Our Current Postmodern Cultural Context

Link - Sally Quinn, Finding Magic: A Spiritual Memoir

This interview epitomizes the significant shift in our culture's religious thinking; this is what the philosophy of postmodernism looks like in real life. The author (a former atheist) went from believing in nothing to believing in everything. Moreover, the classic ways of determining truth are now taboo, and postmodernism is clearly the new cultural "truth" norm. Any form of religious objectivity is now considered absurd. Religious truth is something found within us not outside of us, and it is individual and relative.

Some Daunting Cultural Challenges Indeed

Per Dr. David Wells, here are the daunting cultural challenges Christ's church faces at the beginning of the 21st century:    

"The fact is that we are living in a time of the most extraordinary paradoxes. Never have we had so much in our society and yet never have people had so little. Never have we had more affluence, despite some economic ups and downs, and yet seldom have we felt so empty. We have brilliant technology but disconnected, fragmented families. Never has so much talk filled the air through radio, television and the Internet, and yet never before has so much talk been left unheard. We are connected to everyone, potentially, in every place, and yet never have we felt so alone. Ours is a world of extraordinary opportunity but one that is also littered with many broken dreams and forgotten hopes. It is a world dark with hatreds but one in which, for so many people, evil is no longer a part of their vocabulary. If the church cannot become the place where all these issues are given their deepest and truest treatment, then the church will have lost its reason to exist. These are the questions now facing us. If we fail, Christianity may well stumble and falter throughout the West (italics mine)."

 

A High View of Marriage Includes Divorce

"Friendly Fire"

I don't agree with every minor detail of this blog post, A High View of Marriage Includes Divorce, but I do wholeheartedly agree with its central, long-overdue message: In the interest of maintaining a high view of marriage, Evangelical and Reformed officers/churches/believers often further victimize spouses who pursue a Biblically legitimate divorce. Over the years, I have witnessed this tendency first-hand many times, privately counseled many such wounded and bleeding sheep, and I have personally experienced some of this pain myself (since I'm the spouse of a believer who obtained a divorce through a legitimate church court in the OPC). Inadvertent as some of it may be, Evangelical and Reformed officers/churches/believers have their ways of issuing emotional sanctions against legitimately divorced believers, whether via overt messages of rejection or shame, subtle marginalization (e.g. treating them as though they were invisible), or putting such believers in a glass room, as it were, with a limiting glass ceiling and walls, lacking any doors, thus thwarting their ministerial influences and opportunities. At the end of the day, such is nothing less than a form of "friendly fire," to a borrow a military concept; the church often shoots yet another bullet into an already severely wounded brother or sister.

Thank you Rebecca VanDoodewaard for speaking up for some of the "least of these" in this post.

The Scriptures and Inventive Gimmicks

Here's one good reason why one should avoid utilizing the Scriptures to facilitate inventive gimmicks.

The Doctrine and Dynamics of the Trinity

Triquetra (a.k.a. "Trinity Knot")

    If you're a Christian, chances are you've been exposed to a lot of good doctrine regarding the Trinity. And, such essential teaching could have come from any number of reputable, historic creeds like the Athanasian Creed or, perhaps, the Westminster Confession of Faith. However, if  a serious intellectual consideration of the doctrine of the Trinity is all that currently informs your faith, your faith may still be lacking something critical, something personal and relational. Per the Scriptures, the "true God" is also the "living God" (Jer 10:10), and His personal and relational dynamics are ever and always at work, actively shaping every nanosecond of history (e.g. Matt 16:16; 2 Cor 3:3; Heb 12:22). Hence, communing, by faith, with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit involves much more than merely comprehending an abstract doctrine that grapples to define Him; it must also involve a participation in and dancing with His living dynamics (1 Jn 1:3). Here Eugene Peterson offers us some invaluable help, so I've quoted him at length:  

    "The dance is perichoresis, the Greek word for dance. The term was used by our Greek theologian ancestors as a metaphor to refer to the Trinity. Perichoresis, wrote Karl Barth, “asserts that the divine modes of existence condition and permeate one another mutually with such perfection, that one is as invariably in the other two as the other two are in the one.” Imagine a folk dance, a round dance, with three partners in each set. The music starts up and the partners holding hands begin moving in a circle. On signal from the caller, they release hands, change partners, and weave in and out, swinging first one and then another. The tempo increases, the partners move more swiftly with and between and among one another, swinging and twirling, embracing and releasing, holding on and letting go. But there is no confusion, every movement is cleanly coordinated in precise rhythms (these are practiced and skillful dancers!), as each person maintains his or her own identity. To the onlooker, the movements are so swift it is impossible at times to distinguish one person from another; the steps are so intricate that it is difficult to anticipate the actual configurations as they appear: Perichoresis (peri = around; choresis = dance).
    The essence of Trinity, the centerpiece of Christian theology and sometimes considered the most subtle and abstruse of all doctrines, is captured here in a picture that anyone can observe in an American neighborhood barn dance or an Irish ceilidh.
    Trinity is the most comprehensive and integrative framework that we have for understanding and participating in the Christian life. Early on in our history, our pastors and teachers formulated the Trinity to express what is distinctive in the revelation of God in Christ. This theology provides an immense horizon against which we can understand and practice the Christian life largely and comprehensively. Without an adequately imagined theology, spirituality gets reduced to the cramped world reported by journalists or the flat world studied by scientists. Trinity reveals the immense world of God creating, saving, and blessing in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with immediate and lived implications for the way we live, for our spirituality. Trinity is the church’s attempt to understand God’s revelation of Godself in all its parts and relationships. And a most useful work it has been. At a most practical level it provides a way of understanding and responding to the God who enters into all the day-to-day issues that we face as persons and churches and communities from the time we get out of bed in the morning until we fall asleep at night, and reaches out to bring us into participation on God’s terms, that is, on Trinitarian terms. It prevents us from getting involved in highly religious but soul-destroying ways of going about living the Christian life.
    Trinity understands God as three-personed: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God in community, each “person” in active communion with the others. We are given an understanding of God that is most emphatically personal and interpersonal. God is nothing if not personal. If God is revealed as personal, the only way that God can be known is in personal response. We need to know this. It is the easiest thing in the world to use words as a kind of abstract truth or principle, to deal with the gospel as information. Trinity prevents us from doing this. We can never get away with de-personalizing the gospel or the truth to make it easier, simpler, more convenient. Knowing God through impersonal abstractions is ruled out, knowing God through programmatic projects is abandoned, knowing God in solitary isolation is forbidden. Trinity insists that God is not an idea or a force or a private experience but personal and known only in personal response and engagement.
    Trinity also prevents us from reducing God to what we can understand or need at any one time. There is a lot going on in us and this world, far exceeding what we are capable of taking in. In dealing with God, we are dealing in mystery, in what we do not know, what we cannot control or deal with on our terms. We need to know this, for we live in a world that over-respects the practical. We want God to be “relevant” to our lifestyle. We want what we can, as we say, “get a handle on.” There is immense peer pressure to reduce God to fit immediate needs and expectations. But God is never a commodity to use. In a functionalized world in which we are all trained to understand ourselves in terms of what we can do, we are faced with a reality that we cannot control. And so we cultivate reverence. We are in the presence of One who is both before and beyond us. We listen and wait. Presumption —God-on-demand on our terms —is exposed as simply silly. Defining God down to the level of our emotions, and thinking and then demanding that God work by the terms of our agenda, is set aside in favor of a life of worship and prayer, obedience and love —a way of life open and responsive to what God is doing rather than one in which we plot strategies to get God involved in what we are doing. Trinity keeps pulling us into a far larger world than we can imagine on our own.
    And Trinity is a steady call and invitation to participate in the energetically active life of God —the image of the dance again. It is the participation in the Trinity (God as he has revealed himself to us) that makes things and people particularly and distinctively who they are. We are not spectators to God; there is always a hand reaching out to pull us into the Trinitarian actions of holy creation, holy salvation, and holy community. God is never a nonparticipant in what he does, nor are any of us. There are no nonparticipants in a Trinity-revealed life. We need to know this. It is a lot easier to guide, motivate, plan, and direct from a distance, whether in our homes or in our work. So we keep a little distance, find ways to delegate so we don’t have to get too involved. But the reality of the Trinity does not permit it. If we are going to know God we have to participate in the relationship that is God. We discover ourselves as unique participants —each of us one-of-a-kind —in the life of God. The Christian life is not preprogrammed; it is a release into freedom. Trinity keeps us alert and responsive to the freedom that derives from participation in the life of God. And every act of participation is unique.
    Every expression of spirituality, left to itself, tends toward being more about me and less about God. Spiritual theology counters by giving witness to the living God, using the largest and most comprehensive and involving terms possible. Trinity provides these terms, a theological language that enables us to maintain our Christian identity in God’s image rather than in what we see in our mirrors each morning."

(Peterson, Eugene H. Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. 2005. 44-47.)

Augustine and the City of God

    The opening words of the Bible (Gen 1:1) reveal the dualistic cosmic reality we live in as human beings: "In the beginning God created the heavens [i.e. the invisible realm] and the earth [i.e. the visible realm, including the planets and stars]." Accordingly, human history can only be truly understood when both cosmic realms are duly considered (cf. Col 1:16).
    Consistent with this worldview, centuries ago Augustine (354-430 AD) diligently searched his Bible for real-life wisdom, eventually writing a classic masterpiece titled, The City of God. A large book, most Christians today are intimidated by it. However, one contemporary scholar, Dr. Nick Needham, has provided us with a one-hour-long lecture (includes a Q&A session) that summarizes this priceless book (link below). Here are two gems from this invaluable lecture:    

 " . . . Augustine says, that we must step back from the immediate historical event to look at the broad sweep of history. What is history all about?  How can we understand any event in history, if we don't understand what history itself is? So what is history? It is, says Augustine, a tale of two cities, two cities in conflict. If we do not grasp that, we won't understand the driving force behind human history. And, if we don't understand what is driving history, we won't be able to have any appreciation for the real significance of anything in history."

"Relate yourself relatively to the relative and absolutely to the absolute. The soul-destroying error of utopian dreamers is they relate themselves absolutely to the relative." 

Link to Dr. Nick Needham's lecture: Augustine and the City of God.

Framing Our Prayers and the Psalter

   "The Psalter is the vicarious prayer of Christ for his Church. Now that Christ is with the Father, the new humanity of Christ, the Body of Christ on earth, continues to pray his prayer to the end of time. This prayer belongs, not to the individual member, but to the whole Body of Christ. Only in the whole Christ does the whole Psalter become a reality, a whole which the individual can never fully comprehend and call his own. That is why the prayer of the psalms belongs in a peculiar way to the fellowship. Even if a verse or a psalm is not one's own prayer, it is nevertheless the prayer of another member of the fellowship; so it is quite certainly the prayer of the true Man Jesus Christ and his Body on earth.
    In the Psalter we learn to pray on the basis of Christ's prayer. The Psalter is the great school of prayer.
   Here we learn, first, what prayer means. It means praying according to the Word of God, on the basis of promises. Christian prayer takes its stand on the solid ground of the revealed Word and has nothing to do with vague, self-seeking vagaries. We pray on the basis of the prayer of the true Man Jesus Christ. This is what the Scripture means when it says that the Holy Spirit prays in us and for us, that Christ prays for us, that we can pray aright to God only in the name of Jesus Christ."

(Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community. New York: HarperOne. 1954. 46-47.)

Drifting Off Course Into Impersonalization

Pilgrim's Progress: Christian Recovering His Lost Roll (i.e. the Scriptures)

    Christian churches throughout the centuries have always seriously struggled to remain faithful to Christ's "new" commandment (Jn 13:34-35). Accordingly, within a church even good things, like the defense of orthodox thinking, can become inordinately situated in the place of love, a greater thing (Rev 2:1-7; 1 Cor 13:13). This is where Eugene Peterson, who I've quoted below at length, offers us some very insightful wisdom. The context: he's addressing threads of thought regarding love woven into the biblical book of 1 John.

   “A primary task of the community of Jesus is to maintain this lifelong cultivation of love in all the messiness of its families, neighborhoods, congregations, and missions. Love is intricate, demanding, glorious, deeply human, and God-honoring, but — and here’s the thing — never a finished product, never an accomplishment, always flawed in some degree or other. So why define our identity in terms that can never be satisfied? There are so many easier ways to give meaning and significance to our human condition: giving assent to a creed or keeping a prescribed moral code are the most common in congregations.
     Belief and behavior are essential, but as the defining mark of the Christian they lack one thing — relationship. They are both prone to abstractions or programs. Abstractions (learning right belief) are good; programs (learning right behavior) are good; but it is also possible to master the abstractions and carry out the programs impersonally. In fact, it is far easier if it is done impersonally.
     Teaching people to think rightly and accurately is largely a cognitive process. We learn the right words and acquire the appropriate images for thinking about, imagining, and responding to God in Christ. All this is important. Still, it is possible, and not only possible but common, to think rightly and live badly, live impersonally. Knowledge does not turn into acts of love automatically.
     Training people to behave morally is largely a programmatic process. We are trained in right responses, in keeping assigned rules, in respecting boundaries, in avoiding danger and fulfilling goals. But again, it is possible, and not only possible but common, to behave impeccably but live badly, live selfishly.
     We have an abundance of educational courses for teaching right thinking about God in the community — Bible studies, catechetical curricula, Sunday School classes. And we have many imaginative programs for training in behaviors that are obedient to the scriptural commands to help and heal, form missions, and evangelize the world. But whoever heard of a class on love? And whoever heard of a love program? And the reason is that love cannot be reduced to what can be taught in a classroom or what can be formulated in a program.
     The attractiveness of a class is that it simplifies by excluding everything but the subject involved. There is nothing wrong with this, as such, and much that is good. We need to get our thinking straight, know who we are and what we are dealing with. The classroom deals primarily with concepts and understanding. But learning to love can’t be reduced to ideas about love.
    The attractiveness of a program is that it simplifies by depersonalizing: get everyone doing the same thing for the same goal. There is nothing wrong with this, as such, and much that is good. It can help us to accomplish agreed upon things in the community to the glory of God. But the practice of love is nothing if not personal. You can’t simplify it into a function.
     What is dangerous is not ideas but the academic mind that abstracts both things and people from particular relationships into concepts. And what is dangerous is not programs but the programmatic mind that routinely sets aside the personal in order to more efficiently achieve an impersonal cause. These are not only dangerous but sacrilegious, for it is precisely relational particularities and personal intimacies that are at the center of our God-given, Holy Spirit– formed identities as the beloved who are commanded to love.”

Peterson, Eugene H. Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology (pp. 313-314). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Kindle Edition.

Less Contempt and More Civility Please

"I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House"

"John McCain is not a war hero"

    I’m a person who deeply cares about relationships, so I study every facet of them. Relationships are valuable and fragile, and most of us know that they can be surprisingly fractured, often beyond repair. Relational estrangements abound all around us, ranging from toxic friendships to nasty divorces to political brawls to religious jihads to all-out wars. And, somewhere along the line, all of us, in one way or the other, get caught in the crossfire of such devastating, gut-wrenching experiences.

    Interestingly, some of the most insightful relational experts I’ve read indicate that there is one telltale sign that often signals the beginning of the end of a relationship: contempt. When contempt surfaces amid any disagreement, the intemperate contenders “take the gloves off,” so to speak. And, unless the gloves are put back on soon, all hell usually breaks loose. This is what I see increasingly happening in American politics and culture, both on the left and the right. Vigorous disagreement (a good, healthy thing) degenerating into malicious contempt (something ominous and dangerous).

    So I entreat you, as a fellow-American, whether you claim to be part of some declared moral majority on the left, or some declared moral majority on the right (or somewhere in between), keep your contempt to yourself. And if you haven’t kept your contempt to yourself, put the gloves back on before our country implodes.

Rethinking Life After Death & Eternal Life

John 5:24
"Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life."

What does it mean to have "eternal life" (something commonly misunderstood in American Christianity)?