I think I have finally nailed what my problem is. It’s that i’m just not an Evangelical. I was for the better part of my Christ following life very integrated and involved at a local church associated with the Evangelical Free Church. Which is no where near free of Evangelical’s humorously.

On the of tenants of the Evangelical and the Free church is that they celebrate diversity of theological thought and faith tradition except where it conflicts with a handful of their statements of faith. Which as it turns out appear general but really aren’t.

The latter 5 years of my involvement were more bore more frustration than fruit which ended with me leaving to join another smaller faith community.

We rarely have the guts to admit it, but our most cutting critics often hold up a mirror into which we would do well to look.  The picture at right, which many will find highly offensive, is just such a mirror.  It reads:

CHRISTIANITY:  The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a woman who was created from a man’s rib was convinced by a talking snake to eat an apple from a magical tree . . . yeah, that makes perfect sense.

That summary makes some Christians throw up and others laugh hysterically.  What I wish it would make more of us do, is think –really think– about the stuff we say.  The harsh truth is that Christians make an awful lot of claims that sound nonsensical…and that’s because a lot of them are.  I don’t mean this in a “scandal of the cross” kind of way either.  While it will always be true that the non-negotiable claim of Christianity that Jesus died and rose again from the dead, is laughable to many (just as it was in the first century when the Apostles proclaimed it), it’s also true that the church has created many “barriers to entry ” (to borrow a business phrase) that were never demanded by Jesus or the Apostles (for reference, read the “Statement of Faith” of any Evangelical church).  As I have said before, we must face the fact that Jesus cares a whole lot about who we drive from the faith.

I care, paradoxically, because I want people to meet Jesus.  You may have noticed that the title of this post can have at least two meanings…on one hand, some things I say are heresy to the conventional Evangelical, but on the other hand, some of the “heresies” I have proposed, come precisely from my “evangelical” desire to see people acknowledge King Jesus (I use this word because it’s been applied to me; I do not acknowledge that my proposals are heresy).

Far too much of what the church teaches, has to do with making sure people think the right thoughts about God.  This is not what Jesus preached…he invited people to follow him; he commanded his apostles to make disciples; he said “come unto me all you who are weary” (Matt. 11:28) and “he comes to me I will not cast out.” (John 6:37)  We who name Jesus’ name, need to rediscover the fact that Jesus cares more about people seeking him, than he does about people thinking the right stuff about him.  I’ll believe we are doing that when our creeds are replaced by our communities.  We still won’t make sense, but our foolishness will be that of Jesus rather than that of our own arrogant intellects.

For those who have not been with this blog for years, or to save others from too many wild goose chases, I’m going to do a series summing up some of the positions I’ve come to and discussed in the now-three-years since I began Nailing it to the Door.  These are not settled positions.  I’ve learned a lot in dialog with many of you, and I do not expect this process to stop.  This series represents where I am today.

I am not proposing a new creed or statement of faith.  I have written before that I think the very act of defining a creed is an error on at least two fronts: first in that creeds tend to reduce faithfulness to a collection of intellectual propositions to which one must assent, and second that all-too-often the creed is used primarily to exclude dissenters from fellowship or service.

If there is a single phrase that would capture many of the conclusions to which I have come over the past few years, it would be this:

None of us knows as much as we think we do, about God or about ourselves.

By this I mean that we need to release many long-held dogmas from the death-grip in which they’ve been held.  I find it highly paradoxical that the school of Christian thought which shouts the loudest (at least to my ears) about God’s greatness and our inadequacy is the very school which insists on some of the most rigid doctrines about God and us (I refer, of course, to Calvinism).  To me, an understanding of God’s bigness and my smallness requires me to hold those things I *do* think I believe with a much gentler grip, recognizing that where God is concerned, none of us really “gets it.”  Many are fond of quoting the maxim “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”  I agree.  Much of what I have written and will continue to write, is to advocate for the proposition that there are very … very … few essentials.

A great deal, though not all, of my departure from classic Christian (particularly Evangelical) thinking can be summed up in the mnemonic ROCK.  Each of the following sections will be elaborated in its own post in the coming days…I’m not defending the theses here, I’m just enumerating them.  The four “ROCK” concepts are:

Rightly Dividing the Word:

Applying the term “The Word of God” to the Bible is erroneous and unsupported by the Biblical text.  The Bible contains words of God to humanity, other words of humans to God, and a great deal of narrative about God’s interaction with humanity.  Responsible exegesis involves (in part) discerning which is which, and then giving due primacy in doctrine to that subset of the text which is actually God’s words.  It also involves reexamining–and appropriately softening, correcting, or dismissing–any teaching which is based on extracontextual or extrabiblical sources…including a great many dogmas of the “church fathers.”  Rightly divided, the Bible leaves a great many questions that later theologians have presumed to answer.  We need to gain the humility to accept that if the Bible does not answer a question, no matter how reasonable or valid that question might seem to us, the answer is not necessary to faithful obedience to Jesus.

Open View of God:

Seriously interacting with Biblical accounts of God’s dealing with humans requires us to confront a picture of God dynamically interacting with his creation.  While the Calvinist view maintains God has deterministically ordained all things, good and evil; and while Arminianism suggests God has granted humans free will to accept or reject him, but nevertheless he knows what each of us is going to do (which, I argue, is merely determinism behind a veneer of freedom as only what is determined can be foreknown); the Bible portrays a God who actually changes his mind and his actions in interaction with people.  Reconciling these apparent contradictions (and the existence of evil) requires significant mental gymnastics for both Calvinists and Arminians.  On the other hand, accepting that God well and truly delegated some choices to humans (and other creatures), and knows the outcomes instantly when they happen but not before (“omniscience” being the knowledge of all that is knowable…that is, all that is), greatly simplifies the question of human accountability and the problem of the existence of evil, all the while being far more faithful to the textual narrative, without in the slightest denying or denigrating God’s sovereignty or power.  The perspective that God has left some choices to us that might genuinely go more than one possible way, is commonly called the Open View of God, or Open Theism.

Christus Victor:

Classic theory of the work of Jesus on the cross focuses primarily on the concept of Jesus’ death paying the penalty required by God for humanity’s sin.  This doctrinal system is commonly known as “Penal-Substitutionary Atonement” (PSA).  PSA is largely based upon an erroneous interpretation of the Jewish sacrificial system, and desperately anti-contextual reading of the Epistles, in particular Romans.

A more Biblical understanding centers the work of Jesus in his resurrection, not his death, and recognizes that both are the lynchpin of Jesus’ battle with Satan and the powers that have aligned themselves against God. This perspective recognizes that sin is not merely the failings of humans, but the corruption of a whole swath of creation (maybe all of it) by God’s enemies, the Principalities and Powers of which the New Testament writers spoke.  Jesus’ death and (more especially) resurrection were key battles in that war, in which we are now engaged with God in fighting to take back territory and citizens occupied and enslaved by the enemy (Christus Victor = “Christ the victor”).  Paradoxically, as the weapon of Jesus’ victory was to take on death and defeat it by rising anew, so our greatest weapon is to take on hatred and defeat it with his love, for our weapons are not carnal.

Kingdom of Jesus Christ:

The salvation of Jesus is not simply a future escape from earth to heaven, but rather his naturalizing us into citizenship in his kingdom (the new creation) here and now.  As God breathed into Adam the breath of life in the first creation, so Jesus breathes into his disciples the Breath (Spirit) of new life in the new creation.  With our new citizenship we are now aliens in this present enslaved world, and we (individually as citizens, and collectively as embassies or outposts of the kingdom) are called to work as reconciling ambassadors and members of a divine resistance, participating with Christ to take back his territory and his people from the slavery under which they now live.  Our goal is not to get people “believing” in a “religion;” it’s to help people to recognize who is their true king–to bow the knee to Jesus as Lord now, and then to join us as citizens of Jesus’ growing kingdom.

There are other issues, in addition to ROCK, that I will revisit in this series, among them:

• Neither Jesus nor the apostles used the threat of hell in their evangelism of the “unsaved.”  If they didn’t need it, we don’t either.  In fact, a Jesus perspective on hell is more of a warning to those who claim to be his, but who are driving others away from him with their “religion.”
• Jesus spent his entire ministry trying to convince the Apostles that “greatness” and authority and power were not his way.  Whether or not the Apostles ever got the message, the church that followed them clearly did not, as evidenced by the hierarchical patterns of authority that were instituted by at least the second or third century A.D.  and remain to this day.
• The doctrine of the Trinity, insisted as “orthodox” by the vast majority of Christians, is at best an oversimplification of concepts that the Biblical texts leave vastly more ambiguous.  Insistence on the fourth-century formulations of Christ and the Holy Spirit, though they were done (in part, at least) to counter genuine error, erred themselves in going far “beyond what is written” in Scripture itself.  (This is an inflammatory claim; I encourage the reader to see this post on Christology and this on the Holy Spirit before lighting the flames on my stake).

As I visit these issues over the next few weeks, I will probably come back and update this post with links to the various detailed articles, so that this document can become somewhat of an index to my credo (non credo?).  I look forward to your challenges!

A number of recent discussions I’ve had with Kurt Willems and Carson T. Clark have revolved in one way or another around questions of ecclesiology and sacraments.  Today I’m taking a look at one of the most universally-acknowledged sacraments across Christendom:  The Lord’s Supper, otherwise known in some circles as “the Eucharist” and in others simply as “Communion.”

Churches vary widely in just how they practice the ritual meal of bread and wine, instituted (so we say) with Jesus’ repurposing of elements of the Passover meal on the night before he was crucified.  But while they disagree (sometimes to the point of mutual exclusion) over the ritual details, over whether the practice includes an element of the miraculous or merely material symbols of transcendent truths, and even over who is authorized to lead or conduct the ritual itself…despite all these disagreements, every church I know, in its own way, has made of “the Lord’s Supper” a highly ceremonial practice, conducted in the context of a worship event, usually in a place set aside for such events.

Returning, as I contend we always ought, to the original words of Jesus, it seems to me that perhaps we’ve missed something vital here.  I grant as previously stated, that Jesus’ original institution of what we now call “The Lord’s Suppper” was in the context of another highly-ritualized meal, the Jewish Passover.  It is not, therefore, as though Jesus was unfamiliar with, or hostile to, prescribed religious practice.  Jesus certainly repurposed the broken bread to symbolize his body, and the cup of wine to represent his shed blood.  Only Luke, and later Paul in 1 Corinthians, actually tell us that Jesus also told his disciples they should share the bread and the cup “in remembrance of me” see Luke 22:14-20 and 1 Cor. 11:23-26 (note that this is a rare, if not the only, instance where Paul says what he’s relating is something he directly “received from the Lord”).  And it is Paul’s account in which we learn that Jesus told the disciples to remember him in the bread and the cup “as often as you drink it.”

This is not enough upon which to hang a doctrine or destroy somebody else’s fondly-held belief.  But I wonder if Paul had an insight we have lost in our ritual.  Rather than creating a sacred, symbolic (or miraculous) meal to be received in the context of a sacrament, I wonder if in fact Jesus’ intention was to take ordinary staples of life and imbue them with the sacred memory of himself…not so we would have a monthly, or quarterly, or weekly ritual “in a church,” but so that as we break bread and drink wine together in loving fellowship, the memory of Christ is front-and-center.

This is certainly consistent with the way God instituted the teaching of his law even from old:  to talk of it “when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (Deut. 6:4-8).  God’s intention was that there be no boundary between the sacred and the profane, but that every activity in which his people engage, be an opportunity to learn and remember his way.

It’s also consistent with the character of Jesus.  Though as I mentioned above, he was no stranger to ritual, Jesus was also the one who got in trouble–along with his disciples–for not keeping the Sabbath in the rigidly-prescribed manner of the Pharisees (Mark 2:23-27 and parallels).  More importantly, though, we learn in Luke 24:35 (the two disciples who met Jesus on the road to Emmaus) that Jesus was “known to them in the breaking of the bread” (Luke 24:35).   Might we, by sacramentalizing the “breaking of the bread,” have robbed ourselves of the opportunity to know Jesus each time we sit at the table?

C.S. Lewis said something similar about wine in his essay “Miracles,” which is part of a collection entitled “God in the Dock.”  Lewis was talking about the miracle in which Jesus turned water into wine at Cana, and suggested we only really recognize the miracle when “if whenever we see a vineyard or drink a glass of wine we remember that here works He who sat at the wedding party in Cana.”  I find this strangely compelling, particularly if taken together with Jesus’ own words in Mark 14:25 and parallels:  “Truly, I say to you, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.”  Jesus, it seems to me, was inviting us to remember him, not only in a formalized ritual, but every time we lift a glass of wine.

So what does this mean and why do I care?  I believe that by ritualizing the Lord’s Supper, we may be missing the presence of Jesus in the everyday.  Our ceremony has created–or at least heightened–a false dichotomy between the “sacred” and the “profane.”  Jesus, in contrast, calls us (as God has since the Old Testament) to see the sacred in all of life…in particular the life of followers of Jesus in community–communion–with each other. I do not (necessarily) advocate the abandonment of the sacramental ritual, for it has brought blessing and comfort to many for many years.  But however necessary–or at least appropriate–our ritual is, it is not enough.

Buddhists have a concept they call “mindfulness.”  I’m no expert, but the best I understand, it involves disciplining oneself to be conscious of the present moment and all that it contains.  I suggest we consider a different, perhaps more timeless form of mindfulness, in which we recognize Jesus every time we break bread and look to his coming every time we share wine.

In remembrance … till he comes!

Several years ago I made an observation which led to a question: “Why don’t Christians stand out in culture?”

My observation was that so many Christians, particularly in the US, blend in with everyone else. With that observation in mind Matthew 7:13-14 when Jesus states that “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few,” strikes a chord with me.

We talk a lot about the loving character of Jesus, and well we might.  But despite the popularity in some circles of pointing out God’s wrath, we rarely seem to notice one thing that really seems to have pissed Jesus off.  We find the same language in all three synoptic gospels, in Matt. 18:6-7, Mark 9:42, and Luke 17:1-2.  Jesus says that someone who causes “one of these little ones who are faithful to me” to stumble, would be better off if a millstone were tied around his neck and he were tossed into the sea.  Or to put a finer point on it, if you drive others away from Jesus, you’re better off drowned.

Obligatory disclaimer:  In this current whacko-filled environment I find it necessary to point out that Jesus never told anybody to actually perform the millstone remedy, and neither do I.  It’s what we call a figure of speech, and in no way should be taken as an incitement to actual drownings.

Disclaimer aside, I think it’s worth taking a good hard look at what could possibly have gotten Jesus so riled up that a guy who was normally all about self-sacrifice and loving service would–even in hyperbole–turn to such violent language.  Interestingly it’s not due to the basic depravity of man so pivotal to Calvinist theology.  Rather, it’s to those who create the conditions that drive others–Matthew and Mark both say others who already have placed their faith in Jesus–to turn from him.