Eddie Arthur links to an interview with Christian songwriter and worship leader Matt Redman. This is especially interesting for his second thoughts on writing words like “Jesus, I am so in love with you”.
Matt Redman interview
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Category Archives: Theological Issues
Complementarianism according to John Piper
I happened to come across some comments which I myself originally wrote in July 2006, on this post on Better Bibles Blog. I repeat them here to preserve them and bring them to a wider audience.
The context is a discussion of John Piper’s Vision of Biblical complementarity, chapter 1 of the book Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
There are ways for a woman to interact even with a male subordinate that signal to him and others her endorsement of his mature manhood in relationship to her as a woman. I do not have in mind anything like sexual suggestiveness or innuendo. Rather, I have in mind culturally appropriate expressions of respect for his kind of strength, and glad acceptance of his gentlemanly courtesies. Her demeanor-the tone and style and disposition and discourse of her ranking position-can signal clearly her affirmation of the unique role that men should play in relationship to women owing to their sense of responsibility to protect and lead.
In response to these words I made this comment:
Are these rules supposed to be Christian and derived from the Bible? It sounds to me as if they come from a 19th century manual of etiquette. That doesn’t make them necessarily wrong, but nor does it make them right. Piper, Grudem and friends need to distinguish between Christian values and old-fashioned conservative cultural ones. A good course in cross-cultural evangelism, or some in depth first hand experience of a very different culture, would do them a world of good.
I took the matter a bit further in this comment (reformatted):
Yes, Jesus really did rise from the dead
Ruth Gledhill asks Did Jesus really rise from the dead? Or perhaps she is simply reporting the question, as asked of Rowan Williams by a friend of Father Geoffrey Kirk (no relation). No doubt Williams’ answer would have been deep and philosophical, maybe not even comprehensible. But I prefer the answer of her commenter “A Renegade Priest”:
Yes He did; I spoke to him this morning, he’s alive and well, reigning in glory, and he sends his love, to you and to everyone.
Indeed! If we can’t give this kind of answer for ourselves, the deep and philosophical answers are never going to be convincing.
Packer denies the Trinity?
The following passage from J.I. Packer’s 1973 classic Knowing God was quoted by Marilyn in a comment on the Complegalitarian blog, and I have checked and slightly corrected it from my 1975 copy (p.64):
It is the nature of the second person of the Trinity to acknowledge the authority and submit to the good pleasure of the first. That is why He declares Himself to be the Son, and the first person to be His Father. Though co-equal with the Father in eternity, power, and glory, it is natural to Him to play the Son’s part, and find all His joy in doing His Father’s will, just as it is natural to the first person of the Trinity to plan and initiate the works of the Godhead and natural to the third person to proceed from the Father and the Son to do their joint bidding. Thus the obedience of the God-man to the Father while He was on earth was not a new relationship occasioned by the incarnation, but the continuation in time of the eternal relationship between the Son and the Father in heaven. As in heaven, so on earth, the Son was utterly dependent upon the Father’s will.
Thus Packer’s way of teaching the eternal subordination of the Son is to claim that the Son has a “nature” which is different from that of the Father, according to which it is “natural” for him to do one thing and “natural” for the Father to do something else. Note that in the context Packer is clearly referring to the divine nature of the Son, not his incarnate human nature.
Doesn’t that conflict with the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, according to which the Father and the Son have the same divine nature (homoousios)? Doesn’t it contradict these extracts from the Athanasian Creed?
we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and man. God of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds; and man of substance of His mother, born in the world. … Equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, … One altogether, not by confusion of substance, but by unity of person.
Doesn’t it go against Philippians 2:6, where we read that Christ Jesus was “in very nature God” (TNIV)? In orthodox Trinitarian thought, the pre-incarnate divine nature of Christ is not some second-class divinity, not a “nature … to acknowledge the authority and submit to the good pleasure of the first [person]”. No, it is the same nature, substance or essence (ousia) as that of the Father.
Perhaps Bishop Ingham is right to accuse Packer that “that he has publicly renounced the doctrine … of the Anglican Church of Canada”, which presumably still requires him to ascribe to the Apostles’, Nicene and Athanasian Creeds. In fact, of course, Packer wrote the words in question long before he moved to Canada, so perhaps he should never have been licensed to minister there.
For the orthodox view, I quote the church father Basil as quoted here:
We perceive the operation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to be one and the same, in no respect showing differences or variation; from this identity of operation we necessarily infer the unity of nature.
Satire: Election in Texas
Elder Eric of Tominthebox News Network posted on Obama Explains Election Process. His satirical post is hilarious but also reveals his Calvinist presuppositions.
Here is my take on the same subject, originally written as a comment on Eric’s post – perhaps the start of a series of satirical posts here:
In this election year Texas voter, and fringe member of an evangelical church, John Doe is puzzled. He sees that he has the opportunity to elect Obama or Clinton, McCain or Huckabee as President. And he sees all the campaign materials from them. But then he hears in church that God may or may not elect him to eternal life. So he has decided to mount his own election campaign. He is having leaflets printed and TV adverts prepared with the message, “O God, vote for Doe!” He is not sure yet of the most effective method of delivering his campaign message. One technique he is trying, suggested by a friend who had read Revelation 8:4, is to burn some of his leaflets along with incense. He plans to broadcast his TV ad upwards into the sky. But he is also targeting his leaflets and TV ad, recorded on DVD, at people he thinks are especially close to God, of whatever religion to hedge his bets, in the hope that they will put in a word for him with the one Voter who counts in his race for eternal life.
Giles and Sunlyk head to head on the Trinity
Already this month Nick Norelli has posted about the Trinity at least a dozen times, mostly in connection with his Trinity Blogging Summit. I have not yet had time to read most of these posts. But I have read one of the first of these dozen posts, Giles’ Reply & Paulson’s Response, which I quote in full here:
Following Matt Paulson’s critique of Kevin Giles’ Trinitarian theology came a reply from Giles and a response from Paulson. I have not yet read either of these but will probably post some thoughts when I have done so.
Now Matt Paulson is apparently the real name of Phantaz Sunlyk, whose discussion of the eternal subordination of the Son I recently critiqued. I did not respond earlier to Nick’s post quoted above as I was waiting for him to read and post his thoughts on the reply and the response. But he has not yet done so, although some of his commenters have, and Nick’s own contribution to the blogging summit is relevant. So now I am myself reading the reply and the response, and the comments, and posting my own thoughts here.
Antichrists, Beasts, and the Man of Lawlessness
It is always strange to me when Christian speakers and authors refer to the Antichrist in the singular, often with a capital letter. Even Pope Benedict seems to have done this, in the passage from him I quoted in a recent post, so I can hardly blame those who commented on that post for following his lead.
Of course it is fun to speculate about which political, religious or media figures might be the Antichrist – perhaps Tony Blair as I suggested tongue in cheek last year, or one of the various suggestions made in the more recent comment thread here.
But in fact there is nothing in the Bible to suggest that there will ever be an individual identifiable as the Antichrist. This is teaching from outside the Bible. It is so ancient that John, the author of the letters of John traditionally identified with the Apostle John, knew it, but he did not teach it. His teaching, which is the only biblical teaching on this subject, is that there are many antichrists, and that some of them had already come in his time.
Wow! Benedict + Antichrist = Explosion of blog stats
Welcome to thousands of new readers of this blog!
Perhaps I should have anticipated your arrival. Linking “Pope Benedict” and “Antichrist” in the title of a blog post has brought you here, it seems. Yesterday this post attracted 2143 views, and today already at 6 pm that total has been surpassed with 2267 views. The well over 3000 total visits to the blog on each of these two days dwarfs my regular 200-300 visits per day.
And all this without me making any suggestion that Pope Benedict is the Antichrist, indeed I wrote the opposite! I am not a Roman Catholic, but I have a lot of respect for His Holiness.
Of course one problem with this is that it has attracted a few people commenting with their own theories of which individual the Antichrist might be. That was not the point of my post at all. Rather, I was suggesting that there is not and will not be any single figure called the Antichrist, as suggested by 1 John 2:18.
In fact the great majority of you new visitors reached me from just one site, Spirit Daily, apparently a Roman Catholic news site which linked to my post.
Phantaz Sunlyk on the Eternal Subordination of the Son
Nick Norelli continues his discussion of eternal subordinationism in the Trinity, which I reported earlier, by posting a link to a critique of Kevin Giles’ work by Phantaz Sunlyk (a.k.a. Matt Paulson). In fact the link that Nick posts is incorrect; this is the correct link.
Sunlyk’s paper is long and complex. I have skimmed a large part of it, although I skipped most of part III and part VI. At this point I can make the following necessarily provisional comments. To summarise, Sunlyk has made some telling criticisms of Giles’ work, although he fails to understand its thrust because of his unfamiliarity with the viewpoint Giles is interacting with. But in fact Sunlyk upholds Giles’ main point concerning the Trinity, that the relationship between the Father and the Son should not be understood in terms like “The Father commands, and the Son obeys.”
Pope Benedict, Bible scholars, and the Antichrist
No, I am not going to break my rule on this blog that I don’t speculate about the end times. But I was struck by the extract from Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth, about the temptation of Jesus, quoted by Michael Barber. Here is part of it (typos corrected):
The devil proves to be a Bible expert who can quote the Psalm exactly. The whole conversation of the second temptation takes the form of a dispute between two Bible scholars. Remarking on this passage, Joachim Gnilka says that the devil presents himself here as a theologian. The Russian writer Vladimir Soloviev took up this motif in his short story ‘The Antichrist.’ The Anitchrist receives an honorary doctorate in theology from the University of Tübingen and is a great Scripture scholar. Soloviev’s portrayal of the Antichrist forcefully expresses his skepticism regarding a certain type of scholarly exegesis current at the time. This is not a rejection of scholarly biblical interpretation as such, but an eminently salutary and necessary warning against its possible aberrations. The fact is that scriptural exegesis can become a tool of the Antichrist. Soloviev is not the first person to tell us that; it is the deeper point of the temptation story itself. The alleged findings of scholarly exegesis have been used to put together the most dreadful books that destroy the figure of Jesus and dismantle faith… [T]he Antichrist, with an air of scholarly excellence, tells us that any exegesis that reads the Bible from the perspective of faith in the living God, in order to listen to what God has to say, is fundamentalism; he wants to convince us that only his kind of exegesis, the supposedly purely scientific kind, in which God says nothing and has nothing to say, is able to keep abreast of the times. The theological debate between Jesus and the devil is a dispute over the correct interpretation of Scripture…
Well said, Your Holiness. These days I try (not always successfully) not to get involved in disputes with Bible scholars of this Antichrist kind.
With the apostle John in 1 John 2:18, I refuse to identify any single Antichrist but think in terms of multiple antichrists. These may include the liberal Bible scholars Pope Benedict has in mind. But ironically it is not just theological liberals who want to limit what God has to say by “supposedly purely scientific” exegesis. I often come across an essentially similar approach from those who call themselves evangelical Bible believers, but in practice hold that “God says nothing and has nothing to say” beyond the interpretations of the Bible by certain typically 16th and 17th century teachers. So I also wonder if among the antichrists are some evangelical scholars who are so sure of their traditional interpretations that they refuse to read the Bible “in order to listen to what God has to say”.