So it's definitely time to pick this back up and get to it. Things have been really crazy because of our church's move.
Anyhow, Mike blogged about the intro here. Good stuff. I especially liked this quote:
The question of "What if I'm wrong" hangs out there like a god-awful pink flamingo on a California lawn. Careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but in this generation of emergent faith, it's hard to say what the baby actually is.
That's a great description, and I'll simply take that analogy way too far by saying that often, emergent faith seems prone to me to simply say "there is no baby to lose, we are the baby" and thereby react like babies. See, I told you I'd take the analogy too far. ;-)
Anyhow, here again a stream of consciousness on Chapter 2 - "Yoke"
- I found myself enjoying and resonating with this chapter far more than with Chapter 1. The reason is that I think he's hitting at the heart of what has bothered me as well for quite a while: The (modern) thought that somehow, the Bible can be understood without any interpretation being necessary. Here's a quote from the chapter on this:
Somebody recently told me, "As long as you teach the Bible, I have no problem with you." Think about that for a moment. What that person was really saying is, "As long as you teach my version of the Bible, I'll have no problem with you." And the more people insist that they are just taking the Bible for what it says, the more skeptical I get.
-page 44
That's so true! Everything and anything in the Bible needs to be interpreted in some fashion.- "Love your neighbour" - what's love? "Love is patient, love is kind" - what does it mean to be patient? Do I have to let people walk all over me?
- "Women should cover their heads while praying" - does this mean all women or only the women of Corinth, or only the women of that culture where not wearing a head covering was immodest?
- "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." - What is sin? "Sin is lawlessness" - Which laws does that include, and do they include the law I need to cleanse myself if I even brush against a woman who is having her period?
- I also like his point that Jesus brought a new "yoke" which means "way of interpretation" - among many other things(!), Jesus brought with him a new way of living, a new way of viewing Scripture and living it out.
- And so here's the big point for me: We interpret the Bible in community. God made the Bible so we were to interpret it together. I love Bell's point to an extent:
For most of church history, people heard the Bible read aloud in a room full of people. You heard it, discussed it, studied it, argued about it, and made decisions about it as a group, a community. [...] So if one person went off the deep end with an interpretation or opinion, the others were right there to keep that person in check.
-page 52 - Unfortunately, there are a couple of things I think he's overlooking or at least doesn't ever mention.
- "The community" is more than just your little group. We need to realize that the community we interpret the Bible with needs to include people like Paul, Augustine, Martin Luther, and all the rest of our Christian heritage and church history over the past almost 2000 years. In other words, "repainting" and "reinterpreting" things in a way that goes against the mainstream interpretations can be a dangerous, dangerous thing to do because you're basically breaking with the historical Christian community simply because your little 10-person house church happens to interpret the Bible in such a way that sleeping with your girlfriend is fine. Well, how convenient.
- There is such a thing as spiritual authority. In the above quote, he's acting like the synagogues were a little pluralist democracy where people voted on what was right. That's not the way things worked. People were rabbis for a reason. And someone becoming a rabbi needed the approval of two other rabbis. Bell acts like everybody is a rabbi, which explains why there are so many freakin' "Emergent" blogs where everybody acts like they're some kind of authority even though all they did was sign up for a Wordpress account and start writing cynical criticisms of things they didn't like about their church. People like to feel like they're "rabbis". Well, we're NOT. And we should listen to and respect those who are.
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2 Kommentare:
Hey John, again I love how you balance things out. But as I already told you in one of our Monday morning sessions, there are two aspects I would like to consider.
1) Spiritual authority is something that I have thought about very much, because I know quite a lot of churches where this has been turned into a real mess. Never in history there was so much knowledge and training available (with so easy access) to most of the people as it is today. Therefore people are much quicker in getting mature. They cause "problems" for their leaders because they don't get supported in multiplying the church and in advancing God's kingdom themselves. Instead, frustrated leaders suppress them by telling them what (not) to do and by creating feelings in them of being inobedient, when the leader's approach is questioned.
If every leader would act in a respectful way with people who are adults and spiritually experienced, this topic would not be as much discussed and questioned as it is.
Dear bloggers, please start building churches, connect with each other and other churches, bless those, who are against you and try not to do the same mistakes later, when your children question your ways of having church!
2) You are right, John, the community should include history and not only my own small group. Yet, throughout the church history, again and again, there were small groups who began to realize that certain aspects about God had been forgotten in the church at their time. They started to question the status quo and focussed on basic truths, that God revealed to them in his word and that were not convenient for the mainstream church at all. But today they are established and there's no doubt that God was at work, to revive his people. In these times of an emerging (postmodern) culture, it is vital to ask God again, how he wants to see his church built. It is so much fun, to discover that with you togehter as we go on.
Hi Daniel! Thanks for commenting. Here are my two cents to your two cents, so I guess that'd make four:
Never in history there was so much knowledge and training available (with so easy access) to most of the people as it is today. Therefore people are much quicker in getting mature.
Whoa, I don't get that logical conclusion. Maturity is something that takes time regardless of knowledge and easily available training. I'd agree that people are quicker in getting knowledgeable and "intellectual". But mature? I'd wager that takes just as long as in the good ol' days. ;-)
But your point is still a good one - as I've said before, I think a lot of the postmodern movement can be described as a counter-movement to weaknesses in "modern"-minded churches, which definitely can include dictators as leaders. So I agree with the gist of what you're saying.
In these times of an emerging (postmodern) culture, it is vital to ask God again, how he wants to see his church built.
Absolutely. All I was trying to say with that point was that it seems to me some Emergents (like Bell) totally neglect the big picture of our Christian traditions and heritage, as if somehow we are today simply so much more cultured and wise than people used to be.
Rethinking how the church needs to reach out and work, what our daily witness needs to look like, etc., is one thing - this absolutely needs to evolve with the culture around us, and is a huge strength of emerging churches.
But denying or even just placing into "question-with-no-real-answer" territory major theological creeds of the past 2000 years such as the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, the Penal Atonement, etc., is a wholly different thing and what I mean by "dangerous".
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