Category Archives: Scripture

Is Richard Dawkins really an atheist?

Posted on by | No Comments

Or has he simply rejected a watered-down version of God that isn’t the God of the Bible and Jewish/Christian tradition? After running across this joint interview Time conducted with him and Dr. Francis Collins in November 2006, I’m not so sure. Check out this exchange:

TIME: Could the answer be God?

DAWKINS: There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.

COLLINS: That’s God.

DAWKINS: Yes. But it could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small—at the least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that’s the case.

How about, for starters, that if one goes to Scripture and to the history of Christian thought—perhaps especially to the Augustinian stream out of which the Reformers arose, but not only—what one finds satisfies Dr. Dawkins’ conditions? This makes me wonder if he is in fact rebelling, not against true Christianity, but against one of the debased, culturally comfortable forms of the sort that moved J. B. Phillips to declare, Your God Is Too Small. (Interesting that he addressed the subtitle “to believers and skeptics alike.”) Certainly in a lot of ways, Dr. Dawkins sounds a lot more like St. Augustine and John Calvin there than he does an atheist.

Then there’s this, the final word of the interview as printed:

DAWKINS: My mind is not closed, as you have occasionally suggested, Francis. My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about, nor can you, nor can anybody else. What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up. When we started out and we were talking about the origins of the universe and the physical constants, I provided what I thought were cogent arguments against a supernatural intelligent designer. But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea. Refutable—but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect. I don’t see the Olympian gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there is a God, it’s going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.

Three thoughts on this. First, Dr. Dawkins sounds here a lot more respectful of religion in potential than he ever has of any particular religion; which suggests that his mind is rather more open on the point than I ever would have guessed, and also seems to me to further support the thought I voiced above. I strongly suspect that if anyone asked the right questions, we’d find that the god Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe in is a god the church doesn’t believe in either, and that his view of what Christianity actually is would prove to be more than a little out of whack.

Second, his lumping Jesus together with the Greek gods fits in with that; it shows real ignorance and failure to understand. If he sees the Incarnation as of a piece with Greek mythology, I hardly blame him for rejecting it.

And third, I think the root of that failure is to be found in the one thing that doesn’t occur to him: that that God he has powerfully described might have acted to reveal himself, rather than waiting for us to get smart enough to reveal him for ourselves. I almost think the only thing that divides Dr. Dawkins and orthodox Christian faith—and of course it’s a very large thing—is the absence of a doctrine of revelation.

In case anyone suspects this interview might not be representative of Dr. Dawkins’ views in this regard, he sounded very similar in a fascinating interview with Ruth Gledhill of the Times; he even told Ms. Gledhill, a Christian, “I don’t think you and I disagree on anything very much but as a colleague of mine said, it’s just that you say it wrong.” (Check out her blog for more thoughts and material.)

Blinded by the darkness

Posted on by | 4 Comments

As I posted a few weeks ago, the Rev. Dr. Paul E. Detterman, past PC(USA) associate for worship and current executive director of Presbyterians for Renewal, preached an excellent sermon on 1 John 2:1-11 and Matthew 28:18-20 at our February presbytery meeting. His sermon has now been posted on PFR’s website (note: it’s a PDF), and I encourage you to read it. He’s speaking in this message as a Presbyterian to Presbyterians, so it’s addressed specifically to intra-Presbyterian issues, but it is by no means limited to them. There’s a lot in this sermon, but I want to highlight a few things in particular.

You have invited me to preach the Word of God, and preaching God’s Word can be a very dangerous thing. God’s Word is liberal enough to make conservative people very nervous—but it is also conservative enough to make liberals squirm. And because most of us have our emotional/ideological feet far out in the aisle at any gathering like this, when God’s Word rolls through, toes will be smashed. It happens.

This was part of Dr. Detterman’s opening paragraph; I appreciated the reminder as he began speaking that we should never open the Scriptures assuming they’re only going to tell us what we’re comfortable hearing. God isn’t limited to what we like.

We forget basic theology so easily—like who God is and who we are and why we should care. Theological amnesia is not a liberal problem or a conservative problem—it is a human problem. It is the human problem, to be exact, and it is exactly where our passage from John’s letter begins.

Indeed, it’s all too easy to go about our normal lives in a very ungodly forgetfulness, rather than living out the reality of who we are in God in the cold, hard facts of our daily circumstances and situations and choices. Specifically, Dr. Detterman identifies the three great inhibitors of our call to carry out the Great Commission as the inverse of 1 Corinthians 13:13: we have forgotten biblical faith, hope, and love. That doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten those words—but we’ve forgotten what they really mean, and replaced their biblical content with our own.

We really don’t know how dark our present darkness really is until we see flashes of God’s penetrating light—then we see how much of God’s reality we are missing.

The problem is, as John notes, there is something in us that prefers darkness and resists the light, and so we let the darkness blind us, congratulating ourselves all the while on how well we see.It’s a great sermon, and there’s a lot more to it than this; again, I encourage you to read it for yourself, especially if you’re a part of the Presbyterian Church (USA)—no matter where you stand on the conflicts that wrack this denomination, Dr. Detterman’s sermon will challenge you toward greater faithfulness.

A children’s Bible for grownups, too

Posted on by | 5 Comments

“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty—except, of course, books of information.
The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of
are those which it would have been better not to have read at all.”—C.S. LewisGiven that, one would hope that children’s Bibles would be books worth reading at the age of fifty; one would hope they would be a joy to read to our children. Unfortunately, however (at least from my experience), that isn’t often the case. It’s too bad, because our older two really enjoy the one we kept; it isn’t great, but it’s good enough. Still, you always want something better for your kids—and now, I think we may have found it. Ben Patterson, who was something of a mentor of mine during his time as Dean of the Chapel at Hope College, and whose judgment I trust implicitly, has a thoroughly positive review up on the Christianity Today website of The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name; Sara and I got halfway through it and decided we want a copy. It’s not just the review itself, either, because there’s a link to The Jesus Storybook Bible‘s version of Genesis 3, which I think validates Ben’s glowing comments. Of all the things for which he praises this book, I think the most important is that it “manages to show again and again the presence of Christ in all the Old Testament Scriptures, and the presence of the Old Testament Scriptures in the life of Christ.” That’s something too many adults don’t see—perhaps, in part, because they never learned it from their children’s Bibles.

Forgiveness, repentance, and the Gordian knot

Posted on by | No Comments

A while back, I commented on Dr. Stackhouse’s first post on repentance and forgiveness, which was the beginning of his reflections on Advent this year; I meant to go back when he posted the second part and comment on that too, but other things distracted me, and I’m just now getting back to it. As with the first part, it’s an excellent piece, one which directs our attention to the key truth in understanding repentance and forgiveness: our sins aren’t just between us human beings, they’re between us and God. The Psalmist even goes so far as to say to God, “Against you and you only have I sinned” (Psalm 51:4).

This means that when we sin against someone else, or when they sin against us, we aren’t inextricably bound to them by that action; we aren’t enslaved by their refusal to repent, or by their refusal to forgive us if we repent. God is the one against whom the offense was ultimately committed, and he gives us the opportunity to free ourselves from it. We are free to forgive the one who hurt us even if they do not repent, because it’s not up to us to bring about their repentance (or their judgment)—that’s in God’s hands; and we are free to repent and receive forgiveness even if those on this earth whom we’ve hurt will not forgive, because God can and will forgive us, if we truly confess our sins to him and repent. (As Dr. Stackhouse notes, “the Bible says surprisingly little about repenting to each other, and a lot about repenting to God.”)

One of the ways in which our sin enslaves us is by binding us together in Gordian knots of guilt and pain and suffering and shame, knots we often cannot seem to undo no matter how hard we try, even though we were the ones who tied them. In Christ, however, God calls us to repent of our sins and be forgiven, and to forgive one another, and thus to cut that Gordian knot, and find freedom. In so doing, as the Rev. Casey Jones says, we can leave behind this world’s way of life and enter into the life of the kingdom of God here and now. This is good news; this is gospel.

(Note: subscription required for that last article; but the first month’s subscription to Presbyweb is free.)

God’s own fools

Posted on by | No Comments

18 For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,and the discernment of the discerning I
will thwart.”

20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. 22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

26 For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, 29 so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. 30 And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, 31 so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

—1 Corinthians 1:18-31, ESV

God’s foolishness begins with a crucified Messiah, but it doesn’t end there. If God’s use of the cross is foolish on our terms, is it any less foolish that he chooses to use us? Put it another way—if you were God and wanted to fix the world, would you start with us? I don’t know about you, but I think I’d be inclined to focus on the important people, the ones who control the world’s governments, media, money, etc.

Once again, though, God doesn’t work that way. He certainly wants to save the rich and powerful just as much as anyone else, but he doesn’t focus on them; rather, he chooses the weak, the powerless, the insignificant, the foolish—he chooses ordinary people, and many of the weakest and most vulnerable among us—in order to show up those who think they are powerful and important and don’t need him. God does this because we matter to him as much as those in power do, but he also chooses us to make it clear that there is no one who has the right to boast in themselves; there is no one who does not need him, and no one who can stand against him. There is no one he cannot raise up, and no one he cannot bring down.

We are called as Christians to be fools in the world’s eyes; our salvation is foolishness to the world, and the idea that God would choose to use us is foolishness, so if we are to follow God we must choose his foolishness over the world’s wisdom. We’re called to follow Jesus Christ, God’s own fool, and to live in this world as he did. He turns to us as he did to Peter and says, “Come, follow me”; if we protest, “Lord, they think you’re a fool,” he just says, “Come be a fool with me.”

But what does that mean? Clearly, we aren’t called to random acts of foolishness, after all; we’re called to be fools like Jesus. Just as he valued doing God’s will over all the things the world thinks important—comfort, success, material well-being, and the like—so should we. More than that, just as he valued doing God’s will more highly than his own life, accepting suffering and death in his Father’s service, so should we. In the world’s eyes, this is foolish; but to us who are being saved, it is the power and the wisdom of God.

“He is no fool who would choose to give the things he cannot keep
to buy what he can never lose.”
—Jim Elliott

Christian escapism

Posted on by | 4 Comments

I have Hap to thank for pointing me to ASBO Jesus, Jon Birch’s strange, often fascinating, and frequently very funny comic blog. (I have Birch to thank for the following explanation: “btw. for the non british among you… an ‘asbo’ is an ‘anti-social behaviour order’… the courts here award them to people who are deemed to be constant trouble in their neighbourhoods… presumably according to their neighbours!”) I’ve appreciated any number of his comics, but I especially like this one, because I too have a problem with the whole idea of the “Rapture.” I agree with Birch that it’s bad theology, though we can argue that at another time; more than that, it’s bad exegesis.

I imagine that statement will surprise some people, who are no doubt already flipping to 1 Thessalonians 4 to prove me wrong. I can hear them now: “See, it says, ‘The Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.’ See, there’s the Rapture right there!” Fine, except . . . it isn’t. Does that text say the Lord will return? Yes. Does it say we’ll all meet him in the air? Yes. But look closely and notice what it doesn’t say: which direction we’ll go from there. The assumption behind the idea of the Rapture is that Jesus will go back to heaven for a while and we’ll go with him—but the Scripture doesn’t actually say that. It’s only an assumption.

Now, I can predict the most likely rejoinder here: “It’s obvious!” Except, once you get outside the assumptions of our culture, it isn’t. To understand what’s really going on in 1 Thessalonians, remember the parallels between this passage and the wedding parables of Jesus. In several places, Jesus compares those waiting for his return to people waiting for the bridegroom. Thus for instance we have the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids, in Matthew 25. In that parable, the crisis comes for the foolish bridesmaids when the cry comes, “Here comes the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!” Here’s the parallel to 1 Thessalonians 4: the Lord, the Bridegroom, returns, and we go out to meet him and escort him to the house.

In other words, the coming of Christ Paul talks about isn’t a halfway coming to pick us up and leave the rest of the world to rot; it’s his final return to earth, and we will go out as the wedding party to escort him in. There’s no Rapture in this passage, no “Get Out of Trouble Free” card; only our wishful thinking makes it so.

Update: OK, this follow-on of Birch’s really cracked me up.

1 Timothy and the misdirected conscience of the West

Posted on by | 7 Comments

I’m preaching a series on 1 Timothy (yesterday was 1:12-20), and it’s started me thinking about the whole concept of conscience, and how so many in the American church abuse it. Literally the word means “to know together with,” and it refers to the things we know together with God about the way the world is supposed to be and the way we’re supposed to live; it’s the awareness God has placed within us of his character and will. We might almost call it a sixth sense, as it gives us the ability to perceive reality in its moral aspect. The problem is, it’s only valuable as far as it accurately reports reality—in this case, moral reality, what is right and wrong in the eyes of God—but that’s not how we want to use the idea of conscience; rather than recognizing it as something objective relating to real right and wrong and actual guilt, we want to take conscience as subjective, reflecting how we feel about something, whether we feel we’ve done right or not. We strive to unhook our conscience from God’s character and will, so that far from challenging our own preferred standards of right and wrong, our sense of conscience merely reflects them.

As I was thinking last week about why this is, and reflecting on Paul’s paean to the mercy of God, it hit me that at some level, we don’t want the conscience God gave us because we really don’t want what God is offering—we don’t want his solution, and we don’t even want to believe what he’s telling us about the problem. The word of God tells us we are sinners, rotten at the core, who need to accept his mercy, to be saved by his grace, through none of our own doing and none of our own merit, and we just don’t want to hear that. We want to believe we’re basically OK—and if we run up against something we can’t get around, that everyone agrees is bad behavior, we want to redefine it as a disease; that way, we’re not bad, we’re just sick.

When the Bible tells us that we do bad things just because we like to do bad things, and that the purpose of our conscience is to convict us of our sin, not to justify our behavior, we resist. As much as we call the gospel good news, it often doesn’t come to us as good news. We don’t consider it good news that we’re sinners saved—despite the fact that we do not and will not ever deserve it—solely by the loving grace of God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. That kind of thinking is for losers, and we all want to think we’re winners, if there’s any way we possibly can; we want to believe that God saved us because we’re such all-fired wonderful people that we just had it coming. And the truth is, we aren’t, and we didn’t. The truth is, Christianity is for losers—and that means us. Even the best of us.

That’s one reason 1 Timothy is so important for us. Paul was far more of a winner than most of us could ever hope to be, a man who would tower over the church of our day just as much as he did in his own time, and yet he gave all the credit for all his success to the power of God; for himself, he said this: “It is a true statement and worthy of acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost.” He understood what folks like the Covenant Network don’t, or at least don’t seem to (any more than bad drivers in Dallas), that the good news of the gospel has nothing to do with lessening our sin and our guilt. Instead, it has everything to do with the marvelous, infinite, matchless grace of God, this spectacular gift we have been given, which overwhelms our sin and guilt, washing it all away through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and the power of his Holy Spirit. The good news of the gospel is that yes, we are sinners, yes, there really is a problem with us, and that God has fixed that problem, because Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.

Conversation on Calvinism

Posted on by | 11 Comments

The question has come in, what does it mean to be Reformed? . . . OK, so it means to be Calvinist, but then, what’s that? So, to kick things off and provide a logical place for discussion, here’s a brief summary, cribbed straight from our membership class at church.

Central themes of Reformed doctrine

Total depravity (Romans 3:9-11, 8:7-8)

  • not “total corruption”—not that we’re as bad as we could possibly be, incapable of any good at all
  • but that there is nothing we do which is untainted by sin—our motives and desires are never pure, always mixed
  • also called “total inability”—in and of ourselves, we are not able to turn away from sin and toward God, because we are born in slavery to sin; left to our own devices, we would be without hope

Irresistible grace (John 6:43-44, Romans 9:14-18, Ephesians 2:1-10)

  • therefore it is only by God’s grace that we are saved, through his gift of faith to us
  • his grace breaks the shackles of sin on our lives
  • the Spirit can make himself irresistible—if he so chooses, we cannot resist his work any more than the prisoner can resist the key that unlocks his chains
Unconditional election (Romans 9:14-18, Ephesians 1:3-6, 2:1-10)
  • therefore our salvation cannot depend on our own effort and initiative, because those are not and cannot be sufficient
  • God chooses whom he will save
  • we do not know and will never know on what basis; all we know is that it is his free gift
    ––his choice and his love have no conditions and no strings attached

Limited atonement (Mark 10:45, John 10:14-15, Romans 8:31-32, Ephesians 5:25-27)

  • the death of Christ on the cross was immediately effective to save all those whom God chose (the elect)
  • it was sufficient to save all, but only efficient to save the elect
  • not made available for people to choose or not, but powerful in and of itself

Perseverance of the saints (Romans 8, Philippians 1:6, 1 John 2:1-6, Jude 24-25)

  • therefore, since our salvation is God’s work in our lives, and since it is a work of transformation, it is not something we can undo
  • we have been justified (our relationship with God has been restored—the penalty for our sin has been paid and his wrath at our sin has been satisfied), and we are being sanctified (made holy—we are being changed into the people God wants us to be, so that we live lives that are in accordance with his will)
  • this means we are in process; we are saints, because we are in right relationship with God, but we are also sinners, because we’re still being changed
    ––Lutheran language: simul iustus et peccator, “at once justified and a sinner”
  • the fact that we still sin doesn’t mean that we have fallen away from God, nor does it mean that we risk losing our salvation–it just means we aren’t perfected yet; our sin cannot be so big or awful that it undoes what God did

Note: the standard acronym for these five points (in slightly different order) is TULIP. It’s an effective mnemonic, especially since this particular summary of Calvinist doctrine was first developed in the Netherlands.Overarching theme: the sovereignty (lordship) of God

  • it’s all about what God does
  • this doesn’t mean it’s not about what we do; but it does mean that what we do is a response to what he has done, is doing and will do
  • we don’t carry the responsibility on our shoulders, whether for our own salvation or anything else—he does