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Jesus Brand Spirituality: He Wants His Religion Back is a book I wrote as an evangelical, by which I mean, as someone who cares about communicating the good news (gk. evangel) among those who have not heard good news.  Right here, for example, where I live.  It is based on a certain reading of the culture in which I live.   We who have received and therfore have a responsibility to be and share good news, also have a responsibility to face up to the cultural context we operate in.  Here’s the challenge: we have a branding problem.  We who love, admire and seek to follow Jesus of Nazareth, must acknowledge that the Christian brand in America has sufferred something very like trademark infringement.
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I believe the Bible literally, word for word.  Sorry, that’s not good enough.  It’s not direct enough.  It’s not immediate enough.  It’s not what God–through the Bible–is communicating.  God wants to speak to us through the Bible and this can only happen when the words become more than literal.  It can only happen when they become actual.
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How did we, the friends of the friend of sinners get to this place?  Jesus was known as the friend of sinners.  He took a lot of guff for being the friend of sinners.  These “sinners” were a social class, not simply a theological category.  They were people on the outside of Israel’s accepted circle for a host of reasons. They were not mobsters or murderers or notorious offenders.  (You notice that “tax collectors” and “prostitutes” were often given a distinct designation alongside “sinners” in the gospels.)   Jesus so identified with “sinners” as to bring upon himself the judgment of the religiously self-righteous.  He expects us to be the friend of sinners, which means our righteousness has to exceed that of the Pharisees; it has to be a righteousness of pure sermon-on-the-mount love, not a righteousness that depends on harsh condemnations and judgment of others–the “business as usual” approach to sinners.  We need to get our gentle back.
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Thirty years ago, evangelicals started talking about “worldviews.”  I first remember hearing it from Francis Schaeffer. It began innocently enough–as an attempt on the part of evangelicals to become a little more thoughtful about the faith. But a hundred years of separating the head from the heart, as if there are two homes within which to house your faith–and we know which one is superior–had taken their toll. Soon “worldview” was reduced to another piece of the evangelical apologetic armor, a little pop anthropology to go with our pop psychology.   People sent their high school kids away for a month to learn about “the Christian worldview” and its nemesis “the secular humanist worldview.”
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Every systematic theology, every air-tight system, every completely consistent view of the bible, every logically constructed and perfectly put together faith, crashes like waves on the shoreline of  God.  Because the Bible is not the system in written form and the system, once “discovered” (read: invented)  is not the solution. The Bible is a living, breathing, personal witness to a living, breathing, personal God, with whom we have to do.  This is what drives us crazy about the God revealed in the Bible–a God of mystery, paradox, plain speech, simple commands, subtly, a.k.a. a personal God: a someone with whom we have to do.  Directly.  Last night I went to sleep dreaming-praying…
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We love these sticky phrases, don’t we?  Especially the ones that get us off the hook like this one does. The ones that swoop in and lift us right over the horns of the dilemma that another sticky phrase plunges us into:  “judge not, lest ye be judged.”  How do we do that, without all hell breaking loose?  Gosh, we have to judge don’t we?  He couldn’t have meant, literally, “judge not, lest ye be judged.”  No, he meant judge carefully, judge wisely, judge lovingly, judge well, judge insiders.  So why didn’t he just say that?  Because he didn’t have us around to write his speeches for him! So we come up with our own sticky phrase to “complement” his. “Love the sinner, hate the sin.”  Voila! we’re off the hook!  Or are we?
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Many of you are cringing. Not to worry, this post won’t be a laundry list of American evangelicals at our worst.   There’s only one thing worth mentioning and it trumps all the others: at our worst, we’re more concerned with being right than being evangelical.  It’s the saddest thing about American evangelicalism today, how much passion we have for being right and how little for being evangelical.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with being right, unless it keeps you from being what you are meant to be.  And in this case it does.
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I’ve owed you this post for a while.  Yes, I have a pebble in my shoe over the current state of the American evangelical movement of which my tribe, the Vineyard, is a part.   Yes, I think Phariseeism is alive and well in evangelicalism.  I’d call my own out if I saw it, but others are free to do so in the comments section.  And yes,  I’m bored by Christians who call out the sins of the world like it’s a worthwhile hobby.  Or like it’s news.  Been there, done that.  Spent fifteen years of my life in that mode, and I guess I got it off my chest.  I can imagine being wearied by this–hearing this, reading this– just as I am wearied, but not so much to stop.  So the first of a two-parter: evangelicals at our best (to be followed by evangelicals at our worst.)

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Seems to be a preoccupation of religion these days.  Let me show you how wrong the world is about sin, righteousness, and judgment.  Let me show you how wrong the world is about abortion and gay marriage,  and evolution and climate change and on and on and on it goes…..    The three-fold preoccupation of much religious discourse it seems: what is the worst of sin, the pinnacle of righteousness, the certainty of judgment?  If we can only be clear on these, we will be right, orthodox, faithful.   When the Spirit comes, surely he will show the world how wrong it is.   How wrong they are.  But will it turn out as we expect?
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Well I’ve gone and made a few of you nervous, which means we’ve got a good conversation going about Jesus and Paul and understanding this book that is so important to us or we wouldn’t bother.  In some of the comments to my previous post I detected a certain unease about the idea that there might be any difference in the relative weight or significance of various biblical writers or books in the Bible.  As if any suggestion of such a difference entailed a rejection of parts of the received text of Scripture.
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