Living the Questions

Introduction

This page is a collection of links and reflections associated with the Living the Questions curriculum. Please note that the selections here are Jonathan’s and will certainly reflect his slant on things. I’m very much enjoying the study group Blacksburg Presbyterian is holding on this curriculum, but I think the series deserves some critique, and this page will focus on the more critical reports. Google for “Living the Questions” and you’ll find a huge swath of laudatory reviews.

Please join us in the discussion forum if you would like to respond to or improve this document. (Or post comments below.)

Related Links and Resources

The homepage for the LTQ Curriculum.

LTQ is described by its editors as an “unabashedly liberal alternative” to the Alpha course. You can learn about Alpha in the UK and Alpha in the US. LTQ is also compared with the Beginnings course offered by Cokesbury.

Reviews and others use of the curriculum…

• A review by James R. Adams of the Center for Progressive Christianity
• A Chattanooga perspective.
• Bendis, Debra, and Jason Byassee. Video ventures: two alternative to ‘Alpha’. (Living the Questions) (Beginnings) (Video Recording Review).” The Christian Century 122.7 (April 5, 2005): 28(2). InfoTrac OneFile. Thomson Gale. Virginia Tech. 11 October 2005. [GaleGroup Link][full-text @ findarticles]…
  

  These videos might generate some good discussion if the audience is familiar with the Jesus Seminar and has come prepared to discuss critical arguments. But the series may confuse and even dismay those who have chosen to pursue questions of faith within the church.

  The critical claims about the dangers of certainty are offered with disturbing certainty. Orthodoxy “never” expresses itself in love? What about the orthodoxy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero and Mother Teresa, to name a few counterexamples ? If fundamentalists are those who see the world as divided into the “saved” and “damned,” LTQ comes close to being a perfect minor image.

  This posture of over-againstness causes LTQ to fall into incoherence at times. For example, Geering is featured declaring that that the liberal nation-state guards the aspirations of Christianity better than the church does. But the chief opponent of such a view, Stanley Hauerwas, also makes an appearance in these videos. He is shown arguing that the doctrine of the Trinity keeps Jesus’ death from being a case of divine child abuse, since it’s God himself who dies on the cross.

  Hauerwas fits the series, apparently, because he is arguing against a “literalistic” view of atonement–never mind that he would sharply disagree with other participants on many other issues. Given the discordant mix of voices assembled for the series–Jesus Seminar scholars, a womanist theologian (Townes), a process theologian (Cobb), and the likes of Hauerwas and Sample–one has to have a seminary degree to detect the real theological battlelines.

  The Hauerwas segment on the Trinity reveals another problem: Wait, what’s the Trinity? We are never told–an odd omission for any introduction to Christianity. A similar problem arises when Heather Murray Elkins, a liturgist at Drew University Theological School, recounts a lovely story about a young man who is told that his father’s disapproval of him is overcome in baptism, in which God proclaims “you are my beloved son, with you I am well-pleased.” The viewer may well wonder at this point: So what’s baptism?

Further Reading

Readings available written by Living the Questions contributors:

• Jesus Seminar — Many of the contributors to LTQ have been associated with the Jesus Seminar.
• Nancy Ammerman — A list of Ammerman’s publications
• Marcus Borg — Borg’s homepage.
• John Cobb — Religion-online has quite a number of full-texts written by John Cobb. Check their author index for his name. Wikipedia has an entry for Cobb.
• John Dominic Crossan — Crossan’s home page
• Stanley Hauerwas — Religion-online has quite a number of full-texts written by Stanley Haurwas. Check their author index for his name.
• Stephen Patterson — Eden’s Patterson home page.
• John Spong — Some information about Spong is available from the Diocese of Newark