By now, there is no way you have missed the controversy about Rob Bell's new book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. The internet nearly exploded on Saturday when Justin Taylor posted a rather unhelpful piece essentially declaring Bell to be apostate for rejecting the idea of hell and embracing universalism. Taylor wisely amended his post soon afterward and noted that he had made his judgments without actually reading the book. Nonetheless, folks all over took Taylor's post to be the truth, and immediately proceeded to toss Bell aside as a heretic.

My knowledge of Bell's theology is limited, but I know that he has been a controversial figure for quite some time. Robin, my wife, is from Grand Rapids, and during the time we were dating we went to Bell's church a couple of times, although for all the ink spilled about his bad theology, I never heard him say anything overtly unbiblical. Nonetheless, I was not surprised to see his name dragged through the mud again for his views on how God deals with those who reject him.

I was not surprised, but I was very disappointed. We always need to have an enemy, it seems, and Rob Bell made the perfect target this weekend. And so without having read his book or interacted with him on the issue at hand, people all over set to judging him and condemning what they think they knew of his theology.

Eugene Peterson, in Practice Resurrection, spends a few pages discussing Martin Buber's book, I and Thou. Buber puts forth the theory that there are three ways humans typically approach their relationships with others: I-It, which objectifies the other in the relationship; Us-Them, which divides every relationship into good and bad; and I-You, which recognises the personality and humanity of each person in the relationship. Having the Bell controversy on my mind as I read this, I was struck by how often evangelicals view everything through the lens of Us-Them. Peterson summarises Buber's second category like this:

Us-Them: the world is divided into two, the children of light and the children of darkness. This is a very convenient way to think about the world because whatever is wrong, it's obviously because of 'them.' Complexities vanish. Everything is suddenly tidy. There are goats and sheep, and the sheep by the very nature of things will triumph – didn't Jesus say so? Us-Them has always attracted demagogues, and the demagogues have attracted great crowds. This in effect demonizes everyone who doesn't think or feel along the lines of Us... Us-Them turns others into the enemy.

I am not here to defend Bell's theology or to offer an apology for his book. And if you do a quick Google search, you will find lots of helpful (and not so helpful) responses already written about what happened this weekend. But the whole controversy brings to light again the need for Christians to stop glorying in ugly theological battles, especially when our understanding of the theology we are opposing is based on speculation.

John Frame, one my seminary professors, had such wisdom and humility in how he dealt with the thought of others, particularly those he disagreed with. I learned a great deal from him about this. We have a responsibility to have a thorough understanding of the thinking of those we disagree with before we set out to critique them. And when we do, Ephesians 4 is instructive, because our critique of the theology of others is not to tear them down, but to build them – and the whole body of Christ – up. So we must speak the truth in love (Eph. 4:15). What's more, we simply cannot be so casual when it comes to throwing around accusations of a false gospel. To be sure, we have a responsibility to carefully evaluate the teaching of others, and sometimes there will be a need to be frank and honest about someone teaching a false gospel. But to label someone apostate is a major charge, one that has immense implications. We are wise to use this label very sparingly. 

Needless to say, this was largely absent from the internet discussions over the weekend. It is a lot easier to label someone apostate than to take the time to interact with their thought. But this hardly serves to build up the body of Christ.

I don't know what Rob Bell thinks about hell or universalism or how God deals with those who reject him. If the promotional video that caused so much of a stir is accurate, then there are some major theological issues that need to be addressed. But writing off Bell as a heretic or bidding him farewell should not be our first reaction. We need to carefully evaluate Bell's theology, interact with him about these issues, and speak the truth in love. Don't revel in division and controversy. Seek the unity and peace of Christ's church.

Earlier this week, I wrote about the need for an ontological understanding of the church, one that views the church for what it is, not for what it does. I mentioned a number of problems that arise from a functional understanding of the church. But there is an additional problem worth noting. When we attempt to define or measure the church functionally, we try our best to disguise the fact that all the people in the church are still sinners.

Naturally, we don't altogether mask this – you can't escape something as blatant as Romans 3:23 – but we make a concerted effort to downplay reality. What is that reality? It is simply that the church is a mess. We don't like the fact that nobody has it all together. We don't like it when we get hurt in church because church is supposed to be a place where everything is good and peaceful. We don't like the fact that living the Christian life is really, really difficult and so we (sometimes unconsciously) draw up a set of standards for what we think Christians should be like that make a lot of concessions to our culture because then it is easier to make it look like we have it all together, and as a bonus, outsiders will feel more welcome when they are among us. We want to justify the idea that 'Jesus makes everything better,' and we need to create that illusion in order to make it believable.

Needless to say, a lot of Christians don't want to be honest about the state of the church. I quoted a small portion of N.T. Wright's, Small Faith – Great God, the other day where he noted that Christians often want to walk by sight instead of by faith. We want the perfect church, and when we don't see it, we think we have failed. We then think we need to concede the fact that we are all a bunch of hypocrites, nevermind that most people just want us to be real and to stop creating a façade that masks who we really are. But because we want to avoid being honest, we respond in a number of different ways, as Eugene Peterson notes in Practice Resurrection:

A lot of [people] seem to have no idea what is going on. What they see is chaos: hostility, injury, brokenness, church fights, church sleaze, church grandstanding, religious wars. Many of them find a place in the bleachers with a few other likeminded people and make do with what they find there. They survive by ignoring what they find confusing and disorienting. They remove their attention from what is taking place on the field (in the congregation, in the denomination). They do pray together, study together, socialize together. Life in the bleachers isn't all that bad.

There are other people who are so disturbed by what they perceive as chaos on the playing field that they decide to 'do something about it.' They want a game that looks like a game, a church that looks like a church, where no one gets hurt and everything is orderly and stays in place. They understand church as something they need to take charge of. And of course, there are a great many people who just walk out and look for a game that they are already familiar with or go home and turn on the television where they can satisfy, if you can call it that, their religious needs by picking a brand without dealing personally with either God or people.

The point is that willful ignorance, creating alternative realities, or abandonment are not the answers to the mess we see when we look at the church. As Wright said in the short quote I posted the other day, we walk by faith. We are not going to get this right all on our own. Peterson again:

I don't think we have to make any apologies that church is not conspicuously prominent as a place of peace... The church in its deepest being, as it is in itself, the ontological church comprises a vast company of men and women in all stages of maturity: crawling infants and squalling babies, awkward and inpulsive adolescents, harassed and fatigued parents, and occasional holy men and holy women who have it all together. All of us who understand and practice peace in the company of Jesus, who is our peace, have a lot of maturing to do. About the time we are becoming mature (if we ever do), we find that we have brought another generation into the world that has to go through the whole process once again. Humankind does not mature all at once. And so peace is constantly in the making, and also constantly at risk.

...When anyone looks at church as a performance, whether from inside our outside, mostly what they see is skinned knees and sprained ankles, awkward, bungled attempts at keeping the peace. But we also know that at the source and center of church, Jesus is our peace. And so we don't quit.

Jesus is our peace. When we try to 'fix' the church with our own solutions or try to cover up who we really are, we hurt ourselves, we cease to bear witness to the transforming power of the gospel, and we block the way for true peace in our churches. Being honest about who we are and putting our faith in Jesus, embracing the new life we have in him, is the first step we need to take. True peace comes only through Jesus, the source and life of the church.

One of the interesting things Eugene Peterson talks about in his book, Practice Resurrection, is an ontological understanding of the church; that is, understanding the church for what it is, not what is does. He observes that the functional understanding of the church is pervasive within the context of American Christianity.

Americans talk and write endlessly about what the church needs to become, what the church must do to be effective. The perceived failures of the church are analyzed and reforming strategies prescribed. The church is understood almost exclusively in terms of function – what we can see. If we can't see it, it doesn't exist. Everything is viewed through the lens of pragmatism. Church is an instrument that we have been given to bring about whatever Christ commanded us to do. Church is a staging ground for getting people motivated to continue Christ's work.

This way of thinking – church as a human activity to be masured by human expectations – is pursued unthinkingly. The huge reality of God already at work in all operations of the Trinity is benched on the sideline while we call timeout, huddle together with our heads bowed, and figure out a strategy by which we can compensate for God's regrettable retreat into invisibility. This is dead wrong, and it is responsible for no end of shallowness and experimentation in trying to acheive success and relevance and effectiveness that people can see. Statistics provide the basic vocabulary for keeping score. Programs provide the game plan. This way of going about things has done and continues to do immeasurable damage to the American church.

There is little to add to Peterson's remarks here; he is, of course, spot on. We become so wrapped up in our numbers and statistics and methods and practices that we entirely lose sight of the fact that the church is first and foremost a living body that Christ, as the head, has promised to preserve for all time (Matt. 16:8). It is not primarily about what we do. To be sure, God has entrusted us with certain things that we must do as the church – faithfully preaching the Word, administering the sacraments, and so on – but these are intended to nourish the life of this living body. And what we do in the world – looking after the orphan and widow, bearing witness to the Kingdom of God and embodying an alternative reality of life transformed by the gospel – is not to build up numbers or raise money, but simply to remain faithful to the calling God has entrusted to us, proclaiming the gospel, making disciples, and bringing shalom to a broken and hurting world. If we see numerical growth, praise God! But this should not be our primary motivation.

Recently, there was a church that celebrated an anniversary of some sort (five or ten years or something like that), and to celebrate they wanted to fly some new church planters out to their church so they could see how things are done. I am sure that their intention was only to be supportive and encouraging of other church planters, but what seemed to come to the forefront was a deep faith in programs and methods. Effectively, what they were saying was that they had figured out something that enabled them to go from a small core group to several thousands of members in a short time span, and others needed to adopt these methods if they wanted the same results. It was numbers and statistics that proved God was blessing them.

It is so easy to get caught up in this because we want that visible, tangible proof that God is blessing us. We cannot disconnect from the idea that numerical growth equals blessing and success. We want to see results – big church buildings, big budgets, front page articles in newspapers, people flocking to learn from us. Our barometer for faithfulness is statistics, and when our statistics are not good, we think our strategies have failed. That is business and economics, but the church is neither. Writes Peterson,

This way of understanding church is...very, very wrong. We can no more understand church functionally than we can understand Jesus functionally. We have to submit ourselves to the revelation and receive church as the gift of Christ as he embodies himself in the world. Paul tells us that Christ is the head of the body, and the body is church. Head and body are one thing.

'Ontology' is a word that can get us past this clutter of functionalism... [Church] is far wider, deeper, higher than anything it does, or anything we can take charge of or manipulate... Church is not something that we cobble together to do something for God. It is the 'fullness of him who fills all in all' (Eph. 1:23) working comprehensively with and for us.

Now, I am not saying that big churches are wrong (although I'm a proponent of small, multiplying churches), or that a big church is actually an unfaithful church. The point is that the measure of a church's faithfulness is not so easy to see. Helping to lead people to put their faith in Christ and to be baptised is only one part of the church's task, and we cannot say that our work is done when someone is converted. No, that is only the beginning. A lifetime of discipleship must follow as we walk hand in hand with fellow believers learning to embody the transformative power of the gospel and learning to live in a way that honours Christ's lordship over all of life.

That, of course, is not so easily measurable. But maybe that is the point.

The church is what it is regardless of what we do, and thankfully so, because left to our own devices we make one big mess of it all. It saves us from pride and from putting our faith in what we do. When we come to understand the church for what it is – ontologically – we begin to understand that it is not our responsibility to create or jump-start the life of the church. We are, instead, participants in the life that Christ gives his church. He is the head and we are the body, and anything that we are to do flows from who he is and what he has called us to be.

Work is something that very few people get right, Eugene Peterson observes in his book, Practice Resurrection. Broader culture, on the whole, tends to romanticize work. Our work is where we find our significance. It becomes the defining part of who we are. It "becomes a way to extend our influence or importance... Work becomes a way to become godlike without ever dealing with God" (104).

Conversely, Christians tend to spiritualize work. This does not mean they are free of the same pitfalls as those who romanticize work – they too will work too much and find their self-worth in their work – but their conception of the significance and meaning of their work is much different.

The pietist 'spiritualizes' work. Work is desecularized into religious acts: prayer, worship, witness. Or it is professionalized into occupations of pastor, preacher, missionary, evangelist. This spiritualization of work de-spiritualizes most of the world of work...the daily work of what is often dismissively referred to as 'women's work' – laundry, meal preparation, child-rearing, typing, and carpooling. It also, across the board, removes unskilled work from the Christian workweek: work for hire, assembly-line work, grunt work. The only work left for honoring and practicing 'good works' is church work, often identified as 'the Lord's work' or 'Christian work' (105).

One of the reasons so many Christians fall into this trap is because they don't understand two things. First, they forget that work is something God gave mankind to do before the Fall. We don't work because of the Fall. The Fall has made work difficult, to be sure, but God designed us to work from the very beginning. Second, and related, is the unbiblical notion that ultimately the things we do on this earth do not matter because in the end it will all pass away. Paul Marshall has noted in his excellent book, Heaven is Not My Home, that Christians are apathetic and passive about so many aspects of our earthly life (like our work) because we don't take God's world seriously. We separate the things of earth from the things of heaven such that vocations like accountant, construction worker, and engineer are just "jobs," while pastor and seminary professor are "callings."

In his 1981 encyclical, Laborem Exercens, the late Pope John Paul II wrote, "Through work, men and women participate in the very action of the Creator in the universe." Our work has far greater significance and worth than we often attribute to it. In a culture that operates with a distorted view of work, the church has an opportunity to begin to develop a theology of work or a theology of vocation where, in the process of discipleship, believers can start to understand that their work in the world has significance and purpose beyond being a forum where they interact with non-Christians or a place where they make money so they can give to the church.

The nature of work, the relationship of faith and work, our work and the Kingdom of God – all these are pressing questions for believers who seek to be faithful in acknowledging Christ's Lordship over all of life. Given that many believers spend the vast majority of their week engaged in their work, it is of prime importance that the church help them begin to answer these questions.

I remember reading the following, from Eugene Peterson's Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity, somewhere before, a few years ago. When I saw that John Barach had posted it, I copied and pasted it here because it is characteristic of Peterson's incisiveness and wisdom, and his ability to systematically expose the rampant consumerism at work in American evangelicalism. Here he laments the way the pastorate has become just another tool used to satisfy the wants of the consumers in the pew.

For a long time I have been convinced that I could take a person with a high school education, give him or her a six-month trade school training, and provide a pastor who would be satisfactory to any discriminating American congregation. The curriculum would consist of four courses. Course I: Creative Plagiarism. I would put you in touch with a wide range of excellent and inspirational talks, show you how to alter them just enough to obscure their origins, and get you a reputation for wit and wisdom. Course II: Voice Control for Prayer and Counseling. We would develop your own distinct style of Holy Joe intonation, acquiring the skill in resonance and modulation that conveys an unmistakable aura of sanctity. Course III: Efficient Office Management. There is nothing that parishioners admire more in their pastors than the capacity to run a tight ship administratively. If we return all telephone calls within twenty-four hours, answer all letters within a week, distributing enough carbons to key people so that they know we are on top of things, and have just the right amount of clutter on our desks — not too much or we appear inefficient, not too little or we appear underemployed — we quickly get the reputation for efficiency that is far more important than anything that we actually do. Course IV: Image Projection. Here we would master the half-dozen well-known and easily implemented devices that create the impression that we are terrifically busy and widely sought after for counsel by influential people in the community. A one-week refresher course each year would introduce new phrases that would convince our parishioners that we are bold innovators on the cutting edge of the megatrends and at the same time solidly rooted in all the traditional values of our sainted ancestors.

(I have been laughing for several years over this trade school training for pastors with which I plan to make my fortune. Recently, though, the joke has backfired on me. I keep seeing advertisements for institutes and workshops all over the country that invite pastors to sign up for this exact curriculum. The advertised course offerings are not quite as honestly labeled as mine, but the content appears to be identical — a curriculum that trains pastors to satisfy the current consumer tastes in religion. I’m not laughing anymore.) [7-8]

Pastoral ministry is not about giving people what they want. Instead, it is about giving people what they need. While at first we may, with Peterson, laugh a little about this, we too must come to the point where we are not laughing about this anymore. When it is all said and done, this is not just a matter of wants versus needs, or likes versus dislikes. The reality is that this a matter of life and death.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a number of posts trying to work through how to understand and practice the Sabbath. Too often, I think, we look at the Sabbath through one of two lenses: the first has us thinking about what we are not supposed to do on the Sabbath, and the second has us saying that as long as we go to church, the rest of the day is free for us to do whatever we want.

My point is simply that in thinking about the Sabbath this way, we are making it about us actively doing something, and so we have missed the point of the Sabbath altogether. Yesterday morning I was reading Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, and came to a part where Eugene Peterson talks about the need for a Sabbath:

If there is no Sabbath—no regular and commanded not-working, not-talking—we soon become totally absorbed in what we are doing and saying, and God's work is either forgotten or marginalized. When we work we are most god-like, which means that it is in our work that it is easiest to develop god-pretensions. Un-sabbathed, our work becomes the entire context in which we define our lives.We lose God-consciousness, God-awareness, sightings of resurrection. We lose the capacity to sing 'This is my Father's world' and end up chirping little self-centered ditties about what we are doing and feeling.

This is a most difficult command to keep, a most difficult practice to cultivate. It is one of the most abused and distorted practices of the Christian life. Many through the centuries have suffered much under oppressive Sabbath regimens. And more than a few of us have been among the oppressors. It is difficult to assemble a congregation of Christians today that does not number in its company both oppressed and oppressors. John gives us accounts of two of Jesus' Sabbath healings (chapters 5 and 9) that serve as serious warnings against glib or legalistic or oppressive Sabbath practices. Jesus spent a good deal of his time at odds with people who had wrong ideas about keeping Sabbath. (See also Mark 3:1-6; 3:23-30; Luke 14:1-6). And one contributing cause of their wrong ideas was that they had severed the connection between Sabbath and work.

But I don't see any way out of it: if we are going to live appropriately in the creation we must keep the Sabbath. We must stop running around long enough to see what he has done and is doing. We must shut up long enough to hear what he has said and is saying. All our ancestors agree that without silence and stillness there is no spirituality, no God-attentive, God-responsive life.

For Peterson, then, the Sabbath is not about keeping a set of rules, but resting in order to take the focus off of ourselves and look to God. We rest from our toils in order both to imitate God's rest from his creative work, and as a means of remembering the rest we find in redemption.

More to come on this. Maybe.

One of Eugene Peterson's concerns in his book, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, is to get us to see that creation is sacred—all of creation. It is easy for us to look at the grandeur and beauty of the mountains or to bask in the warmth of the spring sun and recognize the beauty of creation. Yet, when we find ourselves looking at the pinnacle of God's creation, humanity, that is not often the case."There is a great deal of so-called creation  appreciation, or 'love of nature,'" Peterson writes, "that prefers to look the other way when men and women appear on the scene." But, he argues, Genesis 2 won't allow us to do that because of how integral humanity is to creation.

Peterson tells this story to make his point:

Several years ago one of my students who lived a distance away and rode a crowded bus to the college each day said to his wife as he went out the door one morning, 'I'm just going to go out and immerse myself in God's creation today.' The next day his parting words were the same. On the third day, she called him back, 'Don't you think you ought to go to class today? A couple of days walking in the woods or on the beach is okay, but don't you think enough is enough?'

He said, 'Oh, I've been going to class every day.'

'Then what,' she said, 'is all this business about immersing yourself in creation?'

'Well, I spend forty minutes on the bus each morning and afternoon. Can you think of a setting more thick with creation than that—all these people created, created in the image of God, created male and female?'

'I never thought of that,' she said.

'You mean you've never read Genesis?'

As big of a challenge as it is, we need to learn to see the beauty in the broken. "I'm not suggesting it is easy," Peterson concludes, "...I'm only insisting that it is necessary" (82-83).

As I mentioned in the previous post, Eugene Peterson is coming to speak at RTS this week. A good friend of mine is picking him up from the airport tomorrow morning, and Peterson will be delivering two lectures tomorrow and then another two on Thursday. It promises to be very good. The overarching theme for his lectures is that prayer must be at the very root of the Church's life, and he will be taking us through Ephesians to explore that.

Peterson has a five-book series on what he calls spiritual theology, and when I came across the term the other day I was not quite sure what he meant by it. But it did not take long to find a definition—within the first few pages of the introduction to the first book in the series, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, Peterson writes this:

Spiritual theology is the attention we give to lived theology—prayed and lived, for if it is not prayed sooner or later it will not be lived from the inside out and in continuity with the Lord of life. Spiritual theology is the attention that we give to living what we know and believe about God. It is the thoughtful and obedient cultivation of life as worship on our knees before God the Father, of life as sacrifice on our feet following God the Son, and of life as love embracing and being embraced by the community of God the Spirit.

Spiritual theology is not one more area of theology that takes its place on the shelf alongside the academic disciplines of systematic, biblical, practical, and historical theology; rather, it represents the conviction that all theology, no exceptions, has to do with the living God who creates us as living creatures to live to his glory. It is the development of awareness and discernments that are as alert and responsive in the workplace as in the sanctuary, as active while changing diapers in a nursery as while meditating in a grove of aspens, as necessary when reading a newspaper editorial as when exegeting a sentence written in Hebrew.

Some may want to simplify things by keeping the spiritual and throwing out the theology. Others will be content to continue with the theology as usual and forget the spiritual. But the fact is that we live only because God lives and that we live well only in continuity with the way God makes, saves, and blesses us. Spirituality begins in theology (the revelation and understanding of God) and is guided by it. And theology is never truly itself apart from being expressed in the bodies of men and women to whom God gives life and whom God then intends to live a full salvation life (spirituality).

The former president of RTS Orlando, Frank James, once said to our church history class, "Doctrine means nothing if it is not followed by doxology." The point, of course, is that there cannot be a disconnect between what we believe and how we live, something Peterson would wholeheartedly affirm. In the end, then, we are talking about nothing less than recognizing the Lordship of Christ over all of life. Our beliefs and convictions, insofar as they are faithful to God's revelation, are to bring about holistic transformation of our hearts and minds such that we begin to live in a manner that reflects a complete devotion and allegiance to our sovereign God.

If that is what spiritual theology is all about, count me in.