A review of Horizons’ “Keep it Weird: Thinking About Salvation in the Land of Bikes, Books and Brew”

.  Cynthia O’Brien[1], who is a singer and pastor,  in her Horizons article, “Keep It Weird: Thinking About Salvation in the Land of Bikes, Books and Brew,” writes using the unofficial motto for Portland Oregon, “keep it weird.” She attempts to point out a way to minister to people when their thoughts and lifestyles’ are very different from mainstream Christianity. After thinking about my past in reference to witnessing and reading O’Brien’s article I concluded that some of her ideas were good but she was missing the main point of Christianity.

O’Brien is right that Christians need to meet unbelievers on their home turf understanding who they really are. And although she doesn’t write it O’Brien shows, in what she writes, that there is joy in the act— and yet there is both her critical view of the ordinary witness and her lack—she never speaks the gospel. This is troubling because Horizons’ editors use the article to advertise what the PC (U.S.A.) is doing with their development of “1001 communities.” That is in one smaller box at the bottom of the article; in another box there are questions from their “Make the Most of Your Magazine.”

An example of the questions is, “Sunday brunch. Coffee. If sacraments are outward and visible signs of an inward, invisible grace, what would you name as ‘sacramental’ in your life?” This is in reference to O’Brien’s statement that, “In Portland, Sunday brunch is a sacrament, the living water is coffee and craft beer, and anything promoted as The Way would be expected to have a designated bicycle lane.” She isn’t, as the editors with their question imply, saying that is what the sacraments are- about personal examples of grace. But she never does mention what the sacraments truly are, nor who the Way really is.

O’Brien in explaining how “to think and talk about salvation,” writes of her encounters with a bartender, a gardener who writes about the environment and an agnostic author who writes about Christianity via a book O’Brien suggests some might find offensive. The author, in fact, whose book is entitled A Very Minor Prophet, calls it blasphemous. However, O’Brien writes that the book is “drenched in scripture and demonstrates a clear understanding of Jesus.” She makes friends with the author and suggests that such authors and others like him might be those who “unmask idolatries” in the church.

But contrary to O'Brien, the author, who reads material written by the Jesus Seminar, has his prophet say:

 I actually told the lesbians that I was a preacher, and not only that but I started going off telling them that I was a minister of a very different kind of Christian church: one that was based on the actual teachings of Jesus Christ—about living simply & not being judgmental & not giving a shit about $$$--& not on all the hogwash about the resurrection & the second coming & all the other made up bull shit that should have gone out with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

So, reading O’Brien’s article, I might learn how to be kind and caring to unbelievers and I would be encouraged to do that in an enthusiastic way, but if I was an unbeliever I wouldn't know what it really was that Christians believed. But so much more is required; compassion and enthusiasm, wisdom and biblical truth are needed when ministering to people in our world.  O’Brien brings up several examples of ancient Christians who witnessed in the world. But she only presents their use of the culture not their presentation of the gospel.

For instance she mentions Paul in Athens. When he preaches to the people he uses their altar to an unknown God. But absent from her wording is the connection he makes, explaining exactly who the real God is and finally finishing his sermon with a very clear pronouncement of the gospel:

“Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent because he has fixed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness through a man whom he has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising him from the dead (Acts 17: 30-31).”

O’Brien also mentions Peter’s vision in Acts 10. She writes, “He [Peter] learns to stop calling Gentiles unclean and welcome them as Christians. Practicing the art of watching and listening, I see God at work in people, places and ways I might not have expected.” But Peter uses his new understanding to preach the complete gospel to the Gentiles. He testifies to the resurrection, the judgment to come and the forgiveness which Jesus gives.

“You know of Jesus of Nazareth, how God anointed him with the Holy Spirit and with power, and how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses of all the things he did both in the land of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They also put him to death by hanging him on a cross. God raised him up on the third day and granted that he become visible, not to all the people, but to witnesses who were chosen beforehand by God that is to us who ate and drank with him after he arose from the dead. And he ordered us to preach to the people, and solemnly testify that this is the One who has been appointed by God as judge of the living and the dead. Of him all the prophets bear witness that through his name everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins (Acts 10:38-43).”

O’Brien is right about meeting people in their context. Many years ago, when our children were young, we, with all six, would troop over to a restaurant after our church’s Saturday night concert. Often our booth was filled to overflowing with other people from the concert. The waitresses were always busy as many members also went there. One waitress in particular waited on us—the kind of waitress who does everything with dexterity and care no matter how busy.

We became friends and visited each other’s homes. We discovered she was a divorcee with two small children. She came for Christmas Eve and we gave her presents and a Bible. Finally she disappeared from our lives only to reappear as she called one evening telling us she had a need. Our church met that need and she and her new husband became vibrant Christians. Over a year ago they came to our 50^th wedding anniversary party. They are still vibrant Christians.

In the same way, a few years later we invited a young woman over for tacos and gave her a Bible. In the process of buying a little blue Datsun from her we took her to a Saturday night concert at our church. The performer was T-Bone Burnett, the musician who wrote and compiled the music for O Brother Where Art Thou. The music was just right for someone who liked night clubs and music. She moved, as expected, to Switzerland.  We do not know if she ever developed a relationship with Christ, but we still pray for her. 

The point is, friendship, care and compassion are needed, but so is the whole gospel. Jesus went about doing good and healing, he also died for our sins and was resurrected. This is the gospel, the good news, salvation, even in weirdness.  

[1] My apologies, I spelled Cynthia O’Brien's name wrong throughout the posting, I have now corrected it.

Second Sunday of Advent

The truth is, God takes the suffering home with him. In another place I wrote of how a visiting pastor, at my church, told of the sufferings and good deeds of two pastors in the Sudan. His text was the story of the killing of the children of Bethlehem—the boys, two years old or younger. King Herod was attempting to destroy the boy Jesus, because he feared that a King appointed by God would take his place.  

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in one of his Christmas sermons, 1940, also uses this text. In the Old Testament it is:

A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because her children are no more. (Jeremiah 31:15)

Rev. Toby Nelson, the visiting pastor, explained that there were probably no more than nine or so infants killed in this back-water place, but God in his infinite compassion cares for the least. Bonhoeffer understood that this event was not unknown to God—it was part of the suffering of Christ. As he writes of the weeping that could not and should not stop:

The weeping over the witness unto death of Jesus Christ rises and will not be silenced throughout time, until the end. It is the weeping over the world, estranged from God and hostile to Christ, over the blood of the innocent, over the world’s own guilt and sin, for whom Jesus himself came to suffer. But in the midst of this inconsolable weeping, there is a great consolation: Jesus Christ lives and we will live with him, if we suffer with him.

The massacre of the innocents in Bethlehem, for all its godless horror, must ultimately serve God in bringing his promises to fulfillment. Suffering and tears come over God’s people. But they are costly to God, because Christ has gathered them to himself of his own will and Christ takes them and carries them into eternity.

Jesus bears it all, on the cross, for us—and we wait, in suffering for his return. He has come, to a manger,  he has suffered and died, in his resurrected body Jesus will come. Praise God.

God's work in the Bay Area

The work that God does is often hidden, so it is like a sweet surprise when you find some part of it. As many of my friends are moving with their church to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church I was looking around on their site looking for familiar names. I found something wonderful. Something that only God could plan and do. It was in San Francisco, and Berkeley, and Oakland as well as Marin County. First I went on the site for Christ Church in Berkeley and Oakland, an Evangelical Presbyterian Church. And then I read about their Mother and their Grandmother.

Their “Mother church” is City Church San Francisco, which is a Reformed Church in America. Their “Grandmother church” is Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, a Presbyterian Church in America whose pastor is Tim Keller. And some of the churches that City Church has planted are PCA & EPC. Their concerns are the city and how to authentically bring Jesus Christ to the cities. The beauty of this is that while they “wholeheartedly” embrace “the historic Christian faith expressed in the ecumenical creeds of the universal church,” and reformation faith, they are finding unique ways to reach their particular community.

Christ Church and City Church each have lots of videos to watch that allows one to understand what it is God is doing in the Bay Area—but I was particularly intrigued by one on the City Church site. I am going to place it below. I believe this is God’s work; it has brought together a community of people who belong to various denominations, yet hold to the same foundations, ministering to the very needy people of the Bay Area:

Holston Presbytery, Discipline and the Huguenots

Something that happened in Holston Presbytery collided with what I have been reading. They, rightly, refused to admit Dr. Don Steele into the Presbytery as a pastor. They used proper biblical discipline. (1 Cor. 5) He is a gay man working in John Shuck’s church in Elizabethton Tennessee. John Shuck is the teaching elder (pastor) who does not believe in God. So how did this collide with the book I am reading?

Let me start at the beginning. My husband and I were replacing a phone and in order do that we had to move a large amount of my books. That led to finding a lot of dust and dirt behind my books and that led to removing even more books, cleaning and reorganizing. And then behind one set of books I found some others, one I had forgotten about. The Huguenots in France: After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (With a Visit to the Country of the Vaudois) by Samuel Smiles was published in 1877. I found the book in a used book store in Oxford but had not paid much attention to it until now. I began reading from the middle of the book, a bad habit of mine—but I was amazed at some of the information.

After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, thousands of Huguenots fled France. This was because the elimination of the Edict of Nantes left French Protestants with no freedom at all. Their churches were destroyed, their leaders hanged, and those lay persons who persisted in protestant worship and were caught were severely punished. The men were sent to be galley slaves in the French navy. The women were sent to such dreadful prisons that many died within six months. There were few Huguenots left in France. But Smiles explains how the church began to reorganize again—and part of that story has to do with church discipline.

The part of the book I am reading centers on a Huguenot pastor Antoine Court. He became a preacher and leader within the secret meetings of the Huguenots.  He began dreaming of renewing the Church and gathered a few men around him to do so. Smiles writes:

He urged … that religious assemblies must be continued, and that discipline must be established by the appointment of elders, presbyteries, and synods, and by the training up of a body of young pastors to preach amongst the people and discipline them according to the rules of the Protestant Church.

Smiles points out that because of the persecution most organization had disappeared. He writes that “the training of pastors had become almost forgotten.” The first synod meeting was small. I smiled when I read it, only nine members met. But from that group pastors began to be trained. Young men who seemed gifted were chosen to work with someone who was already a pastor. They traveled together and studied under trees in safe places. Smiles writes:

“I have often pitched my professor’s chair,” said Court, “in a torrent underneath a rock. The sky was our roof, and the leafy branches thrown out from the crevices in the rock overhead, were our canopy. There I and my students would remain for almost eight days; it was our hall, our lecture-room, and our study. To make the most of our time, and to practice the students properly, I gave them a text of Scripture to discuss before me—say the first eleven verses of the fifth chapter of Luke. I would afterwards propose to them some point of doctrine, some passage of Scripture, some moral precept, or sometimes I gave them some difficult passages to reconcile.”

There is much more. The training of preachers and pastors as well as the appointing of elders was a part of the beginning of revitalizing the church. Biblical training was the second great task. As Smiles records:

When a Testament was obtained, it was lent about, and for the most part learnt off. The labour was divided in this way. One person, sometimes a boy or girl, of good memory, would undertake to learn one or more chapters in the Gospels, another a certain number in the Epistles, until at last a large portion of the book was committed to memory, and could be recited at the meetings of the assemblies. And thus also it happened, that the conversation of the people, as well as the sermons of their preachers, gradually assumed a strongly biblical form.

A very important part of the recovery of the Huguenot Church was the discipline of those who lived in disobedience. And that is where I circle back to Holston Presbytery and their actions. They were faithful in their actions, faithful to their people, faithful to Christ and faithful even to Steele as one in need of discipline. But many presbyteries and members of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), after reading Smiles words, must stand in shame when faced with the faithfulness of the members of the persecuted Huguenots: 

We have said that part of the duty of the elders was to censure scandal amongst the members. If their conduct was not considered becoming the Christian life, they were not visited by the pastors and were not allowed to attend the assemblies, until they had declared their determination to lead a better life. What a punishment for infraction of discipline! To be debarred attending an assembly, for being present at which, the pastor if detected, might be hanged, and the penitent member sent to the galleys for life!

A good direction: The Jerusalem Declaration

A declaration written by the Protestant Consultation on Israel and the Middle East (PCIME) takes a stand for Israel and the Christian minorities who are suffering persecution in the Middle East. The Jerusalem Declaration was written at “the Jerusalem Consultation on the Mainline Protestant Churches and the State of Israel. It is directed at those mainline denominations whose views toward Israel are extremely one sided and hurtful toward any real peace in the Middle East. The Jerusalem Document begins:

We are church members residing in Europe, North America, and Africa. We came to Jerusalem to share our concerns for the relationship between our churches and Israel. We affirm our love of Israel. We believe that God remains in covenant with the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God’s intention is to bless them, and through them to bless others. We repudiate the “replacement theology” that claims Israel has no further place in God’s plans.

 We see the modern State of Israel as a hopeful sign. In a region long dominated by harsh autocrats, Israel stands apart as a stable, pluralistic, multi-party democracy. Israel’s citizens are free to criticize failings of their government and there are mechanisms to correct those failings. Our group heard Israelis frankly discuss the wisdom of government policies. This propensity for self-criticism is a legacy of the prophetic tradition that Jews and Christians share.

 Our love for Israel does not contradict our love for other peoples in the region, including the Palestinians. They too have a place in God’s heart. We believe it is possible to pursue justice and peace in ways that attend to the rights and needs of all peoples of the region.

This is a document that can be signed by those who have been concerned with both the continuing persecution of Christians by radical Islamists and the widening divide between mainline denominations and the Jewish community.

A review of Horizons' "Jesus Saves: Early Christian Reflections on Salvation"

Alexander Hwang, visiting professor of theology at Brescia University, in his article, “Jesus Saves: Early Christian Reflections on Salvation,” contends, among other things, that “Jesus saves,’ is an incomplete sentence.  Hwang, in his article, examines, a bit simplistically, the salvific views of Augustine, Pelagius and Origen. Hwang, in order to contemplate who Jesus saves, uses the image of a dinosaur, a towering statue of some sort that sets beyond a billboard with the words “Jesus saves” on it. So the question becomes, does Jesus save dinosaurs? Is salvation universal or are only the elect-or only those who trust Jesus saved. [1]

Today, December 2, at Journey Church, we had a visiting pastor who told a story about two pastors he had met in the Republic of South Sudan.  They understood, at least theologically and experimentally  that “Jesus saves” is truly a complete sentence. One pastor had been a soldier, kidnapped for that purpose at eleven years old. When wounded he was dumped with other wounded soldiers into alligator infested waters. He survived and became a Christian and a pastor who has put together an orphanage in South Sudan. Another pastor, studying to become a Muslim imam, was ostracized by his community for asking how he could be forgiven and gain paradise. He became a Christian who in the process of caring for the needs of others has seen many Muslims, including imams, become Christians.

Hwang suggests that many Presbyterians will object to the sentence Jesus saves because of its “theological imprecision” and because they claim that “Jesus saves only the elect, the chosen, the predestined of God.” Of this he writes:

This [reformed] interpretation was based on a particular—some would say peculiar—reading of Paul’s letters that can be traced the back to the Westminster Divines (The authors of the Westminster Confession), John Knox, and before that, John Calvin and Augustine.

At this point Hwang points out the differences between Augustine and Pelagius, Augustine believes; “Jesus saves those whom God wills to save.” And Pelagians believed “Jesus saves those who choose to be saved.” Hwang believes that both of these men were setting limits on God’s salvation. Hwang concludes that in Western Christianity the dinosaur would probably not be saved!

The biggest problem when one explores the controversy between Augustine and the Pelagians is the Pelagians denial of original sin and their insistence on works as a means to salvation. Yes, they both set limits on salvation, but the real controversy had to do with salvation by works or the salvation Jesus bought by his death and resurrection. As Paul states in Ephesians, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourself, it is the gift of God, not as a result of works; so that no one may boast.”

Hwang turns to the Eastern Orthodox and one of the Church Fathers, Origen, who was a universalist, believing that even Satan would be saved. He states that Origen was using neo-Platonism and its idea of the eternal return of all things to their source.  Hwang believes in this case the dinosaur would be saved. Nevertheless, as Hwang points out, Origen’s idea of Satan’s salvation was condemned in the sixth century.

Not ready to give up, Hwang also writes that “Clement, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa and other church fathers held similar views.” But the idea is somewhat limited in Orthodoxy. One of the explanations given by Eastern Orthodoxy is that God draws all to himself but those who reject his love find his love hellish while those who are truly in Christ find God’s love blessed. Think of those on the bus that moves from hell to heaven in C.S. Lewis’ book The Great Divorce. Even the grass of heaven was sharp and painful to the visitors from hell. Universalism, meaning all will be saved, is not an acceptable doctrine to most Orthodox communions.

Hwang concludes with the idea that this is all a mystery. We know Jesus saves but we don’t know the object of the sentence. He writes:

I know with certainty that Jesus saves. I hope it’s me. I hope Jesus saves everyone and everything, but I don’t know for certain. Jesus saves. Perhaps that is all that can and should be said—nothing more and nothing less.

This is a great deal less than what the Apostle Paul wrote when he was dealing with imprisonment and suffering for the sake of Christ:

For this reason I suffer these things, but I am not ashamed; for I know whom I have believed and am convinced that he is able to guard that which I have entrusted to him until that day (2 Timothy 1:12)

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[1] One should note that two different questions get mixed in this article. It is possible to disbelieve in the predestination of the elect and still not be a universalist. While the author does tend to mix the questions he understands that both Augustine and Pelagius were not universalist. However, Pelagius who believed in salvation by works would have agreed that it was possible for all to overcome their sin.

First Sunday of Advent-

My devotional commentary for Advent led me to a Christmas song sung by Joan Baez. Looking it up on You Tube, I, of course, started listening to all of the old songs I love. Baez singing, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” Peter, Paul and Mary and their “500 Miles” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” Simon and Garfunkel singing “The Sound of Silence.”   But there is a certain kind of melancholy, a looking back at the sadness of the past, the goodbyes, the brokenness—it is after all part of what makes many folk songs beautiful. But for Advent we look back and forward, with joy.

We look back to the birth of our Savior, the Incarnation, the One who is both fully human and fully God. And just as the Hebrews experience their history as now—they speak of the Exodus as through they were present—God delivered us. They are the community delivered. So, in our salvation, our deliverance, in our union with Christ we also look forward to the coming of his birth, the coming of his life, the coming of his suffering and death, the power of his resurrection. We live through it by way of Scripture and the Holy Spirit who unites us to the Lord.  And finally and ultimately we look forward to his return—the second coming of our Lord.

We will (and do) skip like calves in our joy.

“For behold the day is coming, burning like a furnace; and all the arrogant and every evildoer will be chaff; and the day that is coming will set them ablaze” says the Lord of hosts, “so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.” “But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings; and you will go forth and skip about like calves from the stall.” (Malachi 4:1-2)