Theology Archives - Page 11 of 11

Knowing God

April 21, 2010 Theology Comments are closed

Reflections on what it means to connect with the divine

Growing up in the church, I was aware of the cerebral nature of my particular faith tradition – the Christian Reformed Church – from an early age. Whether it was memorizing Lord’s Day Questions and Answers from the Heidelberg Catechism, or being able to answer doctrinal questions before the council when I was preparing to make a profession of faith – these are what constituted the heart of the Christian faith, as I understood it for a long time. In our circles, what mattered most to parents concerning their children was 1) that we stayed out of trouble; and 2) we memorized the catechism. As long as those two things were happening, it was assumed we were good Christian (Reformed) kids. Little was talked about in terms of an actual faith experience. Our creeds and confessions and formalized answers seemed designed to protect us from anything that could be termed an actual encounter with the divine.

Today it seems that two (among many) of the various struggles that churches across the denominational spectrum have are: 1) how to reach young people; and 2) how to maintain a particular theological and denominational identity in a world that is increasingly pluralistic and post-denominational, and decreasingly concerned about theological particularities.

Perhaps it comes down to a question of ‘knowing’. What does it mean to ‘know God’? Is it primarily being aware of the historical and theological distinctions of a particular tradition and being able to regurgitate these facts on demand? Or is it something else?

Personally, it was not in a catechism class that I first really encountered God. It wasn’t in brooding over the theological nuances and complexities of election. None of that penetrated my heart. None of that impacted my soul. It was all just a lot of ‘right answers’. But what good are answers to questions you’ve never asked?

Christian was a name I wore, and it gave me a vague sense of comfort, but that was about it. Faith was something I could give a nice, tight theological formulation of, but didn’t really hold. There was a sense in which I knew a lot about God, but didn’t actually know Him. And it seems to me that my church experience was geared to achieve exactly that.

For me, once I began to see and experience God in everyday life, once I realized that faith is a journey – one I had to experience myself – it seems I really began to know him. The more I encountered the person of Jesus, the more alive it became. And in that moment, it really didn’t matter how you defined it, or what they said about such encounters back in the late Middle Ages in Germany, or during church councils in the Byzantine era. This was real. This was now.

It seems to me that this kind of encounter was what captured the hearts and minds of the disciples and the early Christians in Jerusalem, Galilee, and various parts of the Roman Empire. Knowing God had nothing to do with answering a bunch of questions about God. It had to do with a transformative encounter. The ongoing impact and relationship with the man from Galilee was what fueled the movement, not a precise definition of a yet-to-be-articulated Trinity. If you had asked our ‘essential’ doctrinal questions in the late first century to a collection of disciples, they likely would have responded with quizzical looks on their faces, shrugged their shoulders, and gone about the business of living and declaring the kingdom of God.

Knowing for the early believers (in their Hebraic context) meant personal knowledge. It meant they were in a relationship rooted in an ongoing transformational encounter. It could be summed up in one word: love. That is how 1 John 4:8 can say, “Whoever does not love does not know God.” This kind of knowledge is not the same as other kinds of knowing. A physicist can be a terrible neighbor and spouse, yet be a brilliant physicist with a terrific knowledge of science. His moral life and actions do not impact this knowledge. Yet knowledge of God is always transformational: “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.” A person with this kind of knowledge is not concerned primarily with defining God, but with living a life which God is defining.

And so I wonder if our continued emphasis on doctrinal and confessional statements derived out of theological feuds in the middle ages might ironically be the very thing that protects us from encountering God in the first place. Much like an oft-repeated prayer can keep us from turning on our brains to have an actual conversation with God himself, so might our theological presumptions keep us from having to ‘know’ God in the biblical sense. Knowledge of God is always partial. One theologian notes that it is much like an infant who knows and loves her mother, yet has no way to articulate that knowing, other than to be grasped and known by the mother. He rightly concludes, “It is ridiculous to imply that a baby can really only love her mother if she understands her.”

Now some will say, “But a child grows up and is able to articulate more things about her mother.” Certainly. Yet it is all centered around a relationship, around engaging with the mother in everyday situations. That is the key. The child will never sit down memorizing a list of dozens of questions and answers about her mother in the case that a quiz might be given. The absurdity of it scarcely needs mentioning.

It is God who knows us, and in being known, we know (in part). There is a world of difference between our understanding of God, and God as He really is. And it is precisely in our continued pride over theological correctness that we find ourselves in opposition to other Christians (not to mention other religious traditions) and disconnecting from young people who couldn’t care less about theological precision but care an awful lot about questions of identity and purpose, and about the economic, political and social realities of their world. They want to know what faith has to do with the world they’re actually living in.

I am not encouraging ignorance of, nor rejection of, our theological traditions. Rather, I am advocating moving beyond our preoccupation with theological knowledge and correctness, so that we might become more open to being engaged by the source of all of our speculation. And as He engages us, may we increasingly become the articulation of who He is to the world around us. That is a definition that matters to all of us.

Rev. Bryan Berghoef is the pastor of Watershed, a faith community in Traverse City, MI. He facilitates weekly Pub Theology discussions on Thursday nights at Right Brain Brewery, in Traverse City’s Warehouse District. This article originally appeared in Traverse City’s Record-Eagle.

Found and Lost

April 8, 2010 Culture, Theology, Travels Comments are closed

Reflections on the spiritual merits of losing your way

I recently traveled to a relatively large city that I was unfamiliar with: Belfast, in Northern Ireland. I had never been there before, so I watched a Rick Steve’s video on Ireland, perused a guidebook or two, and picked up a map of the city at the airport.

My first instinct was to chart out a plan for what to see in the city. So I made a list in my head. First stop: a used bookstore near Queen’s University, which was a gem of a place – old dusty books, some on shelves, some scattered haphazardly; dirty, marked-up tables with melted candles on them serving as both cafe and reading area. I nearly picked up an old Paul Tillich volume, but it proved to be out of my budget, so I settled on a paperback for three pounds – Violence, by Slavoj Zizek. Next I wandered over to the University to sit in on a class. Somehow I ended up in a lecture for Accounting 101 rather than Irish Culture in Art and Image (so much for planning!) Fortunately Zizek got me through the class. Then I stopped in at a pub for some food and my first Guinness in Ireland, as recommended by the guidebook. Great stuff. So far so good. All according to plan (mostly).

The next day I decided to do it a little differently. I left the guidebook in the hotel room. I refused to consult the map. I stepped out the door onto the street, and amidst the busy-ness of taxis, buses, and pedestrians, acted like I knew where I was going. I had no idea. I just walked. And walked. And walked. Noticed the shops, the pubs, the people. Saw several old churches. City hall. Turned up an alleyway. More shops. Should I keep going this way? I have no idea where I am. Yet as I was getting more and more ‘lost’, I felt a profound excitement – this was new territory, there were places to discover, and I felt as though on the edge of discovery. This was a journey. This was living. Planned is certainly OK, but the unknown somehow allures.

Is this not true in relationships? The relation to the other, says John Caputo, is “bracing but risky business.” He gives an example: When you get married, you are saying “I do” not only to who this person is, or who you think this person is, but to whomever or whatever this person is going to become, which is unknown and unforeseen to the both of you. In other words, it’s a risk – what Levinas called, a “beautiful risk,” yet a risk all the same. This willingness to go forward despite (and perhaps at some level because of) the risk is what leads us to call it beautiful. Caputo quips, “If it were a sure thing, it would be about as beautiful as a conversation with your stockbroker.”

I keep walking. Another street. Another small alley with stone pavers. What’s this? A cafe with outdoor seating. Old wooden tables. Flower beds awaiting spring. A man standing outside, smoking. I thought, ‘What the heck?’ and went in. Inside was more like a traditional pub. I walk up to the bar.

Bartender: “What’ll you have, mate?”
“Do you have coffee?”
“Sure – Cappuccino, Latte, Americano.”
“I’ll have an Americano – for outside.”
“Right then.”

I ended up having an enjoyable couple hours reading outside this small cafe, eating lunch, reading Zizek, and drinking good coffee. Further, I asked the guy smoking to take my picture, and we got into a great conversation. Introduced myself as Bryan and he said, “I’m Brian as well.” After complimenting each other on our great names, he asked why I was there, and I mentioned something about a conference on theology. Said I was a pastor. He said, “I grew up strictly religious, but I’m an atheist myself.”

I asked him if he had a good question for my friends meeting at the pub back in the States. He answered by way of telling me about a book he had written: A Dream of Jesus in My Cocktail, or something to that effect (still seeking publication). It’s about three missionaries to S. Africa who refuse to engage in the physical and social challenges facing the people, but merely offer them the panacea of hope after this life. Then the question: “Is it wrong to delude people if the delusion is serving the greater good?”

He had to jet, work was calling. I had another Americano and kept reading. After awhile the weather began to turn, so I decided to head out and explore a little more. Found a few other nooks and crannies, and some that came in handy later in the week. I learned the city with my feet rather than from a book. I saw it with my own eyes, not just on TV. I got lost. And in getting lost, something was found. Here I was at a conference which was exploring new ways to articulate the journey of faith, about exploring the sometimes fuzzy edge between theism and atheism, and I run into a local man who grew up religious and thinks he has left all that rubbage behind, yet clearly has not. A terrific discovery that could never have been “planned” or even “foreseen”.

I wonder how this relates to our spiritual journeys. My sense is that traditionally we like to go ‘by the book’. In other words, we’re on a journey, but the trail has already been blazed. All we need to do is look for the signposts left by all who have gone before. The discovery is all done. The theological trail has been marked. Just as there are no explorers discovering new continents on our planet anymore, so it seems there is no new spiritual territory to discover. In What Would Jesus Deconstruct, John Caputo asks, “When is faith really faith?” Great question, and I don’t have a simple answer for that. His response: “Not when it is looking more and more like we are right, but when the situation is beginning to look impossible, in the darkest night of the soul.” In our circles, we didn’t let people come back who admitted to having a ‘dark night of the soul’. We needed security. Certainty. And we had it, or so we thought.

But I wonder what kind of a journey this really is? Caputo ponders the nature of a journey: “If you knew very well where you were going from the start and had the means to get there, it would almost be like getting there before you even set out, or like ending up where you were all along.” Indeed. If it’s all charted territory, and there is no discovery – is it actually a journey? Or are we willing to traverse places where there are bends in the road around which we cannot yet see? It seems to me that this is the essence of what faith is about. If the path is already lit, if there are no moments of darkness, if the map has been drawn – then of what need is faith? True faith, at its core, involves radical trust. So if there is no element of risk, no venturing into the unknown, then our spiritual journeys have never really left home. Caputo continues: “Going to a place we already know how to reach or going with a tour guide who has mapped out every stop along the way, or along a paved road with guard rails, rest stops, and food stands where everyone speaks English, is hardly a journey at all.”

This extends not just to our personal faith lives, but to our churches as well. My experience in being part of starting a new church is that many people inevitably ask, “So what is the long-range plan?”, “What’s next?” or “Where is this thing going?” The understood (and hoped-for) answer generally has to do with stability, money, perhaps even a building. My usual answer has been, “I don’t know exactly.” We know what things we value, what kind of ethos we are seeking to have as a community, but as to how all that plays out – who knows? Indeed, who can know, as we have not yet been there. We seem to want to squeeze out any room for the Spirit, which Jesus noted “blows wherever it will”. We eschew the need for actual faith. We want to know if we’re investing in something that is “going to make it”, or “headed for success”, otherwise we’ll invest our time and energy elsewhere. So much for risk. So much for faith. Yet Caputo puts it this way: “The more credible things are, the less faith is needed, but the more incredible things seem, the more faith is required, the faith that is said to move mountains.”

And so as I wandered around Belfast with no real idea where I was going, it felt as though I were really on a journey. What was around the bend? Where would this street lead? Where would be my next stop? Who would I meet? The times that were not mapped out and were not on the itinerary were some of the highlights of my trip (we’ll have to save the story of Pete Rollins getting us lost on the way back to Belfast from the North Coast for another time). It was the moments in which I was, you might say, “creatively adrift”, and on a true adventure (ad-venire), in which the “incoming” of something unforeseeable was made possible. That is a journey worth taking, or as my friends at Ikon would sing: “I once was found, but now I’m lost.”

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A shortened version of this article was published in the Traverse City Record-Eagle.

What is the Emerging Church?

April 8, 2010 Theology Comments are closed

Many people have questions about terms like the ‘emergent church’ or the ‘emerging church’, and wonder, well what exactly does that mean?

The Re-Emergence Conference I attended in Belfast recently helped clear up some of that for me. Phyllis Tickle, one of the featured speakers, noted that there is a shift happening in Christianity, and it’s something that happens every 500 years or so. Most recently was the (Great) Reformation in the 1500’s, before that was the Great Schism between the East and West portions of the church, before that was the Great decline and fall of the Roman Empire, with Christianity recently becoming the official religion of the empire, and before that was the life of Jesus, called by some the Great Transformation. (And if we want to go back further, 500 years before Jesus was the Babylonian exile, the end of 1st Temple Judaism and the beginnings of second temple Judaism, and 500 years before that was the beginning of the monarchy in Israel with David. Note that all of these dates are approximations, nobody is suggesting it is 500 years to the day.)

Tickle and other experts assert that today we are entering a similar time of broad change. When these changes happen, certain things are brought under question and examination – in the Reformation one major issue was ‘who or what is our authority?’, and the answer shifted from ‘the church’, to ‘the Bible’, or sola Scriptura. That was one major aspect of the shift at that time and helped spark the birth of Protestant Christianity (noting there were many other factors as well).

Today similar questions are being asked:

1) What is a human being? (Tickle: “For the first time in human history we do not know what a human being is.” She noted the shift from Descartes to Freud to Jung among others.)

2) How do we relate to other faiths and religions? (We live in a ‘glocalized’ world, where global and local concerns, realities, traditions, religions intersect, and the old imperial/colonial mentality of Christianity (‘the need to convince everyone’) perhaps needs to be rethought or reunderstood.)

3) What is our understanding of the doctrine of the atonement? (In other words, what did Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection accomplish? What was he about? Our understanding of that typically comes from a medieval development stemming from Augustine and more fully articulated by Anselm of Canterbury in Cur Deus Homo, or ‘Why God Became Man.’)

4) What is our authority and what exactly is the Bible? (Given scientific discoveries, biblical criticism, etc.)

These shifts are happening throughout Christianity, and there are various aspects of it under a variety of names: the emerging church, missional church, the emergent church, fresh expression, de-church, faith collectives, the house church movement, the new monasticism, hyphenateds (meaning a combination of a specific tradition with emerging church aspects, such as Anglican-Emergent, Reformed-Emergent, Presby-Emergent). No aspect of Christianity will remain unaffected by this shift.

Some hear the word ‘emergent’, and say we should run away from it. Those are usually people who don’t know very much about it, or only have ‘second-hand’ knowledge of it – in other words, they’ve only read what other people have written about it (usually condemning it), without reading authors who are a part of the movement itself. Some criticisms are that it ‘doesn’t take the Bible seriously’, or ‘isn’t faithful to Jesus’, or has ‘weak theology’, for example. Tickle noted that this couldn’t be further from the truth.

She says there is a profound depth to the theology of those who are a part of this shift, and I would totally agree. Authors like NT Wright, Walter Brueggemann, Marcus Borg, Brian McLaren, Scot McKnight, Dallas Willard, and Walter Wink, to name just a few, have done some incredible studying, thinking and writing about who Jesus was and how we are to understand the gospel and Christianity today. My own sense is that these individuals have such incredible respect and love for the Bible and for Jesus that they are willing to ask the hard questions, questions that might cause us to rethink what we thought we knew about exactly who Jesus was and what his message was/is. Those opposed to change are often ironically a product of major changes that have already happened in the faith (e.g., the Reformation or the invention of the printing press).

The questions many of these authors in the emerging world are asking are: how does the culture of the authors of the Bible affect what they are saying, how does the broader political, geographical and cultural context help us frame certain events and writings, how did the original readers of a text understand it, and how have our own modern, post-Enlightenment, post-Reformation biases affected our understandings of the text? Some are opposed to doing any rethinking about any of this, and think we’ve already arrived at all the answers (Thank you, John Calvin and Martin Luther. Of course we forget that even Calvin and Luther had a religious and political milieu within which they were living and reacting against). If you ask me, a faith that refuses to ask questions, refuses to engage with the text and take it on its own terms (as much as possible), a faith that thinks it has already arrived, is a faith that is not living but dead.

The wonderful thing to me is that many in the emerging church are finding that the gospel is bigger, broader, and more beautiful than we’ve thought. Jesus wasn’t just about helping individuals escape punishment in the hereafter, he was articulating a new way to be human, not just individually, but in community, as it relates to a local community of people (of varying beliefs/backgrounds) as well as to the various political and social realities we find ourselves in. Jesus did not come to start a new religion but to announce and embody the kingdom of God. This embraces and includes all of life, all people (not just Christians), and the entire universe. It is truly good news.

I hope this is somewhat helpful, as many are asking these questions and wondering what this whole emergent or emerging church thing is. It is not something to be scared of, and the reality is – you are in the midst of it, whether you know it or not. Phyllis Tickle noted that emergents are people who are skeptical of denominations and mega-churches, are allergic to owning a church building, are interested in exploring and developing their faith in community and conversation, are eager to draw on some of the other great Christian traditions other than their own, and are interested in how art, faith and justice connect and interweave. Perhaps some of that resonates with you. Above all, it is a conversation – one you are invited to join.

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Tickle has a great book on this whole shift, called, aptly, “The Great Emergence”. I cannot do justice to the whole conference, or even one lecture, let alone a book in a short posting, but feel free to leave a comment or send me a note if you want to discuss it further.

If you haven’t listened to the BBC audio of the conference (a 5 min clip), check it out, there you can hear Phyllis Tickle, Dave Tomlinson, Peter Rollins, and myself, among others.

Here is a short explanation from Tickle herself:

Musings from the Pub

April 7, 2010 Theology Comments are closed

Every once in a while, it’s good to ask yourself, “When was the last time I had a real conversation with someone who doesn’t believe in God? Do I even know anyone like that?”

The reality is that people of no religious belief are one of the fastest-growing segments of the population. They’re also just the sort of people Jesus engaged.

With this in mind, our church began to contemplate how we could connect with people who would never set foot in a church on Sunday morning. We decided we had to go where people were already hanging out. So a year and a half ago, on an October Thursday evening, we started a conversation group called “Pub Theology.”

We had cleared the plan with the owner of a local brewery and put up a few posters, but we weren’t really sure what to expect. More than 15 people showed up that first night, and we’ve rarely missed a Thursday since.

In many ways we’ve connected with the crowd we set out to meet: people who have left the church but consider themselves “spiritual” individuals who believe in an undefined higher power, atheists, Buddhists, and others. It’s an open environment: there are no presentations or lectures, just good talk over a good brew.

Fertile Ground and a Safe Place

One of Pub Theology’s regular attenders, Steve, is an atheist. He loves coming because it’s the first time he’s met Christians who are willing to admit they don’t know it all. “If more Christians were like this, I would be much more open toward people of faith,” he said to me. Many of the Christians who attended Pub Theology have said the same thing about people of unbelief. That is a healthy development. It opens the door to meaningful relationships that can become fertile ground where the gospel can be seen, experienced, and shared.

Rebecca, a former Christian who openly declares her lack of belief in God, noted that Pub Theology feels like a “safe place” to talk about matters of faith. She also says she never senses a tone of condescension. “So often you try to talk to people about this stuff and it’s clear they feel superior to you and are less than subtle about their underlying agenda to convert you to their position,” she said.

Hanging out at the pub this past year has taught me that I have a lot to learn from people who think differently than I do. One of the unfortunate tendencies of Christians, myself included, is to surround ourselves only with people who think like us. This limits our own ability to think, to learn, to ask questions, to grow. It’s hard to be objective about something when you’ve never heard another perspective. It’s also easy to start thinking that you’ve got all the answers. Or that your answers are the best answers. Or that you need to talk with non-Christians only so you can “tell them how it is.”

Certainly we should be enthusiastic about what we believe and desire to share those beliefs with others, but we are shortsighted and ignorant if we think we’ve got the whole world figured out. Not to mention that few people enjoy talking with someone who thinks he or she has all the answers; the conversation tends to be a bit one-sided.

Persuading by Love

Often in encounters with people of different beliefs, Christians end up using oversimplified arguments in an aggressive way. In other words, we attempt to persuade someone by the cold facts, rather than by love and by reliance on the Holy Spirit.

In opposition to this, consider the apostle Paul: “When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. . . . My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power” (1 Cor. 2:1-5).

Consider also the approach Jesus took. Rarely do we see him engaging in arguments about God’s existence or even attempting to prove who he was through his miracles. In fact, many times Jesus’ miracles were for a different purpose: to bring healing. And often when someone wanted to tell everyone else about it, Jesus told that person to keep quiet.

Peter Rollins, in his book How (Not) to Speak of God, elaborates: “Instead of offering a scientific explanation that would convince, or publicizing the miracles so as to compel his listeners, Jesus engaged in a poetic discourse that spoke to the heart of those who would listen. In a world where people believe they are not hungry, we must not offer food but rather an aroma that helps them desire the food that we cannot provide.”

In our gatherings at the pub, we’ve had evenings where some well-intentioned Christians have shown up armed with Bibles, tracts, and pamphlets. Their agendas are written on their sleeves, and the conversations in these instances rarely go well. (Mis)treating people as the objects of evangelism has negative effects on them and on us: others can sense when we aren’t listening or aren’t taking their beliefs seriously. They are repelled by that, and we miss opportunities to learn something or to befriend someone when we open our mouths and not our ears.

Encounters with people of different beliefs will, for many Christians, be eye-opening, difficult, and challenging, perhaps requiring us to critically examine long- and deeply-held beliefs. To participate honestly and lovingly is to open yourself up to sometimes scary doubts. If you choose to do this, prayerful preparation may be required.

Unexpected Blessings

These interactions definitely come with unexpected blessings as well. Sitting at the table with agnostics, atheists, Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Muslims, Buddhists, and others has broadened my own perspective in a healthy way. I’ve learned things about other faith traditions, other ways of seeing the world. I’ve been forced to examine the things I believe and the things I take for granted. This is a good and healthy thing.

I’ve also learned that Christians aren’t the only people who want good things to happen in the world. While people of different belief systems may have different motivations for doing good, we can often agree on far more than we think. Even though people of non-belief are one of the fastest-growing elements of the population, we should not fear that statistic. Rather, we should see it as an opportunity to meet someone who sees the world differently yet often cares for it equally.

Today, when believers are portrayed as “delusional” and atheists caricatured as “evil,” we need more than ever to sit at the same table, ready to learn. When that happens, I can’t help but think that a little leaven of God’s kingdom mixes through the dough.
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This article originally appeared in The Banner entitled How (Not) to Talk about God.