A friend commented on my last post with a great question that was originally to be a comment to that post, but has now been given a home on my blog frontpage. Hopefully I haven't misstated any positions held by adherents to any of the ideologies addressed below. Feel free to correct me if I have.
Without having studied each of the dispensations proposed by any of its proponents, I will start by soapboxing with regard to the concept. Those who propose dispensationalism find eras in history where God not only acts differently toward humanity but expects different things from it. Most notably are the law v grace, Israel v Church dichotomies. Most people, myself included, will protest to the general concept of God changing. Dispensationalists state God is not changing but the way he expects humanity to react to him does. In the law period humans were expected to follow the law and share it with other nations. However - in the grace period we are told by Paul and the Gospel writers that God has now revealed a new plan through Christ.
So our Dispensationalist friends have two groups of people both loved of God and, since we are in the early 20th century (when dispensationalism hit the popular culture) we are hyper concerned with the afterlife and not the salvific implications of the here and now. Both groups need to get to heaven, but they are of different dispensations. This is why I believe there is such a strong tie between dispensationalists and pretrib rapture believers. The pretrib rapture lets the dispensationalist get rid of the church and let God appeal to his "chosen" nation one last time before armageddon.
This is poppycock. First there is the concept of the two Israels - the nation and the faith. The faith, also called the "remnant" is the group God's promises are given to. Paul tells us, the Church, that we are grafted, adopted into God's family through Christ. There is now no longer any distinction between Jew and Gentile, slave or free... Moreover, the promises given to Israel now belong to the faith Israel (the remnant) and the Church. God need not whisk away the Church while he deals with the Jews - the Jews will enter heaven by the only way God has established - through faith in Christ.
Now that is a diatribe to sum up my dispensationalist take. To relate the dispensations to the eras of human history is a bit of a stretch the more I think about it. Each paradigm in Church history has been brought about by outside stimuli. Communication revolutions, Scientific and Philosophical revolutions have given the face of human society many different looks. God given? I believe God has his hand on human history and perhaps He has purposes for these paradigms. That is where I lean.
People criticize Bush to this day on both sides of the argument: Bush didn't have a postwar plan for Iraq and he doesn't seem to be willing to listen to criticism about his current philosophy. I think this critique is healthy and good since Bush is a human being and subject to mistakes. No one expects a perfect being to change unless it decides to change. Bush = imperfect, the Church = ?
I tend to think the Church is not perfect. We have humans involved at varying degrees of surrender to God and as Uncle Screwtape will tell us - being in Church to him is better than a Christian not be. Wormwood has a better chance of using petty inadequacies of members to irrititate the "patient" and whiddle away at his/her faith.
Obviously I refer to the Church universal and not just a specific congregation, but I still think it is evolving simply because it is not perfect. The reason I assert any one paradigm is not better than any other is because I believe through each of these phases in human history we are able to add another lens to our historical time travel device and continue to refine our view of God and the significance of this "story we find ourselves in" as McLaren says. One area of reflection we can and should keep revisiting is the incarnation.
So...this Emergent Church thing. Basically a group of great thinkers is converging in this community to discuss the nature of the new paradigm they believe humans have entered and the way the church will look in this paradigm. There are Emergents from every denomination - they seek not to form a new church but to encourage dialog between denominations and cultures so we can breathe new life into the Church worldwide.
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3 comments:
In reading your post, I'm wondering if you're arguing that each paradigm was "the best for its era" and THAT is why we can't say one is better than the next? In other words, is the newest paradigm OBJECTIVELY (in a timeless sense) better but paradigms must always be evaluated by the standards of their historic moment and not by the standards of the future? I can see the merit of such an argument, but I still think that there is a "best" way to interact with God and we humans do not get to dictate the boundaries of that model. But then the Catholic church has always claimed that the institution of the Roman church is God-ordained and its faith-&-praxis constitue the proper model. A Kuhnian "Paradigm Shift Model" presupposes that humans need to search for the proper way to corporately relate to God while the Catholics claim that God has already given it to them. I am inclined to reject the paradigm shift model, arguing instead that the church should strive to retain the earliest "paradigm," form a culture around THAT, and risk being counter-cultural in the present moment.
I see your point. I think Robert Webber may agree. He argues that the way we deal with new paradigm shifts is to return to the first century church to learn fresh how to interact with one another and with God.
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