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The final chapter in Webber’s The Divine Embrace is entitled Life Together, which is, of course, where all this ends, in church. One of my repeated critiques of a contemporary church experience is that it is essentially existential, focusing on the self. Webber agrees, saying that the problem is that spirituality itself is taught as generating from the self: “It is a view that seems to permeate the evangelical culture.”

Webber proposes that when spirituality is situated in God’s embrace, church and worship then reveals that to us. We are no longer cheerleaders (my term) that have to conjur up some sense of worship and spirituality, but are rather participants who have God revealed to us as we respond to his embrace. 

Webber criticizes the modern business model of the church, which has created, as you’d expect, a consumerist mentality. This has followed a natural progression, with churches focusing on what the unchurched want, and making the church culturally relevant. As a result, many churches merely reflect not only the look, but the “narrative of culture.” Churches offer programs to meet the needs and desires of the congregation, as opposed to nurturing new converts and discipling them.

This chapter also discusses what Webber calls the crisis of worship. As I have mentioned before, contemporary worship sees God as the object God who needs to be worshipped by us, which originates worship in the self. Webber believes that a Biblical and historical view of worship is that “worship does God’s story.” Worshp proclaims God and what he is doing, and in worship we enact the story. A worship that is nourishing focuses on historical events (not emotions), uses Biblical language, and includes prayer that discloses and echoes God’s story.

Since I’ve started reading this book, I have paid even closer attention to what kind of worship happens in the churches I attend, and I think Webber is correct. The further and further we have “progressed” into evengelicalism, our worship songs have become more and more meaningless, offering little if anything of the truth of the Gospel. Even in my own Vineyard culture, the contemporary worship songs have become less and less doctrinal. No longer is the Trinity mentioned (in fact, often the Persons are confused). In fact, it’s rare to find Biblical language used that hasn’t been edited and lost among less meaningful phrases.

What now?  As I’ve probably mentioned in the past, I really don’t have a great deal of hope that the Evangelical church will stop the nonsense and realign itself with a Biblical concept of spirituality. I also don’t have hope for the emerging church, which to me is simply modernism will the lid off.  That’s not to say I haven’t lost  faith in God’s church, or his ability to pull it together.

As for what I do, I’m not sure. Next Sunday is Easter, and at the moment, I’m looking for a good church that remembers what it’s like to celebrate a resurrection. Then, I’ll go to our church with my family.

Time Magazine online jumped into eschatological waters yesterday with an interview with N.T. Wright concerning his latest book, Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. An introduction to the interview states:

N.T. “Tom” Wright is one of the most formidable figures in the world of Christian thought … and is a hero to conservative Christians worldwide for his 2003 book The Resurrection of the Son of God, which argued forcefully for a literal interpretation of that event.

It therefore comes as a something of a shock that Wright doesn’t believe in heaven — at least, not in the way that millions of Christians understand the term.

In Bishop Wright suggesting that John Lennon was on to something when he wrote, “Imagine there’s no Heaven?” Well, not really. But, perhaps - if you believe the Dante version of Heaven. Wright explains what he means in his phone interview with Time writer David Van Biema, which actually is one of the better “Christian” interviews I’ve seen in the secular press, although the headline - Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop - is a bit melodramatic.

As my faithful readers know, NT Wright is one of my favorite theologians (definitely my favorite contemporary theologian), for a number of reasons. He is not an American Evangelical, for one thing (he’s Anglican), which is very refreshing. He is also an historian, he understands modern and postmodern philosophy, and he writes very plainly without being condescending or “popish.” He also makes a ton of sense, and is pretty consistent with traditional theology, although he does occasionally present some new approaches to understanding the New Testament.

It has been interesting that the Evangelical community has embraced him to the extent that it has; it seems to indicate that Evangelicals don’t understand their own theological positions. Unless it comes down to a “pet issue” like predestination or in this case, eschatology, they don’t seem to realize that Wright - as well as traditional, historic theology - undermines a lot of contemporary Evangelical thinking. He’s become quite a favorite with many of the “Emerging” folks such as McLaren, who try to appropriate his ideas but just muck them up as they try to incorporate in their emergent-evangelical theological stew.

I first heard about Wright’s newest book, which was just released this month, on the Jesus Creed website. Scot McNight has been providing a chapter-by-chapter peek at the book, which seems to be a perfect follow up to Evil and the Justice of God, which I have mentioned before. In Surprised…, Wright has chapters dealing with the meaning of the Cross, the Resurrection and the Atonement, but it seems it his thoughts about Heaven which have some people in a tither. Per Wright, it’s because all of that “Left Behind” thinking is wrong.

Wright seems to have this old-fashioned idea that what we believe impacts how we live. The Publisher’s blurb about the book states, “Wright convincingly argues that what we believe about life after death directly affects what we believe about life before death.” In the interview, Wright states:

If there’s going to be an Armageddon, and we’ll all be in heaven already or raptured up just in time, it really doesn’t matter if you have acid rain or greenhouse gases prior to that. Or, for that matter, whether you bombed civilians in Iraq. All that really matters is saving souls for that disembodied heaven.

This, of course, is not proof of Wright’s point of view, but it is reason enough to work through what the Bible really teaches about the future. If Wright is right, the truth about Heaven could change how we want to live today.

One more book for my reading list…

Some time ago I wrote a bit about the authority of the Bible, which you can read here. Beneath the issues of orthodoxy, orthopraxy, theology and denominationalism we will often find some discussion about the Scriptures, with questions as seemingly elementary as, “what constitutes Scripture?” We are taught as children that the Bible consists of 66 books, beginning with Genesis, ending with Revelation, all inspired by the Holy Spirit (the Aprocrapha is, of course, not inspired). We even somehow think that the order of the books is important, sometimes judging those who don’t know where Romans is.

This morning I read a couple of very interesting posts on the subject on the internet monk blog. The first is by Michael Spencer (the IM himself - he’s actually Baptist, I think), who identifies himself as a “post-evangelical,” which he defines elsewhere on his blog. The second post (on the same internet monk site) is by guest-poster Josh Stodtbeck, a Lutheran blogger who gives a Lutheran perspective on the Scriptural Canon.

Both posts raise very interesting issues and challenges with regard to how militant we can be concerning our position on the Canon of Scripture. As I think I’ve mentioned before, it is interesting to note that based on what we read in the New Testament, the “Word of God” does not seem limited to anything which was written down, and in fact, seems to speak of oral testimony. It would seem that some fundamentalist approaches to the Bible, while trying to raise the stature of the Bible and encourage faith by assigning adjectives such as inerrant, may in fact have the opposite effect.

As Paul told Timothy, all scripture is inspired by God. However, as I realized some years ago, in context we see that Paul was referring to that “scripture” which Timothy learned as a child. While I do not doubt the inspiration of the New Testament books, it seems fitting to ask (and not assume), “What did Paul mean by ’scripture?’” Michael Spencer writes:

It is important, however, to note that the term “scripture” was not synonymous with “approved canon.” It is apparent that Jewish writers could use the term “scripture” in a much broader sense than we would use the word “canon,” and that books not included in canonical lists might be referred to as scripture. This seems to provide strong evidence that there are books- such as the Apocryphal books- that may have been quoted as “scripture” while not appearing universally on all Jewish lists of canon. In fact, it’s clear that the Jewish canon was never as settled as the retelling of the canonical tale might sometimes imply. This suggests that the category of “beneficial, but not authoritative” should be applied to some writings, and that supplemental collections of non-canonical books and readings are appropriate.

Spencer’s post give’s his own, “post-evangelical” views. Mr. Stodtbeck presents a Lutheran understanding of the Canon and how it works in practice; that is, how it impacts Lutheran theology. For example, he discusses how not all books were unanimously adopted into the Canon; some books, like Revelation, were highly contested:

An example of the application of this is that Lutherans will never make some particular interpretation of Revelation a church-defining issue. Yes, we preach from it, write commentaries in it, and read it in our lectionaries, but because the early church witness to the origin of this book is divided, our confessional principles on eschatology are ultimately drawn from the Gospels and Epistles.

You may not agree with either position, but if you have any interest at all in the subject, I think you’ll find the articles worth your time.