Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • 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).

  • Moral Absolutes

    Most of the time I read the evangelical outpost to keep me up to date on intelligent conservative thinking. I can disagree with Joe Carter, and often do, but I never call him stupid.

    Today, however, he hit on an important topic–absolute truth. Now I’m all in favor of humility about our personal knowledge about truth, and about the appropriateness of trying to force truth as we understand it on others, but the post-modern age bothers me a good deal in that so many people appear (to me, at least) not to be in the search for truth at all. They’ve given up.

    Carter put it in balance here:

    Christians, on the other hand, would be more like the second umpire, who recognizes that there is an objective reality even if our ability to perceive it is somewhat limited.

    You’ll have to go read his whole post to get his truly great baseball analogy that makes this whole idea even clearer.

    The only place I would amend his statements is where he says: “Christians, however, can know moral truths and thereby know more than their po-mo neighbors.” I have two amendments. In spite of significant problems I might have with their epistemology there are post-modern Christians. Post-modern isn’t binary. One can be more post-modern and less, in my non-absolute, relative opinion. But further, those who are not Christians can also know moral truths, though that is a longer topic.

    I also wrote on this for my wife’s devotional list today, Seeking Truth. In that one I allowed myself to have some fun! Yes, I’ve been writing quite a few devotionals for the list recently.

  • A Singular Lack of Imagination in ID

    A post today dealing with junk DNA led me to some thinking about just how the nature of a designer might impact the nature of the things designed. It seems to me that no matter where we are looking for design, whether in the form of alien artifacts on a distant planet (in our imaginations) or for the footprints of God in living creatures, what we end up searching for is signs of human-like design, i.e. at a minimum we are looking for something that is designed the way we might design it.

    Casey Luskin at (HT: The Panda’s Thumb) Evolution News & Views says:

    Proponents of intelligent design have long maintained that Neo-Darwinism’s widely held assumption that our cells contain much genetic “junk” is both dangerous to the progress of science and wrong. As I explain here, design theorists recognize that “Intelligent agents typically create functional things,” and thus Jonathan Wells has suggested, “From an ID perspective, however, it is extremely unlikely that an organism would expend its resources on preserving and transmitting so much ‘junk’.” [4] Design theorists have thus been predicting the death of the junk-DNA paradigm for many years . . .

    But this really avoids the issue. Let’s consider some analogies, starting with architecture. What is the purpose of decorative elements on a building. I live in a very simple building, with almost nothing about its design that could be called decorative. I work in a similar building. But I know of numerous houses that are clearly designed (I not only know the nature of the designer, I know him personally) that nonetheless have wasted space, and elements of their design that are just there because they looked good to someone.

    I’ve heard this home designer explain to a client that doing something in a certain way will cost extra in materials and may not be the most efficient use of space, but if they like that appearance, it can be done that way. In general those clients decide to make the house look the way they want to, even if they could get more square footage of usable floor space at less cost by eliminating some of the odd shapes. The point here is that there is “junk” in the design, and it would be very difficult to determine why if we didn’t know something about the designers (and clients) and why they might want a certain design.

    Now let’s consider a horse. Horse ancestors in the wild are not “designed” for humans to ride them. Human beings thought of how to tame them, to breed them for particular characteristics, and train them for particular activities. A horse in the wild might be mistaken as something that had a human-oriented purpose (though without humans it would be unlikely that an imaginary alien would figure it out), and a “designed” horse, that is one that was bred for particular characteristics but which had then been released into the wild might be assumed to have no human intervention.

    My point is that our “instincts” on these issues all have a strong element of our understanding of how various humans think and what the possibilities are for human designers. I’m wondering if we would necessarily recognize something designed by a completely alien culture. How much would it overlap? Would it be possible, for example, to have an alien science that was totally centered around biology and solved various problems through manipulation of living things? Science fiction writers have certainly imagined such civilizations. The question I have is how long it would take us, with our assumptions and “instincts” to recognize such a cultures products as designed.

    From the theological point of view, I would suggest that we make excessive assumptions about the desires of the creator. Very commonly people assume that human beings are the only intelligent creation. But we have only our lack of knowledge of anyone else to make us assume that. There is plenty of room for other creatures out there. There are those who argue that the Bible is addressed to us and doesn’t mention those other creatures, yet to whom precisely do they expect that a divine revelation would be addressed, except, well, to the folks to whom it is addressed? In other words, we do not know the answer to that question. We don’t know if human life, or life on earth in general, is the one and only form of life the creator might have created.

    This is one of the possibilities that biological evolution opens up for theologians. The observations that stand behind the theory of evolution let us know that there is a tremendous freedom and a certain level of disorder behind our observed order. This suggests to a number of people, including me, that God is less interested in a fixed order and more interested in the freedom of creation–a creative creation–than we might normally have imagined.

    Due to our fears and uncertainties, we tend to try to take control of our environment and fix things in place. Then we try to make God in our image by assuming that he is going to do the same thing. We try to conserve our resources when we create something, though even at that we expend resources on decoration. Just look at any church building if you doubt me. But is there any reason to assume that God as creator would behave in the same way? Can we assume that an alien culture would share our insecurities?

    I have previously stated it this way:

    We put a low value on freedom of choice, on autonomy, and on creativity. We prefer comfort and safety. Many, many people will give up their own decisions and their own stewardship in exchange for the feeling that they are safe. But it appears that in the way that God has arranged the universe, physical safety is much lower on the priority list. Spiritual safety is much more assured than is physical safety. (Not Ashamed of the Gospel, p. 55)

    All of these questions suggest that we need to know the nature of a designer before we can discuss just what that designer would design.

    Again, to quote myself:

    When we deal with the creation, we’re in a similar position with God. We can look at the way the universe functions and we can see certain things about what is necessary to live in the universe. We can try to imagine the attributes of God that are reflected in his natural universe. These would include the law of cause and effect, and the apparent desire for creatures that have a range of freedom of action. Simple application of the law of cause and effect could make moral creatures of us, though we might choose rather different value systems.

    But if God has a greater purpose for this world, this universe, and for our individual lives, the universe itself is not going to inform us. For that we would need special revelation if we are to know at all. (Source: When People Speak for God, p. 21

    Now I’m somewhat unorthodox in much of my theology, but on this I believe I’m quite thoroughly orthodox. We will not comprehend God’s purposes purely from natural things. We require God’s self-revelation. I think it is logical to derive from that the idea that the purpose of some elements of creation may look like one thing to us without special revelation, and may look quite different in the light of God’s revelation in scripture.

    Intelligent design may claim to detect design without any comment on the designer, but it looks to me as though through a foundational lack of imagination, it is stuck looking at totally natural design, and thus providing nothing new that could ultimate explain the existence of anything.

  • Ephesians 5:21-33: A Short Lesson in Focus

    It often amazes me to notice the difference in what I get from the scriptures when I approach a book or a passage simply asking what message God has for me in that passage as opposed to when I search out various passages of scripture in order to answer a particular theological question.

    That second procedure is not always a bad one; there are questions that can be answered by going to scripture and studying a particular topic. Getting a variety of scriptures that bear on a particular topic can help you keep your balance. Paul addresses the law in both Galatians and Romans (amongst others). You’ll get a more complete understanding if you read both.

    Very frequently, however, we view the topical study of scripture as the shortcut method. It’s easier to know topics than it is to know the Bible. But that is the danger. Quickly surveying a topic is a good way to fall into proof-texting, and that is dangerous ground.

    What brought this to my mind today in particular was my pastor’s Father’s Day sermon this morning. He used Ephesians 5:21-33, and he pointed to many of the balancing features of the entire passage.

    Let me suggest that you read the passage over, and then answer the following two questions:

    1. What is the primary focus of this passage?
    2. What from that passage have you heard quoted the most?

    My suspicion is that if you read the passage carefully, you’ll see it talking about the relationship been husbands and wives, and its focus is on the love that husbands are to have for their wives. This love is to be like the love Jesus Christ had for the church–self-sacrificing love.

    Now while I might debate issues of just what submission means and how this applies today. But that’s not my point. Whatever you believe about the structure of the home and authority there, Paul talks only a little bit about authority, secondary to his main point about the way a person in authority is to love, following the example of Jesus.

    Now what about the second question? Though I’ve heard quite a number of balanced sermons from this passage in conversations I’ve heard largely verses 21 and 22 quoted. Jesus is really, truly, and absolutely the head of the church (v. 23), and that’s the way the husband is the head of his wife (v. 22). While that fits the words of those two verses, if you add the remainder of the passage, starting with mutual submission (v. 21), and going on to note that the characteristic of Christ’s headship that husbands are asked is self-sacrificing love.

    The focus makes a great deal of difference. Now I’m not suggesting that the details of a passage don’t matter. What I am suggesting is that it’s important to see the overall focus–what it was that Paul was most interested in communicating in this case–before applying the details.