Middle School + Castle Bluff = Amazing!

The highlights from another great weekend at Castle Bluff!

Deep Church… Almost

Ok, so I think about a dozen people or so are committed to reading this book together.  We are shooting for having our first “discussion” next Monday (11/16).  Just in case, you haven’t gotten your hands on the book yet, and can’t wait to dive in, here’s a LINK to the intro and first chapter.

Once again, I hope that there isn’t uniform agreement among all of us reading.  I’m not one who likes to argue just for the sake of arguing (despite what my beloved might say), but it will be sort of boring if we are all just nodding our heads ‘yes’ from week to week.  But on the flip side, I think it goes without saying, that we should strive to respect each others’ opinions (including the author’s).  Sometimes electronic discourse creates an environment in which people say things that they might not normally if they were face to face with a person.   Ok, you get it.

Read with me?

Ok, so I thought I’d try something different around here.  Instead of me telling you what I am reading or have read lately, I thought it might be interesting to read something together.  An online book club if you will.  Here’s how it would work.

Step 1: Give everyone a chance to acquire the book.

Step 2: Establish some reasonable reading schedule.  Maybe a chapter each week.

Step 3: Begin reading it.

Step 4: Weekly post some thoughts, questions, or reflections from the chapter.

Step 5: And here’s the all important part…  Everyone reading the book joins in the online conversation.

Simple enough.  So the book I had in mind is Deep Church by Jim Belcher.  I’ll be honest, I know next to nothing about the book.

I like the front cover.  I read the back cover.  It is endorsed by people who I am drawn to…  and some that I’m not.  But I know that the author (or publisher) is speaking my language when he says,

“Deep church looks like – a missional church committed to both tradition and culture, valuing innovation in worship, arts and community but also creeds and confessions.”

My hope isn’t so much that we’ll all be convinced that his perspective is the “right” one.  Rather, I’m hoping that through reading this book together we’ll begin to ask some of the right sorts of questions concerning what it means to faithfully live out our calling as the people of God today.

So if it looks interesting to you, and you would like a place to think out loud about what you are reading and thinking, then pick up a copy and we’ll get started in a couple weeks.  If you are local and want me to order a copy for you, let me know by November 2nd.

I’ll shoot for having the first post up on November 16th.

If you aren’t feeling the whole “emerging-church-dialogue” thing, then I’m also reading THIS and THAT.  I’d be happy to talk about them too.

Surprised By Hope… Again.

Mumford and Sons – Roll Away Your Stone

I take it back.  In my little blurb on this book a few posts back, I suggested that this wouldn’t be a very good introduction to N. T. Wright’s thinking.  I was wrong.  It may be the perfect book for that purpose.  I read a bit and thought that it was going to be a toned down version of his exceptionally long treatment life after death and the Christian understanding of resurrection.  It is that, but so much more.

Who should read this book?  Anyone who cares about understanding what the New Testament teaches about life after death.  I think even the relatively informed Christian will have their thinking on this subject clarified.  Anyone who wants to understand the gospel and salvation better.  Anyone who wants to understand the mission of the church more fully in terms of the resurrection.  Anyone who tires of simplistic reductions of the Christian faith that tend to rely more on categories of Greek philosophy than the story that emerges from the pages of Scripture.

Here are a few gems…

[A] feature of many communities both in the postindustrial West and many of the poorer parts of the world is ugliness.  True, some communities manage to sustain levels of art and music, often rooted in folk culture, which bring a richness even to the most poverty-stricken areas.  But the shoulder-shrugging, functionalism of postwar architecture, coupled with the passivity born of decades of television, has meant that for many people the world appears to offer little but bleak urban landscapes, on the one hand, and tawdry entertainment, on the other.  And when people cease to be surrounded by beauty, they cease to hope.  They internalize the message of their eyes and ears, the message that whispers that they are not worth very much, that they are in effect less than fully human.

Ok, after you have wrapped your brain around that one, here’s another…

The power of the gospel lies not in the offer of a new spirituality or religious experience, not in the threat of hellfire (certainly not in the threat of being “left behind”), which can be removed if only the hearer checks this box, says this prayer, raises a hand, or whatever, but in the powerful announcement that God is God, that Jesus is Lord, that the powers of evil have been defeated, that God’s new world has begun.

Or…

As far as I can see, the major task that faces us in our generation, corresponding to the issue of slavery two centuries ago, is that of the massive economic imbalance of the world, whose major symptom is the ridiculous and unpayable Third World debt … I simply want to record my conviction that this is the number one moral issue of our day.  Sex matters enormously, but global injustice matters far, far more.

But in order to understand the context of statements like these, one needs to wade through ones like this…

It is love that believes the resurrection.  “Simon, son of John,” says Jesus, “do you love me?”  There is a whole world in that question, a world of personal invitation and challenge, of the remaking of a human being after disloyalty and disaster, of the refashioning of epistemology itself, the question of how we know things, to correspond to the new ontology, the question of what reality consists of.

I think I’ve said this before, but there is no one writing today who more clearly expresses my own feelings, thoughts, misgivings, and hopes.  While he begins with developing our understanding of the resurrection, he ends up leaving no stone unturned.  Because he (and I) believe just that…  the resurrection changes everything.

better words

Tonight, I was engaged in one of my main roles as a pastor… teaching.  And it wasn’t on any ordinary run-of-the-mill topic either.  It was on the rather thorny issue of “How can a good all-powerful God exist when there is so much evil and suffering in the world?”  Envying me yet?

Frequently after teaching, I will come across someone who says in writing the same thing I say – but better. Rarely though does that discovery come so quickly. So, not two hours later, I read from N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope the following:

If creation was a work of love, it must have involved the creation of something other than God.  That same love then allows creation to be itself, sustaining it in providence and wisdom but not overpowering it.  Logic cannot comprehend love; so much the worse for logic.

Yeah, what he said.

Three Views Revisited

Julie Peel – Unfold

A few days ago, I mentioned that I was reading a book entitled Three Views on the New Testament Use of the Old.  I’m done now and wanted to make some reflections on the book and subject.  So be forewarned…  boring theology talk is about to commence.  I use this blog for a variety of purposes, one of which is to think out loud.  Therefore, you may want to simply click ‘play’ on the song above and enjoy a little background music while you go do something else on the internets.

First, a few preliminary comments on the strategy of the book.  It is a part of a series called Counterpoints which covers a wide variety of topics, including the Rapture, hell, women in ministry, baptism, and so on.  The general layout of this series is that an editor will make some introductory comments, and then the various proponents of whatever view will sound off.  After each view is presented, the other contributors have a few pages to respond to the main essay.  The other day, I called it a theological cage match, but that wasn’t entirely fair.  It really has the tone more of a cordial debate than a smack down.

The contributors for this particular volume are well known biblical scholars in the evangelical academic community: Walter Kaiser, Darrell Bock, and Peter Enns.  The volume editor, Johnathan Lunde, makes some very helpful introductory comments on the subject of NT/OT intertextuality which provide even the uninitiated with some handles to begin to grasp the major contours of the lay of the land.

And it is very unfamiliar territory indeed.  Sometimes it is easy to forget that the New Testament is inextricably linked to the Old.  For example, you can buy a New Testament that is unencumbered with all that lengthy prolegomena.  A not so subtle suggestion that we don’t really need to know what is in the Old Testament, just the bits that involve Jesus and everything after that.  Frankly, its a bit offensive.  Can you imagine if they sold an Old Testament only version of the Bible?  Funny to think that was all Jesus, Paul, and the gang had to work with.  And yet, even a casual reading of the New Testament reveals its dependence on the Old Testament both for its major themes and frequently for exact wording.  Ok, nothing really debate worthy there.

However, if one puts those references and quotations under greater scrutiny, a problem emerges.  Sometimes, it looks as if the New Testament author hasn’t really understood the Old Testament passage correctly or has taken something out of context, and in doing so has imported a meaning onto the text that wasn’t there in the original Old Testament author’s mind.

The classic example is in Matthew 2:15, where he quotes Hosea 11:1 – “Out of Egypt, I have called my son.”  In Matthew, the verse is cited as being somehow prophetic with respect to the journey that Jesus’ family makes to and from Egypt early in his childhood.  Now, if one just sort of blows through Matthew without pausing for much reflection, the reader is unaware of any “foul play.”  However, when one goes back to Hosea, it seems (to some) that the text doesn’t seem prophetic at all, but is instead a look back at God’s saving act in history – specifically the deliverance of Israel from Egypt under Moses’ leadership.  In this context, it is relatively clear that Israel is the “son.”

So there is a tension there…  Is Matthew playing fast and loose with the text?  Is he a poor exegete and misunderstood what Hosea has said?  How one resolves this “tension” is largely shaped by certain understandings of how the New Testament authors approach the Old.  Kaiser (and those sympathetic with his view) doesn’t see the possibility of two different meanings for a single text.  Rather, the Old Testament author had an intended meaning and whatever the New Testament author is doing must agree.  So for example, Kaiser would likely argue that the Hosea text was in fact predictive and that the “son” there looked forward to Jesus in some way and that Hosea would have been conscious of the predictive element in his writing.

Bock represents a fairly nuanced view that sees patterns in biblical history.  So, he wouldn’t necessarily need to argue that Hosea was predictive in a strict sense.  However, due to God’s consistent patterns of deliverance throughout history, Matthew is capitalizing on or evoking a theme of deliverance that up until Jesus was most clearly expressed in the exodus tradition.  It is more complex than that, but this sort of approach both recognizes the tension and assumes the best about Matthew in his use of the Old Testament.

The final view that is articulated by Enns is that Matthew is simply employing exegetical practices common to that  time that paid more attention to specific words and how they could be mined for meaning apart from the actual original context.  While this lack of regard for original context might cause concern to the modern reader, Enns would argue that we shouldn’t expect ancient interpreters to conform to modern hermeneutical practices.  God’s Word was spoken into a certain places and times and bears all the marks (including the “faulty” interpretive traditions) of that culture.

Ok, as you might guess, it is far more complicated than that, but that’s why these guys wrote a book, not a blog post.  If you are still reading (and that’s a big ‘IF’), rest assured that all of the positions have merit and can be held by intelligent faithful readers of the Bible.  However, my own view is something of a combination of Bock and Enns.  I appreciate Enns’ observation that the Bible will inevitably reflect the culture in which it was forged.  And yet, I also would affirm that due to its dual authorship (man AND God), that it can transcend culture and take in the grand sweep of redemptive history.

Despite the differences of opinion, one thing that everyone agrees on is that the New Testament’s interpretation of the Old Testament has been indelibly marked by the one we know as Jesus of Nazareth.  After Christ, everything written in the Old Testament had to be re-looked in the light of Christ’s coming, living, dying, and rising.  May our own interpretation of Scripture – both “Old” and “New” – reflect the same.

the bluff

Crazy, I know!  Two posts in one day.  Maybe I do have a blog.

Highlights from the most recent trip to Castle Bluff with high school students.  Enjoy!

currently reading

The Avett Brothers – Ten Thousand Words

I consider myself to be an average reader.  I read more books than some and less than others.  The ones that I tend to gravitate towards usually have something to do with God, the church, theology and sometimes all the above.  Right now, I’m in the middle of four books and each one is a worthwhile read.  So I thought I would share them with you.

The Case for Faith by Lee Strobel is one that I am reading with students.  It is basically a straight forward apologetic for the Christian faith, but written in a slightly more engaging style than your average apologetics.  Strobel (a former journalist) takes to the road and interviews various experts on the big objections people have to Christianity.  So it has the feel of a narrative while providing some solid answers to questions.  Over time, I’ve been less and less compelled by the modernist approach to defending the faith (I tend to see apologetics as being more helpful for the already convinced than the skeptic), but there are some worthwhile observations here.  What I’ve loved most is that the students (and not a few adults) seem to be really engaged by it.  If you need a reminder that Christian faith actually stands up to reason, then you might find this relatively easy read helpful.

I meet with a group of men on Monday mornings, and the book we are wading through right now is a collaboration between Richard Foster and Gayle Beebe entitled Longing for God: Seven Paths of Christian Devotion.  This one was something of a surprise.  Judging both by the cover (which of course we should never do) and by the title, I was thinking this was going to be of the more “touchy-feely” variety.  Well, it’s not.  The strategy of the book is to look back on the history of the church and highlight the contributions various saints have made to Christian spirituality.  It is something of a unique book in that it doesn’t read like a popular treatment of these men and women, nor it read like a college text.  It finds the happy middle-ground of helpful summary, critique, and application.  If you find yourself woefully ignorant of the major figures in church history (and let’s be honest, most of us are), then this serves as a wonderful introduction to and distillation of their thought and practice.

N. T. Wright is a name that I’ve mentioned maybe once or a hundred times around here.  By all accounts, Wright is one of the most influential New Testament scholars alive today.  He is strongest when he is shedding light on first-century Jewish beliefs and practices and how that impacts our understanding of Jesus and the communities from which the New Testament emerged.  He is about half way through an extraordinarily ambitious multi-volume New Testament theology.  However, one of the things I appreciate about Wright is that he takes nearly all of his scholarly work and attempts to make it accessible to a broader audience.  Such is the case with Surprised by Hope.  It is a more readable version of The Resurrection of the Son of God in which Wright ever so slowly wades through what the New Testament teaches about life after death, life after life after death, and so on.  Not the first book I would pick up by Wright, but it wouldn’t be the worst introduction to his thinking either.

This one is called Three Views on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, and to borrow a phrase from the students I work with “that’s my jam.”  This book is one of a series of books in the Counterpoints Series.  The idea is simple enough.  Take a biblical subject that has a variety of views (and what biblical subject doesn’t?) and let a leading proponent of each view take a whack at it – and then a whack at each other.  It is as close as one comes to a theological cage match.  Anyway, the Old Testament in the New is something with which I have more than a passing familiarity, and this volume lays out the issues and the options with great clarity.  On a side note, I realize that this topic is probably intensely boring to 99.99% of Christ-followers, but I could make a pretty strong case for it being one of the key building blocks for our understanding of what the Scriptures are and the authority they are supposed to have in our lives.

Alright, so there it is.  If you have read or later read any of these books, I would love to hear your thoughts about them.

Back to the Bible (pt. 2)

J. Tillman – Earthly Bodies

If you remain unconvinced that we have adopted the democratic approach to our study of the Bible, just attend most any small group “Bible study” and try this out for a change. When someone starts airing their random reflections on what a particular passage of Scripture means, and they are not quite getting it right, throw this comment into the mix, “I’m sorry that’s wrong. There is no world in which any semi-normal reading of those verses could have possibly meant what you just said. In fact, that may very well be the worst butchering of any biblical passage I’ve ever heard.” What do you think? I’m thinking you have just been de-invited from the group.

No, instead what we tell ourselves and one another is that your opinion is as valid as the next guy or gal’s. So just nod your head. Maybe look a little perplexed, and say “ok, who’s next?”

With most areas of knowledge, we recognize that some people’s opinions count more than others. If I am having a medical problem, I don’t consult with a doctor only to say, “I’m going to get a second opinion from my hairdresser and a third from my stock broker.” And yet, American evangelicalism has unknowingly propagated a way of interpreting Scripture that tacitly implies that everyone’s opinion of what the Bible says is equally valid.

There is a meaning, and (get ready for this) some readings get closer to that meaning (i.e. are more right) than others.

However, I’m not suggesting that we all climb into our little ivory towers and study the Bible. Despite what I’ve said, I really do believe we need each other to understand the Bible. Solo scriptura means “Scripture alone” not “alone with Scripture.”

It is when we are reading with others, and being taught by others, and questioned by others, and challenged by still others, that we find our horizons expanded on what the text might actually mean. Reading in community forces us to confront our own biases and warped ways of looking at reality (and the Bible). Reading in community keeps us from simply assuming that “I” will always have it right.

And not just the “community” of the few other people who are slight variations of ourselves. If I read the Bible with people who are more or less just like me, then I shouldn’t be surprised if all that ends up happening is that we mutually affirm one another’s opinions.

The community includes people of different denominations (even non-Evangelicals). Different races. Different countries. Different time periods. Different education levels. Different ages. As a side note, this is why books are so important… it would be borderline impossible to assemble a group with that range of diversity in one room to study the Word together on a consistent basis. Plus, if it is in a book, the odds go up (sometimes only slightly) that they know what they are talking about.

I realize that this looks like I’m contradicting myself, and in some ways affirming the “we-all-have-something-to-contribute” way of thinking is maybe only a slight variation on Western society’s democratic individualism, but it is that with a twist.

What I’m advocating for is a move away from simplistic readings of Scripture that assume the “I” will always be right in my opinion. The reality is I need help to understand it, certainly from the Holy Spirit, but also from others.

If you are still reading (and that’s a big ‘if’), then I’m guessing only one half of this post resonated with you. If you liked the first half about some opinions mattering more than others, you probably need to go back and read the second half again. And vice versa, if the stuff about reading in community was more up your alley, you should go back and read the first half again. If you liked it all, then you are approaching something akin to Zen-Buddhist enlightenment.

I don’t think there is a fourth option… is there? Oh, yes. I suppose there is the possibility that you didn’t give a rip about any of it. In which case, you should probably just go back to watching re-runs of The Bachelor.

Back to the Bible (pt. 1)

AA Bondy – When the Devil’s Loose

I would have liked to return to the topic of biblical interpretation sooner, but there was this thing called “The Entire Summer” that got in the way.  So, I’m back.

That is back to the Bible.   I closed out last time with the idea that interpretation done on our own will always lead to error.  This isn’t the time or place to go into great detail about how we arrived at a place where the ideal Christian is one who reads the Bible by themselves for hours on end, but maybe the broad strokes will suffice.

I know it is hard to believe but the idea of the “self” that is separated from the rest of one’s society, clan, tribe, family, etc…  is a relatively “new” idea.  Certainly, roots of individualism can be traced back to the 14^th century when a person’s capacity to think and reason for one’s self was highly esteemed and praised.  Even in Martin Luther’s famous phrase, solo Scriptura (Scripture alone), we find not only the singular importance of Scripture idealized, but it also implicitly idealizes the ability of the one who is reading the Scriptures… solo.

Well, what got started in the Europe in the 14^th century certainly has reached its fullest expression in 21^st century America.  The idea that the ‘self’ or ‘individual’ is the most important determinant of what is right and true simply goes unchallenged.  It is one of the givens by which we operate.  When I say it is a ‘given,’ it is just that.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident (that is… not needing any justification), that all men (we’ll assume for the moment they meant women and non-whites too, even though they probably didn’t) are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

To be an American is to recognize that that the self is entitled to certain things and has the ability to secure them.  Of course, this democratic way of looking at things colors all we do.  Take for example American Idol (it all comes back to AI eventually).  Regardless of what one thought of the abilities of the contestants, skill or ability was secondary to how much people liked the contestant.  So, if one had the right look (and in our society, maybe every society, the right “look” often determines how much one “likes” someone) then he or she has a decent chance to go far.  Because in the end, it is me the individual, the solo viewer, who has the power to determine what ‘good’ is.

Stick with me, this is going somewhere.  If the individual, the solo viewer determines what talent is or isn’t.  Then it really isn’t that much of a jump to get to a place where it is the individual, the solo reader who determines what is right or true when interacting with Scripture.

to be continued…