Scot McKnight: July 2007 Archives

I let the cat out of the bag Saturday in the Weekly Meanderings and the nice conversation that followed from it. I linked to the story of the reporter named Lobdell who, after a conversion to the faith and after covering the religion scene for a good long while, has walked away from his Christian faith. I mentioned then that I was doing some research on conversion theory and apostasy, so here's the first in a series this month on loss of faith. My question will come up later in this post.

In 2002 "we" -- not Tony and I -- published a book on conversion theory and how that theory shows up in the Gospel stories of conversion. The book is called Turning to Jesus. The basic thesis is this: all converts go through a similar process. It begins in one's context, is prompted by a crisis, leads to a quest for a resolution, finds itself in an interaction and encounter with the advocates (Bible, charismatic evangelist, etc), leads to a commitment and to consequences. Conversions, of course, vary -- some have an intense crisis while some simply shuffle through a series of "gentle nods of the soul."

In that book, which is rooted in Lewis Rambo's monumental Understanding Conversion, I stated that all conversions involve apostasy -- and saying so is not so much a moral judgment or a theological position as a social description. To enter one faith system, one leaves another. (Children emerging into faith is a little different, but that is not the point here.)

I am working now on the last chapter in a book for Baylor University Press tentatively called Finding Faith/Losing Faith: Stories of Conversion and Apostasy. "We've" done one on why evangelicals become Roman Catholic, one on why Jews become messianic, one on why Catholics become evangelicals and the study I am presently doing is on why people abandon the Christian faith.

Today's post is a brief one but I'll do some more this month. I begin with the story of Charles Templeton, told in his Dawkins-like diatribe Farewell to God. Famously, Templeton was a close Canadian associate of Billy Graham and a powerful evangelist with Youth for Christ and church-building pastor in Toronto. Everyone knew of his legendary preaching abilities and the impact he was having in evangelism and preaching. In the 1950s, just before Billy's famous LA Crusade, Templeton revealed to Billy Graham that he was struggling with his understanding of Scripture, inspiration, and overall biblical commitment. He said he and Billy were on two different paths.

Well, I can't tell the whole story here. What I see in Templeton's decision to abandon the faith is the clash of scientific data with the biblical record -- in other words, Templeton had an intellectual crisis from the conflict of scientific facts with the biblical worldview. Templeton left his church, went to Princeton Theological Seminary, then was employed as a mainline evangelist but within a few years, because he could not with integrity continue to preach what he was no longer sure of, left preaching altogether.

For Templeton it was all about intellectual freedom. It was a hard difficult decision for Templeton, but here are his words: "The oft-postponed decision irrevocably made, there came a soaring sense of freedom, not least, intellectual freedom.... My mind could freely quest where it would. I could examine any question without a predisposition to harmonize it with the body of Christian belief. I felt loosed. Set free!" (222).

"In the end, one must follow the truth as one perceives it. Not to do so is to live a lie" (224).

While one cannot reduce Templeton's loss of faith to his problems with Genesis or the Bible, these issues for the heart of his crisis. What do you think the Church can do more to encourage genuine research on these issues and, what is far more important, bring such research into the local church? What does your local church do? What about your own journey?

This book is a record of his response, but it comes off as a lengthy diatribe against the Genesis accounts, the entire presentation of God in the Bible, the improbability of miracles, the moral hypocrisy of the Church in history, the strange stories of some pastors, how the Bible and Church understand women, and the Christian theory of good and evil. It isn't simply the rant of a disaffected Christian but it does turn into this at times. Most of his argument is by assertion and logic.

Templeton, who died in 2001 after a lengthy, successful career as a newspaper, magazine and TV editor and leader, was an agnostic -- not a theist (he doesn't think one can believe in a personal God), not an atheist (the evidence is the same against God as for God), but an agnostic (one can't know such things).

Eugene Cho is keeping us up to date. Pray.

Kris, my dear wife, is a hawk when it comes to healthier foods. We gave up on red meat aeons ago and we have salmon filets twice a week now and maybe every other week we eat tuna steaks -- don't overcook those things or you'll be eating some primitive form of rubber. We have turkey or chicken in our marinara sauce with pasta, and she's always scouting for the healthiest options. Now we've discovered something even healthier when it comes to "meat."

And I'm not talking about that fu-fu soy stuff, or some kind of veggie burger or veggie steaks. We don't eat pork very often, and not because it is levitically unclean.

Which meat source is the healthiest? FDA stats:

Meat Fat Calories Cholesterol Sat Fat Protein Iron

????? 2.42 g 143 kcal 82 mg 0.91 g 28.44 g 3.42 mg
Beef 11.73g 217 cal 85 mg 4.63g 26.11g 2.71 mg
(90% lean)
Chicken 3.57g 165 cal 85 mg 1.01g 31.02g 1.04mg

Do you know what the ????? -- yep, that's right: Bison or Buffalo.

Any experiences or advice on bison?

So Sunday evening we got out our first Buffalo Burgers, from our local grocery store, and cooked them over medium heat so as not to ruin the moisture -- it's real lean stuff -- put on some tomatoes and some onions and a little mustard. Maybe one of the finest burgers we've ever had. We are now committed to eating some buffalo each week.

Here's the company we bought stuff from. The Buffalo Guys.

Missional Jesus sympathized with the poor and the marginalized and the powerless. As his mother was a widow and suffered, so Jesus was sensitive to widows. Here's a story that opens a window on missional Jesus:

Luke 7:11-17: 11 Soon afterward, Jesus went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went along with him. 12 As he approached the town gate, a dead person was being carried out–the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. And a large crowd from the town was with her. 13 When the Lord saw her, his heart went out to her and he said, “Don't cry.”14 Then he went up and touched the coffin, and those carrying it stood still. He said, “Young man, I say to you, get up!” 15 The dead man sat up and began to talk, and Jesus gave him back to his mother. 16 They were all filled with awe and praised God. “A great prophet has appeared among us,” they said. “God has come to help his people.” 17 This news about Jesus spread throughout Judea and the surrounding country.

1. Missional Jesus "teaches" by "showing" the kingdom's power to others.
2. Missional Jesus raises the dead -- which tells about (1) who Jesus is and (2) what the kingdom of God accomplishes. And this must be read over against the Jewish anticipation of the general resurrection at the end of the ages -- which means it is the demonstration of the arrival of the eschatological age of salvation in Jesus.
3. Missional Jesus restores people to their families -- empowering and resocializing them.
4. Missional Jesus created rumors.

Protestants today may be thoroughly surprised to learn that things weren't always so permissive and open when it comes to sexuality -- that is, between husbands and wives. Gilbert Meilaender, in The Way That Leads Home (chp. 4), puts Augustine to the test. Augustine influenced the Roman Catholic view of sexuality massively, and so it is good to state what Augustine argued.

I ask this question though: In your community of faith is there any discussion about contraception -- or is it either simply ignored or assumed as legitimate for the Christian? How realistic is the procreation theory of sexuality? the "unitive" or "communion" theory?

Augustine made a distinction between goods and pleasures -- and he was theologically and philosophically nervous about pleasures, deriving as they do from ardent desire, because humans are fallen and prone to let pleasures run amok. Here is an analogy from Augustine:

1. Food is a good because it is provided by God for our health and sustenance -- and that is all. Food eaten for the purpose of fullness or pleasure is sinful. (Augustine, you might imagine, was big on fasting, too.)
2. Sex is "a good" because it is provided by God for procreation -- and that is (about) all. Augustine actually allowed for Adam and Eve to have had coitus prior to the Fall but that is a condition in which humans no longer find themselves. So, any sexual intercourse outside of the intent of procreation partakes in desire and pleasure and outside its good.

Augustine's view is the rigor of sex for procreation viewpoint -- and it is not officially the Roman Catholic view. RCism believes -- and here I'm relying on the way Meilaender describes it -- in sexual intercourse not only for procreative but also unitive intents. Wife and husband surrender themselves to one another and come to a fuller knowledge of one another.

Contraception, it follows, is wrong because it divides the procreative from the pleasure principles.

Meilaender disagrees with Augustine. On food, he thinks there is clearly also another "good": food is also designed by God to draw humans to the table for conversation, for fellowship, and for loving one another. So also sex is more than procreation: it is also has a unitive focus.

All admit -- how can they not? -- that sexuality is not only procreative but is also pleasurable. If one puts with procreation also the unification good, is there a place for pleasure in a Christian theory of sexuality?

Now we ask a question that most Protestants don't think about. Hardly ever. But, this is precisely the theological conversation that has shaped the Church's view of sexuality. Augustine believed that pleasure, since it accompanied the procreative process, is a good if it comes as a result of the procreative intent. Otherwise, it is like eating too much or eating for the sake of pleasure alone. In other words, it is only about pleasure.

Meilaender does something I've not seen: he thinks sex, which he calls a "mode of presence to the spouse unlike any other" (140) -- should not have either the procreative or unitive intent. Instead, it is the passion of a man and a woman and both the procreative and unitive results are gifts from God. "Love-giving has been life-giving, not because the lovers willed it, but because God has so blessed it" (140). The gift is seen as gift when the wife and husband "set aside our intentions and purposes" (140). Sex then is to be sought for its communion with one another -- let God determine the gifts.

Augustine, he suggests, reminds us that sex is not simply about pleasure.

Contraception is permissible as long as the couple doesn't prolong that "mode of presence" too long -- for then it is divorced from the "gift" God gives.