Finding Momentum

I wrote yes­ter­day about being in a sus­pen­sion in between “cat­e­gories” and fig­ured it would do some good to clar­ify what’s going on in my head.

Let’s take for exam­ple, my iden­tity as a Christ-follower. There are, quite frankly, too many lay­ers for me to deal with on my own:

This year I’ve found myself drawn to Reformed the­ol­ogy; find­ing my heart com­pletely enam­ored with a God who rules rightly and justly and lov­ingly and wrath­fully in a man­ner that is a dimen­sion or six over what my human mind can com­pre­hend. My friends in these cir­cles talk about the beauty of the Gospel with so much pas­sion. And yes, I’m a closet John Piper fanboy.

On another level, my involve­ment with Inter­Var­sity on cam­pus has opened up my eyes to the sys­temic injus­tices of this world and how the king­dom of God through Jesus is ori­ented to “bind up the broken-hearted, pro­claim free­dom for the cap­tives and release for the pris­on­ers.” This the­o­log­i­cally lib­eral approach takes up social jus­tice issues, call­ing atten­tion to global crises (e.g. fram­ing the suf­fer­ing in Dar­fur as a moral issue), call­ing for polit­i­cal account­abil­ity (e.g. debt can­cel­la­tion to Third world coun­tries as a Bib­li­cal con­cept) and, on a local scale, sim­ple acts of good deeds and jus­tice towards the poor, home­less & needy.

Many of my close friends and fam­ily have been Pen­te­costal folks, liv­ing out the real­i­ties of the Holy Spirit in every­day life. They know God is real because the Holy Spirit works in the every-day. I know I come into these things with more than a lit­tle cyn­i­cism, but I’ve heard and seen more than enough to keep proof pos­i­tive that the Holy Spirit works today in real, vis­i­ble, tan­gi­ble (and intan­gi­ble) ways (–heal­ings, mir­a­cles, knowl­edge, crazy out-there stuff). And man, have you ever seen any­body live out life more pas­sion­ately than a Pen­te­costal?

And finally, a nod to my friends who are Emergent-type thinkers, who attempt to take a step back and exam­ine the faith with post-modern tools of decon­struc­tion. The more rad­i­cal ones will talk about how words & mean­ings are fluid. They’ll do their best to reveal Jesus in a culturally-relevant light. These folks are about the holis­tic expe­ri­ence of the Divine–in terms of imple­men­ta­tion, they expe­ri­ence Jesus in every­thing from art to dance to poetry to liturgy to YouTube. “Hey–nobody likes ‘reli­gion’ so let’s just tear it all down and start from the basics.”

I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that these camps can’t be com­pletely melded into One Awe­some The­ol­ogy because each one begins with a pri­mary value over another. One begins with the Cross, the other begins with the King­dom, the other begins with Pen­te­cost and the other one, Culture.

But because I’ve been hang­ing out in each cor­ner, I see bits of God revealed in each (and, admit­tedly, see flaws in each, too). I’ve heard it said that the Gospel is like a dia­mond with many facets. I’m still some­what reluc­tant to find a home in any one camp, for fear that it would flat­ten this dia­mond and com­pletely obscure the other facets.

(Aside: I’ve been hav­ing a very “meta” moment lately as I real­ize that I’m start­ing to iden­tify with the Reformed folks and imme­di­ately find myself resist­ing that association–then real­iz­ing it’s only because I don’t like the label. Categories–blast!)

Don’t get me wrong–all this talk about “camps” and the­o­log­i­cal dis­agree­ment shouldn’t divide the church (although sadly, it some­times does). I’d say we all share 80% of the same beliefs–Jesus, essentially–and the other 20% are cause for thought and research and prayer.

I’m really strug­gling with inte­gra­tion right now. I want to know Jesus in 3-D. I need that solid foun­da­tion to stand on. Jesus, I need a clear pic­ture of you.