Jon Rogers

There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, ‘Dad, give me my share of the company.’ So he divided his business between the sons and, taking nothing more than a warm coat, left them.

The younger son squandered all he had been given – drink, drugs and dubious characters. His part of the business eventually went under, he spent every penny he had. He was broke, it was a recession, but he lucked out in finding a job sorting waste at a recycling plant. Sometimes he just wished he could eat the banana skins and chip wrappers there, he could barely scrape enough together to survive.

One day he heard that his father was back. With no time to plan, he ran from work, into the street, up to his father. Through tears he blurted out, ‘Dad, I screwed it all up, I wrecked all you gave me and I never thought I’d get to see you again. You probably can’t even face talking to me.’ Before he could even finish, his father had grabbed him and, stinking work clothes and all, took him in a huge bear hug.

His father called to a guy standing near, ‘Get him a room in the hotel – and a shower! My son will need some new clothes and spending money – tonight’s going to be a party!’

The man had made another fortune while he was gone, so dinner was at the best restaurant in the city – and that guy was his PA. Everyone who had known the father came that evening, it was a real celebration!

While they were there, someone managed to get the older son on the phone and explained what was going on, ‘Your dad’s back, he’s found your brother and they’re hitting the town!’ The father begged him to come and join them, but the older son answered him, ‘Listen! All those years you were gone, I was slaving at keeping your business going. It’s still just as good as the day you left. I didn’t spend a penny of your money – not even one pizza with my friends! But that disgrace of a son destroyed your firm, wasted everything with hookers and now you party with him?!

‘Son’, his dad replied, ‘It was all yours to do what you want with all along. I want to give you more and more – and your brother too. I just want to get our family back together again.’

Define:Prodigal – “Given to extravagant expenditure; expending money or other things without necessity; recklessly profuse; lavish.”

This story is a response to Deus Absconditus, the hidden, or missing God. It was always the father that was prodigal, giving without thought or care apart from love, the son was just lost. In this story, both sons have lost the father. But his character is just the same – giving prodigally, recklessly, lavishly. The difference is that the younger son knows straight away what he’s lost, the older doesn’t. Like the famous original, we never know how he responds to his Dad’s generosity.

I wrote this and then came across Prodigal God by Timothy Keller. His book too is based around the idea that it is the Father that is the lavish, generous one and the real meaning of prodigal.

I woke up this morning to the headline “Osama Bin Laden is dead”. President Obama declares “Justice has been done”. Has it? It sounds like the kind of justice Holywood loves, the kind of redemptive violence that makes good action move. It’s the type of justice that has been doing the rounds since ancient Babylon. And it’s decidedly not the type of justice that the Bible speaks of – in fact it shows us to be just the same as the revenge motivated Muslims our media have demonised. Here’s how the story of Osama might sound like if it was a Babylonian-style epic.

There was once a land that was fought over by giants – one after another they rose up and stamped their way around, puffing themselves up. Once, two giants arose so massive that they could not fight. It seemed that if they did they very sky would fall and the earth be ripped apart. They danced around each other, feinting and jabbing, looking for heroes who would do the dangerous job of taking down the other giant. One day, in a small corned of the land, a hero was found. He was in love with a legendary woman called Khalifa. He could only meet her when the sleeping giant of his homeland awoke. He would do anything to bring his dream to life, even follow the greatest quest. The hero travelled to the mountains, where the giant Rus was terrifying the people. The giant Americ helped him to tease and harry the enemy giant all around the mountains. After months, years even, the warrior Osama cut off the hand of Rus, who slunk back to the frozen wastes to the north. It seemed Rus would never be the same again – like a bear with a sore paw, she hid in her den and watched the land change. Osama was loved like the greatest of heros in the mountains. Just as during his joust with the first giant, Osama recruited fighters to learn with him. They shared his dream of waking the giant Salam, they went all over the land to do what they could to wake him. There was just one giant towering over the land in these days. Other, smaller ones looked for footholds, but they could see that Americ could not be challenged. But Osama and his army knew no fear – they had driven one giant out of the mountains, now he would challenge another in its own lair. His soldiers fired three darts that put out the eye of the great giant Americ. Enraged, Americ swore to get revenge. Osama was once the hero of Americ, now he was the sworn enemy. The giant stomped over to the mountains to find Osama and get revenge for the pain of the darts. Where Rus could not defeat the hero, Americ put all his might into finding and crushing him. Osama slipped around the land of the mountains nimbly, just escaping the crushing stamps of the giant’s feet several times. He hid in caves, he hid in houses, he did not know who would tell the giant where he was. He could only speak in whispers, the giant was always listening with giant ears and chasing after any hint. For years he evaded the enraged giant, every stamped foot and pounded fist. He hid in the hills nearby, doing anything to be sure the giant would not harm him, while sending his warriors to keep irritating and harassing the giant. His army grew more, with new soldiers attacking the giant in the desert and in other places too. Osama’s fame grew so that many who waited for giant Salam to wake and longed for the beautiful Khalifa flocked to help him, new soldiers to advance his cause. They were sure that they were waking a new giant who would balance the land, even chase Americ away. No more would they be terrorised by the great giant, their hero and their giant would protect them. One night, Osama could hide no more. The giant found his hiding place and crushed him, grinding him into the ground like a bug. His dream of the beautiful Khalifa was never realised, the giant Salam had not done more than stir. What would his army do now – would they revenge his death, would new heroes arise, could they escape the same fate as Osama?

Note: Osama is not a hero to me, but he fulfils the ‘hero’ prototype of the epic genre. The hero of the epic violently resists forces much bigger than him, in a comedy he would triumph, in a tragedy, be defeated. However, the great hero of the Bible triumphs by seeming to be defeated and never resists violently. His kind of justice does not come by killing the enemy, the other. So how do we feel, how do we respond?

Something I’ve been thinking about for a few days and Peter Rollins goes and blogs about it before me!

He argues (and I agree) that ‘faith’ has come to be about thinking something is true. It’s used of things that we do not have enough empirical evidence to know for sure and yet we are convinced of.

…faith has come to mean a psychological claim to certainty about something that would, from a purely empirical point of view, be uncertain. In terms of religion faith has come to mean the confident assertion of dogmas (historical, biological, cosmological etc.) that evidence alone could not reasonably enable us to affirm.

As Rollins goes on to say, that misses the point of what the Apostles were trying to say. The way Paul describes faith is living in a new type of reality, the life of Christ. The other NT writers do the same thing.For example, in 1 Peter 1:6b-7 “… you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” Trials don’t help us assess the validity of propositional statements. Suffering does not make us more or less able to create a systematic doctrinal system. Suffering demonstrates inwardly the new reality that life in Christ is creating.

This is what we find beautifully hinted at in the famous definition found in Hebrews. Here faith is described as a way of living that we cannot deny but that we cannot render into a thing. It is an invisible reality that we do not see, but that we fully live within. A reality that enables us to see.

Faith has much more to do with who we believe in that what. Of course faith in Christ will require us to have beliefs, but we will hold beliefs lightly compared to faith. Beliefs are subsidiary to faith, small and particular and often inarticulately expressed. Faith saves us, beliefs often seem to divide us.

Faith is totally different to law or even systematics. When we focus on the beliefs themselves, rather than God who we claim to have faith in, we create an idol of our beliefs and our religion becomes easy. Easy religion requires mental assent to a list of statements only; faith is a constant chasing after, a struggle, crucifixion with Christ. But faith is the thing that brings new life, ‘life of the age to come’, resurrection life.

At the Easter Vigil, the journey along the paths of sacred Scripture begins with the account of creation. This is the liturgy’s way of telling us that the creation story is itself a prophecy. It is not information about the external processes by which the cosmos and man himself came into being. The Fathers of the Church were well aware of this. They did not interpret the story as an account of the process of the origins of things, but rather as a pointer towards the essential, towards the true beginning and end of our being.

Pope Benedict XVI, Easter Homily

Scripture is not a collection of data from which we can construct objectively true doctrines. Doctrines which we can come dangerously close to imagining to be superior to even scripture. No, every genre of scripture, every form of text has a prophetic word to speak. Pope Benedict goes on to show the importance of seeing God as creator, of care for creation, of the dignity of humanity and of the divine creative reason. Ultimately, he shows how the narrative of resurrection both affirms and subverts the original creation story – the climax of the sabbath, the seventh day of rest is subsumed in the day of victory, the first day of the week, Resurrection Sunday!

Creation remains good… Hence the world can be saved. Hence we can and must place ourselves on the side of reason, freedom and love – on the side of God who loves us so much that he suffered for us, that from his death there might emerge a new, definitive and healed life.

Resurrection is the fulfilment of the prophetic call of creation; God has acted decisively in creation to rescue and redeem it.

Today is Resurrection Sunday – Jesus is alive and we’re just barely beginning to understand what that means and how it touches our lives. I didn’t hear much of today’s sermon, thanks to Little Rogers, but the text from Luke 24 got me thinking – “He is not here, he is risen”.

Yesterday was Holy Saturday, when Jesus was dead, buried, and with him all hope, life and joy. It was an appropriate day to read Nietzsche’s Madman:

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers”…

“What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”

But today is Resurrection Sunday – Jesus is alive, death could not hold God down. Not the murderous Romans and their torturous cross. Not the atheistic moderns and their apathetic scientism. Jesus is alive!

But as the followers go to the tomb, they hear “He is not here…” and sometimes the same thing can be said in the monuments to the deceased God of modernity. Doug talked (while I was there) about what God was doing outside of our church, where we could not see him, where we were not looking.

The women at the tomb knew what culture expected them to do for the Rabbi. They knew where to go, what to do, how to mourn him. But they’d overlooked the most important thing – death could not hold him, no cross, no graveclothes, no tomb could keep him.

How did modernity finally kill God? They figured out how to nail God down. Doctrines, dogmas, denominations, structures, agendas. They pierced his heart with divisions and distinctions. They entombed him in new forms of rigidity and protestation. They buried him far below the text, interpretations and criticisms.

But nothing will hold this God down. Jesus is alive and won’t be held down! Your church may not be a ‘sepulcher of God’, but perhaps this Resurrection Sunday you will find him out on the road with the homeless, travelers and  others of dubious repute. Maybe you will feel the heart burn of tasting resurrection life outside of the sanctuary, because “He is risen!”

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Aside: I don’t pretend that I’m revealing what Nietzsche really meant in The Gay Science, merely using his cutting critique of modern christianity. It’s too far a stretch to call on Nietzsche to support postmodern christianity, but not to engage with his critiques is a great oversight.

I travelled into London for “An Evening with Rob Bell”, organised by Greenbelt. I tweeted a few things while I was there and I’ll stick them all at the bottom of this post.

One question and the responses have stuck in my mind particularly. I was chuckling along as Bell avoided “pinning his colours to the mast”, definitively stating what he actually believes about eternal hell and universal salvation. Then I realised his position more clearly as the moderator for the evening (Martin Wroe) asked him about whether it was OK for Christians to be agnostic about some things. There it is, right there. Rob Bell won’t answer “yes” or “no” – he doesn’t know whether everyone will be saved or not. He could guess – he could make the guess that lots of Christians have in the past or a different guess that not quite so many have gone with. But it would still be a guess, because all that the postmodern Bell really has is a bunch of texts and space to ask questions of them. Oh, that and the fact that because the new life is here and now, because the kingdom has already arrived and the resurrection life of Jesus is breaking into his own, he actually doesn’t need to know for sure whether everyone will be saved or whether some will choose to reject every offer of liberation for all eternity. It’s an interesting question (probably more interesting that that one about angels and a needle) but the way Rob Bell frames it, it’s not a question that really affects our need to tell the gospel.

Now, some of my more reformed friends might tell me that you don’t have good news without  “a heaven to be gained and a hell to be shunned”. And of course Rob Bell affirms that, but his focus is on here and now – what ever the “hellish” situation you’re in, God is for you, God loves you, Jesus died for you. There’s no question (if you read the book or hear him speak) that he believes in hell and heaven. The closest he comes to universalism is to say that there will be opportunity for redemption after death and (as discussed above) that he doesn’t know for sure if everyone will take that opportunity, though he believes that God wants everyone to be saved.

And I feel that it’s OK to not be sure about everything. Rob Bell asks searching questions that ultimately end, as he puts it “in a tension”. On the one hand, there’s God’s desire for all to be saved and Jesus death that is sufficient for all. On the other is the apparently boundless possibility of people to freely choose to reject God and the momentum we pick up on a destructive path. It’s a tension that we can resolve by forcing logic to mangle the inputs, or we can leave it as a tension and enjoy the blessing of new life. It’s a blessing so vast, that once people hear that possibility of its limitless scope they are more inclined to tell people, not less, according to Bell. It’s a gospel that embraces rather than condemns, taking its cue from the lost son parable that Bell dwells on. The returning younger son didn’t need an elaborate confession, he certainly didn’t need a diatribe detailing every failure and omission in his history. He needed his father to run towards him and just hug him, pig filth and all.

In London vilage for “an evening with @realrobbell”
19:00:26 via: TwimGo 2

Rob Bell looks pretty small from back here! http://twitpic.com/4minxj
19:39:49 via: Pixelpipe

I don’t think trying to be controversial is a noble goal… I never set out to be controversial. -@realrobbell
19:55:46 via: TwimGo 2

There’s no powerpoint! … (stories are) true in a different way than (a) (b) (c)… -@realrobbell
19:58:23 via: TwimGo 2

Truth is a flesh-and-blood thing for Jesus (rather than cognitive) – if you hold to my teachings you will know the truth -@realrobbell
20:21:21 via: TwimGo 2

God wants all people to be saved and I believe we should want what God wants -@realrobbell
20:32:53 via: TwimGo 2

Rob Bell leaves eternal hell in a tension, won’t pick one side or the other when pushed.
20:35:31 via: TwimGo 2

Everything you need to know about pastoring you can learn on an airplane – put the oxygen mask on yourself first, then… -@realrobbell
20:43:15 via: TwimGo 2

On wrath: did Jesus’ work on the cross do it all, satisfy whatever needed to be satisfied…? -@realrobbell
20:45:01 via: TwimGo 2

All done, book signed, heading off #lovewins http://twitpic.com/4mjhws
21:07:39 via: Pixelpipe

In John 10, Jesus is explaining his shepherd care for Israel. They don’t understand, so he changes metaphor:

Jesus said again, “Very truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep… They will come in and go out, and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. (John 10:7-10, NIV, ©2011)

Listening to an Erwin McManus sermon, he reminded me that we often think about the gate being for coming in to safety, protection, salvation or some other name for a “holy huddle”. Jesus says that the sheep “will come in and go out, and find pasture.” Not go out and find other sheep to bring in, not just stay in because there are wolves, bears and thieves out there. Come in, go out, find pasture. A sheep is happiest when she’s surrounded by grass, safe with her shepherd. Being locked in a pen with all the other sheep is a temporary thing to keep her through the night. Going out to pasture, to feed, run free, enjoy – that’s where the life is.

John describes the Holy City from God in Revelation 21 – it has twelve beautiful gates, and “On no day will its gates ever be shut”. Even at its ultimate end, the story is not about shutting ourselves away from everything to be with God alone, but living in a city with wide open doors, welcoming in the world around it.

Get this: 1937, a Russian Orthodox theologian in France:

Is there a ladder between heaven and earth and do the angels of God ascend and descend upon it? Or is this ladder only a convenient emergency exit for those who wish to be “saved” by forsaking the world? Is our Lord’s Ascension into heaven the very last, and, so to speak, culminating act of our salvation? Or is there something else that follows after it, something new, in the second coming of Christ into the world, the Parousia, which is not only judgment but at the same time the beginning of a new, eternal abiding of our Lord on earth? ^[1]

Fr. Bulgakov diagnoses us accurately: how often our gospel is about forsaking the earth, but that’s not the gospel of Jesus. The Kingdom is here, among you, now. The ladder is no longer about angels coming down and up, but the body of Christ in action, bringing the grace of God and returning worship to him.

1. ^[1]Sergius Bulgakov, The Wisdom Of God, 1937↩

The big ‘Christian’ story of 2011 so far has been the release of Love Wins, Rob Bell’s new book. Twitter followers (@jonrogersuk) will have seen my tweets from each chapter, which are all below. No doubt there’ll be loads more things for me to blog about the book and my responses to it since my MA dissertation is based on the book. As I’m collecting responses to the book and the ideas in it, I’ve been tagging pages on delicious with things like “rob-bell“, so you can see the sort of things I’ve read online. I’ll obviously read offline too, and I hope to talk to some people ‘in real life’ to gain some depth to put in my 20k words.

Have you read Love Wins yet? What did you think? What parts of the book did you enjoy/find challenging/have a problem with?

I sit down in Esquires with Rob Bell’s book, a good coffee and Oasis start playing “let there be love”…
2:37 AM Mar 30th via TwimGo 2

Chapter 1: 19 pages, 94 question marks. Plus one in the chapter title. “But this isn’t just a book of questions.” #lovewins
3:04 AM Mar 30th via TwimGo 2

Chapter 2: Jesus is “interested in our hearts being transformed, so that we can actually handle heaven.” #lovewins
3:41 AM Mar 30th via TwimGo 2

“Failure… isn’t final, judgement has a point, and consequences are for correction.” Chapter 3 #lovewins
7:58 AM Mar 30th via Ubuntu

If we want hell, If we want heaven, They are ours. That’s how love works. Chapter 4 #lovewins
1:20 AM Mar 31st via TwimGo 2

A gospel that leaves out its cosmic scope will always fell small. Chapter 5 #lovewins
1:40 AM Mar 31st via TwimGo 2

Jesus is both near and intimate and personal, and big and wide and transendent. Chapter 6 #lovewins
2:00 AM Mar 31st via TwimGo 2

We do not need to be rescued from God. God is the one who rescues us from death, sin and destruction. God is the rescuer. Chapter7 #lovewins
4:30 AM Mar 31st via Ubuntu

Whatever you’ve been told about the end … Jesus passionately urges us to live like the end is here, now, today. Chapter 8#lovewins
4:45 AM Mar 31st via Ubuntu

My Title: A Critical Apologetic Appraisal of Rob Bell’s Love Wins

Rob Bell’s fifth book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived ignited a huge internet controversy before it was even available in the shops. The ‘teaser video’ and some preview chapters led to commentators labelling Bell’s theology as ‘Universalism’. In interviews and in the book, Bell claims to not to be saying anything new in his book, but reclaiming an orthodox view of Christianity. He is also clear in interviews not to be ‘a theologian’, so this dissertation will engage with Love Wins as a text explaining his postmodern apologetic. I will explore what it means to do apologetics in the postmodern era and try to see how Bell fits with others attempting to do the same things.

The responses to Bell’s apologetic will depend on his interaction with three different areas: the scriptures, the wider church and the world. In creating an apologetic, the apologist must read all three – the Bible, the traditions of the Church and the contemporary culture s/he is found in. The apologetic will be received and responded to in different ways by the church and the world.

In Matthew 5:39, Jesus tells his followers in the Sermon on the Mount “do not resist an evil person.” Of course, Jesus didn’t say it quite like that, and Matthew didn’t record it in the English of the NIV. Matthew uses the word αντιστηναι in greek – ‘antistenai‘. If I tell you that ‘stenai‘ means to ‘stand’, you can guess that it literally means ‘stand against’. ‘Resist’ seems like a good translation until we look at the cultural context of the word.

I’ve been reading Walter Wink for a seminar tomorrow and I discovered this series of videos called ‘Nonviolence for the Violent‘. Wink explains how the word also had a technical usage. When two ancient armies met, they would ‘face off’; posturing, shouting, waiting for the battle to come. As battle started, the two lines of soldiers would advance at each other until the lines collided. There would be swinging of swords and axes, blood, severed limbs, disembowelment and finally one of the lines would break and flee. This was called ‘taking the stand’; whoever could resist would win.

Jesus says ‘do not violently resist evil. For example…’

Wink goes on to suggest that one of the purposes King James had at the end of the 16th Century in commissioning the  the ‘Authorised Version’ was to combat the teaching of the Geneva Bible, imported by the Presbyterians. They taught that it was permitted to overthrow a tyrant – the very opposite to the ‘divine right’ that James wrote two books on. His authorised version was to teach that there were two options when faced with evil – fight or flight. Fight is not permitted, so flight, passivity and being crushed is the only option. Wink says that Jesus in the following sentences shows that there is a third way, a non-violent resistance that means we do not ‘take a stand’ violently and militarily, but we do not allow evil to run amok.

His teaching is sound; James did hate the Presbyterians, Jesus did teach non-violent resistance (see the second video for his explanation) and this is a message that dictatorial governments do not want to be heard. But the Geneva Bible (1587) uses the same word ‘resist‘ as the KJV. King James’ scholars may not have given us the best translation, but neither did Geneva. Wycliffe says ‘against-stand‘ in a direct translation; Tyndale uses ‘resist‘; the evidence for this political translation is not good.

In another example of confirmation bias, I found a post from Peter Rollins that says “Fundamentalism isn’t too violent, it isn’t violent enough.” When fundamentalists (largely looking at the US here) defend the use of violence it is in a conservative way (small ‘c’) Defending the status quo is an impotent kind of violence. Resisting evil with violence continues the cycle of violence and oppression. Rome knew what to do with Zealots, they knew what to do with invading Goths, but killing Christians did not diminish them. Regimes know how to handle terrorism, but people peacefully sitting in the biggest square they can find will bring down tyrants.

The violence of conservatism isn’t violent enough for Jesus – it brings no change. Real change comes (says Rollins) from “people like Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King who, in their pacifism, are truly violent”. By attacking ‘the powers’ with weapons that they can’t handle, structural change happens as it is brought in through a vision of a better world.

Thus, the next time we hear of some blustering speaker attempt to bolster their support by making themselves sound like the follower of a cage-fighting, bodybuilding Jesus, we should avoid the trap of arguing that their image of Jesus is too violent and instead show how it isn’t nearly violent enough. Drawing out how, amidst all their seeming machismo they are little more than a timid sheep in wolves clothing.