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R is for Revelation (modified)

Revelation is a topic sure to bring raised blood-pressure and raised voices! This is true no matter which ‘revelation’ you mean.

  • ‘Revelation’ can simply mean the way that we know anything about the divine reality or the way that God reveals something.
  • ‘Revelation’ to most conservative-evangelical-charismatic believers will refer to the last book in the New Testament that talks about the end of the world.

Both are very serious topics in their respective arenas.

Let’s deal with the concept first and then with the Biblical book.

Revelation: Refers both to the process by which God discloses the divine nature and the mystery of the divine will and purpose to human beings, and to the corpus of truth disclosed. Some theologians maintain that revelation consists of both God’s activity in *salvation history through word and deed, culminating in Jesus (who mediates and fulfills God’s self-revelation) and the ongoing activity of God to move people to yield to, accept and personally appropriate that reality.

 -Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms (Kindle Locations 1139-1143).

 Revelation is often further parsed out into two categories:

  • General revelation concerned with what can be known (and ascertained) through nature and history.
  • Special revelation is used to designate that which can be known through particular (special) people and events. This is often related particularly to ‘salvation’. [more on that next week]

Those who are suspicious of General revelation say that it can be misleading to try to decipher things about a perfect God from a fallen world.

Those who are suspicious of Special revelation say that it wreaks of fideism (see ‘F’ earlier in the series) – only those who already believe, have read the Bible and been empowered by Holy Spirit can truly understand.

There are many insightful schools of thought that address the concept of ‘revelation’. Those in the evangelical camp, they look to thinkers like Karl Barth as the final word on the subject. For Barth, revelation happens in Christ alone. Apart from Christ, mankind has no hope of in any way coming to a knowledge of divine reality.

More liberal or mainline churches may bristle at that line of reasoning because it seems elitist, exclusionary, and too narrow – surely the God of the Universe can be seen (at least partially) in other religions and cultures around the world. Pluralism is the word for our era.

This plurality makes me very cautious about privileging (or bracketing or silo-ing) any realm of knowledge and protecting it from review to ‘outside’ areas of knowledge like science or psychology. All information, including revelation, needs to be subjected to a correspondence theory of interplay and accountability.  History is too clear about the dangers of allowing one arena to be except from critique. Now, having said that, we do need to talk about which field is in the ‘supervisory’ role and which area in submitted to review. There has to be a mutuality and agreed upon standard – and where that standard is established and who has authority over that is admittedly in question. Knowledge is a contested arena and history is full of dogmas, ideology, and programs that have shown themselves to be terrible masters that have resulted in domination and devastation.  

_________

Growing up, when someone said ‘revelation’ they meant the Book of Revelation – as in the apocalyptic letter that closes out the New Testament.

I love the book of Revelation. I study it all the time. I am inspired by it and challenged by it and am constantly referring to imagery within it.

The only thing I dislike is what most people do with the book of Revelation.

  1. It is not a book about the end of the world.
  2. It is not a book about the 21st century.
  3. It is not a book that should terrify or intimidate us.

The early audience for that book would have taken great consolation and comfort from it. The sad thing is that we should be writing things like the book Revelation for our time – but don’t because we think that John’s letter is about our time!

The book of Revelation is written in a literary form called apocalyptic. It is part of a genre (see ‘G’ earlier in the series) called literature of the oppressed. When you lived in an occupied territory under an oppressive regime, you write in code. You use imagery. You use allegory and analogy.

The book of Revelation is political critique and prophetic hope about those first couple of centuries of the church! It was meant to give hope and raise expectation for those early believers.

We should study the forms and harness the same prophetic imagination that the author of Revelation had and use it for our time. Unfortunately, we have had a failure of imagination because we have been taught to think that Revelation is about our time …

I could literally give you 1,000 examples of how the imagery in the book of Revelation is genius and time appropriate to the first two centuries.[1]

My one prayer is that God reveals to those who are most sincere that the inspiration and imagery that we see in the book of Revelation would be replicated (and surpassed) in our generation for our generation.

God knows we need it.

Artwork for the series by Jesse Turri

[1] If you want to dig deeper I suggest commentary on Revelation by Ronald Farmer in the Chalice series

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Q is for the Quest for the Historical Jesus (modified)

The Quest for the Historical Jesus is a topic that I am both intrigued and frustrated by. You may dismiss this reaction up to my evangelical background but I am like a teenager in the midst of drama. 

“They drive me nuts, I hate listening to them talk! … What did they say? Tell me everything.”

I am both attracted to and repelled by the work and findings of this movement. I am leery of their process, confused by their conclusions, while simultaneously fascinated their scholarship and insight.

Before we go any further, lets see how Justo L. González introduces it:

Historical Jesus: Often contrasted with “the Christ of faith,” the phrase “historical Jesus” is somewhat ambiguous, for sometimes it refers to those things about Jesus that can be proved through rigorous historical research, and sometimes it simply means the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. The phrase itself, “historical Jesus,” was popularized by the title of the English translation of a hook by Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1910). In this book, Schweitzer reviewed a process, begun by Hermann S. Reimarus (1694-1768), which sought to discover the Jesus behind the Gospels by means of the newly developed tools of historical research. After reviewing this quest of almost two centuries, Schweitzer concluded that what each of the scholars involved had discovered was not in fact Jesus of Nazareth as he lived in the first century, but rather a modern image of Jesus, as much informed by modern bourgeois perspectives as by historical research itself.

Essential Theological Terms (Kindle Locations 1905-1916).

González goes on to explain that much of the quest was abandoned after Schweitzer’s findings but has recently reappeared in a minimalist expression (what are the bare facts that can be validated?).

Another person that I trust, Stan Grenz, is clear about this historical quest – that its proponents think Jesus:

  • never made any messianic claim
  • never predicted his death or resurrection
  • never instituted the sacraments now followed by the church.

All of this was “projected onto him by his disciples, the Gospel writers and the early church. The true historical Jesus, in contrast, preached a simple, largely ethical message as capsulized in the dictum of the “fatherhood of God” and the “brotherhood of humankind.”

Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms (Kindle Locations 1089-1093).

A modern manifestation of this quest is seen in the Jesus Seminar.

I am deeply indebted to those in Historical Jesus research. I never knew any of this stuff (like Empire[1]) as an evangelical pastor. It has been both eye-opening and disorienting (not to mention the spiritual whiplash).

I have problems with so many of the conclusions reached but am at the same time grateful for the depth of engagement and sincerity of scholarship. My faith has been enriched and informed in ways I could never have imagined.

There is just something about the whole enterprise that gets under my skin and rubs me the wrong way. It is possible to be grateful for a pebble in your shoe as you journey?

Even as I write this I am thinking, “I don’t like where y’all  take this… but I need to know what you know. I just want to draw different conclusions than you do.”

This, of course, is the danger of venturing outside your comfort zone.

Why does it get under my skin so much? My agitation stems from three areas:

  1. The reductive maneuver of enlightenment rationale.
  2. The arrogance of assuming that we know more.
  3. The molding of Jesus into our image.

First, the reductive move within enlightment rationale is pervasive in our time. You know that this mentality is being employed when the phrase “nothing but” is used. Emotion and feeling are explained away as nothing more synapsis in our brain. Sexuality is nothing more than hormones and chemicals. Religion is just the projection of our greatest hopes and fears onto the screen of the heavens.

Biology, psychology, sociology, religion and so many other fields are reduced down to their lowest common denominator and summarily dismissed and explained away. I object to this reductive dismissal in favor of a more complicated, nuanced, and emergent exploration of areas of concern by examining the ways that the phenomenon we see are expressions of a complex set of interactions and overlapping manifestations that are mutually impacted by each other.

There is just something suspicious about trying to get behind the text in order to distill the real Jesus away from the presentation (re-presentation) of Jesus in the text of scripture. Which brings me to the second objection.

There is an odd arrogance present in historical Jesus scholarship that dismisses or explains away what we see and hear in the gospel texts. How do we know that Jesus never really said that? I am leery of importing and imposing our modern expectations on an ancient figure. Admittedly, however, the minute I start looking at the four gospels we have in the cannon of scripture I begin to see clearly that the synoptic authors (communities) had different agendas and that John’s gospel is almost entirely novel in many of its aspects. Perhaps my hesitation is because I was raised with a harmonized presentation of the gospel where they were all made to be unified and coherent as one gospel and all differences were dismissed and explained away. I have become very clear that Luke had a very different take on Jesus than Mark – whose text he certainly had and was working off of. The result is that I begin talking of ‘Luke’s Jesus’ which is very different than the image of the cosmic Christ that John is picturing.

Third, it is undeniable that the end product of historical Jesus research often creates a Jesus that is remarkably similar to us. Apparently Jesus is highly moldable depending on which threads in the tapestry of the gospels you choose to highlight and trace. You can get an imperial Jesus, a revolutionary, a capitalist, and even a Marxist one. There is a hallmark version of Jesus who told little boys and girls to be nice to each other and sage-shaman who tapped into the supernatural realm that manifested in miracles from healings to multiplying food to commanding the forces of nature.

In conclusion, work behind the text is difficult but probably necessary. We just want to do it with some humility (especially epistemic agnosticism) and we need to be careful that we don’t make Jesus in our image which seems to dabble in a form of idolatry that should be avoided. Once those three cautions are in place, we begin to engage in a vital and furtive work of excavating and renovating a powerful and important figure of history who has been buried under layers of dirt throughout history.

[1] Beyond the Spirit of Empire – Rieger, Sung, Miguez;  Arrogance of Nations: Paul and Empire ; God and Empire – Crossan , Jesus and Empire – Horsley, New Testament and Empire – Carter

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Conspiracy and Christians

Does belief in the resurrection make one more susceptible to conspiracy theories? I was recently asked this questions and have been giving it a lot of thought.

I want to say no – but not for the reason that you might think.

First of all it needs to be said that Jesus’ trial is conspiratorial.

But that is not where Christians get the conspiratorial thinking. That comes from passages like Ephesians 6:12 where Paul talks about unseen realms and powers beyond our view that maneuver behind the scenes:

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”[1]

It is this belief in unseen realms and in spiritually dark forces that make Christians susceptible to conspiracy theories.

It come comes holding to a pre-modern cosmology of the 3-tiered universe with heaven being a realm above and hell below. That cosmology comes with an embedded metaphysic – an explanation of the universe beyond what you can see, and touch, and explain or even understand.

The most helpful thing that I try to get protestants to understand is that we actually do this to catholic believers. Protestants historically have accused Catholics of being superstitious. Catholics are not superstitious, the have a different metaphysic.

You see this in the Reformation controversy over transubstantiation vs a ‘real presence’ understanding from people like Luther. This is why priests who sexually abuse can’t be simply defrocked – it is because of their understanding of priesthood where the person (like the bread and wine in communion) is actually ontologically changed (altered) into something else while retaining the form or appearance that it had previously. It is substantially changed (substance).

Well protestant Christians have a similar divide from modern enlightenment rational when it comes to unseen realms and angelic/demonic powers. Christians are not merely physicalists who think that everything that is real can be quantified and measured in some sort of a laboratory setting. There is more going on in the world that you can possible understand, measure, and explain.

This belief makes them susceptible to modern conspiracy theories. It is one of the features (or bugs) of our operating system. It is embedded in the DNA of the way that we were taught to think and believe.

Side note: I don’t have time to go into it here but this also includes an inherent ‘persecution complex’ even when we are the majority religion and the dominant expression.

It is helpful to think about this in the normal distribution of a bell curve. There are a small group of Christians on the far left who say “let’s just not do any conspiracy theories – just too much bad historically has come from it so let’s avoid it all together.” Then there is a large majority of believers in the middle who are not entirely closed to conspiracy because … let’s be honest: you never know. There have been nefarious schemes and not everyone’s motives are always obvious and clear. Then there are those on the tail-end of the bell curve who are prone to seeing shadows around every corner.

This is what concerns me: not those who are gullible to cynical and devious schemes and outright lies but those leaders who know that and peddle such fabrications. I am concerned about those who are led astray by the Rush Limbaughs and Jerry Falwells of the world.

Which brings us back to the original question about the resurrection of Christ.  The suspicion of conspiracy isn’t that far from the narrative of scripture. Look, something rolled away that stone and somebody took that body. It is not out of line with the entire show trial (kangaroo court) that condemned Jesus. That was a conspiracy between the religious leaders and politicians. Now, I’m not talking about modern grand conspiracies about the Illuminati and the masons or Jews in Hollywood or any of the cartoonish caricatures that make for mocking tropes. I am talking about the ever-present specter that haunts Christian thought in the real world that something is off and we don’t have all of the information – that there are forces at work behind the scenes (either political, economic, or supernatural) that pulled the strings from the other side of the curtain.

Like it or not, that makes us a little bit susceptible to these devious schemes of darkness and to those who cynically play on those fears for their own purposes. Admittedly, even saying that starts to sound like a conspiracy theory.  

If you will allow me just one-side note of application: this is actually something that conservative and liberal Christians have in common! The only difference is that liberals look to earthly powers like governments and corporations where evangelical and charismatic Christians might look to the heavenlies and a supernatural realms.

I would love your thoughts, comments, concerns, and questions.

[1] You can also see it is passages like Ephesians 3:10, “ so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places” and Ephesians 2:2, “in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.”

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Layers of Evil

Evil is a real presence in our world that can be very abstract to define, fluid and ever-changing in its manifestations, but devastating (and deadly) in the its concrete consequences.

In the past I had become fond of paraphrasing Augustine that evil does not exist – it is not something but the absence of something. It seemed self-evident. Darkness is not a thing, it is the absence of thing. Where there is not light, there will inevitably be darkness. Over the past 12 years I have become aware of the inadequacy of that line of reasoning. It is not only theologically unclear but it is seemingly (maybe intentionally) elusive.

It is not enough to say something is the ‘natural’ consequence of the absence of something. Why is that capacity toward evil within nature in the first place? Is that a defect built into the human machine? Is that a bug in the system that the designer missed or is a feature of the system built in by its creator? Perhaps it was introduced by outside influence like a subversive hacker or a jealous competitor?

We used to be able to blame the demonic forces and their satanic overlords – angelic beings from an unseen and spiritual realm. In the Age of Enlightenment, however, the world became largely disenchanted and not only can we no longer outsource the blame for the evil that is in the world but we have come face to face in the 20th century with humanity’s capacity for evil and destruction. The horrors of WWII brought to light profound capacity for devastation in the forms of concentration camps, gulags, gas chambers, and atomic bombs.1

I openly admit that this constructive proposal is a form of radical theology that moves on from the inherited tradition of past understandings because they are not only but inaccurate but actually insufficient for helping us to deal with what we are up against.

We must, in our contemporary society, address (at least) 3 areas of our understanding of sin:

  • Personal
  • Social – Cooperate
  • Systemic – Structural

Then I would want to add (or include) a fourth:

• Spiritual – Cosmic

Evil is very real and incredibly consequential. I think this is what the Apostle Paul was attempting to address when he said in 2 Corinthians 10:

3 Indeed, we live as human beings, but we do not wage war according to human standards; 4 for the weapons of our warfare are not merely human, but they have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments 5 and every proud obstacle raised up against the knowledge of God, and we take every thought captive to obey Christ.

He was trying talk about the differing and multi-layered manifestation of the same causal issue. In another letter he configures by saying, “12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” (Ephesians 6:12) He is pointing to layered (in the academic world we would call it laminated) nature of the various manifestations in these distinct but mutually informing and empowering realms of influence: personal, corporate/systemic, and spiritual or cosmic. I think that it is vitally important to hold onto all three of those in our present day. We must contend with these various layers simultaneously and in combination :

  • Personal morality and responsibility
  • Cooperate participation in larger structures
  • Systemic mechanism of power and control
  • Larger abstract forces of our inter-related systems

The reason that we must deal with this laminated reality is that we are all (as individuals) participants in activities and groups that are complicit in ‘the way things are’. The injustices and disparities that plague our society and our globe are then outsourced (or up-sourced) to systemic mechanisms of government, business, economy, etc. Those entities are then ‘fueled’ by the permissions, desires, attitudes, anger, and failings of this greater web of meaning and connection- especially as it breaks down into isolation, resentment, despair, alienation, and even hatred.2

An illuminating framework for understanding evil in our world today has come to me from my academic work in Critical Race Theory (CRT). Racism is such a blatant and egregious offense to the dignity and humanity of another group or individual. Therefore it provides me an obvious and tangible example of evil to focus on in order to understand the elusive and sometimes abstract concept of evil in more tangible and concrete ways.

The most helpful analogy (or word picture) that I have found comes from Troy Duster in his essay ‘The Morphing Properties of Whiteness’ in the book The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness. Duster uses the analogy of vapor, water, and ice to talk about the abstract, the fluid, and the concrete (consequential) nature of race in our culture. I love this ‘elemental’ imagery and find that it is supremely helpful in both framing these issues for myself and in facilitating discussions of these issues with others.

Ideas about race (and for this essay, ‘evil’) can be very abstract and even elusive. It can be tough to define and even more difficult to point at exactly. It can also be very fluid – it changes over time, it looks different ways in different locations, and in manifests in liquid experiences that pour into our life but may seem difficult to hold onto. Then there are moments when the vapor or the liquid solidify into rock-hard manifestations that have real world consequences that impact our concrete lived realities.

This framework is helpful for addressing the evil of race but also evil more generally. Evil is real. It is multilayered. It can be abstract and difficult to define. It is fluid is its expressions and manifestations. It solidifies in real-world consequences and conflict. Evil (and racism) is a byproduct of the overlapping interactions between our personal decisions, cooperate life and participation together in groups and cultures, the systems and structures that form the mechanisms of our global economy and society, and the ‘spirit of the age’ that fuels the underside of our national, transnational, and global systems of governance, business, security, and economy.

We can still talk about the devil, or Satan, or ‘the enemy’ as long as we understand that this is a personification of evil forces – or what I call a theo-poetic of evil. It is a basket term that helps us group and carry all of the manifestations of the hurtful and harmful effects of this larger system. The only problem is when we overly-concretize these symbols into an actual character – an evil overlord of sorts.

Someone might object by saying, “Jesus seemed to believe in the demonic realm.” But I would submit that I am not convince that Jesus believed in demons. He was able to set people free from their suffering and bring them into liberation/salvation and restore them to community but entering into their world (the way that they thought) and expose their real malady. Like an adult talking to a 4 year old he played their language game in order to maneuver the game pieces in a way that brought victory.

Look at the way Jesus taught in parables. Take Luke 16 for instance. In the parable of Lazarus and the rich man Jesus is not giving us a map of the afterlife he is using that as a stage to talk about god’s involvement in the drama of human life now. Jesus is telling us what God values in this life. Jesus is not giving us a tour of how things really are on the other side or endorsing some ontological reality. He is taking on his listener’s assumptions in order to undermine their assumptions and call them to repentance.

1 Many works have influenced my thinking on this issues. From Bonhoeffer’s Letters from Prison about ‘the world come of age’ to the Death of God theologies of the past 60 years. The most influential however has been an edited work by Sheila Greeve Davaney entitled “Theology at the End of Modernity”.

2 It must be said that this web of influence and meaning can also be used for good – but that is not the subject of this essay.

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Fear of Critical Race

Fear of CRT

Listening to your critics or to those with whom you disagree can (at times) be very helpful and eye-opening if you give it long enough and don’t get defensive.

I have been taking in the current concern about CRT for the last couple of months to try and understand the real fear behind the public outrage by conservative Christians. You have to wade through some very distracting and disturbing inflammatory rhetoric at first but once you get past that you find several interesting areas of confusion.

  1. The Bible
  2. Worldview
  3. Identity Politics
  4. Hammer & Nail Thinking
  5. Marx
  6. Utopian Expectation

So after listening, reading, and interacting for the last couple of months here are the biggest objections to integrating CRT with Christianity.   On a side note, I have figured out that anything is a good excuse if you don’t want to do something.

Please see my page of 10 previous post about CRT or Whiteness

One issue is that most (86%) of the outrage is actually about overzealous Identity Politics and not CRT. Opponents of our current focus on racial matters or those who are defensive about whiteness tend to conflate Identity Politics and CRT because they have not taken the time to understand the difference.

The Bible is Used as a Barrier.

Based on things that are contrary to scripture. We can’t believe this because 1 Cor 6:15 says X. I have a dozen examples of this kind of thinking but John 8:34 was recently brought up, that Jesus says we are all slaves to sin so CRT can’t be right because it starts with the premise that some are oppressed and some are oppressors. This is an actual objection from just this week. It’s so easy to reconcile this! Yes we are slaves to sin that is why we participate in systems of oppression and we are oppressed. Those two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, one might argue that one is the root of the problem and the other is a fruit or expression of that same systemic issue.

A Competing Worldview.

Christian critics of CRT think that there is a Christian ‘worldview’ and thus any competing ideology or truth-claim or overarching explanation of reality (meta-narrative) must not just be refused but resisted and even attacked. The problem of course is that once you take on this combative and adversarial mentality you tend to project it and create ‘worldviews’ out of approaches or systems of thought that are hardly cohesive or holistic worldviews. CRT is not a worldview, it is an analytic tool to address the disparity and injustice built into the system that these Christian critics are desperate to defend.

CRT makes race everything.

See everything as race. Sees race everywhere. This is a classic Hammer & Nail problem. See racism where it isn’t. They actually create the problem.

But this is where intersectionality comes in.

Binary Thinking.

The biggest sticking points seems to be the binary that can be found in DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi that you are racist or anti-racist and that if you think you are not racist then you are really racist. Most people that have their hackles up against CRT are actually mad about overzealous Identity Politics or the binary approach of DiAngelo and Kendi. I actually think that if we could bracket these three things out we could have a very different conversation. I want to start asking people, “who are you working off of here?” because the vast majority of things that the outrage is focused at isn’t even CRT specifically but just a binary approach to Identity Politics.

I want to ask: who ELSE are you reading? Tell me who you are working off of.

Marxism.

You can read a lot of CRT and never encounter Marx. In fact I never have. In the history of Critical Theory you might but CRT has a different starting point. Its concern is legal, financial, issues of education, and other concrete consequences of the historical past that manifest in in our contemporary society.

I want to ask: Tell me who you are reading … what Critical Race Theorist? Please show me.

Utopian –

Tim Keller utilized this language but it is an odd thing for a Christian to say.

Let me know your thoughts, concerns, questions, or ongoing issues to address in future posts.

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P is for Perichoresis (modified)

Perichoresis is the most beautiful and elegant picture of the Christian godhead that many Christians may be completely unaware of.

The easiest way to break down the word is:

  • Peri – as in perimeter
  • Choresis – as in choreograph

That choreography word is from a Greek word that means to ‘give away’ or ‘make room’. Think of ballroom dancing or square dancing and you can imagine the dynamic movement this word brings.

Perichoresis (or mutual indwelling) is the dance of the godhead. The picture is of movement and inter-relatedness. It is the constant exchange of moving around the edge – always providing space in the center. [1]

“ The theological concept … affirming that the divine essence is shared by each of the three persons of the Trinity in a manner that avoids blurring the distinctions among them. By extension, this idea suggests that any essential characteristic that belongs to one of the three is shared by the others. (This concept) affirms that the action of one of the persons of the Trinity is also fully the action of the other two persons.”

Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms (Kindle Locations 254-256).

In the gospels, God points to Jesus and says, “this is my son – whom I love and am well pleased”. Jesus says, “I do only that which I see the father doing”. The spirit anoints Jesus and empowers him to point people to God. Jesus leaves and sends/is replaced by the presence of Holy Spirit. This Paraclete leads us into all truth and reminds us of what Jesus said (John 14:26).

Admittedly, talk about the Trinity gets complicated quickly. This is why so much contention surrounded the early churches’ councils and creeds.[2]

Modern arguments abound regarding the hierarchy of Father-Son-Spirit. The filioque clause caused a schism between Eastern and Western branches of the church in the 11th century. Contemporary conflicts multiply about the gendered language of trinitarian thought and moving toward formulations of God such as Creator-Redeemer-Comforter.

This, by the way, is a major distinction between strict monotheists (like Jews and Muslims) and Christianity which in trinitarian. It is a serious sticking point for both Jews and Muslims to accept that Jesus was the ‘son’ of God and is worshipped as God. Islam teaches that God has no offspring so Jesus is honored as a great prophet (Prophet Isa) alongside the other honored prophets.

In fact, it takes upper level philosophy and vocabulary to explain how 3 can be 1 or how a monotheistic religion has 3 persons[3] in the godhead.

It gets even more complicated when one has to explain exactly what happened on the cross when god died and where exactly ‘god’ was at that moment.[4]

That is for another time. Suffice to say that examination and exploration of trinitarian theories are deep.

One sure thing is that we have a beautiful legacy in this perichoretic picture of the inner-life and dance of god from the 3rd century.

The question becomes, ‘how do we take this out of the theoretical and speculative?’ What do we do with this? What are its implications and applications.

Those who think about such things attempt to be clear about God’s eternal nature and God’s interactions with the world. Some seek to divide this into the ontological trinity (God in God’s-self) and the economic trinity. Others prefer to talk of the primordial nature and the consequential nature of God.

No matter your conceptual scheme, the often neglected question is ‘what do we do with this?’ Another way of asking that question is: since this what God is like, how should we be?

Does our understanding of God impact the way that we live, interact, and organize ourselves?

If one has a hierarchal understanding of God, it may be difficult to employ a more shared or democratized view of religious community. Many question if there even is an application of trinitarian understanding to our ecclesiology (view of the church).

I believe that there is a direct implication. I have adopted a perichoretic view of the church and the liturgy.[5] I try to conceive of everything in a trinitarian framework, including organizing our worship gatherings into three ‘acts’ that have movement and interaction in them. I have taken out the stage/platform so that there is no elevated space and took out the pews so that the furniture can be arranged in peri configuration as we ‘meet in the round’. I attempt to choreograph the gatherings in such way that one person (or a group) is brought to the center before they move aside to make room for someone else’s perspective, insights, or experience to be brought central.

There are similar consideration that could be fleshed out in the areas of education, politics, economy, and relationship. The questions are, ‘what is the nature of the divine and does that make any demand on us? Does it call us to anything? Are there any implications? Or is God so transcendent that there is no direct correlation to any arena of human affairs? 

[1] The concept is also known as cicum-incession or inter-penetration.

[2] The list of early century heresies and modern attempts to revive or reformulate theories about the Trinity can make one’s head spin.

[3] Person is based on the same word that we get ‘persona’ from – it is a theatrical word that has a connotation of ‘role’ or ‘mask’. 

[4] Moltmann in ‘The Crucified God’ says that what happened on the cross was an event between God and God’s-self.

[5] Church 2.0 or Interactive Church is one of my favorite topics and you can find some resources on my blog: https://bosanders.wordpress.com/interactive-church/

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O is for Open & Relational (modified)

One of the most vibrant developments in Christian theology has happened in the past 50 years. The conversation is diverse and includes everyone from Process friendly Mainliners to Vatican II Catholics, from Emergent types to progressive Evangelicals – and plenty of others.

These diverse perspectives come under a canopy called “Open and Relational Theologies”. The name itself is instructive and helpful in this case. Here is the easiest way to think about the name:

  • Open addresses the nature of the future.
  • Relational addresses the nature of power.

The Open crew often hale from more evangelical camps who question the common held belief (in their circles) that the future is determined. Questions of human free will, God’s intervention, and nature of certainty when interpreting things like biblical prophecy, salvation, and world history.

The Relational crew is more concerned with assumptions of God’s character and power and thus question common held beliefs about things like omnipotence and intervention. This camp looks at world history and says, ‘We know how God’s activity has been framed and thought of in the past but is that really how the world works?’ Challenges to the other famous ‘O’ words are seriously undertaken: omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence.

Both groups have many positive assertions even though they often grow out of a negative critique of established or institutional assumption regarding God’s character and work in the world.

There is much overlap between the two schools and thus they often work together and can be grouped at partners.

There are, however, three significant differences:

  • Open thinkers often come from an evangelical background and thus are heavily Bible focused. They question the nature of the future and of God’s power but are unwilling to go all the way over to Process thoughts or to convert to a different metaphysic.
  • Relational folks may be more likely to engage liberal brands of biblical scholarship and to shed antiquated or outdated notions by integrating scientific discoveries and new models (and better explanations) of reality.
  • Open thinkers also hold that God could be coercive and interventionist, but willing holds back (or relinquished this) in love and for human free-will. Relational thinkers may be more willing to go all the way and say ‘no – this is just not the nature of God or God’s character. It is not that God could if God wanted to … it is simply not the way that things work.’

I came to O&R through Emergence thought.[1] Emergent explanations of science and society make far more sense than former top-down and authoritarian (coercive) models of God and the world.

Emergence thought focus on the inter-related nature of existence and how higher forms of organization emerged from simpler and smaller  elements (or entities) within the organization or eco-system.

Many of the models we have inherited from church history are either based in hierarchy (like King-Caesar thought) or are mechanical (from the Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment on). Those mechanistic explanations of God’s power and God’s work become problematic and seem entirely outdated (and unprovable) in a world come of age.[2]

Open & Relational schools of thought provide a much better model of reality (nature) and human experience than antiquated explanations based in the 3-tiered Universe and ancient metaphysics.

Here is a bullet point list of themes compiled by my friend:

  1. God’s primary characteristic is love.
  2. Theology involves humble speculation about who God truly is and what God really does.
  3. Creatures – at least humans – are genuinely free to make choices pertaining to their salvation.
  4. God experiences others in some way analogous to how creatures experience others.
  5. Both creatures and God are relational beings, which means that both God and creatures are affected by others in give-and-take relationships.
  6. God’s experience changes, yet God’s nature or essence is unchanging.
  7. God created all nondivine things.
  8. God takes calculated risks, because God is not all-controlling.
  9. Creatures are called to act in loving ways that please God and make the world a better place.
  10. The future is open; it is not predetermined or fully known by God.
  11. God’s expectations about the future are often partly dependent upon creaturely actions.
  12. Although everlasting, God experiences time in a way analogous to how creatures experience time.

[1] Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson

[2]  This phrase and similar concepts come from thinkers like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Gordon Kaufman in the wake of the oversized catastrophes in WWII such as the holocaust and the nuclear bomb. The basic assertion that humanity has entered a new phase or stage in their capacity for technology and devastation. Humanity is no longer in its infancy and thus its conceptions of God must move out of the primitive and adolescent understandings that we have inherited through our traditions and history.

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L is for Liberation (modified)

Imagine stumbling into a kind of Christianity that was almost entirely different from anything that you had known about before. That is what happened to me in my early 30s. I had grown up a Christian in a minister’s home and had received my own call to ministry. After Bible College, I had been pastoring for more than a decade when I decided to returned to seminary. While writing my Master’s Thesis at an evangelical seminary on ‘Contextual Theology’ I stumbled into something called Liberation Theology (notice the modifiers). I had been raised and ordained in a Missionary denomination, but I was unaware of what had been developing in some foreign countries amongst the local believers.

Liberation Theology: This term most often refers to a theological movement developed in the late 1960s in Latin America (where it continues to hold prominence). In attempting to unite theology and sociopolitical concerns, liberation theologians such as Gustavo Gutierrez emphasize the scriptural theme of liberation, understood as the overcoming of poverty and oppression. Liberation theologies have also found expression among representatives of seemingly marginalized groups in North American society, including women, African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and Asian Americans.

Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms (Kindle Locations 797-800).

It was in the midst of engagement with different authors for my thesis that I stumbled upon a form of contextual theology (an alternative perspective) that stood apart from the enlightenment/colonial models. It was called ‘Liberation’ and it was unlike any of the other models being examined.

I had been sold a brand of Christianity where salvation was mostly about personal sins (like lust or being tempted to drink or do drugs) and God was concerned with getting us out of this filthy world and to heaven after we die. Politics was a dirty word – part of the kingdom of this world – and not the kingdom of heaven. We drew a big line between the spiritual and the temporal.

Liberation thinkers were almost the complete opposite, it seemed. Gonzalez explains some differences:

Some liberation theologies center their attention on international economic oppression, while others are particularly concerned with classism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and other foci. Besides acknowledging and claiming their contextuality, … liberation theologies insist on the need to promote and practice justice and love, not only at the personal level, but also in societal practices and structures.

Justo L. González. Essential Theological Terms (Kindle Locations 2442-2446).

Another significant difference between classic forms of Christianity and liberation camps is that Western Christianity is often saturated in and framed by philosophy (primarily Greek and Roman schools of thought) where liberation circles are influenced by and framed in political terms and modern concerns about colonialism and capitalism. There is a teaching about ‘God’s preferential concern for the poor’. God chooses sides and is always with the marginalized and oppressed.

There is much to be said on this issue not just because the incarnation sets the tone for liberation models of ministry but because the entire Christian gospel is based on the reality that the logos was made flesh and dwelt (camped or tabernacled) among us.

As early as the 6th century B.C.E. Greek philosophers were addressing the logos as “the divine reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form and meaning.”

The Gospel of John borrows/appropriates/adopts this term to address the pre-existence of Christ and how that manifested in the person of Jesus. It is important to understand that the gospel writer integrated/adapted Greek philosophy. This move is significant for several reasons:

  • Proclamations about Jesus were not made in a vacuum.
  • Some early church writers drew from Hebrew narratives and themes.
  • Others spliced in philosophical ideas and concepts from non-Jewish sources.
  • Both in scripture and in church history we see a constant and elaborate mixing/integrating of external philosophies and concepts.

I bring this up because a major objection to Liberation theology is its use/appropriation of secular political theories (like Marxism) and critics will use this to discredit Liberation thought. Admittedly, liberation theology does have its drawbacks and limitations (as do all approaches) – but simply having political partnership is not one of them. In fact, there has never been a theological or ‘biblical’ expression that did not have philosophical underpinnings or explicit frameworks.

Christianity does not happen in a vacuum. All theology is contextual theology. The only problem is when certain theologies don’t recognize their contextual nature with time and place and purport to being both universal and timeless.

Liberation theology is not for everyone and it does not happen everywhere. While true that it is thoroughly political and radically ideological at points, it is also highly contextual and local – as all theology should be.

I have proposed that there are 3 primary ways that churches in North American relate to the ‘powers’ – i.e. the system, the status quo, etc. These can be broken down as:

  • Messianic
  • Prophetic
  • Therapeutic

Messianic churches focus on helping one survive until God delivers you from the system. This can be rapture, evacuation, eschatological, etc.  Messianic churches often have animosity toward culture’s slippery slope ‘slouch toward Gomorrah’ and view change as resistance. Anything else is just ‘rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic’.

Prophetic churches critique the as is structures to confront the system. They speak truth to power. Prophetic churches look toward the marginalized and those being run over by the machine.

Therapeutic churches help people exist within the system. ‘Chaplains to the Empire’ as we say. Therapeutic churches work within the ‘ways things are’ to help make you a better version of yourself.

Liberation is an entirely different approach that incorporates elements of all three but in a grass-roots way that listens to, takes its lead from, and is primarily concerned with the common people.  It organizes itself in ‘base-communities’ and takes its direction from what is happing in those local contexts. It is much more of a bottom-up model instead of a top-down hierarchical model.

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K is for Kenosis (modified)

Kenosis is one of those Greek words in the New Testament that I wish went untranslated in English. Words like agape, koinonia, kairos, and ecclesia are just great words that maintain an air of gravitas and foreignness by leaving them untranslated.

Kenosis would carry a similar power of mystery if we did not offer an English translation.

Here is how it gets translated in Philippians 2:

 5 Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

6 who, though he was in the form of God,
    did not regard equality with God
    as something to be exploited,
7 but emptied himself,
    taking the form of a slave,
    being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
8     he humbled himself
    and became obedient to the point of death—
    even death on a cross.

Translating the Bible is important– in fact the translatability of the Christian scriptures is a major distinction from other religious traditions like Islam. We don’t have to learn the original language in order to read and interpret the Bible.

Lamin Sanneh in Whose Religion Is Christianity: the Gospel Beyond the West, says:

Being that the original scripture of the Christian movement, the New Testament Gospels are translated versions of the message of Jesus, and that means Christianity is a translated religion without a revealed language. The issue is not whether Christians translated their scriptures well or willingly, but that without translation there would be no Christianity or Christians. Translation is the church’s birthmark as well as its missionary benchmark: the church would be unrecognizable or unsustainable without it…  Since Jesus did not write or dictate the Gospels, his followers had little choice but to adopt a translated form of his message. (Sanneh p. 97)

So while I love this translatability aspect of the Christian testament, I also mourn for the loss of deep and mysterious words from the original language.

 

Kenosis appears four times in the New Testament. Three times in is translated ‘made void’ or ‘to no effect’. The most famous appearance is in Philippians 2:7 when it talks about Christ Jesus and is translated ‘emptied himself’.

The self-emptying of God had become a big topic in the 18th and 19th century – then expanded in the theological work after the Second World War. A popular voice of such work is found in thinkers like Motlmann and the ‘Crucified God’.

The Pocket Dictionary defines it as:

,,,*Christology,which spoke of the incarnation as the self-emptying of the preexistent, eternal Son to become the human Jesus. This self-emptying involved the setting aside of certain divine attributes, or at least the independent exercise of his divine powers. (Kindle Locations 773-777).

While the concept is beautiful … it also gets really tricky really fast.

What exactly did he empty himself of?

Most people go for the low hanging fruit of ‘3 omnis’ (as I call them) of omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. Obviously Jesus could not have been those 3 things and been human. This is why ‘C is for Christology’ was an important prequal to this topic.

Once you start down the road of kenosis you quickly run into your first barrier: if Jesus was lacking something that God has … how exactly was he still God? BUT if he had something that no other human had … then he wasn’t really all that like us and thus his being tempted or performing miracles is not really something that we can exactly imitate…

Many times this leads to a ‘Clark Kent’ version of Jesus where he wore a flesh suit and appeared to be human but underneath was a superman who could have done anything he wanted … it’s just that he chose not to! This dangerous notion is rooted in the heresy of Gnosticism.

We want to be careful in talking about Jesus as a different kind of being. Jesus was fully human – what we want to affirm is that Jesus embodied humanity to a different degree. 

This is part of why there is no end to the work of christology. Depending on your ontology (view of reality), metaphysics (beyond the physical), your view of the Trinity, and your anthropology (view of humanity) … the danger of getting tied in knots is constricting.

What starts out as a beautiful word – kenosis – hides a dangerous concept that can quickly become theological quicksand.

This is the opposite of a different ‘K’ word: kingdom.

We have looked at kingdom language before but I wonder have big of difference it would make in our mental frameworks if we let untranslated: Basileia tou Theou.

From the age of Caesars to the reign of Kings it may have made sense to translate it as king-dom. It no longer does.

Not only does ‘kingdom’ not capture the nuance and possibility of expectation in Basileia tou Theou. It can actually be misleading because people think they know what a Kingdom is and are just waiting for God to take off this Clark Kent costume and take up the rightful claim to the throne!!

There are so many better translations of Basileia tou Theou. I have heard :

  • Kin-dom of God (family)
  • Reign of God (still too royal for me)
  • Common-wealth of God (my favorite)
  • Community of God (no hierarchy assumed)

I wish that we just left it untranslated as Basileia tou Theou.

You can see in these two ‘K’ words that translation is a tricky business and provides a constant supply of new material for the theological endeavor.

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