Paradoxy: Creating Christian Community Beyond Us & Them"

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K E N H O W A R D

Creating Christian CommunityBeyond Us and Them

PARADOXYAf terword by The Very Rev. Dr. P

aul Zahl

Foreword by Brian McLaren

B R E W S T E R , M A S S A C H U S E T T S

®

Paradoxy: Creating Christian Community Beyond Us and Them

2010 First Printing

Copyright © 2010 by Ken Howard

ISBN: 978-1-55725-775-8

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture references are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Copyright 1989, 1995 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America and are used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture references marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permis-sion of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture references marked TNIV are taken from the Holy Bible, Today’s New International Version®. TNIV®. Copyright © 2001, 2005 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture references marked THE MESSAGE are taken from The Message Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Howard, Ken (Kenneth W.) Paradoxy : creating Christian community beyond us and them / Ken Howard. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN 978-1-55725-775-8 1. Church. 2. Church--Unity. I. Title. BV600.3.H68 2010 262’.72--dc22 2010023207

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in an electronic retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published by Paraclete PressBrewster, Massachusettswww.paracletepress.comPrinted in the United States of America

In memory of my great-grandfather,Rabbi Reuben Minkoff

T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

I L L U S T R A T I O N S vii

F O R E W O R D

Brian McLaren ix

I N T R O D U C T I O N

May You Live in Interesting Times xiii

P A R T I

Does the Future Have a Church?

1 The End of the World as We Know It: 3

Collapsing Paradigms

2 Constantine’s Ghost: 16

Christendom

3 Reality Ain’t What It Used to Be: 30 Foundationalism

4 Hanging by a Thread: 47

Christianity as Religion

5 O God, Our Help in Ages Past: 66

Christianities That Might Have Been Peter, Paul, and James and Fellowships of Grace Martin of Tours and Servant Leadership Celtic Christians and Radical Hospitality Common Threads

P A R T I I

A Church for the Future

6 The Shape of Things to Come: 99 Promising Principles for a New Way of Church

7 A New Middle Way? 138 Characteristics of an Incarnational Orthodoxy—a.k.a. Paradoxy

8 Paradigm Pathways: 166 Which Reality Is Your Church Living Into?

C O N C L U S I O N

Alpha and Omega— 173

Beginning and End (and Beginning)

A F T E R W O R D 177

The Very Rev. Dr. Paul Zahl

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S 180

N O T E S 183

S E L E C T B I B L I O G R A P H Y 197

I L L U S T R A T I O N S

F I G U R E S

4.1 Curbing Our Dogma 59

T A B L E S

5.1 Christianities That Might Have Been 86 7.1 Key Differences in Theology, Ecclesiology, 164

and Missional Strategy

F O R E W O R D

In this exciting new book, Ken Howard does what good leaders do in times of change and challenge. First, he describes where we are. Then he tells the story of how we got here. Then he gives us a vision of where to go from here.

In describing where we are and recounting how we got here, Ken strikes a beautiful and difficult balance: he simplifies, without oversimplifying, complex historical and philosophical developments. His approach provides a good on-ramp if we don’t have a lot of historical, theological, or philosophical background, and yet it won’t insult our intelligence if we’re more knowledgeable in these matters.

The vision Ken proposes isn’t a step-by-step plan. It can’t be, because we live in vastly different settings and face different opportunities and different obstacles. Instead Ken offers an intriguing vision, evoking a twist on Robert Frost’s famous poem. Where Frost pictures two leaf-strewn pathways diverging in the yellow wood, one of which is “less traveled by,” Ken sees two wide and well-traveled roads, but between them, a barely visible path. That’s the one he invites us not only to explore, but to widen by our walking it so that others may follow.

P A R A D O X Yx

Along the way, he provides apt and intriguing quotes, much like roadside rest stops with interesting historical markers, to remind us that though we may feel like pioneers moving into uncharted territory, we are part of a long tradition of pioneers who blazed trails of their own in the past, making possible the future we know as the present. Seen in that light, suddenly it matters very much whether we seek to preserve the church in its current state, abandon it altogether, or help it become a creative agent for a better future—the world that will be the present for our great-grandchildren.

The key to that creative work is not simply good ideas, but true faith, hope, and love, rooted in the living God in whom we trust and love, and by whom we seek to be empowered. It’s at that point of connection with God, not just in theory, but in experience and practice, that Ken’s proposal—what he calls Incarnational Orthodoxy or Paradoxy—offers a vision that transcends old polarities between liberal and conservative.

As a person from a very conservative background, I know that what conservatives cherish beneath their arguments and divisions is the experience of God, the nearness of God. It’s their pearl of great price, and in defending a lot of other things, I believe this is what they really are seeking to defend. And as a person who has grown first to accept, then begrudgingly to respect, and eventually to love liberals, I also believe the same is true for liberals. On both sides a lot of other issues get mixed in, but in appealing to this core treasure, this core desire—and not only in appealing to it, but more, in embodying it—Ken offers a way forward that I believe has the only real hope.

It’s no accident that Ken “gets” this way forward and embodies it, because it flows from his own biography, spanning Jewish and Christian, conservative and liberal, Pentecostal and liturgical, academic and pastoral. And beyond that, as you’ll learn in these

F O R E W O R D xi

pages, Ken also knows this way forward because he has seen a church polarize and divide, and then saw another church take shape beyond schismatic polarity.

For Episcopalians and for all mainliners, this book holds great value, and for evangelicals and charismatics, I believe the same is true. It can help us discover an identity where those terms become less like epithets applied to enemies and more like family names applied to neighbors.

May that better day come!

—Brian McLaren

I N T R O D U C T I O N

May You Live in Interesting Times

A Conservat ive/Liberal Schism?

“May you live in interesting times. . . .” This ancient Chinese aphorism, that is said to be both blessing and curse, certainly seems to have come true for the church.

It seems that in almost every denomination, conservative-liberal conflicts that have simmered for decades have come to a boil. Mainline liberal denominations are in turmoil. In my own denomination, the Episcopal Church (a part of the worldwide Anglican Communion), following the consecration of the first openly gay bishop and the first female presiding bishop, dozens of conservative congregations and several dioceses (representing about 3.5% of U.S. Episcopalians) have severed ties to align with conservative bishops and archbishops on other continents. While we may have the most visible and vociferous conflicts at the moment, we are not alone. Just about every mainline church is experiencing similar conflicts and departures.

P A R A D O X Yxiv

Moreover, this is not a one-way, liberal church phenomenon. Mainline conservative denominations are also experiencing turmoil. The Southern Baptist Convention, following the takeover of the seminaries by hard-line conservatives, lost more than 7% of its membership to moderate-liberal groups such as the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Contrary to the popular belief that growth rates in conservative denominations are increasing, while liberal ones are decreasing, recent research has shown that both have experienced steadily decreasing growth rates since the late 1950s, and if current trends continue, conservative denominations will follow liberal ones into decline within a generation. If you factor out that portion of conservative denomination growth that is due to higher-than-average birthrates among conservatives and “conversions” of mainline liberal Christians to conservative denominations (as opposed to growth by attracting the unchurched), real conservative church growth rates are already in decline.1

A potential liberal-conservative fault line exists in almost every congregation in every denomination. If left unaddressed, might not this rift eventually split these denominations? That we are living in interesting times may be the only thing everybody in the church can agree on.

Slicing and Dicing and Sl ippery Slopes

At a recent official gathering of the churches in my diocese, I watched with astonishment as an exchange between a conservative delegate and a liberal delegate became both brutally hot and cruelly cold at the same time. First, the conservative delegate submitted a resolution angrily demanding that our largely liberal diocese insist that our national church legislative body fall into line with the demands of conservative churches worldwide (a resolution

I N T R O D U C T I O N xv

he had to know would either be voted down or amended). This was followed by an amendment from the liberal delegate, that was gracious in its words but seemingly patronizing in its intent: couched in words of toleration of differences and respect for “my conservative brother in Christ,” but that would have cut the guts out of the conservative’s resolution. As the exchange wore on, the conservative’s remarks grew more and more sarcastic and condemnatory, while the liberal’s grew more and more icy and smugly tolerant. In the end, the amended language passed, effectively reversing the intent of the original resolution. At one level, it seemed like the liberal had won and the conservative had lost. But at another level, both had won: they got to walk away from the meeting with their preconceived prejudices about each other’s side confirmed. Both appeared to feel justified by the exchange.

It is astounding how rapidly discussions become heated these days when the topic turns to religion, perhaps even more so when the topic is Christianity. It is shocking how much vitriol, invective, and good old-fashioned abuse are being doled out in the name of the Prince of Peace, especially between his followers. It is disturbing how deeply divided the body of Christ has become, with its “right” and “left” arms each growing more and more willing to amputate the other.

Not that this is anything new. In many ways, the church has been dividing itself in the name of unity since the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church” first opened its doors. It was probably to counteract this very tendency that the apostle Paul, in the first century, employed his “body of Christ” metaphor in the first place. It was likely in response to this tendency that Richard Hooker in the sixteenth century urged his fellow Anglicans to view “even heretics” as “wounded Christians,” rather than as heathens.2 Is it any wonder that many Christian leaders both on the left and

P A R A D O X Yxvi

the right have so often asked themselves why the Christian church is one of the few armies that shoot their own wounded?

Even so, things do seem to be getting more heated of late. It is as though those on either side of the divide view the other’s most distinctive feature as a slippery slope to be avoided at all costs. Conservative Christians seem to view liberals’ emphasis on love and acceptance as the first step toward a Christianity without the truth of Christ at its center. And liberal Christians seem to view conservatives’ emphasis on Scripture and doctrine as the first step toward a Christianity without the love of Christ at its center. On any of the issues that ostensibly divide them, the two ends of the theological spectrum divide the spectrum into “sides” that view each other’s words and actions with suspicion, filtering them through judgments they’ve already made about each other and through reacting against them.

It sometimes seems that each “side” is more interested in “winning” than in hearing any truth its counterpart might have to share. Having declared the other side the “enemy” and labeled it either “heretical” or “devoid of love” (having failed their own side’s test of orthodoxy), each then feels free to defeat the other by any means necessary: name calling, misrepresentation verging on libel, ad hominem attacks, even outright harassment. On issues of human sexuality, for example, conservatives accuse liberals of being “revisionists,” while liberals call conservatives “homophobic.” These knee-jerk reactions only serve to reinforce existing suspi-cion, providing each side with ammunition for further attacks and thus widening the gap between them.

In my denomination, these divisions have tended to be over sexual orientation and gender roles. For some, the issues represent choices between stark opposites: whether to affirm or condemn same-sex relationships, whether to permit or deny the ordination of gays and lesbians, whether to permit or deny the ordination of

I N T R O D U C T I O N xvii

women, or some combination thereof. For others, the issues are more nuanced: whether or not to ordain “practicing homosexuals” or whether or not to allow female bishops. I have seen liberals vote down resolutions affirming the authority of Scripture, not because they disagreed with the proposition, but because of who proposed it: they feared that it was some kind of setup by their conservative opponents. I have seen conservatives reject alternative Episcopal oversight plans, not because they had objections to any of the candidates suggested as potential overseers, but because of who would be choosing them: the presiding bishop (or as some of them have called her, “The Presiding Heretic”3)—whom they see as “too liberal,” rather than someone on their side. The fear and loathing expressed by bloggers on both sides is very disturbing. A parishioner of mine, a former JAG commander with the Navy, calls this way of interacting the Tribal Narcissistic Tendency (T.N.T.), and suggests that it is at the heart of most conflicts.

I Agree with My Friends: The Lessons of Personal Experience

Despite the uncharitable behavior I have witnessed, there are people on both sides that I have come to know, respect, and count among my friends. I know these people to be my brothers and sisters. I know their commitment to Christ and to the church, and their love of the gospel.

Back in my seminary days, my theology professor, whenever he was asked his opinion about a contentious theological issue, would say, “Some of my friends say [insert opinion here] and some of my friends say [insert opposite opinion here]. Me? I agree with my friends.” I, too, agree with my friends. In fact, even on the issues that divide them, I’ve been surprised by how many points of agreement

P A R A D O X Yxviii

I have with my friends—and thus they with each other—on both sides of these issues. It is exceedingly frustrating—even painful—to watch my friends focus so single-mindedly on what divides them, while living in denial about the many points of agreement that they share.

Having a foot in two camps is a familiar experience for me. I am to many a living contradiction: a Jewish Christian. Born the son of a Jewish mother and a Gentile father, I am by Jewish tradition and Halakhic law a Jew. Being a follower of Jesus Christ makes me a Christian. As usual, agreeing with my friends, I claim both traditions and the best of both faiths.

I became a follower of Christ through the actions of a conservative, evangelical, Pentecostal friend, who challenged me to consider the claims of Jesus. I took up the challenge and tried to prove him wrong, wanting to shut him up, and the rest, as they say, is history. While my friend’s approach could be quite annoying, the challenge he offered was one I needed to take seriously, because I couldn’t make a commitment to follow and worship Jesus Christ unless I was convinced that Christ was God. The fellowship Christianity offered was necessary but not sufficient for me to make such a commitment (not when it meant I would have to give up the fellowship I could have in a synagogue).

●Generosity without orthodoxy is nothing.Orthodoxy without generosity is worse than nothing.4

Hans Frei German-born, American postliberal theologian, 1922–88

Over time, I came to find that while doctrine was necessary for me to start my journey into the Christian faith, it was not sufficient to sustain me in that journey. Doctrine couldn’t feed

I N T R O D U C T I O N xix

my spirit. I needed to experience the love of Christ and to experience the transcendent yet immanent mysterious presence of God. Moreover there was truth and value in my Jewish heritage that I didn’t wish to leave behind. I found these qualities more present on the liberal side of the church, and most present in the Episcopal Church. Not only did it allow me to experience the Divine Presence in the Eucharistic liturgy every Sunday, it was also, as I have often told people, “the most Jewish church I could find.” Yet sometimes I find the reticence of many of my fellow Episcopalians and many liberal Christians to make doctrinal truth claims frustrating as well. I often find myself caught in a tension between love and truth, heart and mind, spirit and doctrine.

●If . . . you are truly my disciples . . .you will know the truth, and the truth will make you freeBy this everyone will know you are my disciples,if you have love for one another.

Jesus of Nazareth (John 8:31–32, 13:35)

I appreciate—though don’t always agree with the conclusions of—the biblical rigor of my friends on the conservative side of the church, a rigor that my friends on the liberal side seem to fear. And I often feel that my friends on the liberal side of the church operate out of a spirit of acceptance and tolerance that I frequently find lacking on the conservative side.

I’m generalizing from my own journey, of course. Even as I make this generalization, I recognize that it does not completely describe even my own experience: I count among my circle of Christian friends both tolerant conservatives and biblically rigorous liberals. But isn’t that the nature of human learning, that we generalize from our journeys? In fact, it would be nearly

P A R A D O X Yxx

impossible for us to engage in a serious exploration of new ideas and concepts without making all kinds of generalizations. But as we will see as we continue this particular journey of exploration, the problem is not that we make generalizations about the world around us, but that we mistake our generalizations for the truth.

Yet our generalizations must have some truth to them or they would be of no use to us. Both sides of the conservative-liberal divide do have their predominant tendencies and these tendencies do have characteristic strengths and weaknesses, though they are often flip sides of the same coin.

So I want to say to my friends on both sides that each has something of value to share with the other. I want to remind my liberal friends that Jesus said, “[If] you are truly my disciples . . . you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:32). And I want to remind my conservative friends that Jesus said, “By this everyone will know you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).

In Christ There Is No Us and Them: The Lessons of My Congregat ion

My own congregation has experienced both the curse and the blessing: a premature and painful death, followed by a resurrection. The first St. Nicholas Church (Version 1.0), planted in the early 1990s, experienced the curse. A relatively conservative congregation, it grew quickly at first but within two years had “crashed and burned,” ostensibly in conflict over human sexuality issues, but really over issues of power and control.

Two years later, blessing followed curse. Version 2.0 of St. Nick’s rose from the ashes of 1.0. And as is often the case, Version 2.0 was a bit more stable, with a newly ordained leader (me) and

I N T R O D U C T I O N xxi

composed largely of “survivors” of the first plant. Determined to learn from painful experience, we dedicated ourselves to discerning and living into a new way of being church, in which conservative and liberal Christians could live together in love, and that conservative-liberal theological differences could not kill. We have been engaged in this journey of exploration for more than a decade.

We tried to be good interpreters of the spiritual signs of the times (see Matthew 16:1–3), looking critically at ourselves, our church, and the church at large. We discovered that neither we, nor our denomination, nor its parent body, were transiting these turbulent times alone. Churches everywhere are wracked by these conflicts. It’s just that we Anglicans tend to be more public in our disagreements than others. (A healthy sign, we thought.)

In time, it dawned on us: this conflict was not your average, everyday schism, but a paradigm shift—and not just one paradigm was shifting, but several. Realizing that we live in—and what we should expect in—an age of collapsing paradigms has helped our congregation respond to changes around us with less anxiety and more compassion. Realizing that what we had thought was a field of battle between unalterably opposed sides was really an emerging landscape, helped us understand that we needed each other’s eyes to find our way safely through.

We learned that major paradigm shifts are almost always accompanied by turmoil and disorder. Take science, for example. The primary mission of science is the discovery and integration of new knowledge. Yet studies have shown that, when confronted with data that conflict with the dominant paradigm, scientists reacted anxiously. Warring camps developed: “liberal” camps prematurely proposed new paradigms based on insufficient data; “conservative” camps defended the old paradigm by attacking the new data and the proposed paradigms. Eventually, the old paradigm fell,

P A R A D O X Yxxii

yet neither camp really won. Some aspects of the liberal camp’s proposals found their way into the new paradigm, many did not. Some aspects of the old paradigm, that the conservative camps were protecting, remained standing, many did not. Because their vision was still limited by the old paradigm, both camps were blindsided.5

● World views, in fact, are not very often exclusive.Most of us carry two or three around with us all the time.6

E.P. Sanders Theologian and scholar of Jewish Christianity

Major paradigm shifts have been even more traumatic for the church, provoking anxiety, anger, and reactivity in the form of conflict and even violence. Yet somehow, with God’s help, the church has always found a way to survive the fall of old paradigms and eventually to adapt to new ones.

Coming to terms with our natural anxiety has helped the members of my congregation develop a sense of humility about what they know to be true, and to exercise a greater degree of tolerance toward those with whom they disagreed than they had previously. Conservatives learned to ask: “Are we truly acting to protect God’s will (as if God needs our protection) or merely protecting the status quo?” Liberals learned to ask: “How do we know we are prophetically promoting God’s will (as if God needs our promotion) or merely our own innovations?” Understanding our own propensity for reactivity has tended to give us pause about attributing evil intent to those who oppose our point of view. Recognizing that the dominant paradigm has created blind spots in our vision helps us realize how much we need the insights of those who disagree with us.

I N T R O D U C T I O N xxiii

We began to realize that our paradigms are really our finite, human attempts to domesticate God. Because we cannot handle our reality raw and unfiltered, humanity creates paradigms in order to impose meaning, stability, and predictability upon wild and untamed reality. As long as we realize that our theological concepts must be provisional in nature, and are only our best attempts at expressing what we know about God and reality, this is okay. The problem comes when we begin to believe that our concepts are the full expression of God’s reality, and then refuse to modify them. There is a word for trying to domesticate God. It is called idolatry. Yet over and over again throughout their histories, church after church has found itself doing precisely that.

● Orthodoxy:What God knows,some of which we believe a little,some of which they believe a little,and about which we all have a whole lot to learn.7

Brian McLaren

We have come to view changing paradigms as God’s way of telling us, There you go again: trying to put me in a box. We have come to understand that the dis-ease we feel when we experience such change is God’s way of showing us that we have become so attached to our paradigms that we have rendered them impervious to change; so brittle and inflexible that the tiniest new breath of God’s Spirit crumbles them to dust. We have come to recognize that when a familiar paradigm begins to fall, we have an opportunity to release God to the wild of mystery and paradox (actually God never left it) so that God can un-domesticate our faith.

P A R A D O X Yxxiv

This involves curbing our dogma.8 Back in my seminary days, one of my theology professors said the functional definition of the word dogma was “let’s stop talking about this and move on.” The core dogmas of the church, as described in the great creeds—the overflowing love and grace of the Triune God, and Christ’s human-divine essence as the conduit for that love and grace—were the best that humanity could do to describe the infinite essence of God after almost 400 years of grappling with the issue. It wasn’t going to get any better than that. After all, the essence of the infinite (God) is that it is beyond the finite (humanity). It was time to stop trying to refine the dogmas and to instead get on with living them out “with God’s help,” as the baptismal formula goes.

My congregation and I have learned that, as much as our concepts of orthodoxy are intended to express truth, they are not themselves truth, and they certainly are not The Truth. They are human constructs, subject to the influences, understandings, and assumptions of culture, as well as the limitations of the finite human mind, and to the extent that they contain such imperfections they are less than sufficient as organizing principles of Christian community.

● Orthodoxy is my doxy—heterodoxy is another man’s doxy.9

William Warburton English literary critic and churchman, 1698-1779(Bishop of Gloucester from 1759)

I am not advocating dispensing with dogma, but limiting its use to where it’s constructive to Christian community, rather than destructive. In other words, we would do well to distinguish more clearly between our dogma—those primary doctrines that form the core of our common Christian faith—and what some have

I N T R O D U C T I O N xxv

called our doctrinal distinctives—doctrines that are secondary—and not to allow what is merely distinctive to separate us. This is not to say these distinctives are without value. The doctrinal distinctives of a particular denomination or group might best be understood as part of its unique calling. As such, they may have great value as a witness to the whole church. However, the more of these distinctives we raise to dogmatic significance (i.e., make accepting them mandatory for membership in the body of Christ), the more we splinter our churches. Our congregation has been trying to learn the difference between essentials (things that truly matter) and nonessentials (what Augustine called adiaphora) and to be very, very cautious about what we put in the first category.10

An Invitat ion to a Journey of Explorat ion

So interesting times come with a blessing as well as a curse. The curse of a paradigm shift is the loss of a familiar way of organizing life. Like any death, it gives rise to feelings of uncertainty and anxiety about what the future may hold. Yet, while the death of a way of life is not to be pursued for its own sake, when it does occur it always brings with it the possibility of the birth of a new way: the rising of a new paradigm more complete and encompassing of the fullness of reality than the one we lost.

I believe that there is a new paradigm emerging: one that will transcend our current US/THEM attitudes; one that will bridge the increasing chasm between the “right” and “left” arms of the church; one that will reconcile the parties in this divorce between truth and love. But there’s one big problem with this paradigm: it is still emerging. Because our eyes have been trained by the old, we cannot yet see clearly what the new will look like. But we can begin to explore its outlines. That’s the purpose of this book.

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So I would like to invite you to join me on a journey such as the ones taken by the explorers of old; a journey into an as yet undiscovered country; a journey of exploration to map the boundaries of the new world. We will start by digging deeper into why the current paradigms of Christian community seem to be collapsing, so we can stop “looking for love (and unity) in all the wrong places.” Then, since there is nothing entirely new under the sun, we will begin to train our eyes to recognize the new paradigm by exploring several “Christianities that might have been”—movements in the early church that had different ideas about what it meant to be a community of faith. Our journey concludes with an exploration of the possible outlines of a new way: thinking about orthodoxy that unites rather than divides; a concept of orthodoxy that transcends the distinction between liberal and conservative, yet captures much of what is at the heart of each; an incarnational orthodoxy anchored in the love of Christ.

●B i b l i c a l R e f l e c t i o n

a n d G r o u p D i s c u s s i o n

Whether you are reading by yourself, or as part of a study group, you may want to supplement what I am asking you to consider with reading in the Bible, and reflecting and praying about what you discover there.

If so, read the following texts. And if time permits, look them up in the Bible and read them in their fuller contexts. Then consider the questions that follow.

John 17:22–23The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

Jesus called us to be one in the same way that he (God the Son) and God the Father are one. In what manner are God the Father and God the Son one? What then are the implica-tions for how we, as the followers of Christ, are to be one?

1 Corinthians 13:12For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.

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How confident can we be that our knowledge of God’s will is complete and correct? What does this say about the attitude we should hold toward those who disagree with us?

Luke 24:30–33When [Jesus] was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was open-ing the scriptures to us?”

On the road to Emmaus, Jesus taught the disciples from the Scriptures, but it was not until he communed with them in the breaking of bread that they recognized him. What does this say about the relationship of doctrine and common worship to our recognizing that Christ is among us?

●Q u e s t i o n s t o C o n s i d e r

1 What was your image of God as a child? . . . As a teen? . . . As a young adult? At the age you are now? How has your image of God changed?

2 In your opinion, which do you believe is more important to the church: correctness of belief or the unity of the body? How are they related?

3 Draw two large circles that overlap side by side. Ask the group to divide itself into two sections: one composed of people who identify themselves as theologically liberal, the other composed of people who identify themselves as theologically conservative. Identify the things upon which you agree and the things about which you disagree. Write the things upon which you agree in the area of overlap. Write the things upon which you disagree in the outer circles (liberal ideas/issues in the one circle, conservative ideas/issues in the other). Are there other circles? What did you learn?*

*Question 3 is an important one for a study group that includes people holding opposing viewpoints. A facilitator should allow sufficient time for a full exploration of views on the part of all who are present.

P A R T I

Does the Future Have a Church?

C H A P T E R 1

The End of the World as We Know It:

Collapsing Paradigms

par·a·digm [par´ -d¯m’, -d˘m’] n. 1. One that serves as

a pattern or model. 2. A set or list of all the inflectional

forms of a word or of one of its grammatical categories:

the paradigm of an irregular verb. 3. A set of assumptions,

concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way

of viewing reality for the community that shares them,

especially in an intellectual discipline. From paradeiknunai,

“to compare”: para-, “alongside,” +deiknunai, “to show.”

USAGE NOTE: Since the 1960s, paradigm has been used in

science to refer to a theoretical framework.11

I know. I know. The term paradigm sounds a little clichéd these days. In the world of business it seems like every other week somebody is promoting some new management technique as the newest paradigm in leadership. Yet while the term may have been overused (or even abused) of late, it is of great importance to understanding the turbulent times we face. If the word paradigm is a little hackneyed to you, just substitute world view, conceptual model, or some other equivalent term. Whatever you want to call it, if we want to understand how human beings learn and practice truth, we have to talk about paradigms. Because paradigms are the way we think and the way we interpret our perceptions of reality. It’s in our DNA.

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The words truth and reality are commonly used as though they were interchangeable. But while they are integrally related, they really are two very different things. If we were to look at them in the form of a mathematical equation, the relationship might be expressed like this:

● T = R + MTruth Equals Reality plus Meaning (what we seek when we seek what we call truth)

With apologies to agent Fox Mulder of The X-Files, it’s not the “truth” that is “out there” but “reality.” And while we are borrowing phrases from old TV shows, we might borrow a line from officer Joe Friday of Dragnet and say that reality is “just the facts,” without any meaning attributed to them.

We do like our reality filtered. Our minds seem “hard-wired” to develop paradigms. We are meaning-seeking creatures, determined to understand how and why things relate together the way they do, and we are driven to create conceptual systems based on our experience and observation of the world. It is this understanding of the hows and whys and relationships of reality that is what we mean by “truth.”

In fact, we so depend upon such understanding that we will create conceptual systems even in the face of minimal experience and a paucity of observations. For example, rather than accepting that major natural disasters are just expressions of random chaos at work in the world, we call them “acts of God.” Some find it easier to attribute poverty to character traits of the poor than to accept that their poverty and our prosperity might be as much a product of luck as of anything else. When a woman is sexually assaulted by a stranger, some are tempted to ask if she was wearing something

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revealing or acting in a seductive manner. In this way, creating paradigms gives us the illusion of predictability and control.

Paradigms help us negotiate our way through the world more effectively. As with walking, if we had to think about each step before we took it, our minds would be preoccupied with putting one foot in front of the other. We wouldn’t be able to chew bubble gum and walk at the same time. But once we “get” how walking works, we can move the activity out of our conscious minds and focus our conscious thinking processes on more important questions, such as “Where are we going?” and “Are we there yet?” Paradigms are the conceptual models we’ve developed to explain and predict how reality works. They provide a framework within which we can organize and integrate new experiences and observations.

The Problem with Paradigms: Confusing Truth with Real i ty

Paradigms seem to work so well for us so much of the time that we sometimes confuse our paradigms of reality with reality itself. Just like the glasses or contacts many of us wear, we forget that we have them on.

Similarly, when we lose sight of the provisional nature of our paradigms and begin to think of them as timeless and immutable, we can become reactive when faced with new experiences that don’t fit our old way of thinking. We may be tempted to deny them. We may be suspicious of anomalous observations that threaten the old way of seeing things, or of the motives of those who bring them to our attention.

But our denial cannot stop the accumulation of discordant observations and experiences that the old paradigm no longer

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explains. Sooner or later—usually later, human nature being what it is—the weight of the evidence becomes so great that the old paradigm collapses it. It is only then that a new paradigm can arise.

Physicist and historian of science Thomas Kuhn12 once explained the process of individual and collective denial that historically happens when major paradigms shift in fields of scientific knowledge. Some scientists dismissed discrepant data as measurement errors, even when they arose in their own experiments. Others attacked the competence or motivation of the researcher (when anomalies arose in other scientist’s experiments). Some appeared to “adjust” the data (mostly unconsciously) to fit the ruling paradigm. Others worked heroically to adapt the old paradigm to fit new data by introducing corollaries or constants. In some cases, researchers’ commitment to the old paradigm was so strong it actually rendered them incapable of perceiving the data that didn’t fit. These reactions were not limited to individual scientists. Resisters of change tended to be drawn to other like-minded scientists, eventually forming factions to oppose any consideration of abandoning the old, ruling paradigm of knowledge.

● Rather than being an interpreter,the scientist who embraces a new paradigmis like the man wearing inverting lenses.13

Thomas Kuhn

Meanwhile, Kuhn noted, other scientists would react in the opposite direction, intuitively formulating and often aggressively proposing alternative paradigms to account for those discrepancies. Often, several alternate paradigms would be formed. Some of


these would be truly radical departures from the ruling paradigm; others merely an artful repackaging of the old way. Sometimes several of these alternative paradigms would be mutually exclusive of each other. The one thing they shared was that each would be championed with great hubris by their promoters. And as with the conservative scientists, factions of these progressive theorists tended to form to defend their positions.

● Do not confine your children to your own learning,for they were born in another time.14

Talmudic proverb

But when the new paradigm finally emerged, it was neither exactly what the reactionaries feared nor what the radicals were advocating. Rather, the new paradigm usually contained some aspects of the heavily defended ruling paradigm, some aspects of the heavily promoted proposed ones, and—this is the interesting part—some aspects that neither side expected. Obviously, if scientists, who are in a field of understanding that is supposed to be the epitome of open-minded objectivity, respond to shifts in understanding reality with such a high level of reactive subjectivity, how can we expect the rest of us to be any less reactive and subjective in our responses?

It is our nature to resist change of any kind. When our paradigms are challenged, we fight tooth and nail. The greater the shift required, the stronger we tend to react against it, even when the loss of the paradigm would not threaten core operating principles.

Historically, the church has been especially prone to these reactions. Take the case of Church v. Galileo in 1616. Galileo’s observation that the Earth orbited the sun was contrary to

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long-standing church teaching. Yet Galileo’s discovery was not exactly new to science, nor unknown to the church, it was only a confirmation of earlier observations by Copernicus. Nevertheless, Galileo’s announcement of his “discovery” was met with angry denunciations from the church in a manner that Copernicus’s observations were not.

Why did the church react so “reactively” to Galileo after virtually ignoring Copernicus? The answer probably lies in the way human organizations react when a dominant paradigm collapses, especially when the collapse of the dominant paradigm would diminish their own dominance. Copernicus had published his observations among his peers, while Galileo announced his “discovery” publicly. Galileo’s pronouncements of his findings were sarcastically dismissive of the church’s position on the matter, while Copernicus did not “connect the dots” from his findings to the church’s teachings. Galileo’s observations—because they were brashly and publicly defiant—threatened the church’s dominance in a way Copernicus’s did not.

To be fair to the church, before Copernicus, most scientists also believed the Earth was at the center of the universe, and their initial reaction to the new findings was not all that welcoming. Scientists had the luxury of less publicity and a few extra years to get used to the change. Otherwise they may have reacted to Galileo just as badly as the church.15 The bottom line is that the hardening reaction to public criticism is typical of institutional reactions to the attacks on dearly held paradigms that often precede their collapse.

We live in an age of rapid change when paradigms that have served us for centuries no longer adequately describe the reality we are coming to know. Our knowledge is changing faster than the capacity of many paradigms to adapt. Just about every field of human endeavor—from physics to politics, from art to


psychology—is experiencing this shifting of the sands underfoot. Theology, which monk and theologian Anselm of Canterbury once called “faith seeking understanding,”16 is no exception.

Theology is the church’s division of paradigm development. We seek to develop paradigms to describe the nature of the spiritual realities that we have experienced; things such as the nature of God, the nature of Christ, the nature of God’s Spirit, the nature of the world, the nature of humankind, and other issues.

Understandings that have emerged from theology have in turn profoundly affected the way the church has understood its role and mission in the world, its understanding of faith and what it means to be a community of faith, its relationship to other faith communities, and more. But just as in other fields of knowledge, theological paradigms are still only human approximations of a reality that only God can fully know. They are not the reality they seek to represent.

The End of the World as We Know It

I believe the church is facing a particularly rough patch this time around, because it is losing several familiar paradigms of Christian community:

1. Christendom. An approach to Christian unity grounded in institutionalized power and control that came into full play when Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. While Christendom may no longer be the “official” paradigm of Christianity, its memory still has an influence on the Christian imagination.

2. Foundationalism. Conservative and liberal Christianity, as we know them today, have their roots in the Enlightenment paradigm of Foundationalism that assumes that ultimate

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truths can be grasped through human rationality. Foundationalism had two main schools of thought: one that sought to establish universal truths by objective observation of the outside world, and another that sought to discover universal truths through objective analysis of internal human experience. The modern conservative belief in biblical inerrancy grew out of the first approach. Modern liberal Scripture analysis grew out of the second. Both forms are now collapsing.

3. Religion. Organized religion is itself a paradigm based on the assumption that spiritual unity requires the security of an organized, centralized system of beliefs and practices. Where Foundationalism sought unity in certainty about truth, those employing the paradigm of Organized Reli-gion have sought unity in the security of organization. If the increasing number of people identifying themselves as “spiritual, not religious” is any indication, Christianity conceived as organized religion would seem to be in some trouble.

The collapse of these paradigms presents the church with danger and opportunity. The danger is obvious and immediate: schism. When the church’s governing paradigms have shifted in the past, the process has been chaotic, if not violent; the emotional climate confused, if not angry; the outcome has been the tearing of the fabric of the church, if not actual schism. The Reformation, the church’s last great paradigm shift five hundred years ago, was a violent and disruptive affair. Protestant–Roman Catholic schism was just the beginning: after the separation Protestantism rapidly began to splinter into dozens of smaller denominations whose members were willing to die (and kill) for their distinctive doctrinal visions. Many today fear that the rapidly disintegrating consensus around the nature of Christian community will result


in increasing schism: a rapid cell division spreading through the body of Christ like a cancer, that in the end will prove deadly to the unity of the church.

But is our rapidly disintegrating consensus really such a bad thing? It all depends on the meaning we assign to uniformity. If we view agreement on things as an indicator of health, and disagreement as a sign of pathology, then the loss of consensus we are facing is very frightening indeed. But what if those valuations were reversed? What if we viewed difference and differentiation as a positive thing and conflict as a natural part of life—a sign of health? What then? Maybe what makes cancer such an unhealthy condition is not that cells are dividing rapidly, but how they are dividing. Cancer is one kind of cell division: mitosis.

But mitosis is not the only form of rapid cell division. There is another kind that is completely healthy and much more hopeful: meiosis. Instead of creating a duplicate of itself, the cell divides in two and redistributes half of its DNA to each of the two new cells, so that each new cell carries half the encoded traits of the original cell. This kind of rapid cell division is essential to healthy biological reproduction. Whenever we have tried to defeat it in the hope of maintaining uniformity—in the breeding of pedigreed dogs or royal families—the results are frequently detrimental and sometimes deadly. Meiosis ensures a level of diversity in our DNA that keeps us healthy.

What if we viewed the diverging consensus in the church in a different light: not as mitosis gone wild, but as a return to healthy meiosis. Could it be that the Holy Spirit is moving in the church to initiate a kind of spiritual-theological meiosis? Could the Holy Spirit be preparing to birth something new? A new way of being church? A fresh, new basis for Christian unity? One that depends on the welcoming of differentiation as a way of becoming a more whole and complete body of Christ?

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● It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impos-sible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Sherlock Holmes From “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” by Arthur Conan Doyle, 1900



Deuteronomy 8:2Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wil-derness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments.

As the old saying goes: it took God a day to get the Israelites out of Egypt, but it took God forty years to get Egypt out of the Israelites. Why is it so difficult to leave behind even a paradigm that has ceased to be healthy? A whole generation of Israelites had to pass on before the Israelites were prepared to enter the Promised Land. What has to die before we are able to enter a new paradigm?

Acts 10:11–16[In a dream, Peter] saw the heaven opened and something like a large sheet coming down, being lowered to the ground by its four corners. In it were all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air. Then he heard a voice saying, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat.” But Peter said, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean.” The voice said to him again, a second time,

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“What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” This happened three times, and the thing was suddenly taken up to heaven.

In a dream, God revealed to Peter a new paradigm for a community of faith, yet Peter was resistant to giving up the old way. If God were to reveal to us a new way of being a Christian community, what might hold us back from living into that revelation?

Matthew 7:3–5Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, “Let me take the speck out of your eye,” while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.

Imagine a conflict that you have experienced in church. To what extent was each side criticizing the other for things they are overlooking in themselves? In what ways do we engage in this dynamic on a routine basis?

● Q u e s t i o n s t o C o n s i d e r

1 Which part of your church’s liturgy would you be most resistant to changing? Which item of liturgical “furniture” (e.g., altar, baptismal font, etc.) would you be most resistant to moving? What does this say about the spiritual meaning you invest in the action or item in question?

2 List several things you value about the nature of spiritual com-munity in your congregation. Which thing on your list do you consider the most important? The least important?

3 Which of the above would you be willing to give up for the sake of Christian unity? Explain. Answer the same question for your congregation and/or denomination.

C H A P T E R 2

Constantine’s Ghost:Christendom

Chris·ten·dom [kr˘s’ n-d m] n. 1. Christians considered

as a group. 2. The Christian world. From Old English

cristendom: cristen, Christian; see Christian + -dom, -dom:

kingdom.17

Christendom. In its wider sense this term is used to

describe the part of the world which is inhabited by

Christians. . . . But there is a narrower sense in which

Christendom stands for a polity as well as a religion, for a

nation as well as for a people. Christendom in this sense

was an ideal which inspired and dignified many centuries

of history and which has not yet altogether lost its power

over the minds of men.18

An interesting thing about paradigms is that once one becomes dominant it eventually becomes so pervasively engrained in our subconscious mind that not only does it become invisible to us, but it continues to influence our thinking, behavior, and social interactions long after it has fallen. Given the right set of cues—especially in times of conflict—we find ourselves slipping back into them like a comfortable old shoe: a kind of paradigm regression.

Garrison Keillor tells a story about going home for Christmas.19 He left his own home a fully grown, mature adult, but as he drove toward his parents’ home it was as though he grew smaller with

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each passing mile, and had more and more trouble reaching the gas pedal and seeing over the steering wheel. The story ends with him hopping down out of his car, skipping up to the house and into the living room, climbing up onto the sofa, dangling and swinging his legs, and shouting, “Hi Mommy, what’s for dinner?” That’s often how it works with us and it’s one way of understanding what has happened with the paradigm of Christendom.

The ideal of Christendom may have reached its most complete fruition with the near-complete merger of church and state under the Roman Emperor Constantine—that is why some call it Constantinianism.20 Yet Christendom neither started with Constantine in the fourth century nor ended with the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth.

The seeds of Christendom were actually planted in the early second century. Christianity was still illegal in the Roman Empire, largely due to the efforts of politically conservative defenders of the Empire who sought to depict the church as threatening the stability of the Empire by undermining its values. In an attempt to soften the resulting persecution, Justin Martyr and other so-called “apologists” wrote and published tracts portraying the church as having no axe to grind against the Empire. Later that same century, the apologist Tertullian went a step further. Instead of portraying the church as merely nonthreatening to the Empire, Tertullian argued that the virtues of Christianity were supportive of the virtues of Imperial Roman culture.21

The third century found the church fathers venturing even further down the path toward the syncretisation with the state, adopting in their writings the metaphor of God as the church’s heavenly Emperor and suggesting that the heavenly emperorship of God ought to be mirrored on earth by a human emperor over the church. By the end of the century, many were arguing that, for the good of the church, Christianity ought to be the unifying force

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behind the Empire. So when fourth-century emperor Constantine attempted to unify the rapidly disintegrating Empire and quickly crumbling culture of Rome by making Christianity the official religion and himself head of both church and state, it was a small leap rather than a radical departure.

To be fair, the larger God-King paradigm did not originate with Christianity, having been the worldwide cultural norm for millennia prior to the birth of the church. Long before the birth of the Prince of Peace, God had already fought a losing battle with the people of Israel and gave in to their demand for a king to rule in God’s name like the nations that surrounded them (1 Samuel 8:4–22). So it’s hard to blame the church for falling prey to the temptation of the God-King paradigm. Perhaps the only surprise is how fast it fell.

Unity through Uniformity, Enforced by Power

Constantine’s goal was to bring unity to the Empire by bringing uniformity to civil affairs, with the church as the new civil religion. But first, by the power of the Empire if necessary, he had to impose uniformity. As a result, uniformity of doctrine and practice increasingly became the paramount concerns of the church. And for the first time in its history, churches were able to pull the levers of power to enforce such uniformity. This was the heart of the Christendom paradigm: unity through uniformity, often enforced by power.

It is difficult to overestimate the extent to which the church allowed itself to be re-shaped and re-purposed by the Christendom paradigm.22 It is difficult to overstate the degree to which, once adopted, the paradigm rendered the church unaware of the scope of these changes.


Ironically, it was these first attempts to employ the power of the Empire to unify the church that would sow the seeds of the first schism. Before Constantine’s unilateral decision to call the Council of Nicaea, the great ecumenical councils of the church were called and their issues considered and decided in a conciliar (i.e., consensus) fashion among the representatives of the various “Apostolic Sees” (major centers of Christianity thought to be established by the apostles). But his heavy-handedness did not end there. He lobbied hard for (and later won) the excommunication of Jewish Christianity from the church, not on the basis of heterodox belief, but because he misunderstood their desire to worship in the same Jewish style as did their Lord and Savior.

The effects of the Christendom paradigm were perhaps most keenly felt in the church’s attitude toward war and violence. For its first three centuries, Christianity understood violence and war as incompatible with the teachings and example of Jesus.23 I am not sure early Christians would have thought of themselves as pacifists: they did not always remain passive in the face of violence but were willing to actively resist it at the cost of their lives. But the resistance offered by early Christians was almost always non-violent. In fact, they refused to respond violently, even when their lives were at stake. Until the time of Constantine, imperial soldiers who became Christians resigned from the military at the first opportunity. Because of this, the Roman army banned Christians from its ranks in the fourth century. Yet by the fifth century, writers such as Augustine were justifying military service24 and Christians began joining the military in increasing numbers, and by 416 CE it was illegal for anyone but Christians to serve in the Roman army. It is astonishing to think that it took only a century for Christianity to morph from a religion that abhorred violence into one that came to believe in, as Walter Wink called it, “the myth of redemptive violence.”25

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● I am a soldier of Christ.To fight is not permissible for me.26

Martin of Tours 316–397

The Christendom paradigm also led to a reversal of the church’s understanding of evangelism. The church before Constantine thought of evangelism as an interpersonal and hospitality-oriented process: the Christian community tended to offer fellowship to all who wished to participate in the life of their community. Recipients of this love would sometimes be won over by it and then express their desire to enter the Christian community formally through baptism (Acts 8:36; 16:29–33). As they say in the Cursillo movement (Cursillo is short for “Cursillo en Cristo”—literally, “A Short Course in Christianity”), “Make a friend . . . Be a friend . . . Bring your friend to Christ”—except in the early church the evangelism effort was an effort of the entire community, rather than just of individuals.

Under the influence of Christendom, the role of the evangelist quickly evolved into the equivalent of the Roman proconsul. Dealing with potential subject nations or peoples, the proconsul would (1) present the Emperor’s terms to their leaders; (2) demand an immediate decision as to whether they would accept or reject those terms; and (3) if they accepted, make them subjects of the Roman Empire, enjoying all the benefits of Roman citizenship. If they declined, the result was war and enslavement. In the church the evangelist would (1) present the gospel; (2) ask for a decision as to whether his listeners would accept or reject Christ; and (3) if the answer was positive, offer fellowship. Rejection of Christ (or at least the image of Christ that was presented) was often said to result in eternal condemnation. To this day, imperial evangelism remains common in some areas of Christian life and expression, so


strongly associated with evangelism that liberal Christians often reject evangelism itself because they can picture no other way of doing it.27

This tension is evident in the memoirs of Christopher Columbus, who clearly felt called to share the gospel with the indigenous peoples of the New World, yet until they were converted he felt little need to treat them as human beings. As a result, many Caribbean natives met their death by the sword. Even after their conversions, he did not treat them as having equal humanity to Europeans like himself. In Europe, this kind of thinking would lead to the excesses of the Inquisition and to wars between Catholic and Protestant nations, and even between nations populated by closely related Protestant sects. In the United States, it would inform the destructive relationship between Christian European settlers and Native American Christian tribes, such as the Cherokee Nation,28 and between Christian slave owners and their slaves, whom they Christianized enough to maintain social order, but continued to treat as subhuman. Of course, it’s possible that this kind of racism would have emerged in the absence of Christendom-based evangelism. However, it’s fair to say that the two reinforced each other.

This dehumanizing way of thinking has left a legacy in the church’s present conflicts. Those who hold differing opinions about theology or worship practices often view people on the other side almost as non-Christians. They often feel free to treat their opponents with extreme disrespect, saying and doing things to them that they would ordinarily never direct toward another human being, let alone a brother or sister in Christ. One has to wonder how the world might be different today if those who brought the cross to the New World had not been so profoundly influenced by the Christendom paradigm. In fact, one writer of popular science fiction and fantasy, Orson Scott Card, has done

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exactly that. In Past Watch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, Card imagines a team of time travelers who go back in time to strand Columbus on Hispaniola by sinking all his ships, thereby forcing him to live among the indigenous people for a decade and come to terms with them as equal human beings.29

The transformation of Christianity from a nonviolent movement into a religion that endorsed armed warfare would have been unthinkable to the earliest Christians. However, the evolving Christendom paradigm, in which the church came to accept the exercise of power as a given, made this transformation not only possible, but inevitable.

Demonizing the Other

The effect of the Christendom paradigm is to divide the world into “us” and “them.” This tendency to demonize and dehumanize those with whom we disagree has contributed to some of the worst excesses of the church over the centuries, by whichever branch held legitimate authority. This US/THEM demonization has continued to the present day, practiced by liberals and conservatives alike. Just sample some of the “scorched earth” rhetoric on the more extreme blogs on either side of the current debates and you will see what I mean. Those on both sides feel free to employ sarcasm, derision, and ad hominem attacks on their “enemies” on the “other side” of Christianity that they would never think of using on their non-Christian next-door neighbor. It is simply breathtaking, and incredibly sad.

In all of these areas, and perhaps many more, Christendom has continued to haunt us long after it has been officially laid to rest. Like a divorced couple who won’t release their hold on each other, church and state still reach out to bend the other to their


will, sometimes without either of them realizing it. Such is the seductive memory of Christendom. The Christendom paradigm reaches down through the years to influence all of us, conservative and liberal alike, even as it grows increasingly irrelevant.

What once was the unifying principle of the culture has over the last several centuries become increasing irrelevant to it. The spheres of influence of the church and Western culture are rapidly separating. We live in a largely post-Christian world. Christianity is rapidly losing its dominance in the northern hemisphere. Once the established, or at least preferred, religion in most Western nations, it is now one of many options (and not necessarily the majority option). Christianity is no longer the answer that most people seek, even those people who remember the question.30

Organizations that perceive their power and influence to be threatened by changes in their surrounding culture generally respond reactively to preserve that power and influence. They respond reactively (i.e., reflexively, without much forethought), because, at some level, they perceive that the loss is a threat to their very existence. Therefore, organizations that perceive cultural change as a threat react in one of two ways: (1) defending themselves against the change in the culture or (2) accommodating themselves to it. Being very human organizations, churches —and the various groups that exist within them—react in similar ways. Sensing that their values, beliefs, and influence are being threatened by the culture, conservative churches tend to react by defending themselves against it. They do this by:

This reac-tion is found mostly in mainline denominations (those with a received tradition). The goal seems to be to draw the line on change or perhaps even to roll change back. This may take different forms in different denominations.

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Many denominations and individual churches are raising barri-ers against ecumenical, interfaith activities.

In Protestant Christianity, this reaction is evident in fundamentalist, literalist strains developing within almost all denominations. Similarly, in recent years Roman Catholicism has begun returning to a greater emphasis on the magisterium (the teaching author-ity of the church’s hierarchy).

These survival-level, defensive responses have not been without positive effects. One gain has been an increase in concern for the clarity of belief and integrity of doctrine, which can be a healthy challenge to conservative and liberal Christians alike. Likewise, there has been an increased concern for the consistency of belief and behavior, which is also healthy for Christians generally. Other gains have included a concern for consistency and connection with what has come before. This can provide a sense of certainty and stability for those who value them. Many such congregations are reporting rapid growth.

On the other hand, these defensive reactions have also resulted in losses. Some groups that seek refuge in certainty become more easily disconnected from society (becoming a subculture), develop an inability to adapt to change, and begin to lack tolerance for those who are different. Ironically, this may leave them less able to accomplish their goals over the long term.

Liberal churches have also responded to their sense of a loss of influence in a reactive way. Perceiving a need to be more attractive to those in the culture, liberal churches attempt to adapt to and be tolerant of the changes in society. This accommodation is evident in:

This reaction is sometimes evident in an over-


emphasis on remaining current in language and style by reflexively adopting popular language and sensitivities into the language and style of the liturgy.

It is not unusual to see doctrine de-emphasized in preaching and teaching for fear that these may not only seem irrelevant to the culture, but also potentially divisive. Differences between world religions are minimized by assuming that they all teach the same ultimate truths.

It is common for liberal church groups to present only those aspects of the faith that the culture finds easy to accept and de-emphasize those it does not.

Like the aforementioned defensive reactions, these accom-modating reactions are not without positive aspects. Liturgical language and practice must be renewed if they are to speak the truth in ways that a changed culture can comprehend. Similarly, it is important to acknowledge the ideas and values that the Christian faith shares with other religions. And as the apostle Paul said, there is some benefit in feeding new believers with baby food before making them chew on the tough meat of the faith (1 Corinthians 3:1–2). Such actions can be healthy if taken in order to make the faith understandable to the cul-ture, resulting in outreach to marginalized groups, openness to cultural differences, and a sense of radical hospitality and inclusivity not unlike that of Christ.

But if such actions are taken in an effort to accommodate (as opposed to explain) the faith to the culture, they can become destructive. The losses inherent in such accommodation include a loss of scriptural/theological grounding and a loss of courage—attempting to be all things to all people, but ultimately standing for nothing.

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Moving Forward Together

A collapsing paradigm does not peacefully release its grip on those who hold it. Perhaps the intensity of the argument between the conservative and liberal strands of Christianity ought to be viewed as merely the final gasps of the Christendom paradigm before it departs the body of Christ for good. The departure of the Christendom paradigm is slowly but surely disconnecting the church’s syncretism with the culture and ending its ability to directly exert power, control, and influence over it. This is not a bad thing, because such a connection always works both ways. When the church attempts to lead the culture, it has to hold the culture in an intimate embrace. And in the end, the church ends up following as much as it leads.

We now have entered a new era with new opportunities. We have an opportunity to faithfully and undistractedly focus our attention on our true marriage: our union with Christ. Rather than trying to change the world through worldly means—power, control, and influence—the church instead changes the world through the witness of its communal life and its servant ministry. Simply put, if we take away power and control as the binding force of Christian community, we are left with love: the love of Christ experienced in common worship and fellowship—the kind of love that does not insist on having its own way (1 Corinthians. 13:1–13). What might that mean for us, moving forward together?



Mark 12:17“Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

What belongs to the emperor? What belongs to God? How do we discern the difference?

John 18:36Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”

Where is our kingdom? How does this influence our relation-ship with this world?

Matthew 5:43–45“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”

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If this is how Jesus asks us to treat those who are enemies of the gospel, how then should we deal with brothers and sisters with whom we disagree?


1 To what degree does your church or denomination demand unifor-mity as the price of admission into its spiritual community? List the areas of your church’s or denomination’s corporate life in which complete agreement seems important. Of these areas, which do you most want to be enforced? Least want to be enforced? How much uniformity can you enforce without producing disunity? How much unity can you tolerate before you stand for nothing? Where is the balance point?

2 Describe for your church or denomination: who is “us” and who is “them”? Is there more than one category of “them”? Which of these groups would be the hardest to include? Is it necessary for there to be a “them” for there to be an “us”?

3 What social or moral issues do you, your church, or your denomi-nation feel strongly enough about that you want to directly exert power or influence in order to effect change? In what ways have you attempted to exercise this kind of influence? What have been the results? Is it possible to influence the culture without resorting to power and coercive methods?

C H A P T E R 3

Reality Ain’t What It Used to Be:

Foundationalism

Foundationalism. In epistemology, the view that some

beliefs can justifiably be held by inference from other

beliefs, which themselves are justified directly—e.g.,

on the basis of rational intuition or sense perception.

Beliefs about material objects or about theoretical

entities of science, for example, are not regarded as

basic or foundational in this way but are held to require

inferential support.

Foundationalists have typically recognized self-evident

truths and reports of sense-data as basic, in the sense

that they do not need support from other beliefs. Such

beliefs thus provide the foundations on which the edifice

of knowledge can properly be built.31

Have you ever been looking around for your glasses, only to find out you’re already wearing them? Paradigms operate like that. We get so used to looking through our lenses that we forget we are wearing lenses at all.

Researchers trying to determine how much of the phenomenon of vision was “hardwired” fitted subjects with special lenses that turned their vision upside down. For several days the subjects were extremely disoriented, but after about a week of wearing the

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special lenses twenty-four hours a day, they suddenly began to see normally again. Their eyes were still receiving the images upside down, but their minds were correcting the view. Our paradigms similarly “correct our view” without us even being aware of it. We tend to see reality the way we are used to seeing reality and, when our five senses tell us something different, we learn how to filter out the discrepancy between what is really there and what we “know” is there. Hence, as we look back at previous generations, we assume that they must have seen reality the same way we do, but weren’t smart enough to interpret it correctly, the way we do. (“Once upon a time, people were stupid, but now we know better.”) In reality, we just have different glasses than they did.

The last time we got a new pair of paradigm lenses was almost 500 years ago. Europe had recently emerged from the so-called Middle Ages and was heading into what has been called, variously, the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, or simply the Modern Age. The cornerstone of this age was a paradigm of epistemology (i.e., the development of knowledge) known as Foundationalism.

Foundationalism promised a solution to a long-standing human concern: the desire for epistemological certainty (how to prove that what we know is true). This concern is as old as humankind itself, but by the time of the Enlightenment the concern had become acute and the desire urgent.

Before the Enlightenment, a different sort of epistemological paradigm held sway. Questions of knowledge, especially moral or religious knowledge, could be resolved by appealing to the authority of common tradition. However, the Protestant Reformation fractured that common tradition, closing off that means of resolution, resulting in decades of turmoil across continental Europe, and revealing the need for a new approach. Philosophers, secular and religious, sought to reduce the turmoil

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by establishing new ways to establish with certainty the truth of competing claims.

Foundationalism promised precisely such certainty. At its core was the belief that human reason, exercised appropriately, could ascertain absolute, incontestable, universal truths. Foundationalism assumed that knowledge was like a building: if the foundations were strong, the rest of the building was strong; and if the foundations were weak, everything built on top of them was shaky. Foundationalism was about determining those incontestable beliefs or irrefutable first principles—universal, objective, and discernable to any rational human being—upon which all other beliefs and principles could rest.32

This paradigm had two “fathers,” each of whom developed a different approach to isolating universal principles. René Descartes and John Locke were driven not only by their concern for society as a whole, but for the future of the church. From opposite sides of the Roman Catholic–Protestant divide, they both wished to avoid, as Descartes put it, further “tearing of Christ’s seamless Garment.”33

Descartes worked the problem from the inside out, attempting to isolate universal innate ideas, undistorted by culture, tradition, subjectivity, or error, from which it would be possible to derive truths about reality by deductive reasoning. Locke, on the other hand, worked the problem from the outside in, attempting to derive truths about reality from sense perceptions by a process of induc-tive reasoning. So we can see why Descartes, focusing as he did on isolating the truths of ideas, could reasonably be called the father of modern philosophy, while Locke, focusing on deriving truth from that which was observable, measurable, and testable, might reasonably be called the father of the modern scientific method. Both approaches brought about the virtual explosion of knowledge over the last several centuries, and the Foundationalism paradigm became so


pervasive in its influence that for centuries humans literally could not think without using terms that connote foundations. We had “grounds” for our actions, we “built” our arguments, and our opin-ions were “based” on “underlying” logic.

What may be harder to see (especially for Christians) is that Descartes and Locke are also the fathers, respectively, of modern Christian liberalism and modern Christian conservatism. Entire books have been written outlining the evolution of Christian conservatism and liberalism from their roots in the Foundationalist approaches of these two men, so I will not attempt to develop that history here. Suffice it to say that Descartes’s approach, which chose for its universal and unassailable foundation the inner spiritual experience, evolved into what we now know as theological liberalism. Meanwhile, Locke’s approach, choosing for its universal and unassailable foundation external divine revelation, evolved into what we now know as theological conservatism.

The reason this familial relationship is sometimes hard to see is because the original positions have evolved to become what they are today. Few people today would espouse Descartes’s purely internal, spiritual experience approach to truth any more than they would Locke’s purely external, divine revelation approach. Almost all of these people would wish to nuance their approach in some way. Yet that does not alter the fact that those two extreme and seemingly mutually exclusive approaches are the most logically consistent with the foundational beliefs of their side. In order to understand that theological liberalism and theological conservatives are, in fact, two sides of the same coin, it is useful to understand the strict logic of those pure, radical, original positions.

The position of liberal Christianity is often mischaracterized by conservative Christians as theological relativism or indifference (i.e., “it doesn’t matter what you believe”). However, a more

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accurate way of stating the pure experientialist position from which theological liberalism descends would be to say that while doctrinal beliefs do matter, they are simply not foundational truths. The most universal and indisputable truths are to be found in the innermost human experiences of spiritual awareness. Doctrinal beliefs, while important, are our attempts to express those deeper truths and are secondary in importance.

Meanwhile, the position of conservative Christianity is often mischaracterized by liberal Christians as a rigid and unthinking commitment to certain untenable truth claims, with fundamentalism and biblical inerrancy at the extreme. Yet if we examine the logic of theological conservatism’s divine revelationist forebears, it is unassailable. The only way this approach could provide certainty of truth would be through an unimpeachable, external source: God’s divine revelation. Spiritual experiences, while important, cannot be authentic unless they are grounded in scriptural truths.

So what we often think of as the extreme ends of the liberal-conservative divide are actually the logical extensions of their branch of the Foundationalism tree. They share the same goal of establishing indisputable, universal, foundational truth. Yet because they approach the problem from different directions—liberals from the inside out; conservatives from the outside in—to accept the logic of one side is to deny the other, both cannot be true. If one of them is right, the other has to be wrong. This has brought us to where we are today: a division across which neither side can reach without repudiating its core.

Unless both are wrong. . . .


Cracks in the Foundation

Despite the early enthusiasm, it was not long before those on both sides of the theological divide were faced with observable facts that called their assumptions into question. Liberal Christianity’s assumption that core spiritual experiences were universal seemed obvious at first. But that seeming universality of experience turned out to be more artifact than fact: an artifact of the still fairly homogeneous cultural context of Europe rather than a fact independent of context. Even though Europe was splintering politically and denominationally at the time of the Enlightenment, it still shared a common cultural heritage (Roman/Western civilization) and faith tradition (Christianity). The other cultures and religions that were known at the time existed at the fringes of Western civilization and were not a part of social experience for the vast majority. Even Judaism, Christianity’s only serious competitor within Western civilization, shared common roots with Christianity, and their often acrimonious conflict was over which faith had the stronger claim to those common roots.

But in the centuries since the Enlightenment, as the West developed an increasing diversity of cultures and religions, the assumption that all religious experiences were created equal was called into question. Could one really say that the Christian’s ultimate desire for communion with God is the same as the Buddhist’s desire for the transcendence of nirvana? Is it not a form of religious chauvinism to assert that the ultimate aims of other religions must be the same as ours? Does it not deny both their distinctiveness and our own? The conviction that Jesus Christ is the unique expression of God has always been the heart of Christianity. In all of this questioning, it soon became clear that it was difficult to make the case for universality of spiritual

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experience without undermining the case for the uniqueness of Christ.

Meanwhile, conservative Christianity’s assumption of the existence of a divinely revealed, error-free, bias-free, external source of universal truth in the form of inspired Scripture came face-to-face with inconvenient truths. With the invention of the printing press and moveable type came typesetting errors. These small but troubling mistakes quickly led to the more nuanced theory of autographic inerrancy, claiming that only the manuscripts written by the hand of the original author were inerrant. Soon even the nuanced version faced increasing challenge as increasing numbers of primitive manuscripts were unearthed and discrepancies between them were revealed. And just as liberal Christianity’s assumptions about common universal truths of human spiritual experience were challenged by contact with other cultures and religions, so conservative claims of a unique, external, nonexperiential expression of universal truths in the Scriptures were challenged by the discovery that the holy books of other faiths contained similar—and sometimes older—stories.

As vexing as these problems might be, they were peculiar to the field of theology—mere cracks in the foundation of Foundationalism that continued to spur on major discoveries in other fields, especially in the field of science. Ironically, within a few centuries it would be one of the most advanced fields of science that would poke so many holes in Foundationalism that its whole house would begin to crumble.34

● As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain;and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.35

Albert Einstein Theoretical physicist, 1879–1955


The first significant holes were punched by Albert Einstein in the early twentieth century. Einstein demonstrated that matter had no ultimate, indivisible foundation, but that at the atomic level, matter and energy were fungible (to use an accounting term): matter could be turned into energy and energy into matter. He also demonstrated theoretically that the properties of reality were not fixed: time could be dilated, mass could become infinite, and causality could be changed, all dependent on the observer’s point of view. Okay, but which view is true? According to relativity theory, both are true (or stated more accurately, neither point of view is more valid than the other). This was not the certainty and universality of truth promised by Foundationalism.

If Einstein put a few holes in the wall of Foundationalism, quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg turned it into Swiss cheese. Heisenberg mathematically demonstrated that it was impossible to observe reality without changing it: that unobserved, matter (or energy) could exist in several states simultaneously, but once observed, could only exist in a single state, which could not be predicted. He called this the “Uncertainty Principle.” Later, Heisenberg proved this principle experimentally, demonstrating that the more accurately one measured the direction of a particle, the less accurately one could measure the velocity, and vice versa. He called this the “Observer Effect.” The practical impact of these discoveries was to render Foundationalism-based Newtonian physics useless at the quantum level. Classical physics posited that if one knew the initial state of a system with infinite precision, one could predict the behavior of the system infinitely far into the future. Both the Observer Effect and the Uncertainty Principle demonstrate that such precision is impossible to attain.

Consider what these principles of quantum physics say about the nature of reality itself: they leave us two basic options for explaining the nature of reality. On one side is the

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Copenhagen Interpretation—so called because it was formulated by Nils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg during their collaboration in Copenhagen—that posits that the properties of reality are not fixed and that conscious observation creates the reality observed. In effect, human consciousness exists in a field of statistical probabilities and, at some level, chooses which of the possibilities becomes the reality.

On the other side is the so-called E.P.R. Thesis—the name being obtained from the initials of the last names of the three theoretical physicists who proposed it: Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen. The E.P.R. Thesis rejects the notion that reality is somehow created by the observer, holding instead that reality, while infinite, is also fixed. The reason observation seems to have a causative effect on reality is because finite human observation can only see a portion of reality. Infinite reality contains things that, to our finite powers of observation, seem paradoxical (for example, light being both a wave and a particle, or electrons being in multiple orbits at the same time). So for us to observe reality at all means we must only observe a portion of its seemingly impossible possibilities. There is actual reality and there is observed reality, which is a cheap imitation of the real thing.

Think of it this way: if reality were a video game, actual reality would be the internal programming of the game. The program is real (just ask the programmer who created it). The program is fixed (until you get an upgrade). Yet its code contains multiple levels, and an effectively infinite number of permutations, the full range of which is known only by its creator. Observed reality is what the players see when they pick up the controllers and play the game. Each individual player must make successive choices between multiple mutually exclusive alternatives and can only negotiate a minute portion of the permutations available within the programming code. Different players make different choices


and so experience the game differently. But any programmer will tell you what complete reality of the video game resides in the code, not in the small portion of the code that comes into play in any single gaming session.

In a letter to Bohr, Einstein once summed up his objections to the Copenhagen Interpretation in these words, “God does not play dice with the universe.” To which Bohr replied, “Don’t tell God what to do, Albert.”

Which point of view is correct? There is no way of knowing. But in either case the impact on Foundationalism is devastating. Foundationalism promised that objective observation could reveal universal truths that the rational human mind could know without doubt. The discoveries of quantum physics have revealed that the premise on which the promise was made was not true. There is no such thing as an objective observer.

This insight has led scientists—as well as most philosophers and theologians—to abandon talk of discovering “universal truths.” In fact, scientists seldom use the word truth at all, preferring instead the term verisimilitude (lit., “a quality similar to the truth”) to describe the relative probability that their observations of a particular phenomenon accurately represent reality. In other words, to say something has “a high degree of verisimilitude” is to say it is a “close approximation of truth.” And, in what is equally relevant to our discussion of the Foundationalism paradigm, the larger the community of researchers investigating any phenomenon, the higher the degree of verisimilitude, because each investigator comes at the problem with slightly different perspective. These are concepts that the church would do well to appropriate.

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Patching the Cracks and Plugging the Holes

These inconvenient facts created problems for paradigm proponents on both sides of the liberal-conservative divide. If the paradigm has become your reality, what do you do when the cracks become too noticeable to ignore? If you can’t abandon the dominant paradigm (or maybe even recognize that you are in one) in favor of a more complete and encompassing one, what are your choices? There seem to be three:

1. Rally around the purist position with increasing defensiveness and increasingly elaborate rationalizations.

2. Adopt compromises that soften the position or attempt to prop up confidence in it by means other than facts.

3. Focus all of your attention on what seem to you to be the greater inconsistencies (and the “unlike-ablilities”) of the other side.

Today you will find all of these coping strategies employed to varying degrees by both sides. When faced with contradictions between scriptural texts, conservatives may defend their positions on the authority of Scripture by producing detailed rationalizations to harmonize varying accounts. Failing that, they may reluctantly allow that one or both of the texts are speaking metaphorically and claim that when Scripture is speaking metaphorically, it is inerrant in its metaphorical sense. When faced with clear differences in the spiritual experiences and goals of various faith traditions, liberals may defend the position of universality by insisting that such universality lies at a deeper or more symbolic level. Faced with scriptural texts containing accounts of miraculous events that rational minds find hard to swallow, they may reduce their feelings of doubt by employing text criticism to exclude those events from


consideration and by accepting as true only those accounts that can be attributed to natural causes.

What Remains When Foundational ism Fades?

The promise of the Enlightenment paradigm of Foundation-alism was the hope that unity could be achieved through certainty of the truth based on rational human observation. With the fall of Foundationalism, that promise was betrayed and that hope proved hollow. So what remains? What can we hold on to? If we cannot achieve unity through what we believe, what hope is there for unity?

Simply put, when certainty of truth fails as a foundation of Christian community, our hope for unity is in faith. But as we had to do with our concept of love, we must similarly move beyond the kind of faith we are used to. God is removing from minds our misplaced assumptions that our minds could know all the facts and that knowing these facts, even with certainty, could set us free. And in the place of these assumptions God is encouraging in us a faith that is beyond belief, grounded instead in a relationship of loving with the One who is the Truth.

In retrospect, it should have been clear from the start that Foundationalism could never have delivered on its promise. To assume that the finite human rationality can fully understand the infinite is both a scientific impossibility and a scriptural-theological error. Even if it could have delivered that certainty (and to the extent that we pretended that it could), it would have meant the death of faith, at least the kind of faith Christians profess to believe: “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). What is more, if we were to equate faith with the work of our minds, then that would eliminate

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the possibility of grace, making it no longer a free “gift of God,” but rather a something of our “own doing” (Ephesians 2:8).

No One Has a Lock on the Truth

In different ways, both sides of the theological divide based their approaches to faith on the assumption that human rationality can identify universal principles and eliminate doubt. If that presumption turns out to be presumptuous, it hardly matters how you go about trying to achieve those goals. Whether you seek ultimate truth externally (through the propositions of Scriptures you presume to be inerrant) or internally (through the deep spiritual experiences you presume to be universal), whatever you end up with HAS to be a little wrong. The best we can humanly hope to achieve is verisimilitude (a close approximation of the truth).

If we have to settle for verisimilitude, then we need to learn how to increase it. Science has shown us that the most effective way is to triangulate in on the truth by increasing the number of observers, so that each brings a different angle of observation and their biases cancel each other out. If we in the church accept this approach, then we will have to admit that we need those people who have different theological points of view from our own. When we engage each other’s differences with open minds, we become better and better at triangulating in on a closer and closer approximation of what truths there are to be known.

Our friends in the Jewish tradition have always understood this principle of verisimilitude and long ago developed a way of studying the Scriptures that brought together many points of view to enhance their biblical understanding. This method, called Midrash, assumes that by placing texts against texts and interpretations against interpretations, without assuming that


one must be right and the others wrong, we develop broader, deeper, and clearer understanding of the fullness of what God is communicating to us through the Scriptures (but of which none of us fully receive, hear, or comprehend).36

It’s time we stopped trying to build the unity of the church on a foundation of what WE BELIEVE, and instead started assuming our unity because of our RELATIONSHIP with the one we believe in—or more importantly because of the one who loves and believes in us. After all, Jesus did not say, The doctrines I will teach you are the way, the truth, and the life. What he said was that HE was the Way, the Truth, and the Life (cf. John 14:6). If unity cannot be achieved based on WHAT we believe, the only thing left is WHO we believe in.

It’s very important what we believe. God is the source of all truth, and we should bend our minds toward understanding that truth and forming our lives around it. But since we now know all of us must be a little wrong (though we don’t know exactly where), we should both seek—and speak—the truth with humility and with a mind that is at least a little open to what truth “the other” might help us to find. Whatever truth we do know—to the extent that we truly comprehend it—we understand only through the grace of God. So we should “speak the truth in love,” (Ephesians 4:15a) with “all humility and gentleness” (Ephesians 4:2).

● For no one can lay any foundationother than the one that has been laid;that foundation is Jesus Christ.

Paul Called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus(1 Corinthians 3:11)



Exodus 33:18–23Moses said, “Show me your glory, I pray.” And [God] said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, ‘The Lord,’ ’’ [Heb. YHVH (with no vowel points, making it unpronounceable)]. . . . “But,” he said, “you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live. . . . See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.”

God tells Moses his name, which is not humanly pronounce-able, and allows Moses to see only a small part of God’s glory, because no human being can see God’s “face” and live. To what extent can finite human reason comprehend ultimate reality? How confident can we be in our certainties about God?

John 14:5–6Thomas said to [Jesus], “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the


way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. . . .”

What does it mean for a person to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life? How do your answers to this question inform and influence the way you understand truth? The way you live out your faith? The way you relate to Christ?

Matthew 18:20Jesus said, “For where two or three are gath-ered in my name, I am there among them.”

What is the significance of Jesus promising to be present AMONG two or more gathered in his name, as opposed to being present WITHIN an individual believer?


1 In what areas of your spiritual life do you feel the need for cer-tainty? How does that need for certainty express itself? When deciding what is true, to what do you tend to give the most weight: Scripture, tradition, reason, prayer, other?

2 How does your need for certainty interfere with your faith?

3 Given that the best we can hope for is verisimilitude (a close approx-imation of truth), how might interacting with someone whose point of view is different from ours help us to gain a more complete under-standing of reality?

C H A P T E R 4

Hanging by a Thread:Christianity as Religion

re·li·gion [ri-lij-uh n] –noun 1. a set of beliefs concerning

the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, esp.

when considered as the creation of a superhuman

agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and

ritual observances, and often containing a moral code

governing the conduct of human affairs. 2. a specific

fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed

upon by a number of persons or sects: the Christian religion;

the Buddhist religion. 3. the body of persons adhering to

a particular set of beliefs and practices: a world council of

religions.37

So far we have examined two of the three paradigms that I claimed were part of the paradigm shifts that we’re currently experiencing. We have looked at Christendom and Foundationalism. What’s next?

While it may seem odd to define the Christian religion as a paradigm, it does fit all the requirements. Remember the definition of paradigm? “A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them.” Is it not strikingly similar to the definition of religion?

Most people think of a religion primarily as a set of beliefs about God and the meanings of life and reality. Only secondarily

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is it a set of practices, rituals, devotional activities, and rules of life. We often use this set of beliefs and practices as a way to distinguish our religious group from another religious group. Similarly, over most of the church’s existence, Christian orthodoxy has been defined as subscribing to a broad set of beliefs and rejecting others (this despite the fact that the word “orthodoxy” literally means “right praise,” not “right beliefs”) and Christians have used the acceptance of those beliefs and practices as a way to separate those that belong from those who don’t. We have used this concept of orthodoxy not only externally—to distinguish ourselves from other religions—but also internally—to create distinctions between us.

But it wasn’t always this way. Christianity as we have come to know it, as an organized religion, didn’t exist at the time of its founder. In fact, it would be technically incorrect to call Jesus Christ the founder of Christianity, because as far as biblical scholarship can ascertain, Jesus neither started nor intended to start a new religion. Nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus say to his disciples, “Go forth and start a new religion and name it after me.” He was born a Jew. He grew up in a Jewish family. He taught as a rabbi. He was executed for being a Jewish king (even though he never claimed to be one). His body was collected by a sympathetic member of the Sanhedrin (the supreme court of Israel), who laid the body inside a Jewish tomb located in a Jewish burial site.

● Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets;I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.

Jesus of Nazareth (Matthew 5:17)

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Certainly he condemned the Jewish temple leaders—for not living up to the spirit of the laws God gave to the Jewish people. He argued against the Pharisees, but as one brought up in the Pharisaic tradition. He healed Gentiles as well as Jews, but he did not try to convert them to anything. He called people to be his followers; he called them to be his friends and learn about him, not to form a new religion (“learners” is the literal meaning of the word “disciples”).

The apostle Paul planted churches all over the Mediterranean, but never called any of them “Christian,” nor uttered the word “Christianity” in any of his letters. In fact, the first use of the term Christian (lit., “little Christs”) was as an insult to Gentile followers of Christ. Jewish followers were called “Nazarenes,” a similar insult (Acts 24:5). Most followers of Christ called themselves followers of “the Way” (Acts 9:2). Only later, in a bold reversal, did followers of Christ take on those derogatory terms as a point of pride, as many oppressed groups have done in modern times (e.g., the within-group use of the term “queer” by gays and lesbians, and the “n-word” by African-Americans).

By and large, the writers of the New Testament viewed religion as an irrelevant, obsolete category. Today the word “church” evokes images of organized religion, yet this was not inherent in its New Testament usage. Ecclesia, the Greek word translated as “church,” literally means “the called out ones.” Similarly, we think the word convert today as a proselyte (a person who has changed religions). Yet when the Paul described new believers, he did not use the Greek word for proselyte or words that carried that connotation. Rather, he employed several different words to describe new believers, the literal meanings of which were nonreligious terms generally used in agriculture: “first fruit” (Greek: aparche–Romans 16:5) or “newly planted seed” (Greek: neophuton–1 Timothy 3:6).

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The Primit ive Church: Rel ig ion or Movement?

The primitive church of the first century was anything but organized. Not only was there no ordained leadership, there was no agreement on how churches should be governed. Individual churches and groupings of churches generally adopted leadership, organizational, and liturgical structures that reflected the cultures out of which they emerged. There was no Scripture other than the Hebrew Scriptures, and even these were in flux, as the canonization of Hebrew Scripture took place over several centuries and wouldn’t be complete until at least the end of the second century. Nor was there any tradition at this point except for those the early church members brought with them from their faiths of origin. What did exist was a diverse movement of people out of widely different religious and cultural backgrounds centered on the person of the risen Christ, and bound together and empowered by the Holy Spirit. In effect, they were all asking themselves the same question: “If Christ, then what?” What difference did the risen Christ make in their individual lives, their corporate lives, and their lives lived in the cultures in which they found themselves?

Despite all of this, somehow, somewhere along the way, someone turned the popular movement that followed him into an organized religion. In fact, some suggest that Christianity created the paradigm of religion as we know it today: that Christianity was the first faith to create a religion whose membership was based primarily on agreement to a specific set of beliefs.38

Unity through Security of Self -Preservat ion

In becoming a religion, the church leaders sought unity in the security of organizational self-preservation. Who could


blame them, really? Today it is almost a cliché to say that “the church is only one generation away from extinction,” but in the early days, this was a clear and present danger. For decades the church faced a growing tension between dynamism and stability, between fluidity and structure, between Jesus movement and Christian religion. It was a lot easier to exist as a dynamic, fluid, Spirit-driven movement, because they expected Jesus Christ was coming back in their lifetimes. When it became clear that they were in for a much longer wait, other concerns began to creep into their considerations. For example, how could they be sure that this movement survived their own passing? How could they preserve their own experience to pass down to their children’s children?

There was a wolf outside the door: the Roman Empire sought to destroy them. The Roman authorities believed that the church was subversive to the social order, an antireligious and anarchist movement. There were also threats from the inside from those who sought to change the nature of their experience into something unrecognizable. For example, adherents of Gnosticism (a first-century religious ideology based on the concept of hidden knowledge) wanted to change the movement into a kind of mystery religion of hidden truths withheld from the masses and known only to a select group of initiates.

Both of these external and internal threats that the nascent church faced tended to push it away from a more fluid movement, organized primarily around the relationship experienced with the risen Christ, and more toward structure and rules that constitute an organized religion. From the Empire’s point of view, the more the church became organized and predictable, the less alien and threatening it appeared, providing, of course, that it did not set itself up in opposition to the Empire. Thus, the more the church moved in this direction, the less persecution it was likely to face.

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The internal threats were more subtle, but no less serious. The kind of closed and secretive religious structure the Gnostics sought to develop was rewarding for those initiated few who were “in the know,” but it would be very unlike the kind of open community of love the disciples had experienced in the risen Christ. The task of defining what the authentic (i.e., orthodox) experience was and was not also pushed the movement in the direction of religion.

Others can trace the transition of the church from movement to religion better than I, but suffice it to say that most of the organizational institutions that developed in the church (e.g., ordained ministry, the canon of Scripture, and the authorized Tradition) were not demanded by Scripture, but evolved out of the emerging needs of the church.39

A few years ago, at a training session for clergy at my former seminary, we were asked to describe our personal theology of church and ordination. As those around the circle of my small group gave their answers, I listened and pondered, turning the question over in my head. When it was my turn, I said, “A mistake made holy.”

As far as I can tell, there is no clear biblical mandate for either the church or the ordained ministry. It may well be that Christ had something else in mind. However, I believe that God has blessed this invention of ours, sent the Holy Spirit to the church as Companion, and made the church the body of Christ.

We tend to make one of two mistakes when we think about the history of the church. Either we place our traditions on a pedestal of God-given perfection or near-perfection, or we tell ourselves that if we could only sweep aside the traditions and discover how the primitive church operated, we would find the God-given perfection we seek. However, if we explore without preconceptions the development of the early church, we find that neither of these assumptions is true.


The early leaders had powerfully experienced Christ’s divinity AND his undeniable humanity, but how would they express this paradox in a way that made sense, and could be passed on to the next generation? They had also experienced the unique power and personality of the Holy Spirit. This presented them with yet another holy paradox: how could the one God exist in three persons? They had to find the words to describe and pass this paradox on, too. But how could they even come close? As a seminary professor once told me, “If you can describe the Trinity in a way people can understand, you are probably speaking heresy.” Of course, he later explained, that didn’t mean we shouldn’t try to speak about it, just that we should practice a little humility when we do.

In this effort to describe the paradoxical nature of God, we find the church yet again leaning toward the test of unity—what all Christians everywhere believed—to define orthodoxy. In the end, according to most scholars, the earliest formulations of this kerygma (lit., key) boiled down to these basic statements: God in Christ fulfills the Scripture; God became incarnate in Jesus Christ; Christ was crucified; Christ was buried; Christ rose again; Christ was exalted to the right hand of God; God gave us the gift of the Holy Spirit; there will be a Day of Judgment; therefore, repent.40

If this begins to sound familiar, it is because these statements went on to become the basic building blocks of the Apostles’ Creed sometime in the second century, developed into the form of the Nicene Creed by the fourth century, and were further refined in the Chalcedonian Creed in the fifth century. If you read these later documents carefully, you will find they map out the outside boundaries of orthodoxy rather than specifically defining it.

The two core dogmas of our faith—the dual natures of Christ and the triune nature of God, neither of which is developed in Scripture—are primary examples:

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The dogma of the nature of Christ is that Jesus Christ is both fully human and fully God, without confusion, change, division, or separation: two natures (Greek: ousia) together in one person (Greek: prosopon) and one essence/underlying reality (Greek: hypostasis).

The dogma of the nature of God is that God is a complex unity: three distinct persons (or personalities) within one undivided Godhead.

These two dogmas are not “definitions.” Rather they each describe a paradoxical state of existence. This is important. The precise mechanism by which these states are achieved was left an undefined and indefinable mystery. Perhaps it was precisely because the church fathers knew they were dealing with an indefinable mystery that they decided to “explain” these things in terms of essential criteria rather than atomistic definitions.41 Perhaps this is why another of my seminary professors once offered this tongue-in-cheek operational definition of dogma: “This is as good as it’s gonna get, so let’s stop arguing about it.”

So, Where Is Rel ig ion Going?

Consider how often you’ve heard people say, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.” While it’s hard to say exactly when this idea first originated, it seems to have come into widespread use in the mid-twentieth century. With the advent of Alcoholics Anonymous, this statement was used as a way its members described the spirituality of their Twelve-Step recovery program. Since that time, its usage has grown steadily until now it is used ubiquitously.

Clearly, something is going on. Some people are beginning to turn away from the aspects of Christianity that they associate


with organized religion—officially sanctioned beliefs, approved practices, rigid traditions—seeing them as irrelevant, unhelpful, or even damaging to their spiritual journeys. Yet many of the same people are appropriating some of those same beliefs, practices, and traditions informally and outside the auspices of the organized church. It is not unusual to hear unchurched or dechurched people speaking about their belief in God’s grace, their relationship with Christ, or their practice of centering prayer, monastic chant, or walking the labyrinth. Despite turning away from the religion, to which their families belonged, they don’t see themselves as less spiritual. If anything, they see themselves as more so, because they appropriated these things freely.42

Another sign that the current paradigm of Christianity is in epoch-making flux is the growing Emerging Church Movement. From across the denominational and nondenominational spectrum, groups are forming that reject the current definition of what it means to be church. They focus much less on the specific set of beliefs and practices that defines them and focus more on what is common to Christians across the theological spectrum and on the strengths that various Christian traditions might have to offer.

This creative, cross-cutting way of exploring what it means to be church has given rise to the popular term “Generous Orthodoxy.” Interestingly, this was first coined by theologian Hans Frei in the 1980s to describe why he, an ordained Baptist minister, was drawn to the Anglican/Episcopal tradition that he eventually adopted. As Frei later put it:

Split as we are, not so much into denominations as into schools of thought, [what] we need [is] a kind of generous orthodoxy that would have in it an element of liberalism—a voice such as the Christian Century—and an element of evangelicalism—the

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voice of Christianity Today. I don’t know if there is a voice between those two, as a matter of fact. If there is, I would like to pursue it.”43

Ironically, while the term was originally coined by an Anglican in the 1980s, it was popularized by an evangelical in the late 1990s. Brian McLaren, then pastor of Cedar Ridge Church in Maryland, would use it to describe a way of approaching orthodoxy within evangelical Christianity that would become the Emerging Church Movement.

Only recently have mainline denominations such as the Episcopal Church begun to warm up to the Emerging Church and its vision. Meanwhile, the boundaries of denominations have begun to blur. Rents are appearing in the fabric of the church over schools of thought about the nature of church that cut across denominational boundaries.44

There is a dawning realization of the distinction between the organization that is called the church and the living organism that is the church. An organization that is called the church is a collection of individuals who cooperate within an agreed-upon structure to conduct business that achieves a common goal. The organism that is the church is a living thing with a vision built into it by God that constantly adapts its actions and its organization to bring that vision to life in each new generation. Organisms must have organization to survive, yet a particular organizational structure cannot ensure the survival of the organism. Ironically, to the extent the organization called the church insists upon having certainty of its own self-preservation, it drains away the vitality of the organism that is the church. As religion falters, we are forced to let go of the certainty of self-preservation, and in its place to turn to more essential things that unite us. Just as we were required to shift our understanding of the love that remains when Christendom fell


and the faith that remains when Foundationalism falls, so we must adapt our understanding of the hope that remains when religion ceases to make the most sense in our spiritual lives. What God is turning us toward is not a hope for a particular outcome, but a confidence that God will bring about the future that God wants.

Moses at the burning bush was faced with the paradox of the bush that burned yet was not consumed. He realized with God-given clarity that he was standing on holy ground. Like Moses, we must wrestle with a new reality that defies complete understanding, and yet strive to understand it as well as we can so that we might teach it, preach it, and pass it on. Faith in the twenty-first century must adopt a paradoxical stance of both confidence and humility.

The following are some thoughts about where this would leave us.

-standing.

Christ.

essentials.We begin to appreciate that the church’s creedal statements

of orthodoxy function more effectively as descriptions of the boundary criteria for our understanding of God than they do as any precise definition of God’s nature. In fact, we have learned that it was the attempts of early church leaders to be too precise in their descriptions of the nature of God that got them into trouble. We should therefore be humble in our use of orthodoxy—using it as a tool to unify rather than as a weapon to exclude people.

Indeed, what each of us thinks of as orthodoxy has at least as much to say about what we believe than what God holds to be essential truth. The more intuitively true something seems to us, the more likely we are to believe it to be universal truth. And it

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might be, but it could just as easily be merely a projection of our own comfortable assumptions. The longer our church has held something to be true, the more we are likely to believe that it must be eternal truth. And it might be, but it might simply be a belief that seemed reasonable at a certain time or that seemed to have universal application within a specific cultural situation.

Think of it this way: let’s draw three concentric circles—an inner bulls-eye enclosed by a slightly larger circle, which itself is enclosed by an even larger circle [see Figure 4.1].

In the innermost circle we’ll place those paradoxical statements of belief by which we attempt to express—nay, hint at—the ultimate nature of God, that is by nature ultimately inexpressible: things such as the triune nature of God and the fully human–fully divine nature of Jesus Christ. Let’s label this circle, “DOGMA.”

In the next circle we’ll place those beliefs we hold as logical consequents (that is, second order beliefs) of our Dogma: concepts such as grace and redemption, whether the Holy Spirit is sent to us by God the Father AND God the Son, or just God the Father. Let’s label this circle, “DOCTRINE.”

Finally, in the outermost circle we’ll place those things the church has taught about the implication of these beliefs for how we should live: things such as the church’s teachings on issues of evangelism, war and peace, and human sexuality. So that we can use it as an alliterative aid to memory, let’s label this last circle with the Greek word for “teaching,” that is “DIDACHE.”

FIGURE 4.1CURBING OUR DOGMA

You might disagree with my determinations about what things fall into which circle, but my point does not depend on our agreeing on every placement. My point is that when we are defining what makes a person an “orthodox” Christian, the farther we move away from the bulls-eye, the more division and disunity will result. So, what can keep it all together in the new future?

D I D A C H E

(Teaching & Tradit ion)

D O C T R I N E

(The Creeds)

D O G M A

(Paradox Core Doctr ines)

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The Core of Or thodoxy Is Paradox-y

We would do well to remember that the core doctrines of our faith are ultimately indefinable paradoxes. What is a paradox? Consider the dictionary definition. . . .

par·a·dox [par-uh-doks] –noun 1. a statement or

proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in

reality expresses a possible truth. 2. a self-contradictory

and false proposition. 3. any person, thing, or situation

exhibiting an apparently contradictory nature. 4. an

opinion or statement contrary to commonly accepted

opinion.45

We are using the term in the sense of both the first definition (“a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory . . . but expresses . . . truth”) and the fourth (“an opinion or statement contrary to commonly accepted opinion”). But, just as important, we are also using it in the third sense (“any person . . . exhibiting an apparently contradictory nature”) of Jesus Christ, who by his very nature is both human and God, both finite and infinite. There is no getting around the fact that the core of any Christian orthodoxy is Jesus Christ. Orthodoxy—at the CORE—is paradoxical. This being the case, we would do better to contemplate and explore together the mysterious paradoxes that lie at the heart of our faith, and to try to live as though we truly believe them, rather than use them to sort people into “US” and “THEM.”

The early church’s view was much like an ancient Jewish saying: “we do not seek to understand God so we might follow God, but rather we follow that we might understand.” The early church’s understandings of God were strongly shaped by their


worship of the risen Christ, their seeking and following of Christ’s call, and their serving the world in Christ’s name.

Somehow, the early church was extremely diverse in many ways yet very committed to its unity. An important criterion in determining what was normative for the church was what held it together, rather than what divided it. We should pay close attention to whether our attempts to define what is normative for the church produce unity or schism. We should be wary of elevating to importance things that produce the latter. Unity, not uniformity, should be the test of orthodoxy.

Albert Einstein is commonly thought to have suggested the following functional definition of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”46 If so, then the reverse is also true: the first step in returning to sanity is to stop doing what no longer works. From the gradual dissolution of the above paradigms we take two important lessons about what no longer works:

Conser-vative Christianity and liberal Christianity are modern creations, deeply rooted in the paradigm of Foundation-alism. Like two punch-drunk boxers locked in a clinch after fourteen rounds, the only reason either remains standing is the other’s embrace. It’s time to end the fight.

The old paradigms of Christian unity share an assumption that uniformity is a prerequisite of unity. While the world certainly operates on this basis, when it comes to the church (with apologies to George Gershwin), “it ain’t necessarily so.” If anything, the more the church has strived for uniformity, the more it has splintered. What will it take to put unity in Christian community? When we have sifted through the rubble of

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the old paradigms, what will remain standing that we can rely on as our source of unity?

Take away power and control as the binding force of Christian community, and we are left with love: the love of Christ experienced in common worship and fellowship.

Take away certainty as the foundation of Christian community, and we are left with faith: faith in the incarnate person of Jesus Christ.

Take away the security of organization as the primary preservation principle of Christian community, and we are left with hope: the hope of an organic, spiritual community that is yet to emerge.

Faith, hope, and love . . . sound familiar? Christians have long seen the wisdom of ordering their individual and interpersonal lives by these three words from the apostle Paul (see 1 Corinthians. 13:13). The more the church breaks free from the grip of these old ways of viewing the world, the freer the church will be to live into these words in its corporate life.

● B i b l i c a l R e f l e c t i o n


Matthew 5:17–18“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.”

If Jesus never intended to start a new religion, what does it mean to follow Jesus Christ?

Luke 9:49–50John answered, “Master, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he does not follow with us.” But Jesus said to him, “Do not stop him; for whoever is not against you is for you.”

What are the implications of this text (and others like it) for defining Christianity?

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1 Corinthians 13:13And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

In what ways do faith, hope, and love order your life as an individual believer? How would your church be different if it ordered its life around these three attitudes/qualities?


1 In what ways is the structure of your church more like an organi-zation? In what ways is it more like an organism? In what ways can the structure be either a strength or a potential weakness?

2 Write on ten sticky notes the ten most important beliefs of your faith. Now stick them to one of three sheets of newsprint labeled Dogma (the church’s core, mostly paradoxical beliefs), Doctrine (the church’s creeds), and Didache (the church’s traditions and teaching).

3 Discuss why you placed your sticky notes where you did. Attempt to come to a consensus about the placements. Discuss the implica-tions for yourselves, your congregation, and your denomination.

C H A P T E R 5

O God, Our Help in Ages Past:

Christianities That Might Have Been

This chapter is entitled “Christianities That Might Have Been” because in it we will be exploring three unique expressions of Christianity that once flourished but no longer exist. These are:

-ments of the first century through the fourth century.

the fourth century.

through the eighth century.I call these “movements” because they tended to be areligious

or transreligious in nature. They did not define themselves as distinct denominations. They had little interest in “converting” people from membership in other religious groups to their own. Their focus was on knowing, following, and sharing the love of the person of Jesus Christ.

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There’s an organic connection between these movements. The Jewish Christian and Gentile Christian movements were not only aware of each other, but interacted with and supported each other—like two branches of a single tree. Two centuries later, Martin of Tours’s radical monastic communities would draw much of their inspiration from these first-century communities. Celtic Christians drew inspiration from them as well. There are other movements worthy of study as examples of what might have been in the history of the church, but this chapter is not intended as a comprehensive history, but rather is an offering of a few historical vignettes, in the hope that we might draw inspiration from them. Above all, I love these three examples for the ways that they sparked massive expansions of faith in Christ. They spread the love of Christ like it was an infectious agent.

I believe that these Christianities that might have been can offer us some important insights to identify the outlines of what the new paradigm of church might be. If we can understand how they maintained unity in the midst of their diversity, and how they sustained the vitality of community that seemed to attract people into their body of believers, then maybe we can apply those understandings to the task of being church in our own day. Not to imitate them—which would be impossible because of the many differences between them—but to learn from them.

Peter, Paul, and James and Fel lowships of Grace

Whatever else you might say about the primitive church, monolithic it was not. Just as there were “many Judaisms” in the first century, it would be accurate to say that there were “many Christianities” as well.47 In the earliest church, as various national, cultural, and religious groups came face-to-face with Jesus

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Christ through the spread of the gospel, each was transformed. Transformed, not obliterated. The forms of Christian practice that sprung from these intersections with Christ maintained many of the characteristics of the spiritual practices of the groups from which they sprung.48 Those, such as the apostle Paul, who came out of the Pharisaic movement retained many of their spiritual practices and ways of thought. Paul’s biblical interpretation had a distinctly Midrashic character.49 He never renounced his Judaism, and in almost every town he visited, he worshiped in the synagogue as well as with the Christian assembly there.

Early Christianity followed this same pattern of diversity as it spread among the Gentiles. For example, Paul’s letters to the churches in Galatia, Ephesus, and Rome show many differences in style and substance that could well be attributed to their pre-Christian cultural and religious differences. It would not be until the time of Constantine that this diversity of expression began to be strongly suppressed in favor of uniformity. Even then, Christian diversity could be found springing up on the fringes of the Empire, among the converted barbarians in Gaul and Celtic Britain.

● Christianity started out in Palestine as a fellowship;it moved to Greece and became a philosophy;it moved to Italy and became an institution;it moved to Europe and became a culture;it came to America and became an enterprise.50

Sam Pascoe American clergyman and scholar

Ironically, the contemporary institutional church seemed to view these movements’ out-of-control spreading of the gospel and their classless diversity as a threat. In each case, the institution


sought to reign in the movement, suppressing both its diversity and independence.

Suppression took many forms. The various communities that made up the Jewish part of the first-century Jesus movement were branded as heretical and were excommunicated from the larger church. The Pauline congregations that made up the Gentile part of the movement were eventually absorbed into the emerging organized church. And while Paul’s radical notion of salvation through God’s grace alone became officially acknowledged as doctrine, in practice the church tended more toward canonical legalism.51

While the Jewish Christian and Gentile Christian movements of the primitive church might seem very different on the outside, on the inside they shared much in common. Both saw themselves as parts of a movement centered on the person of Jesus Christ. At its beginning the church was a Jewish Christian phenomenon: all of its members were Jews. The controversy dealt with by the first church council at Jerusalem was whether a person could become a follower of Jesus without first effectively converting to Judaism (i.e., without observing the ceremonial law). This indicates that the majority opinion in the earliest church was that Jewish Christianity was the norm and an exception was being made for Gentile Christians. The apostles were generally supportive of Jewish Christianity, as they were themselves Jewish Christians. Jewish Christianity was the conservative practice in the earliest church. Paul’s idea—that the Gentiles not be required to observe the ceremonial law—was a liberal, if not radical, concept. However, the apostles evidently found Paul’s arguments persuasive and agreed that the requirements of the law would not be laid upon Gentile Christians (see Acts 15:4–30). The Jerusalem Decree represented a compromise that went deeper than merely dividing up the evangelistic work between Paul and

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the “pillar apostles.” The agreement not only committed the Jewish Christian church in Jerusalem to respect Paul’s law-free mission to the Gentiles, it also committed Paul and his Gentile churches to respect the right of the Jewish Christian church to observe the ceremonial law.52

THE NAZARENE JEWISH CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT

Because of its eventual suppression by the institutional church and the destruction of its documents, our knowledge of the Jewish Christianity is limited. But even through the documents of its persecutors, we can piece together enough evidence for some useful conclusions. We know that the Jewish Christian church had its birth in Jerusalem on the day of the Jewish feast of Shavuot (that was also known as Pentecost), within months of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, somewhere between 26 and 36 CE. We know that among its founders and early leaders were Peter and James, the brother of Jesus. We know that it was diverse, including Jews from a wide variety of religious origins (from Pharisees to Sadducees to Essenes to proselytes), socioeconomic levels (from fishermen to members of the Sanhedrin), and national origins (from Judea to Egypt, and from Mesopotamia to Rome).

We know that Jewish Christianity was a thriving, fast-growing faith movement—adding over 3,000 people on its first day alone (see Acts 2:1–41)—in large part because it adapted well to the diversity within Judaism at the time. These early Christians were active in sharing the gospel with their Jewish brethren in the synagogues, though they seemed more interested in telling the story of Christ and introducing people to Christ than in trying to convert them in the sense of changing religions. They seemed just as happy worshiping in synagogues with non-Christian Jews as they did in worshiping in Christian-only groups. They also


appeared open and hospitable to non-Christian Jews and even to Gentiles participating in their community life.

We also now know that their later excommunication by the larger church notwithstanding, the Nazarene movement was as orthodox in its beliefs as it was possible to be in that time. The early Christians accepted the entirety of the Scriptures, both the Old and New Testaments, though they did appear to be partial to the Gospel of Matthew, because of its strong allusions to the Hebrew Scriptures. They acknowledged that God was the Creator of all things and that Jesus was the Son of God. They believed in the Holy Spirit. They believed in the resurrection of the dead, as well as Jesus’ death and resurrection. Their focus was on the life of Jesus Christ and on living and worshiping like him, that is, in a Jewish manner. So while they did follow the Jewish ceremonial law, they did not believe it was essential for salvation. Rather, their motivation for following the law was to be imitators of Christ.

They recognized the authority of the apostle Paul and his mission to the Gentiles, as well as the authority of the greater church, of which they considered themselves a part.

● And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another.

The Letter to the Hebrews (10:24–25)

We know that the Nazarene community continued to grow rapidly until the Roman siege of Jerusalem, around 70 CE, at which time the community escaped en mass to an area of Pella near the Decapolis, east of the Sea of Galilee, having been warned by a revelation of Jesus (see Luke 21:20–22). Unfortunately, their

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departure from the Jerusalem area severely limited their contact with the larger church. By the time the Nazarene community attempted to return to the Jerusalem area around 129 CE, they found there a mostly Gentile Christian community that was unfamiliar and somewhat suspicious of Jewish Christian practices. After several years of attempting to integrate with the Gentile Christian community there, the Nazarenes abandoned Jerusalem and resettled in Pella for good. Continued isolation from the Gentile Christian community, along with rising levels of anti-Semitism in the larger church, led to increasing misunderstanding of Jewish Christian practices, especially their practice of observing Easter on the same day as the Jewish Passover. This eventually led to their excommunication at the Council of Nicaea at the insistence of the Emperor Constantine, who stated that it was the church’s duty to have “nothing in common with the murderers of our Lord . . . nothing in common with the Jews.”53 Officially branded as heretics and cut off from the rest of the church, the Nazarene movement died out by the end of the fourth century.54

THE PAULINE GENTILE CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT

Unlike the Nazarenes, the problem we have with the Pauline Gentile Christian movement is not that we know too little, but that we think we know more than we do. The name of the apostle Paul is ubiquitous in Christianity. At the time of the birth of the church on that first Pentecost, Paul (then known as Saul) was a young man, a Roman citizen born in Tarsus, a Jew educated in the religious traditions of the Pharisees. Offended by this upstart movement that had sprung up around this failed messiah, Jesus of Nazareth (who himself had likely grown up within the same Pharisaic tradition), Paul began his adult years as an avid opponent of the Nazarene Jewish Christian movement. But as a


result of some mysterious revelation by Jesus in the wilderness, he was transformed from one of its chief antagonists into its foremost apostle. In an ironic twist, this former Pharisee was chosen by God to bring Christ to the Gentile citizens of the Roman Empire. Soon after he returned from his “Road to Damascus” experience, he petitioned and won approval from the leadership of the nascent—and then almost entirely Jewish Christian—church in Jerusalem to allow Gentiles to become followers of Christ without first converting to Judaism, and with this approval was born his Gentile Christian movement. Over the next decade or so, Paul planted and nurtured a dozen or more vibrant and rapidly growing church communities around the predominantly Gentile, northern Mediterranean. These communities would continue to grow and expand after his death until eventually, the Gentiles would far surpass in numbers the Jewish Christians in the church.

Over the two to three decades of Paul’s ministry, as an integral part of the process of planting and guiding Gentile Christian communities, he carried out an intense correspondence with them, most of which was helping them to figure out what it meant to be communities centered on Christ. A half-dozen to a dozen of these letters (depending on whose opinion you ask) would become canonized as Holy Scripture—what we now call the New Testament. Within these letters he set forth the words of institution for Holy Communion—“This is my body that is [broken] for you. . . . This cup is the new covenant in my blood. . . . ” (1 Corinthians 11:23–26)—and he articulated the theological principle of salvation through faith in God’s grace extended to us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ—not to mention offering much practical advice about the communal life of faith. I think it is ironic that many view Paul as the founder of Christianity as we know it today. Because while his concept of radical grace occupies a revered

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place—a pedestal at the very center of Christian doctrine—it has seldom been taken down from its pedestal and put into practice in the church’s communal life. So rather than seeing Paul as the founder of the Christian religion, I think of him as a catalyst for a Christianity that might have been, had the church not misunderstood and misapplied his teachings.

● And regard the patience of our Lord as salvation.So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him,speaking of this as he does in all his letters.There are some things in them hard to understand,which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own distruction,as they do the other scriptures.

Peter An apostle of our Lord Jesus Christ(2 Peter 3:15–16)

Much of what we think we know about Paul doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. As one of my seminary professors once put it, “Paul got a bad rap.” For example, Paul is often perceived as being antagonistic toward Judaism and toward followers of Christ who observed Jewish ceremonial law. But a closer look at his writings shows that his attitude toward Judaism and Jewish Christianity was more open than popularly believed. He never described himself as a convert from Judaism or an ex-Jew, nor does he use the language of conversion to describe his experience of coming to faith (see Galatians 1:15ff.). Instead, he seems to regard the issue of conversion (in the sense of changing religions) as irrelevant, seeing faith in Christ as the spiritual equivalent of the faith of Abraham, rather than a religion of Christianity as a successor to the religion of Judaism (see Romans 4:1ff.).55 He was willing to


observe the ceremonial law in his dealings with Jews in order to win them to Christ (see 1 Corinthians 9:19ff.). And he was willing to require that Gentile converts observe basic Jewish ethics (see Acts 15:5–21).56 He did not object to Jewish Christians following the ceremonial law, as long as they did not make the case that it was necessary for salvation, as did the so-called “Judaizers.”57 With reference to Judaism as a whole, it is clear from Paul’s letter to the Romans that he does not believe that his Jewish brothers and sisters who have not accepted Jesus as the Messiah are lost to God. After much agonized wrestling with the issue, he realizes that he must learn to live with the paradox that while the name of Jesus is the only name by which people are saved, God’s promises of salvation to the Jewish people cannot be broken. So he resolved to continue to try to persuade them, but to leave their ultimate fate to God (see Romans 9–11).

Paul is generally viewed as being authoritarian in his oversight of the churches he founded, handing out and rigidly enforcing rules for individual and community conduct. Yet a closer reading of his letters reveals a more flexible leadership style: advice and counsel about the implications of the love of Christ and the grace of God as it applies to the circumstances of each community. For example, in Ephesians he appears to be encouraging the community to strive for a greater and more charismatic experience of the Holy Spirit. But in his letters to the Corinthians, he seems to try to turn the thermostat down on such experiences. In his first letter to the Corinthian church, he advises the community there to put a person outside the community for sexual immorality, but in the second letter he advises them that they have taken this corrective measure too far, and that now that he has repented they should welcome him back. Space does not allow an exhaustive review, but such examples abound in Paul’s letters, if you don’t come at them with the preconception that Paul is trying to enforce rigid rules.

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In every case, in every community, he seems to ask the question, “If Christ, then what?” In other words, if the love of Christ and the grace of God are true and transformative, then how ought this to be acted out in the life of this community and in the situation at hand. Paul is not the authoritarian rule-giver we often believe him to be. He was not about uniformity, but rather seemed to revel in raucous diversity within his communities as obvious evidence that it could only be the Holy Spirit making such community happen. In fact, the one thing absolutely consistent across all of Paul’s correspondence was his desire that he, and his communities, “know nothing . . . except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2).

We know that the communities Paul founded—and their humble, radical, grace-centered approach to community in Christ—survived Paul’s death at the hands at the Romans. What we don’t know is for how long. We know that the more organized the church became, the less this approach was followed. As early as the second century—as evidenced by the three so-called Pastoral Epistles—we begin to see a much greater emphasis on uniformity and a more authoritarian approach to life in Christian community. This emphasis and approach would continue to expand in the fourth century as the church began what would ultimately become a near-merger with the Empire, and as more and more canon law developed over time. While the church would continue to acknowledge the concept of radical grace as foundational to the way of Christ, with Paul as its greatest apostle, it would increasingly operate as though Christian community was based on obedience to church law.58


Mart in of Tours and Servant Leadership

Now, let’s fast-forward a few centuries and pause to consider the second movement of a Christianity that might have been. Martin of Tours is remembered in the church as bishop, confessor, and theologian. Born around 316 CE, in what is now known as the Balkans, he lived to the ripe old age of eighty-five and died at the turn of the fifth century. The majority of what we know about Martin and his movement comes from one source, The Life of St. Martin, written by his contemporary and admirer, Sepulpitus Severus. Independent of this biography, we also know that his work among the people of the region of Gaul resulted in one of the most rapid expansions of the church since its birth—so prolific that some have called it “The Great Barbarian Conversion.”59

It is said that Martin became interested in Christianity in his early teens, attending meetings, asking questions, and eventually inquiring about baptism. His interests in and activities among the still-persecuted Christians caused his parents—who practiced the worship of the Roman pantheon—much embarrassment. It especially rankled Martin’s father, who was a high-ranking military officer and expected Martin to follow in his footsteps. Apparently the Roman military agreed and used their legal authority to involuntarily enroll the sons of Roman officers into the officer corps upon the elder’s retirement or death to force Martin into military service. So in his late teens, with great reservations, he bowed to the pressure and joined up.

Martin was not your typical Roman officer. He was reticent to wield his sword, cared for the poorer and lower class foot soldiers, and was always attentive to the beggars who followed the army from camp to camp. It is said that on one occasion, on the way into camp he attempted to give his officer’s cloak to a freezing beggar at the gates. When told by his superior that without a cloak he

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would be considered “out of uniform,” he cut his cloak in two and gave one-half to the beggar. Eventually, Martin came to believe he could serve in the military no longer, in large part because he strongly wished to be baptized and it was illegal for Christians to serve in the Roman military.

The story of how Martin bargained with the Emperor to release him from military service is remarkable. When the Emperor refused to release him, fearing that would set a bad example, Martin proposed a deal. The Emperor’s army was currently engaged with a barbarian army on the outskirts of Rome. Martin would walk out to face the enemy army alone, without armor or sword, carrying only a cross. If he was killed, the matter was settled in the Emperor’s favor, but if he came back alive, the Emperor would allow him to retire. The Emperor thought it a safe bet, but he was wrong. Not only did the barbarians allow him to live, but his faith struck such fear into them that later the same day, they sued for peace. Martin retired and was baptized by Bishop Hilary of Poitiers, who became his mentor.

Hilary saw such promise in Martin that he soon wanted to ordain him. At first Martin declined, but eventually he agreed to be ordained to the lowest possible position in the church at the time: that of exorcist. Then he took up a semihermitic lifestyle in a cave by a stream outside the nearby city of Tours. People came to him from far and wide to seek release from their demons. He did not actively seek to convert anyone, yet people were drawn to him by his strong faith, simple lifestyle, and his confidence in the power of the Holy Spirit. Before long, a growing community of hermits and holy men gathered around his hermitage, and it eventually became a monastery. When the current Bishop of Tours died, the people of Tours turned to Martin, and asked him to consent to become their bishop. He declined. Eventually, the people resorted to a subterfuge, asking him to come into town


to pray for the healing of a sick person. As he entered the town, they grabbed him and carried him into the cathedral, and refused to let him out unless he consented. Finally, he agreed, on two conditions: (1) when not required at the cathedral, he would live a simple life at his monastery, and (2) when he was required at the cathedral, he would not sit enthroned on the bishop’s seat, but on a simple wooden stool.

As bishop, he established several dozens of churches across the part of Gaul that is now central France. He led as a servant. He visited all of his congregations annually, always traveling on foot or by donkey. Many people sought him out for training for the priesthood, and he was well loved among the priests that served under him, not to mention the people his priests led.

On the other hand, he was not very popular among the ecclesiastical and secular powers. His humble lifestyle and egalitarian style leadership aroused the ire of those bishops who chose a more elevated lifestyle and practiced a more authoritarian leadership. In addition, he frequently intervened on behalf of those whom the ecclesiastical authorities were investigating for heresy, and strongly opposed the execution of those convicted of heresy.

The vibrant movement started by Martin would survive his death, but only for a few generations. The hierarchy of the church tolerated Martin and his movement while he was alive because of his popularity with the people and priests who followed him. But once he died, they appointed in Martin’s place bishops less likely to rock the boat of ecclesiastical and secular authority. Then they began a waiting game. As the priests trained and ordained by Martin retired or died, they were replaced with priests more to their liking. Eventually, the vibrant, egalitarian communities established by Martin were reabsorbed into the more familiar structure of authority.

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Of course, the monastic communities founded by Martin were not the first monastic communities, nor the last. Martin drew heavily on the teachings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers in founding his own orders.60 Nor were Martin’s communities the only monastic movement of the Dark Ages—but one of many vibrant variations on the monastic theme. Other movements, such as the Benedictines and the Franciscans, were engaged in transformational community life throughout the continent as well. There were a variety of movements over the course of a millennium that brought renewed vigor and practice to Christians and Christian faith. As many have said before me, it was primarily monasticism that kept the faith alive in what we call the Middle Ages. What would today’s faith look like in terms of how we handle issues of authority if the model of St. Martin had become the norm rather than the exception?

Celt ic Christ ians and Radical Hospital i ty

This brings us to the third of these three movements. It is impossible to give a precise date of origin or to name a founder for what we call Celtic Christianity, since both date and origin are shrouded by the mists of time. But we can make some educated guesses.

Most likely the followers of Christ first visited the British Isles not long after the death of Christ and the missionary journeys of the apostle Paul. Some scholars believe that the church Paul founded in Galatia was composed largely of members of one of the many Celtic tribal groups that moved across the Near East and Europe. The Romans called them the Gauls, from which comes the term Gallic (and also Galacia). The scholars propose that these Christianized Celts from the area around Galatia migrated along


the trade routes first to Gaul in southern France, then to the area now known as Galicia in Spain, and then on to the Celtic areas of Britain: Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.

But we can’t really speak of a Celtic Christian “movement” until the third century, when Celtic members of Martin of Tours’s communities in Gaul brought word of his movement to their cousins in the Isles. They were inspired by the egalitarian and communal nature of his movement. Even more, they were inspired by the spiritual power inherent in it. Martin and his followers dispensed with much of the ancillary authority structures, and doctrines that supported these institutions, and focused on living as though the core supernatural mysteries of the spiritual body of Christ were true (there is a great difference between believing things and living as though they are true). The Celts had always been a hot-blooded and warlike people, but now they could don the “armor of God” and fight the greatest battles of all, against “the cosmic powers of . . . darkness” and “the spiritual forces of evil” (Ephesians 6:11–13).

So broad-based was this movement that it is impossible to name a single founder or leader at any point in time. The Celtic Christian movement generated a veritable “pantheon” of heroes, far too numerous to list here (a number of writers have tried however, and their works are well worth reading).61 A few notables come to mind: Patrick, who brought the faith to Ireland; Columba, who brought it to Scotland; David, who brought it to Wales; Aidan, who brought it to the Scottish Borders area on the east coast of England. There was much in common among the communities they founded.

Celtic monastic communities in-volved lay and clergy, nobility and common people. Many involved both men and women. Participants could take per-manent vows or temporary ones. The communities were

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not cloistered but open to the communities near where they were located. People from the local community par-ticipated in monastic community, and vice versa.

Celtic commu-nities were organized based on calling and gifts rather than hierarchy of position. For example, bishops were chosen because they were gifted in the raising up, training, and supporting of priests. Everyone in the community, includ-ing bishops, was under the guidance of an abbot or abbess. Interestingly, all of the mixed-sex monastic communities were headed by abbesses. These monastic overseers were nonauthoritarian—more like what we know as spiritual directors today. Most important in the Celtic monastic movement was one’s relationship with an “anam cara” or “soul friend,” a person with whom one partnered in order to receive (and give) unconditional truthful insight and unconditional love.

Celtic communities were focused on helping people “live as though they believed.”

Unlike the evangelistic approach of the Roman Church (start by sharing doctrine and make assent to that doctrine the door to full fellowship), the Celtic movement switched the order. Full fellowship was offered from the very beginning. This pulled their visitors deep into the life and love of the community. Sooner or later these visitors would realize that they were no longer visitors but had become a part of the worshiping com-munity and by experience had come to believe in the love of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit. Asking to be baptized became the way of “making it official,” as it were.


● Hail guest, we ask not what thou art;If friend, we greet thee, hand and heart;If stranger, such no longer be;If foe, our love shall conquer thee.

An ancient Celtic welcome (found over the door of an old inn in Wales)

Celtic Christians had much more success in bringing Christian faith to Ireland than did the official Roman evangelistic mission. The success of that effort, led by Augustine of Canterbury, was limited mainly to the more populous urban areas around the few major cities in the south of England—those that had been settled by the Romans. The vast majority of those who came to faith in the Isles did so through the lively but unauthorized efforts of the members of the more organic Celtic communities.

So, what happened to the movement? In the end, things came to a head with the official Roman delegation. Ostensibly, the arguments seemed to have been over tangential matters, such as the tonsure (Roman clergy shaved off the crown of their head on a horizontal plane, while Celtic clergy shaved theirs vertically by removing all of the hair in front), the dating of Easter (Celtic Christians preferred to celebrate Easter on the fourteenth of Nissan, like Jesus would have, while Rome insisted on separating the dating of Easter from the Jewish calendar), and the role of women in authority. But the underlying reasons seemed to be about control and authority. Celtic Christians were threatened with excommunication if they did not come into line. This conflict was finally settled at the Council of Whitby, where Celtics basically agreed to submit in all areas to Roman practices rather than split the church. Ironically, the “compromise” was negotiated by Hilda

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of Whitby, the abbess of the mixed-sex monastic community of the Celtic tradition that had hosted the Roman and Celtic Christian delegations. But the Celtic spirit was too strong to be entirely subsumed and lived on in the churches of the British Isles for centuries. I have noticed a wee bit of that spirit in my own Anglican/Episcopal tradition: especially in its love of mystery and paradox and in its appreciation for the unifying influence of common worship of the living God

Common Threads

So what are the common threads that connect these movements? What enabled and empowered these communities to be so diverse and yet so committed? What enabled them to spread the gospel so contagiously? What can they teach us about alternative ways of “being church”?

ORIENTATION TO CHRIST

One of the most important commonalities of the movements was their orientation to Christ. Their corporate lives and the individual lives of their members were focused on the person of Christ and the experience of relationship with person of Christ.

All of these movements, one way or another, asked the question, “If Christ, then what?” If Christ is real and the relationship offered by Christ is real, then what difference does that make in our individual and corporate lives? Yet each movement had its own unique way of asking that question. If I was so bold as to put words in their mouths, it might be something like this:

incarnation and his way of life among us are significant, how should we then live?”


grace of Christ is true, what effect should that have in our individual and corporate lives?”

Christ is true, how should it manifest itself among us?”

true, how will that love make itself known through us?”

ORIENTATION TO ORTHODOXY

The orientation of these movements toward orthodoxy was, in many ways, similar to their orientation toward Christ. Rather than making acceptance into the body of Christ dependent on adherence to a broad range of beliefs, they tended to be careful about what they raised to doctrinal significance. They tended to focus on a few core dogmas—those unverifiable yet quintessential mysteries of Christian faith: things such as the trinitarian nature of God, the human-divine natures of Christ, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in fallen human hearts.

● Orthodoxy—or right opinion—is, at best,but a very slender part of religion,if it can be allowed to be any part of it at all.Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions,yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers.There may be a right opinion of Godwithout either love or one right temper toward Him.Satan is a proof of this.62

John Wesley Anglican minister and Christian theologian, 1703–91

CHARACTERISTIC

Dates

Founder(s)

Favorite Evangelist

Inspiration

Orientation to Christ

Orientation toUnity & Diversity

Orientation to Orthodoxy

Orientation to Evangelism

Orientation to Scripture

Orientation to Religion

Orientation to Organization

Orientation to Culture

JEWISHCHRISTIANITY

30–400 CE

Peter, James

Matthew

Life of Christ

Christ-Centered(Imitation of Christ)

Agape Relationship (Over Doctrine)Struggled w/diversity but

understood as sign of Holy Spirit

Open to the marginal and the marginalized

Core Dogmas Living “As If”Love of Paradox & Mystery

NonproselytizingHospitalityLove changes hearts

Gospels firstStory over doctrineStory transforms

AreligiousTransreligious

Low HierarchyCall/Gift Centered

AculturalCulture-Adaptable

PAULINECHRISTIANITY

40–500 CE

Paul

Luke?

Vision of Christ

Christ-Centered(Grace of Christ)

Agape Relationship (Over Doctrine)Diversity tolerated as sign

of Holy Spirit Open to the marginal and

the marginalized


NonproselytizingHospitality Love changes hearts

Gospels firstStory over doctrine Story transforms

AreligiousTransreligious



T A B L E 5 . 1C H R I S T I A N I T I E S T H A T M I G H T H A V E

MARTINECHRISTIANITY

300–400 CE

Martin of Tours

Mark?

Desert Spirituality

Christ-Centered(Power of Christ)

Agape Relationship (Over Doctrine)Diversity tolerated as sign

of Holy Spirit Sought the marginal and

the marginalized




Intrareligious



CELTICCHRISTIANITY

300–700 CE

Unknown

John

Desert SpiritualityMartine Spirituality

Christ-Centered(Love of Christ)

Agape Relationship (Over Doctrine)Diversity celebrated as

sign of Holy Spirit Sought the marginal and

the marginalized




Intrareligious



B E E N : A C O M P A R I S O N

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These were not theological concepts to them, but were windows opening into a greater reality—one that they were unable to fully comprehend. They reveled in these profound paradoxes as evidence of that greater reality. They asked themselves what difference it would make if these things were true, and then they lived as if they were.

ORIENTATION TO UNITY AND DIVERSITY

The source of unity of these movements was not uniformity of doctrine or practice. Rather, they found unity in the love of Christ they experienced when they gathered for worship and fellowship, and their trust that this love could hold them together in community despite the many differences that should have torn their communities apart. The effects of this understanding of unity is aptly summed up in the apostle Paul’s assertion that in Christ, “[t]here is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). These communities experienced that Christ’s love was powerful enough to overcome the categories that naturally divide them. Even their adversaries had to admit that something unusual was at work among them, and that this unnatural diversity lent credence to their claims that in Christ God was doing something new among them.

This is not to say that such diversity was always easily or consistently practiced. Clearly, the earliest Jewish Christians struggled with the idea that one could become a follower of Christ without first becoming a Jew (see Acts 10:1–48). Yet it is equally clear that they came to understand that such diversity was not only permissible, but was a sign of the Holy Spirit at work (see Acts 15:1–35). Likewise, Paul’s earliest communities struggled with diversity of religious background, class, ethnicity, and gender


but similarly understood it to be a sign of the Holy Spirit at work (see 1 Corinthians 11:17–22). Nevertheless, by the time of Martin of Tours and the Celtic Christian movements, such diversity came to be the agreed-upon norm rather than merely understood or tolerated.

● And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love,may have power, together with all the saints,to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Paul Prisoner for Christ Jesus(Ephesians 3:17–19, NIV)

This isn’t to say that doctrine and practice were unimportant to these communities. On the contrary, they seemed to believe that it mattered a great deal what one believed and how that belief affected one’s life of faith and one’s real-world behavior. They appeared to argue about such things frequently and with fervor. It’s just that they recognized the potential divisiveness of doctrine and believed that the fact that they were brothers and sisters united by Christ’s love was a much more important consideration and a stronger binding force (see Ephesians 4:14–16).

ORIENTATION TO HIERARCHY

Rigid hierarchy was antithetical to these movements, in large part because it would hinder the fluid adaptability that was essential to their rapid growth and spread. They generally observed

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and respected the traditional orders of ministry—deacon, priest, and bishop—but they tended to view them functionally, rather that hierarchically. And they tended to select those who would hold those orders according to how God had gifted them for that particular role: those who lived to serve, they chose for deacons; those who had gifts of preaching, teaching, and pastoring, they chose as priests; and those who rejoiced in identifying, mentoring, and encouraging people into those leadership positions in the church they chose as bishops.

Paul, for example, considers himself an apostle because of the gifts and the calling given to him by his Lord, Jesus Christ. But he seldom, if ever, insisted upon special treatment according to his “rank.” Instead he provided for himself so that no one could claim any special attachment or privilege from him (see 1 Corinthians 1:11–14, 2:1–5, 9:1–15). Even when pleading for the freedom of a friend who was the slave of another friend, he refused to “pull rank” (see Philemon 1–25).

Similarly, among the Martine and Celtic Christian communities, there was role clarity without a hierarchy of power and control based on those roles. Martin agreed to the role of bishop, but not the trappings. There have been various moments in ecclesiastical history when other leaders did likewise—taking steps to separate themselves from the power, influence, and money of their offices—in order to focus specifically on the spiritual matters at hand. Some of these experiments failed (Pope Celestine V in the late thirteenth century, for example); and some of them succeeded (such as Peter Damian and Francis of Assisi). In the Celtic Christian communities, most bishops voluntarily placed themselves under the spiritual authority of an abbot or abbess.


ORIENTATION TO EVANGELISM

It may seem paradoxical that while these movements were primarily responsible for evangelizing much of the European continent and the British Isles, they were nonproselytizing in their approach to sharing the gospel. It sounds paradoxical to us, because we have attached our own cultural connotation to the term evangelism.

● Preach the Gospel at all times.When necessary, use words.63

Francis of Assisi Deacon, preacher, and founder of the Order of Friars Minor, 1181/1182–1226

While we tend to think of an evangelist as one who converts people to Christianity, the literal translation of the Greek word for evangelist is “a bringer of good news.” Meanwhile, the Greek word for proselytizing (“making converts to a different religion”) and proselyte (“a new convert to a religion”) are never used of followers of Christ in the New Testament. The two terms used by the Pauline Christians for new followers of Christ had nothing to do with being converted in the sense of changing religions, but rather literally “newly planted seeds” (Greek: neophuton—1 Timothy 3:6) or “first fruits” of a harvest (Greek: aparche—Romans 16:5). The Celtic Christians did not see themselves as making converts, at least not in the sense of changing religion or even in the sense of requiring agreement to a set of doctrines before admitting a person to the community. For example, St. Patrick was known to refer to “Jesus, my druid.” Rather than making proselytes, their main focus was on making new “anam cara” (heart friends). They loved Jesus, they loved the Good News, and they loved to

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tell—and live—the story. They loved to live the love. That was how they evangelized.

Conclusion

The reason these “Christianities that might have been” are worthy of our attention is not because they were perfect: They were no more perfect than the institutional church whose roots they shared. They had their biases. They made their fair share of mistakes. They fought amongst themselves (as brothers and sisters so often do). Yet they are helpful to our exploration.

These movements illustrate for us the tension in which the church has always existed: between maintaining the inspiration of its first love and organizing itself for long-term survival. At the very least, they can be for us a kind of cautionary tale. One way or another, all of these movements within the church ultimately lost their arguments with the institutional church about how to be church. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that none of them won. Like water against a mountain made of stone, it may be forced underground for a time—perhaps even for a very long time. But water always leaves it mark on stone, wearing it down, sometimes over millennia. It finds a way to force its way back to the surface through the smallest of openings. So in a very real way, we could say these movements are all springs from the same subterranean source, always there, ready to be tapped—ready for us to bring balance to the life of the church in time of need.

Equally as important is the possibility that studying them might help us to see our church paradigms for what they are: fallible human constructs that we have created to describe a divine reality. Recognizing our paradigms for the constructs they are is the first step toward breaking out of them. Studying these


movements can also begin to move us in the direction of what the new paradigm of church might be. Not that we should try to replicate any of these movements in our own day. That would be a mistake. Yet the pictures they offer us of other ways of being church can open our eyes and our minds and our hearts to the possibilities of a new way.



Philippians 3:10I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death.

Galatians 3:28There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

Galatians 5:6For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision* counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love.

Select one of the above three passages and answer this question: if this were the single most important and defining characteristic of Christian community, what difference would it make?

*The terms “circumcision” and “uncircumcision” refer not to physical characteristics but to two different approaches to Christian community.


1 One advantage of studying these movements is to open our eyes to the extent to which our present doctrines, theology, and practices are culturally conditioned. Using what you have learned from this chapter, identify one or more of your own church’s teachings or practices that seem to be a product of the culture in which it developed. Discuss.

2 What can we learn from these movements? What is the appropriate balance between the church as movement or organism and the church as institution/organization?

3 If relationship with Christ (that is, being loved by Christ) were the single most important aspect of Christian community, and all other aspects were secondary, how would Christian community be different?

P A R T I I

A Church for the Future

C H A P T E R 6

The Shape of Things to Come:

Promising Principles for a New Way

of Church

So, now comes the hard part.This will be a challenging journey for all of us, no matter

which “side” of the church we call home. My conservative friends will find this journey difficult, because they will have trouble laying down their need to defend God’s truth. My liberal friends will find this journey difficult, because they believe their “progressive” ideas are the new paradigm. To my conservative friends I say, if it’s God’s truth, you don’t need to defend it, because nothing can prevail against it. To my liberal friends I say, don’t get cocky, because a little self-critical introspection may reveal that what you call new paradigm is just old paradigm with a progressive twist. My conservative friends may be uncomfortable at the table, because they tend to want their truths served up literally, while my liberal friends may be just as uncomfortable, because they prefer to take their truths metaphorically. But much of what we

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will find on our menu as we explore the prospective paradigm will contain ingredients that are both literal and metaphorical at the same time.

We will have to become more comfortable with the discomfort of paradox—engaging the tension between truths that to us seem irreconcilable—while recognizing that to God, reconciling the irreconcilable is all in a day’s work (if that long). This is why I have taken to calling our potential new paradigm “Paradoxy.”

My own congregation has been exploring some of these nascent concepts: a way of Christian community based on faith, hope, and love. From the beginning we have felt called to be a place in which people from across the theological spectrum could find a common ground upon which they could firmly stand as a community. Indeed, we have in our community members who, in terms of their theology, run the gamut from those who gamely call themselves near-fundamentalists to those who would label themselves radically liberal. Yet we have found a way to live together as brothers and sisters in Christ, feeling free to argue and “fight” like brothers and sisters are wont to do, at the same time recognizing our indissoluble connection. Throughout this chapter and the next, I will draw from the experiences of my community as illustrative—though admittedly provisional and imperfect—examples of the principles and strategies of Paradoxy.

If we are to have any success with our exploration, we will have to be open-minded yet rigorous, confident yet self-critical, creative yet provisional. We will have to be open to the possibility that we all might be a little wrong, that our adversaries may be a little right, and that there will likely be surprises out there for all of us. We will need to open our hearts and minds to a newer and more expansive reality, and to what our friend C.S. Lewis called a “deeper magic.” So let’s “enter the wardrobe”64 and see what we find on the other side.

T H E S H A P E O F T H I N G S T O C O M E 101

The One Foundation

● I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Jesus of Nazareth (John 14:6)

Here is where I think we need to start. “Who do you say that I am?” Jesus once asked Peter, who had just finished telling Jesus who everyone else said he was. It seems to me that this is one of the most crucial questions Jesus asks those of us who would be his disciples. It also seems to me that if we are to accept the name “Christian,” the answer we give to that question, and what it says about our relationship to Christ, is one of the most crucial answers we can give.

“I am the way, the truth, and the life.” When I read these and other “I am” statements of Jesus, I am reminded of the words of C.S. Lewis, who once observed that Jesus frequently made statements about himself that left us very little wiggle room. If anyone made the kind of claims Jesus made, we would have to conclude that he was either a megalomaniac or a total loon, on the order of someone who said, “I am a poached egg.” Or . . . we would have to conclude that he was the incarnation of God.65 Jesus did not claim to teach us the way, he claimed to BE The Way. Jesus did not claim to teach the truth, he claimed to BE The Truth. Jesus did not claim to show us how to live life, he claimed to BE The Life.

If we take Jesus’ claim at face value by acknowledging Jesus Christ as the incarnation of Way and Truth and Life and ourselves as “little Christs,” then these twin acknowledgments cannot help but have enormous consequences for understanding ourselves, Christ, God, and reality itself. Because if these things are true, then the life of faith is all about relationship: relationship with

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Christ, relationship with the body of Christ. If the apostle Paul is correct about our being the “body of Christ” (Romans 12:5), then what we are talking about is an organic relationship, a sharing at the genetic level. In this deep connection Christ becomes our genetic “switch,” activating dormant genes as necessary for us to take up our unique function in his body, connecting all of us as part of an organism bigger than ourselves and inclusive of each other, and helping us to learn that in the body of Christ there is no “junk DNA.” If these things are true, then the English priest and hymnist was communicating to us a deep reality when he wrote, “The church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord.”66 At the same time, as Anglican theologian Richard Hooker put it, the sole criterion for applying the term Christian to persons or churches is their acknowledgement of Jesus Christ as Lord.

For a people named after Christ, we have been remarkably creative at avoiding the implications of his life’s story. One might think that his followers would want to virtually live in the Gospels, immersing themselves in Christ’s life, appropriating his story, and making it their own, living into and incarnating (lit., “putting meat on the bones of”) it. But we are so tempted to turn our attention elsewhere: to searching the New Testament epistles or the books of the law in the Hebrew Scriptures for rules and formulas by which to live our lives, or to limiting our time in the Gospels to sifting Jesus’ teachings for their ethical implications so that we might make more ethical choices. Could it be that the reason we are tempted to shy away from the Gospels is because at some level we know that studying them is a dangerous activity—dangerous because we meet Jesus Christ there, who is part and parcel of the Living God?

Early in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, book one of The Chronicles of Narnia, Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, two of the talking animals who are the subjects of Aslan, the Christ figure of the


story, offer their opinions as to the lion’s nature. Mrs. Beaver says that no normal person can stand before Aslan “without their knees knocking.” And when Mrs. Beaver is asked if Aslan is “quite safe,” Mr. Beaver retorts “Course he’s not safe . . . he’s good.”67

It really is not safe to spend too much time immersed in the Gospels, because those who encounter Jesus Christ there do not leave untested or unchallenged—not even their theology is off limits. There is no question that the Gospels present a Savior and his teachings that are more often mysterious, and occasionally, seemingly contradictory. But paradoxy is part and parcel of our faith in the future. We can embrace it in the Gospels, and elsewhere. This process of anamnesis (lit., “remembering ourselves into the story”) is exactly what we must do if we are to consider ourselves “one body” with Christ and the incarnation of Christ’s body in the world. We will come to study the Scriptures in the same sacramental way that we think of Communion, or in the way that Jews think of Pesach (Passover): an act that transcends time and space and connects us with those events and thus transforms us.

One way we have done this in my congregation is through an educational process that some have called maieutic (“midwife”) education.68 Maieutic education seeks to experientially connect us with the Scriptures by helping us discover shared themes between us (or as one author put it, “living our story through God’s story”).69

This might involve a single passage or an entire book. For example, if the text at hand were the feeding of the five thousand, the group would read through the text together, then set the actual text aside and recreate the story from memory, putting themselves in the place of the disciples and imagining how they would have felt at various places in the story.

On one retreat, we had just finished the Gospel according to Mark and were beginning our recreation. There was a

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lively discussion over the next hour as we reconstructed the entire Gospel from memory through the eyes of the disciples. Afterward, a participant confided in me that she had misgivings at the beginning of the exercise that had been overcome by the end. “At the beginning, I thought this was just so much ‘warm and fuzzy bull****’,” she said “but that changed as we went through the exercise. All my life I have resented the fact that God had never allowed me to experience grace. But now I know that it was not God refusing to share, but me unwilling to accept it.” Others have shared similar experiences of long-held assumptions challenged, attitudes changed, and prejudices overcome. It has been quite gratifying to witness such transformation.

WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?

Not too long ago, one of my most conservative parishioners—in the midst of a moment of insight—put it this way: “I guess if I’m going to call myself a fundamentalist, I have to start by being fundamentalist about Jesus.” When I asked her what being a “fundamentalist about Jesus” meant to her, she put it this way, “Jesus told us ‘The first and greatest commandment is this: love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy mind and all thy strength. And the second is like unto it: Love thy neighbor as thyself.’ He also told us to love one another as he loved us. Isn’t everything else in the Scripture a commentary on this and therefore of secondary importance?”

No sermon of mine could have said it better. If we view the entirety of our spiritual lives—our understanding of Scripture, doctrine, and tradition—through the lens of the love of Christ, we find ourselves with a more common field of view. The rest of Scripture can then serve as inspired commentary on how to view that love and how to live into it.


This way of looking at Scripture is nothing new. The letters of Paul reveal that the apostle considered his own writings to be a form of commentary. Each of Paul’s letters was one side—Paul’s side—of an ongoing conversation with one of the infant Christian communities he had founded. They are his answers to questions, concerns, and problems raised by the members of these communities. They contain his attempts to help these communities interpret the implications of Christ’s love—as demonstrated by his life, death, and resurrection—in their own unique contexts. To Paul, a diversity of opinions in those early communities was something to be championed, because the fact that a diverse group of people could live together in love was evidence that the power of the Holy Spirit was at work in them. Only the Holy Spirit was capable of creating community out of components that the world believed to be irreconcilably different.

In my congregation, this is certainly what we have discovered. Our starting point has always been the acknowledgment that we have Christ’s love for us in common. Viewing our relationships with each other through that lens has allowed people of exceedingly different theological persuasions, not just to tolerate each other, but to learn to really love one another. Many Christian communities maintain a careful coexistence between liberal and conservative Christians by insisting that members keep their varying theological positions under wraps. We come at it differently. Believing that if we are to learn to love one another as Christ loves us, we need to be transparent to each other: voicing our differences unapologetically and acknowledging others’ differences nondefensively. Starting from our common ground in Christ allows us to view the differences between us as less important than the common ground we share. Just as important, it gives us the confidence that the love of the One who is our common ground is a more powerful binding force that any dividing forces our differences might exert. We feel

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less of a need to defend our positions from each other, because we know we can leave them to Christ to sort out. As a colleague of mine from Mississippi once said, “After I’ve said my piece, I can leave it where Jesus flung it.”

I have been continually amazed at the vastly different people this insight has brought together to live and move and have their being together under the same roof. A disabled, theologically liberal, openly gay parishioner working shoulder to shoulder with a former CIA bureau chief, who once described himself as “to the right of Attila the Hun.” Or a self-proclaimed fundamentalist and her extremely liberal husband worshiping together in the same church for the first time in more than thirty years. Several years ago, we cosponsored with our diocese a “Common Ground Dialogue on Human Sexuality.” The primary approach of the dialogue was to start with the assumption that the participants had Christ in common, and that this commonality was more important than anything else. After a single day of dialogue, many of the participants, from the most conservative to the most liberal, acknowledged that they could no longer dismiss each other as “not caring about the truth of Christ’s teachings” (a frequent conservative complaint) or “not caring about the love expressed in Christ’s way of life” (a frequent liberal complaint). In fact, so common was this outcome that observers from advocacy groups representing both sides of the conflict were overheard whispering among themselves that “our people aren’t going to like this.”

If we can agree that the church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ and recognize that all other issues are nonfoundational and of secondary importance, we will have recognized that the common ground on which we can stand together is much larger and firmer than we had previously imagined.




John 6:35“I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

John 8:12“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”

John 10:7, 9b“I am the gate for the sheep. . . . Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.”

John 10:11, 14–16“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. . . . I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.”

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John 11:25–26a“I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

John 14:6-7a“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also.”

John 15:1, 5b“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine-grower. . . . Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.”

Recalling that “I AM” (Heb. YHVH) is the name for God that God told Moses, consider each of the above “I AM” statements of Jesus as a lens through which to view both Jesus Christ and the rest of Scripture. Which of these lenses feel most inviting to you? Which feel most challenging? Which feel both inviting and challenging? What tensions do you experience as you consider these things? What are the implications?


● A Q u e s t i o n t o C o n s i d e r

Consider any controversial issue in your church. How might your individual approach to the issue shift if you started with the assumption that both sides shared an organic, living connection with Christ that could not be severed? How would the interpersonal process shift if both sides started with that assumption?

Law of Love over Love of Law

● “This is my commandment,that you love one another as I have loved you.”


In this new paradigm of ours, the next principle of how to be church is this: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” Jesus said (John 14:15). Many choose to read this as an endorse-ment by Jesus of living life by following a broad set of biblical rules or principles, or a commandment to model our way of life upon Jesus’ way life. But a closer reading and more literal inter-pretation of this text reveals that Jesus was not being prescriptive in either direction. Almost immediately he goes on to state the reverse: “They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me” (John 14:21a). What this kind of construction means is that rather than being prescriptive, Jesus was stating, as he often did, the reality of how the kingdom of God works.

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“Love God and do as you please” is how Augustine of Hippo put it. Apparently, Martin Luther and John Calvin wished they had said that, because both eventually did. Loving Christ and keeping Christ’s commandments are inextricably connected. To the extent you love Christ, to that same extent you will keep his commandments. You can’t help it. You can’t have one without the other. The reason for this lies in the nature of the love we are talking about. This is not love as a warm and fuzzy feeling, but as a physical fact: love “in the biblical sense,” if you will. The kind of love we are talking about—God’s love—once accepted, makes us one body with Christ. And if we are one body with Christ, then if Christ moves in a certain direction, we cannot help but move in the same direction. The only way to move in a different direction from Christ is to break the connection.

● Love is represented as the fulfilling of the law.A creature’s perfection.All other graces, all divine dispensations, contribute to this,and are lost in it as in a heaven.It expels the dross of our nature;it overcomes sorrow;it is the full joy of our Lord.70

Herman Hooker American author and Episcopal priest, 1804–1865

In giving the commandment “Love one another, as I have loved you,” Jesus was not referring to a body of laws to be followed, but rather to the fulfillment of God’s law through love: to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself (see Mark 12:28–31). As writer, Herman Hooker pointed out in the above quotation, love is the very embodiment of the


kingdom of God. It is powerful. It creates and sustains Christian community. It draws us into the life of God and transforms us, drawing us into God’s realm and God’s realm into us.


What would be the impact of giving greater priority to the law of love? Just as it was in the Jesus movements of the early church, the love of Christ lived out in community can be a powerful form of evangelism that we can perform without proselytizing—that is, without feeling like we have to talk people into changing religions. Just as they were in the days of the early church, diverse communities of Christ—communities that should not have otherwise existed, people who should not have even liked each other but were held together by a shared love—were a powerful and attractive witness to the power of God’s Holy Spirit. The Celtic Christians, for example, were extremely good at this. They offered love and fellowship to all. People were drawn in by it, and then, before they knew it, and much to their surprise, they found that they had become believers.

I have seen this principle at work in our congregation. Understanding that it is only Christ’s love that creates Christians and community has helped my congregation to see evangelism in a different light and, as a result of this different understanding, feel less anxious about the topic. We are less anxious, because we know we’re not the ones responsible for converting people. Yet not having to worry about “closing the deal” has, paradoxically, made us feel less awkward about describing our personal experiences of the love of Christ, and even inviting people into the fellowship of our church community. It has also made us more tolerant of people with different theological opinions from our own. We realize that our job is only to engage such people in relationships of love, or

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as one of my fellow parishioners put it, “to live Christ’s love out loud.” We’ve learned to accept that any relationship that involves Christ is transformative to all involved. We have begun to learn to expect that we may well experience Christ’s love through someone very different from themselves, and that our own heart is as likely to be “converted” as the other.



John 13:35“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

What forces/issues/considerations support Christian com-munities being known primarily for “having love for one another”? What forces/issues/considerations hold them back? List them below:

Supporting Forces Restraining Forces



1 If Jesus came to your church, what evidence would he see that you “love one another”? What evidence would he see that you do not?

2 How is having love for one another made manifest? How is God calling you and your congregation to love one another more obviously?

Embracing the Mystery: Living As I f We Bel ieved

● If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.

Paul An apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God(2 Corinthians 5:17a)

We’ve already seen how the more a Christian community strives for uniformity of belief, and the greater the number of beliefs it requires to be held in common as the condition for membership, the more likely it is that the community will suffer schism. When the smallest matters of church teaching become nonnegotiable, then the smallest disagreement on the smallest issue will result in people going their separate ways.

This “splinterability” reaches its apex in all kinds of denominations. It doesn’t seem to matter if a church is more liberal or conservative. We are prone to this. And it doesn’t only

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just happen over theological issues. It could just as easily be over ethical/moral precepts, or even the paint color of the church, or whether or not to purchase a new organ (or to even have one).

Some more liberal congregations have attempted to avoid this splinterability by saying it really doesn’t matter what you believe, since all religious experience is at its core universal anyway. But this hardly seems a viable alternative, either practically, logically, or theologically. Organizationally, it is near impossible to maintain a community for long without some clarity of vision. Logically, it is unlikely that vastly different belief structures and greatly divergent spiritual goals arise from a universal source. And theologically, it’s hard to argue that the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation (i.e., the divine-human natures of Christ) have any equivalents in other faiths. Christ is either unique, or he is not.

CURBING OUR DOGMA

The late Christian rock guitarist and singer Larry Norman frequently called upon his listeners to “curb” their dogma. In fact, he often wore a T-shirt emblazoned with this phrase. At first glance, it sounded like Norman was opposed to dogma. In fact, he wasn’t, and neither am I. Consider the “dog”-ma metaphor. A single dog, properly trained and controlled, is a wonderful animal. A pack of dogs, wild, untamed, and out of control, can terrify a neighborhood and injure a lot of people. So it is with dogma. Properly understood and appropriately applied, and limited in number, dogma can have a constructive impact on a Christian community. But a pack of dogmas—too many teachings with the status of dogma—can be very injurious to the cohesiveness of a Christian community. The solution, then, lies in making sure we are very careful about what teachings we raise to the status of dogma, not doing so unless absolutely necessary.


● No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the Splen-

dor of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish them than I am carried

back to the One. When I think of any One of the Three I think of him

as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I

am thinking escapes me.71

Gregory of Nazianzus Philosopher, theologian, and archbishop of Constantinople, credited with creating the definitive doctrine of the Trinity, c. 329–89/90

As I mentioned earlier, one of my seminary professors once said, “The definition of a dogma is ‘let’s not talk about this anymore.’ ” After he had thus gotten our attention, he went on to unpack what he meant. By the time of the Council of Nicaea, the church had been struggling for centuries to define certain ideas about the nature and essence of God that were unique to Christianity: inescapable implications of the incarnation of Jesus Christ. But the more they wrestled with these concepts—the nature of Jesus Christ and the complex nature of the Godhead—the more they found themselves confronted with the mystery of divine paradoxes. The church had experienced Jesus as undeniably human. Yet it also had been confronted by the resurrected Christ as inescapably divine. How could those two things be simultaneously true? The church had experienced the Godhead as different “persons.” One was a person they knew as the Creator of all things, whom they had heard Jesus name as “Abba” (the Aramaic expression for what a baby would call its father, i.e., “daddy”), whom they had come to think of as God, the Father. They had also experienced God in the person of Jesus Christ—begotten of God and human—who had come to redeem them and reunite them with the Godhead—whom they had come to think of as God, the Son. The third way

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they had experienced the person of God was as the Spirit who created, infused, and sustained the church, whom they had come to think of as God, the Holy Spirit. Yet they knew, as Jesus did and had expressed in his recitation of the Shema (“Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is ONE”), that there was not a pantheon of gods, but one God. So how could God be both three persons and one God?

The genius of the Council of Nicaea was not that those gathered there had finally arrived at a formula that fully and completely reconciled these seemingly irreconcilable concepts. Rather, it was that they finally decided to stop talking about it and fully embrace the mystery. Thus the formulas that emerged from Nicaea defined the paradoxes inherent in the human-divine natures of Jesus Christ and the trinitarian nature of the Godhead, but did not define the essence of those natures. They called these formulas “dogma,” since at some point you just had to stop asking questions and fighting about them, and just live with them.

If we embrace the mystery of our faith together, we are better prepared to enter into new paradigms of understanding. The point is that the way we act in reality is powerfully influenced by our paradigms. These paradigms almost always reflect the unquestioningly accepted beliefs of the culture in which we live. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, describes how powerfully these culturally inculcated paradigms can mitigate for or against success. As a negative example, he relates one tragic story about how a Columbian pilot’s culturally passive submission to hierarchy likely led him to run out of fuel rather than question intimidating air traffic controllers. As a positive example, he relates how the meticulous work ethic developed over the centuries in the rice farming cultures of Asia tended to provide the children of those cultures with a diligence that “primes” them for greater success in academic environments.72


In a similar way, if we immerse ourselves in the stories of Scripture, and begin to imagine a different reality than the one we have accepted, we can prime ourselves to live into that reality, and by living into it, bring it about. Just as importantly, I have found that the more we are able to live into the reality of our faith, the more space we open up for others to live into that different reality as well—without our having to say a word, without trying to convert a soul.

● The imagination is one of God’s greatest gifts. . . .Not to conjure up false things and foolishly believe them to be

true,but to take true things and make them vivid in the life of today.73

W.E. Sangster English Methodist clergyman and denominational leader, 1900–1960.

Research has shown that people are looking for an expression of faith that is powerful and clear—authentic and inclusive.74 In my congregation, I have found that people are more powerfully drawn by the qualities of Christian community than they are by broad doctrinal consensus or popular forms of liturgy—not that truth is unimportant to them or that liturgy isn’t meaningful. On the contrary, they find these things important and meaningful. But they are deeply skeptical about externally imposed truth, prefer-ring instead to recognize truth from prayerful discernment within their relationship with Christ and with the people of Christ, and engaging in dialogue with other believers about what they read in Scripture. I have also found that this approach heals and recon-ciles those whom we have taken to calling the “de-churched.”

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OUR WAY BACK TO THE FUTURE

I believe God is calling us back to basics: to pare back what we elevate to dogmatic significance—back to the core and paradoxical dogmas with which the church wrestled in its infancy and finally acknowledged as indefinably true at the Council of Nicaea. I believe that God is calling us to focus our imaginations on living as though these mysteries were true. As it curbs its dogma to the core paradoxical mysteries, the church offers a spiritual core that truly stands for something, yet is not imposing or excluding. In embracing these mysteries and concentrating our attention on imagining ourselves into the divine reality they express, the church, without pretending to fully understand them, can offer the world a powerful way of tasting and seeing the goodness of God.



Ephesians 4:14aWe must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine. . . .

There are two ways of interpreting this text:(a) Paul is warning against doctrines different than his own.(b) Paul is warning against an excessive focus on doctrine, because it is a human attempt to describe divine reality, and is therefore imperfect and subject to change.What are the implications of these very different interpretations?



1 What do you find attractive about the idea of curbing your dogma? What about it makes you feel uneasy?

2 What attracts you to the idea of embracing the mystery and living as though the core, paradoxical beliefs of Christianity were true? What about it makes you feel uneasy?

3 What would be the impact of implementing these ideas in your life? In the life of your faith community?

Fel lowship First

● The one thing truly worthwhileis becoming God’s friend.75

Gregory of Nyssa Bishop and prominent fourth-century theologian, c. 335–85/86

The principle we are talking about here is perhaps the ultimate in curbing our dogma and embracing the mystery. To paraphrase the apostle Paul: relationship with Christ equals new creation. When people come into relationship with Christ, love starts re-creating them.

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The Jesus movements of the first several centuries showed us how evangelism could be carried out with a set of assumptions that abandons the need to control and that values fellowship above everything else. These movements offered fellowship first, knowing that the love of Christ, experienced in the midst of a worshiping community, would soften individuals’ hearts, eventu-ally converting (i.e., “turning”) their hearts in a new direction—to a connection with Christ. Then, the church would offer baptism.


It certainly made a difference in the early church. This Friendship and Fellowship First approach, which was so deeply ingrained into the early Jesus movements, resulted in some of the most rapid expansions of the church in its entire history.

This can work in much the same way today. The National Episcopal Cursillo movement is one example. In this movement the approach to evangelization is friendship, and fellowship, based. Graduates of Cursillo are encouraged to approach evangelism, not by attempting to convert people, but by making friends with them. Once you have made a friend, your job is to be a friend, simply by loving as Christ first loved you, and by inviting your friend to experience an immersion of love in a Christian community. In fact, that would be a good way to describe this approach: evangelism by immersion in Christ’s love, allowing friends to “taste and see that the LORD is good. . . .” (Psalm 34:8a).

One of our members once jokingly called this the “Borg” approach to newcomer incorporation. The Borg Collective was one of the fictional alien races of the Star Trek franchise of the television series and movies, a biological-mechanical, pseudo-race, with a “hive mind” intent on incorporating the biological and technological distinctiveness of all other races into its collective.


This sci-fi aficionado and Trekker thought we were as persistent as the Borg in our efforts to assimilate newcomers into our fellowship but without the bothersome side effect of robbing them of their individual personalities. It is an apt metaphor, because we assume that when God sends a person into our midst, God has already invited that person into our fellowship, already made that person a part of us. Our job, then, is merely to act as though that were true. Our job is simply to envelop that person with the same love with which God has already enveloped us and them.

If evangelizing with love and acceptance sounds more difficult than evangelizing with words, that’s because it is. It is easier to offer a step-by-step formula for conversion. But while this approach is not easy or safe, in the end, the fact that offering Christ’s love not only transforms those who receive it, but also those who give it, is what makes it so worthwhile.

This isn’t just another “technique.” If it were, it would be a deviously manipulative one. The love and fellowship offered have to be truly given as gifts, and not with the hidden agenda of converting that person to Christianity. The gift we are giving is not the institution of Christianity but the opportunity to experience the love of Christ. One need not leave one’s religion to experience the love of Christ. One need not cease being a Jew or a Muslim (lit., “One who obeys God”) or a Buddhist. On the other hand, one may choose to become a baptized follower of Jesus, and a member of a Christian denomination. But the gift of the love of Christ may not be made contingent on that decision.

Yet it has been our experience that many people do make that decision to convert. Jews, Muslims, even Buddhists have made the choice to become a member of our Christian community through baptism. We accepted them for who they were and embraced them with the love of Christ, exerting no pressure on them to change. A young Buddhist man attended our worship services for

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years, laughingly proclaiming himself to anyone who would listen as the church’s “resident heathen.” On the serious side, he said the reason he kept coming was because he “loved the questions we raised but never had reason to question the love we offered.” He felt love but no pressure. He felt free to ask questions about faith and even express doubts. Even so, over time he became aware that he was being drawn into relationship with Christ. It was a slightly bittersweet day when he “ruined his reputation” as our resident heathen by requesting that he be baptized. However, just this year, as a result of her engagement to one of our members, a young Buddhist woman has eagerly volunteered to take on his historic “resident heathen” role in our community.

Does it always work this way? No. Are people uniformly drawn in by the love of Christ? Of course not. Are we perfect examples of how to pass on Christ’s love unconditionally? Far from it. To be honest, sometimes we can only say that it is an aspirational goal. Sometimes, even when we manage to get it more right than wrong, some people find themselves unable to trust it. Sometimes, people make the connection and understand the implication that if they accept this kind of unconditional love, eventually they will feel obligated to pass it on, and don’t yet feel ready for that. Even so, the more we are able to remove the conditions we are tempted to place on our sharing of Christ’s love, the more we experience people finding themselves drawn into it.




John 15:7–12“If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my dis-ciples. As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s command-ments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.’ ”

What is the difference between believing (as in doctrine about Christ) and abiding (as in being in relationship with Christ)? What difference would this distinction make in your faith journey? In the life of your congregation?


1 What is the difference between believing without proof and trusting without reservation?

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2 How do belief and trust influence each other in your faith journey? How does belief move you forward on your journey? How does faith move you forward on your journey?

Organism over Organizat ion

● There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit.There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord.

Paul Called to be an apostle(1 Corinthians 12:4–5, NIV)

F.G. “Moe” Cavin, a member of the board of trustees of United Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, once said at a graduation ceremony, “The first problem with ‘organized religion’ is that it’s too organized.” He got a good laugh from the gathered seminarians, but there is truth in his words. Whenever at least “two or three are gathered” anywhere, organization becomes an issue. Human beings need some sort of organizational structure to get along with each other and to get things done, but there is a balance to be maintained. Even highly disciplined organizations such as the military realize that organizational rigidity can be a dangerous thing and that a certain level of adaptability is desirable for the survival of the organization and its members.

One would think that organizational flexibility would be especially desirable for an organization such as the church, particularly since it claims to owe its birth and its continued existence to God’s Holy Spirit. Yet judging by the old joke that the last seven words of the church will be “But we’ve always done it that way,” organizational rigidity is a long-standing problem.


Indeed churches with low levels of organizational structure and hierarchical authority, such as the Society of Friends (Quakers), tend to be the exception that proves the rule.

The structure of organizational authority may take many forms. It might be a global, highly centralized, multicongregation authority structure, such as the Roman Catholic or Orthodox Churches. It might be a single-congregation, nondenominational community church. Or it may be somewhere in between. Some denominations, such as Episcopal, Lutheran, and similar churches, have a moderately centralized, multicongregational authority structure that shares governance with its member congregations. Other, more congregationalist denominations, such as the various varieties of Baptist polities, have a strictly localized authority structure but share centralized ministry networks (e.g., coordination of missionaries) and resource structures (e.g., seminaries). Churches with nonhierarchical organization and leadership are few and far between. But it hasn’t always been that way.

Certainly, Jesus’ style of leadership (“But I am among you as one who serves” Luke 22:27b.) was counterhierarchical, as was the way of leadership he taught his disciples (“the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves” Luke 22:26b). This way of leadership was carried on by Paul and handed down explicitly by Paul to the communities he founded. Paul taught his communities that they should be less like organizations and more like organisms. He compared a Christian community to the human body, in which diverse parts with different abilities and functions came together to form a complete organism. If a Christian community was indeed an organism and not simply an organization composed of distinct individuals, then each individual member was essential to the completeness of the whole. Individuals would know that they were selected by God

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to be a part of the organism that God was creating and growing. The individual members of the community would know that God had placed them into the community to play a unique role in the life of the community, and they and the community could discern the nature of their intended role by the unique gifts God had bestowed upon them.

Such alternative approaches to organization and leadership have never been dominant in the church—nor have they maintained an unbroken visible presence over the centuries since the communities of the apostle Paul. Homeostasis is a hard thing to overcome. Yet, as we have seen in those approaches we have reviewed, every so often, like a fresh spring emerging from an underground aquifer, they find a way to bubble to the surface. And when they do, even if they don’t manage a sustained existence, the result is usually the revitalization of the church.


You may think that where I am heading with this is to suggest that moving into a new paradigm of church will require the wholesale dismantling of the organizational and authority structures of the church in favor of a single counterhierarchical model. I am not. I’m still an Episcopal priest. Rather, I am suggesting that we wear these structures more lightly, living in the tension that comes from our acknowledgment that, as I stated earlier, they are “a mistake blessed by God”—a human creation that God did not require us to adopt, but through which God has clearly worked. If we acknowledge that this tension is a healthy one, we can not only tolerate the vital forces that have bubbled up through these recurring Jesus movements, but welcome them as a blessing and not resist them as a threat.

How might this work?


ORGANIZATION AS ORGANISM

First, we need to take seriously Paul’s vision of the organic nature of Christian community (1 Corinthians 12). Christian community is not an organizational structure in which people occupy various fixed and static roles; it is a living organism. It grows, adapts to its environment, reproduces, thinks, moves toward goals, and has a vision and a calling. All too often Christian communities become “God’s Frozen People,” organizing and acting in certain ways because they’ve “always done it this way.” While these ways of acting and organizing may not be inherently bad—in fact, they may be good—if we are frozen into them, we are not free to respond in a living way to the call of the living God. All congregations, be they liberal or conservative, can fall into this trap. All have their implicit default settings. But thinking of our Christian communities as living organisms can help us allow them to be more open to God’s call and more flexible in organizing to meet their call within the contexts they find themselves.

GIFTS OF THE MEMBERS AS GUIDANCE FROM GOD

How does an organic Christian community discern its vision and its calling? By viewing the gifts of each of the people God brings into the community as a message from God: a piece of the puzzle about what God is calling the congregation to be and to do. By sifting through the aggregation of the gifts that God has sent, a church can begin to discern the call God is extending to her. For example, if God is sending to a particular congregation a lot of new people with gifts suited to a ministry that doesn’t currently exist there, maybe that is God’s way of telling that congregation to start a new ministry that does suit their gifts. Or if God is not sending a particular congregation enough new people to replace the people stepping down from a particular ministry, maybe that

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is God’s way of telling that congregation that the time has come to discontinue that ministry, no matter how long that ministry has been identified with that congregation. And if God is sending a particular congregation lots of new people whose ideas and attitudes challenge those of current members, maybe it is God’s way of telling the current members that they need a change of heart.

LEADERSHIP BASED ON GIFTS

All congregations, be they conservative or liberal, carry in their DNA unspoken assumptions that certain ministry roles are better or more spiritual than others. Within more conservative Christian communities, these preferences may lean in the direction of roles such as evangelist, preacher, and teacher. In more liberal Christian communities, these preferences may lean in the direction of social justice. These are false hierarchies. No one role in the church is inherently better than any other. If fact, a role that would be good for one person might be bad for another, because the good in the doing only comes from doing it in response to the call of Christ.

It is very easy for congregations to fall into the temptation of assuming that the needs of their churches—that is, the holes in their churches’ organizational charts—are God’s messages to them about the roles that parishioners, and particularly newcomers, are called to fill. But the reality is more likely to be the opposite. The gifts and callings of the parishioners should determine where they fit in the organization. And if their gifts and callings don’t match with the needs of the church organization, it may well be the organizational structure that God wants to change.76


LEADING BY VISION

Finally, we need to lead by vision rather than by power or authority. If we accept our Christian communities as living organisms, and believe that every member has a role to play in moving the community toward the mission and goals that God has given it, then we have no need to lead through power and authority. Rather, we will be able to lead more effectively by painting for the community a clear picture, a vision, of what God is calling us to. The clearer the vision, the more the community will move toward it.

What we are talking about is servant leaders engaging their congregations in discernment about what God is calling their congregations to be and to do: helping to “birth” a congregational vision and bring it to life. We are talking about leaders painting a picture in clear terms that can be taken into the imagination of the members. Once congregational members have taken the vision in, their imaginations will encourage them to move toward it, both consciously and unconsciously.

● God has not called me to be successful, God has called me to be faithful.77

Teresa of Calcutta 1910–1997

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1 Corinthians 12:22–25, NIV

On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpre-sentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other.

How is your Christian community living into the spirit of this Scripture?


1 What principles and considerations have guided your congregation’s organization? Which, if any, of these principles and considerations would you consider the primary organizational principle?

2 If the gifts and callings of the members of your congregation were elevated to be its primary organizational principle, how might that change your organization?


3 What is your congregation’s vision? How did it emerge? How does it influence your congregation’s direction?

Communit ies without Boundaries

● And I, when I am lifted up from the earth,will draw all people to myself.


I grew up in West Texas before the civil rights marches of the 1960s. In my home town of Lubbock, many of the restaurants and stores displayed signs in the windows that read, “We reserve the right to refuse service.” It seldom said precisely to whom they would deny service, but we all knew to whom the sign referred: any person of color. The sad thing was, even restaurant and store owners who would have called themselves Christians posted the signs.

The church has long struggled with such a question: who is in and who is out? This question surfaces in many guises. Who is a Christian and who is not? With whom do we share our fellowship? With whom do we share Communion?

This last version of the question is painfully ironic, because it turns the very sacrament that Jesus gave to unite us into a source of division. It is a sad historical fact that the primary cause of many denominational schisms has been theological differences over the definition of this sacramental act. This is doubly ironic, since all denominations agree that it is ultimately a mystery. It continues to cause bruised feelings on the part of many followers of Christ,

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who visit other churches and are refused Communion because of theological differences between their denomination and the one they are visiting. Even well-meaning ecumenical events can be painful, as it was in the planning of a recent ecumenical Ash Wednesday service that my congregation was hosting. It was almost derailed at the eleventh hour by a disagreement over Communion. One of the participating clergy said he would have to stay away, and advise his congregation to do the same, if we offered both the imposition of ashes and Communion. After some high-stakes theo-canonical negotiations, we managed to keep all parties happy by breaking our Episcopal Ash Wednesday liturgy into two back-to-back services separated by the “passing of the peace,” so that it became “officially” an ecumenical Imposition of Ashes service follow by an Episcopal service of Holy Communion to which members of other denominations were invited, but their clergy were free not to assist in leading. It is a shame (literally) that the very act that should be the church’s greatest symbol of unity, the sharing of the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, in whom we are made “one body” (see 1 Corinthians 10:17), is so often turned into the occasion of such division by the very church that is called the body of Christ.

Sadly, even within denominations there can be division over this sacrament. In my own denomination, some advocate for closed communion, limiting it only to baptized members, while others advocate for open communion, making it available to all worshipers.

Yet comparing these practices to those of Jesus, we see an approach that is 180 degrees different. When the Pharisees complained to Jesus that he shared his table with sinners—tax collectors, prostitutes, and all manner of unclean people—his answer was fairly plain: “I have come not to save the ‘righteous’ but sinners.” The quotation marks around the righteous are my doing,


because I think if Jesus were familiar with the modern gesture, he would have been making “air quotes” when he said it. There is no record of Jesus turning away from his table ever. So it would seem to be wise for the body of Christ to exercise a similar approach.

● If then God gave them [the Gentiles] the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?

Peter An apostle of Jesus Christ (Acts 11:17)

Indeed, from the very beginning, the church has been aware—often reluctantly so—of the tendency of the Holy Spirit to work wherever he willed, even beyond the boundaries of the church as they were assumed by its leaders at the time. Certainly the apostle found this to be true when in a vision he argued with God about whether he should baptize Gentiles, who up until that point the church leadership believed had to become Jewish first before being baptized. Similarly, the early church acknowledged as being valid—albeit irregular—baptism done in the name the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, even if it was performed by a nonbeliever.

●We can set no limits to the agency of the Redeemer to redeem.78

Clement of Alexandria Christian theologian and head of the catechetical of Alexandria, c. 150–c. 215

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Many of the early church fathers and mothers agreed that it is not for us to decide who is in God’s kingdom and who is out. The snag that we often run into is one of basic logic. Because we know that the church is inextricably bound to the Holy Spirit, we assume that the Holy Spirit must be similarly bound to the church. But we must acknowledge that the church does not control the workings of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is free to work outside of what we consider to be the boundaries of church.


It isn’t our job to determine people’s worthiness to receive Communion. After all, in God’s eyes no one is any more worthy to receive Communion that anyone else. If it were anyone’s job to make those kinds of decisions, it would be Jesus’. Yet Jesus consistently refused to make such decisions—instead he welcomed everyone. Maybe it’s time for us to ask ourselves, “What DID Jesus do?” and do the same ourselves—welcoming everyone.

In my own congregation, we have taken a position on this issue that we hope is both radically welcoming and yet provides clarity about our theological understanding of Christian community. We call ourselves “A Place to Belong. A Place to Become.” These two phrases represent what we understand to be our two core callings. “A place to belong” represents our core understanding that as a community we are called to love unconditionally. We believe that the only sufficient basis for Christian community is Christ’s love for us. Because Christ first offered us the grace of unconditional love and acceptance, and unconditional adoption into the family of God, we are called to accept and love whomever God brings without condition and welcome them into our family in the same way. “A place to become” represents our core understanding that we are called as a community to speak truth unconditionally.


Because part of the grace that God offers us is the truth about ourselves—to see ourselves as God sees us, both as we are and what God knows we are meant to be—we are called to offer the same grace to everyone that God sends to us. As imperfect creatures we see only imperfectly, and so we say what we see with humility and ask only the same in return.

This is not always an easy balance to maintain. There are people in our congregation who are conservative politically and those who are liberal. That in itself would not be unusual in a congregation, but what is unusual in ours is that our people don’t change the subject when politics comes up. In the run-up to the recent Iraq war, when many congregations were avoiding the topic for fear of division among their members, we held a series of discussions in which, after talking through how to speak our truth in love, people on both sides of the issue shared their thoughts and feelings about the impending invasion. There were disagreements and strong emotions expressed, but we were able to agree on two things: (1) war is always an evil, never a good, and (2) we need to pray for all involved in the conflict: our leaders and theirs, our soldiers and theirs, our civilians and theirs. Other examples from the life of our congregation include:

on our leadership board. They recently came together to petition the U.S. government for the release of five Muslim Uyghurs who had been found to be noncombatants but were still being held captive at the Guantanamo Bay detention center. When that petition was denied, our leaders worked with a local Muslim congregation to hold a fundraising dinner to obtain the release of prisoners from the Albanian refugee camp where they had been abandoned. One of our conservative leaders said, “This is not about politics. This is about justice.”

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Genghis Khan,” and an openly homosexual man, retired on disability, recently learned to accept, and then respect, and then to love, each other in Christ.

-mentalist” and he, jokingly, as “sort of U.C.C. (Unitarians Considering Christ),” who for the first time in their lives have found a church in which they can coexist openly.

Of course, not every occasion for putting this principle into practice has turned out so positively for us. On the matter of gay people in the church, at least one person I know has left over the issue. Even so, she seemed to struggle over the question. On the one hand, she understood our position that Christ’s love alone is a sufficient basis for Christian community—and she even agreed with it . . . in principle. But on the other hand, she could not help feeling uncomfortable in a congregation that permitted gay people to serve in positions of authority, and that was part of a denomination that even ordained them. Even so, as painful as it is to have any parishioner leave, at least our approach made it possible for her to leave without animosity and for her to clearly communicate the reason for her leaving, both of which are healthy.




John 12:32And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.

Consider the implications of Jesus’ use of the word “all.”


1 What rules or traditions create distinctions between insiders and outsiders in your congregation? In your denomination? What beliefs or attitudes?

2 What would have to change in order to eliminate the distinctions between insiders and outsiders in your denomination? In your congregation? In your own life?

3 If this change happens, what would you appreciate about it? What about it would be hard for you?

C H A P T E R 7

A New Middle Way?Characteristics of an

Incarnational Orthodoxy—a.k.a. Paradoxy

● How wonderful that we have met with a paradox.Now we have some hope of making progress.79

Niels Bohr Danish physicist, quantum theorist, Nobel Prize for Physics, 1885–1962

If a new paradigm is beginning to rise from the ashes of the old ones, it might be called a New Middle Way: a path on which conservative and liberal Christians can find common ground. This path takes us beyond the dying argument between liberal and conservative theology: it is a path that provides the space for God to turn us all toward a new way of being church. Moving into this nascent paradigm will call on us to be both bold and provisional at the same time. Bold, in striking out creatively in the areas of faith that God is calling us to re-vision. Provisional, in understanding that even as God is calling us into a new way of church, we can only see the contours of that paradigm “through a glass darkly.”

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● Grant that we may maintain that middle way,not as a compromise for the sake of peace,but as a comprehension for the sake of truth.80

An Anglican Prayer

I am talking about prayerfully seeking from God a renewed vision of what God is calling the church to be—a new way to sing the songs of God in the foreign landscape into which all of us are now entering. When I use the term provisional, I am not suggesting acting tentatively, but realizing that God may yet have to further clarify our vision, and that God may well use people with visions seemingly opposed to ours to accomplish that clarification.

The irony of a new paradigm is that when it arrives, it is never exactly what those fighting against it feared, nor exactly what those fighting for it hoped for. As we investigate the implications of this New Middle Way, I hope to explore in each case what this radical middle might look like compared to its conservative and liberal companions. I hope to explore in each case where there might exist common ground on which all Christians might stand. I hope to do so while giving both sides of the theological spectrum due respect for the perspective they bring to the discussion.

Defining Terms: Three Or thodoxies

I’d like to begin by suggesting that the term “orthodox” has lost its clarity of meaning. It has been appropriated by various groups who use the term to mean different things. The general public tends to think of “orthodoxy” as the generally accepted or approved way of thinking or acting. Eastern Christians use it as a term to refer to

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any member church of the branch of churches of which they are a part. Conservative Christians tend to use it to describe a broad spectrum of doctrines that they consider to be the traditionally accepted views of the church, and to describe those who share their particular constellation of doctrines and teachings. This may vary widely from group to group. Liberal Christians generally shy away from using the term at all to describe themselves, yet the vast majority believe their theology to be within the borders of the Nicene Creed—certainly not heretical. As Hooker pointed out, everyone thinks their theology is the right theology:

●Everywhere through all generations and ages of the Christian world,no church ever perceived the Word of God to be against it.81

Richard Hooker Anglican priest and theologian, 1554–1600

The literal meaning of orthodoxy is actually “right praise.” Another way of expressing it might be “appropriate praise in response to God.” The conservative concept of orthodoxy is more like right doctrine (or correct beliefs). The liberal concept of orthodoxy is more like right action.

So before we begin our exploration of a radical middle way of being church, we are going to have to define our terms. In keeping with Hooker’s observation, we would be advised to keep our terms neutral. We’ll label each of them as a different type of orthodoxy, giving each a name that reflects its approach to orthodoxy. And for the purpose of easy discussion, we’ll give each of them a shorter nickname.

Doctrinal-Propositional Orthodoxy or .


Ethical-Practical Orthodoxy or .

Incarnational-Relational Orthodoxy or .

Orthoproxy stands for “right doctrine” (ortho meaning “right” and prox being shorthand for “propositional doctrines”), reflecting the fact that for most on the conservative side of the church orthodoxy means holding the correct doctrinal propositions. Orthoproxy tends to remain committed to the Enlightenment paradigm of Foundationalism (i.e., that it is possible for human reason to comprehend universal truths), accepting the conservative assumption that universal truth is external and propositional. Therefore, there can only be one ultimate truth and that truth may only be found in Christianity.

Orthopraxy roughly means “right practice” (ortho meaning “right” and prax being shorthand for “practice”), reflecting the fact that for most on the liberal side of the church, orthodoxy means living out a way of life consistent with the teachings of Jesus. Orthopraxy also remains committed to the paradigm of Foundationalism, but it accepts the liberal assumption that universal truth is internal and experiential. Therefore, at the deepest level all religions must access the same universal truth, and Christianity is perhaps the most unique and fullest expression of that truth.

Paradoxy comes from the Greek word paradoxos. Unpacking the word paradoxos will take a little more doing. Para can mean both “next to” and “in relation to.” Doxos, of course, literally means “praise” but also “awe” or “celebration.” A near-literal translation of paradoxos would be “things that, placed in relationship to each other, inspire awe and praise.” Paradoxy, then, represents an approach to orthodoxy that comes closer to the literal meaning

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of the word than either the conservative or liberal approach. It means embracing and celebrating relationship with Jesus Christ, realizing and accepting that the incarnate Truth will always be greater than we can understand or imagine. It is centered on being in right relationship with Christ and celebrating, embracing, and living into the power of the paradoxical reality of the Incarnation and all its implications.

Paradoxy understands that the paradigm of Foundationalism is fatally flawed. A statement widely attributed to physicist Niels Bohr observed that, while the opposite of a true statement is a false statement, the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” In other words, universal truth exists, but fallen human reason is incapable of fully comprehending it (see John 1:10), and thus incapable of devising any organization or system that can fully contain it. Therefore no religion, not even Christianity, has full and complete access to it. The only connection fallen humanity has to the full and complete truth is Jesus Christ. Christ does not contain truth—Christ IS Truth. Therefore, even through Christ fallen humanity cannot attain full and complete understanding. What it can do is be in living relationship with the Truth.

This does not mean that Paradoxy does not value Christianity as a religion. On the contrary, it values it highly. To the extent that Christianity seeks to be a way of living relationship with Christ, it comes as close as any religion can to understanding truth. But Paradoxy recognizes that even Christianity, as a religion, is capable of both error and sin, and that Christianity, as a religion, is secondary to Christ.

I apologize in advance for describing Paradoxy in the present tense, in the same manner as I describe Orthoproxy and Orthopraxy. This is only because describing it in some sort of conditional tense would not only be too great a challenge to


write, but an even greater challenge to read and understand. So I would ask you to bear in mind that my descriptions of Paradoxy are not intended to represent a completely developed theology. Nor are any of the descriptions that follow intended to be exhaustive. Rather, my intent is to lay down a series of markers for the comparison of what I believe may be the nascent paradigm of Paradoxy to the familiar conservative and liberal forms that are currently in conflict.

I would also ask you to keep in mind that the differences I describe are not intended to be categorical or mutually exclusive. My purpose is to highlight the differences, not to describe their many areas of agreement, though I may occasionally do so when such agreement might seem surprising or counterintuitive. What I want to do is view these differences as different sides of the same path: the right side, the left side, and a new middle way that is radical (as going to the roots), and paradoxically holding elements of both sides in tension.

Finally, while I have tried to evaluate all three points of view objectively and dispassionately, complete objectivity is not something any human is capable of achieving, especially when discussing one’s own ideas. In comparing these three approaches, I have, in each of the following sections, discussed them in the same order: first Orthoproxy (Propositional Orthodoxy), then Orthopraxy (Ethical Orthodoxy), then Paradoxy (Incarnational Orthodoxy). I have done this not to imply relative merit (e.g., good, better, best), but only for the sake of clarity. It is not my intent to ascribe ill intent to those who would identify themselves as either theological conservatives or theological liberals. Nor do I wish to imply that either is inherently lacking or that either is inherently better than the other. Both have strengths and both have weaknesses. It is my wish only to identify those strengths and weakness (and I assume others will return the favor). I owe

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much of what I am and much of what I understand to both conservative and liberal Christians. I owe my appreciation for the significance of doctrine to conservative Christianity. I owe my understanding that doctrine is necessary but not nourishing to liberal Christianity. I would not be a follower of Jesus Christ today were it not for a very conservative Christian friend who took an interest in me and challenged me—as a person of Jewish origin—to engage the Hebrew Scripture and the New Testament, if only to try to prove him wrong. So I apologize in advance if I give any offense to either liberal or conservative Christians. The old cliché is nonetheless true: you only hurt the ones you love.

The Three Ds: Dogma, Doctr ine, and Didache

Another way of comparing these three ways of being church is to examine how each relates to what I have called the Three Ds: Dogma, Doctrine, and Didache.

Orthoproxy does so through assent to a broad spectrum of specifically defined doctrines. Orthoproxy tends to seek broad agreement on a wide number of carefully defined and explicitly described doctrines and teachings. A strength of this approach is clarity of belief. Orthoproxy folks tend to clearly know and articulate their views, and members of Orthoproxy churches know what they have to believe in order to be safely within the bounds of the acceptable. However, a great weakness of Orthoproxy is its tendency to splinter easily over small deviations in their understanding of these doctrines and teachings. Also, an excessive focus on head understanding can impair heart understanding, also making argument and division likely. As it was once expressed mathematically to the church in Corinth by a certain apostle:


●All Knowledge x No Love = Nothing

Paul Apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God(see 1 Corinthians 13:2)

Orthopraxy approaches the three Ds via what I would call commitment to a narrow spectrum of broadly defined teachings. Orthopraxy relies less on doctrinal agreement and much more on common commitment in acting out the love of Christ and practic-ing Christ’s teachings and way of life. Its strengths and weaknesses are the reverse of those of Orthoproxy. Orthopraxy’s stronger emphasis on the heart generally results in greater tolerance and less tendency to splinter. However, Orthopraxy’s weaker emphasis on the head sometimes means that greater tolerance comes at the cost of theological clarity. As one formerly very liberal colleague of mine once said, “Sometimes theological liberalism can be a pretty weak soup.” Sometimes it can seem like there’s “not much there there.” Again, we might quote Paul:

●Did you receive the Spiritby doing the works of the law. . . or by believing what you heard?

Paul An apostle sent neither by human commission nor byhuman authorities(Galatians 3:2c)

Lastly, Paradoxy approaches the three Ds by way of embracing a narrow spectrum of paradoxically defined dogmas. The way of Paradoxy threads a middle path between the clarity of Orthoproxy

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and the acceptance of Orthopraxy. A distinguishing feature of Paradoxy is its focus on upholding, celebrating, embracing, and living into the reality and power of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, and into the core, paradoxical dogmas of Christian faith that are its necessary implications. Paradoxy allows greater clarity as to what we hold in common without the overdefinition that can result in increased intolerance and increased likelihood of splintering.

Creedal or Confessional?

Another useful comparison of these three approaches to Christian community is whether they tend to be creedal or confessional in their understanding of faith and belief. What does it mean to be creedal or confessional? The simplest distinction—perhaps even an oversimplification—that we could make between creedal and confessional churches would be to say that “creedal” denominations tend to place more emphasis on what the church corporately believes and teaches, while “confessional” denominations tend to place more emphasis on what the individual member believes and confesses. Creedal is more communal in understanding, while confessional is more individual. Again, this is not an entirely black and white distinction but more of a continuum.

Churches favoring Orthoproxy tend to be more individu-ally confessional in their approach to orthodoxy, requiring each individual to personally believe and confess a set of theological propositions. Broadly speaking, evangelical Protestant denomi-nations tend to favor this sort of confessional life. Of course, the amount of consistent emphasis on what the individual believes and the specificity and strictness of the interpretation of each point


of belief as confessed can vary between and even within confes-sional denominations. Missouri Synod Lutherans, for example, are usually more strictly confessional than those belonging to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA), especially as the latter has moved toward full communion with the Episcopal Church (clearly creedal in its approach), even as some break-away Episcopal splinter groups become more confessional. The strengths and weakness of the individually confessional approach would tend to be the opposite of the communally creedal approach.

A strength of the individually confessional approach comes with the clarity with which individuals come to terms with what they believe and why. The confessional approach encourages its members to clarify what they believe. One weakness implied in this strength is that the more extensive and strict the confessional formula, the more times the church will likely splinter. The Buddhist turned Episcopalian that I mentioned earlier happened to have been born into a fairly strict variety of individually confessional church. He assures me that a “no-questions asked” confessional approach can be just as oppressive as any authoritarian communal creed.

Churches favoring Orthopraxy tend to be more communally creedal in their approach to orthodoxy. In Orthopraxy, the sense of embracing orthodoxy lies in the community’s affirmation of the church’s communal belief—for example, as described in the Nicene Creed: “We believe in God, the Father, the Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. . . . “In reciting the Nicene Creed, they are saying, “This is what we, the ‘one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church,’ corporately believe.” Examples of traditions whose official approach to orthodoxy are strongly communally creedal would be the Anglican/Episcopal communion of churches, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Eastern churches.

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A strength of the communally creedal approach would be its high capacity for withstanding schism. Its emphasis on what the church believes over what the individual believes allows individuals to nuance their understandings of what they are giving assent to when reciting the various beliefs. As a seminary professor of mine once said, “Some days we believe some parts of the Nicene Creed more than we do on other days.” Also, it gives validation to the church’s mission of teaching. A weakness of the communally creedal approach would be that if too much focus is placed on what the church believes over what the individual believes, the individual might never have to come to terms with any of it. On the other hand, if a communally creedal congregation were to become authoritarian, enforcing a creed could become just as oppressive as enforcing a confession.

The approach of Paradoxy would be creedal and confessional in communion. Paradoxy would uphold the creeds as the ultimate expression of orthodoxy. The reason why Paradoxy would unreservedly accept the creeds is not because they completely and accurately define the reality of God, but because they provide the most beautiful expression of that infinite reality that finite humanity has yet been able to produce. Paradoxy would also call itself confessional. It understands the importance of clarifying and expressing individual belief. Yet at the same time Paradoxy would not insist on uniformity of those beliefs among individuals. Rather, since it understands the core realities of the Christian faith to be paradoxical, it would insist on bringing varying conceptions of those realities into dialogue with each other, so that in the tension between them we might achieve increasing verisimilitude. In fact, Paradoxy believes that, like Jacob wrestling with the angel (Genesis 32:24), it is precisely by struggling with our various creeds and confessions—and with each other’s various understandings of them—that our individual and communal understandings of the


paradoxical realities that the creeds and confessions represent are made more complete. Paradoxy recognizes that God’s nature is paradoxical: containing seemingly opposing realities that must both be true, but that cannot be humanly resolved.

Paradoxy would also acknowledge that there are movements within communally creedal traditions that would like to make their denomination more individually confessional, as well as movements within that work in the other direction. Examples of those from mainline traditions who would like to become more individually confessional include: the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (which broke away from The Episcopal Church to affiliate with the Anglican Church of Nigeria), the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (which split from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America), and others. The former are the many Orthodox-hyphen groups within mainline liberal denominations: Orthodox Anglican, Orthodox Lutheran, etc. The generous orthodoxy and emerging church movements, which emerged from the conservative and evangelical side of the churches, are an example of the latter. These groups are often controversial or conflictual within their own denomination or tradition, sometimes becoming breakaway movements, sometimes attempting to reform their own denomination from the inside.

What Is Truth?

Closely related to a spiritual community’s approach to orthodoxy is how it answers the age-old question asked by Pontius Pilate: “What is Truth?”

On either side of Paradoxy lie seemingly very different understandings of truth. Yet both are the logical products of the same Foundationalism paradigm within which the church has been

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enmeshed since the Renaissance: a paradigm that assumes that the human mind, rationally applied, can apprehend indisputable foundational truths.

Orthoproxy’s approach is a direct descendent of the outside-in approach first proposed by John Locke, which we examined earlier in this book. Orthoproxy tends to understand the nature of truth as propositional, indisputable, and exclusive. What Orthoproxy wants to know is, “What doctrinal truths can we teach about Jesus Christ?” A great strength of Orthoproxy is its passion for truth, and its desire for clarity of belief. A weakness of Orthoproxy can be the rigidity to which it can hold on to particular beliefs, even in the face of contrary experience, which can ultimately be a form of denial and a form of idolatry.

On the other hand, Orthopraxy’s approach is a direct descen-dent of the in-outside approach first proposed by René Descartes, which we also discussed earlier. Orthopraxy tends to understand the nature of truth as universal in that the deepest human experi-ences are understood to be universal in nature. What Orthopraxy wants to know is, “What experiential truths are inherent in Jesus’ life and teachings?” The strengths of the Orthopraxy approach are its passion for universality: a universality that translates into a predisposition toward inclusion, and the weight that it gives to learning and living into teachings of Jesus and to following Jesus’ example. As is often the case, Orthopraxy’s weaknesses are often the flip side of its strengths. For example, once you make the assumption that the deepest meanings of all spiritual experience are universal, it is a small step to assuming that what you come to understand to be the deeper meaning MUST be the same as theirs (a kind of spiritual chauvinism). And Orthopraxy’s preference for practice over doctrine can make it all too easy for individual believers not to think about the implications of what they believe or even to think that it doesn’t matter what they believe.


Paradoxy’s approach to understanding truth might be called relational. In other words, if, as Jesus said, “I am the truth,” then truth is to be found in relationship with him. What is more, truth is to be found in communal relationship with Christ. This is, as we learned earlier, similar to the quantum understanding of reality—expressed in the Heisenberg Principle and the so-called Observer Effect—and its approach to improving the understanding of reality is the way of verisimilitude.82

Paradoxy explores a middle way, keeping in tension the passionate thirst for ultimate truth expressed by Orthoproxy and the compassionate desire for universality expressed truth by Orthopraxy. It does so by recognizing that there is ultimate and undeniable truth that humanity needs to know, which fallen humanity cannot fully comprehend, and which only by being in spiritual community with people who don’t fully agree with us can we hope to approach it.

Understanding of Christ ian Community

Another important difference between these three ways of being church is what they understand to be the theological basis for Christian community. What do they understand to be the grounds for their formation and continued existence? What do they believe holds them together?

ORTHOPRAXY

The Truth OF

Jesus Christ

PARADOXY

The Truth IS

Jesus Christ

ORTHOPROXY

The Truth ABOUT

Jesus Christ

P A R A D O X Y152

Both Orthoproxy and Orthopraxy view Christian community as bound together by some form of uniformity. The difference is upon what that uniformity is based. Orthoproxy sees community as bound by a uniformity of belief. Its primary emphasis is on believing what is right and on conformity to what are held to be the church’s traditional teachings. Orthopraxy sees community as bound by a uniformity of purpose or ethical agreement. Its emphasis is more on doing what is right than believing what is right, and its focus is on our love for each other as an expression of Christ’s love for us. There are strengths to both of these ways, but because they are based on uniformity, neither of them is sufficient.

The emerging understanding of community in Paradoxy is radically simple. Christian community is bound together by the power of Christ’s love as experienced in the community’s common worship. What makes one a Christian is ultimately the affirmation of a relationship with Christ. That is what we have in common. The only force capable of uniting Christians in community is the love of Christ. Not our love for Christ or our love for each other as the body of Christ: our love is neither strong enough nor constant enough. The only force powerful and unwavering enough to bind together fallen, incompatible human beings in community is Christ’s omnipotent and unconditional love. As a community begins to live into this understanding, it becomes more open to the differences inherent in diversity as real differences, and it welcomes the struggle that engaging these differences entails as a path to a more healthy way of being community.

The focus of Paradoxy is not on achieving conformity—of any kind. Rather, the focus is on each of us being transformed by mystery and God, so that, as Paul put it, we might become icons of Christ so that people might look into each of us and see the image of Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18). To quote Paul, the focus is


on being conformed to God by the renewing of our minds. The distinctiveness of this characteristic is a little more difficult to explain, because to some degree all Christian traditions recognize the power and the mystery of God. What makes Paradoxy distinct is the extent to which its sense of Christian community is centered on these things. The dogmas lying at the heart of Christianity are still the heart and soul of Christian community. They are, as Flannery O’Connor observed, instruments for penetrating reality.83 And they are, as Gregory of Nazianzus said, designed to draw us into an experience of the awe-filled mystery of the reality of the nature of God.84

Understanding of Confl ict

A faith community’s understanding of the nature of orthodoxy, truth, and the theological basis for Christian community has a direct influence on its understanding of the nature of conflict. This in turn determines the community’s approach to dealing with conflict.

Orthoproxy understands truth as propositional and categori-cal. Because of this, if conflict arises, the assumption is that one side must be right and the other wrong; that one side must have committed a wrong against the other; or that both sides have transgressed against the teachings of the church. Because of the categorical nature of truth, no compromise with the transgressor seems possible.

Orthopraxy understands religious truth as inner experience and at the deepest level all religious truth is equivalent. Because of this, if conflict arises, it is assumed that the conflict is a sign that one or both sides hasn’t yet learned to see the ways in which their positions reflect an underlying universal experience. Of course,

P A R A D O X Y154

human nature being what it is, each side often feels that it’s the “other” that has failed. In Orthopraxy, conflict is to be avoided if possible, and if it cannot be avoided it must be defused through compromise.

Paradoxy recognizes that while ultimate truth exists with God, infinite reality cannot be fully understood. Because of this, conflict is the inevitable and natural result of authentic relationships with Christ and among the members of Christ’s body. As a result, Paradoxy does not shy away from real differences. Rather it requires that each of us confidently offer the truth that we know, with humility, knowing that bumping into people with different understandings than our own could expand our understanding.

Understanding of Conversion

Another difference among these three approaches to Orthodoxy lies in the way they understand the conversion experience. You might think that there is only one biblically correct way to define conversion. At first glance it might seem that way, since the same English root word is used for the word conversion and for related words such as the noun convert (as in “a new convert”) and the verb to convert (as in “to convert to a different religion” or “to convert another person to a new religion”). But in the original Greek, different words with different roots are used in different contexts and carry different connotations. The differences between the way Orthoproxy and Orthopraxy think about conversion relate closely to the connotations of the different words.

Perhaps closest to the way Orthoproxy understands conver-sion are the connotations of the biblical words proselute and epistropheo. Proselute (Acts 6:5,13:43) means what it sounds like: in its noun form


it means “proselyte” or “a person who has adopted a new religion,” and in its verb form it can mean “to adopt a new religion” or “to pros-elytize,” that is, to encourage someone to adopt one’s own religion. Closely related to this is the connotation of the word epistropheo (lit., a turning), used in the Acts of the Apostles (15:3) to describe the mass conversion of Gentiles from idol worship to the worship of the one God. Similarly, Orthoproxy tends to view the conversion experience as a change of religions (turning away from whatever you believed before and swearing allegiance to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior). In other words, conversion starts from the outside and leads to a change on the inside: a change that then results in outward commitment.

Meanwhile, Orthopraxy’s view of conversion is in some ways similar to and in some ways very different from Orthoproxy’s. Closest to the way Orthoproxy understands conversion are the connotations of the biblical words metanoeo and epistrephe. If epistrepho sounds similar to epistrophe, it’s because the two words share a common root. Epistrephe (Acts 26:20) literally means “to turn” and when it is used in terms of a faith experience, it often follows the word metanoeo (Acts 26:20), which literally means “to change one’s mind (or heart)” and is often translated as “to repent.” The sequence, then, is a change of heart followed by a change in direction or action. In like manner, Orthopraxy tends to view conversion as an inward change of heart that leads to outer life changes. While both Orthoproxy and Orthopraxy involve a turning, Orthopraxy’s movement—in contrast to Orthoproxy—is from the inside out. Because of its understanding of the process as an internal one, Orthopraxy resists engaging in evangelism activities for fear of interfering with the internal freedom of the individual. There is a joke about my own denomination that probably would apply to many others in this regard: “The Episcopal idea of evangelism is like putting an aquarium next to the ocean and hoping for fish to jump in.”

P A R A D O X Y156

Paradoxy’s understanding of the process of conversion builds on the writings of the apostle Paul. In doing so, it navigates a course between the outside-in understanding and the inside-out one, incorporating aspects of both. For example, it would appear that Paul saw the process of conversion neither as an exclusively outward change of behavior or lifestyle, nor as an exclusively inward change of heart or mind. Rather, the word he uses to describe it (metamorphoo—Romans 12:2; 2 Corinthians 3:18) comes from the same root as the term metamorphosis, implying a transformation of the whole person that worked both ways at once, and is the same word the gospel writers used to describe the transfiguration of Jesus (Matthew 17:2; Mark 9:2). In fact, it would be safe to say that Paul did not think of the process of coming to faith in Christ as an individual conversion, but as a process of transformation, moving the individual, the community, and ultimately the world, toward completion and wholeness. In Paul’s letters to the church in Corinth, he said: “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Corinthians 5:17, italics are the author’s). And of his role in the process, he said: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:6).

Paradoxy views the process of coming to faith in much the same way: as a process of transformation that takes place within the context of community. By living their lives in the love of Christ and by sharing the stories of their lives, the members of the community plant seeds of Christ’s love in these people, knowing that the seeds don’t belong to them but were only given to them to share, and letting go of their control of the seeds they have planted. Over time the members of the community, by those same lives lived in love, water the seeds, knowing that it is not their job to control the way the seeds grow, and leaving that to God. Meanwhile, God is working through those seeds not only


to transform each individual believer into a unique member of the body of Christ, but also to transform the body of Christ itself into a more complete reflection of Christ, and to transform the world more and more into the shape of the kingdom of God.

● Make a friend, be a friend, bring a friend to Christ.85

A slogan from CursilloAn international multidenominational renewal movement

Approach to Relevance (Remaining Attract ive to the People of a Changing Culture)

From its very inception, the church has struggled with the issue of relevance. We have always existed as a subset of the larger human society: a living society with a constantly evolving popular culture. Thus, the question has always been: “As the culture changes, and people’s interests and attention change with it, what do we do to keep them interested and involved, so that they might ultimately find a relationship with Jesus Christ?” A related question with which the church has struggled is: “How does the church maintain its influence on people within the culture?” This question, bequeathed to the church by its Constantinian heritage of Christendom, is based on the assumption that by maintaining influence on the culture, we can influence what interests the people within the culture, predisposing them to consider what the church has to offer.

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● Come, follow me . . . and I will send you out to fish for people.

Jesus of Nazareth (Matthew 4:19, TNIV)

Using Jesus’ analogy of evangelism as catching fish, the question becomes: “If the fishes’ tastes change, how do we fishers adapt our bait?” When Orthoproxy churches and Orthopraxy churches ask this question, they come up with very different answers, the reason being that they have very different ideas as to what part of what they offer is the bait (the part that can be adapted to the fishes’ changing tastes) and what part is the hook (the part that pretty much has to be swallowed whole).

For Orthoproxy churches, the hook—the part that is held constant regardless of cultural changes—is comprised of the church’s doctrines and teachings. These are what they hold to be foundational: the key to relationship with Jesus Christ. Understandably, Orthoproxy churches are loath to adapt these truths to the culture. Some are wary of modernizing even the language by which the teachings are expressed. But they are more willing to adapt the manner in which they express their worship to be consistent with popular musical expressions. They are often quick to adapt popular musical styles (e.g., praise bands), entertainment mediums (e.g., big screen video), and business methods (e.g., PowerPoint sermon presentations). For Orthoproxy churches, teaching is the hook that the fish must swallow whole, while worship is the bait to attract the fish to the hook.

For Orthopraxy churches, worship is the hook, since it is in worship that their foundational truths are experienced, and it is the application of these truths in life that are the key to deepening one’s relationship to Christ. As a result, Orthopraxy churches tend to be keen to maintain the uniformity and continuity of their forms


of worship, and so are more resistant to adapting them to popular cultural norms. What Orthopraxy churches use as the bait—that which can be adapted to changing cultural tastes—are the language in which the church’s teachings are expressed and, to the extent that they reflect a particular culture, the teachings themselves. For example, I am aware of one congregation that tried to achieve this by going to great effort to develop alternate, modern English definitions of theological concepts (sin, savior, faith, grace, etc.).

Paradoxy offers a different kind of fishing. For Paradoxy churches, worship and teaching are secondary to relationship with Jesus Christ. The analogy of bait and hook fails here. Authentic relationship cannot be called the bait because it does not need to be adapted to suit the changing interests of people in the culture. It cannot be called the hook because it does not need to be baited to make it attractive. The correct analogy is the very water in which the fish live and move and have their being. This may sound abstract and intangible, but it is really quite simple in practice: it simply means accepting people as they are and encouraging them to express who they are. It requires that church leadership model these qualities both individually and communicates them corporately. In my congregation, as I mentioned, we adopted the credo “A Place to Belong, A Place to Become” to remind ourselves of our commitment to this principle. People have a need for acceptance as part of a community. Too often, the acceptance they are offered in church must be purchased at the cost of their authenticity, as they encounter subtle messages about how they must conform. Church should be about taking off masks rather than putting them on. Most people already have to wear too many masks in the rest of their lives without also having to wear one at church. The opportunity to engage in authentic relationship is a powerful draw, because it meets a deep human need.

P A R A D O X Y160

Leadership, Discipleship, and the Role of the Leader

These different understandings of what it means to be church also have an impact on issues of leadership and discipleship within a community.

The goal of leadership in Orthoproxy is to keep the people of the community doctrinally unified—that is, following the community’s understanding of orthodoxy in belief and practice. The goal of discipleship is obedience to God, specifically, obedience to the Lordship of Christ through obedience to the leaders of the community. The role of the leader is to provide direction by exercising authority. Or as one pastor put it:

● My role is to make sure all the people in the boatare rowing in the right direction.86

Anonymous Clergyperson In response to the question: “How do you view your role as a pastor?”

The goal of leadership in Orthopraxy is to influence the people of the community to live their lives in love according to the example of Jesus Christ. The goal of discipleship is service: serving Christ in those around them, both in the community of faith and in the community in which they live. The role of the leader, then, is to provide direction by exerting influence. Or as a different pastor put it:

● My role is to point out opportunities for ministryand encourage people to engage in them.87

Anonymous Clergyperson In response to the question: “How do you view your role as a pastor?”


For Paradoxy, the goal of leadership is to call the people of the community to ongoing discernment about what God is calling them to do, both as individuals and as a spiritual community. The goal of discipleship is to follow Christ’s call: the gathered community listening for what God is calling it to do with the gifts God has given it, and stepping into that call. This is, in effect, an ongoing visioning process, grounded in mutual discernment by the leadership in connection with the community, based in part on the constellation of spiritual gifts God has brought into the community. The role of the leader in Paradoxy is a cyclical pattern of invitation to discernment, facilitation and visioning, articulating the emerging vision, then reminding the community of (and occasionally questioning the community about) the vision as it emerges. Or as a different pastor (me) put it:

● My role is to articulate the vision of the communityand to help people discern what Christ is calling them to doto make that vision a reality.88

Nonanonymous Clergyperson In response to the question: “How do you view your role as a pastor?”

While the above discussion of leadership has been framed—for the sake of clarity—in terms of the role of the ordained leader, the lay leadership in a congregation plays similar roles in each of the three approaches.

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Teaching, Preaching, and Liturgy

How a spiritual community approaches orthodoxy, and how it understands the nature of truth has a direct impact on the goals and methods of teaching, preaching, and liturgy. They affect how the leadership of the community approaches biblical exegesis. And when the job of unpacking the Scripture is done, it affects how the teacher, preacher, or liturgist interprets Scripture to the community in education, sermons, and worship. So let’s look at how these three approaches would unpack a biblical text. What are they seeking from the text? What questions do they bring to it?

Orthoproxy comes to a biblical text seeking the answers it believes God has placed there. The kinds of questions that are asked are deductive in nature: What principles does this particular biblical text teach us about (doctrine, issue, problem, behavior, etc.)? How can we apply these biblical principles in our lives?

Orthopraxy comes to the biblical text seeking its deepest and most universal meaning. The questions it brings to the text are more inductive in nature. What are the issues I am facing in my life? In what way is this text relevant to those issues?

Paradoxy’s approach to biblical exegesis is different from either of its companions. It does not so much bring questions to the text as allow the questions to arise as the reader “inhabits” the text—imagining him or herself into the story and imagining the story into her or himself. The questions that then arise are interactive in nature: “What is God asking me to ask the text?” and “What is God asking me through the text?”



John 16:12–13, THE MESSAGE

“I still have many things to tell you, but you cannot handle them now. But when the Friend comes, the Spirit of the Truth, he will take you by the hand and guide you into all the truth there is. He won’t draw attention to himself, but will make sense out of what is about to happen and, indeed, out of all that I have done and said.”

Might Christ have something to say to your church that he has not already said? In what ways can the Spirit of Truth be your friend as you explore the difficult or unfamiliar?

●Q u e s t i o n s t o C o n s i d e r

1 Review the summary table on the following page, and then complete the Church Paradigm Inventory that follows. Discuss its implica-tions for you, your church, your denomination, and the church at large.

2 Choose an item from the inventory on which you would like to see your church change from where it currently is. Consider what might have to change for your church to move in that direction. Discuss this with the rest of the group.

T A B L E 7 . 1K E Y D I F F E R E N C E S I N T H E O L O G Y, E C C L E S I 0 L O G Y,

PROPOSITIONAL ORTHODOXY (ORTHOPROXY)

Ultimate Truth is found in one religion

Christianity is THE WAY to that Truth

Assent to broad spectrum of doctrine

Kerygma/didache given equal weight

Individually confessional

Truth is propositional and exclusive

(The Truth ABOUT Jesus Christ)

Doctrinal agreement/uniformity of belief

Conformity to church’s teachings

Conflict is evidence of dysfunction

One side must be wrong

Compromise is discouraged

Resolve by conversion or exclusion

Proseleo/aparche (externally encouraged

change of allegiance)

First proseleo/aparche

Then koinonia (full fellowship)

Conversional/proselytizing (inviting to

convert to Christianity or “orthodoxy”)

Making converts

Tell the story

Require a “yes/no” decision.

Worship is bait; teaching is hook

Opportunity to defend/convert

Keeping people doctrinally unified

Obedience

Authority

Seeking answers from the text

What does the Bible say about ______?

What does it tell me to do?

Pastoral Epistles (to learn the doctrines)

Deductive (outside-in)

- Identify Scriptural principles.

- How do these principles apply

to our lives?

CHARACTERISTIC

View of Religion

Approach to Orthodoxy

Theological Basisfor Christian CommunityApproach to Conflict

Understanding of Conversion

Relationship of Conversion to Community (Koinonia)Evangelism Approach

Evangelist’s Role

Approach to RelevanceEcumenical StanceLeadership ApproachDiscipleship ApproachRole of the LeaderExegetical Approach

Biblical EmphasisDominant Mode of Preaching/Teaching

ETHICAL ORTHODOXY(ORTHOPRAXY)

Deepest Truth is shared by all religions

Christianity is THE BEST WAY to that Truth

Ethical action

Acting in love

Communally creedal

Truth is universal and inclusive

(The Truth OF Jesus Christ)

Ethical agreement/uniformity of purpose

Conformity to Jesus Christ’s ethic of love

Conflict is evidence of dysfunction

At the deepest level we all are the same

If possible, change the subject, but if not . . .

Focus on agreement, ignore disagreement

Metanoeo (change of mind/direction)

Aversion to conversion, per se

Koinonia offered w/out condition

Inner faith experience leads to metanoeo

Conversational (inviting to conversation

about the spiritual life)

Making friends

Tell the story

Call to repentance from injustice

Teaching is bait; worship is hook

Opportunity to seek common ground

Keeping people engaged in serving God

Service

Catalyst

Seeking the universal meaning of the text

What questions do I have of the text?

In what way is it relevant to my life?

Gospels (to learn from Jesus’ example)

Inductive (inside-out)

- Identify our deepest needs.

- How do Bible/church teachings meet

them?

INCARNATIONAL ORTHODOXY (PARADOXY)

Religion is irrelevant

Christ IS Way and Truth and Life

Kerygmatic (core, paradoxical dogmas)

Kerygma over didache

Communally creedal

Truth is relational and collective

(The Truth IS Jesus Christ)

Bound by Christ’s Love in common worship

Being transformed by God’s power/mystery

Conflict is natural result of authenticity

All of us are a little wrong

Resolve by prayerful engagement and open-

ness to transformation by Christ’s love

Metamorphoo (transformation brought about

by relationship with Christ)

First koinonia (full fellowship)

Then fellowship catalyzes metamorphoo

Relational (inviting to relationship with

Christ and the Body of Christ)

Making (and being) disciples (lit., learners)

Tell the story

Invite into community

Neither bait nor hook; make friends with fish

Opportunity to engage in relationship

Keeping people engaged in discernment

Call

Visionary

In dialogue with the text (like Midrash)

What questions do I have of the text?

What questions does it ask of me?

Gospels (to tell the story)

Narrative/transformative (two-way)

Identify common issues: salvation story/us.

What is God calling us to be/become?

A N D M I S S I O N A L S T R A T E G Y

C H A P T E R 8

Paradigm Pathways:Which Reality Is Your

Church Living Into?

A Church Paradigm Inventory

INSTRUCTIONS:

For each of the fourteen questions below, circle the response that best describes your church. Give your “first glance” response (do not think too long about any question).

Transfer your answers to the scoring guide and tally the number of answers in each column.

Respond to the Scripture reflection and discussion questions at the end of chapter 7.

1 Which statement best describes your church’s view of religion?a. Ultimate truth is found in one religion (Christianity is the

).b. Deepest truth is shared by all religions (Christianity is

).c. Religion is irrelevant for following Christ (Christ is the

).

P A R A D I G M P A T H WA Y S 167

2 Which statement best describes your church’s understanding of truth?a. Truth is universal and inclusive.b. Truth is relational and collective.c. Truth is propositional and exclusive.

3 Which statement best describes your church’s approach to orthodoxy?a. Orthodoxy is right opinion: of Christ, of God, of the church’s

traditional teachings.b. Orthodoxy is right response: appropriate to the incarnation

of Christ.c. Orthodoxy is right practice: of the love ethic of Christ.

4 Which statement best describes your church’s understanding of the theological basis for Christian community?a. Christian community is grounded on the experience of

Christ’s love in common worship and the experience of mutual transformation brought about by that love.

b. Christian community is grounded on ethical agreement, uniformity of purpose, and obedience/conformity to Jesus Christ’s ethic of love.

c. Christian community is grounded on doctrinal agreement, uniformity of belief, and obedience/conformity to the church’s teachings

5 How does your church interpret the existence of conflict within a congregation?a. Conflict is the result of error (one side must be wrong).b. Conflict is the result of human nature (we are all a little bit

wrong).c. Conflict is the result of misperception (at the deepest level

we all are the same).

P A R A D O X Y168

6 When conflict exists, how does your church respond to it?a. Change the subject: downplay disagreement, focus on

areas of agreement, agree to disagree, exclude the conflict from conversation.

b. Change the person (or the venue): correct the errant party (or parties), if the person won’t change, exclude them from fellowship.

c. Change the context: correct the interpretation of conflict, explore areas of agreement and disagreement, exclude exclusion as an option for resolution.

7 Which statement best describes your church’s understanding of conversion?a. Conversion is an internal change of heart and mind, that

catalyzes profound changes of the direction in the per-son’s life.

b. Conversion is a process of change that works from the outside in and from the inside out transforming the whole person.

c. Conversion is an externally encouraged commitment of life and belief that catalyzes profound changes of heart and mind.

8 Which statement best describes your church’s understanding of the process of including newcomers?a. First conversion, then fellowship.b. First full fellowship, then fellowship catalyzes transfor-

mation.c. Community offered with few conditions, then the inner

faith experience leads to the person’s change of heart.


9 Which statement best describes your church’s approach to relevance?a. Teaching is bait, worship is hook b. Worship is bait, teaching is hook.c. Neither worship nor teaching are bait or hook.

10 Which statement best describes your church’s ecumenical/interfaith stance?a. Ecumenical/interfaith relationships are an opportunity to

engage in relationship.b. Ecumenical/interfaith relationships are an opportunity to

seek common ground.c. Ecumenical/interfaith relationships are an opportunity to

defend orthodoxy.

11 Which statement best describes your church’s approach to leadership?a. Leader as catalyst: engage people in serving God.b. Leader as authority: keep people doctrinally unified.c. Leader as midwife: engage people in discerning/following

a shared vision.

12 Which statement best describes your church’s understanding of the goal of discipleship?a. The goal of discipleship is learning to obey.b. The goal of discipleship is learning to hear and obey one’s

unique call to serve.c. The goal of discipleship is learning to serve.

13 Which statement best describes your church’s understanding of biblical exegesis?a. Seeking to search and be searched by the text.b. Seeking the deeper, universal meaning of the text.c. Seeking answers from the text.

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14 What statement best describes the questions your church brings to the Scripture?a. What issues are present both in the salvation story and

in us? What is God calling us to be/become through our interaction with the salvation story?

b. What principles are established by the Scripture, as understood by the church’s traditional teaching? And how do these principles apply to life?

c. What are our deepest needs? How does our understanding of the Scriptures help us to meet them?


A CHURCH PARADIGM INVENTORY SCORING GUIDE

1. For each question, circle the same answer you circled on the inventory.

2. Tally the numbers of answers circled in each column.

COLUMNS 1 2 3

a c b

c b a

a b c

c a b

a b c

b c a c b a

a b c

b c a

c a b

b c a

a b c

c a b

b a c

QUESTIONS

1. Which statement best describes your church’s view of religion?2. Which statement best describes your church’s

understanding of truth?3. Which statement best describes your church’s approach to orthodoxy?4. Which statement best describes your church’s

understanding of the theological basis for Christian community?

5. How does your church interpret the existence of conflict within a congregation?

6. When conflict exists, how does your church respond to it?7. Which statement best describes your church’s

understanding of conversion?8. Which statement best describes your church’s

understanding of the process of including newcomers?9. Which statement best describes your church’s approach to relevance?10. Which statement best describes your church’s

ecumenical/interfaith stance?11. Which statement best describes your church’s

approach to leadership?12. Which statement best describes your church’s

understanding of the goal of discipleship?13. Which statement best describes your church’s

understanding of biblical exegesis?14. Which statement best describes the questions your

church brings to the Scripture?

Tally the number of circles in each column and write the total hereÆ

P A R A D O X Y172

1. Write your column 1 score here (this is your preference for Orthoproxy): __________

2. Write your column 2 score here (this is your preference for Paradoxy): __________

3. Write your column 3 score here (this is your preference for Orthopraxy): __________

Record your insights below:

C O N C L U S I O N

Alpha and Omega— Beginning and End

(and Beginning)

We’ve Come to the End of a Voyage of Discovery . . .

At the beginning of this book I invited you to join me on an explorer’s journey. I bid you to leave behind the familiar and comfortable shores of the ways we have always thought about the nature of church—to venture out beyond the ways our various denominations have thought about church for hundreds of years: out beyond the ways the church has defined itself for thousands of years—since shortly after its beginning: out beyond the certainty of Foundationalism: out beyond the power of Christendom: out beyond the safety of religion.

I Appreciate Your Trust . . .

If you have come this far with me, I really appreciate your trust. Not so much that you trusted me, but that you trusted God’s faithfulness enough to take the risk of going on a journey with a guide who is not 100% sure that he knows where we will end

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up, or even that his compass is 100% accurate. In fact, the only thing he knew was that the old paradigms—the old ways of being church—were not taking us there anymore.

● The feeling remains that God is on the journey, too.89

St. Teresa of Avila Spanish mystic, Carmelite nun, and writer of the Counter-Reformation, 1515–1582

A Journey Worth Taking . . .

We have been seeking out a new paradigm of church—a new way of being church. We have been mapping out the rough boundaries and contours of a New World of church. It has been our hope on this journey that this hitherto undiscovered country might be a place in which conservative and liberal and in-between Christians can find common ground. A promised land in which they can reside together in their common relationship to Christ, without sacrificing the integrity of their respective beliefs. A sanctuary place in which the battling factions of Christianity can lay down their arms—or at least fight fair, with healthier rules of engagement.

A Journey that Is Not Over . . .

I wish I could assure you that we have reached our final destination. But I think it is more likely that we have only reached the coastline of this undiscovered country, and only begun to chart its broad outlines. It will likely take many more journeys

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over many more years by many more explorers before we begin to gain some confidence in the accuracy of our maps. And we will likely get our feet dirty and make a few wrong turns as we press into the interior on foot to gain a more complete picture of the terrain. Yet we have realized that a way does exist for us to take—and survive—these journeys together: a radical middle pathway that runs between conservative Christianity and liberal Christianity: a way that balances elements of both in a paradoxical tension: an incarnational orthodoxy, a paradoxical orthodoxy, or Paradoxy. This book is not the last word . . . or even the one after that.90 We have only begun to explore the practical implications of this radical middle way as compared to its liberal and conservative counterparts. There is much more to explore, much more common ground to map. Yet even with these preliminary insights, we have begun to understand that our conservative-liberal divide is ultimately a false distinction.

We Are Not Alone . . .

We are not the only explorers on these seas. There are many others out here who have left the old paradigms of church behind to seek a new way of being church: Generous Orthodoxy,91 Radical Orthodoxy,92 Paleo-Orthodoxy,93 Quantum Spirituality,94 Quantum Theology,95 The Great Emergence,96 Emerging Church,97 Deep Church,98 Fresh Expressions.99 All of these movements—and the many individual Christian leaders and communities applying their concepts—are expressions of a desire to explore the boundaries of a new paradigm of Christian community.

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And Perhaps Only the Language Is Truly New . . .

As I have presented the concepts outlined in this book to various groups—conservative and liberal, clergy and lay, church planters, redevelopers, and local church pastors—there is one theme I hear repeated time and again. After they have had a chance to hear, consider, and wrestle with ideas such as these, these people speak of having for the first time a language to express a deep yearning they have been feeling for a long time: a deep desire for a unity that transcends our differences. Maybe the basis for our unity is already there and we only need to find the words that will allow us to think it. Maybe the way is already there—deeply coded into the DNA of the church—and we are not explorers after all but midwives, helping the church to bring that new way to birth.

● All the way to heaven is heaven.For He said, “I am the way.”100

St. Catherine of Siena Christian Mystic, 1347–80

A F T E R W O R D

What are the prospects for success of Ken Howard’s panoramic blueprint for the next future of Christianity?

Paradoxy is, after all, an optimistic plan for transcending present divisions—terminal divisions in my experience—portraying a way forward that majors on love and calls Christians back to basics.

But what are its prospects for success?They are very good for the coming generation. This is because

Ken elevates the law of love over the love of law. He underscores the core element in Christianity: God’s one-way love for sufferers and sinners. This is Christianity’s core element, its defining characteristic, if there is one. Jesus means welcome. Jesus means grace. Jesus means forgiveness. Jesus means healing.

Jesus also means freedom. That was Ernst Kaesemann’s phrase not so long ago, and I believe it holds. People aren’t looking for new forms of imprisonment, new ways to inhabit better straitjackets. Yes, there is probably always some hankering after submission—our child nature’s longing to be told what to do. But deep down, and for sure in the present day, people long for freedom. Christianity’s initiative to absolve and therefore give primacy of place to people in pain as well as offenders creates fellowships of freedom. We really don’t want to return to the house of bondage, even if it looks like we sometimes do.

Ken’s program has good prospects for success, and not just because of its major in grace. It also understands that organism has got to be set over organization. This is crucial. Institutional Christianity carries a big black eye these days, whether you con-sider the abuse scandal in one large section of the worldwide church or the aftermath of “culturewar” in another of its sections.

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The war in this country between ideological liberals and ideological conservatives came down to a no-win future. I think of the English rock ‘n’ roller Nick Lowe, and his song, “I Live on a Battlefield.” We have been living on a battlefield for a long time—almost my whole ministry of thirty-five years. But it started earlier than that.

I was reminded in Ken’s book of Emil Brunner’s The Misunderstanding of the Church that was published in 1951. Brunner’s argument, which no one was able to refute and which was therefore quietly consigned to oblivion, runs parallel to Ken Howard’s: Jesus had no intention of founding an institution. He was rather intending a movement of invisibly led characters called out of pain and personal distress by Jesus’ intangible but immanent message of urgent love. We can hope that this new book will not suffer the same fate of forgetfulness that buried Brunner’s somewhere deep in the Marianas Trench.

There is another reason to be hopeful about Paradoxy: it is a little like Good to Great, the 2001 book by Jim Collins about successful companies. Collins argued that you create the job around the person and his or her gifts, rather than trying to squeeze people and their individual talents into a formal (and often arbitrary) “job description.” You start, in other words, with a gifted person, and work outward from there. The gifted person creates the job, in other words, and its potentialities. Success proceeds from there. Collins observed that successful businesses usually begin, and also grow, from an individual and their gifts. Then the “spirit,” as it were, creates and develops the direction of the business. He demonstrated this proposition almost beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Ken Howard understands that Christian churches and people need to develop in their own way, organically, as it were, without a lot of inherited preconceptions about structure. Will Ken’s idea be received? I don’t know. It never has been, historically, except in

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the cyclical renewal movements that stir things up for awhile and then become either domesticated or exhausted. Even so, Paradoxy understands how living things sustain themselves. I believe Ken is exactly right, even if his doctrine of natural and spontaneous development is resisted by the structures he seeks to renew.

Let me offer one final afterthought about Ken Howard’s bold book. It may not work with the former generation, the generation just now passing, although most of whom are still alive. The “liberals” of the “recent unpleasantness” seem pretty determined. So appear the “conservatives” of the recent unpleasantness. In his once famous novel By Love Possessed, James Gould Cozzens invoked a basic principle of politics: never force people to define their position in such a way that they cannot later compromise. The culture-war position-taking that came out of ideological conflict in the church—and religious conflict can be as raw as it gets—became a drawing of lines that has not, so far, allowed for much concession. The passionate desire for “clarity” that possessed conservatives and liberals didn’t allow for a quiet, willing demolition of walls between parties.

This means that Ken’s inspired program may not fully succeed with recent veterans, left or right. But I believe it can and should succeed with our children and grandchildren. In a way, it has to! If Ken’s barrier-breaking program does not succeed with them, then, in a way, Christianity itself may prove unable to be a future, at least in the secular West.

Looking back on Ken’s Paradoxy, from the standpoint, say of the year 2525, I hope it may be said then what T.S. Eliot said in “East Coker” concerning the “next step” of chastened experience: “Old men ought to be explorers.”

—The Very Rev. Dr. Paul Zahl

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

There are many people and institutions I would like to acknowledge for their contributions to the task of making this book a reality.

I want to thank the wardens and vestry of St. Nicholas Episcopal Church for encouraging me to take quiet time away from the busyness of a relatively new church plant, so that I might write. I thank my former associate rector, Alison Quin, who covered for me during two successive summer research sabbaticals. And I am deeply grateful to the community of St. Nicholas Church for being a living laboratory of Christian community for more than a decade.

I am thoroughly indebted to the people who served at various times on my book review and discussion workgroup—Bruce and Marjorie Campbell, Susan Culbertson and Steve Wright, Carolyn and Terry Deibel, Becki Hardie, Rhee Howard, David Maglott and Charlotte Rogers, Ron and Rose Mahan, Janet Marshall, Barbara Miles, and Lynette Telford—who labored with me over five years to both develop the concept for the book and who reviewed, discussed, and offered constructive criticism on chapter after chapter. I am also thankful for the dozens of friends and colleagues from various denominations and points across the liberal-conservative theological spectrum who reviewed and commented on online drafts.

I am grateful to Phyllis Tickle, Brian McLaren, and Paul Zahl for their reassurance that the concepts in this book were worth writing about, and who became my mentors, then my colleagues, and then finally my friends. I am especially thankful to Brian for his kind words in the foreword, to Paul for the gracious way in

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which he composed the afterword, and to Phyllis for bringing my manuscript to the attention of Paraclete Press. I am thankful that the people of Paraclete Press were willing to take a chance on an unpublished author in the midst of difficult economic times, and I am especially grateful to Jon Sweeney, whose incisive editing skills left my manuscript infinitely more readable than when he found it, and to Ron Minor, whose superior copy editing skills saved me from potentially embarrassing factual errors.

I offer my sincere appreciation to Tom Brackett, missioner for church planting and redevelopment for the Episcopal Church, and the participants of Plant My Church 2009, who endured my first PowerPoint presentation on the concepts outlined in the book; and to James Derkits, assistant rector, and the people of St. Mark’s Church in Houston, Texas, for the opportunity to present these concepts at their annual Epiphany lecture. Special thanks to Robert Cornner, rector of Christ Church, Redondo Beach, California, for pilot-testing draft chapters, biblical reflections, and discussion questions from the book in the church’s Lent 2010 book study group.

I give thanks for the institutions that gave me firsthand access to original manuscripts, content experts, and historical sites. These included: St. George’s College, Jerusalem; the Diocesan Church House at Glastonbury Abbey; and Westcott House College at Cambridge University, who sponsored me as a Visiting Research Scholar so that I might gain access to the ancient manuscripts at the Cambridge University Library.

Finally, I save my most profound appreciation for those whose attention not only enabled me to write a better book, but also enabled me to become a better person: my friend Paul Lebel, who introduced me to a relationship with Jesus Christ more than thirty years ago, and my friend Steve Holloway, whose friendship helped to deepen that relationship. John Jordon and Verna Dozier: dear

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mentors from opposite sides of the conservative-liberal theological continuum. My son, Jonathan, whose skeptical comments and questions kept me honest. My daughter, Mary Beth, whose editing and assistance on formatting and graphics were invaluable. And most of all, my wife, Rhee, who read and commented on more versions of the manuscript than anyone, and who put up with thousands of hours when it must have seemed that I was giving more face time to my laptop than to her, yet somehow managed to encourage me to continue to write.

—Ken Howard

N O T E S

1. Kirk Hadaway and Penny Marler, “Growth and Decline in the Mainline,” in Faith in America: Changes, Challenges, New Directions, Charles H. Lippy, ed. (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger 2006), 1–24.

2. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, III.i.11; V.1xvii.6; cf. Alison Quin, Hooker’s Understanding of the Authority of Scripture as a Resource for Anglicans Today. (Washington, DC: Episcopal Diocese of Washington, 2000).

3. This title has regularly been applied to the Presiding Bishop on a number of conservative blogs, including: Stand Firm in Faith (http://www.standfirminfaith.com), TitusOneNine (http://www.kendallharmon.net), VirtueOnLine (http://www.virtueonline.org), and others.

4. Hans Frei, “Response to ‘Narrative Theology’: An Evangelical Appraisal” Trinity Journal 8 (Spring 1987): 21–24. Note: Frei used the term generosity in the sense that it is often used in the New Testament: as “charity” or “love.”

5. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

6. E.P. Sanders, Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah: Five Studies (Philadelphia: Trinity Press, 1990), 323.

7. Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished Christian (El Cahon, CA: Zondervan, 2004), 28.

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8. Larry Norman, on a T-shirt produced by his own record com-pany (Soquel, CA: Phydeaux Records). Norman was a Christian rocker who began performing in the early seventies.

9. Joseph Priestley, Memoirs of Dr. Joseph Priestley. (London: J. Johnson, 1806), 372.

10. The doctrine of adiaphora (lit., “things that do not mat-ter”). Or, as it is expressed in this statement attributed to Augustine: “In the essentials, unity; in nonessentials, free-dom; in all things, love” (cf. 1 Corinthians 8).

11. paradigm. (n.d.). The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Retrieved November 27, 2006 from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=paradigm&r=66.

12. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

13. Ibid., 122.

14. Madison Peters, The Wit and Wisdom of the Talmud (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1900), 64.

15. Ronald Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail—and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 68–78. Numbers points out that several of the things the church is popularly believed to have done to Galileo—such as imprisonment and torture—are myths.

16. Thomas Williams, Anselm: Basic Writings (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2007), 75.

17. Christendom. (n.d.). The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Retrieved January 19, 2007 from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/christendom.

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18. Christendom. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. III. Retrieved January 19, 2007 from http://www.NewAdvent.org/cathen/03699b.htm

19. Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion. National Public Radio, WAMU, Washington, DC (date unknown).

20. Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989). The authors associate the rise of Christendom/Constantinianism with the Edict of Milan, by which Constantine legalized Christianity, paving the way for its eventual recognition as the official religion of the Empire.

21. One could take this line of reasoning too far, of course. Tertullian eschewed the virtues of Imperial Roman culture in at least one important respect, writing (in De idolatria, 19:1–3): “But now inquiry is made about this point, whether a believer may turn himself unto military service, and whether the military can be admitted unto the faith . . . how will a Christian man war, nay, how will he serve even in peace, without a sword, which the Lord has taken away? . . . by disarming Peter [the Lord disarmed] every soldier.” The Fathers of the Church. Retrieved July 15, 2010 from http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0302.htm

22. Hauerwas and Willimon (1989), The authors describe the impact of Christendom on the relationship of church and culture after Constantine; James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001) describes the impact of Christendom on the relation-ship between the church and the Jews after Constantine; Ken Howard, Jewish Christianity in the Early Church (Alexandria: Virginia Theological Seminary, 1993) describes how the

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church’s concept of itself shifted between its birth and the time of Constantine.

23. Terrance Rynne, Gandhi and Jesus: The Saving Power of Non-Violence (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008); André Trocmé, Jesus and the Non-Violent Revolution. (Farmington, PA: Plough, 2007); Walter Wink, Jesus and Non-Violence: A Third Way (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003); Walter Wink, “Turning the Other Cheek: What Did Jesus Really Mean?” Catholic New Times (February 13, 2005).

24. Neil Elliott, “Revisiting Augustine and Just-War Theory,” The Witness Magazine; cf. retrieved July 15, 2010 from http://thewitness.org/article.php?id=275; St. Augustine. The City of God. Chps 12, 13, 15, retrieved July 15, 2010 from website: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1201.htm.

25. Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millenium (New York: Random House, 1999), 42.

26. Sulpicius Severus, The Life of St. Martin, 4, quoted in H.H. Scullard, Martin of Tours: Apostle of Gaul (London: Deansgate and Ridgefield, 1890), 16.

27. George Hunter, The Celtic Way of Evangelism: How Christianity Can Reach the West... Again (Nashville: Abingdon, 2000); cf. David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999).

28. Example: The forced expulsion from their land of the Cherokee Nation, a predominantly Christian tribe, resulting in the infamous Trail of Tears, more than decimated their population.

29. Orson Scott Card, Past Watch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (New York: Tor, 1995).

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30. Kirk Hadaway, Penny Marler, and Mark Chaves, “What the Polls Don’t Show: A Closer Look at U.S. Church Attendance,” American Sociological Review, 58, no. 6 (December 1993) 741–52; Peter Brierley, Pulling Out of the Nosedive: A Contemporary Picture of Church Going—What the 2005 English Church Census Reveals (London: Christian Research, 2006).

31. Foundationalism. (n.d.) Encyclopædia Britannica: Retrieved from website July 19, 2010: http://www.britannica.com/eb/checked/topic/1373315/foundationalism.

32. Stanley Grenz and John Frank, Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Post-Modern Context (Louisville, KY: Knox, 2001).

33. Quoted in Grenz and Franke, Beyond Foundationalism, 31. Note also the Eurocentrism of this quote from Descartes, over-looking as it does the Great Schism between Eastern and Western Christianity centuries earlier.

34. For a more complete discussion of the impact of quantum physics on the understanding of reality, truth, religion, and spirituality, the reader might consider the following sources: Walter Anderson, Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be: Theatrical Politics, Ready-to-Wear Religion, Global Myths, Primitive Chic, and Other Wonders of the Post-Modern World (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1990); Walter Anderson, ed., The Truth about the Truth: De-Confusing and Re-Constructing the Post-Modern World. (New York: Putnam, 1995); Peter Hodgson, Theology and Modern Physics (Hants, UK: Ashgate, 2006); Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Robert Russell, Theological Issues in Light of Physics and Cosmology (Berkley: Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 1997); Ken Wilber, Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the

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World’s Great Physicists (Boston: Shambhala, 2001); Richard Wolfson, Einstein’s Relativity and the Quantum Revolution: Modern Physics for Non-scientists (Chantilly, VA: Teaching Co., 2001).

35. S.I. Hiyakawa, Language in Thought and Action (New York: Harcourt, 1991), 122.

36. Avi Weiss, “Black Fire on White Fire,” Hebrew Institute of Riverdale (http://www.hir.org), September 28–29, 2002, /23 Tishrei 5763; cf. Betty Rojtman, Black Fire on White Fire: An Essay on Jewish Hermeneutics, from Midrash to Kabbalah (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, God’s Echo: Exploring Scripture with Midrash (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2007).

37. Religion. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Retrieved March 15, 2007, from Dictionary.com website: http://dic-tionary.reference.com/browse/religion.

38. Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

39. Everett Ferguson, Church History Volume One: From Christ to Pre-Reformation: The Rise and Growth of the Church in Its Cultural, Intellectual, and Political Context (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2005); Jean Comby and Bruce Shelley, Church History in Plain Language (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1996); Jean Comby, How to Read Church History: Vol. 1: From the Beginnings to the Fifteenth Century (New York: Crossroad, 1985); Justo Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity: Vol. 1: The Early Church to the Reformation (New York: HarperOne, 1984).

40. E.R. Dodds, Humanism and Technique in Greek Studies: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 5 November 1936 (Broadbridge, UK: Clarendon Press, 1936).

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41. Ferguson, Church History Volume One; Comby and Shelley, Church History in Plain Language; Comby, How to Read Church History: Vol. 1; Gonzalez, Story of Christianity: Vol. 1.

42. David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity . . . and Why It Matters (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2007).

43. Hans Frei, Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, ed. George Hunsinger and William Placher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 208.

44. For views of the Emerging Church movement from three dif-ferent points of view, see McLaren, Generous Orthodoxy; Larry Pettegrew, “Evangelicalism, Paradigms, and the Emerging Church,” The Master’s Seminary Journal 17 (2006): 159–75; and Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008). McLaren’s point of view is that of a leader in the Emerging Church movement. Pettegrew comes at the Emerging Church movement from the standpoint of a skeptical traditional evangelical. Tickle, an Episcopalian and a writer on church history, approaches the phenomenon in historical context.

45. paradox (n.d.) Dictionary.com unabridged. Retrieved on January 17, 2007 from website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/paradox

46. This quote has been attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, and an ancient Chinese proverb. However, the earliest attribution is Rita May Brown, Sudden Death (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), 68.

47. Ken Howard, Jewish Christianity, 18; Bart Ehrman, Lost Christianities—The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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48. Jean Danielou, The Development of Christian Doctrine Before the Council of Nicea: Vol. I: The Theology of Jewish-Christianity (Chicago: Regnery, 1964),10; cf. Acts 15:4–5 (“some believ-ers who belonged to the sect of the Pharisees...”).

49. Raymond Pritz, Nazarene Jewish Christianity: From the End of the New Testament Period until its Disappearance in the Fourth Century. Jerusalem, Israel: Magnes, 1988), 62.

50. Greg Russinger and Alex Field, eds., Practitioners: Voices within the Emerging Church (Ventura, CA: Regal, 2005), 224.

51. Other cases fell somewhere in between. The personal popu-larity of Martin of Tours was such that the church merely waited until he passed from the scene, and then moved to appoint a new bishop who would bring his communities back into stricter compliance. In the case of Celtic Christianity, at the seventh-century Synod of Whitby the Roman and Celtic branches negotiated a compromise that—at least on the surface—brought Celtic church practices into compliance.

52. Craig Hill, Hellenists and Hebrews: Reassessing Division within the Earliest Church (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 146–47.

53. Eusebius, vita Const. 3.18–20, quoted in Hefele, Vol. 1, and 323ff. C.J. Hefele, A History of the Councils of the Church, Vol. 1, to AD 325 (Edinburgh, UK: T.&T. Clark, 1871), 323ff.

54. For a more complete discussion of the history of Jewish Christianity in the early church, the reader might consider the following sources: Ken Howard, Jewish Christianity; Robert Hann, “The Undivided Way: The Early Jewish Christians as a Model for Ecumenical Encounter?” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 14 (1977): 233–48; Matt Jackson-McCabe, Jewish Christianity Reconsidered: Rethinking Ancient Groups and

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Texts (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007); Gerd Ludemann, Heretics: The Other Side of Early Christianity (Louisville, KY: Westminster, 1996); Oskar Skarsaune and Reidar Hvalvik, eds., Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007); Ekkehard Stegemann and Wolfgang Stegemann, The Jesus Movement: A Social History of Its First Century (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001).

55. Patrick J. Hartin, “Jewish Christianity: Focus on Antioch in the First Century,” Scriptura 36 (1991): 38–50.

56. G.P. Carras, “Jewish Ethics and Gentile Converts: Remarks on 1 Thes. 4:3–8,” in The Thessalonian Correspondence, ed. Raymond F. Collins and Norbert Baumert, (Ithaca, NY: Leuven University Press, 1990), 306–15.

57. Roger Beckwith, “The Origin of the Festivals of Easter and Whitsun,” Studia Liturgica 13 (1979): 7–8. Beckwith argues that Paul allowed Jewish Christians to observe Jewish festi-vals privately.

58. For a more complete discussion of the history of Pauline Christianity in the early church, the reader might consider the following sources: Ken Howard, Jewish Christianity; Richard Hays, ed., The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel’s Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005); Ekkehard Stegemann and Wolfgang Stegemann, The Jesus Movement; William Kaye and Anne Amos. Re-Reading Paul: A Fresh Look at His Attitude to Torah and Judaism. Retrieved July 10, 2010, from website Jewish-Christian Relations web-site: http://www.jcrelations.net/en/?id=789; Davina Lopez, Apostle to the Conquered: Reimaging Paul’s Mission (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008).

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59. Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).

60. A good overview of the work of the Desert Fathers and Mothers may be found in David Keller, Oasis of Wisdom: The Worlds of the Desert Fathers and Mothers (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005).

61. Perhaps one of the broader and more inspiring of these books is Restoring the Woven Cord; Strands of Celtic Christianity for the Church Today by Michael Mitton (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1995). Others include: Michelle Brown, How Christianity Came to Britain (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2006); Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization (New York: Doubleday, 1995); Brendan Lehane, Early Celtic Christianity (London: Continuum, 2005); Ray Simpson, Exploring Celtic Spirituality: Historic Roots for Our Future (London: Hodder, 1995); Graydon Snyder, Irish Jesus, Roman Jesus: The Formation of Early Irish Christianity (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity, 2002).

62. Frank Whaling and Albert Outler, John and Charles Wesley: Selected Prayers, Hymns, Journal Notes, Sermons, Letters, and Treatises (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1981), 8.

63. Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation, Preach the Gospel at All Times—Use Words if Necessary. Retreived July 15, 2010 from http://www.e4gr_more.org//EGRBOOK2006.pdf, (2006); cf. James 2:14–17.

64. C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).

65. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 52.

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66. Samuel Stone, “The Churches One Foundation.” In Hymnal 1982 According to the Use of the Episcopal Church. New York: Church Publishing, 1985.

67. C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, 79–80.

68. William Dols, Awakening the Fire Within (St. Louis: Educational Center, 1998); cf. Matthew Lippman, Thinking in Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

69. William Dols, The Bible Workbench: Living Our Story through God’s Story (St. Louis: Educational Center, 2008); cf. Lippman, Thinking in Education.

70. Herman Hooker, Uses of Adversity, and the Provisions of Consolation (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1850), 94.

71. Gregory of Nazianzus, On “Not Three Gods,” quoted in Elizabeth Theokritoff and Mary Cunningham, The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 49.

72. Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2008), 185–89; 224–49.

73. W.E. Sangster, The Secret of Radiant Life (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 171, 172, 192.

74. Kinneman and Lyons, unChristian, 17.

75. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, quoted in Richard Kieckhefe, Theology in Stone: Church Architecture from Byzantium to Berkeley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 19.

76. Albert Clifton, Donald Liesveld, and Curt Winseman, Living Your Strengths: Discover Your God-Given Talents and Inspire Your Community (New York: Gallup, 2004). Our congregation has found the Strengths Finder inventory a useful tool in making

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the transition to a more gifts-driven organization and leader-ship structure.

77. Kathryn Spink, Mother Teresa: A Complete Authorized Biography (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998), 245.

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83. Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 178.

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86. Anonymous. A quote from a field supervisor of seminarians at a supervisory training session at Virginia Theological Seminary, Alexandria, VA.

N O T E S 195

87. Anonymous. A quote from a field supervisor of seminarians at a supervisory training session at Virginia Theological Seminary, Alexandria, VA.

88. A quote at a supervisory training session at Virginia Theological Seminary, Alexandria, VA.

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96. Tickle, Great Emergence.

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100. Mark Zwick and Louise Zwick, The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2005), 206.

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