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My friend Jim Henderson together with the collaborative team at Off-the-Map are gearing up for a national conversation happening in Seattle, in early November. This year’s theme is Hear·Listen·Connect.Presenters include Diana Butler Bass, Brian McLaren, Richard Twiss, Ruth Padilla DeBorst, and Todd Hunter and many others, I’ll even get to facilitate a workshop.

My working title for my workshop is:

Orthoparadoxy: embracing the gifts of sin, heresy, and ‘the other’

or

At-One-Ment:  re-imagining ‘a good Christian’

I offered a brief outline of what I mean by “orthoparadoxy” in the new book, Emergent Manifesto of Hope. But I want this workshop to be a practical exploration of how embracing “otherness” is in fact what faithfully walking in the way of Christ is like. We will look at a bit of the theology that undergirds this gracious, Christ-like way of being but mostly we will stretch our connective imaginations for embodying an Orthoparadox way of being.

For those of you who have been redirected to my personal site from Hear·Listen·Connect I thought I’d offer a bit of biographical info:

I teach practical theology at Mars Hill Graduate School and for more than 11 pastored an emerging simple church on Seattle’s eastside. I am active in interfaith and ecumenical conversation; currently serving on the “Faith & Order Commission” of the National Council of Churches. I am active locally, nationally and internationally with missional and emerging church movements. My wife Lynette and our son Pascal live in Bellevue, Washington.

I hope to see you at this conversation.

Peace, dwight

“. . . I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.  Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” 

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 34-5

Certainty looks at paradox and says, “they can’t both be true. I will take sides. I will exercise my mind and my reason to confidentially claim my argument as true. I will gather data and build my case. I will defeat my enemies. I will defend my position adamantly, for I am right.” Certainty can be one of the chief enemies of relationship, because it draws a line in the sand daring others to cross. Inability to live with paradox requires the “Certain Person” to battle all contrary world views. “Us verses them” in a battle-royal-fight-to-the-death. It is little wonder that certainty often leads to closed-minds, closed-hearts, and I’m in/you’re out fundamentalism.

Doubt looks at paradox and says, “neither is true,” or says “I can never know which is true and which is not.” Doubt looks within itself to create meaning. Doubt is void of relationship because doubt turns neither to God, nor other people but turns inward to make truth for itself. It relies on the individual as it is incapable of seeing beyond itself. Doubt often leads to materialism/atheism, and agnosticism.

Faith is less concerned with the propositions and dogma then it is concerned about a person, Jesus Christ. So when faith sees paradox, faith humbly bows before God, saying “You are Truth. Let me walk with You and Your Truth will be my truth. Reveal Yourself in me and I will experience and know You, for You are Truth.” Faith approaches truth from its knees. Faith approaches truth as relationship with God. Faith is in a person not in a concept or ideology. Faith approaches truth with certainty not in principles, creed and text by with certainty of relationship.

When a person stands before God on that day the question is not “were You orthodox in your theology” rather the question is “did you know ME?”

All Christian doctrine is rooted in paradox so as to drive us toward relationship with Christ. When Paradox is not core to our theology our human tendency is to move theology toward certainty – a knowledge which puffs up and divides, or to move toward doubt which says we can not know anything, so why try.

What do you think?

peace, dwight