Category: worship

Experimenting with Rosenzweig and spiritual discipline

I admit that I am experimenting.  And so I am also admitting that I do not know what I am doing.  But I am hopeful.  I am increasingly trying to integrate my general interests in philosophy and theory in my profession as a pastor.  Sometimes this works easily in cases of preaching.  Other times it works surprisingly as in the case of hospital visitation.  And sometimes it must just be experimented with.  This is what I will be doing this Sunday.

Over Lent we are having an adult education series on spiritual discipline (big surprise!).  I am leading the opening session which will hopefully give some ‘frame’ for what follows.  I was originally going to frame sessions in the context of ‘prayer’.  This of course could have been helpful but I did not know where I would go with this and also many of the other sessions deal directly and indirectly with prayer.  I have recently finished Franz Rosenzweig’s Understanding the Sick and the Healthy.  I decided that I would experiment with this work as a context for understanding the motivation and direction for spiritual disciplines.  I will in fact introduce this framework as a spiritual discipline in that I am confessing it for testing and examination.

Understanding the Sick and the Healthy is an attempted diagnosis of the illness of philosophy in its tendency to essentialize reality.  Essentialism for Rosenzweig is the isolating of aspects of reality for examination in a way that ends up distorting the manner in which reality is distinguishable but integrated (Rosenzwieg uses the image of ‘flow’ as the metaphor for engaging reality).  What is the world?  Who am I?  Who is God?  These are ultimately paralyzing questions in isolation that lead to a sickness and insulation from reality.  Rosenzweig calls then for a return to ‘common sense’ which is re-establishing an appropriate view of World, Humanity, and God.  These are pictured as distinct mountaintops in which it is impossible to have all three in view at all times though one must have a ‘base’ at the centre of the three if healing is to occur.  So what is a common sense view of the three mountaintops?

What is our world-view?  Rosenzweig warns against the notion that we can dip water out of the river to analyze as it as the world and believe that in so doing we understand it.  My reading of Rosenzweig on this is that we should not look for deeper meaning when it comes to the world.  Understanding the world means beginning precisely on the surface.  The world is not us and the world is not God.  The meaning of the world is in its relation to Humanity and God.  Therefore we enter each day “frankly confronting each thing as we encounter it; we look for nothing beyond, do not try to walk suspiciously around the object; nor do we peer into its depths, but accept it rather as it is, as it hastens towards us.  And then we leave it behind and wait for whatever is to come tomorrow.” (74)  Therefore we do not look for God in the World because the world is something and therefore not God.  This frees us to embrace a fully scientific model of engagement (as though this should still be a major question) and warns against viewing God’s ‘blessing’ in particular world events.  Because if God blesses in this way then wouldn’t God also curse in this way.  Let the world be the world in all its ferocious and unyielding consistency.

What is our life-view?  There is tendency towards trying to ‘pin-down’ our identity.  But again to isolate and abstract in this manner is to have things truly come unhinged and find ourselves in a crisis of identity.  You cannot set out to ‘find yourself’ except maybe in spite of that process.  Nevertheless we tend to situate ourselves in some form of ‘worm theology’ or act as though we are ‘like gods’.  Both instances are unhealthy thou both instances present themselves with a sort of ‘security’.  I sense again the Rosenzweig is interested in a simpler descriptive account that has no interest in a stable definition but understands the basic variability of humanity in its temporal orientation.  Here is a fabulous quote,

Let us seek not seek for anything beyond ourselves. Let us be ourselves and nothing more. Such a moment of existence may be nothing but delusion; we shall, however, choose to remain within the moment, deceived by it and deceiving it, rather than live in deception above or below the moment.  Let our personal experience, even though it change from instant to instant, be reality.  Let man become the bearer of these shifting images.  It is preferable that he change masks a hundred times a day (at least they do belong to him) rather than wear continually the mask of the divine ruler of the world (gained by thievery) or that of the world’s bondservant (forced upon him).  The hundred masks will serve in lieu of one countenance. (79)

The strength of humanity might not be in securing identity but in accepting the variability.  Let humanity be human in all its fabulous variability.

What is our view of God?  How can we speak of God?  But didn’t we also have trouble speaking of the World and of Humanity when we sought essences?  Why would we expect anything else when seek God in this way?  But the stakes do seem higher.  When we claim or secure our identity of God then what we may be doing is articulating our own highest value and therefore become more threatened and aggressive when opposed.  But God is not us and God is not world.

Throughout his work Rosenzweig gives attention to the way in which language, words, and names form the bridges between these three peaks; that allow for the flow of the river.  The same is true of God.  The world is named by humans.  Humans engage past and future through their names.  God does not need a name but a gives a two-fold name.

One the one hand He embraces sinners (Humanity); on the other, He proclaims law for the world. The root of all of man’s various heresies is to confound the two parts of His name with one another; God’s love encroaches upon His justice, His justice upon his love.  It is indeed God’s task both to maintain the two-fold character of His name as well as reconcile them.  So long as there is reason for such a division, so long as God is not God-in-Himself whom philosophers drivel about; if He remains God of man and the world, then it is He, who by means of His two-fold name transforms – and we use the word in its technical sense – human energies into the energies of the world. (92)

Have faith in God.

What does this have to say about spiritual discipline?  Spiritual disciplines are the acts by which reality is properly distinguished and properly joined.  We do not secure and reside ‘in the world’ creating life as cogs and law.  We do not secure and reside ‘in humanity’ allowing ourselves to think too highly or too lowly of ourselves and each other.  We do not secure and reside ‘in God’ retreating from the responsibilities of life and creating an idol that will not heal and redeem.  It could be argued that for Rosenzweig spiritual disciplines are those things orient life thus,

There is in addition to the world and himself, He who turns His face towards both.  He it is who summons man by name and bids him take his place in the congregation who calls upon Him.  He it is who orders things so that they may form a kingdom bearing His name.  Thus man may act unconcerned with the outcome; he may act according to the requirements of the world as it is today.  That day, the day when action is required, lets him understand what he must perform. . . . Truth waits for him; it stands before his eyes, it is ‘in thy heart and in thy mouth,’ within grasping distance; ‘that thou mayst do it.’  In the same way as he has achieved certainty concerning the reality of the world and has found courage to live, he must also have faith in God who brought him into existence. . . . The proper time then is the present – today. To avail himself of today, man must, for better or worse, put his trust in God. . . . The proper time has come [when need calls], and thus God assists you. (93)

If I have given any justice to this short work then it should be somewhat apparent that Rosensweig has indeed given us a ‘common sense’ account of things in which the world is allowed to be the world, humanity is called to be human, and God turns toward and takes responsibility for both.

I am not entirely sure what to think of this project let alone how the presentation on Sunday will go.  What I appreciate about this project in terms of spiritual discipline is its liberating and clarifying possibility.  There are many critiques out there that deal with our need to ‘let go’ of our need for control but rarely have as helpful a supplement for how to take responsibility.  Perhaps after the session I can articulate some of those possibilities.

Do my words ring

The readings for this Sunday included the following:
Genesis 1: 1-5 – creation
Mark 1:4-11 – the baptism of Jesus
Acts 19:1-7 – an account of Paul baptizing believers and the believers receiving the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues and prophesying.

My sermon last Sunday began with tracing the trajectory that connects creation in Genesis to Jesus’s baptism in Mark.  The imagery of creation (chaotic waters/deep, wind/spirit moving over them, dry land/body appearing) has to be one of the best candidates for helping to form a ‘biblical theology’.  I spoke of the culmination of this imagery in Jesus’s baptism and how the words of creation that are now spoken are ones of love.  However, I went on to say that the trajectory does not end there and continues into Acts 19.  Here is the second half of the sermon,

Continue reading “Do my words ring” →

Christian Discourses, Helplessness Blues, and the mechanics of liturgy

[This started as a simple update on my Kierkegaard reading then turned into something I wanted to edit and develop but I doubt that will happen any time soon so I thought I would throw it up in its disjointedness.]

As I mentioned in my last post, the first half of Kierkegaard’s Christian Discourses was firmly okay.  It was gently pastoral in tone while attempting to stir and provoke in content.  The second half entitled “Thoughts that wound from behind” promised to be more engaging.  The preface of the second half read,

The essentially Christian needs no defense, is not served by any defense – it is the attacker, to defend it is of all perversions the most indefensible, the most inverted, and the most dangerous – it is  unconsciously cunning treason.  Christianity is the attacker – in Christendom, of course, it attacks from behind. (162)

The final line is of course of utmost importance for what follows because Kierkegaard’s attack is against the notion that Christendom can implicitly produce Christians.  Kierkegaard begins by noting the role of circumstance in the power of a message how “the sickbed and the nighttime hour preach more powerfully than all the orators [because they] know this secret of speaking to you in such a way that you come to perceive that it is you who is being addressed, you in particular (164).  Kierkegaard relates this to his understanding of the ‘Lord’s house’ and how it is to be a place more terrifying than terror (for awakening that is) though pastors take it to be a place to preach for tranquilization.  The Lord’s house is by definition the space that a human encounters the truth, that is, encounters God.  This is a horror becuase it is an encounter with sin.

Here in God’s house there is essentially discourse about a horror that has never occurred either before or after, in comparison with which the most horrible thing that can happen to the most unfortunate of all people is a triviality: the horror that the human race crucified God. (172)

This discourse of terror is the first discourse and it is necessary.  The Christian is to use this discourse to win people – “but woe to you if you win them in such a way that you leave out the terror” (175).  So use this discourse to terrify people but “woe to you if you do not use it essentially to win them for the truth” (175).

While these discourses began with a pointed and promising account of attack or ‘awakening’ they settled into what (from a contemporary perspective) is a now familiar account of the need to ‘break from the herd’ in how you understand your own subjectivity and how it is formed.  I do not doubt the ongoing validity of this message it is only that the ‘herd mentality’ is now precisely in being unique and original.

How then does one break from the demand of uniqueness and become formed as an individual?

There is the already well commented on lines from Fleet Foxes recent single Helplessness Blues in which they harmonize on being some cog in a greater machine.

I was raised up believing I was somehow unique
Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see
And now after some thinking, I’d say I’d rather be
A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me

In that instance the strength of individuality is in its submission to something  beyond the scope of a single subjectivity.  I think this is a fair response.  The problem of course is that there is no such static machine in which humans function as the cogs and pulleys.  The response in HB is a sort of almost naive localism.

If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m raw
If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m sore
And you would wait tables and soon run the store

I say almost because of the final lines of the piece.

Gold hair in the sunlight, my light in the dawn
If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m sore
If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m sore
Someday I’ll be like the man on the screen

They recognize that this too, this honest labour, is the production of the entertainment industry.  It is the production of flat subjectivity that will not truly intervene in the existing order.  For Kierkegaard subjectivity is based around the primary human dialectic of being a synthesis of the eternal and the temporal.

It is the final section of Christian Discourses that offers some help in understanding how the Christian can engage in the practices of faith while attending to the internal dialectic of subjectivity.  This final section is a collection of discourses to be read at Friday Communion services.  As such they offer a rare glimpse into Kierkegaard’s direct and public communication on church liturgy.  There is no strength in the basic repetition of Communion as an act that builds an alternate imagination.  This would be to function as a cog some great machinery.  Rather one does indeed approach the Communion table and share in the elements but when you leave it is as if the Communion table followed you (273).  It is only possible to speak of real presence because there is continuity with the table and with Christ.  “Where he is, there is the Communion table” (273).  The Communion table becomes present not necessarily at the religious site but at the site of reconciliation that is called for prior to sacrifice (Matt 5:23-24).  “The task is to remain at the Communion table when you leave the Communion table” (274).  A sermon should ‘bear witness to him. . . . At the Communion table, however, it is his voice you are to hear” (271).  The point here is simple.  There must be continuity and congruence.  And the perhaps the solution for the church is just as simple, that is, to call individuals to both leave and remain at the Table.

Notes on Theology of Money

This Fall I plan on leading a few adult education sessions on a theological understanding of contemporary economics.  This is far out of my field but something that is continually being impressed on me as crucial for the church to better understand and engage.  In preparation I am working through Philip Goodchild’s Theology of Money.  I am about half-way through book and I am coming to realize that I should probably summarize or re-orient myself to what I have already read.

ToM is no simple theological gloss over the woes of the economy.  The heart of the work is a sustained (relentless?) conceptual framework for understanding money.  Here are a few points of orientation from the Introduction.

It is possible to consider money as mode of transcendent social/metaphysical orientation for life as other local cults and global religions have performed in the past.  One significant difference is that as an object money does not call attention to itself and therefore has alluded close scrutiny into the nature of its power.

Christianity has also largely evaded any scrutiny of the money’s power by internalizing the question of piety so as to remove it from the presence and effects of money.

The founding of the Bank of England can be viewed as a helpful image in the founding of modern capitalist economy.  As such it can be observed that from the very beginning this system functioned to create wealth in excess of itself . . . the creation of debt and interest.  With this model in place “production for the sake of profit rather than use became the dominant motivation for social activity and interaction” (11).

Money has continued to advance its place in society to the point of becoming the primary ritual activity that orients the social order in how it mediates the basic desires, values and beliefs of the people.

In order to study money it is important to acknowledge its dual nature.  It is both fixed and in motion.  And so, rejecting a basic Cartesian model of understanding Goodchild proposes 1) an ecology of money that traces its concrete relations 2) a politics of money the observes its effects over time 3) a theology of money that exposes its basic need for obligation and belief in order to function.

Hopefully more to come . . .

From Scripture to Spirit; Or, Once again away from liturgy (though perhaps returning again)

[This is a (rather lengthy) sermon I preached this past Sunday on John 16:5-15 and Revelation 1:9-19.]

I just finished my second year of college, papers were submitted and exams completed.  In honour of this occasion my roommates and I thought it would be good to hit the town a let loose a little.  So three of us headed downtown ready for a little mischief.  Now granted we were renting a house in [the small Mennonite town of] Steinbach [the fictional setting of Miriam Toews’ Complicated Kindness] so heading downtown may have limited our options a little.  In any event we hit the 7-11 for some Slurpees.  We pulled a stuffed racoon across the road by string when cars drove by.  You know, wild and crazy college stuff.  In any event as the night wore on we began to wander aimlessly around when eventually we heard some shouting.  We went to get a closer look.  Eventually we came across a man and woman fighting on the driveway.  We were quite close at this point.  Eventually the fight ended, they parted and the man got into his car to drive away.  We quickly hid behind a bush on the next yard.  Now as the man turned the headlights on and backed out of the driveway the car paused for a moment and in that moment lined up directly with the bush we were hiding behind.  The car lights lit up the bush like a light bulb clearly revealing three figures cowering behind it.  The engine was shut off and the door opened and we heard him get out with a yell.  And in that same moment we turned and ran with him coming after us.  Running down a back alley we eventually split up and I found myself running alone, well that is with an angry man coming up behind me.  Now I need to make clear that I am not runner, a sprinter at best, but I knew I could not keep my pace up.  And in those brief moments I needed to make a choice.  Bear in mind I had no idea how big or small, young or old this guy was.  I decided to stop.  As I stopped I turned around, folded my hands behind my back to face and see my pursuer.  I’ll leave it there for now.

Continue reading “From Scripture to Spirit; Or, Once again away from liturgy (though perhaps returning again)” →

A little Q&A

Question: Why did Jesus die and what did Jesus’ death accomplish?
Answer: Jesus died for our sins and his death paid the penalty for our sins.

The answer comes before the question is even finished.  In fact certain readings of Isaiah would have the answer come before the question.  Is there a particularly Good Friday answer to this question.  Shouldn’t the answer be intimately bound with Good Friday?

If I stay with the text (John was our reading this year) the sequence goes as follows.  Why did Jesus die?  Because he was killed.  What did Jesus’ death accomplish?  Nothing.   So we sit with futility of death.  The God of king and priest is dead because the one and only king and priest is crucified.  By definition then Good Friday sits with atheism and anarchism.  Good Friday sits with the knowledge that the nature of religion and empire is death.

But if you would like something other than death to sit with  and there must be something more than death because the disciples continued to live in the days between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  If you would like some words to come alongside the words of the dead and forsaken God then listen to Jesus again from the cross.  Listen to him before his final words.  He turns to his mother, the woman who gave him birth.  Jesus looks at her and then motions to his disciple standing by her and says, “Here is your son.”  And then he looks at his disciple and motions to his mother saying, “Here is your mother.”  And with these words a community is called.  A community based not on lineage, culture, tradition, status or interests.  This community is called by all who will gather and acknowledge that the gods of this world are dead and the gods of some heaven reserved for the privileged are dead.  So what will live on?  Where will life be found?  Today all we are offered are the words to turn and see our mother, our father, our sons and our daughters among those gathered at the site of death; the site too often created by religion and empire that work to exclude the undesirable.  Jesus has called a people to gather beyond the illusion of religion and beyond the power of empire; to gather in death where we must ask ourselves if love too has died.  And if love has not died . . .  then we must love.  But few of us find that place on our own so must begin by seeking the lost who have been thrust there.  Why did Jesus die?  Maybe first we need to ask another question.  Where did Jesus die?

Is this heaven? No . . . its the 44.

A few weeks ago in the first Sunday of Lent I challenged our congregation to fast from the fruits of privilege.  One minor act on my part has been to ride the bus as often as possible.  As a country-boy the bus has always been a source of fascination for me and this spiritual exercise paid dividends this last week as my experience ended comprising about half the sermon.

Continue reading “Is this heaven? No . . . its the 44.” →

Lent 1 – Taking positions

An abbreviated version of my Lent 1 sermon this Sunday.  (For some other great reflections see here and here)

I can, quite clearly, remember a handful of times having an upset stomach when I was a child.  I don’t think this was any sort of chronic issue that I suffered.  The memory embedded itself because of its strangeness.  It was not like a cut or a bruise or even a headache where the source of pain or discomfort was readily and clearly identifiable.  An upset stomach was something a little more buried.  It was something that shifted and churned.  At one point it could be a pain and at the next moment a nauseous feeling would wash over me.  Something at the centre of me was out of place and it affected my entire orientation.  And so I remember trying to sit or lie down in certain positions.  I tried to find some way of being that would ease these subterranean flows.

Continue reading “Lent 1 – Taking positions” →

Preaching Existentially?

I am noting a consistent trend in my preaching.  I am targeting the individual.  This comes in part from my own experience and formation in existentialism but also in my experience of the Mennonite church in which it is easy for individuals to point to our good works in social supports and non-violent initiatives.  And then when the individual is called to account it is typically with some moral leveraging around what else we could be doing.

The approach I am taking seeks a type of honesty that is divorced from being identified as a criteria of truth.  I am not sure where I equated honesty with truth . . . is that a cultural thing?  But, rather, I am seeking honesty as an attempt at congruence and liberation.  I am trying to push my congruence to simply acknowledge the way things are.  This is not a statement about access to some neutral body of truth but of observations.  Observations could include things like money and economic security as constituting our primary mode of personal decision making.  Observations like acknowledging the power of status and conformity within the church.  There are many observations that need to be made as such.  Subsequent qualifications can follow but I believe many of them can initially stand.  Secondly, I am trying to divorce this from the typical and almost immediate shift to guilt and/or shame.  The reason for this is not because we are not guilty of things or that certain expressions could not be considered shameful.  Rather, I want to move away from them because they are debilitating.  I want us to get a sense that we are in many ways already ‘living a lie’ so why don’t we name it as such.  In this I want the pursuit of congruence to lead towards a liberating experience and liberating expressions.

As part of being honest with myself in this process I must admit that with respect to liberation I hold to some view of ‘enlightenment’.  This does not refer to an isolated inner-journey but again of a sort of honesty that manifests itself in congruence with action, experience and belief.  This is partially informing my conception of faith in which anchors to various modes of knowledge and decision are exposed.  While I hold a high view of material liberation as it is being expressed in many contemporary theologies I cannot shake the notion that there is a prior act and experience of liberation.  I would consider the Gospel insufficient if it cannot offer liberation to those suffering under material bondage.  That is, I believe there is liberation without immediate material liberation.  This does not mean that the two are not divorced.  Rather it takes Jesus as an example in the liberating independence he exhibits despite the fact that his life arcs towards material bondage.  So while full liberation is always to be engaged and on the table this does not deny that individuals cannot already enter into forms of liberation.  For those with material forms of power at their disposal congruence will mean acting in accord with liberation; which means oppression as incongruent with liberation.

All of this is to say that I believe in a personally engaged form of faith that works intimately with if not perhaps prior to structural changes.  So I will continue to support those working on a structural level (and hope to add my own contributions) but given my primary influence in preaching this remains a fundamental orientation.  I hope to continue to push my own ‘honesty’ in this expression.  Currently I am actively monitoring the extent to which my sermon preparation reflects a safety with respect to my own economic stability.  I believe that this influence is waning but I would also admit that it is still probably the strongest external influence.  I could interpret this as a structural flaw (that is churches that can dictate whether or not they want to keep a pastor) but I am not interested in engaging it on that level (presently).  It would seem that it would be helpful situation for a church to have to reject and even fire a pastor on the basis of his or her preaching.  In any event I am working on liberating myself from economic security in my preaching.

Thoughts or criticisms of this homiletic theology?

On My Arc Away From Liturgy

I left an annoying comment on Tony’s recent post about liturgy.  His post briefly explores the possibility of the Church Year as offering the foundation for an ‘irregular dogmatics’.  My comment was simply stating that I wish I could comment because at present the notion and validity of the Church Year and its structural liturgy is, at present, in upheaval.  I thought I might try and trace my thought trajectory so that I can see where it might be heading.

As I alluded to my last post I have been preaching Romans for Advent.  Paul, having little to say about the historical Jesus at the best of times, has no Christmas story.  There appears to be no value in recounting Jesus’s birth for the sake of churches he worked with.  This led to a sort of paradigm shift which began to view liturgical practices not so much as rhythms of resistance but as abstractions displacing what should be existentially integrated (did that make sense?).  So we set baby Jesus outside of us as opposed to attending to the blood, shit and pain that comes with childbirth.

This thinking was further crystallized by a comment Chris Rodkey made on a somewhat unrelated post at AUFS.  He states,

One thing I have been thinking about as I am constructing an outline for a collaborative project a colleague and I are gearing up to write together is Jacob Taubes’ critique of Christianity in his book Occidental Eschatology. Essentially my appropriation is this: The liturgical calendar and liturgical time prevents any sense of Parousia. [emphasis mine]

Perhaps I could be convinced that present liturgies are simply parodies but it hardly makes a difference.  The point is the manner in which our lives are presently and existentially engaged.  As it turns out Dan seemed to push my thinking even further with his recent post.  He writes,

This is the season of Advent and some of my friends are writing pretty words about this time of waiting, hope, anticipation and proleptic action.  They are saying the sort of thing I used to say not too long ago.  As for me, I am tired of waiting and tired of being a good little fellow and “waiting well.”  With all due respect to my friends, I say fuck that noise.  If there is a God out there, and that God is lingering, deciding to postpone an intervention, then I think the only way to wait is to act as if God is not coming or to try and force the coming of God.  Instead of finding ways to make our peace with our godforsakenness we should absolutely refuse to accept it.  Anything is better than that acceptance.  Better to risk everything on the wager that God cares enough to intervene (although that usually doesn’t work out well) than to sit back and make peace with this.  Better to spit at the back of God if that is what will bring God to act.  Besides, it is actions like these, and only actions like these, that actually take God seriously.  Anything else in the context of abandonment is either a pale imitation of worship or idolatry.

I am not quite sure how to take this.  At present I read it as a Psalm which is fully truthful if not entirely complete (is that an insult Dan?).  This leads me to my present reading in Philip Goodchild’s Capitalism and Religion.  Goodchild looks at Henri Bergson’s work on time and freedom.  Bergson critiques ‘measured’ or ‘counted’ time.  Goodchild writes,

For synchronization to occur, real time must be replaced by an abstraction which has eliminated the essential quality of time – change.  Measurable, homogeneous time is an abstraction where nothing takes place.  In countable time, the living is measured in so far as it conforms to the behaviour of inanimate clocks. (105)

In brief, the representation of reality in both science and metaphysics is a commodification, replacing the thing with a quantifiable symbol fashioned for the purpose of exchange.

Bergson’s alternative is to place reason within the temporal process itself. . . . The experience of thinking replaces the object of thought.  Freedom must be encountered in the experience of thinking before it can become the object of thought. (107)

The question this raises is the extent to which liturgical practices actually undermine, overthrow or replace dominant social modes (empire, capitalism, etc.).  Or do they simply fall prey the near omnipotent work of commodification?  Does a flash mob singing the hallelujah chorus in a food court do anything more than make people feel good about their shopping experience?  Even the cultural liturgist Jaime Smith thinks not (I have not read his Desiring the Kingdom). (I also can’t help but cringe at Winnipeg’s attempt to piggy-back on this . . . apparently the press was there waiting for it ‘to happen’)

So that is a bit of the arch.  I still retain theological convictions of doxology as a sort of foundation for practice but as for present form of church liturgy I am becoming increasingly dissatisfied.  The issue remains the extent to which the acts and the structures produce abstractions or commodities that keep one from encountering and entering into the Gospel.  What is my alternative?  At present it is little more than an increasingly social form of (or socially aware) existentialism.  Or to be more naive . . . a biblical faith.  Hopefully, more to come.