Karen Sloan Podcast.

This week Nick talks to Karen Sloan about her life, her writing, NPR, and how she now walks the earth. Karen is an energetic voice representing women Presbyterians and emergents. She is a big part of Presbymergent.

She is second in our ongoing search for women to interview. We are glad to have her on. She talks about her book Flirting With Monasticism published through InterVarsity Press.

Enjoy the interview and read more about her in a Relevant Magazine. (The Nick and Josh Podcast does not endorse Relevant Magazine). She also had a bit to do with the Emergent Manefesto of Hope so check that out as well. Nick also set it up where you can now download the episode as an MP3 directly if you’re not into iTunes Podcast. Why you wouldn’t be into it, I have no idea, but it’s a cool feature for your cave people nonetheless.

[Download Episode]

[tags]Karen Sloan, Presbymergent, Emergent+Women, Emergent Village, Monasticism[/tags]

An Emergent Manifesto of Hope: A Review.

Recently I got given a gift card to Borders and was finally able to go out and buy a book instead of relying on the trusty old library. So I picked up a book that I’ve been wanting to read but that the library didn’t carry and to which I was not privilege with an advanced reader’s copy (I’m not complaining). I’ve been curious to read it because it is the first book that Emergent has released in their new line of books. And I thought the format would be perfect for just this type of entrance into the publishing world.

The book is made up of 25 authors who each wrote a chapter for the project with general editors, Doug Pagitt & Tony Jones, providing intermittent thoughts and transitions between sections.

These 25 authors represent a diverse group of people that are, Protestant and Catholic, male and female, mainline and evangelical, clergy/pastors and lay leaders, authors and bloggers, black, white, hispanic, and Native American. This is the book’s strength. It’s diversity of authors and thus it’s diversity of perspective. My only complaint in this regards would have been to had a more diverse ethnic presence and a sampling of thoughts that come from outside of the American context. But I also realize that with anything new, it takes time for diversity to establish itself.

As far as the book itself . . . it’s a great introduction to what makes Emergent what it is and what sets it apart from other denominational or organizational structures. Namely, friendships and conversations. This context of friendship and conversation is what funds the theological imagination and hopeful practices of the church emerging. Instead of Emergent creating a movement focusing on doctrinal statements (defining whose out) . . . they have been a part of a friendship that has organically created itself in the form of a conversation about the dynamic tension between God, culture, theology, ecclesiology, and practice.

True to form, I don’t always find myself agreeing with everything written or shared. But true to form, I count myself privileged to be part of an extended friendship where agreeing is less important than belonging.

I suppose, as what should be expected, the best chapters are written by the “professional authors”. Brian McLaren‘s chapter on the direct, inseparable ties of colonialism and postmodernity is borderline brilliant. Sally Morgenthaler has an excellent chapter on leadership in a flattened world that was equally insightful. And Tim Keel wrote a beautiful piece about leadership needing to come from the artists at the margins. Rudy Carrasco has a nice chapter on inner-city work and the primacy of social justice. Samir Selmanovic has a chapter on inclusiveness that left me entirely frustrated and yet intrigued to stretch and think wider. My friend Adam Walker Cleaveland shares his thoughts on why he has chosen to stay within the system and structures of the church, which was a challenge for me to think about. And Nanette Sawyer had a very good chapter on Huckleberry Finn and the relational ethics of Jesus (which is very much in the vein of what I wrote here).

Honestly though, there are some chapters that aren’t that great from a readability/literary skillz standpoint. But even in those chapters you get the deep sense of humility and friendship that pervades all that these authors are bound by. For an introduction into the church emerging with it’s growing diversity and generative friendships . . . I couldn’t recommend a book more highly. And since I bought it with a gift card and I’m trying to de-collectify myself . . . the first person who leaves a comment wanting the book can have it.

[tags]Emergent, Emergent+Village, Emergent+Books, Emergent+Manifesto+of+Hope[/tags]

The Evolutionary Trajectory of the Story of God: The Community As Umpire.

Again . . . a bit of a reminder . . . everything from this point will be heavily influenced by Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt‘s developing works on “provisional theology”. Tony lays out an excellent formulation to it here in a presentation he gave at the 2007 Wheaton Theology Conference and Doug begins an articulation of it in one of our first podcasts which you can find here and in his forthcoming book, currently titled Wild Goose Chase. Every bit of what I propose is a knock-off and a much more poorly worded proposal than what they’ve been developing.

Part One – An Introduction
Part Two – The Mystique
Part Three – Purpose
Part Four – Inerrancy & Inspiration
Part Five – The Problem of the Holy Spirit
Part Six – An Odd Letter
Part Seven – A Local Text & A Theology of Place

Today’s entire post is a direct quote from Tony Jones’ presentation at Wheaton’s 2007 Theological Conference . . . a presentation that later got rejected from inclusion in the collected printing of the keynote speakers’ presentations. I am directly quoting the first 4 pages of his presentation which you can download here. What follows from Tony is one of the more intriguing metaphors that has developed to articulate the interplay between orthodoxy, community, and scripture. Tony begins by describing his experience with umpiring baseball games and then translates that into the role of the community in shaping orthodoxy.

BEGIN QUOTATION

A plate ump sees about 300 pitches in a 9-inning game, and he’s got to make a decision on about half of them. Every pitch, you see, is either a ball or a strike. If the batter swings at the pitch, then it’s a strike (although, even whether it was a swing or not is often called into question). If the batter doesn’t swing at the pitch, the umpire has a decision to make a very quick decision. If the ball crosses the plate in the strike zone, it’s called a strike. If it does not, it’s called a ball.

Simple, right? Well, we umpires had to collectively affirm that we interpret the strike zone according to the “literal, or normal, sense.” (By that I mean, of course, “the meaning which the writer expressed.” To that end, let me read you the periscope from our almost-sacred text, the Baseball Rulebook, Rule 2.00,

The Strike Zone is defined as that area over homeplate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the kneecap. The Strike Zone shall be determined from the batter’s stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball.

It doesn’t seem to leave much room for interpretation, does it? Except for that bit about the batter’s stance at he prepares to swing, it’s there, right there in black-and-white. You might say, “A strike is a strike is a strike.”

Except . . . when it isn’t.

Here you see (slide 6) the official strike zone, shaded in blue, and the strike zone as it’s actually called by Major League umps in the gray box. Significantly smaller, low and outside. Why? Well, baseball has changed a lot since that rule was penned. For one thing, have you ever tried to hit a 96 mile an hour fastball at the letters? It’s nearly impossible. And, on the umpiring side of the equation, the move from the bulky outside chest protectors to the vest protector under the jacket means that umpires crouch lower behind catchers, lowering their sightline and thus the strike zone. Major League Baseball has also increased penalties against bean balls in recent years, meaning that pitchers have pitched more outside pitches, and the umps have given them more of those pitches.

Finally, any umpire will tell you that the eyes of a manager standing in the dugout are about belt high to the batter in the box. That means the manager has a good gauge of high balls and low balls – and he’ll start barking at the home plate ump if they look too high or too low. But he can’t tell if a pitch hits the outside corner, or if it misses by an inch and a half. I can assure you that no ump likes to see players walk, so we steal strikes wherever we can. And, it’s easier to steal them outside and inside than it is high and low.

In 2001, Major League Baseball announced that it would be requiring umpires to get back to the literal interpretation of the strike zone, but that didn’t even last until the All Star Break. By June, the zone had once again moved low and outside.

Actually, let me put it another way: the Strike Zone was pulled low and outside by the community of baseball: pitchers and catchers, hitters and managers, umpires and MLB officials. And, of course, the beer-soaked fans who scream every time an umpire misses a call.

The hallowed Baseball Rulebook and its myriad interpreters live in a hermeneutical tension with one another, and that tension has resulted in a de facto strike zone – a working strike zone. There is no one, single authority who determines the strike zone.

But, intriguingly, neither has the strike zone slid down the slippery slope into nihilistic meaninglessness, with umps calling pitches in the dirt strikes. No, the community of baseball wouldn’t let that happen.

Of course, it’s not lost on me that since the earliest days of the postmodern conversation, there’s been story floating around about three umpires,

- The pre-modern umpire says, “I call ‘em as they are!”
- The modern umpire says, “I call ‘em as I see ‘em!”
- The postmodern umpire says, “They ain’t nothin’ ’till I call ‘em!”

This all stems, it seems, from the irrepressible literary critic, Stanley Fish, who years ago told this story about the legendary umpire, Bill Klem,

“Klem’s behind the plate,” Fish said. “The pitcher winds up, throws the ball. The pitch comes. The batter doesn’t swing. Klem for an instant says nothing. The batter turns around and says, “O.K., so what was it, a ball or a strike?” And Klem says, “Sonny, it ain’t nothing ’till I call it.”

“What the batter is assuming is that balls and strikes are facts in the world and that the umpire’s job is to accurately say which one each pitch is. But in fact balls and strikes come into being only on the call of an umpire.”

Have you looked at Luther’s 95 Theses?  They’re not about systematic theology, they’re about the very specific issues of his day.  Have you read Augustine’s treatises?  They are confronting the Pelagianism of his day.  And Aquinas?  The Islamic Aristotelianism of his day.  This is
orthodoxy: an ongoing conversation who is God?, who are we?, and what’s the relationship between us?

END QUOTATION

If this is anywhere near correct . . . then it means that the locus of authority is found in the community as they navigate the story of God. And if the church has always stood in a specific place and context as they interpret and practice the scriptures . . . then we too stand in a specific place and context in our interpretation and practice.

Listening: Let Me Introduce My Friends by I’m From Barcelona

[tags]Scripture, Bible, Scripture + Evolution, Emergent, Emergent+Scripture, Emergent+Wheaton, Wheaton+Tony Jones, Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt[/tags]

Doug Pagitt Podcast.

We’ve got a new podcast up.

This week we celebrate Festivus with Doug Pagitt. We begin with an airing of grievences. Doug airs some grief about voice mails and then we get some things off our chests that have been peeving us about Doug since we met him at the 2006 Emergent Theological Conversation at Yale, namely eating our pizza without asking, throwing some loose change at Nick in a mocking manner, and blowing us off when we wanted to do some Skull & Bones hunting.

Other than that, it’s a great little conversation with Doug talking about An Emergent Manifesto of Hope and some about his upcoming book. We also lost our intro and Tall Skinny which we thought was one of our best ones yet. So Nick recorded a new one but the audio is a bit sketchy. We also have a Soularize minute with Spencer Burke.

[tags]Doug Pagitt, Pagitt+Podcast, Soularize, Spencer Burke, Emergent+Manifesto[/tags]

The Evolutionary Trajectory of the Story of God: A Local Text & A Theology of Place.

Part One – An Introduction
Part Two – The Mystique
Part Three – Purpose
Part Four – Inerrancy & Inspiration
Part Five – The Problem of the Holy Spirit
Part Six – An Odd Letter

Sorry for the interlude between posts. Honestly, I felt like what I was “musing” on was getting out of hand and sort of racing out of control. I wanted to make sure that when I wrote my proposal for what I am beginning to come around to, that I wasn’t just rushing something out that I hadn’t really thought through.

Also, to be quite fair . . . everything from this point will be heavily influenced by Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt‘s developing works on “provisional theology”. Tony lays out an excellent formulation to it here in a presentation he gave at the 2007 Wheaton Theology Conference and Doug begins an articulation of it in one of our first podcasts which you can find here and in his forthcoming book, currently titled Wild Goose Chase. Every bit of what I propose is a knock-off and a much more poorly worded proposal than what they’ve been developing.

Anyway . . . on with the heresy.

Let’s do this thing logically for a minute.

The Holy Spirit didn’t pull a Poltergeist move and inhabit the bodies of the writers, taking over their bodies.

The Holy Spirit didn’t sit in the room with the authors and dictate things word for word to them.

The Holy Spirit nor God (or Jesus for that matter) robotically controlled the hands of the authors.

God did not drop down a book from “heaven” with everything already written.

Human people like me and like you wrote it.

If humans wrote it in a specific context and a specific place to a specific people . . . in narrative forms in the Old Testament and letter format in the New Testament . . . then it is a local text.

And if it’s a local text then it’s a provisional text. I’ll discuss this idea of “provisional” in the coming days, but first I turn my attention to the idea of the text being local.

Doug Pagitt writes that the scriptures both come from and inform the church. They were not written in a vacuum. Nor were they written by “outsiders”. They were written by the church to inform the church. Or more simply put the scriptures shape the church and the church shapes the scriptures. The two are never divorced from each other. Rather at every point they are intersecting and in constant interplay with each other. You can not separate the scriptures from the community that wrote them. They are a local text. They belong to a specific location.

They only “work” in so far as they are local. They only make sense if you see them in the light of their locality and their place. To remove their context is to be left with nothing but words void of placement and detached from the material world of space, time, place, and history. To remove their locality is to be left with nothing more than imaginary words floating around without context.

In many ways Wendell Berry’s “theology of place” brings this to light.

“A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives.”

While Berry is writing about the locality of the Earth and land, this idea that we all live in a specific place with roots and context has fruitful possibilities for how we approach the nature of scripture. Realizing that each author existed in a deep way with their place (space, time, history, culture) begins to open the text up to a much more nuanced reading. A reading that is much more rooted in the local rather than the universal. A reading that is planted in the stream of specifics rather than generalities.

So in an applicable interpretation what does this mean or look like?

Take the role of women throughout church history.

The community of God in their appropriation of God’s story saw it fit that women should not be allowed to “rule over the man” but rather the converse. Although one could argue that there were certainly competing views of this in the New Testament when you look at Priscilla’s role (the historical version and not the revisionist version) as a teacher and colleague of Paul’s. Or Paul’s own views that there is no difference between male and female in Christ (Galatians 3:26-29).

But let’s just assume for the sake of an argument that the predominant view was that women shouldn’t have much of a leadership role in the early church. Let’s just assume that for the most part women were thought of as subordinates of their husbands or at the very least not on equal standing with males. This is an idea that mirrored popular culture around them at the time. Where women were not allowed to have jobs in the workplace. They could work in the marketplace and that’s it. They could not vote. And they could not own property. They could do very little without the expressed consent of a male, either their father or their husband.

Taken from a universal perspective detached of place, the text becomes binding from that point in history when Paul’s pen touched the paper to write these lines (1 Cor. 14:33-35) in his letter (let’s call them lines in a letter rather than verses – I think it de-mystifies the text). To think of scripture as universal and absolute to all generations in all cultures means that from the time Paul’s ink quill hit the parchment paper until the last chapter of humanity is written that women should submit to their husbands and should not teach or have a public leadership role over man. This then becomes a binding and universal truth that is to be practiced by all forever.

Taken from a local perspective rooted and planted in place, the text does not become binding, universal, and absolute. Rather it becomes contextual, local, and provisional in nature. It becomes a fitting (see my last paragraph for the apparent problems with this idea) appropriation of God’s story for that specific culture, specific place, and specific people. Whereas in today’s culture, it is not a suitable appropriation. Therefore, it opens up the possibility for alternative, local readings that are always situated in place and specifics. This in no way robs the “authority” of scripture (as I will show in the coming days) or neuters the “truth” of the text. But rather the “authority” and the “truth” comes from the local community that is situated in the universal community, as opposed to the other way around.

This is but one small example, and a poor one at that, of what this local perspective looks like in our hermeneutical exercises.

I understand full well the “slippery slope” argument that many people fear. That this will lead to relativism and pluralism. But I do not think that a slippery slope is any worse of a predicament than a rigid concrete wall of exclusion that is predominant today.

This also creates as many problems as it solves (if you even believe it solves any to begin with). What then do you do with a history that appropriated the story of God in such a way that it subjugated women, African-Americans, and a variety of others? You simply can’t pass that off with revisionist history and say that it was an appropriate interpretation for it’s time. At some point you have to deal with this local approach. You also have to deal with the questions of accommodating or mirroring culture as opposed to creating something new that is either counter-cultural or alternative culture.

But until tomorrow . . . this is a start.

Listening: Marry Me by Saint Vincent

[tags]Scripture, Bible, Scripture + Evolution, Emergent, Emergent+Scripture, Emergent+Wheaton, Wheaton+Tony Jones, Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt, Emergent Village, Wendell Berry, Wendell Berry + Place[/tags]