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!”

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!

Mick found a great quote from N.T. Wright’s book, Evil and the Justice of God (pp. 138-139). Wright, a highly esteemed Anglican bishop, is not a full preterist, but what he says is very much in line with stuff I have written. One of the many books I’m going to eventually get around to reading is his The Coming of the Son of Man: New Testament Eschatology for an Emerging Church.

Hope you don’t mind, Mick, but because of its covalence with a recent topic of mine, I’m going to reproduce your quote here on my blog, too. Enjoy!

The four living creatures are singing “Holy, holy, holy” and the elders are casting their crowns before the throne; but the one who sits on the throne holds a scroll…sealed with seven seals, and nobody can be found worthy to open it and break its seals. The way to God’s unfolding purposes to put the world to rights, to complete the whole project of creation, appears to be blocked, since God made a world in such a way that it must be looked after by human stewards, and no human being is capable of taking God’s plan forward. This is Revelation’s statement of the problem of evil: God has a plan for the world; but unless He is to unmake creation itself, which is designed to function through the stewardship of God’s image-bearing creatures-the human race-it looks as though the plan cannot come to fruition. And that is Revelation’s statement of the answer: the lamb has conquered, has defeated the powers of evil. And now (Revelation5:9-10) the Lamb has ransomed people from every nation in order to make them a royal priesthood, serving God and reigning on the earth.

This theme, so frequent in the New Testament and so widely ignored in Christian theology, is part of the solution to the problem (of evil). It isn’t that the cross won the victory, so there’s nothing more to be done. Rather, the cross has won the victory as a result of which there are now redeemed human beings getting ready to act as God’s wise agents, His stewards, constantly worshiping their Creator and constantly being equipped to reflect His image into the his creation, to bring his wise and healing order to the world, putting the world to rights under His just and gentle rule. A truly biblical ecclesiology…the church is the community of those who, being redeemed through the cross, are now to be a kingdom and priests to serve God and to reign on the earth. Our fear of triumphalism on the one hand and on the other hand our flattening out our final destiny into talk merely of “going to heaven,” have combined to rob us of this central biblical theme.

Preterists who deny a physical Resurrection of the Dead have been accused of being gnostic (because we supposedly believe that only spiritual reality matters and that the physical world is evil). Yet those who demand a destruction of the physical universe and the replacement with a spiritual new heavens and new earth are surely closer to this belief than are full preterists. We don’t see a reason to believe that the earth and the physical universe will not sustain us into virtual perpetuity. Our strictly spiritual Kingdom is more likely to take over the realm of the physical as we apply the mandate for dominion in every area of our lives. Those looking forward to a restoration of the physical universe need look no further than the preterist’s Kingdom of God made manifest in us, the sons of God, the co-heirs with Jesus.

Genesis 1:28 shows us the original intention God had for man: man was tasked with subduing the earth and ruling over it and its creatures. Now, think theoretically for a second. Was God thwarted in His plan? Was He forced to go back to the drawing board because man did something God knew he was going to do all along? Was the sum of human history a waste because no sooner did God give us the mandate, but we screwed up? Was God’s experiment with a physical universe a dismal failure that He’s been stuck with for millennia, while He sits up there and waits (for something or other) to wipe it off the map and forget the whole embarrassing experience? Poor God. Better luck next time!

This view is untenable for someone who believes that God is omnipotent and omniscient. So it’s really no wonder that Calvin and others devoted especially to the concept of God’s sovereignty should resort to the defense, “Well…God really wanted it that way! Yeah, He didn’t fail: He planned the whole fiasc–, uh, glorious plan!”

I think, rather, that His plan will be fulfilled and that His first-century work was a new beginning. We see a similar pattern in the flood account. What happened after God wiped out the wicked with the Flood? He started again, with the same earth and the same animals, and the faithful; in fact, the only change was in the topology and the exclusion of the wicked from the land. That’s what happened in AD 70. Noah, like Adam, was charged with populating the land with offspring and subduing the creation (Gen. 9:1-3, 7). So it is with us.

When Christendom has finally understood and embraced its reinvigorated Kingdom mandate, the physical world will reap the benefits. This goes for improvement in medical science: the world reshaped by the influence of Christianity has already done much in this direction, but there could be more. For instance, could Christians leading science in the far off future eventually essentially marginalize physical suffering, perhaps even going so far as to subjugate physical death? What about the environment? I don’t just mean caring for it in the ecological sense, but being able to predict and manipulate even the weather — sure, it sounds Star Trek, but my point is that the sky’s the limit. In a few millennia, the fallen world as we know it may be a distant memory, fading away much like the mother’s childbirth pain once she holds the newborn in her arms.

Is this fantasy?

Technorati : eschatology, theology

The heavens and the earth have passed

The new has dawned, the night complete,

The day of judgment come. At last

The rule of Death dies in defeat.

The fear, the tears our fathers knew

Awaiting the Redeemer’s call

Have dried, has fled. The Life broke through;

Death’s victory was snatched withal.

All hope fulfilled and joy made whole

By overflowing life within,

Those purchased with His blood extol

With lips and lives purged from all sin

The mighty arm of Him Whose name

Renowned from depths to utmost height

Has justly earned its glorious fame

By forging endless day from night.

Thus every proud dominion must

Assuredly return to dust

While we, the ransomed, with our birth

Possess new heavens and new earth.

Next time on the Poetry Channel: Germanic alliterative verse. Yeah, we’ll see about that…

Technorati : eschatology, poetry
Del.icio.us : eschatology, poetry

Sometimes money makes the world go round — at least a few more revolutions for a few people.

Someone known only as “Anonymous Friend” has given $100 million dollars to the Erie Community Foundation. This organization “is a collection of charitable endowments operating under the administrative umbrella of a single public charity.” The anonymous donor apparently singled out fifty-one nonprofit groups to receive the money in various amounts, based on the donor’s perception of need.

Amazing what good can be done by one person Providentially supplied with money and with the will to give hilariously. I wonder if this donor is a Christian? I wonder if there are Christians with such means willing to give and make such necessary strides toward advancing the interests of the Kingdom.

In his response to Clarence’s good-natured remonstrance that Heaven’s denizens have no need for currency, I think George Bailey was right: “Comes in pretty handy down here, bub!”

God is fully aware of this. God gives to givers for giving. I am not the best steward of the money I do have, but I hope to prove faithful enough to be given more so that I may give more.

When the Church of Jesus

When the church of Jesus shuts its outer door,
Lest the roar of traffic drown the voice of prayer:
May our prayers, Lord, make us ten times more aware
That the world we banish is our Christian care.

If our hearts are lifted where devotion soars
High above this hungry suff’ring world of ours:
Lest our hymns should drug us to forget its needs,
Forge our Christian worship into Christian deeds.

Lest the gifts we offer, money, talents, time,
Serve to salve our conscience to our secret shame:
Lord, reprove, inspire us by the way you give;
Teach us, dying Savior, how true Christians live.

- F. Pratt Green (#319, Baptist Hymnal)

Josh’s blog has something important to say on this.

‘Nuff said.

I’ve always rolled my eyes when I encountered the “Revelation” nuts in the church: obsession with the day’s headlines, thinking that they elucidate the details of the fulfillment of end-times prophecy, this bugs the ever-loving stew out of me.

I realize I’ve been talking a lot of eschatology lately. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m a one-trick pony or that I’m unhealthily devoted to discussion of this particular doctrine. I thought I’d dedicate a post explaining why I’ve been talking about this, and why I am not likely to completely stop posting about eschatology in the future (although I’m sure it will slack off here and there).

I never could stomach codswallop, and especially widely celebrated codswallop. It’s always been natural for me to be critical of things handed to me to believe, even when I understand that the majority believes it. And then sometimes I discover that I have unquestioned, inaccurate presuppositions on a subject. Now, when I realize that I have been eating food with a hair in it, I make absolutely sure that I have purged my mouth by rinsing it with drink and stuffing it with a prodigious amount of uncontaminated food. So it was with my eschatology. Having long since rinsed my mouth out and cleared away the bunk I believed before, for the last few years I have been on the mission of preparing and chewing up the replacement meal. I am using this blog as a way of probing everything and getting my own ducks in a row, but also of answering the questions of some friends who have lately been asking questions.

Although my interests are by no means limited to one or two topics, I do bury myself in one or two at a time until 1) I reach a dead end, 2) I’m distracted by the luster of another topic, or 3) I obtain a measure of comfort with what I believe on that topic. And when this last is achieved, the teacher in me makes me dig just a bit deeper so that I can explain it to others.

This is where I am with eschatology. I am fully aware that there are some divisive topics which do not request to be voiced abroad, or if so, more as a heads-up full disclosure than a “Repent of your contrary belief!” sort of thing. Christianity can tolerate a lack of homogeneity of belief on a number of peripheral topics.

But eschatology is different. Not only does futurism needlessly make Christianity a laughingstock with its endless failed predictions, it’s based solely on a ludicrous hermeneutic for Scripture interpretation that undermines even our Lord’s own credibility. Moreover, my eschatology needs to make substantial gains in acceptance within the Church if its chief implication, the victory of Christianity throughout the world, is to be realized any time soon.

So please don’t roll your eyes when you see me writing about this particular topic, and please do make sure that you’ve tried to understand why it means so much to me and that you are satisfied that you have given it the level of importance that it deserves.

Generally speaking, I am of the opinion that, all time and culture considerations aside, the political philosophy held by most of the Founding Fathers matched the basic ideals of the modern libertarian philosophy. The core belief of libertarianism, ignoring the distinctions of all the various permutations of it as well as the whole anarchist strand, is the philosophy of Paine that government is a necessary evil and must hence be limited to doing the things that make it a necessity at all: that is, government should only ever be about the business of protecting the life, liberty, and property of its citizens. It is in essence passive, and must be restrained from intruding upon noninjurious liberty. The Bill of Rights is an heir to that concern.

Libertarians are on steadiest ground against government regulation of economics. They are generally firmly capitalistic, which is to say that they think government intrusion into economics always leads to decreased liberty and profitability for all parties. Most libertarians are equally insistent that the government not make any law abridging people’s freedom on social issues. This latter is a reason that I shy away from committing to the libertarian ideal. It’s not that I think the government has a vested (or Constitutional) interest in invading our personal lives or that it is particularly effective when it does so. These are my dilemmas.

Above, in passing, I allowed a distinction between the political philosophy of the Founders and modern libertarianism. This factor is the state of the society’s morality. The Founders would not have wished a government that intrudes on personal liberty; there is no doubt about that. However, neither would they have wished (or imagined) a society whose personal liberties looked so non-traditional and scandalous. On this point, I often quote John Adams:

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Libertarians are generally in favor of the legalization of drugs, prostitution, gambling, and abortion - in short, all the social issues that left-wing philosophers champion and right-wing philosophers unequivocally condemn! But, following the Founders’ principle against the impingement on personal liberty (seen, for instance in the right to bear arms, free speech, and the practice of religion) and absent any explicit Constitutional prohibition of the moral vices I mentioned above, the modern libertarian view appears to be quite consistent with the Founders’ philosophy. “Times change,” libertarians say, “and the vices of the past are the personal prerogatives of the present.”

So what should we do? Should we just let it go? Should we “fight back”? What does that look like politically?

The government cannot dictate morality; it can only enforce punishment against behavior decided upon as unacceptable by those who constitute the government. The contention of the Founders and the libertarians is that the only behavior that should be sanctioned by government is behavior that violates the life, liberty, or property of others. Some conservative groups, seeking to compensate for the disparity of early and modern American moral standards, include behavior that violates specifically Christian morality in the list of legal prohibitions. This includes prostitution: how does this violate the rights of anyone? Someone sells a service to someone — sounds like a typical capitalistic win-win enterprise when Christian morality is removed from the equation. (The issue of abortion is completely different: even biologically, without reference to religious concerns, there is no excuse for the killing of the unborn.)

The problem is the question of whether we should pick and choose things that offend our (and God’s) morality to legislate and then prosecute violations of those mores. There is a segment of Christian society that thinks that might makes right, and any decisions we make, any liberty we prohibit, as long as it is done in God’s name, is obedience. I wonder if such people can cite a case in which a system like this was enforced and it turned out well; God’s own chosen people bucked against these sorts of restraints under the theocratic Torah-established government. It didn’t take long before they were ignoring whole swaths of the most central laws. This was because all the Law could do was bring consciousness of sin and bestow condemnation, and was powerless to evince the changes necessary to avoid breaking the laws: it could not create pure hearts.

What are the solutions? One the one hand, we could “update” the Founders’ philosophy and legislate matters of conscience with which non-Christians may be in disagreement and hope that doing so will…appease God? make them change their minds about the behavior? On the other hand, we could stop trying to keep people from making personal sins that affect only those who wish to be involved and lean more heavily on the Church to change the hearts of the population. Sounds like I’m advocating the latter, doesn’t it? Not necessarily; I realize that the issue is more complicated than that.

The problem is that some of those “personal sins” (homosexuality, prostitution, drug-use) pollute the culture such that it becomes unfit for our posterity’s consumption; I don’t want my children exposed to so much of that stuff before I have time to ground them in our faith’s morality. That’s a major reason why we’re homeschooling. But even that doesn’t much mitigate the frog-in-hot-water factor of Christians in a degenerating culture; and there is a distinct possibility that the water heats even more imperceptibly if the legalization of questionable behavior is confused with tacit approval. To this Christian libertarians might respond, “Well, even if so, Christians just need to raise their influence level a few notches so that we can take back the culture more quickly.” I don’t doubt that we can do that — but will I have to sacrifice the innocence and well-being of my children and grandchildren for it?

What’s the answer?

You tell me.

What would it take to wipe out hunger and give all poor nations a chance at development?

Better yet, why aren’t more Christians asking this question?

This is something that’s been in my mind of late. Thoughts of children suffering and dying and their parents helpless to prevent it are so burdensome that only my strong defense mechanism (called “ignoring it”) keeps me from being constantly disturbed. But I ask myself - if you knew that your sibling(s) and/or parents were somewhere far away suffering the same way unaided, would you be content to put it out of your mind? Where’s the love for “the least of these”?

The U.N. tells us that 24,000 people die from starvation/malnutrition every single day. This figure is one of the lower I’ve read, so don’t think the U.N. is making it look worse than it is. Nor does this data even take into account the number of deaths that happen because of untreated, though easily treatable, medical problems.

Does any of that shock you? Or are they just statistics?

I have been disturbed to hear committed evangelical Christians shrug their shoulders at the insurmountable tasks I pointed out above. Three common responses:

1) If they’d just get off their lazy butts, they’d be able to do something about it.

It’s not the well who need a doctor, but the sick. Jesus came to seek and save the lost: even given occasional accuracy of the “laziness” accusation, those who are lost in self-destructive habits are prime examples of those who need our Savior’s administration in their lives.

2) All we can hope is to spread the gospel to as many places as possible so that Jesus can come back and end poverty once and for all.

This is a load of garbage (since I try to use more than four letters for all of my descriptive words, I will leave it at that). This is a perfect example of why futurist eschatology is dysfunctional and dangerous. That aside, this mindset makes the gospel look irrelevant: it ignores the example of Jesus who customarily treated the physical need before (or as a way of) ministering to the heart.

3) We do send missionaries to help where they can. We’re helping out little by little.

It having recently come to my attention that a surprising number of my intimate acquaintances are uninformed of the specifics of my eschatological beliefs, and owing to my conviction that the opposing views most frequently encountered are deficient both in their ability to be supported Scripturally and in their effect on various doctrines, both abstract and practical, which by natural progression contribute to unsatisfactory Christian behavior, and seeing that there is little chance that anyone of you would come aware of this view apart from my divulgence and explication of it, I have decided that an attempt at presenting the essentials of my view, insofar as I have them strictly formulated, in a fashion as clear and concise as possible and hence wholly unlike the current paragraph, is a goal worth pursuing in the form of a blog post.

I like trying to talk like that! Ok, I’ll cut it out now.

My view on eschatology (the Scriptural doctrine of end times) is called “preterism” or “covenant eschatology”. Both are descriptive for different reasons: the first reveals the distinctive belief that the bulk or entirety of New Testament prophecy (including the Olivet Discourse and the book of Revelation) has already been fulfilled (praeter- being Latin for “past”) and requires no further, futurized fulfillment; the second term partially addresses the “huh?!?!?!” factor common to futurists when they first hear this interpretation. Let me explain.

King Alfred the Great of England (r. 871-899) was truly one of the most remarkable men in history. The fifth son of the previous king of England, he was a man of deep Christian faith, a man of learning, and a great warrior king, the first king of an England he united and rescued from the onslaught of the “Danes” (those worrisome Vikings). He became the prototype of the ideal king, and was thus probably a major historical referent for the character of King Arthur in the later medieval legends. A man of letters, he personally translated both a verse and prose version of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy (the original was in verse). He exhibited his concern for spiritual leadership by translating Gregory I’s Cura Pastoralis (Pastoral Care). The following is a preface he attached to the latter, an extremely important historical document that sets forth his desire to educate the people of England; he describes his intention to make England literate, to translate the Bible and other religious works, all concerns well before their time in Europe. The period after England’s Christianization was a time of learning that declined, among other things, because of the incursion of the Vikings. Alfred blames this calamity on the people of England being poor stewards of the virtues and doctrines of Christianity and of the education that passes it on. The following is my translation from the Anglo-Saxon “sometimes word for word, sometimes meaning for meaning,” just as I learned from my professor William Provost, and my professor Jonathan Evans.

Today I overheard someone pondering whether the pressures of the wrestling industry were what “got to” Chris Benoit and caused the atrocities he committed. I just shook my head.

Wrestling industries don’t kill people. Wrestlers kill people.

I’m not trying to be funny here. People blame the desperation of poverty when poor people commit murder, the corruption of wealth when rich people commit murder, the rat-race of middle class life when the bourgeoisie commit murder. The only real common denominator is that we have disturbed people committing the murder in each situation. And even this doesn’t appear to be particularly helpful, given that there are plenty of disturbed people who are poor, rich, or middle-class and yet somehow not murdering people. Obviously, there is more than one factor causing people to fly off the handle and do the unthinkable. Not only are the situations of each individual who makes those wrong sorts of choices infinitely more complex than one or two social factors, in the end I think that the primary blame cannot be placed anywhere but on the person whose internal moral composition does not respond correctly to the external stimuli that so many people cite as the chief factors in immoral behavior.

Ok, so let’s blame the murderer’s “internal moral composition”. What factors are responsible for defects in that? As far as I can tell, the largest single determining factor for the formation of one’s morality is parenthood. Nothing but chemically unstable mental conditions can account for a child growing up to be a murderer when the child’s moral and loving parents both effectively communicate a healthy view of ethics to the child.

Yet parenting is not completely determinative, because there have been plenty of children with awful parents who have made their own decisions when they got older and ended up being adults of outstanding character. I still say that culpability comes down to the individual’s in-born aptitude for morality. Only the Kingdom is able to compensate for such dangerous variation.