Category Archives: Theological Issues

Posts on theological issues not in other categories

The spoof that wasn't

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Doug linked to a post The Day I Became a Calvinist at Parchment and Pen which he seemed puzzled by. I read it and decided that it was a rather convincing spoof, a reworking of a testimony of how someone became a Christian into a story of becoming a Calvinist. Among the clear signals of it being a spoof are the introduction, illustrated by the picture “The Scream”:

There are a few things that people never forget. The details of certain tragedies and trials stay by your side and the vivid details remind you of their significance.

This is followed by examples: 9/11, the death of a sister … and the day the author became a Calvinist, presented in the context as the greatest tragedy and trial in his life!

Not recognising the name of the author, C. Michael Patton, I judged that he was a non-believer or a rather liberal Christian who wanted to mock both Calvinism and testimonies of conversion.

It was only when I started to skim through the comments (over 150 in three days) that I realised that people were taking this seriously. Had the commenters not spotted that this was a spoof? Then Patton himself joined in. Was he just keeping up the joke? I still wasn’t quite sure until I posted my first comment asking explicitly if this was a spoof, to which Patton replied:

Peter, I am not sure what you mean. Maybe it was a bad post, but it was meant to be “a day in the life” type post. The scream is illustrative of how many people handle unconditional election.

Well, I get the last part, for hearing too much about that doctrine makes me want to scream. But I don’t see how Patton, as confirmed his further comments, fails to recognise how good a spoof this is. After all, it’s not that he doesn’t have a sense of humour, for he appreciates Tominthebox News Network.

If you are not a Calvinist, do read it as a spoof.

If you are a Calvinist, please explain to me why becoming one can be listed as a tragedy and a trial.

For my own take on these issues, see my previous post.

A TULIP by any other name …

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… would it smell just as unattractive? (Apologies to Shakespeare – some of us Essex people have heard of him, even if we don’t win Big Brother.)

I couldn’t resist this title, so I decided to use it as an excuse to comment on the discussions on five-point or TULIP Calvinism which are going on at Ancient Hebrew Poetry (completely off topic for that blog, so don’t be scared to read this if you don’t know any Hebrew), at Metacatholic, and in a long comment thread on this very blog.

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Forgotten Ways

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This is not actually a follow-up to my post Forgotten fruit, more to Why does a believer believe?

I thank David Couchman, via a comment at Kouya Chronicle, for introducing me to Alan Hirsch’s blog The Forgotten Ways. I have yet to look into what Hirsch is teaching in any detail. But the interesting extract from his book here is enough to show that he is putting forward a model of missional Christian practice which looks very different from traditional church life, a model which is designed not for maintenance but for rapid growth. The extract is well worth reading, if you are prepared for your church to be turned upside down!

I was struck by this from one of the most recent blog posts, belief in belief:

I have been hanging around Evangelical circles for most of my Christian life. but truth to tell, I was brought to the Lord by some real crazy, chandelier-swinging, Pentecostals. I had a really profound, life-defining experience, through their amazing ministry. They didn’t seem to know much about the faith, but they knew the Holy Spirit. But the interesting thing is that I have come to conclude is that they were real God believers. The comparison with my Evangelical brethren is that I think they can be described as beliving in belief in God. A whole set of ideas, dogma, and doctrine provides an screen of objectivity between the believer and God. Perhaps this is a way of mediating the ‘danger’ of the God experience. But while theological understanding is gained, immediacy is lost through the objectification of God and the God experience. the loss is great. … I have come to conclude that real Penties believe in God, while good, solid, Evangelicals believe in belief in/about God.

Indeed. I hope this is not true of all Evangelicals, but it does seem rather true of some. But on this comparison I think I can honestly put myself as not a good solid Evangelical but a crazy chandelier-swinging Pentecostal. Indeed, I can’t see how anyone can become a believer in belief. But, as I have described, I can see that as someone truly meets and experiences God they can come to believe in him.

The Caleb Generation

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The title of this post is in some ways an odd one because there was no Caleb generation, apart from Joshua and Caleb himself.

Of course Caleb did have a whole lot of contemporaries among the Israelites. But, apart from the probably much younger Joshua, they were very different people from Caleb. They grumbled and rebelled against Moses, and they were afraid to go into the Promised Land when God told them to, but presumed to try to go when God told them not to. Only Caleb and Joshua had the faith to go when God said “Go”, and to wait when he did not. As a result, God punished the entire generation, apart from those two, with early death.

And so, when the time came for the conquest of the land, Caleb, aged nearly 80 (see Joshua 14:7,10), was twenty years older than any of the other surviving Israelites, apart from Joshua. Yet Caleb was by no means ready to retire; five years into the conquest, at age 85, he could still say

I am still as strong today as the day Moses sent me out; I’m just as vigorous to go out to battle now as I was then.

Joshua 14:11 (TNIV)

It seems that the God who had caused all the other Israelites to die by age 60 had miraculously preserved Caleb’s health and strength for 45 years.

So it was perhaps a little strange that at Soul Survivor, which I came home from just over a week ago, Mike Pilavachi preached about the Caleb generation, about how we should have faith like Caleb did. Continue reading →

Proud reason and systematic theology

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Adrian Warnock, in a post about the doctrine of “double predestination”, quotes one of his heroes, the 19th century Cambridge preacher Charles Simeon, as follows:

But this is a perversion of the doctrine. It is a consequence which our proud reason is prone to draw from the decrees of God: but it is a consequence which the inspired volume totally disavows. There is not in the whole sacred writings one single word that fairly admits of such a construction.

Thus Simeon shows how wrong is the teaching of double predestination, that God predestines some people to be damned. Adrian agrees with him, and so do I.

But I want to take this a step further. It seems to me that any systematic theology or teaching derived from it needs to be judged according to this criterion, whether it actually consists of “the decrees of God”, or is “a consequence which our proud reason is prone to draw from [these] decrees”. This applies especially to the Reformed systematic theology based on the five points of Calvinism which Adrian is currently expounding in a mini-series. Among the tests which need to be applied here is whether the teaching is “a consequence which the inspired volume totally disavows”. And among the teachings which fail this test I find not only double predestination but indeed the whole system of election and predestination which is the basis of Calvinism. For these are based on the idea that God does not want all to be saved which “the inspired volume totally disavows”, in 1 Timothy 2:4 and 2 Peter 3:9.

Augustine's mistake about original sin

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Scot McKnight writes:

Behind the Reformation is Augustine; behind much of modern evangelicalism, especially in the Reformed circles today, is the Reformation. Therefore, at the bottom of the evangelical movement in the Reformed circles is Augustine and his anthropology.

And behind Augustine’s anthropology (understanding of humanity), which is outlined in Scot’s post, is a simple misunderstanding of one word in the Bible, a preposition consisting of just two letters. Scot is writing about the New Perspective on Paul, an interesting issue. But my point here is not about that, but about how a misleading Bible translation has led Christian theology seriously astray for 1600 years.

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Homosexuality, Divorce and Gay Marriage

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Readers may wonder what I find in common between homosexuality and divorce, except that I can loosely categorise them under “gender issues”. This is nothing to do with the ending of gay marriages or “civil partnerships”. But it is all about how a proper understanding of the biblical teaching on divorce, which I discussed here recently, may also be helpful in finding a Christian approach to homosexuality. Here I take further one of the points which I outlined in my post about Bishop Gene Robinson.

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Paul Trathen on the Atonement

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Paul Trathen is the Anglican vicar at whose church, about ten miles from my home, I went to a gig by Tim Chesterton, which I blogged about before. Paul, a rather occasional blogger, has now entered the atonement debate by contributing quite a long essay. In this he reviews three different books about the atonement. Pierced for Our Transgressions, of which we have heard so much here, and even more on Adrian’s blog, is not one of them. One reason for this is that Paul’s essay is probably not as new as this book. But it may also be that from Paul’s perspective outside the rather narrow confines of evangelicalism Pierced for Our Transgressions looks a much less significant book than Adrian and some others want to consider it.

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