Monthly Archives: December 2006

An Unfinished Life

28 Thursday Dec 2006

Posted by in a happy God, eschatology, love of God, movies

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Einar Gilkyson: You think the dead really care about our lives??
Mitch Bradley: Yeah, I think they do. I think they forgive us our sins. I even think it’s easy for them.
Einar Gilkyson: Griff said you had a dream about flying.
Mitch Bradley: Yeah. I got so high, Einar. I could see where the blue turns to black. From up there, you can see all there is. And it looked like there was a reason for everything. 

Just saw a great movie — An Unfinished Life. Ranks right up there with Places in the Heart and My Life As a House as stories of redemption and forgiveness, told in realistic terms by a real thinkers who understand the complexity of human experience.

The quote above is from the end of the movie (not giving away the plot). Two crusty old cowboys played by Robert Redford and Morgan Freeman are reflecting on the dead because at the beginning of the movie we learn that Redford’s character Einar had a son who died in his 20s, and the old man never got over it. Every day he would sit at the grave and tell his son what had happened, what he was thinking, and ask for his opinion. It was not eerie or spiritualistic, just a man coping with life by metaphorically speaking to his son’s memory. So at the end Einar asks Mitch if the dead can forgive. The movie has just explored the more practical question, “can the living forgive?” The title comes from the inscription the father has cut into the son’s gravestone — “an unfinished life.”

My wife and I loved every character in the movie, and appreciated that the story saw hope and joy in even the bitter, disappointing aspects of human experience. In the end, the reason for everything comes out.

It makes me happy to see Hollywood types who are cynical toward churchianity, yearning to pierce the veil of time and ask what the purpose of human life might be. And it makes me happy to see them often arriving at the view that our lives are not in vain — that there is hope for everyone.

Two Flawed Prophets

25 Monday Dec 2006

Posted by in Brian McLaren, revolutionconference

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The Bible is full of material which challenges simplistic interpretations and this is one of them. It is a tale of two prophets: “the prophet from Judah” delivers a true prophecy that was fulfilled with accuracy more than three centuries later. The “old prophet from Bethel” transmits a lie that trips up the prophet of Judah, and then delivers a judgment message from God himself because of the younger prophet’s disobedience. It is a most unsettling story — almost reading like a divine sting operation in which the Almighty seeks to trick a faithful man, and then gives him a harsher penalty than the evil king he was sent to correct. (see 1 Kings 13)

I’ve been thinking about this one a long time, and as I was preparing some remarks about “listening to God” it finally dawned on me that this story is like a theatrical piece or screenplay illustrating the fact that all of God’s spokesmen are flawed characters. Except for Jesus, everyone who has ever spoken for God has had deep, fatal flaws that deserve God’s judgment, and no pronouncement or claim from anyone who teaches the Word can be relied upon withhout careful checking. No wonder James warns that teachers will have a severer judgment.

The prophet of Judah was brave and true, confronting king Jeroboam, who had introduced idolatry to the 10-tribe kingdom of Israel. When God gave him the message he was to present to Jeroboam, He also instructed the prophet of Judah (I’ll call him PJ) to go home a different direction, and not to eat food or water before he got home. PJ passed the first test when Jeroboam asked him to stay and dine. He also demonstrated one of the hallmarks of a true man of God, in that moments after he condemned Jeroboam for the most serious types of sins, and the wicked king had actually commanded his soldiers to seize the prophet for punishment, PJ became an intercessor on Jeoboam’s behalf, praying to God to release Jeroboam’s withered hand after God had frozen it in position. What a merciful man he was… instead of laughing at the King’s predicament and walking away from his misfortune, he used his close relationship with God to gain a reprieve for Jeroboam as soon as the king showed the slightest hint of repentance.

The old prophet — I’ll call him OP, heard of these remarkable acts of virtue and followed PJ until he overtook him as he rested in the shade of a mighty oak. No doubt PJ was famished — that’s a long journey to take without food and water — and the old man extended kindness to PJ, offering him some refreshment and a place to rest. At first PJ remained loyal to the instructions God had given him, but then, when OP told him he was a prophet too, and that an angel of the Lord had told him that he should indeed come home for a meal with him, PJ succumbed to the temptation and went home with OP. While they dined, the word of the Lord came to the Old Prophet, that PJ would die away from his father’s house, and be unburied. Sure enough, a lion came and killed him on the way home. OP heard of it and made the journey to the site, becoming a witness to a bizarre scene in which the lion stood there by the corpse, not eating the man or his donkey. In sorrow OP took PJ’s corpse to Bethel, and put him in his own grave, where not many years later he joined him in death. Their bones were mingled in death, according to the account.

Most of the commentaries I have read on this strange tale draw from it the idea that God is extremely intolerant of even the slightest deviation from His word … that if we are unfaithful in the least little detail, God will judge us harshly.

Here’s my take. Every spokesman for God is flawed. God knows this. So God has arranged that while we live, we must be each accountable to Him for what we see and know. If we see and know something to be true, a word from God, we are accountable to Him and no one else for our faithfulness to that revealed principle. On the other hand, we will constantly coexist with other brothers and sisters who are also prophets of God. They will have things they see and know that call attention to other truths, other dimensions of God’s plans and dealings that we are unaware of. We need to test what they say against the word of God.

I can hear one school of thought right now, saying “The point is, we dare not depart from the truths we have learned — we must be faithful to God!” From this perspective, the post=protestant initiative is like the lie of the Old Prophet, theatening to lead the “orthodox” into judgment. But that’s not what I see going on here. As I see it, the real problem in the church today is not that the emergent church is questioning and contradicting the word of God (although that does occur in places) but that what has been accepted as the word of God — the systematic theology of orthodox Christianity — has within it elements that never were part of the word of God and have always needed to be reexamined. Looking back at history, there have always been dissenting voices, challenging this or that orthodox position. And since the 4th century, the way those voices has been dealt with has been both ecclesiastical and political violence. Today the monopoly of orthodoxy is being undone by the shear volume of dissent and the ease with which dissenters can now communicate.

By flipping the script, as Brian put it at the Revolution conference, we can start to get a more complex, but more productive view of this process. God is speaking through multiple voices, each of which are flawed and as Pope put it, partial evils that make up together a universal good.

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see
All discord, harmony not understood,
All partial evil, universal good:

How will we find out what is true, whether it be in eschatology or in our current practice? By remaining kind and diligent in pursuing dialog, study, testing, and conversation. By avoiding what Pope called “pride, reasoning pride”, — by listening to each other and rigorously retesting what we thought the Bible said, we can do better than merely tolerating paradox — we can arrive at broader, more kind and inclusive truths.

The old prophet was used by God to expose the weakness in the prophet of Judah. That’s the hard pill to swallow. Both were faithful men, though both had flaws. OP could have been talked to by a lying angel, the way we are warned that Satan will speak to all God’s people — as an Angel of Light. So whether what he said was a malicious lie, a “white lie” or fib to get him to be sensible and eat some food, or a case of unfortunate gullibility by the Old Prophet (believing a lying angel), his words became the occasion of stumbling which exposed the weakness of the prophet from Judah. One man’s flaw exposed another man’s flaw — just as iron sharpens iron. And OP loved PJ — he was saddened to have to be the agency which taught him a very hard lesson.

OP was a stone of stumbling to PJ. And by turns each of us in a Christian community is a stone of stumbling to the others. The bitter fact of our life in Christ, even with our closest friends and co-workers, is that we trip each other up. We have flawed friends whose flaws bring out our weaknesses, and yet which reveal to us either by precept or example, our own areas of sin.

Viewed in that way, I think the story of the two flawed prophets is a beautiful and realistic story — in the best Hollywood traditions of complicated characters whose interplay creates drama, struggle, and eventual resolution. What is the resolution here? Not some sort of frightful judgment of an angry and legalistic God, but a warm and loving picture of two men who struggled to accomplish God’s word in their lives, were partially successful and partially failures, but whose bones ended up together in death, awaiting a resurrection together by the kind Judge of all.

The principle of kindness over judgment is what all of us must use to get our eschatalogy into line with God’s love and fairness. To me, that’s the main goal of the emergent conversation, and I appreciate the efforts of Brian McLaren, Jim Henderson, Donald Miller, Geeorge Barna, and others who are contributing to this dialog today.

The Murky Marriage of Love and Truth

23 Saturday Dec 2006

Posted by in Brian McLaren, Emergent Conversation, Generous Orthodoxy

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In an interview by Next Wave, Brian McLaren defines the purpose of his book, A Generous Orthodoxy (which I am enjoying and have been responding to over the last few days):

In a sentence, A Generous Orthodoxy is an attempt to remarry two things that never should have been divorced — truth and love….

This reminds me of an old “Father Knows Best” episode in which the teenage daughter is trying to change her boyfriend’s character, and Robert Young says,”why don’t you try something easy, like moving the Rocky Mountains.”

Truth and beauty, even, would be a lot easier, as they do not require us to bend our minds to embrace what repulses us.

For all my adult life I have pursued Truth with a capital T. Sometime in my late 20s I started adding Love to that quest. This dual pursuit became for me the impossible dream, because Truth took me beyond the boundaries of my Christian upbringing, and began to make my concept of Love grow broader than was normal in my denomination. Truth and Love were at war, and the more I was able to reconcile them in my own mind and philosophy of Christian fellowship, the less my longtime brothers and sisters could handle it.

Initially, love seems to take the lead, arguing in defense of those who seem nice but don’t fit our “truth” definitions. For example, as a young man I learned this Joaquin Miller verse and kept it with me as a tolerance builder:

“In men whom men condemn as ill
I find so much of goodness still.
In men whom men pronounce divine
I find so much of sin and blot.
I do not dare to draw a line
Between the two, where God has not.”

It has only been in recent years that I have begun to discover how the Bible resolves its own seeming flip-flops in preference between Truth and Love..

It is indeed a murky area, where the ability to embrace paradoxes and to have a healthy degree of self-doubt seem to be pre-requisites for making progress.

Tomorrow I will explore the story of the Prophet from Judah who was killed by a lion for not obeying every detail of God’s word to him. Within that story, I believe, are some important clues as to why love and truth must learn to coexist within the emergent, unfinished, presently-divided Christian community.

My McLaren Colloquy: 4. The Faithful Remnant

23 Saturday Dec 2006

Posted by in Brian McLaren, Emergent Conversation, eschatology, orthodoxy, remnant

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Conversing with his friend Samir Vesna on pp 129-130 of A Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren writes,

Restorationists… often refer to themselves, Samir says, as a remnant…. “We’re not small because we’re ineffective, or lazy, or ingrown, or otherwise unattractive; we’re small because we’re a faithful remnant! Everone else has compromised…. We’re the few, the committed, the faithful, the proud. (Oops.)…Samir has seen a lot of this remnant thinking in restorationist territory; he sees how destructive it is.”

McLaren goes on to mention how Samir preached about Moses, who was essentially offered the status of remnant by God when the nation of Israel lapsed into idolatry. Moses didn’t take the bait, but pleaded with God to preserve and continue investing in Israel, rather than starting over with Moses as a new patriarch. Moses, who really was a faithful remnant kind of guy, set an example for all who wish to be similarly faithful by showing a willingness to be sacrificial in his love, and eager to bless even the errant members of God’s heritage. McLaren concludes:

Samir asked his friends with a remnant mentality: what is a truly faithful remnant like? Its members do not turn inward in elite self-congratulation…. No, the faithful remnant “after God’s own heart” turns its heart others-wise, outward, toward the unfaithful, in loyalty and love. True faithfulness bonds the hearts of the faithful to their unfaithful neighbors.

If Christ’s faithful church is a “remnant”, it has been learning not to subscribe to the destructive, oppressive orthodoxy of earlier times. It has been “a generous orthodoxy” which is patient under injustice, hopeful that in due time God would bring justice; like Jesus, encouraging the bruised reeds and smoking flaxes of the world; — and pre-occupied with trying to get its own actions brought into harmony with God’s word and spirit.

My McLaren Colloquy: 3. New fields of opportunity

21 Thursday Dec 2006

Posted by in Brian McLaren, Generous Orthodoxy, orthodoxy

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On page 140 of A Generous Orthodoxy Brian McLaren writes:

When I imagine what a generous orthodoxy can become, I realize I must seek to honor both conservative and liberal heroism. And when I do, I want to consider myself both liberal and conservative. I must learn from their mistakes, and when I do, I don’t want to be boxed in either category. Instead they can look up for a higher way and look ahead to the new fields of opportunity and challenge that stretch from here to the horizon….

In my own journey I was once characterized as a liberal, and my response was that I am only liberal if one takes a rather narrow slice of conservatism.
That is the trouble with labels — they are snapshots taken by someone else, usually with a macro lens and with a specific point of view. And yet labels are the stuff that Protestantism consists of.

So I greatly appreciate, and strive to copy in my own ministry, the inclusive, kind, non-polemical, post-protestant spirit I observe in Brian, in Jim Henderson, and in other “Revolutionaries” I am meeting.

Where are these attitudes taking us? As Brian put it, into new fields of opportunity. New fields that were anticipated, as usual, by the Master himself.

Matthew records a most amazing promise, a signed blank check that empowers all followers of Jesus, whatever label they answer to:

And Jesus said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has become a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like a head of a household, who brings out of his treasure things new and old

To me this means that any scribe or writer/teacher of the Word — (greek, grammateus) — is like a steward who is empowered to bring from the storehouse both old things and new. The old things, it seems to me, are what the Bible says directly, what we learn from the text itself … things that all disciples of Christ have seen more or less clearly. The new things, to my way of thinking, could be realizations about spiritual truths, about the fulfillment of prophecy in our own time, and insights into the character of God that come from our personal walk — meditations, interactions with others, etc. There is room here for the rational as well as the mystical/poetical insights that Brian writes about in the next chapter of AGO.

Knowing God is the very fountain and purpose of eternal life, and all who have experience with God, as students of his word, are enriched and empowered to record meaningful insights along their way. These are the sources of one type of the heroisms, plural, that Brian refers to (it seems to me), coming from both sides of the spiritual aisle.
Think of all the scribes, past and present, who have recorded their insights and yet whose works are lost to us because they were not part of our particular ism.

It is for this reason that I feel called to disregard sectarian fences and to pray to God for the strength to make the assembly and compilation and comparison of all these different heroic threads — writings from every Christian stream of thought — for the edification of the present and future generations of disciples. That is what my dream of the Grammateus Institute is all about.

For me, this is one of the great, new, fields of opportunity created by the convergence of Web 2.0 technology and an Emergent, Revolutionary ethos among Christian brothers and sisters.

My McLaren Colloquy: 2. Restorationism

20 Wednesday Dec 2006

Posted by in Brian McLaren, Generous Orthodoxy, restorationism

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One of the most fascinating and vigorous sectors of protesting Protestanism has been “restorationism” — a belief held by a succession of groups through church history that, by finally getting the last or lost detail right, they now represent a full-fledged restoration of “New Testament Christianity.” – A Generous Orthodoxy, p. 128

Like Brian, I was raised with such an ethos. And my experience jives with his: “if you are part of a restorationist group, the group dynamics of your group will be nearly identical to those of every other restorationist group.” And while I no longer identify with the “group dynamics” of my spiritual heritage, I appreciate and share the kind sentiments with which McLaren describes the individual Christians within it:

Fortunately, beneath these squabbles over distinctives, one nearly always finds an idealism among restorationists, a belief that Christianity should be and can be better than its common manifestations. This is a good thing, and needed….One often finds a beautiful, sincere, childlike desire to follow Jesus whatever the cost and however lonely the road.

I am not sure where Brian is headed with his search, now that he appreciates the strengths and weaknesses of many different spiritual streams. At times he seems to envision a sort of ecumenical fusion — gaining a kind of institutional strength from many people who, it would seem, would have to miraculously lay down their points of difference and grow silent on the areas that up till now have been their sources of identity.

For myself, I think the model will be more like WIKI — devoid of institutional frameworks and fully free to embrace individual distinctions of thought and action.

I agree with McLaren, though, that the revolution must embody kindness, not as a surface gloss but as a defining, foundational principle. And in so doing it will radically depart from constant “protest”-isms.

Thus I expect that the Lord’s people who Barna says are now leaving the institutional church in droves will gather around Jesus, will sense the spirit of Christ in each other, and will be driven by humility rather than sectarian pride toward common understandings of the kindness of God and his happy plans for the human race.

It seems to me that the processes which will serve this gathering will incorporate both the rational, evidential tradition of Protestantism and the poetic, visionary disposition that is emerging through post-modern influences. Both isms are dangerous and extreme. But we do not need to choose either extreme, or lukewarmness either. We can, in Brian’s gracious words, find a balance that through generosity and humility walks that edgy middle road of Christlikeness — and honors what has been good in both the orthodox and heterodox thinking of preceding generations.

The only restorationist movement that will ever work is the inclusive, broadminded, and kindly one that God fuses together from every corner of His world.

McLaren/MacArthur colloquy: 1. Honoring evangelicals

20 Wednesday Dec 2006

Posted by in Brian McLaren, evangelicalism, Generous Orthodoxy, John MacArthur

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I appreciate the honorable treatment Brian McLaren gives to evangelicals when he writes: (A Generous Orthodoxy, p. 119)

“evangelicals have a passion that drives them into action: their emotion puts them in motion. And this emotion goes right to the heart of what it means to follow Jesus: loving God and loving others…. That’s why you’ll find evangelicals passionately at work around the world — including every dangerous and difficult place they can get themselves into. They have a mandate from Jesus to get out and make a difference. They love Jesus and they’re not going to let anything stop them. I love that.” He goes on to say, “evangelical passion for spiritual experience, for spiritual understanding, for mission is precious. If it could be bottled, one quart of it would be worth five libraries full of religious books (including mine) …. Even though it can’t be bottled, it cann be acquired, because, ultimately, “it” is the Spirit of Jesus, and Jesus gives himself freely to all who ask.”

I, too, have observed this evangelical zeal and I love it. The evangelicals who are attacking McLaren for what they perceive as dangerous perspectives in “Generous Orthodoxy” would do well to copy his kindness. I think that this missional spirit, this zeal to learn truth and stand for what is right and obey God’s commands and reach out to bring a message of salvation to the unsaved world are all noble impulses — as McLaren said, “the spirit of Jesus”.

I think Jesus was referring to this wholesome part of evangelical traditions when he praises the Philadelphia church — the only one of the churches he did not rebuke — in Rev. 3:7-13.

Unfortunately, the current church is not Philadelphia, which I believe was the 19th century church. Today we’re in Laodicea. We’ve moved beyond the missions of Dwight Moody and Hudson Taylor into the “hour of tempptation” realm of the 20th and 21st centuries. The historic period of “justice for the people” (literal translation of Laodicea).

John MacArthur’s contribution to this colloquy:

He agrees with me that the Philadelphia church is a “true, faithful church”. And he agrees with me that the Laodicea church is “a graphic picture of the church in the Tribulation.” Well, actually, Revelation doesn’t say “Tribulation,” it says “hour of temptation”. Which I think is now. And I do not share MacArthur’s black and white view of reality, that there are “no true believers, only false” in Laodicea; any more than I think there were only true and faithful believers in Philadelphia, a century or more ago. Why then, does Jesus say to them (us) “as many as I love I rebuke and chasten; be zealous, therefore, and repent.”? And why does he counsel the lukewarm believers of Laodicea to obtain from him gold, and fine linen and eyesalve, so that they can see their nakedness etc. and be healed of it? So I agree with McLaren’s perspective, that we need to keep “flipping the script” as he put it in the Revolution conference — keep recognizing that by fits we each are what we despise.

Laodicea feels to me like Evangelicalism

Brian McLaren points out that where he got off the Evangelical (capital E) train was when he began to notice finger-pointing, strife, and debate more than bringing the poor to their house (to put it in Isaiah’s words). In Brians’s words, they seem to have “started identifying judgmentalism and anger as fruits of the Spirit.” (p. 117)

So I join McLaren in honoring what is good about evangelicalism, the focus on a good message with passion and creativity — and call to them to open their ears to the words of Jesus in Revelation 3:14-22…. something that clearly they are hearing, hence the many different strains of “revolution”.

It is the Emergent movement that is finally trying to prick the conscience of the church with this century-old social theme of Justice for the People. [that God is not on the side of the powerful but the powerless]. So I share McLaren’s observation that evangelicals need to balance their passion for getting the details right with an appropriate emphasis on the mercies of God. It is indeed above all else a Revolution of Kindness. Tomorrow I’ll give a brief reaction to his thoughts on page 125ff about Protestantism.