Dr. Mark Steiner was the second the two keynote speakers at Westminster Reformed Presbyterian Church's Renewal Conference Friday night. You can read a blub about Steiner here. Steiner is a professor of communication, rhetoric back in the day, and took a rhetorical tack to his analysis of contemporary Christian political action. Appropriate Christian engagement in politics "is less about substance" than it is about "who we are." In other words, it's not what we say that's important but how we say it. Gotta wonder what Carl Trueman thought, with his emphasis on the purity of the Church and such. But back to Steiner.
Steiner used Bartholomew and Goheen's The Drama of Scripture (Baker 2004), a biblical-theological approach to the Bible drawing heavily on N.T. Wright's more academic version of the same, as his jumping-off point.
Starting with a bang (rhetoric in action),Steiner criticized contemporary evangelicals for their Pharisaism. Taking his notes from Bartholomew and Goheen, Steiner identified four leading concepts of first-century Pharisaism with respect to the Kingdom of God: it was temporal (to be here and now, not in the future); the Kingdom was to be political in nature (which indeed it is, but more about that later); the Kingdom was to come in a straight-line, formulaic fashion; and finally, the Pharisaic understanding was, in Steiner's words, therapeutic, i.e., the hoped-for immanent temporal arrival of the Kingdom of God made the politically impotent Jews of first-century Palestine feel good.
Concurrent with his list of Pharisaic proclivities, Steiner compared contemporary evangelical political activity to what he perceived as their first-century brethren. In short. American evangelicals believe that the future aspect of the messianic Kingdom will arrive through political action; that their belief in a one-time-but-now-lost Christian America is a myth; that Pharisee-like formulaic thinking leads to anti-intellectualism; and that the purpose of evangelical boundary-drawing is to make themselves feel good (hasn’t Steiner heard of Rob Bell?).
I suppose two or three out of four isn’t bad but rather than interacting with Steiner point-by-point I suggest that the purpose of his address was to embody what he criticized and thus to encourage a cathartic rejection of contemporary evangelical political action, at least in its conservative form. In other words, it was “less about the substance” of what Steiner said than it was about “who he was.” And “who he was” was a sort of reverse evangelical political activist. An inverted evangelical Stephen Colbert. Pretty cute but it remains to be seen if he employs the same shtick today.
Steiner used Bartholomew and Goheen's The Drama of Scripture (Baker 2004), a biblical-theological approach to the Bible drawing heavily on N.T. Wright's more academic version of the same, as his jumping-off point.
Starting with a bang (rhetoric in action),Steiner criticized contemporary evangelicals for their Pharisaism. Taking his notes from Bartholomew and Goheen, Steiner identified four leading concepts of first-century Pharisaism with respect to the Kingdom of God: it was temporal (to be here and now, not in the future); the Kingdom was to be political in nature (which indeed it is, but more about that later); the Kingdom was to come in a straight-line, formulaic fashion; and finally, the Pharisaic understanding was, in Steiner's words, therapeutic, i.e., the hoped-for immanent temporal arrival of the Kingdom of God made the politically impotent Jews of first-century Palestine feel good.
Concurrent with his list of Pharisaic proclivities, Steiner compared contemporary evangelical political activity to what he perceived as their first-century brethren. In short. American evangelicals believe that the future aspect of the messianic Kingdom will arrive through political action; that their belief in a one-time-but-now-lost Christian America is a myth; that Pharisee-like formulaic thinking leads to anti-intellectualism; and that the purpose of evangelical boundary-drawing is to make themselves feel good (hasn’t Steiner heard of Rob Bell?).
I suppose two or three out of four isn’t bad but rather than interacting with Steiner point-by-point I suggest that the purpose of his address was to embody what he criticized and thus to encourage a cathartic rejection of contemporary evangelical political action, at least in its conservative form. In other words, it was “less about the substance” of what Steiner said than it was about “who he was.” And “who he was” was a sort of reverse evangelical political activist. An inverted evangelical Stephen Colbert. Pretty cute but it remains to be seen if he employs the same shtick today.
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