Questions Worth Asking
Questions we’ve been working with for the past couple years at our church:
What does it mean to move from being “a place where” church to being “a people sent” church?
What difference does it make if God’s mission informs our understanding of spiritual formation and worship? Can it be understood as more than “outreach” or “social justice”?
How can we listen better? to God? to one another? to the Spirit’s movements in the world?
How can we see ourselves as working alongside people in the world rather than just making a project of people in the world?
What happens when our primary understanding of salvation and gospel comes from the dynamic concept of “kingdom of God” rather than from some particular view of atonement?
Since theology is worked out in time and space . . . what is God’s timing in our own church and our own community? How does scripture and our own experience witness to that?
These are not the questions I was taught to ask. But they strike me as the ones worth asking.
These are questions that need asked. Thanks for being a church willing to look for the steps that need to be taken. I’ll be praying you guys can continue to walk that path.
You’re definitely asking the right questions – praise God for that. As a movement – our questioning/processing filter broke down somewhere along the way.
Hmmm. What do you think of the Decaration of Independence and the Constitution of the country you live in? The meaning behind the question is just because you were not here when it was done, does it become irrelevant? The same thought applies. The miracles that Jesus and the Apostles did was for a reason and we can read about it. How in the hundreds of years that are between Genesis and Matthew could such a perfect Book be written? The Koran starts out peaceful enough, but is changed by the same person at the end and nothing at the beginning is true, how can anyone believe when the writer himself never lived how he preached?
Mike,
Could you clarify the question about “kingdom of God” and a particular view of atonement?
All the questions are already answered in the scriptures. We must go into all the world and proclaim the gospel. As we have opportunity , do good to all men and especially to the church. Love people . Demonstrate compassion. Pray for open doors . The church of Christ has been concerned and active ever since Pentecost. Sure, mistakes have been made because we are humans trying to do spiritual good and stumble from time to time. Since we are citizens in His Kingdom we have been given the mandates from the King. Now we need to be obedient.
Eddy – Unfortunately, so often the church has in recent years reduced the vibrant gospel message to one view of atonement — the view that is sometimes called penal substitutionary atonement.
This reduces our understanding of sin, the world, and (especially) salvation.
When we talk about the kingdom of God — well, that’s very different. It’s the largest possible category for talking about the good news of salvation. God is here to rescue the world from its emptiness, brokenness, and lostness. He’s restoring what has fallen.
I’d love to write much more about this later!
Are we saying that the penal substitutionary atonement is not what we should preach/teach ? Is that not what is at the heart of the gospel ? What else , except his death and resurrection and the response of obedeint faith , is it that we need to tell the world to save them from an eternity of hell ? Or has the message of being saved or lost becoem lost in our evangelism ? Sure there is much to the Christian life and life in the kingdom . But what is it a lost person , not in a saving relationship to Jesus to know ? Is it not the gospel ? What did they preach in Acts ?
Thank you.
Reading through the two lists of questions, it’s hard to ignore the fact that the answers are implied by the listmakers, simply by the nature of the questions. The truth is that their questions are less offensive than their answers. Otherwise, they would have listed their answers.
Ray – The issues here are these:
1. What do we mean by the gospel? How does that relate to the kingdom? In what sense is the gospel the announcement of the coming, present, and future reign of God? And how is the death and resurrection of Jesus the very center of that announcement?
2. How do we understand the death of Jesus? The theory now known as penal substitutionary atonement is relatively recent. It’s not the primary way the church has through the ages understood the meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus.
I’ve written several times before on these themes and plan to do so again.
“How can we see ourselves as working alongside people in the world rather than just making a project of people in the world?”
Let me know when you figure this one out… Great question…
Thing is, Baron, I’m not sure Mike intended for people to attempt to answer the questions he posed. These are questions that, in community, could take a lifetime to crack open. As with most questions, though, it’s the process of making these questions a community’s life’s work that is important and not the “getting it right.”
(For the record, I think it tells volumes about an individual’s and community’s theology if they are even willing to entertain some of these questions … you know, really chew on them.)
Thanks for the questions Mike. They help others of us who are serving in congregations that are trying to discern the future and God’s mission.
—-
I can understand from reading some of these comments why Jesus said some would see and hear but never see and hear. Do I agree completely with the dogmatic church authority throughout history or sola scriptura? No but thanks to God that we have a canon of scripture. Are the answers to all of Mike’s questions found in scripture? Yes but not without discernment. Of course scripture teaches us to be ‘witnesses… …to the ends of the earth.’ but what does that mean? How do we do that in our current culture and not the Greco-Roman culture of the first century or the North American Christendom culture of the past two centuries? People who have eyes to see and ears to hear realize we cannot answer these questions without scripture but neither can we answer them without discernment within the Spirit-filled community of Christ.
-K. Rex Butts
Here’s one to ponder:
If God knew beforehand that trillions would roast in eternal Hellfire (or at least suffer forever the agony of separation from God), why in the world did he go through with creation as it now stands?
i walk in the dark much of the time in terms of my own understanding; but it is clear to me that everything is about “the other.” Whether God or my brothers/sisters in the world–it all “out there” away from the “Me”. . .”the other” defines all reality in the Kingdom.
Mike,
I am puzzled by the questions being raised about penal substitution. I have read many who presume that this atonement doctrine is not all that recent, including NT Wright:
“And I was put in mind of a characteristically gentle remark of Henry Chadwick, in his introductory lectures on doctrine which I attended my first year in Oxford. After carefully discussing all the various theories of atonement, Dr Chadwick allowed that there were of course some problems with the idea of penal substitution. But he said, ‘until something like this has been said, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the full story has not yet been told.’ For myself, I prefer to go with Henry Chadwick, and James Denney – and Wesley and Watts, and Cranmer and Hooker, and Athanasius and Augustine and Aquinas – and Paul, Peter, Mark, Luke, John – and, I believe Jesus himself. To throw away the reality because you don’t like the caricature is like cutting out the patient’s heart to stop a nosebleed. Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and all because of the unstoppable love of the one creator God. There is ‘no condemnation’ for those who are in Christ, because on the cross God condemned sin in the flesh of the Son who, as the expression of his own self-giving love, had been sent for that very purpose. ‘He did not spare his very own Son, but gave him up for us all.’ That’s what Good Friday was, and is, all about.”
I admit at times it feels a bit awkward. But I cannot escape the intentional language of both the Old and New Testaments that leads one down the path of penal substitution.
That being said, I’m not sure it excludes a healthy view of kingdom living and mission. Salvation (quickly becoming a taboo word) in the general sense is the core of the mission. I could be wrong but I get the feeling that the emergent movement/liberal theology wants to focus on social justice. While I can find a case for this movement in the gospel story, it is only relevant as a battlefield for a war for salvation. And even then, it is rooted in the physical and material. If social justice doesn’t have spiritual salvation as it’s end goal, I have a hard time seeing it’s relevance to the kingdom.
But good questions. I’ll be thinking on these some more.
Though it was not central to his post, Jacob asked the question “You think they should read McClaren or Bell instead?
Well, I think it is clear that many of the folks that post here may well think they we should read McLaren and Bell instead.
Before anyone accuses me of just be an old guy with traditional views you should know you would be contradicting a lifetime of having been accused by the CofC or being a liberal.
I do wish some would read books like Why We’re Not Emergent (By Two Guys That should be). That book along with D.A. Carson’s book (and others) on the emerging church have been sugggested in the past in a post by another person. There is some room for criticism of the emergents and too few accept their perspective uncritically.
No offense intended toward anyone.
Kyle – Yes, I want to write more about this. Without question, one of the images to describe the death of Jesus is substitution: “he died for our sins.” But that’s quite different from the legal theory that has become so prominent in the past hundred years.
I think it’s one of several metaphors that help us understand the atonement. But it has devolved into a metaphor that misleads. That means, of course, that we should recapture the metaphor in the way it is intended.
Suggested readings: N. T. Wright’s “The Shape of Justification” and Scot McKnight’sA Community Called Atonement (Living Theology)
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RE. Baron& Ray B.
Baron- Where did Jesus give instructions…etc?
“If YOU continue in My words…………..
Where in the Bible is God’s Word restricted to what is written down?
“Do not add to My words do not subtract from My words and do not make My words mean less than what I meant by saying them” Summed up by “Do not go beyond what is written” for NO student has better understanding than his teacher.
Ray B.
What did they teach in Acts? I guarantee you it isn’t substitutionary atonement. For God guarantees that no man’s life can be taken by bloodshed without resulting in NOT being required to give God an accounting. See Gen. 9:5 NIV. What you both need to figure out is what sin was repented of to obey the Acts 2:38 command.
Kyle, I do not share your distinction between salvation and social justice, which you appear to found on a dichotomy of the physical and the spiritual.
Many of us who don’t think as you do are approaching the issue with sympathy for an ancient Near Eastern worldview or an otherwise anti-modern view. I think that it would really help you to understand us if you would try to understand our differences over “salvation” in terms of differences between our worldviews.
Kyle, the Oxford scholar,
The gate into the church of God of which Jesus Christ is the head is only found by a few and it is small and narrow. Never will any credit be given by God to the human achivement of scholarship relative to this gate. Just because a church exist does not necessarialy mean that it is a church that Jesus is head of. For men will and do build upon sand or in other words hot air.
The truth can only be found by continuing in Jesus words. But are the words of Dr. Whose his face and Dr. What’s his Butt are those
Jesus’ words? Isn’t it clear that Jesus said that his enemy was to come in and sow bad seed, i.e. a false explaination of why he was crucified? How do you think this bad seed is sown friend and what authenticates it? Study so that your conclusion only shows that God approves of it. For if God does not approve his rebutal already preexist and I’ll find it if needed.
Jeff W,
I don’t quite follow you. Can you elaborate? (specifically what should I understand about your worldview)
What happens when we ask what it means to be like Jesus instead of asking how we can recreate the church of another era?
So much has already been said. I have nothing profound to add. I find that the questions I had in my early 20′s are some of the same questions I ponder today.
As a young woman, I poured over my Bible daily, trying to understand that which was confusing to me.
What is God asking of me?
Where does baptism fit?
How will I recognize the Holy Spirit within me?
I have learned from some of the comments to this post and been confused by others.
I guess some things don’t change.
Mike, I don’t have time to read comments, but wanted to say I loved this post. Really, I think these questions sum up what your whole blog has been about. Thank you for using this place to help so many of us start asking these questions as well.