theo|digital

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

If you know me, you know Over the Rhine is one of my favorite bands.  Not the least because they write like being human depends on rich description and late night adjectives (maybe it does).   Checking e-mail here in the early afternoon felt a little bit less to-do list ish because Linford sent an e-mail that warmed up gmail enough to make me want to share parts of what he wrote:
(the photo of Linford is when they played here in Chicago on 5 Nov 08)

His PS was great:

Shane Hipps is a Mennonite pastor who I noticed wrote a book a couple years ago entitled The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture. I borrowed it and skimmed but never really read it, and now I’m realizing I’m gonna have to catch up, since Shane is starting to get some voice on these issues in the evangelical Christian leadership world.  I’d love to meet him and chat it up some time, since this is one my primary areas of interest.

Because so much of media ecology is simply unawareness, I had hoped another a fellow watcher of communications as culture would cultivate an imaginative view on ideas like “virtual community.” But here Shane makes it clear that he views online interaction as entertainment (“enjoy it, but don’t call it community, because it isn’t”).  This was somewhat disappointing to me (and not unusual, see my first post on this )

Scot McKnight posted a response at both Our of Ur and at Jesus Creed that asked Shane to consider the Jesus Creed community, a blog that does have a remarkable level a participation (both in volume and quality) compared to (most?) other blogs that often function as more soapbox than dialogue.

Over 40 commentors have contributed some amazing thoughts to this thread: Dan (4) points out that he doesn’t know Scot McKnight, and comes because the community is useful.  Makes sense to me.  I think utility is clearly a reason we both approach and stay in offline communities as well.  Eric (9) calls Jesus Creed a better community than any church he’s been part of in 20 years.  He cites questions and disagreement as key draws.  And these are clearly crucial in offline community as well!  Show me a community without conflict and I’ll show you “shallow.”  Chris E. notes that Scot’s experience is remarkably different than others because of his central role.  As a campus pastor at the center of a vibrant church for a number of years, I eventually realized myself that my experience was also remarkably different to those who knew only a few people in our church, or hung “near the edges.”  There really are positions and vantage points in communities that vary the experience.  Matt S. (14) sets up a thought experiment that makes me hopeful for deeper thinking on this, and Pat B (38) is wise to the net when (s?)he notes that blogs don’t have a natural format for extended conversation.

All this to say:  with not too much thought, we find a great deal of similarity between “virtual” community and “physical” community.

Next post (hopefully coming soon):  more on why I think Marshall McLuhan would argue with Shane Hipps four point analysis on virtual community.

Scot McKnight super graciously invited me to share some thoughts on my trip to Washington DC for the Presidential Inauguration.  He’s posted my article today on his Beliefnet blog, Jesus Creed .

“The most integral and involving time sense imaginable is that expressed in the Chinese and Japanese cultures. Until the coming of the missionaries in the seventeenth century, and the introduction of mechanical clocks, the Chinese and Japanese had for thousands of years measured time by graduations of incense. Not only the hours and the days, but the seasons and zodiacal signs were simultaneously indicated by a succession of carefully ordered scents.”

“In the Renaissance the clock combined with the uniform respectability of the new typography to extend the power of social organization almost to a national scale. By the 19th century it had provided a technology of cohesion that was inseparable from industry and transport, enabling an entire metropolis to act almost as an automation. Now in the electric age of decentralized power and information we begin to chafe under the uniformity of clock-time. In this age of space-time we seek multiplicity, rather than repeatability, of rhythms. This is the difference between marching soldiers and ballet.”

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

Because our society has elevated tolerance to the highest of virtues, our society remains confused about what “love” means.  Christians are not called to tolerance; Christians are called to love.  Tolerance condescends; love honors.

But for many, love-as-toleration implies not exercising moral judgment about another’s choices and actions.  We all hear about Christian love a plenty—and what we hear is that Jesus says, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged.”  Thus, they infer, Jesus teaches love that means we are not to make moral judgments about others.  Eau contraire:  Jesus’ love is always moral, because love is always sacred.  Love is the human response to others in light of the Abba’s sacred love and our scared love for Abba.

~ Scot McKnight (www.jesuscreed.org);  The Jesus Creed: Loving God, Loving Others, page 57.

I can’t agree more strongly with this, yet I’ve found that it’s counter-cultural nature makes it difficult. The post-modern emotional reaction to moral discernment is defensiveness at best, and more likely complete marginalization.

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

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’m sitting in my car in the parking lot, and the weather is changing outside; the sky’s going from dry, crazy thrashing in all directions to something slow and wet, and my eyes are wet, where did that come from?

My Hyundai got keyed this afternoon, and I know who did it. I didn’t get their licence plate number because I was too busy cutting them off in traffic. I guess they followed me to the lot here at work, which is all to say that I deserved it, but at the same time I’d like to kill the bastard. My Hyundai is-was-the only unflawed thing in my life.

I’m actually more sad than I am pissed.

No, I could kill.

~ Douglas Coupland (as Roger) in The Gum Thief. He’s been one of my favorites for a long time, due to my college buddy Tim. Coupland pretty much tutored me in how to describe something without sounding like I’m, you know, describing something.

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Now playing: Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers – Breakdown
via FoxyTunes

Hey I-Life/Champaign friends – see below.

My first real breakthrough in understanding these invisible powers came when I stumbled over the angels of the churches in the New Testament Book of Revelation. Why, I wondered, are each of the seven letters in chapters two and three addressed, not to the congregation, as in apostles Paul’s letters, but to the congregation’s angel?

~ Biblical scholar Walter Wink in his 1999 book The Powers That Be.

I frowned when I read this. Really?? I mean, it only took me a second to look it up and confirm. But it was something I’d always ignored – just sort of took each message to be to the people in the church. Okay, but does this mean there is an angelic middle-manangel of sorts? It is footnoted in some translations as possibly messenger. …

Wink doesn’t think so.

I first heard of Wink several years ago via my friend J.R. Woodward — and he’s challenging me (although I don’t know if I’ll agree with everything he writes – he’s fairly progressive theologically). Anyway, I recently picked him back up in part to prepare a talk on 5 April, when I’m speaking at Saturday Night Grace at the invitation of Ty Grigg and company. Hey I-Life/Champaign friends: be sure to come out and say hi. I’d love to see you. (can you believe it: it’s been almost a year since I’ve spoken at SNG…geesh.)

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Now playing: Interference – Gold
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