theo|digital

I belong to that category of people who pay for Amazon Prime, mostly for that little jump of joy we get every time we see the UPS guy—brown shorts and all—on a dash to the front door. New books are grand. And this box took me by happy surprise: Creating A Missional Culture: Equpping the Church for the Sake of the World by my friend and influencer JR Woodward (Intervarsity Press). I was pumped about this one enough to pre-order… And it arrived ahead of Amazon’s estimate. Bonus.

I’m sure I’ll need several posts on this one as we go, but I’ll start with the keyword Culture. Easy to skip if it’s just tossed on there, but you don’t make it off the first page of the first chapter without realizing that JR is going to make “culture” a centerpiece of his construction.

How would you characterize the typical person in the congregation you serve? A mature follower of Christ? A consumer of religious goods and services? Or something in-between? …

As a church planter, I have been haunted by these questions. I’ve started churches that continue to thrive, multiplying disciples and churches around the country. I’ve also started churches that have been slow to get off the ground. I’ve celebrated with church planters whose churches have thrived and are a great blessing to their neighborhood. I have also walked with church planters through the agony of having to close church doors. Through much reflection, reading and many sleepless nights, I’ve discovered that effective church planting requires thinking about the culture of the congregation.

Alan Hirsch and others have blurbed this one, so I’m a little lower on the Klout score chart. But having been acquainted with JR’s life and ministry for almost 15 years, I suspect (and hope) this book sticks. I think pastors will not find it to be the marketed book of the week (skim so you can tell people you saw it),  but really a compendium of true experience to absorb and re-read.

I’ll post a little more review or notes as I get time to jump back in.

On my quest to settle into a theological stream of thought that recognizes my roots in evangelicalism, but has become too uneasy with many of its claims, Vanhoozer articulates helpful thoughts. This was from my summer reading for a chapter in my thesis that surveyed some current proposals in the doctrine of scripture:

To mention the gospel and theology in the same breath is, of course, to raise the question of “evangelicalism.” So-called Evangelicals are not, of course, the only Christians interested in the gospel. Yet their self-designation signals their ambition: to be people of the gospel. …

What began as a reform movement in confessional orthodoxy has become a “movement” in its own right, complete with institutions that often simply ape their surrounding secular culture. … Practices that owe more to managerial, therapeutic, consumerist, and entertainment cultures increasingly characterize Evangelical churches, so much so that they are in danger of becoming the de facto, if not the de jure, authority for the Evangelical way of life. Jesus himself remains popular, to be sure, his cruciform way, less so.
…
Canonical-linguistic theology represents a way beyond the debilitating stand-off between propositionalist and nonpropositionalist modes of conceiving revelation, Scripture, and theology. Evangelicals have been quick to decry the influence of modernism on liberal theology but not to see the beam of modern epistemology in their own eye. The present work articulates what an evangelical theology with a postpropositionalist Scripture principle and an ear cocked to the postmodern condition should look like.

From The Drama Of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach To Christian Theology

A text, then, is a communicative act with matter (propositional content) and energy (illocutionary force). … It is important to acknowledge that authors may intend to communicate complex, multilayered intentions.

There is an instructive dialogue in the opening pages of The Hobbit. The scene is Gandalf’s first visit to Bilbo Baggins:

“Good morning!” said Bilbo, and he meant it…

“What do you mean?” he [Gandalf] said. “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”

“All of them at once, ” said Bilbo. And a very fine morning for a pipe of tabacco out of doors, into the bargain.”

A bit later Biblo uses the same locutionary act [Chris:  words] with a very different illocutionary intent [Chris:  purpose]:

“Good morning! We don’t want any adventures here, thank you!”

“What a lot of things you do use Good morning for!” said Gandalf. “Now you means that you want to get rid of me, and that it won’t be good till I move off.”

I love it.  From Vanhoozer’s First Theology: God, Scripture and Hermeneutics, 178

People who have never developed a deep personal knowing of God will be limited in the depth of their personal knowing of themselves. Failing to know God, they will be unable to know themselves, as God is the only context in which their being makes sense. Similarly, people who are afraid to look deeply at themselves will of course be equally afraid to look deeply at God.

For such persons, ideas about God provide a substitute for direct experience of God

Knowing God and knowing self are therefore interdependent. Neither can proceed very far without the other. Paradoxically, we come to know God best not by looking at God exclusively, but by
looking at God
and then looking at ourselves
then looking at God
and then again looking at ourselves.

This is also the way we best come to know our selves. Both God and self are mostly fully known in relationship to each other.

– David G. Brenner in The Gift of Being Yourself

“Printed books are slow. It takes a lot of time to read a book or to find information in libraries of books. Printed books are narrow. The “bandwidth” of the printed page contains no sound, no motion, and no easy way to connect to other books. Printed books are solo performances. They project the statements of an individual or small collaborative group and create a mental feedback loop confined in most cases to the reader’s mind alone.

Our traditional schools, built for the industrial age, are bound to printed books. They reward most those who can decode and learn in this confinement. Schools will change only when the curriculum no longer shows up on the loading dock but shows up over wired and through the air, when it can be updated every day and can be customized by the user.”

Gary Rowe, creator of CNN Newsroom, in an essay entitled “Publishing Words and Images:  Schools and Learning in the Millennial Shift,” From One Medium to Another: Basic Issues for Communicating the Scriptures in New Media.

“At the end of his Gospel, John describes how Peter looks at the beloved disciple and seeks from Jesus some promise or prediction of what the future may hold. Jesus’s answer is brusque. “What is that to you? Follow me!” (John 21.22). So begins the journey of Christian ethics. Jesus’s statement recognized that there are mysteries, wonders, problems, and troubles that the disciples—even Peter—will not be able to resolve,at least not with a simple, verbal explanation. The statement asserts that there is, nonetheless, a valid way forward, despite the lack of a comprehensive solution.”

I’m reading The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells.

This rings true not only theologically, but experientially. A valid way forward without knowing which way that is…

Political moral insight is a law unto itself, independent. Such values are nature, reason, law. They are considered autonomous in that they are thought to be known otherwise than through revelation or worship. … Ordinarily the definitions of such concepts do not seem to be dependent on faith or on Jesus, although maybe we hold them to be vaguely supported by nature or “nature’s God.” In any case, we do not expect “worship” to tell us more about them. … The duties they lay upon us are different from what Jesus calls us to do. For example, a banker is called to save money or to lend it with interest, not to give it away or to lend it without interest. A soldier in battle is not supposed to love the enemy.

John Howard Yoder was a Christian Anabaptist theologian and ethicist. I’m reading Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community Before the Watching World for my course this term:  Christian Ethics.

(Photo is one of mine:  the National Archives in Wash DC in Feb 2008).

“Body” is an ancient image for the human community. When I use it as a modifier, it pins down the awareness that each member needs and serves each of the others, that the whole is more than all of the parts, and that the interdependence of all is structured according to an already given plan, flexible and able to grow, but neither chaotic nor infinitely negotiable.”

John Howard Yoder was a Christian Anabaptist theologian and ethicist. I’m reading Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community Before the Watching World for my course starting this term:  Christian Ethics.

“The fact that early believers followed a “crucified Messiah” (the ultimate oxymoron for both Jew and Greek) meant they aligned themselves with a religious sect whose founder had experienced ultimate shame (hence Paul’s saying to the basically Gentile congregations at the heart of the empire that the gospel is not a matter of shame for him [Rom 1.16]).

To follow Christ and thus experience cultural shame and isolation were not negotiables for Paul; this is the way God had chosen…”

Page 181, Gordon Fee writing on Gal 3 in Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity Without Hierarchy

As communion with the Sunday paper has replaced church-going [she writes in 1979], there is a tendency to forget that sermons had a one time been coupled with news about local and foreign affairs, real estate transactions, and other mundane matters. After printing, however, news gathering and circulation were handled more efficiently under lay auspices.

Such considerations might be noted when thinking about the ‘secularization’ of ‘desacralization’ of Western Christendom. For in all regions (to go beyond the 18th century for a moment), the pulpit was ultimately displace by the periodical press and dictum ‘nothing sacred’ came to characterize the journalist’s career.

She goes on to note that print culture broke the link between community and communication (we don’t often gather to hear the public speech at church or areopogus).  But “communal solidarity was diminished; vicarious participation in more distant events was also enhanced… links to larger collective units were being forged.”

Elizabeth Eisenstein still hold the definitive work the subject matter defined by her book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Volumes 1 and 2 in One).