theology

Jun 7, 2013 ∞

Is this Calvinism's Default Position?

I’m sitting in a hotel room tonight enjoying a family weekend and catching up on twitter while trying to get the kids to go to sleep, and in doing so I run across this from Pastor Steve McCoy this afternoon:

“I’m not clear on most things about God, but Calvinists anger me.”

- An Absurd Number of People

(@SteveKMcCoy, June 7, 2013, at 2:36 PM)

Steve (pastor of an SBC church in the Chicago area) and Bill Kinnon went back and forth a bit on Twitter after that tweet, Bill suggesting that it was a bit judgmental to suggest that people who aren’t Calvinists “aren’t clear on most things about God”, and Steve saying that he didn’t mean that everyone who hates Calvinism is unclear, but that “an absurd number” are. Their conversation trailed off before they came to any resolution.

Then there was this stunning quote from the Founders.org website, for which SBC pastor Tom Ascol is a primary leader:

In the first place, Calvinistic Christianity is nothing more and nothing less than biblical Christianity. It follows, then, that the future of Christianity itself is bound up in the fortunes of Calvinism….

…For whoever believes in God’s redemption through Christ and recognizes his own utter dependence on God, whoever recognizes that salvation is of the Lord, whoever seeks to glorify God in his worship and life, that person is already implicitly a Calvinist, no matter what he calls himself. In such circumstances, to make the person an explicit Calvinist, all we are required to do (humanly speaking) is to show the believer the natural implications of these already-held fundamental principles, which underlie all true Christianity, and trust God to do his work, that is, trust God to reveal these implications to the person.

Did you get that? Calvinism is “nothing more and nothing less than biblical Christianity”. And if anyone recognizes salvation from the Lord, and seeks to glorify God, then that person is implicitly a Calvinist! And all the Calvinists need to do is explain it in a way that the unknowing Calvinist might understand.

Now, I’m not suggesting that all proponents of Calvinism would make such presumptuous, arrogant claims, and I won’t claim for an instant that there aren’t some really God-ignorant Calvinism haters like Steve is talking about. I’m sure I don’t speak for the group of progressive bloggers who have been very vocal in recent weeks about their concerns with Calvinism and certain highly visible Calvinist groups. But I can speak for myself.

I’m not particularly progressive. I accept the Bible as God’s authoritative, inspired Word, but I don’t think that means I have to read the first bits of Genesis literally. I believe, based on what I read in the Bible, that homosexual behavior is wrong, but I’m in favor of the state sanctioning same-sex marriages and I believe Christians have done a pretty poor job of loving homosexuals over the last several decades. I voted for Bush twice and then Obama twice. I try to not post about politics on Facebook.

I also don’t think I’d fit into Steve McCoy’s category of being “not clear on most things about God”. I grew up in a very conservative Christian home, did 12 years of AWANA, attended a Christian university that required a bunch of Bible classes, have served as a deacon and an elder in a Conservative Baptist church and helped plant another CBA church that eventually became an Acts 29 church. I read widely in theology; my last couple years of reading includes Baptists, Anglicans, Catholics, Lutherans, Arminians and Calvinists alike.

And here’s the thing: (well, two things:) I’m not a Calvinist. And some of what I’m seeing out of some of these key Calvinists does anger me.

The big fuel on the fire lately has been the recent statements about CJ Mahaney and the sexual abuse lawsuits brewing against several folks from Sovereign Grace Ministries churches. Calvinist leaders like Albert Mohler, Mark Dever, Don Carson, and Justin Taylor have put out statements supporting Mahaney, and erroneously claiming that Mahaney was accused of no crime (he was accused of conspiring to keep the abuse claims quiet).

That men of such intellect and reputation would publish a statement with such obvious mistruths in it angers me. That after posting it on Facebook and getting dozens of disapproving comments, they deleted the statement and the comments frustrates me a lot. That then they, without comment, revised it to remove the claim that Mahaney was never accused, and posted it on their organization’s website while disallowing comments infuriates me.

That Justin Taylor would claim, on twitter, that continuing discussion with divisive folks is a sin (a not-so-subtle explanation, one would assume, for why he was keeping comments closed), only to delete the tweet a couple days later once people called him on it, makes me want to bang my head against the nearest immovable object.

I don’t hate these guys. I have, in the past, respected them a lot. Which is why it’s all the more infuriating and disappointing when I see them taking indefensible positions like these.

I don’t want to assume that this circling of the wagons and declaration of Calvinism as nothing more or less than true Christianity is the default Calvinist position. I want to believe that there are Calvinist brothers and sisters out there who are as horrified by the alleged abuse and cover-up, and by the ridiculous arrogance of the Founders.org statement as I am.

But where are they? Why are they quiet?

Where is the Calvinist brother who is willing to publicly suggest that it would be wiser to not have CJ Mahaney still regularly preaching and on the conference circuit while allegations about the cover-up remain unresolved?

Where is the Southern Seminary graduate who is willing to say that while he personally believes Calvinism to be the truest expression of Christianity, he would never dream of asserting that every Christian would claim Calvinism if only they understood it better?

Without those voices many of us are left with few options but to believe that these are the default Calvinist positions. I beg you, my brothers, speak out and give us more options. God’s church deserves better.

May 8, 2013 ∞

Facing the truth about ourselves

Andrew Peterson has a beautiful piece up at The Rabbit Room today. He reflects on his discomfort at answering personal questions on a doctor’s questionnaire, and the dichotomy between what he wants to think he is and what he actually is.

But you see, the story we tell ourselves is skewed. There comes a time when we need to sit and take account of how we’re spending our lives, like at the doctor’s office or with the budget, and be reminded that we are not who we think we are. We need Jesus more than we allow ourselves to admit. We are not really so much better than the people around us whose lives are so obviously messy. In fact, we’re not better at all. They may in fact be closer to the heart of Jesus because they are humble enough to admit to themselves that they need help, humble enough to answer the hard questions about their weakness boldly.

You should really read the whole thing.

May 2, 2013 ∞

Telling the Tales of the Scarring War with Sin

Songwriter and singer Jennifer Knapp answered questions over on Rachel Held Evans' blog this week, and in the midst of it all she offered up a devastatingly spot-on critique of Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) and how it reflects the attitude of the evangelical church:

In this sense CCM reflects our Christian culture very well. It is our Christian culture to invite those to tell only the story of victory and spare the gruesome details of the scarring war. We can reside if we are made clean and presentable, those who are still writing their story must wait for absolute victory before they can share it with others.

I don’t know about you, but from my experience, she’s right on.

When we hear testimonies in church, or smaller gatherings like men’s groups or (I would assume) women’s groups, etc, the stories we are told are only, as Jennifer calls them, “stories of victory”. How someone battled their demons, their besetting sin, and hallelujah, with Jesus' help they came out victorious.

And sure, it’s encouraging. Stories of victory provide hope that there is victory to be had.

But when was the last time you heard a testimony that said “I don’t want to do this sin, but I did it again this week. So I’m repenting again and I’m going to God for grace.”?

Let’s go even further. If, by some odd happenstance, someone does confess struggles with sin in a church meeting, what gets confessed is a “respectable” sin. Pride. A bad attitude. Shortness with a spouse. Failure to have a regular quiet time.

Have you ever heard a testimony where someone confessed an ongoing, painful struggle with alcohol, or pornography, or anger, or financial honesty? Not a story of victory, but a story of the pain of the “scarring war”? I never have.

Here’s what I think this means:

We don’t really believe in the gospel of grace and forgiveness.

Sure, we give it lip service. But what good is the message of grace and forgiveness when the only time we acknowledge it is for stories of victory, for people who have experienced absolute victory?

Yes, Jesus said “Go and sin no more”. We put fancy words on it and call it “progressive sanctification”. But sanctification will progress at different rates sometimes. One brother may experience a sudden change and never go back to drunkenness; another may fight the bottle his whole life. To only affirm and share the stories of the former is tacit acknowledgment that what we really value is not the grace but the works.

I can hear some objector ready to quote me Romans 6:1. “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? May it never be!”

Here’s the thing: we will all continue in sin for the rest of our lives. For some of us it’ll be the same sin. Others will retire old sins only to find and wrestle with new ones. We don’t want to, but we will. See Romans 7.

But when we silence the stories of the ongoing, painful, scarring battle, we are hampering the bountiful endowment of grace.

In God there is an abundance of grace. Powerful. Rich. Saving. Free. Not designed only for those who have already cleaned up their act.

Let’s not do anything to withhold it.

Mar 27, 2013 ∞

Celebration is a craft I need to learn

Sarah Clarkson has a beautiful post over on The Rabbit Room today about, as she says, “the grave importance” of celebrations, and how they remind us that God cares for our joy - not just the joy that we find from spiritual hope in the midst of trouble, but also in the fully-embodied, rollicking joy of song, food, and friendship.

Satan, I think, strikes a few of his best blows when he can persuade us that God is boring. That life with our Savior is a dull and dutiful upward climb toward a summit of righteousness always a little out of reach. We are close to defeat when we start to believe that God cares nothing for joy, that holy people are wage slaves to long days of righteousness. Work, pray, endure, and pay your bills, check off that list of upright deeds. And the image of God in our weary minds becomes that of a long-faced master whose only concern is our efficient goodness. We forget that we are called to a King who laughs and creates, sings and saves. That our end is a kingdom crammed with our heart’s desires. We forget that our God is the Lord of the dance and the one whose new world begins with a feast.

Worth reading the whole thing.

Feb 19, 2013 ∞

Richard Beck on Holiness and Hospitality

…the pursuit of moral purity often undermines the life of welcome as “sinners” and the morally “unclean” tend to be shunned and excluded. The church stories we all could share illustrating this dynamic would provide ample evidence of the dynamics Unclean [Beck’s recent book] was trying to describe.

So what’s the trick? How are we to pursue holiness in a way that makes us more hospitable rather than less?

I think a part of the trick is this: holiness is a first-person rather than a third-person enterprise. Holiness is a personal rather than public affair.

I think he’s on to something.

[Experimental Theology: Finely Tuned Instruments of Welcome]

Feb 12, 2013 ∞

Biblicism and the Reformed Evangelical magisterium

One of the long-term hallmarks of the American evangelical church has been a congregational independence free from strong denominational ties. Sure, the denominations exist as broad placeholders with certain doctrinal distinctives, but the range of actual beliefs and practices among churches even within a single denomination is often large. In practice, theological interpretations mainly happen at the individual congregation level. This seems reasonable given that the popularly accepted definition of evangelicalism includes “biblicism” as one of its four key characteristics. [ref]Per British historian David Bebbington as referenced in this Wheaton College post. The other three characteristics are conversionism, activism, and crucicentrism.[/ref]

Within less-evangelical denominations that have a well-defined hierarchy, doctrinal disputes and practice are better kept in-house; the Presbyterians are more than willing to govern their doctrine and practice, and the Catholics have their magisterium - the teaching authority of the church which speaks authoritatively on doctrine.

While Reformed Evangelicalism is still loosely grouped into tribes (Acts 29, The Gospel Coalition, Southern Seminary alumni, etc.), I think we are seeing the emergence of a Reformed Evangelical magisterium of sorts. Its hand has been evident the past several months in the reaction to, among other things, Rachel Held Evans' new book. I don’t want to address the book in this post - I did that previously - but rather the reaction to it.

Let me say up front that I have great respect for everyone I’m going to mention here, and that I have learned much from and appreciated the teaching of nearly all of them. My goal here is not to suggest that they have nefarious intents or are necessarily intentionally working to form this sort of authoritative cabal, but that its emergence may point to a lack of confidence in the sufficiency of the tenet of biblicism.

Seeing the organization of this Reformed Evangelical cabal isn’t difficult. There is a nicely defined structure that includes:

theological institutions (Southern Seminary being the chief example)
theologians - D. A. Carson, Albert Mohler, Wayne Grudem, John Piper, Mark Dever
charismatic teachers - Mark Driscoll, Matt Chandler, Voddie Baucham, Josh Harris, C. J. Mahaney
mouthpieces - The Gospel Coalition website, Desiring God’s website, and The Resurgence website, among others
inquisitors - Tim Challies and Kevin DeYoung being the prime examples
councils - we call ‘em conferences, though. Desiring God holds a big one every year, T4G is every other year, and so on.

If a member gets too far out of line, this group is quietly self-regulating. See: Acts29 moving from Driscoll in Seattle to Chandler in Dallas. See also Mahaney leaving his Maryland church of nearly 30 years under a cloud, only to re-emerge as pastor of a new church in Louisville, KY, safely in Al Mohler’s backyard.

Among the larger group of individual pastors that follow these leaders, doctrinal alignment is maintained by conferences and publishers. As an aspiring author, your first book likely won’t get a look from one of the big names, but if Challies reviews it positively, your second one might. A cover blurb from Driscoll, Keller, or Chandler will help ensure that your book gets accepted at the book sales room at the next conference, and from there you’re all set on your track to successful blogging, authoring, and maybe even your own speaking gig at the next conference!

Get a vote of disapproval, though, and you’ll be on the outside looking in, anywhere from just being ignored (which I’d imagine is bad for an author’s prospects) to having the full court press turned against you (as Rachel Held Evans has had the past few months).

Now, from one perspective, this sort of unity seems like a positive thing, right? We have Baptists, Presbyterians, Free Church-ians, and independents of every stripe coming “Together for the Gospel”. And indeed, this tent is apparently big enough for diversity on sacramental issues like baptism and communion. But touch one of the “third rails” like women’s roles or origins and you’re gonna get dropped like a hot potato. (Recently a professor at Cedarville College got fired because he believed the “right things” about Adam and Eve but not for the right reasons.)

A few of the authors who go where angels fear to tread are given a grudging pass, typically because their academic credentials are too impressive to totally ignore. Think here of Scot McKnight, whose Junia Is Not Alone argues hard for the egalitarian position, but who also taught at TEDS alongside D. A. Carson. And also, oh, that N. T. Wright guy who says some amazingly liberal stuff on social gospel and the environment, but who wrote some stunning stuff on Jesus.

Academic credentials don’t ensure asbestos underwear, though. Pete Enns (a tenured professor) got run out of Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia, back in 2008 after publishing his book Inspiration and Incarnation, which argued for a re-evaluation of how we read and interpret the Bible - and especially the early parts of the Old Testament. And if you’re a woman without a theology degree, like the aforementioned Evans, well, sorry. You’re toast.

Ask any of these guys (or your local adherents to their creed) why they put the big focus on these specific doctrinal issues, and what you’ll probably hear is this: “the gospel is at stake”. I think it’s clear, though, that what it really means is “our version of the gospel is at stake”.

And this is where the idea of a magisterium comes in. In the Catholic tradition, the magisterium is the teaching authority of the church. The church leadership speaks an authoritative interpretation of Scripture, and the matter is settled.

In the evangelical tradition, however, we don’t have the strong denominational and hierarchical structures to pronounce and enforce Scriptural interpretation. And even though we love the Scripture (a pastor I know and love proudly says he has such a high view of Scripture that “it’s not bibliolatry… but *wink* it’s just almost bibliolatry."), it’s apparent that while we also love our congregational independence, that independence is just insufficient to protect the evangelical doctrinal turf. And so evangelicalism falls back on its informal magisterium.

I don’t think one can conclude from all this that a magisterium is a bad thing, nor can one conclude that the solution is to move our evangelical churches into some hierarchical denomination. But what is clear is that no matter how loudly some leaders of evangelicalism may cry that we need to simply “believe what the Bible says”, it’s never quite that simple.

Feb 28, 2012 ∞

The people of God are like... a political advance team

After recently finishing N. T. Wright’s Simply Jesus, I’ve been thinking again on Wright’s view of the church’s work as inaugurating the Kingdom of God here on the earth. Even though we know it won’t come into perfection until Jesus' return, Wright says, is no excuse that we shouldn’t start working on it now. I love this bit of reasoning from Wright’s Surprised by Hope:

What would you say to someone who said, rightly, that God would make them completely holy in the resurrection and that they would never reach this state of complete holiness until then - and who then went on to say, wrongly, that therefore there was no point in even trying to live a holy life until that time? You would press for some form of inaugurated eschatology. You would insist that the new life of the Spirit, in obedience to the lordship of Jesus Christ, should produce a radical transformation of behavior in the present life, anticipating the life to come…

…Apply the same to Romans 8! How do you answer someone who says, rightly, that the world will not be completely just and right until the new creation and who deduces, wrongly, that there is no point trying to bring justice to the world… until that time? [I]nsist on inaugurated eschatology, on a radical transformation of the way we behave as a worldwide community, anticipating the eventual time when God will be all in all even though we agree things won’t be complete until then.

The analogy that’s been rattling around in my head in this election year is of the people of God as a political advance team. Say that you’re the supporter of a candidate that you know is ultimately going to win. Your work as part of the advance team is to get the word out - in hopes that others will join the team, and to get the groundwork done so that things are ready when the winner finally shows up. Then, when the new ruler is in place, the people that were on his side the whole time are the ones who are rewarded - with good things from the kingdom and with places of responsibility.

So, too, in many ways with the kingdom. We know who the ultimate ‘winner’ and coming ruler is. He has already conquered death and is the prototype of the new creation. But until He comes to set up his complete rule, we are here, spreading the word. Jesus is Lord. We’re doing as much ground work as He enables us to do. 1 Cor 15 says that ‘our works are not in vain in the Lord’. Those works have a purpose. And when Jesus finally does return, it’s not a stretch to the understanding that ruling and reigning with Christ may be something akin to the leadership positions and ambassadorships that come today to the early and long-time supporters of a new ruler.

So… get the word out. Get people on the team. Get the work started. Wait expectantly. Come soon, Lord Jesus.

Jan 9, 2012 ∞

Stringfellow on Revelation

In the second chapter of William Stringfellow’s An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, he continues to contrast the two cities mentioned in the latter half of Revelation: Babylon and Jerusalem. The Babylon of Revelation, he says, “is archetypical of all nations.” Those nations are principalities that, Stringfellow argues, by their very nature are anti-human; they serve themselves and work against that which is good. Jerusalem, on the other hand, is representative of Christians as “an embassy among the principalities” or as “a pioneer community”. (These phrases remind me instantly of N. T. Wright’s similar description of the Church in Surprised by Hope.)

But Revelation, says Stringfellow, cannot be read as a “predestinarian forecast”.

To view the Babylon material in Revelation as mechanistic prophecy - or to treat any part of the Bible in such a fashion - is an extreme distortion of the prophetic ministry….

A construction of Revelation as foreordination denies in its full implication that either principalities or persons are living beings with identities of their own and with capabilities of decision and movement respected by God. And, in the end, such superstitions demean the vocation which the Gospels attribute to Jesus Christ, rendering him a quaint automaton, rather than the Son, of God.

While my Calvinist friends will quibble with the thought that humans have “capabilities of decision and movement respected by God”, I find that last sentence to be a compelling thought - that the work of Jesus Christ redeeming the world is magnified if his work is redeeming free and willful men, and that if, as in the strong Calvinist view, the whole cosmic saga is already completely fixed in history, then Christ is, in a way, just one more player in a pre-defined role.

Jan 4, 2012 ∞

William Stringfellow: "An Ethic for Christians & Other Aliens In A Strange Land

Among the many Christmas gifts I received this year, I was quite pleased to get a book which had been sitting on my Amazon wishlist for several months: William Stringfellow’s An Ethic for Christians & Other Aliens in a Strange Land. I will confess to having been completely ignorant of Stringfellow prior to someone online (I forget who) recommending this book, but he seems to have been a fascinating fellow; an Anglican layman who graduated Harvard Law only to move to Harlem and doing pro bono legal work for racial minorities and sex offenders.

To quote Ben Myers excellent summary of Stringfellow’s emphasis:

The most striking feature of Stringfellow’s work is his powerful analysis and critique of the “principalities.” For him, the principalities are institutionalised forms of death. Institutions exist for the sake of their own expansion and self-perpetuation; they are not subject to human control, but are autonomous entities vis-à-vis all human agency. Human beings often believe “that they control the institution; whereas, in truth, the principality claims them as slaves” (Free in Obedience, p. 99).

I’m only 35 pages into this slim 150-page volume - having read only the introduction and Chapter 1 - but I’m immediately struck by how timely his critique of American government and corporate institutions is. Consider this:

The Fall is where the nation is… Americans have become so beleaguered by anxiety and fatigue, so bemused and intimidated, so beset by a sense of impotence and by intuitions of calamity, that they have, for the most part, become consigned to despair. The people have been existing under a state of such interminable warfare that it seems normative. There is little resistance to the official Orwellian designation of war as peace, nor does that rhetorical deception come near exhausting the ways in which the people have found the government to be unworthy of credence or trust. Racial conflict has been suppressed by an elaborate apartheid; products which supposedly mean abundance or convenience turn out to contaminate or jeopardize life; the environment itself is rendered hostile; there is pervasive babel; privacy is a memory because surveillance is ubiquitous; institutional coercion of human beings has proliferated relentlessly. Whatever must be said of earlier times, in the past quarter century America has become a technological totalitarianism in which hope, in its ordinary human connotations, is being annihilated. … Americans have been learning, harshly, redundantly, that they inherit or otherwise possess no virtue or no vanity which dispels the condition of death manifest everywhere in the nation. (p. 19-20)

If Stringfellow felt this strongly in 1973, what would he be thinking today in 2012?

An Ethic is not quick reading but to this point every page has been worthwhile.

Jun 21, 2011 ∞

Moving at the speed of love

Richard Beck has a great piece today on interruptibility.

Basically, interruptibility is a form of welcome and hospitality. It is a way of making room for others. This space we create is less a physical space than a temporal space, making room in your To Do list, making space so we can slow down and pay attention to others.

Interruptibility is, he says, “a sign that we are moving at the speed of love.” (What a great line!)

Beck goes on to explore some other traits that our interruptibility (or lack thereof) demonstrates. It’s worth reading the whole thing.

May 4, 2011 ∞

Love your enemy: within a divided self

It’s been at least a week since John H. linked this James Alison essay on Twitter, so it’s high time that I passed it along with my recommendation. It’s not light reading, but it’s quite an insightful consideration of Jesus' command to love your enemies.

In the first half of the essay Alison explores “mirror neurons” and infant imitation to bring us to an understanding from science that our minds and actions are influenced by those around us. He summarizes:

With this we are well on the way to being able to understand, for the first time rigorously, how it is that what we normally call the “self” of each one of us is constituted by the desire of another. How it is in fact that the self of each one of us, rather than being something hermetic, locked into itself until we choose to enter into relationship with what is other than us, is in the first instance a real but malleable construct which is a symptom of the way this body has been brought into being and is held in being by the relationships which preceded it.

With the remainder of the essay Alison then brings home how Jesus' instruction to love our enemies beautifully works within this scientific understanding…

But, Jesus says, this being run by the adulatory other, or the excoriating other, which is the same thing, has nothing to do with God. What God’s love looks like is being creatively for the other without being defined over against the other in any way at all. That is what is meant by grace and freedom. It is going to involve breaking through the strong-seeming but ultimately fragile dichotomies of “in group” and “out group”, “pure” and “impure”, “good guys” and “bad guys” which are quite simply the ambivalent functions of our cultural identity, and coming to love other people without any over against at all. Living this out is going to look remarkably like a loss of identity, a certain form of death. And living it out as a human is what it is to be a child of God, and to be perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect.

If you’ve hung in through those two quotes, I really encourage you to go read the whole thing. Alison has much good insight here about how the attitudes of the groups we’re in and the attitudes we take towards those around us affect us… well worth the read.

Mar 10, 2010 ∞

Doctrine good, stories bad?

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. :-)

Jan 5, 2010 ∞

Offering right sacrifices

In 2010 I’m undertaking the Bible reading plan put out by The Journey, and this morning’s reading hit an interesting combination of passages - Genesis 4, Psalm 4, and Matthew 4. The theme that links them all: offering right sacrifices to God.

Genesis 4 gives us the familiar story of Cain and Abel. Abel gives the right sort of sacrifice. Cain doesn’t. Jealousy and murder ensues. Such a tragic story.

Psalm 4:4 - 8 follows up that sobering story with these verses:

4 In your anger do not sin; when you are on your beds, search your hearts and be silent.

5 Offer right sacrifices and trust in the LORD.

6 Many are asking, “Who can show us any good?” Let the light of your face shine upon us, O LORD.

7 You have filled my heart with greater joy than when their grain and new wine abound.

8 I will lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety.

David gets in several zingers here that speak directly to me in my daily situation:

If you’re angry with what you see happening, don’t sin, but rather shut your mouth and search your heart.
Offer right sacrifices and trust the Lord.
The light of God’s face on us will bring joy greater than any material possession.
I can sleep in peace knowing that God alone is my security.

So what are these “right sacrifices” that God wants from me? A couple of texts quickly come to mind:

1 Samuel 15 - King Saul attempts half-hearted, doing-what-seems-right sacrifices, and is corrected by Samuel: God desires obedience rather than those sacrifices.

Romans 12 - reaffirms the command in 1 Samuel by telling us that we should present our bodies as living sacrifices.

So there it is, loud and clear: the right sacrifice that God desires is our obedience. If I’m wearing myself out doing lots of ‘good things’ thinking that God will be happy with me, while at the same time I’m ignoring areas in my life where I’m choosing to not be obedient to God, I’m doing it wrong. God has already justified me apart from any right living on my part. My obedience to him is an offering to show my love to Him for what He has already done. And, as the Psalmist says, I will find greater joy and peace in that life of obedience than in any striving for material things.

The final passage in today’s reading (Matthew 4) fits in nicely with this lesson as well. Jesus goes to the desert and is tempted by Satan with some ‘good’ things. Jesus, though, sets the example for us by choosing obedience. I would do well to follow.

Oct 20, 2008 ∞

An end-times deal-breaker

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]

Apr 5, 2008 ∞

The Strange Story of Easter: Surprised by Hope, Chapter 4

Having noted in chapter three that something happened to cause the early Christians' belief in resurrection to be vastly different from their former religious or cultural beliefs, in chapter 4 N. T. Wright sets out to make the case for a real, historical Easter. He starts out be listing four “strange features” shared by the accounts in the canonical gospels which, he says, should compel us to take them seriously as early accounts. Those features:

The “strange silence” of the Bible in the stories. Up to this point, the gospel writers consistently used allusions to and quotations from the Old Testament to show that Jesus' death was “according to the scriptures”. The resurrection narratives, though, have almost no such references. If the resurrection accounts were invented much later, you would expect the writers to stay consistent.
The presence of women as principal witnesses. As has often been remarked upon, women were not regarded as credible witnesses in the ancient world. Yet there they are in all the resurrection accounts.
The portrait of Jesus himself. If the resurrection stories were written later, you’d expect a shining, transfigured Jesus. Instead, you get Jesus mistaken for a gardener and as a human being with a body that was in many ways quite normal.
The resurrection accounts never mention the future Christian hope. In every account since then and in every Easter sermon preached, the conclusion is drawn: Jesus is raised, therefore there is life after death. But in these accounts, no such conclusions are drawn.

Wright goes on to address with great clarity some of the other common objections to the resurrection, including hallucination, cognitive dissonance, the swoon theory, mistaken identity, and the like. Each of them is reasonably discarded.

Finally, Wright concludes,

In any other historical inquiry, the answer would be so obvious that it would hardly need saying. Here of course, this obvious answer (“well, it actually happened”) is so shocking, so earth shattering, that we rightly pause before leaping into the unknown. And here indeed, as some skeptical friends have cheerfully pointed out to me, it is always possible for anyone to follow the argument so far and to say simply, “I don’t have a good explanation for what happened to cause the empty tomb and the appearances, but I choose to maintain my belief that dead people don’t rise and therefore conclude that something else must have happened, even though we can’t tell what it was.” That is fine; I respect that position; but I simply note that it is indeed then a matter of choice, not a matter of saying that something called scientific historiography forces us to take that route.

Wright’s other main argument in chapter four is for those who discount a “real” resurrection based on “science”. He notes that

…there are different types of knowing. Science studies the repeatable; history studies the unrepeatable… historians don’t of course see this as a problem and are usually not shy about declaring that these events certainly took place, even though we can’t repeat them in the laboratory.

But when people say “But that can’t have happened because we know that that sort of thing doesn’t actually happen,” then they are appealing to a would-be scientific principle of history, namely, the principle of analogy. The problem with analogy is that it never quote gets you far enough. History is full of unlikely things that happened once and once only, with the result that the analogies are often at best partial.

There’s a lot more to this chapter but it would be uncharitable to just quote the whole thing. Suffice it to say that Wright very convincingly argues that there is really no good explanation for all that has happened since other than that Jesus was truly resurrected from the dead. “Sometimes,” he notes, “human beings - individuals or communities - are confronted with something that they must reject outright or that, if they accept it, will demand the remaking of their worldview.” Having thus set out the framework in part one of Surprised by Hope, Wright will continue to discuss what that worldview looks like when it comes to future things.

Apr 4, 2008 ∞

Early Christian Hope in Its Historical Setting: Surprised by Hope, Chapter 3

Let’s start at the very beginning, says a familiar song from a classic musical, it’s a very good place to start.. And start at the beginning N. T. Wright does in Chapter 3 of Surprised by Hope. In fact, Wright is in a supremely-qualified position to start at “the beginning” given his preeminence as a New Testament scholar. Wright’s question for chapter three is this: how did the early church talk about the resurrection? What was their view? The answers provide some keen insights into truths about the resurrection of Jesus.

In the ancient Jewish tradition, Wright says, they did have a concept of resurrection. But their view of resurrection wasn’t some vague concept of “life after death”. Instead, what they looked forward to was a bodily resurrection of the righteous at the end of time. When Jesus tells Martha that she will see her brother Lazarus again, and she replies “I know he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day”, that’s what they’re talking about. So when the early Jewish writers then spoke of Jesus resurrection and being bodily alive right now, they understood that they were describing something that had never happened before. The resurrection was the thing that set Jesus apart.

Wright then discusses seven ways in which the Christian view of resurrection soon mutated from the traditional Jewish view of resurrection:

The Christians, though coming from a broad spectrum of philosophical and religious backgrounds, quickly agreed on a single, “two-step” view of life after death: a temporary, spiritual time with God until the final, bodily resurrection.
The resurrection became more important - it moved “from the circumference to the center”.
The understanding of the resurrected body moved from some vague Jewish beliefs to a solid belief in a material, transformed human body.
The early Christians came to understand the resurrection as “split into two” - the prototype of Jesus resurrection, which points forward then to the resurrection at the end of days.
Because God had inaugurated the resurrection in Jesus, the Christians now “believed that God had called them to work with him, in the power of the Spirit, to implement the achievement of Jesus and thereby to anticipate the final resurrection, in personal and political life, in mission and holiness.”
The metaphorical use of resurrection changed from being about the restoration of ethnic Israel to being about the restoration of humans in general.
Resurrection became associated with the Jewish views of messiahship. To this point, no one had expected the Messiah to die and be resurrected; from this point on, they understood it to be the case.

It is important here, Wright says, to see this key development of a very early belief that “Jesus is Lord and therefore Caesar is not.” This, says Wright,

…is the foundation of the Christian stance of allegiance to a different king, a different Lord. Death is the last weapon of the tyrant, and the point of the resurrection, despite much misunderstanding, is that death has been defeated. … Resurrection was never a way of settling down and becoming respectable; the Pharisees could have told you that. It was the Gnostics, who translated the language of resurrection into a private spirituality and a dualistic cosmology, thereby more or less altering its meaning into its opposite, who escaped persecution. Which emperor would have sleepless nights worrying that his subjects were reading the Gospel of Thomas? Resurrection was always bound to get you into trouble, and it regularly did.

So, Wright says, there was a definite shift in the religious views as Jews became Christians following Easter. So what happened, really, on that historical Easter? That’s the question Wright will address in Chapter 4.

Also in this series:

Overview
Chapter 1: All Dressed Up and No Place To Go?
Chapter 2: Puzzled About Paradise?
Chapter 3: Early Christian Hope in Its Historical Setting (this post)
Chapter 4: The Strange Story of Easter
Chapter 5: Cosmic Future: Progress or Despair?
Chapter 6: What the Whole World’s Waiting For
Chapter 7: Jesus, Heaven, and New Creation
Chapter 8: When He Appears
Chapter 9: Jesus, the Coming Judge
Chapter 10: The Redemption of Our Bodies
Chapter 11: Purgatory, Paradise, Hell
Chapter 12: Rethinking Salvation: Heaven, Earth, and the Kingdom of God
Chapter 13: Building for the Kingdom
Chapter 14: Reshaping the Church for Mission (1): Biblical Roots
Chapter 15: Reshaping the Church for Mission (2): Living the Future

Apr 1, 2008 ∞

Puzzled About Paradise? Surprised by Hope, Chapter 2

In Chapter 2 of Surprised by Hope, N. T. Wright examines the wide sweep of confusing views that the Church has commonly held about death over the past few centuries. I found them quite familiar. From the stern “death is our enemy” position all the way over to the “death is our friend to take us out of this place” end of things, Wright quotes familiar hymns (most of which you’ve probably sung in church before) to point out the varied viewpoints. Really, how do you even begin to start to rectify John Donne’s “Death be not proud… Death, thou shalt die”, with Abide With Me’s “heav’n’s morning breaks and earth’s vain shadows flee”? There’s a disconnect there somewhere. Wright reminds us that “God’s intention is not to let death have its way with us.” Death is an enemy, one that has been and will be defeated.

So, then, what about heaven? The common Christian conception of heaven, Wright says, and I find this true in my experience, is that it is “…the appropriate term for the ultimate destination, the final home, and that the language of resurrection, and of the new earth as well as the new heavens, must somehow be fitted into that.” Not so, says Wright - “there is actually very little in the Bible about ‘going to heaven when you die’ and not a lot about a postmortem hell either”. Rather, Wright says, “Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hudden, dimension of our ordinary life - God’s dimension, if you like.”

Wright goes on to ask a series of questions that he will answer later in the book: What about the human soul? What is it? What do we mean by “Jesus coming to judge the living and the dead”? What do we mean by “the communion of the saints”? In this final introductory chapter, Wright definitely impresses us enough that there is widespread confusion, not just from outside the church about the church’s beliefs, but from inside as well. It is that confusion that he hopes to iron out in future chapters.

Also in this series:

Overview
Chapter 1: All Dressed Up and No Place To Go?
Chapter 2: Puzzled About Paradise? (this post)
Chapter 3: Early Christian Hope in Its Historical Setting
Chapter 4: The Strange Story of Easter
Chapter 5: Cosmic Future: Progress or Despair?
Chapter 6: What the Whole World’s Waiting For
Chapter 7: Jesus, Heaven, and New Creation
Chapter 8: When He Appears
Chapter 9: Jesus, the Coming Judge
Chapter 10: The Redemption of Our Bodies
Chapter 11: Purgatory, Paradise, Hell
Chapter 12: Rethinking Salvation: Heaven, Earth, and the Kingdom of God
Chapter 13: Building for the Kingdom
Chapter 14: Reshaping the Church for Mission (1): Biblical Roots
Chapter 15: Reshaping the Church for Mission (2): Living the Future

Mar 30, 2008 ∞

Wrestling with Tom: Surprised by Hope, Chapter 1

So it’s been far too long since I posted my original review of Surprised by Hope, the latest book from N. T. Wright. As you may recall from that review, I found myself stunned by the clarity and richness of Wright’s exposition of the doctrines of heaven and the resurrection. (As Wright so cleverly puts it, “heaven is important, but it’s not the end of the world!") Finally I’m finding some time to come back to it and interact more fully here. Surprised by Hope is split into three broad sections: ‘Setting the Scene’, ‘God’s Future Plan’, and ‘Hope in Practice: Resurrection and the Mission of the Church’. In this post I want to just address the first chapter, titled ‘All Dressed Up and No Place to Go’.

Wright opens Surprised by Hope by positing two questions which he says are often dealt with quite separately but that should really be tied together.

First, what is the ultimate Christian hope? Second, what hope is there for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities within the world in the present? And the main answer can be put like this. As long as we see Christian hope in terms of “going to heaven,” of a salvation that is essentially away from this world, the two questions are bound to appear as unrelated. Indeed, some insist angrily that to ask the second one at all is to ignore the first one, which is the really important one. This in turn makes some others get angry when people talk of resurrection, as if this might draw attention away from the really important and pressing matters of contemporary social concern. But if the Christian hope is for God’s new creation, for “new heavens and new earth”, and if that hope has already come to life in Jesus of Nazareth, then there is every reason to join the two questions together.

Wright then goes on to highlight just a few of the various beliefs commonly held today regarding death and the afterlife. From the ancestor worship of Africans and Buddhists to the Islamic hope of paradise to the Jewish hope of resurrection, and finally to the Christian view… but what, exactly, is the Christian view? Wright asserts that while there are many popular views of the afterlife in today’s culture, “so far as I can tell, most people don’t know what orthodox Christian belief is.” Yes, there is some belief in “life after death”, but what form does it take, and in what places? What about this word “resurrection”? Wright wants to clear up confusion on these issues.

It’s hard to do much commentary on this first introductory chapter, but it certainly sets the scene for the book. More to come.

Also in this series:

Overview
Chapter 1: All Dressed Up and No Place To Go? (this post)
Chapter 2: Puzzled About Paradise?
Chapter 3: Early Christian Hope in Its Historical Setting
Chapter 4: The Strange Story of Easter
Chapter 5: Cosmic Future: Progress or Despair?
Chapter 6: What the Whole World’s Waiting For
Chapter 7: Jesus, Heaven, and New Creation
Chapter 8: When He Appears
Chapter 9: Jesus, the Coming Judge
Chapter 10: The Redemption of Our Bodies
Chapter 11: Purgatory, Paradise, Hell
Chapter 12: Rethinking Salvation: Heaven, Earth, and the Kingdom of God
Chapter 13: Building for the Kingdom
Chapter 14: Reshaping the Church for Mission (1): Biblical Roots
Chapter 15: Reshaping the Church for Mission (2): Living the Future

Mar 6, 2008 ∞

Wrestling with Tom: An American Evangelical's coming-to-grips with N. T. Wright's Surprised By Hope

Few writers have gained the attention of, and made waves in, the Christian blogosphere in recent memory in quite the way that N. T. Wright has. (The other that immediately comes to mind is Mark Driscoll, but his similarity with Wright probably ends about right there.) A “Lord Bishop” (ach, a hierarchical title!) in the Anglican (aren’t they all liberals?) Church, Wright is a brilliant yet down-to-earth scholar of the New Testament. He has written a thick three-volume set on Jesus (one volume of which I received as a Christmas gift and am still wading through), a defense and apologetic of Christian beliefs (Simply Christian), and a little book that went off like a bomb in the Reformed world called What St. Paul Really Said. (As a non-Reformed evangelical, I don’t really get what the huge deal is about, though I do appreciate the insights that Wright has to Paul.)

I have been listening to as many of Wright’s messages as I could get my hands on over the past year (check out ntwrightpage.com - a great resource!) and have heard much that seemed to make sense, though it seemed different than what I’ve learned in the evangelical church, regarding the resurrection, heaven, and the end times. So when I heard that Wright was writing a book to sum up those arguments, I put it on my to-buy list and grabbed it as soon as it was released.

Surprised By Hope runs just over 300 pages (not counting the copious end notes) and is full of the reminder of the hope of Christians not for some ethereal existence in some far-off “heaven”, but for a resurrected body (similar to Jesus' prototype) and eternal existence as a part of a redeemed and restored creation on the “new earth”. Wright makes powerful arguments that this hope of resurrection is consistent with the belief of Israelites before Christ, with the belief of the early church, and that it makes much more sense of the gospels and of Paul than do some of today’s more popular views of heaven.

I have completed one pass through Surprised By Hope and have managed to mark up almost every page. What I have found has been eye-opening; not so much that it is a hugely different doctrine than what my denomination holds to, but more that it sets out so clearly beliefs that we tend to get muddled up and then just gloss over. Wright hits it on the head in Chapter 2:

It comes as something of a shock, in fact, when people are told what is in fact the case: that there is very little in the Bible about “going to heaven when you die” and not a lot about a postmortem hell either. The medieval pictures of heaven and hell, boosted though not created by Dante’s classic work, have exercised a huge influence on Western Christian imagination.

And a bit later:

Most Christians today… remain satisfied with what is at best a truncated and distorted version of the great biblical hope. Indeed, the popular picture is reinforced again and again in hymns, prayers, monuments, and even quite serious works of theology and history. It is simply assumed that the word heaven is the appropriate term for the ultimate destination, the final home, and that the language of resurrection, and of the new earth as well as the new heavens, must somehow be fitted into that.

Yeah, that’s me. That’s what I’ve been taught… though not so much taught it, because other than a requisite Sunday School class teaching the standard dispensational view of the book of Revelation, we don’t teach it much more than the usual thumbnail sketch: heaven is where Christians go when they die. They are there forever in God’s presence. It’s pretty much an eternal conversation with the saints of old who you want to get to know, and there’s some idea of worshiping God, though we’re not quite sure what that’ll look like, and then the glassy sea, and crowns, and well, yeah, it’s a bit muddled. We don’t teach it much because we don’t have a coherent framework that incorporates the gospel with the resurrection and then applies it to our mission today. Sure, if we’re current we’ll talk about things like contextualization, of paying attention to the culture and being in the community, but we see it with just the end goal of being “normal” people so we’ll have an in with the non-Christians who we want to tell about Jesus. Wright is saying throughout the book that there’s more to it than that, and he makes a powerful argument.

I’m planning on chewing on the book with multiple blog posts over the next week or two; I also now need to make another pass through the New Testament with this new understanding in mind and see how it fits. Oh, and to Dad and to Richard: I have ordered you copies and they’re on the way. :-)

[You can buy Surprised by Hope from Amazon.com.]

Feb 25, 2008 ∞

Tim Keller's The Reason For God - a review

Tim Keller has been a favorite speaker of mine for some time now. As pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, he reaches thousands each week. He has also become a fixture at pastor’s conferences including John Piper’s conference in Minneapolis (where I saw Keller in person a couple years ago) and Mark Driscoll’s Acts 29 conferences. His dry wit and humor coupled with great insight on ministering to the city make him a must-listen for me.

(As a brief aside, I made this analogy at Piper’s conference a couple years ago: if Piper’s conference were Star Wars, Mark Driscoll would be Han Solo, Piper would be Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Tim Keller is quite easily Yoda. Quite easily.)

When I heard that he had written a new book, I eagerly ordered it (thank you, wtsbooks.com) and put it at the top of my reading stack.

God and Reason have been hot topics lately in the book world; it seems to be the topic du jure for atheists who want to trash Christianity. Keller’s book seems to be something of a response to those books, proposing, as the title suggests, The Reason for God. There has been significant buzz in the Christian blogosphere surrounding the book, and a not-insignificant marketing blitz as well - it’s not often that a new Christian apologetic comes complete with its own website.

Quite frankly, I found The Reason for God to be underwhelming. Keller spends the first half of the book responding to common objections to Christianity (“why is Christianity so exclusive?” “How can God send people to hell?”, etc) and then takes the second half on the positive side of the bargain, explaining why he thinks Christianity is true, and then laying out a bit about Christian beliefs. While the reasoning was solid, it wasn’t anything groundbreaking - it’s the same stuff you’ll find by reading C. S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man and Mere Christianity and N. T. Wright’s Simply Christian. In fact, Keller quotes extensively from Lewis and philosopher Alvin Plantinga. Too often it seemed to me Keller should just be suggesting that we buy and read Lewis and Plantinga rather than reading his repackaged version.

The first half of the book kept my interest pretty well, but I will admit to a waning interest and a lot of skimming toward the end. This isn’t to say that The Reason for God is a bad book, or not worth reading. Put into the right hands, it could be a good introduction to the rational, logical reasons for Christianity. I don’t think it’d answer all of the serious intellectual doubter’s questions, but it’d be a start; good for your college seeker, too. But for someone who’s already familiar with the arguments, has already read Lewis and the like? Don’t bother. Or buy it for the quick read and then give it away. Here’s hoping for something more fresh and insightful next time from the capable Dr. Keller.