Musings on Mystery

Mystery is popular today. Many a postmodernist worships at the altar of mystery. Many a modernist spurns it with every chance they get. In reality though its impossible to be a Christian without mystery – in fact if you think you’ve removed mystery there’s a good chance you’ve created a heresy (just ask our 3rd century friend Arius). That’s an odd thought really that us conservatives don’t like to entertain at any serious level – we don’t like to explore the probability that too much rationality and too much empiricism can lead to heresy. We’re terrified of doubt and prefer to champion the cause of certainty. Yet in that quest to make certain that, which isn’t always certain we are causing others to doubt that which should be certain.

A very wise old church history professor said to me today:

“You can’t be a Christian without mystery”

Is it not perhaps that the very certainty of our faith is strengthened in the acknowledgment of that statement?

Called to the Ministry? – An Open Forum

Looking through a number of blog posts today I came across Al Mohler’s post about discerning whether or not God has called you to the ministry. Now I’ve always found it fascinating that we have this developed doctrine of ‘calling’ with regards to career word ministry and yet I’m not so sure I can see it all that clearly in scripture. Some people point to 1 Timothy 3:1 and a person with a ‘desire’ to be an elder but I think that’s fairly flimsy evidence on which to build an entire doctrine that seems so hallowed in our particular tradition.

Now I don’t deny that God uses subjective impression to move us into all sorts of places, as he wants us – but to me that’s different from the traditional evangelical view of ‘calling’. So here’s the forum: Is ‘being called to the ministry’ a biblical concept? If not how do we categorize the subjective impression that so many career bible teachers claim (including myself)? There we go, have a crack at it…

Idolatry in Noble Tasks

I think sometimes I get myself into some sort of internal conundrum trying to have a water-tight take on specific doctrines. I don’t think I’m trying to get all my important doctrines squared off into neat little boxes so that I can take the moral high-ground on everyone else and point fingers. That’s really not my intent. I think I quest more for neat formulas because I vest confidence in those formulas as I proceed in ministry and life.

So for example, at the moment I’m frantically scratching my head over the doctrine of the church. There are a number of loose ends that I’d love to see neatly tied up. Why? So that I can tell the world off because they’ve all got church wrong? No – simply so that I can do church properly myself. And herein lies the problem. It becomes a trust problem. My confidence in ministry and life becomes vested in how well I’m able to intellectually tie together my framework about specific doctrines. Now even though many of those doctrines might be closely tied to Christ, they are themselves not Christ and my pursuit of them can therefore become idolatrous.

I wonder if some of us truly believe that we can become idolatrous in our doctrinal quests and miss the Christ under whom all our doctrines should be subservient? I must quest for knowledge, I must quest for truth, I must quest for doctrinal clarity where possible, but I must quest with Christ as my master and nothing else. Anything less is religious idolatry and depreciates the very point of knowledge, truth and doctrine.

Preaching Errors According to Manchester #3

Part #1

Part #2

Simon Manchester’s third error – ‘System beats Text’:

Even more common than this manner-over-matter preaching is the system-beats-text preaching. This is the widespread danger of dragging every text through the grid of one doctrine that ignores the point of the original passage. For example, one overseas preacher seems to put every passage through the ‘justification by faith’ grid. He is clever and insightful and searching – you’re on the psychiatrist’s couch in no time! – but there is this sa/bad taste left in your mouth that the biblical book was in the service of an idea. ‘Bible-combing’ preaching also has its systematic strengths but often seems to neglect each biblical writer’s specific point in favour of the biblical overview. For example, if Jesus is teaching on people in prison (Matt 25:31-46), it is dangerous to start collecting ‘prison’ references and miss the point in the passage that Jesus will one day announce those who took his ‘brothers’ seriously. Much better to stay with the text in hand until the main point is clear.

My own view, for its worth, is that this is the single biggest problem in preaching in our ‘Reformed’ camp. I’ve often heard of it referred to as ‘the dreaded sack of knowledge’. The need to systematize everything just hinders us from seeing the point of each individual text. If God wanted us to have a systematics text book he would have given us one – but he didn’t, he gave us a story. We might find that certain doctrines would be better nuanced if we tried to avoid this trap even when we’re doing systematic theology. We need to preach the text, not our systems.

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?

Context, Context, Context

This a constant refrain that comes out of my hermeneutics lecturer’s mouth. In hermeneutics class when asked a question and you’re unsure of the answer then simply answer with the word, ‘context’ and there’s a fairly good chance you’ll get it right. In terms of determining the meaning of a text context is king and without it you can pretty much make the Bible say what you want. Now this should be quite straight forward – nothing new. What I was thinking of the other day is how many different types of contexts you have to take into account to derive meaning and then make that meaning understandable. As I see it you have the following contexts to deal with:

Redemptive Historical Context: The Bible is a story of God’s work in the world, it is a story of progressive revelation and therefore it means that texts at certain points of the story, if not connected to the broader story, will become nothing more than proof-texts. My short experience in evangelicalism tells me that this is the most neglected context. We have to locate our texts in the bible storyline before drawing conclusions.

Historical Context: Our text has to be located within the history in which it is set. The Bible is a book written by people living in particular historical settings and we have to take that into account and not assume that the people we’re reading about all had Ipods, Macs and watched ‘Prison Break’ every night on television. This context is a bit tricky in that our knowledge of this context is based on disciplines that fluctuate. I experienced this at university in the Classical Civilizations department where there is a large amount of varying opinion as to exactly what historical conditions were like in certain eras – and opinions constantly change as new findings come to the fore. So whilst this context is helpful and necessary, it needs to be treated with humility and I would be wary of the person who puts too much stock into the historical context in order to derive meaning.

Literary Context: The Bible is literature, we have poetry, history, parable, discourse, apocalyptic etc. etc. We need to be genre sensitive and then we need to learn the rules of those various genres and be able to work with them to derive meaning. The Bible is not a systematics textbook where the meaning is just set down for you in neatly packaged propositional statements.

Those three are the standard contexts that you’ll learn about in a hermeneutics class. There are two others that I want to add:

Historical Theological Context: Texts have a history of interpretation, to ignore that history and the gifted people that God has given to the church through the ages is foolishness. We don’t do hermeneutics as islands, isolated from the rest of the church and so this context needs to be recognized.

Personal Context: I didn’t know what else to call this, but we all come to the text with our own baggage and so a helpful question to ask is, ‘why am I reading the text in this way – what from my own context causes me to see the text in this way’. This is a difficult process as you wade through your socialization, enculturation and present context to try and achieve an as objective as possible reading of the text.

From here you would start to talk about conveying the meaning to specific contexts – but that’s a whole new blog post.

Facebook Proves Doctrine

With so much dispute going on about the validity of systematic theology in contemporary theology an unlikely source has sprung to the defence of the Reformed doctrine of ‘the Depravity of Humanity‘. Opponents of this doctrine will have a difficult time at refuting such clear evidence presented on such a grand scale.

Researchers scanning through the myriads of groups that have been spawned on the social networking site, Facebook, recently stumbled across a group entitled, ‘If this group Reaches 150,000 members I will name my son Batman‘. Upon probing a little further they discovered a discussion thread posted on the group entitled, ‘YOU ARE ALL SO STUPID‘, at the time of print the thread contained 326 posts by 154 different people. In this thread the initial author, a JOn Bennet, claims that the entire group is a hoax and that the group author has no intention of naming his son ‘Batman’ even if the group reaches 150,000 members. What follows this initial comment is a barrage of people, who clearly suffer with serious problems of boredom and anger management, ranting with the most colourful of langauge about what a “%&##!!#$!” JOn Bennet is. Researches who scanned the thread concluded that the only word that adequately described this sort of behaviour was the word ‘depravity’.

Reformed theologians around the world delighted in this finding as at vindicates a doctrine that has long been treasured by this particular tradition. One pastor remarked in celebration that he was going to start a group entitled, ‘If 150,000 people join this group I’ll name my son Calvin’

Diversity is Confusing

I preached at a large pentecostal church yesterday morning and I came out afterwards rather perplexed. Culturally the church was quite different from my usual place of fellowship – but then again nothing new that I hadn’t experienced before. I’ve been fortunate in the last few years of being able to minister in all sorts of churches to more than one culture group. The diversity has been amazing to witness from preaching in western middle-class St Stephen’s (my current church) to preaching with a translator in a tiny Yao church in Malawi amongst a people who are considered unreached – the diversity has been huge.

What perplexes me is that sitting listening to the service yesterday I noted that its not just differences in culture that create the diversity – its more than that – its different understandings of God. The content of what I heard yesterday in the singing, the prayers and the service leading suggested to me that I had a different view of God to the one I was hearing about. What continues to perplex me is that I don’t think we always distinguish those two.

I don’t just think think its a pentecostal versus reformed understanding of God – its more than that – the differences were more fundamental than views on spiritual gifts and how high we lift our hands. I have more than enough pentecostal friends who have exactly the same view of God as me. These differences though are disturbing.

It seems to me that we are not worshipping the same God with different cultural expressions, rather we are actually worshipping different gods – and that’s disturbing.  There’s no yesterday, today and forever – always the same here. I suppose I’m just making mention of a danger in a country like South Africa where we have so many different cultures and we’re extremely cautious about being culturally sensitive in our ministry – the danger is that we confuse diversity with plain outright error, that in our attempts to be culturally sensitive we overlook distortions of the gospel and pretend as if we’re all serving the same God. We can’t be, the differences in some cases are just too big – they can’t be the same God – we need to be aware.

God’s New Community – A Review

Church? 

The word ‘church’, and all its significance, is in desperate need of being biblically reclaimed – enter Graham Beynon and his book, ‘God’s New Community’. Beynon sets out to do this through a series of applicatory expositions of key New Testament texts in order to reclaim this word which is so central to the lives of all Christians. This book comes as a welcome challenge to much wrong thinking in contemporary evangelicalism and provides a healthy corrective to what many might consider minor issues regarding the doctrine of church. It will be helpful to briefly outline the author, his intent, a synopsis of the chapters and then to critically summarize how well Beynon has achieved his goal.

Before continuing on our path we must firstly comment on the readability of the book. The book is concise, making up only 137 pages – hardly a daunting task for even the most trepid reader. Each chapter is well composed with logical flow of thought and littered with helpful contemporary illustrations and anecdotes. Whilst it is clear that the author hails from the United Kingdom, due to his use of certain allusions, it is not to the detriment of the overall thrust of the book and these allusions should be easily understandable to any reader with an understanding of western culture. Each chapter also contains a bible study section that can be utilized in home groups and any other sort of small group setting. Brief appendix of further reading (138) is included for the student who would wish to explore, in more depth, the themes introduced here. The chapters are simple without being simplistic and allow for both the young disciple and the seasoned veteran to glean much insight from its pages. Beynon has an obvious gift in the area of clarity and he puts it to good use concerning a subject that is in need of a crystal clear voice.

The Author

Benyon a pastor in Leicester, England and has been involved in a number of churches prior to his current position, including involvement with St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate. Dave Burke, a former colleague of Beynon, has the following to say about him in the foreword, ‘Graham Beynon’s deep knowledge, passionate commitment and practical involvement have equipped him for the job; you won’t get a better teacher than that’ (8). Beynon notes that the occasion for the book was as the result of delivering a series of sermons on the topic of ‘church’ which he then developed into book form. This accounts the nature of each of the chapters which are sets out largely as expositions of New Testament passages.

Synopsis of the Chapters

In the introductory chapter Beynon expounds 1 Peter 2:4-10. It is in this chapter that he makes a call to join his ‘personal campaign’ (11), and so he explains his campaign is a campaign ‘for Christians to use the word “church” properly.’ (11). Here he sets out the fundamental truth, drawing on the apostle Peter’s teaching, that church is about people, but not any old group of people, rather those who have been redeemed by Christ – they are the church. His view then, on the origin of the church, is deeply wrapped up with the concept that the church is made up of God’s people, and so ultimately he sees church being traced as far back in a redemptive historical trajectory as the Garden of Eden. This chapter helpfully sets the agenda for the rest of the book and puts the emphasis first and foremost on people as opposed to the numerous other tangible objects that enter our heads when we think of church.

In chapters 2, 3 and 4 Beynon, building upon the idea of the church as people, looks at the united nature of the church. Firstly he opens up Ephesians 2:11-22 and challenges the notion that there is any form of division in the church either racially, economically or socially. In Christ the dividing wall of hostility is broken down. Using the analogy of Paul, regarding Jews and Gentiles, Beynon states, ‘When we think of Jesus’ work on the cross we usually think of his purpose as being to reconcile us to God; and rightly so. But along with that he has another purpose. Verse 15 states it very strongly: “his purpose was to create in himself one new man out of two’. Jesus forges them together into a brand new humanity.’ (29). He goes on to contest that the church is the expression of this new humanity, a new family (30). The implications, which he draws out (32), are that we, in the church gently bear with one another in love.

Chapter 3 further extrapolates this by turning to Ephesians 4:7-16 and outlining how this new united family might grow. He states the twofold purpose of the church in their responsibility to testify to the world and also to edify the believers themselves (40). He then zooms in on this growth process of edification and demonstrates from the text the relationship between word gifts and church growth. He helpfully describes the word gifts as acting as orchestra conductors for the rest of the church that they might serve and grow correctly (47).

Chapter four continues with the unified nature of the church and picks up Paul’s metaphor of the body from 1 Corinthians 12:4-27. He Beynon extrapolates that metaphor in order to demonstrate that church members intimately ‘belong’ to one another (51). He calls for a church that actively involves its lives with the lives of one another and that does not promote individualism.

Chapter 5 then shifts the focus to two chapters that deal with love, the motivating force behind the unity. Firstly Beynon opens up Romans 12:3-21 and discusses the sort of love that should be exhibited in the church body. He concludes that the sort of love needed is not a ‘fluid love’ but rather ‘concrete love (76). He suggests that the ultimate way this is displayed is if members of the body reflect the love of God himself (74). Love is such a crucial concept that he then continues ion chapter 6 by looking at a number of places in the New Testament where practical love is exhibited. The list of New Testament references that he assembles are quite overwhelming in conveying the idea that love is central to what it means to be church. He translates these references into some down to earth practical realities in the church today where love needs desperately to be manifest. He concludes, as Jesus concludes, that love ought to be the element which marks out a Christian from the rest (91).

Beynon then goes on, in chapter 7, to discuss the role of leadership in the church. He draws on 1 Timothy 3:1-13 and Acts 20:25-38 and concentrates most of his time on the role of elder/overseer/shepherd/pastor which he sees as essentially one office. He outlines their task as ‘protecting, feeding and leading’ (100). He contends that they are to accomplish this by firstly teaching the word of God and secondly by the examples of the lives they live. He does make mention of the office of deacon but notes carefully that we ought to be careful about what exactly we designate a deacon to be since the New Testament does not give us nearly as much information as it does on the subject of elders. Hence he sees the concept of deacon as being largely tied up to people with specific roles of service (105). In conclusion to the chapter he calls on believers to ‘pray, encourage, respect and give thanks’ for church leaders (106).

In chapter 8 the proverbial rubber hits the road as Beynon gets practical. He notes that we might be tempted to give up on such noble ideals of church and not truly get involved and so he turns to Colossians 3:12-17 for help in strengthening believers to continue with such ideals that the Bible presents. His thesis here revolves around the idea that through the many activities we partake in at church we must be letting the word of Christ dwell in us richly. This means that teaching of the scripture, in its many expressions, is to be central to the life of the church. He suggests that this is the only way in which the peace of Christ will rule amongst us and allow us to fulfill the true concept of church (120).

In the final chapter Beynon looks at Acts 2:42-47 and the early church presented there as he attempts to pull all the threads together into what a church should look like. He highlights Bible learning, togetherness, praise, prayer, fellowship and evangelism as the hallmarks of a healthy growing, biblical church. He concludes with the following words, ‘I hope you have seen from this chapter and from the whole book that church is more about who we are and what we are committed to than about particular meetings we attend.’ (136)

Strengths and Weaknesses

Let us first discuss the weaknesses of the book. Firstly the book is nowhere near a thorough theological treatment of the doctrine of Scripture, nor is it intended to be. A serious student might desire further discussion on certain points. The book is also western, and whilst it still has much to say to the church in the majority world it would still need further packaging in terms of ideas and concepts for this to be a truly global book.

In saying this though I find the overall book to be filled with strength after strength. The most obvious strength is that it deals with the text; the Bible is clearly exegeted, explained and applied by an unashamed workman which is a refreshing approach when one considers much of the Bible handling in large amounts of Christian literature today. The book also has the strength of being profoundly simple. It deals with profound issues in a simple manner without playing down the issues in any way – this is the mark of a good teacher and Beynon steps up to the plate in this regard. Thirdly, the book challenges a large amount of wrong thinking and wrong action within the church, and as on who sympathizes with the thesis presented, this book offers a necessary corrective and many would benefit from reading it. Fourthly the book is practical and full of applicatory insight in order to bring home the Biblical teaching. And finally the book is about people, not structures or organizations, but real people trying to live like united Christians in a real world.

Conclusion

This book deserves a wide reading and, in the opinion of this review, should be given to all young Christians – one can think of no better book for such an audience. Beynon has done his homework and he has done it wish real insight that deserves an airing. One cherishes books that can be both profound and yet simple on such important topics.

Beynon, G. 2005. God’s New Community. Inter-Varsity Press. Leicester.

NT Wright and Penal Substitution

Here’s a link to the reason that Tom Wright is beginning to disappoint me a bit, here’s what David Field thinks, here’s a link to the book that Wright thinks is ‘sub-biblical’, and here’s what I mentioned about the book in February.

Reflections on Emerging Theology #1

I’ve been reading a number of sites dealing with emerging theology over the last few days. As I’ve been reading I’ve started to notice some recurring themes which I thought I’d make mention of. Now I need to qualify so as not to create a storm of any kind here. Firstly, my reading has not encompassed all of emerging theology, I’m limited, I can only read so much. Secondly, these are just initial thoughts and reflections. And thirdly, I’m a historic evangelical and so whilst I have much sympathy and empathy for the emerging church, I read things through a historic evangelical lens, this is not to say that I don’t personally critique my lens time and time again. So here are my reflections:

Reflection #1

I’ve mentioned this before elsewhere, but it seems to me that a lot of the EC’s critique of evangelicalism deals with abuses within modern evangelicalism and not so much with historic evangelicalism. So for example I’ve seen people taking evangelical views of scripture such as authority and infallibility. The reason behind the challenge though does not always seem, to me, to stem from an intellectual or reasoned disagreement with the doctrines themselves (although this follows), but initially it seems to stem from frustrations with abuses of the doctrines.

So here’s the logic in an example: The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa used the Old Testament to justify apartheid. How do we stop people from doing this in the future? Well we neutralize the authority of the Old Testament. We have a dilemma – we can’t correct apartheid interpretation of the Old Testament because that would then be to impose our own interpretation which is governed by our time/cultural lens. So because we can’t correct we rather diminish the authority of the Old Testament. So instead of the OT being God’s Word it now instead becomes the writings of a small Jewish community trying to figure out what it means to follow God in their context.

Historic evangelicalism doesn’t pit those two against each other – the OT is God’s authoritative Word as well as being the writings of a small Jewish community within a particular context. The two are not necessarilly natural opponents as some would make it seem.

So whilst I think this sort of theology brings a healthy indictment upon much evangelical reasoning it fails, in my mind, to provide an accurate way forward.

Whilst on the subject of scripture, I’m also a bit alarmed at the poor knowledge of manuscript evidence when dealing with things like the integrity of the original manuscripts. Having a background in Classical Civilization, and therefore the study of ancient texts and their transmission, I have a bit of an upper hand on most – but I still hear arguments about whether the Bible has significantly changed over the centuries. I have secular Classics Professors who will testify to the integrity of the Old and New Testament manuscripts with far more conviction than some emerging folk.

Anyway, that’s my first reflection for now.

Gospel for Believers

I grew up in church with an unhealthy paradigm in my mind. It went something along these lines: The gospel is for unbelievers, they need to hear it and then come to faith. Once they’ve come to faith then they mature and they start to learn doctrine.

And so when a minister, who is now a friend of mine, told me that he preached the gospel every Sunday I was a bit concerned – how would his congregation mature? There were two problems with my thinking – I saw the gospel as too small, I basically equated the formula that you’ll find on some ‘old school’ evangelism tract with the gospel. I needed a bigger picture of the gospel. Secondly, and following on, I disconnected doctrine or teaching from the gospel – I didn’t see the two as naturally compatible. It took me a while to work through these things until I got to the point, where I’m still at, where I can’t conceive opening the Bible to any audience without teaching the gospel.

Now the reason for this little  admission is because I’ve finally gotten round to listening to those Tim Keller talks that I mentioned a few weeks ago and I’ve decided (yes I who make all dogmatic decisions) that Tim Keller is best preacher of the gospel to believers that I’ve ever heard. So if you’re wondering how to apply the gospel to believers go download the talks – in fact download everything you can find of Tim Keller’s and listen to it carefully, and let a master teach you about THE master.