A society of Pentecostals
Last Wednesday I flew out to Durham, North Carolina to attend the Society of Pentecostal Studies annual meeting. Though there was wireless in my hotel room and at the conference I didn’t check in here. I guess it’s the same part of me that tends not to take pictures at big events. I want to enjoy the moment, be in the moment, rather than be thinking how to document the moment.
I guess it’s another sign that I studied history rather than journalism in college.
That being the case, now that the trip is in the past I can begin to document the goings on.
My dad took me to the airport early on Wednesday morning, on his way to work. Which was nice, though his work and my flight time didn’t exactly match up. I got there round about 7. My flight took off at 11:40. Plenty of time to get to know the Ontario International Airport. I walked for long while. And I read for a long while, read a book I was hoping to re-prime me for theological conversation. It certainly did. The Holy Spirit in the World is a wonderful, wonderful book, though very dense, and got my brain moving again. It even ignited thoughts about new trails of study.
The time went by fairly quickly. Hardly felt like a wait at all. I boarded my flight, a very new Delta 757, and had a 4 hour ride to Atlanta, in which I mostly read some more, listened to a lot of classical music, as well as one of my favorite people in the world.
Landed, then I had to go from one side of Atlanta to the other for my next flight. Well, one side of the airport to another, Terminal A to E, which involved a mile+ walk and riding a train for ten minutes. Then onward to the Raleigh/Durham airport. Totally uneventful, entirely full, flight.
Landed. Was picked up by my good friend Maria, who used to be a SoCal resident before finishing up her degree at Fuller and wandering over to see what kind of extra education she can pick up at Duke. We first met at the church I used to go to/work at, and had good long conversations about very intellectual things as well as less intellectual things. She was, without a doubt, one of my earliest and most encouraging cheerleaders when I began my writing in 2003. That she’s brilliant and exceedingly well read with a superior grasp of English (despite being born and raised in Austria) made the encouragement all the more encouraging. So it was nice to see her. And not have to walk to the hotel.
She made me a turkey sandwich, because it was late and she thought I would be hungry. I didn’t know I was, but it turned out I was more hungry than I knew.
Got to my Quality Inns and Suites, right next door to the Durham Hilton, checked into room 103 and proceeded to immediately not fall asleep. Sure it might be 10:30 local time, but it was just starting out the evening in my time. Add the fact I was really suffering from a cold and a bad cough… well, I didn’t get to sleep until around 1.
Woke up wide awake at 6. Round about 7:30 I walked over to the Hilton, checked into the conference, opened my little packet of materials and was happy to see me staring back. A flier on It’s a Dance was included. Made me smile. I also got a couple of free books, which occupied my time until the shuttle came to take folks to Duke. Sat next to one of the main organizers of the conference, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, not until he stood up at the main session that evening.
Did I say I’ve not been real involved in academia for a while and don’t really know anyone?
A new session had been added at the last minute. I decided to go. The Rev. Eusebius Stephanou spoke on his charismatic conversion in the early 60s and his subsequent ministry within the Eastern Orthodox church for the last forty years.
My thoughts on that will be in the next post.
Oh, and I forgot to mention. The night before my flight to the conference I got some nice news which helped my attendance take on more substantive meaning. I got a note from Dr. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen that I had been accepted as his PhD student at Fuller Theological seminary beginning this Fall, and more that I had been awarded by the School of Theology a scholarship that entirely pays my tuition.
Off and Away to an emerging pneumatology
I’m leaving on a jet plane, be back late Sunday evening.
Going to the Society of Pentecostal Studies annual conference, out in North Carolina–at Duke to be more exact.
Should be a grand time. I’m giving a little presentation on emerging pneumatology, in which I take the traits of the emerging church and view them through the lens of Moltmann’s theology to identify these traits as an emerging pneumatology.
In other words, the same thing I did with my book.
This morning I practiced and recorded it. I need more practice, and I need to get over this cold and cough, but for the most part I’m happy with what I’ve done. The book is 270 pages. The paper I wrote for the conference is 27 pages. The text of the presentation I will be giving on that paper is 13 pages. Editing down is fun!
Here’s the 1/2 hour presentation.
Or you can visit me on youtube.
If there is good access I’m going to try to do regular posts from the conference, and maybe get some video. We’ll see.
Cheers!
active and contemplative
If we compare the two ways of knowing, it is easy to see that modern men and women need at least a balance between the vita activa and the vita contemplative, the active and the contemplative life, if they are not to atrophy spiritually. The pragmatic way of grasping things has very obvious limits, and beyond these limits the destruction of life begins. This does not apply only to our dealings with other people. It is true of our dealings with the natural environment too.
But the meditative way of understanding seems to be even more important when it is applied to our dealings with our own selves. People take flight into relationships, into social action and into political praxis, because they cannot endure what they themselves are. They have ‘fallen out’ with themselves. So they cannot stand being alone. To be alone is torture. Silence is unendurable. Solitude is felt to be ’social death’. Every disappointment becomes a torment which has to be avoided at all costs.
But the people who throw themselves into practical life because they cannot come to terms with themselves simply become a burden for other people. Social praxis and political involvement are not a remedy for the weakness of our own personalities. Men and women who want to act on behalf of other people without having deepened their own understanding of themselves, without having built up their own capacity for sensitive loving, and without having found freedom towards themselves, will find nothing in themselves that they can give to anyone else. Even presupposing good will and the lack of evil intentions, all they will be able to pass on is the infection of their own egoism, the aggression generated by their own anxieties, and the prejudices of their own ideology.
Anyone who wants to fill up his own hollowness by helping other people will simply spread the same hollowness. Why? Because people are far less influenced by what another person says and does than the activist would like to believe. They are much more influenced by what the other is, and his way of speaking and behaving. Only the person who has found his own self can give himself. What else can he give? It is only the person who knows that he is accepted who can accept others without dominating them. The person who has become free in himself can liberate others and share their suffering.
~Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life
Are You a Theologian?
“Theology is for me a suffering from God and a passion for God’s kingdom. For me this is a messianic passion, because it is possessed and moved by presence of the crucified Christ. For me theology springs from a divine passion–it is the open wound of God in one’s own life and in the tormented men, women, and children of this world; from the accusation Job threw at God; from Christ’s cry of forsakenness on the cross. We are not theologians because we are particularly religious; we are theologians because in the face of this world we miss God. We are crying out for his righteousness and justice, and are not prepared to come to terms with mass death on earth.
But for me theology also springs from God’s love for life–the love for life that we experience in the presence of the life-giving Spirit and that enables us to move beyond our resignation and begin to love life here and now. These are also Christ’s two experiences of God, the kingdom of God and the cross, and because of that they are the foundations of Christian theology, as well: God’s delight and God’s pain. It is out of the tension between these two that hope is born for the kingdom in which God is wholly in the world and the world is wholly in God. “Seek first the Kingdom of God…”
~Jürgen Moltmann, A Passion for God’s Reign
emerging conclusion
“Life in the Spirit is a life in the ‘broad place where there is no cramping’ (Job 36:16). So in the new life we experience the Spirit as a ‘broad place’—as the free space for our freedom, as the living space for our lives, as the horizon inviting us to discover life.” Yet, in the history of the church there have been again and again restrictions placed upon this ‘broad place’ some for reasons that make sense in attempts to deter heresy, other times for reasons that can only be characterized as anti-Christ as they assert personal or corporate power for reasons of individual gain. Most often, and consistently through the last two thousand years, the restricted place of the church has not been due to some kind of intentional nefarious rejection of God, but rather due to uncritical assumptions of the broader culture in each era, leading to wholly non-Spiritual boundaries. Churches in which racism or sexism dominate are restricted places. Churches in which the rich dominate poor, or the powerful dominate the powerless are restricted places. Restricted not for those who are the aggrieved, restricted for the aggressors and for the whole society, unable to take up the whole work of the Spirit because of these inherent, societal, restrictions.
As Moltmann writes “‘The broad place’ is the most hidden and silent presence of God’s Spirit in us and round about us. But how else could ‘life in the Spirit’ be understood, if the Spirit were not the space ‘in’ which this life can grow and unfurl.” The dismantling of institutional racism, the new emphasis on equality between men and women, the growing awareness of first world responsibility to the third world, and the increasing concern for the environment have all broken the bonds of restriction that have silently fought against the constant mission of the Spirit. So it is no surprise that now, in this era of new openness, we can see new movements that in their freedom reflect the freedom that is God’s kingdom, movements that echo in practice what Moltmann emphasizes as traits of the broad place of the Spirit. “We explore the depths of this space through the trust of the heart. We search out the length of this space through the extravagant hope. We discover the breadth of this place through the torrents of love which we receive and give.” Only those contexts which freely open themselves to this continual discovery can expect to learn and to express a holistic pneumatology.
This is not a new reality of the Spirit or a new movement of the Spirit but is, in essence, the heart of what was spoken of by the Prophets and then experienced in the early church beginning on Pentecost. In this way, we could call the movement described by Gibbs and Bolger not only the emerging church, but indeed a form of neo-Pentecostalism in which a holistic pneumatology is embraced through a new, liberating freedom for living. “God’s Spirit encompasses us from all sides and wherever we are (Ps. 139). Christ’s Spirit is our immanent power to live—God’s Spirit is our transcendent power for living.” In embracing this reality in full, individually and communally, in unity and in diversity, the church emerges into the comprehensive vision of the kingdom of God.
Thus I concluded my paper on Moltmann and the Emerging Church.
emerging church and moltmann
I’ve decided, for a couple days at least, to post the revised article I finished a couple of weeks ago. I’m curious to hear some responses, especially from the emerging church side of things. Because there isn’t a settled emerging/missional theology I’m picking and choosing as I go from a selection of writers who I see best getting to the heart of what’s going on in a positive, rather than deconstructive, way.
It’s also the case that as I turn more academic in my writing I don’t want to be an academic writer… ever. I want to develop a style that can be dynamic, adjusting one way or another depending on the particular audience, but never leaving one side out altogether. So I’m curious about a broad reading.
I’m going to leave the link up only for a week or so mostly because I don’t want the link I’m posting to be broadly accessible for very long.
Please let me know your thoughts, if you get download it, either as a comment here or an email to dualravens at yahoo dot com.
I’m writing a new paper that bounces off some of the ideas in this one so I’m curious to see how those idea work.
Have a merry Christmas week!
Moltmann
Here he is, in an interview from late last year.
And yes, I have caught a bit of Moltmannia. I’ve a big presentation due on the 15th on Jurgen Moltmann and emerging church pneumatology. Moltmann is the main speaker at the conference and might be in the audience at my presentation.
No word on if any emerging church folks will be there.
I’m actually excited. I think I’ve found a fun new rhythm with the presentation and am hoping to take full advantage of my non-establishment status.
How emerging of me!
But yeah, check out the interview. I don’t agree with everything Moltmann says or writes, but I’m loving how he pushes me to think in great new directions.
Emerging Moltmann
One of my big projects this year, beginning in January and continuing now onwards to at least this next March, has been to read Moltmann as a guide for emerging/missional thinking. This won’t be too surprising to those who have read my book and have gotten to the end and into the “About These Sources” section in which I talk about the foundations of my thinking. Moltmann makes a strong appearance. When I ventured back into the emerging/missional world and read Emerging Churches by Gibbs and Bolger I was struck by how similar the themes in that book were with Moltmann’s Spirit of Life. Not directly correlated, mind you, but similar enough that I was provoked to think more about the relationship between the Holy Spirit and emerging church practices.
At the beginning of this year I sought a little more study, not on the emerging side but on the theological. So I sat in on a PhD class focusing on Moltmann. We read through and discussed all his major works. Though I was not required to do so I wrote a research paper on Moltmann titled Hope for the Kingdom: Jurgen Moltmann and the Emerging Church in Conversation. In that paper I took a section from his last ‘Contribution to Systematic Theology’ and used his points to interact with various emerging church texts. I also took a few leaps. I had read his major works but that’s only a part of his collected writings. I’ve since ventured into more. And the more I read the more I’m narrowing in on a couple of realities. My leaps are in fact a lot more grounded than I supposed. And, second, Jurgen Moltmann was emerging before the emerging Church began to take off, not just in hints and suggestions as I had supposed. Pretty directly. Though, as Bauckham suggests, most people took up Moltmann’s discussion on other theology topics while almost entirely ignoring his pleading and hopes for a new expression of ecclesiology.
Take a look at this quote from his 1999 book, God for a Secular Society: The Public Relevance of Theology, a book I’m just now reading for the first time:
Mission in the original theological sense of the word is missio Dei–God’s sending. But what does God send? According to biblical understanding (both Jewish and Christian) he sends nothing less than his Spirit into this world, through the Christ, the Messiah. This is the Spirit who is the life-giver and who is therefore called the Spirit of life, or the source of life. According to the Gospel of John, what God brings into the world through Christ can be summed up in a single word, life. ‘I live and you shall live also’ (John 14:19). What is meant is the fulfilled life — the wholly and entirely living life — the shared life — the eternal life — the fullness of life.
It is experienced in the new livingness of love. Nor is it just human life that is meant, for according to the prophetic message this living power of God will be poured out ‘on all flesh’, which in the language of the Old Testament means everything living. God’s sending is biocentrically oriented, not anthropocentrically. It is not concerned with the political or religious rule of human beings over the world, and not merely with the salvation of human souls, but with the liberation, salvation and final redemption of the life shared.
Its goal is therefore ‘the new creation of all things’. The eternal life which is the gift of the Spirit who is the life-giver is not a life other than this life here and now; it is the power through which this life here will be different. This mortal, temporal life gains a share in the divine life, and through that becomes life that is eternal: ‘This perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality’ stresses Paul (1 Corinthians 15:53). So Nietzsche was right: ‘Eternal life is eternal livingness.’ If Gods’ sending embraced the whole of life, the shared life of all the living, it must not be reduced to religion and inwardness and ‘the salvation of our souls’, important though our ’souls’ are.
Jesus didn’t bring a new religion into the world. He brought new life. He didn’t found ‘Christianity’, nor did he set up an ecclesial rule over the nations. He brought life into this violent and dying world, the life ‘that was from the beginning, which we have looked upon and touched… and the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the life that is eternal…’ (1 John 1:1-2). Christ is the divine Yes to life. That Yes leads to the healing of the sick, to the acceptance of the marginalized, to the forgiveness of sins, and to the saving of impaired life from the powers of destruction. This is the way the Gospels tell about Jesus’s mission. And according to the Gospels this is also the character of the mission of the women and men who life in his Spirit (Matthew 10:7-8).
Absolutely. The question remains, however, why we all should care what a theologian that the great majority of Christians have never heard of has said on this topic. It is important because so much of emerging/missional thought has risen out of a interest in liturgical or organizational change. And so much of the books are about practices or church models or leadership or other kinds of structural issues. However, underlying these instincts towards institutional change is something much deeper, and I think not as well explored. It is a renewed look at the core theology of our faith. This isn’t about ignoring Scripture or drifting into liberal rejections of core principles. It is about taking Scripture as a whole, a more thorough examination, and finding where we have missed the mark.
Fundamentalism and Liberalism are, as Moltmann states earlier in the book, products of the Modern Age, actively fighting against each other with now very clear models of attack and defense. However, modernity is behind us and so we entire into something new.
And what this something new becomes is not a rejection of the past as much as it is an embrace of the future of the Holy Spirit who has always been working in the life of those who call on Christ, even if the church has not well reflected this.
So Moltmann is important because he comes to the conclusions mentioned above not out of a rejection of church leadership or an experience of dry, parched Evangelicalism. He comes to those conclusions having walked forty years through the utter depths of Scripture and Theology. Which means he, and those who share this journey, can give emerging church thought a foundation that goes far beyond fleeting liturgical transformation and becomes instead a new face of the Church that takes better more holistic note of Scripture, better more holistic understanding of the Trinity, better more holistic balance of breadth and depth, and in every way points to the fuller, richer mission of God that we experience and are called to pursue.
Relatively Speaking
Richard Bauckham, The Theology of Jurgen Moltmann, p.125ff.:
The church is related to the whole, through its participation in the universal mission of Christ and the Spirit on the way to the universal future of all reality in the messianic kingdom, but it not the whole and will never itself become the whole. Consequently, ecclesiology can and must recognize the relativity of its subject and its own standpoint without subsiding into mere relativism. As a particular related to the unique eschatological person, Jesus Christ, and his universal future, the church fulfills its eschatological mission in open and critical relation to other particulars, its partners in history on the way to the kingdom of God.
Because it is itself ‘on the move’, as one element in the movement of God’s trinitarian history, it can engage in real relationships with these partners, living relationships in which both participants are open to change, and direct these relationships in hope towards the common future of the kingdom of God. In other words, although the church does have a special relationship to the universal (the kingdom of God), it has this special relationship only in relation to other particulars. It fulfills its messianic vocation not by absolutizing itself but in open relationships of dialogue and co-operation.
Which is why when those in the church begin to see themselves as the absolute context of God’s work in this world the church begins to leave behind its power and effectiveness, isolating itself and increasingly dependent on its own energy. The circuit is broken. As a part of God’s kingdom, however, it comes alive, listening, discerning, assessing, shifting, focusing, transforming through the power of the life endowed Spirit.
Interesting
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying to get my way through some ministry books. Mostly emerging/missional related stuff. I’ve had them around for a couple of months but hadn’t cracked them. I tried again this week, got a ways through, and once again noticed that my eyes were skipping whole paragraphs, my mind was wandering, and even when good points were made the thrill didn’t last for hardly a moment. I’ve been on and off depressed, on and off irritable, and otherwise struggling to keep my focus.
Then I turned and opened a Moltmann book, Trinity and the Kingdom, which is the one Moltmann book I haven’t read all the way through.
After fifteen minutes I felt renewed and refreshed and invigorated. My mind was tossing around thoughts related and on tangents all at once, in ministry, theology, and life.
It was like I was awakened.
The fact is that I get more ministry thoughts out of theology books than I do out of ministry books. Why is that?
I think it’s because theology books are talking about God. Focusing on God renews me, sharpens me, excites me. Focusing on practice, good or bad, isn’t very interesting to me. Something I’m realizing more and more.
Even with good ministry books I get bogged down. Good theology books get my motivation back on track.
I think I need to read more theology books. My ministry life depends on it.
