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Women: Princesses or Priests?

Found this at Christians For Biblical Equality

 

Choosing Priest Instead of Princess   The expanded version of this column first appeared in the "Beauty" issue ofMutuality, Spring 2011, and can be purchased here. *     *     *     *     *     * I hadn't heard of Captivating yet or John and Stasi Eldredge's Ransomed Heart Ministries, the undisputed flagship of what I call the "Christian princess movement." So when I asked a friend about where all these crowns were coming from, she directed me to that book. I borrowed a copy and read it in a crowded coffee shop in the middle of an Indiana winter. In it, I learned that, as a woman, I was designed by God to be a princess who longed to be romanced, reveal her beauty, and play a part in a grand adventure. I'll be honest with you—it was a pleasant daydream. I think that an overwhelmed, tired college student would take any diversion from her coursework, and if the diversion showed up on a white horse with a sword, so much the better. It was, apparently, God's will. I packed my bag, a little encouraged and a little deluded, and stood up. Then I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror. It was, I think, God's firm but kind reminder of the reality I was living in. In that mirror I saw who I really was—a fallen image-bearer of God in a room full of other fallen image-bearers, no better or worse or more worthy of love than any of them. The world did not need my beauty—in that moment, it needed me to throw away my coffee cup so someone else could relax with a book and hot chocolate at my table for awhile. And in order to be a good steward of a college education, I was not going on any fantastic adventures but would have to complete the long, icy walk back to my dorm room, heat something up for dinner, and work hard. My life isn't a fairy tale, but God never promised me one. He promised me a hope and a future. I'll take it. I'm not a princess (though I suspect my dad will fight me on this point when he reads this). And I don't think it's cynical of me to say it. It's not bad news. It's great news, actually. God has called me—has called all of us—not to a life of childlike sentimentality, but to concrete hope and service in him through discipleship. In this way I encourage women, when they're tempted to think of themselves as royal, to think of themselves as royal priests (1 Pet. 2:9). Here are the present pitfalls of being a princess—and God's alternative, which is so much better. A Princess is Proud. There's a reason why so many leaders of women's retreats hand out plastic crowns and tell women they are princesses. It is exactly what everyone wants to hear. In our fallen state, we like to be flattered and coddled, to be let off the hook of responsibility, to feel entitled, and so forth. A princess is the heroine of the story—the perfect, untouchable character. We want to hear that "the whole, vast world is incomplete without me. Creation reached its zenith in me" (Captivating, p. 25). A daughter of God, on the other hand, is a beloved, hard-working, and self-sacrificing servant of her Father. She imitates Christ by loving and serving others without self-entitlement. A Princess is Pretty. I have seen, heard, and read more Cinderella renditions than I can possibly count, and every Cinderella character seems to have one trait in common: she's pretty. Cinderellas can also be active or passive, bold or shy, rebellious or submissive, outspoken and strong or worn out and broken down. None of these qualities really matter because the only attribute she actually needs to get the prince is beauty. Christian princess culture has handily absorbed the "pretty princess" cultural phenomenon to the point that it's the underlying thesis for the Eldredges'Captivating. The Eldredges assert over and over again that the world longs to enjoy the beauty of a woman, and that every woman has it to offer. A Princess is Passive. Remember how Sleeping Beauty wins her prince? Hint: it's right there in her name. She's beautiful. And she sleeps. For years. Good fortune just comes to her after she's been lying there for awhile. Snow White sleeps too, waiting for someone to show up and remove her curse. Cinderella actually goes to a ball to get her man, but only with the princess paraphernalia provided by her fairy godmother. Rapunzel waits in a tower and functions as her own ladder for someone to rescue her. And so on. Noticing a pattern here? Being a princess comes with the guarantee that you don't have to venture out and take risks—that someone else will rescue you from servitude, or a tower, or a coma. Stationary princesses are rampant in the world of fairy tales. They are in a position of waiting to be rescued. That's it. Thank God that he has a much higher calling for us! Certainly there is an element of rescue in the Christian story—God has saved us by the gift of his wonderful grace, with no assistance on our part (Eph. 2:5). But God has given us another gift as well—the gift of work. The first couple was put in the Garden of Eden to "work it and take care of it" (Gen. 2:15). Solomon calls finding satisfaction in one's work "the gift of God" (Ecc. 3:13). And Paul commands new Christians to "work, doing something useful with their hands, that they may have something to give to the poor" (Eph. 4:28). A girl's confidence should not come from a label that denotes value in title only. She has value because she has been "created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do" (Eph. 2:10). Works prepared in advance for us to do—what an indescribable gift! Now, if this doesn't sit well, remember that if our Father is still king, then we are still royal—all of us, men and women alike. Women are not princesses but "a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's special possession" in order that they "may declare the praises of him who called [them] out of darkness into his wonderful light" (1 Pet. 2:9). Being a priest is a hard, high-responsibility calling that has been extended to every member of the church regardless of his or her gender. God has given us a new identity, and the hard work that comes with it is incompatible with the self-absorbed Christian culture of fairy tales, crowns, and princesshood. When Paul speaks of love, he reminds us that when he grew up, he put childish ways behind him (1 Cor. 13:11). And when the elders worship at the throne of God, they take off their crowns and lay them before him (Rev. 4:10). Playing pretend is all right for little girls, but when we get to the throne of God, we too have to set aside our playthings and worship God, not ourselves. This is why I am choosing to be a priest and not a princess. *     *     *     *     *     *     * Laura Robinson is graduating from Indiana University in May with majors in English and religious studies and a minor in history. She will begin a masters program in biblical exegesis at Wheaton College in the fall. She interned for Christians for Biblical Equality in the summer of 2010 and enthusiastically encourages other students to do the same!

 

The Rabbi is wrong on a couple of points....

I don't find myself much in agreement with Southern Baptist Al Mohler, but... Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (most famous as a spiritual director of sorts to Michael Jackson) has responded on the Huffington Post to a tweet by Mohler. Mohler's offense? Offering Jesus to Anthony Weiner. 

Mohler tweeted "Dear Congressman Weiner: There is no effective 'treatment' for sin. Only atonement, found only in Jesus Christ."

To which Rabbi Boteach responded:  "I hear you, Rev. Mohler. But I seem to recall many sexual scandals involving evangelical ministers that would seem to undermine the premise that salvation through Jesus Christ grants immunity to sexual sin."

Say what now? 

Does the Rabbi really mean to suggest that Mohler was offering an "immunity to sexual sin"??

He goes on to take Mohler to task for "proselytizing" via tweet and to lay out an interesting theory of redemption, namely- atonement and redemption are a product of what we do, and are impacted not in the least by our "faith."

Respectfully...

Proselytize? Please- a shout out on twitter hardly counts as that- amidst all the cat calls, condemnation and kerfuffle, and it's Mohler, trying to speak what he sees as the bottom line for the man's soul that gets everyone's knickers in a twist? (Read the comments that follow the article- knicker are truly twisted good. Lots and lots of atheist and agnostic wedgies, in fact.)

Maybe it's the fact that Weiner is Jewish and Mohler a Christian? That's an interesting form of reverse religious bigotry... to say that a Christian can't recommend the only lifeline he knows and trusts to anyone who's *not* already of the same faith. This has truly become the post-modern unforgiveable sin: To offer what you believe is true to someone who doesn't already agree with you.

To the Rabbi's points, though-

1. He says: "I seem to recall many sexual scandals involving evangelical ministers that would seem to undermine the premise that salvation through Jesus Christ grants immunity to sexual sin." A complete straw man- who ever said faith in Jesus brings immunity to sexual sin??? Not me. In 40+ years  of Christianity, Bible College, and Seminary I've never heard a *single* suggestion that it would. Forgiveness and moral/ethical maturity are separate (though related) matters. David's Judaism didn't save him from temptation and sin with Bathsheeba, and no one's faith in Jesus gives anyone a free pass from temptation.

2. More to the point- Mohler wasn't suggesting a way Weiner could gain immunity- rather, a path to redemption, and relationship with God. *It's okay if you disagree with Mohler's idea about that path*- please just understand what he was and wasn't saying- disagree, but at least show you are disagreeing with what he said and not your misunderstanding of it.

3. You are free to believe that "Redemption comes about not through anything we believe but how we behave" and "Redemption is never a function of belief and always a function of deed. " but this is NOT the core message of the faith that Mohler and I  happen to share- and quoting Jesus in that context doesn't mean He believed it either. Jesus' point is that you know the kind of "tree" you are dealing with by the results of its life- in other words, an apple tree produces apples BECAUSE it is an apple tree, not the other way around. A tree does not BECOME an orange tree or an apple tree by producing either oranges or apples. Jesus is in that passage giving a test by which you can know the reality of someone's relationship with God, not a means by which one can come into that relationship (ie thru good works/"fruit"). 

4. The idea that our redemption and entrance into relationship with God is based not on what we do but on what Jesus did is the core essence of the Good News of Christianity- and good news it is. If my redemption were based on how well I toed the moral line, if my good works outweighed my bad- I'd be in a world of hurt, and so, I suspect, would most of those reading this.

5. I appreciate Rabbi Boteach quoting Jesus- but I think the conversation in John 6 would be more relevant on the issue of what God is really looking for from us: "They replied, “We want to perform God’s works, too. What should we do?”

Jesus told them, “This is the only work God wants from you: Believe in the one he has sent.” (speaking of Himself)

6. The idea of belief bringing redemption isn't a Christian one though- I'm surprised to hear the Rabbi talk as he has here. It makes me wonder about the last time he read Genesis 15:6: "And Abram believed the LORD, and the LORD counted him as righteous because of his faith."

 

Does It Matter What We Believe About God?

Does it really matter what we believe about God- don't all conceptions of God just point us towards the same unknowable Somebody? Can't we just say all statements about God are equally valid??

 

"If your conception of God is radically false, then the more devout you are, the worse it will be for you. You are opening your soul to be molded by something else. You had much better be an atheist."

-William Temple

Brothers And Sisters, We Kinda Sorta Are Professionals

If there’s any issue at all that pastors must wrestle with, beyond how the Gospel applies to their own lives and ministry, it’s the issue of rest and Sabbath.

Wait- Scratch that. Those are actually the same issue. 

More about that in a second, but first the question: Why is Sabbath so hard for us? 

There was a time a few years back when, while still working at a church, I was in a support staff role doing media design. It also happened to be the first year of my marriage, and as far as first-year-of-marriage jobs go, I couldn’t have asked for a better one. I came in the morning, did my work, went home and didn’t think about it again until the next day. The computers I worked on were there at the church office, I couldn’t take work home with me, and I was very, very okay with that. When I was off, I was off. 

Fast forward a couple of years and we’ve planted a church. Suddenly, that’s all I can think about. Early morning, late night- I’m working on the website, writing posts on our forum, answering emails. Always on. 

What was the difference? I was working at a church during both periods, both were “ministry”... 

Yes, both were ministry. But the difference is one was a job, and the other? 

My identity.

For many of us, ministry is viewed as a calling, and we purposefully push back against the idea of ministry as a job or a profession. Usually that thinking is helpful. But maybe the unintended side-effect has been that the natural boundaries that often come with a job simply aren’t present or present enough in our ministries, often to our own detriment and worse, the detriment of our families.

Like I said, for the last few years of church planting and pastoring, I’ve been “always on,” answering the phone when it rang, working on sermons on my weekends, packing my schedule with ministry meetings and events, and just generally being a pastor all the time. Through it all, I’ve watched with a bit of envy as friends I have go to work and come home; as they turn it off and enjoy their nights and weekends without always thinking about work. 

And as I’ve gotten more tired, less effective and increasingly frustrated with my decreasing ability to be present when and where I really need to be, I’ve realized that the issue isn’t so much time-management or getting more productive (though those help) but rather a shift in thinking and belief. 

I needed two things. 

First, as always, I need more fully to embrace the Gospel at a personal and heart level. My failure at turning off ministry and truly resting as part of my weekly rhythms reveals within me a basic disbelief of the Gospel truth that Jesus is enough and that my identity can and should be rooted in His finished work for me, not the results I get, the church I pastor and how well (or not) it’s doing, or whether I think people are approving or disapproving of me based on the amount of access I give them to myself and my time.  

The only way we pastors will ever find sustainability and longevity in ministry is if we do what we tell other people to do ALL THE TIME: Rest our souls in the finished work of Christ. Stop getting our identity from our job/ministry. Take some time to unplug, unwind and more importantly, connect with God, our families and our own souls again.

Secondly, along with leaning more and more deeply on Jesus, and understanding that my value and worth are derived from what He did, not what I do, I find the most helpful thing I can do is to regain a sense of where the job pieces of ministry start and stop. My calling is to be a full-time follower of Jesus and to serve Him with the gifts He’s given me without reservation. Right now, my profession is serving as a pastor to my community. And whereas I once saw those two things as being virtually identical and overlapping, I can now see that they aren’t. 

There are things like kindness and mercy, patience and justice, how I relate to God and relate to others, basically Christlikeness, that I need to pursue hard 24-7. But there are other pieces of what I do that are still ministry, but need to fall into the category of 9-5. And I don’t mean just the admin stuff. Writing my sermon on my day off? Answering the phone during dinner? Doing the emergency counseling session? Sure- there will be times when I need to bend a little. But I’m beginning to see that for the sake of my family, I need to recategorize much of my ministry activity. I need, like those friends of mine with their 9-5 jobs, to be able to say with equal conviction, “Now I’m at work and it’s time to get after it” AND “Now I’m off- I’m going to let that sit until Monday morning when I can give it my full attention. Right now, I’m not working, and my family needs me.”

Essential to truly resting from our work is being able, in a sense, to put that work on the shelf for a day or two, step away from it, and let go. 

Brothers and sisters, (with apologies and all due respect to John Piper) we kinda sorta are professionals. And truly finding rest and Sabbath will depend both on how you look at Jesus AND how you look at your job. Know when you are at work and on the clock and give the communities you serve the full benefit or your attention and efforts. Know when you are not at work, and when you are off, be off. And know and remember most of all where true rest is found. 

The Gospel for Portland

I helped edit and am contributing an essay to a book which will come out this Spring from Ecclesia Press (part of the Ecclesia Network) called Viral Hope. The book is written by authors from all over, each expressing their take on the Gospel for their city. 

Here's mine- the Gospel For Portland. 

I love the city of Portland. 

It would be impossible for me to estimate how many times I’ve said that sentence over the last decade and a half of living in the Rose City. 

There’s so much to recommend it, but I honestly think one of the things I love so much are the people. At times a bit eccentric, but almost always kind and polite, they are concerned about each other and the world. If you believe in community, in caring for the environment, in taking care of others, especially those on the margins, then Portland is for you. 

And interestingly enough, those are also very same reasons I love Jesus. 

As I read the Gospel accounts of His life, and as I see the nascent church movement He left behind, I see exactly those things- a deep love for community, a care for the oppressed, the marginalized and the poor and not only a desire, but a commitment to put back together in our world that which has been ruined and spoiled. 

“Look, I am making all things new,” says Jesus. 

The man whom the religious leaders of His day despised, in part because of the company He kept and in part because He threatened their power structures came bringing what He called “Good News.”

And that was this: God has not forgotten us. He’s on the move. Though it’s hard to see, especially in the midst of tragedy and pain, God is busy. Bringing hope out of despair, bringing redemption and forgiveness, bringing life. 

The story of redemption that God is writing in history is hard to see because we live before the final conclusion, but we see the foreshadows of it all around us. We see it in the person of Jesus and His resurrection which showed- this man who dared to speak truth to power and proclaim light in darkness was no fraud or crackpot. We see it in those who follow Jesus and how with their love for each other, their love and care for the poor, their care for creation and generous, sacrificial responses to tragedy  they point to a future reality that’s both amazingly different and incomprehensibly better than our present. 

Yes, those followers of Jesus often fail to live up to and adequately picture all that Jesus taught and is doing in the world. And when they do so, they are, however inadvertently, pointing to a common truth we all share as humans: none of us, no matter how well-meaning, ever live up to even our own ideals, or those of the people around us, much less what God has envisioned for humanity- and so we all need grace, we all need forgiveness. 

Which is another reason I’m so glad for Jesus. 

The Good News is that God, in Jesus, has turned back, is turning back and will someday completely turn back evil and death and completely restore all of creation. And through Jesus He’s offering us a redeemed community, in a renewed creation, in relationship with God Himself. 

That is great Good News, Portland.

Interaction/Review- Tony Jones' "The Teaching of The Twelve"

“The Didache is the most important book you've never read,” starts Tony Jones, in his latest book, The Teaching of the Twelve: Believing & Practicing the Primitive Christianity of the Ancient Didache Community.

And while Tony's examination of this ancient Christian manuscript is engaging and thoughtful, I just don't know if I'd go quite that far. I enjoyed reading this book- well-written, I think well-researched... but the main premise is something I find myself wanting to push back against somewhat.

The Didache, according to The Teaching of the Twelve, records "a primitive Christianity" of about the same era in which the synoptic Gospels were composed, and seemingly unfamiliar with the theology of the Apostle Paul. 

And in that, it's a helpful look at some of the rhythms of the early church. The question, of course, is what can/does that early Christianity mean for us today?

Tony attempts to answer that question as he examines the Didache, by also looking at a small, modern community of Christians who call themselves the Cymbrogi- a house church of sorts which includes Trucker Frank, a friend we've gotten to know from some of Tony's other works. 

The Cymbrogi take from the Didache a very praxis-oriented approach to their walk with Jesus. They are in search of that primitive Christianity that "emphasizes how you live."

Tony writes, "The Didache's vision of communal life in Christ is powerful and potentially transformative. For the Cymbrogi, the Didache's primitive rhythms of faith have changed them personally. Each one of them I've spoken to has professed that the raw, organic Christianity that they find in the Didache and now attempt to practice is exactly what they've been looking for all along." Tony continues, "The Didache offers something of an alternative to what many know of Christianity. The real power of the Didache is its ability to remind us of what is truly important in Christianity: showing the love of Jesus to the world."

Okay... Here's where I start to wonder. 

Dust Up at UR over Virtual Chruch!

Last week, Doug Estes, the writer of a new book called Sim Church posted on Out of Ur what was essentially a response to my thoughts in previous Ur articles regarding the idea of Virtual Church. He wanted to avoid responding to me by name, but there were too many pointed comments to avoid the conclusion. 

You can check in out here: "In Defense of Virtual Church."

I wrote and sent a response that was pretty quickly made superfluous by the (now) 87 (and counting!) comments on the original post. 

I reproduce some of it here. I hope you'll read it (and the original article that inspired it) and come back here to answer this question: What do you think of this debate? 

It's my contention it's an important one to have (in fact, I think I need to write a post on why!)- but I'd like to know what you all think. 

Here's my response to Mr. Estes:

October 27, 2009

Virtual Church is STILL a Bad Idea

Online churches are missing a few essential ingredients.

by Bob Hyatt

**Editor's Note: I apologize for the lack of posts in recent days. We've been experiencing some technical difficulties. -Url Scaramanga**

I was disappointed to read Douglas Estes’ piece last week on Ur, for a number of reasons, but chief among them is this: it fails to deal substantively with a single serious critique that has been raised regarding virtual church. In fact, Mr. Estes not only fails to address the critique, but he seems to fail even to understand it.

So in a spirit of Christian love and good dialogue, let me respond point by point!

First, Mr. Estes asserts that critique of virtual church can be boiled down to “Internet campuses and online churches are not true churches because they don’t look like and feel like churches are expected to look like and feel like (in the West, anyway).”

Respectfully, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, my concern about internet church is that it’s too much like what we expect (and want) church to look and feel like (at least in the West).

Video venues and internet church are the logical next step to the celebrity and consumer culture of America, and they represent a threat to both the overall maturity of the Body of Christ and our counter-cultural mandate. Celebrity elevation of pastors who have begun to franchise themselves and their “brand” around the nation should concern us for a number of reasons I’ve outlined elsewhere—they draw down people and resources from other church communities and they are unable to do mission-critical activities.

I’d say those are pretty substantial concerns.

Second, this article repeats what I see as the major scriptural argument in favor of virtual church—“Nowhere in the Bible does it preclude online church.” The argument from silence, as we all remember from high school debate class, is the weakest. And in this case, I believe the Bible isn’t silent. Let me ask very plainly...

READ THE REST AT OUT OF UR 

Do we claim to have ALL the answers?

Some random thoughts swirling in my head as I clean the kitchen (my regular Saturday/Mindless Task rundown)...

Does Evergreen claim to have "all the answers"? 

No- not by a long shot. 

These thoughts are stirred maybe in part by my recent posts on Video Venues and such- I probably need to point out every once in awhile that we don't feel we have stumbled on the One True Model™ for doing church. 

But mainly I'm thinking through various conversations, some facebook posts, some comments... just some things I feel like I want to say at this point. 

No- we don't have all the answers. And that means some things and it doesn't mean some other things. 

What does it mean?

It means we have a sense of epistemological humility (epistemology: a branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge. humility: the quality or condition of being humble; modest opinion or estimate of one's own importance, rank, etc.). It means that even when we do make claims about truth, we are careful, humble and respectful as we do so, knowing that we are subjective humans who quite often misunderstand things. It means we do our best to make room for questions, for those who are doubting or unsure and to truly journey beside them as they ask. It means we show patience and love to those who aren't where we are at and do our best to continue to learn alongside them. It means we make room in every gathering for multiple voices to be heard alongside the one leading the discussion, for questions to be asked and even for people to disagree. I feel in that, we are somewhat rare...

What doesn't it mean?

The New in the Old and the Old in the New...

(My last post on reading the OT and NT together and what God might have been doing in some of those more "difficult" passages has sparked a good discussion- make sure to check it out. In the meantime, here's a post from 2 years ago on a similar theme. I had been thinking through Jesus in the OT, etc and had attended the "Spurgeon Fellowship" Western to hear a talk on preaching Jesus from every text. This post was the result...)

So, to backtrack just a bit...

I enjoyed the second half of the Spurgeon Fellowship quite a bit- it made me glad I went.

The two halves were each a talk... and when I say talk, I mean sermon, by Art Azurdia :) And apparently, word on the street is, even Art's classes aresermons. Which is fine, but there are times when you know you're being talked to and times when you know you are being preached at, and man, Art is a "preach at-er"... Which too is fine, just a bit unnerving when you are no longer used to or conditioned to expect that sort of thing.

The first half was my least favorite. It was basically a talk, err... sermon, on how Jesus should be preached from all of Scripture including the Old Testament. It was fine as far as it went, but I'm down with that idea already and wanted to hear more of the practicalities. I also have the feeling that most of the men (yep- just dudes... and all the prayers were for the "men of God" who were there, etc) there were already down with that idea as well, it being the Spurgeon Fellowship and all.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who got a bit frustrated with the rhetorical question approach that seemed to assume that none of us there had heard of this idea before and thought it kind of iffy... I just wanted to get down to business, but I had to wait for the second part of the talk for that.

 

The second half of the talk was basically a really well-done and helpful walk through Genesis 39, and how Joseph's story points us to Jesus- how to preach it in context as a chapter, related to the chapters around it and then in the context of the whole redemptive narrative of Scripture. I dug it because it was another piece in helping me see Jesus in all the Scripture...

Jesus in the Old Testament. This is something I, of course, got tastes of in Bible College and Seminary with typology, but it was presented more as a n interesting side note rather than the main theme of Scripture... and I've been thinking more and more about over the last two years, prompted mainly by the most excellent Tim Keller.

Honestly, I don't know why this isn't more of an emphasis in the emerging church.Seeing Jesus in and through all the Scriptures would seem to me to be a very emerging thing to do... as we renew our emphasis on the person of Jesus and what He actually did and said, how better to focus on the King of the Kingdom than to see Him  as He presented Himself to those disciples on the road to Emmaus- all through Moses and the Prophets?

Is it that many others who think this way about the Bible tend to be mainly "Reformed" and so emerging church thinkers shy away? Well, what better way to build common ground than to focus on this area of huge agreement? The Bible is not a handbook, not a rulebook, it's a Story. The Story  of God's redemption and we see the Hero of that story on every page. Sound "emergent"? It's not- it's Art (paraphrased), about the most non-emerging church guy you could hope to meet this side of Johnnie Mac.

At any rate, as I said, the second part of the talk was great- focusing on the methodology of preaching the Gospel and preaching Jesus in and through every story in Scripture... 
For instance, the story of David and Goliath? So not about how you can defeat the giants in your life (how many times have you heard that sermon???) 
It's about how you can't- but God can. And it's specifically about how He does so through the weakness of the substitute- the unlikely one who stood in Saul's place, who came in the name of the Lord and the power of the Spirit and defeated the enemy of the people of God. If you read that story and see yourself in David, you are reading it wrongly. You're not David- you are the cowering Israelites who face an undefeatable foe... 
But God is on the scene, sending One who can defeat whatever we face- and that's who David points us to- Jesus. The point of the story is not "Be like David." Youcan't... it's trust Jesus, the real and true David who wins the victory over death and sin.

The more I read of Scripture, the more I see that this is the way it's meant to be read- it all points to Jesus and in such amazingly literate ways as to boggle the mind. As Art said, the writers of Scripture were better writers than even they knew...

One of the best parts of Tuesday's visit to the Spurgeon Fellowship for me was talking to my old Greek professor, Dr. DeYoung. 
James DeYoung was nearly fired from Western for making that same point about the writers of Scripture in mid-90's in his book Beyond The Obvious. 
At that time, it was written into the teaching position of the school (which all faculty had to sign) that the literal, historical, grammatical, "authorial-intentical" method of reading Scripture meant that there is only 1 (and Dr DeYoung tells me the number "one" was written into the position) meaning of any and all texts.

Now, any first year Bible-College student who stumbles upon a Messianic Psalm (like Ps 22) knows better, and apparently it was okay to point out certain accepted examples (such as those messianic psalms and places where the NT made OT typology plain), but in suggesting that there was more meaning in Scripture beyond the obvious and that perhaps we should even read the NT the same way we read the OT...? (I'll talk more about what that looks like in a minute)

That got Dr DeYoung nearly banished.

But now the teaching position has changed, and Dr DeYoung is (somewhat!) vindicated by hearing Western's homiletic professor say that authorial intent matters, but there's more than one author to each text in the Bible- the human author AND the Holy Spirit and the human author may not have had a full understanding as to allof the meaning in what he or she was writing.

During the second half of the morning, I found myself sitting up in the balcony next to Dr DeYoung, and afterwards we had a great talk about one of my more recent kicks- not just seeing Jesus in the OT, but seeing the OT in the NT.

This started for me when I was preaching through the book of Luke, and realized that much of it was structured to point back to, and in fact to recapitulate in a sense the Old Testament narrative.Jesus was re-doing much of what happened in the OT, but rather than failing as they did, He was succeeding. 

In other words, the idea that He was in the desert for 40 days becoming very hungry wasn't just an arbitrary happening. It's not just that 40 is the "magic" Scriptural number for "testing."

It was meant to point us back to both the Moses and the Israelites and Elijah and their times in the desert... And it was meant to show us that Jesus did what they wouldn't/couldn't, not only in His trust of His Father but in the resisting of temptation. The whole modern evangelical message of seeing those passages in the Gospels as mainly a 3 point sermon on "How to Avoid Temptation" so miss the point they make me want to bang my head against the wall- it's not about "how to avoid temptation... so be like Jesus!" It's about how we try and try and just can't- but Jesus can and did. Not that we should never look at a Gospel narrative and pick up things to emulate in Jesus (of course), but the point of this narrative is not simply example- it's a comparison/contrast between Christ and Moses/Israel and Elijah, and on a certain level between The Gospel and the Law/Prophets.  

The Old Testament is a record of failure and the New a record of Jesus and His success where others had failed- His success and the success of the Gospel in bringing the life that the Law could not bring through obedience and the Prophets couldn't bring through their preaching.

Much of the Gospel narrative works this way- Why does Jesus feed 5,000 with 12 baskets left over? Neat party trick? No- Elisha did the same thing, but he fed only  a hundred or so. Jesus fed many times that and with 12 baskets (enough for all of Israel- all the people) left over. Jesus is the true and better Elisha.

Why appear on the Mount of Transfiguration with Moses and Elijah? Because they are the ones who pointed the people to Him, and  He's constantly pointing us back to them... saying- "See what they failed to do? I'm now doing it. I'm the true and better Moses, the true and better Elijah."

Could keeping the Law bring righteousness? No.
Could war and killing all their enemies bring peace? No... 
and that right there has been a HUGE piece in helping me understand the OT- the point of all the violence in the OT is that IT DOESN'T WORK. It doesn't bring them peace. If you read the OT as anything but a record of failure that points us to the ultimate success of Jesus, you get to some odd places and find yourself trying to wrap your head around and defend some wild things.

Jesus comes and gives a new and better way to righteousness and peace...

There are these three "peaks" in the Scriptural narrative- Moses and Joshua/the Law, Elijah and Elisha/ the Prophets and...

And here's where it gets interesting with Jesus. The Gospel narrative refers to John the Baptist as the "Elijah" who would precede the Messiah, so in a sense it's John and Jesus... but here's the interesting thing about the whole Moses/Joshua, Elijah/Elisha typology- the first is always better known, but the second, in a sense gets the job done. It's Joshua who leads the people into the Promised Land, it's Elisha with the double-portion of Elijah's spirit...

And in the NT narrative it's the Church in the book of Acts who does "greater works" than Jesus in the sense of taking the Gospel message beyond the borders of Israel to the whole world. So the picture has this dual hinge of John the Baptist and Jesus, Jesus being in that second place as the  one who really gets the job done, and then Jesus and the Church- with the Church in that spot.

And the "recapitulation" we see in the Gospels isn't only found there- it's in the book of Acts as well. 
For instance, Pentecost.
It's 50 days after Passover.  
Everyone thinks the people are drunk because the Holy Spirit has filled them. 
Peter steps up and preaches the Gospel 
3,000 believe and are given new life.

Cool story, eh? I especially love it when it's used to justify big churches, because that's totally the point :)
I kid, I kid...

Actually, the point is this- it's meant to point us back to Sinai, when:
50 days after Passover, 
Moses came down from the mountain and found everyone actually drunk. 
He gives them the Law, and...
3,000 of them die.

See? It's not just a story about how the Church was born. It's a story about the difference between the Gospel and the Law, between the Law/Moses who brings death, Jesus (who Moses told the people would come) who brings new life.

Did Luke see that when writing Acts? I think maybe he did, but I'm not sure. I think the Gospel writers saw a lot of the parallels and structured their narratives accordingly- but in the same way the authors of those Messianic Psalms didn't get all the import of everything they wrote, I have no trouble in seeing the same thing happening with the Gospel writers.

Does that mean it didn't happen the way they record it (with allowances for rearranging some of the parts to make specific points)? Not at all...

It's fascinating to me that more non-Christian scholars of Scripture see these things than Christian ones. I think it's because they aren't looking for "lessons for living" in the text, but approaching it as purely literature and so seeing some of the literary features Christians miss in their effort to make every part of the text about some kind of life application. Unfortunately, the conclusion most of those scholars draw is that the Gospel/Acts narratives MUST be fictional- nothing could fit together that well with the OT narrative.

I don't know about that...

You all heard OJ was recently re-arrested? For (allegedly) trying to "steal" back some items of his... at gunpoint. Of course you heard that...

What you may not have heard is that among the items he was trying to retrieve was a suit.

A suit he was apparently wearing the day he was declared "not guilty" way back when.

Ten felony charges, and possible life in prison, for trying to steal back the suit he wore when he was found "not guilty" for the crime everyone knows he committed.

Further, there's some dispute about the suit. A judge says the Goldmans (who have a $30 million judgment against OJ and get basically everything he makes) can't prove it's the suit and so collect. But apparently, OJ cut himself shaving on the day of the trial and there was a noticeable blood stain that could be linked back to OJ and used to prove it was, in fact, his suit.  

See, you couldn't make that stuff up.

So when someone says that the parallels and "coincidences" in Scripture prove it's fictional, I say- Yeah- and OJ is "not guilty."  :)

There's more to say on all this... Dr DeYoung and I got to talking about if/how this reading of Scripture applies to the Epistles... He thinks it does, but is not exactly sure how. As for me, I want to spend the next decade or so thinking about how this reading informs my understanding of the OT/Gospels and Acts. Maybe in 10 years, or 20... I'll be as smart as Dr DeYoung and able to see more in the NT letters that show that just as Moses, the Prophets and the authors of the Gospels /Acts were better writers than even they knew, so were the authors of the Epistles.

But one hermeneutical paradigm shift at a time, yeah? 

(My last post on reading the OT and NT together and what God might have been doing in some of those more "difficult" passages has sparked a good discussion- make sure to check it out. In the meantime, here's a post from 2 years ago on a similar theme. I had been thinking through Jesus in the OT, etc and had attended the "Spurgeon Fellowship" Western to hear a talk on preaching Jesus from every text. This post was the result...)

So, to backtrack just a bit...

I enjoyed the second half of the Spurgeon Fellowship quite a bit- it made me glad I went.

The two halves were each a talk... and when I say talk, I mean sermon, by Art Azurdia :) And apparently, word on the street is, even Art's classes aresermons. Which is fine, but there are times when you know you're being talked to and times when you know you are being preached at, and man, Art is a "preach at-er"... Which too is fine, just a bit unnerving when you are no longer used to or conditioned to expect that sort of thing.

The first half was my least favorite. It was basically a talk, err... sermon, on how Jesus should be preached from all of Scripture including the Old Testament. It was fine as far as it went, but I'm down with that idea already and wanted to hear more of the practicalities. I also have the feeling that most of the men (yep- just dudes... and all the prayers were for the "men of God" who were there, etc) there were already down with that idea as well, it being the Spurgeon Fellowship and all.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who got a bit frustrated with the rhetorical question approach that seemed to assume that none of us there had heard of this idea before and thought it kind of iffy... I just wanted to get down to business, but I had to wait for the second part of the talk for that.

 

The second half of the talk was basically a really well-done and helpful walk through Genesis 39, and how Joseph's story points us to Jesus- how to preach it in context as a chapter, related to the chapters around it and then in the context of the whole redemptive narrative of Scripture. I dug it because it was another piece in helping me see Jesus in all the Scripture...

Jesus in the Old Testament. This is something I, of course, got tastes of in Bible College and Seminary with typology, but it was presented more as a n interesting side note rather than the main theme of Scripture... and I've been thinking more and more about over the last two years, prompted mainly by the most excellent Tim Keller.

Honestly, I don't know why this isn't more of an emphasis in the emerging church.Seeing Jesus in and through all the Scriptures would seem to me to be a very emerging thing to do... as we renew our emphasis on the person of Jesus and what He actually did and said, how better to focus on the King of the Kingdom than to see Him  as He presented Himself to those disciples on the road to Emmaus- all through Moses and the Prophets?

Is it that many others who think this way about the Bible tend to be mainly "Reformed" and so emerging church thinkers shy away? Well, what better way to build common ground than to focus on this area of huge agreement? The Bible is not a handbook, not a rulebook, it's a Story. The Story  of God's redemption and we see the Hero of that story on every page. Sound "emergent"? It's not- it's Art (paraphrased), about the most non-emerging church guy you could hope to meet this side of Johnnie Mac.

At any rate, as I said, the second part of the talk was great- focusing on the methodology of preaching the Gospel and preaching Jesus in and through every story in Scripture... 
For instance, the story of David and Goliath? So not about how you can defeat the giants in your life (how many times have you heard that sermon???) 
It's about how you can't- but God can. And it's specifically about how He does so through the weakness of the substitute- the unlikely one who stood in Saul's place, who came in the name of the Lord and the power of the Spirit and defeated the enemy of the people of God. If you read that story and see yourself in David, you are reading it wrongly. You're not David- you are the cowering Israelites who face an undefeatable foe... 
But God is on the scene, sending One who can defeat whatever we face- and that's who David points us to- Jesus. The point of the story is not "Be like David." Youcan't... it's trust Jesus, the real and true David who wins the victory over death and sin.

The more I read of Scripture, the more I see that this is the way it's meant to be read- it all points to Jesus and in such amazingly literate ways as to boggle the mind. As Art said, the writers of Scripture were better writers than even they knew...

One of the best parts of Tuesday's visit to the Spurgeon Fellowship for me was talking to my old Greek professor, Dr. DeYoung. 
James DeYoung was nearly fired from Western for making that same point about the writers of Scripture in mid-90's in his book Beyond The Obvious. 
At that time, it was written into the teaching position of the school (which all faculty had to sign) that the literal, historical, grammatical, "authorial-intentical" method of reading Scripture meant that there is only 1 (and Dr DeYoung tells me the number "one" was written into the position) meaning of any and all texts.

Now, any first year Bible-College student who stumbles upon a Messianic Psalm (like Ps 22) knows better, and apparently it was okay to point out certain accepted examples (such as those messianic psalms and places where the NT made OT typology plain), but in suggesting that there was more meaning in Scripture beyond the obvious and that perhaps we should even read the NT the same way we read the OT...? (I'll talk more about what that looks like in a minute)

That got Dr DeYoung nearly banished.

But now the teaching position has changed, and Dr DeYoung is (somewhat!) vindicated by hearing Western's homiletic professor say that authorial intent matters, but there's more than one author to each text in the Bible- the human author AND the Holy Spirit and the human author may not have had a full understanding as to allof the meaning in what he or she was writing.

During the second half of the morning, I found myself sitting up in the balcony next to Dr DeYoung, and afterwards we had a great talk about one of my more recent kicks- not just seeing Jesus in the OT, but seeing the OT in the NT.

This started for me when I was preaching through the book of Luke, and realized that much of it was structured to point back to, and in fact to recapitulate in a sense the Old Testament narrative.Jesus was re-doing much of what happened in the OT, but rather than failing as they did, He was succeeding. 

In other words, the idea that He was in the desert for 40 days becoming very hungry wasn't just an arbitrary happening. It's not just that 40 is the "magic" Scriptural number for "testing."

It was meant to point us back to both the Moses and the Israelites and Elijah and their times in the desert... And it was meant to show us that Jesus did what they wouldn't/couldn't, not only in His trust of His Father but in the resisting of temptation. The whole modern evangelical message of seeing those passages in the Gospels as mainly a 3 point sermon on "How to Avoid Temptation" so miss the point they make me want to bang my head against the wall- it's not about "how to avoid temptation... so be like Jesus!" It's about how we try and try and just can't- but Jesus can and did. Not that we should never look at a Gospel narrative and pick up things to emulate in Jesus (of course), but the point of this narrative is not simply example- it's a comparison/contrast between Christ and Moses/Israel and Elijah, and on a certain level between The Gospel and the Law/Prophets.  

The Old Testament is a record of failure and the New a record of Jesus and His success where others had failed- His success and the success of the Gospel in bringing the life that the Law could not bring through obedience and the Prophets couldn't bring through their preaching.

Much of the Gospel narrative works this way- Why does Jesus feed 5,000 with 12 baskets left over? Neat party trick? No- Elisha did the same thing, but he fed only  a hundred or so. Jesus fed many times that and with 12 baskets (enough for all of Israel- all the people) left over. Jesus is the true and better Elisha.

Why appear on the Mount of Transfiguration with Moses and Elijah? Because they are the ones who pointed the people to Him, and  He's constantly pointing us back to them... saying- "See what they failed to do? I'm now doing it. I'm the true and better Moses, the true and better Elijah."

Could keeping the Law bring righteousness? No.
Could war and killing all their enemies bring peace? No... 
and that right there has been a HUGE piece in helping me understand the OT- the point of all the violence in the OT is that IT DOESN'T WORK. It doesn't bring them peace. If you read the OT as anything but a record of failure that points us to the ultimate success of Jesus, you get to some odd places and find yourself trying to wrap your head around and defend some wild things.

Jesus comes and gives a new and better way to righteousness and peace...

There are these three "peaks" in the Scriptural narrative- Moses and Joshua/the Law, Elijah and Elisha/ the Prophets and...

And here's where it gets interesting with Jesus. The Gospel narrative refers to John the Baptist as the "Elijah" who would precede the Messiah, so in a sense it's John and Jesus... but here's the interesting thing about the whole Moses/Joshua, Elijah/Elisha typology- the first is always better known, but the second, in a sense gets the job done. It's Joshua who leads the people into the Promised Land, it's Elisha with the double-portion of Elijah's spirit...

And in the NT narrative it's the Church in the book of Acts who does "greater works" than Jesus in the sense of taking the Gospel message beyond the borders of Israel to the whole world. So the picture has this dual hinge of John the Baptist and Jesus, Jesus being in that second place as the  one who really gets the job done, and then Jesus and the Church- with the Church in that spot.

And the "recapitulation" we see in the Gospels isn't only found there- it's in the book of Acts as well. 
For instance, Pentecost.
It's 50 days after Passover.  
Everyone thinks the people are drunk because the Holy Spirit has filled them. 
Peter steps up and preaches the Gospel 
3,000 believe and are given new life.

Cool story, eh? I especially love it when it's used to justify big churches, because that's totally the point :)
I kid, I kid...

Actually, the point is this- it's meant to point us back to Sinai, when:
50 days after Passover, 
Moses came down from the mountain and found everyone actually drunk. 
He gives them the Law, and...
3,000 of them die.

See? It's not just a story about how the Church was born. It's a story about the difference between the Gospel and the Law, between the Law/Moses who brings death, Jesus (who Moses told the people would come) who brings new life.

Did Luke see that when writing Acts? I think maybe he did, but I'm not sure. I think the Gospel writers saw a lot of the parallels and structured their narratives accordingly- but in the same way the authors of those Messianic Psalms didn't get all the import of everything they wrote, I have no trouble in seeing the same thing happening with the Gospel writers.

Does that mean it didn't happen the way they record it (with allowances for rearranging some of the parts to make specific points)? Not at all...

It's fascinating to me that more non-Christian scholars of Scripture see these things than Christian ones. I think it's because they aren't looking for "lessons for living" in the text, but approaching it as purely literature and so seeing some of the literary features Christians miss in their effort to make every part of the text about some kind of life application. Unfortunately, the conclusion most of those scholars draw is that the Gospel/Acts narratives MUST be fictional- nothing could fit together that well with the OT narrative.

I don't know about that...

You all heard OJ was recently re-arrested? For (allegedly) trying to "steal" back some items of his... at gunpoint. Of course you heard that...

What you may not have heard is that among the items he was trying to retrieve was a suit.

A suit he was apparently wearing the day he was declared "not guilty" way back when.

Ten felony charges, and possible life in prison, for trying to steal back the suit he wore when he was found "not guilty" for the crime everyone knows he committed.

Further, there's some dispute about the suit. A judge says the Goldmans (who have a $30 million judgment against OJ and get basically everything he makes) can't prove it's the suit and so collect. But apparently, OJ cut himself shaving on the day of the trial and there was a noticeable blood stain that could be linked back to OJ and used to prove it was, in fact, his suit.  

See, you couldn't make that stuff up.

So when someone says that the parallels and "coincidences" in Scripture prove it's fictional, I say- Yeah- and OJ is "not guilty."  :)

There's more to say on all this... Dr DeYoung and I got to talking about if/how this reading of Scripture applies to the Epistles... He thinks it does, but is not exactly sure how. As for me, I want to spend the next decade or so thinking about how this reading informs my understanding of the OT/Gospels and Acts. Maybe in 10 years, or 20... I'll be as smart as Dr DeYoung and able to see more in the NT letters that show that just as Moses, the Prophets and the authors of the Gospels /Acts were better writers than even they knew, so were the authors of the Epistles.

But one hermeneutical paradigm shift at a time, yeah? 

The God of the OT vs the God of the NT

I hate the very premise of the "God of the OT vs the God of the NT" question- you know, the one that sets up within the question itself an unresolveable dichotomy between a God of violence (the OT) and a God of love and compassion (the NT). 

I hate it mostly because it gives credence to what, for many, had been a faith-destroying red herring. 

 

The truth is, there's only one God revealed in Scripture. The LORD, the maker of heaven and earth, the one whom both OT and NT reveal to be a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love. 

BUT...

That there are pretty stark differences in how that God has dealt with humans throughout history is undeniable. WHY those differences exist is a vital question I think everyone should have some answer for. 

For a couple years, since I began thinking through this issue, I have explained it this way: The OT is a record of what doesn't work. It's God patiently allowing and even at times commanding His people to try all the ways of the people around them, one by one, all the while pointing towards Jesus. In the OT we have what doesn't  work- in Jesus we have what does- the Gospel. 

Think through your works you can be righteous? Okay- here are the rules. Let's see how you do with them.

Think through violence you can achieve peace? Think killing your enemies leads to having fewer enemies? Let's see how that works out. (We still haven't gotten this one...)

Think you need a king like all the other nations? Okay- let's give that a try. 

All the while, pointing them towards the One who would ultimately give them the righteousness, the peace and the security and hope they were looking for. 

Today, Greg Boyd had a great post that pushed the ball forward on this idea. I wish his blog took comments- I'd love to interact with him on this. 

I'll encourage you to read the whole thing- but the important bits for this conversation

are this:

Here’s a thought to start with. I think its very clear Jesus affirmed the divine inspiration of the Old Testament. Out of fidelity to Jesus, I feel compelled to accept this collection of ancient writings as divinely inspired. Yet, also out of fidelity to Jesus, I feel compelled to emphatically repudiate its violence.

What’s interesting is that Jesus himself repudiated the violence of the Old Testament — despite his belief that this collection of writings was inspired. Jesus taught, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also (Mt 5:38-39).

It’s true, as many scholars have argued, that most of the contrasts between what people had heard and what Jesus taught (”you’ve heard it said… but I say“) do not repudiate Old Testament itself but Jewish interpretations that rose up around Old Testament teachings. But this is clearly not the case with this passage, for the “eye for an eye” commanded is explicitly and repeatedly given in the Old Testament (e.g. Ex 21:24; Lev 24:19-20). In fact, this quid pro quo philosophy lies at the very heart of the law, especially its required violent punishments.

Most interestingly, in Deuteronomy Moses goes so far as to stress that the law must not be waved aside out of compassion. “Show no pity,” the text says, “ life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” (Deut 19:21). Yet, Jesus not only commands people to “show pity,” he replaces the Old Testament quid pro quo ethic with his radical ethic of unconditional love.

For example, while the Old Testament allowed Israelites to hate their enemies and sometimes command them to slaughter them, Jesus forbid his disciples from ever hating or doing any harm to an enemy. Instead, he commanded people to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Mt 5:43-45). Luke includes the command to “do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you” and “pray for those who mistreat you” (Lk 6:27-28).

...I’ll leave you with this teaser thought: Is it possible that some divinely inspired material is not supposed to reveal to us what God is like but what he is not like? Is it possible that some material is inspired precisely because God wants us to follow Jesus’ example and repudiate it?

Abraham believed God told him to sacrifice his child, yet he trusted that God was not really like the bloodthirsty Canaanite god Molech and thus would not make him follow through with his request, even though he had no choice but to move forward in obedience. He trusted that God would supply the commanded sacrifice, if only at the last minute (Gen. 22:8).

Read the whole thing here.

I don't know that Abraham believed God would stop his sacrifice of Isaac- it seems that he more likely believed that God would raise him again afterwards. Perhaps Abraham didn't know going up the mountain that the LORD was not like the pagan god Molech. 

But he certainly knew it coming down. 

They (and we) may not have had the 50,000ft view that would allow them to see His motivation and strategy, no more than my 5 year old can understand some of the ways we feel compelled by our love for him to parent, occasionally allow to fail, and even punish. But just because it's hard to see doesn't mean it's not there.

I see all through the OT God contrasting Himself to pagan gods and inviting His people to discover for themselves that the ways of those pagan people do not work- do not get them where they need to go. And ultimately pointing them to Jesus. 

Anyway you slice it, that's a pretty loving God.

Hell!

I am just blown away by Keller's sermon on hell. Never heard better. Normally, I would just preach it myself, but this is so good, so well stated and so... right, that I wanted to share it in its original form. 

Those who "discard" hell are discarding a misunderstanding. 

And, if Keller (and Miroslav Volf) is right, are more responsible for the cycle of violence and vengeance in this world than they would care to admit. 

Wonder how that could be? 

Listen. 

Paul Young Interview

Paul Young, author of The Shack, is one of the most down to earth, nicest... most "Jesusy" guys I've had the pleasure of meeting. We did an OPB radio show together awhile back, and I've run into him here and there- always a treat. 

I reviewed The Shack here. Basic gist, if you don't want to read the review (it's long) is that The Shack is a good book, will do good things in you, but has a couple of theological (and it IS a theological book, no matter what you think- Young himself says as much) issues I think people should be aware of and take with a grain of salt. We're all wrong in our theology somewhere (even you A29 guys!), all have a certain percentage of crazy monkey talk on our doctrinal statements, Young just wrote a multimillion seller and included some of his.

Anyway, I wish American TV was more like this. Here's Young on a Canadian show, in a fifteen minute interview that actually allows for some depth. I love the end when Paul begins to let the host know just what God thinks of him. Awesome. 

ht: Brother Maynard

Theology?

Opinion One goes something like this: Theology is divisive at worst, and frankly, even at its best just a luxurious waste of time. A good friend of mine (who will remain nameless, since while I'm disagreeing with his opinion, I dig him immensely and don't want this to feel like a personal poke) recently said:

"Foremost in the Christian luxury market are doctrines and theology. It seems that, particularly among white, overeducated, upper middleclass males, the great sport is endless wrangling about scripture minutia. Smoke and mirrors with no fire. Jesus told us to love God, love ourselves and love others…I’m stickin’ with that."

Opinion Two is represented by this quote:

"Odd, when we hear the names of Paul, Athanasius, or Augustine, we tend to think of them as theologians, and they were. Yet these great thinkers spent most of their time being pastors, and most of their theology was thought in response to specific issues of pastoral care."

-Will Willimon, Pastor

While certainly not a theology geek (okay- maybe a recovering one), I do tend towards opinion two. Yes- love is the most important thing, but it's not the only thing. Or maybe another way to put it is this- Love expressed in a multitude of ways, including theologically is the only thing. Love devoid of truth is less-than-love. How much do you have to hate someone to allow them to continue in harmful self-deception. And how does one speak both lovingly and carefully about our self-deception and sin without engaging in a bit of... theology? Of "scriptural minutia"? 

For example- How satisfied with your doctor would you be if all she ever ever told you was "Eat right and exercise!"? I mean, that's great advice, and it certainly forms a basis for healthy living... but might there not be, for specific problems, more to say? "Eat right and exercise" is the answer to "five pounds overweight" but not to "broken arm" or "thyroid imbalance" or "prostate cancer."

"Love God, love others," as Jesus says, sums up all the Law and the Prophets, and while summaries are helpful, I can't help but wonder what you miss if you stop at the summary. Do we really NEED the Book of Romans? Not a whole lot on "Love God, Love others" in there, you know? Maybe we should just do a Dead Poets and rip it out?

No? 

No. There's something needful in there. Ditto Galatians, Ephesians... heck, Joshua, Judges... Let's just say the whole thing. There's something we need to know about ourselves and about God that risks being lost when we stop at the very good summary of "Love God, love others." Something you'll never get without engaging in a bit of reading, study... "theology." 

Yes- absolutely, taking theology too far abounds. Supralapsarianism vs infralapsarianism? Please. But to claim somehow to be atheological is to cede vast amounts of territory properly belonging to pastoral care, deep questions of life and death, of purpose and pain, of community and Christ to... "whatever!" Without theology I know precious little about the God I say I'm trying to love and I know little about how best to love those around me.

Endless wrangling about scripture minutia may be the great sport among some white, overeducated, upper middleclass males... but to be honest, I think its close competitor is oversimplification of deep truth. To paraphrase some common wisdom, to claim to have no theology is to have a theology. Just not a very good one. 

And by "good one" I mean one that's really going to help people thru the complex realities of life in the way of Jesus that most of theology arose to answer. 

What do you think?

Chesterton on Miracles

"Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them."

-G.K. Chesterton

The Productive Uncomfortability of Worship...

When I was in junior high or high school, I memorized Gal 2:20 (at camp, to a song which I still remember no less):

"I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me, and gave Himself up for me."

And even though I memorized that verse 25 years ago I think I can honestly say that it's only in the last couple of months that I've really begun to understand it. 

I had always read that verse as one of those "theological reality" pieces that describe the "essence" of who we are as followers of Jesus. We are the ones who have been identified with the death (and resurrection) of Jesus. 

Cool- got it. Not by my works, as he tells the Galatians. But by Jesus' work. Got it. 

But what if Paul isn't speaking (just) theologically? What if he's speaking experientially? What if this thought, written probably 20 years after he began, describes not just the reality of what happened to Paul when he started following Jesus- but what has happened every day of the last 20 years? And continues to happen. And what must happen... to me.

When I think of this as someone farther along in maturity than me describing not just the reality of justification, but the process of conversion, of maturity and growth, I begin to understand the every day struggle and war within myself. 

And I begin to see what I need to do about it. 

We've been having a long and good discussion on our forum about our worship. Some have expressed frustration at our lack of engagement and any outward indication that many of us are worshipping as opposed to mentally cataloguing our DVD collection. Others have said "Back off- I worship in my own way." Others have expressed a desire to be more engaged and acknowledged the reality that in a community, what we do or don't do actually impacts others, particularly when it comes to community disciplines like worship. All in all I'm glad to be a part of a community that can have such open conversations- where some can say "I wish we worshipped more emotively" and others can say "Please, no!"

Actually, I get that discomfort with worship in all its forms. I really do- and I'm not just saying that- I feel it too. But, I think the discomfort is a sign that in many ways, the worship we are doing as a community is having one of its intended effects on us as individuals. 

Over the last few years my weight has gone up and down- between 175 or so on the high end and 139 on the low. So yeah- at one point, I lost close to 40 pounds. How? 

A little diet I like to call "eat less and exercise." 

I had tried many, many times to shed some pounds with varying degrees of success, but never really hit the sweet spot until I made one small mental adjustment. 

I started to "enjoy" feeling hungry. 

It wasn't that I liked the feeling. It was more- when I felt it, I knew I was making progress. When my body said "eat!" or "eat more" and I said "No" or "Not yet" I was rewarded with some discomfort. And it wasn't until I embraced that discomfort and learned to listen to it in a different way (not listening to it as a signal that I needed to eat, but as a signal I was pressing in the right direction) that I got where I wanted to be. 

Like I say- I get that parts of worship are uncomfortable. Do I want to sit with you, pray with you, sing with you? No, I really don't.

And in a way, that's exactly why I do it. 

I recognize that pain and discomfort is an odd thing to talk about this way. Most pain/discomfort is a signal to do a 180. But some is a signal to keep going. And part of growing up is learning the difference. 

We sing less than probably 80% of the congregations out there- no 30-40 minute sets to start us off (though some EGers would love that), no extended periods of song after song after song. Mostly, we break up 3-5 songs throughout the morning. Generally our longest set is 15 minutes and 3 songs long. We do it this way because we want to signal: It's ALL worship. Not just this part at the beginning. And worship isn't the prelude to the main event (the sermon). It's all worship, and that's the main event. 

But because we see singing talked about both descriptively and prescriptively in scripture, because it's difficult to find communal worship talked about in Scripture (whether descriptive or prescriptively) that doesn't involve music and singing... we sing. 

It's one of the ways we try to remain in the historical stream of all those who came before us and one of the ways we try to worship God as HE wants to be worshipped. 

I try constantly to remind myself- worship isn't about us. In fact, in so far as it's specifically about pulling our hearts off of ourselves and the things we have attached them to and attaching them to God, it makes sense to me that I would lean into some things I wouldn't choose otherwise. 

In other words- often I find myself not worshiping by praying, listening to Scripture, singing because I want to... but precisely because I don't. 

Not to get too preachy here (but I'm going to get too preachy here): Some day our knee will bow before Jesus in worship. At least for myself, I'd like it not to be the first time. And inasmuch as I'd like my stubborn knees to get used to bowing (and my stubborn heart, my stubborn mouth, etc to that worship) I think a little practice is in order. 

To me, it's all a part of the process of me being crucified- doing the daily dying to myself Jesus told me I would need to do if I were to truly follow Him. Did I think that would involve only my money? Only my time? Did I think any part of me would escape?

When I choose to do that which I would not otherwise do for the sake of others, for the sake of Jesus, whether in sacrifice or in worship, I am being formed. Formed into someone that looks just that much more like Jesus.

Someday, my sincere hope is to be able to look back and truthfully say "I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ in me" and have it describe not just a theological reality... but the day-to-day existence I have lived. 

I just know it starts right now.  

God of the Moon and Stars

Got to see this tonight from a Dutch singer. We start the Gospel of John this next week- made me think very much of that...

What does it matter WHY Jesus died?

I'm a firm believer in the atonement of Jesus as a multi-faceted gem...

Victory over sin and death? Yep

Ransom? Check.

Uncovering the hatred and violence of "the powers" of this world? Totally. 

Substitute? 

Without a doubt. 

I won't go into *all* the theology here, but I will say a few things. 

First, it's imperative to see substitution in the saving death of Jesus. Why? 

Because without that you either conclude that we don't really need saving (a feel-good-but-ultimately-bankrupt escape hatch more and more are taking) OR you end up, of necessity, trying to save yourself. Trying to be good enough, holy enough, enlightened enough. 

No- it wont be conscious- you probably wont even realize you are doing it. But without the substitutionary death, there's certainly no substitutionary life, that is if Jesus didn't die for me, He most certainly didn't live for me either, and I'm left to cobble together my own righteousness, rather than understanding that I live in His; that His perfect life, his holiness and righteousness is what I get in the bargain of the cross. Double imputation the cool theological kids call it.

 

Apart from understanding that, I will always, always feel not-quite-good-enough, and I'll be chasing one functional savior after another in one self-salvation project after another. 

Second, yes, the violence of the cross is disturbing. Of course! It's meant to be. 

But don't take the easy way out and just try to explain it away. 

Apostolic ministry and... doctrine.

Here's a cool light bulb moment for me... 

In working through the Eph 4/Frost/Hirsch categories of leadership and gifting (apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd/pastor and teacher) we've identified where I and the rest of our elders are at. It even helped us in identifying a need on our elder team and filling it (someone with the giftings/sensitivity of an evangelist. 

As the one with the initial church planting impulse and the desire to continue to push us outward to new things, I've felt that even though I've been the main teacher of evergreen (up until we started a second gathering) that teaching wasn't my main gifting... that I fit more solidly into the slot of apostle as described by Frost and Hirsch. 

One thing that hasn't fit in that for me though, is the more, uh... prophetic tone of much of my writing. My deal seems to be offering not just encouragement to church planters (something I need to get back to here on the bob.blog- more on that in a bit) and also some correction to the church as a whole and even the emerging church in specific. 

I've always chalked that up to a nice mixture of cynicism, busybodyness and lazyness- after all, it's easier to offer critiques than solutions. Telling people what's wrong is easy. Offering a cogent vision of what could be? Of the way forward? That's a bit harder...

It's probably all that, but maybe a bit more too. Maybe it's actually a piece of the apostolic impulse? 

"Apostles are not just hot-headed entrepreneurs; they are also working theologians- or at least they ought to be if genuinely apostolic. This impulse to doctrinal integrity is therefore another key characteristic of apostolic ministry, and without it we would not be here today, as it forms the basis of the Christian faith. While acknowledging that the unique teaching authority of "the twelve" was foundational and authoritative and constitutes the base theology of the church, apostolic ministry throughout the ages has both elements in it. Witness the ministry of Patrick, John Wesley, Ignatius of Loyola, John Wimber, William Booth, William Carey, and the countless unnamed apostles of the Chinese underground church, for example, and you will see this dual element of pioneer missionary and working theologian. 

In light of these comments, we can see how Bishop John Shelby Spong, and his particular brand of DIY/designer Christianity, is somewhat of a danger to us today. I am not trying to be needlessly provocative here- this is a real live issue for us. Designer Christianity is a form of diluted, consumerist and syncretized faith that in my opinion, has in the context of postmodern pluralism and relativism become a genuine threat to the church in the West precisely because it distances us from the real vigor of our original and primary message. In many ways it has always been one of the major functions of apostolic ministry to keep the Gospel uncontaminated and so preserve its saving God-power for future generations (Rom 1:16). This is just one of the reasons why such ministry is so vital today. There is no doubt in my mind as to how Paul would handle 'Spongianism'; he would see it as a direct assault on the DNA of the gospel and therefore the church."

-Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

...through whom it was made in the first place

"Precisely because creation is the work of God's love, redemption is not something alien to the creator but rather something He will undertake with delight and glad self-giving. Redemption doesn't mean scrapping what's there and starting again from a clean slate, but rather liberating what has com to be enslaved. And because of the analysis of evil not as materiality but as rebellion, the slavery of humans and of the world does not consist in embodiment, redemption from which would mean release of the soul or spirit. The slavery consists, rather, in sin, redemption from which must ultimately involve not just goodness of soul or spirit but a newly embodied life. 

This is the plan that throughout the Bible is articulated in terms of God's choice of Israel as the means of redemption and then, after the long and checkered story of God and Israel, God's sending of His Son, Jesus. Incarnation- already adumbrated in the Jewish tradition in terms not least of the Temple as a place where God chooses to live on earth- is not a category mistake, as Platonists ancient and modern imagine. It is the center and fulfillment of the long-term plan of the good and wise creator. 

If you tell this story from the point of view of the good creation, the coming of Jesus emerges as the moment all creation had been waiting for. Humans were made to be God's stewards over creation, so the one through whom all things were made, the eternal son, the eternal wisdom, becomes human so that he might truly become God's steward, ruler over all his world. Equally, if you tell the story from the point of view of human rebellion and the consequent sin and death that have engulfed the world, this again emerges as the moment all creation has been waiting for- the eternal expression of the father's love became the incarnate expression of the father's love so that by his self-giving to death, even the death of the cross, the whole creation can be reconciled to God. If you put these two ways of telling the story together and cast them into poetry, you will find you have rewritten Colossians 1:15-20. This is the real cosmic Christology of the New Testament: not a kind of pantheism, running under its own steam and cut off from the real Jesus, but a retelling of the Jewish story of wisdom in terms of Jesus himself, focusing on the cross as the act whereby the good creation is brought back into harmony with the wise creator. 

The balance of the clauses in the poem in Colossians 1 shows the extent to which Paul insists on holding together creation and redemption. Redemption is not simply making creation a bit better, as the optimistic evolutionist would try to suggest. Nor is it rescuing spirits and souls from an evil world, as the Gnostic would want to say. It is the remaking of creation, having dealt with the evil that is defacing and distorting it. And it is accomplished by the same God, now known in Jesus Christ, through whom it was made in the first place." 

-NT Wright, Surprised by Hope

What does God hate?

"The biblical doctrine of God's wrath is rooted in the doctrine of God as the good, wise and loving creator, who hates - yes, hates, and hates implacably - anything that spoils, defaces, distorts or damages his beautiful creation, and in particular anything that does that to his image-bearing creatures. If God does not hate racial prejudice, he is neither good nor loving. If God is not wrathful at child abuse, he is neither good nor loving. If God is not utterly determined to root out from his creation, in an act of proper wrath and judgment, the arrogance that allows people to exploit, bomb, bully and enslave one another, he is neither loving, nor good, nor wise."
-- The Cross and the Caricatures, N T Wright.

And to the gnostics and psuedo-gnostics at Easter...

When Doug Pagitt basically labeled standard evangelical thought on the resurrection/afterlife as platonism and gnosticism masquerading as orthodoxy he was
1. Metaphorically burned at the stake
2. Totally right

In honor of Doug (who told me he actually regrets how the interview went down and how defensive he allowed himself to become), but more importantly, of Resurrection Sunday (did you know that's this coming weekend???) I give you a sampling of the truly awful, the pretty darn good, and the awesomeness that is NT Wright.

Maudlin, half-assed, pseudo-gnostic-but-probably-seen-in-thousands-of-church-bulletins-this-weekend Easter prayer:

"Lord, You have arisen forever
In my heart!

May the sunrise
Remind me to shine in Your light.

May the caress of a gentle breeze
Remind me of Your compassion.

May the fragrance of a flower
Remind me to blossom in Your love.

May the singing of birds
Bring a song of joy to my lips.

And in the closing of each day
May I remember to quietly pray."

Meh. Better, truer, more artful poetry:

"Make no mistake: if He rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance."

-Seven Stanzas at Easter by John Updike

And yet more forceful prose:

"What is more... because of the early Christian belief in Jesus as Messiah, we find the development  of the very early belief that Jesus is Lord and that Caesar is not...
But already in Paul the resurrection, both of Jesus and then in the future of his people, is the foundation of the Christian stance of allegiance to a different king, a different Lord. Death is the last weapon of the tyrant, and the point of resurrection, despite much misunderstanding, is that death has been defeated. Resurrection is not a redescription of death; it is its overthrow and, with that, the overthrow of those whose power depends on it.Despite the sneers and slurs of some contemporary scholars, it was those who believed in the bodily resurrection who were burned at the stake and thrown to the lions. Resurrection was never a way of settling down and becoming respectable; the Pharisees could have told you that.  It was the Gnostics, who translated the language of resurrection into a private spirituality and a dualistic cosmology, thereby more or less altering its meaning into its opposite, who escaped persecution. Which emperor would have sleepless nights worrying that his subjects were reading the Gospel of Thomas? Resurrection was always bound to get you into trouble, and it regularly did."
-NT Wright, Surprised by Hope

Thesis:

thinking through next week's sermon on "Belief."

Here's my thought:
God has revealed exactly enough of Himself/evidence for His existence so as to ensure that you can believe but withheld exactly enough of Himself/evidence so as to ensure that you are not compelled to believe, thus offering you salvation while protecting your free agency.

Thoughts?

(And the issue is "Why doesn't God just show Himself to us in proof-positive ways?" not Calvinism vs Arminianism, so... )

The Holiness of Diapers...

From Martin Luther:
“O God, because I am certain that thou hast created me as a man and hast from my body begotten this child, I also know for a certainty that it meets with thy perfect pleasure. I confess to thee that I am not worthy to rock the little babe or wash its diapers, or to be entrusted with the care of the child and its mother. How is it that I, without any merit, have come to this distinction of being certain that I am serving thy creature and thy most precious will? 0 how gladly will I do so, though the duties should be even more insignificant and despised. Neither frost nor heat, neither drudgery nor labour, will distress or dissuade me, for I am certain that it is thus pleasing in thy sight."

I need to confess that I have yet to view diapers quite this way. But maybe having a bit more of this mindset might help?

Grenz and Renewing the Center...

If Wayne Grudem is the theological center of Acts 29 (yeah, yeah... humanly speaking, of course. If  there's a more influential modern theologian for the Acts 29 movement, I'd be happy to be corrected on this), then for Evergreen and possibly more and more churches like us, it's Stanley Grenz.

We use both Grenz's Theology for the Community of God (his systematic theology) and Created for Community (a shorter, summary version of Theo. for the Comm. of God) extensively in our theology pubs and discussions. Of course, we have and will use other things, but Grenz has served as a great, uh... "foundation" for us (if you don't get that... just move on :)

Whether it's his positive views on women in ministry (I think evergreeners are pretty united on this one), "welcoming but not affirming" in terms of various sexualities (maybe slightly less so on this one), even a drift towards amillennialism (that would be more me than evergreen), we're pretty much in line with Grenz (except on his congregational rule- we have elder rule, as it's a necessity without membership, though with a strong emphasis on consensus from and among the people).

New Evergreen elder (yeah!) Dustin Bagby has written a great review of Grenz's seminal work "Renewing the Center."

An excerpt:

"I love the fact that Grenz does not polarize or belittle either of the two streams within evangelicalism. He is able to critique and examine both streams thoughtfully engaging with their primary works and shows how all of these men had/have a passion for engaging the times in which they live. Grenz ends with a call for (using Hans Frei's phrase) a generous orthodoxy (which Mclaren picked up and ran with) within evangelicalism instead of constantly trying to define evangelical orthodoxy in fundamentalist terms. Evangelicalism is a broad and diverse group of thinkers and theologians where there is room to think, to change, and to challenge traditional understandings. The boundaries are large and there is plenty of room for diversity theologically. That is why even Clark Pinnock who is an open theist, annihilationist, and an inclusivist can still be a part of the Evangelical Theological Society! I disagree with all three of those things, but he is still a brother in Christ. This was a good reminder that Clark's theology is not what saves him, nor even is his understanding of the atonement what saves him, but it is Jesus Christ who saves him."

Check it out

Should Wives Submit to their Husbands?... Wrap up

(pt 1, 2, 3, 4)

So, if you've stuck with the series, you know the answer is "yes."

AND husbands need to submit to their wives.

The whole thing is rooted in three things-

First, the brokenness of this world, which leads to a lot of pain, but specifically in marriage leads women to want to rule their husbands and husbands to want to dominate their wives (Gen 3:16).

But (secondly) the Gospel breaks down walls, begins to reverse the effects of the curse, calls us to participate in that reversal, and serves as a great leveler of rich and poor, slave and free, and male and female.

And specifically (and thirdly), it calls us to resist the urge to dominate one another by means of mutual submission.

Yes, Paul says- you Wives still need to submit to your husbands- but not out of duty to the Hellenistic ideas of male superiority, not out of social convention and the pater familias family structure, but out of reverence for Christ and a desire to witness to a watching world that your husband may own you (in ancient culture), but it's JESUS who is your Lord.

And Husbands (even more radically in Paul's day, and apparently in ours as well) you need to submit to your wives.

In Eph 4:21, Paul commands us to submit to one another. This is SPECIFICALLY tied to the marriage verses which follow. How? In the Greek, the whole thing is one sentence with just one verb- Submit to each other- wives in this way, husbands in this way. "Submission" and "laying down your life" are really two ways of saying the same thing.

So why only tell the men they need to lay down their lives?

Maybe because most women already GET that submission means laying down your life- Paul doesn't have to tell them that. Most women do it almost daily in marriage and mothering.

But he reminds the women that are tempted to forget that and he needs to tell the men,Your submission to your wife looks practically like this: laying down your life. Those who believe that marriage is meant to represent Jesus and the Church (it is), but take that to mean that submission moves only in one direction misread (I believe) what Paul is saying here and miss the very example of Jesus in becoming a servant Himself- both in death and practically, as an example to His disciples in washing their feet. 

Submission runs both ways- and we see this in Paul's explicit command (Eph 4:21), by the working of the Gospel and by Jesus' example...

Paul's overall contextual desire (at least in the Colossians passage most of this has flowed out of) is this: "And whatever you do or say, do it as a representative of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father."  His main concern is that we represent Jesus well- that our relationships, be they marriage,  parent-child, or  those we  work for/with, represent Jesus well. 

Now, the big complaint in the comments of this series is that the complementarian ideal of marriage isn't "offensive." Well... I've seen "complementarian"marriages that were both offensive and non-offensive, at least on their face. However... I think the idea of stressing wives' submission misses both Paul's command to submit to each other as well as his intent. Stressing wifely submission without balancing it out with husbandly submission is, I think, inherently offensive, and violates the spirit of what Paul is trying to do.   

Overall, here's how I read these commands to wives- Paul's not laying on this over-arching ethos of womanly submission as many seem to think. He's speaking specifically to those living in a patriarchal, abusive-to-women society and saying "Women, believing in Jesus doesn't give you the right to give your husband the finger. And men your duty as a follower of Jesus trumps your rights as Roman citizens/pater familias. As a Christ follower, you still have a duty to submit to each other- as to the Lord!"

And to me, the marriage which best represents Jesus to an onlooking world is one which understands and lives out the principles which Paul lays out here- which, like most things, probably look pretty different in our context than it did in theirs.

I heart Alan Hirsch...

Alan Hirsch is a great guy... He loves Jesus, is passionate about the Gospel and his books (Shaping of Things to Come and The Forgotten Ways) are essential reading.  I enjoyed the time I spent with him and hope to do more in the future...

Some thoughts of his on religion and (ahem) Calvinism.

"I believe that Christianity minus Christ equals Religion–and the reality is that we so easily subvert Jesus from the faith.  And this to our great demise.

I have been talking with some of my more Reformed friends recently and have increasingly come to the rather unnerving conclusion that Calvinism is particularly susceptible to religiosity. Partly because of its idea of the continuity between law and gospel, partly because of its church over society stance, and partly because of sense of being the chief historical defender of the Faith. But mostly I believe this susceptibility comes from its general circumventing of the life and teachings of Jesus. If this is so, why? Well, it is inordinately hard to make Jesus sound like a supralapsarian, five-point, Calvinist. I trained in a strongly Reformed seminary (which shall remain unnamed) and so I can speak from experience here. I can say that by and large it felt that we considered the Gospels were mere exercises in Greek exegesis to prepare us up for the real deal–Paul. Yes, we we reserved our real energies and excitement for Paul and Pauline theology, and I think this is true for Calvinist faith in general. I have come to the rather disconcerting conclusion that Reformed theology can easily become a religion of Paul rather than an expression of the life of Jesus is it is not careful. This subversion of Jesus from his own movement is rightly called Paulinism because it so readily discounts the central and defining role of Jesus in the life of the Christian faith. Christianity is a ‘religion’ based on Jesus or it is nothing! And it is not just about the birth, death, resurrection, ascension, and return that are vital to Christian faith, but his life, lifestyle, teachings, and ethos as well.

This loss of Jesus-presence and Jesus-consciousness has always led to the degradation of Christianity throughout history, and the recovery of it will always lead to our renewal."

Do Wives Need to Submit to Husbands? pt 4

So. The big question- do wives have to submit to their husbands?

In some senses that’s the wrong question. Paul says in Ephesians, just before writing out similar commands to husbands and wives and children and slaves- he says- submit to one another. Husbands submit to wives? Yeah. Wives to husbands? Yeah.

Here’s what the Gospel says to husbands and wives- you are equal. You are in relationship with God. You both have a duty to submit to each other and to love each other. Your lives, including your marriage should reflect well on Jesus and part of that means it should be attractive and compelling- you represent Jesus.

If you live in a patriarchal society where women are considered property, submit to your husband and show him to whom you really belong.
So, ironically, in our society… those who read these passages and because of them demand that wives take on some kind of subservient role (and they still exist, believe me), that women cannot be leaders in the church, that they are somehow equal in value and yet cannot have the same voice as men in the life of the community- those Christians in an effort to remain faithful to the Scriptures, often end up doing exactly what Paul is arguing against here- their marriages and their communities run the risk of failing to represent Jesus well and so becoming a stumbling block for others.

Now-hear what I’m saying and don’t hear what I’m not saying. The Gospel has serious claims on our lives on the ways we treat others, on our relationship to sex, to money, to power- and sometimes those claims are going to be offensive.

But the point is, if anything about us is going to be offensive, it darn well better be the Gospel, and not our marriages, and so the church better give some serious thought as to how we treat our wives and even women in general.

It’s offensive enough to proclaim that Jesus is the Savior, because that means proclaiming that people are in need of a Savior, that there is a problem that needs to be fixed called sin, and no one wants to hear that. Let’s not add to the offense of the Gospel by missing what’s really going on here and saying that women are somehow second class citizens in the ecclesia.

The prevailing Roman society of Paul’s day, drawing mostly from the Greek thought of the Stoics and others had very rigid family definitions. There was the pater familias, the Man, the Father at the top. And the woman was not equal, not in rights and not in value. In Greek thought she was second class. And the children under her and slaves last of all. Aristotle put it this way: “For the male is by nature better fitted to command than the female… The free rule the slave, the male the female, the man the child…”
So- into the mess of that society, into a whole world patterned on that Paul says, “Wives, submit to your husbands, but do it so they know who you really belong to. Husbands, love your wives and even if the law gives you the right to treat them harshly, Jesus doesn’t. Children, obey your parents- not because you are inferior, but because it makes God happy when you do. Fathers, don’t aggravate your children- you may have a legal right to treat them however you want, but it makes them discouraged.
Slaves- live so that your master knows you have a higher authority in your life than him. And remember- though the law of the land considers you property that can be inherited, the Lord, Jesus Himself says He will give you an inheritance- a reward for serving Him.

Paul, in reiterating to these women who might think that freedom in Christ meant throwing off the "shackles" and no more submission to their husbands that no, they still have a duty as Christ followers to submit, is not defining the woman's role as submissive and the man's as dominant.

Do I submit to my wife? You better bet I do. I couldn't follow Paul's command to love her sacrificially, like Jesus, without submitting myself to her wishes, her desires. To claim that I can love someone sacrificially and yet try to keep "submission" out of it is silly.
Does she submit herself to me? You bet. As a Christ follower, is she to love me sacrificially like Jesus? Yes. And that includes, even in this day and age though probably looking very different than it did in the first century,  the idea of submission.

For both of us.

Some concluding thoughts tomorrow...

(This series is adapted from a sermon I preached during our time in Colossians. I'm heavily indebted to Walsh and Keesmaat and their book Colossians Remixed)

Do Wives Need to Submit to Husbands? pt 3

(pt 1 here, pt 2 here)

So- why all this talk about slavery? It’s nice to know, it’s kind of an academic question, but the one we're really interested in is the question about husbands and wives...

Can you think of any reason at all why Paul might want to say something without really saying it? Why he might want to choose his words carefully? And maybe say something between the lines?

I’ll answer that by asking: What does Jesus do?

He changes things.

But He does it in His own way- He transforms structures from the inside out- slowly, surely, like (as He described His kingdom) yeast permeating a whole lump of dough.

What He doesn’t do, at least not yet, is tear down our societal structures completely and start over. His revolution is a slow one that depends on changing the hearts of people, not simply imposing His will. Someday the Kingdom will come fully, but for now- he tells us that in Christ there is neither slave nor free- that He came to free the oppressed and we should be like Him.

And it only took us 1860 some odd years to work out what that meant in regards to slaves.

So- the one who came to set the slaves free says to slaves- don’t demand freedom. But do what?

"Work willingly at whatever you do, as though you were working for the Lord rather than for people."

Live in such a way that your master can never complain about your service and yet becomes completely aware that you have a higher allegiance- a different Master...That you serve Jesus first and foremost, that regardless of what your earthly master may think to be the case- you really are free.

And to wives who may have run their own businesses, like Lydia who was well-known for selling purple cloth, or a woman Paul mentions later in this letter who had the unfortunate name of “Nympha” but who had a church meeting in her house… to these women who in many ways were leaders in business and the church but were still considered by the society around them to be property, chattel, He says- don’t demand your rights, but live in such a way that everyone knows- it’s Jesus you really belong to. If you have a non-Christian husband who believes you are nothing more than his property, live in such a way that he can’t complain about anything, but he clearly knows- you belong to another.

This is subversive thinking at its best. This is nonviolent resistance to this broken world and its broken ways at its best.

See, we read this from a society where slaves are already freed and women are no longer property and we think: how awful, how regressive. And we completely miss the radical, freeing nature of what he is saying. And how absolutely seditious and dangerous it would have sounded to the society around them.

So. The big question- do wives have to submit to their husbands?

pt 4 tomorrow-

(This series is adapted from a sermon I preached during our time in Colossians. I'm heavily indebted to Walsh and Keesmaat and their book Colossians Remixed)

Rob Bell: Everything is Spiritual...

Ht: Steve McCoy

Do Wives Need to Submit to Husbands? pt 2

Here’s what the Gospel says to both the powerful and the powerless- to those at the top of the pyramid socially and those at every other level-
Col 3:17- "And whatever you do or say, do it as a representative of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father."

First- remember that whoever you are- if you are a Christ follower, you represent Jesus. People are watching and they are wondering about this new group of people who do so many things differently. And some are worried about the radicalness of your faith and what you might try to do to society… so-

"Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting for those who belong to the Lord.
Husbands, love your wives and never treat them harshly.
Children, always obey your parents, for this pleases the Lord.
Fathers, do not aggravate your children, or they will become discourage.
Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything you do. Try to please them all the time, not just when they are watching you. Serve them sincerely because of your reverent fear of the Lord. Work willingly at whatever you do, as though you were working for the Lord rather than for people.
Remember that the Lord will give you an inheritance as your reward, and that the Master you are serving is Christ. But if you do what is wrong, you will be paid back for the wrong you have done. For God has no favorites."

It’s interesting to me that in this paragraph, he gives the most space, the most attention to slaves. Slaves and masters. Is the Bible pro-slavery???

This letter to the Colossians was carried from Paul in prison to the city of Colossae by a man named Onesimus. Onesimus was a slave… A slave who had stolen money from his master named Philemon who lived in the city of Colossae, had run away and ended up in Rome, and somehow ended up knowing Paul. Maybe he got a job where Paul was being held?

But however he met Paul, the result was that Onesimus became a follower of Jesus. And so Paul sends him back to Colossae with two letters. This one to the Colossians and the short little letter we know as Philemon, named after Onesimus’ master. And what did Paul want Philemon to do in regards to his run-away slave?

That is why I am boldly asking a favor of you. I could demand it in the name of Christ because it is the right thing for you to do. But because of our love, I prefer simply to ask you. Consider this as a request from me—Paul, an old man and now also a prisoner for the sake of Christ Jesus.

I appeal to you to show kindness to my child, Onesimus. I became his father in the faith while here in prison.  Onesimus hasn’t been of much use to you in the past, but now he is very useful to both of us. I am sending him back to you, and with him comes my own heart.

I wanted to keep him here with me while I am in these chains for preaching the Good News, and he would have helped me on your behalf. But I didn’t want to do anything without your consent. I wanted you to help because you were willing, not because you were forced. It seems you lost Onesimus for a little while so that you could have him back forever. He is no longer like a slave to you. He is more than a slave, for he is a beloved brother, especially to me. Now he will mean much more to you, both as a man and as a brother in the Lord.

So if you consider me your partner, welcome him as you would welcome me. If he has wronged you in any way or owes you anything, charge it to me. I, Paul, write this with my own hand: I will repay it. And I won’t mention that you owe me your very soul!

Yes, my brother, please do me this favor for the Lord’s sake. Give me this encouragement in Christ.

I am confident as I write this letter that you will do what I ask and even more! "

What do you think Paul is saying here? Knowing that all his mail will be read by his captors, what do you think he just might be trying to communicate to Philemon by that interesting last phrase: “and even more.” I mean- past forgiving Onesimus, taking him back, treating him like a brother… what could possibly be left?

Maybe freeing him?

Can you think of any reason at all why Paul might want to say something without really saying it? Why he might want to choose his words carefully? And maybe say something between the lines?

So- why all this talk about slavery? It’s nice to know, it’s kind of an academic question, but the one we're really interested in is the question about husbands and wives...

pt 3 tomorrow-

(This series is adapted from a sermon I preached during our time in Colossians. I'm heavily indebted to Walsh and Keesmaat and their book Colossians Remixed)

Do Wives Need to Submit to Husbands? pt 1

Well, sure. :)

But before you take away my (Somewhat) Progressive Church Leader credentials, let me elaborate.

Two huge, huge statements Paul makes in the NT are these:
"There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."- Gal 3
and
"In this new life, it doesn’t matter if you are a Jew or a Gentile, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbaric, uncivilized, slave, or free. Christ is all that matters, and he lives in all of us."- Col 3

Here’s the basic problem when we come at passages like this in Scripture. In a different time, a different place, a different society, we have a hard time connecting with how radically freeing Paul’s words (all of Paul's words) sounded to their original audience.

Paul drops an atom bomb on them. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, upper class, lower class- in terms of your relationship with God, none of that matters. You don’t have to be a certain class to be accepted by God. There is to be no Christian version of the caste system.

You don’t have to be a certain gender to be in relationship with God- God made men men and women women and while I don’t believe His intention is to turn us all into sexless neuters, neither does God say- because of your gender, men get THIS much of Me, and because of your gender women, you get this much of Me.

All the distinctions that humans excel at making of race, and class, and gender- These do not matter when it comes to talking about relationship with God through the person of Jesus Christ.

Now, imagine... You sit in first century Colossae. Some of you are Jews, some are Gentiles. It’s an amazing thing you sit in the same space, worshiping the same God. Thrown into that mix is this: some of you are men and some are women. In the midst of a society that segregates worship according to sex, especially those with the Jewish background, you sit in a mixed crowd. Amazing that the Gospel has done this.

And some of you are rich, some poor, some slaves, some slave owners. And yet, in this place, you all have a voice. In this community, you are all valued. Nowhere else in the world is this true that slaves and slave owners both speak and are heard- but it’s true in the ecclesia- the gathering of people following Jesus.

And so Paul writes these words to these people in this time- people whose entire world has already been turned upside down by the Gospel and he writes these words. Slave, free, rich, poor- doesn’t matter. And I’m sure they are wondering some things, especially knowing that these letters get read to a mixed group- some of the people hearing this were not Christians. These letters got copied and sent on to other cities, to a wide audience. Paul knows that people are watching and listening. Men and women, rich and poor, mixing races, mixing classes, slaves and free… How far does this go? Slaves eating at the same table as free??

Is this a danger to the Empire? Our whole economy is based on slave labor. Our whole society is based on patriarchy. Are these Christians who don’t seem to respect either the Jewish or the Greek ideas of the superiority of the male going to try and destroy the whole fabric of our society? Are these people dangerous???

Yes…but not the way you think.

Is Jesus against slavery? Yes, yes, yes.

Is he for armed revolt and slaves throwing off their slavery and their masters? No, no… no.

He’s for a completely different approach. A revolution infinitely more subtle and harder to put down, to crush.

pt 2 tomorrow-

(This series is adapted from a sermon I preached during our time in Colossians. I'm heavily indebted to Walsh and Keesmaat and their book Colossians Remixed)

A Word for Young Complementarians, redux

Someone, again, made the point in the comments to another post (a post NOT about the roles of women, but about our views/treatment of them) that since Jesus chose only men to number among the 12 disciples, then clearly He must intend for all church leadership, worlds without end, to be male.

Let me be clear- I think there are good scriptural arguments on both sides of the egalitarian/complementarian debate. But the maleness of Jesus' disciples ain't one of them. Why?

From the archives (Aug '06 to be exact):

Having been a complementarian and having argued the position a lot over the years, let me give a word of advice to young complementarians as to which argument to drop out of your repetoire. It's this one: "[Our church] like Jesus did, only appoints men to the highest position of spiritual leadership."

Okay... is that your final answer? Is that really one of the reasons you want to stick to- that because all of Jesus' disciples were men, therefore, you are going to stick with appointing only men to leadership?

Well, here's my problem with that.

Arguably a bigger issue than male/female roles in the early church was the relationship between Jews and Gentiles. For awhile there, the first Christians (who were Jews) were somewhat skeptical that Gentiles could even be saved. And then, there were a bunch of Jewish Christians going around saying that to become a Christ follower, Gentiles needed to first become like Jews, getting circumcised and becoming obedient to the law.

Of course that was all hogwash, but they did have one very powerful piece of evidence on their side, after all...

Jesus chose only Jews for His disciples.

Yeah- just good Jewish boys like Levi and Simon and Judah (though we all know how it turned out with Judah...). It seems as though Jesus was making a powerful, powerful statement in favor of non-Gentile leadership in the church, no? Or at least as much as He was saying anything about all male leadership...

If you are going to argue that we should have only men in leadership because Jesus Himself had only men in leadership, then try to be a little more conistent. With that line of argument, Jewish men are also technically what's required.

But Jesus is our peace who has broken down every wall? In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek?

Exactly.

There are a lot of good reasons and good arguments for complementarianism (just as there are many good reasons and arguments for something else). But if I hear one more respected Bible teacher make the argument that male leadership is based on and modeled after Jesus' choice of disciples, my head's gonna explode...

I'm just sayin'... :)

 

 

Okay... is that your final answer? Is that really one of the reasons you want to stick to- that because all of Jesus' disciples were men, therefore, you are going to stick with appointing only men to leadership?

Well, here's my problem with that.

Arguably a bigger issue than male/female roles in the early church was the relationship between Jews and Gentiles. For awhile there, the first Christians (who were Jews) were somewhat skeptical that Gentiles could even be saved. And then, there were a bunch of Jewish Christians going around saying that to become a Christ follower, Gentiles needed to first become like Jews, getting circumcised and becoming obedient to the law.

Of course that was all hogwash, but they did have one very powerful piece of evidence on their side, after all...

Jesus chose only Jews for His disciples.

Yeah- just good Jewish boys like Levi and Simon and Judah (though we all know how it turned out with Judah...). It seems as though Jesus was making a powerful, powerful statement in favor of non-Gentile leadership in the church, no? Or at least as much as He was saying anything about all male leadership...

If you are going to argue that we should have only men in leadership because Jesus Himself had only men in leadership, then try to be a little more conistent. With that line of argument, Jewish men are also technically what's required.

But Jesus is our peace who has broken down every wall? In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek?

Exactly.

There are a lot of good reasons and good arguments for complementarianism (just as there are many good reasons and arguments for something else). But if I hear one more respected Bible teacher make the argument that male leadership is based on and modeled after Jesus' choice of disciples, my head's gonna explode...

I'm just sayin'... :)

The New in the Old and the Old in the New

(Warning- this is probably the longest bob.blog post ever, so... be aware. But if you are in the least bit interested in how I, emerging hipster pastor that I am, read Scripture and thru what lens, read on. If not, feel free to go back to the funny YouTube video post!)

So, to backtrack just a bit...

I enjoyed the second half of the Spurgeon Fellowship quite a bit- it made me glad I went.

The two halves were each a talk... and when I say talk, I mean sermon, by Art Azurdia :) And apparently, word on the street is, even Art's classes are sermons. Which is fine, but there are times when you know you're being talked to and times when you know you are being preached at, and man, Art is a "preach at-er"... Which too is fine, just a bit unnerving when you are no longer used to or conditioned to expect that sort of thing.

The first half was my least favorite. It was basically a talk, err... sermon, on how Jesus should be preached from all of Scripture including the Old Testament. It was fine as far as it went, but I'm down with that idea already and wanted to hear more of the practicalities. I also have the feeling that most of the men (yep- just dudes... and all the prayers were for the "men of God" who were there, etc) there were already down with that idea as well, it being the Spurgeon Fellowship and all.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who got a bit frustrated with the rhetorical question approach that seemed to assume that none of us there had heard of this idea before and thought it kind of iffy... I just wanted to get down to business, but I had to wait for the second part of the talk for that.

 

Why I'm Not an Egalitarian...

When we as an elder board and a whole community processed the issue of women in leadership, we came to something different than the complementarian position- we could see that it's not a universal principle in Scripture that women never taught men or exercised authority over them. It just isn't. So we knew we needed to be open to that.
Also, there was no "elder exception clause" that would allow us to be open to women in all positions of leadership except the role of elder or pastor, (I've come to believe (watch your toes) that the only two really consistent positions, scripturally, are the heirarchical and what is often called the "egalitarian" position... but that's a different topic), so we knew we couldn't talk about including women in the full life of the community and leadership and arbitrarily exclude them from certain positions or (toes! TOES!) call certain positions "director" if women happened to fill them and "pastor" should the occupant be male.

But what we didn't come to was what many think of as being the egalitarian position. And let me be clear here- when I talk about the "egalitarian position", I'm talking about perceptions and common understandings that may or may not be representative of the positions of others who claim that label, yeah?
Anyway, what I mean by "what we didn't come to was what many think of as being the egalitarian position" is that we didn't set out to seek some percentage balance or (the dreaded word) quota of women in leadership. It's entirely possible (and was true for the first two years of evergreen) that we would not have women on the elder board. It's also entirely possible that we might have ALL women on the elder board. And so on.
Also, I really want to affirm the "complementary" nature of male/female creation. We really are different. Very different. Sometimes shockingly so :)
And that's WHY we need women in leadership, but again, that's another post...
(As an aside, a certain large, emergent-esque church here in town has recently finished processing this same issue, but with slightly different results- they maintain their complementarian leadership structure but they have, *ahem*... The Council of Godly Women. I have nothing but love for said community, so, I'm just poking a little fun at a sister-community here, but every time I hear "The Council of Godly Women" I can't help but think of some Stars Wars inspired Jedi-like council with robes meeting in a dark room...)

All of that to say, I was happy to see David Fitch come out with the same "We're for women in leadership but not egalitarianism" position... and do a much better, more erudite-sounding job at explaining it.

He says:

"In the church world where I come from, people still argue about the issue of women’s ordination and equal participation in the authority of the church. Conservative protestants have virtually beaten the issue to death yet still remain locked into the well worn polarity between the Complementarians, who view women in the church as determined by the NT role of husband ‘s headship over the wife, and the Egalitarians, who point to the plethora of NT evidence concerning women’s equal participation with men in the authority of the church. The “Biblical Equality” position views this newfound equal status for women as part of the redeemed structure of humanity in Christ and therefore it applies to Christian marriages as well. I too believe that woman have equal participation in the gifts of the Spirit given on Pentecost to the church (Acts 2:17-18). I am for the ordination of women in the church as well. I endorse and affirm women’s full participation in the authority/leadership of the church as part of the redeemed structure of humanity inaugurated in Christ. To many of us this seems all too obvious at this point. This last affirmation however is why I see a lack in the Egalitarian option (I see similar issues with the Complementarians). Both positions seem incapable of describing a justice born of the reconciliation God is working in the world through Christ (2 Cor 5:19). And I believe, oddly enough, that a few postmodern critical theorists help us understand this better. In what follows, I offer three insights from Critical theory that reveal the inadequacies of the “Biblical Equality” position and their cousins among the classic protestant modern feminists (as distinguished from the post-structuralist feminists). I concentrate on the Egalitarians because this position is most often assumed to be the position best aligned with gender relation justice. I realize I am characterizing their views in the short space that I have here. I can only hope to be more precise in future writings.

So here goes with three insights from postmodern critical theorists (and friends) that help us see the inadequacies of the so-called Egalitarian position as a way forward in establishing justice and reconciliation regarding gender relations in the church of Jesus Christ. "

Read the rest here

Eugene Cho- the Gay Conversation...

Eugene Cho is the pastor of Quest in Seattle... We've had blog conversations and I think (but can't be sure) that we may have met at least once at some event up there...

It feels to me like Eugene and I are kind of the same tribe- trying hard to navigate that middle road.

Anyway, Dan Savage himself (nationally syndicated sex columnist and out-spoken gay advocate) came to Eugene's Church as part of a 30-author rate-the-churches-in-Seattle deal.

An email conversation ensued and when Eugene blogged about it the comments went wild. 311 at last count. Whoa.

Eugene's the real deal... Check out his response and when you have time (lots of time!), the response to his position (which I share) of "welcoming but not affirming" (also the title of a book on the issue by Stan Grenz)

UPDATE: Probably even more important, check out Eugene's updates and thoughts on the Christians being held hostage right now in Afghanistan...

Question for you Southern Baptists out there...

Okay- I recognize that I tend to defend the Emerging Church a lot... as well as critique the status quo in American Evangelicalism. I do so for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that while flawed, the emerging church is important. It represents an important voice in the never-ending conversation of how we contextualize the Gospel and live faithfully as followers of Jesus in our day and age... questions which others, among them some prominent Southern Baptists seem to be actively resisting.

I maintain that in a more free-form movement like the emerging church, I can actively disagree with my fellow emerging brothers and sisters, not necessarily buy everything they say, and yet still claim a seat at the "emerging table."

It seems to me that when you talk about things like denominations or political parties, however, the freedom to do something like that is fairly restricted, if not absolutely gone.

In other words, how does one continue, day after day, week after week, year after year continue to belong to any group which stands for the opposite of what one stands for? For example, I ceased to be a Republican (I'm now a "no party affiliation) when I realized that "close-but-no-cigar" doesn't cut it when belonging to official groups with written out platforms, when those platforms and rules and regulations negate what you believe and stand for. Whether it's because of a lack of real, substantive concern for the poor or a lack of real substantive concern for the unborn, I can't in good conscience belong to any party right now...

So here's my somewhat confrontational (apologies!) questions for those of you out there who remain Southern Baptists.

How is it that you can belong to a Convention who wouldn't allow Jesus Himself into leadership?
And how long will you give it? When does that official party line mean that you can no longer belong to the "party"?

I ask in all seriousness... this would be a matter of conscience for me.

ht: joe carter

why that?

Studying for sermon on Sunday... thinking through kenosis, Christ's self-emptying in Phil 2. It's my understanding that He didn't empty Himself of His deity, but rather the independent use of his divine attributes...
Thus He was still all powerful, the one who created the world and continued to hold it together, He still knew all things, such as what was happening in people's hearts and minds...

All things, except of course that one detail of the timing of His return.

So here's my question for you-

Why THAT?

Why would Christ not know that particular piece of information? What's the significance?

Help me out here...

Zech 3

I read this during some quiet time this morning... absolutely amazing Messianic passage. I don't know how anyone who believed the OT, on hearing the story of Jesus (Jeshua) could miss this...

Zechariah 3

Cleansing for the High Priest

1 Then the angel showed me Jeshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord. The Accuser, Satan, was there at the angel’s right hand, making accusations against Jeshua. 2 And the Lord said to Satan, “I, the Lord, reject your accusations, Satan. Yes, the Lord, who has chosen Jerusalem, rebukes you. This man is like a burning stick that has been snatched from the fire.”
3 Jeshua’s clothing was filthy as he stood there before the angel. 4 So the angel said to the others standing there, “Take off his filthy clothes.” And turning to Jeshua he said, “See, I have taken away your sins, and now I am giving you these fine new clothes.”

5 Then I said, “They should also place a clean turban on his head.” So they put a clean priestly turban on his head and dressed him in new clothes while the angel of the Lord stood by.

6 Then the angel of the Lord spoke very solemnly to Jeshua and said, 7 “This is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies says: If you follow my ways and carefully serve me, then you will be given authority over my Temple and its courtyards. I will let you walk among these others standing here.

8 “Listen to me, O Jeshua the high priest, and all you other priests. You are symbols of things to come. Soon I am going to bring my servant, the Branch. 9 Now look at the jewel I have set before Jeshua, a single stone with seven facets. I will engrave an inscription on it, says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, and I will remove the sins of this land in a single day.

Complementarity Without Hierarchy...

I picked up a book I've been looking to get for awhile (thanks to a gift card for the Western Seminary bookstore from my friend John Johnson!)

Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity Without Hierarchy by Pierce and Groothius.

This looks to be an encyclopedic treatment of the subject and a serious companion/rejoinder to Piper and Grudem's book, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism (it's funny- with the former, they've clearly copied the style of the latter- the two look like they belong together on the shelf... very, uh... complementary)

I know that until I committed to rethinking the issue, I had never picked up and read (that I remember) anything on the issue other than texts by Complementarians. Why would I? What I had been taught was the biblical position and so reading anything else from any other point of view was simply a waste of time... and in the back of mind, a dangerous playing with "liberalism."
Of course reading books like Sumner's Men and Women in the Church: Building Consensus on Christian Leadership, and Webb's Slaves, Women & Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis showed me that nothing could be further from the truth.

So, here's my request to all the Complementarians out there. This is HUGE issue for the church right now, and is only going to get bigger in the coming years. One of the problems with debate in the church is that so few accurately understand much less represent the views of those they are in debate with.

I think you owe it to yourself to understand this issue from a variety of perspectives. Owning and actually a reading a book from a perspective other than your own (I know many have done this... this advice is for those who were like me and studiously avoided it...) will be good for you.

Will you commit this next year to doing a bit of reading on this subject? From a perspective other than your own? Even if your views remain unchanged, your understanding of the issue can only be enhanced, along with your empathy for those on the other side of the debate.

The work of Christ on our behalf... Objective or Subjective?

In light of the discussion on Spencer's book below, a quote from Stan Grenz...

Given these pictures of the benefits of Christ's death, how do we become the recipients of his act on our behalf? This question- the application of Jesus' atoning sacrifice to our sinful situation- returns us to the issue of the atonement that has been central throughout theological history. Are we to understand the work of Jesus as objective or subjective in intent? Is it an event of history that fundamentally alters reality, or is it primarily directed toward evoking a response from sinful humans?

The New Testament declares that the atoning work of Jesus is an objective, completed fact (1 Pet. 3:18). Our Savior died once for all. This act effected a fundamental alteration in the relationship between God and humankind, and it sealed his authority over the cosmic powers. The New Testament also indicates that Jesus' provision is intended to move us to appropriate its benefits. In fact, Christ's death is of no value unless we respond in faith to the God who in Jesus purchased reconciliation.

How can we bring together these seemingly diverse ideas? Perhaps an analogy suggests the answer: Suppose the leader of a country announces a total amnesty for all jailed persons. That provision is effective for the individual languishing in prison only if the prisoner personally appropriates the offer and walks out of the jail. So also Jesus ' death has altered the relationship between God and humanity and has freed us from the dominance of hostile powers. Yet until we appropriate the new status he offers us, our Savior's death is of no salvific effect. For this reason, the New Testament writers declare that despite Jesus' sacrifice the one who does not believe "stands condemned already" (John 3:18).

As our expiation, Jesus' sacrifice covers all sin, so that God is able to forgive any and all . Hence, Christ's death radically altered the relationship between God and humankind . At first glance, this declaration appears to lead inevitably to universalism, the teaching that in the end all will be saved. But is this indeed the case?

...If the atonement were directed only toward God's set disposition against sin, we could gladly affirm that all humans will eventually enjoy fellowship in the eschatological community of God. However, our wretched human situation consists not only of the sin that evokes God's displeasure, but also our own enmity against God. Through Christ, God is reconciled to us. But in our sin we remain at odds with him. From God's side, therefore, the atoning sacrifice of Jesus is universal; from the human side, however, its efficacy requires our response, namely, that we be reconciled to the God who has reconciled the world to himself (2 Cor. 5:19-20). This means that all may not be saved. Some may hold on to their set enmity against God despite Christ's provision.

The application of this principle to the reality of hell follows naturally. Were the problem that required Christ's death only with God, hell would be a fleeting phantom. However, our enmity against our Maker and Savior means that hell remains a real possibility, for it is ultimately our own doing. Stubborn human hostility necessitates it.

Stanley J. Grenz. Theology for the Community of God. (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000). Page 349-350.

Oh Spencer, Pt 2

(The first part of my thoughts on Spencer's book can be found here)

I simply cannot believe what I am reading.

I've picked up A Heretic's Guide to Eternity again (don't think I'll link to this any more...)

Oh my sweet... It just keeps getting worse.
Spencer!

The second of three sections starts with some reality checks for the church. Okay- I'm always up for a few of those. Kind of a hobby for me, you could say. These "reality checks" are things like "pluralism" and people finding spiritual input from places other than "the Church" like... The Simpsons or films ike What Dreams May Come. Gotcha. This is reality.

But it's in these "reality checks" that I think we start to get a sense not just of where Spencer is coming from, but perhaps why. He makes this jaw-dropping statement: "Today, the church just doesn't have that kind of control. It may still offer catechism classes, 'discipleship' courses, and Christian maturity growth tracks in an effort to exert some control over the spiritual formation of congregants, but the reality..."

Hold up. Say what now?

Did he say "in an effort to exert some control over the spiritual formation of congregants"???

Theology Spag Fac...

Certain things conspire to keep the lowly church planter humble...

There's the weekends when it seems like everyone goes out of town, the offering ends up being $231 and you drive home mumbling "Stupid, stupid...Stupid!" like Chris Farley because of the dumb thing you said in the middle of the sermon... (sometimes me)

Or there's the time you walk up to someone in your community who's sitting with a nice lady and ask "Is this your mom?" only to be told that, no... This, is in fact, my girlfriend. D'oh. (Uh... not me. But someone I know!)

The thing God is using to keep me humble right now is our latest Theology Pub.

Theology for the Community of God

We are doing, or attempting to do, our theological education in the form of discussion times, generally held in pubs (we like the public space, the relationships created with the staff and regulars... plus there's always good food and drink). For our "on ramp" or basic, introductory discussions, we've used Stan Grenz's Created for Community , a summary of his systematic theology, Theology for The Community Of God (both of which you can get used on Amazon)

We're gettng ready to start doing some "middle lane" discussions- our first will be on Christology, and with it, we're making the jump to the larger theology.

I love Grenz's work on many levels... First, I had the opportunity to interact with the man a few years back, and he struck me as real and genuine and personable. Second, his theological writing is real, and genuine and personable. :)

Here's a summary statement from the opening to the section on Christology. I think we're going to miss Grenz's voice... he died suddenly last year.

The Bible presents salvation history in narrative form. It recounts the acts of the triune God in accomplishing his intention for creation. From beginning to end God's intent is the establishment of community. Throughout history the Creator who noted the solitariness of the first human in the Garden of Eden is actively bringing into being the community he envisions for the world .

One day God's activity in history will climax with the coming of the new heaven and new earth, as anticipated by the Old Testament prophets and developed more fully by the closing chapters of the book of Revelation. This future new order will be characterized by community in the fullest sense. The peoples of the new earth will live together in peace. Nature will again fulfill its purpose of providing nourishment for all earthly inhabitants (Rev.22:1-4). Most glorious of all, however, God will dwell with humans on the new earth, bringing to completion the ultimate divine design for creation (Rev.21:3;22:3-5).

The establishment of community as the overarching purpose of God forms the integrative motif or ordering principle for systematic theology... When viewed in terms of the theme of community, theology proper ( the doctrine of God ) becomes the explication of the nature of the God whose goal is that of establishing community. This God is the Triune One, the community of the three persons. The Christian understanding of God as the Trinity sets forth God as the foundation for establishing the eschatological community. God is throughout eternity the community of the Father, Son, and Spirit. In history, therefore, the triune God is at work seeking to bring creation into participation in this eternal fellowship.

Sesame Street Theology...

One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn't belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?

What do you hope will ultimately emerge from the emerging church conversation for evangelicals?

My hope is that what emerges is a blessing of both teams, so that contenders for the gospel become better at evangelism, and contextualizers of the gospel walk away from some of the heretical doctrines (e.g. denial of the inerrancy of Scripture, penal substitutionary atonement, hell, and male pastors) they are considering by returning to Scripture and the legacy of faithful teachers who have guided the church in previous generations. In short, I hope for an uprising of cool Calvinists who can preach the Bible, teach the truth, fight the heretics, plant churches, evangelize the lost, comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable, and compel men to be manly. -Mark Driscoll (emph mine)

Three of these things belong together
Three of these things are kind of the same
Can you guess which one of these doesn't belong here?
Now it's time to play our game (time to play our game).

Oh, Spencer...

Spencer, you're killing me here...

(Warning- this started off as a short, breezy commentary on a couple things from Spencer's book. A few hours later, my fingers are tired from typing and I'm cussing. Read on at your own risk and don't say I didn't warn you. I didn't intend to open up a can of Driscoll, but...)

Still reading a Heretics Guide to Eternity. Still not liking what I'm reading. I can see where this seems to be going, and it frustrates me. It frustrates me because I spend a lot of time arguing with schismatics that the emerging church is not rife with heresy and heretics (in the actual non-cool meaning of the word), and those same schismatics are going to make hay with this book...

I realize that's not Spencer's fault. He's just honestly trying to describe his ideas. But at this point, with all the criticism of the emerging church and the inability of the critics to differentiate between individuals and the whole, Spencer's book equals a whole lot of 'splainin' for a whole lot of us... A lot of us who see good in the emerging church, but definitely do not reside in its outer reaches of doctrinal revisionism. Yes- there are some who have lost the plot, who seem to have come up with some creative reasons why we don't need to make disciples of all nations. But they don't describe the vast majority of us who are trying to contextualize salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ for a postmodern, post-Christendom world.

More on the book itself-

Whoa...

Now this is what I call a blog post! A review of what sounds like an intriguiging book and a great run-down of an argument for equality of roles between men and women all wrapped up into one.

A tip of the hat to Michael Kruse for a great review/post...

And a wag of the finger to those who imply that support of women in roles of leadership in the church=
ignoring Scripture!

Two ways to ruin a word...

I'm reading an advance copy of Spencer Burke's Heretic's Guide to Eternity, and though I'm not very far into it, I wanted to make a point about language...

There are two great ways to ruin a useful word.

yeah...

I like the way Scott thinks...

"...for example, when I hear that particular understandings of the atonement described as "cosmic child abuse," I think it's a pile of crap. No serious trinitarian theology can ever say such a thing and remain trinitarian. It's simply not possible. It's sloppy. And, vice versa, when I hear others saying that God is some kind of macho uber-man who "crushes Jesus" for our sins, I think exactly the same thing. Where's the trinitarian theology in that statement? It's sloppy. It's an awful way to tell the story. It's nothing more than American machismo read back into what started as an articulation of the Christian faith."

a word for young complementarians...

Having been a complementarian and having argued the position a lot over the years, let me give a word of advice to young complementarians as to which argument to drop out of your repetoire. It's this one: "[Our church] like Jesus did, only appoints men to the highest position of spiritual leadership."

Okay... is that your final answer? Is that really one of the reasons you want to stick to- that because all of Jesus' disciples were men, therefore, you are going to stick with appointing only men to leadership?

Well, here's my problem with that.

Arguably a bigger issue than male/female roles in the early church was the relationship between Jews and Gentiles. For awhile there, the first Christians (who were Jews) were somewhat skeptical that Gentiles could even be saved. And then, there were a bunch of Jewish Christians going around saying that to become a Christ follower, Gentiles needed to first become like Jews, getting circumcised and becoming obedient to the law.

Of course that was all hogwash, but they did have one very powerful piece of evidence on their side, after all...

Jesus chose only Jews for His disciples.

Yeah- just good Jewish boys like Levi and Simon and Judah (though we all know how it turned out with Judah...). It seems as though Jesus was making a powerful, powerful statement in favor of non-Gentile leadership in the church, no? Or at least as much as He was saying anything about all male leadership...

If you are going to argue that we should have only men in leadership because Jesus Himself had only men in leadership, then try to be a little more conistent. With that line of argument, Jewish men are also technically what's required.

But Jesus is our peace who has broken down every wall? In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek?

Exactly.

There are a lot of good reasons and good arguments for complementarianism (just as there are many good reasons and arguments for something else). But if I hear one more respected Bible teacher make the argument that male leadership is based on and modeled after Jesus' choice of disciples, my head's gonna explode...

I'm just sayin'... :)

Wright on women in ministry...

"What I mean is this: if we deny the basic Biblical tenets that we were made equal but distinct as male and female, with differing God-intended roles in the church and home, then homosexuality is the logical conclusion. "- Driscoll

"Part of the problem, particularly in the United States, is that cultures become so polarized that it is often assumed that if you tick one box you’re going to tick a dozen other boxes down the same side of the page – without realising that the page itself is highly arbitrary and culture-bound. We have to claim the freedom, in Christ and in our various cultures, to name and call issues one by one with wisdom and clarity, without assuming that a decision on one point commits us to a decision on others."-NT Wright

NT Wright has a great, concise work (from a speech) on women in ministry, working verse by verse through the passages most relevant here