One of the funny things about being me is that many people find me difficult to understand, but I remain convinced that this is because I am taking a very simple standpoint and applying it to profound and complex issues and people mistake the complex issues for the simple standpoint. They can’t see the wood for the trees. Now that I’m attempting to push back to the basics it seems to some, as Cheryl and Chris helpfully discuss in their comments on the last post, like I’m missing something out, or making a leap. Of course the gaps will need to be filled in, and that’s what I’m asking for collaboration in, so that we can put a course together that thinking, but not necessarily intellectual or academically inclined people, can be helped by. But my intention remains to keep the coming Kenarchy Course as simple as possible. Basically I am an evangelist of the good news (euaggelion) of the kingdom of God, which is why although I have to squint quite a bit to sign something like the EA statement of faith, I regard myself as 100% evangelical, or to put it literally, ‘goodnewsical’!

I began as a children’s evangelist, and my grasp of Jesus and his kingdom was learnt from children’s evangelists as a boy. The good news of Jesus and his kingdom that I learnt then was in stark contrast to the frequently legalistic and prejudicial teaching of the Christian Brethren church life and background in which I grew up. [See my book The Kingdom Factor (Marshall Pickering 1985), a few copies of which I still have available if you email me.]

I haven’t essentially shifted from that original ground, based on a personal ‘now’ encounter with the Jesus of the gospels, summed up in the statement ‘I believe the Jesus of the gospels to be both the Jesus of history and the God of eternity, who shows us what God is like and what humans can be like in relationship with him.’

My theological research is the result of asking the question, how can we explain the Western world and its history, and the church’s place within it, from the position of this simple standpoint. It asks how we can reconfigure our understanding of God, church and human being today and sets about doing it. Although it is a simple standpoint, it’s not static. It’s part of an ongoing ecounter and relationship with God and other people, and this blog and the attempt to put together a Kenarchy Course is all part of that.

In attempting to provide a starting point on what kenarchy means for our understanding of God, the last post focused on what the God shown to us by the gospel testimony is NOT: not wholly other and separate from sinners, not all-powerful or omnipotent, not absolutely sovereign over all and not offended or needing appeasement. All these traditional descriptions appear to be imported or discovered from a different starting point to the gospel Jesus.

So this post moves on to provide a standpoint for what the God portrayed by Jesus positively IS. I suggest that the gospel account depicts a God who sows himself into the created, natural world in order to communicate, relate, live among and save the human race and the whole created order.

Once again using the simple approach of arguing from Jesus to God, and responding to the initial impact of Jesus in the four gospels, these things can be expanded as follows:

1. God sowing himself into the created, natural world: Matthew and Luke describe Jesus as inseminated into Mary by the Holy Spirit. This appears to be the implication of “conceived by” (Mtt 1:20, Lk 1:31). Matthew points out that this fulfils Isaiah’s prophecy “They shall call his name Emmanuel … God with us” (Mtt 1:20). As Matthew’s preceding genealogy makes clear, Mary’s egg carries the genes of some very sinful, fallible humans.

2. God communicating: The gospel writers describe God speaking to Joseph and Mary by the angel of the Lord and the angel Gabriel (Mtt 1:20-21, Lk 1:26), through John the Baptist to the crowds (Mk 1:2-8), via people inspired by the Holy Spirit (Lk 1:67) and above all through Jesus who John describes as God’s Word become flesh (Jn 1:1,14).

3. God relating with the human race: Through the act of sowing himself into the human genealogy, or incarnation, God relates ontologically, which means ‘in his very being,’ to the human race. Matthew calls human beings “his people” (Mtt 1:21); Luke depicts Jesus as both the son of God (Lk 1:35) and the son of David (Lk 1:32) and in John, Jesus calls them “his own” or his “children” (Jn 1:11-12).

4. God living among us: As we have already seen in (1) above, Matthew introduces Jesus as “God with us” Mtt 1:20). Mark describes him as the Son of God (Mk 1:11) present in their streets, homes and synagogues. Luke assigns him human throne, reign and kingdom (Lk 1:32-33) and while this is clearly a very different kind of governance to that of the Roman Caesar and his puppet rulers in Israel, its referents are clearly this worldly. When John’s disciples wanted to discover what it meant that he was the son and lamb of God, he asked them to stay with him and see for themselves (Jn 1:34-39).

5. God working to save the human race and the whole creation. It is because the word salvation has been so associated with appeasing God’s supposed anger over his offended sovereignty, that it is a struggle at first to understand how big salvation is in gospel terms. Here in the initial narratives it includes saving people from their sins (Mtt 1:21), declaring the possibility of a new political order (Mk 1:15), releasing people from evil spirits (Mk 1:23-27, caring for and healing the sick (Mk 1:20, 34), scattering the proud, deposing the mighty, elevating the humble, feeding the hungry and dispossessing the rich (Lk 1:51-53).

Clearly kenarchy introduces a very different paradigm for understanding God than our more familiar one. This has massive implications for our theology of history, the future (eschatology), salvation (soteriology) and the Holy Spirit (pneumatology). It reconfigures the way we understand ourselves as the created image of God and the corporate outworking of human life in the world in terms of ecclesiology, missiology, politics, economics and ecology. Understanding these implications and their practical applications in daily life will shape the content of the Kenarchy Course as it develops.

All you friends and visitors to this blog, thank you for your interest and comments! Please keep them coming. Before proceeding to the next stage of the course outline I thought it would be helpful to give some advice on the comments and discussion. The good thing about Kenarchy is that it is stirring up interest at a number of levels. I really welcome very down to earth comments and quite academic ones. So can I encourage comments at both these levels, and in between? This means that when you read the comments, just skip the ones that don’t connect for you. But please don’t let them make you feel inadequate or thick and decide the course is not for you. The main text of the last two posts is giving a good idea of the course level. If you can handle that, fine! The course will not require a theology degree!

Today’s blog sets about the process of creating a general outline for the proposed Kenarchy Course. If you are new to this, for the sake of brevity I refer you to the previous post for an introduction. There the principle of starting only with the testimony of Jesus in our understanding of God, life and the universe is explained.

The four gospels expect us to encounter God through Jesus. This is why I also refer to them as the “testimony of Jesus.” From the outset, God and Jesus are correlated with power, or authority. This is obvious, for example, in the connection that Mark makes between “Jesus Christ, the Son of God” and “Lord” (Grk kurios: supremacy) which in Strong’s concordance is taken to denote supreme authority (Mk 1:1-3). But the nature and operation of this power is immediately presented as being of a totally different kind to that which was expected, then and now. I call this difference ‘counterpolitical’ because instead of indicating power over people in the way that the political systems of this world generally function, the divine power that Jesus manifests is a kenotic, or self-emptying power that is given away for the benefit of others. This is clear in numerous ways. I will indicate just four of these here, and am asking you, as a reader who’s willing to collaborate in putting together the substance of this Kenarchy Course, for at least two things. Firstly, what do you make of these examples, and what better or further ones can you think of which show Jesus’ power, and therefore God’s, in this counterpolitical way? Secondly, if you disagree with the angle being taken in these interpretations, or perhaps want to agree but find problems, please say so, and give your reasons.

The difference between God’s counterpolitical power as demonstrated by Jesus and the way power has generally been understood:
i) God is not wholly other or separate from sinners according to Matthew: Jesus is given the name “God with us” (Emmanuel) (1:23), yet has already been described as a human being (1:1), deeply associated with human sin (1:3,6,10; cf Gen 38:15-29; 2 Sam 11:2-17; 2 Kings 21:1-6), a helpless baby (1:23,25), and a saviour from among us (1:21). This is not a God who is wholly other and separate to us in the way that we have generally been given to understand.
ii) God is not all-powerful or omnipotent from Mark’s perspective: Jesus is introduced as “Son of God” (1:1), and “Lord” (supreme authority) (1:3), and yet he is impelled by another (1:12) and tempted by yet another (1:13). So God is not irresistibly powerful as the almost universally accepted idea of God’s omnipotence has led us to expect.
iii) God is not absolutely sovereign over all, as Luke makes clear: Despite being designated great (Grk: megas), son of the Most High (Grk: hupsistos) and given throne (Grk: thronos) and reign (Grk: basileuō) (Lk 1:32), the status of Jesus is associated with humility (Lk 1:48), and the marginalised, in this case unborn babies (Lk 1:41-44), women (Lk 1:30, 41-43) and the poor (Lk 1:52-53). So for God, true greatness, the highest place, and the nature of governance is identified fully with the lowly, the poor and the excluded.
iv) God’s authority is not offended and needing appeasement from John’s viewpoint: While John is unequivocal about Jesus’ equivalence with the Father as in “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known” (Jn 1:18 NIV), the author then has him depicted as the lamb of God (Jn 1:29) who desires intimate relationships with humanity (Jn 1:38-39). If Jesus is fully revealing God, then God is the lamb carrying in himself the cost of intimacy with sinful human beings, rather than the traditional idea that Jesus is the sacrificial lamb providing access to the intimate side of a powerful sovereign God who has been offended by our rebellious behaviour and rejected us accordingly.

The implication of these four examples, given that it is God the creator, sustainer and ruler of all that Jesus reveals, is that the power through which all things are held together is kenotic power, not sovereign power. Or to put it another way, it actually is love that makes the world go round. My thinking is that these gospel depictions of power will open up practical discussion of the radical nature of God’s power in comparison to and distinction from the generally accepted expressions of power both then and now.

So please comment!

For some time now, a bunch of us have been contemplating the idea of a Kenarchy Course. Something that would provide a new theology for the repositioned church, or ecclesia. Something relational, collaborative and practical but with meaty content you can get your teeth into. As we are convinced that the very nature of knowledge is relational and collaborative, we are keen for your help in putting this together and I will be using the blog for this purpose for a while. So please, whoever you are with an interest in this, join us in putting the course together, and then, if you are motivated by the experience to get more deeply engaged, join the course and encourage others to do so. We are aiming to have the material ready to begin in September 2012, and we are anticipating a combination of freely motivated distance learning, mutual mentoring, coaching, evening seminars and occasional over night residentials. Depending on the take up we hope to base these in various regions and cities both within the UK and further afield. If you like the idea of something happening where you are, don’t hesitate to let us know!

For those new to this blog, let me quickly explain this word ‘kenarchy,’ as it is probably new to you. It is invented out of two Greek words, kenō to empty and arkhō to rule. This word kenō is used by the apostle Paul to describe what Jesus was all about when he explained that because Jesus was God-shaped, he emptied himself out in love for the rest of humanity and the whole creation. The word arkhō is used in scripture in some very interesting ways, and is applied to Jesus by Luke when describing the beginning of his ministry (Lk 3:23). It basically refers to the priorities of governance, or what is of first importance. After a lot of discussion with others, some of it recorded in the early stages of this blog, as to a contemporary way of describing the kingdom of God, it seemed that kenarchy, combining ‘emptying out’ with ‘the beginning of rule’ was a good way to refer to the substance of God’s kingdom or rule as revealed in Jesus. As it is a new word, it forces those who encounter it to rethink what the kingdom of God means, and this, in our view, we urgently need to do. As my friend Andy Knox put it when several of us met last night to discuss this, there will need to be three essential components to the course: what kenarchy means for our understanding of God and the created world, what it means for our personal life and identity, and thirdly, what the practical implications are for social and political life on the planet. Given this pretty much encompasses everything, there will need to be a few sub-categories!

It may be helpful at this point to state what is original and ‘new’ about the theology of kenarchy. This is its procedure of working from Jesus to God in all our understanding of his character, nature and relationship to the world. This is a very different starting point from the traditional one, although we hold that it is the heart of Jesus’ own teaching as found in the gospel narratives. The traditional approach begins with the assumption that God must be sovereign in the way that he operates. This is often expressed in something like Thomas Aquinas’ categories for the definition of God, in terms of what I call the ‘omnies.’ That is to say that to be God he has to be omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent and that because he is all powerful like this he has to be obeyed. You might say that rationally you would expect God to have these characteristics, or that if you were God it’s how you would operate. But the theology put forward here doesn’t begin with human reason or inclination as its starting point, but our encounter with the Jesus of the gospels and it argues from him to God. From this perspective, instead of the big thing about God being his sovereign power, the big thing is his kenotic love, that is to say the way he emptied out the great power that he had in order to initiate and sustain humanity and the universe. It is from this starting point that everything else flows.

Tracking the trajectory of New Testament transcendence, it amazes me that the idea of sovereignty stuck to God so strongly. But the subsumption of transcendence by sovereign power is that strong. This blog continues its commitment to reconfiguring a transcendent good that is free from the transcendent evil that sovereignty so often covertly connotes. So continuing from the previous post, this one explicates a transcendence exemplified by freeing the oppressed and declaring the era of divine favour.

Freeing the oppressed: One way of paraphrasinging this, which I rather like, is “apostling away free those who are crushed to pieces.” I particularly enjoy this because of the way that it detoxifies apostleship from its association with hierarchical superiority. The assumption of this is so strong in so much contemporary church thinking and cultural forms that continue to associate the restoration of apostleship with expectations of wealth, sumptuous offices and the power to hire and fire without recourse to consultation or justice. Then secondly it is good because it reveals the practical capacity of the incarnation to make the most broken victims of evil transcendence the primary advocates for the good. In so doing it upends the kingdoms of this world.

Declaring the era of divine favour: Luke’s clear statement that Jesus closed the book at this point cannot be underestimated! Here Paul’s understanding of Jesus as the end of the law (Rom: 10:4) and James’s recognition of the triumph of mercy over judgement (Jam: 2:13) is seen in Luke’s account with particular clarity. It follows that the day of vengeance of our God that follows in Isaiah’s prophecy is now over, complete and abolished in the incarnational life of Jesus. A statement which he pressed right home, as Luke makes clear in the narrative that follows, where the predecessors of today’s Palestinians and Syrians are favoured over Israelis. We prefer to hear of judgement and vengeance on our enemies, not that they are more the object of God’s grace than we are who think we deserve it. A viewpoint that is likely to get as much approbation now as then! Good transcendence is not about vengeance. Jesus shuts the book on it. It is fulfilled in him at the cross.

Chris Bourne has very kindly researched the source of the problem that some people are having with this blog and WordPress free sites generally. As he summarises “this is not a browser issue. It is a WordPress issue. It will affect people who have either a WordPress.com account or a gravatar account. WordPress.com now finds the cookies from these and forces a login requirement no matter what the security settings on your site. This is hugely unfriendly and potentially dangerous. For example, I can now, because I am logged in, add new posts without reference to you, and this might not be what you want at all.”

The WordPress team are receiving lots of complaints about this. As you can see here: http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/you-must-be-logged-in-to-comment?replies=327 The discussion gets quite heated, and some WordPress staff tried, sort of, to help.

But sadly, overall, WordPress don’t seem to be responding sympathetically, having closed the comment string on their site and suspended customer service for the time being for those like me who have the free version of WordPress. All this does not make me inclined to pay for the full version. Althugh many folk don’t report a problem, there is significantly less traffic on my blog since these changes took place. So I will keep going with WordPress for the time being, but unless they sort it out soon I will look elsewhere for a blog site. Any further ideas on the subject will be very welcome!

Luke juxtaposes Jesus’ successful confrontation with transcendent evil with his declaration of the nature and outworking of transcendent good. Describing his return to Galilee “in the power of the Spirit,” Luke quotes Jesus as he publicly applies Isaiah 61 to himself: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Lk 4:14-19). From this we can deduce that the nature of divine being, or good transcendence, that Jesus manifests, is summed up in practical terms by communicating good news to those in poverty, proclaiming freedom to those in prison, restoring sight to the blind, and sending out free (literally ‘apostling’ apostello) those who are oppressed, and announcing the year of the Lord’s favour. Let’s take these five practical, immanent expressions of the divine character present in the power (dunamis) and anointing (chriō) of the Holy Spirit and look at them carefully.

i) To preach good news to the poor. There is a single word for “preach good news” used by Luke here. It is euaggelizo, the word from which the terms ‘evangelize,’ ‘evangelism’ and ‘evangelical’ are derived. It is important to reflect on the implications of this. The goodness of this news is vested in the revelation that God is transcendent good and that this goodness is specifically angled toward the poor. While it is clear from the other gospel writers that the word poor can be extended to include the poor in spirit, Luke chooses the unequivocal word for the destitute, ptōchos, beggars who have nothing but what they can receive from those who give to them. This, we shuld note, roots the good news back into John the Baptist’s politically orientated repentance which begins with the redistribution of wealth. So we can say that the good news is about a transcendence that manifests practically in the world by redistributing wealth to the poor. This is what evangelism and evangelical ought properly to begin with. I, for one, am reluctant to let go of these words, despite the fact that they are purloined and misused by many today who have no understanding or sympathy with this kind of radical politics.

ii) Proclaiming freedom to those in prison. In Jesus’ day this would have included common criminals and the likes of Barabbas “in prison for insurrection and murder” (Lk 23:19). It is no surprise therefore that the incarnation of transcendent goodness led to his release from prison. While it is quite in order to apply this freedom from prison metaphorically, it clearly has primary reference to God’s sympathy for those in prison, whatever they are doing there, and his determination to get them out as soon as possible. It has to mean at the very least that humane conditions, hope, protection, rehabilitation, honour and above all mercy for offenders and enemies, irrespective of whether or not they present a danger to us, is the divine priority.

iii) the recovery of sight to the blind. What makes this very challenging is that by the same token with which “release for the prisoners” carried metaphorical potential but needed first to be taken literally, this aspect of good transcendence also needs to be taken literally first. Which immediately brings the healing character of God into play, and particularly in relation to eyesight. So God focuses his kenotic love on those who can’t see, an orientation that is born out in the gospel narratives where Jesus is described as showing practical love toward and restoring sight to the blind (Mtt 9:27-30, 11:4-5, 12:22, 15:31, 21:14 et al). It follows that prayer, the gift of faith, medical knowledge and the resources to make it available is the particular application of transcendent good. This is especially poignant and salutary given the ease with which hundreds of thousands of African children’s sight could be saved easily and cheaply right now if we cared to attend to it [http://tinyurl.com/bpjsjzz].

This post is now long enough to be going on with, so I will continue with the implications of a transcendence committed to freeing the oppressed and declaring the era of divine favour in some days time.

Hi folks. I’m about to post a new blog over the next few days. However, someone else is finding difficulties with accessing the blog, basically getting lots of advertising pop-ups. Please let me know if this is happening for you too. From my end everything is working normally. However if this a wide problem I’ll have to upgrade to WordPress pro in order to get support to sort it out, which I’m not particularly anxious to do unless it’s necessary, but I will if the problem is widespread. So can you also let me know by commenting here if you DON’T encounter any problems, as well as if you do!

Cheers,

Roger

Hello all you surfers! Are any of you finding problems when trying to post comments on the blog? One good friend is reporting problems, so if you are, please email me at admin@passion.org.uk and we’ll look into it.