“Following Jesus requires that we lose our overpowering sense of self. Such a loss often accompanies participation in any grand movement, but the kind of forgetfulness required to follow Jesus is different from those moments that are briefly exhilarating but soon lost. The forgetfulness that Jesus offers is made possible by the compelling reality and beauty of participation in his time, a time that cannot be lost, because it is God’s time.”
— Stanley Hauerwas, Commentary on Matthew 6.
“. . . Jesus commands us not to resist evil by using means that are evil. Jesus calls us to resist evil, but he does so by empowering us with the weapons of the Spirit.”
— Stanley Hauerwas, Commentary on Matthew 5.
A very cool new feature from Flickr: a collection of public domain photos from various museum and other archives.
“Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servent, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heavan and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
Phil. 2:5-11.
Scot has a thread going with some amazing stories of faith and doubt in the midst of terrible personal suffering. It’s incredible to read about the things people go through and to hear of the grace they find even in the middle of terrible hurt.
In Matthew 4, Satan tempts Jesus with worldly power. Jesus refuses. Hauerwas notes in his commentary:
The devil is but another name for our impatience. We want bread, we want to force God’s hand to rescue us, we want peace — and we want all this now. But Jesus is our bread, he is our salvation, and he is our peace. That he is so requires that we learn to wait with him in a world of hunger, idolatry, and war to witness a kingdom that is God’s patience. The Father will have the kingdom present one small act at a time. That is what it means for us to be an apocalyptic people, that is, a people who believe that Jesus’s refusal to accept the devil’s terms for the world’s salvation has made it possible for a people to exist that offers an alternative time to a world that believes we have no time to be just.
Mike Gene posts this test of ambiguity tolerance. I fail!
Mark Noll’s book Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America, is must-reading for anyone who wants to engage as an evangelical with historical and critical methods in Biblical studies. Noll sketches the history of evangelical interaction with Biblical criticism and points towards a way forward (a “third way”?) for evangelical scholarship. Noll shows that Protestant evangelicals historically tried to develop theological frameworks, such as B.B. Warfield’s notion of “concursus,” that would allow them to interact with the broader world of scholarship. Here is a somewhat lengthy passage in which Noll splendidly makes his point:
Since the fundamentalist-modernist controversies, however, evangelicals have usually lacked this kind of theological anchorage. Evangelical voices on both sides of the Atlantic have increasingly drawn attention to the striking absence of a secure theological framework for the study of scripture. So Englishman David Wright: ‘One of our most urgent unfinished tasks is the elaboration of a satisfactory doctrine of Scripture for an era of biblical criticism. . . . In particular, we have to work out what it means to be faithful at one and the same time both to the doctrinal approach to Scritpure as the Word of God and to the historical treatment of Scripture as the words of men.
An even more striking appeal along the same lines has come from Bernard Ramm, one of the leaders with E.J. Carnell and Carl Henry in the postwar renewal of evangelical thought. Ramm’s 1983 book, After Fundamentalism, called upon his fellow evangelicals to learn from Karl Barth how to be both genuinely Christian and genuinely honest about the ‘humanity’ of Scripture. Ramm was especially distressed at the ‘obscurantism’ which he felt had beset evangelical efforts to incorporate modern Western learning into the study of Scritpure. Here was the primary problem, as Ramm saw it, complete with his own italics and an unflattering comparison to Barth:
there is no genuine, valid working hypothesis for most evangelicals to interact with the humanity of Scripture in general and biblical criticism in particular. There are only ad hoc or desultory attempts to resolve particular problems. Barth’s method of coming to terms with the humanity of the Scriptures and biblical criticism is at least a clearly stated program. . . . To date, evangelicals have not announced such a clear working program. If Barth’s paradigm does not please them, they are still under obligation to propose a program that does enable an evangelical to live creatively with evangelical theology and bibilical criticism.
The historical record, both evangelical and more broadly Christian, suggests two things about Ramm’s appeal. First, Christians certainly have often done what he proposed. Whether it was Augustine and Platonism, Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, Luther and nominalism, Wesley and eighteenth-century sentimentalism, or Jonathan Edwards and Newtonianism, the history of the church is filled with orthodox thinkers who have baptized (and transformed) apparently alien world views for the use of the church. But history also reveals that the synthesis of any one era does not remain intellectually or spiritually satisfying indefinitely, at least without periodic readjustments requiring nearly as much creativity as the original formulation. Ramm’s appeal, therefore, does not seek the impossible or the unorthodox, but it does call for the exercise of creative theological energy on a very broad scale.
Scot McKnight has been blogging about a “Third Way” in evangelicalism. Donald Bloesch wrote a book in 1983 — yes, 25 years ago! — talking about many of the same ideas: The Future of Evangelical Christianity: A Call for Unity Amid Diversity. Among other things, Bloesch’s book (and others from that era like it) show that thinking about a “third way” is not just some kind of emergo-liberal babble. Bloesch resonates with me on scripture and epistemology. Here he is in “The Future of Evangelical Christianity” on scripture:
As I see it, there are three basic approaches to scriptural authority: the sacramental, the scholastic, and the liberal-modernist. In the first, the Bible is a divinely appointed channel, a mirror, or a visible sign of divine revelation. This was the general position of the church fathers, the doctors of the medieval church, and the Reformers. In the second, the Bible is the written or verbal revelation of God, a transcript of the very thoughts of God. This has been the viewpoint of Protestant fundamentalism, though it was anticipated in both Catholic and Protestant scholastic orthodoxy. in the third, the Bible is a record of the religious experience of a particular people in history; this refelects the general stance of liberalism, both Catholic and Protestant. Only the first position does justice to the dual origin of scripture — that it is both a product of divine inspiration and a human witness to divine truth. We need to recognize the full humanity of Scripture as well as its true divinity. Indeed, it should be impressed upon us that we can come to know its divinity only in and through its humanity. As Luther put it, the Scriptures are the swaddling clothes that contain the treasure of Christ.
Well there you have it — all of the issues that are on the table today were being discussed by wise and eminent evangelical theologians such as Bloesch twenty-five years ago. And, as Bloesch notes, what we are calling the “third way” is really the ancient way of “faith seeking understanding.”
Similarly, Bloesch deals in “The Future of Evangelical Christianity” with how we define the inerrancy or infallibility of scripture. He says:
On the intractable problem of whether Scripture contains errors, e need to recognize that this conflict is rooted in disparate notions of truth. Truth in the Bible means conformity to the will and purpose of God. Truth in today’s empirical, scientific milieu means an exact correspondence between one’s ideas or perceptions and the phenomena of nature and history. Error in the Bible means a deviation from the will and purpose of God, unfaithfulness to the dicates of his law. Error in the empirical mind-set of a technological culture means inaccuracy or inconsistency in what is reported as objectively occurring in nature or history. Technical precision is the measure of truth in empiricism. Fidelity to God’s Word is the biblical criterion for truth. Empiricism narrows the field of investigation to objective sense data, and therefore to speak of revelation as superhistorical or hidden in history is to remove it from what can legitimately be considered as knowledge. The difference between the rational-empirical and the biblical understanding of truth is the difference between transparency to Eternity and literal facticity.
Again, here it is — a critique of modernist epistemology from an evangelical theologian who is not “post-modern” twenty-five years ago. The “third way” is not an effort to do something new. It’s an effort to correct something new and get back to something ancient.
Michael Bird at Euangelion (fast becoming one of my favorite lunchtime blog breaks!) offers a long post on Evangelicals, the Reformed, and evangelicalism inside and outside of North America.
On some folks in the Reformed wing of North American evangelicalism today, Bird says [correction: I realized after I posted this that it is offensive out of context. I myself am “Reformed” in theology, generally speaking. Bird is referring, I think, to a very narrow sub-set of folks who are probably better regarded as hyper-Calvinist rather than “Reformed”. Apologies for any offense]:
(1) They are more excited about all the things that they are against than anything that they are for; (2) They preach justification by faith, but in actuality practice justification by polemics; (3) They appear to believe in the inerrancy of a confession over the suffiency of the gospel; (4) They believe in the doctrines of grace, but do not treat others with grace; (5) They believe that unity is overrated; (6) They like doctrines about Jesus more than Jesus himself (and always defer to the Epistles over the Gospels); (7) mission means importing their debates and factions to other churches; and (8) The word “adiaphora” is considered an almost expletive.
Preach it Mike! Concerning North American evangelicals in general, he says:
my dear friends in North America have to learn that outside of North America the things that they regard as badges of evangelicalism may not necessarily be badges elsewhere. For example, nowhere outside of the USA is “inerrancy” the single defining issue for evangelicals. The UCCF statement of faith in the UK refers to the Scriptures as “infallible” not inerrant. At the GAFCON meeting in Jerusalem where an international group of Evangelical Anglicans met together, their statement of faith referred to the “sufficiency” of the Scriptures, but there was no reference to inerrancy or infallibility. Ironically, these are people who are besieged by real liberals (not N.T. Wright, Peter Enns, Norman Shepherd, or those Federal Vision chaps, I mean real liberals!) and they do not associate an orthodox view of Scripture with pledging one’s allegiance to the Chicago Statement or to B.B. Warfield.
And further he notes:
there are also some things about North American evangelicals that Christians outside of North American cannot comprehend: 1. Only north american evangelicals oppose measures to stem global warming, 2. Only north american evangelicals oppose universal health care, and 3. Only north american evangelicals support the Iraq War. Now, to Christians in the rest of the world this is somewhere between strange, funny, and frightening. Why is it that only north american evangelicals support these things? Are the rest of us stupid? It makes many of us suspicious that our North American evangelical friends have merged their theology with GOP economic policy, raised patriotism to an almost idolatrous level, and have a naive belief in the divinely given right of American hegemony. North Americans would do well to take the North-Americanism out of their evangelicalism and try to see Jesus through the eyes of Christians in other lands.
Amen brother!