Theology for the Masses

In this post I wish to look at the impact of Isaiah 53:11 and Romans 5:18-19 and how they influence justification. Romans 4:25 has been shown that Paul (or someone from whom Paul adapts a traditional Christological formula) does in fact read Isaiah 53:11 into his doctrine of justification in that the resurrection of the Righteous One, Jesus Messiah, effects justification for the people of God. This follows what was seen in Acts 13:38-39 and that Jesus being the Righteous One comes from being raised by the Spirit of God, vindicated or justified in that resurrection or by that resurrection. It does seem that Isaiah 53:11 is playing a very central role in how Paul understands our justification. continue reading…

Something I have been wondering about recently is the use of judicial language in letters and our interpretation of said letters. Often antique rhetoric (art of persuation) would employ the language of judicial proceedings to describe/persuade the recipient. In fact these authors were not saying their subject matter functioned as law courts, but the language of law courts was the form through which they made their arguement.

Now, this is just some stuff off the top of my head and I’d need some examples for me to be taken seriously. I am just wondering about this over breakfast.

From The Rise of Christianity: [1] by R. Stark:

Free-rider problems are the Achilles’ heel of collective activities. […] “Truly rational actors will not join a group to pursue common ends when, without participating, they can reap the benefit of other people’s activity in obtaining them.  If every member of the relevant group can share the benefits… then the rational thing is to free ride… rather than to help attain the corporate interest.” [2]

Do you see this being the case?  The Canonical Church certainly faced these issues and attempted to put measures in place to limit freeloading.  We see it in the Pastorals, James, Peter, etc.  In our zeal to be an Acts 2 Church, do we ever miss out of the pragmatics of the Acts 2< church?

1. Subtitle: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religous Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries. [↩]
2. Here Stark is quoting Hetchter (1987:27). [↩]

Before moving on in the narrative of the Bible, I want to look at new creation, union with Christ, and how they play into Obtaining the shalom that was forfeited by Adam. Adam rebelled against the creator I AM in the garden of Eden. A curse was placed upon Adam and his posterity. I AM then set up a community, a kingdom, called Israel. But this community failed to bring back shalom. A king was promised by I AM who would come and restore peace to I AM’s creation. I AM fulfilled this promise, many centuries later, in the person of Jesus Christ. He was that king who purchased shalom by his death and resurrection here on earth. For humanity to gain back that peace we saw that humanity must submit themselves to Jesus and trust wholly in what he did to achieve peace. I AM unites that believer to Jesus so that they can take part in the new community centered around a new covenant and exist in shalom. Before we move on from this pause in the action, I want to look at new creation and the role it plays here in humanity and the created order returning to shalom. continue reading…

While Meredith, JR, Amanda and I were visiting Cassie and Tom in Wilmore, KY, we had the chance to sit around and talk some theology.  We touched on quite a few topics, such as pacifism and the pros/cons of postmodernism.  One of the topics we tossed around was the nature of God’s glory.  It started with a quote Tom read me from Free of Charge: giving and forgiving in a culture stripped of grace:

Some theologians claim that all God’s desires culminate in a single desire: to assert and maintain God’s own glory.  On its own, the idea of a glory-seeking God seems to say that God, far from being only a giver, is the ultimate receiver.  As the great twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth disapprovingly put it, such a God would “in holy self-seeking… preoccupied with Himself.” In creating and redeeming, such a God would give, but only in order to get glory; the whole creation would be a means to an end.  In Luther’s terms, here we would have a God demonstrating human rather than divine love.

Boom, shocka-locka.  This encapsulated my thoughts and intuitions on the matter.  Then Tom read me the next paragraph:

But we don’t have to give up on the idea that God seeks God’s own glory.  We just need to say that God’s glory, which is God’s very being, is God’s love, the creative love that wants to confer good upon the beloved.  Now the problem of a self-seeking God has disappeared, and the divinity of God’s love is vindicated.  In seeking God’s own glory, God merely insists on being toward human beings the God who gives.  This is exactly how Luther thought about God.  So should we.

Galactus, after being freed from Annihilus by the Silver Surfer

Boom, Sho—-wait.  Is Volf trying to have it both ways?  Meredith, Tom, and I wrestled with this quotation for quite a while.  First off, what in the world is glory?  Glory seems to be intimately tied to honor – exchangeable, as a matter of fact.  Honor is a fundamentally a status ballast – receiving honor lifts your status up and losing honor lowers it – at least in antiquity and any other cultural setting that I am aware.  When I give my wife honor, I am elevating her status in my and my community’s eyes.  It is the same when we honor Christ (or give Him glory).

Given this, seeking one’s own honor is fundamentally a selfish act.  The being in question is attempting to gain status for herself in a given society.  Now, for God to assert and maintain God’s own glory, He must fundamentally be acting selfishly (see Barth and Luther as quoted in the quotation).  However, a selfish God seems contrary to God’s character, which is the motivation for Volf’s first quoted paragraph.  However, Volf immediately switches gears and says that if God’s very being is love, the whole problem goes away.  He says “[i]n seeking God’s own glory, God merely insists on being toward human beings the God who gives.” What Volf does not do is tell the reader how this is accomplished.

After talking through this with Tom for a half hour, we came to the following conclusion.  There are two types of glory; glory that seeks its own gain and glory that seeks the flourishing of others.  The first one, which we are most familiar with, is a flawed human since of honor and glory.  The second, which is foreign to the historical record and counter-intuitive, is divine glory – the evaluation of status, not because of majesty or might (fear based glory), but based on love that seeks the flourishing of others and not of itself.  I don’t give God the glory because He is a mighty being who could squash me like a bug (although He most certainly can), but I give God the glory because of what he hath done for me and for Meredith, and for my good friend Scott.  Here, God is not really seeking his own glory (at least in the human sense) but receives it because he is not doing so. 

In God’s eyes, real glory and honor is seeking the good of others for their own sakes, not one’s own.

Thoughts? (Tom – I am recounting this several weeks after we talked about this – what would you change or add?)  I would love to hear from my reformed and my Church of Christ friends.  It is hard to phrase with the succinctly with the correct nuance.

My church hosted a community-wide prayer meeting. I was asked to deliver the prayer for the least of these. Here’s what I prayed:

God, our Father, we thank you that you are also Adonai Jireh, our provider. We thank you that you have been so good to us, that portion of your people who live in America. We thank you for our seemingly limitless resources, for safety as we go about our daily lives, and for a government that lets us follow you as you command. We thank you for all of these blessings and many more, and we pause to acknowledge that you and you alone are worthy of our love and allegiance.

But we cannot think on our blessings without recalling also those times when we’ve not been so blessed. We remember Egypt. We remember when we came there as immigrants. We also remember when Egypt made us to work as slaves. We remember how your mighty hand led us out from that place of slavery, and how you took us into the wilderness, where we learned that every good and perfect gift comes from you, that you are our source of all things – of security, of shelter, of food and drink. We remember how you led us into our Promised Land, and how you continued to provide for us even there.

We remember these things now, Adonai Jireh, God our Provider, because we must confess that we have often forgotten them. And so as we recount the ways in which you have blessed us, let us remember those in our community and in our world who do not experience the blessings you’ve given us. Let us remember that many around the world still groan under slavery to the power of Sin and Death; we remember that we must teach them how they may be free. Let us remember the poor among us: the homeless, the drug addict, the drug dealer, those trapped in generational cycles of poverty. Remind us that they do not have to earn our compassion or our mercy, just as we did not – indeed could not – earn yours. Let us not give with a spirit of patronage and paternalism, but with a spirit of love, of identification and gratitude. For we believe you when you tell us that by sharing with them, we are sharing with you. Thank you for allowing us to bless you, even as you have blessed us.

Let us remember the strangers among us, too. We remember when we were strangers in Egypt, and we recognize that, as your children, we are all strangers in this world. We confess that we have not shown the hospitality you’ve commanded to those among us whom we perceive to be different. We’ve sought to legislate against the immigrant because he doesn’t look like us. We have mocked the immigrant because she doesn’t sound like us. We have ignored that today, more of your most precious creations, those created in your image are in slavery than at any time in history, and many of them are children. Teach us to love the stranger among us even as you loved us when we were strangers to you.

We thank you for those among us who are involved in caring for the needy in our midst. We ask that you bless Morningstar Counseling, who provides affordable mental health for our community. We remember the Shepherd’s Basket and Central Missouri Food Bank, who share such basic necessities with the families of our community. Bless Open Arms, who ministers to women who are struggling to birth and raise the next generation. Bless Loaves & Fishes and the St. Francis House, who work to redeem the homeless our city ignores. Bless the Intersection and Urban Empowerment, who are committed to reach that part of town many of us fear and most of us pretend doesn’t exist. Teach all of us how to work alongside our brothers and sisters in these ministries. Give us eyes to see how we can get involved with them, and to see how we can love those our society has deemed unlovable.

Finally, teach us to be generous. We live in a world where over 2 billion persons live on less than $1 per day. Teach us to see that solutions the problems of this world are not beyond your people’s reach. Teach us to recycle. Teach us to live simply. Teach us to open our eyes to the poor around us. Teach us to use less and to give more. Teach us to be free from our lifestyle of consumption. We know that you are the God who suffers with the poor. We ask that you would teach your body to suffer with them as well. You have blessed us richly, so that we may be a blessing to the world. We ask that you would consume us, that your heart for our world and for your beloved creations would become our heart as well. Give us eyes to see your work, that we might join you.

Amen.

I wanted to write a post on how some movies can provide spiritual edification for us, despite their origins from Hollywood. Like any great art, God has provided us with the medium of film which carries with it beauty, catharsis, sublimity, and powerful emotional realizations that would be difficult to replicate in other mediums of art.

Right now, I am re-watching There Will Be Blood, the masterpiece from Paul Thomas Anderson, and, in my humble opinion, the best film of last year. For those who have not seen this movie, Daniel Day-Lewis gives a perfect performance as Daniel Plainview, an oil-man at the turn of the century who wants nothing more than wealth and power, and who descends into madness getting exactly that. The film has been called “Biblical” by many critics, and rightly so. There is a feel to this movie that is both epic, and yet very personal; and it is this “personal side” of the movie that kept me in much tension, and left me extremely moved in the end. Throughout the movie, you are asking yourself, “Who is this guy?”, “What is he going to do?”, and “What won’t he do?” I think that the brilliance of this film is that these questions should be asked of ourselves. We are truly no better than Daniel Plainview, for the sinful nature that drives his choices and ambitions is the same nature the drives all of us. For example, consider this dialogue between Plainview and his brother Henry:

Plainview: Are you an angry man, Henry?
Henry Brands: About what?
Plainview: Are you envious? Do you get envious?
Henry Brands: I don’t think so. No.
Plainview: I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.
Henry Brands: That part of me is gone… working and not succeeding- all my failures has left me… I just don’t… care.
Plainview: Well, if it’s in me, it’s in you. (emphasis mine) There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money that I can get away from everyone.
Henry Brands: What will you do about your boy?
Plainview: I don’t know. Maybe it will change. Does your sound come back to you? I don’t know. Maybe no one knows that. A doctor might not know that.
Henry Brands: Where is his mother?
Plainview: I don’t want to talk about those things. I see the worst in people. I don’t need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I’ve built my hatreds up over the years, little by little, Henry… to have you here gives me a second breath. I can’t keep doing this on my own with these… people.
[laughs] (courtesy of IMBD)

Even Plainview knows that this nature is pervasive throughout all people; none of us is exempted. Even though Henry is done with “that part of him,” “that part of him” is not done with him, and Plainview knows this. For me, there is the Gospel here. Though many do not know Christ and the grace that He bestows, many know Man and the awfulness that Man is capable of. This should lead us to a humility about ourselves, and a fervor to further the Good News of Jesus Christ.

What do you guys think? Do you know of movies that has made you feel that way? For those that have seen TWBB, did you see this too in the film?

God’s Providence Defined

The Scriptures clearly teach that all things outside of God owe their continued existence to the will of God. [1] And in the work of redemption, while the Bible teaches that this providential control is universal, powerful, wise, and holy, it nowhere attempts to inform how it is reconciled with man’s free will. What the Bible is clear on is God’s character precludes Him to govern His creatures and control them in a way where no violence is done to their natures.

God’s Foreknowledge Defined

What God foreknows must be as fixed and certain as what is foreordained. Foreordination makes the events certain, while foreknowledge presupposes they are certain. Another way of saying this is to say if future events are foreknown to God, they cannot take a turn contrary to His knowledge. The Calvinistic doctrine of the foreknowledge of God proves also His predestination. Boettner says:

“Since these events are foreknown, they are fixed and settled things; and nothing can have fixed and settled them except the good pleasure of God – the great first cause – freely and unchangeably foreordaining whatever comes to pass.”

[2]

[1] Acts 17:28 NIV; Col. 1:17 NIV; Heb. 1:3 NIV.

[2] Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company), 46.

I started to write a response to jr. and realized I wrote a paper for seminary on the issue last semester. I thought I’d reprint it in a series called “The Doctrines of Grace.” There seems to be some specific discussion about the “L” of the TULIP acronym – limited atonement – right now.

I am going to start with a preliminary framework and then I will move towards examining the TULIP acronym side-by-side with the doctrines of grace and Arminianism, in light of Scripture. I promise I’ll get to the “L” eventually. Additionally, this is not an exhaustive, 300-page book but rather a “tight” paper on the highlights of the doctrines of grace. In other words, I haven’t turned over every rock, but have tried to turn over the biggest ones…

Here is the first post of the series:

God Has a Plan

It is unfathomable that a God of infinite wisdom and power would fashion a world without a distinct plan for that world. [1] It is one of His perfections that He has the best possible plan, and that He conducts the course of history to its appointed end. And to acknowledge that He has a plan which He carries out is to admit to the idea of predestination. Loraine Boettner, an American theologian and author, in his book, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, says this:

When He did choose to create, there was before Him an infinite number of possible plans…and what can give the Christian more satisfaction and joy than to know that the whole course of the world is ordered with reference to the establishment of the Kingdom of heaven and the manifestation of the Divine glory. [2]

God’s Sovereignty Defined

By virtue of the fact that God has created everything which exists, he is “the absolute Owner and final Disposer” of all that He has made. [3] He exerts not merely a general influence, but actually rules the world in which He has created. [4] And since he permits willingly, all that comes to pass – including actions of men – must be, in some sense, in accordance with what He has desired and purposed. Boettner continues, “God has lost none of His power, and it is highly dishonoring to Him to suppose that He is struggling along with the human race doing the best He can but unable to accomplish His purposes.” [5] To suppose that His plans fail and that He strives to no effect is to reduce Him to the level of His creatures.

[1] Isa. 46:9-10 NIV
[2] Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1932), 24-25.
[3] Ibid., 30.
[4] Ps. 29:10 NIV
[5] Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, 32.

As I was studying me some Attic Greek tonight I was reminded of Hank’s retranslation of John 3:16. Hank did an excellent 5-part series on this verse and went through the translation process step-by-step. I would recommend reading reading through each of the five parts (one two three four five) to get a feel for the translation process.

His translation reads as follows:

“Thus in this manner God loved the world that he gave his one and only Son so that everyone that is believing in him will never perish but have life forever.”

I especially like two of his changes/emphases. First, Hank rightly translates the “so” in the phrase “For God so loved the world…” as “in this manner.” It describes how the love of God was shown to the world. God showed his love through a selfless sacrificial act.

The second aspect that I appreciated was Hank’s emphasis on the middle voice of ἀπόληται, or to perish. The emphasis on the middle voice demonstrates that the perishing was a result of our own actions. Restated, we perish ourselves. It demonstrates that although we have shot our selves in the foot, God action of love for us is his providing a way into eternal life despite our shooting of our own foot.

The only thing I would really change about his translation is restoring the subjunctive forms of “will never perish” and “have” in the last two clauses. The verbs are in the subjunctive form, which describe possible worlds, not actualized ones. Those that believe, by their believing enter into this possible world where they do not perish and instead have eternal life. This world is make possible by God’s giving of his son, Jesus.

My changes would read as follows:

“Thus in this manner God loved the world that he gave his one and only Son so that everyone that is believing in him might never perish but might have life forever.”

This Lamp has a great discussion on how to translate perhaps the most important word in the New Testament, πιστεύω/pisteuo. It’s a lengthy read, but well worth your while.

THIS LAMP :: Has Faith: John 3:16 in the NEB/REB–Good Translation or Not?

Well, the problem is with our English word. It has two different meanings. Believe can mean to accept something as true. But believe can also mean to hold an opinion. When John speaks of those who believe in Jesus in John 3:16, is he speaking of the same kind of belief when we say, “I believe it will rain tomorrow”? Of course not. Such belief has to be more than opinion. It also has to be more than mental assent. James foresees this as a problem when he writes,
“You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.” (James 2:19 TNIV)
Believe may simply not be an adequate word for πιστεύω in English. It’s awkward, but the Amplified Bible gets the meaning across fairly well with “..so that whoever believes in (trusts in, clings to, relies on) Him shall not perish…” The parenthetical definition for believes in–”trusts in, clings to, relies on”–gets it right. But the Amplified Bible is not really suitable for any kind of use in a group setting (I don’t really even recommend the Amplified Bible in general), so how can πιστεύω in John 3:16 best be rendered?

For all of you who have seen the third installment of the Spider-Man saga, did you guys notice the tasteful job in dealing with the theme of forgiveness and harboring hatred and vengefulness in one’s heart. I developed this a little at a post on by blog called Review Spider-Man 3. I really think that this movie could be a useful tool in teaching younger kids the dangers of revenge and an unforgiving heart.

This leads me to a question for something I am going to do with a group of kids I might teaching, should movies like this be used as teaching tools? Some people I’ve talked to don’t like the idea of showing such movies like this and others (ie Superman I, II, Returns; Star Wars; The Matrix?) because of the other stuff in them like violence and foul language and sex. Would you feel comfortable using Hollywood films to make a point or not?