Careful Thought

News Forge carries a piece on the further devolution of the church [can we call it that anymore?] into random, postmodernist swill. The current flavor of the day is tagged “open source theology”. The title is derived from open source software, which refers to any program whose source code is made available for use or modification as users or other developers see fit.

Now that idea has been extended to religion.

[Open source theology] is an offshoot of the emergent church branch of Christianity. The founder of the open source theology movement, Andrew Perriman, says he started it “out of the conviction that if there is such a thing as the emerging church … it urgently needs an emerging theology. In the narrative world of the emerging culture, open source developers are the good guys — quirky, generous, iconoclastic heroes — and the commercial producers are the bad guys, with Microsoft dominating the axis of evil.” Perriman says that in this postmodern culture, the Christian church is struggling to “rebuild credibility” and needs to change its theology from one that has generated by so-called “experts” to an open source theology that is the product of “public conversation. It is exploratory, open-ended, incomplete, less concerned to establish fixed points and boundaries than to nurture a thoughtful and constructive dialogue between text and context.”

Perriman first encountered open source software and philosophies when he began using Postnuke. “I had been looking for a way to post some theological articles on the Web and see if I could generate some discussion around them — this was before blogging really took off,” he says. “The search for low-cost software solutions coincided with a growing awareness that theology — evangelical theology in particular — was going through some sort of transition or crisis, and was on the lookout for new methods, a new rhetoric, new ways of formulating old truths, and perhaps even a quite radical overhaul of old truths.“

Sounds like the same old song and dance: truth is what you make it and we certainly can’t be bound by the authoritarian dictates of Scripture. Yechh…

“For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life.” (2 Cor 2:15-16a, NIV)

Did you ever stop to consider how you smell? Penguins and other critters can distinguish their young from among hundreds or even thousands of others by their scent. As Christians, we are infused with the scent of Christ, and as Paul says, believers and unbelievers will respond differently to the smell. At times I find myself trying to cover up the scent with churchiness or other things that mask the strong pungentness (?) of Christ within me. When will I learn
to let the scent through, unfiltered and unashamed?