So last week I started my little geek project and after much ado it is now finished and our kafé has a pirate box with the potential to viraly spread ideas thoughts, documents freely.

The package arrived from iSupply.se within days with the tiny wireless router TL-mr3020. I was astonished that such a small thing could actually function as router, AP and file sharing point.

It was fairly simple to replace the firmware with the open source version (OpenWRT) that would allow me to run the pirate box software (A tiny python web server) on it.

It was equally simple to install the pirate box software package (OpenWRT runs a small debian like package manager called opkg). So within virtually no time I had a running Pirate Box.

I then realised that this version did not include the shout box (wich is a tiny chat on the front webpage) so I decided to go ahead and add that. This of course resulted in a long wrestling with upgrading firmware and package manager frustration. Thankfully the Pirate box community is fresh and full of enthusiasm. Within a few days a new package had been created (Thanks Matthias) and the Pirate Box at our café now serves a slew of theological papers and e-literature as well as an anonymous chat interface.

What did I end up sharing on the box? Well come down to our café and find out, it will be well worth the visit (at least if you are in the general neighborhoud anyway).

Geek as I am, I have stumbled upon “Pirate Box” and realised i must build one (and I shall, and I will, and it will show up at a cafe near you, if you are anywhere near Malmö, Sweden.) However as I am home still something sick and I can’t start this exciting project right this second, I play with the idea in my mind.

So, if you had a personal internet where you anonymously could share anything to anyone within reach of the wireless. What would you share. What documents, film clips, books, graphics. I am guessing it would say a lot about you the files you share….

Here’s my short list…

• Piratteologi (the latest draft of the book I am currently writing)
• S-tech – Soulfilter (my weird fiction book finished but unpolished)
• Flyers about #piratkyrkan, the pirate church event I am hosting together with Mackan Andersson and friends
• Maybe a copy of what book I am currently reading or what audiobook I am currently listening to.
• An ebook made from my LGBTQ series …
• I need suggestions what else should I add?

-Why should it be so complicated? -Why do we find out and know everything?

The questions are justified, on the one hand, one can easily say: We can not know anything about God, if one claims to know something about god then you have created an idol. On the other hand, one could argue that we are both encouraged and invited by scripture to seek understanding and wisdom (sophia).

Some of those who advocate a blind acceptance of biblicism and any doctrines think we need to have a childlike faith (and with this they mean a non-questioning and innocent faith).

Rachel Held Evans writes in his book “Evolving in Monkey Town”:

Those who say that having childlike faith means not asking questions haven’t met too many children. Anyone who has kids or loves kids or has spent more than five minutes with kids knows that kids ask a lot of questions. Rarely are they satisfied with short answers, and rarely do they spend much time absorbing your response before moving on to the next “why?” or “how come?- Rachel Held Evans, Evolving in Monkey Town

Children are a bit like Ronja Rumpnissar, “Voffö, Voffö fool?”

what they (children) really mean is, ‘That’s interesting to me. Let’s talk about that together. Tell me more, please.’ ” Questions are a child’s way of expressing love and trust. They are a child’s way of starting dialogue. They are a child’s way of saying, “I want to have a conversation with you.”

- Rachel Held Evans, Evolving in Monkey Town

But the “asking questions” game quickly becomes tedious if one is to respond to the questions with quick and easy answers, this will make sure that the questions never end. We believe that the child wants answers, but what the child really wants is to have a conversation, intimacy, quality time. Therefore, the answer is not that important but the conversation is, or the road to the answer ….

Psychologists say that the best way to handle children in this stage of development is not to answer their questions directly but instead to tell them stories
- Rachel Held Evans, Evolving in Monkey Town

Soon the little girl will become so lost in her father’s beautiful stories that she will forget she ever had a question to begin with — Rachel Held Evans, Evolving in Monkey town
- Rachel Held Evans, Evolving in Monkey Town

Perhaps this is the via mediabetween the biblicist /fundamentalist and the naturalistic/scientific way. To read and understand the biblical text as a mythical story.

We like children ask questions, and our God responds with mythical tale.

A myth is how things always are, but never where.
- Marcus Borg, Putting Away Childish things

“All stories are true. But some of them never happened.”
- James A. Owen, The Search for the Red Dragon

Our stories, our myths, our fairy tales affect us deeply. Scientists believe it is in our treasury of folk tales (which is an important part of our heritage, or rather what actually defines our culture) that we maintain who we are and the meaning of our lives. Somewhere instinctively we know that there is truth in story, truths hidden deep in our consciousness.

“Story is a primary language of experience. Telling and listening to a story has the same structure as our experience … The episodes of our lives take place one after another just like a story. One of the ways we know each other is by telling our stories. We live in stories”
- Steven A. Evans Quoting Boomershine in ‘Story telling Affecting worldview change’

Narrative is so important to us. We can only love other people by getting to know them, we can only know them by hearing and understanding their story. We can only invite other people to love us by inviting them into our story for to be known is to be loved, and to be loved is to be known.

Note how the woman at the well live in a depressingly small story (a corrosive story, Morrisy) and sneaks of to the well believing herself to be unlovable.

-Give me water, he says

- Are you really talking to me, she says, disbelief thick in her voice.

-Tell me your story, he implies

-I don’t have one, she lies

Caution spilling out of her very being. He then tells her, her story and her life is transformed, she is known, she is loved. She runs of to tell her new story!

-Listen, listen all and listen well, I met a man who told me my story, now come hear for yourselves.

And she becomes part of gods story, gods epic narrative encompassing time and space itself.

We all live in a story. We hear stories. We watch stories on TV and in the movies we attend. Stories are everywhere.
— Winn Griffin, God’s EPIC Adventure

The question is not: Do we really live in a story? The question is: Which story are we intentionally living in?
— Winn Griffin, God’s EPIC Adventure

September let go a long-held breath. She stared into the roiling black-violet soup, thinking furiously. The trouble was, September didn’t know what sort of story she was in. Was it a merry one or a serious one? How ought she to act? If it were merry, she might dash after a Spoon, and it would all be a marvelous adventure, with funny rhymes and somersaults and a grand party with red lanterns at the end. But if it were a serious tale, she might have to do something important, something involving, with snow and arrows and enemies. Of course, we would like to tell her which. But no one may know the shape of the tale in which they move. And, perhaps, we do not truly know what sort of beast it is, either. Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.
— Catherynne Valente, The Girl who Circumnavigated fairyland in a vehicle of her own making

“I wonder what kind of tale we’ve fallen into, Mr. Frodo?”- JRR Tolkien, The Two Towers

What kind of story are you living in? What kind of stories do you read in the Bible?

What kind of story would you like to live in? What kind of story does the bible invite you to live in?

And perhaps most importantly, how would your life change if you lived in such a story?

“A genuine story will not leave us alone. It insists, sometimes in the most impolite terms, on changing us
– Ann Morisy quoting Taylor, Journying out

“Only another story can come alongside a prejudicial story and begin to melt a hardened convinced heart”
— Anne Morrisy, Journeying out

It is precisely here that the power of the biblical narrative resides (god’s power unto salvation?!). Regardless of what may be historically accurate or not, whether god created the world in seven days or if Jesus was really born from a virgin. Regardless of who wrote the text and for what purpose. When the Holy Spirit is allowed to use the biblical narrative to give our lives a new context, a new meta-narrative, then we re-think, re-pent, then we are rescued from our own tiny personal reality show and we are invited into God’s own story …

“The stories of God’s word serve as a catalyst for a new script, laying a foundation for a new worldview, resulting in life transformation”
— A. Steven Evans, ‘Story telling affecting worldview change’

Just by listening to God’s story we get to know God, and getting to know someone is to learn to love that someone.

Therefore, we, as young children must ask all our questions and see what stories God will tell us in response.

Sometimes through a bible passage, sometimes through our own lives, sometimes at the cinema, sometimes through a nice book and sometimes through someone else’s life.

Remember to press god for answers. Aske the why? the How? and the When?

This is our childlike way of saying, God I want to talk more about this tell me a story ….

and God responds, with stories, everywhere, all the time.

When I wrote my articles about LGBTQ , one of the comments I received was that I had a “liberal theology”.

The more I think about this, the more I realize that the way the word is used today in the Swedish Christian community is: Liberal equals not conservative, or at worst non biblicist.

If this is the proper definition then I am guilty as charged, that is. I am not and never will be a biblicist (again). If liberal theology is the only alternative to biblicism, then I am a liberal through and through.

Fortunately, it’s not so black and white. Indeed, there are many other ways to relate to the Bible.

I agree (with liberal theologians) that we must learn biblical criticism and exegesis, we must understand the historical context and where / how the text has come to be, if we are to extract the gold from the biblical text, and if we are to have a theological conversation that allows for depth, while still respecting the text.

But that’s not enough, a liberal hermeneutic not enough to build a Christian community in a secular post-modern society. Liberal theology (in the most extreme cases) robs the Bible of its deep mystery and the revelation of the holy spirit. Liberal Theology, many times result in a secular biblical stance that is not congruent with a living Christian faith.

Post Liberalism, narrative theology, progressive christianity

So what do you do when you are no longer a biblicist but find that liberal theology falls flat?

Well, you could enter the world of post-liberalism (it means exactly what it sounds like, after liberalism and is a reaction to liberal theology). Post-liberalism is based on narrative theology, ie. ”the Church’s use of the Bible should focus on a narrative presentation of the faith as regulative for the development of a coherent systematic theology.” (Wikipedia)

The post-liberal or narrative theology stands in stark contrast to the liberal and modernist individualism and interpret the biblical text not only in historical context but in a broader perspective that takes into account the culture, spoken tradition and contemporary culture. Instead of staring themselves blind at the historical context as they read Bible stories as an imaginative act where the story is reborn and reinterpreted (from its historical context, with great respect for the contemporary culture and tradition) into our own context and in in our own contemporary Christian community and tradition. Theologian Walter Brueggemann calls this “imaginative remembering” who says that:

“The traditioning process of retelling does not intend to linger over old happening, but intends to Recreate a rooted, lively world of meaning That is marked by bothering coherence and surprise in Which the listening generation, time after time, can situate ITS own life” (Brueggemann – An Introduction to the Old Testament, 2003 pts 

This post-liberal theology is the basis for much of the thinking of the emergent church. But there it has been discovered that it is not enough to employ a new hermeneutic (a new way to read and understand the Bible), but you need a new practical theology (how we live out our theology and how we shape our modern tradition and liturgy of this post-liberal hermeneutic. When you begin to ask these questions it may be that you take the next step in progressive theology .

Progressive theology is what happens when the Christian church listen to the voices of liberation theology, feminist theology and the secular critique of the traditional church. Another way to see it is to say, progressive theology, or progressive church is what you get when you let Jesus love-priority be central in the Christian community. With Jesus’ love priority, I mean:

“” Master, which is the greatest commandment in the law? “He answered,” Thou shalt love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all thy mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. ‘”(Matthew 22:36-40 SWED2K)

This coupled with the realization that we must be shepherds not devourers of the Earth. Creating a love-centered, eco-conscious Christianity can (all be it very simplified) be called progressive Christianity.

Wikipedia defines the following items as the characteristics of progressive Christianity.

• A spiritual vitality and expressiveness, including participatory, arts-infused, and lively worship as well as a variety of spiritual rituals and practices such as meditation
• Intellectual integrity including a willingness to question
• An affirmation of human diversity
• An affirmation of the Christian faith with a simultaneous sincere respect for other faiths
• Strong ecological concerns and commitments

The lure of theopoetics

In all these theological waters, there are many currents, uncharted depths and an incredible openness to diversity.

One flow of theology that I feel a strong attraction to isteopoetics.

Wikipedia has the following definition of teopoetics:

Theopoetics is an interdisciplinary field of study That combines elements of poetic analysis, process theology, narrative theology, and postmodern philosophy.Theopoetics … Suggests That deprecated of trying to developement a “scientific” theory of God, as Systematic Theology Attempts, theologians Should deprecated try to find God through poetic articulations of Their lived (“embodied”) experiences. It Asks theologians to accept reality as a Legitimate source of divine revelation and Suggests That bothering the divine and the real are mysterious – that is, irreducible to literalist dogmas or scientific proofs.

This teopoetic lure is calling from the forgotten depths and reminds us of the mystery. The mystery, the secret that can only be experienced, that ever dances an alluring wild dance at the limits of our consciousness. A mystery that contains both the Cataphatic and Apophatic tradition, a mystery that is both 100% man and 100% percent God, a mystery in which we are co-creators with the divine and where we lose ourselves in Christ and become one with God without us becoming god.

Polarization and pirate theology

The problem remains, as soon as you begin to question the biblicist fundamentals, you become a Pariah thrown out of the Swedish Theological mainstream, branded a liberal.

There is no theological argument that can win these biblicists over and I do not think it’s something we should aim for. Who am I to argue that my interpretation is better than yours? No, we need to create small pirate islands. where we live out a different reality, a different world view, a different hermeneutic, a different kind of Christianity in the middle of the biblicist mainstream.

We become pirate theologians (with all the positive, or romanticized aspect of that image, and perhaps unfortunately, sometimes some of the negative). But our purpose is not confrontation, or to somehow take over the establishment. No, our purpose is to gather in these wild, lawless islands and live out a rag-tag but true, lawless but loving, tradition-breaking, but not without tradition, or simply a radically different Christianity that does not actively threaten the normal Christian daily life in any other way than that it exist.

All are welcome

What’s great with the lawlessness of the pirate island is that it is diverse, colorful and totally unmanageable. Everyone fit in, everyone is welcome. Conservative biblicists and liberal secularists, theopoets and systematic theologians, stay at home dads and graduate students, hobby theologians and professional theophiles, philosophers and scientists, hetero and homo, atheists, Buddhists, Muslims, however queer you are, you are welcome … As long as we all respect the lawlessness of the pirate island and the diversity and intrinsic value of each other, then we call can let the theological conversation flow in this noisy environment with wide doors, high ceilings and low thresholds.