Undeception

My long-time friend Heather has tagged me with a meme listing my five favorite things (in no particular order). So here we go!

1) Receiving and spreading knowledge. I am an education nut (read: “nerd”); I love to receive it, and welcome opportunities to share it.

2) Discussing important topics. I want real back-and-forth dialogue on things that I’m interested in. I’m not much of a small talk guy. I like big talk: theology, politics, pressing interpersonal problems, anything that matters or strikes my fancy as unique. Discussion of sports does not qualify.

3) Studying origins. I’m not primarily talking about the evolution/creation controversy here: I like to know about the beginning of almost anything. This has led to almost choosing ancient history as my postgraduate field, and it did lead to my choice of Indo-European/Germanic linguistics, which seeks to uncover the details of the origin of each language family. I like visiting historical sites so that I can experience, as much as possible, times and circumstances anterior to my own – and the earlier, the better.

4) Experiencing nature. I have not had much luck at spending time out there in recent years, due to my young family, my schooling, and my urban residences. My ideal summer would be a hike down the Appalachian Trail or some other wilderness experience. For now, the occasional camping trip has to suffice.

5) Having a family. This is definitely my #1 favorite. I’m a husband and a father of three, and I can tell you with all conviction that, as a Christian, nothing else is nearly so fulfilling or important – even essential – as having a family. My life isn’t just about me, or just about a woman I love and enjoy during my lifetime, but about what we build together that will last. My wife and I will probably die within 60 years and everything I will have said or written will quickly fall away, but our children and their children will be our living, self-perpetuating legacy. More so than anything I believe or do while I’m here, what knowledge I gain, what great discussions I have, it will be how I perform as a husband and a father – how I mirror our Lord – that will serve as my greatest act of worship. My family is the treasure I will lay down at the feet of my God when I stand before Him. I married young and became a father young, which is countercultural nowadays; I am grateful that in so doing I didn’t have the chance to bury the money He entrusted me or squander it on self-fulfillment, but that I invested it early on in something that will grow and honor Him in ways that I will have ample opportunity to observe within my own lifetime. Sure, it’s been harder to perform by the world’s standards: I would have finished this degree long, long ago, could have already had a nice house of my own and lots of possessions to be proud of, would have already hiked the Appalachian Trail, etc. But when I look at eternity…who needs a degree? Who needs stuff? I have a family! Thank you for this blessing, dear Father.

Runners up:

Scifi/fantasy. Gotta love it. Don’t read much of it, but I like to see a good scifi/fantasy film or TV series.

Movies. Good movies. I’m picky, but I definitely appreciate a well written and well executed film, especially a well written and well executed scifi/fantasy film.

The internet. Yeah, this makes me sound like a hopeless, couch (desk?) potato geek (but see number 4 above). The thing is, it’s not the internet’s slant towards goofing off and time-killing that make me enjoy it: rather, it’s the currently unparalleled potential to aid me with favorites 1, 2, and 3 above.

If you read this, you’re tagged! If you have a blog and care to, do it there; otherwise, you may simply wish to list your five favorites in a comment below.

I’ve had a poll running for a couple months asking Undeception readers what topics they’re interested in seeing me address. I decided to give it a while and see if trends emerged. Well, I just noticed yesterday that there is indeed a small trend. At present, there is a four-way tie for second place: Linguistics, Creation/evolution, Calvinism/Arminianism, and Worship. In first place by two votes is Eschatology/preterism, and in last place I was amused (and a bit disappointed) to see the very topic I just declared I was going to be writing another series on: Bibliology/hermeneutics! I still plan on writing on this in the near future, but to throw a bone to the masses, I decided I’d write one on the clear winner, eschatology. Fairly soon I will write about the intersection of eschatology (the study of last things) and protology (the study of first things) in my theology. I think they work together remarkably well, although I developed them mostly independently. But in the meantime, here’s a question to help me get the pulse of my readership on the issue of eschatology. And I expect at least all eight of you to answer!

The strength of preterist eschatology is its exegesis. I don’t have any interest in going into the issue of church history in this post (check this out for a summary of my position on this matter), but instead I want to examine purely scriptural evidence; this is because most evangelical Christians in the Protestant tradition who make up my core audience believe that no church dogma should be adopted amidst biblical evidence to the contrary. Contingent of course upon your cooperation, I’m not going to write the meat of this post. In asking you the following narrowly delimited question, I want to know (and want you to make sure) that your position has biblical support and is not just an inherited presupposition. Here it is:

Question: Quote or reference the one passage or verse that you think most clearly promises a return of Christ yet future to us. If you do not believe there is a future coming, state so, and respectfully interact with those who do.

Stipulation: Please do not use as your reference a passage that only presents another eschatological event that you think has to happen before, with, or after the next coming of Christ (e.g. the Resurrection, Romans 8′s groaning creation, etc.), but rather provide an out-and-out reference to an advent that has not yet occurred (whether or not you think of it as a “second” coming).

Why that stipulation? Any evangelical affirming a future return should presumably have a scriptural basis for that belief, and I want to see if it can be found when you strip away complex theological constructs; if there is in fact at least one passage that explicitly predicts a still future Coming, I would like to see it produced. If you believe in a future coming strictly on philosophical rather than biblical grounds, I would be interested in knowing that as well.

Thanks in advance for your cooperation!

I’ve been thinking about switching themes for months now, but this weekend I’ve been toying with the one you see here. I can already see some things that I’m going to want to tweak, but if you have any suggestions as well, let me know. Also notice that I am trying out a “wall” widget à la Facebook on the rightmost sidebar right beneath the “Recent comments” widget; if you wouldn’t mind, leave any comments you have on the theme there so I can see how it works.

Edit: I removed the wall widget. One, I can’t see people using it, and two, I didn’t like the comments showing up in my “Recent Comments” widget.

I come from a Christian tradition that downplays or contradicts basic principles of biblical interpretation (hermeneutics) on a regular basis. The starting assumption is that the Bible is God’s Word written; this effectively entails the idea that the Bible is about as divine as He is: inerrant because He is, authoritative because He is, perfect because He is, etc. The fact that evangelicals have taken to referring to the canon by one of Jesus’ own titles is an indication that they view it as a proxy for Him on the earth; Karl Barth rightly noted that, on the whole, Protestants have installed a paper pope in lieu of a living one. For these, reading the Bible is as close as most of us will get to gazing into God’s eyes. Surely this takes it too far. What if the Bible is not the ipsissima verba (“very words”) of God? Its profitability for the Christian life is not a result of near-divinity but of our wise God’s decision on how to create it, namely its humanity. The divine is the Bible’s subject, not its nature or essence.

The Bible should not be thought of as an exhaustive instruction book for humanity written by God as much as a journal written by mankind recording its encounters with God. It’s a play-by-play recounting of salvation history as guided by God. We learn by the revelation they received from God and their experiences, but we shouldn’t expect every statement and every thought to contain “a word for us” directly from God’s lips. C. S. Lewis put it this way:

The total result is not “the Word of God” in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God; and we (under grace, with attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the use of such intelligence and learning as we may have) receive that word from it not by using it as an encyclopedia or an encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper and so learning its overall message.

As someone else put it (more succinctly than Lewis), “The Bible is made up of 66 books, not 31,000 fortune cookies.” That large figure, of course, is an estimate of the number of verses in the Bible, but even subdividing by chapters instead, although producing a much lower number, is almost as dangerous. Too many evangelicals are wont to expect the Holy Spirit’s illumination of the Scriptures to function independently of the context and often in apparent contempt of it. The idea is that because the Bible is a mystical, magical book (which is how many understand the adjective “inspired”), each passage or verse can mean whatever God wants it to, and we should look forward to those instances in which He extracts nuggets of personally relevant data in blatant violation of the context in which He inspired it. But if the Bible can mean anything, it means nothing. Context is either an essential factor for determining meaning or it is essentially trivial, wholly subject to being thrown out as soon as someone decides that the passage means something more suitable to him/her in their situation. Original, contextual meaning gathers dust beneath the shadow cast by the Holy Spirit’s illumination. There is no middle ground because the more “spiritual” reading is always able to tilt the table in its direction.
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