Right of Reply?
I know a number of people have been fascinated by the content of the Armybarmy blog and would periodically like to enter into public dialogue about it. Here's your opportunity to do so...
Friday 21: “Belong. Believe. Behave. Etc. (the new missional 'gospel') I don't know about all of that. It's a little complicated. It all sounds a little too formulaic and regimented and possibly even (-tell it not in Gath!-) legalistic! I'd prefer we just preach the gospel to people, compel them to repent and believe, and disciple them. Why not try this simpler approach today?” ---- A formula for selling heavenly insurance, it was called: “just preach the gospel to people, compel them to repent and believe, and disciple them” A bit like saying “do you believe the four spiritual laws?” “Yes”, “then you’re a Christian”. “I am? Is it really that simple?” We don’t ask people to reject their fundamental thinking and behaviour. Instead, we say, “Believe this and you’re saved.” That’s the heavenly insurance formula. But Jesus didn’t give people a simple formula. He said if you want to follow me, start over. Our preoccupation with correct belief is excessive. Obsessed with correct theology and correct doctrine, we have creeds, statements of faith and covenants, all designed to keep us on the straight and narrow. If we all just believe the same thing, the same words in this creed or covenant, everything will be fine. When Jesus called his disciples, he did not give them a test about their beliefs, about their theology, about their faith. He didn’t ask them if they believed the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic law. He simply said, “Follow me.” We would say, “Hang out with me for a while. Join up with me. Watch what I do.” The pattern Jesus sets is this: Join up with me, behave like I do, and from that your faith will grow. Yet if I insist on a “belong, behave, believe” order, I am simply replacing one formula with another. , “Believe this and you’re saved.” Maybe the sequence of these three isn’t that important. Maybe what is important is that all three happen—and continue to happen. A healthy interaction between believing, behaving and belonging is needed. If we want to assess our faith, a review of the integration of our behaviour, belonging and beliefs would be an effective tool. Hang out with us for while, see what we’re about, get to know us, see what we do. That was the way of him who said, “My deeds are my credentials.”
I wonder what a church growth strategy would look like if we said to people, come hang out with us for a while, see what we’re about. Or we could take another route and say, like Jesus did, look at my life, at the things I’ve done, and then decide about the Christian faith. I’m not sure I want to do that, to have someone look at my life and then decide about becoming a Christian. If my deeds are my credentials, that gets quite personal. WJE
Conversion historically has often meant an imperialistic (and sometimes coercive) demand for obedience to the institutions, creed and ethical norms of a dominant church. Pre-packaged theology, condescending approaches and assumptions that converts will conform to the predilections of the evangelist have continued to plague evangelism. Conversion is unidirectional. In a post-Christendom world we need to recover an authentic biblical emphasis on conversion. Does ‘belonging before believing’ delay indefinitely questions of ultimate allegiance? Do process evangelism courses downplay the crisis of decisive commitment to Jesus Christ as lord? Do centred-set churches imply no paradigm shift is necessary for those who would follow Jesus? We need a robust but chastened theology of conversion. Invitations to follow Jesus must be winsome rather than overbearing. And they must imply an ongoing journey of discipleship for those issuing as well as receiving such invitations. Conversion is a paradigm shift that stimulates news ways of thinking and living, not arrival at a pre-determined destination. Conversion is multidirectional and lifelong. This understanding of conversion changes the tone and content of evangelism. Maybe we need to re-read Acts 10 again. Peter’s vision, the shock to his theology it represented and his encounter with Cornelius affected his message. His opening words – ‘I now realise how true it is that God does not show favouritism but accepts those from every nation who fear him and do what is right’ – are humble, grateful and directed as much to himself as to Cornelius. The testimony of the New Testament, conversion is crucial for building Christian communities. But we need to disavow distortions like Armybarmy and welcome the opportunity to recover a gracious but radical understanding of conversion. Conversion is about believing and belonging. It involves commitment to a story and a community. But it is also about behaving in ways that are congruent with this story and strengthen the life and witness of this community. This is another Christendom legacy: providing people assented to the required beliefs and demonstrated they belonged by reasonably frequent church attendance, behaviour was investigated only if it became scandalous or socially damaging. But church after Christendom dare not ignore ‘behaving’. In a sceptical culture, faith must be lived if it is to be believed. In a culture moving away from both residual Christian values and distorted Christendom patterns, we have new opportunities and responsibilities to incarnate the gospel authentically. This does not mean legalism or moralism, but counter-cultural churches that live out the attractive but provocative implications of the story they proclaim.
- habitual is not necessarily holy. That is, some people put some helpful parameters in their lives, doing their rations at certain times and places regularly, studiously avoiding situations they find tempting, and the like. But habitual lifestyle is not necessarily a holy one.
How is it possible to grow holy and attain to union with God, if we do not habitually think of His presence? There is a presence of God which consists of an habitual infused peace. It is difficult to see how being holy doesn’t affect our habits and conduct, and the best way acquire the practice of the habitual presence of God is to meditate often on Our Lord Himself. The habit of the presence of God, like all other habits, is difficult to acquire, but once acquired, is easy and pleasant to preserve. All regenerate souls should seek for the habitual presence of this fruit of the Spirit.
As we become a reproduction of Christ, we will have a manner of life that expresses the Triune God, and we will be holy in all our manner of life—1 Pet. 1:15; 2:12: The expression of the Triune God from within a believer indicates that such a believer has become a reproduction of Christ—Phil. 1:20. The excellent manner of life—a life beautiful in its virtues—is the holy manner of life and the good manner of life in Christ, a life not only for God but filled and saturated with God—1 Pet. 2:12; 1:15; 3:16. A holy manner of life is a life that expresses the holy nature of God—1:15. According to 1:15, we should not merely be holy and live a holy life—we should become holy in all our manner of life. If we would be holy in all our manner of life, we ourselves, the persons, must become holy; our being, our disposition, our entire person, should become holy. If we would be holy in all our manner of life, we need to be habitually holy; we need to become a certain kind of person, a person who is holy in constitution. In order to be holy in all our manner of life, we need the impartation of the Father’s holy nature into us, the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit to make us holy, and God’s discipline so that we may partake of His holiness—vv. 2-3, 15; Heb. 12:10:1. When we were regenerated, the Father imparted His holy nature into us as the basic factor for us to be holy in all our manner of life—1 Pet. 1:3, 15. We become holy in all our manner of life through the sanctification of the Spirit; with the Father’s holy nature within us as the basis of operation, the Holy Spirit is working on us to make us holy—v. 2. Because we are often disobedient, we need God’s discipline; for this reason, Hebrews 12:10 says that God the Father disciplines us so that we may partake of His holiness and become holy even as He is holy—1 Pet. 1:15-16. Johno
“Get holy now, get sanctified now” – such statements reveals a failure to understand holiness from a biblical viewpoint of what it means to “be in Christ” and “Christ in us”, rather than a cherry picked use of Brengle. Holiness is Christ likeness or cohabiting Christ and the Spirit. “Putting on Christ” and so being “in Christ” is not a private mystical experience but a corporate fellowship of transformation. The goal of conformity to Christ (Rom.8:17. Phil.3:11-12,21 ! Cor.15:49) is inaugurated through faith and is an ongoing experience of our participation in Christ through the Spirit. To be in Christ s to be in God and to be the ongoing recipients of the Holy Spirit. Thus in the New Testament participation in God the Father’s gift of his Son and the Spirit is the root meaning of holiness. When we come to faith we are “sanctified in Christ” and are therefore rightly called “holy one” (1 Cor.1:2. 30. 6:11). To be like Christ is to participate in the Spirit and to embody the activity of God. It is, in other words to be like God, to be holy, to participate in God’s very life. Believers are “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom.6:11), and as God’s children, indwelt by the Spirit we have been liberated from all past slaveries and their related fears. Those who respond in faith are moved into Christ, that is into the sphere of his life and holiness. Simultaneously, those who move into Christ find that Christ has moved into them (Gal. 2:15-21). Faith, therefore is a liberation that is also an incorporation into Christ our new Lord, and into his body (Rom.6:11,13,19). Sanctification – growth in holiness, or dedication to God – replaces “greater and greater iniquity”. This growth is achieved, according to Paul, by means of regular self-offering to God. Paladin
Now since boredom ... is the root of all evil, what can be more natural than the effort to overcome it? ... My method does not consist in a change of field, but resembles the true rotation method in changing the crop and the mode of cultivation. Here we have at once the principle of limitation, the only saving principle in the world. The more you limit yourself, the more fertile you become in invention. A prisoner in solitary confinement for life becomes very inventive, and a spider may furnish him with much entertainment. Sifting through his "notes" for an unfinished "essay on boredom," the "slothful" narrator-protagonist of Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, Charlie "Melancholy" Citrine, stakes his claim to originality as follows: "I saw that I had stayed away from problems of definition.... I didn't want to get mixed up with theological questions about accidia and tedium vitae. I found it necessary to say only that from the beginning mankind experienced states of boredom but that no one had ever approached the matter front and center as a subject in its own right". The statement is striking, if not downright paradoxical, flying in the face as it does of a long and considerable literary history. Indeed, though he points here disparagingly to the tradition of medieval scholasticism and goes on to single out "Modern French literature" as "especially preoccupied with the theme of boredom", Citrine fails to acknowledge boredom's considerable literary-intellectual pedigree in the intervening period. Given the importance of much of the literature and culture so elided to Bellow's repeated efforts to awaken humankind to its slumbering powers not only in Humboldt's Gift but in his other novels as well, that omission invites a reconsideration of boredom as a central subject in his own work and of the relationship of that work to the actually vast literature of ennui. Abridged but no less tacit in Citrine's "boredom notes" and in much of Bellow's later fiction, this relationship is writ large in his first novel, Dangling Man. For this reason, the novel in question repays closer scrutiny. The debate provoked by such analyses and their findings has tended only to confirm Walter Kaufmann's conclusion regarding the so-called Existentialists themselves, namely that "one essential feature shared by all these men is their perfervid individualism". There is, however, something else which these latter share besides "the refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever ... especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life" and that is the intellectual genealogy of boredom. Unlike Citrine's "boredom notes" with which Dangling Man has often been juxtaposed, contained a nod to that genealogy in its original title Melancholia, after Diirer's rendering of the ambiguous Renaissance disease/pleasure. And more overtly, in his study of Baudelaire, Sartre acknowledges the emotional-intellectual kinship between Existential "nausee". The Existentialist author who seems most aware of and is most explicit about boredom's complex genealogy, however, is the author with whom Bellow is most often compared. By way of justifying his "violent spleen," the Underground Man of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground asserts that "excessive consciousness is a disease" and that its "direct, inevitable product is inertia" and "boredom". He explains: Naturally, to enter upon any course of action, one must be completely reassured in advance, and free of any trace of doubt. And how am I, for instance, to put my mind at ease? Where are the primary causes I can lean on, where are my basic premises? Where am I to find them? I exercise myself in thought, and hence, within my mind, every primary cause immediately drags after itself another, still more primary, and so on to infinity. Such is the very essence of all consciousness and thought. We're back, then, to the laws of nature. And what is the ultimate result? Boredom.
“Demon kicking”. I doubt that our friend would recognize a demon if he saw one let alone be able to “kick” it. Seems to me he is coming from a tribal animistic power encounter worldview to interpret biblical spiritual warfare. Scripture provides no support to the idea that we are to be “demon kicking”. The cross as victory makes little sense in such a worldview In the Bible the cross and resurrection is the demonstration of victory. The cross was the ultimate battle and Satan lost., The cross is the victory of righteousness over evil, of love over hate, of God’s way over Satan’s way. If our understanding of spiritual warfare does not see the cross as the final victory, then we are wrong.
Friday 21: “Belong. Believe. Behave. Etc. (the new missional 'gospel') I don't know about all of that. It's a little complicated. It all sounds a little too formulaic and regimented and possibly even (-tell it not in Gath!-) legalistic! I'd prefer we just preach the gospel to people, compel them to repent and believe, and disciple them. Why not try this simpler approach today?”
ReplyDelete----
A formula for selling heavenly insurance, it was called: “just preach the gospel to people, compel them to repent and believe, and disciple them” A bit like saying “do you believe the four spiritual laws?” “Yes”, “then you’re a Christian”. “I am? Is it really that simple?” We don’t ask people to reject their fundamental thinking and behaviour. Instead, we say, “Believe this and you’re saved.” That’s the heavenly insurance formula. But Jesus didn’t give people a simple formula. He said if you want to follow me, start over.
Our preoccupation with correct belief is excessive. Obsessed with correct theology and correct doctrine, we have creeds, statements of faith and covenants, all designed to keep us on the straight and narrow. If we all just believe the same thing, the same words in this creed or covenant, everything will be fine.
When Jesus called his disciples, he did not give them a test about their beliefs, about their theology, about their faith. He didn’t ask them if they believed the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic law. He simply said, “Follow me.” We would say, “Hang out with me for a while. Join up with me. Watch what I do.” The pattern Jesus sets is this: Join up with me, behave like I do, and from that your faith will grow.
Yet if I insist on a “belong, behave, believe” order, I am simply replacing one formula with another. , “Believe this and you’re saved.” Maybe the sequence of these three isn’t that important. Maybe what is important is that all three happen—and continue to happen. A healthy interaction between believing, behaving and belonging is needed. If we want to assess our faith, a review of the integration of our behaviour, belonging and beliefs would be an effective tool.
Hang out with us for while, see what we’re about, get to know us, see what we do. That was the way of him who said, “My deeds are my credentials.”
I wonder what a church growth strategy would look like if we said to people, come hang out with us for a while, see what we’re about. Or we could take another route and say, like Jesus did, look at my life, at the things I’ve done, and then decide about the Christian faith. I’m not sure I want to do that, to have someone look at my life and then decide about becoming a Christian. If my deeds are my credentials, that gets quite personal. WJE
Conversion historically has often meant an imperialistic (and sometimes coercive) demand for obedience to the institutions, creed and ethical norms of a dominant church. Pre-packaged theology, condescending approaches and assumptions that converts will conform to the predilections of the evangelist have continued to plague evangelism. Conversion is unidirectional.
ReplyDeleteIn a post-Christendom world we need to recover an authentic biblical emphasis on conversion. Does ‘belonging before believing’ delay indefinitely questions of ultimate allegiance? Do process evangelism courses downplay the crisis of decisive commitment to Jesus Christ as lord? Do centred-set churches imply no paradigm shift is necessary for those who would follow Jesus?
We need a robust but chastened theology of conversion. Invitations to follow Jesus must be winsome rather than overbearing. And they must imply an ongoing journey of discipleship for those issuing as well as receiving such invitations. Conversion is a paradigm shift that stimulates news ways of thinking and living, not arrival at a pre-determined destination. Conversion is multidirectional and lifelong.
This understanding of conversion changes the tone and content of evangelism. Maybe we need to re-read Acts 10 again. Peter’s vision, the shock to his theology it represented and his encounter with Cornelius affected his message. His opening words – ‘I now realise how true it is that God does not show favouritism but accepts those from every nation who fear him and do what is right’ – are humble, grateful and directed as much to himself as to Cornelius.
The testimony of the New Testament, conversion is crucial for building Christian communities. But we need to disavow distortions like Armybarmy and welcome the opportunity to recover a gracious but radical understanding of conversion.
Conversion is about believing and belonging. It involves commitment to a story and a community. But it is also about behaving in ways that are congruent with this story and strengthen the life and witness of this community.
This is another Christendom legacy: providing people assented to the required beliefs and demonstrated they belonged by reasonably frequent church attendance, behaviour was investigated only if it became scandalous or socially damaging.
But church after Christendom dare not ignore ‘behaving’. In a sceptical culture, faith must be lived if it is to be believed. In a culture moving away from both residual Christian values and distorted Christendom patterns, we have new opportunities and responsibilities to incarnate the gospel authentically. This does not mean legalism or moralism, but counter-cultural churches that live out the attractive but provocative implications of the story they proclaim.
- habitual is not necessarily holy. That is, some people put some helpful parameters in their lives, doing their rations at certain times and places regularly, studiously avoiding situations they find tempting, and the like. But habitual lifestyle is not necessarily a holy one.
ReplyDeleteHow is it possible to grow holy and attain to union with God, if we do not habitually think of His presence? There is a presence of God which consists of an habitual infused peace. It is difficult to see how being holy doesn’t affect our habits and conduct, and the best way acquire the practice of the habitual presence of God is to meditate often on Our Lord Himself. The habit of the presence of God, like all other habits, is difficult to acquire, but once acquired, is easy and pleasant to preserve. All regenerate souls should seek for the habitual presence of this fruit of the Spirit.
- habitual is not necessarily holy.
ReplyDeleteAs we become a reproduction of Christ, we will have a manner of life that expresses the Triune God, and we will be holy in all our manner of life—1 Pet. 1:15; 2:12:
The expression of the Triune God from within a believer indicates that such a believer has become a reproduction of Christ—Phil. 1:20. The excellent manner of life—a life beautiful in its virtues—is the holy manner of life and the good manner of life in Christ, a life not only for God but filled and saturated with God—1 Pet. 2:12; 1:15; 3:16. A holy manner of life is a life that expresses the holy nature of God—1:15. According to 1:15, we should not merely be holy and live a holy life—we should become holy in all our manner of life. If we would be holy in all our manner of life, we ourselves, the persons, must become holy; our being, our disposition, our entire person, should become holy. If we would be holy in all our manner of life, we need to be habitually holy; we need to become a certain kind of person, a person who is holy in constitution. In order to be holy in all our manner of life, we need the impartation of the Father’s holy nature into us, the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit to make us holy, and God’s discipline so that we may partake of His holiness—vv. 2-3, 15; Heb. 12:10:1. When we were regenerated, the Father imparted His
holy nature into us as the basic factor for us to be holy in all our manner of life—1 Pet. 1:3, 15. We become holy in all our manner of life through the sanctification of the Spirit; with the Father’s holy nature within us as the basis of operation, the Holy Spirit is working on us to make us holy—v. 2. Because we are often disobedient, we need God’s discipline; for this reason, Hebrews 12:10 says that God the Father disciplines us so that we may partake of His holiness and become holy even as He is holy—1 Pet. 1:15-16. Johno
“Get holy now, get sanctified now” – such statements reveals a failure to understand holiness from a biblical viewpoint of what it means to “be in Christ” and “Christ in us”, rather than a cherry picked use of Brengle. Holiness is Christ likeness or cohabiting Christ and the Spirit. “Putting on Christ” and so being “in Christ” is not a private mystical experience but a corporate fellowship of transformation. The goal of conformity to Christ (Rom.8:17. Phil.3:11-12,21 ! Cor.15:49) is inaugurated through faith and is an ongoing experience of our participation in Christ through the Spirit. To be in Christ s to be in God and to be the ongoing recipients of the Holy Spirit. Thus in the New Testament participation in God the Father’s gift of his Son and the Spirit is the root meaning of holiness. When we come to faith we are “sanctified in Christ” and are therefore rightly called “holy one” (1 Cor.1:2. 30. 6:11). To be like Christ is to participate in the Spirit and to embody the activity of God. It is, in other words to be like God, to be holy, to participate in God’s very life. Believers are “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom.6:11), and as God’s children, indwelt by the Spirit we have been liberated from all past slaveries and their related fears. Those who respond in faith are moved into Christ, that is into the sphere of his life and holiness. Simultaneously, those who move into Christ find that Christ has moved into them (Gal. 2:15-21). Faith, therefore is a liberation that is also an incorporation into Christ our new Lord, and into his body (Rom.6:11,13,19). Sanctification – growth in holiness, or dedication to God – replaces “greater and greater iniquity”. This growth is achieved, according to Paul, by means of regular self-offering to God. Paladin
ReplyDeleteNow since boredom ... is the root of all evil, what can be more natural than the effort to overcome it? ... My method does not consist in a change of field, but resembles the true rotation method in changing the crop and the mode of cultivation. Here we have at once the principle of limitation, the only saving principle in the world. The more you limit yourself, the more fertile you become in invention. A prisoner in solitary confinement for life becomes very inventive, and a spider may furnish him with much entertainment. Sifting through his "notes" for an unfinished "essay on boredom," the "slothful" narrator-protagonist of Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, Charlie "Melancholy" Citrine, stakes his claim to originality as follows: "I saw that I had stayed away from problems of definition.... I didn't want to get mixed up with theological questions about accidia and tedium vitae. I found it necessary to say only that from the beginning mankind experienced states of boredom but that no one had ever approached the matter front and center as a subject in its own right". The statement is striking, if not downright paradoxical, flying in the face as it does of a long and considerable literary history. Indeed, though he points here disparagingly to the tradition of medieval scholasticism and goes on to single out "Modern French literature" as "especially preoccupied with the theme of boredom", Citrine fails to acknowledge boredom's considerable literary-intellectual pedigree in the intervening period. Given the importance of much of the literature and culture so elided to Bellow's repeated efforts to awaken humankind to its slumbering powers not only in Humboldt's Gift but in his other novels as well, that omission invites a reconsideration of boredom as a central subject in his own work and of the relationship of that work to the actually vast literature of ennui. Abridged but no less tacit in Citrine's "boredom notes" and in much of Bellow's later fiction, this relationship is writ large in his first novel, Dangling Man. For this reason, the novel in question repays closer scrutiny. The debate provoked by such analyses and their findings has tended only to confirm Walter Kaufmann's conclusion regarding the so-called Existentialists themselves, namely that "one essential feature shared by all these men is their perfervid individualism". There is, however, something else which these latter share besides "the refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever ... especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life" and that is the intellectual genealogy of boredom. Unlike Citrine's "boredom notes" with which Dangling Man has often been juxtaposed, contained a nod to that genealogy in its original title Melancholia, after Diirer's rendering of the ambiguous Renaissance disease/pleasure. And more overtly, in his study of Baudelaire, Sartre acknowledges the emotional-intellectual kinship between Existential "nausee". The Existentialist author who seems most aware of and is most explicit about boredom's complex genealogy, however, is the author with whom Bellow is most often compared. By way of justifying his "violent spleen," the Underground Man of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground asserts that "excessive consciousness is a disease" and that its "direct, inevitable product is inertia" and "boredom". He explains: Naturally, to enter upon any course of action, one must be completely reassured in advance, and free of any trace of doubt. And how am I, for instance, to put my mind at ease? Where are the primary causes I can lean on, where are my basic premises? Where am I to find them? I exercise myself in thought, and hence, within my mind, every primary cause immediately drags after itself another, still more primary, and so on to infinity. Such is the very essence of all consciousness and thought. We're back, then, to the laws of nature. And what is the ultimate result? Boredom.
ReplyDeleteScholar
well, that was boring...
ReplyDelete“Demon kicking”. I doubt that our friend would recognize a demon if he saw one let alone be able to “kick” it. Seems to me he is coming from a tribal animistic power encounter worldview to interpret biblical spiritual warfare. Scripture provides no support to the idea that we are to be “demon kicking”. The cross as victory makes little sense in such a worldview In the Bible the cross and resurrection is the demonstration of victory. The cross was the ultimate battle and Satan lost., The cross is the victory of righteousness over evil, of love over hate, of God’s way over Satan’s way. If our understanding of spiritual warfare does not see the cross as the final victory, then we are wrong.
ReplyDelete