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I have been having some fun at different outlets around the web. Here are 3 audio files that you may want to download for your listening pleasure.

  • I preached this past Sunday at Westwood UMC. Here is the Media player. You can also download it onto your computer or get it on I-tunes. I look at the story of Zacheaus from Luke 19 in a sermon called “the Gift of Possibility”.
  • The economy is a concern for us all. At Homebrewed Christianity it is a theological concern. Tripp interviews Joerg Rieger, author of No Rising Tide – my favorite book on the subject. It is a theological look at the economy and it is fascinating.
  • I got to interview Graham E. Fuller ,the former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA. This is our HBC 9/11 special and I hope that you will listen to it. [the interview starts in minute 9] He wrote a book called “A World without Islam” and we talk about the world we live in and geo-political roots of our contemporary conflicts. We go to  Israel, Turkey, Russia, Bosnia,  Malaysia, Indonesia and America.  We also go back in history – past the Crusades – to the roots of the East/West split and the relevance of those tensions for us today.

I wanted to link these all here for those who, like me, are always looking for something interesting to listen to on their Ipod. It is wonderful to be a part of the wider conversation and I really appreciate all who participate in this little corner of it!   -Bo

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Here and Now

I am a big fan of being present. That is especially true in the spirituality of presence. It is also one of the great dangers of our modern technology. It allows us to be somewhere else, neglecting those we are sitting with,  and to be focused on some other time (either future plans or past memories). This has always been a danger. Now, day dreaming or living in regret are one thing but technology enables us and can even encourage us to be some other place or at some other time.

There is a beauty to being here now.

This tendency, if unchecked, can accentuate a mentality in some christians to long for the 1st Century in an idealized form of ‘the early church’ or the ‘church of Acts’.  I have talked often about the error of making the early church singular by quoting books like “The Churches the Apostles Left Behind” , “The Emergence of the Church” and “Unity and Diversity in the New Testament“. The is no ‘Early Church” in that homogenized sense. It was never a singular expression. There was always diversity and variation. I actually think that God likes it that way and wants it to be that way. But that is a different conversation.

My main focus here the is the temptation to long for the 1st century as Bible readers. We should be careful what we wish for. We might not be getting what we think we are asking for. In fact, not only is it impossible … even if it were possible, I’m not sure how accurately our romanticized version would measure up to the real deal.

Two things have prodded me in this area recently. The first is a quote that a freind sent me from Alfred North Whitehead

Whereas you can make a replica of an ancient statue, there is no possible replica of an ancient state of mind.

The second prompt came from a recent comment on this blog. It comes from Jason Stewart:

When I get in these sorts of conversations, I find it very helpful to stress that it is IMPOSSIBLE, not simply difficult, to read the scriptures in the same way the original audience would have. Many times I have made this very point, only to find out later in the conversation that the other person thinks I really mean something more to the effect of: “We should be really careful to make sure we’re reading the text in the same way the first audiences would have”.

Not being a premodern man and lacking premodern man experiences, language, culture, and expectations, makes my reading of the text very very different from his from the outset.

These two thoughts have been rattling around and haunting me. On this weekend where we remember that attack of September 11, I am very aware that in so many ways the 21st century is not like the world that we have known. It is not entirely unlike the world we have known but neither is it entirely similar. I want to be awake to the realities that we find ourselves in now. I think that the first step to that may be coming to terms with the fact that A) We can’t go back even if we wanted to. B) the past was never singular and homogenous. There was always diversity and complexity.

We are here now. I thank God that I have the opportunity to be here and to be here now. There is no other place I would rather be.

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a Better way to read the Bible?

A better way to read (read) Admittedly, this is not how I learned to read the Bible. In fact, I’m not sure that I learned to read the Bible at all. I just read it. I read it like you would read anything else. I just read it and took it at it’s word. It was there in black and white.

However, there were some things about the Bible that made it different than everything else I read: it didn’t have a single author (or even a stated author for many of it’s ‘books’), it was written thousands of years earlier, and it was not written in English – it was translated.

None of that is a problem necessarily. I still got the main point of the book (I think) and was able to pick up on most of its important themes (at least they were important to me). In fact, the more general my reading and the more generic my intent, the better that way of reading works.

The problem comes when you want to either make bigger and broader claims bases on Scripture or the more narrow and specific you want to get.

For instance, if you want to make a big claim about how the universe works or the fate of every human soul throughout history, you end up doing something with the text that it may be unsustainable under further review. If you want to get specific and say that this word in the original text says ____ and therefore women can not ______ , or ministers must ______ … using the text that way may become an issue.

I put forward an idea in my previous post that gives us permission to update, revisit, and re-engage the texts of scripture based on two things:

  1. we do not have a pre-modern mind and therefore have a very different relationship to story, text, idea, and experience than people of the pre-modern world.
  2. we live in a world that is so different, has changed so much, has gone through such radical and traumatic experiences that we would be blind not to acknowledge and account for it.

In my clearest language: I am advocating for a more sophisticated way of reading the Bible and to move away from a simple reading. Like I said at the beginning, I was not taught to read the Bible, I just read it – or so I thought. I had to get rid of the illusion that I was ONLY reading. It is a simply awakening and only requires one thing to get started! You must admit that you are translating when you read. You are not simply reading , you are doing something else – even if it subconsciously  or unknowingly. There is a hermeneutic (way of reading) that is being employed by all of us and we have to come to terms with the idea that our way of reading is not (and can not be) the same way of reading as the ancients did.

Here are four advantages to awakening to the presence of interpretation:

  • We can read the creation stories in Genesis and call God ‘creator’ without discounting or disregarding contemporary science (and especially emergence theory).
  • We can take the story of Jonah or Job and recognize that they are more like movie scripts or plays than they are newspaper reports and not get bogged down in the details.
  • We can believe that the incarnate Jesus calmed a storm (the miraculous) without making the leap that God sent Hurricane Irene or directs tornadoes.
  • We can see that the Book of Revelation is a political commentary (prophetic imagination) about the first century C.E.  and not an exacting prediction about the end of the world.

I believe this to be a better way to read the Bible. It is both more authentic to the text and has more integrity in the world that has developed since the text was written. We are not limited to only the physics and metaphysics of antiquity but we also are not abandoning the whole project and going out on our own. We are providing continuity with the historic trajectory and honoring the tradition.

You can call this a ‘new kind of christianity‘ if you want, or something else, but it is a way a being in the world that honors Christ and engages the world as it actually is. It allows us to believe in miracles without being superstitiously ‘super’natural.  It lets us listen to the wisdom of the ancients without being stuck to their ‘three-tiered’ universe. It provides a dynamic engagement between the classic themes and the world we find ourselves in.

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Jesus and Storms

There has a been a vibrant conversation this week about whether God is in control of the weather. (see what I did there?) I have learned a lot from the people who believe that ‘he’ does send, direct, and control things like hurricanes. They are sincere in their belief and many have really thought about how to reconcile the tensions that come up in the discussion.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a threshold that the conversation stalls at. There is just a moment when these two ways of reading the Bible seem irreconcilable. I am not intending to ‘bridge the gap’ but I do think that there is a way to help those who think that God sends hurricanes to see how those of us who don’t still read the Bible.

I want to talk about Hermeneutics (the way we read the Bible) and specifically the Second Naivete. Here is a 9 minute video by Image of Fish that explains this well.  Here is a quick summary for preaching the text this way.

My thesis is this: when we come to passages like Jesus calming the storm, it is impossible for us in the 21st century to read it or understand it as people did in the 1st century. The pre-modern mind had a different relationship to story, idea, text, and experience than we have. So even when contemporary believers attempt to have a pre-modern reading of the Bible, they can not. When they try to reconcile their world and experience to the world and experience in scripture there is an inherent gap.  That gap must be bridged or accounted for or it becomes prohibitive. The tension represented by the gap becomes untenable for one’s faith.

Here is how I read the storm stories in Matthew 14:22-23, Mark 6:45-52 and John 6:16-21. I believe that the event really happened and the disciples really experienced that moment. I take it by faith. Now I have said before that the point of the story is not for me to walk on water or for me to tell storms to be quiet. The point of the story is to hear the word of Christ to ‘be not afraid’. It this sense, I think that the important part of the text is not physics (how did Jesus walk on water) but poetics (what is the message). The problem for some modern readers is that if Jesus did not literally walk on water then they can not literally be not afraid. It is a 1:1 rational. I get that. and I will even concede that to them if they will talk to me about hermeneutics.

But – and this is a big but – it is quite a leap to move from the disciples’ experience of Jesus calming a localized storm on a sea while he was incarnate, to the contemporary believer watching satellite footage of last week’s hurricane on the Atlantic coast and  asserting that God is ‘in control’ of the weather. That is an irreconcilable set of assumptions.

When Jesus was incarnate he calmed a storm one night does not equal God sent Hurricane Irene.

Some people have a real problem giving up a naivete or even wrapping their head around it. I  had an amazing conversation with a Bible College student about Emergence Theory and the first 3 chapter of Genesis. When I explained how I thought the importance of the text was not a literal report of those first 6 days (or why in one story man is created after plants and in the second story it is before – Gen 2:5-7) but the truth about HOW God works with God’s creation to bring about a new and preferable reality. This person got really annoyed and said “then why even read Genesis at all if it is not real?” I explained that it was real. That really is how god works with humanity and creation.

After a while I said, ” you are like the person that finds out that there is no Santa Clause for real and that Jesus wasn’t really born on December 25th and says “then Christmas doesn’t mean anything- it is not worth celebrating”. You would be wrong. Christmas is the most beautiful thing in whole world. It is the message behind it (the poetics) that give it it’s meaning.

I know that reading the Bible while being aware of the gap (between the pre-modern world and our contemporary mind) can be jarring and disorienting. I get why not everyone will want to do it. But I also think that it is far better than the other option which is to insist on fabricating a pre-modern reading when one does not have pre-modern mind. It just can’t be done with integrity. It is better acknowledge where we are at, admit that things have progressed & changed, and to authentically engage the text from our radical and particular located-ness.Jesus calms the storm

Next time: I will address how much more FUN it is to be a Christian once you embrace the hermeneutical gap!

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How do we read the Old Testament?

I had said (over at FB) that “the God revealed in Christ has a power that is neither coercive nor unilateral.
The God of the Old Testament would never turn the other cheek. Jesus presents to us a view of God that is a radical renovation of previous conceptions.”

As Christians we talk about god particularly not generically. We are not God-ians in a universal sense but Christ-ians in a specific sense.

My friend Ryan wrote a thoughtful response about reading the Old Testament. Here is Ryan: 

In a way, the characteristics of God often portrayed in the Hebrew Scriptures appear to be incomplete. The reason I say that is because the writers and communities that formed those Scriptures were locked into a particular time and place and could only see dimly the pictures of God they were given. I do believe that it is not God that changes, but our understanding of who God is. So I would absolutely agree with your initial post, that in Christ we get the fullest picture of who God is, (i.e. power, grace, mercy, judgment) though we still see dimly because of 1st century culture and our own present one. What Christ does enable us to do is understand what we aren’t able to see in the Hebrew Scriptures without the reality of his incarnation. We can then reexamine the God described in the Hebrew Scriptures with a fuller picture of God’s unique character, through the lens of Jesus. This is truly a gift.

Part of the problem with our modern ways of dissecting Scripture are that we expect the fullness of who God is to be revealed in every single letter and word. This seems to miss the messy and real life process that was undertaken in writing these Scriptures to begin with. Communities of faith, albeit inspired by God, still had to wrestle with the inconsistencies of who they believed or wanted God to be, and who God actually revealed God’s self to be. Because we have the entire canon at our disposal we don’t see the centuries that it took to arrive at the understanding of Christ as the incarnation and fullest expression of God’s self. 1 Peter 1:10-12 provides this perspective, that it was never the intention of the Hebrew Scriptures to be the et. al. portrayal of God, but that when the Messiah was revealed he would make God known. Finally, that same Christ whose Spirit infuses God’s people, is continuing to make God known to us, in order that we might see less dimly and be given the grace of seeing God for who God truly is.

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Earthquakes Hurricanes and Politics

Earlier this week, Michelle Bachmann said something stupid… or at least something that I regarded as such.  Later she said she was just joking. I posted it on Facebook and some people actually tried to defend her thinking that ‘god’ caused the earthquake and hurricane.

I have written before about how God does not direct tornadoes or punish the people of Haiti for some deal their ancestors made with the devil. I have said that Crucifying Job’s God” href=”https://bosanders.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/crucifying-jobs-god/” target=”_blank”>we need to update our concepts and adapt our frameworks (theological, philosophical, sociological, spiritual, etc.) to the realities of the 21st Century and not allow ourselves to get limited by what the ancients believed/understood in the first couple of centuries C.E.

What follows is an amalgamation of my comments in that Facebook conversation. I have modified some of them to account for responses by those in the conversation.

When I say that God did not cause these things, I am talking about  intervention, ‘an act of God’.
Do you believe that God intervened in the natural order to make the earthquake and the hurricane? Did God cause them as part of ‘his’ plan?

I do not.  But I also understand that those who want to believe like Bachmann that god does work this way and that scripture does not allow us to think otherwise … is certainly is one way to be a Christian. – a way I think made a lot more sense in the pre-modern world… but it is one way to be a christian.

That being said, it is not the way that I am looking for. I do not want to be limited to only the physics and meta-physics of the first centuries C.E. As christians, I want to incorporate modern realities, acknowledge scientific advancement and adjust to expanding knowledge. I want to grow up out of humanity’s infancy. This means we adapt and integrate to leave behind some of the previous ways of thinking.
Christianity is a perpetual maturing toward reality and moving from milk to meat.

In this rubric, the Bible is an inspired and authoritative record of God’s dealings with a part of humanity as interpreted and then represented by those individuals and communities in their understanding and capacity.

This is where ‘all or nothing’ thinking really fails us. I’m not saying to  “throw out” the teachings or worldview of those who wrote the Bible. I am saying that we need to integrate. You have to have something old to integrate the new into. Otherwise it is replacement. I just don’t want to be limited ONLY to first century meta-physics. I obviously don’t want to chuck everything Paul said.

Here is why this is so important: part of the good news that the church has to proclaim is that the world is God’s and that God by God’s spirit is present at at work in the world!!
My hesitation here is what you mean by ‘in charge’ because God is not an Caesar-Emperor with ‘thumbs up- thumbs down power’.

  • that conception of god is to miss that counter-narrative provided by Jesus. God is NOT like Caesar. Jesus shows us something different – that God is NOT like the powers of this world.
  • those who miss this counter-narrative, often also miss that the God revealed in Christ is at work in Holy Spirit at this is why we must be Spirit Christians and not Old Covenant Christians just getting out frameworks and word pictures from the days of Kings. Jesus provides a revision to that understanding and a counter trajectory to simply sticking with that previous understanding.

When we say that it is time to update some things we are NOT saying that the ancients knew nothing about physics or metaphysics. Let’s say that they were exactly as proficient in their day as we are in ours. That is all we can do – do the best we can do in our time as they did in theirs.

What I am 100% against is saying that they knew MORE than us and we need to stick with ONLY what they knew!

There is no other area other area of our life where we stick with the knowledge of the 1st century.

 

I wanted to add a link to “making sense of the miraculous” for those who are interested

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if you are going gray

I wrote this for a friend of mine who hates his prematurely gray hair but loves Joel Osteen… or is it the other way around?

Go to the mirror every morning and open your Bible to Prov 16:31 or 20:29.

Then in your best Texas-Pentecostal voice say:

This is my Gray Hair. I love my Gray Hair.
I have earned every one of these Gray Hairs.
I believe what God has said about my Gray Hair and I receive it as a crown of Glory!
I will never regret my Gray Hair. Never never never.
I will wear it like a banner of Victory and confess that God has established me like a root of prosperity!
I am blessed with God’s favor and my offspring will declare that I am the beloved of God.
I will not be ashamed of what God has done to my hair – and will let it be known today that with this Gray Hair that God has crowned with with favor and blessing.
Therefore what God has declared over me will cast down all concerns about me
and no appearance or image held up against me will prosper.
The Lord has said and now let it be so!!

In case you have never seen the original here is a link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncxlkokN-6Q&feature=youtu.be

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Catching Up – September 1

it has been a wild a woolly Summer. In the past week I have moved from Claremont (where I go to school) to the west side of LA (where I work). I had to make multiple trips to the old apartment to clean and clean up in order to get ready for the final walk through (so we could get our deposit back). I also started a new semester of school.  It has been busy.

I have been blogging over at Homebrewed Christianity and will transfer some of that over here… but not all of it. I wanted to experiment and see how some theological ideas would float over there with a different audience. It has worked out well and I have figured out what voice I want to use over there and what I want to post over here.

If you have missed the TNT (Theology Nerd Throwdowns) that I do with Tripp Fuller, you may want to listen to these on I-tunes – unless you have 43 minutes to listen to them streaming.

I will be posting some catch-up stuff in the next couple of days. I look forward to the ongoing exchange of ideas.   -Bo

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The Nine Nations of Evangelicalism

One of my all time favorite books is The Nine Nations of North America by Joel Garreau (published in 1981). [summary article here]
His theory was that by any measure of culture, there were at least nine of them in North America. As someone in the newspaper industry in the 70s and 80s, he was commenting on how things worked and what priority is evident where.


The three most important ideas for our conversation are these.

– The Nine Nations are broken down as  New England (including the Maritime provinces), Quebec, the Foundry (the rust belt), Dixie (the Southwest), the Island (centered in Miami), The Breadbasket, The Empty Quarter (around the Rockies), Mex-America (in the southwest) and Ecotopia (on the Pacific coast).

– The borders dividing the United States, Canada, and Mexico nearly disappear when one re-examines according to  values, money, lifestyle and other factors. A person in Calgary, Alberta has far more in common with someone in Denver, Colorado than she does someone in Ottawa, Ontario.

– There is no such thing as the Midwest. It doesn’t exist. Chicago is the western boundary of the Rust Belt (the Foundry) and west of it is the Breadbasket. Chicago is a border-town and not a Capitol. The concept of the midwest has no actual base in reality. The cornfields of Ohio and the wheat-fields of Kansas are part of two different systems.

Earlier  this week I blogged about the definition of Evangelical. I think that we are in danger of the label ‘evangelical’ being as undefinable as the ‘midwest’ is geographically. We need to re-conceptualize how the landscape really looks and develop a better map that  reflects how things actually function.

In this diverse group called ‘Evangelical’ we have a large and varied collection of groups that may qualify: Conservative, Fundamentalist, Holiness offshoots , Charismatic, Pentecostal, Anabaptist traditions , Congregationalist, Free Church folks, progressive protestants who attend Mainline churches , and potentially some Neo-Reformed perspectives, etc.

I suggested starting with Bebbington’s definition (4 emphasis).
My Hope: is to updated these 4 a bit with a more progressive emphasis – or more a generous perspective.

New Life – expectation of transformed self and community
Bible – I follow N.T. Wright’s ‘ongoing play’ narrative analogy here [How can the Bible be Authoritative]
Activism – faith in Christ should be emboddied and proclaimed to impact /transform culture
Cross Centered – the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus is central to the Christian message.

My Fear: is that they will be replaced by four other issues that will become the new litmus test for this unspoken imagined orthodoxy.

  • Biblical Literalism / Inerrancy
  •  Substitutionary Atonement Theory
  • Anti-abortion stance
  • Anti-homosexuality

If the latter set of four prevail then I am afraid that evangelicalism will become as unclear and unhelpful as the Midwest is in geography. It would become a generic area absent of any real coherence that fails to provide any continuity and thus lacks any real constituents. It would become a citizenship not worth having and which provides no tangible benefit for its citizens.

I look to Mark Noll and Stanley Grenz as examples of the historical and theological richness of the Evangelical tradition. If it becomes merely political, then perhaps the title deserves to fade into irrelevance and to be abandoned. I pray that is not the case.

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