Heretics

Great pair of quotes here at Richard Beck's site:

We muzzle dogs; shall we leave men free to open their mouths and say what they please?...God makes it plain that the false prophet is to be stoned without mercy. We are to crush beneath our heels all natural affections when his honour is at stake. The father should not spare his child, nor the husband his wife, nor the friend that friend who is dearer to him than life.

--John Calvin, Protestant Reformer and Father of Calvinism (1509-1564)

Calvin says that he is certain, and [other sects] say that they are; Calvin says that they are wrong and wishes to judge them, and so do they. Who shall be judge? What made Calvin the arbiter of all the sects, that he alone should kill? He has the Word of God and so have they. If the matter is certain, to who is it so? To Calvin? But then why does he write so many books about manifest truth?...In view of the uncertainty we must define the heretic simply as one with whom we disagree. And if then we are going to kill heretics, the logical outcome will be a war of extermination, since each is sure of himself.

--Sebastian Castellio, French theologian (1515-1563)

Obviously, the Bible doesn't encourage relativism. Coffee with Jesus cuts to the chase:

However, we do need to figure out what is really worth dying for ... or killing for. I don't want to hear Jesus tell me someday that I, like Saul, was really persecuting him. That those I thought were so wrong and treated so badly were actually closest to getting it right. So, humility in our disagreements is crucial. And a weighing of the consequences of being wrong before I say or do something "discerning," as they say. And the development of genuine respect for those with whom I disagree. Not a "respect" that pretends to agree with everyone, but one which says that everyone is valuable, and loved by God, and worthy of grace and kindness. No matter how badly we disagree. Something that won't have burned the bridges if one of us changes our mind later. Tough to do, but much better that than making enemies of those who may prove to be our own family.

Noah Webster & God

[Salvation #6] 

Having established that salvation may be knowable, even when we are unable to clearly define salvation or unable to agree upon such a definition, we turn to the question of why we have been left to write our own definition. If our own definition writing requires that we wade in the oft-murky waters of scripture interpretation, then why has God failed to clearly provide such crucial information? Why didn't God just give us a dictionary if he knew the mess we would make of this? Why did he give us the Bible, filled with poetry, riddles, proverbs, songs, correspondence, code, and lots and lots of stories and parables, instead? Understand that these are types of writing not normally used to dictate precise definitions, or genres from which we expect to extract them. And why use Hebrew of all languages for the majority of this, a language known for its ambiguity?

Maybe neat, theological definitions don't exist. Maybe God isn't at all eager to spoon-feed them to us if they do. Maybe they are as nonsensical as mathematical equations written to explain color. Maybe God is less interested in developing our knowledge than our character, our humility, or our relationship with him. Maybe God knows that definitions create the illusion of mastery, certainty, and control; and maybe he is less interested in being defined or understood than being known, obeyed, and loved. 

What definition of "God" do we find in Scripture, for that matter, and shouldn't that be even more important than understanding salvation? "God is love;" "God is spirit;" "God is a consuming fire;" "God is light." How's that for a single and clear definition of what God is? And what about Jesus? How eager was he to give key definitions? The gospels record his question, "What shall we say the kingdom of God is like?" and multiple different answers—yeast, a farmer, a landlord, seeds, etc.—but no instances of "What is the exact definition of God's kingdom?" Really, if he wanted to communicate definitions, he picked an odd way to do it.

The obvious answer is that God's purpose, both for his inspiration of the Scriptures and in his glorious performance on the stage of history, was not and has never been to give us definitions, or to satisfy our desire for propositional certainty. Or, as Karl Barth reportedly said, "Jesus does not give recipes that show the way to God. [...] He is Himself the way." His purpose is that we might come to know the guide himself, rather than a map. As a result, much of our theological definition writing distracts us from God's real message and intent. And, perhaps, is as misguided and inappropriate as reading love poems for a technical understanding of how the heart works. To put it another way, the point and priority of neither God nor the Scriptures is to give us a definition of salvation that we can memorize, recite, and stick on our bumpers. 

Noah Webster's contribution to the English-speaking world was a book of words and definitions. What God the Father has given to all of us instead is Jesus, the Word of God. He has spoken to us directly through his Son, that we might know him. And this is eternal life. This is salvation.

I Wish We'd All Been Ready

For those of you who missed it, the rapture has already taken place, and, according to the Lark News story, "took both people on the planet whose theology was exactly correct."

What I'm looking forward to is the scene at the pearly gates -- the one where, from time to time, we'll see the arrival of those from the one denomination that actually had all their doctrines correct. I can almost hear the hearty congratulations that Jesus will lavish upon them. As for the rest of us ... "saved, but only as one escaping through the flames," at least we'll finally know who gets the prize for being right. So, we'll have that satisfaction to soften the disappointment of our Lord.

How does that saying go, the one about wishing on their deathbed that they'd invested more time in their careers? How many of us will meet Jesus and wish we'd spent more time polishing our doctrinal idols?

New Improved "God Said It" T-Shirt

As well-meaning as people may be when they boldly proclaim it on their bumpers, the "God said it / I believe it / That settles it" triptych leaves much to be desired as far as guidance for actual Christian life. For a more honest and humble T-shirt slogan, look no farther!

I won't spoil the punchline here, but the middle section begins with "I interpreted it."
 
Buy yours today!

Do We Know What Jesus Knew?

The Internet Monk posted an interesting list of questions about Jesus' knowledge. And it's followed by about thirty pages of comments about what the answers mean to our understanding of the God/man incarnation.

Some of my favorites:

3. Did Jesus miss any questions on the test? Did he have to study?
4. Did Jesus use tools to measure in his carpentry work? Or did he just know what to do?
8. Were Jesus questions real questions? Or were they all rhetorical?
9. If Jesus did not have exhaustive divine knowledge as a human being, does this impact our view of him as God incarnate?

Or, in the words of Relient K's lovely Christmas tune, I Celebrate the Day:

And the first time that you opened your eyes
Did you realize that you would be my savior?
And the first breath that left your lips
Did you know that it would change this world forever? 

Yet another example where language, story, and theology collide, hinting that the certainty of our formulations might just be more easily said than realized. It is one thing to affirm, in the words of the Athanasian Creed, that Jesus was "fully God, fully man," but what does this mean, practically speaking? That he always won games of chance? That the other kids as he was growing up stopped including him in riddles and jokes because he already knew the punchlines? Or that there is something about the nature of Jesus' omniscience that we haven't fully comprehended?

The faith of the Christian rests on the clear statements of Scripture alone even when we are not able to rationalize them.

The "clear statements," as opposed to the not-so-clear statements that the Bible also contains. There are some things that we just don't know—even if we read the Bible. We can speculate, opine, and argue, but we really don't know, at least in a way that we can articulate with words. As A.W. Tozer said, "Truth lies deeper than the theological statement of it" (That Incredible Christian). And that's OK, for we are known, and loved. And I'll take that over my own knowing any day.

Faithful Questioning

Some humorous and some meaty quotes on asking questions and Christian scholarship, from James K.A. Smith in his interview at the often-excellent Through a Glass Darkly blog:

• The tipping point was a sermon I preached entitled "Trivial Pursuits: Or, Things That Bother Us that Don’t Bother Jesus."

• I also have some letters in my files from my former Bible college professors in which they describe me as a "student of Judas Iscariot."

• I guess I would be hesitant to set up these two different worlds–the "questioning" world of Christian scholarship and the "confessing" world of the church. I think there’s inseparable intermingling here. Or let me put it this way: every question is its own kind of confession. Even our questions are articulated from somewhere, on the basis of something–however tenuous. And some of our best confessions are questions: Why, O Lord? How long, O Lord? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? As I think about it, the confessions are not boundaries that mark the limits of questioning; rather, the creeds and confessions are the guardrails that enable us to lean out and over the precipice, asking the hard questions.

• Our churches often are not comfortable with fostering an ethos of curiosity and questioning, even though God is not at all frightened by such things. Again, I think it’s important for Christian scholars to model what faithful questioning looks like.
  

I'm no scholar, but I think that advice applies to the rest of us, too.

How Necessary Is the Bible?

There has never been a time in history at which we have all had the same Bible.

Ponder that one for a moment.

Setting aside that fact, consider that millions of believers both throughout history and today have lacked some or all of what Christians now call the Bible. The "New Testament church" did. The masses before the printing press (c. 1440). Much of the underground church still does. Many who have been imprisoned. Many who are poor, or blind, or infirm. Those who are illiterate. Those without a Bible in their own language (200 million people, at present). Those without a written language, even.

If the emphasis (or even overemphasis) placed on the written scriptures by some parts of the modern Christian church is correct, and if the near-legalistic expectation of "personal" Bible study—even if only for a trivial number of minutes or verses per day—is correct, then several questions come to mind regarding those who go and have gone without, those already in the prophesied "famine of the Word," as some might call it: What is their Christian life focused on? How are they to truly know God or hear his voice? And if faith comes by hearing, and hearing (by?) the word of God, then on what basis can they come to faith in the first place? Are they inevitably stunted in their spiritual growth, compared to those who have the complete Bible? Weaker brothers and sisters, to be pitied, perhaps?

It seems that we should conclude thusly.

And if we insist that any challenge a specific passage of scripture presents can be made sense of by "the whole Bible," and that the whole Bible is required for proper understanding of (any of? much of?) its contents, then what must we conclude about those without the whole Bible, now and throughout history? And those without any Bible? That these unfortunates are doomed to misinterpretation and misunderstanding on "all matters of faith and practice"? Even on essentials, such as ... the Trinity; the relationship between sin, faith, grace, and works; or the nature of their own relationship to God?

It seems that we should conclude thusly.

And what if our own favorite translation of the Bible contains mistakes? Or if, someday, we were to find the autographs (the original books of the Bible), written in the very hands of the original authors and/or scribes—depending on your view of how the Bible was written—and different from any of the manuscript witnesses (the later copies of the books), from which all of our various and varied translations have been made? Should we conclude that we have not had—have never had—the true "Word of God"? That nobody has ever had the correct Bible?

It seems that we should conclude thusly. That we the privileged, despite our feast of Bibles and Bible study tools, have actually been in a similar position to those who lived before the closing of the canon, or those behind the Iron Curtain, or those with no Bible in their own language. That we didn't have every answer at our fingertips. That we didn't have every last word. We should conclude that some of our opinions may have been misguided, some of our emphases misplaced. We should conclude that some of our knowledge, our certainty was actually error, or naivety. Or perhaps even arrogance.

And what would this mean about God—if he has allowed all of us to wander in such imperfect light?

Or what would it mean about the Bible—if a perfect, loving, and holy God has not thought it necessary to provide one complete, uniform, and error-free Bible for all of us and for all of this time?

Despair not, gentle reader! More on this topic later.