Theology – Page 7 – neumatikos

Assimilation

I have a paper due in a few days in my class on worship. The task is simple: say *something* about worship in about 5 pages. Interact with three books. And I’ve been hitting a brick wall. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say about worship. Oh golly. It’s that I’ve got too much. So for the next few days, I’m going to be inflicting you, my dear readers, with some of the things I’ve had to work through in order to get on to writing the paper. It’s hopelessly biographical I’m afraid, so I do hope you’ll forgive me. It’s also incredibly long, so I’m going to be breaking it up over a few days. By the time you get to the part that pertains to my paper, the paper (God willing) will already have been turned in.

Worship has been at the center of how I defined myself for the better part of my life. Worship was who I was. I was the worship guy. Worship is what I was all about. At that time, I understood worship to be a kind of mystical experience. When God meets with man, and man sees God for even a piece of who he is, man is both lifted up and demolished, and this… experience… is what I called worship. I have something of a philosopher’s nature in me, so I parsed theories about how worship worked. Worship could be had in private or in groups of various sizes. Worship could be expressed, as God used people to reveal God’s Spirit, character, and nature to other people. This expression came out in the form of spiritual gifts and various arts which could be used to communicate in worship. However, the soul of worship was ultimately in the experience itself, somewhere between catharsis and illumination. “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). The process of being transformed, as I understood it, consisted of worship.

But in about 1999, my life came to a crashing halt. Everything I thought I had built my life upon turned out not to have enough substance to get me anywhere. It’s very difficult for me to describe this time, because there’s nothing I can point to particularly that was *wrong*. It was just that nothing was particularly *right*. I was training for ministry at a church that had no particular use for my contribution – but why is it exactly that I needed them to need me? I was lonely – though I had never before cared if I had friends. I was going through one of those classic spiritual dry times, and I should have been content to recognize it as such and ride it out. But things just didn’t add up. All around me everything was as ideal as I had ever imagined it, and yet I was discontent – crying, agonizing, discontent. Something in my worldview – my theology – was incomplete. And I didn’t have the first clue what it was.

So I started everything from scratch. Continue reading “Assimilation”

Only Catholics Should Speak in Tongues?

Mark Barnes believes that Speaking in Tongues is a practice that should only be practiced by Roman Catholics:

Most Charismatics believe that “speaking in tongues is prayer or praise spoken in syllables not understood by the speaker”. Tongues, in other words, are understandable only with interpretation. Frankly, this turns the clock back on the reformation. Charismatics who practice tongues-speaking in public worship have given up the hard-won victory that the word of God should be in the language of the hearer.

I may have some thoughts later to share in response, but for now, I’d like to hear *your* thoughts.
However, I will add that his arguments in this post aren’t nearly as interesting as his earlier post that Charismatics Are Not New Testament Christians

Let a woman Learn

###Curious bits of 1 Timothy###

Last semester, I embarked on an ambitious effort to do some analysis of 1 Timothy 8-15, one of the infamous biblical texts on whether women should have positions of authority. It was a little too ambitious, and I never quite completed it, but ever since, it’s been hanging in my mind, and I keep coming back to it with different results. Since I’ve been dwelling on it again, I thought I’d share a few of my quandaries.

First is the issue of learning and teaching. A cursory reading seems to show that Paul believes women should be allowed to learn, but not to teach. Furthermore, there is a peculiar way that a woman should learn: quietly, and submissively. “Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man; rather she is to remain quiet.”

Beyond the general offensiveness of this idea to modern Western minds, there have been any number of sound biblical objections to this simple interpretation, which I’m not going to bother to address. The one that has been holding my attention for a while has been that there seems to be an inherent contradiction just within those two verses: “Let a woman learn… I do not permit a woman to teach.” This is curious. Why would someone conjure a person to learn, only to abjure them to teach? I know this is ignoring the religious frame of the text, but the old one-room school house would fall apart under these orders: Imagine not allowing those who have just learned to immediately go and teach! Does knowledge rot in the mind, depending on whose mind it is encased? Continue reading “Let a woman Learn”

Alpha Male

That’s not my term; it’s Valerie’s. The word to me draws up pictures of Gorillas in the forest. But the other night, as we were driving home, I was whining about the fact that I have so few friends, particularly guy friends. Due to a weird quirk in my personality, not having a lot of friends doesn’t normally affect me so much – I don’t get lonely. But what bothers me is that it seems pretty consistent that whenever I meet somebody I think I ought to be able to get along with, I don’t like them. This is particularly true when the person is a guy with any kind of position or prestige, or strong character. Almost inevitably, I don’t like them: they’re too harsh, too rude, too proud, too wrongheaded, too unopen to correction. Normally, I like to think of myself as an easygoing kind of guy, but it seems like I have something in me that rebels whenever I think I ought to make a friend, and I just can’t get along with half the men I meet.

Valerie summed it up in two words: “Well Kyle,” she said, “You’re an alpha male. And these other men you keep having problems with, they’re alpha males also, and you recognize that in them – it’s part of what makes you think you ought to get along so well. But when you see them leading in ways you don’t approve of, it sets off triggers so that you want to fix them.” Of course, being a dutiful wife, she also assured me that all my judgments about these other men are of course correct, that the things they’re doing that get under my skin are betrayals of their weak character, and that I’m perfectly justified in disliking them. In short, I am the very image of Jane Austen’s Mr. Knightly, and not merely a jerk with control issues, which gratified me immensely. But in one step she punched my equality button and registered an incipient dislike of silverback gorillas.

Continue reading “Alpha Male”

Terrible God

I’m sure your rss reader has been flooded the last few days with posts on Easter; I know mine has. And yet I feel guilty posting on all the other things we’ve been writing about and seemingly going on as if we had no regard for the most important Christian holiday of the year. I’ve wanted to say something, but I haven’t had anything particularly arresting to say.

No longer. In church this morning the Easter sermon was on the unlikely text of Revelation 5:9-10

“Worthy are you to take the scroll

   and to open its seals,

for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God

   from every tribe and language and people and nation,

and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,

   and they shall reign on the earth.”

Patrick, our pastor, preached today what I believe was a terrific sermon, but I was lost around point 3 as I was struck by the terrible nature of the God we serve.

By terrible, I don’t mean evil, but frightening, incomprehensible, awe inspiring. Here is a God who will stop at nothing to get what he wants. The 24 elders and four living creatures say to the lamb, the Son of God, “worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God.” Why did Jesus offer himself up on the cross? Because God the Father told him too. Because God wanted *men* (people), and the blood of the righteous Son of God was the price for them that was set by our sin. Continue reading “Terrible God”

God Speaking

There’s a certain kerfuffle going on right now over the phrase “God still speaks today.” It seems to have been started by an anonymous article in Christianity Today, titled “My Conversation with God,” in which a conservative seminary professor described with awe and wonder the experience of God directing him to dedicate the proceeds from a book toward a friend’s college tuition. The author seems to have wished to remain anonymous either to avoid turning the article into a fund raising scheme, or because he was fearful of an anti-charismatic backlash.

Of course, there has been something of a backlash. Among other things, John Piper, who I understand is *not* anti-charismatic, or even a cessationist *per se*, wrote an article last week, in which he described having a similar experience:

As I prayed and mused, suddenly it happened. God said, “Come and see what I have done.” There was not the slightest doubt in my mind that these were the very words of God. In this very moment. At this very place in the twenty-first century, 2007, God was speaking to me with absolute authority and self-evidencing reality. I paused to let this sink in. There was a sweetness about it. Time seemed to matter little. God was near. He had me in his sights. He had something to say to me. When God draws near, hurry ceases. Time slows down.

At first, I was very pleased to read about John Piper’s experience, until he transitioned about half way down and made it clear that he wasn’t talking about the same sort of experience described in Christianity Today. He was describing an experience he had reading his Bible, what you might refer to as a “quickening” of the text.

Honestly, my first thought was that he was mocking the other man’s experience: he used the same kind of tone and phrasing, and deliberately concealed the true nature of his experience until it was revealed in a startling sort of way. In fact, his efforts at concealment were thorough enough that, looking back up the article, it becomes clear the experience could not have happened *precisely* in the way he described it: “So I sat down on a couch in the corner to pray. As I prayed and mused, suddenly it happened. God said, “Come and see what I have done.” Of course, it didn’t happen suddenly at all. He opened his Bible, turned to Psalm 66, and prayerfully read the text.

Perhaps it was a moving experience. Perhaps the Holy Spirit was there, quickening those words to him, and filling them with more meaning than he had ever realized before. I have no reason to believe otherwise. But it doesn’t fall in to the same category it would have if the words of Psalm 66 had fallen into his head, unbidden, and he had only later realized they were the exact words of scripture.

Reading through the rest of the article, you discover that John Piper’s real purpose in writing was to castigate the author of the Christianity Today article, not for having an experience, but for treating that experience with the amazement that it was due. Continue reading “God Speaking”

Testimony

For a job application I’m filling out right now to teach at a Christian school, I’ve been asked to share my testimony “including approximate date of conversion,” and it occurred to me that I’ve never actually shared the story of the beginning of my Christian walk on this site.

Frankly, I have ambivalent feelings about the term “conversion,” not because I’ve never had one, but because I believe I’ve had at least two. When I was about five years old, I remember coming out of church in early spring and praying to God that he would “make me a Christian.” (Apparently, I had been asking lots of questions the preceding few weeks – questions along the line of how the preacher managed to stay dry in his suit while baptizing people.) When I prayed, the image came to my mind of a poorly drawn stick figure, and I had a sense that my prayer was…insufficient. But the following Sunday, as my parents got ready for church, I echoed the sinner’s prayer after a preacher on TV. I immediately ran to my mother and announced that I was now a Christian. I was baptized a few weeks later. This would have been around 1983.

You may have some doubts about the authenticity of my “conversion” in such as simplified format, so early in my life. “Where’s the heart-felt repentance?” you may say. I started asking the same thing about a year later. I remember being at school, back behind a pre-fab classroom, with a group of boys, boasting. Oddly enough, however, we weren’t comparing the normal attributes that young boys are prone to demonstrate. Instead, we were each bragging about how young we were when we got saved. The assumption seemed to be that the younger you were when you became a Christian the more innately holy you must have already been, to come to Christ so quickly. I have no idea, I only remember bragging.

That next Sunday, there was a guest speaker at our church who preached a powerful evangelistic message. The gist of the message was that you might *not* be saved, though you had repented, if you had come to Christ for the wrong reason. What if, for instance, you had become a Christian simply for the sake of status or reputation? I was cut to the heart. My very words from the pulpit against me. When the time came for the altar call, I swore to be the first to rise. Eyes blurred with tears, I hurried toward the steps, to grab hold of the horns of the altar, as it were. I wanted to be a Christian, and not one in name only!

As I knelt and prayed, I waited for the pastor or a deacon to come and talk with me. Instead, my mother came. I poured out the secrets of my hear to her, and asked how I could know that I was saved, and that I hadn’t merely “prayed with wrong motives.” I don’t believe she actually showed me the verse in Romans 8 that says, “The Spirit himself bears witness,” but she told me she believed that the Holy Spirit would confirm my state before God if I asked him to. So I did. I prayed, and received a confidence that God looked on me and saw a Christian.

Nevertheless, upon conversion, I immediately became a perfect hoodlum. My life was not marked by a desire to live out the gospel. When I was 9, my parents moved, and I was placed in an exceptional Christian school, where I learned (among other things) that my hurtful, self-centered way of behaving was not the best tool for winning friends. Over the next year and a half, I worked on reforming my manners, and succeeded in making myself a very nice, attractive boy. My reform efforts were so successful that, while I had been wildly unpopular in that school, when we moved again and joined a new church, I found I had discovered all the secrets I needed to “win friends and influence people.” I had become very good at making myself liked. However, in all this my heart was not converted. Continue reading “Testimony”

I know what I want for Christmas

The NET Pastor’s Bible Pack
This is my kind of Bible. First, it’s a new translation, where, in addition to the usual concerns for accuracy and readability, they also paid attention to the writing styles of different authors, instead of merely fixing their vocabulary at a particular reading level. Second, in an attempt to provide the greatest level of transparency in the translation, they’ve included 60,000 translator’s notes. You can see exactly what choices were made, and why. Third, there’s a reason why they chose the acronym NET, since this is the first bible (they claim) to fully use the electronic translation resources now available. All the research and collaboration was done on-line, and in that spirit, they’ve waived nearly all copyright considerations: you may distribute the NET bible, without cost, in any form that you like, provided you don’t charge for it. The whole thing can be downloaded free off their web site.

However, if you want a nice print copy, with all 60,000 footnotes, like I do, apparently the only place you can get is directly from the manufacturer. So, anyway, I know what I want: There’s a nice “Pastor’s Bible Pack” that has the complete first edition, with all 60,000 notes, a reader’s edition, which only has 7,000 or so notes, and a diglot New Testament edition, with Greek on one page and English on the other. All in all: Yum!

Written vs. Oral Communication: an application

As I was saying last week, before I was so rudely interrupted by the weekend, I have my own personal little conflict between talking and writing. Talk is easier, but writing is more cogent, more permanent. I have lots of great ideas all the time, nice little five-minute blasts of controversy. When my life is peaceful, these things show up here, in print. But when things are all crazy, like they’ve been for the last six months (or so), writing things down just takes too much effort. I keep having great ideas, but you never hear about them. My poor wife hears them – over and over and over again – because seeing that I can’t expurgate them by writing, I keep talking until I’m done thinking about them.

For instance, last semester, I had a spiritual encounter that was a sort of culmination of a period of thought and study on the nature and purpose of the church. This was a Big Encounter, something on the level of the call I had to go to seminary. Continue reading “Written vs. Oral Communication: an application”

Bruce Metzger

Bruce Metzger, a prominent professor of Biblical Criticism at Princeton, died last week. I was generally familiar with him, but I haven’t read a lot of his work. However, this quote was particularly pleasing:

On another occasion, one of our more charismatic ‘scholars’ took issue with one of Dr. Metzger’s interpretations of several verses in the book of Revelation. She proceeded to share the interpretation she had received by ‘the gift of the Holy Spirit’ while she was praying over that Scripture the night before. Some students began to giggle. But Dr. Metzger thanked the young woman for sharing her interpretation and noted that he placed great faith in the ability of the Holy Spirit to assist us whenever we interpreted Scripture. He stated further that he, himself, never approached the study of the Bible in any language apart from prayer and the invocation of the Spirit. And then class continued.