One of the biggest questions I am getting is why I used the word “New” in the subtitle of Discovering The God Imagination: Reconstructing A Whole New Christianity. It get this.  I really do.  It’s easy to assume that I’m presenting the idea that I’ve come to some special knowledge.  I haven’t.  The simple answer is that new represents the paradigm shift the book is intended to create.  Much like seeing an answer for the first time, that state of “Aha” is not technically new in that it being created as we speak.  It always existed.  But what changed was our capacity to see the new.  It became new for us.

This idea is called a paradigm shift, which for a while became a terribly overused word.  Stephen Covey brilliantly explored this idea with a simple story in Seven Habits.  A man walks onto a train to see another man’s kids causing havoc and disrupting the people on the train.  He’d annoyed that the father does nothing.  When he finally asks the father why, the father explain that their mother just died and he’s in shock.  Immediately the first man’s paradigm shifts and he’s no longer annoyed.  His paradigm shifts because he can see it in a “new” way.  He didn’t create anything.  He just saw it differently for the first time.

When we change the assumptions, we change the conclusions.

As I was finalizing production of the title of the book I was wrestling with the title.  “Discovering The God Imagination” was set for a long time.  But the original subtitle was actually “Reframing Suffering, Justice and Reconciliation in the Gospel Story.”  I sat on that subtitle for a long time.  And as much as it conveys the nature of the book, it doesn’t convey the change the book creates.  The argument I am making in the book is that our assumptions in the Garden of Eden create a perception of the problem God is solving.  And our historical assumptions get it wrong.  I argue that these assumptions are natural extensions of the actual root problem.  If we understand the problem we can expect these assumptions to be created.  They make sense from the perspective of the root problem, which is to blame, or to cast the problem away from where its actually located.  The act of blaming hides the capacity to see the location of the problem.  These assumptions then create a historical understanding of Christianity that is ultimately disempowering because it locates the problem incorrectly.  And thus our understanding of the cross becomes distorted.

All I did was re-examine the story to see if these assumptions held water.  And they didn’t. The story actually revealed a much different understanding of the root problem, which completely reframed everything.  In other words, the changed assumptions created a different perspective.  It created a paradigm shift in my understanding of Christianity that was new.  For the first time it reconciled in a way that spoke of a ferocious love.

I want to be clear that I’m not making the argument that this is special revelation or that I’m the first to get this.  I honestly believe many in the story like Noah, Abraham, and David got it.  I believe that Jesus clearly got it and communicated the basic understanding of the root problem to his disciples.  (I also have my assumptions about why God doesn’t spell it out to us, but I could be wrong.)  I believe that Paul and the first century church got it.  The evidence I would use for this is their exponential growth and life that just happened.  When we see the root problem, exponential growth is immediately possible. They fundamentally understood why love was so important to the process.  But over time that understanding became lost.

Today’s post is my contribution to the Eighth Letter project, which invites participants to compose letters to the North American church in the spirit of John’s seven letters of Revelation.  A handful of these letters will be chosen for public reading at the Eight Letter conference in October.

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To the Church in North America,

Much love you my brothers and sisters.  Our journey is about remembering.  It’s about discovering what has always been true.  As we enter a new age, one defined by media, social networking, and a longing for life, we’re beginning to see a change in culture that is unprecedented. People are beginning to question everything, including what it means to be a follower of Jesus in a unstable world.  In the midst of this doubt, people are longing for answers to the most fundamental questions of the soul.  What does it mean to be human?  Who am I?  And, what am I supposed to do?  But deeper than that, we’re all wondering, is there anybody out there who will love me?

The answer is yes.

I invite you to return to love. Return to the beginning of time, to the words that inform your soul and define your dignity. Return to the declaration that is imprinted on every human mind, “It is good.”  These are the very words of God, and inform the heart of love.  Love is simply a judgment of good.  These words inform our judgment of each and every person we encounter. Love reminds us that there is nothing we can do to lose the love of God?

God’s love can’t and won’t change because it was never dependent on circumstance.  We can’t change what was true.  But we can forget what is true.  We can judge ourselves as outside of God’s love and create a reality that blinds us from God’s love.  Much of the problem we encounter is biological.  As human beings created in the image of God, we do what God does.  We create and we judge.  But unlike God, we’re bent towards seeing ourselves as unlovable because we assume God is like us.  We’re bent towards seeing love as dependent on tangible things, as conditional. Once we enter into the space of doubt, our minds are biased towards thinking God can’t love us.  So we run.

Thank God for the cross.  I implore you to remember that the cross is not defining God’s statement of love. Grace was always true, from the beginning of time. The cross is God’s defining statement that reiterates the love that was always there. Thank God that Jesus was willing to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that God will always love us.  God never loses site of good.  God never forgets his own words.

So we embrace love because it is the defining act of humanity.  To be human means getting the judgment right.  This is wholeness. When we love we are remembering who we are. It strips the blinders off to the one thing that gives us peace, what is true.  We know its true because it produces something valuable. It allows us to rule over the body in a way that produces life.  Love allows us to step into the spaces of pain and suffering, and remained undefined by it.  It allows us to give without the necessity of obligation or receiving.  It allows us to see past the constructed identities of black or white, Muslim or Christian, American or African, or homosexual or heterosexual, to the one true identity that informs the soul, one of child of the living God. It allows us to rule over the self in a way that produces Shalom.

When Jesus simplified everything to the command of love, He was giving us God’s original structure.  Everything came down to the simplicity of love.  We’re free to do anything but we’re guided by love.  To love was a return to God’s rule, to the Kingdom of God.  When we love we’re revealing heaven in our midst.  To love is to see the God image in each and every human being, including ourselves.  Love validates our own dignity as much as the other.

So I invite you to return to love so that you may experience life in its fullest. Much love.

Your brother, Jonathan

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Jonathan Brink is sharing some key insights regarding questions that matter to all of us: What defines us as human beings? Are we good or evil from God’s perspective and in the way God places worth and value on human beings? How does the biblical narrative identify the reason for God allowing us to probe the possibility of evil and how did “the Fall” impact our own judgment of God’s attitude and of our dignity and identity? What if the impact of false judgment and derailed thinking caused us to read the story itself in a skewed way, reflecting that same broken understanding of God and humanity ever since? What if the root problem and God’s response is much simpler than we thought possible?

Brink goes into great detail exploring particularly the opening chapters of the Bible. He demonstrates over and over again how the changed human perspective misreads and contradicts God’s actual intent and judgment. He also illustrates beautifully how the calling of Abram and the history of Israel become the blueprint of God meeting people where they are at and preparing them to understand both the futility of our own attempts to find validation and identity apart from God’s judgment of “good”, and the true view of reality from God’s point of view. He proposes a radically different understanding of the atonement that takes into account the actual reason why God had to become (!) sin in order to demonstrate His unchanging love and invite us to overcome the root problem.

I really loved this book for several reasons:

1. It brought many “puzzle pieces” of my own questions and past discoveries over the years together into a coherent picture that makes sense to me personally and offers a compelling view of both the Old Testament and the rationale of the Christian Gospel.

2. It is wonderfully liberating in its focus on the eternal nature of God’s love and grace.

3. It is insightful not only regarding the theological aspects of the story but also more recent scientific discoveries how our brains work and how the brain creates a sense of reality and personal judgment.

4. It breaks through many unhelpful and paralyzing paradigms, helping me to see how our participation through faith (which is identified as the ability to “see” the truth and agree with it) mobilizes us, instead of making us into passive recipients of a falsely understood rescue of God.

5. It helps us to see and embrace not only our own identity, dignity and purpose of love but also in every other human being, independent of their gender, race, sexuality, religious affiliation etc. It particularly compels us to see the “enemy” no longer as the problem and as a threat to ward off in order to secure our own existence but as another human being, with the same dignity, struggling with the same root problem.

I highly recommend the purchase of the book. It still inspires me daily to think about the wider implications in a multitude of areas: evangelism, a Christian approach to ethics and justice, ecclesiology, a new perspective on heaven and hell, biblical hermeneutics etc.

This post is part of the Emergent Village Synchroblog on “Creating Liberated Spaces in a Post-Colonial World.”

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As a white, Anglo-Saxon, American male, I am a man of significant power.  And I didn’t do anything to achieve it.  I am given a ridiculous amount of power simply for the fact that I was born that way.

Almost four years ago I was deep into my Masters in Organizational Leadership at Gonzaga, taking a class on race, gender and social class.  As you can imagine it was not a fun class for me.  Much of what we had to read for the class explored the historical elements of the conflicts in gender, class and race within the American history, and how powerful white men subjugated just about everybody. Each paper I wrote essentially required me to confront a legacy of what it means to be similar to those who have been in power in history.

Without exception, white men would come into an indigenous culture and colonize it. They would enforce a way of life onto the people already living with the land. This practice was especially horrific for the native American’s who eventually lost their ability to even speak their own native language.    But we can’t ignore that the process stripped people of their original identity, one that had hundreds of years of meaning and tradition behind it.  The end result came at the expense of the person.

Wikipedia defines colonialism as:

“Colonialism is the building and maintaining of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. Colonialism is a process whereby sovereignty over the colony is claimed by the metropole and social structure, government and economics within the territory of the colony are changed by the colonists. Colonialism is a certain set of unequal relationships, between metropole and colony and between colonists and the indigenous population.”

Colonialism argues for the moral superiority of specific way of thought, especially defined by a culture and morality, and then inflicts that thought onto the indigenous culture.  Much of this historical process was in the name of the Gospel.  But in most cases, the process didn’t begin with the Gospel.  It began with an entire way of life that robbed individuals of how they already lived.  In other words, people didn’t just get the Gospel.  They were forced to take on an Anglo-Saxon way of living.  And if we’re really honest, in the end it’s not really about the Gospel. It’s about control.  It’s about constructing a world that is safe and secure at the expense of people’s humanity.  It’s about making it look like me.  We invade for the sake of removing the “other”.  And then we craft a world that looks like us.  I don’t doubt that some had good intentions, but the ends rarely justify the means.

A new response is emerging, one called Post-colonialism.

“The ultimate goal of post-colonialism is combating the residual effects of colonialism on cultures. It is not simply concerned with salvaging past worlds, but learning how the world can move beyond this period together, towards a place of mutual respect. This section surveys the thoughts of a number of post-colonialism’s most prominent thinkers as to how to go about this.”

With the advent of media, we can no longer ignore the history of colonialism.  Post-colonialism requires us to confront our legacies.

The class had a profound affect on me.  It required me to confront the destructive notion of power and compelled me deeper into what it means to let go of that power.  As a white man, I can enjoy it, most likely at the expense of someone different than me.  Or I can use it to confront injustice.  As much as I enjoy the fact that I live in one of the most powerful nations in the history of the world, I can no longer ignore the cost it took to achieve that power.

The irony is that the Gospel suggests a kingdom that doesn’t invade a person’s life and then expects them to immediately reject everything they used to know.  It suggests a kingdom that begins with where the person is at and then transforms their way of seeing reality from within.  What this means is that transformation is intrinsic, not extrinsic. Each person determines the change.  It begins with participation, not the subjugation, of the individual.  And the best part is that change is determined by the act of love, one that consistently produces life, not death. One of my favorite stories in the Bible is Jesus letting the rich man walk away.  For Jesus, the kingdom of God does not invade someone and then inflict a way of living onto them.  It is offered and then received.

The temptation of colonialism is to make things happen, usually NOW.  We assume that God wants things done yesterday.  It’s the idea that we’re actually furthering the kingdom of God by forcing it upon someone.  Yet Jesus did very little to make things happen.  He didn’t force it.  Instead, he participated in its happening.  He simply made himself available to what God was already doing.  And when the opposing kingdom made it very clear it didn’t want the Kingdom of God, Jesus REFUSED to just make it happen.  And when it got really bad, Jesus revealed the reality of the kingdom of God by giving his own life.

Jesus let go of power.

So how do we create liberated spaces in a post-colonial world?  Renowned author Paulo Freire argued extensively in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed that the problem almost never goes away unless those in control choose to give up power.  In order for positive change to happen, they must give it up willingly.  They don’t because once they do the people who were subjugated rise up and kill them.  In other words, the oppressed do the only thing they’ve ever been taught, which is to oppress.

I would suggest it begins by giving up power and refusing to invade the other.  It begins by finding the beauty that is already present in indigenous cultures.  It begins by looking past our own prejudices to discover the image of God staring back at us.  It begins with love.  It begins with seeing what God sees, which is the dignity of the other and the self.

So I choose to love.

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Other participants:

– Annie Bullock at Marginal Theology marginaltheology.wordpress.com

– Julie Clawson at onehandclapping julieclawson.com

– Nelson Costa (in Portuguese) at www.nelsoncostajr.com

– Natanael Disla (in Spanish) at karmatarsis.wordpress.com

– Carol Howard Merritt at TribalChurch.org tribalchurch.org

– Dave Ingland at www.daveingland.com

– Mihee Kim-Kort at first day walking miheekimkort.com

– Crystal Lewis at Jesus Was A Heretic, Too. jesuswasaheretictoo.blogspot.com

– Katie Mulligan at The Adventures of Tiny Church tinychurchnj.blogspot.com

– Ann Pittman at anncpittman.blogspot.com

– Danielle Shroyer at danielleshroyer.com

Some days I realize that I just need to stop and listen. So I’m interested in hearing from those who read this blog. I’d like to know a little about you so I’m gonna be posting some short questions that help me understand you the reader.

Question #1: What is the one thing you are passionate about and would do even if it were illegal?  Come on! Fess up.  There has to be something.

Discovering the God Imagination is now available at Amazon for $19.99.  If you don’t see the $19.99 price is simply means the server hasn’t updated. Also don’t be confused by the old cover at Amazon.  It should go into print in about a week.

Okay, so the orange cover is going away.  Behold the a sneak peak at the new cover. It should be updated in Amazon in the next week.  Feedback is always appreciated.

What if philosophers got it wrong? What if the basic notion that we are hard-wired for narcissism and self-interest is not as true our our forefathers adamantly ascribed?

I’m deep into The Empathic Civilization, a profound work of human understanding. Jeremy Rifkin suggests that science is now calling into question just about all of our pre-existing notions of human enlightenment and philosophies, many are built on the notion that humans are selfish brutes.  Science is now revealing a little thing called mirror-neurons, which reveal that we are hired wired for connection.  It doesn’t mean we don’t have selfish interests.  It suggests that our bodies are hired wired to transcend those selfish interests automatically.

Mirror neurons work very simply.  In order to understand the world, we internally reconstruct what we see happening outside of our bodies.  In other words, our bodies create meaning by reliving what we see in others.  This ability reveals that we are hard-wired to connect, to feel what others are feelings, to engage other’s pain and suffering, and to help transcend those maladies.

“The essential point is that mirror neurons underwrite the ability to recognize what helps or distresses others, what they suffer and enjoy, what they need and what harms them.” – A.C. Grayling

Rifkin begins his great work by suggesting that there is a strange relationship happening inside the body.

“At the very core of the human story is the paradoxical relationship between empathy and entropy.”  Rifkin,  (p 2)

Empathy is the fullest realization of our design as human beings created in the image of God.  Entropy is the fullest negation of it. So the question is then what keeps us locked into a state of entropy?  What keeps us from realizing what our bodies are already designed to experience?

I wonder if we’re afraid of empathy because if we experience what the other person is experiencing it may just captivate us.  This is the tension of the human story.  Does the experience of evil make us evil? Can we change reality?  I would suggest that this is the underlying tension of the human experience.  Can God transcend what we’ve done and love us then? I would also suggest that the basic human journey is to participate with Jesus in overcoming this death.

This is the brilliance of grace. Grace is the original framework that allows us to live in the midst of chaos and not be defined by it. Actions, or what we’ve done was never the basis for human dignity, or value.  God’s declarations were.

So my question is this.  What keeps you from experiencing what you are already designed to do, which is connection and relationship?

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How much of our fear is self-generated but untrue?

This TED video is presents journalist David McCandless who create infographics to understand the meaning of our data.  When we present data in relationship to other data it gives it a deeper meaning and helps us understand it better.

But at 3:10 he begins to present the data regarding fear. Much of that fear was self-generated by the media including Sars, Swine flu, bird flu and even the millennium bug. What is interesting is listening to the audience laugh in retrospect. In hindsight they know each of these sensations was nothing nothing more than a small problem made big by the media.  And now they can laugh about it.  Much like a horror movie, we take part in the fear, screaming out the moment the bad guy jumps out.  But then we laugh with the joke because we know it was a trick.

Why do you think we do this?

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This is one of the most powerful videos on the the subject of war I have EVER seen. The speech is given by war veteran Mike Prysner.  I would really encourage you, regardless of your views of military service, to watch it. Mike strikes at the heart of the problem of war. The real enemy is racism, which is simply another way of saying, “someone not like me.”

You can read the transcript here but a few choice lines stood out to me.

“I tried hard to be proud of my service but all I could feel was shame.  The racism could no longer mask the reality of the occupation.  These were people.  These were human beings.”

“We are told we are fighting terrorists; the terrorists was me and the real terrorism is in this occupation.”

“Racism is a vital weapon employed by this government. It is more important than a rifle, a tank, a bomber or a battleship. While all of those weapons are created and owned by this government, they are harmless without people willing to use them.”

“They don’t have to fight the war, they merely have to sell the war.”

My favorite was, “Understand that their power lies only in their ability to convince us that war, oppression and exploitation is in our interest.”

“Without racism we realize that we have more  common with the Iraq people than we have with billionaires that send us to  war.”

I’ve always been frustrated at my ability to effectively communicate my tension with the idea of military service. I have good friends who have served, and while I want to honor what they have done, I cannot honor the idea behind it.  I honor the person serving but not the idea they are serving.  And I don’t think my tension is singular. The video received 6821 likes and 312 dislikes.  This video has finally given me and understanding of why.  In participating in it we become the very enemy we are seeking to destroy. To participate in it it to become it.  And I can’t desire that for anyone.

[ht: Jeff Straka]