Emergent eschatology

I don't understand enough about the emergent church to comment on many of their distinctive ideas (although part of the problem can be actually pinning down what those ideas are). But one area where I feel they are adrift is eschatology.

A recurring theme in emergent writing is the relative neglect Christians should have for the future. Now I understand where this comes from: as far as I can see there is a reaction against the ghetto mentality of some 20th century eschatology which led churches to abandon the needs of the world in favour of waiting out the last days in an ecclesiastical bunker. But to then advise us that the bible says little about the future and the emphasis is all now and that if we concentrate on the second coming etc then we will neglect present needs....is just wrong. There is no necessary connection at all.

I recently preached through the latter half of Romans 8. The whole basis of this most encouraging passage is that we can persevere in the present because we have such an overwhelming future hope (v25). Nowhere in Romans are we advised to ignore the present; rather we are told we will be joyful and strong Christians because of our hope based on the promised future that God gives to us in Christ. Which is why Paul can repeatedly speak of living in eager expectation (vv19, 23, 25). Daily, he powers himself up on future hope.

He then goes on to demonstrate how solid and infinite the foundation of this hope is, strecthing out of time (v29); and then spends most of the rest of the passage assuring us that absolutely nothing can rob us of this life, stretching from the present into the everlasting. Indeed it is the future that provides the great verse of hope (v28): because we are promised that we will be conformed to Christ we can be sure that all things work together for good: because everything feeds into this conformity, all events good and bad, in the hands of God, make us like Jesus, work for us an everlasting weight of glory.

I really think that emergent teaching on this point is losing out badly. Maybe I have misunderstood their teaching, because I can't see how anyone would willingly give up the present power of such a future hope.

Piper: live like He is treasure!

If Christ is an all-satisfying treasure and promises to provide all
our needs, even through famine and nakedness, then to live as
though we had all the same values as the world would betray
him. I have in mind mainly how we use our money and how we
feel about our possessions. I hear the haunting words of Jesus,
“Do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall
we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after
all these things” (Matthew 6:31-32). In other words, if we look
like our lives are devoted to getting and maintaining things, we
will look like the world, and that will not make Christ look
great. He will look like a religious side-interest that may be useful
for escaping hell in the end, but doesn’t make much difference
in what we live and love here. He will not look like an
all-satisfying treasure. And that will not make others glad in
God.
If we are exiles and refugees on earth (1 Peter 2:11), and if
our citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20), and if nothing can
separate us from the love of Christ (Romans 8:35), and if his
steadfast love is better than life (Psalm 63:3), and if all hardship
is working for us an eternal weight of glory (2 Corinthians 4:17),
then we will give to the winds our fears and “seek first the kingdom
of God and his righteousness” (Matthew 6:33). We will
count everything as rubbish in comparison with Christ
(Philippians 3:7-8). We will “joyfully accept the plundering of
our property” for the sake of unpopular acts of mercy (Hebrews
10:34). We will choose “ rather to be mistreated with the people
of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin,” and we will
count “the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures
of Egypt” (Hebrews 11:25-26).

Don't Waste Your Life, p107-8

Chesterton: acceptable ideas

Whatever else is true, it is emphatically not true that the ideas of Jesus of Nazareth were suitable to His time, but no longer suitable to our time. Exactly how suitable they were to His time is perhaps suggested in the end of His story.

Baker: Trinitarian community

The fulfilment of God's image is when we enter into the Trinitarian indwelling (keep the greatest commandment) and reproduce it among ourselves (keep the second, which is like the first). this is our eternal purpose; to do this is life...

God, having set Himself the task of making a creature that dwells in a community resembling the community of the Trinity, will not rest until He has accomplished all he has said.

Baker, p.93

Fenelon: stubborn sins

Bear with yourself in your involuntary frailties as God bears, wait patiently for His appointed time of complete deliverance, and meanwhile go on quietly and according to your strength in the path before you, without losing time in looking back; sorrowing over [your sins] with humility, but putting them aside to press onwards; not looking upon God as a spy watching to surprise you, or an enemy laying snares for you, but as a Father who loves you. … Such you will find to be the path toward true liberty.

The value of the unborn

From this week's West Briton:

A YOUNG woman whose unborn child was killed in an horrific car crash has called for a change in the law after the driver responsible – her ex-boyfriend – was fined £200 and given six points on his licence.

Care worker Christopher Sloggett, 21, admitted driving without due care and attention.

He had lost control of his vehicle on the A39 at Playing Place a year ago and hit an oncoming car.

His badly injured ex-girlfriend in the front seat, 20-year-old Kim Quigley, had been eight months pregnant by another man at the time and lost her unborn boy, Thomas.

Serious charges of causing death by driving could not be brought against Sloggett because the law regards a person as alive only once they have taken their first independent breath outside the womb.

After the court case at Truro Magistrates last week, former nursery nurse Miss Quigley, now 21, called for a change in the law.

The police officer in charge of the case, Motor PC Claire Hawkins, said: “While we have to accept the sentence was proportionate to the charge brought against Mr Sloggett, nothing can reflect the terrible loss that Miss Quigley has suffered.

“Unfortunately, legislation does not account for the death of an unborn child and it was therefore not possible to bring a more serious charge before the court.”

Unfortunately for this lady she doesn't stand much of a chance. The lobby fighting for the 'rights of women' would prevent her very logical wish - they cannot afford to allow the unborn to be termed as 'alive', the psychological effect of this would reinforce the very gradual rise in support for unborn children. And if they are alive and human, then what? Where would it all end? We would have to take responsibility for our actions. Deary me.

Ideas from Postman

...the adoration of technology pre-empts the adoration of anything else...[religious symbols must] be made impotent as quickly as possible - that is, drained of sacred, or even serious, connotations. The elevation of one god requires the demotion of another.

(an example would be the way clergy are portrayed in the media as idiots or terrorists)

Those who resist 'technopoly' are people-

who pay no attention to a poll unless they know what questions were asked and why...

people who:

• refuse to accept efficiency as the pre-eminent goal of human relations
• who have freed themselves from the belief in the magical power of numbers
• who are, at least, suspicious of the idea of progress, and who do not confuse information with understanding
• who do not regard the aged as irrelevant
• who take the great narratives of religion seriously
• who know the difference between the sacred and the profane, and who do not wink at tradition for modernity's sake.

Quoted in Dawn, p.271, 282 &283

I suppose it was going to happen

Barbara Wagner is dying of lung cancer, and Oregon won't pay for any more treatment. But it will cover a fatal dosage of drugs so she can kill herself, according to citizenlink.org. Dr. Kevin Olson, a member of the Oregon Health Services Commission, said coverage is limited to "those services that offer the most benefit in terms of prolonging life, especially those services that are low cost and high value." So the state is offering Wagner end-of-life "comfort care" — suicide. A pharmaceutical company has stepped in to pay for the medicine Wagner was denied.

Interruption.........

Just to say: this is the 200th post!

Who would have thought it?

Thanks again, Mintiernational.

Degree of Image

Humanity is made both to represent God, to stand in his place, and also to resemble him to such a degree that we might be mistaken for him.

Baker, Covenant and Community, p68-69

What to do in danger

Thou mayest do in this as it is in thy heart. If it is in thy heart to fly, fly: if it be in thy heart to stand, stand. Anything but a denial of the truth. He that flies, has warrant to do so; he that stands, has warrant to do so. Yea, the same man may both fly and stand, as the call and working of God with his heart may be. Moses fled (Ex. 2:15); Moses stood (Heb 11:27). David fled (1 Sam. 19:12); David stood (1 Sam. 24:8). Jeremiah fled (Jer. 37:11-12); Jeremiah stood (Jer. 38:17). Christ withdrew himself (Luke 19:10); Christ stood (John 18:1-8). Paul fled (2 Cor. 11:33); Paul stood (Act 20:22-23). . . . There are few rules in this case. The man himself is best able to judge concerning his present strength, and what weight this or that argument has upon his heart to stand or fly. . . Do not fly out of a slavish fear, but rather because flying is an ordinance of God, opening a door for the escape of some, which door is opened by God's providence, and the escape countenanced by God's Word (Matt. 10:23).

John Bunyan, Advice to Sufferers

Pleasing people the wrong way

To give the whole store away to match what this year's market says the unchurched want, is to have the people who know least about the Christian faith determine most about its expression.

This writer fears that we are on the verge of seeing happen what happened in the 1950s to mainstream Protestant churches: they retooled for people who were casually attracted and liked big parking lots, spectacle, and low demands; and people left as easily as they came. You can see that I lean toward the search for the dynamisms in the longer-pull worship traditions and against the emerging market orientation. But I am never cocksure abut this and try to listen.

Martin E Marty, quoted in Dawn Reaching Out... p258

Chesterton: Joy

Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live.

Orthodoxy p159)

Yancey: self righteous & grace

God's grace, the only solution to death and evil, comes free of charge, apart from law, apart from any human efforts toward self-improvement. For a free gift, we need only hold out open, needy hands—the most difficult gesture of all for a self-righteously evil person.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/may/32.80.html?start=2

Piper: knowing what counts

You don't have to know a lot of things for your life to make a lasting difference in the world. But you do have to know the few great things that matter, perhaps just one, and then be willing to live for them and die for them. The people that make a durable difference in the world are not people who have mastered many things, but have been mastered by one great thing. If you want your life to count, if you want the ripple effects of the pebbles you drop to become waves that reach the ends of the earth and roll on into eternity, you don't need to have a high IQ. You don't have to have good looks or riches or come from a fine family or a fine school. Instead you have to know a few great, majestic, unchanging, obvious, simple, glorious things - or one great all-embracing thing - and be set on fire by them.

John Piper, Don't Waste Your Life, p44.

CSL: literary gossip

If I had some rare information about the private life of Shakespeare or Dante I’d throw it in the fire, tell no one, and re-read their works. All this biographical interest is only a device for indulging in gossip as an excuse for not reading what the chaps say.

Letter dated Jan 19, 1948

Baker: what is man?

"What is man? What am I? Why would the creator of the universe care about us, about me?"

David's question, so famously asked in Psalm 8, has been ringing in every human soul ever since we hid in the bushes from the sound of God's approach. We may have the option of ignoring the question's answer, but we do not have the ability not to ask it.

Doug P Baker, Covenant and Community, p1.

Bunny wunny

I was sitting on my front porch watching a rabbit hop across a field, towards the road and the field beyond. As the rabbit was just beginning to cross the road, a car came by hit it, knocking it flying over the car and onto the pavement.

The driver slammed on the breaks, jumped out of the car and ran back to examine the rabbit. Then, she went back to the car, opened the trunk and got out an aerosol can. She returned to the rabbit, used the can; and to my surprise the rabbit revived. It got up, hopped a few steps towards the field, turned and gestured to the woman. It then hopped a few more steps into the field, turned and gestured, and continued on across the field and out of sight.

At this, I came over and questioned the driver about the contents of the aerosol, how it revived the rabbit and caused such odd behavior.

"Well," she said, "It's just hare restorer with permanent wave."

(Sorry, I couldn't resist)

http://merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2008/05/the-tragic-deat.html

Eliot: perfect systems

Read part of this quotation in an article questioning what would happen if all politicians and laws were just right - would we have the life we want?

They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is shall shadow
The man that pretends to be.


TS Eliot

Hope: US/UK TV

The British people generally seem to disdain commercialism. (They've been brainwashed for years by the non-commercial BBC.) Their attitude is mostly evident in the soft-sell on their commercial television. They do a lovely little domestic scene, and hidden somewhere in it is the product. They rarely refer to it directly...

...the big difference in those days was that in England the government subsidized TV, in America we work on TV so we can subsidize the government.

Bob Hope, I Owe Russia $1200 (1963), p 27