Star War's Sense of Mission in the Bible: "May the Force Be With You"

 

The Star Wars Reboot and the Bible

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2012/08/15/jeff-cook-could-believing-in-god-harm-your-soul/

 

by Jeff Cook

Oct 14, 2013

Comments

 

Nerd out with me, and watch the video posted below. I resonated with these observations and found that all four apply well to why we love the Bible and how we should read it.

 

Rule #1: The setting is the frontier.

 

Star Wars doesn’t happen in the city. It doesn’t happen in parliament, or in the library. It happens out here away from civilization amidst smugglers and bounty hunters. Star Wars is a western and it’s set in the frontier.

 

So too, the Bible is written in times of hardship–not at a seminary, monastery or a common church building.

 

Most of the Bible was edited and composed by those in distress after the symbol of their faith–the Temple–had been torn apart (either in 587 BC for the Old Testament or 70 AD for the New). The writers picture both the desolation as well as a whole new world arriving. The setting is the frontier and there is deep anticipation of God’s future.

 

Rule # 2: The future is old.

 

Star Wars beauty isn’t clean. It isn’t new. It’s dirty, gritty, a second hand world. The beauty of the frontier.

 

So too, We discover new and progressive truths in the ancient when we read the scriptures. The soul-moving beauties presented by God are often wrapped in disease, politics and blood. In order to love the Bible, I must get my mind covered in muck and my heart aware of God’s voice in the alleyways and truck stops.

 

The Bible is not clean! it is graphic literature that uses foul imagery to display the grand and abiding grace of God.

 

Rule 3: The Force is mysterious.

 

We don’t always need an explanation. The greatest power of the Force is it’s sense of magic. That comes from the unknown.

 

Christians–especially those who do work like I do–consistently fall victim to this trap (and yes “it’s a trap”).

 

The Author of reality doesn’t explain everything in neat little package (thankfully). One of the primary attributes of the real God is that He so often hides, speaking through donkeys and storms and flaming bushes in seemingly random, brief encounters. The God of the Bible allows tension and longing and hopes finally realized. This is true not only in the text but in the lives of the faithful today.

 

As such, we lose the real God when we make God’s work and priorities systematic and obvious–the result of mere deduction. The real God is like the wind, said Jesus, blowing where he wishes–sometimes cooling our brows, sometimes igniting small sparks into a wildfire.

 

If we make following Jesus about Jedi “midi-chlorian levels” we lose huge and no one will care.

 

Rule 4: Star Wars isn’t cute.

 

Walk into the wrong bar, lose your arm. Don’t pay your debts, end up in carbonite. The frontier is a dangerous place. It’s never cute or silly. It’s not child proofed. It’s freakin’ Star Wars – and Han always shoots first.

 

What world do you think we live in?!?

 

The common portrait of life on earth in the Bible is a spiritual war zone, overrun with villains, troubles and a soul-infecting disease unleashed on humanity that will crush everything we care for if God does not act.

 

Jesus’ charge–perhaps the words he said more than any others– was “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” In other words, we live in enemy occupied territory, a revolution is underway, and we are invited to flip the world right side up again through an ancient and decisive force: we are to embrace this force at every turn; we are to lean in to it because this force never fails.

 

Resurrecting, cruciform love is the power of the living God–the force that binds the galaxy together. Christ’s love has been unleashed into our world, and in the end everything will be transformed by its power and scope.

 

The Bible isn’t cute. Its a subversive manifesto in the midst of a dangerous world inviting us to throw off every chain of the present regime for the easy yoke offered by the world’s true heir.

 

 

Jeff Cook pastors Atlas Church in Greeley Colorado. He teaches philosophy at UNC and is the author of Everything New: One Philosopher’s Search for a God Worth Believing In. @jeffvcook

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Does God Move and Act in the Universe? - "Eight Positions of Divine Sovereignty"

Options in Divine Action

http://thomasjayoord.com/index.php/blog/archives/options_in_divine_action/#.Ula2i9KsiSo

by Thomas Oord

Dec 13, 2010

A recurring interest of mine is pondering how God acts. It's an immensely complex subject. I've come to think eight main options present themselves to Christians wanting a general framework for considering divine action.

Below is a chart of the eight general options. Some options are more attractive to me than others are. Those nearer the middle of the chart are most attractive.

Less Attractive Options

The options on the far left of the chart presuppose a very controlling God. The universe is virtually a puppet, because God controls everything or almost everything. This view of divine sovereignty, in my opinion, allows little or no room for genuine creaturely freedom or agency. These options fit some Calvinist theologies.

The options at the far right have problems as well. Although I think some degree of mystery should always be present when pondering how God acts, absolute mystery negates the entire enterprise of believing in God. I can't affirm wholescale negative theology.

Deism is not a viable option for me. My own personal experience, the Bible, and from reports of people throughout history testify to the ongoing activity of God after the creation of our universe. Thoroughgoing deism allows no room to account well for the spiritual experiences of my life and the lives of most people who have every lived.

More Attractive Options

Among the four remaining options, I see strengths and weaknesses.

Traditional freewill theism fits most of what John Wesley says about God's action. So I'm partial to that option. God generally gives freedom and only occasionally "interrupts" or "intervenes" the freedom God gives.

Natural and/or Supernatural Action fits most of what I read in the writings of important theologians like Thomas Aquinas. His version of divine primary and secondary causation has been influential, although I don't think it answers some of the most important questions pertaining to theodicy.

What I've called the Steady State Divine Influence option has the advantage of an active God whose causal activity is uniform. This option fits well with theologies that emphasize God working in and with the laws of nature. But it has a more difficult time accounting for miracles. And most versions say God is voluntarily self-limited and the gifts of freedom and/or agency God gives are entirely voluntary on God’s part.

The option I currently like most is Essential Kenosis Freewill Theism. It says God necessarily gives freedom and/or agency to others. But the forms of God’s causal influence vary. And the effectiveness of God's activity depends in part on creaturely responses. It seems to fit best both with the idea that God creates and works with natural laws and the idea that God can act dramatically – miraculously – without squashing creaturely freedom and agency entirely.

I like to think Essential Kenosis Freewill Theism option takes Wesley's theology of prevenient grace, puts it on turbo charge, and then offers a consistent basis for affirming God's love. This is the option I develop in the last chapter of my new book, The Nature of Love: A Theology (Chalice Press) and in Defining Love: A Philosophical, Scientific, and Theological Engagement (Brazos Press).

We Live by Faith

At the end of the day, of course, there will always be a speculative element to thinking about how God acts in the world. We live by faith, after all. None of our minds can comprehend the Universal Mind.

But some divine action options make better sense of what we find in Scripture, in our own experience, and contemporary science. And some do a better job of consistently affirming God's love.

* * * * * * * * * *

An Observation

Of note is that both ends move away from the idea of Open Theism while the middle positions are various versions of Open Theism from weak to strong to weak. Tom Oord's selection of EKFT will fit best with Wesleyan-Arminian theology, which would also fit best with this website's position of divine sovereignty (one which is always open), human free will (open), and relational theism (the freeing nature and action of the love of God).

R.E. Slater

October 12, 2013

continue to -

Index to past articles on "Calvinism v. Arminianism"

 

The Certainty of Completion Against Despair

Certainty Against Despair

by R.E. Slater

In life there is death;

and in death there is life;

It is here in this wilderness

where both life and death find,

Completeness from the other

despite the jagged shards within.

In our agony lies a greater finality,

a greater promise bound in the

Time worn promises of a

healing yet to occur,

Bound in the promise of God

Beyond death's reach.

Even as sorrow and tragedy

unbind wounded hearts,

So forgiveness in grief's silence

rebind broken souls waiting,

Eternally waiting for completeness

a'washed tears of grief.

Silence is the wisdom 

which comes from living,

Hope is the deep balm

which comes from knowing,

These, the severe gifts of the mortal

allowed the human breast.

And yet, there is another gift,

the promise of God to all who wait,

A promise that life and death

find meaning in His fellowship,

'Til the world ends and He comes

in the silences of grief's mortality.

- R. E. Slater

3.19,2019

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

We all bear a past even as we envision a future. One pointing forward to the present present while the other points backwards to the same. Each present present is made from all past presents even as each present present forms the basis for a future made from all past presents. For some, our pasts remain with us for a lifetime. For others the present doesn't stay with us long enough. Even as for others the future doesn't come soon enough, and when it does, doesn't last long enough, or satisfy fully enough. Mostly, we feel abandoned... of ourselves that disappear too quickly into the fogs of what once was, and could have been, to then as quickly slip clear of its own present time. A time we would but wish to hold onto a bit longer leaving a feeling of brokenness lingering in our bones. A brokenness that isn't quite complete, quite healed, quite ended. A brokenness needing more time to savor, to sit within quietly, beholding its sublimity. A sublimity requiring an ending, requiring a healing, or a fullness, and most always requiring melodic notes of completion in soothing choruses of comfort and embrace.

And it is in this sense that death doesn't come just once, but repeatedly through our present presents. Ending things before they are ended. Removing things that were wonderful to know and experience. Feel, and touch. Turning us forwards away from our steady backwards stare. Pushing us away from loved ones, glad times, and things we might hold onto for too long for their dearness of life to us. But in another sense, death holds the keys of life within its grasp. For wherever death is - so is life. Each defining the other with purpose and meaning. Otherwise there would be no present to move into. Nor a future to think about. There could be no other orientation than that of a black blackness, or nothingness, or lifeless silence. In each, both in death and in life, can be found the habitation of the other. Each defining the other with meaning and prose like two halves of the same coin without which there could be no coin:

⁵⁵ “Where, O death, is your victory?
     Where, O death, is your sting?”^[i]

⁵⁶ The sting of death is sin,

    and the power of sin is the law.

⁵⁷ But thanks be to God! He gives to us

   the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

⁵⁰[For] I declare to you, brothers and sisters,

that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,

nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

⁵¹ Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep,

but we will all be changed -

⁵² in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye,

at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound,

the dead will be raised imperishable,

and we will be changed.

⁵³ For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable,

and the mortal with immortality.

⁵⁴ When the perishable has been clothed

with the imperishable,

and the mortal with immortality,

then the saying that is written will come true:

“Death has been swallowed up in victory.”

- 1 Cor 15.50-57

In but a few short sentences and observations the Apostle Paul sums up the Christian hope. That life's completion and fullness is forever fulfilled in the Christ of the Cross where mortality is clothed with immortality, and the perishable with imperishability. It is Christianity's bold proclaim that God's divine presence will forever inhabit creation's seeming voids of presence with purposeful meaning. Its horridness and evil. Threading each broken life into the holy garments of re-creation where each suffering life may find its final completion and rest. Allowing no earthly work to be forgotten. No tearful prayer unheard. No rent passion unfulfilled. No relationship a final finality. Knowing that all who are broken may come through Jesus for immortal healing and life everlasting. And not simply in the next life but, if possible, to begin even now in this very life of our present present in which we live. Possessing lives filled with death with lives filled with eternal hope, love, mercy, forgiveness, kindness, and compassion. Bourne by the Spirit of God, and the Spirit of Christ, whose Spirit pervades and overcomes life's many deaths with life's intended sense of meaning and divine purpose.

This is the Christian hope. A hope that is present in our present present filling us with the knowledge that our pasts our neither meaningless, nor forgotten, but bound up in the presence of the God of life and breath. The God of immortality and purpose. Who holds each life dear though we may hold it too cheaply, and thereby abandon ourselves to despair, to hatred or jealousy, to unforgotten pains, thus allowing death to live within lives (made up of present moments) meant for life. It is this Jesus who brings life to those who are dead. Who wish to live lives filled with fullness and meaning. Bravely facing all future deaths with the promise of ever-present life overcoming each and every death and pain, sorrow and woe, separation, harm, and hurt. Nay, we are not abandoned. We cannot be. Not by a God of life who would overcome all evils with His love and wisdom. It is such a one to whom we would look to, to find life's meaning, and death's demise: "O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting? But thanks be to God who has given to us the victory through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ."

R.E. Slater

October 10, 2013

A Second Sight
by R.E. Slater

Burnt Norton, No. 1 of "Four Quartets"

by T.S. Eliot

N.T. Wright, "Paul and the Faithfulness of God" (Vol 4) - Rome and Its Empire

Rome as Empire and Emperor Worship

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/10/10/rome-as-empire-and-emperor-worship/

by Scot McKnight

Oct 10, 2013

Comments 

I have been reading theological books for forty plus years. In that time only one truly great piece of writing stands out as a book deserving reading for the poetry of its prose, and that was Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus, a book with a story so good and a conclusion so wrong. Yet, no book stands next to it when it comes to prose. Until N.T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God, a book zippered up with eloquence and tightened by potent observations. Read it for the prose.

 

I should perhaps note that when Tom was the good bishop he had many other responsibilities; now freed to be a professor we might long for the day when his big books were only 700 pages or so!

 

In this chp we get to the heart of the new contribution that PFG will make; here is a full display of the imperial cult as a/the context for understanding Paul’s claim that Jesus is Lord. That Tom knows this claim will be given considerable pushback explains the detail and vigorous prose and evidence-based conclusions. There can be no doubt the emperor, from Augustus on, was worshiped or prayed to (and for); the issue will be how much this figured into Paul’s theological claims about Jesus as Lord.

 

So what is, or better yet, was religion in Paul’s world?

When Paul arrived in Ephesus, Philippi or anywhere else with his message about the one God and his crucified and risen son, he was not offering an alternative way of being ‘religious’ in the sense of a private hobby, something to do in a few hours at the weekend. He was offering a heart transplant for an entire community and its culture. If ‘the centrality of Artemis was part of what it meant to be an Ephesian,’43 it is not surprising that Paul’s ministry there caused a riot (255). 

By the same token, even the small beginnings of a ‘thick description’ of greco-roman culture such as we have made here indicate that when Paul arrived in a town and began to speak about the one true God, and about this God raising from the dead a man called Jesus who was now to be invoked, worshipped and hailed as kyrios, there was a whole network of assumptions, vested interests, long-cherished traditions, hopes and fears both personal and civic, which would be aroused. When the antagonists in Philippi declare that Paul and Silas are Jews, throwing the city into an uproar by ‘teaching customs which it’s illegal for us Romans to accept or practise’,122 and when the crowd in Thessalonica yell out that Paul and Silas have been ‘turning the world upside down’ by ‘acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus’,123 we can understand, in view of the evidence so far surveyed in this chapter, that these, though carrying an inescapably political dimension, were fundamentally to do with a strong, deep-rooted culture, and within that culture with something we may as well call ‘religion’. ‘Religion’ may not be ultimately the best category for describing or analyzing what Paul was doing, or what he thought he was doing. But it is certainly a key and basic element in what his contemporaries will have seen him doing and heard him saying. And with ‘religion’, in all of these complex senses, we are dealing with what today we might call ‘the fabric of society’, the things which held people together and gave shape and meaning to their personal and corporate life (273-274).

But a pressing issue in today’s scholarship is Caesar or, to ramp him up one notch, Empire.

The Roman empire was the great new Fact of the world which included the Palestine of Jesus’ boyhood and the Cilicia of Saul’s. It proclaimed itself as a bright new world: new roads with new soldiers to march along them, new taxes and new coins to pay them with, new administrations and law- courts, local officials falling over themselves to erect splendid, presti- gious new temples to the divine royal house. New crosses by the roadside, displaying the bird-pecked remains of rebels. Whole cities were redesigned to give honour to the emperor and his family, portrayed, often enough, in the guise of the ancient pagan divinities. Perhaps, after all, the gods had come down in human form. Rome took the eagle as its symbol; popular legend and iconography suggested a direct link to Jupiter, the highest god of all (279).

Now to Empire:

It was not by military force alone that Augustus consolidated his power, or that his successors maintained it. It has been shown in great detail that from the beginning the empire used every available means in art, architecture, literature and culture in general – everything from tiny coins to the rebuild- ing of entire city centres – to communicate to the Roman people near and far the message that Augustus’s rise to power was the great new moment for which Rome, and indeed the whole world, had been waiting. This is what I mean, in this broad sense and in the present context, by ‘rhetoric’ (294).

Wright provides extensive discussion of the empire narrative, the narrative that says history is coming to a golden moment in the Empire’s Caesars, at work in the Roman world among the Roman historians — from Horace and Ovid and Livy but especially Virgil, about whom Wright makes an important observation, one with which I agree:

There is every reason to suppose that an intelligent boy growing up in Tarsus, or for that matter in Jerusalem, would know at least its [Virgil's Aeneid's] main themes, if not its finer details (307). [And now to the conclusion:] “But his grand narrative stands to the grand narrative of Israel’s scriptures, together with their putative final chapter, at worst as a kind of parody, at best as another altar to an unknown god” (311).

Wright ventures into the Empire as religion, or the imperial cult, with a swirling set of paragraphs loaded up with nuances and claims that in spite of all this variety there remains something we can call the “imperial cult.”

1. There was a long tradition in the East of a divine monarchy.
2. There was a long tradition as well of worshiping the goddess Roma, Dea Roma.
3. Hercules was long associated with someone transcendent, with the divine. Flanking him are intellectual and civic heroes seen as gods.
4. There is the decline of traditional religion and the decision by Augustus to restore the ancient religion/cult, revealing the connection between the new leader and the old gods.
5. Homes and some more localized settings had their own shrines and religious settings(Lares and Penates). By the use of one word — augusti — these got connected to Augustus himself, leading religious customs to be more connected to the emperor.
6. Traditional deities were absorbed and renamed in new cultures, as when the Greek gods got new Latin/Roman names and became Roman gods. Kings got connected to these gods as well.  Augustus was portrayed as Jupiter or Zeus.
7. And Rome’s power was absorbed when local elites, chosen to represent Rome, were unafraid in expressing gratitude to Rome for their gifts and protection.

Now we get to the “divinity of Augustus,” something ambiguously worded but seemingly clear in implication: the man was divine. From a decree in Asia we learn these things:  

Augustus has bestowed great benefits, including ‘salvation’; Asia has held a competition to see who can propose the best way of honouring him, which has been won by the proconsul who suggested this reordering of the calendar. Augustus’s rule has proved a new beginning for the world, and for individuals. He has been raised, as it were, to cosmogonic stature; the Roman imperial system has been equated with the cosmic structures of the world. The events surrounding Augustus’s coming to power are therefore ‘good news’, euangelia, a word virtually always in the plural in such contexts, though, interestingly, always in the singular in the New Testament. This ‘good news’ is not merely a nice piece of information to cheer you up on a bad day, but the public, dramatic announcement that something has happened through which the world has changed for ever and much for the better (327).

Wright catalogs the evidence around the Roman Empire. Everywhere cities had altars and centers for Augustus; space was shaped to focus on the emperor. Here is how Wright puts it together for a good reminder:

There was indeed, then, no single thing we can call ‘the emperor cult’ at any time during the reign of Augustus. However, from the hints in Horace and Virgil to the enthusiastic temple-building in Asia and Palestine, to the soldiers’ drinking-cups in Switzerland, Augustus was the name that was found, literally, on everybody’s lips. The cults worked their way into domes- tic and workshop shrines, and onto signet rings, oil lamps and numerous other small artefacts. Libations were offered to the emperor at every feast whether public or private, a ruling from as early as 30 BC in the enthusiastic aftermath of Actium. However varied the cultic phenomena, however piecemeal the development, however ambiguous some of the phraseology, people were doing with Augustus what they had long done with the ancient pantheon: building temples to his honour, invoking him in prayer, offering sacrifice to him (334). 

The cults, in all their variety, and for all their blending of Augustus with other divinities and especially with Roma herself, came down to a focus on Augustus himself as the lynch-pin to the whole symbolic universe. Thus all the lines, east and west and in Rome itself, pointed to one conclusion, which was confirmed shortly after the great man finally died on 19 August in AD 14. Numerius Atticus, a senator, declared on oath that he had seen Augustus ascending, like Romulus, into heaven. Livia, Augustus’s widow, paid him a million sesterces for his trouble. Augustus thus received in death what he had refused to receive in his life. Suddenly, therefore, what was formerly forbidden now became urgent. A shrine for Augustus was at last built in Rome itself, priests were appointed, with Livia herself as priestess and a new college of priests, the sodales Augustales, consisting of leading senators. A golden image of the late emperor was placed in the temple of Mars, the architectural focus of Augustus’s civic building programme. Other rites and ceremonies were voted. Whereas with Julius Caesar it had taken some time for deification to occur, with Augustus it happened very quickly. This was the final, public, dotting of the ‘i’s and crossing of the ‘t’s in the message that the world had been able to read for some time (335).

Augustus then had climbed to top of Olympus; Tiberius, his successor, was immediately “son of god,” or son of the divine Augustus. Tiberius was moody; Gaius Caligula an egomaniac. Claudius kept pace. Nero was unstable but he too was given similar honors.

 

This is the makings of empire ideology and counter-ideology on the part of the apostle Paul. Was Paul, then, using language to counter the imperial cult in its various forms and ideas?

 

You may know that Joe Modica and I were co-editors of a book called Jesus is Lord, Caesar is Not, a book that examined claims made by scholars about anti-empire ideology at work in the NT authors. Our collection of authors routinely argued the evidence was overcooked. Not one of the authors under examination put together as much evidence as is put together here by Tom Wright, meaning we are in need of yet one more evaluation.

 

Continue to Index -

 

Index to the "New(er) Perspective(s) of Paul"

 

 

 

 

 

 

In "Jesus" the Muslim Allah and the Christian Yahweh Become as One Father

 

 

 

"Go beyond mere tolerance to a passion for Muslims. Nabeel Jabbour explains

how  that can be done in ways that are sensitive to Islamic culture and provides

suggestions on how to build vital relationships with Muslims."

Allah and Yahweh — The Difference Jesus Makes

http://www.biblical.edu/index.php/faculty-blog/96-regular-content/788-allah-and-yahweh-the-difference-jesus-makes

 

by Steve Taylor

Monday, 07 October 2013

 

Are Allah of Muslims and Yahweh the same God? Yes, when the veil is lifted from

their eyes and Muslims see Him as the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. Fine-tuning

to see Yahweh as He truly is takes place through Christ. Christ is the visible image

of the invisible God.

 

Any Christian pursuing deeper relationships with Muslims eventually has to struggle with this question: Allah and Yahweh—are they the same God? This question became the topic of heated discussion at the annual convention of a notable evangelical denomination this past summer.  Delegates to this gathering were put off by a paragraph in an appendix to a minority report from a study committee working on evangelism in Muslim contexts. (Yes, it was buried that deep!) Here is the offending paragraph:

 

Are Allah of Muslims and Yahweh the same God? Yes, when the veil is lifted from their eyes and Muslims see Him as the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. Fine-tuning to see Yahweh as He truly is takes place through Christ. Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.

 

Pastors, elders, and theologians weighing in subsequently on denominational discussion boards and affiliated blog sites have accused the author of the statement of peddling a rehash of the old line, classical Liberalism opposed by J. Gresham Machen or of enticing the denomination to the cliff of a “syncretism” in which “Islam remains but Christianity is not needed”. The firestorm has not abated.

 

The author of the minority report, Dr. Nabeel Jabbour, a Syrian Christian by birth, is a veteran of over 40 years of ministry to Muslims in the Middle East. In his minority report and in other writings,* Dr. Jabbour amply evinces a clear commitment to the gospel and to the exclusive supremacy of Christ as the climactic and final revelation of God. The issue Dr. Jabbour raises is, rather, how best to dialogue with people who are still unconvinced: what kind of persons should we be and where should we start?

Context Matters

 

These concerns are evident even in the immediate context of the offending paragraph (repeated below in bold font):

 

There is only one God, and He is Yahweh, the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is the tendency of all human beings to bring down, as it were, that almighty God and to place Him in our little boxes. Those little gods that we tend to create are not the Almighty God. The Jews at the time of Jeremiah did it, although they gave him the name Yahweh. . . . Yahweh, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, cannot be placed into a box.

 

Are Allah of the Arab Christians and Yahweh the same God? Yes, when we do not have a veil over our eyes and when we do not bring Him down to become our servant who is supposed to answer our prayers and do what we think He should do. . . .

 

There is only one Yahweh, yet all people in all religions project their image of what He is like and assume that they are worshipping that Yahweh when in reality they are worshipping their own creations.

 

The Allah or God in Islam has 99 attributes, and we would agree with most of them. But the huge missing names are “Father of the Lord Jesus Christ” and “our heavenly Father.” . . . (Emphasis added; repetitive sentences omitted)

 

Critics insist that it is precisely these missing names (and attending concepts), which are so central to the Christian concept of God, that demand a complete and explicit rejection of any identity between Yahweh and the Allah--as a precondition for any meaningful discussion or evangelism.

 

An Historical Analogue

 

But consider this definition for God taught to Christian children for several centuries in certain sectors of the Church: “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth” (Westminster Shorter Catechism [1674]). Most thoughtful Muslims could agree with this statement; there is nothing distinctively Christian in it. Could this definition serve as common ground in a Muslim-Christian discussion?

 

This could be pressed further: Why would Christian theologians intent on instructing future generations of the Church write such a definition? Why not follow the Apostles’ and Nicene Creed with explicitly Christian claims like, “God is the all-mighty, all-knowing Tri-Personal Creator who was active in the story of Israel, and who is ultimately revealed in the person of Jesus Christ and dwells among us in the person of the Holy Spirit . . . ”?

 

The authors of the Shorter Catechism were defining God in a context framed by a long discussion spanning over 1700 years and reaching back to Greek philosophers: the Supreme Being had to be defined first in these “essentialist” terms. The “Westminster Divines” wanted to speak into the long conversation about that particular Referent, not start a new conversation about another. Whatever its other merits and demerits, this definition is, in itself, pre-Christian if not “sub-Christian”; but that is part of the necessary price paid to intelligibly inject new meaning into an old and venerable conversation. And the willingness to join that conversation is itself an act of faith in the God who has already been at work in the great conversations of history.

 

Conceptual Help

 

It might help to borrow some distinctions from linguistic philosophy. Swiss thinker Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) described meaningful communication as the interplay between three factors:

1. The “signifier” – the sound or marks on a page that one recognizes as a sign, in our case, the words “Allah,” “Yahweh” or “God.”
2. The “signified” – the concept, idea, or mental content that a sign (“signifier”) expresses or evokes, in our case the different concepts and theologies that characterize the various Christian and Islamic systems.
3. The “referent” – the actual thingor person, or set of things or persons, to which a sign (or “signifier”) refers, in our case the actual person God is in God’s self.

The critics of the offending paragraph above assume a virtual identity between their set of “signifieds” (concepts, ideas about God) and the “referent” (God). For them the obvious differences between what they mean by God and what the Muslim theologian means is so great that there cannot possibly be a common referent for a Christian and any Muslim. The Christian is thus duty-bound to start with a different “signifier” (a different name for God) or to start with a list of differences about the “signified.”  The proclamation of the absolute antithesis becomes the sine qua non of faithful evangelism.  For them the conceptual cup of shared language and concepts for evangelism is always less than half empty and the contents poisonous.

 

The author of the contested quotation, on the other hand, is acutely aware of how all our concepts and systems of concepts about God fall short of God’s true glory and that there is individual variation; not all Muslims are in precisely the same place. The cup of shared concepts is frequently half full and represents a God-engineered starting place for the mysterious process of making disciples.

 

Pauline Precedent

 

Paul is the first Jewish preacher on record who, upon observing  rank pagan idolatry, did not heap scorn on it (like the Old Testament prophets rightfully did—Isa 44:18-20, Jer 2:27, Hos 4:12) but rather used it as a starting point: “the God you already worship in ignorance is the one I want to tell you about. . . . he created all the nations throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries. His purpose was for the nations to seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him -- though he is not far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and exist. As some of you own poets have said, 'We are his offspring'” (Acts 17:23-28). Paul did not lead with, “Let me tell you about a different God” but rather with “This is what the God you and your poets have been groping after is really like.” Paul was alert to a rather small set of shared “signifieds” and assumed that he could talk about the same “referent”—he could start where his audience was.

 

Of course there are risks, dangers of syncretism. This, however, is the point: there are dangers on both sides. Dealing faithfully with the gospel is always a matter of walking a ridge route; one can fall off the path both to the left and the right. The gospel demands a creative faithfulness by which we avoid sliding down either the slope of syncretism (compromising the faith) or the slope defensiveness and fear (bridling the faith). [And it is] in that spirit we can join with the author of the minority report and issue the Muslim this sincere invitation: come know the Creator God more fully; discover that the one you and your poets have served as “Allah” is the God who through His Son Jesus and by His Spirit wants to be embraced as “Abba.”

 

 

* * * * * * * * * * *

 

NOTE:  Dr. Jabbour’s The Crescent through the Eyes of the Cross: Insights from an Arab Christian (Colorado Springs, CO: NAV Press, 2008) is a must read for any Christian serious about befriending Muslims and reaching them with the gospel.

 

Stephen Taylor is fascinated by God’s commitment to work in and through human history and culture—a commitment most clearly displayed in God’s sending of his Son, “born of a woman, born under the law.” Steve specializes, therefore, not only in the Pauline letters as inspired texts but also in the elements which form their historical, cultural and religious context, e.g., Early Judaism, Greco-Roman history and culture, and most radically, the career of Jesus, the Crucified and Risen Messiah.

 

 

Don Thorsen, Calvin vs Wesley - "God's Grace: How Calvin and Wesley Differ"

Grace, and the God of that Grace

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/10/09/grace-and-the-god-of-that-grace/

 

by Scot McKnight

Oct 9, 2013

Comments 



Don Thorson



A rock-solid agreement on which Christians of all stripes — and I mean all stripes — should agree is that God is gracious and that the whole of our redemption comes from God’s grace. So, humans don’t save themselves, they don’t become loving or holy by themselves, and they don’t stand up from the grave by themselves. They can no more rise from the dead by themselves than be born again by themselves. So, we can all  agree that it is all of grace.

 

Yet, we differ. Over grace. In ways that get the bristles raised among some. John Calvin - whose viewpoint was “not within the historic mainstream” and whose view was more in line with Augustine; and John Wesley - whose viewpoint was the historic Christian mainstream and who was “Semi-Augustinian” [not semi-Pelagian], differed in some dramatic way — though they both stood together on firm ground that it was all of grace. All of this is sketched well in Don Thorsen, Calvin vs. Wesley: Bringing Belief in Line with Practice.

 

My questions today: What picture of God emerges from Calvin’s view of grace? What picture of God emerges from Wesley’s view of grace?

 

Thorsen’s sketch of the two views of grace can be see in these two ways: for Calvin, grace is effectual. God determines, acts, sustains, and accomplishes salvation and humans are “passive.”

 

For Wesley, grace is prevenient in that God showers grace upon all and that grace is triggered into effectiveness by the gracious granting on God’s part of human freedom (“free grace”).

 

To show what Wesley believes, I quote from Thorsen’s summary:

God is thought to limit voluntarily God’s own power over people (which does not represent a genuine limitation in God’s sovereignty) so that people may act responsibly and not irresistibly. By means of God’s prevenient work of grace, which is universally available through the Holy Spirit in the lives of people, people may genuinely respond without God effectually determining their choices. When people do respond, of course, they are thought to be genuinely responsible for sin and the evil that occurs. Sin and evil do not occur irresistibly, because of God’s sovereignty and irresistible grace, but through people’s active rebellion or passive indifference to God (49).

Calvin’s emphasis is on the sovereign determinations of God. One of the important elements of Calvin’s theology is that it is all of grace, to be sure, and furthermore it is all in the determinations of God, to be sure, and God’s grace is irresistible from beginning to end, but the reprobates (damned, unsaved, etc) are responsible for their sin and their final judgment. All of this shows the sovereignty of God and is therefore to God’s (sovereign) glory.

 

Calvin believed in general grace, which is God’s goodness to all of creation in the normal affairs of life, and a special grace, which is the saving grace of God. But Wesley’s "net" in God's general grace was a bit wider than Calvin’s though he distinguished general grace from prevenient grace — the grace that offers and makes salvation available to all. General grace will later be called “common grace.”  Both also emphasized the “means of grace” (like sacraments, church, preaching, prayer) though their lists do differ on what gets included on the list.

 

They are both grace-theologians, but they differ substantively when it comes to how that grace of God works.

continue to Index of Articles -

 

Index to past articles on Calvinism v. Wesleyanism

 

 

 

 

 

 

From Paul's New Perspective to a Fresh Perspective of Paul

From New Perspective to Fresh Perspective to … what’s next?
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/10/08/from-new-perspective-to-fresh-perspective-to-whats-next/

by Scot McKnight

Oct 8, 2013

Comments

 

In N.T. Wright’s earlier work on Paul he advocated a pioneering orientation we now call the New Perspective, in part because Wright himself used that expression but even more because J.D.G. Dunn called the whole movement that. Then less than a decade ago Wright wrote a little book on Paul that added to the new perspective and he himself called it the “fresh” perspective. What Wright added to the NPP was anti-imperial themes: Paul was not only extending Judaism but he was intentionally provoking the idea that confessing Jesus as Lord was consciously saying “Caesar was not.”

 

What happens now in Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God, and I have not worked it all the way through, will yet again advance the new and fresh perspectives. What happens here is a renewal of Paul’s Greek and Roman worlds as more central to the mission and message of Paul. In effect, Paul becomes in part a “philosopher” — of the Greek sort — not your ivory tower university theoretician but an on-the-ground and concerned-with-the-world kind of philosopher. The kind we see in Socrates and Plato perhaps more than in Aristotle, but Wright’s focus here is toward the value of the Stoics — Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. To this mix Wright adds a little bit of the great Roman, Cicero — and a sketch of the Wisdom of Solomon as a Jewish predecessor of just this kind of interactive thinking.

 

So, we get a Paul of two worlds — the Jewish world and the Roman world, now not two worlds but one world, mixed together and not separate as one might have on a library categorization. The days of Hengel’s famous studies of Judaism and Hellenism have come to fruition in a fresh synthesis in this new work by N.T. Wright. The days too of superficial parallelisms are also over: here we find a more robust set of worldview ideas being compared to one another.

 

The Paul of Acts 17; then, the one who could stand on the same dais as the philosophers of Athens, is a thoroughly Jewish and at the same time a Hellenized Jew, a Jew who could do philosophy in the modes of that day, particularly of that day, the Stoics. He was not unlike the Wisdom of Solomon, then. The old-fashioned Jew OR Greek, then, is broken down in this new edition of Tom Wright’s through on Paul. I give now samples of the progress of his chapter on this very topic…and we are just getting started in a book that goes on more than 1500 pages.

So Paul has been studied in ‘departments of religion’, though neither in ancient nor in modern terms do his letters, or the communities which he founded, belong primarily in such a category (203).

Where do we locate Paul’s world, Paul’s audience, and so Paul’s angles? Wright says in Stoicism.

Whereas the default mode of most modern westerners is some kind of Epicureanism, the default mode for many of Paul’s hearers was some kind of Stoicism. Observing the differences between the two, particularly at the level of assumptions, is therefore vital if we are to ‘hear’ Paul as many of his first hearers might have done. If, when someone says the word ‘god’, we think at once of a distant, detached divinity – as most modern westerners, being implicitly Epicureans or at least Deists, are likely to do – we are unlikely to be able imaginatively to inhabit the world of many in Corinth, Philippi, Ephesus and elsewhere for whom the word ‘god’ might reasonably be expected to denote the divinity which indwelt, through its fiery physical presence, all things, all people, the whole cosmos. 

Stoicism, after all, was the classic form of pantheism, the doctrine that sees divinity in everything. Saying this to someone today might appear to suggest that ‘everything’ is therefore in its essence ‘spiritual’, pointing back to some kind of Platonic vision of a ‘real’ world beyond space, time and matter. Stoicism, however, went in the opposite direction: everything, including the divine force or presence indwelling all things and all people, was ‘material’ or ‘corporeal’, not far from what we would normally call ‘physical’ (though all these terms are slippery with age and varied usage) (213).

An example: Paul can sound at times like the Stoic Epictetus.

Epictetus, more than any other whose writings have come down to us, exemplifies the ‘diatribe’ style, which emerges most obviously in the New Testament in some passages in Paul’s letter to the Romans. There are times, indeed, when it sounds as if Epictetus and Paul had grown up in the same street: 

What then? (ti oun) Do I say that man is an animal made for inactivity? Far be it from me! (mē genoito). But how can you say that we philosophers are not active in [public] affairs? For example, to take myself first: as soon as day breaks I call to mind briefly what author I must read over . . . 

What then? Is it we philosophers alone who take things easily and drowse? No, it is you young men far sooner. For, look you, we old men, when we see young men playing, are eager to join in the play ourselves. And much more, if I saw them wide-awake and eager to share in our studies, should I be eager to join, myself, in their serious pursuits. 

The subject-matter is of course different; but nobody who has an ear for Paul’s cadences, especially in letters like Romans and 1 Corinthians, can doubt that he and Epictetus were, to this extent, employing a very similar method of argument, which traced its ancestry back to Socrates and was to be located, within the disciplines of ancient philosophy, as part of ‘logic’. This was a way of ensuring that one was working steadily towards the truth, and not being deceived by faulty impressions or rhetorical trickery (224). 

The result of all this – flying in the face of some recent suggestions to the contrary – is that, for Epictetus, the primary task of the would-be philosopher is in fact theology: 

Now the philosophers say that the first thing we must learn is this: That there is a God, and that He provides for the universe, and that it is impossible for a man to conceal from Him, not merely his actions, but even his purposes and his thoughts. Next we must learn what the gods are like, for whatever their character is discovered to be, the man who is going to please and obey them must endeavour as best he can to resemble them. If the deity is faithful, he also must be faithful; if free, he also must be free; if beneficent, he also must be beneficent; if high-minded, he also must be high-minded, and so forth; therefore, in every- thing he says and does, he must act as an imitator (zēlōtēs) of God. 

Here, for Epictetus, is the heart both of ‘physics’ and of ‘ethics’, and all to be argued out strenuously according to his own practice of ‘logic’. Once one has this knowledge, one is ready for the philosopher’s specific active voca- tion: to be dispatched like a scout or a spy in a time of war, to search out what is really going on, and then to come back and explain to people that they are mistaken in their perceptions of good and evil, and to point out the truth of the situation whether people want to hear it or not.121 Philosophers, to return to our opening image, are to be like owls who see in the dark – and then like heralds who announce the message with which they have been entrusted. Paul had a different message, but might well have agreed with the outline of the vocation as Epictetus articulated it (227).

And Cicero, too:

Cicero, in fact, provides us with evidence of two things which are worth bearing strongly in mind when contemplating the philosophical climate of the world in which Saul of Tarsus grew up and in which Paul the apostle travelled about announcing Jesus as Messiah and lord. First, philosophy was a topic of widespread discussion and debate right across the greco-roman world, particularly among the literary and cultured elite but also – as Epictetus reminds us a century or more later – very much at street level. This was already true before the first century BC, but the events of that highly disturbed period, particularly the terrible convulsions through which the Roman world passed in the middle decades of the century, contributed substantially to a fresh opening of ultimate questions: 

These troubled times, which are reflected in the poems of Virgil and Horace, were a significant influence on the Roman turn to philosophy. As long as the main fabric of the Republic was intact, leading Romans had chiefly defined themselves by reference to family tradition and the renown that civic and military service could promote. With the state in complete disarray and no ethical or emotional support to be derived from official religion,we begin to find a more reflective and ascetic mentality, that would become still more prominent in the Empire. 

That was the world of Paul. 

Second, Cicero’s mixture of the ‘Academic’ position with several significant elements of Stoicism is a reminder that, granted there was no creedal or dogmatic structure or policing of the different schools and opinions, the influence of Plato himself remained massive throughout the period. Much of his thought – for instance, on the immortality of the soul – had passed into Stoicism, just as much of the Socratic method which he made famous had opened the door for the questioning which led some to Scepticism. The explicit revival of the study of both Plato and Aristotle, which we noted earlier, combined with the teachings of both Stoic and Academic thinkers (the Epicureans alone maintaining, as they would, a dignified detachment), to form a general climate of opinion, at least as to the spectrum of possibilities. In particular, when we ask what Paul might have supposed his hearers would be thinking when he spoke or wrote about a being he referred to as theos, about a powerful pneuma through which this ‘god’ might perform new deeds in his people, about the creation and recreation of the cosmos, and many other things besides, we must assume, and we must assume that he assumed, that the default mode for their thinking would be somewhere in the region of the Stoic development of Plato’s thought (231-232).

Here is where we have a sketch of all of this in terms of worldview from 10,000 miles high:

Above all, the worldview-questions give us a sharp insight into the world of the philosophers – and into the possibility of a comparison, when we have studied him in his own right, with Paul. Take them first as addressed to more or less the entire ancient philosophical world. Who are we? We are humans, part of the world but trying to understand it and live wisely within it. Where are we? In the world of space, time and matter, but a world which some think teems with divine life as well. What’s wrong? Most people, even most philosophers, do not see clearly enough in the darkness of the world,do not penetrate its secrets, and so do not live in the best possible way. In particular, they lack ‘happiness’ (eudaimonia), both in the normal sense that their circumstances trouble them and in the philosophical sense that, in seeking for normal happiness in outward circumstances, they are ignoring the real happiness that philosophy can help to produce. What’s the solution? Why, study philosophy, of course, and then you will (gradually) accustom your eyes to the darkness of the world so that you can grasp the truth and live in accordance with it. Part of the result will be that you come at least to resemble the divine, and possibly to be transformed into a divine being yourself. Ironically, whereas ‘religion’ in the ancient world meant submit- ting to someone (a god) other than oneself, philosophy meant that one was autonomous; either because, with the Epicureans, the gods are not concerned with what we do, so that we are only responsible to ourselves, or because, with the Stoics, the divinity is within us, so that responsibility to god and responsibility to self seem to be the same thing viewed from two different angles. Death itself will either be a return to absolute nothingness (Epicurus) or a transformation into a better life (Plato); as we have seen, some highly regarded Stoics kept this question open. What time is it? That’s the sort of question, our philosophers might say, that a Jew might ask . . . (The Stoics might have said that it was time for moral effort; the Academics, that it was time for more thought; the Peripatetics, that it was time for more research; the Epicureans, that it was time for a drink . . .)

And now even more narrowly, the reconstructed “worldview” of the Stoics:

A Stoic would, of course, give sharper answers to the questions. Who are we? We are creatures composed, as is the whole world, of a mixture of the elements, with the physical element of fire indwelling us in the form of the human psychē. We are therefore part of the divine, and the divine is part of us. Where are we? Within the Universe, the Cosmos, Nature, to pan – which is itself composed of the four elements, with fire and air acting upon earth and water to produce manifold forms of life. The same logos is at work in the world as within each of us. What’s wrong? Nothing is wrong with the world itself (the Epicureans would have disagreed strongly at this point). However, most people, deceived either by false impressions or by sloppy thinking or both, do not realize the truth of the matter, and so spend their time in futile pursuit of a mirage they think of as happiness. Even philosophers find it difficult to get it right all the time. What’s the solution? No surprises: study philosophy, start off on the path that might make you a sage, and continue to discipline yourself, to examine your own life and to take yourself in hand. All the virtues are within your grasp through the divine life within you, so co-operate with it and nerve yourself for the moral struggle. This will result in the appropriation (oikeiōsis) of what is in fact natural to ourselves. The end result (surprisingly similar, this, right across the philosophical board): a calm, untroubled life, free, self-sufficient, self- controlled. (The Stoics aimed to achieve this by refusing to regard pleasure and pain as important; the Epicureans, by regarding them as guides, but in a sophisticated fashion which looked for the real, calm, pleasure behind the mask of mere hedonism.) What time is it? For the Stoic, we are somewhere on the cycle between conflagrations; the fiery pneuma, which is the very breath of the divine, of Zeus himself, is at work in the world, and will one day transform everything into its own life of total fire before setting it all in motion yet again (233-235).

Well, this promises to set Paul in a Roman context in a way mostly ignored in the new perspective studies. In fact, ignored by most Pauline scholars today. But I do have to say I’m now wondering (aloud) if Paul would have been seen as a philosopher. So I ask a long-ish question:

 

Let us imagine our way into the elite circles of Ephesus or Corinth or Athens when a report circulates among them about a man named Paul. Would the reports of his activities — synagogue attendance, synagogue teaching, Scripture reading and explaining, division creating, debate ensuing, persistence in his point of views… then add to this that he worked with his own hands at tentmaking, whether of leather or cloth doesn’t matter much, that he was using such places to gospel and continue his debates and was gaining adherents… and add to this that his new groups were called “churches” (ekklesia, not schools, clubs, not associations) and that he and others were “appointing” leaders called “elders” and “deacons” and that they, too, were reading and commenting on Scripture… now add the big one: it all about this Jew named Jesus, whom they called Messiah of Israel, which drew all the attention to the Bible to see if it predicted that story … now I ask, Would such a man be called a “philosopher”? or something more Jewish? Like apostle? Pastor? Gospeler? Teacher? Would the elites have seen him as one of themselves, a philosopher schooled in the right books and ideas and methods of communication, or would they have said, “Not one of us?”

Continue to Index -

 

Index to the "New(er) Perspective(s) of Paul"