When you hear a quote from a theologian or a voice from Christian history – when you read something like chapter 9 in this book … it asks for something from you.
Our moment is asking us a question and providing for us an opportunity. The times that we live in call for a re-evaluation of priorities and an examination of our relationship to power.
What IF we took each other seriously?
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People with no children play an important role in our future, communities, congregations, and families. #social #relational #identity #politics #family
I am preaching through the Gospel of Mark this year and I am up to chapter 13 where Jesus turns on the doom and gloom. Many people have been told that this is about our time (currentist) or about the near future (futurist) but do not know about the preterist perspective that everything that Jesus was predicting about actually happened in the first century.
I made this short video about my plan to address it in my sermon:
The ongoing storm around Critical Race Theory (CRT) can be confusing … because its opponents intentionally want it that way.
Today’s video tries to distinguish between the fruit and the actual root of the problem.
You can also check past post about CRT here: https://bosanders.com/critical-race-theory/
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There is a great danger – especially in 2020 – of not understanding the thought and convictions of those you disagree with.
I was taught to refute evolution. It was a cornerstone to evangelical apologetics.
Zebras and their stripes were a primary example used to refute evolution. If the stripes are for camouflaging a herd of zebras from predators … then the first striped offspring would have actually stood out from the heard and thus would have been an easy target.
This is an example of getting ahead of oneself without fully entering into the school of thought one is trying to combat.
We saw this same problem with Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron’s banana conversation [watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfucpGCm5hY].
You can’t simply start with where we are and extrapolate backwards from there [for more on this see the note below].
You have to understand the primary concern:
We can’t pretend to honestly engage in asking questions if we begin with the assumption of the answers. That will always result in coming out with twisted conclusions.
Admittedly, scientists have been baffled over the zebra’s stripes for a long time. Recently some strong studies[1] has have shown that the stripes are not about camouflaging herds from large predators but about flies.
The region where zebras dwell has a breed of flies called tsetse that are legendary in their viciousness. Scientists have historically known that flies have an aversion to landing on striped surfaces. The zebra’s striped pattern acts then as a natural deterrent. This leads to greater health with less blood loss and therefore greater vitality which benefits reproduction – passing on those key genetics to offspring.
It turns out that zebras stripes are not primarily about herds camouflaging from large predators but about individuals deterring small pests. This means that the initial zebra ancestor to have that genetic variation would have benefited and thus that attribute would be more likely to be passed on to the next generation.
The apologetics argument I learned is flawed and would not refute the point it is intended to.
That is the first problem with not fully entering into an idea well enough to understand it – there has to be a commitment to the question not just a conviction about the conclusion.
The second problem is that much of the suspicion from creationists about evolutionary thought is based on the hard and cold version of survival of the fittest from a century ago. Many don’t know of newer strains of evolutionary thought that incorporate cooperation, mutuality, and emergence thought (see O is for Open & Relational).
Evolution has evolved in the past 30 years but many creation apologists prefer to takes pot-shots at the straw man caricature of Darwinian schools of the past. They have perfected taking swings at shadows of where the theory used to stand.
As we wrap up the ABC’s series, I wanted to acknowledge that not only has Christian belief evolved and adapted over the centuries but to encourage you to embrace these historic adjustments.
The gospel is itself incarnational and the universe is evolutionary. Those two things go together beautifully. The gospel is good news and is constantly in need to be contextualized to new times and new places. The scriptures are inherently translatable and come into every language and culture. This is one of the unique aspects of the christian religion (K is for Kenosis).
If evolution is true of the universe, christians should have no need to avoid or refute it. We can embrace evolutionary thought wholeheartedly.
Christians should, after all, be people who love truth.
If we want to contest certain aspects of the evolutionary theory, we should at least understand its claims thoroughly so that we can do that well. Christian and atheists do this to each other. Protestants and Catholics do it to each other. Islam and the West do it to each other. We would be served by adopting the debate principle that you have to explain your opponents’ position to their satisfaction before proceeding with yours.
This the problem starting in the middle. You can’t just walk into the way things are, assume the status quo and then make a case for it.
I was camping in a national park with a longtime friend who lives in and loves his ‘red’ state. We were hiking out and enjoying the beauty when he began to tell me about how ridiculous the environmentalists are and how stupid it is to put all these regulations on industry – we are handcuffing these innovators who create jobs for people. His evidence was to point to the trees around us and say “look at all of this amazing space – what are they so worried about? I don’t see why we need to have all these regulations and get so upset at industry.”
I pointed out that if somebody 100 years earlier had not had the foresight to preserve this land, the timber industry would own all this land and would have harvested all these trees. It would look nothing like it did and we would not be walking or hiking there. He had literally never thought about that.
You can’t start in the middle and ignore how things came to be – then present it as evidence of how they should always be!
A fundamentalist pastor said: In the Old Testament God was a King not a Queen – Jesus was man not a woman – and he picked men, not women, to deny him, betray him, doubt him and abandon him. (I added that last part)
It would be like walking into a grocery store, seeing a steak wrapped in saran wrap on a Styrofoam platter and beginning to articulate how perfectly the steak was designed for your grill – how the saran wrap crumples in your hand for ease of disposal in the waste basket – how the steak is the same dimensions in thickness from side to side for consistent grilling. Clearly God designed this steak to go on your grill and for your enjoyment!
If we do not take into account the elaborate set of systems that delivered that perfectly proportioned piece of protein to your plate, we will miss much of the beauty in the process and may falsely be under the impression that the way things are is the way that they have always been and thus the way that they should always be.
So we don’t start in the middle, we can’t get back to the beginning, and shouldn’t start with the conclusions already established. What is left for us to do then? Understand your opponent’s position, explore the history of yours, and account for the ways that your currents position have been adapted or adjusted.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-zebras-got-their-stripes
Is the way that the world runs today the way that is has to be?
Is the status quo the best that we can do?
In December 1999, I got a call from a newspaper reporter. They were calling pastors and religious leaders in our city to see what we were telling our people about Y2K.
When the article came out I was the only pastor who was telling their people not to worry and that the real fear was people panicking and doing stuff like pulling all of their money out of the banks.
This was especially odd because I was part of a denomination that majored on eschatology and was very end-times focused.
I had multiple friends in that group who made major purchases (like extra freezers) in preparation.
One close friend went in with another family and bought a trailer full of food and supplies and had it parked in a remote location … but then they had to worry about guns in order to protect the trailer in case of societal breakdown.
The alarm and drastic measures are telling. There is something about the way that we have been taught to read the Bible that makes us especially susceptible to panic. By calling the Bible ‘the word of god’(see W) and not distinguishing genres (see G) we end up creating a tight little system of end-times expectation that repeatedly fails us.
I became a bible-believing Christian during the cold-war era. Communist Russia was our biggest threat and ‘Christian’ bookstores and TV shows were filled with very specific projections about how current events lined up with biblical prophecy.
I was taught to read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other – because they lined up!
Not understanding that apocalyptic literature in the Bible is a critique of their time and contemporary present order and a hope of future deliverance makes us vulnerable to panic in ours.
We are taught that apocalyptic elements in the Bible are predictive instead of prophetic critique and this is creating the problem that leaves us so susceptible.
In my short lifetime I have seen so many predictions come and go. I have seen layers and layers of moving onto the next thing a passage means without even acknowledging that 6 months ago we were told it was something different.
There is a sort of amnesia required to stick with this way of reading the Bible for more than a couple of years.
I have seen more than 40 antichrists come and go. Everyone from foreign leaders to Popes to Presidents have been said to be the Antichrist.
This exposes a second problem with eschatological expectation. Every time I hear the phrase ‘the Antichrist’ I know I am in trouble. The person has not done a close reading of the Bible.
If you read the 4 passages in the New Testament[1] in which this phrase appears you will be left asking why we think that a world leader is this character. The answer is that in eschatological readings there is a great deal of amalgamation.
Amalgamation happens when you take a character like ‘antichrist’ and blend it with an Old Testament character like ‘the prince’ from Daniel 9 or a the bad-guy from Revelation 13. You take all of the villains in all of apocalyptic literature and meld them into one super-baddy.
I just had a talk this weekend with a denomination leader about how end-times expectations have changed in their lifetime. We talked about young leaders and how different their eschatology is from 50 years ago.
My hope for the next 3 decades is that sincere people of faith get fatigued on this unfulfilling way to read the Bible and this next generation is released and empowered with an understanding of genre that does not leave them susceptible and vulnerable to panic over sensations like y2k and franchises like Left Behind.
The world is in too great a need for really great people to be distracted by thinking that apocalyptic is A) predictive and B) about the 21st century.
Here we have 2 crippling problems to confront – and the problem is that they compound the effect of each other intensely.
The more minor problem is the one that we have touched on above: a loss of the prophetic or our Christian imagination.
The major, and more hideous problem, is something called “final forms”. We live in an era where systems have become so solidified, concrete, and assumed that are assumed to be ends in themselves.
They are final forms that, once invented or introduced, are here to stay.
And there is an ominous implication:
The faith we have today cannot be reexamined, tinkered with, or questioned. It is written in stone and unchanging.
In fact, it gets worse – true Christianity was found in the early church and the answer to our current problems is to get ‘back’ to that kind of a faith.
We live in the odd hybrid space where we live in the ‘end’ – the world in its final form – imagined to be the pinnacle of history … and a sort of primitivism or originalism that looks ‘the’ early church, the founding fathers, pure democracy, and raw capitalism.
The danger is two-fold:
The church, the law, the nation, the economy (and so many other categories of life) are severely complicated evolutionary adaptations in their current configurations.
So I want to end the way that I began this entry:
Is the way that the world runs today the way that is has to be?
Is the status quo the best that we can do?
What would it take for the world to work a different way?
Are small adjustments to the current system the most we can hope for?
Is it enough to make the current arrangement slightly more just?
[1] For instance, 1 John 2:22 says “ Who is the liar? It is whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a person is the antichrist—denying the Father and the Son.”
X is for X-ray
Something a little different this week.
What happens when our technology exceeds our ability to understand it?
Is there a danger when technology goes beyond the scope of most human’s understanding?
Let’s start in a different place and then come back to those questions.
100 years ago, we were engaged in what would become World War I.
I am fascinated by the changes that have come in that 100-year period.
The transition from the 19th to the 20th century houses a fascinating and rapid shift in both politics and technology (to name just two fields).
The buildup to World War I is a study in what seems like not just a different time but wholly different world at points. Like learning the geography of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth or the kingdoms and families in The Game of Thrones, the world before the great war seems alien.
You have to get up to speed on such things as the Habsburg Dynasty and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Eschatology is an interesting entry point to this conversation. At the beginning of the 20th century, Post-Millennial views were the overwhelming position for protestant churches and denominations. The optimistic view of human progress and societal transformation brought an expectation of ushering in the Kingdom of God and a reign of peace and prosperity that would fill the whole earth. The horrors of the war brought that to an end. There was no ‘war to end all wars’ and by the end of the 20th century (the Christian Century) Post-Millennial views were as a rare as telegraphs.
The beginning of the 20th century also saw seismic shifts in technology. The telephone, the airplane, vaccines and the radio mark the era.
The X-ray illustrates the point as well as any other from this era.
The ability to see into the human body is remarkable. It transforms not just how we practice medicine but how we conceptualize the human body.
I read a passage a while ago, which I can now not find, where an author wondered how the apostle Paul’s writing would have changed if he had been able to take a trans-Atlantic flight or if he had seen that famous picture of the earth as a little blue marble as seen from the moon.
Which brings us to the question at hand as we begin to wrap up this series:
If technology and medicine, communication and psychology, economics and politics – and every other field – get to (and are encouraged to) advance, evolve, adapt and transform … why is religion so bound to the thinking of the pre-moderns and the ancients?
There is something peculiar about religious thought that needs to be examined. I understand those who want to conserve the tradition – I don’t agree but I understand the conservative impulse.
I prefer an approach that is incarnational and contextual. I see christianity as embodied (in-body) in a time and a place. Our faith must be re-calibrated, re-formed and re-membered within our cultural context.
Faith, like language, does not happen in a vacuum. It is inherited.
There is a given-ness to faith. We receive what is handed down.
But faith is also in-acted and em-bodied.
This is a delicate dance to both honor the tradition and express in our time and place the truth of what was passed on to us.
The 1500’s had both Copernicus and William Harvey. The former told us that the earth revolved around the sun, the latter that the heart was responsible for blood circulation. In science, the telescope and the microscope changed everything.
We live in the nuclear age. The Xray, the nuclear bomb and the microwave are just the tip of the iceberg. I have not even touched on TV, cell-phones, no-fault divorces, Christian-Mingle websites and credit-card giving machines in the pews.
Why, when every area of our lives from medicine to politics to economics to psychology is updating and evolving … why would religion insist on holding to the cosmology, metaphysics and epistemology of the pre-modern world?
When we get sick, even conservative/traditional folks will take an aspirin and get an x-ray.
The Christian faith, based on the story of incarnation, is designed to be embodied in a time and place. To hamper this process of adaptation and adjustment is to not only miss the point of the entire story but to worship an idolized moment in the development of its trajectory.
I would love to address the previously enchanted world (though we must avoid supernaturalism) and the concept of second naiveté – but here is what I really want to leave you with:
The gospel is designed to be (in)carnate and (em)bodied. We have no fear of losing the gospel’s essential character by appropriating it to our time and our place. We live in a world come of age. It is time for a response to the nuclear era or our technology is in danger of outsizing our theology.
There is no phrase that is more misused, or more contentious, than The Word of God. We might need to take a vacation from throwing the phrase around as a tight summary until we pull it apart and clarify its multiple uses.
The Word of God, when used properly, carries three layers of meaning:
For clarity, I will now refer to the first and third meanings as ‘the word of the Lord’ and the second as the ‘Logos made flesh’.
The pitfall that some fall into is that they take this last sense (revelatory elements within scripture) and attempt to make it concrete (or foundational). Doing so is to erroneously confuse the messenger and message, the vessel with the element, the sign for the object.
Calling the Bible the Word of God is as inaccurate as it is accurate. It is not exactly true … but it is true enough that it is tempting. The problem is that it confuses the ‘curves ahead’ road sign on the mountain road for a road-map up the mountain. It is not that they are unrelated – it is that they are not equivalent or interchangeable. The map may be accurate, and trustworthy for the journey, but it is not the landscape itself.
Knowing the map well is not the same as going on the journey.
This is the important difference between a sign and symbol.
One can see the problem in legal court and in Sunday school. It is ironic to place one’s hand on a Bible and swear ‘to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God’. The irony, for those who have actually read the Bible, is that two different New Testament passages say not to do such things. We are not to swear by things but to simply let our yes be ‘yes’ and our no, ‘no’. That should be enough. We don’t need to swear by heaven or earth or anything like God. It is an odd practice. It treats the Bible like a talisman and a fetish[1] full of superstitious power.
Similarly we see things like this in the songs we learn as children:
The B-I-B-L-E,
that’s the book for me,
I stand alone on the Word of God
The Bible is not a book. It is a collection of 66 books by different authors in different centuries representing different histories, perspectives, and opinions utilizing diverse genres of writing. This is part of why you can not say ‘the Bible says’ as the late Billy Graham was fond of doing.
When we say that ‘the word of God is living and active’ or that ‘all scripture is God breathed and useful’ we are right … but we must avoid the temptation of too quickly boiling those three into down into one interchangeable phrase lest we miss the awesome power and invitation provided by the interplay between them.
Now, if we mean that because of what we learn in the Bible, we hear the word of the Lord and believe in the Logos made flesh … that would be fantastic. If, however, we mean that the Bible is equivalent to the Word of God, then we have set our children up to be confounded, frustrated and spiritually impotent.
We have given them a road sign and told them it was the adventure. The word of the Lord propels us on a journey! To walk the way of the Logos made flesh, to know the truth of that which was in the beginning – with God and was God – and to live the life of the ages (eternal life).
To paraphrase a famous line – we are like children making mud-pies out of dirt in the back alley while there are real pies waiting in the kitchen.
Part of the problem is that we have tried to cram too much into the phrase ‘the word of God’ and asked more from it than can be expected from any sign or symbol.
The most helpful thing I have found to address this problem is called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. The quad is composed of 4 elements:
This quadrilateral of values provides an amazing framework for congregational vitality, personal faith, and communal discernment. It is probably the most helpful tool that we have as Methodists for spiritual/religious thinking and discussion in the 21st century. It is not only unique among religious perspectives but it is supremely fruitful for personal development, congregational discernment, cooperate life, as well as ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue.
There are three important issues to understand aboutthis Wesleyan quadrilateral that illuminate the four core elements themselves.
The first issue is related to Scripture. Wesley, being from an Anglican tradition, held to prima scriptura – scripture first. This position was in contrast to the more famous (and dominant) position help by many other Reformation protestants of sola scriptura – scripture alone. This distinction is significant for the slight change of emphasis and significant change in ethos that is evident in Wesleyan traditions in contrast to some other more fundamentalist approaches that descended from the Reformation and took root in the soil of North America.
The second issue relates to experience. Methodists, by adding ‘experience’ to their quadrilateral, depart from the inherited Anglican tripartite formulation of Scripture, tradition, and reason. This recognition of the importance of experience is a key distinction that transforms the formulation from merely a cerebral (intellectual) approach to inherited religious frameworks to a vibrant expectation of personal application and a clear recognition that community’s (or person’s) experience of the divine is a valid location for God’s revelation and our reflection. We recognize the importance of people’s concrete lived realities and not just a set of ideas or abstract speculations and theories. This is especially true when considering the underrepresented voices that have traditionally been marginalized or repressed in Christian history.
The third issue deals with sequence. The four elements of the ‘quad’ are not perfectly parallel. In fact, the formation works best when addressed in the sequence presented in the above question. We start with Scripture because it provides us a starting point and trajectory for the revelation of God’s work in the world. We don’t start with experience because Christian faith does not begin with us. There is a givenness to the faith that we have inherited. That is why we look to the tradition next. We don’t lead with reason either because ours is a faith tradition centered on incarnation – the embodied presence of the divine – and not merely ideas, concepts, and theories. The sequence is nearly as important as each of the four elements themselves! I would go as far as to say that the sequence is a fifth element and should be discussed (and debated) on its own merit.
My favorite way to present the quadrilateral is to temporarily remove each one and examine how the construct would be impoverished without its presence.
Scripture: Try to imagine a religion or faith that had tradition, experience, and reason. It might still hold together and provide communities and people with direction and connection. It would, however, be lacking something vital and central to the entire enterprise. Scripture provides us with an essential framework for our belief and practice. This is done through the use of narrative and example. The framing stories given to us in Scripture are vitally important both for the precedent that they provide us and for the trajectory they set in expectation for faithful (and faith-filled) continuation.
Tradition: Without tradition we would be left to try and read this antiquated text which has been translated into modern language and to attempt to import and apply it in our contemporary context without any framework or guidance. Tradition provides us an example of practices, behaviors, approaches, relationships, and applications that we can learn from and be enriched by. This is available to us in both the positive of what to do and the negative of what to avoid. Without tradition we are left with only trial and error and we are poorer without the exemplars of the faith.
Experience: A faith that is not experienced is an empty shell; a corpse with no life in it. The church was birthed in Pentecost and it is Holy Spirit power that animates her life still. This faith must be experienced and allowed to transform our incarnated (embodied and enacted) expressions of it. It is important both that we experience the things that we say we believe and that our experiences inform our beliefs through reflexive praxis.
Reason: We live at the far end of Christian history and know well the dangers of an unreasonable faith. Heresies, cults, and genocidal atrocities are the result. We learn a great deal from the legacy of these tragic consequences. We not want an unreasonable faith that hurts people, causes harm and dysfunction at the personal and societal levels, or contributes to the hatred, vitriol, and violence that plagues our world.
The ‘Wesleyan Quadrilateral’ was formulated as a construct in 1960’s based on historic Methodist teaching and practice.[2] It is notable that this development came about as a result of a period of time which saw the demise in societal certainties, stable cultural norms, and challenges to authority in every arena of life from family to government, from sexuality to religion. This loss of a centralized authority (or hierarchy) in an instructive milieu for the need to develop a tool-box like the quadrilateral that provides a dispersed set of anchor points for communal decision making. This tool facilitates communal discernment in a way that allows multiple elements for informing and empowering diverse perspectives and which honors people’s differing perspectives, insights, experiences, and backgrounds.
The danger of what has been called ‘Bibliolotry’ is not simply that it makes the Bible ‘a paper pope’ or ‘the 4th member of the trinity’ (as bad as those seem). The danger is in missing the way, the truth, and the life that is available to us by instead settling for a road-sign instead of an adventure.
[1] an inanimate object worshiped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit.
[2] Albert C. Outler is generally credited with this formulation through a series of published works of Wesley.
Bo Sanders: Public Theology 
