Preaching about Joy while Suffering

It's relatively easy to preach about joy in suffering when things are going well. 

A theology of suffering is simple when the suffering is "out there," outside the walls of the church. It is a little harder when it is in the pew in front of you, but still not as hard as when the suffering is in your house or in your own head.

My friend and fellow PhD student at SEBTS, Kenny Hilliard, was recently diagnosed with a tumor on his brain stem that is likely malignant. He is six years my junior with a wife and two children.

He is also the Pastor of New Horizon Baptist Fellowship of Marion, NC.

He's on the brink of the trials ahead. Today the uncertainty is a greater part of the suffering than the physical and emotional tests that lie ahead for the Hilliard family.

In light of the trials ahead, Kenny preached a sermon on 2 Corinthians 6:1-13. The sermon is on the hope of the Gospel. It's about finding joy amidst suffering through hope in the redemption that is to come.

It's too early to make Kenny a hero, but I have hope that the end of the story will be as good as this beginning. In the meanwhile, we can pray that Kenny will suffer well. We can pray that his family will be sustained and encouraged through this time. We can pray that he will make a full recovery soon.

In light of the trial that is to come, this sermon may gain in significance, but it will not diminish.

Regardless of what comes next, listen to the sermon below (it's just audio over a still picture) in light of Kenny's diagnosis. Listen and be blessed by the powerful trust in the goodness of God, even in light of his present sufferings.

Kenny and his family are facing significant medical expenses in the near future. If you'd care to contribute toward those, you may do so through this link to a third party crowdfunding site.

How to Read the Bible - A Review

I often read books that I disagree with. It is necessary to read the intellectually challenging disagreement with scholars who oppose my view. This drives me to question whether my answer, their answer, or another might be right.

Recognizing that Harvey Cox is, at least from my conservative Evangelical position, a liberal scholar, I picked up his recent volume, How to Read the Bible with some interest and hope for a fruitful conversation.

This is a popular level book, written with few footnotes and more as a summary of Cox’s religious experience than as a means of engaging in serious debate. 

As such, Cox’s audience appears to be Christians who have not engaged with Scripture seriously and wonder what method the wise sage who has spent a long career proclaiming a version of progressive Christian theology from the respected halls of Harvard Divinity School might encourage them to use. It is, in reality, an apologetic for a liberal approach to Scripture from a post-modern liberal Christian. This statement is not meant in the pejorative (as the label liberal often is) but to clarify my understanding of the author’s actual intent, which is distinct from what he may have actually accomplished; according to his own hermeneutic, his accomplishment will be evaluated as something distinctly different based on the one who actually reads the volume.

Summary

How to Read the Bible is a layman’s book on hermeneutics. It has assumptions (often exposed, but seldom stated) and shows how to apply them to the text of the Bible.

After a personal introduction, which places the book in the context of Cox’s faith journey, there are ten chapters in the text. In them Cox walks through his method of reading of Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Job, the prophets, two chapters on the Gospels (though one ignores John entirely), the Pauline Epistles, and Revelation. The tenth chapter is a summary of Cox’s hermeneutic, which is focused on a contemporary reading of the text. The book has a conclusion in which Cox answers the logical question that arises from his deconstruction of Scripture, namely, “Why should we read the Bible at all?”

Qualification

For Cox, this book is no doubt a very personal book; in fact, the first person pronoun and his own anecdotes prevent reading it any other way. He is explaining how he reads the Bible and gains some spiritual value from it. As such, it would be easy to turn these critiques into accusations against Cox’s faithfulness. That is not my goal. Cox no doubt holds the faith commitments that he has, which have some ties to historic Christianity, sincerely. This book helps to reveal what shape they have and why, but the book does not lead me to question the fact that he believes something about God that approximates a form of historic Christianity and is very personal to him.

Despite this personal nature of the book, he did publish it publicly, which means that it is fair game for analysis and critique. This is not a private expression of faith that, like a discovered diary, should be left alone until the author is deceased.

Assumptions

The logical question that arises from this text on how to read the Bible is why it should be read at all. This is a serious accusation that Cox seems to recognize at the end of the volume and begin to address, but, to my mind he fails.

Cox begins with the assumption that the Bible is solely a human book. In fact, given the option, it seems fairly clear that Cox recommends discarding the notion that any biblical data is factual. He allows that Jesus and Paul did exist, but nearly every other apparent factual claim in Scripture is best rejected at first blush. If some things in the Bible actually happen to correspond to historical truth, this is coincidental to the spiritual truth of Scripture and largely irrelevant.

Additionally, biblical scholarship that rejects traditional understandings of the text or modifies what the text seems to say about history are to be preferred over other scholarships. Throughout the volume, Cox consistently refers to his preferred group of scholars as “the best scholars” or “most scholars.”

In fact, one of the prevailing assumptions that seems to drive Cox’s hermeneutic and general approach to biblical studies is that anyone who accepts the prima facie reading of the Bible is intellectually deficient or ignorant.

For example, the hypothesis that has recently been published that presents a late domestication of camels is valuable explicitly because it undermines the historicity of Scripture and because “it require[s] one to move beyond a literalistic view of the Bible to a more mature comprehension.” (pg. 44) In other words, if only those that believe the Bible to be factually accurate would read the New York Times, which popularized the recent archaeological theory, they wouldn’t be so immature as to believe that Scripture was true. The problem is that the archaeologists conclusions were drawn from a limited data sample and appears to have been interpreted by the New York Times to maximize circulation with a controversial headline rather than critically interact with the study.

Similarly, just a few pages later, Cox discards the notion of the miracle of manna in Exodus by arguing, “The meaning of the ‘miracles’ of Exodus is that these people [i.e., the Israelites of the 7th century B.C.E who he believes wrote the Pentateuch] believe that it was through God’s grace and justice that they were escaping from slavery, and they told their story in their own idiom. Mature and imaginative students of the Bible try to get inside that worldview. They do not simply reject it as superstitious or recast it in terms of modern, if often improbable, scientific rationalizations.” (pg.47)

In other words, speaking from the enlightened cultural perspective of the 21st century, we can know with certainty that these miracles did not happen. This solves two problems simultaneously: (1) It eliminates the weird pseudo-scientific theories about how pre-scientific people may have misinterpreted natural phenomena; (2) It eliminates the need for believing in a God who can do miracles.

While I am thankful for the first result, the second result seems unnecessary unless one has accepted the reigning paradigm of naturalism, which allows for only regularity in the natural world. In other words, it requires that God, whatever that being is, does not interfere in history.

From the Pen of Skeptic

At times, Cox seems to be reading the text as a scoffer. He describes the account of the spies of Israel and Rahab as a “dinner-theater fluff piece” (pg. 69) Thus we should read the accounts of the conquest of Canaan much like school boys read Virgil’s Aeneid (pg 76); they're interesting and have some literary value, but certainly aren't true because, after all, a recent book argues that the entire Israelite history may be incorrect, since the Israelites were likely just Canaanites who banded together against their neighbors and created an elaborate nation-myth to justify their actions (pg 76). Since the Pentateuch is just political propaganda, Cox writes, “I do not believe it is necessary for current readers of the Bible to slog through all these grisly verses [about the reasons given by God for destroying the Canaanites.]” (pg. 74)

This brings back that pertinent question that came to my mind while I was reading this volume, why would you read it anyway? I’ll get back to that in a moment.

Cox continues his way through various representative genre’s of Scripture. Job is “explicitly ‘fictional’" (pg. 79); the prophets have meaning according to how modern revolutionaries decide to use them (though not in an absolutely unconditional sense) (pg. 105); the canonical gospels are merely a result of the winning political faction; the synoptic Gospels are a composite of factually erroneous interpretations of history written too far after the events they depict to be remotely accurate; Paul likely didn’t write most of the letters attributed to him and things we find ethically objectionable are either his misunderstandings or later textual additions; and Revelation can be nothing more than an inspiring poem by a political revolutionary.

It is fair to note that few of these assertions are supported in the text; but it is also important to realize that this is not a scholarly volume. Cox merely assumes the validity of scholarship built on the so-called Higher Critical methods and ignores conservative scholarship as immature or poor. This is an evidence of his bias, but should not be counted as a criticism against his method in this volume.

Again, I wonder, why bother reading it if nearly everything that it reports is questionable?

Spiritual Benefit

Cox believes that there is spiritual benefit in reading Scripture. He intimates this throughout. It can inspire the contemporary reader to pursue justice. This he makes clear in the Introduction, where he recounts the inspiration that African American civil rights activists found in the Exodus stories. While he sat bored in his cell (having been arrested during the same demonstration), the segregated African American detainees preached to each other from the account of Moses.

This reading and contemporary application, he notes, is in accordance with the “full-orbed holistic way I have termed ‘spiritual.’” (pg. 8) But it isn’t clear that such a reading is possible once the reader has rejected the factual content of Scripture as mere political fiction.

In other words, if the Bible is just a human book, with a great percentage of it written for political purposes, then why should it be trustworthy for spiritual readings? Why would one trust Scripture more than a contemporary novel for spiritual information?

Cox wrestles with this in part toward the end of the volume, “Why should I spend any time writing yet another book about this strange old collection? One answer is that the Bible helps us to know who God is, and for many people, perhaps most, that is enough. But there is another reason. The Bible also helps us heed the counsel of Socrates to ‘know thyself,’ and the wisdom of all the religious traditions teaches that the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves are inseparable.” (pg. 230)

Of these two reasons that Cox offers, it isn’t clear how the shreds of Scripture are helpful any longer in knowing God. He has taken pains to debunk the supernaturalness of God throughout the volume. Gone is the miracle-working God. Gone is the redemptive God that chose a people. Gone is the God that is holy and worthy of judging sin.

The second reason Cox presents is more true to what the tattered text of the Bible can do once it has been explained away by Cox’s “mature” hermeneutic. Once all of the parts of Scripture that conflict with the contemporary reader’s worldview are eliminate, what is left is a reflection of the individual from the ancient text. It isn’t clear why it would take over two hundred pages to explain this fact.

Conclusion

Cox’s book is an excellent example of the reader-response hermeneutic at work. He combines this post-modern approach that rejects a desire for objectivity with an acceptance of the validity of modernistic biblical scholarship to work his way through many genre’s of Scripture.

This is a helpful book because Cox explains what many Christians do on a regular basis. What is masked in the liberal pulpit is made clear in this volume.

In the end, the deconstruction of Scripture and rejection of the supernatural reminds me of C. S. Lewis’ description of creating “men without chests.” They are bidden to be moral, but the means for their morality has been removed. Though this is not Cox’s purpose in writing the book, his demonstration of the failure of the liberal theological method has explanatory power for the slow death of many liberal churches.

How to Read the Bible

$18.71

By Harvey Cox

Buy on Amazon

NOTE: A complimentary copy of this volume was provided by the publisher for review with no expectation of a positive outcome.

Can We Go Too Far with the Big Picture?

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As a parent of young children, I’m thrilled with the work that people like Sally Lloyd-Jones has done with her Jesus Storybook Bible. Also, LifeWay has done great things with The Gospel Project. And Desiring God has also developed curriculum that walks through the Bible as redemption history.

All of these resources are exceedingly helpful. They explain the big picture narrative of Scripture in a way that I was unable to do until much later in life. They train young people to look beyond the bare facts of the stories to ask why the story is included in the Bible.

A recent article in Christianity Today provides a number of perspectives and reasons why the Big Picture approach to Scripture is important.

This approach is a vast improvement over the approach that many people still use and that was the sort of bread and butter of my childhood. However, I’ve recently begun to recognize the need for a hybrid approach to teaching Scripture.

The Story Model

I can’t tell you how many times I heard the story of David and Goliath. And the story of Daniel and the lions. And the story of Zacchaeus, the wee little man who climbed up in the sycamore tree. Or Jonah and whatever the large sea creature was that swallowed him.

These stories, with their details, we told and retold. Often the details were embellished with theological interpretations about how the individuals might have felt or what they might have thought.

Other times, the facts were actually misrepresented. For example, I grew up thinking that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. That may be, since there was probably no clear distinction between whale and fish as sea critters in the (human) biblical author’s worldview. However, the text actually says fish. Also, I was much older when I put together the fact that when Daniel got thrown into the den of lions he was probably pretty old. Daniel was cemented in my mind (often with the help of flannel graphs) at the tender age where he experienced the robust benefits of a vegetarian diet.

Despite the mistaken details, which may have been my fault as the hearer, the connections between these accounts were clearly missing. Clearly they were connected by being in the Bible. They all had something to do with God. However, there was often no cohesion to the tales, even after I had “heard them all” dozens of times.

The Big Picture

The approach that is popular in contemporary circles is more helpful in building an integral understanding of Scripture.

Over and over again Sally Lloyd-Jones emphasizes the redemptive themes that are woven through Scripture. Christ is in the text, often imperfectly represented by types.

For example, David is like Christ when he, the improbable hero, redeems the people of Israel from probable slavery to the Philistines by slaying the giant with the stone. The boy-shepherd-who-would-be-king is a picture of Christ, despite his later plummet from grace.

This is vastly improved over the “hero story” approach that finds moral examples in particular scenes of Scripture and bids the children to do likewise.

However, it’s a little difficult to be brave like David facing Goliath when a) you aren’t God’s anointed one and b) your childish ability to reason from literary types is limited such that you find yourself preparing to fight a literal giant, in case you ever encounter one. (Harvey Cox cites this as one of the reasons he drifted from a conservative understanding of Scripture.)

Also, there is the fact that sooner or later the children find out that David had some problems later in life. He didn’t just commandeer someone’s rubber ducky (as in the Veggie Tales version), but committed adultery (perhaps even rape) and killed a man for his wife. This is a good lesson in grace, but a difficult one for children to sort through when they’ve been presented the “moral example” method of reading Scripture.

The big picture approach is much better than that. And yet, it causes me to think.

The Pitfall

The most likely pitfall of the big picture approach is that, when it is taken too far, it can inadvertently reinforce the notions that a) every detail has to be tied to the big picture and b) if the details don’t fit, they probably don’t matter.

Let me be clear that I do not believe that Lloyd-Jones, LifeWay, Desiring God or any of the other proponents of the big picture approach commit, foment, or accept any of these errors; they are writing curriculum and books that meet a vital need and use a particular approach. Similarly, I do not believe that the authors of the moral example lessons necessarily missed the big picture. I am talking about implementation and receipt of information rather than authorial intent.

The big picture approach is wonderful for getting the main idea across, but it can allow the casual student (or teacher) to miss the vivid detail that is included in the text.

For example, Ehud was a deliverer of the people; a foreshadowing of what Jesus would be. He was also born left-handed, the king was fat, and he apparently liked privacy when he was relieving himself. These are providential pieces of the story; they are details that enliven it and undergird the historicity of it. All the details don’t fit into the big picture, but they allow the big picture to be what it ought to be—they help us know the stories are true.

Conclusion

This warning, then, is as much to me as to anyone else. As I teach my children, I do not want to lose the big picture or the details.

In other words, it is as bad to miss the forest for the trees as it is to see only the forest without distinguishing the beauty of the trees.

In order to understand the beauty of God’s redemptive plan, we need to teach our children the big picture. It will help them make sense of the various genres and accounts in Scripture.

In order to recognize the truthfulness of God’s Word, we need to emphasize the details as we teach the stories. It helps them to trust the documents written by both divine and human authors.

This is not an either/or but a both/and. We need to balance the approaches so that we have biblically literate students of the Word when all things are done.

The Gospel of Christmas

Christmas is not about presents. It isn’t about family gatherings, trees, human love, happiness, or world peace.

Christmas is about the incarnation of God himself. It is, therefore, about the renewal of all of creation.

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There is nothing wrong with celebrating with family, having a tree, showing love, being happy, or striving toward peace. In many ways these things point toward the renewal of all creation.

However, Christmas is not merely about these things, but about the rich abundance that lies behind these things.

Christmas is about the gospel. The gospel made real, physical, tangible, and complete.

The Christmas Gospel

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth through his spoken word. He made everything from nothing and at the end of his flurry of creative acts, he declared it all very good.

He even made two humans to be like him, and to represent him in miniature on the earth. They were made in his very image.

However, that didn’t last very long because the first humans, Adam and Eve, messed it up by disobeying the one rule that God had given them. They didn’t take God at his word; instead they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

As a result, God sent death into the world. Adam and Eve would surely die. So would all of their children and their children’s children.

God also cursed the ground to remind all humans that things aren’t the way they were supposed to be. Thorns, thistles, and other weeds make the process of making a living from the earth harder. They remind us of what is wrong with the world. They keep us hoping for something better that is to come.

The world got a glimpse of that better something a few thousand years ago in the form of a human child born in unlikely circumstances. That child was Jesus, God’s anointed one, and the Word of God himself.

The one who had created all things and who holds all things together stepped down into creation to become part of it and bear the curse of the whole creation to set it free from the penalty of sin.

According to Athanasius,

He, the Mighty One, the Artificer of all, Himself prepared this body in the virgin as a temple for Himself, and took it for His very own, as the instrument through which He was known and in which He dwelt. Thus, taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered His body to death in place of all, and offered it to the Father. This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, when He had fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men. This He did that He might turn again to incorruption men who had turned back to corruption, and make them alive through death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of His resurrection. Thus He would make death to disappear from them as utterly as straw from fire.

And in wiping away the effects of the curse from humans, Jesus also loosed the creation from the effects of sin.

Thus, “the renewal of creation has been wrought by the Self-same Word Who made it in the beginning.”

This hasn’t yet taken effect in full.

Romans 8:19-23 tells us:

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

The Christmas story is a historical account of how God made possible the redemption of all things from the effects of human sin. Both Luke and Matthew tell us what happened in a dusty Middle Eastern town two millennia ago, but their accounts also point beyond the details of the story to the hope that should invigorate our celebration.

Conclusion

Enjoy this Christmas. Enjoy the cookies, candy canes, ugly sweaters, and weird relatives. Enjoy the toys, the tinsel, and the many cultural accretions that have accumulated around the day.

Enjoy these things all the more because they point toward the greater hope we have in the coming renewal of all creation because Christ’s incarnation made possible the redemption of all things from the effects of sin.

The Importance of Amateur Theologians

There are two very important aspects of the Christian theological enterprise that need to maintained in order for the church to be (or become) healthy. First, there need to be professional theologians. Second, the discipline of theology needs to be accessible to amateur theologians.

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The terms “professional” and “amateur” are intended to refer to more than the status of being paid for thinking and writing. It is certainly true that someone who is paid to think theologically and express those thoughts cogently (we hope) for others to read should be able to be more productive theologically and, perhaps, research and think more deeply. However, the bigger concern here is the training for becoming a theologian. The discipline of theology needs to be accessible to those that have the professional credentials (read advanced degrees) in the discipline and those that don’t.

Recently, a group of professional Catholic theologians got together to call on the New York Times to silence columnist Ross Douthat. It wasn’t just any Catholic theologians, it was a group of leading Catholic thinkers from Georgetown, Loyola, St. Thomas University, Yale, Harvard, Lasalle, and more. In other words, a pretty big group of well-credentialed theologians got together to call for the muzzling of one journalist.

What did Douthat do to incur their wrath? He argued that there is a movement that is pressuring a change in Roman Catholic doctrine to permit individuals who have been divorced and remarried to participate in Communion. This, he argued, is a bad thing for the Church. He also made the assertion that the Pope himself is involved in pressuring the church to change. This is a bold accusation for a Roman Catholic to make.

The Issue Under Debate

For those of us in Protestant circles, particularly we low-church Baptists, it may not be clear exactly how monumental this shift is. In brief, I will attempt an explanation of the problem without much nuance.

In the Roman Catholic tradition, marriage is one of the seven sacraments as is the Lord’s supper. Marriage, by their definition, is essentially (and not merely incidentally) the spiritual union of one man and one woman before God. There is, then, an actual event that happens when a couple is wed; it isn’t merely the case of two people being legally associated to keep society in check. The only way out of marriage, then, is for one spouse to die or for the Church to annul the marriage. The annulment process basically says that the marriage never really was a marriage, which frees the individuals up to pursue other ventures. If the marriage is not annulled by the Church, then whatever occurs in the legal system is irrelevant because the two individuals are still married according to God and the Church. If a couple divorces without an annulment and remains celibate, this is unhealthy but acceptable. However, if one of the divorcees remarries without the annulment, this second marriage puts the individual in a state of unrepentant sin and thus the individual is barred from receiving the sacrament of Communion.

According to Douthat, there is a move afoot within the Roman Catholic church to change the Church’s practice by a) removing the requirement for annulment for remarried divorcees to take Communion and also b) expediting the annulment process including creating a “no-fault” annulment category. Douthat correctly argues that this reflects a significant change to the Roman Catholic doctrine of marriage; if this change is made in the practice of the Church is tacitly admitting that marriage is dissoluble, which is something they have denied for centuries. The change would be huge.

The issue of the doctrinal change is, in itself, interesting from a historical-theological perspective. However, the response that it engendered is more significant for the way that theology is done.

The Response to Douthat

Douthat’s critics, which include a host of heavyweight Catholic theologians, have called for the editors of the New York Times to shut him up. They write:

Aside from the fact that Mr. Douthat has no professional qualifications for writing on the subject, the problem with his article and other recent statements is his view of Catholicism as unapologetically subject to a politically partisan narrative that has very little to do with what Catholicism really is. Moreover, accusing other members of the Catholic church of heresy, sometimes subtly, sometimes openly, is serious business that can have serious consequences for those so accused. This is not what we expect of the New York Times.

Of course it isn’t what anyone expects of the New York Times. The so-called “newspaper of record” is so far left of center politically that it always amazes me that Douthat is able to survive from week to week. Sometimes I click through to his columns even when I’m not interested in the topic just to increase his web-traffic so that maybe, for a little while longer, the New York Times will continue to allow a more or less conservative columnist to continue writing. Douthat isn’t what we expect of the New York Times because his voice is a reasoned dissent from the liberalized mainstream.

However, the more significant question is why someone has to have “professional qualifications for writing on the subject.” It seems odd that theology is such a difficult topic that only those who have special training should be able to have any opinion on the subject.

I’m a Southern Baptist working on a PhD in Theological Studies. I regularly deal with “bubba theology,” which is generally a painful and draining experience. However, for every blog post, newspaper article, or sermon I encounter that has poorly done theology, I encounter another where someone without the guild certification—an amateur theologian—is doing quite as well as many professional theologians.

In fact, as a Southern Baptist, I am thankful for the many “amateur theologians” that managed to reclaim the denomination’s theology from the so-called professionals during the Conservative Resurgence. It seems, though, that the concern is not as much for Douthat’s qualifications, as for his conservative opinion.

Liberalism and Elitism

There is an assumption by some academics that good theology is liberal theology. Being a conservative myself, I obviously question this truth. However, the feeling is so entrenched that a a pair of California sociologists (they are professionals so we can trust them) argued that it is the liberal theologians and church leaders that will save the planet if only their silly conservative parishioners will cooperate. In their article, “Why Conservative Christians Don’t Believe in Climate Change,” Bernard Zaleha and Andrew Szasz write:

“There is also a longstanding recognition that liberal policy statements from national denominational bodies frequently do not filter down to the individual congregations, which often will not tolerate too much liberalism from their pastors, ministers, and priests. Church conventions and liberal seminaries may be doing an excellent job promulgating the urgency for increased environmental concern; getting congregants to internalize and act on these ideas has so far proved to be a much harder life.”

Liberal theologians would likely never have written this so clearly. However, sociologists writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists are apt to be more frank, and more hopeful that conservative Christians won’t find their article.

There is an assumption native to much of academia that pushing boundaries and formulating innovative doctrines is good theology. Confessing traditional orthodoxy is repressive, repetitive, and thus bad theology. There is a condescension native to the way much liberal theology is done; only the backward are concerned with reconciling the way things have been understood. The amateur, unencumbered by a commitment to such chronological snobbery, is more likely to find resonance with tradition than to seek new territory to make a name for himself.

Rather than admitting their bias against tradition, which is nearly sacrosanct among some Roman Catholics, these professional theologians just called on the amateur to shut up because he isn’t an expert.

It may well be that he is not an expert, but their letter to the editor failed to show why Douthat’s comments were inadequate. They simply assert that he is unsuited for the field and should keep his comments to things about which he has been properly trained. To my conservative mind, that seems a bit pretentious.

The Importance of Amateur Theology

In reality, the amateur is not entirely unsuited to discuss the merits of changing Roman Catholic doctrine or practice. He likely has not read as much on the topic. He also probably has less professional capital involved in his pet theory or theological innovation being the newly approved version. However, as an amateur theologian or, as some might call him, a layman, Douthat is well positioned to know what has been taught and recognize that this new thing is something quite different. It doesn’t matter how many supporting sources can be cited, he recognizes the thing for what it is.

Laypeople doing theology is not a problem to be confronted in the church, but an indication of the strength of the church. When theology is driven from above, by an elite class of scholars, it has a tendency to miss the most significant practical needs of the world around. When theology is done within the pew in addition to in the ivory tower, it an indication of vitality and intellectual activity.

The church needs to have professional theologians who are doing work, engaging important critical issues, and debating fine points of theological nuance. This is essential if the integrity of confessions of faith is to be maintained against the tide of change or, perhaps, revised in expression (not content) in response to cultural change.

At the same time, the church needs to have intelligent people, who may lack the credentials or full training, to stand and shout “stop” when the scholarly guild gets out of hand. Douthat provides that for the Roman Catholic church, just as others provide it for other denominations.

Douthat may be right or wrong, I’ll leave that for the reader to decide. However, his position as a layperson critiquing the professional theologians is essential to keep them honest.

The Story of God's Love for You - A Review

The Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd-Jones is my favorite Bible storybook available. The illustrations by Jago are interesting and faithful to the text. The audio version, narrated by David Suchet, is well produced and engaging. It is a product that the whole family has enjoyed greatly since it was released several years ago.

When Zondervan announced the forthcoming release of a grown-up version of the book, The Story of God’s Love for You, I was intrigued. I wasn’t sure how well the story would convey without the pictures.

As it happens, this little volume does stand well on its own without the illustrations. While I still prefer the full version of the book, the big kid’s version is almost as good.

BEGINNING AS THE JESUS STORYBOOK BIBLE

For those that haven’t encountered The Jesus Storybook Bible, the approach is worth considering. Most Bible storybooks focus on particular scenes in Scripture that seem most likely to be interesting to a young audience. Thus, while still well-told, a regular refrain tales make their appearance in most Bible storybooks: David and Goliath, Noah and the Ark, Moses and Pharoah, Jesus calms the storm, etc. These are the same stories that I was raised on in Sunday School and seemed to come up with a regular frequency.

Often missing from the traditional approach to children’s Bible storybooks is any sense of the big picture. How does the crossing of the Red Sea fit into the bigger picture of the Bible? Is the Bible just a loose collection of hero tales and miracles? The metanarrative of Scripture has been tragically lacking in many books intended to bring Scripture down to the cognitive level of children.

As a result, many children grow up in the church with no sense of what God is doing through the Bible. This has allowed young Christians to fall prey to skeptics who assault the apparent inconsistencies between the miracle-less present and the supernatural accounts of the past. It has created a broader culture may know that David and Goliath is a story about little beating big, but is unaware that this has the additional significance of being God’s anointed one defeating the seemingly unconquerable evil. In other words, David and Goliath tells a piece of the bigger story of Christ defeating evil in the world.

Sally Lloyd-Jones takes those stories, which have been made to trite and simple over the years of Sunday School tradition, and reinvigorates them with a theological approach. She tells us,

“The Bible is most of all a Story. It’s an adventure story about a young Hero who comes from a far country to win back his lost treasure. It’s a love story about a brave Prince who leaves his palace, his throne—everything—to rescue the one he loves. It’s like the most wonderful of fairy tales that has come true in real life.

You see, the best thing about this Story is—it’s true.

There are lost of stories in the Bible, but all the stories are telling one Big Story. To Story of how God loves his children and comes to rescue them.”

This approach unites the stories in Scripture into a tapestry of wonder, which is woven (often untidily) through with the golden thread: Jesus saves because God loves his creation. Lloyd-Jones communicates that truth so simply a child can comprehend it, but without dissolving the polychromatic hues of Scripture into a monochrome mass of christocentric allegory.

STANDING ON ITS OWN

Even having lost most of Jago’s lovely illustrations, the text Lloyd-Jones wrote is edifying. It takes a reader willing to put up with a bit of child-like simplicity and sometimes silliness to enjoy the volume. Her prose is playful, which could make the adult concerned with being grown-up disdain this volume.

However, taken on its own merits and enjoyed for what it is (an entertaining retelling of an amazingly complex story), The Story of God’s Love for You gets along quite well. For the seasoned saint who needs encouragement, there are reminders of God’s always surprising affection for us on nearly every page. At times the capricious retelling highlights an aspect of a story that would have otherwise remained obscure to the accustomed eye, which always tends to read what the mind already knows.

This volume may also have use in introducing new believers to the big picture of Scripture. Again, the attitude of the reader makes a great deal of difference. However, Lloyd-Jones hits the high points and provides a basic hermeneutic that can help the novice to see the purpose in many of the stories of the Old Testament. They aren’t just weird fables of an outdated God; they are pieces of the bigger story, which is the most exciting story of all.

The Story of God's Love for You

By Sally Lloyd-Jones

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Note: A gratis copy of this volume was provided by the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.

The Gospel According to Heretics - A Review

Have you ever wondered if Apollinaris was actually Apollinarian? Or how about Ebion? Was he really an Ebionite?

If you’ve ever dabbled in Christology or Church History, you’ve probably encountered these questions. If you haven’t been exposed to those intellectual concerns, then you may not have heard of such oddly named villains of the early church. However, these are perennial debated figures with often excoriated views.

In The Gospel According to Heretics, David Wilhite explores the panoply of historic heretics in one accessible volume. For the MDiv student in Church History I or whichever theology course covers Christology this is a goldmine of summary, analysis, and further footnotes.

SUMMARY

Wilhite covers ten different heresies in the ten chapters of his volume. There is a simple formula to each chapter, which is helpful for progressing through the text simple. He begins with a summary of what the accusers of the heretics said, then he breaks down what the available primary sources say the heretic taught. Next he outlines the orthodox response to the alleged teaching of the heretic.

The book progresses chronologically through the major heresies of the early church. It begins with Marcion, who is said to have argued that Jesus is a new and different God than the one of the Old Testament. The second chapter covers the Ebionite heresy, also called adoptionism, which denies the deity of Christ. In Chapter Three, Wilhite tackles the Gnostics, who denied the humanity of Jesus because of their stark dualism. The subject of the fourth chapter is the modalism of Sabellius, who allegedly argued that God exists as either the Father, Son, or Spirit at separate times. In Chapter Five the most famous heretic of all, Arius, is analyzed; the subordinationism attributed to Arius, which argues that Jesus was divine, but not quite equal with God forms the subject matter.

Wilhite comes down the backstretch of the volume with Apollinaris to whom is attributed the argument that Christ has a human body but a divine mind, which challenges his full humanity. Nestorius is the topic of Chapter Seven, especially his argument that the Son of God is a divine person that inhabits the human Jesus. In the eighth chapter the monophysitism of Eutyches is the subject matter; he is alleged to have taught that Jesus is half man and half divine and thus a sort of super-human hybrid. Chapter Nine takes on the iconoclasts who argued that Jesus must not be depicted, which seems to challenge the notion of an incarnate Christ. Then in the tenth chapter, Wilhite outlines the heretical Christology of Muslims, which portrays Christ as merely a human prophet and not divine. Finally, Wilhite concludes the book with a call for gracious interaction by both the orthodox and the heretical, though he recognizes that both exist.

ANALYSIS

The debate about whether the heretics discussed in Church History courses were really heretical is the subject of many seminary papers and late night debates over coffee. Wilhite does not definitively end any of those debates, but The Gospel According to Heretics does present a helpful tool for those discussions and papers (for any seminary students reading this).

Wilhite approaches his topic with the mind to revise the received traditional accounts. However, unlike other revisionist church histories, Wilhite is not out to argue that there is no orthodoxy. Rather, his argument is that there is an orthodoxy that Christianity should be centered around and the the early Christological debates helped in its formulation and documentation. It is simply that the historically accepted accounts of the heretics themselves may have been overblown. The doctrines the heretics represent are and were bad, but their locus is, perhaps, historically unrecoverable. This approach makes Wilhite’s book both edifying and informative.

The chief weakness of this volume is one that others may see as a strength. In some ways, Wilhite’s call to an irenic attitude toward contemporary heretics, in light of the perhaps wrong treatment of historical heretics, is a positive. However, there are situations in which a refusal of those in teaching positions to recant non-orthodox positions warrants vocal and vehement refutation. Wilhite is right to call for this to be handled as generously as possible, but in the face of a proud heretic, that individual may indeed need to be removed from positions of power, which in the case of a pastor or professor may cost him or her a livelihood. If legitimate heresy actually distorts the gospel, then it is a big deal and should be resisted accordingly, which seems to be downplayed in The Gospel According to Heretics. At the same time, Wilhite’s call for patience and humility is an important one to create the balance of speaking truth in love.

This is one of those books that has the potential to become a favorite textbook for years to come, if it remains in print. Wilhite’s careful research, vibrant writing, and simple outlines make this accessible volume a useful tool for years to come.

The Gospel according to Heretics: Discovering Orthodoxy through Early Christological Conflicts

By David E. Wilhite

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Note: A gratis copy of this volume was provided by the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.

Why Academic Conferences are Important: Observations from ETS 2015

For the introvert, conferences of any sort tend to be an exhausting affair. The attendees are never alone. There are a million hands to shake, people to talk to, questions to answer. The germophobe, too, will find himself in a veritable purgatory of horrors.

Image from Ben Rogers, used by Creative Commons License. http://ow.ly/UOFOS 

Despite my own preference for small groups or solitary scholarship, I find this sort of theological nerd-fest to be important. This importance is often despite our best efforts to make it intolerably unimportant.

Many of the papers are, indeed, boring. Sometimes it seems that scholars are attempting to demonstrate a sure-fire cure for insomnia, or run a clinic trial on such a cure through their papers. Often this is a result of the desire to appear sufficiently scholarly, as if only in bland statements with a torrent of references can one demonstrate their expertise.

Other papers are, to be honest, quite bad. They were proposed at a point in life when the months until presentation seemed inexhaustible. The summer break from classes offered seemingly infinite hours to mull deep academic thoughts and write a paper reflective of sheer genius. In reality, those hours were consumed with other, often more important activities. Stellar scholarship is thus lost in a melee of mediocrity slapped together in the waning weeks before the conference event.

Still, these events are important.

Reasons for Importance

Academic conferences are important because for every mediocre paper, there is usually another—often from a surprising source—that is quite good. Often, despite self-doubt over the potential failures by student presenters, the fledgling scholars produce the most provocative and most helpful papers.

In some of these papers, there are a wealth of new ideas, freshly mined sources, and voices brought into harmonious conversation in a way only possible when students are trying to make sense of the readings of diverse PhD seminars and finding history, philosophy, and hermeneutics at the same time.

In other papers, there are nuggets of information at the very edge of the argument that stir the coals of the imagination and inspire the hearer (or reader) to further investigation on a topic only tangentially related to the paper itself. These are the gems that can be mined from the academic conference—not necessarily new information, but new ideas and new promises of horizons yet to be explored.

Another reason that academic conferences are absolutely essential is that in those hundreds of handshakes—each of which costs the introvert so very much—there are new opportunities for alliances, research partnerships, and synergistic relationships.

Scholarship is best done in community. In our age, that community often occurs over the internet via e-mail, blogs, and Skype. However, the personal contact at these melting pots of weird people are often the necessary foundation for later community.

These events are also, in one sense, like a meeting of a support group, but without the anonymity. Academics tend to be well off the center of the bell curve socially. We are, often, what most people consider weird. In fact, the cast of characters at a Comic Con and an academic conference are not that much different—except the academics tend to dress up in costumes that are more uncomfortable.

Academic conferences are important times for those of us who feel more comfortable with footnotes and formatting than new people. They provide both an opportunity to get the weirdness out and to experience true sympathy for our shared malady. The gathering allows us to feel a little more normal, if only because it concentrates the slightly abnormal segment of society in one place. This can strengthen the scholar’s heart for solitary legs of the journey to come.

Another significant benefit of academic conferences are the opportunities to walk through the hall of books. Of course, for some academics this results in marital stress. However, even without making forbidden purchases from publishers, there is value in seeing the scope of fresh publication from a variety of publishing houses and getting the opportunity to peruse volumes recently released.

Thankfully, these conferences typically require travel, so the purchasing opportunities are naturally limited. Still, the temptation is fierce and sometimes volumes just follow the lonely scholar home—or so the story goes.

Finally, in addition to meeting fresh faces and new acquaintances, there is great community built over years of bumping into the same people. A casual conversation in an elevator, over a period of years, can develop into a friendship with correspondence and real bonds of mutual interest. This is a fascinating experiment in human psychology that bears more study, but it is a real phenomenon.

The moral of the story, if there is one, is that conferences are worth going to for a number of reasons. They are also, for those spouses left at home with young children, worth sending your spouse to because they fuel the fire in so many ways and are more important than our esoteric paper topics might make it seem.

Inventing American Religion - A Review

In our interminable run-up to the next U.S. Presidential election, we are regularly bombarded with information from a variety of sources about how each of the candidates from both parties are doing in the polls. Often these poll results, whether from Pew Research, Gallup, or another organization, include information about how a particular candidate is faring in a particular religious demographic.

There are some who question how those religious profiles are constructed and whether they are, indeed, accurate.

In the newly released book, Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation’s Faith, Robert Wuthnow outlines the rise of scientific polling, the increasing influence of the religious questions in them, and the more recent decline in support for the published poll results.

Summary

Wuthnow’s thesis is “that the polling industry has influenced—and at times distorted—how religion is understood and portrayed, particularly in the media but also to some extent by religious leaders, practitioners, and scholars.” He argues this thesis is eight chapters.

The introduction outlines the early history of public polling and surveys the breadth of the history that Wuthnow goes on to unpack and interpret in the remaining seven chapters. Chapter Two covers the early attempts to do comprehensive surveys to assess public opinion. Such surveys were accurate for local issues, but they were time consuming, expensive, and unable to establish broader public opinion. Still, they were a common tool used by social organizers like Du Bois. In the third chapter, Wuthnow outlines the rise of George Gallup, who pioneered the use of the scientific poll to assay public opinion on a broader scale; since Gallup was a self-professed Christian, he asked religious questions in his polls, which began the process of examining the impact of religion on social and political positions.

Chapter Four highlights the differences between scientific studies, which are usually carried out by scholars, and public opinion polls. Wuthnow explains that polls are designed as quick hit diagnostics, based on an attempt to gain a rough idea of a person's opinion with as few questions as possible. In contrast, scientific studies ask more probing questions. As a result, scientific studies tend to be more narrowly focused, but they also tend to have more precise explanations for the results. Scientific studies go after the “why” not merely the “what.” In the fifth chapter, the evolution of the pollster as pundit is discussed. In 1976, the so-called year of the evangelical, the religion question become more important. Suddenly Gallup’s years of asking about religion began to pay off. Additionally, the people doing the polls began to interpret them for the media audiences. It’s easy to see how possible misinterpretations can result. This trend to question the polls has grown since that point; for some, the promise of punditry undermines the possibility of objectivity in the polls.

In the sixth chapter, Wuthnow describes the falling confidence in polls. This was due to the conflation of pundits and pollsters. It also has to do with the changing demographic of respondents. Initially people would answer the phone and respond to polls, but that began to change. Response rate became an issue and the questions about the demographics of those actually responding to polls arose. Additionally, external observers (though not the pollsters themselves) began to question some of the ways conclusions were drawn. These observers began to notice fluctuations in some of the responses, such that the percentage of church goers varied widely across a six-month span in some cases. Chapter Seven discusses the breaking down of the fourth wall, when pollsters began to take polls about polls. The answers began to show a growing distrust in the accuracy and usefulness of polling. However, Wuthnow argues that the influence of polling is far from gone. He notes, “Polling studies demonstrate that polling rarely has discernible effects on election outcomes, but it offers background information that draws attention to how candidates are doing and reinforces implicit perceptions that some issues are more important than others.”

Wuthnow concludes the book by surveying the state of polling in Chapter Eight. Polls are still important, but they aren’t the trusted sources of information they once were. They are now more likely to be used as sermon illustrations or points for beginning a more in depth process of investigation. Polls continue to suffer due to lowering response rates. People's lives have become saturated with polls, opinion questions, and other calls for feedback. In a world of big data, politicians and corporations are turning away from using polls as ultimate grounds for decisions; better information is available in usage statistics from Facebook, Twitter, and other sources. Additionally, the history of polls continues to show that the categories being used to define religion are no longer adequate (if they ever were). The future of polling, particularly related to religion, is indeterminate. It is unlikely that polls will disappear, but criticisms of polls may continue to reduce their importance. Time will tell.

Analysis and Conclusion

Wuthnow’s book is timely. Polls are regularly published; their results are lauded as sure truths by the 24-hour media cycle by pollsters and the talking heads. Real people, on the other hand, are asking more and more whether the results are trustworthy. After all, we think, when is the last time I was asked to respond to a poll? Most of us don’t even answer the phone when we don’t know the number. Our experience drives us to question the validity of polls, whether that is just or not.

Inventing American Religion is part history and part critique. His history shows what has happened and, it seems to me, explains is very clearly. His critique is a telling warning about how polls have been abused and how to avoid being mislead by them. At least it provides grounds for asking further questions, something that is nearly always a worthwhile endeavor.

The weakness of this volume is that it highlights a problem--the potential unreliability of polls--but it fails to provide a solution. This, of course, was not part of his thesis. However, if Wuthnow had any suggestions about how to improve the use of polls or interpret them better, it would have been good to include them.

In the balance, this is an important book for academics and pastors who want to use polls in their papers, books, and sermons. Wuthnow's point is well made: polls may not be trustworthy and misreading the data may well lead the consumer astray.

Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation's Faith

$24.37

By Robert Wuthnow

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Note: Oxford University Press provided a gratis copy of this volume with no expectation of a positive review.

The Ignorance is Astounding

Recently multiple news outlets have reported on Dr. Ben Carson's theory that the Egyptian Pyramids were used for grain silos. 

There is little reason to give credence to Carson's theory, which is an extreme minority position. All the archaeological evidence seems to point toward the pyramids being built as monuments to rulers. In a presidential election, it's fine to point out the weird ideas of people that have put themselves on display.

What is inexcusable, however, is the fact that multiple news outlets are reporting that Carson's theory is drawn directly from the book of Genesis. 

In their original report (which may be updated any time now) Forbes wrote:

When I found this, I wondered if the ignorance was isolated. However, when I looked at the illustrious reporting of CNN, I found that while their article was correct, the original report required a correction:

“Correction: An earlier version of this story stated the Book of Genesis refers to Joseph building pyramids to store grain. It refers only to Joseph storing large amounts of grain.”

I stopped looking at two sources. Most likely the error was in the original news service story that the other outlets subscribe to.

I'm glad that CNN caught the mistake. However, it is telling that the original authors of the article was so ignorant of Scripture that he or she believed that Genesis talks about using the pyramids for grain storage. This also made it through the editorial process.

It isn't like this is information buried in someone's diary from the 17th century in an obscure monastery library in the Alps. No, this is information that is readily available online in multiple languages and versions. The team of individuals responsible for these reports lacks a basic literacy in Scripture, and yet was too lazy to take a few minutes to proof their information.

Remember this artifact as you read news article reporting on what people are supposed to believe and have said. While one example does not prove that all such reporting is bad, it does give an indication that the authors and editors may be well out of their depth.

Application for Christians

Christians should also recognize the significance of this error. We assume an awful lot of baseline knowledge when we talk to each other and to others. If I asked a group of school age kids at most local churches if Joseph had stored grain in the pyramids they would have given me an incredulous look. Yet, here is a group of adults so unfamiliar with Scripture that they could make such a blatant gaffe in published work.

Think about that when you present the gospel to someone. You can't assume they know the background. And, really, the notion of the substitutionary atonement is pretty crazy apart from the background of Scripture and an understanding of the Ancient Near Eastern culture of the Hebrews. It probably takes more explaining than what has been expected in previous decades.

We are no longer in a culture where we can assume the basics of the gospel. The ignorance is astounding. However, ignorance is not a sin. 

The solution to ignorance is information. This means that we need to get the gospel message out in a way that is comprehensive and intelligible. We can't afford to assume that anyone knows the rest of the story. Likely they have never actually heard it told well at all.