Evangelical Outpost has a regular feature called “Thirty-Three Things”. I’m not there yet. I hope to be consistent with three things for now.
(1) I’ve been hearing and reading a lot lately about how when Jesus said “on earth as it is in Heaven” he wasn’t just talking about “thy will be done”, but also “thy kingdom come.” While that is a true and worthy assertion, what about “hallowed be thy name“? Many (please forgive my vague and largely inexcusable use of the word “many”) who point this out are advocating social justice that “lives out the Gospel” but doesn’t preach it.
But is the name of the Father to be hallowed on earth? Can we truly do that if we don’t “teach them to obey everything [Christ has] commanded”? Then we must preach and practice putting Christ above all else, including our good works.
(2) In related news, “Love God” and “Love your neighbor” are two separate commands. They are not, together, the Greatest Commandment. (continue reading…)
This Sunday at Garnett Wade talked about demons. We’re going through this series called Chreaster, which is following Jesus life and work from Christmas through Easter. This week he talked about Jesus’ interactions with demons. He focused on three stories: the man in the synagogue in Mark 1, “Legion” in Mark 5, and the boy in Mark 9.
It was an interesting sermon that we discussed Sunday night when I sat in on the high school small group. We talked a lot about spirits and demons and whether or not we were talking about literal demons that can possess and control a person, or a person’s bad traits. Everyone seemed to come to the same conclusion that they’re are different issues and both equally valid.
Late in the discussion one of the girls was talking about how modern medicine has affected the perception of demons and miracles, using epilepsy as an example. It made me think of diseases like autism or ALS that aren’t really understood, they’re only classifiable. What if those types of diseases are in fact symptoms of possession?
As I type this I can see some people becoming upset or offended because they know or have known someone affected by one of the aforementioned disorders. Please don’t. I’m simply raising the question.
Stephanie Simon of the LA Times wrote a piece the other day about Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s new homemaking concentration. I won’t go into all of the details of the article, because it’s pretty straightforward, with the expected liberal bias (since when is Jimmy Carter a “moderate”?). What is most interesting to me is the comment section. There are many, many misunderstandings and bullheaded refusals to see anything but male dominance and the devaluing of women, all aside from scattered comments likening this to the subjugation of women in Islam.
Many people simply reject the idea that there could be different roles for the sexes. Others say that gender roles are outdated, “50’s baptist culture.” Most seem offended by the idea that a woman should stay home. Below are some samples:
NEVER have I once thought that I am unequal to a man and should sacrifice my desire to have a career for marriage and children. There is no reason why a woman shouldn’t use the talents God gave her.
I could never marry any man who expected me to place my dreams and ambitions second to his. My parents raised me to be independent, to be able to take care of myself.
This seminary is teaching women that they are subservient to men’s desires and that’s not true. In this day and age women and girls learn and work alongside men and boys. It’s the norm and its accepted (as it should be). If a person enjoys being a homemaker, then I’m not disputing that they should pursue a life doing that, but women should NEVER limit themselves and their abilites based on how one group (a male dominated group) interprets scripture.
Submitted by: Brittany
(continue reading…)
Here’s an incomplete list of mindsets that I don’t understand:
1.) Christians who believe the Bible is totally metaphoric. One such person said he chooses to believe this because the alternative is ugly. But ugly doesn’t equal untrue. This seems to spill out from a materialistic worldview, and the belief that since we’ve made many scientific advances since that time, we know that those things weren’t possible. One side says the Bible was never meant to be taken literally, that it’s all myth; the other says that the writers truly believed it, but were wrong. Both say a metaphoric reading has more meaning than a “literal” reading.
2.) Women who are willing to be accomplices in their own objectification. They dress to get men to lust after them. The only reason to show it, is because you want people to look. It would seem to me that this is a bad way to get attention, or at least it is bad attention to get. The looks (leers is more like it) women will receive from men when they wear revealing clothes are not the type that lead to thoughts like, “She seems smart,” or, “She’s the type of girl I could settle down with.” Maybe those aren’t the kind of responses you’re looking for, but that’s a whole other issue. If you are hoping to meet someone and settle down, perhaps you shouldn’t be out fishing for a lustful response from the men in your vicinity.
3.) Christians who believe that we have to choose between social justice and evangelism/discipleship (Beliefnet has a good thread on this…here). Why can’t both sides agree that the two are equally important? Sure, Jesus said in Matthew 25:31ff that those who care for “the least of these” will enter the Kingdom. But he said in verses 1-13 that those who horde their goods and refuse to share will enter. Not too many people preaching that message today. Then he said in 14-30 that those who make money will enter, and those who merely save it will be thrown “outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” I haven’t heard that sermon yet. What’s really strange is that these people, many of whom are of the liberal/progressive/emergent stripe that values a metaphorical reading as superior, take a surprisingly literal reading of the parable of the sheep and the goats…one unbecoming to their exegetical skill.
More to come, I’m sure…
I’ve been reading a few books lately, The Case for a Creator, Theology of Word and Spirit (still), The Bourne Supremacy, Harry Potter, and Four Views on Salvation in a Pluralistic World (Counterpoints). I’m a bit ADD, so it helps if I can switch books if I get antsy about the subject matter. I’ve been deep into physics and cosmology and philosophy with Case, so I decided to change up and take on the next quarter of Four Views.
The first chapter was John Hick’s position of pluralism: all “ethical” religions lead to God (air-quotes mine). He begins by recounting a spiritual journey much like Marcus Borg’s. The main difference is that he came to Christ during law school. He then went on to study philosophy where he began asking the Big Questions, and, as with many in the wide world of Liberal Christianity, assumed that since people weren’t answering those questions, they couldn’t be answered.
An example of these questions is about the sun standing still in Joshua. “In light of our modern knowledge of astronomy, we would have to say that the earth, which rotates at a speed of about a thousand miles an hour, suddenly ceased to rotate; but taken seriously, this is mind-boggling.” Is this idea more mind-boggling than a man being raised from the dead after a couple of days? More mind-boggling than God taking the form of a human to live among us? For me the answer is this simple: if God wanted to stop the earth from rotating, He could. And if He wanted to keep us (and everything else) from hurtling into space at indeterminable speeds, He could.
One of his other questions is the ever-present, “is it loving to send (insert descriptive phrase here…he chose “the majority of”) the human race to eternal torment in hell?” I find it interesting that it’s apparently ok to ask this question, but not ok to ask, “is it just to allow any human to enter heaven?”
Hick’s position of “pluralism” is problematic in its justification because it centers around a severely altered definition of salvation, and moral equivalence. For most Christians, salvation means being set free from sin and spared from Hell by the sacrifice of Jesus. For other people and in other situations, it generally refers to being rescued from some form of peril. But Hick decides to swing for the fences on this one.
He spends quite a bit of time establishing many things, some true (Paul’s first letter is dated about 50 A.D., Gospel of Mark about 70), and some quite speculative (the early followers didn’t believe Jesus was divine). He also talks about the son of God “metaphor”, saying that it was several centuries before Jesus was considered by the church to be the “literal God the Son.” Of course, he just said the Gospels were written within 7o years of Jesus death, and they all attest to his being of one being with the Father (”who can forgive sins but God alone”). How did 40 years become 400?
Anyway, his focus, leading up to his new definition of salvation is to establish the moral equality of the world religions. He wants to show that all of the major religions are doing an equally good job of causing people to think less about themselves and more about others. It’s not hard to do with narrow terms and a priori assumptions, like that human goodness “reflects a right relationship to God.”
He shows that all religions teach a variation of the Golden Rule, and follow it with about the same success rate. He argues that “if Christians have a more complete and direct access to God than anyone else and live in a closer relationship to him, being indwelt by the Holy Spirit”, there would be evidence that we have more of that “human goodness”.
Now that he has established this equality, he turns to salvation, which he considers to be a change from natural self-focus to others-focus. Now that he’s established a new definition for the term, relegating it to a personal change, he can make his move on the uniqueness of Christ.
He argues that because there is moral parity in the great world religions, all must have the same level of access to “the Real”. But his argument fails in that it requires you to accept his highly…”stylized” definition of salvation.
What he’s actually talking about is described in the Bible. It’s called sanctification. Most of us have heard the word before, but may not quite know what it means. Well, in a nutshell (a very small one) it coincides with Hick’s (misguided) definition of salvation.
He also presents the speculation that Jesus didn’t say the things attributed to him in the New Testament as fact. He cites a lot of people who agree with him, then establishes the point: “That Jesus himself did not claim to be God cuts the ground from under the feet of the old apologetic.” The only problem is that this is not established fact. It will never be, unless we find writings from an eyewitness who wrote as things were happening. The two problems with that are a) it’ll never happen, and b) even if it does, the question will still be clouded with doubt.
You can choose to believe he didn’t say those things, but that poses more problems. What did he say? How do you know he said that and not the other things? How can you trust any part of the Bible? How do you know which parts are trustworthy and which aren’t?
Hick never addresses these questions, except to say that the writings of the New Testament were still “documents of faith”. But according to his argument, they were essentially hallucinations of faith.
I think Hick uses the weakest theological and philosophical reason of the three authors I’ve read. Though his arguments have reached their peak of efficiency and fulfilled their potential, that potential is alarmingly low. Logic was not on his side.
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