intersections

NT Wright on Heaven

NT Wright has a new book out (by the way, how does this guy do it? I'm in awe!) called, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church. My copy is on its way from an Amazon.com warehouse to my door as I type!

Here's an really interesting article and interview with Wright from Time magazine. I highly recommend this short piece from Time. I'll let you know about the book after I read it, but as some of you know, NT Wright is something of a hero with me so I'm predisposed to agree with him. He's one of the top 5 people I'd like to meet someday.

Here's a short quote to whet your appetite. It has interesting resonances with Adventist theology of the nature of people, death, resurrection, heaven and hell.

Our culture is very interested in life after death, but the New Testament is much more interested in what I've called the life after life after death — in the ultimate resurrection into the new heavens and the new Earth. Jesus' resurrection marks the beginning of a restoration that he will complete upon his return. Part of this will be the resurrection of all the dead, who will "awake," be embodied and participate in the renewal. John Polkinghorne, a physicist and a priest, has put it this way: "God will download our software onto his hardware until the time he gives us new hardware to run the software again for ourselves." That gets to two things nicely: that the period after death is a period when we are in God's presence but not active in our own bodies, and also that the more important transformation will be when we are again embodied and administering Christ's kingdom.

My Delicious Library

For just less than a year I've been using Delicious Library to catalogue my books and it's really wonderful. If you use a Mac and love books, this is definitely the software for you. Recently, thanks to my friend Johnny Ramirez, I was introduced to a small (free) program that will make a webpage out of your Delicious Library catalogue. It's called DeliciWeb and you can download it here. It takes a while if you have a lot of books in your library, but it does make your library available for others to look at online.

You can connect to my library by clicking here. There are some 560 book in there, so it will take a bit to load. There's a link to request to borrow a book which sends an email to the owner of the library. It's not perfect. As best I can tell it's listing my books in random order in spite of the fact that I've check the "sort by author's name" checkbox in the Preferences. If anyone has any tips I'm all ears!

Talking with Paul Rauschenbusch

This Sabbath afternoon I'll be attending a lunch and conversation with Paul Rauschenbusch, great-grandson of the famed Walter Rauschenbusch, the father of the "social gospel."

The is what Progressive Christians Uniting said in their press release about this book tour.

In 1908 Social Gospel pioneer Walter Rauschenbusch rocked the nation with a powerful treatise he called “Christianity and the Social Crisis.” The crisis then was  marked by falling wages and worsening conditions for working people, unrestrained greed at the top, child poverty, lack of access to health care, failing schools, and a bellicose U.S. foreign policy.

Serious Christians at the start of the 21st century confront many of these same social conditions—along with heightened concern about sustainability, persistent racism, AIDS, and the resurgent nuclear threat.

Now the great-grandson of Walter Rauschenbusch—Paul Raushenbush, associate dean for religious life at Princeton—has re-issued his ancestor’s original text along with brief new manifestos by such contemporary Christian luminaries as Cornel West,  Phyllis Trible, Tony Campolo, Joan Chittister, Stanley Hauerwas, James Forbes, and Jim Wallis.  Renowned philosopher Richard Rorty—another Walter Rauschenbusch descendant--contributes the final essay for the new book.

The new book is called Christianity and the Social Crisis in the 21st Century. While I have not yet started reading this book yet, I feel that I have been unconsciously influenced by Walter Rauschenbusch. I've been wanting to read this book and now the 100th anniversary of this amazing classic is republished with chapters from contemporary theologians and practioners.

So, needless to say, I'm really looking forward to the time spent with Paul Rauschenbusch. I wish I had had the time to read this book before the conversation, but alas, I've been delaying in savoring another book which I'll write about soon - Evangelism After Christendom.

If you're in the Southland and want to catch Paul Rauschenbusch, here's the scoop:

Thursday, January 17, at 7 p.m.
First Christian Church of Orange
1130 East Walnut Avenue
Orange, CA 92867

Friday, January 18, at 7 p.m.
Redlands United Church of Christ
168 Bellevue Avenue
Redlands, CA 92373

Sunday, January 20, 10:00 a.m.
All Saints Church Pasadena
132 North Euclid Avenue
Pasadena, CA 91101

If you want to attend the Sabbath afternoon meeting - originally designed for clergy and a little smaller and more informal, please email me directly. I can probably get you in. It's in Studio City.

Intuitive Leadership, by Tim Keel

I just finished reading the latest book in the Emersion series from Baker - Intuitive Leadership, by Tim Keel. Tim and I have spend a little time together over the years at various Emergent events and the like. I first met Tim in October of 2001 at The Ooze gathering in Seattle. We happen to meet up at a coffee shop just before the opening day of the conference and we hung out a bit at that time. They were just getting their new church started back then. Now, seven years later, God has done some pretty remarkable things at Jacob's Well.

For those who are used to reading books about leadership, this is not what you're thinking. The subtitle says it all: Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor and Chaos. Tim has spent some time with Alan Roxburgh in recent years. Alan also wrote the forward to the book. Since I have been a doctoral student mentored by Alan for the past 4+ years I can definitely see some of the influence. The truly amazing this is that Tim was intuiting many of these things before he met Alan. I needed 2 hard years with Alan before I started to get it. I knew I was completely fed up with and frustrated by the "church growth" models I had been exposed to. Natural Church Development was more of the same (to give just one example). I just never realized how embedded in a modern, corporate mentality I was until stepping into the space that my D.Min. afforded me.

What Tim does in this book is basically share his personal journey and the journey of the church that he leads. However, I suspect that many readers will be disappointed that he doesn't let us in on more of what Jacob's Well has done and is doing. This is intentional. Instead, Tim offers what he calls "postures" of intuitive leadership, like "A Posture of Learning: From Answers to Questions" or "A Posture of Surrender: From Control to Chaos." In fact, this chapter is really the gem of the book, I think, for those who are wanting to come away with something to do. The first revolution is internal. Leaders need to find ways to change they way they think about the task of church leadership. Our role is no longer devising strategic plans, getting the congregation lined up, and pursuing some ideal future. For one thing, we're discovering that there is no "ideal future." There is only the future that God is bringing to pass in your time and place.

I would highly recommend this book to any pastor who is struggling with corporate, managerial leadership styles that they've inherited. Many of the ways of being church and being in leadership that Tim describes here are the same things we are learning in Hollywood. I can affirm the truth of everything Tim says because we are beginning to live these realities as well.

I'll end with a couple of choice quotes.

We have a mounting leadership crisis in the church. We are facing a crisis of imagination, an ill-fed spiritual attention span nourished by novelty. I believe this dynamic has debilitated local churches....

We are missing prophetic leaders who are able to read the signs of the times, who listen carefully, thoughtfully, and theologically, who respond in faithful and creative ways based on an imagination baptized and engaged in a missional reading of scripture, the environment, the people God has provided in their midst - not to mention the resources at hand that God has supplied....

At it's worst, this reduced pictures of reality has drained the landscape of color and creativity under God, and imagination has been lost in favor of a very small and uniform version of life. Our churches are the religious equivalent of strip malls with the same ten massive retailers located in Anytown, USA (76-77).

How well do our organizations create spaces that allow for diverse people with varied experiences and multiple intelligences to gather in order to discern signs of life intrinsic and extrinsic to our communities? How willing are we to do the hard and long-term work of creativity and contextual engagement? Will we create systems and structures that allow for a new imagination to emerge?

The reality is that creatives walk into our communities, systems and structures all the time, and when they do, they intuit the environment we have created and know immediately whether there is space for them. Most often, they discover there is not (209).

Intersections book store

I've added an Amazon Bookstore widget to the left bar of my blog. This is my personal bookstore through Amazon Associates. You can click anywhere on the widget and link directly to my bookstore. By buying books through my bookstore I will earn a few pennies which will go to support the expense of maintaining this blog.

So, if you visit this blog and want to buy a book I'm recommending or that I've reviewed, buy it online through the Intersections bookstore.

Loving Our Neighbors...for our own sake

I get this daily email from Sojourners...here is today's quote.

When Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors as ourselves, it was not just for our neighbors' sakes that he commanded it, but for our own sakes as well. Not to help find some way to feed the children who are starving to death is to have some precious part of who we are starve to death with them. Not to give ourselves to the human beings we know who may be starving not for food but for what we have in our hearts to nourish them with is to be, ourselves, diminished and crippled as human beings.

- Frederick Buechner, from Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons

What do you make of this? Do you agree? Is this perhaps a way of framing the spirituality of social justice in a way that makes sense to Christians who are used to seeing the purpose of the gospel as "serving my needs?" Perhaps this is also a way of thinking of "what is in my self-interest" (for those of you who are familiar with PICO's organizing model). If its true that we all act out of our self-interest (what is important to me), then perhaps what is in our self-interest is the health of our own souls.

Mission in Metropolis

The much anticipated release of Monte Sahlin's newest book, Mission in Metropolis: The Adventist movement in an urban world, is just around the corner. According to The Center for Creative Ministry's website, the book will be released at the Adventist Urban Congress, in Huntsville, Alabama on July 22.

On Friday I received a pre-release copy of the book and as far as I can tell, this is the first public look at the cover. Regarding the cover, this is probably the nicest cover art of any book published by an Adventist publisher that I have ever seen. The old saying goes, 'You can't judge a book by its cover.' I agree, to a point. Still, there is no excuse for a lame cover in today's world! Good job, CCM!

From the introduction:

This is the year that urban becomes the global norm. "Thanks to rapid urban growth not only in China but elsewhere in Asia and Africa, some time in the coming year the population of the world will become mostly urban.... For the first time in the history of our species, more humans will live in urban areas than rural places (State of the World 2007: Our Urban Future, page 4). About one million people are moving to the cities of the world each week. It has been building for a century and a half. It is the single most important social phenomena of our era. Is the church prepared for it? How does it change the prospects for evangelism and the way we must do mission? (iii)

Sometime during the printing of this book, that milestone was passed. As of today, there are more people living in the cities of our world than rural places. The future has arrived!

This is a new day for Adventists dedicated to ministry in metropolis. There is greater opportunity, more support among both the hierarchy and the membership than at any point in my lifetime. I praise the Lord for that and it is my great hope that the information in this book will be of some help to the many people who want to seize this opportunity (v).

The Hollywood Seventh-day Adventist Church is an exciting and challenging place to be in ministry at this time. My family and I feel we were made for this!

God & Empire - 3

This is the second installment in my ongoing discussion of the new book God & Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now, by John Dominic Crossan.

God & Empire - 1 is here
God & Empire - 2 is here

Chapter 2 - God and the Ambiguity of Power
This chapter is easily the controversial up to this point in the book - at least for the more conservative Christian reader. But whether you think of yourself as conservative, liberal or something in between, one of the challenges that must be faced by people who take the Bible seriously is what Crossan calls, the "ambiguity of God's power."

Perhaps it would be best to begin where Crossan ends this chapter. By doing this, I hope I can share the point he trying to make. Then I will go back and show how he arrives at this. From pages 94-95:

The ambiguity of divine power suffuses the Christian Bible in both its Testaments and therefore presses this question for us Christians: how do we reconcile the ambiguity of our Bible's violent and/or nonviolent God? My proposal is that the Christian Bible presents the radicality of a just and nonviolent God repeatedly and relentlessly confronting the normalcy of an unjust and violent civilization. Again and again throughout the biblical tradition, God's radical vision for nonviolent justice is offered, and again and again we manage to mute it back into the normalcy of violent injustice (emphasis in original).

The problem, Crossan points out, is that the struggle between peace through victory (world's way) and peace through justice (God's way) is

depicted inside the Bible itself. That is its integrity and its authority. If the Bible were only about peace through victory, we would not need it. If it were only about peace through justice, we would not believe it.

The Christian Bible forces us to witness the struggle of these two transcendental visions within its own pages and to ask ourselves as Christians how we decide between them. My answer is that we are bound to whichever of these visions was incarnated by and in the historical Jesus.

This is a vision of scripture that is not prescriptive, but descriptive. In other words, the narratives of the Bible describe how things were and how people struggled to relate to God and how God struggled to relate to them. Sometimes there were victories. More often, defeat. This is the modern story of our existence and spiritual quest as well. Crossan is placing all his eggs in the basket of Jesus, which, as a Jesus scholar, we would expect him to do. But what about those pesky OT passages where it sure seems that God was commanding His people to achieve peace through victory using violence?

God & Empire - 2

This is the second installment in my ongoing discussion of the new book God & Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now, by John Dominic Crossan. God & Empire - 1 is here.

Chapter 1 - Empire and the Barbarism of Civilization
In the first part of this chapter, Crossan gives an amazingly concise history of the rise of imperial power in ancient Rome. (As a brief aside, I was pleased to find that I was rather well acquainted with this history due to my faithful viewing of HBOs, Rome, for the past two seasons. Unfortunately, this series has come to an untimely end - just like Julius, I suppose. I hate to admit it but I guess I'm in the "everything-I know-about-Roman-history-I-learned-on-HBO" camp).

Crossan quotes Michael Mann, professor of Sociology at UC Berkley, and author of the four-volume, Sources of Social Power and then summarizes those sources:

1. Military power: the monopoly or control of force and violence
2. Economic power: the monopoly or control of labor and production
3. Political power: the monopoly or control of organization and institution
4. Ideological power: the monopoly or control of interpretation and meaning.

Crossan goes on to identify how Rome embodied each of these, with a special focus on ideological power as "Roman Imperial Theology." By now many of us are familiar with this theology which taught that Caesar was Lord and the Son of God, but here Crossan really makes the argument from archeology and history without losing track of the fact that he is not writing to a group of Biblical historians and ANE archaeologists. It's great to have this argument so nicely laid out in a few pages. He concludes this section with a question that highlights the tension that Jesus stepped into:

Imagine this question. There was a human being in the first century who was called "Divine," "Son of God," "God," and "God from God," whose titles were "Lord," "Redeemer," "Liberator," and "Savior of the World." Who was that person?

The amazing truth, Crossan tells us, is that "before Jesus ever existed, all those terms belonged to Caesar Augustus. To proclaim them of Jesus the Christ was thereby to deny them of Caesar the Augustus."

The rest of this chapter concerns two questions:

First, "are all empires, past and present, but deeper manifestations of what we call 'civilization'?" This questions harks back to his axiom, "the normalcy of civilization's violence." So, the question he address next is, are all empires necessarily civilizations of violence characterized by the sequence "first victory, then peace," or "peace through victory?" The answer he gives, seven pages later is, "Yes!" Civilization is, by definition a violent trap.

Second, "Is the normal imperialism of human civilization simply an inevitable manifestation of human nature? Is our addictive and escalatory violence not just something we made but something we are? Is the human race, in other words, as doomed as the saber-toothed tiger?" His short answer to this one is, "No!" the violence of civilization is not inevitable. There have been alternatives in history. For evidence he points to the monastery as an alternative lifestyle as a "semicommunal or fully communal life witnessing that violence is not the inevitability of human nature but only the normalcy of human civilization."

In the next chapter we turn to one of the great resources of this book - an clearly articulated Biblical account of violence in the Bible, highlighting the "ambiguity of power" and violence in the history of God.

For now, as we think about our new American Empire, can you see the "normalcy of human civilization?" I leave you with this one chilling quote which Crossan shares from The Nuremberg Diary, quoting the words of Reichsmarchal Herman Goring:

The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

And that was written in 1947!

God & Empire - 1

I've just started reading John Dominic Crossan's latest book, God & Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now, and I can't put it down. I get up early every morning to read it. So, I've decided that I'm going to blog about each chapter. If you like to get the book, just follow the link above to Amazon. You won't regret it. Please join in and let's make this a conversation.

Prologue
By now there are many scholars, authors, and other commentators who have made the claim that America is an empire, of sorts. Just a quick glance at my library and I can see nearly half a dozen that I own. However, Crossen points out that as long ago as 1860, Walt Whitman published a poem entitled, "The Errand-Bearers" that, in Crossan's words, "triumphantly proclaimed America's imperial destiny" (2).

The bulk of the Prologue comments on Jesus' words in John 18:36.

My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.

He goes on to make several points about this verse, my favorite of which is this:

"Had Jesus stopped after saying that 'my kingdom is not of this world,' as we so often do in quoting him, that 'of' would be utterly ambiguous. 'Not of this world' could mean: never on earth but always in heaven; or not now in present time, but off in the imminent or distant future; or not a matter of the exterior world, but of the interior life alone. Jesus spoils all of these possible misinterpretations by continuing.... Your soldiers hold me, Pilate, but my companions will not attack you even to save me from death. Your Roman Empire, Pilate, is based on the injustice of violence, but my divine kingdom is based upon the justice of nonviolence" (4).

He closes the Prologue and sets up the argument of the book with these three questions:

1. "Since the Old Roman Empire crucified our Lord Jesus Christ, how can we be his faithful followers in America as the New Roman Empire?
2. "Is our Christian Bible violent or nonviolent - is it actually for or against Jesus' nonviolent resistance to 'this world'?
3. "Is Bible-fed Christian violence supporting or even instigating our imperial violence as the New Roman Empire?"

The structure of the book will proceed by examining where the Christian biblical tradition stands on Rome or any other empire (ch 2), why Rome crucified Jesus of Nazareth (ch 3), executed Paul of Tarsus (ch 4) and exiled John of Patmos (ch 5). Chapter 1 will look at the Roman empire itself and the barbarism of civilization more generally. We'll get to that in a few days. For now, chew on these questions and post a comment!