:: in.a.mirror.dimly :: A theology and culture blog with the Bible in one tab and a news feed in the other.

GIBBERISH ALERT: From time to time I’ll be posting anecdotes that will be pure gibberish. There is no truth value whatsoever (which some conservative critics may say about my book!!!). I’m just having some fun with the release of Coffeehouse Theology (Sept 15th by the way). I hope you enjoy my first round of book-related gibberish.

Are you troubled by our consumer society? Do you simply buy items to make yourself feel better? Is your spending out of control? Do you make foolish purchases on impulse?

If any of these descriptions fit you, then you need to rush over to Amazon.com right now and place your order for Coffeehouse Theology!

Coffeehouse Theology has a proven Biblical method for counteracting the negative effects of our consumer society. But it won’t help you unless you buy it right now and read about the importance of sound contextual theology.

If you’re feeling down about your out-of-control spending, then the best solution is found in purchasing Coffeehouse Theology. Simply looking at the cover will put a smile on your face. What doodling! What cleverness! Why, even the spine is attractive!

And you can’t judge this book by it’s cover. Once you open it up you’ll find a virtual smorgasbord of ideas about contextual theology that will make you feel guilty about your compromise with today’s consumer culture and move you back onto the straight and narrow toward God.

And if that doesn’t cheer you up, you can always purchase the Bible Study Guide and the Contemporary Issues Study Guide. Both will increase your contextual theology aptitude and rid you of those nasty consumer habits once and for all.

Remember, you won’t start to feel better until you purchase my book Coffeehouse Theology. You’d best do it today if you want to beat consumerism once and for all.

Would you believe me if I told you Christianity aims to make God as easy to access as possible?

I have been thinking about this a lot lately, and I believe Christianity works out to be something like this. Christianity makes it incredibly easy to come to God, but once you’ve come to God, you have a lot of hard work to do. Grace is available in abundance, but obedience must follow grace.

I don’t know how exactly to compare Christianity with other religions, but for all the frustration people have with Christians who say their faith is the only way to God, I think this makes a decent case for such a “narrow” view. In other words, God wants to make himself as accessible as possible, so Jesus is sent down to earth. Jesus not only simplifies every command into one: “love,” he also dies and rises from the dead to clear a path to God so that we only need to accept the forgiveness he won by believing it is so. He even leaves the Holy Spirit to help us obey and to guarantee we’ll one day be in heaven.

No pilgrimages necessary.

No special prayers needed.

Meditating is good, but it’s more of a bonus.

Attending religious services will help, but they don’t replace meeting God.

In other words, all of the things we associate with religion are well and good, but Christianity offers a religion where God is reaching out, visiting us, and even dwelling among us. How much easier can God make it? If we start adding other religions to the mix it suddenly becomes more complicated, missing out on the simplicity God has in mind. Believe and love: these two verbs sum up so much of scripture. Why add anything else and muddy the waters?

While we can find many helpful practices along the way to help us believe and love, there is no substitute or mixing of anything else at rock bottom. God has made it simple for us to come and believe, even if we are asked to love one another, even our enemies, not to mention loving God above all else.

After taking a few weeks off from blogging due to our vacation at Lake George and some other summer projects, I’d like to begin my return by announcing the good news that my book Coffeehouse Theology: Reflecting on God in Everyday Life received a nice little review at Publisher’s Weekly. I count myself fortunate enough to have even been reviewed in the first place, but it’s a double blessing for the review to be not only an accurate summary of the book, but a generally positive evaluation of my work.

When you’ve invested lots of time on a project like this, on and off no doubt, for the past four years, it’s a wonderful relief to read this review. I’m particularly thankful that the reviewer caught on to my vision for greater Christian unity. Here’s the full review from the Publishers Weekly site:

Coffeehouse Theology: Reflecting on God in Everyday Life
Ed Cyzewski. NavPress, $14.99 paper (240p) ISBN 9781600062773
Freelance theologian Cyzewski enters into the Emergent conversation from the conservative end of the evangelical spectrum. He urges readers to explore theology while reassuring them that they don’t have to become postmodern philosophers: theology can be considered, as it were, in the coffeehouse. Arguing that “[o]ur local settings and cultural values—in other words, our context—influence how we read God’s Word,” Cyzewski approaches “contextual theology” by weaving together discussions of mission, culture, God, Scripture, tradition and the global church. Personal anecdotes of his own growth in faith are disarming in their honesty. While this accessible work is a useful introduction to aspects of Emergent theology, Cyzewski’s summary of modernism and postmodernism is sometimes too sketchy to be useful; however, each chapter includes valuable suggestions for further reading. Gently nudging his fellow Christians to listen to diverse points of view, Cyzewski doesn’t explain why he is committed to engaging in dialogue with some aspects of culture and not others (say, progressive theologians and secularists). This addition to books about emerging and missional forms of Christianity ends on a hopeful note for unity across denominations. (Sept.)

If that has you interested, the book and it’s study guides are available for pre-order with most book dealers such as Amazon.com.

NPR interviewed Evangelical pastor Rick Warren about his upcoming event with both John McCain and Barack Obama. Warren was a bit vague about what he hoped to accomplish with this event, but I liked the way he answered this question:

NPR: Do you see any sort of split or division between older evangelical voters and the younger generation coming up in the issues that are of concern to them?

Warren: I don’t see a split. I see an evolution. I’m spending almost all my time with the next generation of evangelicals. What I’ve seen is that they are broadening the agenda. But they’re not dropping the agenda. That is the biggest myth and wish that some people would like to see happen, but it isn’t happening.

In some quarters there is a reversal in thinking, but I like the way Warren is maintaining a sense of continuity with the Evangelical past, even if he wouldn’t align himself with it today. This is most evident in his statement, “I’m still pro-life, but I don’t call myself pro-life anymore. What I do is call myself “whole-life.” I’m not just in favor of the unborn baby. I’m in favor of her when she’s born. Is she a crack baby? Is she an AIDS baby? Is she a baby living in poverty? Is she going to get an education? It’s not just concern for protection of the unborn but for protection of the born, too.”

What I find most appealing about Warren’s approach is the way he’s trying to move the conversation beyond the price of oil, which is important, but a relatively soft issue for candidates to bat around. He could very easily jump behind McCain, as I’m sure the Evangelical establishment is generally thinking, but instead he’s letting his congregation decide for themselves after they’ve heard out the candidates. He seems to understand that each candidate has strengths and weaknesses and is willing to simply let them make their own arguments.

I think I’ll stop reading the news now while I’m still slightly encouraged…

I was recently asked this question by an acquaintance, and I believe it may in fact be one of the more important questions Evangelicals can answer today. With fundamentalist Islam looming as a supposed threat and fundamentalist Christians sometimes causing offense with their stringent separation from the world, Evangelicals will want to carefully parse out their differences and commonalities in comparison to the fundamentalist branch of Christianity.

Of course we can’t do all of this without a quick sweep through history.

I could start in any number of places, but I’ll pick up the story in England 1700’s. A group called the Pietists from Europe, mainly Germany, had a profound impact in the 1600’s and 1700’s, prompting Christians to seek out God in personal devotion in addition to public worship. As the Bible became available to people, lay preachers became more common, and the people took greater responsibility for their personal walks with the Lord. In this time a group began to coalesce under the banner of the simple Gospel message the Christ died for sins, rose from the dead, and we can be saved by believing he’s the Savior.

Preachers also spread this ecumenical message in America during the 1700’s, and revivals moved through a variety of congregations, though the ones with lay preachers spread rapidly such as the Methodists. Throughout the 1700 and 1800’s the Evangelical movement emerged as a Gospel-centered group, even certain denominations took up the “Evangelical” qualifier to their names (such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church).

In the late 1800’s theological liberalism took a strong hold in many denominations and removed the supernatural elements from the Bible in the wake of the scientific method. There was great anticipation about the progress of humanity under the Bible’s moral guidance and humanity’s reason until World War I broke out. In the 1920’s a group of theologically conservative Christians worked to hold on to five key fundamentals for Christianity such as the inerrancy of scripture, the virgin birth, and the resurrection. This group set a course of withdrawing from the world as it tried to preserve the truths of scripture. Thus, the Fundamentalists of Christianity formed.

After twenty years of cultural retreat in the interest of preserving truth, a number of Christians, especially in the Northeast section of America in towns such as Boston, began to rediscover the importance of an Evangelical consensus on the truth of the Gospel, much like the consensus in the 1700’s and early 1800’s. Though many laid the groundwork, Billy Graham became the face of this neo-Evangelical movement. Graham simply focused on preaching the Gospel message of salvation; however his son has since founded a relief agency known as Samaritan’s Purse.

It is this neo-Evangelical movement that we know today. Over time many of these neo-Evangelicals entered the political fray under the group known as the moral majority in order to support several issues deemed important for the moral health of America. In the past five to ten years this group has begun to unravel with more moderate and liberal elements emerging in the Evangelical camp.

Though some mistake Evangelicals for Fundamentalists, the two groups have very different approaches to contemporary culture and theology. They both believe in the same God and the same basic elements of the Gospel, but one could never drop the words of a Fundamentalist into the mouth of an Evangelical or vise versa without taking great care. One scholar once quipped that you can tell someone’s an Evangelical if he/she likes Billy Graham. In my experience, this statement is generally true.

I used to live next to a nine hole, par three golf course. The golf course was next to a river. Guess where most of my shots ended up.

What I knew about golf I gleaned from my summers working for a house painter and dear friend of mine, Jimmy. Jimmy was hosting a Spanish exchange student named Felix who also worked with us. We’d typically finish around 3:00, wash the brushes until 3:30, and then grab our clubs to putter around in Jimmy’s back yard. Jimmy sort of knew what he was doing, I knew how to putt, and Felix just hit the ball really hard. Felix had a saying that went like this, “Jimmy is stra-tee-gee. I am force.”

Jimmy’s favorite stunt was chipping golf balls off his roof to the hole dug out on the other end of the yard. Felix and I just waited until he came down.

With this kind of expertise as my guide, I’d sometimes drag my clubs over to the nine hole course and play a few holes. I rarely made it through all nine. I typically ran out of balls, patience, or both. Sometimes I managed to drive the ball clear down the tiny fairway, and even manage to plunk the ball in on four shots. This was a rarity at best. Suffice it say, sometimes my methods worked, but more often than not I ended up whacking brush back in the woods or fending off mud and crayfish in the river.

The mud almost ate my sandal once.

While there was no reason why I couldn’t keep playing golf and having a good time, it would be foolish to say that I didn’t need lessons or a training video. A bad golfer is a bad golfer, even if he sometimes lucks out.

While I don’t want to stretch this analogy too far, I think that the ways we share the Gospel are often left unevaluated because we occasionally enjoy success. If it works on some occasions, then we have nothing to evaluate, lest we undermine the well-meaning people who are just “trying to do God’s work.”

This is sticky business, however I think it’s key that we honor good intentions, while turning a critical eye to the way we live out and share the good news that God loves us and wants to know us. For example, we typically think of the Gospel as a message to be shared. Yes, we sometimes quote the line from Saint Francis about preaching the gospel by how we live, but I don’t think Evangelicals on the whole really understand just how radical a living witness to the Gospel can be. When we meet gossip with blessing, dishonor with honor, and harsh words with kind words, we are living out the reality of God’s Kingdom, living beyond the limits of this world. Suddenly these doctrines we profess have profound power over our daily lives.

While I don’t think we necessarily need to develop a “stra-tee-gee” for sharing the good news of God’s love, I think it helps to hold ourselves up to scrutiny from time to time. Are we watering down the message? Are we failing to live out the message? Are we being pushy and offensive? These are normal, healthy questions we should be asking. We can’t guarantee a birdie or an eagle every time we love our enemies or do good to those who persecute us, but in doing such things we are training ourselves to follow in the steps of Jesus. This makes it all the more likely that we’ll one day figure out that balance of living and speaking the Gospel in the right ways and at the right times.