Note: I’m making some changes to this blog in the coming year.  I’m going to be expanding my focus.  I hope to have a blog redesign very soon.  But in the meantime…

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What are the theological questions that need to be explored in the coming decade?  Here is my list.

1. What is the problem?

Much of the conversation in the emerging church has been deconstructive.  It’s been good.  Postmodern faith has been mostly about coming to terms with the dissonance in our theological framework.  We don’t like to admit when we don’t have it all together. Yet that is what the emerging church has done.  It took the risk to raise its hand and say, “Wait a minute.  Something doesn’t quite add up.”

That period I believe is coming to an end.  We’re comfortable now with the idea that we don’t have it all figured out.  Case in point is Scot McKnight’s recent exploration of universalism. We would never have had this conversation ten years ago.  It was taboo to even consider the idea that God could restore all of creation.  Yet the more we explore it, the more we’re realizing that it has significant merit directly in Scripture.

From my perspective, this shift towards seeing the problem is THE most important outcome of the last ten years. It’s kind of like an alcoholic.  Much of the work in alcoholism is first coming to terms that there is a problem.  Denial is the biggest obstacle to overcome.

Much of the tension is with tradition. We can’t ignore the reality that we are born into systems.  We are born into established rituals and traditions that we participated in before we even knew what they were.  To buck those traditions is to swim against the flow.  Much of the movement has been people taking the risk to do that even in the face of claims of heresy.

2. What is the postmodern Gospel?

Once the problem has been identified, it is then possible to begin dreaming again.  If we acknowledge there is a dissonance, we can begin to imagine better ways of seeing the story in Scripture.  The biggest possibility in the next decade is the idea of imagining new possibilities and bringing them forth. The seeds of the last decade will begin to bloom.

I’m gonna steal from Phyllis Tickle who identified three important theological questions in Memphis.

1. What is the theology of religion?
2. What does it mean to be human?
3. What is the nature of the atonement?

I would argue that her second question is the most important.  Embedded within it is the fundamental problem and answer.  If we’re going to make progress, we need to go back and ask what does it meant to first be human.  Before we are ever Christians, we are first human beings.  The Fall is predominantly about losing our capacity to see our own humanity. Jesus wasn’t about creating another construct on top of humanity called Christianity.  He was interested in getting back to what it means to be human beings created in the image of God.

3. How do we gather?

Once we begin to address the underlying problems, we can begin to ask some of the deeper issues of how we gather.  I seriously wonder if denominations will crumble in my generation.  I say this not because they don’t provide value, but because they are a subset of what it means to follow Jesus in the Way. Denominations are part of the larger kingdom. And once we see denominations as expressions, rather than exclusive identities, we can begin to participate together.

I have been a proponent of going back to the basics of the Jesus Model.  I think the most restorative means of gathering together actually looks exactly like what Jesus did.  But we can’t get over our own protective mechanisms about gathering until we answer #2 above.  We have to agree on what is the story we are sharing.  We have to come to terms with what is the Good News.  And once we do, watch out.

What is on your list?