On Tradition

As you should know by now I'm a huge baseball fan and as such I found myself spending my Sunday afternoon watching the Pirates vs. Reds game on tv and watching the Orioles game via mlb.com gamecast. During the telecast on FSN one of the announcers began to discuss baseball tradition and the important role it plays in helping teams and the game. The announcer also made the point that it is becoming necessary for the teams to bring in the players of older championship teams (i.e. the '79 Pirates) to help create some sense of belonging and connectedness to the organization with the younger players.

As I thought about this it seemed like a good idea to me, I long for the winning ways of the older Oriole teams, the days of the Oriole Way with Weaver, Palmer, Powell, the days of legend that I don't remember but that I've heard about time and time again. I also thought about football, of course I would love the Vikings to rise again and become the Purple People Eaters of yore.

It seems to me that Sports fans constantly talk about and long for tradition lived out in their teams. It seems that this desire is part of the torture of having a team relocate from one city to another. If a team moves then in a sense the tradition dies, the character seems to be ontologically changed and thus it just isn't the same. Think about when the Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Ravens. Why did they change their name? In part is was because the city filed a suit against the NFL to retain the name and the records. Thus when a new team came back into Cleveland the name and records were in place and the tradition of the Browns could pick right back up where is left off with the dog-pound intact and everything.

It seems that it's not just sports fans that long for tradition either. Towns and communities seek to keep various traditions alive, our nation has traditions like the 4th of July and all the local customs that are entailed with that. Tradition is everywhere and is commonly held as a good thing to sustain within our culture, but the question I must as is, "Why is the church an anomaly to this?"

You may have though that this post was going to just be about baseball and football but really the aforementioned baseball commentator started getting me thinking about why if society (via sports and other things) values tradition so much then why does so much of the American church seek to rid itself of any sort of Christian tradition?

Why over the past 20+ years has American Christianity (especially Protestant Christianity) pushed to rid itself of the life-giving traditions of the Church? Why have we stopped following the Christian calendar? Why have we stopped fasting? Why have we left the songs of the faith and tried to push all forms of tradition out of our churches?

Granted the Emergent movement is trying to remedy this, but the problem with them is that they see tradition as merely something ascetic and enjoyable rather than an authoritative life practice. The problem with the Emergents is that they can embrace the traditions but they appropriate them in such a matter that they continue in their heresies and blasphemies just like the Nestorians and Arians of old.

I have heard the Jaroslav Pelikan once said that "traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, tradition is the living faith of the dead." I would add to that that the true faith of the Church is found in her traditions as they live and breathe among us. In fact our Holy Scriptures are very much a product of the tradition of the faith and we have them in part because holy men and women saw fit to preserve these letters and gospels and pass them on as authoritative texts.

Yes, there is a danger that the life-giving traditions can become dry and stale examples of nothing more than traditionalism, but it is our job to remember these things, to live them and to allow them to be authoritative to us so that we may be able to live in the heritage of the Christian faith.

Just as the FNS announcer saw it as a good thing for the Pirates and Reds to bring in their "cloud of witnesses" to attest to the younger generations the heritage of their organization so we must never forget our ways and embrace the traditions of the faith or else we risk forgetting the faith altogether. Why evangelicals see it as necessary to abandon tradition in hope of winning converts is beyond me. We do these hypothetical converts a disservice when we initiate them into a tradition-less faith that is devoid of the truth and the power of the gospel. Obviously we want to remove hindrances but in order to be of any salvific good we must live and breath the language of faith and then explain that language of faith with peace, patience and love to those who see the fullness of truth that is found in Christianity.

Shared Experiences

Much of what is below is still a work in progress (especially given I just started thinking about this about 3 minutes ago) but I wanted to throw it out there before I forgot it (as I usually do).

I was just youtube-ing at work since the student center is completely empty and I have another hour and a half to work, and I came across a sweet video via my friend Tegan's blog. I promptly sent the link to my sister with whom I was IM-ing to pass the time.

After a period of no response from my sister (not an unusual thing) I asked if she watched it yet? She replied that she hadn't and thus I exhorted her to watch "now." I told her it was great and gave her a few reasons to watch it. After prodding her to watched it I began thinking about the youtube phenomenon and blogging and things of that nature.

I began to wonder how much of this is more the desire for shared experience than actually just the dissemination of cool videos and ideas. I'm sure it's a bit of both, but it seems that one of the driving forces behind youtube and really all the internet fads is shared experience.

As I think about this I wonder if this is need or craving for shared experience has helped to feed into the various popular Christian movements over the past few years. Think about the Emergents. What do they emphasize? They build upon a need for experience and collective-ness at the expense of Christian orthodoxy, even to the point of holding heretical views and ignoring essential Christian tenets. I personally am absolutely dismayed that the emergent movement continues to thrive. This is a cancer growing through protestantism that is causing us to forsake the Christian faith all for some sort of collective experience and liberal idealism. In my mind many of the emergents are no better than the heretics of old such as Arius, Nestorius, Montanus, etc.

I also wonder if desire for shared experience helps to contribute to the Rob Bell craze. While I'm still working on reading through some of this guy's books, I do have to say that I'm not a big fan. His nooma videos are junk and I think they are mostly fueled by this desire for a shared experience or a desire to be 'timely' (see my post: Current? and yes I do realize that I'm being a bit contradictory by posting these thoughts so quickly)

The students here crave Bell and the Emergents. They get all starry-eyed when someone mentions their names and quickly bristle when someone like me says that they're not that great and may indeed hold heretical beliefs (emergents). I find it disturbing that students champion these people and drink the proverbial Kool-Aid so quickly. Why must our shared experience be found in the latest fad and not the timeless beliefs of classic Christian orthodoxy? Why do we champion these new thinkers for innovative ecclesiologies when they lack the substance of the faith and are doing nothing more than leading people down the path to hell with their watered down theology and absence of anything genuine?

If these men and women teach something contradictory to classic Christian Orthodoxy and they cease to become "nice" and "slightly misguided" people that we should learn from and they become impious God-haters (to use some of the phrasing for those anathematized at the ecumenical councils).

Just so I don't get misunderstood and get a ton of backlash let me be clear: I am not calling Rob Bell a heretic. I am also not calling ALL of the Emergents heretics. I have, however, had a conversation with one high-profile Emergent leader in which he claimed the Trinity was just Greek philosophical ideals and not really Christian and thus not a necessary or even important doctrine. I also think that Emergent theology down plays Christian orthodoxy to a dangerous extreme and thus runs fearfully close to falling into heresy (like the aforementioned leader).

My concern is that Asbury Seminary students and undoubtedly students, ministers, and lay people across the country and buying into these faulty paradigms because they desire a shared experience. This is absurd. The shared experience should be the Holy doctrines of the Church which help us to partake of the divine essence of God as St. Peter says. I am absolutely disgusted with the hero worship the students around this campus give to folks like Rob Bell and the emergents.

While the same charge of hero worship could be thrown at me and the way I read the saints of the church, I will just say that my hero's have lasted the test of time, and were actually building up and codifying Christian orthodoxy not ignoring it and leading people astray.

- Ben

Postmodernism

Let me preface this post by saying that I'm a bit tired so I apologize in advance for any points that seem to be unusually unclear or nonsensical.

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about postmodernism and the Church's response to it. Some of this thinking has come from classroom readings, some from dialogues with friends and some from my own experience in a postmodern "intentional community."

Thinking back to my Houghton days, oh so long ago, I remember how I was all about postmodernity and the "emergent" movement. I was so excited for this new paradigm in which to minister. A paradigm which seemed to throw off the shackles of modernity; especially the scientific method and the need for empiracle proof of all things, and seemed to embrace experience, narrative, and people.

I was all for this new paradigm for the majority of senior year and did not become wary of it until Doug Pagit came along and told us about his emergent church: Solomon's Porch in Minnesota. His lack of concern for orthodoxy bothered me, along with the lack of spiritual depth with which this emergent leader spoke. I am not trying to criticize him personally, but I observed this in his lecture and my subsequent conversations with him. My main concern with this was that he was one of the key leaders of a movement and seemed to lack deep spiritual passion - usually a bad combination.

Although this was a red flag, I still was a fan of postmodern christianity represented by authors like Pagit, and McClaren, and what is becoming countless other authors. This changed, however, when I came to Asbury.

At Asbury one can hardly hear students and some faculty talke for long without hearing phrases like: "our story", "our narrative", "emergent", "community", and other words and phrases that are hot phrases in the postmodern christian dialect. (To be sure, the context these phrases were spoken in ways often spiritually deep and packed with meaning.) Added to this I started to attend "Communality" an emergent-like intentional community in Lexington that had a very postmodern vibe. With the combination of these two factors and some readings in one of my classes, I began to have a new perspective on postmodernism and Christianity. I guess one could say that I was simply getting burnt out on the phrasology, but I would argue that I was begining to see a broader picture than what I had seen before.

I began to wonder why I was becoming dissillusioned with this Christian embrace of postmodernism. I wondered if it was the apparent lack of spiritual power that I observed in Communality and Pagit. I didn't think this was it because at the seminary there was incredible depth. I wondered if I was just sick of hearing the word story and narrative. Maybe, but it seemed to be larger than just annoyance. I wondered if I was just merely too far entrenched in modernism that it hurt to break out. I didn't think that was it either. I kept asking these sorts of questions trying to pinpoint what I disliked about it and then the other day I seemed to realize my problem with it.

It's trendy.

I think that we as Christians are making way too big a deal out of postmodernity. We're racking our brains trying to discifer the global culture, the way the world is taking shape. We're trying to be relevant by accentuating community, story, and other postmodern things, when really we're just hopping on the newest Christian fad.

I'm not saying that postmodernity doesn't exist, I'm not saying we should stop trying to understand culture, but I'm asking "why do we care so much?" Why are we so busy trying to understand what the world is thinking. It's as if we need to figure it out because we have a way to project the gospel to the whole world at once and it needs to be relevant to all. I am convinced this deep need to understand the entire culture is nothing but an immediate product of our mass targeted Christianity (church growth movement) which is deeply rooted in modernism. We're becoming obsessed with community and story because it is the next gimmick we can use to sucker mass groups of people into the Kingdom (or what we narrowlly view the Kingdom as being - i.e. the local church). The Kingdom always grows one individual at a time (though it does not emphasize THE individual in all things) and it is always working by the power of the Spirit.

Yes, community and story are genuinly important to some (and rightly so), but to talk about them all the time seems like a mere gimmick. To value community is not to continuously talk about it, rather it is to live within it and structure one's life within community and to value story is the same.

We've missed the mark. We constantly focus on global contextualization when really that's not the issue. The real issue is local contextualization. Why do we care what the whole world thinks and how society is moving. To be concerned with that seems to me to be an excuse for us to become blind to what our neighbor thinks and how she or he is moving in life. We constantly seek to look on large scales, when the real ministry of the Kingdom is done on small scale. In the case of the Kingdom of God, bigger is not better!! - Well at least not until the parousia.

The book of Acts shows us the movement of the Kingdom from Jerusalem outward. It starts small, with a rag tag group of Spirit filled disciples and grows into a large Spirit filled movement that encompasses much of what was then the known world, including Rome. While we may not have the same scenario here, we do have something analogous. We are constantly looking at Rome and beyond and trying to figure out how to reach it, but we haven't even concerned ourselves with Jerusalem, let alone forged a path to Rome.

We need to stop talking and start living. We need to stop theorizing about what the world is thinking and start dealing with the thoughts of those around us. We need to throw our hands in the air and say "who cares about postmodernism." We need to realize that the only ones talking about it are philosophers and Chrsitians (not that the two groups are mutually exclusive) and realize that the average person on the street, doesn't need postmodern Chrstians, they need real Spirit-filled Christians to help them in their needieness - both spiritual and physical.

So who does care? Not I.