Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Quotes on Imputed Righteousness

    The translator’s difficulty with this passage arises from the lack of a single English verb to express both “do right” and “be right with God”; of a noun that means both “righteousness” and “acceptance with God as righteous”; and of an adjective to describe the man who is both “righteous” and “accepted as righteous,” or to use the Latin, both “just” and “justified.” The resulting obscurities and inconsistencies give aid and comfort to human nature–Paul would say “the flesh”–in its habit of divorcing faith from faithfulness and justification from righteousness. The interpreter has to guard against basing “justification by faith” upon a fictive or imputed righteousness rather than presenting it as an actuality inseparable from the Christian’s present life in Christ. When Paul says that the righteous man who is both just and justified is to live on the basis of faith, he is describing a way of life that is present as well as future. His faith is the determinant of action which makes righteousness actual even now.
    — The Interpreter’s Bible on Galatians 3:11

    But to him that worketh not – It being impossible he should without faith. But believeth, his faith is imputed to him for righteousness – Therefore God’s affirming of Abraham, that faith was imputed to him for righteousness, plainly shows that he worked not; or, in other words, that he was not justified by works, but by faith only. Hence we see plainly how groundless that opinion is, that holiness or sanctification is previous to our justification. For the sinner, being first convinced of his sin and danger by the Spirit of God, stands trembling before the awful tribunal of divine justice ; and has nothing to plead, but his own guilt, and the merits of a Mediator. Christ here interposes; justice is satisfied; the sin is remitted, and pardon is applied to the soul, by a divine faith wrought by the Holy Ghost, who then begins the great work of inward sanctification. Thus God justifies the ungodly, and yet remains just, and true to all his attributes! But let none hence presume to “continue in sin;” for to the impenitent, God “is a consuming fire.” On him that justifieth the ungodly – If a man could possibly be made holy before he was justified, it would entirely set his justification aside; seeing he could not, in the very nature of the thing, be justified if he were not, at that very time, ungodly. — John Wesley on Romans 4:5

    Note that I’m not quoting these as authority for the position, but rather as expressions of this view of imputed and imparted righteousness to spark thought. I do consider both of these statements very good expressions of my own view on the matter.

    I would place these expressions alongside what Adrian Warnock quoted from Wayne Grudem.

    If I could add my own note, God counted (not “thought of”) Jesus as one of us (sinners), to bring an end to that reality. He counts us as righteous upon our justification, in order to begin bringing an end to the reality of sin in our lives. This is one of the problems I see with making PSA the central metaphor of the atonement. One almost has to see God in error. He sees Jesus as sinful, even though he is not, and he sees us as righteous, even though we are not. I would say that God intentional mixes the categories–counting Jesus as one of us, and then us with Jesus–to bring about the reality. He always knows what he is doing, and I think it’s better to express it in that way.

  • Transformed Daily

    I’m adding another site to my blogroll, Transformed Daily. I got an e-mail from blogger Eric Jones on this one, thinking there might be some synergy, and after reading a bit, I think there is.

    A couple of entries that really caught my eye:

    ARE YOU A TRAINED FLEA CHRISTIAN OR ARE YOU A FREE FLEA CHRISTIAN? — this is really good. Read it and think about it!

    I Said the Prayer – Now Make Me Happy. This is an exceptionally good short piece on our reading. Now why would I, a Christian writer and publisher, promote a blog entry that talks about reading too many Christian books? I do so because Eric is absolutely right here. My experience as a Bible teacher (and my publishing started and still continues primarily in support of that ministry) has put me in contact with many, many Christians who are thinking about Bible study or playing around with it. But what they do primarily is read books about the Bible or books that they think go more directly to the answer. But there’s a reason Jesus spoke in parables, and there’s a reason why the treasure–knowledge of God–is not strewn over the surface. So if you’re going to buy that Christian book in place of studying your Bible, even if I’m the publisher or author, think twice.

    I expect to enjoy keeping track of Eric’s postings in the future.

  • Two Cows

    I think I first saw this thing about two cows several years ago, but there have been several more instances added in this version. Some of the new ones are even funnier than the earlier ones. It looks like people have just been tacking examples on the end. (HT: 42)

  • Exclusion and Inclusion and Vague Boundaries

    A community must have some sort of definition in order to exist. This may seem fairly obvious, but often in discussions of religion we lose sight of that fact in efforts to be inclusive. It’s important to remember that there is a difference between saying somebody is a bad person and saying that they don’t fit into a particular community.

    I could go on and on here, talking about communities within a community, such as congregations and denominations within the broader community of the Christian religion in general. There are different requirements for different communities. That’s not the particular issue I want to write about, however. I simply want to note that I’m aware that boundaries are necessary for there to be communities.

    Having said all that, I’ve observed with interest the advent of exclusion talk in the atonement debates (recent discussion of PSA). While these specifically deal with the evangelical movement in the UK, I think many of the same questions are applicable on this side of the pond.

    What’s interesting to me is that having heard the suggestion over the years (not just in the current debate) that liberals are not really Christians because of their view of the atonement, suddenly it is conservatives, specifically conservative proponents of PSA, who are concerned with exclusion.

    I have noted the same thing in recent discussion with United Methodists. Some evangelical pastors and/or candidates are feeling exclusion from sponsors or from boards of ministry. This is an issue that concerns me a great deal. If the exclusion is real, and is not part of setting the appropriate bounds of the community, then we have folks on the liberal side not living up to their principles.

    There is an alternative. Some people who have had the power to exclude become very irate when that power is taken from them or restricted. I have encountered more than one church in which established membership has become extremely angry and has felt excluded simply because newer members have gotten power and as a result have restricted the power of people who thought of themselves as permanent leaders.

    A very specific case of this is when one restricts someone else from exercising the power of exclusion themselves. Let’s take a couple of hypothetical situations. (Though these two situations may resemble broadly some real situations, I do not intend to duplicate any real-world situations.)

    Situation #1: A candidate for ministry expresses a very conservative view, supporting the United Methodist position (per UM Discipline) that homosexuality is not compatible with Christian practice. The candidate’s liberal mentor makes every effort to block this candidate’s continuation toward ordination.

    Situation #2: A minister is accustomed to reject for church membership anyone he can identify as being homosexual in orientation, irrespective of whether such a person is celibate or not. He is instructed by his DS that such behavior is inappropriate. He claims he is being persecuted for his conservative views.

    These are not well-rounded situations. Fill in the blanks as you wish. Even better, fill in the blanks in different ways, potentially producing different results. A key difference between the two situations, in my view, is that the first candidate believes nothing that is contrary to the accepted beliefs of the community, and has given no indication that he will not carry out his duties appropriately. (You may, of course, fill in the blanks with contrary information.)

    The second candidate is potentially acting contrary to church discipline, yet he feels persecuted, and perhaps excluded by the actions of church authorities. (Note that I’m not a United Methodist pastor, and I don’t have a finely tuned notion of just how important an “admonition” for one’s DS actually is.)

    Is the second person actually persecuted? I would suggest not. He can remain and carry out his duties as instructed.

    Let’s compare these ideas to the PSA issue. Supposing we have a pastor of a church who believes in PSA and has been teaching people that in order to be regarded as Christians, they must understand and accept PSA. When new members transfer from another church, they are immediately indoctrinated into this position and are only made welcome as part of that church community if they accept that position.

    If a superior authority in that denomination admonishes this pastor is he being exclusive? Consider the fact that if this pastor is ordered not to act as he has, he will feel that he is not truly bringing people to a saving faith in Jesus. Is it possible for him to minister honestly under those circumstances?

    The boundary lines become somewhat difficult to draw under these circumstances. I’m simply exploring them. Off hand, I would suggest that the liberal mentor I mentioned is wrong to attempt to exclude the conservative candidate, but that the denominational authorities in my two other examples are acting appropriately. If these two pastors cannot function in a way that they feel is faithful to the gospel, they need to find a different congregation/denomination in which to exercise their gifts.

    Membership in a loosely defined “evangelical movement” is a bit more difficult. Nobody holds the keys there. How much does the word “evangelical” mean? I’m not certain of the answer to that.

    I would like to see moderates and liberals to support the maximum amount of inclusion possible consistent with creating a coherent community.

    Dave Warnock made a couple of very cogent comments in his post :

    I do not believe in a Christianity, or an Evangelical Christianity which does not welcome Adrian and those like him who believe so strongly in PSA. Mind you I also do not believe in a Christianity which demands that all believe in PSA nor an Evangelical Christianity which demands the same understanding and acceptance of PSA that Adrian has.

    . . . and again . . .

    We do need to recognise though that it is always a difficult challenge to include in a community those who continually attempt to exclude others.

    He’s responding to an update by Adrian Warnock to his post Christianity Magazine reviews Pierced For Our Transgressions, in which Adrian says:

    Since writing this article, I came across a piece from Carl Trueman that alleges that some UK ministers feel that they are being leant on quite strongly on the issue of the atonement.

    Now Dave is right when he notes (in the same post) that there are a number of feelings and vague accusations going around (my paraphrase of his words). But those feelings and vague accusations are precisely what most exclusion is made of. It is rarely a matter of direct confrontation. It is a matter of suggestion and pressure, often subtle and not clearly expressed.

    I advocate bringing these suggestions out into the open. We need to examine the boundaries we can accept openly. This is essentially what I was advocating in my post from June 2, 2006 Unity, Diversity, and Confusion. Sometimes we’re so afraid of setting explicit boundaries that we allow vague boundaries to contict our appropriate freedom.

  • Expressing the Multifaceted Nature of the Atonement

    Peter Kirk has a post, The personal relevance of the atonement, that expresses what I have been trying to say about the atonement much more precisely than I have managed to do it. I commend it strongly.

    At the same time, Adrian has posted again regarding a review of Pierced for Our Transgressions. Since I haven’t gotten hold of a copy of the book yet, I’m not going to comment on the review itself, but Adrian said one thing that has left me wondering.

    It is ironic that the more inclusive the evangelical movement in the UK aims to be – by including people who attack or minimize PSA the more they seem to exclude those who hold a more traditional evangelical position.

    I don’t call myself evangelical, but after talking to a few evangelicals from the UK I probably could. (I’m absolutely not going to fight over labels.) I’ve even encountered a few folks on this side of the pond who call themselves evangelical and appear to be even more liberal than I am.

    But even from my more liberal perspective I have no desire to exclude those who hold a “strong view” of PSA from any tent. They believe that God has provided redemption through Jesus Christ. I know of none of them who reject the incarnation. The feel I get from Adrian’s post is that if one doesn’t join in excluding the more liberal elements on this issue one must be excluding the more conservative.

    It would be a total denial of my view of the importance of non-essential doctrines (and I regard the specific metaphor used for atonement as a non-essential) for me to deny someone the one expression of the atonement that best brought the message of God’s reconciling grace home to them.

    I’m wondering if it’s really true that any evangelicals in the UK want to exclude advocates of PSA from their big tent. Could any of my UK readers help me with this?

  • Added to my Blogroll

    Every so often in wandering around the blogosphere I notice a blog that makes me say, “Why haven’t I noticed this before?” I found one today, The Christian Cynic, and I wanted to call attention to his post dealing with formal issues of an argument from ignorance.

    I think I’ll have fun keeping up with this one.

  • Media Interviews, With Scientists or Anyone

    There has been some discussion amongst the science blogs about dealing with interview requests, in this case specifically for scientists. I had thought about saying something from my non-scientist perspective, but hadn’t really come up with anything. Then this morning, going through my Technorati favorites, I saw this story from Carl Zimmer. Now since I really appreciate Carl Zimmer as a science writer, I expected some useful information. I wasn’t disappointed. Besides his own comments he has some excellent material from Kevin Padian, someone who certainly is familiar with being misrepresented.

    One part of the problem with interviewers and how they report interviews is simply perspective. Let me give an example that comes directly from Carl Zimmer’s work. I mentioned that I really like his writing, no? Well, here’s a quote from my notes on At the Water’s Edge, the first book of his that I read:

    I personally dislike the journalistic style with many intermissions talking about the author interviewing various scientists. Those kinds of things feel like interruptions to me. For many readers, however, I think this view of the scientists personally may well be of interest.

    You see, I would be very happy if he had just jumped from discovery to discovery, telling me about the importance and how it fit into the story. Fortunately for the advance of science literacy, Zimmer was doing the writing, and he knows what people are going to read. Had I chosen the contents, there would have been many less readers.

    I do think many journalists are very careless, and I could cite a number of stories. But science, and facts in general, need all the publicity they can get. In the absence of interviews with knowledgeable people, the media will print and/or show material of even less quality. As a layperson I appreciate those scientists who take the time to provide interviews, and those journalists and science writers who put out the effort to popularize their material.

    The level to which the non-scientist needs to comprehend the subject is much less than that of a specialist, and in general any popularized material is going to appear inaccurate from some perspective.

  • Richardson Misunderstands Diplomacy

    This story and video shows why Richardson really doesn’t understand how diplomacy actually works. He’s going to withdraw all the troops and then he’s going to go seriously into diplomacy.

    Let’s not make a mistake about this. When we withdraw from Iraq, we’re going to lose most of our ability to impact the country diplomatically. What some people refuse to understand is that there are people in the world whose motivations are not good, who are not going to be persuaded by our good arguments, and who prefer killing us to peace. Once the threat of force is gone, countries like Syria and Iran will have no reason to cooperate.

    The threat of sanctions is futile and always has been. The sanctions will leak, and Iran (the sanctions target specified by Richardson) will go right on doing what they intended to do all along.

    I support withdrawing from Iraq, but I do so because we cannot create a democratic Iraq through military means. We are now pursuing a goal we cannot accomplish. It’s not because our troops are not good; it’s because a unified and democratic Iraq is simply contrary to the nature of the country itself. We need to withdraw for two reasons: 1) People are dying for an impossible goal–horrible strategy, tragic reality; and 2) We need those troops to take action elsewhere. We need them, for example, as a credible threat to add to the negotiating mix with Iran, amongst many other things.

    The idea that we’ll pull out our troops and then settle in to serious diplomacy is absolutely ludicrous. After the withdrawal we aren’t going to have any chips to throw into the game in Iraq. It appears some politicians are living in dreamland and don’t have the courage to recognize the negative side effects of their policies.

  • Salman Rushdie Knighted / Violent Reaction in Muslim World

    Update: Or really, just a better reference. I think this story from MSNBC covers the ground better in a single article.

    I believe very strongly that we need to distinguish between radicals who want to kill us, and the very large number of Muslims who are peaceful people. But with the reaction to the knighting of Salman Rushdie, it is again important to point out that we need to be on our guard for violent people, and there are lots of them.

    I am very aware that there has been calls for violence by Christians, or at least those who call themselves Christians. I live near where Paul Hill, a defrocked Presbyterian minister, took a shotgun and killed two people. I’m glad to say that he was a defrocked minister, as in not a minister any more, but nonetheless he did violence in the name of Jesus, and I condemn his actions. I will continue to challenge and condemn all violence and calls for violence from my own or from other religions.

    But right now, in terms of numbers, the calls of violence seem to be coming most commonly from the Muslim world. I have been told that I don’t understand Islam, but my question is just who do I listen to in order to understand. Is Islam a religion of peace and of choice, or is it one that punishes apostasy by death? In many countries at least, it appears to be the latter. Is it a religion that is willing to become part of a pluralistic society, to win converts peacefully through persuasion, and to uphold the freedoms of other religions no matter how high a percentage of the population become adherents? It doesn’t seem so, if one considers those nations that are already majority Muslim.

    Now I know from personal experience that there are Muslims who are peaceful people, good citizens, good neighbors. I believe that these are likely the majority, though I really can’t prove that. But events like this tend to make it hard to keep people’s attention on the moderates:

    Salman Rushdie, who went into hiding under threat of death after an Iranian fatwa, has been knighted by the Queen.

    His book The Satanic Verses offended Muslims worldwide and a bounty was placed on his head in 1989.

    But since the Indian-born author returned to public life in 1999, he has not shied away from controversy.

    A devout secularist, he backed Commons Leader Jack Straw over comments on Muslim women and veils and has warned against Islamic “totalitarianism”.

    And the reaction? Were Muslims the world over willing to allow a man who opposed their religion to be honored? Well, years ago they had called for his death. What would happen now?

    From Pakistan (source: here):

    Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, Pakistan’s religious affairs minister, said giving the title to the author was an insult to Islam and ‘at the root of terrorism’.

    Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses caused worldwide protests in 1989 and led to Iran issuing a fatwa ordering his execution.

    Speaking about the writer at the National Assembly, Mr ul-Haq reportedly said: ‘If someone commits suicide bombing to protect the honour of the Prophet Muhammad, his act is justified.’

    But after the comments were reported on local news networks yesterday, the minister claimed he did not mean to condone or incite terrorism, merely to warn that such insults against Islam could lead to attacks.

    Or the words of the one Muslim British peer: (from ABC Australia):

    Muslim Labour peer Lord Ahmed describes the decision as provocative and damaging to Britain’s relations with Muslims.

    “Actually I was appalled to hear that Salman Rushdie had been given knighthood, particularly when this man has been very divisive,” he said.

    “This man – as you can see – not only provoked violence around the world because of his writings, but there were many people that were killed around the world and honouring the man who has blood on his hands, sort of because of what he did, honouring him I think is going a bit too far.”

    My major point here is that while we must be careful to blame those who are actually guilty, we must also not allow a desire to be fair to keep us from recognizing evil when we see it. The reaction to the Danish cartoons was evil, and so is this. We in the west should not be intimidated by threats of violence. The insult is not the cause of the violence. People suffer insults without violence every day. The violence stems from the evil in the hearts of the people who preach it and carry it out.

    HT: Dispatches from the Culture Wars (and commenters there). That article is worth reading.

  • Excessively Large Tent = Crash

    I have written a few times before on the need for a core of essential beliefs that provide a basis for community along with a broader set of non-essentials on which people can agree. Probably my most comprehensive discussion of the issue is in Unity, Diversity, and Confusion.

    Over the last few days I’ve been following the story of Episcopal priest Ann Holmes Redding. I don’t recall where I first saw it, but the story above will do.

    Now I’m a big tent person. I like diversity. But in order to be a community there also has to be commonality. I frequently encounter people who advocate one or another form of interfaith spirituality. Almost all of them will claim that they have discovered the essentials of religion and that on those essentials the various faiths they combine have no conflict. What I have never found, however, is that those claimed essentials agree with what committed adherents of the individual religions would call essential.

    I’m not writing against interfaith spirituality. I’m not even writing to criticized Redding’s own spiritual journey. But I do believe that the Episcopal Church has a serious tent size problem in this case. Many commentators have been upset about such issues as ordination of female priests and bishops and the acceptance of homosexuality in the Episcopal church. But no matter how one stands on those issues, one should recognize that they are less central than the incarnation itself. Between Islam and Christian lies the doctrine of the incarnation as an impassable barrier.

    I think the Episcopal church would share with the United Methodist Church (of which I’m a member) one characteristic: Neither has the central coherence to deal with this level of diversity. I don’t think Christianity can handle it.

    Again, this is not to condemn the individuals who hold such beliefs. As strongly as I believe in the incarnation as the core of Christianity, I also believe that I am not to judge. But I can look at the community and how well it can function, and this goes beyond making a functional community.

    Two other Christian reactions: Pursuing Holiness and NRO (HT: Locusts and Honey).