Ancient Evangelical Future

How the Prayers of Others Help the Worship-Challenged

2011-07-12T13:45:00.005-05:00

Interesting reflection from Stanley Hauerwas:

The worship of God does not come naturally to me, as it seems to for some. I live most of my life as if God does not exist. Yet I know I would not have survived without the prayers of friends who have learned to pray the prayers of the church. My life depends on learning to worship God with those who have made it possible for me to go on. Through worship, the world learns the truth that is required for our being truthful about ourselves and one another.

Two key themes emerge in that paragraph:

1. For many of us not so gifted, the prayers of others are necessary to sustain and shape our own prayers.

2. Worship is about truth (see John 4:23-24). In worship we encounter the one who is the Truth, we hear both the good news and the bad news about our own condition, and we learn to be truthful by proclaiming the truth.

In the end, it is because of the rough confrontation with the truth that we know we need the prayers of others.

The quotation is from Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2010), p. 159.

An Easter Prayer from Mark Galli

2011-04-29T10:10:00.003-05:00

Every year, my Christianity Today colleague Mark Galli composes an Easter prayer which he offers as family and friends gather for his family's Easter dinner. On Monday, he shared this with the CT staff, and with his permission, I'd like to share it with you before this Easter Week is over.

Easter Prayer 2011

O Risen Lord, be our resurrection and life.

Be the resurrection and the life for us and all whom you have made.

Be the resurrection and the life for those caught in the grip of sin and addiction.

Be the resurrection and the life for those who feel forsaken.

Be the resurrection and the life for those who live as if you do not.

Be the resurrection and the life for those who do not believe they need resurrection and life.

Be the resurrection and the life in churches that believe they are dying, and in successful churches who don’t know they are dead.

Be the resurrection and the life in us who know the good but fail to do it, who have not been judged but still judge, who know love but still live for self, who know hope but succumb to despair.

Be the resurrection and the life for those dying of malnutrition and hunger.

Be the resurrection and life for those imprisoned unjustly and those imprisoned justly.

Be the resurrection and life for those who live under regimes that seek to crush all who proclaim resurrection and life.

Be the resurrection and the life for those in the throes of sickness that leads to death.

Be the resurrection and the life in families where the weak are maltreated by the strong.

Be the resurrection and the life in marriages that are disintegrating.

Be the resurrection and the life for women trafficked and enslaved by the forces of wickedness.

Be the resurrection and the life for those whose lives are snuffed out in the womb.

Be the resurrection and the life for anyone anywhere who knows suffering and death in any form, and for Creation itself, which groans in travail.

Be the resurrection and life in the life we share and the fellowship we enjoy, that filled anew with the wonder of your love and the power of your grace, we may go forth to proclaim your resurrection life to a world in the grip of death and yet on the verge of redemption, a redemption promised by you and assured by what occurred on the first Easter morn.

Amen.

Although Mark wrote the prayer for use before a festival meal, it can easily be adapted for liturgical use.

Mark Galli is the author of Beyond Smells and Bells: The Wonder and Power of Christian Liturgy (Paraclete, 2008) and eight other books.

Video: Singing the Bible in Worship

2011-02-05T06:22:00.000-06:00

Every month, the editors of Christianity Today prepare a video introduction to our digital edition. The digital edition is a bonus feature available only to print subscribers, but the video introduction is always available on YouTube.

The March edition of CT features four articles on worship or worship music, so I decided to say a few words in this video about the relationship between the Bible and our singing.

.
Here's a fun fact that got edited out for length:

Almost 250 years after the publication of the Genevan Psalter, when John Newton and his friend William Cowper were writing hymns like "Amazing Grace" and "There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood," they had to avoid singing these hymns in the Sunday morning service. That would have attracted negative attention from the church authorities, so these hymns were restricted to the less formal Sunday evening service.

Mavis Staples: The Devil Doesn't Have Any Music

2010-12-17T12:29:00.001-06:00

“Why should the devil have all the good tunes?” Gospel and R&B legend Mavis Staples plays off that often (mis)quoted, often (mis)attributed line in a profile/interview slated for the February issue of Christianity Today.

“The Devil doesn’t have any music,” Staples says flatly. “Ever since we were young kids, we sang songs that we thought of as positive music. Some of them were gospel songs. And some of them were message songs like “Long Walk to D.C.” or “For What It’s Worth,” songs that reflected the times we lived in. They were all true songs, you know. We just sang songs about the truth. And it seemed like people always wanted to hear those songs.”

The profile, by veteran music critic Andy Whitman, is worth reading. But you'll have to wait until February. In the mean time, think about her comments. Hyperbolic or not, they nudge me toward these ruminations:

Music is God’s. He embedded it into his creation. Like other aspects of his creation, it gives us glimpses of his character. The ancients could talk about “the music of the spheres,” alluding to the “harmony” that was demonstrated by the perfect working of the heavens. Music is rooted in the handiwork of the Creator. Although cultures adapt and elaborate them, the elements of music are part of the natural revelation of God.

If the devil uses music, it is as a perversion of God’s creation. It becomes a false music—full of false notes and false ideas. Is it just me, or is it true that the music most likely to celebrate brutality toward women and flaunt sex as simple gratification is also the least tuneful music?

The believing musician who wants to serve God is not a priori unable to employ any style or genre of music. What bars us from some music is its falsity. Falsity shows up in various ways: superficial emotion, for example, or flash without substance. Authenticity is also known in many ways: tunes, texts, and tempos that reinforce each other; embodiment of genuine human struggle; celebration of human love and goodness.

So if it sometimes seems that the devil has all the good tunes, to paraphrase Arthur Holmes (with a hat tip to St. Augustine), perhaps all music is God’s music—if it be authentic music.

* * *

Footnote: That famous quip, while often attributed to Martin Luther or John Wesley, was likely spoken by 19th-century hymn writer Rowland Hill in a sermon delivered in London in 1844. It is often misquoted by substituting “music” for “tunes.” Blame Larry Norman.

Does the vindictiveness of the last verse ruin Psalm 137?

2010-08-30T20:04:00.010-05:00

Eduard Bendemann "The
Sorrowful Jews in Exile," 1832

I always look forward to the Sundays when we have a Scripture reading about the Babylonian exile. Such lessons allow me to drag from my music files one of my favorite opera choruses, Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate from Verdi’s Nabucco. I know my choir loves to sing that song. (Listen here.)

On Sundays when I don’t have the choir forces for Va, pensiero, I plan to fall back on William Billings’s round/canon on the first verses of Psalm 137 (sung hauntingly here by Don McLean of “American Pie” fame).

On October 3, the appointed Psalm is of my favorite laments in Scripture, Psalm 137:

By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, *
when we remembered you, O Zion.
As for our harps, we hung them up *
on the trees in the midst of that land. …
How shall we sing the LORD'S song *
upon an alien soil?

Last night I was reading the Wikipedia article on Psalm 137. It notes that most classical music settings of the Psalm omit the final verse.

Happy shall he be who takes your little ones, *
and dashes them against the rock!

The Wikipedia article then quotes hymnwriter John L. Bell, explaining that he had omitted that final verse from his metrical version “because its seemingly outrageous curse is better dealt with in preaching or group conversation.” However, notes Bell, the verse “should not be forgotten, especially by those who have never known exile, dispossession or the rape of people and land.”

So what do you think about the use of Psalm 137 in worship? Should we truncate it, reading or chanting only verses 1-8 (or perhaps omitting verses 6 and 7 as well, since they serve as an on-ramp to the “outrageous curse”? Or should we be faithful to the Spirit that inspired the sacred poet and use the whole damn thing? (D-word used advisedly.) And if we omit the final verse because it is better to handle the curse in a sermon, would that instead just let the preacher off the hook?

Your thoughts?

Dwelling in the Suburbs of Heaven

2010-08-22T16:55:00.007-05:00

Detail: Virgins in the Heavenly Jerusalem from the Last
Judgment, Sanctuary, Notre-Dame des Fontaines, La Brigue

Here is my sermon from today, August 22, 2010, at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Glen Ellyn, Illinois

Epistle for the 13th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 16, Year C: Hebrews 12:18-29

I love the trivia I can find using my computer. Recently I used Mapquest to determine that our retired rector, Bob Macfarlane, now lives 728 miles from this parish. That number describes the magnitude of one good reason that we don’t see him much anymore. But when he and Maria paid us a visit back in June, I was really glad for the chance for us to talk and to catch up with each other.
   You know how people talk when they haven’t seen each other for a while. They reminisce and remember, and sometimes they regret. After dinner one night, Father Macfarlane said, “If I had it to do over again, I think I’d preach a lot more about heaven.”
   We talked about the preacher’s resources on heaven—Dante’s 1321 Paradiso , Richard Baxter’s 1650 The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, Pope Benedict’s 2007 encyclical Saved in Hope, and N. T. Wright’s 2008 Surprised by Hope.
   I remarked that the lectionary readings really didn’t offer much opportunity for preaching about heaven. But Bob said, “Oh, no, there are plenty of opportunities if you look for them.”
   He was right. Next month, we’re going to listen to Jesus tell a story about a poor man named Lazarus who died and went to heaven, and a rich man who had failed to help Lazarus when he could. The rich man died and went somewhere else. Perhaps Father Matt will preach about heaven that Sunday, or maybe he’ll preach about that somewhere else. Me? I’ve already picked out two really good songs for that day.
   Today, however, our reading from the Letter to Hebrew Christians is also about heaven, and I think I’ll take this opportunity to talk a bit about that subject.
   The passage from Hebrews is filled with obscure allusions. “You have not come to something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them. For they could not endure the order that was given, ‘If even an animal touches the mountain, it shall be stoned to death.’”
   Those images—of a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and the sound of a trumpet and a voice that made hearers beg that not another word be spoken—those things are all associated with the story in Exodus 19, when God descends on Mount Sinai to announce to Moses and the people Israel the law that would govern the Israelite’s relationship with the God who freed them from slavery.
   It was a terrifying event. But, says the writer to the Hebrews, “you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new agreement.” Instead of a fearsome spectacle at Mount Sinai, Christians are treated to a festal gathering of angels and righteous spirits at the heavenly Mount Zion. Instead of the old agreement, there is a new agreement. Instead of being told to keep our distance, we are told to draw near. Instead of Moses, there is Jesus.
   This is the climax of a series of contrasts the writer presents in his letter. Jesus is better than angels. He is a better priest than Moses’ brother Aaron. His sacrifice is better than the animal sacrifices of the Old Agreement. The heavenly tabernacle in which Jesus prays for us is a better tabernacle than the one the Israelites had in the desert. And so on through the book until this point where these Jewish followers of Jesus are reminded that while their ancestors looked back to something truly awesome at Mount Sinai, the event that had created them as a chosen nation, they could and should look forward to something even more awesome at the heavenly Mount Zion.
   Mount Zion is, of course, a reference to a particular part of Jerusalem, a part that often stood for the whole. Heaven is pictured as a city that is the real Jerusalem, of which the earthly Jerusalem is a reflection or shadow. It’s not just the Letter to Hebrew Christians that does this. The Jewish rabbis inferred the existence of a heavenly counterpart to the earthly Jerusalem from Psalm 122. In Galatians 4:26, Paul speaks of “the Jerusalem that is above, which is our mother.” And in Revelation 21, the prophet John foresees the new Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven.
   The difference is this. In Revelation, the picture is entirely future. But in Hebrews, it is present. The writer uses the perfect tense, “But you have come near to Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.” You have come near, indicating a completed act with present implications.
   The great New Testament scholar F. F. Bruce notes that the Greek verb used here to mean “you have come near” is also the root for the word “proselyte,” a Greek noun meaning “convert.” Perhaps, Bruce says, it was the conversion of these readers to Christ that brought them near to the heavenly city. Of course, they do not have it yet in its fullness, but “the privileges of its citizenship are already enjoyed by faith.”
   Like so much in the New Testament, heaven partakes of the already-but-not-yet paradox. “The people of God are still a pilgrim people,” says Professor Bruce, “ … but by virtue of His sure promise they have already arrived [at the heavenly Zion] in spirit. Our author … makes it clear that His people need not climb the heavenly steeps to seek Him, for He is immediately accessible to each believing heart, making His dwelling in the fellowship of the faithful”[1].
   But even as the writer of the Letter to Hebrew Christians emphasizes the present accessibility of heaven, we want also to remember that it is a future home for Jesus’ followers, as he promised in John 14. “If I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, that where I am, you may be also.”
   Following Jesus, Father Macfarlane told me, is the key to our hope of heaven. In baptism, we die with him, are buried with him, and are united to him. And as we follow him, we can be sure that we will be raised with him, and that he will take us to himself.

It was that future dimension that Father Macfarlane was interested in talking about. After he returned to Virginia, I telephoned him and asked him: Why did you want to preach more about heaven?
   He was unashamed to confess: “The most cogent reason in my case is age,” he said. “As one gets older, one begins to think there is not much of this life left,” he said. “Thinking about heaven is a faithful response to the running out of the string.”
   Teaching about heaven is an important ministry to believers who are getting older. Most pastors know that focusing on those who are aging does not pay back readily in congregational or budget growth. It is common wisdom that a focus on young adults and families is what often marks churches that are geared for growth. It is an axiom of the religious marketplace. But preparing for death and for life in the presence of God is not something the aging should do alone. Children, youth, and young adults need to engage with the aging in order to understand the scope of Christian hope. Creating “a culture of resurrection” in the church is foundational to full-orbed multigenerational ministry.

Teaching about heaven is also a good way to keep our vision of justice in perspective. You can’t talk about paradise—the time and place where everything is right—without talking about the way things will be put right. We can’t talk about heaven without talking about the resurrection of the body and the Last Judgment, the time when God puts all things right.
   Our individual memories and our community stories are full of injustices—both those we suffer and those we perpetrate. In this life, there is no undoing those injustices. There can be forgiveness and reconciliation and even restitution, but lost lives and lost opportunities cannot be recovered.
   Scripture’s earliest clear teaching of the resurrection of the dead is in Daniel 12. It follows a prophecy about God’s people suffering unjust persecution. How will God put things right after his people experience the greatest “time of distress” since the world began? Through a general resurrection and a judgment. Daniel writes, “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt” (v. 2).
   In his papal encyclical Saved in Hope, Benedict XVI points to the way the “Christian faith has been individualized and primarily oriented towards the salvation of the believer’s own soul.” As a result, he says, “in the modern era, the idea of the Last Judgment has faded into the background.”
   “Faith in the Last Judgment,” Benedict says, is “first and foremost hope.” He calls “the question of justice . . . the strongest argument, in favor of faith in eternal life.” It is morally inconceivable, he says, “that the injustice of history should be the final word,” and when we face that, “the necessity for Christ’s return and for new life become fully convincing.”

I think Christians talk more about justice now than they ever have. God is on an intergalactic justice mission, and we are God’s agents, charged with bringing about justice for the poor, for the sexually trafficked, for the abused, for the hungry, for the victims of floods in Pakistan and religious discrimination in Iraq and ethnic violence in Sudan. But it is always a limited and relative justice. We alleviate the worst, perhaps, but we never get things completely fixed. Lest the overwhelming task make us weary, our heavenly hope keeps it in perspective. As Pope Benedict writes, “A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope.” The restoration of justice is ultimately God’s task.
   A God whose justice restores lost lives and dreams should lead us to think on heaven. Practice such meditation on the life to come, wrote the Puritan Richard Baxter, and “you will find yourself in the suburbs of heaven”—a phrase that delightfully echoes Hebrews’ “you have come near”—not 728 miles away, but near.
   Dante visits heaven’s suburbs in his fabulously insightful Paradiso. In Canto III, the poet meets a former nun named Piccarda, who in her earthly life was unable to keep her vows because she had been abducted by evil men. She was thus assigned to heaven’s “slowest sphere.” When Dante asked if she wasn’t “desirous of a higher place,” she claimed utter satisfaction and blessedness. To wish for anything else would be “discordant” with God’s will, she explains.
   There’s the secret. The Christian’s future, the world’s justice, and the believer’s bliss is the where and when of everything and everyone being in perfect concord with God’s will. A taste of that is available now—here in heaven’s suburbs. We have come near to the heavenly Zion with its angels in festal array and myriads of righteous spirits. But the fullness will come in God’s time by God’s power. That is worth preaching about.

* * *

[1] F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews (Eerdmans, 1964), p. 375

Image: Detail from the Last Judgment at Notre-Dame des Fontaines, La Brigue.

Carolyn Arends on Worship, Hospitality, and Song

2010-08-14T18:24:00.003-05:00

In her next "Wrestling with Angels" column for Christianity Today (due out in October), singer/songwriter Carolyn Arends talks about what characterizes the best worship services she encounters in her travels. "I recognize certain commonalities," she writes. "Each of those services ... was thoroughly Christocentric and profoundly reverent. No surprises there. The common characteristic that I least expected?" The answer is "hospitality," and she relates a Robert Webber anecdote that ties hospitality to the way congregations sing.

It's a thought-provoking column for those of us who lead church music. You'll have to wait for the October CT read the full column.

But in the meantime, you can listen to Carolyn discuss her thoughts on worship in a free webinar sponsored by CT's sister e-pub Kyria. Register for the August 26 webinar here.

Ten Good Ideas from Contemporary Hymn Writer Keith Getty

2010-07-21T07:51:00.004-05:00

Irish songwriter Keith Getty began his workshop Tuesday at the National Worship Leaders Conference by telling those who had come to learn how to write a great worship song to leave. “Because art is the expression of life, you cannot ‘how-to’ creativity.”

Getty collaborates with his wife Kristyn and friend Stuart Townend. “They’re the words and I’m the music,” he says, estimating that somewhere between 5 and 20 percent of the words of any of their songs are his. “But we both get involved on both sides.”

Here are ten notable and worthwhile ideas edited and distilled from Getty’s workshop comments:

1. The primary form we use is the story form. The gospel is primarily story. How do you take people who want 4-line worship songs and get them to sing 32 lines? By structuring the song as a story.

2. It is important to look at things that are harrowing and that don’t necessarily make us feel happy. The central core of the Christian faith is not something that makes us happy. We need to acknowledge our need for a redeemer. The reason we worship is that we meet God through the central story of the cross.

3. We need lament. But if you want to write lament, remember that a successful lament resolves. Not into a happily-ever-after ending, but like the psalms of lament, by ultimately acknowledging that God is God.

4. To write strong melodies remember that folk melody has to be passed on orally (aurally). I try to write songs that can be sung with no written music. I imitate Irish folk melody, with a great deal of contour, of rise and fall.

5. Use pastors and theologians as resources for your writing. But keep company with them. Don’t just ask them to fix your text here or there when you’re done with it.

6. Trinitarian worship safeguards us from so many problems our worship can get into: either an overly stern view of god or a casual view of god. Both can lead to problems in our lives.

7. Martin Luther is one of ten people from history I would want to have coffee with. I have looked at a lot of Luther’s hymns and emulated him. First, Luther had a high view of redemption. He also believed we live our lives in the midst of spiritual warfare. Thirdly, he had a high view of the church and a high vision of the church.

8. The congregation is the choir and it is merely the privilege of those of us who are musically gifted to help them sing.

9. Lyrics and great writing are the same thing. Lyricism is poetry. If your write lyrics, read as much poetry as you can. Lyricists are people who love words and do crossword puzzles.

10. Growing up, I never listened to pop music as a child. I was steeped in church music. That could be a blessing because everything I write can be sung by a congregation.

* * *

Christianity Today interviewed the Gettys in 2008.

Learn more about the Gettys' work at their website.

Out of the Miry Clay

2010-07-20T08:12:00.001-05:00

KANSAS CITY—In England, worshipers influenced by the charismatic renewal have been derided as “happy clappy.” With its roots 40 years ago in the Jesus Movement’s marriage of rock-n-roll and charismatic faith, you might expect the National Worship Leader Conference—with its theme of “Sing a New Song”—to kick off with rambunctious exuberance.

Instead, the conference opened last night on a somber note, with Tennessee pastor Steve Berger reflecting on the pain of having to bury his 19-year-old son just two years ago. For the keynote address, Berger exposited Psalm 40:1-3, one of nine Scripture passages that use the phrase “new song.” The psalm is a narrative prayer that begins with the psalmist’s experience of despair—of being in “an horrible pit” and stuck in “miry clay.” But by waiting patiently upon the Lord, the Psalmist says, he was taken from the pit and the mire and had his feet set “upon a rock” and had “a new song” placed in his mouth.

Berger stressed the pit as the location from which we learn the “new song” (which Berger defined as “a fresh experience with an ancient truth”). Those who want, with the apostle Paul, to experience the power of Christ’s resurrection had better be prepared to suffer with him. “Nothing gets resurrected until it dies,” proclaimed Berger.

The pit is God’s place for renewal—not just a renewal of worship experience (“In the pit, my hallelujah didn’t get stolen!”) but also for renewal of life ("Many will see it ... and trust in the Lord," says the Psalm. “New Song needs to be seen as well as sung,” says Berger).

Gerber’s deep spiritual realism has laid a solid foundation and provided focus for three-days of renewal and learning.

* * *

The National Worship Leader Conference is presented by Worship Leader magazine and hosted by the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas. The conference runs July 19-22.

Steve Berger and his wife have written about their experience of “the horrible pit” in Have Heart: Bridging the Gulf Between Heaven and Earth (Thomas Nelson, 2010).

The Preacher and the Holy Spirit

2010-06-21T14:39:00.000-05:00

An aphorism from Norval Pease, my late father-in-law who was also my homiletics professor in the late 60s: "The Holy Spirit can just as easily meet the preacher in the study as in the pulpit."

He hoped his students would learn that preparation is not less spiritual than winging it. That was the 60s, and spontaneity was a culturally salient theme. Unfortunately, I've heard a number of preachers since then who can't blame the 60s for their lack of preparation.

P.S. I've googled this aphorism and it looks like it may have been original.

At Play in the House of the Lord

2010-06-20T17:17:00.004-05:00

Last Sunday, June 13, I delivered the commencement sermon at The Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies in Orange Park, Florida. As someone who has long admired the late Dr. Webber's work in the area of liturgy, I felt privileged to give this address and truly honored when the school awarded me an honorary doctorate.

The readings for the commencement Eucharist were

2 Sam. 6:12-22
Psalm 104:24-35
1 Cor. 14:6-15
Luke 5:33-39

Here is the full text of the sermon.

At Play in the House of the Lord

I grew up in a congregation where worship was so Word-centered that it often tried to usher beauty out the door in the name of truth. It might have succeeded had it not been for my father, who loved choral music and believed that God was a god of beauty and should be worshiped with our whole beings.

Our church didn’t have an organ until my father bought a Hammond B-3. It wasn’t exactly an organ, but it pretended to be one. And we didn’t have a choir until my father became the patron of a children’s choir.

There was a no-nonsense woman in our congregation who just didn’t see the point of wasting time on music in public worship. Why, if we did away with the organ prelude and other music, the pastor could extend his already stretched 40 minutes of reasoning by proof text to almost an hour.

* * *

Memories like these get me wondering. Does our public worship have multiple goals which must be kept in proper balance (as when Sister Anita and my father clashed over the time devoted to music and to teaching)? Or is it better to think of our public worship as purpose-less? As producing many good effects, but inherently free from a driving sense of utility?

That memory also sets me to thinking about the relationship of the rational, reasoned, and ordered elements of worship to the intuitive, aesthetic, nonrational elements.

Paul reminds his Corinthian readers that while it is a good thing to pray with the spirit and sing with the spirit, it is even better to pray with the understanding and sing with the understanding.

If Paul had been writing to my home church, he might done the opposite. He might have said that while it is important to be able to trace a chain of proof texts to establish a doctrine, it was also edifying to cut loose in the spirit.

On Pentecost Sunday, my choir sang John Rutter’s wonderful anthem based on 1 Corinthians 14:15, “I Will Sing with the Spirit.” Rutter’s opening melody creates a sense of freedom and ambiguity. It is a musical metaphor for Paul’s words, “I will sing with the Spirit.”

But when Rutter sets Paul’s next clause, “And I will sing with the understanding also,” he uses compositional techniques that create a sense of certainty and structure. He gives his hearers the closest thing in music to deductive reasoning—musical logic that serves as a metaphor for “I will sing with the understanding also.”

I mention this metaphorical music to call attention to the complementarity of “spirit” and “understanding” in worship. Rutter’s composition highlights the paradoxical nature of worshiping, singing, praising, and praying in both spirit and understanding. Without both both dimensions, worship becomes, in Hamlet’s words, “weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable.”

I’m a great fan of the best traditional hymns because that kind of hymnody lifts both the spirit and the understanding. It gives us metaphorical language—in both text and tune—that we can borrow to give expression to both spirit and understanding.

Think of the bold declaration of God’s steadfast, protecting love we sang this evening in “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” The imagery of the text is reinforced by the fanfare like repetition of the tonic (the home-base note), and then moves stepwise up and down to create a musical picture of a rampart built on a secure foundation.

Or think of a more tender hymn, like Isaac Watts’s brilliant paraphrase of Psalm 23, “My Shepherd Will Supply My Need,” usually married to the American hymn tune “Resignation.” The pentatonic tune bespeaks simple trust. It evokes both the vulnerability of the sheep and the tenderness of the shepherd. Its wandering contour suggests both a flowing stream and wandering sheep. The simplicity of trust suggested by the tune is crowned by Isaac Watts’s final line: “No more a stranger or a guest, but like a child at home,” thus creating a metaphorical resting place where final word and final tone may dwell together.

Even that beautiful line falls short of expressing the full truth of David’s Psalm, but it gets us closer. If we were to sing only with “the understanding,” we could never reach that full truth.

Take a line from “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded”: “What language shall I borrow / to thank thee dearest friend, / for this thy dying sorrow, / thy pity without end?”

Because God’s saving acts on our behalf and his creative acts toward the entire cosmos and his eternal love are unfathomable, so great as to be beyond any language, we are driven to borrow the least inadequate language from creative souls who have reflected on this love and compassion before us. And yet, we know that the best of borrowed language will not do. And thus we must “sing with the spirit.”

* * *

We’ve talked about singing with the spirit and singing with the understanding also. We’ve talked about beauty and truth. Let me introduce another pair of terms: performance and play.

These came to me as I was recently watching some old Leonard Bernstein lectures on DVD. The great conductor talked about Igor Stravinsky “playing with notes,” and playing “the game of notes,” and then “juggling with notes.”

I often talk about “playing music” or “playing my instrument,” without using play in the sense Bernstein used it, associating play with game with juggle.

Performance and play. I perform at the organ. I perform a prelude or toccata or fugue. But I play the music and play the instrument. The word play carries light overtones of ebullience and enjoyment, of getting lost in the moment and the music. Perform, on the other hand, carries notions of thorough preparation, disciplined practice and informed interpretation, well delivered to an audience. Perform is a high-anxiety word, while play evokes joy.

I have told my church choir many times that when they sing an anthem, they should not think of it as a performance. In public worship, our choir’s aim is not to perform. Our aim is to give voice to the people’s praise or petition or lament in a more technically challenging way than they would be able to do as a congregation.

In worship, we who lead—preacher, priest, lector, acolyte, Eucharistic minister, usher, organist, percussionist, choir singer, crucifer, or thurifer—all of us both perform and play. We follow certain forms but we fulfill those forms with varying degrees of freedom.

Performance demands disciplines and structures. We need to consult with each other and with our worship traditions in order to perform the elements of our worship in a theologically and logically coherent way. We must plan the choreography so that we don’t stumble over each other. We work out our gestures and our postures so that we act meaningfully together. We think through our liturgical acts so that we don’t leave something out or inject something alien.

That is what David risked when he danced—minimally clothed—before the ark of the Lord—that he injected something alien into the occasion, something that distracted the worshipers from the object of their worship. But then, 2 Samuel tells us Michal was more concerned for the dignity of her husband than for the worship of the Lord. She was concerned about performance and not open to the play dimension of worship.

Some people think liturgical worship is all form and no freedom. But we who are here know that the elements of freedom and play are strongest when the routines of form and performance are well thought out and practiced.

In my music, diligent practice with attention to technique and interpretation prepare me for performance, and they open the door to play. When one note follows the next naturally because a piece is well rehearsed, I can respond to moments of inspiration. That is when I play.

In worship, well-worn and well-rehearsed structures open up freedom. The freedom to interact with a congregation, to stop preaching a sermon and start preaching to people. To stop reading prayers and to start praying. To stop singing hymns and to make the hymns our own.

* * *

Let me apply several key elements of to worship:

First, play involves repetition. But repetition is not just sameness. It requires variation, as when children play “I spy.” “I spy with my little eye…” that’s the thing repeated. But what comes next: “I spy with my little eye, something that begins with ‘C’,” or “I spy with my little eye something yellow,” that’s repetition with variation.

We do this in worship. We read the prayers of the people with the same words and the same categories of concern every week, but we leave the spaces in which people voice to the particularities of their lives. We like to sing familiar songs, and but we like it best when familiar songs are treated with just enough variation to stimulate delight.

Second, play involves creation and invention. Children are enormously creative in their play. There’s no reason that when children play 19th-century cowboys and Indians can’t mix with 20th-century space aliens and knights from the middle ages. We pour a lot of creative energy into the liturgy. Let me illustrate with one of my favorite instances of creativity that has emerged at my parish. During the “dry bones” reading from Ezekiel at the Easter Vigil, a cellist accompanies the reading, pulling from her instrument the creaks and groans that evoke Israel’s dry bones, and then humming, buzzing sounds swell as the bones and sinews come together.

Third, play involves pretending. Children play house, acting “as if” they are trying to meet the challenges of marriage and parenthood. This pretending is practice for the future. But they also borrow identities from television or books or fairytales. As a child I frequently took on the character of Zorro, thanks to my mother, who sewed me a black cape. When we worship, we act “as if” by dressing up as the kind of people who we truly believe ourselves to be in Christ. We act “as if” the preacher speaks for God because we truly believe that the Word he is exegeting and applying is indeed more than just his word. In the Stations of the Cross we act “as if” we are walking with Jesus to Calvary. During Communion we act “as if” we are sitting down to the Marriage Supper of the Lamb as we practice for the kingdom of God. We act “as if” because we know these things to be true.

Play, then, is my code for the creative, inventive, delightfully repetitive and variable approaches we take to the structures of worship. Performance is the disciplined, informed, practiced activity that builds the foundation and framework for play.

Play is not purposeful. It is valuable in its own right. Think of Psalm 104:26, which says that out in the ocean God made “that Leviathan … for the sport of it.” The text could mean that God made Leviathan to play in the waters. Or it could mean God made Leviathan to play with. The Message blends the two ideas: “Leviathan, your pet dragon, romps in them.” There is no ulterior motive to God’s creation of Leviathan. He does it out of a sense of play—perhaps even whimsy.

Public worship is similar. We do not worship to achieve a set of goals. We do it simply because God is who God is and we are who we are. God is creator and savior. We are creatures and saved ones. And so we worship, so we praise.

The closest we come to praise in daily life is complimenting people—but unfortunately many compliments aim at some ulterior goal. These are not praise, but flattery.

If we have an ulterior purpose for praise, we turn public worship into something else.

Sister Anita, whom I mentioned at the beginning of this sermon, thought church was all about learning. She wanted to strip away anything that “robbed” the preacher of time. While teaching should take place in worship, teaching is not the goal of worship. Teaching is to enable us to know the God we praise. It is not to build up our fund of spiritual knowledge. As Paul writes to the Corinthians, “Knowledge puffs up.”

Some try to turn public worship into an evangelistic service. I want people to get saved in the context of worship, but we do not worship in order to produce a harvest of decisions. If we proclaim the mighty acts of God in our praise, that should prick consciences and lead people to lay their all on the altar. But we proclaim the acts of God because it is his drama and we are players in it.

Some try to use public worship to coerce God into doing our will. This is essentially pagan magic. You see this across the spectrum, from some traditionalist forms of Catholicism to prosperity preaching on the fringe of Pentecostalism. But worship is about what God has already done. And we rest in gratitude for his care.

The Hebrew word for rest is shabbat. The Bible doesn’t command public worship on the Sabbath. The commandment is about imitating God by abstaining from work. But the synagogue service evolved as a Sabbath institution, and Christians inherited this connection.

If Sabbath is about abstaining from goal-oriented labor, that underscores what I’ve said about worship. Instead of telling people that going to church will bring them benefits, we should describe it as an oasis in time, a space where we can rest precisely because we’re not trying to “accomplish something.” We can simply dwell in the relationship with God, experienced through the community’s reading of his Word and celebration of his sacred meal.

When people asked Jesus why his disciples went on eating and drinking while the followers of John the Baptizer and the Pharisees fasted often, Jesus answered, "Can you make the guests of the bridegroom fast while he is with them?” He then predicted they would fast once the bridegroom was gone. But, later the risen Christ promised he would be with us always. The bridegroom is with us. So let us play in the house of the Lord.

‘All Acolytes Are Pyromaniacs’

2010-04-13T22:19:00.006-05:00

Fellow St. Barnabas parishioner (and Christian Century columnist) Rodney Clapp reports here on his life as an acolyte. He quotes his priest (and mine) as saying, “All acolytes are pyromaniacs.”

Despite the sound of its final syllable, the word acolyte has nothing to do with fire. It derives from a Greek word meaning path, modified to mean someone who follows—and thus referring to an assistant or helper. But as assistants in worship, acolytes do get to play with fire, and Rodney has exciting tales about smoking brooms sweeping up glowing coals.

Acolytes (who along with lectors and subdeacons later become minor orders) begin showing up in Christian records in the second century. But the practice of carrying two candles or torches in procession at the reading of the Gospel is not mentioned until the early 600s. Because St. Isidore of Seville says the candles were extinguished after the Gospel reading, Dom Gregory Dix thinks their use was at that point still utilitarian. But by the time the Ordo Romanus Primus was compiled about the year 800, the candles had taken on a clearly symbolic role. In the papal liturgy of the period, the candle bearers stood below the ambo steps, while the Gospel was read from above. The candles thus illumined nothing, but they symbolized everything: that the Gospel book stood for Christ.

Read Rodney Clapp's “My Life as an Acolyte.”

Fire!

2010-04-07T10:53:00.005-05:00

"Either put fire into your sermons or put your sermons into the fire." —Thomas DeWitt Talmage (1832-1902), American Presbyterian preacher. (h/t Matt Reynolds)

IWS - where the amount of product in your hair doesn't matter

2010-03-27T20:55:00.009-05:00

One of the great things about the late Bob Webber was his understanding that worship is not about us—it is about God.

I was reminded of this the other day when I got my review copy of Stuff Christians Like, by Christian satirist Jonathan Acuff. (Acuff’s book available here ; his website, here .)

Stuff Christians Like devotes several pages to the Metrosexual Worship Leader Scorecard. A worship leader with a soul patch gets three points, while one with a goatee gets only two. A scarf with a t-shirt gets a one point, while a winter knit hat in summer gets an additional two. And having huge gobs of product in your hair is absolutely essential to being a Metrosexual Worship Leader. (My score is somewhere in the negative numbers.)

Acuff’s satire sends up the way certain parts of the worship movement are consumed by style and appearance. And that made me appreciate the legacy of Bob Webber all the more. Worship, Bob kept reminding us, is about God. It “sings, preaches, and enacts God’s story,” not ours. Bob admonished us to turn away from forms “that assert the self as the source of worship.”

The day before the mail carrier delivered Stuff Christians Like, my e-mail brought me a press release about an important milestone for the Institute for Worship Studies, the graduate school Bob founded in 1999. For just over a decade, IWS has been training students in God-ward worship. In 2005 it began the accreditation process with the Association for Biblical Higher Education. Now, the school has been granted accredited status. IWS President Jim Hart calls it “a significant and critical threshold for the institute.”

A few days later I was walking across the campus of Wheaton College with Bob’s widow, Joanne. It’s the faculty, she said. The quality of the faculty is what impressed the accreditation team. In fact, faculty excellence was item two on a list of six commendations the team handed Jim Hart.

Other key items from that list of commendations: the school is operating debt free; it assembled library resources rapidly; it uses a blend of online and onsite instruction to create an innovative and substantive academic program; its capstone courses are noted for their rigor.

Having enrolled over 400 graduate students in its masters and doctoral programs over the past decade, IWS is playing a crucial role in focusing church leaders on worship that tells and enacts God’s story. This latest step—accreditation—is an important factor in the continuing stability of this mission.

Congratulations to everyone in the IWS family.

* * *

Photo: IWS President James R. Hart and Registrar Laura Ritter receive the plaque from Lisa Beatty, Chair of the Commission on Accreditation of the Association for Biblical Higher Education.

Liturgy That Gives Rest

2009-12-30T10:31:00.010-06:00

Today’s snail mail brought an envelope from Regent College theologian J. I. Packer. Inside was an article clipped from The Anglican Planet. It was titled “Liturgy That Gives Rest.” There was also a note in Packer’s hand commending its author, Julie Lane-Gay.

The article had many good things to say about the Anglican service: Its historicity gives it a “tried and trueness,” for example, and its use of the lectionary means that “old women in India, the Queen of England and surfers in Queensland—we are all on the same page.”

But the article’s main point was about its restfulness. That’s a point I resonate with.

Ms. Lane-Gay writes:

My first Anglican service was quiet and calm. Instead of feeling that I had to conjure up enthusiasm, I felt like someone had handed me an antique pillow to cradle my weary mind and soul. I didn’t have to think what to say.

My own experience was different. I wouldn’t have compared the liturgy to a pillow. But I felt the same relief that I didn’t have “to conjure up enthusiasm.” Conjuring up enthusiasm—and godly grief and glorious rapture and even stillness—all of that was part of what I had been exhorted to do in the religion of my youth, a religion that owed much to American revivalism.

That side of revivalism placed the accent in worship on my feelings. Revivalism fed off of a cycle of duress and release, and it required that I feel the right emotions as we approached the transactional moments of worship. When it came time to (re)dedicate myself to Jesus, the moment was validated or invalidated by my feelings.

The liturgy taught me that there was instead one great transaction. It happened on Calvary. In the liturgy, we celebrate and memorialize that transaction together—together as a local congregation and together with Christians around the globe, together with Christians throughout history and together with those who have gone on to glory. Fortunately, that celebration continues in spite of whatever feelings I may have because the great transaction was completed before I ever experienced my first emotion.

The liturgy “did the work of worship for me,” writes Lane-Gay. She discovered this when “after ten years of marriage, flexibility, and professional success, parenthood upended [their] lives.”

The liturgy took on a startling new role: it did the work of worship for me. I did not have to think up my prayers or create my own confession—neither of which I could have done in my sleep-deprived state. It took the pressure off me to evoke certain feelings. I rested in the liturgy; I sunk deep. … I could say the words just as they were printed, … and leave the rest to God. I did not have to cajole myself into being joyful or thankful or contrite. I could just show up at church, baby in tow, burp stains on my shoulder and participate.

Seven years and three more children later, she writes about being “able to arrive at church and fall into a structure far bigger than I.”

That bigness is what draws me to the liturgy. There’s a bigness in the church's liturgy just as there’s a wideness in God’s mercy.

The liturgy must be seen as part of God’s mercy. It is not the words that do “the work for me.” God acts toward me in the liturgy. That is why in Morning Prayer we often say a paraphrase of Psalm 51:15: “O Lord, open thou our lips, and our mouth shall show forth thy praise.” Without God’s help, we can’t even start praising.

When worship loses its bigness, the sense of God’s mercy also contracts. But when we join our voices with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, we also know instinctively that the quality of God’s mercy is not strained.

* * *

Read Julie Lane-Gay’s full essay here.

Public domain image of 1596 Book of Common Prayer via Wikimedia Commons.

Why Evangelicals Are Reading the Bible with the Fathers

2009-11-05T05:35:00.004-06:00

On October 29, the nation's attention was focused on Yankee Stadium and game two of the World Series. But at Wheaton College, several hundred people chose instead to crowd into Barrows Auditorium to mark the public beginning of the Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies.

Robert Louis Wilken, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, promised baseball fans he'd keep the Center’s inaugural lecture brief. In his short address, he dashed through the church fathers’ approach to interpreting Scripture, touching the bases at Isaiah 6, Matthew 5, and Job 14, before coming home with key insights on patristic exegesis.

In addition to relating the Fathers’ comments on these passages, Wilken explored why evangelical Protestants in particular should pay attention to writers like Gregory the Great, Augustine, John Chrysostom and Gregory of Nyssa, and why evangelicals are indeed beginning to realize “that the early heritage is theirs also.”

The large majority of Wilken’s graduate students over the past ten years have been evangelicals, he said. The success of the ambitious Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (InterVarsity Press) testifies to such interest as well. Now the opening of the Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies institutionalizes that interest—and in a first-rate location. .

First, Wilken posed the question, Why this renewed interest? Precisely because evangelical theology and spirituality are built around Scripture, and so were those of the patristic writers. You cannot read them without an open Bible in your hand. Their writings are shot through with Scripture. Evangelicals and the church fathers thus have a natural affinity.

Second, Wilken asked whether giving some priority to these early interpreters of Scripture isn’t at cross-purposes with the evangelical principle of scriptural perspicacity. Evangelicals have long taught that the meaning of Scripture is open to every Spirit-led reader, and that biblical interpretation must not be held hostage by church tradition. Isn’t the Bible intelligible without the Fathers?

Yes, of course, in a sense it is. But the Fathers help us go more deeply into the Bible, Wilken said. They teach us to read it more slowly and enter it more deeply. He illustrated this by looking at several passages through their eyes, showing the way in which they treated the Bible as a single, coherent book in which difficult passages are illuminated by other passages. Indeed, those other texts raise the questions that lead us deeper.

Thus Isaiah‘s report in chapter 6 that the prophet “saw God” is clearly in tension with passages (such as John 1:18) that suggest no human has seen, or even can see, God. The key, however, is found in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” By mining the notions in that passage, the Fathers were able, not only to explain in what sense some might “see God,” but also to point the way toward the ideal Christian life. Thus to see God is to be united to him through purity of life. Understand, said Wilken, that the Bible is not primarily about the head; it is about the heart.

Third, Wilken reminded us, the patristic writers were the best minds of their day. From their engagement with Scripture, they forged the language with which we express the Christian faith. To ignore their reading of Scripture is also to undercut the foundations upon which the great creeds were built.

* * *

The Fathers are replete with interpretations that diverge from the plain meaning of the text. This makes modern evangelicals nervous—though as Robert Webber has argued, because this approach is rich with imagery, it should have greater appeal to postmodern evangelicals. We have many ways of knowing, and imagistic thinking has been marginalized in some streams of evangelical theology.

Wilken made several key points about the Fathers’ nonliteral and image-laden reading of the Bible.

1. The New Testament authors clearly applied Old Testament texts in ways that departed seriously from the plain, surface meaning of the text. When Paul cites Psalm 19 in Romans 10 (“their voice is gone out into all the world”), he applies the Psalmist’s statement about the heavens to the preaching of the apostles. This runs against the plain meaning, said Wilken.

2. The books of Scripture do not bear their own significance. They must be united to something greater, which is Christ. Thus Paul interprets the creation of man and woman as a great mystery, which is Christ and the church; and he interprets the water-giving rock in the Sinai desert as Christ.

3. Typically, such creative renderings of the Bible are focused on the Old Testament. That is because the Old Testament text signifies Christ, but the New Testament text does not signify another Christ. It requires no allegory or analogy to reveal the Incarnate Word.

4. The Fathers also understood the interpretation of Scripture to require the reader’s participation in the spiritual reality of the text. Thus it is not enough to say that Christ was crucified. We must also say, “I am crucified with Christ,” and thus also I am raised with Christ.

* * *

All of this is new territory for many evangelical Protestants. It involves an ancient way of reading texts that is at odds with contemporary methods being taught in the classrooms of Christian colleges. Students will feel at first that the Fathers’ method places no limits on allegorical fantasy.

It will take some time for this kind of reading to take its place alongside our linguistic and historical approaches. Neither approach needs to edge out the other. But if we do not make an effort to imbibe the spirit of the church’s first interpreters, we can easily miss something close to the heart of Christian faith.

This entry is cross-posted from the Christian History Blog.

Does Hell Have a "Sorting Hat"?

2009-08-07T20:12:00.020-05:00

I’ve been listening to Dante’s The Divine Comedy this past week. (The 1891 Charles Eliot Norton translation is this month’s free download from Christian Audio.)

One horrific scene in the Inferno struck me as a literary echo of a more lighthearted moment in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

In Rowling, there is a sorting hat. In Dante, there is a sorting monster.

In Rowling, the wizarding school Hogwarts is divided into four residential houses, and a magical hat assigns each first-year student to one of them. When placed on a student’s head, the sorting hat announces where the student belongs: Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, or Slytherin.

In Dante, hell is divided into nine circles, progressing from circle one, populated by the virtuous pagans who lived without Christianity, on through the realms of the lustful, the gluttonous, the avaricious and prodigal, the wrathful, the heretical, the violent, the deceitful, and finally, in circle nine, the traitors.

How are sinners assigned to the proper circle? By the sorting monster named Minos. As Dante tells it,

Thus I descended from the first circle down into the second, which girdles less space, and so much more woe that it goads to wailing. There abides Minos horribly, and snarls; he examines the sins at the entrance; he judges, and he sends according as he entwines himself. I mean, that, when the miscreant spirit comes there before him, it confesses itself wholly, and that discerner of sins sees what place of Hell is for it; he girdles himself with his tail so many times as the degrees he wills it should be sent down. Always before him stand many of them. They go, in turn, each to the judgment; they speak, and hear, and then are whirled below. (Canto V)

Like C. S. Lewis and J. K. Rowling after him, Dante borrowed figures from pagan mythology and imported them into narrative contexts teeming with Christian figures and tropes. Pagan and Christian figures work in complementary fashion to represent longing and fulfillment.

The monster Minos was a mythical king of Crete who after death was said to become a judge of the dead in Hades. That much Dante borrowed. But the act of coiling his tail around himself the precise number of times needed to indicate the circle of hell to which the sinner is to be “whirled below” is Dante’s imaginative invention.

Hades is not Hogwarts and Hogwarts is not hell—indeed for most of Rowling’s series it is effectively defended against invasion by the forces of evil. But both the sorting hat and the tail of Minos represent an orderly universe. Each discerns the corruption or capability of the souls it examines and then places them where they are most suited—either to develop (at Hogwarts) or to suffer (in hell).

Both Dante and Rowling represent the longing for an orderly universe in which talent is cultivated (in the manner in which it specifically ought to be nurtured) and malfeasance is punished (in a manner most fitting to its perversity).

W. S. Gilbert parodied such an orderly universe in his song “A More Humane Mikado.” The “more humane” Mikado announces that instead of executions and arbitrary imprisonments, he will bring in a new order of criminal justice:

My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time —
To let the punishment fit the crime —
The punishment fit the crime;
And make each prisoner pent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment!
Of innocent merriment!

All prosy dull society sinners,
Who chatter and bleat and bore,
Are sent to hear sermons
From mystical Germans
Who preach from ten till four.
The amateur tenor, whose vocal villainies
All desire to shirk,
Shall, during off-hours,
Exhibit his powers
To Madame Tussaud's waxwork.

And so on with exquisitely devised punishments for ladies who dye gray hair yellow or puce, advertising quacks, music hall singers, and billiard sharps. The billiard sharps are forced to play “On a cloth untrue / With a twisted cue / And elliptical billiard balls!”

How exquisite was Gilbert’s sense of justice.

A longing for something like fitting justice persists throughout the Bible and the history of Christian thought. It is implicit, for example, in Christ’s parable of the servant who was forgiven much yet failed to forgive a much smaller debt. We enjoy the jailing of that unforgiving servant precisely because the longing and instinct for such justice is planted within us.

Without this same instinctual longing we would not understand the scandalous character of grace, illustrated the vineyard owner who pays the latecomers as well as those who have worked all day, the prodigal son who gets the fatted calf, and the prostitutes and tax collectors who enter heaven before the religious leaders.

A longing is evidence for the existence of what we long for—whether we lust for junk food or justice. The desire for ultimate justice is a pointer, a sign, a seed, a fragment of evidence that we do well to pay attention to.

The Healing Power of Church Choirs

2009-07-30T21:30:00.011-05:00

Okay, I’ll admit that I inserted church in that title because I direct a church choir, and I am zealous for the preservation of church choirs. I’ll explain more about that below. But let’s begin by recognizing that choirs—church and otherwise—have healing properties.

In his book Beauty and the Soul, Piero Ferrucci illustrates the power of music to heal by telling a story about a group of French monks.

Shortly after the 1960s liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council, 70 out of 90 monks in a particular Benedictine monastery grew strangely ill. “They were lethargic, depressed, unable to carry out their normal tasks,” writes Ferrucci. Various medical experts came to study the monastery, but only one—a research audiologist named Tomatis—was able to identify their problem.

Only one thing had changed in their lives. Before the Vatican II reforms, the monks had chanted eight or nine times a day for 10 to 20 minutes at time. After the reforms, they hardly chanted at all. “Tomatis prescribed a return to the past order, and within weeks all the monks recovered,” Ferrucci reports.

* * *

What are we to make of this story? Scientifically, it is hard to say. But it provokes several key ideas.

First, monastic chant—although it is sung in unison--creates a kind of interpersonal harmony. Good unison singing attunes us not just to notes but also to the rhythms of a group. When we sing together, we breathe together. We become something organic. Ferrucci reminds us that singing in chorus is a social activity and that “there is no better example of social inclusion” than a chorus.

Second, chant is meditative. Meditation on a deeply spiritual text, such as the psalms, canticles, and ancient hymns, attunes us to truth. When we are out of tune with truth, we become dis-eased. We can only be healthy when we are in tune with the truth.

Third, singing is physical. Those who don’t do it much may not realize how important posture and breathing are to proper singing, but there is certainly a heathful property to practicing the proper postures and diaphragmatic breathing demanded by singing.

* * *
Ferrucci writes that since Tomatis’s experience with the monks, many studies have been done that demonstrate the link between healing and singing in chorus. He goes on to list the many healing uses to which music is now put in hospices, in psychiatric wards, in pain management programs, and in neonatal care units.

Remember the title of Ferrucci’s book: Beauty and the Soul. While we can quantify the aerobic benefits to body tissues that proper breathing brings, beauty eludes measurement. But surely beauty is as important as any other factor in music’s healing power.

* * *
Now let me explain why in the title of this post I modified choir with the word church: “The Healing Power of Church Choirs.”

As more and more of our churches allow praise bands to edge out church choirs, they are not merely replacing the old-fashioned with the contemporary. They are not merely exchanging one cultural style for another.

When worship bands edge out church choirs, they are also robbing one segment of the congregation of the healing power of choral singing. In addition, they are depriving the whole congregation of the unique support a choir provides for the singing of the gathered people of God. Many praise bands discourage congregational singing, whether because of the sheer volume of their playing or because of the solo performance style of the music they lead. A good amateur church choir, properly located in an acoustically vibrant worship space, can provide incredible encouragement to the less trained singers in the congregation.

Preserve our church choirs. They are important for the emotional, social, and spiritual health of our congregations.

* * *
Beauty and the Soul will be published by Tarcher/Penguin on August 20. Order it here.

Image: the children’s choir in which the author first learned to sing.

A Mighty Cantata

2008-10-28T05:25:00.008-05:00

Lutheran churches were celebrating Reformation Sunday this past weekend, and I was blessed to hear J. S. Bach’s eight-movement cantata based on Martin Luther’s hymn Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott (“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”) the way Bach intended—in the context of a worship service.

The Neffs met up with their friends Mark and Nina Moring at Grace Lutheran Church in River Forest, Illinois, for a splendid service of evening prayer complete with choir, orchestra, organ, and professional soloists.

In our time, Bach’s cantatas are usually performed as concert pieces, as if they were mini-oratorios, small-scale versions of Handel’s Messiah or Mendelssohn’s Elijah. But that is not at all what Bach had in mind. He wrote these pieces to be paired with sermons as musical expositions of Scripture.

Robin Leaver explained it all in issue 95 of Christian History and Biography: The Gospel According to J. S. Bach. In an article entitled “Sermons that Sing,” the Westminster Choir College musicologist described how this unique musical genre functioned in 18th-century Lutheran worship.

“These services were long,” writes Leaver, “lasting up to four hours—with a complex liturgical order based on Luther's evangelical reinterpretation of the traditional Mass.” (Fortunately, the service we attended on Reformation Sunday lasted just an hour and fifteen minutes.)

Leaver explains:

[T]he cantata was closely connected with both the reading of the Gospel and the sermon. The simple sequence was this:

Gospel, Nicene Creed, Cantata, Hymn, Sermon.

The portion from one of the Gospels appointed for that day was read. The choir responded to the Gospel, affirming the faith by singing the Nicene Creed in Latin. Then the choir and instrumentalists performed the cantata. The whole congregation responded by singing in German the hymn Wir glauben all' an einen Gott ("We all believe in one true God"), Luther's rhyming, metrical version of the Creed. After this second affirmation of faith came the sermon, a detailed exposition and application of the day's Gospel reading. The cantata therefore stood in the middle of a sequence that began with the Gospel reading and ended with the sermon. Like the sermon, the cantata was also an exposition and application of the Gospel of the day.

The cantata was thus a theological commentary on Scripture and even an exhortation to faith and perseverance. In the Ein’ feste Burg cantata we heard, God’s strength and sure victory are repeatedly invoked to urge the believer to be steadfast in fighting the devil.

The bass soloist sings:

Consider well, O child of God,
This love so mighty, which Jesus hath
In his own blood for thee now written;
By which he thee
For war opposing Satan’s host,
Opposing world and error,
Enlisted thee!
Yield not within thy spirit
To Satan and his viciousness!

The soprano (representing the Christian soul) then responds to God with this invitation:

Come in my heart’s abode,
Lord Jesus, my desiring!
Drive world and Satan out,
And let thine image find in me new glory!
Hence, prideful cloud of sin!

I’m sure the poetry is better in the original German, but you get the picture. This pattern of exhortation and faithful response repeats throughout the full range of Bach’s cantatas.

Leaver’s article gives examples from various Bach compositions of the many inventive ways he used both musical and literary techniques to drive home a gospel truth and evoke both the terror of God’s judgment and the comfort of his grace.

Bach’s—and Luther’s—message is ultimately about God’s triumph. As the libretto of Ein’ feste Burg tells us:

Who hath to Christ’s own bloodstained flag
In baptism sworn allegiance
Wins in spirit ever more.
All that which God has fathered
Is for victory intended.

* * *

Professor Leaver’s full article is available online, but only to ChristianHistory.net subscribers. You can sign up for a mere $12 a year (surely you can afford a paltry dollar a month).

Or you can order a print copy of Christian History & Biography issue 95 for $5.00 plus shipping and handling.

Listen to the first movement of J. S. Bach's Ein' feste Burg.

Science, Sex, and Stars

2008-10-16T22:32:00.004-05:00

Just over a week ago, TIME’s David Van Biema wrote about vampirologist Anne Rice’s latest book, which recounts her return to faith: Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession. Like every good evangelical, I love a conversion story.

Van Biema called the book “catnip for devout Christians” and offered this evaluation: “Rice's conversion is disorganized enough to sound real, her eagerness to embrace confession and discipleship is inspiring, and her arguments in a passage on ‘Christmas Christianity’ suggest Rice could rival C. S. Lewis as a popular apologist for the faith.”

One thing Rice said, however, sounded very unlike CSL.

Centuries ago the stars were sacred. A man could be burnt at the stake for declaring that the earth revolved around the sun...Now the Christian world holds the stars to be secular...Is it not possible for us to do with gender, sexuality and reproduction what was long ago done with the stars? To realize that...new sources of information on them may be as valid as the information given us long ago?

Now, unlike much of Rice’s mystery-laden account, that paragraph struck me as very modern—appealing to science to help us desacralize gender, sexuality, and reproduction. Once again, as it has done so often in the drama of modernity, science is called on to play the role of savior from intellectual and spiritual darkness.

It is certainly true that science has taught us some things about sex. If you read Masters and Johnson’s Human Sexual Response, you’ll find careful research that debunks earlier misbegotten understandings of how our bodies work. But how does that sort of thing desacralize sex?

Rice’s comment about the stars reminded me of an essay by Michael Ward in the January/February 2008 issue of Books & Culture. In “C. S. Lewis and the Star of Bethlehem,” Ward writes of Lewis’s interest in astrology.

[T]he pre-Copernican model of the cosmos was a Christian model not despite, but because of, its acceptance of astrological influence. Lewis valued its astrological aspect not because he considered astrology to be literally true, but because astrology represented a spiritual reading of materiality.

“A spiritual reading of materiality” is precisely what Anne Rice seems to lack. Sexuality and stars are whatever science can describe them to be. Here’s more of Michael Ward on CSL:

Since the Copernician revolution, the heavenly bodies had been steadily evacuated of spiritual significance until they were regarded as no more than large aggregations of rock or gas. Readers of Narnia will remember an exchange in The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" during which Eustace is rebuked by Ramandu for claiming that "In our world a star is a huge ball of flaming gas": "Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of." Because the pre-Copernican model of the cosmos viewed the planets as more than merely material it was a model worth keeping in mind. It was, in this sense, a more Christian model than the Newtonian or Einsteinian versions which have succeeded it.

How ironic it is that Anne Rice seems to be succumbing to modernity even as she returns to Christianity. As an author of vampire novels, Rice is no stranger to mystery and otherness. Nothing archetypal should be alien to her. Maleness and femaleness have long resisted being reduced to reproductive mechanics, no matter how precisely Masters and Johnson could articulate the exquisite engineering of human sexuality. Someone with Rice’s romanticism should not be blind to that fact.

But these days, sexuality has been the victim not only of scientism but of legal reductionism. Just two days after Van Biema posted his comments on Anne Rice, the Connecticut Supreme Court struck down state law that provided gay couples with all the legal privileges and protections of marriage, while preserving that term for heterosexual unions.

In the court’s opinion, the modernist myth of progress trumped old-fashioned sensibilities: “Our conventional understanding of marriage must yield to a more contemporary appreciation of the rights entitled to constitutional protection.” Where Rice called on Science, the Connecticut justices invoked Progress.

Indeed, it was one of the Court’s dissenting voices that offered an appeal to science, or at least “biology”:

Justice Peter T. Zarella … argued that the state marriage laws dealt with procreation, which was not a factor in gay relationships. “The ancient definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman has its basis in biology, not bigotry,” he wrote.

That’s not exactly an appeal to transcendence, but it is a kind of common sense. Unfortunately, the law is stuck in modernity and cannot desacralize the Myth of Progress or abandon the Worship of the Goddess Science. More unfortunately, much of the church seems stuck in the service of the same idols.

In Ancient-Future Faith, the late theologian Robert Webber recognized the importance of changing our communication style in the postmodern context--in part to allow us to remystify evangelical religion. This changed communication style includes “the rediscovery of ‘imagination,’ ‘intuition,’ and a sensitivity to ‘spiritual realities’” (p. 24). Webber then worked out how this communications revolution applied to worship and the recovery of the classical sense of mystery.

These same requirements should apply in the church’s approach to sexuality. Sexuality is, in a frequent Webberian phrase, “more than” what science can analyze and describe. It requires an understanding of symbol and a willingness to let the imagination and intuition loose to play.

That will lead some to the Dionysian feast and others to the joys of Christian marriage. Can we judge like Lewis that in sex, as in astronomy, a spiritual vision is superior to scientifically induced blindness?

The Church's Greatest Ornament

2008-10-12T19:56:00.004-05:00

Here's a striking statement I heard today:

“Music is well or better able to praise God than the building of the church and all its decorations. It is the church’s greatest ornament.” —Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky

Source: Naxos Classical Music Spotlight podcast, “Rachmaninov Vespers, Academy of Choral Arts, Moscow,” September 8, 2008 (approx. 10 minutes into the audio file).You can subscribe to Naxos podcasts here or through the iTunes store. You can stream all podcasts at Naxos.com by registering to become a member.

In Summary: Third Annual Conference on the Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future

2008-10-11T22:02:00.006-05:00

The third annual conference on the Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future concluded today. Here is the text of the summary I gave those attending the meeting at Northern Seminary in Lombard, Illinois. If you were unable to attend, perhaps this quick round-up of the presentations and discussion will be helpful.

* * *

I recently attended a conference where Muslim and Christian leaders spoke together about their faith. The Muslims were pointed and crystal clear. Unfortunately, the Christians, by and large, failed to present the core of our faith with a comparable crispness. National Association of Evangelicals president Leith Anderson was one glorious exception. Unfortunately, a very prominent Christian preacher left the most lasting impression. He stated that he had more questions than answers about the Christian faith and that we needed to reframe the gospel in terms of the human need for self-esteem.

By contrast, I have relished the past two days as core elements of the faith embodied in the biblical narrative were compellingly presented over and over again.

We’ve been talking about the church as the continuation of God’s narrative. God’s story didn’t stop with the end of Scripture, because just as the Holy Spirit anointed Jesus and ignited the apostolic church and inspired the New Testament writers, he continues to shape the events of the church as it acts as the agent of God’s in-breaking kingdom.

Howard Snyder (Tyndale Seminary, Ontario) kicked off our explorations by looking at the church in five historical periods and examining three aspects of each: the narrative, the redemptive plan, and the way in which the church was most visible. I was particularly struck by his statement that during the first few centuries the church and mission were one. The church didn’t have a mission; the church was mission.

In the panel discussion that followed, Dan Williams (Baylor University) and Chris Hall (Eastern University) asked whether Howard quite had the story right, suggesting that he was mirroring the traditional evangelical account of the early church’s decline and (much) later restoration.

I think many of us have been influenced by that narrative of decline and restoration. I know that I was raised to think that the post-apostolic church fell almost immediately into apostasy and did not experience significant restoration until Luther went to his workshop to find a hammer and some nails. But even if you read the story differently from the way Howard does, you’ll have to agree that his is about the most generous version of the decline narrative you could find. He highlighted genuinely redemptive moments and movements in each of the major eras of the church’s narrative.

Then Jenell Williams Paris (Messiah College) took us through three narratives about the church to examine the way we deal with “the good, the bad, and the ridiculous.” As an anthropologist she helped us think realistically about the church, and she prodded us to think about how best to integrate the good, the bad, and the ridiculous that already exist in our churches. It is not our responsibility to spin the story so that God looks good, she told us. Bad, said Jenell, is never for nothing but always works to advance the narrative towards its proper climax.

David Fitch (Northern Seminary & Life on the Vine Christian Community) challenged us to recover from our Niebuhrian hangover and to look at the ways that capitalism (as a set of values) governs the way we do church. Particularly, that set of values creates and inflates inappropriate desire, and it engenders a greed for numerical growth that distorts ministry. The panelists disagreed sharply about capitalism, but all agreed that if you were to substitute a word like, say, “marketing” for “capitalism,” it would definitely describe the false narrative that the contemporary church has written into its script. The church, all agreed, needs to engage in forming its members spiritually with God’s narrative, and so help them resist being formed by the marketing or capitalist narrative they hear shouted at them every day. In particular, direct engagement with the poor will help believers resist being squeezed into the world’s mold.

Last night, D. H. Williams led us through a description of the early church’s ways of reorienting new believers away from the multiple religious and philosophical stories of Greco-Roman pluralism and providing them instead with a core story that would be a foundation for their lives. Dan gave us a reading of this catechetical process that accented core doctrine. The beginning of catechesis, he said, was focusing the believer on God— Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and not on the believer’s experience or personal journey. Earliest Christianity was a teaching church. In our panel discussion, we clarified that this did not mean merely abstract doctrine, but rather the complex of revealed truth, moral practice, and ritual experience that provided an irreducible foundation on which to build Christian lives.

And now this morning, Rick Richardson (Wheaton College) has turned our attention to mission. He has given us a rich survey of the origins and various streams of missional church thinking. He has warned us of the dangers of each stream, and he has suggested how we might discern a given congregation’s best approach to mission.

Two of Rick’s remarks caught my attention. First, Rick said that whenever we recapture the eschatological emphasis of Jesus, the missional identity of the church is renewed. Second, Rick suggested that just as we discover our spiritual gifts by using them, a church can discover its missional DNA by expressing it.

* * *

That’s it for this conference, except for some important thank-yous:

Special thanks to Chris and Brian Monroe who have webcast and live-blogged this event. Last night when I got home, I found a message from the Wright family, living in Afghanistan, who wished they could have been here at the conference:

“Many thanks for the live webcast!!!!!” they wrote. “Though I'd like to be in Chi-town, it is good to enjoy the thoughtful discussions from the comforts of home. Blessings! [signed] jdw”

And so I want to give a shout-out to the Wright family in Afghanistan and to all the others that joined us via webcast.

Thanks to our publishers, InterVarsity Press and Baker, who have published so many of the books that feed the Ancient-Future movement with insights. And let me also mention Zondervan, which is in the process of bringing out a 30th anniversary edition of Bob Webber’s 1978 book, Common Roots, the volume that started it all.

Thanks also to Northern Seminary and President Alistair Brown for hosting us, to Phil Kenyon and Ashley Gieschen for the incredible detail work they have done, to Karen Roberts and the worship team, to sound engineers Chris and Sheldon, and to all our panelists and presenters. Without any of these, our conference would have been much the poorer.

Plans for next year’s conference are still in the works. We’ll be sure to e-mail those who attended this and previous conferences when we develop the plans.

AEF Conference Begins Tonight with Webcast

2008-10-09T05:45:00.005-05:00

Ancient Evangelical Future friends Chris "Desert Pastor" Monroe and his son Brian will once again be providing video of the AEF conference. This year, however, they'll be providing a live web feed. I'll embed the code here, and hope that tonight, when I'm away from my computer and emceeing the program, it all works for you.

Tonight's speaker is Howard Snyder, author of the 1975 classic The Problem of Wineskins: Church Stucture in a Technological Age. The program gets started about 7:00 PM Central with a time of worship, welcomes, and introductions followed by Howard's address and a panel discussion.

Thanks to Chris and Brian for making this event available to our web audience.

Where the Psalms Meet Heavy Metal

2008-09-27T09:34:00.004-05:00

I've come to believe that even heavy metal is kind of like praying the Psalms, where you are crying out in a loud voice and moving through moments of great passion.

Those are the surprising words of renowned Chicago violinist and one-time prodigy Rachel Barton Pine. Besides being a Bach fan, Pine is a speed metal devotee. She had her dressmaker sew the logos of Led Zeppelin, Rush, ACDC, Anthrax, Metallica, Megadeath, and Slayer on her violin case. (Check out her album Stringendo: Storming the Citadel for a taste of her string interpretations of headbanging rock.)

On second thought, Pine’s comparison between the Psalmist’s cries of anger and anguish to metal music shouldn’t surprise us. Chicagoans will remember that when Pine was 20, the rising star’s violin case got caught in the doors of a Metra train. She was dragged some distance and one leg was severed by the train’s wheels.

I’m sure that both those metal bands and the Psalms connected to the emotional hell of her period of accident and recovery. I met Pine earlier this year at the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel where we were both participating in a performance of Franz Joseph Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ. I offered the spoken meditation on “Into thy hands I commit my spirit,” and Pine played in the string quartet. Haydn’s music also touches the deepest moments of anguish and suffering. Violist Richard Young, who has been playing the piece for decades, told me after the performance that Pine had captured the work’s spirit perfectly.

Pine talks about her faith in God and its place in her music in a wonderful human-interest piece by Chicago religion journalist Judy Valente. The piece ran on this morning’s "Religion & Ethics Newsweekly." If you missed it, you can watch the video on their website.

The closing words belong Rachel Barton Pine:

The one thing I've learned is that the way to get through challenges is just to ask God not to change what's happening, not to make it OK, but just simply to be with me, be with me in the worst of times and to be with me in the best of times.

Jesus Creed vs. Out of Ur: Emerging Church Lives

2008-09-25T11:45:00.014-05:00

A few days ago, a staff-written post for the Out of Ur blog operated by Christianity Today’s sister publication Leadership declared the emerging church “dead in nomenclature—if not in spirit.” (See “R.I.P. Emerging Church: An overused and corrupted term now sleeps with the fishes.”) The anonymous blogger began by talking about the death of the term “emerging church,” but before long seemed to suggest that the movement itself was over. “As the emerging church rides off into the sunset,” the writer said, new networks were taking its place.

The blog post irritated a lot of folk, not the least North Park University professor Scot McKnight.

Early, very early, yesterday morning (12:30 AM, to be exact), McKnight posted a response to Out of Ur’s insinuations on his Jesus Creed blog. Ur seemed to say that not only “the word ‘emerging’ was dead but also the emerging church … Tommyrot!," Scot said.

You can feel the heat of Scot’s vehemence.

Scot took a deep breath, counted to ten, and then explained. Terms don’t make a movement. And terms don’t end a movement. And Scot is really, really tired of explaining all the terminological nuances within the phenomenon called “the emerging church." He has certainly been one of the most articulate observers of the movement.

As he explained in his 2007 Christianity Today article, there are five major streams that flow into Lake Emerging. People swim in different streams, some (like Scot) in more than one. If the term is dying, the currents are still there. If it isn’t Lake Emergent, Scot and friends will still swim in Lake Whatever. People are forever doubting the usefulness of labels like "conservative," "fundamentalist," "evangelical," and "feminist." After a while, all movement labels carry excess baggage. They create general impressions that often do not fit the people who are conservative, fundamentalist, evangelical, feminist, or even "emerging."

Nevertheless, Scot says, a lot of young church leaders are rightly concerned about the evangelical turn to neo-fundamentalism, and they are looking for ways to present a perishing world with a holistic gospel.

Scot admits (as Out of Ur suggested) that a new network is being born, but it is “not a sister/brother alliance” of Emergent Village. It's not there to take the place of the emerging streams. Instead, the new network will focus on evangelism, a dimension that has been weak in some emerging churches. Scot and friends are building the new evangelistic alliance on the foundations of the classically evangelical and seriously holistic 1974 Lausanne Covenant. That's a good place to start, because doctrinal questions and rumors that circulated around Emergent and emerging have weighed down some noble efforts. The Lausanne Covenant is as sound as doctrinal statements come. The new network shouldn't have to rebut rumors about flawed doctrine.

Scot promises to reveal more details of the new network soon. Read his entire reply to Out of Ur here.

Forget labels, do ministry.

Early-Bird Conference Savings Extended Just a Few More Days

2008-09-24T18:42:00.008-05:00

Here’s an opportunity to save some money and advance God's kingdom at the same time.

Earlier this week, Northern Seminary president Alistair Brown announced an extended deadline for the early-bird registration for the Ancient Evangelical Future Conference.

That reduced price of $94 saves you nearly $50 off the full price of $140. But that reduced price is only good until Friday. Take advantage of it here. (If you're a student, you can save even more.)

I expect the conference to be a challenging, stretching, inspiring, enabling time for those who care about what God is doing through the church. Here’s the description of speakers and topics I posted earlier:

Discovering Your Church’s Missional DNA
Rick Richardson, director, masters in evangelism & leadership, Wheaton College
§ Missional is the new code word in the theology and praxis of ecclesiology. But how do we become genuinely missional and not just rhetorically missional?
§ Rick Richardson will help you understand what God is doing in restoring the missional identity of the church, and where your church—with its unique missional DNA—might fit.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ridiculous: The Church Visible
Jenell Paris, professor of sociology and anthropology, Messiah College
§ We need an authentic common sense approach to connect the AEF Call to “take seriously the visible character of the church” with what can be observed in the everyday life of our congregations.
§ Jenell Paris will help you think about how your congregation incorporates the good, the bad, and the ridiculous. She will help you consider the unique stories of your congregation, and how those stories fit with the larger story of the church.

Can the Church and Capitalism Get Along?
David Fitch, founding pastor, Life on the Vine Christian Community and prof. of evangelical theology, Northern Seminary
§ Despite the benefits they bring us, capitalism and consumerism distort the church, its fellowship, its spiritual formation, and its mission. How do we shape a community of Christ that is in capitalism, but not of it?
§ David Fitch will offer some basic practices we can adopt to protect our churches from being squeezed into capitalism’s mold.

Tracing the Church’s Journey
Howard Snyder, prof. of Wesley studies, Tyndale Seminary; former prof. of history & theology of mission, Asbury Seminary.
§ The twists and turns, the highways and detours, of the church’s journey through 2000 years of history and a slew of cultures clarifies our present challenge.
§ Howard Snyder will help you think about how that journey will help your congregation effectively come to grips with its own story and mission in light of “God’s narrative” and the biblical story.

Preserving the Church’s Story
D. H. Williams, prof. of patristics & historical theology, Baylor University
§ If the church forgets its story, it will be shaped by the world’s stories. We can easily lose our identity and our mission.
§ To prevent such loss, the ancient church developed a systematic approach to Christian education. It aimed to preserve its message by teaching its story. Because many of its members were illiterate, the church’s message had to be preserved in the minds and hearts of its members.

Conference Preview: The Church, the Continuation of God's Narrative

2008-09-12T15:18:00.005-05:00

I am getting increasingly excited about the third annual conference on the Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future, coming up October 9-11.

In the past few days, our speakers have given us glimpses into what they’ll be sharing with us. I think you’ll find this material thought-provoking and equipping for ministry.

Check out these previews:

Discovering Your Church’s Missional DNA
Rick Richardson, director, masters in evangelism & leadership, Wheaton College
§ Missional is the new code word in the theology and praxis of ecclesiology. But how do we become genuinely missional and not just rhetorically missional?
§ Rick Richardson will help you understand what God is doing in restoring the missional identity of the church, and where your church—with its unique missional DNA—might fit.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ridiculous: The Church Visible
Jenell Paris, professor of sociology and anthropology, Messiah College
§ We need an authentic common sense approach to connect the AEF Call to “take seriously the visible character of the church” with what can be observed in the everyday life of our congregations.
§ Jenell Paris will help you think about how your congregation incorporates the good, the bad, and the ridiculous. She will help you consider the unique stories of your congregation, and how those stories fit with the larger story of the church.

Can the Church and Capitalism Get Along?
David Fitch, founding pastor, Life on the Vine Christian Community and prof. of evangelical theology, Northern Seminary
§ Despite the benefits they bring us, capitalism and consumerism distort the church, its fellowship, its spiritual formation, and its mission. How do we shape a community of Christ that is in capitalism, but not of it?
§ David Fitch will offer some basic practices we can adopt to protect our churches from being squeezed into capitalism’s mold.

Tracing the Church’s Journey
Howard Snyder, prof. of Wesley studies, Tyndale Seminary; former prof. of history & theology of mission, Asbury Seminary.
§ The twists and turns, the highways and detours, of the church’s journey through 2000 years of history and a slew of cultures clarifies our present challenge.
§ Howard Snyder will help you think about how that journey will help your congregation effectively come to grips with its own story and mission in light of “God’s narrative” and the biblical story.

Preserving the Church’s Story
D. H. Williams, prof. of patristics & historical theology, Baylor University
§ If the church forgets its story, it will be shaped by the world’s stories. We can easily lose our identity and our mission.
§ To prevent such loss, the ancient church developed a systematic approach to Christian education. It aimed to preserve its message by teaching its story. Because many of its members were illiterate, the church’s message had to be preserved in the minds and hearts of its members.

* * *

The conference is fast approaching, so register right away.

The Three Little Pigs and the Life of Faith

2008-09-06T15:28:00.006-05:00

Public radio raconteur Garrison Keillor grew up fundamentalist. So it was not surprising to hear him say in a recent News from Lake Wobegon segment (the quote is about 13 minutes in):

I used to think that faith was sort of like a building block, and you’d put all these blocks together, and you’d build a house sort of like the little pig built that the wolf could not blow down.

When I heard these words in Keillor’s comfortably weary voice, I thought of several friends who had grown up fundamentalist—including Bob Webber. Keillor’s metaphor (the brick house of the three little pigs) is defensive. It was a fortification, a bulwark against big bad wolves.

Webber also used defensive language when he described the theological system he picked up in his education and carried with him into his early years of teaching. Here are sentences and fragments from the opening chapter of Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail (1985).

… I was being swept away into evangelical rationalism…. Christianity was no longer a power to be experienced but a system to be defended. … My study of the Bible now turned into a defense of its inspired authorship.

… I was asked to teach a class called Christian Doctrine. Here’s my chance, I thought, to give them the goods, to show them how rationally defensible the Christian faith is and how reasonable it is to believe in the Christian system of things. …

I also thought I could rationally defend the Scripture as God’s mind written ….

I derived a great deal of security from my system. …

Keillor and Webber shared a defensive notion of faith as their starting point. The next step for Keillor was surrender.

I used to think that faith was sort of like a building block, and you’d put all these blocks together, and you’d build a house sort of like the little pig built that the wolf could not blow down. And now I get older, and I feel that faith is a matter of surrender. (Italics supplied)

Webber recalled his frustration in trying to prepare a chapel sermon for Wheaton College students, one that would deliver the answers Christianity had to offer to the questions of a world in despair. But Webber found the answers he knew so well to be “so cold, so calculated, to rational, so dead.” He crumpled up those pages of his sermon manuscript and threw them into the wastebasket.

I dropped back into my chair and sobbed for several hours. I had thrown away my answers. I had rid myself of a system in which God was comfortably contained. I had lost my security …

Both Keillor and Webber believed in a defensive faith that gave them a sense of security. Both Keillor and Webber abandoned a defensive posture and left the security of a system. But then their stories diverge.

Keillor again:

And now I get older, and I feel that faith is a matter of surrender. It’s a matter of just giving up and just leaving that house, of just walking out and experiencing the cold and the rain and doubt and confusion and trying to keep up your hope and some sense of gratitude. If you just keep up hope and gratitude, maybe that’s all you need.

Keillor replaces brick-wall security with stepping out into a cold, rainy, doubt-filled, confusing world, while (presumably by sheer will) “trying to keep up your hope and some sense of gratitude.”

That, of course, raises questions like these: Hope for what? Hope in what? Hope in whom? Gratitude for what? Gratitude to whom?

Webber also left the secure system. But his leaving was about seeking God. And that did not mean aimless wandering while willing yourself into hope and gratitude. Instead, Webber began a purposeful search and immersed himself in the study and experience of worship.

While the world may be cold and rainy and confusing, Webber discovered that abandoning the security of his defensive theology brought him into a greater community. His house, he discovered, wasn’t the only one. There are many mansions. There were people he hadn’t seen while living defensively. By leaving his secure box, not only did he experience God, he met others who experienced God: especially the venerable fathers and mothers of the early church and many contemporary believers whose traditions differed from his but which complemented his.

That is my experience as well. Leaving my little brick house did not mean being attacked by the big bad wolf. It meant discovering other houses, other people, other communities that (to shift the metaphor) presented a rich tapestry of faith.

But that tapestry, both Webber and I discovered, is not entirely woven of rationalist threads. Some of its fibers are images. Some are songs or poems. Some are inexplicable experiences. Some are miracles. Some are mysteries. Woven together they present us with a picture, an icon, of God. They do not contain God, but reveal him in glimpses. And that is something that brick walls can never do.

* * *
Be sure to register for the third annual Ancient Evangelical Future conference, October 9-11, featuring Dan Williams, Howard Snyder, Janell Paris, Rick Richardson, and David Fitch.

Rescuing the Lord’s Prayer from Sentimentality

2008-09-02T09:22:00.009-05:00

First, a word of explanation: I use DVD movies in 30-minute segments to distract me while I daily exercise my creaky body on my creakier classic Nordic Track ski machine.

On a recent Saturday morning, I finished watching a vampire movie (or what seemed like a parody of one) and began watching Ken Curtis’s Reflections on the Lord’s Prayer for People with Cancer.

The contrasts between the two movies are many, but I want to focus on a few important things. In the vampire movie (as in all vampire movies) Christian symbols like the cross and holy water are treated as magical talismans against the evil power of the vampires. In some vampire lore, you can destroy one of those undead bloodsuckers by holding up a crucifix and reciting the Lord’s Prayer. These are regarded as potent weapons, but not for any particular reason. They are on the same level as garlic and sunlight as tools for defeating vampires.

Curtis, the founder of Christian History magazine, doesn’t want us to think of the Lord’s Prayer as a talisman—as something that, if we keep repeating it, would magically keep the cancer at bay. Instead, he treats the Lord’s Prayer as one of God’s ways of helping us see the world differently, see it through God’s eyes. When we understand in our depths that we are commanded to address God as “our Father,” understand deeply that God is our Father, we see the world differently precisely because we know we are not alone.

The classic vampire movie will include at least one scene in which the potential victim is isolated, caught alone in a dark alley or dank cavern or some other place where her screams will not be heard as she comes face to face with the thing that threatens to drain her life from her. Cancer is a vampire that catches us vulnerable and alone. It drains away our life and eats away at us.

In the classic vampire tale, there is also a rescue. At the crucial moment when the vampire is about to feed on his victim, the hero arrives, armed with knowledge and a crucifix and holy water. The message is this: If you’re alone, the vampire will get you. But if you’re with the hero, you’ll be safe.

Curtis wants us to know we’re not alone, that we’re not waiting for the hero to arrive, but that the rescuer is always with us. And we see that by seeing the world through the words of the Lord’s Prayer.

Near the end of his life, when cancer was eating at his pancreas, Bob Webber once again wrote about the importance of seeing the world in the framework of God’s story, not our own. The point is explicit in the title of Who Gets to Narrate the World? (IVP, 2008). But the same point runs through all his writings. Whether he is writing about worship or spirituality or evangelism or theology, Bob stressed that in a properly conceived Christian life, we don’t read God’s story through the lens of our own, but vice versa.

Here for example, is how he put it in The Divine Embrace (Baker, 2006). The fundamental error in medieval mysticism occurred when the focus shifted from God to self.

Spirituality, which was once a contemplation of God’s saving acts, now contemplated the self and the interior life. What was once a journey into God became a journey into self. … [S]pirituality now focused on the experience that occurs inside ‘my story.’ … God’s cosmic story of redemption was exchanged for the drama of redemption that takes place within me, which is different from witnessing to God’s saving acts, which embrace me and I in turn embrace. [51]

Curtis makes the same point about the relationship between our story and God’s. He shows his viewers a Tom Clancy novel. Here’s a 1200-page novel, he says. He rips out a page and holds it up to the camera. This is your life, your story. You can tell some things about the larger story from it, but you can’t really make sense of them unless you have read the whole novel.

Your story only makes sense when you understand it as part of God’s story, as part of his plan to extend his rule over on everything in the cosmos.

While standing on the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, Curtis highlights the radical nature of praying for God’s kingdom to come. In the section of the video titled “The Prayer That Could Get You Killed,” he says:

This prayer for God’s kingdom to come and his will to be done is nothing less than subversive. … Think of the implications in Jesus’ time. And incidentally, they’re just as incendiary today. The Roman Empire … ruled with an iron fist. For a peasant carpenter from up in Galilee to come here and teach his followers to look and pray for another kingdom, that could easily be seen as seditious and treasonous.

Well, not just “seen” as seditious. It was and continues to be seditious and treasonous, as the early Christian martyrs found out.

A few other things I appreciated about Ken’s video:

* He stressed the communal nature of the Lord’s Prayer—both its history as a communal prayer and the implications of the first person plurals in the prayer itself: "Give us ... Forgive us ... Deliver us ..." We’re not in this (the cancer) alone, but can have others interceding with us.

* He chose to shoot the “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us” segment of the video in front of the infamous security barrier that walls out Palestinian terrorists along with all the productive Palestinian workers and former Jerusalem residents who need to commute regularly from Palestinian territory into Israel. The wall is a potent symbol of the enmity that can only be healed by the mutual forgiveness the prayer teaches us.

Kudos to Ken Curtis for producing a video meditation on the Lord’s Prayer that taps into its revolutionary nature. Cancer sufferers (for whom he produced the video) and all the rest of us do not need to sentimentalize these familiar words. We need to feel the radical intimacy with which Jesus framed the “Our Father.” We need to see the grand subversive vision embodied in praying for God’s rulership. We need to experience the humility that can lead to restored relationships. It’s a grand prayer, and Ken has helped to rescue it from sentimentality and familiarity.

* * *

Don’t forget to register for the Ancient Evangelical Future Conference, October 9-11, 2008.

The Radical Snyder

2008-08-29T22:10:00.011-05:00

On one shelf in my basement office, four potent books sit side-by-side. They were written by Howard Snyder between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s. All of them were published by IVP, where I worked from 1981 to 1985. All of them liberated me from institutional Christianity. The books are:

* The Problem of Wineskins (1975)
* The Community of the King (1977)
* The Radical Wesley (1980)
* Liberating the Church (1983)

Ironically, these four sit right next to Friedrich Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith, which is as soft-headed and accommodating as Snyder’s books were clear-eyed and iconoclastic. Howard is a great thinker in his own right. But the contrast with Schleiermacher makes him look even better.

Tonight I was perusing phrases I had highlighted in The Community of the King. Here are a few that still jump out at me three decades later.

The genuine demonstration of Christian community is the first step toward accomplishing God’s cosmic plan. This is miracle, and miracle attracts.

The Church most transforms society when it is itself growing and being perfected in the love of Christ.

The task of the Church … and its place in God’s cosmic design is first of all genuinely to be the redeemed, messianic community, and secondly to do the works of God and carry on the works of Jesus. In truly being the community of Jesus’ disciples the Church commits itself to a pattern of corporate life and a way of relating to one another which is a rejection of, and therefore a challenge to, the social and political structures of the world. In this way the Church’s very existence becomes both prophetic and evangelistic.

Evangelism [in the book of Acts] was not merely something that individual Christians did; rather it was the natural result of the presence and influence of the Christian community in the world. The community gave credibility to the verbal proclamation.

The first task of every Christian is the edification of the community of believers. If we say that evangelism or soul winning is the first task of the believer, we do violence to the New Testament and place a burden on the backs of some believers that they are not able to bear. … [It] ignores the biblical teachings

[B]iblical evangelism must be church-based evangelism. … [T]he Church is both the agent and the goal of evangelism.

Howard’s books from that period were radical. Being intensely scriptural, they cut to the root. They liberated from false consciousness encouraged by institutional Christianity. They were--they still are--empowering.

* * *

Remember that Howard Snyder is speaking at October’s Ancient Evangelical Future conference. The theme is the church. You really ought to be there.

David Fitch: Can the Gospel Be Too Big?

2008-08-28T06:09:00.008-05:00

David Fitch is one of the speakers at October's Ancient-Evangelical Future Conference (you really should come hear him). David leads a double life: He is both a professor of theology who is a church planter. He is a church planter who is a professor of theology. But despite the double life, he's no Jekyll and Hyde. David brings a consistent vision to both pastoral and professorial roles.

David contributed the most recent essay to Christianity Today's Christian Vision Project series, which CT made available on its website yesterday. Here's how he begins his article:

Missional Misstep
Emphasizing the big gospel can make it hard to communicate any gospel.

Can the gospel be too big? For some of us in the missional church movement, this question borders on heresy. We regularly caution that the gospel is not only about what Jesus can do for me. It is primarily about the transformation of our very way of life into God's mission for the world. We resist any temptation to turn the gospel into anything that might be too "user friendly." The mission of God (missio Dei), so we proclaim, must be all-encompassing, and we must become participants in it.

Yet for all the good in this approach, there may be another heresy beneath the surface.For in protecting the bigness of the gospel, we risk making the Christian life inaccessible to those outside of it. As a result, amid the current swell of appreciation for missio Dei theology in American churches, and the outcries against a gospel that has become too small, I find myself concerned about the ways we may unintentionally be making the gospel too big.

Read the rest of David's article here.

Biology Class for the Church

2008-08-23T18:37:00.007-05:00

Howard Snyder will be speaking at October's Ancient-Evangelical Future conference. This year's topic is the church. And since Howard and his friend Daniel Runyon wrote a provocative book on the church in 2002, I thought I'd post my six-year-old review of the book. There's plenty here to chew on. But I'm confident that at the conference Howard will be giving us still more to digest.

Here's the book review, which originally appeared in the November 2002 issue of Christianity Today. The book is, unfortunately, out of print. But copies are still available at Amazon.com.

Biology Class for the Church
Howard Snyder maps the genome of the body of Christ
By David Neff

Some radicals are unbalanced. Others help us regain our balance.

Howard Snyder—whose prior books include The Problem of Wineskins (1975) and The Radical Wesley (1980)—helps us maintain theological equilibrium by constantly testing the state of the church against the teaching of the Bible. He sounds radical because he thinks that somehow, in the power of the Spirit, we can live out that teaching.

Snyder's latest book, Decoding the Church (Baker, 208 pages, $14.99), elaborates the familiar biblical metaphor of the church as a body using contemporary concepts: DNA and ecological systems.

When the apostle Paul writes about the church as a body, his main messages are diversity of gifts and interdependence of members. He secondarily draws out the related notions of unity, growth and maturation, and reconciliation.

In Paul's thought the body is not a simile for the church. The church is not merely like a body. The church does not merely resemble a body in its diversity, unity, and interdependence. It is the body of Christ, who is its head. Every member of the body is, in a mystical sense, a part of Christ.

For 50 years, we have known scientifically what Paul presumably didn't (though it extends his thought nicely). We know that every cell in the body shares the same genetic code. The DNA in the head is the same as the DNA in the toes and the elbows.

Snyder wants to join the DNA metaphor to Paul's body metaphor as a way of saying that the reality of the church's relation to Christ is deeper and more complex than we might think.

DNA is, as Watson and Crick announced in 1953, a double helix. Snyder asks whether our churches have been operating with only half their DNA. He takes the creed's four classic marks of the church (one, holy, universal, and apostolic) and asks whether there isn't a second scriptural strand that intertwines those attributes (diverse, charismatically gifted, locally contextualized, and prophetic).

Any careful reader of the New Testament recognizes those factors as characteristics of the church. Snyder claims, however, that the first strand of DNA tends toward the institutional and hierarchical. That may be natural, since they were historically codified during a time when the church was having to define itself in response to heresies. And since heresies tend to arise in independent, prophetic, charismatic, local contexts, arguments from universality and apostolicity came in handy. One, holy, universal, and apostolic do not need to be instruments of institutionalization, but diverse, gifted, contextualized, and prophetic are good reminders of the organic (body-like) nature of the church.

(Snyder seems to love lists of four. After devoting one chapter to diverse, gifted, contextualized, and prophetic, he spends an additional chapter on missional, alternative, covenantal, and Trinitarian. Did the church's DNA just become a triple helix?)

Snyder offers an even bigger challenge to most churches when he urges the claim of Benjamin T. Roberts (principal founder of the Free Methodist Church) that preaching the gospel to the poor is a mark of the church. Here, historically, are Wesley and Whitefield. Here, historically, are William and Catherine Booth and Francis of Assisi. Here today are Howard Snyder and Ron Sider and a host of faithful urban congregations.

So if it doesn't seem obvious that ministry to the poor is an indispensable mark of the church, think again about the church's universality. Is universality merely a geographic and ethnic concept? Or is it socioeconomic as well? If the gospel is truly for all, we must consider the geography of social class and power as well as the geography of countries and cultures.

Functional structures
Snyder is convinced that church structures either help or hinder the mission of the church. ("Structures, though purely functional, do reinforce values and worldview assumptions.") Churches may successfully carry out God's mission in spite of bad structures, but why not lay aside every weight to run with patience the race?

None of Snyder's DNA factors automatically yield better ways of structuring churches. That takes godly experimentation in community. Thus Snyder's coauthor Daniel Runyon strings a running narrative through Decoding the Church: a tale about "Heartland Church," its pastor, and key lay leaders. The storytelling is neither Salinger nor Steinbeck, but it effectively portrays the necessarily serpentine process of self-discovery. In these narratives, the pastor does not go to a megachurch conference and come back with a winning formula. Instead, the parties work their way through life crises while listening to Scripture. Ultimately, the people and their church are transformed.

Snyder lists three places not to look for helpful structures—megachurches, microchurches (house churches), and business models. He calls them "dead ends, or worse." Yet even at his most negative, Snyder is not a thundering Savanarola, but a Saint Paul showing a more excellent way. And he shows his balance by pointing to exceptions and possibilities. For example, Snyder says, large urban African American churches often do not share the typical problems of other large churches. And, Snyder admits, " 'dead' structures" have historically been "the incubators of fresh forms of renewal."

Hierarchy phobia
Snyder reserves his strongest antipathy for hierarchical thinking about the church. Hierarchy "seeped into biblical interpretation and ecclesiastical practice and overwhelmed the more radical, subversive New Testament teaching," he writes. Snyder makes Aquinas the heavy, citing Colin Gunton: "Aquinas implies … that the hierarchy of the church—[consisting of] an ontological grading of persons—is modeled on that of heaven." Then he calls hierarchy "an instrument of oppression," which supported "social inequality and privileged interest." The Bible, he says, "gives many examples of hierarchy, but it never teaches that hierarchy is normative for society or church."

Before readers can reach for their Bibles to prooftext him into a corner, Snyder makes several defensive moves. First, he defines hierarchy narrowly in ontological terms (hierarchy implies inherent degrees of value and perfection). Second, he distinguishes such hierarchies of being from the functional and relational authority proper to family, church, and other social groupings. Parents' authority over their children is a matter of responsible loving, not of higher value. Third, in discussing the medieval concept of the Great Chain of Being (an "inadequate principle of coherence"), he allows that it is "attractive," primarily for its "instinct of connectedness" and because it guards the truth of "ordered relatedness."

Everything is connected
For Snyder, "ordered relatedness" finds better expression in ecological thinking, in seeing the natural world, the church, the family, and society as interdependent systems of complex organisms. The philosophical intuition that follows on the empirical observation of such systems is: "Everything is significant simply because it connects with everything else—even if we don't yet understand the connection."

It's not hard to see where this leads. Thinking about church in an ecological way prepares us to minister to those who cannot reward us in return and to listen to those without specialized knowledge or social position.

Jesus pointed to the child as the model of faith. Paul said his message was "not in plausible words of wisdom" but "in weakness." God chose "what is weak in the world to shame the strong … what is low and despised in the world … to bring to nothing things that are." Jesus taught us to serve "the least of these, my brethren" in prison, poverty, hunger, or thirst. The poor are not always right or righteous (that is the error of some liberationists), but they are always important to God (that is the truth taught by John Wesley).

The ecological impulse helps us regard all of these as significant. It goads us to value interdependence over institutions. It leads us to treat authority as functional rather than a matter of inherent value. All of this is for the health of the church.

Nobody's perfect
So what are the book's weaknesses? First, the book's final leg is a disappointing attempt to grapple with issues of globalization. Snyder rightly insists that the church must deal with this economic, cultural, and technological phenomenon. But he stumbles, for example, when he announces that "digitization reinforces the tendency of contemporary culture to value quantity over quality." Say what? Digitization is all about quality. What every digital technology, from DVDs and HDTV to digitized facsimiles of ancient manuscripts, aims at is to ensure faithful reproduction of the original.

Second, many readers (most pastors are intuitives) will wish that Howard Snyder would just get them started on thinking about an idea and let them run with it. Snyder references the DNA idea throughout Decoding the Church, and the entire second half is an episodic reflection on ecological systems. Readers can easily become impatient, either running ahead of the authors down obvious paths, or feeling irritated at yet another application of DNA that doesn't especially illumine.

Third, for all its savvy about the church, the book lacks any reference to baptism (by which believers are incorporated into Christ) and the Lord's Supper (by which they are spiritually nourished). The themes expounded in Snyder's treatment of the church as an organic system rather than an institution potentially say much about how we profit from these sacraments/ordinances and how they strengthen our relationship to God and our fitness for his mission in the world.

Fourth, because Snyder has immersed himself in these contemporary symbols of DNA, ecology, and globalization, he occasionally lapses into jargon. It is remarkable, I suppose, that he doesn't become completely mired in jargon. Yet the following paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 10:31 seems stylistically almost unforgivable: "Synergize the many things you do in the one direction of the kingdom of God."

But what are those flaws next to this book's power to provoke discussion and action? Buy this book, and give it to your pastor. If you are the pastor, give it to your lay leadership—or to the officers of your denominational judicatory.

Make them all stop promoting programs or seeking quick fixes and start thinking organically and ecologically. This is the truest sentence in the book: "Think of the church organically, and it focuses on what makes for healthy life."

Copyright © 2002 Christianity Today

Clippings Ecclesiological #1: For the Sake of Sinners, Not the Smug

2008-08-08T17:00:00.014-05:00

The topic of this year's Ancient Evangelical Future conference (October 9-11) is "the church [as] the continuation of God's narrative." So I'm collecting clippings ecclesiological as I run across them.

Here are a few memorable lines on the church from American Catholic novelist Flannery O'Connor, borrowed from Martin Marty's Context, which in turn borrowed them from an article by San Francisco archbishop George Niederauer in America. (Don't tell me you've never borrowed anything from Martin Marty.)

You have to suffer as much from the church as for it. The only thing that makes the church endurable is that somehow it is the Body of Christ, and on this we are fed.

And then ...

The operation of the church is entirely set up for the sake of the sinner, which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.

Archbishop Niederauer also offered this insight from T. S. Eliot, which he thought dovetailed with O'Connor's view of the church: Eliot said that "modern people do not like the church because

she is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft.

Ancient-Future Books on the Digital Trail

2008-08-06T20:16:00.007-05:00

Today a reader named o1mnikent tipped us off to the fact that Logos Bible Software is planning to produce an electronic version of Bob Webber's Ancient-Future books: Ancient-Future Faith (1999), Ancient-Future Evangelism (2003), Ancient-Future Time (2004), and Ancient-Future Worship (2008). Read my review of the most recent volume here.

Logos is currently taking preorders at a special price of $44.95. When enough people have preordered, the set will go into production (available either on CD-ROM or as a download). The progress bar on their website looks like they have about 1/4 to 1/3 of the orders they need to proceed.

Note 1: o1mnikent is one of the bloggers who maintains the delightful "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks (which documents exactly what it says) and earlier blogged briefly on the annoying phrase "a whole nother."

Note 2: The planned Logos set comprises the four volumes that actually have Ancient-Future in their titles, but Bob originally intended The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (2006) as part of the series. The book's copyright page lists The Divine Embrace as part of the Ancient-Future series, but I'm told the publisher thought a book titled The Divine Embrace would sell more copies than something called Ancient-Future Spirituality. If you missed that book, you should read Patricia Raybon's review for Christianity Today.

Sermon: The "Ruulaship" of God Makes Settled Things Strange

2008-07-27T17:03:00.008-05:00

I don't preach very often anymore. My role in leading worship is musical now--facilitating the congregation's worship in song by leading the choir and playing the pipe organ.

But today I preached, just to help out my pastor who was coming back from vacation and didn't want to spend his last week of vacation preparing a sermon.

I want to share that sermon with you because it illustrates a basic principle that Bob Webber wrote about in Ancient Future Worship: All of our worship should tell (and, if possible, perform) God's story as we know it from the biblical narrative. Bob's conception of what this means was expanded by a renewed engagement with the Hebrew Scriptures as he was writing this book.

Many sermons fail to range widely enough in the biblical story for the congregation to remember that they are living out part of a bigger narrative. A sermon should help believers see how their stories are expanded by God's story. A sermon should not squeeze God's story into the narrow confines of the believer's life narrative.

And so I offer this sermon as one humble effort to model that. Note the use of the Old Testament as well as the eschatological perspective. The prescribed Gospel reading for the day was the familiar list of what seem like miscellaneous kingdom parables from Matthew 13: The kingdom of heaven is like (a) a mustard seed, (b) yeast, (c) a man who finds buried treasure, (d) a merchant who finds a rare pearl, (e) a net full of fish, both good and bad.

I hope you find this helpful.

The Ruulaship of God Makes Settled Things Strange

A Sermon Preached July 27, 2008
at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church
Glen Ellyn, Illinois

G. K. Chesterton once said that "the function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange."

And that is true of Jesus' parables as well. The stories he told and the analogies he drew were not designed "to make strange things settled," but "to make settled things strange." That was why most people became puzzled or angry at his teaching. It didn't confirm their prejudices--which is what we expect religious or political leaders to do for us.

Now these parables, these comparisons or analogies--especially the ones we have heard these past three weeks from Matthew 13--are so familiar to us, we have heard them so often, that we may need a little help to see how they "make settled things strange."

So let's take a closer look. Each of these parables begins the same way: The kingdom of heaven is like ...

* The kingdom of heaven is like buried treasure.
* The kingdom of heaven is like yeast.
* The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant who finds a very special pearl.
* The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed.
* The kingdom of heaven is like a net full of fish--some kosher, some not kosher.
* The kingdom of heaven is like this: a man sows good seed in his field, but an enemy comes by night and sows noxious weeds. The man's servants want to pull up the weeds, but he counsels them to be patient and wait for the harvest.

It is important to understand that the central point of Jesus' preaching was about "the kingdom of heaven" or "the kingdom of God." The central point of Jesus' teaching was not Love (though he had a lot to say about love) or Inclusiveness (though a lot of welcome will flow from Christ-formed lives) or Social Justice (though Jesus' followers will be responsible for righting a lot of wrongs).

In Matthew's gospel, Jesus begins his public ministry by proclaiming, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near."

That is in chapter 4. When we turn to chapter 5, we hear Jesus begin his most famous sermon with these words, "Blessed are the poor in spirit; the kingdom of heaven belongs to them." The Sermon on the Mount is punctuated with references to the kingdom of heaven. And in chapter 6 he teaches his followers to pray, "Your kingdom come."

The phrase "kingdom of heaven" or "kingdom of God" is overly familiar to Christian ears. So let's use different words: instead of the word "kingdom," let's use the word "rule" or "reign" or "government." We do that, because "kingdom" can sound like we're talking about the territory a king rules over. But Jesus is talking about the act of "ruling." I like the way the West Indies Bible Society's planned Jamaican patois translation renders the Lord's Prayer, "Mek yu ruulaship kom." We can use that word for God's kingdom: Ruulaship.

Let's imagine ourselves living in Palestine a very long time ago, dealing with a series of foreign armies occupying our land and extracting taxes that keep us from eating the fruits of our labors. We are hungry and poor because of the Romans. And before them the Seleucids. And before them the Greeks. And before them the Persians. And before them the Babylonians. And before them the Assyrians. It seems like our entire history has been a history of oppression and occupation.

But our prophets have told of their visions that some day we wouldn't be ruled by foreign tyrants. We would someday be ruled by a king on the order of the great king David. And this king would bring the ruulaship of our God instead of tyranny. He would throw off their yoke of oppression. He would bring freedom, would this king, this anointed one, this Messiah. He would bring in "the reign of God."

This hope sustains us. It sustains us while our priests connive and collaborate with the Roman oppressors. They'll get what's coming to them, we know, when the Messiah comes.

* * *

Unfortunately, some people just can't bide their time. They think they can bring in the rule of God by fomenting a revolution. They believe that God wants them to draw a little blood just to get the revolution started. Once they put their lives on the line, they know God will finish the job. These firebrands are called Zealots. And among Jesus' followers, there are some Zealots.

Into this political tinder box, Jesus comes preaching that the rule of God is very near, that it is right now beginning in our midst. Good news. The time has come! Finally!

But then he starts talking weirdness. We are expecting a revolution, and he tells us that it's not going to be like that. I can just hear the disciples talking among themselves: "What's he been smokin'?"

The rule of God, he says, is like a mustard seed. A very tiny seed that eventually grows into a towering bush, but it does so quietly, unobtrusively. The rule of God, he says, is like yeast. You put it into a lump of dough, and the dough grows. But it works quietly, gently permeating the whole mass of dough. The rule of God, he says, is like a man who finds a treasure buried in a field. He keeps mum about it until he can buy the field and quietly take possession. Talk about it too soon, and the treasure will belong to someone else. The rule of God is like a merchant who finds the perfect pearl--but doesn't let on until he pulls all his assets together and makes the purchase.

All of these analogies emphasize the quiet, unobtrusive, gentle nature of the way the kingdom comes and grows.

God's rule does not come in obvious ways. The treasure is hidden. The perfect pearl is rare. The mustard seed is tiny. The yeast is almost invisible. You have to wait patiently for it to show itself.

You have to be observant, very perceptive to notice the first signs of God's rulership. And you have to be perceptive to even understand Jesus' teaching. Indeed, Jesus says, there is a gift of perception. Right here in this same chapter of Matthew, Jesus' disciples ask him why he is teaching in parables. And he says, ‘To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. ... [then, quoting Isaiah, Jesus says,] For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; ... But blessed are your eyes, [Jesus tells his students] for they see, and your ears, for they hear.'

You have to pay close attention. That same message is found in last week's lesson about the man whose wheat field was sabotaged by an enemy who planted weed seeds. The weeds were of a sort that looks just like wheat when it is young. Only after weeds and wheat have grown can you be sure you can tell them apart. So the owner of the field counseled patience. Lesson? Even when we're paying attention, we can't tell who around us is wheat and who is weed. The seemingly fine upstanding citizen may prove to be a rather nasty piece of work in the end. And the ne'er-do-well may turn out to be a rare perfect pearl. So be patient and pay attention, because as God's rulership arrives, things are not always as they seem.

This is really hard for us to hear in 2008 in the United States of America. We are a polarized nation. We feed on vicious rhetoric about our political leaders. Cable news shows mercilessly mock the candidates and perpetuate rumors. We repeat stories, spreading them across cyberspace, because they say what we want to hear rather than what we necessarily know to be true.

This is also hard for us to hear because we inhabit a culture of bigness. We are used to our country being the first, the fastest, the richest, the most resourceful, and the most bountiful. But then we get trapped in a credit crunch or a fossil-fuel crunch, and we are at a complete loss. We don't now how to do with less. We don't know how to see the beauty in the small. We are blind to the small ways God wants to work, his almost invisible, yeast-like manner that he uses to bring in his justice and his rule. The rule of God doesn't arrive in a gas-guzzling Hummer. It may just arrive on a donkey.

Let me quote from my friend Andy Crouch whose book Culture-Making has just been published. In a forthcoming interview in Christianity Today, Andy compares a Tower of Babel model for cultural transformation with an approach based on the Incarnation:

When God chose to intervene in the world, he thought it best to start in a pre-technological, modestly literate backwater town of the Roman Empire. And it’s the best because the revolution God was introducing to the world was designed precisely to undermine Babel’s idea that humans will scale up and, through homogeneity and technology, take over. The Babel story is not about love. Love is always small. So a cultural transformation that is going to eventually reseed the whole world with the fruits of love is going to have to start in a particular place and time with ordinary people.

* * *

But just when we're ready to think that God's work is always done in quiet, gentle ways, over long periods of patient waiting, Jesus takes us once again by surprise. When all is said and done, he says, there'll be hell to pay. In last week's lesson, Jesus tells how the owner of the field counseled patience until harvest time, but then he said that there will be a day when God's angels gather the wheat-people into God's barns, but they will throw the weed-people "into the blazing furnace, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth."

And when Jesus tells the story of the big net full of fish, he says, "This is how it will be at the end of time. The angels will go out, and they will separate the wicked from the good, and throw them into the blazing furnace where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth."

When Father Matt asked me to preach this week, and I teased him: "You just don't want to have to preach about hell," I told him.

Behind my teasing is this fact: Contemporary Americans don't want to hear about judgment and final punishment. We value a gospel of tolerance, and we want God to be just like us. A recent Pew study showed that fewer and fewer people believe in ultimate punishment. Especially when compared to the persistence of belief in heaven. In a general population sample, 74% (nearly three quarters) said they believe in a heavenly reward. While a significantly lower 59% believe that there is a hell. But we don't need to listen to polls. We need to listen carefully to what Jesus says.

God isn't tolerant, Jesus tells us. And he shouldn't be blandly tolerant. We are the ones who have become hardened to the pain and suffering of others--as long as the suffering isn't in our back yard. But God cares passionately about the things that hurt the creation he loves. He is not indifferent to evil. Judgment is not the bad news that puts the good news into sharper focus. It is not merely the logical "other side of the coin." Judgment is itself part of the Good News. God passionately loves his creatures and he will "deliver us from evil."

And so there will be justice, Jesus says. But it is God's justice in God's time and in God's way. Please note that these images do not speak about eternal, conscious torment. Jesus' paints a picture of destruction and disposal, as when the harvesters take the wheat to the threshing floor, and separate the grain from the chaff. They store up the grain and throw the chaff into the fire. That's a picture of disposal, not punishment. Likewise, with Jesus' saying about the dragnet that pulls in a whole host of fish, some of them kosher and edible, others not. He draws a picture of separation and disposal. There will be wailing and grinding of teeth, but that is the weed-people's response to exclusion from God's bright future. Our God does not torture.

Now in the story of the weeds and the wheat, Jesus names two groups who will be thrown into the furnace. First: the people who cause others to stumble. That is, those who draw others into destructive behaviors that ruin relationships and families and health and economic well-being. You could come up with various examples, but a few years ago I heard one that to me seemed an apt illustration. I met a banker in Dubuque who told me how right after the riverboat casinos came to that fair city, the default rate on mortgages simply skyrocketed. Behind that default rate, you can easily imagine, are a lot of ruined families and broke breadwinners suffering from a gambling addiction. Do you want God to turn a blind eye to those who prey on the weakness of others and entice them into trouble?

The second category Jesus mentions are the people who promote a lifestyle of lawlessness. Jesus is not talking about those who, like all of us, stumble from time to time and do things we know we shouldn't. Jesus is describing those who thumb their noses at God's way of life. The word "law" has taken on some very negative connotations in Christian parlance, but Jesus is teaching in a Jewish setting, where the word "law" actually stands for something very positive: God's wisdom about right living that fosters human flourishing. Do we really think God should bless those who obstinately refuse his wisdom for living?

These people, Jesus says, will get what's coming to them, but you, he says, you, my followers, will shine like the sun in your heavenly Father's realm. The time for comeuppance is not now, and you are not the agents of justice. That is for the angels of God at the end of the age--after the mustard seed has grown into a bush and after the yeast has permeated the lump of dough.

And so as Jesus uses these parables "to make settled things strange," he gives us three unsettling gifts:

* First, he gives us eyes to see the unexpected, to see the hidden and surprising ways God works.
* Then he gives us patience, for having seen God at work, we know we can trust him to finish what he starts without our untimely interference. As Paul writes in Philippians 1:6, "The one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ."
* And then third, he gives us hope of justice. The meek will indeed inherit the earth, and not just the dirt. Those who are persecuted for righteousness sake--that is, because they stood up for justice--will inherit the kingdom of heaven. The poor and those who mourn--they too can have a confident hope of justice.

The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel.

* * *

Information on Andy Crouch's Culture-Making is available here and here and here.

Review: The Urgency of "Ancient-Future Worship"

2008-07-21T21:45:00.017-05:00

Almost 20 years ago, I met the late dean of historical theologians, Jaroslav Pelikan, at a conference at Carthage College.

“Do you know what you evangelicals need?” Pelikan asked me.

“What?” I said, taken aback by his forthrightness.

“You need to stop being so Jesus-centered.”

I was too stunned to say much.

Seeing my confusion, Pelikan explained: “You evangelicals need to be more thoroughly Trinitarian.”

That was the extent of our conversation, but I’ve been thinking about it since that 1991 encounter.

If I read Bob Webber’s posthumously published Ancient-Future Worship (Baker, 2008) correctly, I believe Bob would agree with Pelikan.

Pelikan did not, of course, mean that evangelicals should actually talk about Jesus less, love him less dearly, or follow him less nearly. Pelikan meant rather that we should regard him in his proper context as the second person of the Holy Trinity. If we forget to understand Jesus in his Trinitarian context, we forget the cosmic purpose of Jesus’ incarnation and we collapse God's grand mission in Jesus into one or another form of religious individualism. Jesus came to save me from my sins, yes. But the mission of the Trinity is to restore and renew the entire creation to fellowship with the divine community of love.

In his latest volume on worship, Webber moves into this Trinitarian territory.

The book is subtitled Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative. God’s narrative begins before the creation and stretches infinitely into the future of a restored creation. In worship, my own narrative—my story about the genesis of my troubles and my renewal of hope for a life freed from failure—should never become the narrow frame into which we squeeze God’s story. Rather, our stories are to be caught up into God’s story and find expanded meaning there.
Evangelicals—indeed most Western Christians—think about the biblical story like this: Creation, Sin and Fall, Cross and Redemption.

But in some of the church fathers, there is a different framework: Creation, Incarnation, and Eschatological Re-Creation. Webber turns especially to the second-century bishop Irenaeus and his theology of recapitulation to underscore this way of framing God’s story. (If you need a quick refresher on the theology of recapitulation, see my October 2007 blog post “What’s the Fuss about Recapitulation Theology?”)

If the middle term of our three-part story is Sin and Fall, the focus is on us, the problem-makers. But if the middle term is the Incarnation, the focus is on God, the problem-solver. In chapter 4, Bob's hip-pocket history of “How the Fullness of God’s Story Got Lost,” he writes about the neglect of the Word in medieval Western worship.

By the late medieval period the service of the Word with preaching was infrequent. The Mass was generally reduced to the eucharistic prayers. Because the Word was dropped and the focus [of] the Mass centered on the death of Christ, the whole story of God was not proclaimed in worship. The story was reduced to the death of Christ, his suffering, and the salvation that was brought through the sacraments.

The Reformers tried different correctives to this hypersacrament- alism. But the Reformation liturgies retained one thing that distinguished them from the ancient church: “Worship now places greater attention on the individual’s condition before God. The vision of God to reclaim the whole world and redeem all flesh and matter through the victory of Christ over sin and death scarcely appears.”

Webber's purpose is to get us to reclaiming this larger vision. He does this by

* showing us from early church texts that the renewal of all things in the Incarnation and the restoration of all things through Christ’s victory was the common theme of early church worship.

* asking us to be Old Testament Christians as well as New Testament believers. This requires that we know the Hebrew Scriptures as background to the New Testament, but it also demands that we imitate the apostles by reading the Hebrew Scriptures as foreshadowings of what would happen in the Incarnation.

* calling us to stick to the basics of worship—Word and Table. We must especially resist the idea that music is a fundamental element of worship, as many contemporary evangelicals have come to believe. Music can play an important role in worship, but unlike Word and Table, it is not of the essence. When people seek the presence of God in music, writes Webber, rather than in the Word or the Table, the accent shifts to the activity of the self in worship ("I will praise you," "I lift your Name on high," etc.).

* inviting us to return to the ancient patterns of prayer that frame our petitions in the light of what God has done. Because this kind of prayer arises out of God's story, it does not grow out of our own needs of the moment or those of our friends. Thus we remember to pray "for the whole state of Christ's church and for the world." If God has demonstrated his love for the whole world, we can do no less than to pray big prayers for the whole world.

Ancient-Future Worship is a grand summing up of Bob's increasingly urgent word to the church. His message is not optional. The breadth of the church's vision and the scope of its mission depend on understanding the mission of the Trinity as it seeks to restore and recreate not just us but the entire cosmos.

New Free Church Statement: 'Ordinances Nourish the Believer'

2008-07-10T21:56:00.005-05:00

The Evangelical Free Church in America has a new statement of faith. On June 26, delegates to its National Leadership Conference affirmed the revised statement by a wide margin. Because of their relationship to the EFCA, Trinity International University (including Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) and Trinity Western University will adopt this revision as well. (Read the EFCA’s 2008 statement here, and compare the text of the denomination’s earlier statement from 1950 here.)

My colleague Collin Hansen will be writing on the Christianity Today website about the significance of the revised statement. (Collin is an interested party, since he currently attends Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.) But on this blog, I want to focus on one particular aspect that Ancient-Future Christians will find especially interesting.

The subject is “ordinances” (or as some of us call them, “sacraments”). The EFCA’s prior statement treats their observance as a matter of duty and warns against thinking they might be means of salvation. Here’s the text from 1950:

Water baptism and the Lord's Supper are ordinances to be observed by the Church during the present age. They are, however, not to be regarded as means of salvation.

The new statement is of an entirely different tone. First, it embeds the ordinances in an article on the church, rather than splitting them from the life of the community and treating them in the abstract. This is important because the ordinances are actions of the gathered community. Baptism is into the body of Christ. The Lord’s Supper is a community meal. Solitary baptism and solitary communion would be meaningless.

Second, the new statement says baptism and the Lord’s Supper “visibly and tangibly express the gospel.” This is significant, because some parts of the EFCA have (like much of evangelicalism) been highly logocentric. But as many, including Bob Webber, have pointed out, we are in an age when worship needs to recover its ancient connection to the material creation. This is not to downplay the importance of the Word. It is to recognize that human beings are multidimensional, and that God ordains (the verb from which we get “ordinance”) that his material creation should participate in his salvation.

Here is a brief passage from Bob Webber’s Ancient-Future Worship (Baker, 2008). After reflecting on Irenaeus’s insight that Christ’s Incarnation shows God’s intent to save the whole creation, Bob writes:

God has descended in the incarnation and taken union with humanity so that humanity may ascend into union with him. This profound theme of the incarnation has rich implications for an earthed worship. By “earthed worship” I mean to emphasize how ancient worship is not an escape from this world. Worship uses the substance of nature—water, oil, bread, wine, movement, symbol—to proclaim that all of creation has been redeemed.

Third, the ECFA’s new statement says that the ordinances “confirm and nourish the believer.” Whereas the 1950 statement used the language of command (“ordinance”) and warning (“not to be regarded as means of salvation”), the 2008 statement echoes the ancient notions of the Eucharist as medicine and food. The ordinances are positive gifts of God to be celebrated, and not merely duties to be observed with caution.

In an e-mail, Greg Strand, the EFCA’s director of biblical theology and credentialing, told me: “Our commitment to the ordinances is stated more strongly, and we acknowledge, in a positive, affirming way, they are to be celebrated by believers.”

Here’s the full text of the new statement’s article on the church:

We believe that the true church comprises all who have been justified by God's grace through faith alone in Christ alone. They are united by the Holy Spirit in the body of Christ, of which He is the Head. The true church is manifest in local churches, whose membership should be composed only of believers. The Lord Jesus mandated two ordinances, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, which visibly and tangibly express the gospel. Though they are not the means of salvation, when celebrated by the church in genuine faith, these ordinances confirm and nourish the believer.

Many of the older statements of faith adopted by evangelical denominations and institutions had a astringent flavor, as they appeared primarily to be drawing boundaries so that they could tell who was in and who was out. This new EFCA statement seems to celebrate God’s goodness and grace. This seems to reflect the confidence of a community that, while still guarding truth against error, no longer sees itself as embattled but as blessed.

Chant Hits the Charts--Again

2008-06-26T20:56:00.015-05:00

The New York Times reports to- day that a chant re- cording by the monks of Heiligen- kreuz monastery in Austria has soared on the British pop charts (at one point beating out Madonna).

The album, entitled "Chant: Music for the Soul," will be released in the United States next Tuesday.

The last time we saw such a phenomenon was the stunning success of the 1994 chant album by the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos in Spain.

Obviously, Gregorian chant is not for everyone. It is an archaic musical idiom. But these periodic crossover albums demonstrate that chant does appeal to many more people than we usually imagine. Within a limited repertoire, we can in 2008 still use chant in public worship.

There are simple chant melodies in many hymnals, and many of us already know some of them. One of the first that I learned (my father taught it to me as a child) is a tune known as Divinum Mysterium, with the English text "Of the Father's Love Begotten." It is a lovely Christmas chant, and congregations can easily learn to sing it.

* * *

What is the appeal of Gregorian chant?

First, it can be musically very simple, moving stepwise up and down the scale with only a few leaps. If you know "Of the Father's Love Begotten," you will see immediately what I mean. The chantlike French folk tune that is paired with the words "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence" is chantlike for that very reason.

Second, in its less elaborate forms, chant serves the text. The music is not something you want to whistle and tap your foot to. The music gives the text a boost without overshadowing it.

Third, chant is placid. If I have had a hectic week, why should I go to a worship service where percussion-punctuated praise music thumps my nerves and bumps up my blood pressure? Chant can help me slow down enough to pay attention to God's still small voice.

* * *

A few weeks ago, I visited the non-denominational Community of Jesus on Cape Cod, where singing Gregorian chant as part of the regular worship services is part of the routine. The musicians in that community have been given the charge by European guardians of the chant tradition to foster it here in America.

One of those musicians, organist James Jordan, told me of his plan to develop a simple method of teaching local churches how to begin using chant. (I think he's still working on that.)

In the meantime, you can hear their community's own choir (the Gloria Dei Cantores Schola) singing chant on any of the seven chant CDs they have recorded. In addition, you can hear the gold-standard chant recordings by the monks of the Abbey of Solesmes in France. Click this link from the Community of Jesus' publishing arm, Paraclete Press, for a list of available disks. And if you're a Gregorian junkie, you can get a 26-disk set by the two choirs for 30% off. Books on chant are also available.

The End of the Story: How the Dismissal Can Shape Our Worship

2008-06-17T10:24:00.003-05:00

In the 16th century, humanistic scholarship opened up the Scriptures anew and upstart scholars challenged the Church’s traditions by their fresh reading of the Bible. Part of their debate was over the meaning of the Mass, and particularly what happened in the re-presentation of Jesus’ sacrifice in the consecrated bread and wine. That disagreement not only split the nascent Protestant movement from Rome, but it divided the reform movements from each other.

Medieval Catholic teaching set the agenda for the discussion, and the Reformers responded out of necessity on that point. But what if liturgical Christians looked at the the Eucharist) through a different lens? My friend Greg Pierce has recently published a book that does just that with the liturgy (The Mass Is Never Ended: Rediscovering Our Mission to Transform the World, Ave Maria Press, 2007).
If you want to understand a familiar story, consider how it ends. Then look back and see how various plot elements point forward in clear or obscure ways to how things will turn out. The “end of the story” for liturgical Christians is the dismissal, when the deacon or priest says, “Go, the Mass is ended,” or in more contemporary rites, “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.” The congregation responds, “Thanks be to God.”

What can we mine from that brief exchange about the purpose of Christian worship? The word mass did not always refer to the entire order of worship. The original Latin phrase (Ite, missa est) literally means, “Go. It is the sending-forth.” That in turn raises the question of what we are being sent forth for.

The term missa simply means sending. But to Christian ears steeped in the language of the New Testament, there are clear echoes of passages such as “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20:21) and “As thou didst send me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” (John 17:18). We are part of God’s mission to the world. And when at the end of a liturgical worship service we are sent forth, it is precisely as part of God’s mission to the world and as representatives of Christ.

For Greg Pierce, this sending into the world is a sending into the world of work. (Greg has made spirituality in the workplace the focus of his efforts at ACTA publishing.) Work is what most of us do—whether paid work or the unpaid variety that improves and eases the lives of families, friends, fellow citizens, and strangers. So the various parts of the worship service must strengthen us and prepare us to do that work in Christ’s way. The sermon, which is supposed to help us hear God’s scriptural voice speak more clearly, had better not stop short of application to daily life. Saying the Creed together should be understood as assuring that we are all on the same page before we take up our mission for another week. The prayers should, of course, praise God, but they must also address our world of work. Communion is receiving strength for the task, because Jesus himself is the food and drink that sustain us on our kingdom-advancing mission.

Has Greg gone out on a limb by trying to view Christian worship through the lens of the dismissal? It doesn’t sound very Catholic (at least to Protestant ears).

Not really. On the back cover of his book, Greg has reprinted Pope Benedict XVI’s comments on the dismissal: “These words help us to grasp the relationship between the Mass just celebrated and the mission of Christians in the world. ... The People of God might be helped to understand more clearly this essential dimension of the Church’s life, taking the dismissal as the starting-point” (The Sacrament of Charity, 51).

The Mass Is Never Ended is a quick read with short chapters that leave you wanting more. It is therefore a good stimulus to help us think about whether the way we conduct and participate in worship really does help us in our task of advancing God’s kingdom in our daily lives. The book is written in a simple style to encourage Catholic lay people to think about their public worship as preparation for their daily work and to think of their daily work as an extension of their public worship. But non-Catholics and non-lay people need to be encouraged to think along these same missional lines.

Now, go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

What Makes a Good Hymn Last?

2008-04-01T20:36:00.004-05:00

Today at the office, a colleague put the March-April 2008 issue of Worship Leader in my hands--and lo and behold, there I was.

I'd completely forgotten that they'd interviewed me about what makes a good hymn last and about the relative strengths and weaknesses of traditional hymns compared to contemporary worship music.

You can read the article here. I hope you'll notice the way my remarks feed into Bob Webber's notion of "blended worship."

Congratulations Are in Order

2008-03-22T11:39:00.007-05:00

This past week I consulted my doctor about some shoulder and neck pain. His nurse checked my weight, temperature, and blood pressure. She congratulated me on my blood pressure. (As to the weight, well, she was discreetly silent.)

My wife also has good blood pressure. Actually, it is remarkably low blood pressure.

Since we're about to celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary, I was delighted to read this morning that happily married couples have noticeably lower 24-hour blood pressure than either singles with excellent friendship networks or unhappily married couples who also report having supportive circles of friends. (The basic AP report is here. And there's more detail here from Science Daily.)

"Marriage may literally be a matter of the heart," quipped the Science Daily writer.

“There seem to be some unique health benefits from marriage,” said [psychologist Julianne] Holt-Lunstad, whose findings will be published March 20 in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine.

I'll take those benefits and testify to a lot more.

* * *

The study has two co-authors who worked with Holt-Lunstad when they were undergraduates at Brigham Young University: Wendy Birmingham and Brandon Jones. The study is titled “Is There Something Unique about Marriage? The Relative Impact of Marital Status, Relationship Quality, and Network Social Support on Ambulatory Blood Pressure and Mental Health.”

'Father, Into Your Hands I Commit My Spirit': What Jesus added to David's cry.

2008-03-22T10:44:00.006-05:00

Sorry I haven't been blogging for the past ten days. Preparations for Holy Week and the intense schedule of services and rehearsals predictably took my attention. But here's something I can share from Tuesday night.

At the annual performance of Franz Joseph Haydn's The Seven Last Words of Christ at the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, I joined other Chicago area religious leaders in giving spoken meditations on Jesus' sayings on the cross, interspersed between the exquisitely performed musical meditations by the 18th-century composer.

Jesus called out with a loud voice, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." When he had said this, he breathed his last. (Luke 23:46)

Jesus' spiritual life was bathed in the language of the Psalms of David. He was a descendant of David and was hailed on Palm Sunday as the Son of David (Matt. 21:9). The Psalms reflect the rough emotional terrain of Jesus' famous forebear's turbulent life.

Like a leitmotif in a Wagnerian opera, the theme of trust in the face of doom returns, repeats, reasserts itself in the Psalms of David: "They conspire against me and plot to take my life. But I trust in you, O LORD; I say, 'You are my God'" (Ps. 31:13b-14).

In his most trying moments, in his dying moment, Jesus reached into the depths of his experience for the words of his archetypal forebear David. He brought forth Psalm 31:5: "Into your hands I commit my spirit." His dying moment was a moment of trust.

It was also a moment of intimacy. The two belong together: trust nurtured by intimacy; intimacy nurtured by trust. The intimate word Jesus added to the words of David was Father. "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit."

David cried out to his God: "O Lord," he would say, "You are My God." In David's time, such language was radical. The Psalms of David personalize the spiritual life in a way that earlier biblical literature did not. But Jesus took it even further. He consistently spoke of and to his Father. And to his disciples he said, "When you pray, say, 'Our Father … '" This language of intimate converse with his Father he shared with his followers.

Just before his final expression of trust, Luke tells us, the heavy curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. Interpretations of this event vary widely, but I see this as a sign of newly opened access to God. The structures of worship are both barrier and bridge. They both separate worshipers from and connect worshipers to the divine. But in the tearing of the temple veil we see that the formal separation between worshipers and the Worshiped One is destroyed as Jesus himself provides free and open access. He is, in his own words, the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

In our last moments, may we too be given the gifts of trust, intimacy, and an open door to the Father.

* * *

Reflections from previous years of the Rockefeller Chapel Seven Last Words concerts are compiled in Echoes from Calvary, edited by Vermeer Quartet violist Richard Young. The book includes two audio CDs.

Washington Post: Don't Sell Me Something at Church; Put Me in Touch with the Mystery of God

2008-03-12T15:07:00.006-05:00

Last weekend, the Washington Post's Jacqueline Salmon highlighted the Ancient-Future trend among evangelicals in her story "Feeling Renewed by Ancient Traditions." The story was subtitled: "Evangelicals Putting New Twist on Lent, Confession and Communion."

Salmon quoted patristics scholar Dan Williams, one of the theological editors of the Call for an Ancient Evangelical Future, "Evangelicalism is coming to point where the early church has become the newest staple of its diet." This is, in Williams's words "a sea change."

Part of the reason for the article was the cover story by Bethel Seminary's Chris Armstrong in the February 08 Christianity Today, "The Future Lies in the Past," which traced the 30-year history of this movement from some of Bob Webber's earliest agitations to the present.

I spoke with Salmon while she was reporting the story and recommended that she talk to Chris and to John Witvliet at Calvin. (Dan Williams had referred her to me, and she already had Chris and John on her list, I discovered. Way to go, Dan!) Here are the key comments from Chris and John.

According to Chris, the young adults who are attracted to things Ancient Future are

still in love with their Bible. They're still in love with their God. They still see the Bible as their primary authority .... But their experience is one of churches that look too much like the rest of the world -- a little bit too much like malls or rock concerts.

John's quotable comments help to set straight those who worry that Ancient Future is all about surface elements like incense, candles, and calendar. It is about the inner person and the mystery of God:

I definitely sense a hunger for acknowledgment of life's mysteries and of the mystery and beauty of God .... There's a hunger for deeper engagement -- "Don't just sell me a product at church, but really put me in touch with the mystery and beauty of God."

When the church not only feels like the mall, but acts like the marketplace, we feel like consumers. But God seeks worshipers--not consumers--and so John W. has really put his finger on it: "Don't see me a product at church... put me in touch with the mystery and beauty of God."

Thanks to John, Chris, and Dan for steering the Post's Salmon down the right path.

History Lesson: Positively Protestant

2008-03-02T22:43:00.015-06:00

Last summer, I received an essay from a friend—a leading Evangelical intellectual—who said that the label Protestant should fade out in favor of the label Evangelical because, in part, Protestant was “negative.”

In many people’s minds, it certainly is. It sounds like it is about dissent and disagreement. It evokes images of picketers carrying poorly made signs back and forth in front of a factory. Indeed, it sounds disagreeable.

More recently, another friend published an engaging account of his exploration of Catholicism. The book is Jon Sweeney's Almost Catholic, and you can read an excellent review of it on my wife LaVonne’s blog.

The book is a good read, but its argument rests in part on his contrast between the “universal” character of Catholic faith and the negative Protestant alternative:

To be Protestant is to define yourself as protesting against certain forms of religion. ... there is little need for Protestants anymore. What are we still protesting? The Reformation of the sixteenth century was a European event.

So many seem to think that the essence of being Protestant is to conscientiously object to what is or was Roman Catholic. A little history and a little linguistic research shows Protestant to be a much more positive word, referring to what the original Protestants stood for rather than what they stood against.

* * *

Sweeney rightly ties Protestant to the Second Diet of Speyer (1529), and the response of the German evangelical princes to its decision to restrict their freedom. But he misleadingly labels Protestant “a political moniker,” when the cultural context thoroughly mixed religion and politics. The word religion certainly existed, but it remained for the Enlightenment to create it as a distinct category of thought and experience. Sixteenth-century people were more likely to think in concrete terms of the overlapping authorities of king and pope, bishop and prince, priest and magistrate. Neither religion nor politics was an abstract category for them.

What do the major historians of Protestantism say? Like almost all their colleagues, John Dillenberger and Claude Welch link the origin of the word Protestant to the ‘Protestation’ of the German evangelical estates in the second Diet of Speyer. But they see in that term “the duality of protest and affirmative witness.” That protest, they write, was

from the standpoint of affirmed faith. Few churches ever adopted the name “Protestant.” The most commonly adopted designations were rather “evangelical” and “reformed.” ... [W]hen the word Protestant came into currency in England (in Elizabethan times), its accepted significance was not “objection” but “avowal” or “witness” or “confession” (as the Latin protestari meant also “to profess”).

That meaning lasted for another century, say Dillenberger and Welch, and it referred to the Church of England’s

making its profession of the faith in the Thirty-nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer. Only later did the word “protest” come to have a primarily negative significance, and the term “Protestant” come to refer to non-Roman churches in general.

* * *

Writing about the second Diet of Speyer, the esteemed Luther biographer Roland Bainton called the word Protestant

unfortunate as a name because it implies that Protestantism was mainly an objection. The dissenters in their own statement affirmed that “they must protest and testify publicly before God that they could do nothing contrary to His word.” The emphasis was less on protest than on witness.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of the history of the church at Oxford University, traces the history of the term. From 1529 until 1547, Protestant was limited to the sphere of German politico-religious life, identifying those princes who followed Luther or Zwingli and who in 1529 “issued a protestatio, affirming the reforming beliefs that they shared.” The term entered English in 1547, when the officials who were organizing the coronation of Edward VI listed “in order the procession of dignitaries through [London].” There, in that list, was a place for “‘the Protestants,’ by whom they meant the diplomatic representatives of [the] reforming Germans.”

* * *

When Edward VI was crowned, the word still had a positive connotation. On the CultureVulture blog for the Guardian, Sean Clarke notes that it was 60 years from the introduction of Protestant in English until its first use in the extended sense of "object, dissent, or disapprove.” That (according to the Collins Etymological Dictionary) was first recorded in English in 1608. The Online Etymological Dictionary places the first use of protest to mean “statement of disapproval” in the year 1751—another century and a half. Through much of that history and well after, protest continued to mean “avow,” “affirm,” “witness,” or “solemnly proclaim.”

Poor, misunderstood protest has had a history something like that of another word—apology. That word has gone from its positive, head-held-high sense of “a formal justification or defense” (as in “the essay was an apology for capitalism”) to something tinged with shame and remorse (“a statement of regret or request for pardon”).

We need to recover the positive sense of protestant. It denotes things that we stand for: the authority of Scripture, salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone. It’s a matter of principle. And because it is about standing for truth, Catholics can be protestants too.

* * *

Works cited

Roland H. Bainton, The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century (Enlarged Edition, Beacon, 1985)
John Dillenberger and Claude Welch, Protestant Christianity Interpreted Through Its Development (Scribner’s, 1954)
Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (Viking, 2003).

Institute for Worship Studies passes accreditation hurdle

2008-02-27T08:32:00.003-06:00

The late theologian Bob Webber had a vision for an academic program where people could pursue graduate-level studies in worship, without having to pass through the standard seminary channels first. There are a lot of church musicians and worship leaders whose training is in music or dance or some other related field--people with the academic abilities but who for career reasons cannot take the M.Div. detour before studying the theology and history of worship.

In 1998, Bob founded the Institute for Worship Studies in Jacksonville, Florida. It has been a nontraditional program that combines on-site seminars with distance learning. It's facilities are seriously limited, but it has attracted a knowledge-hungry and enthusiastic group of students, having graduated 161 students from over 30 denominations in its 10 years of existence.

Last week I got an e-mail from IWS president Jim Hart, excitedly telling me that the school had passed a major hurdle in the accreditation process.It has been granted candidate status with the Association for Biblical Higher Education. According to the IWS press release:

Candidate Status grants the Institute membership in the association, and also provides pre-accredited status. Pre-accredited status is granted by the ABHE to institutions that meet its Conditions of Eligibility, and provide a basis for achieving accreditation status within four years.

Congratulations to Jim Hart and the IWS community!The press release with full information is posted at the website of the Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies.

Shameless Self-Promotion Dept.: Holy Week Edition

2008-02-25T19:52:00.007-06:00

Today's mail brought the brochure for this year's performance of Franz Joseph Haydn's The Seven Last Words at the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Memorial Chapel (string quartet version with guest meditations). I mention it because I'm one of the "special guests" providing one of the meditations. Others include Martin Marty, David Tracy, John Buchanan, Willie T. Barrow, and Jean Bethke Elshtain. For the full list and for ticket information, click here and scroll down to March 18.

This will be the second time I've participated in this event, which is made especially meaningful by violist Richard Young's pre-concert parsing of Haydn's musical themes and their relation to the theological themes of the work. (Young collected meditations from past years in E choes from Calvary. His essay on the relationship of the music to the theology can be found in the book's appendix.)

In 2004, shortly before I first spoke at one of these events, I wrote up the following historical commentary for Christianity Today:

The Passion, Eight Adagios, and an Earthquake

Haydn's Seven Last Words is a powerful guide for Good Friday meditation.

By David Neff | posted 3/01/2004 12:00AM

In writing about Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, I identified it as a devotional exercise. It seemed to me to be an extended visual meditation on the five Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. Others have identified it as a meditation on the Stations of the Cross. In any case, the movie translated a classic Christian devotion into a shockingly modern form.

The church has preached the Cross from its apostolic beginnings at Pentecost, but it seems that once people heeded the message of the Cross and became followers of Jesus, they felt a need to structure personal and communal ways to remember that pivotal event in salvation history.

The most ancient description of a ritualized remembering of the Passion is a fourth-century eyewitness report by a Spanish nun named Egeria. She traveled to the Holy Land and reported that Christians in Jerusalem gathered for three hours on Good Friday to listen to the bishop read from the Scriptures the prophecies of the Lord's Passion and their fulfillment.

Christians have developed other forms of commemoration (literally, "remembering together"), such as walking the Way of Sorrows (via dolorosa) either literally in Jerusalem or symbolically by praying and meditating before a series of plaques that recount the events of Jesus' painful trek to Calvary.

This Holy Week, I am going to participate in another variation on such communal remembering: a service of meditations on the Seven Last Words. This service was first developed by Jesuit missionaries in Peru, who blended cross-centered preaching with guided meditation to create a kind of congregational "spiritual exercise." In Jesuit terms, the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church says, Spiritual Exercises refers to a 4-week program of meditations designed by Ignatius Loyola to combine "sense impressions, imagination, and understanding, in actuating the will towards the pursuit of perfection." Ignatius devoted fully one-quarter of the meditations (the third week) to the Passion, and these meditations shaped the spiritual lives of his followers. In the century after Loyola created the Spiritual Exercises, these Jesuit missionaries created a three-hour meditation on Jesus' seven sayings from the Cross for use on Good Friday.

This service eventually became an occasion for dramatic music as well as meditation. In 1785 or '86, the Austrian Catholic composer Franz Joseph Haydn received a request from Spain to write a series of seven orchestral interludes to accompany the spoken parts of the service. Though Haydn wrote with classical restraint just after the close of the Baroque era, the spirit of the Spanish Baroque is at work in this project. (To gain a visual impression of how the Spanish imagination had dealt with the Passion, consider the Pieta by El Greco, Ignatius's younger contemporary, or Christ on the Cross by Velasquez, who lived at the same time the Jesuits shaped their meditations on the Seven Last Words.)

Here is how Haydn himself described the service for which he composed his Seven Last Words:

Some fifteen years ago I was requested by a canon of Cádiz to compose instrumental music on the seven last words of Our Savior on the Cross. It was customary at the Cathedral of Cádiz to produce an oratorio every year during Lent, the effect of the performance being not a little enhanced by the following circumstances. The walls, windows, and pillars of the church were hung with black cloth, and only one large lamp hanging from the center of the roof broke the solemn darkness.

At midday, the doors were closed and the ceremony began. After a short service the bishop ascended the pulpit, pronounced the first of the seven words (or sentences) and delivered a discourse thereon. This ended, he left the pulpit and fell to his knees before the altar. The interval was filled by music. The bishop then in like manner pronounced the second word, then the third, and so on, the orchestra following on the conclusion of each discourse.

My composition was subject to these conditions, and it was no easy task to compose seven adagios lasting ten minutes each, and to succeed one another without fatiguing the listeners.

Haydn's music—an introduction, seven musical meditations on the words, and a final "earthquake" movement—not only succeeded in not "fatiguing the listeners," but its popularity and power has lasted more than 200 years, from its first performance in 1787 till now. Haydn also created a version for string quartet so that the music could be played where the full forces of an orchestra were not available. And in 1795-96, he wrote a choral version, which was published in 1801.

In one of history's curious twists, Good Friday services that focus on the Seven Last Words have become more popular among Protestants than among Catholics. Perhaps this is because the service lends itself to preaching, and Protestants, we all know, love to preach. The service also lends itself to multiple preachers, which is why it is often sponsored as an ecumenical service by local ministerial fellowships.

The event in which I will be participating this year, uses Haydn's string quartet version, and its nature is ambiguous. Is this a concert? Or is this a service? The promotional materials call it a "concert," a "performance," and a "presentation," but in order to be true to the work's original intent, eight religious leaders (including yours truly) will be offering brief meditations. (I am speaking on "I Thirst." In two previous events, CT's associate news editor Stan Guthrie spoke on the same saying from the cross.)

The ambiguity is heightened by the choice of venue: the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. A grand Gothic-revival structure, the broad strokes of the Rockefeller Chapel's architecture evoke medieval cathedrals with their soaring tribute to God's transcendence. But whereas Gothic cathedrals were filled with Christian symbolism: crosses, angels, saints, pelicans, and such, the details of Rockefeller Chapel reflect the liberal Protestant spirit of its times, and its few Christian symbols are discreetly placed so as not to offend anyone.

The musicians for this occasion are the Vermeer Quartet, and I know from conversations with violist Richard Young that they take very seriously the religious character of Haydn's music and its performance. Since 1988, their annual presentations have tried to recreate something of the original experience.

Not everyone can get to the Vermeer Quartet's concerts at the University of Chicago and Northern Illinois University where they blend music and spoken meditation. So in 1994 they produced a two-CD set—one CD that is music only, and one CD that features both music and spoken word. The CD features such high-profile preachers as Billy Graham and Martin Luther King, Jr., renowned scholars such as Raymond Brown and Martin Marty, and the voice of Jason Robards.

Whether you participate in person or by listening to a recording, the music of Haydn is a powerful instrument to help focus meditation on the Lord's Passion.

Sidebar:

The Seven Last Words

Jesus' sayings from the Cross

Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. (Luke 23:24)
Today thou shalt be with me in paradise. (Luke 23:43)
Woman, behold your son. Behold your mother. (John 19:26-27)
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Matthew 27:45-46)
I thirst. (John 19:28-29)
It is finished. (John 19:30)
Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. (Luke 23:46)

Book Review: How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind

2008-02-22T19:30:00.012-06:00

A few years ago, an African-American friend and I were discussing a popular black pastor whose doctrine of the Trinity just wasn’t orthodox. My colleague thought Christianity Today should give the man a pass. After all, he was doing good ministry and the fine points of the Trinity were just more of that dead-white-European-male baggage.

I hadn’t thought of it before that moment, but suddenly I had a flash: Athanasius, the architect of Trinitarian orthodoxy was African, not European. (So, of course, was Arius, the heretic who drove Athanasius to distraction.)

I took the opportunity to remind my colleague that orthodoxy arose out of the African context.

* * *

Indeed, many of the shapers of Christian orthodoxy were African. Names like Augustine, Tertullian, Origen, Clement, Anthony, and Pachomius were familiar from my undergraduate church history survey. But my professor had not presented them as Africans ministering and teaching in the context of an African culture.

That common omission is what theologian Thomas C. Oden wants to address with the Ea rly African Christianity Project as well as with his book, How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind (IVP, 2007).

The title of Oden’s book suggests a parallel to Tom Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization. That’s unfortunate, because readers may expect Oden to play the raconteur in the Cahill manner. Instead, How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind is an outline and an agenda for research. (The agenda genre is classic forward-thinking Oden, who has devoted other books to outlining where theologians should be turning their attention.)

Classical African Christianity, claims Oden, has been ignored—or treated as something other than African. Augustine, Athanasius, Tertullian, and others have been treated as Europeans in disguise.

The story of Christian theology has been told from a European perspective. Oden wants to tell that story differently: classical Christian theology was heavily shaped by Africans. The language we use to worship the Trinity, the received definitions of the Christ’s two natures, the early church’s methods for restoring repentant sinners, the basic patterns of monastic life, our fundamental approach to biblical interpretation, the church’s devotion to its martyrs—all of these things have their roots in African theological debate, African prayer, and African biblical study.

The movement was from south to north. Concepts hatched in Alexandria or Carthage were appropriated in Constantinople or Rome or Milan. Eventually, Arab Islamic expansion across north Africa drove many Christians from their native soil. The result is that some of what Cahill’s Irish monks preserved was in fact African. Writes Oden:

There is little doubt that Irish Christianity sustained strong African and monastic motifs in its piety, hagiography and temperament. This can be seen visually in its crosses, funerary objects, décor, calendars and art forms, as well as literarily in poetry, song and preaching.

Oden theorizes that as the scholarly monks who followed the rules of Pachomius and Augustine were driven out of Africa by the Vandal and Arab invasions, they migrated to Sicily and the little island of Lérins off the coast of France. From there came the influences that shaped Irish monasticism. That monasticism, as Cahill tells the story, eventually shaped European Christianity, which in turn sent missionaries back to Africa.

But even before the seventh-century Muslim conquest, the influence flowed from south to north. Not only theologians like Athanasius, but influential rhetors (the Greek term for professional orators) like Augustine and Tertullian brought distinctly African patterns of argument to Rome. Throughout this book, Oden asserts the significance of the African context for the contributions of these key figures. Then he repeatedly appeals to African scholars to document and analyze the material in its African context.

Those repeated appeals may grow tiresome for the general reader, but Oden’s focused audience is African scholars who need to take up the outlines of his agenda, document the broad strokes with all the historical detail, and above all, demonstrate just how socially and culturally African our orthodoxy is.

* * *

Why is Oden so urgent? Part of his motivation fits broadly into his program to redeem theology from liberalism. It was northern European liberalism (Adolf von Harnack is the chief villain in Oden’s narrative) that dismissed the significance of the African context and tried to label many ideas of classical Christianity as Greek philosophy, alien to biblical thought.

But the urgency derives even more from the current sub-Saharan struggle between Christianity and Islam. As Oden writes:

The rising charismatic and Pentecostal energies in Africa are stronger emotively than intellectually. They may not sufficiently sustain African Christians through the Islamic challenge unless fortified by rigorous apologetics.

That rigorous apologetic can clearly come from Africa’s own history, but only if African theologians reclaim the history of Africa’s north for the entire continent. That reclamation is at the heart of Oden’s agenda.

* * *

For a special treat, see the literary timeline of early African Christianity included among the appendices of How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind. A similar feature can be found on the Center for Early African Christianity website.

OTB - Where Everybody Knows Your Name

2008-02-22T05:23:00.002-06:00

The board that oversees New York's 71 remaining OTB (off-track betting) parlors has voted to close them, according to an article in the New York Times. Apparently, they are no longer profitable for the city of New York.

People are already mourning the demise of OTBs because of the unique social atmosphere they provide. (The article is strong on atmospherics.)

Here's the quote caught my eye in that article. A regular at the OTB on Seventh Avenue at 38th Street told the Times reporter:

“Wherever you have gambling, you’re going to have rich guys and beggars next to each other,” observed ... Eric Quinones, 40. “And that’s what makes these places unique.”

Oh, wait a minute. I thought that having "rich guys and beggars next to each other" was supposed to be the church. As a matter of fact, it is what the church is called to be.

And from what I read in my own magazine, New York's churches are doing a pretty amazing job. (See this important article by Tony Carnes from December 2004.)

Some of Us Still Sing Hymns

2008-02-20T21:03:00.008-06:00

I keep hearing that hymn-singing in churches is virtually extinct, that contemporary praise-and-worship music (accompanied by contemporary praise-and-worship bands) has completely taken over the church music scene.

That's why I was thankful for small graces today when I saw the results of a (totally unscientific) poll on the Christianity Today website. We asked our readers what they sing in church.

Here are the percentages:

Almost exactly half do sing predominantly "modern worship choruses." But 34% sing "mostly hymns." We who love (or at least tolerate) meaning-packed rhyming text set to predictably rhythmic tunes are not quite yet extinct!

Christianity Today Poll
What do you sing in church?

Mostly hymns - 34%

Mostly modern worship choruses - 52%

Mostly gospel/spirituals - 2%

Other - 12%

Total Votes - 849

An Opportunity for Texas Readers of this Blog

2008-02-20T10:07:00.003-06:00

Yesterday I received an e-mail announcement of an upcoming lecture by patristics scholar Dan Williams. Dan is the editor of the Evangelical Resourcement series of books from Baker Academic (which yours truly has blurbed) and consulted with my team at Christian History and Biography to produce our theme issue on the Council of Nicaea. In addition, he was one of the four theological editors of the Call for an Ancient Evangelical Future.

Here is the poster for his upcoming lecture at Baylor:

I always enjoy listening to Dan, and I'm sorry I'll be in frigid Illinois rather than temperate Texas on February 28. But if you're going to be near Waco on that day, you may want to take in this lecture. More info after the jump:

For further information, contact:

Joyce Swoveland
Office Manager/Assistant to the Chair
Department of Religion
Baylor University
One Bear Place #97284
Waco, TX 76798-7284
office: 254.710.3758
fax: 254.710.3740

Inscrutable Advice from Pastor Ingqvist

2008-02-17T17:49:00.002-06:00

Quote for the Day:

Garrison Keillor’s News from Lake Wobegon segment from the February 9 broadcast of "A Prairie Home Companion" ends with disturbing news for Clint Bunsen.

After he failed to find any records of his grandfather among the Norwegian immigrants at Ellis Island, Clint got DNA test results that show he isn’t Norwegian at all.

Clint confides in his pastor. And Pastor Ingqvist tells Clint:

We are what we are—Sumus Quod Sumus—but Management reserves the right to change this suddenly.

And so be grateful, as we say in Norwegian, we say, … “Shut up and be beautiful.” Meaning that you are beautiful, whoever you are. Take it as an opportunity; take it as an experience.

Some luck lies not in getting what you have or what you thought you wanted, but in getting what you have now, which—once you have it—you may be smart enough to realize is what you would have wanted had you known in the first place.

It’s good to get inscrutable advice.

Truth and Power; Faith and Ideology

2008-02-16T12:09:00.000-06:00

Quote for the day:

Political ideologies read history as an opportunity for empowerment. Classic Christianity reads history as an opportunity for living out the truth revealed in history.

Thomas C. Oden, How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2007), p. 106.

Christology: Luke Timothy Johnson on the Great Both/And

2008-02-10T19:23:00.000-06:00

A little over a year ago, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) rapped the knuckles of Latin American liberation theologian Jon Sobrino.

That reads like a dog-bites-man headline. But in the current issue of Commonweal, New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson illumines the debate in a helpful article entitled, “Human and Divine: Did Jesus Have Faith?” (requires subscription to read full article).

It seems that Sobrino, taking his cues from the New Testament book of Hebrews, wrote that “with regard to faith, Jesus in his life is presented as a believer like ourselves.” The CDF replied that since Jesus was fully God, his divine consciousness and his intimate communion with the Father precludes him from having faith the way we have faith.

Johnson argues that both sides have much to learn from each other.

As they articulate their Christologies, the CDF and Sobrino are engaged in two entirely different but nevertheless complementary modes of discourse, says Johnson. The CDF speaks the language of ontology (the philosophical discipline that deals with being), which shaped the language of the Chalcedonian definition of Jesus as fully God and fully human—the Great Both/And of Christian faith. Sobrino, like other liberation theologians, is influenced by other modes of discourse: politics, economics, historiography, and anthropology—all of which are appropriate if we are to understand Jesus as fully human.

Not only does the CDF not know how to bring these disciplines together with the traditional philosophical categories, says Johnson, they don’t know how to bring the fruit of biblical scholarship to bear either.

* * *

Johnson is a bridge-builder, but he’s not a split-the-difference compromiser. In this situation, he wants both sides to learn the usefulness of all the disciplines and all the modes of discourse in our understanding of Jesus; thus he does some knuckle-rapping of his own, admonishing both the CDF and Sobrino for their lack of breadth.

Unlike many in our postmodern context, Johnson does not want to jettison the putatively Greek philosophical categories of the creeds, even as he advocates the importance of historical consciousness and of understanding the narrative and literary character of the gospels. He is a both/and kind of thinker. The philosophical language, he says “was a splendid and supple instrument with which to express the mythic dimension of the Christian faith: that God entered into the frame of human existence and elevated it to a participation in God’s own life.” (Note: Mythic here does not mean “fictitious,” but refers instead to the language that transcends the natural world and provides an explanatory framework for why things are the way they are.)

But all of this is prelude to addressing the question over which the CDF gave Sobrino a warning. Did Jesus have faith as we can have faith?

Yes, says Johnson, because the CDF misunderstands the relevant scriptural passages and fails to give full weight to the humanness of Jesus. The CDF clearly understands faith as a cognitive thing—believing that something is so. And if Jesus had a divine consciousness, his way of knowing about the Father and the Father’s plan of salvation was surely different from our own.

But that is not the way Scripture talks about faith, for the most part. Johnson gives a nod to the exceptions, but asserts (rightly) that when the New Testament talks about faith, it usually is talking about the volitional rather than the cognitive. The Greek words built on the pist- root can have cognitive overtones (I believe that), but the vast majority of contexts demand that we read them in more relational and volitional categories (I trust in).

Thus, while Jesus had full communion with the Father and knew the plan of salvation, he was still required to trust and obey, even as we are to trust and obey. Especially in Hebrews, Johnson writes, “Jesus’ human faith” is understood “in terms of his obedience to God (3:1-6; 5:8-9; 12:1-3).” It even says that Jesus “learned obedience.” And in this way, Jesus is the leader/pioneer/trailblazer (archēgon) and perfecter (teleiōtēn) of faith.

It was this notion of faith as trust in God, and not just assenting to truths about God, that made the 16th-century Reformation possible. Fortunately, the magisterial reformers (Calvin, Luther, Zwingli) were like Johnson, seeing the value in both the cognitive and the volitional understandings of faith.

* * *

This puts me in mind of Edith Humphrey’s paper at the most recent Ancient Evangelical Future conference. She resisted the postmodern tendency to suppress propositional approaches to theology in favor of narrative approaches.

Like Luke Timothy Johnson, Edith understands that our faith is a both-and kind of faith (Jesus is both fully God and fully human). And she showed in some detail why we need both narrative and propositional thinking in order to live as followers of the Great Both/And.

Forgotten Church Discipline

2008-02-09T09:31:00.000-06:00

An Alabama blogger named Ron Etheridge has linked to a 2005 series of articles on church discipline from the pages of Christianity Today. One of the articles, "Healing the Body of Christ," was mine, but until he pointed to it, I'd forgotten I'd written it. (Such are the demands of my life, that I must, as St. Paul says, constantly press toward the mark, forgetting those things that are behind.)

Here's that 2005 article, which discusses the high ethical demands of church membership in the apostolic and patristic eras and ties those demands to the character of God.

The points are parallel to article 5 of the Call for an Ancient Evangelical Future, which demands that the "spiritual formation of the people of God" be "based firmly on a Trinitarian biblical narrative." Article 5 continues:

We are concerned when spirituality is separated from the story of God and baptism into the life of Christ and his Body. Spirituality, made independent from God's story, is often characterized by legalism, mere intellectual knowledge, an overly therapeutic culture, New Age Gnosticism, a dualistic rejection of this world and a narcissistic preoccupation with one's own experience. These false spiritualities are inadequate for the challenges we face in today's world. Therefore, we call Evangelicals to return to a historic spirituality like that taught and practiced in the ancient catechumenate.

And now, my 2005 article:

Healing the Body of Christ

Church discipline is as much about God as it is about erring believers.

All of the offerings in this special section presume one particular truth: that church discipline hinges on a high-demand understanding of what makes the church the church.

In For the Glory of God, Baylor sociologist of religion Rodney Stark discusses the dynamics of high-intensity religious movements. High-intensity religion is often created by reformations, he says, by attempts to restore religious belief and practice in existing organizations to a more demanding level. When such attempts fail, reformers are pushed out of the existing structures and create "high-intensity religious alternatives." That is what happened in the 16th-century magisterial and radical reformations, as well as in later movements such as Methodism, Puritanism, Quakerism, and the Salvation Army.

In economic terms, high-intensity religion demands a high price. But, Stark points out, people will pay a high price to obtain a product of high value. And high-demand evangelical religion indeed offers great value: transformed lives, support and motivation for moral reform, a deep sense of connection to a community of believers, intimacy with God, and ultimately, salvation.

Evangelicalism sprang to life in the ministries of John Wesley and George Whitefield. Methodism, in both its Wesleyan and Calvinistic forms, expected a reorientation of the affections from worldly pursuits to godly goals. Rigorous moral, financial, spiritual, and practical disciplines have long been part and parcel of evangelical religion.

But over the past few decades, evangelicalism's eagerness to reach the lost has taken a cue from a different economic model: discount retailing, where prices are low and the customer is king. In some corners, a radically abstracted doctrine of justification by faith has been used to marginalize any concern for renewed and reoriented lives. Dietrich Bonhoeffer called this "cheap grace."

In the beginning, things were not so. The religion of Yahweh was distinct from other religions of the ancient Near East because it emphasized the ethical imitation of its god: "Be holy, because I am holy" (Lev. 11:44, CF. Lev. 19:2, 1 Pet. 1:15-16). The prophet Moses taught that choosing and living the right and good leads to health for individuals, families, and society. Choosing the wrong and corrupt leads to death. These themes run through the final chapters of Deuteronomy and come to a climax in 30:15ff: "See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. … This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life…"

The followers of Jesus understood their calling in similar terms. They called their movement "The Way." And The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, one of the earliest and most highly esteemed Christian documents that almost made it into the New Testament (and written while some of the apostles were still alive), begins, "There are two ways, one of life and one of death, but a great difference between the two ways." The book goes on to exhort readers to love God and neighbor, forgive enemies, and avoid adultery, fornication, and idolatry.

Reconciling the Brother

This early ethical focus arose from the theological. God's saving action brought with it the demand that our lives mirror his character. Church discipline was (and is) one of the key ways of manifesting the intersection of the horizontal and vertical dimensions of our faith.

The classic text for discussing church discipline is Matthew 18:15-20. Despite the way we often use the text, it is not about procedure. Jesus is teaching first about reconciliation between "brothers"—that is, fellow followers of Jesus. "If your brother sins against you," Jesus begins, "go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over." Reconciliation is the goal. The church gets involved only when the offending brother refuses to reconcile. And if that brother remains unrepentant, the church should "treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector."

Though the focus is on the horizontal, Matthew does not omit the vertical dimension. For Jesus concludes by saying, "Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." God affirms the results of both failure and success in reconciliation. (Heaven was often used as a metonym for God.)

Likewise, when in the same chapter Jesus tells Peter to forgive "seventy times seven," seemingly without limit, he adds a warning in the form of a parable. He tells about a servant who begged his king to cancel his debts, but who then turned around and threw another man who owed him money into debtor's prison. "This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you," Jesus said, "unless you forgive your brother from your heart." This is a matter of simple congruity: Receiving forgiveness from God requires giving forgiveness to brothers and sisters.

We see the vertical and the horizontal intersect in Romans 6, as well. Paul categorically rejects the idea that God's grace abounding unto sinners means that we may continue in sin. "By no means!" he exclaims. To continue in sin would be incongruous.

He writes in startling terms: "We have been buried with [Christ] by baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life." He goes on to unpack these ideas: Our old selves were crucified so that we might be freed from our enslavement to sin and made alive to God, just as the resurrected Christ is alive to God. We no longer "present our members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity," but we "now present [our] members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification."

The Divine Family

All of this turns on the idea that we are "in Christ." We are made "alive to God in Christ Jesus." In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul teaches us to think of Christ as the second Adam, that is, the head of a new human race. And as reborn people, we belong to that new humanity of which Christ Jesus is the head.

So when we talk about the church, we are not talking about a voluntary society of people who share compatible religious views or similar religious experiences. We are instead talking about those who are related by (re)birth into a new family. We are talking about the body parts of Christ. Our relationships to each other (the horizontal) do not exist apart from our relationship with God in Christ (the vertical). Indeed, it is our vertical relationship with Christ that makes possible our horizontal relationships with each other. The vertical constitutes the horizontal.

Now we are ready to understand why alienation and sin in the church must be dealt with, why accountability is essential, why reconciliation is not optional. It is inconceivable that Christ should be at war with himself. Alienation between followers of Jesus is tantamount to slicing open the body of Christ. Reconciliation between followers is the healing of that wound.

It is also inconceivable that Christ should sin. That is why Paul recommends that a flagrant sinner be separated from the church and handed over to Satan "so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord" (1 Cor. 5:5). Christ cannot ignore the sin or division in his body any more than you or I can ignore a growing, cancerous tumor.

Then again, reconciliation between followers or restoration of a sinner is as if a wound is healed, a cancer cured, and full health and vitality restored to the body, Christ's body.

High demand, indeed. High reward, especially.

David Neff is editor of Christianity Today.
Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today.

Martin Marty on Ancient-Future Evangelicals

2008-02-06T17:37:00.001-06:00

On Monday, the day before he turned 80, senior church historian Martin Marty took note of Christianity Today's cover story in his weekly "Sightings" commentary.

Back to Marty. He credits the CT cover story for stimulating some reflections on how American evangelicalism has changed and stayed the same.

These thoughts were brought on this week by my reading of Chris Armstrong's "The Future Lies in the Past," subtitled "Why evangelicals are connecting with the early church as they move into the 21st century," in the February issue of Christianity Today. Armstrong takes off with a report on the 2007 Wheaton Theology Conference on "The Ancient Faith for the Church's Future." He pays tribute to the recently-deceased Bob Webber, the pioneer in this "connecting" work. Many of us had paid tribute to him as he lay near death at the time of a 2006 conference on this theme, one in which I participated and found ample opportunity to do some sizing up. As Armstrong describes it, this growing minority is weary and wary of an evangelicalism that puts too many of its bets on growth for growth's sake, triumphalism, present-mindedness, and repudiation of the Christian past.

The 2006 conference Marty refers to was the first conference on the Call to an Ancient-Evangelical Future, where he was one of the speakers.

Marty notes that a small minority have migrated to liturgical churches, but that the issue for most Ancient-Future evangelicals is not migration but positive change based on ancient understandings: "Most remain in the churches of which they were a part, but bring in change—not made up of novelties, but based on the early Christian church. The changes are to be used not as antiques or period pieces, but as challenges to many of the forms that took over in recent decades."

You can trust Marty to get to the heart of things. Read his full commentary here.

And for more on Chris Armstrong check his blog.

Finding the Primacy of the Biblical Narrative--in the Bible!

2008-02-04T22:05:00.000-06:00

John Kirn, interim president of Northern Seminary, recently wrote his response to what he heard at our December conference on "the primacy of the biblical narrative." Where does one get such an idea? From the Bible itself, says Kirn. Read his essay here.

DVD Review: "The Apostles' Creed"

2008-01-28T21:56:00.000-06:00

I love Christian doctrine. Perhaps that’s because of the way I was brought up.

No, it wasn’t that my church taught me to love doctrine. In fact, it taught me to hate it by emphasizing all the things that our group had right that everyone else had wrong. In my youth, doctrine was not about being illuminated by the truth, it was about memorizing arguments that would prove other Christians wrong.

But when I finally broke out of that sectarian “remnant” mindset, I discovered that there was a classical Christian tradition that was not bankrupt (as I had been taught). There was indeed a rich foundation, built up out of biblical truth. I fell in love with what I thought I had despised.

There were several doors into my new experience: C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity was one, as was John R. W. Stott’s Basic Christianity. Much less celebrated, but equally important to me, was J. I. Packer’s I Want to Be a Christian (later renamed Growing in Christ).

At some point—I can’t remember quite when—I realized that one of the best ways to know what is central to Christian faith—what is “Mere” or “Basic”—is to meditate on the Apostles’ Creed. That was an important element in Packer’s I Want to Be a Christian, and I discovered that he was doing what others had done before him: Using the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments as the framework for Christian instruction. Loving music and being curious about church history, I soon realized that this was the same pattern that Martin Luther had followed. And not just in his catechism but in his hymn-writing. That Saxon Renaissance man made these three texts memorable by converting them into rhyming verse and setting them to music: Wir glauben all’ in einen Gott, Vater unser in Himmelreich, and Dies sind die heil’gen zehn Gebot’.

* * *

This weekend I encountered the Apostles’ Creed again, but this time it wasn’t in a book or in a German hymn. It was on a DVD. Through his company Vision Video, our friend Ken Curtis (the founder of Christian History & Biography) has collaborated with others to bring us The Apostles’ Creed: A look at its origin and its relevance to our lives today.

The subtitle ("a look at its origin") does not refer to the historical development of the Creed, of which we know relatively little. We have no evidence for the authorship of the apostles, although pseudo-Augustine asserted it some time in the fifth or sixth century. We do however have late second-century quotations of creedal material by Irenaeus and Tertullian that show very strong parallels to what eventually crystallized in present form by the late seventh century. In between, we have much evidence that churches East and West were using similar material to prepare baptismal candidates.

The "origin" in the video's subtitle is instead the Creed's biblical foundations. The program features a number of well-known scholars commenting on the Creed's biblical roots: New Testament historian N. T. (“Tom”) Wright, theologian Alistair McGrath, and historian Martin Marty, among them. Even former Christian History managing editor Mark Galli is among the talking heads. But what is striking about the experience is not simply the quality of the scholars, but the ecumenicity of it all. Besides the Anglicans and Lutheran already mentioned, there’s Baptist Derek Tidball (London School of Theology), Greek Orthodox Kallistos Ware (Bishop of Diokleia, Oxford), Wesleyan Robert Mullholland (Asbury Seminary), and Seventh-day Adventist William Johnson (Andrews University).

* * *

To someone whose upbringing taught him to pay attention to Christian differences, listening to voices from these varied tradition sing in unison is an attention-getting experience.

But this Apostles’ Creed DVD is not the velvet ecumenism that plays down doctrine. It is the diamond-hard ecumenism that brilliantly celebrates the central truths of the faith and explains them all by referencing their biblical foundations. This is the Christian tradition the way evangelicals love it: stated clearly and explained in explicitly biblical terms.

The result is that where the biblical text is (nearly) silent, the doctrine is skimmed over. Thus “he descended into hell” gets a brief commentary, but the more fanciful interpretations are ignored in favor of stressing the biblical truth that the Christ fully and truly died.

Similarly, because of the biblical grounding of these teachers, their comments on “the resurrection of the body” emphasize the unity of body and soul in the biblical picture of the human person. No soul-body dualism for these theologians.

This DVD is a two-hour abridged version of a series that is eventually going to run 13 or 14 hours (available Fall 2008). But the editors have made the two hours of talking heads move right along. There are a lot of quick cuts between speakers, often allowing just a phrase to escape Alistair McGrath’s lips before Derek Tidball or Kallistos Ware takes over. The pace is fast (well, except for Bishop Ware, who speaks ponderously—the basso profundo to Martin Marty’s high-strung tenor).

* * *

I conclude with a tip of the hat to William Johnson. This Adventist New Testament scholar is the opposite of my Adventist upbringing. Biblically centrist and absolutely clear on what is “Mere” and “Basic.” Like Tom Wright, Johnson explains the judgment as God’s welcome setting things to rights, rather than as the day an angry God metes out punishment. Johnson also explains the book of Revelation as being about the cosmic restoration of all things in Christ, rather than, well, what seems to fascinate the people who want to sell you the apocalyptic decoder ring.

If you study the Bible, you will understand the Apostles’ Creed with great depth. If you study the Apostles’ Creed, you will discover what is “Mere” and “Basic” in the Bible. If you watch this video, you’ll have a good start on both.

Creation Care: Prophetic Vocation of the Church

2008-01-13T20:51:00.000-06:00

The last section of the Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future demands a life of “embodied holiness” in the world. Part of that is “to be faithful stewards of the created order.”

Northern Seminary’s Phil Kenyon has planned a one-day seminar that considers creation care “as a prophetic vocation of the church.”

This is something I usually don’t deal with in church. I believe in it, and I practice it. I recycle, conserve, and use compact fluorescent bulbs, but it usually doesn’t impinge on my church life.

The seminar presenter will be Steven Bouma-Prediger, chair of the religion department at Hope College and director of Hope’s environmental studies program.

Steven’s book For the Beauty of the Earth: A Christian Vision for Creation Care won an award of merit for the Theology/Ethics category in the 2002 Christianity Today Book Awards.

Phil sent me this brief description of the seminar:

Deafness, ignorance, denial, indifference. Four reasons Christians today fail to take seriously their calling as caretakers of creation.

How can we regain our prophetic voice against these barriers to living faithfully? What will empower us to be the earthkeepers God calls us to be?

Our sacred text, the Bible, begins and ends with rivers and trees.

Indeed, the biblical story tells us that everything God creates and sustains is very good and that we humans are charged with serving and protecting God's good earth. And in the biblical story God's good future is of the earth redeemed and restored, not destroyed. If we are to regain our prophetic voice, we must get the biblical story right, and we must learn to live into that story with faith and joy. We must learn to be faithful stewards of creation.

View details and information about attending the April 16 conference here.

A Good Book on Worship Is on the Way

2008-01-13T20:08:00.000-06:00

I’m back on the blog.

The demands of the December holidays sapped my blogging energies—what with all the fun family stuff and the church music demands plus an early January trip to frigid Orange Park, Florida, to speak at the opening convocation for the new term at Bob Webber’s graduate school of liturgics, the Institute for Worship Studies.

The weather was colder in Orange Park/Jacksonville than it was in Chicago, but the trip was worth it: The students and faculty I met were mighty impressive. Check out IWS’s newly refurbished website.

* * *

Speaking of worship studies, here’s a new book to watch for. I just e-mailed Paraclete Press an endorsement for Mark Galli’s forthcoming book, Beyond Smells and Bells: The Wonder and Power of Christian Liturgy. According to the publisher’s website, the slim volume of short essays is “for those who find themselves attracted to liturgy but don’t quite know why.” The book is due to be out April 1.

Here’s what I sent to Paraclete:

Genuine worship raises our sights above ourselves. It sets us into a community—past, present, and future. It fits us for God's mission. Above all, it brings us face-to-face with Jesus and trains us to play our role in his story. Much that passes for worship these days misses all of this. But Galli gets it decidedly right.

And here’s what I have to say to you about my friend Mark Galli. He’s a learner. In this book he talks vulnerably (as we said in the 70s) about the lessons he needed to learn and how he learned them in the school of life. Those same lessons, he shows, are taught us on a regular basis in the liturgy.

Take, for example, chapter 4, where he writes about courting and marrying his wife—only to discover that what he thought was a shared passion for theology was only a passing interest on her part. How do we get to know “the intimate Other” in marriage and in worship? Abandon romantic illusions, says Mark, both about your spouse and about God. At least when it comes to God, the liturgy helps us to face reality—and the real God (like the real wife) turns out to be both more challenging and more satisfying than the imagined one.

When the book rolls off the presses, be sure to get a copy.

More Blog Commentary on the AEF Conference

2007-12-05T16:56:00.000-06:00

Here are comments on the AEF Conference from InterVarsity Press's Al Hsu (The Suburban Christian) and North Park University's Scot McKnight (Jesus Creed).

The Biblical Story and Stem Cell Research

2007-12-05T16:42:00.000-06:00

One of the hallmarks of the Call for an Ancient Evangelical Future is the primacy of the biblical story over all the other narratives that try to tell us who we are and what the world is about.

Evangelicals almost always turn first to the Bible when they have a question or are trying to meet a contemporary challenge. But we often fall into proof texting rather than using the entire sweep of the biblical story to inform us. Likewise, we frequently use biblical passages as if they were written in our own day with our own society’s issues in mind. It takes time and effort, but it is worthwhile to look at the whole story and to try to make explicit all the links in the chain of connection between the biblical story and our own time.

At the moment, I’m attending a consultation on Human Embryonic Stem Cell research in Pasadena, California. One of the participants is Allen Verhey, who taught at Hope College for many years and moved to Duke Divinity School in 2004.

In his paper, Allen tries to look at medical research (including stem cell research) in the light of the whole biblical story and not just the familiar proof texts evangelicals got in the habit of quoting when they got entered the abortion debate in the late 70s and early 80s.

Allen contrasts the biblical story with other accounts of reality, including “the Baconian project” (Science and technology are the saviors that deliver us from the world's evils) and “the Capitalist project” (The market saves us from our ills).

He begins his account of the biblical story by noting that most Protestants who want to support stem-cell research start with an appeal to Jesus’ healing ministry. That is a noble place to begin. Jesus was a compassionate healer and so were the apostles. If that text gives us our orientation, it “forms a readiness to celebrate the research, including stem cell research, that may provide help for the sick and suffering,” writes Allen.

But let’s not stop there, he says. The story of creation “orients us both to turn from idols and to delight in the creation as a gift of God.” But what happens when nature (the creation) becomes our enemy (as it does when disease threatens)? And what happens when technology (including medical technology) becomes an idol? At times, the creation story helps us to resist that idolatry. But at other times it helps us to roll up our sleeves and bring nature back into line. It takes wisdom to know in any given moment which we are to do.

We also find in the story of creation respect for human dignity and for natural relationships. Human beings are not mere animals but are made in the image of God. We are also created to be social creatures who form marriages and families and societies. When it comes to medical research, this means that we cannot reduce other people simply to their bodies or their organs, which may be fascinating subjects for research but which are not ours to commandeer.

Clues from the Jesus Story

Now let’s turn back to Jesus. “The stories of his conception and birth point us toward a high regard for and generous hospitality to nascent life,” writes Allen. The application of that orientation to embryonic stem cell research will be familiar to evangelicals.

When as we look at Jesus’ ministry we see that he was not only a healer, but a preacher of “good news to the poor.” That means that when we confront questions of medical technology and scientific advance we need to be oriented to issues of fairness and “the effects of research and development on the lives of the poor.”

And then we look at Jesus’ death. This story (among the many other things it does) calls us to “a readiness to share suffering,” not just to eliminate suffering as modern scientific culture pushes us to do.

The biblical story ends with “God’s good future.” We’re not there yet, but we must always keep that in view as we struggle with contemporary challenges.

Allen summarizes his survey of the biblical story this way:

These orientations ... do not always point in the same direction or towards the same conclusion. Until the good future of God we will live with moral ambiguity. The Bible does not provide a code for research, but it does form a community capable of moral discourse and discernment.

Now, if you’re looking for the Bible to always deliver clear answers to your questions, Allen's summary may not be very satisfying. But mature Christians know that you can’t always expect the ancient text to give you a quick and easy answer. That’s why Jesus promised that we’d have the Holy Spirit to lead us into truth.

Notice what Allen says about how the Bible forms “a community capable of moral discourse and discernment.” Our task as a Christian community is to be formed by the biblical story, to engage vigorously in moral discourse, and under the guidance of the Spirit to practice discernment. That is not an individual task, but a communal one, and like much of what happens in community, it may have a longish timeline.

* * *

The ideas in Allen’s paper were also covered in his book Reading the Bible in the Strange World of Medicine (Eerdmans, 2003).

The 2007 AEF Conference Begins

2007-12-01T07:00:00.000-06:00

Yesterday afternoon and evening, I emceed the opening sessions of the Call for An Ancient Evangelical Future (AEF) Conference at Northern Seminary in Lombard, Illinois.

We had some thought provoking papers by Kevin Vanhoozer and Scot McKnight based on the first article of the Call (“On the Primacy of the Biblical Narrative”) and some lively, engaging panel discussion.

Check out the notes and video clip from live blogger Chris Monroe (a.k.a. “Desert Pastor”) at www.paradoxology.com.

Here are his entries so far. (Watch for further posts on presentations by Scot McKnight and Edith Humphrey.)

AEF Round Two

2nd Annual "Ancient Evangelical Future" Conference Begins

2007 AEF Conference: Kevin Vanhoozer

2007 AEF Conference: Panel Discussion #1

2007 AEF Conference: Evening Worship

Dr. Luther, Rapmeister

2007-11-27T22:14:00.000-06:00

Last week the e-newsletter from ChurchLaughs.com brought me a chuckle.

The lead cartoon featured a pastor talking to his worship leader. “Okay,” says the pastor to the guitar-clutching musician. “We’ll do the rock service, but forget about rapping the Nicene Creed.” (Oh, the challenges of "blended worship"!)

As soon as I had chuckled at the cartoon, I realized there was a historical precedent. Others had already had set the creed to rhyming, rhythmic verse, hoping to make it memorable for worshipers. Tobias Clausnitzer (1668) and Cyril V. Taylor (1941) are among the lesser known writers to attempt this. The most famous was clearly Martin Luther (“We All Believe in One True God,” 1524).

* * *

Now Martin Luther didn’t write rap. Rap is not just rhyme and meter. Rap is also improvisation (and therefore a vehicle for personal statement and an opportunity to show off just a bit).Yet Luther, like rappers, placed a premium on the words over the music. Among his many hymns were didactic songs that helped the people learn their faith.

Luther’s Shorter Catechism is well known as a brief and digestible guide to the faith. It was organized around what he considered the basics: The Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, Baptism, Confession, and the Sacrament of the Altar. If one understood these things, one could be an informed believer. One would be equipped to understand the gospel and to resist superstition.

It isn’t surprising then that Luther would also write a hymn to convey each of these truths. The American Edition of Luther’s Works comments on his Ten Commandments hymn (“These Are the Holy Ten Commands”):

We have become so accustomed to think of poetry as an expression of the personal feelings and emotions of the writer that we cannot conceive of a merely “utilitarian” use of poetry. Hymnody in our own age has been defined as “lyrical religion.” We find it difficult to think of a merely didactic hymn without sentimental overtones.

But Luther proceeded from different premises. Very soberly he thought of the hymn as a means of instilling the Word of God in the people. While some of his hymns were born out of his most personal experience and reflected the struggles and victories of his own faith, others were mere versifications of the Catechism.

His setting of the Creed seems a little less didactic than the Ten Commandments hymn, because it is the bold declaration of a common faith.

We all believe in one true God,
Maker of the earth and heaven,
The Father who to us the power
To become his sons hath given.

But the didactic purpose is still blended with the joyous celebration of truth.

Luther relied on an earlier medieval attempt to versify the Creed, but that poem tried to cover the creed in a single stanza. Luther expanded the structure to three stanzas to reflect the three parts of the Creed, one for each person of the Trinity. That larger structure required more material, and so he infused the hymn with additional truth (as in the brief excerpt above, where he inserted the idea from John 1:12 that we have been given the power to become children of God).

Luther wasn’t just interested in teaching the faith; he was interested in teaching the young. He was worried about the things that seduce young people away from the faith. And so he explained in a preface to a 1524 hymnal:

These songs were arranged in four parts to give the young—who should at any rate be trained in music and other fine arts—something to wean them away from love ballads and carnal songs and teach them something of value in their place.

That makes him sound like one of the architects of Youth for Christ in the 1950s!

Hats off to the Reformer dude, Rapmeister Martin.

* * *

P.S. So what do I think about rapping the Creed? Well, the main thing I have against it is that rap isn’t a communal form of expression, while the Creed is the statement of a community of belief. But if we all had a good enough sense of rhythm, we might be able to rap it together.

* * *

Concordia Publishing has published a 4-CD set of Luther's Hymns, Ballads, and Chants. You can here a short bit of "We All Believe in One True God" here and another excerpt of "These Are the Holy Ten Commands" here.

The Church Next to the Godiva Chocolate Shop

2007-11-23T19:54:00.000-06:00

At lunch today, my wife and I were discussing ecclesiology. (Does that happen only in our family?)

The subject came up because we had both read an op/ed by Kyle Wingfield, an editorial page writer for the Wall Street Journal Europe.

Wingfield lives in Brussels, and he wants us to know that, for many of the Europeans he has met there, “it's not God who is dead to them as much as it is The Church—the official, often state-supported church, be it Catholic, Anglican or Lutheran.” He then shares his personal experience with a nontraditional church called The Well.

The Well, with its rock-oriented music, would in some ways feel familiar to many American evangelicals. But here’s what wouldn’t feel familiar: it doesn’t meet in its own building, but it uses several decentralized meeting places—including a restaurant called Jesus Paradise and a tavern called La Chaloupe D’Or, billed on the church website as “close to the Godiva chocolaterie.” (Well, count me in!)

The entire 120-member church meets together for worship only once a month. The rest of the time, they meet in these satellite sites.

In a tavern or restaurant, just anyone can happen by. And, Wingfield says, such serendipity is much more likely to occur in the settings chosen by The Well than if the group were to meet in a designated church building.

It's far less intimidating for newcomers to visit a public space with a dozen or so other people than a normal "church" with pews and a steeple and a hundred strange faces. In the course of our gatherings, we also meet people who were just going out for coffee and probably wouldn't have wandered into a sanctuary along the way.

That’s where my wife and I started talking about ecclesiology. “Is it church when confused people get together to discuss religion?” she asked. “Or does church require belief, commitment, and participation in worship?”

I said, the church should fundamentally be a gathering of the committed. And those who are committed should be trained to help the confused sort out their questions.

This tension between meeting the needs of the confused and the nurture of the committed is, of course, not new. It was present in the mid-1970s rise of the seeker-sensitive church, which minimized elements of traditional worship in order to appeal to the unchurched. The tension continues in mainline denominations that want to be so inclusive of everyone and so tolerant of everything that they can’t tell the difference between hospitality and inclusion. (See my review of Good Fences: The Boundaries of Hospitality and my interview with author Carolyn Westerhoff for more thoughts on this mainline Protestant trend.)

From Closed Doors to Public Square

The early church met behind closed doors. That made sense in a truly hostile culture where being a Christian could cost you your life. When it was finally able to meet in public, the church became not only a sacred institution but a civic one as well, with its meeting places prominently located on piazzas. In that new role, what the church gained in openness it lost in distinctiveness.

In a comparatively indifferent culture, some kind of alteration of the barriers makes sense. Barriers to inclusion shouldn’t be erased, of course. The Well’s website says that “at its core, church is people, coming together, becoming more like Jesus than they were before.” True, but not complete. At the heart of Christian life and Christian community, there are things that don’t make sense without study, commitment, and participation. Christian communal life cannot exist apart from common prayer, common confession, and Communion. These are things that unbelievers cannot join in. Because of the nature of the church, there will always be insiders and outsiders.

Placing key elements of church life out in public view is an important part of Christian witness in a secular and indifferent culture. A group like The Well can maintain its distinctiveness from Europe’s post-Christian culture. It can be open and welcoming at the same time. Maintaining that tension consciously and conscientiously will be an important challenge, because without the things that make Christian life distinctive it may be a great opportunity for discussion, authentic sharing, and witness. But it won’t be church.

Nevertheless, bless The Well and similar groups across Europe for engaging in this experiment.

* * *

Related:

Article 4 of the Call for an Ancient Evangelical Future defines some of the essentials of the church’s worship.

The Well is a project of Christian Associates International, which has church plants in 15 European countries and aims to have planted 50 “high impact churches” by 2010.

What J. P. Moreland Really Said

2007-11-20T17:22:00.000-06:00

In a recent post (“Over-committed to the Bible?”, Nov. 16), I agreed with several points made by J. P. Moreland in a paper he presented at the Evangelical Theological Society.

I relied on a report by CT’s Ted Olsen, to which J. P. Moreland has now responded. He calls Olsen’s summary “generally fair,” but he says that “because it is still a summary,” it “could not provide the needed context for understanding [his] paper.”

Since the lay audience has now heard about his paper, he has made it available on his website. Read his argument and evaluate it for yourself.

The church and the Bible

In my previous comment, I said that the church was the missing element in Moreland’s picture of evangelical “over-commitment” to the Bible. Now that I’ve read his paper, I need to refine that.

J. P. is clearly calling for scholars to conduct their search for the truth (whether in biblical or extra-biblical areas of research) for the sake of the church. And when he talks about evangelicals who take the Bible as the sole authority for and source of truth, he quotes earlier authoritative evangelical statements that portray the Bible not as the sole authority but the supreme and final authority. In that context, the church and tradition are also mentioned. The church is not missing from his paper.

Moreland portrays evangelical over-commitment to Scripture as a reaction to the shift in our universities and our culture away from the search for an integrated understanding of knowledge and from a commitment to cognitive notions of truth.

By and large, Evangelicals responded during this shift by withdrawing from the broader world of ideas, developing a view of faith that was detached from knowledge and reason, and limiting truth and belief about God, theology and morality to the inerrant Word of God, the Bible. If I am right about this, then Evangelical over-commitment to the Bible is a result of the influence of secularization on the church and not of biblical and theological reflection.

But the point I made in my November 16 post, I believe, still stands. Evangelical over-commitment to the Bible (as Moreland carefully defines it) is also the result of our abandonment of our heritage of reading the Bible with the larger church.

Martin Luther read the Bible in innovative and intensely personal ways, but he was still in dialogue with all that had come before him. Luther read the Bible in conversation with the church. Somehow over the centuries that got transformed into the idea that just any Christian, disconnected from past and present believers, could read the Bible, know precisely what it meant, and try to use it as the sole authority for truth.

If we could recover the habit of reading the Bible in conversation with past and present believers, all the while paying attention to the inner testimony of the Spirit (Calvin), it would go a long way toward curing the ills Moreland has diagnosed.

Two Paths Through the Old Testament

2007-11-19T21:18:00.000-06:00

Advent 2007 hovers on the horizon, and I am planning this year’s music of judgment, hope, and expectation for my congregation. This particular Advent, parishes in the Episcopal Church will be adopting the Revised Common Lectionary, instead of the more traditional lectionary found in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. It was voted by General Convention, and so it shall be.

At first glance, the lessons for the four Sundays in Advent don’t seem that different from what we heard before. The main difference comes during the long season that stretches from Pentecost to Advent, the beginning of the next liturgical cycle.

On these Sundays, two sets of Old Testament lessons are made available. One is traditional, with the Old Testament passage chosen to highlight some aspect of the Gospel reading for the day. The other is, well, not new-fangled, but different. It provides for a more continuous reading of the key Old Testament stories so that preachers have the opportunity to expound their way through the stories of Abraham and Joshua and David—and Deborah and Ruth, as well. The profile of the women of the Old Testament has been raised.

Some have complained about disconnecting the Old Testament reading from the Gospel reading, and their complaint has good grounds. Ever since the beginning of the Christian movement, Jesus' followers have read the Hebrew Scriptures through the window of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection.

Luke 24 tells how the risen Christ explained the Scriptures to two followers who did not yet have eyes to see.

25 Then Jesus said to them, “You foolish people! You find it so hard to believe all that the prophets wrote in the Scriptures. 26 Wasn’t it clearly predicted that the Messiah would have to suffer all these things before entering his glory?” 27 Then Jesus took them through the writings of Moses and all the prophets, explaining from all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.

Compare that to John 5, where Jesus tells his contemporaries:

39 You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, 40 yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

Early Christians adopted that filter in their reading of the Hebrew Bible, even before they had assembled the various Letters and Gospels into what would become the New Testament. Look at the preaching of the apostles in the book of Acts, and you will see that their fundamental message was based on the way Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled the words of the prophets. This sometimes required them to read the Law and the Prophets and the Writings typologically, so that something that is said of Aaron or David or Melchizedek is applied to Jesus.

This was not, by the way, foreign to contemporary Jewish ways of reading the text. If something was true of the archetypal King David or Prophet Moses, how much more would it be true of Messiah, went the shape of the argument. It is this kind of reading of Scripture that Bob Webber urged us to recover in The Divine Embrace (see p. 127ff). The Call for an Ancient Evangelical Future does not address typology explicitly, but it critiques its opposite when it speaks of “modern methods” that “compartmentalize God's story by analyzing its separate parts, while ignoring God's entire redemptive work as recapitulated in Christ.”

So the traditional lectionary, which selected an Old Testament reading to match some part of the Gospel story, was following this early Christian way of seeing the Hebrew Bible.

From Typology to Warning

But the typological/messianic reading is not the complete picture of how the New Testament writers viewed the Old. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul writes that the stories of Israel’s failures were written as ethical warnings.

11 These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come. 12 So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don't fall! 13 No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.

And in the famous 2 Timothy passage on the nature and purpose of Scripture, the writer once again focuses on the ethical (on praxis, if you will).

16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Not all apostolic reflection on the Hebrew Scriptures was Christological, though Christology was the central filter through which they read the text. Their reflection was also ethical, treating the stories of vice and virtue and of God’s faithfulness in both judgment and mercy, as pointers to how we should live.

The more continuous Old Testament stories presented in the Common Lectionary will prove more preachable for this secondary purpose—as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come.

Not that we need more moralizing, particularly in evangelical pulpits. But both approaches to the Old Testament are needed. Evangelicals do a better job of reading the stories as cautionary tales than we do of expounding Christ in all the Scripture.

So let me urge my fellow evangelicals to polish the lenses of our Christological spectacles and learn to look for Jesus in the book that he said “testifies” of him (John 5). The moralism doesn’t help us see the overarching narrative of God’s work in the world. The Christological vision does.

* * *

There’s still time to register for the Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future Conference. Click here for more information.

Over-committed to the Bible?

2007-11-16T16:08:00.000-06:00

J. P. Moreland said something provocative this week. Ted Olsen, in his “Postcard from San Diego” (where the Evangelical Theological Society has been meeting) recounts how Moreland told a packed auditorium that North American evangelicals are “over-committed” to the Bible.

Ted opines that “to accuse evangelicals of over-commitment to the Bible at ETS would be like accusing environmentalists of talking too much about climate change at a Sierra Club meeting.” But there it is.

This primo evangelical apologist, J. P. Moreland from Talbot School of Theology, told the Evangelical Theology Society, “In the actual practices of the Evangelical community in North America, there is an over-commitment to Scripture in a way that is false, irrational, and harmful to the cause of Christ. And it has produced a mean-spiritedness among the over-committed that is a grotesque and often ignorant distortion of discipleship unto the Lord Jesus.”

I too have observed the irrationality, the mean-spiritedness, and the distortions of discipleship of which Moreland spoke. I can relate.

Moreland’s complaint, according to Olsen, is “the idea that the Bible is the sole source of knowledge of God, morality, and a host of related important items.”

Those with a little historical knowledge know that when the 16^th-century reformers raised the cry, Sola scriptura, they never meant that Scripture stood alone, only that it was the norm by which all other religious authorities were to be judged.

In Olsen’s “postcard,” Moreland says Scripture has crowded out three other good things. It has suppressed (1) an eagerness to learn from investigating the phenomenal world for what it can teach us; (2) an openness to following the leading of the Spirit; and (3) a willingness to appeal to natural theology and moral law in political and cultural discussions.

The Missing Factor

All of these things are important. All of these have their appropriate use. But what is missing from this picture?

The church. A distorted evangelical use of Scripture has resulted from tearing the Bible away from the fabric of the church.

Bob Webber wrote succinctly about the place of the Scripture in the fabric of the church’s life and faith in the Appendix to Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World.

Scripture is the church’s tradition, the possession of the church, and as such, the church is responsible to guard it, preserve it, pass it down, and interpret it. ... It is not the Bible standing alone, but Scripture as the product of apostolic interpretation handed down in the church for generations.

Others have noted the importance of reading the Bible “with” the church. Jim Packer, for example, addressed this in the New Dictionary of Theology in his typically understated way: “Nor is the helpfulness of the church’s heritage of interpretation always recognized.” And Chris Hall’s Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers is a successful experiment in trying to put the Bible back where it belongs—in the bosom of the church. This restoration of the tie between Bible and the church is also the point of the first article of the Call for an Ancient Evangelical Future, on which Bob Webber labored so diligently before he passed away.

So when we read the Bible “with” the church (with the historic church, with the global church, and with the ancient consensual church), do some of the problems Moreland mentioned solve themselves?

Surely a historically and globally informed reading of Scripture will get us listening to the Spirit and learning from his leadings. And it will also help us to recognize and discipline excess without withdrawing into an anti-Spirit rationalism. And if we read the Scripture with the church, we’ll learn how the church was able to use natural law arguments alongside Scripture, but in subordination to Scripture.

Whenever an issue arises, evangelicals’ impulse is to ask, What does the Bible say? But an informed evangelical perspective realizes that there is usually no straight line between the biblical text and the contemporary problem. Negotiating that path requires contemporary social or scientific analysis, prayer for wisdom and guidance, and drawing on the experience of Christians. For the mature Christian, Scripture is supreme, but never truly alone.

* * *

Update: I've now been able to read Moreland's paper. Read my further comments on this subject.

The primacy of the biblical narrative is the topic of the Call for an Ancient Evangelical Future Conference this month. There’s still time to register.

J. P. Moreland's most recent book is Kingdom Triangle: Recover the Christian Mind, Renovate the Soul, Restore the Spirit's Power.

Your Atonement Is Too Small

2007-11-06T09:32:00.000-06:00

Scot McKnight wants you to have your golf bag fully equipped—theologically speaking. That’s the controlling metaphor of McKnight’s new study of soteriology, A Community Called Atonement (released in August by Abindgon).

Here’s the way the metaphor works. Each “theory” of the atonement is, like a particular golf club, better suited to some situations than others. Ministering the gospel is like a round of golf. The way we proclaim, teach, or share the good news in any given situation should be adapted to the situation, just as a golfer knows when to use a driver, a wedge, or a putter. You can, theoretically, still hit the ball out of a sand trap with a driver, but why would you if you had a wedge available?

Here’s the strength of the golf-bag metaphor: It asks us to stop being partisans for one particular theory of the atonement or another and actually to do ministry with the best tools at hand. McKnight is a peacemaker and a bridge builder, and that makes his book very welcome.

Plenty of discussion recently (some of it acrimonious) sounds very much like people saying that all the other clubs are better than your putter—and indeed that your putter is inherently defective. Meanwhile, others respond by defending the putter as the only club you need, since each round ends on the green. (“Drive for show, putt for dough.”)

Check out this recent news item from Christianity Today and you’ll see why McKnight’s book is a breath of fresh air.

* * *

The main target of criticism has been “penal substitution,” a 16^th-century Reformation development of Anselm’s 11^th-century “satisfaction” theory of the atonement. In penal substitution, God the Son bears the penalty for our sins on the cross. The Son having paid our debt, God now views us as righteous because we belong to the Son.

Sometimes people stretch this language too far, and they divide the members of the Trinity, setting them against each other—as when they talk of the Son as the object of the Father’s wrath on the Cross.

Sometimes they talk about the paid penalty almost exclusively in individual terms. When John Wesley had his heart strangely warmed while listening to Luther’s preface to his commentary on the Romans, he grasped something important. “I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” But my salvation is not the full picture, and speaking only in individualistic terms can lead to a weak doctrine of the church and even an anemic doctrine of the atonement.

Some critics stretch the concept to charge that penal substitution language amounts to nothing other than “divine child abuse”—an angry cosmic Father beating up his meek and helpless Son, an image which subtly leads us to tolerate the evils of domestic violence.

But McKnight recognizes that while the Scriptures do talk about Jesus bearing the penalty for our sins, they never divide the members of the Trinity at the Cross or bifurcate the God of love from the God of wrath. Whatever took place at the Cross and however we are to understand it, it is a unitary act of the whole Trinity. Thus John Stott could devote a chapter of his magnum opus, The Cross of Christ, to “The Self-Substitution of God.” And the Apostle Paul could write about God setting forth his own hilasterion. (This is a rare Greek word that literally means a thing that makes someone happy, but that is used as a technical term for the place on the Ark of the Covenant where on the Day of Atonement Israel’s chief priest sprinkled the sacrificial blood.) Paul clearly stresses that any appeasement is God’s self-appeasement. What is that? Self-appeasement? It is ironic even to use such language, but Paul wants to get at something bigger and ultimately more mysterious than the picture often portrayed by those who preach penal substitution.

In this tense context, McKnight recognizes that the best defenders of penal substitution do not fall into these traps.

* * *

But A Community Called Atonement is not just a bridge-building book. It is an expand-your-vision book. To parody J. B. Phillips’s famous title, this book could have been called Your Atonement Is Too Small.

Classic evangelical writers tend to use the word atonement fairly narrowly to refer to what Christ Jesus accomplished in his death on the Cross. When most evangelical expositors wanted to talk about the bigger picture, they would use a phrase like “the plan of salvation.”

Unfortunately, when you use the word atonement that narrowly, you can end up not thinking about the broad reach of God’s atoning activity. God was in Christ reconciling you and me to himself. But that’s not all. Paul says that God was in Christ reconciling the entire world to himself.

Decades ago when Bob Webber stepped out of line and shocked the evangelical ranks by emphasizing the early church’s understanding of Christ’s activity as victory over the devil, death, and sin, he was asking his students to grasp this bigger picture.

Scot McKnight does something similar in A Community Called Atonement. He reviews the various metaphors, pictures, and theories of atonement implicit in Scripture and looks for the big picture. Like Webber, he finds it in the witness of the early church. Taking the themes expounded by the earliest fathers together—victory, ransom, recapitulation—he wraps them into one package called “identification for incorporation.” In Christ, God identified with the descendants of Adam to the point of experiencing an ignominious death and was raised to new life so that he, as the new Adam, might incorporate the fallen race into a new humanity. He became what we were that we might become what he is. That’s the summary notion that Athanasius used to express this view most succinctly.

This is the creator God re-creating, but doing it in such a way that he does not leave the old creation to languish in its sin and brokenness.

* * *

This broader approach to atonement requires a corporate understanding. And that is the point of McKnight’s title: A Community Called Atonement. It also requires a missional understanding.

In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes that the result of God’s reconciling the world to himself is that he gives to us, the members of his church, a ministry of reconciliation. God’s reconciling action and our ambassadorial role are bound tightly together in Paul’s thought. God does not simply reconcile us to himself. He does this with the purpose of making us his agents of reconciliation. And McKnight’s call to see atonement in a bigger context is nothing other than a call to mission, mission that copies God.

* * *

This post is already too long. Part II will come along in a few days. In that context I hope to connect McKnight’s golf-bag metaphor with a couple of my own images—J. K. Rowling's Dobby the self-flagellating house elf and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

While you’re waiting for Part II, consider coming to the Ancient Evangelical Future Conference to hear and interact with Scot McKnight in person. Click here for information.

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