I just received the page proofs for my new book. I am not sure of the release date, but it will certainly be out in 2013. I will be blogging about the book more in the days ahead, but for now, here is what I wrote for the publisher as a possible description for the back cover:

 

Is the Bible media savvy? Can ancient Scripture address the cutting edge technology of the digital age?

The church is unsure of itself in the 21^st century’s media culture. Some Christians denounce digital media while others embrace the latest gadgets and apps as soon as they appear. Many of us are stumbling along amidst the tweets, status updates, podcasts, and blog posts, wondering if we have ventured into a realm beyond the scope of biblical wisdom.

Though there is such a thing as “new media,” this book reminds us that the actual concept of media is ancient, theological, and even biblical. In fact, Scripture regularly features the media of God, “TheoMedia.” These are the means by which God communicates and reveals himself—creation, divine speech, inspired writings, the visual symbol of the cross, and more.

If God creates and uses media, then Scripture provides a theological logic by which we can create and use media in the digital age. This book is not an unqualified endorsement of the latest media products or a tirade against media technology. Instead, it calls us to rethink our understanding of media in terms of the media of God in the biblical story of redemption.

It also calls Christians to a life of media saturation. But the media that are to saturate our lives most prominently are the media of God….

 

The main point of the previous post is that our calling is premised on the idea that Someone beyond ourselves speaks. Vocation is a divine summons.

Go to the land that I will show you.

Come, I will send you to Pharaoh. 

Whatever I command you, you shall speak.

Follow me.

Vocational Angst

But in raising the theological profile of “calling” and “vocation,” we also tend to elevate our anxiety levels. With the stakes so high, we squirm beneath the pressure of hearing rightly from God as the One who calls. We strain our ears. We wait for the Caller’s specific instructions.

Some are confident that they hear, and off they go. Yet many of these who so confidently receive the divine summons must backpedal and find their way back to ground zero, vocationally bruised and beaten, wondering if they ever really heard that voice or if they had just imagined it. Some never hear a thing and remain vocationally immobilized. Others pick up something faint, some whisper that could be a divine call, but might simply be the wind. So they tread softly and gingerly, twisted up with concern that they may well be missing God’s voice and unsure about how to confirm the source of what they faintly hear.

Those who lack a theology of vocation may actually be much less anxious about their lives because they do not have to bother with all this ear-straining for a divine voice. So is it a bad idea to think theologically about calling? Are we freighting vocation too heavily by premising it on a holy vox?

I think part of the problem is that we have individualized our theology of vocation. In other words, we process our understanding of God’s call through our culture’s lens of individualism. Thus the language of “my” calling or “your” (singular, not plural) vocation.

God told Abraham to head for an unknown land. He told Moses to confront Pharaoh. He assigned Jeremiah the unpleasant task of prophesying to a stubborn nation. But when Jesus says “follow me,” he is speaking not only to individuals, but also to a corporate people.

Our individualistic mindsets lock onto the “individual callings” in Scripture. But we are quick to miss that humankind in general was issued callings, that Israel had a calling, and that the Church has a calling. These “corporate callings” are more important than the “individual callings” in the Bible.

Hear, O Israel… you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

He has told you O man [collective humanity] what is good… to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.

Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ.

Christians operate within the realm of God’s vox. This voice has spoken Christ to us. And within this acoustic range of Christ our lives are addressed, redirected, re-oriented. What we do in the daily grind is labor summoned into divine service. Whether we eat or drink or plow or preach or hammer or write, it is devoted to the glory of God. As addressees of this voice, our “careers” are owned by the Speaker. And this is true whether our jobs have been specifically assigned to us by an individual address.

But how does hearing and obeying the “corporate calling” or “individual calling” work in the gritty realities of everyday life?

More to come….

Now begins a new series here at Hopeful Realism. We will be focusing on vocation (with some other stuff inserted from time to time).

By vocation, I mean divine calling. Part of my own vocation seems to be wrestling with the idea of vocation, especially now that I am working overseas on a doctorate in biblical studies.

Lately I have been thinking that when I finish this PhD, it will be a “Pyrrhic victory.”

Pyrrhus was a Greek king who soldiered valiantly into the might and muscle of Rome in the 2nd century BC. After a brutalizing series of particular engagements, the battle dust began to settle and someone gave him the news that he was the victor.

Pyrrhus did not feel very victorious.

In fact, he felt messed up, broken down, and demoralized. To gain this “victory” he had sustained massive losses. Though most of the 15,000 corpses lying across the outskirts of Asculum belonged to the Romans, the Greek body count was grievously high (and the Romans had been much better resourced).

A Pyrrhic victory is one in which the gains are roughly commensurate with the losses. From the annals:

“Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one more such victory would utterly undo him. For he had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders….” (see here for Plutarch’s biographical sketch).

Vocational calling often feels like a “Pyrrhic victory.” There are many beautiful narratives described in inspirational books and sermons that spur us on to victorious Christian living; you know what I mean—the stories of those who accepted God’s call and miracles seemed to fall from the sky while obstacles below dissolved with each vocational step.

But the idea of a Pyrrhic victory seems quite compatible with the biblical portrayal of discipleship. At least in part.

This is because any “Christian” sense of “victory” is scarred by two perpendicular wooden beams. The cross of Christ splinters the idealization of Christian vocation. God’s call hurts… and the path is often ugly. Vocation is messy. And pursuing it may cost almost every resource you’ve got.

Or more.

[Author's note: My original post ended here... wrongly.]

Then again, the promise of Christian discipleship is that our vocation will ultimately never be Pyrrhic in the sense that the losses and gains come out nearly equal on the scales:

Peter began to say to him, “Look, we have left everything and followed you.”  Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news,  who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. (Mark 10:28–30)

Giving up everything to follow the call of Jesus (our vocation) will ultimately amount to giving up a pint of goodness for an ocean of extravagance.

But the way vocation often works itself out in the daily grind, in the here and now, sometimes involves a series of Pyrrhic victories.

More anon….

I love preaching. It darn near kills me, but I love it.

In trying to be a better preacher, I am thinking more intently and prayerfully about the practice and theology of this curious, holy, frightful, and joyful discipline.

One of the temptations I have found in sermon preparation is that of providing a full explanation of the text (or topic) at hand. Most of my preaching is “expositional” (meaning that I am working with a specific passage of Scripture). This means that my material is helpfully confined within the set parameters of the text. If I preach a “topical” sermon, the parameters are usually much broader: if I am addressing the issue of “money and possessions,” for instance, I feel pressured to exhaust the “whole counsel of God” on the topic found in the Bible. An impossible demand for one preacher and one sermon.

It is also impossible to exhaust the richness and depth of just one text, no matter the set parameter of verses.

I think I used to operate under the idea that preaching is ultimately didactic, that exposition is ultimately explanation. My idea of a good sermon was that it had to exhaust the meaning of a text and supply a comprehensive explanation of its entire meaning.

Untrue.

Preaching is certainly didactic (meaning that a sermon teaches something). Preaching is certainly explanatory. But in a Christian framework, teaching and explanation never result in the intellectual mastering of the subject matter. This is because the Subject Matter of a Christian sermon is the Triune God. And our Triune God cannot be fully explained; he always exceeds our didactic (teaching) capabilities. He cannot and will not be mastered… intellectually, or in any other way.

A sermon must ultimately present the Triune God of the text. Preaching is a revelatory means of God’s self-presentation through a mortal voice. So it is okay if a sermon leads more readily into worship than into intellectual understanding. It is okay if the sermon mystifies more than it explains.

Now, if you know me at all or follow this blog even a little, you know I am not interested in promoting any sort of anti-intellectualism or encouraging a mystical, gnostic conception of faith absent of rigorous theological thinking and vigorous ethical living. Sermons should certainly explain and enrich intellectual understanding.

But with that disclaimer, let me say it again: it is okay if a sermon leads more readily into worship than into intellectual understanding; it is okay if the sermon mystifies more than it explains.

In fact, a sermon that fully exhausts and entirely explains a text (or at least presumes to do so) may actually be a failure.

This is because such preaching may give the congregation a false sense that they have now mastered a passage, that they can tick it off as “done” and then move on to master other texts. A sermon that presumes to explain an entire biblical passage (or topic, as the case may be) teaches something dangerous: that our sacred Scriptures are a repository of limited knowledge that can be sufficiently grasped and mastered by mortals.

What a disastrous idea.

And what an awful message for a sermon to convey.

“The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in this world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

I open the New Testament and read: ‘If you want to be perfect, then sell all your goods and give to the poor and come follow me.’ Good God, if we were to actually do this, all the capitalists, the officeholders, and the entrepreneurs, the whole society in fact, would be almost beggars! We would be sunk if it were not for Christian scholarship! Praise be to everyone who works to consolidate the reputation of Christian scholarship, which helps to restrain the New Testament, this confounded book which would one, two, three, run us all down if it got loose (that is, if Christian scholarship did not restrain it).”

-From Kierkegaard’s Journals

The release date is still about 6 weeks away, but it will be worth keeping an eye on the discussion generated by Francis Watson’s Gospel Writing: A Canonical Perspective.

Prof. Watson is my supervisor at Durham, so I am somewhat familiar with the material and arguments of the book (almost 700 pages). Here is the synopsis provided by Eerdmans on the book’s webpage:

That there are four canonical versions of the one gospel story is often seen as a problem for Christian faith: where gospels multiply, so to do apparent contradictions that may seem to undermine their truth claims. In Gospel Writing Francis Watson argues that differences and tensions between canonical gospels represent opportunities for theological reflection, not problems for apologetics.

Watson presents the formation of the fourfold gospel as the defining moment in the reception of early gospel literature — and also of Jesus himself as the subject matter of that literature. As the canonical division sets four gospel texts alongside one another, the canon also creates a new, complex, textual entity more than the sum of its parts. A canonical gospel can no longer be regarded as a definitive, self-sufficient account of its subject matter. It must play its part within an intricate fourfold polyphony, and its meaning and significance are thereby transformed.

In elaborating these claims, Watson proposes nothing less than a new paradigm for gospel studies — one that engages fully with the available noncanonical material so as to illuminate the historical and theological significance of the canonical.

 

And here are a few endorsements from major figures in biblical and patristic scholarship:

What is the best ecclesial context for doing theology as a “pastor-theologian”: a mega church or a small church?

This is the question of my previous post, and I take up on those thoughts here focusing on the small church context…

Theology in the Small Church

The vocational model of “pastor-theologian” sounds a bit too highfalutin’ for the “1st Baptist Church of Smalltown, USA” or for the village parish somewhere in rural northern England. High-brow theological training at multiple academic institutions can leave a minister feeling licensed for “bigger and better” positions in greener pastures (let’s just be honest… and the burden of student loan debt will certainly cause some of us to look for a certain salary range).

If we pastor-theologian-types can wrestle against our personal sense of ministerial grandeur, we might find that the small church setting can be a rather exciting environment for serious theological work.

Pastors of small churches cannot rely solely on their efficient management skills: they must relationally lead as well; nor can they rely on managerial executive pastors to run the church on their behalf while they devote the majority of their time to study: they must help balance the budget while reading Barth and Calvin. A small church pastor has to get into the relational, administrative, and political messes of parish life. There is no insulating layer of a highly qualified staff.

These messes may at first be viewed as distractions from the pristine work of doing theology.

Not exactly. In fact, theology that cannot engage and address a local church’s relational, administrative, and political messes is too shallow for the people of God and for the God of the people.

And when a pastor is personally wading in the muck of the parish, that’s when the parish will listen to theology and care about it.

Personally…

I’m not sure yet whether I will end up serving a local church or working in a seminary/divinity school when I complete (Deo volente!)  my PhD program. But when I was working on a Master of Theology degree a few years back, I was also pastoring a small Baptist church.

The rush and thrill of learning in a high-profile environment was exhilarating.

But if I didn’t have theology thick enough to sit in Jo’s living room after paramedics had just removed her husband’s body from her house, then the classroom experience was all for naught. If I didn’t have a theology thick enough to sit at a hospital bedside and help a nurse adjust the position of a sedated parishioner, then the impressive theological training was suffering a disconnect.

Of course, it is not entirely up to our theological instructors in the seminary and the div school to connect our theology to our ministerial labors. Ultimately, that is the job of the minister. And context helps make the connection happen.

In this regard, the small church setting was really helpful for me. It forced theology to leap off the pages and out of the libraries into living rooms, kitchens, hospitals, and graveyards.