Monthly Archives: November 2007

Adrian censors criticism of one of his idols

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I tried to post this comment on Adrian Warnock’s blog, in response to his post on Mark Driscoll at the Menmakers conference in Scotland:

Looks like Driscoll has not read 1 Corinthians 7:25-32, or noticed that Jesus was not married. Come to think of it, looks like Driscoll has not read the New Testament at all, except perhaps for isolated verses, for his “gospel”, as seen here and in the previous post about him, seems to leave humanity fallen and sinful with God hating them.

Charity, the basis for the argument you mention is a dubious translation of Genesis 5:2 which was new in the RSV.

Adrian, who has recently reintroduced comment moderation on his blog, refused to publish this comment because I dared to suggest that Driscoll might not have read the whole New Testament.

Well, first he doesn’t seem to have realised that this is very obvious hyperbole, rhetorical exaggeration. My real point is of course that Driscoll is ignoring most of the New Testament in his teaching. Perhaps I could have got away with writing that. But I am not going to allow Adrian to determine what literary style I can use in response to his blogging. If he doesn’t want my response on his blog, he can have it here, and I will send him a link.

But what this really shows is Adrian’s hyper-sensitivity, so typical of Reformed Evangelicals, to any criticism of their favourite preachers. It is not that they are sensitive to critical comments in general. They seem quite happy to accuse well known Christian teachers from different strands of preaching another gospel or blasphemy. So they can’t claim that they dislike criticism because it is not showing Christian charity. No, instead they seem to react like fundamentalists of some religion who hear their gods being criticised. For it seems to me that favourite preachers like Piper and Driscoll have become idols in the minds of certain people, who treat their words as infallible and beyond criticism, and react intemperately to anyone who disagrees on this.

Mark Driscoll: "I murdered God", "God hates you"

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If Adrian Warnock’s summary of his words is to be believed, in a sermon on the atonement, preached yesterday in Edinburgh, Mark Driscoll said:

A war is brewing over this issue. This is the issue we must be willing to fight over. If we lose this, we lose the gospel. … if you deny this, you have essentially lost the Christian faith …

I MURDERED GOD!

Now Driscoll can confess this of himself if he likes, but he seems to require every Christian to confess the same. Now I have committed a large number of sins, but I do not confess to this particular murder, or indeed to any murder. Continue reading →

Kinesthetic and Visual

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I just took the VARK questionnaire about learning styles suggested by Tim Bulkeley. My score came out as

  • Visual: 5
  • Aural: 0
  • Read/Write: 2
  • Kinesthetic: 9

This is not one of those questionnaires which gives you a nice bit of HTML to paste your results into your website or blog, which tends to reassure me that, unlike the source of the last set of such results I posted, this is actually a reasonably reliable site.

So, like Tim, I am basically a “kinesthetic” learner (actually the British, and New Zealand, spelling should be “kinaesthetic”), with a second strength of “visual”. We are

the ones who fiddle with their pens while others are talking, and who walk about or wave their hands a lot…

… (Kinesthetic learners do not like sitting still being talked to, or even with 😉

Note the zero score for “aural”. No wonder I find it hard to learn from sermons without visual content. I always find myself distracted from the sermon if there is anything to see or do. This is why I never download podcasts, even ones only five minutes long, sorry Tim.

Unlike Tim, I have experience tertiary education, of a kind, oriented in part to my kinesthetic learning style. I learned Hebrew from the late John Dobson using in part a total physical response method. I remember learning the Hebrew for “stand up”, “sit down” and “turn around” by actually doing these actions at the teacher’s request, and this part has stuck in my memory far better than most of the course. Perhaps if preachers did a bit more of this I might not forget what they said before I get home.

On the other hand, I hate choruses with actions (perhaps because the actions distract me too much), and I don’t like breaking up into small discussion groups (a different aural strategy). If you are not going to give me something relevant to do, just let me fiddle with my pen or wander round the room.

The root of John Piper's wrong theology

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I may have got myself into trouble with some comments I made on Adrian Warnock’s blog, on his post 2 Corinthians 5 and Romans 5 – Two Critical Passages on Justification. This post is part of Adrian’s series on John Piper’s new book The Future of Justification. I was commenting mainly on these words which Adrian quoted from Piper:

Justification . . . happens to all who are connected to Christ the same way condemnation happened to those who were connected to Adam. How is that? Adam acted sinfully, and because we were connected to him, we were condemned in him. Christ acted righteously, and because we are connected to Christ we are justified in Christ. Adam’s sin is counted as ours. Christ’s “act of righteousness” is counted as ours.

In my first comment I argued that Piper is here basing his theology of justification on an analogy with Augustine’s understanding of original sin, an understanding which is faulty because, as widely recognised and as I explained in a previous post here, Augustine misunderstood Paul’s meaning in Romans 5:12 based on a poor Latin translation.

I went on to begin to sketch out some alternative views of my own. Continue reading →

Convert or Die?

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I have put off responding to Doug Chaplin’s challenge, passed on from John Hobbins, to name my top ten Bible verses. Maybe I will do this sometime, but don’t hold your breath. I always find it difficult to name my favourite anything, and with Bible verses it is harder than ever.

Doug nominated me for this Bible verse challenge as “someone who seems to think entirely differently from me on so many things”. Well, yes, we have big differences on a few issues, such as reservation and adoration of the eucharistic elements. But in fact as brothers in Christ we think very similarly on far more issues – although I don’t so often comment on them on Doug’s blog.

For example, take Doug’s response to the new “Convert or Die” meme, in which he explains why he did not become a Roman Catholic. Although I have never come close to going over to Rome as he did, I could echo all of his reasons for not doing so, although I might also add a point about the Eucharist.

Having refused (for now) to take up the meme which Doug did tag me with, I will now take up the “Convert or Die” meme with which he didn’t tag me, or in fact anyone. If this is breaking the unwritten rules for memes, I don’t care! The meme originates with Nick Norelli, who has made a good choice of WordPress template (!). The question is:

If your life depended on it and you absolutely had to change your denomination/religion, what denomination/religion would you convert to?

Well, how do I answer that one? Continue reading →

Religious tolerance and secularist intolerance

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For my 300th post (at least, the one which WordPress numbers 300), I return to the theme of tolerance. A couple of weeks ago I quoted Justin Thacker of the Evangelical Alliance on Deciding to tolerate difference. In fact the article I quoted from was in part a trailer for a major speech on tolerance between religions by Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, which was given last night. Now Ruth Gledhill reports on the speech, and on the intolerant response to it from secularists.

See also what Joel Edwards actually said about tolerance in Ruth’s article in The Times. Here is an extract:

It is our task in this debate to persuade society that tolerance is not the absence of conviction, or even of conversion. It is the absence of coercion. In a liberal democracy it is more intolerant to disallow religious views based on secular prejudice …

It makes a nice change for religious people to be presented in the secular media as standing up for tolerance, and for secularists to be seen as opposing this.

One commenter on a previous post of mine implied that I supported coercion against practising homosexuals. I don’t. I do hold to the right of people to express their disapproval of homosexual practice. And I support the right, and the duty, of churches not to appoint practising homosexuals to positions of leadership. For other homosexuals, I leave the decision on whether to practise or not between them and God.

A Solid Rock Ledge on the Slippery Slope

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The argument is sometimes made that there is a “slippery slope” of “concessions” by the church to modern culture in the area of inter-personal relationships, and especially gender issues. The various stages on this slope are, perhaps:

  1. Abolition of slavery;
  2. Women in leadership in the church;
  3. Full acceptance of homosexuality in the church;
  4. The latest one I have read about: acceptance of “polyamory”.

Now to be fair by no means all of those who use the “slippery slope” argument start it with abolition of slavery. But some do. And the general argument seems to be that acceptance of one of these stages necessarily opens the way to the next stage. So, the people who argue like this position themselves with pride on a supposedly solid mountain top, often based on a fundamentalist understanding of the Bible, and condemn any shift from this position as starting on the slippery slope. Perhaps they are thinking in terms of the psalmist’s image of his feet slipping in Psalm 38:16 and elsewhere.

But is the slope in fact a slippery one, or is it broken by a ledge or barrier made of solid rock, a “shelf of rocks” as Ben Witherington renders part of Matthew 16:18, of biblical truth? Can this determine how far Christians can legitimately part company from one another without betraying the gospel abandoning their faith?

Continue reading →

Reflecting Culture, not Changing Attitude

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Chelmsford Anglican Mainstream quotes from an interesting press release from Changing Attitude, a pressure group which is “working for gay and lesbian affirmation within the Anglican Communion”, and of which the Bishop of Chelmsford is a patron. The press release, written by Davis Mac-Iyalla, director of Changing Attitude Nigeria, is interesting for its argument that full acceptance of homosexuality in the life of the church is analogous to the abolition of slavery.

Now in my post yesterday A further implication of Christianity being cross-cultural I noted (quoting an older post) that

slavery is accepted in the Bible because it was accepted by all in the cultural context, but this does not imply that it is normative for Christians.

In other words, it is right for Christians to support the abolition of slavery because the acceptance of slavery in the Bible was a culturally relative matter. This argument is in practice accepted by almost all Christians today, although it was highly controversial in the 19th century. Many evangelicals, including myself, apply the same argument to biblical passages which appear to teach that church leaders must be male, but this remains a controversial issue.

But does the same argument apply to homosexuality, as Mac-Iyalla seems to claim? Where should the line be drawn between what is culturally relative and what are the fundamental and unchangeable principles of the Christian faith?

Continue reading →

A further implication of Christianity being cross-cultural

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I wrote yesterday that Christianity is cross-cultural and cross-linguistic (see also my follow-up post). This evening, for a quite separate reason, I found myself reviewing the series I wrote last year on The Scholarly and Fundamentalist Approaches to the Bible. In Part 5 of that series I quoted several times from How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart (this link is to the current edition, not the one I quote). I note now that these quotations, and the explanation I wrote of them, show how the cross-cultural nature of Christianity has important implications for understanding and applying the Bible. So I repeat here part of what I wrote there.

Continue reading →