Month: September 2010

Categories
Spirituality

The Bounds of Hope

From John Chrysostom’s Paschal Homily:

He that was taken by death has annihilated it!

He descended into Hades and took Hades captive!

He embittered it when it tasted his flesh! And anticipating this Isaiah exclaimed: “Hades was embittered when it encountered thee in the lower regions”.

It was embittered, for it was abolished!

It was embittered, for it was mocked!

It was embittered, for it was purged!

It was embittered, for it was despoiled!

It was embittered, for it was bound in chains!

It took a body and came upon God!

It took earth and encountered heaven!

It took what it saw but crumbled before what it had not seen!

O death, where is thy sting? O Hades, where is thy victory?
Christ is risen, and you are overthrown!

Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen!

Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice!

Christ is risen, and life reigns!

Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in a tomb!

Categories
Spirituality

Giberson on Religion Cramming

Karl Giberson writes in the Huffington Post and on BioLogos in response to the claim often made by new atheist leaders that religious people “cram their beliefs down their children’s throats”:

This language evokes the harshest of images. What is a secular reader, unfamiliar with how religious children are actually raised, to think? They have never seen a Christmas pageant where dozens of happy children sing cute choruses under the direction of dedicated volunteer staff; they have not seen teenagers gathered in prayerful support around one of their friends whose little brother was just killed in a terrible accident; they have not seen older teens holding bake sales so they can raise enough money to spend two weeks in Haiti helping people in need. Instead, they must picture stern-faced parents dragging kids against their will to indoctrination sessions where they sit on hard wooden chairs until they affirm a set of beliefs in settings reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange. After years of such training, the once-open-minded children mature into narrow-minded adults who carry out the narrow-minded agendas of their parents — oppose healthcare, gay marriage, stem-cell research, Muslims, and anything else they can think of — and begin the process of having their own kids, with a new generation of throats down which more toxic ideas will be crammed.

Categories
Biblical Studies Science and Religion

Brandon Withrow on Reading Scripture in Context

An interesting article by Brandon Withrow on how our reading of scripture is always contextual to our understanding of cosmology.  As he notes:

While the temptation may be to read through ancient Christian literature to produce a litany of historical support for a particular Christian cosmology, this is not my intention here, as that leads to disaster. Instead, if we cut away all of the theological differences of one historical Christian figure over another, what we find is a common theme—each new Christian generation reads Scripture within the accepted cosmology of the culture or sub-culture to which they belong. A reader’s response is always filtered by a worldview. Origen’s world is a prime example of this enculturation, but by no means the only example.

Categories
Biblical Studies Theological Hermeneutics Theology

Daniel Kirk on Bible and History

Daniel Kirk, a New Testament Professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, offers a good series of posts on the Bible and history (Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3 his excellent blog “Storied Theology.”  Here’s a long quote:

For me, the question of “inerrancy” versus not, or the question of how “historical” the Gospels are, or the question of whether or not we should harmonize different passages pushes in this direction: When we push for inerrancy, harmonizations, and historicity, we show that we have a fundamentally different desire for what these texts might give us than the biblical writers themselves had when they composed them.

If the purpose of the Gospels was to give us the historically identifiable account of the anointing of Jesus, then Luke would not have changed the location, host, time frame, and body part on which Jesus was anointed. If the purpose of a Gospel is to give a full, historical account, then Matthew would not go around introducing second things such as a second Gerasene demoniac or second donkey that Jesus simultaneously rode into Jerusalem with the other.

The point is that at various points both Matthew and Luke have decided to tell versions of the story that are in ways major or minor different from the story of Mark–and that in trying to smash them all back together into a coherent unity we show that our own desire for the text is antithetical to the impulse that gave us the texts we actually have.

What the Gospel writers have separated, let no man put together.

And this begins to form my response . . . about where my view ever moves from the messy details to the “high” acknowledgment that this is God’s word for the church, not just a human doing. My response to that is that it is precisely these humans doings that are God’s word to the church. God’s word to the church is Matthew’s post-Torah Jewish Christianity, and Mark’s apocalyptic and surprising messiah, and Luke’s seamless-salvation-history-Davidic-King, and even John’s pre-existent heavenly but now incarnate Son of God.

Honoring them as the word of God means receiving them not only as they are actually given to us, but trusting that God gave us the kind of books he wanted us to have in order to find the salvation that God has on offer in Christ. In other words, it’s precisely by not turning these into history books that I honor them as the word that God has given to guide us into the life that is only found in Jesus the Son.

He continues in a subsequent post:

I would like to put the shoe on the other foot. Why must God be accountable to our modern, rationalistic demands about how the Bible must fit together in order to be trustworthy? Why must the Bible be devoid of human labor, research, and even historical creativity, in order to be worthy of God’s voice to speak through it?

What I am saying is that we trust that the Bible we have is the Bible God wanted us to have, and that we investigate this Bible to learn how it is, in fact, that God has chosen to speak to us. I trust that this Bible we actually have is the Bible God wanted us to have. To respond to this by saying, “If this is what the Bible is then we shouldn’t listen to it” is to say that God must fit certain criteria, established by us, independent of the actual contents of the Bible [!] in order to be worthy of our ear.

It will never do to say that God must speak in x manner in order to be worthy of our ear. It will only do to say, This is actually how God has spoken, therefore if we would hear God’s voice we must accept this mode of divine speech. All this is to say that, as pious as it sounds to demand that “Bible as word of God” dictate our posture toward the text, I will not allow that confession to tell me that the Bible must be something that the data demands be recognized as something else.

But secondly, the reason why it is important that pastors and theologians adopt this stance and not attempt to force the Bible into a preconceived mold is that it is disastrous for the faith of those who then go on to get an education in religious and/or biblical studies.

A professor friend of mine used to say, “A liberal is a fundamentalist who got an education.” What he meant by that is linked to what I said in my first point. Both fundamentalism and liberalism look at the world, and at the Bible, and make the same demands. This includes the demand for historical accuracy, the ability to be harmonized, and all the rest.

Once a thusly educated fundamentalist leaves the friendly confines and starts wrestling with the data in some other venue (such as an undergraduate or seminary New Testament Intro course), they discover that by those standards the Bible simply doesn’t measure up.

The problem is not that I’m saying that “the Bible doesn’t measure up to the historical standard,” the problem comes in when we affirm that in order to be truly apprehended as the word of God the Bible must live up to this preconceived historical standard. It’s that demand, made to my right and my left, that will cause people’s faith in the God of the Bible to be shaken when they wrestle with the tensions, not the reality of the data itself.

Allowing the data of the Bible to set our expectations about the kind of history we find there is essential–both for duly honoring the God who gave us this particular Bible and for speaking of scripture in such a way that followers of Jesus can maintain their faith even when they discover that the Bible does not live up to one set of preconceived expectations.

Categories
Science and Religion

N.T. Wright on America's Culture Wars and "Faith vs. Science"

Another good video.

Categories
Law and Policy Spirituality Theology

The Girl in the Dog Cage, the Lion, and the Lamb

Somewhere in America right now, there is a little girl locked in a dog cage.  A man will bind her with duct tape.  The man will sexually abuse her while another takes pictures and videos.  The men will distribute these materials over a vast network of child pornography file sharing servers.  Tens of thousands of other men will look at the pictures and videos, discuss them in chat rooms, use them as masturbatory tools, and demand more.  And they will get more, much more.

I know this is true because I’m teaching a course this semester on “Cybersecurity Law.”  Most of the course focuses on commercial and public espionage – hacking, data theft, and so on.  This week, however, the topic has been online safety – cyberstalking, harassment, obscenity and child pornography.  Our guest speaker yesterday was the Brian Sinclair, Chief of the Computer Crime Prosecution Unit in Bergen County, New Jersey.  While he mercifully didn’t show us any of the volumes of child porn his unit has seized over the years (it is technically a felony to display such materials even in an educational setting), he described in general terms the sorts of things that commonly appear, including what he noted as  “disturbing recent trend” towards the literal caging of victims.

It is nearly impossible to theologize about something like this without becoming either morose or trite.  Bergen County is a wealthy suburb of New York City, and most of the perpetrators of child pornography and child cyberstalking here are educated middle-aged men.  I could write about how the corruptions of wealth and power tempt these men to think of themselves as above any sense of law, morality or decency.  Or, I could write about the perversion of the mainstream entertainment media, and how it feeds into far darker “entertainments.”  I could explore how these sorts of practices explode whatever reticence I might have about the personal reality of the “demonic.”  These are worthy topics.

But I feel compelled to write today about the victims.  The girl in the cage is rarely rescued.  As Assistant Prosecutor Sinclair explained, in the rare cases where the prosecution is able to obtain a victim statement, the victim usually has already grown to adulthood.

Where is “Justice” for these victims?

This is a piercing theological question.  Any wise theologian will first admit that he or she cannot really offer anything like a satisfying answer.  As a Christian, I cannot offer a satisfying answer.  I can offer a Lament.  I can offer some action, even the meager offering of a law school course that maybe helps raise awareness.   And I can cling to a glimmer of hope, which I know with the heart of faith is more than a glimmer:  Christ will return and make this right.  Indeed, I can pray for these victims, and as I do so I can strain forward with the Church and the saints throughout all the ages towards the day when Christ will bring final justice into this world, the day of his return.

We Christians have lost, I’m afraid, the “blessed hope” of Christ’s return (Titus 2:13).  On the one hand, this is because the dispensational “Left Behind” theology has perverted this hope into a wish for me to be “raptured,” leaving the world – including the girl in the cage, if she has not made a “conscious decision for Christ” (and how could she, being locked up and tortured?) — to burn in dramatic High Definition and Dolby Surround Sound.  It’s a sort of parousia porn.  On the other hand, the this-worldly rendering of the parousia popularized by figures such as Jurgen Moltmann and N.T. Wright, while offering a valuable and necessary correction to dispensationalism, at times seems to mitigate the drama and decisiveness of Christ’s personal return.

The Biblical drama of the parousia is that it is a final unveiling of what is truly real.  Evil and injustice and the powers of this world are to be unmasked and shown for what they truly are.  Christ is to be shown fully for who he truly is.  The Church is to be shown fully for what it truly is.  All will see and know.

The girl in the cage will see and know. If the Bible’s claims about God’s unwavering compassion for the poor and oppressed are true, then I have a confident hope, indeed a kind of certainty, that the girl in the cage will recognize Christ the Lamb, will be drawn into his blessed presence, will be welcomed into the company of the saints who have held her in their prayers, will be marvelously healed.

The men with the duct tape and cameras will see and know.  I won’t presume to know the fate of any such individual person.  Yet I am certain, based on the Biblical witness, that many of them will gape in terror and hatred at Christ the Lion, and will justly be devoured.

None of this is comforting to the girl in the cage right now – again, how could it be, while she is locked up and tortured and unaware of her own hope for redemption?  None of it excuses the work that must be done right now to free her.  But it should compel Christians to echo on of the concluding prayers of the Christian scriptures, without which no Christian account of “justice” is complete:

He who testifies to these things says, ‘Yes, I am coming quickly.’  Amen.  Come, Lord Jesus. (Rev. 22:20-21.)

Categories
Culture

The Diversity of Islam

An excellent primer by Patrick Ryan in Commonweal.

Categories
Culture Epistemology

More Rationalistic Apologetics: Sigh

Scot McKnight writes about Dallas Willard’s new collection of apologetic essays, A Place for Truth:  Leading Thinkers Explore Life’s Questions.  Scot and many others like this kind of book.  For me, it provokes more of a frustrated shrug.

First — looking at the Table of Contents of this book, it’s an odd collection of folks who don’t agree with each other on many important things. Francis Collins and Hugh Ross speaking of faith and science in the same book? Really a radically different apologetic between those two, even though they both agree on the age of the earth (Ross thinks the Bible is a scientifically precise document and its supposed scientific precision is what led him to faith).

This strikes me as problematic, not just fot the coherency of the book, but for the presumption about apologetics and truth that underlie the book. It still is in this rationalistic vein of evangelical apologetics, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, there’s a place for such arguments — as where McGrath pokes holes in the “meme” idea, for example. But if the Big Idea underlying the book is that Truth is One and Truth is Rational and The One Rational Truth is Accessible to All Through Reason — then it’s a huge problem to feature radically contrasting perspectives on what the truth is about something like whether Gen. 1-11 is a kind of embedded pre-science (Ross) or an allegory (Collins).

Second — even the general “fine tuning” arguments Francis Collins makes are not in themselves terribly convincing. I think they are convincing, or at least “helpful,” for someone starting from a position of faith, in order to support or show the coherence of faith. But taken strictly on the grounds of secular reason, they don’t really prove anything.

And this, once again, is the central problem with Willard’s style of apologetics: it presumes that the propositions of Christian faith are demonstrable at least in significant part through the exercise of natural reason. This just isn’t so (or as Barth would say: “nein!”). A genuinely Christian epistemology and apologetic must begin with the claim that “Jesus is Lord,” a claim known only through revelation, and then work outwards by employing reason to demonstrate the coherence, beauty, and correspondence to reality of that claim (or better, the contingency of reality upon that claim).

Categories
Law and Policy Theology

First Faith, Law and Culture Talk: Stephen Long

The first talk in our “Faith, Law and Culture Speaker Series” at Seton Hall Law School will be held today, September 15, at 4:30 p.m. in the Faculty Library.  The speaker series will feature theologians whose work focuses on the connections between faith, reason, law, reconciliation, and justice.  Today’s speaker is Dr. Stephen Long of Marquette University (bio here:   http://www.marquette.edu/theology/long.shtml).  He describes himself as follows:  “Steve was baptized by the Anabaptists, educated by the evangelicals, ordained and pastorally formed by the Methodists and given his first position as professor of theology by the Jesuits, which makes him either ecumenically inclined or theologically confused.” Dr. Long’s topic for today’s talk is “Being a Christian in Modernity: Nominalism, Politics and the  Christian Life.”

The year-long series schedule is available here:  http://law.shu.edu/About/News_Events/faithlawculture/index.cfm.  All of our speakers, including Dr. Long as well as Miroslav Volf, David Bentley Hart, and Nicholas Wolterstorff, are distinguished and internationally recognized theologians.

Whether you’re a theologically-minded person or someone who thinks “faith and reason” is an oxymoron, we think you’ll find these talks stimulating.  There is still time to register and attend.

Categories
Relief Work Spirituality

Students of the Kingdom: When We Get it Right

Here’s an interview with a group of folks from my church who are doing some great missional work in Uganda.  This is a terrific example of holistic mission.