Since I’m not reposting/updating the “Desanitizing Christmas” series this year (though I’ll likely do some updates next year to work in some objections an EO friend of mine has with my contention that Mary did not continue to be a virgin after Jesus’ birth, among other issues), here’s a quick ‘toon that hits on several of the issues I’ve touched upon in the past:
I am nearly finished with Justification and, as I have said at some point in each post I have made on this book, I am thoroughly amazed at the depth of NT Wright’s understanding. His ability to see an entire letter in one stroke is mind-boggling and a profound example for all exegetes and preachers.
I have just a short thought for today, one that will hopefully generate some conversation about the issue it raises. Here it is:
The Gentiles are fellow heirs! They are part of the same body! They are co-sharers in the promise through the Gospel! And, tellingly, this bringing-the-world-together gospel was the main aim of God’s grace in calling Paul to be an apostle.
Why? What’s the point? Yes, say the scoffers, ethnic divisions are broken down, we know that, but why make such a fuss about it? The answer is that the church, thus united through the grace of God in the death of Jesus, is the sign to the principalities and powers that their time is up. Ephesians is not about the ordering of the church by the gospel for its own sake. ‘Ecclesiology’ may sound secondary and irrelevant to some ardent enthusiasts for the old perspective, but that could just be because they are unwilling to face the consequences of Paul’s ecclesiology. For him, the church is constituted, and lives its life in public, in such a way as to confront the rulers of the world with the news that there is ‘another king named Jesus’ (Acts 17:7).
Why should not the point of justification itself be precisely this, that, in constituting the church as the single family who are a sign to the powers that Jesus is Lord and that they are not, it serves directly the mission of the kingdom of God in the world? It cannot be, can it, that part of the old perspective’s reaction to the new is the tacit sense that once we associate ecclesiology with the very center of the gospel we will have to go all the way and rethink the political role and task of the church? Surely the wonderful ‘objective’ scholarship of so many old perspective exponents would not allow such a motive to affect exegesis! (NT Wright, Justification, 173, 174)
What do you think? Could he be right?
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“Do we have the same angry, demanding gods and goddesses, who are never satisfied? Do we just call them by different names?” – Rob Bell, The gods Aren’t Angry
Like all the best religions, fear of climate change satisfies our need for guilt, and self-disgust, and that eternal human sense that technological progress must be punished by the gods. And the fear of climate change is like a religion in this vital sense, that it is veiled in mystery, and you can never tell whether your acts of propitiation or atonement have been in any way successful.” – Boris Johnson
And at noon Elijah mocked them, saying, “Cry aloud, for he is a god. Either he is musing, or he is relieving himself, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.” – I Kings 18:27
How should Christians react when the gods of the world receive mortal wounds? This is a question I’ve discussed recently with my wife and a number of friends – with a gamut of responses. In particular, I’m interested in the ‘god’ of warmism (part of the pantheon of secular environmentalism). Having sifted through many of the 4000 documents (emails, computer code, raw data) released in the ‘ClimateGate’ scandal, I think it is safe to say that “warmism” – as a religion – has been dealt a serious, if not fatal, blow.
I’m not going to regurgitate everything that has been written about this enlightening scandal in great detail, since many others (from across the political spectrum) have done a bang-up job. Rather, I’m first going to go far enough into it to highlight “warmism” and its key levers, briefly explore the religious angle of warmism, then move into the historical spectrum of responses we might view in Judaism and Christianity toward false religions, and finally, calculate what might be an appropriate response.
ClimateGate and the Fall of Warmism
Steven D. Levitt, in Superfreakonomics, makes a fairly convincing case that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is more of a faith than a science:
It is understandable, therefore, that the movement to stop global warming has taken on the feel of a religion. The core belief is that man inherited a pristine Eden, has sinned greatly by polluting it, and must now suffer lest we all perish in a fiery apocalypse. James Lovelock, who might be considered a high priest of this religion, writes in a confessional language that would feel at home in any liturgy: “[W]e misused energy and overpopulated the Earth . . . [I]t is much too late for sustainable development; what we need is a sustainable retreat”.
It is this same mentality among the “true believers” that fueled the Population Bomb scaremongering of the 60’s and the Global Cooling panic of the 70’s. Which touches upon the key ‘need’ of this – and other – religions:
Read the rest of this entry »
I am nearing the end of Justification by NT Wright. What an amazing read! I cannot tell you, in a short space as thought for the day, how important this book is, but I can give you snippets of its importance and let you decide for yourself. Here’s a wonderful, beautiful snippet of delight:
But the great story of Scripture, from creation and covenant right on through to the New Jerusalem, is constantly about God’s overflowing, generous, creative love–God’s concern, if you like, for the flourishing and well-being of everything else. Of course, this too will redound to God’s glory because God, as the Creator, is glorified when creation is flourishing and able to praise him gladly and freely. And of course there are plenty of passages where God does what he does precisely not because anybody deserves it but simply ‘for the sake of his own name.’ But ‘God’s righteousness’ is regularly invoke in Scripture, not when God is acting thus, but when his concern is going out to those in need, particularly to his covenant people…God’s concern for God’s glory is precisely rescued from the appearance of divine narcissism because God, not least God as Trinity, is always giving out, pouring out, lavishing generous love on undeserving people, undeserving Israel and an undeserving world (NT Wright, Justification, 70-71).
There’s more to it than that, of course, but I promised a snippet.
I agree with him. There is a big-arch to Scripture and we do well to notice it, preach it, and live it. Oh Happiness! There is grace enough for us and the whole human race! And He wants us to know it.**
**disclaimer: that is not, in any way, intended to be a plug for ‘universalism’ of any stripe. so please, please, don’t go there.
I’d like to share a thought or two with you about worship this morning. Specifically I’d like to share a couple of thoughts with you about a special time of the worship that Christians refer to in various ways—communion, the Lord’s Supper, Eucharist. It is a most special time during the worship and one that I have participated in regularly since sometime in 1983.
In the tradition I used to belong to, the Christian Church/Church of Christ, communion is a weekly part of the worship. Sometimes it is offered near the end of the worship and sometimes it is offered in the middle of the worship just before the sermon—it depends upon the local church’s tradition. When my wife and I were looking for a new church to belong to and worship with it was essential to us that, regardless of where in the worship it was offered, communion be offered on a weekly basis. It is important to us and it is one of those essential aspects of worship we were unwilling to part with.
The church we now belong to, an Anglican Church, offers communion on a weekly basis and we are glad for it. That’s where today’s post was created (but not in six, literal 24-hour days). It was a moment not written in the scheduled liturgy. Thus I am certain it was a Holy Spirit moment—an unwritten moment of pure joy.
You see the denomination I used to belong to is very serious about the Lord’s Supper and maybe rightly, absurdly, so. One is not allowed to have communion until one has been properly baptized and gone through all sorts of other hoops (made the right confessions, given the secret handshake, and participated in three or four years of mandatory pot-luck dinners). This is probably generally true of most denominations; whatever.
It seems if there’s one thing that keeps many Evangelicals up at night, it has to be defining exactly who is and who isn’t an Evangelical. There’s been all sorts of attempts to craft different statements of faiths and covenants that spell this out. A couple famous examples are the Lausanne Covenant or the NEA Statement of Faith. One of the newest attempts to define the boundaries of Evangelicalism is a document entitled “An Evangelical Manifesto“. Now in and of themselves, these documents don’t bother me too much. Most of them are vague enough that a majority of people who call themselves Evangelicals wouldn’t have much of a problem agreeing with them. But then again, if that’s the case, why are these documents need at all? Why do the framers of these documents feel compelled to draw these proverbial lines in the sand?
This article from the online publication, Patrol Magazine, attempts to answer that question. And the answer the author gives is largely a negative one – it is out of a sense of desperation and a last ditch effort of self-preservation. It’s perhaps best stated in the following paragraph:
The fight to define evangelicalism in its latter days also operates on the mistaken premise that an imagined theological purity or conformance to a “lost” orthodoxy, rather than an emphasis on ethics, spiritual discipline and mystery, will revive the power of the Christian church. It is astonishing that so many intelligent Christians seem to believe there is a deficit in emphasis on evangelism and scriptural literalism, and that, if the hatches are just battened down on a more solid “worldview,” evangelicalism can resume explaining the universe to new generations of believers. In this respect, evangelicalism’s true believers resemble the faction of the Republican Party that asserts with a straight face that returning to “core principles,” and not a radical restructuring of priorities, will bring waves of Americans back to the right wing.
I find a lot of truth in this statement. It seems that whenever a group spend a great deal of time and energy in defining it’s boundaries it is inevitable that the original mission and values get lost to some extent. In attempting to ensure that people say they believe the right things, it become very easy to push doing the right things to the back burner. Perhaps this is why it is so difficult for these types of organizations to maintain the same level of influence from generation to generation. The values that one generation recognizes as life changing simply become words and statements that the next generation is expected to sign on to. Whether a person has wrestled with and come to terms with these values is of secondary concern.
So am I advocating that we do away with all statements of faith and creedal confessions? Of course not. I believe that having a common starting point for discussion is an important element within churches. But I also believe that we need to be careful that are creeds and statements of faith serve the purpose of bringing Christians together rather than keeping the outsiders out. If anything, reciting a historical creed should make us remember out brothers and sisters who have gone before us and struggled with the deep questions of their time, and we should remember that many of their deep questions are questions that people are wresting with today. Additionally, we would be wise to remember that no creed or statement of faith can replace a real encounter with the living Christ.
Grace and peace.
I’d like to do just that, which I assure you is no small task. I continue to find myself torn between the absolute necessity to write research papers and finish projects for my graduate work on the one hand and my passion and love for debating theological issues on the other. Right now, to be sure, I should be stretching sentences across my laptop that have something to do with ‘vocabulary acquisition,’ but that paper only has to be five pages, APA format (which means double-spaced!), and only a couple of references (and I have already completed my reference page which contains at least 8 different books, journal articles, and web pages).
Clearly, then, the importance of theological conversation is outweighing the need to stay in control of a 4.0 in graduate school. But I digress.
It is true that we have been through this over and over and over again concerning justification, but it is equally true that we always end up back in a similar position: stalemate. That is wholly unsatisfying. As was recently pointed out in another thread, sometimes these conversations become mere places for a ‘monthly colonic,’ which, however disturbing that may be, assures us that some people are merely full of it when it comes to these conversations. I find these conversations satisfying and stimulating.
I am also happy we can provide a sufficient cleansing ground for the angst of others.
So here’s another avenue in the discussion of justification. NT Wright, anathema to the cultured despisers among us, begins chapter four of his book Justification by pointing to the work of Alistair McGrath. I have not read McGrath’s work at any level so I am quoting here only as far as Wright does, but the quote is so potent, so theologically powerful, that it is worth even a secondhand quote. Thus,
The concept of justification and the doctrine of justification must be carefully distinguished. The concept of justification is one of many employed with the Old and New Testaments, particularly the Pauline corpus, to describe God’s saving action toward his people. It cannot lay claim to exhaust, nor adequately characterise in itself, the richness of the biblical understanding of salvation in Christ. (McGrath, as quoted by Wright, page 80, his emphasis.)
Now Wright interprets this for us in the very next paragraph:
This is highly significant. McGrath is creating hermeneutical space in which one might say: there are many equally biblical ways of talking about how God saves people through Jesus Christ, and justification is but one of them. This (for instance) enables us at once to not that the four Gospels, where the term ‘justification’ is scarce, are not for that reason to be treated as merely ancillary to, or perhaps preparatory for, the message of Paul–as has sometimes happened, at least de facto, in the Western church. (Wright, 80)
Then the coup de grace comes where Wright finishes McGrath’s quote and knocks the ball out of the park:
The doctrine of justification has come to develop a meaning quite independent of its biblical origins, and concerns the means by which man’s relationship to God is established. The church has chosen to subsume its discussion of the reconciliation of man to God under the aegis of justification, thereby giving the concept an emphasis quite absent from the New Testament. The ‘doctrine of justification’ has come to bear a meaning with dogmatic theology which is quite independent of its Pauline origins. (McGrath, as quoted by Wright, page 80, his emphasis)
Wright goes on to point out that it is this statement, and statements like it, that set the ‘guardians of truth’ back on their heels. And I agree.
Someone asked me the other day what I meant when I wrote something to the effect that ‘we don’t know much about the Gospel.’ Well, these quotes move in the direction of what I was getting at. Of course Wright also notes that he is putting for a hypothesis based upon the available evidence, but from where I sit it is a mighty powerful hypothesis. What if what we have been taught, what we have believed, what we have taught is not entirely, wholly, all that needs to be said? What if we in the Western church place far, way too much emphasis on the ‘I take Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior’ bit?
What is there is more?
Shouldn’t there be more?
What is wrong if there is more? And if there is, is it not incumbent upon all preachers and teachers and disciples of Jesus Christ to preach the entire Gospel? What if American individualism has so influenced the Gospel that it has corrupted the clear biblical message that God means to fix the world through the Sons and daughters of Abraham? What if God means to do more for the world than merely save those who are able to repent, confess, believe, and be baptized?
I read this by Wright, I see the carefully reasoned exegesis, and I apply what I have already preached about and believed and I see that this makes far more biblical sense than mere hypothesis would suggest. What if there is ‘grace enough for us and the whole human race’ and God means to bring that grace to the world through the sons and daughters of Abraham?
I’m thinking through this with you, so I’m not making any definitive suggestions one way or the other. I’m just inviting you to think through the possibility that there is more to the Gospel than, “Thank God, I am saved!”
For those of you who ever wondered what Joe Cocker was really singing about at Woodstock, I present this captioned version of With a Little Help from My Friends. Enjoy!
Birthday Greetings from Joe Cocker
Regina | MySpace Video
I’m finally getting around to reading Justification by NT Wright. I’m 40 pages in, and I am happy to say that Wright agrees with me. I do believe that I have finally found a theologian who agrees with the way I have always read Scripture.
It is terribly hard to put the book down, although I must because I have graduate responsibilities to tend to this afternoon, so I wish to give you a glimpse. I know others have written about the book or quoted it here or there. What I propose to do is read and think through the book just as I did with Jesus For President (which, by the way, I have gained some clarity on in recent days, especially in regard to what is referred to pejoratively as ‘redemptive violence’; more on that another time).
So here’s a word from Pastor Wright:
It is central to Paul, but almost entirely ignored in perspectives old, new and otherwise, that God had a single plan all along through which he intended to rescue the world and the human race, and that this single plan was centered upon the call of Israel, a call which Paul saw coming to fruition in Israel’s representative, the Messiah. Read Paul like this, and you can keep all the jigsaw pieces on the table. Ignore this great narrative, and you will have to sweep half of them out of sight or try the Stasi trick. (35; his emphasis)
Wright is simply brilliant here. The last major series of sermons I preached to my former family dealt with just this subject and traced the story of faith from the the creation, to the fall, to the call, through the prophets, to the Messiah, to the New Heavens and the New Earth. It’s all there: We are sons of Abraham.
I hope to share more of this wonderful book with you as I read along. I’m not trying to step on any toes of those who have already written reviews or quoted from the book. I just hope to share some of his wisdom and the beauty of his work in the Word with you who might not otherwise dare to read it.
Blessings.
“God is not moody or capricious; He knows no seasons of change. He has a single relentless stance toward us: He loves us. He is the only God man has ever heard of who loves sinners. False gods–the gods of human manufacturing–despise sinners, but the Father of Jesus loves all, no matter what they do.”
-Brennan Manning
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