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Chapter 5

Part Two:

This second part of chapter five deals with two things I would like to talk about here:  

The first is a mystic understanding of the gospel.   McKnight comments that the “ecstatic experience of union with God is not unusual for Christian mystics.  I believe that eternity will be an uninterrupted flow of such ecstatic union with God.  We will be, in our very natures, blended into the presence of God with maintaining our identity…we will enter into perichoresis.”[1]  Perichoresis says that the trinity “exists as an interpenetrating and mutual indwelling…In other words, God’s eternal reality is the love between Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”[2]

If this is how God is, this also is how Heaven should be.   McKnight uses an analogy that I like very much: Heaven may be a little bit like family camp.  We all know the feeling.  Families in constant community for a week or weekend.  Families cook together, sleep in close quarters and play games together.  The kids running around playing with the sticks (hopefully not the stones), hiding behind trees, finding an “alternate reality” as they escape into games of Narnia or Middle Earth.   C.S. Lewis, in his book The Great Divorce, describes hell as a place where diminished humans are constantly in search of distance between themselves and others.  This would say that Hell is anti-perichoresis.    

Understanding this McKnight goes on to explain that “there will be no law courts, because humans will transcend justice with love; there will be no locks because humans will own what they need and rejoice in what others own…and on and on in the perichoretic circle of eternal life.” [3]

It is a beautiful to think of heaven as a place of “eternal life.”

[1] Scot McKnight, Embracing Grace: A Gospel for all of Us (Brewster: Paraclete Press), 58
[2] Scot McKnight, Embracing Grace, 34
[3] Ibid., 59

Core Issue #1

I was at the blog of Alan Creech and I noticed his Core Issue #1.  He really dealt with three sections and I would have a number of questions about them.  In his first section, if you read, he deals with this switch in relativist thinking in the world around us.  The question that I’ve been asking for a long time (and have still received no good answer to) is this: Is the switch to relativist thinking a good thing?  If not, why do we believe that we need to “change” in order to make the world accept us?  

The second section of his paper dealt with teaching as the central issue of the  church.  That is, that doctrines come about above everything else.  My main question (and I have still received no good answer to this) is: How would we change the church in such a way that activity is valued over teaching?  When would this be going to far to the point where teaching takes a back seat to service?  

The last section dealt with professional clergy.  This section was obviously left unfinished.  I think it was more of a, as you’ve seen the first to sections how should we reform the clergy?  And this is a good question, is the position of pastorship in need of reform?

Chapter 5

Part One:

I will have to separate chapter five into two parts. This section will deal with McKnight’s section of “What does Revelation tell us about Eternity?” McKnight begins saying that “Revelation, the most political book in the entire Bible, is the story of right finally being right and wrong finally being wrong.” In a world of moral relativism I sense a hope in McKnight’s tone that the world can and will be a better place. In this hope that I heartily agree with McKnight who says that we must understand the end of a story in order to understand its beginning. In reading books by an author who really writes well, a person finds clues in the beginning that tell us about the end. The end often explains much about the beginning of the story. It is not until we get to that end that we understand what the beginning was all about.

The ending first comes with a battle. At the end of the world we find this dualistic battle split between good and evil. McKnight here deals with good and evil to the point where I feel I most quote Kyle Potter in his thoughts on eternity. Kyle argues that denying “the goodness of creation…holds that the goodness of God is expressed in the Creation.” For Potter:

“Salvation is not about heaven as some kind of ‘final destination.’ Heaven is the place where the reign of God is complete, and in John’s apocalyptic vision at the end of the New Testament we see a city that exists in a renewed heaven and earth. Life is physical, life is real, and life is spiritual. Those ideas are not mutually exclusive, but are rather inseparable where God reigns.”

McKnight supplements and augments Potters argument saying that “the Ending flows from life now.” This ending will be comprised of a “complete society where the cycle of grace runs perfectly and where humans carry on their normal but enhanced gifts and abilities.” McKnight and Potter both argue for a type of “community of the risen.” Heaven is a place for the community of God to come together. Rob Bell, when talking about the direction of his church, argued that “the flames of heaven might be hotter than the flames of Hell.” In other words, if a person is embittered in this life, what’s to say they are going to be full of joy in the life to come? A community of God begins in the here and now.

Along with the end flowing from this life, McKnight argues for the centrality of Jesus at the end. If Jesus is central, as Revelation makes clear that he is, and if the life we are living now is flowing into eternity, it would be wise for us to begin the transformation process today. This world is not a place where we should be waiting for the next to come, we should be living in the here and now to help bring about change that will lead to our transformation and others into the way of Jesus.

The end, according to McKnight, will also be centrally focused on worship. McKnight notes that it means more than to “fold our hands, bow our heads, and endlessly sing uplifting hymns in an assembly of Christians plopped down on pews while heavenly harpists orchestrate yet one more rendition of ‘My Jesus I love Thee.’” Instead, “Worship, according to chapter twelve of Romans, is offering our bodies—that is, all we are—as a living and holy and acceptable sacrifice.” If this is true than “Worship, then, is a life lived as it is meant to be lived: for the good of others and the world.”

Rethinking Theology

Rethinking Theology

In the last post from McKnight’s book I spoke on this idea of “reforming theology.”  It is the idea that theology that has spoken throughout the ages must be understood and rethought out for this present generation.  There are a number of reasons for this:  

1. Beliefs that sit for long periods of time without being questioned often become empty rituals.  God does not call us to empty ritual (he has enough of that) but to follow the living God (Isaiah 1:11)


2. In a changing culture words do not stay the same, new words are sometimes needed to better describe and relate the message of the Kingdom of God to a new generation.


3. Theology needs to be contextualized to one’s particular situation.  A community of God in America will be different than the way a community in Africa will do theology.  Some of this is cultural and some of it is simply the fact that there are different needs in different places.

That’s enough to think about for right now.  

Embracing Grace - Chapter 4

Embracing Grace – Chapter 4

McKnight argues that authenticity is what people want.  The immaturity inherent in Adam and Eve led to the fall, not living as they were meant to live.  As a result, the flow of God is interrupted.  This interruption is primarily relational and not legal.  Sin needs to be redefined in light of this. Jesus should be seen as the incarnation of the kingdom living in God’s flow uninterrupted.

McKnight speaking of “authenticity” saying that his “students don’t care for sappy, sentimental love stories” (McKnight 40).  Instead, “they know there are lots of agendas at work in this…Instead of respectability or sociability, this generation values authenticity (McKnight 40).”  In a culture that deals heavily with Disney endings and easy “fast food” answers, this provides fresh air to an often theologically shallow western church.  

McKnight takes an interesting view here saying Adam and Eve were “immature” in their walk with God before the fall.  So often we hear “In the beginning things were perfect.”  Adam and Eve before the fall were not “perfect” they were simply living as they were supposed to be living in connection and communion with God.  McKnight concurs here saying Adam and Eve were “created to journey into union with God and communion with others, and they took care of God’s good world” (McKnight 43).  

McKnight takes an interesting view on the fall itself.  He argues that their “mind became disordered” with a “weak connection” between themselves and God (McKnight 45).  McKnight does not seem to view “original sin” as something that people are born into powerless to stop.  McKnight quotes Auxentios saying the fall “was not a departure from an originally static and perfect nature; it was the interruption.”  The fall should be recognized as “interruption.”  McKnight attempts to revamp the definition of sin as well.  Some consider the definition of sin to be breaking a “moral law” while McKnight consider it “relational.”

McKnight uses the example of the lawyer coming to Jesus asking how he can inherit eternal life.  When Jesus answers “Follow the law” he also tacks on, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  If the law is only seen as moral it “depersonalizes and de-relationalizes sin.”  McKnight uses the example of “infidelity” saying it is not primarily a legal issue; it is a relational issue breaking a commitment made by two people.  It is only then that we can see sin in its proper context.

McKnight here cites Cornelius Plantinga saying that “sin is disruption of created harmony and then resistance to divine restoration of that harmony.”  If  “God is for shalom and therefore again sin…Sin is culpable shalom-breaking.”
Plantinga continues, “In sum, shalom is God’s design for creation and redemption; sin is blamable human vandalism of these great realities and therefore an affront to their architect and builder.”  McKnight logically brings forth the next point saying that if Sin is comparable to shalom then “sin is anything that impedes the kingdom of God.”  

McKnight is taking us somewhere very important.  If we are to be kingdom people, we will have to redefine a lot of doctrines that have stagnated the church.  This redefining done by McKnight is necessary for any serious Christian and theologian who wants Christianity to continue into the next century (otherwise I believe it will die out within two more generations of shallow theology in the west).  If we see sin as a legal matter then we come up with God as analogous to the common protestant theme of “judge” or “banker.”  

God needs to be seen as the one in which we need communion with to sustain life.  If Hell is the only message that we give people, they see God only as a fire escape.  Once they are free of fire, they can continue to live whatever way they please because that is how churches define Jesus.  If we wee God as one in which we need absolute communion, we will find a very different Christian in a very different world.    


    

Embracing Grace - Chapter 3

Embracing Grace: Chapter 3

McKnight places here four chapters in the story of the Eikon. The First is the Edenic chapter dealing with the world as it was always supposed to be. The second chapter deals with the cracking of the Eikons. The third chapter dealt at length with the story of Jesus. The fourth and final chapter deals with eternity as God’s long awaited return to the world for the glorification and reuniting of man to God.

Here McKnight, whether intentionally or unintentionally, leaves out a large chunk of the story of the Eikons. There is “chapter 2 ½” that dealt with the world of the cracked Eikons in the context of Israel. Israel plays an important and central role in understanding God’s divine chase of humankind. It is the chase that began when he grabbed a hold of Abraham’s life and sent him in a new direction. It is the story of God pulling Moses out of his context to help bring redemption to a people long oppressed by the Egyptians. It is a chapter of the story that we cannot leave out.

McKnight argues that the most important aspect of the Eikons is the third chapter. I disagree. I would argue that it is in this “chapter 2 1/2” that we find God moving to create the basis for a world in which the “kingdom of God” could come through Israel. There a five books dedicated to this idea called “Torah.” It is these books that deal with the very foundation of what it means to live as people of God in a world that is “God-bathed.”

Jesus didn’t all of a sudden invent this “kingdom” idea. Jesus only interpreted it a certain way. He was the incarnate who brought this kingdom to its consummation, restoring it to the status of what it was always supposed to be. But Jesus primarily taught Torah and to say that “chapter 3” somehow stands above the others is a subtle fallacy.

McKnight moves on from there attempting to understand what it means to be an Eikon in the here and now. The question that is of importance to McKnight here is, “What makes humans like God?” This may seem like blasphemy until one considers that we are “Eikons” or “images” of God. That is, that we are called to be people transformed to be more and more like God.

To answer this question more concretely McKnight asks a sub-question: What does God do? He answers this with three main attributes of God: God creates order out of chaos, God relates, and God rests. Each of these should be central to how Christians worship, serve, instruct, reach out and fellowship. If we are to be Christians who make order out of chaos we need to understand contextual theology. If there is a problem in our city, whether it has to do with God or not, if we are to be Eikons of God we will help to fix the problem.

For example: there is a huge problem of education in America today. Should we create more Christian schools (often inaccessible to lower income families) or should we help to fix the ones that are decaying? Communities of Christians should be the first in line at schools for volunteer work, to help rebuild decaying buildings and to give of their bodies. So often white upper-class Christians are interested in writing a check to somewhere in Africa where the gospel is desperately “needed.” There are places in America that need this same “gospel” and money is not always going to be the answer.

Secondly, God relates. If we are to relate to the world around us as God relates in Trinitarian love then we must be able to see people, not programs. I just finished a class with a highly respected professor at Azusa Pacific University named Bruce Baloian. The class was a 1 and 11 Samuel Class. In it he dealt with this idea of people. At the very end of this semester he mentioned that Saul’s model of kingship will make a person much more successful, but, David’s model is the model of God. It is the model that cares about people. It relates to people and hopes to understand where they are coming from.

Finally, God rests. In watching “A Charlie Brown Christmas” it is always funny to here Lucy’s response to Charlie Brown’s problem of Christmas: “You need involvement.” This is the often quoted answer of many churches in the West: you need to fit more crap in your already busy schedule and that will give you happiness in the Lord. What if we really took a Sabbath on Sundays? What if we stopped working so hard and said, “God we give this day to you for a day of rest and reflection?” We would live in a different world.

Rudolph Otto - Part 2

I’ve just finished my report on “The Idea of the Holy” by Rudolph Otto. Right now I’m a bit upset at my teacher because he wants me to write a five page report including a summary, interaction, analysis, etc. of the book. I might be able to write a five page report on the first chapter, but definitely not on the entire book (that would take at least 50 pages to do somewhat of a justifiable analysis of his work). But whatever, it’s okay (I shouldn’t complain too much).

The book itself I couldn’t really read that closely. I’m going to go back and reread it much more slowly and for content over the break. Maybe I’ll be able to go back and blog on each chapter individually. We’ll see. What I’ve really taken from the chunks that I have skimmed is that God is not bound by our theological “concepts.” God is a God much bigger than those who think they can describe him down to his essence. God again and again defies definition and cannot be condensed to the reality of this world. Jesus described the kingdom of God, but could not tell us what it was concretely. This is no accident.

The kingdom of God is one that calls for us to be able to swept up into the story putting God first. The one thing that Otto said most powerfully in his book was that we cannot begin with ourselves in a feeling of dependence, we must first begin with idea of God realizing we are but “dust and ashes.” If we do not start with God there will be little that we can do for ourselves.

Embracing Grace - Part 2

Embracing Grace: Chapter 2:

Mcknight argues that the gospel begins at the beginning of the Bible. There have been a number of Christian churches that I’ve been to that have read the Bible in two ways that would contradict McKnight’s view of gospel. The first paradigm is one that starts the gospel in the New Testament. It is in these churches that we find people who want to give Christ centrality in their lives. They might often speak of the love of Christ but will rarely deal with the wrath of Christ in any tangible way (as if to say, we functionally don’t believe the Old Testament as a source of truth in the here and now).

The second group attempts to understand the gospel as beginning in chapter three and not in chapter one. It is this group that attempts to make sin the central issue of salvation. Here grace is only seen as a way to get rid of sin, not really as a help to live our lives. McKnight would probably disagree with both of these models (see his prologue in Embracing Grace for the different types of gospels that he sees. If one really wants to go in depth on the “Gospel on the Right” and the “Gospel on the left” one should see “The Divine Conspiracy” by Dallas Willard. Willard has done much to open my eyes to the different “types” of American gospels that he’s found in America).

McKnight, instead, argues that it is the fact that we are the “eikon” of God that matters. It is a “new term to think with” that McKnight uses to challenge the conceptual model of Christianity today that is often overused and diluted among all the other Christian noise in the world today. The two aspects that are inherent to understanding what at “eikon of God” is to look at the two implications of what it means. The first is freedom and the second is relationship.

“Here then we have the context of being an Eikon of God: we are individuals who are inherently like God and like one another so we can love God and love others, and we are to do all this in the place where God puts us—right here on earth, and for its good…The gospel is about every one of these dimensions of human life—the human’s relationship to herself and himself, to God, to others, and to the world and to the society in which we live.” (McKnight 19)

McKnight goes on to show that since the time of the enlightenment this message has been diluted into an individualistic message. We find people who want “entitlements” who have no “obligation” to civic duties. Individualism puts the person themselves at the center of the story, rather than God.

Instead we must learn to embrace God and embrace others. The question for me comes like this, “How should this look in the church today?” Especially in this Christmas season, how can we embrace God and embrace others? I’ve dealt a lot with criticisms of the worship service before on this blog. If you want more information on this you can find it at http://communityoftherisen.blogspot.com/2005/10/following-revision-of-two-posts.html.

A young probably early teenage boy is questioning the very value of Christmas. The story starts. Wearing that probably too large yellow T-shirt with the black zig-zags we find a boy who don’t understand the meaning of Christmas. He doesn’t receive the Christmas Cards, his kid sister only seems to care about getting presents, and in this life he seems like he can’t do anything right. Feelings that we’ve probably all felt either before or after Christmas. The high of waiting for the presents only to find that they were gone. He has people everywhere telling him that something is wrong with him. But no matter what people say, for him it always seems like there is something wrong with the world.

He gets a job as a director of a Christmas play, believing that will somehow get him “in the spirit.” But he fails miserably at this, no one listening to him and he yet again finds himself dejected during the “happiest season of all.” He and his friend finally leave to go to the Wal-Mart to find tree for the Christmas play. He finds aluminum trees, trees that sparkle and ding with the commercialism of this Western culture. He finds trees of every color, but he’s pulled to one side by a tree that is smaller than the rest.

Pushed aside to one corner, the manager simply says he can have this one. And in some weird way, a way that was never meant for children’s stories, the boy feels sorry for the tree. He picks it up and, somehow, sees his own self pushed to the corner where no one can see him. Pushed out of the light and he finds communion and hope in a tree. Taking it back for the play he is again ridiculed for his inability to complete even the most minutest of tasks.

Angry in a set of fury he finally screams, “Can’t anyone tell me what Christmas is all about?”

His friend comes center stage telling the gospel story. The story of power that has been so told many times and never loses its appeal. And finally the boy simply walks out and all of his friends follow. He dumps the tree and tells himself that he just can’t do anything right. But this is where the story really starts. His friends, behind him, pick up the tree and begin decorating it into a beautiful Chrimas Tree.

Charlie Brown found Christmas in the most unexpected place.