Category: book club

Book reviews, thoughts and reflections

An incredible, shrinking Gospel

I know – I promised I’d go back and talk more about the security system Brian McLaren talks about in “Everything Must Change.” I will – soon (I hope). But as I read on I have to share some of these thoughts….

“The Gospel of Christ knows of no religion, but social; no holiness but social holiness.” – John Wesley

Wesley was deeply sensitive to systemic justice. He was passionate about abolishing slavery yet McLaren suggests “the concept of holiness (in the modern era) did not retain the profoundly social dimension it had for Wesley, but over time shrank to a matter of personal rule keeping.”

No wonder legalism has taken such a strong hold of people.

Only a fraction of our sins are personal. By far the greater part are sins of neglect, sins of default, our social sin, our systemic sin, our economic sin. For these Christ died, and continues to die. For these sins Christ atoned, and continues to atone… As long as evangelism presents a gospel centered on the need for personal salvation, individuals will acquire a faith that focuses on maximum benefit with minimal obligations, and we will change the costly work of Christ’s atonement into the pragmatic transaction of a salvific contract… The sanctifying grace of God in Jesus Christ is not just for the sinner but also for a society beset by structural sin. – David Lowes Watson

My original thought is, “Is McLaren teaching universalism as some have suggested?” I don’t think so.

“Individualistic theology has not trained the spiritual intelligence of Christian men and women to recognize and observe spiritual entities beyond the individual” – Walter Rauschenbusch

In other words, many of our religious institutions have taught us to see no horizon for the message of Jesus beyond the soul of the individual.

“Our spirituality and the very gospel that we preach, needs to be as big and ubiquitous as sin and evil. We will falter in our spirituality and thus grieve the Spirit if ‘our struggle with evil’ does not ‘correspond to the geography of evil.'” – Eldwin Villafane

Because sin and evil are so “big and ubiquitous” and because the “geography of evil” extends far beyond the dimensions of our individual souls, we need a Gospel that is correspondingly expansive and mind blowing.

McLaren explains:

Sadly, in too many quarters we continue to reduce the scope of the Gospel to the individual soul and the nuclear family, framing it in a comfortable, personalized format – it’s all about personal devotions, personal holiness and a personal Savior. This domesticated Gospel will neither rock any boats nor step out of them into stormy waters. We have in many ways responded to the global crises of our day with an incredible, shrinking Gospel. The world has said, “No thanks.”

How big is your God and how big is your Gospel? Big enough to save your soul? Or big enough to save the world?

Things Missionaries Never Say

Guys, if you’re in the Ellis County area and you’re not making it on Wednesday mornings you’re really missing out.

This week Brian shared 5 things missionaries never say:

It goes right along with everything I’m reading, hearing and discussing right now. It matches the encounter 9 discussion and the Inverted series Brian’s been bringing on Sunday mornings and I think it really goes along with The Ragamuffin Gospel and Everything Must Change.

I just have to keep reviewing the things in my life and say God > others > me.

It must be so much less me and so much more of others and God.

It (Christianity) has focused on “me” and “my soul” and “my spiritual life” and “my eternal destiny,” but it has failed to address the dominant societal and global realities of their lifetime: systemic injustice, systemic poverty, systemic ecological crisis, systemic dysfunctions of many kinds.

…those remaining in local churches and those outside of them share the same sense of doubt: a message purporting to be the best news in the world should be doing better than this. The religion’s results are not commensurate with the bold claims it makes. Truly good news, they feel, would confront systemic injustice, target significant global dysfunctions, and provide hope and resources for making a better world – along with helping individuals experience a full life.

(we find ourselves wishing for)… a vibrant form of Christian faith that is holistic, integral, and balanced – one that offers good news for both the living and the dying, that speaks of God’s grace at work both in this life and the life to come, that speaks to individuals and to societies and to the planet as a whole.

– Brian D. McLaren :: Everything Must Change

Quote(s) of the day

(America has the right) “to unilateral use of military power” to ensure “unihabitated access to key makets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.”
– Bill Clinton speaking to the United Nations – Sept. 27, 1993

“We have a choice, either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or to change the way they live, and we choose the latter.”
– Donald Rumsfield

(both as quoted in Everything Must Change)

The Peace Insurgency

peace log by Cogdog: http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/

I don’t know about anyone else, but this has really irked me the last couple days…

I read a chapter of Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change and I can’t decide if I should throw the book across the room in disgust or quit working and join an anti-war protest. This suicidal machine he’s talked about is out of hand! Seriously – EVERYTHING must change.

Religion: Armed and Dangerous

McLaren paints a chilling comparison between suicide bombers in the Middle East and “religious leaders” in the U.S. in chp. 19 of his book.

Suicide bombers in the Middle East cry, “God is great!” as they blow their bodies – and those of innocent neighbors – to pieces. Religious leaders in the United States encourage presidents to “blow [enemies] away in the name of the Lord.”

After checking the book notes and reading further, I’m not sure I would call the U.S. leader a religious leader, but many people may say/argue that she is.

McLaren refers to Sam Harris, America’s leading atheist several times in his discussion on Armed Religion. Harris wrote a column after Sept. 11 that called religious leaders to task for the ways religion aids and abets the violent turn in human nature and society.

We have become, “increasingly deranged by our own religious certainty. We have a society in which 44 percent of the people claim to be either certain or confident that Jesus is going to come back out of the clouds and judge the living and the dead sometime in the next 50 years. It just seems transparently obvious that this is a belief that will do nothing to create a durable civilization.” … (if) the future is determined by God and predicted in a book, and it’s going to get worse and worse, so why try to work against the destruction that is predestined? As one famous evangelist put it, if the Titanic is destined to sink, why rearrange the deck chairs on it? Far better to man the lifeboats.

Is that the attitude we as Christians have taken? Are we so bent on Jesus coming back and “ridding the world of evil” that we simply don’t care to fight for what’s good and holy in the world any more? Are we more like the doomsday profits who are more interested in scaring everyone than the musicians on the Titanic who played their music until they went down with the ship?

The Jesus approach

Jesus seems to take a different approach to the war and doomsday framing story of His day – as well as the similar doomsday framing story of our day.

His cross doesn’t represent a “shock and awe” display of power as Roman crucifixions were intended to do, but rather represents a “reverence and awe” display of God’s willingness to accept rejections and mistreatment, and then to respond with forgiveness, reconciliation, and resurrection. In this kingdom, peace is not made and kept through the shedding of the blood of enemies, but the king himself sacrifices his blood to make a new kind of peace, offering amnesty to repentant rebels and open borders to needy immigrants.

This may have been the punch in the gut…

If, as Domnic Crossan says, the Roman motto is peace through victory, or peace through the destruction of enemies, or peace through domination… then for Jesus the motto is peace through nonviolent justice, peace through the forgiveness of enemies, peace through reconciliation, peace through embrace and grace. If in the violent narratives of Rome the victorious are blessed – which means that the most heavily armed, the most willing to kill, and the most aggressive ad dominant are blessed – then in the framing story of the kingdom of God, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, blessed are the peacemakers, and blessed are the those who are willing to suffer for doing good. In this light, these aren’t simply greeting card sentiments, but rather ways of starkly contrasting Jesus’ framing story with the narratives and counter narratives of His day… Following Jesus instead means forming communities that seek peace through justice, generosity and mutual concern, and a willingness to suffer persecution but refusal to inflict it on others.

McLaren goes on to talk about the U.S. and the Western war machine that we’ve created… but I’ll let you all mull on these thoughts for a while as I had to.

What Jesus Meant

The popular Christian question “What would Jesus do?” is not an especially useful one, Wills notes, for Jesus did many things we would not, and should not, do. Should Christian believers today, Wills asks, “like Jesus, forbid a man from attending his own father’s funeral… or tell others to hate their parents?… Are they justified in telling others, ‘I come not imposing peace, I impose not peace but the sword’…? Or ‘I am come to throw fire on the earth’…?” Such moments in the Gospels, Wills writes, “were acts meant to show that he is not just like us, that he has higher rights and powers… [as] a divine mystery walking among men.”

– John Meachum reviewing Garry Wills’s book What Jesus Meant

“We must ask what Jesus meant by his strange words and deeds. In other words, if we focus on what Jesus said without determining what He meant in his original context, we run the risk of misquoting Jesus even when quoting His words.”

– Brian McLaren Everything Must Change

re: Everything Must Change

Some more thoughts from Chp 3 of Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change:

Trying to spur some more discussion for our book club….

In Chp 3 McLaren talks about his visit to Bujumbura in Africa. As a meeting he was scheduled to speak at began he writes that the guy who brought him to the conference says that as a son of a preacher and going to church all his life, sometimes five times a week, in all his childhood he “only heard one sermon.”

Ouch! He says that one sermon was heard over and over again every week. “You are a sinner and you are going to hell. You need to repent and believe in Jesus. Jesus might come back today, and if he does and you are not ready, you will burn in hell.”

Growing up I can’t say that this was the case for me, but then again I can’t say I remember any sermons from my childhood through probably high school.

After graduating high school I began attending Baptist churches, including on very conservative Baptist church and I would say that that was almost the case for that particular church – only mixing in sermons about the importance of tithing.

How does that compare to your life growing up? How does that compare to English and Scottish churches or churches around the rest of the world? How do messages like that help Christians grow?

Is that typical in other churches? Do our churches continue to ignore ideas like hatred, distrust between tribes/neighbors, poverty, suffering, corruption, injustice? I feel that at encounter we’re closer to addressing these issues but we could be doing more.

“They told us how to go to heaven. But they left out an important detail. They didn’t tell us how the will of God could be done on earth.”

McLaren suggests this isn’t just an African problem – and I would tend to agree. Did North American church leaders teach the early colonists to treat the Native Peoples with love and respect? Did they consistently and with one voice appose slavery? Did they express outrage over the exploitation of factory workers or the second-class status of women? Did they/do we stand up for refugees and immigrants? Did they oppose white privilege, segregation, anti-Semitism, stereotyping or Muslims and other forms of ethnic prejudice? Did they see the environment as God’s sacred creation that deserves to be cherished and conserved?

Lots of places I believe the church has failed and continues to fail…

Jesus continued to talk about “the kingdom of God.” McLaren says this idea – contrary to popular belief – was not focused on how to escape this world and its problems by going to heaven after death, but instead was focused on how God’s will could be done on earth, in history, during this life.

McLaren continues and says the Gospel is not just a message about Jesus that focuses on the afterlife – but that the Gospel is the core message of Jesus that focuses on personal, social and global transformation in this life.

What does that mean to you? Is that idea contrary to your beliefs? Does it help answer some of the questions about your faith?