a (hesitant) pentecostal theology

on being pentecostal in a new world

[cdbaca]

On the Atonement

I just published a piece on the atonement over at Medium. Here's a small section:

"As Christians, I think our standard, rule, and measure for understanding any particular doctrine MUST start and end with Jesus (including the stories of Jesus we have from the Gospels, the creedal/theological statements the universal Church has accepted as true, and our real, present experience of Jesus, the person, today).

In my experience, most people have taken their ideas about what God must be and how God should act, and forced those ideas upon the person of Jesus. Instead, I think we ought to do the reverse. It is not that we impose our ideas about God (a nebulous term that can house virtually anything we want it to — wrath, anger, violence, justice, morality, love, and so forth) onto Jesus; it is that we must now necessarily define God by the person and character of Jesus of Nazareth."

[cdbaca]

OK, my little system is AT LEAST, EVEN IF. I provide definitions for religious concepts in the form of axioms in a manner that is compatible with naturalism (falsifiable and provable). Even in the sciences, we must admit we don’t have a complete understanding of most concepts, so AT LEAST could be applied to natural concepts too (the Universe, gravity, etc.) Basically, this is a ground floor which doubt can dip no further. It allows us to always feel intellectually honest about pursuing God, religious ritual, fellowship and even Jesus himself. God is AT LEAST the natural forces that created and sustain the Universe as experienced via a psychosocial construct rooted in evolved neurologic features in humans. EVEN IF that is a comprehensive definition for God, the pursuit of this personal, subjective experience can provide meaning, peace and empathy for others and is warranted. Prayer is AT LEAST a form of mediation that encourages the development of healthy brain tissue, lowers stress and can connect us to God. EVEN IF that is a comprehensive definition of prayer, the health and psychological benefits of prayer justify the discipline. The Bible is AT LEAST a set of writings where a people group describes their experience with and understanding of God over thousands of years. EVN IF that is a comprehensive definition of God, study of scripture is warranted to understand our culture and the way in which people come to know God. Jesus is AT LEAST the idea of a man so connected to God that he was called the Son of God and the largest religious movement in human history is centered around his teachings; he was very likely a real person. EVEN IF this is all Jesus is, following his teachings can promote peace, empathy, and genuine morality.

http://gungormusic.com/2013/03/for-the-doubters/

[cdbaca]

Structuralism’s nihilism | Peter J. Leithart | First Things

"Post-structuralism extends this nihilistic direction of structuralism, but deconstruction, like Foucault’s archeological or genealogical method, arises more directly from the failed promise of structuralism. In the hands of some practitioners, structuralism became another form of foundationalism that claimed to discover the ground of language and culture, and post-structuralists have come to doubt the scientific pretensions of structuralism."

[cdbaca]

Creating exemptions for the Sermon on the Mount and explaining when and where Jesus's teaching does not apply is fine (in theory, I suppose); but at some point you have to decide what Jesus DID mean with his kingdom imperatives on nonviolence and enemy love. Which is to say, we eventually have to ask ourselves what DID Jesus intend and when DO we need to turn the other cheek? If our default response to this portion of the Sermon on the Mount is to craft exemptions, we might give the impression that we really don't believe in Jesus's ideas of nonviolent resistance to enemy love AT ALL.

Brian Zahnd - A Farewell to Mars

[cdbaca]

It is the bitter irony of history that the common people, who are devoid of power and are the prospective victims of its abuse, are the first to become the ally of him who accumulates power. Power is spectacular, while its end, the moral law, is inconspicuous.

The Prophets - Abraham Heschel (203)

[cdbaca]

The resurrection of Jesus is not to be understood in good liberal fashion as a spiritual development in the church. Nor should it be too quickly handled as an oddity in the history of God or as an isolated act of God's power. Rather, it is the ultimate act of prophetic energizing in which a new history is initiated. It is a new history open to all but peculiarly received by the marginal victims of the old order.

The Prophetic Imagination - Walter Brueggemann (107)

[cdbaca]

The crucifixion of Jesus is not to be understood simply in good liberal fashion as the sacrifice of a noble man, nor should we too quickly assign a cultic, priestly theory of atonement to the event. Rather, we might see in the crucifixion of Jesus the ultimate act of prophetic criticism in which Jesus announces the end of a world of death (the same announcement as that of Jeremiah) and takes that death into his own person. Therefore we say that the ultimate criticism is that God himself embraces the death that his people must die.

The Prophetic Imagination - Walter Brueggemann (91)

[cdbaca]

The point that prophetic imagination must ponder is that there is no freedom of God without the politics of justice and compassion, and there is no politics of justice and compassion without a religion of the freedom of God. If a God is disclosed who is free to come and go, free from and even against the regime, free to hear and even answer slave cries, free from all proper godness as defined by the empire, then it will bear decisively upon sociology because the freedom of God will surface in the brickyards and manifest itself as justice and compassion.

The Prophetic Imagination - Walter Brueggemann (18)

[cdbaca]

The dominant conservative misconception, evident in manifold bumper stickers, is that the prophet is a future-teller, a predictor of things to come (mostly ominous), usually with specific reference to Jesus. While one would not want to deny totally those facets of the practice of prophecy, there tends to be a kind of reductionism that is mechanical and therefore untenable. While the prophets are in a way future-tellers, they are concerned with the future as it impinges upon the present. Conversely, liberals who abdicated and turned all futuring over to conservatives have settled for a focus on the present. Thus prophecy is alternatively reduced to righteous indignation, and… prophecy is mostly understood as social action.

The Prophetic Imagination - Walter Brueggemann (12-13)

[cdbaca]

Reformational Catholicism ftw

[cdbaca]

St. Paul & the Broken Bones at KEXP

[cdbaca]

The principalities and powers will always seek to capture and enslave God in an attempt to use the name of God to underwrite current power arrangements. To go against the status quo, declare the powers, is to go against God... Consequently, before proclamation to human captives can be made - freedom to those being oppressed by current power arrangements - the prophet must dare to proclaim that God is not the spokesperson for the status quo, but rather stands outside the system - free - to speak a word of judgment.

The Slavery of Death - Richard Beck (120)

[cdbaca]

When we change allegiances in baptism, we are renouncing the way the world defines significance and value. Concretely, the hero systems found in serving the principalities and powers offer a vision of 'success,' a vision that guides just about everyone around us... But in baptism, Christians turn their backs on this game... and reject the things that give others value, respect, and significance. By this act, Christians register a dissent that implicitly indicts how everyone else is choosing to live their lives. And we can't kick out the props of everyone else's self-esteem without expecting a negative response.

The Slavery of Death - Richard Beck (82)

[cdbaca]

"Pentecostals were birthed on the wrong side of the theological railroad tracks, persecuted from virtually all sides from the beginning of the movement for our emotionalism, apocalyptic urgency, and radical deconstruction of racial and gender barriers.  Since we have superficial commonalities with other fundamentalists, that’s where we’ve sought acceptance.  In our need for acceptance, we have softened the more edgy and more interesting contours of our way of understanding God, church and world, minimizing our potential to be a renewal movement for the entire body of Christ."

[cdbaca]

If we receive everything - even our very lives - as a gift, then we have nothing to cling to or to protect. Following the example of Jesus, we become 'nothing.' In a sense, we 'die' - and thus we no longer have to fear dispossession, loss, diminishment, or expenditure in the face of death. Not that we seek out such losses. But we form our identities in such a way that we are freed from the anxiety of self-preservation, which makes different choices and modes of being human open and available to us. The creation of a secure heart makes love a possibility. It enables us to do something that biological creatures worried about self-preservation don't naturally do: place the interests of others before our own.

The Slavery of Death - Richard Beck (77)

[cdbaca]

[cdbaca]

Love, as many Christians seem to conceive of it, costs nothing and requires no real sacrifice. We can see the neurotic death-denial at work here, creating and maintaining the fantasy that we can always say "yes" to ourselves and simultaneously say "yes" to everyone else. Need, want, and lack don't exist in this illusion of deathlessness. But need really does exist, and sacrificial love will quickly bring it to the surface. We find that when we give, what we give isn't always replenished. This truth is what marks love as love, as something more than mere exchange, as an act of grace. The account books are not balanced. Love gives gifts and makes sacrifices and expects nothing in return.

The Slavery of Death - Richard Beck (66)