Thomas Oden, United Methodist, longtime Professor of Theology at Drew University and prolific author began what he called his “long journey home” from liberalism to things orthodox and evangelical in 1979. You can read about it in his book from that year, Agenda For Theology. Since then Oden has published like wild fire including a massive 3-volume Systematic Theology which remains an unparalleled tool for plowing back to the sources of historical theology, especially sources dating from prior to the year 600 A.D.

In a recent volume, Turning Around the Mainline: How Renewal Movements are Changing the Church, Oden taps decades of archived material to urge orthodox evangelicals tempted to bolt Mainline denominations to hunker down and stay put. Oden believes they have more company within and without their denominations than they realize and that real prospects for the recovery of historic, orthodox, biblically shaped and Holy Spirit empowered renewal are quite good, perhaps inevitable.

Protestants targeted by Oden include: Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Disciples of Christ, and (even though, technically, they are not of the Mainline) American Baptists. Could Oden be right? The slide toward liberalism was halted within the Southern Baptist Convention, but then, the structure of that denomination made the path to reform clear (not easy, just clear). What will it take to achieve something real and lasting in the Mainline? Oden addresses some of the difficulties in his book. 

An American Baptist congregation I pastored in Indiana recently gave up on their decade long efforts (banded together with other likeminded churches) to see the long leftward slide of their denomination halted and reversed. Today they are Southern Baptist. If Oden is right, should I be happy or sad that they jumped ship?

Do any of you or your friends out there have experience with evangelicals “living in exile” within their Mainline denominations? What are your thoughts? 

Where the relationship between science and religion is concerned, I have found it helpful to envision two overlapping circles, one representing objects of interest that are susceptible to the tools of the Enlightenment or Science, if you will. Those tools or means of knowledge include both the rationalist (esp. Descartes) and empiricist (e.g., Newton) epistemological streams. The other circle represents objects of knowledge appropriate to Christian faith and enjoyment of life in the family of God. Included in this circle are matters as different as the substitutionary atonement and the existence of the city of Ai mentioned in the Old Testament.

The circles overlap because some objects of knowledge belonging to the full enjoyment of a Christian believer are investigatable and so potentially knowable or at least rendered plausible through Enlightenment epistemological tools by believers and unbelievers alike. This image recognizes a certain irreducible historical dimension of Christian confession from which we must never hide. We dig together with unbelieving archaeologists and submit to a common epistemological standard, fully recognizing the historical vulnerability of our confession. The image also reflects recognition of epistemological turf in which the believer and the church submits to the expertise of the scientist, the physician or the physicist. When the eye surgeon offers his diagnoses, I have no interest in whipping out a copy of the Proverbs to dispute the advice given. But the scientist is encouraged to admit ignorance and perhaps keep silent where his own epistemological tools prove insufficient, say regarding the Trinity, the two natures of Christ or the substitutionary atonement.

In his book Breaking Faith: The Pope, the People, and the Fate of Catholicism, John Cornwell identifies core beliefs held by Catholic laity between Vatican I (1869-70) and Vatican II (1962-65): Devotion to Mary as the Mother of God; the indissolubility of marriage, and the inadvisability of mixed marriage; the real presence in the Eucharist; venial and (deserving Hell for all eternity) mortal sin; the necessity of confessing mortal sin; the immortal soul, the resurrection of the body; Purgatory and the scope for praying for the souls therein; infallibility and primacy of the Pope as successor of Saint Peter, the role of bishops as successors of the Apostles; the intercession of the saints; the reality of Satan, and of demons and angels; a hostile antagonism toward atheistic communism; the inadmissibility of contraception, abortion, premarital sex, adultery, homosexuality, and remarriage; the inadmissibility of worshiping with non-Catholics, weekly attendance at Mass; Holy Days of “obligation”; and the imperative to avoid meat on Fridays. Compare to Cornwell’s survey-supported post-Vatican II core convictions:

Belief that it is possible to have a personal and loving relationship with God; belief that God took human form as Jesus to redeem the world and bring us to God; commitment to a relationship with God through public and private prayer, worship, and reading of scripture, principally within the faith community and sacramentals of the Catholic church. Cornwell then observes that “unlike the pre-Vatican II list of priorities, these post-Vatican II Catholic convictions are shared with other Christian denominations.”

Certainly more and more members of whatever tradition are sitting more lightly in their pews than ever before. Movement between traditions has never been higher. But straying Catholics have earned a well-deserved reputation for finding their way back to Rome in the end. Cornwell and others expect the former magnetic effect of Roman Catholicism, largely due to the unique hold of the sacraments and cult of Mary upon the faithful, to wane. Are we poised for massive migration of Roman Catholics into the ranks of evangelical traditions? Or will we see perceptible evangelicalizing within Roman Catholicism or both?

Like so many attempts to understand a currently developing and growing phenomenon, the quest to comprehend the emergent/emerging church proves frustrating and often elusive. Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures by Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger promises a comparatively more accurate window into the world of emerging churches because it taps a wealth of primary source material. So I tend to lend more weight to the findings of GB.

Chapter 6 is entitled “Welcoming the Stranger,” one of the nine defining patterns of emerging churches according to GB. Check out the following quote from Manchester (UK) emerging church leader Ben Edson of Sanctus1 from that chapter:

“We had a guy from the Manchester Buddhist center come to Sanctus1 a couple weeks ago and talk about Buddhist approaches to prayer. We didn’t talk about the differences between our faiths. We didn’t try to convert him.” Pip Piper of maji community Birmingham (UK): “Evangelism or mission for me is no longer about persuading people to believe what I believe, no matter how edgy or creative I get. It is more about shared experiences and encounters.” I am sorry but this statement from Piper reminds me so much of the mindset and values that infused the drug culture I once inhabited! Never mind. GB from the same chapter: “Christians cannot truly evangelize unless they are prepared to be evangelized in the process.”

One refrain I am encountering repeatedly in the emerging literature is their critique of seeker-sensitive mega churches. But Sanctus1 sounds fairly seeker-sensitive for Buddhists. I expect that emerging church leaders such as Piper and Edson would embrace, as I do, two conditions of real learning and converse passed on by my Ph.D. supervisor: #1. One cannot critique what one has not understood and #2 One cannot usually understand what one has not first engaged sympathetically. Let’s agree that screaming and shaking fingers in unsuspecting faces might not be the best way to share the love of Jesus whether it is done door-to-door or on the street corner or anywhere else.

But has genuine gospel witness occurred where the message is left unarticulated? And does that message not include the exclusive claims of Christ? And is not this claim bound to offend most? And do not the biblical warnings against having other gods (you remember, the first of the ten commandments!) belong to every kind of evangelism worthy of being called Biblical or Christian?

***Several years ago William Willimon spoke in chapel here at Midwestern Seminary. Willimon was then Dean of the Chapel at Duke University and was already the most brilliant popularizer of Narrative Preaching. I find Willimon’s preaching style and particular brand of sarcasm-laced humor seducing, probably because it seems to derive organically from the Piedmont of the Carolinas from which we both hail. Willimon’s preaching disarms me. Stories abound, the humor simultaneously shocks and illuminates. Tears and laughter alternate and mingle among the listeners. But Willimon said something to this effect; “I do not know if the resurrection was a historical event. I do not know if it was a physical occurrence. And I cannot know. I may never know. It really does not matter though, because we have the story itself and its power to heal and create community, transform lives and inspire faith does not depend upon the historicity of the resurrection.”

After Willimon finished and sat down, the president of the seminary addressed the assembly and made if clear that we could not follow Willimon on this matter; “we, he said, agree with the apostle Paul:

“Now if Christ raised from the dead is what has been preached, how can some of you be saying that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is not resurrection of the dead, Christ Himself cannot have been raised, and if Christ has not been raised then our preaching is useless and your believing it is useless; indeed, we are shown up as witnesses who have committed perjury before God, because we swore in evidence before God that he had raised Christ to life. For if the dead are not raised, Christ has not been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, you are still in your sins. And what is more serious, all who have died in Christ have perished. If our hope in Christ is for this life only, we are the most unfortunate people” (1 Corinthians 15:12-19).

So is this the fruit of Narrative Theology? To snatch the resurrection from us and try to make us like it? Do all narrative thinkers and preachers go so wobbly on matters as essential as the resurrection of Jesus?

***When Richard Land (Southern Baptist), Jim Wallis (Sojourners), and Dwight Hopkins (University of Chicago) speak with a single voice, it’s news. All three gave a big thumbs down to the health and wealth positive thinking message of Joel Osteen over the holidays on CNN. Osteen’s messages would leave me buoyant and energized if he would just stay on message. The hitch in the stream of good feeling comes with Osteen’s 18 second attempt to jam Christianity down the throat of an otherwise consistent quasi-evangelicalized Norman Vincent Peale spiel. The ham-handed effort to christianize the love of filthy lucre and all its promises tends to jolt Bible readers from Osteen’s spell, reminding us that the apostles received a rude welcome from the world and that Jesus (once the healing and feeding miracles ground to halt for a few days) was crucified. Osteen’s appeal is good ole’ stuff―it just ain’t Christianity.

***Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth’s biographer and live-in secretary recorded his last memory of the great theologian, just two nights before his death. It was Advent, 1968:

In his last year he was not so busy and I think very ill. There were some times in the spring and summer when it seemed he would die. But he survived. In the Netherlands that summer, the radio already announced that Karl Barth had died because he was so ill. But I remember the last weeks. It was the high point of the time I lived with him. After his death, my wife said to me, “He was a little bit like an angel in his last weeks.” I could also say he was like a child. He really returned a bit to his youth and very often he sang simple songs he learned in Sunday School.

The last evening, two days before he died, I was with my wife in his house. And I think in the last times he feared the night. Therefore he didn’t want us to leave his house. At one o’clock we said we’d like to go home because we had a one-hour walk. So Barth said to go when we wanted to but that he would go to his bed and that we should come and sing songs. It was 1:16 A.M. and his windows were open facing onto the street. I said, “We’ll have to close the windows because other people will be awakened by our song.” Barth said, “Oh, it doesn’t matter, it will be a good song.” And first he began with his children’s songs, then he said to take a church hymnbook and we would sing an Advent song that spoke of the great comfort that Christ is coming with joy. And that was the last time I saw Karl Barth.

*** “I felt sure that the creature was what we call ‘good,’ but I wasn’t sure whether I liked ‘goodness’ so much as I had supposed. This is a very terrible experience. As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can’t eat, and home the very place you can’t live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable? Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible; the last card has been played” (Perelandra).

Lewis combined a love of goodness and virtue without the typical concomitant pretense to having achieved much of it himself. Lewis was not politically correct. He believed in depravity all the more as his vision of God grew. Lewis loved truth more than his own honor. By his own account Lewis suffered more from selfishness (the desire to have one’s way) than from self-centeredness (fixation upon and fascination with oneself and how one is viewed by others). This comparative division of weakness freed Lewis to “let God be true and every man a liar,” more clearly and boldly than is usual.

*** Barth on Schleiermacher:

“We have to do with a hero, the like of which is but seldom bestowed upon theology. Anyone who has never noticed anything of the splendor this figure radiated and still does―I am almost tempted to say, who has never succumbed to it―may honorably pass on to other and possibly better ways, but let him never raise so much as a finger against Schleiermacher. Anyone who has never loved here, and is not in a position to love again and again may not hate here either.”

No more profound, no more thoroughgoing, no more devastating critique of the theology of Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher compares to the one Barth would bring. Barth traced most of what he found objectionable in modern theology from around 1825 until his death in 1968 to the influence of Schleiermacher. When it comes to theological persnicketiness and the leveling of withering critiques against rival theological approaches, Barth takes a back seat to no one.

But Barth evidenced acceptance of two convictions held and propagated by my doctoral supervisor: (1) We cannot critique what we have not understood and (2) we usually do not understand what we have not first engaged sympathetically. Barth’s tip of the hat to Schleiermacher was prompted in part by the appearance of a scathing rejection of Schleiermacher published by Emil Brunner in 1924. By not taking seriously the two pre-conditions for understanding and critique, Barth believed Brunner not only “got Schleiermacher wrong,” but fell into the trap Schleiermacher set for theology in the 19th and 20th centuries; namely, the abandonment of theology for anthropology.

Be that as it my, the two convictions certainly help define a “do unto others” context for theological dispute.

***“Calvin is a cataract, a primeval forest, a demonic power, something directly down from Himalaya, absolutely Chinese, strange, mythological; I lack completely the means, the suction cups, even to assimilate this phenomenon, not to speak of presenting it adequately. What I receive is only a thin little stream and what I can then give out again is only a yet thinner extract of this little stream. I could gladly and profitably set myself down and spend all the rest of my life just with Calvin” (Letter to Eduard Thurneysen, June 8, 1922).

The musings of the 36 year old Karl Barth upon acceptance of the Chair in Reformed Theology at Göttingen after his own “bombshell dropped into the playground of the theologians,” his peculiar commentary “The Epistle to the Romans,” made him a star in the theological world.

Do not imagine that acquaintance with Calvin’s disciples or Calvin’s interpreters approaches acquaintance with the man himself. He did not get to be Calvin by spoiling otherwise happy gatherings with fierce debates about predestination and an angry God. Read him for yourself. Start with the Institutes (1559) in the Battles/McNeill edition. You will meet more of yourself there than you expected and you will begin to understand how Barth could become so alternately awestruck and smitten.