Category Archives: Theological Issues

Posts on theological issues not in other categories

Has God stopped allowing divorce?

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In my post about a gay bishop, I wrote:

God, through Moses, allowed divorce, which was less than his ideal for marriage, because people’s hearts were hard (Mark 10:2-9). Perhaps by analogy he would accept same sex marriage, for those whose “hearts are hard” and cannot accept his ideal, at least as better than gay or lesbian couples living together outside any kind of formalised relationship.

This second sentence is of course a highly controversial suggestion (which I am not discussing in this post). I didn’t expect the first sentence of this quotation to be controversial. But in a comment on this Jeremy Pierce has written:

One difficulty with the Moses argument is that Jesus seems to be saying that God allowed it under Moses but isn’t allowing it anymore. At least that’s how I’ve usually taken it.

Well, I suppose I have come across this kind of interpretation before. For it must underlie the traditional absolute prohibition of divorce in churches and in so-called Christian countries – a tradition which is very much in retreat now, although the Roman Catholic church continues to take quite a strict line on divorce.

But does this interpretation of Mark 10:2-12, and the parallel passage in Matthew 19:3-9 (compare also Matthew 5:31-32), stand up to detailed scrutiny? I don’t think so.

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Christian lending and the uglification of Ugley

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John Richardson caught my attention with a post on The Debt Disaster, mainly because in his introduction he quoted Psalm 15:5 and highlighted the words “without charging interest”. The highlighting was in fact a link to an older post which further linked to an essay which John wrote called Losing Interest, where he argues from the Bible and from Luther that it is wrong for Christians to accept interest. I commented on the debt disaster post, and John responded quickly with a new post about The wrongs of loans, in which he appeals additionally, but inconclusively, to CS Lewis.

Now I entirely agree with John that irresponsible lending and borrowing have got out of hand. Many people who were not especially poor have fallen into a poverty trap by taking out loans larger than they can afford to repay, in many cases to buy things they didn’t need, but in others to buy the bare necessities of life such as houses to live in.

But it seems to me that the steps which John proposes for solving this problem are neither soundly biblically based nor effective.

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Wife beating

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For some reason which neither Joe Carter nor I can understand I cannot access the blog Evangelical Outpost; I always receive the following error message, from the home page and from any individual post:

Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access / on this server.Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Apache/1.3.37 Server at www.evangelicaloutpost.com Port 80 

Anyone know why? Anyone else get the same response?

But thanks to Eddie of Kouya Chronicle I was able to read the main part of this post about being critical of others’ theology etc. Actually at least the part Eddie quotes seems to be taken from this 2005 post, for which I found a Google cache.

Maybe I can at times be a bit of what Anthony Bradley is said to call a “wife beater”. Perhaps Lingamish feels a bit that I have been beating him. He is not my wife, of course! (Nor is he my gay “civil partner” – I don’t have one, or a wife.) In my defence I can say that the view I beat him about was “heretical or likely to lead someone away from salvation”, and so I can claim to be justified in fighting tooth and nail about that. But on lesser matters, just like Joe Carter,

I find that I just don’t have the stomach for those old arguments anymore. I’m still willing to discuss doctrinal differences. But now I’m less sure that I’m standing on the right side of scripture.

Cyber-psalm satisfies

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Lingamish has posted a new version of the cyber-psalm which I had an issue with yesterday. This is a definite improvement, with the problematic word “rejected” dropped. I have no theological objections to the new version of these few lines:

And you left him there
Out of love for us,
The people living in darkness.

But there is an ambiguity which I don’t think was intended. The collocation of “left” with “there” gives a different meaning to “left”, suggesting that Jesus was allowed to remain on the cross indefinitely, but not foregrounding the fact that God left Jesus. The meaning would be better without “there”, or as “And there you left him”. I cannot comment on which makes the best poetry; I leave such things to English major Lingamish.

Cyber-psalm is suspect

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My cyber-friend Lingamish has published the first of a series of “cyber-psalms”. (In this sentence “cyber-” seems to mean no more than “communicating only on the Internet”.) On his lingalinga blog he notes:

Aren’t those susserating* sibilants simply succulent?

Indeed, Lingamish, this is a great poem or psalm. Except for one little problem. You have fallen straight into the trap of describing the atonement as the Father working separately from the Son, the very trap I have been trying to warn you and others about on this blog for more than a year. Well, I can hardly blame you for not reading all my 45 posts on the atonement, but surely you have read at least one of them?

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How to understand the Bible on atonement

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Andrew has written an important post on the methodology of exegeting atonement doctrine, i.e. how to understand what the Bible has to say about the atonement. He explains what is wrong with the way many others study the biblical teaching on the atonement. The principles he gives here apply to the biblical teaching on any other doctrinal issue.

Andrew also outlines how, through years of study, he came to his own view of the atonement. But he doesn’t actually describe that view; he simply says:

The reasons why I think my view is best are horrendously complicated

I hope he will try to make sense of these complications in clear writing in the near future.

In the light of his own lengthy studies he writes:

I think this makes me truly appreciate works where the author[s] … have long grappled with all the different atonement ideas and really understand the situation. I think this is what made me so contemptuous of Pierced For Our Transgressions as the authors demonstrated ignorance on all the important issues and had set out to prove what they had been taught in response to some else denying the truth of what they had been taught.

Ouch! Read Andrew’s post for some justification for this statement.

UPDATE 26th July: Andrew has followed this up with a post The same cup, which shows clearly how flawed is the argument, used in Pierced for Our Transgressions and elsewhere, that Jesus’ use of the word “cup” for his sufferings implies that God was wrathful towards him.

Does Canadian Anglicanism have more to do with Anabaptism?

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Maybe quite a few of you my readers, especially those who are not Anglicans, did not read through my rather long essay on the Church of England, despite my attempt to give it a catchy title. Perhaps rather more of you are interested in my various posts on Anabaptism. For your benefit, here is a summary of one of main points of my essay:

According to Rev John Richardson, who takes this idea Bishop Stephen Neill, there is no distinctively Anglican theology, and the only thing which distinguishes Anglican churches from others is their claim to be the catholic or universal church in certain countries, mostly those of the former British Empire. This claim can be traced back to Henry VIII’s presumption in setting himself up as the head of the Church of England. This is thus the very epitome of Christendom, the church being identified with the state. So I wondered how Tim Chesterton could claim that Anabaptism, which stresses the separation of church and state, could have anything to do with Anglicanism, especially in this area.

Tim responded in a comment that his idea of Anglicanism, from a Canadian perspective but also informed by his recent time in England, is fundamentally different from John’s very English viewpoint. For him, the Anglican church in Canada, and indeed anywhere apart from England, is a place for people who are “looking for something more sacramental without the hardline dogmatism of Rome, or something a bit less conservative than the evangelical churches.” So perhaps it is only in England where people are trying to be more reformed than Calvin or more catholic than the Pope while still calling themselves Anglican. This viewpoint is interesting, although I’m not sure it takes into account the position of the Global South group. But it is helpful for understanding the difficulties facing the Anglican Communion.

Meanwhile I am still waiting for the ninth part of Tim’s series ‘What does Anabaptism have to do with Anglicanism?’, in which he has promised in advance to outline “the church as a distinct community from the world” as an area of convergence between Anabaptism and Anglicanism. Perhaps the delay is because he is rethinking his position because of my comments – or perhaps just because he has been taking a weekend break.

The Ugley Vicar on the Church of England

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I have known for a while of Rev John Richardson and his blog The Ugley Vicar. Indeed I have been to a Chelmsford Anglican Mainstream event which he introduced. But I have only interacted with him personally since Wednesday, when the Chelmsford ordination kerfuffle came to my notice. “Ugley” is not a mis-spelled description of him, however ugly some of his ideas might be to some people such as his bishop, but the name of the small village about 20 miles from here where he is the non-stipendiary (i.e. unpaid) vicar.

John has graciously responded to my post here and to my comments on the Chelmsford Anglican Mainstream blog which he also runs. I have also commented about him here. Now he has posted, at The Ugley Vicar, a long essay, originally written in 1997, outlining his understanding of the Church of England. Here is my response to that essay in the context of the current controversy; it is also partially in response to Tim Chesterton’s series ‘What does Anabaptism have to do with Anglicanism?’, which I started to discuss before. Note that I am writing here as a lifelong Anglican, not as an outside critic.

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