Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Christianity

  • The Conclusion You Want

    It was one of those great days in seminary, and I was in a small class studying prophets from the Hebrew text. The professor favored following the consonantal text as written. (For those unacquainted with the Massoretic text, there are occasions when something is specified “to be read” [Qere] that is not as it is written [Ketiv] in the text. There are various reasons for this [Wikipedia], but those aren’t important right now.) I would tend to choose one or the other text in a rather eclectic manner, so we had an ongoing discussion.

    That day we came upon a passage which was very important to this professor theologically, and the reading that best supported his theology was Qere and not Ketiv. He looks at me and says, “Henry, now’s your opportunity. You can finally accept the Qere!”

    I’m a contrary fellow, and it turned out that in this case, I thought a perfectly good translation of the Ketiv could be produced and that it was the better text. I don’t know whether I was right. I’ve been wrong about many things. But that isn’t the important thing here.

    As he said that, I was thinking, “You are just accepting that text because it suits your theology.” And as I was thinking that, he said, “You just reject that text because you want to undermine my theology.” Of course, neither of those accusations moved any discussion forward.

    I’d heard that accusation before, and I’ve heard it many times since. I do believe people often arrange evidence to suit their preferences. We should all avoid doing that. It’s important to look at your reasoning and see whether it will stand up to scrutiny from someone who disagrees, who would prefer a different conclusion.

    As an accusation, it doesn’t prove anything, nor does it advance the argument. In fact, it’s a way of avoiding the argument entirely. I know someone is wrong. How? Because he desires a particular conclusion and has so arranged his evidence as to make that conclusion plausible. But isn’t that what we do when we arrange evidence? We arrange it to point to a conclusion. It’s going to look like we did that. Ah, but the question is whether we came to that conclusion with an open mind by studying the evidence or whether we came to that conclusion prior to a study of the evidence. We would do well to watch for this problem in our own work.

    But there is a use of this accusation that troubles me, and my professor’s and my own mutual accusation illustrates it. It’s quite possible for the more progressive among us to assume that all conservative conclusions come from producing evidence to support a foregone conclusion, and for conservatives to think that progressives come to their conclusions for the very same reason. At the same time, each group looks at their own camp as truly following the evidence where it leads.

    Traditionalists can use this argument: You only say that because you want to undermine tradition. Progressives can use it: You only say that because you want to uphold tradition.

    One of the things I teach regarding Bible study is that we should learn to point the scripture we read and study first at ourselves. It’s easy to read scripture to find all the things other people ought to be doing. It’s much more challenging to read scripture to find out what I should be doing and how I should change.

    Similarly, it’s easier for us to see the bias in other people or other groups. Demonstrating that bias is a bit more work, but unless you do that extra work, you’ve done nothing worthwhile.

     

  • Cessation and Continuation

    Dave Black posted some notes on the difference between being a cessationist and a continualist (his term). I agree with his comments.

    Most commonly when we talk about “cessationism” we are talking about the gifts of the Spirit. Do these gifts, particularly the more spectacular of them, continue to operate in the church today? (I know that people divide these gifts differently, but in general, the question winds up whether the more spectacular of them, however, grouped, continue.)

    The fruit of the Spirit is much less controversial on paper, but do we show the evidence of the Spirit working in our churches? I maintain that the sign of the Spirit’s work that Paul was looking for in 1 Corinthians 12-14 was not the gifts, but rather the one Spirit under which those gifts operated. The gifts of the Spirit put some power behind the fruit of the Spirit, but without the fruit, they are not a sign of the functioning of God’s Spirit.

    In my experience, when people are looking for a gift of the Spirit they’re not that interested in gifts of helping or administration. What they want is miracles or prophecy. That is quite often a sign of a very wrong spirit, a spirit that seeks to dominate and stand out rather than to serve.

    So I like Dave’s list of things that need to continue. How many continue in your church? In your life? In mine?

    It leads one to pray, no?

  • The Problem with Eschatology

    The Problem with Eschatology

    I grew up in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which is very interested in eschatology. We didn’t learn the term all that early, but we were subjected constantly to sermons about it. SDA eschatology is one of the key reasons I’m not SDA any more, but when I first joined a United Methodist congregation, I was surprised to discover that nobody really thought that much about the end times. One pastor I know had even invited an SDA to come in and teach on Revelation. Why? “SDAs know something about eschatology.” Of course, the corollary to that was that Methodists did not.

    But SDAs were not the primary source for the congregation. Most of them picked up what eschatology they knew from television and other popular media, which meant some kind of futurist interpretation including a seven-year tribulation, usually a pre-tribulation rapture, and a pre-millenial second coming. This eschatology, while built on a dispensational view of biblical interpretation and theology, was held without necessarily accepting, or even knowing, its theological foundations.

    Most Methodist pastors that I encountered during this time didn’t really teach or preach about eschatology. They preferred to avoid it. They might say that Methodists weren’t really committed to a particular eschatology. Some accepted the “left behind” eschatology themselves. But in general there was, and is, a void in this area of theology.

    Let me warn readers at this point that this is one of my posts reflecting on a book I have published. There won’t be much of a commercial, however. I’m just giving some of my thoughts on eschatology and why we should pay attention to it in the church.

    I believe the reason many pastors and teachers don’t talk about eschatology is that it has a bad reputation amongst those theologically trained. There is so much craziness that goes on, such as setting dates for the end of the world, that people just don’t want to go there. The “left behind” theology and the futurist view of the interpretation of Daniel, Revelation, and other apocalyptic literature is popular because it is proclaimed almost in a vacuum. If people hear only one view proclaimed, they can perhaps be forgiven for thinking it is the way to think about eschatology.

    And I believe that groups with even more peculiar views of the last days find an opening amongst Christians simply because pastors and teachers haven’t addressed the issues at all. I recall a comment by my uncle on a sermon which he called “fearfully and wonderfully made.” He didn’t intend it positively. Most systems or programs about the end time are, in that sense, “fearfully and wonderfully made.” They are also houses of cards, to be blown over if anyone studies the texts themselves without the guide. I find the SDA interpretation of the seals and trumpets of Revelation to be ridiculous, and rejected them while I was still a college student in an SDA school. But if you hear just that view, and look at just the texts (and the emphasized portions of texts) than an evangelist or other presenter wants you to see, it can sound very plausible.

    But even more importantly, eschatology is critical. It’s where we’re going. It’s why we are the church. I don’t mean to diminish the importance of now, and there are views of eschatology that do not diminish that importance. That’s something to consider. But when you’re making a decision as to what to do and how to do it, knowing where you’re going is important. One result of bad eschatology is the idea that because Jesus is coming soon (and just what does “soon” mean?) we don’t need to take care of the planet we’re living on. Why bother, when it’s all corrupted by evil and about to be destroyed in the fires of hell?

    The answer is to take this subject on directly, and as frequently as necessary to counter popular Christian culture. It is also important not to just teach some alternate scheme of the end times. Too often we teach conclusions in the church (and even in seminary), and not how to come to those conclusions, and yes, how to challenge them.

    9781938434105mThat is what Dr. Edward W. H. Vick does in his study guide, Eschatology: A Participatory Study Guide. Interestingly enough, Dr. Vick is a Seventh-day Adventist. But he isn’t teaching the SDA evangelistic message. He’s surveying the field of eschatology and teaching readers and students the terminology and the ideas they need in order to understand the discussion of this field. It isn’t a simple book, but it is direct and straightforward. You’ll need to study it carefully, lesson by lesson. You can’t jump in somewhere in the middle. It won’t tell you what you should believe about eschatology. It will provide you with the tools to study the topic and to understand what others are saying.

    I accepted this manuscript for publication because I think we need to think, study, and teach more on this topic. I am also convinced that on every topic we need to let people know not just what we conclude, but how we came to those conclusions. It builds on what Dr. Vick has already said in his books From Inspiration to Understanding: Reading the Bible Seriously and Faithfully, and The Adventists’ Dilemma. The latter volume will be of particular interest to SDAs who often wonder just what “soon” means when you’ve been proclaiming that Jesus is coming soon for a couple of hundred years. Don’t worry. The church has been doing it for 2000 years. But perhaps we don’t know what “soon” means.

    There are those who may be concerned about using a book on this subject written by someone from a group that has peculiar views on eschatology. Let me assure you that Dr. Vick treats eschatology as an academic subject. I’m not going to try to characterize his view of SDA eschatology. I’ll simply say that in this book he presents an overview of this topic that is broad, intense, and extremely helpful.

     

    (If you’re interested in pursuing a study of basic eschatology in that manner, this will be the book for you. If you’re considering this book for use in your church, remember that you can request a free evaluation copy simply by e-mailing Energion Publications with a note telling us your intended use and the size of the group you intend to use it with.)

  • Losing Our Sense of Mission

    When it rains it pours, so I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about mission lately, and here’s another one that raises some very interesting points. (HT: Kouyanet).

    Having served on and led short-term mission teams, grown up with long-term missionary parents, and served on mission committees, I find that a great deal of this resonates with me. Read it all and give it serious consideration. This is to be a series. I intend to follow it.

    One thing that strikes me is that minor changes in the details are not the solution to the various problems (see Of Resources and Mission Priorities and Worship, Service, and Mission). Our problem is that we don’t view ourselves as on a mission in the first place. We view the church as a way to provide a moral education to our children, a place for networking, and in some cases a route to salvation.

    Perhaps our committees, agencies, and denominations lack a sense of mission because our members lack a sense of mission. Perhaps that lack of a sense of mission comes from a lack of understanding the basic gospel message.

     

  • Dave Black on Worship and Missional Theology

    Some important thoughts.

  • Of Resources and and Mission Priorities

    I received two requests for help today. One was from a pastor overseas. He didn’t ask for money. He asked for prayer. I happen to know he needs money. But his most earnest desire is that Jody and I pray for him.

    I also got another request in the mail. It comes from an organization that does much good. They are raising money for a substantial building project that will make things more convenient, even much more convenient, for people in this country who are preparing to be missionaries. The amount is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe a thousand times the amount that would relieve the pastor’s need.

    What am I to do? I am not naming any organizations, because I don’t want to criticize them. I don’t know what the needs are or whether the kingdom will be built by this particular expenditure. But I do have to look at where I put my very limited resources. (In case you’re wondering, being in the Christian publishing business, at least in the manner in which I practice it, is not the road to great personal wealth!)

    But it’s not just this particular project that concerns me. It’s the proportion of our resources that go to providing for our comfort, for making it easier for us to do whatever we do, as opposed to the amount we put where it’s needed. I think of this when I see large recreation centers attached to churches that are empty most days of the week. Now I understand the need for places for sports and social interaction. In fact, a great deal of ministry can be carried out by providing a place for young people. But I know of more than one church that closes its facilities to outsiders. They want to avoid “those people” getting in there and perhaps damaging things or causing an increase in their insurance rates.

    I understand liability issues. I really do. But I don’t recall Jesus saying to do good to the least of these only when there was no risk. As a matter of fact, the gospels record that Jesus did it at a rather great risk. So many times we have facilities built that are just to entertain those who are already in the church.

    Again, I understand that people need rest and recreation. The church does need to provide for its members. But the ultimate purpose of providing for members is building the kingdom, and that means getting those members to go out and serve others.

    And so we come to church sanctuaries. In many churches the only use of the sanctuary is for a worship service on Sunday morning. That has to make it the most wasted piece of architecture around. One or two additional meetings a week may make it a little bit better, but it’s still underutilized space, space we pay a great deal of money to have.

    This isn’t the complaint of someone who doesn’t appreciate church architecture. I really like a majestic church sanctuary. I enjoy being in it. I enjoy sitting in the pews. If it has stained glass, it’s even better. A pipe organ? I’m in ecstasy. Just play it and let me look at the windows.

    But that’s the problem. I like it. It’s for me. The question is, just how much money should go to pipe organs and stained glass as opposed to feeding the hungry. I’m not saying we should put an end to all church music, or eliminate all church architecture, but what are the priorities? Where is the balance?

    In doing ministry in southern Mexico in the 1960s, my parents lived in a building with rough concrete floors (just try to sweep them), with a tin roof and walls that were not solid, so rain could blow in. My dad was a doctor (MD), and my mother a registered nurse. They could have had a great deal more, if they’d chosen to go to work in Canada (their home) or in the United States. But most of the time they didn’t, and when they did, they sought underserved areas. There were many things they wanted that they could not have. My own life is not without its problems, but I keep comparing it to theirs. What were their priorities? What are mine?

    I have had wonderful times of worship in fine church buildings, but I’ll never forget worshiping with a small Gypsy congregation in eastern Hungary on the first mission trip I led there. I was to speak. I had been a bit disoriented, because while I had been overseas before both as a child and young person with my parents and on mission trips, I had never been to a country where I couldn’t speak a word of the language. My Hungarian was such that the couple of words I had learned were potentially dangerous. I didn’t understand what people were saying.

    The room was small, too small for the number of people. The floor was concrete. The building was not beautiful. They had a small electric keyboard that would have been discarded had it been in one of our churches here, or probably even in a home as a child’s toy. Someone started playing it, and the people started singing. I didn’t know the words, but I felt the Spirit that was in that place. In fact, I have rarely felt the presence of the Spirit more than in that particular meeting.

    They didn’t need the things that we all think we “need.”

    Do we?

     

  • Robert Reich on Immigration

    Robert Reich exposes some myths about immigration. I’d have a couple of quibbles (I wish “myth” weren’t used in this way, for one thing), but they wouldn’t change the overall result. This is why I don’t worry about immigration. In fact, our paranoia about immigration costs more than immigration, in my view. I favor treating aliens as “the citizen among you …” (Leviticus 19:34). And yes, I’m aware of the hermeneutical issues with using that verse, but I choose to borrow the phrase nonetheless.

  • Why I Still Don’t Like Inerrancy

    Andrew Wilson has a post on The Gospel Coalition (Voices) blog titled Why I don’t Hate the Word Inerrancy. In a certain way I have to agree with his conclusion:

    But I don’t think the answer is to hate the word. If we were to abandon every word that had been tainted by poor use, we’d have to remove dozens of descriptors from our lexicon, beginning with “Christian”—only to find that the replacements we brought in were also sullied over time by clumsiness, groupthink, insensitivity, and arrogance. …

    Just so! It’s pretty difficult to hate a word when the word hasn’t really done anything bad. It just fell into the hands of cruel people who have tortured it a bit.

    But I still have to wonder about the value of the word in the first place. As a substitute for saying that God’s word is true, it draws much of its usage from the effort to narrow down the concept of what we mean by “true.” It ties truth to a collection of facts, to data, and not to the message. Properly interpreted, the message of the books of Kings in the Hebrew scriptures can be true without being accurate in every detail of the numbers. There are serious issues in the chonology of the divided kingdom, and resolving these is an interesting hobby, but it’s not really something that impacts the truth of the Bible message.

    I think inerrancy, as used—and in effect a word is the way it is used—tends to put our focus on the wrong aspect of any story. It makes our first question be “did this happen precisely as stated?” rather than “what message does God have for me in this story?” That’s unfortunate.

    I think there are worse problems for inerrancy than the ages and reigns of kings, but that provides a good starting point. Once we are past that, we need to look at how God communicates. How did God send us scripture? How did God cross the gap between infinity and our finite existence?

    This is one of those questions that plagues discussion of topics such as the meaning of Genesis. I believe that God communicates to us in our language, and that Genesis communicated God’s message about creation to people who believed in an earth that was flat (though round, like a dinner plate), with the waters under and the heavens above. They also believed that earth was the center of the universe and had no concept of the size of the universe. In that context, God spoke about God’s involvement in human lives.

    That means that the science of Genesis is doubtless in error, when looked at from our point of view. But it’s not in error by mistake. It’s in error intentionally. By God’s intention, not by the intention of the human authors who knew no better. It’s in error in the same way as my explanation of some technical topic might be if I presented it to a child.

    And lest you get the idea that I think we are on a pinnacle or knowledge, I expect that, if the world continues and we don’t set ourselves back to the stone age through our own stupidity, people a few hundred years from now may consider our view of what the universe is like to be hopelessly primitive. They’ll look for new ways to tell the story of God’s involvement.

    I don’t like the word “inerrancy” because it says that the Bible is going to mean what I think it needs to mean rather than saying that the Bible gives God’s message in the way that God wanted it to be presented.

    As I read it, God did very little to scratch our modern itches.

  • Of Creation, Evolution, and Worship

    There are few topics that get Christians more angry at one another than the subject of evolution. Those who accept a young earth (or young age for the universe) tend to think that those who accept the theory of evolution do it simply because they lack the faith to believe the Bible. To them, this is the first step toward rejecting Christianity and becoming an atheist. Those who accept the theory of evolution often think the young earthers are ignorant, perhaps willfully so. (All of this ignores the broad sweep of views between young earth creationism and a purely materialistic view of origins. There are many nuances on the line between the two. But that is a subject for another blog post.)

    I disagree with both those viewpoints. Irrespective of my own beliefs (and I’ll get to those in a moment), I have met too many dedicated Christian believers whose faith is nurtured by Scripture and also accept evolutionary science to imagine that acceptance of evolution is necessarily the first step on the road to unbelief. I have also met too many intelligent and capable individuals who accept a young earth to believe that they are all ignorant or stupid. As a matter of principle, I never want to imagine someone is stupid because of their view on a single issue, nor do I want to think them immoral because of their view on one moral issue. Someone who is intelligent, competent, and functional, and yet believes something I find ridiculous, does not thereby become generally stupid.

    As an example, my dad was a doctor (MD), and an excellent one. Yet he believed in a young earth and a literal creation week his entire life. I’m not going to go down the route of believing that he was somehow less capable of carrying out his profession in a competent fashion, which he did all his life, because of one issue. There’s the family connection there, but I know a number of other people in similar situations.

    In spite of this, I  am not arguing a middle of the road position. I have a firm position on creation and evolution. I was raised with young earth creationist literature. I devoured the literature written by George McCready Price and Frank Lewis Marsh, icons of my Seventh-day Adventist upbringing, as well as many others. I did not begin to doubt this view because of studying science. In fact, I changed my position through a study of Scripture. It all started when I wrote a college paper examining the text of the genealogies of Genesis 5 & 11 and looking at the resulting chronology. Archeology did enter into it, as I looked at the dating of events that would be required to match that chronology, but characteristics of the text itself first suggested that we did not have literal history there. Nothing I have studied since has changed my mind on that point.

    9781938434723mBut I’ve written on this subject many times before. Just try typing “evolution” in the search box. I’m writing this because I’ve just sent a book off to the printer titled Worshiping with Charles Darwin. That’s a provocative title. Carol Everhart Roper designed a provocative cover to go with it. That was intentional. It’s not actually the most controversial book I’ve published, even on this topic, but I’ve focused on the controversy. That’s marketing, but it also comes from conviction.

    I look at this from two perspectives. First, as a Christian and a church member, I believe that this is a non-essential. That God is creator is an essential. How God created is not. I think we should have tolerance and respect in the church on this issue. But my belief in tolerance and respect does not mean that I don’t have a firm position on the issue myself. I believe that God is the creator of heaven and earth and that through the study of the world by the methods of the natural sciences we can learn how creation was accomplished and how the physical world functions. I believe we are in error both in theology and in science when we try to impose our theology on the findings of science. It’s bad theology because to claim that what we learn from the natural world is not reliable we make God a liar. It’s bad science because it imposes a conclusion prior to the data.

    Thus I would be called a theistic evolutionist, though I object to the label. I am a theist, in that I believe in God. But my theism is not a characteristic of my acceptance of the findings of evolutionary science. Though I am strictly an amateur in any scientific endeavors, I do not modify the findings of science by saying “and God.” This is not because I do not see God in the natural world. It is rather because I see God everywhere in the natural world and not more so in one place or another. I do not see God more in my cat’s purr than I do in a pencil falling. Both things result from God. Science tells me how. Science does not discover God at some specific point. Science is studying God through studying God’s handiwork. But science does not improve its study of the handiwork by trying to pretend to find God at some specific point. That is why I don’t like linking the word “theist” to “evolutionist.”

    But I also object to the word “evolutionist.” Evolution is not my philosophy. It is not my religion. It is not an article of my religious faith, though the fearless pursuit of accurate knowledge is. I am not an evolutionist any more than I am a gravitationist. I believe that gravity functions as science describes. I believe that evolution functions as science describes. I believe we will discover more about how each of these works. Neither gravity nor evolution is an object of my faith or trust. My trust in science is based on the method, a method that has proven functional repeatedly. It is not a matter of perfection either. Science will produce new results and alter previous understandings. But it has proven effective at correcting its own errors.

    Now people who believe what I do about evolutionary science have tended either to keep quiet in church or to simply say that we believe the Bible teaches that God is the creator and the how doesn’t matter. I don’t agree with these approaches. What I think we need to do is think about how the discoveries of natural science impact what we believe about God and how they change how we tell the story of God the creator. Genesis 1 & 2 told the story to the ancients. We can listen in to that story and learn theology and generate our own liturgy. But I think to tell the story as faithfully as it was told so long ago we need to tell the story of the creator in the light of what we know about cosmology and origins. Belief that God has used evolution as the means of diversifying life here on earth, and presumably elsewhere in the universe, is not a withdrawal from an area of faith. Rather, it is a new look at the expanding story of God and our knowledge and experience of God. We need to tell that story faithfully and vigorously.

    And this brings me back to the title of this recently released book. We could pretend that the discussion doesn’t matter, but that would not be faithful to the search for truth or to the integrity of the way we proclaim the gospel. I know of people for whom this issue has been a stumbling block. It’s time to talk about it openly. We’ve been arguing about it vigorously, but that’s not what I mean. We need to start looking at the implications and talking about how we tell the story of the gospel faithfully in the world God created and is creating. I think that is something worth celebrating.

    Bob Cornwall has taken up one part of that task. I hope the conversation continues to grow.

  • Science and Genesis: Allister McGrath, John Polkinghorne, N. T. Wright, John Walton, et. al.

    Some very interesting points. It’s only fair that Herold Weiss, whose book Creation in Scripture I publish, would disagree with some of John Walton’s views, while affirming the broader ideas about how to read an ancient text.

    (HT: Allan R. Bevere)