Like Tables in the Temple

I think some times we get lost in the literalness of the text and we’re looking for the little truths of is this — did it really happen this way? Did the sea really split? Were there really these plagues? And we look for scientific explanations of how a sea could split and was there a wind? And we lose the profound truth that underlies the story. The miracle of the Exodus is not in the contradiction of physical nature, but really in the refashioning of human nature. What happened once upon a time happens all the time. – Rabbi Sandy Sasso (from On Being)

This quote has stuck with me since I heard it on Sunday. The parallels between the Exodus and the events of Easter are profound. My meditation this week has focused on how the cross and resurrection is a refashioning of human nature. Christ’s resurrection provides new flesh, new humanity, a new covenant. The Kingdom wins and the whole world and its paradigms are turned over like the tables in the temple.

In truth, I could really care less about scientific theories or rigorous apologetics. I hunger to be part of God’s dramatic refashioning of human nature and the whole universe.

Down the Christianity Rabbit Hole

A couple of days ago I stumbled upon a blurb in Twitter linked to some post on “neo-Reformed.” I actually do consider myself Reformed, in the broad Anglican/Lutheran/Presbyterian sense of the term, as in Luther, Barth and N.T. Wright are all Reformed. But one of the benefits of currently sitting happily in the East Coast evangelical camp is that I have been spared the craziness of the neo-Reformed movement that is seemingly eating the rest of American Christiandom alive. Whether it is good or bad, I don’t know. I just hear snippets about it, like hearing rumors of war from the front line.  For me, it is all quiet on the Western (Christianity) front.

But stumbling onto this blog, and then looking at its blog roll, I realized this whole conversation swirling around me that I am blissfully ignorant of. There are conversations going on that remind me of the dull chronologies of theological battles over baptism in William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation (full text here, see page 384 for the baptism “controversy”). The Puritans of old in Rhode Island were fighting over the exact way to baptize infants. From my cursory view, it seems like the neo-Reformed movement is carrying on this fine Christian tradition of knit-picking. It’s an adventure down the rabbit hole of Christianity.

The dark side of renewal movements like the neo-Reformed movement are that they can spiral out of control, and you end up leaving normal life and entering a place like Wonder Land. It’s a place where every little jot and tittle of religious views become lock-step requirements and disagreement is a declaration of war. The “Queen of Hearts” is orthodoxy, and anything that stands in her way must be thwarted, expunged and excommunicated.

The rabbit hole of the neo-Reformed movement is one I will gladly stay away from. I will remain happily above the surface, waiting for people to come wandering back from Wonder Land, and gladly listen to their adventures.

Four Questions: Scot McKnight

Engaging with different voices is always important. In blogging it is so easy to concentrate on your own view, and let other views orbit around it. “Four Questions” is a series on Everyday Liturgy which looks to authors & artists to ask them four questions about their craft.

Today’s guest is the prolific Scot McKnight. Similar to N.T. Wright, Scot has the wonderful ability to take complex academic discussions and present them in concise, accessible prose. His writings on fasting, Mary, hermeneutics and the atonement have all been formative in my own thought and practice. I wanted to ask him some questions about his new book, The King Jesus Gospel.

Everyday Liturgy: In your new book The King Jesus Gospel you talk about how contemporary evangelicalism is a “salvation culture” instead of a “gospel culture.” What are some examples of contemporary evangelical worship that are rooted in “salvation culture”?

Scot McKnight: First, think of many of our songs, which are rooted in our personal experience of salvation instead of in the glory of God, the centrality of Jesus Christ, and our empowerment by the Spirit. Many think Philippians 2:5-11 and Colossians 1:15-20 are early Christian hymns, not to mention the rich hymns of Revelation, and you will see a remarkable difference between our experience-based music and their Christ-focused lines.

Second, how much of our worship is focused on Christ? Notice again the art of ancient churches: they all had wonderful art that found its focus in Christ. I’m thinking of Hagia Sophia’s famous depiction of Christ, or even the cross-shaped York Minster. What is the “shape” of our churches?

Third, think of how the ancient liturgy led us to the Table. That was the focus and the climax of the “service” while ours is focused either on a sermon or on an invitation. There are huge theological factors at work here, and we are losing theology and not gaining it.

EL: What are some of the changes churches can make to their worship that would make their worship services a cultural expression of the gospel?

Scot: The major shift is simple and yet will prove itself difficult because we unfamiliar with it: we need to readjust everything so that our entrance, our music, our readings, our sermons and our sacrament all lead us to the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Spirit, all known most clearly in Jesus Christ.
We could go through our hymnals and cut out all songs that aren’t focused on God.

EL: What are some spiritual disciplines that people can begin to practice that will help them live out the gospel of Jesus?

Scot: Bible reading. We need to become mastered by the Bible’s Story and to let that whole Story—Genesis to Revelation—guide us to Jesus Christ.

Spiritual disciplines make me nervous at times, mostly because they are often too focused on “my own” spirituality. They tend to draw attention to how we are growing, our own condition before God, etc. Genuine spiritual disciplines will draw us into God and then into the world where God is accomplishing his mission. So I would urge us to reconsider some of our disciplines, and begin to see other-directed praxis as discipline: evangelism, service, compassion, visiting the marginalized and unempowered…

EL: In your book you discuss how the sermons in Acts are the best example of the gospel of Jesus. These sermons are pretty different than the sermons heard from many pulpits today. How should pastors look to preach a two thousand year old message to our contemporary culture?

Scot: Evangelism needs to be reshaped from a persuasive rhetoric designed to precipitate decisions toward a declarative rhetoric designed to exalt Jesus Christ. The essence of the sermons in Acts was to tell us stuff about Jesus and not to persuade sinners to accept Christ.

Good evangelism takes us from creation to Christ and to the consummation, but one doesn’t need to do the whole each time, esp if a congregation or a person has no clue. The center of evangelism, and all good preaching, is Christ — we tell people about Jesus. That Story of Jesus has the power to awaken faith in sinners and the saints. So, we need to become people who are most concerned with presenting Jesus.

If you want to know more about Scot McKnight you can read his blog, Jesus Creed.

Confessions of A Commentary Kid

There was a point in my college career when I started to seriously geek out about commentaries. Every serious student at a Christian college needed to pick the commentary series they would defend in a fight to the death. Mine was the NIV Application Commentary. Scholars I respected like Tremper Longman III, Douglas Moo, Darrell Bock, Peter Enns and Scot McKnight wrote some of the commentaries in the series.  Enns and McKnight especially put me over the edge into giddiness.  It was my go-to commentary series. I would sit near it in the library, ready to reference it at a moment’s notice. It was well put together in general, but I especially liked that commentary series because it was more thematic than word by word reading of the text.

For the word by word reading of the text we were assigned the Bible Knowledge Commentary. That is a commentary I would not wish upon anyone. It was assigned reading for some of my classes, and I would dread to read from bold phrase to bold phrase about Greek conjugations and parsing and (insert Charlie Brown’s teacher’s wah-wah voice).

There is a new commentary series put out by IVP called the Resonate Series and I…ahem…resonate with it. This is a commentary series that takes a more contextual approach than even the NIV Application Commentary did. It is absolutely not bogged down in the tweed scholar-speak of pale Bible scholars who never see the light of day.

I was given the opportunity to review the newly published Matthew commentary in the Resonate Series. The Matthew commentary was written by Matt Woodley, author of The Folly of Prayer (my review). Woodley does a great job of commenting on the text, which I think is what a commentary should actually do. With all of the etymological and scholarly jargon removed and a format that moves section-by-section and not verse-by-verse or word-by-word, the Resonate Series offers the reader an actual interpretation of the text in contextualized terms. This means that the commenter, in this case Woodley, is showing how the text can actually be applied to daily life and spiritual practice.

Woodley does a great job of this. In what other commentary passage on Matthew 17 would you have a parable by Kierkegaard and a story about the highs and lows of a worship experience while in Mexico? By offering this type of relatable context, Woodley is able to flesh out the deeper meaning of the story and how it applies to the reader and the Christian community, as he does in his description of the tension he experienced in Mexico:

The noise and squalor of downtown Cabo didn’t match the lyrics of “What a Wonderful World.” Instead I heard a clanging song of drunkennes, pain and lust.
But as the church of Jesus Christ we will train our ears and our eyes to hear and see both songs: songs of Christ’s glory and songs of the world’s brokenness. (180)

All this in a discussion of the Transfiguration.

While at first glance someone might say that this is actually not what a commentary is supposed to be. A modern commentary is supposed to narrow the reader’s focus on the text so that an explicit truth can be presented in a proposition. This is not, however, like many of the ancient commentaries or Reformation commentaries of the church were written. There is a big difference between Augustine’s commentary on Genesis in Confessions, Matthew Arnold’s commentary on Genesis and the Bible Knowledge Commentary’s word-by-word delineation of Genesis. At some point between Arnold and the BKC Protestant scholars lost their way. So, it is refreshing to see a commentary series that goes back to the roots of the Christian and Protestant traditions of commentary writing to offer up a text that with human words tries to express the depth and mystery of the divine Word.

Book Information

The Gospel of Matthew: God with Us
Matt Woodley
InterVarsity Press
$12.16 (Amazon)

Twenty Five Books Every Christian Should Read

Renovaré, the spiritual formation organization, has come out with a book about Christian books, the provocatively titled Twenty Five Books Every Christian Should Read. Gathering together editors from Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant traditions, the list comprises the following books:

1.  On the Incarnation  by St. Athanasius
2.  Confessions  by St. Augustine
3.  The Sayings of the Desert Fathers
4.  The Rule of St. Benedict  by St. Benedict
5.  The Divine Comedy  by Dante Alighieri
6.  The Cloud of Unknowing  by Anonymous
7.  Revelations of Divine Love (Showings)  by Julian of Norwich
8.  The Imitation of Christ  by Thomas à Kempis
9.  The Philokalia
10.  Institutes of the Christian Religion  by John Calvin
11.  The Interior Castle  by St. Teresa of Avila
12.  Dark Night of the Soul  by St. John of the Cross
13.  Pensées  by Blaise Pascal
14.  The Pilgrim’s Progress  by John Bunyan
15.  The Practice of the Presence of God  by Brother Lawrence
16.  A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life  by William Law
17.  The Way of a Pilgrim  by Unknown Author
18.  The Brothers Karamazov  by Fyodor Dostoevsky
19.  Orthodoxy  by G. K. Chesterton
20.  The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
21.  The Cost of Discipleship  by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
22.  A Testament of Devotion  by Thomas R. Kelly
23.  The Seven Storey Mountain  by Thomas Merton
24.  Mere Christianity  by C. S. Lewis
25.  The Return of the Prodigal Son  by Henri J. M. Nouwen

I have read Confessions, Divine Comedy, Institutes, Pilgrim’s Progress, The Way of the Pilgrim, the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Mere Christianity, which comes out to about 25% of the list. I have On the Incarnation, The Practice of the Presence of God and The Cost of Discipleship sitting on my “book queue” shelf, waiting to be read. Almost all of these books have been on my radar, and I would want to eventually read every one, except for Brothers Karamazov—I just can never really get into Russian writing.

Which of these books have you read? What would you add to the list? Subtract from it?

I Owe My Faith to “Heretics”

It’s high time we recognize the narrowness of contemporary evangelicalism’s definition of “heresy” as a yeast that leavens the whole body and soul with sin and condemnation. If the wrong view on something such as infant baptism, seven literal days of creation or heaven and hell can make someone a heretic in contemporary evangelicalism then the following people are “heretics”:

-James
-Iraneus
-John of Chrysostom
-Origen
-Gregory of Nyssa
-Augustine
-Anselm
-St. Nicholas (“Santa”)
-Thomas Aquinas
-Martin Luther
-John Calvin
-Karl Barth
-George MacDonald
-G.K. Chesterton
-J.R.R. Tolkien
-Dorothy Sayers
-C.S. Lewis
-N.T. Wright

The fact is, I owe my faith to these “heretics.” They have taught me so much about living the gospel and finding salvation and deliverance in this life and the life to come. They taught the people who taught me, and the people who taught them, from generation to generation to generation. I am part of the rich, vibrant faith tradition of Christianity that has been passed on for thousands of years by the people in the list above.

The thought that for thousands of years God has used “heretics” who don’t understand the “gospel” of contemporary evangelicalism to pass down scraps of knowledge that did not redeem them, only so that two thousand years later we are allowed to understand exactly what is in the Scriptures is the worst kind of pride.