Olson, "Inerrnacy & Definition/s"

Olson:

Kenton (“Kent”) Sparks is professor of biblical studies at Eastern University (American Baptist) in Pennsylvania. He has authored books such as Ancient Texts for the Study of the Hebrew Bible and God’s Word in Human Words. He identifies as an evangelical. Some critics will question that identification, but I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt and view “evangelical” as a fuzzy category.

In my opinion, a person can be evangelical without adhering all the way to every part of the so-called “received evangelical tradition” (stamped as that tends to be by Old Princeton theology).
Without question Sparks’ argument is bold—at least among evangelical and relatively conservative Protestants. It will be interesting to see how it plays out among moderate to progressive (postconservative) evangelicals.

What’s especially interesting about the book is Sparks’ response to the Old Testament “texts of terror”—something we have discussed here quite a lot. If I understand his thesis correctly, it is very similar to what I have argued here—that the Old Testament must be interpreted in light of the New and that, at least occasionally, reports in the Old Testament (about what God commanded people to do) must be relativized in light of the character of God revealed in Jesus Christ who is the Word of God in person.

Here is one especially clear statement of the book’s overall thesis:

Scripture, as a book written by fallible human beings, is itself a book of theological discourse that that advances the truth but also stands in need of redemption. Scripture is beautiful and broken, and it is being read and studied in the church, and sometimes outside of the church, by beautiful and broken human beings. Nevertheless, Christians have theological and philosophical reasons to suppose that, when we read Scripture well, we are able to understand it. And as we understand it, we shall find that God’s truth and beauty run deeper, and are more potent, than the brokenness that God is healing. (88)

In other words, according to Sparks, there are records in Scripture that simply cannot be trusted as true because of the Bible’s humanity. He begins with blatant contradictions such as the accounts of Judas’ betrayal of Jesus and death in Matthew and Acts; they cannot be reconciled. Most people are not particularly bothered by that. Only neo-fundamentalists find it necessary to try to harmonize them. The differences are not important theologically. One can easily respond to them by saying that, in spite of such contradictions, the Bible is “perfect with respect to purpose” (John Piper). We can chalk such flaws to human fallibility so long as we hold to a dynamic rather than verbal view of inspiration. (By “verbal inspiration” here I mean the idea that God led the writers to the exact words he wanted them to use. By “dynamic inspiration” here I mean the idea that God led the writers to the ideas he wanted them to record but allowed their personalities and cultures and fallible memories, etc., to affect what they wrote.)

What will trouble many evangelicals more is Sparks’ handling of the Old Testament texts of terror:

Where we judge that Scripture presents God as saying or doing something he would not say or do, we should confess that “these texts tell us more about the purposes of their human authors than about the purposes of God.” We will simply admit that the author of Deuteronomy wrongly believed (as Luther did) that God told his people to slaughter their enemies. To express in theological jargon, Scripture includes both “God-talk” (first-order words from God to humanity) and “god-talk-talk” (mistaken, second-order accounts of what God has supposedly said. This is an important distinction…. (105-106)

Telling the difference between these two types of texts is a matter of Christological discernment, not cultural accommodation. Sparks adamantly rejects any idea that his proposal is based on modern sentiments. To those who disagree he rightly points back to church fathers such as Gregory of Nazianzus and John Chrysostom and others who freely admitted that the texts of terror in question could not be taken at face value. The way premodern Christians handled them was to allegorize them. That method isn’t open to us. So where does that leave us?

 For the rest, click HERE.

--Nick

Chief Justice Roberts & ObamaCare

Independent Journal:

Before you look to do harm to Chief Justice Roberts or his family, it’s important that you think carefully about the meaning – the true nature — of his ruling on Obama-care. The Left will shout that they won, that Obama-care was upheld and all the rest. Let them.

It will be a short-lived celebration.

Here’s what really occurred — payback. Yes, payback for Obama’s numerous, ill-advised and childish insults directed toward SCOTUS.

Chief Justice Roberts actually ruled the mandate, relative to the commerce clause, was unconstitutional. That’s how the Democrats got Obama-care going in the first place. This is critical. His ruling means Congress can’t compel American citizens to purchase anything. Ever. The notion is now officially and forever, unconstitutional. As it should be.

Next, he stated that, because Congress doesn’t have the ability to mandate, it must, to fund Obama-care, rely on its power to tax. Therefore, the mechanism that funds Obama-care is a tax. This is also critical. Recall back during the initial Obama-care battles, the Democrats called it a penalty, Republicans called it a tax. Democrats consistently soft sold it as a penalty. It went to vote as a penalty. Obama declared endlessly, that it was not a tax, it was a penalty. But when the Democrats argued in front of the Supreme Court, they said ‘hey, a penalty or a tax, either way’. So, Roberts gave them a tax. It is now the official law of the land — beyond word-play and silly shenanigans. Obama-care is funded by tax dollars. Democrats now must defend a tax increase to justify the Obama-care law.

Finally, he struck down as unconstitutional, the Obama-care idea that the federal government can bully states into complying by yanking their existing medicaid funding. Liberals, through Obama-care, basically said to the states — ‘comply with Obama-care or we will stop existing funding.’ Roberts ruled that is a no-no. If a state takes the money, fine, the Feds can tell the state how to run a program, but if the state refuses money, the federal government can’t penalize the state by yanking other funding. Therefore, a state can decline to participate in Obama-care without penalty. This is obviously a serious problem. Are we going to have 10, 12, 25 states not participating in “national” health-care? 

Suddenly, it’s not national, is it?

I'm curious to see how this comes about. I'm not certain if the prediction will come to pass, but the idea doesn't strike me as absurd. 

For the rest, click HERE.

--Nick

Hopped and Bothered; Flying Dog Gonzo Imperial Porter

Flying Dog -- Gonzo Imperial Porter

Alcohol content 9.2%. The pour is thick and silky. Dark as space. Thin brown head. Aroma is roasted and almost toffee like. Alcohol essence. The first taste is like velvet, with cocoa beans coating between your teeth. Almost chewy with the hefty malts. Almost a burnt sensation over the tongue. Very sweet. A tad bit of singed cherries. The finish is dry and long, with a creaminess coating the tongue. Very thick.

Buy if: no buts. BUY.

Overall: Creamy, rich, deep and with the best coffee and chocolate flavoring I've yet encountered.

5 out of 5.

EXCELLENT. 

--Nick

A Crucified Prism, or Gods and Lobbyists

At what point does God become our political ally?

For me, I used to think God was on the side of America, especially around 2004 and Bush (who I still like) was seeking reelection. It was very easy to think that YHWH had a personal stake in America reconstructing the Middle East into our image. 

Then things shifted for me. I began to wonder why God was on our side, and this became especially clear when more liberal Christians began to say he wasn't on their side, and our enemies were even more vocal (and active) about suggesting that He was siding with them. That made me pause.

So, who was right? Us? The other us in the camp that we don't like? Or the people we want to kill, and want to kill us?

Mind you, I'm very nervous about swinging the political pendulum in one direction so far as to alienate the message revealed in Jesus. I don't want to forsake the poor, but I don't want to become so enamored with pacifism as to allow people to slaughter other people.

So, what do we do? Is there some middle ground to occupy?

I don't think so.

I can speculate and say that if you really look into the Bible, you can see exegesis strongly supporting free market capitalism. Or socialism.

I guess the question is rather this: through what lens do we view the world?

I don't think it is as simple as voting Democrat or Republican or Libertarian. I don't see Jesus embodied in any of the political candidates or past American presidents. I realize this is highly idealized, so I'm not going to insist on such things in a dogmatic fashion.

Most Christians would say that they view it through Jesus. I think they are sincere and are doing the best they can. However, I would like to simply present this snapshot of what I think the kingdom of God looks like, and how this should transcend our politics.

Just something that crossed my heart.

--Nick

Christian Smith, "The Narcissism of Small Differences"

Christian Smith:

There is something very strange about the Reformed Protestant world in which I grew up and which I have since left. By “Reformed Protestant world” here I mean circles of conservative Presbyterianism represented by institutions such as Westminster Theological Seminary, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC), the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), the “neo-Reformed” movement, and so on.

I am sure that these dynamics apply in many non-Reformed and non-Presbyterian circles, but I limit what I say here to them, since I know them best.

Almost all of the people that I know in this world are really good folk. I owe a great deal to them. But for some odd reason, they do love to make huge controversies out of minor issues. The smallest points of doctrine become major subjects of storm and battle. Endless attention and energy gets spent on matters that, with a bit of distance, are clearly tempests in teapots.

Doctrinal controversy seems almost to function as a form of community entertainment, something to prevent things from getting too boring. So, various of them continually “bringing charges against” others of them in their congregations or presbyteries within the denominational “court systems,” which seems to be a never-ending source of interest.

I have always chalked up these pervasive making-mountains-out-of-molehills tendencies to a kind of subcultural trauma suffered during the early-twentieth-century modernist-fundamentalist battles, in which the conservative Presbyterians were trounced in the 1920s—and in particular to losing Princeton Theological Seminary to the liberals (which gave rise to Westminster Seminary).
A kind of post-traumatic-stress syndrome beset the conservative Presbyterian subculture from that trauma, it seems to me, which gave rise to the kind of nervous “doctrinal legalism” that continues today. (Limiting “leadership” to [de facto] white males—the homogeneity of the composition of annual General Assembly photos published in denominational magazines is astounding!— cannot help either, seeing how that tends to skew discussion more toward “principles” than relationships, but that is another story.)

Recently, however, I came across a concept in psychology that I think sheds illuminating light on the tendencies described above: the narcissism of small differences. Now, I am no advocate of allowing psychology to colonize Christian truth—far too much of that has already happened in both mainline and evangelical Christianity. But the narcissism of small differences is too revealing to be ignored.

The term was coined by Sigmund Freud (which unfortunately means that those who most need to understand it will be the least willing to take it seriously). The basic idea is this: groups of people are often most sensitive and snotty toward those who they are most socially alike.  

Human groups do not have their fiercest conflicts with those who are quite different from them. Instead, they display the greatest pettiness and viciousness in fighting those who they look the most like.

For the rest, click HERE. 

--Nick

Abraham Lincoln "Twilight Hunter" pic

HAH.

--Nick

Bonhoeffer Quote

“There is no part of the world, no matter how lost, no matter how godless, that has not been accepted by God in Jesus Christ and reconciled to God. Whoever perceives the body of Jesus Christ in faith can no longer speak of the world as if it were lost, as if it were separated from God; they can no longer separate themselves in clerical pride from the world. The world belongs to Christ, and only in Christ is the world what it is ... Christ has died for the world, and Christ is Christ only in the midst of the world”

(Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 67)

Thanks to Robin Parry for this. Quite good. 

--Nick

Hopped and Bothered; Stone's Smoked Vanilla Bean Porter

Stone -- Smoked Vanilla Bean Porter

Alcohol Content 5.9%. Instant vanilla aroma, mixed with smoke. Reminds me of a campfire. Dark black color. Almost milky darkness. Roasted malt is overpowering, with strong carbonation. The roast is strong, almost cancelling the vanilla. The finish is thin, creamy and rich. The excessive carbonation is distracting. Pitch perfect finish.

Buy if: you are a fan of Stone, and want a vanilla kick.

Overall: Though the flavoring is rich and creamy, the carbonation is too much and ultimately the finish is far too thin to sustain it.

3 out of 5.

--Nick

McKnight, "Re/Irresistible Grace"

McKnight:

Roger Olson is right: at the heart of the debate between Calvinism and Arminianism (or non-Calvinism) is this question: Is grace resistible or irresistible? To this end, I will begin a new series Monday (so come back to see what it will be about). But today’s post is Roger’s chp “Yes to Grace: No to Irresistible Grace/Monergism.”

I will put my cards on the table first: I believe those Calvinists who push hard for irresistible or effectual grace sketch a God who coerces and I am convinced, regardless of their contentions, that they effectively (and effectually) deny free will. If grace is irresistible, it is not chosen; if it is irresistible, humans aren’t free to say No to God. If that it is the case, … time to move to Roger’s chp.

Do you think irresistible grace is defensible morally? Does it deny free will for it to be true? If you and I were capable of saving an orphanage full of children who were starving and we chose instead to save only some, would we be called good? [Where does this analogy break down?]

Big one: If grace is resistible, is high Calvinism undermined?

For the rest, click HERE. 

--Nick

Jones, "Bonhoeffer & Christianity"

I liked this. Quite eye-opening.

Tony Jones:

Everyone wants to claim Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Liberals like his political action on behalf of an oppressed people. Evangelicals love his “religionless Christianity” and his critique of his students at Union Seminary in New York. That he is a complex historic figure is currently on display, brought to a head by Eric Metaxas.

Metaxas, an accomplished author and unapologetically conservative firebrand, wrote a popular biography of Bonhoeffer that was met with plaudits by fellow conservatives, winning Book of the Year in 2010 by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. Metaxas got another jewel in his crown when he gave the plenary address this year at the National Prayer Breakfast.

The problem? Metaxas’s account of Bonhoeffer’s life has been almost universally derided by Bonhoeffer scholars. They say that he simply took bits and pieces of Bonhoeffer’s biography — all cribbed from earlier books — and pasted them together to make his point that Bonhoeffer was actually a conservative cultural warrior who repudiated liberal Christianity and considered fundamentalists in America to be in the same plight as German Jews.

In the Association of Contemporary Church Historians Quarterly, for instance, Victoria J. Barnett of the US Holocaust Museum writes,

There are two central problems here. The first is that he has a very shaky grasp of the political, theological, and ecumenical history of the period. Hence he has pieced together the historical and theological backdrop for the Bonhoeffer story using examples from various works, sometimes completely out of context and often without understanding their meaning. He focuses too much on minor details and overlooks some of the major ones (such as the role of the Lutheran bishops and the “intact” churches). The second is that theologically, the book is a polemic, written to make the case that Bonhoeffer was in reality an evangelical Christian whose battle was not just against the Nazis but all the liberal Christians who enabled them.

 For the rest of the post, click HERE.

--Nick

"Free Will in Heaven?"

Richard Coords:

Due to the contradictory and confusing nature of Calvinism, Calvinists often struggle to articulate their own arguments. So Arminians with whom they are in dialogue, are often found having to first unscramble their own logic puzzles, in order to provide an answer. 

One such Calvinist logic puzzle is the following: "In Heaven, we will not be able to sin, and yet we will be free, which proves the doctrine of Compatibilism, in that God can irresistibly determine our actions, while yet we remain free in what we choose."

As a response to what kind of free will that we will possess in Heaven, I personally think that we will have a full, free range of libertarian free will in Heaven, but that there is an added dynamic that is overlooked, because our sin nature is the only nature that we presently know. And so we perceive a future through that lens alone. 

For the rest, click HERE.

--Nick

Greg Boyd's "Godless Sermon"

Greg Boyd:

We’re not called to be big. We’re not called to be mass-marketing Jesus. We’re not called to have fancy churches. We’re not called to have high steeples. We’re not called to have soft pews. We’re not called to have great programs…

What we’re called to do is love.

Love is by definition, sacrificial.

It’s got to grieve the Lord to the core of his being when he sees… the American church… that is so up in other things. We’re to be followers of the Lord who said “If you don’t give up all your possessions, you can’t be my disciples”…

[Christians say they can't help because they have their own problems.] But what are the problems that so many American Christians think they have? Well, you look at what they do with their resources, that’s how you tell what their problems are. It’s the problems of upgrading your curtains! It’s the problem of upgrading your car! It’s the problem of finding bigger closet space because you’ve got too many clothes! It’s the problem of “I gotta get a job promotion; I want the best for my kids, and I gotta have this and I gotta have that and I’ve got my own problems. I gotta make house payments!”

…I think the Lord would say, “You’ve got the wrong set of problems! You’ve got the wrong set of problems.”

…But you say, “Greg, you can’t solve the world’s problems!”…

That’s true. You can’t.

But the Good Samaritan wasn’t trying to curb the crime rate in Jericho. There’s this one guy here in need, and he met that need.

You can’t solve the world’s problems, but maybe this person over here could use your friendship, and this person over here could be helped out by you…

Have you seen the movie Schindler’s List? Schindler was a man who bought about 6,000 Jews out of destruction by putting together a phony business… At the end of the war, when the Jews were freed, they came and thanked him and said, “Thank you, you’ve done so much.”

And Schindler began to cry. He says, “It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough!”

They said, “But you did so much!”

And he says, “But I could have done more! This watch – I could have bought three lives with this watch! … And this tie clasp – this would have been a life! And these shoes, how many lives are these shoes worth? And this car! How many lives was this car worth? Why didn’t I sell the car? I could have bought more lives! It wasn’t enough!”
And the question that the gospel… would put right in my face is this: “Who is paying a price for my curtains?”

This cuts right to the heart of the American dream. What else could I be doing with what I’ve got?

To listen to the entire sermon (17 minutes is roughly where the quote is), click HERE. 

It is well worth your time. 

--Nick

Jeff Cook, "C.S. Lewis, Rob Bell & 'Love Wins'"

Nick:

This is something I've been mulling over for a few weeks. I think I agree with most of what Cook says about Bell. I don't see much difference between Bell and Lewis, though there are nuances. Bell seems for more hopeful about God potentially saving all, whereas Lewis had a more pessimistic streak about such things.

McKnight:

This post is by a friend of the Jesus Creed blog; Jeff’s got a strong point to make about Rob Bell’s new book and the seeming culture war at work in the responses. He isn’t suggesting that such a battle is all that is in play, and I’m asking us to give his post a very careful hearing and reading. I’m not enough of a CS Lewis expert to give a definitive answer, though I always have thought the end of The Last Battle went in a universalistic direction. Perhaps we can have some CS Lewis experts speak up today.

 Cook:

Rob Bell, CS Lewis, and the Real Argument at Hand

After a couple of weeks of dialogue it is clear to me that the primary issue in the debate over Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived is not about what Bell is saying, but how he says it.

I suspect many felt poked in the eye by the way Harper and Rob decided to market Love Wins. I suspect Bell intimidates some because he is part of a culture they do not understand and cannot control (that culture is urban, postmodern, and discovers the truth more naturally through questions, sarcasm, and intuition than through the systematic presentations of the top Christian publishing house).

And let’s not kid ourselves, I suspect the fire behind the debate is often about envy and resentment of a very talented man, about our own inability to get a hearing in the public square, and about the fear that new ways of talking about Jesus might trump what some have preached for decades.

These issues are big, but they are not only about doctrine. The issues at hand are about culture and control, about how the theology of emerging Christians will be defined, and about the continuing fight between postmodern and modern expressions of Christianity. This seems clear to me now, for I would like to defend the following claim:

There’s not one controversial idea in Love Wins that is not clearly voiced as a real possibility by the most popular evangelical writer of the last century, CS Lewis. 



Lewis and Bell hint at a number of theological possibilities in their writings that cut against what we might call the majority opinion, including: the possibility that those in hell might journey toward the grace of God after death, the possibility that those who have not heard the name of Jesus might find salvation in and through the image of Christ in their own pagan stories and myths, the possibility that some will eventually receive God’s grace freely after death, the possibility that hell is about bigger things than God’s wrath, the insistence that the metaphors describing what Jesus’ cross accomplishes and how his work is applied to us are culturally subjective, and that some ancient pictures of the atonement may be too confusing to help us right here, right now. All of these lines of thought were in Lewis’s writings before they were in Love Wins.

Let’s look at one example. Though I [Jeff Cook] do not hold the following position (I’m an annihilationist regarding hell), consider how Lewis, like Bell, advances the possibility that those in hell might one day journey toward the grace of God after death. Lewis writes, “I would pay any price to be able to say ‘All will be saved’ but my reason retorts, ‘Without their will, or with it?’” Notice in this and other quotes like it, the salvation of a soul is not dependent on God’s will, but the will of the damned. In the same vein, he wrote, “I believe that if a million chances were likely to do good, they would be given” (The Problem of Pain, 110). This is a confession that God wants to save all and would provide such roads if God thought they’d work.

For the rest, click HERE.

--Nick

Jeff Cook, "Everything New"

This looks quite interesting. I love the pitch video.

--Nick