I have learned much over the past several years from brothers and sisters of the Reformed theological persuasion. I love and respect them deeply. But the good Dr. Daniel J. R. Kirk today puts his finger on a point which has provided me some unease in my conversations with my Reformed brethren, saying it, as usual, more succinctly than I could.

Quoth Daniel:

Doctrine Good. Stories Bad. That’s the mini-theme of this month’s Christianity Today.

I begin with the most egregious offense. There’s a short inset on p. 26, snipped from a book by J. I. Packer and Gary A. Parrett (Grounded in the Gospel; Baker, 2010) entitled, “The Lost Art of Catechesis.” The point? Back in the old days, folks used to have to learn their theology. That waned for a bit, but was revived in all its glory in the Reformation. Doctrine. The church has to learn its doctrine.

When did this all go astray between then and now? When Sunday Schools entrusted instruction to lay people and rather than teaching people theology substituted “instilling of familiarity (or shall we say, perhaps, over-familiarity) with Bible stories” (26).

Daniel, though, strongly disagrees, and he hammers it home here:

This is the classic inversion of sola scriptura: no longer do we really want you to do what the Reformers did (read your Bible), we want you instead to read and memorize what they said after they had read their Bibles.

And that is the unease I’ve always had w/ the Reformed types. So often when asked a question, they don’t respond w/ Scripture, but rather with a quote from one of the Confessions or with a paragraph from Calvin or Edwards or Spurgeon or Packer.

I know, I know, those Confessions are a distillation of the church’s understanding of the whole Scripture over the years, and useful as a doctrinal reference and as a safeguard against taking any single Scripture passage wildly out of context. But Dr. Kirk makes a great point here: our first priority and focus should be to the Scripture, and the Confessions and Institutes need to come later.

I’d love to hear from some of my Reformed buddies on this one. And yeah, I’m afraid what I might be in for when they pile on.

Ever feel this way when talking to someone?

I should say this up front: the idea that I’m going to be able to intelligently “review” Wright’s massive Jesus and the Victory of God in a 250-word blog post is ridiculous at best, and insane at worst. But I’m posting individual reviews for each book I finish this year, so here goes.

I first became familiar with N. T. Wright through some of his shorter books: What Saint Paul Really Said, Simply Christian, and, of course, Surprised by Hope. Somewhere along the way I found out that he has written a three-volume set specifically about Jesus, and so I requested one of the volumes for Christmas back a year ago. (Why I requested Volume Two of a three volume set is beyond me… but I did.)

Sure, there have been a million books written about Jesus. So why does Wright’s stand out? Wright takes the angle of exploring what I’ll call the “historical” Jesus. What was Jesus, the man, thinking? What were his goals? How did the things he said fit into the theological and political scene of first-century Palestine? Wright answers these questions brilliantly, with clarity and insight.

As just a small example, Wright at one point asks this question: Did Jesus know that he was the Son of God? Certainly we affirm that Jesus was fully man and fully God, but how did Jesus the man know that he was God? Wright gives by way of answer this analogy: Jesus knew he was the Son of God in the same way a musician knows they are a musician. They have the skills and abilities of a musician, and something deep within them says ‘I simply must make this music’. As such, a person knows they are a musician. Similarly, Jesus knew he had the skills and abilities of the Messiah, and had the internal calling. It may not be a perfect analogy, but it certainly provides opportunity to stop and think.

Jesus and the Victory of God deals with Jesus’ life and teaching, leading right up to his death. Wright then devotes the entire third volume in his series to the Resurrection. (I got that book for Christmas this year.) Jesus and the Victory of God isn’t a simple read – it’s more like a college-level scholarly text. But if you’re willing to make the effort to dig through it, it will reward you with insight into the life and purposes of Jesus.

Definitely recommended. [You can buy Jesus and the Victory of God from amazon.com.]

On an internal discussion board at my workplace today, a co-worker (who is a Christian, though a bit of the far-right cynical type) posted this:

Full up your gas tank today. And any other necessary purchases. Once the elections are over, anything that they’ve been holding off on can now be done. I expect that the repercussions of this economic meltdown have been held at bay and international moves that will make us unpopular have been tabled until after the election.

To which I have (and posted) this response:

I refuse to live in fear.

Political parties, bloggers, cynics, and conspiracy theorists of all stripes use fearmongering as a motivator to try to get us to do what they want. If you’re on one side, it’s fear of gays, liberals, taxes, big government, and athiests. If you’re on the other side, it’s fear of theocracy, invasion of personal privacy, neocons, and big oil.

No more.

—

A reminder from Romans 13: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.”

So yesterday afternoon I noted that the next church on our short list for visiting during the Church Search was probably Cedar Valley Bible Church. I know a few folks there, including the couple that has brought Andrew Peterson and company to town twice for concerts. I’ve been to a wedding there, too, and my overall impression was that the church might be a little further over into the conservative homeschooling culture than I’d be comfortable with, but then, it might be OK.

The only other note I’d made about Cedar Valley thus far was when perusing their Doctrinal Statement online, it seemed to me that they had a far more detailed and lengthy statement on the End Times than do most doctrinal statements I’ve read. A very literal, pre-trib, dispensational sort of end times view. Still, as of yesterday, the church was still on my short list.

Then last night I cruised on over to the Cedar Valley website again to check out Sunday morning service times, and I noted this link on the sidebar: “2008 Second Coming Conference“. That’s right, in November Cedar Valley Bible will be bringing in a special speaker from Friends of Israel to speak three times over two days. The topics:

• “Close to Construction” – Presentation on the movement in Israel to rebuild the Temple and how it could fit into Bible prophecy.
• “Pre-Tribulation Rapture” – A look at some different views of the rapture along with Biblical proof for the pre-tribulation position.
• “Signs of the Times” – Biblical evidence that we are now living in the end times.

And that’s just about a deal-breaker for me. Let me explain a little bit why.

I grew up in what I’d consider a pretty standard set of evangelical churches. We attended a C&MA church for a while in Fremont, NE, then a Bible church in Granbury, TX. I got the basic dispensational teaching on the end times – basically, Left Behind without all the dramatic stuff that made LaHaye and Jenkins best-sellers. Imminent rapture, followed by a 7-year tribulation, followed by Christ’s return for 1000 years, followed by Satan being let loose again on the earth, followed by another clean-up and the ultimate destruction of the earth and creation of a new one, etc. Most of the time I was just confused by it. Maybe it was partly my practical engineering nature – we’re not gonna know what’s happening until it’s done, right? So who really cares?

I stayed basically in that theological position until reading N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope a year ago. In Surprised by Hope, Wright explains, among other things, the amillennial position on end times in a way that actually made sense to me. It turns out there is a whole ‘nother way to interpret the passages in Peter, Thessalonians, and Revelation that I had never been introduced to. And that there were legitimate, reasonable Christians who believed it. Talk about an eye-opener. Since then I’ve read a couple of books by Kim Riddlebarger on amillennialism, which too have been helpful. At the moment I’d say I’m at the point of leaning toward an amillennial position, but feeling no need to be dogmatic about it. There are far more important things to get worked up about than the end times.

Which leads me to my end-times deal-breaker with Cedar Valley Bible. This (apparently second-annual) “Second Coming Conference” shows me that they’re very interested in being dogmatic about a pre-trib dispensational end-times viewpoint. And while I’m OK with them believing that (heck, Noelridge, Imago, and Stonebridge all have the word “premillennial” in their doctrinal statements), I’m not really OK with a church being dogmatic about it. That just won’t work for me.

Becky and I had a good talk about end-times stuff last night and why I feel this way about it. I don’t know that we’ve decided anything yet, but I’m really leaning toward taking Cedar Valley off our list.

[N. T. Wright's Surprised by Hope at wtsbooks.com]
[Kim Riddlebarger's A Case for Amillennialism at wtsbooks.com]
[Kim Riddlebarger's The Man of Sin: Uncovering the Truth about the Antichrist at wtsbooks.com]