dr trinity

reconciling images in the Bible

2010-08-02T09:19:00.000-07:00

A friend recently asked me, “How do you reconcile the different images we're given of a kingdom, a bride, a dance, and the Old Testament sacrifices? I guess the first three can sort of be reconciled, but it's hard to get a coherent picture out of all of this. I read Michael Horton's critique of the idea that salvation wasn't a legal issue as much as it was a health issue. As much as I love the trinity, I find some of these ideas as less obvious in scripture than the reformed interpretations.”

My response: Good question!

Images of the Kingdom are about the fulfillment of God's community, the reconciling of all peoples at God's table, living within God’s peaceable kingdom as the fulfillment of an expectation that goes back at least to David.

The Bride is also about the fulfillment of God's community in the language of covenant relations toward which we are drawn to feast at the great banquet and then in the life of intimacy that follows.

The Dance is also about the fulfillment of God's community, first as the Son is in the Father and the Father is in the Son (perichoresis) and then we enter the dance as we are in Christ and He is in us. This is also the language of the life of intimacy and recursion (have you read my article?)

Old Testament sacrifice is also about the fulfillment of God's community. Atonement is making at-one that which is fractured. On the Day of Atonement, the most holy person, the high priest, enters the most holy place, the holy of holies, and speaks the most holy word, the name of Yahweh. All Israel sees herself in the High Priest (symbolized in the breastplate) going in as a mediator to restore intimacy and a forgiven community. The outcome is a restored community at one with God in grace and forgiveness that creates renewed intimacy.

Each of the sacrifices is realistic in acknowledging the alienation of sin on our relating to God and one another. All envision an overcoming of shame and a return to loving community. This is especially true of the shalamim offering. Part is offered to God to eat (burned); the rest is shared with friends and family to celebrate the fellowship and peace that is the outcome of God's gracious community.

I have not read a lot of Michael Horton, so I cannot critique or comment on his views. But I do think it is about health as the proper function of the people of God in restored relation acting out that love in the community and world. Our modern legal thinking should not be transposed back on that time. I do think that guilt, shame, and a clean conscience are not as time-bound.

The Triune life of God is the life of the Kingdom lived in heaven for which we pray that it come to earth. The Triune life of God is God’s husbanding to embrace his bride in fulfilled intimacy. The Triune God lives the Dance of God that acts from eternity to eternity and invites humanity to participate that our joy may be full in that koinonia. The Triune God is the self-sacrificing God who fulfills the sacrificial system, offers forgiveness and restoration, and reconciles the world in acts of atonement.

The Trinity makes sense of it all ...

Blessings!

thoughts on icons

2010-07-27T16:51:00.000-07:00

Inscape Gallery is hosting an iconographer who sees herself as rebellious. Yet she is drawn to the rich traditions of the icons as a meeting place where faces speak and emotions are brought out to create a kind of encounter that shapes our story.

Icons are foreign to most Protestant Christians. Paul says in Colossians that Christ is the image (icon) of the invisible God. The Reformers took this to mean that no other image was allowed. Even in the Calvin reading group I attend, I hear strong resistance to manger scenes and other pictures, based on the Reformed idea of Christ as the only image.

But it seems that songs create images, stained glass windows are images, and basically anything we use to communicate uses some mode of images. Why resist Icons?

Icons are strangers to us. They have faces we do not understand. But if you live within an iconic tradition, they are the faces of the family. Walking into a church is like walking into a family room. The people are there; the stories are embedded in the depictions. This creates a depth of community that is unparalleled in most of our experience. It creates a remembering who we are and what it means to live in the Gospel narrative.

I use the Rublev icon of the Old Testament Trinity to depict God in hospitable community inviting us to join in. Somehow, the image says more than many books and definitions by portraying relationships and inviting us to sup.

Do you resist, rejoice, or remain undecided on the value of icons in your journey of faith?

reflections on white-water rafting

2010-07-16T10:30:00.000-07:00

I donned clothes of protection against the icy, ravaging river and climbed into the raft. We were white-water rafting for the thrill, but I got more than just thrills as I thought about similarities to the church.

I quickly noticed that we had to work as a team. We had to stroke together sometimes; other times, it was backstrokes on our side and forward strokes on the other. We had to be unified in our intent to survive and go for the goal -- what a great picture of what a church could be! The mission is to be a community who goes into the rapids of the world, gathering to prepare to work together in our different ways.

The guide was clearly knowledgeable, but used that knowledge to serve us and find the path to the goal. We “obeyed” his commands, not because we had to, but because he knew where we were going and could coordinate our working together in a way that empowered us and required little of him other than to keep us directed.

The raft was designed to go somewhere. We could sit in it on the shore, but it is best fitted for the water. The church can be a retreat from the world, but is best served when we are loving each other and those we meet in the rocky places of our daily journey.

Fear of the cold water kept us in the boat. We were all watching the others and how they moved so we could align with them. Most people in churches are afraid to get in the boat because of the sacrifice that might be required. People show up for the safety videos but miss the trip, sitting on the shore decked out with all the paraphernalia.

We were not in control, but were riding an incredible power that moved us forward when we positioned ourselves to be moved by the surges. The church is often like a wading pool with synthetic waves that minimally replicate, but could never come close to approximating, the real work of the Holy Spirit to launch us forward.

We bumped against a lot of rocks. Life with God is not safe and comfortable. We may feel out of our zone in listening to our neighbors. But we are not stopped or thrown out by these exciting interactions.

We had fun because we took care for our own part and supported the rest of the crew with a helping hand or supportive words of encouragement and clarification. We all wanted to make it to the goal, and hence had to stay in the boat, taking care not to drink water if we fall in. “Together” was a proximal term as we each did our unique part in cooperation, not replication.

Sometimes we just stopped and enjoyed the ride. Other times, it was all-out energy invested on a very specific task. Maybe churches would do well to get out of the comfort zones and climb on board, ride the waves, and tell the stories afterward to invite others into the adventure.

reflections on Princeton

2010-07-07T13:02:00.000-07:00

Princeton is a town of academic brilliance. Princeton University is a jewel in an historic setting where people like Einstein have lived. The Karl Barth interest at Princeton Seminary is due to his prestige as the greatest theologian of the twentieth century. What qualifies one for this title?

Barth saw with clarity that theology had become a mere reflection of humans looking at human interests and questions, only to project these snapshots onto God. He insisted that God must speak for God, and that that is not a literary archeological dig, but is a fresh hearing of the Bible as enabling us to encounter the Living Lord, Jesus Christ.

The conference I attended in June was focused on Karl Barth’s critique that the church often becomes an institution that refers to God and worships as an inward-focused community. He proposed that God is a Missional God, witnessed in the Father sending the Son and the Spirit. If one reads with Missional eyes, one becomes aware that everything being communicated is intended to mobilize the community to be sent out. We think of Missions as an extra program of the church. For Barth, the church is Missional: hence it gathers, builds up, and sends EVERY WEEK. If churches miss being Missional, only the storm troopers will go out, and the norm for most will be to maintain and protect existing structures.

Is your church Missional or in Maintenance mode? What would it take to re-direct its course?

going beyond Candide

2010-06-17T06:14:00.000-07:00

Watching the musical Candide at Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theater was an interesting discovery in interpretation. Voltaire, the author, is questioning how optimism and the church interpret the world. He intended to strip away the naivety of “hoping for the best” to see the depravity of men, the cultural stuckness of women, and the need to get used to being disappointed.

I wonder if this philosophy of the Enlightenment is not a common vision. Though the theater was full and delighted in the quality, people seemed equally happy to dismiss the hope of a creative God engaged in this world. Candide communicates much truth about the uses and abuse of humans toward one another, which I took as an apt description of the state of fallen humanity. But I left wondering why we have to give up hoping and focus only on our garden of survival.

Churches have a great task in creating hope in the alreadyness of God’s activity in the world. Yet so much is focused on what we can do, and we dismiss the story of God in creating our own. Yes, we need to be honest about our weaknesses and failures, compassionate toward the needy, and active in loving those who dance around us. But we also need to be able to speak of God’s future with a grounded optimism that extends beyond the mental twisting portrayed in Candide. How do you live the story of God’s hope in your context?

finding our story

2010-06-03T22:26:00.000-07:00

I finished reading Who gets to Narrate the World?: Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals by Robert Webber. He contends that through a story of Allah’s conquest over all non-Muslims, radical Islam is on the rise in our world. At the same time, the Western church and culture are weakened and fading as they accommodate civil religion, rationalism, privatism, and pragmatism -- meaning that as we are all about our individual selves and what works for us as individuals, we are losing a unifying story that holds us together. Competing stories will determine the future of the world.

For better or for worse, a culture is sustained by having a story that gives meaning to the existence and direction in which a people live and dream. A dream where everyone does his or her own thing is a dream of disintegration. It is kind of like people wanting to say there is no truth (a unifying belief) and then wanting others to believe their truth about this. If we aim at giving everyone their own truth, there is a built-in self-destruct for everyone to disregard what others think and to become insensitive and indulgent. One definition of hell is everyone serving himself or herself.

Webber proposes that we need to regain the Christian story, to sing, pray and enact God’s creative, nurturing, and restoring work in the world. Our stories find meaning within that narrative. We need to go to church for more than a fill at the gas pump. We need to find meaning in the context of God’s ongoing story. What story does your church tell -- its own, the story of individuals on a private spiritual journey, or the story of God’s Creation, Incarnation and Re-creation? What story do you live in?

reconciliation tears

2010-05-28T16:34:00.000-07:00

Reconciliation themes in movies almost always leave me in tears. Last night I watched Mao’s Last Dancer, part of the Seattle International Film Festival line-up. It was the first time the festival used an Everett venue, meeting at the Everett Performing Arts Center, in a city blossoming with the arts. Mao’s Last Dancer was directed by Bruce Beresford, the director of Driving Miss Daisy. He was actually present for the showing and answered questions afterward, which was wonderful.

The film is based on the autobiography of a boy who was born in rural China, separated from his family at a young age, and who became one of the great ballet talents of our age. Growing up apart from his family, dealing with the culture clash of American life, and defecting to the West were compelling themes of struggle and survival. But the deeper themes for me were his reunion with parents after decades; the dance in the village square for his first teacher, who had been taken away; and finding identity as a person with many national loyalties.

I am currently reading Who Gets to Narrate the World, written by Robert Webber. Webber asserts that we are losing the Christian story in the ways we think about who we are, what gives life meaning, and what is our destiny. Watching Mao’s Last Dancer, I am convinced we need to watch, tell, and live stories of reconciliation within God’s big story in order to make visible the glory of the gospel that brings tears for the right reasons. What themes touch you deeply in movies?

the world growing up

2010-05-24T21:17:00.000-07:00

In medieval times, the church controlled the lives of people. Protestants protested to change that world; their protest grew up to be the Reformation. Some people resisted whatever had anything to do with religion, including the authority of the church to dictate; their resistance grew up to be the Renaissance. In their quest to change the world, they exchanged revelation from God for human reason, saying they were enlightened; thus the Renaissance grew up to be the Enlightenment. Eventually, weary of being controlled by the world of reason, the world grew up into Modernism, controlling through science. The protesters against modernism are postmodernists, trying to change the world to affirm the individual. What will postmodernism grow up to become? Could we become a relational world?

connecting

2010-05-18T12:48:00.000-07:00

Social networking has helped me reconnect with the past. It has a "rest of the story" feel as I weekly catch glimpses of holy moments in the lives of those who populate my story during many decades past. I believe in living in our stories fully, and that means viewing the past as it impacts our present. I find I am encouraged by my conversation partners, and I am delighted to discover the past is not buried, but has produced a garden of amazing new/old friends. Do you experience more connection at church or at work?

Ray Anderson . . . bridge person

2009-07-10T05:23:00.000-07:00

The passing of Ray Anderson is a personal loss to me of a man who modeled for me being a bridge person. He both taught at Fuller Theological Seminary and pastored a church. This is exceptional and yet so wise in bridging the gulf between the academy and the church. I took Theological Anthropology from him in 1992, which provided an intimate glimpse into the world of really caring for people because we have a vision of God that will not let us just sit back and observe; we must engage and help through restoring relationships. This is my life as well, as chancellor of a seminary that is embedded in a local church full of misfits.

Ray also bridged the gap between theology and counseling. He wrote books, worked with Dennis Guernsey, and lived his own life as a people helper. The stories he would tell of sitting in the office and hearing the pain-filled hearts of those who came to him were captivating and made you want to join in.

Ray was an external examiner for my PhD because he understood and valued the works of Karl Barth, John Zizioulas, and John Macmurray, the focal conversation partners in my work. Ray comes from a tradition of theological giants who have reshaped the conversation of theology to be more about the acting God of the Gospel and the place of that triune God in our everyday lives.

Ray was an innovator who was beloved by students. Everywhere I go, when I mention Ray to someone who knows him, a smile lights up a face that has been with a giant. Many say he was their favorite. His earthy humanity made him approachable and yet a vast wilderness to be explored.

I invited him this last year to be on my seminary board, but he said no, he was trying to stay focused . . . but if there is anything he could do . . . Ray was the theologian who most closely approximated my own theological and practical views. I feel I have lost a person who is one of the last to speak my language (in a world where so many languages are being lost as the last few step off the stage).
Ray’s name is added to a list of great Trinitarian theologians who have taken the church to a new possibility of life of personal relating with God and one another that is not of this world in origin, but is that purpose of this world in intention. Their books fill my shelves in special collections of favorite authors:

Colin E. Gunton - May 6, 2003
James B. Torrance - November 15, 2003
Stanley Grenz - March 11, 2005
Thomas F. Torrance - December 2, 2007
Ray S. Anderson - June 21, 2009

Others are rising, but they will stand on the shoulders of these humble giants.

meeting is mission

2009-05-07T20:20:00.000-07:00

I met this week with Dr Jeff Keuss, who teaches at Seattle Pacific University. During our conversation I was struck by his idea that meeting is mission; that is to say, I believe that when we sit at table and converse with anyone, we are fulfilling the mission of God to create, through friends, community that reflects the life of the triune God. If all our theology is lived, what does it look like? Is it high attendance at church services? Is it feeding the poor? Is it about our obedience in extending friendship each day through conversation and shared time and activity? Probably all of these apply to some extent, but in a fast-lane society, it may be that personalized moments are a gospel experience.

passion focused education

2009-01-02T09:51:00.000-08:00

It is traditional that educational institutions define degrees, the major and the courses that are a part of that. Some allow for choice within the program, but for the most part what a person’s education is going to look like is determined by what the school offers. But both process and outcome change when we begin by asking certain questions. What is it that you really feel uniquely impassioned to pursue? What is it that your heart really wishes you could do? And then in every class you take, your passion is intentionally tied to that subject.

So in the world of counseling, for example, someone may be particularly interested in working with adoption. And so we ask the questions: What does the Old Testament have to do with adoption? What does church history have to do with adoption? What does preaching have to do with adoption? What does engaging our contemporary culture have to do with adoption? Now every class is overtly tied to the student’s particular passion, rather than just hoping that people somehow will connect the ideas they’re learning in school to their ultimate application. The very nature of the education, by identifying the passion and then having that passion be part of every educational conversation, allows for a sense of student connectedness, a sense that the teacher comes to help the student be all of who (s)he is, rather than the students having to figure out how to conform, so to speak, to what the professor is all about.

In some ways this ties in to student-centered learning, though in student-centered learning, it’s usually the teacher who’s still determining all of the goals and then trying to make them important for the student. But when a teacher’s priorities are to hear where the student is going and then to bring all of their expertise to best equip the student or move the student on to really live out that passion, that’s a recentering of education that provides a vital dimension of student-centered learning that really puts a professor in the position of being first of all a student of the student, learning about their needs, hopes, dreams, aspirations, and this will also cultivate better teachers.

network education

2008-11-24T05:48:00.000-08:00

In the world of education, we are very oriented to thinking about classroom settings and tests at the end to see if people have in their head the facts and the explanations of the particular subject that’s being studied. But network education says that there’s something about building a relationship with the conversation that is going on in a particular area -- through the avenues of the people who are in the conversation, the books that are in the conversation, programs that are part of the conversation. So if you’re asking a question about theology, for example, it’s one thing to take a class and memorize definitions and the basic topics of systematic theology, but it’s another thing to meet a theologian, and to have a relationship with a couple of them and to ask them how they feel about different subjects and how a particular subject affects the way they think about the way the church might be or the way that we might care for broken people. Now you’re making a network connection with a person who’s thinking dynamically as a person, using all their years of training, and you being in the conversation with them means that you are becoming part of the network. And so network education is to enter into those conversations that don’t have conclusions, but they do have connections that help us to move forward, and to have partners in thinking about the situations that will come up for us.

The same thing is true with books, to know that there are books that are important to read -- even if you don't read the whole thing -- to have the books, or to know where they are, to know the table of contents, to know who the important books speak about as mentors. If we can think of a book as something not just to be read, digested, and then to move on, but rather that we need to develop a network relationship with each book that’s important and see what that book is networked with, that in that process our learning is not something that we’re thinking about getting done with, but rather that we’re continuing to build a web structure. That is really what makes the internet work, too; the reason we can learn so much on the internet is because things are networked together. So we can think of engaging in network education as becoming part of the web. But it’s not just that it’s all sitting there; you intentionally engage specific parts of the web. It’s like you’ve set up favorites so that you have the capacity to get the people, the places, the books, the journals – you have gathered all of those things that are related so that you have quick access. You’ve built a sense of what’s trustworthy, what’s not, and where there are questions to be played out. At the end of a period of time, when you have all of your “favorites” in place, one would say that you’ve been networked in to an understanding of a particular subject, not just from one perspective, but in all of its implications in ways that allow for an ongoing conversation. The illustration of coming to a party where conversation is going on, and you listen for awhile and you begin to get a sense of where people have their positions and you reach a point where you start in the conversation, you start responding because you’ve heard enough, or another way of saying that is you’ve been networked in, so now you have something to say, and as you engage in the conversation and carry on something that’s intelligent, there comes a point when you recognize that you need to leave that conversation at least for awhile, but you’re able to be in that conversation now.

And so my sense is that network education is to walk through all of the issues that we want to train people for in theological thinking and in ministry, to be networked in so they have the capacity to come back, to both build and come back to and live within those conversations that make them the unique person with the unique skills and gifts to be able to accomplish things and to create the connections that create communities that make a difference and bring information where information is needed, and bring in people with expertise where that’s needed, and to see that that is the culminating fruit of bringing network education into a livingness in life, a livingness in our ministry contexts, a connectedness in our families, that is a living out of the conversation.

what are we counting?

2008-11-04T10:51:00.000-08:00

Recently I attended the Off the Map conference in Seattle. One idea that stood out to me was put out there by Rich and Rose Swetman: that we count what we care about. That means that if we’re in a church and we’re only counting how much money we bring in each Sunday, how many people are there, then simply the objective sense of those people showing up is what we really care about.

Rich and Rose suggested three c’s that they attempt to work out of in their ministry: conversations, collaborations, and connections. To be able to say, “I had this many conversations with the people in church or the community this week. To say, “We collaborated; I worked with people in the church on these projects, or with people in the community.” To say, “We made connections; we got people together who needed to be connected. We got people who had needs connected in the places where their needs could be met.”

I think all of these are very helpful terms for us to get at what it means to really have our success be about community and creating community that functions well, that builds relationships well, and that lives into the context of where we live in ways where our caring really is about moving people into relationships of meaningful engagement that truly live out the gospel in practical ways in our neighborhoods.

prosperity or abundance?

2008-10-26T20:20:00.000-07:00

Recently I drove north to Vancouver, BC, to attend the Laing Lectures, which this year hosted Walter Brueggemann, a noted Old Testament scholar. Something that stood out to me during his lecture was his response to a question asked about the difference between prosperity, as in prosperity gospels, and what he was saying about the Old Testament envisioning abundance. In response to the question, Dr Brueggemann answered that prosperity as it is used in the contemporary context is about the individual; individuals want to have things for themselves, money for themselves, to feel a sense of self-satisfaction in this world. On the other hand, abundance is a term for a community experience.

Dr Brueggemann gave the illustration of parents with the Christmas tree, that if you give just lots of stuff to kids, then they can become spoiled. But if you give a few well-thought-out things, and if you play with your kids with what they receive, thoughtful gifts can actually be quite simple. When we talk about what it means to give our kids things that involve us in their lives, where they feel a sense that “we may not have had much, but we had a family that cared, and I had parents who knew who I was,” we are talking about abundance. So abundance, then, has this communal sense, and Dr Brueggemann suggested that we actually don’t have to have that much in order to feel abundance, whereas with prosperity, it always seems that we need more.

So I think there’s a helpful distinction here as we think about what it means for us, in our contemporary environment, to be people of abundance and create communities of abundance, which doesn’t mean having lots of stuff. It means taking time; it means having conversations; it means finding ways to work together, and maybe to hear the possible small things that each of needs and to find ways to meet those needs, but to recognize it is in community that we will ultimately feel a sense of abundance.

on Cirque d'Esprit

2008-05-14T06:13:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday night I went with my wife and some friends to Cirque du Soleil in Redmond, Washington, for Corteo.

Cirque du Soleil is a circus event, Circus of the Sun -- a very richly layered experience of music, acrobatics, humor, word; the whole thing is a bit of a dreamlike experience, so it allowed everything to be integrated into this whole sense of dying and friends gathering around, and all of the dimensions of angels and friends and other things that are brought in as companions for the experience.

This whole world of Cirque du Soleil has laid a foundation for a title I am giving to the one Sunday a month that Washington Seminary facilitates Sunday5 at Washington Cathedral. Sunday5 is a 1-hour alternative worship service, and we call the one Sunday each month when the seminary runs it “Cirque d'Esprit” – Circus of the Spirit.

The whole nature of Circus of the Spirit is that there’s something about circus that says we’re not playing within the lines. So where you traditionally have a liturgy of song and prayer and spoken word, here we may have spoken word, but it may be in the form of Japanese poetry with flute music playing in the background, and you may experience different scents, from herbs or cinnamon or who knows what, that are integrated into the worship service.

No direct sermon. Stories and exploration of ideas are pieces in the text, but again, wherever possible, to not just have everything be focused on the speaker, but to have other things going on -- whether it’s music or sounds or sights or something -- is what I call a thick experience, a layered experience of multiple things going on that speak to your whole being in different ways than traditional liturgies do, which usually have one person at a time doing their activity. So Cirque d'Esprit is a 1-hour canvas to try and playfully do things that tie in with thoughtful, contemplative ways of being, but in playful and multi-mediumed experiences.

This Sunday is our first Cirque d'Esprit, looking at Acts 8, and I’ll be playing out a piece with crushed herbs being like the early life of the church, the witness of the martyrs, the church growing and being a heavenly scent that will be part of our experience of worship as we inhale those scents and think of those people. The evening will culminate as we take communion with herb bread, that again sees the whole sacrifice that is poured into the bread, which symbolizes the body of Christ.

So I think that the whole sense of circus being laid alongside church helps us to expand in our creativity and to recognize that the Spirit wants to do and say things in new mediums that take us not so much into great acts of physical feats like Cirque du Soleil does, but takes our hearts, minds, and spirits to places that cause us to sit back with wonder and amazement that people can go to these places, that God can take us there by His Spirit, and that we can have what the early church did – a sense of amazement and wonder at the mighty acts of God.

on visiting Disneyland

2008-04-21T08:39:00.000-07:00

My family and I visited Disneyland over spring break a few weeks ago. Disneyland is always an interesting adventure to reflect on as a theologian. One of my favorite books, “Jesus in Disneyland,” points out how much Disneyland represents a postmodern world as defined by giving the image of being in all kinds of places -- one moment in Switzerland, another moment in the deep south, another moment in the frontiers of the wild west -- very much the postmodern world, and yet all run by the modern machinery of electrical gadgetry and sophisticated systems of entertainment.

It stood out to me, though, that Disney mentioned that every ride in Disneyland has a story. Part of the nature of what makes a ride complete is not just that it has moments of thrill but that it starts you somewhere, it works through a story, and takes you through to the end of that story. It struck me how much this is like what we do in the world of theology -- bringing the story of God to meet the story of humanity -- and how maybe we need to tell the stories of our communities, the people and events that have shaped the communities in which we live and hope to have influence.

Also, in counseling, the value of the telling of story is to help people get out what it is that’s going on, that it’s not merely diagnosing diseases, but it’s revealing stories that give us access to what’s going on. In a way, Disney captures the heart of American history and the stories of individual characters to touch the hearts and minds of kids and adults.

It also struck me that Disney began his whole project with a desire to give children and adults a place where they could enjoy life together. There is something here about putting multigenerational and enjoyment together that I think is significant for us in the life of the church to notice as well. I remember the first time I went to a Young Life club I was surprised when my Young Life leader, Ed Berg, came running up to me full of enthusiasm. As I left that night, I thought, “Wow, Christianity can be fun.” It’s not quite the same thing as Disneyland, but it did occur to me that there’s something about bringing a vision of what it really means to live life as Christians that is maybe close to Disney’s dream of the relationships between adults and children being shared.

Another aspect of dreams, too, is that whatever we think is history in looking past, just speaking about the lives of those who have gone before us, is not nearly as significant in changing the world as the dreams that we have as we think about what we might do, what we might want, and then act in ways that live out those dreams, which obviously Walt Disney himself did.

There’s also something about the dreamers in the Bible. We can also think about the visions of the kingdom of God and live within the kingdom in ways that change the world. Martin Luther King had a dream, and in many ways that dream is still continuing on.

The nature of who I want to be and who I want Washington Seminary to be is finding the best in telling stories across generations and living our dreams in ways that the gospel becomes incarnated in the places that God puts us.

on being a walking seminary

2008-04-07T06:30:00.000-07:00

Tim Dearborn, who is the founder of the Seattle Association for Theological Studies (its name was changed to the Pacific Association for Theological Studies and KOINOS is the name currently used to describe its ministry), one day described me as a walking seminary. What he meant by this is that I have a huge interest in all of the dimensions of what happens in a seminary, from biblical studies to theological studies to pastoral counseling to church history, and I attempt to integrate them at all times.

I love surveys; I love getting the big picture and then being able to drill down deep later. Some people would call that being a generalist.

My father-in-law began the Family Medicine program for the University of Washington in Spokane. In Spokane they needed generalists who would go out to communities and understand all that was going on, and if necessary to send them to Seattle where specialists are trained. Specialists often aren’t as aware of all that is out there, but they’re the best within the area of their focus.

So, I lean towards being a generalist. I lean towards being somebody who wants to see all the different parts of theological training integrated into all the parts of a person’s life, so to be a counselor who is a theologian is just one of the ways that I bring together that whole sense. And when I train people at Washington Seminary, my concern is that they would end up as those who have a general education that integrates all of these pieces together, but preparing every step of the way to minister in a specialty that brings together the generalities to bear on specific questions. So I don’t think it’s an “either – or” type thing. I think we need generalists who are able to specialize and that we will be best served because those people will be able to go anywhere and to draw on all the fields of thought that need to be drawn on to be equipped to minister. And communities of faith, the families of faith if you will, that are part of the world shaped by God that we currently live in needs leaders who are theologically informed and practically able to strategically make a difference.

on being a bridge person

2008-03-31T07:14:00.000-07:00

I consider myself a bridge person. You may ask, “From what to what?”

One of my primary concerns over the years has been to be a bridge between the church and the academy. I spent almost 20 years in higher education; at the same time I was also working in churches -- on staff at four churches during those years, plus volunteer work, as well as working with Young Life. My concern is that the church needs to get its questions to the academy, and the church needs to help the academy to understand that its ultimate value is in finding answers to how the gospel is lived, incarnated, and comes alongside to help the world that God wants to reach.

Being in the church has helped raise those issues for me. I’ve worked in adult ed, youth ministry, and children’s education, and each one has its own value. I think the academy is hugely valuable in finding answers and digging deeply into things, and that the church desperately needs those resources. I’m reminded that in the world of dentistry, for example, there are people who work on people’s teeth every day, and there are also people in the academy who are constantly researching better materials and procedures and techniques, and that the academy doesn’t operate outside of asking how this is ultimately going to shape the world of dental practice. And I would like to see more of that between the church and the academy. So I attempt to bridge the gulf between those. Washington Seminary, where I am the chancellor, is embedded in a church and is also embedding itself in the world of academic discussion. So we are attempting to have a seminary that embodies both of those worlds as well and serves as a bridge.

I also see myself as a bridge between the conservative side of Christianity and the liberal. I think everyone has a general concern to ask, “What does love look like? And what does it mean to be the body of Christ?” There are varying degrees as to how we achieve that. During several school terms I have taught both at Northwest University, which is an Assemblies of God school and to the conservative side, and at Seattle University, which is more to the liberal side. I teach pretty much the same kinds of things -- largely about the Trinity and the life of relationship, and what it means to know others personally and not merely as objects. And I find that people are very open to the idea of relational thinking as a core to where it is that we’re all going, whether from the right or from the left. Both the liberal and the conservative have seemed to be void of trinitarian thinking, so there is a need for someone to come in and see the possibilities of going back to the affirmations of the early church and how those thoughts shape the way that we do ministry in the modern world, and the way we talk about who God is -- that God is a relational community of Father, Son, Spirit that continues in the world in a relational manner that we are invited to share. So again, to be a bridge in theological thinking by providing trinitarian thinking is another dimension of who I am as a bridge person, the way I want to be involved in bridge activities and to see the divergent components within our current contemporary institutions somehow be brought together by persons who embody being bridges.

reflections on the new conspirators conference

2008-03-24T20:01:00.000-07:00

The New Conspirators Conference, hosted earlier this month by Tom and Christine Sine of Mustard Seed Associates, was a great success in asking questions about whether or not the future has a church and if so, what some of its distinctive missions might be. Reflecting on who I am and what Washington Seminary is about, I think the word missional is a significant word with which we connect. We are not merely attractional, hoping that people come to us, but are preparing students to go out into the world. I still have a sense that there is value in offering options like Under the Green Roof that attract people to come, but the whole idea of raising up students to go out and serve the community is a significant opportunity that I think expresses what we are about. I believe that God is missional, and so my theology is missional -- that God always goes where people are -- and so should the seminary, which is partly why we’re connected with the church.

Secondly, the idea of mosaic, the idea that we have multi cultures within our church, is certainly true at Washington Cathedral, which has an Esperanza service. Washington Seminary is hoping in the future to offer Spanish-speaking students the opportunity to complete a Spanish only degree. More and more Spanish language resources are becoming available, including books, but also other resources (Logos Bible software is now available in a Spanish edition), so we are hoping to be a place that increasingly embraces other cultures and other language streams, and so that is part of the future, and is very much a part of the mosaic of who we want Washington Seminary to be.

The monastic component, intentionally practicing prayer and spirituality while living in a busy world, is also something we are about in that at some level, the learning mode, where people spend time listening and reading, and then come for a conversation as the mentored part of what it is we do I think lives somewhat within the monastic tradition, and one could say that the mentors, in a sense, are the abbots, those who are the overseers, the spiritual companions along the way, so I have a great interest in the monastic tradition as something that nurtures the life of Washington Seminary.

And emerging, which is of course a broad term, has something to do with the church not holding to traditional modes, but asking authentic questions about how we engage culture in significant ways that are postmodern. Dwight Friesen, my good friend, spoke to what it was that we are doing at Washington Seminary as innovative, which is one of the words that I think is significant about who we are: we are trying to innovate and do things differently. Another word I heard at the conference about our seminary was from Mark Scandrette, who introduced Washington Seminary as alternative, which I think is also a helpful adjective, to say we’re not just trying to do it the same as we’ve always done it, but we’re trying to think how we can be more person-centered, how we can have more diversity within the programs, by allowing each person to have a sense that they are important rather than the program being of primary importance, so we want to be person-centered rather than program-centered.

And so, the conference I think as a whole for me was an enriching conversation in examining Washington Seminary in the light of those things that were the three clear goals of the conference. We want to communicate creative models of what New Conspirators are trying to address. We are certainly trying to engage in new modes of communication, and even when we look at biblical hermeneutics, it’s about learning how that affects our communication in all parts of life. We want to connect leaders from all four streams; connection is certainly something that Washington Seminary is about as a network organization which connects through personal conversations, through connecting with books and programs, all of those different ways that our students might be out and connected to others, we want to be about all of those things. And lastly, we want to create new ways to advance God’s new order in our world. Creative is one of those other adjectives that I really want to embrace, that we are attempting to be creative in new ways, new modes, new personal connections that really honor and respect the dignity of each person within God’s broader mission.

So this was a great conference to reflect on all those things and to discover that Washington Seminary is not mostly stuck in just one of these models, but that we are really caught up in some way in furthering all of them. All of these speak to us, and hopefully we will speak for them and to them and with them in the future.

about washington seminary

2008-03-03T04:40:00.000-08:00

I am excited to be the Chancellor of a seminary in Redmond, WA, called Washington Seminary. This is a seminary that’s attempting to think and function differently from traditional forms of education because of a couple of things. One is we live in a very busy world where it’s difficult for people to fit theological education into their busy lives, and so we offer flexible education. Students listen to recorded lectures from Regent College and to short tutorials that I record, and they read several books and articles to give a broad perspective of reading around the subjects of the course.

We offer four masters degrees: Master of Theological Arts, Master of Ministry, Master of Marketplace Ministry, and Master of Christian Counseling. These really play out some of my delights in life, to think about how the arts play out theology in ways that mere books and mere words cannot. The nature of ministry – I’ve been involved on staff in four churches in my life, and so I’m very concerned with the life of the church as it goes forth to live out the missional life of God in the world.

Regarding marketplace ministry, I have worked as the manager of a bakery espresso, and I’ve worked as a custodian and, well, quite a number of jobs out there in the “real world,” meaning not the world that is just Christian, and I have a great desire to discover how to help people to think about working in those areas as ministry, not merely as the support for what one does with ministry in the church, but that our jobs are our ministry. I am a Christian counselor as well, and I think I have some different ways of thinking about Christian counseling than what most of the literature that I read in Christian counseling is working from, so that is another area of great interest to me. So these four degrees shape the masters programs.

On Wednesday evenings we also offer Under the Green Roof, where I get to play out art and scripture. We’ve gone through the book of Genesis and are now going through the book of John. Every week we discuss a different kind of art form as it plays out a different chapter or two from the Bible and then have conversations with those who come as a way of really learning to live, and shaping the culture of Washington Seminary as something that is both deeply rooted in the biblical traditions but also has wings to fly in what it means to speak artistically in a world where the artist seems to have become the truth bearer of the day. Musicians, movie makers -- all those are where people are looking for their truth statements, I think, and so believing we need to be involved in that, we are studying art, talking about art, as a way of living the missional life of God. It’s amazing. People can even talk about the art when they go back to work the next day in a way that they might have a hard time talking about scripture or principles or anything like that. And we offer weekend seminaries where we bring in people like Tom and Christine Sine for extended periods of time, and quarterly Conversations, which are idea jam sessions based on the idea of a jam session in jazz where a variety of people come together and don’t preplan, but begin by setting a theme and playing out of that theme.

We are developing other ideas as well, but that just gives you a little bit of insight that my concerns as a relational theologian are not merely academic, but that they are really concerned about bridging between the life of the academy and the church, believing that the questions of the church really need to inform the questions of the academy, and that the vast amounts of information that the academy has need to be translated and brought into the life of the church to enrich its future and to live within the purposes of God and to see the people of God equipped to articulate and act out of the very life of God.

integration vs contextualization

2008-02-25T05:29:00.000-08:00

As a Christian who counsels, I often distinguish between integration and contextualization. The nature of integration, I think, starts with two systems of thought and attempts to take the best of the two of them and to come up with a third something. My problem with this is that one is likely to lose the integrity of both and come up with something that’s a bit Frankensteinish. So if one takes family systems thinking and theology, at what level does one really lose the whole sense of a living, active God, if one’s theology just looks at the human part of the family system? As humans, our choice of what we take and what we leave behind has a great potential to go awry, so when we select from, it causes me some concern that we end up with a mythology (meaning “my theology”) where we end up having from both of the systems only what we choose, and we call that our integrated system.

But I prefer to use the word contextualization, because there’s a sense in which context says that one system is left entirely intact and the other is put within it to ask how the meaning of one is changed by it being in the context of the other. So when one calls one’s self a Christian, one says, “I will no longer see my life story as a life story separate from the life story of God, but I will see the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the context for my story. His story trumps my story.” It’s not that we’re going to try and work out some mutually acceptable terms. What Jesus has done is the entire foundation for my love and acceptance being a reality because of the gift of God, which we call grace.

So I want the nature of theology in my counseling to always precede the use of therapeutic terms, but it doesn’t exclude me from using therapeutic terms, so that when I use the term “family,” there’s something about God’s life as Father, Son, and Spirit, and the whole election of Abraham and all those that follow after Abraham, that shapes something about a family that is connected, that covenants together, that when I come and talk about family systems and what it means to trace out a genogram and to see where triangling is going on, it’s providing language that articulates what I already see in the nature and life of God. When Bowen talks about fight and flight as being responses to fear, we see that fear is foundational. We see in the Bible that perfect love casts out fear, and the nature of fear causing fighting and flight is certainly evident in the lives of all those people who were around Jesus and the way they responded to Him. And so there is an insight that can be seen within the context of Scripture where therapy plays out, gives language for, what’s going on in a way that is not forcing something onto the text, but is an insight that we’ve come to have that they may not have had at that time, but now we have the capacity to see that something’s going on, and it is not alien to what is there; it is further articulating the nature of what is there.

I do think that we have to be careful about always making sure that we’re not foisting onto the whole understanding of God revealed in Scripture from our therapeutic notions, but to recognize that the very purpose of Scripture is to explain the nature of the God-human relationship by first of all revealing who God is and what God is committed to, and then to see how that understanding of God shapes the ways we function in our communities of faith and in our families and in the ways that we engage our neighbors. And so we need to both critique and also employ the articulation of contemporary languages of therapy and leadership to further those biblical agendas once the biblical agenda is given precedence.

That is how I also function in thinking about marketplace as well as counseling as well as everything else -- that the theology sets the agenda, and that one might think of these others merely as languages that we’re translating into, just like translating from Greek and Hebrew into German for Luther or English for us. There is always the tension when you cross over from one language to the other that you may miss something. But if we’re going to keep it ever closer to the people who are supposed to hear the message, we have to act beyond our fears and be involved in that work of translation, or we won’t, as my friend Harry MacDonald says, “We won’t get the hay out of the hay loft down where the animals can eat it.” I think that the Bible wants us to get there, and that contextualized, contemporary modes of thought can be helpful in that journey, but they cannot set the agenda; that must be done theologically by the living God -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

conversation in the blogosphere

2008-02-11T20:24:00.000-08:00

The whole idea of blogging is a bit overwhelming for a relational person because there’s a question about how many people you can really have an authentic relationship with. It’s conceivable to have literally thousands of people who are on your Facebook friends list or to have people responding to your blog, and to not really have a sense of knowing and being known, which I think is so central to what a relationship really looks like. There is a sense in which even weak connections do have some value; as my friend Dwight Friesen says, that a free-scale network that has many weak connections is a strong network. And so I do believe in blogging, but I just wonder about its limitations and the nature of choices that we have to make as to what it is that we value. Do we have communities of faith, do we have family, with whom we balance our time and our openness, or is it possible for there to be an overtaking of the blogolog (like dialog, except it’s blogolog) that might fill us up or consume our time? So, in the same way that one might say that idolatry is anything that takes the place of a living relationship with Christ (idolatry can include worshiping the church and the Bible and all kinds of good things that are just one step away), so too, all of these communication devices of blogging and skyping and cell phoning and everything can be part of the very connecting life of relationship or they can become idols. And I’m on my own journey of trying to figure out what that looks like. I have a deep sense of many, many years of not being in the conversation in the way that I would like theologically because I haven’t published books (though I have published articles). Since I haven’t published books, some people don’t seem to acknowledge what I think (unless they happen to be my students at one of the places where I teach); they don’t seem to acknowledge my thought or my thought processes as having value simply in the dialog, but it’s the published that seems to take precedence in terms of giving an authoritative voice. And yet I think the blogosphere is creating opportunities for that conversation, so I want to affirm that and to make the connections and move out of the place of exile that it seems that I have been in, and that’s why I’m pleased to be here in the conversation with you all.

about being persons

2008-02-04T06:29:00.000-08:00

Let me introduce you to three influential thinkers who shape what I do.

The first one I’ll speak to is John Zizioulas. John Zizioulas is a Greek Orthodox theologian who wrote a book called Being as Communion. The basic thesis of this book is that when we talk about what it means to be a person, for God, it is not tied up with bodily being, but it’s tied up with that being of God that is known in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, where each person of the Trinity is not a person merely by virtue of having a face. The word person comes from the word procopo, which is like a mask or a face that one would wear in the Greek theater. But there’s something more essential to who we are; there is a going out from within one’s self that meets another in conversation, who is also going out to meet you. That’s the transcending of the self -- to go beyond one’s self as your words go and meet another. It’s not just words; it could be any nonverbal being of one’s self, but to say that the whole being of the Son goes out to meet the Father, who is going out to meet the Son, and the same would be true of the Spirit. That whole life of the interrelated going out to one another creates a mutuality between them, an irreducible connectedness, that is the very constitution of God’s life, and John Zizioulas identifies the most basic thing in the universe as this personal being in communion. So, largely based on John Zizioulas, my vision of God is a relational being.

Karl Barth is the second person who is very influential for me. And his basic task in the twentieth century is to say that if we’re going to do good scientific theology, we have to let God speak. And God speaks where? God speaks in the person of Jesus Christ. So all of our theology has to continually go back and ask who Jesus is as the One who fills out all of our terms of God and our terms of humanity. So we can’t ask what it means for a human to be free without asking what it means for Jesus to be free and to actually give content to the meaning of that word. Webster is not the authority, nor any other dictionary, not even Wikipedia. Jesus is the One who truly defines, by living out all of the words of the Christian faith. And so Karl Barth sets us on a whole theological methodology that stands over against filling out our terms with human experience. And the nature of human experience is that we all have different human experiences and therefore we end up with different theologies of what it means for God to be Father and to be loving and all those things, so to not have any of those be our starting point, but to let God be the starting point, as witnessed to by Scripture, looking at the Father-Son-Spirit relationship, opens us up to what Barth calls the happy science of theology.

The third person is John Macmurray. John Macmurray was a Scottish philosopher who studied on the nature of what it means for us to be persons. He was a Christian, and his basic thesis is, once again, that the very form of what it means to be persons is not to be merely bodily or to be separate from one another, but it is being in relation. Macmurray said that the whole Western mode of thought is built on thinking or rationality as the basis of what a person is, building on Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” and Kant’s concepts of the transcendental unity of apperception, which gives the human a priority in all knowledge, and merely attempts to fit God within the limits of human reason. Macmurray suggested that what he calls an act, the act of a human being, precedes any thinking about that act. And so if we are going to really understand the nature of who we are as persons, it’s an acting, and that acting is not something that’s done apart from others, but we grow up from the very time we are babies in the context of relationships. So what it means to be a person is to act in the context of relationships. And so, “I relate, therefore I am” would be a basic thought within John Macmurray’s thought, and that shapes my thinking about the nature of how we work out a God who lives in relationship, who’s revealed to us (Karl Barth) in the person of Jesus to understand that relating on Planet Earth in a way that defines our ethics and our very understanding of being a person in a term that John Macmurray calls friendship. One of his most famous quotes is “All meaningful knowledge is for the purpose of action, and all meaningful action is for the purpose of friendship.”

These three thinkers were focal in my doctoral work and still heavily influence the way that I think as a relational theologian.

more about my personal history

2008-01-28T13:35:00.000-08:00

To say a little bit more about my own personal history . . .

I grew up in the Seattle area, and as a teen was heavily influenced by Young Life to see that a person’s life could be both Christian and also fun. I had seen Christianity as something that was largely boring, separated from life. But through my exposure to Young Life, I began to see that there’s a God who loves us and cares for us, and who gives us (even adolescents!) a place of belonging and affirming that’s not about conforming to peer pressure or performing well, but is a gift of acceptance in relationship that welcomes us wherever we are.

Through Young Life, I began a journey of attempting to understand what they talked about as relational theology; I found the Academy did not accept it, and so, I’ve spent the last twenty years of education plus years of teaching attempting to flesh out what it means to have a relational theology that is not merely taking psychology and putting theology on top of it as something where the theology loses its own integrity and is simply trying to interpret psychological terms, but to let theology stand on its own to discover a God who reveals in a particular way, which I think the Bible is all about, and enables us to understand the Bible and our lives because we begin to understand the very nature of who God is. When you stand in that perspective, seeing through the eyes of a God who loves and relates, then the Bible makes more sense -- then life makes more sense -- instead of seeing in some human way that comes up with a set of beliefs to somehow get us whatever we’re supposed to be looking for to find happiness or success or any of those other terms that tend to be so shaped by our human perceptions of success, and so often seem to miss what success looks like as friendship with God, neighbor, and self.

what is relational theology?

2008-01-21T05:42:00.000-08:00

My name is Marty Folsom, and I am a relational theologian. This is a term that is not used with clarity these days, so I hope to explain in a few words what I mean by that.

My defining theme in relational theology is that God exists in relationship, and all that God does is for the purpose of relationship. By saying that God exists in relationship, I am affirming a triune God who is not merely theoretically proposed, but to say that when Jesus speaks, He reveals this Other, this intimate Other, His Father. And He reveals the Spirit and gifts us with the Spirit as One who is irreducibly connected to who He is. And so when we look at Jesus, we necessarily see Jesus as a Being in relation. Who He is is One who exists by virtue of this intimate, loving dance that is not merely the coming together of three separate Ones, but is the One who expresses the very relating life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

When I say that all that God does is for the purpose of relationship, I am not talking about something separate from that kind of life that God has, of love and freedom for one another, but that all humanity is addressed by God, in the person of Jesus Christ, to respond to the invitation, the initiation of the God who reconciles, creates community, speaks to us, and calls us His own, His family, His body -- those who live out of that life and share with this three-personed God in the world in a way that fulfills a vision of what love looks like, not as a feeling within one’s self, but as a creative, diverse community of persons who are enriched by their being together and sharing their life together.