start a post-modern theology discussion group

I’m giving up on this goal because it’s too modern… Discussion groups, too much structure ;) Just kidding. Realistically, my post-modern discussion group happens with my friends, on my blog, and just throughout my life. So I’m giving up on this one

I still haven’t completed this goal. Sometimes (perhaps all of the time?) I feel stuck and unable to move forward. I’m not a good planner/organizer and it becomes painfully obvious with goals like this. I can come up with lots of ideas for discussion but I’m not good at getting people into the discussion; actually starting the group. That said, a few months back a friend from my church who baited me into starting a blog where we could talk about stuff. It’s a start… See digitaljesus.org (can you believe I got that domain!)

Thinking about the theme of theology/truth as story, myth, mystery, I’ve been hunting for good examples of this. Within the past week I’ve discovered two great ones.

The Secret Country is a book that I’ve been reading to my 7 and 5 year-old sons at bedtime. It’s an engaging story about a young boy who meets a talking cat from Eidolon, “The Secret Country” and uncovers a scheme where creatures are being smuggled out of Eidolon into our world. All of the creatures suffer and start to die in our world because there is “no magic”. I haven’t finished the book yet, but there are countless alegories in the book that echo the Christian tradition, and it’s fun to read.

Because of Winn Dixie is a delightful movie (my wife says it’s a GREAT book too… she read it to our kids as well) about a little girl whose mother ran away and who’s father is a hurting and marginally effective preacher in a small town in Florida. Opal (the little girl) befriends a dog who she names Winn Dixie. The dog with a penchant for meeting people and smiling a lot (hard to tell if it’s just CG or they found a dog that can smile) introduces Opal to a bunch of “sad” people all isolated from each other and in the process builds genuine and beautiful community. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could all live like Opal?

If you’ve read other books by Brian McLaren, particularly New Kind of Christian or The Story We Find Ourselves In, you probably already know… But he’s got a new book called The Last Word and the Word After That So far it’s every bit as captivating.

I’ve been reading Blue Like Jazz. It’s a great book but Chapter 18 “Love: How to Really Love Other People” hit me hard. You should read it!

There is a branch of biology called sociobiology which seeks to explain culturual behavior using an evolutionary model. It was first coined by E.O. Wilson a famous biologist (or so I hear… I’ve only read Concilience ).

For whatever reason, I remembered sociobiology when thinking about the idea of Christian sanctification (or the process of becoming holy). I thought:

Sanctification is kinda like spiritual evolution so if social evolution happens (like sociobiology argues) then maybe socio-spiritual evolution happens?

In simpler terms. Does the church evolve? Are there mutations that help or harm the church?

I suppose those questions rely on the definition of the church. I think there are two definitions of “church”. The first definition is the spiritual reality which is God’s people or Christ’s bride The second definition is the institution of the church; specific local communities with pastors, elders, deacons, etc. a “particular” church, a denomination. I’m content to say that the church by the former definition doesn’t really evolve. If you believe in unconditional election this is an easy one. Those that might subscribe to “conditional election” have it a bit harder, but I don’t find it too hard to believe that an omniscient being would know who will “choose” to believe. The church by the later definition does and should change.

Let me offer a couple thoughts about that. First, that the “institution” of the church “evolves” shouldn’t come as a surprise; it is composed of changing individuals. Second, we know that the church has changed historically (certainly different customs, but also different theologies… remeber the Reformation, among many others), and we can deduce that it will continue that trend. You can probably come up with lots of other ways that the church changes.

So… What’s my point? In the churches that I’ve been in, there seems to be a tendency to treat the church that should change (institution) as the one that doesn’t change (spiritual). This may be one of the reasons why people don’t like organized religion like Daniel points out. Certainly there are fundamental beliefs that the institutions hold that won’t change (there’s plenty of room for Confessions and Creeds), but personally I’d be happier if we got more comfortable with change as institutions. Try to talk about “post-modern theology” or the “emerging church” in the wrong crowd and you’ll have lots of uncomfortable and defensive folks. That’s probably not rocket science; change is difficult. As for me, I’m comfortable stepping out in faith and trusting God to lead us into truth and away from lies as we change.

I had the following discussion with a friend:

What do you think about this McLaren dialog (from “A New Kind of Christian”)?

I protested “Neo, I never said that my interpretations were infallible. I’m just saying that the Bible itself is.” He responded, “Well, I’m wondering, if you have an infallible text, but all your interpretations of it are admittedly fallible, then you at least have to always be open to being corrected about your interpretations, right?” I was nodding again. Yes. Of course. Neo kept talking: “So the authoritative text is never what I say about the text or even what I understand the text to say but rather what God means the text to say, right? So the real authority does not reside in the text itself, in the ink on paper, which is always open to misinterpretation—-sometimes, history tells us, horrific and dangerous misinterpretations. Instead the real authority lies in God, who is there behind the text of beyond it of above it right? In other words, the authority is not in what I say the text says but in what God says the text says.

I don’t think McLaren would argue that we should then, never say anything about what scripture says, but rather we should just be careful to not think that we have all of the answers correct. Perhaps there are things in our current theology that will, in 200 years, look like the theology that allowed for slavery 200 years ago (slavery was the “horrific and dangerous misinterpretation” referred to above)?

Thanks for the opportunity to continue the discussion.

What McLaren is saying has some merit. However, the question arises, “How then can I know anything with certainty, with certainty enough to live my life on”? Is there not a place for the acceptance and deeper yet, belief, in something that the Church has set out to be true, i.e. the Creeds and Confessions? Certainly we must hold our beliefs with humility, but this does not mean that our beliefs can have no authority in anyone else’s life. Or am I missing the point?

You’re right. The danger in postmodernism is towards relativism where no one has any right to believe anything with “certainty”. McLaren would call such a person a “bad postmodern.” McLaren agrees that there is a place for confessionalism and creeds. I might summarize McLaren by saying that we need to hold onto Confessions and Creed loosely and with faith. We need to hold on to them and cherish them as the ancient story of our “family”; as our story. We need to hold onto them as the best efforts of countless Godly men and women to understand God and his purposes in our life. We should not hold onto them as a rigid and unchangeable rule by which we can separate those who know God from those who do not. We should not hold onto them like facts that you memorized in Biology class. We should not hold onto them as a substitute for wrestling with hard questions about God. We should not hold onto them as a substitute for God Himself.

I was thinking about reading the Bible the other day, and had the thought that we should disdain the reading of scripture if it’s not a place where God is met. On those days where, for whatever reason (I think it might be God training us to seek Him and only Him), we don’t experience God in reading scripture we should be disappointed in the waste of time because there is no value in reading scripture if God is not there (I grant that it’s not entirely wasted… God may use your invested time later)

I think a key point is that with confession and creed, it’s easy to learn and recite a “theological fact” and never think about it again just like you never think about what 2 + 2 is. Doing this closes one door to experience God and never lets Him mature your thinking.

One more thought… I don’t think that reason is the only way to experience certainty. Do you love your wife? Are you certain? Did you come to that conclusion by reason? I’m “certain” that I know God, and that he loves me because of how he has moved in my heart. I did not need Confession or Creed to come to that conclusion. Creed and Confession are less important and less infallible than we think.

I was watching West Wing last night, and I did a double take (literally… thanks TiVo) at this exchange between Toby and a Republican senator that just popped in for this episode.

Wilkenson: “Do you believe the Bible to be literally true?”
Toby: “Yes sir, but I don’t think either of us is smart enough to understand it.”

In my limited reading, this is probably the most concise rendering of what a postmodern theologian (at least Christian) looks like. I did a double take because I fully expected Toby to say something like “are you kidding me? that’s just a bunch of stories that we tell children to make them behave?” or something else to the effect of “that’s superstitition” or something otherwise derogatory that would emphasize how Christianity isn’t reasonable.

Christianity often times isn’t reasonable, but then again would you imagine any infinite, omnipotent, omniscient Being to seem reasonable to us; finite, powerless, and not all that brilliant? But why should it be dismissed because of that? Donald Miller in “Blue Like Jazz” has a great thought about this:

I had no explanation for Laura. I don’t think there is an explanation. My belief in Jesus did not seem rational or scientific and yet there was nothing I could do to separate myself from this belief. I think Laura was looking for something rational, because she believed that all things that were true were rational. But that isn’t the case. Love, for example, is a true emotion, but it is not rational. What I mean is, people actually feel it. I have been in love, plenty of people have been in love, yet love cannot be proved scientifically. Neither can beauty. Light cannot be proved scientifically, and yet we all believe in light and by light see all things. There are plenty of things that are true that don’t make any sense. I think one of the problems Laura was having was that she wanted God to make sense. He doesn’t. He will make no more sense to me than I will to an ant.

Increasingly, I feel like the popular rhetoric about religion is shifting away from proof to experience. We don’t have to feel the burden of proving that God exists, but rather is He beautiful and does following Him make your life more joyful/hopeful?

This Christmas season my wife and I have listened on Messiah incessantly. One song has occupied my thoughts more than any other. On disc two “Lift Up Your Heads, O Ye Gates” is a beautiful song with the interplay of male and female voices, but it’s the lyrics that got me thinking. They go like this:

“Lift up your up your heads, o ye gate and be ye lift up the everlasting hosts and the King of Glory shall come in. Who is the King of Glory?... The Lord of hosts…”

Listening to that tune, I realized that I don’t really relate to the words “king”, “lord”, and “glory” and yet they are littered throughout scripture (king 332 times, lord 6513 times, and glory 284 times) and these songs speak of perfect power, authority, justice and love with such ethereal beauty that I long to relate. The interesting thing is that Handel and his audience didn’t seem to have this problem…

Over the coming weeks I’m going to try to catalog some topics that may or not be interesting to talk about in a postmodern theology group. Without further ado here’s the first installment.

Disclaimer: I’m not a scholar of history or theology.

The modern period (by which I mean 1450ish – 1950ish) killed authority and is the reason why I no longer relate to the words above. In the early modern and modern age we see the following (very roughly):

• The fall of feuadalism and rise of capitalism
• The fall of monarchy and rise of liberal democracies
• The fall of the authority of the church and the rise of the authority of reason

All of these de-emphasize authority and emphasisze the individual. No longer am I a “vassal” subject to a “lord”; I make my wage however I choose in my capitalist economy. No longer am I a subject goverened by laws that I do not choose; my voice is heard (at least in theory) and the laws that govern me are my laws and I can change them. No longer are there institutions that have an authoritative claim on me (like the medieval church); I will think what I want and reason will be my king.

But I’m not really interested in talking about the modern era. The question is “do you think that authority is dead? will authority return in the postmodern era and what will it look like?”

I’ll close with this small thought. At least in American culture we are starved for community (see Bowling Alone) and it seems to me that technology is trying to fill that void (text messaging, blogs, instant messaging, social software, 43 things ;) I think that with the postmodern age community will rise, and with the rise of community we’ll see a different kind of authority. I don’t really know what those authorities will look like (thought leaders? experts? connectors?) nor do I know the extent to which they might influence our ability to rekindle the ancient concepts of power and authority, but it seems worth thinking about. I’m too tired at this point to know whether tha last paragraph was thinking about…. I’ll post a follow-up when I figure that out ;)

I didn’t expect most people to link the two (“be a better Christian” and ”...post-modern discussion group…”)