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On September 25, 2017 By In Family and Children, Theology

Burdened

Watching a loved one make foolish choices which you know will end in his pain or complete devastation is heart-wrenching. You watch as your loved one abuses drugs or alcohol, refuses to take care of his health by overeating, gives himself to sexual immorality, pays no attention to warnings about how he is treating his spouse, or a myriad of other things. He stubbornly refuses to hear good counsel. If there were something more you could do to turn him around, to shake him out of it, to change his heart, you would do it. The last thing you want to see is this destructive pattern to continue and end where you know it will end.

Love desires what is best for the beloved. Love causes great grief and unceasing sorrow when you see your beloved destroying himself.

Israel according to the flesh, the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is on a destructive path. The majority are stubborn, refusing to hear the gospel; the gospel that proclaims that all of the hopes given to their patriarchs have been fulfilled in Christ Jesus. If they don’t turn to Christ, they will suffer an eternal hell as disinherited children to whom belonged sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the Law, the worship, the promises, and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh (Rom 9.4).

This is Paul’s family. He loves them. He loves them so much that he would pray that he himself be anathematized from Christ for their sake (Rom 9.3). That is, if Paul could suffer eternal punishment so that they would turn to Christ in faith, he would do it. That is a burden. That is love.

This love is not unprecedented. Paul is echoing what Moses did when YHWH threatened to destroy Israel at Mt. Sinai because of the worship of the golden calf. Moses interceded on behalf of Israel saying, “Alas, this people has sinned a great sin. They have made for themselves gods of gold. But now, if you will forgive their sin–but if not, please blot me out of your book that you have written” (Exod 32.31-32). Paul is a new Moses who is recognizing the sins of his family in rejecting their God. YHWH has revealed himself in the man Christ Jesus, who is God blessed forever (Rom 9.5). Israel is doing now what they did at Mt. Sinai, and destruction is imminent. Paul, like Moses, is standing between God and Israel praying that he himself be cursed for the sake of his family. (more…)

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On September 25, 2017 By In Culture, Film, Theology

Wonder Woman vs Elastigirl: What is the Ideal Female Superhero?

In a recent interview, director James Cameron criticized the movie Wonder Woman as hindering the conversation about what a female main character should be like. He accused the movie of taking a step backward. He suggested that all the praise for the movie was just “self-congratulatory back-patting” because the movie had both a female lead and a female director. People were so tied up in the genders of the people behind the story that they didn’t really give much thought to the story itself.

But while Cameron might have brought up a possible problem with the hype around the movie, he didn’t have much to offer when the interviewer asked, “So then why are movies still so bad when it comes to depicting truly powerful women?” Cameron’s response was telling: “I don’t know.” He tried to point to his own work, Sarah Connor from the Terminator series, as an example of a strong woman: “She was strong, she was troubled, she was a terrible mother, and she earned the respect of the audience through pure grit.” In Cameron’s eyes, Diana—Wonder Woman—didn’t have any of those qualities and so fell far short of this bar.

While I take issue with Cameron’s ideas (and his suggestion about Sarah Connor), I think this interview provokes important questions about what the ideal female superhero is. Does she have to be a troubled, terrible mother? Or can she be a noble and virtuous goddess? Also, what is the place of weakness in a female superhero?

Alastair Roberts has argued that we should jettison the “strong female character” and instead look to the multiple examples of women in the Bible and how they impacted the world. Roberts writes:

“The dawn of the great new movements of God repeatedly occurs in women’s spaces. The choice of Jacob over Esau occurs in Rebekah’s womb and Rebekah is the one who ensures that God’s choice is honoured. The births of the twelve children of Jacob—who would become the twelve tribes of Israel—are narrated in terms of God’s dealings with and remembering of the wives of Jacob. The story of the Exodus begins with the heroism of women in bearing and rescuing Moses and other Hebrew boys.”

Roberts is onto something important here. God begins new movements in places where women dominate, like birth and childbearing. This is something that Christians seem to have a hard time catching on to. If nothing else, we should be telling more stories that imitate God’s story. And it would also be great to see more movies doing that as well. A few good examples come to mind: Children of Men (2006) and Arrival (2016). Childbirth plays a central focus in these films which were both very successful.

But is childbirth the only female dominated space? Surely that is not the only feminine setting or quality to focus on, is it?

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On September 19, 2017 By In Theology, Worship

Attaining Unity: A Reply to Mike Allen

By Peter Leithart

Mike Allen of Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, scores some points in his review of The End of Protestantism. He lodges the fair complaint that my rhetoric sometimes outruns my evidence. He argues that more stress on the present reality of the church’s unity deepens the tragedy of division; divisions in the church “straightforwardly oppose reality.”

Of course, I have parries to these criticisms. The complaint about rhetoric misconstrues the genre of the book, which is sermonic rather than academic. Sermons need arguments too, but sermons aim to move, not merely to convince.

Mike is right that I don’t provide complete arguments or probative evidence for many of my assertions, that doesn’t mean there are no arguments or evidence to present. In some cases, I mistakenly wrote as if the reader would be familiar with my other work, where I offer fuller arguments. Mike is also right that my assertion that “nothing has so weakened our witness as our tragic divisions” is unprovable. But there’s plenty that makes it plausible – the New Testament’s forceful emphasis on unity as a part of the church’s witness, the testimony of unbelievers over several centuries, and the cultural effects of the church’s fragmentation documented by writers like Brad Gregory. (I suspect Mike is as skeptical of Gregory as he is of me, but I’ll leave that for another day.)

Some of his other criticisms miss the bull’s eye. Mike thinks he can rebut my discussion of global Christianity by saying that the globalization of the church is likely to make Christianity more “fissiparous” rather than more unified. But I make exactly that point (p. 128), and his criticism misrepresents my argument in any case. The north-south inversion of Christianity isn’t evidence that “unity is just around the corner” (Mike’s mischaracterization, not my words). Along with the softening of Protestant-Catholic and East-West boundaries, it’s evidence that God is busting up the old world of post-Reformation Christianity, an end that offers opportunities for fresh beginnings. Mike doesn’t think these trends have much of anything to do with one another, but, working within the biblical paradigm I outline in chapter 8, I take both trends as signs of what appears to be an epochal internal restructuring of Christianity.

Mike’s point about the present unity of the church is criticism of a different order and requires a different sort of response. Like many, perhaps most, Reformed thinkers, Mike takes the present unity of the church as an invisible or heavenly unity, and characterizes my position as illegitimately empirical. Mine, he charges, is an ecclesiology of sight rather than faith. He acknowledges that I occasionally speak of present unity (p. 28), but thinks that present unity doesn’t play a large enough role in my book.

Let me attempt a slight restatement of my position that I hope takes account of Mike’s criticisms.

For starters, a methodological remark that addresses one of the underlying issues in Mike’s review: He characterizes the “underlying logic” of my book as “sociological” rather than “theological.” I don’t accept the criticism because I don’t acknowledge that disciplinary separation. More positively, I write from the conviction that theology is inherently sociological and that biblically-informed history-writing is a mode, and should be one of the chief modes, of theology. Are Samuel and Kings political science or theology? Is Acts history or ecclesiology? To my way of thinking, The End of Protestantism is a thoroughly theological treatise.

To the question of unity more particularly: An empirical test is integral to the biblical portrayal of unity. Jesus prays the church would be unified enough for the world to recognize it (John 17:21, 23). This cannot be a unity discernible only to faith, since Jesus expects the world to discern it. If our unity doesn’t show the world that the Father sent the Son, it’s not the unity Jesus prayed for.

On the basis of Ephesians 4:4-6, Mike argues that the unity of the “one body” is a present reality but not an empirical reality. The unity must be the unity of the invisible church. “God reveals oneness first as a gift in the present” that “must be maintained.” It “can be stretched and even scandalized” but remains inviolable. In the midst of stretch and scandal, we need to view the church theologically rather than sociologically or empirically.

This is a questionable reading of Ephesians. Nothing in the passage suggests that Paul is speaking of an invisible body (a strange category in any case). Immediately after the “poem” on oneness, Paul writes of gifts distributed by the ascended Lord Jesus to His church (vv. 7-11), gifts including visible apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers who build up what must be the visible “body of Christ” (v. 11). Does it make sense to say that “body” in verse 4 is an invisible company when “body of Christ” in verse 11 is a visible communion? What warrants the insertion of a visible-invisible distinction? It seems more straightforward to conclude that for Paul the unity of the body is as visible as the unity of baptism. (more…)

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On September 18, 2017 By In Theology

Salvation Through Sin

Romans 9–11 is challenging on so many levels. Predestination and apostasy walk side-by-side in this part of the letter without even a line of explanation of how the two work together. This is the way things are. No explanation is needed.

As much as these realities are focused upon by exegetes and theologians, these doctrines are not the focus of this somewhat climatic part of the letter. They (and other Scriptural presuppositions with them) provide the foundation for Paul’s main subject: how God maintains his righteousness by keeping his promises to the fleshly children of Abraham when he has ordained their rebellion in order to accomplish salvation in Christ. (Got all that?) Earlier in the letter (2.17–3.8) it was established that it was through Israel’s sinful rebellion that salvation–God’s saving righteousness–was revealed in Jesus Christ. That is, Israel’s sin in rejecting her Messiah and crucifying him brought salvation to the world. God used Israel’s rebellion to display his righteousness.

That provoked some questions with which Paul had to deal immediately: “If our unrighteousness brings about the righteousness of God, should we continue to sin so that the whole world will be saved?!” Those questions were dealt with, but some other questions were left dangling; namely, “What about God’s promises to the physical descendants of Abraham?” Paul is answering that question throughout Romans 9–11. This goes to the greater concern, “Has the word of God failed?” (cf. Rom 9.6)

Though much of the way God worked can now be understood as we look back through what he has done in Christ Jesus, the wisdom of God’s plan remains inscrutable. He chooses to harden some in rebellion so that he might show mercy to others. He hardens Pharaoh to show mercy to Israel. He hardens Israel to show mercy to the Gentiles. But then he will use the mercy shown to the Gentiles to make the Jews jealous so that they will come join in on the promises that were given to them in the first place.

This is God’s plan. It is the way things are. Though we are called to connect as many dots as we can in studying the works of God, there are some things we will never figure out. If we are following Paul, our inability to comprehend everything doesn’t lead to frustration but rather doxology. “ Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! ‘For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?’ ‘Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?’ For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.” (Rom 11.33-36)

There are graces given to you by God that you will never figure out. How is it that someone with your family history can experience the salvation that you have experienced? How is it that with all the bad things that people have done to you, you have a healthy relationship with God? How is it that a sinner like you can know God like you do? There is no other explanation but the grace of God. He chose to harden some so that he could show mercy to you. In the story of redemption he did this with Israel. In our personal stories within this story, it is possible that he has hardened others in order to show mercy to you.

Why? I don’t know. That’s just his plan. He hasn’t called you to figure out why. Ours is to respond in grateful allegiance and praise, enjoying the mercy we’ve been shown.

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On September 4, 2017 By In Theology

Predestination

Predestination. The word itself provokes all sorts of images in people’s minds. Some will see this austere God who is sorting people out as impersonally as a CPA working with numbers on a page. These go over here in the “going to heaven” group. Those go over there in the “going to hell” group. Those groups are set from before the foundation of the world. Consequently, there is nothing you can do to get out of one group and into another. Your decisions mean nothing. Even if you were to love God with all of your heart, if you are in the “going to hell” group, your destiny is fixed by the big Bureaucrat in the sky.

The reaction to this image of God is, understandably, negative. Understanding God in this way is anything but comforting, and it certainly doesn’t take into account the personal relationship that involves love and choices revealed in Scripture. As a result, there are Christians who will throw the predestination baby out with the sovereign bath-water.

This is not the Scriptural picture of predestination. But we must be careful not to discard the whole idea of predestination. The Scriptures do teach that God predestines events, the course of the world, and the lives of people.

Predestination is just what the word denotes: it is determining destinies beforehand. The Scripture is quite clear that God is sovereign and does, indeed, set the destinies for all things, including people. Paul says clearly that God works all things after the counsel of his own will (Eph 1.11). It is quite clear in Romans 9 that God chooses people for his own purposes before they are born (Rom 9.10ff.). Predestination can’t be rejected without doing violence to an important Scriptural truth: God’s absolute sovereignty. Trying to protect man’s sovereignty at the expense of God’s sovereignty leaves us with a God who is subject to the whims of man. Nothing is certain.

However, the Scriptures don’t present predestination in impersonal terms. We serve a personal God who, in his mysterious sovereignty, deals with us personally. Predestination is (primarily) presented in Scripture as the expression of God’s love for his people. His absolute sovereignty over all men and our destinies is a comfort for those of us who love God.

This is how Paul presents predestination in Romans 8.29-30. In a world that looks like it is coming apart at the seams, a world in which the creation and we in it are groaning because of the effects of sin, God’s predetermined purposes to bring everything and everyone to a certain end means that all of this makes sense in the plan of God … even when it all looks completely random to us. As we suffer with Christ, we need certainty that it is not all in vain. We have that certainty. God set his love upon us before the foundation of the world, establishing a relationship with us. He foreknew us; he foreloved us.

Foreknowing us he predestined us that we should be conformed to the image of his Son. For those of us who love God, he has determined that we will be conformed to the image of his Son. This means that we will share his character. We will be holy as he is holy. We will love what he loves.

This also means that we will share his vocation. The Son is God’s appointed ruler of the world. We as sons of God in the Son of God are predestined to rule with Jesus. We will inherit glory with Christ Jesus.

While we cannot pry into the secret counsels of God concerning every aspect of predestination, we can be sure of our predestination unto glory by how we relate to Jesus now. Do you live in allegiance to Jesus as your Lord? Do you love what he loves? Do you fight sin and cultivate righteousness in your life? These are evidences of the Spirit’s working in your life.

As you are fighting the good fight, the Scriptural teaching of God’s predestination undergirds your faith, helping you not to lose hope. God will not fail you in keeping his promises. All of those who are loyal to Christ will certainly inherit the promised glory. It has already been determined.

 

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On September 4, 2017 By In Books, Culture, Theology

The Benedict Onion

Don’t get me wrong. I love onions. You can ask my wife. So when I suggest that the Benedict Option is really just an onion I am not saying that it was a terrible book. I am saying that I like it a lot. But I came away from the book wondering: where are the meat and potatoes?

I think Dreher is on to a lot of really good stuff in this book. For example, his call to leave the public school system is wonderful. Yes, Christians should get out and get out fast. I also like how he gets the big issues (Homosexual marriage, the LGBT agenda, etc) and he presses his readers to see how society has turned against Christians. We are in a war and if you don’t see the red dot aimed at you then you need to look in the mirror more often.

Society has run so far from the truth that even little daily things that I do are now extremely counter-cultural. For example, my four year old daughter will tell me that I can’t wear dresses because I am a man. And I say yes, that is correct. She says women wear dresses and I say yes, good. Such simple truth that is apparently so radical. Gosh, I feel edgy. Or another example is all the godly Christian wedding ceremonies that are happening in our country. Each one is a fire shot at larger society. Each one is a bold statement that we do not agree with the intoleristas and that we will resist their confusion tooth and nail.

These kinds of black and white issues offer great clarity to Christians. Just yesterday I saw a Christian on Twitter explain why he is sending his young daughter to a public school: he wants her to experience racial diversity. What a lame reason to send a child into a lion’s den. If you are sending your child to a public school for the reason of diversity then you are inviting the gender bender bologna in and you are part of the problem.

Dreher is good at explaining and warning about the problems. His book is solid on that.

The area where he is weak is his solution, which we have to admit is everything. If you can see a problem but you don’t have a real solution then you aren’t really helping much. It’s like a doctor that tells us that we have a brain tumor and then he writes us a prescription for some vitamins.

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On September 1, 2017 By In Culture, Family and Children, Theology

Mere Sexuality

The Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) released the Nashville Statement this week. I have had more disagreements with the CBMW over the years. Initially, I was enthralled by them. But more reading, in particular, historical reading, has led me away from them. However, this statement is good. It lays out mere sexuality, as in basic, very basic, Biblical sexual ethics concerning marriage, sodomy, and transgenders. Initially, I thought the statement was too basic to be worthwhile. But the response by many progressive Christians has vindicated the need for it. Surprise, surprise many Christians are not as firm on the basics as they let on.  (more…)

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On August 28, 2017 By In Theology

The Good From The Bad And The Ugly

Sometimes it seems that the more we pray the worse things become. Even if they’re not becoming worse, they don’t seem to be improving. Sickness and death still plague us. Our Western civilization is losing its collective mind. Hurricanes still strike our coasts and bring unbelievable destruction to property and life. Now with the availability of information 24/7/365 we are notified about every bad situation from our own neighborhoods to Timbuktu. We are constantly bombarded with everything that is going wrong in the world. Our minds are overwhelmed with this information noise that can be discouraging and disorienting.

If we are praying and nothing is perceptibly changing, why do we keep doing it? If we are weak and don’t know what to pray for as we ought, why do we keep praying with wordless groanings, not knowing just how our prayers are being answered (Rom 8.26)?

We persevere in prayer and through all of the suffering and groaning because “we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to his purpose” (Rom 8.28). This is our assurance in prayer. This is our assurance in every situation in life; the good, the bad, and the ugly. This is our foundation for sanity in an insane world.

Our God has a plan. That plan will not be thwarted by the sin of man. Indeed, God, in his wisdom, is using even the sin of man to work for the good of his people and, through them, the entirety of the cosmos. One need only look at the cross to see this truth. While sin is not good in itself and will be punished, God is working through sin to accomplish his purpose. All of the insanity that is going on all around us right now in Western civilization is all a part of the plan.

Lest we begin to believe that God’s plan is dependent upon our strength as the church, we need to remember that we are weak and don’t know what to pray for as we ought. God’s purpose will not be accomplished because we are mighty prayer warriors who know just what to pray. We are assured that the Spirit is working with us in prayer and that our weakness will in no way hinder what God will do for us. God works through our weakness in prayer to accomplish his purpose.

Our encouragement in prayer is not that we come to the place that we have figured everything out and that we know how to fix it. Our encouragement is not even seeing God do what we want him to do for us and those around is in the short term. Our encouragement is that we love, serve, and pray to a sovereign heavenly Father who loves us, is sovereign for us, and promises that he is working all things together for good whether we see it or not.

Yes, we come groaning in prayer with the weight of the effects of sin being felt. But we come groaning to a heavenly Father who loves us and enters into that pain with us in Christ and by the Spirit. He is not a God who is far off but a God who is near. And this God who loves us and is near to us is the one who declares the end from the beginning; he works all things after the counsel of his own will (Eph 1.11).

On this side of our resurrection there will always be reason to groan in suffering prayer. But as we pray, we can pray with the rock-solid faith that our heavenly Father loves us more than we can imagine and has a good purpose for us. We can trust him that the suffering we endure, no matter what form it takes, is under his control and is working for our good.

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On August 10, 2017 By In Counseling/Piety, Family and Children, Theology, Wisdom

Like turning a container ship

One of the most striking and unexpected lessons I’ve learned over the last decade or so is that repentance is hard.

Very hard.

Initially this came as something of a surprise. Like most people, I used to cling to the instinctive idea that we’re basically in control of our lives, that we can make rational choices about which of our desires to follow and which should be resisted, and so on. But a few years of experience – both of helping other people to deal with their sinful, foolish and destructive habits, and in dealing with my own – have kicked that idea firmly into the long grass.

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On August 4, 2017 By In Theology, Wisdom

Upgraded Humanity: From Tribes to Kingdom (Part 2)

In Part One, I used a metaphor from the science fiction novel Snow Crash which re-imagined the Tower of Babel story as a place where human beings were “upgraded” from programmable worker to self-conscious human individuals. Perhaps a more popular story is found in Arthur C. Clarke’s sci-fi novel, 2001. Like the Obelisk upgraded the hominids in the story, the Tabernacle was meant to change human beings in their thinking and acting over the generations.

There was lots of disobedience and idolatry in Israel, but eventually the Israelites came to the next stage in their development.

Thinking about Proverbs

Proverbs is inspired Scripture. It is one of the most generalizable books in the Bible. There is very little in it that gives it a historical context (the authorship of Solomon would be an example of such context). It contains wisdom for everyone.

So why did it come so late in history? Most of Leviticus was dictated by God to Moses. He could have dictated most of Proverbs and given it to guide generations of Israelites. There is wisdom in the Pentateuch, of course, but Proverbs gives a fuller and more concentrated articulation of wisdom. It is tied to the history of Israel somehow, but not like the prophets who are usually responding to certain historical events.

To put it another way, we would never ask why Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles weren’t written earlier. It is self-evident that they were grounded in events that occurred at a particular time. And even though there may be sections of the prophets that could possibly be such far distant predictions that they could have been given earlier, most of them are also set in a historical context.

But except for the bare fact of authorship, Proverbs doesn’t seem to have such grounding. Obviously, God used the history of Israel culminating in Solomon’s wisdom to produce Proverbs. But given the fact that God could simply have dictated it to Moses, what is the reason God chose to leave Israel without that fuller revelation of his wisdom until centuries later?

The only explanation I can think of is that people were not ready to hear it. They needed time with the Mosaic administration to give them ears to hear.

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