AD-D

We're all familiar with Attention Deficit Disorder. We even know about ADHD: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. But I think I have diagnosed a new disease within the Church.

(Technically, it is not a new disease. I am just isolating the condition and putting a name to it.)

This condition is called AD-ADD, or AD-D for short.

The name stems from a dating convention that was established in the sixth century by a monk named "Dennis the Little." He calculated the year that Jesus Christ was born based upon the historical information contained in the gospel accounts. The years before Christ's birth were eventually labeled "Before Christ" or "BC."

Contrary to popular opinion, "AD" does not stand for "After Death." It is an abbreviation of the Latin phrase Anno Domini, which means "the year of our Lord." This is why it properly belongs before the date: e.g. A.D. 2007 = "in the year of our Lord 2007."

So what's my point? Most Christians have forgotten what A.D. means.

Ancient calendars often were based on the establishment of a government. The year was calculated from the beginning of a dynasty or the reign of a ruler. The Roman calendar was based upon the traditional date for the founding of the city (A.U.C.). After the French Revolution, the new Republic started over the numbering of years to reflect the new order.

The designation A.D. is likewise an indication of a radical new order. It marks the beginning of a revolution.

Jesus established a new kingdom.

This doesn't just mean that he made it possible for us to go to heaven when we die. The "kingdom of God" is not just a different way to say "heaven." It is a real kingdom with a real king (MP3).

Jesus came to reclaim his rightful place as Lord.

The claim that "Jesus is Lord" is subversive. It means that Jesus is Lord and nothing else is. All other powers have been defeated.

Yet we live in an era of transition. The victory has been won, but the enemy refuses to concede. It is still trying to produce as many casualties as possible even though it has no chance of winning.

And we have a responsibility to advance this kingdom.

When we pray, "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven," we are pledging our allegiance to this government. And we are committing ourselves to its advancement.

There is coming a day when it will be said, "The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever." In the meantime, we are agents of the new Lord. And we are called to participate in his work to bring all things under his authority.

So what is AD-D?

It is a lack of focus on the Lord (Domini) and an inclination to be distracted from his kingdom work.

We say, "Sure, I believe that Jesus died for me and that one day he will come back to take his people to heaven," but then we live in complicity with the powers that he defeated. We are unwitting collaborators with the enemy.

We say, "Jesus is Lord," on Sunday. And Monday we do whatever is necessary to get ahead and to maintain our standard of living.

Jesus is not dead. He is the reigning Lord.

We have been called to participate in his kingdom. And we cannot afford to lose our concentration.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Post-modern NT?

The writers of the New Testament seem to be willing to interpret Old Testament passages to mean something very different than what the original authors intended.

One example is Matthew's use of Hosea 11:1 in chapter 2 verse 15:

So [Joseph] got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: "Out of Egypt I called my son."

Hosea makes no mention of the Messiah. His original clearly is referring to the exodus from Egyptian slavery. Yet Matthew invests new content in these words applying them to Jesus Christ. These words were "fulfilled" in him.

This raises several questions:

• Did the NT writers use a faulty method of biblical interpretation to arrive at these results?
  
• If so, how can we trust the conclusions they make?
  
• If not, can we use the same approach in our own interpretation?
  
• If the Bible can be used in this way, what's to prevent us from reading our own ideas and wishes into the text?
  
• If the Bible can be used in this way, how can it be any longer an ultimate authority?
  
• If we shouldn't use the Bible this way, how can it be legitimate for the NT writers to do so?
  

One important point, inspiration cannot be used to "sanitize" this method of interpretation. The apostles and early Christians used this method in all their study of the Scriptures (the Old Testament). It wasn't limited to the documents that later made up the New Testament.

My current understanding has been shaped by many influences, but primarily Peter Enns, NT Wright and Tim Keller.

The early Christians were not taking liberty with the OT Scriptures. They were not just making up whatever interpretation they wanted. They were guided by a simple principle. And this principle was taught to them by Jesus himself.

In Luke 24:27, the narrator tells us:

And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

Here's the principle: All Scripture is primarily about Jesus Christ. This is true whether the original author was aware of this or not.

So Matthew was not playing "fast and loose" with the text from Hosea. He was simply understanding it from the post-resurrection perspective that Jesus Christ was the fulfillment of the story of slavery and exodus, of exile and return.

Likewise, we must understand Scripture from this same perspective. Not only must we do this when reading the OT, but also the NT. When Paul says, "You must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips" (Colossians 3:8), it must be understood in the context of Jesus Christ. We cannot clean up our act. We can only live in the power of God's grace as expressed in the person of Jesus Christ.

The written Word of God is essentially about the incarnate Word.

• It is not a list of rules for living.
  
• It is not a source book for systematic theology.
  
• It is not a science textbook.
  

It is the word of life about the living Word.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Wright & Spong

I ran across this list of 12 areas where Bishop Shelby Spong takes issue with historic Christianity.

Instead of telling you why I think Spong is wrong, I thought I'd let N. T. Wright explain why he is not right. (Spong's words are in blue, Wright's in red, and mine in black.)

1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.

The New Testament is not free-standing. It is what it is because it points away from itself, to the One God of Jewish monotheism who is now known in Jesus of Nazareth and the events of his life, death, resurrection and the outpouring of his Spirit on his followers. If the Bible, Jewish and Christian, does not refer to these extra-textual realities, it fails in its whole object. The biblical writers referred to the actual story of the creator and his world, focused on the story of the creator of Israel, on the story of Jesus and Israel, and on the story of Jesus' followers and the cosmos. In other words, whatever view of the Bible you take, if you are to be in any way obedient to the Bible you cannot make the Bible itself the centre or focus of your attention. It points away from itself ("The Book and the Story," The Bible In Transmission, Summer 1997).

If Spong wants to reject the God of the Old Testament, or the New Testament, then he is free to do so. But let's be clear what the reason is for this rejection. It is not because theism is dead, or that God himself has died.

2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.

I propose, as a matter of history, that Jesus of Nazareth was conscious of vocation, a vocation given him by the one he knew as "Father," to enact in himself what, in Israel's scriptures, Israel's God had promised to accomplish. He would be the pillar of cloud for the people of the new Exodus. He would embody in himself the returning and redeeming action of the covenant God (The Historical Jesus and Christian Theology).

Spong's Jesus is just another incarnation of the great moral teacher a la Siddhartha.

3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.

Most people rooted in contemporary Western culture assume, unless they have been specifically shaken out of this way of thinking, that the word "God" refers, more or less univocally, to a being who is detached from the world, living at some great ontological remove (most know that Christians and others do not believe in God as a being literally "up in the sky," but most assume a similar detachment in some other mode of being). They then tend to assume that when Christians talk about God becoming human in Jesus, about God addressing individuals or the world, or about God active within the world, this must be a matter of God's "intervening" from a distance. They assume, moreover, that all religions are basically trying to be about the same thing; this idea is frequently supposed to be a very recent innovation or discovery, but was of course the common coin of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and indeed has roots much further back in some aspects of classical paganism.

And they assume that this general thing — which may as well be called "religion" for want of a better term, though that word is so over- and ill-used that one wonders if a moratorium would not be a good idea — has basically failed. It has collapsed, so it is thought by those who think about these things, under the critique of Marx, who said that talking about God was what those in power did to keep the rest quiet; of Darwin, who said that we were all descended from the apes anyway, and that the world could be understood successfully without a creating or sustaining God, since it works on the basis of competition; of Freud, who said that God-language was projection of a latent father image; and of Nietzsche, who despised Christianity for being wet and wimpish while also exposing its truth claims as power games. Of course, as C. S. Lewis used to say, if people really thought about these things, it might become clear that the attacks, though sometimes interesting and important, are not ultimately valid. But most people in western Europe, and many in North America, do not think very hard about such issues. They assume, not least because the media tell them so, that "God" and "religion" are somehow out of date. Within the postmodern world it is feelings that count, not arguments; and there is a general feeling, widespread in much (though not all) Western culture, that all that sort of thing has had its day — certainly in any form that the culture has known for the last several hundred years (The Letter to the Galatians: Exegesis and Theology).

If Spong is arguing against a 144-hour creation and a 10,000-year-old earth, then I agree. But there is nothing inherently anti-intellectual about the idea of a Creator. And anyone who really believes that Darwin is the final word on origins is just not very smart.

4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.

Because I am convinced that the creator God raised Jesus bodily from the dead, and because I am convinced that Jesus was and is the embodiment of this God, Israel's God, my worldview is forced to reactivate various things in the suspense account, the birth narratives included. There are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in post-Enlightenment metaphysics. The "closed continuum" of cause and effect is a modernist myth. The God who does not "intervene" from outside but is always present and active within the world, sometimes shockingly, may well have been thus active on this occasion. It is all very well to get on one's high metaphysical horse and insist that God cannot behave like this, but we do not know that ahead of time. Nor will the high moral horse do any better insisting that God ought not to do things like this, because they send the wrong message about sexuality or because divine parentage gave Jesus an unfair start over the rest of us (God's Way of Acting).

If we are able to produce babies by in vitro fertilization, why is it so incredible that some supra-human being did a similar thing 2000 years ago?

5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

See above.

6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.

The story the gospels are trying to tell is a story in which evil and its deadly power are taken utterly seriously, over against the tendency in many quarters today, in the ridiculous clinging to an older liberal idea that there wasn't really very much wrong with the world or with human beings. With a fully-blown theology of the cross such as the evangelists offer, there is no need to shrink back from the radical diagnosis, since the remedy is to hand. To be sure, it is humiliating to accept both the diagnosis and the cure, but as our world lurches more and more obviously into a demonstration that when you pretend that evil isn't there you merely give it more space to operate, so perhaps it is high time to look again at both the diagnosis and the cure which the evangelists offer (Evil and the Justice of God).

7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.

If we are to think in first-century Jewish terms, it is impossible to conceive what sort of religious or spiritual experience someone could have that would make them say that the kingdom of God had arrived when it clearly had not, that a crucified leader was the Messiah when he obviously was not, or that the resurrection occurred last month when it obviously did not. However strong the disciples sense may have been that Jesus had been vindicated, that they had been forgiven, or whatever, they would still not have said he had been raised from the dead (Christian Origins and the Resurrection of Jesus).

The Gospel accounts do not describe a "physical resuscitation." The resurrection is something very different.

8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.

We would be wrong to assume that the language of heaven and earth, and of clouds veiling the passage between the two, was heard with a naive literalism in the first century. People who use three-decker language by no means necessarily think in three-decker cosmological terms, any more than we who say that the son rises in the east are committed to pre-Copernican astronomy. Often enough in the Bible, heaven is simply God's space, interrelated with our space in ways char are usually opaque. Stories about Jesus' being exalted to a place within God's space are stories designed to safeguard the bodily resurrection on the one hand and the transformed nature of the body—what Paul calls the "spiritual body"—on the other. We do not, of course, find it easy to come to terms with this latter reality. That problem does not start with the ascension narrative; it is there as soon as we distinguish resurrection both from resuscitation and from disembodiment. If we thought it was easy to talk about this new embodiment, that would just go to show that we had forgotten what we were talking about (Early Traditions and the Origins of Christianity).

It appears that the Bishop has a very limited imagination. One possible interpretation of what really happened is that Jesus went up into the sky, was obscured by clouds, and then went to heaven—traveling in direction (dimension) that we are unable to perceive (as of now).

9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.

"Ethics," then, understood as Paul's arguments about Christian behavior, function within Galatians not as an appendix to "theology," … but rather as part of the inner working of the gospel itself. Through the gospel events of Jesus' messianic death and resurrection, the God of Israel delivers Israel and the world from the rule of evil and the "powers" who perpetrate it. Through the Spirit-inspired proclamation of the good news of Jesus as Messiah and Lord, this same God calls into being the redeemed family he had promised to Abraham, whose distinguishing mark, over against those of Judaism, is "the faithfulness of Jesus" — i.e., Jesus' own faithfulness, reflected now in the faith/faithfulness … of Christians. Precisely because this family is the Christ-and-Spirit people, they are set free from the destructive powers and solidarities (including social solidarities) of evil, and are under the obligation of freedom, namely, to sustain this life by Spirit-given love for one another (The Letter to the Galatians: Exegesis and Theology).

I'm not sure what his point is here. I think he is trying to say that we must update our "rules" as culture changes. Anyone who thinks that Christianity is culturally bound has not understood Christianity. Right from the beginning, Christianity clearly was free of any cultural limitations.

10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

In prayer, we are invited, summoned, to become more truly human, to worship the God in whose image we are made and so to find ourselves interceding for the world he loves. The start of God's address to the world, following the death and resurrection of his son, is the creation and vocation, by the Spirit, of a people drawn from every family who will live consciously out of tune with the world as it presently is and in tune with the way God intends it to be (Romans 12.1–2: do not be conformed to this present age, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds – a statement that might serve as a title for this whole lecture), and who by bearing that tension in themselves, and turning it into prayer, become agents of that new world beginning to break in to the present one in healing and hope. Prayer thus lies at the heart of the task of the people of God, their glorious, strange, puzzling and ennobling vocation (Evil and the Justice of God).

Why not? However, if one accepts that there is no God (in a theistic sense), then this statement is a tautology.

11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.

A generation ago, liberal thought managed to get rid of sin; and, with sin, most theories of atonement were dismissed as odd and unnecessary. But in our own generation we have rediscovered guilt; we have plenty of shame and violence; we have alienation at all levels. And we don't know what to do with it, either at a personal or at a corporate level. Cleansing of the conscience is what is required; and the only way to do that is by the total offering of the human life to God (The Final Sacrifice: Hebrews).

Spong sure has a limited understanding of Christianity for a Bishop. "Life after death" is not about "behavior control." Christianity does not depend upon guilt as a motivation for moral behavior.

12. All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

Christians must be active not only in advocacy of the moral standards in which all are treated as full human beings, not as toys or as trash, but also to stand alongside and help those who, having been treated like that themselves, treat others the same way because that is the only way they know. In these and many, many other ways, those who would tell the story of Jesus must first live it, bearing a measure of the world's pain as they do so (The Letter to the Galatians: Exegesis and Theology).

OK. But without Christianity (as it is historically understood) there seems to be no basis for making this argument. What we need is not less Christianity or a different "Christianity." What we need is more and truer Christianity.

I keep looking for some intellectual challenges to Christianity that I can take seriously. John Shelby Spong sounds intelligent and sophisticated, but his argument does not hold up to scrutiny. If he wants to reject Christianity, then he should just be honest about it. But don't give me this nonsense that he is recovering the "real truth" of Christianity.

His "faith" no more requires a historical Jesus Christ than Buddhism requires a historic Gautama Siddhartha. In fact, what he is advocating seems to be essentially a westernized Buddhism.

What do you think?

(While I have been somewhat dismissive of Spong's assertions, I would welcome debate and dialogue on these points. I would especially like to hear from atheists who think that I'm wrong and Spong's right.)

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Wright-ing History

In his Judas and the Gospel of Jesus, N. T. Wright makes an important point that is often overlooked in the discussion of Gnostic Christianity.

The gnostic gospels are today being trumpeted as the radical alternatives to the oppressive and conservative canonical gospels, but the historical reality was just the opposite.

Elaine Pagels is one of those heralds of Gnostic superiority. In The Gnostic Gospels, she writes:

At a time when the orthodox Christians increasingly discriminated between clergy and laity, this group of Gnostic Christians demonstrated that, among themselves, they refused to acknowledge such distinction. Instead of ranking their members into superior and inferior "orders" within a hierarchy, they followed the principle of strict equality…

Such practices prompted Tertullian to attack "the behavior of the heretics."

(Quoted at The Gnostic Jesus.)

The popular view is that Gnostic Christianity is "a lost treasure of immeasurable value, long buried in the suffocating darkness of conventional orthodoxy on one side, and blind fundamentalist extremism on the other."

But Wright argues that the truth is very different:

The people who were burned at the stake, fried on hot irons, thrown to the wild beasts, pulled apart on the rack…, these people did not imagine themselves to be on the way to a great political victory of "orthodoxy" over "heresy." They were not, as is often suggested, settling down and making comfortable compromises with the status quo…. They were following their crucified Lord.

The proponents of Gnostic Christianity, like to bring in factors from the reign of Constantine and from the time we call the Middle Ages. But the second century was a very different world.

In a.d. 177 many Christians were martyred in Vienne and Lyons. Among them was Pothinus, the Bishop of Lyons. He was immediately replaced by Irenaeus who was living in Rome, but who had been a highly-respected presbyter in Lyons. "And it was exactly then that he wrote his Against the Heresies, the work which mentions the 'Gospel of Judas.'"

This runs counter to the popular narrative about the emergence of Christian orthodoxy:

Reading Ehrman, Meyer and others, it is easy to forget what was really going on at the time, and to imagine that Ignatius, Irenaeus and other like him were simply unpleasant and arrogant heresy-hunters, eager to simply prop up their own power and ecclesiastical systems.

The truth is that in the second century the Gnostics were the cultural conservatives. They were the ones who took the path of least resistance. There was nothing dangerous, radical or progressive in Gnostic "Christianity."

The Gnostics were quite content to capitulate to their surrounding culture, in which mystery-religions, self-discovery, Platonic spirituality of various sorts, and coded revelations of hidden truths were the stock in trade. In other words, the Gnostics were the cultural conservatives, sticking with the kind of religion that everyone already knew.

In fact, an honest reading of the Gnostic texts will give us the impression that these people were "fairly thoroughly sexist, anti-Semitic, and lacking the courage to stand out against the ideologies and authorities of their day."

In stark contrast:

It was the orthodox Christians who were breaking new ground, and risking their necks as they did so.

(All unattributed and unlinked quotations are from Judas and the Gospel of Jesus by N. T. Wright.)

As an aside: As it was in those days, so should it be today. The orthodox Christians should not be known for "heresy hunting," conservatism and caution. Rather we should be known as the ones breaking new ground and risking our necks as we do so.

Pastor Rod

"Helping you become the person God created you to be"

Wright on Time

I just received my CDs of N. T. Wright's lectures at the University of Saint Mary of the Lake on March 23. At the end of the first lecture I asked this question:

The popular Christian view tends to see time as an illusion. If, as you argue, time is real and an enduring fact continuing into the new creation, it seems to me that this requires that God interacts with time in a way that involves genuine participation in the passing of time. I'm sure you've given this some thought. Could you comment on this please?

Here is his answer:

Yes, there is, of course, quite a debate at the moment I'm aware of, within North American not least, about God's interaction with and engagement with time, with the question being really whether things that happen in time can, in our cricketing image, put God on the back foot, whether God thinks, "Hmm, never thought you were going to get up to that."

There are, of course, places in the Bible which do seem to say that. You know, when Jeremiah inveighs against the practice of offering children to Molech, he says as the Word of God, "Not only did I never command that, it never entered my mind." That's an extraordinary idea for us, that humans can do something which God would never have dreamt of. And it kind of puts God in a different position. But God remains sovereign.

Jonathan Sachs, the chief rabbi of the UK, is one of the finest commentators on our present scene in Britain, wrote a piece no long ago likening the children of Israel wandering in the wilderness to what happens when you have a sat-nav or GPS system in your car. The voice says, "In half a mile turn right." And you say, "Actually, no. I don't like that road. I'm going to turn left in a quarter of a mile." And there's a pause, and the voice says in effect, "Well, this wasn't what we had in mind, but since we're now here, you're going to need to go this and this and this and this." And it seems to me that this is a perfectly proper way to think about how the sovereignty of God plays out through the responsibility of humans.

It's all to do with image-bearing-ness as humans and the sense that our job in worshipping God is to reflect him into the world. And because God has made the world like that, it is part of God's sovereign determination rooted in the triune nature of God himself that he will act through and with what humans think and do, and that actually you can collapse that back but you're actually moving away from the Trinity if you do so. Equally, you can move it too far forwards into a kind of totally indeterminate idea where really there is no sense of God as creator and judge, but merely of God as one player in a rather odd game. So for me, bring it back to the Trinity. Think through particularly creation and judgment, and you may be able to hold together what some people at the moment find is falling apart. Not a very adequate answer, but that's a starting point at least.

I'd be interested in your reaction to his answer.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Wright on Sacraments

Today I attended the Albert Cardinal Meyer Lecture Series by N. T. Wright at Mundelein Seminary.

First, I must say that the hospitality of the people at the seminary was remarkable. The lectures were offered free of charge to the general public. And they even provided lunch. These people were so friendly and generous that I felt honored to be on their campus.

The lectures focused on sacramental theology.

Wright was wearing his purple clerical shirt with his characteristic cross hanging from a chain around his neck, and read his notes from a laptop on the lectern.

He began by addressing the longstanding rift between Protestants and Catholics. He talked about the "cultural suspicions and alienation" between the two groups. He said that Protestants think that Catholics are caught up in idolatry and works righteousness. Even though the Catholics say it is not true, the Protestants don't believe them.

He said that Anglicans take fire from both sides. But possibly "this Anglican" can offer some words that will form a basis for the two groups to move closer together. He decried the emphasis on tradition, whether based on "papal pronouncements or protestant confessions," at the expense of the authority of the Scripture.

The key, he argued, to understanding the sacraments is eschatology, the movement from creation to the new creation. Everything must be understood in light of what God is doing in bringing the Kingdom to completion. He has called his people to be "the people of God for the world not the people of God away from the world." We must resist the dualist missiology of "saving souls for heaven" over and against building the kingdom here and now.

God's work can be understood in three dimensions:

1. Space
   
2. Time
   
3. Matter
   

"When God made space, time and matter, he made something good." Understanding these three dimensions can give us a richer theology of the sacraments.

Space

Heaven and earth overlap in many ways. The temple in Jerusalem was one such place. Jesus was the ultimate overlapping of heaven and earth. He was the "walking sacrament."

Jesus did not give his disciples "a theory of the atonement to be held in the head, but a meal."

We must make explicit the connection between Jesus' sacrifice and the observance of the Passover.

"When Jesus arrived in Jerusalem, the place wasn't big enough for both him and the temple."

The Eucharist is "a place where the bright cloud of God's presence engulfs us" as occurred on the Mount of Transfiguration.

Time

Eternal life is not a timeless existence. It is life of the age to come. "Time itself is part of the good creation." "God is very keen on time. He made plenty of it and likes it."

We have assumed that time is part of the problem, but it is, in fact, a great gift. God will remake and redeem time as a part of the new heavens and the new earth.

Jesus always seemed to be working on a different time scale.

The images of the coming age that are given to us in Scripture are "signposts point into a fog." They are not photographic images of what is to happen.

"Baptism is an encoded narrative" including creation, the exodus, the entrance into the Promised Land, the baptism of John and the death and resurrection of Jesus.

We don't come to the Eucharist to be justified by faith. We come because we are justified by faith.

Matter

The miracles should not be understood as Jesus transcending matter. They should be understood, rather, as "Jesus doing things that manifested the new creation."

We should not frame our understanding of the Eucharist in terms of a dated ontology and epistemology.

Sacraments

We should not think of the sacraments as "theological meteorites" that have randomly fallen to earth. Rather, we should think of them as "outcropping of rock" that give us a hint at what is underneath it all.

These are just a few of my notes from these lectures. I've tried to be as accurate as possible.

Let me know what you think.

Pastor Rod

"Helping you become the person God created you to be"

Update: Here’s Helen Mildenhall’s much more detailed notes.

Final Objections 18–20

This is the final post in my series of responses to the pamphlet by Chaz Bufe called 20 Reasons to Abandon Christianity. The first in the series can be found here.

(The text in blue is from Mr. Bufe's pamphlet. I have used ellipses to show where I have condensed the original.)

18. The Bible is not a reliable guide to Christ's teachings. Mark, the oldest of the Gospels, was written at least 30 years after Christ's death, and the newest of them might have been written more than 200 years after his death. These texts have been amended, translated, and re-translated so often that it's extremely difficult to gauge the accuracy of current editions—even aside from the matter of the accuracy of texts written decades or centuries after the death of their subject. This is such a problem that the Jesus Seminar, a colloquium of over 200 Protestant Gospel scholars mostly employed at religious colleges and seminaries, undertook in 1985 a multi-year investigation into the historicity of the statements and deeds attributed to Jesus in the New Testament. They concluded that only 18% of the statements and 16% of the deeds attributed to Jesus had a high likelihood of being historically accurate. So, in a very real sense fundamentalists—who claim to believe in the literal truth of the Bible—are not followers of Jesus Christ; rather, they are followers of those who, decades or centuries later, put words in his mouth.

I do not have the time or the inclination to develop my own detailed response to this common objection. Here are several good replies:

• Probe Ministries
  
• How Can The Bible Be Authoritative? By N. T. Wright
  
• Can We Trust the Gospels? By N. T. Wright (BeliefNet)

The Jesus Seminar is not a collection of objective scholars:

A group of secularized theologians and secular academics went seeking a secular Jesus, and they found him! They think they found him, but, in fact, they created him.
Birger A. Pearson
Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara

I have my own problems with fundamentalists, but it is not because they gullibly believe that Jesus said words that were "put in his mouth" after the fact. My problem is that they don't take those words seriously enough.

There are plenty of "outs" for people who do not want to acknowledge Jesus as God. But anyone who claims that the gospel accounts are completely unreliable is intellectually dishonest.

19. The Bible, Christianity's basic text, is riddled with contradictions. There are a number of glaring contradictions in the Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments, and including some within the same books.

Since Mr. Bufe did not take the time to mention any of these "glaring contradictions," I won't take the time to address specific occurrences of these apparent contradictions. Instead, I want to make some general observations here.

• It is wrong to expect the biblical record to follow our modern ideas of "accuracy." (This is another problem I have with fundamentalists.) The authors cannot be faulted for not doing something they never intended to do.
  
• The biblical record has the kind of "variety" of data that one would expect in an account of things that really happened. Eyewitness accounts that agree in every detail are obviously manufactured.
  
• Many of these "glaring contradictions" have reasonable explanations. Some are textual variants that were introduced in the transmission of the manuscripts.
  
• None of these supposed contradictions alters in any way any significant doctrine of Christianity.

20. Christianity borrowed its central myths and ceremonies from other ancient religions. The ancient world was rife with tales of virgin births, miracle-working saviors, tripartite gods, gods taking human form, gods arising from the dead, heavens and hells, and days of judgment. In addition to the myths, many of the ceremonies of ancient religions also match those of that syncretic latecomer, Christianity.

This is an example of the logical fallacy of false cause. If Christianity is true, then it would not be unreasonable to expect that there would be hints of its basic truths in "false religions." C. S. Lewis cited these "reflections" of the Christian story as compelling evidence that Christianity was the "true myth" behind all the other stories.

A Final Word: These are but some of the major problems attending Christianity, and they provide overwhelming reasons for its abandonment. (Even if you discount half, two-thirds, or even three-quarters of these arguments, the conclusion is still irresistible.)

I would agree that there are good reasons for abandoning Christianity, but none of them are based upon historical difficulties in the Bible or sociological problems inherent in Christianity. The best reason to reject Christianity is to avoid having to submit to any higher authority. This is the real obstacle to faith.

Here is the honest confession of a candid atheist:

For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: We could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever.
Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, 273

Pastor Rod

"Helping you become the person God created you to be"

PS: This is my first post using Microsoft Word 2007. It's not perfect, but it's an improvement.

Struggle with Sin

Continuing with my series of misunderstood Bible passage, it’s time to deal with Romans 7.

The common view is that Paul is describing his personal struggle with sin. However, there are two opinions about whether this is a normal state of the Christian life (“I knew that deep down inside, Romans 7:14–25 is describing me.”) or a state than is replaced by what is described in chapter 8 (“This moment, therefore, we may be emptied of sin, filled with holiness, and become truly happy.”).

I don’t want to get caught up in this particular battle right now.

I do want to suggest to you that both of these camps have misunderstood what Paul is saying in Romans 7.

Notice what he says before chapter 7:

For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—because anyone who has died has been freed from sin (6:6–7).

For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace (6:14).

You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness (6:18).

So we can see that Paul clearly considers the life of a believer to be a life that is free from slavery to sin.

So what does Paul mean by this lament in Romans 7:14–24?

The key to understanding this complex and confusing chapter in found in reading Romans 5:20, “The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more,” along with Romans 6:6, “For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.”

Paul’s argument in Romans is that God gave the Law in order to “call out” sin. But this Law did not have the ability to eliminate sin. In fact, it had the effect of increasing sin. Rather than freeing humans from sin, the Law made their slavery to sin even more obvious.

But this was not a mistake on God’s part. Things must often get very much worse before they can be “fixed.” Ignoring a problem seems less disruptive than facing up to it. But facing the full brunt of a terrible situation often makes the solution more obvious and easier to accept.

Here’s how N. T. Wright explains this passage in a Bible Review article:

In Romans 7:1-8:11 Paul declares that the renewed people are given the Spirit to do “what the law could not” (Romans 8:3). He argues (through the device of the “I,” speaking of himself as the embodiment of Jewish history) that when the Law was originally given Israel recapitulated the sin of Adam (Romans 7:7-12, looking back to Romans 5:20), that in her continuing life under the Torah Israel finds herself simultaneously desiring the good and unable to avoid the buildup of sin, and that Israel, despite her great vocation, remains “in Adam” (Romans 7:1-6, 13-25). God, however, has dealt with sin and given new life, to those who share the resurrection of Christ through the Spirit (Romans 8:1-11).

Scot McKnight expands on this:

Israel struggled with the Torah to do it, and couldn’t get the job done. (Or, for others: everyone failed to do the Torah.) God sent Christ. Paul is thinking of death: those who are in Christ are those who have died with Christ and his death becomes their death. The condemnation that death is has been dealt with when Christ died on the cross.

Here are a few scattered statements from Wright’s article, “Romans and the Theology of Paul”:

The way through the complex little argument of 7:1-4 is found by reading 5:20 in the light of 6:6 and 6:14f.: Torah binds “you” to Adam; Adam, the “old you,” dies in baptism; “you” are therefore free to belong to another—namely, Christ—without Torah having anything to say about the matter.

The chapter is a defense of Torah against any suggestion that it is identical with “sin” (7:7-12) or that by itself it was the ultimate cause of death (7:13-20).

[T]he Israel that lives under Torah continues to carry
about the mark of sin and death that results from being the child of Adam.

Torah, Paul said in 5:20, came in in order that sin might abound. That is, the divine purpose in the giving of Torah was in order to draw Adam’s trespass to its full height precisely in Israel.

God’s covenant purpose, it seems, is to draw the sin of all the world on to Israel, in order that it may be passed on to the Messiah and there dealt with once and for all.

So we see that Romans 7 is not describing a personal experience of Paul’s. (If you need further evidence, check out Philippians 3:6.) It is rather a description of the predicament of Israel under the Law.

To say that Romans 8 is only talking about the legal standing of a believer in Christ is to emasculate Paul’s argument. On the other hand, to say that “life in the Spirit” is only for some Christians is to completely miss the point of verse 9.

But when we pay close attention to the narrative flow of Paul’s letter, we see that he is making a very specific argument based upon the history of Israel. Even Romans, Paul’s most theological letter, has a story line. We get ourselves into difficulty when we read the Bible as a theology textbook or as a collection of facts and propositions.

Pastor Rod

“Helping you become the person God created you to be”

Outline for Preaching

I have been describing some of the problems with the virtual canonization of expository preaching as “the only method of preaching that preserves the purity of Scripture and accomplishes the purpose for which God gave us His Word” (John MacArthur, Rediscovering expository preaching, p. 24).

While many still cannot see the problems, it is time to move on and answer the question, “Exactly what kind of preaching should we be doing?”

Let’s start with the Old Testament. For many pastors preaching from the Old Testament is problematic. Some avoid it almost entirely. Others treat passages from the Old Testament as morality lessons.

Then there are those who apparently have never read Hebrews 8:13. They teach about tithing from Malachi. They promote Sabbatarianism. They manufacture artificial distinctions between the moral, civil and ceremonial Law given through Moses.

Until recently, I struggled with some of these same problems. But through the influence of N. T. Wright, Tim Keller and Peter Enns, I have finally understood how to treat the Old Testament with respect and from a Christian perspective.

The key is Luke 24:27, “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.” Jesus reinterpreted the Old Testament in light of what God had accomplished in the life, death and resurrection of his Son. Through the book of Acts we see the Apostles doing the same thing. Paul proclaimed from the Scriptures (Old Testament) the good news about Jesus.

When we preach from the Old Testament, the ultimate focus must always be on Jesus Christ. We can preach about Joseph and talk about how faithful he was, about how God’s providence was displayed in his life, and about how he held to his faith right down to the end by making them swear to take his bones back to the Promised Land. But in the end we must shift the focus to the One who was faithful to the point of death on the cross, to the One who God providentially used to provide the Bread of Life, to the One who did not waver in the Garden and trusted God to fulfill his promise of resurrection.

I now find preaching from the Old Testament more exciting, more appealing and more powerful as every text is reinterpreted in the light of what God has accomplished in the person of Jesus the Christ.

The Old Testament is more than just background for the Gospel. It is an important part, an essential part, of the grand narrative that finds its key moment in the resurrection of Jesus. And this narrative continues today.

Pastor Rod

“Helping you become the person God created you to be”