The Gospel in 5D: Community Building

This is part three of my series looking at five dimensions of the gospel. Check out the last couple if you haven't read them yet!

The Gospel as Community Building

Liberated from the alienation of Sin, we are freed to enter into relationship. Sin’s relational destructiveness isolates us from one another, driving a wedge between ourselves and healthy relationship with God, our own self, others and the created world. The scope of Jesus’ redemptive work is cosmic, “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross” (Col 1:19-20). The gospel makes relationship possible and draws once segregated people together in community.

The fact that Paul declares the power of the gospel for salvation on behalf of both the Jew and the Greek is radically significant (Rom 1:16). For these two ethnic groups to share the table fellowship of communion was an enormous paradigm shift. The universality of the gospel creates one unified body of Christ while we retain our diversity (1 Cor 12:27). We are not separated from each other on the basis of being “Jew nor Greek..slave nor free...male nor female; for all...are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 2:28). However, our various forms of distinctiveness--gender, culture, age, and more--remain intact as we worship around the throne of God (Rev 7:9-10).

If there is one dimension of the gospel the 21st century Church desperately needs to hear afresh, it is this one. The gospel has systematically been reduced to individualized salvation interpreted as access to eternal life, heaven when we die and a personal relationship with Jesus. 

There's a lot of issues with this, but I'll just point out two.

First, our journeys of spiritual formation and discipleship are not meant to be solitary enterprises. There is a reason why the majority of the "you's" we read in Paul's epistles are in the plural form, addressed to the whole church. We simply can't grow in spiritual maturity or Christlikeness alone. These things are fleshed out in the context of relationship where following Jesus is hard. Piety is easy when you're alone! It is as a community that the Church's worship and ecclesial practices glorify God. Not only that, we each need the wisdom of our community to reveal dynamics of the Christian life we could not comprehend on our own. And, painfully at times, we need others to reveal those parts of ourself that we've ignored or haven't allowed God to deal with. 

Second, the world is a heart breakingly divided place. Follow this link to a map of America. The map is made up of colored dots that represent people's ethnicity. Zoom in on your city. How integrated is it? Less than you would hope, I guarantee it. What ethnicities live on the poor side of town? In the cities I've lived in, they almost exclusively minorities. Who lives around where your church is? 

This function of the gospel may be the most important component of our witness. Society is as divided as ever, which means the church has the opportunity to prove that our faith empowers us to be different than the rest of the world. As the diverse and unified body of Christ, we become what Lesslie Newbigin described as the “hermeneutic of the gospel.” When we come together in unified missional witness, our community life is the best apologetic for the truth of the living God. Over 50 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. called Sunday mornings at 11:00am the most segregated hour of the week. Let us make more progress on this statistic in the next 50 years than we did in the last. The future of the Church's relevance depends on it. 

As I will explore in the next post, it is as a community that the Church is able to practice alternative ways of being in the world, ways that make this planet a more just and beautiful place, the ways of shalom. We simply can't skip this dimension of unity. And why would we want to? Life is so much richer together! 

How I'm Trying to Read the Bible

Leadership is a practice based in biblical study and theological reflection. It has to be if it is to be "Christian." The bible and the ideas we draw from it provide us with the worldview, the vision, the character, and the means of leading toward the common good--shalom for all people.

But there are about as many approaches to interpreting the bible as there are interpreters, so I thought I would use this post to lay out a few of my presuppositions when it comes to biblical study--more focused on the "what" than the "why" or the "how." This has been a gradual process for me (an unending one I hope) but my thoughts took on much greater clarity (along with a whole new set of questions) this year. 

I'll start somewhat snarkily with this claim: a verse cannot be understood by studying it. 

What I mean is this. When I was being taught how to study scripture, probably starting around Junior High, I was taught to focus on a few verses at a time, asking the “when, what, where, why, who?” questions. I might need to look around before or after the verse to figure out what the "therefore was there for," but for the most part once I answered those questions and prayed about it, God would help me understand what this text meant--usually skipping straight to what it meant for me. 

Now these are by no means unimportant questions. We have to keep asking them, but that does not mean we can stick with Junior High bible study methods and expect them to allow our minds to wrap around one of the most complex books ever written in multiple literary genres, by multiple authors, speaking multiple languages, multiple millennia ago in cultures radically different from our own.  

These four hermeneutical pre-commitments represent the way I am trying to approach the text these days...

1) We are incapable of approaching the text from outside our own sociocultural location. This does not mean that we have to read our contemporary meanings into the text, but that our worldview is fundamentally shaped by our context. As exegetes, we must acknowledge up front that this affects our interpretive ability. Therefore, to write “Theology” as though we are objective readers is simply more than we should/can ever claim. It is possible to become a “border crosser” by gaining experience in other cultures, developing our cultural intelligence (CQ), and even by immersing ourselves in the biblical world, but we are never fully capable of reading scripture from its author’s perspective. I have already said a good deal about this here, here and here, so I'll stop repeating myself.

What is beautiful about this is that it means the act of reading scripture draws us into community and gift sharing with the body of Christ. My contextual lenses help me notice certain things in the Bible that others may miss, but in order to see all that God has provided in this incredible book I need to also listen to the insights of men and women from Asia, Africa and South America, of people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, and of different life experiences. Together our theology will be far richer than when we form conclusions on our own.

2) After acknowledging our context, we must come into an encounter with scripture recognizing that it is predominantly literature written as narrative in a historical context. Therefore, I cannot only ask the “w” questions of a text, but must also ask how it fits within the grand narrative being told through the entire bible, the salvation history of God’s activity in creation. Biblical scholar Sylvia Keesmaat describes the story like a 6 Act play:

“Act 1 is the creation of a good world. Act 2 is the distortion of that world by sin. Act 3 is the calling of Israel to be a blessing to this fallen world. Act 4 is the coming of Jesus, where sin is decisively dealt with. Act 5, scene 1, is the early church, where the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus are grappled with and lived out in the lives of the first Christian communities. Further scenes unfold, from the apostolic era, through the patristic period, and so on to the present. Act 6 is the coming consummation, when Jesus will return and we will join him on the new earth at the resurrection of the dead.”

We come to the text as sojourners living in the story it reveals--still in Act 5, awaiting Act 6

I must also ask what the specific historical context of the verse is, what the author’s lifeworld means for the text, and how it fits within the literary context of the book or letter that contains it. Deeper study into the bible's historical, economic, and sociological backgrounds is never a waste of time.

3) Jesus is the key point of departure for biblical reflection because “Jesus Christ is the self-disclosure of God in history” (God Our Savior, Norman Kraus). All verses only make sense in the light of his story. And that means including the whole story stretching from pre-existence with the Father to fully human incarnation in a stable, to his childhood, adult ministry, betrayal and unjust trial, crucifixion, death and burial for three days (and whatever was happening on the other side of the grave!), resurrection, time spent on earth in his resurrected body, ascension to the right and of the Father, giving of his Spirit, presence through the Church as the body of Christ, and eventual return to remake creation and rule on the new earth with his people. 

One caveat to this. Jesus makes no sense except against Old Testament, Roman and Second Temple Judaism backgrounds. So while I am saying that he must be the starting point for biblical interpretation out of one side of my mouth, I am also acknowledging that he requires a good bit of interpretation. Sorry, but we aren't benefitted by shying away from the complexities.

4) A quote from Professor of New Testament Tim Geddert can sum this one up: “Theology is important not because it is “Truth” or certain or final, but because it helps us move closer to that which is far more important still. The bible is more important than theology. The triune God is more important than the bible. The goal is to encounter, relate to, and follow God. Don’t get it backwards.” 

The goal of biblical interpretation is not--contrary to what is often portrayed--about formulating the right doctrines. Theology matters. I am deeply committed to it. But if our convictions about what the bible means begin to take precedence over actually knowing and following Jesus our Lord and God we will wind up in all kinds of mess. Biblical study is about entering into relationship with God, learning to be his disciple and learning to help others know and follow him too.