Christians have discussed the coming of rampant unrighteousness in Western culture as though we were somehow righteous before. I daresay we haven't remembered the unrighteousness of our history.
But the discussion typically goes something like this: "The Church hasn't been doing what the Church is supposed to do. Therefore the country has gotten bad."
Some observations:
It's up to the Church to be faithful, but it's not up to the Church to produce results. The results are up to God.
The Church largely hasn't been faithful. We have indulged in poor theology and our focus has been on behavior over and against the pursuit of truth. We have promoted Therapeutic Moralistic Deism instead of the Gospel.
The Church has been increasingly faithful in some quarters. The fruits of the unfaithful quarters have resulted in rebellion against the fruit of the faithful quarters.
This means that there has been a schism in the Church as what is dead becomes repugnant to what is alive and what is dead is naturally poisonous to what is alive.
This means that what is dead will blame what is alive for the schism. I'll gladly plead guilty to that. We have all left God. If returning to him means being separated in some significant way from what we once were, then I'll take that charge as a good thing, giving glory to God, while impelling my accusers to join me.
We have been lulled into being a relatively dead and ineffective church by our own prosperity. The blessings of God have become a curse. The fault is our own as we have not stewarded his blessings according to his wishes. Rather, we have been lulled to sleep by the comfort we have been afforded only to awaken at this late hour bloated and obese, unable to respond quickly as though to a house burning around us, our blessings aflame. Should we seek to rebuild the house only to return to our slumber?
What should we then do? Dr. Doug Groothuis has some good observations to that question:
When dealing with the sins of brothers and sisters in Christ, we must be both strong and delicate.
We must be strong on sin.
That is to say that we must be clear on what sin is. This goes two directions:
First, we must understand what particular sins are. Unrepentant sinners typically don’t like for their sins to be called sins. They will be angry. They will consider your recognition of their sins as a sin in and of itself. They will persecute you, if possible, for calling out their sins.
Second, we must understand the nature of sin as part of the nature of fallen man. It’s not enough to point out individual sins, but we must understand that those individual sins are fully seated in the identity of sinners. We must be clear that we are all sinners in this way. The only difference is that those who have faith in Christ are forgiven based on his work on the cross and are subsequently reconciled with God.
But it’s precisely because of this point that we must be clear on what sin is. If we don’t get sin right, we don’t get the gospel right. If we don’t get the gospel right, we fail to convey the truth of it to those who are yet perishing in their sins. Without the truth of the gospel there is no way they can have enough understanding to have faith in Christ. It is precisely recognition of sin that brings recognition of our need for Christ. So we must be clear about sin.
We must be delicate with sin.
Being clear on sin doesn’t mean fully appreciating every little sin we commit. Even in the Law of Moses, sacrifices were offered for the forgiveness of sins that people were not aware of. Paul addressed people who had already come to faith with the revelation of sins they were committing unawares up until that time. As we go through life walking with Christ, spiritual growth necessarily entails learning of sin s we have been committing that we are now able to be discipled about effectively. The Holy Spirit, who guides us through this process, knows when to reveal sins to us in due course of our life as Christian believers.
As we live in community with other believers, and at home with Christian families, we must necessarily bear each other’s sins delicately. That is, if we are to agree with the Holy Spirit, we need to be sensitive to his guidance in pointing out the sins of others lest we reveal a sin before its time. Some obvious sins must be dealt with swiftly. Others must take time and an understanding of how that sin fits in with the development of another. If we are strong in minor sins and swiftly deal with them too early, a Christian who is not mature enough to handle certain sins may become undone or develop a resistance against dealing with sins and become weak in recognizing sin instead of stronger.
More could be said on this, but it is best to stay in prayer for your brothers and sisters in Christ to whom you have been given to live in Christian fellowship that you have guidance from the Holy Spirit to handle sin wisely, with both strength and delicacy, understanding that you should be also undergoing the same growth in other areas.
People from my church have known Pierre and Yolande Korkie from spending time with them in London. I had only the privilege of meeting Yolande who roomed next to me in the hostel where we stayed. I fondly remember waking to the sounds of Yolande and her South African companions singing praises to God early in the morning as their songs gently filtering through the thin wall between our rooms.
It was in those days that she shared with us her and Pierre’s intentions to move to Yemen to teach.
After they settled into their life in Yemen, their family was taken hostage by al-Qaeda militants. The children were released soon after their capture but Pierre and Yolande have been in captivity for several months now.
We rejoiced when we heard of Yolande’s release a few days ago. However, her release was so that she could raise money to pay the ransom for Pierre. The condition is that she had 8 days to raise $3 million dollars or he would be beheaded.
According to Yolande, their captors believe that the Korkies are rich Americans. She also says aside from holding them hostage, the al-Qaeda militants have been kind to her family. I suppose that remains to be determined whether they kill Pierre or not.
But aside from sharing this news to you, I want to make a broader point. From having met Yolande and hearing her words since her captivity, I believe her faith is as strong as ever in this dire situation. She remains, it would seem, the same woman I heard leading worship in that hostel in London. Though the threat of death looms large in her family, the promise of eternal life is far greater.
For those whose faith is in the temporary provisions of God in this fallen world, their faith would be threatened by such a situation as this. But for those whose faith is truly in Christ, their faith would be strengthened. Faith in Christ is the exchange of death for life, although it takes recognizing what death and life are.
Christ died to bear the punishment due for our sin and demonstrated the power of God over life and death by his subsequent resurrection. Faith in this necessarily entails trusting our lives to him in our death and receiving unending life in him. We may be moved to despair over events that surround the death of our broken bodies that each one of us faces.
We only have but a fleeting moment on this earth in comparison to eternity and we have a task to do while here. In carrying out that task, we must be willing to demonstrate our faith in our death if necessary. Pierre and Yolande laid down their lives for Christ long ago. Jim Elliot and his companions laid down their lives for Christ long before they landed on that beach in Huarani territory only to be killed immediately. Jim’s wife, Elisabeth, and a few others ventured into Huarani territory thereafter and were able to win many to Christ, even those who killed her husband.
Now, I’m not saying that Yolanda should return to the al-Qaeda should they kill Pierre, although it is within the realm of possibilities. God will direct her on the best course of action. But it may be that if Pierre were killed in the next few days, that God could use his death to bring many in the al-Qaeda to faith in Christ.
The death of this temporary life is rightly fearful. It is a merciful instruction in the wrath of God allowing us to understand the seriousness of the eternal death that we face without Christ. So we mourn over the loss of loved ones. Nevertheless, we who have Christ can rejoice in that while these bodies may die, we will yet live.
And so, when we give our lives to Christ in faith, we also give our lives to the task of proclaiming the good news of Christ’s work and discipling people who come to faith. Too many who are short on faith pray and work in the name of Christ as though escaping death and threatening circumstances are the signs of our faith. In reality, we are already dead in these broken bodies. Though our bodies may cease to function, can we not plan on living boldly in such a way as to make the reality of the resurrection to come the sign of our faith? Therefore, even if we die proclaiming Christ, so shall we live.
I can still hear her voice echo from those early mornings in London praising God in her room filled with faithful South Africans. May many al-Qaeda come to faith because they heard the voice of Christ from the mouths of their captives.
Don’t waste your death. Praise God even to your last breath.
Twelve years ago people climbed into real planes and
crashed into real buildings. People lost their lives.
The purpose for this action was to provoke a response and
illustrate the power of the God of Islam over the world. The belief of the
perpetrators is that we flout unrighteous freedom. Their contention is that we
are all subject to the commands of Allah.
That message doesn’t sound too far from the Christian
message. Sin against God is indeed the unrighteous flouting of freedom from the
commands of God. Many atheists have noted this similarity and have concluded
that Christianity is as dangerous as Islam. Many point to the Crusades as
evidence of the similarity in the danger of the message. That’s only evidence
of a lack of sophisticated thought enough distinguish between historic political
European Christendom and the true Body of Christ as it bears the gospel of
peace.
But let us not make the same error. The American
experiment was an attempt to build a nation free of the errors of Christendom
by marrying a Christian worldview with a novel iteration of the Greco-Roman republic.
Our success has been marginal, but the system is failing. It quickly morphed
into just another kind of Christendom. Instead of self-sacrificing for each
other, we sacrifice each other for our own benefit, and we wonder why we aren’t
acting like a Christian nation anymore.
Our false towers of institutionalized morality have
fallen. People are losing their lives spiritually because we have relied on
government for a good country instead of relying on the proclamation of the
gospel for changed lives.
Our towers were attacked precisely because we haven’t
relied on the proclamation of the gospel. Those who are dead in their sins are
angry with those of us who have trusted Christ for our lives and are dead to
our sins. They have attacked our false political towers to demonstrate the
power of their god of self-worth and self-determination over and against those
of us who trust Christ.
Let us not forget the towers that fell twelve years ago.
Let it serve as a reminder that we have a fallen world to serve, not to help
them uphold the sins that separate them from Christ, but to shine the light
into the darkness of their sin to highlight the need they have for Christ so
that they might believe. It is the gospel that makes us free and not political
victory.
In watching a video of Ken Meyers delivering a keynote
address at Hope College, he quotes literary and social critic, Marion
Montgomery, as saying, “The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love
is power.” (HT: Justin Taylor)
Quotes like this in their brevity require a bit of
interpretation. On the surface, this idea seems curious. What did Marion
Montgomery mean by this? I’m not very familiar with Marion Montgomery. Is he a
Christian? A quick glance at Wikipedia indicates that he was perhaps Roman
Catholic. How faithful he was to that is anyone’s guess. I suspect that most
people who would read this don’t have a clue.
So we first contemplate the most reasonable possible
meaning of this statement by asking the question: In what ways is power
antithetical to love? Perhaps Montgomery was thinking about the tendency of
people to seek power over other people in the ordering of lives for the sake of
enhancing the quality of their own life at the expense of the quality of another’s
life. Given the Montgomery was a social critic, this makes sense. Perhaps one
could draw some distinction between this kind of power-seeking and hatred,
although the two overlap in some ways.
Does this make sense theologically? Jesus told the
disciples in Mark 10:42ff that rulers of the Gentiles lord it over people, but
that it should not be so among them. The idea of power-hunger is in some
significant way not the way leadership should be carried out among Christians.
This seems reasonable.
Now there are Christians who think this way fundamentally.
If we love God, we should submit to him. That is, our love for God is to give
up power over ourselves. But they apply the same thinking to God. Since god
loves us, he’s a “gentleman”. That is, he doesn’t try to control us. If the
opposite of love is power, then God cannot be both loving and all-powerful.
The problem is that this is not what the Bible teaches.
Not only is God loving and all-powerful, he is love and power.
Now the observation that people who are hungry for power
are sinfully hateful in doing so does not negate that power used righteously is
loving. Think of a person who lacks the ability to care for himself. It is
loving for someone who is able to exert power over that person in order to seek
the best interest of the one who is incapable.
This concept plays into the debate over Reformed
theology. Those who oppose it say that man is capable of choosing Christ on his
own. Therefore, it is not loving for God to exhibit power over men. Those who
are Reformed in their thinking say that man in incapable of choosing Christ on his
own. Therefore, it is loving for God to use his power to give him the ability
to make that choice.
There are more refined nuances that I won’t go into
regarding different strains of Reformed thinking. However, I will note that if
Montgomery were steeped in Catholic thinking, this would comport with the idea
that power is the opposite of love.
We all have some power over other people. Just by saying
hello or ignoring someone on the street has some effect on the people we
encounter. Actions that are truly loving in nature are powerful. My fellow
Christians, let us conduct ourselves in such a way as to convey the love of
Christ that people will be warmed to his message. That we can give the gift of
the Holy Spirit who raised Christ from the dead and can resurrect the souls of
those we meet.
There is a good discussion on Presuppositional versus Evidential Apologetics on a recent Unbelievable podcast. You can listen to it here. (HT: AOMin)
Kurt Jaros speaks on the evidential position and Scott Oliphant speaks on the presuppositional position. They discuss alternate terms for the positions and sometimes use them. The alternate term for Evidential Apologetics is “Natural Theology”. The Alternate term for Presuppositonal Apologetics is “Covenant Apologetics”. I mention that so you won’t be thrown off if you dive into the middle of it without listening to the whole thing.
One thing I wanted to point out: At just past the 1 hour mark, 1:03:00 Jaros asks, “How do we know?” He’s asking the epistemological question about how we convey with certainty the assertions regarding our Christian theology over and against other beliefs. The argument Jaros is making is that presuppositonal apologists still need to provide evidence to back up their assertions.
Oliphant’s response is that God can use all kinds of things, but that doesn’t make those things true or epistemologically revealing. Evidential apologetics are still constrained to probability. Jaros understood the response well enough, but I wanted to unpack this briefly.
Neither Evidential nor Presuppositional apologetics are convincing unless the Holy Spirit opens someone to the truth of the gospel. Now, my non-Reformed friends will disagree with this. That’s what makes evidential apologetics more appealing to the non-Reformed.
But in either case, the most convincing presentation isn’t evidential in the classical sense, it’s testimonial in the legal sense. That’s why our witness is of the utmost importance. Those of us who have the Holy Spirit can testify as to his work in our lives. We can testify as to the living work of Christ through the Holy Spirit today.
It’s not like a science experiment where we can say that this is most likely to be true, but like a court case where we take the stand as eyewitness testimony to the living God. Yet we do not make our case to the jury as it were. We call out fellow witnesses to recognize their own testimony of the work of God in their lives. That is the truth that Presuppositional Apologetics upholds.
Consider, therefore, your witness.
There’s a common adage among evangelicals that states, “Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.” A thoughtful article written by a Lutheran addresses the subtle mistake in this:
It it true that your action of going to church does not turn you into a Christian. No work of ours gives us our identity as Christians.
But it is precisely in going to church that one is made a Christian. First at the font. Then in the assembly. Later at the table. God does his work of making and keeping us Christians in his Church. It is why the phrase “I believe in the Holy Spirit” is followed quickly by talk of the Holy Christian Church in the Creed. As Luther says, “the Holy Spirit calls us by the Gospel, enlightens us with His gifts,sanctifies and keeps us in the true faith. We are only made Christians by the Gospel and Gifts of God. And those are given out in the church. So in this sense, it is precisely by going to church that you are made a Christian and remain one.
As a Baptist who was once a Lutheran and still ministers among Lutherans on a regular basis, I’m going to temper the ecclesiology that Baptists disagree with in my analysis. Namely, Baptists do not believe that Baptism does anything particular for the believer aside from serve as an expression of the faith he or she already possesses. Baptists also do not agree that the presence of Christ is somehow mystically in the elements of the Lord ’s Table.
However, we Baptists do hold to the priesthood of all believers. We do believe that the gospel must be preached and that the normal way for people to come to faith is because Christians as members of all believers reach out to them with gospel ministry in one form or fashion.
There are a few Lutherans who believe that being baptized actually saves someone. However, most Lutheran’s who I have discussed this with acknowledge that just because someone is baptized as an infant doesn’t mean that they are automatically going to heaven. Likewise, partaking of the Eucharist doesn’t save anyone. Someone can grow up in church being baptized and attending every Sunday, being confirmed, etc. and still possess the wrong motives thereby losing all at the final judgement. So I appreciate the opening statements in my quote from the article.
But rarely is anyone saved outside of the actions of the church. There are exceptions we hear of from countries that are closed to the gospel where Christ has appeared to individuals or groups of people and called them to faith in similar manner as he did with Paul on the road to Damascus.
However, people make a good point when they ask about the native in deepest Africa who has never heard the gospel. It’s why we do missions. Our goal is to proclaim the gospel so all people hear it and have the opportunity to respond in faith. It doesn’t happen unless the church goes. Perhaps, therefore, it is better stated that “Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian, but it sure helps when the Church goes to you.”
I’m watching a special on the History Channel that’s investigating physics from observations of the latest Star Trek movie. One statement was made that I think relates to understanding God. One of the contributing physicists made the comment that we don’t know why time dilation exists. This isn’t entirely true. He didn’t qualify this comment, but let me investigate it briefly and then turn to what this means for understanding God.
The speed of light is the speed limit of the universe despite theoretical speculations of warp fields and wormholes. The reason why is related to the production of electromagnetic radiation, aka “light”. Light doesn’t have mass. We can say that light transfers energy. More accurately, it is a pattern of energy manifest in multiple spacetime frames of reference. I’ll keep it as simple as possible:
Energy is transferred from particle of matter to particle of matter when those particles come close enough for their respective systems of forces to influence each other significantly. When a photon of light is produced, the particle that produced it approaches the speed f light and suddenly loses energy. That energy is transferred to the object the photon eventually strikes. As the particle that produced the photon approaches the speed of light in the process, the distance between it and the object that will eventually absorb the photon that is produced is diminished infinitely within the frame of reference of the originating particle. This is called distance contraction and is part and parcel of time dilation. So as far as the source particle is concerned, it hits the receiving particle and thus loses energy.
To the outside observer, no distance ever closed in. What happened is that time dilated for the originating particle and distance contracted. Once the energy transfer happened, the distance snapped back to “normal” and its temporal frame of reference became relatively aligned once again with its surrounding objects. But the distance contraction is represented to the outside observer as a photon and the observation of the originating particle hitting the receiving particle is represented as a difference of time related to the distance. This is the speed of light.
The reason we have time dilation is more easily thought about with a simple thought experiment. If Bonnie and Clyde drive by in their automobile and fire a gun down the road, the velocity of the bullet relative to Bonnie and Clyde is roughly the same as if the vehicle were not in motion. To someone standing by the side of the road, the bullet whizzes by at the velocity of the bullet if the vehicle were not in motion plus the velocity of the vehicle.
But light is different. If it were night time and Bonnie and Clyde had their headlights on, the velocity of the photons being emitted from the front of the vehicle would be precisely the speed of light. To the observer on the side of the road, the velocity of the photons would also be precisely the speed of light. So what happened to the speed of the vehicle? That’s where time dilation comes into play. There is a time differential between the vehicle and the observer on the side of the road that accounts for the difference due to the velocity of the car. That’s time dilation.
Now add to this that a vast spectrum of electromagnetic radiation is passing around us constantly in all directions. We perceive a relatively uniform temporal frame of reference. However, it is anything but uniform. On the subatomic level, time is extremely volatile and changing. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be able to perceive anything around us. The chemical processes that make our bodies work couldn’t happen. We wouldn’t be able to see the world around us. There would be no life.
Where to go from here? I could talk about creation and how this applies to developing cosmologies. I could talk about how this isn’t often applied very well when people consider the various speculations regarding the beginnings of the universe. But I want to make another observation regarding God’s revelation of himself.
What I’ve written above in very simple and short order is understood by very few people, including some physicists who are interviewed by TV shows. The reason is that most people find it acceptable to relate to and survive in the world with the mere macroscopic perceptions available to us. Most people couldn’t tell you how a simple radio works, but they know how to use one.
God revealed himself to us in a very practical way. In this way, even many intellectually challenged people can grasp the basics about God. However, the depth of information included is enough to make the brightest among us wrestle with some of the issues he revealed to us. Most people are able to function quite well with the information God has provided although some concepts are difficult and present apparently conflicting concepts.
The fact is, God knows the range of intelligence of the creatures that bear his image and planned on giving us all enough to warrant a knowing faith as well as keep us learning about him for a lifetime. The Great Commission is more than simply leading someone into the Kingdom. The Great Commission is more than simply teaching a new believer the basics. We are all to be disciples until we pass from this world.
The reviews of The Bible miniseries by Mark Burnett and Roma Downey have started to come out. And as I type this, I’m watching the second showing on Lifetime (The first was last night on the History Channel). I won’t add to what they say, but I will make one point. It’s easy for Christians to criticize an attempt to convey the overarching message of the Bible in a scant ten hours. But I think Burnett and Downey have a good approach here. See the trailer:
The reviews I’ve read so far are at Stand to Reason and Answers in Genesis. But it’s helpful to hear the idea from the standpoint of the creators. They did an interview with Focus on the Family that you need to listen to. Their goal is not to try and tell every story in the Bible, but to produce a series with high production value that will provide an incentive for people to read the Bible – particularly those who are not Christian.
I was raised with the typical Sunday School lessons of unconnected Bible stories and Aesop’s-fable-style moral lessons. So the idea is that we are supposed to be good people, right? That’s what the stories are all about, or so my Sunday School teachers always taught. That’s what Matthew Boyd wrote about recently. But that kind of teaching doesn’t provide a solid framework for actually teaching the gospel. The goal isn’t to behave well, but to understand what God has done for us through Jesus Christ. It wasn’t until I was an adult and read the Bible in such a way as to see how all the stories were part of a whole meta-narrative that I understood how it all speaks to Christ.
That’s why my church has been breaking into small groups and reading the Bible together using the Community Bible Experience as a tool to do so. So if The Bible miniseries doesn’t have all of our favorite details, don’t fret. It might make more Christians when people pick up a Bible and read it for themselves instead of criticizing it based on what other people have said about it. They might follow in the footsteps of Rosaria Butterfield:
Al Mohler published a blog article recently about the inequality of families with good parents versus bad parents:
President Hollande wants to end homework in order to level the playing field for the nation’s students. As France 24 reports, Hollande told an audience at The Sorbonne, “An education program is, by definition, a societal program. Work should be done at school, rather than at home.”
He went on to explain that it was unfair for students with parents who are engaged with their schoolwork to gain an educational advantage over others, whose parents do not offer such support.
Dr. Mohler points out correctly that good parents are important for their children, even beyond the quality of education that they receive.
However, I want to take this in a different direction. Dr. Mohler, in summing up President Hollande's statements, points out that it is "unfair for students with parents who are engaged with their schoolwork to gain an educational advantage over others." (emphasis mine) The implication is that education is a matter of competition. In this view, the goal of education is to do better than others so that you can help yourself.
My understanding of education has always been that the goal is for each student to do better at the end of any course of study than what they did at the beginning. In other words, the goal of education is a personal struggle against ignorance.
But that's not and end in itself. There's a larger goal. While we improve ourselves the goal is to contribute positively to society thereby helping others, not defeating them.
An observation I've often made is that it seems more acceptable to tout some talents than others. For example, it seems relatively acceptable for a good leader to say, "I'm good at leadership." But one talent it seems particularly unacceptable to tout is intelligence. If someone says, "I'm exceptionally intelligent," he or she is quickly labeled arrogant. The fact is that some people have a natural predisposition to great intelligence. For some reason people don't think that's fair. And this doesn't figure into President Hollande's idea for a "level playing field."
But this betrays the fact that it is fairly common to think of education, not as a benefit to society, but a benefit to individuals over others. The reason is because many people use greater academic achievement not primarily for the betterment of society, but for their own advancement in society. What most in secular society will ignore is that this is precisely evidence that people are basically evil.
So what are Christians to do?
First, we must recognize the God-given responsibility we have to train up our own children.
Second, we must vie to help them get the best education possible with the goal not of improving their own status, but for contributing positively to society, particularly in the fulfillment of the Great Commission.
So we have to stop looking at education as the means for achieving the best life for ourselves on this earth ans start looking at it as a means for drawing us closer to God by using our talents to help other people.
A church that is active in building and sending its own missionaries, in the local community, region, and around the world, is a healthy and Biblical church. Without this aspect of a church's ministry the church would turn its God-given resources in on itself and implode. The mechanism for doing this is the idea that the goal of evangelism is to get people to join, or even just to come to, the church. The mentality is that the church is there to meet their felt needs with the hopes that they will pay their dues. The struggle at this point is between those who think the church should change everything to draw more people and those who think the church should do things the way it has done for hundreds of years. The changers what new people to come to church to be ministered to. The non-changers want the people already paying their fair share of the dues to be catered to with services as they have always been. The point that is missed is that the struggle needs to be to make the current members understand that having accepted the gospel and being God's children means that we need to take the gospel out where people have never heard and disciple them with it whether they end up joining your church or not.
I ended up with something longer than I could post as a single comment. So I'm posting the rest of it here. I talk about the stages of a dying church...
Churches in the cycle of self-consumption go through progressively painful steps toward their own destruction as we are observing today:
1. The Social Club stage. People come and pay their dues and enjoy the company of other people as they are ministered to by charismatic people who have to be in control. These people often feed off the clubby nature of the church because their desire to control is aided by the desire of members to not have to do too much. These ore most often not the pastors of the church, but the deacons or church council members. Pastors who don't see this stage won't teach against it and may cater to the controllers because they fear their influence in the church, or because they tithe from a healthy portfolio. If a pastor can't turn things around in this stage, the church will go through major upheavals in later stages. But a certain amount of tact and wisdom is required to pull it off lest he inadvertently throw the church into stage 2:
2. Non-powerful members of the church realize their duty to serve God instead of just paying for others in the church to serve them. When they ask for help from the church, financially or otherwise, they are met with obstacles*. These obstacles are placed in their way by the ones in control who like the clubby nature of the church as I have described. The ones in control become upset because the Christians who desire to serve God biblically require vested leadership. This threatens the power base of the ones in control and they fear losing the status quo of their clubby church. The longer this goes on, the stronger the obstacles become and they often become codified. This is where the church enters into phase 3.
3. The people who want to minister begin to find the obstacles insurmountable and they begin to leave the church in favor of other congregations open to their ministering. I have often found in many of these churches where the ones in power will actually counsel those who want to minister that they should leave the church. Churches in this stage will dwindle in size and struggle painfully sometimes for a long time with being able to pay the bills, much less a pastor. I'm not talking about very small churches who have this struggle naturally, but by churches once built to accommodate a much larger congregation who are no longer able to maintain the physical plant. Most often, I've seen the church dissolve. The property goes up for sale to a new or growing church or is renovated for some other purpose.
Can a church come back after having slipped from stage 1? Possibly, but I've never observed it. Once a church denies the gospel to the rest of the world, it denies it to its own members. If any church life grows back, it's not a biblical church (e.g. the prosperity gospel).
I've seen this happen too often in the states and I'm familiar with this pattern. I don't have anyone to credit by my own observations. Someone may be able to refine them. But the material in Matthew's article is inextricably linked to the health of a church, I believe as according to what I have observed, and I think God allows this pattern to lessen the impact of sinful churches and increase the effectiveness of healthy churches.
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*These obstacles can be unnecessary procedural difficulties (red tape), de-funding from the budget, the decay of orthodox doctrines, etc.
Stand to Reason has recently combined their youth blog with their main blog. One of the features that the youth blog brought to the table was a weekly challenge that gives readers an opportunity to try their hand at answering a challenge to the Christian faith with a followup article later in the week that offers a recommended answer. This week's challenge was thus:
Here's a question we received from a reader:
If morality is in God's nature, then He is omnibenevolent, right?
Does that mean that God cannot choose evil? So, if God cannot choose to
do evil, does that mean He doesn't have free will?
What do you think? How would you respond to a friend who asked you
this? What kind of questions would you ask him? What would he need to
clarify? Leave your response, then look for Brett's answer on Thursday.
People from different theological traditions will probably respond to
this differently, so this should be interesting.
My response was to clarify the difference between God's will and human will:
We
must understand that God's will is not the same as man's will. God's
will is creative. Man's will is reactive. Man doesn't choose the
conditions or the determinants of his choices. Mutually exclusive paths
(conditions) are set before him from outside of himself and he cannot
choose by using information or stimuli (determinants) outside of God's
created order. For God, however, the conditions and the determinants are
the same for he creates them out of nothing more than his nature which
his will reflects. Since goodness has its foundation in the nature of
God, there is no higher ethical standard against which God's will can be
compared. So whatever God does is good.
Now the problem we have in trying to ascertain God's goodness is the
effect of sin on epistemology. Sin distorts our ability to perceive
truth by creating ethical dilemmas inside of God's creation. God himself
is not conflicted, but we perceive conflicts because of the distortion.
Perhaps a metaphor will help. God's will is like a river that flows
gently but swiftly and strongly. We are like swimmers in the river who
can choose either to swim against the flow of God's will or with it. If
we swim against God's will we push against the water that is carrying us
downstream. Our efforts are frustrated by the strength of God's will.
Our swimming is laborious and difficult and we are buffeted by the
current. Are we not swimming as God has instructed? yet because we swim
against the flow we feel God may be doing some evil against us.
On the other hand, if we choose to swim with the current, our
swimming is easy and we are carried along to our destination. Perhaps
the speed at which we are carried along is frightening and other
swimmers struggling against the flow impede our path dangerously.
Perhaps rocks or some other natural peril threatens us. Nevertheless, we
find that we are carried to our destination handily.
God has established not only the river, but its source, destination,
obstacles, and us. We will be carried along willingly or unwillingly.
The willing will be happy with the destination. The unwilling will not.
God has done no evil to either.
Now, this answer I gave doesn't answer all questions regarding the problem of evil. That wasn't my intent. But since we know that God is always good, he is trustworthy despite what we may not understand. That is what someone questioning Christianity on this point will most need to hear.
The Bible is filled with appeals to evidence. God has given signs and wonders since the beginning to mark His revelation and to establish evidence of His authority. In the exodus of Israel, God performed some amazing things for Israel to experience. As they failed His expectations time and again, the subsequent wilderness wanderings were peppered with reminders of how God miraculously delivered them. In the Psalms, there are countless observations of God’s work in creation.
Jesus’ teaching was filled with evidence intended to encourage people of faith. Interestingly, the same evidence evoked a different response from those who lacked faith. The very presence of the Bible is evidence of the revelation of God it contains. It contains accounts of its own writing and its effect on people at different stages of its writing. It is part of the history that it records and we can see how different people have reacted differently to it as evidence of its veracity.
So evidence is important, but evidence never convinces on its own. The reason is that evidence is apprehended differently by different people based on their presuppositions.
Parenthetically, even arguing presuppositions is often pointless. The reason is because of what I have discussed recently regarding the dual nature of theistic epistemology. Lacking the Holy Spirit, making sense of the world is fraught with frustration for those who care to think about it. That’s why many challenge and contend for a pointless existence. In some way, they sense their own pointlessness and are irritated by it. Why even argue if what they say is true? It would be better to let sleeping dogs lie and go find somewhere to be blissfully happy until their inevitable demise. Yet they spend countless hours fretting about it and bothering people who seem to have the peace of mind they lack.
My current MO for dealing with people like this was illustrated recently on Justin Taylor’s blog. I won’t repost anything I wrote there. Just follow the link if you’re interested. Jay, apparently an atheist, made a blanket challenge for evidence and claimed that no evidence was sufficient. I responded enough to point out and illustrate that his problem was a faulty presupposition. That’s not really the core presuppositional argument, but it’s designed to make someone who is really interested in truth question their own presuppositions for flaws.
I did what I usually do at that point and exchanged enough to see if Jay would show signs of enough intellectual honesty to have a fruitful dialog. Two people in a discussion can only grow if both are honest enough intellectually. Usually, people like Jay will not question himself and seek to grow in the exchange, despite his challenge. The challenge is merely a pretense for verbally expressing the angst of a pointless case.
I did say something I’d like to elaborate on here. Children often cling to what respected authorities say unquestioningly among their peers. So a typical children’s argument might go like this:
“My dad says….”
“Oh yeah? Well my dad says…”
“That’s stupid!”
“Huh-uh!”
“Uh-huh!”
So children grow up and their dad’s lessons are replaced with the likes of various books, professors, pastors, news media, celebrities or peers who appear authoritative by virtue of their insistent assertiveness. Now grown up these same children will draw on the authorities they know as they once did on people like their dads. These are the basis of the average person’s presuppositions. Inherent in assertions is an unmentioned authority as though to say, “Oh yeah? Well my dad said…”
Unless one is willing to address one’s presuppositions, the effect of any resulting argument is no different than the child’s argument above. I’m of the mind that it’s most fruitful not to allow a childish debate to continue, but to cut to the chase and ask people to question their true motives. If they will, then the discussion can continue. If they won’t be honest about it, the discussion should be over.
It’s also good to throw in a quick presentation of the gospel. No telling who is paying attention or if the Holy Spirit will see fit to use it at that time.
