One of my classes this semester has explored in-depth some of the issues the metropolitan area of Denver is facing and how some ministries are reaching out to help solve those problems. A couple weekends ago, we met with a pastor in Arvada, a suburb just to the northwest of downtown Denver. Our topic of conversation that afternoon was the suburbanization of poverty. Poverty is being pushed out of the downtown area because of large contingents of wealthy people moving into lofts and older houses near the downtown. This man had been a pastor in Arvada for about 10 years. When he first joined the staff of the church, weekly attendance was around 2000 people and it was one of those suburban churches with lots of flash and cash and everybody and their dog would attend. However, the neighborhood began to change and poverty was soon pushed into the first ring of the suburbs. The pastor realized that something needed to change and that change was to reach out to these people stricken by poverty. However, not everybody thought this was a good decision in the church. Over half to be exact. He said there are about 800 people who attend the church now while all the others have left after the church shifted its focus from entertainment-driven worship services on Sundays to helping people in need. They have sold some of their facilities and are getting ready to get rid of some more. From the realm of mega churches and numbers, this church may seem like a failure when it is anything but that.

This pastor, along with some other area pastors, meets with leaders in the Arvada area to see how they can best serve the needs of the community. They were at a meeting with the mayor and he was talking about the issues that Arvada was facing. But his last comment stuck with the pastor who in turn shared it with my class. The mayor said, “All these problems would take care of themselves if we could just be good neighbors.” The pastor said the comment rang loudly in his head for weeks. As pastors, we try to lead our church to love their neighbors but somehow we have reduced that command to loving a hypothetical neighbor rather than the tangible neighbors we are geographically located near. We have turned the command to love our neighbor into loving those that love us or those in the church or those that are like us and we have completely neglected our physical neighbors.

What does it mean for us to be good neighbors? We should start by getting to know our neighbors and chatting with them on the sidewalk or on their front porch. Maybe we can get involved with the neighborhood association and learn about the issues our particular neighborhoods face. Maybe we should try to take tangible steps to loving tangible neighbors rather than hypothetical steps to loving hypothetical neighbors.

Almost everybody has heard the old adage about people losing their faith in seminary. Being surrounded by seminarians on a daily basis, I sense this fear in a large contingent of students as well. Students no longer feel as if they are growing in their relationship to God even though their lives are devoted to studying God. We continue to engage God the same way we did before we began in-depth study. I think this is where seminarians run into trouble – they no longer know how to relate to God with their new knowledge they have obtained. Thus, they continue to wonder why they are unable to connect with God through reading the Bible because their minds are inundated with questions from Biblical Interpretation class. So, as a solution, many students try to compartmentalize academic reading and devotional reading. Essentially, the dichotomy is between mind and heart. But why do we need to separate the two? Is our new knowledge of God a hindrance to the relationship?

In contrast to this common perception of separating the mind and heart, I propose that for seminarians to continue to mature in their faith during seminary, they need to fuse the two together. The new knowledge should allow one’s relationship with God to be more rooted and thus able to move beyond the elementary stages of a relationship. In human relationships, you do not hear people complain that all the knowledge they have gained about the other person has made it more difficult to relate to them. Rather, these are building blocks for the relationship to develop even further. People that have been married for 25 years hold much more knowledge about the other person than when they first started dating. This knowledge affects how people interact with one another. A couple married that long probably acts quite differently than when they were first married. Knowledge serves as a catalyst to relate to the other person in a different way, a way that leads them into a closer union.

But we don’t see it this way with God. We are unwilling to change how we relate and connect to God because some of those steps may be difficult. We often have not been taught how to relate to God except through Bible reading, daily prayer, and journaling. What happens when those run their course? In human relationships we adapt. Seminarians need to learn how to adapt – they need to seek to employ their knowledge to deepen their relationship with God rather than hinder it. They need to change their repertoire of spiritual disciplines, ones that can utilize knowledge rather than suppress and compartmentalize it.

It is not knowledge that is getting in the way of our relationship with God but rather the compartmentalization and neglect of it.

Ever since I wrote a paper and did a presentation on civil religion, I have found myself noticing the presence of it in churches time and time again. The most obvious sign of it is the American flag usually positioned near the front of the church. However, I have also noticed that almost every Sunday, churches pray for our troops, meaning our American troops. This is usually in conjunction with specific prayers for those who are from the church in the armed forces. This has always made me a bit uncomfortable because we often neglect to pray for those that we are fighting against. However, Michael Gorman recently posted on his blog a letter to the church in the U.S. in regards to praying for our troops. It is worth a read. Gorman is a professor and the dean of the Ecumenical Institute of Theology at St. Mary’s Seminary & University in Baltimore, Maryland. I first heard him at a Pauline conference I attended (he is a NT scholar and his specialty is Paul). Anyways, I thought I would share his letter with you and introduce you to him.

I like theology. A lot. I dislike reading more recent systematic theology texts. They are terrible. They are written in a bubble. They are theologies for theologians, not for the church. The are theologies that neglect culture by and large. They are theologies that do not allow us to wrestle with the most difficult questions of our time.

But what would a systematic theology for our day and time look like? Stanley Grenz and his book Theology for the Community of God is probably the best recent attempt in my opinion (and that was in 2000). But that was before 9/11. And before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And before we elected a black president. What would a present-day systematic theology cover? Would it rehash the most pertinent doctrines of the 3rd and 4th centuries? Or would it seek to interact with the questions and challenges of our time and place here? I am not suggesting we neglect former doctrines and theologians. But, we do need to engage our culture at the same level that theologians of the past have.

What are things we should address in this 21st century theology from an American perspective (I am thinking about my particular context as an American citizen and a product of conservative evangelicalism)? The problem of evil would be near the top of the list. And postmodernism, consumerism, civil religion, environmentalism, terrorism (and warfare in general) must be addressed with more than a paragraph or two. Maybe the trustworthiness of the Bible. An eschatology that leaves behind Left Behind eschatology. I think it must even address the roots of the country and its manifest destiny. And the ideals of freedom and liberty. And capitalism. What else would a present-day systematic theology book need to address in order to be mindful of our time and place?

I have been off the blogosphere for too long. This is my welcome back party.

I currently am in a theology survey class. One observation I have made: People at Denver Seminary do NOT like Karl Barth. This is disheartening for me, as many of you know of my man-crush towards Barth. And I have been trying to narrow down the reasons for the dislike. Here is my list: 1) Karl Barth does not believe the Bible is the inerrant, infallible word of God and 2) Karl Barth opposes natural theology. That’s it. It seems as if nobody can get past those two points. They are so fixated on these that even if Barth says something profound that we all need to hear and we can all benefit from, they will refuse to entertain the thought. Thus, I am pondering how we should evaluate theologians. It seems as if the criteria we use is centered around specific doctrinal positions. This is fine and dandy until we realize that Barth’s situation or Gregory the Great’s situation or Anselm’s situation is greatly different from 21st century America (or more specifically, evangelicalism). We can criticize Barth all we want, but we must not discount that Barth was trying to ward of the state church’s support of the Nazi regime. The Nazi party was using natural theology and the Bible to support their plot to exterminate the Jews and create the utopian Aryan state. OF COURSE Barth would deny these things in light of this situation. But why do we judge him so harshly? I think that theologians should not be judged by specific doctrinal stances but rather their engagement with theology, the Bible, church history, the church, and the culture in which he/she resides. Our views of certain theologians may shift dramatically or maybe just a bit. Regardless, I think theological methodology more accurately portrays theologians rather than their stances.

You can find almost anything in the Bible if you look hard enough for it. And you can create almost anything you want out of the stories of the Bible. Two instances stand out in my mind. First, somebody had posed a question to a seminary professor of philosophy on whether or not Jesus could be considered a philosopher. Thus, the professor went to the gospel stories in order to give this person a good answer. Lo and behold, as the professor read the gospels, he found himself enamored by the philosophy of Jesus and how he articulated it in the face of opposition. The professor went back to the student and told him that Jesus was not only a philosopher, but the greatest philosopher in human history. The second story comes from a “Christian” counseling textbook. Apparently, this book has turned to the gospels for case studies in counseling, which of course are applied today because if we want to counsel, we might as well counsel like the greatest counselor who ever lived on the face of the earth. One specific example from the book was in regards to Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well, saying that this was an excellent example of counseling somebody with a messed-up life.

Has the Bible developed into a handbook for every profession? It sounds like Jesus is becoming painted in whatever light we wish. Oh, I wonder if Jesus is a philosopher? Well, of course when we begin scouring the Bible like a Where’s Waldo book, we are going to find what we set out to find. That is unless you want to see Jesus as a car salesman or an engineer. The process goes like this . . . we come up with a hypothesis, then go back to Scripture to see if we can verify it. Because the Bible is large and expansive, we usually only look to one or two sections. And because we have to have a set of criteria to test our hypothesis against, we get to set up our own boundaries when making a decision on interpretation. So on verses or passages where it may or may not be referring to Jesus as a philosopher, we may stretch our boundaries a bit in order to fit it into our criteria. This may not even be a conscious decision. We just do it. The whole problem with this type of interpretation is that we decide not only the hypothesis but also the criteria, and thus, only the parts of the Bible that verify our hypothesis and fit within our criteria are what we cling to. Thus, we naturally pass over what the Bible says in order to find what we want the Bible to say. We can draw up a number of hypotheses and try to garner support for them from the Bible, but it the process, we may miss what the Bible is actually trying to communicate.

Jon Birch posts short cartoons on his blog. The one shown above was posted recently and I very much resonated with it. I have come across a number of people in my seminary experience who cling to one or two specific verses of Scripture (at one point, I was tallying up the number of times I heard John 14:6 quoted in all of my classes combined . . . after week 2, my count was at 36 . . . I have since stopped because it was getting far too depressing). Also, there are those who quote Scripture as an alternative to actually thinking about a topic. We use the Bible as an excuse for not thinking critically or faithfully because we are able to quote a verse here and a verse there without even understanding the context in which it was said.

At just about every seminary, emphasis is placed upon the holistic development of the student, not only intellectually, but also spiritually. Some would refer to this as the maturity of both head and heart. The concept of holistic development is a very good thing. However, if often excludes one area that is very important – the physicality of human beings. We do a terrific job of furthering growth in the academic realm and also in our spiritual journeys. Nevertheless, our flesh is ignored.

Gnostics believe in the Platonic dualism that spirit is good and matter or flesh is bad. Thus, they sought to unite with the spiritual realm and leave the human realm behind. We may be going down a similar path with pastors. In all the seminary catalogs that I scoured while contemplating seminary, I did not find one that offered a course on health or nutrition. You may be objecting thinking that seminary is not the place for such classes to take place. But, if we truly are seeking to develop holistic pastors, we must acknowledge the physical side of pastors. Sadly, very few people follow the food pyramid, myself included. Pastors also have a tendency to eat out often with parishioners. Eating out is not necessarily bad, but healthy choices must be made. Essentially, we need to re-educate pastors how to eat healthy and to take care of their bodies physically. Stress and some other emotions are tied to the foods that we eat (desserts being an example). Also, sadly, many pastors suffer heart attacks. I say we need to be preemptive in combating future health problems by teaching pastors how to care for their bodies. If anything is neglected in seminary, it is not the head or heart, but rather the body. And to be blunt, if the body stops working, it really doesn’t matter how developed the head or heart have become.

I would like to see classes in seminary on health and nutrition. We must learn how to take care of our bodies through healthy eating and exercise. I think it’s vital to long-term sustainability for pastors. If we seek to be holistic, not only in word, the physical aspect of people must be addressed.

mk’s comment on my last post about Christians and food provided a great transition for what I wish to write about today: Eating healthy is costly. I use costly as a very broad term, seeking to encompass all the different facets of cost. First, there is the price of food. Good, healthy food may cost you more financially. I am not necessarily referring to simply the high price of organic or all-natural food. Highly processed foods saturated with preservatives cost very little because our food industry is a science able to manipulate corn into anything that tickles our fancy. All-natural mac and cheese is at least two times as much as the cheapest stuff on the shelf. Free-range chicken or beef can be 3 times as expensive of those coming from feedlots or chicken houses. The disclaimer of this first point however is that fruits and vegetables really are not that expensive. Believe me. I’m not talking about the canned stuff but the fresh fruits and vegetables. I bought a jalapeno for 8 cents today. I think that’s a steal. My yellow onion: 47 cents. That 10 pound bag of potatoes: $2. Lettuce for a dollar, spinach for two. A pound of apples for $1.50, a pound of cantaloupe or bananas for 49 cents. I can hear you saying aloud, “Wow, that’s really cheap. Maybe I should start buying more fruits and vegetables.” But this brings me to the second cost – time. Eating healthy costs us our time. We have to prepare our food . . . slice the potatoes, dice the onion, boil the corn, slice the watermelon. We can’t just throw a frozen dinner in the microwave or that frozen pizza in the oven. We actually have to prepare the food. And this takes time (I must admit, sometimes I miss the caf at NWC). It’s easier to run to McDonald’s or Qdoba or Panda Express (there are a few healthy options at these places). By cooking our own food, we know what is being put into it. We are no longer in the dark of the many ingredients we don’t know how to pronounce, let alone have an idea of what they are. Lastly, we sacrifice our taste. I am not saying that eating healthy does not taste good. Rather, we have to re-train our taste buds to tell us what tastes good and what doesn’t. For example, if you don’t eat any sweets or sugars for a long time, you will begin to notice the sweetness of the fruit or the red pepper. Sweetness becomes redefined in our new diet. This isn’t an easy process and probably the worst thing to do is try and go cold turkey. But I do think this teaches us self-denial. Not only this last point, but all of them. Food is a gift. Gifts are to be cherished and not taken lightly. Too often we see food and eat it rather than thinking about where it came from and whom to give credit to for producing the food. Too often we forget that food gives sustenance to our bodies. Eating healthy means we take serious our gift of life, our gift of our physical being. But this costs us something. And these costs are what deter both you and I from eating in a healthy manner.

I will attempt to sum up the life of a seminarian in three words: books and papers. While that may be a gross oversimplification of what seminary is about, I do think it captures the essence of what my life is like as a seminary student (although I am tempted to add Greek translations and grammar). Everyday, I spend at least 4 hours reading. At least. And, on average, I have been writing 3 papers a week. Some of these are long (8-10 pages), others are short (3-4 pages). This may sound miserable to some of you, but to me, this is a good life. My job is essentially to read really smart people’s writings, then try to sound as smart as they do in my own writings. The latter is where the struggle exists.

Because I spend my life surrounded by words, they have almost become a part of me. I breathe them. I eat them. I dream about them. I wake up to them. A word is never just a word to me – there exists pages upon pages of scholarly work recounting the story behind this word. Simple Greek phrases draw the attention of upwards of 10 pages in English. My life is about words and how they fit together. This cause a problem. My whole life, much of my devotional life or my spirituality has been built around reading the Bible. But now I read the Bible all the time for school and even translate it. And after spending all day studying it and writing about it, I find it difficult to open it up again in the evening to read it some more. Essentially, I am drowning in words so much so that adding more words through Bible reading as a spiritual discipline, only compound the asphyxiation. And so I pray. Or participate in the divine office. Or I run. Or be quiet. Or still. Anything but surround myself with more words. Anything but take in more words than I can swallow. Once again, I am reminded of the evolution of one’s spirituality. As one’s life unfolds and changes, the way one connects with God or finds rest in God also changes. This may be an uncomfortable transition for some. Or it may be naturally. Spirituality develops and adapts as we grow up, as we mature, as we move towards completion in Christ.