The Beginning of the End of the Beginning?

The subject of my prior post has been on my mind a lot over the last few weeks, and as the title implies, I have been wrestling with the question of where to go from here.

Then I watched a very interesting short video, which I think I might be smart enough to embed here...



What I want to focus on is the part where Brian gets down and start drawing in the dirt. Regardless of your opinion of the kind of theology a person subscribes to (lots of folks are freaked out by Brian McLaren) he does point out something we have been prone to do. We tend to look backwards through the lenses of our experience with certain types of theology and interpretations of the biblical Jesus, which can have the effect of turning him into a figure we try to plug into whatever structure we happen to find ourselves attached to. The problem is that this can end up making Jesus an object that we project our own ideologies, agendas, and politics (both the nationalistic and church varieties) upon.

We do need to look at how Jesus came about. We spend about eight months of the year in church discussing stuff that happened after the resurrection, and really only look at the story of why Jesus came on the scene during advent. I believe that if we look deeper into the why of Jesus, and less on the "how to do [your denomination] successfully, we'll find some interesting things.

So why Jesus? What made him so necessary and important? The most common answer might be that we are depraved and Jesus was the sacrifice necessary, but I think this sells Jesus/God short. If Jesus was just the ultimate sacrificial lamb, why bother with all the preaching, teaching, and showing of new weird and wacky ways? So why all that?

When I look at the story of the Old Testament, a few things stand out. First, their view of God was pretty inconsistent. If you look at all the different acccounts of God and man before Christ, there are times when God is looked upon as a genie, when God is a bringer of wrath, and when God is just someone we aren't talking to because he doesn't make our crops grow like the Baal worshippers crops grow. With a few exceptions, the people of the old testament had little or no clue who God was as a personality. I think Jesus is a vital character for showing the truest nature of God. As John puts it, he is the "word" of God (word being translated from logos, which not only means word but knowledge, reason, and account). So in Jesus, perhaps we are presented with some knowledge of God.

The other thing I see when I look at the old testament is the failure of systems to help people get better at dealing with God and one another. Sure, there are some bright spots, but all in all, what ends up happening in the old testament is that people get more attached to the system (a temple, rulebook, a country) than they are to one another and God. It's not that the nation of Israel were a bad people, they just did what come naturally when presented with uncertainty. They clung to whatever structure they had. You see the golden calf in the wilderness. You see the outcry for a king just like everyone else. I think you get the point. Jesus changes that substantially. His mindset and attitudes guide everything he does, and as pointed out in the text itself (I'll try to find the exact passage later), the law is fulfilled when we act from that mindset. Not because we know our doctrine backwards and forwards, but because we adopt a different mindset. This is incredible to me. People think that by claiming Christ, I'm looking for some hocus pocus to stave off a fear of mortality, and that's probably somewhere in the back of my head. But what is most appealing about Christ to me is that his life offers hope we can be different. We can live without a concrete rulebook that tells us all the answers (which doesn't exist, because the world is evershifting) because we can claim Christ and by doing so, exchange an attitude of competition, exploitation, and power pursuit for one that actually helps us live better lives with one another.

Now where do we go from here? I'm not really sure, but I think moving from contemplation to action sounds like it has to be involved. If we're really interested in becoming Christlike as people, then to the best of my understanding, we have to move from a hypothetical understanding of God, love, and all that to a manifestation through action. We need to actively cultivate community, live towards justice, and become practitioners of grace.

To my colleagues in Limbo, it's time. Dual meaning intended.

Peace