Monthly Archives: February 2009

The Politics of Pornography and Christianity

Posted by Halden on February 28, 2009 11 comments

A recent article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives made some interesting observations about the rate of porn usage among groups in America. According to this study anyway, porn use is the highest among conservatives and particularly strong among conservative Christians. Utah also happens to have the highest rate of porn usage in the country. Can’t say I’m surprised there. Here are some of the relevant quotes from the article:

Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama. Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don’t explicitly restrict gay marriage…

States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage,” bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behaviour.”

Money’s Power

Posted by Halden on February 28, 2009 3 comments

I have had a rather interesting experience the last few months, and one which will continue at least through the month of March. That experience is one of having barely more than enough money to cover all my obligatory expenses. There have been plenty of stretches of time where I’ve had, really, plenty of extra money and plenty of times where I haven’t had enough to get by and had to depend on others to help me over a slump. But coming up just straight even is different altogether.

The simple fact is that, given that I have enough cash lying around, I tend to spend a lot of time on leisure. If have the money I’ll go out the pubs, treat people, buy books, travel, etc. If I have less than enough money, I am also forced to be active outside my household, usually by doing extra work and things of that nature. However, simply having enough creates a different form of habitual sociality altogether. When I simply have enough money, and thus can’t go out and spend any, but don’t have a need to discover alternative ways of bringing more money in to make ends meet, I am left to simply be among the people that I live with. I eat at home, I talk with others, I read more, I exercise more.

Now, I certainly don’t want to glorify having enough as some sort of ideal. Indeed, the fact that simply having enough feels so different for me from having excess is a bit troubling and perhaps reveals the ways in which simply having more money exercises power over my life. I also think that one of the essential elements to the Christian life is learning how the rightly be poor. I don’t know what that means but I think we all need to learn that.

However, simply having enough has felt uniquely good and liberating in some key ways. When you simply have enough money to get by the way you look at money changes. It ceases to be something that enables the satiation of frivolous desires, and simply becomes a tool to continue living. Rather than being bound up with an economy of desire, money is simply reduced to means of fostering life. When, out of necessity, one ceases to think of money as something to spend to acquire things one simply wants, some element of the power of money is broken, or at least challenged. In other words, I think there’s something to be said for just having enough. Even if that is ultimately just a step on the way to learning how to have less, at least its something.

Thank You, Mark Driscoll

Posted by Halden on February 27, 2009 28 comments

Less than one year ago I wrote my most popular post of all time. The post that asks the age-old question, “Who can Mark Driscoll Worship?” It sits at 134 comments (which a couple months ago I finally felt I had to close–all horses must be pronounced dead eventually) and nearly 10,000 views. In some sense, I feel like Mark did me a solid on this one. My rather acerbic critique of him has catapulted me into the best blog stats I have ever known. Since the day of its publication, I don’t know that my post on him has ever not been in my top five for the day. If you Google the guy’s name, my post comes up about fourth or fifth, for goodness sake.

Anyways, Driscoll is still at his shenanigans in Seattle, much to the detriment of the body of Christ (seriously, that’s what I believe, folks). Here’s a snippet from a recent article that was done on him and his church in the New York Times:

Nowhere is the connection between Driscoll’s hypermasculinity and his Calvinist theology clearer than in his refusal to tolerate opposition at Mars Hill. The Reformed tradition’s resistance to compromise and emphasis on the purity of the worshipping community has always contained the seeds of authoritarianism: John Calvin had heretics burned at the stake and made a man who casually criticized him at a dinner party march through the streets of Geneva, kneeling at every intersection to beg forgiveness. Mars Hill is not 16th-century Geneva, but Driscoll has little patience for dissent. In 2007, two elders protested a plan to reorganize the church that, according to critics, consolidated power in the hands of Driscoll and his closest aides. Driscoll told the congregation that he asked advice on how to handle stubborn subordinates from a “mixed martial artist and Ultimate Fighter, good guy” who attends Mars Hill. “His answer was brilliant,” Driscoll reported. “He said, ‘I break their nose.’ ” When one of the renegade elders refused to repent, the church leadership ordered members to shun him. One member complained on an online message board and instantly found his membership privileges suspended. “They are sinning through questioning,” Driscoll preached.

Now, as my friend and fellow conspirator, Adam has rightly noted, the author here is pretty naive, and simply wrong about some facts in regard to John Calvin. However, regardless of her shoddy Calvin exegesis, the stuff that is coming out of Driscoll’s mouth these days just gets more and more comedic. It’s like he’s becoming his own walking caricature nowadays. It’s literally a “sin” in his mind for the elders in his own church to question his agenda(s)? Wowie. This is the epitome of of the worst possible instantiation of Protestantism. Here we literally have someone setting himself up as his own pope–and an ultramontaine pope at that!

Could Mark Driscoll become the first pope to ever fight in the gladiatorial games of our current coliseums? Time alone will tell I suppose. I for one welcome the constant increase in Driscoll’s antics. The more insane he becomes, hopefully the more he will lose his influence and the horrible damage he has done to so many people, especially families and women will be lessened. But I suppose I owe him my thanks for boosting my blog stats. Hopefully this post gets no hits. That would be a good sign.

The Church as Apocalyptic Event, Baptism, Eucharist, and Discipleship

Posted by Halden on February 27, 2009 1 comment

Continuing this series of responses to Steve Long‘s queries about “filling out” some of the details of what conceiving of the church as apocalyptic might mean, here is his third question:

Would [an understanding of the church as apocalyptic event] acknowledge the necessity of the relation between baptism (and thus a commitment to a life of discipleship) and the Eucharist?

The first point–which has been made in other ways in regard to the first two questions–is that an apocalyptic conception of the church places its primary emphasis on the centrality of God’s prior action in Christ singular historicity. What is central about an apocalyptic conception of the church is that it seeks to consistently bear witness to the radically interruptive and transformative action of the Trinitarian God in and for the world. As such, the supreme characteristic of the church is its struggle to adjust their vision, as it were, to the radical new world that God has wrought in Christ. And apocalyptic conception of the church requires us to think the church in distinctly responsive and active terms, because the church lives “after the event”, seeking to discover what it means for us to live in light of the great transformation that God in Christ has effected.

So, bearing that in mind, baptism and Eucharist name gifts of the Christ’s Spirit to the church, through which the church shapes its life in a manner fitting to the great transformation of the world in the apocalypse of Christ. Baptism is a sign of the new world that has been created in Christ, through the singular outpouring of God’s Trinitarian agape. Baptism is the gift of Christ’s Spirit who, in the midst of our own contingent histories, translates us into Christ’s own singular historicity by drawing us, in baptism, into God’s own radical love. From an apocalyptic perspective, the strongest possible connection between baptism and discipleship is drawn. For, baptism names the Spirit’s action of drawing us into Christ’s own apocalyptic victory over the powers, effecting liberation for slavery and death. As such, baptism is fundamentally our pneumatological induction into what Christ has apocalypsed–the transfigured creation in which God comes to dwell with humankind and be their God. Being such an induction, baptism translates us into a whole mode of life, the life of being engrafted into God’s radical love. The admonitions of the New Testament often follow these lines: “Welcome one another as God in Christ has welcomed you” (Rom 15:14).

Now, in regard to the connection between baptism (and the life of discipleship) and the eucharist, there is much to say indeed. The first thing to be noted is that from an apocalyptic perspective, the Eucharist’s quality as anamnesis is of the utmost importance. The Lord’s Supper is fundamentally an act of remembrance of Christ’s historical action for our salvation. The Eucharist is the constant embodied remembering of God’s singular apocalypse which is our salvation. As such the Eucharist remembers and reenacts Christ’s own dispossessive love for us unto death, the same love into which we are inducted in baptism. The Eucharist constitutes our continual reimmersion into the agapeic pattern of Christ’s life into which we are called as disciples.

Moreover, the Eucharist is also to be understood as a modality of Christ’s presence to the church. As such it recalls Christ’s promise to be with his disciples to the end of the age (Matt 28:20) in their missional vocation to proclaim the gospel. Thus, Christ’s Eucharistic presence is helpfully understood as his empowering accompaniment, in the Spirit of his missional church. In the Eucharist, Christ abides with his church through the Spirit, leading the church in its missional vocation to embody the radical love of God. From an apocalyptic perspective, Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist is not separable in any sense from his promise to, through the Spirit, accompany and empower the church in its missional encounter with the world.

So, what, in a nutshell is the connection between baptism and Eucharist? In baptism we are inducted in the radical love of God, in which our lives are reshaped according the cruciform image of Christ. In the Eucharist Christ we remember the agape of Christ into which we have been inducted in baptism, and Christ himself, through the Spirit is present to us in the sacramental act, accompanying us in our missional vocation to embody the irruptive and transformative agape of God in all the world. There is certainly a great deal more that should be said about the sacraments and their relation to apocalyptic, but for now, I hope this at least begins to shed some light on how we might understand some key aspects of their connection.

Canonical Theism: 30 Theses

Posted by Halden on February 26, 2009 35 comments

This list of theses is authored by William Abraham, the main fellow behind recent publications that are proffering the label “Canonical Theism” as a sort of ecumenical and ecclesial movement that endeavors to appropriate the theological heritage of the church in a particular way. Specifically this movement centers on re-envisioning the very idea of “canon”, attempting to purge it of any connection with a theological epistemology and broadening to include vast segments of the church’s traditions, practices, saints, liturgies, images, hymns, etc. I’ll have some thoughts on this later, especially after I get around to reading the book which bears name of the movement. For now here’s Abraham’s thirty theses on the movement. I’m curious as to what folks might think about this construction. I have quite a few questions and apprehensions.

Thesis I: Canonical theism is a term invented to capture the robust form of theism manifested, lived, and expressed in the canonical heritage of the Church. It is proposed as both a living form of theism and a substantial theological experiment for today. We can explicate it further by distinguishing it from other forms of theism and by indicating more clearly how it is related to the canonical heritage of the Church.

Thesis II: Canonical theism is to be distinguished from Mere theism, Philosophical theism, Process theism, Open theism, Classical theism, and Consensual theism.

Thesis III: It differs from Mere theism in being much more robust; thus it is unapologetically Trinitarian in form and content.

Thesis IV: It differs from Philosophical theism, say, Anselmic or Perfect Being Theism, in that it is derived from the canonical heritage of the Church rather than developed from philosophical sources.

Thesis V: Canonical theism differs from Process theism in that it has no stake in the theism advanced by Process philosophers and theologians are free to examine the claims of Process theism on merit.

Thesis VI: The same principle applies mutatis mutandis to present attempts to develop the form of Open theism that is currently being articulated by some American Evangelicals. Canonical theists are free to examine the claims of this form of theism on its merits and to either reject it or to accept it as additional midrashic extension of their theism.

Thesis VII: Canonical theism differs from Classical theism in that the latter is a historical notion drawn from the history of ideas and used to designate a strong monotheism with impassibilist connotations. Canonical theism is first and foremost Trinitarian; and, while it readily absorbs the classical attributes of monotheism, the commitment on passability is modest and complex.

Thesis VIII: Canonical theism differs from the Consensual theism of, say, Thomas Oden, in two ways. First, it is skeptical of the claim that there exists a consensus across the patristic era, Roman Catholicism, Magisterial Protestantism, Evangelical orthodoxy, and the like. While there are clear elements of overlap between these groups, there are very serious differences that challenge the claim of consensus. Second, Canonical theism focuses on the public, canonical decisions of the Church existing in space and time across the first millennium.

Thesis IX: Canonical theism is intimately tied to the notion of the canonical heritage of the Church. The Church possesses not just a canon of books in its bible, but also a canon of doctrine, a canon of saints, a canon of Fathers, a canon of theologians, a canon of liturgy, a canon of bishops, a canon of councils, a canon of ecclesial regulations, a canon of icons, and the like. In short, the Church possesses a canonical heritage of persons, practices, and materials. Canonical theism is the theism expressed in and through the canonical heritage of the Church.

Thesis X: The canonical heritage of the Church came into existence through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was active in motivating, energizing, guiding, directing, and overseeing their original production in the Church.

Thesis XI: The canonical heritage of the Church functions first and foremost soteriologically. It operates as a complex means of grace that restores the image of God in human beings and brings them into communion with God and with each other in the Church. Each component is primarily a tool to be used in spiritual direction and formation.

Thesis XII: The canonical heritage through which Canonical theism is mediated is not in and of itself an epistemology, nor is it meant to serve as an epistemology. It is not a handbook on how to resolve disputes about rationality, justification, warrant, knowledge, and truth.

Thesis XIII: The ongoing success of the canonical heritage of the Church depends on the continuing active presence of the Holy Spirit working through the relevant persons, practices, and materials.

Thesis XIV: The canonical heritage of the Church is to be received in genuine repentance and lively faith. The effective operation of the various components depends on an open and contrite heart and a readiness to practice the light of God that one encounters.

Thesis XV: Generally speaking, the various components of the canonical heritage have their own distinctive role in the economy of faith. Thus, the scriptures do not do the job of the creed, and the creed does not do the job of the episcopate, and the episcopate does not do the work of baptism, and so on. Each has its own function in the healing and restoration of the human soul.

Thesis XVI: While the various elements in the canonical heritage work ideally together, there is a fair degree of overdetermination, for there is overlapping in their particular purposes. When one is missing or improperly used, others can take up the spiritual slack. Thus the icons can marvelously convey the content of the gospel and the teaching of scripture.

Thesis XVII: Canonical theism’s vision of canon differs from the standard western vision of canon in two ways. First, it extends canon beyond the canon of scripture or the bible. Here it draws on the original meaning of canon as a “list”. Second, it eschews conceiving canon as an epistemic criterion, relocating canon within the Church rather than within the field of epistemology and philosophy. In Canonical theism canon is construed fundamentally as a means of grace, a way through which the Holy Spirit reaches and restores the image of God in human agents.

Thesis XVIII: On the surface commitment to Canonical theism appears to involve a turn to Roman Catholicism and a move a way from Protestantism. This is false. Both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism work with a radically epistemic conception of canon; and they restrict canon to scripture. Magisterial Protestantism tries to work with the canon of scripture alone. Roman Catholicism adds tradition, the magisterium, and papal infallibility understood in epistemic terms as the means whereby the meaning of the canon is to be rightly understood. Hence epistemology rather than soteriology is primary in the conception and reception of canon in both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.

Thesis XIX: Although canonical theism is clearly compatible with Eastern Orthodoxy, it is unclear how far the Eastern Church articulates any substantial vision of the canonical heritage of the undivided Church.

Thesis XX: Canonical theism emerges as an option within Protestantism and is proposed as a healing theological option within Protestantism. It can readily be seen as a fresh reappropriation of the patristic tradition for today. It invites Protestantism to a radical revision of its internal commitments. It is unclear how far this is possible given the constitutive elements of Protestantism. Perhaps Canonical theism is essentially post-protestant at its core and cannot be absorbed within Protestantism. At its conception Canonical theism arose out of a deep, even searing, dissatisfaction with current forms of liberal and conservative Protestantism. However, there is no reason in principle why Canonical theism cannot preserve and even enhance the best insights and fruits of the Protestant traditions across the centuries.

Thesis XXI: Canonical theism gives intellectual primacy to ontology over epistemology. We find ourselves meeting God, discovering our sinfulness, encountering redemption, struggling with evil, immersed in suffering, and the like. We are initiated into the faith of the gospel, baptized, enter the Church, experience the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, and are converted to a life of holiness. We encounter these phenomena without having to hand an epistemology, without necessarily figuring out how to deal with the questions about truth, rationality, justification, and knowledge that conventionally arise. Nor do these phenomena require us to have an epistemology before we engage in them. Hence ontology is logically prior to epistemology. Without the ontology the epistemology is likely to be thin, wooden, and inappropriate.

Thesis XXII: The canonical heritage generates rigorous epistemological reflection and theorizing. Such work needs to be pursued at the highest intellectual level. There is no drawing back from the epistemology of theology into some kind of naive credulity or a shutting down of the question of meaning and justification rightly raised by philosophers in the twentieth century. Canonical theists are interested in pursuing the implications of epistemologies compatible with Canonical theism for the understanding of the history of the Church and the study of scripture. Canonical theism may lead to the development of epistemological insights that have overtones for all of human thought and existence that are as yet unidentified and unexplored.

Thesis XXIII: Canonical theists have no stake per se in foundationalism as an epistemological position. Canonical theism is open to a whole variety of epistemological options, whether foundationalist or coherentist, internalist or externalist, evidentialist or non-evidentialist. These matters are to be pursued with rigor and appropriate sophistication as needed.

Thesis XXIV: In the epistemology of theology, special attention should be given to epistemic suggestions already present in the canonical heritage of the Church. These have often been obscured from vision when canon has been construed as a criterion and when epistemology has been conceived along internalist lines.

Thesis XXV: No single epistemological vision should be offered or sanctioned as canonical in the Church. This can be spelled out in two ways. First, various and internally competing epistemological visions and theories are compatible with the content of the canonical heritage. Second, the various epistemological assertions, comments, and suggestions found in the canonical heritage do not constitute a full-dress, comprehensive epistemological vision.

Thesis XXVI: Epistemological insights and theories have a place as teaching tools in the Church and as part of the work of evangelism and apologetics. People naturally ask epistemological questions within and without theology and their questions deserve to be taken seriously. Knowing when and how to introduce epistemological issues and materials is a matter of delicate pedagogical judgment.

Thesis XXVII: The history of the canonical heritage throws light on the history of epistemology. Some of the most interesting epistemology in the West has been evoked by theological disagreement, even though in the secularization of the academy this has been lost from view in the histories of epistemology. Canonical theists are interested in fresh ways of understanding the history of epistemology, not least in identifying and exploring epistemic insights that have been forgotten or ignored. They are especially interested in the place of theism in the history of epistemology, exploring the role posited for God in debates about rationality, justification, and knowledge.

Thesis XXVIII: The continuity between the canonical faith of the Church beyond the first millennium is an open question. Clearly, different configurations of Christianity have preserved and effectively deployed much of the canonical heritage in their own way and manner. Witness, for example, the varied way in which the doctrine of the Trinity has been preserved in hymnody in non-creedal traditions.

Thesis XXIX: The canonical heritage of the Church should constitute a bedrock commitment for Christians as a whole. We need to approach the various Christian churches and denominations not in terms of one element of the canonical heritage as constitutive of Christian identity but in terms of how far they have owned the various components of the canonical heritage. This prohibits an all or nothing judgment, with one group automatically in and another group automatically out. We will have to work with judgments of proportion and degree.

Thesis XXX: All epistemological proposals, like papal infallibility, scriptural infallibility, and the Methodist Quadrilateral, should be treated as midrash, secondary to the primary constitutive commitments of the Church as a whole. Hence we need not give up our epistemological theories, but they do have to be decanonized in the ecumenical arena. This is where the rub is going to come hard for many. Perhaps the epistemological positions could be canonical for sub-groups within the Church as a whole, while not being at all canonical for the whole Church. Radical decanonization of epistemologies of theology is the preferred option.

The Church as Apocalyptic Event and Common Confession

Posted by Halden on February 26, 2009 Comments Off

Having already touched on the previous question of how conceiving of the church as apocalyptic informs our understanding of church discipline, here is my response to Steve Long‘s second question regarding the issue of the church’s common confession:

Does the Church as apocalyptic event recognize the need for a common confession such that anyone who could not confess the Nicene Creed should not be baptized?

In thinking about this question, it seems to me that the question of conceiving the church apocalyptically does not directly bear on the question of creedal prerequisites for baptism. Indeed, the relation of creedal confession to the proper subjects of baptism is far more of a conflict between peadobaptist and free church traditions, and to my reading has no direct correlation to whether or not one adpots an “apocalyptic style” in doing theology (see David Toole, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo for a discussion of doing theology in an “apocalyptic style.” Note also that Toole is Roman Catholic.).

However, having said that, I do think that an apocalyptic conception of the church does strongly orient ecclesiology towards highly prioritizing creedal confession. From an apocalyptic perspective, the church has its being precisely in its pneumatic orientation to the prior event of God’s invasion of the cosmos in Jesus’s death and resurrection. Our existence as God’s people is solely due to our reception of God’s agape, as poured out in Christ’s victory over the powers of death. As such, the participation of persons in the liberating reign of God, of which the church is a sign, sacrament, and foretaste, can only be realized on the basis of truthful confession of the lordship of Christ. Thus, for a church that understands itself apocalyptically, truthful confession regarding the nature of Jesus’s lordship and the character of the triune God is of the utmost centrality. For it is only in our acknowledgement of the truth about Christ that we are, by the Spirit freed into sharing the life of Christ’s apocalyptic victory over the powers.

So, in sum, given that an apocalyptic understanding of the church places its emphasis consistently on the priority of God’s invasive and transformative action in Christ’s history, truthful confession is of the utmost importance. What is central to the church’s apocalyptic identity is what God has done in Christ and the Spirit. The Creed serves as a truthful codification and narration of God’s prior divine initiative, to which we bear witness. As such, from the perspective of apocalyptic ecclesiology, confession of the Creed is of the utmost importance, both in terms of doxology and mission. For it is in proclaiming the truth about Christ’s lordship and the divine nature that we respond rightly to God in the form of worship. Likewise, this very movement of doxology is coextensive with the church’s missional existence which is solely concerned with our call to “proclaim the excellencies of him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light” (1 Pet 2:9).

The Praxis of Togetherness

Posted by Halden on February 26, 2009 3 comments

In his seminal book, Jesus and Community, Gerhard Lohfink offers a list of passages from the New Testament Epistles centering on the statements and commandments regarding “one another” (allelon). The sheer volume of such admonitions (paraklesis) is quite striking in considering the ecclesiology of the New Testament. Lohfink appropriately dubbs this theme “the praxis of togetherness” and rightly underscores the centrality that “one-to-anotherness” has in the New Testament. I have expanded Lohfink’s list considerably for consideration:

“be at peace with one another” (Mark 9:50)
“you also ought to wash one another’s feet” (John 13:14)
“love one another… Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another” (John 13:34)
“love for one another” (John 13:35)
“love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12)
“I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another” (John 15:17)
“outdo one another in showing honor” (Rom 12:10)
“live in harmony with one another” (Rom 12:16)
“love one another” (Rom 13:8)
“no longer pass judgment on one another” (Rom 14:13)
“welcome one another” ((Rom 15:7)
“admonish one another” (Rom 15:14)
“greet one another with a holy kiss” (Rom 16:16)
“wait for one another” (1 Cor 11:33)
“have the same care for one another” (1 Cor 12:25)
“agree with one another” (2 Cor 13:11)
“through love become slaves to one another” (Gal 5:13)
“bear one another’s burdens” (Gal 6:2)
“bear with one another lovingly” (Eph 4:2)
“be kind and compassionate to one another” (Eph 4:32)
“be subject to one another” (Eph 5:21)
“bear with one another…forgive one another” (Col 3:13)
“abound in love for one another” (1 Thess 3:12)
“you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another” (1 Thess 4:9)
“encourage one another” (1 Thess 4:18)
“comfort one another…build one another up” (1 Thess 5:11)
“be at peace with one another…do good to one another” (1 Thess 5:13)
“do good to one another” (1 Thess 5:15)
“exhort one another every day” (Heb 3:13)
“provoke one another to love and good deeds” (Heb 10:24)
“not neglecting to meet together…but encouraging one another” (Heb 10:25)
“confess your sins to one another…pray for one another” (Jas 5:16)
“love one another from the heart” (1 Pet 1:22)
“have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another” (1 Pet 3:8)
“be hospitable to one another without complaining” (1 Pet 4:9)
“serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received” (1 Pet 4:10)
“meet one another with humility” (1 Pet 5:5)
“greet one another with a kiss of love” (1 Pet 5:14)
“have fellowship with one another” (1 John 1:7)
“this is the message you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another” (1 John 3:11)
“we know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another” (1 John 3:14)
“we ought to lay down our lives for one another” (1 John 3:16)
“love one another, just as he has commanded us” (1 John 3:23)
“let us love one another, because love is from God” (1 John 4:7)
“we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:11)
“if we love one another, God lives in us” (1 John 4:12)
“let us love one another” (2 John 5)

To my mind, these admonitions makes some very specific assumptions about the depth, intimacy, and centrality of mutuality in the life of the church. The question for us seems to be, what kind of church life must we have for these commands to possibly be followed? How do we live this together? What kind of rearrangment of our lives must be made for us to even be able to intelligibly hear, let alone respond appropriately to these biblical admonitions? What does a life truly shaped by the praxis of togetherness look like in our own context?

The Church as Polis? Some Biblical Reflections

Posted by Halden on February 25, 2009 19 comments

One of the big debates to emerge from the torrent of blog discussions about Nate Kerr’s book, Christ, History and Apocalyptic is the issue of whether or not the church is rightly described as a polis, as Hauerwas (and sometimes Yoder) tends to describe it. This of course, is to ask the question of what we really mean by “polis” in the first place, and I don’t want to elide this issue. However, the first thing I want to do is actually look at some of the biblical language about the church and see what impression that leaves. Here are some of the passages that I found relevant to this question:

“You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid.” (Matt 5:14)

“…he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God.” (John 11:52)

“For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building.” (1 Cor 3:9)

“Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Cor 3:16)

“But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” (Phil 3:20)

“Remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” (Eph 2:12-13)

“He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace.” (Eph 2:15)

“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.” (Eph 2:19-22)

“Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works. ” (Titus 2:14)

“But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven…” (Heb 12:22-23)

“For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.” (Heb 13:14)

“…like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” (1 Pet 2:5)

“…but you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people…” (1 Pet 2:9-10)

“And I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” (Rev 21:2)

Some thoughts:

Some of the terms used to explicitly describe the church here include: light of the world, field, building, temple, commonwealth, nation, people, race, priesthood, house, household, citizens, dwelling place, new humanity.
The only verse that I’ve find that maybe specifically designates the church as a polis is Matthew 5:14, but that’s a bit thin. The mention of “city” there seems more by way of illustration of the church’s unhideability than of the church’s nature as a sort of civitas.
All the passages that explicitly talk about God’s city, the holy city, or the new Jerusalem seem to refer to the eschatological polity of God that will be established on the last day.
However, consistently the church’s present reality seems to be described as partaking of the heavenly city in the present in some sense (cf. Heb 12:22; Gal 4:26; Eph 2:12). The heavenly city, though ultimately future, is, in some partial sense present in the church’s present life.

So, in light of this, should we call the church a polis? Certainly not if by that we mean a stable political entity that is established and certain in its givenness. The church’s eschatological and provisional character forbids any strict identification of the church with any political entity that is determinate and given in its closure. “Here we have no lasting city.”

However, the biblical terminology of the church is utterly tangible, material, concrete, and communal. The church is a peoplehood and can be described in a number of political and familial terms with accuracy. As such, our emphasis on the chruch’s eschatological provisionality and non-closure should not eclipse the fact that the church is a visible communal reality in the world. Thus, if by “polis” we simply mean that the church’s political and social constitution is just as real and concrete as that of other social and political formations in the world, clearly the church is a polis in that sense. However, I’m not sure that its possible for us to purge the concept of territoriality from the language of polis, and what is clear from the New Testament language is that the church is distinctly non-territorial in nature, indeed its non-territoriality is the very shape of its “catholic” fullness.

In light of this I’m inclined to steer away from the language of “church as polis,” but not the language of church as political, social, communal, or peoplehood. This langauge seems far too central to the New Testament to be done away with. Indeed the diversity of the New Testament language seems to me to suggest that the church’s social reality–having its its genesis the the apocalyptic victory of Christ over the powers–cuts across so many lines of “sociality” that the diversity of social and communal images for the church are essential to our attempt at description.

The Church as Apocalyptic Event and Church Discipline

Posted by Halden on February 25, 2009 4 comments

In the latest installment of the Church and Postmodern Culture symposium on Nate Kerr’s book, Christ, History and Apocalyptic D. Stephen Long has posed some interesting questions about what conceiving the church as an “apocalyptic event” means in regard to some distinct questions about ecumenical ecclesiology and the church’s practice of mission and discipleship. I take these sorts of questions to be quite important, and as such, I’d like to take them up in turn here and see what kind of fruit can be garnered by engaging these important inquiries. Here is the first question:

Does the Church as apocalyptic event have any stake in disciplining its members on questions of sexuality, abortion, fetal tissue experimentation, unjust practices of war (at least), participation in torture, racism, sexism, etc? Should there be means to do this?

Fundamental to an apocalyptic definition of the church is the claim that the church exists purely as an aftershock, a sign, a response to God’s prior inititum in Christ. The church “has” its being precisely in its reception of this event through the ongoing mission of the Spirit who makes Christ’s singular reality–as the embodiment of God’s own trinitarian agape–present ever and anew amidst the contingencies of our own history. As such, the church’s own social reality is fundamentally one of struggling to apprehend the gravity and volume of God’s apocalyptic invasion of the world in Christ. The shape of the church’s social life is one of constant attention to the event of Christ and the meaning of this event–always being made present everanew by the Spirit–for how we shape our common life in response to the way in which God has unleashed his transfiguring agape into the world in Christ.

So, in regard to the specific questions listed here, the answer is clearly a yes. All of these examples constitute instantiations in which the principalities and powers of death attempt to exert rule over the world. Given that their rule and hegemony has been decisively broken through the invasion of God’s agape in Christ’s death and resurrection, the church is called to live free from such tyrannies. The call to the Christian church, which exists solely through the Spirit’s act of uniting us to Christ’s agape, is to order our lives in accordance with the very particular pattern of self-abnegating, generative love that Christ himself embodied. Such a life would, of necessity inform the church about how it must order and discipline its members’ lives in regard to these issues. The singular agape of Christ is not contentless, it is irreducibly particular and concrete, and this Christic concreteness is made present to the church in the Spirit as the church seeks to discern how to live into Christ’s agape, how to live as Christ lived, free from the powers.

The means to do this must, of necessity be grounded in the church’s fundamental posture of prayer and supplication. The church has no power to free itself from the rule of the powers, it can only receive the freedom that Christ has actualized in the cross and resurrection through the gifting of the Spirit who makes that freedom present (cf. 2 Cor 3:17: “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”). Thus the means that the church has to discipline and order its members must be shaped by the practices of prayer and discernment, and be administered in the spirit of Christ’s agape, through non-coercive appeal and entreaty. Excommunication, as the last resort in cases where members of the church persist in refusing to live according the freedom of the Spirit, constitutes the church’s resolve to live solely on the basis of the shape of God’s agape. When the church says the definitive “no” to practices such as these it is doing so on the basis of its “yes” of faith to God’s liberating agape. The church, then as an apocalyptic event has its being in, though the Spirit, being caught up into the freedom of Christ’s agape. And this freedom liberates us from the tyranny of practices such as these. As Paul says, “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom 8:15-16).

(In)stability and Mission

Posted by Halden on February 25, 2009 5 comments

One of the most significant and contentions elements of many contemporary ecclesial movements is the practice of stability. Among ecclesial communities that are proliferating in the West today there is a strong emphasis on rejecting the sort of transience and career-driven mobility that has become ubiquitous in our culture.

However, to many ears this sort of theological practice raises questions, particularly missional questions. If the church is to start practicing stability, rootedness, and understand itself in a way that gives particular and sustained priority to locality, how does this relate to the church’s missional vocation? Is the church not always a community en via, a communion on its way? If we are a company of pilgrims is the commitment to stay in one place really fitting to the nature of our missional identity as the elect people of God?

I want to suggest that yes, in fact it is, or at least that the practice of geographical stability/longevity is a central part of the church’s missional identity. The first thing to be noted here is that the upward mobility of the Western middle class has nothing whatsoever to do with the missional mandate of the Christian church. The idea that simply being free to pick up and leave whenever we want is somehow closer to the ideal of missionality that commitment to a particular location is simply silly.

More to the point however is the fact that stability, when understood theological is actually a missional practice, indeed, it is rightly understood as a practice of dispossession, of instability. The commitment to remain with a people in a specific place is not static, lethargic, or lazy, but rather indicates a form of agapeic surrender in which we attempt to give up control of our lives for the sake of the other to the end of the faithful worship of God.

In other words, the commitment of stability is at once koinonial and doxological in nature. All of this, however, is overtly missional. Indeed the idea that geographic longevity is somehow a sort of maintenance of our own domestic status quo is an idea that only occurs to Westerners who desire maximum control over the shape of their lives. Nearly every missionary that I have ever met or read about insist that the only true and viable form of missional encounter occurs through long-term proximity and communal solidarity.

In short, the practice of stability is not an attempt to refuse the call of mission, but rather the very embodiment of that call’s acceptance. The practice of stability, far from being a mode of maintenance or control is the very act of allowing ourselves to be destabilized by the lingering presence of the other, of the neighbor. Stability names the very way in which we practice the instability and openness to the interruption that is the inbreaking of the kingdom of God.

The Bible and Meat: Sweet, Delicious Meat.

Posted by Halden on February 24, 2009 43 comments

It is often claimed these days by Christians with a vegetarian bent that, in the scope of the biblical narrative, meat-eating occurs because of the Fall, and, as such should not be practiced by Christians who are called to live as a foretaste of the new creation. This is completely and utterly wrong and I’ll tell you why.

In contrast to the standard assumption that the Fall unleashed upon the world an era of murderous meat consumption, the actual point in the biblical narrative that animals are given by God to the human race for food is after the Noahic flood (Gen 9:3). In fact, the proclamation on the part of Yahweh that animals were now a source of food for humankind occurs in the context of God’s covenantal promises to humanity and the world as a whole. Indeed, the context for the remark is God’s own remembrance and care for animals themselves (cf. Gen 8:1). The rationale for eating meat, then, is not the rationale of fallenness, but of covenant. In biblical perspective then, meat is given to us to remind us of the contingency of our existence and of the world’s existence. It exists as a symbol, a sacrament if you will, of God’s promise of peace and preservation.

So in conclusion: Hah! That’s right, the Bible is pro-meat. There you go. It’s in there. Take that vegetarians. Now we not only have the best-tasting food, we also have the word of God to back us up.

The Ethics of Witness

Posted by Halden on February 18, 2009 8 comments

In his Free in Obedience, William Stringfellow takes up an absolutely vital point regarding the nature of Christian political ethics, what he terms “the ethic of witness”. The ethics of witness “means that the essential and consistent task of Christians is to expose the transience of death’s power in the world.” Herein lies the fundamental vocation of Christian political thought and action: to bear witness to the defeat of death itself through the cross and resurrection of Christ. The point of Christian politics is to point to the defeat of death through resurrection.

What this means, however, is that the Christian can never be satisfied with the political accomplishments of the principalities and powers. Since our purpose is to bear witness to the defeat of death and its power, “the Christian in secular society is always in the position of a radical…in the sense that noting which is achieved in secular life can satisfy the insight which the Christian is given as to what the true consummation of life in society is.” From the stand point of Christian theopolitics, we can never find ourselves fully, or even largely committed to the political accomplishments and movements of our time, given the reliance of the principalities on the power of death.

Thus, “the Christian always complains of the status quo, whatever that happens to be; he always seeks more than that which satisfies even the best ideals of other men.” This is precisely why Christian politics are not, or should not be “useful” to the principalities and powers. The Christian is always seeking to bear witness to the resurrection and the defeat of the powers of death. All the principalities of our world fundamentally operate on the basis of the power of death in order to secure and exercise their authority. Given that the Christian denies the legitimacy of the power of death to order and facilitate human life, the principalities should find no allies among Christians in their pursuits.

To again quote Stringfellow, “Or, to put it differently, the Christian knows that no change, reform, or accomplishment of secular society can modify, threaten, or diminsh the active reign of death in the world. Only Christ can doe that, and now his reign is acknowledged and enjoyed in the society which bears his name and has the task of proclamation in all the world for the sake of that part of the world still consigned to the power of death.”

This puts the Christian in the extremely unpopular position of remaining a critic of all forms of earthly political sovereignty, even (especially?) when they seem to be becoming more morally appealing and worthy. Because the whole logic of the principalities is based on the power of death to order and control human life, no amount of institutional maintenance, reform, or fine-tuning can satisfy the Christian ethic of witness, the call of Christ to live a life free from the powers of death itself, the invitation of resurrection life. What is important to note here is that the inherent antipathy of Christianity towards secular politics is not a negative reaction determined by that which it is against. It is rather the overflow of the abundant gift of life that is wrought by Christ in the resurrection. The issue is not that the world is so evil that Christians must be anti-world. Rather, it is that the resurrection of Christ has actualized the reality of true authentic humanity so utterly that we cannot settle for supporting anything less.

Theological Commentary: 1 John 1:5-10

Posted by Halden on February 17, 2009 6 comments

“This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.” Following the introductory declaration, the elder gets straight to the point of the treatise: God. At the center of everything in First John is the reality of God and who God is. There are two things to note about the elder’s description of God in this verse. First, this message about the identity of God is what “we have heard” from Christ himself. Christ and Christ alone is the soured of the elder’s knowledge about God that he is seeking to impress on the church (cf. John 1:18; 2 John 9). Second, the message about God that we have learned from Christ is that God is light; there is no darkness in God. There is no ambiguity in God according to the elder. God has no inner dark side, no secret agenda; God is simply light, the fullness of purity and goodness.

“If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true;” Herein lies one of the major linchpins of First John, namely that we cannot participate in God’s life while living in sin. The elder is not esoteric; he proclaims no mysticism that could be separated from ethics. Union with God through Christ is ethical through and through. We cannot become a partaker of the divine nature (cf. 2 Pet 1:4) except under the form of discipleship; our participation in God can only take the form of a cruciform life, a life devoted to embodying in our own practices the singular love that God has revealed to us in Christ. For the elder our union with God, our communion with the fullness of divinity is utterly and completely earthly—it is nothing more or less than a call to live in the self-abandoning love of Jesus, walking in that love, and practicing it in all things. Deification means discipleship.

Moreover, what is ultimately at stake in our call to truly have fellowship with God is the issue of truth. Any claim to being union with God while living a life not shaped by Christ’s agape is a life under the bondage of the lie. Truth, for the elder is the reality of God and what God has accomplished. We “do” the truth in being conformed to God’s love. Any claim to union with God outside of this conformity to love is to live in futility and bondage to falsehood.

“but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.” Here the elder states the antithesis of the life bound over to falsehood: the life of mutual fellowship among the forgiven. For the elder here, the opposite of lying and failing to “do what is true” is to live a life of fellowship with one another. The opposite of falsehood is the community of the forgiven. Truth is inseparable from our life together as the forgiven ones of Christ.

The life lived in the light is a life to be walked, it is a road, a pilgrimage of discipleship. And the first thing to be said about this path is that to walk it is to be bound up with one another. The elder mentions first that we have fellowship with one another, and only then goes on to mention that the blood of Christ cleanses us from all sin. The experience of forgiveness and sanctification cannot be described except in light of mutual fellowship.

Note also that the passage here does not say that the blood of Christ cleanses us from “our sins”, but from “all sin” (cf. John 1:9). Though this certainly includes any sins we have committed, as verse 9 below makes quite clear, the communal note on which this verse opens seems to be the focus here. We are cleansed, not simply of our own guilt, but of all the ways in which the powers of sin and death have marked and debilitated our lives. The point of the elder is that all the power of sin is broken and that in following after Christ we are freed from the tyranny of its powers. To be sure this includes the erasure of our guilt, but that is but a sliver of the fullness of liberation that the elder is trying to communicate. We are freed from all sin, from the control of all powers, from the debilitation of all ideologies, from the reign of death itself (cf. 1 John 3:14). For the community of the forgiven, the power of sin itself is broken, and this reality of liberation is precisely what grounds the Johannine call to mutual love, the practice of which is the very reality of life itself, life in God.

“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” In further elaboration of the nature of salvation, the elder goes on here to make clear that our salvation cannot consist in any sort of self-deceived notion of our own righteousness. The vision of salvation articulated here is centered in truthfulness. The only way for us to have fellowship with God, to participate in the divine life is through the truthful acknowledgment of our condition. The great enemy of salvation is self-deception. Participation in God only comes through the agony of truth; only in facing the reality of our shattered and sinful lives do we find liberation and union with God.

“If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Confession. Confession is the key to life, the key to living within the reality of salvation. The essence of confession of sin is truthfulness. Confession is not public humiliation, or even personal acts of confiding in another. Rather confession is the truthful naming of ourselves and our action. Confession is how we are called to speak ourselves truthfully. It is the supremely painful and horrifyingly personal act of saying our ugliness, of proclaiming our corruption, and doing so without any qualifying remarks. Confession is our practice of truthing ourselves.

The supreme theological point though, is that for the Christian, confession can be borne. The truth can be faced. The truth can be acknowledged without fear. It can be so because the truth is Christ himself (cf. John 14:6). Christ who is at once our judge and our redeemer, from him we can bear the truth about ourselves. The truth about us, and our sinfulness consigns us to death. The reality of our fallenness and our brokenness is beyond fixing. Outside of Christ the truth about ourselves must be avoided at all costs, for the only end of it is death. In Christ however, the fear of death lies broken. In Christ alone full truthfulness is finally possible without despair unto death. Or rather, despair unto death can be borne in light of the resurrection. The one who is faithful and righteous forgives, cleanses, and resurrects us in Christ. And for this reason, and only this reason, we are able to bear the truth, and indeed to find the true and only freedom therein. In Christ, confession is the very life of freedom itself.

“If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” The lie above all lies, that we have not sinned. Indeed, the denial of sin is the very opposite of confession, and it has the opposite effect. Confession breaks through the bonds of slavery and self-deception, freeing us into the life of the community of the forgiven. Denial of sin however boxes us into ourselves and closes us forever off from the Word of life. Denial of sin is the absolute insistence on our own capacity, our own ability, our own integrity. Denial of sin, the declaration of innocence, like the declaration of accomplishment is utter and total slavery. To deny our sin is the see the truth about ourselves and refuse to believe that it can be borne in Christ. It is the only alterative to the freedom of confession; it is the visceral insistence that we cannot be false, therefore everyone else must be. Even God must be made a liar so that we can insist on our own truthfulness. The declaration of innocence is thus the ultimate slavery. The call of the elder is that we abandon such false and contrived innocences and be drawn into the true and only freedom, the life of agonizing, liberating truthfulness. The life of confession and forgiveness, of death and resurrection.

Stringfellow on the Resurrection

Posted by Halden on February 16, 2009 2 comments

“Christ’s resurrection is for men and for the whole of creation, including the principalities of this world. Through the encounters between Christ and the principalities and between Christ and death, the power of death is exhausted. The reign of death and, within that, the pretensions sovereignty over history of the principalities is brought to an end in Christ’s resurrection. He bears the fullness of their hostility toward him; he submits to their condemnation; he accepts their committal of himself to death, and in his resurrection he ends their power and the power they represent. Yet the end of the claims of the principalities to sovereignty is also the way in which these very claims are fulfilled in Christ himself. The claim of a nation, ideology, or other principality to rule history, though phony and futile, is at the same time an aspiration for salvation, a longing for the reality which does indeed rule history. In the same event in which the pretension of the principality is exposed and undone, how and in whom salvation is wrought and disclosed and demonstrated. In Christ the false lords of history, the principalities, are shown to be false; at the same time, in Christ the true Lord of history is made known. In Christ is both the end and fulfillment for all principalities, for all men, and for all things.”

– William Stringfellow, Free in Obedience (Euegene, OR: Cascade Books, 2006, 73)

The Scripture Project: Nine Theses

Posted by Halden on February 13, 2009 9 comments

In The Art of Reading Scripture, Ellen Davis and Richard Hays bring together a superb collection of scholars who offer some great essays on the theological interpretation of Scripture. The book is the result of the studies of a group known as “The Scripture Project” and includes nine theses on the interpretation of Scripture:

Scripture truthfully tells the story of God’s action of creating, judging, and saving the world.
Scripture is rightly understood in light of the church’s rule of faith as a coherent dramatic narrative.
Faithful interpretation of Scripture requires an engagement with the entire narrative: the New Testament cannot be rightly understood apart from the Old, nor can the Old be rightly understood apart from the New.
Texts of Scripture do not have a single meaning limited to the intent of the original author. In accord with Jewish and Christian traditions, we affirm that Scripture has multiple complex senses given by God, the author of the whole drama.
The four canonical Gospels narrate the truth about Jesus.
Faithful interpretation of Scripture invites and presupposes participation in the community brought into being by God’s redemptive action–the church.
The saints of the church provide guidance in how to interpret and perform Scripture.
Christians need to read the Bible in dialogue with diverse others outside the church.
We live in the tension between the “already” and the “not yet” of the kingdom of God; consequently Scripture calls the church to ongoing discernment, to continually fresh rereadings of the text in light of the Holy Spirit’s ongoing work in the world.

A few thoughts:

First, we need to be careful about what we mean by construing Scripture as a “coherent dramatic narrative” informed by the rule of faith. The rule of faith must not be understood as an unquestioned rule in our interpretation of Scripture if we are to avoid falling into ideology and theological imperialism.

Second, 3 and 8 seem to be in tension. If it is an article of faith that we cannot understand and the Old Testament apart from the New its going to be hard for us to read the Old Testament in dialogue with Jews.

Third, the meaning of “continually fresh rereadings of the text in light of the Holy Spirit’s ongoing work in the world” seems illusive. How exactly is this sort of discernment supposed to function hermeneutically?

Fourth, these theses would be better served by explicit mention of the God as Triune, and Jesus as the center of the biblical narrative in speaking about Scripture telling the story of “God’s action of creating, judging, and saving the world.”

Inhabitatio Dei

Where creeping anti-institutionalism eviscerates thick confessional identity