Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Christianity

  • A Monopoly on Healing?

    I’m enjoying editing Bruce Epperly‘s new book, to be released this fall, Healing Marks. Here’s an excerpt:

    A Monopoly on Healing? Quite satisfied with their orthodoxy and ability to maintain the purity of Jesus’ healing ministry, the disciples come to Jesus with what they assume is good news: “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” They expect a pat on the back for maintaining decency, order, and clarity in Jesus’ healing lineage. Imagine their surprise when the Healer retorts:

    “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterwards to speak evil of me. 40Whoever is not against us is for us. 41For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.” – Mark 9:39-41

    The one who opened the floodgates to divine healing and hospitality to all people by welcoming sinners, social outcasts, diseased women, lepers, tax collectors, foreigners, and persons possessed by demons, adds one more scandalous footnote to his healing ministry, divine healing is not restricted to his direct followers or even to Christians. God wants everyone to live abundantly and will use any healthy means to bring us to well-being (page 138 in advance copies).

    Yep! I’m enjoying this …

  • Church Sign Theology – Sorta Saved?

    OK, I said the last church sign was theologically incorrect, and I stick with that, because the sign seems to be providing a definition of faith. As a definition, it’s incorrect. Faith may help you not to panic, but it is not the same as not panicking.

    What’s got me on this is looking for church signs to post at Megabelt.info, the support site for the book Megabelt by Nick May. Megabelt is a look at church life in the Bible belt. The name comes from megachurch + Bible Belt, and thus Megabelt. But some of them are fun to discuss.

    I spotted this next one on the road back from Blue Lake Methodist Camp, and I turned around to take a picture of it.

    Sorta Saved?

    I have to say that this one could be a bit profound, depending on how you think about the word “salvation.” I might equate “sorta saved” with having recited a prayer and then failing to become a disciple. But overall, the sign doesn’t strike me right.

    I’m thinking someone might say that it’s unfair to critique short statements on church signs. In my view, the best thing to do with a church sign is to put information about the church services. I don’t think church signs are generally helpful. Even those that aren’t bad are generally not that constructive. So I’m grumpy about church signs, along with the lead character of Megabelt!

  • Theologically Incorrect Church Sign

    I took this picture because I wanted it for the Megabelt book site. In the book Megabelt (a cross between Megachurch and Bible Belt) the lead character Gil has a real thing about trite church signs, which covers most of them.

    In looking for church signs to post on the book site, I’ve found any number of church signs that promote some really questionable theology, probably contrary even to the theological positions of the denominations involved. (For independent churches it’s harder to tell.)

    In any case, my reaction to the following sign was: That’s not right!

    Theologically incorrect church sign

    Note: This is a real church sign posted at a church near my home. It’s not photoshopped or run through one of those church sign generators.

     

  • Quote of the Day – Chicken Sandwiches or Daily Bread

    From Allan R. Bevere (author of The Politics of Witness):

    [W]e Christians in America need to ponder the reality that while we were arguing over eating chicken sandwiches this past week, that there were people in many parts of the world who were, at the very same time, hoping only for a morsel of daily bread.

  • Interactive Covenants and Prophecies or God Has a Plan B

    It’s interesting to me how we (and I definitely include myself) often read scripture. One concept can easily override another. For example, I recall a conversation in which someone was claiming that no human being was ever righteous. I brought up Job, who is described as righteous in Job 1. “Oh, but that is only as he was seen through the righteousness of Christ,” I was told. Of course, Job 1 isn’t speaking of the righteousness of Christ, and in fact the entire book would be very silly with that change. Job is concerned that he has been punished, but that nothing he has done deserves these results.

    This post is a follow-up to Psalm 89: When Eternal Doesn’t Last, and you should read that post first.

    It’s funny that I begin this post with an illustration from Job, because Job provides a counterpoint to the theology I’m looking at. Jeremiah 18, which I cited in the previous post, talks about how if God is sending disaster, and the recipients of the disaster repent, God will repent of that disaster. One implication that might be drawn is that good deeds result in blessing, and bad deeds result in curses. One need look no further than Deuteronomy 28 to find this theology made explicit, and it is repeatedly hammered in through the various books of the Deuteronomic history.

    But what I’m more interested in here is the interactive nature of the texts, the way in which people’s actions are woven in with God’s will with the implication that you can change the future. Even if God has said things will go one way, that might be changed through human action.

    In theology we tend to reconcile the differences in some way. God might only appear to react to the actions of humans, but he actually knows precisely what is coming and he does precisely what he planned. It may be considered blasphemous to suggest otherwise. But open theism and process theology both suggest that God is more interactive than traditional theology holds, though to different degrees and in different ways.

    My interest here is in the way we read the biblical text, and the way that we understand prophecy and its fulfilment. I’ll get to the covenants shortly.

    Imagine a father who tells his children that he will take them all to the movies in the evening. Now think about the father’s mental processes. Did he suddenly realize that in the fixed future he would have taken his children to the movies, and thus he informed them of this information he had received (or divined, perhaps)? Or did he decide at this moment that he wanted to take his children to the movies, and that he would, in fact, do so this very evening?

    Given that this human father does not know the future, such as to see himself taking future action, we’ll have to assume the latter. He makes a decision in the present, and he announces it to his children by saying, “I’m going to take you to the movies.” At the point at which he makes that statement it’s true. Being an optimistic sort, this particular father doesn’t think of all the possible reasons he might not make it or might change his mind. He just says he’s going.

    Let’s imagine now that the children, having heard of their good fortune, decide that nothing else matters. They fail to do their chores. They ignore their mother. The fail to put away their toys. They say unfortunate things. In fact, they generally make life miserable for their parents.

    Now the father says, “Because you have been misbehaving, we are not going to the movies any more.” Does this make his earlier statement a lie? It was true (at least in intent) when he said it, but it does not actually take place.

    My suggestion is that prophecies are more like this father’s statement than they are like scenes which one might see in a crystal ball. (If crystal balls worked, which they don’t!) When God says “Nineveh will be destroyed in 40 days,” he doesn’t mean that he has observed the future and seen that this happens, but rather that he intends, in 40 days, to destroy Nineveh. That’s clearly the way the Ninevites understand it. It’s the way Jonah is afraid it’s going to work.

    I’m not certain how much difference there is between these two ways of thinking when it is God making the promises or predictions. It makes a great deal of difference in the way we think about what God has to say.

    Now we come to covenant, and I’d like to call our attention to Jeremiah 31:31-34:

    31 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. (NRSV)

    (Note: I would use “lawful lord” rather than “husband” in this passage, but that gets beyond the scope of this blog post.)

    There are a few things to notice about this passage. First, the covenant came with promises (or are they predictions?). Does this make a difference? There are conditions. It is by violating these conditions that the covenant is broken. Once broken, the covenant is not in effect.

    Then comes the unheard of grace—a new covenant. It’s not a restoration of an old covenant. That one has been broken, and as we learned in Psalm 89, no matter what we do we cannot make the promises “have been” fulfilled, because they weren’t. David’s throne was removed. There was no one sitting on it. No amount of restoration years later can make what did not happen happen. Instead, there’s a new covenant. God is now on plan B, unless it’s plan C or D and we didn’t realize it. But at least it’s not plan A.

    And this is where Christians can go off the rail, especially considering how much this passage is used in the book of Hebrews. The easy Christian solution is to assume that the new covenant that God created is a covenant with the church. And I believe that God does indeed have a new covenant with the church.

    But having a covenant with his people the church does not really fulfil the words of Jeremiah 31:31-34, because there he says that a day is coming when he will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. That precludes one set of ideas, specifically that the church replaces Israel, and that Israel as such is no longer a player.

    But on the other hand we have the view that everything said in the old covenant, the one that was broken, must still be fulfilled. That is not, in my view, scripturally justified. In fact, that is to make the same mistake as those Jeremiah mentioned (7:1-20) who kept repeating: “The temple of the Lord! The temple of the Lord!” God calls attention immediately to Shiloh which had once been the seat of God’s tabernacle, but which had not done so well.

    So it’s now plan B, or perhaps plan C. (Shiloh?) How do we know the form that God’s blessing will take? Perhaps no eye has seen it nor any ear heard it, nor has it entered into any human heart (1 Cor. 2:9).

  • Scot McKnight on Dominion Theology

    Well, actually he’s summarizing Paul C. McGlasson. I recently wrote about hearing Dutch Sheets speak and mentioned what he had to say about the term “dominionism.”

    There is something that concerns me here, and that is that Rushdoony and those who agree with him are lumped in with folks like C. Peter Wagner, and of course Sheets. There are similarities and there are differences. There are differences in goals, such as the basis of whatever biblical law various leaders would apply. Is this a reapplication of at least the civil portions of the Mosaic law, or is it a gentle application of the Sermon on the Mount? I don’t see either of these as a basis for civil administration in a pluralistic society, yet the two goals are substantially different. Then there are differences in terms of strategy. Is force permitted? Is one simply working through the democratic process, or is one trying to undermine the entire system?

    I happen to believe that the Kingdom of God, insofar as it is manifested on earth, should be manifested through the people of God, what we often call the “upper case Church.” I believe that civil administration should be secular or as religiously neutral as possible. (I’ll have to write sometime about how I combine those two potentially conflicting ideas.) But at the same time I believe that we need to be careful when we lump groups of people with quite different goals and approaches together.

     

  • Psalm 89: When Eternal Doesn’t Last

    This week’s lectionary (RCL) texts for this week (Proper B11) form an interesting set, complete with the occasional weird cut-off for the scripture. For example, 2 Samuel 7:1-14a chops off the last part of Nathan’s message to David, the part about both the eternal covenant and the potential for God’s discipline. As I read this, I was thinking that they didn’t want to go into that “eternal covenant” territory.

    (Note that for this post I am reading the Old Testament as a Christian and I am not making use of Jewish interpretation. I use “Old Testament” when referring to the Hebrew scriptures as a part of the Christian Bible. I use “Hebrew scriptures” to refer to them as a literary collection or as the Jewish Bible.)

    But then we have Psalm 89:20-37. Here they have all the stuff about the eternal covenant, but they don’t go on to deal with the most important topic of the Psalm. Verse 38 (not part of the reading) begins:

    But you have spurned and rejected him;
    you are angry with your chosen king.
    You have repudiated your covenant with your servant;
    you have thrown his crown to the ground (38-39 NET).

    If you continue reading you get a scene that sounds very much like the Babylonian exile or thereafter, though there might be a couple of other dates that would fit in. In fact, the author of this Psalm is addressing God specifically because he doesn’t see the eternal covenant being fulfilled. Rather, at this point it is impossible for that covenant to be fulfilled as originally written because it called for a descendant of David to be on the throne “forever” and “forever” is not to be interrupted. Unfortunately “forever” has been interrupted.

    Now there are a number of Christian workarounds for this issue, and most readers likely will have one so readily to mind that they may never have noticed the problem in the first place. We get so used to an imposed or traditional interpretation that we actually hear the interpretation when we think we’re reading the text.

    Many of our common answers involve what I call in my essay Facing the Proof-Text Method “text trimming.” Using this method we trim a text down to size so we can claim either that we obey the command or that a promise or prediction has been fulfilled. In this case a common interpretation for this eternal covenant is that Jesus is of the lineage of David, and either is now sitting on David’s throne (conveniently, if figuratively, transported to heaven), or that at a future date Jesus will sit on David’s throne, thus fulfilling the terms of the covenant.

    But somebody future sitting on David’s throne again, or someone sitting on a throne somewhere else doesn’t fulfill the terms of the covenant as expressed here. In fact, these terms cannot and will not be fulfilled because they have already been overcome by events–specifically there was and is a time when no son of David has been sitting on the throne of Israel. To make this seem like a fulfillment, we must make the covenant itself say less than it actually says.

    If we transport ourselves briefly to a time when the door was still open, but this very issue was front and center, we may see some of the difficulties. I refer to the time when Jerusalem was under its final siege prior to the 586 BCE fall of Jerusalem. There we have some people saying that the city cannot fall because it is, after all, the location of God’s house, and God has promised that there will be a descendant of David on the throne.

    Jeremiah has to argue that there is no safety here. The city can fall. The king can be removed. The temple can be destroyed. He makes an extended argument to this effect in Jeremiah 18, which is sometimes quoted to support God’s sovereignty. “Yes, indeed! God can do whatever he wants!” But that is not the intent at all.

    There are times, Jeremiah, when I threaten to uproot, tear down, and destroy a nation or kingdom. But if that nation I threatened stops doing wrong, I will cancel the destruction I intended to do to it. And there are times when I promise to build up and establish a nation or kingdom. But if that nation does what displeases me and does not obey me, then I will cancel the good I promised to do to it (Jeremiah 18:7-10 NET).

    I recommend reading the entire chapter. The message here is not so much God’s sovereignty, though that is a fundamental assumption of the chapter. Rather, it is that God responds to our actions. Eternal blessings involve responsibilities. You can reverse the blessing, but the good news is that you can also reverse the punishment.

    The book of Jonah illustrates this point in narrative form. Jonah assumes the type of theology that Jeremiah states explicitly. Jonah is actually afraid that God will be merciful and won’t fulfill the promise, yet the story does not include any notion that Jonah preached a possibility of repentance. He hoped the Ninevites would not repent. He was annoyed when they weren’t destroyed. (Again, read the whole book! It’s only four chapters.)

    So what do we do with eternal promises that don’t happen precisely as predicted?

    First, Psalm 89 itself makes it clear that any variation here doesn’t involve abandoning Israel. Canonizing this as part of Christian scripture (or accepting it as canonical) indicates that we believe God is in action in Psalm 89, after the king has been removed. God is still active with his people Israel. We acknowledge through this act that Israel is not abandoned, even if we don’t always remember that we did.

    Second, we have another explicit statement of God’s approach in Jeremiah, this time in chapter 31:31-34. (Again, if you are not well acquainted with this passage, shame on you, go read it!) This is the famous passage used extensively in the book of Hebrews. I am reading it in Jeremiah’s context (to the best of my ability), however, and what I want to note is that the new covenant made is not with someone else, but with the house of Israel.

    There is an argument that God transfers his promises from Israel (Israel is said to have failed) to either the church or in some cases to another nation. There are those who think the United States has become God’s chosen people in some way. But a sudden transfer of the promises from Israel to the church is not a good option, because the new covenant is made with Israel.

    I base my interpretation here heavily on Jeremiah, even though I started with Psalm 89, because Jeremiah is the guy who had to deal with this issue when it was live. He had to proclaim his view of the covenant and the results of violating it in the face of torture and death, not sitting comfortably in front of his computer screen or in a church office somewhere.

    At the same time, if we as Christians are to understand this as God’s will, and ourselves as part of God’s will, we will have to see some way in which we become connected. Thus we “trim the text” in some ways, allowing modification, but it’s a modification that is, I think, well supported. Jeremiah maintains there is a new covenant. Even the old covenant called for Israel to bless the entire world.

    Paul makes his argument in Romans 9-11, which is again less concerned with God’s sovereignty, though that is again a fundamental assumption of the passage, but rather with how God deals with Israel. Like a parent, God doesn’t say, “I think I’ll put aside this one son in favor of someone else.” Rather, he looks to extend his blessing. Thus we gentiles are grafted in and receive some of God’s blessing. (It would be interesting to spend some time on Paul’s use of scripture in Romans 9-11. He does some interesting things!)

    It’s easy here to imagine that the Jews must somehow be blessed less. It’s hard for us to understand that God’s love and his blessings are not a limited commodity. When I became a step-parent I was careful never to suggest that my step-children should love their birth father less. I loved them as my own, but I knew the love was shared, yet I felt no loss. Love isn’t a limited commodity either. And we, limited as we are, can add more people into our circle of love. So can God.

    But even here we can make a mistake. We often see “chosen-ness” as being chosen to receive blessings, to be the best loved favorite. But God tends to choose people to do things. Jeremiah was chosen, just as Israel was chosen. It was a different time and place and different purpose (though not as different as it might seem), but being chosen wasn’t fun for Jeremiah. In fact, it was quite miserable.

    So the gentile church has no cause for boasting or for thinking of themselves as better than others. That’s not the point of being chosen by God. The point of being chosen by God is mission–whatever mission God has for you.

    Thus while I say that the promise cannot be fulfilled as written, because it wasn’t, yet God is faithful to act with consistency. A rebellious church might consider a serious reading of Jeremiah 18.

  • Shades of Outrage but Comments Closed

    I pointed earlier to a post by J. R. Daniel Kirk responding to the post at The Gospel Coalition by Jared Wilson. Wilson has now responded to some of the outrage generated by his original post. But generally his new post says we shouldn’t read his excerpt as saying what it actually says, but should understand it as saying something completely different. He then closes comments.

    I have two issues here:

    1) The minor one is that the effort to respond and then cut off public discussion. E-mail is an easy way to take on only those you want to, and not have your responses subject to public scrutiny.

    2) This is not a good characterization of complementarians that I know. I’m egalitarian. I’m quite willing to argue the issue. But I believe most of those complementarians of my acquaintance would not be any more comfortable with this language than I am. It’s important to recognize nuances of one’s position. It’s easy to make all of our arguments based on what some position might lead to or what might be associated with it.

    Wilson tries to maintain that his excerpt is saying nothing more than the ordinary complementarian position (fourth paragraph), and then wonders why people are so perverse as to fail to realize this, especially after the author has said that he really, really didn’t mean what we read his words to say. But unfortunately if language means anything, that summary is inaccurate (the fourth paragraph), and Douglas Wilson’s denial is disingenuous.

    Consider this paragraph, the second in the exerpt:

    When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, [note that this is not said to be offensive to all decent people, but to egalitarians] and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed [in other words, authority and submission is appropriate to the marriage bed, and is suppressed] (bolding and bracketed comments are mine).

    I vigorously reject this paragraph. Obviously I do so as an egalitarian. But I also reject it as a fundamental statement of complementarianism. Were I to accuse my many complementarian friends of holding such a position, they would justifiably accuse me of constructing a straw man.

    Wilson accuses detractors of decontextualizing this post. Is this excerpt insufficient context? Let him tell us what context would suffice to make this acceptable. The only context I could imagine that would justify the paragraph would be one that made it the statement of a villain in some sort of theological novel.

    (See also this post from Political Jesus regarding Douglas Wilson and a discussion of slavery.)

  • Responding to TGC on Sex and Power

    Well, I’m not responding. I found someone who wrote a better response than I could manage. That is J. R. Daniel Kirk. The payoff quote:

    When Jesus came and showed us what Christian manhood was all about, he did not conquer, but allowed himself to be conquered; he did not pierce, but allowed himself to be pierced; he did not plant by scattering his seed forcibly, he planted by giving up his own life–the grain of wheat falling to the earth and dying that it might produce a crop 100-fold.

    A certain number of the differences between egalitarians and complementarians might be resolved if we all took our concept of authority and power from Jesus and the way he loved. Not all the differences, but a good number. “As Christ loved the church.” It’s not about putting you or me in charge.

  • Measuring Liberal Christianity

    There have been a number of posts around the web regarding the decline of liberal Christianity. It got started by Ross Douthat in the New York Times. There have been a number of good responses, including Rachel Held Evans (which connected best with me), Chaplain Mike, and Diana Butler Bass. All these responses are good.

    There are so many factors in making a church a vibrant, successful operation that it’s easy to see how people can disagree so widely on what’s wrong and what ought to be done.

    My first problem is with how we measure the success of a church. Most of us are quick to claim that numbers don’t matter when the our own numbers are in decline, yet we are quite ready to accept that the decline in someone else’s numbers is an indication that something is wrong with them. And there are good scriptural examples of both. Jesus began his ministry with crowds following him and ended it pretty much alone. The early church, on the other hand, experienced steady growth.

    We can easily use “numbers don’t count” as an excuse for not doing our duty. At the same time, I don’t think that numbers really tell the story. When I look at a conference dashboard (a UMC thing!), the first thing I notice is the context-free use of statistics, with numbers not normed for church size nor adjusted for the demographics of the community in which a church is located. But more important, I think managing churches by the numbers is a sign of the very laziness of which some pastors are accused. It’s an excuse for bishops to fail to do their duty to use spiritual discernment in leading the church. I must confess that at first I was merely ambivalent about this approach. But the more I watch it, and the more I read about it, the more firmly opposed to it I become.

    This doesn’t mean that declining numbers cannot indicate failure. It’s just that they are not the one and only indicator. Determining the difference requires spiritual discernment and a willingness to take responsibility for acting on that discernment. I think the church is badly in need of this sort of leadership.

    But let me now turn my discernment to liberal Christianity, and take responsibility for my own views. I use the label “liberal charismatic” along with “passionate moderate” in the header to this blog. This doesn’t result from a rejection of labels, as one might take it from Brian McLaren, but rather a search for a set of labels that are applicable. I think I look at liberal Christianity with one foot in that camp.

    From that perspective I see a great deal of life in liberal or progressive Christianity. Unfortunately, like conservative Christianity, there is often a great deal of difference between the pastors and leaders and the folks in the pews. There are also dead spots in both versions (and all those between). I think these dead spots result from the same thing.

    Too many liberals in the pews are liberals not because they are liberal in theology but because they are not conservative. (I’m sure this applies to some pastors as well, but I don’t know many like that personally.) By this I mean that they really don’t have a theology of scripture. They reject the conservative doctrine and then just go along “not taking it as literally” as conservatives. They don’t have a liberal doctrine of the atonement; they just don’t accept the conservative view.

    I think it’s quite possible that it’s as a result of this lack of interest in doctrinal positions that liberal pastors often don’t preach much about doctrine. But there are liberal interpretations of all these things, and quite robust ones. I know liberal preachers who do preach about them, and in general their congregations are doing well. (Note that all such comments are from personal experience, not any sort of survey.)

    I have the privilege of publishing some authors who would identify themselves as progressive. Bruce Epperly, Bob Cornwall, and Bob LaRochelle come to mind immediately. I hope they won’t mind my taking their names in vain here, but they are all serious about their theology and active in discipleship and mission. They are deeply interested in Bible study. Indeed two of them have written Bible study guides that I publish. I list these three because of personal knowledge, but I would add that when I recently attended the Academy of Parish Clergy conference, I heard a number of presentations from people who are serious about both theology and mission. (Some of these folks should probably be categorized as moderate as well, but they were generally mainline.)

    While there are certainly churches in decline, what I question is the potential of the organizations for success. It is not that there is no life at the local level. It is rather that organizations are not tending to respond to the realities of ministry today. In the United Methodist Church, I think there is a substantial number of both clergy and laity whose main occupation is keeping things as they are. It is these people who are bringing death to the church, not the active liberal pastors and thinkers.

    I believe there is life in liberal Christianity, and in conservative Christianity as well. There is no life in the way we’re trying to determine success.