I have to confess (I guess it’s pretty obvious) that I’ve lost a lot of my momentum in blogging over the last several months.
When I first started this blog back in late 2004, it was one of two blogs, simultaneous with one called “WorldSpeak,” where I wrote about encounters with Christianity’s various manifestations in popular and often secular culture. By 2008, I found I couldn’t maintain two blogs at once, so I let WorldSpeak die and focused on EmergingChristian. In 2010 I hit 500 posts, which was a big feat after a fairly slow start.
But life happens: seminary and full time work and… perhaps disappointment: in years past I encountered too many “would-be mentors” who seemed to care about not only my development as a writer and provocateur, but as a disciple of Christ and as a young friend open to guidance. But instead, time after time, when I couldn’t jump through the hoops to meet their professional or ministry needs, they seemed to fade quickly away. Maybe it’s selfish to expect mentorship to be about my own development, and I’ve got no qualms about hard work, but it’s disappointing to encounter too many people who seemed interested in me, who were perhaps more focused on fulfilling their own endeavors through me. But maybe I’m just a narcissist. I don’t think I feel upset about it anymore, although it’s taken me several years to work out… but I have a nagging sense of disappointment, and a lot more cynicism than I started with. I have some great friends in the industry now who remain huge encouragements, and who continue to help me find opportunities to get my writing out there, but real genuine mentorship? Is it out there? I don’t know. Maybe that’s just an inhumanly tall order…
The other difficult aspect of continuing a long-term blog is finding fresh material. Perhaps it’s simply chronic writer’s block, but I can’t help feeling like my last few dozen posts have rehashed the same ideas, or the same rants, or the same political/social observations.
The reality is, I don’t want a new kind of Christianity. A few months ago I joined the United Church of Christ, and I love the combination of mainline liturgy and old-school liberalism. I don’t want the church to be more “hip.” Worrying about being “hip” is what got us into all this attractional, pop-Evangelical trouble in the first place. If winning people over is our modus operandi, instead of doing what we’re deeply convicted is true and right, we’re bound to sell out again and again.
What’s all this mean for this website?
I’m not giving up on the blog — I’m not going to stop blogging. But there are so many reasons why my priorities are changing, and my passions for “transforming the church” have hit a different kind of wall. I still feel passionate, but I’m not so arrogant as to think I’m smart enough to “re-dream” a brand new way of “being the church.” I just want us to be a better old kind of church.
I’m playing with the idea of a spoof on The Message.
The Massage: A Satirical, Postmodern “Relaxation” of the Good Book.
I think Eugene Peterson’s retelling of the biblical narrative, while well-intentioned, is too-often an oversimplification of much more complex source material. It’s also full of laughable (yes, also well intentioned) idioms that were out of vogue before his translations were ever published.
Moreover, Scripture itself is full of all sorts of problematic texts. Spong calls these the “sins of Scripture.” Phyllis Bird refers to “Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities” throughout the canon. The marginalization of women, as well as racial and sexual minorities are constant themes throughout the Bible.
And science? Well that’s just it: it’s so silly to ask an ancient collection of texts to support modern constructs that hadn’t even been fathomed yet: gravity? Time and space? Spherical earth? Evolution? C’mon.
So if Eugene Peterson can “modernize” the Bible with “hip” Baby-Boomer-relevant language, why can’t we have some fun playing with scripture from a satirical, liberal, postmodern vantage?
Here’s a nice little video promo piece Christian Piatt put together to promote Banned Questions About the Bible, the first book in the “Banned Questions” series. I contributed to Banned Questions About Jesus, the second book, releasing in June (or July) so it’s exciting to see the first book launching!
I’ve been skimming Rob Bell’s Love Wins yesterday and today, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out what all the commotion is over. Yes, I get it: hell is one of those foundational religious concepts whose imagery is so deeply soaked with our historical faith that – at least initially – it can be hard to imagine what Christianity would like like with out it…
But c’mon. Have you watched Bell on his Nooma videos? Have you really picked up the guy’s vibe from his books? This is pretty soft stuff. Yes, conservative naysayers call him a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing (“the WORST kind”) but all I read are the same frustrations I have: I don’t want my friends doomed to a concept of hell that I can’t buy into myself!
What I read in these pages are the natural questions that arise from that dissatisfaction. Much of that dissatisfaction comes from the very notion that Christians have any business at all judging anyone, given our spotty, often sad and sordid history:
When one woman in our church invited her friend to come to one of our services, he asked her if it was a Christian church. She said yes, it was. He then told her about Christians in his village in eastern Europe who rounded up Muslims in town and herded them into a building where they opened fire on them with their machine guns and killed them all. He explained to her that he was a Muslim and had no interest in going to her Christian church.
But we’re the ones with “the answer,” right? And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love…
I think what pisses off a lot of folks is that Bell talks about “hell” in terms of “hyperbole,” using “hell” as a sort of allegory for “hell on earth” – children mutilated with machetes, raped women, genocide, torture… “Do I believe in a literal hell?” Bell asks. ”Of course.” And he indicates to the hells we create here on earth. Evangelicals want an eternal, ethereal hell where the soul is tormented for rejecting Christ. Doesn’t matter how one lives or what one does – whether one was kind or lived with love, compassion, grace or selflessness – only that one said the words (or thought the thoughts) “Jesus, forgive me, come into my heart…” even though those words — and that very concept — have no occurrence in the New Testament.
Bell writes:
We need a loaded, volatile, adequately, violent, dramatic, serious word to describe the very real consequences we experience when we reject the good and true and beautiful life that God has for us. We need a word that refers to the big, wide, terrible evil that comes from the secrets hidden deep within our hearts all the way to the massive, society-wide collapse and chaos that comes when we fail to live in God’s world God’s way.
And for that,
the word “hell” works quite well.
Let’s keep it.
I’m not going to spend a lot more time going over this book. As I’ve said before, lots of other folks have written more (and better) analyses. I’ve never met Bell, but I get the feeling he’s a nice guy. He’s got a generous heart and it shows in his writing.
Now my critique: in his other books I’ve read (Velvet Elvis, Sex God and this) I get the distinct feeling that I’m being written to as a high school senior. The font on the page is big. The layout is scattered, poetic – lots of returns, creating stanzas spread across the paper. A bit melodramatic. A bit indulgent? Maybe. It’s certainly accessible, and that accessibility is probably why Bell’s book sales are as high as they are. He’s creative – I don’t want to knock him for that. But I never feel like I’m the audience he’s speaking to. I was in a young adult Bible Study a few years ago (I was probably 28 or 29) and we were watching the Nooma videos, and we had some good discussion from them, and like I said before – I like the guy… but the videos felt more geared toward high school students. So with Bell’s books.
That’s not a slam, but it’s interesting. There are thousands of critiques of Bell online, attacking him – especially for this most recent book. Bloggers, pastors, theologians and pseudo-theologians are going after Bell’s book as if it’s a serious piece of theological work. It isn’t, and I don’t think Bell would ever argue that it is. It’s a conversation starter. It’s a Gen-Y conversation starter. And more power to him, for creating it! But going after Bell with heavy theological artillery is like The UTNE Reader critiquing Reading Rainbow for being sophomoric. If we’re going to start weighing every piece of writing by some kind of (supposedly) objective, intensive rubric, then fundamentalists will need to answer for their crappy salvation tracts, dangerously ahistorical theology and hermeneutics, and dozens of poor and lazy translations of biblical texts. And that’s not even a good comparison. Again, Bell’s book isn’t presented as a piece of dogma or a theological treatise. It’s an attempt at wrestling with information and material that has been around us, in our churches, in our history, in our canon, in our hearts, and – yes – even in the midst of our orthodoxy – for thousands of years. By choosing easier answers, we wounded ourselves, and we wounded the world around us.
So far, the word is that the sales for the first book in the ‘Banned’ book series, Banned Questions About the Bible, are very good, and the pre-orders for the book I contributed to – Banned Questions About Jesus - are very solid!
Other good news: the books received strong endorsements from Brian McLaren, Scot McKnight and bestselling author AJ Jacobs (author of A Year of Living Biblically). McLaren called the project “brilliance.”
AJ Jacobs said the following:
“This book isn’t just entertaining and fascinating. It’s inspiring and potentially life-changing. Here’s my own question: Can you be curious and thoughtful about religion and NOT read this book? My answer: No. “
Thanks to those of you who have clicked the gaudy ad above and pre-ordered your copy!
Continuing a great conversation with my friend from George Fox Seminary, David Manning.
David Said:
And my belief in the vision of Christ and the Kingdom of God is real enough that it doesn’t hinge on anything but itself.
If your belief is a real thing in itself, and doesn’t have to signify anything beyond itself, then in what sense can you and I—we both being Christians—be said to share the same faith? I can see how the phrase “we both believe X” has meaning if we both have a similar belief that corresponds to a thing exterior to us both, but if the correspondence to something objective isn’t important, how can two individuals be said to belong to the same faith?
The Cross and Resurrection illuminated Christ and illustrated salvation. They did not invent, define or limit them (imho).
This seems to assume that there is *something* out there that corresponds to the idea of salvation. What sort of thing is it? On what basis is it founded? Whatever it is, why is it a more acceptable basis for salvation than the historical Incarnation?
* * *
This is a GREAT question: “can you and I… be said to share the same faith?” David, I would answer that, by the grace of God, yes. But qualitatively? Maybe not really…
Just as I believe that our faith in God, through Christ, is made whole and complete through the grace of God that reaches out and meets us, I also believe that our faith — our conception of God — and our feeble attempts at understanding Divinity, “aiming” toward truth and responding appropriately — are inevitable failures in and of themselves. So I would say, David, we share the same faith because we share the same wholehearted, authentic desire to follow God, through Christ, although our understanding of what that means is divergent. But David, wouldn’t you agree that even if you and I used the exact same language, and had no identifiable differences in our theological constructs, our psychology/neurology, personality, and even our minor geographic and cultural, differences would all contribute to hugely dissimilar internal meanings for all those constructs? I think so. If any of us is ever on the same page, it’s only momentary, and even then we’re on different paragraphs.
This is why I’m also willing to call my neighbors from other faith traditions “sister” and “brother,” and why I call my time with my agnostic friends “fellowship.” We are on parallel paths, although our language is different. I don’t believe I am endangering or sacrificing my salvation or theirs by dropping my need (and it used to be a very strong need, indeed!) to self-differentiate.
Love your question about salvation, too. I’m a universalist, and my language on salvation gets me into trouble, because I call myself an evangelical too, and sometimes I get myself trapped! Part of that is because I haven’t worked through all of the intricacies of what it means to be a liberal, evangelical, universalist (+douchebag) and part of it is because I believe that there are inherent tensions in these identifiers that cannot be resolved. And perhaps should not be. And as I’ve said before, I’m an evangelical for cultural reasons as much as any other factor.
So, I believe that God is an inherently salvific being, and that creation is in a process both of being created and saved, and of being maligned and destroyed. I believe creation wins, on the long arch “that bends toward justice,” but it doesn’t happen by magic. It happens by the steady, deliberate march of the people of the Kingdom of God.
I believe that Christ, as the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, Co-Equal with the [Gender-Neutral] Father, and the Spirit, demonstrated on earth the Divine nature of God and what human beings were capable of in perfect spiritual submission: forgiveness, unconditional love, subversive, counterintuitive Kingdom economics/politics (I’d rather not get into all that here).
I believe that the inevitable response of Principalities and Powers to the nature of God (true, pure, goodness) is to destroy it. I also believe that, often, the response of those oppressed by Principalities and Powers is to lash out against the “other” victim, when the system exerts itself elsewhere. This is self preservation. So something I dealt with (briefly) in this Banned Questions book is that arguing about whether or not Christ’s crucifixion was a “requirement” of atonement by God has been an unnecessary theological exercise. Not right or wrong (necessarily) but not necessary. Probably inevitable, in that we like to explain everything, and put God behind the reins, but I don’t believe humanity needed “atonement.”
Do I believe in sin? Absolutely! Do I believe sin distances us from God? Well, I believe sin is dysfunction and lack of health, so when we are unhealthy we have a harder time connecting to Divinity – of course. But I do not believe God needed recompense, or to be “satisfied,” or that Satan had to be paid ransom. This is more than simply “moral influence,” because I choose to believe Christ was God, and that God revealed Divine nature, Divine will, Divine Mercy and Humility, Divine love – Divine desire and intent – through Christ’s Theophany. It showed MORE than what humankind was capable of. Christ shows us what God is up to…
So I believe that the process of salvation has been in operation since the Big Bang (pow!) and that God is mysteriously, subversively (frustratingly-slowly, imho) wooing all of creation toward redemption. That salvation is working its way through every society, culture, and religious tradition, not necessarily making any of them salvific in and of themselves, but all of them marked with the presence of the Holy Spirit.
I could go on and on, and as I re-read what I’ve written, all of the “I believe’s” strike me as more than a tad narcissistic. But so is blogging, in general. David, again, you asked, “Whatever it is, why is it a more acceptable basis for salvation than the historical Incarnation.” I hope that I’ve demonstrated that the historical Incarnation actually is my basis for what salvation is. I simply don’t believe that the historical Incarnation is the matrix in which salvation exists, or that it serves as a boundary or limitation for salvation’s identity. The Incarnation is a window through which we view something much larger – ultimately incomprehensible.
As you can see from the prominent ad on this website, or onfacebook if you’ve friended me, a book I’ve contributed to is coming out inJune.
The book explores a series of questions, most of themdisconnected, except for the fact that they are all “hot-button,” ones many folks feel afraid to ask Christians about directly (for fear of judgment,condescension, or other negative responses). A group of writers, academics, and theologians (a dozen ofus, or so) took turns responding to these questions, and this book is the editedcollection of those responses in all their variance, harmony anddissonance. I’m looking forward toseeing the finished product.
The role I found myself taking seemed to consistentlygravitate toward this conclusion, regardless of the question: I believe becauseI choose to believe, but I do not have to believe, and neither do you, and weare probably wrong about a lot, and it is the act of choosing to believe inwhat is unknown that is fundamentally an act of faith. Otherwise, it’s beliefism…
Perhaps it would be fair to articulate this: The correctnessof one’s theology is less important than the humility of one’sspirituality. That is not tosuggest that I am a particularly humble person (yes, go ahead, you can callbullshit).
In terms of the supernatural, I carry a lot ofcynicism. In terms of Orthodoxy,it’s the same. It’s not that Idon’t choose to believe in a robust Christian faith, replete with supernaturalwonders, miraculous events and godly intervention. It’s not that I want to see religion stripped of everythingextraordinary…
I just don’t want to be told that I HAVE to believesomething to be a Christian. Idon’t like requirements on this journey. Hmmm… that doesn’t sound very humble, now, does it? How about this: I’m willing to CHOOSE to believe something, acknowledging it is possiblethat it might not be true. Ibelieve that is faith. I am notwilling to FORCE myself to believe something, hinging my salvation or religioussystem on its inherent truth. Iwon’t do that with the literal resurrection. I won’t do that with the virgin birth. I won’t do that with the Doctrine ofthe Trinity, the Hypostatic Union or any other fundamental Christiandoctrine. I affirm these. I choose to believe them. But my faith in God does not rely onthem.
I am convinced that an emergent, postmodern, existentialfaith must honestly acknowledge this deliberate, cognitive paradigm ofaffirmative belief if it is to reach the emerging culture-at-large.
Strangely, I’m not seeing this articulated clearlyanywhere. Are you? (please point me in the right direction if I’m missing it!)
Most liberals, like Marcus Borg, or perhaps Rudolf Bultmann,for example, would not likely claim to choose “belief in” the miraculous natureof Jesus’ resurrection.They wouldascribe supernatural, spiritual “meaning” to it, and find value in it.But this is something different.
Isn’t it even possiblethat the supernatural occurs? Iargue that if it’s possible, Ican be humble enough to choose to believe it’s possible. That’s not certainty. It’s not supposed to be.
What do you make of this conversation? What do you make of faith, of thenature of certainty and doubt? Doyou need to feel certain of anything? Do you have non-negotiables?
My wife got me a book of poetry by Sufi poet Hafiz for Christmas. It’s really wonderful stuff. Hafiz came several hundred years after Rumi, another great Persian Sufi poet.
Thought I’d share some of these poems with you. Hope you’ll enjoy. There are more below, after the jump…
With seminary demands, I don’t spend enough time reading for pleasure, but I’ve been working through Hocus Pocus very slowly and wanted to share a couple of witty forecasts from Vonnegut in the late ’80s, projecting on America into the early 2000s.
“He predicted, I remember, that human slavery would come back, that it had in fact never gone away. He said that so many people wanted to come here because it was easy to rob the poor people, who got absolutely no protection from the Government. He talked about bridges falling down and water mains breaking because of no maintenance. He talked about oil spills and radioactive waste and poisoned aquifers and looted banks and liquidated corporations. ’And nobody ever gets punished for anything,’ he said. ’Being an American means never having to say you’re sorry.’” (94)
And on the next page:
“‘I heard you said Jesus Christ was un-American,’ she said, her tape recorder running all the time.
So I unscrambled that one for her. The original had been another of Grandfather’s sayings. He repeated Karl Marx’ prescription for an ideal society, ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ And then he asked me, meaning it to be a wry joke, ‘What could be more un-American, Gene, than sounding like the Sermon on the Mount?’” (95-96)
I know the narrative is completely incomprehensible from these quick quotations, but I’m always moved and convicted (and a little terrified) by the sober predictions made by this witty, biting, hilarious, prescient novelist. And so it goes.
I’ve been writing here since late 2004. Back then, I was unmarried, not enrolled in seminary, and I had JUST changed party affiliation on my voter registration.
I wrote pretty sporadically back then – only a few posts each month. Everything was so ambiguous to me at that time that I felt I was stumbling through the dark. Or whistling (except that I can’t whistle). I still remember laying on my bed, staring up at the ceiling, wondering if my questions would end in apostasy or atheism. I cried about that, scared to lose the thing that was so precious to me – faith – but also just as scared to lose the semblance of comfort and belonging I still felt so strongly in the Evangelical world. There was a part of me fighting to ignore the doubts and questions and disillusion, if only to retain that comfort.
Eventually, I lost that comfort, but I never lost my faith.
It wasn’t until 2008 that I got really serious about blogging here. I had a painful experience with a would-be mentor that woke me up to cold reality, but up till then I thought getting a book deal was going to be relatively easy. Naive, to be sure, but until then momentum had been going in my favor. That “momentum” ended almost as quickly as it had begun, and I was left with a bad taste in my mouth. I was bored and tired of my manuscript, but I didn’t want to give up on writing…
For the last couple of weeks, EmergingChristian.com has maintained an average daily visitor count that I’m quite excited about – it’s taken several years, but I have loved the conversations and friendships I have found along the way.
A lot of people tell me, “I read your blog, but I never have anything to add to the conversation, so I don’t comment.” That’s fine, but I always encourage them (and YOU) that conversations are what this blog is about. Conversations are what started my own spiritual evolution (or devolution, depending on your vantage) and there’s a layer of richness and depth that’s added here when YOU speak up.
Either way, the fact that you visit here – that you read my sometimes nonsensical rants – means a lot to me, and your participation in these conversations deeply affects my own faith journey. Thank you.
I’m an M.Div student and a contributing writer in Spencer Burke’s Out of theOOZE (NavPress), Leonard Sweet’s Church of the Perfect Storm (Abingdon Press) and Christian Piatt’s Banned Questions About Jesus (Chalice Press).
I’m a liberal, an egalitarian, a deconstructionist, an Outlaw Preacher, and a loudmouth. I want to be your friend...
My wife got me a book of poetry by Sufi poet Hafiz for Christmas. It’s really wonderful stuff. Hafiz came several hundred years after Rumi, another great Persian Sufi poet.
Recent Comments