James Henley one of the students on CYM had a great reflection as we sat around the dinner table so I asked if he would put it together as a guest post. James blogs here Monster-in-Law move if you want to check it out.

I had some interesting thoughts (mainly questions) during a conversation over lunch at CYM about heaven and hell, and in particular to do with universalism. Although I’m not completely sold on the concept of universalism, I also equally think that our conventional reasoning around heaven and hell needs to be thought out more thoroughly. So here are some of my thoughts…

The conventional Christian understanding of the end times is that God is so perfect that he can’t have sin – evil, bad stuff, imperfection – in his presence. So by accepting him and the cross we are purified of this sin and so as perfect, complete people, we can enter his presence.

But if the major theme across the whole gospel is self-sacrifice – the sacrifice of God sending His son to be confined to a human body, and then the self-sacrifice of Jesus dying on the cross for us – then why would the same God not make the sacrifice of allowing sin into His presence? Surely, that wouldn’t be one sacrifice too far? If we believe in an omnipresent God whose presence is all around us in the world – then surely He is already in the presence of sin in the interactions he has with us. Even if God isn’t “walking amongst us” as he did in the garden, in order to be with us – in everything – he also must have to be in the presence of all the bad stuff in the world?
James

The Good Night on dvd

I have an inkling that much of what we call mission (youth or otherwise) in the UK (west) is not rooted in sound missiology but rather unconsciously influenced by western culture. In an individualistic consumer driven society where people gain identity from brands and their positioning in the world, much of the mission we undertake is individualistically focused and even some of the service based community initiatives are consumer driven they can consumed either by the participants or those receiving. We have lost the missionary call to go to communities and grow expressions of church within the community, we have lost the art of balancing our service to the community with the building of intentional relationships, lost the balance of speaking of God and being Christlike. There a number of possible reasons:
– the cumulative effect of culture on the church
– it is short cut and costs less in terms of time and commitment
– we are in the in-between time where there are still churches so the focus is on the individual and calling them to join existing communities of faith
– in a similar vein a failure to embrace the reality of the current state churches/ and most denominations resulting in a rearranging of the deckchairs on the titanic

• The Lion in Winter ipod

mentality rather than a willingness to get out of the boat
– existing communities of faith wrongly think that they reflect the wider communities they are placed in
– a lack of discipleship and cheap christianity
– a focus on teaching and singing rather than space for mission and experiments in being inclusive faith communities
– a selfish desire not to been seen as hypocritical that dis-empowers us from action and challenge.

The reason for the title for this post is that we have lost much of the raw reality of Christianity (VERY aware I am sitting in my comfortable house on my laptop typing) and as such the raw missionary impetus to go and be and see what happens. More that this the need to deconstruct our faith before we go, and to go whilst we are still deconstructing, to go with our questions, so that our being reflects our questions and so allowing what happens to be fresh and raw.

I sit here thinking okay so how does this work in the real world? If i brought this to a local church what would the response be? Well first if they were up for the challenge the focus would be on the deconstruction bit; as teaching is overly loaded in most churches and familiar and comfortable – I expect they would opt for a series of teaching weeks to get their heads around it and then maybe something would happen. This is not raw Christianity, it would be sanitised, packaged. After the death of Moses God tells Joshua and the people (all xxx thousand of them) they have three days to prepare and then they will enter the promised land. Can you imagine trying to prepare to go to war, emigrate, move your whole family and community in just three days? All the time still grieving for a leader who has died and being unsure of the guy taking his place. These people went with questions, they went with their whole worldview turned upside down, they went with little preparation all of which caused them to go with faith.

I read something somewhere last week about questions from below. These are human questions about truth or doctrine that we cannot answer from below. The answer can only come from above – from God. I found myself speaking at the weekend at a church about mission in front of church (see off the beaten track/tacking stuff) and some of the questions after were these below questions. That is not to say the questions are not valid, and maybe worth discussing but they can sidetrack us getting on with the mission at hand.
Questions from below are bit like when you are thinking about buying a car, all of a sudden the model you are looking at seems to be everywhere. Now I have become aware I would really like to build a bit of list of these questions from below. Here’s a few to get you started although not everyone will think they all constitute questions from below.

Who will be saved?
Are you saved?
How do you become a Christian?
What will happen to babies and children who die?
What is church?
The whole predestination thing?
What is hell/heaven like?
Is there more than one way to God?

After Good Friday how did the disciples cope? For us we know how the story ends, the hope of Easter Sunday. We tend to focus on the confusion and expectancy after the women have been to the tomb and discovered the body missing. Yet the in between period and turmoil must have been terrible, how do you cope after the expectancy of the previous three years, walking and talking with Jesus? Every time you see bread or wine, what is going through your mind, does it help when it seems your world has just come apart?

Trying to reflect on this in between time is hard. A way in is to try and imagine the disciples scattering after the arrest, and that feeling of loneliness. Most of us will have experienced loneliness from time to time but this must have been a loneliness of body, mind and spirit. A loneliness not just of missing the physical presence of a friend, but a loneliness of mind as all the thoughts and expect ions have gone and loneliness of spirit when God is distant or even seen to have died.

1 Cor 10:23″Everything is permissible”—but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible”—but not everything is constructive. 24Nobody should seek his own good, but the good of others.

This has been one of those weird un-understandable verses to me for a long time, but with what I am learning about law and rules I’m wondering if I’m beginning to understand it.

A couple of the problems with rules, in my mind, are:

• They can’t guide you to do the best, optimum thing at any moment, because they are generalised ideas.
• Knowing a moral rule is not the same as knowing God – following rules can in fact appear to reduce your reliance on knowing God. I say ‘appear’ because we are tempted to think that we are better because we followed the rule and perhaps if we are better then we don’t need to know God so well.

I’ve started to notice that Jesus never forces us to do what he would like us to do, he very much leaves things to our own free choice. You could say that, therefore, he permits us to do anything – which leads us to choose, ourselves, what we will actually do. By moving from a set of rules, where you were permitted to do certain things and not permitted to do others, to acting out of a changed spirit inside it would seem that everything is now permitted. Note the second verse above “Nobody should seek his own good, but the good of others.” Also note that we are still capable of acting independently of God’s guidance, acting out of our will rather than His – that we can and do still do wrong.

Antinomianism P.S. I Love You trailer Clue full

is listed in Wikipedia as “Antinomianism (from the Greek αντι, “against” + νομος, “law”), or lawlessness (in the Greek Bible: ανομια), in theology, is the idea that members of a particular religious group are under no obligation to obey the laws of ethics or morality as presented by religious authorities. Antinomianism is the polar opposite of legalism, the notion that obedience to a code of religious law is necessary for salvation.”

Often antinomianism is painted as a way of life that means you can sin as much as you want to! Well, that would be a horrific lifestyle, but one that I don’t think antinomianism is responsible for. There is a big difference between “no rules” and “no rules, be as evil as you like”. To me antinomianism is “no rules, follow God’s heart in you” – where’s the evil in that?

Surely obeying a rule instead of acting out of God’s guidance is just as much an act that is separate from God as breaking a rule outside of God’s guidance. The act, whichever one it is, still comes out of a separation from God and therefore is a sinful act – sin being separation from God and sinful acts being what you do in your separation from God. Rules do not bring the desired result, in fact they tend to reinforce our ‘stuck in death’ state.

So looking at the opposite behaviour – having a relationship with God and acting directly out of it, having the Holy Spirit inside and acting from that – we see that rules have no place within our relationship with God. God breaks through the barriers and allows us to know him, meaning we no longer have to approximate what he wants, we can know what he wants and do that – in fact we will want to do that just as much as he wants us to do that.

When we are ‘in Christ’ there is no room for rules, rules which cannot bring us to doing the right thing. We are left instead with the single broad command to love – and we can only love when we are acting in God’s will that we know through his Holy Spirit… surely…

When I did the series of posts on redefining church I briefly explored the concept that the church has an intrinsic sub cultural weakness, and like many institutions this is a preference for evolution over revolution, yet I feel that the shifts we see in scripture are so dramatic that they are more like revolutionary change.

Pete Rollins has been exploring the concept Revelation as a rupture and you can check out some of his thoughts here which in many ways helps describe the type/scale of change and root of what I was getting at. However I find it quite hard to find which post to recommend on his site so would suggest as an alternative to check out the talk he gave at Greenbelt 2006.

The preacher this morning made reference to this verse as a Joshua moment.
“And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” Joshua 24 v15 KJ

It got me thinking about a modern interpretation of it. It has always been read as a way of saying me and my family (and in ancient times the rest of the extended household or servants etc) but I wondered how a literal interpretation could help us today. There is something implied in the text about going Gods way with everything you have. Obviously for most people our house is our biggest asset but I was thinking how it is also a place of privacy and a sense of my space and the tendency to see it as mine which could take us away from following God. If we were to commit to the literal version it would get us to question how we use our house, and reflection on how we opened up our life and house would help us encounter God in a deeper way.

Bristol CYM is hosting Pete Rollins in March, unfortunatly it is smack in the middle of when the baby is due so it is unlikly I will be able to attend. I have heard Pete speak twice and read his book and blog, and am really impressed by what he has to say. There are a few people who are saying anything that new, but Pete does bring a challenging paradigm of thinking and I think he is one of the people we really need to listen to. Find the flyer here

• The Onion Movie film

and come and hear, engage and question.