Review of Holy Subversion: Allegiance to Christ in an Age of Rivals by Trevin Wax (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2010)
Trevin Wax was written and outstanding primer to the Church’s task of bearing faithful and effective witness to the Lord Jesus Christ in North America. Lucid, brief, reflecting the best of contemporary scholarship, his book would be an excellent small group or study group resource. The issues he treats are precisely those we most need to face yet those that are among the difficult for us to face.
The root issue Wax is getting at is the Lordship of Jesus over all of life. He creatively gets our attention by eschewing the language of “Lordship,” an all too familiar piece of Christian lingo, and using the less but still accessible image of “Caesar” to make his point. Rooted in the first century world where Caesar was an omnipotent and omnipresent reality. Lordship is what Caesar is all about. We are rediscovering in our day that when Jesus is acclaimed as “Lord” this is a direct challenge to the pledge of allegiance of the Roman Empire, “Caesar is Lord.”
Thus the call to follow Jesus is a call to a subversive commitment and lifestyle.
Wax uses subversive to mean something that “undermines” (26) the existing structures rather than fomenting a revolution to overthrow them. Wax relentlessly and effectively presses home his key point: “true Christianity is not merely life-changing. It is world-changing” (24).
Wax makes it clear that following Jesus is much more than an inner life of the soul or heart (though it is that too). Rather, Jesus came to establish a group, a community, in the midst of the world who are distinguished from the surrounding world by observable behaviors – how and what they buy and sell, how they raise our children, ways they are involved in their neighborhoods and communities, who they invite home for meals and parties, how they handle our money, and so on. This visible, public community of faith is an evidence of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension to God. What is more, this community is an evidence of the credibility of the gospel itself! This is what makes books like Wax’s so important and helpful for us.
Seven Caesar’s receive their comeuppance at Wax’s hand. : self, success, money, leisure, sex, power, and evangelism. Each chapter provides a brief description and analysis of its particular Caesar followed by a set of practical and helpful reflections and practices designed to help the reader begin to engage that issue.
While the first six Caesar’s may be unsurprising, as they are perennial issues with which the Church is called to struggle, the seventh Caesar, evangelism, will likely be a surprise.
This is to me the best chapter in the book. Wax challenges cultural distorted practices of evangelism shaped by the prevailing orthodoxy of “tolerance” or the marketplace mentality of consumerism. The former warns against “imposing” one’s beliefs on anyone else and accepting the perspective of other’s as as valid as one’s own. The latter frames a gospel in terms of the benefits one can gain from following Christ while soft-pedaling or ignoring the cost entailed in such commitment.
Wax exhorts us to recover our proper theological nerve as prepare ourselves to proclaim Jesus as the Lord of all of life as well as the only source of salvation. Love, not tolerance, is what we owe others for Christ’s sake. And that means we find winsome and appropriate ways to share the truth of Christ, including the cost of commitment to him, with them. In conclusion, he again sounds the note of the necessity of a viable community of faith as a visible and tangible expression and evidence of the gospel being shared with them.
Inevitably, any reader will find something they wished the author would have discussed but didn’t. I would have liked Wax to offer his reflections on the value and witness of singleness in his chapter on sex. He rightly situates and praises sexual practice within the context of marriage. However, there is much ferment and thought be given now to the appropriateness and power of the witness of singleness to the gospel. In a sex-saturated world, folk who choose or learn to live peaceably and even joyfully without sexual expression are a quite subversive presence.
And a chapter on the Caesar of the Church would have been interesting, especially in day when we are recovering the stringent critique of religion delivered by Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the last century. Some of this is implicit in what Wax writes but a more explicit treatment would have been helpful.
Nevertheless, I whole-heartedly commend Holy Subversion to all readers and give thanks to God for its author, Trevin Wax, and pray God’s blessing on him in all that he does.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
A NEW KIND OF CHRISTIANITY - CH.5
A NEW KIND OF CHRISTIANITY
Ch.5: Setting the Stage for the Biblical Narrative
McLaren begins constructing his alternative biblical story line at the beginning – with creation. This creation is not complete at the beginning, however. It is just beginning to unfold in “constantly evolving” stages. He takes the creation stories seriously but not literally. They are intended, he claims, to relate “a kind of compassionate coming-of-age story.” (49) God, the patient father, deals with his rebellious children with wisdom not law, punishment but not destruction (at least not for all his creatures). Instead the consequences of humanity’s punishment actually result in an ascent as they are forced by them to begin an evolutionary journey from hunter/gatherers in the garden, to nomadic herders to agriculturalists, to city dwellers, to empire dwellers. Ironically, however, this ascent provokes are corresponding “descent”: from (presumably) innocence, to shame/fear, to murder, to corruption/violence, to oppression/genocide.
The climax to this “ascent/descent” story line is the call of Abraham and Sarah. In their call God serves notice that he is not thereby rejecting or damning all those not called. No, rather those called are called on behalf of and for the sake of all those other peoples! Joseph is McLaren’s parade example - his life of terrible ups and downs, injustices, and harsh treatment. In the end though, God is with Joseph and thus Joseph is able to “forgive and forgo revenge” and “God creatively overcomes evil with good.” (54)
This biblical setting of the stage features not the Greco-Roman narrative of creation-fall-condemnation-salvation-heaven or hell. Rather, it’s a story about “the downside of ‘progress,’” a dance of human foolishness and divine faithfulness, “a story of goodness being created and re-created.”(54) God and good conquer in the end. Thus the story about God and that about Theos square off right here in the beginning.
McLaren’s emphasis on the dynamic, on-going nature of the creation story, as well as his recognition of the “grace trumps judgment” motif in Genesis 1-11 are helpful. Both reflect scholarly gains of more recent times. In general McLaren’s exposition, though rhetorically provocative (fall as ascent), is clear and headed in the right direction.
I do have two notes of concern. The first is McLaren’s use of the evolutionary paradigm. While not particularly troublesome in this chapter, we will meet more objectionable uses of it later on. For a postmodernist it is unusual to see such commitment to one of the chief “totalizing” narrative of modernity! The second concern is to watch the direction of McLaren’s hermeneutics. Does he allow the biblical story line to discipline the imagery he uses to explain it or does such imagery seem to press alien elements into it? His use of the “coming-of-age” imagery in this chapter seems to fit the cut of the narrative in this case. Will they always do so? We need to watch carefully as we read on.
Ch.5: Setting the Stage for the Biblical Narrative
McLaren begins constructing his alternative biblical story line at the beginning – with creation. This creation is not complete at the beginning, however. It is just beginning to unfold in “constantly evolving” stages. He takes the creation stories seriously but not literally. They are intended, he claims, to relate “a kind of compassionate coming-of-age story.” (49) God, the patient father, deals with his rebellious children with wisdom not law, punishment but not destruction (at least not for all his creatures). Instead the consequences of humanity’s punishment actually result in an ascent as they are forced by them to begin an evolutionary journey from hunter/gatherers in the garden, to nomadic herders to agriculturalists, to city dwellers, to empire dwellers. Ironically, however, this ascent provokes are corresponding “descent”: from (presumably) innocence, to shame/fear, to murder, to corruption/violence, to oppression/genocide.
The climax to this “ascent/descent” story line is the call of Abraham and Sarah. In their call God serves notice that he is not thereby rejecting or damning all those not called. No, rather those called are called on behalf of and for the sake of all those other peoples! Joseph is McLaren’s parade example - his life of terrible ups and downs, injustices, and harsh treatment. In the end though, God is with Joseph and thus Joseph is able to “forgive and forgo revenge” and “God creatively overcomes evil with good.” (54)
This biblical setting of the stage features not the Greco-Roman narrative of creation-fall-condemnation-salvation-heaven or hell. Rather, it’s a story about “the downside of ‘progress,’” a dance of human foolishness and divine faithfulness, “a story of goodness being created and re-created.”(54) God and good conquer in the end. Thus the story about God and that about Theos square off right here in the beginning.
McLaren’s emphasis on the dynamic, on-going nature of the creation story, as well as his recognition of the “grace trumps judgment” motif in Genesis 1-11 are helpful. Both reflect scholarly gains of more recent times. In general McLaren’s exposition, though rhetorically provocative (fall as ascent), is clear and headed in the right direction.
I do have two notes of concern. The first is McLaren’s use of the evolutionary paradigm. While not particularly troublesome in this chapter, we will meet more objectionable uses of it later on. For a postmodernist it is unusual to see such commitment to one of the chief “totalizing” narrative of modernity! The second concern is to watch the direction of McLaren’s hermeneutics. Does he allow the biblical story line to discipline the imagery he uses to explain it or does such imagery seem to press alien elements into it? His use of the “coming-of-age” imagery in this chapter seems to fit the cut of the narrative in this case. Will they always do so? We need to watch carefully as we read on.
Monday, March 1, 2010
A NEW KIND OF CHRISTIANITY - CH.5
A NEW KIND OF CHRISTIANITY
“The Narrative Question” (Chs.4-6)
McLaren addresses the first of his Ten Questions in this section: The Narrative Question. It focuses on the Bible and the ways we read it. In ch.4 he asks if there is a story line in the Bible itself that should guide our reading of it. Before getting to that biblical story line, McLaren deconstructs what he understands to the default story line western culture has bequeathed us for reading the Bible. He calls it the “Greco-Roman narrative.” Six elements make up this narrative – creation (static perfection), Fall into sin (plunge into the world of becoming, change), condemnation (living in a fallen world), salvation through Jesus which has two results for humanity: heaven or hell. We imbibe this six-stage story line, according to McLaren, from our western heritage as we read the Bible backwards through lens fashioned for us by the likes of Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, or Pope Benedict, Calvin, Wesley or Newton, Luther or Erasmus, Aquinas, Augustine, Paul, finally arriving at and Jesus as he appears through the accumulated perspective of these predecessors.. He proposes an alternative, reading forward from Adam to Abraham to Moses to David to the prophets to John the Baptist, to Jesus.
If we read backwards, as we usually do, we read through a perspective formed by Greek philosophy and various strands of the ethos of the Roman Empire. Chief among the values of such a perspective are dualism (dividing reality into two types – material and spiritual – and valuing the latter and devaluating the former), energy and confidence (belief that the superiority of the Greek-Roman approach gave access to the real truth on which to act), and social dualism and superiority (the Empire was the real mover and shaker in world affairs, thus if we were not an elite of that empire you were inferior and on the outside of the social, economic, political status system.).
The deity of this narrative McLaren names Theos (English transliteration of the Greek word for “God”). Dissimilar from the Biblical God n every way, Theos values “spirit, state, and being and hates matter, story, and becoming, since . . . the latter involve change, and the only way to change or move from perfection is downward into decay” (41).
The upshot of reading the Bible backwards through all these filters is that traditional Christian theological terms, like Creation, Fall, Sin, Salvation, have been transformed/corrupted by this Greco-Roman narrative into a fundamentally different story than that of the Bible!
McLaren posits his program of “reading the Bible forward” as an antidote to the above fatally flawed Greco-Roman narrative. This way of proceeding is fleshed out in ch 5.
What of all of this? There is no question that in general McLaren is right! Our Greco-Roman/western/North American heritage certainly inclines us to read the Bible through a variety of lenses which, if unrecognized and corrected for, distort the Biblical story. Dualism is clearly the chief culprit in all this. Nothing has done more damage to western Christianity and its reading of the Bible than the splitting up of reality into two separate, unequal spheres, the material of which is inferior, the spiritual of which is superior. The invisible, immaterial sphere was identified as “spiritual” with its material counterpart as “worldly.” Obviously, Christians then ought to be concerned with the “spiritual” and eschew contact as far as possible with the “worldly.” This is a Pandora’s box that, once opened by Plato and his followers, unleashed a plethora of conceptual, social, and political ills.
That said, I do not think that the “being (static perfection) – becoming (change, history, impermanence) is as important as McLaren does. Nor do I think the people he is writing for would be able or even care to identify what they think in these terms. They just “know” that the “spiritual” is more important than the “worldly” or the material and that God and the things of God are identified with the former. This is what Nietzsche contemptuously called the watered-down “Platonism of the masses” of his time, for which he too largely blamed Christianity. Thus, I do not think it is helpful to use all the philosophical names and terms for the purpose of explaining to our contemporaries why they read the Bible the way they do. I fear it only befuddles the uninitiated and is too general and in some ways misleading for those trained in philosophy. I have tried in my own work to address this matter which Brian has rightly and forcefully identified as central to our dilemma and will say more about that in my post on ch.5.
In sum, what McLaren has done in this chapter needs to be done! Even though he has hit on the major points such a critique needs to address, I am not sure he has done so in the clearest and most effective way. He has raised the matter of the ways we are conditioned to read and understand the Bible (or any other literature for that matter) though, and for that he is to be thanked. This discussion needs to be had!
“The Narrative Question” (Chs.4-6)
McLaren addresses the first of his Ten Questions in this section: The Narrative Question. It focuses on the Bible and the ways we read it. In ch.4 he asks if there is a story line in the Bible itself that should guide our reading of it. Before getting to that biblical story line, McLaren deconstructs what he understands to the default story line western culture has bequeathed us for reading the Bible. He calls it the “Greco-Roman narrative.” Six elements make up this narrative – creation (static perfection), Fall into sin (plunge into the world of becoming, change), condemnation (living in a fallen world), salvation through Jesus which has two results for humanity: heaven or hell. We imbibe this six-stage story line, according to McLaren, from our western heritage as we read the Bible backwards through lens fashioned for us by the likes of Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, or Pope Benedict, Calvin, Wesley or Newton, Luther or Erasmus, Aquinas, Augustine, Paul, finally arriving at and Jesus as he appears through the accumulated perspective of these predecessors.. He proposes an alternative, reading forward from Adam to Abraham to Moses to David to the prophets to John the Baptist, to Jesus.
If we read backwards, as we usually do, we read through a perspective formed by Greek philosophy and various strands of the ethos of the Roman Empire. Chief among the values of such a perspective are dualism (dividing reality into two types – material and spiritual – and valuing the latter and devaluating the former), energy and confidence (belief that the superiority of the Greek-Roman approach gave access to the real truth on which to act), and social dualism and superiority (the Empire was the real mover and shaker in world affairs, thus if we were not an elite of that empire you were inferior and on the outside of the social, economic, political status system.).
The deity of this narrative McLaren names Theos (English transliteration of the Greek word for “God”). Dissimilar from the Biblical God n every way, Theos values “spirit, state, and being and hates matter, story, and becoming, since . . . the latter involve change, and the only way to change or move from perfection is downward into decay” (41).
The upshot of reading the Bible backwards through all these filters is that traditional Christian theological terms, like Creation, Fall, Sin, Salvation, have been transformed/corrupted by this Greco-Roman narrative into a fundamentally different story than that of the Bible!
McLaren posits his program of “reading the Bible forward” as an antidote to the above fatally flawed Greco-Roman narrative. This way of proceeding is fleshed out in ch 5.
What of all of this? There is no question that in general McLaren is right! Our Greco-Roman/western/North American heritage certainly inclines us to read the Bible through a variety of lenses which, if unrecognized and corrected for, distort the Biblical story. Dualism is clearly the chief culprit in all this. Nothing has done more damage to western Christianity and its reading of the Bible than the splitting up of reality into two separate, unequal spheres, the material of which is inferior, the spiritual of which is superior. The invisible, immaterial sphere was identified as “spiritual” with its material counterpart as “worldly.” Obviously, Christians then ought to be concerned with the “spiritual” and eschew contact as far as possible with the “worldly.” This is a Pandora’s box that, once opened by Plato and his followers, unleashed a plethora of conceptual, social, and political ills.
That said, I do not think that the “being (static perfection) – becoming (change, history, impermanence) is as important as McLaren does. Nor do I think the people he is writing for would be able or even care to identify what they think in these terms. They just “know” that the “spiritual” is more important than the “worldly” or the material and that God and the things of God are identified with the former. This is what Nietzsche contemptuously called the watered-down “Platonism of the masses” of his time, for which he too largely blamed Christianity. Thus, I do not think it is helpful to use all the philosophical names and terms for the purpose of explaining to our contemporaries why they read the Bible the way they do. I fear it only befuddles the uninitiated and is too general and in some ways misleading for those trained in philosophy. I have tried in my own work to address this matter which Brian has rightly and forcefully identified as central to our dilemma and will say more about that in my post on ch.5.
In sum, what McLaren has done in this chapter needs to be done! Even though he has hit on the major points such a critique needs to address, I am not sure he has done so in the clearest and most effective way. He has raised the matter of the ways we are conditioned to read and understand the Bible (or any other literature for that matter) though, and for that he is to be thanked. This discussion needs to be had!
Second Sunday in Lent
I was struck this week by a passage in 2 Samuel 14. Absalom, David's rebellious son, has fled the capital city, estranged from his father, King David. David agonized over Absalom and longed to have him back. Reasons of pride and state seemed to make that impossible, however. David's aide and friend, Joab, discerned the king's agony and strategized with a "wise woman" from Tekoa to convince David to effect the return home of his beloved Absalom.
The wise woman seeks and is granted an audience with the king. She tells him a story, purportedly about herself and her son. He has killed his brother in a fight in the fields. The rest of the family wants to avenge the death of the one brother with the death of his murderer. The old lady pleads with David for the life of her remaining son, even though he is a murderer. David grants her request with a promise of protection.
The wise woman speaks again. With Nathan-like acuity she charges the king with duplicity for he is planning to do to Absalom just what he has sworn himself to prevent in the case of the woman's remaining son. she says,"For in giving this decision (about her son) the king convicts himself, inasmuch as the king does not bring his banished one home again" (2 Samuel 14:13)!
David heard God's word in this woman's words and summoned Absalom back to Jerusalem, eventually forgiving him.
The potency of this passage for Lent lies in v.14 where the wise woman says: "we must all die; we are like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up. But God will not take away a life; he will devise plans so as not to keep an outcast banished forever from his presence."
what an astonishing saying. It is gospel if it is anything. As we move deeper into Lent our reflections turn away from ourselves and our disciplines of self-examination to intense reflections on the life and death of Jesus, Immanuel, God-with-us. What we see unfold in his life we have discovered are precisely the plans the Great King, God, has "devised" so as not to keep outsiders like us, like me, from his presence forever.
Herein lies the hidden hope of Lent. It is good, however - remembering that the Sundays in Lent are not themselves part of Lent but rather retain their character as "Little Easters" and thus invite us to acclaim and embrace the good news of the gospel even in the midst of Lent - it is good to allow this hope to surface so as to season of examinations and repentances with grace and gratitude. In other words, our Sunday celebrations of gospel in Lent transform the hard and painful work of examination and repentance into gifts. Such grace-seasoned gifts lead us not into condemnation and despair but rather deeper into the life and suffering of the One who blessed his tormentors at the cross with these words, which belong to us as well, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34).
May such a blessing resonate deep in our hearts this second Sunday in Lent and may we go forth with courage, vision, and humor into the Lenten work that lies ahead!
Peace,
Lee Wyatt
The wise woman seeks and is granted an audience with the king. She tells him a story, purportedly about herself and her son. He has killed his brother in a fight in the fields. The rest of the family wants to avenge the death of the one brother with the death of his murderer. The old lady pleads with David for the life of her remaining son, even though he is a murderer. David grants her request with a promise of protection.
The wise woman speaks again. With Nathan-like acuity she charges the king with duplicity for he is planning to do to Absalom just what he has sworn himself to prevent in the case of the woman's remaining son. she says,"For in giving this decision (about her son) the king convicts himself, inasmuch as the king does not bring his banished one home again" (2 Samuel 14:13)!
David heard God's word in this woman's words and summoned Absalom back to Jerusalem, eventually forgiving him.
The potency of this passage for Lent lies in v.14 where the wise woman says: "we must all die; we are like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up. But God will not take away a life; he will devise plans so as not to keep an outcast banished forever from his presence."
what an astonishing saying. It is gospel if it is anything. As we move deeper into Lent our reflections turn away from ourselves and our disciplines of self-examination to intense reflections on the life and death of Jesus, Immanuel, God-with-us. What we see unfold in his life we have discovered are precisely the plans the Great King, God, has "devised" so as not to keep outsiders like us, like me, from his presence forever.
Herein lies the hidden hope of Lent. It is good, however - remembering that the Sundays in Lent are not themselves part of Lent but rather retain their character as "Little Easters" and thus invite us to acclaim and embrace the good news of the gospel even in the midst of Lent - it is good to allow this hope to surface so as to season of examinations and repentances with grace and gratitude. In other words, our Sunday celebrations of gospel in Lent transform the hard and painful work of examination and repentance into gifts. Such grace-seasoned gifts lead us not into condemnation and despair but rather deeper into the life and suffering of the One who blessed his tormentors at the cross with these words, which belong to us as well, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34).
May such a blessing resonate deep in our hearts this second Sunday in Lent and may we go forth with courage, vision, and humor into the Lenten work that lies ahead!
Peace,
Lee Wyatt
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