Introducing the Tweak

I first ran across the idea of "tweak" theology in NT Wright's Christian Origins series. I read them as a senior in college, and was captivated by Wright's description (I think in Jesus and the Victory of God) of how Jesus took forms of stories, traditions, even historical accounts familiar to first-century Jews and invested them with new meaning, even new content. He stood their expectations upside-down and forced them to look at the world, at everything they'd taken for granted, through new eyes.

For example, Wright describes the parable of the Prodigal Son as one that would have been very familiar to Jesus' audience, but Jesus makes the hero of the story the prodigal instead of the righteous older brother. In the same way, Jesus retells Isaiah's story of the vineyard, but makes the religious leaders out to be those who'd forsaken God's vineyard (Israel).

Like I said, I was fascinated by this idea of Jesus taking familiar forms (familiar story arcs, etc.) and investing them with new content. Basically, Jesus presented the same old story, and then tweaked it to bring his listeners one step closer to understanding his message and God's character. Having seen it in Wright's book, I suddenly saw Jesus working this way throughout the Gospels, constantly tweaking people's expectations of the Messiah, of the Son of Man, even of Israel's King, to fall more in line with God's idea of what these should be are truly are.

Then I started seeing tweaks throughout the NT, not just in the Gospels, as Paul took the familiar and invested it with new meaning for both the Greeks (Acts 17, the Areopagus) and for Jews (all the way through Romans, especially looking at who are God's people; also pretty heavily in Hebrews, taking figures and events from the OT and reinterpreting them, investing their roles with new content/meaning for the Jewish Christians). In other words, God, through these authors, moves readers from where they are and what they currently understand about God and the world to a new understanding of how God works and what his plan is for the world--and he does this by taking what they accept as true and tweaking it one step at a time closer to his view of reality.

Then Micah took a class on Elijah/Elisha and on the book of Jeremiah. From those he took the idea that God is continually moving his people toward greater holiness, greater knowledge/understanding of himself, greater responsibility as his people. And again, he does this by starting from where they are, tweaking that, and moving them one step at a time toward himself.

We began talking about the idea of "evolutionary theology"--an incendiary phrase for some, to be sure. But by this I meant the idea that God was, and is, constantly in the business of refining our theology to actually look more like himself. So what the early Israelites understood and thought to be true about God is different (less full, complete) from what later Israelites under the monarchy understood, which would be less than what exiled Israel understood, and etc., etc., etc.

The key is, God never changes. But in his understanding of humanity and his patience with us, he starts with what we can understand--as little as that may be--and moves us one step closer to full vision of himself. Thus God's disturbing demand of Abraham that he sacrifice Isaac, and his silence about the patriarchs' problems with polygamy, and all the other little (and not-so-little) inconsistencies we find in how Israel related to and thought of God. Each generation was a step further than the last, because God took their best understanding of him, tweaked it, and handed back a new vision to pass on to the next generation, and so on.

Stephen Lawhead, in his Pendragon Cycle, creates a vivid image of the coming darkness that Taliesin, Merlin, and Arthur would experience. The key to this image of darkness is the brightness of the light that will shine through it. Expand that a little, and you see the people of God as the light in the darkness. The job of the light is to shine brightly. The brighter the light shines, the less dense the darkness around it. Yet the light must continue to shine more and more brightly, or it will no longer illuminate the darkness as effectively (in the same proportions). So the church must reflect God more and more clearly to the world around her, infecting the world with light and yet not getting lost in the growing twilight. We shine in the darkness as we wait for the sun and the full light of day. When the sun comes, there will be no more darkness.

These are all outlines of ideas that feed into each other. A big part of what Micah and I would like to do is trace how they intertwine, test them against Scripture and against each other, and by the grace of God come up with an articulated worldview (paradigm, if you will) that resonates with truth and (even!) makes sense.

Micah, have at it. Your turn!