Announcing Book on John Owen

This is probably as good a forum as any to announce the American release of my book on John Owen's devotional theology, Trinitarian Spirituality: John Owen and the Doctrine of God in Western Devotion. The book is a slightly-edited version of my dissertation at the University of Bristol, so it might be rough-going for those who do not already have an interest in the great Puritan, John Owen, or in the development of Western devotional theology. However, there's plenty also to attract determined Christian readers who might want to consider how an abstract doctrine like the Trinity might actually change the way they speak to God in prayer. I am, of course, incredibly flattered to have J.I. Packer's foreword - he, after all, is the one whose writings first introduced me to John Owen. Amazon has copies, as does the publisher, Wipf and Stock.

Interview with John Stott

A few years ago I interviewed John R. Stott for an article in my seminary newspaper (Gordon-Conwell in Massachuesetts). Very few saw that original article, so I thought I would reprint it here. At the time, I was wrestling through a few theological questions and thought I'd ask Dr. Stott to weigh in. For those of you who don't know, Dr. Stott is an evangelical Anglican who was recently described in the New York Times by, I believe, David Cromartie, who said, "If Evangellicals could elect a pope, it would be John Stott."

Brian Kay: In your ministry you have emphasized what you term BBC, or Balanced Biblical Christianity. What areas of potential imbalance do you see as temptations for those preparing for ministry in evangelical churches?

Stott: Frankly there are so many examples of evangelical imbalance that it would be difficult to know which to select, but I would like to begin with a question that I was asked just now which relates to the case of devotional life in theological studies. I quoted to that person something which is attributed to Bishop Moule. He said that we must be aware equally of an undevotional theology and of an untheological devotion, and that is a good example of balance. Now there are plenty of men and women who go to seminary and gain their academic excellence, which is fine, but their spiritual life suffers. They leave an academic success and a spiritual failure. And then of course, there are the people who go the other way; they are such men and women of God that they don’t care about academic excellence. But I believe that we need in the ordained pastoral ministry today people who combine academic excellence with personal godliness. The two are more or less equally important.

Kay: In order to insure proper balance in our Christian intellectual life, you have spoken of biblical agnosticism, that we should avoid forming doctrinal beliefs in areas where the Bible does not speak clearly. Which such areas do you believe evangelicals have shown unwarranted dogmatism?

Stott: I think my phrase was not areas in which the Bible does not speak but areas in which the Bible does not speak with absolute clarity. When the Reformers talked about the perspicuity of scripture, they were not referring to the whole of the Bible but to the central message of salvation—in Christ, by grace, through faith—and that is as plain as day. Evangelical people who take the Scripture as their authority are 95 percent agreed on these central doctrines of the faith—but then there were these areas in which the Scripture is not so clear which the Reformers referred to as the adiaphora, the matters indifferent, in which scripture is not equally plain. These would include questions concerning baptism, such as the particular volume of water that is necessary to validate a baptism or whether you should only baptize adult believers or the children of adult believers as well. It would include our particular understanding of the ministry, I think. It would include prophetic questions, of course, the millennium and the interpretation of biblical prophecy. These are some of the areas, although there are a great many more, in which Christians ought to give one another liberty. I’m sure you know the phrase which is attributed to Rupert Muldinious. Nobody knows quite who he was (some think he was a pseudonym for Richard Baxter, round about the Puritan period). He said that in essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty and in all things charity. We’re talking about the second—nonessentials. How do we know that they are nonessentials or that they are adiaphora? Because Scripture isn’t so clear or because equally biblical Christians, equally anxious to be submissive to the Scripture, come to different conclusions. These then seem to me to deserve to be called adiaphora.

Kay: For Protestantism, documents like the Westminster Confession or the 39 Articles have been historic standards of belief and practice. However, the length of these confessions seem to dwarf many of the short statements of faith that our churches use today. Should we view this trend as a sign of properly applied biblical agnosticism or as a watering down of historic doctrine?

Stott: I think we need to realize that churches that have produced confessions have tended to produce two, one a baptismal confession for members and the other a much fuller confession for teachers of the faith. The Apostles’ Creed is regarded as the baptismal faith of Christians, at least in the Church of England of which I am. Candidates of baptism either have to recite the Apostles’ Creed, which is a basic statement of Trinitarian faith, or they are asked whether they believe it as it is recited for them. The Creed is a pretty elementalist statement focusing on Jesus (though actually Trinitarian) which we believe to be so basic that people shouldn’t be baptized if they don’t believe it. In our Anglican situation, it was the 39 Articles, of course, which were the fuller statement. It was never intended that members should subscribe to the 39 Articles at baptism, but it was intended from the beginning that clergy should subscribe. Indeed, when I was ordained it was still the rule in the Church of England that you assented to the 39 Articles before the bishop ordained you and that in each new church to which you went as a minister you had to recite all the 39 Articles. In fact, for about 20 years at All Soul’s Church I used to recite them every year and then preach on one of them.

Kay: Church discipline is usually considered appropriate not just for moral failure but for areas of doctrine as well. Should we base our discipline on the standard of a more basic document, such as the Apostles’ Creed, rather than on a longer confession?

Stott: I would. Perhaps with one exception—one of the main gaps in the Apostles’ Creed is any reference to justification by grace through faith. Salvation is mentioned in the Nicene Creed, but there is no doctrine of the cross—there is no atonement. I would say that there should be discipline, I don’t know about members but certainly for teachers, if they don’t subscribe to the really basic things. These would include the virgin birth, the atoning death and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. But then again, for BBC, the church has always oscillated between extremes of laxity and discipline, and I don’t want us to get back to a very severe discipline where you’re excommunicating people every other day. I think the New Testament indicates that it’s only for very serious offenses, either belief or practice, that excommunication should be considered, and then only as the final resort.

Let's Not Give Up on "Sin"

As a pastor, I’ve learned that one of the realities of my job is to receive unsolicited performance reviews after the Sunday service— sometimes from people I’ve barely met. Alternately, I find myself humbled, flattered, encouraged, insulted, and confused. It's a part of church work that I wouldn’t trade for anything. There is one visitor’s comment, however, that I’ve heard enough times that I’ve begun to take a little more notice. It’s usually phrased something like this: “I like it when you talked about God’s love, but did you have to keep talking about sin?”

The psychiatrist Karl Meninger wrote a book a few decades ago called Whatever Became of Sin? Meninger’s question is still worth asking. It seems that “sin,” as a serious word to describe the dark side of human motivation, has almost fallen out of use. It certainly has lost its broad appeal. When the word makes a rare appearance, it usually serves two very opposite purposes. Either it describes only the worst kind of atrocities, or it acts as comic relief—sort of a playful jab at the overly scrupulous (“Let us tempt you with our Sin-Sationally Rich Chocolate Sundae!”).

Why the recent twisting of such a long-used word? With embarrassment, Christians must admit to some (not all) of the blame. Certain periods of American Christianity have suggested that sin is coequal with drinking any amount of alcohol, playing cards, and dancing. The rest of the culture looks at the Church in such times and sighs, “Oh, brother.” I call this the silly-ification of sin, and it makes my job harder. What’s worse, when “sin” is trivialized in this way, the word loses much of its original power.

The New Testament has another view of sin altogether, one that makes the word worth keeping in our vocabulary. Sin was a deeply complex topic for Jesus and the apostles, yet one very simple term was often used to describe it: the Greek epithymia, which is best translated “over-desire.” Sin, therefore, is not simply the desire for the wrong things, but a disproportionate over-desire for anything, even good things. To appreciate a sleek car is not sin, but to over-desire it by believing that your life is somehow incomplete without it, is greed. Over-desire shows itself as the root of all kinds of sin. Having a good reputation is certainly desirable, but if you over-desire to protect your reputation, you will be tempted to lie or dodge criticism whenever you fear someone may discover your faults. The sin of bitterness has a similar cause. Because God made us, we have built-in dignity and worth. But, if we over-desire that others respect our dignity, we will succumb to bitterness or even hatred when someone doesn’t give us the respect that we demand. Have you ever surprised yourself by flaring-up at another driver who didn’t afford you the courtesy of his turn signal? The Bible says, “Don’t be so surprised,” for to be even slightly snubbed is a crisis for the one who is over-committed to getting the appreciation of others.

If we neutralize such thoughts and motivations by simply calling them “defense mechanisms” or even “personality flaws,” we underestimate their damaging effects. In fact, the greatest underlying human problem, which really defines all sin, is that we desire other things more than we desire God. We regularly seek our ultimate pleasure in things that were never designed to bear that responsibility—they just aren’t weighty enough. Ironically, even those who set out for a great career, a loving family, a good reputation, and then attain their goals, often report a nagging restlessness that something is still missing (and so we divorce, change careers, etc.).

Jesus taught that there is only one thing that can’t be over-desired, one thing that is substantial enough to be the anchor for our souls: himself. Jesus said that knowing and serving him actually brings about the satisfaction that we failingly (and sinfully) seek in so many other places. Blaise Pascal said it this way: “Inside every man’s heart is a God-shaped vacuum.” That is, though we try to fill ourselves with meaning by any number of people, possessions, and good causes, only God is shaped to fit. So, in the end, sins are not the arbitrary no-no’s of a Heavenly Kill-Joy, but the dangerous pursuits that prevent us from gaining the great Joy-Giver himself. Keeping a rough word like “sin” in our vocabulary reminds us that displacing God is not just a lifestyle choice, but is tragedy in the truest sense.

Late Night Thoughts on Arcade Fire and Prayer

Briefly: there is a fine line between desperate, honest, yet reverent prayer to God, and the overt disbelief and God-condemning renuncation of God, to his face. In a way, one might say "fine line? what could be more disparate than a hurting soul crying out to God for relief versus a soul that renunces God?" Ah, but Psalm 88 proves the line really is fine - this psalm would be almost unsingable in churches today, even though it was once sung by the ancient faithful without sense of contradiction. If you haven't read Psalm 88, you might have an overly pretty-ified view of prayer. Now, Arcade Fire is a band that a lot of Christians are excited about (as well as a lot of non-Christians -- seriously, U2 and David Bowie both have taken the stage with these guys - the latter whose recent album is entitled "Heathen" while the former's lead singer has declared his Christian faith in increasingly overt ways lately). My question: is Arcade Fire singing Ps. 88's or are they shrugging off Christianity itself in their lyrics? Which side of the line are they on? Maybe others have settled this question, and I see no evidence that Arcade Fire's talented artists make any public Christian claims (which is fine in itself, even if any of them are Christians). Maybe the answer doesn't matter -- speaking as a true believer, these songs make sense, even if I'm wrongly interpreting them from my side of the line. Their album "Funeral" is jaw-dropping, and, as one Youtube.com post-er said, "if you dont' cry at this, you are dead inside." Overstated? A little, but not by much (though if you're over the age of fifty, I'll let you off the hook for reasons of changing generational aesthetics).

Micah and Justice

Well, I've been a fairly unfaithful blogger lately, I'm sorry to say! Let's start things up again with a short and painless entry. What follows is a pre-press reflection on Micah 6:6-8 that Fuller Theological Seminary asked me to write for their Southern California newsletter. Faithful Enormous Hippo readers like you will get it first.


"Doing Liturgy, Doing Love"

The prophetic injunction in Micah 6:6-8 is exactly the kind of warning one would expect a highly ordered (scripturally ordered, no less) worshipping community like Israel might need to hear fairly often. It is as if Micah said, “never let this good, divinely-inspired liturgy (burnt offerings, calves, rams, oil) replace love (doing “justice” and “mercy”). Christians should not over-read this text as if it were privileging acts of mercy over acts of worship, as if the two were somehow in essential contradiction. We can imagine some choice words that Micah might have had for an Aaronic priest who heard Micah 6:6-8 and then declared, “Yes, mercy is what matters, not worship! Until we achieve social justice in Israel, we’re calling off the morning and evening sacrifices, as well as Passover and Pentecost.” As long as God remains the loving Redeemer of his people, the corporate worship of the people is the obvious, proper, and instinctive response of the redeemed.

But the sin crouching at the door is to make the zealousness or regularity of our worship acts into bankable credits that can buy us out of the harder work of loving the unlovely and resisting unjust powers. It is always easier to sing a hymn than to “do advocacy” or the even harder work of, say, spending an hour caring for an emotionally needy person. The front page of the New York Times yesterday described the resurgence of liberation theology in Brazil , on the eve of Pope Benedict’s visit – the same man who, twenty-five years ago, helped write his church’s official denunciations of the movement. But in light of Micah’s words, even Protestant/Evangelical-me must admit (with the liberationists) that some engagement with causes of justice is part of my mandate as a follower of a justice loving God, and (with the Pope) that service without a heart that delights in the God who offers a greater “inner liberty” (Ratzinger’s phrase) in Christ is just a different kind of vanity and emptiness.

In the end, the best way to pursue “justice and mercy” without eclipsing the worship of the triune God is to look at the cross. Calvary keeps us from the easy moralism of much activism because it shows us that we ourselves would have been the just target of divine retribution apart from Jesus’ advocacy for us. And deeds of mercy are now calibrated as responses to a greater cross-shaped mercy we have received, not as abstract works of obedience or mere moral duty. On the other hand, the cross moves us to worship because it shows us the willing condescension of a God who was eager to give us mercy instead of justice , welcome instead of exile. Pouring out “ten thousand rivers of oil” for such a God would be, even still, too meager an act of worship.

Augustine for 2007

It makes very little sense for a thirty-seven year old man like myself to commend to you the writings of someone like Augustine of Hippo, as if my endorsement mattered. But tonight, because I'm riding high on the Sunday-night exuberance of a day well spent, I will. Apart from Jesus, the biblical prophets and apostles, Augustine is the most influential person in the history of Christian thinking. Amazingly, such a statement would be largely undisputed, even by his critics, a full 1,500 years after his death. As all philosophy is footnote to Plato, all theology is said to be a footnote to Augustine. I just found a few new websites dedicated to Augustine's complete writings and secondary literature about him (www.augustinus.it is one, though most of the site is in Latin or Italian). Did you know that a current biliography about this man runs to over 25,000 entries? If you've never read Augustine's Confessions, maybe this is the year to check it out. Arguably, it is the most published book in history other than the Bible, and is instantly enjoyable as an autobiography of a staggeringly smart man who encountered Christ as a great sinner, while in his friend's backyard. He was never the same after than night (nor was Western Christianity). The whole Reformation, as some have said, was nothing more than a debate in the mind of Augustine, with his view of grace triumphing over his view of the church. Grandiose statements aside, the Confessions is surpisingly intimate and warm. If you are a Christian, you will easily recognize in this book the voice of a fellow traveler, someone who may have little in common with you culturally, but many things in common spiritually. No one will blame you for skipping the last couple of chapters on the philosophy of time, etc., but the rest is gold. It you're a non-Christian, the Confessions contains an interesting account of how a man with plenty of intellectual ammunition against Christianity in the end found Christ to be more compelling than all his doubts.

Paul vs. the Gnostics: Who are the Real Environmentalists?

Here's an interesting quote I happened on in this week's issue of HopeDance, a free newspaper in San Luis Obispo County with a fairly sizable distribution. It's an excerpt from a book by John Lamb Lash called Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief:

If the human species is to survive in the near future, it will have to live in Gaia's way, not in the demented, self-centered willfulness to which we are accustomed. But what do we know, so far, of Gaia's way? With the eradication of the Mysteries, humanity lost the most important spiritual resources of the Western world...The process that began six thousand years ago, perhaps triggered by a vast climatic catastrophe in North Africa and the Near East, led to monotheistic religion with its suppression of the Goddess, and then, through the transference effectuated by Saint Paul, to the triumph of salvationism as the spiritual paradigm of the Western world...There is no more powerful ideology for oppression than redemptive religion.

I realize this is a fairly standard New Age analysis of how Christianity ruined Western culture, but what I appreciate about it (believe it or not) is its attack on the actual doctrine of Paul and Christianity, rather than just a vague stab at cultural Christendom, which has always been somewhat at odds with genuine biblical Christianity. Lash says that Christianity's focus on redemption and salvation makes it a dangerous religion that will ruin the world. Here, though, is the mistake in this accusation: Paul's religion was that the kingdom of Jesus Christ would bring in the restoration of the whole cosmos, not just human souls. In other words, Paul's doctrine of redemption included the redemption of the world, the freeing of even nature from oppression. In Romans 8:19ff. Paul says, "For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves..."
Notice how the inanimate creation experiences its renewal alongside of those persons who also will be renewed by Christ -- their salvation becomes the cosmos' salvation. Paul's Christianity, therefore, has an extremely exalted view of the environment and its future, and those who follow Paul will not be haphazard in causing decay in very same world that God has said he wants to one day fully restore. Christian doctrine doesn't take the Gaia route to its positive view of the environment, but it gets there nonetheless. Of course, Christendom (the society of historical Western culture that has presumably based itself on the Bible) has not always lived consistently with these biblical values. But its worst blemishes arose when it abandoned Paul and redemptive religion, not because it followed it. Neither is Paul's teaching a fully formed environmentalism in a modern sense -- but it's still fair to say that texts like Romans 8 lean in the environmentally-conscious direction rather than away from it.
And here's the real kicker: if Paul's emphases on the created world were forgotten at times by Western Christendom, it was due to the ongoing influence of Platonic and Gnostic philosophy. While Gnosticism is diverse, most versions taught that the physical world was the vile creation of the evil Demiurge who was trying to distract humanity from the real God-beyond-creation. Those under the influece of such a system of doctrine, even when otherwise informed by the Bible, were more likely describe salvation in terms of jettisoning the physical body and this worthless world, and to get on to the ethereal heavenlies. While such ideas clearly have a home in Gnosticism, they would not have occurred to Paul or the writers of the New Testament who believed that God had made human flesh and the physical universe, and would one day restore both when Christ returns. So, one of the most natural religious foundations for a positive view of the environment turns out to be Pauline Christianity -- a redemptive, salvific religion, yes, but one that can conceive of the final location of that salvation in other New Testament terms as a "New Heavens and a New Earth."

Shouting, "Amen!" with John Knox

Some of those who occasion this blog come from the Reformed tradition of Christianity, and others, like myself, find our home specifically in Presbyterianism. To those of you from these "tribes," please take a moment to gird up your loins before reading the next few sentences. Folks like us are known for doing things "decently and in order" and are sometimes chided by our Christian friends from other traditions for our stiffness in public worship. Well, it wasn't always so. Apparently, the practice of parishoners shouting, "Amen!" and other exclamations during the Sunday sermon has its historical roots, of all imaginable places, in Scottish Presbyterianism. And not in some late manifestion, but during the time of the Reformation itself. On no less an authority than Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of the magisterial and massive The Reformation, "Scotland..developed the community drama of the sermon to its height. It was preceded by the prolonged ringing of the church bells which had once rung the faithful to Mass...Once everyone was in, the doors would be locked. Scottish congregations might then be encouraged to participate in the sermon-drama, being urged to shout out responses, cries of praise or 'Amen', in the manner that has been inherited by American evangelical Protestantism" (p.586). Honestly, I really thought the "Amen!" "Praise the Lord!" business was the original property of Pentecostals and Charismatics. Didn't you? I don't know what might happen if this fact gets out, and I fully expect that a few folks from my own congregation might start pressing their historical rights the first Sunday after they read this. Well, bless them. Most Christian liturgy, ours included, is full of congregational responses -- so why not during the sermon? As somebody once said, "When the Holy Spirit falls on some people, they quiet. When he falls on others, they get loud." So, as far as I'm concerned, we Presbyterians might be currently runnng an "Amen" deficit, to the degree that might even surprise our own theological and ecclesiologial forebearers. I've always been encouraged when I hear somebody blurt one out, however timidly. Knowing we've also got John Knox nodding in approval is a welcomed twist of church history that I, honestly, never saw coming. Amen, indeed.

Scandal in SLO: The Outing of a Journalist Who Believes

Some of my interest in the intersection of religion and public life got a lot less theoretical this month when a local radio host blasted my good friend, Ryan Miller, editor of the New Times, a widely read alternative newsweekly here in San Luis Obispo. Ryan was taken to the cleaners for his supposed mixing of his faith with his journalism and, because he has been publically seen with me, a confirmed, fully-outed, religious guy (see below).
Congalton has long had the biggest radio audience in the county, and is a major opinion-shaper. Ryan is a Christian (a member of my church, actually), and recently took the helm of the second largest paper in town. One of Ryan's editorial strengths is his general unwilingness to publish "hit pieces," stories that do not allow a person who is criticized to give his or her own response to other's charges. While this would seem to be just journalistic fair-play, many alternative weeklys avoid such scruples. While this certainly gives such papers scintillating content, it usually comes at the expense of fairness. As Ryan once explained it to me, in some alternative newspapers, in any hypothetical story that might discuss a dispute between a landord and a tenant, the landlord will always be the bad guy, and the tenant will always be painted as unfairly oppressed. But Ryan, who says he learned this lesson directly from Steve Moss, New Times' revered founder, assumes that sometimes the tenants might actually be the bad guys, and if so, the story should be written that way.
So, both Steve Moss and Ryan Miller have had this thing about fairness, and believed (Moss has since died) that it is more important for a paper to be fair than to make a story scintillating. I didn't know Steve Moss, and so I don't know where his ideas about fairness found their ultimate grounding, but for Ryan, a Christian, values like fairness, honesty, and thoroughness flow, quite naturally, from his religious convictions. So here's the question: if Ryan's journalistic ethics flow from his specifically Christian faith, is he Christianizing the New Times by operating with those ethics? Is he (rightly or wrongly) making the paper into an Evangelical rag by doing so? Dave Congalton thinks so. Here's what he said:


Sunday, December 17, 2006

New Times Gets Religion

I suspect some dramatic editorial changes are underway at what has been the Alternative Paper of Record in this community for 20 years. New Times has had a pretty rocky period these last 18 months, starting with the sad death of founder Steve Moss, the uncertainty surrounding possible new owners, the whole controversy involving the meth story, the departure of King Harris as Managing Editor, declining circulation, etc.

Now it seems there is a staff revolt simmering under the surface and it just may boil over in the next few weeks as key members of the newsroom decide to move on.

The problem seems to be twofold. First, publisher Bob Rucker wants New Times to be more upbeat, softer in tone and less controversial, a vision shared by Ryan Miller, the wet-behind-the-ears editor who is still finding his editorial voice with the paper.

Apparently the voice Ryan is listening to most belongs to God. No kidding. A devout Christian, Miller is apparently being guided by a higher authority in putting out the newspaper week after week. Stories alleging a serial rapist on the loose in San Luis Obispo and reports of major FEMA violations by Atascadero are being scrapped in favor of this Thursday's cover story . . . .wait for it . . . . .A COMPARISON BETWEEN 'THE NATIVITY STORY" AND "PASSION OF THE CHRIST."

I'm not kidding! That's the cover story scheduled for this week by the weekly alternative paper.

Look, I believe in religious tolerance and support the right of anyone to follow the god of their choice -- or not. But leave it at the door, pal. Ryan apparently has trouble doing that, often openly consulting his pastor for advice in running the newspaper.


There are a few points of fact I'd dispute about this story, such as my role as Ryan's consultant, the main thrust of the cover-story he mentions, Ryan's level of experience (five years editing the Santa Maria Sun), etc. But the main question is this: while Congalton believes in "religious tolerance", does that include tolerance for religions (such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, to name a few) that cannot be "left at the door" without denying their central precepts? Most religions advocate a non-compartmentalized life, that is, to purposefully ignore their teachings when you go to work would really be to fundamentally deny the religion. To say to a religious person, "I tolerate you as long as you don't act religious from 9 to 5" is not really tolerance. This is not to say that Congalton or anyone should tolerate every religious impulse a person might have. If a newspaper editor said, "My religion requires me to sacrifice one of my reporters every day at noon before a statue of Molech," or, "my religion requires me to maliciously misquote all politicians," then well, it's probably OK not to tolerate the practice of that religion in a newspaper editor while he's on the job.

So, I'd make the case that we ought to be more tolerant than Congalton, but not tolerant of every form of religion that someone might want to practice in the workplace. Just how much tolerance is the right amount? That's a hard question, but shouldn't we at least say that an editor like Ryan Miller should be allowed to follow his religiously grounded ethics, especially when those ethics match up to commonly agreed upon journalistic standards that others might hold to because of a different fundamental philosophy? Remember, Miller and Moss agreed on their ethics, though would probably describe their ultimate reasons for such beliefs differently. This doesn't completely solve the tough question about the proper place of religious reasoning in a religiously pluralistic society, but it should be enough to show that telling someone to leave his Christianity at the door is not necessary or desirable, nor a mark of the kind of tolerance that we're all hoping to achieve.

Here's how I responded to Dave Congalton, and then his words back to me.

I'm the pastor of the church that Ryan attends -- I'm not sure who your sources were, Dave, but since Ryan took the helm at the New Times, I've never met with him to talk about the paper. We used to meet for lunch when he edited the Santa Maria Sun, and occassionally we'd talk about his work, but to call it a "consulting" relationship would be more than a stretch.

Even still, the requirement that someone like Ryan leave his faith "at the door" is easily overplayed. While I can understand your concern that a newspaper editor might covertly import his religious beliefs in illegitimate ways, there are many ways that one's ultimate beliefs can increase the quality of work, especially in a field like journalism. If someone's religous beliefs ground his convictions about justice, truth-telling, honesty, etc., -- all of which are New Testament values as well as journalistic values, I'm sure we'd all hope those are not jettisoned merely because they were born out of religious conviction. In fact, unless we were to ask all newspaper editors to only ground the ethics that we expect of them in a specifically a-religious philosophical pragmatism, we need to allow that privatley held religious beliefs can properly inform public ethics. Of course, there are plenty of examples of misappropriation of religious beliefs in the public square -- no argument there -- but there's not much evidence that Ryan has done so, Christmas cover-story notwithstanding. In fact, here's one piece of counter-evidence that the New Times is some kind of vehicle for softy Christian sappiness (something I loathe myself): earlier this month we saw an opinion piece making fun of heterosexual soccer moms and the downtown Christmas parade. At least two f-bombs were dropped in the process. Whatever changes Ryan has brought, he's certainly not forcing his staff to get religion.


To Brian Kay,

Though we are honored to have a pastor join the discussion on the blog, I stand by what I wrote originally and have taken it a step further in a new posting.

New Times is going soft, backing away from investigative reporting, playing up arts and events coverage. More and more religion will creep into these pages because of Ryan.


Oh, well. At least we got the conversation started.

Jansenists: Reformed and Roman Catholic?

I'm biting off more than I can chew with this post, since it's about time for bed, on a Saturday night no less, and Jansenism has a complex history that I'm just getting my head around. Let's suffice it to say that in the mid-1600's a Roman Catholic movement developed based on the ideas of a Dutch bishop named Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638). After reading a ton of St. Augustine, Jansen came to believe that the Roman Catholic Church, and espeicially the Jesuits who were so active in his own day, had departed from the radical nature of grace and sin for which Augustine had argued against Pelagius. By ditching Augustine and instead following the ideas of Molina, the Jesuits had functionally become semi-Pelagian: fallen humanity was only sick in sin, not dead, and that by cooperating with a dose of God's grace, we can cooperate in our eventual acceptance by God. Jansen's seminal work, the Augustinus rapidly spread through Holland,Belgium, and France, and was actually endorsed by ten professors at the Sorbonne in Paris, the old bastion of Catholic orthodoxy. The party didn't last long. Pope Innocent X, after thirty-six long discussions with advocates and detractors, over two years, finally condemned five representative statemements from the Augustinus in 1653. But here's my point: look at the five condemned statements and notice how close they were to the Reformed views on the same topics. Here are the five condemned statements as they appear in the somewhat clunky wording of the old Catholic Encylcopedia (newadvent.org). Following that are my five, easier-to-read versions of the same points:

1. Some of God's commandments are impossible to just men who wish and strive (to keep them) considermg the powers they actually have, the grace by which these precepts may become possible is also wanting;
2. In the state of fallen nature no one ever resists interior grace;
3. To merit, or demerit, in the state of fallen nature we must be free from all external constraint, but not from interior necessity,
4. The Semipelagians admitted the necessity of interior preventing grace for all acts, even for the beginning of faith; but they fell into heresy in pretending that this grace is such that man may either follow or resist it;
5. To say that Christ died or shed His blood for all men, is Semipelagianism.

Now, to put this in updated and slightly expanded language:
1. No one can follow all of God's laws, no matter how hard they strive, for no one now has the moral power to do so. God does not even grant this power to everyone.
2. An unregenerate person can only be saved by an irresistible act of God's grace.
3. The idea of an unregenerate person eventually "choosing" God is not a contradiction of God's irresistible grace that ennables such a choice. This irresistible grace does not externally constrain the will, but ennables it, from the inside, to really be free.
4. Semipelagians admitted that ennabling grace was necessary, but fell into heresy when they said such grace must be cooperated with by a non-ennabled choice of the free will.
5. To say that Christ atoned for all people's sins is Semipelagian, because, since all people are not finally saved by God, then they must have resisted what is merely an open offer of his grace.

If this reminds anyone of the classically Protestant Canons of Dort, also completed in Holland a few decades earlier, you couldn't be blamed! To me, this is an amazing example of how some within the Roman Catholic Church were able to advocate for, at least for a few years, a return to Augustinian (dare I say, Pauline!) views about sin and grace, and with several highly-situated advocates. To bad Jansen's views were outlawed-- they probably wouldn't have been as controversial three-hundred years earlier, but the Reformatin/Counter-Reformation lines were drawn pretty firmly by the 1650's.

Some Thoughts on Bart Ehrman

I've had a few thoughts bubbling since Bart Ehrman released his book, Misquoting Jesus, last year. After hearing an interview on Fresh Air with Terry Gross I finally thought I'd better write them down, and now, at last, post them here. Ehrman teaches New Testament at the University of North Carolina, is an ex-Evangelical, and, overall, makes the case that our present English Bibles cover-up hopelessly contradictory stories about Jesus in the existing Greek manuscripts. Here are a couple of his summary thoughts, mosty from the NPR interview, and some of my responses.

Ehrman says that the story in John 8 of the woman caught in adultery is only attested by late manuscripts, and thus is not likely original to John's own composition. This example functions as kind of a locus classicus for Ehrman's overall point that our English Bible, which contains this story, is fraught with arbitrary privileging of one text's reading over other ancient manuscripts that might have a contradictory reading. I.e. the presence of the woman caught in adultery story in most English Bible's proves that Jesus must be routinely "misquoted" in the N.T.
Problem: Ehrman is right that this story from John 8 is very unstable, but most English translations alert the reader to this fact in a footnote, so the instability of this partiuclar story is very transparent to the reader. More problematically, Ehrman implies by this example that all or many other stories is the New Testament are as equally instable as John 8. But there is no such textual instability for the vast majority of N.T. stories. That is, John 8 is not generally representative or an example of a coomon problem, it is, rather, an extreme outlier on the spectrum of textual stability (the only other comparable example might be the long ending of Mark's Gospel). To leverage John 8 to make a general point about widespread and damning textual discrepancies is like pointing to someone's hangnail and saying, "See, I told you he was dying."

Ehrman also says, "If the original text is authoritative, we have a problem, because we don't have the original text." By this, Ehrman is trying undercut the basis for the orthodox Christian claim that the Bible is our ultimate authority, since God inspired the apostles to write what they wrote. Ehrman is saying that if we don't even possess their original manuscripts, and if the manuscipts we do have contradict each other, then there's no sense pointing at any current Bible verse and saying, "This is God's authoritative word."

A few thoughts:
1. Not having the original manuscripts does not mean we have a substantial disconnect from the original in the texts that we do have. Like I've said above, this would be the mistake of concluding that the presence of a few conflciting texts, or even the presence of many insignificant variances between texts (i.e. those that have little impact on the final meaning of a verse) means that the original N.T. is basically unrecoverable or it's meaning basically obscure. Of course, if I had it my way we'd have access to the original manuscripts, but, failing that, what we do have is pretty good, even considering the text variances.

2. Ehrman seems to act as if textual criticism, the task of determining which of the two or more conflicting readings most likely represents the original, is a task unknown to orthdox Christians, or that they somehow turn a blind eye to how textual criticism makes their submission to scritpure as God's Word unreasonable or naive. But everyone have always known we don't have the original manuscripts. Apart from the King-James-Only crowd who believes that God surpernaturally inspired the 17th century English translators to make a newly inerrant Bible, Christians have always had to do the hard, disciplined, principled work (science? art?) of text criticism, that is, determining which of a number of contradictory readings might be closest to the original. This is not arbitrary or hopeless work, it has a fairy established and uncontroversial methodology, and most conclusions that text critics make are quite defensible.

3. In short, Ehrman overplays (a) the number of scribal changes, (b) the significance of the changes - i.e. even the variant texts have very little doctrinal signficance, (c) the final overall judgment against the N.T.'s stability, which is far greater that any other ancient text that I know of.

4. A final word on the definsibility of recognizing the present N.T. as divinely authoritative: Even though a text like the English Bible has the possibility, even liklihood, of some minor textual or translation errors, it makes sense for people who believe that the original N.T. was God's authoritative word to treat our present N.T. texts authoritatively as well (more particulalry, it is a good critical text like the Nestle-Aland 27th edition that is the safest to treat authoritatively, since it is the product of lot of careful textual criticism). Until counter-evidence appears that might cause us to ammend our text (and the end of Jn.8 should probably be deemed non-authoritative for this very reason), it is intellectually defesible to treat the N.T. as if the apostles and their associates really wrote it. In other words, if my secretary left me a note saying, "Your wife called to ask you to pick up three tomatoes on the way home," I might name many reasons why the note might not be letter-accurate to my wife's original words (maybe my secretary wasn't listening closely, maybe she accidentally wrote "three" instead of "two", etc.) but I would not be wrong to treat the note "authoriatively" even with those possibilities facing me, in fact, it would be more unreasonable and risky not to act on it and come home empty-handed, pleading "how could I have been sure?" No, treating a text with authority does not require claiming infallibility of the present text nor even our own interpretation of it. That's just the way texts work, and the Bible, in this regard, is not so different.

Ehrman has defeated the King James Only folks with his observations, but not really any historically mainstream view of Christian scripture, and not even that of conseravtive mainstream American Evangelicalism.

Why Conservative and Liberal Radio Isn't Good for You

I could have called this post "The Hermeneutics of Political Radio," but that might have sounded pretentious -- my point, however, really does relate to how certain political discourse interprets facts in the world. This morning during breakfast I was listening to the left-wing Air America radio network. Al Franken was away and two commentators were sitting in for him. As the hosts weighed-in on many recent events, one uniting theme soon became apparent, "George Bush and people who like him are only evil and dumb, all of the time." Which is to say, today's uniting theme on Air America was the same as yesterday's, and the day before. If a Republican were to do something apparently commendable, the interpretation of that event would fall into one or more of the following categories: (1) "Yes, but the commendable act was a publicity stunt, his heart wasn't really in it as we can clearly see by his past actions." (2) "It's about time he did something commendable, but this won't take away from the greater damage of his past actions. How dare he think this one act redeems him?" (3) "Victory for us! Our side exerted enough pressure to get him to do the right thing! So really, we're the ones to thank." (4) "Hey -- commendable acts like that were invented and perfected by OUR side - now HE'S trying to take credit?" (5) "OK, this was a commendable act -- but the exception proves the rule! The stark contrast between this act and the normal way our opponents conduct themselves highlights how generally uncommendable they are." The driving interpretive grid is this: whatever the event might be, it proves that "Republicans and what they do are always bad." Conservative radio operates by the same rules: all facts, all news stories, one way or another, prove the absurdity and villainy of liberals.

What's wrong with these kind of intepretive systems? Most philosphers and theologians recognize that we all operate with complex cognitive grids through which we pass all of our experiences. This is necessary so that we can quickly categorize what is happening around us, make decisions, etc. We can't avoid having presuppositions, even biases -- in fact, we'd be immobilized without them. Sometimes this is called the "hermeneutical spiral" - the proper, gentle circularity with which our presuppositions help us make sense of the facts, while the facts also shape our presuppositions. However, our ability to arrive at the truth is endangered when our presuppositions cannot themselves be corrected by the new discoveries, nor admit exceptions to general rules. A kind of craziness results when the hermeneutical spiral is interupted is this way, when our interpretive grid cannot be challenged by any number of contrary experiences, and so, our minds become shut off from the possibility of knowledge of certain things. For example: "Are all Democratic party leaders evil secularists?" ("Yes!") "But Democratic senator Barak Obama admits that his party is too secular and should allow more religious language in public policy debates - surely he is not an evil secularist." ("Wrong! We know he's an evil secularist because he's a Democrat.") Philosophers also call this "begging the question" -- using your conclusion as evidence for your conclusion. This is not to say that, for the sake of argument, the basic Democratic interpretation of the world is more correct than the basic Republican world view. Nor is it to say that one could not, with intellectual honesty, host a radio show that discusses national events from the vantage point of one such political perspective. Rather, the test of political craziness might be to ask, "Have my opponents ever gotten it right? If not, might they sometimes have at least meant to get it right? Can I speak for more than sixty seconds about an area of commonality bewteen us?" The most successul politicians (and people) are able to build on commonalities, give credit where credit is due, admit past mistakes in their own belief or action, find ways to work with opponents, etc., all without going soft on their own convictions, goals, and general presuppositions about reality. The radio shows, by contrast, tend to enforce interpretive grids that are actually, on these terms, crazy, because all facts, all the time, prove the host's grand narrative to be true: on all counts we are morally good and epistmemically right, and they are morally bad and epistemically wrong.

The Bible has another word for this state: blindness - the morally blameworthy state of making yourself unable to see relative value in others or faults in yourself. Christianity says that the reason we are drawn to such totalizing political visions is a problem with our hearts: we desperately want to see ourselves as good and respectable, and the easiest way to do this is to find an opponent who is always wrong, always morally corrupt, always so much worse than we are. Like a drowning person, we elevate ourselves by pushing the other guy under water. My own faults are made so much smaller in the face of the heinous faults of the opponent. For example: "They're blaming our guy for X? Well, X might have been a mistake, but their guy did Y! How can you blame us for one instance X when they do Y all the time?" And, while, Y may really be much worse than X, X is still wrong and, morally speaking, requires an unqualified apology. Being a Christian, among other things, involves actually believing that on your best day you are a moral and epistemic mixed-bag. Put differently, it means saying that apart from all the legitimate good you may have done in a given day, you have so fallen short of God's perfection that your sins required the death of Christ to atone for them. Those who really believe they have need of Christ to cover their daily sins are moving toward the cure for all kinds of blindness, including political blindness. Such people may still have a specific political vision, yet they won't be able to speak or act morally superior to everyone who disagrees with that some part of that vision. They'll make a case for their interpratation of the truth, but will less likely do so with words or a tone that suggests only idiots would disagree. They'll see sinners on both sides of the isle, and will include themselves in that number. Their need to see their oppenent as thoroughly dumb or evil will be diminished because they have already admitted to their own intellectual and moral failings: as Christians they believe God alone is all-knowing, not them, and he has moved to forgive them from their own failures through the sacrifice of Christ for them. Such people, when acting consistently with their beliefs, won't spend much energy drawing attention to their intelletual or moral OK-ness, nor, espectially, will they they need to push others down in order to lift themselves up. In a sense, Christ has already allowed himself to drown in order to bear them up.

Of course, all of these thougths about politics apply to the politics within our families, our churches, our schools. Common sense can keep us from some of the crazy politics we may be tempted to engage in, but the gospel is the most intellectually sound and spiritually powerful cure. Only it addresses the real heart of crazy politics, the compelling idol that we always get our way and that we be seen by God and others as right and respectable.

Vancouver the Great

I'm writing today from Vancouver, British Colombia, where my family and I are taking a week to relax and audit a theology class from Jeremy Begbie at Regent College (one of my favorite places in the world). At the moment, I'm looking out over the city from our 22nd floor hotel room. This week hosts Vancouver's international fireworks competition, so every other night or so everyone heads out to the beaches and watches different nations compete for the best display. Does any other city in the world so effortlessly blend urban style with the majesty of ancient forests and surging, crystal rivers? I almost did my M.Div. here instead of Gordon-Conwell, but changed my mind because, among other reasons, I was afraid I'd love British Colombia too much by the time I was forced to leave the country upon graduating. My wife has never been to Regent College or Vancouver, so I'm in show-off mode. Tomorrow we'll do tea at Stanley Park, then probably rent bikes and explore the forest. I'd say this place is most like a big-city version of a Europeanized Yosemite, if that makes any sense. And watching the sun start to set (it won't fully go down until 10:00 p.m.), over the blue English Bay, wild forests rising up beyond the skyline to the north, it makes plenty of sense to me.

Strangely, I'm sitting here waiting for J.I. Packer to call me back. I never thought I'd write that sentence before today. He's (maybe) doing the foreward to a book I'm putting out next year, and thought I'd use that as my excuse to try to drop in on him at the college and introduce myself. One of the Regent staffers who nearly forced me to call him at home laughed at how Packer-fans sometimes show up and take pictures of themselves in front of his house. Check out his new book, Prayer: Finding Our Way Through Duty to Delight (co-written by Carolyn Nystrom, who groomed some of his lectures). Packer is best known for the tremendous Knowing God but has continued a steady output now into his eighties. Another classic is Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God which shows why a high view of divine sovereignty in salvation (that God chooses us before we choose him) is perfectly compatible with the practice of sharing our faith with others. Last month Packer gave a lecture here at Regent where he claimed that best the label for his career-calling would be "catechist" (agreeing with Alister McGrath's dubbing him as such in his biography of Packer). That is, he takes historic Christian orthodoxy and makes it accessible to everyone.

More on the Regent College trip later. Tomorrow, my wife and I and about six others will have tea with George Marsden, who wrote the great new (and really, the definitive) biography of Jonathan Edwards. Quite a treat, indeed. I'll write more about the Jeremby Begbie class later, but now, back to vacationing...

Univocity vs. Analogy vs. Equivocity

If the title of this entry didn't stop you from reading further, especially in the middle of a hot summer, you must be a real theologian. Here's the issue: when the Bible attributes certain characteristics to God, how are to we to understand the relationship between those attributes and God himself? Or, how does Biblical language work? More simply, if the Bible says that God "changed his mind" or is "fuming in anger" or "feels betrayed", we have three main interpretive options. "Univocity" means that such words when applied to God mean the same thing ("one voice") that they do when applied to us. Lately some controversial evangelical theologicans have taken the univocal approach in order to say that when God "changed his mind" (in a few places in Scripture) that he did so in the same way and for the same reasons that we change our mind: new data that we hadn't forseen comes into view, and so, we adjust ourselves. So, God changed his mind about destroying Israel in the desert because Moses helped him see reality in a new way. You can see the problems that univocity gets you into! But many fundamentalists use the univocity view to justify extremely literalistic readings that discount metaphor, allegory, etc. On the other extreme, equivocity is the route of hyper-skepticism and postmodernity, which often suggets that God is so ultra-transcendant and unknowable that the Biblical language itself can't tell us anything very reliable about God. Human language for God, including scriptural language, is a form of our reaching up and trying to explain our religious feelings and experiences. Of course, this view would deny that Biblical claims about God are themselves revealed by God.
The best way out of the dead-ends of univocity and equivocity is analogy. To say that God felt "betrayed" in an analogical sense means that our experience of being betrayed is both similar and somehow different than God's experience. In common with God, we would experience betrayal when someone who promised us love ended up witholding it from us. Different, however, is that God is never dominated or overwhelmed by his feelings, he is never taken off guard by a betraying act, he somehow also uses the other's betrayal for a better end he had in mind, amongst other diferences that we can't even name because we don't fully understand God given our finitude. The analogical view says that the differences in language usage between how a word applies to God and how it applies to us does not cancel the communicative, revelatory value of such a word: when God says "I felt betrayed" he is communicating something real about himself, and enough for us to know him deeper by him tellling us so. God gives us biblical descriptions of himself to deepen our love and worship of him, but not as a way of building a univocal and exhaustively metaphysical model of his nature. As the Reformers said, we never know God fully as he is in himself. So, did God change his mind that day with Moses in the desert? Yes and no. He halted one plan and embarked on another (like we might do), but he foreknew this reversal and was teaching Moses something about intercession (unlike what we could do). Respecting the principle of analogy helps us avoid a lot of bizarre theological claims that we might be able to "prooftext," but that really misuse the text (usually in the direction of univocity).
If you made it this far, I think you've earned your beach read. In fact, I'm off to the pool myself...

Psalms and Concurrent Operation

"Concurrent operation" is the theological idea that every event that comes to pass in our world, apart from its natural cause, is simultaneously and fully the operation of God. For example, when it rains, it is proper to say, "God gave us this rain" as well as "a rising warm air system has collided with a sinking cold air system." God is the first cause, but both the divine cause and the natural cause are real, and operate concurrently, not in competition. This is not just a theological axiom, but a fundamental for the spiritual life. In other words, the more you believe in concurrent operation, the more you: 1) thank God for every good thing that happens; 2) trust that God is up to something valuable when bad things happen; 3) pray for all kinds of things, knowing that all events, however mundane or momentous, are under his control.
As for prayer and concurrent operation, I've been noticing lately how much the Psalmist glorifies God for his work in the normal operation of the world. In the case of the animal kingdom, notice: Ps. 29:9, "the voice of the LORD makes the deer give birth"; Ps. 104:21 "the young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God"; Ps.104:27ff. "these [animals] all look to you, to give them their food in due season. When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things. When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your breath, they are created." So, in addition to what National Geographic has taught us, lions also can be said to look for their food and receive it from God, they are dismayed or happy depending on what God provides them, they die when God determines, and are born when he breathes new life into a cub. Perhaps a culture as scientifically advanced as ours needs to be re-convinced of the dotrine of concurrent operation the same way the Psalmist was -- if we were, instead of letting God get sqeezed-out with our advances in knowledge, we'd just find more things to praise God for..." when you give them the word, O Lord, the chromosomes divide, the stem cells commit to be a particular tissue, the electrons spin and never collide..." Or as Gerard Manley Hopkins reminds us, "The world is charged with the grandeur of God...Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs - Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."

The Hard Road Out of Cultural Captivity

One of the comments on my last post brings up a truism about Chrisitanity wherever it flourishes: cultural captivity will never be fully escaped, even by the church. Tim V. mentioned that while Africa's current orthodoxy is marked by a traditional (and proper) resistance to homosexuality, it is, at least where Tim lived, less stalwart about the orthodox view of marital celibacy. Ouch. That is, while the church might be unanimous that homosexuality is wrong, it is less unanimous in its belief that husbands should be monogamous. The statistics of African church growth could be embarrasingly compared to the equally dramatic rise in AIDS, suggesting that while many folks are converting to Christ, many are also sleeping around.
Should this surprise us or cause us to doubt the authenticity of the African revival of the last thirty years? No. The church, even when it is flourishing, always exists within broader cultures. And, since cultures are made up of humans, and humans are sinfully fallen, the church will likely always have sin-patterns of the same variety as their surrounding fallen cultures. Amercan churches will tend to have more sinfully materialistic members than churches in poorer countries, while Christians in, say, Asian cultures, will be more likely to over-venerate their ancestors, and male Christians of other cultures will have a higher rate of marital infidelity. While Christianity is counter-cultural in many ways since it is about the erecting of a new kingdom with new values, it takes generations (sometimes) for certain cultural sins to be purged from the believing community. The power of culture is that it slowly, surely, makes us blind to certain moral categories that, were we really objective, we'd see the Bible clearly opposes. As much as we'd like it be different, real Christians sin in culturally predictable ways.
This is worth mentioning because one of common reasons people reject the Christian gospel is that they perceive hypocrisy or lifestyle failure in Chrisitans they meet as a deal-breaker. The underlying assumption is that followers of Christ will be fairly sinless, and if they aren't, then they are either frauds or the Christian message itself is to blame. But even Christian people are not quickly or ever thoroughly freed from the false values they are surrounded by. Often it takes a Christian from the perspective of a different culture to diagonse the ways we have capitulated to our own. East Indian evangelist K.P. Yohannan reports visiting a 3,000 member church in the United States and being shocked to find only two or three in attendance at their weekly prayer-meeting. Does the prayerlessness of that church mean that that it, or that Chrisitanity, is a sham? No, it means that 3,000 self-suffficient Western Christians need to go back and read the Bible more closely where it speaks about prayer, and be glad for the kind rebuke of an Indian brother. One of the reasons that it's good to have multi-national church dialogue is that we can help each other to take off the cultural blinders that we often don't know we're wearing. As Jesus said, the wheat and the tares of his kingdom will grow up together, and only finally sorted out at his return. The Lord of his church knows that it will always be impure, until he comes to fully purify it. Until then, authentic-yet-fallen churches need to keep helping each other to be better cultural critics of their own surroundings.

Global South Christians Take the Lead

A few years ago we used to hear anecdotes that the geographic center of world Christianity was Timbuktu, Africa. Sometime later, in November of 2003 to be exact, Peter Jenkins wrote a cover story for the Atlantic Monthly called "The Next Christianity," citing a lot more statistics to make the same point: increasingly, Christianity is a Southern Hemisphere religion. The church is growing wildly in Africa and South-East Asia, while sputtering in Europe (old news) and plateauing in North America. Nothing will illustrate this global shift more plainly than what is going on today in world Anglicanism. Of the 73 million Anglicans in the world, the majority live in Africa. The Nigerian church alone sees more worshippers on Sunday than all of England. While the African church owes its existence to colonial-era missionaries from Britain (primarily), the African church is now taking to task its Western brethren in England and the U.S.A. for failure to hold to the teachings it had first learned from them. And, because of the global shift, the West is forced to listen. As you may know, the 2003 confirmation of Gene Robinson as the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church (USA) began a chain reaction of dissent among the few remaining orthodox Episcopal churches in America, and the African (and South American) bishops heard their cry. So began a new phenomena in world Anglicanism: individual American congregations began to secede from the oversight of their own American bishops and ask to be reassigned under a third-world bishop. The Anglican bishops of Rwanda and Uganda now both have several American churches under their authority. In fact, one of my old seminary buddies, Bill Haley, was ordained in February to begin an Episcopal church in Washington, D.C., but his ordination was by the Anglican bishop of Bolivia! Last week, the Most Rev. Peter Aquinola, who heads the Primates of the Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa (CAPA) published an "Open Letter from Global South Anglican Leaders to the Episcopal Church USA" to say, in effect, "you Americans have broken with the faith you once taught us -- so we're moving on without you." (To be fair, the ordination of a homosexual bishop is really the last straw after decades of creeping unorthodoxy in the American church.) CAPA will meet in September to make a final decision about what to do about their formal ties with what they perceive as the rogue American church, but whatever they decide will really be the global Anglican response to a pipsqueak American branch of the world Anglican movement (and the American church loses abot 50,000 members a year). Of course, the Archbishop of Canterbury still has unofficial "first among equals" status among Anglican leaders, but for sheer reasons of size, the Africans are the heavies of global Anglicanism. And because of that fact, thankfully, global Anglicanism is largely an orthodox, biblical, movement. I predict we'll see a rise in African ruled American churches as the likes of Peter Aquinola increasingly see America as spiritually destitute region of the world that is in need of the gospel, and many, many missionaries. What a reversal, huh?

Renaming God?

Summer is a time for annual denominational conventions, and, because of the occasional absurdity of what those conventions are debating, it is a time for loads of media coverage of American Christianity. Not the least interesting of these stories was last week's revelation that the Presbyterian Church (USA) received a policy paper recommending that the "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" be allowably replaced with "Mother, Child, and Womb" as a way to refer to the triune God in worship services. How bad is this development for the PC (USA)? On one hand, the Associated Press names the reaction of certain conservatives that "the church should stick close to the way God is named in the Bible." This seems almost right, but the real issue is not that we must only use explicitly Biblical language for God (i.e. who would argue that it would be wrong to address God as the "Great Physician"?), or even that God does not have certain "motherly" qualities (cf. a previous post regarding places in the Bible where God is portrayed as a brooding mother-bird). The real problem is the desire to replace God's own self-determined names with names that explictly reverse the meaning of those revealed names -- even when the new name might carry some truth in it.
Here's what I mean: The first person of the Trinity calls himself "Father," and though he also reveals mother-like qualities about himself, this fact, for whatever reason, does not result in God also naming himself in the Bible as "Mother." Why not? In the end, you and I don't know the answer for this, nor do we have to know. Somehow, the Father-metaphor is more central to God's character, more helpul for us to know, whatever -- but "Father" is what he has chosen to call himself, rather than "Mother". To substitute "Mother" for "Father" is different than calling God "Great Physician," since doing so does not reverse any other name that God has chosen to reveal.
Another trend in the Scriptures that helps to make the same point: God reveals certain qualities about himself by way of metaphor, others by way of simile. Metaphors say "A is B" while similes say "A is like B". I.e. Jesus "is" the Son, but is only "like" a mother hen (Luke 13:34). Of course, one could do a lot of unwarranted speculation about why God chooses some names as metaphors and other self-descriptions as mere similes, but it's an easy, organic, and biblical way to name God by using the metaphors, and not to try to reframe the similes as if they could as easily become metaphors. I.e. to start calling Jesus our loving "Hen" is to turn a simile into a metaphor. This is not an insignificant move, but is a kind of genre-violation of God's own modes of self-naming. Language does matter, and for reasons we can't always name.
The impulse to rename is sometimes legitimate and a sign of affection, of course -- we give endearing nick-names to our spouses and kids -- but this habit becomes immediately subversive (wouldn't you say?) when we do it to those in authority over us. To call a civil court judge "Pops" is partly appropriate as to the nature of his authority, but definitely disrespectul. And, since God exercises his authority over us lovingly, for our benefit, even the names he has chosen for himself carry some form of a gift, even if we don't always see it.

Getting into the Psalms

In about 381 AD a Christian woman named Egeria set out on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem from her native Spain, and wrote a travel-journal of her experiences. Among the other wonders of her story (it's still in print, by the way) is what she reports about how ancient Christians conducted their public worship services. Now, nothing that's old is worth repeating merely because it's old, but getting a viewpoint from a different millenium and a different culture has its value. And what the early Christians seemed to value was the Psalms. For example, the basic daily morning services she would have encountered in Jerusalem opened with either Psalm 50 and 51 or 62 and 63, then several other variable Psalms were read (or sung), then an Old Testament "canticle" (like a Psalm), then Psalms 148-150, followed by various prayers and a blessing. While the services she attended had been heavily influenced by "monastic model" worship practices and their even heavier Psalmody, these "cathedral model" services of the average Christian were very Psalms-rich.
What's great about the Psalms? They marry theology and poetry, doctrine and personal experience, and model how the whole range of human emotions can be expressed to God through through prayer. The Pslams teach us how to pray, and praying them ourselves gives us words to say to God that we might have difficulty expressing on our own. Since the Psalms are also inspired by the Holy Spirit, they are God-endorsed guides that we can trust, and keep us from being lopsided in our own self-made prayers. For example, praying the Psalms over time keeps us well balanced between praise, thanksgiving, repentance, and requests for God's help.
Christians have the advantage (and duty!) of praying the Psalms in light of Christ -- which will help us to make use of many Psalms that might otherwise seem too locked-in to an ancient time and place. Here are few tips: When there is a dialogue between "the king" and "the LORD" in a Psalm, think about Christ as that king. While David was the historical king who wrote the dialogue, Christ is the "Greater David," and many of these Psalms amazingly illuminate Christ's relationship with the Father, especially while he was on earth and depending on his Father while on the way to the cross. We can worship as we rehearse how Christ was in league with his Father in their joint project to save their people. Another tip: when the Psalmist calls out to God for the destruction of his enemies, remember that the three main enemies of the believer in this life are sin, death, and the harassment of the devil. While David had earthly enemies who he could pray against very strongly because of his particular call by God to maintain an earthly kingdom, we are citizens of Christ's spiritual kingdom that is presently more concerned about spiritual enemies. So, don't pray brimstone down on your cranky office-mate, but do pray it down on your own sin-nature and the work of the devil in the world. Again, when the Psalmist praises God for his rescue of his people at the Red Sea, remember that the Exodus is a foreshadowing of Christ's greater rescue at the cross -- realizing this will allow you to use many Psalms word-for-word while praising God for the greater Exodus by which he saved us. Likewise, the Psalmist warnings against abandoning God in the Sinai desert can be read as a warning to the church to not forget the God who has brought them into such freedom through Christ. With a few such New Covenant adjustments to our interpetation, we can see why the Psalms are just as useful for the Christian as they were for Jews before Christ.
Now a very practical idea. If you'd like to go through Psalms in a month, read the Psalm that has the number of the current date, as well as the current date plus 30, 60, 90, and 120. So, on June 22, you'd read Psalm 22, 52, 82, 112, and 142. That's a lot in one day, but still less than a lot of Egeria's new friend's were reading! Personally, I'd say to go slow and try to pray as you read. There's no shame in taking ten or more minutes per Psalm (or even an hour). You only might finish one Psalm in a sitting, but at least you're on your way. Enjoy meeting God through his own words!

Book of the Month

One of ongoing problems in contemporary theology is how to best relate "systematic theology" and "biblical studies." Here's the problem: if a person starts with a somewhat formed view on any of the traditional subjects within theology (such as the nature of God, the Bible, the person and work of Christ, the role of the Holy Spirit, etc.), he will have a hard time being unbaised when he is trying to interpret any individual text of the Bible. He'll be tempted to sift scripture through his predetermined theological grid, and so, individual texts will have less chance to challenge or correct his views. His pre-textual framework will decide beforehand which texts are essential and determinative and which are odd anomalies that are "exceptions to the rule." But the other problem comes when someone seeks to do biblical studies without reference to systematics, that is, to interpret any individual text without reference to what the Bible says elsewhere on the same topic. To refuse to engage in systematics makes one forever a mere child -- never growing in wisdom as the broad strokes of the whole Scripture sink in. Such a path also tends to arbitrarily deny the organic nature of the Bible, that is, that, Christianly speaking, the Holy Spirit is behind the whole project of Scripture, and that Scripture therefore fundamentally agrees with itself and invites some form of systematization (while being sensitive to various genres, historical contexts, etc.).

Enter Covenant Theology. A long-tradition, perhaps begun in earnest by the early church father Irenaeus (2nd century AD) and massively expanded by Protestant Scholastics in the 16th and 17th century, Covenant Theology seeks to make some inroads to solving this age-old problem. To grossly oversimplify, Covenant Theology suggests that the organic structure of the Bible is covenantal, that is, the unfolding drama of Scripture is strikingly organized around various "covenant administrations" between God and his people. Scripture does not just tell us about these covenants, rather, covenants are the basic "architectonic principle" (Horton's term, I think) of both testaments. So, while this observation definitely sees some "system" to scripture, it is a system that is in every imaginable way inherent to the text, not forced on it from above. The covenantal superstructure of Scripture has been made even more clear after various acheological discoveries of the 20th century showed that whole books of the Old Testament bear remarkable literary-stuctural similarity to ancient near-eastern treaty formulas. When all of this is understood, an extremely organic way of connecting biblical texts to systematics starts to arise. If this is unclear, it's because I've left out all of the specifics, but hopefully a post of this short lenth will be enough to at least whet your appetite.

Michael Horton's new book God of Promise: An Introduction to Covenant Theology is a good place to dive into this amazing field (O. Palmer Robertson's Christ of the Covenants is the older, simpler, intro), though, by any counts, it's for advanced beginners, at least. Horton was my dissertation advisor, so I'm a little biased, but I do think his last two academic titles (with a finale on the way) have done a lot to advance Covenant Theology in dialogue with a range of unlikely modern conversation partners. Not exactly summer reading, I guess, but it is a worthy book for anyone's 2006 reading list. Start here, then if you're really ready to take the plunge, try his Covenant and Eschatology: The Divine Drama and Lord and Servant: A Covenant Christology to see how other areas of systematics are helpfully impacted by attention to the Bible's own covenantal structures.