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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.

Some of you might recognize Everything must change as the title to a rather poor book by Brian McLaren which I reviewed some time back. While McLaren - in my opinion - failed miserably in laying out a case for why everything must change, I think Webber does just that quite well in The Divine Embrace, although he doesn’t use those words.  I am surprised, though, that evangelicals could read and say they agreed with what Webber says, but then go merrily on their way.

This post, by the way, is the 8th article in my Webber series that is discussing the book. These next 2 chapters are entitled My life in his and His life in mind. In My Life in His, he states:

The Christian life does not oppose experience of the transcendant, but the Christian spiritual life is not an experience out of this world, it is an experience of transcendant meaning here and now in this world.

This is a key, I think, in distinguishing between the spirituality of the past and that of the present. We tend to think of transcendant experience in a Platonic sense, where we leave the physical (the secular) and reach the spiritual (the sacred). However, this is to deny the incarnational aspect of God’s work.  God did not only become incarnate once; he continues his incarnational work in his embrace of us and creation. Webber suggests, in fact, that few evangelicals really grasp the concept of the humanity of Jesus. The incarnation is so contrary to our modern sense of Platonic dualism that we have a hard time really accpeting it for what it is.

In Chapter 9, Webber deals with what he sees as the common misunderstanding that spritiual disciplines as the source of our spirituality. I would agree, from my own experience in dealing with various evangelical groups, that this is indeed the basic teaching: if you want to “grow,” you must pray, read the Bible, and so on. There is a constant tension in teaching that we are not saved by “works,” but that we require works to mature, or in some cases, even to continue being saved. However, Webber says that “our goal is never to become spiritual but to live out the spirituality we have” in continuing to live in the divine embrace.

Webber, however, lost me a bit in this chapter as he spends a lot of time discussing a Benedictine approach to the spiritual disciplines. As this chapter is drawing conclusions about how to respond to everything he has said in the prior chapters, I found this suggestion to follow a Benedictine approach a bit anticlimactic and disappointing.  Even so, his points about prayer, study and so on are well-taken.

As I sat in church this Sunday morning, I was very aware of how far the evangelical church has moved from any sort of Biblical understanding of spirituality. The “worship” songs had very little worship content in them (most celebrated our emotions) and the sermon gave us ideas on things we could do to grow. There was no celebration of God With Us, no sense that God is able to do all that He has set out to do.  Not too long ago, I just would have left disatisfied, not really knowing why. Webber has been beneficial in that now I can better see and understand what lies beneath these defects. It helps to know why… I didn’t leave angry. Sad, yes… disappointed, yes… but not angry. That’s progress.

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.