This is Where I am Going!

Fairly decent article on the origins of post-liberalism, which is more or less what I will be studying at Yale Divinity beginning next fall. I'm excited, I think this is a very intriguing and constructive movement in theology!

Reflections During Holy Week

For a while I have been wrestling with trying to figure out what salvation is. That seems like such a basic question theologically that I almost don't know that I should admit that I have been asking about it. But I wrestle with what I feel like are two extremes that I see manifested in our culture. The first is the extreme that I heard most frequently in my circles growing up- that salvation is solely spiritual, that it involves a particular answer to the question "what happens when I die?"- that answer being "I go to heaven because I had faith (which has become a very, very vague term) in Jesus." The second extreme is one that I hear railed against on several fronts- most prominently in the "health and prosperity" gospel and the "total sanctification" gospel that is often associated with Wesleyan theology. The problem with this is extreme is that it makes everything immediate, salvation becomes about radically changing my life now in some otherworldly way- heaven becomes the rest of my earthly life beginning right this very instant. I think a large part of the problem that I see with both of these views is that neither takes into account the "already-not yet" manner in which our salvation takes place. Already, salvation is beginning its work in me. But it is not yet completed, and it will not be completed until all things come to their completion.

The already is a lot of what we celebrate this week. This is the week we remember most vividly the work of Jesus Christ on the cross. Yet even the way we often talk about his death, I think, moves towards one of these extremes or the other. Protestants, as part of a reaction against the Catholic Mass, which taught that Jesus was continually being sacrificed for sins in the rite of the Eucharist, are quick to emphasize the "completion" of Christ's work on the cross, especially in light of its substitutionary status. Christ died to forgive our sins and that was done "once and for all." Thus, Zwingli can argue consistently that Lord's supper is just an act of remembrance, not in any way sacramental.

The problem is that I'm not certain either the Catholic theology of the mass or the Protestant theology of "once-for-all" substitutionary atonement really captures the essence of what is going on at the Crucifixion. What has been very interesting for me to realize is that Jesus death on the cross is intentionally connected in all four gospels not with a sin offering or the Day of Atonement offering but with the Passover offering! Passover is not really about the forgiveness of sins, its about the redemption of slaves. Passover is the celebration of God's final act of deliverance to redeem the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt- to set them free and make them his people, a nation of his own possession. Those are themes that are echoed all throughout the New Testament. God, through Christ, establishes a new people for his own possession, and the great act of redemption that brings these people out of their bondage to sin and death is Christ on the Cross. Christ's death is substitutionary, but not in the sense that we typically think of, a sense that is tailored by a desire to portray Christ as replacing the sin offerings of the Old Testament. He is substitutionary in the sense that the Passover lamb was substitutionary for the firstborn of Israel who were spared in the plague. They should have been killed with the firstborn of Egypt, but they were redeemed and bought back by the blood of a sacrificial lamb. So likewise we who are in bondage to sin and death should perish with sin and death as they are conquered and destroyed by God. Instead, we are redeemed by the blood of Christ and now we are the free people of God, a people for his own possession. Christ becomes the new Passover, and by conquering sin he makes the sin offerings obsolete.

Understanding the substitution this way makes a great deal of sense with the "already-not yet" scheme of the New Testament. Already, Christ has died on the cross, acting as a substitutionary Passover sacrifice and redeeming us as his people. Already, we are free. Already, God's kingdom is coming to earth. But it is not yet completed. The death blow has been dealt to sin, but the dragon is still writhing around wreaking havoc on this world. We have been set free, but it is difficult to stand up to one who has been master of our lives for so long. There is still a struggle going on, the final battle when the defeated enemy will be destroyed is still to come. That is the tension that we live in and the reality we wrestle with.


And that brings us back to the Eucharist and to the very concept of salvation itself. The Eucharist is not merely a remembrance of our sins forgiven. It is a celebration of our freedom. It is a celebration of the foundation of our faith, the founding of the Church as the People of God. In the same sense that the Passover was a somber but joyous celebration by the Jewish people of their nationhood and their covenant with God, so is the Eucharist for us. Even the name reflects this- Eucharist means "Thanksgiving." We are giving thanks for what Christ has done for us, for our redemption. But we are also remembering that it is not yet fully completed, and in that sense it is also a ceremony of dedication and renewal of our identity as Christ-Followers. It is an embodiment of the "already-not yet" theme of our salvation. Already, we are free. Already, Christ is Risen. Not yet has he returned. Thank you, Lord, for the Cross. Hurry, Lord, and come back to us to make your victory complete.

Reflections on the Effects of Technology

I was at a camp not long ago with my youth and I had reinforced to me what I have noticed in passing a few times before- That kids nowadays are entirely dependent on technology, particularly networking technology. They play games in a virtual world with people all over the world. Their social lives revolve in large part around social networking web-sites. Their source of information is form internet sites that are collectively composed by people from across the globe (and people with no particular qualifications for writing said articles, we might add). They simply cannot survive without these bits of technology, it might seem.

Now, before I get into a critique of the effect this is having on our society, let me say I am not totally exempt from this. I am typing this right now on a laptop that is connected to my blog (itself technological) via wireless internet. I have my own social networking accounts that I check fairly frequently (in fact, my Twitter is open in another tab at this very moment). My predominant mode of communication is e-mail or texting. I am very much a part of this technological world as well. But my point in saying all this still applies, I think.

Here are three detrimental effects that I believe being dependent on technology has on our society:
1) Disconnects us from reality.
2) Disconnects us from history and the broader world.
3) Disconnects us from our values and from the process of building true character.

First, we are disconnected from reality by technology. This is pretty obvious. Playing a video game that simulates a battle is not a battle. The real thing, with real bullets flying and real blood splattering across you, is not something you do for fun. But it seems like it would be to plenty of people I know who have played video games and maybe even tried to really simulate a battle by playing paint-ball or air-soft. Chatting on a social networking site is not the same thing as sitting down and having a face-to-face conversation. Yet we substitute them far too often. The virtual world is not the real world. Unfortunately, its becoming harder and harder to tell the difference.

Second, technology disconnects us from history and the broader world. We sometimes think it actually brings us closer to those things- we talk and interact with people across the globe online. But we are not entering their world and they are not entering ours. We are both entering a different world, one that isn't real but in which we both pretend to interact and live for a little while. In this world, who we are in "real life" is irrelevant. I am an expert when I write something online. And so is everyone else. I can't tell you how many times I have run across ideas and philosophies online in discussions that were discredited or disproven 80 years ago but that the author takes seriously because they are his/her "own" ideas. Or how many rumors or stories have run wild across the internet because in that world everything is plausible and nothing has to be verified or scrutinized. It simply is not in check with reality.

Third, technology disconnects us from who we really are and how we become that way. I can be whoever I want to be online. Those of you who know me probably recognize that I am tremendously more bold in writing online than I am in speaking in person (though I am probably close to being every bit as sarcastic in person as I am here). I am also much more polished and elegant. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that if you met me after reading these blogs, you might be very disappointed. And likewise, this is probably true of most people you might "meet" online. Because here, you don't actually meet the person in question, you meet the persona they have adopted for the sake of being in this virtual world. What's more, this persona can be created in about a second and a half. It doesn't have to go through all the process of developing its own character that I myself have to go through over the course of my life. It is simply a fabrication that appears instantaneously in its fully developed state.

In a lot of ways, this virtual world is much more desirable if our values are simply easy pleasure, having a good time, making ourselves happy. However, if we really want to be meaningful human beings who really care about this world and about other people, I feel like the effects of technology should be really, really alarming. In fact, I think that this technology, which represents the pinnacle of the progress of our society, is going to be in the long run the thing that destroys our society from the inside by undermining the lives and thoughts of people in the real world.

Soul Searching, Part 9- Moralistic Thereapuetic Deism and the Collapse of the Church in America

Perhaps the most alarming and also the most honest section of the book Soul Searching is the one that contains these passages:

In short, our teen interview transcripts reveal clearly that the language that dominates US adolescent interests and thinking about life, including religious and spiritual life, is primarily about personally feeling good and being happy. That is what defines the dominant epistemological framework and evaluative standard for most contemporary US teenagers- and probably for most of their baby boomer parents. This, we think, has major implications for religious faiths seriously attempting to pass on the established beliefs and practices of their historical traditions.- p. 168.


We have come with some confidence to believe that a significant part of Christianity in the United States is actually only tenuously Christian in any sense that is seriously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition, but has rather substantially morphed into Christianity's misbegotten step-cousin, Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. This has happened in the minds and hearts of many individual believers and, it also appears, within the structures of at least some Christian organizations and institutions. The language, and therefore experience, of Trinity, holiness, sin, grace, justification, sanctification, church, Eucharist, and heaven and hell appear, among most Christian teenagers in the United States at the very least, to be supplanted by the language of happiness, niceness, and an earned heavenly reward. It is not so much that US Christianity is being secularized. Rather, more subtly, Christianity is either degenerating into a pathetic version of itself or, more significantly, Christianity is actively being colonized and displaced by a quite different religious faith.- p. 171.

A few thoughts in response to this: My last post covered a good bit of the themes related to these issues, so no need to rehash everything here. Suffice it to say my assessment of Christianity in America is not too different from this one.

Thinking in some more blatantly philosophical terms, I think what we are seeing here is an effect of Enlightenment/Modernistic thinking that resounded so well with American individualism. This philosophical thinking attempted to exalt the abilities of man to solve all of life's problems through concrete and scientific means. This optimistic, triumphant spirit is very prevalent in American thought where it was embodied in the individualistic spirit of the American dream. However, most of the philosophical claims of this movement have been abandoned because of logical problems and because of the experience of the 21st century. This is much more obvious in Europe- it is hard to tell a continent that still remembers vividly the destruction of two world wars and the tenseness of the Cold War that mankind is getting better and our problems are being solved. However, the optimism of Modernism has also given way in United States to a variety of Post-Modern philosophies.

Here is what makes this all relevant to our discussion- Modernism is built on the concrete- science and engineering are the golden occupations of Modernism because the belief is that through these mechanisms all the answers that can be answered and all the problems that can be solved will be. The "can be" is important- purely abstract things- like morality, religion, etc.- these things cannot be solved according to modernistic thinking. So we have to either be skeptics or relativists about questions regarding religion or morality. Post-Modernism is often considered more radically relativistic. I am of the persuasion, however, that a positive post-modern philosophy that does not result in a radical relativism is possible (and maybe someday I will write out something that outlines such a philosophy… probably not, but lets be optimistic). This skepticism/relativism however leads to a variety of systems of morality (and religion) that attempt to provide some sort of moral guidance without making absolute claims. Typically, the guiding principle for these systems is "whatever makes you happy" or "whatever you feel is best." These systems are very much rooted in emotions and the immediate satisfaction of our desires. Is it any wonder, then, that our churches have begun to teach the same, even if it is couched in more religious terms? Far too often we hear that following God will make you rich or that following God is the key to happiness. Godliness the is the key to a successful marriage (it no doubt plays a part, but I know plenty of non-believers with more successful marriages than most of the believers I know). Godliness is the key to satisfaction at work (I never found this to be true when I was working in the food business…). And what is Godliness anyway? It gets defined in terms of jumping through some religious hoops- reading the word and praying everyday, attending church regularly, etc.- all things that ensure that people who work in ministry (like I do) have jobs. Now, no doubt all of those things are beneficial. And no doubt godliness is beneficial. But is that our motivation for doing these things? For a religion that claims in most of its literature that selfishness is wrong and immoral, this whole scheme sounds very selfish!

One final consideration concerning the implications for all of this for our church leadership and global missions. There are two conflicting phenomena going on in the global church. First, the dominant presence of the church in the West is shrinking while the presence of the church in non-Western parts of the world is exploding. Second, the leadership of the church is still overwhelmingly Western. In part this is natural- the West has existing leadership structures that have yet to be built in the developing parts of the world. However, it is also worrisome. Particularly among American missionaries who attempt to provide leadership to other parts of the Christian world, I get the strong impression that there is an attempt to export American modes of thinking to these regions. Given everything we have said already about the cultural inconsistencies between what should be proper Christian doctrine and the popular American conception of faith, this should set off a lot of alarm bells. Somehow as we educate and teach other cultures to follow Christ, we need to keep in mind that we have not exactly done this well ourselves and that we do not need to teach them to repeat our mistakes but instead to learn from them and avoid them.

The Cross and the Ecumenical Movement

Very interesting post by the World Council of Churches about its new leader. I'm excited to see what this guy is going to be doing!