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Sola Scriptura is the rallying cry of the Protestant Reformation, but it never rang true for me.  I was never a Lutheran or a Presbyterian.  Forgive me, but I was raised Episcopalian–that middle way between Catholicism and Protestantism–and then went Ayn Randian for a while, then back to Jesus through the Jesus movement, shaped mainly by a Jewish believer who didn’t have a dog in the Catholic-Protestant fight, which was a Gentile brawl.
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Good pastors are about empowering people to do the Jesus stuff.  So there is a great need for pastors who can learn to trust others to do things better than themselves.  Clericalism, the view that pastors are the Christian professionals who can do Christianity better than anyone else is boo-honkey.

But it’s my belief that many pastors have been too passive in their leadership.  We’ve allowed ourselves to be cow-towed by other voices within the wider Christian community.  We let them take the lead because they have the biggest media megaphones, or the biggest mailing lists or they have somehow gained the ear of many people.  Which is fine.  It’s good to have a mix of voices in any movement.  But we’ve given too much of our pastoral leadership task away to some voices.
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I’ve got some thoughtful responders to this blog and it’s one of the real benefits of a blog. You toss your thoughts out there and people respond. You rethink or you go a little deeper in your thoughts, maybe you revise, maybe you come away even more convinced having heard the responses of others. One of my thoughtful responders is Clif and I want to continue from a thought Clif laid down in a comment about the Rush Limbaugh post. Clif indicated that he thinks Christians who listen to Rush regularly do a pretty good job separating the wheat from the chaff. If Clif is right, then I’m probably a little overwrought in my previous post. But I wonder about that. Because there’s a Christian I know pretty well who used to listen more than he does now to Rush, and at least in one case, he didn’t do a very good job separating the wheat from the chaff. And I have a very high regard for the perspectives and discernment of this particular Christian, him being myself.
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Writing a book, like having a conversation or putting words to your thoughts in any form, is an exercise in learning what you believe. It’s not just that you believe something and then put it into words. You discover what it is that you believe in the process of putting it into words. You read the book you write, or you hear the words formed by your thoughts in a conversation, for the first time. Like God in Genesis, chapter one, orchestrated the creation, made what he made, and then saw it himself for the first time, pondered it, and said, “It’s good.” Here’s a crack at summarizing what I believe after more than a few decades of organizing my life in fits and starts around Jesus of Nazareth and his path through this world:
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The Jesus movement that swept me into love with Jesus of Nazareth was the one that read Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran theologian who led the faith resistance to Hitler and lost his life in the process of gaining it. Bonhoeffer railed against what he called “cheap grace.” In the Lutheran orthodoxy of his day, the proof of orthodoxy was to demonstrate no inclination to lean toward “works”–salvation by faith through grace alone. The easiest way to assure the guardians of orthodoxy that you were safely orthodox was to deny any cost to discipleship–because that was dangerously close to “reliance on works.” You’d have to be Lutheran to understand how this worked. Bonhoeffer called that whole thing, cheap grace. Today in my tribe there’s something similar at work: cheap orthodoxy.
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I traveled down with a van load of Ann Arbor Vineyard friends to speak at the Columbus Vineyard Joshua House–the twenty something Sunday evening service. Found myself speaking to them as an old(er) Jesus freak, seeking to convey something that I’m struggling to put into words. I’ll keep trying till I get it.

All theology is biography ultimately–something we can’t shy away from if our study of God involves the knowing of a truth in person whose first-last-and deepest truth telling begins-ends-continues with the words, “I am.” All of biblical truth is carried on the back of a donkey called story–history, his story, the story that includes and redeems and transforms our story, because a plot likes nothing better than to thicken. And so I find myself struggling to tell my Jesus freak story to this generation that’s filling up the likes of Joshua House.
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