Recently in Spiritual Category

I'm not going to dignify this enough to give it a further link beyond all the attention it's getting, but I can't resist commenting on the idea of desecrating the Eucharist in an internet stunt. In case you haven't heard of the events this is about, there are two posts about it in the latest Christian Carnival. You'll have to follow the links there.

This is one of the lamest things I've ever heard of, and the fact that people are insulted is extremely unfortunate, because they shouldn't be.

Consider the Catholic view. According to transsubstantiation, this action takes something that isn't a piece of bread but is literally Jesus, the same Jesus who was pierced by swords, spears, and rusty nails on the cross. So someone pierces Jesus with a rusty nail and attaching some pages from the Qur'an and Richard Dawkins' diatribe against theism. I'm not sure what the fuss is. He didn't do anything that hasn't already been done, if to the Catholic view is correct. In fact, the person performing this act (along with the rest of humanity) was already the cause of Jesus' death, and thus he'd already done the thing that he so proudly did. He'd already killed Jesus, never mind poked a hole in him with a rusty nail.

Of course, if the Catholic view is wrong, then this action is of little significance except as the immoral act of deliberately trying to cause offense to a large group of people, most of whom are very peace-loving. That's nothing at all to proud of, but why should I as a Protestant be offended that someone seeks to offend Christians? Isn't that what Jesus said to expect? Didn't he announce that lots of idiots will come along and say all sorts of nasty things about his followers? So someone from an anti-theist site decides to offend Christians, and he does so publicly. It's ok to recognize the immorality of his motivations, but I don't understand why people are up in arms about this.

In the latest Christian Carnival, I found a post at Got Bible? about the term 'Reverend' for people we also call pastors or ministers. I remembered posting about the same issue a few years ago, but as I was reading this post a new idea occurred to me. At least I thought it was a new idea. Here's the idea. Wouldn't it be interesting to start calling every Christian 'Reverend' the way everyone is a brother or sister in a lot of congregations? After all, Paul calls everyone saints as a reminder that we're all made holy in Christ. Doesn't 'Reverend' pretty much mean the same thing?

The problem with the term is that it makes some people seem more holy just because they hold a certain position in the church, and that's completely opposed to biblical teaching. But if you called everyone by that term, it would removed the problem. I thought about doing this after church on Sunday, but I didn't get around to it with anyone.

So I went to go find my previous post, and here it is. Check out the last paragraph especially. Am I really that out of it that I can't remember the punchline of a post that I can nevertheless remember writing? I mean, I can remember the content of the punchline enough to come up with it again, but I can't remember that it's not new and that it was part of the original post that I was thinking about all along, and I somehow end up thinking it's a new idea that I've never thought of before.

I've often heard passages of music that sound similar enough to another one and wondered if the writer might have taken it from that without noticing. There's a beautiful Spock's Beard song that has a line that sounds an awful lot like John Williams' Jurassic Park theme, which came out the year before. I've long thought some pieces by Trevor Rabin of Yes had some similarities to the Princess Bride theme by Mark Knopfler. There's a repeated short bridge section in Carry on Wayward Son that sounds similar to a Journey song that was never released (but I think might be on their boxed set). That song had been played on a tour the previous year when Kansas had opened for them. The guys in Journey have several times publicly accused Kerry Livgren of deliberate plagiarism. If I can steal an idea from myself without even knowing it, surely these musicians (and all of them are good writers) can unknowingly come up with a melody that's similar to one they've heard before but don't happen to remember hearing.

In our sermons, we just finished Matthew 1-7 followed by the Ten Commandments. Matthew 5-7 contains the Sermon on the Mount, and doing that right next to the Ten Commandments is pretty convicting. It's hard to imagine anyone who has carefully read and studied the Sermon on the Mount coming away from it thinking that it's easy to follow Jesus' teaching there. In the light of the full teaching of Jesus, anyone who does so is like the Pharisee who thanks God that he's not like those sinners, someone Jesus roundly condemns. The person is indeed a hypocrite of one of the worst kinds. In one of the last few sermons in the series, one of our elders pointed out exactly this response as one of the many ways people have responded to the Sermon on the Mount that miss the point, in this case violating several other major teachings of Jesus in the process.

I've been trying to find a good interpretation of Barack Obama's 2006 words that have recently gotten a lot of attention. (I first saw the complete quote in context here. although I won't endorse everything in that post, which also seems to me to be focused in the wrong direction.) I'm not having an easy time being charitable.

And even if we did have only Christians within our borders, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? James Dobson's, or Al Sharpton's? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount - a passage so radical that it's doubtful that our Defense Department would survive its application?

There's a lot in there that worries me, quite deeply in fact. I've seen a lot of comment about these words, and a lot of it isn't entirely fair, which amazes me given how many things could be fairly criticized. I do think it reveals some lack of understanding about the New Testament's presentation of how Christians should see the Old Testament, but some very smart biblical scholars make those same mistakes, and in the theologically liberal churches whose well Obama drinks from, I'm sure he gets most of his understanding of the Bible from such people (probably very indirectly).

I've deliberately put off commenting on it, but I still haven't seen anyone point out the aspect of this statement that most disturbs me. (The closest is Collin Hansen's Christianity Today article, but that only gets to the beginning of my worry.) This isn't the only time I've seen Obama try to use the Sermon on the Mount as a method of sticking it to someone whose sins he doesn't happen to commit (or at least not in the way they do). It's very strange to use the Sermon on the Mount that way, though. The Sermon on the Mount sets some pretty tough standards, ones that no one really could meet.

Kevin Sam tagged me with this meme. I don't always get around to following up on these things, but this seemed like less work than the post I'm working on that I'd otherwise be completing right now.

1. What translation of the Bible do you like best?

I probably use the ESV more than anything else.

2. Old or New Testament?

Uh ... they're both the Bible. I spend more time in the Old Testament just because it's bigger and takes longer to get through.

3. Favorite Book of the Bible?

I can't name a favorite, but some favorites are (in one particular order) Philippians, Isaiah, Deuteronomy, Ecclesiastes, II Peter, and Habakkuk.

4. Favorite Chapter?

Again, I have to list several, but near the top would be Psalm 139, Philippians 2, II Peter 1, Genesis 50, Isaiah 10, John 17, Acts 17, Zechariah 14, and Genesis 5 (I'm not kidding about the last one, either; it's the key to a major theme of the book and of the entire Bible).

5. Favorite Verse?

Phil 3:12-14 isn't one verse, but it's one sentence that would be hard to break up.

6. Bible character you think you're most like?

Moses

7. One thing from the Bible that confuses you?

I don't know if it's really confusion, but one recent wondering that comes to mind is how the Ithamarites ended up with the high priesthood by the time Samuel was born given that the descendants of Phinehas the son of Eleazar should have had the high-priestly role.

8. Moses or Paul?

After my answer to #6, I can't resist saying Paul.

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

I'm currently working on the fact that Paul can see the unknown God in Acts 17 as God, but he doesn't think someone believing a different gospel believes in the same Jesus as he does. He's got to be working with two different senses of "the same as", but I need to figure out what those two senses might be exactly. What's worse is finding the same phenomenon going on within one text in II Kings 17 with the syncretistic practices of the resettled peoples in the former northern kingdom counting as both fearing and not fearing YHWH.

10. Coolest name in the Bible?

Melchizedek is one of my favorites, but it's hard to resist mentioning Maher-shalal-hash-baz. I'm sure there are a few that I might like even more, but I won't be able to remember them now. Or is this a trick question, and it's supposed to be the tetragrammaton?

I have to tag five people, so here they are: Mike, Danny, Mark, Sam, and Nobody.

In a comment on this post, Kenny Pearce directed me to Robert Adams' paper "Christian Liberty", which appears in Philosophy and the Christian Faith, ed. Thomas V. Morris, a book I happen to have. I had been making the claim that a Christian ethical theory that fits with the biblical texts requires us to be perfect, as God is perfect. It thus allows for no actions that are what philosophers call supererogatory. A supererogatory act is supposed to be something that would be a wonderful thing to do but is far beyond what you can be expected to do. As I'd been saying in the post I linked to, I don't think Jesus believed in such acts. The Sermon on the Mount seems to me to preclude such a category. Since I think the Sermon on the Mount accurately captures moral truth, I reject the notion of supererogation.

Adams says that a Christian ethical view needs to allow for supererogation to capture the sense of options in Christian life. There's no other way to account for Paul's insistence that Christians are free in Christ and no longer slaves, that Christians are friends of God and no longer in servitude. I have two responses, one exegetical and the other philosophical.

The exegetical point is that I think he misconstrues Paul's point. Paul isn't saying that we are free from God's command. The freedom is first of all a freedom from sin. It's a freedom to serve God, which is put in slavery language. Christians are no longer enslaved to sin but are instead enslaved to God. This picks up on the language of Exodus. The people of Israel were freedom from slavery to Pharoah to become slaves of God. The Hebrew term in question is often translated as "worship", and so translations often say that Israel is freed from slavery to Pharoah to go worship God. But the verb is the same. It's a movement from slavery to Pharaoh to slavery to God. God is the master. It's just that God is a master who loves his people and wants what's best for them, while Pharaoh is just taking advantage of them.

The parallel language in Paul's epistles about Christians being freed slavery from sin to become enslaved to God should be no surprise given the old covenant antecedent. Freedom in Christ is slavery to God. So I don't see how the movement from slavery to freedom involves moral permissibility to do as we wish provided that we meet some minimal moral threshold. It in fact binds Christians to serve God fully and completely, to surrender any self-directed goal in favor of becoming like God, having a heart that values what God values, having motivations that line up with God's will, and acting in a way that a morally perfect being would act. This is in fact what the Sermon on the Mount enjoins. "Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect", an echo of Leviticus 18, which says "Be holy, as I am holy."

Now this doesn't mean that there aren't options in Christian living. As Adams points out, there are two ways of generating options. One way is supererogation, which allows for the less-than-perfect to be morally permissible. That's what I don't see Jesus allowing for. The other way is what Adams calls indifferent actions. These are things that are equally good, and so we have the option of choosing whichever of the equally good things we will do. If there really are equally good things, all things considered, then I have no problem with those.

I'm not sure they will easily occur, though, and Adams seems to agree. He just says it's because of nuances in ethical importance that may play a role. I can imagine he has in mind things like the fact that two actions might be equally good but that one of them involves going against my natural tendency and thus allows me to develop a trait that I ought to work on. He might have in mind two actions that, other things being equal, are equally good, but one of them involves a better fit with my special obligations to my family. In such cases, it's pretty clear to me that the one that is better, all things considered, is morally obligatory. So these aren't options after all. But there is room for all considerations to work out equally. It just doesn't seem likely that they will be exactly equal. What seems more likely is that they will be so close to equal that I won't be able to discern the moral difference or the balancing out of moral considerations in the right direction. There is always the problem of figuring out what is the best option when various possible courses of action appear in front of me.

This difficulty suggests to me a philosophical distinction that I think lies behind my disagreement with Adams. He wants a moral theory that allows for options in order to explain the difference between legalism and Christian freedom. But he is locating that difference in moral obligation. There can't be moral obligations that I ought to do, or I am not free in some sense. I am not morally free to do what I want. I think this is the wrong place to locate Christian freedom, because I think we do have an obligation to do what is best. It is a moral obligation, not some other kind of constraint. What Christian freedom amounts to is not freedom from moral obligation. Paul even says so. He says there's the law of Christ.

What we don't have are very specific laws that are to be followed absolutely, without room for reflection on whether those laws apply in our case or whether those laws conflict with other laws and what we should then do. Christian freedom, on my view, consists of not being bound by laws to be followed without reflection. It consists of being bound by general moral principles that require careful thought about what we ought to do, what we ought to be motivated by, what attitudes we ought to have, what character traits we ought to be developing, and so on. Adams seems to want freedom from obligation, but I think Christian freedom is rather freedom from rigid rules. Morality isn't about rules. It's about conformity to a standard, a standard who is a person. Christian morality has to do with being conformed to the image of Christ, being transformed to becoming perfect. It is much more complete than simply an ethics of action. There is something morally wrong about us if we are not perfect, and our moral obligation is to pursue perfection. This is the thrust of the ethical teaching of Jesus and Paul both (along with the rest of the Bible, I might add).

I was struck by the HCSB translation of Matthew 5:

But I tell you, everyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. And whoever says to his brother, 'Fool!' will be subject to the • Sanhedrin. But whoever says, 'You moron!' will be subject to • hellfire.

There's a footnote after "Fool!" that says:

Lit Raca, an Aram term of abuse similar to "airhead"

On the one hand, I don't generally approve of translating words that in the Greek are foreign (in this case Aramaic) into English translations as English. It's not a Greek word, so translating it into English should involve keeping the foreign word as a foreign word, other things being equal. But Matthew's readers would have know the word, or he wouldn't have used it. English-speakers generally don't. So other things might not be equal in this case.

That issue aside, I think the HCSB has it right with "moron" and "airhead". Those words have much more force than the typical "fool" used in this passage. The downside is that Jesus may well have intended a connection with the fool of Proverbs, who usually is called a fool in English translations. But the English "fool" doesn't exactly capture that either. The term "moron" really does capture the anger element Jesus is getting at, and "airhead" isn't bad for "Raca".

It would be fun to ask people where the word "moron" is in the Bible and see what they come up with. It would be interesting seeing how certain people respond to Jesus saying that calling someone a moron is sufficient for deserving to burn in hell (I'm thinking of people who see Jesus as all mercy as a revision from the wrath of God in the Old Testament). All it takes is calling someone a moron. I know the Sermon on the Mount has pretty high standards, but think about that for a little bit.

Ilya Somin takes on Daniel Callahan on an issue we don't hear about all that much: radical life extension. Callahan argues against any technology that could extend the human lifespan to double its length. His reason? It's not tragic that people die, at least if they've lived a relatively long life. Somin seems to take this approach as indicative of social conservatism. There are so many things wrong with this that I'm not sure where to begin. I'll start somewhere though, and I hope I'll get to it all.

1. If this is supposed to be an argument against life-extending technology, it fails hopelessly. Suppose it isn't tragic if someone dies at age 86. Does that make it wrong to extend the person's life to 145, say? I don't see how that follows.

2. The fact that dying at age 86 is relatively better than dying at age 2 does not mean dying at age 86 is not tragic.

3. Similarly, the fact that we can alleviate our existential agony at confronting death at 86 by saying "oh, it's all right; she lived a good life" also does not mean dying at age 86 is not tragic. It's simply a sign that we seek to find coping mechanisms by comparing lives that are relatively not as bad as others. That doesn't make death ok, and it doesn't mean death isn't tragic even with a relatively long life. It certainly doesn't mean a longer life wouldn't be better.

4. There is good reason to think all death is unfortunate. Why wouldn't it be better to extend our lives indefinitely? Even if an 86-year life is better than a 23-year life, it doesn't mean 86 years is the best there can be. There are people (I know a number of them) who claim that they wouldn't want to live too long a life, but that's at least partly because we're used to shorter lives and partly because this existence in a fallen world involves a lot of grief. There come points in life when we wish for more but don't have it. That doesn't make a 200-year life bad, though. It just means a 200-year life might well have lots of bad things in it, just as a 100-year life can, and just as a 50-year life can. The fact that there will likely be twice as much bad might drive people from wanting the possibility, but there will just as likely be twice as much good. I suspect the real desire not to see a 200-year life as good is that we've become too used to not wanting what we can't have.

5. I don't know if Callahan is a Christian, but most social conservatives in the U.S. are. If Somin thinks this is typical of social conservatives, I'd be extremely surprised if he's correct. Christians tend to think of eternal life as intrinsically good. It's true that longer life in this life isn't the goal for Christians, but the extended life itself is intrinsically good according to Christians, even if the more important goals are spiritual, including eternal life in the new heavens and new earth. So I have a hard time thinking Callahan's view should be typical of social conservatives.

6. What's worse for Callahan's view according to Christianity is that the current limit on life is actually a penalty. Death is intrinsically bad, and Christians can't deny that even if they seek to see extra years as not intrinsically good. It is at the very least a consequence of sin, and most Christians would see it as a penalty for sin. Even if animals would have died had humanity not sinned, human death is the result of sin according to Christianity. The only sense in which death can be an instrumental good is that it is a release from the fallenness of this world, but even that is only true of someone who will receive eternal life after this world.

This just leaves me bewildered that this view could be seen as representative of social conservatism, even aside from the reasoning that I've questioned. I'm not going to advocate putting lots of effort into extending our lives in order to put off something I consider every human being to deserve. It may be important to treat out bodies well because we're made in the image of God and represent him, and it may be good to see the intrinsic goodness of life as God has created it, but that doesn't mean it's good to put in a lot of effort to stave off what God has declared to be the end of every human being in this life. Christians do have reasons to try to resist expending a lot of resources on this sort of thing. But I don't think Callahan's opposition is well-grounded, and I hope it doesn't become the approach associated with social conservatism. It sounds to me more like resisting change for the sake of resisting change rather than having any real grounding for such opposition.

Consider the city of refuge law in Deuteronomy 19:

Here is the law concerning a case of someone who kills a person and flees there to save his life, having killed his neighbor accidentally without previously hating him: If he goes into the forest with his neighbor to cut timber, and his hand swings the ax to chop down a tree, but the blade flies off the handle and strikes his neighbor so that he dies, that person may flee to one of these cities and live. Otherwise, the avenger of blood in the heat of his anger might pursue the one who committed manslaughter, overtake him because the distance is great, and strike him dead. yet he did not deserve to die, since he did not previously hate his neighbor. [Deuteronomy 19:4-6, HCSB]

Compare Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount:

You have heard that it was said to our ancestorys, Do not murder, and whoever murders will be subject to judgment. But I tell you, everyone who says to his brother, 'Fool!' will be subject to the Sanhedrin. But whoever says, 'You moron!' will be subject to hellfire. [Matthew 6:21-22, HCSB]

Jesus' sequence of "You've heard that it is said" statements and their corresponding "But I say" statements are sometimes taken to be revisions of the Torah or at least revelations of the hidden meaning behind the Torah, which readers couldn't have seen very easily without his aid. Not so. When he refers to the spirit of the law, he doesn't mean just some hard-to-see intent. He means the basic fundamental principles that undergird the specific teachings, and these are usually explicitly taught clearly within the Torah, some of them over and over again.

I just noticed this particular statement yesterday, but it's pretty clear in the Deuteronomy passage that the difference between the murderer and the manslaughterer is that the murderer hates their neighbor. The reason the manslaughterer doesn't deserve death (and by implication the reason the murderer does) is that the manslaughterer doesn't hate (and the murderer does). So it's actually hate, in Deuteronomy 19, deserves death. When Jesus says that anyone who hates deserves hellfire and judgment, he's not going deeper than the Torah's own criterion, which is the heart attitude. There are probably lots of cases of this kind of thing, but this particular one struck me yesterday when reading Deuteronomy 19. I don't think I'd ever noticed it before.

Justin Taylor had some great posts not too long ago on imprecatory prayer (i.e. praying against someone). I was particularly impressed by Crying for Justice. The main difficulty is that these prayers occur throughout the psalms (and elsewhere in the Bible), and yet they seem to offend modern moral sensibilities. Justin gives three approaches people have taken that minimize the role of imprecatory prayers in the Bible and why those views are misguided:

1. Imprecatory psalms express evil emotions that should be suppressed or confessed as sin (C. S. Lewis, Walter Brueggemann).

2. They are utterances consonant with old covenant morality but inconsistent with new covenant ethics (Roy Zuck, J. Carl Laney, Meredith Kline).

3. Such words may be appropriately spoken only by Christ in relation to his work on the cross and only by his followers through him (James Adams, Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

Justin gives a brief but good account of why all three views are unsatisfactory and offers a better approach that takes these psalms as legitimate prayers in certain contexts, even if such contexts are more rare in contemporary North American life. I won't repeat his reasoning, but I think he's right.

I think it's worth thinking through the possibility that love and hate are simultaneously possible and in fact even good in certain contexts. We assume that love and hate are opposites, and thus love for enemies requires not hating anyone. But there are clear biblical statements of hate for people, which Justin in an earlier post explains and defends in the context of loving enemies. Augustine's way of thinking through this issue has seemed to me to be the best way to work together these two seemingly contradictory themes. Love is our obligation, always, to any human being, whether we see the person as an enemy or not. With respect to the gospel, no one is our enemy. Everyone is a person in need of repentance. At the same time, we ought to hate evil, and people can be pretty evil. Everyone is evil in some significant ways, and we ought to hate what is evil in people.

This isn't just hating actions that are bad, since actions aren't all that makes us bad. Evil is within us, worked into the very fiber of our moral thinking, our character, our hearts and minds. We ought to hate that in anyone, and that does mean hating individual people with respect to the things in them that are evil. But what is redeemable, what will still be there if the person is transformed by God's grace, is always lovable, is always worthy of love. We aren't worthy in ourselves, without God, of any love, but what remains of God's original work (and something must, or regeneration would actually produce a new person, with the original ceasing to exist) is good. What God will do in transforming someone's mind and heart is good, and that is worth seeing as deserving of love. This is so even with the worst persecutors of Christians. Consider the example of the worst of such persecutors in ancient times, Saul of Tarsus, who was so transformed.

This is funny coming from a Baptist theologian and biblical scholar:

If I’m called to preach the gospel among a lot of people who are cultural teetotallers, I’ll give up alcohol for the sake of the gospel. But if they start saying, “You cannot be a Christian and drink alcohol,” I’ll reply, “Pass the port” or “I’ll think I’ll have a glass of Beaujolais with my meal.”

For context and explanation, see the whole quote. It's just funny seeing this from a committed Baptist like Carson, but then again there's only been one time I've seen anything in Carson's writings that I disagree with, and I've read a lot of Carson. In that case he did get it about as wrong as it could be gotten, but it really is the only time I remember thinking that something Carson was writing was surely wrong. (There have been things he's defended that I've had no view on, but that doesn't count as disagreeing with him. There have also been times he's said things I disagreed with, until I finished seeing his arguments, and then I was convinced. But I don't remain in disagreement with him in such cases.)

But there aren't that many Baptists, even Reformed Baptists, with absolutely no qualms about the fundamental morality of drinking alcohol. I'm a complete teetotaler myself, but my reasons for not drinking alcohol have nothing to do with thinking it's wrong to do so. I just think it smells so unappetizing that I've never wanted even to taste it, and so it isn't very tempting to try to develop a taste for something that, given my hypoglycemia, would be extremely unhealthy to drink regularly. I do find myself regularly purchasing 12-packs of Saranac or Sam Adams, however, because someone in the family does happen to have a fondness for those particular beers. I don't think I'd pull one out and start drinking it if I encountered someone claiming that not drinking was essential to being a Christian, but maybe I could pull one out and hand it to someone who would drink it.

When I first saw this video, I was wondering what Andrew Sullivan was getting at by calling it The Christianity of War. He obviously finds it problematic but says nothing about what is so problematic. But then I followed the link to the original location and read some of the comments, and I think I know what's wrong with it. The problem is that the makers of the video produced something for the evangelical community that anyone remotely biblically literate would understand as a call to spiritual action, cognizant of the reality of Satan and the necessity of bearing up the weapons of Christian warfare as listed in Ephesians 6:10-20 and referred to in II Corinthians 6:7; 10:4; Hebrews 4:12 (among other places). These weapons are things like faith, righteousness, the good news message about Jesus Christ, the word of God in general, and salvation. Most of them are defenses against spiritual attacks from Satan and his minions.

But it seems to me that in a biblically-illiterate culture, it's setting yourself up for misunderstanding to post something on the internet if many will not understand the biblical context of the metaphor you're using. This is especially true given those vocal anti-evangelicals who adamantly misinterpret everything evangelicals do in order to further the completely ridiculous thesis that evangelicals are all about political agendas and that evangelical missions groups have nothing to do with spreading the gospel but seek to fight human enemies (not the spiritual enemies discussed in the verses I just referred to that the video was actually about) with human weapons (not the spiritual enemies in the verses I just referred to that the video was actually about).

I am not going to absolve the pretty ridiculous commenters on the video from doing their homework. Anyone who thinks that video was about political fighting against the political opponents of the religious right is morally at fault. There's plenty of publicly-available information that should easily make it plain that that's not the case, and it is indeed immoral to make base charges, that are so obviously false, against such a large movement when it's so utterly obvious that you know so little about that movement.

But I think evangelicals have a calling to make the message of the good news plain and clear in a way that videos like this are not going to get in the way of that. This was obviously not intended to do anything but motivate Christians to pray, study the Bible, hold each other up in times of spiritual trial, and seek to live a godly life. Its creators therefore didn't expect this to be viewed by those who know very little about evangelicals besides the popular misconception based on how evangelicals are treated in the media. But they put it on the internet, and they failed to take into account the small but vocal miscreants who find anything they can about evangelicals in order to take it out of context and put evangelicals in as bad a political light as possible, and that's what's happened here. Those who would produce such videos ought to take that into account and not just leave metaphors like this hanging unexplained to be taken to be about whatever the viewer happens to want it to be about.

Update: I write this post, and then I check up on what's been going on at the Volokh Conspiracy in the last couple days while I haven't had the chance to check in there, and I find this post, which has statistics showing that the demographic group that is most disproportionately Christian fundamentalist in the U.S. is African-American women, and more fundamentalists are Democrats than Republicans. Neither of these is all that surprising to me once I think about it a bit, but it certainly goes against the sort of thing I was trying to confront in this post.

A megachurch in Arlingon, Texas canceled a funeral service for someone when they found out he was gay, on the ground that they didn't want to be seen as endorsing that lifestyle. Since when does agreeing to host a funeral service for someone mean you endorse everything that person did? Should a congregation refuse to use their building to provide a funeral for the dead brother of one of their members simply because they guy lived with his girlfriend without getting married? What if the dead brother was a convicted thief or a greedy drunkard who slandered people fairly regularly? What if it was the rebellious son of members of the congregation or an arrogant and boastful member of the congregation?

Two of the most prominent passages that deal with homosexual sex in the New Testament list these other sins alongside same-sex sexual acts. No passage in the entire Bible elevates anything to do with homosexuality on a level that disallows showing love to the family of the sort that would be involved in having a funeral. Somehow homosexuality has become so evil to many evangelicals that we could refuse to do something for the family of a gay person that we'd probably do for the family of a murderer.

It's nice to see that this doesn't affect Dale Carpenter's attitude toward Christianity, but I think that's because he has direct contact with sincere, loving Christians who treat him as a real person with a lifestyle they simply disagree with. He understands that true Christianity is not like this. But when high-profile congregations do this kind of thing, it is all the majority of secular people will ever see. Most people who aren't Christians don't have a lot of significant contact with believing Christians who live out the Christian norm of love for neighbor in a way that demonstrates that gay people are part of that love. This isn't because Christians aren't doing that but because most secular people have little contact with evangelicals to begin with. So high-profile Christian leaders and congregations like this one have a much higher responsibility because of their visibility. Unfortunately, this congregation has utterly failed in that responsibility in this instance.

Baptist Blogger has a very interesting and thought-provoking post on Christianity Sexuality and the Ethic of Pharmaceutical Enhancement. He's not talking about what is now coming to be called "male enhancement" but about such drugs as Viagra. I'd never looked into the actual scientific behind drugs like this (i.e. what they actually do and what their effects are on a level more specific than the popular understanding), never mind thought about the ethical issues they raise, so I learned quite a few things from this post. I'm not sure I agree with everything the post says, but I don't think I'm going to work out a careful view on this anytime soon, so I'm not going to raise any worries now. I did find it an interesting read that raises some good questions worth thinking about by those for whom this is an issue.

In case anyone might want to comment on this post, be aware that comments might more easily be trapped in the spam filter or held for moderation for a post on this subject, due to the presence of certain keywords. If you leave a comment and don't see it within a reasonable amount of time, send me an email, and I'll check to see if it got eaten by the filter.

Update: Ha!

Mark Goodacre points to the attention Deirdre Good's new book Jesus' Family Values is getting. Her argument is basically that Jesus had no family values, on the following ground:

1. Jesus challenged some of the societal expectations people in his cultural context had about families.
2. Jesus doesn't spend a lot of time on some of the moral perspectives assumed by all first-century Jews because of the background of the Hebrew scriptures, i.e. he focuses on where the people of his time were misinterpreting or violating the spirit of the Hebrew scriptures.
3. Jesus predicts that families will divide over him, without ever saying that those who reject his followers in this way and put them to death are right to cause such division.
4. We see no sign of Jesus calling his foster father Joseph by the name he reserved for his heavenly Father.

She also says (falsely) that the word 'family' never appears in the New Testament. Now the English word never appears in the Greek, but a simple online search would have shown her that many English translations use the word regularly (see the ESV, NIV, HCSB, TNIV, NLT). Maybe she got some not quite true information about the KJV not having the word in the NT (it does have it once), but that has nothing to do with the content of the Greek NT itself but more to do with the English language at the time the KJV was translated (or rather the English language of a couple centuries earlier, which is what the KJV translators were translating the Bible into). [Update: see the comments for a more careful presentation of her view, why it's a little better than this, and why I still disagree with it.]

Now maybe the bulk of her argumentation is good, and maybe her conclusions aren't as radical as this presentation makes it look, but the impression of what I'm getting is that she's trying to send a message that pretty much everything those who speak of "family values" consider to fall under that would have been foreign to Jesus, and he'd in fact take the opposite views on many of those issues. The implicature is that those who say they derive their moral and political views from the Bible on these issues are in fact making them up whole cloth.

As I said in the comments on Mark's post, this is a very strange argument. For one thing, Jesus did speak about family values. He lambasted the Pharisees for taking the money they should have been using to care for their parents and dedicating it to God with a vow so they could use it now and not have to support their parents. He gives his mother to John to take care of her. He treats the love of the father for the prodigal son as an image of perfect, divine love, which affirms such love for wayward children.

For several years, the students in a local campus ministry had me give seminars at their fall retreat. I think I ended up giving four or five different ones over as many years. Since I don't have a lot of time to post much this week, I thought I'd post my notes for one of these seminars. I've been wanting to put those notes online for a while now anyway. This was a talk on how to deal with the tension between the unity and diversity among Christians, designed primarily for an audience of Christian college students. The seminar was on October 19, 2002, about a year before I started a blog. I have left everything as it is in my notes, except one typo fix and one brief note toward the end about a section that appears to me missing (but probably never existed).

Four issues about unity and diversity will haunt us as we look through this:

A. Differences in belief in practice
B. Differences in ability or gifting
C. Differences of race, ethnicity, or other cultural issues
D. Different campus groups or local churches

What does unity look like when people disagree about the Bible’s teachings and how we should live? How does it work with different strengths and weaknesses? How can we seek unity across social barriers or cultural walls? What do we do on campus with different Christian groups, and what about local churches?

The first thing is to look to God’s word. We can see some things in the process and come back to anything else after looking at some passages. I have some thoughts on these below, but we might leave some things for a discussion time.

John Piper recently preached a sermon on the high calling of singleness. Someone wrote to him afterward, asking why anyone should get married if singleness is such a high calling. His response is balanced, careful, and full of wisdom. [hat tip: Justin Taylor]

D.A. Carson has reviewed N.T. Wright's new book on evil and God's justice. You can read the review here. Carson has authored what is hands-down my favorite book on evil from a biblical (as opposed to philosophical) perspective. I'm currently reading through the second edition of that book, but you can read my review of the first edition here. I have read his review of Wright, and it's definitely worth reading whether you've looked at Wright on this issue or not. Beware that it's ten pages long, so reserve some time for it.

For more discussion of Wright, who has been getting some play in the Christian blogosphere lately, see

• Jollyblogger's post on the penal substitution discussion in the UK (where it's clear that Wright affirms penal substitution and denounces some who are denying it, from Wright's quotes in this article).
• Adrian Warnock's discussion of Wright's critique of both sides in the UK debate
  
• Justin Taylor's post on the Carson review
• Jollyblogger's followup on Wright and penal substitution
• Justin Taylor's discussion of Wright's defense of Steve Chalke, whom he amazingly doesn't think denies penal substitution
• But perhaps the best thing to do is to read what Wright has to say about the penal substitution debate and then to examine the other posts in the light of Wright's own carefully prepared thoughts.
• Update: Justin Taylor has some choice quotes from Wright very clearly defending something that most people would count as penal substitution (and that Wright himself clearly does count as penal substitution, given some of his above-mentioned quotes against those he does believe to deny it). Perhaps Wink would quibble here on whether Wright's view is truly substitutionary. I suspect Wright would accept substitution and union on that issue. But it's very clearly penal, and that's the main issue under debate here.
• Update 2: Alastair Roberts has some helpful distinctions between different models of the atonement. One position worth considering is that none of them is wrong, but what would be wrong would be denying any of them. (Or perhaps most of them are correct, and it would be wrong to deny any of those number.) Heresy, of course, is another matter. Being wrong does not always line up with being heretical, and I'm not sure I've thought about this long enough to have a sure view on that.

Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy has some interesting observations about interracial dating. It turns out that there's more resistance to interracial dating even when it comes to online dating, which means it doesn't just have to do with who you associate with in daily life within your local community (although that's got to be a factor, because groups who tend to live in areas where they are the majority are less likely to take part in interracial dating than groups that typically find themselves in the majority wherever they live).

One factor that he includes that I hadn't connected with this is that people with higher or more specific standards in non-racial ways might be more open to interracial dating simply because their pool is already much smaller than other people's. He includes religious standards such as refusal to date someone of another religion. This may well be one explanation why, in my own observation, evangelical Christians (at least in the circles I run in) are far more open to interracial dating than most any other group I can think of. It may well be partly because evangelicals have a smaller pool to pick from because many evangelicals will date only other evangelicals, and being open to interracial dating helps widen the pool from what it would be if they looked only at people within their own racial group.

Nonetheless, I don't think such an explanation undermines what I've long thought to be the explanation for evangelicals' greater openness to interracial dating. I've generally taken it to be because evangelicals have a heightened sense of the oneness of all genuine followers of Jesus, who evangelicals typically see as including mainly those who have put their allegiance to Christ above all other allegiances. Identity in Christ is primary, and other sources of identity are at best secondary. Thus when I think about who I'm most closely aligned with, I'm going to think of black evangelicals as much closer to the heart of my identity than I will white non-believers.

This isn't just not in conflict with Somin's point, as if they are two compatible explanations. It's actually the same fact under two different descriptions. On the one hand, evangelicals who have this restriction do indeed have a smaller pool to pick from, and they are thus more likely to be willing to include others in the pool than just those of their own race. But the philosophical justification for restricting the pool to like-minded believers is the same justification for expanding it to include like-minded believers regardless of race. After all, it's the sense of closer identity with fellow believers that leads both to the restriction to only believers and to openness to believers of other races.

In a post about how white evangelicals often do but should not assume what he calls a "white presumptive" perspective (something I wholeheartedly agree with and have discussed in the past under the term 'normative whiteness'), Mark Dever says something in passing that I'm not sure I agree with.

African-American Christian history is more fundamentally Christian than it is African-American. I realize that may be a controversial statement, but inside the body of Christ, we must realize that our racial identities (while seeming in Revelation to last into eternity) are not as fundamental as our Christian identity.

Again, his main statement there is something I wholeheartedly agree with. Black evangelicals, in my experience, are more likely to resist this biblical truth than white evangelicals, at least in their explicit beliefs. But white evangelicals can often give it lip service to it without realizing how much they are in fact tied to their white identity, as instanced by the very occasion of Mark's post. Whiteness is invisible to most white people, and the fact that white people affirm this statement doesn't mean they really understand what it amounts to and how their lives would have to change were they really to incorporate its truth into their lives.

But the disagreement I have with this statement is not in what it says overall but in what he says in passing in parentheses. He says racial identities seem in Revelation to last into eternity. Is that true? Now it may be that the things that inform our identities racially do last into eternity. Does that mean we will still have races in eternity? I don't think that follows, but I think the question of whether we will have racial identities in eternity is separate from the question of whether the book of Revelation includes anything that should seem to indicate that racial identities will continue in eternity. There are strong indications that the believers gathered around God's throne is a united body of people from every tongue and nation.

But two things make me think it is not teaching that racial identities continue into eternity. First, these descriptions are not just about eternity. They are about the gathered people of God, who are spiritually speaking around the throne of God in heaven. This isn't a resurrection scene. It's a teaching about the nature of the church now. Second, it doesn't say that these are people defined in terms of racial identities. It says that there are people there from every tongue, tribe, and nation. These are people called out of the world and into the people of God. It doesn't mean racial identities are wiped out, but it doesn't say they're not. It simply says that people who were of all the tongues, tribes, and nations are gathered together as one.

Is ethics just a matter of right or wrong+people's comment There's plenty of debate about what it means to say something is right or wrong (and thus about what ethics is really about), but I've never heard of anyone questioning whether ethics is even about right and wrong to begin with. is it against god to commit suicide It's most immediately against yourself, but given what Genesis 9 says about taking human life, isn't it a capital crime due to its being against someone made in the image of God? Of course, the death penalty gets administered in the process. republical lizard tax conspiracy Occasionally I get a search where no snarky comment I could write seems to do it justice. I think this is one of those cases, unfortunately. what if the president and vice president didnt get 270 votes There's no constitutional requirement of getting 270 electoral votes. Given the current assignment of electoral votes to states and given that only two candidates get any electoral votes, whoever gets at least 270 votes will win. But the assignment of electoral votes can change. Last I had heard, it might change by 2008 with Utah getting one more vote and nothing else changing (in exchange for D.C. getting a representative who can vote in the House), but that actually still leaves 270 as what's needed to win. Certainly we could end up with a situation where a third candidate gets enough votes that the winner has fewer than 270, even with the current assignment of votes to states. I'm sure that sort of thing has happened lots of times, although not recently. But imagine what would happen if the Democrats nominate Hillary Clinton, the Republicans nominate John McCain, and Rudy Giuliani runs as an independent. I don't think that scenario is all that likely, but it's not impossible, and I think Giuliani would probably get a fair number of electoral votes if that were to happen. If both of the others also got enough electoral votes, as I think would be likely, then whoever won would get less than 270.

Peter Leithart has a very thoughtful post on profane language, looking quite closely at a couple passages sometimes thought to have some bearing on the issue. Jollyblogger agrees that Leithart's post is excellent and offers some thoughts of his own. I can't agree with every statement in either post, but I'm not really motivated to detail the disagreements I have on minor points at the moment, and I thought some of the readers of this blog might find this of interest.

Gnu at Wildebeest's Wardrobe reflects on the relationship between philosophy and faith in the scriptures in Philosophy and Canon.

I don't agree with his take on Ecclesiastes, because I see the positive elements throughout the book and the narrator simply framing it and putting it all in perspective, without there being anything really false about the statements of Solomon within the main text.

I'd also change his (3) to "The OT explains how authentic divine predestination is compatible with authentic moral responsibility." That's what it doesn't do. I think it does implicitly affirm that the two are compatible by affirming them both, even in the same breath in some instances (e.g. in Isaiah 10).

But those are minor quibbles. His overall point is worth considering, particularly the way that an intelligent reading of the Bible leads to seeing the Christian's approach to the scriptures as challenging the views of the reader in the same kind of thoughtful way that philosophy at its best will do.

I regularly get searches coming to this site like the following one:

premarital sex is ok in the bible

This sort of thing is thrown around so often that I think a lot of people must think it's at least close to the truth. I even thought it was almost true for a while. It's actually not close to the truth, not in the slightest. Premarital sex was extremely uncommon in ancient Israel compared to today, and it thus doesn't come out anywhere near as explicitly in the more emphatic commands, but there's enough reason to think the laws of Israel condemned it very strongly in the few kinds of circumstances when it did have something to say about it. Since the new covenant commands against sexual immorality would have been assumed to rely on the Torah for what constitutes sexual immorality, Christians who follow the New Testament therefore ought to see sexual immorality as including premarital sex.

If it were viewed as perfectly ok, why is there a requirement that someone who sleeps with an unmarried woman would have to compensate her with a bride-price, whether her father consents to let him marry her or not? (Exodus 22:16-17) While some of the requirements for Levites serving in the tabernacle and temple were elevated beyond other Israelites (e.g. no deformities), the command to marry a virgin is grounded in the principle that he not profane his children (Leviticus 21:13-15), which suggests there's at least something less than perfect about such a marriage. Deuteronomy 22 treats premarital sex as tantamount to prostitution, and though the law only has a penalty for the woman that's likely because women can establish virginity in ways that men can't. (Besides, going to a prostitute is a sin just as much as being a prostitute is, and if it's prostitution then he's guilty and not just her.)

Now people are free to reject biblical teachings as a guide for how we ought to live. By and large contemporary Western society has done that. But I don't think those who accept the Bible as authoritative can get away with the sort of claim this person was searching for. The Bible doesn't always cooperate with our attempts to make it say what we want it to say. There may be some complex hermeneutical gymnastics someone could come up with to get around this, but it's not something that should come very obviously, and it seems to me that sort of thing will largely be driven by what someone would want the Bible to say rather than by what the biblical text should lead people to conclude.

Bruce Meyer left the following comment on a post that wasn't about this subject, so I thought it might better occupy its own post:

Recently Jeremy and I have been talking about reaching out to neognostics and pagans. After we talked, I realized that the guy with expertise in this area is in my own town (where I teach) of Salem, Massachusetts, Pastor Phil Wyman. So on Halloween I stopped by his church to catch up, and found their outreach at work. Also found that they were on the front page of the Salem News and The Wall Street Journal. The problem is that they were reaching out to pagans. Oops. Waddya know. Here are some links. BTW, I'm quite proud of my friend Pastor Phil.

Befriending witches is a problem in Salem, Mass
Let's Not Get Too Cozy with Pagans? Foursquare Church and The Gathering
The Missional Journey of Phil Wyman
Church severs tie with Salem branch:The Gathering chastised for getting too close to witches

I have to say I like the following quote from the first article:

"Sure, he wants to convert people," he says about Mr. Wyman. "But he does it in a way that respects you."

It's also worth noting how much some of his critics sound like Jesus' critics:

Mr. Wyman appeared "too familiar, too cozy, too amicable with that community," said the Rev. Kenneth Steigler, a United Methodist Church pastor.

Mark Roberts is doing a series called What is a Church? Biblical Basics for Christian Community. I especially like the four posts he's written so far under the title "When a Church is not a Church?" These look at the Greek word usually translated as "church" in the New Testament, 'ekklesia', which means "assembly" or "gathering" (and not "called out ones", as many erroneously claim because of some bad arguments from etymology).

The fourth post in that series within the series raises a point very much worth emphasizing. It makes no sense to say that you're part of a gathering that you don't show up for. In a sense any Christian is a member of the gathering around the throne of God in heaven, but we also speak of ourselves as members of local congregations. The average congregation has about 60-70% of its membership regularly attending. Does it make sense to call the others members of a gathering that they don't ever gather with? Treating a church like an organization with a membership list does have this particularly unfortunate consequence, even if there are legal reasons (and perhaps other reasons) to do so.

There's lots of other good stuff in Mark's series, but that struck me as a pointed observation about this attitude about what the church is among a large enough population in contemporary evangelicalism.

Roman Catholicism has never officially endorsed the idea of Limbo (a place not as cool as heaven but much better than hell and purgatory). It was proposed as a place for children who die before being baptized and for people who believed before the Messiah's first coming. It looks as if Pope Benedict XVI is pulling the Roman Catholic church out of their ambiguity on this issue. There is no such thing as Limbo, he is now declaring.

According to the article, the idea goes back to Augustine's unwillingness to accept that God would send innocent children to hell. That, of course, fits neither with the biblical teaching on what Augustine later called original sin nor with Augustine's own views on the subject. The biblical teaching on what is required for salvation never includes a footnote indicating an exception for those under some fictional age of reason. Augustine's own views treat original sin as something that's part of us from conception, and original sin is the basis of the death sentence on every single human being (except Christ, although he faced it anyway). I can't see any absolutely compelling biblical argument against the view that all children who die young will be saved. God would have to perform a work of grace specially in each child who is saved to regenerate the person and remove the sin nature, which is what scripture teaches about every adult who is saved. But the lack of any exceptions to what seem to be clear statements seems to me to count as evidence against such a view.

However you treat the biblical silence on the issue, it's clear that there's no positive biblical evidence for such a view. The article seems to me to suggest that the reason for removing Limbo is that there's no biblical evidence for it. Why, then, assume that all children will be in heaven? That equally has no biblical evidence. Are they thinking it's better to err on the side of giving false hope in this life than it is to err on the side of preparing people for the worst in case their children who die young will not be saved?

[hat tip: Claude Mariottini]

Update: See Siris for some hesitations on a number of things here. I don't agree with his interpretation of I Peter's statement about Jesus speaking to the spirits in prison (who in context and especially in relation to Jude and II Peter's similar statements have to be the Genesis 6 fallen angels, with the message one of victory over them rather than salvation). [Update 2: See his comment on this post for his clarification even on that.] I don't have much background in the other issues he raises, but he's much more aware of the history of theology than most religion writers for newspapers like the Chicago Tribune.

Jollyblogger's recent post on whether churches should advertize gets into some interesting issues about the goal of advertizing. In particular, what sort of people do the advertizements intend to attract, and does that fit with the purposes of what a gathering of believers is for? What sort of people do we want coming to visit our congregations, and how do we get them there?

I'm not going to get into those issues, though I think they're worth thinking about. What drove me to comment (and thus, now, to expand on my comment here) was his side discussion of whether it's good to single out newcomers, in particular whether it makes a difference if the person is a Christian or a nonbeliever. Several people in the comments were saying that Christians like to be singled out, but nonbelievers aren't very comfortable with that. I don't think it's that simple. Some nonbelievers might like being noticed, but I think the more important issue is that not all Christians will want to be singled out. Extroverted Christians might like that, but if I visit a church and they do something like that I tend to get really turned off. I don't like to be made the center of attention (unless I'm doing something specifically requiring it like teaching, in which case I then won't want people not paying attention).

In the wake of my internal criticisms of the religious right (which in turn were spurred on by Joe Carter's), Jollyblogger offers some of his own thoughts. I pretty much agree with all of his major points.

I haven't commented on the recent brouhaha involving the pope and Islam, largely because I've been too busy to put my thoughts together. In the meantime, lots of posts I've read make some worthwhile points, and there isn't really a whole lot I have to say after all of it, but I thought I'd put them all together in the same place.

My first thought was that nothing could even be taken as offensive once you had everything in context, but Jonathan Wilson at the Elfin Ethicist thinks it's a little more complicated than that, mostly because his representation of Islam is inaccurate. Mark Goodacre also thinks it's a little unfair to Islam to say that Islam doesn't embrace reason. My problem with this complaint is that the pope never asserts anything about Islam, as far as I can see. He does quote some people who say that Muslims place God above reason and thus are not limited by it. Nowhere do the people he quotes say that Muslims see reason as bad. The reason issue is his topic, however, not Islam.

Mark puts the quote in context fairly well, and despite my disagreement of his characterization of what the pope was doing, I do very much like his concluding comment: "those who are overreacting to the speech might well wish to demonstrate the importance of reason in their thinking by engaging it rather than caricaturing it." Indeed. It has struck me as especially ironic that those who took issue with his portrayal of Islam as violent (which I don't think he really did, but that's what's being assumed) decided to confirm that very judgment by being violent in response. Does that make any sense?

Jollyblogger and Tim Challies are discussing an argument from David Powlison against social explanations for homosexuality. In particular, they pick on a Christian counselor who explains why someone is a lesbian by pointing to events in her past.

I think there are several reasons to disagree with the basic thrust of this argument, but one pretty ironic one is that many Christians are spending so much effort to deny biological explanations for homosexuality that they're left explaining it in terms of social factors exactly like the case Powlison is rejecting here. Powlison now wants to remove social explanations as well. Why? It seems that Powlison thinks (and David Wayne and Tim Challies agree with him) that giving an account of why something is true is inconsistent with saying that anything could be sinful about the thing you're explaining.

I can't disagree more. This argument seems to me to rely on two fallacies, a category mistake and a false dichtomy, and I think it leads to some very disturbing consequences if we consistently refused to explain sin in this way. I hereby call them to reconsider for the following reasons.

Was Steve Irwin a Christian
steve irwin christian
I've been getting searches like this up to several times an hour (but usually less) since Steve Irwin died, but nothing I said was relevant to this. Maybe those searches will get diverted to this post. I know nothing for sure about Steve Irwin's views on religion. He did, of course, accept current scientific understanding on the process of human origins, which will automatically disqualify him in the eyes of some people who think views on the means and time frame of creation count as the gospel (or, even worse, think evangelism consists of sending creationist tracts to celebrities). But of course plenty of people accept common descent who are genuine Christians.

He did believe in God, or at least he sometimes talked that way, saying, "But I have a gift. God put me on this planet with a mission. My mission is to educate people about conservation." But lots of people believe in God without being Christians, and lots of people speak of God's purpose metaphorically, mostly to suggest that they feel a purpose for their life. Someone in this thread remembers him saying he believed his mom was in heaven and looked forward to joining her, which suggests some sort of Christianlike view of heaven. I can't find any substantiation for him saying this, however. It says it's in the Larry King interview, but I didn't see anything even close to that there.

One piece of evidence against his being a Christian is that they had Buddhist nuns (his term; I don't know the proper term) bless their child in a sort of public baptismal ceremony. I doubt they would have done that in addition to a private Christian service, but it's possible. More likely is that this was all they did in that area, and it's probably not something serious Christians who accept and follow biblical teaching would have done, since this looks strikingly like the kind of pagan temple worship that the early Christians would have considered idolatry.

Update: Snopes.com finally tackles this issue (or at least the issue of the hoax discussed in the comments).

Andreas Kostenberger has a thoughtful post on singleness in the Bible. I especially found one observation noteworthy. He finds a trajectory across salvation history with regard to singleness and marriage. Marriage is part of the creation order, part of God's original intent before the fall. It isn't until Jesus comes along to initiate the new covenant that you get any sense at all that there's anything but marriage as the norm, with singleness as an extraordinary exception (e.g. widows, serious illness). But Jesus indicates that some will be single by choice, and Paul even argues that the kingdom is more greatly served (in certain kinds of situations?) by those who are single, and therefore what was once the exception becomes something especially useful.

But Jesus also indicates that there will be no marriage in the resurrection. That means the intermediate phase between the initiation of the new covenant and its ultimate fulfillment in the resurrection is in tension between the marriage norm of the old covenant and the singleness norm of the resurrection. Seeing this according to a trajectory makes so much sense of how Paul can have such a high view of marriage and yet also view singleness as something for some to strive for. This doesn't (as some have argued) imply a lower view of marriage but simply reflects the tension between these two norms, one eventually to be replaced by the other but both having value in the in-between time. But Kostenberger does take marriage as a sort of norm even in this age, citing Matthew 19 as evidence. It's just not a norm in the fuller sense of when most everyone would be expected to get married.

Molly Ziegler, Leaving politics aside?, looks at the media coverage of borderline evangelical Greg Boyd's recent controversy over refusing to get his church involved in politics. (I say borderline because Boyd is an open theist, and many consider open theism automatically a disqualifier for evangelicalism, while others do not.) While I agree with the general sort of view of the church and politics that Boyd is saying, I agree with the criticism of his erroneous claim that Jesus didn't push people's buttons about sex. He most certainly did. Also, I think the abortion discussion toward the end reveals that there's a distinction between the church taking a stance on the best political policies and leaders (which I'd say is contrary to the church's purpose) and the church taking a stance on moral issues that are clear in scripture (which I think is its obligation).

I've just spent a good deal of time working through Augustine on this issue, and when I get a chance to put it into post form I'll be posting my notes. I really appreciate almost everything he has to say on it, but that will have to wait.

My clone second cousin Danny has another post that I feel like I could have written. What I mean by this is that (1) I happen to agree with everything he says, (2) the things he's most interested in emphasizing are what I think is most important, and (3) the qualifications he makes to his major points are all things I would want to be clear about so that the major points wouldn't be misunderstood. It gets into the purpose of public worship, the connection of being filled with the Spirit and singing songs to each other, and the significance of all that for how we should do public worship. It's a thoroughly balanced post. Also, check out the comments to see why I think the view that public worship is about intimacy with God is not only wrong but even contrary to the real purpose of public worship.

Josh Claybourn and co. at In the Agora have brought in a new blogger, Seth Zirkle. Along with Jollyblogger, who gets the tip of the hat on this one, I very much appreciate Seth's call to recognize the importance of the local church in a time when there's a serious fad to abandon it on grounds that are downright contradictory, i.e. a pretense that someone can be a Christian without being part of the church, which defies the very definition of the church. The church is manifested locally, and each local body is the church. Thus rejecting what is sometimes called the organized church is rejecting God's people as a whole. [For more on this, including more careful support of the fundamental premise, see my Organized Religion and the Church from two years ago.]

For similar reasons, I have an extremely strong presumption against leaving a local body except for reasons of serious heresy or immorality among the leadership, and even then only when the church as a whole refuses to confront that issue or the relevant people. Of course if you are leaving the area and wouldn't be present to attend your local congregation's meetings, it's a pretty good idea to commit to a different congregation. For reasons other than those sorts of things, leaving a local body is tantamount leaving the church, even if where you end up is also the church. What you left was the church, fully the church, and not just a part of the church. The New Testament knows nothing of local bodies that are just part of the church, and what you do to any local body you therefore do to the church. For these reasons, I greatly appreciated the main point of Seth's post.

Yet there's this one line that sort of spoils it for me. One of his points is that no local congregation is perfect. It's hard to find a local congregation that teaches the Bible rather than just giving topical sermons. In the same breath, Seth also says that it's hard to find a local congregation that avoids "secular instruments, such as pianos, guitars, and drums". If I hadn't been warned by Jollyblogger, I would have been stopped in my tracks.

I can't resist linking to "Follower of Jesus" or "Christian"? by Danny Pierce. I happen to share a last name and a couple great-grandparents with Danny (i.e. he's my second cousin), but I'm not sure if we've ever met in person. I think we have, and he thinks we haven't, but even if we did it would have been more than a decade ago. But read his post. Can't you imagine me having written that post? When I read it, I kept thinking his style of argument and way of framing his conclusions sounded so much like my own style of argument and way of framing conclusions. Suffice it to say that I think it's a great post and well worth reading.

Update: See Danny's response to this post. Even his humor is along the same lines as mine. I am indeed his mother's mother-in-law's brother-in-law's grandson, as he is mine.

A friend reminded me of a piece I wrote a year and a half before I had even thought of blogging, one that I've had sitting online without anything linking to it. I had always intended to move all my previously posted pieces to my blog, but I'd completely forgotten about this one, so here it is. This was written in the context of a discussion list within a Christian campus ministry and assumes some very particular arguments for positions that I'm seeking to find a middle ground between. I wouldn't word everything this way now, but I'd like to leave it as it is. The original piece was written 24 April, 2002. When I posted it to my old website on 28 February 2003, I modified it in a few places to remove the names of the guilty, to fix grammar, and to clarify some misleading statements. What follows is the statement as I posted it on that day.

OK, I've got to say one thing about the "God picking someone out for you" issue. I'm convinced that the reason people are so resistant to this idea is that they fail to see the biblical point that God is sovereign over everything that happens in a way that's totally consistent with our making our own choices. Read Isaiah 10 very carefully and compare it with Genesis 50:20 and Acts 2:23; 4:24-28. It's hard to get around that.

The only way I can read the resistance to this is that people somehow think what's being said is that God picks someone special out for you but then has no interest in what you do to get to the point of finding such a person, which assumes God isn't ultimately sovereign over everything but has this obsession with this one thing about us, and we have to spend all our energy to figure out who that person is before we can live our life normally.

Our congregation is working through John 13-17 in our sermons right now. Jeremy Jackson, one of our elders, was teaching on John 15:9-17 a couple weeks ago, and he presented a very interesting definition of joy. Joy can't be mere pleasure, because you wouldn't then have it while experiencing severe persecution. But it also seems to be an emotion of some sort. So many of the biblical discussions of joy seem to involve over