Taking Up Space

In response to my last post, OSC asked me to identify my theological pigeon-hole, so here goes:

My theology is sort of a hybrid thing. My dad grew up in the Plymouth Brethren church, but as we moved around the country following his military career, we didn’t attend Brethren assemblies, but mostly non-denominational “Bible” churches. When I was 15, we came to Nashville and began to participate in Community Bible Church, where I’ve been ever since. Our pastor for most of my time at CBC graduated from
Dallas Seminary in the 1950s, the era of John Walvoord and Charles Ryrie.

The hallmark of this tradition is Bible exposition, which remains the central feature of worship at CBC. The theory is that when we preach expositionally through a text, we’re doing better at giving “the full counsel of the word.” (I recognize that this approach has it’s own set of problems, one of which is that it overestimates its own “objectivity”). The thing a Lutheran would notice about it is the complete absence of liturgy. My brother’s wife grew up in the LCMS (they were married in a Lutheran Church), and from time to time, this resulted in my visiting a Lutheran service. I always felt a bit lost, not knowing how to follow the order (that’s not a criticism, just an observation).

Theologically, the distinctive feature of Dallas Seminary is dispensationalism. This was the result of a combination of the 19^th century Presbyterian penchant for systematizing theology and a biblical literalist reaction to German liberalism. Mix in a little American entrepreneurialism and the result is a new church tradition of anti-traditionalism. My own church came to be in the late 1950s when a group of people, mostly baptists and methodists, got fed up with the creeping liberalism of their mainline denominational Churches.

So that’s where I’m from: American conservative independent evangelical. My own studies at DTS led me to conclude that our tradition is a little too modernistic in the way it emphasizes individualistic rationalism, especially in hermeneutics. It also carries a big thread of Finneyan revivalism and a strong tendency toward pragmatism in ministry. In this way, OSC, we are largely responsible for the woes you bemoan so well. Sorry. It seems to me that lamenting the shallow theology of glory of our day is the thing that you and I have in common.

As it happens, my seminary curriculum “accidentally” included a fair dose of Lutheran theology, which I find both interesting and helpful. I took senior level seminars in both historical and systematic theology. These are courses in which the specific subject matter varies from one semester to the next. My historical theology seminar focussed on the writings and context of Luther himself, and my systematics course was a focussed discussion of Robert Jenson’s (leading contemporary Lutheran theologian, for those who don’t know the name) Systematic Theology.

Of course, I’m obviously not a Lutheran, and there are many specific elements of the Lutheran Confession that I would disagree with (but not want to argue about). When it comes to the sacraments, for example, I’m pretty much a Calvinistic baptist. As I’ve come to appreciate the necessity of tradition and community in all human understanding, I’m led to remain in the tradition I’m part of, in part to have some opportunity to shape it, but more so as to be fully engaged in the life of the Church and the promotion of the gospel.

There’s a lot more to the answer to this question, but maybe that’s a good start. By the way, OSC, you’ve intrigued me by mentioning your DTS grad friend who recently joined the LCMS. I wonder if I know him. There were a number of Lutherans in my Jenson seminar. There’s an e-mail link on the Subsidiary Awareness page; maybe you could drop me a line.

A blog written by a Lutheran (Missouri Synod) pastor is getting to be one of my favorites. He recently wrote a piece he titled “The Way of Salvation: A Rant,” which reminded me of something I wrote in response to reading Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation. As a way of saying amen, here’s my own rant on the subject:

Is the crucifixion of Jesus Christ good? This question is at the heart of Martin Luther’s Theology of the Cross. The uttermost expression of God’s love is at the same time the complete satisfaction of His wrath. Justice and mercy (which is normally an injustice) cohabit the cross. The impassible God demonstrates His infinite compassion. Life participates in death and in doing so imparts life. In short, Luther proposed, the cross is the beginning point of the knowledge of God because at the cross God is revealing himself in a way that is only accessible by faith. The cross cannot be figured out—no human would have thought to propose it and no human can claim to understand it. But on the cross, we are confronted with the bare reality of the person of God—powerful and powerless—and the only appropriate response is that all our fuses should be blown.

The essence of Luther’s point is that we don’t get anywhere in theology (or in Christianity) unless we first blow all the fuses of natural theology and human philosophy. We must realize our spiritual poverty, and that necessitates coming to grips with the limitations of our intellect. On this point, Luther stands against the historical tide of humanism. In the cross, Luther sees God as the great reverser, elevating those who have nothing and destroying those who bring something of their own to the table. So the essence of Christianity is not progress, but regress—of constantly emptying oneself, so as to make room for grace. This will involve “the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death; in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead,” (Php. 3:10-11) or as Jesus put it, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it.” (Luke 9:23-24).

In light of all of this, it strikes me that American evangelical presentations of the gospel are utter failures. We gloss over the cross, and consequently leave spiritual poverty unmentioned. We almost always present the Christian life as “the good life” more fully realized. In other words, we tell people that there is something they want, something they already think of as good, that can be found in a “personal relationship with Jesus.” Luther begins with the assertion that human beings don’t know “good” when they see it. Does the gruesome execution of Christ look like the good life more fully realized? People need to know that our deliverance involves crushing us—that the cross solves all of our problems…by killing us. Should we announce to people that sort of “good news”—what they need to hear but cannot accept as “good”? Are there any Christians in America who demonstrate the image of God by being happily crushed—who for the joy set before them endure the cross? Or should we just try to get people “saved” first and tell them the bad gospel later?

A while back, some good friends of mine convinced me to start up a little theological/book discussion group, which now meets about once a month. I’m one of those people who thinks every group has to have some kind of cool name. My friends actually proposed calling this gathering “An Evening with Doug,” which struck me as decidedly uncool, so I began to brainstorm. My favorite philosopher, Michael Polanyi, spends a lot of words on the social component of human exploration and discovery, for which he coined the term conviviality. I love that word because it’s etymology seems to capture the idea that life is a fellowship. But conviviality is something a group experiences, not the group that experiences it. Furthermore, the dictionary I had access to was no help at all

I decided to ask my English teacher friend what the noun form of convivial might be. “Convivium?” she said, like it was a question, and I knew it was exactly right. Plus, since I couldn’t find this word in any English dictionary, I thought it was completely original.

The problem with this name is that it requires explanation every time it’s used. Fortunately, a third friend who also participates in our little group, thought of googling the word and sharing his results. Turns out it’s not at all original; it’s just Latin. A long, long time ago the word meant any kind of fellowship or gathering organized around a common interest among the participants. Later, it got focussed on food and came to mean simply a feast. Recently–very recently–the word has been adopted by people who identify themselves as the Slow Food Movement, which is a bunch of little clubs that promote the home-preparation of locally grown foods–they’re swimming against the tide of fast-food and food that comes in little boxes from a factory. They use the word convivium for their gatherings.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this is a perfect name for what we’re trying to do. Our convivium isn’t about food (though we always have some food); rather, it’s a feast of the mind, a sort of theological slow food movement for people who want to be better connoisseurs of the glory of God. We’re having one this Saturday, and I can’t wait.

You can now listen to all thirteen lessons in the series I taught in the winter quarter, “The Challenges of Discipleship.” Just click on the link at the top of the page. There are also PDF handouts available for taking notes.

It’s a well known fact that the Searle’s are a family of unmitigated geniuses, and Sheldon is no exception. Just this afternoon, he brought his insight to bear on college basketball, saying, “There are teams that might not win against any team, but then they might win.” The rest of us were speechless in the presence of such intellect. 

Sheldon is named after our paternal grandfather, Sheldon Walter Searle, Sr., whose intelligence bordered on the clairvoyant. One day, Grandpa Sheldon came home to the family ranch after spending all day taking care of business in town. He called his clever sons together to dole out their punishment for misbehaving while he was gone. Even though they had gotten everything back in place before his return, Grandpa new exactly what they had done. Turns out, the business he went to town for was renting an airplane to fly over the ranch and spy on his kids. You did not want to try to outsmart Grandpa Sheldon.

Sheldon’s also kind of named after our Uncle Walt, Sheldon Walter Searle, Jr. During a good part of his life, Uncle Walt has earned his living demonstrating that he is much smarter than horses, cows, and other animals. That is to say he had careers both in training horses, especially horses used to herd cows, and guiding hunters. But Uncle Walt’s genius is most evident in his storytelling. It’s from Uncle Walt that we learned that our dad was no ordinary airplane pilot, but had actually flown his A-4 jet under the power lines there at the ranch. Because of Uncle Walt’s great storytelling skill, sometimes it’s not until several days later that you realize that the story couldn’t possibly be true. I mean, I’m not sure you could ROLL an A-4 under those power lines. Our dad was a great pilot, though. I remember watching him win the Yuma Aeroclub landing contest by landing ON the target stripe.

Both Mom and Dad were also geniuses. One example of this was their invention of boatless waterskiing some time around 1952. Yakima, Washington, where they grew up, was a place where agriculture was possible only because of irrigation. Consequently there were lots of irrigation canals around in those days, some of which had roadways along the banks. Our clever parents figured out that they could water ski in the canal by tying the tow rope to the bumper of a car. What a great idea! And it worked great ‘til the bumper came off the car. 

As you can see, it is no surprise that this gene pool would produce prodigious offspring. A national merit finalist, Sheldon graduated near the top of his high school class, and attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he took a degree in chemical engineering. Today, if you ask him what he does for a living, he’ll have to dumb it down for you. One of the most obvious signs of Sheldon’s intelligence is the fact that he somehow talked Stephanie, a genius in her own right, into marrying him, though he nearly let it slip when he gave a particularly clever vacuum cleaner demonstration just before they got married.

When we were teenagers, Dad figured out that waterskiing was more convenient if you used a boat, so he bought one. Not long after buying the boat, Mom and Dad quit coming to the river with us, and being left to our own devices, our weekly ski trips on the Colorado River became an opportunity for our natural Searlean gifts to flourish. After only five or six tries, we figured out how to get back to the dock before running out of gas and exactly how close to a sandbar you could ski without running aground. We also came up with all kinds of cool tricks. In one of them, Sheldon and I would both be skiing along, me on two skis and Sheldon on one. With his rope just a little longer than mine, he would ski up next to me and climb from his ski onto the back of mine so that we would both be skiing on a single pair of skis. Wow! 

Our little boat had two gas tanks, and when one ran out of gas, you had to pull the gas line from the empty tank and hook it up to the full one. Being geniuses, we eventually figured out that it was not necessary to stop the boat to change the gas line. When the engine started to sputter, whoever wasn’t driving would jump down in the stern and switch the tanks before the motor died, and you could just keep right on skiing without missing a beat. It was while this was happening one day, that Sheldon conducted a really clever experiment to determine just how high you could get a boat up in a tree. Sheldon was driving along pulling a skier when the motor began to sputter. Being especially quick myself, I jumped to the task of changing the gas line. But it didn’t come loose from the empty tank right away, so the motor continued to threaten to die on us. This led Sheldon to sense a need to provide instructions, so he turned to see what I was doing. Right about then, I got the gas hooked up to the new line, which resulted in a sudden burst of acceleration followed shortly by coming to a quick and complete stop and a strange sensation of altitude. Having taken his eyes off the road, so to speak, Sheldon had driven us right up the riverbank and into the nearest tree. The whole boat was completely out of the water. No worries though. This was simply another opportunity to put our mental prowess to work. We Searles are probably the only people in the world who know how to get a small powerboat into and out of a tree.

This story explains why Stephanie was so enthusiastic about our decision to purchase a ski boat in 1996. Obviously, a couple of geniuses like us would have nothing but hours of uninterrupted fun once we got back on the water. And hardly anyone has more experience than us dealing with the little things that go wrong while boating. What could be more fun than learning to use rented hoists and pumps to deal with a little sinking issue? So as you might imagine, Stephanie’s enthusiasm reached a whole new level when Sheldon recently returned to another hobby he started in high school, flying airplanes. Now there’s an opportunity for smarts to shine!

All kidding aside, Sheldon is actually a bona fide genius, and it is one of the main blessings of my life that God led us to live in the same town and be part of the same Church. His intelligence, insight, enthusiasm, and sense of humor have sharpened my ministry in more ways than anyone knows. He is a diligent student and clear communicator of God’s word. He is a wise and committed elder who loves God’s people well because he is even more devoted to the Lord himself.