Author: Matt Jenson
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Faith is Nothing
Faith is nothing. Really, it is. In fact, one way to ensure missing the gospel is to think faith is something. But it’s not. It’s really nothing at all. Faith is a negative concept that opens up space to speak about something else. It has what John Webster calls a ‘rhetoric of indication’, one which…
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The Heresy of Cool
Coolness is heretical. Or at least the pursuit of it is. This is because an inverse relationship exists between our attempts at being cool and our faith in Jesus Christ. The one struts, confident in his ability to do and say all the right things. The other limps, just as confident in his ineptitude, his…
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(How) Do Women Sin?
Back in 1960, Valerie Saiving Goldstein wrote a short article called “The Human Situation: A Feminine View” in which she made a simple assertion: men and women sin differently. In her own words: The temptations of woman as woman are not the same as the temptations of man as man, and the specifically feminine forms…
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On Division in the Church
While his Christology leaves much to be desired, the grandfather of liberal Protestant theology, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) has some great thoughts on ecclesiology. Consider the following: [T]here are frequently also efforts at union which do not originate in the Spirit of the Church, and the success of which cannot therefore be regarded as a gain,…
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The Emerging Church: Evangelical Poster-Boy or Whipping-Boy?
It seems that the emerging church (hate to use that singular, but it’s convenient) scratches a couple of different itches amongst evangelicals. On the one hand, it is hailed as a fresh expression of evangelicalism’s ever-outgoing nature. It is contextualization for the sake of conversion. On the other hand, it represents the (further) watering down…
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Emergent Allergies: Bigger is Better
If anything, for emerging churches, smaller is better. But why? Like any renewal movement in the church, the emerging church movement hearkens back to the good ol’ days of Acts 2. These were days of community, economic simplicity and radical discipleship, days when the church was the church and the world was the world. But,…
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Emergent Allergies: Boundaries
The problem with boundaries is that they serve too often to keep people out, rather than to keep people in. Insider/outsider, or ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ language too often threatens to undermine a gospel which is about an ever-expanding ‘us’ group. Furthermore, it tends to seduce us into thinking that ‘they’ are the problem, at which…
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The End of Integration?
In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, David Brooks laments the ‘end of integration’. (Read the whole piece here.) Nothing is sadder than the waning dream of integration… Expecting integration, Americans find themselves confronting polarization and fragmentation. Amid all the problems that have made Americans sour and pessimistic, this is the deepest… But it…
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Emergent Allergies: Systems
As part of an ongoing series of posts on emerging churches, I’m going to look at a few emergent allergies — things that get emerging churches itching and scratching and threaten to leave an embarrassing rash. As I noted in a previous post, the early days of deconstruction are receding from view as these churches…
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(Dis)continuity in Creation and Redemption
Christian theology must attend to both continuity and discontinuity when speaking of creation and redemption… So much of theology comes down to strategy. That is, how does the gospel need to make its way into our lives and churches here and now? Liberal Protestant theology could use a good dose of the discontinuity. A little…
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The Who? What? Where? When? and Why? of the Emerging Church
I’ve just finished up co-teaching a class on ‘Readings in Emerging Church Theology’ with Ron Benefiel at Nazarene Theological Seminary. What a joy to be talking church, theology and ministry with pastors-in-training! Too many conversations on this subject begin, ‘What exactly is the emerging church?’ The response is some variation on, ‘Um…well…it’s sort of…well, it’s…