Pastor Scott's Thoughts

Addiction and Virtue - by Kent Dunnington

One of the great joys of teaching is when a former student outgrows you. Kent Dunnington was a clearly gifted undergrad student at SNU when I was a professor there. I had the privilege not only of teaching him in a couple of courses, but of developing a dear friendship. At the time he - like many college students - was struggling with how to be a thoughtful Christian in a church world that is often anti-intellectual. A couple of my colleagues and I were able to convince him to love Jesus even when he didn't like church people and to find ways of doing theology that got beyond the pitfalls of modernity. His first book is not only a testimony that he did both of those things well, but it is a gift to the Church he has learned to love and serve.

Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice, is the culmination of his work in theology and ethics at Duke Divinity School and his PhD in philosophy from Texas A&M. It has rightly received several excellent reviews including a very positive endorsement in Christianity Today.

Kent argues that the modern conversation about addiction has largely been shaped by the categories of disease and choice and neither in the end has been very helpful. People as they struggle with addiction rarely feel like they have true freedom of choice. All one has to do is sit through the testimonials at an AA group to know that those who suffer through addiction rarely feel like they were acting "freely" while their lives were dominated by their addiction. To call addiction "choice" just isn't very helpful nor very accurate.

But on the other hand, to place addiciton within the category of disease doesn't fit well either. As Kent points out in his book, when one thinks of disease one usually thinks of medical treatment through various chemical answers. However, in the case of addiciton, "medical treatment" does not have very high success rates. Plus, labeling addiction as a disease removes all of the moral implications tied to people's actions and it does not have an answer for why so many people are able to overcome addiction through non-chemical methods.

What Kent offers as an alternative is the philosophical category of "habit" as articulated by Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas habits (or the habitus) are patterns of life that are so deeply woven into us that they operate in ways that become second nature and thus largely beyond the direct control of free will. However, habits are of such a nature that with the right environment, right circumstances, and most importantly the right set of practices, a different set of habits can be formed within us. So, at the risk of greatly over simplifying 97 pages of extremely careful and articulate philosophical reasoning from Kent, thinking in terms of "habit" explains why we often are not free. (Because we are a slave to our habits). But it also explains how one might have the freedom to be free from addiction. (Through the re-habiting of life).

I do think Kent is right about this. But my favorite part of the book is the second half where Kent argues that addiction is a particularly modern phenomena and that an abundance of addictions happen in a culture that has lost its sense of telos (or purpose). In pre-modern cultures there was, more often than not, a shared conception of a telos, purpose, or vision of the good life to which human life is pointed. If people know what their telos is, then they also are able to name the virtues that help them to achieve that telos and the vices they need to avoid that keep them from getting there. (Think Pilgrim's Progress).

But what if a culture lacks a clear vision of purpose or telos? What if postmoderns, inheriting the destruction of the older visions for life that took place during and after the Enlightenment, now live with the angst that life is going nowhere? What is left for people to do? Doesn't this lack of a shared telos for life create a human crisis of meaning? Kent rightly argues that it does. And then in one of my favorite sections, he writes,

The dominant response of our culture is simply to ignore the crisis by means of distraction. In particular, late modern capitalism provides consumers the opportunity to pursue "value" in the absence of any shared commitment to the good... Thus consumerism is an expression of the wish to be distracted from the frightening prospect that we do not really know what is worthwhile. The pursuit of constant titillation, which is the pulse of consumerism, is the enthronement of the immediate over the teleological... But addiction is addicting rather than merely distracting exactly because it provides the kind of propelling and purposive force that consumerism cannot provide. Consumers buy and sell to distract themselves from a lack of purpose. But addicts find purpose at precisely the moment in which they recognize that, rather than consuming their products of choice, they are instead consumed by those products. Addiction provides what consumers do not believe exists: necessity. Major addiction can therefore be interpreted both as a response to the absence of teleology in modern culture and as a kind of embodied critique of the late capitalist consumerism which this absence produced... For modern persons are not only plagued by the absence of a teleology but also by the belief that a resolution to the crisis is not forthcoming since the only imaginable sources of such a resolution - Aquinas's Faith, Kant's Reason, Hegel's History - are the very things that modernity has called into irremediable doubt. Modern persons, therefore, are not so much despearte as cynical or bored. (p. 112-113).

That last sentence is amazing.

The second half of my copy of the book is all marked up, with "Amen"(s) and "That is so right"(s) written in the margins. Kent's critique of the loss of a teleology not only helps make sense of the rise in addiction, but I think it helps us understand many uniquely modern maladies. We shouldn't be surprised that students cheat so frequently in a culture that has lost the telos of education. We shouldn't be surprised at the sexual ethics of a culture that isn't sure what the purpose of having sexual bodies is supposed to be. And we shouldn't be suprised at the economic ethics of a culture whose only end is acquisition and consumption.

Kent's book isn't a "how to" book on addiction. But if you are looking for a very thoughtful way of not only thinking about a culture of addiction and imagining ways forward (especially as the Body of Christ) this is a powerful and beautiful book.

Thanks, Kent for making your old ethics professor proud.

The King Jesus Gospel by Scot McKnight

There is has been a growing angst among evangelical Christians for the last several decades over the question of salvation. The angst takes several different forms. It shows up in questions about whether modern American evangelical Christianity looks more like Paul than like Jesus. It shows up in tense debates over substitutionary atonement in relationship to other understandings of Christ's work on the cross. It shows up in the questions about the goal of salvation. (Is the ultimate goal of salvation to get people to heaven or to redeem the creation)? In the Church of the Nazarene (and other Holiness traditions) the tension shows up in the on-going conversations about the relationship between justification and sanctification.

There are other manifestations of the angst that could be pointed to, but the root issue or question is the same: What is the good news of the Gospel? Or to say it another way: What do Christians mean when they invite people to be "saved"?

There are many books that have tried to address this question. Dallas Willard addresses the question in both The Divine Conspiracy and in The Great Omission. NT Wright has taken on the question in books like Justification, Simply Christian, Surprised by Hope, and his most recent book Simply Jesus. As I look at my book shelf and the three piles of books on my floor waiting to be read, I count somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty or forty books that are trying to address the question of the Gospel under the assumption that at least part of what American Christianity has been advocating as the good news is at least partly incomplete (if not outright distorted).

A very gifted writer and thinker - Scot McKnight - also takes on this question in his latest book The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited. Scot may be the king of the theological bloggers and I frequently find his insights helpful. So I'm not surprised that I found his most recent book The King Jesus Gospel very thoughtful and helpful. The book is not very long and is written at a level that most lay people will find accessible. I think it will be a nice book for small groups to wrestle with.

Scot's main concern is that the contemporary church has become what he calls a "salvation culture" rather than a "gospel culture." A salvation culture is fixated on the question "who's in and who's out"? A salvation culture, argues McKight, separates salvation from the gospel.

The key to overcoming this divide, for Scot, is rooting the "plan of salvation" into the larger story of God's redemption in the world. He argues that there are four big categories or themes given in the Scripture. The primary story is the story of God's redemptive work in the people of Israel. The story of Israel not only tells us what is wrong with the world, but it gives us the vision for a renewed creation and the trajectory of God's plan of redemption.

The second big category is the story of Jesus. The story of Jesus is embedded within the story of Israel. This is the primary reason why the early church refused to get rid of the Old Testament. But it is clear when one reads each of the four Gospels that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are clearly retelling the story of Jesus within the categories and themes of the story of Israel. Jesus is the completion of the story of what God was doing in Israel and apart from that story the story of Jesus makes little or no sense.

The third big category is the plan of salvation. This is the key idea for Scot. The plan of salvation cannot be removed from its location within the story of Israel and Jesus. When one is "saved" one does not just simply cognitively affirm a few ideas about God and his Son Jesus, one enters into the story of God's redemption and salvation as it is revealed in the stories of Israel and Jesus.

The last big category for Scot is then the method of persuasion or evangelism that flows from those first three categories. If salvation is not simply convincing someone of a few ideas (or a few spiritual laws) but inviting someone to enter into God's redemptive story, then our methods of evangelism must flow from those stories. In particular, I believe this is why a re-affirmation of baptism as a means of receiving salvation is so critical. In baptism the new believer leaves behind their former story, former life of sin, and their former story and enters by faith into God's story, God's new life, and God's redemptive story. 

Scot goes on to demonstrate biblically how the preaching of both Peter and Paul reflect a "gospel culture" and not just a "salvation culture." I particularly appreciated the last sections of the book that address how a church can begin to form and reflect a gospel culture.

If you are looking for a good introduction to many of the important conversations going on regarding salvation today, or are looking for a good small group book for discussion. As always, Scot McKnight gives the church a really nice resource for helping us live into the mission God has given us.

Review of Wright and Borg: The Meaning of Jesus

A few weeks ago I attended the annual combined meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion which was held this year in San Francisco. It was a four or five day conference attended by 10,000+ bilblical and religious scholars. Papers were presented. Thousands of books were on display. Receptions and gatherings took place. It is quite a bit of nerdy fun, but these kinds of conferences can also be quite overwhelming - especially for someone raised in conservative Evangelicalism.

My first trip to the conference - several years ago now - was quite troubling because it was certainly not what I was used to. The purpose of both the SBL and the AAR is to advance the academic scholarship of the Bible and religion (as a discipline) not necessarily to advance the Christian faith. That was what seemed so foreign to me. It felt so odd to spend several days talking about God as an object of our intellectual speculation and not as the subject of our worship. (I remember calling my dad and telling him that the conference was great, but if the Lord returned, I think the conference would carry on). I don't ever want to grow fully accustomed to dealing with faith as an academic pursuit, nevertheless I have grown in my appreciation for what even the most suspicious scholarly work contributes to the conversation of vital Christian faith.

In particular, I've grown a bit in my appreciation of what the so-called "Historical Jesus Movement" has contributed to biblical scholarship and even to evangelical thinking about the Gospels. As Christians read the Bible with any degree of thoughtfulness we recognize that what we find there is the product of both divine and human interaction and synergy. Even the most conservative Christian who is convinced that the Scriptures contain the authoritative "Word of God" recognize that the divine Word is received and then transmitted through human agents.

In the conservative Evangelical church our emphasis tends to be on the divine voice revealed through the Old and New Testaments - and rightly so. We are, as the Body of Christ, most interested in discovering what our Creator and Father has to say to us through the preaching and teaching of the church. Religous and Biblical scholarship on the other hand, tends to focus more on the role particular humans and particular human communities played in the writing and formation of the Scriptures. The interest of current scholarship tends to be on the historical contexts, the political motivations, and the social constructions that were at work in the development of Hebrew and Christian sacred texts.

By the way, both are important. I would argue that when conservative Christians fault it is when we pay no attention to human aspects of history, politics, sociology, religious development, etc. at work in the writing (and interpretation) of the Scriptures. But when scholarship faults (at least from my perspective as a Christian) it is when it only pays attention to the human element and leaves out (or nearly leaves out) the presence, revelation, and work of the divine in the Bible.

The Historical Jesus Movement is and was primarily a scholarly pursuit. The basic premise of the movement is that because the four Gospels contained in the New Testament are products of the early community of Christian faith written to inspire others to have faith in Jesus as the Christ, they are faith histories and not what we would consider today to be "acutal" histories of the person Jesus of Nazareth. (Which by the way is a premise we conservatives would not disagree with). So the pursuit of the Historical Jesus Movement is to try and recover - as much as possible - the actual historical Jesus (what he said, what he did, and what he meant) from the Jesus described by the community of faith. That likely means - for those scholars - that much of what we receive in the Gospels are faith additions, embellishments, and products of the later church placed within the mouth (and actions) of Jesus. (Which is the point where they lose most conservatives).

One of the leading advocates and respresentatives of the Historical Jesus Movement is Marcus Borg - Professor of Religion at Oregon State University. I just finished read the book The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions which is a dialogue between Borg and well-known and much more conservative scholar NT Wright. The book takes eight questions about Jesus - How do we know aobut Jesus? What did Jesus do and teach? Why was Jesus killed? What is the resurrection? Was Jesus God? What do we believe about the birth of Jesus? Is Jesus coming again? And what is the impact of Jesus on the Christian life? - and allows Borg and Wright to each write a response (and some dialogue) on each of those important questions. Borg writes from his "Historical Jesus" standpoint and Wright from his more conservative Orthodox vantage point.

The book is actually quite a fascinating read. Subject by subject they alternate who writes first and it is interesting how civil, thoughtful, and convincing both writers are with one another. I found the book stimulating. It was like getting to go to lunch with both of them and asking them the questions you have always wondered about.

Here are three quick thoughts about the book:

1. Although I really enjoyed the book I don't recommend it for everyone. Not because the book raises some hard issues, but because some people aren't wired in ways that will allow them to fully appreciate it. There are a lot of brothers and sisters in Christ who prefer - or are at a place in their walk with Christ - when they desire or even need indoctrination. They want to know what they should believe and are not ready to wrestle with the challenging perspectives of others. I think at some level it is healthy to have to wrestle with hard questions, but not everyone is ready for that or even wants that. So consider yourself warned.
2. Although I largely don't share Borg's perspective, I am very thankful for the work of the Historical Jesus Movement. I think the basic flaw of the movement is that it is always forced to set up rules ahead of time to try and recover the historical Jesus from the Gospels. When we have to set up rules to help us discover what is historical from what is not, the rules always determine what we are looking for ahead of time. For example, if we begin to look for the "historical" Jesus by determining that miracles were added to the Gospels by the faith community after the life of Jesus and anything that is unique to one particular Gospel and not found in the other three is a later addition, then we don't really know in the end if we discovered the historical Jesus or the non-miraculous, highly repetitive Jesus we were looking for at the beginning. If historians assume Jesus was a politically profound peasant, then that's usually who they discover. As Wright points out in the book, all we have today is the Jesus of faith because that is the only Jesus the Gospels tell us about. Nevertheless, the work historical scholars have done in helping us root Jesus back into the historical, political, and sociological context is invaluable. Too much teaching and preaching decontexutalizes Jesus which easily turns into a form of idolatry on our side of history as we assume the words and actions of Jesus are decontextual and therefore easily translated and recontextualized into the twenty-first century. The truth is, the more we discover Jesus in his historical and social setting the more we are able to discover his radical kingdom message for our day.
3. Even though I sided with Wright's perspective in the debates, I left the book deeply moved by Borg's own personal sense of Christian faith. And there are even parts of Borg's articulation of faith that I found not only informative but significant for my own faith. What I appreciated most about this book is the ability of Borg and Wright to dialogue with Christian civility about their differences. There should be more of what Richard Mouw calls "Convicted Civility" or "Uncommon Decency" that marks our conversations with one another as followers of Jesus (both the one of history and the one of faith). For that alone I am thankful to have read The Meaning of Jesus.

Desiring the Kingdom

It has been fun to teach a couple of sections of Practical Theology this semester. Often in the church we practice faith without a whole lot of theological reflection or we do theological reflection without figuring out what impact that theology has on day-to-day Christian living. So it has been fun to mess with students a little bit and get them to reflect on how good theology gets put into practice.

The class just finished reading together a great book - Desiring the Kingdom: Worshp, Worldview, and Cultural Formation - by James K. A. (Jamie) Smith.

In the book Jamie is concerned about Christian education - really Christian formation - and how that formation takes place in both the academy and the church. He argues that much of education (in both the school and parish) has moved away from the idea of formation to the distribution of information. It is not surprising in that shift that there is often a focus on the development of a "Christian worldview" in students and disciples.

The problem, argues Jamie, is that the rhetoric of a Christian worldview is connected to information and thus becomes centered in thinking differently about the world. Smith believes this tendency to focus on the rational aspects of the gospel radically misunderstands the nature of how we are formed as humans. Although thinking and rationality is an important quality of humanness, Jamie proposes that we are not so much homo sapien (man/woman the thinker) but homo liturgicus (man/woman the worshiper or the desirer). In other words, human action is not oriented toward our thoughts as much as it is oriented toward what we love. Our lives are always pointed or oriented toward our ultimate loves and those loves or desires are formed in us through habits and practices that shape those desires.

"Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it's a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly - who loves God and neighbor and is oriented to the world by the primacy of that love. We are made to be such people by our immersion in the material practices of Christian worship - through affective impact, over time, of sights and smell in water and wine" (p. 32-33).

To say that ultimately we are what we love is an incredibly profound idea. But central to the thesis is the idea that our loves or desires are formed through practices and habits - both intentionally and unintentionally. Jamie spends a good deal of time pointing out how most social and cultural practices are not value-neutral but carry within them pictures, ideas, and visions of the good life.

The students' favorite section of the book was when Jamie analyzes what he calls the liturgies of the mall, of nationalism, and of higher education. I think his description of an alien athropologist's analysis of the mall as a place of worship is incredibly profound and worth the price of the book alone. Smith does an amazing job of helping the reader think critically (and apocalyptically) about how our desires are shaped by practices that are very different from the kingdom of God.

I couldn't help as I read the book to think about Kierkegaard's story of the town of ducks that waddle everywhere they go. Each day they waddle to and from the store, the school, places of work, and home. But every Sunday they waddle to the duck church, sit in the duck pews, and hear a sermon from the duck pastor. Each Sabbath the duck preacher proclaims from the duck bible about God's gift of wings. The preacher passionately orates how ducks have been given wings so that they can fly above the earth and see things from a different and untethered perspective. As the sermon about wings flows on the congregation of ducks get blessed and quack their "amens" loudly. But when the sermon is over they simply stand up and waddle home.

The point being that if the church (and the Chrsitian college) tries to do formation through information then congregations and students may give their mental ascent - and might even quack an "amen" - to the ideas about the kingdom of God, but having been formed in their bodies by habits and visions of the good life informed by the market or the nation, they (we) will simply go back to the actions framed by desires formed in the practices of the culture. (We will quack "amen" to the kingdom, but waddle home to the empire).

What is required therefore is a church and academy that recognizes how to create counter-practices that shape in worshipers and students the desire for the kingdom of God.

So my favorite section of the book is Jamie's description of the various practices of worship and how they can become counter-formative in the lives of believers. I especially like his description of what a Christian university should look like. (Although I find it troubling how little local churches and Christian universities actually look like his description).

One of Jamie's gifts is his ability to interact with film, literature, and popular culture. Not only are the frequent illustrations in the book helpful for the reader but they also help form us into people able to exegete the culture and the way that it shapes us toward and away from the desires of the kingdom.

I think this is a book every pastor and Christian college professor or administrator should read. And not just because I am referenced in a footnote on page 91. Although that doesn't hurt.

 

25 Books Every Christian Should Read: St. Athanasius - On the Incarnation

An editorial board from Renovare - led in particular by Richard Foster and Dallas Willard - came up with a list of "25 Books Every Christian Should Read." So I downloaded the list and decided since I would like to be considered part of the "every Christian" group, I should read the 25 books. You can find the list here:

http://bit.ly/jDgXHZ

Thankfully, I have read several of the books on the list. (One would hope a seminary education would be good for something). But I decided to revisit some that I have read in the past with hopefully fresh eyes and a maturing perspective.

So I started with the first one on the list - On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius. I have the edition done by St. Vladimir's Seminary Press which is a wonderful little volume that includes a preface by CS Lewis and a brief history of the life of Athanasius (both well worth reading).

On the Incarnation has both historic as well as theological significance. Athanasius was born around 298 in Egypt. He was raised primarily in Alexandria in a wealthy and educated family. The last - and in some ways the worst - persecution of Christians was by the emperor Diocletian beginning in 303. The persecution in Alexandria was especially severe. Among those martyred were many people that Athanasius knew and from whom he had been taught the faith. The persecution ended in 313 with the Edict of Milan. 

But this period of fear had led many believers to flee to the desert for safety and refuge. It was in the desert that the spirituality that formed monasticism was born. During that time the person many consider the first of the great monastics came into prominence - St. Anthony. Anthony is usually depicted in art with demons tugging and pulling at him in many directions. He lived a solitary life in a ruined fort on the banks of the Nile. Athanasius wrote a biography of Anthony and it is believed that the parents of Athanasius may have sent him to live in the desert for safety during the persecutions in Alexandria. Although Athanasius always admired and envied the life of the hermit, he always felt drawn back into the battles that leadership brought to him. (I identify with him and deeply admire him on that point).

Six years after peace was finally established (319) an Alexandrian presbyter named Arius began to teach about the person of Jesus that "once He was not." In other words, he taught that because Jesus Christ is described as the begotten of the Father, and the first of his creations, there was a time when he did not exist as part of the Godhead. It was this controversial teaching that led to the first ecumenical council in Nicea in 325. Although Athanasius was present at the Council of Nicea, he was at the time only a voteless deacon. Three years later he became the Bishop or Patriarch of Alexandria - a role he fulfilled until his death in 373.

Although what we would think of as traditional Trinitarian theology won the day at Nicea, the conflict with Arianism continued for several decades. The history is quite convoluted, but it is fair to say that the years of leadership for Athanasius were turbulent to say the least. For example, he was exiled and then brought back from exile five times during his time as Bishop of Alexandria. (Can you imagine being voted out of and then back into the same church five times)?

Through the turbulent theological upheaval of the early fourth century Athanasius was committed to what became the orthodox understanding of the incarnation of Jesus. He believed - and perhaps rightly - that the very existence of the Church was at stake. Although he did not write it, later one of the primary articulations of Trinitarian doctrine - the Athanasian Creed - was named in his honor.

CS Lewis writes about him, "His epitaph is Athanasius contra mundum, 'Athanasius against the world.' We are proud that our own country has more than once stood against the world. Athanasius did the same. He stood for the Trinitarian doctrine, 'whole and undefiled,' when it looked as if all the civilized world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius - into one of those 'sensible' synthetic religions which are so strongly recommended today and which, then as now, included among their devotees many highly cultivated clergymen. It is his glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away."

The work On the Incarnation is powerful and well worth wresting with. My copy was already marked up in many places. What struck me as I read it again was Athanasius' commitment to the goodness of creation and God's covenantal determination to restore the creation to what it was intended to be. God, in other words, would not and will not allow humankind's corruption to be the end of the story.

Athanasius proceeds to not just give reasons for the incarnation but also, as best he can given the limitations of language to express the inexpressible, to talk through its theological and philosophical intricacies. But what I always take away from Athanasius is the dual purpose of the incarnation. In the incarnation of Jesus we see two things: we see what the character of God (the character of love) looks like as it walks among us, and we see what - by his grace - humankind was intended to be and can become again. In other words, God became man so he could reveal himself to us and so we could also see what he wants to recreate us to become. "He became like us, so that we could become like him."

One of my favorite illustrations from Athanasius pictures God as a painter:

You know what happens when a portrait that has been painted on a panel becomes obliterated through external stains. The artist does not throw away the panel, but the subject of the portrait has to come and sit for it again, and then the likeness is re-drawn on the same material. Even so was it with the All-holy Son of God. He, the Image of the Father, came and dwelt in our midst, in order that He might renew mankind made after Himself, and seek out His lost sheep, even as He says in the Gospel: "I came to seek and to save that which was lost." This also explains His saying to the Jews: "Except a man be born anew..." He was not referring to a man's natural birth from his mother, as they thought, but to the re-birth and re-creation of the soul in the Image of God.

There are a few things I'd like to wrestle with Athanasius about. There are issues surrounding the fall of humankind that are extremely challenging for contemporary theologians and I'm not sure Athanasius helps us get through some of the complexities. Also, I think Athanasius overlooks important political aspects of the death of Jesus in the section where he addresses why Jesus died on a cross. His answers are so cosmic and spiritualistic in nature that I'm not sure they help us make sense of what it means for disciples to take up their own cross and follow Jesus. But those critiques are shaped more by my questions in the twenty-first century than by his concerns in the fourth.

Nevertheless, I find that he is enormously relevant for today. I kept wishing that some of the college students I hang out with could grasp from Athanasius the importance of what they do with their bodies. Jesus became like us, so that we could become like him. He did not come to show us how to escape our bodies (which you think a Greek like Athanasius would emphasize) or to make what we do with our bodies irrelevant. Because he became a body, Athanasius believes, Jesus sanctified our bodies. And therefore, we must now glorify God with our bodies, because by entering into the creation, God has redeemed it from its corruption.

This is the good news. The Word became flesh and moved into the neighborhood. Thanks, Athanasius. And praise be to God.

The Great Giveaway

I have a new favorite book. This fall I have had my class reading David Fitch's book The Great Giveaway: Reclaiming the Mission of the Church from Big Business, Parachurch Organizations, Psychotherapy, Consumer Capitalism, and Other Modern Maladies. Apart from the distinction of having one of the longest subtitles in history, it is a masterful synthesis and analysis of a number of concerns shared by theologians and scholars such as Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, George Lindbeck, John Milbank, and many others. Whereas those scholars can often be fairly inaccessible to the average reader, Fitch does a great job of making their constructive critiques of modernity's impact on Christianity more accessible to pastors, students, and lay-people.

The basic thesis of the book is that during modernity, while science under the guise of complete obejectivity was dismantling the older narratives and metanarratives that gave people moral frameworks and existential meaning, the church acquiesced to the modern impulse by giving away much of what made the church the church. Or as Fitch puts it, "The thesis of this book is that evangelicalism has 'given away' being the church in North America. Simply put, evangelical churches have forfeited the practices that constitute being the church either (a) by portioning them off to various concerns exterior to the church or (b) by compromising them so badly that they are no longer recognizable as being functions of the church."

What postmodernity offers the church is a way of recovering its unique existence. Postmodernity (in particular the postmodern critique of individualism and the complete objectivity of science) is not itself the hope. It is certainly possible for postmodernity to lead people to complete relativism and despair. But the postmodern critique of modernity opens the space for traditions of interpretation (like Christianity) to re-enter the conversation of meaning and moral purpose.

It is here where Fitch takes my favorite ethicist - Alasdair MacIntyre - and uses MacIntyre's articulation of "traditions" as socially embodied and historically extended arguments for Truth as the framework through which the existence of the Church as the socially embodied historically extended Body of Christ makes sense.

But for the church to make sense in postmodernity it has to live out its claims in ways that make its truthfulness evident in life and practice and not just in speech. In other words, Fitch believes that postmodernity has offered the church the opportunity it gave away in modernity - the opportunity to once again be the (capital C) Church.

That's the complicated part of the argument. And so if you didn't understand any of that, don't despair. What Fitch does is flesh out that argument using various practices of the church as examples.

He describes the way that the definition of success in the church has been shaped by modern quantitative values such as effectiveness (meaning numbers) and efficiency, rather than qualitative values of faithfulness and Christ-like living.

He exposes the modernist assumptions behind apologetic and "seeker-sensitive" forms of evangelism; opting instead for an evangelism that is dependent upon the community of Christ as not just the bearers of the message of Christ but the embodiment of the message of Christ.

He critiques the use of CEO models of leadership in the church as shaped by modern values and not by the kingdom of God.

In my favorite two chapters he demonstrates how most of what the church does in worship is oriented around an informational view of preaching (rather than a formational one) and an emotive/experiential view of worship (rather than a transformational one). In other words our worship tends to ask if people enjoyed it or learned from it, rather than ask if people were shaped to be like Christ through it?

The most challenging - but also richest - chapters are the final three where Fitch deals with the way the church's work in justice, spiritual formation, and moral education have been co-opted by democratic liberalism, psychotherapy, and capitalism. His critiques in these areas are powerful if we have the ears to hear it and the eyes to see it.

I will likely buy copies for the church staff so that we can walk slowly through it and wrestle with how we as a church can recover the practices necessary for us to be shaped as God's unique people in the world. There is much in this excellent book to take in but the value of this book is for groups of believers to read and wrestle with together. We have given away too much of what it means to be the Body of Christ in the world, with the help of the Spirit perhaps the next volume can be entitled The Great Rediscovery.

 

Get Radical

As I have been preaching through the Gospel of Mark this year I have been reminded repeatedly how often Christians divide the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus from his life and teachings. I hope no one would articulate it this way, but at times I have a feeling that some Christians view the point of Jesus' life as his death on the cross ("he came to die") and his life and teachings were a nice bonus that he gave us on the way to his true purpose.

So it's wonderful to come across a book - written for everyday Christians - that encourages believers to take seriously the full gospel of Jesus. Dr. David Platt is the lead pastor of the Church at Brook Hills, a four-thousand-member congregation in Birmingham, Alabama. Cynically one might expect a mega-church pastor to be writing books about self-actualization in order to draw in more Christian consumers. But Platt has written a wonderful and challenging book calling believers to be Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream.

Platt wrote the book after realizing that he "was on a collision course with an American church culture where success is defined by bigger crowds, bigger budgets, and bigger buildings." The problem for him was that the Jesus he encountered in the Scripture "actually spurned the things that my church culture said were most important." And so he had to decide whether or not he was going to take Jesus seriously. And he is hoping the reader will wrestle with the same dilemma. As he puts it, "...this is where we need to pause. Because we are starting to redefine Christianity. We are giving in to the dangerous temptation to take the Jesus of the Bible and twist him into a version of Jesus we are more comfortable with. A nice, middle-class, American Jesus. A Jesus who doesn't mind our materialism and who would never call us to give away everything we have... A Jesus who is fine with nominal devotion that does not infringe on our comforts, because, after all, he loves us just the way we are."

The strength of Dr. Platt's book is its accessibility. This is a perfect book for a Sunday school class or a small group to wrestle with. There are two things I especially like in what he does. First, he forces readers to consider if American Christians have merged the "American dream" with the gospel - thus giving into a form of idolatry. As he states, "While the goal of the American dream is to make much of us, the goal of the gospel is to make much of God."

Secondly, Platt exposes the way in which all of us tend to think that the hard claims of the gospel are for someone else. The call to "go into the world" with the gospel is not just a call upon those called to be missionaries. It is a call for the entire Church. As a pastor and preacher I especially loved his section on "receivers and reproducers." Platt argues that all believers are called to be reproducers of God's Word in the world but we tend to be receivers. Here is the difference:

Imagine being in Sudan. You walk into a thatched hut with a small group of Sudanese church leaders, and you sit down to teach them God's Word. As soon as you start, you lose eye contact with all of them. No one is looking at you, and you hardly see their eyes the rest of the time. The reason is because they're writing down every word you say, "Teacher, we are going to take everything we have learned from God's Word, translate it into our languages, and teach it to our tribes." They were not listening to receive but to reproduce.

Now journey with me to a contemporary worship service in the United States. Some people have their Bibles open, while others don't have a Bible with them. A few people are taking notes, but for the most part they are passively sitting in the audience. While some are probably disengaged, others are intently focused on what the preacher is saying, listening to God's Word to hear how it applies to their lives. But the reality is, few are listening to reproduce.

We are, by nature, receivers. Even if we have a desire to learn God's word, we still listen from a default self-centered mind-set that is always asking, "What can I get out of this?" But as we have seen, this is unbiblical Christianity. What if we changed the question whenever we gathered to learn God's Word? What if we began to think, "How can I listen to his Word so that I am equipped to teach this Word to others?"

This changes everything. All of a sudden the pen and paper come out...

As a pastor and preacher, I loved this! What if the congregation came to understand that they were not there to be receivers but were there to learn what they needed to become reproducers of the gospel in the world? I can't imagine how fun it would be to preach if people believed that they would have to in turn teach this same material to others.

Dr. Platt has a Ph.D from New Orleans Baptist Seminary and my one complaint with the book is likely just a Wesleyan one. Although Platt does a nice job calling Christians to take seriously both the cross and the teachings of Jesus, I don't think he connects them together very well. His description of Christ's work on the cross is entirely substitutional in nature. (On the cross Christ becomes our substitute and bears God's wrath against sin). Although this is an important aspect of the cross, it is not they only work Christ accomplishes there. The cross is also Christ's victory over sin and death and it is the very way of the kingdom. Let me give you three examples of how this narrow view of the cross hurts the book.

First, although Platt does an amazing job of taking seriously some of the hard claims of Christ's teaching, he ignores the one that I think is central to the gospel - "If any want to become my disciple, they must take up their cross daily and follow me." This is the central claim of discipleship but it's essentially ignored in the book. If the cross is only the means by which Jesus took on God's wrath, then I'm not sure what it would mean for a disciple to take it up. But if the cross is the way of the kingdom and the central means by which Christ overcomes evil with good, then the disciple's cross makes sense.

Second, although he mentions the kingdom of God in several places it is usually associated with heaven or the life to come. The more I wrestle with the four Gospels in the New Testament, the more I am convinced that the primary message is that "the Kingdom of God is at hand." I think Platt leans a little too far toward associating the good news with going to heaven when we die. The good news is not that we go to heaven, the good news is that heaven has come here (and we can live in it now and for eternity). For example, when Platt talks about the death of Stephen he is primarily described as an example of how the blood of martyrs (ancient and contemporary) is seed for the Church. But I think it is equally important to recognize that when he dies that Stephen sees "the Son of Man standing at the right hand of the Father." That is kingdom language. Stephen lives as a member of the kingdom now and therefore he can pray a prayer of forgiveness upon those killing him because they don't (or won't) see that the kingdom of God is already at hand.

Third, I wish he took more seriously the redemption of creation. He has a very interesting reading of Romans that rightly calls all believers to be instruments of the gospel in the world. But I think he ends before getting to the "groaning of all creation" as it waits for redemption. Platt rightly calls people to enter into places of poverty and brokenness in the world, but more often than not he thinks we should do that because Jesus calls us to be compassionate and because we need to help the lost get to heaven. I just think Platt would be better served with a more robust understanding of the presence of the kingdom and God's desire to redeem all of creation. The result would be the same. Believers would be going to every corner of creation. But we would go not just to obey a command or to get people to heaven, but we would go because God's kingdom has claimed every inch of the creation and where God's kingdom is, his justice and righteousness must be also.

I think these issues are more than just nit-picking. (It's not a good thing that the resurrection is only mentioned twice). But I don't think any of these critiques invalidate how helpful this book would be for groups of Christians to wrestle with.

The best, and most unique, part of Platt's book are his five suggestions at the end of the book for believers to dare to live out. I won't tell you what the five are, because I think you ought to buy the book and read it. There are other books out there that call Christians to live out the radical claims of discipleship, but most of them end in somewhat idealistic and impractical places. I really appreciated Dr. Platt's suggestions for believers who want to take first steps toward radical discipleship and I think you will appreciate them also.

If you are looking for a wonderful book that will create some exciting, lively, and important discussion in your Sunday school class or small group, get Radical.

To Change the World

One of my favorite evagelical jokes was told to me by a rabbi.

At the beginning of the twentieth century a group of American Jewish leaders gathered together because they were very concerned about the negative influence politics, the economy, and this new industry called Hollywood was having on the culture. They prayed together for several days and at the end of their meeting one-third of the leaders moved to Washington DC and ran for office. A third of the leaders moved to New York and started working on Wall Street. And a third moved to LA and started working in Hollywood.

Seventy or eighty years later a group of evangelical leaders got together because they were concerned about the negative influence politics, the economy, and Hollywood was having on American culture. So they prayed together for several days and when they were done they all moved to Colorado Springs.

Not everyone thinks that joke is funny. But it sums up well the point of one of the best books that I have read this year - To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern Worldby James Davison Hunter (Oxford Press).

The first half of Hunter's book essentially argues that evangelicals in the last few decades have done a poor job in transforming the culture because (1) they don't really understand how culture changes, and (2) the primary ways they are working to change the culture are actually doing more damage than good.

Evangelicals, argues Hunter, tend to believe that culture changes from the bottom up. Although it is obviously a good thing to work at changing people's hearts, Hunter thinks this rarely has major impact in cultural change. Instead he details the way in which most of the major historical shifts in culture have occurred from the top down as networks of "cultural elites" work together to bring about change. (Hunter's eleven propositions on cultural change - chapter four - is worth the price of the book).

Unfortunately, in the last few decades evangelicals have begun to recognize this problem but have primarily run to politics as the location of power and influence. Three incredible chapters are devoted to analyzing the ways the Christian Right, the Christian Left, and the Neo-Anabaptist movement have focused their energies on politics. Certainly each one has a very different approach to the political, but they all share a common conviction that the political sphere is in one way or another determinative.

I think every American evangelical needs to read this section of the book. Hunter's insights in this area are too varied and too complex to rehearse in a blog, but here are just some of the problems with evangelicals' political obsession:

1. The political realm doesn't actually bring about much change culturally. The political sphere is reactive more than proactive. Political changes respond to cultural change, not the other way around.

2. Politics in a democratic society is inevitably built on compromise, and so rarely does substantive get accomplished.

3. What is accomplished, however, is the politicization of the Church (and the gospel) and the continued fragmentation of civil dialogue in the culture at large.

4. There is a kind of bluff that takes place within the church regarding politics. Many Christians come to believe that if they just vote for the right candidates they have done their work to change the world. (So if we vote for the candidate who advocates for unwanted children then we don't have to adopt them into our homes). But then we wonder why culturally things haven't changed?

There a lot richness in this section of the book and Christians on the right and left need to read and discuss Hunter's critique. I think Hunter is right that there is a great deal of "irony and tragedy" about the way American Christians tend to be at work in the world. His point is not that the political realm is unimportant. It is. It is just far from being the most important social location for creating cultural change. Unfortunately, however, it is the place Christians (and many non-Christians) focus on first.

The last half of the book is constructive. Hunter advocates for Christians to live as a "faithful presence" in all of the areas of cultural influence. This would mean raising up and sending our kids into the various halls of power and influence in the culture. Hunter argues that cultural change takes a long time and requires faithful people to work diligently for God's purposes with patience and perseverance.

There is much about being a "faithful presence" that resonates with me. My one concern at the end of the book is not with Hunter's theory but with the Church. I am concerned that as the Church, we are not raising up people who have the skills necessary to live in the world but not be of it. To go back to the rabbi's joke, evangelicals need to have more discussion about what a faithful presence would look like on Wall Street, in Washington DC, and in Hollywood. Could we imagine, for example, Christian stock brokers who work for human flourishing among the poor and not for giant year-end bonuses? Can one be a good trader if profit is not the only agenda or criteria for defining success? We certainly can't send our children into the halls of cultural influence without regularly participating in the practices of resistance necessary for the Judeans to live in Babylon without worshiping Nebuchadnezzar.

The discussions of what a faithful presence looks like in the world will be very challenging. But, if Hunter is right, these Spirit-led conversations helping Spirit-filled people live as Christ's faithful presence are what we will have to have if we hope to change the world.

Love May Win, But Some People Won't Like It

Rob Bell's new book Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived is scheduled to be released tomorrow. But for weeks it has been setting the blogosphere on fire. A video was released two or three weeks ago of Rob promoting the book and asking hard questions about "traditional" views of hell and since then every quasi-evangelical blogger in the e-universe (now including me) has been commenting on what is likely to be in the book. Although one would hope that the horrific tragedy in Japan would put some of the craziness over the book in perspective for people, the hub-bub hasn't really died down.

The controversy over Bell's book has made CNN, Christianity Today, and today it made the pages of USA Today. Of course, the attention hasn't been all bad for Rob (or his publisher). On the one hand, all of the press and net coverage has made the book a bestseller before it is released. But on the other hand, Rob has been the target of some extremely harsh Christian rhetoric.

Although Rob and I were students at Fuller at the same time we didn't know one another. (He was then, and still is, one of the cool kids - I still am not). I have been asked several times over the last few weeks to weigh in on his book and I have thus far avoided the temptation. I am still going to resist commenting directly on the book, (mainly because I haven't read it), but instead I'd like to say some things about eschatology (the study of last things) which is the root of the conflict that Rob's book has raised. I have never understood why Christians find the beginning of creation and the end of time such rich soil for division, but we do.

So here are some of my random thoughts about eschatology in light of the Bell-battle going on:

1. These are not new questions. And this is not a new conflict. I used to teach a class in the Patristic Theology (the theology written by the second and third generation Church leaders after the original apostles). Several of the early church theologians were already wrestling in the second century with questions about eternity and the nature of God's judgment. The issue of God's judgment, and grace, and how the two shape eternity was then, and continues to be, a matter of great speculation. The primary problem, then and now, is the nature of God as revealed in Jesus. In Revelation chapter 5 we discover a powerful truth, the Lion of Judah is in actuality the Lamb that was slain. If Jesus is the full revelation of the Father, then God's judgment also has to look like Jesus the Lamb, because if it doesn't, then we have two gods and not one God. I find it very hard to imagine what the "judgment of the Lamb" will look like, and so have hundreds of theologians throughout Christian history. I would wager that a good church historian could find examples of pastors, theologians, and biblical scholars asking almost the identical questions Rob is raising in every one of the twenty-one centuries since the life of Christ.

2. The Bible speaks about eternity in metaphors. Metaphors are pretty but they aren't very precise. Here are some of my favorite things that the Bible says about the eschaton: the lion will lay down with the lamb, the Lamb will be the lamp that lights the holy city, all will eat from the tree of life, there will be no more death and no more crying, the New Jerusalem will descend, there will be a new heaven and a new earth, all the nations will be gathered around the banquet table of the Lord... I could go on and on. Notice that nearly every one of those descriptors is a metaphor. Metaphors are word pictures that describe what we can imagine but cannot speak with certainty about. Which means that...

3. Its ALL speculation. Only one person has ever come back from the dead and he didn't tell us a whole lot about the life to come; other than that he would be with us. Norman Vincent Peale compares our knowledge of the life to come to the knowledge of this life a baby has while still in the womb. He writes:

They (new born babies) are leaving the only life and world they know. They never heard - they didn't even have the capacity to hear or understand - about this life. There's no way for the father to speak through the wall of the mother's body and explain to that infant child that nine months is nothing! Nine months is just fleeting - here you will have 60-70-80 years. The baby in the mother's womb has no capacity to understand. There's no way to explain to that baby the disparity between the tight confines in which it can barely turn and twist and the 25,000 mile circumference ball upon which it will one day live... All the baby knows at that stage of life is that that life is all there is to life. Then the mother's body begins to push the baby towards what we know as real life. The doctors said the baby can only experience this (push) as nothing more, and nothing less, than death. Then the baby cries, and the baby struggles, as it thinks he is dying, and we're standing looking... knowing that the baby is about to live as it has never lived before.

No one knows for certain how God will judge, nor what eternal life and eternal punishment looks like. Do we really want areas that are completely speculative to be a source of division in the Body of Christ?

4. The Bible tries to balance judgment and grace. One of the challenges in all of this is the Scripture itself. The Bible rightly calls people to see and acknowledge God's holiness. There must be judgment upon sin and evil or God is not a good God. But the Bible also holds out hope, that in the light of the grace revealed in Christ, that all creation will be redeemed and that God will be all in all. I have read some of Bell's critics saying that his viewpoint is "unbiblical." I doubt that will be the case. Knowing Rob, I am quite sure that his book will be making a biblical argument. Ironically, however, so will his critics.

5. There are certainly some potential dangers to universalism, but I am equally (and maybe even more) worried about those getting obsessively and passionately angry in defending an anti-univeralist position. Years ago I heard the famous theologian Jurgen Moltmann lecturing on 1 Corinthians 15:28 ("that God will be all in all"). At the end of the lecture a student raised their hand and asked, "Dr. Moltmann, your lecture tonight sounded a bit like a universalist position. Are you a universalist?" Dr. Moltmann, in his heavy German accent replied, "Oh no, no, no. There are many people I hope go to hell... I'm just not sure Jesus feels the same way about them." I continually keep that quote in mind.

I don't know if I will be surprised by who makes it into God's eternal kingdom, but I hope I am. I have a sense - especially when I look at the cross - that God's grace is bigger than I imagine it to be. I am not the judge of the lives of others, God is. I would never presume to know how he will judge. Which is why I am a little worried about those who have become so extremely angry over what may or may not be in Rob's book. I suppose it is possible that a universalist position can dangerously misrepresent God by making him sentimental rather than holy, but when I read some of the critics it seems as though they not only want, but at some level even hope, people will spend eternity in hell. The late Clark Pinnock used to say that people inevitably end up looking like the God they believe in. For that reason alone, I tend to want to be on the side of generous rather than stingy graciousness.

6. Salvation is first a relationship with God in this life that then gives us assurance of eternal life in the life to come. Even though I don't know how God will judge things in eternity, my evangelistic zeal has to do first and foremost with the desire for people to discover the abundant, new creation, kingdom life their Creator has for them today. That amazing Body of Christ life can only be described as being completely born again. It is this new life of the Spirit that gives one the assurance of eternal life. I want to live this life with the assurance of eternal life. The rest, quite frankly, is up to God (and not a bunch of theologians with Twitter accounts).

Thanks be to God.

To read a good blog on Rob's book itself, see what my friend and mentor Richard Mouw (President of Fuller Seminary) has written about it here: http://www.netbloghost.com/mouw/?p=188

A Charitable Discourse

I had the privilege of teaching a seminar on preaching this week with about 40 really gifted pastors from around the Southwest. In one of the sessions together we got to talking about how preachers should speak from the pulpit about social issues that have political aspects to them. It was the clear consensus from just about everyone in the room - including myself - that most of us who preach regularly get apprehensive when it comes to preaching about various social issues, not because we don't believe we have something from God and from his Word to say about the issues, but because we all feel trapped between extreme voices within the Church on both sides of the various hot cultural issues of the day.

Just this week I read an interview, in one of the various ministry magazines, with a pastor/preacher who is highly active in various social and political issues. In the interview the pastor was quoted as saying that any pastor who will not speak out on political issues is not being tactful but is displaying the utmost in whimpishness and spinelessness.

At one level he is probably correct. Those of us who shy away from addressing social and political issues in our preaching probably do so in part out of fear. But the problem for me is that the Christian leaders who are most vocal about the need for pastors to be more outspoken in the pulpit are usually closely aligned with one party or the other. So I think what they want are those who agree with their particular political views and political methodologies to speak up because these same leaders are usually very critical, and often resort to name-calling, against those who speak up but who take a different stance, or advocate a different methodological approach, than theirs. I may wrong, but in this particular case I don't think the pastor in the interview is really interested in having all pastors preach on social issues. I think his primary interest is that pastors agree with his political and social interpretation of the gospel, allign with his political party, accept his political methodologies, and then preach on social issues. All others are whimps or heretics.

The criticism for pastors comes from both the conservative and liberal sides. It is not unusual for pastor/preachers to get attacks from those who think the Church is being too close-minded or too legalistic in its stance on various social concerns. Not too long ago I had to decide to take a pastoral stand on how the particular church I lead would approach a significant social issue. After I (with the advice of other pastors and in conversation with the church board) decided how we would address the issue. We in essence decided that although we agreed deeply with the conservative point of view on the issue, we did not share in many of the conservative tactics and so we as a church would take a different approach. I spoke clearly on the issue, but as a church we decided to work toward the issue in the way we thought God was leading us to go. Predictably, I ended up taking hits from both sides. I took criticism from some on the left for being too narrow-minded, and I received a letter from a prominent conservative Christian leader calling me the low point in the 100+ year history of PazNaz. It wasn't enough to agree with him in principle. I had to agree with him in practice also.

With that in mind you can understand why a room full of 40 preachers this week was looking for help in figuring out how to approach social and political issues in sermons. As preachers we all want to be faithful to what we believe is right and is in line with a Christlike approach to the gospel, but it is very difficult to do that in a church world that increasingly reflects in its dialogue the extreme tensions found in the political dialogue of the day. The loudest voices on both margins dominate the political and theological conversations and those of us somewhere in the middle get drowned out.

That is why I am so thankful for a brand new book written by Dr. Dan Boone - A Charitable Discourse: Talking About the Things that Divide Us. Dan is the president of Trevecca Nazarene University and he is someone that I consider to be one of the most thoughtful, articulate, and courageous leaders in the Church of the Nazarene.

In this new book Dan argues that the important conversations that we need to have in the Church don't take place as often as they should because of the intimidation caused by the voices on the margins. In the first section of the book entitled "Jihad in the Church" (a section that I wish was required reading for every Evangelical in America), Dan covers seven tactics used by people on extreme both sides to label, villify, misquote, and intimidate others.

I had the privilege of reading the manuscript for this book several months ago before it came out and I will admit that I wept through the first seven chapters. As a child of the Church who is in the middle of my tenure as a pastor, I am beyond burdened about the tone of dialogue and rhetoric going on in the Evangelical world. I remember reading Richard Mouw's book Uncommon Decency almost two decades ago and resonating with the similar themes of civility in Christian dialogue that he highlights there. But in just a handful of years the advent of email and the internet has meant that extreme voices don't even have to spend $.49 to send a letter anymore. They can simply click a button and send statements of destruction literally around the world to thousands of people in an instant. (And once that button is pushed you can't get it back). There was a day when a person had to be biblically and theologically qualified to get their work published by a publishing company. Today self-publishing can be done easily, and is done regularly. And one does not need to be thoughtful to build a web page or start a blog. (This blog being no exception). Any theological illiterate can create a web page and become the faceless source of "discernment" for congregations of Google-ers.

As Boone points out there are at least two tragedies when dialogue in the Church reflects that of the political culture of today. The first is the destruction of ministries and the divisions formed in the Church. Especially in the Wesleyan tradition we have forgotten that important motto often associated with John Wesley: "In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, but in all things charity."

Secondly, and more central to his book, when we as the Church can't have thoughtful conversations about the most pressing issues of the day, our children go looking for places that will talk tactfully and openly about those issues. However, most of those places are not shaped by the framework of the gospel and so while the Church fights, our children walk out because we are not perceived by them as relevant to their lives or to their world.

The rest of the book takes on several issues in a thoughtful way. Dan takes on women in ministry, alcohol, sexuality, homosexuality, science and religion, and the emerging Church. Each of these chapters comes out of conversations he has helped lead on the campus and Trevecca and they are extremely thoughtful. These chapters are very courageous and he will take hits from both sides for what he writes. I don't agree with everything he writes in this section. But that's the point isn't it? We can model thoughtful dialogue with each other on these issues. We can trust each other's hearts, even if we question each other's heads.

The last section gives really helpful practices and virtues that can help us as Christians learn "the more excellent way" of charitable discourse.

Thanks, Dan, for your courage in giving voice to some of us who are trying to walk faithfully with you in the via media between the extreme voices in the culture and in the Church. I am encouraging every believer I know to pick this book up and find some friends to discuss it with. I would like to make it required reading at PazNaz. You might not like everything Dan has to say. But we can talk about it. Can't we?