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| [MC500] My Thoughts on the Last Class Session: Lecture by Bishop Graham Cray (Nov 11, 2009)
“The missio Dei is the activity of God that we participate in, not what the church does, after which it reports to God about.” Hence, objections to the language of “building” the kingdom of God. Such language is unbiblical, it is alleged, for it places the focus on our own activity rather than us cooperating with what the Spirit is doing. On the one hand, this is indeed an important emphasis recognizing that “unless Yahweh builds the house, its builders labor in vain” (Ps 127:3). On the other hand, anyone who has ever tried to discern “God’s will” will certainly have realized that it is often not easy. What is it, exactly, that God is doing that we are called to participate in? The general direction that many people seem to be moving in, indicating corroboration of spiritual intuition? The “fresh expressions” movement in the U.K. offers a good case study. Conservative may hurl criticism at what they see as expressions of pseudo-church and sham spirituality, but at the end of the day our best bet for discernment would probably be the fruit it produces: “a tree will be known by its fruit.” There’s deep wisdom in that – and there doesn’t even have to be anything “spiritual” about it!
“You must be willing to go with [those whom you seek to serve] to where you’ve never been before.” These words have helped me crystallize much of my thoughts on travel and adventure. Is there not a deep theological significance to the fact that we are captivated by narratives of exploring the unknown? A parallel to Joseph Campbell’s archetype of the “hero’s journey,” surely. But more than that, it is Abrahamic: to leave, not knowing whither he was going, borne by the wind of the Spirit. 行走江湖，漂泊不定；浪迹天涯，四海为家。Pastiched vocabulary from wuxia theodramas notwithstanding, may I not frame, with fear and trembling, my impending graduation/departure from Fuller as such?
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| [MC500] My Thoughts on the Last Class Session (Nov 9, 2009)
“Our desires have been shaped by consumerist capitalism. Consumerism is idolatry, and the task of the church is to reshape these desires.” Surely it is possible to view the increasing interest in theology of culture as a sinful love of the “world,” fueled by such idolatrous consumerist impulses. Yet is it not equally (if not more) possible to also regard it positively, not only as a reexamination of biblical teaching, but as the missiological contextualization of theology within consumerist culture? Can not all cultures serve as vehicles through which God can reveal his grace and mercy to humanity? Charles Kraft puts it this way: “God is absolute and infinite. Yet he has feely chosen to employ human culture and at major points to limit himself to the capacities of culture in his interaction with people” (Charles Kraft, Christianity in Culture).
“Missionaries in Turkey: the last thing on their mind is to get people to attend a 10 am service.” Fostered in part from a recent viewing of Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern (in which claustrophobic rigid architectural structures serve as concrete metaphors for the oppressiveness of patriarchal feudal society), it’s dawned on me that the different structures within our churches may be likened to buildings. What’s most important is not the outward form of the building, but what happens inside. It’d be great if a building were impressive and beautiful, but that would be of little use if it’s not conducive for the community’s purposes. If it works, good – but we ought to remember that the structure itself is not absolute. And if it doesn’t, perhaps some parts of the structure ought to be changed…!
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| [MC500] My Thoughts on the Last Class Session (Nov 4, 2009)
“In Byzantium Christianity, the emperor was the icon of God on earth. Just as there is only one God in heaven, so there could only be one emperor on earth.” The emperor is indeed iconic of God in terms of, say, God’s authority and power, but he certainly is not the only and ultimate icon. To make such a claim would be to step over the fine line between revelation and anthropomorphism. While I often weary from making categorical distinctions as such (cf the contribution of postmodernism to our understanding of language), the perspective of faith recognizes a distinct qualitative difference between revealed theology and human religion, no matter how inextricable the two may be. Hovering around this is the basic debate between Protestants and Catholics: does final authority lie in scripture or tradition, and how do we mediate between the two?
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| [MC500] My Thoughts on the Last Class Session (Nov 2, 2009)
I had always known that the earliest Christian missionaries in China were Nestorians. But to me Nestorianism was a chiefly theological term. Mary ought not to be referred to as theotokos, the “bearer of God;” it was the human Jesus, and not the divine Logos, who was born of a human mother. This stemmed from Nestorius’ view that Jesus was a human being “intimately and completely indwelt by the Logos,” rather than, as Cyril of Alexandria put it, “one incarnate nature of the divine Logos” (Richard A. Norris, The Christological Controversy).
I had never, however, made the obvious connection between Nestorianism and Orthodox Christianity -- which brings up an entirely different set of connotations and experiences. When I was in college, Murray-Dodge Hall was where many different religious groups met. I remember stumbling into one of its wings one day, when it had been prepared for an Orthodox service. The lights were dimmed, and the place was full of icons, candles, and incense, all working together to evoke a fantastic sense of mystery and sacredness. (Perhaps I wouldn’t have found it fantastic if that was what I grew up with!)
Along with the video we watched, this connection helps a lot in putting imaginative flesh on how 7th to 8th century Nestorians along the Silk Road might have expressed their faith. Surely Orthodox Christianity’s use of icons harmonized well with the use of effigies in Buddhist devotion. In particular, I am fascinated with a bishop named Adam during that period who stands as a seminal figure of the history of early Buddhist-Christian interactions. Adam freely made use of Buddhist (and Daoist) concepts to contextually express Christian theology; to Buddhists he was a dangerous man “not because he was making Christianity too Buddhist, but because he was trying to make Buddhism too Christian” (John Foster, The Church of the T’ang Dynasty). Instead of two-dimensional icons, is it possible that there were statues of Christ that Chinese Nestorians used to contemplate the divine? Or, could they even used statues of the Buddha to adore Christ?
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[MC500] Book Report #3: Notes/Reflections on Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence
Chapter 1: Rummage Sales
“What politically and culturally would very swiftly spiral down into the Dark Ages was already at work peeling the Christianity of the Early Church away from the laity and inserting into the resulting vacuum a kind of animistic, half-magical form of a bastardized Christianity that would characterize the laity and much of the minor clergy over the next few centuries… During those centuries of darkness, and largely because of Gregory’s prescience and acumen, Western Christianity would be held in trust in Europe’s convents and monasteries” (25).
Having taken the entire sequence of church history courses at Fuller, I find it surprising that so little time was spent on Christianity during the Dark Ages. Patristic theology ends around the 6th century, while medieval/reformation period begins in the 10th century. Is this symptomatic of the biases of Protestant seminaries? Or is it that there simply has been far less scholarship done during this period? If so, why? In any case, the survival of the genuine, apostolic faith in convents and monasteries recalls, to me, the flight of the babe Jesus into Egypt, fleeing Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents. The story of the gospel’s perpetuation, according to Andrew Walls, is a story of “great escapes.” The destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, the collapse of Rome under the Vandals, or the sacking of Constantinople by Islam – are these not all near-death experiences of sorts for Christianity, through which it survived and nurtured itself back to health in another cultural climate?
Chapter 2: Cable of Meaning
“[C]ommon and consensual imagining does not have to be factually true at all. It simply has to be the general, operating, opinion of the group for whom it serves as both true and actual… To use a simplistic example, the world was, effectively speaking, flat so long as the majority of our forefathers thought it was flat. Its being ovoid was simply not within their illusion or imagining of reality and, therefore, was beyond their engagement. Accordingly, // they structured their worldview and their living to accommodate a flat world” (35-6).
A live example of when the consensual illusion or the common imagination takes a battering in an individual: all his life, Christian believed that Genesis taught that the world was created in six literal days, or that Adam, Eve, and the serpent were literal beings. His entire church believed this was so, and organized entire Bible studies around it. His Pentateuch professor, however, tells him that “day” is a figure better understood as “age,” and that the protagonists of the Eden narrative may not have been literal. Christian’s faith is almost crushed, as he starts doubting all the times when he received encouragement from the passage, and even all the times when he thought he heard God speak to him through these concepts. Within Tickle’s clever framework, we may say that the “mesh sleeve” of the cable of religion has been lacerated. How does Christian hold on to the boat of his religion? That will depend on the strength of what’s within the mesh sleeve: the three braided ropes of spirituality, corporeality, and morality.
Chapter 3: The Great Reformation
“The Counter-Reformation is also called the Catholic Reformation, the choice depending largely on whether one is Protestant or Roman Catholic. By either name, the phenomenon being referred to is one of reaction. The truth of the thing is that the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century thrust toward reform in the Church was not ‘Protestant’ per se in the beginning. It simply was a push toward change that, in that end, managed to burst out in two directions... // Protestantism resulted from the first. A renewed – or to use Butler Bass’s term, a re-traditioned – Roman Catholicism flowed out of the second” (57-8).
Tickle continues to describe the beautiful fruit that the energy of the Catholic Reformation birthed: the mystical spirituality of St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, the Jesuits who would take Christianity to the most distant shores of Asia, the purification of doctrine at the five Councils of Trent. Why is it that these landmarks are all too often egregiously absent from accounts of the period told by Protestant theologians? Personally, I find it absolutely intolerable when Protestants teach that Christianity was only “really” brought to China in the 19th century with Robert Morrison, Hudson Taylor, et al – completely ignoring the work of Jesuit missionaries in the 16th to 18th centuries! I kid you not – this is still the standard story as told by most Protestant missionary organizations. Conversely, I am sure that there are many Catholic accounts out there that demonize Luther and his reformers. To this sharp dissonance Tickle’s advice is almost prophetic: “The imperative for us in the twenty-first century, therefore, is not to fear either of the two coursings, but to fear with all our hearts and minds and souls the pattern of bloodiness that has in the past characterized the separation of innovators and re-traditioners from one another” (58). If a similar bloodshed is to avoided in today’s Great Emergence, it is imperative that we take seriously the imperative to “love thy enemy.” And we would do well to put that into practice by starting to tell true and balanced stories about the histories of the Other.
Chapter 4: Questions of Re-Formation
“[The Power of Myth] still stands as the single, most popular and most frequently purchased on in PBS’s history. But it also triggered a whole new generation of expanded readership for Campbell’s books; and together, books and series persuaded much of North American Christendom that exclusivity and particularity were a hard, if not impossible sell. What of solus christus, not to mention sola scriptura” (69)?
Interestingly enough, hitherto reading Tickle’s book I knew about The Masks of God and The Hero with a Thousand Faces, but not about Joseph Campbell’s PBS series with Bill Moyers. That explains so much of how these Campbell-esque views have almost virtually the default understanding of world religions amongst the public. As Tickle puts it, “the mind comes out to play with the imagination” when one is seated in the comfort of one’s home. T. S. Eliot makes a similar point: it is what we do in leisure and relaxation that shape us most profoundly – and reveal most tellingly who we really are. The ascent of pomo pluralism might be novel within the an American cultural milieu, but it is, verily, what most of Asia has been holding to for thousands of years. (After all, Campbell was a devoted student of Indian and Japanese religions.) The Chinese mind, for instance, is insistently syncretistic. A Chinese today would hardly have heard of Campbell. But ask him about his view of world religions and the question of absolute truth, and his answer would hardly differ from that of the average American. Thus, the claims of traditional exclusivistic monotheism stands as a scandalon to the natural mind? Do I really believe that, or is that just an answer I am sticking to as an expression of my Christian devotion?
Chapter 5: The Century of Emergence
“Pentecostalism by definition assumes direct contact of the believer with God and, by extension, the direct agency of the Holy Spirit as instructor and counselor and commander as well as comforter. As such and stated practically, Pentecostalism assumes that ultimate authority is experiential rather than canonical. This is not either to say or to imply that there is denial of the Holy Scriptures. It is to say, rather, that forced into a choice between what a believer thinks with his or her mind to be said in the Holy Scripture and an apparently contradictory message from the Holy Spirit, many a Pentecostal must prayerfully, fearfully, humbly accept the more immediate authority of the received message” (85).
Tickle is certainly right in saying that Pentecostalism prioritizes the individual’s experience of God; this is an emphasis amongst mystical writings as well. Substituting “Holy Scripture” with reason – for both of them are norms, and interpretation of the former is driven by the latter – we recall Luther’s infamous renunciation of the reason: “Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but—more frequently than not—struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.” However, I suspect that Tickle overstates the undercutting of biblical authority within Pentecostalism. On the contrary, classic Pentecostalism stresses the importance of testing possible inner promptings or spiritual impressions against Biblical teachings. The way that these trump the Bible, then, comes not from a choice of revelation over scripture, but from the re-interpretation of scripture in light of the ostensible revelation. This way, both are preserved with a semblance of godliness and orthodoxy. The mind is an amazing thing, and we are oft to interpret according to our desires and delusions.
Chapter 6: The Gathering Center
“Centripetal force… is usually envisioned by us as running downward, like the water in a bathtub drain. The gathering force of the new [emergent] Christianity did the opposite. It ran upward and poured itself out, like some bursting geyser, in expanding waves of influence and nourishment, Where once the corners [of different denominational distinctives] had met, now there was a swirling center, its centripetal force racing from quadrant to quadrant in ever-widening circles, picking up ideas and people from each, sweeping them into the center, mixing them there, and then spewing them forth into a new way of being Christian, into a new way of being Church” (135).
Common church wisdom has it that a robust Christian faith involves rootedness in a particular tradition. There is no such thing as Christianity in the abstract, only Christianity in concrete, particular terms. Well and good. Nonetheless, many denominations were formed in response to social-cultural-theological situations that no longer exist. What does it mean to be Presbyterian, or Methodist, or even Protestant today? Why does one have to be a Reformed Christian, instead of simply, merely Christian? Does having an inclination towards Calvin and Barth make me Reformed? How then does that fit with my affection for Kierkegaard and Tillich, then? Perhaps what denominational purists are really seeking for is consistency, the elimination of cognitive dissonance. But that is a quite a different thing from integrity – which is really what we need. Contrary to popular understanding, humanity’s sin at the tower of Babel was not so much the vaunting of human pride against its creator, but rather the excessive drive towards homogeneity, disobeying God’s mandate to be fruitful and multiply. Unity in diversity, or diversity in unity, rather than monolithic uniformity.
Chapter 7: The Way Ahead
“The duty, the challenge, the joy and excitement of the Church and for the Christians who compose her, then, is discovering what it means to believe that the kingdom of God is within one and in understanding that one is thereby a pulsating, vibrating bit // in a much grander network. Neither established human authority nor scholarly or priestly discernment alone can lead, because, being human, both are trapped in space/time and thereby prevented from a perspective of total understanding. Rather, it is how the message runs back and forth, over and about, the hubs of the network that it is tried and amended and tempered into wisdom and right action for effecting the Father’s will… Thus, when pinned down and forced to answer the question, “What is the Emergent Church?” most who are will answer, “A conversation,” which is not only true but which will always be true” (152-3).
The dynamism of entities within the Emergent network recalls: 1) the way that our bodies are designed, with eleven body systems (e.g. nervous system, the muscular system, respiratory system, etc) working together in intimate interrelation; and 2) the economy of movement and action within the Trinitarian Godhead. The church was never intended, I think, to be a static institution. While the New Testament does refer to the church as a household, the focus was really on its familial nature. The metaphors are essentially personal: a people, a nation, priesthood, a bride, a body. After all, do not the church and its doctrine exist to bear witness to the living God, the person of Jesus, the companionship of the Spirit. Thus, it is surely a good thing that the Emergent Church defines itself not as creed, dogma, or proposition, but as a conversation, amongst people, and between people and their God. In Lukan terms, the emergent church is the people of God ho hodos, “on the Way.”
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