1. worldviews as models:We must adventure into other worldviews to experience help sort out what in ours is affecting our faith, e.g. the Copernican Revolution: 'To really get the impact of how different the medieval model was, we could imagine what would happen if we could take two of you students - let's say you, there, and you, over there -- and send you back into the fifteenth century. Nobody could possibly believe that you could be Christians. Of course, first there would be obvious cultural issues -- for example, even a medieval prostitue wouldn't have been seen in public dressed like you.... But on a deeper level, if you told them you didn't believe in the pope and you didn't accept that kings ruled by divine right and you didn't believe that God created a universe consisting of concentric spheres of ascending perfection, and if you let it slip that you agreed with Copernicus that the earth rotated around the sun, you would surely be tried as heretics and perhaps burned at the stake.... To the Christian culture of medival Europe, none of you today could be considered real Christians. ...C.S. Lewis suggested that our modern view itself is not the absolute, ultimate truth, that it is not the ultimate viewpoint but rather just a 'view from a point.' ...Entering the medieval model enables us to see our own modern model of the universe' (34). '
2. on biblical interpretation:'When [right-wing] evangelicals say they're arguing about the Bible's absolute authority, too often they are arguing about the superiority of the traditional grid through which they read and interpret the Bible' (49). Examples of situations in which these right-wing evangelicals don't take the Bible literally: they don't condone women for wearing jewelry or having a short haircut as Paul might; they don't practice polygamy as did David and Solomon. Instead, they have a 'grid of decency that keeps them from applying the Bible literally in these situations' (49).
3. so you think i'm a televangelist? evangelism and the Kingdom of God:Probably the best reponse is to agree that we've made mistakes and say no more. McLaren says, 'I think some Christians use Jesus as a shortcut to being right. In the proces they bypass becoming ...wise. They figure if they say 'Jesus' enough, it guarantees they won't be stupid. ...[So] if people reject Jesus when they hear some half-baked would-be evangelist strutting his stuff..., I don't think they're really rejecting Jesus. They're rejecting the arrogance, ignorance, and bad taste of the preacher' (65).
And the alternative model for
evangelism could be called
mission (156). And missoin would look like this:
'Instead of conquest, instead of coercive rational argument or an emotionally intimidating sales pitchor an imposing crusade or an agressive debating contest where we hope to 'win' them to Christ, I think of it like a dance. you know, in a dance, nobody wins and nobody loses. Both parties listen to the music and try to move with it. In this case, I hear the music of the gospel and my friend doesn't, so I try to help him hear it and move with it. And like a dance, I have to ask if the other person wants to participate. There's a term for pulling someone who doesn't want to dance into a dance: assault. But if you pull someone in who wants to learn, and if you're good with the music yourself, it can be a lot of fun!' (62).
Taking the idea of
mission to its fullest, the missional Christian would think along these lines: 'I dont' even think of [people] as Christians or non-Christians. I just think of them as people I love' (103). People are sacred and so are our relationships with them. If we truly value another person, if we truly love them, then we will exist on a two-way street, each learning from the other; should we see them faltering as they try to dance, we believe we have started to learn the dance and so actually have something to offer them, because we love them, and this is the Gospel. During this process, we'll likely spend a lot less time giving packaged answers and a lot more time doing what Jesus might have done, and that is asking provoking questions. We have lost the content of the 'Kingdom of God' terminology, and we must work cleverly to regain the sense of 'a kingdom that transcends all earthbound geography, all human borders...[but] is real,' more real than anything physical (105-7).
4. more on the Kingdom of God:culte is the French word for 'a religion.' what is the relationship between
culte and
culture? 'I guess for starters,
culte can simply try to serve culture -- you know, kind of like
civil religion. ...Somtimes your radio preachers seem so concerned about 'saving America' that you'd think the gospel existed for the sake of American
culture. ...Religion can also try to withdraw from culture -- isolate itself and create its own
subculture. I suppose the most extreme groups we call 'cults' do this most notoriously; they completely separate themselves and dvelop their own insider language, their own conspiracy theories, their alternative histories, adn as a result we call them cultic. ...Jesus, it seems to me, had a different way -- radically different. He wanted to send his people into the culture with a
mission -- not in service to the culture in the senes of helping the culture achieve its own ends but in a kind of divinely subversive way,
culte infiltrating
culture with the kingdom of God, not trying just to serve it as a civil religion would, but more like trying to redeem it for a higher agenda, God's agenda' (74).
notes:~'Sometimes I wonder if hell is just what heaven feels like for those who haven't learned in this life what this life is intended to teach. ...We are becoming on this side of the door of death the kind of people we will be on the other side' (91). C.S. Lewis would add this: 'For all find what they truly seek' (92).
~on causality and the problem of evil: the problem is in fact our mechanistic model. 'If a company designs a plane and it crashes due to design failure, we hold the designer liable. Or if a person drives a car drunk and kills a pedestrian, we hold the driver responsible. In both cases, the machine designer or operator is the only sentient being capable of being held responsible. But if a parent raises a child with all appropraite guidance and the child grows up and rejects hisparents' teaching and commits a crime, we don't hodl the parent responsible in the same way' (23-4).
~great philosophical lights of mostmodernism: Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Rorty, Rish, Baudrillard. also Polanyi on philosophy of scince.
