Recently in BookBloggin Category

Blogging Church is mentioned as an upcoming book that has been contracted for the Fellowship Church blog gurus. As you can see by my previous post on the initial reactions I had to visting their sites and blogs, I am skeptical of the amoutn of "church" that will flavor this book, based on the heavy CEO/Successful Church/Successful Pastor stuff that is plastered all over their sites. I'll probably want to get it simply for what it's theology of blogs is about; it's "theoblogy" if you will. I will, of course, offer my "theoblogical" take on it. They have a blog here

Internet Efficiencies p.41----see later post

Blogging is word of mouth on steroids p.43

"Blogging is faster and more effective than walking from village to vilalge and knocking on doors" p.44
Welll, not exactly (perhaps for products...not for the fuller engagment whcih leads to community, and more specifically, the type of community we are about).......the aim I have is to draw people to where conversation takes place and desires physical prescence in order to more fully know the human behind the stories; and perhaps to try to discern how we might "give a go" to the vision of church that happens when a particular two or three or more are gathered.

"Transparency is not high-risk unless you have something to hide"
Vic Gondrota, General Manager for Platform Evangelism, Microsoft in Naked Conversations, p. 17

Another quote from Microsoft's Tech Evangelist, Lenn Pryor:
"There's no doubt we moved the needle, he said, adding with apparent pride, "and we did it without so much as a press release"
p.16

The above attest to the power of the conversation. If we open it up,and show the customer/audience who we are, this speaks volumes; more so than PR talk. And this goes for church talk too. Nothing reveals more about a church than the interests and concerns of its members and participants in its missions/ministries. This is why I have advocated for church blogs. It's the best mediated STORY delivery medium yet.

When the church becomes a place of brokerage rather than an organic community, she ceases to be alive. Brokerage turns the church into an organization rather than a new family of rebirth. She ceases to be something we are, the living Bride of Christ. The church becomes a distribution center, a place where the poor come to get stuff and the rich come to dump stuff. Both go away satisfied (the rich feel good, the poor get fed) but no one leaves transformed -- no new community is formed. People do not get crucified for charity. People are crucified for disrupting the status quo, for calling forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them.

I've been reading this, along with the other two books I mentioned last week (The New Monasticism book and In Good Company: The Church As Polis by Hauerwas. I have some designs on rolling back through Becoming the Authentic Church again as well.

The Taylor Branch book, Parting the Waters: America In The King Years 1954-63 has me hooked. There are two more books in the series. I saw the third book , At Canaan's Edge: America In The King Years 1965-68 in the bookstore on MLK day, and so I went to the library and checked out the first in the 3 part series. The middle one, Pillar of Fire: America In The King Years 1963-65. Taylor Branch is an excellent writer. I'm about 120 pages in.

I have some quotes from The New Monasticism book as well that I will eventually be blogging about.

Most recent Amazon boxes to arrive at my house:

Schools for Conversion: 12 Marks of a New Monasticism (various writers involved in communal living)

They have a web, http://newmonasticism.org/


The 12 Marks

Moved by God’s Spirit in this time called America to assemble at St. Johns Baptist Church in Durham, NC, we wish to acknowledge a movement of radical rebirth, grounded in God’s love and drawing on the rich tradition of Christian practices that have long formed disciples in the simple Way of Christ. This contemporary school for conversion which we have called a “new monasticism,” is producing a grassroots ecumenism and a prophetic witness within the North American church which is diverse in form, but characterized by the following marks:

1) Relocation to the abandoned places of Empire.

2) Sharing economic resources with fellow community members and the needy among us.

3) Hospitality to the stranger

4) Lament for racial divisions within the church and our communities
combined with the active pursuit of a just reconciliation.

5) Humble submission to Christ’s body, the church.

6) Intentional formation in the way of Christ and the rule of the
community along the lines of the old novitiate.

7) Nurturing common life among members of intentional community.

8) Support for celibate singles alongside monogamous married couples and their children.

9) Geographical proximity to community members who share a common rule of life.

10) Care for the plot of God’s earth given to us along with support of our local economies.

11) Peacemaking in the midst of violence and conflict resolution within communities along the lines of Matthew 18.

12) Commitment to a disciplined contemplative life.

May God give us grace by the power of the Holy Spirit to discern rules for living that will help us embody these marks in our local contexts as signs of Christ’s kingdom for the sake of God’s world.

In Good Company:The Church as Polis Stanley Hauerwas (I had been looking for this in the Vanderbilt Div. School Library, but it seems to stay checked out, so I gave in and bought it.

Great one-liner that suggests and points to elaboration as only Hauerwas can achieve:

the skills required to worship well are not separable from the company itself. That is why theology, even one othat is strictly "orthodox", proves insufficient for the care of the traditions, since it lacks the company neccessary for it to do its work for the upbuilding of the community
p.9 In Good Company

I have completed the bookshelf's hotspots here: Movable Theoblogical: The Office Bookshelf

There are two additional shelves over my computer desk:

OK, the hotspots are all the way down on the leftside bookshelf. The right side and the various little "satellite stacks" will come later. I was just thinking how this might even be a good way to catalogue/photograph what I have in the house in case of something unforseen such as a house fire. I thought of that last night (possibility of fire) when we discovered that our outside heat/cool unit was not shutting off when the AC/Heat blowers had turned off......I had begun checking everything when we notiiced our electric bill shooting up to double of that last month (it hasn't been much colder in December....some , but not much) so we were suspicious. It was also about 75% higher than last year in December, even though this year has been far milder than last. So it was running last night, and I was unsure about removing the big pull fuse from the box; unsure of how to properly shut things off. I figured this had been going on for a couple of weeks, so I figured one more night wasn't going to start a fire or anything. The heat/AC guy showed up this morning and sho' nuff, it was a "Contact" that had kind of melted together, that had kept the circuit connected when it was supposed to be OFF. THat set us back about $180, but I was afraid it might have been worse.

Anyway, I was about to say something about the Elizabeth O'Connor books. Next post.

I decided that this is not such an exercise in vanity and nerdiness as I first thought. It gives me the opportunity to do some fun reflecting on the past 30 years of reading. (Maybe 31) I started my theological reading with my membership in the WORD book club, soon after I discovered Keith Miller and Bruce Larson's The Edge of Adventure (I haven't gotten to Keith Miller's shelf yet in my hotspots that I'm adding to my bookshelf photo (in my post from last night). But I do have some John Killinger, Bruce Larson, Bob Benson, and Elton Trueblood, all of whom were a part of those years of reading in college of the writers in the "Lay Renewal" movement. It was a time of which the present Emergent Church movement today reminds me. There was a movement, sort of a Protestant Vatican II, that called for more authenticity and stressed small groups. My high school youth group experience was flaovored with quite a bit of Lyman Coleman stuff (he was the "Serendipity" guy; wrote a lot of oddly shaped books with glossy pages spalshed with lots of photos, and featured lots of "Ice Breaker" questions. I have an NIV Serendipity Bible for Study Groupsthat has Small Group Questions in the margins of every page of the Old and New Testaments (sometimes , in obscure places in the Old Testamant, the "Group Questions became quite a stretch to relate them to something interesting) We also had a coffeehouse at our church in the early 70's when I was a young high schooler.

The top shelf, to the right of and including "The Book of Bebb" are several Frederick Buechner books, whom I statrted reading after an interview with him by the Wittenberg Door (one of my other 70's reading fare--- which stretched into the 90's until Youth Specialities, who published The Door sold it to another publisher. Mike Yaconelli was the name associated with that mag, and it was full of satire along with some really top notch interviews and Back Door articles (the Back Door was the regular Yaconelli article that was always one of my favorite pieces. The little brown boxes to the left of my INterpreter's Dictionary of the Bible that you can see the bottom of sitting atop the bookshelf, are full of back issues of The Wittenberg Door (later renamed to simply "The Door"), as well as old issues of The Other Side and Sojourners, both of which I started getting in the 80's. The Other Side has now ceased publication. I stopped taking it sometime after I started taking Sojourners.

Following on the heels of all this reading in "Lay Renewal", was my reading about the Church of the Saviour in books by Elizabeth O'Connor (top shelf, middle, closeup photo here) More to come in a bit.

OK, I did an incredibly geeky thing here (not geeky as in complicated or highly technical, but geeky in a whyd-I-just-spend-that-much-time-get-a-Life kind of a way). I made hotspots that pop up an enlarged photo of that section of books from closer-in photos of those books on my shelf. I may do some more later, but that's nerdy enough (yeah, that's it---nerdy is a better description of this little exercise than geeky, although it is actually both, in mutually unhealthy doses. Also, it may be a bit vain to show you my bookshelf, but I tend to show people I think are into theological reading my bookshelf anyway, and so what better friends to show than those with whom I share some of my most theological-geeky-nerdy thoughts.

Bell's major thesis in his book, according to thepage at the front is the title of this post , plus:

"Christian resistance must take the form of a counter discipline".

In other words, a "detox" to unlearn the assumptons of the capitalist discipline; as in the "addiction groups" we need in the church to help us through our overcoming our addiction tof culture, as Gordon Cosby has been saying in Becoming The Authentic Church

I'll read on and flesh out some of my understandings of this. Now, I have someplace to go.

Marsh's wrap-up chapter, entitled The Contours of an Activist Faith for the 20th Century has a lot to say about the fluid movement of God in and out and in between the ecclesia and the activism; one might say there is an interdependence, even so much as the church drawing some lessons and challenge from the willingness of the "movements" communities to challenge the status quo, and to insist on the communal roots whcih seek sustenance for the activist journey. The following segment expresses some complexities of the relationships between ecclesia and healthy , community based activism. I'm not entirely sure I'd be able to say that I wouold say everything just like this, but I like Marsh's thesis of the absolute neccessity for the spiritual community base.

While the church as a worshipping community exists for the specific purposes of confessing, proclaiming, and worshipping Jesus Christ as Lord, the beloved community quietly moves from its historical origins into new and unexpected shapes of communion and solidarity. To be sure, the church has an obligation to nurture and fortify the beloved community, even though it often fails in this task. But the church's failure, its concessions to expediency and comfort, does not limit God's action in the world. At such times when the church chooses the easy way over the narrow way, God may nurture and fortify the beloved community through the activity of the Holy Spirit. Beloved community may then become a source of knowledge and conviction for the church, which the church in turn must acknowledge and appropriate in humility. But beyond humility, Christians should rejoice in the fact that when the church defaults on its mission in the world, the Spirit places the beloved community in the embracing arms of the kingdom of God.

In this manner, the Christian regards the peaceable reign of God as the hidden meaning of all movements for liberation and reconciliation, the hidden meaning that "brings us together for these days as strangers and yet as friends" (as the theologian Karl Barth wrote in 1919).6 We should not collapse the kingdom into the church, nor should we diminish the full energy of the church to radiate outward into a gathering more inclusive than the confessing body. As we have observed throughout the pages of this book, beloved community is a way of talking about the redemptive and reconciling spaces whose real history is the church but which cannot be contained by the church or brought fully under its management. Beloved community overflows the boundaries of the church in a way analogous to St. Augustine's description of the divine love overflowing the triune God in tile creation of the world. The logic of the church (as one might say), like that of the beloved community, moves always and everywhere beyond itself toward the peaceable reign of God on earth.7 For this reason, we should also note that the Christian church has no monopoly on affirmations of the human; that movements, agencies, and persons outside the church often understand and appreciate affirmations of human dignity with greater attention to the detail and scope of their application in the world. (Who could doubt, for example, that Amnesty International operates with greater attention to human suffering than the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, which regards its mission as the saving of lost souls from eternal damnation?)

Importantly, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer pondered this matter of Christians and "good people" in his late meditations on justice. Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor and dissident, had joined an organization in the Gentian resistance called the Abwehr, and his writing, ponderous now in its intent, strains toward exceedingly difficult theological notions in a fragmented and unfinished beauty. For Bonhoeffer, those who come to the work of mercy and justice from places outside the church are drawn by a power that the church most eloquently bespeaks. The "children" of the church, who have left the church for reasons that are not only understandable but sometimes noble, and who have gone their own way in the world, return to their mothers They do not return to their mother out of guilt or weakness, or out of an anxious realization that they could not make it on their own; whatever need they feel is based on shared concern for humanity. "During the time of their estrangement their appearance and their language had altered a great deal, and yet at the crucial moment the mother and the children once again recognized one another," Bonhoeffer writes. "Reason, justice, culture, humanity and all the kindred concepts sought and found a new purpose and a new power in their origin. "9

p. 208 The Beloved Community

I was struck by the stories of Martin Luther King and the early SCLC and Jordan's Koinonia Farm community. I can't identify a better narrative, including theological analysis, of the issues at stake and in play re: church and state when we look at these two stories through the eyes of Marsh.

He talked about how shortly after King had invited Jordan to come and speak at Dexter Avenue, the two took contrastingly different paths:

The next year, King left his one and only tenure as a parish pastor, to work full-time for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, while Clarence Jordan, despite his harsh and exceedingly precient judgments on the white evangelical church, came to a noti on of Christian community so extreme in its rigor and discipline that it risked becoming as insular and obsessed with purity as the segregated churches he loathed. The differences between the two ministers then intensified. From King's perspecitve, Koinonioa Farm simply became irrelevant to racial reform in the South, to the massive legal changes necessary for a more just nation. From Jordan's perpecitve, King became a parody of his former self, a man of non-violence who relied on the men of great violence for his well-being, a politician (and not a very good one), whose pastoral energies were lomg spent.

No doubt, as the new civil rights leader, King had little choice but to broaden his scope, fortify his leadership, and forge ahead into complex political terrain. But as a profressional organizer with a staff postion in his father's church in Atlanta, King was no longer accountabnle to the Dexter deacons of the world, proud people who kept his feet to the fire on moral rectitiude. ...King's new freedom to operate must have no doubt felt liberating after years of negotiating the scrupulous Dexter crowd; but in Jordan's estimation it was freedom purchased with a moral cost.

Jordan believed that the only way authentic change could transpire in southern race relations was through "incarnationl evangelism," and that meant making Christian truth concrete in community and in shared life with the excluded and the oppressed. Evangelism at its highest, Jordan said, is "based not upon a sermon, not upon a theory, not upon an absraction, but upon the word of God become flesh and dealing with us, and restoring us to our right minds."

Two figures in Christian history in my own era (actually just prior to my coming of age) who deeply challenged me as a college student, and who awakened me to that first glaring contrast between God's Kingdom and the Kingdoms of this world, and the church standing mostly with the kingdoms of the world and the cultures that grew up under them. Racism and the complicity in it that so dominated the churches that Jordan's "God Movement" could not be seen except where this, as the first of the barriers that must be overcome, were challenged and set aside to make room for other challenges like economic realities. It was King who ended his life aiming at the violence of war and the injustices of poverty (and it was probably one or the other or both that led whoever was responsible for his assasination to decide that enough was enough). Both these men battled these three massive demonic forces: racism, violence, and poverty (and both realized how each of the three lived in residence with the others, and that they were interrelated.

I listened to hours and hours of Clarence Jordan lectures on tape while a college student, and it was impossible to miss Jordan's incranational evangelism. "You don't take the name of God in vain with your lips, you take it in vain with your life"

I decided to clip this section on my early readings in Charles Marsh's The Beloved Community from an earlier post to bring this work to a greater focus. What a tremendous book (through 72 pages thus far. The narrative of both King and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the first half of the story of Clarence Jordan and Koinonia Farm is a treat and a moving story.

I have started into The Beloved Community, Charles Marsh's book on "How Faith Shapes Social Justice, From the Civil Rights Movement to Today". Marsh introduces his book with this:

Although a boycott was neccessary in Montgomery to bring an end to discriminatory laws, King urged the church people in the movement to keep in mind that a boycott and its achievments do not in themselves represent the goal. "The end is reconciliation, the end is redemption," he said, "the end is the creation of the beloved community."

I'm just in the first chapter, but I 'm reading with new awareness what I read about back when MLK first captured my attention folllowing an NBC minii-series in 1978 called KING. Marsh follows MLK from his upbringing through his education, and how the moment of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the threats that ensued shook him to his core and brought him to a moment of surrender and seeking God. This shook him out of his dependence upon his "liberal education" and sophistication and thrust him in with the lot of his community, and took him places he had not planned to go.

The next chapter deals with Koinonia Farm, a Christian Community Clarence Jordan began in the late 40's in rural Georgia after he garduated from University of Georgia with a degree in Agriculture and from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary with a degree in New Testament Greek. Jordan is the author of The Cotton Patch translations, an NT Bible translation using Southern lingo and sets the entire gospel and rise of the church in the South where Jerusalem is Atlanta, Washington DC is Rome, and Jesus is born in Valdosta, Gerogia. Jordan's interracial Christian community actually pre-dates and spills over intot he early Civil Rights movement. IN the Cotton Patch translation, the Kingdom of God is "The God Movement". The Chapter in Marsh's book is titled: " nN the Fields of the Lord: The God Movement in South Georgia"

I'm only on page 35, but I have not been able to put it down for long. And I gotta finish After Christendom, since its due back next Tuesday.

About half way into After Christendom, Stanley Hauerwas is posing questions about a "justice" whosae defintion is being set by, as he tells it, a sense of natural revelation that imparts to any in the world a common "shared" sense of what justice is, and this is grasped by Christians as a form of power-play. Certainly likely that there is an abstract like this which people can claim and laud for its relevance and impact, but do so out of a desire for Christian thought to have a place in the mainstream.

And of course, this starts putting me on the defensive about how he is going to implicate the "Peace and Justice" Christians. As I would say (and have written, ad infinitum) in response to Jamie Smith's treatment of this topic, there is here an issue of giving a more charitable survey of the kind of thought from which this RO type perspective derives, for it is just those educated, progressive, Christians who would and in some cases have represented the most open and receptive hosts for the elements of RO theology to take root. But the way to this dialogue is not in what must come off as a paternalistic attitude toward "activist types". And thus far, there are far more academic theologians floating RO ideas than there are people throuroughly engaged in just those types of communities their theology would envision.

I adore the writings of Hauerwas (that's probably too "cute" a word for it). I "relish" it and simultaeously "brace myself", knowing that in my present state of "churchlessness" (other than the loose connecitons with "ecclesia-based" folks I have developed, mostly online, but beginning to see some various opportunities for "meet-ups" of various local bloggers such as Jonathan (who has a great thread going on his blog, and like me, has gotten himself a Vanderbilt Divinity School Library card to get hold of some of these RO books to pore over)-------sorry for the long parenthetical comment -----to continue:
in my present state of "churchlessness" I am "super-sensitized" to the yearnings for church embodiment that I read about in Hauerwas and Smith, and also Cavanuagh, whose "Theopolitical Imagination" I am also reading.

I stopped by and got a bag full of books from Vandy Divinity Library that I seriously doubt I will get through in two months, as follows:

Does God need the church? : toward a theology of the people of God Lohfink, Gerhard (Renewed it---almost done....beware of upcoming posts with my reactions----book has been great----- many confronting , umcomfortable, troubling and yet hopeful things have arisen from it) HIGHLY recommended. I will probably have to buy me a copy after I have to turn it back in.

After Christendom? : how the church is to behave if freedom, justice, and a Christian nation are bad ideas Hauerwas, Stanley (Had to renew this one, still haven't gotten to it, still poring over Lohfink)

New bag full:

Sanctify them in the truth : holiness exemplified Hauerwas, Stanley

Christianity Incorporated : how big business is buying the church Budde, Michael L.

Augustine and modernity Hanby, Michael

Liberation theology after the end of history : the refusal to cease suffering Bell, Daniel M.

Theopolitical imagination Cavanaugh, William T.

The two churches : Catholicism & capitalism in the world-system Budde, Michael L.

From the first chapter of Gerhard Lohfink's book:

in its first book the Bible not only narrates the story of human sin, but also the beginning of the story of salvation with Abraham. Without looking at that history of salvation and trying to live within it no one can say whether God's creation is a success or not.

It is only the redeemed who have a clue as to what "success" is. "Success" is life as God intended. This is the only "abundance" worth its weight (and not in "gold"...which most associate with wealth, but the "gold" has its worth because it is "of that city".

I have a feeling that as I read this book, I will want to (even more) read The City of God

There must be a place, visible, tangible, where the salvation of the world can begin: that is, where the world becomes what it is supposed to be according to God's plan. Beginning at that place, the new thing can spread abroad, but not through persuasion, not through indoctrination, not through violence. Everyone must have the opportunity to come and see. All must have the chance to behold and test this new thing. Then, if they want to, they can allow themselves to be drawn into the history of salvation that God is creating. Only in that way can their freedom be preserved. What drives them to the new thing cannot be force, not even moral pressure, but only the fascination of a world that is changed.

Clearly this change in the world must begin in human beings, but not at all by their seeking through heroic effort to make themselves the locus of the new, altered world; rather it begins when they listen to God, open themselves to God, and allow God to act.

"allow themselves to be drawn into the history of salvation that God is creating" --- this has been what my deepest experiences of church have shown me. Such things happen all too infrequently and in too few places. Not that God has not been active in these places and times. It is a matter of "listening to God"; and depending upon the gathered people for a "gathered" experience of Pentecost where the call of God rides on the winds of Pentecost, and many hear it and share it, and all they can do is respond with their lives.

After finishing up Resident Aliens, I picked up Where Resident Aliens Live from the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, which basically just picks up where they left off and intersperses commnets from others reaction to Resident Aliens.

In Resident Aliens, the authors Hauerwas and Willimon implore us in the ministry/theological/churchleadership professions to set as priority one the evoking of an exciting sense of adventure. The quote about theological writers making us feel "too dumb":

Alas, too much theology today seems to have as its goal the convincing of preachers that they are too dumb to understand real theology. Before preachers buy into that assumption, we would like preachers to ask themselves if the problem lies with theologies which have become inconsequential

brings to mind the question of whether all this debate back and forth about the level of faithfulness in this "activist" approach vs that "ecclesiological" approach, and who engage in "statecraft" vs those who "participate in true worship" is not just another pitfall to getting on with it.

The question Steve Bush asks in his latest comment to the range of comments on his paper re: when are Christians obligated to support a "movement" or an initiative thaqt just so happens to have widespread support for the sake of some sense of justice that just happens to be both moral and "widely supported" by lots of people who are moral-seeking people. Yes, I believe that the church is rightfully the representatives, the "colony" which is called to rightly embody this "otherwordly" morality; a "Biblical people", a people formed by the workign of God in their midst. But there are, I believe, paths of growth at various outposts of those people who are seeking to embody church; paths which range from the ones who do not "notice" how Constantinian they are, or how accomodating they are. Do we "abandon" them? If the proponents of RO say no, I would ask what "formation" strategy we are to employ? What kind of "correction" and "teaching" do we encourage? Does it help our worldwide communion to be harshly dismissive of "activist" Christians by lumping them with "leftish politics" and accusing them of "ceding to the state?" There are certainly elements of truth to those observations, but how does the Church instruct and form rightly those who have entered into conversation with her through the invitation of those who are politically active as an expression of their faith, which has been instilled in them via the passion for feeling involvement in the alleviation of injustice and violence?

Bonhoeffer involved himself in the plot to assasinate Hitler. Many have said that this "betrays" his "practicality" in agreeing to "do what it takes" to stop Hitler; that this justifies the "just war" , "long-term" view for Christians. Bonhoeffer himself did not take this view. To him, he was being "disobedient" for the sake of others. I wonder whether or not we in the church are not called to our "activist" brothers and sisters to encourage activity which has at its impetus the alleviation of injustice via works of mercy and appealing to the state for concessions which help to alleviate SOME suffering and loosen SOME oppressive restrictions.

I believe in a diversity of gifts that God gives the people , to be put together into structures for ministry which address the world at some point of need. I also believe there is a role for the "activist", IF this activism is grounded in misison and emanates from church. Jim Wallis himself testifies to the neccessity of a church home; a church base from which all this derives; the reason de etiere. That also does not mean that to merely acknowledge the "source" insures that we will not be lured into the "world's way" of "getting thiings done". As long as the world is the world, this allure and temptation will always be there. This is why the Church of the Saviour continues to emphasize and order itself as a "Journey Inward, Journey Outward".

Back to that original quote from Resident Aliens about pastors being made to feel "too dumb" to be truly faithful. I associate some of this RO-based arggument with that tendency. I can and do agree with much of what RO observes about the church and the world, and how liberal democracy has subverted so many expressions of church into Constantinian outposts and operations. I also deeply identify with their emphasis on ecclesiology and that all TRUE justice and freedom and "values" are formed in the church, and that , as Resident Aliens observes, the church is a "Colony" set apart. But do we then use these stances as quick and easy delimiters of who is "with it" and who's not? As if that approach is going to have much hope of transforming or "converting" anyone who has found that "seeking to speak TO" worldy structures has an impact or an effect for the better, to join with those who with them affirm that the city they seek is one whose builder and maker is God, and yet who speak of their "activist" members as if their whole agenda is separated from their "true home".

I found Jamie Smith's "I'd prefer Wallis to Falwell" less than endearing. I'm not saying Wallis is as "eccesiological" as I would prefer. But I also know that Wallis deeply believes in the Journey Inward, Journey Outward as expressed by the Church of the Saviour. IN fact, Sojourners and Wallis constantly lift up ministries and examples of the Church of the Saviour as logical outcomes of a proper balance of both inward and outward journeys, and that there may well be times that our activity that presents itself to the public eye will look to be occuring on the "stage of the State". But it is also likely that any rootedness or locality of such efforts in the church are going to be the story which gets the headlines in society. I do believe that more needs to be said by those who "seek to influence" andf "seek to participate in and call for change" of their source of motivation, their source of mission, and that this acitivy IS mission. It is NOT the ONLY mission, nor do they claim it is the ONLY mission. I belive that there are some who are gifted for and called to some sort of "conversation" with the powers that be. But I believe that their reasons for being there are to be rooted in the church, and that testimony to that fact should be more forthcoming.

The "sense of adventure" of which Willimon and Hauerwas write should emanate from the Biblical witness to the Kingdom of God. THere WILL be those touched by that good news who will naturally take that and seek to "infiltrate" the structures and halls of the powers that be, since it seems natural to belive that it is through present structures that the message will "get out" that the people of God believe that something should be done to "tell a story" that needs telling so that the works of darkenss can be exposed. Some of these works (not ALL of them, just SOME) , if only they can be brought to light, could be dealt with. Even if it is true that this is making the world only "a little less unjust" , this is a direction preferrable to its opposite. Neither is this all that 's required; that if we can only get this or that bill passed, then the Kingdom would be ushered in. Of course not. But even to those who are "sucked in" by relying too much on "worldly structures" and "results" (as the world sees them), they need to be "welcomed in" by the church who represents the gathering center of God's acitvity, and restored, and constantly formed by an ultimate hope in God's Kingdom, no matter how dimly that may be refelected in the harsh "realities" (as they SEEM to be) of "the world", ....."out there" . There is that eschatological hope which sustains us in our strivings which constantly seem to get rejected and subverted and seem to get nowhere.

I wonder sometimes how many RO-ers have come to that place out of "burn out" with the promises and escahtology of activism, and seek a new, more "who cares what they think" stance. I see the validity of that, and avenues for how that can be an approach that is a more effective forming structure; to listen to and participate in the liturgy and the Scriptural focus of the church, and seek to respond to call. I actually DO belive that. This is why I continue to read Hauerwas, Smith, and the critiques of "Liberal Democracy": becuase I belive they're right. Where I find myself holding back is in the style of critique they level at "other" approaches and theological sensibilities which are formed in them from other approaches. I just feel that are OTHER more serious enemies for the church to fortifyand "armor" against than those they criticize. The "peace and justice" folks in the Church may well include amongst them tendencies identified by RO, but they also include many who have found the church's proclamation of the Kingdom as testified by Jesus and embodeied by Jesus to be good news, and they are seeking to tell the world, however naively and however "accomodationist". The role of the church for these and all of us is to continue to lovingly embrace us and encourage us to bring us together to hear God's word, and to wait for the visitation of God's spirit and the gifts and call that result. I belive that the adventure that is the church is experienced a few "adventures" at a time. One adventure leads to and deepens the next one, and to a large extent, determines the next.

Here's a quote from Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony by Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon

Salvation is not so much a new beginning but rather a beginning in the middle, so to speak. Faith begins, not in discovery, but in remembrance. The story began without us, as a story of the peculiar way God is redeeming the world, a story that invites us to come forth and be saved by sharing in the work of a new people whom God has created in Israel and Jesus. Such movement saves us by (1) placing us within an adventure that is nothing less than God's purpose for the whole world, and (2) communally training us to fashion our lives in accordance with what is true rather than what is false.

I just acquired a Library card for Vanderbilt Divinity School, which I could get as a "local clergy" status by virtue of working for a church agency. Getting a copy of Gerhard Lohfink's "Does God Need the Church?" was the impetus for my looking into Vandy's Divinity School library, in addtion to the other goodies like Hauerwas that I can find there. So when I was checking out Lohfink, I also looked to see what Hauerwas books were there that I had in mind to read and had not read yet, so I found "Resident Aliens" which he co-authored with Will Willimon in 1989. As I got in to it, I wish I had found this in 1989, and that Hauerwas had been one of the oft-quoted authors in my theological education, so that I would have been exposed to this "eccesiological" emphases earlier. It would have attracted me then as well, since The Church of the Saviour had already prepared the ground for me on such matters since 1976 when I first began reading Elizabeth O'Connor. I know that 16 years ago was not such a long time ago, and Hauerwas was not exactly a young man then (he was the same age as I am now), but I was thinking I was going to be reading some "early Hauerwas", but it sounds to me as if even with Resident Aliens, he started right in on the problem of liberal democratic nation states as carrying on the traditoon of the post-Enligtenment project of the State's seduction of the church with a promise of power in its "chaplaincy" role.

The theme from the above quote, on "the journey"; the role our story has in a larger story, the story of God and a People of God, this is also significant. The realization that I, that we are coming into that story "in the middle" is both a reminder that we are siginificant onlyu in the context of the story we inhabit, and for your part in that, and also that what comes after is a continuance and a building upon.

We argue that the political task of Christians is to be the church rather than to transform the world. One reason why it is not enough to say that our first task is to make the world better is that we Christians have no other means of accurately understanding the world and rightly interpreting the world except by way of the church. Big words like "peace" and "Justice," slogans the church adopts under the presumption that, even if people do not know what "Jesus Christ is Lord" means, they will know what peace and justice means, are words awaiting content. The church really does not know what these words mean apart from the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth

"words awaiting content", to be supplied from the Church's vision of the Kingdom of God, as preached by Jesus. As a peculiar people; a "colony" as Willimon and Huaerwas describe it, there is much for which to hope as we await a call and a prescence to sustain us in that call. The stories confirm a past history of God's deliverance, and a present-future promise that God will go before us, to a land that he will show us.

Often during Seminary, I heard people quote Augustine's City of God. Never once was it required reading. When I read the following "Back Cover" synopsis on this abridged version I picked up a couple of weeks ago (unaware of its being abridged, not noticing that it says so on the front cover), I anticipate seeing if I can pick up the larger complete work at the library, or perhaps order a hardback copy from Amaazon ( I saw such a hardback copy at Borders a couple of days ago)

The back cover:

No book except the Bible itself had a greater influence on the Middle Ages than City of God. Since medieval Europe was the cradle of today's Western civilization, this work by consequence is vital for an understanding of our world and how it came into being.

St. Augustine is often regarded as the most influential Christian thinker after St. Paul, and this book is his masterpiece, a vast synthesis of religious and secular knowledge. It began as a reply to the charge that Christian otherworldliness was causing the decline of the Roman Empire. Augustine produced a wealth of evidence to prove that paganism bore within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Then he proceeded to his larger theme, a cosmic interpretation of history in terms of the struggle between good and evil: the City of God in conflict with the Earthly City or the City of the Devil. This, the first serious attempt at a philosophy of history, was to have incalculable influence in forming the Western mind on the relations of church and state, and on the Christian's place in the temporal order.The original City of God contained twenty two books and fills three regular sized volumes. This edition has been skillfully abridged for the intelligent general reader by Vernon J. Bourke, author of Augustine's Quest of Wisdom.

The heart of this monumental work is now available to a much wider audience.

(I wonder if Augustine would have a reaction to the phrase "skillfully abridged by the intelligent general reader"? It seems to border on a concept of "natural theology" ; an interesting question, it seems)

I have been reading with interest the reviews of a Complete, Hardback edition on Amazon here

After my last post in which I dove headlong in to a heart felt rant of disgust over the Busdh administration, I have been thinking a lot lately about this work of Augustine's which I am about to start reading. Maybe I will get a flavor for it by starting with this abrdged version (but the cover kind of scares me when it says it is "Abridged for the Modern Reader". What the hell is that about? That almost gives me pause, kind of like "The Bible: Abridged for the American Patriot", or "The Bible: Chicken Soup For the American Soul"

I think, though, that it is a time for a study like this to take hold in today's "Confessing Churches". I also wonder, as I wrote that last line, what today's conversation would be in working such a confession. There would be a mighty debate over the issue of language. But it seems to me that a statement of and by the American church as to its stance of loyalty to an American empire (ie. the repudiation of any talk of "loyalty" to the extent that it conflicts with a call to the gospel which transcends national boundaries, and knows no specific "American ethic or ethos")

This should keep me occupied until 2006 (considering I also have the Bonhoeffer Bio ....only p. 322 of 941 pages of bio, and 1048 pages including notes and index, and the two Hauerwas books I got two weeks ago). I feel like I've gone back to Seminary.

I was just reading in Bonhoeffer's biography, during the time when the Confessing Church was making its separation real, Bonhoefer was fully engaged in talks with the German church government, which had become appointments of the Reich, and thus an arm of the state; true "statists" IOW. So what kind of "getting hands dirty" might this entail; this talking to state servants , albeit those in the garb of the church? Is this "getting into bed" with those who have clearly themselves gotten into bed with the state? This adds yet another layer to the question of what the church has a call to appropriately address and confront the state, and through what means.

It's not that Bonhoefer himself is to be the ultimate authority on this matter, but I picked up the story of Bonhoefer and his approach to the relationship of the church to society during such a time as his, in order to see what kind and manner of development ensued from that time when the flavor of Christianity in that country was so nationalistic. That Bonhoeffer has become such a figure after World War II in theological circles and in ecclesiological discussions, is testimony to how important his narrative, thought, and eccesiology has become.

Some thoughts as I continue in my reading of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, in the chapter : Berlin 1933, and the church protest and statements concerning the Ayran clause. Many Germans in the church were vocal in their support of nationalism in this matter. They accepted the premise of the acceptability of pre-emptive action against a threat whose veracity was "guaranteed" by the Reich.

In the year that Hitler came to official power, the church struggle was a consuming force in Bonhoefer's activity. Much of the activity reminds one of the kinds of divisions today. I cannot subscribe to the notion that it is to be considered inappropriate to "compare" the political climate of Nazi germany with any subsequent era or society, merely on the basis of the "degree" of the evil unleashed. Evil is evil. Unjust and unChristian "consent" to "walk that wall for us" and do "whatever it takes" to "protect our way of life"; this is all evil in alternate guise, and under which, the church has the issue thrust before it as to what Kingdom it owes and shall give its loyalty.

The arguments for nationalism today seem so similar. For Hitler, his "waepons of mass destruction" was the "Bolshevik threat", which was invoked as the theme and justification for Hitler's expansionist dream, all in the name of the German's security as a nation. This building on "threat" and "fear" and "protecting our way of life" is for me an ominous sign , and I agree with Hauerwas that violence draws its power from our fear of the stranger; that "ominous other" which precipitates paranoid reactions of murderous proportions. And we see Christians totally oblivious to this appeal to fear.

This little gem is one which sits well with me.

Hauerwas has discovered a dirty little secret Anabaptists who reject historical Christendom may not actually be rejecting the vision of Christendom as a society in which all life is integrated under the Lordship of Christ. On this reading, Christendom may in fact be a vision of shalom, and our argument with Constantinians is not over the vision so much as the sinful effort to grasp at its fullness through violence, before its eschatological time. Hauerwas is quite consistent once you see that he does want to create a Christian Society (polis, societas); a community and way of life shaped fully by Christian convictions. He rejects Constantinianism because "the world" cannot be this society and we only distract ourselves from building a truly Christian society by trying to make or nation into that society, rather than be content with living as a community in exile. So Hauerwas wants, Catholics to be more Anabaptist, and Anabaptists to be more Catholic, and Protestants its be both, and the only way he can put this together in terms of his own ecclesial location is to be a "Catholic" Methodist in roughly the same way that some Episcopalian, are Anglo Catholic

Hauerwas concurs:

Schlabach's presentation of my own position says what I have been trying to say better than how I have said it. More important, I hope, his suggestion points a way forward if we are not only to survive but to find ways to resist global capitalism. It should surprise no one to discover that I believe any response Christians have to the challenge of the global market will be ecclesial.

Violence and capitalism (whom violence serves) are the principalities which we face. I see this a pretty darn good summary and "set of basics" for a church-world relationship/status

On the "we only distract ourselves from building a truly Christian society by trying to make or nation into that society, rather than be content with living as a community in exile", I say amen, but I also can't bring myself to paint as "deluded" or "compromising" those who feel that some of this ought to be tried, and try to persuade others. It may be a form of delusion, but I also don't want to be guilty of covering what could be proven to be an escapism. This is not to say that "being content to live as community-in-exile" neccessarily means ignoring the world. In fact, Hauerwas often stresses that the exile can be a way of framing the context around which that community exists and how it derives its loyalties. In my book, anybody who opposes with all their known gifts and energies the forces of capitalism as they are, and the resort to violence to protect things "as they are" is a much kinder, gentler, and more "Christ-like" try, and the life efforts to do so may well be misplaced or insufficient in comparsion to more ecclesial-based alternatives, but can certainly be revered as someone trying to do their best. What I'm trying to say but sucking at saying, is that I think Hauerwas and RO are closer to what I would identify with as ultimate goal and the call to pursue, but that these "lesser" more "mainstream" and "liberal political" movments are not all that "deluded" or "in bed with state". They may be unwittingly or unifittingly appropriating language that is less than distinctive, but in light of the idea of "transforming" or "fulfilling" the aim which "state ideals" purport to fulfill, and point us instead to a better way, and a better hope, I remain hopeful that a good portion of these folks can continue to grow in the realization that the people of God called together in the church are really the movement we seek.

Just arrived from Amazon

"No human being would stack books like this"

Bill Murray as Dr. Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters, 1984

I've spent the last week doing all my bookreading in Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, by Eberhard Bethge, since last Friday when I bought it at Border's (with a 30% coupon). I've read about 200 pages, and I'm now at the sopt where he has returned from America, has met Barth and had many conversations with him and continued correspondence, and is now getting involved in the ecumenical movement, and starting to talk of peace in a very "non-compromising" way. In fact, Bonhoeffer joined the World Alliance, despite his thrological misgivings and concerns about the group which Bethge describes as "the group most dominated by the spirit of liberal and humanist Anglo-Saxon theology", becuase "with its emphasis on peace work, it was laso the group most committed to doing something"

He quotes Bonhoeffer :

But, notwithstnading all criticism, it is plain that the World Alliance...is doing work the urgency of which must set everyone's conscience alight, and so far as we know there is no other way of doing it better or more quickly

I bought this a couple hours ago, since I had a 30% off coupon, and was just about to order it from Amazon anyway. It is one FAT book (1048 pages). I 've been wanting to get deeper into this story for quite some time, since I saw the DVD Bonhoeffer, which I bought last November.

To get some perspective on just how FAT this book is, here is a pic of it sitting on top of Hauerwas's Performing the Faith

I am starting in on Stanley Hauerwas' essay The Church as God's New Language , from the Hauerwas Reader , pp. 142-162, referenced in a footnote in Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, p.39 n32

In the note Smith quotes Hauerwas from another essay in Modern Theology saying: "not only that Barth's Dogmatics should be read as a training manual for Christian speech, but also how that speech shapes the speaker in a manner appropriate to that which the speaker speaks"

(I actually wrote this post yesterday, and just saw that I had yet to move it into Publish from Draft. Although I have taken what might seem to be great pains to press this point,and posted on simialr things just a while ago, I found this post to be reflective also of some different ways I have wanted to pose this. All of this has me "revved me up" for this RO/Wallis confrontation, which is a confrontation that I think for me is certainly good, and one in which I hope can end up showing a great deal more congruity of Wallis with RO than not. I WANT it to be so. That is probably apparent. But since RO draws on Hauerwas, and I love what I read from Hauerwas, and also feel like I owe a great deal of my own theological sensibilities to Sojourners and Jim Wallis, I want this to be a comfortable blend. I also want to remain a learner, especially where it concerns theology and the church, and so here I stand, ranting, refecting, and reacting. I hope it is useful.)

"Radical Orthodoxy, although it opposes the modern, also seeks to save it. It espouses, not the pre-modern, but an alternative vision of modernity" Milbank, The Programme of Radical Orthodoxy in Radical Orthodoxy? A Catholic Inquiry

Also, Smith says that

RO's project is aimed at the aimed at unveiling the ultimately religious stature of this modern vision, thus alerting us to the ways in which these core values or doctrines of modern life are, in the end, competitors of the gospel of Christ.

As I said in my earlier post, challenging Smith's crtique of Wallis as possibly representing a "Constaninanism of the Left" and seemingly concluding that Wallis has "ended up as a humanist", I do not wish to call into question the legitimacy or importance of Smith's deep investment in the RO position. As I have said many times, and am in fact indicating by my continued interest and reading in this topic, I am , so far, in complete agreement on most everything presented in IRO. IN fact, had I not known of the above mentioned article by Smith on his blog, I may never have noticed the challenges that this posed to my own agreement with RO and my sense of identification with the Sojourners narrative. Although it is a challenge, I am not convinced that there is nearly the amount of discongruity as Smith posits. MOst pointedly, I entirely disagree that Wallis is any sort of humanist, except that he is very "ecumenical" in his reaching across the aisle of modernity and bringing his "distinctively Christian worldview" to bear on the "public discourse", in which he is advocating for a more prominent role for progressive Christians in the discussion about how politics and religion should and do interplay.

This assement of RO as "seeking to save modernity" rather than to be "pre-modern", it wished to posit an "alternative vision of modernity". I believe strongly that Wallis does the same.

Smith's critique of Wallis saying "religion must be disciplined by democracy" is out of proportion to what I am reasonably certain Wallis meant when he said "religion". First , Wallis would never say "Christianity must be disciplined by religion", but can and did can say that "religion" must be. There is a definite distinction in what Wallis says about "religion" and what he believes about the specific distinctiveness of the Christian faith. It is very clear to me that here is is addressing, or proposing, a common set of "ecumenical ground rules" or "values" that can be shared across faith traditons, within the Christian faith, and across all other faiths. This "democracy" is NOT the American Democratic system, although it is also calling those whose "faith" might be more in a "civic" sensibility than a faith-based one, and yet they too (and perhaps especially they) can agree upon some of these "basic values of democracy") These would be "honesty", "integrity", "refusing to compromise the public trust" ; the assumption that elected leaders will "work for the common good". I believe that in the God's Politics discussion he has been having over the past 5 months, that he is addressing a challenge to the Religious Right concerning their uncritical acceptance of a deceptive government and disingenuous leaders. He is also appealing to "people of good will" to "stand up to the abuses of government so blatantly abused by the Bush administration. It is calling for a "coalition", not in a theological compromise, but simply for a "decent and effective democracy that simply makes a valiant effort to consider the needs of a broader range of persons OTHER than the extremely rich.

I hear Graham Ward, in True Religion saying similar things , such as:

RO's radical critique of modernity, therefore, does not commit adherents to being intellectual luddites, nor does it require a rejection of the "fruits of modernity", such as advances in science and medicine or the undoing of forms of insitutionalized repression