Lee, your comments on the ‘personal relationship with Jesus’ theme are to the point and very helpful. I’m not sure I can take the analysis very much further, but here are some rather condensed and erratic thoughts.
1. One way back to a more biblical understanding might be to think more in terms of a ‘people’ than a ‘church’. I would suggest perhaps that the idea of a church that is called out of a society under judgment, that is the body of the Christ who preceded others in suffering, belongs especially to the eschatological context of the New Testament, and that once we get beyond this (this is part of the thesis of COSM), we come back to the broader notion of a people chosen to be renewed humanity and the place of God’s dwelling in the midst of the nations. Perhaps the practical implications of this distinction are not massive, but it may allow us greater flexibility in determining what it means to be in relationship with Jesus.
2. I think we need to be much more sensitive to the collective, corporate, people-level impact of the church in the world. We address too much at the level of individual behaviour, which makes it much harder to voice larger social and political concerns. We are beginning to see Christian communities endeavouring to make large-scale prophetic impacts on their cities, which I think provides a much healthier framework within which to place the spirituality and work of the individual. We could usefully explore the interplay between the individual and the group both as it appears in the Bible (Jesus as Jacob, suffering servant, Son of man, head of the body, etc.) and as it can be worked out in practice (see The art of being church).
3. Related to this is the recognition that a people expresses itself through a shared culture. Modern individualism was in part a consequence of the rationalist demolition of Christendom, of a distinctively Christian culture. The emerging church, I think, is responding, albeit haphazardly, to this cultural collapse. We are looking for the emergence of a new Christian culture that will redefine the relationship between individual and community and relocate both in Christ. It is always our culture that determines our identity as individuals and our manner of relating to others.
4. I am inclined to suggest that we need to grasp more firmly what it means to be under the lordship of Christ. What does it mean for us practically that God gave the kingdom to one who suffered faithfully, to the point of death? Paul’s appeal to the Philippians on these grounds (Phil. 2:1-11) gives a good idea of what that shared confession ought to entail ethically and practically.
5. An important aspect of what it means to relate individually and corporately to Christ in a postmodern, post-Christendom setting, is that we tell his story - imaginatively, enthusiastically, playfully, creatively, confidently, faithfully, and of course with critical integrity.
simply to win
It’s almost as though the postmodern reading is “that’s over, so what’s next” as opposed to the more traditional “almost but not quite” of older theological thinking vis a vis fulfilment.
We wish to be biblical but not bibliolatrists. We wish to be disciples but not disciplined. It’s an odd mix, heady but dangerous. The ropes that marked out the ring have been obliterated and the Queensbury Rules lost in the mêlée.
Thankfully, the outcome is not up to us. Hopefully we are just trying to do our best with what we have been given.
Maranatha!
Live to serve : Serve to live
That's over, so what's next?
There’s a lot of different issues here. For a start, I shouldn’t give the impression that the emerging church is universally in favour of the more historical reading of eschatology. But still, there is something in your characterization ‘that’s over, so what’s next?’ To my mind, it brings us back to a more fundamental and far-reaching vocation for the people of God. The ‘what’s next?’ is not a trivial question, and I don’t see how we can answer it properly without reassessing the boundaries of traditional faith. But that doesn’t alter the fact that, to my mind, an emerging theology ought to strive to be a faithful reading of scripture.
Postmodern relationship with Jesus
Andrew,
Thanks for you response to my brief post. I concur with your suggestions. I am working on a project of a multimedia overview of the biblical story using Gen.12:1-3 as the focal lens: that God’s agenda in our world and lives is threefold: to get a people, to bless that people, and through that people to bless everyone else. My title: PROMISE, PEOPLEHOOD, AND PEACE. I sense that what I am trying do in this resonates with your points 1-3.
If i understand your fourth point, I would add to it that the theme of discipleship in the Apocalypse - that martyrdom is in fact a sharing in the victory of the Lamb - runs along the same lines.
I have explored as aspect of what you suggest in No.5 in an article “Preaching to Postmodern People” in CHANGING WORLD, CONFIDENT WITNESS ed. by Craig Van Gelder (Eerdmans).
Peace,
Lee
kindred spirits?
andrew: i had no idea such communities of thought existed. i grew up in reformed theology, reluctantly sharing my family thanksgivings with skinny-ankled, black-socked seminary students and even as an adult i have nearly been blugeoned to death by evangelicalism. i have an ongoing frustration with christianity and the church and no matter how much i continue to be healed from those old wounds, no matter how i attempt to reconnect with the bride of christ, i am continually frustrated at a very deep level. so much of it doesnt make sense. i was raised on scripture, commited much of it to memory, went to christian schools and have a fairly deep comprehension of scripture and the character of god and that does not fit the formulas i see enacted around me. i have mostly withdrawn from organized religion and have been rebuilding my understanding of scripture and the god most high on my own (if any such thing can be - certainly it feels so). i am in utter awe at how many of my theological pathways mirror the ones on this site. amazed beyond words. i am happy to have found your site and will be a frequent visitor. perhaps there is hope yet that i may yet find a community of believers. i had nearly given up hope.
sharing my personal post-modern relationship with Jesus
The other day I was talking to a friend about Jesus. Though the language may not be as biblical as it could be it might be, it is more important for me to be in relationship with Jesus now than ever before.
My friend grew up being forced into bible study by a rather fundamentalist upbringing. She said she didn’t really know much though because it wa forced and not real. She was asking how I could say that I believed the only way to God was through Jesus. She was particularly confused around Jesus being God and Jesus being the “way to God.” and she expected me to sort it out…something I would have loved to have thoroughly done several years ago and feel completely incapable of addressing today but she asked a reasonable request and so I endeavored to answer. 1 John 4:16 states, “…God is love…” It doesn’t state, “God became love” or, “God loves his creation.” It states, unsing the verb form that is changeless, “God is love.”
When God created, he created from love and to love because that is his nature. We tend to get in the way of that because our nature is now selfish. But God created me for relationship. It is for relationship that I was created. It was in relationship that I was created. I just got in the way of that relationship. And as Helen Rosevere so wonderfully stated, “Jesus came to cross out the ‘I’.”
We can use all sorts of multi-syllabic words to talk about this stuff but in the end what the moderns lost and what the emerging church is helping me regain is relationship— Relationship with my Creator—relationship with Jesus.
To the modern Truth was a prerequisite to love.
To the emergent Love is a prerequisite to Truth.
Stephen
cool thought
“To the modern Truth was a prerequisite to love.
To the emergent Love is a prerequisite to Truth.”
hmmm. interesting statement. is it yours or one used in this community?
as to the “relationship” issue, i would say that i agree in many ways, but am weirded out in others. i agree that we have a relational experience and expression in connection to the creator-redeemer of the universe, but i also shudder at the “jesus is my home dog” kind of self-centered relationship. i am not in any way suggesting you are pointing to that, just having my own honest reaction to the word “relationship.” prior to the 70s (i was a teenager and recall my father’s reading list well) did we talk about “relationships?” i think we had friends, parents, husbands, children, co-workers. the 70s brought us a whole new pop-psychology, me-centered way of understanding the world around us. perhaps the “in relationship with god” stuff that i am uncomfortable with comes from this? any thoughts?
my thought...
Stacy,
Thanks for responding. God is everything right in relationships. We have screwed them up pretty badly. We even have a 12 step group for people that can’t help themselves from “loving” addicted people (al-anon). That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about true connectedness which counters the isolation which most of experience daily.
That’s allStephen
yes
i think i heard that. i sometimes wish we could just make up new words. there are many that have such baggage, that have such a specific cultural connotation they are difficult to use in a context that is attempting to re-define the concepts they represent.