Along The Way

Anti-abortion… Anti-women?

Posted on 6 February 2010 | No responses

So, in between a life of much too busy, I hap­pened upon a news cast which, for lack of a bet­ter word, decried a cer­tain Super­bowl ad by Focus on the Fam­ily (in coop­er­a­tion with CBS, appar­ently. At least, accord­ing to this news cast). The news­cast seemed to give the impres­sion that any­one who pro­motes an anti-abortion posi­tion (i.e. “pro-life”) does not: (1) trust and value women (specif­i­cally, moth­ers) and girls, (2) respect fam­ily, (3) respect the rights and auton­omy of women. A planned par­ent­hood ad was shown in which it is said that the super bowl was the “per­fect time to honor both sports and fam­ily” (this ad being a response). The news­cast goes on to dis­cuss whether the ‘other side’ should be allowed their own adver­tise­ment advo­cat­ing abor­tion. How­ever, this is irrel­e­vant given that first few min­utes of the news­cast are spent poi­son­ing the well (against the pro-life posi­tion), as the fal­lacy is called. At this point peo­ple aren’t going to care whether or not the oppo­site posi­tion is shown; they are going to care that pro-lifers hate, abuse and mis­trust women.

What I don’t under­stand is why abor­tion is being advo­cated if we’re respect­ing women, girls and fam­ily. I’m sure we’re also respect­ing chil­dren and babies; why not fetuses? Albeit I’m ask­ing from a per­spec­tive which believes in the sanc­tity of human life. Though regard­less, if we can’t answer the meta­phys­i­cal ques­tion what is a fetus? (which is what I hear con­stantly, espe­cially from virtue-ethicists) Then why are we allow­ing the poten­tial mur­der of devel­op­ing — invested with rights — human beings? Even if we don’t know whether or not a fetus is a human being, why are we tak­ing the risk?  The only way I’ve ever seen abor­tion jus­ti­fied also jus­ti­fies infan­ti­cide (and beyond), yet no one is will­ing to take the argu­ment that far. It just seems ter­ri­bly, ter­ri­bly inconsistent.

Any­way, seems typ­i­cal of the media.

Agape: An Unearned Love

Posted on 20 December 2009 | No responses

An essay recently writ­ten for a course…

C.S. Lewis regarded agape love to be the great­est of the four loves. It is the kind of love Christ taught and lived. Author Richard L. Strauss notes that, “it is a love which keeps lov­ing when its object is unre­spon­sive, unkind, unlov­able, or com­pletely unwor­thy… it gives one hun­dred per­cent and expects noth­ing in return!“¹ It is an impos­si­ble love if not a reflec­tion of God’s love for us. It is this kind of love, as Peter Kreeft notes, that “goes beyond worth, beyond jus­tice, beyond rea­son“² . In the words of C.S. Lewis, it is a gift-love from God to us:

God, who needs noth­ing, loves into exis­tence wholly super­flu­ous crea­tures in order that He may love and per­fect them. He cre­ates the uni­verse, already fore­see­ing — of should we say ‘see­ing’? there are no tenses in God — the bussing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails dri­ven through the mesial nerve, the repeated incip­i­ent suf­fo­ca­tion as the body droops, the repeated tor­ture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath’s sake, hitched up. If I may dare the bio­log­i­cal image, God is a ‘host’ who delib­er­ately cre­ates His own par­a­sites; causes us to be that we may exploit and ‘take advan­tage of’ Him. Herein is love. This is the dia­gram of Love Him­self, the inven­tor of all loves³.

It is through the life of Christ that we expe­ri­ence a God of love, a God who is love⁴ . Kreeft goes on to say, “Jesus had dif­fer­ent feel­ings toward dif­fer­ent peo­ple. But he loved them all equally and absolutely” . The impli­ca­tion is clear and the teach­ing is dif­fi­cult. While our feel­ings towards peo­ple may be dif­fer­ent, we, as fol­low­ers of Christ, are to love every­one equally and absolutely⁵, includ­ing our ene­mies and inde­pen­dent of our feel­ings for them. We can­not on the one hand say we love God and on the other, hate our brother⁶ . In the words of Christ, “You have heard that it was said, YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your ene­mies and pray for those who per­se­cute you“⁷ . Christ does not com­mand us to love some abstract ideal, ‘human­ity’. Rather, he tells us to love our neigh­bours and our ene­mies, the “real indi­vid­u­als we meet, just as he did”; Christ lived a life of rela­tion­ship, he died not for the sins of an abstract ‘human­ity’, but for you and me, per­son­ally“⁸ . This, as C.S. Lewis says, is love.

We are left won­der­ing, how can God be love? The answer is that God is love because God is a trin­ity. If God is not a trin­ity, God is not love. As Kreeft notes, “love requires three things: a lover, a beloved, and a rela­tion­ship between them. If God were only one per­son, he could be a lover, but not love itself“⁹ . If God were not love, but only a lover, then it would be that God is incom­plete with­out us, need­ing us, requir­ing some­one to love. God’s love would then not be agape love, but a self­ish love of his own need, need­ing some­one to love¹⁰.
It is here that we must be care­ful to avoid con­fu­sion between ‘God is love’ and ‘Love is God’. A God who is love shows us a love we don’t know. A love that is God shows us a love we already know. In this we divinize a love not wor­thy of deity. We turn the per­sonal God into an imper­sonal force; the love of God becomes human love, rather than human love reflect­ing the love of God. Kreeft says it best, “‘God is love’ is the pro­found­est thing we have ever heard. But ‘love is God’ is deadly non­sense“¹¹ .

It is to this life of rela­tion­ship and love that Christ calls us. A love that, as lived by Christ, is to be prac­ticed every day, hon­estly and authen­ti­cally. Those we meet in the street, those we dis­like and those we con­sider our ene­mies are, like us, cre­ated in the very image of God¹² . We show this love to oth­ers because God first showed it to us¹³ ; “we love, because He first loved us“¹⁴ . The very nature of God is love and it is this nature that pro­ceeds from Him to us. In the words of the Apos­tle John, “in this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the pro­pi­ti­a­tion for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is per­fected in us“¹⁵ . It is a love which nec­es­sar­ily finds its ori­gin in God’s nature; it is from this that we derive our agape. Said dif­fer­ently, God’s love is pri­mary, ours is sec­ondary; deriv­a­tive of God’s. Just as God’s love encom­passed His ene­mies¹⁶ , so too should ours. Our ene­mies are our neighbours.

A teacher of the law once approached and asked Christ what the fore­most com­mand­ment was. In reply, Christ answered with what we have now come to regard as the two great commandments:

The fore­most is, ‘HEAR, O ISRAEL! THE LORD OUR GOD IS ONE LORD; AND YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND, AND WITH ALL YOUR STRENGTH.’ “The sec­ond is this, YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.’ There is no other com­mand­ment greater than these¹⁷ .

In his reply, Christ brings together Deuteron­omy 6:4–5 (the Shema) and Leviti­cus 19:18 ¹⁸ , show­ing that these two com­mand­ments are insep­a­ra­ble. Christ taught that “love of neigh­bour is a nat­ural and log­i­cal out­growth of love of God“¹⁹ . If we claim to know and love God, that love will be man­i­fest in our deal­ings with oth­ers; it is a wit­ness to our rela­tion­ship with God. What is inter­est­ing to real­ize is that the Greek word Christ uses for love, aga­pao, is the verb form of agape. The love of God, fol­lowed by the love of one’s neigh­bour, is there­fore very much an active, rather than a pas­sive love. It is an action, rather than an idea[20.An idea in the sense of what love is; See 1 Cor. 13.] . A love that requires our whole being: our heart, soul, mind and strength. With this in mind Lewis spoke sim­ply and pow­er­fully, “it is prob­a­bly impos­si­ble to love any human being sim­ply ‘too much’. We may love him too much in pro­por­tion to our love for God; but it is the small­ness of our love for God, not the great­ness of our love for the man, that con­sti­tutes the inor­di­nacy“²⁰ . Love has a foun­da­tion, and as we see in Lewis, John as well as in Christ, that foun­da­tion is God Himself.

Some will ask why lov­ing our neigh­bours requires lov­ing our ene­mies. The answer is sim­ple: Jesus com­manded it and defined our neigh­bours as “any­one with whom we have deal­ings at all“²¹ , this entails our ene­mies. In pro­vid­ing a prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion of this, Mit­ton remarks that neigh­bour embraces:

All within our home, those we meet at work, in our church, and in recre­ations. And more than that: our employer is our neigh­bour too; so are our work peo­ple, all who serve us in shops, the men who empty our dust bins and those who try to keep streets and parks clean. So too are the peo­ple of Jamaica, of West Africa, of Kenya, of Ger­many and of Rus­sia. If we love our neigh­bours as we love our­selves, we shall want for them the treat­ment we should want for our­selves, were we in their place²² .

Agape love is a love that nec­es­sar­ily requires the love of ene­mies because our ene­mies are also our neigh­bours, made, like us, in the image of God. It is a love which is deriv­a­tive of God’s love, an out­ward man­i­fes­ta­tion of our rela­tion­ship with Him. Agape nec­es­sar­ily requires the love of our ene­mies, because it is this sort of love that Jesus showed, com­manded and expected. Agape love, is Divine love.

Book Review: Socrates Meets Jesus

Posted on 7 December 2009 | No responses

Pages: 182
Pub­lisher: Inter­var­sity Press
Year:  2002
Author: Peter Kreeft

Peter Kreeft has writ­ten a sim­ple, yet crit­i­cal exam­i­na­tion of the claims of Jesus as expe­ri­enced through a pagan Greek philoso­pher — Socrates.  It is through Socrates that Kreeft cuts through a lot of the the­o­log­i­cal jar­gon, ask­ing what should be the fore­most and basic ques­tions when approach­ing the ques­tion “Who is Jesus?”

The book is writ­ten in the same fash­ion as his other Socrates meets… books. Names are often satire, some times bit­ing and always rel­e­vant. The con­text is always mod­ern day (at least at the time of writ­ing) and the issues as rel­e­vant now as they were back then. Kreeft’s use of satire does not come off as inap­pro­pri­ate or spite­ful, but humor­ous (i.e., Pro­fes­sor Fesser, Bertha Broad­mind) and light-hearted.

Kreeft’s story picks up imme­di­ately after Socrates drinks hem­lock juice, dying. He finds him­self thrown 2,000 years in the future (1987) and reg­is­tered at Have It University’s Divin­ity school. He’s intro­duced imme­di­ately to Bertha Broad­mind, who saves his life a few times (not know­ing what a taxi is, of course) while intro­duc­ing him to the ‘god of progress’ (in the words of Socrates), the idea of fun­da­men­tal­ism and the nature of con­tem­po­rary faith.

Socrates quickly dis­cov­ers he’s been enrolled in three classes which take up the focus of the book, Sci­ence and Reli­gion Com­par­a­tive Reli­gions and Chris­tol­ogy. In Sci­ence and Reli­gion Socrates exam­ines the nature of mir­a­cles — are they unsci­en­tific? Here he meets Pro­fes­sor Flat­land and Thomas Skep­tic. In Com­par­a­tive reli­gions Socrates dis­cusses the nature of reli­gious claims and truth — are they exclu­sive or mutual? As well as the claims sur­round­ing the exclu­siv­ity of Jesus. Finally, Socrates finds him­self in Chris­tol­ogy class, where he meets Molly Mooney, Ahmen Ali Louiea, Solomon Etude, Sophia Sikh and Pro­fes­sor Fesser. It is in this class, the last por­tions of the book, that we encounter the Jew­ish idea of God, how those ideas trans­late into the New Tes­ta­ment and whether or not they are com­pat­i­ble with the claims of Jesus. Also dis­cussed is the impact in the lives of the Apos­tles and dis­ci­ples and whether their lives attest the mes­sage they believed was being preached.

I’m already a fan of Peter Kreeft’s dia­logue style of books and find this to be another sig­nif­i­cant addi­tion to my library. Some might not like his ‘Socratic method’ which brings me to the only prob­lem I can fore­see with the book. While Kreeft is extremely clear in his think­ing and I agree with him entirely. Some may not like that he paints tra­di­tional views of Jesus as wholly sen­si­ble, whereas com­pet­ing inter­pre­ta­tions (Jesus as an arche­type, a myth pro­jected back­wards into church tra­di­tion, etc.) seem almost fool­ish. Though, I think like Lewis, Kreeft cuts to the heart of the issue and in this a lot of views seem increas­ingly jus­ti­fied the more peo­ple that believe it, the more books that are writ­ten on it, the more ‘-isms’ you can attach to them. Kreeft asks one sim­ple ques­tion, “What does the text say?” and leaves it at that. I like this, oth­ers won’t, but fore­go­ing that the book is a funny, enlight­en­ing and pos­si­bly cor­rec­tive read that should be required. It is just too bad that the book is so short, under 200 pages.

With this book I think Peter Kreeft has man­aged to place him­self under C.S. Lewis as the two top thinkers (An Angli­can and a Catholic, go fig­ure) who have most influ­enced the way I view things. Socrates Meets Jesus is an excel­lent book and highly recommended.

Sug­gested reading:

The Best Things in Life
The Unaborted Socrates

Hail Mary, Full of Grace.. Was The Lord With Thee?

Posted on 1 December 2009 | No responses

Let’s get straight to the point. If the vir­gin birth did not hap­pen, then, as Mark Driscoll rightly observes:

If the vir­gin birth of Jesus is untrue, then the story of Jesus changes greatly; we would have a sex­u­ally promis­cu­ous young woman lying about God’s mirac­u­lous hand in the birth of her son, rais­ing that son to declare he was God, and then join­ing his reli­gion. But if Mary is noth­ing more than a sin­ful con artist then nei­ther she nor her son Jesus should be trusted. Because both the clear teach­ings of Scrip­ture about the begin­ning of Jesus’ earthly life and the char­ac­ter of his mother are at stake, we must con­tend for the vir­gin birth of Jesus Christ¹.

As I said in my pre­vi­ous post, I’ve been hear­ing quite a lot of peo­ple down­play or even reject the vir­gin birth as a fan­ci­ful bit mythol­o­giz­ing ².

Larry King was asked who he would inter­view if he could inter­view any­one through his­tory. He answered Jesus. He was then asked what ques­tion he would ask Jesus, to which he replied that he would like to ask Him if He was virgin-born. The answer to this ques­tion, for Larry King, defines history.

In deny­ing the vir­gin birth of Jesus we deny not only an inter­pre­ta­tion of Scrip­ture, but the Scrip­ture itself. What are some exam­ples of Scrip­ture that would be lost?

Luke 1:26–38

26Now in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city in Galilee called Nazareth,
27to a vir­gin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, (of the descen­dants of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary.
28And com­ing in, he said to her, “Greet­ings, favored one! The Lord is with you.“
29But she was very per­plexed at this state­ment, and kept pon­der­ing what kind of salu­ta­tion this was.
30The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; for you have found favor with God.
31“And behold, you will con­ceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name Him Jesus.
32“He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David;
33and He will reign over the house of Jacob for­ever, and His king­dom will have no end.“
34Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a vir­gin?“
35The angel answered and said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will over­shadow you; and for that rea­son the holy Child shall be called the Son of God.
36“And behold, even your rel­a­tive Eliz­a­beth has also con­ceived a son in her old age; and she who was called bar­ren is now in her sixth month.
37“For noth­ing will be impos­si­ble with God.“
38And Mary said, “Behold, the bond­slave of the Lord; may it be done to me accord­ing to your word.” And the angel departed from her.

Matthew 1:18–25

18Now the birth of Jesus Christ was as fol­lows: when His mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit.
19And Joseph her hus­band, being a right­eous man and not want­ing to dis­grace her, planned to send her away secretly.
20But when he had con­sid­ered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, say­ing, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife; for the Child who has been con­ceived in her is of the Holy Spirit.
21“She will bear a Son; and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His peo­ple from their sins.“
22Now all this took place to ful­fill what was spo­ken by the Lord through the prophet:
23“BEHOLD, THE VIRGIN SHALL BE WITH CHILD AND SHALL BEAR A SON, AND THEY SHALL CALL HIS NAME IMMANUEL,” which trans­lated means, “GOD WITH US.“
24And Joseph awoke from his sleep and did as the angel of the Lord com­manded him, and took Mary as his wife,
25but kept her a vir­gin until she gave birth to a Son; and he called His name Jesus.

Isa­iah 7:14

14“There­fore the Lord Him­self will give you a sign: Behold, (A)a vir­gin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call His name Immanuel.

Isa­iah 9:6

6For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us;
And the gov­ern­ment will rest on His shoul­ders;
And His name will be called Won­der­ful Coun­selor, Mighty God,
Eter­nal Father, Prince of Peace.

Gen­e­sis 3:15

15And I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her seed;
He shall bruise you on the head,
And you shall bruise him on the heel.”

Isa­iah 7:14 is an inter­est­ing case in that a very com­mon objec­tion has been lev­eled against it. If Isa­iah had wanted to describe or proph­esy a vir­gin birth, he would have used the word betu­lah. As it stands, how­ever, he used the word almah, which means ‘young woman’. Thus, there is noth­ing in Isa­iah 7:14 that would sig­nal a vir­gin birth 700 years later: the authors of the Gospels as well as mod­ern trans­la­tors were mis­taken in their view of these Scrip­tures. Sam Har­ris writes, “The writ­ers of Luke and Matthew, for instance, declare that Mary con­ceived as a vir­gin, rely­ing upon the Greek ren­der­ing of Isa­iah 7:14. The Hebrew text of Isa­iah uses the word almah, how­ever, which sim­ply means “young woman,” with­out any impli­ca­tion of vir­gin­ity“³  Christo­pher Hitchens writes much of the same, “we know that the word trans­lated as ‘vir­gin,’ namely almah, means only ‘a young woman’”[4. Christo­pher Hitchens, god is not Great: How Reli­gions Poi­sons Every­thing (Toronto: McClel­land & Stew­art, 2007), 115].

In reply we must keep in mind that the genre of Hebrew prophecy is com­plex, how­ever, the above is not beyond answer. Ravi Zacharias notes that there are numer­ous exam­ples of prophecy that have a com­pen­e­tra­tion of two ful­fill­ment, Isa­iah 7:14 in one such prophecy. Zacharias writes:

If Isa­iah had used the typ­i­cal Hebrew word for vir­gin, betu­lah, it would have been the wrong word for the sit­u­a­tion. The imme­di­ate ful­fill­ment of the prophecy comes in Isa­iah 8:3, when Isaiah’s wife gives birth to a son. The peo­ple had asked for a sign that God would indeed send the Mes­siah, and the birth of Isaiah’s son was the imme­di­ate sign that the greater prophecy and promise of the vir­gin birth would be ful­filled… Isa­iah used the world almah, which is lit­er­ally trans­lated as “young maiden” and can include vir­gin­ity. There­fore, it is the very word he needed in order to cover both situations–that of Isaiah’s wife and of Joseph’s fiancée, Mary⁴.

Fur­ther­more, it should be noted that even if almah did not mean ‘vir­gin,’ but only ‘young woman,’ there is still very lit­tle rea­son to believe that Mary would not have been a vir­gin. If we read Matthew — and Isa­iah — with the mind­set one of their audi­ence would have had, then we would have instinc­tively con­nected ‘young woman’ with ‘vir­gin,’ the two were vir­tu­ally syn­ony­mous. In fact, if a young woman were not a vir­gin, her pun­ish­ment under the law would have been death. Any ques­tions of her vir­gin­ity would have resulted in a phys­i­cal inspec­tion (Deuteron­omy 22:14–22)⁵.

Lastly, it is often objected that the vir­gin birth of Jesus is merely a copy­ing of pre-existing myths. This is a ques­tion for another time, how­ever to say quickly that this is not the case, espe­cially as one stud­ies and com­pares the vir­gin birth ‘myths’ of pre-existing reli­gions with the vir­gin birth account of Jesus. For more infor­ma­tion on this, see  N.T. Wright’s The Res­ur­rec­tion of the Son of God.

If Chris­tian­ity is to be fac­tu­ally true and mean­ing­ful, the Vir­gin Birth must be an event in space time. With­out the vir­gin birth, we lose Jesus. It goes with­out say­ing that if we lose Jesus, well, then we’ve lost every­thing. As Al Mohler writes:

Can a true Chris­t­ian deny the vir­gin birth? The answer to that ques­tion must be a deci­sive No. Those who deny the vir­gin birth reject the author­ity of Scrip­ture, deny the super­nat­ural birth of the Sav­ior, under­mine the very foun­da­tions of the Gospel, and have no way of explain­ing the deity of Christ.

Any­one who claims that the vir­gin birth can be dis­carded even as the deity of Christ is affirmed is either intel­lec­tu­ally dis­hon­est or the­o­log­i­cal incom­pe­tent⁶.

Virgin Births and Naked Gospels

Posted on 20 November 2009 | No responses

Over the past few days a cou­ple things have hap­pened: I’ve become supremely irri­tated at peo­ple con­stantly devalu­ing the vir­gin birth — it changes a lot if it didn’t hap­pen! I’ve also, upon rec­om­men­da­tion, picked up the book The Naked Gospel by Dr. Andrew Far­ley. I believe it’s with this book that I’ll start mak­ing more time for book reviews. As an aside, I’ve also picked up more of Peter Kreeft’s work (Socrates Meets Jesus, Mak­ing Sense out of Suf­fer­ing, Three Approaches to Abor­tion and Back to Virtue); I find the man an engag­ing writer and usu­ally spot on.

Back to essays… And after that, per­haps a few things on the vir­gin birth, and a book review, of course.

Unable to Prepare for the Journey?

Posted on 15 November 2009 | No responses

I came across this col­lec­tion of (emer­gent) catch­phrases dur­ing a forum dis­cus­sion which hap­pened this past week­end. There is a visual which goes along with it, which you can find here. The visual itself is, I think, self-evidently bril­liant (I highly rec­om­mend you look at the visual). The atti­tude towards truth that these catch-phrases con­vey is one I can never seem to take seri­ously. If I have a desire, or a thirst, to know the truth, then it seems to me obvi­ous that my ulti­mate end is the des­ti­na­tion. For how can we truly be pre­pared for the jour­ney when we neglect the fact of where we’re going, or hope to be going ? It’s a casual atti­tude, fatally flawed.

The Search for Answers and Meaning

Posted on 4 November 2009 | No responses

Recently I’ve come to view cul­ture and soci­ety as a search for answers and mean­ing. It seems to me that this is some­thing I should have hap­pened upon a long time ago, how­ever, that’s of no con­se­quence now. What this means, though, is that how I approach post­moder­nity within Chris­tian­ity has changed some what, in the sense that, I think, I have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of what exactly is going on. I’ve tried to cre­ate an illus­tra­tion or anal­ogy to cap­ture my thought process, so hope­fully what fol­lows does exactly that, rather than fail.

In my illus­tra­tion I view real­ity as a very long hall­way. At the end of the hall­way is a door, behind which is God. All along this hall­way there are many other doors. These many doors rep­re­sent dif­fer­ent attempts to find answers and mean­ing to life’s ques­tion and pur­pose. Not every cul­ture will try every door, they are depen­dent upon the pre­sup­po­si­tions and world view of those cul­tures. It can be cer­tain that the God door is the one least opened. We can imag­ine dif­fer­ent cul­tures  try­ing dif­fer­ent doors; what post­mod­ern Chris­tians would have us do is fall in line with these same cul­tures, fol­low­ing them through their vain attempt to find answers and mean­ing. It seems to me, how­ever, that the most effec­tive solu­tion would be to stand at the door­way of what­ever door is being attempted by one’s cul­ture, and try to lead them out of that door and to the end of the hall to the door where God is. If as Chris­tians we neglect this and instead enter into the door­way, we are restricted to work­ing within the con­fines of cul­ture and can never par­tic­i­pate in lead­ing the lost to God. Lead­ing the lost to God nec­es­sar­ily requires mov­ing out­side of the con­text of soci­ety, while remain­ing rel­e­vant to the con­text of soci­ety. Almost para­dox­i­cally, for the Chris­t­ian, rel­e­vancy comes through almost being irrel­e­vant.

Evangelistic Discipleship

Posted on 18 October 2009 | No responses

I’ve heard the com­plaint many times that the church does not engage in dis­ci­ple­ship, or at least does not dis­ci­ple as it should. Hope­fully (well, usu­ally) the dis­cus­sions turn to what I think is most impor­tant ini­tial ques­tion: what do we mean by dis­ci­ple­ship? As I said in my pre­vi­ous post, it has been sug­gested that by dis­ci­ple­ship we should include evan­ge­lis­tic and wit­ness­ing out­reaches. That is, dis­ci­ple­ship should also include con­ver­sion as well as any sub­se­quent teaching.

Our next ques­tion con­sid­ers what we mean by dis­ci­ple. Turn­ing to the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

Merriam-Webster defines a dis­ci­ple as one who, “accepts and assists in spread­ing the doc­trines of another: as b : a con­vinced adher­ent of a school or indi­vid­ual”. Tra­di­tion­ally, Dis­ci­ple­ship is the process whereby dis­ci­ples grow in their under­stand­ing of Jesus and doc­trine and then fur­ther spread what they’ve come to regard as truth.

We end up with two words which are at odds with each other; the newly re-defined dis­ci­ple­ship and the fairly his­tor­i­cally con­sis­tent dis­ci­ple. For such a word as dis­ci­ple­ship to be re-defined, we must then also rede­fine dis­ci­ple. How­ever, I’ll leave that up to who­ever is advanc­ing this idea.

It doesn’t seem to me pos­si­ble at all to dis­ci­ple some­one who isn’t already fol­low­ing Jesus (not to be con­fus­ing with teach­ing some­one about Jesus). In this aspect the defense is given that the early Apos­tles, when they were cho­sen and dis­ci­pled, did not accept Jesus, and there­fore we can and should work off this exam­ple. There are really only a few quick things that can be said about this. The first thing that can be said is that the men who would become the Apos­tles were wait­ing for the Mes­siah. They believed in YHWH, fol­lowed the Law and were expec­tant. You could not make this anal­o­gous to today’s world with say, an athe­ist, in that they are pretty sure God doesn’t exist, they prob­a­bly don’t know why they need a Mes­siah and the Law — not that it’s in effect to day — is some­thing for­eign to them. Fur­ther­more, there are instances of the Apos­tles believ­ing Jesus to be the Mes­siah even before their dis­ci­ple­ship began (con­sider the story of Nathanael in John 1). I don’t think it is at all valid to infer from these accounts that we should dis­ci­ple non-Christians for the addi­tional rea­sons that they don’t accept Jesus, they don’t care about doc­trine and those that do show some inter­est in the moral teach­ings of Jesus do so most prob­a­bly out of human­i­tar­ian ‘con­vic­tions,’ not because they have repented of who they thought Jesus is.

I also think it’s only cre­at­ing more prob­lems when using this new umbrella term ‘dis­ci­ple’ by com­bin­ing what we tra­di­tion­ally mean by dis­ci­ple / dis­ci­ple­ship with evan­ge­lism and wit­ness­ing. We will only have to pull apart this word to deal with the same prob­lems we have in the church today. There may be some sort of good inten­tion behind this rethink­ing of dis­ci­ple, how­ever, it’s ulti­mately mis­guided and unbib­li­cal in practice.

Discipleship: What do we Mean?

Posted on 17 October 2009 | No responses

I’ve heard many Chris­tians raise con­cern or oth­er­wise com­plain about the (lack of) dis­ci­ple­ship in the church. What I often find con­fus­ing is the dif­fer­ent mean­ings of the word ‘dis­ci­ple­ship’ that peo­ple use. One exam­ple I heard recently is from a pas­tor who has defined dis­ci­ple­ship so as to include wit­ness­ing and evan­ge­lis­tic out­reaches towards those who have not accepted Jesus. This def­i­n­i­tion holds that a Chris­t­ian can dis­ci­ple a non-Christian in the teach­ings and ways of Jesus. There is an appeal made to the call­ing and col­lec­tion of the dis­ci­ples as an exam­ple of this and the idea seems to either be rejected out­right (as I think it should be) or mildly accepted by those peo­ple I know.

That is what I want to write a lit­tle bit about… Tomorrow.

The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology

Posted on 4 October 2009 | No responses

…Is a book I would really like to buy. Yet it’s very expen­sive, why? Oh well! I’ll either wait for some­one to send me a copy, or there’s always Christmas.

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