theo|digital

Well, I’ve used this blog for years on a variety of ministry and personal topics, including this past year the experience of heading to fulltime work in theological studies for a couple years.

This year marks an entire year of classwork finished, and I’m beginning to need to focus.  The main goal for the next 5-6 months:  choose a specific thesis proposal.

The general topic for my course of study is the “intersection of theology, communications, and culture.”  This means I’ve been focusing on communication studies approaches for looking at theology, but even this is difficult to navigate.

A communications approach could focus on how we communicate theology (e.g. evangelism or “preaching”) and therefore be classified in “ministry” or “missiology.”  Missiology has possibly done some of the best integrative work in communications and culture globally, some of the insights which are finally coming back to hit our local North American context.

OR it could instead look at the process of doing theology (theological reflection) itself.  Noting the cultural context and invisible context which creates fish-in-water assumptions during the process.  I’m particularly curious about the difference the generational distinction of current writing pastors and theologians compared to those that will have grown up in an information age (which I’m sorta on the bleeding age of… 30 years old).  How will the process and assumptions change?  This possibly gets into theological prolegomena (epistomology, etc), which I’ve not had tons of training in.  On the other hand, I can speak with a little bit of cultural knowledge from an online society.

OR I could look at a particular doctrine and the communications dimension within that doctrine, which probably less examines the process.  Ex:  what are the communicative elements of incarnation or sacraments or ecclesiology?

OR… I could look at a theology of communication, a la Vanhoozer’s text as a communicative act that demands a moral responsibility.

Anyway, I hope to upgrade this space to help me process my thoughts in the area, and invite my current friends, partners, but also new friends from the blog world to interact with me as I move through this year of research.

Being at the evangelical-moderate/left North Park, it took me a little bit to realize that more conservative evangelical scholars in the past have been rather suspicious of some standard contextual theologies (e.g. feminist theology). I think NPTS has a rather balanced view that says that these is much to learn from the contextuals, without falling into a pitfalls that would make them un-critiqueable from scriptures. But past that, I found this thought from a missiologist at Wheaton interesting.

Among Christian contextualizers it is this dimension—especially the contextualization of theology—that is most typically discussed and debated. We see this dimension expressed in liberation theology, African identity theology, feminist theology, black theology, Minjung theology, Dalit theology, ethno-theologies, and so on. In evangelical circles, Calvinistic, Arminian, Wesleyan, dispensationalist and Pentecostal theologies are also examples. Though often not recognized as contextualized theologies, that is precisely what they are.

~ Scott Moreau, professor and chair of intercultural studies at Wheaton College. From “Contexualization That Is Comprehensive” in Missiology: An International Review, Vol. XXXIV, no. 3, July

The following is a new ad from the McCain campaign. It feels like movie trailer, and not-so-subtly teases Barak Obama’s fame, a message they’ve been working on for several weeks. But the interesting part of the ad is that I’m pretty sure it’s a veiled communication to Left Behind-reading Christians, who are looking for an anti-Christ, like villain like Nicolae Carpathia. It’s the kind of things that would be understood by conservative evangelicals, but wouldn’t mean as much to other viewers, and I’m guessing that’s intentional.

The part that disturbs me most about “antichrist” language used by some Christians is not just how it doesn’t seem to be supported in scripture (the only references are in 1 John 2, where John clearly defines anyone who denies Christ is God as, as the word suggests, an “anti-Christ”), but how it calls into suspician things of God like increased world justice and world peace.

On theological studies…

“Scriptural scholars of both the Old and New Testaments frequently say that while their treatment must be linear, the subject is not. The subject treats of the relations between God and man, and between God and the world, and of the relationship between man and his neighbor – all these subsist together, and act and react upon one another at the same time.
The Hebrew and Eastern mode of though tackles problem and resolution, at the outset of a discussion, in a way typical of oral societies in general. The entire message is then traced and retraced, again and again, on the rounds of a concentric spiral… one can stop anywhere after the first few sentences and have the full message, if one is prepared to “dig” it.” p43

In the context of the cold war…

Is a severe penalty the best deterrent to serious crime? With regard to the bomb and the cold war, is the threat of massive retaliation the most effective means to peace? Is it not evident in every human situation that is pushed to a point of saturation that some precipitation occurs?… It is obvious that numbness is the result of any prolonged terror. The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.” p48

~ Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man : Critical Edition

My random information bucket of things I found interesting today:

• Toyota will start selling a Prius hybrid with built in solar panels on the roof that power the air-conditioning. Only in Japan, though.
• A political story from Australia about a child posing nude for a magazine cover highlights the idea that any kind of standard societal sexual morality is out the window as soon as some of the older generations die. I’ve been predicting for a number of years that things like the legal age of consent will drop much lower, and acceptance of some child p-rnography will become mainstream. This isn’t scary as much as sad, and I believe rather inevitable. But Christians work best as as compassionate counter-cultural agents, anyway.
• Who knew that Mark Zuckerberg‘s college roommate Chris Hughes is the social architect behind Barak Obama’s social networking website: my.barackobama.org? It has almost 1 million members. The NY Times did a story.
• Related: Rolling Stone just published a bio of Zuckerberg during his Harvard-dorm days (not that long ago) that paints him as a calculating jerk who stole the Facebook idea from other students. Whether or not he’s a jerk, he’s clearly a genius programmer. Obama’s Chris Hughes wasn’t mentioned as one of the belligerents.
• Meanwhile, employees of Google are, interestingly, big contributers to Obama’s campaign. Though David Brooks points out that Obama’s fundraising, while significant with small donors, is hardly the grass-roots-only system that Obama’s campaign implies.
• Today’s younger college faculty are more likely to politically moderate than politically liberal.
• The Anglican church has now had the closest thing to a real split between conservatives and liberals. The former met in Jerusalem for GAFCON (Global Anglican Future Conference) and drew up fourteen evangelically-worded statements of orthodoxy. Suprisingly, liberal archbishop of Cantebury Rowan Williams was “positive and encouraging.”

Welp, now having searched, I now realize this was new in the theology blogging world last week, but I just last night happened to stop to watch the The Colbert Report (silent “t”) and was surprised to hear that his guest was biblical scholar and Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright.The interview itself was typical of Stephen Colbert:  the only promise to guests is that they get the picture of their book on-screen:  no expectation that they’ll be able to get a rational sentence out without Stephen jumping in with comments about Republican heroes.  But Wright did rather well, able to hit the one main point that he’s been hitting for a little while now:  that a Christian conception of heaven as the soul floating off to another place is not Biblical.  Instead, Wright emphasized that the final stage after this creation is the “new heavens and new earth.”  (transcript by Jake Bouma)It’s a point that originally heard from J.R. Woodward, and have further heard from Wright and others, and one I’m fairly certain I’ve come to agree with, in my slow progress to de-spiritualize everything (which has the ironic effect of making “everything spirtual.”).   Essentially I mean that in all aspects of my theology, I’m less seeing the “world” and the “body” and the “flesh” as the opposition to the Christian life I once caught in language from pastors all over.  I still believe sin has damaged and tainted these, but that their re-making is the wonder of the Kingdom both now and later.

NT Wright:…the Middle Ages is when it started to go wrong. If you go back to the very early church, yes, resurrection was the standard doctrine. I’m not saying anything radically new that wasn’t in the New Testament in the early church. In the Middle Ages there’s a lot of stuff [that] comes from the Greek philosophers — people like Plato — which says that actually you have a soul and the soul ends up going off.. and so you don’t need a body anymore.

NT Wright: Yeah, well, absolutely. I mean the whole point about this is that most Christians have this vague idea of going to heaven. It’s something that may happen to you –Stephen Colbert: — No, mine’s very specific. You get a harp, and I’ll have a mint julip, and I’ll ask Ronald Reagan questions.

  (Again thanks to Jake Bouma for his transcript)

I-Life in Champaign has posted the audio for my talk (mp3 -10.5MB) on 5 April in their New Heart series. Like usual with me talking, you miss a bit because we had almost 50 photos, but you can still follow the stories, and why I think Kingdom hearts are to be subversive.

In Champaign almost two weeks ago, I spoke on “In Search of a Subversive Heart” where we spoke about structural evil, power, and King Jesus who rules over them and calls us to subvert them his way. And we reached into the deep story of elderly Mrs. Ntonsheni, the wise victim of South African apartheid.

“Christians are subversive, they think about power upside down,” we said.

More on the talk later (the audio will be available at some point soon). But already I’ve gotten many questions on the related books, some I relied on or recommend for further reading. So for students and friends that were at SNG:

Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals Shane Claiborne is the guy best known for living a “neo-monastic” lifestyle in Philadelphia. But his thoughts on Jesus’ subversiveness in this book are really nicely done. A sweet looking book too – every page is customized! Although this isn’t a resource I read much directly for our talk (I’m still reading it), If I was going to pick just one book for someone “to know more” – this seems to be it.

The Powers That Be by Walter Wink. Wink is the theologian who has done much work on power and structural evil (and one of the guys Shane Claiborne read). He wrote a more detailed trilogy of books before this one, which acts as somewhat of a summary. He’s classified in “liberal” school of theology, which means I’m going to read him cautiously because our assumptions about Jesus and the scriptures may not be the same. But I think he’s got some stuff that’s really worth the thought. I have some previous posts on him.

The Boy Child Is Dying: A South African Experience. by Judy Boppell Peace. I read from this book when telling the story of Mrs. Ntonsheni. It appears to be out of print – I was lucky to find it – but there a few available used online. A very short book, but very powerful pictures of daily apartheid.

Some of the images we saw together were used with permission from the United Nations photo archive.

Whoops, I forget to get back the post I started on Walter Wink. He was wondering about “angels of the churches” in Revelation.

His answer? Instead of being angel figures like white-clothed figure with wings, he proposed that they are the corporate personality of the church – its ethos or spirit.

Looking back over my own experience of churches, I realized that each did indeed have a unique personality. Furthermore, that personality was real. It wasn’t what we call a “personification” like Uncle Sam or the Quaker on the box of oats.

He goes on to notice this idea of angels that seem to be of nations in the book of Daniel.

In fact, he starts realizing that lots of structures – especially ones that have power – have a sort of spirit. Corporations, governments, universities, institutions. And these are big players in the world – the kind of structures or systems that exert power on us. That can do moral things - good or evil.

A corporation can provide needed medical drugs or it can withhold them. A government can assist the weak or oppress them. But who does the husband-abandoned welfare mother who can’t get child-care aid blame? The CEO? The Mayor? We often do, but these people aren’t usually trying to create evil. They are are many layers removed. And they are working withing a great system of powers – economic and political. She becomes the victim of evil but it’s hard to see who made that willful choice.

She’s a victim of a real spiritual enemy – but one expressed in structural evil. And maybe this is all connected…

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Now playing: Béla Fleck & The Flecktones – Scratch & Sniff

One idea that comes up in missional church planting is the idea of “bounded set” vs. “centered set” church philosophy. The idea is often credited to social systems theory (not talking about math here), although if you google for it, you’ll get more hits on church blogs than anything else. It’s buzzy right now, I guess.

First, what’s the difference? Bounded set communities seem to describe most churches. Membership in a group is defined by an assent to a shared set of beliefs and behaviors. The mission of members is to ask people to belong by conforming. By contrast centered set thinking defines a group by its center. In this case, placing Jesus at the center, and allowing for the fact that all humans are at various distances from that center. The role of the group becomes to draw people closer to the center, not to define who is in or out.

The problem is, I still can’t decide whether it is Biblical or not.

Alan Hirsch’s wife Deb, was presenting this model at the Ecclesia gathering in DC, and asked “which of these in more Biblical?” loudly with the implied answer of “centered-set.” It was too simplistic for me.

The centered set is very attractive to me, and fits with my consistent idea that discipleship and evangelism are really very much the same thing – taking people closer to Jesus no matter where they are. And the Graham Tomlin (The Provocative Church) idea that a leader is to “keep the center hot not guard the edges” has rung true for me for years.

Yet don’t the sacraments – baptism and the Lord’s Supper – have a mandated? role of helping define who is in and out? Committed or not? Don’t they provide a boundary marker for who is in the family? (clearly Hirsch wouldn’t think so – but he’s anti-sacramental on the grounds they de-sacralize all of life. I disagree here).

And as much as Hirsch likes to cite early church example, wasn’t the catechical process for training and admitting new believers a long period of time? Three months? As long as a year sometimes? Weren’t they not allowed to enter the church proper until the process was complete? Talk about “in and out.”

So I’m torn.