Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Christianity

  • The Fanatic Illustrated

    In a previous post I used the relationship between essentials and non-essentials to group ways in which Christians (and Christian groups) operate. One of these approaches to doctrine was labeled “the fanatic” (see image).

    With some help from Joel Watts, I’ve found a good illustration of this, and it’s The Berean Library, which lists as false gospels such diverse folks as Pete Enns, the New Apostolic Reformation, seeker sensitive churches, and preterists. Now I have my own problems with some of these, but there are two reasons I think this particular page illustrates the “fanatic” diagram:

    1. Each of these groups they regard as being in error is accused of teaching a false gospel. In the context of Galatians, from which that label comes, this means that their errors are definitely in essentials.
    2. The wide variety of groups means that a large number of doctrinal positions are regarded as essential.

    This combination means that there is little room for compromise (on non-essentials) or cooperation. This reminds me of a church pastor I called on behalf of a city-wide prayer gathering a few years ago. He informed me that he wouldn’t attend the meeting because there was no point in praying with people who were wrong.

    That would leave me out all the time! I suspect I’m wrong on many things. That’s why I continue to study. Perhaps I can become “righter”

  • Reading the Bible Frequently and Thoroughly

    I love it when someone famous says all the things I like to hear about Bible study. One thing I regularly say to Sunday School classes or to groups I’m invited to teach is that if they were looking for a five minute a day method, they invited the wrong person. It takes more than that to become acquainted with that.

    I found this video by N. T. Wright via RJS on The Jesus Creed. It’s excellent:

     

    Some of my notes include the lines:

    Read it frequently and thoroughly …

    We have cut the Bible down to size (referring to our methods of looking at short passages and dissecting them)

    Listen in order to be swept along … (using listening to a symphony as an analogy to reading the Bible)

    Until we wrestle with scripture like that we’re not honoring it.

    The additional comments in the post regarding the doctrine of scripture to “… hold loosely to our particular theological commitments and our doctrine of scripture.” I would probably be more likely to say to loosen our doctrine of scripture, than to hold our doctrine loosely, though both options head in the right direction.

    In my book When People Speak for God, I put it this way (pp. 13-15):

    Typically, Christians have found proof texts in scriptures that make comments about inspiration. “All scripture is inspired (or God-breathed) . . .” (2 Timothy 3:16). “No prophecy of the scripture came by human will . . .” (2 Peter 1:21). These texts are not only used to prove the inspiration of scriptures, ignoring the circularity of using a Bible verse to prove that the Bible is inspired, but they also provide the foundation for an  understanding of how inspiration worked. I most commonly hear 2 Timothy 3:16 quoted in this connection. I ask someone what inspiration means. “All scripture is  God-breathed,” comes back the answer. “God-breathed” is supposed to be obvious, but somehow the passage doesn’t enlighten us as to what God breathes and how. Another answer, that prophets speak as they are carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21), doesn’t really answer the question either.

    The process of inspiration is important not only in terms of how we understand God to behave in connection with people, but also in telling us what we would expect to result. For example, those who believe that God dictates the precise words that a prophet or other inspired writer puts on paper must in turn believe that those words, and not just the message they express, are important, and that they must always be the best words for the  purpose. On the other hand, someone who believes that people receive impressions from God and then express them in human words will place a greater emphasis on the human side of the equation. The message is important, and it may be illuminated by knowing the person who speaks along with his or her cultural background and spiritual experience.

    As the author of Hebrews expressed it:

    1In  old times God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets in many portions and in different ways. 2In these last days, however, he has spoken to us through a Son, one whom he has made heir of everything, and through whom also he created the universe.  3This Son is the brightness of his glory and the exact representation of his real essence. He sustains everything by his powerful word. He performed a cleansing from sins and sat down at the right hand of majesty in the {spiritual/heavenly} heights. — Hebrews 1:1-3

    God’s message came at different times and in different ways, a process that the author of Hebrews states culminated in God’s message coming through a person, Jesus. In Hebrews 4:12 he continues by calling the Word “alive and active” again referring to the Word of God as portrayed in Jesus. Those who place a heavy emphasis on the words, rather than the message, should give serious consideration to the view of revelation expressed in the book of Hebrews. According to this one scriptural author, whom most scholars leave unidentified, inspiration doesn’t always work the same way.

    I would suggest that instead of looking for statements about how inspiration works in the scriptures, we should look at the scriptures themselves. There is no good reason to assume that those who experienced inspiration would also feel it necessary to define it. In fact, when we look at the scriptures we see no real effort to provide us with a theory of inspiration. There were simply people who claimed that they had a message from God, and they expressed it with some force under their various circumstances.

    Reading the Bible as a whole, or reading whole books (Wright suggests the Gospel of John, which should only take a couple of hours), will help you see inspiration in action. Then perhaps, rather than deciding on a theory of inspiration and trying to make the Bible fit, you can see how the Bible was inspired, i.e. inspiration in action, and form from that your understanding of inspiration.

    (I do some commercials on resources from my company here.)

  • Shifting Theology

    Last week I was talking about doctrinal distinctives, and today Scot McKnight has a post very close to that topic. He’s more specific, talking about pastors who shift theology. I think he would have done better to illustrate this post with something other than pastors who have become secret atheists, though I know such things happen.

    The interesting question I would have is just how much can a pastor shift, and on what issues. From there I’d be wondering how much a leader can shift, for example, a Sunday School teacher. Finally, where might the standard be for members?

    Having grown up in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, where I had to affirm a large number of doctrines before baptism, I have experienced the very tight option. After I had left the SDA church, I received a call from someone who wanted to complain about my parents’ positions. They were debating about very minor points and were completely shocked when I pointed out that I didn’t accept either of the positions they were comparing. (The topic was the SDA doctrine of the investigative judgment, which I reject.) To me the issues they raised, and which were critical to them, sounded silly.

    In an earlier, Unity, Diversity, and Confusion, I argue that it’s important to have some essential doctrines, but it’s also important both to know what they are and to keep them limited to actual essentials. A church denomination (as opposed to belonging to the universal church), has limited impact, in my opinion. If one finds that one is drifting from the essentials, as understood by that organization, one should cross the street openly and honestly.

    Let’s say that a local congregation regards tithing as essential. I think it is just as much a lack of integrity to pastor or lead that church if you don’t accept that essential from their point of view, as it would be to pastor a church after you have lost your faith. (I use this example, because I do not believe tithing applies to Christians.) I would make an exception for those cases in which the congregation is aware of the difference, but accepts the leader in spite of it. In that case, however, I would question whether that doctrine was truly an essential in that particular congregation.

    In addition, what precisely is essential? That is not an easy decision either. Are your differences actually on doctrines that are essential? Most congregations have more stated doctrines than are actually essential. Perhaps your shift is one on which you should teach and preach.

    I always like to add a caveat here. I’m a publisher, not a pastor. I work for myself. I teach Sunday School, but I’m not on the church board. Thus I speak from the cheap seats. A pastor who has committed his or her life to a calling and to a particular church group has a  much more difficult decision to make than I will experience.

  • On Doctrinal Distinctives

    Dave Black links to an article regarding the recent statement on the traditional Southern Baptist understanding of the doctrine of salvation. Craig Benno comments further. You may well wonder what a United Methodist is doing commenting on this particular issue. Is it any of my concern whether Southern Baptists accept Calvinism or not, or which view is more traditional?

    No, not at all. What’s interesting to me is the process of looking at “distinctives” and essentials (and you must read at least the first article to understand what I mean here), and distinguishing them. Dr. David Allen lists a number of items on which Southern Baptists can agree generally, but then explicitly places the Calvinist/Traditionalist split outside those boundaries, and thus a topic on which Southern Baptists can disagree.

    Many of us might disagree on these items. I’d see the distinction between Calvinism and other views of salvation as much more important than the distinction between inerrancy and other views of biblical inspiration. But, again, I’m not a Southern Baptist. But making these things explicit is a healthy process, I believe. Knowing what we consider essential is important.

    The United Methodist Church can often tend much too far the other way. It’s hard to tell precisely what it means to be a United Methodist. Certainly we have statements of belief, but there is really no expectation in most churches that the members actually believe any portion of those statements. Of course, the idea of “essentials” is not itself an essential, at least as I see it.

    I actually wrote all this mostly to link back to some previous posts I wrote on this topic:

    Unity, Diversity, and Confusion

    Excessively Large Tent = Crash

    Not All Doctrines Are Equal

    Finding and Protecting the Essentials

    I’d say the first of these is the most important statement of my views.

  • Glorious Stories

    … or “My Wife Reposts Me.”

    Every so often I write a devotional for my wife’s devotional list. She’s been faithfully writing a devotion each weekday (with a very few short breaks) for around 10 years now. You can find here at Jody’s Devotionals. She’s a master of the short devotional form, while I’m not, but I try.

    On even rare occasions, she reposts an older devotional, and today she reposted one of mine, titled Glorious Stories. I read it and found it interesting again. I rarely find re-reading something I wrote interesting. So I decided to link to it.

    Enjoy! Narcissism ‘R Me!

     

  • Discovering What Young Adults Want

    I hear (and participate in) many discussions about what young adults want from the church, usually in the context of asking why the youth and young adults don’t attend church services or the events we put on for them. I’ve arrived at an age where waitresses at restaurants ask me if I want my senior citizen discount (I recently turned 55!), and I sometimes even get one. The interesting thing is how few of the discussions of what young adults like ever include any young adults. I may feel young, but I’m not in touch with the twenty-something or even thirty-something crowd.

    I recall being in a church committee meeting where we discussed what we should do with the church services to get more young people to attend. After more than half an hour of ideas, I felt constrained to point out that there was nobody in the room under 40, and maybe only one or two under 50. The rest of us were in our 50s. Isn’t there are problem with this sort of discussion?

    But when I read Dan Dick’s Beyond Label or Cateogry, I felt much more sympathy (or perhaps empathy) with the girl in the story than with my friends of a similar age. My first reaction was that listing the contents of her purse seemed like a violation of privacy. (I note that some time after I read the post, but before I wrote this, another commenter noted the same thing.) But then I thought that this was an effort to discover her identity, and nothing personal was revealed.

    I too have struggled with labels. I can’t just join a group, in many cases, because I’ll be on their side on one issue, but not on another. People in groups tend to expect you to be on their side, at least most of the time. But despite my own difficulties with labeling, I can get lost in trying to follow the various commitments of those younger than I am.

    So please read Dan’s article and give some consideration to flexibility. Is our complaint that young adults don’t like faith? Or is it, rather, that they don’t like all of our extraneous commitments and our expectation for conformity?

  • Trusting God less than the Government

    Or I could say, I think we trust the Gospel (God’s plan), less than we trust the government.

    Yesterday I posted something from Dave Black to Energion.net (with permission), and e-mailed several of my friends (and Energion authors) to see if they might have a comment on it. As I’ve been thinking about the post, I decided I had a few words of my own to say about it. That post in turn links to a post titled Evangelicalism == Christian Legislation at Juris Naturalist. Though the original post specifically uses abortion as its key example, I am not posting about abortion here, but rather on the question of Christian involvement in politics. Also, I am not going to talk about evangelical Christianity, but rather about mainline Protestantism, of which I am a part.

    I confess that when I went to read the post the first thing that jumped out at me was this:

    I don’t think morality can or should be legislated.

    It seems fairly obvious to me that morality not only can be legislated, we do it all the time. I’ll continue to argue that point. But then I thought of some of the idioms I’ve studied in the Bible, and how the meanings of the words as such may not convey what the phrase has come to mean. So I think it might be possible that this obviously false statement (read one way) might mean something rather different. In fact, over the last few months, I’ve asked some folks who use this just what they’re trying to say. In this very informal and unscientific survey, nobody intended to say that a law couldn’t prescribe doing something that would qualify as moral, nor that it could not proscribe something immoral. Rather, they meant that the law could not make people more moral. Perhaps some linguist will get a good research paper out of surveying what people are actually thinking when they say this.

    I actually have a problem with that as well, in that I do believe that carrying out moral behavior on a regular basis, even when one is constrained to do so by someone in authority, may contribute to one becoming a moral person. Habits do make mental impressions. I think there is a good deal of this illustrated in the Torah. But that is for another time.

    The key issue here, it seems to me, is the strategy that Christians should use in promoting what we think is right in the broader society. The contrast presented in the Juris Naturalist post is that exercising self-sacrifice would be a better strategy for accomplishing our goals than action in the public square. The illustrations used were paying a woman not to have an abortion (with a related question of just how much that would be worth) as opposed to participating in the March for Life in Washington, D.C. While I personally dislike marches as a means of accomplishing political goals, I will admit that’s a prejudice, and I would also see plenty of drawbacks to the proposal to pay women not to have abortions.

    Let me illustrate with a slightly less heated issue. In my home church (which is mainline protestant rather than evangelical), we have a group that is interested in reforming the juvenile justice system. I have great sympathy with their goals, but I’m interested not in the validity of the goals, but in the strategy here. I suspect that nobody would suggest they can accomplish their goals without political action. The juvenile justice system is, and must be to a large extent, run by the government. If one is to reform it, one must make changes at the political level.

    Such changes come slowly. There is a tendency right now to believe that harsher punishment and more cases of trying juveniles as adults is the best approach. Ignoring the validity of each option, let’s think strategy. The temptation is to become frustrated and angry when the government doesn’t go our way. I’m not going to comment on the state of the evangelical church, but for mainline protestants here in the south there is a great deal of frustration.

    What do we tend to do about it? We tend to throw up our hands and say that in this atmosphere there’s really nothing that can be done. It’s not that we trust government so much, it’s that we tend not to see any other options.

    And that’s where, I believe, we need to start thinking much more about the gospel. There’s a stereotype of those who think the gospel can solve these things, one that suggests that “solving a problem with the gospel” means that we preach to people, get them to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior, and when we have accomplished this they no longer commit crimes that result in them being in the juvenile justice system, they no longer use drugs, and they no longer consider abortion an option. I don’t know how many people might mean something like that, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I do believe in transformation of life through the gospel, but that’s one aspect.

    What we need as well is a gospel based transformation of life at the church and Church level, that is churches who are living the gospel on a daily basis, where Christianity is not just what you do on Sunday morning but drives everything. We’ve come a long ways since the church was acting in unity as described in Acts 2:43-47, and the long ways hasn’t all been in the right direction, to say the least! Coincidentally, my wife is reposting some things I wrote about this on her devotional blog. The first part, Church: Alive or Dead – Part I was posted this morning. The result of such a transformation would be to keep many youth out of the juvenile system in the first place, and while this does not eliminate the need for reform, it does help young people. And it isn’t exclusive either. We can do both.

    We no longer expect a community of faith as they did. In fact, our expectations of members are rather low. We no longer assume that when a member of the church is in trouble the primary source of help, encouragement, and support is the church. Similarly, we don’t see the church as the source of accountability. Being part of one body will involve rebuke as well, but I fear we have lost the skill (and perhaps the discernment) to do that right. But even further, we don’t see the church so much as the people as a matter of buildings, programs, and organizational structures.

    I’m sure someone will point out how many people have said things just like what I say, and that my accusation is unfair. I recall a church where I spoke on prayer. I was told that prayer was the second highest priority of that church. (I didn’t inquire as to what the first priority was.) In view of this, the prayer coordinator was shocked that only about 20 people from a 500 member church showed up for the prayer seminar my wife and I were there to conduct. I simply pointed out that our real priorities are not necessarily indicated by what we say. Looking at the church grounds, I’d have to say that sports was a higher priority at that church. That’s where the time and the money were going.

    Similarly look at your church’s budget. Where does the money go? That will give you a good idea about priorities. Yet it isn’t all about money. Where does our time go? Is it looking inward? Is it taking care of a core group of “important” members? I recall a case in which a church board rejected an outreach project to young people. They said it was not a good outreach project because most of the youth involved were not church members. Besides, of course, learning the English language, that board needed to consider just what their church was there for. We often have nice mission statements, but the question is whether our actual mission is the same as our mission statement. You can tell what the mission of a church is by what it actually does.

    And this is what I mean by trusting God less than we trust the government. We take our issues to the political sphere and when that fails us we often give up or we make token efforts. There are a huge number of Christians in this country, even a huge number of active Christians. If our money was backing up our words we could accomplish great things. We’d have to find ways to get around some of our structures. I consider church buildings the most wasted structures around. Whole sanctuaries getting used just on Sunday morning and perhaps Wednesday night! Gymnasiums used just a couple of times a week!

    Then there are our denominational structures. When I look at downtown Pensacola, I see Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches, along with quite a number of others in close proximity. There are some really good things going in terms of cooperation between these churches. I suspect much more could be accomplished if we dropped some of our concerns with denominational identity and credit. And there are many places were dozens of churches exist close together and the members of one church don’t know what the next church is doing. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone points out to me something happening in the downtown area of Pensacola as the result of this blog post–something I should have known about.

    In fact, there are many small lights around the country. I have been tremendously impressed with things I see in smaller churches. What we need is for those things to spread. My mother’s home church has a program that prepares a personalized bag of supplies, including a quilt and other helpful items for children who are going into foster care. I’ve been telling people about that program and over and over people have said, “What a wonderful idea!” And there are plenty of wonderful ideas that result simply from living the gospel on a day-to-day basis, a plan God had in place quite some time again.

    I think we could carry out major reforms in our country simply through active discipleship. I don’t think that would keep us out of the public square. In fact, I think it would find us there quite a lot, and much more successful. I just think many of us have given up on the gospel as a force in the church. If so, it is no wonder we are doing poorly as a force in the world.

     

  • Christianity Today on Short Term Mission Trips

    Christianity Today has a good article giving multiple views on short-term mission trips, specifically those that are travel-intensive. I like getting the multiple views.

    As someone who has participated in and even led mission trips that were “travel-intensive,” I would suggest that leaders and organizers should give serious attention to these evaluations. Don’t take just the negative. It’s easy to imagine that if the money was not spent on a mission trip it would be put into some other good cause. It might, instead, go to a cruise.

    I’d suggest several points to consider if you’re planning such a trip.

    1) Have a good contact in your host country. By a good contact I mean someone who will point you in the right direction. This doesn’t need to be a missionary. It’s best if this is a good local contact. I can’t overemphasize this. Work in connection with the local church.

    2) Be sure you’re listening to your local contact. Don’t plan to do things your way.

    3) Have good church support at home. I don’t mean people to pay the bills. I mean a church (or churches) that commissions you, supports you, and provides accountability.

    4) Choose your team wisely. Not everyone who says “I want to go” actually wants to contribute as part of a team. I could say a lot of things about how to do this, but connection with their local church community, pastor, elders, or other leadership is a good thing.

    5) Be sure you have good leaders on the team.

    6) Prayerfully evaluate what you will accomplish, both for the team and for your hosts. Is this building the kingdom or is it just making us feel good about ourselves? How could this mission be accomplished better?

    Bottom line is that a short-term mission trip is much like any other project. It needs to be done prayerfully and wisely and according to God’s call.

  • Quote of the Day: God’s Word and Our Words

    Creation: The Christian DoctrineI’m working on editing Creation: the Christian Doctrine by Edward W. H. Vick. It’s quite an enjoyable task. I regularly learn new things while reading Dr. Vick’s work. In this case he’s talking about knowledge of God. He has already contrasted this with knowledge of the natural universe. We, as finite creatures, cannot by normal means understand the transcendent. Only as God acts and reveals himself can we attain such knowledge.

    It is because God has expressed himself and continues to express himself that God is known. A clear distinction is to be made between the divine reality, the form by which God is expressed, and the knowledge human beings acquire of him.

    …

    So we, the human creatures, cannot by observation, sensation
    and deduction, arrive at a knowledge of God. We use such methods in our successful search for knowledge within the cosmos, but they are not the ways that we can come to a knowledge of God. But as God reveals himself and the Word is grasped, the human can understand the expression by which the revelation is made possible and expressed. We never transcend the limitations of our language, even in speaking of the revealing act of God. We are creatures and our language is anthropomorphic. But that does not mean that there are not poorer and better ways of using our language! The very use of language should remind us that God is transcendent.
    He is Creator. We are creatures. Without the Word, we would know nothing of the transcendent God.

    (Creation: The Christian Doctrine, pp. 54-55, forthcoming from Energion Publications.)

    Vick develops these ideas further in his earlier books History and Christian Faith (distributed by Energion) and From Inspiration to Understanding: Reading the Bible Seriously and Faithfully.

  • Free Book from My Company

    Giving away one free copy of God’s Desire for the Nations: The Missionary Theology of John Piper (Energion Publications).