(Ir)religiosity

I agree with N.T. Wright:

“It really is high time we developed a Christian ethic of blogging. Bad temper is bad temper even in the apparent privacy of your own hard drive, and harsh and unjust words, when released into the wild, rampage around and do real damage. And as for the practice of saying mean an unjust things behind a pseudonym – well if I get a letter like that it goes straight in the bin. But the cyberspace equivalents of road rage don’t happen by accident. People who type vicious, angry, slanderous and inaccurate accusations do so because they feel their worldview to be under attack.” (ht)

I couldn’t agree more.  Blogging is at the same time both great and dangerous.  It brings out the best and the worst in us.  I am grateful for the many friends that I have made through this platform but I get really put out with the slander and hateful words that are put forth under the auspices of speaking the truth or defending the faith, or whatever else.  As Christians we have a great opportunity to have rich and robust conversation and to model what charitable dialogue and respectful disagreement might look like.  At our best we do that well, but sometimes we blow it.

I’m here because I want to do that well.  I blow it sometimes too, but I hope to create space for kind discussion and participate generous conversation with others.

The last sentence of the above quote is spot on I think.  People tend to really lash out when they perceive their particular worldview to be under attack (which is all the more interesting when you consider that Christianity does not offer a single worldview).  And the detached, abstract nature of commenting on blog without the dynamics of a face to face encounter are enough to make some people brave enough to type something they otherwise probably wouldn’t say directly to another’s face.

Maybe that’s a good way of approaching it — in the same way you would a face to face conversation.  Either way, I think there is always room for improvement.  We’ve got to be better at treating one another like children of God in our blogging and especially in our commenting.

I finally got around to picking up a copy of N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope and I’m almost done.  His deconstruction of the typical concept of heaven as something “up there,” or, as I’ve said, an orgy of eternal bliss, really resonates with me.  Instead of some sort of physical place that persons are transported to after death, heaven, according to Wright, is the ultimate culmination of God’s process of restoration and recreation, a process that began with the Resurrection.  I like that.

I am a little unsure about the cosmological implications of his argument and how some of these things work practically, especially viz. his assertion of actual, physical, bodily resurrection.  He makes it clear that everything, at least in his opinion, hinges upon this.  I’m not so sure.  But that does not at all negate the usefulness of his questioning and reformulating some traditional Christians ideals.  Personally, I think the questioning and re-appropriating can be done without insisting on some of the supposition that he does.  But that’s a different post.

Like I said, the case that Wright makes boldly denounces some of the themes and elements that the Christian Right has latched onto over the last 20-30 years, things like the rapture, the second coming (though Wright plays with that a bit, rather than simply rejecting it), dispensationalism — all those sort of Left Behind Type things.  This is great and I think it needs to be done.  In many ways I’m willing to go even further than Wright does by jettisoning some of these concepts altogether. Read the rest of this entry »

N.T. Wright on the desire to keep one foot in the academy and one foot in the local church:

When I was at seminary in my early twenties having graduated I remember talking to one of my advisors about my desire to do both pastoral work and scholarship and the advisor saying very firmly ‘well, you’re going to have to choose which you want.’ And I thought then and think now thirty-five years later that he was wrong, that I have been right to combine the two. And it has meant at times living on the fault line between two tectonic plates, but that is part of the deal as far as I’m concerned. I think both the church and the academy have suffered from the disjunction. I think it’s important that some people at least get to that particular place of pain, which is a place of, as it were, cultural pain....I sit in a study at home where the great portrait on the wall is J.B. Lightfoot, who was one of most famous ever bishops of Durham and also one of the five leading intellectuals in Europe of his day. He embodies the fact that you should be bringing this stuff together. And that is an incredible model to have day by day.    (ht)

This resonates with me just about as much as anything could I suppose.  I am constantly thinking, discerning, and reevaluating where exaclty my vocational calling lies post-school (whenever that is!).  Only recently am I coming to this realization that it lies in both academia and the local faith community.  Practically, I’m not real sure how that works, there is a certain degree of tension there, but I think it’s a healthy kind of tension.  And I’m more than willing to thing outside the box about how the looks in reality.  For now, its very comforting to know that I am not alone.

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• Bishop: ‘Heaven Not Our Final Destination’

Last time I briefly mentioned that in the book Tom Sine divides “the new conspirators” into four major streams: emerging, missional, mosaic, and monastic.¹  I’m interested to see what you think of his divisions and descriptions. I understand the need for identification, but personally I think there is more overlap with the different groups depending about locality and context.

The Emerging Stream

According to Sine — who cites several other notables including Gibbs & Bolger, Jonny Baker, Brian McLaren, and Andrew Jones just to name a few — the emerging stream is especially attuned to postmodern culture and is “actively seeking searching for the sacred in the profane.”²  Thus, emergents are more relational, experiential and are likely to be especially involved in or show a great appreciation to the arts and various forms of new media which are consequently integrated into their worship. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Tom Sine, The New Conspirators: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed at a Time (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 31-55. [↩]
2. Sine, 34. [↩]

I finished reading Tom Sine’s The New Conspirators a few weeks ago and I’ve meant to throw up a review for a while now.  Because this is such a great and important book I’ve decided to devote a post for each section and hopefully open up some conversation.   If you haven’t read this book yet, I highly recommend it, especially if you’re one of those emergent-y types.  It’s a shame this book hasn’t received more publicity in emergent circles.

Sine begins the book acknowledging that we are indeed living in turbulent times as far as the church as a worldwide institution is concerned.  But instead of focusing solely on the negative he writes, “For followers of Jesus, times of challenge are always times of opportunity to give new expression to God’s love for a people and a world.”¹ Read the rest of this entry »

1. Cf. Tom Sine, The New Conspirators (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 18. [↩]