It is a fascinating datum that the issue of "co-creation" brings up such interest on the board. It brings out lurkers, even me, who have vowed to limit posting. It is more interesting to see that the issue particularly engages thinkers from the Church of the Nazarene on the list-serve. Amongst the "Wesleyans," this issue has a particular sociological locus among the Church of the Nazarene. My guess is that this locus comes from the particular influence of Mildred Bangs Wynkoop that has always been more extensive in the Church of the Nazarene than other holiness ecclesial and educational institutions.

Why does such a phrase invoke such response and why would even anyone care if Wesley can be invoked to legitimate it? It seems to me, that what is at stake reaches to the core issue of the struggle within the evangelical Wesleyan tradition whether it is going to face the "immanent frame" from within a modernist/postmodernist perspective of a play within immanence where "transcendence" finds its end in the continued endlessly "new and improved" movement of history forward toward the kingdom of God (i.e., the mediating Protestant theologies/ecclesiologies of the 19th and 20th centuries) or whether we will face the "immanent frame" within the ontological strangeness to modernity/postmodernity of the historic Christian tradition of the radical, non-contrastive transcendence of God that is required for the revelation of Jesus so that Mary is the Bearer of God, and the Kingdom of God is not something we build, but inherit.

The issue seems to be whether the evangelical liberalism that became prominent in the last half of the twentieth century via the movement to the "relational theology" that fit with the church growth movement can sustain and thicken its modernist/postmodernist intellectual commitments and remain evangelical (it seems to me this is why the question of appeal to Wesley arises) or whether catholicity and the historic grammar of the faith given to the saints frames our witness with all its non-modernist "baggage" in providing an alternative language from that provided by the cultural immanent frame.

We live in a culture where Being has become emptied of its Otherness in the paradox of Transcendence/Immanance revealed in Jesus; in the historicist commitments of the immanent frame, being is now the becoming of history as "god" and "nature" push history forward together through a dialectical process, that, for Christians, may be represented positively in Jesus or other similar type of humanist liberationists movements. Whether this is a baptizing of Whitehead or Hegel or Derrida or Foucault or Zizek or Marx or Thomas Friedman or the Chicago School or George Bush or Barach Obama, the underlying cultural grammar seems to me to stay the same. It is the impulse that Charles Taylor so brilliantly analyzes in A Secular Age that has its roots in reforming Christian movements around the turn of the millennium that have wrought its colonial havoc throughout the earth and initiated ironically the very secularism in which it seems that we live and move and have our being.

Why does it matter? Christian Smith in his new Souls in Tradition on emerging adults in North America notes that the default language of this generation is that provided by Protestant liberalism - even in evangelical churches. He writes, "while listening to emerging adults explain their views of religion, it struck us that they might just as well be paraphrasing from classical liberal Protestant theologicans, of whom they have no doubt actually hear, from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The likes of Adolf von Harnack, Albrecht Ritschl, Wilhelm Hermann, and Harry Emerson Fosdick would be proud. People, it is clear, need not study liberal Protestant theology to be well inducted into its worldview, since it has simply become part of the cultural air that many Americans now breathe" (pp. 288-89).

This morning I was reading through a student essay at the end of the most recent "Viewpoint," the public relations , constituency publication of Point Loma. Like those whom Smith interviewed, the student, an intern for PLNU's Centre of Justice and Reconciliation, adopted the language of the American progressivist social gospel gleaned here at PLNU without even knowing the historic contingencies and baggage that goes with it, "The kingdom of heaven is one of justice, and we who follow Christ are to bring that justice to those who are dying for it." She invoked the chapel theme, "On Earth as it is in Heaven" as legitimation. The Bush administration could not have waxed better Wilsonian propaganda for the invasion of Iraq. We have met the Protestant liberals, and they is us.

I think that the attention this topic has witnessed here shows that we, the "evangelical Wesleyans" are at a cross roads in our movement towards mainline North Atlantic liberal Protestantism (that includes parts of American evangelicalism in opposition to its voluntarist doppelganger, Calvinist/Puritan evangelicalism). The evangelical, experiential use of "more subtler languages" in the mediating theologies of the past generation (themselves ambiguously formed by the Romantic impulses within the late 19th century revivalism/camp meeting movement) has now sunk in institutionally and culturally sufficiently that bolder, less evangelical and historic Christian language may be offered - particularly if appeal to Wesley can justify this language.

Romantic "hard core" revivalism is dead, thank God, in North Atlantic societies except in a few cultural niches. Which will it be for the future? Wesley the theologian of "natural relationality" of the modernist/postmodernist immanent frame or Wesley the theologian of Divine Transcendence/Immancence that has come to us as utter gift in Jesus Christ as witnessed to in Scriptures through whom God by the eternal Spirit calls us to participate in the very eternal Love that is God through the sacramental system of the church catholic. These are two very different ontologies with very different consequences for decades to come.

A prayer/editorial comment to close the post:

"May God who created all things through the Divine Word save God's creation from white people like me who want to co-create to bring God's justice to pass on earth. Forgive us from our white man's burden that has caused God's creation to suffer from the violence of our hubris, those whom we have killed for our imposition of justice, as we have taken upon ourselves the white man's burden/duty to co-create with You to bring your kingdom to pass.

God, have mercy; Lord, have mercy. "