I’ve taken a similar trajectory with most of the writers and speakers who have been most influential in my life:

Phase 1 – Introduction & Interest

I heard someone speak and felt a certain connection to what they were saying, or I heard about their life and work and was intrigued, or I read something they had written and was moved or challenged.

I will always remember the first time I heard Rob Bell speak.

I’ll always remember the first time I read a John Wesley sermon and got a glimpse of what he was trying to say. (For what it’s worth, that came years after the first time I read a Wesley sermon. Sometimes it takes a few times for an introduction to take.)

I remember an early phase when I was introduced to Seth Godin and started compulsively e-mailing his posts to people.

In that introduction phase, there’s a connection and an intrigue. There may be points of disagreement, but the way the person has framed their argument, I at least want to know more. How is (s)he arriving at such a different conclusion than I am?

Some of those I’ve been introduced to give me the sense that they’re thinking what I’m thinking and seeing what I’m seeing – even in places where it seems hardly anyone else is. It’s like someone is finally telling me, “You’re not alone…”

Others give me the sense that they’re way ahead of me. They’re introducing me to things I’ve never considered, but now I want to consider those things. Or they’re living in a way that seems like they’ve figured something out — or committed to something — that I still don’t have worked out.

Phase 2 – Discussions and Arguments and Growth

I begin with some level of intrigue, but I know I don’t fully get these people yet. Could anyone fully “get” you in just your first introduction? Of course not!

So I begin a process of dialogue with these people.

Perhaps that’s an odd way to frame it. I can count my actual conversations with Rob Bell on one hand, my actual conversations with John Wesley on less. But I still think of what happens as a dialogue. Perhaps more of an interview — because this isn’t asking these people to understand me. It’s me trying to understand them, with all my questions and arguments along the way.

So I see John Wesley say, “he that is, by faith, born of God sinneth not […] by any wilful sin.” And I chafe at it. “Surely you don’t mean that, Wesley,” or, “Well that sure isn’t my experience,” I argue. So I go to some of his other sermons: “On Sin in Believers,” and “The Repentance of Believers,” and “The Great Privilege of Those that Are Born of God,” and “The End of Christ’s Coming” (to name a few).

And the more I argue with Wesley, the more I realize that he really does mean it. The more I argue, the more my disagreement and fear and dislike of what he is trying to teach me becomes an agreement and an assurance and a love for exactly what he is saying.

And so, in this second phase, I begin to grow as I understand what these people are really saying. Throughout this phase, a big part of what I’m doing is learning these people’s language – their grammar. At the beginning of the phase, I was interested in them, but the best I could do was tell someone else to go read/listen to them. I didn’t yet have their language. But through this process, I start to progress to a new phase…

Phase 3 – Speaking for them

Okay, I can never really speak for any of these people. But after a while, I feel like I’ve gotten to the point that I can say things like, “Well, you know what Robert Webber would say about that…”

[Webber has also been an enormous influence on me. This interview spurred me to start this blog and originally title it “Enterprise to Movement.” At some point I’ll write about that.]

I can do that because I’ve been in enough discussion and argument with Webber that I think I finally “get” him. I get what he’s saying, how he’s saying it, and why he’s saying it. Surely not perfectly, but pretty well… [1]

Phase 4 – Extending, Refuting, or Applying what they’ve said

It’s only once I understand these people well enough to speak for them that I can begin honestly and confidently doing more with it.

I can work on communication/marketing and begin to imagine how Seth Godin would handle my situation. And since he has never been in my exact situation, I can extend what he has suggested and have a sense for whether I’m doing it in the spirit of what he’s after or whether I’m going against what he advocates. I might decide my context proves him wrong, and I need to do something different. (That would be a decision not made lightly.) I might decide what I want to do doesn’t fit with Seth’s philosophy and, well, he’s right, I’m going to screw it up if I don’t stop and listen to him.

The Overlapping Circles of What We Say and Exciting New Possibilities

A friend called me today and said, “So I think I get what you’re talking about with all of this discipleship stuff…” He had actually read something by someone else that made it all click. [2] It was an exciting moment for me. “Yes! That’s exactly what I’m getting at!” And then he started making a number of other connections. Ones I hadn’t made yet and are some exciting new possibilities.

So if you’ve read this blog for a while, you’ve probably noticed I keep coming back to some of the same ideas. But there’s a reason for it. That’s how most of our ideas work if we’re really going to move somewhere. We take something and pull a bit in one direction. Then we take that same idea and pull in a bit of a different direction. And it takes us (or me, at least) several times of seeing it pulled into a few different situations before we start to really understand. Once we start to understand, we can start pulling in more directions of our own.

I think today’s communication technology is allowing us to do this better than we ever have before. Those overlapping circles don’t create a linear pattern. We can identify lots of overlapping points, but there’s no single clear starting point, and there’s certainly not a single, clear progression to take.

That’s why I keep finding myself writing things like, “That’s what I was trying to get at in [insert link to some other post].” In fact, there are some especially sensitive topics that I keep beginning to write about and stopping, because I realize I’m getting too far out on the edge of a circle. I have too many other pieces that are closer to the center that I need to have in place so I can reference back to them before I push further.

It’s all pretty exciting because I think we can present theology now in a way that’s more fitting than the linear fashions our previous communication media allowed. I dream of a “webbed” theology that has all sorts of internal links. There is no single entry point. We’re all theologians, but our stimuli for doing theology are all different.

A webbed theology might have someone starting with questions of ethics and another with questions of metaphysics. Which comes first? That’s really hard to say. [3] There may be some most-common overlapping points, and points that would be considered non-negotiable (e.g. Trinitarian belief), but the progression out from them is by no means linear.

Because of this, we need to be careful not to pass judgment on a theological claim too quickly until we see all the other connections that claim is touching. Similarly, if we see a claim we really like, but we realize it’s connected to a number of other things that seem off, we might need to question the claim we really like (see my post on Christians, Capitalism and Ayn Rand for an example).

Why do I write all this?

First, I think it shows some of the benefit to going really deep. If you constantly survey – take a little bit of what everyone says – you miss the growth that comes from really getting to understand someone/something.

Second, I hope it will at the same time encourage you to go a bit wider. We usually pit deep and wide against each other. When we do, we usually prefer depth. That’s why there are derisive sayings like, “miles wide and inches deep,” and “jack of all trades, master of none.” But sometimes going a little wider will help us go deeper. Those circles that hit on new areas also make us have to think more clearly about the old, overlapping pieces.

Third, I think it shows a bit of what I’m up to myself – hoping to keep laying circles on top of circles, each one expanding just a bit in a certain direction, but also intentionally saying some of the same things over again. You may not ever agree with my perspectives on the church and money, but if you hang with me, I think you’ll at least start to understand a bit more deeply where they’re coming from.

—————–

1. And to be sure, I call my friend Jonathan, who gets Webber perfectly.
2. That’s how it works for me sometimes, too. Someone else finally says something that makes it all come together. So I think having read Lindbeck and Murphy and Smith [affiliate links] has helped me understand what Rob Bell is doing a bit more clearly, even though I don’t know if Bell has ever read Lindbeck or Murphy or Smith.
3. Unless you’re a metaphysicist.

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• Sexuality and Webbed Theology

In my last post, I introduced language about theological liberalism and conservatism, and I got the sense that I needed to give more definition.

Some notes about what I mean by “liberal” and “conservative”

Most people conflate the theological divide with political ideologies, but they’re almost entirely separate ideas. You can be politically liberal and theologically conservative, and vice versa (although I expect the majority are actually conservative in both or liberal in both, for reasons I won’t get into here…)

So the way that I’m using “liberal” and “conservative” isn’t intended to address politics. In fact, even within the Church, I gather that there are different definitions. I’m using these the way I primarily see and experience them in Protestant-world.

Regarding conservatives, I’m really referring to fundamentalist theology here. I’m dealing with any sense of the Bible being inerrant as typically understood, which is often listed as a core tenet of conservatism.

Here’s a simple attempt to present these different theological methods.

Disclaimer 1: This is, admittedly, quite caricatured and limited. I do this to highlight starkly and basically the differences in these methods. If you want all the nuance behind these, I’d suggest Nancey Murphy’s Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism (affiliate link) as a good start.

Disclaimer 2: I’m using a song lyric, which is not Scripture. So all analogies can’t hold. But enough can to paint a starting picture.

Let’s imagine we found the lyrics of the brilliant Fleetwood Mac song “Landslide” in the Bible:

I took my love and I took it down
I climbed a mountain and I turned around

And I saw my reflection in the snow covered hills
‘Till the landslide brought me down

Oh, mirror in the sky
What is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail thru the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?

How would liberals and conservatives each read this?

The conservative reading

The conservatives would say that the writer must have climbed a mountain, then turned around. And just as she saw her reflection in the snow covered hills, a landslide – probably caused by God – brought her down. Now, since mountain climbing didn’t work out, she should consider sailing, but that could prove an obstacle, too.

The conservative might begin to conjecture about why God brought this avalanche at just such a time. God must have wanted to put her in a better place. Or perhaps climbing the mountain in the first place – or gazing in the snow for too long – was a sin, and the landslide was punishment.

Prove to the conservative that the singer has never actually climbed a mountain or encountered a landslide, and their faith will be seriously shaken.

The liberal reading

The liberal reads this and knows that it’s unlikely for someone to survive a landslide on a mountain. They begin to reconstruct the real history of this account: the author was probably so focused on looking at her own reflection in the snow that she slipped and tumbled. To her, it felt like a landslide. But we know better.

Indeed, much modern psychology shows that when someone becomes obsessive about a love interest, she can lose all sense of reality. This can cause both the dizzied state that caused the author to fall, and the irrational state that caused her to blame her fall on a “landslide.” The song reveals the experience of all humanity and confirms our modern psychological findings.

Problems

It’s not too difficult to see the problems in both of these caricatures. Oddly, both remain focused on what was actually happening in the historical account. One accepts the historical account as inerrantly true. The other seeks to reconstruct the “true history” and the real, universally applicable human experience. One presupposes that God was active in the historical account, and acting literally as presented. The other presupposes that God’s direct involvement isn’t really necessary.

You could say that simple attention to genre would help solve these problems. And you’d be at least mostly correct. Do you see how our inattention to different genres in Scripture has caused problems? And especially how it causes problems to ignore all of the Bible as first a theological document rooted in history? But genre confusion isn’t the only problem here.

You see, at heart, both of these expect that language is descriptive — either to describe objective historical reality or to describe subjective human experience. But what if neither is really the case? Many would say that the Enlightenment – with all of its science and rationalism – convinced us to start thinking about theology and reading Scripture in a different way than we should. The assumption of modern thought forced people into two camps — relying either on the Bible or human experience as their ultimate foundation. Anything that contradicted that foundation would need to be explained away or outright refuted.

But what if there are other options? Some lead down similarly bad roads. But I think others help us think about God and read Scripture in a much more helpful way. More on that later…

To get more, you should JOIN my e-mail update list.

[Edit: I’ve changed “pragmatists” to “utilitarians” throughout. I think that better captures what I’m trying to describe there.]

I’m running into a growing group of Christians – especially pastors – who are trying to figure out where they fit. They find themselves in an awkward and unusual place in the Christian world.

Most Evangelicals (not to even mention the fundamentalists) are going to think they’re far too liberal because they’ll put up with the likes of Rob Bell and may not have a problem accepting theories of macroevolution.

Most “liberals” find them far too conservative because they actually believe that Christ rose and that the Bible has more than just moral or literary authority. And if these people hold that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching, the liberals might as well write them off as full-blown fundamentalists.

Among the ministry utilitarians — who may fall anywhere on the “liberal” to “conservative” theological spectrum, or may just not care — these people are going to have an even harder time because they put theological integrity before results, something the utilitarians often can’t even comprehend. The utilitarians have focused so long on how to grow the church and get results that talking to them in nuanced theological terms is like Alton Brown explaining the science of making a perfect hamburger to a McDonald’s manager.

Are you one of these people — searching for where you fit? Does the below describe you?

You may find yourself at an evangelical Bible study where you’re clearly the “liberal” in the room who doesn’t take the Bible seriously enough (see, e.g., “What if I don’t believe the Bible?“), and then find yourself at a mainline Bible study where you’re clearly the “conservative” in the room who keeps wanting to talk about what God was intending to say through a particular passage. [I’m referencing theological liberals here. John Meunier and Roger Olson have both captured well why I’m not a liberal. You should read both of those.]

And then, in ministry circles that are more focused on “church growth,” you just seem like a nuisance because you keep pressing theological considerations at the expense of utility. (See, for instance, any of my attempts to talk about the church’s use of money, which are attempting to ask how our theology should influence our use of money, but are consistently refuted in utilitarian terms.)

Is this you? You don’t fit the “conservative” mold conservatively enough? You don’t fit the “liberal” mold liberally enough. And yet, you also wouldn’t say you’re a “moderate.” It seems a difference of category, not just degree.

You find yourself wanting to be more theologically faithful in the way you do ministry, even if the results might suffer. And you have a gut feeling that in the long-run, the results will be better. That we’re stifling the much greater growth that could take place if we would truly live according to the calling of Christ, even when it’s unpopular or ignores what Jim Collins would say we should do.

If this is you, you’re not alone. I talk to so many who think they’re nearly alone in this. Everywhere they look, they’re surrounded by people who just don’t “get” them. Indeed, all of our denominations seem overrun with utilitarians and conservatives, or utilitarians and liberals, or somehow in the case of the UMC, all three at once! And so wherever you are, it means you’re likely in the minority if you don’t fit nicely into one of these groups. But you’re not alone! There are others. Many others!

Perhaps you’re speaking up and making it known how out of place (out of line?) you are. Perhaps you’re staying quiet because you know it won’t go well if you speak up.

Is this you? I’d love to hear more about your experience, your thoughts, your stories, where you’re finding like-minded people, where you’re finding hope that this odd form of Christianity you represent can spread and grow.

How are you navigating situations where you know your position won’t be received well? Where your job might be at risk if you act on your beliefs? Tell us more in the comments. And if necessary, feel free to tell us anonymously.

See my follow-up: Liberal and Conservative theologizing — a caricature using song lyrics

And for more like-minded conversation, you should JOIN my e-mail update list.

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