Forging Ploughshares

Paul and Jonathan Totty have a conversation about the state of the restoration movement.

Paul: To my mind, this is the pernicious influence that we’re combatting: Donald McGavran church-growth philosophy which flows with American utilitarianism, pragmatism, and consumerism to produce the model of the mega-church as the goal which is pervasive—and I don’t mean just the big churches, but even in the little churches, the mega-church is just the goal. Is that your perception?

John: Yes, even in smaller congregations in smaller communities, Instead of thinking in terms of how do we best serve the community, how do we grow spiritually,and how do we grow deeper in our knowledge of the Word, the emphasis is still on how we grow numerically.

Paul: Right, and how you grow numerically is not through a scholarly engagement with the Old Testament, but a kind of concealed light treatment—a kind of “gospel-light.” But the whole trend in preaching is toward a kind of spectacle and production—as is the music—all bent upon delivering a product.

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Music: Bensound

What is the mystery resolved in Christ? Paul connects the resolution of this mystery to the meaning of world history and to the meaning of predestination and the role of Israel and the Church. (Romans 9-11)

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Music: Bensound

There is no personal relationship to God apart from the historical ground of the covenant with Abraham fulfilled in Christ. The perverse underside of the law draws us in through imagining we can gain righteousness through agonistic struggle or through intensified personal effort or emotion – through an intensified “personal” disembodied relationship. This leads to the fruits of the law.

The problem Paul struggles with is how to avoid the trap of perversion, that is, of a Law that generates its transgression. Paul presents a sinful perspective on the law which generates transgression (and transgressive desire), but he presents no way out of this bind other than through re-founding subjectivity in Christ.

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Music: Bensound

NT Wright says, “The story of the new exodus in Christ and the homeward journey of God’s people led by the Spirit provides the setting for incorporative and participationist language.” This is over and against the old Lutheran reading, right? In other words the way you are saved in a Lutheran/Calvinist understanding is not so much through participation in Christ but it’s through an imputed legal righteousness. That leaves out the narrative reality that is being described.

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Music: Bensound

Paul and Frank start a conversation about a Biblical understanding of communion and what it may mean to restore Biblical practice today.

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Music: Bensound

Resources from the conversation:

1. Didache
2. Alexander Campbell, The Christian Baptist, “On the Breaking of Bread”

For further reading:

1. Lindsay, Dennis R. “Todah and Eucharist: The Celebration of the Lord’s Supper as a ‘Thank Offering’ in the Early Church.” Restoration Quarterly 39 (1997): 83–100.
2. Gese, Hartmut. “The Origin of the Lord’s Supper,” In Essays on Biblical Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1981.
3. Hicks, John Mark. “Churches of Christ and the Lord’s Supper: Twentieth-Century Perspectives.” Stone-Campbell Journal 13 (2010): 163-176.
4. Hicks, John Mark. Come to the Table: Revisioning the Lord’s Supper. Orange, CA: Leafwood Publishers, 2002.
5. Thurian, Max. The Mystery of the Eucharist. American ed. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1981.

Paul describes  the problem with divine satisfaction and presents an alternative biblical understanding.

As long as we are willing to sell our brother down the river, have the other suffer instead of us, I believe we have no part in true Christianity. When we are willing,though, to take up the cross and stand with those who are suffering, stand with those who are oppressed, then I believe we have joined the way for Christ.

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Music: Bensound

What is the Church and how does it save? The point is not that we have to negotiate between two realities – there is only one cultural reality and this is that established in the body of Christ.

As NT Wright has put this, “No first century Jew could imagine that the worship of their God and the organization of human society were matters related only at a tangent.” That is that who God is—think of the Old Testament means coming out of the nations, forming an alternative economy—what is the economy of the Jews? It’s the strangest economy of the world, it’s built on Jubilee and Sabbath. Every 50 years everything reverts back [debt is erased]. Now, whether the Jews practiced that is in question, but Jesus came preaching, “The year of Jubilee has arrived.” Here is a kingdom, a culture that is going to put into practice the ideas built into Israel. It’s a social rebellion—a departure from the most powerful Empire in the world. This should resonate here. We live in the most powerful Empire in the world. And the tendency is to continue to make bricks.

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Music: Bensound

The New Testament describes the defeat of sin and death and the devil. Historic explanations have missed this focus by picturing atonement as removing an obstacle located in a singular person (God, humans, the devil) when all three are involved in the construct which the cross addresses.

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The scapegoating of Christ pronounced by Caiaphas is the height of political genius and definitive of majority rule. It is this evil that Christ came to defeat. Paul uses Rene Girard to explain scapegoating, the way it consumes all in its wake and how it is exposed by Christ.

The New Testament puts on display the logic and workings of human politics and shows us the logic at the center of human political strategy.

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Music: Bensound