The Church’s Language

“The church exists for the world, but it renews its identity when it gathers for worship.  It speaks in the world, but it learns its ‘distinctive talk’ when its members come together around word and sacrament.  Worship is often misconceived as a series of special ceremonies which are intended for the edification of the individual believer.  Yet baptism is not an episode of private initiation but an action involving the entire church.  Confession is not a formula for personal remorse but a moment in the ongoing mutual admonition and absolution of the brothers and sisters.  Eucharist is not a ritual following the sermon from which one may excuse oneself, but the community’s meal with the risen Lord.  Doxology is not a hymn to be sung but a life to be lived.  Preaching is not a virtuoso performance but the language of the church that accompanies the laborious formation of a new people.”

–Richard Lischer, A Theology of Preaching: The Dynamics of the Gospel (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2001), 78-79.

Moral Certitude, Martyrdom, and Hope

I sometimes wonder about the statements of conviction we make.  I’m firm believer in making very few commitments quickly while making damn sure you always keep the ones you do make.  But absolute statements, declarations, and manifestos are some of the most easy things to say.  They role right off the tongue and theological books are full of them.  For example, I offer this statement:

I would rather die than end up unfaithful to my wife; I would rather die than deny by a profligate life what I have taught in my books; I would rather die than deny or disown the gospel. (D. A. Carson, How Long, O Lord? Reflections on Suffering and Evil [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1990], 120).

Based on this, I think only two conclusions about D.A. Carson are possible.  Either he is far more mature as a Christian and a person than I shall likely ever be (which is certainly possible) or he is just making sentimental statements that make for well-selling evangelical devotional books (which, I think may also be possible, but I hope, less likely).

Now I’ll just be honest here, I would damn well rather cheat on my wife and deal with the horror that would unfold from that than get killed.  Certainly I know that wouldn’t be a moral act in any sense, but I know good and well that if someone put a gun to my head and presented me with that alternative that I’d most likely cave.  Maybe I’m underestimating the power of my own affections here, but I don’t think so.  I’d certainly rather live at variance from my writings than cease to live.  Disown the gospel?  I think on something that stark I might have a chance, but for all I know I’d end up going through a series of denials and recantations not unlike the Anabaptist martyr Balthasar Hubmaier.

Now certainly I agree that in all of the examples that Carson offers I agree that we should rather die than give in to such forms of sin and compromise.  And maybe Carson has had experiences in which these convictions have been tested.  I have not and as such I feel very uncomfortable making statements about myself with such boldness.  I fear such statements tends very quickly towards bravado and reflect a sort of fanciful self-construction.  Or at least I know that that’s what I’d be doing if I made those statements.

Do we not end up conjuring up notions of our own indefectability with statements like this?  We seem to implicitly claim to have come to some sort of indubitable self-knowledge and are certain that we are the kind of persons who above all would never do this.  Is not the message of the gospel often that we will indeed do exactly this?  Does not the message of gospel constantly remind us that we are the betrayers of the truth?  Statements of the sort that Carson makes seem to bear within themselves a grammar that is inappropriate to the whole discourse of Christian discipleship.  To say something like “I would rather die than deny the gospel” is often really saying “I am a person who cannot be shaken and I know it.”  Such statements sound far too bold for me.  “Even if everyone else deserts you, I will never desert you!”

I for one am terrified of death and can’t stand acute pain in the least. (People, if the persecution starts you all need to go into hiding immediately.  I am going to break fast if the torture starts.)  I have no confidence in my ability to become a faithful martyr of the Christian confession.  I cannot imagine writing down in a book that I would rather die than disown the gospel.  I do not find the resources of moral certainty in myself that Carson seems to find within (Let me emphasize, I hesitate to impute duplicity to him; I just know what those lines would mean if I were to write them).  If I were to make statements about my own moral resolve on the basis of the gospel I don’t know any other way to state them than in the interrogative:  “Can these dry bones live?”

I wonder if a truly biblical spirituality should perhaps avoid the indicative mood altogether?  The indicative makes statements about the reality of the present, but the faith of the resurrection is premised on the horror of the past and the promise of the future fracturing the givenness of the present and suffusing it with apocalyptic hope.  A faith that lives between promise and hope exists in the linguistic mode of supplication, of trembling, of desperate hope in the future of the one who has promised that his Life will be the end of all things.  We are called, not into moral certitude and self-confidence in our development as Christians, but rather to the wild patience of those who follow one who always remains beyond our grasp.

We must begin, not with an assertion of our own indefectability, however well-founded our confidence might be.  The mystery of salvation includes the claim that those closest to Jesus often refuse to be found alongside him in his sufferings.  We must begin, rather in the assertion of our radical defectability.  Only then can we embrace the hope that lies precisely outside of ourselves in Christ and the promise of his apocalypse.  “If we are faithless he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.”

More on Mark Driscoll

In light of all the discussion about my post on Mark Driscoll (and why his theological beliefs don’t really allow him to worship Jesus), allow me to commend to you a very interesting, and at times painful article by Lauren Sandler that was done on Driscoll and his Seattle-based evangelical empire in Salon magazine.  You may also be interested in her book, Righteous, which is a pretty interesting social ethnography of the contemporary Christian youth culture.

Ecclesiology & Ecumenism: Update

Here is a further-updated list of all my posts on ecclesiology and ecumenism:

• On Remaining Protestant
• Protestantism and Catholicity
• Apostolic Succession or Theological Continuity?
• The Persistence of Protestant Identity: More Harm than Good?
• Unity and the Papal Office: What Alternative is There?
• “One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church”: What does it really mean?
• The Reunited Church of the Future
• Rejecting Greener Pastures: Ephriam Radner
• Hierarchy and Maturity
• The End of Protestantism?
• Ecclesiality, Holy Orders, and the Eucharist
• “Where two or three are gathered”: A criterion for ecclesiality?
• The Viability of Protestant Churches: Confusion
• An Ecclesiology of Reform?
• We are the Church!
• Reformation Day: Thrown ever back upon grace
• Protestantism as Exile or Emigration?
• Some Theses for Ecumenically-Minded Protestants
• The “Great Tradition” of the Church
• Christocentricism and Catholicism
• The Anabaptist Option: The Only Consistent Alternative to Catholicism?
• To be steeped in history is to be…Anabaptist?
• Versions of Catholicity
• Constantinianism and Ecumenism
• Questions for Catholics
• Non-Episcopal Ministries
• Diverse Polities in Unity?
• A Church Without Theory?
• Against Confessional Diversity
• The Precarious Nature of Christian (dis)Identity
• Why are you where you are?
• The Silliness of Ecumenism in the Global North
• Radical Ecumenism
• The Pernicious Domination of Choice
• Does Protestantism Exist?
• The Protestant Identity Crisis
• Protestants and Their Views of Catholics
• Catholicity and Eschatology
• Authority, Reality, and Vulnerability
• The Catholic Luther

The One Movie Meme

Leave it to Ben to start another one of these things.  Oh well, lets have fun with it.

1. One movie that made you laugh
Drowning Mona

2. One movie that made you cry
Pan’s Labyrinth

3. One movie you loved when you were a child
The Karate Kid

4. One movie you’ve seen more than once
The Devil’s Advocate

5. One movie you loved, but were embarrassed to admit it
Bridget Jones’s Diary

6. One movie you hated
Trade

7. One movie that scared you
E.T.

8. One movie that bored you
Gerry

9. One movie that made you happy
The Big Lebowski

10. One movie that made you miserable
The Cider House Rules

11. One movie you weren’t brave enough to see
The Passion of the Christ

12. One movie character you’ve fallen in love with
Dorothy Boyd (Renée Zellweger in Jerry Maguire)

13. The last movie you saw
Walk Hard (There’s a bit of shame in admitting that one)

14. The next movie you hope to see
Pineapple Express

15. Now tag five people: David, Adam, Eric, Christian, and David.

Jesus for President?

Don’t get me wrong, I think Shane Caliborne is probably a really, really great guy with a lot of good stuff to say.  Even though he sports dreds and probably eats far less meat than I do, I know we have a very great deal in common.  Not the least of which are things like living in New Monastic communities and wanting to learn how to work for a radically Christian political ethic in the context of late modern capitalism, especially in its American incarnation. 

That said, I can’t get over feeling a bit troubled by his latest book, Jesus for President.  I realize (of course) that this title is designed to shock American evangelicals into thinking about the Lordship of Christ in political terms; something that is desperately needed ineed.  However I remain sceptical of using the rubrics and nomenclature of American poltitical discourse to discuss the nature of the Lordship of Christ.  If there is one thing that Jesus needs, it sure as hell isn’t my vote.  The Lordship of Christ nothing if not fundamentally undemocratic.  I realize of course that Claiborne and his compatriots are not trying to draw these analogies, but I just fear that this kind of imprecision and sensationalistic rhetoric may only serve to polarize and piss off rather than convict and persuade (not that I am opposed to pissing people off of course!).  I fear also that this book, the stated purpose of which is to “provoke the Christian political imagination” will ultimately fail to make the kind of meta-level political and theological claims that are necessary to truly fostering a theopolitical imagination.  In other words, what we need to do as Christians is to challenge the very foundations of the working political assumptions in our world.  I’m just not quite sure if this book does that.

Against a Pneumatology of the Gaps

Most of the church throughout the world has just finished the celebration of the day of Pentecost (Assuming, of course that we all did celebrate Pentecost — for those of you that observed Mother’s Day instead, please remember that your salvation is in doubt.)  In light of this celebration, and throughout my congregations’ liturgy, feast, and fellowship for this holy day, I found myself reflecting on the work of the Spirit in the economy of salvation.  Part of our gathered worship involved several people in the congregation reading stories of the Spirit’s work in the world.  Stories included tales of missionaries to aboriginal tribes, the life story of a Muslim man-turned violently persecuted Christian evangelist, and an amazing account of the lives of various people on different sides of the violent conflict in Northern Ireland who were reconciled and became sources of Christian hope and presence to one another (across Catholic-Protestant lines) in situations of extremee violence and tragedy.

What struck me throughout the liturgy and in reflection on my own life and the stories that were brought involved the shape of how we are to understand the Spirit’s work in the economy of salvation.  I found my thoughts constantly referring back to the stories of former radical IRA members and former British soldiers embracing one another and becoming networks of solidarity across lines that were once drawn in blood.  The thought that continued to play in my mind throughout the day of Pentecost was that these things are not unlikely, these things are impossible.  It simply is not possible, under the tyranny of human history that the people in these stories could have come to see themselves as siblings in the same divine family.  The reconciliation of enemies is something that is simply not possible in this world.  Jew and Gentile sitting at table together as full members of one another in the people of God was not just unlikely, it was impossible.  And yet, that is what the church became when the Spirit was poured out of the bosom of the Father.

The point of all this is to help us give praise to the Spirit in a manner that is fitting.  Too often I fear that the Spirit functions in much the same way as Bonhoeffer’s rightly critiqued God of the gaps.  The deus ex machina, the prop-god wheeled out onto the stage of Greek tragedy to give closure to the narrative will forever be the enemy of the Christian doctrine of God.  With Bonhoeffer, we must look, not to some gap, some aspect of our experience which we cannot assimilate and then posit God as the entity to fill that gap; rather we must look for God at the center, in the fullness of the reality of life.  The Spirit, however is almost always looked at as one who fills the gaps.  We only invoke or assume the Spirit’s work when we have run out of natural explanations for how something unlikely happened.  The Spirit is the final piece in an unlikely puzzle.  This mindset lands us in the perilous orbit of idolatry.

The Spirit does not complete the picture, the Spirit is not the final building block.  There can be no Spirit of the gaps any more than a God of the gaps.  For it is the work of the Spirit, not to make really, really difficult things work out, but rather the make the impossible into reality.  The work of the Spirit does not complete, integrate, or solidify any human project.  The work of the Spirit is that of disintegration and receation.  The Spirit renders the impossibilities, not as hopes or possibilities, but as realities to be experienced in Christ.  It is impossible that people bred to despise one another for hundreds of years should become brothers.  It is impossible that people should speak to foreigners in their own languages that they have never heard before.  It is impossible that the blind should be made to see.  It is impossible that a dead man should live again. 

And yet this is precisely what Pentecost proclaims: the impossible has happened!  The inconceivable has come among us!  Unassimilatable newness has shattered the tyranny of the possible in the glory of the Spirit!  For the people of the Spirit all methods of calculation, control, and manipulation are to be rejected, not because such forms of power are too powerful, but rather because they are too weak.  In the luminosity of the Spirit, in which impossibilities become glorious, mysterious realities, the machinations of power and fear are consumed.  The ardor of God’s omnipotent love, poured out into the world in the form of God’s own self, God’s own Spirit has changed everything.  For the mission of the Spirit is to actualize the reality of the resurrection in all things.  And we have confidence that the mission of the Spirit will not be in vain.  The tongues of fire testify to this.  And no less strongly does the fire of infinite love which the Spirit kindles throughout the world.  The love which seats Jews with Gentiles.  The love which makes Loyalists and Republicans into brothers and sisters.  The fire of love has indeed been kindled and they will not cease until all the world has been consumed by them.  Veni Sancte Spiritus!

The Lamb and the Meaning of History

“‘The lamb that was slain is worthy to receive power!’  John is here saying, not as an inscrutable paradox but as a meaningful affirmation, that the cross and not the sword, suffering and not brute power determines the meaning of history.  The key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience ([Rev.] 13:10).  The triumph of the right is assured not by the might that comes to the aid of the right, which is of course the justification of the use of violence and other kinds of power in human conflict.  The triumph of the right, although it is assured, is sure because of the power of the resurrection and not because of any calculation of causes and effects, not because of the inherently greater strength of the good guys.  The relationship between the obedience of God’s people and the triumph of God’s cause is not a relationship of cause and effect, but one of cross and resurrection.”

–John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster, 2nd Ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 232.

The Kenotic Subject

“The kenosis of God creates the possibility of a human subject very different from the consumer self.  The absolute uniqueness of Christ cannot be subsumed under any more general categories of being.  If God is God, then God must always be beyond our comprehension: si comprehendis non est Deus.  We are, nevertheless, invited to participate in the Trinitarian life through Christ and the work of the Spirit.  But in order to do so, we cannot grasp, we can only submit.  We cannot stand back from the world and survey it; we must simply take our role in the drama that God is staging and give ourselves to it.”

–William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 81.

Problematic Words

There are certain key buzz words among evangelicals, particualrly emergey-types that literally make me want to perpetrate extreme violence on anyone I hear saying them.  And sadly, every now and then I find some of them escaping my own lips.  So, if you find me too harsh, just realize that much of what I am about to say is as much self-loathing as others-loathing.

So, here are quintessential evangelical phrases that if you say around me may very well result me suddenly unleashing all my wrath upon your kneecaps:

“I’m just looking for someone to ‘do life’ with me.”

“I’m searching for something real, you know, something raw, authentic, you know?”

“What we really need is authentic community.”

“We need to strive to be more intentionally missional.”

“We’re not Christians, we’re Jesus-followers!”

“Jesus was Green!”

“Everything must change.”

“We totally need to hear each other’s stories…like I need to hear your story and you need to hear my story.  We need to just hear, you know?  Each other’s stories.”

“We’re all about radical discipleship.”

“Our home communities are where the church really happens.”

What else is there?  Come on folks, lets do life and be authentic together as we think of more annoying emergentisms!

Obession over Speed

“We are a nation obsessed.  American culture is nothing more than a pastiche of fixations.  We are obsessed with health.  We are obsessed with pleasure.  We are obsessed with speed.  We are obsessed with efficiency.  In simplest terms, we are obsessed by the desire to accelerate every element of our existence in a futile attempt to expierience as much of life as we can in the shortest possible time.  We have all entered a a race to devour the largest volume of gratification before it kills us.”

–Chuck Klosterman, Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas (New York: Scribner, 2006), 58.

Who Can Mark Driscoll Worship?

I really shouldn’t have expected anything distinctively sane from a magazine called ‘Relevant‘.  That was a huge mistake, and one that I can assure my faithful readership I will never make again.  The magazine as a whole is committed to pedantically insisting that Christians can, pretty much be cool too, if they just try hard enough.  Personally, I find this idea completely insane.  Out of all the people I’ve ever met I have yet to meet someone who is clearly a Christian who is able to fill out all the aspects of coolness that are demanded by our culture.  But I digress.  My point in all this was merely thatI shuld have expected something as stupid, insipid, and sophomoric as this from Relevant Magazine.

In a multiple-person interview that origninally ran in early 2007, Relevant Magazine asked seven questions to various evangelical church leaders about what the most important challenges to the evangelical churches in a America are at this time in history.  The answers vary from the utterly boring, to the sadly uniformed, to the sort of ok, to the downright ridiculous.  Mark Driscoll’s answers however, were in a class of their own.  In response to the question “What do you see as the greatest challenge for young Christians in the next 10 years?” he responded:

There is a strong drift toward the hard theological left. Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a pride fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up. I fear some are becoming more cultural than Christian, and without a big Jesus who has authority and hates sin as revealed in the Bible, we will have less and less Christians, and more and more confused, spiritually self-righteous blogger critics of Christianity. [Italics added]

I am of course most interested in Driscoll’s comment that he is unable to worship someone he can beat up.  Strangely enough this would seem that he is unable to worship Jesus.  As John Howard Yoder pointed out in reflection on John 1, the proclamation that the Word became flesh “does not simply mean that God became tangible.  It means he became weak, undignified, vulnerable.  The power behind the creation came among us in such a way that we can hurt him.”  The whole reality of Jesus is as one who makes himself vulnerable, who puts himself at the mercy of the forces of sin and death that we have unleashed upon the world.  Driscoll is almost certainly right, he could indeed beat up Jesus, and if he saw him, I’m afraid he probably would!

The real Jesus, the Jesus who makes himself vulnerable, thereby revealing the nature and reality of God from all eternity as love is not nearly exciting enough for Driscoll.  His Jesus is a kaleidoscopic amalgamation of Chuck Norris, Bruce Willis, and a cadre of mixed martial-arts welterweight champions.  If Jesus is not an ass-kicking man’s man who changes his own oil, wins bar fights, and ropes cattle, he certainly is not worthy of Driscoll’s worship.

What is ultimately so revealing about this whole statement is not so much that is shows clearly that Mark Driscoll is insanely insecure about his own male identity – though it certainly shows that with sublime clarity.  What is revealing about this quote is how it shows the bombastically western notion of masculinity that defines large swaths of evangelicalism.  For Driscoll anything less than the assertion that God himself is a gun-slinging son of a bitch makes one into a wuss who deserves nothing more than ridicule.  Driscoll lives in a world of binary oppositions.  You either have to be a cage fighter ready to beat the shit out of anyone who so much as glances at your girlfriend, or you are a pot-smoking hipster pinko who does nothing but surf the net on a Mac all day and drink organic microbrews.

It’s a wonderfully simple world of black and white simplicity that Driscoll lives in.  And what makes it really great is that he gets to live at the very tip top of this world’s power structure (maybe just below his Jesus character, pictured to the left).  He is the last of the true Christians.  In a world of effeminate losers toting Derrida around in their beer-stained man purses, Driscoll is standing in the gap, fighting for truth, justice, and of course, the American way.  It’s a world where everything is stark, everything is simple and God is remade comfortably in Mark Driscoll’s masculine image.  Wallowing in his self-aggrandizement, Driscoll makes certain to let everyone know that he is one of the 25 most powerful people in Seattle according to Seattle Magazine (as advertised on the site for Driscoll’s new book).  Just about everything he says or does seems like a plea: “Goddammit, I’m a man!  Am too!”

What makes the world of Mark Driscoll so fascinating is not just that it insane (which it is), or that is so obviously the product of western culture rather than the Bible or the Christian tradition (which is clear).  What is interesting about it is how utterly obvious it is that this world is a complete fabrication.  I cannot imagine anyone looking for a moment at the stuff that Mark Driscoll spouts and not immediately realizing that this guy is obviously freaked out by the world and is doing everything that he can to construct an alternative reality for himself and other like-minded people to live in.  In Mark Driscoll’s world Jesus actually did come to kick the Romans’ ass (or we wish he had) and he calls us to be iron-pumping, football heroes who slam nerds into lockers and date the hottest girl on the cheerleading squad (without having premarital sex of course).

In other words, Mark Driscoll is Wally Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver.  Or, more accuarately, he is Wally after his freshman year of college.  He’s wised up enough to know that he better be able to beat people up, and force his point in order to keep himself above the morass of pagan decadence in this evil world, but hasn’t yet awoken to the fact that his world, which he thinks is divinely ordained, is in fact, a culturally produced schizophrenia.  It is the death throws of a handfull of white western males who are consumed with the terror of the knowledge deep down that they are no longer in control of American culture and history.  And this is precisely why Mark Driscoll is pathetic.  In spite of all his bombast and goofy machismo, he is, in the last analysis a very sad, lonely person.  That’s how you get when you have to construct your whole world.  The very things that could bring him liberation are the very things he sneers at.  Living out of control, embracing vulnerability, allowing oneself to be put into question, these are the very things that he cannot stomach.  They are far too effeminate and girly for a man like him to countenance.  They are marks of the hippie Jesus that Driscoll could never worship.  However they are the very shape of the salvation offered in crucified, murdered Jesus.  Driscoll is rejecting the very things that could set him free in his attempt to make Christianity distinctive.

His loss.