Bumper Sticker Christianity

Here is a selection from the remarks of the Rev. Dr. Timothy C. Tennent, president of Asbury Theological Seminary, at the 2011 convocation. Though some in the United Methodist 'establishment' may still view this evangelical school with suspicion, I've long respected Asbury, and seriously considered attending school there, in large part because of its uncompromising commitment to being Wesleyan, no matter what others may think. No doubt this institution has been one major factor in the more general recovery of Wesleyan theology in United Methodism in recent years. Asbury trains more United Methodist clergy each year than any of our "official" United Methodist seminaries (and Duke would likely be the next largest clergy supplier).

In the video below Dr. Tennent, a Methodist elder (presbyter), calls fellow evangelicals to task for reducing the gospel to slogans. In some ways this might be what has made evangelicalism successful, it is after all much easier to communicate a simple "slogan" gospel than it is to communicate, say, a deeply nuanced covenantal and sacramental theology. So evangelicals have dumped much of the difficulties of deep theology, focusing on "the basics," and with wide effect. What the Bible gives us, however, is not always simple - it is as deep and complicated and nuanced as real life, and it calls forth deep and real Christians, as Sacred Scripture puts it:

"Therefore let us go on to perfection, leaving behind the basic teaching about Christ, and not laying again the foundation: repentance from dead works and faith toward God..." (Hebrews 6:1)

Dr. Tennant and Holy Scripture, call us to move beyond the "continuous partial attention" of our digital world, to really "attending upon the ordinances (and oracles) of God," and call others to do likewise. Certainly the Bible and also the Christian tradition, from the Fathers to Aquinas, from Luther to the Wesleys, from Newman to Lewis to Wright offer us a deeply thoughtful, and intellectually rich and fulfilling faith. One of the really counter-cultural calls of the contemporary Christian, especially if he would be "evangelical" in the broadest sense, is to call people to move beyond "partial attention" to deep reflection and hard thinking.

I like what John Wesley said, "But it is not part of my design, to save either learned or unlearned men from the trouble of thinking.... On the contrary, my intention is, to make them think, and assist them in thinking. This is the way to understand the things of God."
(From the Preface to Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament.)

Lewis on modern academic theology pt.3

This is my concluding reflection on Lewis' essay, "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism," delivered to Anglican students and scholars at Cambridge in 1959. You can read the full essay in Christian Reflections. Here is how Lewis finishes out his essay:

"Such are the reactions of one bleating layman to Modern Theology. It is right you should hear them. You will perhaps not hear them very often again. Your parishoners will not often speak to you quite frankly. Once the layman was anxious to hide the fact that he believed so much less than the Vicar: he now tends to hide the fact that he believes so much more. Missionary to the priests of one's own church is an embarrasing role; though I have a horrid feeling that if such mission work is not soon undertaken the future history of the Church of England is likely to be short."

Lewis' quip about the layfolk hiding how much they do believe from the 'Reverends' reminds me of the opening of Luke Timothy Johnson's book, The Creed:

"Many Christians know that deadly moment at a party when their friends realize they actually believe something everyone has merrily been belittling. They recall their own stammered reassurances, their tortured reinterpretations, their relief when the conversation moves on, their self-contempt. They may never have heard of Nietzsche, may not be able to define Modernity, and may think of the Enlightenment as a chapter in a first-year college textbook. But their embarrassment at being seen as believers reveals them to be Christians whose view of the world has been shaped less by the Christian creed than by its cultured despisers."

What happens if the culture or the atmosphere of the theological seminary inculcates a deep unease with actual faith, so that the seminary trained clergy shift uncomfortably in their seats when the people of Christ begin speaking of actual moves of the Spirit in their lives, or actual miracles that have occured in response to prayer, or of their deep commitment to submit themselves to "living under" the words of some passage of Sacred Scripture?
Having attended a fine seminary of an historic Protestant church, I do believe that there is a degree to which the viewpoint and fundamental assumptions of "the cultured despisers" is very present, alongside a deep Christian faithfulness.

That is probably unavoidable to some extent; could it even be strangely helpful if it causes some students or faculty to attempt to recover the art of apologetics?

Still, I think the seminaries would do well to make abundantly clear that they exist for the faith and the life of church, to explore and pass along the faith of the church at the highest intellectual levels, and train clergy to do the same in the local setting. However, as I've said before, I believe one shortcoming of our seminary system in recent decades has been a focus on the intellectual dimensions of clergy training to the neglect of training in prayer, discipline, discernment, and other spiritual matters.

Thankfully, in recent years most of our seminaries have greatly improved in this area, adding spiritual formation groups and putting greater emphasis on the spiritual life. My hope and prayer is that the day will come when our seminary communities have a more monastic character, in that the students are all engaged in rhythms of prayer, work, and study together on a daily basis. I believe Nahotah House, the Episcopal Church's most Anglo-Catholic seminary, follows a similar model.
Surely, such a deep communal devotional life will radically "re-contextualize" the intellectual work, so that the same conversations or discussions, within this broader life of prayer and service, have a more obvious spiritual connection (or are more obviously useless and speculative). I'm happy to report that, from what I hear, there are neo-monastic houses now connected with our seminaries at Southern Methodist University and at Duke; though this is not yet part of the normal seminary experience, we are perhaps making strides in the right direction.

The extreme center...

United Methodist Bishop Scott Jones wrote a book about our doctrine that called The United Methodist Church "the extreme center." That is a good description. We are a church and a (Wesleyan) theological tradition that quite deliberately sees itself as at once "catholic and evangelical and reformed" (2008 Book of Discipline, para. 102, page 59).

We hold to the ancient catholic faith of the undivided church, especially as expressed in the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the formulation of the Council of Chalcedon (para.101, page 42). Through Anglicanism we've inherited the classic 'catholic' liturgy and order of the ancient church, adapted to our own context (this, after all, is why Scott Jones is a 'bishop' not something else). We use the tradition and experience of the whole catholic/universal Church, across the ages to help us interpret Scripture.

Our official doctrinal statements, the Articles of Religion and the Confession of Faith, not only reaffirm this catholic faith, but also clearly embrace some of the key insights of the Reformation era: such as vernacular liturgy, married clergy, justification by faith, the offering of the Holy Sacrament in both kinds to the lay people, and especially the primacy of Biblical authority. So we are a reformed as well as a catholic church, especially in our emphasis on the primacy of Biblical authority for the life of the Christian Church.

We are also a church that has from the beginning been an evangelical church, seeking to share the good news (evangel) of Jesus Christ through word and deed with the whole world. We were, historically, deeply connected with the "Great Awakenings" and "revivalism" as Methodist preachers called upon sinners everywhere to repent, to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and then to express that faith through changed lives and concrete actions in the world. We have always emphasized the need for each sinner to personally experience the forgiveness and salvation of Christ; and from the beginning we have been singing those great revivalistic songs.

This comprehensive identity, catholic+reformed+evangelical, is the great strength of Wesleyan Christianity. You get a little hint of that in the video below from Trinity United Methodist Church (Wilmette, Il). The church's worship space and the sung doxology, "Praise God from whom all blessings flow" by Anglican bishop Thomas Ken (Hymnal #95), are clearly inherited from our Anglican/catholic roots. The hymn that is then sung ("Pass me not, O gentle Savior") is one of the great evangelical revival hymns (351 in The United Methodist Hymnal). In an Episcopal or Catholic church you might get this glorious worship space, and the rich liturgical and sacramental worship that it signifies; in a Baptist or Evangelical Free church you might get this wonderful and heart-felt revival hymn; in this United Methodist Church you are given both.

Lewis on modern academic theology pt.2

This post is a follow-up to my first post reflecting upon "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism," a paper written and presented by C.S. Lewis for a gathering of Anglican seminarians at Wescott House, Cambridge in May 1959. Lewis, a "sheep" from the flock of Christ, over whom these seminarians will soon have charge, writes:

"Now for my second bleat. All theology of the liberal type involves at some point - and often involves throughout - the claim that the real behaviour and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood and misrepresented by His followers, and has been recovered and exhumed only by modern scholars. Now long before I became interested in theology I had met this kind of theory elsewhere. The tradition of Jowett still dominated the study of ancient philosophy when I was reading the Greats. One was brought up to believe that the real meaning of Plato has been misunderstood by Aristotle and wildly travestied by the neo-Platonists, only to be recovered by the moderns. When recovered, it turned out (most fortunately) that Plato had really all along been an English Hegelian, rather like T. H. Green.
I have met it a third time in my own professional studies; every week a clever undergraduate, every semester a dull American don, discovers for the first time what some Shakespearian play really meant. But in this third instance I am a privileged person. The revolution of thought and sentiment which has occured in my own lifetime is so great that I belong, mentally, to Shakespeare's world far more than to that of these recent interpreters. I see - I feel it in my bones - I know beyond argument - that most of their interpretations are merely impossible; they involve a way of looking at things which was not known in 1914, much less in the Jacobean period. This daily confirms my suspicion of the same approach to Plato or the New Testament. The idea that any man or writer should be opaque to those who lived in the same culture, spoke the same language, shared the same habitual imagery and unconscious assumptions, and yet be transparent to those who have none of these advantages, is in my opinion preposterous. There is an a priori improbability in it which almost no argument and no evidence could counterbalance."

The idea that Lewis criticizes here - that a 20th century American or German scholar knows better than 1st Century Christians in Palestine what Jesus really taught - is one example of the monumental arrogance of much of the modern intelligentsia (precisely what Lewis meant by "chronological snobbery"). And yet this is precisely the (often unspoken) idea upon which much of our academic theology is founded.

It makes far more sense that the ancient Christians, who inhabited the same thought-world of the New Testament authors would have all kinds of insights into the New Testament that simply elude the modern scholar. I am reminded of the New Testament professor at LSU, who pointed to the different "versions" of the Lord's Prayer and certain parables; he cynically asked teenage Christians, "If you really believe in the Bible, which of these versions is the infallible truth, how could they both be, since they are different?" as if the existence of more than one version of a teaching on prayer or a parable in the Gospels somehow implied a necessary contradition.

What the professor's question completely misses is what it means for Jesus to be a travelling preacher. Like Jesus, I've done a little travelling preaching and teaching myself and like any preacher, I know that we often reuse sermons, stories, illustrations - sometimes even to make different points in different contexts - and of course every time you tell it, it is just a bit different. Any preacher would know this. The fact that we see this in the Gospels, far from demonstrating contradition, simply lends credence to the historical narrative (so, Luke and Matthew put the Beatitudes in different sermons preached in different places...perhaps it is because Jesus preached on the Kingdom-shaped life more than once!). That a well-educated professor could miss this point shows a poverty of insight (and perhaps in some such instances it is a voluntary poverty, conveniently ignoring genuine historical possibilities for the sake of spreading skepticism in young minds, after all).

Lewis hits on one major reason why I believe that Tom Oden and other "paleo-orthodox" (or just plain "orthodox," it means the same thing) theologians are quite right to look to the consensus of the ancient church in Scriptural interpretation. The Protestant Reformers drew upon Scripture and the Early Fathers to help reform the Medieval Church; their cry was "ad fontes!" - "back to the fount." This is also precisely what Wesley means by looking to "primitive" Christianity as a guide for Christian teaching. My own New Testament professor in seminary, representing the very attitude that Lewis critiques, encouraged us to resources and commentaries that were less than 30 years old in our study of the sacred text, as if the Spirit had been utterly silent before his own career began. Modern scholarship has certainly brought us some valuable insights into the New Testament, but Lewis, Wesley, and the Reformers had it right: we should learn first from the Ancient Church, and in our studies as pastors the Modern scholarship should not be used as a substitute for the classic tradition, but as a supplement to it.

The development and popularity of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture series (edited by Tom Oden) is an important development in the recovery of that ancient witness that Lewis (along with Wesley, and the Reformers) is talking about. May the church of the next century recover the ability to listen to voices from beyond just the last 30 years, but from the whole communion of saints, and especially those fathers of the early days who lived and breathed in the same culture as the New Testament writers themselves.

George MacDonald on prayer requests

From this coming Sunday's Lectionary Bible readings:

"Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." (Philippians 4:4-7, NRSV)

The excerpt below comes out of From the Library of C.S. Lewis, a compilation of short selections from writers across the Christian tradition, all of whom had some influence on the thought of C.S. Lewis. If you are looking for a "reader" in the Chrsitian Tradition, an absolute necessity for the United Methodist pastor, this is an nice one.

But if God is so good as you represent Him, and if He knows all that we need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary to ask him for anything?"

I answer, What if He knows prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object in God's idea of prayer be the supplying of our great, our endless need - the need of Himself? What if the good of all our smaller and lower needs lies in this, that they help drive us to God?

Hunger may drive the runaway child home, and he may or may not be fed at once, but he needs his mother more than his dinner. Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other need; prayer is the beginning of that communion, and some need is the motive of that prayer. Our wants are for the sake of our coming into communion with God, our eternal need.

This Day in History...

According to NPR this morning, today in 1535 the Coverdale Bible was published by Myles Coverdale, an English presbyter/priest. It was the first complete Bible to be published in modern English. Coverdale went on to become bishop of Exeter. So as we continue to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the exquisite King James Version (1611) of the Bible this year, we also today celebrate the 476th anniversary of the Coverdale Bible.