Resurrection and renewal: some further reading

By Nathan Hobby

Those of you who were there on Sunday would know that I spoke on the idea that going to heaven when you die is not the full picture of our Christian hope. Instead, we wait in heaven for our resurrection and life on a renewed earth, where God’s will is done as it is in heaven and the potential of the things we have done on earth is fulfilled. If you missed it, the audio is now up – http://www.nvc.org.au/messages.htm.

For those who wanted to do some more reading on the subject, here’s some resources that discuss these ideas:

• David Lawrence, Heaven : It’s Not the End of the World [123 pages]
  - This book is hard to get hold of; it was published in 1995 by Scripture Union UK. You can order it on Amazon; Koorong might be able to get hold of it, and you can borrow it from Vose Seminary Library in Bentley.
• Tom Wright, Surprised By Hope [338 pages]
  - Koorong should have this one on its shelf (about $30), and again you can borrow it from Vose. It’s a recent book and covers everything in some detail, including a lengthy analysis of popular misconceptions about heaven. It’s a long read, but worthwhile.
• Tom Wright, New Heavens New Earth [24 pages]
  - This is a much better length and briefly discusses the biblical basis for the idea of a new earth. It was published by Grove Books in the UK in 1999. Network Vineyard people should contact me and I should be able to lend it to you.

The resources on the web are not as thorough, but Tom Wright has given a sermon on this topic and Byron Smith has written an impressive series on his blog.

It was great to respond to some of the questions you had at the end. If you want to continue dialogue in response to the sermon, please leave a comment, though I’m away from Thursday to Sunday, so may be slow replying.

I just have to reproduce the quote from Tom Wright that I finished the sermon with from page 219 of Surprised By Hope -

You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that’s about to fall over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that’s shortly going to be thrown in the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a building site. You are – strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself – accomplishing something which will become, in due course, part of God’s new world. Every act of love, gratitude and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings, and for that matter one’s fellow non-human creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed which spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honoured in the world – all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation which God will one day make. That is the logic of the mission of God. God’s recreation of his wonderful world, which has begun with the resurrection of Jesus and continues mysteriously as God’s people live in the risen Christ and in the power of his Spirit, means that what we do in Christ and by the Spirit in the present is not wasted. It will last all the way into God’s new world. In fact, it will be enhanced there.

David Lawrence, Heaven : It’s Not the End of the World [123 pages]
Tom Wright, Surprised By Hope [338 pages]
Tom Wright, New Heavens New Earth [24 pages]

Internet
- The full text of this sermon will be available on http://perthanabaptists.wordpress.com.
- http://nothing-new-under-the-sun.blogspot.com/2006/11/heaven-in-rear-view-mirror-links.html

Role playing Romans : a 13 week small group course at NVC

Have you ever wanted to understand the Bible better? To go past the familiar verses and learn the background and context? The Role Playing Romans course is thirteen weeks of stimulating immersion in the book of Romans, which will leave you with a new way of looking at the Bible and a much better understanding of Romans, both in terms of its original meaning and its application to the church today.

It’s brain-stretching and involves some reading, but it’s not dry studying. Instead, you’ll be taking on a character in a first century Roman church and have to discuss each chapter of the letter to the Romans through the eyes of your character. Some of you will be slaves, some Jewish merchants, some radical Gentile converts.

The course uses the book Roman House Churches For Today by Reta Halteman Finger. To do the whole course, you will need to buy a copy of the book ($23; we have some extra copies you can buy from us) but you can come along to the first two weeks first to decide if it’s right for you.

“This book is designed to draw learners into the biblical text and the first-century context. What was life like in Rome? for Jews? for women? for slaves? for the well-to-do? for those free but poor? for Christians in households where the head of the household was not Christian? Through action and reflection, learners become first-century persons in Rome and then step outside that world to reflect in our own time and place. Thus we hear and understand the text in and new powerful ways.”
- Linda Vogel, in the foreword to the book.

Where: Hobbys house, 25 Vincent St Nedlands
When: Starting weekly in late July; 7:30pm-9:30pm on a night to be decided

Please register your interest with Nathan or Nicole as soon as you can – nathanhobby@gmail.com / noli_jae@yahoo.com.au / 0405 097 008

Justice, beauty, evangelism: making sure our good news is really good

With our teaching and thinking at Network Vineyard focusing on mission in recent weeks, one of the things I’ve been thinking about it is how important it is that our good news really is good. What I mean by that is that our life together as a church should show that God is at work. I’m reading a book by Tom Wright which puts it like this:

But how can the church announce that God is God that Jesus is Lord, that the powers of evil, corruption and death itself have been defeated and that God’s new world has begun? Doesn’t this seem laughable? Well, it would be if it wasn’t happening. But if a church is working on the issues we’ve already looked at – if it’s actively involved in seeking justice in the world, both globally and locally, and if it’s cheerfully celebrating God’s good creation, and its rescue from corruption, in art and music, and if, in addition, its own internal life gives every sign that new creation is indeed happening, generating a new type of community – then suddenly the announcement makes a lot of sense.

- Tom Wright, Surprised By Hope: p. 239

Justice, beauty and evangelism – three parts of mission that as a church we should be holding together. As we stand up for justice, as we sing songs of God’s beauty, as we tell people about the new life in the kingdom, we’re doing mission.

- Nathan Hobby

Pentecostal, Fundamentalist, Evangelical : labels and why they matter

Last night I was watching a secular documentary called Jesus Camp. It’s an interesting and rather disturbing look at a ‘Bible boot camp’ run by a Pentecostal children’s pastor in the USA. (The disturbing part was the black and white view of the world these kids were getting, and the pro-George Bush, anti-climate change, anti-the rest of the world attitude. But that’s all a different story.) What struck me was that on the back cover blurb, the terms ‘Pentecostal’ ‘Evangelical’ and ‘Fundamentalist’ are used interchangeably, as if they all mean the same thing.

They don’t mean the same thing, and mixing them up causes a lot of confusion. I get the feeling that most Christians wouldn’t be able to distinguish them clearly either, so I thought I’d give a quick guide.  I’ve simplified things a lot here, and I’m just going off the top of my head, so please take this as a starting point, rather than a definitive guide.

‘Fundamentalism’ started early in the 20th century as a reaction against a group of theologians called ‘Modernists’ (or liberals). The Modernists were very taken with the findings of science and rationalism and were interepreting the Bible and theological doctrines in the light of science. (That’s not altogether wrong; but they were certainly taking things too far.) In reaction to this, a group who became known as the ‘Fundamentalists’ issued a series of booklets on the ‘fundamentals’ of faith – doctrines they saw as absolute foundations which were non-negotiable.

The movement – or the label at least – became more and more conservative and reactionary. Fundamentalists became those who shut themselves off from the findings of scholarship and theology; who read the Bible in rigid, literal, unnatural ways and who had a real fortress mentality – ‘them and us’. Today, fundamentalism is also associated with political conservatism and religious fanaticism.

‘Evangelicalism’ in its twentieth century form started as a reaction against fundamentalism. They were Christians who believed the Bible and traditional doctrines of faith but felt that they could still engage with scholarship in science and theology. The movement that grew out of this would tend to be seen as emphasising the trustworthiness of the Bible, the need for a personal commitment to following Jesus, and the importance of evangelism.

Confusingly, fundamentalists would believe these three things too, and the line can be hard to draw. It’s often in the mode of engagement with the world – Evangelicals are willing to dialogue with cultural trends in the world, to make their faith culturally relevant without compromising it, and to politely debate liberals and fundamentalists.

My concern is that if ‘evangelical’ and ‘fundamentalist’ are used interchangeably, the word ‘evangelical’ will be tainted beyond usefulness or redemption – if it hasn’t happened already.

‘Pentecostalism’ grew out of the Azusa Street Revival in the USA in 1904, when the Holy Spirit came upon a congregation and there were manifestations of spiritual gifts. The movement came to generally emphasise the need for a ’second blessing’ or baptism of the Spirit, evidenced by speaking in tongues. Besides the emphasis on the Spirit, the movement was often quite similar to the fundamentalists in tone.

If this was the ‘first wave’ of the Holy Spirit, the second wave came in the 1960s through the mainline (Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran) churches and people affected by this were called ‘Charismatic’. Many of these people stayed in their traditional churches, so you can see why there was a big difference between ‘pentecostal’ and ‘charismatic’.

The ‘third wave’ of the Holy Spirit is where Vineyard fits in. It’s associated with John Wimber and the Vineyard movement starting in the 1980s, and emphasising a basically evangelical outlook with Holy Spirit empowerment, most often shown not in tongues but healing.

Network Vineyard is an interesting mix of backgrounds. From talking to people, many have come from an evangelical background, but then others are from a pentecostal or non-church background. The danger with labels is that they can be used to judge too quickly and shortcut really understanding people. But the benefit of them is that they give us an understanding of what tradition, what strand of Christianity a person comes from.

- Nathan Hobby

Good news for the environment?

Yesterday at my house church, someone asked the question, ‘Is the gospel good news for the environment?’

My answer to this is ‘Yes!’ But first of all we have to ask just what the gospel is. The gospel (which means ‘good news’) is about the coming of the kingdom of God. It’s bigger than our individual salvation. It’s about the renewing and restoration of all of creation.

We get a picture of this in Romans when Paul talks of all creation ‘groaning for redemption’. We can understand this idea even better today when we’ve seen centuries of environmental damage. If creation was groaning twenty centuries ago, it’s screaming today.

We have another picture of the good news for the environment in Revelation. The new Jerusalem has a crystal clear river and trees bearing good fruit.

Our Christian hope is of Jesus Christ returning to Earth to finish off God’s redemption of creation so that God can live with restored humans on a renewed heaven and earth. God’s not just going to screw up this world and start again when Jesus returns; it’s going to form part of what’s next. There’s going to be some carry over from creation as we know it now (in a restored form) as well as something radically new about it. Creation is new, renewed and restored.

This means we need to take seriously the role God gave us back in Eden as carers for creation. Following Jesus means living lives that are good news for the environment. As Christians we should be leading the way for the world, showing them what it means to have this good news for the environment.

- Nathan Hobby

Some thoughts on postmodernism and the gospel #1: the importance of stories

Our life-cell doesn’t have a name or even a place. We’re a nomad people, meeting at the Watsons, the Jumeaux and the Prices, and for the first time this week, Daniel and Christine’s. In our meetings on every second Friday, we’ve loosely been exploring a book by Brian McLaren called A New Kind of Christian. It’s stimulated some great discussion.

McLaren’s book is a good introduction for Christians wanting to understand the implications of postmodernism for the gospel and the gospel for postmodernism. It takes the form of a novel, the story of a disillusioned pastor, Daniel, having conversations with Neo, a science teacher who has grappled with a lot of the big questions and come out with a faith appropriate for postmodern times. As a writer myself, I find the fictionalisation lame, but I think it’s a good approach, an appropriate form for the message. And the message itself is good.

We spent a couple of weeks talking about just what postmodernism is. It’s a big question, and I can’t answer it in one blog post. Or even twelve. But I thought I’d offer a series of short reflections on some starting points people at Network Vineyard should know about postmodernism.

For a start, let go of the idea that postmodernism is all bad! (Or all good.) It’s a shift in thinking, in worldview that reveals a lot of what was wrong with modernist ways of thinking. Evangelicals have been quite captive to modernism and that’s why postmodernism is scary: it confronts the modernism in us.

One of the shifts in postmodernism is the a new importance given to stories. Postmodernism tells us that truth doesn’t have to be propositions about the world, facts outside a time and place. Instead it suggests that truth is also found in stories. Our lives are stories. Our faith is a story. (It also suggests that any statement we make about the world has a story behind it – because it’s expressed in language, which is cultural, and we always have a reason for saying whatever we say.)

When we try to express our faith only in facts or doctrines, we lose something important. Try describing your husband or wife in facts – ‘170 cm tall’ or ‘born in 1981′ – these things are true and necessary, but you aren’t getting to what’s important. The story of how you got together and why and what you’ve done – now you’re on track. The same goes for God.

When we try to read the Bible primarily as doctrines or commands, again we lose sight of the story. A modernist reading of the Bible favours those parts which can be made into commands or doctrines – like Paul’s letters. But even Paul’s letters tell a story. They are about a particular people at a particular time trying to follow Jesus. They are written by an apostle of the Lord addressing particular problems in a church. If we don’t start with the story, if we just try to extract timeless truth, we miss out on something important.

This is where N.T. Wright’s idea of the Bible as a five act story is really important (which Stuart mentioned in a sermon a few months ago).  We find ourselves in the fourth act of an unfolding story. We need to know the story really well so we can faithfully improvise our act – which hasn’t been written yet! We do know the end though – the fifth act. We know that Jesus is returning to bring completion the kingdom of God in the new heavens and new earth.

Any questions? It would be good to start a conversation. I hope to have another post on our journey into postmodernism later.

- Nathan Hobby