Rob Bell’s Love Wins Review, Pt. 2

Posted on March 29, 2011 by PaulVK

At the invitation of a colleague I watched some of an extended Rob Bell interview. It was helpful in that it gave me a fuller sense of the man’s style which I think helps me read his voice into the book.

Style

Style is important. Style can include a whole world of hard to define elements that tends to evoke in people trust or distrust, attraction or repulsion, suspicion or a bias towards acceptance. Whatever you want to say about Rob Bell, he’s to a style and that style comes out in his interview and in his writing.

Style is, in a way, kind of like culture. We never think we have one that is deeply impacting everything we say or do but the cultures of other are obvious to us. For me its hard to watch and listen to Bell and not get the sense that a strong piece of the content he is generating isn’t an attempt to NOT be something else, usually the style or culture of his critics, of which he’s already elicited a strong response. If he experiences them as judgmental, he’ll create a response that is its opposite. He wants to be flexible, engaging, tolerant, open, accepting, understanding, relational, as opposed to firm, resolute, self-defining, assertive, clear, willing to go it alone if need be (I tried to not be pejorative. You can find positive qualities in many behaviors you might disagree with.)

This of course happens to all of us. We all must figure out how to deal with where we’ve come from and what to do with it. Ideally we’d learn to embody a fuller range of qualities. Flexible yet firm, engaging yet resolute, tolerant yet well-defined, open yet differentiated, accepting yet assertive, loving yet clear. Love is often confused with enmeshment. You cannot be self-giving if you don’t have a well defined self.

Heaven Isn’t Far Away

If the main point of chapter 1 was “that kind of Christianity over there has a problem, isn’t making sense, isn’t blessing the world, and isn’t faithful Jesus” the main point of chapter 2 is “Christianity isn’t about getting people from earth to ‘heaven’.”

There is a lot I like about this chapter given that my own tradition is strong on creation-fall-redemption-reclamation. I like that he works a bit on tweaking our assumptions of “heaven” and getting a bit into a more specifically New Testament terminology of “the age to come.” There are places where he’s already tipping his hand on some issues in terms of exclusion.

Sickness Unto Death and Post-Death Self-improvement

One of the important issues that this book raises are the existentialist questions about after death consistency of character. This is an issues I probably first started wrestling with after I started doing some spade work on Tim Keller’s theology and read Kierkegaard’s “The Sickness unto Death“. I wrestled with the issue a bit when working on a sermon on Lazarus and the Rich Man. CS Lewis in “The Great Divorce” also presents us as not undergoing some ultimate character makeover at death (and “The Last Battle” too) but having us now being forced to wrestle with a new view of reality on the other side of the grave. We’re going to have to come back to these questions at some point. Bell will say “What we find Jesus teaching, over and over and over again, is that he’s interested in our hearts being transformed, so that we can actually handle heaven.” (p. 50).

Also on pg 51 “Much of the speculation about heaven– and, more important, the confusion– comes from the idea that in the blink of an eye we will automatically become totally different people who ‘know’ everything. But our heart, our character, our desires, our longings– those things take time.”

I’m sympathetic to a lot of this, but I also have doubts. (See this old blog post on hell. https://paulvanderklay.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/on-hell-and-parties/) At the same time there are still many questions that have to be worked through. The truth is that there is a lot more we don’t know and as I think I’ll get into later on in this series there are major issues with this view as well. Not only does our shaping take time, it also takes context and community and context and community matter a lot when it comes to shaping.

Jesus’ Firsts and Lasts

Bell also wants to highlight one of the strong points Jesus made repeatedly that when it comes to “making the cut” there will be great surprises. Bell seems to want to do this as a kind of “in your face” to the traditions he’s pushing back against, just as Jesus did to the group he was pushing back against, but you can’t push this too hard without also embracing that there is both urgency and consequence in the here and now with respect to these things. It’s hard to say “woe to you” if there is not cliff that you are careening towards.

It is also true that embodying this element of the surprising reversal of those who were satisfied and confident of themselves being lost while the “sinners” are in has long been a stock part of evangelical preaching, often the kind he’s pushing back against. The hardest line drawers have long warned to not put your confidence in church attendance or praying the sinner’s prayer. They, however, tend to more fully embody a full throated “woe” because the consequences imagined are grave.

How Will God Enforce his Weapon’s Ban?

I think my main question for Bell (and if you want to get an answer you have to be a very determined questioner and try to keep him from going ADHD on you) has to do with what world restoration actually requires. In the chapter Bell says:

“God says no to injustice.
God says, “Never again” to the oppressors who prey on the weak and vulnerable.
God declares a ban on weapons.”

To this I say, “OK, how? When?”

CS Lewis, who Bell clearly wants to follow, also notes that ultimate we are rebels that must lay down our arms.

Read the Song of Mary sometime, and how many other passages like it in the Bible. God is not just a therapist helping us deal with our issues, he’s also a warrior and a husband and a father coming with vengeance to rescue. The New Testament doesn’t draw back from this kind of language. We are afraid of it because we’ve seen the Bible used to defend and justify injustice, but as a species we’ve got a record of being shameless about attempts at self-justification.

What Problem Do We Have That Required Jesus?

As I proceed through the book my suspicion is that what we will find is an overly optimistic sense of what we can accomplish and an underdeveloped sense of our own tragic flaws that have yielded this history of ours. What does it say about us that the Son of God feels it essential to be turned over into the hands of sinners and be executed, and that the Son of Man, the title associated with the overthrow of the empire beasts of the world (Daniel 7) will be executed by one of those beasts before his flock of horrified disciples.

Maybe we clean up well when we’re on our best behavior, but there is a darkness about us for which the evidence is clear. If that is only part of the population, then you need a hell. If that is just a darkness in all of us, then you will need a very strong exorcist.

In the chapter Bell asserts that heaven is being with God, and that is quite true and commonly asserted not only by the kind of evangelical Christians and by other faiths as well. Bell, in trying to gain traction with many in contemporary culture shares certain assumptions about what a good God wants and would be like. What are we to do with the God who is a consuming fire? Does Jesus dispel this image? It certainly isn’t dispelled by the rest of the New Testament writings.

Bell’s image of God is as much as dogma as any that he is pushing against. He’s writing a book after all. It is easy to critique the culture from which the writers of the Bible emerged as holding the expectations of an angry dangerous god. OK, but Bell also seems to share the expectations of contemporary culture that God is all about sweetness and light. What stands between us and God is a large misunderstanding. A bit of conflict mediation and re-interpretations can clear this up making us more loving, more sociable, more understanding, better justice doers. To me this is like saying that two people who really love each other can live together and always get along. Really? Does he have evidence for our capacity to do this? How much more if the relationship is enormously asymmetrical with one party being prone to anger, violence, self-pity, selfishness, small mindedness and fear and the other being omnipotent and all knowing.

Let’s check the evidence. Ancients vs. moderns steel cage match. Based on general revelation where predators cull the herds of the weak, earthquakes reshape the landscape not caring what we’ve built, meteor strikes and volcanos cause mass extinctions, which God, the one who imagines us to be just a bit flawed and in need of some correction, or a demanding God who has high standards and is enormously consequential, would we imagine to be most likely?

If heaven is so easy and so close, why send Jesus? The law had been given. CS Lewis himself noted in his Tao that much of the moral code seems available via general revelation. If our problem isn’t large, why did we kill him? If we couldn’t stand God coming in human flesh, how will we respond to the Almighty up at full volume? The children of Israel wanted Moses, not Yhwh. Do we imagine we’ll choose differently? I’m not convinced that a bit more volunteer work will really make me ready to go toe to toe with the likes of Yhwh. God himself is a problem Bell seems not ready to fully face. How Jesus’ death is the solution to that problem is something the church has been working hard in for centuries. Denying that the problem is there isn’t really helpful.

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Rob Bell’s “Love Wins” Review, Pt 1

Posted on March 26, 2011 by PaulVK

I recently wrote the post “Should I buy Rob Bell’s book” after reading the Amazon sample. Part of me expected the discussions to die down. They haven’t yet. Bell’s book obviously hit a cultural nerve. You can criticize Bell for a lot of things, but he’s certainly got a gift for working with the culture, sensing its waves and engaging them.

I actually decided to read the book after having a conversation with a young man about the subject of the book. His questions very much followed along the lines of the questions Bell wrestles with in his book. It made me realize that I should read the book and interact with it. I haven’t read the whole book yet, but I’ll write some blog posts as I go.

Chapter 1: What About the Flat Tire

I could connect with this chapter very well because I could connect with his critique and his challenges of the caricature of American evangelical Christianity that he deals with here. Many of these questions have in fact driven me to study the Bible and the develop my own theological vocabulary. These questions haunt many who grew up American evangelicalism and the lack of satisfactory answers is part of what has prompted many to walk away from the church. Most of these critiques aren’t new and most of these challenges are fairly obvious and have been treated by many defenders of this theological tradition. I think there are some important points to make about his critique.

First I think it is important to recognize that he does set up a kind of a straw man of the composite weaknesses of evangelical theology. This I think reflects the mirror strength of what Bell can do. The community of American Christians that bear the lose label of “evangelical”, especially through the lens of the mainstream media is a diverse group. Many of these traditions bear some of the traits of the critique laid out but few bear all of them. Many of the press accounts note surveys where many Christians hold some of Bell’s views that he brings out in his book, such as the possibility of non-Christians being in heaven. That leaves this opening chapter, which is in a sense the justification for the rest of the book in a bit of a limbo. Is this Bell working through a theology that he was raised in? Is the theology he is pushing against a straw man?

My second thought on chapter 1 is again a questions whether Bell’s strength in cultural exegesis and expression is also hiding a lack of understanding about the relationship of culture to religious systems. When we from one cultural background, far removed from Jesus read the Bible, itself reflecting a significant diversity of cultural contexts far removed from our own and often very alien to our own, we naturally read our culture into the Bible. Bell in chapter 1 very skillfully relays these angularities that emerge from reading Jesus by progressively developing a list of questions about who it is that “makes the cut”:

Is it what you say
or who you are
or what you do
or what you say you’re going to do
or who your friends are
or who you are married to
or whether you give birth to children
or what question you’re asked
or what questions you ask in return
or whether you do what you’re told and go into the city

One of the big clues to recognizing that we’re having a moment of cultural misunderstanding is seeing that I don’t see that that the small pieces don’t fit into the larger picture. We can assume that the smaller pieces DID fit into the larger picture for the original cultural audience. It is therefore my job to try to reconstruct as best I can the cultural matrix of Jesus’ time so that I can understand how the pieces fit together. It is like a jigsaw puzzle but without all the interlocking tabs that indicate to me when I’m done with the puzzle. If I have some clues that the puzzle I’m trying to put together should look like a traditional portrait, but the work on the table in front of you looks like a Picasso, then I can pretty clearly assume that I don’t have the whole picture and I need to keep working on the pieces. If for example you read NT Wright’s voluminous work on the New Testament (the “Christian Origins and the Question of God” series) what you see is that he’s using history to try to put the puzzle together, history informed by everything we can credibly bring to bear on the subject.

Bell seems enormously adept at engaging with contemporary culture but I wonder if in this case the skill he’s really lacking is cross cultural skills, understanding the dynamics of communication OVER cultural lines and understanding the distortions that develop in the jig saw puzzles when by virtue of our place in time and space and history we don’t hear Jesus’ words within the specific cultural context that he spoke them.

To be fair to Bell, however, part of this problem can also be laid at the feet of many in the evangelical community who in fact by virtue of their approach to the Bible resist this fact as well. Many evangelicals want to understand the Bible, and our reading of the Bible as an exception in cultural communication that the Bible somehow transcends culture and therefore unlike talking to an ancient or a person from another country today that we immediately and directly can clearly understand all of Jesus’ words without cultural barriers or filters because they come to us through the Bible. If pressed on specific cases in my experience most Christians I know would say that understanding a passage from the time it was given is important, but when we apply that position to the Bible as a whole they resist it.

Part of the reason many Christians I know resist acknowledging the cultural separation between ourselves and the Bible is because of the modernist/fundamentalist feud that is clearly (by virtue of furry raised by “Love Wins” itself) still playing out in our context. Christians WANT to resist the separation because it threatens a chief Reformational tenet that demands that common Christians have direct access to the Bible, not mediated by the church. For more on this read Alister McGrath’s book on Christianity’s Dangerous Idea that I reviewed for ThinkChristian.net. If you say that only scholars can properly read the Bible due to the cultural distance between ourselves and the Bible then you take the Bible out of the hands of regular folk and it is no longer a tool for evangelism, for Christian devotional reading and for lay teaching. You undercut the Reformational teaching of the perspicuity of Scripture.

My position on this (obviously informed by my own tradition) is that the Bible should be in the hands of lay persons and that God’s Holy Spirit often uses the Bible, even when we read it with errors, to do work in the world and among his saints. I think that the church should train teachers and leaders to handle the Bible formally understanding and trying to compensate for the cultural distance between ourselves and the Bible, but also understand that God still uses the Bible itself to increase the faith, bring comfort, and build up the church even when we mess up our reading of it. All of us, great scholars and lay persons alike struggle with distortions in our ability to read and obviously many of us disagree on how to understand the Bible even in large and important things, but that doesn’t mean we should take the Bible out of the process at any level. My tradition, as with many other Protestant traditions asserts that the life of the church involves a necessary and dynamic interplay between “settled” doctrine (creeds and confessions in our language) and constant critique of that theology with the Bible. We mess up in our Bible reading all the time and so together, as a community, we are continuing to try to align ourselves with the objective standard (canon) that we use to try to navigate in order stay aligned with the historic Christian church. That is the process and it involves both scholars and lay persons throughout our church community.

Bell’s work, in fact, is a part of this process. As the book progresses he will be trying to evaluate his take on the evangelical theology (straw man or not) with the Bible and what he finds to be reasonable and to offer to us his view on the matters at hand. That is the basis upon which we can and should critique and engage his work. What the Bible offers us is in fact a platform, a common basis upon which to have the conversation. The conversation is nearly impossible to have productively without such a common basis.

There will be many in the broader community who will suggest that the best way to move forward is to consider NOT allow the Bible a privileged position in the conversation and to set along side the Bible other historical religious documents from other religious traditions. Whereas that might be a fine and fascinating project for Christians it is in fact a different project than the one Bell is undertaking. Within the community that affords the Bible a privileged position this discussion makes sense. Change the parameters of the discussion and you have a different discussion. For those who believe the Bible should have a privileged position then this conversation matters and matters a lot. For those who do not believe the Bible should have a privileged position this conversation will matter a great deal less, it is more of an in-house fight from their perspective.

I think locating the conversation in this way is important given how Bell (and the publisher) frame the book. Bell is claiming that this book is not simply an in-house discussion but the results of this book impact every human being in the world. That point itself will draw attention from those outside Christianity and those who want to disparage Bell out of hand might recognize that he in fact is not simply accepting the public/private assumption of religious political correctness that is common today. Bell is making an assertion about the future of Christians and non-Christians alike and making that assertion on the basis of the Bible. We will from inside the church evaluate whether we believe he’s doing that job well, but the fact that he is making this assertion at all is noteworthy and some will find it yet another offense in the long line of Christians asserting for others who are not Christians what is real. My response to that objection is simply “that’s what all religious systems do if the religious system asserts that it is talking about ultimate reality.”

Some will of course complain that they don’t make an assertion of ultimate reality, that they’re taking a more agnostic view or a more skeptical view that says we can’t know it, but the assertion itself “that we can’t know it” or “that we only see in part” is itself an assertion about ultimate reality.

The last point I want to make before getting into his chapter on “heaven” is that perhaps Bell wrote this book too soon. We all must live and speak from our own point in our own process and from what I’ve read in the book so far this book is Bell working through the questions he’s facing from his place in time and space. None of us are fully formed but as we proceed I think we will see that whereas Bell has had years to digest his critique of what’s been formed his own solutions are less well formed and likely wouldn’t stand up to the critique he has against what he is pushing back from. Again, this is understandable. It’s far harder to develop a coherent answer than to critique or criticize the answers of others (same for me here). But he has put forward a book and pushed it into the public conversation so his work is fair game for our testing, critique and examination. I wonder where he will be in ten years.

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Jesus appeal and modeling for prayer in the time of trial

Posted on March 24, 2011 by PaulVK

Have we done a “search for the historical Jesus” treatment on the wrath of God? In reading the Screwtape Letters with a men’s study group I came across Letter 23 where Lewis has some prescient things to say about the “search for the historical Jesus”.

One probably unfair way of characterizing the search for the historical Jesus was to first determine what your imagined Jesus could NOT have said or done and then examine the canonical texts eliminating those things (usually supernatural events or claims to divinity), only to discover exactly what you set out to find after eliminating the texts your decided to excise. Schweitzer made his famous comment “The quest was like looking into a well and seeing your own reflection at the bottom.”

I wonder if this hasn’t happened with our talk about “where is God in the tsunami (or fill in any large, natural disaster)?” If you first eliminate a wrathful, angry God, he of course won’t be in the disaster if you’ve first excluded the possibility that this disaster is a manifestation of that wrath. If you didn’t divest God of power you then have the question “Why didn’t he use his power to stop it? Was he not present?” reminding us of Elijah taunting the prophets of Baal.

Despite nearly every Western news reporter’s inability to refrain from describing the tsunami as a disaster of “biblical proportions” we avoid seeing this disaster in community with Biblical disasters. Catastrophes are a large part of the Bible and the Bible isn’t shy about making God the author of them. Likewise the victims of these disasters are not shy about either crying out for mercy, challenging or cursing the God who made them. As recipients of catastrophe we measure considerable less than proportions of Biblical characters.

During the major earthquake in Haiti that killed many there was one famous Youtube video from a cell phone camera capturing the devastation where the woman cries out at the end in English “the world is coming to an end!” I think she voiced the instinctive reaction that many victims of these major catastrophes instinctively feel and express. These instinctive response are often very much in line with the language of many Biblical catastrophes.

One interesting catastrophe passage in the Bible is in 2 Peter 2.

2 Peter 2:4-10 (NRSV)
For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of deepest darkness to be kept until the judgment; and if he did not spare the ancient world, even though he saved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood on a world of the ungodly; and if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction and made them an example of what is coming to the ungodly; and if he rescued Lot, a righteous man greatly distressed by the licentiousness of the lawless (for that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by their lawless deeds that he saw and heard), then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trial, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment —especially those who indulge their flesh in depraved lust, and who despise authority.

The word I want to draw your attention to is “peirasmos” translated “trial”. This is the same word exemplifies the “trial” of Jesus by Satan in the gospels. It is the word that Jesus uses in the Lord’s prayer “keep us from the time of trial” and that Luke features prominently in the Mount of Olives scene in Luke 22:39-46. This kind of “trial” is both eschatalogical in flavor and Satan is deeply involved. (For a detailed treatment of this check out Raymond Brown’s “Death of the Messiah, Vol 1” pgs 157-162.) Satan is very involved in the Passion Narrative in Luke as seen in his entering Judas and his demanding God to sift the disciples like wheat.

Given the fact that in our secular context God is barely visible and Satan nearly extinct is seems clear why we struggle to frame these large natural disasters apart from a purely scientific approach which simply says “they happen” but fails to be able to attach any meaning to them. This is perhaps an illuminating moment in the cost/benefit evaluation of a purely secular worldview.

The “time of trial” it seems is a sorting out type of period where there is a seeming simultaneous loosing and judgment of evil. The releasing of the restraints on evil causing disaster simultaneously brings judgment upon evil and shows evil for what it is.

This “time of trial” is also deeply tied to the tradition of “The Day of the LORD” where Yhwh returns in judgment to sort things out. The catastrophic elements are all there as part of the package, earthquake, hail, fire and brimstone from the sky, floods, wars, famine, etc. These are defining moments where the everyday lying and denial of humanity is blown away by divine power somehow mingled with disastrous chaos to expose the flimsy pretense of human self-sufficiency. Jesus’ story of the house built on the rock and the sand and the flood is one small example of it.

What Luke 22:39-46 illustrates is Jesus praying in the time of trial and admonishing his disciples to pray. The disciples are unable to pray and the implicit message is that they are unable to withstand and triumph through the time of trial. Jesus, however, will receive the cup and fully pass through the time of trial.

Jesus’ prayer itself I think shows three things about praying in the time of trial:
1. It’s absolutely legitimate to ask God for a pass
2. Faithfulness is finally submitting to the will of the Father
3. God will provide the strength for his saints to endure the time of trial and to have it result in dramatic redemptive benefits.

1. It’s absolutely legitimate to ask God for a pass on the time of trial.

What if this weren’t the case? Could we be real with God about our suffering, about our feelings, about our fears? It seems that this is the only way to maintain and authentic relationship with God. We take him everything and pour it at his feet. Jesus, for whom his incarnation and mission centered on this had the right to ask God for another way. If that is the case for Jesus, how much more for us.

2. Faithfulness is finally submitting to the will of the Father.

I’m working through Samuel in my adult Sunday School class and this week we’re at the famous 2 Samuel 11, the David and Bathsheba story. This as everyone knows is a watershed moment for the book of Samuel and the life of David. It shows David finally succumbing to the corrupting power of the kingship and putting in jeopardy all of the progress that God had been making with his people through his servant David. The climax of David saying to his accomplice Joab in the murder of Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband “let this thing not seem evil in your eyes.” David in his cover-up casts himself in the role of moral arbiter.

Garret Keizer in his excellent book “The Enigma of Anger” makes this comment: “I have never ceased to be amazed that the Bible, the Bible, should present the prototype of all sin as the willful acquisition of an independent moral consciousness. Not power or pleasure, a quiver of invincible arrows or a cache of giant chocolate bars, but the knowledge of good and evil. Not the stuff of brothels but of Sunday schools.” (Kindle location 911-14)

In Gethsemane we see Jesus at exactly this point as he pleads for his disciples to pray in their time of trial. Will Jesus acquire an independent moral consciousness? Adam, David and Jesus stand at this point. It is Jesus’ time of trial more poignant and powerful than even the trio of trials put against him by Satan in the wilderness.

3. God will provide his saints the strength to endure the time of trial.

The Calvinist vs. Arminian debate can sometimes boil down to trying to predict the outcome of our times of trials like gamblers try to pick their ponies or winners of games. At the heart of the doctrine of election is the locked door that says “you can’t predict it” but also the results oriented perspective that says “saints persevere”. Who perseveres, why they persevere, why others fair is not ours to say.

We naturally protest at such a reality and scream it isn’t fair, but there never seems to be any fairness in any time of trial that we can discern. Are we capable of saying why Japan got whacked and any China did not? Are we able to weight the morality of a nation? Are we able to judge?

What instead we see is a world of unfairness where some are born to struggle and die young while others catch all the breaks. Can we run the fairness math on any of this? Isaac receives the blessing, Ishmael does not. Jacob receives the blessing, Esau, not so much. Peter will persevere, Judas will fall. One made the correct turn on the fork of the road in Japan and lived, many others perished in the flood.

The text of the angelic visitation to strengthen Jesus is full of problems in terms of the scholarly question of whether it was original to Luke. What we can say is that the message of the visitation seems analogous to the fourth visitor in the Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace in the book of Daniel. Jesus will enter the time of trial, the sun will go dark, the earth will tremble and the Son of God will be broken on a cross to be raised to life on the third day.

With all the talk about Rob Bell’s book I think the greatest fault I find with his approach is his failure to embody the urgency of the call of Jesus. What we see here on the Mount of Olives is Jesus as he often does making an urgent appeal. He is earnest and frustrated at the sleepiness of the disciples. They are not paying attention. He is concerned they will be caught by the time of trial unprepared, and he is right. They will, however, recover.

Catastrophes of Biblical proportions help to rouse sleepy disciples. In those catastrophes we hear the urgent appeal from Jesus for our own welfare to pray fervently that we not fall in our time of trial and that if we find ourselves in the midst of the chaotic process of judgment we appeal to our father to bring us through and to do his work through it.

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The acquisition of an independent moral consciousness

Posted on March 23, 2011 by PaulVK

David attempts to console his accomplice Joab in the murder of Uriah the Hittite with the line “let this thing not seem evil in your eyes” and goes on to make comments about how that’s just the way of the sword.

Garret Keizer in his excellent book “The Enigma of Anger” makes this comment: “I have never ceased to be amazed that the Bible, the Bible, should present the prototype of all sin as the willful acquisition of an independent moral consciousness. Not power or pleasure, a quiver of invincible arrows or a cache of giant chocolate bars, but the knowledge of good and evil. Not the stuff of brothels but of Sunday schools.” (Kindle location 911-14)

In Gethsemane we see Jesus at exactly this point as he pleads for his disciples to pray in their time of trial. Will Jesus acquire an independent moral consciousness?

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Screwtape Letters 23

Posted on March 21, 2011 by PaulVK

Uncle Screwtape is schooling young Wormwood in how to trip up Christian. How to make him unfruitful. Chapter 23 goes on about distracting the patient in the question for a true biography of Jesus. Then he finishes it off with how then to work the political angle. To me this seems to cut both left and right. Enjoy

And fourthly, besides being unhistorical in the Jesus it depicts, religion of this kind is false to history in another sense. No nation, and few individuals, are really brought into the Enemy’s camp by the historical study of the biography of Jesus, simply as biography. Indeed materials for a full biography have been withheld from men. The earliest converts were converted by a single historical fact (the Resurrection) and a single theological doctrine (the Redemption) operating on a sense of sin which they already had—and sin, not against some new fancy-dress law produced as a novelty by a “great man”, but against the old, platitudinous, universal moral law which they had been taught by their nurses and mothers. The “Gospels”, come later and were written not to make Christians but to edify Christians already made.

The “Historical Jesus” then, however danger.. ous he may seem to be to us at some particular point, is always to be encouraged. About the general connection between Christianity and politics, our position is more delicate. Certainly we do not want men to allow their Christianity to flow over into their political life, for the establishment of anything like a really just society would be a major disaster. On the other hand we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything—even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop. Fortunately it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner. Only today I have found a passage in a Christian writer where he recommends his own version of Christianity on the ground that “only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilisations”. You see the little rift ? “Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.” That’s the game,
Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE

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Does Raising “issues” with the Bible destroy faith

Posted on March 21, 2011 by PaulVK

Another discussion from CRC-Voices on whether poking around with Genesis-origins, issues, etc. destroys faith.

My experience is different. I think about it more like a marriage.

It is common for couples when they marry to imagine that marriage will be a Disneyland of pleasures and joys. Your spouse will always say the right thing, do the right thing, make all your dreams come true. It doesn’t take long to learn that Disney land is full of garbage cans that need emptying and workers who don’t have that same “Disney” experience every day. Is saying that to tear down marriage?

What we learn in time, hopefully, is that my initial infatuation was an ego trip imagining that I was the center of the universe and that this other person was here to make my dreams come true. What is also available is the opportunity to learn from a marriage that my problems reside in me and that simply getting a piece of paper and a ring is insufficient.

My experience of my faith in the Bible has increased with my understanding of its complexities. I now believe more than I did as a child that everything it tells me is true. I have learned to rely on it for daily living in a way I couldn’t have imagined just 10 years ago, this with all of my questions and wonderings raised contemporary debates about Genesis cosmology, historicity of Adam and Eve, etc.

For a Christian the core of the Bible radiates out from the resurrection. Without the resurrection the whole system falls apart.

1. Jesus was raised from the dead attested to by multiple witnesses.
2. Jesus’ resurrection means that his crucifixion wasn’t simply another Roman political execution.
3. Jesus’ resurrection means that he was who he said he was.
4. Jesus’ resurrection means that everything he told us was true.
5. We believe in the OT because of what Jesus said about it.
6. We believe in the NT because it is the witness to Jesus of the apostolic community established personally by him.
7. The Holy Spirit moves me to believe all of this is true.

To me this is how it works. pvk

Posted in Saved CRCVoices Posts, Understanding the Bible | 2 Comments

Why Liberals and Heresy are important for the Gospel

Posted on March 21, 2011 by PaulVK

This from a discussion on CRC Voices about classic liberalism and heresy.

One of the contributions McGrath makes in his book is the observation that both orthodoxy and heresy are a process, probably a process vital for the growth and health of the church.

It is clear to me from the books of Isaiah and Revelation that God loves culture and that is part of his desired harvest from the age of decay. This is an audacious goal (these seem to be the only kind God really enjoys) because culture is like the operating system of us. What this means is that for Christ to experience that manifest expression of all peoples, tribes and tongues the gospel has to get into all of these cultures. Missionaries know the complexity of gospel and culture.

McGrath notes that orthodoxy in fact develops through the process of heresy. Over time the church learns what works and what doesn’t. Bill Vis noted Mohler’s critique of Bell. The problems with heresy are all within itself. Putting a label on something can be helpful, but sometimes its helpful to work through why things fail.

We’ve yet to really resolve the issues that gave rise to “liberalism” (for lack of a better label). Most of McGrath’s book walks through a bunch of the classic heresies you read about in seminary. The Donatist controversy is a good one to continue to contemplate because in that case orthodoxy looks “liberal”. Hardliners don’t always win these fights. In the macro perspective heresy helps the church because it helps it sort things out, but that’s a VERY long view. The rest is like making sausage.

I’ve been reading Garret Keizer’s “The Enigma of Anger”, a fine, wise and learned book written likely by a liberal. I’m glad Bill H is among us because he keeps reminding us that liberals are Christians too. They continue to make contributions to Christianity, heretics usually do even if over the long haul their positions don’t win and they fade away.

Mohler’s comments are helpful in noting the history of western Christian liberalism. It kills churches. One of the posts on my website that actually gets some traffic is something I wrote for voices years ago called “Conservative churches lie and liberal churches die“. It probably gets read because of the title and Google. I remember Bill H really pushing back hard on that post and rightfully so.

When it comes time each of us must decide what we believe and what beliefs we will truly live from. I find a lot of liberal scholars and authors very helpful and so I listen to them. I also find many of them live practically not much differently from conservatives. They look to the trinitarian God for all that they need and trust in him for their resurrection. That’s most of the Christian life actually, whatever they think of Adam and Eve or Adam and Steve. pvk

Posted in Culture commentary, Saved CRCVoices Posts | Leave a comment

The Hendiadys of the Human Story

Posted on March 17, 2011 by PaulVK

The tsunami in Japan and the subsequent nuclear crisis has the attention of the great eye of the American media this week. The spectacle of the destruction caused by the ocean is combined with the unseen threat of radioactivity to form a hendiadys anxiety for channel surfers with TV dinners and always-on electricity. God’s ecumenical public relation’s team brings out its rehearsed and practiced lines to answer the scripted “where is God in the tsunami” question. Their admirable goal will be to bring comfort. Most of their audience, however, are experiencing a virtual anxiety. There is plenty of food on their shelves and in their markets and the great machine of modern consumerism will get over the hiccup of a shortage of parts for the IPad 2.

Because the nuclear crisis exposes the limits of our technological idols religions get a boost from this one. Congressional hearings will display the usual fear based, attention grabbing soundbites of our representatives demanding the priests of the technological temples confess that they really can’t offer complete security.

There will be lots of prayers to one or many gods, ancestors, positive thoughts, good energy along with a bump in cash donations to good doing organizations, religious or otherwise. As usual, bad new is good news for my segment of the economy.

Also as usual for me I watch the news with eyeballs embedded in the same head that houses the brain that I use to process this week’s text: Luke 22:13-38. This is a dramatic and controversial passage. It opens with the news that Jesus’ little band of disciples have drawn the special attention of none other than Satan himself, and he has filed papers with the Ancient of Days to have them return to their homes and to regard wistfully their three years with Jesus as some noble but failed spiritual/political experiment. Jesus likewise has filed his own appeal that this not happen. That the disciples not only hang tough as Jesus gets devoured by the powers in Jerusalem but that they come out of it looking like him. The word coming down from on high is an apparent split decision. They will fall away, but they’ll come back. Peter, likely the oldest, is given the special task of supporting his younger brothers.

Peter of course is full of untested enthusiasm and says he can go the distance. Jesus simply says, “no you won’t.”

Jesus then says some things that have given preachers and Bible commentators plenty to write about. God looked out for you when you had nothing. Now is the time to sell you cloak and buy a sword!

This of course is strange. Jesus has throughout his time been distancing himself from the expected role of nationalistic violent insurgent against Roman tyranny all along the way. Will he when the chips are down finally get practical about real power? We, who know the rest of the story know he won’t which means that he’s speaking metaphorically here. He’s preparing his disciples to understand that times will get very dark indeed, life threateningly so. This will not longer be a dinner symposium where we bat around thoughts about religion and politics. The time has come for action, and there will be blood. Jesus then quotes probably the most mysterious passage of the Hebrew Scriptures, Isaiah 53 and applies it to himself. I’m sure they had NO idea what he was talking about. The devil, the age of decay, and our own self-destructive issues were going to be resolved and it would cost the Son of Man everything.

A third element of my crowded cranium this week was the tempest in a tea pot over Rob Bell’s new book. This little fight has been the gift that keeps on giving for Rob Bell, for the publisher, and for the opposition. Rob gets to look cool and generous while the opposition gets to look hard lined and reactive while Harper gets what they want, sales. I already wrote about my thoughts on that little feud but it comes into play here too.

Miroslav Volf advices those of us who live in affluence and comfort to ponder the low-risk, all-reward shape of our own chosen spiritualities. Unlike most everyplace on the planet for most of human civilization, we’ve got the money, security and comfort to play with just about anything we want imagining that any messes we create along the way will be cleaned up by God, government or our therapists. I think both the tsunami and Jesus beg to differ.

For most of human history first person observers of events like the tsunami, or war, very quickly and instinctively identify the catastrophe as God or the gods being angry. People are small and unable to withstand these forces making us victims, not agents of our destinies. Does the modern choir of preachers from every creed and sect in their attempt to disavow us of this idea do so based on any revelation or simply to keep the tsunami in Japan? Earthquakes and tsunamis can be avoided by geography, but everywhere is available to God. “OK, a tsunami in Japan I can manage (because it really hasn’t touched me), but please tell me that God will keep me safe and give me what I want from life.” The slip of our moralistic, therapeutic deism is showing again.

The cross of Jesus Christ stays that no less than the Son of God and Son of Man has to go to extreme lengths to fix up the mess we have made of all that is under heaven. The opposition is not just the tectonic plates doing their thing, or “bad choices” we make, but a malevolent, violent, evil force the likes of which we have little power to resist. There is also the age of decay that robs us of everything around us on top of our own foolishness.

Jesus pleads the case of the disciples but that won’t afford them the cabinet positions they imagined as they entered into Jerusalem with Jesus riding on a donkey, they too will get crosses, as will we.

The tsunami should remind us that our expectations created by a comfy, affluent bubble in human history should not invade our assumptions about our real standing in the cosmos. Jesus’ presence with his disciples and the commitment he exhibits in the sacrificial self-restraint of the story that follows should also ignite our imaginations regarding the gifts that are to come as well. The drama of creation is both darker and more hopeful than our small minds can imagine.

We follow the disciples following Jesus through this story. We’ve cast Jesus as the sugar daddy for dreams that are too small to be worthy of the the Son of Man. Those dreams will be shattered. Along the way we will fail, and fail miserably. The shattering of those dreams is absolutely essential to understand that new, better dreams which will be received as pure gifts will come, but not cheaply.

Tsunami and radiation are not the hendiadys of the human story, it is cross and resurrection.

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Should I buy Rob Bell’s book?

Posted on March 17, 2011 by PaulVK

I love Amazon’s samples sent to my kindle. In this case the sample was disappointingly short, but like Velvet Elvis and most books pastors seem to write in today’s market Rob Bell is a very fast read. What I got from the sample was mostly reaction to our cultural reaction to Christian exclusivity and how it is applied by many evangelicals today.

There is some real grounding for Jason’s comment (posted on CRC Voices) in this. In reality many Christians occupy the middle ground between a hard line position that says “only those with a specific Christian profession of faith are saved” to a more “generous” position that says “we only have assurance of the salvation of those who have a specific Christian verbal profession combined with visible fruit in their lives.” I’m in the camp of the second position. That of course leaves plenty of room for God to do what he wants with whomever he wishes. God doing what he wants is a simple way of defining “sovereignty” just in case you don’t know.

In case you think that is a sudden change of events, I remember Fred Klooster, former systematics prof of CTS, a noted conservative essentially also espousing the second position. There are plenty of evangelicals, not always leaders, who maintain the first position. Many leaders when pressed will go to the second.

I too believe that our language about heaven and hell are sloppy and approximate. Realized eschatology means that we are in fact in this present age sometimes participating in the age to come and sometimes in the foothills of hell. “heaven” actually has a pretty broad lexical range, as does “hell” making it advisable to speak with some care and specificity regarding the subjects.

Bell wants to emphasize the love of God. That’s a good thing to do. Christians have sometimes majored on the warnings of hell to motivate people towards some specific behaviors. Jesus did this, but as is often noted Jesus usually uses this when he’s either talking to his disciples or the religious leaders. You’re hard pressed to find Jesus warning those considered “sinners” in his context of eternal punishment. This should be instructive to us.

I’m on the fence as to whether I want to spend another 11 bucks for the book because I don’t really expect to get anything new out of it. I assume Bell will make a lot of noises trying to differentiate himself from “that other kind of Christian” and position himself in a space that he imagines will be more accessible to the audience he imagines. I’ve certainly done plenty of this in my life. On the other hand, one of the things I’m thinking about is whether this actually has much value in terms of evangelism.

Bell is clearly “successful” in growing a large church. He’s done so, however, in West Michigan, a place known for having an enormous nominal Christian population that are in an estuary of cultural change. I think his audience is really a Christian one, not so much a pagan one. His brand of Christianity is not the kind that it sweeping Africa and Asia. In a sense it is domesticated further. Some of that domestication is what the new hardliners, the young and reformed (and loud) are protesting. They have a point.

Bill’s comment (again on Voices) about the fairness of the liberal straw man is also valid. Just like Rob Bell is positioning himself against a hard line group that is more historical than actual, so the young and reformed are reacting out of fear of yesterday’s liberalism. I thought the CT review of Bell was helpful in recognizing that the liberal church has made contributions as well, despite its flaws.

I think finally where I wind up thinking about Bell is “so what”. Is there enough here to make a fuss about? This is the same dilemma liberalism seems to face. “Be good to the poor and fair to each other” is hardly a new message. As many liberals will note neither is this message exclusive to Christianity. Muslims hosted the same homeless that my church did.

The failure of liberalism it seems to me is its overestimation of our capacity for self improvement. If we accept that “be good to the poor and fair to each other” is our duty, able to be discerned not only from Christian special revelation but also general revelation as seen in many world religions, why do we need to keep repeating it? Why do we keep failing at it? What really is our problem?

This naivety regarding our problem is of course not exclusive to liberal christians or post-Christians, many evangelicals seems to share in it as well. Can we fix it with a lot of talking and writing? Both evangelicals and liberals seem to have a high view of telling people they’re doing wrong hoping that this talking will somehow “fix” the other.

What is left often for church to do with this diminished sense of our own inability to remedy our condition are inspirational services, videos and work projects. We hope that inspiring people with slogans and feel good forays into generosity will make THE difference. I have my doubts and the reason I do is Jesus himself. The cross itself is a message to me that the heavy lifting must come at inordinate sacrifice, the kind of sacrifice that the Son of Man himself dreaded in agony in a Jerusalem garden.

It’s not my job to review Rob Bell’s ministry. I’ve never been to his church. When I’m in GR there are usually other churches I wish to attend for other personal reasons. God bless him.

My experience with myself and the rest of us on the planet is that I need a more dramatic difference maker and the depths of the drama that I see, experience, and hear about makes the heights of heaven and the depths of hell believable. We live in a world of wars, tsunamis, cancer, and death. I suppose my main question for Bell’s approach is whether it is diminished by the context of the suburban mall with reliable electricity and social security. When we paid a lot of attention to liberation theology it was regularly asserted that context informs theology. That was a liberal tenet. It must certainly apply to Grandville Michigan.

The good news of Christianity is a resurrection that is as real as tsunamis, cancer, war and death. It is no mere image or metaphor. If that isn’t true then I’m left with various strategies for emotional management of loss. There are lots of those and they do offer some comfort. I want the dead raised, nothing less.

Posted in Culture commentary | Tagged | 2 Comments

Not so with you…

Posted on March 8, 2011 by PaulVK

Working on Luke 22:23-30. The disciples break out into bickering at the Last Supper. Jesus tells them that one of them will betray him, and they all proceed to betray the fact that they haven’t had a clue of what he’s been trying to teach them about leadership for the last 3 years.

This quotation from Joel B. Green’s excellent commentary on the Gospel of Luke on Jesus’ taking the bickering at the Last Supper as a teaching opportunity for his disciples on the shape of kingdom leadership.

It is at this point that comparison with the apostles is pertinent: they want to be acclaimed as benefactors. The problem to which Luke points may be illustrated with reference to cities in the Roman world. The Emperor himself modeled what was expected of the wealthy elite in every locale — namely, the practice of generous benefaction. Rather than pay taxes, the wealthy contributed time and money in the service of the cities and towns. This form of benefaction was not managed centrally, as though wealth would be distributed where needs were generally agreed. Instead, gifts were made at the whim of givers. What is more, though private involvement of this kind was necessitated by deficiencies in the city treasury, it was to the advantage of the wealthy that the city’s finances be kept in this weakened condition. Private benefaction was the primary means by which the wealthy were legitimated as those most deserving of public office and prestige in the community. In order to provide leadership, wealth was required, so only the wealthy could provide leadership and thus enjoy the honor and self-advancement reserved for those who gave so “generously.” This pattern pervaded the world, so that the giving of gifts brought with it obligations for service and honor. The concern in this text, then, is not with abuses of the system by which leadership was exercised and legitimated, but with the nature of the system itself.

Jesus’ negative instruction, “but not so with you,” is so cryptic that it might easily be misunderstood. Jesus is not teaching that his followers cannot be rulers or benefactors, but that their manner of ruling and benefaction must be utterly transformed. According to Jesus, disciples are, like God, to give without expectation of return, even to the wicked and the ungrateful (6:35-36).

The Gospel of Luke, NICNT by Joel B. Green Eerdmans, p. 768

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