Prayer saves retired pastor but not Porsches

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An interesting story from the BBC: A 93-year-old retired Pentecostal pastor has just had his first accident in 76 years of driving. He ended up hanging upside down in his overturned car, and said

It was a miracle I got out alive and I put it down to the power of prayer and God looking after me.

But God was apparently not looking after the two Porsche cars, symbols of greed some might think, which he managed to badly damage in the process, causing £60,000 ($120,000) damage. So perhaps it is for the best that he says

that’s it – the end of my driving career, I’m never driving again.

Wright and right on shifting the balance of power in the Anglican Communion

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John Richardson quotes Bishop NT Wright criticising those who are calling for a boycott of the Lambeth Conference. Wright sympathises with the plight of orthodox Anglicans in North America who are

vilified, attacked and undermined by ecclesiastical authority figures who seem to have lost all grip on the gospel of Jesus Christ and to be eager only for lawsuits and property squabbles.

But he goes on to say that

these situations have been exploited by those who have long wanted to shift the balance of power in the Anglican Communion and who have used this awful situation as an opportunity to do so.

I have great respect for Wright as a theologian. But, as I pointed out in a previous post, he is a man of his time and background who seems to have a blind spot, along with many of his fellows in high positions in the Anglican Communion, about recognising that African and Asian bishops have an equal right with British and North American bishops to a share in authority within the Communion. Perhaps they have even more right, in fact, as on average they each represent a larger number of committed Anglicans. Yes, they want to shift the balance of power, but in a completely right way, away from those who are illegitimately hanging on to it as a relic of colonialism and racism towards being more representative of the Anglican churches as a whole.

I read on a blog somewhere recently (and not just at Doug’s April Fool – don’t take my comment there seriously) that Rowan Williams should be replaced as Archbishop of Canterbury by Wright, because he would be best placed to hold the Anglican Communion together. Sadly he would not be, because if he tries to lead it with this attitude he will never be able to reconcile the Africans and Asians with the North Americans.

Meanwhile, as John Richardson and Babyblue report, Bishop Wright in the same talk mentioned some letters which Archbishop Williams has sent to certain bishops. Apparently Williams is trying to persuade bishops who don’t support the Windsor Process and the Anglican Covenant, that is, the least conservative bishops, not to attend the Lambeth Conference. Wright said about this

I am well aware that many will say this is far too little, far too late.

Well, on this point he is a prophet: I for one do indeed say that Williams’ letter is far too little, far too late. The only way of sorting out this mess now is for Williams to go, and to be replaced not by Wright but by someone like Archbishop Sentamu of York who has a chance of gaining the respect of the African and Asian majority in the Anglican Communion.

The fall of Bishop Michael Reid

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Peniel Pentecostal Church in Brentwood, about 15 miles from my home, has been controversial here in Essex for several years. I have never been there myself. But I did know people at a church here in Chelmsford which perhaps 20 years ago closed down and effectively merged with Peniel, including a family which left that group and joined my own church. Among the controversies is the allegedly overbearing leadership style of its leader, until last week, Bishop Michael Reid.

But the latest controversy tops the lot, and made it into the national newspapers, at least The Daily Mail, as quoted by John Richardson, and The Sun. The story is also in the Church Times blog, despite being completely non-Anglican. For it seems that Michael Reid has fallen into the oldest trap for church leaders, adultery. If the reports are to be believed, he has for eight years been having an affair with the music director (I nearly said “worship director”, but I know what Doug would say to that!) at his church. Indeed he has admitted adultery, without specifying more details, and resigned from pastoral duties in his church.

Simon Jones, who was apparently hurt by involvement in a similar church, has blogged about this matter in a somewhat intemperate way, accusing Reid of hypocrisy. He also writes, accurately:

A quick Google will reveal some truly awful stories about Michael Reid and the way he has dealt with people who have questioned his leadership over the years.

My aim here is not at all to defend Reid or his church, but to put some balance and truth into this story.

First, the current issue is nothing at all to do with his ministry style or church leadership. That is anyway an internal matter for him and his church, at least unless it is clearly unbiblical or abusive. Not surprisingly people who didn’t like his leadership are not sorry about his fall, but any link between the issues is only speculative.

Second, although Dave Walker and Simon Jones use “scare quotes” around the title “bishop”, and Dave even calls him “self-styled”, in fact Michael Reid is entitled to be called a bishop. Simon quotes a letter from the International Communion of Charismatic Churches confirming that Reid was properly consecrated as a bishop:

His consecration to the office of the Bishop was conducted in Benin City, Nigeria by the late Archbishop Benson Idahosa. He for several years after served as the national presbyter for the ICCC and a member of the College of Bishops. However, since his resignation several years ago he has held no position within the organization and the organization has had neither involvement nor oversight in his ministry.

According to the ICCC’s own website their episcopate was recognised by Pope Paul VI in 1978:

the pope saw it as a gesture of genuine desire to identify with the historical church and he defended the actions of the three Pentecostals and called for McAlister and DuPlessis to be brought before him for commissioning as bishops of special recognition and rights thereby establishing them both as direct descendants of apostolic succession.

Robert McAlister consecrated Benson Idahosa, and Idahosa consecrated Reid. So Reid became a genuine bishop in the apostolic succession. And, although he left the ICCC about ten years ago, on the understanding of those who believe in the apostolic succession he remains a bishop for life. So there is no call for “scare quotes” or words like “self-styled”.

As John Richardon writes, we should not be crowing over the fall of a church leader that we didn’t like, but

what all of us should be thinking is, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

And , I suggest, we should be praying for Bishop Reid and his wife, and for the woman involved and her family; also for the church under its new pastor, including that it will turn away from the abuses for which Reid was allegedly responsible and follow God’s leading for it as a church.

Freedom and uselessness

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A quote from Wally in this Dilbert cartoon:

Freedom is just another word for finding out you’re useless.

I have quite a lot of freedom and free time at the moment, as my Bible translation project winds down. But I’m glad to be finding out not that I am useless, but that God loves me and values me, not for being useful but for being his child. When he has something more for me to do, he will tell me. Until then I will simply wait in his loving arms. Well, things are sometimes easier said that done, but that is my intention.

Love takes a long thyme

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There has been discussion on several blogs in the last day or so, not all of it entirely serious, about how to translate the first clause in 1 Corinthians 13:4. Those involved include Lingalinga, Mike and Suzanne, first here and now here.

I think I was the first in this discussion, in a comment on the Lingamish post, to point out the link between this clause and the description of the Lord in Exodus 34:6 (there I wrote in error 34:7) and several other places in the Old Testament as “slow to anger”. As I pointed out in one of my first blog posts ever, the Hebrew phrase used for this in Exodus literally means “length of nose” or “length of nostrils”; but the word meaning “nose” or “nostrils” also has the metaphorical sense “anger”, and understanding “length” in a temporal sense leads to the understanding “slow to anger”.

The link between 1 Corinthians 13:4 and Exodus 34:6 is with the Septuagint Greek wording of the latter, makrothumos. This adjective is a compound word of makros “long” and thumos, which has a variety of meanings, including “anger”. So the Septuagint translator clearly chose it, or coined it, as a loan-translation of the Hebrew phrase understood as “length of anger”.

In 1 Corinthians 13:4 the Greek of the first clause is he agape makrothumei, the last word being the verb derived from makrothumos. This verb and a related noun and adverb (although oddly not the adjective itself) are used several times in the New Testament. In modern translations these are usually rendered with the “patient” word group. The KJV translation of them was “long-suffering”, which is a good reflection of the Greek compound word if the “suffer” part is correctly understood in its older sense of “allow” or perhaps “forbear”. But this rendering obscures the significant link with the Exodus passage.

So how should we render the clause? Some advocates of formal equivalence translation argue that words should be rendered according to their most concrete literal sense. The most concrete literal sense of thumos is “thyme”, the herb whose English name is derived from this Greek word. So makrothumos should be “long thyme”. Hence the tongue in cheek rendering in this post title:

Love takes a long thyme.

Suzanne took this same approach even further by reading the Hebrew idiom into the Greek word. I’m not sure this is a legitimate approach, but then she was not being as serious as I first thought she was. What she came up with was

The scripture truth that “love is long in both nostrils at once”.

But this sounds a bit like the Pinocchio approach to Scripture: the more you misrepresent it, the longer your nose and so the greater your love!

But in her later post Suzanne looked more seriously at this passage, and came up with the best rendering I have seen, which preserves the link with Exodus 34:6 and fits well into 1 Corinthians 13:

Love is slow to anger.

May we all remember to live in this kind of love, including Doug who this evening rants at me (with good cause), and above all myself.

According to Piper, does God love anyone at all?

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Yesterday I posted “God hates sinners”: John Piper does believe this. In a comment Jeff, “Scripture Zealot”, noted that I had taken this from a sermon 23 years old and wondered if Piper might have changed his mind. Well, that is possible, but I have been offered no evidence for it.

However, we do have up-to-date evidence for something almost as shocking which Piper explicitly states today, or at least he did yesterday. If we can trust Adrian Warnock’s report (which is not certain; thanks to Henry Neufeld for the tip), Piper, speaking yesterday at the New Word Alive conference in Wales, said:

Someone might argue, “Sin was condemned, but not Christ.” Piper then explained: Imagine I got you on stage and said, “I’m going to hit you in the face, but it’s not you I’m hitting, it’s just your attitude.” NO! It was the will of the Lord to bruise him. God made him to be sin who knew no sin so that we could become the righteousness of God. He was wounded for us. His punishment set us free. The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He struck him. It was God the Father who killed Jesus. It is considered today to be appalling to teach or sing this. Piper said it is not appalling to him, it is his very life!

To this, I will simply say that “bruise” (Adrian’s double emphasis) is not the same as “kill”, and where in this is the united will of the Trinity? But this quotation should really be checked from the audio and video expected soon.

To return to Piper’s 1985 sermon, on the same chapter, Romans 8, as last night’s, I noticed something strange here.

When I have objected in the past to statements like “God hates sinners” and its apparent contradiction with John 3:16, Calvinist commenters have claimed that in this verse “the world” in fact means “the elect”. There is in fact no exegetical justification for this at all, but it does make for a consistent, although unbiblical, system of doctrine, according to which God loves those whom he has elected to eternal life, and hates those whom he has not elected.

But the strange thing which Piper said in 1985 was with regard to himself before he was a Christian:

But it wasn’t always so for John Piper. … God hated me in my sin.

Now I am sure that Piper considers himself one of the elect. But here he seems to teach that God hated him before he repented and became a Christian. In fact, if we read on, it would appear that, according to Piper, God still hated him as he

contemplate[d] me in Jesus Christ—chosen, loved, and destined for glory … [and] fulfil[led] his predestined purpose for me by appeasing his own wrath and acquitting me of all my sin and conquering the depravity of my heart.

In other words, Piper’s view seems to be that God continues to hate humans, except for the only one he actually loves, Jesus Christ. And if he does love Jesus, he showed that in a very strange way, by killing him. Also, in this case, as Polycarp asked in a comment here,

If God hates sinners, then why Christ?

If God loved Jesus and hated Piper, why did he kill Jesus and save Piper? This just doesn’t make sense!

Now maybe Piper has some way of making this into a consistent system, but it is different from the Calvinist system I described before, and even more different from the truth revealed in the Bible:

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5:8 (TNIV)

Note the first “for us”: it is not just Jesus, but us sinners, whom God loves, and he loves us before we repent.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

John 3:16 (TNIV)

I shouldn’t really have to quote this, but it seems that at least in 1985 Piper was not aware of it. For these words make it clear that God did not love just the Son, nor even just the elect, but he loved the world, that is everyone.

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.