Dr. Robert Webber - In Memoriam

“Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints” (Psalm 116:15).

My friend and colleague Bob Webber died on Friday, April 27, 2007 after an 8 month battle with pancreatic cancer. He fought a valiant fight and died with great dignity. A public memorial service in the Chicago area is being planned and details about the service will be posted on Northern Seminary’s website: www.seminary.edu.

Bob Webber was a special person. He was a committed Christian who was dedicated to the renewal of the church and to Christian ministry. Bob Webber was one of the foremost authorities on worship renewal. He conducted workshops and seminars on worship and spirituality for almost every major denomination in North America through the Institute in Worship Studies located in Florida, which he founded in 1995.

In the Fall of 2006, Bob brought together a group of scholars, pastors, and church leaders to prepare a “Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future.” The result of this work was a document that challenged the next generation of evangelical leaders “to make God’s story known through the rediscovery of the church’s mission in its worship, spirituality, and life in the world.”

Bob was a prolific writer. Every year when Northern Seminary awarded the annual Faculty Award for Publication, Bob would always have two (sometimes more than two) books that qualified for the award. His vast knowledge of theology and church history was evident in his lectures and presentations. He was a great teacher.

Bob was a good friend and a great colleague. His sense of humor and his friendly attitude was manifest throughout his years of service here at Northern. To know Bob was to appreciate his friendliness, his openness, and his enthusiasm for the church. Those of us who knew Bob and worked with him will greatly miss his joy for the spiritual and his zest for life.

“Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.” “Blessed indeed,” says the Spirit, “because they will rest from their work since their good deeds will follow them” (Revelation 14:13).

Claude F. Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Bob Webber, Northern Seminary

A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future - The Conference

On December 7-9, 2006, Northern Baptist Seminary hosted the First Annual Conference of the Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future. The conference consisted of five presentations, five responses, which were in turn followed by a panel discussion and interaction with the audience. Almost 250 people attended the conference; they came from all over the United States and Canada.

The Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future was the work of Robert Webber. Bob is the William R. and Geraldyne B. Myers Chair of Ministry and Director of M.A. in Worship and Spirituality at Northern Baptist Seminary. Bob Webber is a prolific writer whose focus on worship and spirituality has made him one of the foremost authorities on worship renewal.

Bob has always been concerned with the challenges of the postmodern pragmatism that has invaded today’s church. His dream was to call today’s church back to the ancient traditions of the church in order to give the church a renewed sense of mission.

Thus, the Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future is a summons to the church in general and to Evangelicals in particular to confront the challenges facing God’s people in the twenty-first century. To read the text of the Call in its entirety, click here.

The five speakers addressed different issues raised by the Call. The speakers and their topics were as follows:

Brian D. McLaren, “Does the Emergent Church have an Ancient Evangelical Future? The Call and the Witnessing Mission of the Emerging Church.”

Frederica Matthews-Green, “The Call and Christian Spiritual Formation.”

Aaron O. Flores, “The Call and the Multi-Cultural Ministry.”

Martin E. Marty, “The Call and the Future of Evangelicalism.”

Lauren F. Winner, “The Call and Recovering our Hebrew Roots.”

I responded to Lauren Winner’s presentation on “The Call and Recovering our Hebrew Roots.” In her presentation, Lauren acknowledges that Christians today have abandoned the Old Testament, that in fact, many Christians have accepted the view of Marcion that the Old Testament is irrelevant for today’s church.

She also said that if the church is to recover its story, it must do so through Hebrew Scriptures. Lauren’s presentation focused on two practices that Jews and Christians have in common. The first one is the practice of Sabbath keeping and the second is the practice of bereavement.

Another key point in Lauren’s presentation was the recognition that community and practice were two important elements that provided identity to biblical Israel and to Judaism as the people of God.

On Thursday, I will post the text of my response to Lauren’s presentation. Because of the limitation of time, I chose to address the issues of Sabbath keeping and the concept of community in the life of ancient Israel.

A note of concern: Bob Webber is my colleague and my friend. Unfortunately, because of his struggle with pancreatic cancer, Bob Webber was unable to attend the conference. Many readers of this blog know Bob Webber. Others have known him through his writings and conferences. I would like to ask you to pray for Bob and his family at this very difficult time in the life of the Webber family.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Bob Webber, Lauren Winner, Evangelical, The Call, Ancient Future

A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future

My colleague, Robert Webber, Myers Professor of Ministry at Northern Baptist Seminary, is convening a group of scholars and practitioners who represent the next generation of evangelical leaders to sign a document called A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future.

Bob Webber is recognized by pastors, denominational leaders, scholars, and lay people as one of the foremost authorities on worship renewal. He regularly conducts workshops for almost every major denomination in North America through the Institute in Worship Studies, which he founded in 1995.

The document, A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future, is a clarion call for evangelicals to get beyond their present divisions and become energized once again by the Spirit. The Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future beckons Christians to make God’s story known through the rediscovery of the church’s mission in its worship, spirituality, and life in the world. Below is the final draft of the document:

A CALL TO AN ANCIENT EVANGELICAL FUTURE

Prologue

In every age the Holy Spirit calls the Church to examine its faithfulness to God's revelation in Jesus Christ, authoritatively recorded in Scripture and handed down through the Church. Thus, while we affirm the global strength and vitality of worldwide Evangelicalism in our day, we believe the North American expression of Evangelicalism needs to be especially sensitive to the new external and internal challenges facing God's people.

These external challenges include the current cultural milieu and the resurgence of religious and political ideologies. The internal challenges include Evangelical accommodation to civil religion, rationalism, privatism and pragmatism. In light of these challenges, we call Evangelicals to strengthen their witness through a recovery of the faith articulated by the consensus of the ancient Church and its guardians in the traditions of Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, the Protestant Reformation and the Evangelical awakenings. Ancient Christians faced a world of paganism, Gnosticism and political domination. In the face of heresy and persecution, they understood history through Israel's story, culminating in the death and resurrection of Jesus and the coming of God's Kingdom.

Today, as in the ancient era, the Church is confronted by a host of master narratives that contradict and compete with the gospel. The pressing question is: who gets to narrate the world? The Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future challenges Evangelical Christians to restore the priority of the divinely inspired biblical story of God's acts in history. The narrative of God's Kingdom holds eternal implications for the mission of the Church, its theological reflection, its public ministries of worship and spirituality and its life in the world. By engaging these themes, we believe the Church will be strengthened to address the issues of our day.

1. On the Primacy of the Biblical Narrative

We call for a return to the priority of the divinely authorized canonical story of the Triune God. This story-Creation, Incarnation, and Re-creation-was effected by Christ's recapitulation of human history and summarized by the early Church in its Rules of Faith. The gospel-formed content of these Rules served as the key to the interpretation of Scripture and its critique of contemporary culture, and thus shaped the church's pastoral ministry. Today, we call Evangelicals to turn away from modern theological methods that reduce the gospel to mere propositions, and from contemporary pastoral ministries so compatible with culture that they camouflage God's story or empty it of its cosmic and redemptive meaning. In a world of competing stories, we call Evangelicals to recover the truth of God's word as the story of the world, and to make it the centerpiece of Evangelical life.

2. On the Church, the Continuation of God's Narrative

We call Evangelicals to take seriously the visible character of the Church. We call for a commitment to its mission in the world in fidelity to God's mission (Missio Dei), and for an exploration of the ecumenical implications this has for the unity, holiness catholicity, and apostolicity of the Church. Thus, we call Evangelicals to turn away from an individualism that makes the Church a mere addendum to God's redemptive plan. Individualistic Evangelicalism has contributed to the current problems of churchless Christianity, redefinitions of the Church according to business models, separatist ecclesiologies and judgmental attitudes toward the Church. Therefore, we call Evangelicals to recover their place in the community of the Church catholic.

3. On the Church's Theological Reflection on God's Narrative

We call for the Church's reflection to remain anchored in the Scriptures in continuity with the theological interpretation learned from the early Fathers. Thus, we call Evangelicals to turn away from methods that separate theological reflection from the common traditions of the Church. These modern methods compartmentalize God's story by analyzing its separate parts, while ignoring God's entire redemptive work as recapitulated in Christ. Anti-historical attitudes also disregard the common biblical and theological legacy of the ancient Church.
Such disregard ignores the hermeneutical value of the Church's ecumenical creeds. This reduces God's story of the world to one of many competing theologies and impairs the unified witness of the Church to God's plan for the history of the world. Therefore, we call Evangelicals to unity in "the tradition that has been believed everywhere, always and by all," as well as to humility and charity in their various Protestant traditions.

4. On Church's Worship as Telling and Enacting God's Narrative

We call for public worship that sings, preaches and enacts God's story. We call for a renewed consideration of how God ministers to us in baptism, eucharist, confession, the laying on of hands, marriage, healing and through the charisms of the Spirit, for these actions shape our lives and signify the meaning of the world. Thus, we call Evangelicals to turn away from forms of worship that focus on God as a mere object of the intellect, or that assert the self as the source of worship. Such worship has resulted in lecture-oriented, music-driven, performance-centered and program-controlled models that do not adequately proclaim God's cosmic redemption. Therefore, we call Evangelicals to recover the historic substance of worship of Word and Table and to attend to the Christian year, which marks time according to God's saving acts.

5. On Spiritual Formation in the Church as Embodiment of God's Narrative

We call for a catechetical spiritual formation of the people of God that is based firmly on a Trinitarian biblical narrative. We are concerned when spirituality is separated from the story of God and baptism into the life of Christ and his Body. Spirituality, made independent from God's story, is often characterized by legalism, mere intellectual knowledge, an overly therapeutic culture, New Age Gnosticism, a dualistic rejection of this world and a narcissistic preoccupation with one's own experience. These false spiritualities are inadequate for the challenges we face in today's world. Therefore, we call Evangelicals to return to a historic spirituality like that taught and practiced in the ancient catechumenate.

6. On the Church's Embodied Life in the World

We call for a cruciform holiness and commitment to God's mission in the world. This embodied holiness affirms life, biblical morality and appropriate self-denial. It calls us to be faithful stewards of the created order and bold prophets to our contemporary culture. Thus, we call Evangelicals to intensify their prophetic voice against forms of indifference to God's gift of life, economic and political injustice, ecological insensitivity and the failure to champion the poor and marginalized. Too often we have failed to stand prophetically against the culture's captivity to racism, consumerism, political correctness, civil religion, sexism, ethical relativism, violence and the culture of death. These failures have muted the voice of Christ to the world through his Church and detract from God's story of the world, which the Church is collectively to embody. Therefore, we call the Church to recover its counter-cultural mission to the world.

Epilogue

In sum, we call Evangelicals to recover the conviction that God's story shapes the mission of the Church to bear witness to God's Kingdom and to inform the spiritual foundations of civilization. We set forth this Call as an ongoing, open-ended conversation. We are aware that we have our blind spots and weaknesses. Therefore, we encourage Evangelicals to engage this Call within educational centers, denominations and local churches through publications and conferences.
We pray that we can move with intention to proclaim a loving, transcendent, triune God who has become involved in our history. In line with Scripture, creed and tradition, it is our deepest desire to embody God's purposes in the mission of the Church through our theological reflection, our worship, our spirituality and our life in the world, all the while proclaiming that Jesus is Lord over all creation.

© Northern Seminary 2006 Robert Webber and Phil Kenyon
Sponsors:
Northern Seminary (www.seminary.edu)
Baker Books (www.bakerbooks.com)
Institute for Worship Studies (www.iwsfla.org)

This is a great declaration.

In order to understand the implications of this Call, people from all strands of evangelicalism will gather together on December 7, 8, and 9, 2006 in Lombard, Illinois under the sponsorship of Northern Baptist Seminary to explore ministry that flows directly out of God’s story. The keynote speakers for the conference are Brian D. McLaren and Robert Webber. At this historic gathering, ministers and theologians will come together in order to rediscover their unity in God’s story.

For more details about The Call contact Robert Webber at rwebber@seminary.edu. For registration and additional information about the conference visit www.growcenter.org.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary