MercyMe - I Can Only Imagine

 

MercyMe - I Can Only Imagine

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9La_4svq8JI

- or -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9La_4svq8JI&feature=list_related&playnext=1&list=AVGxdCwVVULXfaz7YN23Ut84Fo3L70i3Rf

 

 

 

Official Band Site -

http://mercyme.org/#!/ss:facebook

 

 

 

Mercy Me in Concert (GRR, MI)

November 2011

(click to enlarge)

Wikipedia Info

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MercyMe

MercyMe is an American Christian rock band founded in Greenville, Texas. The band consists of vocalist Bart Millard, keyboardist James Bryson, percussionist Robby Shaffer, bassist Nathan Cochran and guitarists Michael Scheuchzer and Barry Graul.

The band formed in 1994 and released six independent albums prior to signing with INO Records in 2001. The group first gained mainstream recognition with the crossover single, “I Can Only Imagine” which elevated their debut album, Almost There, to double platinum certification. Since then, the group has released six additional studio albums (four of which have been certified gold) and a greatest hits album, 10. The group has also had 13 consecutive top 5 singles on the Billboard Christian Songs chart, with 7 of them reaching no. 1. MercyMe has won 8 Dove Awards and has had numerous Grammy Award nominations.

Mercy Me in Concert (GRR, MI)

November 2011

(click to enlarge)



 

Which Do You Chose - Justice, Justification or Jesus?

Do We Have the Gospel Wrong?

Scot is on the money here in all three categories. We have (i) the right-wing evangelical conservatives in the Justice camp, (ii) the Reformed traditionalists (or revivalists) in the Justification camp, and (iii) the Love Wins / Emergent groups in the Jesus camp. Each have a condensed version of the Gospel of Jesus - group (i) has a politically charged social gospel with an empire theology at its heart; group (ii) has a soterian gospel that preaches the sinfulness of man and the cross as its penal substitutionary remedy; and, group (iii) has a pure Jesus gospel that sees God at work through Adam, Abraham, Israel and the Church as the completing story and remedy for man's need.

Yes, "Love Wins," but love wins through Jesus' love, and this is what the "Love Wins" group has been saying all along. If you preach Jesus as the gospel you will get both justice and justification (theological camps 1 and 2). But if you preach either the justice gospel, or the justification gospel, you may only get some Jesus, but not all of Jesus, in those gospel versions.

Consequently, preaching the Jesus of Paul's gospel includes both the perspectives of justice and justification. And this third-and-last "J-Gospel" is the theologically correct gospel to place your money on as Scot will go on to explain below.*

R.E. Slater
November 3, 2011

*For additional links on this subject matter please refer to: Do We Have the Gospel Wrong?; The New Perspective of Paul; and generally, to the sidebar "Pauline Theology").

**********

The Three “J’s” in the Gospel Debate

http://www.patheos.com/community/jesuscreed/2011/11/02/the-three-js-in-the-gospel-debate/#more-21889

by Scot McKnight

November 2, 2011

Some people are a bit baffled when they hear there is a gospel debate today. Others, and this is no surprise to the readers of this blog, know that many debates actually end up discovering that at the bottom of this debate is the gospel, or how we understand the gospel. Some mainline organizations break into a rash when interviewing a candidate for ministry and discover that he or she has a traditional Reformed understanding of the gospel, while some in that more traditional Reformed movement today do the same when they hear a candidate contend for a more new perspective view of the gospel. And some in the revivalist tradition cannot comprehend how in the world anyone doesn’t think the gospel is anything but that simple four or five point gospel. Yet others, and I’ll avoid giving names here, seem to think the gospel itself can be reduced to three words: God loves you.

The gospel is at the heart today of every major theological debate, and it spills over into one ecclesiastical debate after another.

In all of this lots of folks get thoroughly confused. Take, for instance, the new perspective and the gospel. Some people think this is a fun debate but at stake for many of us is not just a curious piece of history — what was 1st Century Judaism really like? — but instead we see the gospel at stake. To be sure, if you find yourself in the middle of all of this the debate can become bewildering.

So I want to contend this morning that there are three ways of framing the gospel today. What I want to emphasize is that how we frame the gospel determines everything, and I mean everything. I contend there are three J’s that can put the whole debate today on the table in the simplest of framing categories.

First, some people frame the gospel through the category of justice. The point of the gospel is this: Jesus came to establish a kingdom marked by justice, and of course justice is the big term that includes other important ideas like peace and love and salvation. In fact, for many in the justice camp the word “salvation” is robust enough to be called “justice” or “justice” is robust enough to be called “salvation.” For these folks, Luke 4:18-19 is about as gospel as you can get, and Jesus’ death and his resurrection are all connected to this vision of justice. This means gospel work is justice work; it also means any gospel work that doesn’t entail justice is not gospel work.

Some in this camp, of course, are so justice and so “social justice” that it seems like nothing more than political activism or the worst caricature of the social gospel. But a charitable reading of justice gospelers reveals that they do believe Jesus’ death forgives sins (I find few in this camp care much for substitutionary atonement but they are not denying atonement in the death of Jesus; to be sure, some are little more than Abelard or even Girard).

Justice gospelers today tend toward political activism, the summons for more Christians to see compassion for the poor and better laws and peace in the world, and toward a kingdom language. One of the more recent developments for justice gospelers is the category of empire, and they see a conscious and consistent anti-empire agenda at work in Jesus and in the apostles. They like this expression: “Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not.”

I’m not persuaded empire is as important to gospel as many do today, though anyone who claims Jesus is Lord knows that Caesar is not. The issue for me is how conscious is this. (And I’m co-editing a book with IVP, due out next Fall, that will put this anti-empire theory to the test. We’ve got some really, really good essays in this volume.)

Overall I am utterly convinced as I can be that Jesus intended to create a just society, and I’ve written about this in most of my books: but I am just as convinced that the gospel is not justice per se. Justice is the inevitable result and implication of the gospel but not the same as the gospel.

Second, some people frame the gospel through the category of justification. This is the traditional Reformation category, and Luther famously said that the church stands or falls with justification by faith. (Ahem, Jesus spoke to this and he said it stood or fell with the confession of Peter, namely, that Jesus was Messiah/King. [But] I digress.) For justification gospelers, the gospel is soterian and that soteriology, or doctrine of salvation, can all be summed up in and through the term justification. The essence is that we are sinners and guilty before God and God must deal in a legal courtroom kind of way with our status. The good news is that God forgives us through Jesus and we can become justified, or declared in the right, through the death and resurrection of Christ. (Justification gospelers don’t emphasize resurrection enough, sometimes revealing almost no interest. Most emphasize a penal substitution theory of atonement and see divine satisfaction as the primary act of God at work in making justification possible. Many are also double imputation folks. Not all, as others emphasize union with Christ.)

Justification gospelers preach a soterian gospel, and I’ve said enough about this on this blog and in my book (linked below). They tend to be at odds with justice gospelers, just as justice gospelers are at odds with justification gospelers. Tim Keller is on record saying justification leads to justice, but I don’t think the logic is necessary and it is too obvious to me that far too many justification gospelers inherently react to the justice gospelers because they don’t think justification leads inevitably to justice. More of that some other time. [Thus, though they say it they don't believe it. - re slater]

The issue I’m talking about is how to frame the gospel. The justice gospelers frame the gospel through systemic injustice that needs to be undone and justice established; the justification gospelers frame the gospel through the systematic theology of creation, fall, sinfulness, God’s just judgment of humans as sinners, and the remedy of justice in the cross (and resurrection) of Christ where God is both just and justifier.

But I want to contend once again that justification, like justice, is the implication or result of the gospel and not the gospel itself. The proof is in the absence of justification language (especially as the “driver”) in 1 Corinthians 15, the almost total absence of justification in the gospel sermons in Acts, and the same almost total absence of the category/term of justification in the Gospels (which are the gospel). Again, we are talking here about how to frame the gospel.

The gospel, I contend, is not properly framed as injustice becoming justice (though clearly this happens) or as the unjust becoming just/justified (though clearly this happens too). And the debate between these two folks proves an inability to convince one leads to the other compellingly. There’s a better way. Instead…

Third, some people frame the gospel through the category of Jesus. As I argue in The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited, fundamental category for the gospel in Jesus and the apostles is the Story of Jesus. Just look at 1 Corinthians 15, just look at the gospeling sermons in Acts, and then just take a good look at why the first four books are called THE GOSPEL according to (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John).

What drove them was the Story of Jesus as the completing/fulfilling Story of God’s work in this world, beginning with Adam and then taken up into Abraham.

There are three J’s in the gospel debate. The right J is Jesus.

If you preach Jesus as the gospel you will get both justification and justice.

If you preach justification you may get Jesus (but I see only some of Jesus and not the whole of Jesus) and you may get some justice (I’m skeptical on this one).

 If you preach justice you may get some justification (but I’m skeptical on enough justice gospelers ever getting to justification) and you get Jesus, but again only some of Jesus (often only his teachings, his life, and his life as an example).

If you preach the Jesus of Paul’s gospel (1 Cor 15) or the apostolic sermons in Acts or the gospel of the Gospels, you get all of Jesus and all of Jesus creates both justice and justification.

As for me and my house, we take the third J.

Comments

Comment by Russ — November 3, 2011 @ 6:47 am

Hi Scot. I made a second reading of your article this morning and came to the conclusion that the third-and-last J-Gospel speaks to the “Love Wins / Emergent Church groups” that are unmentioned in your opening paragraph.

Not that other Christian church groups don’t fit into this, but for me (at least my version of the Love Wins/Emergent groups) places this group squarely into the center of the New Perspective of Paul understanding of the Gospel.

And this is the version that I wish to support and to push onto any "Emergent / Love Wins" groups floundering around for direction in their theology. As does the Rob Bell version of the gospel that I am acquainted with. Rob is all about “Jesus” 24 x 7, and goes on to show how Jesus relates to every other thing in societal structures.

I firmly believe the Emergent Church Movement can help revive the Gospel to our pluralistic, postmodern world, and can appeal to all groups, both evangelical and non-evangelical, to denominations and to sub-sectarian groups, to Judaism, Muslimism, Hinduism, and so on. And it can do so in re-righting the understanding of how God loves us through his son Jesus. And as you have said, "Jesus is the center and nothing else," including one of God’s attributes known as divine love. But the “Love Wins” crowd knows and understands this most central of all truths (again, at least in my first-hand experience of this through Rob Bell’s ministry).

And lest I stand wrong in these statements than please correct those gaps and oversights. The Emergent Church movement needs direction (and not backwards) and I believe to the degree it is given that direction, to that degree Christianity can again become relevant to the world rather than hung-up in its factions and “isms.”

Thank you.

Why Inerrancy Doesn't Matter

Dr. Olson relates in this article the difference between the use of the word "inerrancy" v. "infallibility" in strict definitions of the terms. Overall, he concludes, inerrancy is a manufactured word by latter day evangelicals (1980s forward) intent on "removing biblical inconsistencies" found on the pages of Scripture. Olson contends that the word "infallible" is good enough and not in need of any further help through additional definitions and added nuances.

Moreover, believers are better able to maintain an "authoritative" bible when using the word "infallible" as pertaining to the revelation of God to man and all things related to man's sin and salvation. But to insist that the bible does not have inconsistencies within its records and then place the word inerrancy into this definition will do harm to the authority of the bible. It is better to admit that there are inconsistencies found within the bible while knowing that those discovered errors of history, science, etc, do no harm to the authority of Scriptures pertaining to God and salvation.

Thus, this is the complaint and false help (or misdirection) of the word inerrancy. In other articles on this blog we have discussed how the bible is authoritative. Please refer to the "Bible - Authority & Interpretation" sidebar. Additionally let me reference one of the first articles I had placed within that section by NT Wright, The Authority of the Bible.

We take the bible seriously here, all the more so because it is an authoritative and infallible revelatory revelation regarding its teaching on God and salvation. What is not needed are additional qualifications to God's word by dogmatically-bound, well-meaning, believers (of whatever sort and stripe they are). The temptation to over-define (via an hyper-conservatist theology) God's words are as dangerous as to under-define (liberalism) God's words to us. As theologians and students of the Word, let us hear and speak the Word of God aright, in all of its authority and spiritual empowerment, given to us by Almighty God.

R.E. Slater
November 2011

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Why Inerrancy Doesn't Matter
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2010/08/why-inerrancy-doesnt-matter/

by Roger Olson

posted August 19, 2010

I know I promised more about postconservative evangelicalism today. Even though it may not seem directly related to a delineation of that, this post does help explicate how most postconservatives think about the inspiration and authority of the Bible.

First, a strong affirmation. As evangelicals, we postconservatives DO believe the Bible is our (and should be every Christian’s) norming norm for life and belief. Tradition is our normed norm–a secondary guide or compass that is not infallible. Scripture, we all agree, is infallible in all that it teaches regarding God and salvation.

Second, however, for most of us the word “inerrancy” has become too problematic uncritically to embrace and use. To the untrained and untutored ear “inerrant” always and necessarily implies absolute flawless perfection even with regard to numbers and chronologies and quotations from sources, etc. But even the strictest scholarly adherents of inerrancy kill that definition with the death of a thousand qualifications. Some who insist that you must be evangelical to be faithful to Scripture’s authority say inerrancy is consistent with biblical authors’ use of errant sources. In other words, they say, the Bible is nevertheless inerrant if it contains an error so long as the author used an errant source inerrantly!?!

How many people in the pews know about these qualifications held by many, if not all, scholarly conservative evangelicals? When I teach these qualifications to my students (as I have done over almost 30 years) the reaction is almost uniformly the same: “That’s not what ‘inerrancy’ means!” I have them read the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy and most of them laugh at the twists and turns it makes in order to qualify inerrancy to make it fit with the undeniable phenomena of Scripture.

The biggest qualification [by inerrantists] is that only the original autographs were inerrant. Think about this. The claim made by most conservative evangelicals (and, of course fundamentalists) is that biblical authority stands or falls with inerrancy. If the Bible contains any real errors it cannot be trusted. Then they admit every Bible that exists probably contains errors. Only the original manuscripts on which the inspired authors wrote can be considered perfectly inerrant.

Again, for almost 30 years I’ve presented this to my students and allowed them to react. The reaction is almost always the same: Huh? Then no Bible we have is inerrant and therefore no Bible we have is authoritative. Right. You can’t make authority depend on inerrancy and then say no existing Bible is inerrant without calling every Bible’s authority into question. It’s a hole in inerrantists’ logic so huge even a sophomore can drive a truck through it.

My experience teaching theology has been that more students give up belief in the Bible’s authority because they were taught that it depended on [the concept of] absolute inerrancy (even in matters of cosmology and history) than because they are taught [that the bible] isn’t inerrant. In other words, they discover for themselves the problems with inerrancy once they face the problems. Wouldn’t it be better to be totally honest with young people about the Bible so that they do not face a crisis of faith when they finally have to face up to its factual flaws (that even inerrantists admit but rarely tell people in the pews)?

What’s ironic is that many strong inerrantists who insist belief in the Bible’s inerrancy is necessary for authentic evangelical faith define inerrancy in highly questionable ways. In other words, “inerrancy” has become a shibboleth. So long as you affirm the word you can go on to define it however you want to and you’re still “in.”

Here’s an example.  A leading inerrantist wrote his own definition of inerrancy for a college where he applied to teach. I taught at that same college later and his statement about inerrancy fell into my hands. His definition was “perfection with respect to purpose.” He admitted that many statements of Scripture, taken at face value, are wrong, but so long as they do not touch on matters of the Bible’s main purpose which is to identify God for us and lead us into salvation, these do not matter. This scholar has emerged as a leading defender of biblical inerrancy and has spoken out very publicly about it (without explaining his own definition). I confirmed at least twice over the years that he still believes in his definition of inerrancy.

I sent his two page definition and description of “inerrancy” to Carl F. H. Henry and asked him for an analysis and evaluation of the statement (without naming its author). All I told Henry was that this person wrote the statement for the college as an applicant for a teaching position. I didn’t mention that it was years earlier. My purpose was an experiment about how the word “inerrancy” functions in evangelical circles.

Henry wrote back a two page, handwritten letter blasting the statement as totally inadequate. He said “This person means well but needs help [understanding inerrancy].” The thrust of his response was that the college should not hire this person. And yet, the person who wrote the statement is widely considered an influential conservative evangelical who has publicly criticized others for allegedly not truly believing in biblical inerrancy.

Not too long ago I had a debate with another leading conservative evangelical inerrantist. This one was an officer of the Evangelical Theological Society which requires affirmation of inerrancy for membership. I have never joined because I don’t think inerrancy is the right word for what we evangelicals believe–including those who hold to the term. This person is also an officer of a leading evangelical seminary. After much communication back and forth we realized that we differ hardly at all about the Bible. Given his qualifications of inerrancy and my high view of Scripture (supernatural inspiration and highest authority for life and faith) our accounts of the Bible were nearly identical. So I asked him if I could join the ETS without affirming the word “inerrancy.” He said no. To me that proves it is just a shibboleth.

The theologian I referred to earlier who defines inerrancy as “perfection with respect to purpose” and whose expanded definition was deemed totally “inadequate” by Carl F. H. Henry still is and has been for many years an influential member of the ETS!

I have to conclude that within evangelical circles “inerrancy” has developed into a mere shibboleth because a person (such as I) can affirm everything many leading inerrantists believe about the Bible and yet be rejected and even criticized. I fear they have elevated a word into an idol.

So how would I describe my own and many inerrantists’ view of Scripture’s accuracy? I think “infallible” does a better job than “inerrant” so long as I can explain what it means. “Infallible,” to me, means the Bible never fails in its main purpose which is to identify God for us, to communicate his love and his will to us, and to lead us into salvation and a right relationship with our Creator, Savior and Lord.

I like theologian Emil Brunner’s illustration. (I don’t necessarily agree with everything he wrote about the Bible.) In his little book, Our Faith, Brunner wrote about the old RCA Victrola advertisement that showed a dog listening to the megaphone of a record player. Under the picture the caption read “His master’s voice.” We recognize our master’s voice in Scripture in spite of its inevitable flaws, just as the dog in the illustration recognized his master’s voice in spite of the inevitable flaws on the record.

I think it is time we evangelicals matured enough to get over our obsession with a word and care more about our common belief in the Bible’s authority in all matters pertaining to faith and practice. We used to be able to do this. After all, the statement of faith of the National Association of Evangelicals has never included inerrancy. And leading evangelicals of the past who were universally considered authentically evangelical denied inerrancy. (For example Scottish evangelical theologian James Orr who wrote chapters for The Fundamentals and was a good friend of B. B. Warfield!)

When I deny inerrancy I am not necessarily denying anything many inerrantists believe. It may be, and I think is the case, that I am only denying that the word “inerrancy” is the most helpful or accurate term for what they and I believe in common.

The Infallibility and Multi-Vocality of Scripture

Part of reading and understanding the Bible is the acknowledgement to the fact that the Bible is inconsistent within itself - not unified, as it were - as we have been led to believe by well-meaning pastors and theologians. We find numerous mistakes, inaccurate witness, historic revisions, and irreconcilable passages within its pages. But rather than framing this truth in terms of a "fallible" Bible (a common knee-jerk reaction by scholars, the media, and wise-cracking friends) I would rather like to understand this as giving to us an "infinitely wider" Bible. One coloured by the perceptions of multiple authors, their real-life experiences, their accumulated knowledge gathered through training, perception, and life in general. One pitted with the veracity of time and tradition through the many ages of paganism, Judaism and the Church itself. A testimony which I understand to be the multiple voices (or, multi-vocality) of Scriptures.

As such, we now have in our possession a Bible that is replete with the Word of God through an infinite number of sources, viewpoints, and historic arguments both studied and pedestrian. Ranging from wise-fools to corrupt Kings, humble shepherds to hoary sagas, imperfect leaders to willful prophets, faithless priests to wicked scribes. From exasperated housewives to diligent fishermen, hardy camel drivers to orphaned girls lost and alone; from uncertain guards to irreligious jailers, doubting tax gathers to besotted wine-bibbers. From believing crooks to repentant murderers, incorrigible thieves to clear-sighted virgins, from endearing boys and girls to children of faith.

Within the testimony of Scriptures comes to us an infinite parade of beggars, clowns, fools, and ignoble. As well as the honorable, studious, faithful, and spiritual. We see the depressed, the destitute, the harmed and the hurting. We see the determined, the persevering, the blessed and the rewarded. We see repentants and the sinful; the disbelieving and the believing; the confessing and the wicked. The testimony of the Bible shouts to one-and-all its testimony to our fallibleness, making known to us that we are in good company with the residents of its historic pages down through time immemorial.

So then, the misnomer of ascribing the Bible's pages and integrity as "fallible" should be corrected and understood as "faithful and accurate" in its revelatory depiction of man's fallenness and his need for redemption, for guidance, for humility and graciousness. The Bible ascribes to us its "earthy testimony of a heavenly God's revelation to fallen men and women." A testimony as large-and-wide as God is wise-and-deep. A testimony both plain and mysterious. A testimony that can lend doubt, on the one hand, to our "too-well constructed versions" of who we think God is, what He is doing, who we are, and where all this is going. As well as lend certitude (as versus certainty), on the other hand, to those very same questions when constructed correctly, using a broader hermeneutic, a more balanced theology, a wiser understanding of what exactly the Scriptures actually are as redemptive revelation. In this regard we then have an "infallible" Bible in perfect testimony to the Divine.

Lastly, we must add to the revelatory vocality of the Bible the very revelatory voice of God himself in the wisdom, depth, and infinity of his divine personage and the Triune fellowship of Father, Spirit, Son. Whose voice rumbles through its earthy pages with the divine life and breath of our Savior-Redeemer who is the Creator-God and everlasting I AM. Who makes those who are dead, alive through His Spirit. Who empowers sinful men and women with a spiritual renewal to re-embrace life with the thunderous voices of the resurrected. Whose people rumble forth on the storms of His embrace on the troubling sounds of crucifixion - to death, to sin, flesh, and world - to dead men everywhere listening. Who hear in the storms of heavenly redemption the further sounds of lives reaped-and-harvested from emptiness, vanity, ego and pride. It is the sound of Love spoken down through the ages in grace and mercy. A sound more troubling to our soul than any other sound can ever be heard. For it is the voice of God heard in the revelation of Scriptures. A voice valiant and courageous, willing to seek, to find, to embrace all who hear his voice, seek and submit. It is the voice of everlasting Love.

R.E. Slater

November 2, 2011

I think “infallible” does a better job than “inerrant” so long as I can explain what it means. “Infallible,” to me, means the Bible never fails in its main purpose which is to identify God for us, to communicate his love and his will to us, and to lead us into salvation and a right relationship with our Creator, Savior and Lord. - Dr. Roger Olson, Why inerrancy doesn't matter

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On Not Harmonizing (the Gospels)

http://www.jrdkirk.com/2011/10/31/on-not-harmonizing/

J.R.Daniel Kirk

October 31, 2011

I’ve just wrapped up teaching the Synoptic Gospels part of my Gospels and Acts course. Going through the individual books, looking over proposed solutions to the Synoptic Problem, and seeing how the seemingly harmonious stories portray Jesus’ ministry in quite different lights, we are left with a few conclusion that are surprising to many of us. Here are a couple:

• The Gospel writers have different ideas about how Jesus’ death works, which means they have different ideas about how God brings salvation through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

• The Gospels we have used sources, including, probably, Mark as a source for Matthew and Luke, and yet they felt free to change this source for various reasons, including: style, making a somewhat different point, causing the story to more clearly echo an OT antecedent, eliminating theological claims that they did not want to make, or including new theological claims that are somewhat at odds with the theological claims of the original story.

This means that there is not only a plurality of voices in the NT, there is an irreducible theological diversity.

But more importantly, this theological diversity is no accident of history but, on the human level, has been intentionally introduced into the texts we have in front of us. Luke intentionally modifies Mark (and Matthew?) to increase the continuity between the OT narrative and the work of Jesus, and to eliminate the idea of Jesus’ death procuring salvation for people as such.

Two questions came up that I think are important for us to keep working through, especially as evangelicals for whom such conclusions seem to push against our prior conception of what it means to call the Bible the word of God.

First, what does this mean for “scripture interpreting scripture”? This rule became quite popular at the time of the Reformation, or at least, if you Google “scripture interprets scripture” the people who are the most fierce advocates for the view are likely to be appealing to the Reformation traditions in their defense.

But what do we do when Luke says, “Blessed are the poor,” and Matthew says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”? Is Matthew clear here where Luke is ambiguous, thereby telling us what Jesus really meant? Or are we to hear in Luke’s version his special concern for the socially marginalized?

What are we to do when Mark says that you don’t put new wine in old wineskins, but Luke feels compelled to add, “No one wants new wine, old is better!”? Do we let Mark’s apparent meaning stand, where Jesus is the new wine that cannot be contained by the older Jewish practices? Or do we allow the “more clear” Lucan conclusion to change our reading?

http://www.biblegateway.com/quicksearch/?quicksearch=new+wine&qs_version=ESV

Matthew 9:17
Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved."
Mark 2:22
And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins—and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins. But new wine is for fresh wineskins."
Luke 5:37-38
³⁷And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. ³⁸But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. ³⁹And no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, 'The old is good/better.'"

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Biblical_Studies/New_Testament_Commentaries/The_Gospel_of_Mark/Chapter_8

[There can be two responses:] (1) [Do we] allow the scripture one author wrote help interpret that author’s other passages; [or] (2) allow the NT’s example of rereading the OT in light of Christ to train us to reread the OT as a witness to the saving life, death, resurrection, and reign of Jesus.

Question 1 -

If we insist on giving the one meaning made clear by the other texts, we start to force the Bible into our preconception of what kind of Bible would be good for us, what kind of Bible would qualify as “word of God,” and in so doing we spurn the actual Bible that God did give us, and that God thought was adequate for conveying God’s word.

Question 2 - What do we do with this stuff as pastors?

My answer here: it is your pastoral responsibility to help people recognize the Bible we actually have, rather than the Bible of our imaginations, is the word of God.

If you don’t give your people a category for this kind of diverse Bible being the word of God, then you will create a false sense of connection between a supposedly uniform, univocal Bible and the Christian faith as such. So what happens when they go off to college and take a Bible class at State University? What happens when they get bored one Saturday and map out (or try, anyway) the last week of Jesus’ life in each of the four Gospels?

Uh oh.

That’s when they discover that the Bible isn’t what you led them to believe. And if that imagined Bible is necessary for believing what God has to say about Jesus and the Christian faith in general, then the latter are apt to crumble as well.

Make no mistake, there are tremendous pastoral issues at stake in affirming correctly what the Bible is. But one of the worst mistakes we can make, especially in a day and age where media will tell people the truth if we don’t, is to affirm a vision of a single-voiced scripture that fails to correspond to the text we have actually been given.

Why is Neo-Evangelicalism Threatened by "Love Wins"?

Over the past eight months of its inception this blog has re-examined Christianity in its many expressions, both in contemporary culture, as well as in the past eras of church history. It has been a provocative study at times that has shown many popular Christian sentiments to be mis-directional and/or inadequately expressed. Consequently, when Rob Bell's book "Love Wins" was first published there was a heated outcry from Evangelical Christianity's more conservative zealots to seek immediate retribution and retaliation for any perceived doctrinal discrepancies and errors to the(ir) faith.

However, in Roger Olson's latest post, through his student Austin Fischer, we discover (not for the first time) that Evangelicalism's near-and-dear dogmas come under fire again, especially pertaining to Calvinism's doctrinal impasse between the "Sovereignty of God" and the "Election of man in his Depravity" with the more historic positions of "Free Will Theism" and "Prevenient Grace" doctrines more commonly accepted over the past 2000 years of church history.

Consequently, evangelicalism's real reasons for bashing "Love Wins" lies in the fact that it feels threatened in the very heart of its movement's signature interpretations of key biblical doctrines, especially those related to Calvinism. In other words, evangelicalism's whole case for its existence as a modern day Christian movement rises and falls upon its interpretation of whether God needs our help or not to "save" mankind from its sins. Which gets us into the evangelical boundary markers of missions, evangelism, church outreach programs, love, sin, heaven, hell, and so forth, that are near-and-dear dogmas held close to the heart of many Christians. And any restatement of them will be provocative, perhaps contentious, and slowly surrendered, if at all.

And yet, it is the argument of this blog, and from the lips and pens of the many discerning evangelics amongst us, that these very same issues and positional statements MUST be examined, discussed, debated and critiqued lest we miss God altogether in the idols of our man-made religion of dogmas, creeds and systematic statements of confessionalism. And because this task is as much cultural as it is personal, it is not an easy task to undertake. It requires the patient, steady, moderating task of love, prayer and devotion to the people of God who would turn to follow any pretty-voiced "shepherd" calling for alarm, fear, and insurrection (a most curious word to use in light of Peter Rollins latest book of the same name, wouldn't you say?).

Despite all this it is true that we remain critical - but critical both of (i) evangelicalism's more vocal adherents as well as (ii) Rob Bell's looser contentions that he makes in "Love Wins." And yet, give Bell credit for expressing his emotional ire with evangelicalism's modernistic dogmas and more zealot proponents, for the bulk of this web blog has been built to redress those very same issues that Bell has been trying to say to anyone who would listen... something that has taken a newer generation of emergent Christians to finally say and question.... Which is to understand why our brand of Christianity hasn't been more ardently embraced by other religions of the world? Why we have made our version of God as an exclusive, condemning, withdrawn Savior? To ask why postmodernism hasn't been allowed to critique modernism's excesses and pride? And finally, why we have allowed our Christian faith and worship to slip into a wooden experience of religious construction and oversimplified folk religion?

And yet, God is a very patient God with his Church.... For it is this self-same God who raises-up prophetic, discerning, men and women to help lead his people through those difficult times of transition, and out of the dark pathways and dead ends that we have managed to loose ourselves into. Through his Spirit, God continually works to de-construct us - while at the same time re-construct us - into the beings He intends for us to be. How? Partly through the able leadership and guidance of the fellowship of our faith as we examine together the Scriptures with one another. And partly through the hard lessons of life as we turn from our mistakes and errant judgments into His more gracious light of mercy and love.

One of these hard lessons has become the comfortability of our Christian religion as we have fashioned biblical sentiments and statements around our personal beliefs and preferences advocating our preferential cultural views of God. But sometimes it is the contrarian views and seeming anti-biblical statements that we must hear again. That dissettles us. That makes us uncomfortable. That force us to change our beliefs and worship. Because sometimes these contrarian views are true. Are biblical. Are real. Something that we didn't discern earlier in our lives but now require us to significantly modify and adapt to against what we first thought was wrong and unbiblical. This has been the case for Emergent Christianity. It's new. It's unknown. It speaks and acts differently. It seems radical. And it seems unbiblical to our older doctrines of the faith. But when examined more closely, and with less heat and glare, starts to make sense, even helping us over  previous faith-hurdles that had brought us confusion without any decent answers or directions.

For God desires that we look behind the curtain of who we are, and where we once were, and to grow up and re-examine again what our life values are, who we are, what we have become, and can become, as He perfects us into the image of His Son Jesus, the Lover of our Souls. So then my friends, take heed of one another. See each brother and sister whom we meet as heaven-sent and not demon-bound. Rejoice in the strength of our fellowship's diversity, its union, its solidarity with the purposes of God Almighty. For the discerning fellowship of the body of Christ has been given for our protection, our guidance, our help. Learn to listen to all its parts and not to just some its more vocal parts.

RE Slater

November 2011

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More response to Love Wins and the controversy surrounding it

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2011/10/more-response-to-love-wins-and-the-controversy-surrounding-it/

by Roger Olson
posted October 31, 2011

This is a guest post written by one of my students–Austin Fischer. As you can see, he’s particularly bright (and not just because he agrees with me about most things!) and articulate. I think he makes some very good points about the controversy surrounding Love Wins here. However, just because I post a guest essay here does not mean I agree with everything in it (the standard disclaimer!)

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Love Wins? God Wins?

As has been duly noted at this point, Love Wins has sparked a firestorm in the evangelical world because it has exposed some deep fissures. These fissures have been around as long as evangelicals have but certainly seem to be growing. In a lecture on universalism, Scot McKnight suggested that evangelicals have reacted with such vitriol towards the book because it threatens the very heart of the evangelical ethos, which (according to McKnight) is the belief that people need to be converted. As such, Rob Bell’s flirtation with universalism has threatened the importance of conversion and thus incurred the wrath of evangelicalism.

Yet McKnight’s contention seems to make two questionable assumptions. First, it assumes there is a blanket evangelical rejection of the ideas in Love Wins. Second, it assumes that those evangelicals who are rejecting Love Wins are rejecting it for the same reasons.

Why Can’t We Agree On What Love Wins Is Saying?

The first assumption is problematic on a couple of levels. First off, it seems implausible to say there is a blanket rejection of the ideas in Love Wins because there has been little consensus as to what exactly Love Wins is saying. There is an interesting dynamic at work here, because—to speak candidly—Love WinsLove Wins is saying? How can some people think the book teaches universalism and some think it doesn’t?

The answer is exceedingly simple: we’re not good readers. And the fact that we’re not good readers has nothing to do with inadequate education or IQ. It has everything to do with a growing trend in evangelical (and perhaps wider) culture towards sectarianism and the loss of moderation. Lots could be said here, but suffice [it] to say there are fewer and fewer people trying to be in the center anymore. The center is seen as a weak place, a place lacking conviction, a place where the cowards huddle together and try not to offend anyone.

Not too long ago I was talking with a pastor about being a “moderate” Christian and he rebuked the very existence of such a thing: “When it comes down to it, I don’t think there are any moderates.” Hmm. When I asked him to substantiate the claim, his answer was telling: “Because even moderates are passionate about some things.” Apparently, a moderate is a person who isn’t passionate about anything…except everybody being happy. This moderate caricature is as pervasive as it is inaccurate. And while I don’t care to offer a full-blown definition of what it means to be a Christian moderate, I think it is helpful to say that to be moderate is to be passionately committed to meaningful conversations in pursuit of the truth. To be a moderate means you check the impulse to caricature, distort, talk over, and assume you know what someone else is saying. As such you can be a conservative moderate or a liberal moderate, a Calvinist moderate or an Open Theist moderate. Whatever.

We’re not good readers because we’re not good at being moderate. We don’t really want to listen to opposing ideas and we don’t want a real conversation. We think “we” have the truth and “they” don’t, so why have a conversation? Bluntly, if we find it difficult to have an actual conversation then it’s probably because we’re arrogant and ignorant, [and] not informed.

So why can’t we come to a consensus on what Love Wins is saying? Because we don’t want to hear what it is saying. We just want to use it as a springboard into a monologue about why we’re right.

What Is Love Wins Saying?

This said, what is Love Wins saying? Like I said, it’s simple and really not that much different from what people such as C.S. Lewis, Moltmann, and Hans Urs von Balthasar have said; namely, in the end we can’t say anything too firm about the destiny of human beings other than the fact that God will do what God wants with us. Bell speculates over what God does indeed plan to do with us (i.e. giving us all eternity to allow God to save us…a flirtation with universalism) and that speculation is certainly fair grounds for conversation and criticism. Indeed a moderate would encourage such! But the fact that so few grasp this clear, simple thesis of the book is a sad indictment of the current evangelical climate. Like I said, we’re not good readers.

The second problem with the assumption is that there simply hasn’t been a blanket evangelical rejection of Love Wins. Some evangelicals agree with most, if not all, the book. This leads us to an examination of the second assumption: Are all evangelicals rebuking Love Wins for the same reasons?

Why is Love Wins Rejected?

The second assumption—that all evangelicals are rebuking Love Wins because it questions the need for conversion—is problematic because evangelicals are so diverse. The primary example of this is seen in the variously labeled neo-Puritan/neo-Calvinist branch of evangelicalism, characterized by the theology of Jonathan Edwards (especially as articulated by John Piper), the preaching of Mark Driscoll, Matt Chandler, Francis Chan, Tim Keller, and the influence of Al Mohler and company. To state the obvious, this branch of evangelicalism holds as fundamental numerous beliefs that stand in direct antithesis to any “free-will” branch of evangelicalism. As such, it should come as no surprise that while free-will and Calvinist evangelicals might both rebuke Love Wins, they don’t do it for the same reasons.

My contention is that neo-Calvinist evangelicalism doesn’t rebuke Love Wins because it undermines conversion (I mean what could undermine conversion more than unconditional election!?), but because it doesn’t teach Calvinism. To put it another way, they are not rejecting Love Wins so much as they are rejecting anything that is not Calvinism.

This is blatantly obvious if you’ve read any of the numerous books written in response to Love Wins, many of which are written by neo-Calvinists. Now to be clear, I’m not criticizing them for writing a response. That’s the moderate way! But what they and many others fail to perceive is that most of the ideas they critique in Love Wins are not critiques of universalism but of any sort of free-will theism.

Evangelics are not criticizing universalism
but basic free-will theism.

God Wins: A Case Study

An excerpt from God Wins by Mark Galli[1]...

[1] I should note that I don’t know Galli’s theological presuppositions. Indeed at points he seems to affirm free-will theism (see his response metaphor on 73-74). To me he appears to be either a confused/inconsistent free-will theist or a confused/inconsistent Calvinist.

...is helpful: “What is assumed in…Love Wins is that the human will is free, autonomous, and able to choose between alternatives. [Love Wins] assumes that the will is not fallen, that it needs no salvation, that it doesn’t even need help” (71).

A number of things jump out. First, where does Love Wins assume that the human will is not fallen and does not need help? This is a massive indictment and if it were true then I would assume all free-will theists would join in the indictment. But where is it? Page number? Nope. See the above section on being bad readers.

A second thing that jumps out is the lack of an acknowledgement of a mediating position; namely, that while the human will is naturally “turned in on itself” with a propensity towards evil, the grace (prevenient) of God heals our fallen will so that we can actually choose for God or against God. This idea—that prevenient grace heals our fallen will to the point that we can indeed make a decision for or against God—is not universalism. It is classical free-will theism, the predominant Christian understanding of the relationship between human will and divine grace for two thousand years (see Against Calvinism by Dr. Roger Olson for substantiation of this claim).

Does God Give Us What We Want?

Related to this is Galli’s critique of Bell’s central assertion in Love Wins: in the end, God gives us what we want. In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis suggests that the doors of hell are locked from the inside. That is, those who end up in hell are there because they wanted hell and not because God was keeping them out of heaven. God has forgiven everyone (or made forgiveness possible for everyone) through the cross so that salvation, redemption, and reconciliation are possible for every last person and thing in the cosmos. In my view, all Bell does is pick up this line of thought. It’s not universalism. Lewis was clearly not a Universalist and believed many would indeed choose hell (especially the theologians!). It is, I think, a fair and plausible explanation of what Scripture tells us about God and his purposes for the world.

But according to Galli, the idea that God gives us what we want would be “very bad news” (because he mistakenly dismisses the notion of prevenient grace wherein our wills can be healed so that we can indeed want God), and on top of that it’s "unbiblical." He tries to substantiate his claim by citing all the texts that talk about how we’re slaves to sin, insinuating they prove God doesn’t give us what we want because all we would want is sin. In doing so he makes the glaring mistake of failing to acknowledge the basic free-will explanation of such passages. At the risk of monotony, free-will theism holds that we are indeed enslaved by sin but by God’s grace our will is healed so that we can indeed make a decision for God. In other words, according to free-will theism, God does indeed give us what we want, granting us the grace so that we can make a decision for or against God.

Along these lines, to say that the idea that God gives us what we want is unbiblical is, to a free-will theist, itself unbiblical. I would argue that every single time Scripture admonishes us to repent or perish, to do evil or good, to obey God or disobey, to follow or not to follow Jesus, it is telling us that God gives us what we want. And to put it mildly, there are a lot more verses in the Bible about this than there are about our will being fallen, though both are true and easily reconciled by free-will theism.

Seen in this light, I think God giving us what we want is one of the most foundational and often-revealed truths in the Bible. It doesn’t necessitate some mushy sentimentalism in which God exists to serve our every need and wouldn’t criticize Hitler for beating the Virgin Mary. Nope. It just means that our God’s peculiar way of dealing with his creation is not to give it what it deserves. Rather it is for him to take what we deserve upon himself, up to the cross and down into the grave to ensure that none of us have to get what we deserve. We can get what we deserve if we so choose, but we don’t have to. And God doesn’t do this because he has to. He does it because he wants to, which is the great mystery we call love. Love wins? Yep. God wins? Yep.

Conclusions

So what does Love Wins say? I think it says that in the end the only thing we can be sure of is that God will do whatever he wants with us, and that Jesus and the Bible teach us that what God wants to do with us is let us have what we want. In other words, God lets us choose between heaven and hell. That sounds pretty orthodox to me. Now to be sure, Bell does flirt with universalism, so fire away with criticism at that. But the problem is that lots of the “evangelical” criticism isn’t that Bell teaches universalism: it’s that he doesn’t teach Calvinism.

So if the problem with Love Wins is it teaches that God graciously gives us the chance to choose between heaven and hell, then I think evangelicals should have a problem with those who have a problem with Love Wins. In the end, God does give us what we want. I can’t think of anything more evangelical…or biblical.

- Austin Fischer

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Comments

Scot McKnight says:

November 1, 2011 at 2:03 am

Austin,

Good points and a good discussion. I’ll avoid rehearsing what I like and zero in on three observations:

First, I’m not sure I said there was a blanket evangelical rejection of Bell’s book, but I’d be close to that. There was, then, a widespread rejection of the book. I don’t know how we can prove such things, but that is my perception. A number of letters came to me by associate pastors who told me they were being told to “declare their colors on Rob Bell.”

And of course part of what you are saying depends on what you mean by “evangelicalism,” and I tend to define it more narrowly than most rather than embracingly. For example, it makes no sense to me to say someone is an “evangelical” Catholic; I don’t think Michael Horton wants to be called “evangelical” in the popular sense; I see no reason to call Brian McLaren an evangelical; and I think Rob Bell is pushing the boundaries. (I’ll avoid discussing where I fit on that question.)

I’m willing to live with this ambiguity: what one person calls evangelical another person might not. That means where I see a widespread evangelical rejection you might not see i as widespread.

But it seems you slide into that we don’t know what Bell was saying. True in some ways, but I don’t think it is all that ambiguous what he is arguing.

Second, I haven’t read Mark Galli’s book yet … I saw some of it earlier. So I want to avoid that discussion, but the one thing I observed in the furor after the book came out — on the part of Calvinists — was the absence of what I would call distinctly Calvinist arguments. Galli does bring in the free will stuff, and the libertarian free theory at work in Bell is obvious and pervasive, but I saw none of this in the furor — and I mentioned that very point in the lectures at Truett.

Third, on your point about all disagreeing on the same point. Well, yes and no. I did lay out some responses but said I didn’t think they explained the furor. (Remember I was after why this book got so much heat.) So I don’t think everyone responded on the same grounds. But I do think [Bell's] combination of flirting with universalism and postmortem opportunity cuts the ground out from under evangelicalism’s specific identity-marker: it’s emphasis on a conversion experience in this life. Bell calls that into question, and it is my suggestion why the book drew the heat it did.

On the very last point, well I think you’re fudging: it’s not just that God gives folks what they want, which is somewhat evangelical (but not Calvinistic [re election - skinhead]), but that God continues to offer that in the postmortem condition. That’s enough to create liminality for the existence of evangelicalism.

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lim·i·nal·i·ty (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/liminality)

/ˌlɪməˈnælɪti/ Show Spelled[lim-uh-nal-i-tee] noun Anthropology.

the transitional period or phase of a rite of passage, during which the participant lacks social status or rank, remains anonymous, shows obedience and humility, and follows prescribed forms of conduct, dress, etc.

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Additional Observations

McKnight - "That's enough to create liminality for the existence of evangelicalism"

I should like to ask Scot the further meaning of his expression. Does it support or not support evangelicalism's case... my take is that it doesn't support evangelicalism, giving its movement a limited shelf life in the Christian eras to come, even though the statement of "God giving man what he wants" is both true now and after death.

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Fishcer - "... the great mystery called love."

Peter Rollins speaks to this point in his book Insurrection wherein he describes love as selfless, sacrificial, creative, ordering. Love is like the void before creation. Without love there is nothing just as without creation there is nothing. Love cannot exist on its own but only in service to others... and in this case, through the Creator-God who chooses to love man, to recreate man through his love, and to be in fellowship with man (and all things that would sustain man).

http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/11/peter-rollins-on-insurrection-of.html.

Here is my loose adaptation of what Peter Rollins is saying:

"The Resurrection plays a key role... because after the death of God-as-an-idol (or product) we then discover God is love. While an idol exists, is sublime, and is meaningful on its own, love is none of these things. Love does not exist in itself but brings all things into existence; love is not sublime, but points to others and calls them sublime; love is not meaningful in its own right, but renders the world meaningful."

- RE Slater