Eric (& Tim),

Yeah, and #7 should work for theology students, too: We choke on verses like 1 Jn 5:18 due to a faulty practical anthropology—we don’t really think that the Old Man in Adam is still there, ready to be appropriated by the flesh the moment we feel like we need a taste of life from the world. Our flesh is unredeemed, so it is always gassed up—on “high alert”—anytime we feel like taking a nostalgic trip back to Egypt, even if it’s “Grade A, USDA-inspected” flesh (Rom 7:14-25).

Whenever “we” do that, “we” are not born of God—”we” are driving around in the Adam with which we have re-clothed ourselves. But whenever “we” abide in our new identity in Christ (2 Cor 5:17), then his seed abides in us—”we” do not sin, and that enables us to swallow “whole” some of the other “chicken bones” in First John: 1 John 3:6- 9.

Think about what’s happening when you get out the Dad Voice to say something like, “Landon, we don’t hit people.”

In 1 John, John speaks as a father to his children, not as a professor to a classroom full of theology students.

Probably sharing in His body and blood together would be a good start.
But we have a hard time doing even that. We’re so convinced that our tradition Got It Right that anything that deviates from what we expect is automatically an occasion for serious balking. “We can’t worship with those people!”

I don’t know where this journey goes, but for me, one of the key waypoints along the path was the realization that we are not the philistine biblicists that we think we are. That realization turned out to be the price of admission for a whole bunch of other things. It relativizes our strand of the tradition, weakens its grip on us. There are certain things that aren’t okay to say in our strand of the tradition, even though they’re in the Bible — and we don’t tolerate anybody saying them, even when the guy points out chapter and verse. There are strands of the tradition out there that obey biblical commands that we just slide by without noticing (a subject for future posts), or worse, commands that we were specifically taught not to obey. There are actually people out there that get some of these things right, while we get them wrong. If we are willing to learn from them, we can.

That realization allows me to profit from the whole Body, not just the narrow sect where I was raised. It’s one of the things at the very core of River Ecclesiology. The way I got there was hard experience, and in a post like this, I am challenging other people from similar backgrounds to recognize and learn from their own experience.

I know how this sounds, but I really am just following Jesus’ example here. I’m not speaking on my own authority; I am repeating what I heard the Father say. If God said it, I shouldn’t be embarrassed to speak the way He did. If He inscripturated it so people today can read it, I shouldn’t be ashamed to say it that way to people today. Take #4 for example: Time after time, I have heard evangelical pastors carefully mincing about at communion time, at such pains to explain what the Supper does not mean that they couldn’t even bring themselves to repeat the words that Jesus said over the bread and cup. The heirs of the Reformation, blundering headlong where even Zwingli feared to tread! It’s pathetic. And some of these same fellows have sternly cautioned me after hearing me unapologetically say “This is the body of Christ, broken for you….This is the blood of Christ, shed for you.”

When I start talking about Christian unity, the question I hear most often is, “How can you tell when you really shouldn’t work with someone?” One of my answers is that if the person claims the Bible as ultimate authority, and then gets offended when it says something he doesn’t like, we’re probably going to have a hard time working together.

Elegantly put. Time in the ‘wilderness’ — whatever that looks like for a particular individual — is essential to hearing God. We all need it. Where we go from there depends on what we hear; we don’t all wind up hermits, thank God.

That’s exactly where I am today. Though I would word my prediction a little differently. It goes something like this: People will leave traditional church for missional community just long enough to gather what the mindset is all about. Once they’re immersed, there will be a secondary ministry back toward Christians in the traditional setting and they’ll be perfectly blended.

Sometimes you need to separate from something just long enough to figure out why it has to be left, to hear the voice of God, to obey it.

Thanks so much! I’ll certainly be looking up Horace Bushnell.

thanks again!

Christianity is a religion of profound experience, founded on experience. The three saw Jesus transfigured on Mt. Tabor, thereby confirming the prophetic word (1 Pet. 1:16-20). The twelve (and Paul) saw the risen Christ with their own eyes. The believers in the upper room experienced the outpouring of the Spirit, with the empowerment that conferred. When Paul wrote Scripture, he appealed repeatedly to experience — of the deep past, like Abraham’s and David’s experience (Rom. 4), and of the immediate present, like the Galatian believers’ experience (Gal.3:1-5).
Not only does Scripture appeal to experience, Scripture is regularly an account of experience. A sizable portion of the Bible was received in visionary revelation — Revelation, for example, is John reporting his experience of his vision. John’s and Matthew’s gospels are reports of their experience. Mark and Luke are reporting on others’ experience, as is Paul in 1 Cor 15:5-7 (and then his own experience in v. 8). And so on.

Now yes, it’s true that appeal to experience can be done badly, and often has been. But this is just to say that counterfeits exist — which ought not to surprise us. After all, we do have an enemy, and he does seek to steal, kill and destroy. Big deal — we’re called to be adults and exercise discernment to tell good from evil. That happens by doing it (Heb. 5:14), so let’s get cracking. Even if you don’t believe that visionary revelation and prophetic words occur today, they certainly did in the NT times, and people had to know how to tell whether it was from God or from a demon. Scripture gives us ways to discern what sort of experience we are having — which is where I am headed with my question (my last comment, above) on how we should think of Bloom’s experience.

I don’t agree with you that Gary is concerned with promoting experience at the expense of truth. My read is that Gary has a problem with promoting experience under any circumstances whatever — although I’d be happy to find that I’m wrong about that.

My concern is promoting “truth” apart from experience. If you have the Scriptures, but no experience, then you the same thing Saul of Tarsus had, the same thing the Pharisees had — which is not particularly helpful. These writings were founded in experience, testify of experience, and exist in order to change our experience and bring us into personal communion with God. If none of that is happening in a person’s life, then he simply doesn’t know the Bible. He may study the Bible, recite endless trivia about the Bible, have degrees in the Bible — all of that. But he doesn’t know the Bible or the God who wrote it.