Dec. 21, 2009 issue
Canadian MBs study Christology, atonement theories
By MB Herald staff From a report by Dora DueckSASKATOON, Sask. — We gain understanding when Scripture and Spirit come together in community, with Jesus at the center.
That was the message David Wiebe, executive director of the Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches, used to set the stage for an MB study conference, “Confessing Jesus in a Pluralistic World.”
It’s important “to get together and work through together what matters to us,” Wiebe said.
More than 200 people did just that Oct. 15-17 at Forest Grove Community Church. The event was organized by the conference Board of Faith and Life.
In addition to studying Christology in relation to pluralism, the group discussed varying understandings of how Christ’s death atones for human sin.
Tom Yoder Neufeld, a University of Waterloo, Ont., professor and author of Recovering Jesus, gave the plenary addresses. Each gave one answer to Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?”
Yoder Neufeld considered Jesus as the “manifold wisdom of God” (Eph. 3:10). In its wisdom tradition, Israel had its “windows open to the world,” he said, and this literature gave the early church “language and categories of thought with which to lift up Jesus.”
The wisdom that brought the world into being is truly “manifold” for it is also connected to the scandal of the cross and “pushes us into mystery,” he said.
Scriptural confessions of Christ as wisdom were spoken in a pluralistic time much like ours, Yoder Neufeld said.
Yoder Neufeld urged creativity and fresh language, especially poetry, in speaking of Jesus. Society resists the Christian message, he said, because we’ve reduced it to “formulas and definitions” or because “it seems to combine an easy fix with militarism and materialism.”
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