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Part three of The Divine Embrace is entitled “The Challenge: Returning Spirituality to the Divine Embrace,” which is an excellent encapsulation of Webber’s point: we don’t need to find anything new, we simply need to recapture the church’s original understanding of spirituality, rooted in God’s Story, in God’s Divine Embrace of us and the rest of creation. Crucial to this understanding is the concept of the Incarnation, of God fully embracing humanity. This is a 180-degree turn from much of the evangelical church today. Webber states

… Christian spirituality is not an escape from this world, rather it is the discovery and the experience of spiritual purpose in this world.

This morning I was reading a magazine devoted to church planting issues, and as is typical, the issue of being missional was addressed. As I read the discussion, it occurred to me that the reason that the issue of missional is such a hot topic today is that much of the evangelical and emerging church does not have a clear understanding of God’s story. If our lives are merely focused on “getting saved,” getting others saved, and getting to Heaven, we’re missing the big picture. This is something that the liturgical, confessional traditions have not forgotten. As Richard commented the other day, the liturgy is “the enactment of the story of God, of creation, incarnation, and re-creation, and of the reality of God’s kingdom, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” This is also what we, the Church, are all about.

Spirituality, or our mission, is to reenact God’s story of creation, incarnation and re-creation. This is “what the Father’s doing” as it’s put in the gospel of John; it is rooted firmly in our understanding of God’s incarnational embrace of us. This is God’s story.

The Bible presents 3 clear types or images that demonstrate God’s story:

1. creation & re-creation: Jesus makes all things new
2. 1st Adam & 2nd Adam: Jesus, God incarnate, did what we could not do
3. exodus event & the Christ event: “The ultimate restoration of the whole world is pictured in the Exodus event.”

God’s incarnational embrace recapitulates the human condition; He is re-creating us, and will re-create his creation. He is making all things new.

As we can see, the central concept of the Incarnation, of God fully embracing humanity, without any implication that the physical is in any way less holy than the “spiritual,” is essential to understanding not only God’s story, but our story.

So how do we respond? In Acts 2, Peter preaches 1) repent, 2) be baptized and 3) receive the Holy Spirit. Setting aside the common transactional interpretation, both repentance and baptism reflect a rejection of an identity with the world, and an ongoing identification with the story and purposes of God. Receiving the Holy Spirit, as we know, is the seal, or guarantee, of that identity. As opposed to a typical evangelical understanding, even our repentance - our identifying with God and his purposes - is a response to God’s embrace. Baptism, then, also is not a testimony of our action, but a testimony of the Incarnation, of God’s embrace.

This, then, is our part of the story. God embraces his creation (us), and we respond daily, continuously to that embrace. In this ancient (pre-modern) understanding of the Gospel, the focus is not on us, but on God. If you have been raised with a modern Evangelical worldview, you can perhaps see that this way of thinking changes everything. As Webber states,

… the baptized life has a mission in the world. It is not life-denying or life-escaping. Rather, living the baptized life is a participation in God’s vision within the life of the world.

I heard yesterday that they are planning a 4th Bourne movie. The article I read questioned what they’d do, since Robert Ludlum only wrote 3 Bourne novels. However, if that author had ever read any of the novels, they’d have known that that wouldn’t matter, as the 2nd and 3rd movies had nothing whatsoever to do with the books.

I never could figure out why they used the book titles for the movies - even rereleasing the books with new covers that said “soon to be a motion picure!” - when they completely ignored the book plots. In fact, they managed to kill off 2 of the main characters of the latter 2 books in the first movie, and Bourne’s arch enemy, Carlos, the Jackal, never appears at all.  They could have come up with new, unrelated titles, like Bourne to be Wild, or something. How about a little creativity?

Now, I really enjoyed the first movie, and thought the 2nd movie wasn’t too bad, either. It was after seeing both movies that I decided to read the 3rd book (thinking, stupidly, that they had at least stuck to the same general plot).  I then went back and read the 1st two books.  Ludlum isn’t my favorite author, by a long shot, but he did create some very interesting characters, and very tight, extremely complicated plots. It’s too bad that the movies ignored them.

The changes that they made in The Bourne Identity, such as the different items in Bourne’s safe deposit box, were good. However, killing off Alex Conklin (who becomes Bourne’s best friend in the later books) was stupid. The major change in Bourne’s real identity and the nature of his original mission (which really comes to play in the 3rd movie) really bugged me. And, killing off Marie in the 2nd movie was, in my opinion, a major mistake.

I had heard from a number of people that The Bourne Ultimatum, the 3rd move, was the best of them all. However, I was very disappointed in that it didn’t really have a new plot… it was just a continuation of the same un-plot. And, what they revealed about Bourne’s past, as I mentioned, was a 180 from his character in the book. I just didn’t think it was good.

A 4th Bourne movie could now at least borrow parts of the plots of the original books, since they haven’t been used yet. Or, they could use a plot (or at least a title) from one of the 2 (soon to be 3) Bourne novels written by Eric Van Lustbader, which as books go, are pretty lousy.  Lustbader is a hack, who took a decent character, and stripped him of everything that made him interesting. First, he didn’t know how to deal with Marie (Bourne’s wife in the 3 original books) so he ignored her in one book, while he killed off 2 other main characters that he didn’t know how to deal with. Then, he simply kills off Marie. Overall, everyting that made Jason Bourne a good, complicated character is gone. They are a couple of the more underwhelming action novels I’ve read, and I will resist the temptation to read the next one when it comes out.

So, we’ll see what is next for Jason Bourne. Maybe he’ll find out that Marie isn’t dead after all. Or, perhaps he’ll finally find the Jackal. Let’s hope he at least finds a plot. That would be a really nice surprise.

In the opening paragraph to Chapter 4 of Robert Webber’s book, The Divine Embrace, Webber writes:

Spirituality has become situated in the narrative of the self. In this privatized spirituality evangelicals look to themselves for the confirmation of their spiritual condition. The self-focused spiritualities of the twentieth century have not emerged willy-nilly but are deeply rooted in the historical movements that separated spirituality from the vision of God… The problem of these dislocated spiritualities has been compounded by the current antihistorical, narcissistic, and pragmatic nature of evangelical Christianity.

In the 20th Century, three main forms of spirituality developed: legalism, intellectualism, and experientialism. The early century saw the rise of fundamentalism, which developed a legalistic mentality, a spirituality based on what a person does not do. These lists of don’ts is what separated one group from another, creating and us/them mentality. A doctrinal legalism also was developed, as fundamentalist groups defined their theology, adding extra, more defined articles of faith that one had to believe to be “orthodox.” For example, it was not good enough for the Bible to be inspired, you had to believe it was “inerrant.” As Webber states, legalism undermines the Gospel, and actually makes grace the enemy.

An intellectual spirituality also began to develop, grown out of a rationalistic, modern world-view. Spirituality became proof-oriented, a fact to be believed and argued. From this intellectual spirituality we saw the rise in apologetics. For liberals, who saw many of the Biblical stories as not fact-based or provable, they became myths whose purpose was to instruct about morality.

Then, romanticism and existentialism gave way to experientialism, where feeling God became another way of knowing God. Wesley’s experience, Webber posits, was universalized into the “defining mark of spirituality” and “feeling forgiven” became the goal of evangelism. Experientialism “elevates experience as the apologetic for faith.” Webber also suggests that the requirement to have a “personal relationship with Jesus” has led to a works-based mentality and an individualistic understanding to Christianity.

The later 20th century, with the cultural revolution of the 60’s, saw the development of antinomianism and narcissism, especially in worship, which also incorporated romanticism. Worship became about an emotional relationship which has to make us feel good in order to be true. With the influence of the “New Age” religions, it’s sometimes hard to tell Christianity from mysticism.

Another impact upon the church was the secular field of psychology; the thoughts of Freud, Carl Jung, and others led to the belief that we could be “healed” through self-discovery. The impact of this thinking on the contemporary church is obvious as we walk through any Christian bookstore, and see shelf after shelf of counseling and self-help books. Introspection and focus on the self has replaced meditation on the nature of God.

Finally, of course, we have the post-modern influence, which has rejected the Modernist concept of absolute truth. This is a rejection of the secular culture as well as the evangelical culture, both of which are rooted in modernism. For post-moderns, even experience is not prescriptive. Your story is not my story. I might be a Christian and believe that Jesus died for my sins, but it’s not necessarily right for everyone. Individualism is at an all time high. The “emerging” church seems to question everything, but accept eveything. Evangelical apologetics is essentially useless.

As I consider the many current forms of Christianity - most of them distinguished not by theology, but by the extra-Christian influences that they have adopted - it makes absolute sense that the result is post-modernism, or emergentism. As they say, something had to give. It seems that this cognitive dissonance of the modern church resulted in the letting go of truth (or what passed for it).

The answer to this mess, Webber believes, is that first the church must rediscover God’s story. It is here, that we go next.