“What is the Judge supposed to do on the card?” ~Francis Chan
February 1, 2010
Is it Free?
Here’s a million dollar question…Is it Free?
I hear salvation and Christian issues spoken about in this kind of language. The inquiry is sometimes about the personal cost of “it.” What is the action requirement on the person’s behalf to be considered a Christian and to be heaven bound? How much is enough? When can I squeak by being just good enough? How counter the world’s culture is Jesus’ expecting of his followers to behave? Unfortunately, to blur matters, the “it” is often left in ambiguity and blurriness. It depends upon how we define the “it” the determines drastically different answers to the question, “Is it (heaven, Jesus, salvation, Christianity) free?”
In evangelistic contexts, the “it” (much to my dismay) can rarely leave the domain of providing psychological safety of a free ticket to heaven. In such a scenario monumental issues get washed away and it can quickly narrow the scope of interest to the question, “Is heaven free?”, or “What must I do to enter heaven when I die?”, or “How do I accept the free gift of salvation/heaven today?”
In this post I’d like to talk about how we can be more precise and God honoring with the “it” referencing. Ultimately, Jesus’ concerns should be our concerns. If our concerns don’t match up with Jesus’ concerns then it is our concerns that new to be reshaped and transformed by more biblical categories of thinking.
So, is “it” free? Well, yes and no. If a person is talking about salvation, then yes. If a person is talking about following in Jesus’ footsteps, then no. In the gospels Jesus is repeatedly asking people to follow him. Therefore, for Jesus, “it” has more to do with our followership of him than about our 20th and 21st century evangelical evangelistic obsession asking if heaven is truly a free gift.
Salvation is by grace alone, by faith alone, by Christ alone. R.C. Sproul is famous for saying this again and again. Protestant history echoes this chorus. Therefore, yes, a thousand times yes, salvation is free. Ephesians 2:8-9 is often cited as evidence for this position.
Salvation is free, but following Jesus is costly. In fact, following Jesus costs us our lives. We are to identify with Jesus in his death, burial, and resurrection into new life by baptism. We are to lead a new life and live as a new creation being identified as “in Christ.” Denial of self and so much more are wrapped into this teaching of Jesus found in Mark 8:34-37 among other places.
Ultimately, Jesus asks us to follow him, to believe, and place our trust in him. Humans need both saving and someone to direct their lives. Some people count on themselves for both. Some people want the “Savior” part for fire insurance just in case hell is real, but won’t submit to Jesus as “Lord.” Jesus in my reading of Scripture only offers a package deal. He offers salvation as free, but make no mistake about it, Christianity will cost you your life.
January 29, 2010
Bobos in Paradise (Part 2)
“The dominant trend of social thought in those years was toward individual self-expression and away from the group loyalty and deference that were the ideals in communities like St. Nick’s parish. Each person can and must find his or her own course to spiritual fulfillment, the educated-class writers were saying.” -pg 233
“The spiritual pluralist believers that the universe cannot be reduced to one natural order, one divine plan. Therefore, there cannot be one path to salvation. There are varieties of happiness, distinct moralities, and different ways to virtue. What’s more, no one ever really arrives at a complete answer to the deepest questions or to faith. It is a voyage. We are forever incomplete, making choices, exploring, creating, protean.” -pg 234
“All that is required is that people of good faith seek their own paths in an open and tolerant manner, without trying to impose their own paths on others.” -pg 235
“For example, Bellah and his crew interviewed a young nurse named Sheila Larson, who described her faith as “Sheilaism.” She had invented her own custom religion, with God defined as whatever fulfilled her needs.” -pg 236
“The generation that gave itself “unlimited choices” recoiled and found that it was still “searching for something.” In so many ways we seem to want to return to some lost age of (supposed) spiritual coherence and structure. We seem to sense the cost of our new-found freedom is a loss of connection to other people and true communities. We want to recreate those meaningful ligatures. And yet, more often than not, we’re not willing to actually go back to the age of limits, which would mean cutting off our options.” -pg 241
David Brooks does a good job depicting WHAT IS. A big gap exists between WHAT IS and WHAT OUGHT TO BE from my Christian perspective. Boiling it down to the simplest terms…The plurality of choices sought after is ultimately self-defeating. Nothing transcends the world of plurality subjective sameness worthy of full human devotion. The soul is left divided, continuing on a journey that only explores further into plurality, which never finds a concrete resting end. The Bobo culture craves a spirituality without a desire of obligation or singular commitment. It concocts a recipe incapable of satisfying the soul with a pluralistic smorgasbord of equal choices. When extrapolated out it tends to directionless living where passion for a singular unifying worldview is unheard of. The only direction is self-given, not transcendentally called.
January 27, 2010
Bobos In Paradise
“Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There,” by David Brooks. I’ve just finished it and recommend the read to anyone in the ministry thinking through ministry joining sociological issues in the United States today. It’s great outside the ministry context, but I’ll provide comments from inside the ministry context as it’s the context in which I live. It deals with the ideology, manners, and morals of this elite Bobo class shaping U.S. culture. Bobos doesn’t mean “bimbos,” or shallow or unintelligent people. Rather it’s a term that combines the beginning of two words, BOurgeois and BOhemians. The idea is that these once two separate worlds are converging into one, making this a unique era. David Brooks is a writer in the New York Times, so that’s one of the places in which the name might ring a bell for you.
I’ll quote a few sentences that stand out to me worthy of reflection.
First, a grounding of the terms:
“The bourgeois prized materialism, order, regularity, custom, rational thinking, self-discipline, and productivity. The bohemians celebrated creativity, rebellion, novelty, self-expression, antimaterialism, and vivid experience. The bourgeois believed there was a natural order of things. They embraced rules and traditions. The bohemians believed there was no structured coherence to the universe. reality could only be grasped in fragments, illusions, and intimations. So they adored rebellion and innovation.” -pg 69
From the spiritual life chapter:
“Two million people voyage up to Glacier National Park alone each year to get all spiritual in the face of its grandeur.” -pg 220
“”Montana’s special gift is space,” writes local author Glenn Law, “landscape made personal; space that reaches out to the horizon then comes back and gets under your skin. It reaches inward, wraps itself around your soul, incubates and grows.”" -pg 221
“The challenges they face are these: Can you still worship God even if you take it upon yourself to decide that many of the Bible’s teachings are wrong? Can you still feel at home in your community even if you know that you’ll probably move if a better job opportunity comes along? Can you establish ritual and order in your life if you are driven by an imperative to experiment constantly with new things?…The Bobos are trying to build a house of obligation on a foundation of choice.” -pg 228
January 25, 2010
Moralistic Deism
The man in the video is Matt Chandler. He’s the lead pastor at The Village Church in Texas. I’ve always enjoyed his wrestling and passion to bring the life giving message of the Bible into the Bible belt. It’s an interesting thing to think of the Bible belt as an obstacle, but in many ways, it certainly is an obstacle. I’ve also enjoyed his thoughts on moralistic deism (mentioned in this particular video). My experience is that this concept is spot on today, and I see it most frequently exhibited during premarital counseling sessions. Specifically I see this when asking how the couple plans on raising their children. I often hear church life brought into the conversation regardless of if they themselves currently are church attenders. I’m told the answer for them doing this is because they want their children to learn morality and learn how to be “good people.” This is a slice of what moralistic deism is all about. It’s not about Jesus, the cross or anything of this sort, it’s about morality. Their conception of God is a bit foggy, undefined, or unexamined. But it seems as though their adhering most closely to a conception of a distant God like one which a deist would describe.
January 20, 2010
An Emergent Mess
I chuckle at the traffic sign stating there are no traffic signs (47 seconds). This is a classic example of self-contradiction illustrating the suspect grid that at least some emergent church folk operate. I will return to emergent thoughts in a minute, but first we must unearth the currents of thought behind the exterior of emergent. The undercurrent is postmodernism.
The philosophical ideas of postmodernism leaves its hopeful learners scratching their heads. Dizziness and vomiting shortly set in, followed by a demand for full tuition reimbursement due to the fact that they paid big bucks to learn truth only to be taught an intricate system of high sounding language announcing that there is no way to access objective truth. The self contradiction of postmodern thinking from the start in stating the inability to access objective truth claims while this very claim itself is an attempt at an overarching truth claim leaves me staring at the ceiling in hopelessness.
Postmodernism runs as a deconstructive school of thought that likes to destroy attempted statements of truth. To learn more about postmodernism’s ties to deconstructionism you’ll have to turn elsewhere. I lack confidence in my ability to state this relationship adequately, and therefore will not attempt to brush off the dust from my philosophy books and speak authoritatively on which I am ill equipped to handle.
I do know that when emergent meets postmodernism the games begin. And the games usually mean some guy in a coffee shop sipping drinks I don’t even know how to pronounce is “dialoguing” with others and making a whole lot of money. This is often done with playful cleverness, wit, and word play. That’s how its pumped into the mainstream with the popularly witty books that Brian McLaren is able to sell by the truck loads. In a “Generous Orthodoxy,” McLaren makes money by turning words and theological concepts upside down, holding them by their shoes, shake out all their meaning, and returning them upright with new imported meaning stuffed into his victims. He tears down words, and reconstructs them, but with his own new definitions. The result is that you’re reading the same words, but completely redefined, making the language now very confusing for anyone trying to understand historic orthodox Christian thought.
At the end of the day, language becomes laughable because the hardened postmodernist knows with this and other ills how futile are his hopes to convey meaning, intent, and any remotely meaningful truth. Language becomes a broken vehicle incapable of hauling meaning and truth. Postmodernism, put briefly, is the denial that we can have access to objective truth claims.
Bringing this strain of thought back into emergent and Christianity, we see that emergent’s association with postmodernism is a problem because Christianity’s special revelation, namely the Bible, at its core claims to make objective truth claims. If there are not notions of truth capable of grounding one’s life, but only a relativist dialoguing but never concretely settling upon anything muddy mess, then a firm foundation is ripped out from under a Christian’s feet, and all that can be left is emergent “dialogue” that doesn’t seem to have a end target in mind, namely, because by definition, it cannot claim to ever have access to such an end target.
Disclaimer: This is my current take and understanding of these issues. I’m by no means an expert, it’s just the sense I’ve formulated from my knowledge thus far on these issues. I’m sure, just as there is with practically anything, some who align themselves with certain strains of thought, they tweak and nuance their views and therefore fall outside my categorical understandings of how the current Christian milieu is being formed by the strains of thoughts addressed in this post.
