Hellfire vs the Jihadists

www.stratfor.com/weekly/hellfire-morality-and-strategy:

Reiterating the “Law-Gospel” Hermeneutic of the Reformation

HT: Rev. Tony Phelps, who provides this endorsement:

Excellent discussion on this Gospel Coalition video re: the distinction between Law & Gospel. Click the link & watch this, not because Tullian & Jono are two handsome lugs, but because this distinction is essential to properly understanding God’s Word. His Word comes in these two words, Law & Gospel. This is the “hermeneutic” (the proper way to read & interpret a text) taught in the Bible itself. In the Protestant Reformation, this is the hermeneutic that was recovered first by Luther, then Calvin, Beza, Ursinus, etc. Get fuzzy on the distinction between Law & Gospel, and you will get fuzzy on how God saves sinners – by grace ALONE through faith ALONE in Christ ALONE – to the glory of God ALONE.

I appreciate what Tullian Tchividjian is doing, in bringing this hermeneutic back into the light of day.

Bauckham's bargain

In “On Bauckham’s Bargain,” (forthcoming in Theology Today), I critically examine Richard Bauckham’s “christology of divine identity” – which has attracted so many evangelical apologists and theologians.

http://trinities.org/blog/archives/4307

What Tuggy will say in that article remains to be seen. However, I’d make the preliminary observation that the value of Bauckham’s Christological material lies, not in his category of “divine identity,” but in his exegesis of various passages. Even if Tuggy were to demonstrate that Bauckham’s category of “divine identity” is confused, that does nothing to rebut Bauckham’s exegesis. That would just mean Bauckham is better at exegetical theology than philosophical theology.

If experience is any guide, Tuggy will focus on the concept of “identity,” and use that as an excuse to disregard Bauckham’s exegesis.

Tron 2

I recently saw Tron 2 (i.e. Tron: The Legacy). It’s tempting for SF directors to make a film that’s just a string of special effects. CGI set-pieces that lack continuity. That don’t add up to anything.

To its credit, Tron 2 uses CGI to create a holistic, detailed alternate world. You’re not just seeing special effects tacked onto an otherwise ordinary world. Rather, you see everything within the simulated world. The viewer is completely immersed in the spacious, variegated, digital world of the story. That’s artistically satisfying. The film also has a good sound track.

But because the film does some things so well, that draws attention to what it does poorly. A magnificent framework without much filling. Why do SF directors invest so much in CGI, but so little in hiring a talented screenwriter?

In the film, Sam goes on the Grid to see if his father is still alive, and bring him back to the real world. That premise has a lot of dramatic potential–potential that’s largely squandered in the course of the story. And that’s because Sam is in a hurry to leave. He meets his dad early in the story. As soon as he meets his dad, he wants to get back to the real world. So most of the film is about trying to get away. Getting off the Grid.

But why does the director invest so much effort in enabling the audience to visualize the Grid, to be dazzled by what they see, if the rest of the film is about characters striving to put all that behind them as fast as they can? Why not linger? Look around? Play the tourist? Savor the moment?

Watching the film, I think of ways to rewrite the script which would make it better. It could be a futuristic Odyssey. Instead of Sam discovering his father so soon, it would be best to postpone the reunion. Give Sam time to explore the Grid. Get to know more characters. Have some adventures.

Of course, the premise of Sam searching for his father to bring him back home raises a persistent, irritating question: to bring him back assumes that Kevin’s body is still alive somewhere, 20 years later. But that requires some explanation. Theoretically, Kevin could arrange to have his body put in stasis, or kept on life support. Have robots care for his body while he’s on the Grid. That’s kind of clunky, but that would make more sense.

On a related note, there’s the problem of how digital characters like Quorra are able to cross over to the physical world. How can she survive off the grid? What platform supports her personality? Where did she get a flesh-and-blood body?

A more elegant solution would be for Sam to upload his consciousness into the program. That’s a popular SF device. That way, he could survive even if his body died.

Of course, on that scenario, he could never go back. He has no body to return to.

But that has dramatic potential. Instead of having Sam trying to talk his father into leaving, you could have his father trying to persuade Sam to stay. Reverse it. It starts out one way, but flips around.

And Sam might be tempted to stay, not only to remain with his dad, but because he finds the Grid more appealing than real life.

That would also be a better way of handling the “portal.” On this version, the narrowing window of opportunity would represent the body of the user. It can only survive without water for a few days.

That would make the choice more momentous. Once you cross that line, there’s no going back. You can’t change your mind.

Also, because the sense of time’s passage is different on the Grid, Sam could spend weeks or months in virtual time exploring the Grid to find out if he wanted to stay there. And the audience could see it through his eyes.

We might also consider theological ways of developing the plot. Maybe Kevin originally intended to go home every night to be with his family, after spending hours on the Grid, but as a creator, he was seduced by his own creation. He became increasingly captivated by the world he made for himself on the Grid, where he was his own little god.

Or maybe he lost track of time. Because time passes at a different rate on the Grid, perhaps he got so wrapped up in the virtual world that he inadvertently let the exit close (i.e. his body expired). Then he was trapped inside against his will.

Or we could view it as a Faustian bargain. A choice between dying in this world, in the hope of Christian immortality–or trading that for virtual immortality, where you upload your consciousness into the program. As long as the hardware survives, you survive. 

Or you could make Kevin a man who’s disillusioned with the real world, and tries to create a utopian alternative. Only he discovers that his alternative is no escape. Because he’s a sinner in the real world, his sin infects the virtual world. The digital characters share his flaws. The Grid takes on a life of its own, with “fallen” AI characters. They need a Savior, but Kevin can’t save them, for he himself needs a Savior.

Theistic time travel

Since it is not obvious that one can rid oneself of all constraints in realistic models, let us examine the argument that time travel is implausible, and we should think it unlikely to exist in our world, in so far as it implies such constraints. The argument goes something like the following. In order to satisfy such constraints one needs some pre-established divine harmony between the global (time travel) structure of space-time and the distribution of particles and fields on space-like surfaces in it. But it is not plausible that the actual world, or any world even remotely like ours, is constructed with divine harmony as part of the plan. In fact, one might argue, we have empirical evidence that conditions in any spatial region can vary quite arbitrarily. So we have evidence that such constraints, whatever they are, do not in fact exist in our world. So we have evidence that there are no closed time-like lines in our world or one remotely like it.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-travel-phys/#8

What’s striking about this objection is the admission that the possibility or impossibility of time-travel isn’t theologically value-free. All other things being equal, time-travel might be possible in a theistic universe, but impossible in an atheistic universe.

Of course, that, of itself, doesn’t resolve other issues concerning the logical, physical, or metaphysical possibility of time-travel. But it does illustrate the fact that bringing God into the picture or leaving God out of the picture is a game-changer. What is unrealistic in an atheistic universe may be realistic in a theistic universe.

Triperspectivalism in scientific discovery?

"The Cha-Cha-Cha Theory of Scientific Discovery" by Daniel E. Koshland, Jr. (source).

All other ground is sinking sand

If they had their druthers, many if not most liberals including liberal Christians would want to see religious pluralism seize the day. I suppose this in turn is primarily based on the belief that, ultimately, we can't say for sure which religion is true. All religions have some significant measure of truth and validity.

In fact, this may be putting it mildly in some circles. Many think this is the more intellectually astute and even morally enlightened path to trod.

(Of course, there are very vocal militant atheists in the U.S. But their bark is worse than their bite. At least if we judge by the sheer numbers of adherents. I suspect there are probably far more people with liberal beliefs and values who would consider themselves religious or spiritual than there are atheists of any stripe, conservative or liberal or what not.)

However, other societies don't necessarily share this "enlightened" view and attitude. Take the Muslim world. It's not as if many in the Muslim world think all religions are equally valid and true. It's not as if there's a strong liberalizing movement within Islam which seeks to accommodate Islam with other religions like liberal Christianity does. It's not as if many in the Muslim world think we have to best figure out how to modernize Islam and bring it into a pluralistic world. True, there are individual Muslims like Reza Aslan who would doubtless champion such a cause. But my impression is they're few and far between.

As such, when it comes to dialogue between religious liberals like liberal Christians and the majority of Muslims, it seems to me they're talking past one another because they're both entering into dialogue or debate with altogether different assumptions. Spiritual liberals like liberal Christians wish to see Islam become more ecumenical. More open to religious pluralism. More open to a certain amount of relativism with regard to truth. And so forth.

But it seems to me most Muslims are not so subjective in their beliefs and values. It seems to me most Muslims would simply state God exists and has revealed himself. The question for them is which revelation - the Tanakh, the NT, or the Quran? What's more, it seems to me they would likely think this kind of thinking lacks robustness. It's too wishy washy. It isn't serious. It doesn't seek to grapple with objective truth. (Not to mention we're often treated to Muslim clerics and the like denouncing the West for its moral laxity or apathy.)

On the other hand, conservative or Biblical Christianity offers something to Islam which liberals like liberal Christianity doesn't and, indeed, can't.

CSL vs the New Atheists

(See here for more info.)

“The Real and True Nature of Anglicanism”

There are Anglicans who still believe this:

The Real and True Nature of Anglicanism
Our ultimate question does not concern the real and true nature of Anglicanism but the real and true nature of Christianity and as to how well the Anglican tradition of Christian faith comports with the revealed faith of the Lord Jesus Christ. Christendom (faith and institution) is far greater than mere Anglicanism. A minister of the Church of England, for example, is not ordained into the Anglican Communion as such, but into the Church of God. The Church of God is not measured by institutions and statistics, bishops, patriarchs, metropolitans, and jurisdictions but by the reality of faith which only the Lord himself can measure. The visible church and the invisible church are not co- extensive, "For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel" (Romans 9:6). The true Israelite in Old and New Testament terms is the person with the circumcised heart ("No, a man is a Jew if he is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code. Such a man's praise is not from men, but from God" Romans 2:29) and only God can read the heart and count his true people, "The Lord knows who are his" (2 Timothy 2:19).

Externalities, however important, are not of the essence of the Christian faith, but rather union with Christ. The Church of God must be gathered, organized, and administered, but the external phenomenon is not an accurate representation of the true people of God and it consists of "wheat and tares" at every level of participation from leadership through tenuous membership.

"The Truth (About Abortion) Will Set You Free"

I recommend John Piper's post "The Truth (About Abortion) Will Set You Free".

God has a wonderful plan for your life

 

But at the end of the day it seems to me that that double predestinarian means God creates human beings as a means to an end…How do you preach God…has a wonderful plan for your life, you can trust God completely if all this were true?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2013/02/problems-with-calvinist-polemics-against-arminianism/comment-page-1/#comment-38699

Coincidentally, I just happened to ask the Archangel Michael that very question last week when I was debriefing him on the latest developments in spiritual warfare. He shared with me a bit of primordial history.

(October 18, 4004 BC)

Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Lucifer also came among them. The Lord said him, “Lucifer, I have a wonderful plan for your life. Trust me!” So Lucifer went out from the presence of the Lord.

(October 19, 4004 BC)

Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against Lucifer. And Lucifer and his angels fought back, but he was defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven.

And the Lord said to Lucifer, “Does the defendant have anything to say before I pass sentence?”

Lucifer said: “You tricked me! You said you had a wonderful plan for my life, yet here you are about to evict me from heaven!”

And the Lord said to Lucifer, “My dear boy, I do have a wonderful plan for your life. I never said it was a wonderful plan for you. But rest assured, it is a wonderful plan.”

Resurrecting Jesus

In terms of what the glorified body is like, we have roughly two different sources of information. In the NT, we have the Gospel accounts, especially Lk 24 and Jn 20-21. In addition, we have 1 Cor 15. There are other passages, but these are less detailed. There are also some OT passages.

1 Corinthians and the Gospels belong to different genres. The Gospel accounts are historical narratives which describe the postmortem appearances of Jesus, as well conversations. By contrast, 1 Corinthians is more expository. But that’s not a hard and fast distinction, for the Gospels contain interpretive statements.

Christ’s glorified body is a prototype for the resurrection of the just. So we can learn some things about the glorified body from these accounts.

On the one hand, he wasn’t restored to life in the same condition he died in. His wounds have healed. On the other hand, he retains scars from his ordeal.

We might focus on the recognition scenes. Some readers infer from Lk 24:16,31 that the glorified body of Jesus had the capacity to materialize and dematerialize at will. However, that’s a fallacious inference.

For one thing, the divine passives indicate that the observers were kept from perceiving Jesus. They didn’t hallucinate seeing Jesus. Rather, they hallucinated not seeing Jesus. Instead of perceiving something that wasn’t there, they failed to perceive something that was there–until the psychological impediment was removed. Like hysterical blindness.

His body wasn’t objectively invisible, but subjectively invisible.  That’s probably how Jesus could slip through lynch mobs undetected (Lk 4:30; Jn 8:59; 10:39).

It seems likely that Jesus concealed his true identity to heighten the impact when he broke bread, which would remind them of other times when they ate with him or saw him distribute food.

To some degree, we have a similar situation in Jn 20:14-16 and 21:4-7. It’s possible that their lack of recognition has the same psychological point of origin. However, the text doesn’t say that.

Moreover, the text distinguishes between facial recognition and voice recognition. The observers fail to recognize Christ on sight. It’s only when they hear him speak that they know who he is.

So that suggests a different explanation. It may be that Jesus had a more youthful appearance after he rose from the dead. He was in his early 30s when he died. He probably had a weathered complexion from spending so much time out of doors in the hot, dry, sunny climate.

If glorification restores us to a pristine condition, or something approximating a pristine condition, then that process would involve aging us up or down to an optimal age, depending on how old we were when we died. So their lack of recognition may be due to the fact that Jesus looked about 10-15 years younger, without a tan or facial lines.

One time I attended a wedding with my father. He hadn’t seen these relatives for over 20 years. When we went into the reception room, a cousin didn’t realize who he was until he spoke. 

We also have a recognition scene in Acts 9:3ff. Although this might have antecedents in OT theophanies, the Transfiguration supplies the more immediate precedent (Lk 9:29). Once again, there’s a distinction between seeing and hearing, as well as psychologically disparate perceptions of the event (Acts 9:7; 22:9). God is controlling what the observers are permitted to see. And, once again, what we have a not case of sensing what is not there, but not sensing what is there.

We encounter this differential phenomenon elsewhere (Jn 12:28-29). The event is public, but its perception is private and variable.

Before Methuselah

Some places seem interchangeable with other places. Unless you already knew, you couldn’t tell where you were–or even when. But other settings have a sense of time and place. Christopher Hitchens once wrote about driving through the New England countryside. The landscape reminded him of parts of England. Yet, he said, its English counterparts felt far older.

I think one reason some people find it difficult to believe Bible history isn’t just the distance in time, but the distance in space. The world that most of us inhabit looks very different from the world of the Bible. Our world feels modern. It doesn’t look like the kind of world where these things would happen. A different ambience. We read about one world, but live in another. We don’t easily relate to the physical world of the Bible.

Even though there’s a sense in which every part of the world is just as old as every other part, some parts of the world seem older than others. Years ago I was in Cappadocia. That felt far more ancient than any other place I’ve been in. Weighted with a sense of the yawning, forsaken, forgotten past. Like stepping into a different millennium. If you bumped into Abraham, just around the corner, it wouldn’t be out of character. If you happened upon a voice from a burning bush, it wouldn’t seem out of place.

I remember hiking along a bluff, overlooking a dry riverbed below, in a shadowy gorge. There were deserted, rock-hewn churches clinging to the treacherous edge of the bluff. Due to erosion, they were turning back into the rock formations from which they were originally hewn. Weatherworn, they blended into the austere landscape. A palpable sense of silence, stillness, emptiness, antiquity, and aloneness. Abandoned by time–like a misshelven book.

Why apologetics is important to your church

Some people, including some Christians, disparage or discount apologetics. An article like "Why Apologetics is Important to Your Church" could be a useful starting point in understanding the importance of apologetics. Others here including Jason Engwer have likewise previously posted helpful material on the topic.

Paradigms, Tradition, and the Lexicon, Part 2

Or, Jason Stellman’s “already-existing apostolic tradition”

In his article The Tradition and the Lexicon, Bryan Cross says:

In general, Protestants think differently about how to go about interpreting Scripture than do Catholics. When trying to understand the meaning of a passage in Scripture, Catholics have always looked to the Tradition; we seek to determine how the Church has understood and explained the passage over the past two millennia. We look up what the Church Fathers and Church Doctors have said about the passage. By contrast, Protestants typically do not turn first to the Church Fathers when seeking to understand the meaning of a passage or term in Scripture that is unclear. Protestants generally turn to contemporary lexicons and commentaries written by contemporary biblical scholars whom they trust. Only rarely, and perhaps as a final step, do they turn to the Church Fathers. The common form of the Protestant mind is ready to believe that the Fathers often got Scripture wrong, and to use their own interpretation of Scripture to ‘correct’ or critically evaluate the Fathers.

Where does this “tradition” come from? Where does “the Church” first begin to “understand and explain” certain things?

A second childhood

When all my days are ending
And I have no song to sing,
I think that I shall not be too old
To stare at everything;
As I stared once at a nursery door
Or a tall tree and a swing.

Wherein God’s ponderous mercy hangs
On all my sins and me,
Because he does not take away
The terror from the tree
And stones still shine along the road
That are and cannot be.

Men grow too old for love, my love,
Men grow too old for wine,
But I shall not grow too old to see
Unearthly daylight shine,
Changing my chamber’s dust to snow
Till I doubt if it be mine.

Behold, the crowning mercies melt,
The first surprises stay;
And in my dross is dropped a gift
For which I dare not pray:
That a man grow used to grief and joy
But not to night and day.

Men grow too old for love, my love,
Men grow too old for lies;
But I shall not grow too old to see
Enormous night arise,
A cloud that is larger than the world
And a monster made of eyes.

Nor am I worthy to unloose
The latchet of my shoe;
Or shake the dust from off my feet
Or the staff that bears me through
On ground that is too good to last,
Too solid to be true.

Men grow too old to woo, my love,
Men grow too old to wed;
But I shall not grow too old to see
Hung crazily overhead
Incredible rafters when I wake
And I find that I am not dead.

A thrill of thunder in my hair:
Though blackening clouds be plain,
Still I am stung and startled
By the first drop of the rain:
Romance and pride and passion pass
And these are what remain.

Strange crawling carpets of the grass,
Wide windows of the sky;
So in this perilous grace of God
With all my sins go I:
And things grow new though I grow old,
Though I grow old and die.

(G.K. Chesterton)

Hope

"The Difference of Grieving with God and Without Him" by Robin Schumacher.

Like a patient etherized upon a table

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we ‘ought to have known better’, is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image....

For if crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call ‘disease’ can be treated as a crime; and compulsorily cured. It will be vain to plead that states of mind which displease government need not always involve moral turpitude and do not therefore always deserve forfeiture of liberty. For our masters will not be using the concepts of Desert and Punishment but those of disease and cure. We know that one school of psychology already regards religion as a neurosis. When this particular neurosis becomes inconvenient to government, what is to hinder government from proceeding to ‘cure’ it? Such ‘cure’ will, of course, be compulsory; but under the Humanitarian theory it will not be called by the shocking name of Persecution. No one will blame us for being Christians, no one will hate us, no one will revile us. The new Nero will approach us with the silky manners of a doctor, and though all will be in fact as compulsory as the tunica molesta or Smithfield or Tyburn, all will go on within the unemotional therapeutic sphere where words like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ or ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’ are never heard. And thus when the command is given, every prominent Christian in the land may vanish overnight into Institutions for the Treatment of the Ideologically Unsound, and it will rest with the expert gaolers to say when (if ever) they are to re-emerge. But it will not be persecution. Even if the treatment is painful, even if it is life-long, even if it is fatal, that will be only a regrettable accident; the intention was purely therapeutic. In ordinary medicine there were painful operations and fatal operations; so in this. But because they are ‘treatment’, not punishment, they can be criticized only by fellow-experts and on technical grounds, never by men as men and on grounds of justice.

This is why I think it essential to oppose the Humanitarian theory of punishment, root and branch, wherever we encounter it. It carries on its front a semblance of mercy which is wholly false. That is how it can deceive men of good will. The error began, with Shelley’s statement that the distinction between mercy and justice was invented in the courts of tyrants. It sounds noble, and was indeed the error of a noble mind. But the distinction is essential. The older view was that mercy ‘tempered’ justice, or (on the highest level of all) that mercy and justice had met and kissed. The essential act of mercy was to pardon; and pardon in its very essence involves the recognition of guilt and ill-desert in the recipient. If crime is only a disease which needs cure, not sin which deserves punishment, it cannot be pardoned. How can you pardon a man for having a gumboil or a club foot? But the Humanitarian theory wants simply to abolish Justice and substitute Mercy for it. This means that you start being ‘kind’ to people before you have considered their rights, and then force upon them supposed kindnesses which no on but you will recognize as kindnesses and which the recipient will feel as abominable cruelties. You have overshot the mark. Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful. That is the important paradox. As there are plants which will flourish only in mountain soil, so it appears that Mercy will flower only when it grows in the crannies of the rock of Justice; transplanted to the marshlands of mere Humanitarianism, it becomes a man-eating weed, all the more dangerous because it is still called by the same name as the mountain variety. But we ought long ago to have learned our lesson. We should be too old now to be deceived by those humane pretensions which have served to usher in every cruelty of the revolutionary period in which we live. These are the ‘precious balms’ which will ‘break our heads’.

There is a fine sentence in Bunyan: ‘It came burning hot into my mind, whatever he said, and however he flattered, when he got me home to his House, he would sell me for a Slave.’

Read the rest here.

Mischievous innuendo

"The Mischievous Innuendo of Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg’s Brains" by Stephen Casper.

The rage of unbelief

"The Rage of Unbelief" by Robin Schumacher.