Dominionismism: A conspiracy theory unmasked

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Jeremy Pierce writes:

I’ve determined that there’s a political faction out there that needs a name, because it’s a group of conspiracy theorists with a particular agenda that’s becoming somewhat influential, and it’s achieving its agenda fairly well. Its agenda is to discredit mainstream evangelicalism by confusing it with extremist figures who have nearly zero influence on much of any importance.

Abraham KuyperWhat is this conspiracy theory which the always careful philosopher Jeremy has unmasked? He calls it “Dominionismism”, because it started with the invention of a Christian tendency called “Dominionism”. This non-existent -ism has been manufactured by a conflation of three quite different theologies: the Christian political activism of Abraham Kuyper and Francis Schaeffer; the “Dominion Theology” associated with “third-wave Pentecostalism”; and the Christian Reconstructionism of R.J. Rushdoony and others. In fact I already started to unmask this conspiracy theory in my June post Taking over mountains from the grass roots.

Francis SchaefferI would agree with the “Dominionismists” in condemning Christian Reconstructionism, a bid to impose Old Testament laws and punishments on modern society. However, I am glad to say that this is very much on the fringe of Christian teaching today and has “nearly zero influence on much of any importance”. The Christian involvement in politics promoted by many evangelicals today, including several US presidential hopefuls, is something quite different, summarised by Jeremy as

attempting to do what good we can in the world, and that involves seeking to implement policies that Christians agree with.

Now it is hardly unexpected that atheists and liberal Christians object to evangelicals seeking to implement the policies that they, the evangelicals, agree with, but the atheists and liberals do not. But that is no excuse for anyone to confuse quite different theologies and manufacture a non-existent conspiracy.

The really sad thing is that otherwise good mainstream and more-or-less evangelical Christians like my blogging friend Joel Watts have been led astray by this conspiracy theory and are using it to divide the church and discredit good evangelical teachers. To be fair, Joel has not tagged any posts “dominionist” since 2008. But only last month he posted This Week in Dominionism, the Presidency, and 2012, in which he wrote

I haven’t posted much on Dominionism/Christian Reconstructionism lately, … but it is something which people should be concerned about.

That is enough to show that he has bought into the conspiracy theory which Jeremy has unmasked.

Joel, I agree with you in not liking the politics of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann, or for that matter of any of the Republican presidential hopefuls, to the limited extent that I know those politics. But if you want to oppose them, please do so by telling the distasteful truth about their policies and their likely effects, not by smearing them with meaningless labels like “dominionist” or linking them with movements like Christian Reconstructionism which I am almost certain that they reject.

But my real concern is not so much for politicians. After all, most of them deserve the abuse which is heaped on them. And I am not going to treat Rick Perry as a good Christian after the revelation reported by Jim West that Perry gives just half a percent of his income to churches and religious organisations. But I do think Joel is going far too far when he condemns a whole slate of widely respected Christian leaders as “heretical” on the basis of short quotations taken out of context and a completely unjustifiable attempt to assert guilt by association with the word “dominionism”. This is completely irresponsible spreading of dissent and division in the church.

Joel, I know you are a reasonable man and prepared to change your views and admit it publicly. I appeal to you to reconsider what “dominionism” actually means, and to accept that the Christian leaders whom you name, although they may have said some stupid things, do not teach anything like Christian Reconstructionism, but only the kind of generalised Christian involvement in politics which in your saner moments you actually seem to support.

Judgment, Hubris, and True Christian Maturity

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Roger Mugs, whose blog Theologer is subtitled “bible. beer. blog. (and a word for missiology which starts with a b)”, seems to have been more amused than offended that John MacArthur called him “Young, Restless, and Reformed”, although he writes

I resent all three.

John MacArthurWell, Roger can hardly be surprised that some Christians object to his post Beer. Glorious beer, in which he encourages missionaries like himself to brew their own. But it was quite an honour for him to be called out for it by the infamous MacArthur, even in terms like these:

deliberately cultivating an appetite for beer or a reputation for loving liquor is not merely bad missional strategy and a bad testimony; it is fraught with deadly spiritual dangers.

Roger has now followed up his initial response with what he calls “a response to/rewrite of/mockery of John McArthur’s recent post”, Judgement, Hubris, and True Christian Maturity. In this he counters MacArthur’s condemnation of the “Young, Restless, and Reformed” stereotype with his own observations about the “Old, Bored, and Reformed” like MacArthur. The result is hilarious! But there are also many important serious points, such as:

Apparently judgment is also an essential element in the missional strategy. Judging others publicly is often touted as a necessary means of influencing  youth culture, and conversely, humility is deemed a “sin” to be repented of. …

deliberately cultivating an appetite for pridefulness or a reputation for loving myself is not merely bad missional strategy and a bad testimony; it is fraught with deadly spiritual dangers.

Indeed. MacArthur and other “Reformed” leaders need to look more closely for the planks in their own eyes before condemning what they think they see in others’ eyes. Sadly, I suspect that if they did they would find that the greatest sins in the genuine “Young, Restless, and Reformed” tendency (not including Roger Mugs!) are not so much beer drinking as the same self-righteousness and judgmentalism that Roger has identified among their older and more bored fellows.

Off to Italy

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Lorenza in front of the Ponte VecchioLorenza and I are off to Italy for a three week break. We are taking our car – a ferry crossing and a two day drive through Belgium, Germany and Austria. We will spend much of our time with our family and friends there, mostly in and around Florence. We hope also to see some sea and some sun.

This means I will be blogging little if at all until the beginning of September. I hope still to be able to keep up with comments and contact e-mails. But don’t expect any meaty new posts. Meanwhile I hope you my readers all enjoy your August.

 

Rock badgers: biblical animals, pest in modern Israel

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Rock badgersMost of the animals mentioned in the Bible are quite familiar to English speaking readers, although some of the birds are rather obscure. But there is one small animal mentioned several times in the Old Testament which is a bit of a puzzle to many readers, not least because it goes by so many names: “coney” (KJV, ASV, NIV 1984), “badger” (RSV, NRSV, CEV, CEB), “hyrax” (NLT, HCSB, TNIV, NIV 2011), “rock badger” (GNT, NCV, NKJV, ESV), “marmot” (The Message) (all renderings in Proverbs 30:26). As Agur son of Jakeh teaches,

hyraxes are creatures of little power,
yet they make their home in the crags.

Proverbs 30:26 (NIV 2011)

So it is interesting to read a BBC Nature report today (incidentally misquoting KJV) Hyraxes: why Israel’s ‘rock rabbits’ have become pests. Apparently these cute furry creatures “have moved into residential areas of Galilee”, where they live in piles of rubble, artificial equivalents to their favoured crags, and “have been destroying people’s gardens”. As they are not kosher (Leviticus 11:5), eating them would not be a solution. So, the BBC report concludes,

Although hyraxes are generally quite popular with suburban wildlife-watchers, some people have called for a cull.

But early research indicates that simply filling in the boulder piles would drive hyraxes out of the villages and back to the cliffs, just as it says in the Bible.

If only the BBC would broaden its recognition that problems can be solved by doing things “just as it says in the Bible”!

Is the Bible always right?

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Jeremy Myers posts I am Always Right, but don’t worry, those are not his own sentiments. They are an echo of Rush Limbaugh’s words but intended more as an echo of what some people claim about the Bible. They serve as an introduction to Jeremy’s forthcoming series on the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture.

The Bible is always rightImage courtesy of James McGrath

I don’t yet know what Jeremy is going to say about this doctrine. But I can guess his general line from what he has recently written about the inspiration of Scripture, in a series of posts starting with How you can know the Bible is Divine Revelation and continuing to Why the KJV is an Inspired Translation, all found in Jeremy’s category Bibliology.

I had meant to respond to some of these posts, but they kept coming so quickly that I could barely keep up with reading them. That was very much worthwhile because of Jeremy’s fresh and humorous approach to exploring what it means to say that the Bible is inspired. He finds some important weaknesses in the traditional evangelical teaching about inspiration. I am not entirely convinced by his conclusion that “inspired” means little more than “inspiring”. But perhaps his position will become more clear as the series on inerrancy proceeds.

Done with living like a Christian

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I’m Done With Living Like a Christian Kurt Willems writes at Red Letter Christians I’m Done With Living Like A Christian (originally at his own Pangea Blog). Concerning all the things he used to do as a Christian, he says:

This past week made me realize that doing all these things won’t change the world.  That’s because the world can’t be changed unless God changes me. …

For me, it’s time to stop doing.  It’s time to simply be done.  Done “doing” because the Holy Spirit invites us to stop and to “be.” …

I want to know Jesus.  I want to hear Jesus.  I want to be empowered by Jesus.  Not simply in theory as I do the good things that he calls us to do, but as the natural outflow of intimacy with God.  The former way “gets the job done.”  The latter way changes the world.

For me, this means a new-found intentionality of placing myself in a position to hear from the Spirit. …

In principle this is something I have been learning over the last few years. What we do by human effort, even with the intention of serving God, is often frustratingly hard work with little fruit. When we do things “as the natural outflow of intimacy with God”, they receive his blessing and naturally produce an abundant harvest.

But I need to work more on “placing myself in a position to hear from the Spirit” …

Do read the whole post.

Stott: Don’t just be Good Samaritans, remove robbers

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The Good SamaritanGood Samaritans will always be needed to succour those who are assaulted and robbed; yet it would be even better to rid the Jerusalem-Jericho road of brigands.

So wrote John Stott, as quoted in the New York Times, also by Suzanne McCarthy. Stott continued with this explanation:

Christian philanthropy in terms of relief and aid is necessary, but long-term development is better, and we cannot evade our political responsibility to share in changing the structures that inhibit development. Christians cannot regard with equanimity the injustices that spoil God’s world and demean his creatures.

Indeed. It is not enough for Christians to act as Good Samaritans while doing nothing about the evils which cause the suffering they relieve. This is a lesson which many evangelicals, especially in North America, need to learn.

Image courtesy of FreeBibleIllustrations.com.

Gay Marriage and the Wrath of God

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Yesterday I posted here about Jim West, Miley Cyrus and the Wrath of God. At the end of my post I suggested that Romans 1:18 and following does not imply a clear condemnation of gay marriage, especially if the wrath of God is understood in the way that Jim West suggested.

In a comment on that post Gordon challenged me to explain the exegesis of that passage on which I based my remarks. As I stated in my comment in reply, that exegesis is “a tentative suggestion rather than a firm conclusion”. It is also offered from Jim’s viewpoint and so presupposing his view of the wrath of God. But I will offer here some further explanation.

Jim wrote, and I quoted, that

the wrath of God is God allowing people to reap what they sow.  In short, the worst thing that can happen to you is, well, you.

That implies that in Romans 1:18 (all quotations here from NIV 2011) “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven” means not so much “God is exercising his wrath” as “God is showing people that he is allowing them to reap what they sow”. The following preposition epi is usually translated “against” but more literally means “on to” and can probably here be understood as “concerning”.

On this basis verse 24 can probably be taken as the content of what is being revealed, that “God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.” Thus God’s wrath is to be understood not as sending these people to hell, but as allowing them follow their sinful desires. In the words of Hultgren quoted by Jim,

The wrath of God consists in God’s not stopping or rescuing people in their wrongdoing.

Note that in this verse “them” refers back to the gender neutral anthropoi “people” of verse 18, men and women, and so verse 24 is not about homosexual practice but more generally about sexual immorality. In verses 26 and 27 homosexual practices are introduced, but only as examples of a broader phenomenon. The last part of verse 27, “[they] received in themselves the due penalty for their error”, very likely refers not just to the gay men of the first part of the verse but to the “them” of the first part of verse 26, in other words to all ungodly people as in verses 18 and 28.

Miley Cyrus' gay marriage finger tattooSo what does this have to say about gay marriage? Miley Cyrus has expressed her support for this with a tweet that “All LOVE is equal” and a finger tattoo. Does the Bible support this idea? Perhaps it is not quite as negative as it might at first seem. We read in verse 26 that it is God who gave people over to “shameful lusts” including homosexual ones. This suggests that homosexual orientation comes from God, although more as a curse than as a blessing.

So if God brings a gay or lesbian couple together, let them be together. To quote Jesus’ words, “what God has joined together, let no one separate” (Mark 10:9).

God is not the Great Deceiver

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A supernova remnant in the constellation OphiuchusJames McGrath links to a post by David H. Bailey Supernovas and “God the Great Deceiver” theology. In this post Bailey explores some of the apparent implications of the Young Earth Creationist position, that the universe was created only about 6,000 years ago – or in some variants up to 20,000 years ago. Bailey notes that astronomers regularly observe events, supernova explosions, from at least 200,000 light years away in other galaxies, and so, according to orthodox science, which took place at least 200,000 years ago.

The creationist Henry Morris, as quoted by Bailey, explained this apparent discrepancy as follows:

[T]he light rays … must have been created carrying information descriptive of historical physical events (such as super novae) which never actually occurred, because we would now be observing light rays which were created in transit and never were radiated from the stars which they seem to image.

In other words, God created the universe with an appearance of age. Francis Schaeffer tried to rationalise this version of events:

There is a possibility that God created a ‘grown-up’ universe. For example, Adam, the first night he existed, might have seen the light of the furthest stars without waiting for long light years to pass before they could be seen.

To this possibility, we must quickly add one note. This does not mean that God is capricious. And surely it does not imply, and I would totally reject, the concept Bishop Samuel Wilberforce suggested at Oxford in Darwin’s time: that God created fossils in the earth in order to fool fools. This is totally out of character with the God of the Bible.

However, just because it was stated so horribly in the days of Darwin is no reason not to suggest that God may have in some sense and in some areas created a grown-up universe. One could ask, for example, whether the trees when they were created had rings.

Well, Schaeffer has a point, but why would God create starlight as evidence of past events which never actually occurred, unless it was something like “in order to fool fools”? The Psalmist wrote “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1 NIV), but is what they declare in fact deception by God? As Bailey puts it,

to anyone outside the world of hard-core creationists, this type of “God the Great Deceiver” theology, namely the notion that God deliberately constructed a phony universe to mislead diligent seekers of truth in the 21st century, is not only absurd but downright blasphemous. It is utterly at odds with the notion of a rational, comprehensible God that has been the mainstay of Judeo-Christian theology for several millennia. Indeed, such a being would be utterly unworthy of our reverence or obedience.

In fact even young earth creationists have realised the force of this argument and tried to find ways around it. A reader of this blog regularly refers me to articles from Creation Ministries International. So I went to their site for material about this issue, and found an interesting 2003 article A new cosmology: solution to the starlight travel time problem by John G. Hartnett. Hartnett, a believer in a creation about 6,000 years ago, looks at five possible solutions to the problem. Only one of these is that God created the light from events that did not actually happen, and he clearly rejects this:

I don’t believe God commits fraud. Creating a beam of light from source to observer so that the observer appears to see current information must also mean there is a whole stream of information in the beam that is false.

The problem is that three of his other solutions, that the speed of light was enormously faster in the past or that clocks on earth and elsewhere in the universe run at vastly different speeds, seem totally implausible to someone like me who has studied physics to a high level. And the remaining solution is to concede that the universe is ancient and only the earth was recently created.

Hartnett’s own preference is for a solution in which for the first few “days” of creation clocks on earth, and maybe in the whole solar system, ran ten trillion times slower than clocks elsewhere in the universe. Thus each “day” of creation, as measured on earth where there were in fact no observers other than God, corresponds to ten trillion astronomical days. This sounds to me very like an attempt to present “day-age” type old earth creationism in young earth creationist language.

So, it seems that at least some young earth creationists agree with Bailey that God is not the Great Deceiver. But they have yet to come up with even slightly convincing explanations of how the light from distant supernovas could have reached us in 6,000 years of real time.