What's Theology Got to Do with It?

A book came to my attention the other day. Anthony Robinson of the Alban Institute wrote a book back in 2006 titled What’s Theology Got to Do with it? His primary point in the book is that today’s churches have very little real theology (understanding of God) behind most of what they do. In most modern churches, he argues, you’ll hear a lot of talk about God (as in “God-talk”), but very little of a substantive nature of what the church is really about; that is to say that most modern congregations have no real theology of church – a people called out from the world by God to be His own peculiar people with their own peculiar ideas and practices and behaviors and agenda. Rather, he says, when modern churches start reflecting on what it means to be and do “church,” what you get is a thoroughly secular litany of systems theory, leadership studies, conflict management, and marketing strategies, none of which has anything to do with God. Apparently, you don’t have to have a theology of church these days to do “church,” at least as many modern churches understand “church.”

A professor at one of the most prestigious seminaries in the country recently remarked that most seminary students she sees these days have no discernible ecclesiology (theological understanding of the church) at all. “For my students,” she says, “the church is a voluntary not-for-profit organization run like a local franchise.” Robinson put it more succinctly. He said that today’s concept of church is derived largely from the culture: an entertainment industry complete with audience ratings; a seller of spiritual goods and services; a religious club for people with shared experiences; a special interest group gathered around certain social or political agendas; or simply a gathering place where people have their ‘needs met,’ whatever they are, whatever that means.

It's safe to tell it now. I was a pastor once at a church that was hiring a new minister of youth. As senior pastor, it was my job to meet with the search committee and task them for their search. I met with the committee and told them that the primary role of the youth minister was essentially the same as that of the senior pastor; namely, to move persons farther along the way toward becoming fully devoted disciples of Jesus Christ. It was just that a youth minister focused on disciple-making with adolescents and youth, rather than adults. Given that role and function, therefore, I told them that it was vital that they pay particular attention both to the prospective candidate's theology of the church and theology of ministry. No matter what other "skills" this person might happen to bring to the church, I suggested, if they did not see themselves and their chief role as being fundamentally in the disciple-making business, they would not help us as a church to fulfill our mission and purpose; namely, to make disciples. When I finished a woman on the committee, mother of two teenagers, looked at me and said: "Theology of ministry? Why do we need to know that? I just want someone who knows how to plan after school programs for our youth so that my kids will have a place to go where I know they can hang out and not do drugs."

Now I know what you're thinking: "But that's not my church." Oh really? Laypeople, ask your pastor to articulate for you his theology of church. Pastor, ask your laypeople to articulate for you their theology of church. Pastor, ask your staff to articulate for you their theology of church. Oh, they can tell you about the latest book on conflict resolution or crisis intervention or leadership theory or "emotional intelligence" (translate that "manipulating people to get them to do what you want them to do"), and they can tell you all about the latest gimmick for marketing the church to the target population or improving customer satisfaction, but when it comes to a theology of church...the silence is deafening.

Contrast that with the New Testament concept of the Church. The word “church” comes from a Greek word (ecclesia), which means “a people called out.” Do you hear the counter-cultural echoes in that? The church is not a club, or a social service organization, or an entertainment venue, or a place where I get my “needs met.” In the New Testament, the church is a community of people gathered by God to learn daily what it means to follow Jesus Christ. Peter put it this way: “Once you were no people; but now you are God’s people” (1 Peter 2:10).

Everything the church does, from baptism to weddings to funerals to fellowship, ought to be an opportunity to clarify and communicate, both for ourselves and the world, just what a remarkable, counter-cultural difference it makes to be a Christian. "I'm a Christian; I don't believe in a sui generis, eternal, omnipotent Nature; I believe in Creation. I'm a Christian; I don't believe in Luck (Lady or otherwise); I believe in Providence. I'm a Christian; I don't believe that human failings are merely a matter of "Oops" or "Uh Oh;" I believe in sin. I'm a Christian; I don't believe in conflict resolution; I believe in confession and repentance and forgiveness...."

I know it seems a lot to ask these days, but some of us out there actually want a church with a theology, because some of us are silly enough to think (and this will sound strange to some) that the church ought to be about God.

The Shack Revisited*

People have been asking me what I thought of the new book by William P. Young called The Shack. They say: “You gotta read it; it’s a great book.” And so I ask them: “Okay, what’s so great about it?” What I get is theology – they like the view of God the book espouses. Of course, that means I’m in. So I read it. It’s a good read, really. Real page-turner. Young manifests a rare gift of language and imagery. Example: The central character, Mack, receives a note, presumably from God, which he then proceeds to open. Young describes this rather pedestrian task with language that is anything but – Turning his back to the breath-snatching wind, he finally coaxed the single small rectangle of unfolded paper out of its nest. Now, that’s nice.

Theologically, the book is a bit schizophrenic, perhaps intentionally so. When the tortured protagonist, Mack, is speaking, the theology espoused is a sort of new age, postmodern, existential, anti-intellectual, “roll-your-own” spirituality that gives priority to feeling over thinking, experience over tradition, immanence over transcendence, and the personal (individual) over the corporate and cosmic. One passage in the book is telling:

Try as he might, Mack could not escape the desperate possibility that the note just might be from God after all, even if the thought of God passing notes did not fit well with his theological training. In seminary he had been taught that God had completely stopped any overt communication with moderns, preferring to have them only listen to and follow sacred Scripture, properly interpreted, of course. God’s voice had been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellects. It seemed that direct communication with God was something exclusively for the ancients and uncivilized, while educated Westerners’ access to God was mediated and controlled by the intelligentsia. Nobody wanted God in a box, just in a book. Especially an expensive one bound in leather with gilt edges, or was that guilt edges?

But when “God” is talking (as “Papa,” “Jesus,” or “Sarayu” – Young’s take on the Trinity) the theology expressed is more fully orbed, satisfying, and, occasionally, even profound. For example, when Mack asks Papa who’s in charge in the Trinity, Papa responds:

Humans are so lost and damaged that to you it is almost incomprehensible that people could work or live together without someone being in charge. …Creation has been taken down a very different path than we desired. In your world the value of the individual is constantly weighed against the survival of the system, whether political, economic, social, or religious – any system actually. First one person, and then a few, and finally even many are easily sacrificed for the good and ongoing existence of that system. In one form or another this lies behind every struggle for power, every prejudice, every war, and every abuse of relationship. The ‘will to power and independence’ has become so ubiquitous that it is now considered normal.

Actually, that’s not a bad interpretation of Jesus’ statement about the “will to power” in Mark 10:42-45 in which he suggests that power is pagan and cannot be redeemed; only aborted.

Of course, the theological issue at stake in The Shack is theodicy – the problem of evil; literally, the "judgment of God" as in God on trial. (See the collection of essays by C. S. Lewis titled God in the Dock.) Mack’s daughter, Missy, was kidnapped and murdered at The Shack and he returns to the scene of the crime three and a half years later to make sense of it all…and peace with God. C. S. Lewis, in The Problem of Pain, expressed the essence of the issue of theodicy when he says, “There are three statements, only two of which can be held together – God is all-powerful; God is good; Bad things happen.” The Shack resolves the “problem” (just as Rabbi Kushner does, When Bad Things Happen to Good People) with an appeal to impotence and immanence – God may be “all good,” but he is not “all powerful,” God’s power being limited by human choice and freedom. That resolution to the problem of evil works (in the sense of being satisfying) if the pain/evil we’re talking about is personal pain/evil. When what I’m dealing with is individual, personal, intimate suffering then it’s enough to have a God Who puts His arms around me and says “I know just how you feel even though there’s really not very much I can do about it.” When my pain is personal, immanence trumps transcendence. But when the pain is cosmic – when the bombs are falling, or the 767’s are flying into the World Trade Center – I want more than just empathy; I want sovereignty. I observed that churches were full on Sunday September 16, 2001, and the worshippers weren’t so much looking for a Caring God as a Sovereign God. Indeed, someone even said to me on that Sunday: “I needed to come here today to be reminded of Who’s in charge.” To be sure, it didn’t last. Never does. Life settles in and settles down and the tuff stuff, while not painless, is at least personal rather than cosmic, and therefore seems more manageable, and we think that with a little understanding we can handle it. That’s The Shack’s approach to theodicy; and that’s all right, I guess, so long as we remember that God is also the “Blazing Fire” the writer of Hebrews talks about (see Hebrews 12:18-21). Immanence and transcendence – we need both in our gods. Fortunately, with the Bible’s God, we get both.

One final comment. I find it interesting…and encouraging that The Shack is the number one best seller right now on the New York Times Best Seller’s List. It documents what some of us have long suspected; that, despite the ubiquitous secularism and just plain silliness being served up these days as a “junk food diet” for the desperate and the disconnected, there is yet a deep, abiding longing for God hardwired in every one of us. And it shows up at the strangest times…in the strangest places. That’s probably important.

*The is a a reprint of a blog I did on July 10, 2008. There is renewed interest in the book in our area (western NC) because the author has been invited to speak at a local college.

The Power to Bless*

Frederick Buechner, in his book The Alphabet of Grace, speaks softly and poignantly of his experience of acknowledging in the most awkward of circumstances his call to ministry.

In an elegant house on Long Island one summer Sunday, down a long table cluttered with silver and crystal and the faces and hands of strangers, my hostess suddenly directs a question to me. She is deaf and speaks in the ringing accents of the deaf, and at the sound of her questions all other conversation stops, and every face turns to hear my answer. “I understand that you are planning to enter the ministry,” she says. “is this your own idea, or have you been poorly advised?” I had no answer, and even if I’d had one, it wouldn’t have been shoutable, and even if I’d shouted it, she couldn’t have heard it, so the question was never answered and thus rings still unanswered in my head.

What is striking about this is the fact that Buechner, after all the intervening years, is still doing business with those words, is still wounded by them. In another place, he admits that the woman who uttered them meant “no real harm,” yet her words wound still. Why? Why do words, mere words, have such power over us?

Maybe they shouldn’t. After all, they’re just words. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Words are insubstantial, immaterial, even trivial. You can’t weigh them, though sometimes, I observe, we speak of “measuring” them. The great Christian poet, T. S. Eliot, talked not only with words but about words, especially in his Four Quartets:

Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still.

At their simplest, words are symbols, a way of talking about one thing in terms of something else. Someone has said that the mind is like an art gallery with pictures hanging on the wall, and underneath each picture, a little plaque with a name describing what is pictured above. And so when I say a word, what you see is a picture, not the word underneath. When I say “book,” what you see is a volume, not the letters B-O-O-K. And so it goes. I say a word; you get a picture. “Doctor,” “senator,” “southerner.” As I say the word, the picture appears hanging on the wall of your mind just above the word. The problem is, that when we speak to each other, we assume that the picture I have hanging on the wall of my mind above the word I am using is exactly the same as the one hanging on the wall of your mind; but it isn’t! That’s why ambiguity and misunderstanding cling like barnacles to our words and encrust our speech with confusion. That’s why we say so often, “No, no, no. That’s not what I meant at all!” That is, wrong picture!

Words, it seems, are fickle, flexible, slippery things that are difficult to get a handle on. Perhaps that’s why words have become so cheap, so discredited in our culture: “Ah, it’s just hearsay.” “Talk is cheap.” “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words….”

But there’s another word about words. Words are a form of power, and like all forms of power (physical, financial, political, social), words can be used to bless or to curse, to heal or to injure, to save or to damn. “Daddy, I love you.” “I want a divorce.” “Mommy, I’m hungry.” Feel it?

When I was in my first pastorate, I was called late one night to the ER by one of my members who happened to be the ER nurse on duty at the local hospital. She had asked me if it would be okay to call me should there ever be a need for pastoral care for someone who didn’t have a pastor. I said: “Sure.” She met me at the door and on the way to the waiting room filled me in about what I’d find when I got there. It seems a young couple had just brought their infant son to the ER with difficulty breathing. “Blue baby,” I think is what they call it. SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome. Huddled whispers in white corridors greeted us as we arrived. The ER physician asked if I would go in with her to tell the couple that they wouldn’t be taking their baby home that night. We walked in and found them folded together frightened children. Instinctively they stood when they saw us. And clearing her throat, the doctor let them go into the room – seven little words – “I’m sorry,” she said. “We did everything we could.”

“Sticks and stone may break my bones but words….”

“I give you my word,” we sometimes say. And despite all the years of cheap talk and the devaluation of linguistic currency in our culture, that’s still a heavy expression: “I give you my word.” Feel it? That’s because words are a form of power, and like all power, they can be used to bless or to curse, to wound or to heal, to save or to damn, to give life or to take it.

In her powerful and moving novel, St Maybe, Anne Tyler tells the story of Ian, a young man who’s eaten up with guilt because he wrongly accused his sister-in-law of having an affair. She hadn’t, but he spread the vicious gossip anyway. His brother, believing Ian, became so despondent that one night, he went outside and blew out his brains. Ian is haunted by the guilt of what he’d done that he cannot undo. He can’t sleep; he can’t eat. “Oh God,” he pleads, “how long will I have to pay for a handful of tossed-off words?”

That’s why James, Jesus’ half-brother who knew full well just how seriously Jesus took our words, warns Christians with the words: “Let not many of you become teachers; my brothers and sisters, knowing that we shall be judged with the greater judgment.” He continues: “For we all fail much. But if anyone does not fail in any matter, this one is a perfect person about to bridle even the whole body. But if we put bits into the mouths of horses so that they obey us, we [thus] guide their whole bodies. Notice also the ships, [though they are] impressive and driven by stout winds, they are guided by a little rudder wherever the will of the pilot desires. So also the tongue is a little member but boasts great things. Behold a small fire engulfs a great forest. And the tongue is a fire!”

James’ Jewish-Christian background is probably behind his warning about the high stakes of teaching. In Judaism there was no more sacred office than that of rabbi, teacher. And since words are the teachers’s trade and the tongue his tool, James reminds the teacher to choose his words wisely, because words exercise a power disproportionate to their size and substance. Just as it only takes a little rudder to steer a big ship, so also just a few well-chosen, or ill-chosen, words can bless or curse.

Le mote juste, the French say, “Choose just the right word.” That’s good advice, for man or God. And so, John says, when God wanted to bless us, He chose le mote juste, and let it go: “In beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Kathleen Norris, in her book Amazing Grace, tells a story about the power of words, sometimes despite and beyond the limitations of the speaker. She writes:

It was January, bitterly cold and windy, on the day that I joined the church, and I found that the subzero chill perfectly matched my mood. As I walked to church, into the face of that wind, I was thoroughly depressed. I didn’t feel much like a Christian and wondered if I was making a serious mistake. I longed to take refuge in Simone Weil’s position, that her true religious calling was to remain outside the church. But that was not my way. I still felt like an outsider in the church and wondered if I always would. Yet I knew that somehow, in ways I did not yet understand, making this commitment was something I needed to do.

Before the service, the new members gathered with some of the elders. One was a man I’d never liked much. I’ll call him Ed. He’d always seemed ill-tempered to me, and also a terrible gossip, epitomizing the small mindedness that can make small-town life such a trial. The minister had asked him to formally greet the new members. Standing awkwardly before our small group, Ed cleared his throat and mumbled, “I’d like to welcome you to the body of Christ.” The minister’s mouth dropped open, as did mine – neither of us had ever heard words remotely like this come from Ed’s mouth. Like distant thunder, the words made me more alert, attuned to further disruptions in the atmosphere. What had I gotten myself into? I was astonished to realize, as that service began, that while I may never like Ed very much, I had just been commanded to love him. My own small mind had just been jolted, and the world seemed larger, opened in a new way.

Ed’s words, those few, simple words of welcome, had power. Like the sacrament of baptism, they seemed to have made an indelible mark on my soul. And they had real import for me during the service. As I went forward on shaky legs to the front of the church, to join the others who were becoming members that day, my eye happened to catch the disbelieving and most unwelcoming expression on the face of a younger woman, an extremely conservative member of the congregation. Absurdly, my mind jumped to that classic Western movie line: “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.” I felt a twinge for her, for both of us, as I didn’t want to be there, doing this, any more than she wanted me to be invading her sacred turf with my doubts, my suspect Christianity, so unlike her own. I nearly turned around. But I couldn’t because I had just been welcomed into the body of Christ.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words…just words…can sometimes heal me.”

“Let not many of you teach!” said the teacher. But please, let some. And let them use their words well. Because words are power, and like all power, they can be used to bless or to curse, to wound or to heal, to save or to damn, to give life or to take it.

And if you choose them well, and use them wisely, and speak them truthfully, you will bless and not curse, heal and not harm, give life and not take it.

I give you my word.

*The following is a sermon I preached on Sunday School Emphasis Sunday at the church where I currently serve as Intentional Interim Pastor. A version of this sermon was published in RevExp 97:2 (Spring 2000).

In Defense of Tradition

Every now and then I run across something said so well that I wish I'd said it. This piece by Virginia Bennett in The Anglican Digest is one of those.

G. K. Chesterton once said that being a "traditionalist" means a determination not to automatically dismiss any man's opinion outright just because he happens to be your father.

The buzz these days in the church is whether you attend a church that has "traditional" or "contemporary" worship.

William Willimon, former chaplain at Duke University and newly elected Methodist Bishop of Alabama, (not known to be a curmudgeon) writes this: "I was recently at a church of my own denomination, and I came away frightened, thinking, have I seen the future of the church? The hymns (songs really), anthems, everything had jettisoned the tradition, our language, our metaphors, and our stuff in favor of something called contemporary Christian music. And in my humble opinion, what I heard that day, I just don't think will lift the luggage in the future. As people were singing, praising some vague thing called 'God' who, as far as I could tell, had never done anything in particular, as we were bouncing along praising, I wanted to say, 'you know there are people out there today who just found out that their cancer is not responding to treatment, or who found out their kids won't do right, that their marriage won't survive, or that they can’t keep their jobs, and here we are just bouncing along, grinning, praising God. We've got some good stuff for that kind of thing -- where is it?'"

Willimon speaks of running into a preacher who said his church had had contemporary worship for 12 years. "When does the contemporary stop being contemporary? When we go into our second decade of this stuff." The preacher said, "You mark my word, you've heard it here first; you're going to drive by some Baptist church in Atlanta, and they're going to have, out there on the lawn, an amplifier, a set of drums, and a guitar for sale. We will have moved on to some other infatuation."

Willimon reports that he heard an (ELCA) Lutheran pastor say recently, "We are starting to form new churches that have, as part of their mission, the aggressive, loving nurturance of traditional Christian worship."

The fact is, there is something to be said for using words that have been used in Christian worship for 2000 years, something to be said for using prayers that St. Augustine and St. Basil and countless others handed on to us like the precious gems they are. There are 2000 years of Christians who have pressed them to their hearts, stained them with their tears, and carried them to their deaths. The core of our Christian worship is filled with the life blood of Israel as well. The truth is, not many people realize how ancient are the prayers that we pray and the substance that fills them or how ancient is much of our music. This is not to negate that there is some bad theology in traditional hymns nor the need to bring a freshness to worship or a spontaneous voice to prayer.

It IS to say that what traditional worship gives us is something that is not only unique, but something holy, something that has bubbled up from thousands of years of Hebrew-Christian experience.

There are contemporary hymns I love, that bring me fresh insight into God and my relationship with God. But I will never stop breaking out in goose bumps when the choir sings an "Aye Verum Corpus" or a Gregorian chant that suddenly brings the world of my Christian ancestors so close I can almost reach out and touch them; those who felt that God was worthy of the deepest reverence they could offer.

A student asked Willimon, "How come we always sing these old hymns in Duke Chapel? I don't know any of these hymns." Willimon replied, in love, "Well you'll notice that you won't hear any of this kind of music on MTV. This is different kind of music. You had to get up, get dressed, and come down here at an inconvenient hour of the day to hear music like this. Check out the Ten Commandments. It says that thing about 'honor your father and your mother.' This is our attempt to do that in a small way. To be a Christian is to find yourself moving to a different rhythm, a different beat."

So yes, this year in our church you will hear the ancient words again and you will hear the ancient music again and the reason it will touch you is because it has woven its way into your soul as it did those before us. No doubt, there are things that are new, both tunes and words that will ultimately weave their way into our hearts and souls as well. In the meantime, perhaps the test of whether they stay or leave should be do they give you goose bumps! If not that, then at least it should be something that doesn't just make you feel good, but something that pulls back the veil between God, you, and the rest of the community, so that we are able to perceive just Who it is we come before and worship.