Bipartisan Support for the Planet

Al Gore is mixing things up. This is cool! He is launching a $300 million ad campaign putting famous rivals together in support of lowering green-house gases. He used his own proceeds from his movie, his Nobel prize award, and other donations to fund the project. The first spots will bring together a prominent Democrat, Nancy Pelosi, and a prominent Republican, Newt Gingrich; a clergyman on the left, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and a clergyman on the right, the Rev. Pat Robertson; and country singers with sharply differing ideologies, the Dixie Chicks and Toby Keith.

Nice touch Mr. Gore and bravo to the participants. We need more of this. People need to know this isn't a partisan issue. Global warming doesn't kill along any party lines or with religious bias.

full story

Evolution and Disinformation

It seems like everyone has received one of those "Obama is a Muslim" emails by now. It is amazing how soon false propaganda can work its way into the common understanding of society.

With the pending release of the movie Expelled, creationists are making another attempt to bring down modern science by spreading lies about evolution. I find myself in more and more of these debates lately (I live in the Bible-belt). I ran across a wonderful series of videos compiled by a journalist in Australia. He addresses many of the attempts at disinformation by creationists. I was amazed at how efficiently he is able to communicate a large amount of information from the Big bang to human migration out of Africa. You can watch the whole series on his YouTube page. Here are a couple of my favorite episodes debunking the propaganda and providing a wealth of information:

There's no way I came from a monkey!


It's only a "theory"! Science won't listen to all viewpoints.

Stroke of insight

This TED talk, is amazing!

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another. - ted.com

Where Does The Money Go?

Scott Bittle and Jean Johnson are editors of Public Agenda Online. In this book, they've done a wonderful job of sorting through information, disinformation, and partisan rhetoric to bring the monstrous federal budget into the grasp of average citizens. They do this without glossing over the bad news, over-simplifying solutions, or creating hype about one particular pet issue. This book needed to be written. I hope many people will read it during this election period. It isn’t an attempt to bash government or make a partisan plea for votes. It is well balanced and focused on educating citizens about the realities of our complex budget. No simple solutions or silver bullets exist. Fixing our budget crisis is a critical problem but these authors remain hopeful. Feasible solutions exist even if they are not easy to swallow.

We need to realize that the answer isn’t on the left or the right. The answer is in owning up to our responsibilities and facing reality. The book closes with a plea for each person to exercise a little self-examination. Are you part of the problem?

Five Signs You’re Part of the Problem

• You can name every part to the legal entanglements surrounding the death of Anna Nicole Smith, but you don’t recognize the name of the vice president or the speaker of the house.
  
• You’re getting all your news from comedians
  
• You watch every single game in the NCAA tournament, but you don’t have time to keep up with politics.
  
• You’re focused on your family. Politics doesn’t matter to you.
  
• The news is depressing. You’d rather not know.

"Where Does The Money Go" - Bittle and Johnson

If you're curious about how much of the problem is government waste, tax-payer fraud, lazy people collecting welfare, politician's salaries, tax-cuts, or those nasty "earmarks" we hear so much about, then this book will help quantify each issue. The answer is that correcting any one of those problems won't make a dent in the budget crisis.

Pledge For Peace

Blake Huggins has given a wonderful speech at Oklahoma City University in opposition to the war. It is worth a read. I'm giving him a virtual standing ovation as I join in his pledge.

"And so today we gather. ‘We the people’ gather to raise our voice against this glaring injustice and we stand in protest of this heinous atrocity. We stand united for the cause of peace and we stand in solidarity not only with our troops, but with the Iraqi people, who, as we speak are suffering under our occupation. We stand with those that have gone before us as a prophetic witness to ask, 'How many more must be killed for a lie? How many more lives must be lost before our government takes responsibility admits they were wrong? How many more must be murdered before we admit that there never was a smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud? How much more death will we allow? How much more blood will be on our hands before we take responsibility?'
[...]
And we must remain fervently indignant, unwavering in our commitment to prophetic truth, unwavering in our solidarity with the oppressed and the suffering, and unwavering in our hopeful affirmation peace with justice, and reconciliation through healing. We believe that another world is indeed possible. And right here, right now, today, in this moment, we pledge to make that world a reality." - Blake Huggins, blakehuggins.com (2008)

Brueggemann on Jeremiah Wright

I immediately thought of Walter Brueggemann when I heard the recent criticisms of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's prophetic rhetoric. I felt certain that somewhere Dr. Brueggemann was shaking his head and wondering aloud if once again Christians skipped over one of the most important parts of our Bible. Two months ago I spent the weekend listening to Dr. Brueggemann speak at length about the prophet Jeremiah and his key role in our faith tradition. Here is what Dr. Brueggemann wrote in a recent comment printed in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution:

The current spasm of "righteous indignation" concerning Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama's pastor, smacks of embarrassing ignorance. Such a critique of Wright is ignorant of black preaching rhetoric and the practice of liberation interpretation. It is also disturbingly ignorant of the prophetic traditions of the Bible that regularly expose the failures of society in savage rhetoric. I am grateful for the ministry of Wright, a colleague of mine in the United Church of Christ, who for a very long time has been a faithful pastor and a daring prophetic figure. It is odd when right-wingers misconstrue this belated Jeremiah as they do the original Jeremiah, who knew about God's passion for truth-telling in risky places.

Walter Brueggemann - professor emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary

Is Jesus Dead?

This is the real question we must wrestle with on the Saturday before Easter Sunday. Most of my faith journey felt like one long confusing Saturday. Brian McLaren wrote a song called “I Am an Atheist”. This song makes the provocative statement “I can’t believe what they believe in you [but] I believe.” I can identify with that song. As an adult, I could no longer believe the things I was taught about Jesus as a child, but I still believe. I kept hoping for Easter to make sense. Most of the stories in the bible were easy to see as symbolic language. Easter was a bit more difficult to reconcile. It remains a stumbling block for many, but we can’t live our whole lives in the shadows of Saturday. We have to find our way to Easter Sunday.

The first time I saw this book by Bishop John Shelby Spong, “Resurrection: Myth or Reality?”, I was so shocked by it that I put the book down after reading the first few pages. Now, I would say this book has been more helpful than any other book on the subject. It is so much more than a philosophical discussion about the reality of resurrection or a dry academic search for the historical Jesus. If you think you know Bishop Spong or could guess his answer to this question, then you might be wrong and you may want to pick up this book and take this journey.

To dismiss these familiar biblical details as legendary does not end our search for the truth of what happened, it only drives us to another level where we ask a different question. What happened that gave birth to the legendary details that gathered around the moment of Easter? Why did they gather? Hundreds of millions of people have lived and died on this earth - some of them famous, powerful people – and no similar legends gathered around them. Why this one man, at this time, in this place?
[…]
Our great failing was that we did not know anything about midrash, so we literalized narratives that were not intended to be literalized. The Jerusalem Easter legends are not to be dismissed as untrue. They are meant to be probed for clues, as I trust I have done adequately. Behind the legends that grew up around this moment, there is a reality I can never deny. Jesus lives. I have seen the Lord. By that faith and with that conviction I live my life and proclaim my gospel. - John Shelby Spong

For Bishop Spong, the key to understanding the gospels and the early Christian development of faith is grounded in the tradition of Jewish literature called Midrash. I’ve been blogging about that for the last couple of weeks. Understanding the New Testament as Midrash may save Christianity in the 21st century from dying the slow death of ridicule and irrelevance.

My own wilderness moment, my Saturday, my period of mourning the death of Jesus, ended at some point in my journey. I found Easter Sunday when I found a Jesus I could believe in. The Gospels poetically describe resurrection as symbol for the moment when the mourning ended and the meaning of Jesus’ life sunk in. It was an enlightenment experience. At some point, possibly first in the mind of Simon Peter, the light bulb came on. The reason for Jesus’ life and death finally made sense. His followers couldn't remain silent. All they needed to do was envision it through the lens of their religious ancestors and begin telling this powerful life-changing story. That was the moment of Easter and it became the defining moment in history. It happened the moment that these early Christians knew Jesus’ life could not be silenced by his death. Each community immortalized Jesus with their own specific narrative about his life, baptized it in the allegory of Jewish antiquity, encapsulated the whole story into Jesus’ defining ritual of bread and wine, and then placed their own understanding and words deeply into the dialogue and action.

Is Resurrection a myth or a reality? I believe something real happened in the lives of these real people that lead to these important stories. I also recognize that the Resurrection is a myth about a transcendent reality that could not be described through any other means.

Midrash and Allegory

Midrash texts make heavy use of literary allegory to illustrate meaning. A common technique is to tell us about new characters by having them replay events or speak words of older Biblical characters. In fact, in Jewish literature, every story that can claim inspiration must somehow be connected with a sacred moment of the past. This was something common to even the canonized Torah. The story of Joshua is told through the lens of Moses. Rich allegory is used to paint Joshua (Yahoshua, Hebrew for “Savior”) as the new Moses who takes over as the next heroic figure in Jewish antiquity. The Joshua story draws on symbolic acts of Moses including the way they told about the Israelites crossing the Jordan River in a miracle that is clearly an allegory to the Red Sea crossing a generation earlier. Even the Garden of Eden stories and their more developed Midrash complimentary texts appear to be formed as allegoric reference to the Promised Land.

Why is this important to Christians? To understand our own defining texts (the Gospels), we need to recognize their roots in Midrash. Long before western thinkers literalized our myths and symbols, Jesus (Greek for Joshua or savior) had his own life captured by writers steeped in Midrash tradition. Starting with a birth story that compares Jesus and Moses as survivors of infant genocide and ending with an ascension to the heavens that grounds Jesus in the legend of Elijah, the gospels tell us about Jesus through well known stories of Jewish antiquity. In between those two events, these symbolic Gospels include a story about the parting of heavens that is set in the Jordan River, another story about a walk across water, a dramatic set of new commandments delivered from a mountain, and a Palm Sunday donkey ride borrowed from the prophetic words of Isaiah. That merely scratches the surface of the allegorical texts in the gospels. All seem to point to the creative techniques of Midrash.

When studying midrash, students realize the question to ask of the texts is not, Did it really happen? That is a western question tied to a western mind-set that seeks by sensory perception to measure and describe those things defined as objectively real.
…
The proper question of the midrsh tradition is, what was the experience that led, or even compelled, the compilers of the sacred tradition to include this moment, this life, or this event inside the interpretive framework of their sacred past? What was there about Jesus of Nazareth that required the meaning of his life to be interpreted through the stories of Abraham and Isaac, Moses and the Passover, Exodus and wilderness, Sinai and the promised land, Hnnah and Samuel, David and Solomon, Elijah and Elisha, the servant figure and the son of man, Pentecost and Tabernacles, and a thousand other choices that served to incorporate the life of Jesus into the meaning of God known in the history of the Jewish people? That is the midrash question of which we were ignorant for so long, the question that could not be asked in any substantive way until we developed Jewish eyes and Jewish minds with which to read and understand our own holy gospel. – Bishop John Shelby Spong, “Resurrection: Myth or Reality” (p.9)

When I first began to look at the Gospels as symbolic narratives, I was concerned about the implications. Had we been lied to? Was this a 2000-year-old hoax? Was the modern liberal attempts to trivialize the stories the only way out of this problem? I think the answer to each of those questions is, No. Understanding the Gospels as products of Midrash tradition eliminates the intention of hoax and it provides for a reconciliation of ancient stories, modern scholarship, and postmodern deconstruction.

From Lament to Hope – Words Matter

Barack Obama made a speech yesterday that proved words do matter. Having a president with command of language, a cool temperament and a level head is crucial to our success as a nation. It would be a dramatic change to the present administration and the old methods of Washington politics.

The words of Rev. Jeremiah Wright echoed the Old Testament prophets. Obama correctly addressed the meaning of those words and placed them in the category of painful mourning. Those words remind us of the heartfelt cry of the book of Lamentations. The book of Lamentations is critical to the Old Testament message of eschatological hope. We need Lamentations. We must morn our loss of justice, our painful racism, and the exile from freedom just as the Israelites did. This is noteworthy during Holy Week. We cannot find our resurrection until we grieve our loss. There must be a Saturday, before their can be an Easter Sunday. Obama helped us feel that yesterday.

Obama's speech yesterday said all of those things to me. Essentially, he said the problem with Wright’s sermon was that he (or maybe the media's coverage of him) only got as far as Lamentations. Obama called us to move on and to recognize our progress. We live in a post-Easter world and to lament without hope would be to deny Jesus his vindication. Obama said clearly that we've already made great strides in this world and the kingdom of God is not only a possibility, but it is also a growing reality. The justice filled kingdom of God is at hand. Obama is proof. We need more of it.

God, damn the ways of empire! God, bring your kingdom in full!

Should God Damn America?

The modern Western strain of Christianity has nearly forsaken the ancient art of prophetic voice. Rev. Jeremiah Wright has been criticized for his recent prophetic language because so many of us forgot what a prophet sounds like. Didn’t anyone bother to check this guy’s first name? Compared to the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, Rev. Wright is rather tame. In one sense, Rev. Wright was simply quoting Jesus.

The prophet Jeremiah calls Israel, a prostitute, a corrupt wild vine, a craving wild donkey in heat, and then he slings curses on their children and children’s children. That is only chapter 2! He does this for another 23 chapters. Why does he say such outlandish things? He is offering a bit of creative prophetic imagination that criticizes the rampant injustice in Israel as its wealthy elite ruling class had turned their backs on the ideals of Jewish community. Their covenant with God to create a just society had been broken by their greed and arrogance.

This is what the LORD Almighty says:
"Cut down the trees
and build siege ramps against Jerusalem.
This city must be punished;
it is filled with oppression. (Jeremiah 6:6)
...
Take warning, O Jerusalem,
or I will turn away from you
and make your land desolate
so no one can live in it." (Jeremiah 6:8)

I’m not sure how you hear that, but I feel certain the wealthy elite in Israel heard that as “God Damn Israel!” I think this message is particularly appropriate for us on the Monday of Holy week as we celebrate the day Jesus entered the political capital of Israel and staged a public protest as he echoed the words of Jeremiah (7:11) calling the Temple a “den of robbers”. A couple days later Jesus called for the complete destruction of the Temple. Jesus was clearly a “Jeremiah” style of prophet also as he was essentially suggesting that God would soon damn Jerusalem.

It is important to remember that all these prophets offer us a way out of God’s damnation. We often overlook the fact that when Jesus borrows the phrase, den of robbers, he was making an intentional allegory to the same argument Jeremiah had used against Israel. This is clearly stated in the verses just prior to verse 11.

5 If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, 6 if you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, 7 then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your forefathers for ever and ever. (Jeremiah 7:5-7)

Should God damn America? I think the choice is ours to make. Are any of these prophets expressing hatred for their nation? Absolutely not! Do they really desire the wrath of God to be poured out on their friends, family, and political leaders? No, not at all. These types of prophetic voices are legitimate criticisms with sincere pleas for change. We shouldn't be afraid of these types of statements. We should worry if they ever stop, because it would mean that all hope for change had been lost.

Can America stop our path to damnation? Yes We Can!

Emergent Theology and Midrash

The term Midrash describes a library of ancient Jewish commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures. One type of Midrash took the form of a collage. The creator of the Midrash might put one passage from the Bible on the center of a page. Then, he would surround the passage with a variety of commentaries pulled from different generations of rabbis. Each of the commentaries displayed a different perspective. Some often disagreed or challenged one another. It sounds like an Emergent Cohort!

This method invites the reader of Midrash into the process of interpretation. The reader can consider each commentary and allow the entire collection to speak. This act moves the reading of scripture from passive to active interpretation and from individual to communal meaning. It encourages the reader to wrestle with different perspectives. This visual form of exegesis allows meaning to emerge through the active dialog between the present reader, generations of ancient commentators, and the Biblical text.

Too often, our study of scripture devolves into a form of intellectual masturbation as we wrestle with texts on our own. Another common problem is when we let a single human authority dictate the meanings for us. Midrash combines generational wisdom, individual enlightenment, and a profound sense of community as we are encouraged to work together through the historic and present meanings. I appreciate this Midrash form of communal and inter-generational interpretation. Midrash forces us to move from a blind allegiance towards a holistic understanding of deep meaning. It helps us see the Bible as God's living Word not simply God's words.

Emergent communities are becoming more aware of the transcendent in popular culture. Music, art, poetry, and even movies are all thin places that allow us to glimpse the transcendent. One Emergent use of Midrash techniques is to borrow this notion of surrounding a passage of scripture with a collage of poems, lyrics, and pictures. I can imagine how effective that might be as a group activity. Combining ancient writings with layers of historical and current voices allow us to connect to our sacred texts.

Read more posts about Midrash

Emergent Midrash

I’ve recently become more aware of the Jewish Midrash tradition. I’ve heard a few of these Midrash stories in the past, but until recently, I didn't know much about this intriguing world of literature. From what I’m learning, it seems to me that this is exactly where the Emergent movement could find both its roots and its voice.

Midrash is the rabbinic tradition of interpreting the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible). These ancient Rabbis have been doing this much longer than modern Christianity and there is a huge library of Midrash texts to prove it. One of the most common styles in Midrash tradition is explaining sacred texts by creating more stories about the stories. These highly creative stories and poems draw out the meanings in more detail. They fill in the gaps in all our favorite Bible narratives with dramatic creativity. Midrash is the place where minor Biblical characters get their very own fully developed stories. The serpent in the Garden of Eden is more developed as the storytellers speculate about the source of his motivation for tempting Eve. The details about Adam and Eve's adventures east of Eden and Noah's difficult journey come to life. Even the words written on Moses’ two stone tablets become a living mythical character. The actual text (the very words of God) written on these two stone tablets is what lifts the heavy stones and allows Moses to carry them down the mountain. When the words see the golden calf at the bottom of the mountain, the words become angry and they fly off the tablets. Moses can no longer support the tablets void of God’s powerful words and he drops the meaningless stones to the ground. I think that is an amazing creative statement about the power of those words.

Once a canon (i.e., approved scriptural text) is closed, the problem facing the community is the problem of "searching out" the canon…The ultimate goal of Midrash is to "search out" the fullness of what was spoken by the Divine Voice.
- Dr. Charles T. Davis, Appalachian Statue University, Philosophy and Religion Department, NC

The thing I’ve learned most is that these rabbis loved to tell stories. This is how they capture and transmit meaning. I think it's beautiful. Not everyone communicates in three point sermons or PowerPoint lists. These artists created poems, narratives, symbolism, and myths that invoke our imagination while bringing out the deep meanings of the Bible. Doesn’t this sound like a postmodern concept? If Emergent Christians are seeking a return to the hermeneutics of story telling in place of our flat modern systematic theology, then Midrash may be an important model.

God Made Real

How does something outside of human reality become real to humans? God first became real to many of us through the love of our parents. For many, God becomes real in the story of Jesus. God becomes real when a hungry person is fed or a naked person is clothed. What makes God real for you?

To be honest, the traditional Christian view of a literal exclusive incarnation of God in Jesus makes the whole thing seem less real. I don't want a comic book superhero Jesus. It seems too convenient to slap the "real" label on all your own bizarre religions ideas and stories while labeling every other attempt to describe God as false. That view has taken something beautiful and used it to create division, competition, and even death. If I had not found another way to view the incarnation of God in Jesus, I probably would have left Christianity.

I prefer to understand incarnation as a metaphor describing the manifestation of God’s will done on Earth. This symbolic understanding is not meant to suggest that God is not a reality. The issue is not if God is real but how God becomes a reality in the world and in our lives. The ineffable reality (i.e. incapable of being expressed; indescribable or unutterable) becomes manifest into the physical world as we carry out God's will. God becomes "real" as people embody the values, character traits, and priorities that we associate with God. Until it is felt or expressed, love is only a concept, but there are many ways to incarnate love. The Jesus of the gospel stories becomes the Christian incarnation of God’s word (logos, wisdom, divine reason). For Christians, the stories about Jesus portray the best example of how that might look in human form. Then in turn, Christians incarnate Jesus as we express his character in our own lives. Paul described those people living out Jesus' message as the symbolic body of Christ in the same way that Jesus had become known as the symbolic body of God. I agree.

John Hick has written a helpful article on his website called "Who or What is God?". Here is an excerpt:

The basic principle that we are aware of anything, not as it is in itself unobserved, but always and necessarily as it appears to beings with our particular cognitive equipment, was brilliantly stated by Aquinas when he said that ‘Things known are in the knower according to the mode of the knower’ (S.T., II/II, Q. 1, art. 2). And in the case of religious awareness, the mode of the knower differs significantly from religion to religion. And so my hypothesis is that the ultimate reality of which the religions speak, and which we refer to as God, is being differently conceived, and therefore differently experienced, and therefore differently responded to in historical forms of life within the different religious traditions.

I don't think we should overlook or discount the impact of our experiences. For example, the I-Thou experience that one finds in prayer, mediation, religious ritual, or even in nature. Again, Hick has another great insight:

What does this mean for the different, and often conflicting, belief-systems of the religions? It means that they are descriptions of different manifestations of the Ultimate; and as such they do not conflict with one another. They each arise from some immensely powerful moment or period of religious experience, notably the Buddha’s experience of enlightenment under the Bo tree at Bodh Gaya, Jesus’ sense of the presence of the heavenly Father, Muhammad’s experience of hearing the words that became the Qur’an, and also the experiences of Vedic sages, of Hebrew prophets, of Taoist sages. But these experiences are always formed in the terms available to that individual or community at that time and are then further elaborated within the resulting new religious movements.

Piper on Prosperity

This video is getting a ton of exposure in the blogosphere. It features the modern poster boy for the reformed movement, John Piper. I can’t say much good about Piper’s theology, but the production value of this video is good and I do agree with his criticism of the prosperity Gospel. Here is my issue. How is Piper’s manipulative Gospel message any better? His Gospel also relies on a consumer mentality based on the same transactional model. Follow God and you get something in return and in addition you should follow God because he is powerful and demands it. Is a "stick" better than a "carrot"? Both seem to be based on emotional manipulation rather than sound logic.

• Prosperity Gospel says, follow Jesus and you’ll get a new car.
  
• John Piper says, follow Jesus and he’ll make you feel better in your loss.
  
• Prosperity Gospel says, follow Jesus and you’ll get a better job.
  
• John Piper says, follow Jesus and God will be your treasure.
  
• Prosperity Gospel says, believe in Jesus and he will lift you out of poverty.
  
• John Piper says, believe in Jesus and he will save you from hell.

Isn’t that the same consumer mentality? Aren’t both of these views simply creating a religion based on an individual cost benefit analysis?

What ever happened to the idea of following Jesus because he had some good ideas? I'm not wild about making it so complex and emotionally manipulative. I chose to follow Jesus simply because I agree with his message about non-violent protest against injustice and I have faith that his concept for a new way of life is possible. I agree with Piper that Christianity should be based on a life of sacrifice, but not because of a divine mandate or because God's ego demands obedience and worship. Shouldn't we sacrifice because we agree it is a better choice and it makes the world a better place?

Tony Jones Rocks!

After seeing this clip of Tony discussing the term "born again" with a reformed pastor and critic of Emergent, I'm more convinced that I like Tony Jones. He just made my list of top 20 people I'd like to have a beer with. Not only does Tony make wonderful points about some big problems with reformed theology, he also managed not to be an asshole in the process. That really earned my respect. I wish I could do that. I'm simply not an effective communicator and I am not nearly as cool as Tony in the heat of a debate. I have this type of conversation all the time and it never ends up this cordial. Maybe having a camera in the room helps keep the conversation more civil. Then again, maybe I'm just an asshole.

The clip below is part 3 of 3. The first 2 parts have some better debate and you can find those other clips on YouTube if you are interested, but I thought Tony's answer about being born again at the end of this clip is an Emergent classic. Rock on Tony!

The Metaphor of Incarnation

For Christianity, this is where the rubber meets the road. To be Christian in any way means that you somehow feel Jesus incarnates God. I affirm that statement, but it is simply too ambiguous to have any significant meaning on its own. Albert Mohler would also affirm this statement, but we would likely mean very different things. The issue for me is not “if” Jesus incarnates God. Instead, the issue is all about “how” that happens and what exactly we mean when we say it.

John Hick is an internationally read and discussed philosopher of religion and theologian. His many books have, between them, been translated into seventeen languages. I read his book “The Metaphor of God Incarnate” last year and it helped me to crack open the doctrine of Christology like no other book I’ve read. This had been something I avoided. Born and raised as a conservative Evangelical, I was taught not to ask such questions. These doctrines about Jesus’ divinity were supposed to be off the list of acceptable topics. It was never important what it meant, but only that you repeat it as often as possible and with as much emotion as you could muster. At some point in my journey, that shallow denial of reality was just not enough. I could no longer participate in a faith that required me to “check my brain at the door” and ignore the 300 lb gorilla in the room. I’ve learned in my lifetime that when people are afraid of questions, it is always because they know deep down that their answers are inadequate. Still, I'm not ready to give up my faith tradition.

John Hick has done a wonderful job of opening this language of incarnation without loosing its power to change our lives. Conservatives have treated the incarnation as a rare bottle of wine, hidden away in cellar, possessed, revered, showcased on Sunday morning, often treated as an object of pride and boasting, but rarely opened and enjoyed. However, Jesus is not an exhaustible resource. There is no reason to fear opening this bottle up and enjoying it. To follow Christ is to open the best bottle first and let it be enjoyed by all because this wine will never run out. A believable understanding of incarnation is necessary for the survival of Christianity in the 21st century and offers great hope for the end of divisive competitive religious polarization and war.

You can read a short essay by John Hick called “Believable Christianity” on his website. Here is a quote:

Am I suggesting, then, that we should drop the language of incarnation? No, I'm suggesting that we should understand it in a different way. The idea of incarnation is a powerful metaphorical idea. It means to embody some ideal or conviction in one's life. We all know what is meant when someone says that, for example, Nelson Mandela, after the triumph of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, incarnated the spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation. He embodied this in his life and actions. And the metaphor of divine incarnation, according to which Jesus embodied an overwhelming awareness of the goodness and love of God, is intelligible, believable, and morally challenging. The official dogma, on the other hand, is neither intelligible, nor believable, nor morally challenging. For if Jesus, as number two in the Trinity living a human life, was sinless and perfect, what sort of a role model is that for we ordinary human beings? We are not God incarnate, we are sinful, frail and imperfect, and we need a human model whom we can follow and by whom we can be challenged. And the human Jesus of Nazareth was just that. We can take him as our lord in the sense of - to use an eastern word now much in use in the west - our guru, someone whom we try to follow as our role model. - John Hick, 2006

I recongnize this is "too far" for many Evangelical rooted Emergents. They would prefer to keep a cork on this topic, but there is so much to be gained here. Many of the painful frustrations felt within the Emergent groups are due to an unwillingness to have this discussion. The result is often ambiguity, division, and confusion. It doesn't have to be that way. We've made theology so much harder than it has to be by attempting to literalize our metaphors and myths to the point that they become incomprehensible and bizarre. Incarnation is a beautiful story. Let's open it up and let it breath.