“A Day’s Journey into Nineveh” – How Theology is Rooted in Geography

Pastoral work is local: Nineveh. The difficulty in carrying it out is that we have a universal gospel but distressingly limited by time and space. We are under command to go into all the world to proclaim the gospel to every creature. We work under the large rubrics of heaven and hell. And now we find ourselves in a town of three thousand people on the far edge of Kansas, in which the library is underbudgeted, the radio station plays only country music, the high school football team provides all the celebrities the town can manage, and a covered-dish supper is the high point in congregational life.

It is hard for a person who has been schooled in the urgencies of apocalyptic and with an imagination furnished with saints and angels to live in this town very long and take part in its conversations without getting a little impatient, growing pretty bored, and wondering if it wasn’t an impulsive mistake to abandon that ship going to Tarshish.

We start dreaming of greener pastures. We preach BIG IDEA sermons. Our voices take on a certain stridency as our anger and disappointment at being stuck in this place begin to leak into our discourse.

Now is the time to rediscover the meaning of the local, and in terms of church, the parish. All churches are local. All pastoral work takes place geographically. ‘If you would do good,’ wrote William Blake, ‘you must do it in Minute Particulars.’ When Jonah began his proper work, he went a day’s journey into Nineveh. He didn’t stand at the edge and preach at them; he entered into the midst of their living – heard what they were saying, smelled the cooking, picked up the colloquialisms, lived ‘on the economy,’ not aloof from it, not superior to it.

The gospel is emphatically geographical. Place names – Sinai, Hebron, Machpelah, Shiloh, Nazareth, Jezreel, Samaria, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Bethsaida – these are embedded in the gospel. All theology is rooted in geography.

Pilgrims to biblical lands find that the towns in which David camped and Jesus lived are no better or more beautiful or more exciting than their hometowns.

The reason we get restless with where we are and want, as we say, ‘more of a challenge’ or ‘a larger field of opportunity’ has nothing to do with prophetic zeal or priestly devotion; it is the product of spiritual sin. The sin is generated by the virus of gnosticism.

Gnosticism is the ancient but persistently contemporary perversion of the gospel that is contemptuous of place and matter. It holds forth that salvation consists in having the right ideas, and the fancier the better. It is impatient with restrictions of place and time and embarrassed by the garbage and disorder of everyday living. It constructs a gospel that majors in fine feelings embellished by sayings of Jesus. Gnosticism is also impatient with slow-witted people and plodding companions and so always ends up being highly selective, appealing to an elite group of people who are ‘spiritually deep,’ attuned to each other, and quoting a cabal of experts.

The gospel, on the other hand, is local intelligence, locally applied, and plunges with a great deal of zest into the flesh, into matter, into place – and accepts whoever happens to be on the premises as the people of God. One of the pastor’s continuous tasks is to make sure that these conditions are honored: this place just as it is, these people in their everyday clothes, ‘a particularizing love for local thing, rising out of local knowledge and local allegiance.’

Eugene Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant: An Exploration in Vocational Holiness, p. 128-130.

“…all creatures live by participating in the life of God” – An Excerpt from Wendell Berry’s The Burden of the Gospels

I think Jesus recommended the Samaritan’s loving-kindness, what certain older writers called ‘holy living,’ simply as a matter of propriety, for the Samaritan was living in what Jesus understood to be a holy world. The foreground of the Gospels is occupied by human beings and the issues of their connection to one another and to God. But there is a background, and the background more often than not is the world in the best sense of the word, the world as made, approved, sustained, and finally to be redeemed by God. Much of the action and the talk of the Gospels takes place outdoors: on mountainsides, lake shores, river banks, in field and pastures, places populated not only by humans but by animals and plants, both domestic and wild. And these non-human creatures, sheep and lilies and birds, are always represented as worthy of, or as flourishing within, the love and care of God.

To know what to make of this, we need to look back to the Old Testament, to Genesis, to the Psalms, to the preoccupation with the relation of the Israelites to their land that runs through the whole lineage of the prophets. Through all this, much us implied or taken for granted. In only two places that I remember is the always implicit relation – the practical or working relation – of God to the creation plainly stated. Psalm 104:30, addressing God and speaking of the creatures, says, ‘Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created…’ And, as if in response, Elihu says to Job (34:14-15) that if God ‘ gather unto himself his spirit and his breath; All flesh shall perish together…’ I have cut Elihu’s sentence a little short so as to leave the emphasis on ‘all flesh.’

Those also are verses that don’t require interpretation, but I want to stretch them out in paraphrase just to make as plan as possible my reason for quoting them. They are saying that not just humans but allcreatures live by participating in the life of God, by partaking of His spirit and breathing His breath. And so the Samaritan reaches out in love to help his enemy, breaking all the customary boundaries, because he has clearly seen in his enemy not only a neighbor, not only a fellow human or a fellow creature, but a fellow sharer in the life of God.

When Jesus speaks of having life more abundantly, this, I think, is the life He means: a life that is not reducible by division, category, or degree, but is one thing: heavenly and earthly, spiritual and material, divided only insofar as it is embodied in distinct creatures. He is talking about a finite world that is infinitely holy, a world of time that is filled with life that is eternal. His offer of more abundant life, then, is not an invitation to declare ourselves as certified ‘Christians,’ but rather to become conscious, consenting, and responsible participants in the one great life, a fulfillment hardly institutional at all.

To be convinced of the sanctity of the world, and to be mindful of a human vocation to responsible membership in such a world, must always have been a burden. But it is a burden that falls with greatest weight on us humans of the industrial age who have been and are, by any measure, the humans most guilty with desecrating the world and of destroying creation. And we ought to be a little terrified to realize that, for the most part and at least for the time being, we are helplessly guilty. It seems as though industrial humanity has brought about phase two of original sin. We all are now complicit in the murder of creation. We certainly do know how to apply better measures to our conduct and our work. We know how to do far better than we are doing. But we don’t know how to extricate ourselves from our complicity very surely or very soon. How could we live without degrading our soils, slaughtering our forests, polluting our streams, poisoning the air and the rain? How could live without the ozone hole and the hypoxic zones? How could we live without endangering species, including our own? How could we live without the war economy and the holocaust of the fossil fuels? To the offer of more abundant life, we have chosen to respond with the economics of extinction.

If we take the Gospels seriously, we are left, in our dire predicament, facing an utterly humbling question: How must we live and work so as not to be estranged from God’s presence in His work and in all His creatures? The answer, we may say, is given in Jesus’s teaching about love. But that answer raises another question that plunges us into the abyss of our ignorance, which is both human and peculiarly modern: How are we to make of that love an economic practice?

That question calls for many answers, and we don’t know most of them. It is a question that those humans who want to answer will be living and working with for a long time – if they are allowed a long time. Meanwhile, may Heaven guard us from those who think they already have the answers.

- Wendell Berry, “The Burden of the Gospels,” in The Way of Ignorance p. 135-137

Ecclesia and Ethics: An Eco-friendly and Economically-feasible Online Biblical Studies and Theology Conference

Well, this looks very, very interesting.

N.T. Wright, Stanley Hauerwas, Michael Gorman, and Northeastern Seminary‘s very own newly appointed Professor of Biblical Studies, Nijay Gupta are among the presenters of this “eco-friendly and economically-feasible online biblical studies and theological conference.”

From the site:

Ecclesia and Ethics: An Eco-friendly and Economically-feasible Online Biblical Studies and Theology Conference is an academic and ecclesial conference taking place on Saturday May 18th and Saturday May 25th 2013 in real-time via the high-tech Webinar site http://www.gotomeeting.com. No software will need to be purchased by presenters or attendees, and Webinar access is provided entirely for free due to a generous Capod Innovation Grant through the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Participants and attendees will be able to sign on, present, and listen to or watch presentations from anywhere in the world with reliable internet and a computer. Registration for the conference consists of a $10/£7 (minimum) donation to one of our Recommended Charities. We invite participants to give according to their means above the $10/£7 to one or more of our charities if they feel led and are able.

Main papers will be presented by our Main Speakers: N.T. Wright, Michael Gorman, Dennis Hollinger, Shane Claiborne, Stanley Hauerwas, Brian Rosner, Mariam Kamell, Nijay Gupta, Michael Barber, and Sungmin Min Chun. Additionally, we will have five Multiple Paper sessions throughout the conference, via five Virtual Rooms which will feature papers from a total of 20-25 selected papers. Interested parties are invited to submit an abstract to ecclesiaethics@gmail.com for consideration from January 2013-March 2013.

To whet your appetite, here is a video interview with N.T. Wright regarding his take on “Moral Formation, the relationship between the Church and the Academy, and the relationship between Theology and Exegesis.”

And here is an interview with Nijay Gupta, our newly installed Professor:

Looks promising, to say the least.

Go here for more.

New Creation: An Interdisciplinary Theology Conference at Northeastern Seminary

I am excited to announce that Northeastern Seminary has teamed up with the Canadian Evangelical Theological Association in order to bring about New Creation: An Interdisciplinary Theology Conference. The theme for the conference is taken from J. Richard Middleton’s newest book, A New Heaven and A New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology and he will serve as the main presenter. Middleton is Northeastern’s Professor of Biblical Worldview and Exegesis, a renown scholar, author of The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1, and co-author of both The Transforming Vision: Shaping A Christian Worldview  and Truth is Stranger Than It Used to Be: Biblical Faith in a Postmodern Age with Brian Walsh [He can be seen here, here, and here discussing a theology of place].

The call is now out for papers centering on the theme of new creation:

This Call for Papers goes out to established scholars or practitioners in the theological disciplines, as well as to graduate students, post-docs, and pre-tenured faculty.

We encourage submission of high quality papers on any topic of theological relevance to the broad theme of “New Creation.” Papers should be scholarly but not highly specialized presentations of about 25 minutes, aimed at an audience of students, pastors, and faculty from across the spectrum of theological disciplines. We are interpreting theology to include biblical studies; theological readings of Scripture; historical, systematic, philosophical, moral, and pastoral theology; theology that engages culture, the church, other academic disciplines, etc.

Proposals should be approximately 250 words in length and should be accompanied by a short CV. To facilitate anonymous review of proposals, please include your name, paper title, institutional affiliation, and contact information on a separate page from your paper proposal.

Read the rest here.

I am seriously contemplating writing a paper on a theology of place using the likes of Wendell Berry, Craig Bartholomew, and Norman Wirzba. We’ll see.

Regardless if you write or not, I highly suggest you make plans to be there for this gathering. It’s on a Saturday and it is one day. Nothing should be stopping you. I hope to see you then.

Community and Place: Wendell Berry

I have been contemplating the significant coupling of community and place as of late. One of the least examined – and probably the most significant – aspects of daily life for both individuals and communities is how their locales form them.

A great myth of modernism have been the universalizing tendencies to push local community life and practice into a monoculture. Under the guise of the universal we’ve lost the nuances of the local. Within this thought, we can and should expect life to be similar in Denver as it is in Syracuse. Or perhaps even within closer proximity, life to be the same in Nedrow (just south of the city of Syracuse) and Liverpool (a northern suburb of Syracuse).

The diminishing of the local gets carried out when we lose the differentiating nuances of particular communities through top-down practices. Instead of finding the shades and tints produced by a place’s cultural artwork which can only be only known from the ground-up, we supplant this patient-inducing work for the ease of assuming. We assume we know what works without knowing the people or the place. In my experience, this is most evident in ventures of “church planting.” Instead of asking how place and community live symbiotically, we rush in never taking notice of the subtleties the answers to that question raise. Not listening only leads to assuming.

Enter Wendell Berry.

I read this today and it stopped me in my tracks. Instead of commenting further, I’ll let you read and soak it in.

For an authentic community is made less in reference to who we are than to where we are. I cannot farm my farm as a European American – or as an American, or as a Kentuckian – but only as a person belonging to the place itself. If I am to use it well and live on it authentically, I cannot do so by knowing where my ancestors came from (which, except for one great-grandfather, I do not know and probably can never know); I can do so only by knowing where I am, what the nature of the place permits me to do here, and who and what are here with me. To know these things, I must ask the place. A knowledge of foreign cultures is useful, perhaps indispensable, to me in my effort to settle here, but it cannot tell me where I am.

Thoughts?

 

Reinhold Niebuhr on Entertainment Driven Churches…in 1927

There has been ample evidence demonstrating the steady decline of the Western church as we continue to push into a post-Christendom society. Many factors have been qualified and quantified as many individuals, organizations, and churches have sought to revitalize the existing Church by calling into question its current ideas and their resulting practices.

One such critique has been the ever-increasing entertainment quality of the today’s church. Surely, this has emerged from both the individualism and consumerism so rampant in the Western church today. Rather than the church being a community living as a family centered on Jesus in all areas, there are many examples of practices that point to the need for distracting entertainment as the unifying factor. Questions like, “Does the preacher give vibrant messages?”, “Is the music contemporary?”, “Is there a chance I’ll win a new car if I show up on Easter?” point to the reality of needing to consume things which will keep my attention above all else, particularly the Spirit.

Here is an extended quote from Reinhold Niebuhr that caught my attention as I was skimming through his book Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic. Keep in mind this was written in 1927.

I wonder why it is that so many of the churches which go in for vaudeville programs and the hip-hip-hooray type of religious services should belong to the Methodist and Baptist denominations. The vulgarities of the stunt preacher are hardly compatible with either the robust spiritual vitality or the puritan traditions of the more evangelistic churches. Perhaps the phenomenon of which I speak is due merely to the size of the two denominations. They may have more showmen simply because they are big enough to have more leaders of all varieties. Certainly no church surpasses the Methodist in the number of men who posses real social passion and imagination. Nor are the old emotionally warm and naively orthodox preachers wanting in either church.

Nevertheless there is a growing tendency toward stunt services in both denominations. Perhaps it represents the strategy of denominational and congregational organisms which are too much alive to accept the fate of innocuous desuetude, which has befallen some other churches. Finding the masses, which they once attracted by genuine religious emotion, less inclined to seek satisfaction in religion, they maintain themselves by offering such goods in entertainment and social life as the people seem to desire.

When the naive enthusiasms of those generations, among whom religion is an emotional experience and not a social tradition, begin to cool, the churches which serve the new generations must either express religious feeling through devotion to moral and aesthetic values or they must substitute a baser emotionalism for the most religious feeling. Perhaps the prevalence of cheap theatricality among the churches of our great democracy is a sign of the fact that the masses in America have lost the capacity for unreflective and exuberant religious feeling before they could acquire the kind of religion which is closely integrated with the values of culture and art.

There is something pathetic about the effort of the churches to capture these spiritually vacuous multitudes by resort to any device which may intrigue their vagrant fancies. But it may not represent a total loss. The entertainment they offer may be vulgar, but it is not vicious, and without them the people might find satisfaction in something even cheaper.

Home, Homelessness, Homecoming Part 3

Here is the final installment of Brian Walsh’s video series from the folks at The Parish Collective. If you want to know more about Walsh, check out his blog or his books or the dialogue his wife and he presented entitled “Outside a Small Circle of Friends: Jesus and the Justice of God” at Wheaton’s Theology Conference 2010: A Theological Dialogue with N.T. Wright.  They are all great resources.

For more on the great work from the people at the Parish Collective, check out their site. If you like what you read, talk with me about working on some collaborative for the Syracuse area. I’d love to chat. You can always check them out on Facebook and join their online community full of resources and dialogue. Again, great, great stuff.

Enjoy the video.

Caesar’s Image versus God’s Image: An Ancient Reflection on Matthew 22

“So let us always reflect the image of God in these ways:

I do not swell up with the arrogance of pride;

nor do I droop with the blush of anger;

nor do I succumb to the passion of avarice;

nor do I surrender myself to the ravishes of gluttony;

nor do I infect myself with the duplicity of hypocrisy;

nor do I contaminate myself with the filth of rioting;

nor do I grow flippant with the pretension of conceit;

nor do I grow enamored of the burden of heavy drinking;

nor do I alienate by the dissension of mutual admiration;

nor do I infect others with the biting of detraction;

nor do I grow conceited with the vanity of gossip.

Rather, instead, I will reflect the image of God in that I feed on love;

grow certain on faith and hope;

strengthen myself on the virtue of patience;

grow tranquil by humility;

grow beautiful by chastity;

am sober by abstention;

am made happy by tranquility;

and am ready for death by practicing hospitality.

It is with such inscriptions that God imprints his coins with an impression made neither by hammer nor by chisel but has formed them with his primary divine intention. For Caesar required his image on every coin, but God has chosen man, whom he has created, to reflect his glory.”

- Homily 42 from the Incomplete Work on Matthew

“We just don’t.”: Robert Benson on Prayer

A friend of mine called me today inquiring about a book I had recommended on Facebook. The book he was referring to was Robert Benson’s short and tremendously challenging and insightful In Constant Prayer. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it is by far one of my favorite books. I was quickly reminded of this as I flipped through it earlier today and came across this passage on the neglect of prayer:

“We who will get up and walk, or even run miles in the mornings, not to mention those of us who are not willing to wait for there to be enough light to see the bottom of the flag or for the frost to go away before we tee off; we who will haul ourselves through our neighborhoods in the dark to make sure that we have the box scores as quick as we can – for all kinds of reasons, including some good ones, I suppose, we will not, cannot, do not rise in the morning to greet the dawn with a song of praise on our lips, as did those who went before us.

We who will stay up late to watch the televised version of the news that we heard on our drive home at six, who will TiVo enough must-see television that we have to stay up late to keep up, who will not go to sleep without burning the candle at both ends and in the middle if we can figure out how to get it lit, will not end our days with praise and worship and confession and blessing.

We will not do these things in the name of love or discipline, devotion or worship. We will not even do it for selfish reasons, or even as a reliable way of self-actualization, to put it in its least favorable context- which, in our Western American, twenty-first century, self-help, and consumer-driven culture, is astonishing. And that includes some of us in certain communities of faith who made a promise to pray the office when we joined. Some of us did not even notice the promise we made at our confirmation, and the clergy do not point it out very often.

And if you believe the scholars and the media and the pundits who predict our increasing collective future irrelevance, then I am also a member of the generation that will preside over the death of the Church. Call it postmodern, call it post-Christian, call it Post Toasties if you want to, but there is a world out there that says we – the Church united, divided, militant, or otherwise – can do nothing to spread the gospel here on earth. Much less do anything to make each hour of the day or night any holier.

The witness of those who went before us is that we can. We just don’t.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Justification and Sanctification

 

 

 

Justification is the means whereby we appropriate the saving act of God in the past, and sanctification the promise of God’s activity in the present and future. Justification secured our entrance into fellowship and communion with Christ through the unique and final event of his death, and sanctification keeps us in that fellowship in Christ. Justification is primarily concerned with the relation between man and the law of God, sanctification with the Christian’s separation from the world until the second coming of Christ. Justification makes the individual a member of the Church whereas sanctification preserves the Church with all its members. Justification enables the believer to break away from his sinful past; sanctification enables him to abide in Christ, to persevere in faith and to grow in love. We may perhaps think of justification and sanctification as bearing the same relation to each other as creation and preservation. Justification is the new creation of the new man, and sanctification his preservation until the day of Jesus Christ.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, pg. 277-278