Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Christianity

  • The Gospel in the Sermon on the Mount

    Scot McKnight asks the question: Is the Sermon on the Mount the Gospel? I think it’s an excellent question, and my answer would be yes. But I see this as similar to the question of whether the gospel can be found in the Old Testament, or in the law generally, to which I again answer yes. If we get law out of its place, and make it the means of salvation, it becomes bad news. Law in its place, following grace, is definitely good news.

    I wrote about this some time back in an essay titled A Fruitful Faith, which I originally published in my preblogging days (July 29, 2003), but have just moved to the Energion.com site.

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  • Loving C. S. Lewis and Hating Rob Bell?

    Michael Patton, who often steps into controversial issues (which I do not mean as a criticism), asks why people love C. S. Lewis, but hate Rob Bell. His conclusion is that this is because Bell’s ideas that push the boundaries characterize his ministry, unlike those of C. S. Lewis.

    I must admit that I’ve read only a few lines of Rob Bell, while I’ve read just about everything related to Christianity that C. S. Lewis ever wrote. In addition, I’m not a universalist, though I don’t automatically call universalists heretics.

    But I ‘m going to suggest a different reason why people perceive these two men so differently. Rob Bell is contemporary. He may say many things other than what he said in his most recent book, but he has managed to become the poster boy for certain controversies. I’m not sure that his ministry is characterized by this one topic; it’s the publicity about him that bears that character.

    C. S. Lewis got started defending Christianity, and that certainly did make it easier for him to get accepted regarding other ideas. But he gets a pass on many doctrines that in others are regarded as heretical. In my view, other thinkers should get similarly gracious treatment.

    (Note: I ignore here issues of writing quality. In the little bit I’ve read, I’ve come to doubt I could tolerate reading an entire book by Rob Bell, whereas I really enjoy Lewis’s prose. But I haven’t read enough of Bell to make that a firm opinion of his writing.)

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  • Paul Was a Sexist Simpleton?

    Well, no, I don’t think so, but in one of the best demonstrations I’ve seen of how not to argue, that is a view attributed to others by writer Andrew Wilson on the New Frontiers Theology Matters blog (HT: 42).

    Within evangelicalism, four main lines of interpretation can be discerned. (Outside of evangelicalism, the response is fairly simple – Paul was a sexist simpleton who didn’t know any better; we’ve been enlightened now, so we should ignore him – although one wonders if the catastrophic track record of post-1960s white people when it comes to marriage will cause this approach to lose its lustre).

    Now it’s hard to tell just who this statement refers to, because evangelicalism is so loosely defined these days. I know I’ve been accused of ignoring Paul. But I get part of the foundation of my egalitarianism from Paul, while at the same time looking to him as a master of working with the culture as he found it. In other words while I suppose someone might find reason to call Paul sexist, though I think they’d be wrong to do so, calling him a simpleton is utterly ridiculous.

    (I’m not going to go through the rest of the article, but there are other, less glaring problems in characterizing the evangelical streams the author refers to.)

    So who might we say, “resembles” that remark? I know of nobody who does. I’m not saying there aren’t any, but I am a member of a church that ordains women in leadership, and is egalitarian in its theology, and I’ve never encountered anyone who would say something like this about Paul.

    What I have encountered are a few people who think all complementarians are either secretly sadistic tyrants or, at a minimum, enablers of the same, something that I again know from personal experience is not the case.

    We’re going to make enough mistakes in understanding and characterizing one another’s positions. We need to avoid this kind of statement in Bible study.

     

  • My Wife is Giving Away Books

    Grief: Finding the Candle of LightCopies of her own book Grief: Finding the Candle of Light, that is. She’s written an excellent post on dealing with grief in the holidays, and she’s offering a free copy of her book to the first three commenters. So head on over there and be one of those first three and get your free copy of this little book. My (totally unbiased) opinion, as both her husband and publisher is that it’s well worth the effort!

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  • Christian Carnival Posted

    . . . at Codex: Biblical Studies Blogspot.

  • Scot McKnight on Academic Freedom

    Scot McKnight wrote an interesting post today on the need for academic freedom in religious schools. First let me note that I agree with the need for academic freedom, and that I am sympathetic with all three cases McKnight mentions, and have had personal correspondence with one of them. In addition, I like to promote discussion that is as broad as possible.

    I do want to put a note of my own, however. I think that religious schools should be able to set the boundaries on what they are going to permit. Will some of them set boundaries I would disapprove? Of course. Many already do set boundaries that would exclude me. In a free market of ideas, I would only object if an institution advertised itself falsely, i.e. claimed to have standards of academic freedom which were not true.

    In addition, someone who intends to be a researcher at such a school should be aware of such limitations. If you are doing research at an institution that requires your results to fit in with a 6000 year old earth, for example, you must be prepared for a certain amount of disdain from mainstream science.

    Academic freedom is important, and if certain results are excluded a priori, one needs to be aware of the fact.

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  • Scot McKnight on Women in Ministry

    I’ll be eagerly awaiting the inexpensive ebook of his lecture at Fuller. The summary is interesting.

  • Brannon Howse and Justin Peters Dissing Visions

    The following video comes from Worldview Weekend, and is a conversation between Brannon Howse and Justin Peters. What’s interesting about this post is that pretty much every accusation they make against modern people who claim visions of or visits to heaven could be made against various Bible writers.

    In fact, they run into this difficulty in the middle of the video, just after 8:00, when they are criticizing Jess Duplantis for referring to God as having fingers. Suddenly they remember that the Bible also refers to God as having body parts, so they bring out the metaphor defense. Of course, that is a very good defense — it is metaphorical language. But why can’t Jesse Duplantis use metaphorical language?

    They refer to Paul’s statement that he heard things he couldn’t speak of when he was taken up into the third heaven, and thus suggest no modern person should do so. Can anyone say, “Revelation?” Yes, they notice Revelation as well, but apparently don’t notice the problem.

    The fact is that if you want to find weird things, you can find plenty of them in the Bible itself. My intent isn’t to defend everyone who claims a vision of heaven. I just don’t see any reason to exclude such modern visions if one accepts, as these men do, that such visions were ever possible.

    I’m putting the video below the fold to keep it from autostarting on views of the home page.

    (more…)

  • Connectionalism and Dysfunctional Churches

    I have made a few negative comments about conference dashboards keeping statistics on membership, apportionments, and other activities available to anyone who wants to read. I continue to question whether these numbers really tell the story of the health of the churches. There are, I believe, some very large and growing churches that have little or nothing to do with the kingdom of God.

    Nonetheless, I think we have a problem with accountability in the United Methodist Church. When I took my new member class in my first United Methodist congregation, I recall the teacher, who made a number of historical errors, emphasized connectionalism. But if I were to go by his discussion of it, connectionalism means simply that we all go help one another as needed; nothing was said about accountability.

    Those who are pushing the statistical approach are, I believe, responding to a very real problem. Pastors and church congregations in the United Methodist Church can go on indefinitely violating the discipline of the church or refusing to take necessary actions to make their church successful, while expecting that others will take up the slack.

    That is what happens when a church continually fails to pay its apportionments. Now I’m not 100% a fan of apportionments as they are currently implemented, but they do represent a critical element of connectionalism. We put our money together to accomplish things we can’t do separately. Whatever reforms the system might need, the basic concept is sound, and more importantly if you have such a system, and some churches don’t do their share, all suffer.

    This means that we need accountability as part of our connectional system. Churches need to be accountable to those who support them. In a more congregational system, an older church barely hanging on while slowly dying would have a hard time getting people to send money to help. A United Methodist congregation that refuses to take necessary actions, and continues to fail to support the team will nonetheless benefit from the resources of the denomination.

    We should be willing to give money to support the mission of the church. But supporting a church that is willfully imitating a sinking ship sliding under the waves is not mission—it’s bad stewardship.

    In addition, dysfunctional congregations continue to be part of the witness our denomination gives regarding Christ. Our “brand” can be tarnished by the actions of any of our churches. In the case of a denomination, tarnishing the brand also provides a negative witness—tarnishes the brand, so to speak—of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

    My problem is that statistics can and generally do fail to get the entire picture. You can have good statistics and still not be building the kingdom of God. I welcome moves to make pastors more accountable. I think more could be done to make churches accountable as well.

    But accountability is going to take more than reading the numbers. It will require people with good discernment who can see the context, make the necessary decisions, and take responsibility for those decisions. It may be difficult. We may prefer to find some objective measure, but it is still necessary. An objective measure of a subjective set of values will, by nature, be deceptive.

    In critical ways, the church is not a business. Thus my call is for accountability carried out by human beings who exercise all their discernment and wisdom and seek to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit.

     

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  • This Headline Says It All

    Tithing Hits Record Low; Churches Spend More to Make Congregants Happy.

    While I don’t believe tithing is a command binding on Christians, my problem is not that it would demand too much, but rather that it demands too little, does so in the wrong way, and for the wrong reasons. But that’s another topic.

    And I can’t resist noting that the word “tithing” used to refer to giving 10%, not 2.38%, though I know the word has changed meaning. Still, if you’re going to call it a biblical command, it might be better to stick with the biblical meaning, or a close approximation.

     

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