Confessions, Lutheranism, etc.

Fearsome Pirate has a good post about how we sometimes become so confessional we confess ourselves right out of the confessions. An excerpt.

For example, it's sort of trendy these days to say that simul justus et peccator means that the life of a Christian is at best indistinguishable from that of an unbeliever except when he is participating in the liturgy, and that furthermore unbelievers are very much capable of being outwardly far more righteous than Christians. This doubtlessly arose because every other Christian tradition teaches the opposite. The problem is that the Confessions teach the opposite as well. This is because Scripture is painfully clear on the subject, and the Lutheran fathers did not see a need to reinterpret Scripture every time they found someone else agreeing with it.

Full text here.

Messianic Jewish Response to Hagee

Regarding the last post...

Here's a blog post from a Messianic Jewish rabbi that pretty much destroys Hagee's idiotic twisting of Scripture.

McCain Rejects Hagee Endorsement

Story here at Fox News.

John Hagee (his page, Wikipedia) is a dispensationalist pastor. For those of you who don't know exactly what that means, it's basically a Biblical hermeneutic that (among other things) teaches that God works with humanity differently in well specified historical periods (dispensations), with a focus on the entirely different (according to them) relationships between God and the people of Israel on the one hand and the Gentile world on the other. It places national and biological Israel in a prominent place in end-times scenarios, including the re-establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine (which, yes, has happened) and the rebuilding of the temple on the historical site in Jerusalem. The political upshot of this theology is that the state of Israel must be defended at all costs. This is what motivated Pat Robertson to claim that Ariel Sharon was being judged by God when he ceded the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Arabs.

McCain courted Hagee's endorsement because he needed the support of a key GOP constituency, evangelicals. It saddens me that to get evangelical support you have to go to this guy. After all, dispensationalism de-emphasizes the evangel at the expense of a theology that interprets Scripture with the Bible in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other. Having Hagee's support also buttresses your claim as a politician to be a big supporter of the State of Israel.

Well, McCain has been forced to distance himself and finally reject Hagee's endorsement because of all of the looney things that Hagee has said over the years. Hagee called the Roman Catholic church the antichrist (not really a new argument for Protestants, but nowhere near as sophisticated as it used to be), and claimed that Hurricane Katrina was sent as a judgment on New Orleans for homosexuality (yes, I believe it's a sin, very much so... but Hagee seems to have forgotten about all the other sins going on in New Orleans and everywhere else). But what took the cake is Hagee's claim that Hitler was God's instrument to punish European Jews for not returning to Palestine to establish the State of Israel and to basically force the world to help to do so. It was this that caused McCain to do something he should have done a long time ago.

This kind of theology is not merely wrong. It's bad enough that it takes the focus off Christ and him crucified. It's also dangerous. It's the kind of theology that will lead this country into even more war in the Middle East if we follow it to its logical conclusions. We can support the existence of the State of Israel as a political position without using theology to justify it. However, if we do so it also means that we want an Israel that lives at peace with its neighbors, including a viable, democratic Palestinian state. That's the other problem with Hagee... by shunning the Palestinians he basically throws a whole bunch of Palestinian Christians overboard, but (ATTENTION: SARCASM) most of them aren't Protestants, so they're not really our brothers and sisters anyway, right?

However, one of my favorites was this YouTube clip:



Dispensationalism is like drinking theology from the toilet.

Young-Earth Bible

A friend of mine who works in a Barnes & Noble texted me a picture of this Bible today:



Good grief. First, they pick an outdated translation (though this comes as no surprise). Second, note that it is not the doctrine of creation that is emphasized here, but creationism that is.

Creation is a worthy doctrine to focus on, since the story of the Bible is the story of the God of creation, and how he elects, covenants with, and redeems the people of his creation. In the end, he will also redeem creation itself (Romans 8:18-25). However, creationism is a different thing, and young-earth creationism (YEC) in particular. YEC ties the creation story in the Old Testament to a particular interpretation and a wholesale denial of essentially everything discovered by physics, astronomy, and geology.

More importantly, however, most YEC proponents usually end up de-emphasizing the resurrection and the new creation at the expense of their obsession with the age of the earth. Even more importantly, the story of the Bible is ultimately about Jesus Christ, and how in him all of the themes of the Bible are tied together.

Themed Bibles stink. I have enough trouble with my own presuppositions, the last thing I need is to lay down another layer of them on top of them. I would hope that my ministry would never choose to publish a Bible with our own opinions stuck in there. Luckily, I doubt it.

By the way, "New Defenders"? What's so "new" about young-earth creationism?

Campus Ministry

I'm spending the day at my undergraduate institution today, doing some work. I walked past the street where some of the churches and religious foundations are at. The one that I belonged to, which was run by American Baptists, is going through some difficult times but in any case is doing well. They have a mission to proclaim the Gospel to the campus, and they're doing that in all of its dimensions. They have a housing ministry where young men and women are growing together in community to learn what it means to follow Christ.

The Presbyterian religious foundation is not doing so well. Their numbers are down in church attendance, and they had to take down their house and now are putting up what amounts to an apartment complex, for anyone to stay in for university housing. There's nothing wrong with that, but they can't have a spiritually-focused house because no one wants to live in one.

Well, except for the fact that plenty of people want to live in the Baptist ones down the street.

I'm not going to suggest that what I'm about to say is the simple explanation for what's happened here. It must be a very complicated situation with lots of factors. However, the following point deserves some attention.

Much of mainline Protestant Christianity in America has given up on orthodox Christianity, and this particular Presbyterian church is a good example (nothing against Presbyterians, this particular group on that campus is in fact going against its own history in this case). This campus church decided a long time ago that orthodox Christianity simply wasn't for them. The New Testament says all of those unpleasant things about not getting to leave your spouse for whatever reason you want, not getting to have intercourse with whoever you want, that belief in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord is essential, and of course we shouldn't forget all those embarrassing references to casting out demons and healing the sick and raising the dead, because we learned a long time ago that such things were unscientific and therefore unworthy of our consideration.

Sure, they like the New Testament a lot nevertheless, because it asks us to take care of the poor, the widowed, the foreigner, and the destitute. It teaches us that mercy triumphs over judgment. That peace is desirable and war isn't. That restorative justice is possible. They claim that this is what Jesus found really important.

Sure, Jesus found it important. He faults us whenever we don't. However, for Jesus this was part and parcel of his restorative program for the world, to which his historical, bodily resurrection is essential. All of that stuff about what he did here on earth was part of his bringing the Kingdom of God. And, yes, Jesus calls us to that personal holiness that so often gets in the way of what we want for ourselves (myself included).

So what's the point of this rant? The point is that once you drain Christianity of most of its distinctive content, you end up with something that essentially makes Jesus look like any so-called enlightened 21st century Westerner. The problem with this, for those that promote it, is that I can go to any bookstore and pick up books on this, or watch it on TV, or join some other group or cause that has no explicit religious association. It seems rather pointless to go join up with a spiritual group to hear what I can hear about just about everywhere else. Not only that, but these people are asking college students to get up on Sunday morning early and go off and hear what they can hear every day in class. If that's all church was for, I wouldn't go, because I have better things to do on the weekend.

The American Baptists on that campus are concerned about both the evangelical gospel and social justice. In fact, they've linked them together in Jesus' resurrection. It's a message that ties one in with the restoration of the world to its Creator. That's something worth getting out of bed for on a Sunday.

Trinity Sunday

Today I was at my parents' church and we celebrated Trinity Sunday, a day marked out to reflect on the fact that we worship a "triune" God, one God in three persons, one "what" and three "whos."

On this day in many liturgical churches the Athanasian Creed is read, a creed attributed to the fourth-century bishop Athanasius, but likely written later. I've linked to it above if you'd like to read it (and you should!) because it is far too long to post here (just a note to my fellow Protestants: the word "catholic" used in the creed is a reference to the universal nature of the church and is not a reference to the Roman Catholic church per se).

The creed gets very thorough (and quite repetitive) about how the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God, and yet there are not three Gods but one God. Or how the Father is eternal, the Son is eternal, and the Spirit is eternal, and yet there are not three eternals but one eternal.

Two points I'd like to make about the Trinity on this Trinity Sunday: the first is that it emphasizes that Christianity is more than monotheism. Christians believe in one God, yes. However, we believe in a God that has a multiplicity of personhood. This means that attributes of our lives such as community, relationship, fellowship, and love are part of God's very being. Think that one over for a minute.

The second point is that though we cannot understand the mystery of the Trinity, we can state it clearly as the Athanasian Creed does. And this is essential, because our lives as Christians are bound up in the entire life of the Trinity, with God as our Father, Christ as our Savior and brother, and the Holy Spirit bringing us to faith, living within us, and conforming us to the people that God wants us to be.

Gas Prices

Yesterday, across the street from my apartment in Chicago, the gas was ~$4.20 a gallon.

Last night, across the street from Wrigley Field, it was ~$4.50 a gallon.

Today in my hometown it was $3.75 a gallon.

Quite the spread.

Pastor on the run for putting Jesus first

Orlando Sentinel -- DeLand pastor threatened after flag's removal

Do you have an American flag at the front of your church? A Christian flag? Do you even know what the latter is? What would happen at your church if it were taken down?

DeLand police say they are investigating threatening notes sent a local pastor after the 33-year-old removed a U.S. flag from a Baptist church's sanctuary.

DeLand police Lt. Pete Moon says investigators are examining at least three notes sent to Rev. Sean Oliver Allen.

Allen has taken a leave of absence from First Baptist Church of DeLand, the church he came to came in September. Education Pastor John Long says Allen opted to take the leave after receiving a note at his home.

According to a police report, the note read, "Resign this Sunday or else."

Long says some members of the congregation became upset when Allen decided in October to remove the U.S. flag and the church's Christian flag.

This poor pastor, who probably loves the freedom he has in this country as much as the next guy, is getting reamed because he recognizes that Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn't. There were both flags in the front of the church were I was growing up, and I never thought about it until probably sometime in college. We Americans have a strange sort of Christianity that is comfortable with a national symbol, no matter how important to us, taking its place next to the place where the Word is preached and the sacraments administered.

For a similar example, I went to a church in rural Illinois the day before Memorial Day a few years back. It happened to be Pentecost Sunday. Instead of celebrating the birth of the church with the coming of the Holy Spirit, we went outside and read off the names of people who had died in the service of our country. I am sure it was very meaningful to the relatives of those people, and I am grateful for their service (I am personally proud of both of my grandfathers for serving during the Korean War). However, we have a day for celebrating that, and well, guess what, it was the NEXT DAY. Jesus doesn't want the day off for patriotism.

Tell your pastor to take the American flag out of the sanctuary and display it proudly on a pole on his front lawn where it belongs. And I mean no disrespect to anyone, but get rid of the Christian flag. It's misleading, and we already have a symbol; the cross on which our Savior died.

HT: Boar's Head Tavern