This post has been brewing over the past few weeks and I think the thoughts are starting to congeal a bit. It's probably best told in retrospect, but the catalyst was the recent arrival of the book Divinity & Diversity--A Christian Affirmation of Religious Pluralism through the Transforming Theology initiative, currently being moderated by Tripp Fuller and Tony Jones. Basically, they put out an open call for people who like to read nerdy theological books and then write about them--I'm working on it--I think the first post may make it up by the end of the week, but that's a bit beside the point here.
When I opened the envelope to see
Divinity & Diversity I had to laugh a little. All the enthusiasm you can have about finding a great new book can quickly disappear when you realize you've read it before--or at least skimmed it. When I was at McAfee I took a class at Candler School of Theology across town from M.Thomas Tangeraj called "Doing Theology in Global Contexts". He had us read Suchocki's book to force us to wrestle with the deep, abiding issue(s) of religious pluralism. This brought up a whole course of memories which all centered around one very basic question--
What is the Gospel and how is it shared? I couldn't answer that question without examining how my answers would have been so drastically different over the last 20 years. I am not a missiologist, nor am I a fully credentialed theologian, so I'm left with these answers and the course they chart--a passion for a Gospel that I am still wrestling with. For the sake of clarity, I have to start at the beginning.
The "___(Fill in the Blank)___" Gospel
I grew up in a conservative, evangelical, medium-sized Southern Baptist Church. I was raised to believe that the gospel was the Good News about Jesus Christ and was largely formulaic. Back then there were classes on Sunday nights to teach you how to share this Gospel. For the brave, there was even a certification class that required memorizing key passages of Scripture and completing a thorough examination.
Though never stated explicitly, this was the course of all serious disciples--the commitment to making more disciples through a consistent method of evangelism. For the hoi polloi, the Gospel was more of a litmus test--did you really believe it? It was along these lines that there were professions of faith and all sorts of "re"dedications--normally after an evangelistic crusade or drama. The chapel baptistry would even be filled so as to accommodate instant baptism for those seeking it.(Which the youth group would later put goldfish in, but that's a story for another time.)
I was suspicious of some aspects of this, but having had my own genuine experience of understanding Christ at 16 better than I had walking an aisle at 11, I trusted it--and I trusted the Spirit to provoke people to have a genuine, personal encounter with the resurrected Christ. I trusted it so much that in my junior year of high school, I thought it would actually be a good idea to take a box full of tracts and stuff one in every locker of our school. It seemed (at the time) to be noble--a subversive way to get the whole school abuzz about faith. I can clearly remember talking to a teacher on the phone (who happened to go to our church) and passionately arguing that "at least it got people who don't normally talk about their faith to talk about it." Now I can think of a hundred reasons why it was a horrible idea, but that's where I started from.
The Gospel of "Truth"
Going to Shorter College I was relatively sure of what I believed. There were no issues of faith or practice that I didn't have a C.S. Lewis quote ready for. There was, at that time, a real sense of evangelistic zeal--there were people who had actually been to other countries and shared their faith. There was a palpable sense that God was doing something among my generation and there was a sense of meaning and destiny to taking the Gospel to the ends of the earth.
But it was clear at this point that there were other Gospels out there--these were distillations of the Gospel--milquetoast, watered-down versions that belied the cost of genuine discipleship and demanded radical obedience and suffering. It was the time of my brief affair with Calvinism, though it was more like John Piperism at the time. The shift was from stuffing tracts in lockers to passionately caring about people and being sincere enough to win them to faith in Christ. It was all about crusading for what sounded like the highest calling--gaining Christ--the historic, crucified, orthodox, patristic Christ--once bloodied now glorified, calling his disciples to come and die with Him only to be raised to glory.
The chest swells at the thought of it, but subliminal arrogance lies beneath a thin veneer of humility. I was shocked to sit in a Baptist History class and find that Piper had said nothing that Adoniram Judson and William Carey hadn't said before. Moreover, my generation wasn't the first to "claim the world for Jesus"--there had been the "Bold Mission Thrust", as well as countless others that had envisioned proclaiming the Gospel to all of humanity, in the vain attempt to hastening the eschaton. All of a sudden, my affair with Calvinism exposed not God but a man behind the curtain, one that looked suspiciously like it's author, trying to redirect my attention to the Grand Spectacle of Glory.
The Revealed Gospel
I was still getting over the death of Oz when I decided to bite off considerably more than my undergraduate jaws could chew.I was fascinated by Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and their deep and abiding friendship up until Bonhoeffer's execution. Moreover, it seemed there was an ongoing disagreement between the two of them over what Bonhoeffer called Barth's "positivism of Revelation" (Offensbarungpositivismus--it's amazing how German makes one word of three). I dug and dug and by all accounts at the time, no one had written extensively. After some serious diggin (which required way more German than I actually knew) I figured it out.
Bonhoeffer's beef was not a singular accusation, but an ongoing critique of where Bonhoeffer believed Barth had gone too far. Both were Christocentric enough that the cross had to be present always. Bonhoeffer feared Barth was too eager to move the "special" revelation of the cross into the "natural" revelation of the created world. Barth, according to Bonhoeffer, was reading Jesus in the flowers and sunshine, and not solely in the cross-event.
And instantly, I found a new hero. Barth was bold enough to say that it is precisely because of the cross that every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine exists. It was a totally new understanding of "In Him we live and move and have our being." What started as my last theology paper of undergraduate life became not only my magnum opus but the root of a new, emerging view of the Gospel.
The Unspoken Gospel
In between Shorter and McAfee I spent one brief, painful semester at Southwestern Seminary. I remember clearly flying back to Texas from Georgia after having proposed to Jen. I was in a suit, and had my requisite Church History book and Bible in hand. When the seat that had been empty was filled by a late-arriving woman, I felt the guilt of being a seminary student--in a suit--with a Bible. The message was clear--I had to get this conversation back to Jesus.
Weirdly enough, I never even said that name, but we talked about how she was a military translator of
Farsi . She was raised in a conservative church and chafed against it most of her adult life. She found meaning in conversations with some devout Muslims in Pakistan, but left when the Imam began spewing rhetoric against the West. She was drawn to the person of Jesus and hoped to find someone to read the Gospels with and talk to. I said "I hope you find that somewhere." and the cabin lights came on and we shook hands, left the plane and parted ways. It was September 10th, 2002.
I thought I should share faith with her and instead she shared it with me. It felt surreal--dreamlike even. I can still see her face perfectly. And that's when I started questioning things.
The Gospel I Learned in Seminary
At McAfee we were required to Mission and Evangelism, though every student dreaded it, mostly for fear of the unknown. We should have been afraid, but only for the fact that our readings would lay bare what should have been painfully obvious the whole time--God is
always at work in the world around us, we just don't see it or acknowledge it. In all honesty, the
missio dei wasn't that different then what Henry Blackaby was saying in
Experiencing God back in my "fill-in-the-blank" days--God is at work in the world and humanity is called to partner with God in the work of redemption. Admittedly, Lesslie Newbigin and David Bosch took it way further than that, but that was the basic truth and I still find it critical--the task is not ours, it is God's. To think anything else is to call into question divine authority.
This view worked and was indeed liberating to a room-full of seminarians who didn't know how to share the Gospel without coming up with some heinous abuse that smacked of selling encyclopedias. It did, however slightly, reek of some of the pseudo-Calvinist resignation I had seen in college. Humanity was relatively off the hook, as all things could be inevitably chalked up to theological variations on Divine Providence.
But this didn't satisfy lingering curiosities from college--"What about other religions? What about the effects of globalization and glocalization?" To borrow from a certain tall college professor--"What about the boy on the rice patty who will never hear the name of Jesus?" (FYI--We pressed him--"How do you know he'll never hear?" to which he would only say "He'll NEVER hear--trust me--he's out there."
The Gospel I Learned in the Seminary I Didn't Go To
My desire for understanding Christian theology in non-Western contexts led me to jump through the paperwork to take a class at Candler School of Theology at Emory. It was a wonderful experience for a whole host of reasons, but one day of class stood out against the rest. It was the day we were to have "read" Divinity and Diversity. Dr. Tangeraj explained that he knew that pluralism made us uncomfortable, but it was THE key question in doing theology in global contexts. And then he said something deceptively simple that changed everything.
He was a bright-eyed Indian man with silver hair and a beard. His head shook like a bobble-head doll and he had a smirk when he said certain things. This was one of those things. "Jesus said 'I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, no man comes to the Father but through me'. He did not say "You will be the Way through which I will call people." Jesus reserves the right to call whomever he likes and by whatever means he wishes."
And everything just unraveled. Suddenly it wasn't about selling a Western, pasty-white imperialized Jesus through Four Spiritual Laws to get you to the Roman Road so that you could see the Cross Bridge between God and man over the flames of hell. It was about liberating Christ from our own mechanizations and being aware of that calling in the lives of others.
The Never-Ending Gospel
I was finishing seminary and decided to take a theology elective that I didn't need to graduate. I thought about auditing it, but I knew I would slack-off and not do the work, so I signed up for Suffering and Evil with Graham Walker. The class was brilliant and probably ranks among my best seminary experiences. There was enough diversity in the class for there to be a legitimate antithesis to every thesis, which always made it fun. But then there was the book summary. I was assigned The Creative Suffering of God by Paul Fiddes. Dr. Walker said it was one of the two toughest assignments in the entire class. It certainly was among the longest. I wrestled with the concepts Fiddes presented and tried to articulate them as clearly as I could. I don't really know what a "Book Summary" is. I write (and always have) critical book reviews, not regurgitations and distillations of points and positions. (If you read disdain in that, you're on target--he made me take out all the critical parts and re-work it--I am still bitter.)
The most basic way I could summarize what Fiddes presents is along the lines of my favorite childhood movie,
The Neverending Story. I think Dr. Walker thought I was crazy at first, but I made my case. Basically, according to Fiddes, humanity is called into co-creation with God. We are simultaneously living and writing the story of faith and existence, with varying results along the way. In the faith journey, we feel as though we've stumbled onto an ancient story that we're peeking into, until we find, at the pivotal moment when the future hangs in the balance, the characters we are reading start reading us and turn and ask "What are you going to do to
help us?"
It's participation. It's co-creation. It's partnering with God to do the work that neither humanity nor God alone could do. And it is unbelievably compelling. If, as we often say "every life is a story God's telling", then humanity is telling the tale in call and response form. orthodoxy and orthopraxy are inextricably linked, and our witness is only as good as our attention to the Spirit and to our human context.
The Gospel Observed
And here I am four years later. I have instigated and participated in mission trips from Tennessee to Bulgaria. I have, with varying degrees of success, struggled to articulate an incarnational approach to the Gospel. I have squirmed every time someone asks "What do you do?" because I don't always know how to say I'm a minister without subconsciously hawking Jesus like Tupperware.
I have found some solace in the metaphor one writer uses--doing missions is far more akin to
being a tour guide than it is a preacher. Our job as people of faith isn't to proclaim Jesus is Lord by imperial decree, but to set apart Jesus as Lord in our hearts and point out where we see the Spirit of Christ in the world around us.
So as I sat in my living room this past Saturday night watching the last Broadway performance of
Rent on pay-per-view, I felt no shame to be stirred to my core by the depiction of love and loss, meaning and beauty. I could claim these images as echoes of grace, fully revealed in Jesus. What's more, not only,
should I do this, but to do anything less is to claim the Gospel in purely human terms--to dis-believe that Jesus is, in fact, the Way and that
if He be lifted up, all of humanity will be drawn unto him.
When we sit beside other human beings in need of redemption, we affirm that which we already see that is "good, true, noble, excellent and praiseworthy."
When we are stirred by every sacred expression of love that hints at the eternity born in our hearts, we testify to the spirit of Christ.
When we see the compassionate stranger in our midst, we likewise welcome Christ.
When we recognize the holy conversation of two people, we know He is there with them.
And where light is,
darkness cannot be.
