Who is Will D. Campbell

I have recently discovered a theologian and Christian witness of the highest order.  I am ashamed to admit that I made it through seminary without ever hearing the name Will D. Campbell.  However, I am not surprised.  Campbell seems to be one of the better kept secrets of the last fifty years.  In the local church I have found very few people who have ever heard of Campbell.  So I offer this post as an effort to spread the word: Will D. Campbell deserves a hearing from all Christians, especially American Christians of the South.  The following is in no way original thought.  Rather I offer aspects of Campbell’s life and thought as presented in the biographical work Crashing the Idols: The Vocation of Will. D. Campbell (and every other Christian for that matter) by Richard Goode.  If the following interests you I would highly recommend “Crashing the Idols” as a fine introduction to Campbell’s life and thought. 

William D. Campbell was born on July 18, 1924 in Amite County in Southwest Mississippi.  He was raised a Southern Baptist and eventually East Fork Baptist Church ordained him to the ministry by the Laying on of hands.[1]   Campbell attended Louisiana College in Pineville Louisiana for one year before he was swept up into the spirit of the times and in 1942 he left Louisiana College to join the army.  There he spent three years as a surgical assistant in the south Pacific.[2] When he returned from WWII he married and finished his undergraduate work with a degree in English at Wake Forrest.  From there he did a year of graduate study at Tulane before he moved on to Yale Divinity School where he graduated in 1952 with a degree in Divinity. 

After graduation Campbell took on a local church in Taylor, Louisiana.[3]  Here Campbell was already showing his tendency toward “liberal” thought and action as he was a vocal advocate for de-segregation and caused a stir by joining picketing workers at a local paper plant.  Campbell served in Taylor for two years before taking a position as the Director of Religious Life at Ole Miss in 1954.[4]  At Ole Miss Campbell was involved in several controversies over his outspoken views and actions regarding race relations, including (gasp!) a campus ping pong match between Campbell and an African-American Baptist Clergy colleague.[5]  After two years of strife Campbell resigned from his post in 1956. 

During this time the National Council of Churches recognized the growing racial tension in the South and hired Campbell as the Associate Executive Director of the Department of Racial and Cultural Relations of the Division of Christian Life and Work of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA.[6]  Based out of Nashville Tn, Campbell’s job description was to:

(1) Serve as a liaison between persons and groups subjected to economic  pressures as a result of race tensions.

(2) Gather facts regarding race relations in the South and to disseminate such information to denominations and inter-denominational agencies engaged in social action.

(3) Hold and attend conferences on race relations

(4) Function as a resource person for literature and materials on race relations and if necessary write any needed materials himself. 

From his position with the NCC, “Campbell became a kind of itinerate troubleshooter in the civil rights movement.”[7] In Little Rock, Arkansas, Campbell was one of the two white Clergymen to escort the ‘little rock nine’ to school through the jeering crowds and National Guard. During this time of intense engagement with the struggle for civil rights, Campbell was quickly showing himself to true follower of Jesus Christ. “[Campbell] avoided both political power plays, and an easy demonization of the so-called ‘other side.’  ‘In any concern for social justice,’ Campbell told the NCC in his 1959 report, ‘the soul of the racist must concern us as much as the suffering of the victim, and when it does not we are being something less than Christian.’”[8]

For Campbell, 2 Corinthians 5 became a central part of his life and Christian action.  There we find Paul saying:

¹⁴For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. ¹⁵And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them. 16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view;^* even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view,^* we know him no longer in that way. ¹⁷So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! ¹⁸All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; ¹⁹that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself,^* not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. ²⁰So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. ²¹For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Campbell was urged on through hardship and trial, death threats and the murder of friends because he was convinced that Christ died for the victim of racism as well as the offender.  As he was no longer able to regard anyone from a human point of view, he refused to accept the mistreatment of some based on the color of their skin.  On the other hand, because he had been entrusted as a minister of reconciliation, he could not simply condemn the oppressor as a lost cause or as one who was unworthy of God’s grace.  Rather he worked to be an ambassador of God’s justice for the disenfranchised as well as an ambassador of God’s forgiveness for the oppressor. 

One example of this can be found in his response to the murder of his friend Jonathan Daniels.  On August 20, 1965 Jonathan Daniels, a seminary student from Cambridge Mass. was shot and killed while leaving a country store in Lowndes County Alabama.  He was shot by a deputy named Thomas Coleman in plain daylight before multiple witnesses.  Not surprisingly, Thomas Coleman was quickly acquitted by an Alabama court. 

Campbell’s reaction to the murder of his friend is a remarkable act of Christian witness.  In an article titled “Law and Love in Lowndes” Campbell lifts up for us the radically offensive nature of the Good News of Jesus Christ. 

“The notion that a man can go to a store where a group of unarmed human beings are assembled, fire a shotgun blast at one of them, tearing his lungs and heart from his body, turn on another and send lead pellets ripping through his flesh and bones, and that God will set him free is almost more than we can stand.  But unless that is precisely the case then there is no gospel, there is no good news.  Unless that is the truth we are back under law and Christ’s death and resurrection are of no account. When Thomas killed Jonathan he committed a crime against the state of Alabama.  Alabama, for reasons of its own, chose not to punish him for that crime against itself.  And do we not all know what those reasons were?  When Thomas killed Jonathan he committed a crime against God.  The strange, near maddening thing about this case is that both these offended parties have rendered the same verdict-not for the same reasons, not in the same way, but the verdict is the same-acquittal.”

Campbell’s bold assertion of God’s love and radical grace for a racist murder can be disturbing.  We are rightly troubled that the court system of Alabama in 1965 would actively block justice from being served.  However, we are equally scandalized that God would by the grace of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection forgive or acquit the Thomas Coleman’s of the world.  I think Campbell helps us to see the hypocrisy of claiming that “Jesus died on the cross for MY sins” while being shocked that he might have died on the cross of the sins of those who would harm us.  Campbell asks why would be so shocked at this Gospel acquittal.

“Perhaps it is because we are afraid of the Colemans of this world.  Perhaps it is because they have rebuffed us in the Delta and elsewhere.  But worse than either of these it may be that we just plain do not love them.”

Campbell forces us to reckon with the reckless nature of God’s love.  If we loved Thomas Coleman as God does we would rejoice in his forgiveness.  However, because we are scared of those who would harm us, because we just plain do not love our neighbors as we love ourselves, we build walls, borders, prisons and even churches to protect ourselves. 

Will D. Campbell’s life is one of rich Christian witness to the abundant love of God offered to all people through Jesus Christ.  If the above has challenged you or piqued your interest I highly encourage you to encounter Campbell’s writings for yourself:

• Writings on Reconclilation and Resistance by Will D. Campbell ed. Richard Goode. Eugene: Cascade Books, 2010. 
• Crashing the Idols: The Vocation of Will. D. Campbell (and every other Christian for that matter) by Richard Goode. Eugene: Cascade Books, 2010.
• Brother to a Dragonfly: 25th Anniversary Edition by Will D. Campbell.  London: Continuum, 2000.

---

[1] Goode, 4.

[2] Goode, 5-6.

[3] Goode, 9.

[4] Goode, 10.

[5] Goode, 13.

[6] Goode, 15.

[7] Goode, 16.

[8] Goode, 18. 

What About Hitler?

 

In ‘What about Hitler’ Robert Brimlow offers an answer to a persistently troublesome question.  As Brimlow explains:

Anyone who advocates pacifism either as a result of Christian commitment, or as a secular philosophical position, or even as a classroom exercise must provide an answer to the questions ‘But what about Hitler?  Isn’t Hitler an example of an evil that was so great…that warfare and all it entails is the only adequate response?’ (66)

Obviously for advocates of Christian pacifism, this question is difficult to answer.  Brimlow’s book length answer comes in ‘The Christian Practices of Everyday Life’ series published through the Ekklesia Project.  In keeping with tone of the series the work is directed to a nonacademic audience.  More specifically, the book is written for the local church as it struggles to follow Jesus in the midst of wars and rumors of wars. (13) 

 Brimlow does not assume that the reader has a working knowledge all the issues involved in answering so complex a question.  Accordingly, the book walks the reader through the ancient foundations of the just war tradition as well as its setting in more contemporary thought.  Brimlow also considers ‘supreme emergencies’ in response to which both pacifism and the just war tradition might be morally laid aside. 

 After Brimlow has guided the reader through some of the more abstract aspects of both the question and possible answers, he turns to the concrete ways in which pacifists have actually engaged evil.  This move is made through an examination of Mohandas Gandhi and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Of course, spending time with pacifist forces one to re-evaluate what success and failure might look like within the context of faithful Christian discipleship.  Brimlow helps the reader with this important work in a chapter titled ‘Success, failure, and hypocrisy.’

 All of this leads up to the seventh chapter of the book in which offers his Brimlow answers the question ‘What about Hitler?’  The answer is worth reading in its entirety. 

Chapter 7:    The Christian Response

At this juncture it is time for me to respond to the Hitler question: how should Christians respond to the kind of evil Hitler represents if just war theory and supreme emergencies are precluded, and if we live with a different meaning of success? 

 We must live faithfully: we must be humble in our faith and truthful in what we say and do; we must repay evil with good; and we must be peacemakers.  This may also mean as a result that the evildoers will kill us.  Then, we shall also die.

 That’s it.  There is nothing else-or rather, anything else is only a footnote to this.  We are called to live the kingdom as he proclaimed it and be his disciples, come what may.  We are, in his words, flowers flourishing and growing wild today, and tomorrow destined for the furnace.  We are God’s people living by faith. 

 The Gospel is clear and simple, and I know what the response to the Hitler question must be.  And I desperately want to avoid this conclusion.  When my time comes, I may well trot out every nuanced argument I can develop, or seek for a way out in St. Thomas Aquinas or Paul Ramsey.  This would serve me and my fear, my hypocrisy, and my faithlessness very well.  But I would not be telling the truth or living as I ought and as I am called to live. (151)

 Brimlow’s answer is stunning.  It is stunning to think that faithfulness in this life might actually be more important that survival.  It is hard to imagine than faithfulness might cause death rather than rescue us from death.  If you are dissatisfied with the above answer, you are not alone.  Brimlow admits that

 Most of the people I have spoken with about that last chapter have expressed some significant dissatisfaction with it. (160)

 The dissatisfaction stems from our fear of death.  Brimlow puts the matter with an almost comic plainness, ‘well nobody wants to die.’  However, the bare fact of human life is that we will all die.  No amount of struggling with enemy combatants abroad or viruses within our own bodies will prolong our lives indefinitely.  We will all die.  The question is who or what will set the terms of our death?  For who or for what will we die? 

 For Christians of course, the answer is Jesus.  The message of the Gospel is just this: that Jesus has overcome sin and death.  We are right to live with an unshakeable hope that soon and very soon pain and tears and death will be no more.  But as Brimlow suggests, our hope has trumped our faith. 

 Our relationship to Jesus has become inverted in that our hope is more fundamental than our faith, and our expectations of him determine how we will live; rather, we ought to understand that his expectations of us will determine how we will die. (167)

 Once we allow his expectations of us to determine how we will both live and die it becomes easier to understand that ‘our call to follow Jesus and be peacemakers means that we will die.’ (167)  Of course no one likes this answer.  We want an answer that is more just, more effective, an answer which doesn’t require suffering and death.  However, as Brimlow understands it, this is the answer that the Gospel offers us. 

 Brimlow’s answer to ‘the Hitler’ question is frightening in its simplicity.  “What about Hitler?  We must be faithful…and so we shall die.”  That this answer is unsettling and deeply unsatisfying does not make it any less true.  As Christians we worship a God who responded to our sin in just this fashion.  The message of the Gospel, the good news which must give meaning and direction to our life and death is that in response to our sin and failure, Jesus was faithful…and he died. 

 Repeatedly the Gospels offer examples of times when Jesus could have called down angles to protect him or fight for him.  The work of John Howard Yoder has helped me to see that this must have been a real temptation for Jesus.  As the scene from the Garden of Gethsemane makes clear, Jesus too did not desire to die in the name of being faithful.  And yet he did.  The faith of the Church is that Jesus offered his life for ours, that he rose on the third day and in so doing defeated even the worst violence and injustice this broken world will ever produce. 

 As we approach radical violence and injustice and struggle with the tension between survival and faithfulness, let us remember our savior and his radical act of self-giving love.

The Task of Dogmatics

I have just returned from the Ekklesia Project’s annual gathering at DePaul University in Chicago.  The theme of this year’s conference was ‘And God Said…’  Language, Wordcare and Radical Discipleship. The ‘Gathering’ was a great time to make new friendships, renew old ones and learn a lot in the process.  Over the course of three days there were several interesting lectures, breakout sessions and round table discussions. 

One of the breakout sessions was entitled ‘Teach us how to pray: Liturgical Language as Christian Formation and Witness.’  This session challenged the participants to consider the ways in which they shape their liturgical language.  Through the discussion we named some of the factors that determine how we use language in worship.  At times our language is policed by the need to be relevant.  Accordingly, rich words like ‘Doxology’ and ‘Eucharist’ are ditched for words that speak more easily to trendy twenty somethings.  At other times our language is determined by its emotional affectivness.  In certain contexts a prayer of confession may be set aside if it will ‘put off’ people with its negativity.  However, in certain contexts, where guilt is an important part of whipping people into an emotional frenzy, several prayers of confession (albeit in various forms: prayer, indicting song, condemning sermon, sinners prayer) may be used.  Other factors effect our worship as well.  When the 4^th of July falls on a Sunday it invariably dictates to churches in North America that patriotic hymns and displays will be the order of the day.  In other words, there are great many factors which measure, effect, guide and misdirect the Church’s speech on any given Sunday.  This scenario begs the question ‘what actually should measure the churches speech during worship?’  Granted, a great many things impact our speech about God, but what actually should dictate the way we speak of God. 

During a lecture at the Ekklesia Project, one of my former professors, D. Stephen Long suggested a possible answer when he argued that the Church’s doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation are (or at least should be) guiding lights for the Church’s speech during worship.  This called to mind Karl Barth and his definition of dogmatics. 

 The first paragraph of Barth’s Church Dogmatics is titled ‘The Task of Dogmatics.’  At the beginning of a 14 volume exposition of the Church’s dogma Barth offers an explanation of what exactly he means by ‘dogma.’  According to Barth:

As a theological discipline dogmatics is the scientific self-examination of the Christian Church with respect to the content of its distinctive talk about God. (CD 1.I pg. 3)

 The Church stands in a uniquely precarious position.  We are called to proclamation.  We must speak of God.  And yet, as creatures we cannot rightly speak of the creator.  Barth refers to the frailty of our proclamation as its ‘humanity.’

But as it confesses God the Church also confesses both the humanity and responsibility of its action.  It realizes that it is exposed to fierce temptation as it speaks of God and it realizes that it must give an account to God for the way in which it speaks. (CD 1.I pg. 3)

 Given that the Church’s speech about God constantly falls under temptation and judgment, careful attention to language and the way we use words should be of the highest importance.  However, the question quickly arises, ‘By what criteria shall we measure the faithfulness of the Church’s speech about God?’  As we have already seen above, a great many non-theological and quite frankly non-Christian factors exert a disproportionate amount of influence on the Church’s proclamation.  Barth warns against measuring the Church’s speech according to ‘alien principles’ or ‘sciences.’

 The other sciences have not in fact recognized and adopted the task of theology.  To be sure, attempts have always been made on all sides to criticize and correct the Church’s talk about God.  But what is required is its criticism and correction in the light of the being of the Church, of Jesus Christa as its basis, goal, and content. (CD 1.I pg. 6)

 Barth recognized that a great many ‘sciences’ have attempted to measure and correct the Church’s speech about God.  Consider for example the recent popularity of the book ‘UnChristian’ Using the science of sociology and the Barna Group conducted massive polling to gather information on how the Church is perceived by 16-29 year olds.   The result is that the church is perceived to be hypocritical, too political, too judgmental, too old fashioned etc.  I personally know several ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ who have allowed their proclamation of the Gospel to be measured by the reported perceptions of others brought to us by this popular book.  Sociology, anthropology, psychology; as Barth rightly understood, the sciences continue to criticize the Church’s speech from all sides. 

 But notice the careful use of language in the first three words of the above quote from Barth.  Barth claims that the other sciences are quick to criticize.  The use of the word ‘other’ should indicate to us that for Barth, theology too is a science.  This idea, that theology is a science, will surely sound odd to our modern ears.  We have been fashioned to think of science as objective and rational while speech about God is inherently private and subjective.  However, Barth’s reclaiming of the word ‘science’ for theology is a not so subtle challenge to our usual way of thinking.  To be sure Barth means something other than what we usually consider ‘science.’  By using the word Barth does not indicate that theology proceeds on the basis of facts and figures, flow charts and statistics, hypotheses and empirical verification.  Rather, theology is scientific in that in proceeds on the basis of its own basis.  As Colin Gunton explains:

 To be scientific you base your science on the object of that knowledge. This might seem rather simple, but you don’t expect a chemist to prove that chemicals exist through non-chemical means.  Chemistry is only scientific it if presupposes that there are chemicals and gets on with them. (Gunton 2007, Pg. 69)

 In other words, dogmatics is a science in as much as it gets on with the subject matter unique to its subject.  The unique subject matter of both dogmatics and the Church’s proclamation is Jesus Christ.  Again, consider the quote from above.  In the last sentence Barth names Jesus Christ as the being of the Church.  Jesus is the basis, the goal and the content of both dogmatics and the Church’s speech.  That the source and content, the very being of the Church is God’s self-revealing as Jesus Christ, is a theme that Barth stresses over and over again.

 Talk about God has true content when it conforms to the being of the Church, i.e., when it conforms to Jesus Christ. (CD 1.I pg. 10)

 So then what should measure the churches life and speech?  For Barth, the Church’s speech must be measured by its being, its source, its only true content-Jesus Christ.   Once this standard is accepted, dogmatics becomes the mechanism by which the Church’s life and speech are tested.   

 I wish that we could take for granted that the one true measure of the Church’s wordcare is faithfulness to the true Word God has spoken to us, namely Jesus Christ.  However this is not the case.  When churches across North America adjust their worship life to make it feel less judgmental because the Barna Group has told them that 20,000 young Americans have reported that the Church is ‘too judgmental’ can we really claim that we are taking our lead from our source Jesus Christ?  Are we allowing dogmatics (theology) to be the science by which we measure our life together? 

 It is precisely for reasons like this that I appreciate the work of the Ekklesia Project.  As a pastor of two churches I hear a thousand voices a day clamoring for a presence in the preaching, singing and praying of my churches.  That a group of Christians would gather for a few days to study and pray about wordcare and discipleship is a powerfully encouraging happening.  If you are interested in the Ekklesia Project, I would invite you to follow the link above and consider the on-going work of the Ekklesia Project.

Selling Out the Church

Selling out the Church: The Dangers of Church Marketing
Kenneson, Philip D. and James L. Street.  Eugene, Cascade Books. 1997.

Much of the current work on Evangelism is a worthless  kind of cross between ‘The Magic of Thinking Big’ and ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People.’ The next time you visit your local Christian book store, look under the section headings of ‘Church Growth’ or ‘Church Leadership’ and you will find a wide variety of books offering every manner of 12 step program for your church to reach its full potential.  Despite the variety of colorful covers, one constant in all these books is the acceptance of the validity and even necessity of a market mentality. Selling Out the Church challenges the presence of the market mentality and its accompanying techniques in the local church.

Philip Kenneson and James Street begin the book with the question “Can the market driven church remain Christ’s church?” (16) The question is motivated by a deep conciction that the principals which motivate the market stand at odds with those which should give life to the church.  Early on, the two state their position, “We believe that the church is called to be a sign, a foretaste, and a herald of God’s present but still emerging kingdom…If the convictions that animate the life of the church are at cross purposes with the convictions at the heart of this coming kingdom, then the church will fail to be what God has called it to be.” (23)  The authors then set out to show how the convictions of the ‘market orientation’ orient us not towards the Kingdom of God but towards the kingdoms of this world.

The book begins with a forward written by Stanley Hauerwas and then proceeds with seven rich chapters and a conclusion. To offer just one example, the second chapter challenges the neat separation of form and content which is a central assumption of church marketing advocates. Street & Kenneson state “Church marketers assume that marketing is a neutral process or technique that leaves the substance of the faith untouched.  Said another way…marketing affects only the form in which the faith is presented, not the content of the faith itself.” (26) The assumption that marketing techniques are neutral allows market advocates to both side step discussions about whether market strategies are appropriate for the church, and suggest that market techniques can be employed without actually affecting the content of the gospel message. Put differently, marketers argue that changing the package does not necessarily change the content.

This is exactly what Street & Kenneson set out to challenge. Techniques are not value neutral but are embodied in much larger narratives that give them meaning. Someone who refuses to eat because they are on a diet and someone who refuses to eat because they are on a hunger strike are using the same technique (not eating) but their story and the end to which they are working give different meanings to the technique. This serves as a helpful rebuttal to those who would claim that if your church has a sign out front, you are already doing church marketing. This is not true. The presence of the sign is given intelligibility by the end to which it is pointing.  This is just small example of the counter-cultural witness of this book. The authors state repeatedly that their goal is simply to begin to help us to see the subtle ways that a market orientation subverts the Church’s counter-cultural witness and forces us to mimic the consumer culture in which we live.

 The only complaint that I have about this book is that it is too short. I would have liked more help with a constructive path forward. They point in some helpful directions while at the same time making it clear that their task is assessing the illness not prescribing the corrective medicine. The last sentence of the book stands as a wonderful witness in and of itself. Speaking of the Jesus that few in our current cultural climate want to encounter, the authors state, “it is this Jesus who reveals to us…that the way to life is through death.” (164)  No doubt this sentence sends chills down the spine of church marketers and growth gurus.

Selling out the Church is a wonderful book and I would highly recommend it to churches discerning the fine line between faithfulness and selling out the church. 

(Phil Kenneson is an endorser of the Ekklesia Project. Follow the link on this blog to see more examples of the important work of the Ekkleisa Project.)

On Church in a Coffee House

On this blog I have reviewed D. Stephen Long’s short book Theology and Culture: A Guide to the Discussion.  In that review I referenced the often assumed and unexamined idea that the Church must be culturally relevant.  In response to the review my good friend Matt asked me to clarify why it would be theologically unsound to be Church in a coffee house.  This post is an attempt to answer that question.

The Church’s perceived need to be culturally relevant is self-destructive and works against our witness to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.  In his wonderful book Live to Tell: Evangelism for a Postmodern Age Brad Kallenberg offers a post modern (and truthfully pre-modern) understanding of conversion as “the change of one’s social identity, the acquisition of a new conceptual language, and the shifting of one’s paradigm” (Kallenberg 32).   To take just one of these three, conversion requires us to learn to speak the world differently. 

To help us put some form to this concept, I’ll refer to an article by Robert Louis Wilken.  In September 2005, First Things ran an article entitled The Church’s Way of Speaking.  There Robert Louis Wilken recounts this pre-modern tale. 

When St. Augustine abandoned the teaching of rhetoric in Milan to enroll for baptism, he asked St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, what to read in the Scriptures “to make me readier and fitter to receive so great a grace”? Ambrose told him to read the prophet Isaiah. Augustine took his advice, but as soon as he took the book in hand he was perplexed by what he read. “I did not understand the first passage of the book,” he writes, and he thought “the whole would be equally obscure.” So Augustine laid it aside, as he explains, “to be resumed when I had more practice in the Lord’s style of language.”

This example from Augustine’s life can help us to remember that conversion to the Christian faith requires more than the ‘sinner’s prayer’ or some other form of powerful personal experience.  Wilken comments:

[Augustine] recognized that if he were to enter the Church he would have to learn this new tongue, hear it spoken, grow accustomed to its sounds, read the books that use it, learn its idioms, and finally speak it himself. He had to embark on a journey to acquaint himself with the mores of a new country. Becoming a Christian meant entering a strange and often alien world.

This ‘entering into a strange and often alien world’ sums up Kallenberg’s three aspects of conversion as “the change of one’s social identity, the acquisition of a new conceptual language, and the shifting of one’s paradigm.” The process (note the use of that word process rather than instantaneous experience) of conversion is the painful and difficult work of leaving one world with its ways, values, language, customs, etc, for another world.  This is the hard work that modern evangelism has made every effort to sugar coat and avoid. 

And yet it is deeply appropriate that the Church would have its own way of speaking, its own way of marking time, its own music, art, literature, customs and history.  As Wilken points out, we easily accept that there is a language proper to biology, auto repair and aviation.  Why then should we balk at the idea that Christianity as a 2,000 year old faith tradition might actually have (over that not insignificant period of time) developed some particularities? 

As for Augustine, he eventually did learn the Church’s language.  And when he did he embraced it which such zeal that he suggested the Church stop using the Roman name for the days of the week (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday etc.).  Instead, he argued for the more basic numbering of days as day 1, day 2, day 3, etc. (Wilken, 29).  In my rejection of the coffee house notion of Church, I am not asking for anything nearly so bold. I ask rather simply one of two things:

A: We hold our worship in an explicitly Christian setting

                                       Or

B: We have some plan for moving our worship to an explicitly Christian setting. 

There is much to be said for the coffee house church as a way of connecting to the un-churched.  To deny this would be to deny the reality of conversion as a shift from one paradigm to another.  Even Augustine had to start somewhere.  However, if there is no awareness of the need to move into a deeper embrace of the particularities of the Christian faith, if there is no intentional strategy to guide the un-churched (read catechumen) into this deeper reality, then serious questions arise about the nature of the faith being communicated. 

This is ultimately an issue of communal identity.  The people of God have always struggled with maintaining their identity in the midst of other peoples and cultures.  Our day is no different.  Except that whereas the Torah would name cultural accommodation as a grievous sin we call it ‘evangelism.’ 

The question we need to struggle with is this “What difference does difference make?”  Worshiping in a coffee house may be trendy, culturally savvy, relevant, organic, or whatever other buzz word you would like to attach (notice the power of language here) but in the end, such worship turns its back upon the particularities of the Church’s life and witness. 

Wilkens ends his article by saying:

Let the Church call attention to what is peculiar to herself, not to presumed notions about what is meaningful or intelligible or relevant to contemporary society. A robust Christian witness can only be forged by drawing on the fullness of Christ, as known through the Spirit in the Church.

Indeed!  Let the Church be the Church.

The Event of Salvation

In the Church Dogmatics I.1 the concept of the Word of God as revelation receives its own treatment in §4.3 ‘The Word of God Revealed.’ Once established Barth’s understanding of revelation pops up again and again and again, and again…  As a consequence, in reading CD I.1 I have had to continually re-think through Barth’s speaking of revelation.  In the name of articulating what I am pondering, here are a few thoughts on Barth and revelation.

Barth continually speaks of the event of revelation.  Revelation is not a static substance which scripture contains.  Rather it is an event, a happening of past, present, and future. Accordingly, scripture is not revelation but rather scripture points to this happening or revealing.  In the same way, proclamation is not revelation but is rather a long bony finger pointing to the event of God’s being revealed here and now. 

If we were to stay with the idea of revelation as continuing some content, we would do well to say that the content of revelation is God.  Revelation is a revealing, an unveiling, and what is revealed in revelation is always God in our midst.  Still we must go farther as God is not a static substance so to revelation is the unveiling of the event of God showing up in our midst.  This could be put variously, but perhaps most simply, ‘Jesus Christ is revelation.’ 

Revelation in fact does not differ from the person of Jesus Christ nor from the reconciliation accomplished in Him.  To say revelation is to say ‘The Word became flesh.’ (CD I.1 pg. 119)

Notice that Barth makes the move to say that revelation is more than the event of Jesus’ presence, it is also reconciliation accomplished.  When and where God appears, when and where we find Jesus in our midst, that is reconciliation.  It is our sin which separates us from the presence of God.  However when God, out of his freedom and grace, enters into our presence, that sin is over come and reconciliation is taking place in that act or event of God’s self-presentation.  This means that revelation is not only an event, it is an event of salvation.  In speaking of what exactly it is that scripture points to, Barth sums up beautifully what he means by revelation as an event of salvation.

What has engendered Scripture and what Scripture for its part attests has happened truly and definitively, once and once-for-all.  We have already discussed in outline what it was that happened: God was with us, with us His enemies, with us who were visited and smitten by His wrath.  God was with us in all the reality and fullness with which He does what He does.  He was with us as one of us.  His Word became flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood.  His glory was seen here in the depths of our situation, and the full depths of our situation were disclosed for the first time when illumined then and there by the Lord’s glory, when in His Word He came down to the lowest parts of the earth (Eph.4.9), in order that there and in that way He might rob death of its power and bring life and immortality to light (2 Tim. 1:10).  (CD I.1 pg. 115)

 

 

Desiring The Kingdom

Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. (Cultural Liturgies: Volume 1)  James K.A. Smith. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009.

James K.A. Smith’s latest work is a re-thinking of Christian education through the lens of worship, formative practices and discipleship.  As a Christian educator, Smith writes in conversation with a group of fellow educators who have stressed the development of a Christian worldview as the locus of Christian education.  Smith finds this focus on worldview to perpetuate a reductionist anthropology, one that overly stresses the cognitive aspects of human nature while failing to adequately address our embodiment.  Smith’s response to the worldview model is to attempt to shift the center of education from ideas and beliefs to practices which form our hearts and desires. 

 The book consists of two parts.  In part one Smith suggests a shift in the identity of human nature from our cognitive capabilities to our bodies, or more specifically, our heart or gut.   With this move Smith is attempting to address the degree to which our embodiment shapes who we are.  This altered sense of identity is named in several ways.  We are ‘liturgical animals’, ‘embodied agents of desire’ or finally, ‘lovers.’  It follows from this understanding of humans as liturgical animals that our practices are both an expression of and determinative of who and what we desire or love.  We learn more deeply from engaging mind and body in practices than we do from memorizing statements of belief.  A corollary of this argument is that all liturgical spaces are pedegalogical and thus formative.  Accordingly Smith examines the liturgical practices of several cultural institutions that teach and form us, often without our awareness. 

 Part two concludes with an extended look at the way the practices of Christian worship can and must serve as counter pedegalogical practices to those of the dominant culture.  Here Smith roughly follows the basic order of worship, examining the formative power of our worship practices to shape us as liturgical animals.  For example, Scripture and the sermon help us to re-narrate the world while prayer teaches us the language of the kingdom. 

 Smith’s book is engaging and wide ranging.  He frequently draws music, film, fiction and even the occasional diagram into the conversation in a way that is interesting and instructive.  To my mind, Smith’s explorations of the liturgies of the mall, the sports event and the university were a fascinating and worth the price of the book alone.  For those interested in searching out the ways that worship feeds discipleship while challenging our contemporary culture, this books is a must read.