Reflections on the President’s Theological Seminar
As my previous post noted, I’d like to briefly reflect on the presentation and conversation that took place last Tuesday through Thursday during the President’s Theological Seminar. The seminar was comprised of Dr. Mouw (President of Fuller) and three other faculties from across the disciplinary spectrum (old testament, new testament, church history). They came together to present and reflect on Church and Kingdom, new theological challenges. I happened to be the only current student participant along with about 30 others who were in full-time ministry at some capacity and many of whom are alumni of Fuller.
The first evening Dr. Mouw presented a brief overview of the forces that have brought us into the ecclesial shift from modernist assumptions to post-modernist assumptions. Essentially the former can be seen in final form in the seeker-purpose-driven paradigm churches which have given us the birth what Mega-religious gatherings. The former being the rise of the emerging church conversation, the terminological descriptor of missional church, and the theological forces giving rise to the “re-configuration� of the church. Two of the three assigned texts for the seminar (Resident Aliens and Jesus and Community) are part of the theological zeitgeist of these new ecclesiologies.
Dr. Mouw’s presentation was insightful and well crafted. Yet towards the end, in my opinion, he caricatured the emerging church movement as some sort of repackaging of small groups. To which I quickly interjected. It’s not that emerging churches are happening ex nihilo; of course they are drawing upon and rediscovering historical practices of the church. However, they are resurrecting them in new and unimaginable ways, most notably in their tendency to rightly borrow freely across church lines. Thus they represent a post-denominational ecclesiology.
Whereas the mega-boomer churches draw on free market capitalistic practices and secular organizational plausibility structures almost indiscriminately, emerging-missional churches function on a completely different epistemology. They put into (or work towards) practice what Hauerwas and Lohfink and perhaps Jesus and the early apostles had in mind. That is, church as a contrast-community, a people who narrate in thought, word and deed a story which is contrast to that of any empirical myth narrative, whether it be Rome, Europe or the United States.
It is shocking to me that so many people bit the Niebuhrian liberal notion that somehow we work the Kingdom of God into the power, principality and authority structures. This has resulted in the church being a sort of chaplain to the world, one which nobody takes too seriously, but finds comforting or good for morality. Only when the church is visibly particular in its ontology and epistemology is it the body of Christ on earth. Only then can it point to the coming new creation in a way that doesn’t let anyone be fooled into thinking the Kingdom of God is built buy the world or buy the church for that matter. Only when the church truly hears the iconoclastic rhythms and subversive language of the Scriptures can it move into the world with Good News given from God in Christ, not Caesar.
As a wise sage once said; “The church needs to be the church (e.g. narrate in its life a different story than the world’s), precisely so the world (with its story) can know it’s the world.� In pursuing relevance on terms defined by the world we end up with an irrelevant message and church.