One of the interesting things about being a college director, or the “pastor” of college students is that they are in the midst of a huge transitions in life. This is not the only stage or time in life where transition occurs, but it is one of the most obvious. The move from high school to college, often away from home, with entirely new communities, new cities, etc. And while they are in college, they are trying to attain skills, abilities and more to transition into young adulthood, into a new career, and possibly into a marriage, and sometimes kids early on. The 17-23 age range that most of my students fall into is filled with transition. Add to this the new fields of study that identify new groups of development and transition such as emerging adulthood and the The Twixters. Transitioning abounds in life, and very dramatically in the college years.

What is interesting to me as the college director, is that my life is constantly transitioning as well. I think some would hope and expect that the “pastor”/director would be stable in the sense that transitioning was over for a while, and all the answers could come forth, so that the students could be properly guided into the right places. But I am finding more and more that the leader of a group is constantly in transition, often mirroring that of the congregation. And I think this is a good thing. I think it is a good thing to constantly be asking the questions that need to be asked, and to wrestle with the things that need to be wrestled with.

As I head into this new school year as the college director, I find myself in my own transition as I am going back to grad school again, but this time to work on the MFT at Fuller Theological Seminary. I am hoping, and believe that it will be, a good compliment to my M.Div. that I received at Fuller in 2003.

Prior to going back to school, I started reading, as you know (since I can’t stop talking about it), Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology, by Eugene Peterson.

Peterson’s thoughts have been taking me down a different road then I have traveled before, and I am finding myself in a transition point. A transition mainly, from thinking about God in only abstract terms, which is so easy to do when one has gone through seminary, or Bible college, or just loves to read and identify with God on an intellectual level…to a more relational one. I know a lot of info about God. But that is entirely different than really knowing God, and interacting with Him on a relational level. Peterson has been showing me these things, and I am beginning to understand the necessity of our spiritual lives being grounded in community and in relationships, rather than intellecutal and abstract places, which we love to do. Relationships are slow, hard work, full of ups and downs. And we would prefer efficiency and impersonal means, because it is easier to get things done if you take out the relationship. It is easier to be in community if you don’t have to deal with the relationships; it is easier to be in community if you can just put people in groups and refer to them in impersonal terms. And it’s easier to deal with God when we objectify Him in simply intellectual ways; we love talking about God’s attributes, and impersonalizing Him in that way, because it is much more difficult to really wrestle in relationship with God. God transcends our theories and ideas. He definitely shows us who He is, but to simply say, this is all God is, and He can’t operate out of these boxes, is to depersonalize Him. That’s an easier God to work with then the God I see the people of Israel in the OT, and the people in the NT working with.

It’s like me thinking I new all about marriage because I had read the books, talked to people, knew the theories, etc…but wow, what a difference it was to then enter into a marriage relationship with another person. People and relationships don’t operate strictly in the depersonalized and theoretical ways that we talk about them.

Peterson goes on to say this:

What is dangerous is not ideas but the academic mind that abstracts both things and people from particular relationships into concepts. And what is dangerous is not programs but the programmatic mind that routinely sets aside the personal in order to more efficiently achieve an impersonal cause. These are not only dangerous but sacrilegious, for it is precisely relational particularities and personal intimacies that are at the center of our God-given, Holy Spirit-formed identities as the beloved who are commanded to love. (pp.314)

Peterson writes beautifully on the relationality of community, and how community is reflective of the relationality between the Trinity: between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. There is a relationship that exists between the Trinity that cannot be reduced to programs and theories. We try to do that, but to do so would really take out the mystery of the relationship that exists in both unity and particularity. The Trinity is a perfect relationship, and human relationships and community can only hope to be a glimmer of what takes place between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But as people that are made in the image of God, we bear a resemblance, and inherit the importance of relationships. Our being, our life is grounded in relationships, and it is grounded in community where relationships exist. Not in ivory towers and textbooks and philosophical and theological theories…though they can point to what exists in relationship, they can never be a substitute for relationships. “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness..’” (Gen.1:26). We see the existence of relationship in the Godhead at our creation.

Peterson’s book has been highly influential in helping me understand the importance of relationship and community. So I was very excited when I began my Child and Family Development class this week, and as I began to peruse the texts for reading. All of the texts deal with relationship; deal with particularities of relationship, and not abstract ideas. Most of the texts use the model of the relationality of the Trinity as a basis for looking at human community.

My students love being in relationship, and they know that it is hard work. They know when we are trying to replace relationships with quick fixes, and programmatic solutions, that depersonalize the people in the process, and throw abstraction onto our relationships with God. As the church here at Bel Air Presbyterian Church grows, and as our own college community, The Quest grows, we are wrestling with how to be in relationship with one another; a process that is slow and hard, and is not always the easiest solution to growth in numbers.

My training in theology was most often very abstract as we learned to study Greek, Hebrew, systematics and more, often removed from relationship. But being in ministry has shown me what it means to take the tools that I acquired and to put them to the hard, slow work in ministry. And as I begin this program in Marriage and Family, I am more fully understanding the importance of relationality in our communities.

There is very rich reading in this area of study, and there are some amazing books, by some amazing theologians. Here is the reading list for my class, and some are more theological in nature than others, but they all point towards the importance of relationship, which I found was something that was often missing in my “strict” theological training.

The Family: A Christian Perspective on the Contemporary Home, by Jack and Judy Balswick

The Reciprocating Self: Human Development in Theological Perspective, by Jack Balswick, Pam King, and Kevin Reimer

The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design, by Urie Bronfenbrenner

Whatever Happened to the Soul: Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, by Warren Brown, Nancey Murphy and H. Newton Malony

Theories of Development: Concepts and Applications, by William Crain

Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development, by William Fowler

Notable Selections in Human Development, by Rhett Diessner and Jacquelyne Tiegs

The Social God and the Relational Self: A Trinitarian Theology of the Imago Dei, by Stanley Grenz

Autonomy and Relatedness in Cultural Context: Implications for Self and Family, by C. Kagiticibasi (class handout)

The Season’s of a Man’s Life, by Daniel Levinson

The Season’s of a Woman’s Life, by Daniel Levinson

The Logic of the Spirit: Human Development in Theological Perspective, by James Loder

Theories of Human Development, by Neal Salkind

Reforming Theological Anthropology: After the Philosphical Turn to Relationality, by F. LeRon Shults

Recent Theories of Human Development, by R. Murray Thomas

Human Development Theories: Windows on Culture, by R. Murray Thomas

After Our Likeness: The Church as The Image of the Trinity, by Miroslav Volf

I have been a little slow in writing much these last couple of weeks. I find myself in the midst of some major transitions: 1) all of the schools within the ministry I pastor have almost all returned, so we have been gearing up for that by training new leaders, organizing our Wednesday nights, etc. 2) I just started graduate school up again; a new program with new things to read and study, so I have been working away at that 3) I have just found myself in a period here, with little to say (big surprise, I know), and a lot of time thinking, reflecting, and wondering about other things.

In all of this, I have been reading as I mentioned in the previous post, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology, by Eugene Peterson. And this book is challenging me like no other book I have read. Great stuff.

This excerpt has given me pause, as well, on the significance of the Church in our culture. It’s an especially important question that I have been wondering about, given our proximity to Hollywood, the entertainment industry, and more. Peterson says this:

“It gives us pause. If we, as the continuing company of Jesus, seem to have achieved an easy accomodation with our society and culture, how did we pull off what Jesus and the community of Jesus failed to accomplish? How has it come to pass that after twenty centuries of rejection, North American Christians assume that acclaim by numbers is a certificate of divine approval?

The significance of the church has never been in King Number. Its message has seldom (hardly even, in fact) been embraced by the mighty and powerful. Strategies are introduced from time to time to target ‘important’ leaders, men and women in high places in government, business, or the media, for conversion. It is not a practice backed by biblical precedent. There are, of course, Christians in high places politically and prominent in the celebrity pantheon, but their position and standing doesn’t seem to mean anything strategically significant in terms of God’s kingdom. To suppose that if we can just ‘place’ Christian men and women in high prominent positions of leadership, we are going to improve the efficacy of the community in its worship, missions, or evangelism, has no warrant in Scripture or history.” (pp. 288-289)

Wow! Convicting. Especially in our Church culture that worships celebrity, and often caters to them. Why do we thing that celebrity, or status in the world, will somehow validate the ministry that we are about? That it will validate our church? Our worship? Etc.

Maybe not everyone struggles with this, but it is something that I have been grappling with, and am seeing in my own experience.

Dictionaries are wonderful tools and we would be the poorer without them, but in Gospel matters they are among the lesser helps. The reason is that everything in the Gospel is personal, relational, and embodied in particulars. There are no generalities. Every word is embedded in the Story and, in the most comprehensive sense, incarnate in Jesus, “the word made flesh.” Isolated in a dictionary a word has no context and therefore no relationship, no “flesh.” For those of us who are interested in living the truth and not just acquiring information, it is necessary to discover the meaning of a word by looking it up in the Story, not the dictionary.

Eugene Peterson in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (pp.271)

Like my Greek professors were always reminding me. “Stop translating a Greek word apart from the text.”

Hugh Hewitt launches his new blog, One True God. This is going to be an important, and exciting blog to read, as he has gathered together a great group of scholars from a diverse theological tradition. Here is the list of scholars, but to read their bios, if you don’t know who they are, check out the new site.

Albert Mohler
John Mark Reynolds
Mark D. Roberts
Amy Welborn
David Allen White

The first question that Hugh, as the moderator, asks:

September 18, 2005

Questions: Do you believe in demons? Why? What should be the attitude of a mature Christian believer on the subject?