EngineeredTheology

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years trying to understand freedom. Trying to understand how a future could be known, without leaving myself as a puppet that has to act out a certain path to bring about a certain future. I came to wonder if it isn’t that God has set our paths, but knows what we do in certain situations. I know my kids (often better than they know themselves), and I can often predict what they are going to say and do. Just because I know they are going to get bored in the car, or that they are going to disobey what I asked them to do, or they are going to be really interested in something, does not mean that I have forced them to do it – it means that I know them. How much better could God predict what we will do or say?

Sometimes, my kids surprise me. Sometimes I surprise myself. I’ve never taken the next step to wonder if there are times when I surprise God. This is an extremely freeing concept in ways I never would have imagined, and is having significant impacts on my understanding of prayer (which I have never, in any way, understood).

This concept then ripples from the individual out through societies. We often know when people will riot. We know when the situations are right for a revolution. We may not be able to predict exactly who will do what (and that may not be extremely important) but people at a macroscopic level get much easier to predict. With more understanding of people and situations, events farther into the future can be predicted. Sometimes though, even God gets disappointed.

Much of what we consider Christian orthodoxy is based on what the church has taught for thousands of years. It is assumed that as long as our theology is aligned with some of the ancient creedal statements (Nicene Creed, Apostles Creed, etc) that we are in safe theological territory. I wonder, is this really the best place to start. Is it safe to wonder if Augustine was mistaken on some things?

I think we are pretty safe to say that the early church was no friend of Judaism. Even from the book I just read, the epistle of Barnabas is entirely anti Jewish, and the martyrdom of Polycarp has jabs to the Jews (indicating that of course they were front and center to find wood to burn him with). It would be no surprise that the early church would favor a more Greek viewpoint of the scripture, bringing in Platonist thought. To counteract this, there currently is a movement against dualism (God vs. Satan, body vs spirit, heaven vs earth) into a very monotheistic stoicism (bringing creation into harmony).

I wonder how much of this hellenisitic influence impacted our christology. Most of the early epistles warned against Docetism. I wonder how much of this herecy has made its way into and against true christology? It is clear from the new testament that Jesus deserves praise and worship that is reserved only for God. Where is the dividing line between god and man safely drawn? I honestly have no working concept of trinitarian theology (nor does anyone else). How much of that is due to an unhealthy view of christology?

The difficult part is to change christology is to make him incompatible with the Nicene Creed. This would then make the theology outside the normal realms of christianity (and a cult belief). Is it safe to walk down these paths?

I hear often the informal critiques of the emergent church movement as dangerous because of relativistic thinking. Usually it plays out as “they don’t believe the bible is true” or “they don’t believe Jesus is the only way” or “they don’t believe in X” – substituting X for whatever astounding point is that makes the critique more sensational. I suspect the real frustration with relativism (and I’ve hard this used against Rob Bell) is that many in the emergent church find ways to not give straightforward answers to yes or no questions. It is not due to an attempt to be evasive or dishonest, but some questions cannot be so simply answered.

To begin the explanation, we must start with the idea of a worldview. As we grow up, we learn facts. If, as someone was growing up, they also told by their parents often that they are really smart. They learn to read before their friends, they head to school and their teacher comments how well they are doing. We would expect the child to take these facts and put them together in a logical fashion to build a worldview – I am smart. Once this is put together, every piece of evidence is measured against their worldview. If the child gets an A on a test, it agrees nicely with their worldview. If an F, they will need to explain that in terms of their worldview (I am smart, but I must have been tired, or the teacher was bad, or the test was unfair). As time goes on, the worldview can change. If a student begins to do more an more poorly on tests, these facts begin to get more difficult to explain; the worldview must be modified to accommodate this new information. So, the worldview is deconstructed, and a new worldview is built with the new pieces of data – I am average.

Raw data has no meaning of its self. It must be filtered and assembled together with other data to create meaning. Raw data is always objective “I was driving 60 MPH”, “John 1:1 is X in the NIV” and comes from standard measurements. Meaning is always subjective “I was driving too fast”. Making sense of data (providing meaning) is the process of taking a new piece of data, comparing it with the other data we have assembled (worldview) and assembling it together in a logical way to create meaning.

It is because of this that statements such as “I read the bible for what it says (objectively)” is nonsensical. It would imply that if they were asked what the bible says about a topic (say abortion) they would pick a verse out at random and allow the hearer to make their subjective analysis. Any organisation automatically puts meaning behind the text, which means their own personal worldview has been read into it, and therefore must be subjective. This is where my standard (and understandably annoying) response to “but the bible says X” comes from (e.g “the bible says a lot of things”). What scares many people is that if we cannot ever definitively say the bible says X about something, it then implies the bible says nothing.

The way out of the dilemma is to understand the reason why I can not say “the bible says X”. The reason is because my worldview is built on a very small sample size of all the data. I respect people who have different worldviews because they have different pieces of data to work with than I do. It is no longer an argument between “right” and “wrong”, but a give and take to understand why someone would put the puzzle together in a certain way. Hopefully by understanding them, I can strengthen my worldview to more fully encapsulate more data, and take one step closer to truth. Truth, much like perfection, is a target – never a destination.

Truth does exist, but I am not so arrogant to believe that I have it pinned down.

The terms modern, postmodern, and emergent have been getting thrown around quite a bit within the Christian circle for the past 4-5 years. While these terms have some meaning outside the Christian subculture, they take on some specific connotations when referring to religion.

To start, there was a pre-modern time. This was the term we give to the time before the renaissance. For Christian thought, this was the time when the holy catholic (with a lower-case “c”) determined what was orthodoxy. We would label much of the belief as dogma because there was no identifiable logical progression of ideas.

The age of enlightenment then came to shed light on the dark ages. Dogma was examined and belief was transformed. Theology began to be determined solo scriptura, and the bible studied to define exactly what was, and was not being taught. As we have progressed into the 1980′s and 1990′s extra biblical text and histories began to be compared against the bible. Groups like the Jesus Seminar then compared biblical text and began to define what was most likely, and likely not factual history.

In very broad terms, the age of enlightenment came to help organise and define the world. If there was an idea that could not be categorised and logically defined, it was cast out for one that was more scientifically sound. This sort of reasoning drove the industrial revolution and helped bring the technological advances we have today.

The church, for at least the past 30 years has found its self in uncomfortable waters. When the light of science came squarely to bear on the Christian faith, the church saw its self staring down into heresy and areas it could not go. The resurrection, divinity of Jesus, and the recorded miracles in the bible were non-negotiable. When faced with meeting modernity head on with these questions, Christianity fled back to much of it’s pre-modern dogma. To date, the majority of Protestant churches have halted their theology advances with C.S. Lewis (and the Roman Catholic churches far earlier). Even some of his ideas, if observed closely, would be somewhat suspect by today’s mind. Have theologians had nothing to contribute to Christianity in the last 50 years?

While Christian thought has halted, the organisational structure has embraced modernism wholeheartedly. Much of modern American Christianity has become very structured, organised, and logical. Christianity is big business, with sizeable money and political influence. What we have is a super fit state of the art body running off of a wilted underused mind.

Post-modernism is labeled aptly for the period after modernism. For me, most of what is labeled as post-modern is not what I would define as a departure from modernism, but the evolution of modernism. Much of the green movement and the current spirituality shows much of the same fingerprint as modernism. It isn’t so easy as to label Hummers and Twinkies as modern and call the Prius and Whole Foods post-modern. Both come from the same industrial, logic driven, marketing machine. Organic food has some scientific backing to be better for us than McDonalds – and we have realised that the Hummer lifestyle is not sustainable. This is not a departure from modernism, just its next evolution. For me, the Christian face of post-modernity is Mark Driscoll. While it is probably unfair and short sited of me, much of the post-modern movement has been a new marketing scheme (with new Web 2.0 graphics!!) wrapped around much of the same pre-modern theology.

For me, what is a departure from modernism is not well defined (but the least threatening term I hear is emergent). If it is a departure from the structured logic and definition of modernism, it is not very surprising that the movement is largely undefined (and unnamed). It is not a retreat into pre-modernism, but an acknowledgement that not all life is conveniently defined and organised. It has reviewed the best that modernism has to offer and found it wanting. Theology has been redefined, and the problems that kept the church away from modernist theology are found to only exist within modernism.

This current time is difficult because a modern church cannot accept any theology outside of it’s own orthodoxy. With a deterministic viewpoint, you have mapped out the truth and anything outside of that truth must be false. A truly postmodern viewpoint does not even traffic in the same thought patterns, so little effective communication is had over the wall. I can feel change coming, and I suspect a lot will be changing in the American Christian landscape over the next 10 years – into what I cannot say.

The other day my oldest daughter was asking my wife about death, and was sobbing saying that she didn’t want to die. There was nothing that she would accept from us to help her ease her mind about it. How to tell her that it is nothing she needs to be worrying herself about, but also not lie to her when she asks if we are all going to die?

It got us on the topic of what does happen after death. The typical christian answer is somewhere along the lines of “you go to be with Jesus in heaven.” This implies that heaven is somewhere else (often somewhere UP), and it constitutes some sort of Hotel California type of party where there is all the food you want, but you can never leave. I think people have a hard time answering questions about it because heaven doesn’t really sound like a whole lot of fun. Maybe that is why the pressure tactic is less on “going to heaven” but avoiding hell…

Unfortunately, the bible is nothing less than cryptic about what happens when you die – and even those few passages are more of a side note. I would believe that any heavy treatment of life after death would start to draw focus away on what is important – what is going on now in the world around you. I can imagine that describing anything serious and semi accurate would be difficult/impossible to do. What does seem plausible is there is some intermediate stage after death. Jesus mentions a parable where a rich and poor man are having a conversation in some sort of afterlife. I think in most traditional protestant views of heaven and hell, the poor man does not seem to be in heaven, and the rich man in hell, it seems more like a purgatory than anything else. While I draw issues with the idea of payment for sins in life in a purgatory type place, I do not with the idea of a cosmic holding pen. A place where people are kept (under the alter in The Revelation for the pre-millennial view) before the judgement. If we call this “with Jesus” or something else, is fine with me. What happens post judgement is something different all together.

This all of course if you assume a strict linearity of time. If time turns out to contain more than half a dimension, all that is out the window….

Now, how do you explain that to a 4 year old?