jeremyduncan.ca

What I believe

// March 5th, 2009 // No Comments » // church, theology

Part of what we need to work towards at Westside is a statement of faith. I have been reluctant to work towards definitive statements for myself in the past because they are far too often used in a negative context to exclude rather than as a center of gravity to pull people together.

The problem is without that centering idea, it’s tough to give context to decisions and their impact in community.

So here’s the language I’ve been using for the past year or two in my own mind to understand Jesus.

Jesus is God, stepped into history (for me this is about the divinity of Jesus – it’s what makes sure my faith stays Christian and not just Jesus-based enlightenment)

To save us from ourselves (this is about sin, but trying to understand it not as a list of taboo actions or ideas but as worst tendencies inside me. It’s about the hard edge of Jesus teaching – you’re way is death)

To show us a new way to live (this is enlightenment for me. Jesus is not just religion, Christianity is not just mental ascent to ideological principles. The Jesus way is a new way to live and grow and become)

To dismantle the infrastructure we’ve built between ourselves and God (this is about religion. Jesus comes to help us step over it, to move from the life we’re living directly towards the life we were meant to live)

And invite into relationship with our creator (this is about experience for me. My faith is logical and rational but never completely defined by empirical evidence. There is, always will be, and must be, the personal non-transferable relationship that exists between myself and God)

Still needs work…

Death of Jesus: Part 4 of 4

// October 30th, 2008 // No Comments » // church, collected thoughts, theology

Obviously the metaphor of Christus Victor was born out of the context the early Christian church found itself in, facing directly into an unprecedented barrage of persecution. It was shaped by the struggles they were facing and the cultural context in which it was born. These early Christians were giving imagery and metaphor to help them articulate their fundamental belief that through Christ they had been reconciled to God.

This is part of the healthy way that the church has evolved throughout its history in a continual effort to find new and meaningful ways to talk about their faith. That process of cultural evolution has continued.

Substitutionary Atonement
The predominant metaphor that is heard today as the evangelical church talks about the atonement is one we call substitionary atonement. Sometimes we call it vicarious atonement or propitiation or judicial theory or penal substitution, but all of these subtle variants are a form of a metaphor that paralleled the development of the modern legal system. This framework focuses on the divide from the diagram earlier (see Part 1). Paul writes to the Roman church and says, “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” and we are disconnected from God by those shortcomings. The theory of substitutionary atonement lines this reality up against the model of the developing legal system. We have transgressed the standard that God has set for membership in his social order much the same way a criminal transgresses the social order that society has set for itself. Similarly to when someone breaks rules and must be penalized through fine or imprisonment, God has set a penalty for our transgression, and that penalty is death. Now that is a bit of a kludge on the metaphor, which has been articulated much more eloquently to reflect the nuances of the relationship between God, law and sinner by better theologians. However, in its most basic form, substitutionary atonement is a legal picture of our relationship to God. The twist comes in because God sends his son, to pay that penalty for us. In his death he saves us from the consequence of our own actions by stepping into the gap for us.
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Death of Jesus: Part 3 of 4

// October 29th, 2008 // No Comments » // collected thoughts, theology

This brings us to our second major lens on the meaning of the death of Jesus

Moral Influence
CS Lewis, among others, wrote a lot about this concept I’m calling moral influence. Lewis described the very appearance of a moral objective standard as an argument for God. At the same time his belief was that this appeal to an objective moral standard could not be explained as mere instinct, because it does not always win out, nor as mere social convention, because it appears to transcend and is appealed to across cultural divides, nor as a law of nature because the very idea of morality is prescriptive for our world rather than descriptive of our world. Therefore he argued that morality, in and of itself, points us towards not only God, but his intervention into the human story. Jesus steps into that story to bring us a more full picture of what a human life can be. This divine example of humanity becomes an influence on us of unequaled proportion. In fact, Jesus demonstration in his life and in his death is so perfect, and so powerful that it has altering effect on the course of human history helping to point us towards God.
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Death of Jesus: Part 1 of 4

// October 25th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // church, collected thoughts, theology

I taught a session last week on the death of Jesus as part of our Backstory curriculum.

Since then a number of people have asked for the audio and/or notes so I figured I would rework the info into an article for the blog… then I remembered that I have my regular job/writing to keep up with. I still think it’s a good idea (for my own personal thought as much as anything else) but I need a bit more time to put the information into proper(ish) sentences… so I’m going to be posting it in pieces over the next week or so as I go.

Hopefully it can help shape a different (or at least broader) frame on Jesus life and death than the sometimes myopic view presented in the evangelical church.

Intro
There are a number of traditions in the family of the Christian Church and each of those have placed a different emphasis on parts of the life of Jesus. The Eastern Orthodox church has primarily focused on the birth of Jesus – his entry into the world as the focal point for their theology. The Roman Catholic Church has built much of their emphasis around the resurrection, that fact that he died and came back to life as their focus. The protestant tradition which is where Westside has come out of, by contrast, has primarily focused their attention around the death of Jesus. Of course none of things can really be separated off in a meaningful way, because they were all a part of the story of Jesus.
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un’writ.ten

// September 18th, 2008 // No Comments » // church, collected thoughts, quotes, theology

[transcription from the first message of our fall series at un'ed.i.ted spirituality]
Wikipedia – as far as I’m concerned, is the final store of all human knowledge

It is the intellectual equivalent of a flash mob for me

Hundreds upon thousands of individuals contributing their part to a story bigger than any person could write on their own
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“What are we here for” or “Under-developed thoughts on me and God”

// August 7th, 2008 // No Comments » // theology, unfinished thoughts

I had an interesting conversation with Matt (works at Westside) a couple weeks ago. Some of the ideas floated into my message last weekend but definitely weren’t completely developed or (truthfully) ready for primetime.

The conversation centered around the fairly weighty topic of the meaning of life, or more specifically the purpose of life. What are we here for in terms of our relationship to our creator? Classically the church has answered that with any number of variations on the theme of; humanity exists to glorify God.

But that got me (and Matt, sorry to implicate you in my wonderings) wondering about what that does to the character of God. At some level the idea that an omnipotent creator would create for the sole purpose of having his creations praise him does seem a bit narcissistic. Almost as if God was feeling a bit unsure of himself and needed some positive reinforcement. Though, I suppose that, if anyone in the universe could be excused for a sense of narcissism, it would be God.
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Chickens, Eggs, God and Causality

// October 13th, 2007 // 3 Comments » // collected thoughts, theology

Oddly, it came up in conversation at breakfast this morning. (then again he always knew it would) Not your usually morning fare but of late it seems to be a familiar point of discussion. (or perhaps he didn’t)

The question specifically, did God already know that my Eggs Benedict would be overcooked, almost dry, even before the chef rolled out of bed this morning, perhaps even before the proverbial chicken or the egg. The question in general, which is entirely more enticing than my eggs, is, does God know the future and then if that is true what does it mean for God to be outside of, or unaffected by our concept of time. Strangely of late I have entered into this same query in a number of conversations. Each time becoming more and more convinced that the standard response; “of course”, as most standard answers are, is entirely a product of its familiarity rather than its utility.
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Bad Exegesis

// August 21st, 2007 // 4 Comments » // church, theology

Alternate title: John MacArthur versus the Bible.

John MacArthur doing about the worst bit of exegetical gymnastics I’ve seen in a while.

Al-Qaeda + the Emergent Church

// July 27th, 2007 // 2 Comments » // church, random, theology

Of all the crazy nut job arguments I’ve read lately. This has got to be the best.

ht Jordon Cooper

Statement of Faith

// May 11th, 2007 // 5 Comments » // church, emergence, theology

Creating a statement of faith…. I think this is a good idea, not for the typical reasons a statement of faith is used, that is to exclude people from some form of closed group; a church, a picnic, a basketball team… maybe not the basketball team but they are generally used to decide who is in and who is out of a group like a church or a circle of friends, hence the picnic.

That type of exclusion, I’m not interested in, but given my last (long) post about dynamic balance and the inherent need to shift with culture if we intend to remain in the center of our faith I suppose it is important to articulate the center, at least where we imagine it to be today.

And so the exercise I propose is an endeavor to create a snapshot of my faith; today; or at least over the course of the next couple days/weeks/months. Into that I’m enlisting you, that is, anyone that stumbles across this blog. Help me articulate what is at the core; the essential, uncompromised, unyielding experience of truth we find ourselves living in.

I’ll be adding my thoughts over the next (insert open ended period of time here) knowing that, “reality is the dynamic medium in which human knowing does its work” and my work continues to be one, most decidedly, in progress.

quote from Paul Spalding
Proclaiming Christian Truth in a Postmodern Culture