Posted on Friday, September 9, 2016

141: Cathleen Falsani & Jennifer Grant, Editors of “Disquiet Time”

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*Originally Posted at MissioAlliance.org

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A Connecticut native and granddaughter of Italian and Irish immigrants, Cathleen is a graduate of Wheaton College, the alma mater of the Rev. Billy Graham, former U.S. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and horror film director Wes Craven. (Admittedly, she often finds more common ground with Craven and Graham than Hastert.) She holds a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University as well as a master’s degree in theological studies from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. She also was a 2009 Divinity School Media Fellow at Duke University, a Gralla Fellow in Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, and was the 1996 Stoody-West Fellow in Religious Journalism.

Jennifer is a graduate of Wheaton College (IL) and received her Masters degree in English literature with concentrations in fiction writing and critical theory (Go Derrida!) from Southern Methodist University. She lives with her husband, four children, and a wise and affectionate mutt named Shiloh outside of Chicago, Illinois.

DISQUIET TIME takes its cue from migraine those venerable, traditional devotionals in format and appearance, but with a twist. Each chapter will feature a scripture passage or verse chosen by the contributor, who will write a 1,000-3,000-word reflection about why this part of the Bible most excites, comforts, disturbs, frustrates, or soothes him or her.

The idea is not necessarily to be irreverent, but rather to acknowledge the parts of the Bible that confound and fascinate us. Our aim is to create a book with all of the humor of a satire or parody but none of the snark or vitriol. -From the Publisher

Find more info visit Disquiet Time

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Posted on Monday, August 4, 2014

5 Reasons I’m Not an Evangelical (and 5 reasons I am)

Before I started blogging I had a big tent view of evangelicalism. Basically anyone who claimed to follow Jesus as their Lord & Savior, and gave some kind of authority to the Bible, I considered an evangelical. I’ve grown to realize, this isn’t most people’s definition of evangelical. This is important because in the past on this blog and on Seminary Dropout I’ve described myself as an evangelical. I don’t know if I’ll keep using that term to describe myself. It’s not that my theology has changed so much as I’ve either had the wrong definition, or the definition has evolved into something else.

Either way I think it’s important to outline the ways I am and am not an evangelical.

1. So far as being an evangelical means reading the
Bible as a flat document absent of thematic messages
throughout, I am not an evangelical.

So far as being an evangelical means believing
in the authority of God through scripture,
I am an evangelical.

My friend Micah J. Murray has pointed out in the past, the problem of ‘the Bible clearly says’ mentality. The problem being that when that phrase is invoked, the Bible many times does not clearly say what that person thinks it means when taken in the context of the Bible as a whole. We can take isolated verses and sentences from the Bible and construct a theology that fits our worldview just fine, but the Bible demands to be read differently.

This does not however mean that I don’t believe in the authority of scripture. As N.T. Wright says in his book ‘The Last Word: Scripture and the Authority of God- Getting Beyond the Bible Wars’,

…the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ can make Christian sense only if it is a shorthand for ‘the authority of the triune God, exercised somehow through scripture.’

Almost all of the following reasons are based upon this first one.

2. So far as being an evangelical means seeing science
as the enemy of faith or even rejecting the bulk of science
on grounds of faith, I am not an evangelical.

So far as being an evangelical means reading the creation
story the way it intends to be read and seeing the power,
glory, and goodness of God in that story, I am an evangelical.

file0001753589015 You may have heard the logic; the book of Genesis tells the story of God creating the universe and the first man Adam, Jesus refers to Adam as a historical figure (a dubious claim), therefore if you don’t believe that God created the world and Adam in 6 24-hour days a few thousand years ago, then you have to believe that Jesus was either a liar or mistaken, and was certainly not the messiah.
From my view, a failure to read the scriptures as the type of literature in which they were meant to be written is the culprit here. The creation story was never intended to be a historical document.
As for Jesus referring to Adam as a historical figure, I think that’s quite a leap. You know how you and your friends get together and talk about Harry Potter, or Don Draper, or Walter White? And you know how when you say their names you’re always sure to say ‘Remember when fictional character, Harry Potter, battled other fictional character, Voldemort?’ or ‘Hey can you believe how much Don, who is in no way a real person, drank on Mad Men last night?!’ or ‘Wow I can’t believe the invented person of Walter White, IS the danger?!’ I think you see where I’m going with this.

3. So far as being an evangelical means keeping doors
closed to women in the church and at home, I’m not an evangelical.

So far as being an evangelical means following the Bible’s
example of putting people in roles in the church and at
home based on gifting rather than gender, I am an evangelical.

Because I believe in God’s authority via scriptures, I must acknowledge the biblical witness of women leaders in the church such as Junia, and taking seriously Paul’s admonishment for believers to stay single if possible, which logically means that it is impossible for God’s only desire for women is that they be wives and mothers.

4. So far as being an evangelical means participating in
culture wars that make further enemies of the people
Jesus came to love, I am not an evangelical.

So far as being an evangelical means showing people the
love of Jesus no matter what, even if that means giving
up certain ‘rights’ as Americans, I am an evangelical.

The recent Hobby Lobby debacle serves as the perfect example. Some might be surprised to know that I actually have somewhat ‘conservative’ opinions about the case. My apprehension comes in when the cost of standing up for certain rights, even when going through the proper channels, only further ignites the culture wars and gives people like those Jesus befriended reason to become the enemies to Christians. To be clear, I’m not calling for HL or anyone else to violate their conscience, what I am saying is that perhaps it should be more important to refuse to stoke the fires of a culture war, than own a multi-million dollar business. Perhaps the strongest Christian witness would be to close up shop and turn down future millions rather than make an enemy out our neighbors. The end doesn’t justify the means.

5. So far as being an evangelical means refusing to interact
with theology that doesn’t match up perfectly with your own,
I’m not an evangelical.

So far as being an evangelical means believing in Jesus
first and allowing him to dictate what else you believe, thus
freeing you to interact with theology that you don’t believe
in without fear because you are above else rooted in Jesus,
I am an evangelical.

If being an evangelical means that above all else Jesus is Lord & Savior, than it only makes sense that nothing else can be, including certainty. I believe that Jesus is who he says he is as much as a human can believe anything. Most other things I believe in with an open hand. We all have biases against certain theologies and beliefs but if those biases keep us from studying and engaging, that doesn’t make us faithful, it makes us anti-intellectual. If we’re secure in our beliefs (chiefly belief in Jesus), then we won’t have fear when confronted with other beliefs. We also must believe that God gave us our intellect so that we can discern between good and bad beliefs, not avoid them all together.

These aren’t the only issues I wrestle with concerning evangelicalism, but they’re the major ones. Now if you do hear me refer to myself as an evangelical, you’ll know just what I do mean and what I don’t mean.

Posted on Thursday, September 13, 2012

Bible Interpretation: You’re Doing It Wrong. (maybe)

It’s not a cardboard platform, those aren’t flat plastic game pieces, and we’re not playing with our 4 year old nephew at the family reunion because we don’t want to watch the slide show of my 3rd cousins, grandparents baby pictures because I don’t even know who those people are anyway.

We’re playing on a board made of marble, with 3 dimensional pieces that are pawns, knights, bishops, rooks, a queen, and a king. So it’s a problem if we’re still playing by the rules of checkers. Maybe someone tries to tell us that we’re not utilizing the game for it’s intended purpose, but we insist that we are, because we’ve been king’ed twice and look at how many times we’ve jumped the opponent. It works, so I must be doing it right. Someone may point out that it doesn’t really work that well because those pieces don’t balance on each other when we’re king’ed, and most importantly, there’s a better, more accurate game to be played.

If you’ve been close to the Christian subculture for any amount of time you’ve probably heard someone espouse the nobility of interpreting scripture “literally.” I agree with some of those people on their meaning behind that, but the fact is that no one interprets scripture literally, not all of it, and no one should. I am in no way advocating for interpreting scripture any way you like, reading into it whatever suits you, in fact it’s quite the opposite of that, one purpose of good interpretation is to discover the story that God is trying to tell, not the one we are trying insert.

Let me give you an example of the “literal” problem; 1 Thessalonians 5:26 says clearly to “Greet all brothers with a holy kiss,” if there is any sect of Christianity that currently does this, I am not aware of it. Yet there it is, in black and white, no way around it. But for some reason, with this scripture, most believers across the spectrum seem to all agree that this begs to be put in context, and so we look to the culture of the day and we see that kissing was a common way of expressing sisterly and brotherly love, and that the heart of this passage, Paul’s intent, was that we should show our love, in Christ, to each other.

When you don’t look to the cultural context you wind up with some bad theology, you make Esther out to be a whore, men can’t wear hats (and women have to), heck Adam and Eve weren’t even properly married were they(maybe eating the apple was really their 2nd sin)!

This is not to say that nothing can be taken literally because much of the Bible should be. Jesus’s command to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and visit the prisoner, for instance, was meant to be taken very literally. The Bible’s call for sexual purity, while perhaps out of fashion,was meant to be taken literally.

In addition to scriptures original cultural context, we must also interpret through the lens of Jesus. When Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected, he forever altered history. Now we have to interpret everything that came before and after through the lens of Jesus’s death and resurrection. This is not something I’ve pulled from the sky, but Jesus himself in the Bible, proclaimed it. In John 5, he tells the Jewish leaders who are out to kill him “You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you possess eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me…” We must read scripture, Old & New Testaments, in the light of Jesus. We must see, as Paul said, the “shadows” of the old covenant, speaking of the coming new covenant, that Jesus ushered in.

The problem comes when we don’t use our Holy Spirit driven discernment. Most of the time it’s because we don’t want to. We’d rather read specific passages, the way our parents, friends, or pastors tell us to read them, lest we be a isolated in our theology. Just as bad, we decide what we’re going to believe, what’s consistent with our politics or other worldview, and then we go looking for it in scripture, and what do you know, we tend to find it every time.

Don’t take the checkers/chess metaphor too far; interpreting scripture demands humility, and it isn’t about outfoxing an opponent. The thing about checkers is, it’s less complicated, you don’t have to think much, and it doesn’t demand much of you. It’s also not very fulfilling, I mean really, have you ever been overjoyed about winning checkers?!

But to play chess, you have to fully engage, it is more difficult, more is required on your part, but it’s also more rewarding. And if you’re playing with chess pieces, on a chess board, the only correct game to play, is chess.

This obviously isn’t an exaustive look at proper exegesis, but what do you think? Am I off base? Have you seen the checkers method of interpretation?