Tim Keller’s “The Prodigal God”

Tim Keller’s The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith is a great book.  In this short volume, Keller presents the gospel to his readers with a gentle integrity using the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32).  Building on the teaching of his mentor, Edmund P. Clowney, he notes that while the prodigal son is saved in the parable, the story ends with the father appealing to his older son to come in for the celebration of the younger brother’s return.  Keller writes that this party was being paid for out of the older brother’s inheritance, since the younger brother had already taken and spent his part of the father’s property.  Jesus’ target in this parable was the Pharisees and scribes (Luke 15:2), the “elder brothers” who criticized Jesus for associating with sinners, the “younger brothers.”

Keller argues that the two brothers represent the two ways that people sin against God: we can be younger brothers who pursue pleasure with disdain for tradition, or we can be moralists who try to earn favor with God and try to create their own righteousness.  Both are in opposition to loving God for who He is and acting morally because of God’s love and grace to us.  These two types of people often criticize each other, but each is missing God’s grace.  Following the interpretation that the parable is mostly directed at Jesus’ self-righteous critics and counteracting the usual focus on the younger brother, Keller spends more time unpacking the elder brother’s attitude.

Keller discusses our sin and the resulting alienation from God, although he does not say much (if anything) about hell.  This may be the one weakness of the book, although from this article you can tell that Keller considers the doctrine of hell important.  On the other hand, the final three chapters of the book focus on how sinners are redeemed, and give a compelling description for the costly love of Christ and the hope and glories of salvation in its different facets: relationship with God and other believers, the restoration of the creation, and sanctification.  One of the great parts about these chapters is that they point people to the wonders of salvation in a very deep and biblical way, which perform the important task of not simply scaring people away from hell but asking them to consider the joys of knowing God through Christ.  I think that this is a great book for Christians to examine their own hearts for elder and younger brother tendencies and to remind themselves to look upon God’s great love for us.  I also think that it is a fresh way to present the timeless gospel to someone who doesn’t believe in Christ.

Principles for worship

Multnomah University professors Brad Harper and Paul Louis Metzger discuss principles for worship, based on John D. Witvliet’s Worship Seeking Understanding.  The one that spoke most to me was their third principle:

Integrating liturgy and culture requires us to be critical of our own cultural context. Worship leaders need to critique the culturally generated worship forms they use, asking whether each form enhances or degrades authentic worship. Contemporary forms must be examined to see not only if they engage the church through commonly understandable symbols, but also if they are able to represent God and the gospel with integrity.

Few people, perhaps, would question that popular cultural worship forms can engage a broad spectrum of people. People who already identify with contemporary music and computer graphics will find themselves easily drawn into the worship experience when such forms are used. But thoughtful worship leaders and theologians have recognized that there can be a downside as well. As theologian Donald Bloesch has written,

“Worship is not a means to tap into the creative powers within us rather than an occasion to bring before God our sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving. Hymns that retell the story of salvation as delineated in the Bible are being supplanted by praise choruses that are designed to transport the soul into a higher dimension of reality.”

Worship is not about a search for meaning or experience, but an acknowledgment that meaning and salvation are found in God’s incomparable act of redemption in Christ. Methodist pastor Craig Rice agrees: “As long as the church continues to confuse the hunger for God, extant in every human heart, with the same yearnings that drive a market culture and a consumerist society, its worship will remain irrelevant at best and an outright impediment at worst.”

There is no question that authentic worship will meet people’s needs. The problem occurs when worship forms are focused on meeting people’s felt needs. Each week, the church is filled with people whose felt needs have been defined for them by a consumer culture that generally urges them to focus on self-fulfillment. The role of the church in worship is not to meet felt needs but to show people that their real needs go deeper.

Can contemporary worship forms address people’s real needs? Certainly. But in choosing only forms that are comfortable and familiar, there is always the tendency to cater to what people want to hear and feel, rather than confronting them with God, whose presence is not always so comfortable. And a God made comfortable by market-driven worship is unlikely to confront sinners with their need for repentance or a gospel that is fundamentally about self-denial rather than self-fulfillment. Quoting Martin Marty, theologian Marva Dawn remarks that when worship is driven by the market, it “draws crowds, but it is so fully adapted to the not-yet-born-again ‘that worship becomes measured by the aesthetics and experience of those who don’t yet know why we should shudder.’”

I largely agree with the quote from Donald Bloesch about praise choruses, although I know that many people find them meaningful and that I have different preferences from many of my friends.  I don’t wish to denigrate the newer music without trying to understand more about its appeal.  But, to me, the real value of their discussion comes with their contrast between the common perception and the real meaning of worship: “Worship is not about a search for meaning or experience, but an acknowledgment that meaning and salvation are found in God’s incomparable act of redemption in Christ.”

I’d recommend checking out the whole thing.

Lincoln bests the theologians

The last major chapter of America’s God compares the subtlety and humility of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address in March 1865 with the way that theologians talked about the Civil War, which Noll finds predictable and self-righteous.  Noll writes that while American theologians in the mid-19th century often believed that they could interpret God’s sovereign will with great certainty, Lincoln displayed no such hubris in his Second Inaugural.  Here is the most theological section (you can read the whole thing here, and it’s not very long):

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Noll does not believe that the American theologians never plumbed great theological depths or that Lincoln was always deep or even orthodox.  He argues, though, that evangelicals had almost conquered America too thoroughly, leaving a “domesticated” evangelical theology that no longer challenged Americans.

Noll believes that this domestication engendered two unfortunate trends (he even uses the word “tragedy”).  For thinkers who found the American theological synthesis inadequate, like Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Lincoln, the quest “to be faithful to the God they found in their own hearts — or in the Bible, or in the sweep of events” pushed them away from the orthodox American church.  For evangelical Protestant theologians, their tendency “was to rest content with a God defined by the American conventions God’s own loyal servants had exploited so well” (438).

I found the conclusion of this chapter very powerful.  It has always happened that each new culture to which Christianity spreads will adapt Christianity to its own culture, and we in America are no exception.  The problem comes when we adapt it so thoroughly that it becomes domesticated and we become less willing to see the necessity of living lives that truly reflect Christ.  It’s a challenge that Christians of all times must wrestle with.

The perils of short-term teaching missions

The Desiring God series on short-term missions took one day to look at short-term teaching missions, linking to an article by David Livermore.

In his article, Livermore studies the difference in perception between the American trainers and their students in the global church.  Here’s his rationale:

I’ve spent a great deal of time studying training initiatives done by Western church leaders in Nonwestern contexts. There’s little question that there’s compelling need to serve the global church with theological and leadership training. The expansive growth of the church around the world is producing a shortage of theologically equipped pastors and church leaders.
• There are approximately 2.2 million evangelical churches in the world
• 85% are led by men and women who have no theological training.
• 7000 new church leaders are needed daily to care for the growing church.
• If every Christian training institute in the world operated at 120% capacity, less than 10 percent of the unequipped leaders would be trained. (WEA Consultation in Iguassu)
Statistics like these make me more than a little passionate about the need to offer theological training and equipping to church leaders around the globe. But I find great dissonance with my desire to run hard at meeting this need and my fear of perpetuating the subtle but real imperialistic tendencies we bring these kinds of training endeavors.

The Resurgence loves the environment. Cool.

Jonathan Dodson at the Resurgence has a list of practical ways to integrate ourselves into our communities and share the gospel with our neighbors.  I’ve thought about some of these practices before as a way to escape the individualism of modern society, but not much (if at all) in the context of evangelism.  One that I’ve already been trying for environmental and personal reasons is this one:

Walk, Don’t Drive

If you live in a walkable area, make a practice of getting out and walking around your neighborhood, apartment complex, or campus. Instead of driving to the mailbox or convenience store, walk to get mail or groceries. Be deliberate in your walk. Say hello to people you don’t know. Strike up conversations. Attract attention by walking the dog, carrying along a 6-pack to share, bringing the kids. Make friends. Get out of your house! Last night I spent an hour outside gardening with my family. We had good conversations with about four of our neighbors. Take interest in your neighbors. Ask questions. Engage. Pray as you go. Save some gas, the planet, and some people.

I hadn’t thought of it as a way to talk about the gospel with those around me too.  If you have a couple of minutes, check out the whole list.

Hat tip: Justin Taylor

The cultural context of unbelief

John Piper’s Easter sermon addressed how today’s culture provides a different challenge for evangelism:

Behind those two different kinds of unbelief—the kind from 40 years ago and the kind from the present day—is a different set of assumptions. For example, in my college days the assumption pretty much still held sway, though it was starting to give way with the rise of existentialism, that there are fixed, closed natural laws, that make the world understandable and scientifically manageable, and these laws do not allow the truth of the claim that someone has risen from the dead to live forever. That was a commonly held assumption: The modern world with its scientific understanding of natural laws does not allow for resurrections. So unbelief was often rooted in that kind of assumption.

But today, that’s not the most common working assumption. Today the assumption is not that there are natural laws outside of me forbidding the resurrection of Jesus, but there is a personal law inside of me that says: I don’t have to adapt my life to anything I don’t find helpful. Or you could state it another way: Truth for me is what I find acceptable and helpful.

This shifts the cultural ground in the way that the Acts 29 Network discussed in the link that I posted yesterday.  I think it also speaks to the different mindset among young evangelicals discussed in the Matthew Lee Anderson article that I posted a while back.

It’s great to see that there are Christians are working hard to stay on top of cultural trends in order to be compelling witnesses today.  I look forward to continuing to learn from them.

The context of conversion

Through the Desiring God blog, I came across this post from the Acts 29 Network.  Jonathan Dodson writes that there is a temptation for Christians to expect others to follow their path to conversion:

Missionaries of the 19^th and 20^th centuries exported their understanding and experience of Western “gospel change” to non-Western peoples. This often included a conversion that issued “in a holy life typically marked by a period of deep consciousness of personal sin followed by a sense of joyous liberation dawning with the realization of personal forgiveness through Christ.” In other words, missionaries expected Non-Western peoples to undergo a pattern of gospel change similar to their own. However, while the gospel certainly changed the peoples of Africa, India, and Asia, not all change produced by the gospel was identical.

Gospel change in some cultures is more gradual than instantaneous. The American Evangelical tradition of “deep consciousness of personal sin followed by a sense of joyous liberation” is not common to all cultures. Missionaries labored for years before they saw a single conversion, and even then, the conversions were sometimes very different than what they expected. Cultures that are more communal experience conversion differently that cultures that are highly individualistic. In many African and Asian cultures, conversions come in pairs or families instead of by single individuals. Not all gospel change happens identically, especially across cultures.

As I have mentioned before, the idea and reality of the gospel traveling across cultural boundaries fascinates me.  This ideas in this passage show some of the foundation needed to understand the global diversity of Christianity, as seen in the example of the Dinka people of Sudan.

A second note of interest about Dodson’s post is that he takes the global experience and applies it to the contemporary U.S.  He writes that in trying to convert Americans, we often rely on a common Christian cultural foundation.  Yet in “a post-Christian cultural climate,” he writes, we have to find ways to proclaim the gospel that speak to our contemporaries.  We should expect conversions differ from our own experiences, perhaps by being more gradual:

Our goal should not be to replicate our personal conversion experience, but to preach the gospel effectively so that we can make disciples in the emerging post-Christian context. We must heed the failures of the past and call people, not to our experience of conversion, but to the experience of the Spirit’s converting, whatever that process may entail.

If this approach insterests you, take a look at the About page of Acts 29.  I like how they combine Reformed orthodoxy with a desire to reach people with the gospel in culturally meaningful ways.

Thoughts and Questions on Global Christianity

The idea of Christianity crossing cultural boundaries fascinates me.  We’ve seen it since the beginning of course, with Jewish, Middle Eastern, Greek, Latin, and Germanic Christians all coming into the fold within the first four centuries of the church’s existence.  And all of these catergories are certainly too broad.  The most interesting issues for me are how Christian teachings are interepreted by each group.  How does Christianity change the cultures that it enters?  What do converts keep from their pre-Christian traditions?  What effects do these changes have on the culture and the church?

So the story that I related in the last post raised some interesting issues for me.

• First, I was struck that the belief in a spirit world by the Sudanese Christians seems to mirror their traditional beliefs before conversion and probably puts them closer to the mindset of early Christians on this issue than many Western Christians today.  A sermon last Sunday pointed to the idea of darkness in the world that appears in the Gospel of John, and Peter Brown and the Western Civ textbook that I use also point out that early Christians believed in a world full of hostile spirits.
• Second, some quick searching seems to confirm that Nhialic is the Dinka word for a supreme God.  Lamin Sanneh said in Whose Religion is Christianity? that using African words for God, rather than trying to import European words, has helped Christianity to spread.  From some of my reading, it seems that African religions tend to have one creator god over all the other gods.
• Third, this strikes me as a different approach than the early Christians took.  Peter Brown writes that the early Christians viewed the pagan gods as devils rather than nonexistent.  One illustration of this is in St. Ambrose’s letter to Emperor Valentinian II, arguing that a pagan altar should not be rebuilt: “the gods of the heathen,” as Scripture says, “are devils.”  It seems (and I could be wrong) that Christians used the general words for deity, deus (Latin) and theos (Greek), rather than promoting a specific connection between God and a creator god like Uranus.  I don’t have the theological or missiological background to defend or criticize either approach.  I just thought that it was interesting.
• Finally, the idea of the cross as possessing spiritual power is an interesting parallel to the protective properties of sacred symbols and objects that has a long history in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity.

Sometimes, I’m struck by how naturalistic and secular my training in history is.  It gave me the tools to explain and compare but not to comment authoritatively on differing Christian beliefs and practices.  What are your reactions to the descriptions of the cross in Bor Dinka Christianity and the way that the Gospel crosses cultural boundaries?

Global Christianity: The cross in southern Sudan

I have been teaching an introductory course on the history of Christianity using Mark Noll’s Turning Points as our textbook.  This Sunday’s lesson focuses on the modern-day reality of global Christianity, brought about both by missions and the “indigenization” (or adaptation to local cultures) of the Gospel.  Noll agrees with what I usually hear that missionary activity is the necessary first step that needs to be built on with the appropriation of the Christian message by the converts themselves.

Noll provides an example of this from the Bor Dinka people of southern Sudan (who were deeply affected by the recent civil war in Sudan), for whom the cross is an ever-present symbol, which “represents a Christianization of existing cultural forms, for the Dinka had historically put to use a wide variety of carved walking sticks, staffs, and clubs.  Among Dinka converts, the Christian symbol has filled a form provided by traditional culture.”  He continues:

In the second instance, however, the Dinka appropriation of the cross has also become a powerful expression of pastoral theology.  As revealed in a flourishing of fresh, indigenous hymnody, the cross is now a comprehensive reality of great power.  The cross provides protection against hostile spirits, or jak; the cross figures larges in the baptisms that mark conversions; in hymns the cross becomes an ensign or banner raised high for praise and protection; the cross brings the great God, Nhialic, close to the Dinka in the person of Christ, whose suffering is appropriated with striking subjectivity; the cross is spoken of as the mën, or the solid central post that supports the Dinka’s large, thatched cattle sheds; and the cross becomes a symbol of the potent Spirit who replaces the ancentral jak ([singular] jok), whose protective powers have so obviously failed in recent years.  A song composed by Mary Nyanluaak Lem Bol illustrates the depth to which the cross has entered Dinka culture in desparate times:

We will carry the cross.  We will carry the cross.

The cross is the gun for the evil jok.

Let us chase the evil jok away with the cross.

Note: Noll’s source for his information on the Bor Dinka is Marc R. Nikkel’s “The Cross of Bor Dinka Christians” in Studies in World Christianity 1 (1995): pp. 160-185.

UPDATE: I fixed a spelling mistake on Tuesday, March 31.