March 5, 2012 at 11:45 am · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: death, love, preaching, suffering, theology
It’s funny the things that stick in my head and prompt me to write a blog post. Take yesterday for example: just a couple of words from a prayer in an open time of worship at church. The lady thanked Jesus for his “undying love” for us and promised her undying love in return.
Now I understand what she meant by “undying” – enduring, lasting, limitless even. Yet given the things I’ve been reading lately – Moltmann’s The Crucified God and Fiddes’ The Creative Suffering of God - it’s the dying love of God that has captured my imagination.
The love of Jesus that we celebrate in our communion meal is precisely the opposite of an undying love – it’s love that could only be expressed by dying.
There’s a story that’s often repeated by people talking about the suffering of God told by Elie Wiesel, a holocaust survivor. Wiesel was held in the Auschwitz death camp, where one day the whole camp’s population was summoned and made to stand facing three gallows. They had been set up for three Jews who had been found with weapons, suspected of sabotage and resistance. As was the custom after an execution, they were all forced to file past the corpses to get their food, a warning not to cross the camp commandant. Two of the executed were men, they died quickly, but the third was a young boy.
But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing…
And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished
Behind me I heard the same man asking:
“For God’s sake, where is God”
And from within me I heard a voice answer:
“Where he is? This is where – hanging here from this gallows…”
(Wiesel, Night)
A God who is actually alive is one who will die for us, with us. If God’s only response to suffering is to take us out of it is as good as dead until he turns up. A God who suffers with us is present in the depths of darkness as well as the light of liberation. A dying God is more alive, more real than an undying God, a passionless and distant observer.
Christian theologians speak of a ‘cruciform God’, God who is shaped like a cross. It’s a shape he chooses to make himself known by throughout the scriptures, it’s the definition of his love. It’s a shape that should be stamped all over the church – a shape that we not only wear around our necks or place on the top of steeples but that we take deep into ourselves. It’s a shape that refuses to be co-opted by power or prosperity theologies, a shape that cannot help but give itself away.
Last week, preaching at my home church, I began to hint at this. After Peter’s confession that Jesus is “the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (which is affirmed with a blessing), Jesus instructs the disciples not to tell anyone that he’s the Messiah. Why would he do that? It’s quite a strange puzzle, until you look at the next few verses where Jesus begins to reveal the suffering he will endure and Peter try to tell him off. It shows just how much the disciples have fundamentally misunderstood what it means for Jesus to be Messiah and Son of God – it’s about suffering, not an easy ride.
It’s here, at the end of Matthew 16, that Jesus says that anyone who will follow him must “deny themselves and take up their cross”. This can mean nothing less than taking the cruciform shape of the love of God into ourselves, of choosing suffering and rejection, of responding with a dying love. Being a disciple means dying so we can really live – not martyring ourselves to get a reward in paradise but a kind of dying life (as opposed to a living death) where we can see the Kingdom really coming.
February 20, 2012 at 12:49 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: creation, theology, wisdom
Creation: Not just about how special I am
Christians spend far too much time discussing Creation.
What’s worse is that the theology that comes out of this obsession is very often warped and ‘me centred’. It’s all ‘I believe that God made me to be special, so I can tell you how evil you are and how you should live your life’. I think this is partly because it’s all focussed on just a few verses – Genesis 1-3, and often missing out most of chapter 2 altogether (because it clearly doesn’t fit as neatly into the grand schema).
I’ve come to think that if we’re to have a comprehensive creation theology, we need to take into account the books which have the most to say about the God of creation – the ones no-one really mentions in this context, the so-called Wisdom Books. Job particularly, but also Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and several Psalms, revel in the God who made all things, who holds back the chaos, who knows the most intimate details of the wildest creatures and weather.
Taking into account some of the other things that are written about Creation in the Bible unsurprisingly gives us a broader view of creation. It helps us to avoid the person-centred creationism that seems to dominate the conversation, especially on the other side of the Atlantic.
Andy Alexis-Baker has written a very thoughtful article on Jesus Radicals in response to comments made by Rick Santorum (the Republican Presidential hopeful) that “The Earth is not the objective, man is the objective, and I think that a lot of radical environmentalists have it upside down. . . . We’re not here to serve the earth. That is not the objective, man is the objective.”
This story of creation puts humanity at the very pinnacle of the creation, put there to rule and exploit as much as they like, using up ‘resources’ (an un-Biblical word, as Alexis-Baker points out) as they will. I urge you to read the way Alexis-Baker ges through Job, showing what a bigger creation theology looks like, but I want to supply my own illustration of just how short-sighted this kind of thinking is.
Here’s a picture of Tom Cruise, sat on top of the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa. People spent almost unimaginable amounts of money, time and talent to build this incredible building. At the very pinnacle (apart from a very famous guy) is a set of radio antennae, just as there are at the top of so many tall buildings around the world. They have the highest place, the best view, but they are not the purpose or intent of the building! The owners wouldn’t let the lower floors get run down to give more power to the antennae. No one comes to admire the proportions and design of the antennae, not when there’s all that steel and glass and incredible view to look at!
If we accept that humanity occupies a similar place at the pinnacle of creation (or ‘the natural order’ if you don’t believe it was created) it cannot necessarily follow that humanity can do what it likes with the rest of the astonishing tower of the world around us. It especially cannot be a ‘Christian’ argument if we take Jesus’ teaching on what leadership looks like in his community:
“You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
(Mark 10:41-45, NIV)
If we take the ‘Creation Mandate’ of Genesis 1:28 seriously, we are to be rulers over creation, which must mean, according to Jesus, that we don’t ‘lord it over’ and exploit creation but serve it, be a slave to the entirety of it.
Now there’s an approach that might get you into arguments with scientists about creation!
But I guess that it doesn’t make sexy headlines when you’re campaigning for the primaries in the USA because you’ll end up sounding like one of those ‘liberals’ that need so much bashing.
What do you think about the ‘Creation Mandate’ and Christian responses to environmentalism? Please put something in the comments below!
Oh, and a reminder, go read the excellent article on Creation Theology in the Book of Job!
February 19, 2012 at 9:32 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: grace, sin, theology
This morning at church we looked at the call of Matthew in Matthew 9. Jesus tells Matthew, the outcast tax collector, to follow him and accepts an invitation to dinner chez Matt. There he is criticised for being associated with the riff-raff, the people who were most hated by the religious establishment -
“Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
(Matt 9:11-13, NIV)
You can almost taste the disgust with which ‘sinners’ is spat out at Jesus – without the faintest glimmer of respect for the host and guests at the meal, these visitors turn up and pour hate on the host, guest of honour and all the other guests at the meal. The designation ‘sinner’ is seen as a pejorative condemnation just as much today as it was then.
Anyone who questions Jesus’ sense of humour needs to look at this carefully – the sarcasm should not be lost. In the context of the chapter, Jesus has been going round healing people, and continues to after this accusation and another linked on in the next four verses. The writer is showing us that Matthew’s call – his call (we must read this story as a ‘signature’, the author being given a walk on cameo) – is just the same, a healing. Jesus is most definitely not saying that Matthew is still sick – he’s been called, he left his booth like a cripple leaving his begging post. No, Jesus is sarcastically saying ‘if you’re so pure and “healthy”, what do you care who I’m healing and doctoring?’ His scriptural quotation shows up their hypocrisy, they don’t even have the ‘mercy’ to temper their insults in another man’s home.
I imagine air-quotes around “righteous” and “sinners” in that last line – neither one is quite as it seems. Those who think they are healthy are sick to the core, while the patients are already getting healed. The ‘righteous’ are merely self-righteous and no better than the rest.
Jesus is not saying he’s come to make the sinners into righteous people. He’s showing that the division of humanity into those two discrete categories is bankrupt. There is no ‘them’ and ‘us’. God doesn’t ‘hate’ anyone at all, least of all the ones that religious people hate and pillory.
Jesus didn’t call himself a sinner – though by identifying with them he came pretty close. He didn’t call himself a Pharisee or ‘righteous’, though people called him ‘teacher’, ‘rabbi’, and immediately recognised his integrity. This is his call to abolish the categories of ‘sinner’ and ‘righteous’ and to get on with caring for people’s needs, whatever they may be. Reading into the next verses (which we didn’t this morning, probably because people get so confused reading them), the old categories won’t hold the new wine, the new kingdom. Jesus’ transcending of barriers will tear categories apart.
Yet somehow the mudslinging of ‘sinner’ continues to this day. We barely disguise hatred by talking about ‘loving the sinner’. When someone else calls you a sinner, it’s no better than ‘criminal’ or ‘convict’ at welcoming you. Maybe today Jesus would say that ‘Mercy is better than doctrine’ and keep on hanging out with the scum of society, whether they are tax collectors, Sun journalists or just ordinary people who don’t feel good enough when they hurry past our church doorways.
February 14, 2012 at 5:02 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: fear, love, lst, OT, theology, wisdom
Why is it that my brain switches on whenever I get in the shower in the evening? It never does that in the morning! All sorts of things go through my mind, seemingly completely unconnected with whatever’s gone on in the day – ideas for blog posts, questions about books that I read, even ideas for short stories I might one day write!
A thought that began a year ago and has come back to me recently is about wisdom and fearing God – quite a strange one to write about on Valentine’s day!
The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
Proverbs 9:10 (NIV)
This text (and the similar parallels in Job 28, Psalm 111, Proverbs 1 and 15) obviously came up last year, studying Wisdom in the core module of the MA at LST. I think there are two different ways of reading this verse that say a lot about the different approaches of Evangelical Christians today.
The first is to take it at face value: we need to fear God. There is some room for a more nuanced understanding of what is meant by fear, perhaps speaking of a ‘reverent awe’. After all, it’s not just in the ‘wisdom books’ that the idea of fearing YHWH comes. Through the penteteuch and history books it is used to describe a life lived in a godly way – it’s even in the New Testament a few times. This posture of fear is the source, the origin of godly wisdom.
‘Beginning’ could be read differently, though – it could mean that it is the start of a journey. That journey could be a personal one, or in keeping with the process thinking I’ve been grappling with recently, it could be a journey that humanity as a whole is on.
In a talk titled ‘Touching the Stove’, Shane Hipps used the way his daughter is learning about the cooker in the kitchen as a metaphor for how human interaction with God has developed. While fear is a good attitude for a toddler to have toward the hot oven, for a teenager or an adult to have the same response would not be good. Despite the possible utilitarian, objecctifying direction this illustration could take us in, it brings in the idea of development. Whether we understand development individually (each of us taking a journey from fear of God to mature love) or corporately (the dominant metaphor of our communities moving from fear to love), it is the key to this alternate reading.
This choice of readings is about more than the kind of God we follow, though it is that. Is the judgement of God unrelenting punishment – is forgiveness only possible through spilling blood – or is it something closer to discernment? Is God dangerous, an untameable deity who must be placated somehow, or is he genuinely ‘on our side’ (aside: I mean all of humanity by ‘on our side’, not ‘my side’ – that really can be a dangerous teaching!)
It’s more than that – huge as the idea of what God is like – because it speaks to our understanding of how the universe works. Are we doomed to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors while history points a finger saying ‘you should have learned’? Is it genuinely possible to learn from those who have gone before and shown us what God is really like and explored how we can have a relationship with him? If the latter, then progress is possible, we need not continue to just fear God, but grow to a deep and respectful love.
I choose to believe today that progress is possible, that there is some directionality to the human existence - both on a micro, personal level, and on a macro, all-of-humanity level. I choose to believe that God does not want us to remain terrified, or even at an awe-filled respectful distance, he wants us as close as the tightest hug.
What do you think? Is fear a helpful way of considering your attitude to God?
February 10, 2012 at 2:36 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: apologetics, dissertation, essays, love wins, lst, postmodern, rob bell, theology
Here it is. The big one – I know at least a few of you have been waiting to have a chance to read this, I hope you find it as interesting to read as it was to write. Despite the unassuming title, the subtitle gives away the potential controversy in the content of the dissertation:
A Critical Apologetic Appraisal of Rob Bell’s Love Wins
Despite the huge furore of early 2011, I’ve chosen not to focus on the argument over heaven and hell that erupted over Love Wins and take a rather more holistic view of the book. I particularly wanted to put it in its context and assess on its own terms whether it met its aim. On reading (and re-reading…) Love Wins, I suggest that the best way to read it is as a work of postmodern apologetics, which is something that the reviewers I read either ignored (most of them) or denied as a possibility (a very tiny minority). This means taking in both its postmodernity in style and context and its apologetic content, realising that the book is aimed at those on the fringe of Christianity, wondering if they could ever be/remain a Christian because of some of the beliefs that are described as Christian. Bell wants to show that there can be different Christianities, that it is a ‘broad stream’.
My approach to assessing whether Bell has done an effective job of encouraging those postmoderns on the fringe of Christian faith that there is a home for them within is based on a ‘Triangulation’ from Kevin Vanhoozer. In an article entitled ‘On the very idea of a Theological System’, he describes the three points of ‘the Spirit’s speaking in Scripture, the belief-practices of the church, and the world made new in Jesus Christ’, which must be kept in view, triangulated, in Christian life.
If you take nothing at all from my dissertation, if your mind is made up on Rob Bell, or if you just don’t care at all, at least take this bit seriously. We have to keep in view the three points of triangulation to live a balanced and full Christian life – what God is saying through the Bible, the way the church (in its many forms) is acting and thinking and the culture around us, with all its potential for transformation and redemption in Jesus. Under-rating any one of these leads to serious defects in our spiritual life and our witness will suffer.
Taking the three points as section headings, I look at how Bell’s book can be seen in these three contexts, how well it sits in them. I took in a wide range of sources, as you would expect in writing a 20,000 word dissertation, from those who stridently opposed Love Wins to others that leapt to Bell’s defence, from postmodern philosophers to reformed theologians. I look at the way he uses scripture – both which passages he selects (and, tellingly – as is so often the case – ignores) and how he handles exploring them. Then I explore how Bell relates to the church, contemporary and historical – those whose writing he has borrowed from, those who agree with him and those who have opposed him. Finally, I explore how postmodern apologetics seeks to convince contemporary culture of the believability of Christianity, and how Bell fits in with this.
My conclusion was to draw out some strengths of Bell’s writing and suggestions for how other apologists might take his work further in giving reasons for faith to those at the edge of Christianity.
Bell’s understanding and interaction with the world is certainly a strength. He reads the concerns and questions that those on the edge of the church have and paints a picture of God in a style that they recognise that emphasises the aspects of His character that they want to see. Doing this has a high apologetic value as it removes obstacles to faith, showing that Christianity makes sense for postmoderns.
Bell’s handling of scripture and the traditions of the church have some greater weaknesses, however. He is not always honest in his selection of scriptures and his depiction of the sources he has used, which at least raises questions over the conclusions he comes to in some chapters.
Bell has met many of the suggestions made earlier in the paper on what postmodern apologetics should be like. He writes to postmoderns as a postmodern using a postmodern style. However, we can suggest that a stronger apologetic could be written based on the analysis of Love Wins in this paper.
Firstly, Bell’s overemphasis on experience can be balanced with other epistemological bases; revelation, reason and faith. This is not to say that Bell ignores them, but developing them more could strengthen the apologetic. This has particular application when Bell is using scripture; in the terms of our triangulation, it would strengthen his apologetic case if he made sure that scripture was seen to be privileged over experience.
Secondly, apologists must take care in their interaction with the church. While we can learn from Bell’s positioning as inside the church yet sitting beside those at the edges, his treatment of some of his sources, especially those that cannot be considered contemporary leaves something to be desired. Honesty is required in naming some views as traditionally fringe, while others were mainstream and clearly showing where your ideas invert that.
Love Wins can be seen as transforming apologetics, demonstrating a new approach to making Christian faith seem plausible and believable in the postmodern world. Our desire is to see more postmoderns creating apologetic works that take seriously the Spirit speaking in scripture, the belief-practices of the church and the world being transformed by Jesus.
I have published the dissertation as an ebook – on Amazon for Kindle and on Smashwords for other e-readers (also including Kindle, as well as .pdf and other formats for easier consumption). For a limited time (a couple of weeks), you can download it from Smashwords for free if you use the code WT94F (enter the code at the checkout). 
February 8, 2012 at 3:13 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: Acts, biblical, Corinthians, essays, Holy Spirit, lst, Luke, Paul, Romans, theology
Now here was a module well outside my comfort zone – brought up in a cessationist context, I’ve come to think that’s not right, but I’ve never done any real Bible study on it. So a Pentecostal tutor who’s written a book on Baptism in the Spirit - a challenge to say the least!
The module was a ‘Biblical’ one, in the sense that it was primarily focussed on the texts of Luke-Acts and the Pauline Epistles, specifically in comparison between them. Yet in practice, since the actual verses up for discussion were relatively few, we often ended up having discussions that really said ‘such-and-such an author said this, but this other person disagreed, for these reasons…’ This culture of discussion was quite hard for me to engage in immediately, I found it a bit dry and detached.
My topic for the essay was anything but detached – it was on the connection between the Holy Spirit and suffering:
Compare and contrast the approaches of Luke and Paul to relationships between God’s Spirit and suffering
The bulk of the essay examined some key passages in Luke (2:25-35, 4:14-30, 12), Acts (4, 5, 6-7, 9, 20:17-38), 2 Corinthians and Romans 8. The purpose of the essay was to draw out differences and similarities between the two biblical authors, but I also wanted to briefly look at what it might mean today, as well.
We have seen some differences in the way Luke and Paul link suffering with the Holy Spirit. Luke, with his mission emphasis, has only ever described suffering and the response of Christians to it in terms of persecution because of rejection. The Spirit predicts this suffering, inspires the message that is rejected, supports persecuted witnesses and even specially commissions some to a life of suffering evangelism. In Paul’s epistles, we have found that suffering can be a mark of witnessing and his apostolic commission. But in Romans, Paul expands the idea of suffering to include the bondage of all creation, including Christians, and the yearning for eschatological redemption.
Suffering in both Paul and Luke is not personal or individual. On the one hand it is because of identification with Jesus and the Spirit-inspired but rejected gospel; on the other is is because we identify with the groaning of all creation. The question ‘why is this happening to me?’ is not on their horizons. Either way, our identification with a bigger story in our suffering brings great hope, for the Spirit is with us. The promise of the support of the Spirit when we are persecuted is to keep us from being anxious (Luke 12:11 12). And as we identify with a groaning creation, Paul says that the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groaning when we cannot express our suffering in words. All the suffering we have explored is underwritten by the remarkable idea of a suffering God. We suffer with Christ and the Spirit suffers with us.
Rather than explaining away suffering, Paul and the apostles recorded in Acts think it is something to be celebrated, an honour. Persecution is a response to the gospel and rejection is what Jesus and the apostles experienced. The authentic response to it is thanksgiving and prayer for boldness. Suffering that is not persecution is an opportunity to join with the Spirit in interceding for the redemption that we hope for to come. The deep groaning that Paul writes about can only come from experience; it is a unique opportunity to join in with the Spirit’s work.
Exploring the idea of the suffering God is something that I have recently picked up again, and will write on soon, as I explore Moltmann’s Crucified God. To me it’s a crucial idea (pun intended).
Holy Spirit Essay - download a .pdf file of the full essay.
This essay by Jon Rogers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.jonrogers.co.uk.
February 7, 2012 at 3:39 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: church, essays, lst, theology, transformation
I was hugely looking forward to this module – thinking through in a rigorous academic context how the Bible speaks to contemporary culture and can bring about social and political transformation. I brought in some ideas that I was aware of but not really fully up to speed on, like liberation theology, it was an excuse to read some Christian Marxists and Anarchists and looked in more detail at ideas like Jubilee that I’ve been involved with previously.
Because of the mix of the class, we had a good chance to challenge our own and other’s views from a whole spectrum of political views and hermeneutic approaches. However, with so many huge questions – from ‘church and state’ to slavery, to ‘just war’ – we were bound to end up with fewer answers than we started!
In a similar way to how many of the modules operated, we each were given a week to lead, which inevitably meant that the session we studied in the most depth became the source of our essay title. My session fell on my birthday – God’s new community – the Church and my title:
In what ways might the community life described in Acts be relevant to the church today?
Given the feedback from the marking, it seems I spent too much of the essay trying to understand how the community life in Acts came to be and what it was like, and not enough time talking about what it might mean in our contemporary context. I found it fascinating to look at the connections between the life ‘on the road’ that Jesus practised with his disciples (not just the 12, a group that included women too), the Essenes and the early church. It’s also interesting to look at the arguments as to whether this was a temporary, one off thing or a model for the future, since the sharing of goods seems to be found only in the first few chapters of Acts, and almost not at all in the letters.
It’s my suggestion that the radical sharing of property is both a hard thing and a rewarding thing to do. I’m not sure that we have the cultural position to do it on a large scale in the UK church, perhaps as Paul found in the gentile contexts he founded churches. But the attitudes behind are just as important and resonant with contemporary culture. Starting simply, by sharing food and time makes the ‘communion’ service into a real meal of fellowship with one another and with God. It removes barriers of exclusion, in the spirit of Jesus and Paul, building a family atmosphere that would be welcoming to anyone who comes in.
BST Essay - download a .pdf file of the full essay.
This essay by Jon Rogers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.jonrogers.co.uk.
February 6, 2012 at 3:39 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: drama, essays, improvisation, lst, postmodern, theology, wisdom
Semester 2 was a different beast to the first one. Two new modules, a new direction in the core and beginning to think about the dissertation (more of which later!)
The core Wisdom module moved from the Old Testament to the New, then on to look at how Christian Wisdom is found in later years, taking in philosophy, art, music and science. While it’s hard to pinpoint how the module could best be improved, given that the first essay had to be ‘biblical’ and the second had to connect wisdom with a more contemporary discipline, I feel that the balance of sessions was not quite right – and I know it has been altered. I had not opportunity to write about the connection between the New Testament writings and Wisdom because the fascinating NT sessions (on Jesus and the Beatitudes and on how Paul’s writings draw on the Wisdom books of the Old Testament and Apocrypha) came after the Semester break. I think there’s a lot there that I would have found fascinating to write about, but my eventual choice of essay title came closer to my more usual interest in the postmodern:
In your opinion does biblical wisdom resonate best with a premodern, modern or postmodern worldview? What implications arise for a transformative use of the Bible in the current postmodern worldview?
With just 3000 words to play with again, I think I took the ‘route A’ approach of looking at premodernity, modernity and postmodernity, giving a very broad characterisation of how each connects with wisdom. However, with the last third of the essay I went off in a more unusual direction: drama. It was a thought sparked by reading Grenz and Vanhoozer among others
“In a sense, the theater is perhaps the most appropriate artistic venue for the expression of the postmodern rejection of modernism … Postmoderns view life, like the story being told on the stage, as an assemblage of intersecting narratives.” (Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism, p26)
This multiplicity of narratives acts as a check or even a deconstruction of the metanarative(s) derived from scripture, as an acknowledgement of the nuanced approach to life that is needed – it is wisdom.
But I went further than drama, suggesting that there is an inherent danger of just re-running the struggles of those who have played their part in the ‘theodrama’. Improvisation, whether musical or theatrical provides and extended metaphor for how we live the Christian life with wisdom in a postmodern era of ‘suspicion of metanarratives’, where each ‘church’ or community of improvisers works out their response and continuation of the drama of God.
On reflection, this reminds me of the ‘five act play’ metaphor that N.T.Wright often uses (for example, see halfway through this essay on the authority of scripture)
Suppose there exists a Shakespeare play whose fifth act had been lost. The first four acts provide, let us suppose, such a wealth of characterization, such a crescendo of excitement within the plot, that it is generally agreed that the play ought to be staged. Nevertheless, it is felt inappropriate actually to write a fifth act once and for all: it would freeze the play into one form, and commit Shakespeare as it were to being prospectively responsible for work not in fact his own. Better, it might be felt, to give the key parts to highly trained, sensitive and experienced Shakespearian actors, who would immerse themselves in the first four acts, and in the language and culture of Shakespeare and his time, and who would then be told to work out a fifth act for themselves.
I can’t believe, thinking about it now, that I (a) forgot about N.T.Wright having said it all before and (b) got away with not including it – how did the markers not call me out on that one! Still, it’s this discussion of drama and improvisation that is the most valuable part of the essay and has shaped my thought a lot on how to live the Christian life, especially how we relate to the Bible. My characterisations of premodernity, modernity and postmodernity are undeniably flat and one-dimensional, partly because of the constraints of words and what I wanted to say about each in the essay.
Wisdom Essay 2 - Download a .pdf file of the full essay.
This essay by Jon Rogers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.jonrogers.co.uk.
February 3, 2012 at 3:49 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: John Piper, Rachel Held Evans, theology, women
There seems to be a lot of this “Man’s Church (grrrrrr)” going around at the moment – posturing and faux-butchness, saying Christianity has become weedy and feminised, that it needs a good manly rescue in the guise of complementarians. I don’t buy it.
This time it’s John Piper - I read some edited ‘highlights’ of his address at the Pastors Conference his ministry runs with disappointment and a little bit of shame that there still so many high profile Christians who have views that seem to marginalise women at every turn.
“God revealed Himself in the Bible pervasively as king not queen; father not mother,” Piper said at this year’s annual pastors conference hosted by the Desiring God ministry. “Second person of the Trinity is revealed as the eternal Son not daughter; the Father and the Son create man and woman in His image and give them the name man, the name of the male.”
He continued, “God appoints all the priests in the Old Testament to be men; the Son of God came into the world to be a man; He chose 12 men to be His apostles; the apostles appointed that the overseers of the Church be men; and when it came to marriage they taught that the husband should be the head.”
“Now, from all of that I conclude that God has given Christianity a masculine feel. And being God, a God of love, He has done that for our maximum flourishing both male and female.”
When a biblical literalist like Piper needs to infer from a short and very selective, biased list of data, something’s not right. Now I can’t claim to have the years of grounding in study, scripture, pastoral leadership and teaching that Piper has, but it seems that argument from inference here is the weakest of all possible reasons to say that male dominance is not only OK but the right thing for the church, that it is God-ordained for the benefit of both men and women.
There are plenty of good posts being written that that show there’s more balance to the both the Old Testament and the New Testament than is being granted by Piper (see Frank Viola on God’s view of a woman, Daniel Kirk on Imaging the Biblical God and Brian LePort on Christianity began in a patrilineal society for example, or look at the comments on Rachel Held Evans’ post John Piper wants a “masculine Christianity.” What do you think?)
LePort makes a very important point about the culture of the Ancient Near East – it was ‘patrilineal’, patriarchal, father-son oriented. Property, titles, businesses, skills, names and family identity: all passed down from father to son. Look at the genealogies in Genesis: Father begat Son, rinse, repeat. If we read the Bible as a document that was actually written in a place, at a certain time, by human people with human lives and influenced by the humans around them (not discounting the inspiration of God, but saying that people had more influence on the final text than just taking down a dictation from above) then we must expect the patriarchal system to have influenced them.
When Israel imagined God, they looked for a strong God, a mighty warrior ‘Lord of Hosts’ who would rescue them when their enemies oppressed them. They used the metaphors of power and influence that were available to them – and in a male dominated society, no wonder that so many of them were masculine.
Going further, there seem to have been two major gods of Canaan that they particularly struggled to stop the worship of: Baal the weather god, (he controlled thunder and rain, among other things) and Ashera, the (female) fertility god. As those who said that Israel should worship YHWH alone pushed back against these idols, their attributes were either shown to be in the control of YHWH (e.g. the drought and then deluge in the time of Elijah when they had the contest to see which god was real) or largely sidelined as not really divine.
So we’d expect women and female attributes to play a vanishingly small role in the Bible – it would be a huge surprise if they didn’t. Yet time and time again, women play key roles in leading Israel and in their important origin stories. Here are two.
The narrative of the Exodus is the key story that Israel used to explain who they were as a people – and Jews today still do, the people who God rescued from Egypt. Yet reading through the book recently, I was struck by how as they are delivered from Pharaoh and the Red Sea, it is Miriam and the women seem to have a key role in worshiping God – and this after her role in saving Moses, the ‘saviour’ of Israel. Then, as they come to build the tabernacle where God would live among his people, it is the jewelry of both women and men that provides the gold for the lavish structure.
A second ‘origin story’ of the people of Israel is that of Samuel and his establishing of the Kingdom of Israel in the first kings, Saul and David. The narrative would seemingly lose nothing if we were told nothing of Samuel’s background, yet the first chapters fo into detail about his godly mother and her prayer and commitment of her son to God. David is pictured as the ultimate king, anointed by the great prophet Samuel, who is able to do these things because of a holy woman who was not afraid to talk to God, make a bargain with Him, make a decision that her husband had to go along with.
Or take the ‘origin story’ of Jesus – the long genealogy in Matthew 1 which famously includes five women, each with a ‘complicated’ story. The “father of… father of…” repetition of patriarchy is interrupted by women whose stories can’t be ignored – and that’s the pattern of the whole bible: despite the male dominated background, women whose stories can’t be ignored.
Women who are leaders, prophets, business owners, teachers, apostles. Women who seem to sow the seeds of greatness in their sons. Women who overcome every obstacle thrown their way to make sure they are treated fairly by God. And God who listens when they say that it’s not fair, they need more, God who makes things fairer.
So Jesus had twelve “bros” – does that mean it’s only bros are important to him? Of course not! The twelve bros mirror the twelve actual brothers who became the twelve tribes. Sisters didn’t count when it came to founding tribes, so Jesus couldn’t have picked six men and six women while still making the picture of a new Israel work.
It’s also not like the only people with Jesus are the bros, either – and the women around him are not just in supporting roles. They travel with him, learn from him. They are the ones who stick by his side during his torturous death when all the “bros” ran away in terror. It’s women who hear of his resurrection first, a woman who sees him alive again first, despite having no legal standing as witnesses. Women are there in the upper room when the Spirit falls, telling people about the good news in different languages.
I think that if we are to make an inference, it’s that the exceptions show what God really thinks of the ‘rule’: God values women, no matter what culture or tradition says.
Ben Gosden says
I want to thank, Rachel Held Evans… for issuing the challenge to men to respond to John Piper’s remarks. Too often we men who agree with wonderful voices like Rachel sit back and depend on her and others like her to raise these issues so that we can rubberstamp them with our quiet, “Amen”
Worse yet, we see the (appropriate and justified) responses from gifted female leaders like Rachel Held Evans and keep the ‘quiet “Amen”‘ inaudible, not even spilling pixels of approvement in comments or tweets. That won’t do: we need men and women to stand together on this issue and show that there is a different way of imagining the church.
I am not so naive as to think that my little voice will change the mind of a titan like Piper, or even that I could argue the least of his followers into submission, for arguments very rarely change minds. Rather, I hope that by putting myself on what I see as the right side of this conversation, I might show to some other young woman or man that there is more to be imagined than the 1950′s style roles that are prescribed in some churches.
February 1, 2012 at 5:05 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: book review, Doug Pagitt, Evangelism, gospel, postmodern, theology
Evangelism has become a dirty word to some people and cultural changes are happening across the world, ones that I would normally label as ‘postmodern’, which raise new problems with how we share the Christian message. It’s these issues that Doug Pagitt tackles in his new book Evangelism in the Inventive Age.
‘Inventive Age’ is what Pagitt uses to describe the cultural shift we are experiencing – a new era that follows the ‘Agrarian Age, the Industrial Age and the Information Age’. For all the talk of ‘missional church’ and ‘evangelicalism’, how can we possibly tell people about Jesus without sounding like we’re bible-bashing, forcing people into a mold they don’t want to be in? Pagitt’s suggestion is that it is resonance that best describes what we aim for when we are evangelizing – not conversion. The key to this kind of resonance is framing the good news of Jesus in a way that connects with people, and Pagitt looks at this from two perspectives. Firstly, a very contemporary idea, the enneagram is used to show the primary passions and fears of the nine types of people it describes. Each of these is embraced by the good news, each of them has ‘points of connection’, resonances with the biblical story. Secondly, Pagitt looks at eight ‘vignettes ‘ (or stories) in Acts that show the values in evangelism that he suggests are appropriate for the Inventive Age.
This is the fourth book in Pagitt’s series on the ‘Inventive Age’, which I found out is actually aimed at church leaders. At about 110 pages it’s not a long or difficult read – Pagitt doesn’t presuppose that you’ve read all his other books or studied theology for decades to understand his references. This means that it’s very accessible to a wider audience than just church leaders – anyone with an interest in sharing the good news of Jesus who finds that it’s not as easy in 2012 as just pulling up a soapbox in speakers’ corner.
Read the rest of the review at Provoketive.com
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