I just finished reading Brian McLaren’s new book A New Kind of Christianity. Over the last several years I have read most of McLaren’s works and on the front end I found him to be refreshing and asking the right questions. My first introduction to McLaren came over a decade ago when, while doing some work for Zondervan, I was given a prepublication manuscript of his book The Church on the Other Side.  This was about 13 or 14 years ago when discussion within the evangelical world was centered on the rise of postmodernism. A few years later I picked up his book A New Kind of Christian and almost immediately thereafter read the sequel The Story We Find Ourselves In.  I found myself appreciating very much the questions with which he was wrestling and the implications that those questions had, both personally and for the church. (I must confess that I never got around to reading the third volume of the trilogy: The Last Word and the Word after That.)

About four or five years ago I picked up his work, A Generous Orthodoxy. By this time McLaren had emerged as the guru of the emergent church movement. As an historical theologian I appreciated both his unwillingness to be locked absolutely  into any particular Christian tradition, and the fact that he saw contributions that came from all different stripes of historical Christianity. Likewise, I found it interesting/refreshing that he did not lock spiritual expression into the cultural forms of Western Christianity.

I found McLaren stimulating, somewhat edgy and outside the box. As someone who has done more than his share of cage rattling over the years I kind of identified with him. But I began hearing a lot of pushback about some of the things that McLaren is saying in public settings if not in print. For example one of my former colleagues at Western Seminary was nearly apoplectic when he had McLaren in his class speaking. During the discussion the question of the atonement came up. McLaren challenged the widely accepted Orthodox understanding of Christ's atonement as penal substitution, declaring that that was the ultimate in child abuse.

By way of background, we must understand here that evangelical Christianity is rooted in the Reformation and the view of the atonement that has come out of the Calvinistic Reformation is that of penal substitution, i.e. on the cross Christ suffered the wrath of God for the sins of all humanity of all time. In other words there was a one to one substitution that Christ bore the literal penalty for our sin. Among most evangelicals this is the one and only orthodox/biblical explanation of the atonement. (As an aside: over the years a host of explanations of the nature of the atonement have been set forth by those who are well within the stream of historic orthodoxy.  When I was in seminary I once heard a great Anglican scholar, Peter Toon, speak on the nature of the atonement. He wisely observed that the imagery of the atonement that is put forth in Scripture is wide and varied. And that no one's image or theme could capture adequately the variegated scriptural data.) While the idea of substitution is clearly a scriptural teaching supported by numerous passages, there are numerous other images that cannot be so subsumed under the umbrella of substitution. Looking at the question from this perspective, trying to understand the atonement as only substitution is reductionistic. But there is another aspect of the evangelical church’s more informal theological understanding that I find much more troubling. . .that is the popular conception that the eternal son and second person of the Trinity in his death on the cross interposes himself between sinful humanity and an angry wrathful God. This popular understanding presents the incarnate Son as a cosmic "whipping boy" who was arbitrarily selected so everyone else won't have to suffer. It also makes a mockery of explicit biblical testimony of the love of the triune God for his broken creation. Such an understanding involves a thoroughgoing violation of the unity of the Trinity and the fact that what one Trinitarian person does always involves the other two in some level of participation. The unity of intent and purpose of the members of the Trinity is eloquently addressed in the gospel of John in numerous places, perhaps most clearly in Jesus unequivocal statement, "if you have seen me you have seen the Father." (John 14:9)

Now back to McLaren. Assertions like, "penal substitution is the ultimate child abuse" are at best provocative and seemed to reveal a lack of theological sophistication on McLaren’s part. This ought not be surprising when we look at where he is coming from. Although he has spent nearly a quarter century as a pastor he has no formal theological training. From my understanding his background is the Plymouth Brethren (of which denomination I have in the past personally been a member). The Plymouth Brethren are historically a very conservative and anti-intellectual, anti-educational Fellowship of Assemblies (they don’t call themselves churches). There is an old joke, "how many Plymouth Brethren does it take to change a light bulb?" Answer: "What is ‘change’?” In other words, the dispensational system first articulated by John Nelson Darby in the 19th century is the final theological answer. It has final authority because it is grounded solely in the Word of God and is really nothing more than the Scripture’s own teaching about itself. And since the Bible is the normative message of God for us in all ages, we are bound not only by apostolic precept but also apostolic practice. In other words we have to do things the way the apostles did, right down to the head covering of women in worship services.

While McLaren has never had formal theological training he does hold an M.A. in English literature.  We see this side of McLaren early in his works as he is dealing with postmodernism. Contemporary postmodern thought is represented in the literature departments of the world's major universities. French thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jean François Leotard, have been at the lead in the idea of deconstruction. The presupposition is that language is not about communication or exchange of ideas but it is about power and oppression. In reading A New Kind of Christianity we see this skeptical postmodern method being self-consciously (and it seems to me uncritically) employed.

McLaren self-admittedly employs deconstruction of the received Christian narrative in A New Kind of Christianity. Deconstruction as a tool is in and of itself not necessarily evil or bad, for it can raise hidden assumptions that need to be challenged. However it is a tool that must be wielded carefully and with great precision. This is something that it does not appear to me that McLaren does. He boldly challenges the received Christian narrative in toto. And in some respects mirrors the points that some contemporary New Testament scholars, such as NT Wright are making, particularly, since the in late ancient period the Church lost touch with its Jewish heritage. In place of the Jewish there was a self-conscious synthesis of Christianity and Neoplatonism particularly under the mind of the great Augustine. That this is historically accurate has been recognized since the time of Thomas Aquinas. Calvin who was himself a follower of Augustine often complains about Augustine's use of Platonic philosophy. But I digress. That is a topic for at least an article if not an entire book.

 The point I want to make here is that in criticizing the past, particularly in early sections of the book the sense that I get is that McLaren has uncritically bought into the current politically correct narrative with its anti-Christian, anti-western agenda. He paints with broad brush strokes that are unnuanced and give no indication of any depth of understanding of what he's criticizing. Again speaking as an historical theologian, one of the dictums by which I operate is that before you can criticize a position you must understand it from the inside out. Or to put it another way you must be able to walk in the shoes of those with whom you disagree to understand why it is they believe what they believe. Running down the hall and throwing a hand grenade into a room through an open door is not valid methodologically. McLaren sees all historical readings of the Bible as flawed by the Greco-Roman narrative but then suggests that his proposed narrative is not flawed!

I was very troubled by what struck me as a somewhat arrogant condescending tone taken particularly in the early part of the book.  The “generous orthodoxy” of a few years ago has largely been left by the wayside. In fact a close look at what McLaren is espousing as a “New Christianity” looks very much like the liberal Christianity of the nineteenth century.  He posits an evolutionary understanding of the presentation of God in the Old Testament.  He pits traditional understanding of God against Jesus and contends that the Church’s understanding of Theos (the Greek term for God) has more to do Zeus than it does with Scripture. With Harnack he sees Christianity as hopelessly Hellenized.  With the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule ("history of religion school") he espoused an evolutionary development of God (as a character in the biblical story).

While I find much of McLaren’s proposal for “a new kind of Christianity” to be fatally flawed that is not to say that there are not a few diamonds amongst the coal.  McLaren’s most positive proposal is that the Bible be read as a "portable library of poems, prophecies, histories, fables, parables, letters, sagely sayings, quarrels, and so on."  Evangelical New Testament scholar,  Scot Mcknight from North Park Seminary comments in his evaluation of A New Kind of Christianity:

(I think of the Bible in terms not unlike this: as a collection of inspired texts that come at things from different angles and use differing terms and speak to ever-shifting contexts, but always with the ever-true truth of the gospel that leads us to Christ.)

In this new kind of Christianity, with its new view of the Bible, Brian finds a narrative built from Genesis, Exodus, and Isaiah: God as creator and sustainer, God as liberator, and God as shalom-maker. When one reads the Bible with these images of God in mind, one finds that the Bible points constantly to Jesus, whose God is not Theos but Abba. And one finds that the Bible finally makes sense from beginning to end: It's about God's redemptive plan to restore all of creation. In these sections, Brian is doing some of his best work.

I have often quipped that McLaren strikes me as having a spirit similar to a prominent contemporary Evangelical theologian (who shall remain nameless):  he has never met a boundary that he didn’t want to push.  In this case however, as valid as many of McLaren’s questions and critiques may be, he has not just pushed a boundary but has trashed nearly a millennium and a half of God’s work among humanity, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he is reacting to the rigidity of his own past rather than having a sympathetic and adequate understanding of the church’s history and theology.



I have been back from Guam for awhile now. I think I have finally readjusted to Pacific Time. As you probably know Guam is an American territory in the far western Pacific Ocean. The slogan of the island is "where America's day begins." If you ever wonder if the world is going to end today, don't worry, it's already tomorrow in Guam!

The island of Guam is just a little larger than a postage stamp in the vastness of the western Pacific. It is one of the larger islands of Micronesia. But that is not saying much: it is about 6 miles wide and 23 miles long. It is also a study in cultural contrasts. Ferdinand Magellan landed in Guam as he circumnavigated the world. There he was met by the Chamorro tribe, the native people of Guam.

In Chamorro culture (as well as some other Micronesian cultures), there is virtually no comprehension of the meaning of “private property." By "private property" I don't mean real estate, rather the idea that anything belongs to an individual person. To this day in Chamorro culture, if someone admires and wants something which you own, all they have to do is to ask you for it and you are obligated culturally to give it to them. My missionary friends at Pacific Islands University have discovered, much to their chagrin, that this extends beyond those who are Chamorro. They have learned the hard way that when they lend something to one of the Islanders that they will most likely never see it again.

The modern Chamorros, are descended from the island's indigenous inhabitants and comprise the island’s largest ethnic group, about 55% of the population, while Filipinos comprise about 35%. Descendents of other Micronesian Island tribes comprise about 8% of the island's total population.  This leaves the remaining 2% divided between Anglos and other Asian populations, particularly Japanese.

Despite the Western veneer the culture of the island is still Chamorro at its roots.  We are all familiar with the Hawaiian “Aloha” as a greeting.  In Guam the greeting is Hafa Adai (pronounced HALF A DAY) meaning “Hello.”  Americans routinely observe (complain) that this is not just a greeting but also a work ethic! (roughly equivalent to the Spanish  “mañana”  which literally means “tomorrow” but connotes the sense of “not today.”

In our Western culture it is the individual who is at the center of reality.  Among the Chamorros (and other Micronesians) it is the tribe, clan and family that are the important units as opposed to the individual.  Disagreements between husbands and wives regularly escalate into feuds between the families of each spouse.  One longtime friend who is a faculty member at PIU told me of one recent instance where a husband and wife had a big argument. Aunts on both sides of the family started organizing a family brawl that would bring his family together with her family where the families would fight. Two things about this were particularly incredible to me: that the husband's brother was approached by the wife's aunt who asked him which side he was on. The brother refused to take sides. The aunt said “that means you run your brother side.” He protested “no I'm not on either person's." "No you are on your brother side." She insisted. What to my western mind makes the situation even more bizarre is that one of the aunts involved in organizing this brawl was a Christian woman, who is a graduate from a Christian college and has a master's degree in counseling from a major American Christian college.  To me this serves as a jarring illustration of how deeply we drink of our native cultures, and how our beliefs are shaped by our cultural conditioning. Behavior that from our perspective is utterly inconsistent with the claim to being Christian, is viewed as normative in this case in a foreign culture.

Dr. Don Smith, one of my former colleagues at Western Seminary, was a lifelong missionary. Much of his career was spent in Africa particularly in Kenya where he founded DayStar University. Don's expertise is in cross-cultural communication. He has observed that penetrating the culture is much like peeling an onion. You can have an effect on the first level of culture but underneath that layer everything else remains untouched. Ideally, over time the next layer of culture will be penetrated and transformed. Ideally this process will be continual over several generations and the culture will be penetrated by the gospel and transformed. But this is not a given. It is possible in the cross-cultural communication process to convey the gospel in the language and thought forms of people so that it becomes a part of that culture, but the parts of the gospel that challenge cultural norms are brushed aside.

Guam is a study in contrasts. Friends who lived there 20 to 30 years ago tell how primitive the island was at that time. During those days the chief American presence on the island was military and on the military bases the culture was first world American developed. But to step off the base was to step into the Third World with all its poverty and squalor. The situation is better than that today but there is still wide diversity running from developed world (first world) around Tumon Bay with its tourist hotels restaurants and the like, to the small villages on the southern and eastern and interior parts of the island that are virtually Third World.  In some places the first and the third worlds meet one another in jarring ways—nice modern houses beside houses with corrugated steel roofs (or in one place I saw a corrugated steel house whose roof was blown off in the last typhoon about seven years ago).

While not a popular tourist spot for Americans, Japanese tourism and tourism from the Philippines is a vital part of the island economy. The heart of the tourist industry is near Tumon Bay. Here we find a hotel row which is reminiscent of the hotels on Waikiki in Honolulu, replete with chain restaurants such as the Hard Rock Cafe which caters to the tourist trade. (Although on a much smaller scale) Tumon Bay itself is protected by a magnificent coral reef. The snorkeling there is wonderful, although if you go at low tide the coral formations stick up above the surface of the water. But the tourist attractions include golfing and scuba diving. It is an interesting thing to see 20 to 30 Japanese tourists in full scuba gear including wetsuits being led by a couple of instructors who will keep watch over them on their introductory dive. (Why would anyone need a wetsuit to dive in 85° water?)

More in the next post.



Random Thoughts and Observations from My Trip to Kiyv (Kiev)

(I have been meaning to get back and finish this blog since I put down these thoughts when I was going to and coming from Kiev in February.  Finally after about six weeks while I am now in Guam I can find some time to get back to it.)

February 11, 2010

Dateline Munich:

It is 6:15 p.m. oops I mean 18:15.   I am sitting in the Munich Airport waiting for my connection.  Unlike the last time I was here in November, I have not lost my phone! (I ultimately got it back about two weeks after I got home, but that is another story.)

Yesterday was spent getting ready, packing and  doing lots of last minute errands.  The kind of thing that makes me feel like I am going a dozen different directions.  A dangerous state of mind because, even if I make a list I often forget to put some small but important thing on it.

So it was last night.  I had gotten up in the morning and packed most of the things that hadn’t been gathered up during the week.  I made a run to the store to get a couple of last minute things and all was in order.  We left the house at about 6:30 to get to SFO with about two hours to spare.  Kay let me off at the curb and I checked in and headed for security.  (I wasn’t charged for the extra suitcase like I was expecting, but my carry-on was weighed and was too heavy!)  I had to remove my laptop and carry it separately—go figure.  The weight is the same but the carry on has to be below the 12 kilo limit.  But it was OK to carry on the laptop separately—same weight but 1 more carry on: my personal item.)

I got to security and cleared fine, but to my horror as I was putting things back together I discovered that I had forgotten a small plastic part that attaches to my CPAP (breathing machine for sleep apnea).  I gave Kay a panicked call-she was only about half way home.  I called home and Jonathan found the part right where I told him.  He and Steph hopped in the car and made it over to SFO just as my flight started boarding.  The TSA security officer went out to meet Steph, so I wouldn’t have to go out and clear security again.  I got the part and rushed down to the gate.  I was among the last ones that boarded.

The flight was long but uneventful.  I cleared security found my gate and had about 1.5 hours to wait for my flight.  First thing on the agenda—get a latte.  Didn’t need a meal because we had been fed about 1½  hours before touchdown. 

I board for Kiev in a few minutes.

Dateline Kiev: 

The plane touched down on the snow and ice covered runway at about 22:15.  The wind was blowing and there was light snow in the air.  The airport is old—we were met far out on the tarmac and bussed to the terminal.  It took about ½ hour to clear immigration, then off to get my luggage.  I was near the last of the group to clear immigration so my suitcases were easy to find—only about 10 were left on the carosel .

I had been told that customs was easy in Kiev.  Look confident and you can go right through.  I was tired and trying to figure out which way was out, so I guess I didn’t look confident.  As I was passing the customs agent I heard a “Sir!”  “SIR!” “Would  you come over here please.”  After xraying the luggage I was asked to open two bags.  “Do you have any gifts that you are bringing in?” (“No.”) “All this is for your personal use?” (“Yes.”)  “All  right, you may close your bags."

Out through the customs door and looking into the faces of dozens of people, knowing that one of them is supposed to recognize me.  No one approaches me.  I am accosted by several taxi drives wanting to give me a lift.  “No, someone is supposed to meet me.”   I start scanning the faces in the crowd,  Jason Gupta, a faculty member whose father is from India and mother is American is supposed to be there.  No one in the crowd who seems to match that ethnic mix.  I wait, beginning to get a little anxious.  Then I hear “Jim?” I turn to my right and see a big Indian-American guy who could pass for a Latino.  “Sorry I am  late, the roads are slippery and the parking is really bad.”

We made our way out to the car through the 4 inches of fresh snow on the ground  and drove about ½ hour to Kyiv Theological Seminary (Kyiv is the Ukrainian spelling—Kiev is the Russian spelling).  Jason & I hit it off right away—we were already talking theology on the ride to the seminary.

We took my luggage into the building, got the key to my room and dropped the stuff.  Then Jason took me on a quick tour of the facility.  By the time we finished it was about 1:30.  I have no idea about how many hours it has been since I got up on Thursday morning in the Bay Area.  All I knew was that it was early Saturday morning and I was exhausted, but couldn’t get to sleep!

Monday Feb 15:

After a weekend of trying to reset my body clock (it is 10 time zones from California, so I literally didn’t know if it was day or night) my class began on Monday afternoon Feb 8—4 hours for six days, off Sunday, and then on again from Monday through Thursday this week.

My translator André is a youngish looking 40 year old graduate of KTS who is finishing an MA from Talbot Graduate School of Theology (Talbot has an extension campus here at KTS so he doesn’t have to travel to California to do his work).  He grew up in a Christian home and when he turned 18 was drafted into the Soviet Army.  He did a two year stint in Turkmenistan (where Russia’s nuclear and space program are located).  Because he was known to be a Christian he was assigned to the worst post in the whole Soviet Union.  It was a very lawless area where the Soviets posted their criminals, and undesirables.  The idea was to break them psychologically.  But today André, like Joseph in Genesis says they meant it for evil but the Lord meant it for good. He learned to be a man and stand by his conviction in harsh circumstances.  He is the best translator that I have had the pleasure of working with.  As a seminary grad he is familiar with the material, but doesn’t try to take over and teach the class through his translation.

Monday Feb 22

We are 70% through the class time, but only about 50% through the material:  I am faced with a  dilemma—what can I cut?  Most people think of history as boring: names and dates, but if you tell stories about the individuals it captures the heats as well as the minds of the students.  The down side is it takes a lot longer to communicate.  I was chatting with two of my students this evening after class (most of the class has at least a conversational knowledge of English; a couple can even read some English.  I can tell who knows English by whether they get the jokes!  They are the ones who understand before André  figures out how to communicate the joke cross-culturally. That is gratifying and makes communication much easier than my experiences in Bulgaria.

The down side of the experience is that it is cold and snowy.  I grew up as a child in north western  Maine and the weather here is much worse than I remember it as a kid in Maine.  It has been overcast, foggy and with snow or sleet most of the time I have been here.

Yesterday I went to historic downtown Kiev to see some of the Cathedrals—Hagia Sophia (its namesake is the magnificent Hagia Sofia in Istanbul) is nearly 1000 years old .  It was completed c.1037 after 20 years of construction and although it is nowhere near as large as Hagia Sophia in Istanbul—After a thousand years it is still magnificent. (and it is now a museum)  I also had the opportunity to visit two other magnificent Orthodox cathedrals just a few blocks away from Hagia Sophia both of these are active churches. 

I have often said that if you want to travel in time all you need to do is to attend an Orthodox service.  The liturgy will most probably be that penned by John Chrysostom (Patriarch of Constantinople as well as being the greatest preacher of the ancient church) in about A.D. 400.  Add to this incense,  the haunting but powerful music, the magnificent artwork—often gilt tinged, and the icons of the saints (reminders of the historic heroes of the faith as well as being visual representations of the Orthodox concept that the living church as well as those who have died and passed into the presence of Christ participate together in worship) and you approach sensory overload.    

This is a far cry from our Protestant form of worship.  We want to focus on the spiritual as opposed to the material.  The Orthodox insist that the spiritual is known through the material (particularly that which is beautiful and pleasing to the senses) rather than apart from it—and they point to the reality of the physical incarnation when the eternal second person of the trinity joined himself eternally to humanity as proof of this contention.

All that is to say the experience is magnificent, although I reject the underlying sacramentalism inherent in the system as well as the formalism that it can and often does breed—a formalism that takes refuge in the rite of the sacraments rather than actively cultivating a personal relationship with the our Trinitarian God.

With reference to the Ukranian Protestants:  our brothers and sisters are a small and poor group.  They suffered greatly under 70 years of Soviet oppression.  They persevered, but the very qualities that they had to develop to survive hinder their growth now. (Like growing up in a dysfunctional family you learn skills that allow you to survive, but when you reach adulthood those survival skills can undercut your ability to function as a healthy mature adult.)  To our eyes the Ukrainian Protestant church is small narrow and very legalistic.  As Jason and I talked about this he explained to me that during the Soviet era the church had to be constantly on its guard against government infiltrators.  These infiltrators learned all the language, “Praise the Lord, Brother!”  but when they went out and around the corner they would likely light up a cigarette—this became a sign to them: “He is not one of us.”   The same is true of other lifestyle issues such as alcohol, involvement in politics etc.  The reasons for the rejection of certain behaviors have fallen away, but the prohibitions persist as does the condemnation of those who practice the types of lifestyle prohibitions that were characteristic of American Fundamentalism several generations ago.

The Ukrainian church has also lost its outward vision.  To them missions means planting a church in the next village down the road.  Talk of supporting missions is met with  resistance and anger: “We barely have enough resources to survive.  We need help from the outside. We don’t have anything to spare.”

Thankfully, this attitude is starting to change.  All of my students are “World Missions” majors.  They want to go to foreign lands, China, Kazakhstan, or work with OM (Operation Mobilization) and other places.

It has been gratifying to see their involvement and response to issues as we are looking at the history of missions throughout the past two millennia.

Datetline Frankfurt:

Saturday February 27

Breakfast in Frankfurt: well, if you can call it breakfast.   A turkey & Swiss sandwich on dark bread with tomato & lettuce. (Accompanied by a Coke Zero—I had already had a latte at the Kiev airport at 3:30 a.m. while I was waiting for my flight.   The airport in Kiev is bureaucratic!  I had two bags with me to check. At SFO I had planned to pay extra baggage but wasn’t charged J  I asked whether I should be charged for the extra bag with the new regulations  and the attendant who checked me in said that she was not going to charge me the fee.  So when I checked in at Kiev I did expect to be charged—but rather than accept payment where luggage is checked I had to go back out past customs, pay for the extra bag and then come back in to get my boarding pass!  Other than that—no problems.

This is a long day for me.  By the clock its 34 hours.  If you count the fact that I didn’t go to bed last night because I had to get up at 2:00 am. (I am a nightowl and whether at home or abroad I typically don’t go to sleep till after 1:00. The night before I had taken an Ambien because I was going out sightseeing on Friday and wanted to be rested—but to no avail. I still couldn’t get to sleep early.)

My class ended on Thursday afternoon.  During dinner the students and I chatted about their experience.  They were unanimous:  “When will you be coming back?”  “I never thought history was interesting before, but the way you teach it made it come alive!”  “This class has given me a whole new perspective on the church and the way I understand Christianity!”

Yesterday it was out to see more of Kiev (the city is supposed to be quite lovely under all that snow!).  My guide and I went to the Lavra—a many centuries old monastery that is still active near the center of the city.  What is striking is that this monastery is huge, I would estimate that it covers more than 50 acres.  Beside several impressive churches and chapelson the grounds,  beneath, the ground it is honeycombed with caves which house the graves several Ukrainian saints as well as a number of Ukraninan notable individuals.  There are chapels and shrines at every turn.  The saints are buried in glass coffins and the faithful genuflect and kiss the coffins—while the official theology of Orthodoxy is that upon which we as western Christians build, the popular piety is baptized in superstition.

Back to the airport in Frankfurt. . . We boarded the plane on time and got settled.  The captain said we would be leaving in just a few minutes. I dozed off for about 45 minutes and awakened to the captain’s voice again—in German of course. I turned to my seatmate who was German and asked why we were still on the ground.  “In the last check before we took off the maintenance people found a small gash in the fuselage.  They are now measuring to see if it is within tolerance for us to fly.”  We waited another 40 minutes.  The aircraft was not within specs to fly.  Deplane.  No planes available, but there was one arriving in a few minutes.  We waited for the new plane to come in, be cleaned, fueled and checked (memories of four years ago flashed in my mind—on the first trip back from Bulgaria there was a similar problem, but then the only plane that was available had 100 fewer seats on it and we were among the 100 who were peeled off and sent on another flight to Washington D.C, then to LA and finally a day later we arrived home).

This time the plane was another 747 so no one was left to be rerouted.  We got our same seats, settled in and left on the final leg of the journey.  The good part was that despite the long delay (we were supposed to leave at 9:55 a.m. but didn’t leave until 1:30 p.m.), we were only 2 ½ hours late getting into SFO due to stiff tail winds. The bad part is that the 747s are very old aircraft with seats at least two inches narrower and also closer together. This made for a very cramped and uncomfortable ride compared to the AirBus that I flew in from San Francisco.

At 2:40 the wheels touched down at SFO.  I pulled out my phone and called Kay—she was on the San Mateo Bridge.  We taxied to the gate.  I got my things and breezed through immigration, but then had to wait almost ½ hour for my luggage!  Oh well, I was tired but I was home. 

I am taking a couple of days to lay low and recoup.   I have a seminar on forgiveness to do this coming Saturday night at Neighborhood Church in Chico, then it is back to work on another class for Eduplex and then off to Guam in about 6 weeks.

Every place I go to teach the experience is different.  This time I was at a seminary with mostly American faculty many of whom graduated from Dallas & Talbot—that gave a common bond because we started out knowing many of the same people. I stayed on Campus.  The facilities were definitely nicer than anywhere else I have stayed and taught.  In fact the Seminary is in the process of building a spacious new facility that totals about 70,000 sq ft.  Only about 1/3 of it is completed so far. 

The students come from Ukraine, Russia and the former Soviet Republics.  There is a strong sense of Ukrainian identity among the locals.  Ukraine suffered terribly under Soviet leadership and over 12 million Ukranians perished in the artificial famines manufactured by Stalin to pacify Ukraine.  The languages of Ukranian and Russian are spoken side by side but the Ukraine has stopped teaching Russian in school.

Ukraine (not The Ukraiune as it was known in Soviet times) is a country in-between.  The Orange Revolution six years ago resulted in a western looking government that developed close ties with the US in recent years.  So close were these ties that it agreed to host the missile shield designed to counter any possible Iranian threat but to which Russia angrily reacted.  But the government has been beset with corruption to the point that the populace are now apathetic and while I was there elected as the new President the very man whose attempt to steal the election six years ago.  Despite the relationship with the US Ukraine has been largely abandoned by Europe and has been bullied by Russia which has on more than one occasion cut off the natural gas supply to the country to force it into submission to its political domination.  Yet another time Russia invaded Crimea, which is part of Ukraine and possess warm water seaports—something that Russia covets for the western part of its country. 

While the situation is spiritually challenging, the young are rising to the challenge to take the gospel to the entire world.  It is gratifying to be a part of their preparation for ministry

Avatar, Star Wars, Pantheism & Deism

"The great mother does not take sides, Jake. She only maintains the balance of life."

James Cameron's film, Avatar, marked his triumphant return to the big screen after an absence of a dozen years when he swept the Oscars with Titanic.  Box office receipts so far for Avatar are $730,344,000 as of March 14, 2010, making it the highest grossing film of all time. Cameron's Titanic comes in second with $600,779,824. (Realize of course that these totals are not adjusted for inflation.)

I’ve seen Avatar twice now and continue to be stunned by visual graphics that Cameron pioneered in the film. The visual and technical effects signal a great leap forward in the way that Star Wars  set a new standard in film technology.

I also see another parallel with Star Wars. When Star Wars was released in 1977 there was significant controversy that surrounded it.  At that time, I was in my final year of my Th.M. program. I and most of my friends loved the film but despite this love, we did sit around the tables in the coffee shop debating the concept of the Force. We of course recognize that George Lucas was heavily influenced by Buddhism and Eastern thought, but that did not detract from being caught up in the epic story that was unfolding on screen. Others saw  Star Wars and its sequels as more sinister.  Norm Geisler and Jeff Amano wrote a small book entitled, The Religion of the Force, warning about its dangers.  While the incipient pantheism was without doubt a theme in the first movie, it became more developed in the sequels.  Interestingly, the pantheistic elements in the series were modified to accommodate the western sensibility, e.g. Obi Wan, Yoda and Anakin appearing at the end of Return of the Jedi does not fit the pantheistic mold. In true full-blown pantheism all personal distinctions cease at death and the life-force is reabsorbed into the impersonal unity of all life like a drop of water dripping into a lake.  Once the merging of the drop has happened, there is no individuality left. The energy continues but you disappear forever. 

Likewise the force was impersonal and encompassed both light and darkness (good and evil) without distinction, (although there are hints that darkness is more powerful than light).  This same theme is picked up in Avatar when Jake prays to the great mother Ewah. He is told by Neytiri  "The great mother does not take sides, Jake. She only maintains the balance of life." Questions of good and evil are irrelevant in this  universal monistic worldview.

Christianly Today’s reviewer noted:

This notion of natural balance plays into the movie's spiritual side. The Na'vi revere the natural world; believing the whole planet is connected and alive with energy. It's akin to personifying the Earth as Mother Nature, but can also feel like pieces of Native American spirituality, New Age mysticism, and Wicca. Some Christians will be bothered by the worship of the Na'vi's unseen female deity—there are scenes of worship, rituals, and prayer to her. But vagueness about this entity makes it possible to view her not as a New Age goddess but as just one more strange piece of fantasy in this alien world. In fact, there's suggestion that this entity is Pandora itself: one big, living alien.

I wouldn’t quibble with this too much.  However, I think that this brings up another bigger question:  Why is it that we see this theme continuing to show up in many varieties in popular culture?  As I noted, the origin of this theme here in the West goes back decades, but we are seeing more and more nature spirituality, mysticism, Wicca (Mother Goddess worship-not a form of Satanism as some Christians assert).  As we have entered the post-modern era, is this a reaction against Christianity?

I am convinced that it is not a repudiation of historic Christianity per se.  Rather it is a repudiation of the Deism of the Enlightenment that has shorn creation of any sense of the spiritual, any sense of wonder, and replaced a respect for the creation with a utilitarian attitude which allows humans to exploit  the earth because we can.

Christianity as well as Judaism before it rejected pantheism and nature deities.  Contemporary conservative Protestantism has continued to hold onto the ancient doctrines of the faith on one level, but on a deeper level has capitulated to an Enlightenment worldview that is at best deistic, as opposed to historically Christian.

We watch the evening weather report and see maps detailing high and low pressure systems; storms developing far out in the Pacific or in the Gulf of Alaska; Doppler radar images that present us with the path of the weather systems as they make their way across the country; graphic representations of the predicted storm patterns extrapolated from past experience.  The weather is a natural process arising from naturally occurring patterns and governed by natural law.  The more data we have the more we are able to foretell what will happen.  We do not connect these patterns as having anything to do with God.  They operate simply by natural law.  If we only had enough data, we might even be able to control it.

This is how we as contemporary Christians unthinkingly view the natural order.  God is virtually uninvolved on a day-to-day basis.  He created the world to operate under natural law.  We even speak of miracles as a violation of natural law!

This deism, and materialism to which it has given birth has sucked the soul out of both creation and life for the modern human and left it empty seeking for a some kind of meaning and for connection with the divine.

This is not a Christian understanding of God’s relation to the created order.  Ian Barbour (Issues between Science and Religion) has noted that with within 75 years of Newton’s discovery of his laws of motion, the common orthodox Christian view of God’s relationship to the created order was virtually indistinguishable from that of the deists.  The only significant exception was that God occasionally broke into the system from the outside to do a miracle or two.

Historic and biblical Christianity asserts that God is both transcendent and immanent. He is not only “out there” (i.e.  beyond the material creation) but here (i.e. personally present within creation) as well.  If we look into the Old Testament, we see clearly the immanent and intimate personal presence and involvement of Yahweh with the natural order including bringing or withholding the rain, for blessing and even at times what we would call natural disaster. The New Testament too views the presence of God in the created order as immediate and intimate.  In fact, rather than having an independent existence, the apostle John, Paul and the author of Hebrews assert that not only is Jesus the creator, He is the sustainer of the universe as well,  the one that holds all things together with the word of his power.

We as 21st-century Westerners look at the material order as solid and having an independent existence. This is true, whether we are Christians of any sort or, if we are atheists. As Christians, we understand that God created the cosmos ex nihilo (that is out of nothing) and that while the universe looks to God as its first cause, it now continues on its own functioning according to the laws that God built into universe that creation. What is astonishing is that this is not historic Christian orthodoxy.

We only need to look back less than four centuries to see a very different understanding of the cosmos. Looking the Scriptures, we find the concept that God is intimately involved in the created order,  not only as the one who spoke everything into existence, but also as the one who continues to hold the universe together.

The shift in understanding of the nature of the created order arose from the implications of the work of Sir Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton was of course, the discoverer of gravity, and codifier of the laws of motion. Newton's view of the universe was that it was an incomprehensibly large cosmic clock that God had wound up at the creation and left to function on its own. Newton's understanding became a key plank in the origin and propagation of deism. During the Enlightenment (circa 1650—1800) deism became the popular religion of the intelligentsia in the English-speaking world as well as in France and Germany. The Deists believed that  a powerful and moral creator had ordered the cosmos according to both physical and moral laws. The cosmos that God had created was a closed system, because it was a closed system. It was self-contained and self-sustaining.  This creator God did not involve himself in the day to day operations, nor did he relate to human beings individually. 

The Deists denied miracles generally, and they specifically  denied the incarnation. Newton himself was a very devout religious individual who adopted a theological position of Arius fourth-century opponent of the great Athanasius. Arius had insisted that God was singular and indivisible, and hence could not be Trinity. The Word of God, spoken of by the apostle John was not himself God, but rather was the first creation of God, who in turn created everything else. The problem is that the pre-incarnate Christ is a creature who has” nothing proper to do with God.”  The Word was in short a demigod, powerful yet himself created by the One eternal God.  Athanasius understood that if Arius’ claim were to take hold that the possibility of salvation would destroyed.

Deism sank its roots deep into the psyche of Western culture. During the 17th century Deism was opposed by a group of scholars and theologians in England who sought to defend historic Christianity from the onslaughts of deism. One great irony of this defense, according to Ian G. Barbour (issues in Science and Religion, 37-55, esp. 37-40) was that within 75 years. The defenders of historic Christianity's view of God's relationship to the world was virtually indistinguishable from that of the Deists.

As Baxter Kruger has observed, the modern Christian mind has on the one hand conceptualized the creation as a kind of Energizer Bunny, i.e. creation maintains an objective existence separate from God.  Theoretically speaking, even were God to die the Energizer Bunny of creation would just keep going and going and going, until finally after millions or billions of years its battery was depleted.

We today as Bible believing Christians, who are the intellectual heirs of those discussions, are in many ways practical Deists. Our view of the nature of the cosmos is, by default, virtually indistinguishable from those who are Deists or even atheists. However, this is not a biblical position. We find in the Old Testament that God is intimately involved in the ongoing happenings in the created order. Whether these ongoing happenings have to do with weather earthquakes or pestilence or rain and sunshine Yahweh, the covenant keeping God of Israel in his role as Elohim the ruler of creation is intimately involved in all.

 The New Testament opens up an even more profound vista to us. We find that it is not just “ God,” who is involved in creation. It is specifically Jesus Christ, the beloved Son of the Father, who is both the creator and sustainer of all material and spiritual reality. The New Testament witnesses this reality, repeatedly.

We as laypeople still see inhabit the Newtonian clockwork universe on a day today basis. However, those working in the hard sciences proclaim that the Newtonian universe is dead. The reality that we now inhabit is one constructed by Albert Einstein on the one hand and the work of Quantum physics on the other.  The nature of reality is not one of the independent self-existence of each piece.  Rather the cosmos is dynamic and interconnected at a quantum level.

Friends of mine who are physicists tell me that whether looking at creation on the macro level of the Big Bang, or on the micro-level of quantum physics—the deeper the understanding the more questions of God arise in the researchers minds.

What/who is the logic behind the origin and the continuation of the Universe—it is a man, Jesus the Messiah.  It is through his creativity, love and goodness that there is something rather than nothing.  It is because of his love, goodness and faithfulness that we continue to exist day to day.

The scientific method while tremendously useful has hard limits.  It is material and only material in its orientation.  It cannot account for love, purpose, or beauty.

Alister McGrath decries the loss of the understanding of immanence in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment and argues that we must embrace the early Christian understanding of the “enchantment of nature” (The Reenchantment of Nature, Doubleday, 2002) as a place of God’s special presence and care.  This is theologically grounded in the scripture, grounded in the creation narratives as well as being a theme woven throughout the warp and woof of scripture.  It is the proper basis for ecology:  “The Earth is the Lord’s.” 

Pantheism asserts that nature/creation is God.  Deism contends that while God created the universe, it now exists on its own absent a divine presence.  Each view is not only inadequate if not heretical from a Christian perspective because each distorts the being of the triune personal God.  Neither view conceives of God as he has revealed himself to be: the personal, relational and loving trinity; a triune relationship whose humility and love and desire for relationship with his creatures caused him to change his eternal manifestation and draw humanity into his own personal life in the incarnation and to extend that life through his loving grace to a wayward and lost humanity who viewed Him as the enemy.



Chariots of Fire; Shantung Compound; Abuse and Healing

It was in January 1982. At this time I was in seminary doing doctoral work in Dallas, we had two young boys and Kay was pregnant with our third son.  I started hearing about a new movie that I had to go see. This struck me as strange in a couple of ways. First I was getting this recommendation from other Christians and from church as well as from classmates. Why was the strange? 28 years ago in Dallas the Christian community was still very very conservative and generally looked at film from a very skeptical perspective. At that time Evangelicalism was still just emerging from the culture denying attitudes of fundamentalism. Why were Christians who were generally averse to films recommending this movie? The movie itself had a strange name, Chariots of Fire. As I heard the title what came to mind were visions out of Ezekiel's prophecies. But the movie was supposed to have some kind of a Christian theme about it. As I dug deeper I learned that one of the main characters was named Eric Liddell, a young Christian Scotsman who had competed in the 1924 Olympics in Paris and had in fact won a gold medal.

Needless to say Kay and I went to see the movie. It was truly inspiring. I have seen it several times since the initial screening and never cease to be amazed by the depth of character and the courage displayed by Eric Liddell. For those of you who don't remember (or are maybe too young to remember), the movie opens at the funeral of one of the major characters, Harold Abrahams and then the story is told in flashback. At the end of the film we see the credits of what it was that Harold Abrahams accomplished during his life. His accomplishments were impressive particularly in light of the fact that he was Jewish in a very Anglican University. After listing Abrahams impressive accomplishments the next screen informed us that Eric Liddell and become a missionary to China where he died in a Japanese internment camp in 1945. His epitaph was "all Scotland mourned."

Several years later in my first year of teaching at Simpson College in San Francisco, I was using Millard Erickson's Christian Theology as my major textbook. In the chapter on the nature of sin Ericsson quoted at length from the book Shantung Compound written by Langdon Gilkey. I was so impressed by the quotes that Erickson lifted from Gilkey's work that I bought the book and read it. The book is the true story of Gilkey's experience in a Japanese internment camp in China during World War II.  Gilkey was at that time a young liberal optimistic professor of English who had recently graduated from Harvard University with a degree in philosophy. Gilkey tells us that he viewed the internment at the Shantung (Weihsien) Compound as a grand experiment.

 During the war he and the other expatriates in China were rounded up and placed into an internment camp. Although told that the camp would provide every comfort of Western culture he soon discovered that the only thing Western about it was that it was located on a former Presbyterian mission compound. In this small compound, about the size of one city block were housed several thousand Westerners. These were by and large the best of society, Americans, Brits, Australians, businessmen, diplomats, educators, professionals (bankers, lawyers, doctors) as well as monks and missionaries (and hookers).

As I said he viewed this as a grand experiment because the people were by and large good people. They were educated. They were religious. They were moral. They represented the best of society. As an optimistic young liberal Gilkey saw this as an opportunity to create the ideal society. The book is about Gilkey's education in human nature. What is so fascinating is that by the end of the book we see that his optimism is gone. Simply his own experience brought him to something close to an orthodox understanding of original sin. This was not because of cruelty from the Japanese captors. Unlike the Japanese prison camps where soldiers were starved, tortured and worked to death, in the internment camp four Japanese merely guarded the walls and left the internal administration of the camp to its inhabitants.

What he observed was the interaction of the “good” people in the camp.  Particularly sobering for me is that Christian missionaries do not come off well. As a group they were aloof and self-righteous. They came up with pious sounding rationale for their self-serving behavior. They would not associate with the “sinners,” lest they be polluted. The two significant exceptions were the Salvation Army missionaries and the Jesuits.  The Salvation Army people were dedicated to service, including doing all the dirty jobs, such as cleaning latrines, that no one else would touch. The Jesuits receive special mention because of their ability to mix freely with the “sinners” and not be affected by the sin.

About two thirds of the way through the book Gilkey describes the work of a younger missionary from Scotland who took it upon himself to organize and minister to the young people of the camp. The teenagers had nothing to do and as teenagers will, were getting into trouble. He had a tremendous effect on the morale of the high schoolers. But to everyone's dismay he was struck down and died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. That man was Eric Liddell.

All this has been brought back to my attention this past week. I have taken the forgiveness class (Freedom to Love Again [freedomtolove.info]) that I wrote last summer for EduPlex Ministries and have repackaged it as a seminar. For the past three Sunday evenings I have given this seminar at a small Baptist church in the Bay Area.

This past week as I was wrapping up the three-week series an elderly gentleman (whom I will call Frank)  who had been there every week (and with whom I have had an acquaintance for about 10 years), was taking issue with the whole idea that we can find a measure of spiritual emotional healing by forgiving those who have injured us. He insisted that there is no real healing this side of heaven. Frank is a man who has been a pastor for much of his adult life and is now retired. He insisted that the only way that we can see any meaning to suffering is to view it as a result of the sovereignty of God. He also is quite resistant to the current emphasis among contemporary theologians on God's love, mercy and forgiveness.

Last Sunday night all pieces fell together. I discovered that as a child, Frank was an MK (missionary kid) who grew up in China. His parents sent him away to mission boarding school when he was four or five years old. He shared with me that at that school he was beaten with canes every day and, in his own words, "that wasn't the half of it." He went on to tell me that he had been one of the internees in the Shantung (Weihsien) compound. He insisted that the fact that he was removed from the missionary school to the compound was his salvation from the hell of torture that he underwent daily at the school. He said that all his life he has borne the emotional scars of the abuse he suffered at the hands of the Christian school authorities. He survived by stuffing his emotions and memories deep into his subconscious. But in recent months the events have come back to haunt him again and again and again.

Tragically the only avenue he had for survival was holding onto the fact that God is sovereign and righteous and he repays those who do evil. He grew up in an era when it was not permissible to open his heart to anyone. Because of this he remains spiritually and emotionally in great pain to this day.

In the mid-1980s when I was first teaching at Simpson College there was a great controversy in the Christian and Missionary Alliance (of which Simpson College [now University] is a part) about requiring that children of C&MA missionaries be separated from their parents and sent to boarding schools. Paul Young (author of The Shack) was one of those C&MA MKs (missionary kids) who was sent away to boarding school and there, suffered years of abuse. Recently the C&MA has concluded an investigation of conditions in the schools to which the MKs had been sent and they offered a formal apology for the abuse that they had been forced to endure.  Lest you think I am singling out one group here, this same dynamic has been repeated in other mission schools where children of missionaries from various different agencies were sent because conditions (not necessarily mission board policy) did not allow the parents to oversee the education of their own children.  One of my high school friends, the son of Overseas Crusade missionaries in South America, was sent to a mission school. There he too suffered abuse.  He never recovered from the pain; he became a drug addict and died in his early 40s.  

Abuse unaddressed, whether it be emotional, spiritual, physical or sexual, leaves lifelong wounds (I will not call it scars, because scars imply healing of some sort).  Despite Frank’s protestations that there is no healing this side of heaven, and that all such talk is just psychobabble, my experience of seeing and working with  abuse victims up close and personal over the past fifteen years tells a different story.  I know that substantial healing can take place.  I have watched victims of sexual abuse move from a place of being totally consumed by the pain, to a place where they are again functional human beings who are no longer bleeding emotionally, but have come through a healing process and have seen God work in marvelous ways in restoring them to spiritual and emotional health.

Unfortunately, the healing has usually come apart from a church context.  Both Philip Yancey as well as Henry Cloud and John Townsend have made the sobering but profound observation concerning alcoholics:  in AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) people look worse but get better, whereas in the church people tend to look better, but get worse.

Is the church missing something important here?  I for one think so.