The pacifism debate continues

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While I have been quiet here for some time until today, I have been continuing to discuss pacifism with John Hobbins on his blog, primarily in the comment thread of this post and also in some comments on this one.
Here is a taster. John wrote to me:

You are staking out a position … which seems to have little foundation in the biblical witness, Christian tradition, or current sensibilities. …

I don’t wish to caricature your position, but I do wish to point out its weaknesses.

I replied:

This position has “little foundation in the biblical witness” only for those who do not include the Sermon on the Mount and the rest of the teaching of Jesus in their canon. Perhaps those red letters in so many American Bibles are taken to mean that these words should be ignored.

Yes, my position has its weaknesses. So did Jesus’ position, so much so that he was crucified. But God vindicated him. I believe that God will ultimately vindicate my position, not necessarily by making it prevail, but certainly by bringing about in his eternal kingdom the pacifist vision of Isaiah 2:4 and 11:6-9.

More on learning styles

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It is only a couple of months since I took the VARK learning styles questionnaire. Now I have taken another questionnaire on learning styles, from learning-styles-online.com, which was recommended by Sally. This new one differs from that VARK one in offering seven different styles rather than four, and in its claim

This is the web’s only free learning styles test with a graphical result page!

Indeed, VARK did not offer graphical results, but www.learning-styles-online.com does, and here are mine:

Your results

These are the results of your inventory. The scores are out of 20 for each style. A score of 20 indicates you use that style often.

Style Scores

Visual 7
Social 3
Physical 8
Aural 2
Verbal 10
Solitary 10
Logical 14

Memletic Learning Styles Graph:

Again I score low on aural, and relatively high on visual and physical/kinesthetic. My verbal or read/write score comes out significantly higher this time. But my highest scores are for categories not in VARK: logical and solitary. I don’t know why there is such a difference except that perhaps I answer these things inconsistently!

An Eastern Orthodox perspective on salvation

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Molly has written an interesting post on Eastern Orthodox Theological Distinctives. Now I generally find eastern Orthodox theology rather attractive. But, having lived in countries where the majority of Christians are Orthodox, I tend to have a much more negative view of their church practice, and of their at least implicit attitude that if you don’t do things exactly as they do it you are not really a Christian at all.

Like Molly, I love this:

This emphasis on personal experience of truth flows into Orthodox theology, which has a rich heritage. Especially in the first millenium of Christian history, the Eastern Church produced significant theological and philosophical thought.

In the Western churches, both Catholic and Protestant, sin, grace, and salvation are seen primarily in legal terms. God gave humans freedom, they misused it and broke God’s commandments, and now deserve punishment. God’s grace results in forgiveness of the transgression and freedom from bondage and punishment.

The Eastern churches see the matter in a different way. For Orthodox theologians, humans were created in the image of God and made to participate fully in the divine life. The full communion with God that Adam and Eve enjoyed meant complete freedom and true humanity, for humans are most human when they are completely united with God.

The result of sin, then, was a blurring of the image of God and a barrier between God and man. The situation in which mankind has been ever since is an unnatural, less human state, which ends in the most unnatural aspect: death. Salvation, then, is a process not of justification or legal pardon, but of reestablishing man’s communion with God. This process of repairing the unity of human and divine is sometimes called “deification.” This term does not mean that humans become gods but that humans join fully with God’s divine life.

And some more from the same article not quoted by Molly:

Christ’s humanity is also central to the Orthodox faith, in the doctrine that the divine became human so that humanity might be raised up to the divine life.

Indeed, while the law court and penal substitutionary atonement offers a valid and biblical set of metaphors for Christian salvation, the reality of it is surely “reestablishing man’s [and woman’s] communion with God” such that “humans join fully with God’s divine life”. And what accomplished this was not just the crucifixion, but the whole process of the incarnation, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. We should not focus on just one little part of this process but see the spiritual dynamics of the whole.

I'm still here, just about

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My apologies for not posting much recently. I haven’t gone away completely. But I have been extremely busy, mostly still with my house move. Also as part of this I lost my broadband connection for a few days while it was being moved to the new house, and because of this there has been a large backlog of blog posts and other material for me to read. The upside of that is that the broadband connection is now ten times faster than it used to be (5 MB) at the same price, and my ISP apologised for the delay and gave me a discount because of it.

There is still a lot to do to sort out this new house and to get the old one in a good enough state to let. So I don’t expect to be blogging a lot in the near future. But I hope things will gradually return to something like normal.

Another quiz: which theologian am I?

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I have been posting a lot of these quizzes recently, not so much because I am addicted to them (but perhaps I am), more because they are a quick and easy way to find something to post when, as today, I don’t have time to write anything more profound. For the link to this one I thank Paul Trathen.

Which theologian are you?
created with QuizFarm.com
You scored as Charles FinneyYou’re passionate about God and love to preach the Gospel. Your theology borders on pelagianism and it is said that if God were taken out of your theology, it would look exactly the same. 

Charles Finney
80%
Anselm
73%
Jürgen Moltmann
67%
John Calvin
67%
Karl Barth
60%
Friedrich Schleiermacher
53%
Martin Luther
47%
Augustine
40%
Paul Tillich
33%
Jonathan Edwards
27%

I’m not sure the comment about Finney is fair. But note that there is quite a lot of Calvin in my theology, although rather little Jonathan Edwards. I guess the person who wrote the comment was something of a Calvinist.

But as Tim Chesterton perceptively points out,

What a bunch! Not a decent Anabaptist among them!

Pacifism and the Good Samaritan

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Jeremy Pierce and I have been having a long discussion in the comment thread on my post Doug ridicules Christian pacifism. Here I want to bring out one issue which came up in his most recent comment. In an earlier comment he had written:

It’s simply a moral principle that we should protect others

and I had replied:

This is where I fundamentally differ from you, especially if in doing so we kill or wound a third party. I’m not saying it is always wrong to do so either, but there is no sense in which this is a moral imperative for all, where the others have not been specifically entrusted to our care. To go beyond this is to be a “meddler” [referring to an earlier discussion of 1 Peter 4:15], as so well defined by you as “an enforcer of morality in places where you have no authority to do so”. So, yes, protect your own children, and play the hero when you see a mugging if you like (but don’t deliberately shoot the mugger dead), but it is not your responsibility to protect the children of Iraq.

To this Jeremy responded:

I have very strong resistance to the claim that I have no responsibility to treat the people of Iraq as my neighbors. Just because they don’t live next to you doesn’t mean they don’t count as neighbors in the sense that Jesus had in mind in the Good Samaritan parable. He deliberately chose a case of a foreigner helping an Israelite, indeed a foreigner most Israelites wouldn’t have seen any responsibility toward.

But does the parable of the Good Samaritan imply that as a Christian I should abandon pacifism and support armed intervention in Iraq? I don’t think so. Continue reading →

What my pizza says about me

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What Your Pizza Reveals


There are no limits to your eating. You often devour the scraps your friends can’t finish.You consider pizza to be bread… very good bread. You fit in best in the Midwest part of the US.You like food that’s traditional and well crafted. You aren’t impressed with “gourmet” foods.You are dependable, loyal, and conservative with your choices. 

You are a flavorful and bold person. You should consider traveling to Spain.

The stereotype that best fits you is geek. You’re the type most likely to order pizza to avoid leaving your computer.

What Does Your Pizza Say About You?

Not sure how accurate this is, but it’s interesting! Hat tip to Sally.

Hoping to back to more like normal service soon, as I gradually get more and more things in place in my new home.

Moved at last

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Sorry to be slow blogging recently. I have been working hard on my new house with the aim of making it habitable. I seem to have spent most of the last month tiling and otherwise redecorating my bathroom – I did start before Christmas, and it still isn’t completely finished. But it is complete enough for me to move in tonight, just less than a month since I got the keys.

For the moment my computer and office things remain at the old house, not least because I still haven’t got a phone line at the new one. I was waiting for TalkTalk to set me up with their very good free broadband offer, only to find out yesterday that they can’t do it unless I first have the BT line put in my name – which implies a one year minimum contract with BT. Why didn’t they tell me that a month ago? So I am going back to BT, who can probably set up my phone line in a few days, and Metronet for broadband, who promise to transfer my account in a week. Maybe I will try TalkTalk next year.

Rev Sam on the Virgin Birth

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Just before Christmas I caused a bit of a storm with some of my comments on the Virgin Birth. I have now just found that my fellow Essex blogger Rev Sam (hat tip to yet another Essex blogger, Paul Trathen) has spent much of the Christmas season (that is, in our shared Anglican tradition, the twelve days from Christmas to Epiphany) writing an extended series on The Marginality of the Virgin Birth. In this series he makes a number of the same kinds of points which I made, but in greater depth, and gives sensible and clearly argued reasons why he cannot believe in the literal virgin birth of Jesus, although otherwise he holds to orthodox Christian teaching. While I don’t agree with everything that Rev Sam says here, I much appreciate his take on these issues.