I've got a Greek exam tomorrow, and the passage I'm studying tonight is Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. I couldn't help but stop to ponder a few things when I got to these verses:
For truly I say to all of you, until heaven and earth pass away, one iota or one dot will not pass away from the Law, until all has come about.
A couple brief points worth noting here. (1) Jesus uses a cool little word play, 'pass away', that is often missed in English translations. (2) Jesus uses a really strong negation to indicate that not a single dot on an 'i' or cross on a 't' could pass from Scripture until all heaven and earth are done away with.
So what? Well, I got to thinking this: For those who are willing to accept the basic tenets of verbal plenary inspiration and sola Scriptura these verse indicate that the Word of God is perfect, and sufficient for the needs of humanity until the end of the earth.
These verses will do little, however, to convince someone who is not already persuaded of this position. They will simply make snide remarks about the 'Matthean community' which produced this text. Some comments might be made about the Matthean variation from Q here or some Jew-pleasing in this Jew-oriented apologetic book. Either way, they will be unconvinced.
That's fine, I suppose. They see it as circular logic to argue from Scripture that Scripture is authoritative, sufficient, God-breathed, etc. If that's the line you want to take, fine, but please realize that the beginning and end of this view is subjectivism, if you want to find any good in the Bible at all.
How's that, you ask? Well, as long as Jesus is talking about social justice or moral virtues most people are fine with him. When he's speaking up for women and including them in his ministry people today love him.
When he talks about the need for perfect righteousness, or the reality of hell, they hate him. They say he's been tampered with, adulterated, his words have been changed by the corrupt church seeking to suppress the historical Jesus who was just too much of a rebel for us to handle.
Hoogly. You can say that only if you take the texts that you want to take and reject the ones you want to reject. You can cite all kinds of Gnostic nonsense, text-critical trash, or church conspiracy claptrap, but in reality all you've done is import your own desires for what you want Jesus to be on to the text, and then let than determine which texts are 'authentic.'
The only people who have any hope of discovering Jesus for who he said he was are those who accept Sola Scriptura. Why? Because then it's not me deciding what issues I really believe Jesus would speak on, or what he would really say about them. I have to let the text speak. I have to honestly do business with the text that exists and somehow let that form my understanding of who Jesus is.
I start with the Bible and end with the Bible. I let it shape and conform my mind's image of Jesus. To pick and choose verses and chapters from the gospels and the NT epistles which I will adhere to is to conform the Bible to my understanding.
Even worse, it's to make my God in my own image.
It's ultimately subjective.
I've gone back and forth a bit on this issue, so if you've thought about it, I'd love some input. Here's the question: How much value is there in other world religions? How much time should we spend studying them? When we study them, how should we study them?
Before I went to college, I was of the mindset that there was very little value in getting to know other religions in a meaningful way. For good or for ill, by the time I was done at Heritage, I had come perilously close to being convinced that we needed to know other religions. Buddhists were asking better questions than Christians. Many Muslims are more devout than Christians. World religions like Hinduism, Sikhism, even the Bha'i people, had accumulated great wisdom over the centuries, and Christians would do well to learn from them.
Or would we?
Once out of that environment, I began to realize that there were some serious inconsistencies in the ways that I thought. My good friend Rielly had taught me some about the import of the noetic effects of sin (the effects of sin on the mind). My belief in the doctrine of original sin and mankind's total inability also seemed to be at odds with finding wonderful positives in godless, man-made religions.
Today I was pondering a little bit more what exactly I believe with regards to elements of truth in other religions, and how we should react to / interact with them, and I got to thinking about the Bible.
Obviously, things are pretty clear in the Old Testament. God was straight-out against his people having anything to do with the godless nations around them. But much of the crowd at my college seemed (if not always with words, then with attitudes and hermeneutics) to dislike this 'God' and this 'ethic' of the Old Testament and were very happy to proclaim that we have advanced far beyond that type of thing now.
So what about the New Testament?
This is where I got stuck. We have Paul's interaction with the pagan philosophers on Mars Hill in Acts, which seems to be the thing that everyone seems to appeal to in order to make their point on this topic. Remarkably, everyonse seems to have their own take on his this interaction should impact our interaction with other religions and our apologetics today. I'm wondering: what other New Testament texts do we look to here? What texts have you found helpful?
What about Jesus? Many emerging-types like to claim that they are 'red letter Christians', not 'Paulians', so we should deal with Christ. They claim that his harsh words were always for the religious hypocrites (Pharisees), never for anyone else. But it seems to me that Jesus would often use the 'Gentiles' / 'nations' (ie. 'pagans') as a negative example. In other words, 'Don't worry, because that's what the pagans do.' Or, 'Don't just love your brother, because that's what the pagans do.'
Am I wrong? It would appear that Jesus felt free to hold up the false religions as examples of godless 'morality', whose standards and thoughts ought to be avoided at all cost. As I said, I've gone back and forth on this, so I am open to being wrong again. If you've thought about this already, please advise.
Much has been made in other places about the cheesy PoMo quasi-evangelical catchphrases such as 'dialogue', 'story', 'journey', 'romance', etc. I would like to comment here on the term 'conversation.'
A 'conversation' is apparently when more than one PoMo gathers, and they begin to speak. They pile up one non-descript cliché (see above for some popular choices) on top of another, each describing their own 'authentic experience' (their story) which becomes, to each of them, uniquely authoritative for their own journey.
Perhaps the reason why these ones are so quick to devalue language and its inherent meaning is because they simply have chosen to create a dialect of their own, in which each one of the seven (7) words they know becomes entirely defined by its own context (the word's story??). Interpretation, then (and thus, meaning, as well), is entirely in the ear of the hearer.
No wonder they can connect and have such wonderfully meaningful 'conversations'... Everyone tells me my own interpretation of their story... which I interpret the way I do because of my own story... how wonderful!
All that, however, is simply by way of introduction. The reason I wanted to write about the term 'conversation' is because I feel it has been violated, perhaps worse than the others.
It is often stated that the truly 'missional' Christian will not seek to win 'converts', but rather to make 'relationships' which will lead to truly 'meaningful' and 'mutually beneficial' conversations. Only mean old moderns want converts. Hip missional Christians know that conversations are much better.
But that is a lie. This catchphrase simply doesn't work the way they want it to work (which is quite sad, really, because it does sound very pious of them).
The trouble is that conversation is not the goal of a Christian. Conversion of sinners is. While I understand that many emergent types are reacting against the old 'crusade' style of evangelism, they are throwing not just the baby, but also the mother, out with the bathwater.
To be a Christian means that I love God. It is to God's glory to see sinners saved. That's why he sent his Son... that's why we're called to go to every nation and make disciples. We're not told to go to the ends of the world to stake our share in the marketplace of ideas.
To be a Christian means that I love others. I love because God first loved me. Being saved, I know that it is to the benefit of any man, woman, boy, or girl to be saved. To know Jesus is the most eminently wonderful joy the soul could ever know. Why would I want to deny to someone that I really want them to know the greatest, truest, only absolutely sovereign joy the world will ever know? So that we could 'have conversation'?
What a joke.
Either you desire sinners to be saved, or you're not a Christian because you obviously haven't understood that it's to the glory of God and for the good of the person for them to be saved!
So one of two things is happening here. Either these wonderfully conversational emergent types are really seeking conversions through conversations (which seems awfully deceptive... why not just say what you mean? Tell them what you really want!) or else they really think that the world has as much to offer them as they have to offer the world.
If the latter is their mindset than I would argue it is true. The world does have as much to offer as they do... which is absolutely zero. Only a heart that has never experienced the true grace and love of God in the forgiveness of Christ and the comfort of the Holy Spirit could ever think that the world has anything to offer them.
My good friend and cousin,
James, wonders: "
What if we abandoned the religion of Jesus for the religion of the Bible or the religion of Christianity?"
On the other hand, I can't help but wonder...
What if a group of people became disaffected with the Jesus-followers who came before them and decided that they knew better? What if youthful zeal combined with the afterglow of post-Nietzschean pop-culture and formed a new religion which claimed to be faithful to the old religion long-forgotten? What if the warm-fuzzies then created by discovering the "real Christianity" turned into historical snobbery and together with revisionist history, a disdain for doctrine, and a love for philosophizing about all things ethereal created a grass-roots movement from within "broader evangelicalism"?
I wonder what that would look like... I wonder if they'd be any closer to truth than the "cold", "doctrine-consumed" modern church that came before them, that they disdain so much?
Justin Taylor did this better back in July. I recommend reading that post over mine.
That being said, I couldn’t help but notice some serious irony the past few days as I’ve been reading. As Taylor noted, it seems that whenever emergent-types are criticized, they respond with (a) “you hurt my feelings,” and / or (b) “you don’t understand us.”
Brian McLaren is no exception.
The article I read yesterday is a case in point. McLaren has been critiqued over and over again. His response: “You don’t understand us.”
Thus, his solution (at least in part) is the article cited above. In that article he “tells his faith story” so that he will let us all see “the real man,” in hopes that we will be able to contextualize his writing and understand what he is trying to communicate.
The irony of it all is simply this: It’s typically the argument of these pomo post-propositional guys that we should employ a reader-oriented hermeneutic (to Scripture and otherwise).
So… in reality, the message isn’t determined by McLaren as he writes, but by us as we read and interpret. Really, then, he’s misunderstood himself, I suppose, if I think he’s said something he doesn’t think he said. Boy, does that suck. Ah well. He’s fallible anyway (aren’t we all?), so who’s to say with certainty that he knew what he wanted to say in the first place?
I guess now he knows how the biblical authors would feel, were they alive to be subjected to the types of interpretations he and his cronies come up with.
