A Humbled Resistance

A Response to The Irresistible Revolution and Jesus for President

 

 

Claiborne’s Contributions

 

A simple fact of life is that to disagree with someone requires more explanation than to agree with him, therefore on a word count basis, this response is highly unbalanced in the direction of negative critique.  Do not allow the number of pages dedicated to critique of his errors get in the way of grasping the positive impact of Claiborne’s emphasis on living the faith we profess.  I hope my early praise does not get swallowed up in the critique that follows it.  If it starts to appear that I am beating up on Claiborne in later sections, I encourage readers to think about returning and rereading this section.

 

 

Which Son are You?

 

As I read Claiborne’s works, I was first taken aback by the errors, etc. (discussed later), but could not help but be affected by his willingness to tell it like he sees it and live what he believes.  Some readers might be reading this looking for ammunition to unload on Claiborne and other emergents.  Before skipping ahead and finding it, I hope readers will take a moment to examine the log in their (our) own eyes. 

 

When the chief priests and elders came and challenged Jesus’ authority, he first tested them to see if they were really interested in truth.  They showed that they only cared about what people thought rather than truth.  Then he tested them again:

 

^ESV Matthew 21:28 "What do you think? A man had two sons. And he went to the first and said, 'Son, go and work in the vineyard today.' ²⁹ And he answered, 'I will not,' but afterward he changed his mind and went. ³⁰ And he went to the other son and said the same. And he answered, 'I go, sir,' but did not go. ³¹ Which of the two did the will of his father?" They said, "The first." Jesus said to them, "Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you.

 

After reading this response, the reader may conclude that Claiborne is a reckless and rebellious son, but at the same time, the reader cannot deny that he “goes” (v 29).  We may sit here and get our theology just right and say “I go,” but with an eye to the Great Commission, where have we gone lately?  I strongly commend Claiborne for seeking to live the Way and encouraging and teaching others to do so as well.

 

 

A Wise Start

 

In the final chapter of TIR, Claiborne wisely encourages the ordinary radicals2 to stay anchored in the church:

 

So to the young ‘uns: we have to remind ourselves to stay anchored in the church, for we need roots and wisdom. 

     It seems to me that God could surround us with elders as we bring new energy into an aging body, but it will take tremendous courage from old folks to dream new dreams and allow a new generation to make their own mistakes. (TIR 353)

 

... we mustn’t allow ourselves to detach from the church in a self-righteous cynicism. (TIR  354)

 

So may we have some grace, even with those Christians and pastors who make us nauseated and put us to sleep.  After all, they have given us enough of the story that we have been able to stumble into God and community.  A friend just told us that perhaps we should relate to the church as a dysfunctional parent.  (TIR  354-355)

 

As one of those dysfunctional parents, I am seeking God’s face for the courage to examine myself and repent of my many failures as a leader.  Hopefully readers of this response to Claiborne’s work will see that we (old folks) hear and take their critique seriously.  In turn I hope and pray for them to have the humility to listen to the wisdom of their elders and learn from our mistakes.

 

 

Something More

 

Claiborne explains his vision and how many others seem to be sharing it:

 

We are not a neo-denomination, because we are not trying to spread a doctrine or theology.  We are not even trying to spread a model of community.  We are just trying to discover a new (ancient) kind of Christianity. We are about spreading a way of life that exists organically and relationally and is marked by such a brilliant love and grace that no one could resist it. …  Nearly everywhere we speak, young people come up with tears in their eyes, no longer alone in their dreams for another world.  Over and over, we hear, “I knew there was more to Christianity.”  (TIR  348)

 

Indeed there must be something more to Christianity than what we see today in pop-evangelicalism.  There are so many things worthy of our rebellion!  Name a flaw: the push for bigger and sexier buildings, the seeker-sensitive entertainment oriented “worship” services, the escape to the suburbs tendency for our people and our churches, our marketing of Jesus as a form of life enhancement, our …  It’s getting too painful, so I’ll stop now.  I believe Claiborne and other postmoderns/emergents have done an effective job of exposing some of these problems.  Though Claiborne addresses several of these problems, his strongest and most effective critique is in the area of the church’s isolation and separation from the suffering of the poor.

 

Global initiatives like Live 8 and the ONE Campaign have gathered eclectic groups of celebrities and pop stars under slogans like “Make poverty history.” But most Christian artists and preachers have remained strangely distant from human suffering.  (TIR  17)

 

I learned from the lepers that leprosy is a disease of numbness.  The contagion numbs the skin, and the nerves can no longer feel as the body wastes away. … As I left Calcutta, it occurred to me that I was returning to a land of lepers, a land of people who had forgotten how to feel, to laugh, to cry, a land haunted by numbness.  (TIR  89)

 

I asked the same group of strong followers whether they spent time with the poor, and less than 2 percent said they did.  … I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.  (TIR  113)

 

Layers of insulation separate the rich and the poor from truly encountering one another. There are the obvious layers like picket fences and SUVs, and there are more subtle ones like charity.  Tithes, tax-exempt donations, and short-term mission trips, while they accomplish some good, can also function as outlets that allow us to appease our consciences and still remain a safe distance from the poor.  (TIR  157)

 

Claiborne nails us.  We as the church need to step out of our sinful comfort zones and begin engaging the poor in our own areas and abroad.  Many of us are so individualistic that we don’t even know our next door neighbors or the family that sits twenty feet away in the church, much less the struggling poor several blocks away in areas we avoid when we can.  We need to repent of our selfishness as individuals and as churches.

 

Just this last weekend here in Albuquerque, my sweet wife and I decided to go see Ben Stein’s new documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.  We went to the Saturday matinee to be good stewards (spiritual speak for “I’m cheap”). When we went to the window to buy tickets we were informed that a local church had bought out the theater.3 We were turned away.  What a wonderful message to send our neighbors: we want the theater to ourselves—you are out of luck.  We “Christians” sometimes make terrible neighbors.  It reminded me of the time we had arrived early to line up to see The Passion of the Christ at a theater and had group after group of teenagers show up (no doubt part various church youth groups) and cut in line with their friends4 .  I was appalled; I can only imagine what an unbeliever in the line with me must have thought.

 

I mention what bad neighbors we can be to each other and our fellow suburbanites just to illustrate how terribly far we have to go.  We must repent.  We must begin to not only be considerate of our neighbors, but willing to sacrifice our own comfort for their sake and that of the gospel.  TIR has expanded my understanding of the problem.  Not only do we need to be better neighbors to one another, we need to be better neighbors to the poor and suffering in our own communities and abroad.

 

So how are Christians to live anyway? One of our pastors has exhorted us to begin to “get messy in one another’s lives.”  The Christian life was never intended to be a solo journey.  Claiborne says it this way:

 

And they would become known as the Way.  Their community was more than just a group of people who shared religious beliefs.  They were a group of people that embodied a new way of living, … They were to become the salt and light of the world.  The credibility of their gospel would rest on the integrity of their lives.  For they were now to be the body of Christ. (JFP  137)

 

In this section we’ve been talking about “something more” to our Christianity and I’ve expressed my belief that we are indeed missing the mark as good neighbors.  As we consider “something more” it is critical that we, in our zeal for change, don’t end up simply settling for “something different” or worse, “something less.”   

 

 

Other Good Stuff

 

Claiborne has many more helpful (and convicting) things to say in his books and readers will find some of those interspersed throughout the rest of this response.  There were others I found interesting and insightful, but couldn’t figure out where else to fit them in, so I thought I’d mention them here.

 

Healthy Self-Examination

In a church culture that is so afraid of offense that it would rarely ask people to examine themselves, this was a breath of fresh air (and personally convicting).

 

If someone asks if we are Christ-followers, can we say, “tell me what you see”?  Is there enough evidence to prove that we are taking after the slaughtered Lamb?  What if they ask the poor around us?  What if they ask our enemies?  Would they say that we love them?  Christians haven’t always looked like Jesus.  Perhaps the greatest barrier to Christ has been Christians who pronounce Jesus so loudly with their lips and deny him so loudly with their lives. (JFP  230)

 

An Appeal for Church Discipline

Though long considered a mark of the true church5, church discipline is basically non-existent in the present church culture.  It was a great surprise to read this excellent appeal for the return of church discipline.

 

Since one of the most precious treasures of the church is the gift of community, one of the most powerful disciplines of the church is isolation from community, the denial of communion. Excommunication has a harsh ring to it …  This era of sloppy Christianity and timid politeness demands that we rediscover this hidden treasure, which has led to the restoration of even the worst backslider... (JFP  286)

 

Luke 13:32ff  -- “… tell that fox”

I really appreciated Claiborne’s description of the political satire of Jesus’ response to the Pharisees who were warning him that Herod is out to kill him (JFP 119).  “You tell that fox …”  Claiborne contrasts the royal lion (Jesus Christ—Hosea 5:14; Revelation 5:5) and the powerless, cowardly, and skittish fox--a lion wannabe.

 

Caesar’s and Jesus’ Coronations

Claiborne effectively presents the ironic parallels (and contrasts) of the coronation of Caesar and the execution of Jesus Christ (JFP 126-131).  

 

The Nature of True Israel

Claiborne gives a strong statement about the miraculous and God-initiated nature of the birth of members of true Israel:

 

But being born Israelite in the flesh, Jesus insists, is not of concern… As with Abraham and Sarah’s children, it is the child who is born of miraculous means and God’s initiative who carries the blessing. (JFP  108)

 

Learning to Disagree Well

As I prepare to turn the focus of this response to where we disagree, I’m encouraged by these words:

 

As I continued to wrestle with complex human and political issues. I resolved myself to one thing: the starting point must be that the church is a place where we can grapple with difficult questions with grace and humility.  And I believe that, even more important than thinking identically on every issue, we must learn to disagree well.  Our ability as a church to disagree well is as powerful a witness to the larger society as our uniformity on every issue. (JFP  234)

 

 

…But I Have These Things Against You

 

I’ve been warned that when a person begins with “I like your books, but …” that the “but” erases everything that the person has said up to that point.  This is true because our culture of entitlement and self-esteem (narcissism) loathes to be criticized, even in love.

 

I could not, in good conscience, write a hit piece on a movement and message that is attempting the live a lifestyle like that of Jesus, especially when the church culture they are rebelling against neither live it nor proclaim it faithfully.  I’ve chosen the follow the pattern Jesus used repeatedly in Revelation 2: acknowledge what is good, and then correct and rebuke error.

 

Though Claiborne recognizes many of the problems in pop-religion today, unfortunately what we find in these books is an example of the proverbial “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.”  The problems in the emergent movement have nothing to do with candles, couches, or funny haircuts; and the problem with “ordinary radicals” is not their desire to live like Jesus and provoke pop-churchianity to wake up and start living what they believe.  The problem is theological liberalism6 .  Less than a century ago, liberalism thrived as modernism (the previous incarnation of worldliness) was influencing the church.  J. Gresham Machen’s classic work refuting modernist liberalism is as relevant and hard hitting today as it was when it was written.  Substitute “post-modernism“ for “modernism” in the following quote:

 

In the sphere of religion, in particular, the present time is a time of conflict; the great redemptive religion which has always been known as Christianity is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only the more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology.  This modern non-redemptive religion is called “modernism” or “liberalism.”7

 

Dr. D. A. Carson concludes (after extensive content review) his evaluation of Brian McLaren’s  A Generous Orthodoxy and Steve Chalke’s The Lost Message of Jesus in this way:

 

I have to say, as kindly but as forcefully as I can, that to my mind, if words mean anything, both McLaren and Chalke have largely abandoned the gospel. Perhaps their rhetoric and enthusiasm have led them astray and they will prove willing to reconsider their published judgments on these matters and embrace biblical truth more holistically than they have been doing in their most recent works.  But if not, I cannot see how their own words constitute anything less than a drift toward abandoning the gospel itself. …surely the way to maturity, not to say biblical fidelity, is not pendulum-swinging reductionism, but the whole counsel of God, worked out, so far as we are able, in both theology and practice.8

 

I believe and will attempt to demonstrate in the following pages that The Irresistible Revolution and Jesus for President suffer from similar flaws to McLaren and Chalke and their modernist forerunners all of whom attempted to “save Christianity” in a time they were concerned it was becoming culturally irrelevant.

 

I will not be reviewing these other books here and will not depend upon “guilt by association” to make my case, nor will I assume readers will have already read those works or Carson’s review.  I offer up Carson’s conclusion as similar to mine of TIR and JFP to provide a broader picture of the emergent conversation9.

 

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