Signs

I'm at LTS today, looking to sort out how I'll describe these "anti-imperial" stories the Church must tell. As some of you will know, this Disciples of Christ seminary now houses the Baptist Seminary of Kentucky, and a sign outside indicates this.

A couple of older gentleman strolled in and asked the library desk worker if this was a Baptist seminary now. She looked like someone had stolen her lunch money, and tried to explain to them what the Baptists were doing here.

When I returned to my table, I noticed that the bust of Alexander Campbell on the windowsill was weeping.

Anglican Catechesis: Tradition

We were thinking and talking about the popular notion of "scripture alone"* in one's faith and practice last night, and I've been working through various ways to properly express the problem. Just say that Friend X and I are members of the local Baptist congregation, and we're hanging out and studying the Bible (we're good members of the local Baptist congregation, thank you very much). Suppose that Friend X says to me, "you know, I've been reading Acts and 1 Corinthians here, and I really think that it's proper and right that our church services include periods of public prayer and prophecy by lay people, and as long as it's done decently and in order with appropriate interpretation, some of that prophecy and prayer will be spoken in unknown tongues." We'll have a nice chat about whether the norm in the Corinthian church was glossolalia or xenoglossy (essentially, whether the unknown tongues were human or non-human languages), and then by the end of it, I say to Friend X, "No, gifts like that passed away with the apostolic generation."

(You know that he and I would never really have this conversation, right?)

Here's the problem: Friend X and I have each offered a particular reading of Scripture. It doesn't make any sense to talk about one being "more scriptural" than the other, because we're both two people who worship with the same community, read the same scriptures, pray together, and bring that formation and our broader account of the Bible into our reading. We're each trying to make the most sense out of the biggest part of Scripture as well as we can, and we're good enough friends to assume good faith of one another. As "scripture only," evangelical protestants, we would be unable to appeal to any authority to adjudicate between these positions. There is no authority to declare either reading in or out, because there is not authority that can set boundaries on the reading of Scripture.

The Scripture itself does not tell me whether this disagreement is over core issues, or adiphora - is it something about which we can agree to disagree? The congregation cannot both engage in public prophecy in the manner of 1 Corinthians, and not do this. What authority can say to us, you must stay together as friends and fellow bible readers, or that you must walk apart?

Each one of us is holding onto a particular reading of scripture - an interpretive tradition.

In one sense, tradition is (as Tom Wright says) the history of the Church's Bible reading. It's a very long and quite diverse history, with people running around every which way. When we look for a Tradition (note the capitalization), we're asking the question, "In the long history of the Christian Church, which readings of Scripture have seemed to the broadest parts of the Church to be most faithful to the entire Biblical narrative, and most conducive to the growth in holiness and Christlikeness of the Church's members? In the broadest consensus of holy men and women in the Body of Christ through time and space, which readings of Scripture have been disastrous for the Christian life, and which have been a boon?

If appealing to the "Bible alone" were practically sufficient, we would not need to divide over diverse readings of scripture.

*I didn't use the popular Reformed phrase sola scriptura because I don't have any Calvin or Luther to hand, and it's not the Official Reformation Christian Doctrines® I'm disputing - we can go around all day about What the Reformers Really Meant (as if it matters) and never get back 'round to what real people in real churches really do to the Bible and to each other, and the entire discussion would bore me so badly, I would lose the will to exercise bladder control.

Getting Ready for Next Week

"So tell me... what do you think that the religion depicted in these "praise choruses" might have in common with the religion of the martyrs who died for the name of Christ?"

Question of the Day

Is it acceptable for anabaptist Christians to view fireworks displays if they offer the apologia, "I'm not a patriot, but a pyromaniac?"

Fun Pranks

Eastertide

Did you know that a $250 check to the Cooperative Program of the Southern Baptist Convention makes you a Southern Baptist church?

No, really! "Borrow" the checkbook of your local emerging catholic catholic church, apostate episcopalian parish, or wiccan coven (the last two are often the same thing) and find out for yourself!

Wouldn't your local Roman priest be vexed to find himself invited as a messenger to the convention this summer? Try it today!

Baptists Behaving Badly

Recorded at a cookout right after I returned from Oxford. I was horribly, horribly jet lagged. I also apparently got a little fatter, but that's okay.

How to Know You are "Post-Protestant"

Ordinary Time

"I just realized that I have more reasons for not being a Baptist than I have for not being a Catholic."

- Anonymous (until I have permission to quote him)

Storytime

Ordinary Time

I was a member of a conservative Baptist church in my late teenage years. (As a reminder, I had become a Christian when I was sixteen, and between then and my departure for college, had been involved with two churches. This was the second.) It was Rose Hill Missionary Baptist Church, and it had a reputation in the community. I'm not certain what that reputation was or is, but I did know that if I mentioned attending Rose Hill, people knew what I was talking about. But that's beside the point. They ran a Christian school which was pretty infamous, but I thought the church was alright. I was only really connected to the youth ministry anyway, and this only for my last year and a half before college.

I remember when it became known that I was considering attending Georgetown College. Georgetown was (at that time) one of three college's supported by the Kentucky Baptist Convention, the others being Cumberland and Campbellsville. The former was the one with "the best reputation for serving the Lord," and the latter was pretty good too, but Georgetown was considered more than a little out to lunch: it was liberal. That made no sense to me, and I'm not certain that it does now. No one who derided my prospective choice could tell me anything they knew about Georgetown, or any terrible stories or anecdotes of unfaithfulness, they merely insisted on calling it Liberal. And that ought to have been damning enough, they seemed to think.

So here's the thing. In that particular microculture, it was normal for folks not to go to college. What was especially worrisome (even then) was that it was most common for the graduates of the Christian school to attend Ashland Community College - likely not a private college or a public university. It was perfectly acceptable to attend ACC. Now if someone wanted to leave home and attend a university, there were two Best Options. For those seeking to Serve God in a religious profession ( e.g. missionary, preacher, Christian school teacher, youth pastor) the best possible option was Liberty University, the school founded by a preacher named Falwell in Lynchburg, VA. This was usually recommended in a slightly tongue-in-cheek fashion, phrased like, "When you decide to get right with God and go to Liberty..." or "When are you going to get your life straightened out and to go Liberty?" I was never really certain how much was serious, and how much was teasing. Since I was going to be a preacher (I am not making this up), for some folks my matriculation at this institution ought to have been a foregone conclusion.

My best friend at the time was determined to attend Liberty, and I actually completed an application. I didn't quite bring myself to submit it however. My high school teachers thought the idea was nuts, and I didn't have enough church mentors to turn the tide on that one. Mind you, I was also thinking at the time that a "Christian college" might not offer the best possible education and formation anyway - I'm just saying I could have been pushed.

Now the other Best Option was to attend the University of Kentucky. Because they have a popular basketball team. The fact that it was a secular school didn't matter; it was UK. It was UK, and that's what mattered.

I have never understood that.

My best friend did go to Liberty. We've not seen each other much since then. I visited him in Virginia once. He was giving me a tour of campus, and an RA stopped us because I was wearing shorts in a classroom building (after hours). He asked if I was a visitor, so I presented the paperwork to prove it: the Student Life office kept the white copy of the approval of my weekend visit to the campus, while I was left with the yellow copy to keep and the pink one to give to my friend's RA. I am not making this up.

He said he didn't need to see the paperwork, as I clearly wasn't a Liberty student.

Update: Lots more anecdotes in the comments section...

Technorati Tags: liberty university, baptists, jerry falwell, rose hill baptist, christian colleges, georgetown college, university of the cumberlands, university of kentucky

Falling Away

I experienced two “potholes” in my journey that compelled me to choose a different road than Southern Baptist Christianity. Roughly speaking, they involved the Bible and their values regarding life in the world.

As a disclaimer: I like Baptists. I have several friends whom I greatly love and respect studying at Baptist seminaries. I should remind you here that in two weeks, I will be one of them. I have great respect for the Baptist tradition, and have found a great deal of truth and liberty in it, and been blessed by the hands of those who bear it. This is not a post about Baptists, or about some people being bad or others being enlightened. This is a snapshot of two important moments in my journey, and my theological reflections on them.

I enjoyed reading the Bible very much, as well as all manner of study notes. I looked forward to doing this in an academic setting at Georgetown College, as well as the seminary environment later on. I even began to think about getting a Ph.D. in the stuff, to be as educated as I possibly could (because at the time, education = spiritual formation and maturity) before doing church ministry. A minister in my church informed me that because of the suspicion of theological education in many churches, the more (and better) degrees I got, the harder it would be to find and keep a job. This seemed bizarre to me. If course, I did and do believe him (now more than before!), but that’s still bizarre. One day, I wandered into his office to ask the meaning of this “inerrancy” thing everyone was talking about. It was time someone told me the facts of SBC life, and I’m glad he did. He explained it in about 10 minutes, and neither this term nor its definition made any sense to me at all. In all my reading of Scripture, I had never thought to see the Bible in the terms he explained to me. I told him this, only to learn that if I didn’t believe in a “perfect” Bible, I couldn’t have trustworthy information about Jesus, and therefore couldn’t have a relationship with Jesus and therefore couldn’t be saved. I left feeling quite annoyed, as I left with the same high opinion of Scripture and rigorous reading habits with which I’d come in. Only now I was “unsaved” because I didn’t understand this strange thing called “inerrancy.” The minister was (and is) a good man, but I feared his Jesus was a fickle master indeed.

The intellectual struggle necessary to affirm that set of doctrinal positions sounded suspiciously like a “works salvation,” another phrase that conjured great fears in that milieu. I’ve expounded before in this space about the error of inerrancy, so I won’t do it again. I will mention a recent argument I was discussing with friends: this would be a Jesus who is dependant upon me believing all the right things about the Bible, and all the right things about who he is (with no mixture of error) before he can actual be who he is: the savior of the world, and the redeemer of my own life.

Jesus is not so weak as my own apprehension of him. I don’t need to be right all the time. It’s a liberating thing to know when I’m wrong, and have the freedom to submit to Jesus and my friends. I still cannot believe that I have to be right all the time in order to be in a state of grace.

Other people clearly do; why else is it so hard to discuss religion with so many people?

My problem with the ethical focus is more straightforward. When I visited the big Lifeway store in Nashville with my a friend, we found all kinds of books. I of course started looking through them because theology and the bible excited me, but then I wandered into the “contemporary issues” section. I found a book on gambling, two on alcoholism, perhaps a couple of tomes on sexual abuse and one about healing prayer. You know, the places where real people lead their lives. Oh, and also 22,560,342 books on “the endtimes,” where many Christians apparently really wished they lived.

I knew that was wrong, and I just couldn’t be there. It wasn’t an atmosphere that could sustain relationship with Jesus, or the life of the Church in the world. I didn’t know what could.

Technorati Tags: inerrancy, conversion, evangelicalism, Baptists