Bringing Theological Education into the Church Pews

Recently, a church leader posed an important question to me. One of the ministers at their church has recently completed an M.Div. and is pursuing further education. This is a congregation that has not traditionally required theological education of their minsters, but in recent decades has seen reason to encourage and support such education. In general, though, it is like many low church Protestant groups in the US; mostly conservative/traditional on most of the hot button issues in the US today, but not preaching on those topics week in and week out. I didn't ask, but I imagine there hasn't been sermon or class on sexuality or gender roles in a while. It is in this context that our minister friend plans to embark upon an eight-week series on the topic of hermeneutics. 

The question from the church leader to me is a compelling one in this context. This leader has been having conversations recently with a person who has recently been coming to their church. This person is relatively young (late 20's to early 30's), and, though raised in church, has not been regularly living in church since those youth group days. As the church leader described it, this young person had departed fom life in the church to explore the world, which can be nasty at times. Having come out on the bad side of some experiences, the young person has begun building community again with folks in this church and, perhaps taking some steps back toward the faith. The church leader posed the question to me: what does this series have to offer such a person? 

In this post, I will offer 1) my initial reaction to the questions; 2) discuss my fuller repsonse to the question in broad detail; and 3) consider the final piece of information that came out after my initial response: this series is meant to prompt a repsonse in the church that their traditional position on women's roles and LGBTQ may not be as clear-cut and obviously correct as they have always thought.

One brief disclaimer: I hope you, dear reader, do not need me to tell you that I am 100% committed to theological education and I deeply believe in the necessity, especially for ministers, to have more education, not less. Further, I am convinced that any Christian who wishes can and should have the opportunity to learn the intricacies and depths of our faith, should they desire. I do not think, though, that theological education makes one "better" or "more spiritual". As will become clear later, I hope, such education is not necessary for one to understand and live the gospel.

First, I shared in my initial response what I teach my students who are majors in Bible when they begin learning some of the intricacies of exegesis and hermeneutics in the required class Introduction to Biblical Interpretation. I remind them repeatedly of Augustine's guidance in the Enchiridion. To summarize and paraphrase: If you arrive at love God and love your neighbor, I don't care how you've read Scripture, you've read it correctly; if you arrive somewhere other than love God and love your neighbor, I don't care how you've read Scripture, you've read it wrong. I tell these students that the gospel is simple on the one hand. On the other hand, though, the gospel is deeply complex. Our sisters and brothers have been pondering it and plumbing its depths for millennia. If one wishes to explore, the rabbit hole is DEEP. We must remember, though, that such exploration is neither required of the average believer nor does it make a Christian who does explore superior to one who does not. Remember, in God's reign, often the inverse of what we expect is what is true and greatness before God is determined by imitating Jesus and giving up all pretension to superiority and domination, in favor of sacrificing all for others. I then inform them that AS MINISTERS, they are choosing to walk down some of this exploration and that it is incumbent upon them to do so. The task they are called to requires them to be thoughtful about the intricacies of the Scriptures, about the questions they pose to us and the questions we might pose to them. After all, how can they, as ministers, meet the spiritual needs of an average congregant who runs into scholarship on the historical Jesus or Pauline authorship of the Pastoral Epistles, if they have not explored these topics themselves? In other words, if a series on hermeneutics is proposed, it is important to consider all manner of angles with respect to this series. What should be avoided is taking the 20-30 minute sermon slot for eight weeks in a row to give someone a crash course in topics a seminary graduate spent years learning and processing, despite that being a great temptation! Thielicke's 

Second, this leader's question has within it an assumption that is worth considering: for whom is a series like this one on hermeneutics? Or, posed in a different way, who is the primary audience of the Sunday service? This is familiar territory for low church Protestantism and American Evangelicalism broadly in recent decades, where discussions of being "seeker-friendly" have dominated. There is not space to explore the theological intricacies that have led to a consensus by many that the target audience of the Sunday service and, therefore, of the sermon is the outsider to the Christian community, but from the simple practical persepctive of teaching young people who were raised in Christian churches because I teach at a Christian university, allow me a brief exploration of the fruits of this focus. I am continually struck by how little the young people I teach know the Christian Scriptures. Beyond this, I am struck by how little knowledge of their own faith they have. I do not mean to put all the responsibility on their congregations by any means, but I would suggest that this lack of instruction in the basics of Christianity and in the Christian Scriptures is a product of the collision of Sunday services and sermons that are focused on outsiders to the neglect of the faithful and the erosion of other places where the faithful may have been formed. Wednesday (or other during the week) nights are not reliable for many church members. It is hard enough to get people to attend the Sunday service, generally, so you can forget about some kind of additional Bible class or Sunday School for many church members. What is left, then, is the Sunday service. Never mind that for almost all of Christian history this service was for the gathered Christians (and in the early centuries of Christianity we have some indications that for at least portions of the service non-members were not welcome to even be there). I can tell you from my post here in a Christian university in the Bible-belt of the US, the people who are already in the pews need Sunday to form them in the faith. There is much for all of us on the other side of the waters of baptism and there is a good argument to make that work the focus of Sunday morning.

Third, when I learned that this series was meant to prompt a change of understanding about gender roles and sexual ethics, it changed the terms of this entire discussion. If this church minister were asking me about this series, and I had the knowledge I now have, I would press hard to find out what the hoped for outcome actually is. If this series is serving as a way for this minister to direct this church towards changing their congregational views on gender roles and sexual ethics, I would say two things immediately: 1) Eight weeks is nowhere near long enough. Especially if it is eight weeks confined only to the sermon. 2) Why now?

In terms of the first: people struggle with change. Even the so-called liberal and progressive among us struglle with change. As people we don't really like it. When it comes to something like these two topics, which are deeply personal and impact not only us, but also many people we love and, potentially, many difficult conversations we have had with ourselves and others, asking people to "repent" fom their past views as the result of an eight-week series is foolish. That doesn't mean it can't or won't happen. The Spirit of God has changed the terms of how humans are living in shorter times than eight weeks! However, in many of those instances, it was traumatic. Rather, consider the trajectory in Acts for the earliest Christians as they moved from being convinced that God's Messiah in Jesus was for Jews (and those who became Jews by being circumcised) to recognizing that God "shows no partiality" and the uncircumcised should not be asked to be circumcised. It took years. Peter witnessed the Spirit's action in Acts 10 with respect to Cornelius and his household, and yet, just by virtue of considering the travel time for Barnabas and Paul, it was years before things came to a head in the council at Jerusalem Acts 15 narrates. Patience is required to discern the movement of God. Patience is required for people to reckon with a change to something so deep and personal. 

In terms of the second: we are in the midst of a constant low-key boil in US society right now. Everyone is on a knife's edge from screaming at one another. Is now the time to tackle two of the discussions over which so much acrimony is currently being expressed? Maybe. Maybe now is exactly the time. However, given the context, if it is the time, a congregation who would pursue this needs to prepare themselves to tackle it. Leaders who would embark on this discussion need to prepare themselves. The words of Jesus to his disciples upon coming down form the Mount of Transfiguration to their failure to exorcise a demon from a boy come to mind: this kind comes out only by prayer. The demons of our era, that assault our communities, these ones come out only by prayer. So, if a church wants to consider difficult and fraught conversations, the leaders best gird up their loins, fast and pray for a season in preparation, lead the congregation in fasting and prayer, double down on the teachings in John 13 considering how Jesus calls us (and showed us) to love one another, and purify ourselves. If you expect to meet God on Sinai, to hear a word of life from God, preparation is required. Without preparation, as the narratives in Exodus and Numbers show us, bad things are likely to occur.

The Gospel of Mark - Part 1

Mark's Gospel begins with a title that raises questions: The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. That little word "of" substitutes for a complex concept in Greek grammar called the genitive case. This case has a wide variety of potential meanings when one tries to understand it from the perspective of a language like English; it is a highly flexible grammatical structure. It could mean that this is the beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ. It could mean that is the beginning of the gospel (or "good news") that belongs to Jesus Christ, like in Mk 1:14, where Jesus announces the "gospel of God". This is the exact same relationship as the title, but here it seems more clearly to mean that this is God's gospel for God's people: "The time is fulfilled and God's kingdom (again same relationship, but here clearly a possessive) has drawn near (more on this later); repent and believe the gospel." The last major option for the title's genitive relationship is the gospel/good news that is Jesus Christ. Among these three, it is difficult to choose. After all, what comes in the following chapters could easily be the gospel that is about Jesus. It could also be the gospel that Jesus possesses as he turns quickly to announce a gospel. Finally, it is not hard for it to be argued that Jesus being the Messiah, being the Son of God - as will be revealed over the course of the Gospel of Mark - is itself the gospel.

It is important to remember that it is possible we are forcing a choice on to the ancient Greek in which this text was composed that is not necessary or even helpful when trying to understand the Greek. These ancient Jewish/early Christian texts are truly written in a foreign language and perhaps it is only the English-formed brains in us that makes us want to force the Greek constructs into the categories that make sense to us. Perhaps all of these shades of meaning (and more) could be held by the ancient person writing or reading this text.

After a Long Hiatus...

Well, the semester got away from me and so I did not make good on the idea I had for the new year in March, April, or May. I will get back to it this summer! Also, I am going to start a new more regular series. I will be teaching a new version of our first semester required Bible class, Jesus: His Life and Teachings this fall. I will center my idea for the core of the Christian faith: Christ crucified. As part of this, I will be writing regularly about the Gospel of Mark this summer and then probably Matthew. Check back here for more!

The Early Church and the Guidance for Worldly Behavior

I’ve been reviewing my teacher Luke Timothy Johnson’s two volume work on Paul in advance of teaching a course on Paul this fall and I was struck recently by two comments he makes in volume 1. First, in discussing experience as a necessary major node for understanding Paul, Johnson remarks on the wonder that Paul’s letters address “quite quotidian matters” because they are under dispute among his addressees. To explain the disputes, he writes, “… since there as yet existed no guidebook for how the confession of Jesus as Lord and the experience of the Holy Spirit’s power should be translated into worldly behavior.” (Johnson, Constructing Paul 1:205) This struck me as simultaneously insightful and puzzling. After all, wouldn’t most early Christians who hailed from a Jewish background (and even at least those gentiles who had heard of Israel’s God as well as some who were hearing of Israel’s God through the preaching of Jesus) have immediately thought of the Torah as exactly the guidebook for living? Sure enough, in the next chapter, Johnson discusses the forensic metaphor at play in Paul’s letters and writes, “At the heart of this metaphorical field is the law revealed by God… with its commandments… that God wishes to be obeyed. These, globally, are “the works of the law”…, by the performance of which humans – according to the law itself – would be reckoned righteous and “live”.” (Johnson, Constructing Paul 1:241) I think for Johnson, any seeming tension between these two claims is resolved in that he takes the phrase πιστις χριστου (faith in/of Christ) definitively to be “Christ’s faithfulness”, specifically Christ’s faithfulness to God’s Torah, as the mechanism for justification (the granting of righteousness as a status to) of humans. Since Christ has fulfilled the righteous requirement of the Torah and therefore opened up the possibility of righteousness for those who are “in Christ” in this forensic metaphorical field, the question naturally arises, what now is the way to live? Yet, for those who would follow Luther insisting that it is not Christ’s faithfulness that Paul means, but rather the believer’s faith in Christ that Paul intends to label as the mechanism for salvation, the problem is much thornier. Now, the question becomes essentially one of supersession or of relativization of portions or all of God’s Torah given to Israel. Where Johnson’s solution opens up a new era, Luther’s solution requires a redefinition of the Torah. Either, there is a new Torah in Christ because the old Torah’s functions was never to be followed anyway (supersession) or at least some of the Torah, if not all of it, must no longer be valid. In this latter version, the invalidating of Torah follows from Paul’s own arguments that gentiles must not circumcise themselves, otherwise they become Jews and the eschatological age as Isaiah envisions it cannot be present (the nations, gentiles, will come to Jerusalem and join Israel; see Isaiah 60-62). Thus, some portion of the Torah must be relativized or excised and, as many Protestant traditions have found, debating where and how those lines are drawn becomes highly complex, very quickly. 

The Core of the Christian Faith

What is the center of the Christian faith? This question has been lurking in the back of my mind for a few years now as my department has considered the best place to begin our university’s five required Bible courses. As a Christian university, these courses form an essential part of the university’s general education course of study for all undergraduate degrees. For about a decade now, the first three courses have been set, with some flexibility for the fourth and fifth. For many decades, the first course has focused on the canonical Gospels. The current title is Jesus: His Life and Teachings. Our department has noted the decreasing biblical literacy among our incoming students along with an increasing lack of basic knowledge about the Christian faith. We have begun to wonder whether our current sequence, requiring essentially a yearlong survey of the New Testament followed by a one-semester survey of the Old Testament is serving the needs of our students, the future of the churches where they might be, and, thus the Church as a whole. We have wondered whether our current courses meet our students where they are or if they assume a level of knowledge of the faith that is missing. For example, does a course that jumps into the Bible assume both that a student would agree that reading the Bible is good and important for Christian faith and also that knowledge of the Bible is important for Christian faith, much less be prepared to explore various ways of reading the Bible for the nourishing of that faith. The answers are far from obvious.

Thus, we have embarked on an exploration of what we might do differently in order to start the students off in a better place. Two of my excellent colleagues have taught renditions of a pilot course these past two years that would begin from some foundations of the Christian Faith (among other things to be sure!). While the courses have differed in some ways, one core they have shared is teaching the Apostle’s Creed as a core summary of the Christian faith. While I neither deny nor intend to belittle the historical realities of creeds developing to operate as summaries or their use in providing some form of “catechesis” for the first-semester student at a Christin university, for a variety of reasons, some exacerbatingly specific to the current moment in US history and culture, teaching a creed has not sat well with me. Some reasons surely come from my own heritage in the Restoration churches of the Stone-Campbell movement, in which the slogan, “no creed but the Bible” has held sway. But more than that, I see in our particular moment in history a surge in the typical human behavior of using ideological purity tests as weapons. Whether in our federal government, our two political parties in the US, or say the tendency to fill in all sorts of imagined “facts” about a person based on where they might indicate they fit in debates about gender, gender roles, and/or sexuality, social media has put an exclamation point on our desire and willingness to use “creedal” ideas to draw lines by which we establish who is “our people” and who is not, who is to be welcomed and clung to and who is to be excluded, despised, and ridiculed. 

As one of my colleagues and friends that I most respect in the world asked me, though, if, given these negatives, the creed is not to be used as a mechanism for identifying a center of the Christian faith, as a starting point for building out theological literacy in the students as they are, what would I place there instead? So, herein, I hope to propose at least a basic sketch of what I may use.

I would center the Christian faith on a phrase memorialized by Paul in writing to the Corinthians: “Christ crucified”. Given that here we have an even shorter statement than a creed, I will attempt briefly to not only flesh out how this might function as the center of an initial course on the Christian faith, but also why it is superior to some kind of creedal statement.

In writing to the Corinthians, Paul explains (reminds?) them that their baptism was into the name of Christ and that it was Christ who was crucified, thus effecting something in connection with their baptism (1 Cor 1:13). Thus, he tells them, that though the entirety of humanity (both Jews and Greeks/gentiles, used as an hendiadys in 1 Cor 1:22-23) would consider the content of what Paul and his fellows proclaim worthless (a scandal to Jews and foolishness to gentiles), Christ crucified is the wisdom and power of God. It is through this lens that Paul asserts in the opening of his letter that all of the challenges currently dividing and besetting those in Christ in Corinth will be solved. Christ crucified in Corinth, as for Paul himself, changes everything. Most importantly, it changes everything because God has displayed the superiority of God’s weakness to human strength and God’s foolishness to human wisdom when God proved Jesus to be Christ (Messiah) in the Resurrection, by which God defeated sin and death (see 1 Cor 15, Phil 2, Rom 6-8, etc.). In order to understand “Christ crucified”, a first semester course would necessarily require moving out/backward to God, God’s creation, the reality of sin, Israel and God’s covenant, Kingship and Exile, the looking forward to God’s Messiah, etc., but beginning here as the heart of the Gospel, especially in light of how Paul typically reasons on the basis of Christ crucified, prevents us from viewing the center of Christian faith as a possible purity test or as a mechanism by which to draw lines. 

After all, for Paul Christ crucified has as one of its most powerful corollaries that God is now “breaking down the dividing wall” that was most fundamental to him as a Jew as to many other Jews as God’s Holy and chosen people, that wall between Jew and Gentile (Ephesians 2). Not only this, but many varieties of dividing lines are torn asunder by Christ crucified (see Gal 3:28). The moral logic of Christ crucified is an invitation into an inverted power dynamic, a fundamental interrogation of the human proclivity to look for tools that may be weaponized to elevate ourselves and people like us by identifying who is out, who doesn’t count, and who isn’t worthwhile, namely those who are not like us (see e.g. Luke 15). It is a call to greatness by way of humility, a call to fullness by way of emptying ourselves, a call to react to the love which we have received by looking not for ways to secure ourselves in that love, but rather by standing in that love as a place of sure-footing by which to be transformed into “a living sacrifice” as Paul would name it (see not only Rom 12, but Mark 9 and 10 and the parallel texts on greatness in Matthew and Luke). Surely, Paul could sympathize with the human tendency to experience and view God’s work in tearing down division as a threat to special status, but his encounter with the risen Christ changed everything for him. It was his preaching of this Christ crucified whom death could not hold that also caught the imagination of many Greeks and other gentiles. Surely Christ crucified today could also capture the imaginations of first-semester college students and serve as a foundation from which to build not only knowledge of the story of God through our sacred Scriptures, but also moral transformation in sanctification and a lifelong commitment to sojourning with the Church.

Alright, to be sure this is nascent and incomplete, but I find myself more convinced now than when I began of this as a centering starting point over and against any kind of creed. You, dear reader, are welcome to disagree, and if I may steal one other phrase from Paul in Phil 3:15, should you think differently on this matter, “I’m confident the Lord will also make this clear to you.” ;-)

Daily Office Readings 1/17/25

 

This year I will be regularly posting some thoughts that may occur to me from the biblical texts appointed for the Episcopal Daily Office. If you would like to follow along in the readings, they may be found here.

Readings for Friday, Jan 17, 2025: Psalms 16, 17, 22, Isaiah 42: 1-17, Ephesians 3:1-13, Mark 2:13-22

Today picks up closely where yesterday’s readings left off, and not only because the readings in Isaiah, Ephesians, and Mark are the verses immediately following. The theme is the same: God’s redemption is simultaneously surprising and inexplicable. Isaiah 42 recounts God’s version of setting things right (42:1-4), God’s immense power to create and thus God’s power to create anew (42:5-9), the response of the whole of God’s creation to God (42:10-13), and, finally, the reading ends with the surprising and inexplicable things God will be doing in this creating anew, this setting things right (42:14-17). It involves nothing less than things becoming what they are not. 

It is this imagery that Ephesians picks up in chapter 3. What God has done in creating one people out of the previously divided two is the very undoing of what was and the making of it into what it was not. Once, the people were divided in two, but now they are united as one (Eph 2:11-22). It is, as Ephesians 3:1 labels it “a mystery”. What better word could there be for rivers becoming islands? For mountains becoming flat places, for darkness becoming light? What better word is there for the crucified, shamed, and cursed man Jesus, to be not only alive, but Messiah and Lord, the most honored, the one before every knee will one day bow, the one of whom every tongue will confess that he is Lord (Phil 2:10-11)? It is an economy of God’s grace that only becomes clear through an apocalypse, a revelation, as Ephesians labels it (3:2-3). The very hiddenness of it is what makes it a mystery, along with the profundity of what has been and is being accomplished.

Thus, the pairing with Mark 2:13-22 highlights the apocalyptic (or revelatory) nature of Jesus’s presence among Israel and humanity. These verses play out the second and third in the set of five conflicts that open Jesus’s ministry in Capernaum. The first, yesterday, was over the power to forgive sins. The second here concerns who is worthy to join the table (and possibly if we allow the language of Ephesians to intrude a bit, the household) of Jesus. The third concerns proper pious conduct as the people of God, specifically a practice of fasting. Jesus’s presence in each instance changes what is obviously true, becoming right and true only through the revelation of a mystery. In yesterday’s healing of the paralytic, everyone “knows” only God can forgive sins, but Jesus’s ability to change another thing that everyone knows (paralytics don’t walk without the power of God) proves his authority to forgive sins. In Mark 2:13-17, everyone knows you shouldn’t eat with those kinds of people (tax collectors and sinners), but Jesus’s presence reveals something different: God’s healing (given the doctor imagery in v. 17) is exactly for those kinds of people, it is God “opening the eyes of the blind” and bringing out “the prisoners from the dungeon” and darkness (Is 42:7), it is God “leading the blind by a road they do not know” (Is 42:16). Once again God’s planning and action are mysterious and a matter of revelation (Eph 3). Finally, Mark 2:18-22 as the center conflict of the five takes on a particular climactic place in that Jesus’s presence as “Son of Man” means not that the standard forms of pious worship (e.g. fasting) should be even more adhered to, but rather it means the opposite of those pious activities: the presence of the Son of Man requires feasting and celebration. In some sense it requires this exactly because the mysterious-to-be-revealed plan involves the departure of the Son of Man. Things are not as they seem. God’s creative power takes things that are and makes them something they are not. God’s redemptive power is surprising and inexplicable.

Lingering Questions and thoughts: 1) Why does the LXX (Greek OT) remove the first half of Is 42:15, only mentioning the rivers becoming islands? 

2) The NRSV has translated the Greek οἰκονομία in consistently and in interesting ways. In Eh 3:2, the translators give “the commission (οἰκονομία) of God’s grace”, while the similar phrase in 3:9 is rendered “the plan (οἰκονομία) of the mystery”. These renderings don’t necessarily get us close to either the active element of the word or the household metaphorical realm the term implies. It’s not just a one-time commissioning of Paul as it may sound, but rather an ongoing and repeated entrusting of the working out of God’s grace in the realm of these people, the people made one out of the previously two. In addition, it is not some plan that has been decided from the foundations of time and just left to work itself out, like God is some divine computer coder who wrote the code and then hit execute. Rather, it is an ongoing negotiation of planning and replanning as the dynamic nature of the real existence in this household realm (that God has created out of the formerly two peoples, but now one people) plays out in real time. This is part of what makes it mysterious. Moreover, the household context is essential because of all that has been said in chapter two concerning the creation of one people. This people is the household of God.

Daily Office Readings for 1/16/25

This year I will be regularly posting some thoughts that may occur to me from the biblical texts appointed for the Episcopal Daily Office. If you would like to follow along in the readings, they may be found here.

Readings for Thursday, Jan 16, 2025: Psalm 18, Isaiah 41: 17-29, Ephesian s 2:11-22, Mark 2:1-12

Thematically, today’s readings hold together in the question of who is truly a god and by what actions is the true God to be known. Isaiah 41 is the lynchpin in my reading. Verse 20 gives a purpose clause for God’s actions as narrated earlier: “so that all may see and know, all may consider and understand, that the hand of the Lord has done this…” The remainder of the chapter follows up on this asking of the past (v 22) and then of the future (v 23), then moving into action as the witness to who is truly divine. So, we learn from vv. 17-19 that this true God is one who acts, but one who acts specifically to bring life from where there is none. God is the God of the redemption.

It is fitting, therefore, that Eph 2 and Mk 2 are paired with this text. Eph 2 narrates the wonderful power of God in redeeming the nations (the gentiles) into God’s chosen people and Mk 2 shows Jesus reveal his power in healing a paralyzed man. This Gospel narrative poses a question, though, in the form of the scribes. For Jesus does not set out to heal in his initial response to the paralyzed person, but rather to forgive sins. This forgiveness, though, is unrecognized for what it is by the scribes. They say in their hearts that he blasphemes in this statement because only God can forgive sins. Thus, in the spirit of Isaiah 41, Jesus answers “so that all may see and know” by reversing the state of this paralyzed person. As the Isaiah passage states that the wilderness will become a pool of water, reversing its fundamental character, so this person who cannot walk will get up and walk. It is the power of God to make things other than what they are. To tear down dividing walls and unite (Eph 2), to redeem even the most unredeemable.

A lingering question: I have always wondered what it means in Psalm 18 when the Psalmist writes that God shows up as “perverse” (as the NRSV would have it) to the crooked. Perhaps another time I will explore the Hebrew nuance here and consider a bit more what this text might be saying about God.