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New Perspective

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get into a topic I’ve been reading into for quite a while now, but it’s so deep and I’m so shallow. The issue is the so-called New Perspective on Paul. The Paul Page has some extraordinary articles describing it (start with Mattison’s summary), and so what I reproduce on this blog should only be seen as appetite-whetting for that excellent website.

For those of you who would like a summary of the summary listed above, read on. What is this “new perspective”?

Well, for starters, it’s not really new; it takes into account what its supporters insist is the actual historical context for Paul’s teaching on justification and removes it from the lens of Luther’s anachronistic understanding of the issue. What’s “new” about it is that it wasn’t until the seventies that Christians first started taking it seriously. The four most important scholars for this view are Krister Stendahl, E.P. Sanders (with his watershed 1977 book Paul and Palestinian Judaism), James Dunn (who modified Sanders’s view), and N.T. Wright (who has modified Sanders and Dunn). This position has plunged the scholarly community into a flurry of debate for the last forty years, with old school Reformed types standing the hardest against it but other Reformed theologians (such as Wright) showing a willingness to accept criticism of traditional Lutheran understandings on justification.

If you want a short sound-bite summary of this view as I did, you’ll be disappointed; it is, after all, an interpretation of one of the fundamental aspects of Pauline theology, which is remarkably complex for any position. But let me say a couple things that help position us to view Pauline theology in this way.

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Does majority rule in theology?

In this week’s installment of Theology Unplugged, a podcast I highly recommend, Reclaiming the Mind Ministries president Michael Patton made the following comments about full preterists (like myself):

Now I would say, you can believe that, and you can make your arguments — and many people do from Scripture. I’m not persuaded at all by them — but at the same time I would say that this is an unChristian way to believe about a particular issue in the end times. It’s an unChristian way or, another way to put it, unorthodox; it is outside of the sphere of orthodoxy within historic Christianity. Now, the next thing we ask is, ok, if it’s outside of the sphere of historic Christianity, does that make… [you] automatically a nonbeliever, someone who is outside the grace of God, someone who is unregenerate as we sometimes put it, or someone who does not have a relationship established with the one true God? And I would say no.

Now, as much as I appreciate his not calling me unregenerate, I am disturbed by this emphasis on Church tradition. He, a Protestant, uses “orthodoxy” (doctrine that falls within the “sphere of historic Christianity”) as a blunt object to determine what is Christian and what is not. Upon what grounds does he do this? What’s amazing is that he doesn’t offer a rationale for determining exactly which beliefs of historic Christianity are diagnostic for the label “Christian”. Infant baptism, baptismal regeneration, apostolic tradition/succession — none these extremely ancient teachings were ever repudiated by the Church of Rome or the East , and were thus held by all Christendom until Protestantism came along. Are all those who deny any of those to be termed “outside the sphere of orthodoxy” and hence guilty of “an unChristian way to believe”? The doctrine of the personhood of the Holy Spirit so essential to orthodox trinitarianism wasn’t even affirmed by the Church at large until after these ancient beliefs, at least two of which I believe Michael Patton denies!

Nor, apparently, can we fall back on the ecumenical councils to define orthodoxy for us. For one thing Patton finds beliefs outside the pale of orthodoxy that were never condemned by the whole Church. For instance, Patton states in no uncertain terms that Pelagianism is unorthodox and hence not “Christian”, yet that battle with Augustine was not fought at an ecumenical council and has yet to be repudiated by the Eastern Church. Conversely, he gives the belief on the hypostatic union as an example of a belief about the Trinity that is not diagnostic of orthodoxy, yet it was confirmed at an ecumenical council.

So what is he saying? That someone, somewhere in Church history had to believe it for it to be in that sphere of his? How arbitrary is that? It seems to be the case that Protestants (Reformed groups especially) selectively draw from Church tradition, and then pretend that the points from tradition they agree upon are infallible because they are drawn from Church tradition, yet at the same time Church tradition may be cast aside where necessary, and people like Michael Patton here don’t have a consistent rationale for which is which. In the same way I contended in the case of the Scriptures, Church tradition either contains errors or it does not. If it does contain errors, it may not be used as a silver bullet to dismiss anything that sounds strange to them but is irrefutable with Scripture. This is what they do with full preterism.

I refuse to be held captive to a “majority rules” hermeneutic; the “church” of Judaism as it appeared in Jesus’ day hadn’t been a good steward of the truth they had been granted in Old Testament times. Jesus showed them they had been wrong about the Messianic Kingdom, and I can’t see why anyone would insist that the late first-century Church had to understand it all, either. Someone was seriously misled somewhere, at least: either Jesus, Paul, Peter, and John were mistaken about the imminence of the Kingdom and Christ’s return or the Church of the latter first century by-and-large misunderstood the eschaton that had occurred. For obvious reasons, I choose the latter. And this makes my thinking “unChristian”?

Self-preservation, the Fall, and redemption

In my explanation of man’s depravity from the view of a recurring, individualized (non-historical) Fall, I have argued that mankind’s natural separation from God was in origin a result of natural self-preservation instincts. These instincts progressed first into childish selfishness and then, with the onset of divinely gifted God-consciousness (Romans 1:18-21), those instincts gone unchecked morphed into moral failure (sin), to the effect that scarcely had our species become aware of its Creator before it began to reject Him.

I thought of this when I came upon the following quote from C.S. Lewis:

If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?

It strikes me that God uses the selfsame aspect that damns us to redeem us. Self-regard is not an absolute evil; it is a neutral currency of the universe, one of which our ultimate God naturally demands the ultimate possession. This is no doubt because our blessed Maker, in molding man in His Own image, also imprinted upon him another, converse attribute of which He is the ultimate expression: self-sacrifice. In fact, it is this expectation God has of us, not the self-regard shared by every creature from amoeba to ape, that separates man from beast. That God demands something we are in some sense capable of but not predisposed to do is analogous to a parent teaching her daughter to help her in the kitchen, or her son to brush his own teeth (without swallowing the toothpaste!) so they won’t rot out of his head.

In order for us to become like Him, we must subordinate our self-regard to our self-sacrifice; but thankfully, as Lewis notes, we are not required — nor are we able — to perform self-sacrifice wholly independent of self-regard.

What do you think of this?

Why Christian activism seems liberal

Elsewhere I have blamed futurist eschatology for minimizing the Church’s call to focus on social issues and address the needs of the poor. But there are more causes than that alone; for instance, Derek Webb of Caedmon’s Call.

Josh Horne at the Smoak House has posted a dissent from Webb’s solo album, Mockingbird, which he finds enjoyable overall. Webb, whose schtick is to point out errors he sees in American evangelical Christianity, is the type who gives Christian activism its stereotype as indicative of liberal Christianity. It seems like anytime I hear of a Christian activist, he overshoots mainstream evangelical ideology to the point that his good points are marginalized and he is identified with the social gospel. For instance, as Josh points out, Webb makes some inane comments in his lyrics about war being an absolute evil. This has caused a little discussion in the comments that leads to discussion of the death penalty. Check it out and weigh in!

(Click here to comment on this post)

Friends like Job’s

Recently I heard a theologian talking about Job and was not surprised to hear him refer to Job’s “so-called friends”. Not surprised perhaps, but as usual when I hear this common sentiment, I was uncomfortable with it. Were Job’s friends there to give him a hard time? Were they there just so they could make him feel worse? Did they offer him their dire diagnosis of the cause for Job’s travail through condescending self-righteousness?

I’m not going to say that there was none of that attitude in what they said. I do think, however, that we can make the following observations:

1. The text plainly calls Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar Job’s “friends”.
2. They sat with him and shared his grief for a week’s time.
3. They didn’t simply tell him why they thought God had it in for him, but offered a solution (repentance) to extract him from further judgement. When Job was insistent that he had done nothing to repent for, they became even more determined that he do what they felt was necessary to avoid more of God’s judgment.
4. Job thought enough of them to pray for God to forgive them their incorrect counsel.

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Heads up! Change is coming!

Hey guys, just wanted to apprise you of an eminent development. I am going to try to move this blog to http://undeception.com, which is basically the same URL without the “wordpress”, with or without the www. I am doing this mostly so that I can customize some aspects of the site at my discretion. I’m moving over to a wordpress.org blog that requires a lot more manual coding than wordpress.com blogs, so there will doubtless be a few glitches here and there.

I’m going to post on both sites for a few more days. The biggest downside to switching is that I won’t get much visitor traffic by way of stumbling through wordpress.com by searches, so it’s important that, if I want to maintain or increase the current number of visitors, I will have to do something to make the new site show up on Google’s and other site’s searches. Until I see my page show up on Google, I will post on both URLs.

I would therefore like to request that my regulars (both of you ) update your feeds and especially your blogrolls and begin visiting my new site instead of this one. Please post your comments on that one instead, as well. You’ll notice a couple of my already implemented customizations in the comments section:

1) Below the comment entry block there is an as-you-type comment preview that shows what your comment is going to look like, even giving you a visualization of any html tags you use!

2) Also below the comment entry block there is a checkbox that is supposed to subscribe you to subsequent comments via the email address you enter; you will/should be able to manage your subscriptions and unsubscribe whenever you wish (I know I can manage it at your request, anyway). This plugin is in need of testing, so let me know how it goes, if you don’t mind.

Right now the site looks virtually identical to this one, although I’m likely to experiment with different themes soon. Also, I plan in the next day or so to map the last few comments on this blog and not the other one so that the other site is a complete mirror to this one and can supersede it.

Oh, and by the way, I’m not cross-listing this particular post. it’s my last undeception.wordpress.com exclusive!

Thanks for

Mohler on theistic evolution

In a recent post on his popular blog, Al Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, presented a predictable take on the origins debate. He states,

I have not said that one can’t be a Christian and believe in evolution. It is entirely possible to be a confused Christian or a confused evolutionist . . . or both. Nevertheless, the dominant theory of evolution — the theory as taught and defended by the world’s leading evolutionary scientists — explicitly rules out any supernatural design or interference at any point in the evolutionary continuum. That fact alone makes the theory incompatible with any legitimate affirmation of divine creation or of biblical theism.

I am frankly amazed that one so learned and esteemed should display such an obvious oversight concerning the most fundamental of the philosophical and theological grounds for theistic evolution (TE). Even in the purest form that affirms absolute naturalism and denies overt divine intervention in the process, theistic evolution affirms that God alone is responsible for setting the universe as we know it into place, but that the “divine creation” occurred by laws He and He alone created and set in motion. It does not rule out supernatural design but rather views God’s design as taking place at a higher level of sovereignty. The universe was created and life developed into human life because God purposed that they do so. TE in its fullest form does indeed rule out “interference at any point in the evolutionary continuum”, or rather, it renders such interference superfluous. The Author of nature did not need to step in and manually execute the actions of the Creation subroutine after He struck the “enter” key to run what He had already carefully programmed.

Later he triumphantly quotes a TE who happens to be a theology professor at the Claremont School of Theology apparently partial to open theism who tries to argue — with no success, from my vantage — that “[t]heologies that emphasize God as deeply involved in natural, open-ended processes seem better able to make sense of evolution than do the classical accounts of an omnipotent God.” I can’t see how this helps anyone’s case, but Mohler doesn’t even attempt to deconstruct that argument analytically, choosing rather to herald it as proof that TE “is not biblical Christianity.” Of course, I can see why he accepts that theologian’s understanding of TE: Mohler agrees with this mistaken theologian that evolutionary advances which appear random preclude any intentionality, even on the behalf of God. I don’t understand how any theologian, whether at Claremont or SBTS, can accept such an anemic view of the sovereignty of God. Scripture consistently declares that God ordains events beyond our purposes.

Another thing that really bugs me is how TE opponents speak incessantly of “Darwinism” and reference Darwin as the man behind the curtain, pulling the strings for evolutionary theory despite his reported demise in the nineteenth century; they don’t consistently apply their criticism to Christians who accept the theory of gravity as “Newtonists” or some such. Both Darwin’s and Newton’s views have been tremendously modified and/or overhauled since they originally formulated them, so the men who first hypothesized what later became accepted as a workable theory can hardly stand in as representatives of the current views, unless of course you need to demonize those views and need a voodoo doll to burn. “Darwin” becomes a boogieman, used to marginalize the theory of evolution as a personality cult. This tactic is manifest in Mohler’s closing stinger, so typical of anti-evolutionists, “…and that is why there is such panic in the temple of Darwin.” Two favorite red herrings here: 1) evolutionary theory is a religion and 2) Darwin the man = the mounds and mounds of scientific evidence that have confirmed some of the basic notions he first articulated.

Come on, Al. You may have reached the top of evangelical academia’s heap, but that doesn’t give you leave to stop thinking critically.

I’m it

I realized long after the fact that ElShaddai at He is Sufficient tagged me with a Bible meme.

Here’s my shot at it.

1. What translation of the Bible do you like best? NET or NIV (I know, I know, ElShaddai…)

2. Old or New Testament? Gosh! Do I have to choose? You can’t beat Isaiah for good reading, or Paul for doctrine. But since the New Testament has Jesus…

3. Favorite Book of the Bible? Matthew or Romans

4. Favorite Chapter? Hebrews 12

5. Favorite Verse? Hebrews 12:22-24

6. Bible character you think you’re most like? John

7. One thing from the Bible that confuses you? Ok, here’s a common one: the Nephilim of Genesis 6. Viewing it as the survival of an early Israelite myth makes it all the more intriguing

8. Moses or Paul? Paul

9. A teaching from the Bible that you struggle with or don’t get? The Trinity

10. Coolest name in the Bible? Crispus (Acts 18:8; 1 Cor. 1:14)

Ok, I’m going to tag Josh at The Smoak House, Vance at Meditations on an Eyeball, and…everyone else who loves Jesus — well, do you or don’t you?!

The Fallout

This is the eighth and final post in a series on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?

Part 2: What is inspiration?

Part 3: The nature of inspiration and the purpose of Scripture

Part 4: Inerrancy vs. infallibility

Part 5: The literary-generic principle

Part 6: The authority of Scripture

Part 7: Case study: the Fall

 

So anyway what about the Fall? If no one human is the cause for our sinful natures, what is?

Depravity for me is summed up by self-centered living, which is inexcusable for a species that has achieved consciousness of the divine. We are all sinners because we all start off life living for ourselves, which, after early childhood and the awareness of Otherness sets in, becomes sin. Sin is a state of estrangement from God. Over long eons, God brought His children up biologically so that mankind became sentient and came to know that it had a Maker. At that point, God chose a different means to mature our species. We still struggle to subdue and tame our own biological impulses that lead to our detriment and God’s displeasure, but we master them not through natural selection, but by the overcoming power of the Spirit of God. Christianity is the next (and final?) phase in the evolution of God’s creation.

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