Undeception

Summary of Part One

• God the Gardener created a son (Lk 3.38) to tend the garden.
• God, as a father, was training up his children Adam and Eve in the garden.
• Adam was put in a garden for instruction because gardening requires faith: both faithfulness in tending day by day and faith that what is planted and cultivated will one day grow. Planting and tending a garden is an exercise of faith.
• The prohibition against the Tree of Knowledge, like the dietary laws of the Mosaic Covenant abolished in the New, was intended to be a temporary restriction.
• The Tree of Knowledge was made for Adam and Eve when they matured.

Support for the last two points is found in Hebrews 5:13-14 (all quotations hereafter are from the NRSV): “. . .for everyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is unskilled in the word of righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, for those whose faculties have been trained by practice to distinguish good from evil.”

• Adam did not have to earn his place in God’s Garden: rather, God gave good gifts to His children.
• Adam was gifted with gold, precious stones, rivers teeming with life, and authority over all living creatures; no dowry was demanded for him to take Eve as his wife.
• God created the world so that faith was necessary from the beginning. Adam lacked faith in what God told him, and impatiently asked for his inheritance before time (cf. the Prodigal Son).
• The temptation was a shortcut to glory (Genesis 3:5).
• Satan tempted them with something they already had (Genesis 1:27).
• God didn’t just throw His son out of the garden for the first mistake he made. God warned Adam of only one sin.
• Adam was being taught to trust His Father and His goodness. Adam’s sin was his rebellion against his own experience of what God was doing in his life, impatience with God.

The Garden in the New Covenant

Is this motif shown elsewhere in Scripture? Martin gives examples of the gardening metaphor in the NT, specifically as regards life under the New Covenant:

Continue Reading →

From Fox News following Metro.co.uk.:

One unlucky British teen suffered a painful shark attack without ever going near the water. In fact, he was bitten in the face by one of the sharp-fanged animals in his own bedroom, Metro.co.uk reported.

The “attack” happened at 14-year-old Sam Hawthorne’s home in Dudley, England.

Hawthorne was sleepwalking when the teeth of a dead souvenir shark from a family vacation, that hangs on the wall of his nautical-themed bedroom, became embedded in his face.

The teeth left blood pouring from the teen’s face, his mother, Susan, told Metro.co.uk. “It was like something out of a horror film,” she said. “The shark must have been embedded in Sam’s cheek for about 15 minutes and he was in a lot of pain.”

In the end, Hawthorne came away with only a small scar. “It was the most frightening experience of my life,” he told Metro.co.uk.

Whaa…?

The (sometimes bewilderingly) controversial theologian Brian McLaren wrote an article in a newsletter (I think) in which he enunciates his take on where we are and where we should go in modern worship music. He addresses it as “An open letter to songwriters” (direct pdf link), and presents some well-stated observations and requests in his typically humble way. Here are a couple excerpts:

Let me make this specific: too many of our lyrics are embarrassingly personalistic, about Jesus and me. Personal intimacy with God is such a wonderful step above a cold, abstract, wooden recitation of dogma. But it isn’t the whole story. In fact—this might shock you—it isn’t, in the emerging new postmodern world, necessarily the main point of the story. A popular worship song I’ve heard in many venues in the last few years (and which we sing at Cedar Ridge, where I pastor) says that worship is “all about You, Jesus,” but apart from that line, it really feels like worship, and Christianity in general, has become “all about me, me, me.”

It’s embarrassing to admit, but some of us are thinking right now, “If spiritual songwriting is not about deep, personal intimacy with God, what else is there?”

The Bible is full of songs that wail, the blues but even bluer, songs that feel the agonizing distance between what we hope for and what we have, what we could be and what we are, what we believe and what we see and feel. The honesty is disturbing, and the songs of lament don’t always end with a happy Hallmark-Card-Precious-Moments cliché to try to fix the pain. Sometimes I think we’re too happy: the only way to become happier is to become sadder, by feeling the pain of the chronically ill, the desperately poor, the mentally ill, the lonely, the aged and forgotten, the oppressed minority, the widow and orphan. This pain should find its way into song, and these songs should find their way into our churches. The bitter will make the sweet all the sweeter; without the bitter, the sweet can become cloying, and too many of our churches feel, I think, like Candyland. Is it too much to ask that we be more honest? Since doubt is part of our lives, since pain and waiting and as-yet unresolved disappointment are part of our lives, can’t these things be reflected in the songs of our communities? Doesn’t endless singing about celebration lose its vitality (and even its credibility) if we don’t also sing about the struggle?

McLaren lists five neglected topics/themes and six “stylistic observations and requests”; of the latter, my favorite is, “Can our lyricists start reading more good poetry, good prose, so they can be sensitized to the powers of language, the grace of a well-turned phrase, the delight of a freshly discovered image, the prick or punch or caress or jolt that is possible if we wrestle a little harder and stretch a little farther for the word that really wants to be said from deep within us?”

Good stuff, hopefully altogether uncontroversial, and good to hear from someone as influential as he is among the next generation of songwriters.

Dr. Keith Miller’s recent essay on the Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution site entitled “Creation, Evolution and the Nature of Science” included the following statement:

In fact, as I have argued, God is unnecessary for a scientific description, but a scientific description is not a complete description of reality.

Someone responded that this appeared to be a God-of-the-gaps kind of position. I responded with the following observations, and thought it a succinct statement of my view that I would like to have here on my blog for any visitors wanting to know my position on these things.

I think the point of Dr. Miller’s quote was that even a full description of what physical things occur and how they occur in a mechanical fashion does not preclude a third descriptor: why. Philosophical materialists insist that satisfactory answers to “what” and “how” questions are sufficient, and since they are answerable in the laboratory, the picture of reality that the laboratory furnishes for us is, by their estimation, altogether complete. Theists argue that we should not ignore the question “why”, even though it cannot be recovered by the scientific method; discounting “why” as a valid question shows a presuppositional bias toward materialism and does not constitute an argument for it.

God created (or “is creating”, some would say) the universe as it is today by willing it to be as it is. His role was/is the role of intentionality, meaning it to happen. If He had not wanted it to, it would not have happened. Out of all the alternative possibilities that could have arisen from our cosmological womb, out of all of the other paths the evolution of our universe might have taken anywhere throughout its 13.73 billion year age (give or take 120 million years), it is this universe that happened. Science can hypothesize about “what if”, but not “why this?” Materialism has no answer – cannot propose an answer – but does this mean there’s no such thing as the question? Philosophical materialism’s denial of the supernatural based on the existence of the natural essentially attempts to argue just that. I’m not saying that the existence of the question “why” proves there is an answer to itself. There may be meaning and there may not be, but materialism has no authority or power to come down on either side of the question.

By definition, a supreme supernatural being’s purpose for the universe is altogether unanalyzable by the scientific method, so arguing that such a being exists and that he/she/it gives it purpose does not qualify as a God-of-the-gaps argument. Gaps in our knowledge of the natural are gaps we should try to fill with natural explanations; we should try to fill the gaps in our knowledge of the supernatural with supernatural explanations. They are non-overlapping and not contradictory in their aims.

ElShaddai Edwards has tagged me with the Weird Worship meme, in which I am supposed to come up with five worship songs with strange, perplexing, or otherwise – well, weird lyrics. My peeps know I’m highly critical of worship songs in general, but this has been more difficult than I thought to come up with songs whose lyrics I might characterize as “weird”, as opposed to simply badly written, wrong-focused, or theologically errant, or which there are a host of songs I might mention. But here I go…

Continue Reading →

I’ve been quite vocal on this blog in pointing out my disagreements with the Christian critics of science (ID advocates and other creationists). Unfortunately, these special creationists have had quite a bit of help constructing a wall between faith and science.

Dr. Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, is an outspoken evangelical who also happens to be utterly convinced that the method of God’s creation was natural processes. His confidence in the theory of evolution has been bolstered tremendously by the work on comparing the human genome with that of other species. His tone is always conciliatory and never strident, which makes him an excellent evangelist for Christ among scientists and science among Christians.

Continue Reading →

Here’s a bit from an article written by Todd Bentley of Lakeland Revival fame:

By now you may be wondering what angels really look like. Well, I’ve had angels come as shimmering pillars of light with such brightness about their person that I couldn’t make out the details. I had another angel come to me looking like he was about 6′ 4″ tall with 24″ biceps. He was cut with rippling muscles and wore a golden sash about his waist. He had blond, shoulder-length hair and blue eyes-the hunk of hunks. We are talking better than Fabio, OK. Another time I had a similar-looking angel come to me-he was young and in his early twenties. I said, “God is that like me in the spirit?” He said, “No Son, it’s an angel” . . .

I once had an angelic visitation, I believe, in a Mac’s convenience store. I had told these guys in the store about Jesus once before-they were laughing, mocking, scoffing, drug addicts. One guy was an atheist. One of them, an atheist, standing with his buddies, began to scoff at me saying, “Look, it’s the guy who came in here last week telling me about Jesus. What do you guys think about Jesus?” They were all drunk, stoned or smoking cigarettes, wearing AC/DC or Motley Crew T-shirts: “We don’t believe in angels and God and all that crazy stuff and blah blah blah.” Nothing would have convinced these hardened skeptics besides the power of God.

Suddenly, I fell under the power in the convenience store and, on all fours, roared like a lion. Then the shop clerk ran with fear and dived behind the counter with the two dope heads right behind him. By now, the entire atmosphere had changed. Then the atheist gets up, points his finger at me, and says, “Is that your God?” At that moment, this dirty bum comes walking into the store with two bags of bottles or something, puts them up on the counter and says, “You guys, listen to what these guys are telling you. Everything these guys are telling you is true.” He gets his money and walks out of the store.

The first thing I thought when I looked at my friend was, “That was an angel.” He was thinking the same thing. My wife and her girlfriend were waiting in the car and watching what was going on in the store. When we got into the vehicle my wife said nobody went in the store and nobody came out. This particular angel, I’m convinced, came looking like a bum.

Bum? I wonder if he meant “Bam!” Anyway, it gets more interesting:

Continue Reading →