Ken Myers at the Jonathan Edwards Institute

As I mentioned in some previous posts I had the chance to attend the Jonathan Edwards Institute conference a few weeks ago in Annapolis.  One of the best parts of the conference was getting to meet and hear Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio.  He had one plenary speech and did a few seminars.  One of the seminars he did was called "Citizens of Heaven and Members of the Body."  In that seminar he basically was dealing with the theme of the church as the new or alternative polis (city), and the implications this has for us.  He spoke pretty much conversationally in this one and my notes are a bit disonnected so I'll just share a few thoughts from the talk, and may even come back to them at a later time.

He commented heavily on three books.

Christ plays in Ten Thousand Places by Eugene Peterson

Against Christianity by Peter Leithart

Revolution by George Barna

Unfortunately I didn't always catch which book he was talking about at which time and the notes really come across as a bunch of sound bites but hopefully this is helpful.

We have an inadequate understanding of church that is rooted in an inadequate understanding of redemption.

We tend to see the church as a spiritual service center, mainly concerned with meeting the spiritual needs of the individual while not really understanding spirituality.

Jesus' spiritual life involved His body.  He cultivated his relationship with his father in bodily ways.

Eugene Peterson - Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places

We don't insist merely on the immortality of the soul, but on the resurrection of the body.

Recommended reading - C. S. Lewis - The Abolition of Man

God cares about what He has made - our salvation, being restored to a right spiritual relationship with God, is the beginning of a new creation.  Creation is not a burden, it is not raw material, it is not a problem to be solved.

The church needs to give instruction about what redemption looks like as it is ramified - as it spreads out into all our lives.

If you do something that is immediately successful, you have probably not aligned with the Holy Spirit, but with the spirit of the age.  If you do something in the church that is immediately successful you probably ought to ask "what am I doing wrong?" 

Secular history is here so that the church can be built up.  The rise and fall of empires is just the scaffolding for the building of the church.

Cultural institutions carry with them assumptions about what it means to be human. "You deserve a break today" - there is an anthropology, a moral philosophy in that statement.

Separation of church and state often translates into separation of body and soul.

Peter Leithart - Against Christianity

Leithart says "Christianity" is a heresy. "Christianity" suggests that God's redemptive program involves creating an ideology or set of abstractions.

Rather, God's redemptive activity is the calling out of a people who live out His callling.  Orthodoxy serves life, not life serving orthodoxy.  God is not interested that we just become perfect little minds, He wants us to live out the consequences of truth.

The bible is not an ideological tract.

Conversion doesn't just install a new religious program over an existing operating system, it installs a new operating system.

Check out Colin Gunton writings on creation and trinity.  Much of our thinking about creation has a kind of unitarian cast to it - the biblical picture is trinitarian, not unitarian.  We think about the image of God in individual terms.  We are created in the image of a God whose essence is love and relationality.  We are created for a kind of developed relationality.  If our whole person is redeemed we are redeemed in our relationality as well. 

Colin Gunton - "The One, the Three and the Many."

George Barna - "Revolution"

This book is pathetic!  it is a pitiable book. 

This is a radically individualistic book.  The point of the church is that you have to learn to get along with people you don't like.  Part of our redemption is learning to care for those who are boring.  If we don't pursue that in the church, then when we go out into civic and political life, where we are necessarily social and communal, then we are going to bring all kinds of utopian or false ideas when we try to figure out what it means to live in the civic order.

The church is a polis, a community, a city.  If we are not committed to that, we are not going to learn the lessons we need to bring a vision for the new humanity into our civic lives.

The most common term for church in the NT is ekklesia.  The contemporary meaning at the time of the NT was "an assembly."  In the Septuagint it is used to describe the covenant making assembly at Sinai.  It is also used when the people are called together for the dedication of the temple. 

Barna has an ekklesia that never assembles.  He talks about the etymological meaning of the word, but never takes on the usage of the word.

The church was an alternative governing body for the city and in fact the beginning of a new city.

Human beings aren't essentially individuals - we are persons in relationship.

The redemptive work has to involve communion and community.  When churches organize they are outposts of the new humanity.

We tend to think of the church as an entity with a soteriological message.  We don't talk as much about what, now that the rebellion has been put down, how we can live out the kind of life He intended.  The church is the community that strives to learn and display that.

Alot of the work we do in the civic world is not triumphalistic, it is keeping things from being worse than it would be if we weren't there.  Alot of life is damage control.

One of the things that has hurt us in our day is that we have tried so hard to change the culture but we haven't sought to build the church. 

One of the problems we have is that we tend to treat our views as if they are idiosyncratic.  The gospel is that everyone is a human being and humanity has a kind of givenness to it - it has been distorted because of sin - and the message of redemption is that this form can be restored.

We have separated creation and redemption - we have treated redemption as a means of escape of creation.

Resurrection and the Moral Order - Oliver O'Donnell O'Donovan

The church is not an escape from everyday life, it is a place where we discover a template for all of life.

Anabaptists understand covenant theology better than reformed people sometimes - the reformed tend to understand the church as a court, a juridical entity, the anabaptists understand it as a communal entity.

Question to ask about the Ten Commandments - "what makes this a good law?" "What is there about the order of creation that makes this wise?"  Honor your father and mother isn't merely a prohibition to get kids in line it is a picture of what the blessed life looks like.

Gilbert Mylander - we have a calling to bear one another's burdens, and because of this some of us are called to be those burdens.  It is a uniquely American thing to seek to relieve our burdens.

Comments

[Patricia]

Interesting. It is just me, I am sure, but I am confused about whether you agree with Leithart's new book and where your comments about it end in your post. I haven't read anything by Leithart, with the exception of BRIGHTEST HEAVEN OF INVENTION - which is the spine to our study of Shakespeare, which is why I am curious. Thanks!

[Brian]

Ken Myers is one of my favorites. After reading your comments here and and your God-centered post I think you might enjoy the talk I heard Ken give at a Bioethics conference in Nashville. In it, he talks about the incarnation as the basis for bioethics. It's not a technical talk, but he he does spend a lot of time talking about the body and material things and how he have made artificial distinctions between them and what we call "spiritual". You can find his talk here.

Scroll down to the last lecture and look for the link to the MP3 file.

[cavman]

Ah, the church is not a court, among Reformed people. The Session, or elders, is the court. That is the parallel with early Israel. The elders oversaw the community life of the town. If I am correct, anabaptists undo this by rejecting authority and placing all on an equal plane. but I have not studied anabaptists thoroughly.

[Russ]

Maybe I missed it - have you talked about Myers's plenary session (on a "deeper disestablishment")? The title was very intriguing.

[Allison]

Thanks for posting this!

We were at the JEI conference as well, but chose to go to another session and later regretted that neither of us went to hear Ken's breakout session by this title.

Glad you enjoyed the conference! This is our second year and we plan to go every year if we can.

[Allison]

Oops. I got this confused with a different session-- we DID go to this one. It's the other Ken Myers one we'd wished we'd gone to. Anyway, thanks for posting the summary. It's a good reminder for us. (That's what I get for posting after only scanning and doing a million things at once.)

[David Wayne]

Patricia - I haven't read the book so I am not inclined to comment much. A good friend of mine whose opinion I respect thinks Leithart sets up a straw man, and if you accept the straw man then the rest of the book falls into place. The comments I have listed there sound basically good in certain contexts but I don't know what Leithart's context is.

Brian - thanks for the heads up on that.

Cavman - good catch. I don't know that Myers distinguished here between the church and it's leaders, but your point is an important one.

Russ - my battery died during that session so I have no notes from it. I have ordered the CD though so hopefully I can put something up later.

Allison - hope to meet you next year.

[David Reimer]

Resurrection and the Moral Order - is by Oliver O'Donovan. Oopsie!

[David Wayne]

David - thanks - I've changed that.