Category Archives: Individuals

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.

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"What is at stake is the very nature of Anglicanism"

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I don’t often write here about the situation in the Anglican Communion, of which the Church of England to which I belong is a part. But the long and sorry saga of the last few years seems to be building up to a climax which can only be a split, at least in all but name. Here I give a rather simplified summary of the situation and my own reflections on it.

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Mark Driscoll head to head with Joel Osteen

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Adrian Warnock has posted an interesting video (ten minutes long) of two well-known American preachers head to head. The video is basically part of a sermon by Mark Driscoll, but it includes a long clip from a sermon by Joel Osteen. Driscoll is one of Adrian’s favourites, and has had some generally not so favourable mention on this blog; nevertheless I respect him for his no-nonsense approach. Osteen is, I understand, well known in the USA for his prosperity teaching on TV and radio, but is not so well known here in the UK.

Adrian’s main point in posting this video is to present it as “a model of gracious rebuke”, of Osteen by Driscoll. And indeed it is this. If only Adrian and his other favourite speakers had treated Steve Chalke with this same grace, rather than accusing him of heresy! Then the whole atonement debate would have been a lot less bitter. I too need to take Driscoll as an example of how to show gentle wisdom over such issues.

But I want to look more at the different approaches represented here by Osteen and Driscoll. Continue reading →

Muslim leaders call for peace

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As Ruth Gledhill among others reports, 138 Muslim leaders are calling for peace between Christians and Muslims, but are also warning that if there is no peace

The “survival of the world” is at stake.

How should Christians react to this call? The issue is not a simple one because the Muslim leaders are calling for this peace to be based around “the common essentials of our two religions”. Continue reading →

Why I am not a Calvinist

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I’m sorry if I lost some of you my readers in my previous posts about five-point or TULIP Calvinism, including the one about the spoof that wasn’t. I know that for some of you these are burning issues which you know all about. But I’m sure that there are others among you who have little knowledge or interest about these matters.

I will here state openly that I am not a Calvinist, neither five-point nor anything else. A post today by Ben Witherington has reminded me of why not. If God has predestined everything, the fundamental basis of the Calvinist picture of reality, this implies that he has predetermined all the kinds of disasters which are so common in this world, and indeed every bad thing which happens. This makes him the author of evil. But this picture of God is in absolute contradiction to the biblical picture of the character of God who is both just and loving.

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Proud reason and systematic theology

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Adrian Warnock, in a post about the doctrine of “double predestination”, quotes one of his heroes, the 19th century Cambridge preacher Charles Simeon, as follows:

But this is a perversion of the doctrine. It is a consequence which our proud reason is prone to draw from the decrees of God: but it is a consequence which the inspired volume totally disavows. There is not in the whole sacred writings one single word that fairly admits of such a construction.

Thus Simeon shows how wrong is the teaching of double predestination, that God predestines some people to be damned. Adrian agrees with him, and so do I.

But I want to take this a step further. It seems to me that any systematic theology or teaching derived from it needs to be judged according to this criterion, whether it actually consists of “the decrees of God”, or is “a consequence which our proud reason is prone to draw from [these] decrees”. This applies especially to the Reformed systematic theology based on the five points of Calvinism which Adrian is currently expounding in a mini-series. Among the tests which need to be applied here is whether the teaching is “a consequence which the inspired volume totally disavows”. And among the teachings which fail this test I find not only double predestination but indeed the whole system of election and predestination which is the basis of Calvinism. For these are based on the idea that God does not want all to be saved which “the inspired volume totally disavows”, in 1 Timothy 2:4 and 2 Peter 3:9.

Christian lending and the uglification of Ugley

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John Richardson caught my attention with a post on The Debt Disaster, mainly because in his introduction he quoted Psalm 15:5 and highlighted the words “without charging interest”. The highlighting was in fact a link to an older post which further linked to an essay which John wrote called Losing Interest, where he argues from the Bible and from Luther that it is wrong for Christians to accept interest. I commented on the debt disaster post, and John responded quickly with a new post about The wrongs of loans, in which he appeals additionally, but inconclusively, to CS Lewis.

Now I entirely agree with John that irresponsible lending and borrowing have got out of hand. Many people who were not especially poor have fallen into a poverty trap by taking out loans larger than they can afford to repay, in many cases to buy things they didn’t need, but in others to buy the bare necessities of life such as houses to live in.

But it seems to me that the steps which John proposes for solving this problem are neither soundly biblically based nor effective.

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Thoughts about a gay bishop

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Ruth Gledhill of The Times (London) has published the full text of an interview with the controversial gay bishop of the Episcopal Church of the USA, Gene Robinson. The interview is in fact by Andrew Collier from Scotland, and is the basis of an article in The Scotsman which John Richardson calls “Quite possibly the most stupid piece of journalism yet about Gene Robinson”. John’s comment is justified because of editorial gems like

Yet millions of Christians the world over are convinced – absolutely assured – that this man is the Antichrist.

Well, if anyone really thought that, their assurance might be dented if they actually read what the man has to say about himself.

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I want it all too!

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I am right with Adrian Warnock in saying I don’t want balance, I want it all! – although I might have chosen some different role models at the end.

But I also agree with Dave Warnock, no relation, that this all should be for everyone, “Not just white middle class men” like Adrian, Dave and me. So he criticises Adrian for implicitly restricting this by gender and sexuality. On the same basis I agree with Henry Neufeld on this. To be fair to Adrian, I don’t think he disagrees, for he wasn’t writing about leadership, but about matters in which we can all agree that men and women can play an equal part. Of course the entirely predictable responses to Dave’s comments on Adrian’s blog only served to stir up this side issue and detract from Adrian’s real vision, and Adrian doesn’t help by the patronising tone of his comments like

The ladies in our church I speak to feel fulfilled and are serving God in ways consistent with however they are called by God. They can minister, they can lead, they can speak to the church.

– but of course we know that they cannot preach or be elders, and there is no sign of them speaking for themselves on such matters.

But this is not Adrian’s main point. His point is that there is so much that the church is missing out on, because either congregations are going to one extreme at the expense of the others, or they are seeking some kind of balance which pleases nobody. Just as Jesus was not half man and half God, but fully man and fully God, so we should not be half charismatic and half doctrinally sound, or half evangelistic and half socially concerned, or any other half and half balance, but we should seek to be fully all of these things.

A commenter on Adrian’s blog mentioned Smith Wigglesworth’s 1947 prophecy, recently republished by Adrian. Here is part of it:

When the new church phase is on the wane, there will be evidenced in the churches something that has not been seen before: a coming together of those with an emphasis on the Word and those with an emphasis on the Spirit. When the Word and the Spirit come together, there will be the biggest movement of the Holy Spirit that the nation, and indeed, the world, has ever seen.

Whatever we may think of this as an actual predictive prophecy, surely we should take it as wise words for the church today. Those with an emphasis on the Word and those with an emphasis on the Spirit need to come together, to seek together the moving of the Holy Spirit that can bring revival to our nation and to the world. When we stop our public bickering and work together, we can expect to see something truly great happening.