Yoder’s call to missionary arrogance

Yoder is rewarding because he never says quite what I expect, or how I would expect it to be said. But is he right when he calls the church to missionary arrogance? My trajectory has been away from anything which smacks of that. Here is what he writes, back in 1963, collected in the new book of popular writings, Radical Christian Discipleship:

I do not intend to challenge the need for growth in modesty and cultural perspective, but I do intend to challenge the tendency to make a hobby out of a corrective. Today’s more urgent need is no longer perspective and modesty. What today’s world and church need most is a recovery of the missionary arrogance of the New Testament church. To arrogate (the verb from which we get the unpopular adjective arrogant) means to make claims for oneself or for one cause. If the claims we make are for ourselves, then it is understandable why we need to overcome our arrogance. But if the cause for which we are making claims is the cause of the one true God, then anything short of absolute demands is unfaithfulness. (p. 45)

I’ve met too many arrogant Christians arrogant about different things. Yet in the time since he wrote, surely he would only insist more strongly that the urgent need is ‘no longer perspective and modesty’? But which things to be arrogant about? Or maybe not ‘arrogant’ at all, in its normal usage – he is reclaiming the word, as he does so often. Instead, ‘make claims’ for the ’cause’: proclaim the kingdom without apologising.

(He was speaking to a Mennonite audience at Goshen. Would he have given the same address to an audience of conservative evangelicals? Maybe not, although I’m certain he would have given it to an audience of liberals for whom it would have been a hard saying.)

I need to digest this some more.

Quote: Tom Wright on the ‘delay’ in Christ’s return

The problem of the delay of the parousia is a modern myth. The problem is caused by liberal Christianity’s no longer believing in the resurrection, which means that the weight of God’s activity is pushed forward in time. There’s not much evidence that the early church was anxious about this. First-century Christianity didn’t see itself so much as living in the last days, waiting for the parousia, as living in the first days of God’s new world.

We are still awaiting the final outworking of what God accomplished in Jesus, but there are all kinds of signs to show that, though the situation is often bleak, we are in fact on the right road.

- www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2636

Religion as a life sentence

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who’d just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which… is at home at the moment.
– Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

I’ve been listening to The Poisonwood Bible in the car. I didn’t read it when it came out; I was biased against it because it was a book club favourite. But two tapes in, I’m finding it an enthralling novel. A Southern Baptist family move to the Congo to live as missionaries there in the 1950s; Nathan Price, the father, is a harsh and stubborn man, not willing to learn from the Africans – or his wife, from whom this quote comes.

Jesus is tender sometimes, but is just as often harsh, especially with hypocrites. But still her quote resonates with me. Faith asks us to live out a particular way of life, at odds with the world. And we have do that without certainty. We shouldn’t think of salvation as ‘life insurance’ – yet often we do, and if it doesn’t pay out, then we have just been given a life sentence.

Why you shouldn’t read this…

A great quote in the Anabaptist Assocation mailing from Mark Hurst today:

“[The Internet] creates a permanent puberty of the mind. We get locked in so much information, and the inability to sort that information meaningfully limits our capacity to understand. The last stage of knowledge is wisdom. But we are miles from wisdom because the Internet encourages the opposite of what creates wisdom—stillness, time and inefficient things like suffering. On the Internet, there is no such thing as waiting; there is no such thing as stillness. … This culture is on an extraordinary pace toward needing things to be more efficient. But that is a value that is ultimately antithetical to the gospel. I’ve never heard of efficient wisdom, efficient love, efficient suffering or efficient compassion.” — Mennonite pastor Shane Hipps, Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith

Sectarianism and the Trail of Blood

There was a time in my life when I sought the continuity of truth in ‘the trail of blood,’ the communities who defined themselves against the established church. As I began to study the history of the church, I became particularly concerned when I discovered that “the trail of blood” generally included the gnostics of the early church who denied the incarnation and the Catharists of the medieval era who denied the Trinity and practiced communal marriage.
When I turned away from a sectarian view of the church to embrace the whole church with all of its triumphs and failures, I sensed a belongingness to this vast community of people. I also experienced a connectedness to history that broke the arrogance of my sectarian attitude and created a humility that allowed me to be defined by the church as the worldwide community of people to which I belonged. This means that I am able to affirm the whole church in all the various paradigms of history.
- Robert Webber, Ancient Future Faith. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999. p.73.

I read this book when it came out twelve years ago, at a time when my faith was at a formative stage. Reacting against fundamentalism and responding to postmodernism, I’d just started reading theology and I was malleable. I was inspired and influenced by Webber’s book. It was before I’d read Yoder and while I was living with my grandfather, an ecumenically minded evangelical Anglican minister, who probably would have liked Webber very much. Reading Webber I came closer than I ever have in my life to becoming an Anglican.

Reading parts of it again now, it still resonates. This passage stuck out as I read, as you might imagine it would. I’m much less sectarian and much less ‘against’ the mainstream church(es) than a few years ago, say when I aligned myself with the housechurch movement. Working for a denomination has helped me with that, as has preparing some lectures this year introducing theology. I tried to enter sympathetically into a variety of perspectives, and it made me broader.

But still, what am I to do with Webber’s words here? Is to be an Anabaptist to align oneself with the ‘trail of blood’?

And how do we take ‘trail of blood’? Blood spilt or blood shed? Being persecuted and killed for your beliefs (by the mainstream church?) is nothing to be ashamed of, if I read the gospels correctly. Spilling blood for your beliefs – now that is a problem.

Can I have a more nuanced position than the alternatives Webber gives us here? Not every community that defines itself against the established church, but some? The ones that have good reason for distinction?

With his new attitude, could Webber still embrace the sectarian churches? Or are they now excluded from the vast church in all its connectedness through history?

I think the ‘trail of blood’ theory of churches is related to a Landmark Baptist view of church history – that there is a succession of persecuted true Christians culminating in the Baptists. I’m sure it is tied to some terrible fundamentalist ideas. But in a mild form, of at least acknowleding the idea of renewal throughout church history, it has some merit.

I bring the quote from Webber to you because it at once appeals to me and makes me bristle. Yes! And No!

Quotes from Stanley Hauerwas

I read Hauerwas’s autobiography, Hannah’s Child (Eerdmans 2010), a couple of months ago. It’s an interesting portrait of what life is like being a theologian (the politics and career of it), a memoir of a troubled marriage and scattered with some great insights into faith, like the three quotes below. As well as the fullest account yet of What Yoder Really Did to get himself in trouble for sexual misconduct.

Most people do not have to become a theologian to become a Christian, but I probably did. Of course, being a theologian can be a liability for being a Christian. You cannot help but be tempted to be a “professional believer” because you get paid for believing in God. As a result, you cannot afford to call into question what you say you believe.
-p. 159

For me, learning to be a Christian has meant learning to live without answers. Indeed, to learn to live in this way is what makes being a Christian so wonderful. Faith is but a name for learning how to go on without knowing the answers.
-p. 208

Accordingly, Christians should understand marriage as an insitution for resolving conflict, and marriage should be structured toward that end. In the memo, Yoder observed that “the commitment to hanging together, i.e., lifelong fidelity, is a prerequisite for taking conflict resolution seriously: otherwise every conflict becomes an occasion for fantasies of escape.”
-p. 243

Tuning into God

If we want to die well, to die into God, so to speak, we need to start working on our relationship with God (and with others) while we are young and healthy, rather than waiting until death is knocking at the door. Developing a relationship with God takes time and sacrifice, conversion and repentance, discipline and prayer – just as it takes time, discipline, practice, and self-sacrifice to reach proficiency in a sport, in music, or in a profession. Of course, God is always present, closer to us than our own jugular vein, as the Qur’an says. But the problem is that usually we are not tuned into God. To use an analogy: we are surrounded by radio and television waves, but if we do not tune in a receiver we can’t hear the message. So also with God. God is always present, but without a tuned receiver we can’t communicate with God. Tuning into the receiver means tuning ourselves into God. And this means eliminating self-centredness and moving toward God-centredness. Jesus calls this move repentance or conversion, a total change of mind and heart. Usually this takes years of prayer and discipline, not just weeks and months.

- Terence Nichols, Death and Afterlife: A Theological Introduction (Brazos: 2010), pp. 13-14.

I like this quote because it provides a good possible explanation for people’s  failure to have a strong sense of the presence of God.  I also like it because it gives me a picture of what I might strive toward in learning to ‘tune in’ to God.

Quotes from Disturbing Divine Behavio(u)r

Eric Seibert, Disturbing Divine Behavior, Fortress Press 2009.

Is God really in the business of summarily executing those who are “wicked” and “displeasing” in God’s sight? If so, how does this fit with the ugly realities of the modern world? If God instantly executed individuals like these, then why were people like Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Slobodan Milosevic allowed to live so long and do so much evil?

- p. 19

Regardless of how one tries to resolve the tension, it is hard to deny that the Old Testament presents God in ways that appear ethically questionable, if not downright immoral. God is portrayed as one who sanctions violence, particpates in war, executes individuals for seemingly minor offences, and annihilates large groups of people in dramatic acts of divine destruction. If we are honest, many of us will admit that these images of God do not match up very well with some of our beliefs about God. Understandably, this creates a dilemma for those of us who affirm Scripture’s authority yet remain at a loss for what to do with these problematic portrayals.

- p. 34

“If reading the Bible does not raise profound problems for you as a modern reader, then check with your doctor and enquire about the symptoms of brain-death.”

-p. 35

Others do not find these passages problematic because of their comfortable familiarity with them. The familiarity effectively anesthetizes some readers of the Bible, preventing them from experiencing any significant discomfort with the unsettling images of God these stories contain. In short, they have grown so accustomed to these narratives that they are no longer troubled by them.

- p. 51

As Noll puts it, “The storyteller requires a capricious deity to make the plot work… The error we moderns often make is to assume that the characterization of Yahweh “mattered” to the ancient author and the original audience – it almost certainly did not. That is to say, this tale was not designed to teach some religious truth about a god called Yahweh.”

- p. 147

The general blessedness of his life

I want to live with the grace and thankfulness of the Reverend Boughton in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home:

The house embodied for him the general blessedness of his life, which was manifest, really indisputable. And which he never failed to acknowledge, especially when it stood over against particular sorrow. (p. 3)

This quote doesn’t get close enough to what I mean. You have to read a couple of pages, so he can come alive. I’m only in the early pages of the book, but Boughton has an indefeatable thankfulness to his manner; he’s a beautiful character who fleshes out the forgiving father in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son. We need more fiction like this.

If anybody do go to heaven, they will

There’s a delightful scene in Thomas Hardy’s nineteenth century novel, Far from the madding crowd, the funniest one in the entire novel, where some of the farm workers sitting in the pub get to discussing religion, just as Joseph Poorgrass is meant to be delivering Fanny’s coffin to the cemetery. The ‘chapel-goers’ they talk about are perhaps Methodists or Baptists; I need to look up the language.

“But I’ve never changed a single doctrine: I’ve stuck like a plaster to the old faith I was born in. Yes; there’s this to be said for the Church, a man can belong to the Church and bide in his cheerful old inn, and never trouble or worry his mind about doctrines at all. But to be a meetinger, you must go to chapel in all winds and weathers, and make yerself as frantic as a skit. Not but that chapel members be clever chaps enough in their way. They can lift up beautiful prayers out of their own heads, all about their families and shipwrecks in the newspaper.”

“They can – they can,” said Mark Clark, with corroborative feeling;”but we Churchmen, you see, must have it all printed aforehand, or, dang it all, we should no more know what to say to a great gaffer
like the Lord than babes unborn.”

“Chapelfolk be more hand-in-glove with them above than we,” said Joseph, thoughtfully.

“Yes,” said Coggan. “We know very well that if anybody do go to heaven, they will. They’ve worked hard for it, and they deserve to have it, such as ’tis. I bain’t such a fool as to pretend that we who stick to the Church have the same chance as they, because we know we have not. But I hate a feller who’ll change his old ancient doctrines for the sake of getting to heaven. I’d as soon turn king’s-evidence for the few pounds you get. Why, neighbours, when every one of my taties were frosted, our Parson Thirdly were the man who gave me a sack for seed, though he hardly had one for his own use, and no money to buy ‘em. If it hadn’t been for him, I shouldn’t hae had a tatie to put in my garden. D’ye think I’d turn after that? No, I’ll stick to my side; and if we be in the wrong, so be it: I’ll fall with the fallen!”