rusty cellar

Today I read W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio.  I am struck by its powerful imagery.  I have tried to read Auden before but was very bored.  Now I stumble on this jewel!  He is so good with words and imagery that describe the ordinariness of life.  Auden’s imagery challenges me to live now in light of what is yet to come…

Well, so that is that.  Now we must dismantle the tree,

Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes –

Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the attic.

The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,

And the children got ready for school.  There are enough

Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week –

Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,

Stayed up so late, attempted — quite unsuccessfully –

To love all of our relatives, and in general

Grossly overestimated our powers.  Once again

As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed

To do more than entertain it as an agreeable

Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,

Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,

The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.

The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,

And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware

Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought

Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now

Be very far off.  But, for the time being, here we all are,

Back in the moderate Aristotelian city

Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry

And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,

And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.

It seems to have shrunk during the holidays.  The streets

Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten

The office was as depressing as this.  To those who have seen

The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,

The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.

For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly

Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be

Grew up when it opened.  Now, recollecting that moment

We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;

Remembering the stable where for once in our lives

Everything became a You and nothing was an It.

And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,

We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit

Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose

Would be some great suffering.  So, once we have met the Son,

We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father;

“Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.”

They will come, all right, don’t worry; probably in a form

That we do not expect, and certainly with a force

More dreadful than we can imagine.  In the meantime

There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,

Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem

From insignificance.  The happy morning is over,

The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:

When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing

Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure

A silence that is neither for nor against her faith

That God’s Will will be done, That, in spite of her prayers,

God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.

Gustavo Gutierrez in his book On Job writes, “It is important that we be clear from the outset that the theme of the book of Job is not precisely suffering-that impenetrable human mystery- but rather how to speak of God in the midst of suffering.” (13)

I find these words very helpful in thinking through the nature of pastoral involvement with human suffering.  When I walk through a deep valley I need wise companions who will help me wrestle with how I speak of and to God rather than explain the problem of evil.  The intellectual aspect is significant but the relational component of the struggle seems to take the lead.

Here are some excerpts from Eugene Peterson’s interview with Christianity Today several years ago.  I find his words prophetic and convicting…

What is the most misunderstood aspect of spirituality?

That it’s a kind of specialized form of being a Christian, that you have to have some kind of in. It’s elitist. Many people are attracted to it for the wrong reasons. Others are put off by it: I’m not spiritual. I like to go to football games or parties or pursue my career. In fact, I try to avoid the word.

Many people assume that spirituality is about becoming emotionally intimate with God.

That’s a naïve view of spirituality. What we’re talking about is the Christian life. It’s following Jesus. Spirituality is no different from what we’ve been doing for two thousand years just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. It’s just ordinary stuff.

This promise of intimacy is both right and wrong. There is an intimacy with God, but it’s like any other intimacy; it’s part of the fabric of your life. In marriage you don’t feel intimate most of the time. Nor with a friend. Intimacy isn’t primarily a mystical emotion. It’s a way of life, a life of openness, honesty, a certain transparency.

Doesn’t the mystical tradition suggest otherwise?

One of my favorite stories is of Teresa of Avila. She’s sitting in the kitchen with a roasted chicken. And she’s got it with both hands, and she’s gnawing on it, just devouring this chicken. One of the nuns comes in shocked that she’s doing this, behaving this way. She said, “When I eat chicken, I eat chicken; when I pray, I pray.”

If you read the saints, they’re pretty ordinary people. There are moments of rapture and ecstasy, but once every 10 years. And even then it’s a surprise to them. They didn’t do anything. We’ve got to disabuse people of these illusions of what the Christian life is. It’s a wonderful life, but it’s not wonderful in the way a lot of people want it to be.

Yet evangelicals rightly tell people they can have a “personal relationship with God.” That suggests a certain type of spiritual intimacy.

All these words get so screwed up in our society. If intimacy means being open and honest and authentic, so I don’t have veils, or I don’t have to be defensive or in denial of who I am, that’s wonderful. But in our culture, intimacy usually has sexual connotations, with some kind of completion. So I want intimacy because I want more out of life. Very seldom does it have the sense of sacrifice or giving or being vulnerable. Those are two different ways of being intimate. And in our American vocabulary intimacy usually has to do with getting something from the other. That just screws the whole thing up.

It’s very dangerous to use the language of the culture to interpret the gospel. Our vocabulary has to be chastened and tested by revelation, by the Scriptures. We’ve got a pretty good vocabulary and syntax, and we’d better start paying attention to it because the way we grab words here and there to appeal to unbelievers is not very good.

This corruption of the word spirituality even in Christian circles—does it have something to do with the New Age movement?

The New Age stuff is old age. It’s been around for a long time. It’s a cheap shortcut to—I guess we have to use the word—spirituality. It avoids the ordinary, the everyday, the physical, the material. It’s a form of Gnosticism, and it has a terrific appeal because it’s a spirituality that doesn’t have anything to do with doing the dishes or changing diapers or going to work. There’s not much integration with work, people, sin, trouble, inconvenience.

I’ve been a pastor most of my life, for some 45 years. I love doing this. But to tell you the truth, the people who give me the most distress are those who come asking, “Pastor, how can I be spiritual?” Forget about being spiritual. How about loving your husband? Now that’s a good place to start. But that’s not what they’re interested in. How about learning to love your kids, accept them the way they are?

My name shouldn’t even be connected with spirituality.

But it very much is.

I know. Then a few years ago I got this embarrassing position of being a professor of “spiritual theology” at Regent. Now what do you do?

You make spirituality sound so mundane.

I don’t want to suggest that those of us who are following Jesus don’t have any fun, that there’s no joy, no exuberance, no ecstasy. They’re just not what the consumer thinks they are. When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world’s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

The Gospel of Mark is so graphic this way. The first half of the Gospel is Jesus showing people how to live. He’s healing everybody. Then right in the middle, he shifts. He starts showing people how to die: “Now that you’ve got a life, I’m going to show you how to give it up.” That’s the whole spiritual life. It’s learning how to die. And as you learn how to die, you start losing all your illusions, and you start being capable now of true intimacy and love.

It involves a kind of learned passivity, so that our primary mode of relationship is receiving, submitting, instead of giving and getting and doing. We don’t do that very well. We’re trained to be assertive, to get, to apply, or to consume and to perform.

Repentance, dying to self, submission—these are not very attractive hooks to draw people into the faith.

I think the minute you put the issue that way you’re in trouble. Because then we join the consumer world, and everything then becomes product designed to give you something. We don’t need something more. We don’t need something better. We’re after life. We’re learning how to live.

I think people are fed up with consumer approaches, even though they’re addicted to them. But if we cast the evangel in terms of benefits, we’re setting people up for disappointment. We’re telling them lies.

This is not the way our Scriptures are written. This is not the way Jesus came among us. It’s not the way Paul preached. Where do we get all this stuff? We have a textbook. We have these Scriptures and most of the time they’re saying, “You’re going the wrong way. Turn around. The culture is poisoning.”

Do we realize how almost exactly the Baal culture of Canaan is reproduced in American church culture? Baal religion is about what makes you feel good. Baal worship is a total immersion in what I can get out of it. And of course, it was incredibly successful. The Baal priests could gather crowds that outnumbered followers of Yahweh 20 to 1. There was sex, there was excitement, there was music, there was ecstasy, there was dance. “We got girls over here, friends. We got statues, girls, and festivals.” This was great stuff. And what did the Hebrews have to offer in response? The Word. What’s the Word? Well, Hebrews had festivals, at least!

Still, the one big hook or benefit to Christian faith is salvation, no? “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.” Is this not something we can use to legitimately attract listeners?

It’s the biggest word we have—salvation, being saved. We are saved from a way of life in which there was no resurrection. And we’re being saved from ourselves. One way to define spiritual life is getting so tired and fed up with yourself you go on to something better, which is following Jesus.

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we’re just exacerbating the self problem. “With Christ, you’re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.” But it’s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

We’ve all met a certain type of spiritual person. She’s a wonderful person. She loves the Lord. She prays and reads the Bible all the time. But all she thinks about is herself. She’s not a selfish person. But she’s always at the center of everything she’s doing. “How can I witness better? How can I do this better? How can I take care of this person’s problem better?” It’s me, me, me disguised in a way that is difficult to see because her spiritual talk disarms us.

So how should we visualize the Christian life?

In church last Sunday, there was a couple in front of us with two bratty kids. Two pews behind us there was another couple with their two bratty kids making a lot of noise. This is mostly an older congregation. So these people are set in their ways. Their kids have been gone a long time. And so it wasn’t a very nice service; it was just not very good worship. But afterwards I saw half a dozen of these elderly people come up and put their arms around the mother, touch the kids, sympathize with her. They could have been irritated.

Now why do people go to a church like that when they can go to a church that has a nursery, is air conditioned, and all the rest? Well, because they’re Lutherans. They don’t mind being miserable! Norwegian Lutherans!

And this same church recently welcomed a young woman with a baby and a three-year-old boy. The children were baptized a few weeks ago. But there was no man with her. She’s never married; each of the kids has a different father. She shows up at church and wants her children baptized. She’s a Christian and wants to follow in the Christian way. So a couple from the church acted as godparents. Now there are three or four couples in the church who every Sunday try to get together with her.

Now, where is the “joy” in that church? These are dour Norwegians! But there’s a lot of joy. There’s an abundant life going, but it’s not abundant in the way a non-Christian would think. I think there’s a lot more going on in churches like this; they’re just totally anticultural. They’re full of joy and faithfulness and obedience and care. But you sure wouldn’t know it by reading the literature of church growth, would you?

But many Christians would look at this church and say it’s dead, merely an institutional expression of the faith.

What other church is there besides institutional? There’s nobody who doesn’t have problems with the church, because there’s sin in the church. But there’s no other place to be a Christian except the church. There’s sin in the local bank. There’s sin in the grocery stores. I really don’t understand this naïve criticism of the institution. I really don’t get it.

Frederick von Hugel said the institution of the church is like the bark on the tree. There’s no life in the bark. It’s dead wood. But it protects the life of the tree within. And the tree grows and grows and grows and grows. If you take the bark off, it’s prone to disease, dehydration, death.

So, yes, the church is dead but it protects something alive. And when you try to have a church without bark, it doesn’t last long. It disappears, gets sick, and it’s prone to all kinds of disease, heresy, and narcissism.

In my writing, I hope to recover a sense of the reality of congregation—what it is. It’s a gift of the Holy Spirit. Why are we always idealizing what the Holy Spirit doesn’t idealize? There’s no idealization of the church in the Bible—none. We’ve got two thousand years of history now. Why are we so dumb?

Since the Reformation, though, we’ve championed the idea that the church can be reformed.

Hasn’t happened. I’m for always reforming, but to think that we can get a church that’s reformed is just silliness.

I think the besetting sin of pastors, maybe especially evangelical pastors, is impatience. We have a goal. We have a mission. We’re going to save the world. We’re going to evangelize everybody, and we’re going to do all this good stuff and fill our churches. This is wonderful. All the goals are right. But this is slow, slow work, this soul work, this bringing people into a life of obedience and love and joy before God.

And we get impatient and start taking shortcuts and use any means available. We talk about benefits. We manipulate people. We bully them. We use language that is just incredibly impersonal—bullying language, manipulative language.

One doesn’t normally think of churches as bullying.

Whenever guilt is used as a tool to get people to do anything—good, bad, indifferent—it’s bullying. And then there’s manipulative language—to talk people into programs, to get them involved, usually by promising them something.

I have a friend who is an expert at this sort of thing. He’s always saying, “You’ve got to identify people’s felt needs. Then you construct a program to meet the felt needs.” It’s pretty easy to manipulate people. We’re so used to being manipulated by the image industry, the publicity industry, and the politicians that we hardly know we’re being manipulated.

This impatience to leave the methods of Jesus in order to get the work of Jesus done is what destroys spirituality, because we’re using a non-biblical, non-Jesus way to do what Jesus did. That’s why spirituality is in such a mess as it is today.

But many pastors see people suffering in bad marriages, with drug addiction, with greed. And so they rightly want to help them now, by whatever method will work.

Yes, except something backfires on you when you’re impatient. How do we meet the need? Do we do it in Jesus’ way or do we do it the Wal-Mart way?

Spirituality is not about ends or benefits or things; it’s about means. It’s about how you do this. How do you live in reality?

So, how do you help all these people? The needs are huge. Well, you do it the way Jesus did it. You do it one at a time. You can’t do gospel work, kingdom work in an impersonal way.

We live in the Trinity. Everything we do has to be in the context of the Trinity, which means personally, relationally. The minute you start doing things impersonally, functionally, mass oriented, you deny the gospel. Yet that’s all we do.

Jesus is the Truth and the Life, but first he’s the Way. We can’t do Jesus’ work in the Devil’s way.

I get exercised about this because many pastors are getting castrated by these methodologies, which are impersonal. There’s no relationship to them. And so they become performance oriented and successful. It’s pretty easy in our culture, at least if you’re tall and have a big smile. And they lose their soul. There’s nothing to them after 20 years. Or they crash. They try all this stuff and it doesn’t work, and they quit, or quit and start doing something else. Probably 90 percent of the affairs that pastors have are not due to lust, but boredom with not having this romantic kind of life they thought they’d get.

What if we were to frame this not in terms of needs but relevance? Many Christians hope to speak to generation X or Y or postmoderns, or some subgroup, like cowboys or bikers—people for whom the typical church seems irrelevant.

When you start tailoring the gospel to the culture, whether it’s a youth culture, a generation culture or any other kind of culture, you have taken the guts out of the gospel. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not the kingdom of this world. It’s a different kingdom.

My son Eric organized a new church six years ago. The Presbyterians have kind of a boot camp for new church pastors where you learn what you’re supposed to do. So Eric went. One of the teachers there said he shouldn’t put on a robe and a stole: “You get out there and you meet this generation where they are.”

So Eric, being a good student and wanting to please his peers, didn’t wear a robe. His church started meeting in a high-school auditorium. He started out by wearing a business suit every Sunday. But when the first Sunday of Advent rolled around, and they were going to have Communion, he told me, “Dad, I just couldn’t do it. So I put my robe on.”

Their neighbors, Joel and his wife, attended his church. Joel was the stereotype of the person the new church development was designed for—suburban, middle management, never been to church, totally secular. Eric figured he was coming because they were neighbors, or because he liked him. After that Advent service, he asked Joel what he thought of his wearing a robe.

He said, “It made an impression. My wife and I talked about it. I think what we’re really looking for is sacred space. We both think we found it.”

I think relevance is a crock. I don’t think people care a whole lot about what kind of music you have or how you shape the service. They want a place where God is taken seriously, where they’re taken seriously, where there is no manipulation of their emotions or their consumer needs.

Why did we get captured by this advertising, publicity mindset? I think it’s destroying our church.

But someone else might walk into Eric’s church, see him with his robe, and walk out, thinking the whole place was too religious, too churchy.

So why are they going if it’s not going to be religious? What do they go to church for?

Of course, there’s another aspect to this. If you’re going to a church where everybody’s playing a religious role, that’s going to be off putting. But that performance mentality, role mentality can be seen in the cowboy church or whatever—everybody is performing a role there, too.

But we’re involved with something that has a huge mystery to it. Are we going to wipe out all the mystery so we can be in control of it? Isn’t reverence at the very heart of the worship of God?

And if we present a rendition of the faith in which all the mystery is removed, and there’s no reverence, how are people ever going to know there’s something more than just their own emotions, their own needs? There’s something a lot bigger than my needs that’s going on. How do I ever get to that if the church service and worship program is all centered on my needs?

Some people would argue that it’s important to have a worship service in which people feel comfortable so they can hear the gospel.

I think they’re wrong. Take the story I told you about this family in front of us on Sunday. Nobody was comfortable. The whole church was miserable.

And yet, they might have experienced more gospel in going up and putting their arms around that poor mother, who was embarrassed to death.

How do we know when they have moved from merely adapting ministry to the culture to sacrificing the gospel?

One test I think is this: Am I working out of the Jesus story, the Jesus methods, the Jesus way? Am I sacrificing relationship, personal attention, personal relationship for a shortcut, a program so I can get stuff done? You can’t do Jesus’ work in a non-Jesus way and get by with it—although you can be very “successful.”

One thing that I think is characteristic of me is I stay local. I’m rooted in a pastoral life, which is an ordinary life. So while all this glitter and image of spirituality is going around, I feel quite indifferent to it, to tell you the truth. And I’m somewhat suspicious of it because it seems to be uprooted, not grounded in local conditions, which are the only conditions in which you can live a Christian life.

Check out this sweet song by Antsy McClain called “I Was Just Flipped Off by a Silver-Haired Old Lady with a ‘Honk If You Love Jesus’ Sticker on the Bumper of Her Car.”

Our little secret as followers of Jesus: We daily live what we really believe; everything else is just a spiritual propaganda that we reserve for those on the outside of faith.

McClain’s song shows that our little secret is out.  No need to pretend any longer.

This morning I was pondering these words by Hauerwas in A Community of Character,

“Good and just societies require a narrative which helps them know the truth about existence and fight the temptation to self-deception.” (1

What does it look like for a local Christian community in a small place to embrace the narrative of Jesus?  How do we tell that story among our friends in a way that we get to participate in it?

Here is a snippet of Hauerwas’ interview that I just came across. In my mind it summs up pretty well why I have been so excited about this innovative and courageous thinker.

Why are you considered controversial?

Because I tell Christians that they ought to do what they say. They ought to forgive their enemies. There isn’t an asterisk in the Sermon on the Mount that says, “Unless they are Arabs.”

How should Christians make their mark on society?

By telling the truth. I think that one of the problems has been that Christians have often accepted the speech habits that characterize general assumptions about America that have not done us any good in terms of how we should be witnessing to what we think is true. (For example, to say) I think Jesus is Lord, but that is just my personal opinion.

What should Christians be doing?

The first task of the church is to be the church, because only when you do that do you have the ability to be a witness to the wider society. It is only when you worship God that you are then able to say what is true. Most Americans think that everyone believes in God. The God most Americans believe in is not the God of Jesus Christ…

The title of your lecture is intriguing: “Why No One Wants to Die in America.” What does that mean?

It means that we live in a society that’s in deep death denial. Assuming that most Christians live like other people, thinking they can get out of life alive. It’s not going to happen. People care more about who their doctor is today than who their priest or minister is. Most Christians live lives of practical atheism. … Atheism isn’t explicitly a denial of God, it’s to live in a way that God does not matter.

Three things strike me here:

1.Being a follower of Jesus means being a person who is not afraid of speaking the truth. That is the only way to impact our world.

2.The church must be the church. The world does not need another community that mimics something or someone else. So often we are caught up in being purpose-driven, relevant, missional. we place such a big focus on adjectives that define us rather than living out our identity that is defined by a noun- church, the Body of Christ, and yes even Colony of Heaven. We are to give the world what it does need the most a People of God who embrace and live their God-given identity. [Isa. 2:3-4].

3.Atheism is living as if God does not matter. Ouch!!! That’s convicting.

I just came across these thoughts by Stanley Hauerwas,

“The problem with debates about homosexuality is they have been devoid of any linguistic discipline that might give you some indication what is at stake. Methodism, for example, is more concerned with being inclusive than being the church. We do not have the slightest idea what we mean by being inclusive other than some vague idea that inclusivity has something to do with being accepting and loving. Inclusivity is, of course, a necessary strategy for survival in what is religiously a buyers’ market. Even worse, the inclusive church is captured by romantic notions of marriage. Combine inclusivity and romanticism and you have no reason to deny marriage between gay people.

When couples come to ministers to talk about their marriage ceremonies, ministers think it’s interesting to ask if they love one another. What a stupid question! How would they know? A Christian marriage isn’t about whether you’re in love. Christian marriage is giving you the practice of fidelity over a lifetime in which you can look back upon the marriage and call it love. It is a hard discipline over many years.

The difficulty, therefore, is that Christians, when they approach this issue, no longer know what marriage is. For centuries, Christians married people who didn’t know one another until the marriage ceremony, and we knew they were going to have sex that night. They didn’t know one another. Where does all this love stuff come from? They could have sex because they were married.

Now, when marriage becomes a mutually enhancing arrangement until something goes wrong, then it makes no sense at all to oppose homosexual marriages. If marriage is a calling that makes promises of lifelong monogamous fidelity in which children are welcomed, then we’ve got a problem. But we can’t even get to a discussion there, because Christians no longer practice Christian marriage.

What has made it particularly hard is that the divorce culture has made it impossible for us to talk about these matters–and many of you know, I’m divorced and remarried. It has made it impossible for us to talk about these matters with an honesty and candor that is required if you are not to indulge in self-deceptive, sentimental lies.

For gay Christians who I know and love, I wish we as Christians could come up with some way to help them, like we need to help one another, to avoid the sexual wilderness in which we live. That’s a worthy task. I probably sound like a conservative on these matters, not because I’ve got some deep animosity toward gay people, but because I don’t know how to go forward given the current marriage practices of our culture.”

Things that strike me the most:

1.His criticism of his own faith tradition that gives me freedom to think about my own community. Are we more concerned about being relevant/in-with-the-lost/deep/etc than we are about being a Colony of Heaven?

2.The concept of “Marriage as a practice of fidelity over lifetime” seems so retro and bland in the circles that we move. My wife has been severely criticized for speaking along the similar lines as encouraging women to “settle for less”. I wonder if overly romanticized and sexually charged notions of what we should be “feeling” towards our prospective spouse is the source of much loneliness today and the cause of such high rate of divorce among the Christians.

3.I am curious as to why does his position on homosexuality among Christian takes as primary a desire to help them avoid the sexual wilderness. Why does he not start with an affirmation that this is not a Biblically viable option [which seem to be buried underneath his words here and in other interviews] live out and then move to thinking about the issues of solution?

Hauerwas writes in A Community of Character, “Any community and polity is known and should be judged by the kind of people it develops…The most important social task of Christians is to be nothing less than a community capable of forming people with virtues sufficient to witness to God’s truth in the world.” (2)

What does this process of development look like?  Is it an ethos to be caught or as Kallenberg would say a grammar to be learned?

Today I have been mulling over an interesting, but controversial point by Kallenberg. He offers a critique of current focus on effectiveness that churches and Christian ministries have been embracing. This word seems to be very much at home in the business world. But does it become a Trojan horse when transferred into the realm of ministry?

“One of the symptoms of our sinful condition is our tendency to imagine that it is our responsibility to make events turn out well. If we think it is our job to make history turn out all right, then we imagine that the relationship between our actions and the events around us is one of cause and effect. Consequently, we tend to measure our actions by the criterion of effectiveness. As any church-growth handbook will show, even those who serve others in ministry succumb to the ubiquitous pressure to evaluate their strategies precisely in terms of their effectiveness. This outlook is especially commonplace in our technological society; any account of scientific advancement is chiefly a tale of effective prediction, manipulation, and control of the outcomes.” (111)

Put in this light things look pretty bad. Strategic planning process becomes a means of prediction, manipulation, and control of outcome. What about a simple question, “What are our next steps?” Or what about “Where do we want to go next year?” Am I so entangled in the linguistic labyrinth constructed by Harvard Business School that the native tongue of the MBA graduate is the only dialect I know?

Kallenberg’s solution is attractive, but makes me wonder as what it would look like in practice,

“But there is an alternative way of viewing things. John Howard Yoder suggests that the relationship between the actions we take and eventual outcomes is one not of cause and effect but of death and resurrection. Instead of evaluating human actions on the basis of their utility, we can regard our actions as deeds capable of embodying and reflecting the form of Jesus’ story. We ought to measure our actions in terms of their faithfulness: do they faithfully reproduce the cruciform pattern of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection?” (112)

Myriads of questions flood my mind as I think about the implementation of this idea of measuring faithfulness. What is there to guard us from simple workaholism? Who determines what faithfulness looks like? What does resurrection look like in campus ministry or local church setting?

If you were intrigued by my previous post here is an article by Brad Kallenberg that explores the notion of Christian conversion in the Postmodern world. Have fun chewing on it!

The “P”-Word: Conversion in a Postmodern Environment

BY BRAD J. KALLENBERG

Allow me to write frankly about the “P”-word. There is great concern about the proliferation of the “P”-word. In the past decade, over 1,500 articles and 2,000 books have come into print bearing the “P”-word in their titles. Nearly 1,000 of these books are still in print. Everywhere we turn we find that we have been inundated with the “P”-word. And so we have come to fear for our culture. The “P”-word? “Postmodernism.”

Granted, postmodernism is a slippery concept; there are many versions, many postmodernisms. But should Christians fear postmodernism? To be sure, the modern era proved to be no particular friend of the faith. For whatever faults existed in medieval churches, at least they were well-attended. But since the seventeenth century, church attendance in the West has plummeted. In a good week, five percent of Western Europe attends church, while church attendance in the United States barely makes it into double digits.

So the ending of modernity may not be a bad thing. Yet what guarantee have we that the gospel will fare any better in these supposedly postmodern times?

None. Yet the gospel is a robust “virus,” one that is able to inhabit virtually any cultural host. As William James once quipped, “The philosophical climate of the times inevitably forces its clothing on us.” Just as there have been authentic Christians of Platonic, Aristotelian, existentialist, even Marxist stripe, so too, it may please God to raise up authentically postmodern Christians. Perhaps the missionary character of the gospel can inspire us to search out ways to employ insights of postmodern philosophy for the good of Jesus’ Kingdom. I maintain that these insights change the very questions in which the task of evangelism is cast. But I must be clear at the outset what I mean by this.

It is not surprising that in the mechanistic universe we inherited from Descartes and Newton, evangelists hankered after appropriate philosophical crowbars for levering people into Christian belief. “If only we could provide plausible warrant for Christian truth claims.” “If only we could verify in tangible ways the literal meaningfulness of spiritual terms such as ‘God’ and ’soul.’” “If only we could express the gospel in ways that resonate with the deepest longing of every human individual.”

Of course many attempts were made to provide just such levers. But now it is commonplace to think that the dawning of this new age, this Postmodern Age, brings with it the awareness that all such projects have been summarily debunked. Instead, it is hoped that postmodern philosophy offers new and improved methods by which individuals can be levered into the Kingdom, techniques that exceed the old ones in their effectiveness.

However, the change of conceptual schemes from modern to postmodern involves not simply retooling old crowbars into more effective ones; the mechanical view of evangelism is itself a modern metaphor that needs replacing. How now are we to think about evangelism? Perhaps postmodernism can school us away from the “how to” to the “to what.” In other words, the crucial question for the church to ask is not “How are we to convert the unsaved?” but “To what are we asking them to convert?”

As the token Protestant who teaches ethics in an all-Catholic Department of Religious Studies, it fell to my lot to teach Protestant Christianity to the graduate students this past fall term. Of course, the colossal changes in Catholicism since Vatican II (in the late 1960s) made my job easier than it used to be. In some ways, contemporary Catholics stand much closer to conservative Protestant theology and ethics than to prior Catholic theology. Consequently, Catholic students are much more likely to see their reflection in the four marks of Protestantism (by Scripture alone, by faith alone, by Christ alone, and by grace alone) than in the excesses that typified the medieval and early modern Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, since they lacked hands-on experience, I assigned each of them to visit Protestant churches and report on their experience to the rest of the class. The spectrum of churches they could choose to visit ranged from liberal to conservative, from Pentecostal to Anabaptist, from culturally homogenous to ethnically diverse, from the megachurch to the microchurch.

On the last day of the term, students were eager to tell what they had discovered. Thankfully, all the students reported very warm and positive experiences. However, I began to feel uneasy when, one-by-one, each student reported that the sermon he or she heard was not especially sound, exegetically speaking. In fact, many claimed that Bible verses were used sparingly, even haphazardly, as proof-texts for homilies about psychological wellness. (In one case, what mattered was not that Jesus calmed the storm but that he could sleep in the bow rather than succumb to the stress of a busy schedule!) The students asked, “I thought you Protestants were big on the Bible? But we read more Scripture in our services than these ministers preached about. What’s the deal?”

I didn’t know how to respond. I felt especially ashamed of the so-called evangelical churches for giving the Word such short shrift. One student confessed that he had always entertained a secret hope of finding “the noble Protestant savage” whose religion was pure and undefiled. His church visit convinced him that the Protestants had nothing of interest to offer.

When the Reformers first entered the pulpit, they made a point of trading in their priestly vestments for academic robes.1 The message was clear: Reformation faith was serious scholarly business, and following Jesus involved, among other things, diligent renewal of the mind. But somewhere along the way, evangelical churches (Luther’s preferred term for the Reform movement) went soft. In his own day, Luther bemoaned the fact that “the more certain we are about the freedom granted to us by Christ, the more unresponsive and slothful we are in presenting the Word, praying, doing good works, enduring evil, and the like.”2

While I hesitate to say we’ve grown slothful, I do think that churches may be losing their distinctiveness due to our inattention. In part, our problem can be traced to the fact that we have been bewitched by the myth that the best way to reach the unchurched is to translate the message into terms that anybody could understand. This is a particularly modern myth. In Hendrikus Berkhof’s apt illustration, the church since the nineteenth century can be likened to a boat traveling down the river of time that attempted to clear the shoals of modernity by lightening its load. One by one, the items of scandalous particularity (the deity of Christ, the resurrection, etc.) were emptied out of the cargo bay. But alas, now the boat is empty, evacuated of any distinctive content.

Of course evangelicals quickly point out that Berkhof’s analysis describes the history of Protestant liberalism and, after all, everyone knows that membership of liberal churches is on the wane. In contrast, effective evangelistic strategies must be found, or so it is claimed, by studying churches that are growing. But sadly, one finds among many megachurches the very same “user-friendly” strategy employed by liberal churches of the last century. What will be the fate of these churches?

Fortunately, there is more than one way to skin a cat. If there is a communication gap between the followers of Jesus and their secular counterparts, and this gap cannot be closed by translating the gospel into “secularese,” then perhaps the gap can be closed by raising the level of fluency of the secular hearers so that they can understand the gospel on its own terms.

Perhaps now we can see why some are downright cheerful about the end of the mechanical age. Postmodern philosophy may open up ways for us to see evangelism in more living and organic ways. Specifically, postmodern insights about the nature of language help us appreciate that genuine conversion is tantamount to learning the Christian language from a community that participates in the mind of Christ by co-participating in their form of life and practices.

First, conversion involves language acquisition. Here I do not mean that non-Christians become Christians by some petty game of phrase-by-phrase same-saying. That would be magic. But becoming a Christian does involve learning a new conceptual language from believers who speak it. I might be able to learn some Norwegian by reading books and memorizing vocabulary. But I will never learn to bicker with the natives like a brother unless I become immersed into a community of Norwegian speakers. In a similar fashion, how can nonbelievers learn that “forgiveness” is not synonymous with “conflict resolution” nor “grace” with “freebie” except by being immersed in a community that uses forgiveness and grace properly? When we invite others to follow Jesus, we are asking them to learn a language by immersion into a community of speakers. We speak our language with them, and slowly they begin to hear with understanding. Conversion, then, can be likened to language acquisition. Consequently, evangelism is akin to language instruction; it requires of us the same patience and good humor required of my relatives who want to teach me Norwegian.

Second, there is a noetic or intellective component of conversion. However, this turns out to be different than modern apologists imagine. David L. Schindler writes that nonbelievers are not hindered from conversion by faulty reasoning, but by an alternative logic. In other words, nonbelievers make “logical” mistakes about the true order of the cosmos (namely, they cannot see that the cosmos is ordered to the love of God) because this logic is “implicit in a way of life” that nonbelievers do not share. What Schindler urges, in response, is that attention be paid to the nurture of the believing community’s “entire way of life . . . one that essentially includes a new and distinct logic.”3 This distinctive mode of reasoning has been described as narrative because it amounts to learning to see the world through the story of Jesus.4 To once again illustrate a postmodern notion with a premodern source, Calvin saw the gospel record (and indeed the whole of Scripture) as the lens through which the world is brought into focus rather than the text over which our minds sit in judgment.5

Third, the invitation to conversation is simultaneously an invitation to participate with the community in a very particular form of life. This form of life is the basis for the sense of the language Christians speak. All language seems to work this way. To gain fluency in simple words such as “chair” means to become familiar with the vast number of things we do with chairs. We count them, stack them, fetch them, reserve them, reupholster them, stub our toes on them, and, sit on them (not to mention appointing, endowing, and resigning them!). All such activities are bound up in the meaning of the English word chair. The fact that language acquisition depends on regular participation in these very activities is why language is better learned by immersion into a community of native speakers than by rote memorization.

Now think of the word “God.” How do we gain fluency with this word? Isn’t it the same way? We pray to God, confess our sins to God, worship God, tell our neighbors about God, give offerings to God, and thank God. For Christ followers, there is a vast number of activities in which the word God is at home. Amazingly, participation in these activities is not only the means of knowing what Christians mean by the word God, it is the prescribed means for knowing God himself.

But consider the atheist. The atheist insists “God does not exist” and yet neither prays, confesses, thanks, witnesses, tithes, nor worships. What then is the meaning of the word God in the atheist’s denial? Who is to say? After all, to the atheist who neither prays, sings, worships, confesses, nor witnesses, the word God is an empty concept!

What hope has the atheist of understanding Christian speech? None, if we believe the philosophers of modernity. For on their account, if all meaningful language must pass the bar of publicly accessible criteria, then God is a “No-See-Um.” But postmodern insights about the internal relation between language and world6 enable us to appreciate the seriousness with which Luther saw the believing congregation as the Body of Christ: the one who encounters the singing, praying, confessing church meets God in action.7 Thus, in the final analysis, evangelism is seen to be a form of discipleship. For what is needed is precisely that community that robustly embodies in its practices this new and “foolish” (1 Cor. 1:23) mode of reasoning, this mind of Christ, to the end that the church becomes, once again, the anchor and showcase of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15).

Let me try to give these thoughts more concrete form by telling a story I’ve written about elsewhere.8 My former neighbor across the street—let’s call him “Bill”—has been converting to Christianity for the past three years. I met the “new-and-improved” Bill at the end of a period of great turmoil in his life. He and his common-law wife had been drug addicts. He had left his wife and gained custody of their son. He landed a job, but the physical demands of kicking mescaline had required him to sleep most of his off-hours during the first few months. The days crept by.

When I met Bill, he was sleeping better and had just decided to quit smoking and begin exercising. I figured “getting religion” was the logical next step on Bill’s self-help program. So I invited Bill to come to church. First, he attended a children’s musical (our kids play together). Then he began attending worship. Somewhere along the line I gave him a Bible, which he undertook to read from cover to cover. On Sundays, I watched in amazement as he learned to sing songs of worship. Now, it has been said that more lies are spoken over the cover of a hymnal than anywhere else on the planet. But Bill’s tuneful worship was not self-deceiving (as if he were assuring himself that things were on the level with God when, in fact, he was still far off) but rather a training to see life under the aspect of the gospel, a learning to see things as they really are.
In time, Bill was baptized and publicly gave as clear a presentation of his journey to Christ as he was able to muster at his level of understanding. He also began attending meetings with a small group in our church.

Somewhere in this process of conversion, Bill was no longer self-helping himself into religion. Rather, he learned to correctly see himself as the recipient of an undeserved and saving grace.

Bill’s process of conversion cannot be distilled into a linear cause-and-effect chain that could be programmatized for anyone. Rather, what took place in Bill’s life was the involvement in a conversation. Initially, Bill participated as a recipient; he heard the gospel embodied in the kids’ musical, in the preaching of sermons, in the prayers of others; he read the text as a recipient of a notable message. And yet he also shifted his stance to participate in the conversation as an advocate. He sang songs as unto God; he gave a personal testimony before his baptism; he incarnated the gospel in miniature in the enactment of his baptism; he co-participated with the rest of the Body of Christ in incarnating the story of remembrance we call Eucharist; and he participates even now in acts of charity and care for his fellow believers through the ministry of our small group.

ENDNOTES

1. Edward LeRoy Long, Jr., “Ministry and Scholarship in the Reformed Tradition,” in Scholarship, Sacraments and Service: Historical Studies in Protestant Tradition, ed. Daniel B. Clendenin and W. David Buschart (Edwin Mellen Press, 1990),
2. Cited in Mary Gaebler, “Luther on the Self,” in Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 22 (2002), 126.
3. David L. Shindler, “Religion and Secularity in a Culture of Abstraction,” in The Strange New World of the Gospel: Re-Evangelizing in the Postmodern World, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Eerdmans, 2002), 44.
4. Stanley Hauerwas, with David Burrell, “From System to Story: An Alternative Pattern for Rationality in Ethics,” in Truthfulness and Tragedy (University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 15-39. See also Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Hermeneutics (Yale University Press, 1974).
5. “Just as old or bleary-eyed men and those with weak vision, if you thrust before them a most beautiful volume, even if they recognize it to be some sort of writing, yet scarcely construe two words, but with the aid of spectacles will begin to read distinctly; so Scripture, gathering up the otherwise confused knowledge of God in our minds, having dispersed our dullness, clearly shows us the true God.” John T. McNeill, ed., Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion in Two Volumes, The Library of Christian Classics Vol. XX (Westminster Press, 1960), I.6.1.
6. See Brad J. Kallenberg, Ethics as Grammar: Changing the Postmodern Subject (University of Notre Dame Press, 2001).
7. Reinhard Hütter, “The Church,” in Knowing the Triune God: The Work of the Spirit in the Practices of the Church, ed. James J. Buckley and David S. Yeago (Eerdmans, 2001), 23.
8. Brad J. Kallenberg, Live to Tell: Evangelism for a Postmodern Age (Brazos Press, 2002), 63-64.