Archive

Story

Peter Rollins – a Narrative of Idolatry

21/02/2012
Emergent / Emerging, Peter Rollins, Story, Theology
Leave a Comment

Peter Rollins was recently interviewed by Whitworth University about some of the themes in Insurrection.

I find myself especially interested in his push back on the idolatry inherent in the way we use God-talk as a talisman in our quest for a narrative that tells us why we are right/ good and they are wrong/ evil.

Not because right and wrong, or good and evil, don’t exist. But because we all too easily assume that we are “on God’s side,” that we are playing the role of the good and the right in the story being told. And we then craft a narrative about faith, or love, or politics that uses God-talk to reinforce that assumption without ever really allowing the living God to challenge our actions and our beliefs.

on Celebrity Pastors, Planting Roots, and Imagination.

10/02/2012
blogging, Community, Story, Theology
1 Comment

The issue of celebrity pastors has seemed to be front and center over the past couple years, but it has always been something the Church has struggled with. In her post When Jesus Meets TMZ at Relevant today, Rachel Held Evans discusses the difference between honoring and idolizing pastors and teachers.

“Everyone has Christian friends who speak about their favorite pastors with the same reverence and awe generally reserved for Jesus or Apple products. These folks hang on every word the pastor writes, preaches or tweets, and can seem incapable of forming opinions of their own without first consulting the person behind the pulpit. This reveals an unhealthy dependency that elevates celebrity pastors to near idols.

On the other hand, there are cynical Christians who like to find one or two outspoken pastors on whom to continually focus their anger. I really struggle with this in my own life, as I tend to vilify those celebrity pastors with whom I disagree. This may seem like an entirely different problem than the idolization of celebrity pastors, but these attitudes actually represent two sides of the same coin. Both flatten and objectify the pastors in question. While one group sees a pastor as wholly good, the other sees the pastor as wholly evil. But neither sees the leader for who he or she actually is—a person: fallen yet redeemed, imperfect and in need of our grace.”

At Christianity Today Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove  writes about the wisdom of stability in the article The Spiritual Discipline of Staying Put: Planting Roots in a Placeless Culture.

“The trouble for most of us isn’t so much that we cannot afford stability as it is that we don’t value it. We idealize and aspire to a life on the move, spending what resources we have on acquiring skills that make us more marketable (that is, more mobile). We want to “move up in the world,” which almost always means closer to a highway, an airport, or a shopping mall.”

Finally, at Baker’s $1 used book sale I came across Imagination: Embracing a Theology of Wonder. I’ve only just started flipping through it, but it seems like it has potential – expect more on this one if it proves to be a good read. From what I can tell it touches on themes of creativity and story which I am quite interested in right now.

Doubt, Hope, and finding our place in the Story

07/02/2012
blogging, Doubt, Faith, Narrative Theology, Spirituality, Story, Writing
3 Comments

First off let me note that I was deeply encouraged by the response to yesterday’s post. My hope is that here on the blog, in our homes and churches, in coffee shops and pubs, we might find places to have the difficult and necessary conversations about how we are choosing to shape our identity and what it might look like to tell a better re-constructive Story.

Thankfully we do not have to start from scratch, the Christian story, though it has at times been twisted and bent into something that speaks darkness instead of light, has been told well by many brothers and sisters throughout the years.

We do well to learn from their wisdom, and to find inspiration in their stories as we reimagine our own.

One author who speaks to this beautifully is Lauren Winner. I’ve not read her latest book, yet, but after being urged by some co-workers I did read the preface and plan to pick it up once I finish a couple books I’m currently reading.

In those first few pages I found this quote, and I could do no better in explaining why the Story we tell is so important – it’s about more than propositions (though it includes those as well), it is about identity and hope, about who and where we are and what God is doing in the world.

“For whole stretches since the dream, since the baptism, my belief has faltered, my sense of God’s closeness has grown strained, my efforts at living in accord with what I take to be the call of the gospel have come undone.

And yet in those same moments of strained belief, of not knowing where or if God is, it has also seemed that the Christian story keeps explaining who and where I am, better than any other story I know.

On the days when I think I have a fighting chance at redemption, at change, I understand it to be these words and these rituals and these people who will change me.

Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith.” –From Still, by Lauren Winner

Despite frequent bouts of discouragement and disenfranchisement, that right there is why I keep returning to the story of Christ and the Scriptures, that Story has a power to explain and give hope that no other story does.

There’s more I might say, theologically, ethically, sociologically even about my faith, but I must say at least that – I find my place in life by taking part in the Story of what God has done, is doing, and will do in this world.

For and Against – on Identity and Conflict

06/02/2012
blogging, Community, Faith, Love, Spirituality, Story, Writing
12 Comments

Last Friday I got up early before work and wrote a response to Piper’s suggestion that Christianity has “a masculine feel.”

I worked on it during breakfast and while I sipped my first cup of coffee, but when it came time to hit “Post” I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead I shared this interview about the power of Story.

The same thing happened a few days before that, this time while I was drafting my thoughts on the controversy around Mars Hill, Driscoll’s marriage book, and some of his recent interviews. Again, I got part way through preparing my post and just stopped, unable to continue. Eventually I ended up posting something different that day as well.

Part of my hesitation is simply exhaustion. It is incredibly emotionally draining to sustain the continual outrage that sometimes feels like the only proper response to the damaging things I see being done in the name of the faith.

But it’s more than that; I’m tired in a different way, tired of defining myself by what I’m against.

There is a place for that I think, for a time. As I started to rethink the assumptions I had about of my faith – to question the theology, reconsider the social implications, reimagine what it might mean to take God and his Word seriously – it was unavoidable and perhaps even necessary that at the beginning of that journey I would find my identity in what I was against.

For a time that may be a necessary part of our stories, we have no alternative narrative yet, only the knowledge of what we have chosen to reject.

The danger is that it’s easy to get stuck there. It’s easy to go through life defining ourselves by what, or who, we are not.

I know it’s easy for me.

But I also know it isn’t healthy, not forever.

Eventually we must break away from the pull of finding our identity in conflict and opposition, and be for something.

There will be things that need to be spoken out against from time to time, but perhaps it is more important, and more effective, if we spend our energy creating something beautiful, powerful, and transformative.

We must start to tell another story, to articulate an alternative narrative that is shaped by what it affirms, what it creates, more than what it denies or destroys.

[I expanded this post this afternoon for Deeper Story - you can find it here]

Sally Lloyd-Jones on The Power of Story

03/02/2012
Books and Reading, Story, Writing
3 Comments

Yesterday Ed Stetzer interviewed Sally Lloyd-Jones about the power of stories.

Sally is the author of The Jesus Storybook Bible, which I’ve been quite impressed with. My wife and I plan to make it the Bible our kids grow up with, and a friend of mine actually used it to great effect while teaching an adult small group last fall.

Her words on the power of Story are well worth hearing out, no matter our age.

“People have approached me, holding up one of my children’s books, flicking through it backwards–awful for a writer because it implies the order of the words don’t matter–and cheerfully announcing, “I’m going to do one. I mean. REALLY. How hard can it be?”

How many of us would dream of going up to a surgeon and saying, “I’m going to do an Angioplasty. I mean. REALLY. How hard can it be?”

That people feel free to say this about children’s books tells you a lot–not so much about what they think of children’s book writers. That’s not important. It tells you what they think of children.

I think it’s because they don’t have a high enough view of children.

Our proper attitude before children should be humility. We need to be writing up to children–never down.

It also tells you something else: that they have too low a view of Story.

What is the lesson in that story? What is the message? I’m often asked that. But a story is not a sermon.

As writers we know we better not preach on the page. Our job is to tell a story. Not teach a lesson. If we have an agenda, a message in code we want to get across, a moral we want to teach in our writing–it might be an excellent lecture. But it won’t be a good story.

It’s too low a view of what a story is, of what a story can do. A story can do more than teach you.

A story can transform you.”

You can read the rest of the interview here.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 41 other followers