A Parable of the Kingdom?

I found this over at the Emergent Village blog. I hope they don't mind me sharing this:

What is the Kingdom of God like, you ask?

A woman lived in rural central California. She was known for her kindness, generosity and love, but she was also fair and just. Her five children were normal kids, but the four youngest were known around town for their rebellious streaks. As a single mom, she did the best she could to establish both love and rules in the house, but four of her kids desired freedom over relationship. So one evening, the four youngest filled their backpacks and ran away.


The mom woke up and, finding four of her children’s beds empty, began to weep. She would not rest until her children returned home or she found them. Being a farm owner, she had plenty of hired hands to help in her search. She put the farm’s business on hold and sent her workers out to search for her lost darlings. She spent every last dime printing pamphlets, recording radio spots and inundating the TV with ads exclaiming her love for her children and her pleas for them to return home into her loving arms. All that she had, was and would be theirs.


Then one day, it happened. One of her runaways returned home. Seeing and hearing her message, his heart melted and he came back. She embraced him, welcoming him home. She turned to her eldest son (the one that never ran away) and asked if he would help find and bring back the others. He set out with a mission and a message. When he found two of the three, he told them of their mom’s love for them and how badly she missed them and her relentless desire for all of them to come home. He also reminded them of the Great Rule, but they refused to come back with him. He never did find the forth lost one.


Years passed and no sign of her kids. Regardless, a great rule had been violated. So she climbed into her pickup truck with a few hired hands and set out to bring her children home. On May 17, she found them.


All three were huddled up near a dumpster, clutching a worn blanket. They saw her truck approach and, too tired to run, they just sat with terror I their eyes. See, while away, they had been told countless lies by countless people that their mom was not a kind woman, that she did not love them and that she was mad-as-hell at them. Added to this were their incredible loneliness, shame and feelings of worthlessness. Living on the street—isolated from love—can do this to anyone, and it certainly did them. Seeing her children and hearing about their condition, the mother reassured them of her love. But despite her undying, never-ending motherly love for her children, she knew that the Great Rule had been violated and she must act accordingly.


They pulled up into the driveway and the truck came to a dusty halt. The hired hands helped the kids climb out of the back of the truck. As the mom walked to the house she looked back one last time at her kids. Motioning to the hired hands, she firmly declared, “Take them away. They violated the Great Rule and did not return to me on their own.”


“But mom….!?”


“Not another word,” she interrupted. “Whether you knew it or not, The Great Rule says that my children shall not run away and that if they do, they are to return on their own within three years. If they do not, I will find them and the Great Punishment must be inflicted. I even sent my oldest son for you, but you did not believe him.”


“Mom, we are sorry. We were scared, hurting and full of shame. We did things we are not proud of and that you would not approve of. Deep inside, when the nights were the quietest, we knew you loved us but we were afraid that you would have nothing to do with us after all we had done.”


With tears in her eyes she slowly replied, “I understand, I see you are truly sorry and I love you. But there is nothing I can do; I am powerless against the Great Rule. Three years have passed, you did not return and the Rule is the Rule.” With that, she turned and walked towards the house where her returning-son stood on the porch, watching.


The hired hands, still clutching the children by the arms, took them away to the barn…even the fourth child who never heard the eldest son’s message. As directed by the Great Punishment, they entered the barn, tied the children to the posts and began beating them. Next came the kerosene. Then, in the midst of their screams and under the watchful eye of their loving mom, they and the barn were set ablaze.


The loving, kind, full-of-mercy, just and righteous mom, turning from the window overlooking the burning barn, looked at her oldest son and the child who returned to her, wiped the tear from her eye and smiled. She motioned once more to her hired hands and—with the other children still burning and screaming outside—the feast of feasts, the party of parties, began. The mom, her eldest son, her returning-on-his-own child, and even her hired hands lived, feasted, and partied…happily…ever…after.


The End.


Now go, and share this GOOD NEWS of the Kingdom. Praise be to God.


For those that missed the irony, this retelling of the modern evangelical Christian meta-narrative shows how unbelievably screwed up our theology is when we're very comfortable with the everyone burning in Hell,  and offended by everyone going to Heaven. Check out all the noise people have made over Rob Bell's latest book, Love Wins, if you want to know what I'm talking about.

This little parable doesn't prove universalism is true or that Hell doesn't exist, of course, but it does raise a question about what we really believe. Do we really believe that God's love conquers all, or do we believe that Jesus somehow exploits a loophole in the system set up by an angry, wrathful deity? And if the latter is the case, do we really believe that God is triune and completely of one essence in three persons?

On a personal note, as a father, myself, this story makes me sick. If this truly were the essence of the Christian faith, then I'd walk away and never set foot in a church again. Sadly, we've done a very good job convincing the world that this really is Christianity, and they've acted accordingly. I, for one, don't blame them.

Let's make sure we're not only telling a better story, but a true story about who God really is.

Moltmann Meditations (part 1 of ?): Theology and Biography

Now that I've had more than a week to digest the plethora of amazing discussions, conversations, and ideas I encountered at the Emergent Theological Conversation with Jurgen Moltmann (one of my heroes and something of a grandfather in faith, but more on that later), I feel like I'm ready to reflect on what I experienced.

Theology as Biography, or Biography as Theology?

At the beginning of the conference, Danielle Shroyer led us through a "Moltmann 101" seminar that talked about Moltmann's major works in chronological order and put them in context of his biography. I had some idea of the order in which these works were written, but I had never given much thought to them, because like most students of theology since Aquinas, I've been taught to read theology as an objective, closed system free of contextual bias.

(I wholeheartedly reject this idea, by the way, but many systematic theologians write with this assumption, and I like to try to give people a charitable reading on their own terms)

Moltmann, however, makes no such assumptions about himself. His can be deceptive in this way sometimes (or, at the very least, the English translations of his writing) because he has a very structured writing style, and he deeply engages his theological predecessors and contemporaries with very little first person commentary. So it is easy to read him in the way someone would read Karl Barth.

Moltmann is very open about how his theology is deeply rooted in his experiences as a young man serving in the German army during World War II, particularly the deep anguish he felt when he learned about the Holocaust as a prisoner in a British POW camp. His work as a theologian is rooted in the reality of the suffering he saw and experienced early in life, and these questions are still crucial to him in his eighties.

In an effort to understand Moltmann's theology better, I am now reading his autobiography, A Broad Place. I am hoping that understanding his life story better will open up new insights when I reread some of his theological works that I read before.

Moltmann's insight that theology is deeply contextual is in need of greater recognition in the American church today. We are killing each other over a host of issues that are preventing us from working together on the larger problems of the world: problems on which we largely agree like AIDS, poverty, access to clean water, and ending child sex slavery.

But we refuse to work together on these issues because we fight one another over who has the "correct" interpretation of the Bible, as if there is one correct interpretation that rises above any contextual bias. We assume that God can't possibly be speaking to those who disagree with us, because they understand the Bible incorrectly.

Moltmann reminds us that we all come from somewhere, and what we bring to the table greatly affects the way we read the Bible and do theology. So maybe we should put aside the issues where we disagree for a moment and tell each other our stories. If we began to understand where we each come from, we might be less likely to demonize the other and understand why we come to the conclusions we do.

Vicarious Live-Blogging Moltmann

As I said before, I'm not live blogging the Moltmann Conversation (this post doesn't count). I need time to process my thoughts, so I'm taking notes and I'll post reflections when I have time to digest them.

There are, however, a number of folks who are live blogging the event and providing some interesting and insightful commentary.

I'm posting them for the benefit both of those who are here and those who wish they were and want to know what is happening:

Pastor Bob Cornwall

Danielle Shroyer

Katie Z. Dawson (Salvaged Faith)

Brian Paulson (pastor of Libertyville First Presbyterian, where the Moltmann Conversation is taking place)

PomoRev (Frank Emmanuel)

Joe Bumbulis (CollideOScope)

Julie Clawson (One Hand Clapping)

Jeff Gang (The Suburban Pastor)

Nathan Mattox (Leave from the Notebook of a Tamed Optimist)

Anyul Rivas (written in Spanish)

I'll link more folks as I find them

Moltmann Conversation

Next week I'll be attending the Emergent Theological Conversation with Jurgen Moltmann in Chicago. I'm really excited about this because I read a lot of Moltmann in seminary, and one of my professors was a student of Moltmann's at Tubugen. I'm also getting to see some family and friends while I'm there, which will be really nice.

(sidenote- I can't figure out how to get my keyboard to do umlauts, so my apologies to the German scholars out there)

Going to Emergent events is always an experience, because there always seems to be an unspoken competition as to who is the coolest, edgiest, theologically progressive hipster. I'll no doubt be contributing with my Macbook, my corduroy jacket, and my pipe. I don't have square glasses, screen printed t-shirts, artfully messy hair, or creative facial hair (just a plain 'ol beard), however, so I won't be winning any style contests.

One thing I won't be doing is live blogging the event. For one, there will be people there with sharper theological minds than my own who have much more interesting and well read blogs than I do, and when I find out who is doing that, I'll post links to their sites.

But the bigger reason is that theology, particularly the kind of deep theology that Moltmann does that draws from so many different sources in the Christian tradition, is not the kind of conversation that can be related through the kind of first impressions that constitute live blogging.

I will probably tweet a quote here and there, but for the most part I'm going to take notes, let it all sink in, and then I'll post my thoughts a few days after I get back.

The "death" of the emerging church conversation

It seems that the latest fad in the blogosphere has been to debate the state of the emerging church conversation. Specifically, regarding the seeming lack of direction at Emergent Village, some have been quick to declare the entire emerging church conversation "over".

Examples of such claims can be found here and here, while alternate viewpoints can be found here and here.

Given that people much smarter and more eloquent than me have already weighed in on this issue, here are my thoughts.

It's a bit of a misnomer to declare Emergent Village or the larger emerging church conversation "dead" because from the beginning, this whole conversation has not played by the standard rules of what we usually think of as "movements".

For example, most movements in the modern era have tended to coalesce around a particular individual or group of individuals who come to symbolize the values and goals of the movement. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the symbol of the Civil Rights movement. Jerry Falwell was the symbol of the Religious Right/"Moral Majority" movement. Reaching farther back, Martin Luther was the symbol of the Protestant movement. 

While some folks have tried to cast Brian McLaren and/or Tony Jones as the leader and symbol of the "emergent movement", both gentlemen have actively (and wisely, in my opinion) resisted such labels because the emergent conversation would be ill served by playing by such rules.

Instead of being a "movement" as such, the emerging church conversation has been an attempt to shine the spotlight on some thinking and practices that are emerging (hence the term) in different places and share some common characteristics. 

These characteristics include the tendency to question long held assumptions, deep suspicion of authority while not rejecting it outright, a fascination with ancient thinking and practices long forgotten by the modern evangelical movement (which generally does play by the rules of a "movement"), and an emphasis on conversation and learning from one another as opposed to promoting a set list of ideas. 

A couple years back there was some conversation about an emergent "statement of faith/orthodoxy", that thinkers like Brian and Tony resisted, because that would be playing by a set of rules that the whole conversation had consciously rejected since the beginning.

If anything, the emerging church conversation is deeply eschatological, in the sense that it anticipates something that has begun, but has not yet fully arrived. It acknowledges the stirrings of something new and significant, and resists bracketing it with definitions and statements of faith because the most significant work is yet to come.

So is the emerging church conversation "dead"? No, not by any stretch of the imagination. 

It's going through an ebb and flow, yes, maybe something akin to Martin Luther hiding out at Augsburg and people wondering if he was alive, but it's not over. The best is yet to come, which has been the idea the whole time anyway.

Stay tuned...