For those wondering if the doctrine of Trinity (at its most common understanding – a three-in-one God, made up of Father, Son (Word) and Holy Spirit), here is a clip from Rob Bell’s ‘Everything is Spiritual’ tour last year, where he opens with a direct definition of the Trinity from Genesis 1:3 (where God is identified as plural – Elohim):

In John 1, the Apostle John specifically refers back to the Word in the beginning (Genesis 1:3) and makes it known who the word is.

Until we start adding man-made rules and ideas to this, it is not a “system”… it is just plain old theology…

[UPDATE]

FYI, here is a clip from the end of this presentation:

This is just fantastic. Read the whole thing, but here’s a sampling.

The true gospel will always be confused with licentiousness.
….
Listen to how Martyn Lloyd-Jones said it, “The true preaching of the gospel of salvation by grace alone always leads to the possibility of this charge being brought against it. There is no better test as to whether a man is really preaching the New Testament gospel of salvation than this, that some people might misunderstand it and misinterpret it to mean…that because you are saved by grace alone it does not matter at all what you do; you can go on sinning as much as you like because it will redound to the glory of grace. That is a very good test of gospel preaching.”

Do you hear what Lloyd-Jones is saying? If someone misinterprets your message to incite licentiousness, that’s a sign that you are preaching it rightly, because they did the same thing to Paul. So when someone accuses me of antinomianism, I rejoice! When someone says that I’m preaching just too much grace and that the eternal life I offer in Jesus’ name is just a little too free, I rejoice! If some of you are frustrated at this point in our series through Romans and are thinking, “Man, if it’s all really that certain, if I’m really that secure in the grace of God, then it seems like it doesn’t matter what I do! What do I do? Tell me what to do!” If that’s the question you’re asking, then I’ve done my job well. I’ve faithfully exposited the gospel of God as it was entrusted to Paul and recorded in the book of Romans. For that is exactly the question Paul’s hearers asked him at this point when he proclaimed the gospel of God.

Amen.

Brace yourself, folks. The Keningrid machine is churning out another worthless label of libel.

If you haven’t yet grown tired of the (over)use of Ecumenical Church of Deceit, the Apostate Church of Rome, the Spell of Bell, Purpose Drivel, and about 500 other worthless labels which amount to nothing more than libelous name-calling from Online “Discernment” Ministries (ODM’s), there’s a new term in town (full of brotherly love, I’m sure), fresh and ready to be run into the ground:

Christian Agnostic

Apparently, to be one of these, you have to 1) not be Calvinist; and 2) not be Arminian. (And apparently, you don’t have to know what ‘postmodern’ means, you just have to be able to spell it and apply it to anyone that disagrees with you, postmodern or not…)

It seems to be that the ODM’s have decided to just drop any pretense of discernment and just go with “another gospel”…

…and why you should read a book before you review it!

This past Friday night, I attended Rob Bell’s ‘The gods Aren’t Angry” Tour stop in Indianapolis. While I was tempted to write a blow-by-blow review of the presentation, I think that John over at Verum Serum has already done a pretty spot-on description of the basics of that Rob talked about.

I still would like to offer some thoughts on this, in light of the multiple arguments going on about what Rob left out and what the topic actually wasn’t about.

The Topic

The best way to describe the overall topic matter would be to say that Rob Bell was giving a narrative defense of how we are saved by faith in what God has done and not by works that we have to do. It is about God being at peace with us because of what HE sacrificed, and not an angry god that leaves us in limbo as to whether he loves us or not – requiring more and more sacrifices (works) to appease His anger.

The Audience

It was fairly apparent from the inside jokes and language chosen by Bell that his primary audience was one that already had a basic grasp of Christianity. While the aspects of the gospel message were included, this was designed to help individual Christians take the next step in understanding their relationship with and to God.

The Controversy

Most, if not almost all, of the controversy stems from the title and whether or not God is ‘angry’ with sin. To spend all of your time arguing about whether or not sin angers God is to argue about something that wasn’t the topic of Bell’s conversation, and is the equivalent of writing a review (positive or negative) of a book you haven’t read.

The Actual Message

Bell’s talk was divided into five basic parts:

Part I: The Basis of the Sacrificial System

Here, Rob talked about the origins of sacrifice, where man could see the things happening in the world that affected him, but he could not control – the sun, the stars, the moon, growing seasons, pregnancy, and on and on.  Out of this, man believed that each of these things had a ‘god’ which kept it going.  When things were not well (like with drought), it meant that gods were at conflict with each other – or that they were witholding their favor because of something man did.

So, man then created ways in which to sacrifice to the gods by making altars (Bell had a replica of the Temple altar as his only stage prop), and sacrificing things on those altars which were representative of that which they were trying to appease the gods.

The problem arose, though, in that they had no connection to these gods to know if they were angry with them or not.  If the crops did well, they wanted to make sure that they sacrificed more, lest the gods be angry over them not giving enough.  But how much was enough?  If the crops did poorly, then perhaps they hadn’t given enough, and they needed to give more.  Or they needed to give something more valuable to themselves (like their own sex organs or their own children).  This led to a vicious cycle where they needed to bless the gods and sacrifice to them more and more, and to find things more and more valuable to themselves to sacrifice to the gods.

Part II: Abraham

And so then along comes Abraham.  The One true God contacts him directly (something new) and tells him to leave his household (which means more than just physically leaving it, but to also leave all of its practices behind).  This was also something new.  Then, instead of God telling Abraham how to bless Him, God says that He will bless Abraham, and that Abraham will pass on those blessings to other people.  This was radically different.

Then, when Isaac was born, God tells Abraham to bring him up to Mount Moriah and to sacrifice him.  While much of the Christian emphasis has been on how faithful Abraham was in taking his own son to kill him (”flannelgraph that one”, Rob added), the end of the story comes when God provides the sacrifice – not Abraham.

Part III: Leviticus

When the children of Israel left Egypt, God gave them a sacrificial system.  In this, what was required for sacrifice was specified (which eliminated the need to guess how much God wanted), and instructed that the worshipper bring the sacrifice to the altar, to sacrifice it to God, and to then leave, knowing that he was at peace with God (which eliminated the need to guess whether or not God was at peace with you).  This was radically different than all of the surrounding nations and the pagans in the land, who were still following the old sacrificial systems (from Part I).

Within Leviticus, there was even an offering specifically for peace.  In this offering, the worshipper would take a part of his sacrifice to the altar, so that he could be at peace with God, and then he would take the remainder of the sacrifice back to his family and celebrate that they were at peace with God.

Part IV: Jesus 

When Jesus arrived on the scene, the sacrificial system had been taken over by the Sadducee party, which had turned it over to create their own source of wealth.  This system, they enforced with the occupying Roman forces (from the Antonia, right next to the Temple), who tortured and crucified many people who ran afoul of the system.  And so Jesus comes onto the scene and threatens this sytem in multiple ways, so he had to be killed, and was then resurrected.

In sacrificing the most precious part of Himself, Jesus, God did away with the Levitical sacrificial system and permanently made peace with those who would claim Jesus’ sacrifice as their own.

Part V: Us

In the Psalms, Micah, the gospels, Romans and Hebrews, we find out that the sacrifices are not for God – they are for us.  He desires obedience, not sacrifices.  So, in the ritual at the altar – sacrificing for your sins and then walking away from the altar, knowing you are at peace with God – the most important part for God is us being at peace with Him.

Repentence is not an act that we perform (or a sacrifice that we make) – this follows the old mode of sacrifice, where we try to give something to God so that He will make peace with us.  Rather, repentence is walking in a way that would not lead us to make this sacrifice in the first place – it is God’s gift to us.  Jesus paid a price that we don’t have to keep trying to pay, whether it is through the “right” rituals or observances or through sacrificing things He has given to us.  Rather, we are to be “living sacrifices” (an interesting contradiction/juxtaposition, Bell noted), where we give ourselves to God all of the time, knowing that we are at peace with Him.

It is during this part of the talk that Bell gives numerous personal examples that all tie into this theme.

In Short

“the gods are not angry” was an excellent presentation for any Christian, and a great way to start a conversation with an unbeliever.  For me, it put together the pieces of the sacrificial system and how this thread carried through the entire Bible.

What it didn’t do was tell everyone “you’re OK, so don’t worry because God’s not angry with you” – which is what some folks just want to believe he said.  There is an old adage that is so true:  “If you are searching for fault, you will always find what you are looking for.”  This seems to be the case with the critics of this particular tour.

Its that time again, a new podcast is out this time it focuses on what we have to do to earn the right to tell someone about the gospel. Click here to download or listen to it below.

If you’d like to contact us about the podcast you can send email me or leave a voicemail at (313) 416-0285.

Click here to subscribe to the podcast in Itunes.

Here’s the feed for every other podcast client.

 

 Justice and Mercy #17 - Crediblity to Testify: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

HT to Joseph Martino.

“The antiquity of errors keeps many, as it were, fast bound, so that they dare not emerge from them.”

~John Calvin in his commentary of 1 John

(This may beg the question: was Calvin an Emergent of his day?)

Does Ken kind of endorse woman preachers?

From what I can see so far concerning this “Passion for Christ Movement,” though not necessarily an endorsement on my part, I am pleased to tell you that it does actually appear P4CM may indeed be a legit Christian outreach geared most specifically to the black and urban community.

If you watch the videos, it appears that the leader of the Passion for Christ Movement is in fact, a woman, Blair Wingo.

I’m not making an issue of whether women should be pastors, however, Ken (or the mysterious editor) has slammed any church that has a woman pastor/teacher/leader. What’s going on here? Is it because she takes a shot at Purpose Driven?

*Update

Ken edited the article since I wrote this post. I suppose the question now is, is it ok for a woman to preach?

The other question: Is Ken endorsing Christian Rap? Here are some youtube videos of a Christian rap musician that performed at P4CM:

Update 2:

Lecrae, a Christian rapper and his performance at P4CM. The video is mostly of testimonies of kids who went to the show, interspersed with clips of Lacrae:

Nathan White of Strange Baptist Fire  [UPDATE: My apolgies to Nathan, as this article was written by Jim Bublitz of "Old Truth", which explains the gross error contained within], a site which seems to be steeped in Calvinist apologetics (though I could be wrong), has taken issue with my article from back in August on the nature of God and the probability that we humans create contradictions where none may exist for God – specifically with systematic theologies and the weighing of free will vs. predestination. In doing so, he’s reminded me of a conversation I had the other day about labels and how they are basically short-hand attempts to either build credit or discredit apart from any actual merit in the discussion.

To this point, White’s thesis fails from the get-go.

Groups like the Emerging Church would often rather place matters of controversy beyond human reach, and I fear – treat revealed truth as though it were not revealed. I think another example of this postmodern tendency can be seen in this post by Chris Lyons, who is a vocal critic of Calvinism as well as pretty much any kind of Systematic Theology.

While he did get the last part right (my criticism of systematic theologies), connecting my thesis to the ECM and postmodernism are a) an attempt to discredit via ad homenim argument, and b) factually incorrect.

My church background is with the Restoration Movement churches of Christ, which has taken an anti-systematic theology stance for going on two centuries now.

Additionally, I wonder if White understands the difference between postmodern thought and modernist thought. As an engineer/scientist, I tend to approach most issues from a modernist perspective, but both the Christian faith and the ever-increasingly revealed limitations of scientific understanding have led me to believe that even though there is an absolute truth behind everything, we, as humans, may very well not be able to fully understand this truth because of our very nature.

Additionally, the view I espoused in the article is not something ‘new’ or ‘postmodern’, but one that has existed for centuries in both Christian and Jewish tradition, even going so far as to reference secular allegorical work from 1884 (Flatland), which was used to explain this position, as well.

Interestingly, though, he takes issue at my referencing the real and actual roots of Calvinism in Greek Fatalism, studied by St. Augustine and included in his writings, and further incorporated in Calvin’s understanding of predestination…

Next, White quotes my article, where I point out that the basis of many of these systemactic views may be correct, even if their application is not:

“I would posit that the most accurate view possible for us to attain is in accepting that the basis of each of these views […] are all correct and not in contradiction to one another.”

He comments:

The fact that it has always been understood throughout church history that there are obvious contradictions and incompatibilities between each of these views is something that Chris expects us to overlook.

Actually, no I do not. The arguments of free will vs. predestination were never considered all that important by Hebrew scholars prior to Jesus, nor within the church for the first many centuries of its existence. What forced these viewes against one another was primarily the fuel of the Age of Reason, which pitted apparently conflicting scientific views against one another. If we’re going to use Church history as an argument, then one has to wonder how it got along for the fifteen centuries before Calvin wandered along.

There are numerous examples of Christian and Jewish scholars who have reconciled the notion of free will and God’s omniscience over the centuries. For example, from wikipedia:

Jewish philosophy stresses that free will is a product of the intrinsic human soul, using the word neshama (from the Hebrew root n.sh.m. or .× .ש.מ meaning “breath”), but the ability to make a free choice is through Yechida (from Hebrew word “yachid”, יחיד, singular), the part of the soul which is united with God, the only being that is not hindered by or dependent on cause and effect (thus, freedom of will does not belong to the realm of the physical reality, and inability of natural philosophy to account for it is expected).

White writes next:

Supposedly, they are all different angles on the holistic truth which can’t be known; there are no contradictions, and we are asked to simply take his word for it that this is a mystery that we should not try to explain. On the surface, this thinking (which is common in postmodernism) seems very tolerant, but it’s actually very intolerant towards anyone who dares to declare that any one of these views are the truth while the other views are contradictory and false.

Where should I begin?

To begin with, I am not asking anyone to “take my word for it” – I am asking the reader to examine the scientific truth (our inability to understand how time works beyond our own dimension of time – one way, one dimension) and our trying to reconcile this with religious truth (that God has preordained certain events, that God has granted man the ability to choose to obey Him). When we pit free will versus predestination, we end up deciding that our limited scientific understanding of time has rendered an aspect of religious truth to be false or misunderstood. I, on the other hand, am suggesting that we KNOW that our human, scientific understanding of time beyond our own dimension is (and always will be) insufficient because of our own physical limitations – limitations not ascribed to God (with evidence in Genesis 1:1 and elsewhere). Because we KNOW that we can’t fully understand the scientific truth, why on earth should we discount religious truth, based on our limited scientific knowledge?

The second part of White’s statement (on tolerance/intolerance) has nothing to do with my position, and trying to bring in the boogeyman of postmodernism only clouds the issue (because it is a codeword for ‘heretic’ in many Reformed/Evangelical circles). I don’t really care if the position is tolerant or not, all I care about is if it is more encompassing of the truth than any one reductionist view.

Continuing, Nathan writes:

Later on the page Chris Lyons explains that to accept any one of these views as being the true teaching that is revealed in the Word of God is equivalent to putting God in a box.

From another article, he quotes that:

God should be in a box. What’s the alternative? God has no limitations on what He can be like or act like? That is frightening. God Himself is limited by His own nature. He can’t lie. He can’t sin. He can’t go out of existence. God’s box – the definition of what He is like – is what makes Him God and a Person we can love and trust and glorify. If God isn’t in some kind of a box, He would be arbitrary.

Unfortunately, he is making a complete apples to oranges comparison here, and building a straw man. In my article, the “box” these systems try to force God into is not a “box” made up of religious/philosophical truth (i.e. “God can’t sin”). Rather, the “box” these systems try to force God into is a scientific one made up of time and space, specifically time, which we do not (and can not) understand beyond our own sphere.

While I suspect that White would agree that God exists beyond His own creation, I would just point out that in Genesis 1:1, God already exists (i.e. “before the beginning”), and that when God gives His name (”I AM”), he also gives us a glimpse into His nature. If physicists are correct that there are dimensions of time and space beyond our own (for which there is ample evidence), then it is not putting God in a box to suggest that He is in any and all dimensions which exist beyond our own. It is, however, putting God in a box to suggest that He sees and interacts with time in the same way that we do. In fact, it is much easier to argue that God purposely put himself “in the box” in the form of Jesus, and that Jesus’ limitations to our dimensions would explain many of the differences in aspects between Father and Son, and to why Jesus couldn’t know “the day or the hour” of his return.

Oddly, White goes on (once again incorrectly trying to paint me as postmodern and Emergent) to quote Calvin on why we should accept a degree of mystery in predestination, and then pretty much does what I see many Calvinists do – to claim in theory to accept mystery, but to outright reject it in practice.

He then goes on to attempt to portray the systematization of predestination into the same sphere as that of the concept of Trinity.

But really, it’s no different than another systematized concept that was once the subject of much debate, and yet is embraced by many postmodernists such as Chris Lyons, and that is the Trinity. There’s mystery in it – to be sure, but we are still able to systematically define it within the bounds of scripture, and we believe it is true – because that’s what the bible teaches about our triune and sovereign God.

This is like saying that Cold Fusion must be true because the Law of Gravity is true. Again dealing with apples, oranges and men made of straw.
With the concept of Trinity, there are systematized understandings which go beyond scripture, but the concept of Trinity within scripture is pretty clear, though indeed not fully understood. Genesis 1:1-3 identifies the three parts of the Trinity and John 1 identifies Jesus as the Word in Genesis. There’s no trying to bring scientific constraints into the picture to force a choice between two true aspects of religious truth.

The sad thing with these theological systems (like Calvinism, Arminianism, Open Theism, etc.) is not in what lies at their core: A desire to understand important aspects of God. What is sad is that they are each only aspects of the truth, not the entire truth. The tragic thing occurs when White, Mike Ratliff (”There are two views concerning the Gospel of Jesus Christ. First, there is what we call Calvinism. Then, there are varying degrees of unbelief”), Spurgeon (”Calvinism is the gospel”) and others raise their systematic theologies to the level of scripture.

It is at this point that Calvinism (or any -ism) truly is “another gospel” all together.

Dan Phillips writes that you’re either just like a watchdoggie and you’re all cool and sweet and in with the in crowd, or you’re not and you’re probably some sort of commie, or nerd or something.

This post could be summed up in any number of ways, here’s just a few:
We’re #1 we’re #1!!!
Go Bayside, beat Valley!
Springfield sucks!
WOLVERINES!!!!
USA USA USA USA!!!!!!!

Edit:
I’d like to give a big congrats to the writers here at CRN.info for being such compelling writers that we are a higher priority to read by the anonymous coward known only as “editor” over at C?N than Team Pyro is, who incidentally shows up on their blogroll. WE’RE #1 WE’RE #1!!!!