rain and the rhinoceros

D.W. Congdon over at The Fire and the Rose has recently posted a very thoughtful and insightful critique of the “emergent church” movement.

He offers the following seven helpful suggestions for redeeming the emergent church movement:

1. Jettison the language of postmodernity. There is nothing helpful to be found there, and it only serves to create barriers where no barriers need or should exist.

2. Jettison the language of “incarnational ministry” or the church being the “hands and feet of Jesus.” All such language represents a superficial and erroneous christology, which in turn leads to an erroneous ecclesiology.

3. Reject all notions of relevancy, whether in christology or in ecclesiology or in any other area of Christian thought.

4. Similarly, stand under the judgment of God by standing under the judgment of Holy Scripture. Allow the witness of Scripture and life of Christ determine the proper shape of ecclesial existence. Remember that God is “wholly other” and calls us to “not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of [our] minds, so that [we] may discern what is the will of God” (Rom. 12:2).

5. Read and engage with the work of missional theologians such as David Bosch, Lamin Sanneh, Darrell Guder, Andrew Walls, Christopher J. H. Wright, and others. There are important resources here not only for rethinking central doctrines of the faith, but for rethinking how Christ and the church relate to culture.

6. In addition to missional theology, read Barthians and Anabaptists on the church, the former to articulate the relation between Christ and the church and the latter to articulate the relationship between the church and culture.

7. Pray for forgiveness for the way that the church in all times and places has compromised its witness to Jesus, desired to control and manipulate God, and sought to appease one’s cultural context rather than the Holy Spirit.

If a Catholic cannot feel confident in a time of globalization, what is the point in bearing the name ‘Catholic,’ which is another name for global? (The imperative for globalization began with the commission ‘Go preach the gospels to all nations,’ which turned Christianity away from being the religion of one tribe or one people only, and commanded it to see the whole human race as one people of God.) Globalization is the natural ecology of the Catholic faith.

Michael Novak, “Catholic Social Teaching, Markets, and the Poor,” in Doug Bandow and David Schindler, Wealth, Poverty, and Human Destiny (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2003) 56.

The only one who could make a revolution would be one who lived freedom from the established structures to its fulfilled end, without giving up on the historical human reality mediated in those structures. That is, only he could make a revolution who had freely abandoned his life, who had freely died and who had died of his total acceptance of his fellows in all their hate and alienation. There will only be a revolution if it is made by a loving one who has died. Those of us who say Jesus of Nazareth is risen say there is such a man, and await the revolution from him.

Therefore, also, we can invest revolutionary passion in utopias known to be utopias, without despair or fanaticism; he will make the revolution and not we. Just so, therefore, we are free from ourselves to attack each new status quo with abandon, in the name of that future that is the meaning of all presents.

Robert Jenson, “Eschatological Politics and Political Eschatology,” in Essays in Theology of Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995) 25.

D.W. Horskoetter over at Flying Farther tagged me in a music meme. This one takes a little while folks, so prepare yourself. I have to say it is well worth the time. It is interesting to think the music that has helped define your lifespan. So, the meme is to list your favorite albums for each year you have lived. The album doesn’t necessarily have to coincide with the year you listened to it. Although I probably listened to Bob Dylan’s Infidels and Bruce Cockburn’s Stealing Fire when I was a baby, I obviously don’t recall it. This is a difficult exercise and I could probably spend much more time on it, but this is the list I came up with in an hour. I’ll tag Roger, Erin, Steph, David, Joel, Markus, and Drew.

1983: Bob Dylan, Infidels

1984: Bruce Cockburn, Stealing Fire

1985: The Pogues, Rum Sodomy & The Lash

1986: Paul Simon, Graceland

1987: U2, The Joshua Tree

1988: Tracy Chapman, Tracy Chapman

1989: Van Morrison, Avalon Sunset

1990: Uncle Tupelo, No Depression

1991: Pearl Jam, Ten

1992: R.E.M. Automatic For the People

1993: Counting Crows, August and Everything After

1994: Jeff Buckley, Grace

1995: Radiohead, The Bends

1996: Red House Painters, Songs for a Blue Guitar

1997: Radiohead, OK Computer

1998: Billy Bragg and Jeff Tweedy, Mermaid Avenue

1999: Pedro the Lion, The Only Reason I Feel Secure

2000: Sunny Day Real Estate, The Rising Tide

2001: Low, Things We Lost in the Fire

2002: Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

2003: Bruce Cockburn, You’ve Never Seen Everything

2004: Sufjan Stevens, Seven Swans

2005: Damien Jurado, On My Way to Absence

2006: Bruce Cockburn, Life Short Call Now

2007: The National, Boxer

2008: Billy Bragg, Mr. Love & Justice

Because Christians confess that Jesus is lord of the whole cosmos, the church is called to share the gospel message as good news for the world. But because this good news involves a breaking of the cycle of violence that includes the renunciation of logistical effectiveness and possessive sovereignty, it can only be offered as a gift whose reception cannot be guaranteed or enforced. A non-Constantinian understanding of witness does not begin with a theory of universal validation through which the truth of the gospel message can then be justified to all people. Yoder maintains that this is just another manifestation of the Constantinian preoccupation with effectiveness in attempting to make history come out right. He is thus calling into question the sense in which the category of witness itself tends to be understood in terms of the violent logic of speed. Yoder’s genealogical analysis of Constantinianism suggests that such an apologetic conception of witness is only intelligible against the background of the presumption that humans are responsible for controlling the world. However, witness looks different from the standpoint of the non-Constantinian church’s hope that God is in control of history.

Chris Huebner, A Precarious Peace: Yoderian Explorations on Theology, Knowledge, and Identity (Scottdale, Pa: Herald Press, 2006) 130-131.

Out of all the new theology book releases this year, one of the most promising works is Gary Dorrien’s Social Ethics in the Making. Dorrien is the world’s leading expert on the American liberal theological tradition. He is a wonderfully balanced and insightful historian of modern theology and this book will almost certainly become the history of modern Christian social ethics.

Here’s a glimpse at the table of contents:
Introduction
1 Inventing Social Ethics: Francis Greenwood Peabody, William Jewett Tucker, and Graham Taylor
2 The Social Gospel: Washington Gladden, Josiah Strong, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Harry F. Ward
3 Lift Every Voice: Reverdy C. Ransom, Jane Addams, and John A. Ryan
4 Christian Realism: Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, John C. Bennett, and Paul Ramsey
5 Social Christianity as Public Theology: Walter G. Muelder, James Luther Adams, John Courtney Murray, and Dorothy Day
6 Liberationist Disruptions: Martin Luther King Jr., James H. Cone, Mary Daly, and Beverly W. Harrison
7 Disputing and Expanding the Tradition: Carl F. H. Henry, John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, Michael Novak, and Jim Wallis
8 Dealing With Modernity and Postmodernity: Charles Curran, James M. Gustafson, Gibson Winter, Cornel West, Katie G. Cannon, and Victor Anderson
9 Economy, Sexuality, Ecology, Difference: Max L. Stackhouse, Dennis P. McCann, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Marvin M. Ellison, 10 John B. Cobb, Jr., Larry Rasmussen, Daniel C. Maguire, Sharon Welch, Emilie M. Townes, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, María Pilar Aquino, and David Hollenbach
11 Borders of Possibility: The Necessity of “Discredited” Social Gospel Ideas
Index

Christian spirituality is often understood in terms of a quest. We think of God as some thing out there after whom (or from whom!) we diligently search or quest. And so we seek God under, beneath, behind, above, or beyond temporality. God is some thing who is outside of it all. Temporal reality, that is ordinary life, thereby becomes something that must be penetrated or even overcome. Of course, we are always in this stage of seeking, for to claim to have “found” God would appear to be utterly presumptuous, would it not? And what would we do then, after we found God? The practice of questing for God is not limited to the “mystics” in our midst. Christians “seek” God in any number of ways, whether it be in social action or contemplation, rocking out to U2 or worshiping in a more traditional way.

According to Robert Jenson, however, the gospel is “an attack on this religious way of dealing with time,” for the gospel “denies the eternity of timelessness” (110). This questing for God is “regularly launched by some event in the world, that makes us see the peril of our temporality and suggests a refuge” (110). Instead, “the true eternity is temporal liberty, from exactly such fixity” (110). Jenson goes so far as to say the gospel unmasks this God of timeless eternity as Satan. This pseudo-God is bent on destroying us with the guilt of our own past and deludes us in a false sense of security in who what we are. In other words, the God of the gospel, the Father of Jesus, is not someone or something to whom we flee. We do not need to fear, flee, or defend ourselves from the future precisely because “Jesus’ triumph is our future” (110).

Christian spirituality is, therefore, not about questing for God, for the gospel reveals that “God” is not some distant thing above, beneath, within, or behind it all in some other realm of being. God is not out there to be reached for. The gospel identifies the eternity of God with radical temporality, for gospel reveals “God” as Jesus in death and resurrection. This is the crucial point. Jesus is not the revelation of some distant and hidden God. In other words, God does not lie “behind” the man Jesus. Rather, God is identified with the very person, the historical man, Jesus. Thus, in Jenson’s own words, God is “not transcendent by his distance, to be quested after; he is transcendent in that he is coming” (111). The Christian spiritual life is perhaps better described as discipleship or pilgrimage, for we follow a person on a journey toward a goal. And this goal is Jesus himself, a man who is “framed by the same time and space as we; we are not called to seek him, but to follow him” (112).

My dear friends Drew and Dana Johnson recently launched culture goes POP! a blog devoted to “rants, raves and reviews about movies, music, and media.” The husband and wife duo make for a real team. From Dana’s recent post Why I Love Iron Man to Drew’s Remembering Sydney Pollack, they’ve managed to kick off their new blog with a bang. Dana and Drew are my go-to experts on all things related to film and they want to become yours as well. There’s my pitch -subscribe now.

“It is the social function of the church to intrude an ultimate vision into the comfortable arrangements and watered-down values of political and economic everyday, to be the unauthorized upsetter of the achieved world.”

Robert W. Jenson, Story and Promise: A Brief Theology of the Gospel About Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973) 85.

In the sixth chapter of Story and Promise Robert Jenson reminds us that the gospel’s morality is a morality of freedom. Contrary to the legalistic construals of morality that have so often plagued Christianity, the gospel’s specific morality is, in Jenson’s words, “a matter of opened opportunities” (Story and Promise 81). The gospel’s morality is not concerned with what we ought to do, but what we may do, because Jesus lives.

Because Jesus lives, Christian morality is, then, not about laws, but about freedom. It does not follow the pattern “Do this and do that because you ought/must/should/would be best advised/will be rewarded.” Rather, as Jenson rightly emphasizes, the gospel’s discourse on morality “imposes no conditions whatever, on anything at all” (82). Instead, the pattern of the gospel’s morality is: “You may . . . because, if Jesus is risen, there is no need to fear . . .” (81).