So I’ve been gone a while, but I have a good excuse, I just became a dad. I have the cutest little boy in the world, and I’ll fight you for disagreeing. I’ll lose…but I’ll do it anyway. Now, enough with the pleasantries…

Comment from evagrius on The God Who’s Always Known Me:

Hypostasis was the original Greek term. It was translated into Latin as persona using prosopon, mask, as the term, ( which was only used in Christology basically) rather than hypostsis, ( which got translated as substansia).

Ousia gets translated as esse, being, but it’s not completely accurate.

Self-contained here means ego. God is not an ego, nor three egos in one.

Ok, I love the definition of hypostasis. It is an articulation of the idea that I have had in my mind for years: “a term in linguistics to describe the relationship between a name and a known quantity.” I love the concepts involved in the process of communication.

Thoughts are fluid, they aren’t alway quantifiable. So we use a common set of symbols to communicate those fluid thoughts. But just as something is always lost in translation between languages, something is lost whenever we communicate. Our fluid thought is encoded as a word, and that word is passed to another person who must decode it, and - we hope - associates it with the same thought that we had.

Imagine a little nametag attached to a cloud as the relationship between a thought and the word that goes with it. The two are different, but very much related. That quality of being loosely related to a partial description is a great concept.

As far as “self-contained” meaning “ego”: I do not accept that as a given; it is a straw man. I argue that God must be self-contained, because there is nothing in creation that could contain him, and there is nothing outside of creation. How could God be anything but self-contained?

Back to Borg…this is from his On Faith archive:

I see the pre-Easter Jesus as a Jewish mystic who knew God, and who as a result became a healer, wisdom teacher, and prophet of the kingdom of God. The latter led to his being killed by the authorities who ruled his world. But I do not think he proclaimed or taught an extraordinary status for himself. The message of the pre-Easter Jesus was about God and the kingdom of God, and not about himself.

Rather, I see the grand statements about Jesus – that he is the Son of God, the Light of the World, and so forth - as the testimony of the early Christian movement. These are neither objectively true statements about Jesus nor, for example in this season, about his conception and birth. To speak of him as the Son of God does not mean that he was conceived by God and had no biological human father. Rather, this is the post-Easter conviction of his followers.

He claims throughout this post to be in line with “most mainstream scholars” in his assertion that Jesus never claimed to be any of the great things the early Christians said he was. But what does that word - “mainstream” - mean in this context? It certainly doesn’t mean Christian. I’d give you my last dollar if you could show me that 51% of Christian scholars agree with him and the Jesus Seminar. What does it mean? “Mainline”, “theological”, “secular”? There’s no indication.

One of his problems, even with “most mainstream scholars” on his side, is this:

A high Christology is discernible within the minimal core of Jesus’ sayings whose authenticity is approved by the radical critics (the Jesus Seminar, for example) themselves…

…the Christology implicit in the approved core of sayings is indistinguishable from the high Christology of the more explicit sayings attributed to Jesus throughout the Gospels and repudiated by radical critics

(Geivett & Phillips, Four Views on Salvation in a Pluralistic World)

For example, most progressives, liberals, and emergents love the end of Matthew 25. I don’t know if it’s on the “approved” list or not, but I’ll assume for the moment it is. This is a passage that I have most often heard used by the social-justice-first crowd to say that anyone who cares for the poor will go to heaven. So they would be loathe to lose it as an “authentic statement of Jesus”.

But there is a high Christology found there. Who separates the sheep and the goats? Who sends the sheep to paradise and the goats to torment? It’s Jesus. That’s just an example that I pulled out of the air. The straw man element is there, I know; it’s just an example from my own experience. But it’s there, nonetheless.

The problem with positions like Borg’s is that the basis is always very, very shaky. In his case, as with John Hick and I’m sure a host of others, he rebelled against a view of God that was incorrect in the first place, and ran amok in the opposite direction.

He tells the story of how, when confronted with the proposition that God was both in heaven, and omnipresent, he rationalized out the omnipresence so that He could understand God being in heaven. It makes sense…he was 9. But his adult response was to run full-speed in the other direction, rather than to walk, reconciling his ideas of God with the God presented in Scripture.

He goes on to say that God is both transcendent and immanent, here and out there, which is exactly what he rationalized away! He was taught a proper understanding, but he ignored it, then used his misconception to characterize all evangelicals. Well, not all, but the majority of “traditional” positions.

The second problem with the position is that notion that “historical Jesus” scholarship is scholarship at all. It’s skepticism, pure and simple. In order to even conceive of a difference between a historical Jesus and a Biblical Jesus you have to come to the Bible with the presumption that the Biblical narrative could not be true (for whatever reason). Then you must explain how the movement began in the first place, and are forced to concede that Jesus lived and was crucified. From there you try to explain how Christianity came into being from a man who was not, and never claimed to be, God.

But no matter how logical it seems, it just doesn’t add up.  How could it?  Basically the process involves removing or ignoring all of the evidence against the hypothesis, in order to accept as a given a presupposition that can’t be proven, only implied by the (engineered) lack of evidence against.  It’s circular.

UPDATE: I’ve stalled on The God We Never Knew.  I don’t know if I’ll ever get through it.  I hope to, so that I can get the review up.  More to come.

It also seems as though Driscoll has an unhealthy need for power; Driscoll mentions numerous times about how a major point in his essay is to show how “The Christian revelation of God is distinct from and superior to all other views of God”(26) and “But the fact remains that Jesus Christ is distinct from and superior to all other religious leaders and their religions” (27). Later on, in response to John Burke’s chapter, he writes again, “It is imperative that we remain steadfastly committed to articulating the reasons why Jesus is distinct from and superior to all other religions and religious leaders”(71). What is his deal with this power trip?

After reading that at PomoMusings I looked around a tad to see what others thought about the issue, and ran across audio from the 2006 Desiring God National Conference. I accidentally started with session 3, and came across this gem of a statement that Tim Keller quoted from Mark Thompson: “Human language is not best seen as an insufficient human creation, but as an imperfectly utilized gift from God; and the entire purpose of language is Gospel.”

This statement is defended with Jonathan Edwards position that God created the world to spread the delight he had within the Godhead. The idea of Jesus as the Word is “a vehicle for our salvation” and “a vehicle for our being brought into fellowship with God.”

While I’m unsure of the idea that God created us with a purpose other than glorifying him, I like the idea of human language being something given by God. Language existed before humanity. God spoke within the Godhead and spoke the world into existence. Jesus is the Word that existed from eternity. God spoke to Adam and Eve in the garden, and he created languages at the Tower of Babel.

I’ve got some study ahead!

Coming up:

PomoMusings - What’s the problem with being concerned with the fact that Jesus is superior (to everything, not just other religious leaders)?
More on Borg and The God We Never Knew
Reflections on Bloesch’s Theology of Word & Spirit

Paul Reiser used that line on Mad About You whenever someone would restate what he’s been trying to say.

I was just listening to Scott Golike on the Resurgence Featured Audio podcast:

I think one of the best…counterbalances we have…ways of checking ourselves, is to check in with the 2000 or 3000 year discussion. I’m a firm believer that if nobody ever thought that in the 3500 year history of God’s people…I’m wrong.

This is what I’m saying.

Check out Golike and the New Perspective(s) on Paul.

I’m starting to work through Marcus Borg’s The God We Never Knew. It takes me a while to get through books like this, despite the fact that it’s only 175 pages, because it’s so hard to read without scribbling notes like “What are you thinking!?” in the margins. This morning I was only able to read about 4 pages.

Borg paints a picture that is familiar in it’s dishonesty. It’s not a dishonesty based on misrepresentation, but omission. He describes the “two different ‘root concepts’ for thinking about God.”

The first conceptualizes God as a supernatural being “out there,” separate from the world, who created the world a long time ago and who may from time to time intervene within it. In an important sense, this God is not “here” and thus cannot be known or experienced but only believed in (which, within the logic of this concept, is what “faith” is about). I will call this way of thinking about God “supernatural theism.”

[...]

The second root concept of God in the Christian tradition thinks of God quite differently. God is the encompassing Spirit; we (and everything that is) are in God. For this concept, God is not a supernatural being separate from the universe; rather God (the sacred, Spirit) is a nonmaterial layer…of reality all around us. God is more than the universe, but the universe is in God. Thus, in a spatial sense, God is not “somewhere else” but “right here.” I will call this concept of God “panentheism.”

Immediately upon reading this I felt sorry for him. He was raised in an environment that led him to believe that God was distant and unknowable, unapproachable, and unable to be experienced. Then, the only thing that he was open to was the opposite deception that God was not personal at all, but “a nonmaterial layer.”

The dishonesty I mentioned is in not including the third category that falls between the two deceptions (I recently learned that this is called a “false dichotomy”). That God is personal, supernatural, and wholly separate (”somewhere else”), while at the same time being Spirit, ingrained and involved in creation, and knowable by his followers.

He tells the story of how, when confronted with the proposition that God was both in heaven, and omnipresent, he rationalized out the omnipresence so that He could understand God being in heaven. It makes sense…he was 9. But his adult response was to run full-speed in the other direction, rather than to walk, reconciling his ideas of God with the God presented in Scripture.

He’s basically the cliche of the “new evangelical” or the “postmodern Christian” or whatever other term you have. He was raised in a conservative Christian home, and rather than struggle with the tough truths told in the Bible about who and how God is, he raised his voice and said, “I don’t like the way you think of God, it makes me feel small and guilty. God is here to make us feel good and happy!”

Have you ever noticed how if you ask a (theologically) liberal Christian how they came to believe what they always start by telling you that they were taught the exact opposite, and it didn’t make them feel good? Where did this idea come from that God is around to make us feel good, and happy and whole come from?

What about Isaiah 6:5? After seeing God’s glory in the temple he exclaims, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” He saw God and was frightened? He feared for his life (and probably his soul). This certainly doesn’t sound like the feeling people think they should get when they encounter God.

Anyway, I hope to get through a little more soon.

It isn’t Christ-following. I’m amazed at what passes for Christian theology today. The message is truly proving to be “foolishness to those who are perishing.” Check this out. The OP has its own issues, such as the “conversion” we may experience while evangelizing. Commenter Matt MC said this: “I think I’m a little unclear though, on your intentions with those last two quotes. Is the evangelist’s “conversion” in question a broadening of perspective, or a recognition that somehow he has been preaching the wrong gospel?”

But I want to focus on the comments. With the advent of the postmodern movement and the much talked about breakdown of modernity (something I don’t see nearly as much of as some say), some mindsets have been welcomed into the church in the name of tolerance or diversity. Try to imagine Jesus’ response to this:

“Do I or you have the ‘truth?’ Are we so arrogant to think our religion is the correct one?[...]I don’t think my religion is any more true than anyone else’s and I have no desire to participate in their ’so-called’ [Isn't the term so-called enough without the quotes?] salvation.”

I don’t think he’d applaud with the audience of The View, I think a parable would follow…one resembling the man who built his house upon the sand. But that’s just me. My question is this: Why would you want to be part of a religious group and follow a religious leader (this being Jesus himself) who claims to hold all truth if you don’t think that’s possible?

That comment was followed by this one:

The biblical text itself contains so many voices, so many angles, and was written in so many contexts, all removed from ours significantly if by nothing else than time, that using it to form a firm confidence in exactly what God is up to feels, well…honestly impossible.

I’d like to see her expound on this statement in some meaningful way. What about those times and cultures and writers is so different from those that we live in now? Are we not still human? Are we not seeking joy and fulfillment? Do we not have family, and enemies, and suffering, and fear, and work, and rest, and everything else? It’s tiring to constantly hear people say, “things were different back then,” and never supporting it with even an explanation. So tell us how the voices, angles, and contexts were different and what that means to how we read the narrative of Scripture.

I also get the impression that she wouldn’t care to look into it further. Maybe I’m wrong about this particular person…maybe she has a passion for historical and sociological study of the ancient Hebrews. Perhaps she has a deeper understanding than I can surmise from her post. But judging from the others I’ve read with similar opinions, they’re happy enough with the doubt cast by their assertions to leave it at that.

What that does, effectively, is take all the burden and worry off of a person…they no longer have to concern themselves with being right, because it’s not possible. Unfortunately, God revealed himself in Christ, and in so doing said that if anyone denied him, rejected him, or was ashamed of him, that Christ would deny, reject, and be ashamed of him on the day of judgment.

Both of these commenters’ statements - that we are arrogant for claiming we can know the truth - are, in essence, being ashamed of Jesus. Jesus said he was “the way, the truth, and the life”, that he was God, that he’d be seated at the Father’s right hand, that all who followed him would live forever, and all who rejected him were condemned. He was exclusive. And in today’s world that’s a sin.

Much like Republicans are distancing themselves from the President to avoid any shame that may come from being linked to his policies, so these “Christians” are distancing themselves from the controversial claims of Christ, and trying to be something a little more palatable for the world today. For their sake I hope they hear the rooster crow and get their butts back to the Master’s feet.

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