I found this post by Kurt Onken today at the Wittenberg Trail, and thought it was worth referencing.
The socially-palatable, seeker over-sensitive church has no future. This may appear to some to show that Christianity is losing ground. However, I disagree. I think Christianity has already lost ground in many churches. This is why people like the Internet Monk talk about the coming collapse of the evangelical church.
It’s time to take it back.
The final chapter in Webber’s The Divine Embrace
Webber proposes that when spirituality is situated in God’s embrace, church and worship then reveals that to us. We are no longer cheerleaders (my term) that have to conjur up some sense of worship and spirituality, but are rather participants who have God revealed to us as we respond to his embrace.
Webber criticizes the modern business model of the church, which has created, as you’d expect, a consumerist mentality. This has followed a natural progression, with churches focusing on what the unchurched want, and making the church culturally relevant. As a result, many churches merely reflect not only the look, but the “narrative of culture.” Churches offer programs to meet the needs and desires of the congregation, as opposed to nurturing new converts and discipling them.
This chapter also discusses what Webber calls the crisis of worship. As I have mentioned before, contemporary worship sees God as the object God who needs to be worshipped by us, which originates worship in the self. Webber believes that a Biblical and historical view of worship is that “worship does God’s story.” Worshp proclaims God and what he is doing, and in worship we enact the story. A worship that is nourishing focuses on historical events (not emotions), uses Biblical language, and includes prayer that discloses and echoes God’s story.
Since I’ve started reading this book, I have paid even closer attention to what kind of worship happens in the churches I attend, and I think Webber is correct. The further and further we have “progressed” into evengelicalism, our worship songs have become more and more meaningless, offering little if anything of the truth of the Gospel. Even in my own Vineyard culture, the contemporary worship songs have become less and less doctrinal. No longer is the Trinity mentioned (in fact, often the Persons are confused). In fact, it’s rare to find Biblical language used that hasn’t been edited and lost among less meaningful phrases.
What now? As I’ve probably mentioned in the past, I really don’t have a great deal of hope that the Evangelical church will stop the nonsense and realign itself with a Biblical concept of spirituality. I also don’t have hope for the emerging church, which to me is simply modernism will the lid off. That’s not to say I haven’t lost faith in God’s church, or his ability to pull it together.
As for what I do, I’m not sure. Next Sunday is Easter, and at the moment, I’m looking for a good church that remembers what it’s like to celebrate a resurrection. Then, I’ll go to our church with my family.
Time Magazine online jumped into eschatological waters yesterday with an interview with N.T. Wright concerning his latest book, Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
N.T. “Tom” Wright is one of the most formidable figures in the world of Christian thought … and is a hero to conservative Christians worldwide for his 2003 book The Resurrection of the Son of God, which argued forcefully for a literal interpretation of that event.
It therefore comes as a something of a shock that Wright doesn’t believe in heaven — at least, not in the way that millions of Christians understand the term.
In Bishop Wright suggesting that John Lennon was on to something when he wrote, “Imagine there’s no Heaven?” Well, not really. But, perhaps – if you believe the Dante version of Heaven. Wright explains what he means in his phone interview with Time writer David Van Biema, which actually is one of the better “Christian” interviews I’ve seen in the secular press, although the headline - Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop – is a bit melodramatic.
As my faithful readers know, NT Wright is one of my favorite theologians (definitely my favorite contemporary theologian), for a number of reasons. He is not an American Evangelical, for one thing (he’s Anglican), which is very refreshing. He is also an historian, he understands modern and postmodern philosophy, and he writes very plainly without being condescending or “popish.” He also makes a ton of sense, and is pretty consistent with traditional theology, although he does occasionally present some new approaches to understanding the New Testament.
It has been interesting that the Evangelical community has embraced him to the extent that it has; it seems to indicate that Evangelicals don’t understand their own theological positions. Unless it comes down to a “pet issue” like predestination or in this case, eschatology, they don’t seem to realize that Wright – as well as traditional, historic theology – undermines a lot of contemporary Evangelical thinking. He’s become quite a favorite with many of the “Emerging” folks such as McLaren, who try to appropriate his ideas but just muck them up as they try to incorporate in their emergent-evangelical theological stew.
I first heard about Wright’s newest book, which was just released this month, on the Jesus Creed website. Scot McNight has been providing a chapter-by-chapter peek at the book, which seems to be a perfect follow up to Evil and the Justice of God
Wright seems to have this old-fashioned idea that what we believe impacts how we live. The Publisher’s blurb about the book states, “Wright convincingly argues that what we believe about life after death directly affects what we believe about life before death.” In the interview, Wright states:
If there’s going to be an Armageddon, and we’ll all be in heaven already or raptured up just in time, it really doesn’t matter if you have acid rain or greenhouse gases prior to that. Or, for that matter, whether you bombed civilians in Iraq. All that really matters is saving souls for that disembodied heaven.
This, of course, is not proof of Wright’s point of view, but it is reason enough to work through what the Bible really teaches about the future. If Wright is right, the truth about Heaven could change how we want to live today.
One more book for my reading list…
Some time ago I wrote a bit about the authority of the Bible, which you can read here. Beneath the issues of orthodoxy, orthopraxy, theology and denominationalism we will often find some discussion about the Scriptures, with questions as seemingly elementary as, “what constitutes Scripture?” We are taught as children that the Bible consists of 66 books, beginning with Genesis, ending with Revelation, all inspired by the Holy Spirit (the Aprocrapha is, of course, not inspired). We even somehow think that the order of the books is important, sometimes judging those who don’t know where Romans is.
This morning I read a couple of very interesting posts on the subject on the internet monk blog. The first is by Michael Spencer (the IM himself – he’s actually Baptist, I think), who identifies himself as a “post-evangelical,” which he defines elsewhere on his blog. The second post (on the same internet monk site) is by guest-poster Josh Stodtbeck, a Lutheran blogger who gives a Lutheran perspective on the Scriptural Canon.
Both posts raise very interesting issues and challenges with regard to how militant we can be concerning our position on the Canon of Scripture. As I think I’ve mentioned before, it is interesting to note that based on what we read in the New Testament, the “Word of God” does not seem limited to anything which was written down, and in fact, seems to speak of oral testimony. It would seem that some fundamentalist approaches to the Bible, while trying to raise the stature of the Bible and encourage faith by assigning adjectives such as inerrant, may in fact have the opposite effect.
As Paul told Timothy, all scripture is inspired by God. However, as I realized some years ago, in context we see that Paul was referring to that “scripture” which Timothy learned as a child. While I do not doubt the inspiration of the New Testament books, it seems fitting to ask (and not assume), “What did Paul mean by ‘scripture?’” Michael Spencer writes:
It is important, however, to note that the term “scripture” was not synonymous with “approved canon.” It is apparent that Jewish writers could use the term “scripture” in a much broader sense than we would use the word “canon,” and that books not included in canonical lists might be referred to as scripture. This seems to provide strong evidence that there are books- such as the Apocryphal books- that may have been quoted as “scripture” while not appearing universally on all Jewish lists of canon. In fact, it’s clear that the Jewish canon was never as settled as the retelling of the canonical tale might sometimes imply. This suggests that the category of “beneficial, but not authoritative” should be applied to some writings, and that supplemental collections of non-canonical books and readings are appropriate.
Spencer’s post give’s his own, “post-evangelical” views. Mr. Stodtbeck presents a Lutheran understanding of the Canon and how it works in practice; that is, how it impacts Lutheran theology. For example, he discusses how not all books were unanimously adopted into the Canon; some books, like Revelation, were highly contested:
An example of the application of this is that Lutherans will never make some particular interpretation of Revelation a church-defining issue. Yes, we preach from it, write commentaries in it, and read it in our lectionaries, but because the early church witness to the origin of this book is divided, our confessional principles on eschatology are ultimately drawn from the Gospels and Epistles.
You may not agree with either position, but if you have any interest at all in the subject, I think you’ll find the articles worth your time.
The other evening I sat down to finish The Bourne Legacy
Chapter 2 of Webber is entitled A Historical Perspective I (AD 30 – 1500), where he outlines the history of Christian thought concerning the topic of spirituality, which he defines as “a lived theology.” His concept of spirituality is essentially the concept that I have been working under for the past few years, that the type of God that we believe in (or, who we believe that God is) determines how we will live our lives. Conversely, I also believe that the way we live our lives reveals what we believe about God (our theology). Webber strongly makes the point that theology and spirituality cannot – or should not – be separated from each other. They key, rather, to understanding spirituality is in a “lived theology … found in God’s vision of creation, incarnation and re-creation.”
Webber shows how the development of the creeds were more than just theological statements (in the modern sense), they were affirmations of the Biblical spirituality that was under attack by various heresies. The Apostles Creed is the most basic and fundamental of the creeds, countered gnosticism, which taught a spirituality based on freeing the spirit from the bondage of the fallen, physical realm. The Apostle’s Creed very strongly affirms the incarnation, and was seen by the early Church as a guideline for the Christian life, not just belief.
It is interesting, reading through Webber, how certain elements of the heresies of the early church are still around, challenging a true Biblical spirituality. In fact, much (and perhaps post) of evangelicalism functions under some form of one or more of these early heresies, and absolutely functions under non-Biblical post-medieval philosophies. Over the past year I’ve grown increasingly disillusioned with Evangelical theology and practice, as has been evident on this blog. As I’ve dug a bit more into the theological and philosophical history of the church, the Evangelical church seems to have less and less to offer. And, the post-modern, “emerging” church is in no better shape.
Webber, however, is doing something other than confirming what I’ve already been thinking, he’s pointed out some errors in my own thinking, that I thought I had already repaired. This is exciting… As I’ve just posted on skepticism and having our beliefs challenged, I am truly excited when I discover possible errors in my own thinking, and perhaps have an opportunity to correct those errors.
I’ll start posting a series on this book, outlining his main points and giving my own thoughts. As always, feel free to comment along the way.
In a recent post, I discussed the implications that a common contemporary worship style has on the community of the church:
… what I see happening is that our contemporary freedom in worship – to raise hands or not, to sit, stand, jump or twirl – plus the existential nature of the lyrics in our worship songs is undermining the goal of our churches, which is to create a corporate worship experience. I don’t have any sense of community with the people around me, who could be (and often are) engaged in any number of activities.
One of the things happening in our local church, ever since we got this new building without windows in the sanctuary, is that they turn down the lights during worship. It’s bugged my wife and I since they started it, but I haven’t said anything, as I’m already known as somewhat of a malcontent; I prefer to save my comments for more serious issues than “mood lighting.”
Well, today the pastor explained, for the benefit of visitors, why the lights are being lowered. It is to help us focus on God, the theory being that we won’t be distracted by our neighbors if we can’t see them. Now, this does address one of the points in the quote above, that we are involved in individual worship expressions. Granted, this shows some sensitivity in that area, but I don’t think they’ve thought the issue through from the standpoint of community. What the leaders are encouraging is now an even more individualized, existential worship experience. Not only we are to do our own thing, we are to try to forget that the rest of the congregation is even there. To me, this is absolutely counter-productive; that is, if you believe “church” is about corporate worship.
Those who work in early childhood education will probably understand what is called “parallel play.” Until a certain age, the most we can expect of toddlers is that they may engage in the same activities as other children at the same time. They are not playing “together,” they are playing along side each other. When they grow older, they are able to understand the concept of others as individuals to interact with, and corporate play activities begin.
This, of course, illustrates what I am saying about what is encouraged in existential worship. There really is no corporate worship going on; at best, it is “parallel” worship, and may not even be that. What is the point of coming together to worship, if it is to try to ignore the body and enter into our own little worship bubble? Why not stay at home? At least there, we could worship to songs of our own choosing, something that perhaps we could actually sing and mean. Part of the wonder of a confessional, liturgical worship style is that we are knowingly joining together with Christians the world over. We are Christians alone most of the week – on Sunday mornings, we are joined to the Church Universal. By reciting the creeds, by corporate recitation of The Lord’s Prayer, the many become one.
For 10 years or more, I’ve heard churches that I’ve been involved in lament the loss of community. Leadership conferences have focused on it, and church publications have discussed it. The small group strategy that worked 20 years ago is no longer working. Postmodernity is blamed (for everything, it seems). However, what do people expect, when the main focus of the corporate church is taken away, and we are encouraged to become more individualized? Why bother going to a building on Sunday morning only to be isolated? To make things worse, many of the songs are so personal in nature that not everyone can sing them. Many don’t affirm any universal truth, they affirm individual, existentialist experience. What if I, alone and in the dark, can’t join in with the experience being sung from the front?
As Marshal McLuhan said, the medium is the message. I believe it’s time to evaluate our medium of worship, to see what message we’re sending.
We had emo-worship in our church yesterday; at least the singing part of worship (think Dashboard Confessional). Song after breathy, angst-ridden, emotion-filled song delivered by the 20-something worship leader invited us to share in a series of existential experiences that were not necessarily our worship experiences. They were, perhaps, the worship experiences and emotions of a handful of song-writers unknown to any of us in our church. Or, perhaps they were written in the first person to show how someone might feel at a certain point. These emotions and thoughts may have been shared to some extent by the 20-something worship leader, or perhaps he thought people in the congregation ought to feel the way a certain song described. In any event, rather than being invited or led into a corporate, unifying worship experience by singing songs of universal truth telling about a Great God who does Great Things, we were invited to individually try to emulate some unknown persons’ existential worship experiences.
It seems that attending a worship service is like trying to pick out an anniversary card for your spouse. I pick out card after card reading tripe like “I don’t say ‘I love you’ as often as I should” before I find one that I can actually relate to. These “issues” the cards refer to may be the card-writer’s problems, but they are not mine. Likewise, in church I often wait 3 or 4 songs before they play a song where I can authentically sing along.
This is not the case all of the time in our church, as we have a variety of worship leaders, each with their own style and favorite (but often limited) arsenal of songs. At times it does seem kind of like an old top-40 AM radio station, where you could expect to hear the same songs over, and over, and over… And, like top-40 radio, there are perhaps 5 actually good songs in the bunch, and not necessarily those in the top 10 playlist. But, like the DJs on the cool FM stations, each worship leader has their own playlist, which helps to create some diversity. The problem is, it seems that more and more of the newer worship songs are falling into that existential emo category.
But then, I was raised Lutheran, where we sang meaty songs like A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, not to mention a pretty decent liturgy. Not that I’m stuck on hymns, mind you. Maranatha!’s The Praise Album (that dates me, I know) was a breath of fresh air. And, having been in and around the Vineyard since the mid-80′s, I am no stranger or despiser of worship choruses, even those sung from a 1st person perspective. I believe there’s a place for talking and singing about God, and also a place for singing to God. And, there’s certainly nothing wrong with someone writing about their current thoughts and emotions; certainly the psalms of David reflect much of this. What I have a problem with is when worship songs chosen for corporate worship focus on the experience or the emotion in place of any real thoughts about God. As far as I know, we’re not supposed to worship the worship experience, or someone else’s worship experience.
One of the points of liturgical or confessional worship, whether it be Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican or Lutheran, is unity. The Church joins together in a common confession of truth and worship experience that joins us not only with the others in the room, but with believers the world over. Dietrich Bonhoeffer even warned in Life Together that singing harmonies during worship detracts from unity, and only serves to emphasize individualism. I think he makes a very good point, although I think an argument could be made that harmonies can also demonstrate the coming together of diverse individuals – the Church becoming one.
However, as I have written before, what I see happening is that our contemporary freedom in worship – to raise hands or not, to sit, stand, jump or twirl – plus the existential nature of the lyrics in our worship songs is undermining the goal of our churches, which is to create a corporate worship experience. I don’t have any sense of community with the people around me, who could be (and often are) engaged in any number of activities. Nothing we sing joins us in a common confession of faith; they could be Buddhists for all I know (especially since very few of the songs have any theological content whatsoever).
In our attempts to be culturally relevant, relaxed and “natural” (I am reminded of the old A&W commercials: “come as you are, stay in your car“), are we in fact undermining our own goals of creating community? Is this why the church organization (read “club”) has become so important to us? I am suggesting that yes, this is what is happening. Our contemporary church liturgies are encouraging individualism rather than community, and as a result, organizational structure is replacing community.
I also suspect that this internal conflict that we’ve created is at the root of a lot of the Evangelical angst that is feeding the “Emerging” movements, as well as simply driving people out of our churches. Existential worship, leading to Evangelical angst, and the death of community. Thankfully, we know that the gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church. I don’t think our failures will prevail against it, either.
From the i-monk:
If you want to see genuine worshipers, I’m not sure your local evangelical “praise and worship” service is necessarily the right place to go. Maybe….maybe you might want to stop in that 8 a.m. mass over at St. William’s.
This is a nice companion to something I wrote a while back. Someday soon I’ll write about why I’d consider rejoining a Lutheran church… if one (in the original sense of the word) still exists.
Michael Spencer’s post today at his blog, internetmonk.com, prompted a good little discussion on the nature of blogging, fisking and the discussion of theology, which often (usually) trespasses into areas of personal faith and belief. Because theology (man’s attempts to understand God) impacts in a very real way how we interact with God and accept how God wants to interact with us, discussions about theology should never be thought of as purely intellectual exercises.
As I pointed out in a comment on that post, when we are confronted with some different thinking on a theological issue, it provokes us to think the issue through in light of our own theological framework. Often that process appears as a challenge or a critique, which of course it is. From the standpoint of the reader, you can choose to critique something based on a theological framework (e.g. “it’s not Reformed, so it’s wrong”), or you can challenge yourself and your theology in the process. Often my responses to things start out, “I don’t think so, because…” This could sometimes be seen as being “critical,” which is a no-no in some circles, or it could be understood as thinking out loud from another perspective. When I think of it, I do try to indicate that’s what I’m doing. Sometimes.
This week I have been provoked in a good way by a couple of posts on i-monk on the localization of Jesus. The first post was titled Where’s Jesus?: Thoughts on a Locally Available Christ (a brilliant title) and asked the question, “Where can you get your Jesus?.” As the title implies, the post discusses the concept of trying to make Jesus – or see Jesus as – more present in one place than another. Examples include the “Real Presence” at Communion and concepts like God “showing up” at a certain church. While not denying that there is truth in some of these concepts, Michael proposes:
Presenting Christianity as a system of localized appearances of Jesus distorts many things that we want to continually affirm: Jesus as the one mediator, Jesus as the ascended Lord of the universe, Christ who is in the midst of his church and present with all of his people. Maintaining the Biblical balance between “Jesus on the table,” “Jesus in my experience” and “Jesus at the right hand of the Father is a crucial task for worship leaders, pastors and teachers.
In a follow up post, he discusses what he calls a sacramental view of reality. While not everyone would agree with his thinking or his language, what he presents is a great tool for examining how we see God’s presence in our lives, and how we function as churches. It would be nice, would it not, if we spent less time in church talking about how we could make our lives better, and spent more time recognizing the presence of God around us?
My friend Ken writes a couple of posts dealing with similar issues here and here.
On that note, I’ll sign off. Stay tuned for an upcoming post discussing another of the i-monk’s thought-provoking articles, this one on transactionalism, entitled Out of Business With God.
In keeping with prior posts on hermeneutics (that is, how to read and actually understand the Bible in some reasonable fashion), more hermeneutics, discovering the nature of God, and too many posts to link to directed at shaking a bit of sense into mindless pop Christian culture, check out Ben Witherington, once again, as he provides a great post on how we should read the Old Testament in light of the New Testament.
The “old dude” I’m referring to is “Saint” John Chrysostom, one of the gems of the Early (4th Century) Church. We don’t hear too much from Chrysostom, and some may never of heard of him. It seems as though many people assume that there were no brilliant theological minds between the Apostle Paul and Martin Luther (or Calvin, for you Reformed folks). Born in 349, Chrysostom was actually a contemporary of Augustine, who was 5 years younger. Chrysostom became the Archbishop of Constantinople, while Augustine joined the Church in Italy after being converted in Milan. Of course, at that time there was still only one church, although Rome always seemed to always claim a higher status. While both men are considered saints in both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, the West seemed to follow Augustine’s thinking, while Chrysostom seems to carry more clout in the East. But, enough history.
The point that Witherington & Chrysostom make concerning the reading of the Old Testament is that since the coming of the New Testament (basically, I think, the appearance of Jesus) the Old Testament must be read and interpreted in light of the New Testament. Here’s a quote that Mr. W quotes from Chrysostom:
Now when you see these things merely sketched out you neither know everything nor are you totally ignorant of everything, but you know that a man and a horse are drawn there, though they are indistinct. But you don’t accurately [or fully] know what sort of emperor or what sort of prisoner it is until the truth of the colors comes and makes the face distinct and clear. For just as you don’t ask everything of that image/portrait before the truth of the colors, but if you receive some indistinct knowledge of what is there, you consider the sketch to be sufficiently ready , in just that same way consider with me the Old and New Testaments , and don’t demand from me the whole fullness of the truth in the [OT] type…For as in the painting, until someone draws in colors it is a shadowy sketch.
Much weirdness comes from reading the Old Testament separate from the New, and as a consequence confusing how the testaments fit together. Witherington says:
Now what is so interesting about this whole hermeneutical approach is that it believes that one must do justice to the history if one is to do theology and ethics right. Christianity was a religion grounded and founded in history, and so theology proper was a reflection on God’s mighty acts in history which had a before and after to them. It was not an abstract science or philosophy where one took ideas and simply linked them together without them arising out of historical events and their substance. In the end, Chrysostom’s hermeneutic mirrors that of Paul and the author of Hebrews. It would be my view that we should go and do likewise.
Good stuff again from Mr. Witherington. Go read the whole article.