Religion and Secularization

There’s a great article in The Atlantic this month. Some quotes:

“The answer to the question of which religion will dominate the future, at least politically, may well be: None of the above.”

“…one shouldn’t go overboard in describing American religiosity. For one thing, it is as shallow as it is broad…”

“Consider what is occurring within the growing American evangelical movement. It has built megachurches that meet the needs of time-pressed professionals by offering such things as day-care centers, self-help groups, and networking opportunities. Its music owes more to Janis Joplin than to Johann Sebastian Bach. Its church officials learn more from business-school case studies than from theological texts. And its young people—well, as the children of parents who have gone through a born-again experience, they are not likely to be as obedient as the evangelical leader James Dobson wants them to be. Having opted to grow on secular terms, American evangelicalism is becoming less hostile to liberal ideas such as tolerance and pluralism. New efforts to take it in directions sympathetic to environmentalism and social justice are a direct result of the maturing of the faith, which followed from earlier decisions to make the movement more appealing to large numbers of Americans, especially the young.”

“Historians may one day look back on the next few decades…as the era when secularization took over the world.”

Marriage

“Before leaving the question of divorce, I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused. The Christian concept of marriage is one: the other is the quite different question–how far Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for everyone. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the [Muslims] tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.”
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. (HarperCollins: San Francisco, 2001 ed.) pg. 112

Book Covers

With reference to this, this, this, this, and this.

People don’t like the title of Dan Kimball’s book, They Like Jesus but Not the Church. It is cynically responded that non-Christians don’t like the real Jesus, they like a pop-culture sanitized Jesus who never mentioned sin unless it was the sin of the people who are most not like them - religious types. They like the hippie Jesus, not the Jesus who said “Go and sin no more.” They don’t like the Jesus who said “unless you repent you will all likewise perish.” And it’s true. We all (conservative religious people included) typically like a Jesus who looks just like we do, and some think that Dan Kimball was naïve to imagine that these people actually like the real Jesus.

A variant of this term appears in John Stott’s 1971 book, Basic Christianity. The little 1970’s paperback was the first book I collected into my library; it was given to me by a Baptist pastor in Brookfield almost two years before I became a Christian. The preface opens with these words:

About that Convergent Gongshow…

“…like most fundamentalist religions, this one has its inquisitors, and they are a rather unpleasant lot.”
-Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything. (Boston: Shambhala, 1996) pg. 154

So I’ve finished reading the book that got Brian McLaren & Rob Bell ‘in trouble’ last September with Acts29 President Mark Driscoll (listen to the message preached at the 2007 Convergent Conference here). Mark named some names, specifically emergent pastors Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt and Rob Bell. While I agree that Brian and Doug have had it coming for a long time, Rob Bell’s turn came up wanting. Now I’m by no means a fan of Rob Bell, but I think he deserves credit where credit is due. While I agree that some of Bell’s thought is questionable and his trajectory is troubling; I’ve had to retract some things that I’ve written about Velvet Elvis because I’ve misunderstood and misread him, and while I wouldn’t dare say things the way he has said them, with the exception of Mark’s commentary on the virgin birth quotation from Velvet Elvis (which I still think was irresponsible – you wouldn’t have caught any of the NT authors talking like that), Mark seems to have taken issue with Bell for a few errant reasons:

1) Bell’s use of Rabbinical material. I don’t see this as being a problem. What I do see as problematic is the way Rob reads 3rd-9th century post-second temple Jewish customs/Tanakh commentary/etc back into the New Testament - it’s awful history. It would be like using contemporary American politics to understand the American Revolution, or reading contemporary seeker-sensitive pop-soteriology back into the days of Jonathan Edwards and the original Great Awakening - it’s that big of a time gap. It’s bad history. While it’s true that “if Rabbis don’t love Jesus, they have a bad hermeneutic,” Mark misses the point here.

God Crucified

Richard Bauckham. God Crucified. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998)
Hot book, heavy book. Buy two copies and give one away. Here’s a preview:

“Jesus’ sovereignty over ‘all things’
First, the texts frequently refer to Jesus’ exaltation or sovereignty as over ‘all things’. Though New Testament scholars commonly fail to recognize this and in individual texts debate the extent of the ‘all things’ to which the text refers, the phrase belongs to the standard rhetoric of Jewish monotheism, in which it constantly refers, quite naturally, to the whole of the created reality from which God is absolutely distinguished as its Creator and Ruler. God’s servants may be said, by his permission, to rule over some things, as earthly rulers do, but only God rules over all things from a throne exalted above all things. The frequent New Testament christological uses of this phrase should not be studied atomistically, but their cumulative weight should be appreciated as testimony to the way the texts habitually define Christ’s exaltation or rule in the terms Jewish monotheism reserved for God’s unique sovereignty.” (pgs. 31-32)

Pax Occidental

My wife and I watched a movie yesterday afternoon. It was bad. Do not rent it if you haven’t already. American Beauty is perhaps one of the more perverse and downright awful films to come out of Hollywood in recent years, yet it reflects many issues plaguing current middle-class life. Mid-life crises, cut-throat business competition, adultery, lust, sex scandals, urban espionage, heterosexuality, pederasty, sham marriages, teenage angst, homosexuality, lust, unfulfilled dreams, drug abuse, broken homes, lust and of course, the compulsory New Age “everything-is-going-to-be-alright-and-your-gods-will-overlook-sin-vice-and-the-trampling-of-Yahweh’s-Glory-in-his-eikons” afterlife theodicies.

In other words, 1 Corinthians 6.9-10.

If the film is a commentary on life in the Contemporary Western World, then unfortunately the next-door neighbour homo-hating Marine in the film stands in as the forces of overbearing conservatism, which condemn “the other” without realizing the perversity that lurks within its own ranks. Even when it is exposed, instead of reimagining itself as one no different yet resisting the evil that lurks within, it lashes out with violence in condemnation. This is how many people without the church imagine those of us who are within; and this is generally the image that came to my mind of Christians before I became one.

Credit Where Credit is Due

I listened to Rob Bell’s most recent Sunday sermon today, and in the interest of demonstrating that I am not a maniac, I’d like to offer a response.

It was awesome. It was fantastic. It was balanced, clear, biblical, exegetical, and utterly entirely convincing. In his opening prayer he even mentioned that the words of Jesus contain edges, which was nice to hear. I honestly cannot think of any one point where I would disagree or ask for clarification. Listen to it yourself, because it was awesome.

Does this mean that I retract what I wrote last month on Velvet Elvis? Hardly. I had not listened to Bell’s sermon when I wrote that review, and it was never my intention to review the person, Rob Bell, I was reviewing his book - Velvet Elvis. Based on that book alone, if the author’s name on the cover was different, I would have come to the same conclusions. Having heard Rob Bell speaking two years after publication, it doesn’t mean that I don’t still disagree with some points of the book, some aspects of his teaching, or where I think his teaching might be heading, but based on the sermon I just heard, I could not say what I said last month in good conscience - to the degree that I had said it. It just wouldn’t be fair. But I still would not retract what I had wrote as Velvet Elvis should not have to be read with the knowledge of Rob Bell’s thoughts gained through listening to online audio messages, it ought to be judged upon its own merits. It ought to be read knowing what you can learn from cover to cover.

The Gongshow

I have an mp3 player that is about four years old. Its capacity is 64mb (less than 1/10th the capacity of the smallest iPod you can now buy). The battery ‘hatch’ is broken and has to be held shut with a rubber band when in operation. Last night, I was using this device to listen to a sermon I downloaded from the website of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Rob Bell was sick, so Doug Pagitt covered for him. His sermon was on Acts 11.

Doug Pagitt contributed to Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches and is the pastor of Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis. He is also the author of Preaching Reimagined and other books.

After listening to the audio I couldn’t sleep, knowing what a gongshow of a sermon I had just heard. I wonder if Pagitt, at around the 27-minute mark, starts testing the congregation’s reasoning abilities by serving up a textbook example of isegesis. His teaching is not a proposal – not a “I think that maybe what the big deal was in this chapter was…” – but a declaration “this is what was going on in Acts 11.” Before you read any further, watch the discussion between John MacArthur and Doug Pagitt on CNN two weeks ago for some ‘context,’ and then read this analysis of the event by Phil Johnson, which includes a transcript of an email sent by Pagitt to a viewer.

Your God Has No Edges

“Test it. Probe it. Do that to this book. Don’t swallow it uncritically. Think about it. Wrestle with it.”(86-87)

So says the rockstar of youth groups in english speaking churches everywhere, his message gel capped in 10-15-minute segments on NOOMA DVDs, perfect for the MTV generation whose attention span is best measured in 30 second intervals. Some of what I’ll say here has been previously discussed with Mikey Remix and J.Gallant after I read a review of Rob Bell’s 2005 book Velvet Elvis, so I understand that this is somewhat dated. I wanted to actually read the book myself before I made any lasting conclusions about Bell or his teachings. So I opened up my wallet and Amazoned a copy of the book whose subtitle is “Repainting the Christian Faith.”

How not to exorcize

Okay, so here’s the deal:Imagine you’re a good saint-praying 49-year old Roman Catholic Hispanic man with a 19-year old daughter who has her own three-year old daughter. You have an icon of Jesus and his mother on the front of your cinder-block home, so you know you’ve made it. For whatever reason, you suspect that your three-year old granddaughter is possessed by a demon. Your solution? Well; you can figure out the answer for yourself, but if your name is Ronald Marquez of Phoenix Arizona, described by neighbours as a “real gentle soul,” what follows is what you would have done:

You push a bed up against a door so no one can come in while your 19-year old daughter (the mother of the ‘possessed’ child) gets naked, holds a religious icon and starts chanting some bullshit as you attempt to choke the ‘demons’ out of your 3-year old descendent.