Church Plant in Lexington

I'm trying to come up with a catchy name for a new church in Lexington. Here's what I got:

coastal
seaside
seabreeze
seabiscuit
flamer
froth
foam
diameter
circumference
annihilation
exacerbation
consummation

Any suggestions?

Newbigin's Take on Mission

Lesslie Newbigin, village evangelist in India, takes his cue on the church's mission from the Gospels and Acts. In these five narrative accounts there is an "indissoluble nexus between deeds and words". Miraculous deeds perk curiosity of a new reality which is then explicitly stated in word. Preaching without these deeds is about as unhelpful as answering questions that aren't being asked. But where these deeds are present, questions abound concerning the new plausibility structure of which they are a part, and gospel proclamation answers those very questions.

The point here is not to prove every word was accompanied by a miraculous deed, but that such deeds prompted right questions to which the gospel could respond.

The Church inherits this mantle of powerful witness inasmuch as she marries deed and word. The Kingdom of God is not an abstract reality but a Person who we have encountered and whose new creation we have a forestaste in the Spirit. "To set word and deed, preaching and action, against each other is absurd. The central reality is neither word nor act, but the total life of a community enabled by the Spirit to live in Christ, sharing his passion and the power of his resurrection."

How do our lifestyles reflect a new reality? How do we proclaim "Jesus is risen" not just on Easter Sunday but in the company we keep at our table? In the hurt we mend? By the injustices we confront? Through aspirations for our children?

Sadly so much of our lives play out the script of this present reality. No wonder nobody's asking.

Thiselton's Question That Arise

Anthony Thiselton's recent work, The Hermeneutics of Doctrine, seeks to examine if a more substantial interaction between hermeneutics and doctrine could, "rescue doctrine from from its marginalized function and abstraction from life" (xvi). Christian doctrine's premier pitfall has historically been the high-level of abstraction it dwells in. In Thiselton's first chapter he corrects this by shifting the focus from "free-floating problems", to "questions that arise".

An example of this would be the way we exposit a doctrine of creation. Thiselton's position is that early understandings of human origins did not actually come from the question, "where did we come from", but rather from a gratitude for life, a sense of human dependence upon God, and a desire to rejoice in the great natural gifts that we experience. "My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth" (Ps. 121:2). The doctrine of creation, therefore, was sharpened at the dinner table, not in the study.

The issue is not then whether propositions such as, "God is creator" feature at all, but whether we engage these propositions detached from the way they originally arose. This gives a call to examine, as best we can, what context authors were originally asking their questions in. The answers to these questions will naturally have application built into them, because the questions were originally asked in a context where application was their jumping off point. The task of clearly articulating relevant Christian doctrine may not be as difficult as is thought. It is simply a matter of asking questions as they arise.

Seminarian Woes or New Testament Scholarship Has No Clothes

I'm deathly afraid of naive fundamentalism. The Jesus within it hovers six inches above the dusty near east earth. He opens doors for women, never passes gas, and speaks timeless principles that drift over the heads of his hearers and into my living room unscathed. He fits well into the moral majority mold made for him.

But my self-righteous flight leads me into the jaws of the burgeoning beast of NT scholarship. Deep within its bowels I can't make heads or tails of what I came looking for - Was it the Jesus of history? Or was it Matthew's spin? Or am I really seeking the church behind the author behind the text? Or did it all get fuddled in transmission anyway?

There, the Jesus who so winsomely and authoritatively turned Torah interpretations on their heads now slavishly fulfills every whim of Second Temple Jewish literature. The Jesus who confidently butted heads with Pharisees and Sadducees now double checks his theology with Qumran. And the Jesus who recreated the world in his resurrection becomes Paul's plaything, a vacuous two-dimensional figure brought back to life and relevance by a stroke of creative genius.

Who will deliver me from this hermeneutical body of death?

"Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" As I settle down to my English text, millenia removed from the events it contains, I encounter a present, abiding, divine Word. He neither sparkles like the gilded former version nor evaporates into the obscurity of the latter.

Jesus speaks. There is power in the written and risen Word.

Top Shelf Teaching

Teaching is perhaps, ironically, one of the most helpful methods of learning. Whether it be preparing a Sunday school class for junior highers, giving a tour at the art museum or a college seminar discussion group. Communication is hard work.

Particularly with teaching younger children and students, the adage usually is "keep it on the bottom shelf". With advice like "strip away your theology and meat, give them small portions that are on the bottom level". This thinking has some merit and can be a helpful principle. However, I have found it does have some limitations. It unavoidably forces the teacher to paraphrase and reduce things to propositions in accordance with their own understanding. What's a teacher to do? This is the mystery of good teaching. Keeping the camel intact while shoving it into the needle's eye of a students mind.

What timeless truth or principle can you take from most of the stories which we hold to be most sacred? David shared once that shortly after becoming a Christian he was legitimately confused why no one had mined the bible and created a kind of "midrash" of the all timeless truths. Wouldn't it be so much better to know that "God is sovereign" rather than read a confusing story about women making babies? No. An extended quote from Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners might be a helpful voice in this discussion.

"When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of the story is only to help you to experience that meaning more fully". (Mystery and Manners pg 96)

O'Connor is touching on something that Vanhoozer has made incredibly popular. Post-propitisionalism. Here's the kind of teaching of I think O'Connor and Vanhoozer would affirm. Rather than reading any story you can find and giving them the "meaning", respect the story and your audience. Your goal is to help your audience experience the meaning, which should always point them back to the story. In short a good teacher will help their hearers experience the story.

Returning to the opening remark about keeping the cookies on the bottom shelf. Keeping cookies on the bottom shelf mandates doing a kind of violence to the text, you only allow your audience to experience the text at a distance. Not to mention the poop in the cookies on that bottom shelf. How do you know exactly which cookies to include? So here's an attempt at a solution. Go from the known to the unknown. Embodying a story calls for entering into your audience's story and entering into the story of any text. You do your best to bring them into the page and to bring those characters into their world. You want to bring them into Mount Sinai, and bring Moses to their High School. This gets messy. Particularly for preaching, where application is necessary, the waters can be hard to navigate.

A few guiding points:
- To keep the approach consistent application will constantly look backwards before looking forwards.
- Neither the teacher nor the author is the authority on a text. The text is. Continually point back to it, helping your hearers see and experience it.
- Avoid paraphrasing and abridging whenever possible.
- Varying embodiments are unavoidable and desirable. Leave room for it and encourage it.
- Learning is hard work.

Your improvisation will only be as good your embodiment.

"it's a powerful thing, family."

I have loved reading each of Marilynne Robinson's books, but this week I'm contemplating why her latest novel, Home, is by far my favorite.

There are the obvious reasons ... the narrator is female, one with whom I more comfortably identify than with Gilead's John Ames. And Housekeeping, while containing some of the most achingly lovely descriptions I've ever come across in literature, is just too dark for me.

But there's something deeper there, below the first impressions. I think at my very core I resonate with Home because it is a book about family.

As the story unfolds through Glory Boughton's eyes, I am given the rare gift of peering in on this woman's most private possession: the emotional inner-workings of her family. At times I feel the discomfort of an outsider, being made privy that that which is none of my business. And I wonder it if this is a gift I really want.

But I can't stop reading, partly because it is a story I want to know the end of, but mostly because as a human being I am swept up in my own story of family, and I identify all too well with many of the thoughts and emotions taking place within these pages.

This story gets at what is closest to the heart of all humans. To be in family is to be vulnerable. Aren't family relationships the most tenuous of all relationships? There is so much power there. A word can make or break them at any time. They can bring the most joy or the most pain to a person's life. A conversation about one's own family evokes feelings of enthusiasm or pain or anger, but rarely indifference.

As we live and work and play we are each living out our own version of the Boughton's saga - whether we interact with members of our family on a daily basis or never speak to them. Our own family's history, its patterns and wounds and victories and secrets often run too deep to be easily explicable to outsiders but they are part of the fiber of who we are - no matter how much we may try to run from it.

To really know another is to see him in the context of his family story. This is why Home is the most intimate of novels. And I think why it is my favorite.

It's All Fine or Why I Won't Ever Vote

For the Christian there is no right or wrong political system.

The strange new world of the Bible is something that spans many years, languages, cultures. More importantly for this post, we see the people of God living in and under many different political systems and ideologies. Unfortunately, we don't have little sidebars giving us commentary on Joseph's internship in Egyptian foreign policy, Daniel enrolled at Babylon University, or the alleged democratic pardoning of Barabbas (I'd be looking for a hanging chad), or the civil disobedience when Peter says "let us decide whether it's better to obey God or Man" (Acts 5:29). Nonetheless, we do have some texts that demand our best embodiment, or at least an attempt.

As a child, I remembered my dad once telling me that there was no political system mandated in the bible. This was a troubling concept for my very small world. Something that to this day I have tested and thought through. I believe him to be right. Israel wasn't even supposed to have a King, God was to be their King. To my understanding, nowhere in Scripture do we have the command, instruction or even the suggestion for a Christian to hold and setup some political office (I know you can do some fun things with the creation mandate). Perhaps, due in large part because the current democratic process where a "pastor" can run for the office of president wasn't even on the radar. What we do have is people doing the same thing in many different settings, demonstrating righteous living and worship of the Godhead regardless of any political power or system. Here is my [hypo]thesis: the people of God remain the same in their mission and mandates regardless of any political system, the application calls for abstention from the process entirely. We stand back and pray for leaders, all the while ready to obey God rather than men.

Don't tell Peter Leithart this, but Kierkegaard really hated Constantine. Kierkegaard felt that he lived in a context where the ripple effects of 313 A.D. still determined the spiritual climate. The Danish Luther Church was about as lifeless and dull as it got. Contrasted with some of the healthiest moments for the church have been during times of suffering and tyrannical heads of state. I don't think the issue here is distance from the church and state, rather understanding of responsibilities. The church is not in the business of outsourcing its responsibilities to Washington, DC. Why does it matter that we have a President who can remember when he said the sinners prayer? Why do we want prayer in schools? Exactly what Judaeo-Christian principles was this country founded on? Why is that so important to us? The church needs a kind of tunnel vision. Not to the world, but for the sake of it. Ignoring what happens on capital hill and remaining focused on the people in their communities. Often I am asked if I would live in Socialist France or communist China. Sure, what's it matter? Communism, Democracy, Feudal Lords, Facism, It's All Fine. Lead On O King Eternal.