Birthday Nostalgia: Posts that Stirred the Pot

Being the birthday and all its time for another trip down memory lane. We’ve already had one trip back into the archives to find posts that I wished had received a bit of a wider readership but today’s nostalgic trip picks up the posts that drew a bit of heat and fire for various reasons. I suppose you can’t really write a blog with conviction and not stir up the pot from time to time. Well here are the posts that either stirred up others or posts where I got a opinionated:

Charismatics and Conservatives Together (15/09/07) – funny that the controversy this post stirred up had little to do with Charismatics or Conservatives coming together. Go figure.

Witherington and Progressive Revelation (21/09/07) – on this one, as much as I respect and admire him, as much as I and read his blog daily, I just couldn’t stomach Dr. Witherington’s understanding of the unfolding of doctrinal accuracy through the course of redemptive history. In fact I still can’t stomach it or justify it from scripture.

Reading Romans 7 and the Evangelical Conviction (11/10/07) – proof that even your own teammates shoot you sometimes (just kidding Kim – all’s forgiven).

“God is Dead” – But was he ever alive? (26/10/07) – a catchy title goes wrong…

Why I don’t Stone People (14/11/07) – I seem to have a fan base of atheists who visit this blog quite regularly. This post resulted in a bit of frivolous banter between us.

Tutu Gay Rant (19/11/07) – This little rant didn’t really stir too much but it did cause someone to write the longest comment I’ve ever seen on a blog.

What is the Gospel – An Open Forum (28/11/07) – ok so this post didn’t really draw all that much heat, except for that one guy disagreeing with me, Tim Keller, I mean who does he think he is? It’s not like he’s got a Facebook appreciation group that’s bigger than all my friends combined!

Proudly South African (17/12/07) – who knew that being a patriot would rattle the cages a bit?

Golden Compass Christian Hernia (17/12/07) – I managed to unsettle some folks twice in one day! There’s a simple math formula for topics like the Golden Compass if you haven’t figured it out yet. It goes like this: Golden Compass + Christian Blog = Controversy + Lot’s of hits! I couldn’t resist throwing my two cents in.

So far 2008 has been controversy free. Although I’m probably not going to shy away from the posts that stir a bit let’s just pray that I stir in godly way – there is such a thing.

Links at the End of a Slow Weekend

I’ve had a very relaxing weekend, Arsenal won and Man Utd lost so all is good in the world of football (and that’s not that weird sport that you Americans play where the ball barely ever touches your foot). Amongst the lazy happenings of this weekend there were a few links that caught my eye:

John Piper responds to what I thought were some silly comments by Ben Witherington.

Tim Chester is telling stories for a non-book culture.

Spirituality is being discussed at Emergent Africa. The definitions of spirituality being tossed around seem somewhat undefined to me, don’t you think?

Perspective from a different angle: An atheist shares about how his atheism has given him new found respect for nature. I found this fascinating yet I was also deeply saddened by it as I thought about the numerous Psalms penned about the glory of God revealed in nature.

Reading Romans 7 and the Evangelical Conviction

If you’ve ever given any detailed attention to the text of the book of Romans before you’ll be well aware of the difficulties that surround chapter 7:14ff. The big debate in scholarship that surrounds this passage comes down to the spiritual status of Paul as he discusses his struggle with sin. There are two main options: Either he is talking about his experiences as a Jew living under the law prior to his conversion to Christianity OR he is talking about his struggles with the ‘flesh’ as a regenerate Christian. The traditional view, from the time of Augustine, has held to the latter option – Paul’s struggles as a Christian. This view has been upheld by the likes of Calvin, Luther, Packer & Stott. The former view though has some notable contemporary proponents such as Moo, Witherington & Schreiner.

After consulting much of the technical exegetical arguments surround this particular text it seems that the evidence tends towards the former view espoused by Moo and co. The problem is that many evangelicals have rather strong emotional ties to this passage as it seems to relate so well to their own inner struggles with sin. So if you challenge the traditional exegesis you are also, in one sense, challenging the spiritual experience of many if not all Christians.

Now what is most fascinating to me is not so much which view is correct (I’m still not 100% sold on either view just yet and need to study it further before I’ll commit to one view, although as I’ve already stated, after having grown up with the traditional view, my initial response to the exegetical evidence is that it presents Paul in his pre-conversion state contrary to the traditional view), what is most fascinating is how we as evangelicals, who proclaim the authority of Scripture – OVER OUR SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE – debate and deal with this particular passage. My contention is that if this was a passage that didn’t appear to infringe upon such a ‘sacred’ and emotionally charged part of our spiritual experience then we would simply have dismissed the traditional view already. We would have looked at the two views, realised that both views had their difficulties, but that the one view seemed to have more evidence for it than the other, and then objectively we’d have chosen the non-traditional view and upheld the authority of scripture to the best of our ability. It seems to me however that instead of this we’re prepared to flirt with denying the absolute authority and rule of scripture in our lives and practice for the sake of upholding our spiritual experience. Simply put: Evangelicals tend to behave highly ‘un-evangelical’ in situations like this.

Surely the convictions that underpin historic evangelicalism should cause us to rise above even emotion and experience when we attempt to discern the Lord’s voice with clarity in the scriptures? I don’t want to play down emotion and experience and their role in understanding the scriptures but all things, even emotion and experience, in the end must be subservient to scripture for us to be true to our convictions as evangelicals – this has to be the case if we truly believe that scripture is our final rule for life and spiritual experience.

Witherington and Progressive Revelation?

I’m a firm believer in progressive revelation, as you can see by the number of posts I’ve written categorized ‘biblical theology‘, but when we talk about the revelation of scripture progressing does that mean that everything in the bible is progressing all the time? The short answer is no: God, the ultimate author of the scripture (albeit through human authors) is the same in terms of his attributes throughout the bible storyline. God’s attributes do not progress through the bible so that you get some sort of angry, kill-joy God in the Old Testament who turns into a loving caring and gracious God in the New Testament.

So whilst God remains constant the story of his redeeming a people for himself is in a state of progression with Jesus Christ at the pinnacle. This is most clear in Paul’s writing in Ephesians 3:2-7 where Paul talks about ‘the mystery’ that has now been made known, and verse 7 clarifies that ‘the mystery’ was in fact the gospel of Christ. In the past it was hidden but now, in Christ, is revealed – a clear example of progression in the story and the revelation.

I think these two observations are pretty clear and we’d all be in agreement about them. The big question though is whether or not there are other kinds of progression in the bible. One such type of progression that I’ve recently encountered is the contention that the doctrinal understandings of various Old Testament saints were in a state of progression. So Ben Witherington, for example, in his recent discussion about what he feels are erroneous views concerning sovereignty was confronted by one commenter concerning the fact that Job seems to attribute his hardships directly to God in his well known statement:

“The LORD gives and the LORD takes away. Blessed be the name of the LORD.”

Now clearly Job’s doctrinal position doesn’t agree with Witherington’s critique of Piper. However Witherington doesn’t see this as a problem because as far as he is concerned Job’s theology…

“… is an imperfect, and indeed inaccurate one, not one that a Christian should affirm.”

So because, as Witherington goes on to explain, the bible is a progressive revelation so too is the doctrinal quality of the Old Testament saints. So Job, being one of the earliest saints had a ridiculously inadequate theology of the attributes of God according to this view because he was right at the beginning of the progression.

Now this sounds to me like a bit of a moving of the goal posts. Let’s take this to some logical conclusions: Firstly the whole creation narratives are completely useless in terms of doctrinal content because they stem probably from some extremely early oral traditions that Moses picked up on, in fact Moses must have spent quite some time re-working the creation narrative and sorting out all the doctrinal error since he was probably a bit further along the line in terms of progressive revelation, but then he couldn’t have got it all right either and he must have had some pretty big errors in his writing because he’s still fairly early in the whole progression. As for David and his psalms, well they’re really just a bunch of nice songs now that helps us empathize with him in his struggles, but as far as doctrinal content – useless – he’s at least 1000 years too early in the progression to be of any use doctrinally.

Come on Dr. Witherington, if we go that way where does it end?

Witherington on Piper

Methinks the proverbial ‘poo’ might hit the fan on this one. Ben Witherington (a scholar I highly admire) has flung some dung at John Piper (a pastor I highly admire) regarding his view on God’s sovereign control of the Minneapolis Bridge disaster. Of Piper’s view he said the following:

“I am afraid. He’s (John Piper) just guilty of having an unBiblical view of God, that ironically is closer to the fatalistic one found in the Koran, than the Biblical one found in the New Testament.”

Them be harsh words. I’m pretty sure Piper will respond somewhere along the line. Stay tuned…

Chrysostom and Biblical Theology

Ben Witherington has some interesting insights drawn from the hermeneutic of the church father John Chrysostom (my number 1 ancient hero of the faith). He takes a look at Chrysostom’s view of the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Having written and researched on Chrysostom in the past I’m becoming more and more convinced that he held a theological and hermeneutical framework very similar to the contemporary practitioners of Reformed Biblical Theology. A web-page dedicated to the life and writings of John Chrysostom can be found here.

Ben is Brilliant

Dr. Ben Witherington is at his best again as he takes a new Discovery Channel special to pieces. The Discovery Channel will air a show on the 4th March (not sure how the dates match up with DsTV in South Africa) claiming the discovery of Jesus’ tomb, his bones and the tombs of his family members, including a wife and his child Jude. That sounds like an amazing discovery … WELL … Dr. Ben pulls out some of the facts to demonstrate why the show and the accompanying book are anything but an amazing discovery – why, once again, the Titanic will sink.

Witherington on Inclusion

Dr. Ben Witherington is a scholar I really enjoy reading and listening to. He’s recently posted on his experience of hearing Rob Bell speak and what he liked and didn’t like about Bell’s take on a few issues. Amongst that material Dr. Witherington has a truly brilliant quote that I think we’d all do well to listen to regarding the issue of being inclusive in our Christianity,

“A Christian approach must be that everyone is welcome to come to Christ and come into the church as they are without pre-conditions. But no one is welcome to stay as they are— no one.“