ETS, IBR, SBL, AAR and PETA

. . . okay, not PETA. But I did return from ETS/IBR/SBL/AAR this week, and I had a marvelous time with some of my most cherished, colorful, Caucasian friends around the country. Even though it wasn't long before our room began to smell like a Bombay bus station, spending time with these guys is always worth the price of admission. Please accept my apologies for the sparse posting! In any case, after having some time to process the various papers and conversations I experienced, I thought it might be appropriate to blow the mucus which is my reflection onto the Kleenex which is this blog. Why else would I call it "Soylent Green"? Rather than chronicling the iterations of my thoughts in every individual seminar I attended, allow me to enumerate some general themes I found to be of interest:

1) Epistemology: In just about every session I attended, the issue of epistemology lingered around the edges of the paper, only to come periodically crashing to the center, especially when dissent was expressed by panelists or audience members. When it comes to theological discourse, it seems increasingly the case that Jerusalem has actually been relocated to Athens. Issues of prolegomena and theological method have become hot-button topics in Biblical studies, and in many ways I see this as a positive development: Evangelicals are now being forced to lay their philosophical cards out on the table and expose their epistemological underwear. This kind of methodological strip-poker is the necessary beginning for any meaningful rapprochement in that it must be acknowledged that the correspondence theory of truth, accounts of epistemic justification, and traditional theories of language can neither be found in the pages of Scripture nor referenced as “obvious” common sense. Being forced to defend these notions in all of their philosophical technicalities highlights just how NOT common sense the issues really are.

In other ways, though, the center stage given to philosophy can be somewhat frustrating. For one thing, the theologians discussing the issues don’t always have formal training or adequate grasp of contemporary debates in epistemology, which inevitably leads to muddled distinctions, well-worn caricatures and passé (re)formulations. My frustration with this is particularly acute, since I’m only being introduced to these issues via theological debate, only to find out upon further research that my confusion has as much to do with the major participants as with my own initial unfamiliarity. What is foundationalism, and is the rejection of it a rejection of both strong and weak varieties? By anti-realism are we referring to a metaphysical or epistemological position? Is the debate over foundationalism about epistemic justification, or is it a disagreement as to what counts as knowledge in the first place? Is a rejection of correspondance a rejection of Truth? In listening to the debates the answers to these questions aren’t always clear. What is clear, however, is that engagement in these disciplines (philosophy and theology) is crucially clarifying for both parties. The discussion between Merold Westphal, James Beilby, John Franke and Kevin Vanhoozer at the Evangelical Philosophical Society was especially helpful in illuminating this point. Keep watching this site, as I may be posting an mp3 of this session soon.

2) Postmodernism: The buzzwords in greatest currency at all of the sessions I attended were terms related to postmodernism - postfoundationalism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, postconservativism and the like. The fact is, whether one likes it or not, the contours of contemporary debate in most of the disciplines within the guild of Biblical studies (including theology, hermeneutics and missiology) is being shaped by the variegated challenges of postmodernism. The positive effect of this has been the chastisement of positivistic excess and the cultural hegemony exercised by these disciplines under the guise of rational purity and detached objectivity (and hence the increasing discussions of prolegomena mentioned above). Yet, the negative effect is that since postmodernism tends to be more of a critique than a positive contribution, the void left by such criticisms tends to be filled by an untenable skepticism which seems incompatible with the missional prerogatives of the Church. Most of the friendly wrangling with my pals at the conference was over these sorts of issues, but the tension remains - how does one appropriate the global criticism of postmodernism, and the potential it holds for subverting the traditional impasses of Biblical studies, without resorting to nihilistic incredulity? Fortunately some positive contributions have been made in light of postmodern: Though Vanhoozer mentioned that he was "cooling" to speech-act theory as a panacea for all theological ills, I still think it represents heuristic value for textual meaning; Reformed epistemology holds some promise for an account of theological knowledge (while Bruce Marshall attempts a different account by way of a semantic conception of truth ala Alfred Tarski); critical realism is, if not rigidly methodological, at the very least an attitudinal middle-way between positivism and skepticism; Barth has proven to be a resource for a theological account of our knowledge of God, the Bible, and the (in)adequacy of human language, etc. As for the lasting value of these and other proposals, time will tell.

3) Theological interpretation: There seems to be a growing interest in the Bible as a Christian book. While that sounds like a stupid thing to say, the fragmentation of Biblical studies into adversarial sub-disciplines has presented a well-recognized crisis for churchly appropriations of the Bible. Historical criticism and biblical theology emphasize development, dissent and fundamental disunity in the pages of Scripture while theologians and systematicians wrestle these particularities into submission so that Christians can meaningfully speak of one book, one Gospel. Unfortunately the tug-of-war between unity and diversity has resulted in something worse than a stalemate; it’s created a taut rope for educated clergy to trip over. But a heartening turn was felt at this year’s annual meetings with Baker Academic and Brazos Press both publishing commentary series dedicated to the theological interpretation of Scripture, as well as The Dictionary for the Theological Interpretation of Scripture, a stupendous compendium of articles related to this attempted reclamation of the Bible for the Church. Of course the Scripture and Hermeneutics Series has also attempted to grapple with the issues raised by the Bible turf wars. Concurrent with these ongoing publications is the formation of a new study group within SBL, as well as a biannual journal dedicated to the topic. Hopefully these developments, alongside burgeoning theological projects which emphasize the controls of community identification and the rule of faith, represent a return to Biblical studies as a churchly endeavor.

Dealing with Disunity (Final)

Scraping the surface of 1 Corinthians 1:10-17, it’s clear that Paul’s vision for Oneness among the redeemed community is of desperate importance. But as one continues through the chapter what becomes even clearer is his contempt for its disruption. Paul’s tone in 1 Corinthians sanctifies sarcasm in legitimate moral outrage. The pinnacle of the apostle’s rhetorical razing comes in 4:7-8 – but its precursor shows up as early as his very first paragraph. Verses 13-17 read, “Has Christ been divided? Paul was not crucified for you, was he? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? 14 I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, 15 so that no one would say you were baptized in my name. 16 Now I did baptize also the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized any other. 17 For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not in cleverness of speech, so that the cross of Christ would not be made void.”

As much as Paul despises rhetoric for the sake of rhetoric, he masterfully baptizes it for Christian use in what’s called a “reductio ad absurdum”. This sort of argument carries your opponent’s thinking to its logical end in order show its absurdity. Parents employ this timeless classic in response to the perennial complaint, “But everyone else is doing it!” The familiar reductio ad absurdum in that case is (say it with me), “If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?” The force of the argument is to expose the disastrous logical implications of a particular line of thinking – and the best way to do that is with a question. In addressing the Corinthian mindset, Paul’s got three of them.

The first is, “Has Christ been divided?” For Paul, church splitting absurdly implies that Jesus Himself can be broken into pieces and parceled out in chunks among various factions. How this follows from disunity is not easily discernable for most modern evangelicals, since Christ and the Church are typically held at arm’s length from one another. Resigned to the impossibility of moral victory and desiring to minimize the damage to Jesus’ reputation, the only available coping mechanism is to see His ministry as radically independent from that of the Church. But this is a fantasy. The Church, like it or not, is in mystical union with Jesus Christ. So much so, in fact, that 1 Co. 6:15-20 says when a believer joins himself to a prostitute, he’s not only defiling Himself – he’s defiling Jesus too. 1 Co. 12:27 puts it even more plainly – “Now you are Christ’s body, and individually members of it.” The neat distinctions we make between Christology and Ecclesiology can be worse than misleading; they can blind us from the fact that the Church is His body, and as such bear His reputation, constitute His earthly presence and mediate His ongoing ministry. As such, seeking to separate believers from one another is a direct assault on Jesus Himself because, though comprised of many members, He is one.

This first question reveals an absurdity in their view of Christ’s Person; the second question exposes the absurdity in relationship to Christ’s work. Even though he used his own name, he could have just as easily inserted the names of Apollos or Peter – none of these men died on your behalf – so why are you choosing sides according to your loyalty to them? I think we should feel free to read the names of any respected teacher in the Church, past or present in verse 13. Is this where the lines that divide us should be drawn? Should we be organizing ourselves according to these sorts of loyalties? Paul’s answer was plainly, “Hell no.” And the reason for that is because of the nature of Christ’s work on the cross – it demands exclusive loyalty. Neither John Calvin, Charles Spurgeon nor John Wesley died for our sins. Neither John MacArthur nor Rick Warren reconciled our rebellious hearts to God. And since it was none other than Jesus who did that, there is no other loyalty which should be used as the acid test of Christian fellowship. The oft-repeated ultimatum, “Do you stand with X or do you stand with Y” exemplifies Satanic brilliance, because regardless of which option we choose, we’ve inadvertently hacking the heart of true discipleship: exclusive loyalty to Jesus Christ.

On top of these implications Paul piles on one more absurdity – “Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” These divisions reflected different spiritual heritages, the products of different discipleship. Some were influenced more by Peter, others by Apollos; some were the products of Paul’s teaching, and still others claimed to be purists, relying only on the words of Jesus Himself. Surely, then, these divisions reflected different faiths! Not so. No matter who their spiritual fathers were, every single believer in the Corinthian community, as well as every single believer in Macedonia, the Empire, in both times past and present were all baptized into the same name: that of King Jesus. And that baptism was based not on receiving the good news about Paul, Peter or Apollos, but about Jesus, who God has made Lord and Christ by virtue of His death and resurrection. The message of the cross was the basis for baptism in the name of Jesus, and therefore dividing the fellowship was a way of emptying the cross of its significance. The cross brings men of every tribe, tongue and nation into one body through baptism. Gal. 3:28 says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

I’ll close this series of posts with a searching quote about these verses from Gordon D. Fee:

“It is easy to see the urgency of a paragraph like this for the contemporary church, which not only often experiences quarrels such as these at the local level, but also is deeply fragmented at every other level. We have churches and denominations, renewal movements that all too often are broken off and become their own “church of Christ,” and every imaginable individualistic movement and sect. Even in a day of various kinds of ecumenism, the likelihood of total visible unity in the church is more remote than ever. This fragmentation is both a shame on our house and a cause for deep repentance. If there is a way forward, it probably lies less in structures and more in our readiness to recapture Paul’s focus here – on the preaching of the cross as the great divine contradiction to our merely human ways of doing things.”

Dealing with Disunity pt. 3

When considering the exhortation of 1 Corinthians 1:10, maybe your picture of what a factious person looks like is something like the Neighborhood Watch villain. He’s easy to spot and, of course, he doesn’t look anything like us. Knowing our own hearts such as we do, and giving ourselves the benefit of the doubt, we recoil at the idea that such a word could possibly apply to us without overstating the case. We may be rough or over-zealous at times; but typically we reserve this sort of terminology for King James Only people, or hyper-Calvinists, or maybe Rick Miesel. And while these assessments would be correct, Paul's down-to-earth description of disunity in verses 11-12 should give us pause. The extremities of sinful behavior too easily serve as distractions from the very same roots which lie in our own hearts.

Notice that the first manifestation of factious behavior is manifested in what Paul calls "quarrels". The word there is literally “strife” in the plural – the same word used in Titus 3:9: “But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and strife[s] and disputes about the Law, for they are unprofitable and worthless.” Quarrels aren't discussions; they're not friendly debates or healthy in-house deliberations; they describe a kind of verbal sparring which eventually alienate us from one another and rupture trusted friendships. We all know the difference, though we often pretend we're doing one while we're really doing the other. But quarreling isn't simply the action of shouting at one another – it’s also a way to describe the state of a relationship. “We’re quarrelling” doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re at this moment engaged in hostile verbal debate – it means that our friendship is being strained and our fellowship is being disrupted by our heated disagreements.

So far so good; but I suspect that our eyes are still on the branches instead of the roots. What we often fail to recognize is that no one prefers to thinks of themselves as “loving quarrels”. In fact, most of the time we engage in quarrels it’s because we think we’re doing something else - we’re championing the truth against the various manifestations of liberalism, we're standing for God and the Bible in times when it's unpopular to do so, we're being faithful to the Scriptures, come Hell or highwater . . . and so on. But bickering about the truth can still count as quarreling. And this, unfortunately, is often our speciality.

Phil. 1:15 says, “Some, to be sure, are preaching Christ even from envy and strife (or quarrelling), but some also from good will.” Strife, like all other sins, is a deceiver. It dresses up stubbornness as "faithfulness". It paints ego as "boldness". It answers the fear of being challenged with the Bible by a call to tow the party line. In short, factious behavior always looks spiritual, and is always painted as virtuous. Always. Without exception. Notice the Corinthians didn't say "I am of Zeno", "I am of Epicurus" or "I am of "Plato". They said, “I am of Paul,” and “I of Apollos,” and “I of Cephas,” and “I of Christ.” Those of us who are used to fending off criticisms of being "too harsh" or "too narrow" or "unloving" by seeing these epithets as a compliment, or worse, as a sign of divine approval, should let this bald biblical truth haunt us.

In order for our disputes to be spiritual, they must display the fruit of the Spirit. That means that our words, attitudes and even our study should be saturated with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control; and it should display not just one of these things – just faithfulness, for example – but all of them. Don't let the radical nature of that claim escape you! Imagine what our study (much less our disputes) would look like if it were characterized by the love described in 1 Co. 13; and that's just one of the nine qualities of the Spirit's yield.

Of the four very deeply drawn lines of divisions between Corinthian believers, how concerned do you suppose these factions really were for the truth? I'd venture it had very little to do with it, if for no other reason, Paul, Apollos and Peter were all devoted lovers of Jesus Christ. The clue to what drove their separation lies in the common word shared in all of their sloganeering – the word “I”! Selfishness and arrogance, not truth, stood behind their disputes. They were just using the reputations of these leaders to lend both lend credibility to their own views and to use their respected status as a wedge for other Christians to prove their loyalty.

Far from being "spiritual", divisions are usually motivated by lust and manipulation. James 4:1-3 says, “What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members? You lust and do not have; so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain; so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.” The coattails of men like Paul and Peter are worn thin from ambitious, pouncing Christians. Respected pillars of the Church throughout it’s history have their share of uninvited tailgate parties as well. And each with our chosen personality set them up as a barometer for who we will fellowship with, and who we won’t. But when the pretentious platter is removed from this dish, and the rhetorical steam clears, what remains isn't meat(1 Co. 3:1-4); it's shriveled, poisonous fruit (Gal. 5:17-21).

Selling My Indulgences to Spend More Time in Purgatorio

A brief interlude from my current series of posts - I just added Purgotorio to my blogroll, for good reason. Marc Heinrich is a witty Christian Hedonist (from Minnesota, surprisingly) who blogs entirely through the medium of pictures. More importantly, he also likes Radiohead. Go check it out - it's not the usual fare in biblio-blogging and it's worth your time. Express enough interest, and maybe he'll invite you to stay at his house.

Dealing WIth Disunity pt. 2

So, first, an exhortation about disunity. How do we approach this problem? Positing solutions seems simplistic from the beginning because of how pervasive and overwhelming a problem schisms have proven to be throughout Church History; but as always, solutions usually begin on the individual level. Verse 10 simply says “Now I exhort you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all agree and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be made complete in the same mind and in the same judgment.” Considering what was actually happening among the Corinthian fellowship, that seems an astonishing and somewhat naïve thing to say. The immediate issues which leap to mind in protest might be the moral ones, since heinous familial sexual misconduct, divorce, temple prostitution and reckless litigation could all be named among the Corinthian fellowship.

But the doctrinal problems were no less severe. Beyond their eschatological confusion (1 Co. 4:5-8), they denied the existence of a resurrection, and probably the resurrection of Christ Himself (1 Co. 15)! In the face of such flagrant moral and doctrinal meandering, one might wonder how Paul could even assume he was speaking to brethren at all – yet the exhortation in verse 10 addresses them as such. Lest we try to excuse Paul’s inclusive attitude by characterizing the Corinthians as simply “confused” or “mistaught”, consider that Paul’s apostleship was in question, and his ministry under skeptical scrutiny by the fledgling congregation (1 Co. 4:3-4, 9:3). But the opening of the letter in verse 2 proves that this knowledge didn’t hinder Paul from seeing the Corinthians as “saints by calling” who, “with all those in every place, call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours.” Christian standards of conduct were in decay, and the doctrinal situation was in dire straits, and yet Paul consistently regarded the Corinthains as a Spirit filled family of faith because of their professed allegiance to Jesus as their only Lord and King (cf. 1 Co. 12:3).

Even though he could have declared the Church an apostate fellowship comprised of doctrinal miscreants, he continued to regard them (and exhort them) as family – they were a severely dysfunctional family, but they were “brethren” nonetheless. It’s interesting to note that in nearly every case Paul uses these words, “I exhort you”, he appeals to the familial nature of their relationship (Ro. 12:1, Ro. 15:30, Ro. 16:17, Phil. 4:1-2, 1 Thess. 5:14 and 1 Tim. 5:1). Perhaps the best example of the spirit behind this kind of exhortation is in Philemon 9-10: “yet for love’s sake I rather appeal to you [same word] —since I am such a person as Paul, the aged, and now also a prisoner of Christ Jesus— 10 I appeal to you for my child, whom I have begotten in my imprisonment, Onesimus.”

Yet Paul’s heart for unity wasn’t simply motivated by sentimental familial ties or a desire to “keep the peace at all costs”. The exhortation in verse 10 isn’t just based on their relationship as “brethren”, but on the “name of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Jesus’ name, of course, calls to mind who He is, what He’s done for us, and at minimum, His teaching. Jesus taught His disciples to be One, and to distinguish themselves from the world by their mutual love for one another (Jn. 13:34-35). Thus Paul’s desire for their unity was motivated primarily out of a holy zeal for Christ’s own reputation, which the Church sullies by the arrogance of her divisions. And this is Paul’s ultimate concern – the reputation of Jesus Christ. In order to secure this kind of obedience, he commends three practices for their fellowship to embrace at the individual level: 1) “that you all agree”, 2) that “there be no divisions among you” and 3) that “you be made complete in the same mind and the same judgment.”

1) YOU ALL MUST AGREE: Many of the words found in this passage are political terms; the word for “divisions” in vs. 10, quarrels in vs. 11 and the slogans of vs. 12 (I’m for Paul! I’m for Apollos!) all speak to the issue of party loyalty. Literally, the phrase “that you all agree” reads: “that you all say the same thing” (cf. the NKJV); but the NAS decided to translate it “that you all agree” because “saying the same thing” was a political euphemism for speaking about two or more parties setting aside individual differences to cooperate toward shared ends. This socio-rhetorical background for the language employed in verses 10-17 should dispel the notion that Paul is calling for a Borg-like doctrinal similitude among the Corinthian congregation. Far from “repeating the same doctrinal formulation”, “saying the same thing” involves, “taking the same side.” This shouldn’t be construed as mere compromise – it’s not asking people within various political groups to hide or minimize their differences. They can and should continue to engage in vigorous intramural debate –but the emphasis in this leg of Paul’s exhortation is on keeping the group together by focusing on areas which one can truly “say the same thing” for the sake of accomplishing mutual goals. In all the church’s wrestling through doctrinal and moral crises Paul is commending an attitude that sees one another as essentially on the same side – that of the Gospel of Jesus’ cross (1:17-18). The Church is defined by it’s commitment to a Gospel that proclaims Jesus Christ as Lord of the universe (12:1-3) and that proclaims His death for the forgiveness of sins (15:1-8). If a believer is forced to draw a line in the sand and take sides, Paul says that the only line which exists in God’s eyes is the line between believer and unbeliever (this is exactly Paul’s point in 1 Co. 5:9-13).

2) LET THEIR BE NO DIVISIONS: Keeping with the first part of this exhortation, the emphasis there is on AMONG YOU. The word “division” is literally, a “tear”, a “gash” or a “rip”. The same word is used in Mt. 9:16, when Jesus speaks of new patches being sewn on old garments. Eventually the patch shrinks and it tears the garment. The imagery of tearing pictures relational discord and ultimately separation. If you’ve been cut from fundamentalist cloth (as I have) the mind must find some way to explain this apparent moratorium on separation. After all, there seem to be circumstances in which separation is commanded, even in this very letter (cf. ch. 5). But Paul’s point here has to do with an illegitimate separation. For those situations that seem as though separation is required, there is one (and only ONE) legitimate way to carry it out: it’s called Church Discipline. This remains the sole mechanism by which the New Testament will authorize division among those who claim the name of Christ. And before this can done (according to Mt. 18), you’ll notice that God demands we plead with the sinning brother 3 times – individually and corporately – before we can introduce separation. When the reluctant disfellowship takes place, we regard such an individual not as “a wayward Christian” or worse, with pious agnosticism about his spiritual state (“we mustn’t fellowship with such a one, but let God judge His heart”) – No, Mt. 18:17 says, “let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” Thus the line which is to be reinforced among professing believers doesn’t correspond to a camp within Christian doctrine – it is consistently drawn as a separation between believer and unbeliever. Beyond that, Paul says, there are to be no divisions amongst us.

3) SAME MIND, SAME JUDGMENT: In this third and final leg of Paul’s exhortation he suggests the Corinthians be made complete in the same mind and the same judgment. In deliberate contrast with his description of divisions as a “tearing”, this word “be made complete” speaks of sewing back together. Mark 1:19 illustrates the idea in James and John, mending their nets. They weren’t functional while torn, and in order to make them functional again they must be stitched back together, restored to oneness. Instrestingly, the same word is used for “restore” in the context of helping wayward brethren. Gal. 6:1 says “Brethren, even if anyone is caught in any trespass, you who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; each one looking to yourself, so that you too will not be tempted.” The same word is also used in 2 Co. 13:11, which should read: “aim for restoration!” Put things back in order, repair what is broken, knit those who disagree back together in mind and in judgment.

Again, in calling the Corinthians to have the “same mind” Paul isn’t saying, “Resistance is futile – you will be assimilated!” He’s talking about a mind-set, a disposition or attitude. It’s a way of thinking. There’s a big difference between sharing the same opinion on everything and having the same way of thinking about everything. The former speaks to lockstep conformity with one another while the latter speaks to a shared frame of reference, the same basic pattern of thought. In this case, that same framework is about “the word of the cross”, summarized in 1:18-25 and 15:1-11. There may be different levels of maturity and different stages of apprehension (and hence differences of opinion on various shades of the message), but all share the same basic shape in cruciform worldview.

Doctors may basically agree on how the body works. They may have gone to the same medical schools, taken the same classes from the same teachers, read the same textbooks and still come to completely different conclusions. Yet, one doctor may think that diabetes has some genetic link to ethnicity while another may passionately disagree, seeing diabetes as entirely diet related. Yet one wouldn’t reserve the title “doctor” for the doctor with whom she happens to agree. They both share the same basic framework in practicing medicine, and they could likely even work in the same office with their disagreements. Hopefully both are open to reevaluation on the basis of the available data. In the same way, Christians can share the same basic framework – the Gospel – and even respect the same teachers, go the same schools, read the same Bible, and still come to completely different conclusions on a hundred different important issues. They have the same renewed mind, but they don’t necessarily agree on everything.

The issue, then, becomes a matter of disagreeing agreeably; to have debate without division. Charles Spurgeon, in a semon entitled “A Defense of Calvinism”, called this “Christian courtesy”:

Most atrocious things have been spoken about the character and spiritual condition of John Wesley, the modern prince of Arminians. I can only say concerning him that, while I detest many of the doctrines which he preached, yet for the man himself I have a reverence second to no Wesleyan; and if there were wanted two apostles to be added to the number of the twelve, I do not believe that there could be found two men more fit to be so added than George Whitefield and John Wesley. The character of John Wesley stands beyond all imputation for self-sacrifice, zeal, holiness, and communion with God; he lived far above the ordinary level of common Christians, and was one of whom the world was not worthy. I believe there are multitudes of men who cannot see the truths, or at least, cannot see them in the way in which we put them, who nevertheless have received Christ as their Saviour, and are as dear to the heart of the God of grace as the soundest Calvinists in or out of heaven."

Higher words were never spoken of Wesley, and that from the mouth of one of history’s staunchest Calvinists!

The NIV translates the word judgment, “thought” and the NLT says “have the same purpose” – the reason why it can be translated “judgment”, “thought” or “purpose” is because having the same thoughts or judgments imply that you have the same intent, or the same goal. That’s what this word means – it means “purpose.” So by asking that we have the same “judgment” Paul is calling Christians to rally around their missional mandate, which is of course our Gospel proclamation of Jesus Christ as Lord and King. Recall the doctor analogy again and consider that their differing views on diabetes don’t hinder them from carrying out the task for which they’ve directed their lives: treating and healing the sick. All their vigorous debate about genetics and diet aside, both want to heal those with diabetes. Few medical professionals suffer from the tragic pettiness that Christians do in their doctrinal disputes. The world would not forgive society's most celebrated physicians for neglecting the sick in order to quibble with one another in their university lounges.

So, here is the first resource in dealing with disunity – take personal heed to this exhortation. Don’t ignore the issues. Don’t be afraid to talk about your disagreements. If you are and your debate partner are both humble and teachable, you may actually end up agreeing with one another. But even if you both don’t end up fully agreeing, (and obviously that can happen no matter how humble and teachable you both are), you can still learn from one another and grow from your edification of one another. To put it Paul’s way in this letter, “Knowledge makes arrogant, but love edifies (1 Co. 8:1).” “Seek to abound for the edification of the church (1 Co. 14:12)” and “Let all things be done for edification (1 Co. 14:26)”. When you get frustrated or suspicious with another believer for reasons moral or doctrinal, remember that unless such a one has been the object of the final stages of church discipline, you’re on the same team! Don’t be quick to draw lines of division between you and other people unless you’re willing to declare them an unbeliever (in which case you should think about the judicial processes that are to precede such a declaration). Guard yourself from the glib put-downs and air of superiority which may prevent you from fellowshipping with Christians of a different stripe. Refuse to take sides or force other people to take sides against other believers in the body. That’s not discernment - it's the definition of schismatic, divisive, factious behavior, and it’s never a godly thing to do. Go, in love, to confront those in sin with the purpose of their edification; patiently work with them and pray for them to learn and grow, and if they continue to live in sin, with a broken-heart full of hope in their restoration, initiate church discipline. But if those with whom you have conflict with are born-again, God will never sympathize with one group taking sides against the other. Let the only dividing line in your life be between believers and unbelievers.

Seek to heal division within the fellowship, not create it. Instead of trying to force separation between believers in the name of “discernment”, do the harder work of seeking to bring them together around the same mission. Have the same mind and the same purpose that’s supremely concerned with the work of the Gospel, both among us and in the world. Spend your energy, time and resources partnering together with one another in accomplishing that mission. Concentrate your ministry on tearing down unbelieving strongholds in the world. Focusing our attention there leaves us for no time for division, as there’s plenty of work to be done.

Being a family is hard work because we’re all naturally selfish and proud. It takes a lot of humility to learn from one another, love to cover over a multitude of sins, patience as we are sinned against, and endurance with people that are slow to change. But we’re committed to doing that in our families, because without strong families, society decays. The Church is the most important family there is – it’s the hope of the world’s salvation, and its family Jesus died to create.

Dealing With Disunity pt. 1

After my previous attempt to highlight some of the subjective and self-important tactics used by doctrinal politicians, I was inspired to post a series on disunity from 1 Corinthians. I'll be posting them in the coming weeks, but here's some introduction to what's coming:

The division of the family is one of the most pressing problems in the western world today. A person’s family is the soil from which they grow to impact their environment, and now more than ever that soil is being poisoned with divorce, homosexuality, materialism, child-abuse and general selfish neglect. The fruit formed from that soil is unsurprisingly bitter: a dramatic escalation in violent crime, increasing gender confusion, rampant sexual promiscuity, further divorce, and further societal decay. The bond between fathers and mothers, parents and children is like an atom – you can’t split them apart without causing disastrous, far-reaching consequences.

Of course none of that is to say that someone of tremendous integrity and moral strength can’t come from a dysfunctional family – surely one can. Examples abound. But regardless of whether one can actually survive and overcome or not, what remains indisputable are the personal pains and peculiar challenges which extend from formative years of family life into adult relationships. Hence the raison d’etre of the Dobson brigade and his culture war. Evangelicals realize that not only Christian witness but societal order depends on husbands loving their wives, wives submitting to their husbands, parents refusing to exasperate their children and children obeying their parents. We, therefore, more than most, know that unless each member of this institution remains vigilant, the family will be divided, nuclear meltdown will be imminent, and the fall out will destroy civilization as we know it.

Yet this commonly shared sense of urgency about "family values" among us is conspicuously absent in regard to that institution which God deems even more fundamental to the preservation of human society: the Church. The Church is the local and worldwide family of God; the household of the redeemed. Jesus said in Mat. 5:14-16 that the it's humankind’s only light and salt, without which the world would be left in darkness with nothing to stem the tide of rot and decay. Pagan conservatism has often observed that if you divide the family and the world is in big trouble. But according to Jesus and Paul, dividing the Church, the very family of God, strikes at the heart of the world's only hope for redemption. It is the alternative to the society created by idolaters -- it's a new creation, a living preview of kingdom life. The ministry of Jesus is largely mediated through this Spirit-filled community which He rules from the right hand of God's throne. It's health and well-being are therefore vital to the plan of God for the world. The connection between the ministry of Jesus and that of the Church is so organically connected that its likened to husband and wife, head and body, vine and branches.

Jesus directly connected the Church’s visible ONENESS and UNITY to its effectiveness in proclaiming the Gospel. John 17:20-23 says, “I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their word; that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me. The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me.” The mission of the Church, therefore, to some degree depends on our visible unity - the same unity demonstrated by Jesus and the Father - unity of purpose, unity of essence, unity of will, and the unity of mutual joy and synergism. The words "depends upon" are intentionally selected, for they confront the casual distinction made by many evangelicals between the Church's visible unity and the effectiveness of its Gospel proclamation (the former being the object of cynical scoffing, the latter being regarded as indespensible).

Surely the Bible speaks triumphantly about the end of the story, and we know that ultimately nothing can thwart God’s work on earth (as bleak or as dismal as the picture may look at any point in history). But we also know that even though the church can’t be stopped, it can be slowed down. It can be rendered temporarily ineffective. Salt can loose its saltiness and light can be put under a bushel. And that’s exactly the problem facing the Church at present, in all its fragmented shame. The throat of our apologetic posturing and bold proclamation is slit by our mirroring of the world's strife, dysfunction and utter lack of peace. The credibility issue isn't just a percieved problem, it's a real one: is the resurrection power of Jesus real, and is He able to give us the Holy Spirit? The dying world in which we live needs to see our oneness, not just to find therapeutic escape from the fragmentation of their own self-destructing societies; they need to see it in order to beleive that a genuine alternative to idolatrous living really does exist. "Jesus saves" may be the truth, but we give them no earthly reason to believe it.

And people have tried to deal with this problem in a lot of different ways. Some well meaning brothers want to join hands without ever debating the real issues which lie behind our division. Unity, in this frame of reference, is everyone’s duty to minimize disagreements in order to avoid dissension. We all have family members like that – they want peace so badly, they’ll sacrifice just about anything to have it (usually it's your mom). And if you do have family members like that, you know that this kind of peace is only superficial – it’s only skin-deep, and it doesn’t last. Before long, the deeply felt differences among that never get talked about begin to float to the surface, and the illusion of unity instantly evaporates. Moreover, while the conversation at the dinner table may not be heated for these folks, it isn't warm, either. The energy which should be spent on teasing, sharing and genuinely relating is spent on suppressing these deeply felt differences, resulting in sterile, lifeless small talk.

In recognizing the pitfalls of naive ecumensim, some have opted for a different solution to the problem – it’s called the doctrine of separation. If you disagree with a family member with sufficient conviction, you simply extend the offer come around to your way of thinking one last time before packng your bags to leave. Some even go so far as to advocate SECOND-DEGREE separation: that is, if you happen to agree with me, but you also choose to associate with those who don’t, we can’t fellowship together. We’ve all dealt with family members like this too – they respond to disagreements by fighting, getting indignant, and then storming off. When the holidays roll around, the real family politics begin, because if you seem like you’re too sympathetic to someone on one side, the other side will cut you off.

Both of these extremes exist in our worldwide Church family. But the only reason they exist in the Church is because these extremes also exist in our hearts. And that’s why division isn’t just a modern problem for the Church. It’s a sin problem, as old as mankind. Only 23 years after Jesus prayed His prayer in John 17, Paul was forced to write the letter of 1 Corinthians to deal with the disunity that was ripping their church apart. Nearly every other problem in the Corinthian church that Paul addressed in this letter (tolerating gross sin in ch. 5, taking each other to court in ch. 6, hurting weaker brothers in ch. 8-10, disorder in communion in ch. 11, their lack of love in using spiritual gifts in 12-14 etc) had its roots in the problem of disunity, Paul's subject of choice in the first four chapters.

The Corinthians couldn’t manage to worship and minister together as one family, in one accord. So, immediately after his greeting in 4-9, Paul gives 3 resources that wil help the Corinthians sort this mess out. Verses 10-17 introduce Paul's polemic against it by giving an exhortation, a description and an important implication about disunity. The exhortation exemplifies how to approach the problem and identifies a provisional solution, the description illustrates the sorts of attitudes and activities that lead to factions, and the implication exposes just how foolish divisiveness really is. I'll spend some time examining these points in my next few posts: but, just for posterity, here's 1 Co. 1:10-17:

Now I exhort you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all
agree and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be made complete in
the same mind and in the same judgment. 11 For I have been informed concerning
you, my brethren, by Chloe’s people, that there are quarrels among you. 12 Now I
mean this, that each one of you is saying, “I am of Paul,” and “I of Apollos,”
and “I of Cephas,” and “I of Christ.” 13 Has Christ been divided? Paul was not
crucified for you, was he? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? 14 I thank
God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, 15 so that no one
would say you were baptized in my name. 16 Now I did baptize also the household
of Stephanas; beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized any other. 17 For
Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not in cleverness
of speech, so that the cross of Christ would not be made void.

Wright and Reformed Rancor

I just came across a Doug Wilson quote from the Centuri0n Frank Turk that I thought provocative in light of my previous post. Read CenturiOn's inisightful comments (linked above), alongside these three equally insightful posts ( one , two and three ) to get caught up, if you're interested! And if you do read the above, please post your comments here! I'd love to hear your ruminations.

Doctrinal Politics

Of the many perceived problems in evangelicalism’s ongoing identity crisis is the shifting importance of doctrine as a boundary marker. Historically evangelicals have been identified around the loosely fitted pegs of 1) conversionism or new birth, 2) Biblical authority 3) missionary enterprise 4) the centrality of Christ’s redeeming work on the cross. Doctrinally these factors usually coalesce into Trinitarianism, the bodily resurrection of Christ, a high premium on biblical inerrancy and the primacy of faith over against moralistic efforts for salvation. Yet even within these more narrow parameters there has been much debate over how these sorts of criteria should be applied, or whether more stringent requirements are necessary in order to bestow the more coveted label of “conservative evangelical” (which, in such circles, is the same label as “Christian”).

But the fractured face of evangelicalism isn’t only owed to the battle over defining primary vs. secondary doctrines; it is just as often due to what one might call “doctrinal politics”. Doctrinal politics employs a kind of argumentation that tries to debunk a position by seeking to establish a chain of inference that eventually rests at a contradiction with some primary doctrine. The goal of this maneuver is emphatically not the pursuit of truth, though that is often the banner it waves. It is, rather, to eliminate competitive claims to truth without bothering with careful, self-critical, or dialectical reasoning. Philosophically, it’s to make the self objective over against Scripture. Ultimately, though it parades as faithfulness to the Scriptures, it is a political posturing designed to defend one’s position irregardless of the merits of competing views. This explains why it is so commonly employed against those who profess agreement with the generally accepted minimalist position above. It is in this way that those with competing positions, new proposals, or threatening syntheses can be disqualified from consideration without the risk of actually considering them with any seriousness. The cash value of such a scheme is that one gets to claim objectivity while practicing the worst kind of solipsism in the name of Biblical faithfulness.

Take, for example, a self-avowed evangelical who professes to believe in the inerrancy of Scripture while at the same time affirming a kind of genre criticism that characterizes Jonah or the first two chapters of Genesis as something other than historical reporting. For those who would seek to disqualify such a position from evangelical (and therefore “Christian”) fellowship, a case must be made that literal creationism is a logical entailment of inerrancy; a denial of the one must be construed as a denial of the other. Thus a platform for exclusion is formed regardless of the profession. Similarly, in the early years of fundamentalism, dispensationalists often charged covenantalists with a deficient view of biblical authority over their divergent ecclesiologies and eschatologies. In the same vein, Arminians of every stripe (including those who would affirm all but limited atonement) can easily be excluded from “evangelical” fellowship by drawing a chain of inference in their soteriology that violates salvation by faith alone, though this is a matter of strenuous profession for most Arminians. In each case the inferential mallet is often used for the purposes of exclusion in the name of primary doctrines. What’s more, in each case the evangelical professor can be successfully declared as “denying the Gospel” and eliminated from fellowship.

This same line of reasoning is used by those who advocate the literal blood of Christ as being necessary for atonement in order to exclude those who see this phrase as a metaphor for His death. On one hand, literally any doctrine or methodological practice in Biblical Studies, no matter how peripheral, can be shown to be contingent upon some universally recognized essential. On the other hand, any doctrine, no matter how bizarre or even unorthodox, can be shown to be necessary as long as it can be anchored in a doctrine that is generally considered to be essential. What is important to note in all of this is that all sides claim biblical authority or Scriptural precedent for their views; likewise all sides see themselves as “holding fast to the truth” in maintaining these essentials and their supposed “logical entailments”. This is often recognized without difficulty when one happens to be the object of this sort of political maneuver (as with John MacArthur’s controversies with various fundamentalist camps over Lordship salvation, blood atonement, eternal Sonship, and nouthetic counseling); unfortunately it doesn’t necessarily make one more discriminating in the use of such tactics.

Some have suggested a way forward in the realm of narrative theology and paleo-orthodoxy. The former sees doctrine less as an abstract system of propositions and more akin to the linguistic practices of the believing community. This isn’t to deny the propositional content that Christians affirm, especially in the minimalist assertions mentioned above – but it sees the boundary markers for Christian fellowship primarily in discipleship (the practices which grow out of inhabiting the world projected by the Bible’s overarching story). The latter seeks to ground boundary markers in classical Christian affirmations contained in the venerable creeds and collective wisdom of Church history. Remarkably, both of these trajectories are represented by scholars that affirm essential doctrines without apology. Unsurprisingly, they can also be easily excluded from thoughtful evangelical consideration by the doctrinal politics mentioned above.

Shamefully, those who employ these political tactics comfortably maintain a dichotomy between ecclesiology and soteriology that allows different standards for Christian fellowship than for salvation. In this way, one can supposedly “leave judgment to God” in regard to an individual’s eternal destiny, while having already pronounced judgment in the denial of believing communion. Perhaps even more appalling, the virtues of truth and love are either similarly compartmentalized (with the latter being reserved for those that agree sufficiently with the former) or “love” is construed entirely as defending bold, truthful propositions (if truth IS love, speaking the truth in love is poetic redundancy). What seemed like loosely fitted pegs in the beginning, therefore, may actually be a reflection of wise restraint. Whatever way forward evangelicals choose, it should be in a manner that eschews doctrinal politics in favor of a pursuit of truth that doesn’t simply “tow the party line”. In other words it should be a pursuit characterized by humble, rigorous, morally honest doctrinal discourse carried out under the rule of Spirit-filled love.

Lookit - New Books!

Well, new to me, anyway. I'm excited about reading three new titles I just recieved from IVP, as well as one on the way from Fortress Press:

Roger Olson is a regular contributor at the Think Tank, which, most recently, featured his article concerning the future of Evangelicalism. My personal interest in a more irenic and Spirit-filled interaction between the various corners of evangelicalism naturally stimulated interest in The Mosaic of Christian Belief. I've been looking forward to reading something of a more "editorial' style, and Olson's discussion of the various continuities and discontinuities which beset Christian theologies seems like it'll satiate both my desire to investigate this topic and my craving for a more conversational style. If it turns out to be as engaging as I'd hoped, I may end up reading the companion volume as well!

John Stott says on the back cover, "I defy anybody to emerge from exposure to this book unscathed. In fact, my advice to would-be readers is "Don't! Leave the book alone!" - unless you are willing to be shocked, challenged, persuaded and transformed." That's some superlative praise from a highly respected churchman! I have to admit that I'm a little less excited to bite into this one, since my reading to date on the topic of social justice has had an overamped ideological "prophetic call" devoid of a "feet in the dirt" kind of instruction as to how I can contribute to God's kingdom plan in this area. Nonetheless, I trust that Good News About Injustice by Gary Haugen will offer some helpful insight!

I confess that I've never heard of Veli-Matti Karkkainen - but I've yet to read a single volume entirely devoted to an ecclesiological survey, and I figured that this might be a good place to start. The table of contents detail the figures Karkkainen intends to deal with, and include notable figures such as Hans Kung, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jurgen Moltmann, Miroslav Volf and Leslie Newbigin. He also expands his discussion of the topic to include a wider international perspective, with considerations of Asian, Latin American and African perspectives. After having read An Introduction to Ecclesiology I hope to have a stronger grasp on the contemporary scene in this important area of theological consideration.

Of the four books, I'm looking forward to reading this one the most. The Economy of Grace was featured in an interview with Kathryn Tanner I happened to catch on InterFaith Voices (NPR). I was fascinated with the idea of a practicable theological economics centrally focused around the concept of grace. What I heard in the interview echoed Yoder's sketches of Jubilee abundance with the attempt at a more detailed, practical outworking. Since questions of neighbor love inescapably involves economics, and the system we imbibe and within which we participate necessarily rewards injustice, a theological conversation with capitalistic ideologies seems as though it should be an invetible challenge of the Church. Here's hoping the conversation doesn't descend into a baptized socialism . . .

Stereoscopic Social Justice

I recently enjoyed reading Stephen Bush’s proposal for a middle-way “between Hauerwas and Constantine” (what he calls “a stereoscopic political theology”, as opposed to the “monosocopic” vision of those who see the church as the only legitimate political enterprise). Bush’s paper did a wonderful job of giving expression to the gastronomic tension which has characterized my contact with the “radical orthodoxy” of neo-traditionalism. The initial enchantment that comes from beholding the magnificent, towering ideology of Yoder’s ecclesiology soon plummets into saddened disbelief at the church that actually exists in our world today. When one’s eyes are open to the extent to which powers and principalities dominate the institutional realities where we live and minister, a conscientious first response is to form apocalyptic communities in the desert rather than face the hopeless task of reform in the church, much less the state. But Bush perceptively points out that while we bear the ethical responsibility of picturing the coming kingdom, our hope is that Jesus will not only make things right in the world, but that he will transform the body of Christ to resemble its ideologue: “to be theologically accurate, we must start by noting that it is the eschaton that is the true political alternative to both nation-state and the church (emphasis mine).” That is to say the church doesn’t merely triumphantly mirror kingdom life in hopes of drawing sinners into our communities, we draw sinners into a shared groaning for God to bring the kingdom in which he establishes justice. Therefore our confession and transparent neediness forms the platform upon which meaningful political cooperation can occur without idolatrous culpability. With this tension between church and state eased (though not finally resolved), it is easier to see how one can act on the inevitable urge to support, pursue and endorse those public policies that manifest neighbor love while not engaging in idolatrous collaboration with alternative kingdoms; and that is a freeing consideration. Christian virtue is free to act outside of the singular desire to simply display Christian virtue – acts of justice, kindness and sacrificial charity can be conducted without fear of distorting ideological baggage being inadvertently attached to such actions. In other words, the desire to communicate Christian ideology doesn’t trump the actual enactment of that ideology for the benefit of those served by it. As far as I understand, Bush isn’t endorsing the Constantinian compromise to effect structural change under detached moral principles for the benefit of all – rather, he’s pointing out the moral responsibility of those who have the power to act justly to act justly even if their actions may not be construed as acts of biblical faithfulness. This, of course, doesn’t collapse the distinctions between the moral pursuits of the church versus those of the state. The church must take special care to not compromise its message in order “to help people”, not least by refusing to divorce its pursuit of particular policies from the storied ethics that drive our concern; but on the other hand we should take seriously the moral responsibility of being de-facto constituents of a participatory (albeit pagan) system.

Emergent Audio and Some Engaging Ad Hominem

UPDATE: For those who are interested, and in light of Scot McKnight's recent comment to this post, I thought I'd put a link to an interview where he spells out the features of emergent more fully.

Grand Rapids Theological Seminary has generously posted some audio links for a seminar on the emerging movement featuring Brian McLaren, Steve Wittmer and and Ed Dobson. I can't wait to listen to the debate and collegial interaction! Go check out the details with the preceding link, or simply download them here:

Session 1: The Emerging Church: Past, Present, and a Kairos Moment

Session 2: The Emerging Church: A Historical/Theological Professor’s Reflections

Session 3: The Emerging Church: A Pastor’s Reflections

Session 4: The Emergent Conversation: Present and Future & Challenges and Potential

Session 5: The Emerging Church: Reflections & Questions


Speaking of the emerging church, I just came across a rather stinging rebuke from Richard John Neuhaus on the subject (mentioned in Harbinger) - perhaps it's worth reproducing below in the hopes of generating some heated opinions.

I have to say that I've got some mixed feelings about Neuhaus' sentiments here: on one hand there is so much nauseating affected excitement within popular Christianity as to bestow the label "movement" with discrediting regularity; and so I am fairly sympathetic with Neuhaus on that score. But on the other hand he seems to dismiss the conceptual engine of the emerging movement, which is far more searchingly academic in character than the straw man he so triumphantly tumbles. To dismiss the important methodological and theological stimuli behind the emerging movement is a brash act of hand-waiving that fails to benefit either side of the issue. In any case, here it is:

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The reinvention of Christianity, the most traditional of American contributions to religious history, proceeds apace. Publisher’s Weekly is excited. An article, “Pomos Toward Paradise,” breathlessly reports the pomos (postmoderns) of the “emerging church” who are rapidly moving toward the paradise of big commercial success, with many of them having arrived. Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian is a tremendous hit. McLaren “calls the emerging church a ‘conversation’ rather than a movement.” It appears that even “movement” suggests too much of an institutional commitment for “emergents” who want to float unencumbered in their spiritual fancies. Says McLaren, “They’re asking questions about what it means to be a Christian in a postmodern, postcolonial world.” Postcolonial? One waits in vain for the postinanity era in the spiritual hustling of what PW calls the world of “viral networking.” (Viral as in virus, one assumes.) A successful marketer explains, “A lot of people who fit into the postmodern category don’t want to be identified as Christian.” Christ is so much easier to take without the riffraff he has attracted over the centuries. The Relevant Media Group is near the top of the market with a “hip, twenty-something demographic that is the primary core of postmodern thinking.” For Relevant, we are told, “the ‘real world’ is largely an urban one.” “We want to be part of our readers’ world,” says a spokesman, so the company is moving from an affluent suburb to a site closer to the center of Orlando, Florida. You can hardly get more urban than that. Postmodern, postcolonial, emerging, viral networking—it’s mostly the hype and chatter of religious pandering to a neophiliac culture. In addition to cashing in on the newest new thing, I expect most of these authors and perhaps even some of the publishers think they are winning souls for Christ. Christianity Today, the mainline evangelical magazine, pays a lot of attention and is concerned about the theological vacuity and doctrinal deviations of the industry, as well it should be. But the stuff sells, as witness PW’s list of the top-forty religion bestsellers in the same issue, a list which (except for one book by the estimable C. S. Lewis) runs the gamut from lower to higher kitsch. Of course, such an observation smacks of elitism, as in having a taste for excellence. The higher elitism, however, is not scornful toward the inevitability of the popular always being popular, as in vulgar, and holds on to the hope that those who sell the fake satisfactions of being superior to Christianity as it has been believed and lived through time will, however inadvertently, lead some people to a commitment to Christ, including his mostly quite ordinary friends who are the Church. Seeing through the preening self-importance of “seeker,” “emergent,” “pomo,” and whatever is next month’s hot spiritual pretension, they might even find the courage to call themselves Christians.

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Well, what do you think? Is Neuhaus full of hot gas or is he on to something?

Google-de-gook

I just added a couple of search windows on the side panel that may interest . . . okay, you're right - they're not interesting at all. But for those who want to search for blog posts on a particular topic, google's new "blog search" is a wonderful tool.


Above it you'll find a search window for "google scholar", which attempts to return references and links related to scholarly topics. Here's a search result page for the query "Just War Theory and Aquinas", to get an idea of the sort of results to be expected. Nifty little instrument.


Because the main mission of Soylent Green is a public service to provide miscellaneous information, check back to see local movie times and weather. In fact, maybe I'll add a recipe search window next. Here's one for an herbal tea that boosts lactation, just to whet your appetite:

Breast Milk Tea:

Use 1 teaspoon *each* of fennel, cumin and dill, steeped in 8 oz of boiling water for 15-20 minutes. Drink one cup, three times a day. Results should be noticeable within 24 hours. Then you can increase or decrease frequency as needed. Or you may want to try fenugreek tea or tablets, for the tea: use a teaspoon of whole fenugreek. Steep in boiling water for 15 minutes or so and drink three or more times a day.

Remembering 9/11 - Part Three

The Gospel comforts America’s fear with the hope of Jesus’ victory over death. It confronts America’s no-strings-attached faith in god (little ‘g’) by calling her to a radical faith in the Living God combined with true repentance. But beyond fear and faith, America’s response to Sept. 11th raised some disconcerting questions about America’s future. There was a plainly stated sense of uncertainty about what life in this country would be like after this event. Would America be the new Palestine, where we’d hear helicopters constantly circling in the skies and gunfire outside our houses? Would our cities be full of barricaded roads and our urban streets bear the mark of persistent military presence? If nothing else, one tangible difference that I’ve experienced after Sept. 11th is the guarantee that I will be frisked every time I go to the airport. But outside of the occasional involuntary massage, the problems for America seemed much bigger. The world, especially the western world, instantly became a more dangerous place than anyone living here could have ever projected.

Andrew Sullivan, in his TIME magazine article on the one-year anniversary of the attacks, “Most of us know that there is no moving on from Sept. 11. It wasn't a random tragedy for which grief is a slow-acting salve. It was a massacre—a premeditated murder of civilians by men possessed by a theocratic ideology. It was an invasion—the violation of sovereign American soil, the erasure of a visible monument to American success and energy and civilization. It was a crime—the filling of the air of a great and free city with the irradiated dust of innocent human lives. It was a statement—that radical Islam intends to attack and destroy the very principles of the Enlightenment that underpin the American experiment—freedom of religion, of conscience, toleration and secularism.”

Later on in the same article he observed: “[Sept. 11th] showed us that we stand deeply vulnerable to a destructive force in some ways more dangerous than even the last two totalitarian powers Americans were called on to defeat. This enemy refuses to fight with honor; it hides and disappears and re-emerges whenever its purposes are served; it may soon have access to weapons that Hitler and Stalin only dreamed of. But it cannot be defeated the way Nazi Germany and Communist Russia were defeated because it is more like a virus than a host, infecting and capturing nation-states, like Afghanistan, and then moving on to others. So we will have to act to pre-empt it this time, in Iraq and elsewhere, or it will be too late to resist it at all. For Sept. 11 showed that, for the first time in history, the American homeland is actually vulnerable to a deadly foreign enemy.”

These comments aren’t new or revolutionary – they reflect the same oft repeated sentiment offered by the President immediately following the attacks, and that of most Americans: 9/11 has changed the world; nothing will ever be the same again.

As followers of Jesus, what should we make of that sentiment? Has this admittedly horrifying national tragedy really changed the world? In his Olivet discourse Jesus declared, “You will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not frightened, for those things must take place, but that is not yet the end. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and in various places there will be famines and earthquakes But all these things are merely the beginning of birth pangs.” These words weren’t meant to be an eschatological escape hatch by which we avoid very real issues for which we are called to be responsible salt and light in favor of more "heavenly" concerns – but the point is clear. We’ve always had war. Humanity has continually witnessed violent rebellion against sovereign nations (that’s how America was born, remember?) – violence, pain, suffering and evil are as old as sin. But these words, "9/11 has changed the world" are not only dissonant with Jesus’ own realism – they also ring hollow to those countries who’ve suffered injustice on an even larger scale before 9/11, and continue to suffer today. American culture tends to insulate us from the concerns of other nations by their sheer irrelevance to our own well-being. The far-removed turmoil of Rwanda, Darfur, or Nepal are so outside the pale of national self-interest as to not qualify as “world changing” horrors for the people of the United States. It seems as though September 11th, 2001 didn’t really change the world – it continues to be mostly devoid of incarnational, self-deprecating neighbor-love.

But there was a day in human history that really did change the world, because it put an end to the politics of death. One day in 30 AD Jesus the Nazarene (a man attested to us by God, who was delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God) we Americans nailed to a cross by our self-involved godlessness and sin. But God raised Him up again, putting an end to the agony of death, since it was impossible for Him to be held in its power. Therefore let Americans know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ—this Jesus whom, by our sin, we crucified. And if Americans are pierced to the heart, let each one of us repent, and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of our sins; and we will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for all Americans, and their children and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God will call to Himself.

The future of America may be uncertain – but the future of those who trust Christ for the forgiveness of sins is not. Their future is a kingdom in which death has been put to death, fear has been exiled, swords have been made plowshares, and all nations and ethnicities have been reconciled into one New Humanity. In this kingdom the law is love, the economy is grace, and the King is God with us. It is a kingdom to come, yet has broken in on our world through the resurrection of Jesus and the Church which His new life empowers through the Spirit.

Rooted in the Spirit’s filling power Paul can raise a defiant voice to the powers that continue to rule below: “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Just as it is written, "FOR YOUR SAKE WE ARE BEING PUT TO DEATH ALL DAY LONG; WE WERE CONSIDERED AS SHEEP TO BE SLAUGHTERED." But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Remembering 9/11 - Part Two

America is probably one of the most religious countries on earth. Regardless of whether Enlightenment deism or Christian theism lies at its root, religion has undoubtedly played a huge part in the founding of it; it’s vocabulary is strewn across the pages of subsequent American history. But maybe more than ever in recent history, Sept. 11th put God-talk off the charts. Everyone was asking God to bless America, questioning how God could let this happen to America, or promising God's wrath to those who would dare tangle with America. A glance around my small town in those months following the attacks yielded “God Bless America” products slapped on just about everything – houses, cars, store windows and book-bags.

And at that a Christian might at first take heart – but consider: what do all those bumper stickers really mean? One author put it this way: “The American people’s yearning for God’s blessing is prompted by a desire for His immediate protection. For many, “Bless America” means simply, “Preserve our nation”. For many others it means something as down-to-earth as, “God don’t let me die. Don’t let my children die. Don’t let my spouse die.” For still others, it might mean something more mundane: “Don’t let the stock market drop any further”; or “Stop the rise in unemployment”. In many mouths it is a prayer for the preservation of our nations freedom and prosperity. “Blessing”, then, is associated with protection, safety, freedom and prosperity.” It seems that what Americans want is health, not holiness; safety, not salvation; wealth, not worship. In short, Americans wants God’s blessing, but they don’t want God.

9/11 showed that America’s faith is very different than Christian faith. The god whose slogan is on all of our currency, the god whose name is invoked by politicians and news media, and the god whose blessing can come on America without repentance and without faith seems to be someone other than the God of the Bible! This god is a lower-case “g” – he has no name. He’s not YHWH, the covenant keeping God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who has revealed Himself in the Person of Jesus Christ – he’s the god of Muslim Americans, Jewish Americans, Mormon Americans, pagan Americans, and every American – but he’s not the God Christians worship. He’s a god who can’t deliver, and whose promises to bless and keep America aren’t necessarily endorsed by the Living God.

Americans have always believed that God is with them, and that her heritage somehow underwrites God’s promised blessing to keep them as His people. But God only has one people – the blood bought bride of Christ made up of those who have turned from their sin, been forgiven, and have been incorporated into the Church where Jesus has become their new Lord. That’s not to say, of course, that America can’t come to know the true God and be incorporated into His One people, the Church. Peter said in Acts 10:34-35, “I most certainly understand now that God is not one to show partiality, but in every nation the man who fears Him and does what is right is welcome to Him.”

The Gospel is freely available to every nation on earth. But in order to believe, first Americans must forsake their false gods, and the way of life these gods commend. In a word, she must REPENT. The American people have to be willing to do more than make a benign private decision to adopt a new religion; the call to repent is a call to tear down the curtain which seperates private faith from public life. Repentance means that Americans must risk their financial prosperity, military might, and what little they have left of any international respectability to follow Jesus. They have to forsake the alternative path of carnal vengeance, consumeristic selfishness, capitalistic gluttony, colonizing arrogance and cultural decadence in order to embrace the Kingdom Way. Jesus said in Mark 8:34, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul? For what will a man give in exchange for his soul? For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will also be ashamed of him when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.” Until she does that America can’t even define blessing, much less receive it.

Remembering 9/11 - Part One

It’s very difficult to know what to say about September 11th, 2001, or if anything should be said at all. As we’ve witnessed most recently with hurricane Katrina, evangelicals tend to be the first ones to give theological explanations for why these things happen, and they’re not always very good ones. Sometimes we are to the world what Job’s friends were to him, claiming to speak for God, dishing out confident judgment, even though we don’t really have the foggiest idea of what’s in His mind.

What evangelicals like myself are a little slower to learn from Job’s friends is the one blessing they actually did bestow upon him, which is, of course, being respectful enough to keep silent for at least a little while (Job 2:13). Four years have passed since Islamic extremists smashed two fully occupied commercial jets into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon. In a single day they murdered over 2,900 people; 2,900 souls, including men, women, children, Americans, internationals, Muslims, Christians and pagans, perished in one dreadful instant. The President of the United States declared what many Americans felt after seeing another plane explode into the side of the second building, and as droves of the doomed flung themselves from the towers’ top windows rather than being burned to death – “The world has changed”, he said. There was the almost universal feeling that we weren’t safe anymore.

Four years is a lot of time for reflection, and it’s certainly seems long enough for silence to be broken. But the question is, what sort of words does the Church have to offer? What should we say to these things? It’s potentially a very politically explosive topic for Christians to discuss, given how America has responded since then. Conservatives, liberals and moderates are at war about the war in Iraq, and whether America should or shouldn’t have responded this way to the horrifying events of that day. So what can we say? Not only is it not a very safe topic, but it’s a potentially very confusing one – not even all Christians are sure about whether America should or shouldn’t have responded the way it did. Issues of how the church should relate to the state, what constitutes a just war and whether there is such a thing as a Christian foreign policy aren’t easy subjects; they’re very complicated, and no matter what we conclude, we should approach them with a lot of fear, trepidation and even an appropriate amount of uncertainty (check out some book reviews representing Just War and pacifist variations on the topic).

But there is a message that the Church has to offer Americans in light of Sept. 11th that we can proclaim boldly, without fear, because it is the one thing God has actually given us to say: and that is the message of the Gospel. It’s a message that neither republicans nor democrats can bring, because it’s a message about a kingdom to which they don’t belong. It seems that the one message Americans need to hear about Sept. 11th is something that only the Church can say.

But America isn’t just confused about the Gospel, or ignorant of it; the problem is much worse than that. She believes a gospel, it’s just not the Gospel. When Christians respond to Sept. 11th with the Gospel, we’re not just filling a vacuum in the heart of this country – we’re smashing idols. We are, as Paul says in 2 Co. 10:5, “destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God.” Missionaries to foreign fields spend years studying the culture so that they can determine what kinds of idols and false beliefs need to be confronted with the Gospel; but on Sept. 11th, 2001 God revealed some of these things to us. What emerged in this tragedy for our country was America’s false fears, fruitless faith and her uncertain future. And even though these things have already faded from the minds of most Americans (we’re so quick to forget), I’ll never forget how universally they were on the lips of every American in the months following that attack.

Terror. That’s the word which is still being used to describe what happened, and the purported war on terror(ism) that sprung from it. Never before have people in this country felt so vulnerable – these things didn’t happen in Beirut; they didn’t happen in Israel; they didn’t even happen on an island off the American continent somewhere as with Pearl Harbor – thousands of people were killed by foreign attackers within our borders, under our noses, in our faces, in a major city of the United States. And the enemy proved to be practically invisible! They went completely undetected, and we have no idea how many more of them are still within our borders. The attacks were soon followed with mailed packets of anthrax, and even the possible threat of a manually detonated nuclear attack. If something like this can happen once, it can happen again. And they’re promising that it will.

There are so many levels at which this event exposed American fear, but the most obvious one is the fear of death. Perhaps no other people in the world are as simultaneously both afraid and fascinated with death as the United States is. The fact that we’re afraid of death can be seen in how our society handles it – the dying in this country are invisible – they’re carted off to nursing homes, hospitals, and ultimately funeral homes. Americans never have to see them; we don’t have to touch them, or be reminded that it’s going to happen to us. At the same time Americans spend millions of dollars getting plastic surgery, lathering on cosmetic creams, distracting ourselves with toys and entertainment, and going to Disneyland where one can “be a kid forever”. We try to keep death as far from our eyes as possible, and we’ll spend as much money as it takes to prolong it for as long as possible, because we’re scared to death of death.

But at the same time, we’re fascinated. We parade staged, phony death before our eyes all the time. We witness violent, meaningless death after death on television, movies and in music. One columnist said it this way: “Americans are fascinated with death – so long as it’s done at a distance, done to someone else, and done with special effects.” What made the enemies of America who smashed planes into those buildings so terrifying to Americans is that they don’t share this sensibility – they are willing to die in order to kill us! They don’t cling to their lives or go kicking and screaming into death like we do – they welcome it, they even pursue it with determination. They’re willing to die for their beliefs, which is something that simply does not compute for most Americans who don’t even like waiting in line at the ATM. An enemy that’s not afraid for even his own life scares the hell out of Americans who can’t stand to think about death unless its glamorized in entertaining fiction.

A serious reason that death is so scary to Americans isn’t just the indulgent materialistic lifestyles we live (though that’s a huge part of it – we consume more resources than just about anyone in the world), it’s also the fact that we’re terrified by the meaninglessness of it all – the futility of it. Americans don’t mind if their lives are mostly meaningless; they don’t give much thought to life beyond their own personal happiness – but they can’t stand the fact that their deaths would be meaningless. Americans want meaningful deaths without meaningful lives. And so those who died in the World Trade Center weren’t just victims of senseless violence – they were martyrs of freedom. They were characterized as heroes, every bit as much as the firemen and rescue workers at ground zero. Donald Rumsfeld said in a memorial service following the attacks: “Everyone who died were heroes every day. We are here to affirm that. And to do this on behalf of America.” A nice thing to say – but is it true? Did dying in a terrorist siege transform them into heroes, every day? Why isn’t it enough to characterize them as victims, instead of bestowing this additional honor? As tragic as their deaths were, they didn’t give their lives; their lives were taken from them. But Americans just can’t accept that they would die as victims – if they die, especially at the hands of their enemies, they have to die as heroes so that our collective lives as Americans can mean something more than the selfish way we actually live them. It’s interesting that in George Bush’s speech following the attacks he said that the terrorists were attempting to destroy the American way of life, and that in order to show the terrorists that we won’t stop being Americans, the American people need to . . . shop. If that’s all there is to the American way of life, you can see why Americans don’t do death very well.

But the Gospel confronts our fear of death with freedom. Not necessarily freedom from terrorism, the freedoms of civil liberty or democracy; that’s not the kind of freedom the Church can offer. We can live with terrorism. We can live without civil liberties. We can even live without democracy – Paul did, and so did Jesus. What we can’t live without, and what the Gospel does offer is freedom from death. Hebrews 2:14-15 says, “Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, [Jesus] Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through [His] death [on the cross] He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and might free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives.”

Americans may enjoy, for this short period of time in history, some political liberties, but they are slaves – slaves to the devil and slaves to their own lusts. The Gospel has set us free from the fear of death, which means we are free to be the people of God: free to love, because we don’t fear the consequences of love, which could be our deaths!

Like the Muslims who murdered those people, we too are willing to die – but unlike them, we aren’t willing to die in order to kill our enemies, we’re willing to die FOR THEIR SAKE! And just as deliverance from death frees us to love, love frees us from the fear of death. As the apostle John said in 1 Jn. 4:18-19, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love.19 We love, because He first loved us.”

This doesn’t mean that Christians are without fear; but our fear is far different from America’s fear – ultimately we don’t fear death, fanaticism or the enemies of democracy – we fear the God to whom both believer and unbeliever will answer. Mat. 10:28 says, “Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” Almost 2,900 people died from the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. America’s Gospel says that this was an attack on our political freedom, and that the answer to the slavery of radical Islam is the spread of democracy. But Americans are quick to forget that nearly 2,600 Americans die from heart disease every day, one person every 34 seconds. On Sept. 11, 2001 35,615 people in this world died of starvation, and around 85 percent of those were children under the age of 5. Surgical abortions kill something like 1.5 million American children every year. Part of what made Sept. 11th so difficult for Americans is that it riveted them to that which they’re most terrified to face – they’re going to die. We're enslaved to sin and death, and democracy can’t free us from that kind of tyranny.

In the Wake of Katrina

The Society of Biblical Literature has recently posted a list of academic institutions affected by Hurricane Katrina, and among them are several Christian institutions which train for vocational ministry. Below the listing of schools affected are practical ways to aid relief efforts, as well as a means of contacting colleagues who may have been impacted by the tragedy.

Worldvision is focused on shipping much needed emergency supplies through local churches in the affected areas. Please check the link for bulletin insert and donation information.

Also check out an insightful post by Dr. Ben Witherington which brings balance to the evangelical impulse to declare Katrina an act of God's judgement.

If you're interested in audio resources, you may want to check out this lecture on Job and the problem of evil by Eleonore Stump, which is available through the Veritas Forum. Also available are lectures by Peter Kreeft, Ravi Zacharias and William Lane Craig . Hopefully prayer, hands and feet will unite in the Church to bring hope and the power of the new creation to costal sufferers.