiring explicit comment. Furthermore the subsequent sermon serves as an exposition on the final two verses of Joel3, bringing the rhetorical force of imminent judgment and the epiphany of Joel’s prophesy of God’s messianic kingdom into sharp relief for the hearers.

Technorati Tags: Acts, Christianity, David Kushner, Joel, New Testament, Old Testament, Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS

New Series: Dialoging With The Society of Vineyard Scholars

Scroll down for a link directory of all profiles in the series.

Some of you know that last month I was privileged to present a paper at the first annual Society of Vineyard Scholars conference in Houston, Texas. It was a terribly rewarding experience for me, and I’m grateful for the opportunity. There were a total of 18 papers presented in a variety of panel categories including Bible, Culture, Theology, Mission, Religion and Science, and The Vineyard. The Plenary speaker (and the respondent for my panel) was Ron Sider, which was an amazing opportunity to have an outside voice speak into the Vineyard movement.

As one of the presenters, Jason Clark, recently pointed out on his blog, Vineyard USA National Director Bert Waggoner set the tone of the conference well with his observation of “4 Things The SVS Is Not:”

• Smart: We are not the smartest people in vineyard showing each other how smart we are.
• Critical: This is not a venue to show the vineyard it’s weaknesses, and to give the leaders a list of things that we think it needs to change.
• Position: The papers and discussions are not necessarily the position of vineyard churches. The work here is not an official expression, unless later approved by the movements leaders. It’s a creative space and time, for an honest exchange of ideas about the vineyard movement and theology.
• Elitism: This is not a place to develop an elite smug intellectualism. We are a group of Christians wanting to be submitted to Christ and be real with each other. Let’s keep it real, to have earthly engagements on subjects of interest to us and hopefully to God.

This reflects one of the wonderful characteristics of the Vineyard: it creates gracious space for freedom and exploration. SVS was no different. Even though it was a “scholars” conference, it was full of diversity and humility. Most of the participants (myself included) weren’t professional academics; they were first-and-foremost practitioners of ministry, whose experiences in the field have ignited and informed their theological imaginations. I’m grateful to the Vineyard for creating a space where young leaders can be encouraged in their pursuits and nurtured in their theological thinking, and it was thrilling to see people pushing their own boundaries in an environment where ideas could be presented and challenged in a dialog of grace.

I would like to extend that dialog here at Pastoralia and invite you to join it. I think the SVS presenters will benefit from ongoing dialogue concerning their ideas, and I think the Vineyard at large could benefit from more voices joining that dialog, including voices from outside the movement.

Starting Monday, March 8th, I’m going to be profiling a different SVS presenter every day, Monday through Friday. There will be an abstract of their paper along with a little Q&A from me to open the dialog. Then, I’d like to invite you to join in by asking questions and providing thoughts. The presenters themselves will be available to interact with you in the comments.

One important request: I work hard to maintain an irenic and civil space here. Some of the presenters are intentionally advancing ideas and topics that are edgy and challenging because that is part of the learning process. Again, the presenters views do not represent official Vineyard beliefs and doctrine and none of them are proposing conclusive doctrinal perspectives. Hence, this is not the place for condemnation. Feel free to ask (on topic) questions;  feel free to challenge. But do so with grace and respect. Otherwise, your comments are subject to my moderation.

So, I hope you’ll join the dialogue starting next week. We’re looking forward to your contributions!

Schedule:

3/8 – David Kushner: “Echoes in Scripture”
3/9 – Steve Hamilton: “Signs & Wonders: Wisdom & and the Reign of God”
3/10 – Jason Clark: “Consumerism, Social Imagination, and Ecclesiology”
3/11 – Jason Coker: “The Begging Bowl: Toward a Kingdom Economy of Gifts, Power, and Justice”
3/12 – Elisa Berry: “Beauty and the Practice of the Kingdom of God”

3/15 – Orion Edgar: “Justice and the Kingdom of God: Atonement and New Creation”
3/16 – Ryan McAnally-Linz: “The Problem of the Contested Center”
3/17 – Jared Boyd: Naming Injustice: “Doing Theology That Does Something”
3/18 – Jonathan Rutz: “The Case For Creation Care as a Defining Paradigm For the Vineyard Movement”
3/19 – Naomi Forrester: “Science vs. Christianity: A Battle To Be Won or Lost?”

3/22 – Cathy Zellmer: “The Divine Perichoretic Mission of Love”
3/23 – Steve Burnhope: “Culture, Worldview, and the Cross: Penal Substitutionary Atonement and 21st Century Mission”
3/24 – Steven Schenk: “Power and Purpose in a Cross-Shaped Community: Examining the Contradictions Between Theology and Praxis”
3/26 – Jon Bialecki & Jamie Wilson: “Surprise, Return, and Futurity: Social Science Analysis of the Vineyard’s Temporal Imaginary of the Kingdom, and a Theological Rejoinder”

3/29 – Doug Erickson: “Advice to Vineyard Theologians (and Philosophers and Scholars…)”
3/30 - Matt Croasmun: “The Cross, Eucharist, and Imitation in the Gospel of John”

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS, Theology, Vineyard Churches