March 17th, 2010

Live blog by Chipper Flaniken

To view the live-stream for Christine Pohl’s lecture on hospitality, visit here: http://tiuproductions.com/livestream/

The Henry Center for Theological Understanding welcomes Dr. Christine Pohl, Professor of Church in Society at Asbury Theological Seminary

At 1:00 PM in the ATO Chapel of TEDS, Dr. Pohl will be delivering a lecture entitled:

“Practicing Hospitality in Troubled Times: Promise and Peril for the Church”

See below for a summary:

Offering hospitality to strangers was a distinctive feature of ancient Christian life. The biblical texts and tradition, Jesus’ practice and explicit teachings, and the needs of the ancient church and world combined to make hospitality a central aspect of Christian discipleship. In the last 500 years, transformative understandings of hospitality have been mostly lost, and with them, some crucial insights into Christian witness, social ministry and congregational life. Giving fresh attention to an ancient practice allows us to see the close connection between theology and everyday life, and offers promise and challenge to the contemporary church.

Begin Live Blog:

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Introduction

-  In the church today, our hospitality tends to be fairly tame and “safe”

-  It doesn’t really cost us.

Hospitality in Scripture

1. True hospitality is present from the the very beginning of Scripture until the very end, in fact, true hospitality is a condensing of the gospel

2. It wasn’t easy, but the NT finds leaders challenging each other to be welcoming

- Hebrews 13 - we may even be entertaining angels!

- 1 Peter 4 - hospitality is vital yet costly

3. Hospitality was practiced in the church and in the home

4. Hospitality was often practiced around meals

5. Hospitality was connected to the divine

- Jesus makes a close link to this in Matthew 25

- Jesus presents a hospitality parable in Luke 14:12-14

A History of Hospitality:

In the early church, hospitality was a vital apologetic

- as expressed by many writers, including Justin Martyr

The church reformers valued hospitality

The reformers, including Martin Luther, spoke very favorably of hospitality

John Calvin commended Christians engaged in the welcoming of refugees.

However, in their efforts to reform the church, Luther and Calvin did not recover the importance of hospitality in congregational life.

This is a critical issue, because vibrant hospitality occurs when there is overlap between society and the church.

If there is too much emphasis on the social/civic side, hospitality becomes disconnected and scattered.

18th Century - John Wesley recovered many of the practices of hospitality - such as eating meals together and visiting. But he did not call it hospitality since the term “hospitality” lacked a moral significance in England.

The argument is not that hospitality was damaged intentionally, but hospitality has been altered into something shallower in the Christian church over the past several centuries.

Wesley’s understanding of hospitality was much closer to the practices of the early church, so his views certainly deserve a closer look.

The Resurgence of Hospitality in the Modern Church

Why is this important?

1. Hospitality provides us a fresh lens that we can use to think about our faith

- we gain fresh perspective on discipleship

2. Hospitality is critical to the credibility of the gospel

- without hospitality, it is easy to dismiss truth.

- Robert Webber: the most significant apologetic for the Christian faith will be the hospitality found in the local church. This will become the new apologetic. People will come to faith not through arguments, but through fellowship.

Illustration: Christian community in rural Georgia. It is a rural Christian community that attracts 3,000 visitors per year simply because strangers are attracted to see how this Christian body loves and serves refugees.

3. New Christians hear about the gospel through intimate relationship!

- This is what allows for discipleship

4. People are much more alone than they used to be.

- People in lots of churches have no family close by. Thus, the church can help reconstruct families out of people who have come to be parts of these congregations.

- Churches have generally embraced a social service model. We serve meals, but we don’t sit down and have conversations with them, or invite them into our church. This is artificial and destructive! We are not just providing a social service

5.  People today are open to mystery!

- People understand that life has to consist in more than how much money they make. This is a dangerous search unless the church longs to meet these yearnings!

The Perils of Hospitality

What is in danger when we practice hospitality?

1. When we practice hospitality, our lives and our lifestyles are in danger!

- our lives are more exposed when we practice hospitality - especially when we become friends with people unlike ourselves. Hospitality forces us to live closer to our limits. Our frailties are exposed!

- hospitality stretches us! It involves a dieing to self. It is costly!

- we worry about embracing hospitality because we think that strangers might take advantage of us

- we must become willing to live with a certain amount of risk while still protecting the vulnerable people in our families.

- hospitality is safer in the context of community, so since we have smaller families today,

2. Since it is so potent, hospitality can be misused!

- many in the Christian tradition have used hospitality as a means of being idle

- but the churches founds ways to deal with this!

- Calvin wrote that people in need should be helped, but their circumstances should be inquired about. But remember, don’t cover your stinginess under the shadow of prudence!

- We have to start with God’s gracious character and generosity. This gives us a better set of resources to deal with the hard cases.

3. Hospitality can endanger our reputations and our experience of privilege

- transformative hospitality assumes that true hospitality moves in both directions! Other people need to be enabled to used their gifts of service!

4. We hesitate to do significant hospitality because we are worried about losing time and money.

- protecting family time and rest are important things to do, and there are times when we have to limit our hospitality!

- Francis Schaeffer: It is not sinful to be finite!

5. Hospitality endangers our plans

- hospitality interferes with our idea of efficiency and measureable results

6. Hospitality can interfere with our cherished way of life

- a shared way of life in good and compelling, and when we welcome people that are different than us, it can change our own identities.

- we have to be wise about what values we change, and which aspects of our community we are willing to adapt.

Discourse on hospitality as resistance

- our acts of welcome and respect toward people different than ourselves are particularly important when the world says they aren’t worth our time

- when we welcome these types of people, their self-assessment changes. Our opinions are influenced by what people think about us! There is nothing more dangerous than being invisible or having a place to contribute.

- in this way, hospitality is an important means of pursuing justice.

- the most vulnerable people in the world are those without vibrant relationships. These people need places to share their gifts! They need a home!

7. When in ministry, we must separate dignity from need! Otherwise we can easily humiliate the people that we help.

- hospitality reminds us that respect does not need to be drained from relationships when someone has significant needs.

8. there is peril in hospitality because it is effective in forging relationships, so it can be exploited by ambition. Don’t turn hospitality into a form of commercial exchange! We are goal oriented, which can be a dangerous thing.

- Hospitality cannot just be a strategy for church growth or evangelism! There are few contexts that are better for sharing the gospel.

9.  Hospitality is dangerous because it draws us so close to God’s mystery. It’s full of surprise and mystery!

- it can be crazy and unpredictable!

- when you talk with practicioners of hospitality, you often find that you get more than you give! God moves through these circumstances to effect the givers.

- however, we cannot carve our days into mundane things and the things that we think will effect the kingdom! We cannot build this distinction into our days!

live-blogged by Andy Naselli

(Streaming video is available here.)

Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California since 1993, is speaking on “Confessions of an Evangelical Pietist” here at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Here is how this lecture was advertised:

The Christian community needs to work at integrating our doctrine, action and piety (”head, hands and heart”). But which takes priority? And a closely related issue: what, in the most basic sense, is the Bible trying to “do” to us? Shape the way we think? Guide us in the activist programs we align ourselves with in the word? Transform our inner life? Obviously, all three are crucial. But Richard Mouw will explain why he keeps coming back to the fundamental need to be guided in everything else by the kind of piety that characterized the “sawdust trail” of our revivalist past.

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When Mouw taught at philosophy at Calvin College back in the mid-1970s, his colleague Nicholas Wolterstorff set forth a typology of different “minds” within the conservative Dutch Calvinist community in North America.  These labels signified, for him, three different perspectives on the kind of book the Bible is:

1. the “doctrinalist”: The Bible primarily sets forth religious teachings—doctrines to which we must give our assent.
2. the “pietist”: The Bible tends to be treated as a devotional handbook, the reading of which is meant to generate certain godly experiences and to form important subjective dispositions.
3. the “Kuyperian”: The Bible is meant to give us our cultural marching orders, instructing us in the ways of discipleship in the collective patterns of life in the larger human community.

In the final analysis, Mouw is a pietist. (And Abraham Kuyper was also a pietist.) He wants to do two things in this lecture:

1. He wants to bear witness to the basic pietist emphasis on the priority of inner transformation—an emphasis that he thinks best comports with an evangelical understanding of how to integrate “head, heart and hands.”
2. He wants to confess some of his own worries about some of the defective tendencies that seem constantly to plague a pietist-kind of Christianity, as well as pointing to ways that a healthy pietism can enrich our doctrinal and cultural explorations.

There is no better example of what pietists are about than John Wesley’s well-known testimony regarding his “Aldersgate experience.” The kind of very direct and datable experience that Wesley was describing has a link in Mouw’s own spiritual journey to the fundamentalist “altar calls” of his youth.

Ernest Stoeffler’s magnum opus, The Rise of Evangelical Pietism, still stands as the best overall survey of pietism as an international movement. While he did much to highlight pietism’s strengths, Stoeffler was not insensitive to the movement’s faults. He specifically singled out three of what he described as its “less admirable” traits or tendencies:

1. an “escapist” mentality that puts “the emphasis on blessedness in the hereafter rather than justice for all in the here and now”
2. “a certain anti-intellectual atmosphere”
3. a “pronounced tendency toward sectarian fragmentation”

Mouw embraces a pietism in which our intellectual lives, our cultural engagements, and our relationships with others in the body of Christ are guided by a personal and communal godliness.

Mouw places a priority on piety because the religion of the heart in turn must give direction to our heads and our hands.

Some “doctrinalists” are not opposed to seeing the heart as the primary locus of religious faith. John Calvin clearly refused to conflate mind and heart.

The heart, in the biblical sense, is the place where we form our fundamental trustings.

Mouw recognizes that what he is going to say about piety and doctrine will make some evangelicals nervous, so he begins with some appeals to the authority of three of his heroes, all theologians with impeccable orthodox and Calvinist credentials:

1. Charles Hodge disagreed with Friedrich Schleiermacher’s theology but then concludes, “Can we doubt that he is singing those praises now? To whomever Christ is God, St. John assures us, Christ is a Saviour” (Systematic Theology, 2:440n1).
2. Herman Bavinck frequently criticized Roman Catholic theology, but he also wrote, “We must remind ourselves that the Catholic righteousness by good works is vastly preferable to a protestant righteousness by good doctrine. At least righteousness by good works benefits one’s neighbor, whereas righteousness by good doctrine only produces lovelessness and pride. Furthermore, we must not blind ourselves to the tremendous faith, genuine repentance, complete surrender and the fervent love for God and neighbor evident in the lives and work of many Catholic Christians” (The Certainty of Faith, 37).
3. Cornelius Van Til disagreed strongly with Barth, but he would not say that Barth was not a Christian. A person can have a highly defective theology and still have a heart that has been transformed by the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

John MacArthur, an outspoken opponent of the “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” group, disagrees. Unlike MacArthur, Mouw believes that it is possible for people to be saved without subscribing to the doctrine of justification by faith. In other words, it is possible to be justified by faith without being clear (or believing the wrong thing) about the doctrine of justification by faith.

Mouw’s argument goes along these lines with those who show a genuine faith in Christ in spite of what he takes to be defective theology:

• Is your theology adequate to explain the saving grace that has transformed your inner being?
• Is that theology capable of sustaining the kind of faith that you claim?
• (and Van Til’s question to Barth) Is your theology, when spelled out as an evangelistic appeal, capable of presenting the gospel in such a way that people will come to Christ?

Our theology would often be in much better shape if we paid careful attention to what we are expressing in the hymns that we sing.

The Henry Center is pleased to announce that on Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 1pm, it will offer a free live webcast of the Scripture & Ministry lecture by legendary apologist Dr. Ravi Zacharias entitled “Toward an Evangelical Understanding of Postmodernism and Mission.”

Tune in here at 1pm for the free live webcast: http://tiuproductions.com/livestream/

The Center hopes that this talk by one of the church’s foremost apologists will spread understanding of a crucial set of topics amongst Christians from a wide variety of backgrounds.  Also, please visit the Center blog for Hansen Fellow Andy Naselli’s live-blog and summary of the lecture.

Those who are able to attend the event on Wednesday at 1pm at the Deerfield, IL campus of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School will not want to miss it.  In addition, Dr. Zacharias will speak in chapel on Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 11am (this event will not be broadcast).