Author Archives: Rob Harrison

Teach your children well

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The title, of course, comes from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but the theme is as old as history, going back at least to Deuteronomy 6. Unfortunately, too often the church does a poor job of this. It’s not that the curricula we use aren’t effective—most of those that I know are; nor is it that they don’t teach children good things, for those which I’ve used certainly do. Nor am I saying that churches use them poorly, for though I’m sure a notable percentage of churches do, I have no reason to think that that’s broadly true. I can, however, second the point that John Walton recently made on the Zondervan Academic blog: most of our curricula in the American church do a brutally lousy job with Scripture. Dr. Walton does a good job of laying out the ways in which common American curricula misuse, misinterpret and misapply the Word of God, and especially of hammering home the reason why we should care:

If we are negligent of sound hermeneutics when we teach Bible to children, should it be any wonder that when they get into youth groups, Bible studies and become adults in the church, that they do not know how to derive the authoritative teaching from the text?

We all have a working hermeneutic, even though most have never taken a course. Where do we learn it? We learn it from those we respect. For many people this means that they learn their hermeneutics from their Sunday school teachers. Teachers in turn teach what is put into their hands. Perhaps we ought to be more attentive how Sunday school curriculum is teaching our children to find the authoritative teaching of God in the stories.

 

Photo of The Magic Hour by Dirk Joseph © 2019 Elvert Barnes.  License:  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.

Stem cells: the heart of the matter

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There’s a fair bit to be said about embryonic stem-cell research, which I’m surprised to realize I haven’t written about here hardly at all; there’s the fact that research involving adult stem cells is far more promising and far more productive right now (due to the teratoma problem with embryonic stem cells), the fact that we can now produce embryonic stem cells without creating embryos, and the ways in which the pro-abortion movement is clearly using ESCR as a stalking-horse against the pro-life movement. I haven’t written about any of that, but I think I’ll probably do so at some point in the fairly near future, because it’s an important issue—perhaps the most important moral issue of our time.For the moment, however, I’ll just point you to Tyler Dawn’s recent post on the subject, which approaches it from a different angle, and a far more personal one—and in so doing, puts her finger right on the most important point. Thanks, Tyler Dawn.

What “your best life now” looks like in practice

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John Stackhouse noted the other day that a lot of Christians don’t care about theology because they think it’s a dull, dry subject which has nothing to do with their lives. (I would note in response, as a sidebar, that these aren’t people who took theology from Dr. Stackhouse.) The problem is, theology is supposed to point us somewhere, and lead us somewhere; as J. I. Packer always insisted, theology should lead to doxology (praising God), and good theology does, but bad theology leads us somewhere else instead. Even the self-help-self-gratification theology of so much pop evangelicalism, which some would say is harmless, isn’t.As Jared points out, this is the lesson of the flap over Victoria Osteen’s alleged assault of an airline stewardess. Whether or not she was actually guilty of any sort of assault, what comes through loud and clear is her sense of entitlement, and her husband’s. As Jared put it,

That’s how Osteen and his variety of prosperity gospelism position Christian identity—to be better, higher, more favored by the world than anybody else. It is a position of entitlement.And it is the antithesis of grace.

And when that’s how you view yourself and your relation to the world, then you don’t live the life of humble service to which Jesus calls us; you don’t walk the road of self-sacrifice that ends in the cross; and your idea of Christian witness is not martyrdoom but one-upsmanship. It’s bad practice, and it’s born out of bad theology.

The Joker as vandal and the limits of moral relativism

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I can tell the kind of effect The Dark Knight is having from the fact that, even though I haven’t seen it, I keep running across reasons to blog about it. Whatever one’s opinion of the movie itself, it’s undeniably sparking some thoughtful people to write some perceptive analyses of evil, the human heart, and our Western culture. The latest is a piece by National Review‘s managing editor, Jason Lee Steorts, on the magazine’s website called “Lessons from the Joker”; it’s an interesting meditation on the Joker, moral relativism, the nature of vandalism, and the way to make moral arguments to those who don’t think they believe there’s any such thing as right and wrong. I won’t try to summarize it—I’m still pondering it, at this point; but I encourage you to read it.

Change and Christ’s ministry

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Most of the time, when you listen to the arguments for change in the church, they usually boil down to this: the world is doing a new thing and we need to catch up with it. There are two unexamined assumptions here. The first is that giving the world what they want and expect is the best way to do the work of the church; the second is that the work of the church is our work, to be done with our tools. Both of these are false. The work of the church is God’s work; the ministry of the church is the ministry of Christ. Only Christ’s ministry is redemptive; only his power can change lives; only his work will bear fruit; only what he is doing will prosper. It’s not our job, it’s never our job, to figure out what people have already decided they want and give it to them; we’re not here to study what the world is doing this week and copy it. Rather, our job is to figure out what Jesus is doing, where his Spirit is moving, and get in on that. This isn’t our church, nor is it our ministry, that we might do as we please; it’s God’s church, and Jesus’ ministry, and we need to do as he pleases. Our focus needs to be not on what we want to do, but on what he wants us to do.This means two things. First, we need to remember that this isn’t politics, and we shouldn’t be trying to match our ministry to the polls; it’s not our place to cater to our own preferences, or anyone else’s, either. We need to seek God, not the approval of others; our concern needs to be that we’re doing what he’s doing, and what he wants us to do. Second, we need to remember what God has led us to understand along the way, what we’ve already figured out, and to make future decisions in light of that. This is where tradition comes into play, as we remember that the church’s we is God’s royal “we,” in the sense that it’s the whole body of Christ—every nation, every era, and every theological and ecclesiological stream of thought and practice—not just the people we know or those who think like us. We cannot lightly assume our superiority to the church of times past, or in other parts of the world—indeed, we cannot assume it at all.Does this mean the church shouldn’t change? Certainly not; we should indeed be ecclesia reformata semper reformanda, secundum verbum Dei, the church reformed and always reforming according to the Word of God. Change in non-essentials is important in that non-essential things (such as style) should always be secondary to preaching the gospel message; if those non-essentials get in the way of people hearing that message, or distort it, they should be changed promptly and with as little fuss as possible. But change should always and only be at the service of the unchanging, and never designed merely to please or soothe the culture. After all, as C. S. Lewis rightly observed, those who change with the times inevitably go where all times go.

Barack Obama’s foreign vulnerability

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There are a lot of people who assume that Sen. Obama, because of his heritage, will have an advantage in dealing with other countries. Part of that, as John Kerry noted, is that if he wins in November, “it would have a powerful message all across the world about the American story. About our making real the words that we live by. That all men are created equal.” Part too, I think, is the idea that because he doesn’t “look like the guys on the money,” non-European leaders around the world will find him more appealing and accessible.Kerry’s certainly right about the symbolic value of an Obama victory—for Americans. What’s somewhat questionable is the underlying assumption here that anti-black racism is only an American problem. That’s simply not the case: anti-black racism is in fact a significant problem in many of the countries who pose us the biggest challenges, including China and much of the Muslim world, in which slavery of black Africans was never forbidden and continues to be practiced. As such, in dealing with countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, or with the Israel-Palestine conflict, Sen. Obama could actually find his African heritage a disadvantage. That said, it should also be noted that his heritage should be an asset for him in dealing with sub-Saharan Africa, where the US is already generally popular thanks to Bush Administration policies and which should assume increasing significance for American policy going forward.There’s another issue as well for Sen. Obama in dealing with the Muslim world, this one potentially more serious: whether he considers himself that he was ever a Muslim, on Muslim terms, he was, and he clearly isn’t now (regardless of what some people might like to tell you, he’s definitely a practicing Christian), which makes him an apostate, a murtad. As longtime student of the Muslim world Daniel Pipes points out, that’s no small issue. Technically, this would make him subject to religious-based assassination, though it seems probable that prudence would prevail over any such impulse; but as the Christian Science Monitor realized, for the US to elect an apostate Muslim to the White House would be a huge propaganda windfall for al’Qaeda and other jihadist organizations. That, obviously, would create major foreign-policy challenges for an Obama administration.Do these things disqualify Sen. Obama to be President? No, certainly not, nor do they mean he couldn’t have a successful administration—I’m doubtful such would happen, yes, but that’s for other reasons. They do mean, however, that the facile idea that electing Sen. Obama will be a boon for American foreign policy is in fact quite dubious.

The things you find by following links

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There’s a pro-Hillary Clinton website out there that is trying to prove that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is fraudulent—that it is in fact a forgery to hide the fact that he’s an Indonesian citizen.Wow.I have two reactions to this. One, though I’m no expert, from what little I know about the forensic analysis of documents (from reading textbooks and the like a number of years ago), the evidence behind this argument (as presented by its partisans) looks difficult to refute.Two, the whole idea’s completely insane.Oh, and three: whether this is in fact legitimate or (more likely) the product of the fevered brains of a small group of disappointed Hillary backers, it just goes to show how far people will go these days to try to win an election. If I had to make a prediction, I’d expect this will go the same way as most of the crazy stories I’ve read over the years. (“Did you know Bill Clinton was running drugs out of the governor’s mansion in Little Rock?” Yeah, that kind of crazy story.) Still, every once in a while, one of those stories proves out . . . if this happens to be one of them, the next couple months are going to be a real roller-coaster ride.

The evangelical heresy and the gospel antidote

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It’s been said by someone, I forget whom (though it may have been my old theology professor, the late Dr. Stan Grenz—it sounds like him), that the evangelical heresy is believing in our creeds rather than in Jesus. We affirm our creeds and our confessions as expressions of what we believe, and as expressions which unite us with other Christians, but we don’t believe in them, only through them. Our belief is, and must always be, in God as revealed in Jesus Christ.When we lose sight of that fact, we get into trouble, as the Rev. Dr. Ray Ortlund points out, because “no matter how well argued our position is biblically, if it functions in our hearts as an addition to Jesus, it ends up as a form of legalistic divisiveness.” This is what he dubs “Galatian sociology,” the sociological error of the Galatian church. Even if you believe all the right things, if you believe in those things rather than in Jesus, then you are in effect adding those things to Jesus (the error C. S. Lewis called “Christianity And”); the inevitable consequence of that is division from other Christians, and the exaltation of ourselves and our own positions at the expense of others. In contrast to that,

What unifies the church is the gospel. What defines the gospel is the Bible. What interprets the Bible correctly is a hermeneutic centered on Jesus Christ crucified, the all-sufficient Savior of sinners, who gives himself away on terms of radical grace to all alike. What proves that that gospel hermeneutic has captured our hearts is that we are not looking down on other believers but lifting them up, not seeing ourselves as better but grateful for their contribution to the cause, not standing aloof but embracing them freely, not wishing they would become like us but serving them in love (Galatians 5:13).My Reformed friend, can you move among other Christian groups and really enjoy them? Do you admire them? Even if you disagree with them in some ways, do you learn from them? What is the emotional tilt of your heart—toward them or away from them? If your Reformed theology has morphed functionally into Galatian sociology, the remedy is not to abandon your Reformed theology. The remedy is to take your Reformed theology to a deeper level. Let it reduce you to Jesus only. Let it humble you. Let this gracious doctrine make you a fun person to be around. The proof that we are Reformed will be all the wonderful Christians we discover around us who are not Reformed. Amazing people. Heroic people. Blood-bought people. People with whom we are eternally one—in Christ alone.

The heavy yoke of self-justification

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At the Synod of the Church of England at York Minster last month, just before the Lambeth Conference, the Archbishop of Canterbury preached a brave and important sermon—brave and important because he sought to apply the truth of Scripture to the situation in which the Anglican Communion finds itself. In so doing, he offered some characterizations of different parties within Anglicanism with which I don’t agree, but any such quibbles are secondary; the core of his message was wise and deeply biblical. This is in keeping with what I’ve come to expect from Dr. Rowan Williams: even when he arrives at positions with which I disagree (as he fairly often does), he consistently gets there for the right reasons.  That’s as true as ever in this sermon, which is at heart a meditation on the ways in which we try to replace Jesus’ well-fitted yoke with (in the words of one of the Desert Fathers) “the heavy yoke of self-justification.”

There’s a phrase to ponder—a heavy yoke of self-justification. That’s the law, that’s the curse. That’s the waterless pit indeed—where we struggle ceaselessly, unrelentingly, to make ourselves more right, and to lay hold upon our future. We lay upon ourselves a heavy yoke, from which only the grace of Jesus Christ can deliver us. In a nutshell, we lay upon ourselves the yoke of desperate seriousness about ourselves.

And Christ’s promise is so difficult because it’s so simple. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, as the novelist says, that is what Christ offers to us: receiving it is hard. Naaman of Assyria when he came to Elisha to be healed of his leprosy, could not believe that the answer was easy. There must be something complicated for him to do. There must be some magic to be done. The word alone, “release” is not enough. We long for, we are in love with the heavy yoke of self justification. Naaman wanted to go away from Elisha, able to say, “Well I had some part in that—I did the difficult things the prophet asked me”. And Elisha, in the name of God, tells him to do something simple, to immerse himself in the mercy of God. And when Jesus says, “Our yoke is easy and my burden is light”, that is what he says, to all of us as individuals, to us as a Synod, to us as a Church, to us as a society, to us as a human world: lay aside the obsession to possess the future, receive the word of promise, here. And that’s why, as Jesus himself says in the gospel, that’s why only some people really do hear the word easily—only the tax collectors and the sinners. . . .

He alone rests in that eternal, unifiable life. That is why he says, “Come to me and I will give you rest; I will give you sight; I will bring you hope.””My yoke is easy; my burden is light”, which is why we need to be where he is, nowhere else, where he is with the Father.

This is a sermon to read (or listen to; video is available below and on the page with the transcript) with our hearts wide open, that the Spirit may use it to bring us to repentance, and to greater wisdom.

HT: Alan Jacobs

 

Photo:  “Strongman Event:  the Yoke Race,” 2010, Artur Andrzej.  Public domain.