A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Conte (Hardback)

Chapter One

I am a Christian because I have a sustained and sustaining confidence in Jesus Christ. I've lost and rediscovered that confidence a few times, which is a long and messy story worth simplifying and boiling down to manageable length in these first chapters.

I know my original attraction to Jesus came as a young child. In my home and at Sunday school, I heard stories about Jesus. I remember a children's picture Bible that had a simple but beautiful picture of Jesus, seated, in a blue and white robe, with children of all races gathered around his knees. Some were leaning on him. Some were seated at his feet. Some had their arms around him. His arms were opened in an embrace that took them all in, and his bearded face carried a gentle smile a boy could trust.

Looking back, I realize the illustration wasn't historically accurate. It was influenced more by a popular Sunday school song that I also loved ("red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world") than by ancient Middle Eastern realities. But in a way the picture was even truer than a historically accurate picture would have been; it probably would have had no red, yellow, black, or white children at all, but only brown Middle Eastern ones.

The picture Bible was augmented in my imagination by flannel graph stories about Jesus. Flannel graph was a kind of 1950s high-tech precursor of overhead projectors, laptop video projectors, videos, and DVDs. The teachers were always kind women, sometimes even my own mother. Each would tell stories with an easel behind her. On the easel would be a piece of flannel cloth with a scene drawn on it with markers-a countryside, a storm at sea, a courtyard with marble columns, a home, a roadside with big boulders beside it. As the story unfolded, cut-out figures backed with felt would be stuck on the flannel background (felt and flannel being a gentle precursor of Velcro(r))-blind Bartimaeus, Zacchaeus, a woman near a well, a nameless leper and his nine friends, a Roman centurion, or a Syrophonecian woman with a sick child. Through these stories, Jesus won my heart.

When I reached my teenage years, though, I lost that Jesus as one loses a friend in a crushing, noisy, rushing crowd. The crowd included arguments about evolution (which seemed elegant, patient, logical, and actually quite wonderful to me, more wonderful even than a literal six-day creation blitz), arguments about the Vietnam War (which made no sense to me-even if communism was as bad as everyone said, were people better off bombed and napalmed to death?), arguments about ethical issues like civil rights and desegregation and a hundred other things. I wondered if women were really supposed to be submissive to men and if rock 'n' roll was really of the devil. Were Catholics really going to burn in hell forever unless they revised their beliefs and practices to be biblical like us?

After a short foray into doubt and a rather mild (all things considered) youthful rebellion, my faith in Jesus was revitalized, largely through the Jesus Movement. For those who were part of it, especially in its early days, the Jesus Movement was a truly wonderful thing. There was a simplicity, a childlikeness, a naïveté, and a corresponding purity of motive that I have seldom seen since. In fact, this book may simply be an attempt to articulate what many of us felt and "knew" during those years.

But all too soon the Jesus Movement was co-opted. It was to a different Jesus that I was gradually converted.

The first new Jesus I met had a different face, a different tone, a different function. "Jesus was born to die," I was told again and again, which meant his entire life-including the red, yellow, black, and white children around his knees ... Zacchaeus in the sycamore tree (which gave me a lifelong love for sycamores) ... Bartimaeus by the road ... the one grateful leper returning ... the woman by the well ... the caring parents who begged him to heal their children-was quite marginalized. Everything between his birth and death was icing at most, assuredly not cake. This marginalization was unintentional, but in my experience it was very real. I was losing something but gaining something, too: the conservative Protestant (or Evangelical) Jesus.

The Conservative Protestant Jesus

For conservative Protestants, the Good News centers on the crucifixion of Jesus. Jesus saves us by dying on the cross. "Jesus was born to die," I heard again and again. By dying, Jesus mysteriously absorbs the penalty of all human wrongdoing through all of history. The cross becomes the focal point where human injustice-past, present, and future-meets the unconquerable compassion and forgiveness of God. Jesus, hanging in agony, says, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." We are given confidence that at our worst moment, the moment at which we humans behave as badly as is possible in this universe by torturing and killing God's ultimate messenger and representative to us, his prayer is answered. His innocent self-sacrifice somehow cancels out human guilt.

At the cross, the powerful horror of human evil and the more powerful glory of God's mercy meet, and human evil is exhausted, but not God's mercy. Exactly how this happens is understood through various metaphors, with the following four perhaps being most popular.

A legal metaphor: God is judge and humanity is guilty, deserving the death penalty. Jesus, a perfect representative of humanity, willingly takes the death penalty deserved by all humanity. Justice is satisfied, and evildoers can be forgiven. In this metaphor the forensic language of law, guilt, punishment, penalty, and justification is all-important. Sometimes the cool, impersonal guilt pronounced by the law is replaced by the hot wrath erupting from the Judge, but both styles reflect the same legal metaphor.

An economic metaphor: God is the good master, and we are God's servants, but we run away (or are lured away, perhaps kidnapped) by the Evil One, who makes us his slaves. Jesus offers himself to Satan as the representative of the human race: "Take me and let them go," Jesus says, offering himself as a kind of ransom payment. Satan takes Jesus, and as a result, we are potentially set free. (And Satan gets double-crossed in the end because after killing Jesus and thinking he has triumphed, Jesus triumphs by rising from the dead.) In this metaphor the business language of selling, buying, price, and payment is paramount. A governmental metaphor: The human race has rebelled against the King. To be forgiven and restored as citizens in good standing, humanity must repent and resubmit itself to God's will. But humans are so distorted by evil that they are unable to sincerely repent and resubmit to God. Jesus, through his obedient life and voluntary death, acts as a representative for all humanity and enacts repentance and submission to God's will for all humanity. As the representative of the human race, his perfect obedience and submission extend to all who will trust Jesus. In this metaphor, political terms like representation, reconciliation, and citizenship are essential.

A military metaphor: The human race has been conquered by an alien power or powers (Sin, the Devil, and Death are the most common antagonists, although Paul's more ambiguous "principalities and powers" could also be included). Jesus goes to battle with the alien power(s), and appears to be defeated in death, but his death turns out to be the undoing of the antagonist. In this metaphor, military terms such as battle, defeat, and conquering are predominant.

Many conservative Protestants develop little analogies to explain, on a more popular and less technical level, how the death of Jesus "works" to bring us forgiveness within these metaphorical contexts. There are well-circulated stories, for example, about an impending train wreck averted by a man whose son is killed in the process, a bad boy in school whose punishment is taken by a good boy, etc. There's a diagram about a chasm and a bridge. I used to share these diagrams and stories enthusiastically, although over time each analogy presented logical and ethical problems that dulled my enthusiasm.

Ultimately, most thoughtful conservative evangelical Protestants will agree that none of these explanations, metaphors, or theories perfectly or completely explains how the death of Jesus brings good news to the world: the full answer includes and yet eludes all these metaphors, analogies, and diagrams. However it happens, conservative Protestants agree that by dying, Jesus opens the door, not just to heaven beyond this life, but to true communion and relationship with God in this life-whoever you are, whatever you've done. This Good News captured my heart in my late teenage years and recaptured my allegiance to Jesus.

In particular, it meant (and means) a lot to me because I don't think I've ever gone very long without sinning in some more or less obvious way: pride, lust, greed, untruthfulness (exaggeration, excuses), ungratefulness-not to mention the subtler ways. This understanding of Jesus focuses directly, and nearly exclusively, on the problem of individual moral guilt.

But as precious and indispensable as this perspective is for me, over the years a feeling grew within me, usually vague but sometimes acute, that I was missing something, perhaps something important. Jesus' cross in the past saved me from hell in the future, but it was hard to be clear on what it meant for me in the struggle of the present. And more importantly, did the gospel have anything to say about justice for the many, not just the justification of the individual? Was the gospel intended to give hope for human cultures and the created order in history, or was history a lost cause, so that the gospel only could give hope to individual souls beyond death, beyond history-like a small lifeboat in which a few lucky souls escape a huge sinking cruise ship?

And did the conservative Protestant emphasis on the death of Jesus necessarily marginalize Jesus' life-his wise teachings and his kind deeds, which had captured my childhood imagination? Over time I began to feel as though, from my perspective, the gospel became simply an individualistic theory, an abstraction with personal but not global import. It became about the solution to a cosmic legal/business/political problem, real and serious, but a bit dry, a bit removed from real life. In my heart grew a deep, subtle, unspoken sense that something was missing, which gradually opened my heart to search for other ways of seeing Jesus.

I should add that this dissatisfaction with the conservative Protestant Jesus intensified just last Christmas when one of my children was home for the holidays from college. I asked him how he was doing spiritually.

"I'm struggling, Dad," he said.

"Tell me about that," I said.

He replied, "Well, Dad, if Christianity is true, then nearly everyone I love is going to be tortured in the fires of hell forever. And if it's not true, then life has no meaning." He was silent for a moment and then added, "I just wish there were a better option."

My heart was broken. I asked, "Is that the understanding of Christianity you got from me?"

He replied, "No, but that's the way most Christians think. They just kind of bottom-line everything to heaven or hell, and that makes life feel kind of cheap."

My son's insight doesn't apply to the best expressions of conservative Protestants, but it does, I fear, apply too often to the most popular ones. He put into blunt and powerful terms exactly what I felt vaguely and inarticulately when I was his age.

The Pentecostal/Charismatic Jesus

The second Jesus I met in my spiritual journey as a young adult-back when I was about my son's age-was the Pentecostal or Charismatic Jesus. If the conservative Protestant Jesus can tend to become something of an abstraction, necessary for the solution to my legal problem with God the Judge, but somewhat removed from daily experience apart from guilt removal, the Pentecostal Jesus was up close, present, and dramatically involved in daily life. If the conservative Protestant Jesus saves from a future hell by his death in the past, the Pentecostal Jesus also saves by his powerful presence in this present moment.

Sadly, much of my early exposure to the Pentecostal Jesus was clouded by a technical argument with relational implications. The argument had to do with whether all those who were truly following Jesus and therefore "Spirit-filled" had to "speak in tongues," which was an experience of the earliest Christians on a Jewish holiday called Pentecost (hence the name of the group or movement) involving speaking in unknown (some would say ecstatic) languages. The argument, happily beyond the scope of our discussion here, doubly forced one to think in terms of "who's in/who's out." Not only must one monitor who's a Christian or "saved" or "born again" (a distinction practiced by nearly all conservative Protestants including Pentecostals), but also one must be aware of who's "Spirit-filled" or not. I found this constant judging of in/out, us/them to be fatiguing and distracting from loving everyone I met as a neighbor, which I was pretty sure should be primary for Christians.

My Pentecostal friends wanted me to be "in" and share "the gift." But in spite of my sincere prayers and even tears, for many years I never received "the gift of tongues" and was made to feel like a second-class citizen in Pentecostal circles. Even after I did "receive the gift" (which turned out to be quite anticlimactic after all the fuss), I never bought into the belief that there were two easy-to-distinguish classes of Christians: Spirit-filled tongues speakers and everyone else. I resisted this Pentecostal teaching for three reasons (not including the fact that I didn't find the biblical arguments convincing).

First, by that time I had met too many certified tongues-speaking Christians who were consistently dishonest, weird, unhealthy, and mean-spirited. Any understanding of being "Spirit-filled" that didn't include helping people to become healthy, Christlike, and kind didn't seem to be worth much. Second, I had met too many non-tongues speakers who were sincere and Christ-like, radiant and fragrant with the Spirit of Christ. Third, I didn't want to do to others as had been done to me by creating a two-tier, in-group/out-group status.

In spite of this rocky start, from the Pentecostals I became convinced that Jesus is here and now present, active, alive and well, and that the stories of Jesus that had so won my heart as a child were not marginalized at all-and even better, they were not over, either.

Continues...