After throwing around a lot of criticism of fundamentalist and progressive Christianity, I was just asked what are my solutions.
Fair enough. I don’t just want to criticize. And in fact, I have a stake in building a different future.
So here is my quick outline (let me know what you think):
Toward an Integrated Faith
We need to return to a more integrate life of following Jesus, which would look a little like (in no particular order):
• Integrating science and faith (rather than letting one side dominate the other).
• Integrating the reality of Jesus as the Word/Revelation of God while still connecting the Bible to this work of Jesus as authoritative for our lives.
• Integrating the reality that Jesus both fully reveals the nature of humanity to us and reveals the full nature of God to us because he is fully God and fully human.
• Integrating personal salvation and social reform in a way that individual faith (and even an emphasis on the individual) is connected to the common good.
• Integrate the critique of power and pursuit of freedom with the structures of authoritative communities (not authoritarian) that shape and form our character.
• Integrate the full diversity within the church of “every tongue, tribe, and nation” (Rev. 5:9) with the living reality that we are all of “Abraham’s family” (Gal. 3:29).
• Integrating multiple atonement theories that makes sense of “the blood of Jesus” without either worshipping the violence or just dismissing sacrifice as barbaric and unnecessary of further reflection.
• Integrating and affirming the differences between women and men without falling into hierarchy and domination of women by men.
• Integrating matters of the mind (doctrine and ideas) with our bodies and emotions without pitting one against the other, understanding the reciprocally influencing nature of minds, bodies, brains, and relationships.
• Integrating the reality that ideas matter (what we think) and practices matter (what we do), and that both sustain and strength the other and each alone fails and falls into distortion.
• Integrating matters of faith into the public square without entering into a culture war or apologizing or revising faith to fit.
• Integrating the contemplative and active life.
• Integrating an emphasis on life in the Word with life in the Spirit.
Some of this list isn’t particular to this “modern” age, but reflects the disintegration of sin common to humanity.
And it seems the early church (from the New Testament through the first 400 years) has much to teach us about these things.
Of course, the August cohort of 5 Shifts for Reconstructing Faith covers some of these in detail. We’ll be looking at moving from
• From Biblicism to Jesus, the Word
• From Modern Mind to Embodied Faith
• From Anti-Science to Sacred World
• From Penal Substitution to Union
• From Culture War to Sent into the World.
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