PunkIsrael

T-Shirt Theology

Stolen from White Horse Inn blog:

 

 I would add "with the help of the Spirit" right after "platform." 

This Impossible Stone

"And no one can move this impossible stone..." --a Southern gospel song I heard this afternoon

Jesus rolled a giant stone away, walked out of the tomb, and walked again among the living: the hope of mankind.

I am the impossible stone that Jesus moved.

Why Theology Matters

As I have stated before, when I left seminary I went through a period of deep disenchantment with theology. In retrospect I believe I was reacting more against the "cemetery" years of seminary. I was tired of proof-texts and semantic ranges and expositional rain, but that doesn't mean that any of these things were bad in themselves. I was just tired. I wanted God, unmediated by theology. But I had been surrounded by good theology. It wasn't until I had a chance to hear some really bad theology that I began to understand how important it is.

What is theology?

Theology is the study of God. Christian theology is the study of the Christian God, primarily made available through His word, the Bible. Good theologians carefully search the scriptures and support their views with exegetical evidence. Theology is an academic discipline, not a guessing game. I make this point because these days, it is increasingly hip to make outlandish assertions about God, Jesus, the Bible, and Christianity based on nothing more than hunches or a desire to subvert the status quo. And while I've never thought of myself as the resident crank (I have, after all told my share of tall tales), when it comes to the Triune God, I've come to expect more than cute ideas. I'll discuss some of these cute ideas later.

Why does it matter?

It matters because truth matters. I prefer a well-read atheist to a indifferent Christian most days. Atheists, while occasionally very thick, at least (typically) argue well. They expect and provide evidence. They recognize logical fallacies. And, in their own way, they are interested in the truth of the matter, even if their truth (in my mind) is pretty bankrupt.

I used to think non-denominational churches were noble, trying to erase differences between Christians. Nowadays, when I see one, I think, "they either have very little theological structure and will probably degenerate into socio-political liberalism or collapse, or they actually are a particular kind of church, like an Arminian Dispensational Baptist one, in disguise." We cannot help but adopt a theology when we are talking about God and the church.

The question is: upon what will it rely?

Doubting my Motives

First time I've had five minutes to post in...well, weeks.

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I just got finished reading a short book called A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning by James V. Schall, SJ. It's an excellent little book, full of short, digestible insights like these:

• Just because someone is smart does not mean he is wise. Much of the serious disorder in the world can usually be traced back to some intellectual...
• Reasons for the difficulty of learning (include) the baffling multiplicity of useless questions and arguments...
• Thus, practically speaking, we encounter the greatest minds among those no longer alive, and the way we encounter such minds is to read their books carefully--which today often means taking a commonsense approach on those contemporary theories that tell us we can find no truth in a text.

Schall quotes the philosopher Etienne Gilson in the preface: there are things and I can know them. Schall's weighty project in this short essay is to re-establish a commonsense link between theory and the world of things. He argues against reading all of the great books (this is a recipe for confusion), but passionately for finding the great books that make sense of our human experience, and reading them over and over again.

Learning is valuable only insofar as it helps us to function more fully in the world. By this I do not mean (nor, I hazard, does Schall) that everything should be weighed on the scales of production and instrumental rationality. What I mean is that theorists and intellectuals who seek only to disassemble what is known and to unshackle our beliefs from our actions are not to be trusted.

Schall's most fascinating paraphrase is that of Chesterton: humility is displaced; it is thought to be located in the intellect where it does not belong, whereas it is a virtue of the will, an awareness of our own tendencies to pride. We should not doubt our minds but our motives. The condition of not knowing should not lead us to a further skepticism but a more intense search for truth.

The Occamist in me likes this, but the Calvinist is wary. Francis Schaeffer argued that the beginning of the end for Western Rationalism was Aquinas, someone Schall (a Roman Catholic) affectionately references in the book. Aquinas believed very much in the continued rationality of man, even after the Fall. His moral compass failed, but not his mind. But for Schaeffer and many others, this is insufficient to explain the pervasive nature of sin.

Even Solomon seemed to agree that sin affects the mind: see my post Insane Hearts.

What then? Do we doubt our minds? Our motives? Perhaps both?

Doubtful Faith/Faithful Doubt

Faith does not subsist in simple polar opposition to doubt but remains imbedded in doubt all the way down; it coexists with doubt, which is why it is faith and not some kind of privileged access to a higher knowledge, as if a believer is somebody hardwired to God on high and authorized to speak on God's behalf. A faith insulated from doubt fuels fanaticism and high-handed triumphalism and is in love with itself and its own power. Such faith soundproofs the walls of the intramural boy's club called "the Church," the big visible one on top with all the bureacrats and vestments. Faith is faith, and not a sword with which to slay the enemies of God (usually a cover for describing one's own enemies!), if and only if it is haunted by an equally inescapable anxiety that perhaps our words and prayers are just so much cosmic noise that will soon enough dissipate into entropic emptiness, menaced by an uneasiness that perhaps our works of mercy are just the stirring of so much cosmic dust on the surface of a little ball in an obscure corner of the universe, soon to be forgotten. (John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?)

This is the most honest and thought-provoking thing I've read in a while.

Church and Postmodernism

I imagine most of you are familiar with these books already, but if not, check out the Church and Postmodern Culture series. The first book, "Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?" by James K. A. Smith was excellent, and sought to take us past the "bumper sticker" understandings of theorists like Derrida and Foucault, and argued the value of postmodernism for the church.

The second book, "What Would Jesus Deconstruct?" by John D. Caputo is also excellent, although it focuses in on Derrida and I'm still trying to wrap my brain around deconstruction. Brian McLaren haters, relax; although it appears that he co-wrote the book from the Amazon page, he only wrote the preface. There are several others in the works. You can even join the conversation.

Sin Isn't Hip Anymore

Joel Osteen doesn't like to write or preach about sin, preferring to euphemistically refer to it as "mistakes" or "bad thinking." He's smart; he knows people don't like the idea of sin. It's offensive. After all, to call something sin implies that 1) we know what's right, and 2) we aren't doing it. It's much easier to assume the best about everyone, and judge not. We're all basically good people. We're all the doing the best we can.

Which is a lie.

When I was attending Grace & Peace Fellowship in St. Louis, there was a guy about my age who became convinced, for a time, that confession of sin in worship was negative, self-flagellating, unscriptural. He began to stand up in worship whenever that part of the service occurred, begging the congregation not to do it. As Christians, he reasoned, we are forgiven. Our sins are washed away, once and for all. Why repent?

Modern churches, too, seem to have lost the sense of the heft and weight of sin. Many omit confession altogether, seeing it as an individual transaction between the believer and God, which means of course that some people never confess their sin. God is not interested in sin and negativity; He's interested in salvation. God is love.

But He is also just.

John Steinbeck, of all people, wrote a fascinating account of seeing an old fire-and-brimstone preacher in his oft-overlooked canine travelogue Travels with Charley:

The service did my heart and I hope my soul some good. It had been long since I had heard such an approach. It is our practice now, at least in the large cities, to find from our psychiatric priesthood that our sins aren't really sins at all but accidents that are set in motion by forces beyond our control. There was no such nonsense in this church. The minister, a man of iron with tool-steel eyes and a delivery like a pneumatic drill, opened up with prayer and reassured us that we were a pretty sorry lot. And he was right. We didn't amount to much to start with, and due to our own tawdry efforts we had been slipping ever since. Then, having softened us up, he went into a glorious sermon, a fire-and-brimstone sermon. Having proved that we, or perhaps only I, were no damn good, he painted with cool certainty what was likely to happen to us if we didn't make some basic reorganizations for which he didn't hold out much hope. He spoke of hell as an expert, not the mush-mush hell of these soft days, but a well-stoked, white-hot hell served by technicians of the first order. This reverend brought it to a point where we could understand it, a good hard coal fire, plenty of draft, and a squad of open-hearth devils who put their hearts into their work, and their work was me. I began to fell good all over. For some years now God has been a pal to us, practicing togetherness, and that causes the same emptiness a father does playing softball with his son. But this Vermont God cared enough about me to go to a lot of trouble kicking the hell out of me. He put my sins in a new perspective. Whereas they had been small and mean and nasty and best forgotten, this minister gave them some size and bloom and dignity. I hadn't been thinking very well of myself for some years, but if my sins had this dimension there was some pride left. I wasn't a naughty child but a first rate sinner, and I was going to catch it.

Grace is amazing, but means nothing without an awareness of need.  

Considering Joel Osteen

Someone in my Bible study asked me to do a lesson on Joel Osteen, so I chose to read Your Best Life Now. Although the book came out in 2005, it is still readily available in bookstores (and WalMart!), and provides the underpinnings for his second book, Become a Better You.

Osteen is a fascinating character: a polite, charismatic, relentlessly positive man who is adored by thousands. Even in cyberspace he is apparently winsome. For instance, in response to this post, a man claiming to be Osteen responded in a mature and gracious way to a fairly scathing critique of his ministry. Of course, it might not have been Osteen, but it's hardly impossible.

Osteen is a likeable guy, and for this reason, many people find it hard to separate the man from the message. But as likeable as Osteen is, his message is just close enough to the truth to be dangerous. What follows is a short critique of Your Best Life Now. I am indebted to Daryl Wingerd for some of the material here. While his critique is excellent, I felt it somewhat long and involved for the Bible study I lead, so I tried to condense his arguments, while adding a few of my own. I hope that this critique will be read in the charitable spirit in which it is intended.

Who is Joel Osteen?

Joel is the pastor of the largest church in the United States: Lakewood Church in Houston, with 30,000 members and a national and international television broadcast.

What is Your Best Life Now about?

On page five of the book, Osteen writes: The Scripture says that God wants to pour out “His far and beyond favor.” God wants this to be the best time of your life.

Osteen believes, in other words, that God wants to bless everyone, not merely Christians, in not only spiritual but material and physical ways, in this life and not only in the next one.

How should we respond to Osteen’s book?

First, we should acknowledge that Joel Osteen is a human being, made in the image of God, and therefore deserving respect and kindness (Genesis 1:26-27). He is not a punching bag, and should not be ridiculed.

However, respect for Joel as a human being does not have to entail acceptance of his ideas. We should “test the spirits” of the world (1 John 4:1-6). Also, it is possible to be correct in some respects, while being in grave error in others. Things are seldom all good or all bad.

Finally, Osteen claims to be a Christian, and in the name of charity, we should accept him as such. We should be careful in applying labels like “heretic” or “false teacher” to people who claim Christ.

What are the problems with Osteen’s teachings?

Your Best Life Now is a man-centered, exegetically flawed effort to reconcile self-help psychology and theology:

Man-Centered

Your Best Life Now is a good title for this book, because it is focused mainly on self (Your Best Life) and urges discontentment with the way things are (Now). To Osteen, material and physical blessings (health and wealth) are to be expected by everyone in this life. What holds us back are mistakes and bad thinking.

In scripture, however, we are taught that what holds us back from our true potential is not mistakes (as though they were morally-neutral errors in logic) or bad thinking, but sin. The Bible tells us that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23) and “none is righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10). As far as God is concerned, we are all hopeless rebels, dead in our sin and damned.

Jesus, the Son of God, lived a perfect life and died on the cross in atonement for sinners so that we could have fellowship with the Father, and those who follow Christ are promised eternal life (John 3:16). However, nowhere in scripture are we promised material and physical benefit. In fact, consider 1st Timothy 6:3-21.

We are taught that contentment with godliness is great gain (6) , and that we should not seek to be rich (7-11). However, Paul the pragmatist recognizes that God chooses to bless some with wealth, and in the same passage instructs them in how to deal with it (17-19).

Additionally, notice in 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 that Paul himself apparently has a physical ailment, and God chooses not to heal him. Does Paul lack faith? It seems far more likely that God occasionally chooses to heal His children, and occasionally chooses not to.

To Osteen, physical healing is about our faith, which makes it into a human work to which God responds. He especially likes Eugene Peterson’s translation of Matthew 9:29: “become what you believe.” Instead of settling for poverty, sickness, and mediocrity, we should all “become what we believe” and rise above them. We are what we think we are.

Contrast this with 1 Corinthians 15:9-10. Paul is not who he thinks he is; he is who God thinks he is. Our faith and subsequent healing (if God wills it) is a response to God’s sovereign initiative. Consider Lazarus (John 11). Obviously, his faith had nothing to do with it!

It is also worth mentioning that all of Jesus’ close friends suffered persecution after his resurrection, and most of them were violently martyred. Does Osteen suggest that they just didn’t have enough faith, or that their thinking was bad? Because they clearly weren’t living their best life now.

Exegetically Flawed

While it is commendable that Osteen uses scripture in his book, many of his verses are inaccurately quoted, poorly translated, chopped off, or taken out of context.

Consider, for instance, his main “scripture”: the “far and beyond favor” of Ephesians 2:7. This seems to be Osteen’s own translation, since it isn’t found in any major version of scripture. It is also misinterpreted. The sense of the passages is that God has already done something for believers (not everyone) that they might be blessed spiritually in the ages to come.

Finally, Osteen misunderstands contextual things in scripture. He uses David’s attitude of boldness toward Goliath (1 Samuel 17:43-47) to urge a bold and not complaining spirit. Yet that same David wrote psalms with elements of complaint and lament to God, and God called him “a man after God’s own heart.” Osteen’s use of scripture is selective and often careless.

Effort to Reconcile Self-Help Psychology and Theology

For Osteen, the goal of godliness is earthly gain. This is exactly backwards. The Bible tells us that material and physical blessings are aids to godliness, and those who have them are held to a higher standard (Luke 12:48).

Scripture does not address every human endeavor directly, so there may be some value in psychology as a medical discipline. We should remember, though, that self-help is just that—an attempt to aid ourselves—and theology is just that, the study of the attributes of God. We are creatures, and any knowledge of self must begin with knowledge of the Creator. If we desire wealth, we should ask God for it, but be careful to remember that the answer may be “no”—or it may be a kind of wealth we did not have in mind, like a wealth of patience in adversity. There is no harm in asking for bodily healing, but God is sovereign, and the answer might be “not now.”

But aren’t there some good things in Osteen’s book?

Yes. Some of his ideas are fine. He encourages us to let go of the past in chapter 4, to find strength in adversity in chapter 5, to give generously in chapter 6, and to choose to be happy in chapter 7. While there may be some minor problems in his approach to these things, there is nothing wrong with urging them, as long as they are done in Christ and not in our own strength.

He has a congregation of 30,000 people! How could he be this wrong?

There is an article about Osteen in Good magazine. A Jewish agnostic named Jennifer Lee is interviewed, and she says this:

“I look at him like a motivational speaker. I don’t think people get that until they see him [on television]. Yes, he’s a pastor and does it in a church, but the underlying [message] is just to live a good life, love yourself, and be happy. He pretty much doesn’t preach religion.”

Sound like the gospel? And this is an advocate of Osteen, not a critic. The problem with Osteen’s relentlessly positive message, which substitutes the bad news of sin for the pop-psychology of “bad thinking,” and the great news of salvation for the lukewarm message of “health and wealth,” is that what emerges isn’t Christianity at all, the afterthought of a half-page altar call notwithstanding. The world loves him because his message (if not Osteen himself) is of the world.

Heresy: Let's Ratchet Down the Rhetoric

In his incisive yet charitable book "A Jew Among the Evangelicals: A Guide for the Perplexed," Mark Pinsky suggests that his evangelical friends "ratchet down the rhetoric." We often feel that a softening of our discourse indicates a lack of faith. But it simply represents a respect for people.

Although I enjoy theology, reading theology often leaves me cold, especially theology on the internet, because the rhetoric can be so overpowering. Many Christians seem to think they cannot win the argument without relegating their opponents to the status of hopeless heretics.

Heresy is variously defined, but should be defined as an abandonment of kerygma, the gospel: Jesus lived, Jesus was crucified, Jesus rose again and commands that people follow him into the kingdom of God, where he stands in atonement for their sins. Anything other than this is not Christianity. But there are a wide range of things that are not at odds with these truths.

The Greek rhetorician Gorgias proposed that nothing exists, or if it does exist, we cannot know it, or if we can know it, we cannot communicate our knowledge to another person. I actually agree with him somewhat, but I remix his statement to mean that we are limited by our conviction (to say nothing exists is a claim about truth), by our finitude (we cannot know it absolutely), and by our language (we cannot communicate it perfectly). Gorgias is not completely wrong; we are limited by sin, which hijacks our faith (conviction), muddles our minds (finitude), and confuses our language. And yet, as Newbigin and Polanyi urge, we believe responsibly, not based on a shaky appeal to an Absolute Truth we can neither define nor establish.

I found this in a paper I wrote for a rhetoric class two years ago:

Pluralism, or the idea that reality is made up of many kinds of being or substance, is essentially a recognition of the limits of knowledge. It is not, as Rorty reminds, a throwing up of the hands and resorting to intellectual passivity. It is instead a species of tolerance for diverging views within an epistemological, ethical, religious, and rhetorical continuum. It is the belief that while my beliefs are right, they don’t exactly correspond with reality. They are the best I can do under the circumstances. It is an affirmation that I am limited by my conviction, and it shapes my behavior, whether I believe in truth and what kind, and that I am limited by my finitude, that I cannot see the world objectively, with all of its facets at one time, and that I am limited by my language—that even if I were able to attain to Absolute Truth, my words would be insufficient to describe it. What it engenders is a strangely un-academic word: humility.

Church Signs, Revisited

I've written before about the infuriating church signage I pass daily on my way to town. I find myself wishing I could talk back to the pastor, but I cannot find an email address. Therefore, since he broadcasts to a public forum (anyone who might be passing by), I think it fair for me to respond in a public forum (anyone who might happen on this blog). The pastor seems longer on spit and vigor than fairness or reason.

For instance, recently he had this on one side of his sign:

And this on the other:

The irony, apparently, was lost on him.