The Opportunity in Front of Us

This has been a fun stretch of posts and comments--all about definitions of things like "love," "religion" and "Christian." 

On the one hand, I'm sure this could seem nitpicky, but to me this is big stuff, primarily because of the opportunity I feel is in front of you and me.  I'm sure this will sound overstated...but...not finding a great, tempered way to phrase it, let me run it by you this way: The opportunity is to utterly recontextualize biblical faith.

"Contextualization," for those of you who prefer your words to be under seven syllables, loosely speaking is changing the way we think about or present something.  My pitch is that faithful church people for the last century or so have framed being a faithful church person in a certain set of ways that were largely different than the way those things were framed before.  And then they were so successful in that framing, in that contextualizing, that we sort of forgot that there were any other ways to think about following Jesus.  Those became the terms.

That's where, to my mind, a lot of what most people think about when they think of "religion," "love" or "Christian" came from.  And, to my thinking, those ways of thinking just aren't helping us much in the transition we're in now.

I got a call just now from a Boston Globe reporter.  They're running a story tomorrow on a massive advertising campaign that an atheist group is starting tomorrow in Boston (and it will apparently be rolled out to a city near you as well) that mirrors the atheist advertising campaign that's rolled through Europe and that Dan Littauer posted on here awhile back.  Was I outraged that these well-funded bullies were calling my faith superstition and saying that there was more evidence for belief in Santa Claus than God, etc.?  No, I said, it was a free country and, here in Boston, they'd be preaching to a pretty large choir. 

But, he said, surely someone with my beliefs would have to be outraged!  They were calling me and others like me idiots!  Yes, I said, I was tracking with that, but was this new?  Dawkins has been doing this for a few years, and I wasn't sure that line of thought was going to be a winner for them in the long run.  How many people want to be grow up obsessed that anyone who disagrees with them is, by definition, a fool that doesn't need to be actually known or engaged with to dismiss?  Seemed like sort of an unpleasant way to live.  The reporter effectively said that there were very few church people who talked like me, in his experience.

And why is that?  My take: Because you and I are recontextualizing biblical faith to a changing world.  Without those changes, I'd have to be outraged!  My religion was under attack! 

But what if the stakes Jesus actually cares about are different than we've envisioned them in recent years?  What if there's something far more powerful being offered us right in the heart of the Bible than we've understood or pursued, as people of faith in Jesus, for the last century or so?  What if we've been settling for far too little?

I think the entire world, the entire secular culture is wide open for a new experience of robustly biblical faith.  Because, in my view, that is where a rich life is to be found, and it seems to me that a rich life is one compelling sales point. 

But this will require some pretty vigorous recontextualizing.  Thanks for starting in on that process!  Here's to a lot more where that comes from!

Thoughts?