Recommendation: The Sacredness of Questioning Everything

Every once in a while, I encounter a book that breathes life into me by the way it communicates profound truth. The interesting thing is that books like this almost always take me by surprise. Zondervan sent me David Dark's new book, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, with the request that I review it if I liked it. I had heard of Dark, but had never read anything by him. The title intrigued me, so I opened to the table of contents...which intrigued me all the more:

Table of Contents

1. Never What You Have In Mind--Questioning God

2. The Unbearable Lightness of Being Brainwashed--Questioning Religion

3. Everybody to the Limit--Questioning Our Offendedness

4. Spot the Pervert--Questioning our Passions

5. The Power of the Put-On--Questioning Media

6. The Word, The Line, The Way--Questioning Our Language

7. Survival of the Freshest--Questioning Interpretations

8. The Past Didn't Go Anywhere--Questioning History

9. We Do What We're Told--Questioning Governments

10. Sincerity As Far As The Eye Can See--Questioning the Future

End Note: That Means To Signal a World Without End

That was enough to get me to start reading immediately. Halfway through the first chapter I was hooked. Dark artfully articulates faith in the context of what Lesslie Newbigin calls "A Proper Confidence"...faith that is not (cannot be) the equivalent of certainty...faith that recognizes our finite nature, our tendency to re-craft God in our own images and religion into self-justifying dogma. At times, he seems to be virtually channeling Kierkegaard in the context of 21st century Western culture. Dark offers us a thing of beauty, a life-giving breath of fresh air. His book invites us to take God a lot more seriously by taking ourselves a lot less seriously. Drawing from diverse voices (from Augustine and Aquinas to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to U2 and Arcade Fire) and various disciplines (Theology, Philosophy, Literature, Film, Music, etc.), he revives the Biblical tradition of questioning...as an act of humility in the pursuit of truth. He calls for us to cut through the propaganda, and resist any "powers that be" that would seek to subvert or co-opt the Way of Jesus. He beckons us to journey down a path that is characterized by faith, hope, and love (rather than certainty).

Pick up this book. You won't be disappointed.

AE

Amen, Methodists. Thank you.

Wow. Check out this new ad campaign from the United Methodist Church. Seriously...Wow.

May more churches, including ours, catch this kind of a vision.

AE

Memories on our wedding anniversary

My amazing wife put together a cool online slideshow of our life together so far. CLICK HERE if you'd like to watch it...if for no other reason, you might enjoy how dorky I look in the earlier years...and you might enjoy wondering how a girl that beautiful fell for such a dork. I wonder that myself all the time.

AE

Choosing to Err on the Side of Grace

Within the last couple of decades, many in our fellowship began to rediscover the concept of grace. In my opinion, this was a fascinating and much needed conversation that didn't go far enough. Many of us moved from a version of Christianity that often devolved into an earned and maintained salvation, to a version of Christianity that received salvation as a gift...that can often devolve into a subculture of entitlement, who's mantra is "I don't have to!" It never occurred to us that the question we were seeking to answer, might actually be a poorly framed question, suggesting a limited selection of anemic answers. We didn't notice that we were simply selecting the other side of an inadequate coin. We focussed on what grace freed us from, but stopped short of exploring what grace freed us "to".

Biblically, grace seems to be a proactive, transformative reality. It is a gift, but it is a gift that, once received, must be reflected and modeled to the rest of the world. As Scot McKnight suggests in his book, Embracing Grace: A Gospel for All of Us, once we embrace grace, we are to become an "embracing" people who exhibit grace toward the other...precisely because it is unmerited. It is less a benefit for members of a club...and more a new reality that they have bought into. To accept it for myself and refuse to extend it to others betrays both the gift of grace and the Giver. Don't just take my word for it, Jesus actually has quite a bit to say about this in the gospels (i.e. his comments on forgiveness after "The Lord's Prayer" and the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant...just for starters)

It's usually at this point that the fear impulse kicks in. What if we're wrong? This is the fear that haunts those raised in our tradition. Let me clear it up for you. We are. We have 3 pound brains and we dare to speak of an infinite God. When asked if he would fellowship a "brother in error", Fred McClure used to routinely respond "I don't have any other kind. We're all in error on something." N.T. Wright regularly begins his lectures by saying something to the effect of "I'm wrong about roughly 1/3 of what I'm telling you. I just have no idea which 1/3 that is." And thank God for His grace that washes over sin and "error" as he is actively working to form me into the image of His son... into the future where His dream for me and the world are reality.

The Bible is quite clear that the measure of judgment we apply to others will be applied to us. While I highly doubt that the Bible's concept of judgment is as equivalent to the American judicial system as we tend to presuppose in these discussions, the implications are hard to miss. We are going to be wrong about some things, but if, when it comes to judgment, "the measure I use" will be "measured to me", I want to "err" on the side of grace.

AE

Reflections On Leaving Youth Ministry Part 3

For many reasons, including some of the statistics I have already mentioned, many youth ministers can become consumed with a defense-oriented approach. They believe that "secular culture" is fundamentally opposed to faith... especially as it pertains to teenagers. Further, they know that on many "secular" college campuses (and even high schools), faith is overtly challenged in the name of "secular science". Because of these assumptions, many youth ministers adopt a multi-pronged strategy to counter these influences.

1) Alternative Christian Activity--The minister attempts to turn the students' attention to "christian alternatives" of all of the things that can be so attractive in "secular culture". Teens like parties...so we throw "safe" social gatherings like all night "lock-ins" and "fifth quarters" after the local high school's football game. Some go so far as to throw alternative banquets for Christian students to attend in lieu of their prom or homecoming dances. Additionally, the youth minister knows that simple idle time can be filled with the pervasive influence of this alluring secular culture... so we attempt to counter with a flood of our own safe, "Christian" activity. Keep them busy in our sanctioned and sanitized activity, and they'll "keep the faith", or so goes the conventional wisdom of youth ministry.

2) Alternative Christian Media--The minister attempts to turn the students' attention to positive music, movies, etc. produced by Christian artists and Christian companies. Special attention is payed to the details...emulating particular musical styles, and even in some cases going to great pains to emulate a particular band or artist. The idea is to isolate our students from the negative influence of all of that "worldly" entertainment, and intentionally surrounding them with the positive influence of media that knocks-off the worldly stuff in terms of style, while retaining control of content.

3) Alternative Answers to "Secular Science"--The assumption has generally been that since "the world" will be asking really tough questions of faith, we had better develop concrete arguments to refute the questions and claims of science. In many cases, much energy is put into the development, propagation, and indoctrination of these "answers", with the added implication that no ground can be surrendered or faith is no longer viable.

As common as it is, there are many problems with such an approach. First of all, the assumptions that support it are faulty. If Christianity is actually based on the Way of Jesus (as told in Scripture) then we would do well to note Jesus' engagement with his culture. As counter-intuitive as it seems to us, God seems to have sent his "only-begotton Son" because he loved the "world". Jesus' primary engagement seems to have been to those who the religious looked down on. To Him, they seemed to be very much the point. His engagement with the religious people seems to have been primarily to challenge them to become more than they had settled for and to engage with God's mission. In short, isolating students from the world around them in the name of Christianity is as antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus as it is ineffective.

Students do not need a standardized set of answers and counter-arguments to the questions of secular science. Frankly, a) the scientific community remains unconvinced and unimpressed, b) it serves to maintain both a dualistic worldview and a false perception that there is an either/or choice that must be made between faith and science or, on the other side of the same coin, that all things pertaining to faith must be explained in scientific terms...c) a casual study of history will show how the church's assumption that new scientific revelations were threats to faith has frequently led to our looking silly at best, and being brutally un-christlike at worst...d) when we promote the idea that this is an all or nothing choice, frequently our students actually get this message, and choose to abandon faith when the fallible extra-biblical systems and constructs we handed them begin to prove inadequate...and e) Frankly we are pouring our energy into answering questions that fewer and fewer people are even asking...and debating strawmen that no one is arguing anymore (particularly at the quantum level, science can be very friendly to faith again, as it turns out).

In truth, I suspect that on the intellectual level, the pressing questions that must be engaged are coming from the social sciences and philosophy, and that what students actually need is to learn how to use the narrative of scripture as an interpretive lens...that we must teach them to interpret and engage the world around them in light of Jesus. Even so, there is a much larger problem. All of this presumes that faith is primarily intellectual and taylored exclusively to the individual. It seems to me that faith is inherently relational and missional. In scripture, faith is spoken of primarily in relational terms...both in relationship to God and in community. Most of the New Testament letters are addressed to communities of believers, and most of the "you" pronouns are plural. We must figure out ways to help students cultivate community, rather than sending them out "against the world". However, this is not to suggest a bunker mentality. They are to cultivate community that actively seeks to partner with God in what he is doing in the world. We tend to talk about "faith" as if "having faith" is a matter of mentally agreeing with a list of concepts. What a bizarre definition! Faith has to do with confidence. Faith leads to proactive engagement. I think that character and mission may be the most powerful apologetics of faith, for good or ill. If we neglect these for the sake of intellectual coercion and defending the "rightness" of our arguments, we may find that we have lost everything we were trying to protect and ensure. If we settle for creating a bunker-mentality subculture rather than cultivating a life-giving journey of proactive engagement, we may find that many of our students leave us precisely because they are seeking Jesus, and can't reconcile his mission to the world in scripture with ours.
AE