rix rantz ravz & revelashunz

From PoMoXian on the Kingdom

This recent post on PoMoXian is from Chris Criminger. I thought it worth sharing.

Hi everyone,
I have been doing some studying on Jesus and the kingdom of God. Jesus view of the kingdom was very different and in conflict to other views around him (from Qumran separatism, Herod's political kingdom, and the Zealots or Sicarii military revolt option). Jesus kingdom teachings did not conform to the expectations of his day. He warned about God's coming judgment and vindication of true Israel. Jesus was not founding a new church because Israel was already one (the people of God). His intent was reforming Israel from the inside (not forming a different community altogether). The kingdom story that Jesus preached can not be reduced to individual ethics or individualized responses to God's grace. Jesus words and message was always within the context of community.

Here was one of Jesus most radical and acted out parables . . . Jesus befriended not only the oppressed (contra liberation theologians) but also their oppressors. One of his disciples was a tax collector; he healed a daughter of a Roman soldier who represented the military enemy of Israel; He touched people who were viewed as unclean like Lepers and social lepers like prostitutes; while he also dined and ate with Pharisees and members of the religious parties of Judaism who stressed ritual purity. Jesus neither plays our power political games nor the politics of polarization. Jesus welcomed anyone who was willing to follow Him.

Lastly, I like what Philip Yancey says about Jesus and the Kingdom in his "The Jesus I Never Knew." Yancey says, "Jesus pattern of behavior disappointed all who sought a leader in the traditional mold (political and succes driven models). Jesus, tended to flee from, rather than cater to, large groups. He insulted the memory of Israel's glory days, comparing King Solomon to a common day lily. The one time a crowd tried to crown him king by force, he mysteriously withdrew. And when Peter finally did wield a sword on his behalf, Jesus healed the victim's wounds . . . Jesus was talking about a strangely diffferent kingdom and Jesus was rejected, in large part, because he did not measure up to the national image of what a Messiah was supposed to look like."

"Despite Jesus plain example, many of his followers have been unable to resist choosing the way of Herod over the way of Jesus. The Crusaders who pillaged the Near East, the Conquistadors who converted the New World at the point of a sword, the Christian exploration of Africa who cooperated with the slave trade------we are still feeling the aftershocks from their mistakes . . . And whenever the church has intermingled with the state (the Holy Roman Empire, Cromwell's England, Calvin's Geneva), the appeal of the faith suffers as well. Jesus own metaphors of the kingdom describe a kind of 'secret force' that works from within. He said nothing of a triumphant church sharing power with the authorities" (pp.241, 246).

Yancey goes on to say, "This trend troubles me because the gospel of Jesus was not primarily a political platform . . . a democracy may give Christians every right to express themselves but we dare not invest so much in the kingdom of this world that we neglect our main task of introducing people to a different kind of kingdom, one based solely on God's grace and forgiveness" (p.247).

Jesus message of the kingdom was nothing short of a revolution of grace!

Grace and peace - Chris Criminger

The Gink on PoMoXianity

Got this from John O'Keefe's Postmodern Theology group:

i am not saying there is any test to be a postmodern church, but just claiming to be one does not make it so. if willowcreek today decided to call itself "postmodern/emerging" that would not be the case - if a church, just because it is trying to reach a "younger crowd" calls itself postmodern/emerging, that would not make it so. while i would never say there was a "test" i do have to say that there are standards
-

at ginkworld we get some 100 requests a month to be added to the church lisiting - which is vast and growing - but we may add only 10 to 15 (then we also remove some because they no longer are around). many of the requests are from churches that are very modern and very "willowback" in structure and style - but they desire to call themselves "postmodern/emerging" -
must i agree and post them? if left to a committee (very modern idea) to decide, who would be put on? but with all that being said, let me share with you some of the standards i think need to be present to be "postmodern/emerging"

a willingness to extend the self to the world around
a willingness to move past what is, and redefine what will be
a willingness to treat all people as equals
a willingness to hear the voices of others
a willingness to not be driven by programs, building or budgets.

while i think there are more, these are the core - for me - but the idea that there is no standards to be a postmodern/emerging church is just not the case. i
don't think anyone who has writen any book with a postmodern/emerging slant has ever suggested that there was no standard.

pax
jok

Honesty vs. Hypocrisy

If I am brutally honest and say that I am self-righteously hypocritical, am I really being honest or am I simply being self-righeously hypocricall about being brutally honest?

And how would I know the difference?

A Conversation on Faithmaps

This is a conversation I snipped from faithmaps

Hi, Mark. You asked:

1. Regarding the concept of time as we know it, does God experience the past, present and future concurrently? Timeless basically. Will that change? Does it really matter? No, but these thoughts pop into my head and just what the heck is a guy to do? I gotta ask, whether it's foolish or not :-)


Well, I'm not sure this is even really a question. Not that it isn't a question but it isn't a question that makes sense. On my "yet to be read" list is Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point by Huw Price

Here's a blurb from the jacket:

Price then turns to the greatest mystery of modern physics, the meaning of quantum theory. He argues that in missing the Archimedean viewpoint, modern physics has missed a radical and attractive solution to many of the apparent paradoxes of quantum physics. Many consequences of quantum theory appear counterintuitive, such as Schrödinger's Cat, whose condition seems undetermined until observed, and Bell's Theorem, which suggests a spooky "nonlocality," where events happening simultaneously in different places seem to affect each other directly. Price shows that these paradoxes can be avoided by allowing that at the quantum level the future does, indeed, affect the past. This demystifies nonlocality, and supports Einstein's unpopular intuition that quantum theory describes an objective world, existing independently of human observers: the Cat is alive or dead, even when nobody looks. So interpreted, Price argues, quantum mechanics is simply the kind of theory we ought to have expected in microphysics -- from the symmetric standpoint.
IOW, what if our basic, fundamental knowledge of the nature of time is constrained by our perception of it? Or, what if the reality of how time "actually" works bears very little relation to how we think it works?

If God experiences timelessness, is he experiencing the
creation,cruxifiction, and fellowship with the saints?

OK, one last one for the science teacher, please summarize the
relationship of energy/time/quantum physics/string theory and the
various dimensions we live in. A 5 page treatise should do.....

Seriously, I've promised myself someday I'll look into these matters,
I just wonder if there is an orderly way about it.

Mark

I know how you feel, Mark. I'm not sure I'm going about it in the right order and even if I am, my head isn't big enough to hold the ideas. If Greene in his book only comes to a "here's the best guess so far" on the relationship between quantum mechanics, relativity (time and energy are symmetrical in relativity, remember?) and string theory then there is no way I'm going to even understand the questions, let alone have anything remotely resembling an answer.

Which really amuses me when I see many of my theologian friends who have most of the answers all neatly tied up with a ribbon and bow in a boxed set ready for transport and they have no concept of the nature of the discussions going on in physics, chemistry, biology, neuropsychcology and so forth.

I'm a biologist by nature & training so I'm interested in things like genetics, what is life and the mind/body connection. When I start talking to preacher friends about the nature of consciousness or the implications of genetics on Right to Life arguments, their eyes glaze over and they refuse to discuss it. I have some questions I KNOW they don't have the answers to because they don't even know the fundamentals of what the conversation is about.

How about medical ethics and gene therapy? Eli Lilly takes the human gene for insulin, inserts it into bacteria an creates Humulin® in vats as human insulin. When was the last time you heard a preacher questioning the ethics of trans-genetic manipulation? We have, in actual practice, mixed human DNA with bacterial DNA and don't even consider its moral implications.

And then where does this end? If we can do this with impunity, why do we get all bent out of shape when we talk of human cloning?

Yes, it's a long way from physics but I agree with Francis Schaeffer that when it comes to world-changing thought, the theologians are the last people to clue into what's happening in the world at large (sorry, Dan, no offense intended). This is one of the reasons I spend more time reading folks like Dennett and Greene than I do theology books.

But that's just me and I always have been a little odd.

And it's genetic. I asked my 18 year old why the dictionary was in mommy's van. "Oh, Alisha brought it out. She said she wanted to read it because she thought it was interesting." Alisha is 10. Even I wasn't nerdly enough to take to the dictionary for recreational reading.

Six Questions for Faith Communities

from Fred Peatross

March 2004

(1) What is the hottest question that needs to be answered? Easy... how will the church have to undergo radical reconfiguration to be a viable entity into the 21st century? This should be the dominate question for the next several years as we seek to move from tweaking to totally re-tuning, from re- forming to totally reconfiguring, from focusing on ministry (which almost always implies inside the four walls) to being a movement, from centripetal to centrifugal, from being ministers to be missionaries. This will be the decisive arena of in-house discussion. Be warned however, the intensity of this talk, the stakes involved in these migrations, the addictions to the way we have always done it will generate heat as well as light. The interchange will be livelier than any worship war dialogues of the recent past.

(2) I'm in an untraditional Bible class (no teacher, no lecture; only non-linear discussions) at the congregation I assemble with. One of the topics we touched on this Sunday was event versus process. Here's the jest of it: If we are convinced that salvation occurs in some event and point in time that we are fully cognizant of, then we will proceed to present salvation in "decision moment" terms. This is exactly how my heritage ended up using the Jule Miller film strips and the OBS and others tribes found the Four Spiritual Laws to be their evangelism method of choice. What if salvation really is a process? Do we have the sort of vehicles in place that encourage the process or only assist people for a point of decision? Process evangelism in our pomo world may look very different than our point evangelism of modernity.

(3) The issue of theological reflection, how we use biblical and extrabiblical terminology and our understanding of missiology and the kingdom are watersheds for the next edge of the emerging church. In my reading and discussions with friends the forums that seem to stroke the fires the hottest are our language, kingdom, conversion and the movement from point to process.

(4) What is the point of the gospel? This is a question I have been toying with of late. If Christianity is about giving "the answer," we would have to say the gospel is given to make sure people have secured a ticket to get in the heavenly stadium. That is certainly the focus of almost all evangelism training I am familiar with. And yet Jesus seems almost uninterested in eternity. The question of where you will spend your eternity is hardly, if ever, discussed in all of Jesus' ministry exchanges... at the very least I find that extremely troubling. The question we have been taught to ask the pre-Christian is, "if you were to die tonight..." Jesus never asked that and to the best of my knowledge only engaged a rich yuppie in that discussion when he was asked about it. Just as an aside, Jesus' answer to that entrepreneur was clearly out of synch with our evangelical teaching on how to "get saved." So back to the original question, what is the point of the gospel if securing advanced seating in the heavenly arena doesn't seem to be Jesus' main agenda?

(6) If relational apologetics will precede rational apologetics in 21C, (and certainly that has been the case with the inquirers I interact with) then what do those relational apologetics look like? Someone has said, "People seek to believe (the quest for meaning), belong (the quest for community) and become (the quest for hope and a future)." How do we tap into these core yearnings and help the conversations toward Jesus?

For the next few years most faith communities attempting to remain relevant will struggle with these questions

Disclaimer:
The whole landscape (and all our questions) change if the ever present dangers of terrorism and the Middle East evolve to a place where Christianity finds itself on a collision course with Islam. Though the 21st century there will continue to be more Christians in the world than Muslims, yet both will be jostling for converts, and often in the same places. Some foresee several countries "being brought to ruin by the clash of jihad and crusade." If this happens, our questions die and new ones arise.

Society's to Blame - Or not

This is from a recent post of mine to Postmodern Theology at Yahoo! Groups dot com.

I still feel that the tendency among modern historians to treat religion and culture as separate entities rather than mutually reinforcing segments of what makes us human is unfortunate. The trouble is, it is an infectious idea that causes the kind of discussion we are having on Jesus and Paul. Let me elaborate.

We have no problem identifying the religious foundation of the Indian caste system and freely discuss their mutually reinforcing roles. Religion perpetuates social structures and social structures enforce religious beliefs. It's a give and take. We look at the Aztec religion and its human sacrifice as a religious tenet that had political and social consequences. About all we know of Egypt is the multitude of gods they worshipped, their elaborate funeral customs and how deeply their religious structure influenced their society.

But then we come the Christianity and it becomes a whole 'nother ball game. First off, just try and find a dispassionate discussion about Christianity anywhere in Academia today. I imagine there are some who can view Christianity with the same intellectual honesty as other world religions but those who do are so rare that they are exceptional in that regard. I'm reminded here of Robert Fogle's "The Fourth Great Awakening" which ties economic and social movements, most notably egalitarianism, to evangelical religious revivals. Most everyone else is content to blame Christianity for the evils of the world without giving it credit for the societal good that it has accomplished.

Because here's the rub. Any time someone says anything about Christianity, there are some in the reading public who take things personally. If the audience cannot be dispassionate about the topic, then I'm afraid it's hard for the academics to be dispassionate as well. You're a seminarian, John. When was the last time someone took a dispassionate view of the social underpinnings of Christianity and the impact of Christianity on society? I guaran-dog-tee that it ain't happening in the SBC. Since some of my best buddies who are profs at SBC seminaries (that's what happens when you get old - you find your peers become "esteemed" professors when you remember how they used to act in school), I know this through first-hand experience.

Now, since the academics and the audience both feel passionately about the subject, it is difficult to have an honest discussion about the roles and influences of culture and religion. We thank you John, for your Celtic ancestors providing us with a host of "Christian" holidays. Pope Gregory X and others helped reinforce the idea that we take whatever religion was going around, sanctify it to the Lord and make it a Christian holiday. So now we are celebrating Easter Sunday, which non-coincidentally coincides with the first full moon after the vernal equinox which is why this Sunday isn't celebrated on a certain date. This is just one example among many where the culture has contributed to Christianity.

By the same token, Christianity and marked Western culture with a definite fingerprint. Art, architecture, music, ethics, philosophy, and so forth are all influenced by Christianity. Even atheists and agnostics define themselves as being anti-Christian or non-Christian. Reminds me of the atheist child who asked her mother, "Mommy, does God know that we don't believe in him?"

Which brings us to the last example John used. I feel that in Western society Christianity has so permeated the culture and the culture has so influence our Western expression of Christianity that most lines are blurred. Yes, churches give out receipts every January so folks can deduct their charitable contributions from their 1040 form. But does that negate the contribution? I could say that helping the needy reduces my tax burden by providing direct assistance rather than incurring a bureaucratic government overhead cost so that it is to my advantage to help the poor through a faith-based charity rather than a government program. But is that the reason I help out at the soup kitchen?

Here's why I think it is less clear than we would like to make it. I work for one of the largest philanthropic humanitarian organizations in the country. We are most assuredly a non-sectarian organization. Yet I have found more professing Christians in my organization than in any other place I have ever worked. But we are not exclusively Christian; we also have a large number of devout people of many religious persuasions. So working daily in a milieu that is friendly, tolerant and respectful of all religious faiths - including agnosticism - I never cease to be amazed by the "Christian" ethic that permeates the organization. So I don't think religious impulses, behavior, motivations, etc. are confined to the sacred while the secular is devoid of such. Instead, I feel that they are mutually reinforcing and supporting. Many non-Christians incorporate Christian ethics because of the culture. Many Christians adopt non-Christian elements into their faith because of the culture.