Discovering/re-discovering God-Continuing Theology

Resistance lives on the fringe of growth, near our periphery. When we have to reconsider what we’ve known, and adjust to realities bigger than what we first realized. God is bigger…always bigger than we figure on. Just when we get a grip on our theology, he will stretch us further. The bounds of his mission, his grace, his love, and his “Otherness” pushes us further on, into this unknown, and really unknowing.

My post from Jim's blog

I posted this at a friend's blog and I thought I'd like my readers to take a peek too.
He posted a great question about suffering. I encourage you to check out his site and his books. Jim is an amazing human being.
(Jim Palmer divinenobodies.com)


My response:
what a fantastic question.

I doubt the answers are easy... not simple...

In an abstract sense, from my purview of reality, I think it becomes painful to realize we live in a world where great suffering exists. We have a chance to be "the hands and feet of Jesus", but the structures that cause evil do not get fixed. We also participate in our own injustice each time we fail to be kind, or we pass judgment, or we, even in a small way, participate or support unfairness. As we continue in the spiritual stages of development (see E. Liebert's "Changing Life Patterns") slowly we learn to integrate the contradictions and competing truths, not enjoy them, but learn to balance them in tension, so we can live in hope, and do our best in Love.

In a practical sense, I believe, the council of God's Work as narrative, seen in four parts speaks, to this terrible conundrum as well. Within most of the narratives, but in the whole biblical work, the themes surface of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Consummation. Creation is perfection and goodness and beauty. It tells us how good we are to God, and also how things were once, before they broke. Fall tells us the "why" of all that has and will go wrong in the world, the suffering. It does NOT excuse it, but it helps account for it. Redemption is seen right away in Scripture, in the garden in fact, we don't even need to wait long. God redeem us and loves us, and likes us. He wants to be with us.

Consummation helps us understand that there is hope to come. Redemption does solve all the problems of this world. It may not remove our suffering, and heal every wound we may encounter around each bend. A new physical earth is promised in which wrongs will be righted, all justice will reign. Sometimes this may help us bear the horrors of this world. I think this dependence on God, this faith and giving our heart to a good God in the mist of competing realities can make the difference between hope and despair.

Love to all of you.

(this is still a messy situation. but it does give a little context that can be helpful. I think it's a journey, not a destination)

Interview / Dialogue with Ed Cyzewski author of "Coffeehouse Theology"

Thanks for taking the time for this interview and dialogue Ed!

As I mentioned before, feel free to post additional comments, or respond to comments. The nature of this medium is great for this sort of fluid exchange.



me: What was your main purpose in writing Coffeehouse Theology?

Ed: I took a swing at this one at the Emergent Village blog, but I'll swing again here. You don't have to read a lot of theology books to know they're not accessible for average people in the church, even the emergent books that claim to be easy reads. So I set out to pull together the various ideas out there for theology, but to also make them as accessible as possible. In addition, I wanted to help Christians move toward greater unity in the midst of theological diversity because we are united in our common love for Christ our Savior.



me: As a means of knowing God, Scripture isn't minimized in your book, it's given primacy. In postmodern times, where authority in general is seen with suspension, why do you posit to view Scripture with such authority, over experience, and other means?

Ed: Ha! I'm glad you asked the question that way. I use the word "primacy" to avoid the word authority. Scot McKnight just gave a great talk at Biblical Seminary on October 10th where he spoke about scriptural authority contrasted with the centrality of relationship, stating that God wants us to obey out of relationship, not out of authority. So scripture is primary, but it's primary because it leads us to a relationship with God. As we discover the love of God and love God as well, we'll obey scripture and we won't need an authoritarian view of scripture because it's leading us to obedience through a relationship with God.

I start theology with God at the center because the Holy Spirit is the one who teaches us from scripture. So we ultimately look to God, though scripture is primary over our traditions and other Christians. Our traditions and fellow Christians provide insights to guide our readings of scripture, meaning that scripture is primary and connects us with God, but we always need to interact with perspectives outside our own. As we interact with other perspectives and the Holy Spirit empowers us to live in the truth of scripture, we are better able to stand up under the suspicion of postmodern times.



me: Your take on lived out theology seems to be that a number of factors play into how we live out our belief and knowledge of God, and that’s it's important to see several things well to love God, understand him better, and live out our calling. How do you think we should rate their importance? (i.e. Scripture, culture, tradition, church, and so on.)

It's hard to really rate these things since it's an ongoing dialogue where we're always learning, interacting, shaping, and then reshaping our theology. I begin the book with culture not because it's most important, but if we don't understand culture and how it influences us and how we need to fulfill our prophetic calling in the world, then we are severely limited in our theology. So I wouldn't say culture is more important, but it can be a problem if not understood. Having said that, I'd say that we being theology with a relationship with God, then follow that with scripture, and then the traditions and global church.

me:
I appreciate your perspective about an "ongoing dialogue" which is involved in continually reshaping our theology. It seems these are dynamic, not stagnant, factors, and their interplay is what causes growth and lived out faith.

One common view of our times is that we can't arrive at truth solidly, (this occurs in Christian circles too). As we live out our theology (with the factors you’ve mentioned) what can we know?

Ed: As far as truth goes, we can know quite a bit. However, there have been shifts in the way we know, and the amount we think we know. Instead of digging into the Bible with an ahistorical approach seeking out absolute principles that are always true (I'm painting with broad strokes for the sake of brevity), we face the challenge of entering the Bible as participants in a theological conversation over 2000 years and across continents. We're not the only ones doing this, and our perspectives face the limitations of our context. Therefore, I'm interested in understanding my context, and the ways it shapes me so I am prepared to be relevant and prophetic, but also so I can seek out the perspectives of Christians throughout history and the world in order to bring balance and help sharpen my ideas. Perhaps my take on the truth will change, maybe it will not.

All that to say, to say we need to be humble about our take on the truth is not giving up on truth. If anything, I'm affirming what the Bible says about seeing only in a glass darkly and God's ways being higher than what we can conceive. God sees the big picture of truth, and so we seek out the Holy Spirit's lead within our Christian communities as we seek out God's life-changing truth. We don't give up because we can't be 100% certain, but rather we live by faith and continue to read, study, converse, and embody God's revelation.


me:
Can you explain briefly what you mean by "global church" how this plays into contextual theology?


Ed: [I mean] Christians throughout the world who offer different perspectives that we should consider for our theology. For example, Christians throughout the world opposed the Iraq War, while many Christians in America supported it. That strikes me as a situation where Christians in America need to ask why Christians throughout the world didn't support the war.

me:
To you, what things determine integrating global church perspectives to our own?

Ed: We look to Christians outside our own context because we'll never get the whole picture of the truth on our own. They will inevitably see things we will not. For example, in the book I talk about a study of Christians in Eastern Europe who made some striking observations about the famine and xenophobia in the parable of the prodigal son, points that Americans missed. I could read that story over and over again, but probably miss out on the nuances picked up by these Christians. Now I can see that Jesus is addressing fair wages, our treatment of foreigners, and feeding the hungry. How I live out my theology changes radically once I interact with these Christians, even if the core of Christian orthodoxy has not.

However, as we interact with Christians outside our own perspective, we should be careful to keep our central creeds in mind and always run our findings by trusted Christians who can help us process these perspectives. It's not a matter of simply dropping the evaluations of another context into our own, but rather comparing our theologies and letting these other theologies sharpen our own beliefs. Perhaps they'll merely affirm some of our beliefs, while in other cases we'll find ourselves needing to broaden some of our understandings or narrow them. This is always a matter of conversations, not a matter of making American theology win over Asian or Latin American theology. We all have limitations and have something to teach one another.

me: What one nugget of wisdom or vision would you hope to pass along from your book, if nothing else?

Ed: I think we can't overestimate the importance of making God the center in our theology. Jesus said the scriptures testified about him, so while scripture is important and even essential, scripture's main role is leading us to Christ. However, many churches make the Bible their foundation or starting point, which means disagreements on the Bible can divide churches. It's been this emphasis on pure doctrine derived from scripture over the person of Jesus that has caused so much division--we have a hard time dealing with doctrinal diversity because we have made the Bible our foundation, not Christ. While doctrine is important, and I would never leave behind the doctrines passed down throughout history in the creeds, it is the triune God we meet in the Christian faith. That means we cannot have any other starting or ending point than Christ Jesus.

me: Thanks for expounding a bit more on your book, and some ideas about knowing God. I hope the dialogue continues.