Disruptive Grace

Barth Warns His Opponents

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 03:20:00 +0000

This was just too funny not to share:

Among those who have reviewed the preceding volumes, and those
who have attacked me in various ways without reading them, there
are some who have carried things to such a pitch that I contemplated
making a very unfriendly reply in this Preface. They ought to be
glad that they did not come up against me at an earlier period when
I had a greater taste for controversy. I have not yielded even to my
less avid taste because in this volume my concern is with the nature of
man as God created it good, whereas encounters of this kind (and their
objects) belong more to the side of chaos, and would therefore be
badly out of place in the Preface to this volume. Those concerned
may therefore remain unmolested in respect of their past or present
attacks. But I give them warning that in the next volume (amongst
other and better things) I shall have a few things to say about demons,
so that I may well have occasion to return to them (Church Dogmatics III/2, x)

A Biblical Rationale for Barth's "Active Life" Church

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:35:00 +0000

A Biblical Rationale for CD III/4, 488-9

At the end of this section, Barth helpfully summarizes all four of his ecclesial assumptions through his citation of I Peter 2:9-10:

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people, once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

1 Peter 2:9 summarizes the first point that Barth makes – that the church is a particular people and cannot be equated “with any natural or historical segment of humanity” (488). God chose us as “God’s own people,” and this makes the Church to be a peculiar people. As Minear notes, there is the sense that God has created a kind of third race out of the existing peoples, when Paul describes the words of Jesus on the road to Damascus: “I will rescue you from your people and from the Gentiles—to whom I am sending you” (Acts 26:17). This idea of God calling people to God’s self through the act of rescue harkens back to the Shema: “I will take you as my people, and I will be your God. You shall know that I am the LORD your God, who has freed you from the burdens of the Egyptians” (Exodus 6:7). Furthermore, the image of “a holy nation” awakens the memory of God’s call on Abraham: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:2-3). It is especially important to notice that Israel was blessed by God in order to be a blessing to all nations, and this accords with Barth’s outward-focused community (his third point) that does not seek to serve itself. Barth describes the church in his first point as those who exist “in dispersion among all nations with its special task and service” (488). Existence in dispersion is seen 1 Pet. 2:11: “Beloved, I urge you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the desires of the flesh that wage war against the soul,” and Hebrews 11:13, which harkens back to Israel’s own history as those in exile in Egypt and in Babylon: “All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth.”
Barth’s second assumption is that the Church is the creature of God’s Word, and not to be equated with any institutions. All of the passages of calling attest to this fact in Scripture, of which we can only name a few. Because the Church is called by the Living God and worships Jesus Christ, the word through whom the Heavens and Earth were made (John 1), we must avoid thinking of the Church as an institution alongside others. Paul warned the Athenians: “The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands” (Acts 17:24). The rules of the Christian community are similarly necessary forms and creations of the community, but these are purely for the sake of maintenance and not the cornerstone, which is “Christ Jesus himself” (Ephesians 2:20). Paul, not once, ever made himself or his pastoral admonitions in the epistles to be the centerpiece of the Church but always witnessed to Christ. Whereas Barth’s first point is to emphasize our antithetical being in relation to the world, his second point attests to the fact that we find true refuge in the household of God:

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God (Ephesians 2:19-21).

Barth’s third point concerns the Church’s task, its agenda, which is also founded in Christ and not given by the world. The reception of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is promised by Christ not for the sake of existential bliss, but for the sake of witness: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). The commission given it by Jesus Christ is the Great Commission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:19-20). This act of making disciples is done through the act of witnessing, which Barth also makes mention of. “We speak of what we know and bear witness to what we have seen” (John 3:11).
Finally, in Barth’s fourth assumption he deals with the lack of clergy-lay distinction that we see today in our churches. As above, we see in 1 Peter 2:9 that the entire community is called “a royal priesthood” without any distinction between leaders and followers. All are called to be witnesses. It exists as a sinful community to be sure, for all are sinners for whom Christ died (Romans 5:8). But this common identity in Christ’s is also common in His resurrection life, which the community bears witness to. In the ordering of the Corinthian community, Paul attests to the body as made up of many members, all who have their specific gift: “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. (1 Corinthians 12:4-6). There are no “useful and useless” members, as Barth says (499), for “on the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect” (1 Corinthians 12:22-24).

The Witness of God:Trinity, Missio Dei, Karl Barth, and the Nature of Christian Community

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 03:59:00 +0000

John Flett's new book, The Witness of God:Trinity, Missio Dei, Karl Barth, and the Nature of Christian Community, is now available for pre-order, and will be released April 15th, 2010.

Here's the description:

The Witness of God is a constructive revision of Trinitarian missio Dei theology. In it John G. Flett argues that the neglect of mission as a theological locus has harmful consequences both for understanding the nature of God’s connection with world and the corresponding nature of the Christian community.

What Counts as Depth?

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:16:00 +0000

I wrote the following article for the October edition of the New Wilmington Presbyterian Church Newsletter: What's UP?

What Counts As Depth?
Rev. Hawkins kicked off our Stewardship Season last Sunday with a sermon on Going Deeper Into Scripture. This important theme got me thinking further about how exactly one should go about reading the Bible. In both my church bible studies and in my seminary classes the assumed approach has been to take one book at a time and listen to its particularity. For instance, I’ve been trained to ask questions of a specific biblical text – its literary, historical and theological context, its repetitive images and ideas – and then to ask the question: “What does this text have to say to me?”
This approach is important, but I find that it does not go deep enough on its own steam. In a way, this approach has monopolized our reading to the point that I’m afraid we have mistaken the forest for the trees, so to speak. It begs the question: why is this text bound with these other texts? Who put this thing called Scripture together and on what basis did they do it? Do the many texts of Scripture speak with one voice? What does this voice say?
As we commit to go deeper into Scripture as a community of faith, I believe we should begin by listening for the one thing that all these books and authors have to tell us. This one thing, which unites the prophets and apostles, is the very theme of Advent: Emmanuel, “God With Us.” As Presbyterians, we confess Scripture to be the Word of God because it points us to the One Word of God, which is Jesus Christ. To confess the Bible as the Word of God means that we read Scripture’s many voices in order to hear this Word from our Lord, and to follow after this voice which tells us that we have been redeemed.
No doubt we should lament poor biblical literacy, and seek to remember the stories and teach them to our children. But why should we do so? What makes these stories so important? I would suggest that we have taken for granted (or forgotten altogether) the grand Story of Scripture – the Story of our salvation. The Gospel, it turns out, is spoken in more than just “the gospels.” The Bible is more than the sum of its parts. To go deeper into Scripture requires not just zooming in but zooming out. As the people of God, we are called to know the stories in order that we can know the Story of God’s continual decision to be with us in Jesus Christ through the power of the Spirit. It is this Story that gathers, forms, and sends us out together in New Wilmington Presbyterian Church.

Your Fellow Reader,
Chris TerryNelson

John Flett on Hütter and Hoekendijk

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:26:00 +0000

John Flett has an article entitled "Communion as propaganda: Reinhard Hütter and the missionary witness of the ‘Church as Public’" in the November 2009 issue of Scottish Journal of Theology (Volume 62, Issue 04). Having taken a class with Flett on the "Church as Public," I can tell you that the argument in this essay with Hütter can be easily extended to much of modern ecclesiology, precisely because it exposes how an ecclesiology is only as good as its Christology, and therefore its doctrine of God.

Here is the abstract:

The Protestant church, for Reinhard Hütter, relinquished its ecclesial public character when it turned from ‘binding doctrine’ as the means for establishing and maintaining its concrete ‘time-space’. Christendom disguised this basic theological flaw, but with its collapse the public basis of the Protestant church fell away. This reduced the church's witness and destroyed its communal structure. His positive proposal re-establishes the church as a public by reference to the communion nature of God, and to church practices as mediate forms of the Spirit's acting. Hütter's account shadows an argument made fifty years before by Johannes C. Hoekendijk, observing an intensified focus on word and sacrament and the promotion of a culture as a solution to the problem of the church's witness. Yet, for Hoekendijk, this logic exemplifies the problem. The institutions of the church come to bear the full evangelistic load. Mission replicates the basic structures of a particular way of life as a necessary precursor to the gospel. The act of witness becomes propaganda because of an insufficient doctrine of the church. This insufficiency is a failing in the doctrine of the Trinity: God's own life is defined without sufficient attention to his act of reconciliation and redemption as itself material to understanding the nature of his in se life.

Rethinking the Mission of Short Term Missions

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:17:00 +0000

Brian Howell over at Wheaton College has recently published an article in the October 2009 issue of International Bulletin of Missionary Research that points out how the location of mission is typically decontextualized as an "Other," so that the point of missions is the valor and sacrifice of the missionary effort itself. Despite post-colonial sensitive rhetoric that proclaims "we're not going to mess with the culture," this leads to a refusal to engage the culture and learn from it.

Here's an excerpt:

In this article I focus on four elements of short-term mission
practice that contribute to decontextualization. First, participants
in short-term missions strive rhetorically to present
what they are doing as something distinct from tourism, with
the unintended consequence of losing focus on the context to
which they are going. Second, the language of “missionary call”
as understood in short-term mission practice works against
engagement with the specific realities of a particular location.
Third, the meaning of mission embedded within short-term
mission too often leads to a mission based on plight and need.
Fourth, post-trip pictorial representations of short-term mission
trips meant to connect the sending congregation to the experience
of STM become, paradoxically, a means of distancing the
Other and decontextualizing the place visited. In these ways,
the mode of travel unique to short-term missions can create a
construal of what mission is or means. In my research a valued
quality on the part of potential team members was openness in
regard to the group of which they would be a member, the task
to which they would be assigned, and the destination to which
they would go. The meaning of “mission” came to be a kind of
sacrificial availability for carrying out an assigned task and a lack
of connection to any particular place. Together, sacrificial availability
and nonspecificity of location worked to position every trip
as first and foremost a journey to accomplish a specific task and
to meet needs “out there.” The language used privileged activity
over destination and reinforced seeing a relationship between
the need for missions (both long-term and short-term) and the
necessity of “bringing” something to a place where there was
some demonstrable lack. Because every trip was “mission” and
all missions involved meeting needs or accomplishing projects,
every trip, regardless of destination, became a movement from
plenty to want, from have to have-not, from wealth to poverty.
Mission became, in the words of Native American church leader
Craig Smith, “plight-based ministry.”

Discovering the Work of Kenneth Bailey: Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 17:43:00 +0000

Recently, I've had the pleasure of meeting Ken Bailey, who formerly taught New Testament at Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo. He attends New Wilmington Presbyterian Church, where I'm currently working as a pastoral intern for the year. Ken has written a splendid book called Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels.

The book features examinations of the life and ministry of Jesus, specifically the Lord's Prayer, the Beatitudes, Jesus' relationship to women and to the parables. As someone who lived in Middle East for over 40 years, Bailey challenges our muted Western reading, exciting our imagination with what the audience would've heard (and what they were probably thinking!). This brings the gospels to life in a way that will benefit the scholar, the pastor and the layperson.

I'm still working through it, but here are some excerpts from his treatment of Luke 5:1-11, a story in which we, as Western readers, typically focus on "the miraculous catch" as an end in itself.

On the climax of the "great catch," Bailey writes:

"The fine points of the manner in which it unfolds demonstrate its authenticity as a Middle Eastern account. Peter does not call his partners in the other boat. He beckons. Sound carries seven times further over water than it does over land. If Peter calls his mates, his voice will most likely be heard on the shore. Has a new spring suddenly opened on the lake floor? Has a new fishing bank formed under water where fish are currently feeding? If so, there is no need for the entire community to have such information. A sudden flood of competing fishermen converging on that spot is the last thing Peter wants. Financial secrets need to be kept. It is best not to raise one's voice but simply to wave to the other boat! . . . Jesus approaches Peter at the point of Peter's greatest strength: his ability as a fisherman. What shocks Peter most deeply perhaps is not the "miraculous catch' (as it is often called) but the fact that he, Peter, is suddenly faced with a man who had made a real choice between God and mammon. All night, every night, Peter and his team plied their trade in the hope of netting a great catch. Their sleep was punctuated with vivid dreams of that faint possibility. It's akin to winning the lottery, or like a day trader who busy shares every morning hoping against hope for the lucky day when those stocks will jump dramatically in price before nightfall and he will make a windfall. Peter is a fisherman! This net-tearing, boat-swamping catch can greatly enrich him and his team. At last he his the jackpot! ... So why was Jesus, a penniless rabbi without a "real job" wandering around teaching people for nothing? How could God possibly be more important than two boatloads of fresh fish? Evidently Jesus cared more about God and people than he did about acquiring wealth. Who was this man who made such an amazing decision? Jesus found himself face to face with a person who challenged his priorities on the deepest level." (141-2)

Douglas Campbell’s Radical Rhetorical Analyses of Romans 1:18-3:20

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 04:14:00 +0000

Douglas Campbell, in the last chapter of his book The Quest for Paul’s Gospel , offers an even more radical reinterpretation of Romans 1:18-3:20 in comparison to Tobin’s modest rhetorical account. Campbell wants to place Paul’s own theological commitments further along in the letter, so that 1:18-3:20 contains premises that Paul attacks via “a masterpiece of ironic subversion,” which utilizes “argumentative reductions.” The traditional reading, which Campbell dubs the “JF model” (Justification-by-Faith), assumes that Paul is laying out his own position on justification and needs to craft 1:18-3:20 in order to create “a preparatory phase that will leave ‘everyone’ (‘Jews and Gentiles’) unsaved, and anxious as to how to be saved.” Campbell notes that it is difficult to find interpreters of Romans that break out of this camp, which unfortunately includes the early Barth as well as Käsemann. Seeking to provide a proper context for the gospel’s proclamation that begins in 3:21, 1:18-3:20 is read as an exposition of the pre-Christian state. “Consequently some deployment of general revelation or natural theology is automatically required.” Furthermore, a principle of divine retributive justice is at work in Paul according to the JF model.
1:18-2:8 is deemed to be the first of a three-part phase in the argument of 1:18-3:20, whereby Paul establishes “a necessary, innate, universal perception of the key principle that divine judgment will take place ultimately in accordance with works of the law, a principle based in turn, as we have already noted, on a divine nature defined in terms of retributive justice. Soteriology is strictly meritocratic. It is this principle that will undergird both Paul’s overarching strategy of ‘indictment,’ and his concern to include Jews within this judgment.” In 2:1, Paul then universalizes the point that all will be judged according to their own works. The second phase, Romans 2:9-3:9a, seeks to override any special pleading by Jews in order to escape this principle of judgment on the basis of works alone; “so things like possession of, and instruction in, the law (2.17-24), circumcision (2.25-29), and covenantal privilege (3.1-9a) are brushed aside.” The JF model believes that this move by Paul is an attempt “to level the playing field.” The third phase, Romans 3:9-20, “establishes the sinfulness of all humanity through massed scriptural quotation. A catena drawn from various books solemnly reiterates that ‘there is no-one who is righteous/discerning/a seeker of [etc.]’.” Campbell notes a number of problems with this reading of 1:18-3:20, which includes the use of “general revelation, the justice of God, salvation by desert, and the role of law-observance in relation to the foregoing, which seem inconsistent with Paul’s stated positions elsewhere, and in terms of his broader backdrop of late Second Temple Judaism.”
For our purposes, we will focus on the contradictory usage of natural knowledge of God in Romans 1:19-20. It is clear that for the argument in 1:18-3:20 to work, the Gentiles need to be held accountable to the law, albeit it in a different way. Thus, general revelation is the mode by which accountability for sin is secured. The problem with this is that it seems to contradict what Paul has to say against “the capacity of the wisdom of the world to know anything useful about God” in 1 Corinthians 1:18-29, where Paul speaks of the confounding of wisdom through the “message of the cross” (1 Cor. 1:18).
It seems to me that one could argue that Romans 1:22 (“Claiming to be wise, they became fools”) also uses the language of foolishness and wisdom. In both texts, both Gentile and Jewish wisdom are being confounded, precisely because both have assumed a position of wisdom apart from God. It is true that in 1 Corinthians Paul makes the gospel (the message of the cross) to be the scandal, whereas in Romans Paul already has a scandal up and running through the knowledge of God in creation. But is this really a contradiction? It depends largely on how we read Paul’s anthropology elsewhere. Campbell notes that Paul’s encounter with Jesus makes no use of Paul’s prior commitments, but portrays it as “a divine irruption that cut across his own previous understanding and activity.” Furthermore, human nature in Romans 7:7-25 is “difficult to reconcile with a relatively unobstructed perception of divinity; it seems totally incapacitated – literally, enslaved to the flesh – as against innately informed but prone to idolatry (etc.) and hence merely culpable. (That is, it seems too sinful at times to even know this).” Finally, Paul states in Romans 8:7: “For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law—indeed it cannot.”
Campbell elaborates many other points against the JF reading of 1:18-3:20, which establishes universal human culpability at the cost of attributing to Paul a soteriology that is still fundamentally based on justification through works of the law to please a god of retributive justice through highly individualistic law-observance, a redefined Judaism without privilege that contradicts Romans 9-11, a problematic use of the “righteous Gentiles” (2:13-15, 26-29), a relatively weak attack on Jewish sinfulness (2:17-24), and a misrepresentation of Judaism that makes the conclusion in 3:19-20 to be premature and inadequate for what will be said in 3:21 and following. At this point it should be clear why we must at least register Campbell’s view, for if what is said about natural knowledge of God cannot be attributed to Paul based on Campbell’s rhetorical analysis, then we have taken away a key passage used to muster support for natural theology in all its forms. If the JF reading is found wanting, which Campbell believes it is, what alternative reading does he provide?
Campbell argues that we should view 1:18-3:20 in terms of an “ad hominem strategy” against supposed Teachers who are preaching “another Gospel.” This critique begins
by recapitulating the probable elenchic or condemnatory opening of the position that it intends to ultimately undermine. It begins by mimicking its opponent. In this way Paul flushes out a critical soteriological presupposition in the preaching that he is unhappy with, namely desert (which his rivals may not even have been aware that they were strongly committed to). He then drives their subsequent concern onto this principle in a series of devastating reductions. The result of these moves is the discrediting of the entire programme, in its own terms.

Thus, the JF reading remains intact, but Paul is distanced from the position of the text itself, thus getting him “off the hook” from all the problems previously discussed. Instead, in 1:18-32 Paul gets the listener to hear a message which may sound stirring at first but whose consequences are soon revealed to be quite terrible. The teachers have conceded that the Gentiles have “their own innate law,” and so salvation will be through works for everyone. God will judge with strict impartiality, so that neither is the Jew advantaged or the Gentile disadvantaged. The presence of the “righteous Gentiles” is used by Paul as a way to show that “Gentiles who have been saved by this gospel might “actually condemn – and even mock – Jews who have not been saved by desert (and will that category include the Teachers themselves? . . .). It is used to confute the fundamental objective of the Teachers – Gentile conversion – and adds a note of potential humiliation to that irrelevance. The point is simply a strict extrapolation of the basic principles underlying ‘turn or burn’ theology of natural revelation, divine retributive justice, and meritocratic soteriology.” By this extrapolation, Paul concludes in 3:19-20a: “ ‘You, the Teachers, and everybody else, will fail to be saved by works. You will not be declared righteous on the Day of Judgment, and so you will be condemned. In short, your gospel – your good news of salvation – will save no one, not even you, the people who are proclaiming it’ (a pretty crippling reduction, one would have thought).” It is the Teachers who have redefined Judaism. The meritocratic soteriology is countervailed by the scriptures citing universal sinfulness. Thus, while Paul believes in universal sinfulness, his point is not to establish this belief but to undermine the Teachers. The ad hominem strategy is utilized by Paul to reduce their arguments to absurdity.
Campbell finally explores three possible objections to this reading. First regards Greek word gar (γὰρ) in 1:18, which suggest that the ground of the Gospel in 1:16-17 is in the argument for universal sinfulness in 1:18-3:20. While Campbell concedes that this is a possible reading of gar, it is used so many times in Romans (around 145 times!). “And while it can denote causality or reason, it can also signify looser relationship of mere clarification and inference (cp. BDAG: 189-90).” Thus, the best possible reading of 1:18-3:20 should determine its translation, not the other way around. Second, it is objected that Paul is citing obvious antecedents in OT literature in 1:18-32, as well as Intertestamental literature such as Wisdom, so Paul must be using it for his own purposes. However, it is more likely that Paul’s opponents are the ones who are citing this literature. The third and final objection regards how Paul’s readers would recognize the ad hominem strategy. Were they sophisticated enough to understand it? “Ironic, and simply directly satirical textual strategies are evident throughout the extant texts of this general era.” Thus, not only Paul’s hearers but Paul himself was quite well-versed in these strategies, and Paul shows great use of them in passages such as the “fool’s speech” in 2 Corinthians 11:16-12:11, or the play on wisdom in 1 Corinthians 1:17-2:16 which we discussed earlier. How would the audience recognize it? Campbell argues that irony is not supposed to make itself so obvious, and so a faithful performed reading of the text would be expected to confound the listeners of Rome.
Paul and Doug in Conversation:
Overall, I find Campbell’s analysis compelling. While he has shed light on the issues of the JF reading, he has provided a very interesting account that is successful in dealing with the problematic passages. Where I find Campbell’s analysis wanting is in his failure to raise the other obvious objection regarding the parallel of God’s revealing of righteousness and wrath in 1:17 and 1:18 respectively. This is why we treated 1:18 with 1:19-21- to show the interconnection of God’s wrath with the role natural knowledge of God plays for Paul. While Campbell is able to deny natural revelation, he has almost nothing to say at all about the wrath of God – although this is presumably what he calls the “turn or burn” theology of the Teachers. One question that Campbell must deal with is the use of wrath in the rest of Romans, which does not seem to be out of place at all in 1:18. On the one hand, the discussion of wrath comes so suddenly that it does seem to make an awkward transition from 1:16-17, even if we seek to understand it in light of what Paul says about the gospel and God’s righteousness. This awkward transition could bolster Campbell’s account that something new has indeed begun (something that does not belong to Paul’s own thought!).
However, it is wrath and the ungodliness of all that makes the Creator/creature distinction so palpable in the rest of Romans, and while Campbell’s reading wants to focus on our participation in Christ, the apocalyptic wrath against humanity needs to be heard as a faithful witness to the Gospel for the sake of humanity. Campbell seems dead set against 1:18-3:20 because he only conceives of it as a preparation to hear the gospel and thus wants to deny all natural theology. But none of our commentators nor Barth believe this to be the case because they have read 1:18 in light of 1:16-17. Thus, the JF model is a bit more complex than Campbell is willing to admit. Still, it remains to be seen how he will deal with this complexity when his new book, The Deliverance of God, which has only been a suggestive strategy up until this point.

Paul and Karl in Conversation: Romans 1:18-21

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 04:05:00 +0000

In his exegesis of 1:18-21 in his Romans Commentary, Barth has stayed consistent with our own reading and with the major commentaries of Wright, Käsemann, Keck and Jewett. He has rightly sought to capture the connections between 1:16-17 to 1:18 and 1:18 to 1:19-21 by showing the priority of the gospel of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and then connecting wrath to the problems of idolatry in 1:19-21. Furthermore, his attack on natural theology, religion, pietism as projections of human being onto divine being embodies Paul’s attack against ungodliness and unrighteousness. Barth anticipates Paul’s universal scope with regard to both the gospel and wrath, and views Paul’s use of natural knowledge as a way to level the playing field. Like the commentators, there is no way to get around natural knowledge of God in Paul for Barth, and so even as his Romans commentary rails against natural theology, he is still sensitive enough to the text not to undermine or ignore what he sees there. The purpose of natural knowledge is for both Paul and Karl one that applies to all of humanity. It is precisely the fact that Paul does not speak of the Gentiles that the reader or listener would suddenly realize that 1:18-32 is against all ungodliness and not just a rehearsal of the standard Jewish critique of Gentile religion. But because Barth’s scope is already universal at the outset, he does not comment on anything related to the distinctions between Jew and Gentile here. There is no sense of Paul’s rhetorical finesse in Barth. Instead, natural knowledge is simply a given entity. Barth does not engage in historical-critical method at this point, and thus the scandal of universalizing sinfulness not just to the Gentile but also to the Jew is lost.
Karl most importantly seeks to emphasize the Creator-creature distinction, the distance between God and humanity. For Romans, this distinction is fundamental. It is the apocalyptic in-breaking of eternity into time that allows for Barth to speak of the gospel in the form of wrath for the one who rebels against God. The natural knowledge of God is not only a source of universal accountability for sin, but Barth goes beyond Paul back to the creation narrative to show how the search for knowledge is one that seeks superiority over God. The closest thing we get to this selfishness is actually in Romans 1:22 (“Claiming to be wise, they became fools.”). Yet this is precisely what Barth’s account of sinfulness seeks to gravitate towards. Where he becomes less precise is in failing to mark the distinction between ungodliness and unrighteousness, whereby the latter is echoing the righteousness of God in 1:17. Still, this is nit-picking, since Barth has already assumed a divide between time and eternity and between humanity and God.
Overall, then, Karl gets Paul basically right here. Karl is obviously railing against forms of natural theology in his own time, whereby people project themselves into the place of God and then use religion as a means of control over God. It shows great care with the text that he did not ignore the modest use of natural knowledge of God in Paul, but sought to use it himself for a similar purpose – i.e., depicting that the wrath of God is against everyone because all have sinned and rebelled against God. This universal wrath is grounded in the universal gospel in 1:16-17.

Edwin Friedman's A Failure of Nerve

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 03:01:00 +0000

A book that was recommended to me by a pastoral mentor has been very influential in getting me to think about leadership in a new way. Since many of you are involved (or will be involved) in leadership of institutions, I would highly recommend you read "A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix" by Edwin Friedman. Friedman studied Bowen family systems theory and pioneered its application on a macro level towards institutions like the church and even society at large. The main challenge that Friedman puts to us is this: Will we be driven as leaders by our own convictions as well-differentiated individuals, or will we be be driven by the anxiety of others as poorly-differentiated individuals? While there are limits to the way Friedman frames interpersonal relationships (i.e., some of his assertions rely on outdated understandings of evolution and biology, which is an aspect overemphasized), I think his angle is a much-needed one for leaders in the church to consider.

Emails from Crazy People: View Obstruction Part Deux

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 03:21:00 +0000

This is unbelievable and hilarious! (H/T Travis)

Karl Barth Blog Conference 2009 Begins Tomorrow!

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 15:45:00 +0000

The Karl Barth Blog Conference 2009 is convening tomorrow! The tentative schedule should run thus:

Introduction (Travis McMaken)

Day 1:Calvin and Barth Sitting in a Tree, EX-E-GE-T-I-N-G (Travis McMaken; response by Jason Ingalls)

Day 2:St. Paul and the Possibility of Natural Knowledge of God in Romans 1 by Shane Wilkens; Response by Lynn Cohick

Day 3: Barth’s Exegesis of Romans 1 in his 2nd Edition of Romans(title tentative: David Congdon; response by Halden Doerge)

Day 4: Resurrection in Barth’s Rejection of Natural Theology: Romans 1.4 in Barth’s 2nd Edition of Romans (title tentative: Nathan Hitchcock, University of Edinburgh; Response by John Drury)

Day 5: Barth’s Exegesis in the Shorter Commentary on Romans (title tentative: Shannon Smythe, Princeton Theological Seminary)

PTS Updates Website

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 15:25:00 +0000

I can't tell you how relieved I am that Princeton Seminary finally updated its web page. The previous one was very difficult to navigate, but this one is simple, featuring drop-down menus and nice curvature. I'm also glad to see Princeton Profiles have been added, which help personalize the institution a bit more.

Seminary Papers

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 04:06:00 +0000

Why the Eucharist Does Not Make the Church

Gospel and Culture: A Missional Response to The New Christians by Tony Jones

The Shape and Development of Luther's Doctrine of Justification

Barth and the Benefits of Christ

Sermons

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 03:52:00 +0000

Palm Sunday Sermon on Matthew 21:1-11

Sermon on Luke 6:1-5

Sermon on Jeremiah 1:4-10

About Me

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 03:43:00 +0000

My name is Chris TerryNelson, and I recently received my M.Div. graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary ('09) and am currently pursuing ordination with the Presbyterian Church USA. I have worked as a chaplain for my CPE at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and am currently an intern at New Wilmington Presbyterian Church in New Wilmington, PA.

Life, death and the Taliban | Global Post

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 02:26:00 +0000

Life, death and the Taliban | Global Post

Posted using ShareThis

Update

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:39:00 +0000

I ran into a friend today who told me he loved my blog, so this one's for you Andy. I just got done with my M.Div. at Princeton Seminary, and I admit I haven't fully come to appreciate what that means. The first thing that comes to mind is "liberation," but that is the typical honeymoon graduate response that will no doubt be replaced with a kind of grief. With this liberation comes slightly more objective insights into what made Princeton Seminary such a wonderful "mental" institution.

Speaking of which, I am currently working as a chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital for the summer for CPE credit toward ordination within the PCUSA, and am learning about all sorts of things about myself. Anneli has been working 25 hours a week while I do my 40 hours at the hospital, and so we were blessed to have my mother-in-law come stay with us to watch Nora all-day (what a saint!) for this summer. Overall, we are doing very well given all of the transitions.

In terms of plans, I am looking forward to a 1-year internship at New Wilmington Presbyterian Church in New Wilmington, PA beginning in September. We were blessed to be provided housing and health insurance, as well as a generous stipend by the church, and so we are very thankful for this. This means that my wife, Anneli, will not have to work and can spend a good amount of time looking into graduate school for the following year. There looks to be some excellent teaching opportunity nearby in the meantime. My new-born Nora is not so new-born now, as she just turned 14 months and began walking on her own. She currently has about 10 words at her disposal (including hi, buh-bye, woof, moo, dadda, mama, kitty, and the most important and clear-cut of them all: "outside!"). Again, the parental role is also excellent blogging fodder, so stay tuned.

We are currently in the middle of the moving chaos, and so we appreciate your prayers and your last-minute hang-outs and visits before we take off.

Jesus Christ in Our Pluralistic Society

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Fri, 22 May 2009 01:13:00 +0000

I recently had one of those moments where I wish I had said something as succinct as I can say it now. One student stated that she had a theory about religion: "having a religion is kind of like having a specific learning style: everybody's got a different one, and no one person's learning style is better than another's." Really what she was after was that she wanted to say that everyone comes to the same God but through different names for that God, different styles of worship, etc. It was clear that what was driving her theory was a specific result: "how can I get everyone to love one another so that religion doesn't divide us?" No one who lives in America has managed to dodge this question. To operate on this plane is to leave one's own religion behind, to relativize it. But this new plane becomes an absolute, whereby I assume my power to bring everyone together by having their views come together into a cohesive and visible (though invisible to most) whole. She was dead on to call this a "theory." And by providing this theory, she was grappling for a handle on a love that is universal, if only for herself and those she shared it with. She wanted to say that everyone is right, and that nobody has the right to judge.

I hadn't ever really systematically thought through my approach to this issue. So here it goes. It's not that everybody's right, but that everybody's wrong. And not wrong in an incomplete sense, whereby if we just add up all our religious views then God will appear intelligibly in our giant mosaic. No, instead there is an absolute judgment on all religion. Perhaps one of the greatest parables of the punishment (and gift) of our pluralism is the story of the Tower of Babylon, where the desire to be God leads to a great religion, a great city moving skyward. God confuses their language and scatters them, as loving punishment to keep them from what is ultimately most harmful to them: to take the place of God, to be the judge. And when I think of our diversity, it is a reminder that we simply do not possess God in our religion.

And yet, insofar as I have been confronted with the reality of Jesus Christ, I have been confronted with a truth that is no mere theory. I have been told that Jesus Christ died for the sins of the whole world, and in this self-offering we are given the new reality of our plural, diverse humanity. We are told that every knee will bow and tongue will confess that this one is Lord, that his reality is our true reality. Theologically, for this to be true, requires the confession that Jesus is God. Immediately we hear the complaint: "but what about those who cannot confess this? How will you love the one who disagrees with you? you have isolated yourself from others!" And I answer: "Because when I confess this, I confess my true love for the other, the neighbor who disagrees. It is necessarily true love and therefore concrete and practical, because it is the love of Jesus Christ, the incarnate one in obedience. He is thus no mere theory, and neither is his love which pours over all humanity."

Gospel and Culture: A Missional Response to The New Christians by Tony Jones (Index)

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Tue, 19 May 2009 01:49:00 +0000

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Schleiermacher, Tillich and Postmodern Theology

Part 3: Defining Missional Theology

Part 4: Emergent vs. Missional Hermeneutics

Part 5: Defining Emergent Theology

Part 6: Salvation and Sin

Part 7: Proclamation Impossible?

Part 8: Ecclesiology vs. Styles of Church

Part 9: Conclusion

Gospel and Culture: A Missional Response to The New Christians by Tony Jones Conclusion

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Tue, 19 May 2009 01:48:00 +0000

Conclusion:

I have tried to show that Jones as a leader of emerging churches and as an emergent theologian has fundamentally disqualified himself as a missional theologian. It is my hope that such a critique will call for greater theological reflection on the part of emergent Christians. I write as one who is not calling for the end of all things “emergent,” or for a shunning of Jones (or Pagitt, McLaren, et al), but as one who seeks to ground emerging churches (as Anderson does) in a more biblical theology, which is a greater missional self-understanding.

The key to a missional ecclesiology is a missional hermeneutic, which looks to the grand narrative of Scripture as a witness to God’s mission in reconciling the world to Himself. Missional churches read the whole Bible, but we do so not for the sake of showing off an ability to live in paradox. Nor do we confess Jesus Christ as Lord because he stands in solidarity with our suffering – but because he is Lord over our suffering and has proven Himself Lord even over sin and death, conquering it once for all through his self-sacrifice on the cross. In him we have the revelation that God has crossed the chasm to our side and was willing to do so before the foundations of the world because of his great love for us. There is always truth to be found in the world because of this missionary God, but the truth of Jesus Christ sets us free only when we commit ourselves to be his disciples and continue in his Word (John 8:31).

Gospel and Culture: A Missional Response to The New Christians by Tony Jones Part 8

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Sat, 16 May 2009 09:53:00 +0000

Ecclesiology vs. Styles of Church

When Jones speaks of the nature of emerging churches, he focuses mostly on their external characteristics, which he takes from Wiki-technology. Wikichurch is characterized by open access, trust, mutual accountability, agility, connectivity, and messiness.[1] There is no problem with this form of church, but does this form best help to proclaim the Gospel? It turns out that emergents are not interested in answering this question.

What is perhaps the greatest alert signal from a missional perspective comes from Dispatch 17: “Emergents start new churches to save their own faith, not necessarily as an outreach strategy.”[2] First of all, the idea of saving our own faith already reveals a lack of knowledge about true nature of faith as revealed in Scripture, which is not something that we should attempt to save. But more importantly, the starting of new churches is to be done through the leading of the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit sends the churches out (even to gather new ones) for the sake of outreach – that is, for the sake of God’s reconciling mission to the world. Here is where our actions say something about our belief: if we start a church for the sake of our own faith, then we are only interested in ourselves as a community, experiencing the benefits of Christ - or worse, the benefits of community which is only nominally tied to Christ. After all, what ties emerging churches together is not Christ but relationship.

At this point, I think it is important to register a warning about the idolatry of community from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In his book, Life Together, which was written as he lived in Christian community in a German underground seminary during the Nazi era, Bonhoeffer writes that “innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream.”[3] Yet this breaking down often leads to a necessary disillusionment and crisis which the community must weather if it is to prove to be founded upon Christ. “He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.”[4] Spiritual love between human beings comes from Christ and “proves itself in that everything it says and does commends Christ.”[5]

In other words, life together under the Word will remain sound and healthy only where it does not form itself into a movement, an order, a society, a collegium pietatis, but rather where it understands itself as being a part of the one, holy, catholic, Christian Church, where it shares actively and passively in the sufferings and struggles and promise of the whole Church.[6]

In the end, it is always important to remember that emerging churches belong to God, and not to Emergent Village or any emergent Christian who would seek to coordinate them. However, the fixation on emerging churches as a movement has inexorably led to a community life that too easily forgets its place “under the Word,” and that does not see its catholicity, its sharing in “the sufferings, struggles, and promise of the whole Church.” Instead, just as emergent theology has failed to proclaim the gospel, so too emergent communities that embody the emergent theology of Jones tend to fail at living out the gospel. Insofar as these communities choose to put their culture or their experience, their context, themselves on equal footing with Scripture, they violate one of the main principles of what it means to be missional – namely its necessarily explicit biblical character.

[1] Ibid., 182-192.

[2] Ibid., 197.

[3] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1954), 26.

[4] Ibid., 27.

[5] Ibid., 36.

[6] Ibid., 37.

Gospel and Culture: A Missional Response to The New Christians by Tony Jones Part 7

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Fri, 15 May 2009 12:53:00 +0000

Proclamation Impossible?

Yet we see why this can be the case when we read Dispatch 13: “Emergents believe that truth, like God, cannot be definitely articulated by finite human beings.”[5] While such a view can lend itself to the epistemic humility that Jones seeks out, it also truncates the Church’s ability to proclaim the Gospel as truth. Again, this is why proclamation is limited to ethics, and those aspects of Scripture, which speak directly to ethics: Jesus’ command to love our enemies as our neighbors, etc. However, this statement is theologically problematic because it denies the power of the incarnation. For in God’s act of becoming fully human (which Jones nominally ascribes to), we find the ground for our proclamation, so that God descends to human language in such a way that is sufficient and definitively articulated, but only from God’s side. Thus, epistemic humility is ensured but the apostolic witness of the church to proclaim the truth is preserved.

Jones argues that “the Christian gospel is always enculturated, always articulated by a certain people in a certain time and place. To try to freeze one particular articulation of the gospel, to make it timeless and universally applicable, actually does an injustice to the gospel. This goes to the very heart of what emergent is . . . ”[6] Jones despises evangelistic thinking that makes salvation depend on the activity of human beings, noting, “The biblical narrative seems to indicate that God acts independently of us.”[7] This insight would have been helpful when talking about the chasm. He claims: “Good theology begets beautiful Christianity. And so it follows that bad theology begets ugly Christianity.”[8] And so the practice of our theology says something about our theology. The medium is the message.

“The gospel is always more than we imagine, the Bible always has something for us greater than we expect, and Jesus is always beyond what we can conceive.”[9] The gospel says more about our limitations than it does about the gift of God’s love for us. Jones believes it functions the same as deconstruction, where everything “is turned toward opening, exposure, expansion, and complexification, toward releasing unheard of, undreamt of possibilities to come, toward cracking nutshells wherever they appear.”[10]

Theology is defined as “talk about the nexus of divine and human action. All human action is theological – our actions say something about what we believe about God. Theoloy “is local.” It is “conversational” with the past and present.[11] Finally, it is temporary.[12] Despite these characterizations, Jones is quick to defend against charges that they do not hold beliefs with conviction. Most importantly, however, Jones notes that “emergents are drawn to a gospel that meshes with our own experience of the world.”[13] There is no sense that the Gospel challenges our cultural enmeshment (our allegiance to culture), or calls us to repentance. Furthermore, all we are left with are descriptions about the nature of the Gospel, but no message of good news.

When speaking of the Trinity and Christology, these dogmas of the church only serve to illustrate Dispatch 14: “Emergents embrace paradox, especially those that are core components of the Christian story.”[14] That is to say that Jones does not find them interesting for how they help us proclaim the Gospel. Rather, he is more concerned with their paradoxical nature in themselves (three-in-one, fully human and divine), in the same way he was with his account of the whole Bible above.

[1] Ibid., 78.

[2] Ibid., 78.

[3] Ibid., 79.

[4] Ibid., 144.

[5] Ibid., 153.

[6] Ibid., 96.

[7] Ibid., 99.

[8] Ibid., 103.

[9] Ibid., 104.

[10] Ibid., 110.

[11] Ibid., 112-13.

[12] Ibid., 114.

[13] Ibid., 110.

[14] Ibid., 163.

Gospel and Culture: A Missional Response to The New Christians by Tony Jones Part 6

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Thu, 14 May 2009 17:42:00 +0000

Salvation and Sin

After criticizing the “Four Spiritual Laws” diagram of “God” on one side and “us” on the other, with a cross functioning as the bridge between them, Jones asks: “What kind of God can’t reach across a chasm? Chasms can’t stop God!”[1] Indeed they cannot, but only because of the cross. Paul can’t declare Romans 8:38-9 (“Nothing can separate us from God!”) without telling the whole story of Romans 1:18-3:20 (Sin), Romans 3:21-5:21 (Justification through faith in Christ’s death on the cross), Romans 6:1-8:39 (Sanctification and Life in the Spirit). Jones does not bother to tell us the whole story of salvation, which renders God, Jesus, truth and the gospel as containers of great potentiality without any defined historical actuality. Ironically, this metaphysical speculation is something which most of postmodern philosophers would reject.

Jones believes this still puts too much of an emphasis on sin, or at least the wrong definition of sin. He writes that while “many emergent Christians will concur that we live in a sinful world, a world of wars and famines and pogroms . . . they will be inclined to attribute this sin not to the distance between human beings and God but to the broken relationships that clutter our lives and our world.”[2] This answer, which again Jones is peddling as a description of what emergents are inclined to believe, begs the question: what broke our relationships, our lives and our world? Paul’s answer would be sin, which bids us to separate ourselves from God. However, it does not separate God from us, and this seems to be what Jones wants to say. He could say it if he was doing biblical exegesis. Instead, he chooses to narrow the definition of sin down to a relational problem within this world alone, which we can presumably know by experience apart from revelation. If this is the problem, then Jones must tailor the Gospel to serve as a solution to this problem:

Jesus’ message and ministry are ultimately about reconciliation: bringing those on the margins back into the center of God’s relationship with the world. And the crucifixion, when seen as an act of divine solidarity with the suffering and broken world, becomes the event of reconciliation. What happened, economically speaking – what was the cosmic transaction on Good Friday – is a subject to be bandied about in theological circles until the end of time. But when seen as an event of beauty and reconciliation, even in its tragedy, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ is the impetus for healed and healing relationships in a world that desperately needs them.[3]

The cross becomes Jesus’ act of divine solidarity with those who suffer the results of sin in this world. Jones decides to leave it at that, making a rather annoying claim that “what happened” is only for elite academics to discuss till the end of time without resolution. He is asserting that the whole story is not really important because it is not clear. Apparently Paul was an elite academic, because he certainly spends his time talking about what happened “economically speaking” in his letters to his churches. Furthermore, while I am not an expert in postmodern culture, I fail to see how this act of Jesus’ solidarity with those who suffer is supposed to give anyone hope. As Professor George Hunsinger would often say: “If God is in the pit with me, then we’re both in the pit. That’s not good news!” Indeed, it seems that the chasm has stopped God, all for the sake of divine solidarity with the humans. If Jones wants divine solidarity, all he needs is the incarnation. Divine solidarity at the cross does not create reconciliation between God and sinful human beings, nor does it create solidarity between human beings themselves. A more robust biblical theology of the cross could provide this, but Jones refuses to go to the text for it. Yet he has the audacity to claim later, in Dispatch 12, that emergents are marked by their embrace “of the whole Bible, the glory and the pathos.”[4] Reading the whole Bible for the sake of living in paradox, in tension, embracing tragedy, etc., is once again a completely different hermeneutical posture than one that seeks to read all of Scripture for the sake of being equipped to proclaim the Gospel to the world.

[1] Ibid., 78.

[2] Ibid., 78.

[3] Ibid., 79.

[4] Ibid., 144.

Gospel and Culture: A Missional Response to The New Christians by Tony Jones Part 5

GoobyNelly@gmail.com (Chris TerryNelson) — Thu, 14 May 2009 01:06:00 +0000

Defining Emergent

Jones believes in contextual limitation to the extent that he fails to give an account of catholicity of the Church. How are we all united in Christ? Jones favorably quotes Rowan Williams form the foreword to Mission Shaped Church, which gives account of the new forms of worship emerging in the Church of England:

If ‘church’ is what happens when people encounter the Risen Jesus and commit themselves to sustaining and deepening that encounter in their encounter with each other, there is plenty of theological room for diversity of rhythm and style, so long as we have ways of identifying the same living Christ at the heart of every expression of Christian life in common.[1]

Jones wants the large “theological room” that Williams advocates for, but he fails to provide Emergent with “ways of identifying the same living Christ” within this space. In other words, he fails to provide for the church’s catholicity. Jones then quotes Scot McKnight’s (possibly) strong apostolic definition of the Emerging Church movement: “Emerging churches are missional communities emerging in postmodern culture and consisting of followers of Jesus seeking to be faithful to the orthodox Christian faith in their place and time.”[2]

However, Jones seems unsatisfied with McKnight’s definition, based on his comments in the next paragraph:

In the end, what makes what makes the emergents difficult to define is the relational nature of the movement. Whereas traditional groupings of Christians are either bounded sets (for example, Roman Catholicism or Presbyterianism – you know whether you’re in or out based on membership) or centered sets (for example, evangelicalism, which centers on certain core beliefs), emergent Christians do not have membership or doctrine to hold them together. The glue is relationship. That makes it difficult to put one’s finger on just what emergent is; to the question “What do you all hold in common?” the answer is most likely “We’re friends.”[3]

This is very circular: “We are a network of friends who hold friendship in common.” To be fair, Jones, like many emergents, has picked up on the fact that many go to church and claim to love God, but fail to love their neighbors inside and outside their church buildings. We should not disparage this emphasis on relationship. But Jones sees this turn to relationship as an alternative (and even mutually exclusive with) doctrine.

The pastor’s concentration on one aspect of Christianity – a doctrine that is ultimately accepted or rejected by the human intellect – is an articulation of modern Christianity, and it’s one that is clearly helpful to a lot of people. But many faithful followers of Christ are becoming more reticent to place so much reliance on the human intellect. It’s just failed us too many times.[4]

Instead, Jones advocates that orthodoxy depends on whether you live a life of reconciliation and friendship. In reality, what Jones is doing is jettisoning orthodoxy for orthopraxy – for the very postmodern reason that we alluded to earlier – that all that really ends up bringing our micro-narratives together is ethics or “right action.” However, another problem with Jones’ turn to community (“the collective subject”) is that it relies just as much on the human intellect. Jones tells us that the emphasis on “correct doctrine” is a case of Enlightenment thinking, which “vaunted reason and the life of the mind above all other aspects of human existence.” And so we live in a time where the pendulum is swinging the other way, such that “we’re witnessing a culture-wide renaissance in the life of the human spirit, a reembrace of emotions, experience, relationships, creativity, nature, and many other aspects of human being.”[5]

This renaissance is deeply reminiscent to the romanticism we accounted for earlier, and Jones’s embrace of emotions, experience, relationships, etc. is similar to Schleiermacher’s response to the intellectualism of Kantian Enlightenment thinking. This is why his particular theological moves are so attractive to Jones, despite his presumed ignorance that they were inaugurated by Schleiermacher in the first place. This then begs the question of whether emergent is really just a postmodern version of liberal theology.

[1] Ibid., 53.

[2] Ibid., 56, quoting Scot McKnight, “Bloglossary,” Jesus Creed, Nov. 1, 2006, http://www.jesuscreed.org/?p=1691.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 79.

[5] Ibid.