In this week’s installment of Theology Unplugged, a podcast I highly recommend, Reclaiming the Mind Ministries president Michael Patton made the following comments about full preterists (like myself):

Now I would say, you can believe that, and you can make your arguments — and many people do from Scripture. I’m not persuaded at all by them — but at the same time I would say that this is an unChristian way to believe about a particular issue in the end times. It’s an unChristian way or, another way to put it, unorthodox; it is outside of the sphere of orthodoxy within historic Christianity. Now, the next thing we ask is, ok, if it’s outside of the sphere of historic Christianity, does that make… [you] automatically a nonbeliever, someone who is outside the grace of God, someone who is unregenerate as we sometimes put it, or someone who does not have a relationship established with the one true God? And I would say no.

In my explanation of man’s depravity from the view of a recurring, individualized (non-historical) Fall, I have argued that mankind’s natural separation from God was in origin a result of natural self-preservation instincts. These instincts progressed first into childish selfishness and then, with the onset of divinely gifted God-consciousness (Romans 1:18-21), those instincts gone unchecked morphed into moral failure (sin), to the effect that scarcely had our species become aware of its Creator before it began to reject Him.

I thought of this when I came upon the following quote from C.S. Lewis:

If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?

It strikes me that God uses the selfsame aspect that damns us to redeem us. Self-regard is not an absolute evil; it is a neutral currency of the universe, one of which our ultimate God naturally demands the ultimate possession. This is no doubt because our blessed Maker, in molding man in His Own image, also imprinted upon him another, converse attribute of which He is the ultimate expression: self-sacrifice. In fact, it is this expectation God has of us, not the self-regard shared by every creature from amoeba to ape, that separates man from beast. That God demands something we are in some sense capable of but not predisposed to do is analogous to a parent teaching her daughter to help her in the kitchen, or her son to brush his own teeth (without swallowing the toothpaste!) so they won’t rot out of his head.

In order for us to become like Him, we must subordinate our self-regard to our self-sacrifice; but thankfully, as Lewis notes, we are not required — nor are we able — to perform self-sacrifice wholly independent of self-regard.

What do you think of this?

Elsewhere I have blamed futurist eschatology for minimizing the Church’s call to focus on social issues and address the needs of the poor. But there are more causes than that alone; for instance, Derek Webb of Caedmon’s Call.

Josh Horne at the Smoak House has posted a dissent from Webb’s solo album, Mockingbird, which he finds enjoyable overall. Webb, whose schtick is to point out errors he sees in American evangelical Christianity, is the type who gives Christian activism its stereotype as indicative of liberal Christianity. It seems like anytime I hear of a Christian activist, he overshoots mainstream evangelical ideology to the point that his good points are marginalized and he is identified with the social gospel. For instance, as Josh points out, Webb makes some inane comments in his lyrics about war being an absolute evil. This has caused a little discussion in the comments that leads to discussion of the death penalty. Check it out and weigh in!

Recently I heard a theologian talking about Job and was not surprised to hear him refer to Job’s “so-called friends”. Not surprised perhaps, but as usual when I hear this common sentiment, I was uncomfortable with it. Were Job’s friends there to give him a hard time? Were they there just so they could make him feel worse? Did they offer him their dire diagnosis of the cause for Job’s travail through condescending self-righteousness?

I’m not going to say that there was none of that attitude in what they said. I do think, however, that we can make the following observations:

2. The text plainly calls Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar Job’s “friends”.
3. They sat with him and shared his grief for a week’s time.
4. They didn’t simply tell him why they thought God had it in for him, but offered a solution (repentance) to extract him from further judgement. When Job was insistent that he had done nothing to repent for, they became even more determined that he do what they felt was necessary to avoid more of God’s judgment.
5. Job thought enough of them to pray for God to forgive them their incorrect counsel.

In a recent post on his popular blog, Al Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, presented a predictable take on the origins debate. He states,

I have not said that one can’t be a Christian and believe in evolution. It is entirely possible to be a confused Christian or a confused evolutionist . . . or both. Nevertheless, the dominant theory of evolution — the theory as taught and defended by the world’s leading evolutionary scientists — explicitly rules out any supernatural design or interference at any point in the evolutionary continuum. That fact alone makes the theory incompatible with any legitimate affirmation of divine creation or of biblical theism.

I am frankly amazed that one so learned and esteemed should display such an obvious oversight concerning the most fundamental of the philosophical and theological grounds for theistic evolution (TE). Even in the purest form that affirms absolute naturalism and denies overt divine intervention in the process, theistic evolution affirms that God alone is responsible for setting the universe as we know it into place, but that the “divine creation” occurred by laws He and He alone created and set in motion. It does not rule out supernatural design but rather views God’s design as taking place at a higher level of sovereignty. The universe was created and life developed into human life because God purposed that they do so. TE in its fullest form does indeed rule out “interference at any point in the evolutionary continuum”, or rather, it renders such interference superfluous. The Author of nature did not need to step in and manually execute the actions of the Creation subroutine after He struck the “enter” key to run what He had already carefully programmed.

Later he triumphantly quotes a TE who happens to be a theology professor at the Claremont School of Theology apparently partial to open theism who tries to argue — with no success, from my vantage — that “[t]heologies that emphasize God as deeply involved in natural, open-ended processes seem better able to make sense of evolution than do the classical accounts of an omnipotent God.” I can’t see how this helps anyone’s case, but Mohler doesn’t even attempt to deconstruct that argument analytically, choosing rather to herald it as proof that TE “is not biblical Christianity.” Of course, I can see why he accepts that theologian’s understanding of TE: Mohler agrees with this mistaken theologian that evolutionary advances which appear random preclude any intentionality, even on the behalf of God. I don’t understand how any theologian, whether at Claremont or SBTS, can accept such an anemic view of the sovereignty of God. Scripture consistently declares that God ordains events beyond our purposes.

Another thing that really bugs me is how TE opponents speak incessantly of “Darwinism” and reference Darwin as the man behind the curtain, pulling the strings for evolutionary theory despite his reported demise in the nineteenth century; they don’t consistently apply their criticism to Christians who accept the theory of gravity as “Newtonists” or some such. Both Darwin’s and Newton’s views have been tremendously modified and/or overhauled since they originally formulated them, so the men who first hypothesized what later became accepted as a workable theory can hardly stand in as representatives of the current views, unless of course you need to demonize those views and need a voodoo doll to burn. “Darwin” becomes a boogieman, used to marginalize the theory of evolution as a personality cult. This tactic is manifest in Mohler’s closing stinger, so typical of anti-evolutionists, “…and that is why there is such panic in the temple of Darwin.” Two favorite red herrings here: 1) evolutionary theory is a religion and 2) Darwin the man = the mounds and mounds of scientific evidence that have confirmed some of the basic notions he first articulated.

Come on, Al. You may have reached the top of evangelical academia’s heap, but that doesn’t give you leave to stop thinking critically.

I realized long after the fact that ElShaddai at He is Sufficient tagged me with a Bible meme!

Here’s my shot at it.

1. What translation of the Bible do you like best? NET or NIV (I know, I know, ElShaddai…)

2. Old or New Testament? Gosh! Do I have to choose? You can’t beat Isaiah for good reading, or Paul for doctrine. But since the New Testament has Jesus…

3. Favorite Book of the Bible? Matthew or Romans

4. Favorite Chapter? Hebrews 12

5. Favorite Verse? Hebrews 12:22-24

6. Bible character you think you’re most like? John

7. One thing from the Bible that confuses you? Ok, here’s a common one: the Nephilim of Genesis 6. Viewing it as the survival of an early Israelite myth makes it all the more intriguing

8. Moses or Paul? Paul

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

10. Coolest name in the Bible? Crispus (Acts 18:8; 1 Cor. 1:14)

Ok, I’m going to tag Josh at The Smoak House, Vance at Meditations on an Eyeball, and…everyone else who loves Jesus — well, do you or don’t you?!

This is the eighth and final post in a series on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?

Part 2: What is inspiration?

Part 3: The nature of inspiration and the purpose of Scripture

Part 4: Inerrancy vs. infallibility

Part 5: The literary-generic principle

Part 6: The authority of Scripture

Part 7: Case study: the Fall

So anyway what about the Fall? If no one human is the cause for our sinful natures, what is?

Depravity for me is summed up by self-centered living, which is inexcusable for a species that has achieved consciousness of the divine. We are all sinners because we all start off life living for ourselves, which, after early childhood and the awareness of Otherness sets in, becomes sin. Sin is a state of estrangement from God. Over long eons, God brought His children up biologically so that mankind became sentient and came to know that it had a Maker. At that point, God chose a different means to mature our species. We still struggle to subdue and tame our own biological impulses that lead to our detriment and God’s displeasure, but we master them not through natural selection, but by the overcoming power of the Spirit of God. Christianity is the next (and final?) phase in the evolution of God’s creation.

This is the seventh in a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?

Part 2: What is inspiration?

Part 3: The nature of inspiration and the purpose of Scripture

Part 4: Inerrancy vs. infallibility

Part 5: The literary-generic principle

Part 6: The authority of Scripture

The traditional doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin teach that the first human’s first sin caused a rupture in the whole race’s ability to interact with God. How the death that Adam experienced because of his sin was passed on to all his descendants has been explained in various ways: the federal view says that Adam’s fall from God’s favor was effective for all humanity because he was the “head” of the race. Another view is that the Fall corrupted Adam’s very genetic makeup, causing humanity to be a slave to its own sinful and fallen flesh, which explains how it was passed on to his children, and thus the whole race.

Regardless of how they explain it, most Christians believe that God considers all humans straight out of the chute as culpable of sin, a stance of separation from God called “Original Sin”. This position explains why every human sins, and why we automatically start out life estranged from God. That we all sin and by nature act in ways that do not please God from early childhood at least is apparent to all. For this reason, it is accurate to say that unredeemed mankind is, as a race, “falling”, but as for “fallen”, what did we fall from? Or, more importantly, what caused this Fall? Allow me to present you with an alternative interpretation based on a view of the Genesis account as etiology.

This is the sixth of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?

Part 2: What is inspiration?

Part 3: The nature of inspiration and the purpose of Scripture

Part 4: Inerrancy vs. infallibility

Part 5: The literary-generic principle

Preliminary Remarks The purpose of these next few posts is to examine my perspective of the doctrine of the Fall, and specifically how it is influenced by my view of the Bible. The purpose of this post is apologetic rather than polemic: my purpose is less to convince anyone of the view I hold and more to explain how someone who holds it deals with doctrinal issues. The earlier posts in this series argued that our Scriptures are not inerrant and are not in fact completely without scientific and historical errors. I also made a plea for interpreting the Bible as literature: that is, we need to recognize that the words of Scripture were not completely isolated from the words written by their authors’ contemporaries and we must therefore identify the literary genre in which they were composed as a first order of business when interpreting the Bible. I cautioned against a view of the nature of Scripture that overspiritualizes its origins, pointing out that if God had wished to set down a series of unanalyzable propositions free from all impurities and the influence of man’s fallibility, He could definitely have chosen a more suitable means than using words written in three different languages over several centuries that must in turn be passed down through many more centuries and translated into countless other languages. Moreover, Christians are left bickering and head-butting each other while trying to determine the supposedly undistilled, pristine, immutable, and uncontradictable truth for almost any given passage. The fundamentalist might understandably wish that God had provided an inerrant and infallible key to interpretation, one decidedly more reliable than the deceptively straight-forward “literal whenever possible” model, which itself all too rarely yields a single, indisputable outcome in its application.

The problem is that the idea of not having an inerrant and hence perfectly uncontestable final authority makes many Christians uncomfortable, and sets many to wondering how rejecting inerrancy limits the Bible’s value and usefulness. The next few installments of this series are meant to address two concerns related to that question. First, I will summarize my belief in the Bible’s origins and nature; second, I want to present a case study of the resultant hermeneutic, with a brief and tentative exposition of how I interpret the passages that have resulted in the doctrine of the Fall.

Well, I got a Macbook. I’ve been spending a lot of time getting acquainted with it, and no time on my PC. My blog has suffered, because instead of posting online I had been using blog editing software called Zoundry. Great program. Well, it doesn’t offer Mac support, so I’ve been looking into other options. Then it occurred to me that I might as well post this one here within my browser. Trouble is, I’m somewhat addicted to having a stand-alone editor, so I can hardly stand to write any more right now. I will tell you that Qumana, which is free, works ok, but it has no support for the <—more—> tag that allows the first part of the post to appear on the main page with a link to the full post at the end. Because I have frequently used and fully intend to continue using this feature, due to my extra long posts, I cannot stick with Quamana. I haven’t really found any other free options that work. Any suggestions?