There are plenty of thorough reviews all over the web. I see no point in repeating what others have done better than I could. I just want to include one thought. This repeated in my mind throughout, while reading the book:

This is the most important book published for the general Christian audience since N.T. Wright’s Surprised By Hope (2008). What N.T. Wright did for eschatology, I think Scot McKnight does in this book for soteriology.

He takes personal salvation and removes it as the central element of the gospel. This is similar to how Tom Wright moves our hope from a personal trip to heaven to a reconciliation of all things in his said book. Both authors open up the New Testament story into something that is deeper, richer & more encompassing than simply a personal faith in a personal salvation.

And if you can’t imagine what the gospel might ever be if it’s not personal salvation then you need to read this book…immediately.

A Jew did not become a Christian by coming to see God as a righteous judge and a gracious forgiving protector. The Jew believed that already, being a Jew. What it took for him or her, to become a Christian was not some new idea about his or her sinfulness or God’s righteousness, but one about Jesus…
The heresy Paul was struggling against was not that the Jewish Christians continued to be committed to keeping the law; Paul was quite tolerant of those who held to such a conviction. He taught respect for the dietary scruples. He went out of his way to share their ritual faithfulness when in Jerusalem. Nor was it their thinking that by keeping the law they would be saved, for Jewish Christians did not believe that. The basic hersey he exposed was the failure of those Jewish Christians to recognize that since the Messiah had come the covenant of God had been broken open to include the Gentiles. In sum: the fundamental issue was that of the social form of the church. Was it going to be a new and inexplicable kind of community of both Jews and Gentiles, or was it going to be a confederation of a Jewish Christian sect and a Gentile one? Or would all the Gentiles have first to become Jews according to the conditions of premessianic proselytism.

In sum: Yoder is saying Paul is saying salvation is open to everybody, and the old system of us & them is done. This isn’t against the law per se except in as much as the law was used to exclude people.

In John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus I was lead to a possible glimpse of an endless eschatology. Let me quote the pertinent passage:

In correlation with our sense of impossibility we tend to think of “apocalyptic” promises as pointing “off the map” of human experience, off the scale of time, in that they announce an end to history. But the past deliverances of Israel had been recounted as having taken place within their own history and on their own Palestinian soil. The whole body of hermeneutic prejudices linked with the concept of the “interim ethic,” as if what Jesus was predicting was an end to time and space, gets us off the track right at this point. Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom was unacceptable to most of his listeners not because they thought it could not happen but because they feared it might, and that it would bring down judgment on them.

…

The mighty acts of God in Israel’s history had been neither the end of history, nor off the scale of human events. We have every reason to assume that the inauguration of the jubilee was understood by Jesus’ hearers with the same concreteness as the Exodus story or the deliverance of Jehoshaphat had for them. (p.85-86, the end of the chapter “God Will Fight For Us” from The Politics of Jesus)

Previously in this chapter, Yoder describes the experiences of Israel in the Old Testament where they find their saving grace in the acts of God. The point he was making was how people would have heard Jesus’ message in the Palestine of the first century. The point being that the teachings of Jesus were not an unattainable perfection which showed people’s need for his saving power or a vision for a world to come which had no connection to his contemporaries. Rather what Jesus was saying, according to Yoder, would have been interpreted within a worldview where God’s redemption happens within history—because God had already done it before, the Old Testament being our remembrance of that.

What if we took this understanding of Jesus’ hearers not just simply as a hermeneutic but as our eschatology. What if we took the end out of our eschatology. What if Christianity was about continuing the story of God’s involvement in the world…a world without end.

“There is no reason to despise democratic elections; the point is only to insist that they are not per se an indication of Truth—on the contrary, as a rule, they tend to reflect the predominant doxa determined by the hegemonic ideology…There can be democratic elections which enact an event of Truth—elections in which, against sceptical-cynical inertia, the majority momentarily “awakens” and votes against the hegemony of ideological opinion. However, the very exceptional nature of such an occurence proves that elections as such are not a medium of Truth”
Žižek from “First As Tragedy, Then As Farce”

Žižek from First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

Adam Moore described the work as primarily about Resurrection—an affirmation of it, a call for transformation, conversion, & being born again. I had a hard time seeing this aspect of it with my first reading. But after a second reading with more time to reflect upon Pete’s thoughts, I can see and agree with Adam’s reading of the text. Peter Rollins divides the book in two parts: Crucifixion & Resurrection.

Crucifixion

The first half is about cutting our ties to the deus ex machina, the God of the Machine. This term comes from Greek tragedy where a god is lowered down onto the stage to resolve a conflict. Rollins describes how third-rate playwrights began to employ this technique not add to the story but to simply solve plot difficulties. And this is exactly what the Church does today, which Rollins describes as such:

For Bonhoeffer, the Church approached God as a deus ex machina. God was merely an idea clumsily dropped into our world in order to fulfill a task. God was introduced into the world on our terms in order to resolve a problem rather than expressing a lived reality. The result is a God who simply justifies our beliefs and helps us sleep comfortably at night. God is brought into the picture only when we face a problem of some kind that doesn’t lend itself to solution by other means. In Bonhoeffer’s view, this God plays the same meager role as the supernatural beings in third-rate Greek plays.

Rollins uses the Crucifixion as the central event for deconstructing the God-as-crutch. He sees the cry of Jesus, ”Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”, my God my God why have you forsaken me, as a definitive event for our faith. It is the moment of atheism, not the intellectual atheism of Dawkins but rather an existential atheism, the lived experience of abandonment. This is the moment that we all experience the loss of all meaning and comfort.

After setting this event of the cross as the central hermeneutical element, he sets his attention not only on our stated beliefs which affirms a God-crutch but also exposes how the structures and liturgies of church re-enforce a comforting system which believes so that we don’t have to. And I think this is the highlight of the first half of the book. His deconstruction of how we may affirm our doubts, intellectually, but when it comes to songs we sing & liturgies we read there is no hint of the doubt we affirm.

His point is that this allows us to insulate ourselves from the trauma of the cross, the rupture that it causes for our comforts & meaning. We allow our friends, family, & clergy to believe for us. While we may not affirm a creed each week, we find comfort in knowing that our blessed mother goes each week and prays for us. This allows us to not feel the trauma of hanging above the void of meaningless & nothingness.

Peter Rollins argues that we must re-align our structures, liturgies, songs so that our Sunday worship doesn’t allow us to hide from the truth of the cross but rather we need songs which speak from that place of the cross. Not just songs which speak ofthe cross as a comfort—Jesus experienced it so you don’t have to—rather we must lead people to their own experience of the cross through our worship. This is a pulling away of the security blanket that so often is the church.

The point of this for Rollins, is to get to Resurrection. The trauma of going through the cross to get to the Resurrection he sees as necessary. Here is how he frames it as the concluding thought of Part 1:

In short, the Christological crisis is one where everything that grounds us (the political, spiritual, and social) is torn away, where we stare into the void, and, as Nietzsche once said, we feel the void stare back. In this place we are alone as we dimly glimpse life without the gilded cage of religion. And it is here that we stand or fall. Here we must choose whether to embrace life or to turn and run. It is only here, in this dry and barren land of death, that we can approach the truth of life testified to in the event of Resurrection. If, however, Resurrection is not possible, then those who go through this death are, as the apostle Paul knew, “to be pitied more than all men.”

Resurrection

If the Crucifixion is fundamentally about turning towards the reality of yourself and the world, then Resurrection is the embrace of that reality. As Rollins says:

If the Crucifixion marks the moment of darkness, then the Resurrection is the very act of living fully into this darkness and saying “Yes” to it. The faith that is born in Resurrection does not enable us to escape these deeply troubling anxieties; it provides the power to face up to them.

Resurrection for Rollins is about materiality, it is about enveloping the life of love. Often people affirm Resurrection with their mouth but not their hands. Affirming the Resurrection happening by caring for the poor, destroying the systems of injustice. This transforms how we think about not just religion but life itself:

In the Resurrection faith is testified to in the New Testament, the question Do you believe in God? is transformed and now involves the very being of the one asking the question. As such it can be rendered in this way: Is your entire being caught up in a commitment to embracing the world? In Christianity to believe in God means nothing other than to be the site where love is born, where to find the courage to affirm the world and live fully into.

The much of the rest of Part 2 is about helping us to realize that our actions in the world need to be more radical than simply ‘being a better person’. He uses Batman as a great example of this. Bruce Wayne is shown to be fighting crime under the guise of Batman, but Rollins questions the hows & whys of that. How can Wayne get the money to fund this project? Wayne Industries, but how much are they making, that they don’t notice this multi-million dollar project! And what if Wayne used that money for education, homelessness, joblessness wouldn’t his dollars be spent better in fighting crime and making a better city? Rollins looks deeper and finds Batman’s ‘good deeds’ are actually a result of anger & revenge for seeing his parents murdered as a child—talk about good motives…

So he concludes the book by saying “…denying the Resurrection means nothing less than to turn away from the world, to run from our suffering, to avoid an authentic meeting with our neighbor and to hide from ourselves…For it is only when we are the site where Resurrection takes place that we truly affirm it. To believe in the Crucifixion and Resurrection means nothing less than enacting them.”

My Question To Peter Rollins

I love this book, I love the deconstruction and then the call to action from that place. But I can’t get past the central assumption that God is dead, absent, or unable to intervene. While I would agree that too often we rely on a God who is simply there to solve my problems. I am thankful for your tearing down that idol, but at the same time it seems so much of the scriptures is based upon the notion that God has committed himself to making all things right, that God intervening within the world, even today still.Your reading of the Resurrection puts all the responsibility upon us, where my Protestantism would say that is the exact opposite of the gospel, God’s intervention is because we were powerless to rescue ourselves.

I could understand how good this book may be for someone who finds themselves in a dark night, who hasn’t experienced God for quite sometime if at all. But what about the person whose reality is an experience of the divine. Is that a false reality? I have a hard time taking a Radical Theology which seems to want to throw the baby out with the bath water.

I understand you wanted to bracket out these questions because they distract from the direction you wanted to go with your book. But my question is couldn’t you make the moves you made and keep the historical-orthodox understanding of Crucifixion/Resurrection (not that I’m saying you should, but I have a hard time throwing out the historical). For me it is the historical events which give these words power, I don’t understand {though I continue to be very curious in} how the liberal move to divorce historical from symbol keeps meaning intact.

To Everyone Else

Get the book if you haven’t already. Join the Conversation. The Church and Postmodern Culture blog hosted a discussion of the book that is worth reading.

If you aren’t familiar with Mark’s work. He has worked out of San Francisco for some years now, trying to create a way of living out the Christian faith that’s rooted heavily on living out the example and commands of Jesus. He has started a network of folks who are actively looking & listening to scriptures and then most importantly putting the idea into their life. He calls these spiritual experiments.

The book is a divided into two parts. The first part lays the theological groundwork. It is a reset button of sorts, helping us get out of our default positions where knowledge and actions are divided, where spiritual formation is divided from one’s service or ministry. Scandrette’s main thesis is showing how spiritual formation happens best through practice.

Most anyone who talks about discipleship, has 1 on 1 or a small group studying the Bible as their first image. Scandrette sees this model as broken because it fails to focus on getting us living by the commands instead of just studying them. So the centralizing element of Scandrette’s experiments, as he calls them, is to get people trying to live out what Jesus is saying. This isn’t a Pharisee legalism but rather is the belief that the lived experience of trying to practice the way of Jesus is transformative and spiritually maturing in a way that simple study with vague application points seems to miss.

But what is so compelling is that you find yourself on every page thinking, why am I not doing this{!}. And what is so great about the book are the resources he has included. He has included exercises and experiments to try at the end of each chapter, practical graspable ways of taking the idea and doing something with it. There are also beautifully written prayers that Mark and others from his community have written that he shares with us. The book is written to get leaders to lead in this practice focused way and so there is time spent describing how leading and organizing these groups centered on action are different than other groups.

I’ve found this book to be a great resource to the question of how to get people more involved in substantive change in their life. I look forward to taking Mark’s ideas forward within my faith community this Spring. Hopefully out of that time we will have stories just as compelling as the ones Mark has witnessed to.

To Creator, obedience
To Creation, service
To each other, community
In all things, love, in all things love

With possessions, simplicity
For life, prayer
In our world, creativity
In all things, love, in all things love

Make us agents of your healing & justice
To weep with those who suffer
To speak for our sisters & brothers
Whose voices can not be heard
Of love’s triumph over greed
Spending ourselves for the captive
Praying that more liberators will be sent
Until every slave is free.

Because…Vintage…we are…
Created to be creative
We enact our destiny
Embracing the energy of the Spirit
to risk making beauty with our whole lives.

Amen

*adapted from prayers found in Mark Scandrette’s book Practicing the Way of Jesus.

A Vision of the Blessed Cisneros

In the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, as I was among the exiles by the river Chebar, the heavens were opened, and I, Cisneros, saw visions of God.

As I looked, a stormy wind came out of the north: a great cloud with brightness around it and fire flashing forth continually, and in the middle of the fire, something like gleaming amber. In the middle of it was something like four living creatures. Each had four faces, and each of them had four wings. Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the sole of a calf’s foot; and they sparkled like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands and on each hand there were four eyes. The four had the face of a human being, the face of a lion on the right side, the face of an ox on the left side, and the face of an eagle; such were their faces. Their wings were spread out above; each creature had two wings, while two covered their bodies. Each moved straight ahead; wherever the spirit would go, they went, without turning as they went. In the middle of the living creatures there was something that looked like burning coals of fire, like torches moving to and fro among the living creatures; the fire was bright, and lightning issued from the fire. The living creatures darted to and fro, like a flash of lightning.

Over the heads of the living creatures there was something like a dome, shining like crystal, spread out above their heads. When they moved, I heard the sound of their wings like the sound of mighty waters, like the thunder of the Almighty, a sound of tumult like the sound of an army; when they stopped, they let down their wings. And there came a voice from above the dome over their heads; when they stopped, they let down their wings.

And above the dome over their heads there was something like a throne, in appearance like sapphire; and seated above the likeness of a throne was something that seemed like a human form. Upwards from what appeared like the loins I saw something like gleaming amber, something that looked like fire enclosed all round; and downwards from what looked like the loins I saw something that looked like fire, and there was a splendor all round. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Sun and Stone.

When I saw it, I fell on my face, and I heard the voice of someone speaking.

Thus spoke the Voice.

This woman whom you see coming towards you, this man who is passing by in the street, this beggar whom you hear calling, all are for you objects—of that there is no doubt.

Always attend that in the reality of everyday life the Other appears to you. In order to understand it you must question more exactly this ordinary appearance of the Other in the field of your perception; this ordinary appearance holds hidden within it the fundamental relation that is the mystical union, if we only look.

You are in a public park, Not far away there is a lawn and along the edge of that lawn there are benches. A man passes by those benches. You see this man; You apprehend him as an object and at the same time as a man. What does this signify? What do it mean to assert that this man is a object?

It means you have missed the fundamental relation.

If we go further, you will realize at each instant the Other is looking at you. He will be found looking when there is a rustling of branches, or the sound of a footstep followed by silence, or the slight opening of a shutter, or a light movement of a curtain. During an attack men who are crawling through the brush apprehend as a look to be avoided, not two eyes, but a white farm-house which is outlined against the sky at the top of the hill.

Now the bush, the farmhouse are not the look; they only represent the eye, for the eye is not at first apprehended as a sensible organ of vision but as a support for the look.

Know that we all are already eyes.

It is never when eyes are looking at you that you can find them beautiful or ugly, that you can remark of their color. The Other’s look hides his eyes; he seems to go in front of them.

The look which the eyes manifest, no matter what kind of eyes they are, is a pure reference to yourself. What you apprehend immediately when you hear the branches crackling behind you is not that there is someone there; it is that you are vulnerable, that you have a body which can be hurt, that You occupy a place and that you can not in any case escape from the space in which you are without defense—in short, that you are seen.

At that instant, darkness became light, light became darkness, form became shapeless, and that which is shapeless took form. At that moment of chaos and order, Wisdom’s vision departed and Cisneros was left alone and naked in the wilderness.

The Sacred Word for our Guidance.

Interestingly, I found a lot of parallel ideas in a post written by Cary Gibson reflecting on what ikon has meant to her. This shouldn’t be surprising since my work with Vintage Vespers has been highly influenced by the work of ikon founding member Peter Rollins.

Also while mentioning ikon, definitely check out this write up about their recent event at Greenbelt.