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Intro
Ch. 1-3

So I’m reviewing Doug Pagitt’s new book A Christianity Worth Believing and posing some questions to this emergent leader and ecclesiastical provocateur (which may result in a blogerview…blog interview with Doug…). I’m gonna look at chapters 4 and 5 today, which begins laying the ground work for his faith-repainting effort in the rest of the book.

He begins chapter 4 by pointing out that “the Bible was written to a particular people in particular circumstances.” Furthermore, “The gospels are not generic, abstract truths. They are embedded stories. They are filled with culturally relevant language, images, and symbols that made them ring true in the hearts of their listeners.” And similarly, the gospel is to be retold in away that makes sense to this time and space. The gospel itself doesn’t change, but the retelling of it does so that we too can find Life in it.

It’s called contextualization. It’s about making the expressions of God and His Story indigenous to particular groups of people and particular times.

For example, just listen to the voice of the Masai people in Kenya and Tanzania as they retell God’s story in their own words.:

We believe in one High God, who out of love created the beautiful world and everything good in it. He created man and wanted man to be happy in the world. God loves the world and every nation and tribe on earth…We believe that God made good his promise by sending his son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left his home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, showing that the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by his people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died. He was buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day he rose from the grace.

“The hyenas did not touch him.” What a wonderful way to express the resurrection of our Lord and communicate the majesty and glory of the Story of God using their own language! Notice what sort of language was not included: Trinity; sovereignty of God; election; determinism; the omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence of God; and other Western theological constructs. In other words, these African people crafted a theological credo that was contextual to their expression of faith in Jesus. Because as Doug writes, the expression of faith in theology is never universal, anyway, but is in fact very particular.

And this is where I believe Doug is going with this book: our dogmas and doctrines of God, of humanity, or Jesus, of sin, of salvation are firmly embedded in the Greco-Roman context of another time and in some ways have become meaningless in even our own postmodern Western context. Imagine, then, how those Western, Greco-Roman theologies and doctrines appear in an Asian or African context. The Aristotelian Unmoved Mover concept of God, which is shared by many contemporary Western Christians, just will not translate to the Masai people.

Though as chapter 5 explains, the Greco-Roman version of Christianity was always a cultural adaptation and never meant to replace the Hebrew version. “Rather it was intended to help that story make sense to a different set of people.” But as Christianity spread throughout the Mediterranean and further West, the Christian faith lost it moorings in the a Hebraic understanding of God’s Story. The process is called Hellenization and has been taking place ever since the third century.

And what’s more: Doug thinks we’ve ended up with a change faith as the result of the Hellenization and re-Hellenization of our faith. “Whether we like it or not, whether we are aware of it or not, when the telling of the gospel changes, the meaning of the gospel changes with it.” So from his perspective, from Philo to Augustine, to Calivin we’ve received a Greco-Roman version of the original Hebrew version of our faith. All of our concepts of God, Christological categories, concepts of sin, etc…are thoroughly rooted in a Greco-Roman worldview. The questions as Doug puts it, then, is this: “Is it necessary to convert to a particular worldview in order to hold to the Christian faith? Or in this case, does a person have to be a fifth-Century Augustinian in order to be a Jesus follower?”

Ok, here’s the thing: I certainly understand where Doug is coming from. Through 20th century scholarship in such fields as the Historical Jesus studies and New Perspective of Paul, the Church has become much more aware of its creep from a 1st century Jewish understanding of Jesus and our faith in Him. Much of our Western version of Christianity IS thoroughly Platonic and has lacked the Hebraic icing to make it more real than it is often presented. But some of my problem with this book is that the entire argument rests on this dichotomy of Greco-Roman vs. Hebraic. While I understand that our Western version IS Platonic and lacks Jewish nuance, is it fair (or even faithful to the faith) to chuck what the Zeigeist of History has handed us?

He asks if a person needs to be a fifth-century Augustinian in order to be a follower of Jesus. The question is asked in a away that pits Jesus against Augustine, as if we are following (the real) Jesus or following Augustine’s Jesus. But if History has determined that Augustines understanding of God is what is real about God and His Story (or in more academic terms, if Augustinian theology is what has been determined to be orthodox Christianity), then wouldn’t following the Jesus necessitate doing so through Augustine’s categories and understanding?

And what about the notion of progressive revelation? The idea that the Spirit of God continues to unfold divine self-disclosure (aka revelation) to the world as time progresses, that a simply Hebraic understanding isn’t good enough. In other words, we humans continue to understand God in different categories because the Spirit of God continues to unveil himself to us. Thus, we have a deeper, more nuanced understanding of how God relates to himself because of the doctrine of the Trinity, an understanding the early church didn’t have because they didn’t have a more progressed self-disclosure of the Divine.

Again, I appreciate Doug’s critique, but in what I’ve read I fail to see how he takes into account Progressive Revelation or appreciates what the Spirit of God has given us through others, like Augustine, Aquinas, or Calvin. Now I am all for rethinking our categories and even moving beyond a strictly Western theology, I guess my struggle (which exists beyond this book) is what do we keep and what do we pitch. The rest of the book is Doug’s attempt to help me and others sift through the wheat and chaff.

(As an aside comment: another disappointment I have with this book is the lack of citation. He does use endnotes and does sometimes cite, but mostly his ideas and new understandings go un-cited, leaving the reader wondering where the heck he got his bit of revelation! Next time, would you please provide a bibliography so we can see if your newfangled ideas are rooted in previous scholarship or simply Pagittianism!)