After reading Is the D.Min a “fluff degree? at Pomomusings, I started to rethink my grad school choices a little. I want to have my options open for a Th.D, if I decide to go that route, but I don’t want to “waste” my time (I use quotes because study is never wasted time) on a degree that won’t make me a better minister.

My friend Jason is finishing his M.Div and I know he’s been challenged and has had to work hard on his theological understanding. But he says that his classmates aren’t necessarily following suit. And the school isn’t encouraging them to. Neither of us can understand why.

The majority of the study is on pastoral care issues, church growth, and program trends. But praxis changes. That whole portion of study could be useless in two or three years. But theology is timeless.

Sure, our understandings change from time to time, and we have to be able to articulate and apply our theology in rapidly changing contexts. But Christ doesn’t change. God doesn’t change. Our church leaders need to be grounded in the constant, unchanging things…houses built on the rock. (continue reading…)

That’s the motto at ACU, and if you ever go there you’ll see it a lot. It’s a fine sentiment, I think; perhaps a little broad - but it gets an A for ambition. But it always caused some problems for me theologically.

The way I see the world, evil has existed since the fall, and has never subsided. I see it in life and in Scripture. Many people see change - moral advancement. They believe progress has been made, and more will be made. They believe that we can change the world.

Even if you only looked at Israel from the Exodus through the Crucifixion, you see that evil was present in much the same form for the whole of their history. But if you continue to look at Paul’s letters, Roman and other Western history, and the world as a whole, it’s difficult to build a case for true advancement.

How can we believe that progress is being made on a global scale? There are times when the only words that can make sense of the world for me are these:

“None is righteous, no, not one;
no one understands;
no one seeks for God.
All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
no one does good,
not even one.
Their throat is an open grave;
they use their tongues to deceive.
The venom of asps is under their lips.
Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.
Their feet are swift to shed blood;
in their paths are ruin and misery,
and the way of peace they have not known.
There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

Romans 3: 12-18 ESV

The last line is the one that catches me up. No one talks about “God-fearing” anymore (at least not around me). Even Christians avoid this terminology. I’m not sure why, but we’ve chosen to speak of God’s love exclusively, and done our best to ignore his other qualities. Now, there are obviously groups that focus too much on God’s wrath (Fred Phelps, anyone?), but most of us have moved in the opposite direction.

Anyway, that is beside the point. When people have no fear of God, they do what they choose to do without worrying about Him, His will, or His consequences. This results in rampant selfishness and individualism. This doesn’t always mean violence.

When people think of “evil” in the world they often think of major violent events and oppression: Imperialism, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the slave trade, the decimation of the Indians. What we don’t tend to think about are the individual things. We don’t associate promiscuity with evil, it’s just a bad decision - but it’s making an idol out of sex. That’s evil. We don’t think of the endless pursuit of money to be evil, unless it leads to harming someone else - but that’s idolatry, too. We don’t consider the selfishness we encounter in our daily lives, even within ourselves, to be evil. But do you know what it is? Idolatry.

“And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.”

Romans 1:28-32

Does any part of this list catch you as something you encounter regularly? What about envy, strife, deceit, maliciousness, gossip, slander, hating God, insolence, haughtiness, boasting, disobedience to parents, foolishness, or faithlessness? How many of those have you seen face-to-face in the last week? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen all of them, and even been guilty of a few.

This is Paul’s 2000 year-old incomplete list of “unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, [and] malice.” If we’ve each seen all or most of these things in the last week or month or year, how can we think that progress is being made, or is even possible? (Keep reading, I promise I’m not this much of a downer)

I read two interesting posts about sin recently, one at Pomomusings and one at Rend the Heavens. Both are worth reading, the comments as well. One comment really stuck out to me. Robert Austell said:

How do we make a change at the community level? Change must begin with me. And so, even addressing the idolatry and sin of all Israel, Joshua will repent publicly and say “As for me and my house.” Jesus, addressing the sins of legalism and ethnic bigotry, will speak of one good Samaritan and call out individuals to change.

The two are as connected as evangelism and social justice… transformation and redemption of culture begins (as God’s work) in one life at a time, which involves personal repentance, redemption, and transformation. That means personally dealing with issues of holiness, righteousness, humility, and repentance. That means dealing with personal sin… that produces godly “leaven” for society.

I thought of this concept every time I heard someone say “Change the World” while I was at ACU and again today. Today at Garnett Wade preached about transforming and redeeming culture, which rolls right along with the portion I italicized above. I’m not sure if he was saying that we could use a morally neutral culture for good, thereby redeeming it, or that we could make culture good. I believe the former is true, but am not sure about the latter.

Much like the story of the boy who is frantically throwing starfish back in the water after the tide rolls out, we can’t change everyone or fix everything; but every person we reach, and is transformed by Christ, makes our work worthwhile. So go ahead, Change the World.

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.

One of the hardest things about being on the conservative/traditional side of a Christian theological debate is dealing with statements like this:

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.

In this paragraph Marcus Borg, of the Jesus Seminar, states these things as fact: Jesus did not say he was the Son of God or the Light of the World and the statements about Jesus’ divinity are not true. He states this as fact and it’s accepted as fact by many. The problem? It can’t be substantiated. (continue reading…)

I’ve been reading Donald Bloesch’s A Theology of Word & Spirit, the first in the Christian Foundations series. I chose it at random of a shelf at Mardel, and I’ve been very impressed. Of course, how could I not be impressed by the level of scholarship necessary to write such a substantial theology text?

The thing I’m really surprised about is how faithful Bloesch’s theology is to both the Word and the Spirit. He fleshes out some ideas that make thing so much clearer for me…some that I already believed but couldn’t articulate, and some that I’d never thought of before. (continue reading…)

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