Last week was the big Emergent Village theological conversation that I had the pleasure of helping to organize. It was a wonderful event and this week I put some time into catching up on blog stuff.
Over at Ethnic Space, I started into 3 part series. Part 1 dealt with Pipelines and Straight lines
What really concerns me is that we don’t even see the straight lines. It never even dawns on us that they don’t exist. They occur nowhere in nature. They are imposed upon the land and laid over the land. They don’t come from the terrain and are not in partnership with the place.
And yet we never see them. The western mind sees what-is and assumes its giveness as a self validating presence.
Part 2 examine the Two Trolls that guard the bridge to a new way. It starts in 1421 when the Chinese land on the Pacific coast of N. America and ends by looking at Descartes’ nipples and belly buttons.
In response to Rachel Held-Evans’ call for men to address this ideas of ‘masculine Christianity’ I offered Bananas, Bullies, and the Bible: why you can’t start in the middle.
Like Ray Comfort and his banana, John Piper ends up making the opposite point than he wanted to! Comfort intended to exalt the original design but instead highlighted human cultivation, influence and adaption. Piper desired to show how God has made us but instead showed how we have made God.
I also look at the problem of Preaching for Happiness. I start by quickly outlining the 3 predominant christianities in Canada and the US
- Prophetic Christianity – critiquing the empire
- Therapeutic Christianity – chaplains to the empire
- Messianic Christianity – escaping everything (including the empire) through utopian visions
and then examine the amazing flowchart of happiness that I found. 
In the middle I say “If the point of the gospel was to make people happy then this progression would be the best and most helpful thing that has ever been invented.
But, and this is a big butt, if the point of the gospel is anything other than making people happy, then this kind of formulaic thinking is the most distracting thing in the world.”
Around here we continued the conversation about the Wesleyan Quadrilateral of reason, experience, scripture and tradition. I think that the quad has a place in the 21st century but might need a little tweaking.
So, that is some of what I have been up to this week. I had a lot of catching up to do after the conference – a lot of ideas that had been building up. I hope that you will jump in and join the conversation! See you next week.
Bo Sanders: Public Theology 
February 11, 2012 at 5:34 pm
Bo, just a quick comment about your three categories of Christianity. What about the messianic-prophetic Christianity that Rieger argues for? Can we hold those two together in the sense of a dialectic that involves, at one pole, the utopian vision that is able to see beyond the constraints of empire – beyond what the present system says is “practical”? This is not escapist, but messianic for the sake of a more radical prophetic. This is related to my quote from last week’s class about resistance and anticipation. Prophetic critique and resistance is of course necessary and basic, but Reiger argues that we have to be able to hold the transcendental imagination, the anticipation of the messianic irruption of utopia, together with that critical resistance involved in the prophetic if it is to be effective. Only then can we actually work towards something genuinely new beyond the constraints of the imperial system – and therefore avoid giving into its demands and even collaborating with it. As Zizek says, “Let’s be realists: demand the impossible.” What do you think?
February 11, 2012 at 6:29 pm
Austin, that would be really exciting. My concern was only the 3 predominant Christianities in place currently in our context and how that manifests in preaching. I was just looking at one manifestation and not even trying to construct something new for the road ahead. but I like what you are up to!
my one concern would be the fatigue factor. Utopian messages are exhausting to many and the 20th century left us with a collective fatigue in many cases. How would we account for that/combat that? -Bo
February 11, 2012 at 7:01 pm
Oh, I get it. Wasn’t catching what exactly you were doing with those 3 Christianities. (: I’m not sure about the “fatigue factor” – great question. I really am not sure how to answer, except that one pole of the dialectic involves working with the materials available, in a pragmatic sense. On one pole, we need what Cobb calls ‘a practical and realistic hope’ alongside what Rieger calls the transcendental imagination (although he argues that this pole must always be more pronounced). Maintaining the dialectical tension between the two is what creates real change. Not that this is what you are saying, but I do worry that those who so concentrate on the present to the near exclusion of the future (e.g., Richard Rohr) are just reflecting the particular concerns and anxiety of middle to upper class citizens of Empire. Yes, a future, utopian orientation can be exhausting, but for those on the underside of history it seems to be the ultimate locus of hope. At least that’s how I understand the arguments of liberation theologians like Sobrino, Boff, Rieger, etc.
February 12, 2012 at 1:15 am
I am right with you. My hesitation is twofold:
1) the someday nature utopian thought
2) the totalism of most utopian visions.
If this ‘far off’ better day where you have it all figured out is the point of faith… I’ll take Richard Rohr
If we are joining god in god’s work to bring the world to rights , or heal the world, or …. I’m interested.
If we are waiting for a magical knight from another realm to ride in on a sky steed and rescue us … Then Utopianism is dangerous no matter someone’s class, nationality, language, OR it’s utilitarian usefulness !
February 12, 2012 at 4:01 am
Bo, I have four thoughts:
1) I’m wondering if we read the same book, or if maybe you just didn’t get the chance to give the last half of the book a closer read. If that’s the case, I totally understand and the need for this conversation makes more sense. But otherwise, all of the things you are worried about concern the authors as well and are addressed in depth in chapter 4. (-;
2) I believe you know how I feel about the intervening ‘magical knight from another realm’ kind of utopia – because we are on the same page in rejecting that. And I agree that justifying utopian thinking merely for its utility is completely silly. But I say: Rohr’s therapeutic immanence of the eternal moment mysticism is what is actually being adopted on thin utilitarian grounds. I really like some of what Rohr does, don’t get me wrong, he’s just swung way too far in one direction, IMO.
3) One of the philosophical arguments of the authors is that there is no such thing as human existence without the use of transcendental concepts/ideals. Combined with the inherent future-orientation of their Christian experience and faith, this is a compelling argument from anthropology to include the idea of the transcendental imagination as part of the content of faith (not to be confused with ‘the point’ of faith, as you rightly said).
3) The utopia imagined by the authors is said to be impossible to establish in history. It is the opposite (mistaken) belief in historically possible utopias that is the condition of Empire, intensifying their sacrificial logic. There is then no final ‘figuring it out’ someday, but the constant critique of the ideal – again, the dialectical logic of Reiger. And the whole point of the dialectic, for him at least, is that this is a participatory view of the future – humans working with God “to bring the world to rights.” (btw, Cobb argues almost the exact same points in different language at the end of Christ in a Pluralistic Age).