Category Archives: Theological Issues

Posts on theological issues not in other categories

Metaphors We Are Saved By – or maybe not

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As part of my training to be a Bible translator I looked at the book Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff. I don’t actually remember the book very well, but this is part of its synopsis (as at amazon.co.uk):

People use metaphors every time they speak. Some of those metaphors are literary – devices for making thoughts more vivid or entertaining. But most are much more basic than that – they’re “metaphors we live by”, metaphors we use without even realizing we’re using them.

This same principle applies to the metaphors we use to describe God and how he works in the world. Continue reading →

Fully human and born of a virgin

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A few days ago James McGrath of Exploring Our Matrix took a comment that I left at MetaCatholic and made it into his Quote of the Day. This has led to some discussion, partly because people took my comment in a rather more sexually explicit way than I had intended.

James has in fact made several recent posts on the seasonal topic of the virgin birth. I agree with his point that the child Immanuel in Isaiah 7:14 is not Jesus and the mother is not stated to be a virgin.

James also quotes concerning the virgin birth from Arthur Peacocke, who I knew as Dean of my Cambridge college when I was an undergraduate. Peacocke wrote:

for Jesus to be fully human he had, for both biological and theological reasons, to have a human father as well as a human mother … it was probably Joseph.

Indeed. Continue reading →

Justification: metaphor or the real thing?

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Henry Neufeld, at his Participatory Bible Study Blog, has entered the fray about John Piper’s criticism of N.T. Wright’s approach to justification. I cannot claim to understand the whole post because I have not read the chapter by Piper which it refers to (although I have read the Wright article in question). But Henry makes this interesting point in the first part of his post:

There is a fundamental assumption that Piper makes, that there is one, and only one way to understand justification. For him, justification is a fact, not a metaphor. It is the core reality. Metaphors can be used to describe it, but it is the real thing. I emphasize this repeatedly, because it underlies many of the arguments that Piper makes. For him, it would be quite inadequate to suggest that a different metaphor was in play in a different verse, and thus perhaps it might be understood differently.

This is a significant point because it brings out what I see as one of the major weaknesses in Reformed theology, alongside the reliance on tradition which I have also criticised recently.

Continue reading →

Some are more equal than others

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In George Orwell’s book Animal Farm, the animals who took over the farm from their human owner initially proclaimed

All animals are equal.

But later this was altered, by the pigs who emerged as the rulers, to this:

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Orwell’s book was written as an allegory about Communism. But in many ways it can also be taken as an allegory about the church. Continue reading →

Piper has answered Adrian's question: Wright is not preaching another gospel

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A few weeks ago I wrote about what is wrong with John Piper’s theology. But in fact it turns out that in at least one respect his beliefs have been misinterpreted by Adrian Warnock.

I mentioned in my post a post of Adrian’s entitled John Piper: Is N. T. Wright Preaching Another Gospel? (See also the 31 comments on this post, now deleted from Adrian’s blog but saved here.) This was part of Adrian’s series on Piper’s book The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright, available online free of charge (PDF format).

Adrian’s title suggests that Piper is claiming that Wright is “preaching another gospel”, and the content of the post seems to confirm this suggestion. But in fact, as I will show here, this suggestion is incorrect: Piper does not consider Wright’s teaching to be “another gospel”.

Continue reading →

Complementarianism: Sola Scriptura or Sola Traditio?

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I don’t often read materials from the so-called “Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood” (CBMW). They promote a complementarian position, that is (to put it rather tendentiously), that whereas men and women are supposedly equal in status, all of the roles in the church and the family which are generally considered to be of high status are reserved for men only. As my regular readers know, this is not my position. Authors associated with CBMW, such as Wayne Grudem, often try to justify their position from Scripture, but in my opinion, explained further below, their arguments are generally seriously deficient.

But my attention was drawn to a series of posts on the CBMW blog in which David Kotter, Executive Director of CBMW, responds to my blogger friend Molly Aley. See also the discussion here, and Molly’s response to the series (which includes an excellent account by Elijah McKnight of how he moved from complementarianism to egalitarianism when he learned a proper approach to the Scriptures).

In part 2 of the series Kotter seeks to root CBMW’s complementarian position in the doctrine of Sola Scriptura:

The complementary nature of manhood and womanhood and its implications for the home and church can only be defended from the Scripture alone.

But in fact neither his logic nor CBMW’s arguments for complementarianism support this conclusion.

Continue reading →

Australian Archbishop: equal in Christ but not in church

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John Richardson, the Ugley Vicar, reports these words of Archbishop Peter Jensen, the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, who is a leading conservative in the worldwide Anglican Communion – the subject is women bishops:

You know that I am opposed to this innovation on scriptural grounds, believing as I do in the equality of men and women in Christ, but our complementarity in church and home.

Let’s look at the last part of this sentence. We have “equality … in Christ, but … complementarity in church and home” Hold on, does this mean that there is a contrast between “in Christ” and “in church”? When we are “in church”, or for that matter at home, are we no longer “in Christ”? Are churches in Australia so non-Christian that they are not even to be considered “in Christ”?

I’m sure that the Archbishop does not really want to teach this. But without this his argument falls apart. If men and women are equal in Christ, logically that equality must apply to everything they do in Christ, which should certainly include everything that happens in church, and in a Christian home. But if they are denied equality in church, then logically either the church is not in Christ or they are being denied the equality in Christ which is being preached.

The Archbishop continues:

I believe that the way that God has ordered our relationships is demonstrably for the best.

But the way he seems to think that God has ordered our relationships cannot be the real way if it is self-contradictory as I have argued.

US arms manufacturer to run UK census?

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Apparently the 2011 UK census will be run by a private company, and one of the two leading bidders for the contract is the US arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin. There are various reasons why I find this objectionable:

  • Perhaps the least of them: the company manufactures arms. I am not a lover of arms manufacturers, but perhaps they should be encouraged to branch out into peaceful activities like running censuses.
  • This is a foreign company and should not be given access to sensitive information about British citizens.
  • “They also focus on intelligence and surveillance work and boast of their ability to provide ‘integrated threat information’ that combines information from many different sources. … This [census] information would be very useful to Lockheed Martin’s intelligence work”.
  • The choice of Lockheed Martin could compromise the usefulness of the census, because “fears that the data might not be safe could lead to many people not filling in their Census forms.”

The last two points are taken from this post, which also explains what action you can take if, like me, you wish to express your objection to this.

But then I would not want to suggest that the UK government itself runs the census, given its continuing appalling track record on protection of confidential personal data.

Thanks to Pam for drawing this to my attention.

Provinces, dioceses and parishes: relics of mediaeval Christendom which must go

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Diocletian (reigned 284-305) was the last major non-Christian Roman emperor and the last great persecutor of the church in ancient times. Ironically, it was also him who divided up the Roman Empire into new administrative units called “dioceses“. As the Empire became Christianised, and then its administrative structures crumbled under the pressure of barbarian invasions, the bishops of the Catholic church became the only effective local authorities, and gradually dioceses became the areas within which a bishop had authority over all the churches. These dioceses became subdivided into parishes, which were generally the geographical areas associated with an individual church building and priest. Although under late Roman administration a province was a subdivision of a diocese, in the mediaeval western church the term “province” came into use for a higher level unit than a diocese, led by a metropolitan or archbishop.

This geographical division of the church into a hierarchy of different territorial units, although originating in late antiquity, fitted well with the feudal system of mediaeval Europe. Continue reading →

Bishops without borders, including women

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Anglican Mainstream reports these words of Bishop Don Harvey, leader of the Anglican Network in Canada which is breaking away from the official Anglican Church of Canada:

There is no reference in the Bible to a diocese, border, or boundary.  I have heard ‘Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel’. We have lawyers and doctors and engineers without borders. We are launching bishops without borders.

But it is not just in Canada that bishops are soon going to be operating without borders. Last night I attended an open meeting the synod of my deanery (local group of Anglican churches) to discuss the issue of women bishops. Continue reading →