Sweet Sweet Ascension Day

Happy Ascension Day everyone!

I'm preaching on the Ascension of Christ this week and it blows me away how simultaneously important and neglected this aspect of Christian theology is both for our understanding of our worldview and for our day to day Christian practice.

I don't have time to elaborate right now, but here are a few thoughts from others which really drive that point home, at least for me:

"In the incarnation we have the meeting of man and God in man’s place, but in the ascension we have the meeting of man and God in God’s place, but through the Spirit these are not separated from one another." - TF Torrance, Space, Time, and Resurrection

"It is as the Son of God wearing still the flesh of our humanity and the marks of the atonement that he pleads for us before the throne of grace so that our humanity in its terrible neediness is in him brought acceptably before the Father in love." - Andrew Purves, Reconstructing Pastoral Theology

"The Ascension must thus be combined with the Incarnation if we would understand the process by which the Almighty designs to realise His final purpose with regard to humanity." - John Milligan, The Ascension and Heavenly Priesthood of our Lord.

"Thus when we speak of the communion of the Holy Spirit we mean the communion-creating work of the Holy Spirit—communion with the Father through our Spirit-led union with Christ and, consequently, communion with one another as we are formed into the missionary body of Christ, the church. . . .

To make the same point in a liturgical vein [and it would be really interesting to explore how this point manifests itself in other areas as well], it is right and necessary that the ascension receive the same emphasis as that commonly given to the celebration of 'Incarnation Day,' that is, Christmas."
- Andrew Purves, Reconstructing Pastoral Theology

Alan Hirsch's Call to Contend

At our recent district conference there was some really good and some really bad. I've been a bit negative lately, so here's some of the really good.

Alan Hirsch, our guest speaker and author of The Forgotten Ways, was talking about the different types of people that make up the Christian community, as well as the community at large, and was emphasizing the dynamic we need to have in order to have real community (rather than false peace or false unity). He said we need to:

recognize and enjoy our FIT (the grounds of our unity),

and our SPLIT (the diversity of persons within it),

and to CONTEND over disagreements (discuss, don't avoid!)

with the goal that we would TRANSCEND (find one mind, the mind of Christ).


I do think Hirsch may be overly optimistic about our ability to find one mind, even the mind of Christ, with a timing that conviences us (and our lofty corporate strategies and goals), but I do agree about it as a goal. What I would add is that if the original unity is understood to transcend us, as something grounded in Christ around whom we gather, then the unity at the end will aim at consensus, but will transcend both consensus and disagreement for the same reason it always did.

I do think that in communion in Christ we have something in which we should enjoy the freedom to disagree, rather than feel the pressure to maintain "peace" by avoiding conflict and open discussion. I actually think it betrays a failure to trust in Christ or believe in the communion of saints if this is our idea of peace and unity.

Regardless of my nuances on Hirsch's call (which I don't think are minor, but I'm trying to be positive here), I think his call to CONTEND rather than AVOID was a very good and much needed one. Hear here Alan Hirsch!

Quotable GKC

"If people are especially horrified at the failure of Christian practice it must be an indirect compliment to the Christian creed."

- GK Chesterton, Daily News, Feb. 13, 1906 -

Evasive Maneuvers and Propaganda do not an Alliance Make

I have a deep love and commitment for the denomination of churches in which I've grown up, the Christian & Missionary Alliance. But I have a growing burden for it as well, because I truly think that in one regard at least our denomination is in pretty bad place right now. I have a lot of hope in Jesus Christ, and thus have hope for his church. But as for my denomination, I don't know.

What hope is there for a denomination whose main strategies for dealing with controversial issues or hard-sell proposals are evasion and propaganda? What hope is there for a denomination who spends countless hours and dollars trying to figure out how to reach their culture with the gospel while simultaneously pushing away the very people in their midst who could save them a buck or two and just tell them?

Worse yet, what hope is there for a denomination which, instead of looking intently to the Word of God to speak relevantly to each time and culture through the interpretive community as they wrestle with contemporary questions (and with each other), settles for the polar strategies of avoidance and advertising?

I think we show a real lack of faith in Christ as our unifier when we depend on conflict avoidance and motivational media to keep us unified. What would be really promising would be if we trusted our unity in Christ to keep us together while we contended with one another around the Word of God and sought for the Spirit to guide us into truth.

An organization that fails to do this may continue to survive, and if it continues to take all its cues from the corporate world which is so adept at feeding consumers and gaining numbers it may even appear to thrive. But a denomination that claims to be Christian and yet forsakes this fundamental role and identity-marker at this crucial point might be dying inside at precisely the moment when it appears most "successful".

I quite honestly believe that is the crisis my denomination faces today. I respect many of my leaders and colleagues and I believe that they love and wish to serve Jesus Christ with all their hearts. And therein lies my hope. In fact, at our recent district conference our leaders gave us more "open mic" for discussion than I've seen in a long time.

But I think many still are digging for answers in all the wrong places. Hopefully in the years ahead we will have the guts to fight some stuff out (such as ordination, women in leadership, and our over-arching evangelical theology), but I don't think it will happen in the next few years. For now we seem poised for more conflict avoidance and for spending more thousands of dollars and man-hours on our (largely unneeded) self-motivation. Maybe by General Assembly 2012 we'll be ready to deal with some stuff. I sure hope so.

And maybe that's fine. Maybe this stuff has to be allowed to run its course so everyone can wrestle through it. I'm not interested in a dictatorship of new ideas any more than I am interested in the dictatorship of old ones. But that shouldn't prevent us from speaking up, even now. I think we see God more as we enter the process rather than sit back and pine and whine about the end goal. We need to lovingly and honestly fight against the false peace of evasion and the false hope of propaganda or we are going to die.

GK Chesterton adeptly addressed these twin problems in a 1908 essay entitled "On Bluff," addressing the editorialists of his time:

"The idea of fighting, of answering the argument by a suitable counter-argument, even if it be a sophistry, has evidently vanished from the editorial mind. Evasion and violence are the only expedients. . . . But both of these things are equally remote from the fighting spirit, which involves an interest in the enemy's movement in order to parry them. The good controversialist is a good listener . . . .

Most current attempts at [debate] are full of timidity or of bullying; and these two are in truth the same ... habit of admiring Power rather than Valour. That word Valour, by the way, is in itself a stirring sermon. It means putting one's full value into the struggle or sentiment; the almost exact translation of valour is 'being in it for all you are worth.'"

I confess that I struggle (as I'm sure we all do) with when to speak, when to listen, and how to do each lovingly and honestly. But evasive maneuvers and manipulative words are unbecoming a people who are rallied around the One who taught us self-giving communion and speaking the truth in love.

I do think Christ would lead me, and us, through this better than anyone or anything. I do think we have it at center if we'll reach back and grab it. We've quite literally just got to put the Christian and the Alliance back in C&MA. Then we'll really have something worth being Missionary about.

Barth on the Church

In light of recent discussions on this blog about the church, I found the following stuff from Karl Barth (as quoted and summed by Eberhard Busch) very timely. I'd have loved it if he was there to say some of this at my denominational district conference the last couple days too. His statements may have stopped us in our tracks, methinks:

"For Barth . . . . 'To be awakened to faith and to be added to the community is one and the same thing . . . there is no legitimate private Christianity.' That people are connected with each other by cultivating some common conviction certainly does not make them a church. What makes their gathering a church is only that Jesus is in their midst. . . . Barth can speak about this in drastic terms:

'It (the church) may become a beggar, it may act like a shopkeeper, it may make itself a harlot--as has happened and still does happen, yet it is always the bride of Jesus Christ. . . . What saves it and makes it indestructible is not that it does not basically forsake Him--who can say how deeply and basically it has often enough forsaken Him and still does?--nor is it this or that good that it may be or do, but the fact that He does not forsake it, any more than Yahweh would forsake His people Israel in all His judgments.' . . .

The only way for the church to be the one visible church is for believers, each in their own place, to struggle in repentance to be the church of Jesus Christ. . . .

But there are two dangers in which she finds herself (even though she will face them both 'in the name of Jesus'!): sacralization, in which she is immersed in a self-glorification before the world that has a different orientation than she has, or secularization, in which she adjusts to the methods of worldly powers and fashions. . . .

[The mature church enjoys] a freedom to 'live in contact, solidarity . . . with God, but also with men . . . as companions in the partnership of reconciliation.' . . .

The difference between Christians and other people is not that those within the church have salvation and those outside her do not have it. The only difference is that members of the church have heard and recognized that which remains or is again hidden from others. . . .

In her missionary service, the church is not imposing something unfavorable on her fellow humans, for the Word of God became human--not Christian--and in him, Jesus Christ, God reconciled the world to himself. . . .

The church is called to be God's witness within her own times. But she can only be a witness and not the mediator of salvation. She cannot bring about the self-mediating reality of the world's reconciliation with God. God brings it about."

(Barth quotes taken from the Church Dogmatics, Vol IV, The Doctrine of Reconciliation, emphasis mine)