William A. Walker III

Page 18 of 24

Incarnational and Non-competitive Christianity

On June 10, 2013

I’ve written before about how I think the most distinct characteristic of Christianity is the doctrine of God’s incarnation in Christ, rather than the Reformation’s adage of salvation by grace alone and faith alone. Some people might want to say, why not both? While I certainly agree that forgiveness and grace are always unearned gifts, I would push back on “both/and” just because I think the preoccupation with salvation in the first place is the oversight of the Reformers. Of course they probably had this focus largely because of their late Medieval Catholic context. But fortunately for us, we’ve moved beyond that – well beyond it, I hope. As Tripp Fuller recently commented in a Homebrewed Christianity podcast, “Calvin’s Institutes were awesome like five hundred years ago, but [some people] are still repeating it today, and it just keeps getting worse.”

Last week Richard Rohr wrote the following in his daily meditations:

This is Christianity’s only completely unique message. Full incarnation is what distinguishes us from all other religions. This is our only real trump card, and for the most part, we have not yet played it. History, the planet—and other religions—have only suffered as a result. Incarnationalism does not put you in competition with any other religions but, in fact, allows you to see God in all things, including them! It mandates that you love and respect all others.

In other words, God bridges the divine-human gap – not primarily because of a theory of atonement, but because of Emmanuel itself, “God with us.” Obviously this doesn’t mean atonement has no place, but the atonement can only be understood appropriately in light of the incarnation. This is especially true for making any sense of suffering and the reason for which Jesus also suffered. I’ve written about this before as well, but I think it’s worth repeating often.

The second lesson from incarnation according to Rohr has more to do with the truth of Christianity itself and its relationship to other faiths. It should be very clear I think that Rohr is not insinuating that all religions are equally true, that they’re all saying pretty much the same thing, etc. In fact I doubt Rohr would have any problem admitting that he finds the Christian faith to be most compelling in a universal way. But the point is, he doesn’t really need to say that, because the gospel was never supposed to start a competition for truth to begin with. All truth is God’s truth, and we shouldn’t be surprised when it shows up in unexpected places. Hopefully it can be revealed anywhere and everywhere! As Christians, however, we simply maintain that the Christ-form is the normative example of this – historically, cosmologically, anthropologically, and theologically.

The form of Christ in all its diversity and depth is always trying to get itself known and shown. Who would ever want to limit that? Certainly not God, right? Only a narrow, un-universalized reading of the creeds and the great church tradition could warrant a restrictivist or exclusivist view of salvation. This is the big mistake made by popular preachers and authors like David Platt and Francis Chan (see this video, for example), I believe, who, despite their welcomed challenge for American Christians to embrace the call of discipleship more seriously, have really thrown the baby out with the bath water when it comes to their understanding of the meaning of salvation and how non-Christians might receive it. It would really help Christian leaders like Platt, Chan and others if they would recognize a distinction between the historical Jesus on the one hand and the cosmic Christ, or second person of the Trinity, on the other. Instead though, theirs remains a black and white, individualist understanding of the good news reverting back to early stages of faith development, and I think that, despite the admirable and genuine zeal and fervor, they’re stuck in a form of therapeutic Christianity.

For these guys, salvation still mostly means something like “heaven (instead of hell) when we die” because of a “payment” (see my post on this here), even if we’re also called to discipleship in the meantime as an expression of our gratitude. This isn’t the “biblical” picture of salvation though. Salvation is about “heaven coming to earth.” It’s about being healed and extending healing in this life, to everyone – not just Christians – even if it costs us the certainty and security of “heaven when we die” as a fall back. We can still have faith and courage in the face of fear, faith that God will preserve and redeem everything of value that has ever existed – particularly that which seems to be perishing, including the planet. I actually think this is essential. But so far as we know, there’s no escape plan. There’s just faith and hope in an “already/not yet” story. The stage of the drama is right here and now, and it’s an unfinished one that we get to have a hand in writing.

This story by Carl Medearis makes a similar argument, and I like the way he gets there:

Medearis makes some other interesting remarks in this other video as well about how he doesn’t think belief in universalism (or not) should change the way we live. It makes me think of the following quote from Calvin himself: “Even if there was no hell, because [a Christian] loves and revers God as [Creator and Caretaker] and honors and obeys [God as Lord], he [or she] would spurn the very idea of [God].”

I’m not one to downplay God’s judgement of sin — at all! — but I do think we’ve missed the point if we think salvation is primarily about avoiding that judgement. I think the world is ready to hear a better gospel — one that is principally about repentance and forgiveness, yes — we need this — but equally about fidelity to the vision and mission of a making a more just, peaceful and grace-filled world.

Ask a Priest – Can Atheists Go to Heaven? (reflectionsofalaycatholic.com)
An Incarnational Gospel: A Review of Prodigal Christianity’s Sixth Signpost (abnormalanabaptist.wordpress.com)
Images of Salvation (XV) (frted.wordpress.com)
Who Limits the Atonement? (abrahamsseed.wordpress.com)
Evangel-lies #2 (mobiusfaith.wordpress.com)
Images of Salvation (III) (frted.wordpress.com)
Jesus Christ as Mediator (thechristiangazette.wordpress.com)
Immortal Diamond – Take Eight! Probably the most controversial section of Rohr’s book (yliapu.typepad.com)
Even The Demons Believe (thehallowedpath.wordpress.com)

Dallas Willard, Evangelical Salvation and the Spirituality of Resistance

By Bill Walker

On May 21, 2013

In Spirituality

[Recently I’ve made a few more posts at HomebrewedChristianity.com. Scroll down and click on their sidebar badge to the right side of the screen to take you there. The post below is a re-post from the Homebrewed blog last week.]

“Isn’t the whole point of Christianity salvation? Not in terms of being “saved” from “eternal fire” but in terms of being saved from bondage, shame, fear, injustice, and all the other hells around us all the time… so that we can become new beings and find our true identities to “save” this world and all of humanity with it, with God leading the way. Not with platitudes but with actual restoration?” – Ryan Miller, re-quoted by Tony Jones

This tribute comes a bit late in terms of the speed and lifespan of internet news, but I hope Dallas Willard’s death just means that the best reflection on his work and the appreciation for his contribution and what kind of person he was has only begun.

Like no one else perhaps, as a philosopher-theologian of the human spirit, Willard rescues evangelical Christians from bad soteriology. This is partly because he is able to speak the language so well and then transform it by uncovering its lack of depth. He and a few others did this for me a while back, and I remain very grateful.

Willard says:

“Spiritual formation is not something that may, or may not, be added to the gift of eternal life . . . It is the path one must be on if his or hers is to be an eternal kind of life” (Renovation of the Heart, p. 59).

I understand this as one of the great shortcomings of certain Protestant theologies – namely, the dualism of justification and sanctification that reduces salvation – or worse, “the gospel” – to the former. As soon as salvation becomes something we simply get after death that must be “paid for,” I believe it loses its force.

But obviously we don’t see those like Willard going back to Medieval Catholicism either. No, they’re much more Eastern than that. In other words, the urgency of salvation for Willard and others is transformation – and for transformation’s sake. That is, not because of a self-interested preoccupation with avoiding punishment.[i]

For many though, I suspect this isn’t anything new, and some would even suggest it’s not enough – possibly because it still seems so focused on personal piety. It’s ahistorical. Salvation, whatever it is, should be more social, more political! And Willard should be more aware of the role of gender in his diagnosis of the nature of sin, etc.

This is probably all true…

Recently I was reading Dorothee Soelle’s book The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance. Chapter eleven opens with the following from Theodor Adorno:

“As far as possible, we ought to live as we believe we should live in a liberated world, in the form of our own existence, with all the unavoidable contradictions and conflicts that result from this. . . . Such endeavor is by necessity condemned to fail and to meet opposition, yet there is no option but to work through this opposition to the bitter end. The most important form that this will take today is resistance.”

Soelle goes on to talk about how, unlike the European Marxist workers’ movements, the American farmworkers movement was led by a man who prepared himself carefully for every action through fasting and prayer. Cesar Chavez, knowing poverty intimately, once fasted twenty-four days before a large and very dangerous strike. Those who knew Chavez described him as free and happy.

As least for now and in my context, I’ve come to agree with Soelle that the term “liberation” is to some degree inadequate, and could maybe be replaced with the word “resistance.” My conviction, following Soelle, is not just that we need mysticism and resistance. Rather, it’s that today, mysticism, or contemplative spirituality, is a very important form of resistance.

Specifically Soelle shows how mysticism serves to resist the ego, accumulation, and violence. She criticized the First World for its failure to learn resistance. Despite our “knowledge,” we are powerless. She speaks of how most of the great women and men of mystical movements for a time being indeed practiced the contemplative “way inwards,” but their aim was consistently the unity of the contemplative and the active life, of ora et labora (work and prayer).

The superordination of contemplating over acting was criticized and overcome by the likes of Eckhart and Teresa of Avila. “To know God means to know what has to be done,” Levinas said. The mystics only echo back, “and here’s how you know!”

I might differ with Willard in this regard: spiritual formation doesn’t have to be the starting point for transformation. As Soelle insists, “oneness with God, beginning in action, can also discover the mystical unity that undergirds resistance” (p. 201). Nonetheless, for those of us whose faiths weren’t born out of the fruit of resistance movements, we’d probably do well to still apply the spiritual wisdom of Dallas Willard.

Leonardo Boff on The Eucharist and Love of Neighbour

By Bill Walker

On May 8, 2013

In Uncategorized

Christian Social Justice: Four Views

By Bill Walker

On April 30, 2013

In Church and World

This post goes together with another that was recently made here at Homebrewed Christianity.

Conscious Capitalism – does not criticize the dominant social order but is concerned about trying to eradicate poverty, practice charity and generosity, and exhibit self-sacrificial love at the individual and ecclesial level so as to impact society and bear witness to a soteriocentric gospel. Like the other views, there is usually a strong critique of consumerism. Examples of groups in this camp include evangelical non-profit organizations like World Vision, Compassion International, International Justice Mission, and so on.

Christian Realism – sees the flaws and sin of the dominant social order – i.e., the global market and its hyper-financialization – but does not principally call for its transformation. Instead it desires to work within so as to restrain (e.g., Keynesian fiscal policy or democratic socialism). Violence might be necessary, and Christians are naïve to think they can avoid it, but it is still evil. Christian realism therefore recognizes that non-violence is the ideal even if it is judged to be impractical. I think the Roman Catholic Church probably fits here most of the time. (Is this non-violence only judged to be impractical, however, when the judgment is made from the point of view of those in power?)

Liberation Theology – offers a fundamental critique of the dominant social order from the standpoint of those on the margins and strives to realize greater justice and peace here by overcoming systemic poverty and oppression through macro as well as micro-political-economic means. Violence is not justified, but the causes that support liberation are, which may or may not require violence. There is however such thing as a non-violent liberationist perspective, with which I want to identity myself, and this is why I have not organized the chart above in terms of violence but rather in terms of social justice. I also prefer the word “resistance” to liberation. In this way, liberation can be understood more with respect to fidelity to God’s will than to liberation as such. It’s ok, in other words, if liberation isn’t always achieved, and the goal is not to replace one superstructure with another (e.g., capitalism vs. socialism, etc.).

Anabaptist/Pacifism – shares with liberation theology a fundamental critique of the dominant social order but is concerned with subverting it at the ecclesial and micro-economic level instead of at the “coercive” level of formal public policy and law enforcement. It privileges the Christian concern for spiritual formation, community, and discipleship, especially in light of rampant cultural individualism (a problem that many other non-european-descendent cultures don’t seem to have as much). Other groups need not necessarily be opposed to these things. The Anabaptist/Yoderian position simply makes non-violence the central ethical principle. Another important commonality that Anabaptism has with Liberation Theology is the assumption that Christians and the Church should expect to have “minority status” (i.e., post-Christendom). [Note: Further, I think it’s important to avoid the distinction between Liberation Theology and Anabaptism that makes the former about “materialism” and the latter “spirituality.” One can easily imagine, I would argue, a materialist pacificism or a spiritualist liberationism.]

Even though there is much that can be praised about the best that conscious capitalism and Christian realism have to offer, neither is adequate, in my view, due to the respective acquiescence to euro-american-centrism and a failure to align sufficiently with the interests of those on the periphery who have not benefited from the societal machine of “excessive prosperity for a few.” Evangelical piety is admirable, and Niebuhrian ethics is right in much of what it says. But both are too implicated by their proximity to the “center” and by a lack of urgency to resist (I think James Cone’s newest book gives a good, appreciative but critical overview of Niebuhr).

About this notion of the societal machine, I like how Brian McLaren has depicted this problem in his book Everything Must Change:

As each “crisis cog” gets going too fast, the heat and waste produced rises to unsustainable heights.

A Brief Assessment:

In the context of the mostly white, North American middle class and its churches, the Anabaptist/Yoderian take is very compelling, and I would gladly call it a faithful Christian response in our time. In fact it is the one that I for one am most often capable of embracing! I do not write this as a disinterested observer, of course, but as someone slowly, and very imperfectly trying to put into practice the takeaways of such observations with others in my life. The Anabaptist/Yoderian view does not go far enough, however, in translating the gospel for the excluded majority. (Maybe this is ok though, because it seems to me that the excluded majority have been perfectly capable of translating the gospel for themselves.)

Here’s how I imagine this same schema being depicted for a few different church groups today:

I would say in summary that, just as each of the other three groups have a variety of expressions that I have not fully appreciated here, so too does the liberationist hermeneutic have better and worse versions. In light of the call to be participants in God’s work of making all things new, however, it is my contention that only an ethic that takes seriously and starts from the particular material suffering of the victims of history can offer a thoroughgoing Christian hope in the context of globalization and in the face of all the challenges this age presents (ecological degradation, geopolitical wars for economy stability, and poverty/disease on a massive scale – all of which is an offense to God). There are eschatological questions remaining here, but I do not think one has to give up eschatological hope or work with an overly realized social gospel to take this position.

The Universality and Particularity of the Gospel: Confessing Christ in Context

By Bill Walker

On April 16, 2013

In Theology

Below I’ve included some keypoints from the introduction to a chapter entitled “Confessing Christ in Context” in Daniel MiGloire’s Theology textbook, Faith Seeking Understanding. It seems to me that, much as Paul Tillich perhaps pointed out best with his theology of correlation, Christians are constantly struggling here and usually erring on the side of either universality or particuarlity with regard to “gospel proclamation.” This is no new philosophical quandry, but I can’t help but still suspect that the state of things is especially polarized today, at least in North American Christianity, between naïve and ideological conservative-exclusivist universalists on the one hand, and reactionary, progressive-inclusivist particularists on the other (not that the former can’t be reactionary or the latter naïve and ideological — this is just the tendency I notice).

By “universalists”, here I mean those who trust in the applicability of “the gospel” for all times, people and places. Conversely, particularists are for my purposes here roughly those who either refuse or hesitate to say much about whether “the gospel” is for everyone in light of pluralist, postmodern, postcolonial, and other political, contextual, and epistemological concerns — many of which are valid in my view. I know there are others somewhere in between, but they seem so much less known, noticeable and/or appreciated. I do not think, however, that the solution in this case is a mere balancing act of moderation. Rather, I believe that when the universal and particular are worked out concretely and through praxis, there can be a transformation into a qualitatively new kind of community that is at once robust in its Christian identity and radically inclusive. This is what Brian McLaren writes about in his latest book.

Here are MiGloire’s simple but very helpful assertions on this front:

All theology is contextual. Historical and cultural context is a factor in all Christian life, witness and theology.

Many Christians in Asia, Africa and Latin America are convinced that their theological reflection must attend to their own distinctive non-Western cultures and forms of thought.

Just as God’s decisive self-communication is through incarnation in a particular human life, so the transmission of the gospel message by the church makes use of concrete and diverse languages, experiences, philosophical conceptualities, and cultural practices.

For example, we have not one but four Gospels, each of which proclaims Christ in a distinctive way that is shaped by its particular context.

Paul declares that he has become “all things to all people” that he might “by all means” save some (1 Cor. 9:22). This does not mean, of course, tailoring the gospel so that it no longer offends anyone. It does mean, however, that the labor of interpretation is necessary if gospel is to be proclaimed clearly to different people in different cultural settings.

The true scandal of the Gospel must be distinguished from false scandals created by the assumption that only one language and one culture can be vehicles of the gospel message.

On the one hand, if we seek to emphasize the universality of the gospel by generalizing its message and stripping it of all historical contingency, we lose sight of the gospel’s own particularity and its power to receive and transform human life in all its historical particularity and diversity.

On the other hand, if we emphasize one particular expression of the gospel to the exclusion of all others, we lose sight of its universal power.

Robert Schreiter states the problem the way: “In the midst of the tremendous vitality that today’s Christians are showing, one set of problems emerges over and over again: how to be faithful both to the contemporary experience of the gospel and to the tradition of Christian life that has been received.”

Payment or Donation? The Possibility of Atonement as Unconditional Love

By Bill Walker

On March 26, 2013

In Theology

This past Palm Sunday at First Baptist Austin, pastor Roger Paynter confessed his confusion and discomfort with the penal substitution theory of the atonement. In attempt to nonetheless make sense of what God was doing through Christ’s willingness to suffer, however, and after making illustrative reference to the witness of Archbishop Oscar Romero’s death thirty years ago, Paynter suggested that, “only as goodness is willing to involve itself with evil is there any hope of evil being turned around.”

This got my attention. I’ve written about atonement before (here and here) and what I’ve learned about the importance of seeing it not just as forgiveness for sin but as the protest of oppression, God’s solidarity with the victims of history, and the overcoming of unjust death. This year for Holy Week though, I’m wondering once again about atonement as forgiveness.

I think I’ve slowly come to believe that death as a result of unconditional, unselfish love is something different from death for the purpose of appeasing God’s wrath. The Prodigal Son parable is perhaps the best illustration of this (see the post below). This is obviously not to deny that God is depicted as wrathful in the Bible or that God’s anger is justified against humanity’s sin. Nor is it to downplay the significance of warning about judgment or the language and metaphor of sacrifice. But whereas the appeasement of wrath is a transaction intended to satisfy the requirements of a strict accounting of what is due, unconditional love is a donation of abundant generosity and giving rather than of necessity. The idea of a “wrath absorbing sacrifice,” as I’ve heard many preachers call it, still answers to the law rather than to grace and mercy. The cost is still “covered”, not forgiven — even if someone else more suitable makes the payment.

In this way then, the death of Jesus is not so much sacrifice of or violence against himself but the consequence of living self-exhaustively for the sake of others. As Ingolf Dalferth expresses it, Jesus’s death is a life lived

so unrestricted that even [his] own self-preservation does not present itself as an obstacle or limit to this love . . . [Christ’s] death is neither the end nor a means of what [he] does, but is rather taken as an unavoidable collateral damage, so to speak, in abiding under all circumstances by the love of neighbor (from the International Journal of Philosophy of Religion, 2010, 68:77-94: “Self-sacrifice: From the Act of Violence to the Passion of Love”).

In his book Economy of Desire, Daniel Bell argues that

God needs nothing and no necessity compels God to act as God does in redeeming us from sin. Already the standard interpretation of the cross is in trouble, insofar as it asserts that some necessity compels God to exact compensatory suffering as the penalty for sin . . . Indeed as Anselm argues, in the work of atonement God in Christ both dismisses every debt and gives a gift that far exceeds any settling of accounts, since in Christ we are renewed even more wonderfully than we were created (p. 149).

In other words, yes, sin is an offense to God’s honor and holiness, but only in the particular sense that it is not fitting that God’s will or intention for humanity be thwarted, Bell says. Put another way, Christ is less our offering to God and more of God’s offering to us (Romans 5:8) – despite humanity’s frequent rejection of it. In Christ God reconciled the world (2 Cor. 5:18) by refusing to render to humanity what it has brought upon itself. Instead God graciously endures humanity’s rejection and violence, ever extending to a guilty human race the redemption and reconciliation of Jesus (Romans 3:25). Bell explains that Paul makes the same argument by referring to Jesus as the justice or righteousness of God, as the incarnation of God’s faithfulness to the redemptive promise made to Abraham for the sake of the Jew and Gentile alike.

Moreover, God does not merely forgive us as though we were guiltless, leaving us left otherwise unchanged (this is what penal substitution seems to say). A purely negative pardon would mean that humanity remains unable to enjoy blessedness. But this is of course not the case. Instead, we are invited into transformation and restored relationship with God and others as demonstrated with the unconditional love of God in Christ. Christ’s death and resurrection is the grand impetus for this, which is what we are really celebrating during Easter.

As Bell concludes, “Christ’s substitutionary sacrifice is an instantiation of the divine plenitude and superabundance that creates, sustains and now enables us to return to our source to get to participate in the divine life – in the reciprocity that is the triune circle of love, and that is our true purpose in and for which we were created” (p. 152).

Christians and the Iraq War 10 years later

By Bill Walker

On March 19, 2013

In Ethics

Recently I heard the country song “I Drive your Truck” by Lee Brice. The lyrics are very moving, as they tell the story of someone dealing with the death of a brother, presumably in Army deployment overseas in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Few things are more saddening to reflect on for citizens that are thought to benefit from this tremendous sacrifice. It kinda makes you wonder.

I was only a senior in high school when the United States invaded Iraq 10 years ago today. I didn’t know anything then, but I’m not sure this excused my ignorance for the next five years. And of course I was old enough to be fighting myself any one of those years! Articles by the Economist yesterday and Sojourners today address the anniversary in a very critical way, but I think necessarily so. Half the problem it seems, thanks to our mainstream media channels, is that most people have no idea how much this war cost — not just monetarily or even in terms of the lives of U.S. troops lost, but Iraqi lives as well (a much, much larger number in comparison, the tragedy of the 9-11 attacks notwithstanding). Moreover, the U.S. under Reagan was willing to either look the other way or even aid Saddam Hussein when he was murdering thousands of Kurds two decades earlier. Why? Because he wasn’t threatening our security at the time, and in one case was actually furthering it. I’m not even trying to demonizing the U.S. for this. That kind of foreign policy makes sense when you’re a global superpower. It’s just amazing that people don’t recognize the logic. The information is readily available to any remotely thoughtful constituent.

For me at least this is a good reminder not to see our own country through rose-colored glasses, or any country for that matter, especially if it’s rich and powerful with cause to seek its own (often private) interest at the expensive of others (isn’t this the way the world has always worked?). And it doesn’t matter whether the president is George W. Bush or Barrack Obama. Right now under the Obama administration, for example, there is much to be concerned about militarily speaking, particularly regarding drone warfare and the extremely suspect National Defense Authorization Act.

The other day I came across this video of Stanley Hauerwas talking about the threat that sentimentality brings to Christianity and the Church. Whether or not it applies directly to the post-9-11 era politics, it’s at least a sobering message about the costliness of discipleship that is all too often forgotten by privileged and comfortable Christians. What would it look like if a large group of Christians in the U.S. became as outspoken and concerned about militarized and imperial forms of violence as some of us are about homosexuality, abortion, gun ownership, prayer in schools and the like? I don’t think culture would know what to do. People might actually start associating us with Jesus.

Salvation according to William Paul Young

By Bill Walker

On March 1, 2013

In Theology

What is salvation? What does Jesus accomplish on the Cross and in the Resurrection?

For me, salvation is fully accomplished in the work of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It was God in the hands of angry sinners – that’s the phrase that I would use. I’m not a penal substitutionary guy. But I am a substitutionary guy. But I don’t see the Father pouring out his wrath on the Son. I see the human race pouring out their wrath on the Son. So I see the only hope for the entire cosmos is what the Son chooses to accept, crawling up on the instrument of our greatest wrath. He met us at the deepest, darkest place.

That still gives every single person an eternal and ongoing right to reject this affection. But I don’t think it changes the relentless affection. God’s pursuit of me is eternal in nature. That’s what Romans 8:38-39 is talking about. Read the list of things that cannot separate you from God’s love, and you’re going to run smack into this: nothing [can separate us].

But the Bible is replete with language of divine wrath, not just the Old Testament but the New as well. What do you make of that?

I am not opposed to wrath at all, but what’s changed for me is this: I grew up inside a paradigm that said wrath was punitive and retributive in nature. I now see it as restorative. And part of that is affective.

Having children changed a lot for me. If my son was an amphetamine addict, I would like to be a fire and burn that out of my son’s life. If I had a daughter who believed a lie about her value, I would want to be a consuming fire – absolutely. I’d want to get inside of that and burn it out.

So to me, fire is something everybody has to deal with, because we all have crap. It needs to be dealt with, and it’s going to be. To some degree we’re dealing with it in this world, but we’re going to deal with it at some point. But it’s because of love, not because we fail to live up to expectations.

So do you believe in the Last Judgment — with emphasis on last?

Yeah, probably. If you read C.S. Lewis‘s introduction to The Great Divorce, in a beautiful way he acknowledges that he and George MacDonald and other writers are dealing in speculation. The only certainty I have come to with regard to any of this is that I’m now way more certain about the kindness and the goodness of God, even if it’s also a fire. I’m certain of his goodness. But I don’t know how it all works out.

One question I get, of course, is, “Are you a universalist?” I’m not, because I don’t think you can make that step doctrinally. I don’t think Scripture is that obvious. There is this respect for the human creation’s ability to say no. God will not force love. And we still have to choose to be reconciled. But Colossians says that’s what we are to be praying for, that everything gets reconciled back to him.

Taken from the interview by Mark Galli in Christianity Today, March 2013 Issue

Terrence Tilley on "the father who had two sons" (re-reading the parable of the prodigal son)

By Bill Walker

On February 21, 2013

In Theology

I recently got to discuss this passage with the students in the “introduction to theology” class that I’m teaching. Terrence Tilley, the author, explains how parables are stories that “upset worlds.” According to Tilley, the parable of the prodigal son is doing just this, and perhaps in more ways than we might expect.

Jesus calls God abba. We translate this Aramaic word as “father,” although it suggests the intimacy of “papa” or “dad.” Although Jesus not unique in addressing God this way, it is surely a distinctive and central piece of Jesus’ prayer.

The question becomes what sort of “father” is God?

[This] parable is often taken by critics as being a response of Jesus to those who criticize him for consorting with the wicked. Yet that doesn’t seem to get to the point of the story. Others treat it as exemplifying the forgiveness of sins or as a typical “reversing-our-expectations” parable. Yet this is the only parable in the New Testament in which the chief protagonist is the father. Although we have called it by another title, consider this story of a father who had two sons. Read the parable here.

This longest and richest of Jesus’ parables is surely open to many interpretations. Not only do we hear many ideas in it, but the first hearers likely did, too. I think that it is indubitable that this parable makes allusions not only to the people whom Jesus consorted with, but also to the free forgiveness of sins. It also reverses one’s expectations in that the father freely forgives the son who was lost and bestows on him gifts to celebrate with joy his return. But let’s look at what the father does.

First, he split up the property with his younger son. Since Jewish law provided for inheritanec rights only to the older son, this was not an unexpected procedure. Apparently many families did this to provide the younger son with some capital. Nothing exceptional here.

Second, he saw his prodigal son returning and was moved to tears. This father has a heart. But, then, that is not unusual. Most fathers would rejoice at the return of a son who had wandered. Most fathers would see him coming down the road, be overjoyed with the return, and sit and wait for the son to apologize and then forgive the one who has asked forgiveness.

It is the third action that is unexpected here and was likely unexpected then. Instead of sitting and waiting, the father ran to him, embraced him and received him before he said anything. Then, when the son tries to recite his prepared apologetic request, the father interrupts him and gets ready to throw a party! . . .

The final thing the father does is also crucial. The elder brother is outside, complaining and moaning as the story notes (imagine a hard-working brother getting home from the graveyard shift about five in the morning doing the same thing). Again the father gets up and goes out to him. He does not leave him in the cold. He does not demand that the elder brother enter. He not only doesn’t issue commands from his chair, but also goes out and pleads with him, too, explains the situation, and tries to draw him in. The father also performs an unexpected gracious action for the elder brother as well. Again an unexpected action.

It would be allegorization — reading the parable as if it were an allegory — to say that the father in this story stands for the Father of All. Yet this is the only parable of Jesus which presents a father interacting with his children. Jesus’ disciples may have heard this parable as revealing the actions of Jesus’ Father. If this sort of hearing reveals the distinctiveness of the parable and fits the parable as well as other interpretations, then it is one legitimate way to hear it. And then, may a Christian at least hope that this is the way a heavenly Father will act, too?

taken from Story Theology by Terrence Tilley

Ingolf Dalferth on Post-Secularism, Christianity and Apatheism

By Bill Walker

On February 2, 2013

In Church and World

The development of Western societies from religious through secular to post-secular societies is often presented as a process of secularization that is in conflict with the interests and objectives of the Christian faith. But this is a mistake. Just as God must not be confused with religion, so Christian faith must not be confused with the religious institution and authority of Christian churches in society. It is true that secularization is a process of transformation and social differentiation, which lessens society’s dependence on organized religion and establishes more or less autonomous sub-systems of society independent from the authority of the Christian churches. But this by itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Rightly understood, the developments toward secular and post-secular society are due not only to the enlightenment criticism of religion in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. They are also due to the internal criticism of the renewed understanding of Christian faith in the sixteenth century . . .

In the Protestant understanding of Christian faith, there is no theologically relevant distinction between sacred and profane, religious and non-religious, holy and secular, and clergy and laity. Rather, everything in the world is to be judged in the light of the decisive difference between God and world, creator and creation, the one who is and everything else that might not have been. No area of life and thought is intrinsically more “sacred” or “religious” than any other. In each of them, humans can live in appropriate or inappropriate ways with respect to the creative presence of God’s love, and how they live decides on the theological character of this area of their life.

This is not only true of the ordinary life of individual Christians but also of their common life in churches and denominations. In a theological sense, their structure and organization are “worldly matters.” Christians are free to organize them in ways that are best suited for the propagation of the gospel in the cultural matrix of the time. They are not free not to organize their common life as members of the body of Christ, but they are free to do it according to their own lights and on their own responsibility without being bound by a divinely instituted ecclesial pattern of bishops, clergy, and laity.

Thus, in a fundamental and revolutionary sense, Christian faith is a faith that sets humans free to use all their capacities to mold and change human life in the world in accordance with the gospel message of the saving and perfecting presence of God’s creative love. Christians are free to live a free life in responsibility to God and to their fellow creatures—not only their fellow Christians but all human beings who have become God’s freely chosen neighbors. Understood in this sense, Christian faith sets humans free to live on their own responsibility in a secular world, which they know to be God’s good creation, even though it has been distorted by the way humans live in it. They live as Christians in a secular world, but they do so not by denying or ignoring God (secularism) but rather by living an autonomous and self-determining human life in responsibility to God and their fellow-creatures (Christian secularity). They know that to be created is to be made to make oneself, but they also know that this freedom to be free becomes distorted, ruinous, and inhuman when it is not practiced as a created freedom, i.e., a freedom that is grounded in a prior passivity that is not of its own making [italics added].

The ongoing shift from secular to post-secular society is the cultural matrix in which Western Christianity lives today and in which Christian theology is to be practiced in the foreseeable future. Its major challenges today are not the criticisms of a fanatic scientism and a belated atheism that still fights the bygone battles of yesteryear (cf. Schröder 2008) but rather the widespread apatheism and indifference toward faith and God that characterizes many strands of contemporary society. To counter this, Christians must find ways to show and communicate to their contemporaries that faith, hope, and love in God are inexhaustible gifts that enrich, orient, and humanize human life rather than misconceived reactions to human dependency, misery, lack, and deficiency, and that these gifts do not add a religious dimension to human life that one may or may not practice but rather transform all areas of human life by changing the mode in which humans live their lives. Christian faith does not add a dispensable religious dimension to human life but rather transforms its existential mode from a self-centered to a God-open life that puts its ultimate trust not in any human institution, whether religious or non-religious, but in the creative presence of God’s love.

Seen from this perspective, Christian theology has no interest in defending or returning to a pre-modern society that is dependent on religion and religious institutions. On the contrary, it is interested in an autonomous secular life lived responsibly in the presence of God rather than ignorant or forgetful about God (cf. Thiemann 1996; Eberle 2002). It opposes all forms of religiously dominated society that confuse the liberating dependency on God with the heteronomy of being subject to the norms and rules of particular religious traditions. It also opposes all forms of secularist societies that contest or ignore the prior actuality of God. Instead it argues for a secularity that is mindful of the empowering and liberating dependency of human autonomy on the creative presence of God and hence does not ignore the prior passivity in which all human activities are grounded. If theology’s agenda today is understood in this way, it will no longer disorient Christian life in a radical orthodox way by looking back to times long since past, but creatively help to re-orient it in a liberating Christian way toward the future.

Ingolf U. Dalferth, Claremont Graduate University, School of Religion
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, June 2010, Vol. 78, No. 2, pp. 317–345