Finished reading: The Community of the King by Howard A. Snyder 📚

I didn’t find all of Snyder’s arguments compelling, but The Community of the King is still a useful book for thinking about the relationship between community and structure, people and organization. Snyder overreacts—too strongly, in my judgment—against “institutional” models of the church, going so far as to suggest that the church is not an institution (though he acknowledges that the church possesses many of the characteristics of an institution). In my view, it seems better to grant that the church is an institution, but then define it in a way that avoids many of the pitfalls that Snyder rightly identifies. His best advice comes when he counsels that form and structure are subservient to function. While I would probably say there are more normative “formal” elements than Snyder, I agree with him that much in the way of structure must be willing to give way in order to allow the church—understood as the people of God—to function as it should and to exercise the gifts as God allows.

Howard A. Snyder:

Kingdom witness and church growth are not matters of bringing to the church what it needs for success in the way of methods, techniques or strategies. Kingdom faithfulness is a matter of removing the barriers to life and growth. Once these barriers (not only personal sin but also human traditions, worn-out structures and fundamental misconceptions about the nature of the church) are removed, the church will grow through the dynamic of God within it.

Currently reading: Migrations of the Holy by William T. Cavanaugh 📚

Currently reading: On Repentance And Repair by Danya Ruttenberg 📚

on repeat this afternoon…

Kirsten Sanders, in an essay ostensibly about the current online discourse around “Rules of Life,” offering some programmatic statements that resonate deeply with me:

1. Improving people is not the primary work of the church.

2. People can’t be programmed.

3. The Church is not a social program.

4. Rules of Life arise from community, they don’t exist as individual devices, or to form a community.

5. If we do not stop expecting worship to do something, it will never do the thing it is actually for.

Like Sanders, I’m fairly ignorant of the “Rules of Life” discourse. Which also means I’m uninterested in how well her piece speaks into that conversation. Regardless, I do think she’s putting her finger on something really important—in this essay and in her writing more generally. She says this, almost in passing:

I’ll tell you now that I think sin, and its opposite, grace, is the chief misunderstanding we are having in our technological age. It’s not “the problem of the human” merely; it is how we operate, what kinds of things we are prone to, how we will and don’t and how our desires can so turn us against ourselves that we become hedgehogs, operating at a remove from ourselves, we desire to outsource virtue and vice. This is why things like algorithms and advertising are so so hideous. We consider that man himself might be bought and sold and formed, as an outcome, as a product, as a result.

I think this is such an essential insight. We don’t need more abstract accounts of human nature; rather, we need treatments that bring together a substantive account of our humanity with the actual environment we inhabit, with all its attendant temptations and habitual pathologies and incentives to not see what’s there. The operations of sin and grace are becoming equally remote and magical to us all, whether believer or not. It’s unsurprising that we’d reach for whatever tool is nearest to hand—in this case, a “Rule of Life”—in order to make sin more susceptible to human control and grace more routine. Much of Sanders' writing as of late seems to be aimed squarely at unmasking these sorts of technological assumptions, which have (for quite some time) undergirded so much of our practice of the faith. Her conclusion is apt:

And so I will continue to risk the misunderstanding and say again, you do not need a technique or a strategy or a Rule. The fact that you think you do suggests to me that what you do need is a better understanding of what it is you are. A creature, a vessel, a sinner in need of grace. “Holiness” is not an output.

Holiness is not an output. Let that one sink in for a while.

Scott Swain:

All Christian social order has an equalizing tendency toward friendship, toward mutual agency and mutual fellowship in the good things of God. This doesn’t mean that all Christians are friends–at least not yet–for our spatial, temporal, and social finitude precludes this. Nor does it mean that there is no place for authority in the family, the church, and society. It does mean that all Christian agency is friendly, aimed at mutual agency and mutual fellowship, including the agency of those in authority.

Scott Swain:

The systematic theologian’s job when it comes to theology is not to invent the relationships between one theological concept and another but to discover them.

Finished reading: The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen 📚

Meh. As a work of American intellectual history, The Ideas That Made America offers fairly bland summaries of major ideas in American history while failing to weave them into any larger narrative that would provide the book with some raison d’être. Also, Ratner-Rosenhagen undersells the influence of religious ideas. Verdict: save the time and skip this one.

Afternoon run at Lake Pflugerville with Lily - she rode her bike and wore her new watch!