A B C’s

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/

October 19, 2020 0

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:

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

October 19, 2020 0

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.

October 5, 2020 0

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:

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

⁶who, though he was in the form of God,
    did not regard equality with God
    as something to be exploited,
⁷but 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.

October 5, 2020 6

H is for Hermeneutics

We humans are gifted at interpreting. We are constantly interpreting signs and symbols everywhere we go and in everything that we do. We are so comfortable interpreting that we may not even know that we are doing it.

Interpreting comes to most of us almost as second nature. We pick it up as child in the same way that we learn language and so many other things from imitating adults and our peers. We are conditioned in powerful ways that influence our opinions, convictions, prejudices, and even our desires.

We are constantly interpreting.

We almost instinctively know how to read different facial expressions, body language, gestures, moods, words, tone of voice, intensity, sincerity, pace, volume, etc. We even interpret things like gender, body style, and clothing. We interpret everything from human interactions, to sacred texts – from the clouds in the sky to the road signs as we drive.

We are always interpreting.

What if you were told that the way you interpret something may be more important than the thing itself?

Would you be comfortable with the idea that your interpretive lens doesn’t just help you process your experiences – but actually helps create those experiences at some level?

Thinking about the way that we interpret things is called hermeneutics. It is a fancy word that would seem completely unnecessary if humans were not constantly interpreting nearly everything. The ‘Herme’ in hermeneutics comes from Greek mythology where Hermes was the messenger of the gods. Hermes was “considered to be the inventor of language and speech, an interpreter, a liar, a thief and a trickster. These multiple roles made Hermes an ideal representative figure for hermeneutics.”[1]

Words and ideas need interpreting because they can be tricky, double-coded, multilayered, and highly situational (contextual).

You may know that I come from an evangelical-charismatic background. What you may not know is that I am continually contested in conversations with people from that background about the need to interpret our experiences and texts. I am often told that our religious experiences do not need to be interpreted, that they are actually a validation or a sign of faith. That, of course, is in itself an interpretation.[2]

We don’t just have experiences (like we don’t just read and believe the Bible), we interpret. We do it as second nature because to be human – and thus social – is to be thoroughly saturated in language and symbols. We speak, and indeed think, in language. It permeates everything we do and are. It is part of what being human means.

Hermeneutics is quite concerned with the complex set of relationships between an author, the text itself and the original or subsequent audience. The reader, according to hermeneutics, has a lot of power in that relationship.

Hermeneutics is a massive and complex field. Since this an ABC’s series, there are two basic things that are important to know:

The word has been in use since the 17th century even though the idea is an ancient one that can be traced all the way back to the Greek philosophers.
Everything changed in past 90 years. With the publication of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” in 1927, philosophy, and then subsequently the human sciences, took a hermeneutical turn.

This trickle-down effect has made its way through nearly every aspect of society and culture. The impact of this turn has been so thorough that we are now to the point where everything is analyzed, dissected, and questioned. No area of life gets a free pass and no activity is safe from interrogation. Social media is the perfect venue to exam how absolutely everything is now amplified (first) and then scrutinized.

If you are attracted to someone or not attracted to them, if you comb your hair a certain way or you don’t comb your hair, if you go to church or don’t go to church, if you stand for the national anthem at a sporting event or you don’t … everything means something.

This is true for individuals, families, congregations, people groups, and nations. It is the reality of the world that we live in for the 21^st century.

One of Heidegger’s most famous students was Hans-Georg Gadamer. His 1975 book “Truth and Method” was about the world of interpretation and it expanded what is called the hermeneutical circle.

The five elements are characterized as:

pre-understanding
the experience of being brought up short
dialogical interplay
fusion of horizons
application.

This five-part cycle is really helpful and I often paraphrase it this way:

We all come in with something to contribute. We have different perspectives, experiences, insights, histories, and assumptions. We might be familiar with topic or we might be new to the information. Both perspectives are needed.
When we compare notes we come to realize that none of us have the whole picture and we might not even looking at our part of the picture in the most helpful or healthiest way. We admit our limitations or the flaws in what we were given.
We begin to put our individual parts of the picture next to each other and may need to go outside to find some more or different parts of the picture in order to have a fuller or more wholistic understanding of what we are looking at.
We begin to piece the whole picture together. We might overlap some areas, glue some down, we may choose to expand some elements or minimize others into order to make the project work together as a whole.
We commit to actually do something with what we have made. We have each been impacted by the process and we acknowledge that we leave this phase of the cycle different than we came in.

In conclusion:

We all interpret. We think, experience, and speak through a lens. None of us are a blank slate and we never start from scratch. None of us come to a text, an event, or to an encounter value-free or judgement-free. We are rich tapestries full of values and laden with judgements.

These interpretations impact our beliefs, convictions, behaviors, practices, decisions, and feelings. Accounting for and attending to our interpretive lens in any situation will allow us to prosper in the complex, complicated, and multi-sensory world of the 21^st century.

Bonus Section For Church Leaders:

A helpful example of the hermeneutical circle is employed in my field of Practical Theology. I tend toward utilizing the work of Paul Ricoeur and his ‘second naivety’ myself, but the example I want share is from Richard Osmer who utilizes Gadamer as his framework to talk about a community of interpretation.[3]

Let’s looks at what it takes to be someone who facilitates this for their community. This understanding engages in different forms of communication because it is a collaborative effort. The following elements factor in significantly for the spirituality required to carry out the leadership that Osmer envisions.

The Descriptive–Empirical Task is called Priestley Listening and finds great importance in the power of presence.

The spirituality of presence addresses several levels of what is called attending to the congregation as a community of interpretation. Being present with and being attentive to the diverse perspectives, insights, experiences, and histories of those who make up the community.

The second task is the Interpretive Task called Sagely Wisdom.

The interpretive task draws off of thoughtfulness, theory, and wise judgment. Osmer appeals to Israel’s wisdom tradition and to Jesus being the hidden wisdom of God revealed. Facilitating this kind of communal discernment requires a unique set of skills and tools. There is a place for someone with specialized education (like seminary) in a community of interpretation.

The third task is the Normative Task, which is called Prophetic Discernment.

This task weaves together narrative, theory, and scriptural illustration. This is the art of this kind of leadership. Like a quilter stitching together the various pieces of fabric into a coherent whole, or a knitter diligently alternating between the required and various patterns required to bring out the texture for the desired finished product.

The final task is the Pragmatic Task, classified as Servant Leadership.

Osmer identifies the three forms of leadership as task competence, transactional leadership, and transforming leadership. Playing this role in your community requires three overlapping and interrelated convictions: you want to do this well, you want to do it with people, and you want the community to empowered and liberated for their work in the world.

A priest mediates between God and God’s people, a sage has unique knowledge, a prophet tells the truth in interesting and creative ways, and servant works on their hands and knees.

The motif of “deep change” is introduced through the writing of Robert Quinn and is woven together with Old Testament imagery in order to illustrate the type of leadership that is required in this task. Quinn’s Four-stage model of organizational change (called the transformational cycle) involves: Initiation, Uncertainty, Transformation, and Routinization.

I share all of these different examples to point out two themes that you find in almost every hermeneutical project:

They form a cycle, a circle, or a spiral – signifying an ongoing (continual) process.
The second stage or step is one of negativity, negation, or something negative (like uncertainty). This is important because it is only after was pass through the unknowing that we come to see-know-engage-understand-assimilate-fuse in a new way.

In summary, interpreting is always and ongoing process and we must address the negative second step in order to move forward.

[1] This is from the Wikipedia entry on hermeneutics.

[2] Like we talked about in F is Fideism, divine revelation or religious experience cannot be privileged to the point that it is exempt from the attention that pay to other ‘ways of knowing’ and other areas of refelction.

[3] He first examines the idea of guiding the congregation as a community of interpretation. Secondly, he addresses the need to guide interpretation evoked by the experience of being brought up short. Lastly, guiding the dialogue between theology and other fields of knowledge. Leadership of this kind is defined as “the exercise of influence.”

September 21, 2020 0

G is for Genre (modified)

Genre is by far the most important thing about the Bible that many people who claim to be ‘Bible-believing’ don’t know. Nothing matters more than genre when it comes to reading the Bible.

According to Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms (Kindle Locations 593-595).

“Genre: A term that refers to different types or varieties of literature or media. In the interpretation of texts, particularly the Bible, most exegetes agree that identifying the genre of the text to be interpreted is crucial and that the text must be understood in light of the common conventions that typified that genre at the time of its writing. Thus, poetry is not to be interpreted in the same manner as historical narrative, nor is prophecy properly read in the same manner as an epistle (letter).”

Simply stated, one must read a poem differently than history, prophecy differently than a gospel, a letter (epistle) differently than apocalyptic literature.

When people claim, “the Bible says …” it can be a bit of a misnomer. That would be like say ‘the library says’, or even worse, saying ‘according to the internet’.

The Bible is not one book per se but a collection of books. These 66 books were written at different times over a 600 year period by dozens of different men and women.

This is why one cannot say “The Bible says X” with any real authority.

It would be better to say “In Romans, Paul says …” or, better yet, “The epistle to the Romans says … ”.

Saying “the Bible says” is like saying “the Kindle says”.

If you said, “according to the Kindle”, one would ask ‘in which book?’ and ‘who was the author?’

We need to do the same with the Bible.

Think about it this way:

Imagine someone taking a newspaper and reading it without distinguishing between the different types of writing. They would read the weather forecast, the police report, the opinion column, and the sports section, and the comics all the same way.

Most of us know to read the different parts of the newspaper in different ways. You take the weather forecast as a prediction based on best data, the political opinions and rantings as such, the police report as an official (if not censored) story, and the comics section as satire. It is almost second nature. You would not claim that a little boy named Calvin was literally pushed by a tiger named Hobbes (as if it were in the police report) or that either the weather forecast is 100% true or else the whole newspaper cannot be trusted.

All of this is to say that ‘genre’ is an important element of any Biblical reading and is essential to any discussion regarding faith and religion in the 21st Century.

The phase “the Bible says”, is not sufficient and is not helpful in the 21st Century when readers need to be aware of and account for the nuances and differences within the Biblical text.

The books of the Bible need to be read according to the genre that they were written in.

It is by attending to the diversity of the writing styles that we hear the truth contained in them – and Christians, beyond anything else, should be lovers of the truth – wherever that truth leads.

Parables are perhaps the most clear example of this is all of scripture. Parables are tricky: parables are stories told in code in order to come in under the radar of the listener in order to ask them to question the assumptions they came in with. Parables interrogate the established order and the expectations of the listener.

Many of us have been taught to read parables as allegory where each character represents a truth or is a stand in for a bigger idea (like ‘god’ or ‘Israel’). This way of reading leads to some horrible interpretations that present god as vicious, angry, or vengeful landowner or ruler or foreman. It also leads to some odd applications that can actually be counter to the overall theme of the gospels.

A popular way of talking about parables is that they are ‘an earthly story with heavenly meaning’ but Ched Myers says that they are actually ‘earthy stories with heavy meaning’. Remember, a biblical prophet is not somebody who tells the future as much as somebody who tells the truth in creative ways (think of Amos or Hosea). In this way, Jesus by employing parables, in utilizing a prophetic voice to punch holes in the status quo and to interrogate, undermine, and subvert the assumed ‘way things are’ for his audience.

In the Gospel of Luke this often has two results:

It makes the hero of the story somebody that the listener may not have thought very highly of. This can be foreigners, servants, and women.
It calls into question the power and the wealth of the upper-class in the assumption talk to God’s favor is with and who God is working for.

Take Luke 16 for instance. In the parable of Lazarus and the rich man in the afterlife it is noteworthy that Jesus gives the name to this beggar who would have been I nobody but Jesus does not given name to the rich man who everyone in town would’ve known his name. 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. If you were to think that Jesus is giving us the architecture of the afterlife then you would literally think that people in heaven can not only see the people being tormented in hell but that they can converse back and forth. This is not the point of the parable.

Parables are not allegory. When you read parables as allegory assigning each character in the story a corresponding person in real life, you often get the point of the parable 100% incorrect. If each time Jesus talks about someone with power and status, like a landowner, you assume that is the god character in the story then the Gospel of Luke really makes God into a monstrous, violent, and conflicted character. If however, you read the story that God is with the servants instead of the landowner, who is probably Rome in coded language, then Jesus’ parables read entirely inverted from the way most of us have been taught to interpret them.

Which brings up the next point.

We must read the Bible more slowly: if you come in thinking that you already know that point that the text is making, you can easily miss the actual thing that is being said.

In Luke 12: 38-40 we begin to see that Jesus’ teaching reads very differently if you are riding high on the hog then if you are on the underside of the beast (in this case Empire). If you have possessions like many of us in America do, the idea of a thief coming in the night causes worry and anxiety. In the context of the first century Jewish occupation by the Romans the thief coming in the night was the in breaking of the kingdom of God.

Earlier in Luke chapter 11 Jesus had talked about the need to bind a strong man if you’re going to ransack his house. And this was probably and allusion to Roman rule and Caesar would be the strong man.

Take Luke 12

⁴“I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more. ⁵But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him! ⁶Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight. ⁷But even the hairs of your head are all counted. Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.

When Jesus talks about the one it can be tempting to think he’s talking about God. But it is not God who after he is killed you has the authority to cast you into hell! That is Caesar. Jesus is speaking in code and this should probably be understood as part of the literature of the oppressed. You speak in code when you are not safe just say what you really think. We know that the One in verse 5 (who throws people in hell) is not God because in verse six Jesus name’s God as the one who care about every sparrow.

Jesus often had to speak in code, almost with a wink to his listener, and it’s easy to imagine a Roman century and standing just offscreen keeping an eye on the group that was listening to Jesus. There is so much more that could be said on this topic but I think it would benefit you greatly when you read a parable to ask if the person in power–whether that is a land owner, strongman, the one, etc. – is more likely Cesar character or God. If you make every powerful person in a parable a god character you end up creating a monstrous, even demonic, two-faced and violent character.

If you see ‘the one’ and automatically think ‘God’ you get the exact 100% wrong lesson out of this text. Jesus names god in verse 6 as one who cares about each one. Why would he not have name ‘him’ in verse 5? Because the ‘him’ in verse 5 is not god – it is a contrast to the caring God.

Conclusion:

We can do this same careful kind of reading for the genres of history, epic tales, poetry, proverbs, drama (such as Job and Jonah), prophetic writings, apocalyptic, and epistles. By honoring the genre that a work is written in and by reading slowly without assuming that we already understand the point ahead of time, we allow the text to speak in its own voice and actually negate some of the odder, uglier, and more confusing parts of the Bible that people often find so troubling and distasteful.

I could give you 50 examples of how this is true. One of my favorites is in Hebrews 9:22 (without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins) which actually is saying the exact opposite thing of the point that it is frequently quoted to mean. We could do this for the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac or the book of Revelation or more than 80% of the famous passages of scripture that we read outside of their genre.

Genre really matters when it comes to reading the Bible. Which leads perfectly into our next chapter on interpreting texts: H is for Hermeneutics.

September 21, 2020 1

F if for Fideism (modified)

How do we know what we know about god?

There was a medieval theory about this which said that every word represented a concept which represented the reality it was trying to talk about. This triangle theory of knowledge was very popular and deeply formative to the way that we think about and talk about matters of faith.

So the triangle is: words – concepts – reality

Then, as always happens, somebody tried to simplify it and flattened it to be more of a straight line. Words represent the realities that they talk about. It was a case of over-simplifying to the point that the theory fell apart. Then a battle broke out: some became really aggressive in their critique and criticism while others became really defensive in their attempt to preserve The Faith.

Some groups tried to rescue the idea by being more nuanced and elaborate. Other continued to double-down in simplistic and literalists understandings. Some alternative schools of thought sprung up to try and get out of the either-or all-or-nothing game altogether.

Fideism is one of those alternative approaches and it is both tempting, and thus, a potentially dangerous development on the religious landscape for our lifetime.

Fideism: The view that matters of religious and theological truth must be accepted by faith apart from the exercise of reason. In its extreme, fideism suggests that the use of reason is misleading. Less extreme fideists suggest that reason is not so much misleading as it is simply unable to lead to truths about the nature of God and salvation.

Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms (Kindle Locations 552-554).

Fideism has been around for a long time but it has taken on a new tenacity recently. There are several new schools of thought that we will cover in a moment, each of them has an element of ‘you won’t fully understand until you believe’ or ‘what we have (or have been given) is a self-contained unit and really only works if you play the game by its rules”.

The 19th Century was a tough one for ‘reasoned faith’. Those bastions that survived into the 20th Century were not left unaltered. In fact, since WWII the effect of those descended from who Paul Ricoeur dubbed ‘The Master of Suspicion’ – Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx (some add Darwin) – has grown and intensified.

Another way of saying this is that the fields of psychology, philosophy, sociology, and science have deeply impacted the way that faith and religion was understood in the latter half of the 20^th century. It is almost as if the pressure created by the work of these Masters of Suspicion was building up in the 19^th century and was unleashed with the events of the early part of the 20^th century.

The two merged into a storm of doubt and decline that has yet to end in our current situation.

Think about how much changed from just 1900 to now .

From Pentecostal revival that started in 1906, to the great depression, the World Wars, the Civil Rights movement, television, Watergate, Vietnam, the Cold War, cable TV, Monica Lewiski, Y2K, September 11^th, the internet, and the first iPhone in 2007. In that 101 years from the Azusa Street revival to the iPhone … think about how much psychology, sociology, philosophy, and science changed and changed how we think about things – how we conceive of them, interpret them, and participate in them.

Understandably, part of ‘reasoned faith’ is that it had to adjust and modify. It had to account for new data (scientific and sociological) and, more importantly, it had to stop playing by its own rules.

The rules of engagement changed. Faith no longer got a free pass. The ‘church’ was no longer running the uni-versity. Fields like science had grown up since the Copernican revolution were no longer afraid of the church – and began to act like they were running the show now.

Psychology asked why we did things. Sociology questioned the venue in which we did them. Philosophy examined what was behind those things in the first place. Science explored the means by which we did them and expanded our ability to do them.

Not only had the rules of the game changed, the game itself was changing.

Modern Christianity had to choose between:

Fight
Flight
Concede
or Adjust-Adapt-Evolve

A subtle form of this impulse toward fideism is simply to speak of ‘Non-Overlapping Magisterium”. Science and reason take care of their areas and faith takes care of its area.

Those who take this impulse further retreat into what Wittgenstein would call ‘private language games’. They take on a formal defense of the given-ness of faith say that faith doesn’t have to be reasonable. Those two things are just speaking different languages and that science of reason doesn’t even have the ability to understand what faith is doing. That is why neither can even provide a critique let alone a correction. Religion is thus except from an investigation-integration from outside.

I would argue that what we believe in private has massive implication for how we participate in the public arena. In our present societal unrest what folks believe in private really does impact how that participate in public.

I have found it very useful to multiply the categories from 2 to 4 so that we talk about the:

Private
Personal
Public
Political

It is helpful to expand the existing categories to reflect more of how actually think about and engage in matters of faith and politics.

This is why we have to care about fideism. I understand the desire to preserve the past and stake out ones territory for the given-ness of the tradition. It is a way of protecting what is deeply valued and – let’s be honest – in grave danger.

Those who are attracted to fideism look at the evolution of their religion and the disappearance of treasured practices and think “I don’t even recognize this contemporary mutation as the same thing that we inherited from those who came before!”

… and that might be true. But we live in a world come of age and The Faith both needs to and is bound to change.

Here are what seem to be the 3 biggest temptations for modern Christianity:

to concede
to attack
to retreat

Concede

Faith as a public matter has never been more challenging. The easiest response is to both personalize ones faith and then make it private. This is a two-step dance but either is dangerous on its own.

Personalizing faith is a natural response for an Enlightenment Individual. We major in ‘self’. We have cultivated the ability to think in ‘me’. This is a novel development in religion and some argue that it is against the very nature of religion! The purpose of religion is to bind us together in practice (re-ligio) or reconnect us as a belief-community.

The second step is to internalize one’s personal faith. In liberal democracy, no one cares if you believe something – just keep it to yourself. Don’t put it on someone else. Your personal practice in there or over there is one thing … just don’t make too big of a deal about out here. Out here we have a civil expectation of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If your religion helps as a means to those ends, fine. If not, it might become an issue of you infringe on someone else right. Go ahead and practice your ‘tradition’ on your own time but just keep it down when you’re out here in public.

The modern expression of Christianity has responded to this two-step dance in many little ways – my favorite of which is consumeristic-accessorization. The bumper sticker on my interal-combustion automobile and the fashionable yet ironic message T that imitates a popular ad campaign are just two examples. It allows me to allude to a Bible verse (I am not of the world after all) while participating in a capitalist system that goes unquestioned.

Attack

To counter the personal-and-internal compromise noted above, an aggressive and external coup has been attempted. The memory of Christendom has fueled a political response to take back power and ‘return to our roots’. The rise of the Religious Right (and Moral Majority) of the past four decades is perhaps the most high-profile example. It is, however, just the latest incarnation of this impulse.

The fond (and white-washed) memories of days gone by and yesteryear fuel an anger at what is seen as a disintegrating culture and a slouching toward Gomorrah. The resulting Culture Wars and political animosity have a fundamental problem however:

Ever since the Constantinian compromise in the 4th century is has been difficult (if not impossible) to get the Bible to say what one needs it to say in order to justify a claim to power.

A religion founded on the teaching of a marginalized prophet and incubated in persecuted minority communities does not lend itself to being in charge. An incredible amount of selective editing, creative hermeneutics and mental gymnastics are required to make it fit. At some point a voice comes along and points out that ‘this is untenable’.

Retreat

The above two responses are both simpler and more obvious (and thus more popular) than our last response. The retreat is more subtle and sophisticated. There is great concern about a school of thought that seeks to move the Christian tradition toward an “autonomous and protected location”.

A seductive temptation is found in an attempt to preserve former (historic) expressions of the faith behind linguistic fences (insulated language games) and communities that become isolated silos. These “are really retreats into forms of fideism or ‘protective strategies’ that seek ways of interpreting theological discourse so as to preserve its unique status.” [1]

Those who follow this line of reasoning contend that theology is not properly about ascertaining indubitable truth claims about God or reality, nor about fathoming the depths of human subjectivity; rather, the task is to analyze and explicate the fundamental claims about reality and human life that have emerged within a specific tradition, so that believers might more fully appropriate and live out of their tradition’s vision of reality.

It becomes a:

“self-enclosed historical community; its method is interpretive, not critical; and its goal is to aid in the internalization of central claim, not the critique or reconstruction of that which we have inherited.”

You can see the attraction of the retreat! By privileging “revelation” or the “given-ness” of the tradition, one is afforded the space to preserve and defend an inherited system which immune for outside critique and thus preserved in its ‘as is’ status.

This romantic preservation and reclamation mistakenly – and perhaps intentionally – defends and protects manifestations and consequences that we not only need to move on from but that it is impossible to return to.

[1] The Post-Liberal work of Lindbeck and the Radical Orthodoxy camp of Milbank and MacIntyre are in danger of this.

E is for Empire (modified)

E is for Empire in the ABC’s of (modified) Theology.

Em·pire. /ˈemˌpī(ə)r/

noun

an extensive group of states or countries under a single supreme authority, formerly especially an emperor or empress.

Christian thought, belief, and practice, “suffers from an imperial condition” according to Catherine Keller in her chapter in PostColonial Theology. That is eye-opening news to many people who claim to be ‘Bible-believing’.

We live in an odd time in N. America where those who love, quote, and believe in the Bible most deeply happen to be the least aware of the Bible’s concern with and critique of Empire. What is fascinating to me is that those who are most unaware of the nature of the American Empire (imperial policies and practices) are also those who claim to take the Bible the most seriously.

Whenever this subject comes up, without exception someone will question, ‘how can this be so?”, and others will say, “what are you making such a big deal about?”

Here is how it works: The biblical narrative details many empires – all of whom have a devastating effect on the people of God.

The Exodus narrative, the Babylonian captivity, and the Roman occupation are all examples of Empire. The Bible is through-and-through saturated with imperialism and the disastrous effects that it has on the people of God. This includes enslavement, genocide, military occupation, oppressive taxation burdens, displacement, tyranny, and limitations on religion to name a few.

This is where it gets tough: Moses, Daniel, and Jesus all suffered (and subsequently overcame) imperial regimes. The Bible is saturated with themes of ‘empire’ and resistance. The problem is that those who are most embedded in the Empire are the most unaware of this theme and may have no idea that the Bible that they value so much has anything to say about the issue what so ever!

If you do not take into account the themes of ‘empire / imperialism’ then the Bible reads a certain way which allows you to be complicit in the current American imperial impulse and actually believe that you are serving the Kingdom of God by participating in those structures. The shocker is when you find out that Moses, Daniel, and Jesus were on the underbelly of the beast and were figures of resistance seeking to undermine the established order – the systems, structures, and institutions of repression and containment.

This information can be eye-opening!

There is not a single part of the New Testament that is not haunted by the shadow of empire and imperial domination. One might as well not even read the Gospels or the Book of Revelation outside of this lens! In fact, it is impossible to talk about the cross of Christ or Paul’s letter to the Romans without a thorough understanding of empire.

Take a minute and think about what a cross was – an instrument of intimidation and public terror reserved for those who threatened that stability of the empire (like sedition). It was tool of spectacle meant to scare the masses into compliance and submission. To paraphrase Philip Yancey in The Jesus I Never Knew : Jesus didn’t get crucified because he told people to be nice to each other. No, he was a threat to the delicate balance of power that Rome and the Jewish viceroys were attempting to hold together by a thin thread.

I might go as far as to say that empire and imperial pressures dominate and dictate every facet of the Bible and especially the New Testament.

It is concerning then that those who claim to take the Bible the most seriously (or least read it the most) may know the least about this aspect of its original context … and this blind spot may lead those same people to be most complicit and supportive to the current role that their nationalistic government plays in the world.

Even a cursory glance at the history of empire reveals that empires have often been justified and supported by theological means. Already at the time of Jesus the Romans could rely on a well-organized theology of empire that was able to assimilate other theologies to varying degrees – even those that would appear rather incompatible, such as traditional Jewish theologies of places like Palestine.

Joerg Rieger in “Christ & Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Time”

Think about the difficulty you would have if you do not see the role that Egypt, Babylon, and Rome played in the Biblical narrative. By what lens would be able to see the role that post-Cold War foreign policy played in global affairs or that America plays in the global ‘War on Terror’?

It would be difficult if not impossible.

Let’s come at this a different way.

The people of God have frequently been oppressed and dominated.

Scripture tells us of their resistance and deliverance.

Empire is coercive, violent, controlling of nearly everything it its radius. Domination is actually the modus operandi of imperial regimes. The methods are predictable:

Road blocks
Security checks
Boarders
Prisons
War
Surveillance
Control

The Bible testifies to this and provides tools for resistance. Read the stories in the book of Daniel, the parables of Jesus, or the apocalyptic rhetoric in the book of Revelation and you have a manual to interrogate, undermine, and subvert the coercive and dominating powers of empire.

The great irony of history is that so many Bible believing people both don’t know this and ,then, subsequently participate (even complicity) in the continuation of this oppressive system.

The Bible tells us that Moses, Daniel, and Jesus all suffered under imperial oppression. We need to make sure that we don’t use the Bible to defend or extend any Nationalistic/ Empire ambitions in the world that we live in via the systems that we participate in and support.

One possible starting point is found in our translation of ‘Basileia tou Theou’ (Βασιλεία τοῦ Θεοῦ) into English. This phrase is almost always brought in as The Kingdom of God. This translation is problematic at many levels.

The primary problem is that it in no way carries the counter-imperial element of Jesus’ life and teaching. It would be more accurate to translate it as:

The Un-kingdom
The Counter-kingdom
The Anti-kingdom
The Upside-down government

Perhaps the most profound alternative in to speak of a Kin-dom. This kin-dom conveys that we are all god’s children and that we relate to each other as related-ones. We are connected in profound and meaningful ways. Kin-dom language also gets rid of the problematic masculine language of ‘king’ and the hierarchy embedded in kingdom imagery. It is much needed upgrade for the alternate translation of Greek word βασιλεία, (‘basileia’) instead of the classic (and

problematic) ‘kingdom’.

Some thinkers have toyed with the idea of leaving such certain rich and nuanced words/concepts untranslated into English like we do with agape in Greek or Selah in the Hebrew psalms. It provides a novel element and may loan it an air of mystery or exotic foreignness.

There is much work being done with translations such as:

Economy of God
Reign and rule
Commonwealth
Government, etc.

Some of these mayprovide a helpful way forward. Though it may be argued that some convey many of the same associations with the intrinsic hierarchy, coercion, and domination that it incongruent with the love of God revealed in Christ.

In the end, I have circled around again and again to the kin-dom of God. It signifies that we are all interrelated (kin) and that as family, we are relationally constituted. Our related-ness is our prominent characteristic. What defines us? Our connection to the divine/transcendent/reality “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

A helpful advocate is found in the work of Ada Maria IsasiDiaz’s “Solidarity: Love of Neighbor in the 21s t Century” in Lift Every Voice: Constructing Christian Theologies

from the Underside. It resonates with so many scriptural themes, including Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6 when that talk about the inner witness of God’s spirit in our spirit that we have been adopted and are children of God. [1]

There are many reasons to be concerned/critical of ‘the kingdom’ translation. There are so many objectionable aspects to it, including when Americans seem to romanticize foreign monarchy and the imperial ideal of domination. What role or function is being accomplished in this romanticized obsession.

The past couple of years there has been an resurgent theme in Christian books and materials which are centered around King or Kingdom themes. Tim Keller, NT Wright, Scott McKnight, and Rob Reimer have all produced bestseller that doubled down on this phenomenon. While its appeal may be understandable at one level – a return the imagined or romanticized past – one has to be careful that Christianity’s future is not found in Europe’s past.

Jesus didn’t speak English, so there is nothing sacred about the translation ‘kingdom’. In fact, the more one examines the merit of the kin-dom translation, the clearer it communicates the virtue and the loving relational characteristic that Jesus modeled and taught.

Regardless of how these words and concepts get translated into English, the greater concern is that people of faith are aware of how the systems and structures of power continue to employ mechanism of control and violence that oppress and dominate. As people of faith, and especially those who claim to follow Christ, it is important that utilize the resources provided us in the Bible to interrogate, undermine, and subvert the unjust systems of power in our world. We have been given this precedent and this permission by Jesus.

For further examination:

Beyond the Spirit of Empire – Rieger, Sung, Miguez

Colonialism, Han, and the Transformative Spirit – Grace Ji Sun Kim

Arrogance of Nations: Paul and Empire – Neil Elliott

God and Empire – John Dominic Crossan

Jesus and Empire – Richard Horsley

New Testament and Empire – Warren Carter

[1] David Harstkoetter tells us that: “She skillfully argued that the gracious, salvific work of God, through love of the neighbor, entails solidarity characterized by interconnectivity—namely commonality and mutuality. … Yet, rather than describe solidarity as God’s ‘kingdom,’ a term that IsasiDíaz names as sexist and is in the contemporary context “hierarchical and elitist,” she instead uses the term “kindom” to emphasize that the eschatological community will be a family: “kin to each other.” p. 89 in Getting Back to Idolatry Critique: Kingdom, Kindom, and the Triune Economy.

September 14, 2020 0