philosophy

Last week I ran across this article, an interview with Tim Keller, in Christianity Today. This week in my blog I decided to look at the questions he was asked, pull a quote from his answers, and share some thoughts.

Q: What are the changes that you see for your ministry?

A: The question is, How do you make sure that not only the particular theological and ministry DNA of the church is such that other people can get ahold of it?

Of all the things Keller said in the interview, this is the one I have the most issue with. While I'm confident that it's not his goal to package Redeemer and ship it out to all kinds of other urban churches (although him referring to sharing the DNA makes me worry a bit), that's what always happens when you do this. Rick Warren told people not to do what he did, but the result was guys in Minnesota wearing Hawaiian shirts. St. Toms in Sheffield, England makes the same argument when you go over there, and yet there are now churches all over the place using the Lifeshapes, holding cluster meetings, and doing all that stuff.

The problem with all this is that no other urban church is in NYC and has the exact same history and cultural conditions of Redeemer. The same goes for Saddleback and St. Toms. Those are unique situations ... just like the church that's buying up everyone else's resources. Certainly there's something to learn from the process and philosophy of ministry, but trying to replicate the DNA just isn't it.

That's why I'm loving the whole Church Unique book.

Somehow I ended up linked to this article on open source religion from Wired. What is open source religion? According to Wired:

It's the cutting edge of individual spirituality that's thriving outside the walls of organized religion. It's a historic shift in power and authority from religious leadership to the consumer-oriented adherents of religious movements.

If I understand that and the rest of the article, open source religion basically says, "Pull what you like from various theologies and philosophies out there and figure out what works."

Contrary to some I will say that this isn't entirely bad. First of all it recognizes that all religions out there, at some level, have something of value, if nothing else because they give us an opportunity to learn from the real life experiences of others. For example, a Christian could look at the patterns in the daily life of a Muslin (like praying five times a day towards Mecca) and establish a similar Christian pattern of prayer (a ritual similar to the monastic life).

It also promotes the reality that religion should be pragmatic, that is, it should help make sense of our every experience. I think this is sorely lacking in Christianity where, on many fronts, we've concluded that religion has little to do with everyday life but is entirely about missing hell and making heaven.

However, as with most things, when this is taken too far, there are some major issues. First off, as the next quote reveals, open source religion is primarily about what's best for the individual over the community:

So, faith matters deeply to us -- but the reality of open source religion is that we, as Americans, expect to be able to crack open the doors of religion and chart our own individual meaningful journeys through the resources and traditions we find there.

At this level you could say that open source religion is the Americanization of religion, that is, it makes it selfish and individualistic. At its core, this contradicts the very root of the very religions that are being drawn from in that, historically, religions, especially the moral and ethical code aspects, aren't about the individual as much as they are about the community.

But the much bigger objection comes in that it suggests that religion is only limited to the hear and now. While many lines of Christianity have gone to one extreme, open source goes to the other and gets to a point where the consummation of the world isn't an issue. To catch phrase it, you could say that the journey matters more than the destination. It seems to me this contrasts the fundamental purpose of religion, a word that some scholars argue is based on the same Latin word that gives us ligament and essential means "to reconnect".

Thoughts?

Lately I've been checking out a number of the podcasts and articles done by the folks over at Answers in Genesis. For those of you who aren't familiar with them, AiG is an apologetics group made up of a wide variety of very educated scientific types who disagree with the notion that the earth is billions of years old. Rather, they argue that "old earth" folks have one way of interpreting the visible evidence based one set of assumptions and that the AiG crew is coming up with an entirely different story that works with the same evidence based on the assumption that when the Bible says a "day" in Genesis 1 that it means a 24-hour day (here's more on the effect of assumptions). In other words, you have two groups using the same pieces to put together two different puzzles ... the real question is, which is using the right box cover as a guide for what the end product is supposed to look like.

Personally, I dig their whole philosophical argument when it comes to the assumptions that we all begin with and their desire to be honest with the scientific evidence. I will also say that I'm strongly inclined to be a "young earth" guy, not because of the Genesis 1 argument with 24-hour days, but because Scripture paints a picture of death being a bad thing and not existing before the Fall or in the recreation after Christ's Second Coming. However, there is something in their approach that I'm not digging, namely, the idea that if we prove the Bible to be true than we prove Jesus to be true.

As a less important an more extreme answer of where this approach goes wrong, what if we found clear evidence that there was a male stowaway on the Titanic. I'm sure we could also find evidence that there was a well to do young woman who was traveling with her family on board. Now, given that all of the other evidence fits with what we see in the movie, be it the name Molly Brown on the manifest, the shipping hitting an iceberg, or many of those on board dying when it sank, would it be wise for us to conclude that Leo and Kate played non-fictional characters? In the end, we've just proven that the story, fact or fiction, was told within an accurate historical context.

Beyond this, I believe a far greater error in this approach is that encourages people to not trust in promises of Christ, but to place their trust in the Bible and in human ability to defend the pages therein. Now, I'm not saying that I don't believe the Bible or that I don't think that the Bible is authoritative, however, the promises of Christ would be just as valid and real if the Bible ceased to exist and the faith was passed along by word of mouth as it was in the first years of the Christian Church. In those days, Jesus got along just fine without the defense of the Bible.

So, if we don't engage in apologetics to prove our faith, why should groups like AiG exist? To me, the answer is simple, to plant seeds of doubt that make people question what they believe and why they believe it. As questions continue to rise and doubts continue to form a new worldview is needed to fill the void and the Christian is given an opportunity to speak the promises of Christ into somebody's life.