Imagine a world, Jesus once told his followers, where lost people get found. Jesus told three such parables, we call them the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son. I want to dabble with the first two today. (You can read the texts after the jump.)

We need to begin at the beginning:

Jesus is eating with the wrong people: tax collectors and sinners. They are as much a stereotype as the Pharisees and legal experts who are inspecting Jesus’ evening behaviors at meals.

We’ve got the Good-but-Inspected-Guy doing the merciful and forgiving thing with the wrong people and the right people fundamentally upset about what’s being done.

Welcoming sinners to table — evidently before they had committed themselves to Torah observance — was the wrong thing to do.

In that context, Jesus says a new imagination is in order. And that imagined world begins with Jesus’ behavior and is justified by his stories of a different world.

The kingdom world of Jesus is a world in which tax collectors are sinners are pursued by God — a shepherd seeking for a lost sheep, a woman scouring a home to find one lost coin — in spite of the risk and are pursued by God through great effort. In addition, when God finds such a lost person, God is overjoyed — here you can think of the amount of wine Jesus produced at the wedding at Cana — to the point that he throws a big party. When he finds the sheep he puts atop his shoulders and carries it home to safety and celebration; the woman cherishes the coin and calls her neighbors.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.  We need to begin at the beginning and address the fundamental assumptions that keep us from seeing what God sees.

I don’t like to defend my own certainty anymore. I’ve come to believe the notion of certainty is not the point.

Recently a friend named Chad posted a note in Facebook defending certainty.  Chad explores it based on  Hebrews 11.

Hebrews 11:1 – Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

And I completely get the point he was trying to make.  At some point we need to have faith in something, to be certain to an extent.  If we lose the idea that we have faith in something, we have faith in nothing.  But the dialog that followed though illustrated to me why I don’t defend the notion of certainty.  It never comes out the way I had hoped it would.  It usually ends up with hurt feelings and misunderstandings.  Two ships continue to pass in the night.

If I defend it, it misses what the certainty is actually for, which is the fruit of love.  If I really believe it doesn’t really matter what anyone else thinks.  It only matters that I actually believe it.  The person I’m really trying to convince is myself.  And in regards to my faith, the best way for me to be certain that I am certain of my faith is made real in the act of love.  Is my certainty producing love in a way that is life giving, hope-filled, and draws people in, as opposed to pushes them away if they don’t agree with my certainty.

The truest defense of the faith is not a defense of the faith but the act of love. It’s the fulfillment of the Great Commandment.  Its a life lived in a way that actually reveals the Gospel.  Because I can say I believe anything.  But if my life doesn’t reveal it, well then its BS.  This is what I love about the cross.  It’s the truest measure of love.  Are we willing to love in such a way that people cannot help but be profoundly touched, even in a way that requires our own suffering?

I’m engaged in a conversation right now with some friends on Emergence.  Its that little conversation that won’t seem to die, no matter how many people carve its gravestone. ;-P

I have a friend who recently put up a blog site that is actively pushing the bounds, essentially denying what we would typically think of as orthodox Christianity.  Yet at the same time this person is claiming to be a follower of Jesus.  It’s creating an interesting space of tension.  My friend is concerned that this denial is dangerous ground.  Its one of those moments we would likely call a slippery slope, which I would again ask if Jesus is found at the bottom of the slippery slope?

I  actually agree that my friend is on dangerous ground but not for the reason some might think.

You see when I see someone actively wrestle with the topics that make up this thing we call Christianity, even making patently heretical statements like Jesus is not the Son of God, I’m not really worried.  Because I’ve come to believe that actively rejecting God is a form of wrestling with God.  What if the journey towards God for some requires actively throwing God a stiff arm and saying, “Can you love me now?” We can’t ignore that my friend created the site and has made some bold statements regarding his own faith. Can grace penetrate even the spaces of doubt?

If we look at the Prodigal Son, his active leaving of his family did not change his father.  It change the son.  Leaving became the space for the son to work out his own identity and self.  If we look at the story of Jacob, wrestling is the primary metaphor of the human experience.  God names the nation of Israel after the one who wrestles, not the founder.  This is an astounding thought because Abraham represents the one who is promised blessing, but Jacob is the one who represents the human experience.  Jacob is the one who gets it wrong in order to fight his way through.

My concern would be if my friend just stopped caring.  If he did nothing, then I’d be wondering if the Gospel has been lost on my friend.  But I will choose to believe that God is actively sparring with my friend and saying, “Yes, see!  This is my son and he’s on his way home.”

What do you think?  Do you share my opinion or find pushback?

Postscript: James provided a nice follow up post called, Why Do I Follow Jesus? It provides some better insight into his wrestling.

Greg Boyd tweeted the above tweet this morning.  This is EXACTLY the argument I am making in my new book.  Everything goes back to the tree.  We cannot understand the Gospel, the mission of God and the cross without understanding what is happening with the tree.

Earlier today I posted about Peter Senge, who said:

“I think it’s because Buddhism presents itself as a way of life, and Christianity presents itself as a system of belief.”

I posted it because in many ways it caught my attention.  Sometimes perception is reality.  We read Christianity primarily through the lens of belief as opposed to a way of life.

And then Ken Silva posted a comment and said:

“I think it’s a tired old straw man who needs to retire.”

At first I had a sense of pushback, given that I think Peter is on to something. And the reason I say that is because if you visit virtually any church website, the primary means of defining the community is the list of beliefs.  We fight over doctrinal positions and interpretations the same way my dog chews on a ham hock, with every ounce of our being.

But a friend of mine suggested that at the same time Ken is also on to something.  Both are in essence correct. Christianity is seen and even presented as a system of belief, but it is not.  Christianity is then seen as a strawman, which kind of suggests why a lot of people I know complain about the state of the church.  We know we love Jesus, but we’re not really interested in what it means to follow.

What do you think?  Which side do you fall on, or both?

Len Hjalmarson quotes Brian McLaren and Peter Senge.

“Why are books on Buddhism so popular, and not books on Christianity?” Brian, feeling somewhat on the spot, pushed the question back to Senge. Senge suggested his own answer:

“I think it’s because Buddhism presents itself as a way of life, and Christianity presents itself as a system of belief. So I would want to get Christian ministers thinking about how to rediscover their own faith as a way of life, because that’s what people are searching for today. That’s what they need the most.”

What do you think?

“Christianity is in crisis – and in a deeper crisis, in my view, than many Christians are allowing themselves to believe.”

Top of the morning to you too. ;-P

I woke up this morning and began reading Andrew Sullivan’s interesting perspective on Christianity.  And I pick this out because Andrew represents for me the broader view of faith in America.  He’s extremely intelligent, refreshingly honest and insightful, shares a deep love of God, but doesn’t fall into neat little categories of evangelical belief.  He’s gay and I believe Catholic, but he also is one of the more important bloggers in America and has a huge audience that listens to him.  So when Andrew suggests Christianity is in crisis, people listen.

Andrew suggests that we’ve entered into a different period of faith.

“I start from a simple premise. There can be no conflict between faith and truth. If what we believe in is not true, it is worth nothing. The idea that one should insincerely support religious faith because it is good for others or for society is, for me, a profound blasphemy if you do not share the faith yourself. I respect atheists and agnostics who reject faith; I find it harder to respect fundamentalists – of total papal or Biblical authority – because of the blindness of their sincerity; but I have no respect for those who cynically praise religion for its social uses, while believing in none of it themselves. Sadly, a critical faction of the Straussian right has been engaged in exactly that kind of cynicism for a while now.”

“No modern Christian, it seems to me, can claim the literal inerrancy of the Bible without abandoning logos. No educated Christian today can deny that the scriptures we have – copies of translations of copies of copies of oral histories – are internally and collectively inconsistent, written by many authors, constructed in specific historical contexts, reflecting human biases, and supplemented by several other gospels that at the time claimed just as much authority as those gospels eventually selected by flawed men centuries later.”

While I don’t share Andrew’s (or Bart Ehrman’s) cynicism regarding the validity of Scripture, he brings up one really important point in his post.  He shares the tension that is the Catholic and Protestant problem.

“When the man whose authority rests on being the vicar of Christ on earth consigns children to rape rather than tarnish the image of the church, he simply has no moral authority left. Yes, his position deserves respect. But its claims to absolute authority have fallen prey to the human arc of what Lord Acton called “absolute corruption”.”

As Phyllis Tickle says, “Where now is our authority?”  If science, literary criticism, and reality are exposing the fallacy of a perfect Scriptures (the Protestant authority) and history is revealing the fallacy of the Papal authority (the Catholic authority), where is the authority?

Could this be a period of time that shifts authority back onto Jesus?  Andrew even suggests this.

“So we are left in search of this Jesus with a fast-burning candle in a constantly receding cave where we know that at some point, the darkness will envelop us entirely.”

What I love about this time in history is that we’re not only aware of the problem.  Because of the Internet, we’re also aware that we’re aware of the problem.  The crisis is as much our awareness as the problem. History is forcing us to face reality and we don’t like it. We’re conscious enough to know what hasn’t worked in the past but we don’t know how to progress in the future.  This is why I have suggested that we need a new story to progress forward. We need a better understanding of the problem and how to participate with God in faith.  And that structure must in some way recognize the reality of the problem, but suggest a logical, and wholistic solution.

So I would ask if you think Christianity is in crisis?

Over the last year I’ve been working on what I would call my manifesto.  It comes out of a lifetime journey of faith, twelve years of research into spiritual formation, thousands of hours of anthropological study, and countless hours of writing.  And that’s not even counting all the blood, sweat, and tears.  You can read an overview here.

My hope for the book is to begin providing the basis for a new conversation going forward.  In many ways we’ve reached a point of stasis with the critique of the church, religion,and our understanding of the Gospel, and the only way to progress is to offer something new.  The book will include a new atonement theory, and a reframing of sin, suffering, justice, and reconciliation.  It it is my hope to redeem the Gospel with this book.

I made my first presentation of the basic theories in the book at the Transform Gathering in DC.  It went really, really well. I want to thank the vast number of people who have provided feedback and support over the process of developing and writing this book.

I’m publishing it myself and looking forward to seeing where its going.  I’m in the finally proof edits process, which takes forever.  I’m also in the process of seeking endorsements for the book.  Once I’m done with both of those I will publish it.  It looks like it will be late June, early July.  You can pre-order a copy here with a 25% discount.  It will eventually be available on Amazon.

Doug Pagitt and I sat down for a fun talk.  I got to explore some of the background for my book. This happened just after the Transform Gathering.

Scot McKnight is perturbed.

Today, Scot began a series of three posts on Brian McLaren’s soul sort narrative, which is a specific contention Brian makes in his new book. Scot spends quite a bit of time arguing that Brian is presenting something nobody experienced. He says:

One reason I’m doing this series is that I’ve had a few say to me that they actually grew up with Brian’s soul-sort narrative. My contention is that they didn’t; nor can they find one gospel tract or one youth pastor who will ever admit to having believed in or preached Brian’s soul-sort narrative as he describes it. I’ll explain in another post why I think Brian sketches the narrative as he does.

There’s already over 23 comments, many of which are passionately for or against Scot’s argument. Scot main contention seems to be that Brian excludes Jesus from the six line narrative.

Instead, he’s got the fifth element in the Story as “salvation” and he brings in other terms like justification and atonement. What is amazingly absent here — and it’s a tragic omission — is Jesus Christ. Which conventional narrative has no place for the living, dying and ascended Jesus Christ? When Brian is actually describing this conventional narrative, and I don’t mean when he is setting up his narrative of creation and liberation and new creation (which, by the way, is a set of terms that was fashioned by theologians who believe in the six elements) that lead to Christ, there is no place for Jesus Christ in his narrative.

Scot finishes with:

Fine, but don’t call it “conventional.” There’s no “conventional” narrative that doesn’t make Jesus, as God’s redeeming Son and our Savior and our Lord, as the very center of the narrative. None. Ever.

Although I agree with Scot that the Brian’s portrayal is somewhat a caricature, I think Scot misses that this is how people perceive the issue.  It may not be presented exactly that way but that exactly how people see it presented. Brian’s six line narrative is seen from the individuals perspective.  Jesus gets us to “salvation”.  Salvation is the transaction that is supposed to occur.  It happens through Jesus but that’s secondary, even though its part of the story.   I grew up with the six line narrative and the point was largely framed around the “salvation” aspect, even though we did have Jesus as part of it.

But something struck me when reading Scot’s post. “Turnabout’s fair play.” Evangelicals have spent so much time presenting a caricature of Emergence, and now that Brian has done the same thing, it has put people on the defense. If Brian did anything, he presented a caricature of the traditional evangelical view.  And some would obviously not resonate with that caricature.  And now they have to defend their view.  I cannot tell you how many times I’ve read a post about Emergence and thought something similar to what Scot said.

And to be fair to Scot, he has been very fair of Emergence. But he does present himself as decidedly evangelical so I would expect him to defend the evangelical side.

I’m also not saying turnabout is fair play.  I’m suggesting there’s something to learn from it.  I’m learning in my life that I can’t convince someone else about what I think. If someone says, “You believe this,” and I don’t, there is not much I can do to convince the person otherwise. And it becomes very easy to spend all of my time trying to defend my belief, rather than live my belief. I’m also learning that when someone says, “You believe this,” it means that something I said probably contributed to that idea.  They believe it.  So it means listening to how I say things.

Update: After I posted this, I happened to read Tony Jone’s post from yesterday that provides exactly the opposite account from an Emergent position.