Monthly Archives: April 2008

Emerging "Grace"

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Lingalinga (formerly known as Lingamish) has asked me to promote a comment I made on his blog to a post here. His wish is my command.

His post was a rant about modern rip-offs of the hymn “Amazing Grace”, which he associated in passing with the emergent church, concerning which I had just written in a comment elsewhere:

I think “emergent” has become the latest way for Reformed types to dismiss anyone they don’t like, to be added to “liberal”, “post-modern” etc. They make no real attempt to understand or engage with the people who actually use these labels. They just find one or two things they don’t like in any new movement and then add the whole thing to their implicit index of errors.

I could have added here: And then when they detect anything vaguely reminiscent of the new movement in anyone they don’t like they accuse them of being in that movement and use that as an excuse to dismiss them.

I hope that is not Lingalinga’s strategy for dismissing Chris Tomlin’s version of “Amazing Grace” because it has “an Emergent-style bridge thrown in the middle”.

I will risk even more of Lingalinga’s wrath by admitting to actually liking some of the “Amazing Grace” rip-offs he complains about, including the Chris Tomlin one. The motivation for some of these rip-offs is of course that churches insist on old hymns and musicians struggle to do something with them which is musically interesting and relevant to the congregation. But you can’t please everyone. I know an older lady who left our church because she couldn’t take an adapted version of “When I Survey”.

I suspect that Matt Redman, with “Amazing”, has ripped off not so much the original hymn as Philip Yancey’s book title What’s So Amazing About Grace?

Todd Agnew’s “Grace like rain” is a beautiful song, much more so in the version I know from a friend’s CD than in the versions (all the same recording I think) which Lingalinga links to, sung by someone who sounds like he has gravel in his mouth. Of the Youtube selection, I prefer this version, even though it is just one guy with an acoustic guitar. As for the theological correctness of likening grace to rain, see Hebrews 6:7 where the rain surely symbolises “the heavenly gift” (verse 4), God’s grace which is not irresistible but shows his love for sinners. Anyway, if poets and songwriters are not allowed to introduce their own imagery, their poetry will never rise above the kind of doggerel which I write.

Now for the part which Lingalinga wanted me to post, a comment on his post, starting with an example of my doggerel:

Emerging “Grace”? How sour the sound
That stirred a wretch like me.
I once knew one, but now I’ve found
A hundred songs there be.

When I’ve sung them ten thousand times,
10.30 every Sun.,
I’ve no less times to sing these lines
Than when I first begun.

(Yes, “times” and “lines” is a bad rhyme, but the original rhymes are worse.)

Have I earned myself a free trip to the bottom of the sea?

In a follow-up comment I wrote:

My previous comment was not inspired by this description of worship from Dave Walker, but it could have been. Actually three quarters of an hour of worship sounds like a taste of heaven to me, if it’s done well (e.g. by Matt Redman) and preferably without the dancers and flag wavers. But I can understand the reaction of people who don’t understand what’s going on, similar to 1 Corinthians 14:23.

This is of course the same Spring Harvest and the same Steve Chalke that caused such a stir on my blog, and on Dave’s other one, nearly a year ago.

"God hates sinners": John Piper does believe this

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Pam BG has brought up again an issue which was discussed here several months ago, that some Christians are preaching that “God hates sinners”. She has mentioned this initially, I think, in some comments on John Meunier’s blog, and has also brought it up in a comment on her own blog and in several comments on mine. I will dignify this important issue by giving it a post of its own.

This is what Pam originally wrote on John’s blog:

I’ve recently done some research into atonement theory and there is definitely a divide in the current on-going debates.

It’s a divide between those who say that God’s primary characteristic is love and those who say that God’s primary characteristic is holiness. The former is, in my view, much more biblical.

Those who think that God’s primary characteristic is love believe that God hates sin and loves sinners (e.g. Steve Chalke and Tom Wright). Those who think that God’s primary characteristic is his holiness believe that God hates sin and hates sinners too (e.g. John Piper and books written by various individuals at Oak Hill College in the UK).

Those who think that God’s primary characteristic is love see the Gospel message as ‘The Kingdom of God is coming. God’s justice will reign in his kingdom.’ Those who think that God’s primary characteristic is holiness think that the Gospel message is ‘The sins of individual people are expiated through the propitiating work of Christ.’

I think that these views are almost irreconcilably different. I also think that ‘God loves sinners and hates sin and calls his disciples to a life of justice in the Kingdom’ is both a biblical message and a message that is historically in line with Methodism.

Here is my reply, edited with my later clarification:

Pam, is it possible to believe that both holiness and love are God’s primary characteristics? In fact holiness is certainly primary in the sense of having been revealed first, in the Hebrew Bible, and repeated in the New Testament.

But I certainly believe that God loves sinners. Anyone who denies that is denying John 3:16 and, I would judge, denying an essential point of the Christian faith. So basically I agree with you here – although we may not fully agree on which particular types of activity count as sin, i.e. what God hates.

Pam also made a claim that

Piper and the authors of ‘Pierced for Our Transgressions’ – as examples – do explicitly state that God hates sinners. ‘PFOT’ also states that it is God who damns people and who creates their punishment. These concepts were stated in so many words in their books, but you do have to dig for them!

I questioned, in comments my own blog, whether Piper has in fact stated this explicitly. An anonymous commenter on Pam’s blog took this further:

I have read John Pipers books and he has NEVER said God hates sinners as well as sin.

Has this person in fact read every word Piper has ever written, and listened to every one of his sermons? Clearly not – see below. The only person who could say such a dogmatic “NEVER” is Piper himself. But I think that when Pam actually did the digging she referred to she could not find evidence for her claim, as later she largely withdrew it, on her own blog and on mine, although not as yet on John Meunier’s. On her own blog she wrote:

To be transparent, Piper said that the work of the cross is to change God’s attitude from ‘completely against us’ to ‘completely for us’. On p. 184 [which book, Pam?], Piper writes that the purpose of the atonement is that God, as our Father, might be completely for us and not against us forever.

In reply to this I wrote that, even if Piper may not say “God hates sinners”, his friend Mark Driscoll certainly did, as I discussed here a few months ago. As reported by Alastair Roberts (see also Adrian Warnock’s report of the same sermon), Driscoll said

Here is what propitiation is: GOD HATES SINNERS. You’ve been told that God loves the sinner but hates the sin. No he doesn’t: Ghandi says that, just so you know, he’s on a totally different team than us.

What would Piper say to that, I wonder? Would he still “not have .001 seconds hesitation in having Mark Driscoll come back tomorrow to our church or our conference”?

But in fact if Pam digs a bit deeper she will find what she is looking for. Michael Bräutigam from Germany, commenting on Justin Taylor’s blog, offered this quote from John Piper, which in fact comes from a 1985 sermon on Piper’s own website:

Yes, I think we need to go the full Biblical length and say that God hates unrepentant sinners. If I were to soften it, as we so often do, and say that God hates sin, most of you would immediately translate that to mean: he hates sin but loves the sinner. But Psalm 5:5 says, “The boastful may not stand before thy eyes; thou hatest all evildoers.” And Psalm 11:5 says, “The Lord tests the righteous and the wicked, and his soul hates him that loves violence.

Michael also quotes Calvin, but finds in him a much more carefully nuanced message:

Before we were reconciled to God, he both hated and loved us.

Maybe that is a better way to say it. But better still, in my opinion, is the way it is put in words misattributed to Gandhi, who apparently did not use the word “love”:

Hate the sin, and love the sinner.

Driscoll may have been unaware of this, but in fact these words apparently come from the great Christian writer Augustine, centuries earlier, who, according to Wikipedia with a citation from Migne’s authoritative Patrilogiae Latinae, wrote:

“Love the sinner and hate the sin” (Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum) (Opera Omnia, vol II. col. 962, letter 211.), literally “With love for mankind and hatred of sins “

Yes, “love the sinner and hate the sin” should be our attitude because it is also God’s attitude as demonstrated to us by Jesus.

Jesus to boycott the Lambeth Conference?

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No, that is not what Walter means by Lambeth 2008 is Starting Without Jesus. What he means is that there is no mention of Our Lord in Archbishop Rowan’s opening remarks. Indeed none of the words “Jesus”, “Christ” or “Lord” appear on the page, and “God” is mentioned only in Jane Williams’ words. I wonder if any mention of Jesus is considered too potentially divisive for some of those invited to the conference. After all, it wouldn’t be the Anglican way, somehow, to insist that this is a conference of Christian bishops.

But would Jesus be welcome if he did turn up? 1 Peter 2:25 KJV confirms that he is a Bishop and so should qualify for an invitation. But would he behave himself as a bishop is supposed to? Or would he start overturning the booksellers’ tables in the Marketplace and denouncing any hypocrites he might find? And if he should happen to bump into Gene Robinson and his new “bridegroom” outside the venue, what would he have to say to them? Perhaps “Go, and sin no more”? But for saying that he would probably be asked to leave.

Somehow I think Jesus would be more at home at Gafcon in his home country.

An e-mail from hell?

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I was surprised to receive this evening an e-mail whose sender is listed as “Satan”. I was even more surprised to discover it appeared to have been written by ElShaddai Edwards, who is certainly not an alter ego of the devil.

In fact the message was a pingback for my post on Satan in Job, generated by ElShaddai’s post Satan, Job and Goethe which quotes and links to my post. The confusion arose because my WordPress installation generated an e-mail for the pingback with the From: address “Satan, Job and Goethe « He is Sufficient <wordpress@qaya.org>”; my mail program Thunderbird parsed this as two senders’ addresses separated by a comma, and only displayed the first sender’s name.

This seems to be a small bug in my WordPress installation, still version 2.3.3 at the moment, in that it is generating sender’s address display names with commas in them. These are not permitted in display names except in quote marks; that is, they are permitted in quoted-strings, but not in atoms, as specified here. There is a further bug, or undesirable feature, in these display names in that they include visible HTML entities like “&raquo;” and “&#8217;”.

Perhaps they have fixed these bugs in the new WordPress 2.5, but in the light of some other bloggers’ comments I am not going to rush into an upgrade.

What I don't like about Calvinism

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Nick Norelli is not a Calvinist, but in his post What I Like About Calvinism he writes:

I like the logic of it all.  The way that the 5 main points of T.U.L.I.P. interlock is something to behold.  And it is this logical consistency that has me convinced that there can be no hybrid system of Calminianism or Arvinism (or whatever other strange concoction of a theological buzz-word you can think of).  If any one point falls then the system falls.

But this is just what I don’t like about Calvinism: not so much the individual doctrines (although I reject 3½ of the 5 points) as the way they are presented as an unquestionable complete system of doctrine. This is not the biblical way of presenting doctrine. It is not the traditional church way. Come to think of it, it is not even Calvin’s way. But it is the way of people who have made their own logic, or the logic of their theological heroes, judge over the word of God, even over God himself.

Instead, such people should humbly accept that they don’t know the whole truth, that the God whom the heavens cannot contain (1 Kings 8:27) does not live in a box of human making. They should stop relying on systematisations like the Westminster Confession as standards of doctrine. Then they should go back to the Bible, to listening to God speaking to them, and to seeing what he is doing in the world. They need not stop doing theology, but their starting point should be the Bible rather than what old preachers and confessions of faith say, and they should not expect to get many definite answers from their theologising.

Not blessing the "marriage", just blessing the gay couple

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LambethConference.net/Canada reports on a ceremony in Montreal Cathedral in which its director of music’s civil union with another man was “acknowledged”. The bishop had refused to permit his priests to bless same-sex “marriages”, in line with the policies of the Anglican Church of Canada and the Anglican Communion. But in a service in the cathedral the couple

went to the front of the church for blessings by Dean Michael Pitts and Rev. Canon Joyce Sanchez, associate priest.

So was this a blessing of the “marriage”? Apparently not:

“They blessed us,” the music director said in a later interview. “They did not bless our marriage.”

Hold on! The couple went to front of the church together, and two priests blessed them. What is the difference between that and blessing their “marriage”?

So here we apparently have two priests in senior positions, a cathedral dean and a canon, defying the authority of their bishop and of the national and international church, and apparently trying to justify it with semantic trickery. Will they get away with it, I wonder?

Satan in Job

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Brian Fulthorp has brought my attention back to Tyler Williams’ post The Mysterious Appearance of “Satan” in English Translations of the Book of Job, also discussed by Chris Heard.

Now Tyler’s main point is quite correct. Formally, in Job chapters 1 and 2 there is no proper name “Satan”, but only several occurrences of a common noun with the definite article, ha-satan meaning “the adversary”. (In Hebrew, as in English but not Greek, proper nouns never take the definite article.) In the Hebrew Bible only in 1 Chronicles 21:1 does the proper noun satan, the name “Satan”, appear.

But who is “the adversary” referred to in Job, and similarly in Zechariah 3:1-2, if he is not in fact the one we know of as Satan or the Devil? In the context he must be a spiritual or angelic being with close access to God. There is good reason to identify him with the named Satan of 1 Chronicles 21:1. In Jewish writings later than the Hebrew Bible, for example Wisdom of Solomon 2:24, and then in the New Testament and other Christian works, this figure becomes identified with the tempter in the Garden of Eden and with the prince of demons. In Greek the word is usually translated as a proper noun diabolos “adversary” (or “devil”, but that is a secondary meaning of the word), and sometimes transliterated as a name, Satanas, but there is no question that in the New Testament these two words refer to the same being.It seems clear to me what has happened with the Hebrew word here: a common or generic noun has become identified primarily with an individual and so has gradually become a proper name. The same happened with Adam, who is at first ha-adam “the human being” and only gradually becomes adam as a proper name without the article. Also much the same happens with elohim “God”: sometimes we read ha-elohim “the god” as a common noun, and rather more often just elohim “God” as a proper name. But of course in Genesis 2-3 the person referred to as “the human being” is the same person as “Adam”, and throughout the Hebrew Bible the being referred to as “the god” is almost always the one true “God”. So similarly we should probably understand “the adversary”, in suitable contexts, and “Satan” as slightly different ways of referring to the same spiritual being.

Yes, Tyler is correct to note that

There is significant theological development from the time of the Old Testament through the Second Temple period to the New Testament and beyond.

That is true in our understanding not just of Satan, but also of God. This does not imply that the being referred to in the Hebrew Bible as “the god” and as “God” is not the same being as God in the New Testament. See what Jeremy Pierce has written on this issue, in the different context of showing that the God of the Muslims is also the same as the Jewish and Christian God. By exactly the same argument we cannot infer that the being referred to in the Hebrew Bible as “the adversary” and (once) as “Satan” is not the same person as Satan in the New Testament.

There is simply a logical error, a non sequitur, in these words of Tyler:

It is pretty clear that this passage isn’t referring to “Satan” (i.e., the king of demons) since the Hebrew noun “satan” has a definite article. The biblical text refers to “the satan”, not “Satan.”

Indeed the word is “the satan” or “the adversary”, but that by no means proves or even suggests that the adversary in question is not Satan. In fact, adapting Jeremy’s argument, to the extent that the concept of Satan in the New Testament is clearly a theological development from Job’s concept of the adversary, they should be identified as most probably the same being.

Yes, it might be better to put “the adversary” rather than “Satan” in translations of Job. But this is not because, to quote Tyler with his emphasis,

it is very clear that Satan was never in the book of Job to begin with!

Rather, it is good translation practice to render a common noun as a common noun, not as a name. But I would expect to see a footnote something like:

Hebrew ha-satan, understood as referring to Satan.

Lifeway wants to hire Jesus, twice!

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According to this blog post, Lifeway is looking for two seminary students as temporary workers, for a meeting in June, and the job qualifications include:

You must be SBC and cannot have been anywhere near anything sinful in the last 6 months.

Is this an April Fool? I don’t think so. But surely this last condition rules out anyone living on earth. I don’t think they believe in sinless perfection in the Southern Baptist Convention. Anyway, even if these individuals are sinless, unless they are living in a monastery with other sinless people they have at least been near to sinful people. Or would anyone want to claim that every thing and person in an SBC seminary is perfectly sinless?

I suppose they would accept as sinless Jesus newly returned from heaven, but there is only one of him. And then would he count as SBC? There would surely be issues about whether his baptism by John was valid: John may have been called a Baptist, but there is no record of him having himself been baptised as a believer.

If anyone other than Jesus does apply for this job and claim to qualify, they should surely be asked to read this and withdraw their application:

If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.

1 John 1:8 (TNIV)

Tony Blair and God

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Ruth Gledhill has written a follow-up to her piece earlier today about Tony Blair, and so I will also write a follow-up to my earlier post.

Ruth reports what Tony had to say about his former press secretary Alastair Campbell’s infamous words “We don’t do God”. Blair said:

In our culture, here in Britain and in many other parts of Europe, to admit to having faith leads to a whole series of suppositions, none of which are very helpful to the practising politician.

He went into this in more detail, reported by Ruth, finishing with this:

And finally and worst of all, that you are somehow messianically trying to co-opt God to bestow a divine legitimacy on your politics.

So when Alastair said it, he didn’t mean politicians shouldn’t have faith; just that it was always a packet of trouble to talk about it.

Ruth is happy to report that with his new Faith Foundation

he’s not afraid to ‘do God’ now.

But I think she goes over the top in her enthusiasm when she writes:

There’s a vacuum in our national religious leadership at present which badly needs filling, and Tony Blair could be just the man to do it.

Yes, there is such a vacuum, but I don’t see that the public will ever trust Blair enough again to let him fill it.

Tony Blair, a good person?

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Ruth Gledhill nominates Tony Blair as her ‘Good Person’ for today – and this is not the good joke she refers to in her title. If you haven’t seen that joke, also available internationally and probably permanently here, you really must – and don’t miss this explanation of how it was done. But back to Tony Blair …

Last year I reported on how some people were effectively calling Blair the Antichrist. At the time I suggested that the newly appointed Gordon Brown might have

been waiting in the wings for his chance to undo much of the damage caused by Blair.

Now, nine months into Brown’s government, I see little sign of this. True, Brown has almost ended British involvement in Iraq and partly backed down on identity cards. But in other ways, especially on moral issues, his government is causing even more concern than Blair’s did. So perhaps I should retract any suggestion that Blair was personally to blame for the mistakes of his government, and be prepared to look more favourably on him as a person.

And the same Ruth Gledhill, this time in an article today in The Times, has given me good reason to do so. She reports how he is setting up the Tony Blair Faith Foundation

to contribute to better understanding of the different faiths [and] to bring people of faith together to deliver the Millennium Development Goals … “Tony Blair believes that the capacity of faith organisations to do good is immense and that their reach is unparalleled,” an adviser said.

If Blair is really committed to what he is aiming for here, and can deliver it, he is certainly a “good person” not just for today but hopefully for decades to come.