Solus Jesus Proposes a Way Forward in an Increasingly Post-Evangelical World

Having finished Solus Jesus: A Theology of Resistance I found myself feeling massively encouraged about the future of post-Evangelical Christianity in the United States. Ken Wilson​ and Emily Swan​ have written a book which focuses far more on how to move forward than it does on what was wrong with the way "we used to think about things". Not that there isn't anything wrong with doing the latter (critique—prophetic or otherwise—is important), but it is just as important to start actually going somewhere once we decide to leave behind what we have found to be broken.

For many ex-Evangelicals, the process of breaking ties with American White Evangelicalism is two-fold: there is the breaking away from and also the clinging to. The "breaking away from" part is pretty straight forward and much discussed these days. White Evangelicalism in the United States has (despite the heroic efforts of many outstanding Christians) aligned itself with forces of authoritarianism, racism, and exclusion, forces that (to borrow from this book's observations) align more often with oppression rather than with the oppressed. All this is well documented and properly discussed. But it is never enough to know that you are not part of a thing, and many of us who have left Evangelicalism remain deeply committed to Jesus and his Way. The first great joy of Solus Jesus for me is that it proposes a vision of what next might look like for us—more than being a book which calls us to leave or fix the broken thing, it is a vision for what is (and I will say always was) better.

This is a book I have been looking forward to since I first heard that Ken Wilson and Emily Swan, the co-pastors of Blue Ocean Faith Ann Arbor, were working on it. I have already done some writing on how the concept of Solus Jesus has been of significant benefit to my theology and life as a whole, so it should not be surprising to hear that I was thrilled. There is a LOT going on in this book. It certainly did not disappoint, but it did surprise me—in a remarkably encouraging way.

When I sat down to read Solus Jesus: A Theology of Resistance, I was expecting an extended explanation and defense of what Blue Ocean Faith people mean when they talk about the concept. As someone who has been hanging around the fringes of the Blue Ocean Faith community (and cheering it on) for a while now, I was already familiar with the idea in broad terms. Essentially Solus Jesus is a riff on, and reaction to, the reformation credo "Sola Scriptura". Inspired by Phyllis Tickle's suggestion that the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, will begin to work in a fresh paradigm every five hundred years or so, Solus Jesus recommends a decentering of the Bible as a source of certainty and instead placing our confidence in the person of Jesus Christ. Ken Wilson and Emily Swan are both post-Evangelicals who were put through the ringer by the Evangelical "machine" over the issue of  full LGBTQ+ inclusion (Ken Wilson tells the story of this in his previous book A Letter to My Congregation). It was probably for that reason, as well as the general timeliness of the subject, that I expected this book to be that defense and explanation.

It turns out that the vision Swan and Wilson had for their book was much bigger than mine. While there is some defense of the concept (I found Chapter 4: In Defense of Experience—Wilson and Chapter 5: The age of the Spirit—Swan particularly helpful here) the greater portion of the book is devoted to a theological and practical working out of what Solus Jesus can look like in the contemporary world. In essence, the authors delivered to my expectation in Part 1 (Solus Jesus) of the book, and then went well beyond, bringing the titular concept into conversation with Girardian scapegoat theory to recommend a more developed and ambitious theology in Part 2 (A Theology of Resistance), and then working though some of what an application of this theology might look like if implemented by the contemporary Church in Part 3 (A New Way Forward). While all three cohere nicely and the chapters all build effectively on one another, each part really could have been its own work. In fact, the only critique I can think of for this book is that I would have really enjoyed a bit more of each section, so maybe a trilogy would have worked well.

Both Swan and Wilson have engaging and complementary writing styles and they are both up-front with their backgrounds and perspectives. As a result, Solus Jesus is both accessible on a popular level and "challenging and thought provoking" as a book of theology. The co-authorship takes the form of independently written chapters with Wilson and Swan each writing from their respective strengths.

In terms of the actual ideas presented, Solus Jesus represents a serious candidate for a Girardian post-evangelical (and possibly renewed mainline Protestant) theology. Taking the title to represent the two major themes of the book in conversation: First Solus Jesus as a re-centering of Jesus and de-centering of the Bible-as-source-of-certainty in the life of the Christain, then A Theology of Resistance built on the foundation of Solus Jesus and complimented by Girardian mimetic and scapegoat theory. In both cases, Swan and Wilson come across far more as offering, than as arguing, their ideas.

The Solus Jesus thesis is grounded, not in a rejection of the Bible as such, but in a rejection of the Bible as a source of certainty, first, because certainty isn't turning out to be a realistic demand, and second because the Bible itself points more to Jesus of Nazareth than to its self as a source for confidence. While the book does lay out a case for this, it strikes me that Wilson and Swan are writing this book at a time when the evangelical (and post-evangelical) case against rigid understandings of Biblical authority and infallibility have already been made (Pete Enns' The Sin of Certianty is both referenced and relevant here). Swan and Wilson are, I suspect, largely done with attempting to justify their Christianity to the Evangelical machine and have moved on to offer their insights to those who are already searching for something more.

So, too, with their Theology of Resistance. Swan and Wilson waste almost no time attacking or critiquing existing Evangelical theologies of ethics, politics, and atonement beyond sharing a few of their own helpful stories of times and ways in which those theologies came up short for them in the past. Instead, the authors work to interpret much of the (particularly Western) Church's crisis of being and failure through the lens of Girardian mimetic and scapegoat mechanics. While I don't find Girard to provide any sort of perfect, comprehensive model for human behavior or a theology of the atonement (nor do Swan and Wilson claim that he does), I was impressed with how well the model fit both the atonement and as an explanation for the repeated failure of the Church to take the side of justice as it has interacted with an unjust society throughout history. In line with the aphorism "all models are wrong, but some are useful", Solus Jesus: A Theology of Resistance demonstrates clearly that Girard's is a useful model in understanding God's actions in the world and through the church.

Ultimately I found Solus Jeusus: A Theology of Resistance both satisfying and challenging in all of the best ways, and I sincerely hope that it will have a place in determining the direction that post-evangelicalism will take at this juncture in history—it certainly deserves to.

Blue Ocean Reflections Part 4: Religious Squabbles and the Third Way

This is the fourth post in a six part series. You can find Part 1, Solus Jesus is HERE, Part 2, Centered Set HERE, and Part 3, Childlike Faith HERE.

The Blue Ocean Reflections series consists of my personal interaction and history with the six "distinctives" of the Blue Ocean Faith movement as laid out in the book of the same name (you can find my review of the book HERE). Throughout the series I intend to talk about my own history and journey of faith and to offer some thoughts on how what I have come to believe impacts my understanding of the world. As such this series is likely to have a heavy focus on theology, philosophy, and politics. But since my formal education has been as broad as I could make it, my reflections are apt to be fairly wide-ranging as well.

"There are people who take the bible seriously, who also believe that it is OK to be gay."

I realize that it probably sounds hopelessly naif, but I honestly did not realize this was true until I heard Dave Schmelzer explain it at a Blue Ocean conference (I had downloaded the talks) in 2010. Writing six years later, I find this almost embarrassing but the fact remains. Now to be clear, Schmelzer did not enunciate the whole Third Way concept at that meeting; the idea as it is now applied to LGBTQ+ folks was developed a little later on by Ken Wilson and popularized when he turned it into the book A Letter to my Congregation. Back in 2009-2010, if my memories are correct, Schmelzer and the other Blue Ocean folks were in the process of trying to work out what their approach was going to be when it came to the hot button issues of the church. But for me, the real power of taking a Third Way perspective on church controversies became real, the afternoon I listened to that talk for the first time—if was the day I began to understand that being correct is not actually the final goal of faith in Jesus.

This section of Blue Ocean Faith actually contains two of the concepts which I have come to associate with Blue Ocean thinking. Chapter 5, Religious Squabbles Are the Worst (But There's an Antidote!) works out both with the Third Way approach to controversial issues, and also Schmelzer's application of M. Scott Peck's stage theory of spiritual growth (which, I understand, Peck developed in Further Along The Road Less Traveled). This works out pretty well as the stages theory does a good job of explaining why many (particularly religious) people have a hard time with anything like practically applied Third Way thinking, but it also means that I have a lot to reflect on in this post. So please please bear with me.

Stage Theory

Schmelzer's understanding and use of Peck's stage theory works best as a descriptive approach to understanding how a person's approach to, and understanding of, the project of religion or spirituality develops over time, with the additional observation that many people get "stuck" at one stage or another. It has some resonances with spiral dynamics theory as well. Rather than trying to summarize a summary, let me just quote the descriptive paragraphs from BOF:

Stage 1 you might call "criminal." 

It corresponds with being a toddler. Toddlers don't entirely know where the end and you begin, and so they're prone to being grabby and self-focused...Peck suggests two institutions that interact with this stage: jain and the boardroom (or any other position of power. Jail serves Stage 1 people, because it provides clear boundaries—the bars of the cell if nothing else. High-functioning Stage 1 people can also become the kind of effective narcissists that get power because you and I don't realize that they're criminals doing everything for their own gain. Think Bernie Madoff. Or Stalin.

Stage 2 you might call "rules-based."  

Now we're six or seven and we want to obey Mommy and Daddy's rules. Peck suggests two institutions which serve and promote Stage 2. First is the military, which is famously excellent at transitioning young people out of Stage 1 and into Stage 2, at teaching them discipline and honor and making the productive citizens. Second—of greater interest for our purposes—are churches. Peck argues that churches (and mosques, synagogues and other places of worship) famously teach people right from wrong, good from bad. He's at pains not to judge this, pointing out that Stage 2 creates the backbone of most societies. It creates the good people who volunteer, pay taxes, obey the law and raise great kids. 

Stage 3 you might call "rebellions." This corresponds with being a teenager. Suddenly the Stage 3 person is asking, "Who died and made all those Stage 2 rules the rules?" They become skeptics. If the Stage 3 young person is surrounded by a Stage 2 community, they might feel suffocated. Where's the open questioning? Are all these Stage 2 "truths" just shallow grabs for power? Peck says the institution that best promotes Stage 3 is the university. For one thing, universities are filled with kids in this age range, and often their stated mission is quite Stage 3—to get students to question everything they've been taught.... 

What Stage 3 doesn't realize is that its skepticism might not be the final word, that there might actually be answers to its questions, but answers that look quite different than the answers proposed by Stage 2.   

Stage 4 you might call "mystical." 

Stage 4, in Peck's view, isn't the end of the process. At the earliest, we hit this stage in our early 20s, and then we spend the rest of our lives walking out the implications of this. In Stage 4 we realize that many of the things that we were taught in Stage 2 do, in fact, seem true, but in a more expansive perspective than we'd previously understood... 

One way to think about this is that Stage 2 is dominated by answers. If the key is to be a good person and to get things right, we need to know what is and isn't right. In a Christian world, it might take some work to know what you need ot know about the Bible. You might need to read not just the Bible, but the current favorite Christian thinker of your friends. But, after you've done this, you're good. Maybe you won't know everything, but you'll have the answers you need. 

Stage 4, though, is dominated by questions. You've realized that reality is way bigger than you are, and that the way to navigate its vastness is relational. You are the sheep listening to and following the good shepherd. This will make Stage 4 Christians seem slippery to Stage 2 Christians. They seem to use the same language, but they mean different things with it.

It can be a long road but every step is good.

I have found this tremendously helpful (and, for the record, I tend to see myself as probably somewhere in Stage 3 with Stage 4 aspirations) when it comes to thinking about my own spiritual journey. Stage 3 began to break into my Stage 2 thinking around the time I graduated from Bible College, but the process was fairly gradual for me and I don't think I really gave up on Stage 2—that is, on the bedrock belief that there were answers out there for all of my questions and that all I had to do was learn and understand them—until my mid-late 20s. Fortunately for me (and I credit a lot of center-set dynamics, the Truth seeking/always questioning culture of my grad school, and some wonderful spiritual mentors who were not afraid of my questions) the transition from Stage 2 to Stage 3 did not entail any particular need to walk away from Jesus. I certainly despaired of the institutional church for a while, but Jesus was always "there with me" and was entirely happy to hear my questions, absorb my frustrations, and sit with me in my fears and doubts.

But stage theory helped me to make sense of what was going on with myself and with the Christian world around me. It gave me a grid with which to process things, and it has proved to be pretty robust at that job since I first started using it. The shift, from baseline selfishness to a reliance on rules and answers to structure life and existence to an awareness of the damage caused by those rules and answers and an attendant rejection of rules and answers as such and then beyond into a slowly-unveiling appreciation of the Truth in which at least some of those old rules were grounded but which is bigger than they seem to envision, resonates really well with what I have observed in the world of Christianity.

One of Schmelzer's most on-point observations in this chapter is that much of the contemporary "culture war" in the US, and particularly the conversation and tension between American White Evangelicalism and the Progressive Christian conversation seems to represent a Stage 2 vs Stage 3 conflict which periodically seems to shunt various folks into Stage 4.

As my relationship with Jesus has grown, as I have gotten to know him better and better, and as that has led me farther and farther outside the generally accepted bounded set of American Evangelicalism, I have experienced so much of what Schmelzer talks about here. I remember when I was in Bible college, I generally understood the "business of Christians" to be to learn the answers about Jesus, a task well suited to Peck's "Stage 2" and I genuinely believed that there were straightforward answers out there for me to find. To borrow another metaphor Schmelzer uses in the book. I thought that Truth was something I would eventually be able to comprehend, to fit in my own head. As time went on and my Bible College professors, then the books they recommended, then the books the authors of those books recommended, failed to answer my questions—or more accurately, as the answers they provided failed to satisfy my growing questions—I began to worry that the answers just weren't out there.

One wry observation that Schmelzer makes in the book is that, when introduced to the concept, Stage 3 Christians have a bit of a tendency to identify as Stage 4. He is probably right about that but it makes it hard for anyone to say that they actually are in Stage 4. That may be fairly accurate though, one of the hallmarks of the mystical approach to truth and God is an awareness of ones own limitations which would tend to prevent folks in that stage from having any particular sense of having "arrived", I suspect that a lot of mystical stage 4 people think of themselves as somewhere on the border between the rebellious stage 3 and the mystical stage 4. I certainly do and I am happy to leave it up to those who know me to decide whether that is accurate or indicates that I am actually fairly far gone in mysticism (my penchant for getting into internet debates likely counts against me here).

The Stage theory approach works really well for understanding a lot of the Blue Ocean project itself as well. If you think back to the previous sections (Solus Jesus, Centered Set, and Childlike Faith), all of them smack of this mystical/relational approach to God. They rely on the premises that reality is bigger than we can ever really comprehend and that there is a loving relationship available to guide us through it. Reality is both fundamentally wondrous, dangerous, and good. It reminds me a good bit of the classic line about Aslan from The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe:

Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion." "Ooh" said Susan. "I'd thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion"..."Safe?" said Mr Beaver ..."Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.

This fundamental assumption that we cannot and need not "know all the things", that reality and Truth are just too great for us, and that Jesus is there to walk with us, is what—in my mind—grounds Blue Ocean thinking, it is the thread that holds all six distinctives together. It is also what I think drives a lot of Evangelical Christians (who represent the "rules and truth" stage 2 group with which I most identify) so crazy. Blue Ocean thinking delights in questions and the exploration of God without feeling the burden of needing answers (though answers can be pleasant and delightful enough when the come around) while a lot of Evangelicalism experiences an almost chronic anxiety in the presence of unanswered questions about reality, and religious cynicism experiences a mirror anxiety in the presence of confident answers. My experience from within both of these latter groups has been almost a deep frustration with the very idea that one could be at peace with questions or with answers. Maybe that is why Blue Ocean Faith feels so much like being able to breath again.

The Third Way (Handling those "Squabbles")

OK, so the Third Way is my jam. The essence of what Blue Oceaners call the "Third Way Approach

to Debatable Matters" is that Paul's advice to the Roman Church about how they ought to navigate their theological disputes over the observance of special "holy" days and the eating of meat which had been sacrificed to idols, can and should be applied to debatable matters in the church (universal and local) today. As I mentioned above, the Third Way was first enunciated and fully developed by the Blue Ocean Ann Arbor pastor Ken Wilson back when he (together with quite a few of the Blue Ocean group's other pastors) was a member of the Vineyard movement. Wilson first presented the idea in paper for at a Society of Vineyard Scholars conference as an approach to arguments over the level of participation the Vineyard ought to allow to LGB individuals. He later developed his ideas into a book A Letter to My Congregation  and it is his more fully developed version which Schmelzer cites as a Blue Ocean Distinctive in his book.

The Third Way approach begins by identifying its own scope. Riffing on the work of Roger E.Olson, the Third Way breaks religious claims into three potential categories: dogma, doctrine, and opinion. Dogma is defined as the basic beliefs of Christian faith, essentially those propositions without which we are talking about something which probably isn't Christianity. Schmelzer identifies the Apostle's and Nicene creeds as good candidate for this category. Doctrine would be those propositions which would seem to necessarily derive from dogma, usually by only one or two steps; most of the theology that people get really heated about online falls into this category. Then opinion is everything left over; it is the category for those propositions which we might hold but don't feel to be at all critical to our overall understanding of the nature of reality. Within this taxonomy, Third Way is an approach to differences over doctrine. 

The Third Way approach is an approach to what Ken Wilson has called disputable matters. He, and Schmelzer in Blue Ocean Faith, define disputable matters as 1) doctrine; 2) bringing two biblical truths into tension; 3) disagreed upon by otherwise faithfully Jesus-following people. 

Once we have decided that we are involved in a debate over doctrine (and keep in mind that debates over the theology of LGB sex have been the experimentum crucis for the theory) the Third Way approach is to look at which "side" in the debate is arguing for greater liberty of conscience and behavior and which is arguing for a greater degree of holiness or constraint. In Romans, Paul identified one "side"—the one which holds to more laws and have a more tender conscience—as the weak and the other—those with more liberty of conscience—as the strong, and within that framework, each group has a responsibility to the other. In Dave's words:

• By all means hold the belief that you hold and never violate your conscience
• Shun contempt and judgement and trust God to judge wisely
• Make clear to yourself and others that you understand that your belief is not dogma and that reasonable, faithful people disagree with you.
• Do not exclude anyone from full participation in the community over disputable matters—so long as they also abide by these four principles.

This has meant that Blue Ocean churches are functionally "open and affirming" in that they will not prevent an LGBTQ+ person from participation in the full life of the church, they perform same-sex weddings and have ordained LGBTQ+ clergy. However, they aren't technically "open and affirming" since, to quote Schmelzer (working from Ken Wilson) again:

...the "affirming" part of "open and affirming" seems to go against Paul's command here not to judge. To "affirm" someone, in this context, often means something like to "grant them moral approval." I have to meet them and ask myself, "As best as I can figure out, do I morally approve or disapprove of this person?" Then I decide, "I approve!" Along with Paul here, Jesus profoundly commands us not to judge anyone. The issue in Third Way is not passing judgment positively or negatively on anyone, it's to include all people who hope to follow Jesus as the disputable matter works itself out.

The upshot of all of this for me has been a long term commitment to, on the one hand, hold and advocate for my beliefs on this and other subjects as strongly as I know how (feel free to check out my defense of LGB relationships HERE and my defense of the gender identities of transgender persons HERE if you are curious) while remaining in relationship and spiritual community with people who disagree with me.

So far as I can tell the Third Way is really the only viable way forward for the Church as a whole, but I want to acknowledge that it isn't easy at all and, frankly, still needs a lot of working out. I still have questions about what it looks like to take a Third Way approach when there are people who have suffered spiritual and emotional abuse at the hands of those who are the weak (it is interesting to note how often the weak have power over the strong).

Some Resources

• For those who are interested, Ken Wilson and Emily Swan maintain a blog series dedicated to thinking about the Third Way over at The Third Way Newsletter, they have even allowed me to contribute periodically.
• Anyone with questions about Transgender folk and theology would be really well served to check out Austen Lionheart's YouTube channel Transgender and Christian

Click HERE to check out A Letter to My Congregation on Amazon

Click HERE to get Blue Ocean Faith on Amazon

Review of the Second Edition of ALtmC

Note: I wrote this review back in May and only just discovered that I had never published it outside of Amazon. My analysis remains the same and I heartily recommend this book.

Ken Wilson, the former senior pastor of the Ann Arbor Vineyard and current co-pastor of Blue Ocean Faith in Ann Arbor has just released his second edition of A Letter to my Congregation in which he expands on the first edition in a number of helpful ways. But before I address them I would like to mention what the book does as a whole.

Those who have spent any time in the environment of American evangelicalism are, by now, well aware of the “micro-culture war” taking place over the place of LGBTQ+ Christians in the Church. When Wilson’s first edition came out in 2014 it offered a path beyond culture war. The “Third Way” as Wilson and others refer to it, requires a lot of combatants on both sides. Laying down our arms involves making space for the other without devaluing anyone, including those some see as a threat and those who have hurt us and/or the people we love. Wilson’s Third Way, based on Romans 14 and 15 and expounded in the book with exquisite pastoral care and compassion, calls for “traditionalists” to abstain from excluding those they believe to be in sin while simultaneously calling on “progressives” to maintain unity with, and respect for, the very people whose views and actions have done so much damage. Ken Wilson is calling us all to the very radical love for one another which is at the heart of Jesus’ high priestly prayer and was the overriding priority of the first Jerusalem council. This book will not be an easy read for anybody who shares in God’s heart for the church, but it is a necessary one. If there is to be any catholic and Christian way forward for the church in the west, I am convinced that it will have to be the Third Way.

As more and more books are being published to address Christian responses to LGBTQ+ Christians (and they vary widely in degrees of quality and of applicability on both “sides”), “A Letter to my Congregation” and particularly this second edition of it, find an important place in the genre. First, because Wilson writes from his experience as a pastor. In the first edition, he wrote as and evangelical proposing an exciting, if challenging, way forward. In the second, Wilson has added some somber reflections on his projects. Two years into the Third Way, Wilson is able to provide the reader with an report of what is likely to happen for and to churches which choose to adopt this way. To judge from his update, the way has,indeed, been a difficult (one might even say “narrow”) one, but there are rays of hope as we now see Third Way communities growing and flourishing around the country.

The second major addition to this edition, is some careful revision to Wilson’s theological analysis of “the question”. In Chapters 3 and 6, Wilson has responded to some of his more strident critics with a more thorough, robust analysis of the “clobber texts” and of the more general theological and philosophical arguments which are often brought to bear on the discussion. Here we get to see Wilson accommodating and responding to critiques of the original book in a way that show he has “done his homework” and that it has resulted in an even stronger theological foundation for the Third Way approach.

In these two updates, we get a glimpse in miniature of the core strength of this book. Ken Wilson writes as a pastor, the book is a pastoral letter, but he does so without abandoning a rigorous commitment to theological scholarship. Readers looking for a thorough engagement with intellectual and theological questions will find it here, shot through with the shepherd’s care of an experienced pastor, while readers looking for a compassionate, human approach to the very real relational stresses they have with LGBTQ+ friends and family (or their own experience of life) will also find those needs met, rooted in careful, deliberate exegesis and scholarship.

A Letter to my Congregation reflects the heart of God the Father for a wounded and fractious creation, the love of Jesus for His shattered, invaluable church, and is shot through with the Spirit’s discernment of the broken hearts and desperate longings of individual Christians.

You can pick up the Second Edition of A Letter to my Congregation on Amazon by clicking HERE.