Challenge

I've just looked at the book "Life of Jesus" which offers a 'challenge' after each episode of the video that it accompanies.

Also the other day on 2CBA-FM someone mentioned that part of evangelism is to 'challenge' someone...probably to challenge their beliefs.

Now, I don't know about you, but I wouldn't really feel any desire to 'rise' to someone's challenge which clearly seeks to favour their point of view over mine. I just wouldn't bother. It's an obnoxious, pugnatious way of regarding people, IMO. Far better to seek to relate to people, offer something to think about, or to discuss what made you think about faith and life...'challenge' see any marketers using that word to try to change your self-belief? I don't think so.

It suggest to me a sense of panic in those who use it...but don't panic, just get on with cultivating your life of following Jesus, bearing the fruit of the spirit, and seeking to serve and not be served.

Terms of engagement

Further to my previous post on this article, the post on Euangelion on creation, and thinking about this, occurs to me that in Gen 1. Gd sets out what creation is, in his terms: that is, he's the author, he knows what he did and what is important to inform our thinking and understanding about what he did; giving us a basis for informed (a) covenant life, (b) action in the creation, as its stewards, and (c) as part of (a) who we are before Gd and in creation.

If someone wants to use other terms, one has to question their basis in knowledge (true justified knowledge, and not the knowledge that seems to pop out of our cultural framework), their effect on our understanding of Gd and us (points a-c above) and their effect on who Gd is contra his self-representation. So it's man saying that Gd is not self-representing as creator in his terms, but we prefer out terms to define who Gd is as creator and we as creatures. Hidebound arrogance, to my mind, and philosophically and theologically unsound, undoing the stream of history that describes Gd's salvific basis, intent and achievement.

Bonhoeffer on Genesis 1.1 – “And God said…”

Yet another wonderful post on Der Evangelische Theologe:

And I quote the post in full:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1-3 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004): 40-1:
“[T]he God of the Bible remains wholly God, wholly the Creator, wholly the Lord, and what God has created remains wholly subject and obedient, praising and worshiping God as Lord. God is never the creation but always the Creator. God is not the substance of nature. There is no continuum that ties God to, or unites God with, God’s work – except God’s word…That is, ‘inherently’ [‘an sich’] there is no continuum; were the word not there, the world would drop into a bottomless abyss. This word of God is neither the nature nor the essence of God; it is the commandment of God. It is the very God who thinks and creates this word, but as One who chooses to encounter the creature as its Creator. God’s creatorship is not the essence, the substance, but the will or commandment of God; in it God gives us God’s very self as God wills. That God creates by the word means that creation is God’s order or command, and that this command is free.

“God says, God speaks. This means that God creates in complete freedom. Even in creating, God remains wholly free over against what is created. God is not bound to what is created; instead God binds it to God. God does not enter into what is created as its substance; instead what relates God to what is created is God’s command. That is, God is never in the world in any other way than as one who is utterly beyond it. God is, as the word, in the world, because God is the one who is utterly beyond, and God is utterly beyond the world, because God is in the world in the word. Only in the word of creation do we know the Creator; only in the word addressed to us in the middle do we have the beginning. It is not ‘from’ God’s works, then, that we recognize the Creator – as though the substance, the nature, or the essence of the work were after all ultimately somehow identical with God’s essence or as if there were some kind of continuum between them, such as that of cause and effect. On the contrary we believe that God is the Creator only because by his word God acknowledges these works as his own, and we believe this word about these works. There is no via eminentiae, negationis, causalitatis!”

On history

Plutarch writes thus in Theseus:

You know...how geographers, when they come to deal with those parts of the earth which they know nothing about, crowd them into the margins of their maps with the explanation, 'Beyond this lie sandy, waterless desrts full of wild beasts'...Now that in writing my Parallel Lives I have reached the end of those periods in which theories can be tested by argument or where history can find a solid foundation in fact, I might very well follow their example and say of those remoter ages, 'All that lies beyond are prodigies and fables, the province of poets and romancers, where nothing is certain or credible'

He recognises the consequence of not-history: if history cannot be reliably established, then there is nothing certain or credible.

This seems to establish the reason for the Bible giving us, and purporting to give us, sufficient detail of our historical setting and therefore the setting of God's covenant with us (and of the basis of our response to this world and to God), to provide us with understanding of the relationships that obtain in real terms between God the creation and ourselves. It is by these terms that God sets forth the setting of the drama of our interaction with God in his creation.

Thus history in Genesis roots our connection with God in palpably real terms; if it were not so, and there were no solid foundation to God's claims to creator, or the terms of his being creator were not congruent with the terms of our experience of his creation, and of himself, then our faith would be based, not in creation (Hebrews 11:3), but in fantasy and have no connection with the real world that we live in, or any bearing on our relationship either with the creation (cosmos) or God. God would cease to be real in terms that we know 'real' and recede to being lost in the mists where nothing is certain or credible, or can be known at all!

Creation in Romans

I liked this little note on Euangelion that sets the soteriological compass of God's creation.

The full text is here:

In a good little book called The Story of Romans: A Narrative Defense of God's Righteousness, A. Katherine Grieb writes about God's righteousness:


"

The Story of God's righteousness in Jesus Christ is at once the story of (1) God's sovereign renewal of the created cosmos, (2) God's redemption of humanity from universal bondage to Sin and Death, and (3) God's reconciliation of Jews and Gentiles (which involves both God's faithfulness to Israel and the keeping of God's promises for the Gentiles). It is critical to discern the apocalyptic framework in which the story appears: creations groans with expectation (Rom. 8:22) as Paul and his communities live out the script of the end time; they are players in the last act of God's apocalyptic drama of salvation, a story that began with creation and the fall and continues thorugh Israel's history up to the present moment" (p. xxiii)."

The story begins with creation: inevitably, God's relation with us and thus the span of his revelation is the whole creation: underlines that there is nothing apart from God and his actions that concerns our relationship with him.

Inserting naturalistic intervening processes, borrowed from a world view that turns from God seems to be fraught, because the creation that God relates into is the creation in his terms, and his terms are set out in Genesis 1. If we want to apply out terms, then we are speaking of another relationship between us/creation and God, not the one that he sets out as the basis for covenant, his love and our rebellion and the place where he overcomes our rebellion for our good and his glory.

Dark future

I read a review of Margaret Atwood's book "The Year of the Flood" (interesting biblical allusion) which included the following quotes:

"Science is finding stuff out about the material world"

and, a longer one:

"Art and religion -- and particularly narrative -- are wired in. Evolved adaptations," she says. "So our ability to tell stories, our ability to picture things, all evolved during very, very many generations. It would have had an evolutionary edge. Invention is part of that package.

"We seem to be hard-wired to have a belief system of some kind," she adds. "Even atheism. I understand that in Britain recently some people paid to put atheistic slogans on buses -- someone paid? That's religious! Once you're paying money to put slogans on things, well, it's either a product you're selling, a political party or religion.

"Very few people don't have some belief system that includes something other than themselves. That juet seems to be part of the tool kit that we have as human beings."

The slant I see in this is thus:

Some time ago one of the teachers at my parish church remarked, with some disparagement, that some of those who extol the direct reading of Genesis 1 hold that syncretic readings with mainstream (evolutionary) belief will lead to an undoing of faith, and by implication, hobble evangelism.

Atwood seems to have solved the problem: if we accept evolutionary explanations, then we admit the view that 'religion' is an evolved thing. That is, 'god' in this conception is within the creation, and the creation (cosmos) stands independently on its own feet.

Naturally, if this is 'in the air', in the popular conception of the world, evangelism will have to fail, because it will be heard as offering a type of salvation within the world as we know it, not over against the world as we know it. And there is no final hope! Faith will soon follow and crumble as people read it as something that is merely an evolved response to sentient life, and not the connection between our creator and us, through Christ; who, of course, is just a man within the same cosmos we inhabit.

Barth on church growth

Nice quote from Barth at Der Evangelische Theologe on church growth:

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 4.2, 648.

“The true growth which is the secret of the upbuilding of the community is not extensive but intensive; its vertical growth in height and depth. If things are well—and there is no reason why they should not be—this is the basis. The numerical increase of the community indicates that it is also engaged in this very different increase. But the relationship cannot be reversed. It is not the case that its intensive increase necessarily involves an extensive. We cannot, therefore, strive for vertical renewal merely to produce greater horizontal extension and a wider audience. At some point and in some way, where it is really engaged in vertical renewal, it will always experience the arising of new Christians and therefore an increase in its constituency, but perhaps at a very different point and in a very different manner and compass from that expected. If it is used only as a means for extensive renewal, the internal will at once lose its meaning and power. It can be fulfilled only for its own sake, and then—unplanned and unarranged—it will bear its own fruits. As the communion of saints takes place, the dominant and effective force is always primarily and properly that of intensive, vertical and spiritual growth.”

I made the following comment:

In the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, we are enthusiastically attempting the horizontal growth. Resources going to vertical growth are, to my mind, minimal. In my own parish there is work in this area, but it fails, IMO in producing a consistent loving outworking of the Spirit shown in his fruit.
I also have not noticed a great preparation for mission through extensive prayer, study and reflection on the word of God and work to grow in faith.
Seems doomed to me !

Leadership competencies

Caught this link on leadership by Deming

I post it in connection with my earlier posts on this misused term in the church.

Art and evolution

In the Sydney Morning Herald's Spectrum magazine for August 29-30 there was a review of a number of Darwin related books. Mainly art books. The review was entitled "Australian art takes an evolutionary turn", treating "Reframing Darwin: Evolution and Art in Australia", Darwin's Universe: Evolution from A to Z" and "The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution". [BTW, note the now popular use of colons in titles of books!]

The review was the predictable pean to evolutionary dogma that dominates the popular and semi-scientific literature. Tells us nothing, really.

I get the impression from this, and other items of cultural interest I've mentioned in recent posts, that the basic pulse of the modern intellectual climate is given by neo-Darwinian views of origins, it frames the way people approach life and relationships, at some level, and certainly creates an orienting grid through which human life and social and religious thought are filtered. If this assessment is correct, then if the question of origins is not dealt with in both theology and evangelism, then we will end up talking to ourselves, as we Christians largely do as we have evacuated the marketplace of ideas.

The review ends with this comment:

...if you find yourself needing ammunition for evolution-creationist fights at dinner tables or in the public sphere, Dawkins is the arms dealer of choice.

To continue the military metaphor, I would rely on the thermobaric weapon of the origin of life: the debate is only worth taking up if evolution's boosters can explain how life originated, and how a dumb collection of atoms spontaneously made their own software: an information and action system (code, language, reading and transcription machinery), as Paul Davies has made the point (in a New Scientist article in 1999).

I would also want to know why on earth it would matter in an evolutionary world? Matter doesn't give rise to any system of signification, so why do evolutionists so enthusiastically act as though things, including their ideas, matter? They speak as materialists, but act like theists!

There's another review of Dawkin's book at the Economist, which ends with the telling statement:

...Those who do read it will find that among the many puzzles that evolution explains so well are the futility and suffering that are ubiquitous in the natural world...the immensity of pain in the animal kingdom, which defies explanation except via the unyielding calculus of competitive survival.

Firstly, this suggests the rhetorical failure of theistic evolution, which pins pain on God's very good creation (and not seeing it in biblical terms as a result of our federal rejection of God in Adam), and the dead end of natural theology 19th C style, which fails to lead from pain to Christ. Secondly, I don't think evolution per se does explain suffering at all well, or in any convincing way, because suffering is a moral judgement, a value laden reaction to certain events. Once evolution can bring an ought from an is, we might start listening, but until then it will remain a destructive Christian heresy with its roots in pagan speculations about a world that made itself.

Incidently, the Economist's review gets short shrift from Darwiniana and relies on half digested straw man arguments about biblical creation.

Also check Dissenter's comments on Dawkins' book.

Copernicus

In a recent issue of the e-newsletter of cbeinternational a comment was made about the church opposing Copernicus' ideas about the solar system.

I sent this note in reply:

It is easy to think that because the church opposed some scientific advances in the early modern period that it did so as 'the church'; that is, informed by the Bible. In fact the opposition was purely cultural. People like Copernicus did not so much 'rub the Bible up the wrong way' as they challenged the prevailing aristotelian philosphy that had been taken into the church (and is still within it). The irony is that the rise of modern science relied upon Christian believers who took the Bible at face value; today they would be called 'fundamentalists'. But perjoratives aside, it is the realism of the scriptures and the realist ontology they promote that has lead to modern science, rather than the pagan aristotelianism with its ontology that steps outside any revelation and is based on pure speculation.

Then the editor wrote back and asked that I simplify the language!!

And thus:

"The church is often misunderstood as opposing science in the early days of modern science. But this is not totally true. What happened is that the church followed the beliefs of the day which were based on ancient Greek (pagan) views of the natural world: we know today that these pagan views were wrong.

When original thinkers, with their views based on the Bible, looked at the world with fresh eyes, they often ended up in disagreement with the pagan based common beliefs. So, while they looked like they opposed the church, they were really opposing paganism, which the church authorities had swallowed too.

The irony is that modern science arose because of thinkers who took the Bible at face value and were able to look at the material world without the blinkers of paganism. This is because the Bible introduces us to a world that is created by God and is given to us to examine and understand. Some would argue that Adam naming the animals is the first record of us examining and understanding the world.

The notion that women and men have different 'roles' in the church is, I think a similar example of the church having absorbed the world and not reading the Bible for its radical confrontation with human pretences.

BTW, check the news of next year's conference.

Becoming a minister

A recent post on Andy Goodliff's blog on starting in ministry attracted a comment from me. I've re-posted the comment below.

The blog was on how seminary study does not equip one for the real world of 'ministry'.

My comment, a little edited:

Being a 'minister' in organised church terms is very much a craft, which suggests that becoming a minister should be by an apprenticeship. That is, fresh out of theol. college, you are not a minister (although you might have the title), but have a body of knowledge and a level of intellectual understanding (but not necessarily wisdom or applied love) that will assist you be a minister, but not make you one. I don't think that it's even a precondition.

Step one would be to serve in a church under the guidance of its elders; later you might become an elder too, if the Spirit so provides.

However, a highly trained person might make a great teacher: different from the omnibus role we have today of professional minister (I note the unbiblical game was given away by the term 'laity', incidentally).

It would be great, I think if all Christians underwent some form of formal Christian education: some may do short courses, others might do PhDs (and then not advertise the fact out of properly placed humility :-) ); some would then go on to be Sunday School teachers, convene youth or adult study and prayer groups, others would assist with the formal weekly gatherings (aka services) as moderator, reader, speaker, teacher, prayer, etc.

This would tend to create ministering communities, rather than one-man shows, and one would hope, such communities that could organically support their ministry needs, without 'flying in' experts who are not part of the community to get rapidly grafted on, with many attendant problems (but some benefits, too, I agree).

It is the professionalisation of Christian ministry that is a problem. Once people are denied a valid voice in their Christian group, because they must defer to an expert (how does one become an expert in Christian life, or living in a loving manner against the challenges of every day?) they are told, implicitly, that they have no voice that's worthwhile for evangelism, or any other spiritual purpose; which is Not Good!

Grace

C. S. Lewis is reputed to have once remarked that the distinguishing feature of Christianity against other religions was that Christianity was based on the idea of grace: God's grace to us in Christ, to be specific.

But I think that God's grace goes much further, and marks all his interactions with us; including the very first.

Grace suggests generosity, the unlimited deployment of Godly resources where ours or other resources are simply incapable.

God's creation as recorded in Genesis 1 is an example of, and I think, consistent with his graciousness.

The alternatives, or the popular alternative of theistic evolution is, to my mind, most ungracious, and unlike God. God is not, as I read the scriptures, in the habit of requiring secondary causes to mediate his will. Well, I specifically think of grace setting aside our works, but wonder if grace also sets aside the possibility of God making a creation as a god-free machine that goes on to make itself. This seems to fly in the face of the generosity and thoroughness of God's grace, and his not relying on second causes to bring his covenental results: Christ saves, directly, without our works; God creates, as he said, without the works of a creation as a kind of demi-urge that removes God from his creation and obscures the marks of his loving grace towards us.

The church's mission

A quick count reveals that over my many decades of Christian experience I've been a member of about 17 churches, mainly in Sydney. There are also another 7 or 8 churches in Cambridge, London, Wellington, Melbourne, New York, Rochester (Minn), Chicago (south) and country New South Wales that I've visited, spoken to people in, and gotten as much involved with as my time in those places allowed.

The denominations include Anglican (ranging from evangelical to so-called 'high' and anglo-catholic), Presbyterian, Baptist, Churches/Disciples of Christ, Lutheren and Bretheren (the open, not the closed variety).

In many of these churches I've had wonderful experiences, had warm and encouraging fellowship with my Christian brothers and sisters and through their variety, been introduced to aspects of Christian community that I would not have known if I'd stayed in the Presbyterian church of my early childhood: from the liturgical dance of the Chicago University Presbyterian Church to the gigantism of the Garden Grove Community Church (I think it was the name prior to the Crystal Cathedral being built), to the direct biblicalism of St. Helen's at Bishopsgate in London and the wonderful accepting fellowship of some Baptist and Bretheren churches.

I've found the warmest community in a Presbyterian Church in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, the most accepting, an anglo-catholic parish in Sydney, the most open, the Presbyterian Church in South Chicago, the most friendly, a couple of Baptist churches, in Sydney and country NSW. The most spiritually frank doesn't really get a mention above (it should, perhaps): an Assemblies of God church meeting in an inner Sydney suburb, tied with an Anglican curate in a nearby suburb's church. I've enjoyed friendly and accepting bible study groups in a Disciples of Christ church in New York city, Cambridge Baptist church and All Souls London. I've experienced the opposite in my very own city!

Many of these churches have mottos; many mottos are of the style "Proclaiming Christ and making disciples". Very biblical.

Oddly, none take as their motto anything like "living out the love we are called to show" or "helping harvest the fruit of the Spirit in each others' lives" (see Galatians 5:22). But the whole point of Christian witness is to change lives. If ours aren't the first to change, then what is the point?

I say this having some more recent church experiences that would seem to belie the results that faith is supposed to have. Plenty of 'good teaching'; but one wonders, when it is supported by a dearth of 'good living'!

Chiasm

A couple of years ago I read a series of blogs treating the topic of literary devices being deployed in Genesis 1 to the effect of contradicting its possible historicity. Now, I can't recall if chiasm was one such device, but at the St Philip's Bible talk last week Justin included an example of chiasmus in the spoken words reported of Jesus. Jesus used the chiasm to emphasise what he was saying, and doubtless, to increase its memorability. In short, Jesus was speaking truth, not using a device to mask it.