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.

2) Mark doesn’t like William Webb’s book, Slaves, Women, Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis. That’s fine, and while I can see the trouble with a redemptive as opposed to a static hermeneutic, Mark puts the book in the same category as Borg and Crossan’s work on Mark (the Gospel)’s passion narrative; “horrible” was the word he used. It’s unfair. I don’t even know if he’s read the book. Webb’s work upholds the authority and supremacy of scripture, regardless of whether or not you agree with the conclusions and criteria he presents. Sure; Bell used the trajectory hermeneutic to go egalitarian, but the Vineyard was egalitarian in Church leadership long before Webb’s work came along. The fact that Bell wouldn’t let his church go egalitarian without having what he considered sufficient scriptural exegesis beforehand, is far from troubling but promising – if Bell eventually stays within the conclusions that Webb has reached in that book, I’ll have to retract even more what I’ve said about Bell, specifically his own trajectory and where he might be going with all of this.

Whether or not I buy into Webb’s proposal of a redemptive hermeneutic is another story. I’ve had the book for almost a year now, and have only read about 3/4 of it. It’s heavy stuff.

3) Mark takes issue with Rob Bell’s recommendation of Ken Wilber’s book, A Brief History of Everything. It’s a justified issue. What Mark overlooks and ignores is that Bell also recommended everything that John Piper has ever written (in Velvet Elvis) and everything that Donald Miller has ever written (in Sex God), both of whom Mark himself recommends. This ought to have been considered, is all I’m saying.

Ken Wilber’s book – A Brief History of Everything - honestly; - it’s not that bad. In high school I was engaged to some degree with new age religion, so I’m somewhat familiar with their theology, which might be better classified as anthropology. Wilber is a Mayan Buddhist, so if you were expecting detailed interaction and exegesis of Gospel pericopes or something that does not uphold the centrality of man, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Before I’m excommunicated, I’ll qualify what I mean by “that” bad. What I mean is that it’s not like Wilber is animostic toward religions - it’s as though he treats traditional monotheism the way a parent treats his/her child when talking about Santa Claus – patronizing. But it’s only fair - I don’t expect to be treated with respect or privilege. Besides, if you can dish criticism out toward other theologies you have to be able to take it for your own. It’s not as though Paul didn’t hurt some feelings – or didn’t think anyone would be offended – when he wrote “professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”
I digress - I was especially struck how at some points in the first chapter of A Brief History of Everything Wilber sounds downright evangelical – at some points he sounds as though he’s writing for a fundamentalist creation propaganda magazine, which felt very vindicating on the level of “see?! we’re not that crazy after all!”
Some quotes:

“Take the standard notion that wings simply evolved from forelegs. It takes perhaps a hundred mutations to produce a functional wing from a leg – a half-wing will not do. A half-wing is no good as a leg and no good as a wing – you can’t run and you can’t fly. It has no adaptive value whatsoever. In other words, with a half-wing you are dinner. The wing will work only if these hundred mutations happen all at once, in one animal – and also these same mutations must occur simultaneously in another animal of the opposite sex, and then they have to somehow find each other, have dinner, a few drinks, mate, and have offspring with real functional wings.
“Talk about mind-boggling. This is infinitely, absolutely, utterly mind-boggling. Random mutations cannot even begin to explain this. The vast, vast majority of mutations are lethal anyway; how are we going to get a hundred nonlethal mutations happening simultaneously? Or even four or five, for that matter? But once this incredibly transformation has occurred, then natural selection will indeed select the better wings from the less workable wings – but the wings themselves? Nobody has a clue.
…
“Given enough time! One computation showed that the chance for monkey power to produce a single Shakespeare play was one in ten thousand million million million million million million. So maybe that would happen in a billion billion years. But the universe doesn’t have a billion billion years. It only has twelve billion years.
“Well, this changes everything. Calculations done by scientists from Fred Hoyle to F.B. Salisbury consistently show that twelve billion years isn’t even enough to produce a single enzyme by chance.
“In other words, something other than chance is pushing the universe. For traditional scientists, chance was their salvation. Chance was their god. Chance would explain all. Chance – plus unending time – would produce the universe. But they don’t have unending time, and so their god fails them miserably. That god is dead. Chance is not what explains the universe; in fact, chance is what the universe is laboring mightily to overcome. Chance is exactly what the self-transcending drive of the Kosmos overcomes.”
(pgs. 22-23, 26 – emphasis original)

Wilber then goes on to criticize ‘fundamentalist religious creationists’ who have seized upon “…the increasingly obvious truth that the traditional scientific explanation will not cut it,” (pg. 27) and equated creativity with their favorite God. Wilber is an evolutionist, he does not deny that it has happened – for understanding the faults in traditional explanations of evolution does not make you a creationist – Wilber combines punctuated equilibrium theories of evolution with some form of divine creativity, but he is especially careful on this point:

“There is a spiritual opening in the Kosmos. Let us be careful how we fill it. The simplest is: Spirit or Emptiness is unqualifiable but it is not inert and unyielding, for it gives rise to manifestation itself: new forms emerge, and that creativity is ultimate. Emptiness, creativity, holons. “
(pg. 27)

Later on page 42 Wilber continues his musings on evolution and its goals:

“We are part and parcel of this immense intelligence, this spirit-in-action, this God-in-the-making. We don’t have to think of God as some mythic figure outside the display, running the show. Nor must we picture it as some merely immanent goddess, lost in the forms of her own production. Evolution is both God and Goddess, transcendence and immanence. … Is that crazy? Are the mystics and sages insane? Because they all tell variations on this same store, don’t they? The story of awakening one morning and discovering that you are one with the All, in a timeless and eternal and infinite fashion.”
(pg. 42, emphasis mine. Cf. Velvet Elvis, pgs. 75-83)

At one point on page 47, it would sound as though Ken Wilber was quoting Rob Bell verbatim:

“…I am struck with awe and admiration for the astonishing creativity – the original breakthrough creativity – that allowed humans to rise above a given nature and begin building a noosphere, the very process of which would bring Heaven down to Earth and exalt the Earth of Heaven, the very process of which would eventually bind all peoples of the world together in, if you will, one global tribe.”

But whatever – this is not that important. I’m not a fan of the “Left Behind” variety of premillenialism, or all of dispensationalism for that matter, so I’m already excommunicated from about 95% of American pop-evangelicalism (thinking that Revelation and Mt 24 have first century referents, what a heresy!). If you go down that road of criticizing Bell’s eschatology, you’ll eventually end up cutting yourself off from all orthodox Christianity prior to the 19^th century. If you criticize Bell’s over-realized eschatology, at some point you’ll also end up criticizing Charles Hodge’s eschatology. If you want to go that route, go nuts, just be aware that differences in eschatology is one place where I would never want to draw a line in the sand.

What I am curious about, however, is from where Bell got this language of heaven coming to earth (Velvet Elvis, pg. 147) – was it from Ken Wilber? Or from studying the work of Reformed post-millenialists? Sola Scriptura? (which Bell misrepresents and denies in Velvet Elvis, pg. 68 - or does he just deny the misrepresentation?)

I found it validating that Wilber recognizes that ‘modernity ‘ is best defined as “…the events that were set in motion with the Enlightenment, from Descartes to Locke to Kant,” (pg. 53 and further on pg. 69). I’ve argued before that when McLaren et al chide their opponents or Reformed Theology for being modernists, it is really more comparable to name calling or slander then actually suggesting that a certain ideology would fit best into a certain epistemological framework. The Reformation was hardly a modern endeavour, it began long before the Enlightenment in the 16^th century when people still made appeals to ancient sources of theological authority like the Bible. It was anti-modern to the core. How the self-proclaimed experts on modernity & post-modernity (McLaren et al) have managed to get away with this is truly remarkable.

Wilber engages the hard postmodern “mantra” of social construction on page 52, and honestly, he really puts things into perspective!

“Everything is ‘socially constructed’ – this is the mantra of the extremist wing of postmodernism. They think that different cultural worldviews are entirely arbitrary, anchored in nothing but power or prejudice or some other ‘ism’ or another – sexism, racism, speciesism, phallocentrism, capitalism, logocentrism, or my favorite, phallologocentrism. Wow! Does that puppy come with batteries or what?” (pg. 62)

“Evolution is the one great background concept that hangs over every single modern movement ; it is the God of modernity. … [antimodern religious thinkers] are thoroughly trapped in the agrarian worldview. They have not come to terms with the form of spirit in either its modern or its postmodern modes. With eyes turned in shame from the wonders and dignities of modernity, they sing the songs of yesterday’s marvels. Most traditional religious thinkers don’t even think evolution has occurred!
“They have not grasped Spirit in its manifestation as modernity; they have not seen that evolution is, as Wallace put it, the ‘manner and mode of Spirit’s creation.’ … They think that because modernity introduced its own unsurpassed disasters, evolution itself must be rejected, failing miserably to grasp the dialectic of progress.”
(pg. 323-324)

I also find It interesting that on page 288 Ken Wilbur writes “…your God is now green.” God is Green was the title of a sermon series preached by Rob Bell at Mars Hill a while back. I didn’t listen to the lectures, so I don’t know if Rob gave mad props to Ken Wilber or just appropriated the phrase discretely. I didn’t listen to it because I just assumed it would be your typical organic-evangelism sermons - “God created Adam to be a gardener in Eden; therefore you should drive a hybrid to atone for your carbon sins.”

In sum, Ken Wilber has some interesting ideas. But so did Nietzsche, and I wouldn’t be compelled to list him as an influence or cite him/mention his theories in any book of mine (not that Zondervan or Eerdmans will be soliciting a manuscript from me anytime soon). I’m wondering why Bell felt compelled to cite Wilber in the footnotes of Velvet Elvis at all, as it seems so out of place. The footnote said, verbatim: “For a mind-blowing introduction to emergence theory and divine creativity, set aside three months and read Ken Wilber’s A Brief History of Everything.” (Velvet Elvis, pg. 192) It may have been something as simple as he thought that Ken Wilber had some interesting insights (as did I), but Rob thought that the discerning reader would be able to understand that it was not an absolute affirmation of everything Wilber wrote. After all, as I mentioned earlier, if you’re citing John Piper and Donald Miller, you can’t be that much of a heretic – right?

[At this point, for those defenders of Bell, I could very well ask the flipside of that question – if you’re citing Ken Wilber, you can’t be all that orthodox – right? Because the earlier citing of Piper was not an absolute affirmation of everything Piper believes and has written - something to think about.]

But if that is the case, shouldn’t he have had more sense than to footnote Ken Wilber? Honestly; if the subtitle of your book is “Repainting the Christian Faith,” and you ask Open Theists like Greg Boyd to speak at your church, it looks very, very sketchy. You might as well wear a t-shirt that says “Pelagius is my Homeboy.” I can’t speak for Bell, but if it was me, I would not have footnoted Wilber; at the very least I would have qualified the statement, maybe something like “don’t take this shit seriously.”

Anyways, Ken Wilber isn’t even a heretic, he’s the preacher of a false religion. His spiritual writings ought to be treated by Christians no different then the spiritual writings of any other false religion – such as Mormonism, Islam, Judaism, Rastafarianism, Atheism, Pastafarianism, Scientology or Baha’i. No one ought to get special treatment; we are commanded to “cast down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God,” and to “bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.” (2 Cor 10.5)

My advice? If you can spare three months to set aside, don’t read Ken Wilber’s A Brief History of Everything. Read instead J.I. Packer’s Knowing God, it’s a classic. You’ll learn about expiation instead of holons, and I think that it would be much more profitable learning.

~ by Tyler on December 11, 2007.