Notes for our Wednesday Koinonia group, September 12, 2012

A New Kind of Christianity: Brian McLaren.  Summary of first 125 pages

Introduction: Bad news: Christian faith/church is in trouble. (The ‘Way’ of Jesus a club for Pharisees; today people admire Jesus but hate the church). Protestants: lost between modernity and postmodernity. Catholics: torn since Vatican 2 between left/liberal and right/conservative.

Good news: today is pregnant with new possibilities! Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence: ‘Every 500 years the church holds a rummage sale’ – collapse of Roman empire (500AD), Great Schism (1000AD), Prot. Reformation (1500AD), now the ‘Great Emergence’; Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith: ‘Age of Faith’ à Constantine: Bishops, creeds, ‘Age of Belief’ (25000 Xns slaughtered by Xns for ‘heresy’). Now à ‘Age of the Spirit’ (eg. Pentecostal churches which ‘make lists’).

Paradigm shifts: eg. Indulgences (Luther’s 95 theses) 1517; Galileo 1610, Monarchy (‘God’s way’) democracy 1775; 19c + Darwin/Newton; 1960s ML King & segregation; 1991 Mandela

Today – new questions: orthodoxy or orthopathy, orthopraxis.

‘The Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth from his Word’

Question 1: The Narrative Question:

Eden –> Fall –> Condemnation –> Salvation –> Heaven or Rejection of God –> Hell.

Is it taught explicitly in Scripture? No.

Reading the Bible backwards or forwards?

Greek philosophy (Plato) vs. the Hebrew Scriptures.

Greco-Roman mindset – dualistic (matter/spirit); intellectually ‘superior’; social dualism (us/them)

Greek god:  “Theos” – very different from Judaistic God – “Elohim”

Aristotle – a ‘real’ world where things keep happening and changing.

Frontward reading: Invites our participation. No change from state to story – it is all story.

Fall = first stage of ascent and descent Genesis 1-11.

Call of Abram Gen 12 – to bless all nations not damn them.

1^st story: Genesis – story of scarred creation and reconciliation

2^nd story: Exodus – story of sacred liberation and formation.

3^rd story: dream of peaceable kingdom: (In exile, this came to mean more about day and time than land and space. Relationship of mutual belonging and unity)

Question 2: The Authority Question:

Current notions of the authority of Scripture – a scientific, ethical, militaristic mess

Scripture is primarily a cultural library (tracing history back to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob) not a constitution (provoking arguments about interpretation and empowering the authority groups)

A ‘culture’ = people who say different things about the same things.

Revelation through Conversation eg. the story of Job.  The Bible wasn’t meant to end conversation or have the final word on controversies like a constitution does.

Inspiration: God breathes life into the Bible: the Holy Spirit continually calls us into the conversation. We hear the divine voice, human voices and our voices in the text.