Undeception

As my regulars probably know, I like podcasts. One I listen to regularly (it comes out daily) is Renewing Your Mind with Dr. R.C. Sproul of Ligonier Ministries. He is well-known as a partial preterist, but, as you will see here soon, posits a future consummative coming of Christ. This is what he said in a recent podcast.

After the Resurrection [Jesus] sojourns on the earth for a few weeks with His disciples until that moment comes where He ascends into heaven. And what’s the point of the Ascension? . . . [The] “ascension” here takes on a technical meaning, where it means not simply to go up, but . . . to go up to a specific place for a specific purpose. And the place to which He goes is the right hand of God and the purpose for His ascent is to go to His coronation, to His investiture, as the fulfillment of the Davidic Covenant, where God now crowns Him not just one more king in the line of Davidic kings, but He crowns Him the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords and to Whom all the nations of the world are given beneath His authority and under His dominion. And His reign is announced by God in the New Covenant not to last for four hundred years like the dynasty of David but “He shall reign for ever and ever” and ever and ever to which the Church cries, “Hallelujah!”

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Ok, it’s been long enough for me to do another meme, and because I am a good sport, I will respond to both memes I was tagged with by one merciless (mercilessly funny, that is) blogger friend of mine, Kev at Special Kind of Stupid (you want a laugh? check him out!). Unfortunately, my answers will not be particularly funny. But come on, Kev, just be glad I’m doing these at all

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You won’t believe this. I didn’t believe it. I can’t even really comment on it without getting flustered, and the article speaks for itself anyway, so let me just give you this link.

Oklahoma state legislature ponders evisceration of science curriculum

Please return here to offer me your stunned responses.

Talk about a love/hate relationship…

I highly commend Gary Demar of American Vision for a number of reasons. Chiefly, he is on the front lines in arguing against the immobilizing effect premillennial eschatology has on the Church; I love that his postmillennialist approach emphasizes the advancement of the Kingdom of God over every facet of culture and society.

Unfortunately, another of his preoccupations is the “Darwinism Hate Train” of which he is the blindfolded engineer.

On a recent installment of American Vision’s weekly Gary Demar Show entitled “A state-sponsored religion?”, he gave us another doozie. He was sounding the alarm, criticizing the Florida state school board’s proposed revision of its educational standards. Specifically, he argued that the revised science standards come down too solidly on “a scientific question [on] which there is great deal of debate within the scientific community, not only coming from what we might call scientific creationists, six-day creationists, intelligent design advocates, but scientists in general who may still believe in evolution to a certain extent but still have a problem with some of the basic building blocks of evolutionary theory and want the topic discussed, think it ought to be discussed and in reality the science standards framer’s committee is in the process…[of] re-writing those standards to force compliance to a particular dogmatic worldview without question. It’s really something that’s unthinkable within the realm of science for anybody at any period of time to say, ‘This scientific theory is now established fact and there’s no way to debate that.’” He reiterated at another point that any public school curriculum that focused only on evolutionary theory was guilty of “cutting off debate” in the classroom.

Does anyone else see a problem with this thinking? Demar is apparently of the opinion that a high school classroom is a necessary forum for debating and challenging scientific theory — even one of the most universally accepted scientific theories. Say what?

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Jeremiah 18 and Romans 9: a shared metaphor

In talking with Calvinists, there is always one passage that they pull out that in effect tells Arminians/non-predestinarians to “shut up and color.” This passage is the potter/clay metaphor of Romans 9. Most bible scholars acknowledge that Paul’s potter metaphor was drawn, at least in part, from Jeremiah 18. Here’s the relevant passage (Rom 9.18-24 NET):

You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who has ever resisted his will?” But who indeed are you – a mere human being – to talk back to God? Does what is molded say to the molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right to make from the same lump of clay one vessel for special use and another for ordinary use? But what if God, willing to demonstrate his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience the objects of wrath prepared for destruction? And what if he is willing to make known the wealth of his glory on the objects of mercy that he has prepared beforehand for glory – even us, whom he has called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles?

Contrast this with Jeremiah 18.5-12: Continue Reading →

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

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

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

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

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Okay, how many of you guys have seen the site Garfield minus Garfield? The idea is to show the strip without Garfield, making Jon seem delusional, and almost outright psychotic. It’s a riot!

Here’s a sample: