Theology for the Masses

Keith Ward, in chapter 6 of Is Religion Dangerous, deals with the issue of morality and the Bible.  He addresses the charge that religious morality is based on an unthinking acceptance of old religious laws.  As his example, he brings up one of the most notorious of religious injunctions – Deuteronomy 20:15-18.

“But these instructions apply only to distant towns, not to the towns of the nations in the land you will enter. 16 In those towns that the Lord your God is giving you as a special possession, destroy every living thing. You must completely destroy the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, just as the Lord your God has commanded you.  This will prevent the people of the land from teaching you to imitate their detestable customs in the worship of their gods, which would cause you to sin deeply against the Lord your God.

Geno-what did you say?  Isn’t that the very piece of evidence that we use to indict the Nazi’s, their attempted genocide of the Jews?  If we are to be morally consistent, shouldn’t we reject this piece of the Old Testament and anything/anyone that relies on this passage/the book/the collection of books that uses it.  Any religion that accepts this as part of their canon (read: Jews and Christians) are guilty of blindly basing their morality on old and outdated religious laws.  There are three ways that religious adherents have approached this problem. 

Approach One : The Morally Primitive Imagining History

This approach looks at the historical record first.  They notice that the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites keep popping back up in the narrative and the archeological record.  As such, the ban was not actually implemented.  Secondarily, they note that the text itself was “written” [1] around 700BCE, but are describing events that are much, much older.  Taking these two points in tandem, they hypothesize that scribes and priests wrote into the narrative God commanding the slaughter of “present day” rival groups to delegitimize any territorial claims they might have.  This moral tradition (that it is ok to slaughter your opponents wholesale for the protection of your group) is morally primitive and is later corrected by the Prophets. [2]  

Pros:

• The Genocide did not happen historically
• God is not a mass murderer

Cons:

• The Text is a pack of lies
• The authors of our text are a bunch of evil liars

Approach Two: A Unique Situation

This next approach bites the bullet(s).  They say – our text says that God gave the command.  However, this is a unique situation and not universally applicable.  God only intended it for the Israelites in this particular situation, which was necessary for the perpetuation of the Israelites.  We see that it is unique because of all of the other moral injunctions in the Hebrew Bible contradict “the Ban.”  This allows us to maintain the integrity of the text while cutting off this law from the others that we can abstract moral principles from.  It was said and it happened [3] but it was only for one situation and one time.

Pros:

• Maintains the integrity of the text and its authors
• The Ban was a one-time affair and not repeatable nor abstractable.

Cons:

• God is evil and bipolar
• We have mass murderers in our religious tradition.

Option Two point Five: A developing God

Ward does not mention this, but it is possible that God is developing along with his creation.  In order for him to know how and what to be and act, he must have something to act and be contrasted against.  After all, how can I know what red is if I have never seen it?  Likewise, how can God know what wrong is unless he has done it?  This is a Hegelian view of God.  Under this view, God had not fully developed his morals yet.  The narrative reflects God’s moral at that point in time.  Later on his morals developed and he understood that all life had value and that it was wrong of him to order the genocides.

Pros:

• God was not evil – only immature and is now mature through his interaction with his creation
• Maintains the integrity of the text

Cons:

• God is a developing being and is not always right and moral

Approach Three: Morally Primitive People Acting on a Self-Correcting Partial Understanding of God

This third approach tries to address the weaknesses of the other two.  It suggests that we have a roughly accurate reporting of what these people think was happening.  That is to say, the ancient Israelites thought that God wanted them to purge all peoples who threatened their identity.  After all, surviving and maintaining your identity was an incredibly difficult thing to do in the ancient world – something we cannot fully grasp in this blessed age of comfort and inconvenience.  They had part of God figured out – that she wants total devotion, but they also had part of him wrong – that he has deemed all human lives of worth and the wholesale slaughter of peoples is wrong.  In time, they would discover more and more about God and come to understand this, but at this time in their development, they had not reached this understanding.   There is some perception of the divine will, but a limited one.  Under this interpretive model, the Bible contains humanity’s developing understanding of God.

Pros:

• God is not evil
• Maintains the integrity of the text and the developing moral understanding of its authors
• The Ban was based on a partial but flawed understanding of God

Cons:

• The Bible is something to be wrestled with, not a direct perfect view of God and its interaction with history (can’t take it at face value)

Out of these three [4] views that Ward presents, I am uncertain as to which I follow.  My background tells me that all live is Gods and he can do with it as he pleases.  Based off of that, option two seems the most viable.  However, I also maintain that God is morally consistent and always has been.  This forces me to at least consider option three.  If I am forced to choose, this is the option I am going with right now, even though I am uncomfortable with how this view forces me to hold the Bible.  As Ward notes on page 138, “Believers have no magical route to moral certainty, nothing that undercuts the hard process of moral analysis and reflection.”  But it is the same for nonbelievers.  They have to give an account of how life can have meaning in the face of nothingness – or at least fleetingness.  If my flame flickers and then is snuffed out – does it really matter what it burned while it was here?  I am not saying atheists cannot give such an account [5] – only noting that it too is a path forged through analysis and reflection and is not self-evident.

1. that is, the “final” version was edited together around this time – not that these traditions were invented at this time. the traditions behind the text are much, much older [↩]
2. see Ezekiel 18:20 [↩]
3. or at least was attempted [↩]
4. four, if you add 2.5, the one that I added [↩]
5. even though I freely admit that I ultimately reject their account [↩]

A few days ago I linked to a an article that addressed the “evil” god found in the Old Testament.  Throughout history different Christians have dealt with the sanctioned genocides and murder of infants etcetera in a variety of different ways.  Some people say God can kill anyone he wants and have anyone kill anyone he wants because he is lord over all.  Others say that god as portrayed in the Old Testament is a different god than the God in the New Testament.  Quite a few Christian groups during the first few centuries after the resurrection were attracted to this idea.  Other people use this issue to deconstruct, discredit, and ridicule Christianity, constructing Christianity as a fragile house of cards as if criticizing one or several things throughout the 4000+ year history/literary development of our faith negates everything else.  With that said though, we Christians need to wade through these issues because we risk becoming that house of cards if we ignore or gloss over this problem. 

Over the last few months, Greg Boyd’s has started to look at these issues.  Tom alerted me to Boyd’s project yesterday; here is Greg’s description of the problem and his aims:

What intensifies this problem even more is that it’s not like Psalms 137 is an isolated case of celebrated violence in the Old Testament. It’s found all over the place! The worst episodes happened when the Israelites enter the promised land. As they approached certain cities, the Israelites were commanded — by God — to slaughter men, women, children and even the animals! Yahweh is aiming at complete genocide of the Canaanite people. Could anything be more antithetical to what we learn about God in Jesus Christ? Honestly (we’ve got to be honest here, even if it hurts) doesn’t this depiction of God look more like the God of Osama Bin Laden than the Father of Jesus Christ?

In my opinion, this is the most challenging objection to the Christian faith and most difficult theological question of the Christian faith. It’s a problem I want to wrestle with in my next few posts. But I want you to be forewarned: If you think I’m going to have nice and tidy answers to this question, you’re going to be disappointed. I don’t. I’m still in process, entertaining a number of possibilities.

So far Boyd has written thirteen posts exploring this topic.  I look forward to reading through them in the near future.

1. Divinely Inspired Infanticide and Genocide?
2. What’s at Stake in Trying to Explain the Violent God of the Old Testament?
3. The Violent Strand of the Old Testament and Our Picture of God
4. OT Violence and Christian Behavior
5. Could Old Testament Warriors Have Been Mistaken?
6. A Defense of Eller’s Thesis
7. A Critique of Eller’s Thesis
8. Craigie: The Problem of War in the Old Testament, Part I
9. Revealing the Horror of War: Review of Craigie, Part II.
10. A Negative Object Lesson: Review of Craigie III
11. “Shadow” and “Reality”
12. Review of Ehrman’s "God’s Problem"
13. The Teleological Exegetical Principle and O.T. Violence

Danny, over at Personman, claims that God is imaginary.  He points his readers to this site which outlines 50 reasons why God is not real.  Danny then takes two examples that be believes demonstrate that the God of the Bible is not an actual God.

The first line of reasoning concerns the body of Jesus – but not in a manner you would expect.  The Bible says that God was once in human form and then withdrew into the heavens.  Humanity has spent quite a bit of time looking in the heavens – no God to be had up there.  We have been to the moon and have peered light-years into the past, yet no we have seen “gold-plated kingdom floating up there. We see only the vacuum of space. But now God and Heaven have moved to ‘another dimension’ or ‘outside of space and time.’”

The second line of reasoning examines prayer.  Quoting Mark 11:24 and John 14:14, Danny establishes that if the Bible is true and there is a God, then prayers must be answered. Given this, the effects of prayer in human lives should be verifiable. However, Danny lists three scientific studies that demonstrate that it is not – Study 1, Study 2, Study 3.

Because prayer does not work and God, through the Bible says it will, and the Bible describes Jesus as physically going up to heaven and there is no physically visible heaven, then God is imaginary.

Danny issues a challenge to his readers at the end of the post – and this is the strongest portion of the post.  He says that if you cannot come up with concrete proof that our God exists, then “can you claim that your beliefs are any more rational than Islam, FSM or Scientology?”

I have a few problems with his arguments.  Firstly, he is operating from a purely empirical and rationalist standpoint.  We posit a spiritual God that is hidden.  Because of this, setting up a falsifying experiment (looking for a physical Jesus in a physical heaven) that does not test for what you are looking for is just bad reasoning.  Secondly, the prayer experiment does not test for a God, it only shows a non-positive correlation between two phenomena – outcomes of heart surgery (as in the last study) and prayer for that outcome to be positive.  It really does not show anything about God from an existential standpoint.  Lastly, and this is the most important point, if, on the one hand, you assume from the beginning that God does not exist the studies only confirming what you already think is the case; if, on the other hand, you assume beforehand that it does exist, then all you say is that it is not easily swayed to act as humans want it to act and that the study has wrongly interpreted those two naked sentences from the Bible.

Why does a presupposed spirit God have to be physically observed? I submit that we see indirect evidence of God everyday.  Wondrous mountains, the fibonacci sequence in nature, beautiful star factories, and the eyes of my niece all serve as indirect evidence of God’s hand in the world.

“Does God exist” is an unanswerable question from a purely empirical standpoint. We can interpret the observable phenomena as evidence for a creator/God or as natural and random processes.  What it comes down to is that Danny’s interpretive framework does not allow for a god who hides himself – mine does. It is a difference in framework.

What remains is Danny’s last challenge – why the God of the Bible?  To quote my good friend JR, “We have the best story.”  When I consider what I can see, what I can deduce, what I can reason, the story found in the Bible is the best one.  Buddhism has a nice one, but I don’t have their givens.

What do you all think?  I highly encourage you to respond to Danny at his blog.

Dan, at brendoman.com refers us to two lists of God’s that are rejected by two groups, Christians and Atheists.

The question becomes: Why do you believe in only one of these – and what makes that one so special to the point of rejecting all the other ones? I encourage you all to answer that question as it is a worthy one.

Brendoman.com :: Gods we don’t believe in

This is my best answer so far. What’s yours?

In order to continue this post series, I find that it is necessary to stop for a moment to talk about what I mean by Postmodernity. It is a slippery concept, one that is often misunderstood and vilified to the point that most people do not know what in the world it really is. [1] I can say this for certain, because I have and do both. After years of trying to first vilify and then trying to understand what exactly this postmodernity stuff is all about, this is what I have come to and how I have come to use the term in my writing.

In the most basic sense of the term, postmodernity is the system of thought, the way of constructing the world, that succeeds modernism. Remember, modernism demanded from its adherents that there be one final and comprehensive way of viewing and constructing the world to which everyone must adhere. When this cracks, multiple ways of viewing and constructing the world emerge from its ashes, thus Postmodernism is the sum of the systems of viewing the world that emerge after the cracking of modernisms hegemony. Not only is postmodernism the sum of the systems, it is also the collection of the ways in which people deal with the emergence of a plethora of acknowledged (after all, there have been these competing systems forever, postmodernism merely gives them a voice, rather than dismissing them after the first discrepancy) of systems as they interact with one another.

A Series of Cities, each with a Hill to Shine From

Think about a set of cities that all are controlled by a central capital. The central city administers and controls all functions of daily life not only for the cities, but for the people within the cities. This is modernism. Now imagine that all of the cities throw off the rule of the central city and rule themselves. This is postmodernism.

No longer does one ask what the central authority says must be done, must be followed, must be thought and impose it on the lives of Others. Instead there is an acknowledgment of a basic fact of existence – that each city sees the world in a different way. To force [2] [3] them to be like Us is an act of tyranny of the central authority on the lives of Others. Remember, there are some things in this world that are not verifiable. I know math, I know how many apples are in my fridge. However, I can’t show that God exists objectively, I can’t demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that my version of Jesus existed in history without making leaps of faith.

Replacing the above are questions about competing narratives. [4] You are now free to choose the city you live in. Will I move to the Mormon city or the Baptist city? I dunno, what is their narrative like? Does it make sense? These are the sorts of questions that are asked. The cities’ narratives compete with one another for the membership of the citizens of the state.

The Denial of Truth?

Is there a denial of truth here? Not at all! That is the central conservative critique of postmodernism, is it not? Isn’t there one way that things actually are? Is there not one and only one reality? I think that there is. I don’t think that there is a necessary denial of truth in postmodernism, at least the way I use the term. [5] Instead, there is a shifting of the questions that are being asked.

This is where the idea that all postmoderns deny truth comes from. When you are talking about the collection of cities and are wanting to talk about their truth claims, you can only talk semi-objectively about what each city thinks the truth is, not about if each city actually has the truth. Once you start doing that, then you are really speaking about the set of truth claims that the city that you are in proposes. Note that all of this is independent of the actual “truth” that is out there. [6] Any time that someone says anything, they are saying it from their position in time, space, culture, and community. Objectivity, as a concept, is dead.

The Payoff

I see postmodernity, not as a vile beast that threatens the Kingdom of God (or the Realm of the Child of True Humanity lol), but as a better way of viewing the world and its communities, [7] something that allows me to disagree with these other communities without writing them off as useless. Postmodernity allows me to love them as fellow images of God, the whole while without abandoning the tenets of my religion as it has been revealed to me by God.

Now, a great many people have defined and used postmodernism in a great many ways. It is a malleable concept, one constructed by people for their uses. I am sure some of you consider yourself postmodernist and would describe it in different terms; others might point to other postmoderns and their absolute denial of truth to refute the above – just remember that not all elements of this set are the same.

Finally, the way I am using this term, there is no “Philosophy of Despair,” as Travis so polemically put it, to call it such is to demonstrate one’s misunderstanding of it.

I’ll try to address the what narratives are and why they are so important in my next post.

1. to think of something similar, consider the idea of America. Now think of the nastiest thing that America’s opponents say about it, that we are violent, that we only care about material possessions, etc. Now, these things are true of America and not true of America at the same time, that is, they are true for segments of the population and not true for other segments of the population. Thus, postmodernity, like America is an accurate, but imprecise term [↩]
2. i.e. write them off as useless, invaluable on the sole basis of their not sharing our worldview [↩]
3. through active or passive cohesion [↩]
4. By narrative, I mean their story of life – a collection of their worldview, their sacred texts, their stories that give their lives meaning, their practices and pastimes [↩]
5. which is not to say that other people configure postmodernism and construct a narrative that denies absolute truth I am saying that I can use the category of postmodernism in a way that is consistent with what is revealed to us in the Bible [↩]
6. By this, I mean how existence actually is [↩]
7. from a descriptive, not a prescriptive standpoint [↩]

A while ago, I was asked why exactly I believe. I have been pondering this the last few days and I think I can give a semi-intelligible answer. If you had asked me this a few years ago, I would have given my best modernist response. You all know how it goes, right? First, you begin with logical proofs of God’s existence. I would have gone all ontological, teleological, and even cosmological on them.

After establishing the claim that a God exists, I would have moved on to which God exists. I would have pulled out my McDowell’s. You, know, present all the evidence for biblical prophecies coming true, see the prophecy about the city of Tyre, prophecies about Jesus, historical/textual evidence for Jesus’ life, all the standard apologetic answers.

So, after establishing the existence of God and that her revelation to us is the Bible, I would then open the old girl up and start to point out what I believe. After this 30 minute process I would then gladly accept the person to whom I was speaking’s conversion and salvation. Another person checked off the rolls of hell.  Right?

No. The person would/should not have believed me. After all, for each claim that I made with evidence, they could/should have presented countering claims to the existence of God, to the authority of the Bible, and to the person/history/nature of Jesus. I could present my claims and they present theirs. Both of us would have left convinced the other was wrong. I can go into the specifics of the various arguments if needed, but my point stands without them.

In addition, if I would ever stop to listen to the other’s claims, I would more than likely leave the conversation with my faith shattered. Why? Because my faith (as was every idea) was predicated on modernist understandings of verifiable truth claims. That is, the only thing my modernist brain was wired to accept as fact was truth claims that could be scientifically verified. I naturally assumed, from a position of faith, that my claims were so. However, (switching to real life, instead of hypothetical’s) when I started to truly evaluate those claims, I found that they indeed were not as verifiable as I had thought them to be. Each of the logical proofs of God has their problems. The Gospels are not histories as we think of histories. The list goes on and on.

What then? My modernist categories through which I have been trained to view the world demand I abandon these unverifiable truth claims. However, if I were being honest with myself, I really could not bring myself to accept the opposite position either, because it too could not be scientifically verified. How do you test for God? What is your control? The essential questions of religion lay outside the realm of science, which can only access observable and testable data. The modernist categories are simply not adequate for evaluating the claims of religion.

For instance, while the Gospels cannot prove who Jesus was, there was also no way to disprove their claims as well. We simply do not have access to that type of information, given the sources available to us. I found that just about everywhere I looked into my religious beliefs, they were not able to be verified (or denied) through this modernist method of verification. I could speak in terms of probabilities, but never in certain terms. As an honest (as honest I could be) modernist, I found myself at an impasse. Given that the modernist categories are inadequate, one needs to find new categories, post-modern categories, through which one can evaluate the claims of Christianity. Doing so eliminates the need for badly researched pop-apologetics and theologies and opens the door for deeper inquiry.

So what then? Enter experience, community, and relationship, stage right. These will be the subjects of part 2.

Here are some good, bad, and discussion promoting links from around the ‘verse.

LCMS Invites Emerging Guru Dan Kimball from Slice of Laodicea by Ingrid

The human embodiment of Christian unity, Ingrid, freaks out because Kimball, who does not hate McLaren, is speaking in St. Louis at the Missouri Lutheran Church Snod. A small apocalypse ensues. I like that she envokes the Book of Concord in her argument for scripture alone. That and the guilt by association. (Bonus Link: See CRN.Info’s take on Ingrid’s post)

The Source of Submission from Challies Dot Com

Tim Challies argues for the location of original submission before the fall, not as the result of it. Some of his arguments hold some water, others are full of holes (4, 6, 7, 8, 10).

Does the Atheist Deny What the Theist Affirms? from Maverick Philosopher by William F. Vallicella

By far the best post of my morning reading. Vallicella describes how atheist’s arguments against the existance of god often do not address the world that theists put forth.

“[Your dream to become great] is the dream of every living creature, the desire that is the very root of life itself. To grow until every space is a part of you. It’s the desire for greatness. There are two ways of fulfilling this, however. One way is to kill anything that is not yourself, to swallow it up until and destroy it until there is nothing left to oppose you. But that way is evil. You say to all the universe, “Only I will be great, and to make room for me, all the rest of you must give up even what you already have to make room for me.” – Ender Wiggin, Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card

“⁷Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. ⁸ Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. ⁹ God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. ¹⁰ In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. ¹¹ Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. … ¹⁹ We love because he first loved us.” – John the Elder (1 John 4)

What does it mean to say that God is Love? For much of our history, Christian theology has spoken of God’s central attribute as existence or glory or something of the like. But John is claiming something all-together different. John tells us that “God is love”, and another writing from that same community defines Love as Sacrifice: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). But what then does it mean to say that God is Sacrifice? To sacrifice is to give up that which we value. Giving up that which is not dear to us is hardly sacrifice; rather, to sacrifice is in a very real way to give of ourselves, to give that which comprises our identity. So imagine a God who is defined not by self-glorification or –gratification, but by self-emptying, self-sacrifice. Imagine a God existing in three persons who are engaged in an eternal dance of joyful, selfless giving. This sort of God finds glory not in self-aggrandizement, but rather in selfless giving. The greater the sacrifice, the greater the glory. It is this sort of God who, out of the overflow of joy and sacrifice, the overflow of Love, creates a world filled with being who, like himself, have a will that they can willfully sacrifice (for one cannot be selfless if one has no Self to give).

But here, of course, is the steep cost of Love. Beings created in the Imago Dei, the Image of God, can choose to sacrifice, or they can choose not to sacrifice. We can choose to give of ourselves or we can choose to preserve our Selves, to fight and to battle until we have created a space in which only We exist. This is the essence of Sin: that we would choose to preserve I at the expense of the Other, rather than to give I in service, in sacrifice to the Other. This tendency to think first of ourselves, to work for self-preservation, has been at work in us since the beginning, and we are nothing if not creatures of habit.

This Self, this Sin has infected us all since the beginning. We Self-full beings see the beauty of creation through the lens of Self; we tend to ask only “how can this serve my needs?” Rather than work with God to cultivate his Garden, we have chosen instead to do as we please, and in doing so, we serve to unmake that which God called good (Genesis 6). In choosing not to serve God even as God gives himself to us, we have become captives in our own minds, unable to see or care for anything beyond that which is good for I. We have lost what it means to abandon our Selves, to live for something other than I, and so have been cut off from God, unable to enter into his Garden of giving, of true Life anymore.

Thanks be to God that he did not leave us in this sorry state! Rather, he gave once more of himself, emptying himself of his divine nature and taking the form of a slave. He came to We who could tolerate no Other and he refused to be one with us. Rather, he offered us a different way to live, a way that did not demand the preservation of the Self, but rather offers the Self in acts of Love, of Sacrifice. We could not tolerate his Otherness, his difference, and yet still he gave himself to Us, and let us have our way with him. We did what any Self does when it feels threatened. We lashed out and destroyed that which threatens. He knew this, and yet he still gave. He gave and gave, until it killed him.

And only then was the power of Love revealed. For we were made to see that in the end, all of our attempts to preserve I will only end in destruction, for we were not created to take. We were created to give, in imitation of the Self who gave himSelf for us.

“A careless leper too comfortable in his own world to notice the older wounds have new infections with new intentions.
Darkness settled in behind me, tapped me on the shoulder singing shivers to my spine from the corners of my mind,
“I’ve been wanting to remind you of everything you’ve left behind and wouldn’t you, shouldn’t you remember me?
Should you forget, I haven’t yet.”

She’s there when I’m alone and she always seems to know the stories that’ll take me back to where my comforts sleep.
A caress with velvet paws that hide her sharpened claws along the walls that time has built high searching for the blemishes.
And i know she’s breathing murder, that it is folly to endure her. But there is sweetness in her whisper,
“When you’ve had enough, I’ll be waiting. Wouldn’t you, shouldn’t you remember me?
Should you forget, I haven’t yet.’”– Stavesacre, “The Two Heavens”

Today I was reading some more of Jonathan Edwards’s “A Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the Wold.” In it I read this statement in Chapter 1, Dictate 4, paragraph 38,

Hence it will follow, that the moral rectitude of the disposition, inclination, or affection of God CHIEFLY consists in a regard to HIMSELF, infinitely above his regard to all other beings; or, in other words, his holiness consists in this.

In essence, what the Puritan divine was saying is that God regards and respects himself more than anything else in heaven and on earth, and Edwards defines this regarding of himself more valuable than anything else and delighting in himself more than anything else as God’s holiness. My question is this, is Edwards right?

Or let me come at it another way. Is it right for God to delight in himself more than in any other creature? If we place our highest regard and deepest affections upon that which is most valuable; and God is infinitely worthy and is invaluable; then we should place our highest regards and deepest affections on and in God. But should God do that? Should he esteem himself as the most valuable treasure in all the universe? Or does he place his highest regard and deepest affections upon something else outside of him? Does that make that thing more valuable than God? To answer one way is to make theology theocentric to the extreme. To answer the another way is to take theology away from this radical theocentrism that view everything through the lens of God’s worth and value and honor and glory.

If he is to place his highest regard upon himself, what does that imply for how we understand life and Scripture and theology? If not, the same question, how does that impact our understanding of all things spiritual and how we live our lives and minister the gospel? Or even yet, does this question even need to be asked and answered?

If this post doesn’t keep you up tonight, like it will me as I wrestle with what Edwards said, then I don’t know what will. These are some of the weightiest matters to ask oneself if he or she is to call himself a Christian and/or a believer in God.

If you ever wanted to understand how John 1:1 is to be translated “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” when the Greek reads kai theos en (e = ate) o logos, then here is an article that gets into the technical reasonings behind this translation as opposed the NWT and Jehovah’s Witnesses translating this as “and the Word was a god.” I hope this equips you in sharing your faith.

I am not well versed on the history of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, but I think this could make sense: Envisioning a God with a body

Contrary to popular opinion, God in the earliest books of the Bible didn’t know all things.

Nor did He exist everywhere, all at once, James Kugel says.

Instead, the God of Israel was a walking, talking deity who needed to seek clarification from time to time, the world-renowned Jewish scholar observed during a recent public lecture at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo.

God is described as having eyes, fingers hands and ears, Kugel added.

So despite the longstanding and widespread view that God is omniscient and omnipresent, “God does indeed have a body in these ancient texts,” he said.

Kugel doesn’t believe authors of the Hebrew Bible employed references to God in human forms simply as metaphors.

Do you think the authors of some of the texts saw God that way?

Today’s links of the day comes from one of my favorite periodicals, Scientific American. They are not religious in nature or bias (not that bias is a bad thing, everything has a color), but touch on Christian issues.

• Special Report: Has James Cameron Found Jesus’s Tomb or Is It Just a Statistical Error? Short version: He hasn’t.
• 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense Short version: “Debunking” evolution is not nearly as easy as you might think.

The other day I was reading a “commentary” on the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It was a very interesting read, from what I have read. It is by an Episcopalian priest, Fleming Rutlege, who is focusing on the theology found in the narrative itself, and not in the types and themes found in the books. He spends a lot of time supporting what he says about the book from letters that Tolkien had written himself about his precious Middle-earth. Here is one quote that I found puzzling to say the least.

Tolkien understands God in the biblical sense, not as the object of human quest or journey, not as the goal of human moral striving or human religious activity, but as the active subject, calling and sending, independent of the creation but always engaged in redemptive history. — Fleming Rutledge, The Battle for Middle-earth: Tolkien’s Divine Design in The Lord of the Rings, pg. 5.

What I find puzzling is that this is both true and false. God is the subject as he describes in this quote. God is the one calling and sending and acting independent of the creation but on its behalf. That is quite true if one were to read the Scriptures, they would see that it is the story of God working redemption for his people.

However, I think Tolkien–and I think Rutlege shares Tolkien’s view–misses on the whole point of eternal life and the work of Christ. John 17:3 says, “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Peter says in 1 Peter 3:18, “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.” God is the object of our life in Christ. Christ died so that we might have a relationship with the Father. This statement above seems to show that there is no end result, no point to the redemption. It seems like God saves for the sake of saving, and God saves the people he saves for the sake of the people not going to hell. Where as in the Bible, God saves not just so people don’t go to hell, but to bring them to himself and have an intimate relationship with us, the ideal and perfect Father-son/daughter relationship.

What do you guys think of this and Tolkien’s work?

So I was reading an online conversation that is a joint venture by Newsweek and the Washington Post called “On Faith.” Several voices in America discuss different issues dealing with faith. Dr. R. Albert Mohler is one voice of the conservative evangelical position. In Mohler’s article dealing with Christ being the Son of God, one person linked to this site to disprove God and the Bible.

I tried to read it but I couldn’t get very far because the text was in so many different font sizes and colors that it gave me a headache. And his arguments said that the one who was in the burning bush was more like the devil than God, I think. From what I read he sounded like he assumed that parts of the Bible were true and others weren’t. What do you guys think of this page?

I have a question for the bloggers here that is very peculiar to me. In Joshua 5:13-15, we meet the famous “Commander of the army of the LORD.” Knowing that in Revelation that angels do not accept worship, is this possibly a pre-incarnate Christophany?

Also look at Melchizedek in Hebrews 7 and in Genesis 14:17-24. Do you think that this man was a pre-incarnate Christophany?