FROM FUNDEMENTALS TO MEDITATIONS IN FAITHFULNESS.
The movement known as fundementalism arose in the 1950’s as a response to and expression of modernity. Seeking to define faith in contrast to liberalisim the movement laid down 5 points by which they felt ‘historical faith’ should be dfined and defended. They failed to take into account 1) that other traditions at other times in our history have held other persoectives – blood attonement does not show up until the 13th century and that early Christiantiy viewed incarnation, and not death on a cross, as our means of salvation. I wonder what happens if we make these into meditations on faithfulness instead of definitions of ‘true’ faith.
* Inerrancy of the Scriptures
To have an ineerant scripture is to have one that must be worshiped as the end all/be all of faith and knowledge. To engage in such an idoloatry is to refuse to see the project that the bible itself engages in – a collection – or community – of texts. Each text may make specific claims but these claims can be augmented or refuted by other claims in the text. Mark presents a ‘son of man’ or human, Davidic Jesus while John presents an ‘Son of God’ or Divine jesus. These texts are mutually exclusive and mutually revealing. Instead of answers they give us questions to ponder and journeys to go on.
* The virgin birth and the deity of Jesus (Isaiah 7:14)
In discussing the Virgin Birth it is important to note that the narrative itself only appears in two of the Gospel narratives. My point here is to not debate Virgin Birth but to instead insist that such a doctrine is not a prerequisite for faith and faithfulness. The power of the narrative is instead something much different – it is the assertion that the Holy One of God enters humanity in those people most often to be over looked, forgotten and trampled upon. The life of God in the world bursts into human expierence in a fragile form, subject to the ravages of weather.
Jesus as God incarnate is itself a post-biblical idea. Johns Gospel comes the closests to saying it but more closely implies that Jesus and God are of one agenda, one mind and one goal. Paul has a high Christology but also does not go as far as to name Jesus as god. Jesus is most God like in John and most human in Mark. For the Christian then Jesus becomes the parable of God. Jesus becomes the method and mode by which we contemplate God With Us, the life of God touching and intertwined with the human condition.
* The doctrine of substitutionary atonement by God's grace and through human faith (Hebrews 9)
It has been a disturbment to people for ages as to why God needs a bloody sacrafice to appease his wrath. The thinking goes that humanity is to ‘sinful’ that Gods relationship to us is not one of love but of wrath and anger. When ‘God so loved the world’ it was in order to provide a person – a perfect person at that – to receive his wrath and rage. Here we can hear the critiques that say that this sort of thinking justifies abuses of the worst kind.
Liberation theology says the suffering Christ is not the recipitant of Gods rage but is instead the sighn of Gods solidarty with the suffering of the world. Those who suffer under poverty, in justice and human cruelity can turn to Jesus to see a god who does not suffer in their place but suffers with them.
Another idea, which works with the Liberation theology model, is that it is not God who needs a bloody sacrifice, but us. The Holy One of God comes into the world and we respond with violence and injustice. Jesus on the cross becomes the scapegoat – the one whom we direct our rage and intolerance unjustly. In the shock of this we recognize what we did – we created a system of injustivce that killed with out mercy. Salvation here is not Jesus dying FOR our sin but BECAUSE of it. In resserection Jesus steps forward and reveals the broken body – the victim of our crime – and stresses to us the idea that violence does not save us. Jesus challenges the idea of sacred violence as salvic.
* The bodily resurrection of Jesus (Matthew 28)
* The authenticity of Christ's miracles (or, alternatively, his pre-millennial second coming)[4]
I spent my undergrad days –at Jerry Falweels Liberty u – debating the validity of the miracles. I spent my liberal years debating how they didn’t happen. In my ‘emerging’ days I hope to hold onto that last position and then move to a new place that asks ‘what do these miracles mean – what do they say about Jesus and the God he points to? To get engaged indebates about miracles misses the point that the original storytellers where trying to tell: God has erupted into our midst and in this person we meet God-with-us.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
The Work of God
THE WORK OF GOD
The truth of God which sets free, and is a way or path we follow into the heart of the Work of God. Traditionally this work has been referred to as the Kingdom of God but some Emerging Church leaders like Brian McLaren suggest we call it something else in order recover the spirit of the phrase as they exist in the gospels. He recommends ‘the Enterprise of God’ or the ‘industry of God’ among others.
I instead prefer to use Work of God, as the Kingdom of God is something we are building in our midst as a present tense reality. It is not a top down kingdom but instead a bottom up revolution – a mustard seed revolution as the Progressive Christian Alliance would say – that seeks to create a world of fairness and equality. Here we return to the mission of Jesus and ask how we continue the work of inclusion of outsiders that Jesus began in his ministry. The work does not END with what Jesus said and did but BEGINS – we must continually discern who the world/church has excluded and then create a space for them.
It is obvious in our history that the world/church (for much of its history these have been on par with each other) has excluded women, gay people and racial minorities. But we should also turn our attention to, let us say terrorists and find a place at the table for them. If we are honest many of these people are from areas abandoned by wealth and priveledge and whos homes have been over run by injustice. Be it the Buddist terrorists of Japan, Irish Catholic terroists or Muslim terroists in too many cases what has resulted has happened at our failure to include the voices of the lost, oppressed and deprived in our conversations.
When Jesus performs the Lords Prayer – that prayer for God’s Kindom Come, not as an other worldly power but as a present tense reality – he prays for two things of import: bread and the forgiveness of debt. The cycle of oppression is easily broken when we feed the poor – or ensure that all peole have the means to have, aquire and grow food and when we ensure that all people have the ability to escape their debt through work, through gainful contribution to society and through the removing of unjust debt desighned to keep the poor out of society as full contributors.
The truth of God which sets free, and is a way or path we follow into the heart of the Work of God. Traditionally this work has been referred to as the Kingdom of God but some Emerging Church leaders like Brian McLaren suggest we call it something else in order recover the spirit of the phrase as they exist in the gospels. He recommends ‘the Enterprise of God’ or the ‘industry of God’ among others.
I instead prefer to use Work of God, as the Kingdom of God is something we are building in our midst as a present tense reality. It is not a top down kingdom but instead a bottom up revolution – a mustard seed revolution as the Progressive Christian Alliance would say – that seeks to create a world of fairness and equality. Here we return to the mission of Jesus and ask how we continue the work of inclusion of outsiders that Jesus began in his ministry. The work does not END with what Jesus said and did but BEGINS – we must continually discern who the world/church has excluded and then create a space for them.
It is obvious in our history that the world/church (for much of its history these have been on par with each other) has excluded women, gay people and racial minorities. But we should also turn our attention to, let us say terrorists and find a place at the table for them. If we are honest many of these people are from areas abandoned by wealth and priveledge and whos homes have been over run by injustice. Be it the Buddist terrorists of Japan, Irish Catholic terroists or Muslim terroists in too many cases what has resulted has happened at our failure to include the voices of the lost, oppressed and deprived in our conversations.
When Jesus performs the Lords Prayer – that prayer for God’s Kindom Come, not as an other worldly power but as a present tense reality – he prays for two things of import: bread and the forgiveness of debt. The cycle of oppression is easily broken when we feed the poor – or ensure that all peole have the means to have, aquire and grow food and when we ensure that all people have the ability to escape their debt through work, through gainful contribution to society and through the removing of unjust debt desighned to keep the poor out of society as full contributors.
Truth
Truth is not a thing we own and define. Truth, as scripture says ‘set us free’ and Jesus says ‘I am the way, the life and the truth’. Truth is a path we follow, it is a journey we take. Truth is not something we own but something owns us. Truth happens to us, breaking through a barrier, upsetting our expectations, leading us to a new way of being. And everytime we think we own truth we find we need more truth, another truth to set us free from the expectations we built the last time we stopped or paused in our journey.
Maybe this is an idea worth exploring in ‘Truth’ or ‘Grace’. The truth we need to be set free from is that we can ever know truth, that Truth capital T is something definable and ownable. The same with Grace. We are saved by Grace but everytime we start to define Grace then we have entered a law. Grace is the spirit of God saving us despuite the laws we create in order to be saved.
Truth then is that which frees us, is the way we follow, the journey we go on to be in relationship with God, God’s people and God’s creation. When we belive we can define Truth then it is truth that can set us free from the heresy of absolutes. This is what Thomas Merton says about the devil: The devils world is a world of absolutes because there is no grace there. God is the God of grace, of pluralities and journeies (my paraphrase).
Maybe this is an idea worth exploring in ‘Truth’ or ‘Grace’. The truth we need to be set free from is that we can ever know truth, that Truth capital T is something definable and ownable. The same with Grace. We are saved by Grace but everytime we start to define Grace then we have entered a law. Grace is the spirit of God saving us despuite the laws we create in order to be saved.
Truth then is that which frees us, is the way we follow, the journey we go on to be in relationship with God, God’s people and God’s creation. When we belive we can define Truth then it is truth that can set us free from the heresy of absolutes. This is what Thomas Merton says about the devil: The devils world is a world of absolutes because there is no grace there. God is the God of grace, of pluralities and journeies (my paraphrase).
plurality of truth
Having grown up in the Evangelical church of the 90’s awareness of the doctrine wars sits heavily in my heart. In my own life having made progress from conservative evangelical – complete with a stint at an evangelical college – to liberal protestant – complete with a degree from an progressive, liberal mainline seminary – to ‘progressive emerging’ (if that exists) – complete with stints at my kitchen table reading everything I can get my hands on – I have been imbedded in the conflict for many years.
People of faith – of many traditions and the multitude traditions within traditions – are beginning to realize more and more that narrow ways of viewing the mystery that we are imbedded in to no longer work. We recognize more and more that we are on a journey and that our faith traditions provide vocabulary that enriches and inspires the journey. But when it comes down to it and we are sitting next to our more conservative Christian friend or our Reform Muslim friend – or any combination of perspectives from any number of traditions – that it is our common humanity and a faith in that which calls us to be our best and most w/holy selves that unites us. In this regard conversation on prayer, worship, scripture and doctrine is less about ‘convert to my way’ as it is a conversation of awe at the multitude of ways we have of exploring the mystery that we find our selves in.
Such a view allows us to enter into a concept of truth as plural. As Christians we affirm a God who exists in plurality – a triune model of God –, which allows to contemplate faith in a plurality of viewpoints. Such a model allows us to recognize that all our theology – or ‘God-Speak’ – is nothing more than our conversation of making faith real in our minds, or ‘faith seeing understanding’.
As Christians we engage in community-based worship, and communities by their nature hold a diverse range of views. To be Christian is to be centered in a common narrative and to share a common cup and to explore what it means to be a Child of God together. If in today’s church Liberals and Conservatives cannot feed the poor together and ask our nation for better practices in resolved conflict with out violence then we have already lost the Work of God in our generation.
I want to stay on this point for a bit. I am saying this as a PROGRESSIVE Christian – conversations of biblical inerrancy, women leadership, the welcoming of other peoples paths to God as appropriate and the inclusion of LGBT people in all levels of the life of faith are non-issues for me. And yet I believe that any church that holds only MY VIEWS has entered into a dangerous heresy.
Too often when we begin to believe that we have the right path or way we too often assume that those outside of our perspective have nothing to gift us with. What happens here is that we begin to enter into a deep heresy which consists of the Idol Worship of ideology rather than the God and Spirit that stands in the midst of our conversations, calling us into deeper relationship with humanity, with the earth and with his/her self.
If faith is about journey and relationship then any use of doctrine that removes us from relationship then steps into heresy. Again we refer to the triune model where God him/herself is in a relationship with Gods own self. Here the concept of truth as plurality can draw off of the rabbinical tradition – faith in this tradition is exemplified as a community of rabbis sitting in community debating the meaning of Torah out of a mutual love of Torah.
Can we Christians not adopt a similar perspective? Can faith not be a ‘rabbinical’ action of those of us who love faith, scripture, Jesus and God engaged in dialogue and debate of what it means to love these things and do it out of love?
People of faith – of many traditions and the multitude traditions within traditions – are beginning to realize more and more that narrow ways of viewing the mystery that we are imbedded in to no longer work. We recognize more and more that we are on a journey and that our faith traditions provide vocabulary that enriches and inspires the journey. But when it comes down to it and we are sitting next to our more conservative Christian friend or our Reform Muslim friend – or any combination of perspectives from any number of traditions – that it is our common humanity and a faith in that which calls us to be our best and most w/holy selves that unites us. In this regard conversation on prayer, worship, scripture and doctrine is less about ‘convert to my way’ as it is a conversation of awe at the multitude of ways we have of exploring the mystery that we find our selves in.
Such a view allows us to enter into a concept of truth as plural. As Christians we affirm a God who exists in plurality – a triune model of God –, which allows to contemplate faith in a plurality of viewpoints. Such a model allows us to recognize that all our theology – or ‘God-Speak’ – is nothing more than our conversation of making faith real in our minds, or ‘faith seeing understanding’.
As Christians we engage in community-based worship, and communities by their nature hold a diverse range of views. To be Christian is to be centered in a common narrative and to share a common cup and to explore what it means to be a Child of God together. If in today’s church Liberals and Conservatives cannot feed the poor together and ask our nation for better practices in resolved conflict with out violence then we have already lost the Work of God in our generation.
I want to stay on this point for a bit. I am saying this as a PROGRESSIVE Christian – conversations of biblical inerrancy, women leadership, the welcoming of other peoples paths to God as appropriate and the inclusion of LGBT people in all levels of the life of faith are non-issues for me. And yet I believe that any church that holds only MY VIEWS has entered into a dangerous heresy.
Too often when we begin to believe that we have the right path or way we too often assume that those outside of our perspective have nothing to gift us with. What happens here is that we begin to enter into a deep heresy which consists of the Idol Worship of ideology rather than the God and Spirit that stands in the midst of our conversations, calling us into deeper relationship with humanity, with the earth and with his/her self.
If faith is about journey and relationship then any use of doctrine that removes us from relationship then steps into heresy. Again we refer to the triune model where God him/herself is in a relationship with Gods own self. Here the concept of truth as plurality can draw off of the rabbinical tradition – faith in this tradition is exemplified as a community of rabbis sitting in community debating the meaning of Torah out of a mutual love of Torah.
Can we Christians not adopt a similar perspective? Can faith not be a ‘rabbinical’ action of those of us who love faith, scripture, Jesus and God engaged in dialogue and debate of what it means to love these things and do it out of love?
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