‘Dinner With An Imperfect Community’?
In response to Mark Noll’s opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal about the limits of the personal-relationship-with-Christ motif in the book Dinner With A Perfect Stranger and evangelicalism as a whole (Noll writes, “A Christian message stressing the possibility of an enduring—and often less demanding—personal relationship with the loving Creator of the universe sounds very appealing. But does such an adaptation retain enough of historic Christianity’s other dimension? Or does dinner with a perfect stranger fit a little too conveniently into our lives?”), Christianity Today’s weblog writes:
Noll’s article is indicative of what seems to be a growing concern among evangelicals (at least evangelical academics and theologians) that the movement has not spent enough energy and effort understanding and describing a theology of the church (ecclesiology).
Does the Christian life look like dinner with a perfect stranger? Well, Jesus told us that it looks like a wedding feast with an apparent stranger. David Gregory may not be far off after all—it just may be that he didn’t place enough chairs around the table.
Indeed, dinner and “chairs around the table” is a delicious metaphor for communal fellowship with God and other believers, and a very promising starting point for articulating a theology of the church!