Abortion, Personhood and Victimless Crimes

I read this article from John Piper recently (Doing the Right Thing Never Ruins Your Life: A Belief That Prevents Abortion | Desiring God) and I was struck by two of the key points that he makes in the article.

The first has to do with a statistic he quotes that is simply based on the reality that 83% of abortions are by unmarried women who have an unwanted pregnancy. He draws a simple and clear conclusion from this: 83% of abortions are due to fornication. It is fashionable in our time to decry the teaching of the Bible as ‘oppression’ and as an assault on liberty. So long as there is “consent” (as if consent were a matter of complete clarity) then there is no problem, it is considered a “victimless sin”.  The 51 million abortion victims due to fornication since Roe v. Wade make it very clear that this is no victimless crime, and that is without even considering the lifelong emotional and psychology scars on many of the mothers involved.

Yet the Scriptural teaching for Christians is very clear:

·         1 Corinthians 6:18-20

o   18 Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body. 19 Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.

·         1 Thessalonians 4:3-4

o   3 It is God’s will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality; 4 that each of you should learn to control your own body in a way that is holy and honorable

Both of these passages involve the fact that our personhood, our being, involves our bodies as well as our spirit and mind. We are made in the image of God, the Imago Dei, and as personal beings our personhood involves body and soul, not just our soul or spiritual self. The incarnate Christ, the perfect image of God in bodily form, is the ultimate example of this.

That gets at the second impact this article had for me: Piper points out that our cultural laws on abortion declare that a woman takes the place of God in the matter of personhood. If she wants the pre-born baby, then she effectively declares it to be a person; if she does not want it, she declares it a non-person. Personhood is reduced to a mere declaration by a woman. Piper quotes specific statutes in his home state of Minnesota which declare it a crime to kill an unborn baby when the mother wants it, but not a crime when the mother does not (please use the above link to the article to read this: it is powerful). He concludes this:

“Here’s the implication: It is illegal to take the life of the unborn if the mother wants the baby, but it is legal to take the life of the unborn if she doesn’t. In the first case, the law treats the fetus as a human with rights; in the second case, the law treats the fetus as nonhuman with no rights.”

 

“Humanness — existence as a human being — is decreed by the will of the mother. The baby is young and weak and cannot cry out, “I am a human being!” Therefore, the will of the older, the stronger, holds sway. By her will, she may, under the law, confer human personhood on her baby or not. If she does, no one may kill the baby. If she does not, the baby may be killed with impunity. That is legally enshrined self-deification.”

 

“The strong decide which of the weak are persons. We reject this in the case of Nazi anti-Semitism. We reject this in the case of Confederate, race-based slavery. We reject this in the case of Soviet Gulags. But in the case of the unborn, millions of people, even in the church, embrace this self-deifying principle: the human will of the strong confers personhood. If she wants the baby, it’s a baby. If she doesn’t, it’s not. But according to God’s word, both inside and outside the womb, only God confers life and personhood.”

As Piper points out, this is sheer idolatry, idolatry of self. It is making ourselves into God. That so many of the church have accepted this kind of idolatry must be a stench in the nostrils of God.

Partial Calvinism: Why I am neither Arminian nor Calvinist but closer to the Latter

Warning: this is a very long post! It is about 10 pages. The renewed interest in Reformed Theology among evangelicals in recent years has been a matter of great interest to me, but I have been concerned that the debate about that among evangelicals has not dealt with the issues I consider most important. This is my attempt to address that.

Partial Calvinism:

I have always had difficulty accepting the 5 points of Calvinism from the acronym TULIP even though I agree that election and predestination are very much Biblical concepts. The 5 concepts represented by the TULIP acronym (Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, Perseverance of the Saints) include 4 that I have at least some reservations about. The P is the one for which I don’t really have any objections.

I agree that salvation is always God’s initiative: He decided to redeem man, He set up the plan of salvation, He sent Christ into the world, and Christ in John 6:44 and again in John 6:65 makes it clear that no one comes to Him unless the Father draws him. God is the initiator. This is also seen in the Old Testament in passages like Deut. 7:7-8, Jer. 31:3 and Jer. 13:11, Ezek. 36:22-23, 32, Psalm 106:7-8 and many others regarding how God has drawn Israel (His people) to Himself and has done so for on His own initiative and for His own glory. For this reason I would consider myself a partial Calvinist: the Wesleyan idea that anyone can come to Christ at any time does not come to grips with this part of the gospel. As a result, the term election must at least mean that God must initiate, both corporately for mankind (by initiating the coming of Christ in the first place, by initiating the creation of a chosen people through whom Christ would come, by initiating all of this from the beginning) and individually by the conviction of the Holy Spirit which He initiates. These are things most Baptists and most evangelicals have historically held to be the case, and so most evangelical Christians have been at least partial Calvinists. It is not clear to me that the Pentecostal movement holds to these truths, however, so the global growth of Pentecostalism, especially in the global south, may now make this partial Calvinism less the norm than it once was. We must come to Christ on His terms and at His time, not our own.

Whether God takes this initiative through the Spirit with everyone is not totally clear in Scripture. Passages like John 12:32 where Jesus says ‘if I be lifted up I will draw all men to Myself’ is as near an answer as we find in Scripture, and the word ‘all’ is used on a range of ways in the Bible including places like Romans 11:26 that says ‘and thus all Israel will be saved’ where ‘all’ means all of those who are of faith, not every person in the nation. Paul argues at the beginning of Romans that all men have knowledge of God by nature and by conscience, though it is not clear whether the Spirit initiates conviction of sin with everyone. Paul also argues that God remains just even if He does not; we simply do not know whether He convicts everyone at some point.

But the Bible also makes clear that we must respond in faith to His initiative. ‘How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation?’ (Heb. 2:3) is a statement that assumes our responsibility to respond; Stephen’s sermon in Acts 7:51-53 makes clear that it is possible to resist the Holy Spirit in the rejection of Christ, quite specifically accusing the Jewish unbelievers to whom he is preaching of ‘resisting the Holy Spirit’; Paul’s sermon in Acts 13 culminates in his warning to them that forgiveness is available through Christ but they must ‘take heed’ lest they reject it. Jesus in Matthew 11:20-24 pronounces judgment on Chorazin and Bethsaida for they were confronted directly by God in Christ Himself, yet made the choice to reject Him. He says that Sodom and Gomorrah would have repented in similar circumstances. If it is possible to be confronted by Christ and reject Him, is it not also possible to be confronted by the Spirit and reject Him? Again in Matt. 12 He condemns a group of scribes and Pharisees and says the men of Nineveh will rise up in judgment of them. Again, the initiative of God in coming to them is rejected. In both of these passages in Matthew the issue is their choice when confronted by God. Choice is the issue. When Jesus sends out the disciples in pairs in Matthew 10 and Luke 9 He tells them to ‘shake of the dust of your feet’ against those who choose to reject the gospel it is choice that is the issue. Choice remains a requirement. All of this calls into question the concepts of Irresistible Grace and Unconditional Election.

Much has been written about the nature of this choice and of free will, with perhaps the work of Jonathan Edwards as the most thorough. The heart of that argument in support of a ‘strong’ view of election is that man’s will is fallen and man does in fact choose what he wants; man gets what he wants, which is rebellion against God, and so God remains just even if He does not confront every man by the conviction of the Spirit and only confronts the elect with the Spirit. This argument does not, in my opinion, do justice to the various passages above where the entire focus is on choice and ceasing resistance; this argument also requires a particular understanding of what it means to be ‘dead’ and ‘slaves’ in sin, especially in Romans 6, and also a particular understanding of the Romans 9 passage about ‘hardening whom He will harden’ and ‘vessels prepared for destruction’; more on that below. This argument also does not do justice to the Imago Dei as it focuses on the will as if only the will is involved in salvation. The image of God in man is bigger than just the will; more on that below as well.

To me the great strength of Calvinism is its emphasis on how serious sin really is. At the heart of our sins (our behavioral sins) is our sin (our sinfulness by nature) which is in rebellion against God. As C. S. Lewis said, the issue is not that we are fallible creatures with a few imperfections; we are rebels who must lay down our arms. We are at war with God seeking total autonomy, and this is a capital crime even as seeking to overthrow our government is a capital crime. We seek the death of God in order to become our own god. And so we are ‘dead’ in sin and ‘slaves’ to sin. The Calvinist argument regarding total depravity is that ‘dead’ means totally dead and is not used as imagery by the apostle Paul. We are completely dead and cannot even respond to the Spirit without first being regenerated by the Spirit to have some life in us to make us able to respond in faith. The Calvinist view of being a slave to sin is similar; we are totally enslaved to sin and cannot become free until first regenerated by the Spirit. This eliminates the idea that Paul is using imagery or descriptive language here, that he is instead offering a literal definition of ‘dead in sin’.

The difficulty I have with this is that Paul uses exactly the same language to describe believers in Christ, who are now ‘dead to sin’ and ‘free from sin and slaves to righteousness’ in the same chapter of Romans 6. If ‘dead in sin’ when used of a sinner means totally dead and unable to respond to the Spirit, then ‘dead to sin’ for the believer must also mean totally dead to sin and unable to sin. Yet we know it does NOT mean that for the believer. The believer is still capable of sinning and must choose to obey the Spirit. So I find the Calvinist argument for ‘dead’ and ‘slave’ to be untenable. These are images and descriptions, not strict definitions. The ‘dead’ of the sinner is the same kind of ‘dead’ as for the believer. So, the strict Calvinist view of Total Depravity goes too far. While I agree that our depravity is total in the sense that it affects every area of life; it does not mean we are as completely depraved as we could be, but it does mean no area of life or thought escapes from sin. And it does not mean that we are as ‘dead’ as the strict Calvinist view asserts. But it also does not mean that the will is neutral; as mentioned above, God must initiate. Left to ourselves, we would not seek God or choose from a neutral position. It does mean that something remains, even though we are described as ‘dead’, to respond when God initiates, just as there is also something that remains to respond to temptation to sin even though we are ‘dead to sin’. The ‘dead in sin’ and ‘dead to sin’ concepts are very much parallel concepts.

Similarly, when Paul says in Romans 9 ‘what if’ God has made some vessels for wrath and some for mercy, the Calvinist argument is that God did exactly that, rather than seeing this as a hypothetical question that Paul asks in order to defend the justice of God. I disagree with this reading of Romans 9 as well. The entire Romans 9-11 passage is Paul’s reflection on the issue of why so few of the Jews have come to faith compared to the response that was happening among the Gentiles. Why have the Jews chosen to reject the Christ? Paul admits that he is grief-stricken by this and does not fully understand it. Yet he defends the justice of God by saying that even if it were so that God had chosen some for destruction he would still be a just God, which is the part of Jonathan Edwards’ argument that stands. God would still be just in judging sin for man is still sinful. If God had never provided any plan of salvation He would be just in judging sin. He does not owe anyone forgiveness any more than a government owes a chance at reprieve to someone trying to overthrow the government. If He were to choose to have mercy on some while hardening others that would not be unjust. As mentioned above, if He does not convict everyone through the work of the Holy Spirit, He remains just. Paul goes on to argue that still some are saved from the Jews, and that the eschatological plan for Israel is still unfolding until ‘the fullness of the Gentiles has come in’ (Rom. 11:25) after which time ‘all Israel will be saved’. He had already argued that ‘they are not all Israel who are from Israel’ (Rom. 9:6) so ‘all’ is only those in Israel who are of the faith. These entire 3 chapters are a defense of God’s justice in His dealings with Israel but it is not a positive assertion that God has definitively assigned some people to wrath. Hence the ‘what if’. Then at the end of this passage in Rom. 11:33-36 Paul concludes with an exclamation about all of this saying, “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!” The Calvinist view of this is that this is an exclamation that we cannot fully understand how God could have some elect and some destined for wrath; I see it as an exclamation of how we cannot fully understand how God chose Israel to bring Messiah into the world and yet only a remnant of Israel would believe, which is the whole purpose of the discussion in chapters 9-11. The entire nation is ‘elect’ and yet only some are saved, those of faith. It is also an exclamation of the unfathomableness of the mind of God which can at the same time have an elect people and a people who are accountable to choose to respond in faith. There is election and there is accountable choice, at the same time. And Paul does not try to resolve this mystery. He argues in favor of both of them, using Jacob and Esau to argue for election in chapter 9 and using the joining of Hebrew and Gentile under ‘whoever believes upon the name of the Lord will be saved’ in chapter 10. It is a typical rabbinic argument, not a typical western philosophical argument that we try to read it to be. When Paul sums up his argument about election in Rom. 9:30-33 he asks, “What shall we say then? That Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness , attained righteousness, even the righteousness that is by faith; but Israel, pursuing a law of righteousness, did not arrive at that law. Why?” The obvious answer to this ‘Why?’ would be ‘because of God’s election of the Gentiles’ in light of the rest of this chapter. But that is not Paul’s answer; instead, his answer is “because they did not pursue it by faith but as though it were by works”. Man, whether Jew or Gentile, remains responsible to choose faith in Christ. So Paul puts election and free will side by side without seeking to resolve the mystery of how they both exist together. This is exactly what one would expect from a Pharisee.

This unwillingness to allow the mystery in election is a problem with the Reformation view of election, and it is related to the problem of sin; more on that below.

There is also some further mystery about election. Israel was elect as a nation and yet only some believed. So Paul argued that only a remnant is the true Israel. Yet in spite of that, Paul goes on to argue in Rom. 11: 25-32 that during the time of the Gentiles ‘from the standpoint of the gospel they (Israel) are enemies for your sake’ and yet ‘they are beloved for the sake of the fathers; for the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable.’ That is, Israel the nation remains in some sense elect even though they are unbelievers and enemies of the gospel during the times of the Gentiles. Election is not as cut and dried as we might like.

Throughout Romans Paul includes in each passage about election a parallel section about personal responsibility for choosing faith. In this section of Rom. 9-11, the ‘what if’ section about election in chapter 9 is followed by chapter 10 with its great passages of 10:9 (“if you confess with your mouth and believe in your heart that God raised Him (Christ) from the dead, you shall be saved”) and 10:13 (“for whoever will call upon the name of the Lord will be saved”). This is characteristic of Paul in Romans and also of John in his gospel. The passage about slaves to sin in Romans 6 is followed by the exhortation to choose to present ourselves as slaves to Christ; the Romans 3 passage of how all are condemned in sin is followed by Romans 4 about Abraham and righteousness by faith. The great passage of John 10:22-30 about the Good Shepherd and how His sheep hear His voice and follow, no one can snatch them out of His hand because the Father has given them to Him and so on is immediately followed by John 10:31-39 castigating those oppose Him for their unbelief. The passage in John 8:31-38 about those in sin being slaves to sin unless the Son makes them free indeed is immediately followed by 8:39-47 where their unbelief is what keeps his opponents among the Jews from being true sons of Abraham. This side-by-side presence of both election and personal free will is characteristic of these 2 books and is also characteristic of Pharisaic Judaism. Rabbi Akiva, who was executed by the Romans during the Bar Kochba rebellion of 120 AD, is credited with saying ‘All is known yet there is free will’ as the characteristic formulation of Pharisaic Judaism about this coexistence of election with free will. The writing of Paul the former Pharisee is very much in line with this; he discusses them both side by side and does not try to resolve the remaining mystery about this. Rather, he exclaims in Romans 11:33-36 that we cannot fully understand God’s ways. Paul never stopped being Jewish; when he was arrested at the end of Acts he was in the Temple being Jewish; his method of going ‘to the Jew first, and then to the Greek’ (see Rom. 1-3 where he repeats this several times) in his missionary journeys and his arguments in the synagogues that Jesus is the Messiah show his life-long conviction that he was fulfilling his Judaism rather than abandoning it. To read Romans as if he had abandoned his Jewish views on election, which is what Calvinism does, is to take a very late (sixteenth century in the Reformation) and very Western (European Gentile) view of Romans while overlooking both the typical Jewish view of election (which Paul never renounces and none of his writing conflicts with) and overlooking the characteristic
side by side presentation of election and personal responsibility for belief in his writing. It is well known that some of the Reformers, Luther especially, were anti-Semitic and Reformed theology remains suspect among Messianic Jewish believers as a result. It seems to me that their anti-Semitism also affected their reading of Romans in causing them to disregard the Jewishness of Paul and the Jewish roots of his doctrine. Paul’s teaching about the nature of what happens to our body and spirit after death, his understanding of the Torah in prophecy of a coming Messiah, his understanding of election, and his understanding of the governance of a congregation whether a synagogue or a church are all very consistent with his Jewish roots and the common views of Pharisees of his time. The Reformed view overlooks this and projects 16th century Gentile thinking back onto a first century Jew who had found the Messiah.

Similar to this Jewish view of God’s role election is the Jewish view of God’s role in sin, and also the historic Christian view of God’s role in sin. Augustine wrote that all that happens is ordained by God, and that includes the evil that happens. By that Augustine does not mean that God sins but that if sin exists then God in some sense must allow it and in at least some sense ordain its existence. To try to simplify that, God does not force sin to happen but He does ordain its existence. In some sense God elects sin to be. To say that God has foreordained the elect but does not force Himself on them is a similar idea; they are still elect, and God still must initiate or they would not on their own come to faith, but He does not force them to come to faith any more than He forces sin to come about but still ordains sin. Just as ‘dead in sin’ and ‘dead to sin’ are parallel ideas, the issues of ordaining election and ordaining all that happens including evil are parallel ideas. Calvinism agrees with this view of God’s role in sin but takes a very different approach to election, and that ignores the parallelism of these two ideas.

When addressing the problem of sin, the question is how it can be that God ordains the existence of sin without being the author or agent of sin. The typical Reformed answer is that God doesn’t have to actively do anything, he just leaves us to ourselves. Yet that does not explain how the sinner chooses sin A instead of sin B when sin B is needed to carry out God’s plan; so the Bible says ‘God hardened Pharaoh’s heart’. That certainly sounds active. Yet the Bible maintains that God does not sin. This remains a mystery; and still the answer that is given to how God can ordain sin without causing sin is ‘He doesn’t have to’ cause it. It seems to me that the answer to ‘how can God assure election without doing violence to the human choice’ is exactly the same: He doesn’t have to. There remains in man the Imago Dei that can respond to the Spirit. This too remains something of a mystery: how can God assure the salvation of the elect without actively causing it by forcing it to happen? Yet the Bible says this is the case. Calvinism refuses to allow any mystery here while it does allow some mystery in the parallel case of the problem of sin.

The cause of the Reformation was the state of the Catholic church which had, in my view, tried to remove the work of the Spirit and tried to ‘objectify’ everything in the church into acts controlled by the Church, by way of sacraments, indulgences, specified acts of penance and so on. This attempt to make everything objective resulted in an arrogance in the Church that was based on the authority of the Church in all these matters. The Reformation rightly confronted all of this in its emphasis on the ‘solas’: sola gratia, sola Scriptura, sola fide. However, the attempt to over-objectify election, by removing all mystery, makes a similar error in my opinion, and it quite often has resulted in a kind of arrogance among Calvinists. The ‘caged stage’ of over-zealous Calvinism is one expression of this, but I think the underlying issue is not merely a phase.

The historic teaching of the church has been that man is a sinner both by nature and by choice. It seems to me that Calvinism insists that man is guilty only by nature. If man is incapable of making a choice for faith when confronted by Christ due to being totally dead, then he cannot be guilty of being a sinner by choice since he is not capable of any other choice. While Edwards and others insist that he still chooses and gets what he wants, they also insist he is not capable of choosing for Christ. This is a circular argument and the final conclusion is that man is not capable of choice and so is only a sinner by nature and that man’s nature is itself dead. Yet we do not see this kind of deadness in Adam and Eve or their descendants after the Fall in the Old Testament. They still can hear God’s voice calling them and can exercise choice, such as when Abel makes a satisfactory sacrifice and Cain does not, both by choice. The teaching that we are sinners both by nature and by choice is very consistent with the gospel passages above where Jesus condemns Bethsaida, Chorazin, and the unbelieving Pharisees solely for their choice in rejecting Him so the historic teaching that we are sinners both by nature and by choice is entirely Biblical. Calvinism undercuts that teaching with a view of man’s deadness that goes beyond the Scripture.

In regard to the question of whether election is ‘fair’, a common defense of the Reformed view is that God is just but that is different than the modern version of fairness and that grace goes beyond justice. R. C. Sproul, for example, uses a Venn diagram example by drawing a circle labeled ‘justice’ and outside that circle placing both ‘injustice’ and ‘non-justice’ with ‘mercy’ as a subset of ‘non-justice’. After all mercy is ‘not getting what we deserve’ and so is in that sense beyond justice. However I think that view does not do justice to Paul’s argument in Romans 3:24-26 where he argues that Christ died so that God can indeed remain just while also being the justifier (the grantor of mercy) to those who believe. This says to me that God’s grace is also within His justice because of the substitutionary work of Christ. I nonetheless agree that ‘fairness’ is not all that relevant because it is a subjective, man-centered value that changes in every culture. But it does not seem appropriate to argue that God’s mercy is outside of His justice.

Finally, there is the issue of being made in the image of God. This matter of choice is of great importance in the matter of being made in the image of God, as also in the matter of man’s nature. I was greatly influenced by the writing of Francis Schaeffer in my college days, especially by Genesis in Space and Time and The God Who is There. It is interesting that Schaeffer was Presbyterian and taught at the Reformed seminary Westminster in light of the great emphasis all his writing places on the fact that man is not a machine. For man to be in God’s image he must be non-determined, he argues. Here is a summary from him on this topic from The God Who is There (page 112-113 of the 1990 edition of the trilogy of 3 of his books): “God, being non-determined, created man as a non-determined person. This is a difficult idea for anyone thinking in twentieth-century terms because most twentieth-century thinking sees man as determined. He is determined either by chemical factors, as the Marquis de Sade held and Francis Crick is trying to prove, or by psychological factors, as Freud and others have suggested, or by sociological factors, such as B. F. Skinner holds. In these cases, or as a result of a fusion of them, man is considered to be programmed. If this is the case, then man is not the tremendous thing the Bible says he is, made in the image of God as a personality who can make a free first choice. Because God created a true universe outside of Himself (not an extension of His essence), there is a true history which exists. Man as created in God’s image is therefore a significant man in a significant history, who can choose to obey the commandment of God and love Him, or revolt against Him….To ask that man should have been made so that he was not able to revolt is to ask that God’s creation should have ceased after He created plants and animals. It is to ask that man should be reduced to machine programming. It is to ask that man as man should not exist.” This does not sound very much like Reformed theology yet this concept that man is not a machine and that he is capable of meaningful choice runs throughout all of Schaeffer’s writing and is at the heart of his Christian apologetic. It is therefore not surprising that many within Reformed theology circles questioned whether he was really with them in their understanding of election. I don’t think that question was ever fully answered as you can still find it being debated online today. But I am convinced that Schaeffer was on target here. Man cannot really be in the image of God if he is not capable of meaningful choice. Man is not a machine. His choices matter and he will be accountable for them, including his choice of whether to accept Christ. If he cannot make that choice without first being regenerated, then what that says is that a vital part, perhaps the most important part, of being in the image of God is dead. The Reformed view of ‘dead in sin’ essentially means that the image of God in man died with the Fall in Eden. It means that man is a machine after the Fall. He is no longer a non-determined person. It would mean that though Crick and Skinner and Freud and others got the mechanism wrong, their view of man as determined, as a machine, was correct. This deterministic viewpoint is also at the heart of the desperate search for a genetic basis for LGBT behavior as they view it as something determined by genetics rather than a choice and a sin. They are desperately looking for some excuse to say, ‘I have no choice! I was made this way!’ Yet Scripture is very clear that the image of God in man is not dead; the Fall occurs in Genesis 3 but it is reiterated in Genesis 5 and Genesis 9 that the image of God is not dead and in fact that is basis for capital punishment in the case of murder. The reason homosexuality and other sexual perversions as well as adultery are also capital crimes in the Old Testament is because they are an assault upon the image of God, as is murder. If Schaeffer’s argument about man not being a machine was only true in Eden before the Fall, then it is irrelevant today. Yet his whole apologetic is based on fact that man still today is not a machine and still has to make meaningful choices including whether to accept Christ. This would imply that because the image of God remains, it is possible to respond to the Spirit when He convicts of sin and calls us to choose to accept Christ, even though we remain dependent on Him to initiate the confrontation that leads to the decision point. This is to say that the image of God is what keeps ‘dead’ from meaning ‘totally dead and incapable of choice’. If the image of God remains, then man is still not a machine and is still responsible for his choice for or against faith in Christ. This has to do with the image of God being more than mere will. The image of God has to include that which makes it possible to be in a love relationship with God. Perhaps ‘personhood’ is as narrow as that idea can be, as things like will or rationality or decision making are simply not enough to fully explain this. To accept the Reformed view of ‘dead in sin’ is to deny any meaningful content for what it means to be made in the image of God since the most essential part of that image is personhood and the potential for person to person fellowship with God the Person, the Personal God. If man is so dead that he cannot respond, then in what meaningful way is he still made in God’s image? Mere biological life, even with a brain that can reason, is also not nearly enough to be viewed as bearing the full image of God. God has made our bodily life such that it provides a venue and empowerment for this image of God to be expressed, and so the body cannot be ignored as meaningless within the concept of the image of God, but it is not sufficient. By itself it is just a machine. The capacity to make meaningful choice when confronted by God’s initiative is vital to the concept of being in God’s image rather than being a machine. The Calvinist view reduces man to something less than fully human; man is no longer man.

Recently (week of November 10, 2019) the Renewing Your Mind podcast has run a series of talks by R. C. Sproul on the work of the Holy Spirit. In one talk entitled ‘The Spirit in Creative Expression’ talks about beauty in the arts and also the image of God in man. One statement made was that wherever beauty is found the Spirit is there in some fashion, and then he went on to explain that even in unregenerate artists the ability to create true art is evidence of the residual image of God in man and therefore something remains of the Spirit in unregenerate man. I agree. But then another talk entitled ‘Regeneration-a Sovereign Act’ insists that nothing remains that can respond to the conviction of the Spirit. These 2 viewpoints seem contradictory to me; if something of the Spirit remains, then something is there to respond. You can’t have it both ways. To hold the position of irresistible graces requires the death of the image of God.

So then the Reformed view of election leaves man as less than man; it seems to me that it unintentionally also reduces God to less than God by insisting that the means of salvation must be reducible to human logic. It reduces the image of God in man to the will, and it reduces God’s work of election to something fully definable by human logic. We do not do that for the problem of sin wherein God can ordain the presence of sin without directly causing it but we insist on what mechanism He must use in election. I would compare this to miracles; modern man (modern meaning since the Renaissance) has mostly rejected miracles because man insists on defining what mechanisms God has available to do them. Yet the Creator surely has more mechanisms available to Him than we have been able to define in physics. If God can ordain evil without causing it He can surely do so for election as well. Our insistence on defining how He must work here seems problematic to me.

Therefore, for all of these reasons I am only a partial Calvinist. It seems to me that strong 5-point Calvinism requires a misreading of Paul in regard to being dead in sin, requires a misreading of both Paul and Jesus in regard to our responsibility to choose, requires ignoring the Jewish foundations of Paul’s teaching, and requires minimizing the meaning of being made in the image of God. The Reformed view seems to me to try too hard to remove all the mystery from the doctrine of election while still keeping it in the doctrine of why God allows evil since both must be ordained by God; to me the two mysteries are much more similar than the Reformed view allows.

I consider the both of the ‘standard’ views, the one considered Arminian and the one considered Reformed, to be views that go beyond the Scriptures. The standard strawman of Arminianism says that people can choose to be saved at their own time and with their initiative, and the standard view of Calvinism is that man can do absolutely nothing, not even in response to the Spirit. What I see in Scripture fits neither of these entirely and so I find my view to be somewhere between where salvation is always God’s initiative but man must respond. Similarly, views of baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and marriage seem to have 2 extremes that I see as not totally in alignment with Scripture, either sacramental as ‘efficacious means of grace’ or as ‘mere symbols’ or memorials. Here again I think the Scriptural view is somewhere in between, with symbolism and serving as a memorial being important yet with warnings for when they are not taken seriously as practices that have some real effect (like ‘many are sick and some sleep’ in 1 Cor. 11:30). The Scriptures seem a bit more nuanced than we really like, and election is not as cut and dried as we might like.

The great strength of Calvinism is that it recognizes the seriousness and enormous impact of sin and it emphasizes the sovereignty of God; the great weakness is that in recognizing this it pushes beyond Scripture resulting in making man less than man and ironically even reducing God to less than God. The great strength of Arminianism is its emphasis on the need for man to make a decision, a personal commitment; its great weakness is that in emphasizing this it makes man more than man, having lost sight of the need for God’s initiative in salvation and not fully facing the impact and seriousness of sin. I have concerns with both views.

Marriage as Grace and Law

 

I just read Al Mohler’s book We Cannot Be Silent and he does a good job assessing the challenges to Christians by the sexual revolution.  He is exactly right in his discussion that it did not start with same sex marriage, and it will not end there. Others like Francis Schaeffer and Alastair MacIntyre went further back in history to trace how indeed this began much further back than what Mohler discusses, but in terms of the changes over the last century or so he does a good job. He is one of the few evangelicals who clearly and humbly recognizes that the evangelical church was completely out of touch in the 1960’s as the issues of contraception (The Pill) and abortion were developing, admitting that the Catholic church was engaged but evangelicals were not.  He is also clear about how Christians have been complicit in the destruction of both morality in general and marriage specifically by their lack of recognition of what was going on back in the 1960’s and 1970’s but also because liberal clergy, both Protestant and Catholic, were actively undermining Christianity rather than teaching truth.  The unthinking acceptance of the separation of sex and procreation from marriage by both The Pill and by no fault divorce made the parishioners in the pews contributors to the assault on marriage and the family as well. We need to change our teaching from the pulpit, our teaching in Bible studies, and our personal practice in the bedroom if we are to be faithful to the Bible. As he points out, Christian couples assume that so long as they are married there is no issue with using reproductive technology like in-vitro fertilization and contraception but that is simply not so. They also assume that as long as they are married there is no issue with personal practices (like sodomy) that were long forbidden by the Church, and that also is not so. Mohler is absolutely correct on all of these matters.

He is also correct that it will not end with same sex marriage, as the transgender revolution is already showing, and there is no reason to think it will end there either. Polygamy, polyamory, and who knows what else will continue to be pursued by the revolutionaries. The book was released in late 2015 and this has continued to be the case.

I do think he could have done more to present a picture of Biblical marriage that is more inspiring and aspirational, however. Presenting marriage only in terms of covenant, which is essentially a matter of Law, is accurate as far as it goes but I do not think it demonstrates how Biblical marriage provides a reality, a beauty, and a purpose to which same sex marriage can never aspire.

Let me say up front that I am not a supporter of covenant theology in general. Covenant theology proposes that covenants are typical of God’s actions even before the Creation and The Fall, proposing a Covenant of Redemption within the Trinity and a Covenant of Works before The Fall. Since the Bible makes no mention of any covenants until after The Fall, my opinion is that covenants are only necessary after The Fall, just like The Law (Torah) was only necessary after The Fall. The Trinity also has no need for covenants within itself. The operative principle within the Trinity is Love, not Law. So also between God and man before The Fall. As Paul points out in Rom. 3:20, ‘by Law is the knowledge of sin’.  Law is indeed necessary and obedience is required, both in terms of society and in terms of the Bible. But Law is not needed until after The Fall, and covenants are a matter of Law. In describing marriage, Mohler relies mostly on the idea of covenant. Marriage is indeed a covenantal relationship and that is necessary in this fallen world. But the goal of marriage as it was created in Genesis 1-2 is for more than just obedience to Law. On page 65 he says that the ‘why’ for Christians to define marriage as they do is simply “as an act of obedience to the living God.” While that is true as far as it goes, and to obey the Law of God is indeed good and profitable, obedience to Law does not provide insight into why God designed marriage as He did nor to provide some insight into how that design is a matter of beauty and something to be sought after.  He essentially argues that God designed us that way and we should therefore obey, which is true, but it doesn’t let Christian marriage shine as a light of beauty and aspiration to a lost world.  And I think a proper reading of Genesis 1-2 does provide insight into that beauty.

He comes close to getting there in the chapter about what the Bible says about sex, but doesn’t quite go far enough. What happens here reminds me of what he had already pointed out about the 1960’s: evangelicals had viewed contraception and abortion as ‘Catholic issues’ and as a result did not do any serious thinking about the Biblical issues involved. The Catholic Church got it right, and we evangelicals got it wrong. The same thing is happening here in regard to the theology of the body. In this chapter he proposes that we need a Biblical theology of sex and a Biblical theology of the body. He is right, but what he outlines is not quite enough, while the theology proposed by Pope John Paul II is much better. It is much better because what Mohler outlines is based essentially on Law while the Pope includes Grace while not ignoring Law.

The basic issue here is the Imago Dei, the image of God in us. John Paul II points out that in Genesis 1, and also in other passages that refer to the male/female creation including the teaching of Jesus; it is very clear that God made man as male and female in His image. That is, being made male and female is an inherent part of what it means to be in God’s image and marriage itself is an image-bearer. The Pope is not the only one to talk about this: Karl Barth, Frances Schaeffer, Christopher J. H. Wright and others also do. But the Pope went to great lengths of developing the idea and relates the oneness of male/female in marriage to the oneness of God in the Trinity, and he does it very well. (See other blog here for more on marriage as an image bearer: Marriage as Image Bearer) While Mohler brings up the image of God, he does not spend much time there. But this is where the beauty lies. The relationship within the Trinity expresses love, self-giving, creativity and fruitfulness from all eternity. The ‘they shall be one flesh’ of marriage echos the statement that ‘the Lord is One’ of the Shema. Marriage is a human embodiment of those attributes of God, in His image. Some of them, especially the gift of self for which the body is specifically designed as male and female (‘he who keeps his life shall lose it’) and the fruitfulness of procreation are totally impossible in same sex marriage.  Same sex marriage can only seek to counterfeit these things with bodily actions that deny and assault the design and testimony of the body itself, and fruitfulness is impossible without the counterfeit of reproductive technology. All of them provide a view of beauty and truth to which marriage is to aspire, an aspiration that goes far beyond Law-keeping.  Law-keeping is necessary, but so is the vision of what marriage was intended to be as a picture of the love of God within the Trinity. This is the grace part, to be gifted with an embodied glimpse of the eternal life of God. Nothing less than Biblical marriage can ever aspire to this.

Mohler’s book is much better than most of the evangelical books about marriage from the last 30 years in regard to the way things have developed in the last 100 years. It is really honest on the matters of contraception and divorce and how we evangelicals were totally deaf to the great issues of our time in the 1960’s while the Catholic church was seeking to do the right thing. However, he does not quite recognize that we are making that same mistake again by not emphasizing marriage as an inherent and beautiful part of what it means to be image-bearers, by not taking advantage of the teaching from Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. We need both Law and Grace.

Pastors: CEO or Discipler-in-Chief?

Current events have caused me to be thinking about the way the role of pastor is structured in American Evangelical churches these days. One event was the announcement by a local megachurch pastor that he is stepping down to make way for a new and younger pastor after 37 years at the church. Another event was the recent announcement from Josh Harris, author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye back in the 90’s and former pastor of a megachurch in Virginia, that he is both divorcing his wife and abandoning Christianity.

When the local pastor announced his plan to step down he provided input to the church that he views his role as the senior pastor of a megachurch (4000+ members) with this kind of approximate work division: 70% CEO of a large organization, 30% preaching.  This is not to say that the organizational work has no ministry component to it, since that organization exists in order to do ministry. Yet I found this description somewhat troubling and I still do.  For a long time I have been concerned about the failure to make disciples in local churches (see this prior blog:  https://dad-isms.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-failure-to-make-disciples.html ). As I have pondered this division of work in the daily role of a megachurch pastor, it seems to me that we may be structuring churches in a way that essentially guarantees that pastors are not disciple-makers.   The megachurch model may very well demand an effective organizational manager who also preaches but it seems to leave little time for personally making disciples. It seems more aligned to a commission to ‘go to all the world and do church’ rather than to the Great Commission of ‘go to all the world and make disciples’. It seems to me that senior pastors should first of all be ‘discipler in chief’ more than CEO.

The Josh Harris apostasy reminded me of this and also brought into focus the celebrity dimension of pastoral temptation. It is true that significant leadership of many kinds involves at least some amount of celebrity/notoriety and the temptations that come with that.  Harris was vaulted into a celebrity position early in life with his book at age 21, and then he became a megachurch pastor soon after, and that without having had theological education.  It seems clear in retrospect that he was unprepared for either the celebrity or the pastoral role, but more fundamentally it seems he never became a disciple himself let alone a disciple-maker of others. Yet he appeared to ‘succeed’ as a megachurch CEO and pastor until he voluntarily stepped down to go get an education (which then led to other problems apparently though it is not clear how all this unfolded: see this Al Mohler podcast https://albertmohler.com/2019/08/01/briefing-8-1-19 ).  This makes me question if the entire megachurch structure is part of the problem. Other recent issues with megachurch celebrity pastors have also contributed to this concern (see this blog regarding Mark Driscoll, James MacDonald and others: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/07/kissing-christianity-goodbye ).  Recent concerns about Andy Stanley’s sermons advising the church to ‘unhitch from the Old Testament’ come to mind as well regarding megachurch leaders who seem theologically unprepared as Harris also was. Though Stanley did go to seminary, the depth of his theology is questionable.

I continue to be troubled by the CEO model of the pastoral role. In my 40+ years of work in corporate America I had the opportunity to have some acquaintance and work contact with some CEO’s and those one level down who were competing to be the next CEO for a large Fortune 500 company. I cannot say I would want to be like them nor would I want my children to be like them. They may feel the same about me, but this experience alone troubles me about making the CEO a model for the church. As I consider these recent events, I am becoming more convinced that the CEO model in churches is guaranteeing the end of discipleship as a primary role for pastors.

Learning How to Learn

In my early years at Kimberly-Clark Corporation we had an excellent statistics expert on staff by the name of Jim Gander. Jim had taught a number of years at the Institute of Paper Chemistry before coming to K-C and had a much better approach for helping students understand the idea of statistical concepts than many statistics classes that simply focus on how to do the calculations with a very minimal effort on the concept. Jim taught both a 'think version' and a 'do version', where the 'think version' was about the concept and the 'do version' focused on the calculation. The 'think version' struck me as key to learning how to learn.

His approach to teaching about the standard deviation in statistics is a great example of this. When asked 'what is the standard deviation?', a common mathematical definition of that is the root mean square deviation of a sample of data. That is a definition that describes how it is calculated. This is a useful number that finds application in many areas of engineering, physics, predictive models in such places as economic models, and other things. You might sometimes get a more descriptive answer such as it being a measure of how variable a data set is, or it is a measure of how wide the distribution of a data set is, or how much actual values (the data set) departs from a predicted model (the assumed mean).  Those are all correct but were not as helpful to me as how Jim described it: it is the average distance from the mean. This takes some explaining, as to why you have to take the differences (X-bar minus X), then square them, then divide by n-1 (versus n for a typical average), and then take the square root. But when you walk through all of that, it becomes clear that the underlying concept is an average distance from the mean. I just did some online searches for 'standard deviation' and 'root mean square' and did not find this 'think version', and I have not seen it in text books that I have used on statistics. However, I think it is a good and clear way to think about the concept and understand it. It is a good way to actually learn the concept that is behind the calculation.

Much technical professional work in fields like engineering, medicine and physics is 'rules based'. Many practitioners use calculations like this correctly in their work without necessarily having fully thought through the concept. They can build things that work and make working predictive models or other things by following the rules and doing the calculations correctly. This is one form of learning but seems to be a less than ideal way to learn to me. Some of this kind of work is subject to automation as the rules based decisions are converted into mathematical algorithms to deal with the vast amounts of data being generated in our modern society. But thinking about the outputs still requires understanding the concept and whether it is being applied in a reasonable way.

 This kind of 'do version' approach allows covering more material in classes, as you have to spend less time on the underlying concept. But it does not build a habit of thinking through concepts, or learning how to learn. It focuses on the doing. In that way it is much like 'rote memory'. You learn the formula and do it, but may not really understand it. Rote learning still has its place, especially early in life, as my son pointed out to me. They are not yet ready for abstract reasoning, but still need to learn the alphabet, numbers, words, and many other things before they are ready for abstract reasoning. They also learn these things very readily, soaking it up like a sponge. Even throughout life, some things just have to be learned more or less by rote. At some point, however, especially in regard to  more complex ideas in math and science, having both the 'think' and the 'do' versions becomes very important.

Many of the engineers I have known through the years have been totally focused on the doing; they want to go do something, go build something. They are not always that interested in the conceptual underpinnings. 'Just tell me what you want and I will figure out how to build it' was a common lament. On the other hand, many scientists I have known have been totally focused on the concepts and figuring out what should be built, but they were not that interested in the translation to doing it in a practical, profitable way. One key part of my work in R&D management was pushing the engineers toward understanding the underlying concepts and pushing the scientists toward making it work commercially. Both are really necessary in applied development. This has been a classic area of conflict between engineers and research scientists.

Many people go through all of their educational years using a rote approach to learning. They work to remember by rote the formulas or data they need for the test and then do it. The concept doesn't 'stick', though, and so they lose the knowledge quickly unless they are using it regularly. But I do not think I will forget Jim's teaching of statistics even though I haven't used it very much in years. The concept stuck.

Now it may be clear why this matters for statistics or other mathematical concepts, but does this approach apply to other kinds of learning? As mentioned above, I think there are some things that we may need to learn by rote, at least up to a point. When learning some basic geographical facts like states and their capitals, this may be the obvious place to start. Yet if you can visit states and get a real understanding of the geography that is certainly more memorable. That kind of reverses which of  the 'think' versus 'do' approaches is more memorable compared to the statistics example, where here the 'think' is learning it on a map and 'do' is the more memorable visit, but this combination of both a 'think version' and a 'do version' does seem transferable to me and helps me to learn. This is one reason I enjoy traveling so much: it is a great way to learn.

I think it is transferable to other kinds of learning as well. I am thinking of theology at the moment. Much of what is taught in churches, like catechism classes or creeds, along with many sermons and teaching of doctrines, are essentially 'do versions'.  The Old Testament Law, at least in the way it is often presented, is a 'do version' (though in reality it is more than that). These are largely 'rules based' approaches to morality and life. Yet the actual teachings of Christ in the gospels are much more like
'think versions' where He went about challenging the thinking of the experts in the Law (the Pharisees) and challenging everyone including His disciples to actually know and understand God. The rules based approach can be useful in not having to think everything through in detail in every instance that comes up every day in life, but the 'think version' is necessary to actually be committed to a Christian life and to be able to explain it to our children or to those outside the faith.

This is a matter of life-long learning, just as in our professional lives we continue to learn throughout life. But learning how to learn is critical to actually understanding what we are doing. I have found that considering both a 'think version' and a 'do version' has been a big help in learning how to learn across many areas of learning.

Adam's Rib

As Memorial Day 2019 approaches I have been hearing comments about plans to barbecue ribs for the holiday celebration. One man commented, 'I will be making my famous ribs!' for the family cookout. I have recently been thinking about ribs but not the barbecued kind; I have been thinking about the most famous rib, Adam's rib in Genesis 2.

As I consider the sexual revolution in our culture and its various dysfunctions, one of the major concerns is the idolatry of the autonomous individual. Our culture has made an idol of the idea that the meaning of freedom is unhindered autonomy for the individual. The individual should be free to create their own world regardless of the realities of their body for example. The view is that the autonomous individual is the basic unit of society. What we see in Genesis is quite different.

At the end of Genesis 1 we are told that God created man in His own image as male and female. The language used is that God made 'him' (singular) as 'male and female' (plural). As Francis Schaeffer pointed out in his book Genesis in Space and Time, one 'man' consists of male and female. (See my prior blog for more on this:  https://dad-isms.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-image-of-god-in-marriage.html)

Genesis 2 then shows us how God demonstrated to the man, prior to the creation of the woman, that there was more to be done before the creation of 'man' was complete. The text says that God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him." (NASB) This has often been understood to mean that the basic problem was that the man was lonely, that  loneliness was the thing that was 'not good'. I think that ignores what was already stated in Genesis 1, that God's completed creation was one 'man' consisting of male and female to bear His image. As I point out in the prior blog referenced above, the image of the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is borne by the union of man and woman in 'one flesh' that cannot be borne by one individual alone. The bearing of God's image in 'man' requires both male and female united as one and bearing the image of the communion within the Trinity. So the key issue that was 'not good' was not mere loneliness; it was incompleteness. God was not yet done with His creation of man, so of course it was not yet good.

So God takes His time to show Adam that something was missing, and Genesis 2:19-20 relates how God taught the man that nothing else in creation would fill the bill. There was much to do in this new world and there was the personal God there to keep him company, so mere loneliness is not the whole story. The man is missing something fundamental. To treat this text as if the man's loneliness is the main issue is to treat the creation of woman as an instrument to solve the problem of the man's loneliness. This makes the woman merely instrumental, which is not the message we got in Genesis 1 about bearing God's image. Man alone cannot bear the complete image of God, and God has taken pains in chapter 2 to make the man understand that before He makes the woman.

He had made the man from the dust of the ground, but He did not do that for the woman. He used Adam's rib. If all He wanted to do was make another autonomous individual, the dust of the ground would have been just fine for making the woman too. If mere loneliness were the main issue, another person from the dust of the ground would have been just fine. But to have 'one flesh', for the woman to be part of the man and truly 'one flesh' with him, God used Adam's rib instead.

When he sees the woman, Adam's response is, "This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." Many sermons have made light of this by creating their own version of Adam's response, trying to make the text say something like 'Woo-Hoo! Wow!' in excitement over the woman, While this usually gets a laugh, it completely misses the point. The point is not that the man was excited about the woman, though he may well have been. The point is that the man recognizes that she is indeed 'one flesh' with him, the completion of him. She is in fact the rest of him, made from his rib. Now it is good, not because his loneliness has been fixed, but because the creation of God's image is complete.

The bearing of God's image in this world is not complete in autonomous individuals. That task requires the unity of male and female, which makes the family the basic unit of society rather than the individual.  So if you are cooking ribs this weekend, it may be a good time to contemplate that most famous rib.

100 Years Ago Today

One hundred years ago today on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the shooting stopped. All was finally quiet on the western front. Armistice day was first celebrated a year later and then became a national holiday eventually to celebrate the end of what had been until then the most deadly war ever. Sadly, in a few years an even worse war would overshadow it.

My paternal grandfather was a veteran of World War I; a few short years after it ended my father was born. He would serve in World War II and a few years after he returned from that war I would be born. On this Armistice Day, now Veterans Day, I have reached age 65. From this vantage point 100 years doesn't seem that long ago. I do not remember my paternal grandfather since he died when I was a preschooler but I did get to know my maternal grandfather since he lived to be 95. The world they were born into and were living in at that first Armistice Day had more in common with the world of Abraham Lincoln than it has in common with my world, especially in the isolated communities of Appalachia where they both lived. The mechanized killing of World War I along with the end of the age of empires and imperial monarchies that it heralded must have been a huge shock to their world. Things would be changing quickly going forward.

As I ponder the world today on my 65th birthday I am still shocked at the speed of change. I still recall childhood days of going to my grandfather's farm to pitch hay onto a horse drawn wagon, to draw water by hand from their well, and to wake on winter holiday visits to a cold floor that caused me to dress in a rush and scamper to the warmth of the pot bellied stove in the living room or hang around the wood stove in the kitchen. Those times that seemed so idyllic to me were actually long after the world had been shattered by that Great War. I am told that my grandfather was not the same after the war though it was not clear to me if that was from disease or heart issues or something else. He was not alone.

I am grateful today for all those who served in both World Wars; I also wonder how confused and sad they might be if they saw our nation today with its inability to recognize such basic traits as male and female and its confusion over marriage and morality and life itself. In some ways 100 years doesn't seem so long ago; in other ways it seems an eternity.

The Failure to Make Disciples

Thoughts from The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard                                   October 30, 2018

While the title refers to a ‘conspiracy’ by God to subtly overcome evil with good, the message that came through most to me had to do with addressing the question of why the church has been so ineffective in making disciples. The book opens stating the basic problem and his conclusion that both the theological left and right in the church preach a partial gospel that is disconnected from personal integrity and personal character, which are foundational for personal holiness and discipleship. They are fundamentally disconnected from leading people to Christ-likeness. He proposes that the theological left promotes a gospel of commitment to fixing societal/structural sin without really dealing with personal guilt and sin, while the theological right promotes a gospel that is primarily forensic and deals with personal guilt without addressing society. Both of them focus on a salvation that lies somewhere in the future (at death for the forensic gospel, when social justice is achieved for the social gospel) and are what Willard calls ‘gospels of sin management’ rather than of new life.  Neither one really requires a personal, daily walk with Christ; while things like prayer may ‘work’ for some, it isn’t really necessary if you are saved from your guilt on the one hand or aligned with the current politically correct social causes on the other. He comments on this matter that “prayer is not needed either to go to heaven when you die or to be committed to the cause of liberation.”  The result in our time is a Christianity that has little to do with the kind of person you are.  He issues a challenge: would the gospel that I preach cause people to want to become full time students of Jesus? I think he makes good points about this and I have also been concerned about the failure of disciple making in the institutional church. If discipleship happens it is not a result of the programs and culture of the institutional church.

One of my life-long disappointments in the local church has been the near total absence of anything that looks like a serious effort to make disciples. Having been very involved in CRU while in college with their small groups approach to building disciples, I was hoping to find some sort of discipleship in the church that is more aimed at families rather than students. Students have very flexible time schedules so I knew it would be much different after marriage and entering the workforce, but it was very disappointing to find that no such thing exists in local churches. I have lived in Wisconsin, Chicago, Dayton, Memphis, Atlanta, and western Massachusetts and have never found any organized plan to make disciples anywhere.

The CRU approach can be summarized in the 3 words Win, Build, and Send. The CRU approach to evangelism incorporates it as part of discipleship as small groups train their members to do ongoing witnessing. It seems to me that local churches focus on Win (evangelism) but more as events with preaching than by personal witness. Churches tend to have a patchwork of various programs on the other 2 matters. Willard’s book doesn’t really say very much about the Win part or the Send (multiplication of disciplers) part, focusing the Build disciples part. His focus is on being an apprentice to Jesus such that we actually live the new life in Christ and develop habits that overcome our natural, fleshly reactions to life. In that regard he focuses less on what we do and more on the kind of person we are. Most other discipleship definitions seem to be mostly aimed at what we do. 

He also goes on to outline some obstacles to making disciples that are inherent in our current ‘gospels’ in addition to the incompleteness of these 2 that confine the impact of the kingdom of God to some undetermined time in the future. One of these obstacles is our view of God as either far away from us as a result of our view of the cosmos being vast with God out there somewhere beyond space and time, or else an opposite view of God being inside us but not really active in the world around us. Both of these cause us to think of God and His kingdom as being in a location that is not very important in our physical life here and now. He spends time addressing the nature of the cosmos as being within God’s kingdom and God being available everywhere, along with how our limited view of the reality of both matter and spirit limits our openness and willingness to living in the kingdom now.

Another obstacle is our view of Jesus; we often view Him as holy but not actually smart or having great ability; we think of Him as wise but never think of Him as having humor or laughing; we think of Him as having eliminated obedience as important by providing the solution to our sin and guilt but do not see Him as demonstrating what it looks like for obedience to the Law to be our natural and automatic response when we have life in the kingdom. The result is we don’t seek to grow in obedience and holiness; as Willard points out, though, “Trust in Christ is inseparable from the fulfilling the Law” and “Law is not the source of righteousness but it is the course of righteousness”. In misunderstanding Jesus we also misunderstand His teaching, and he uses the Sermon on the Mount to walk through that.

The partial gospels do not require prayer and our misunderstandings inhibit prayer. He encourages praying for what we are concerned about since “prayer simply dies from efforts to pray for ‘good things’ that honestly do not matter to us.” This actual connection with God then leads to a discussion of what building disciples might look like.

Like Piper, he points out that delighting in God is the real goal of discipleship. He finds that getting to that requires some discipline, however, with ‘disciple’ and ‘discipline’ sharing the same root. Delighting in God, desiring God, loving that which is lovely and virtuous; these are all part of the goal and should involve both body and spirit since we are made as unified body/spirit creations. The gospel taught to disciples must be the gospel that reveals the God who can be loved with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, which is to say with both our spirit and our body.  This includes delighting in God’s creation, both of the cosmos and of ourselves. Loving father and mother as in the 10 Commandments requires being thankful that God created us as part of His creation, for example. He sees discipleship as a course of apprenticeship to Jesus that is intended to create habits of body and spirit that break our bondage to natural, fleshly responses to life.  This disciplines us so that our body becomes a spiritual asset.  He recommends 4 basic disciplines in this course: 2 of Abstinence (Solitude and Silence) and 2 of Activity (Study and Worship/Service).

I agree with much of what he has to say, and I think his concern about the need for discipleship is exactly on target. I think it would be good to expand the core disciplines to a few more that go back to the Torah: Sabbath, giving/tithe, and the Levitical constraints on sex. All of these involve key areas where body and spirit connect in important ways.  He mentions Sabbath briefly, and it may be that Sabbath and giving can be included in the Worship aspect, but our current age and the sexual revolution cries out for a specific response to the sexual dysfunction that has also become an obstacle to discipleship in our time. The regular practice of abstinence called for in Leviticus 15 is a stark contrast to the current culture and teaches very directly that regular abstinence and self-control are required disciplines for the body if the body is to be a power for good. Sexuality has become a defining issue of our time and it will need to be better addressed in the church as a result; I think the church has failed in regard to adequate teaching on marriage and sexuality just as we have failed in discipleship (of which marriage and family is an important part).  But you can’t cover everything in one book so overall I appreciated this book a great deal!

Corporations and a Sense of Place

This week Kimberly-Clark announced the impending closure of 2 manufacturing plants in Neenah, Wisconsin. While this sort of thing happens all the time in the business world, it marks the end of an era for this town. K-C was founded there in 1872 and has had manufacturing plants there ever since. Over time the corporate office presence became larger and larger compared to the manufacturing presence, but as recently as the 1990’s K-C still had 2 tissue mills, a diaper plant, 2 nonwovens sites, and a feminine care plant there for manufacturing. These closures will bring an end to production sites there though the corporate locations will still be a very large employer there.

Corporations have historically had a connection to a place, both for manufacturing and offices. For K-C that place was Neenah, WI, but many others come to mind. Ford was connected to Detroit, Dow to Midland, MI; P&G to Cincinnati; Anheuser-Busch to St. Louis. The founders started the company in a place, and as human beings they had ties to that place. It made sense for the factories to be in that place as well. Both the people and the corporation that were extensions of those people had a sense of place. People have a natural love for home, and work has a natural connection to home. Chesterton wrote that “men did not love Rome because she was great; she was great because they had loved her.” Benedictine monks make a vow to stay in one place, one monastery, for life. This blog from First Things is good commentary on that: https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2014/05/on-the-importance-of-place . Perhaps Israel is the best example of this: God’s promises to Abraham and his descendants are not only spiritual promises but also promise of a place, The Land.

That seemed to hold for corporations until after World War II. The economic expansion that followed the war and which had been pent up during the Great Depression resulted in many corporations opening new places of production first all over America, then later all over the world as the global corporation came to be common.  The sense of place began to be diffused and corporate leaders became vagabonds as they moved from place to place to build a career. Those who would reach the top of the corporate ladder often had a much less definite connection to the historic community where the corporation began. Over time as corporate leaders began to come from outside the company, the sense of place also seemed to fade even more.

There are economic reasons of course. It may be better for logistics or energy cost or raw materials to be in a different place. And often the reason for the starting place of a company was the resources available in that place. I am sure there were various economic challenges in the past, but the sense of place seemed to be the impetus to innovation in approaching those problems. Today the focus seems to be more about wanting a target market to be the impetus rather than a desire to stay in a place. The love of a place seems less vital now.

Some think this is a good thing,  promoting the idea that we should be ‘global citizens’ and not so locally oriented.  I am not convinced that is altogether a good thing. I agree with C. S. Lewis , G. K. Chesterton, and Wendell Berry  that connection to a place is one important way we learn to respect and care for creation. As a Christian my ultimate loyalty cannot be simply to a place, but a sense of place contributes to my role as a steward of the land and of life.

So I am saddened by these recent events. Perhaps these were economically necessary moves, but I cannot help thinking that they are nonetheless additional signs of the loss of our sense of place.

Prayer

I recently read Timothy Keller's book Prayer and I found it helpful in the ongoing quest to understand what prayer is all about. I still find myself returning to C. S. Lewis' thoughts on prayer more than to anyone else's writing about prayer but there were some helpful insights in Keller's book as well.

I blogged some years ago about my lack of interest in most of the writing that has been done about prayer as conversation with God. Much of my discomfort with that commentary is that it seems to bring prayer down to the level of  'chit-chat'. Keller in his book maintains the idea of discussion/conversation but makes it clear that this is not mere chit-chat.  In particular I liked his emphasis that this is a conversation that God Himself initiated, both through His Word and through Christ, and our prayer is a response to the conversation that He has initiated. We respond to His Word, to the life and work of Christ, and to the Spirit; it is a conversation that cannot happen without His initiation. I find this a much more clear and also more reverent approach to this idea of conversation with God than what is presented in most things I have read or heard on prayer. Keller's comments taken from Eugene Peterson about how we learn to talk, where 'all speech is answering speech, we are spoken to before we speak' was very timely input for me as I have been watching my young grandchildren learn to respond and to talk. Applying that to us in prayer, where God speaks to us in Scripture and our prayers can and should arise from Scripture was an appreciated insight.

Keller also continues with some of Lewis' thought about how prayer recognizes God as God, the One to whom we must bring our concerns since He alone is sovereign. Lewis adds to this that in prayer God grants to us the high position of  'person'. These two concepts belong side by side in my opinion. Keller goes on with this line of thought by noting that this kind of communication can only happen between persons. He points out that if God were impersonal then prayer would be an illusion. This would help explain some Eastern religions where a meditation without thoughts, words, or concerns seems to be the goal rather than the Christian concept of prayer. Keller goes on to point out that if God were unipersonal then love could only appear after he began to create, which would mean that power is more fundamental than love; love (and its results like communion between persons) would be less important than power. But if God is triune then words and communication take on a power and importance that would not fit those other alternatives. There was communication and love in the Trinity from all eternity; this makes the concept of The Incarnate Word all the richer!

These were the elements that struck me most in this book, and they all come in the first 100 pages. The remainder was more about how to practice prayer more fully, which is practical and certainly needed in our time when it seems that prayer is less abundant than the decadence of our culture calls out for. It is certainly the case that I need to cultivate the practice of prayer more than I do. I especially appreciated from the book those first 100 pages that strengthened my understanding of why prayer is fundamental in the Christian life.

Singleness and the Image of God

In my last post I discussed how marriage bears the image of God in a particular way that neither male nor female alone can do. This begs the question of how are we to think about singleness then?


I think that the matter of sin and the Fall are crucial to this topic. When we look at Genesis 1-2 and the design for the male/female union to bear God's image we immediately realize that this is implemented in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. Genesis 5 and Genesis 9 both reiterate that mankind still bears God's image after the Fall, and that marriage as a bearer of His image and His blessing on marriage also remain after the Fall. Yet it is clear that the image of God in man has been marred by sin. When we look at all of this it seems clear that marriage and the male/female union are designed before the Fall and that in the Garden of Eden there is no design for singleness. It can be assumed that children would have been single for some amount of time even in Eden, but the design is for marriage. It seems that long term singleness is one outcome of the Fall. This will be a 'hard saying' for some folks but that seems to me a clear implication of Genesis 1-3.


This by no means equates singleness to sin; it simply means that the design for men and women has been marred by sin and there are a great many consequences of that. It also does not mean that singles as people are somehow less in God's image as individuals. The fact that marriage bears God's image in a way individuals cannot is a matter of the vocation or calling of marriage, not of the individuals involved.


Widowhood results from the death of a spouse, and death is a result of the Fall. This type of singleness is clearly connected to the Fall. For young adults, the world system is fallen and very often impacts marriage. In China now, as a result of the Communist one-child policy, there is a shortfall of at least 20 million women compared to the male population below 30. Many of these men will be single as a result of the sin of the Chinese leaders who forced so many abortions and the sin of parents in selectively aborting baby girls. Abortion of baby girls has been practiced in India as well, where there will be a similar impact on singleness. In the U.S. how have the 50 million abortions since Roe v. Wade impacted the marriage opportunities for some young adults? Many young adults will be single as a result of the world system through no fault of their own, and  that includes the U.S. as well as the examples in Asia.  They still bear the image of God as individuals. Genesis 9 in the passage that institutes capital punishment makes it clear that individuals also bear God's image, though it in no way cancels the fact that the male/female union bears that image in a way that individuals cannot.


Some believers will remain single for lack of a suitable believer to marry. In this fallen world there are consistently more women than men in church, consistently more women than men who self-identify as believers. This means some will have difficulty finding a suitable marriage partner. The Bible is clear that we are not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers, so it is a Biblical and responsible choice to remain single in this circumstance. This too is a result of the Fall.


There will be some who remain single as a result of chosen sin as well: sins of homosexuality, sins of placing career above all else, sins of promiscuity that end up destroying the chance for marriage all come to mind.  Both the world system and chosen sin have an impact on singleness. They also impact marriages, and destroy many marriages.


This can be compared with disease, which is also an outcome of the Fall. Some disease seems to be a result of our choices (lifelong smoking that leads to cancer comes to mind) while others are simply part of the way things are in this fallen world (infants with cancer come to mind). Some will remain single due to their choices, others due to things beyond their control.


Some are also called to singleness for the sake of the Kingdom of God. Jesus in Matthew 19 speaks of those who are 'eunuchs for the kingdom'; Paul speaks of those who remain single for the work of the gospel in his letters to the church at Corinth. Genesis says that in this world the male/female union in marriage carries God's image in a special way, but Jesus points out that in the resurrection 'they neither marry nor are given in marriage' (Matt. 22:30). The image of communion in a love relationship is carried by Christ and the church in the resurrection. Christ himself was single. Believers may be called to be the picture of what is to come by their singleness in devotion to the kingdom of God.


It is sometimes useful to consider pushing ideas to their extreme limit. What if everyone were single? Would that bear God's image on this earth in a full manner? Would the image of God on earth be diminished by the lack of male/female unity, children, and families? I think this would clearly diminish the fullness of God's image on earth.  What if everyone were married? Would that diminish the fullness of God's image on earth? I think not. There would still be singles before they marry and  there would still be widows. I think this reinforces the notion of marriage as the basic design.


Yet the Fall has resulted in singleness as a reality, and those singles are no less in God's image. Their station in life is different from those who are married, however, and so in Christ they are called to bear God's image in a different way, a way that looks forward to the resurrection.

The Image of God in Marriage

What does it mean to be made in God's image, as Genesis 1 and 2 maintain, and how do we live out that image on this earth? There have been many attempts to try to locate God's image in some single attribute like rationality or language or decision making. The Bible never tries to do that sort of thing and I think it is a mistake to attempt it. However, I do think we can identify some of the elements of being in His image directly from the Bible.


Genesis 1:26-28 is a key text on this topic, saying " Let Us make man in our image, according to Our likeness....And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. And He blessed them and said, 'Be fruitful and multiply...'


In our culture much of the emphasis in teaching about marriage has been about companionship, but this is talking about much more than companionship. It is talking about the male/female union in marriage as an important part of bearing God's image on earth.


In his book The Mission of God (chapter 13, p. 427), Christopher J. H. Wright makes these observations about this passage: "Genesis 1 sets human male/female complementarity closely alongside the image of God.

• So God created man in His own image
• In the image of God he created him
• Male and female he created them

The implication from the tight parallelism seems clearly to be that there is something about the wholeness of human gender complementarity and the mutual relationship it enables that reflects something true about the very nature of God."  Pope John Paul II in his Theology of the Body indicates that the love relationship of the Trinity is pictured in marriage and in the bodily union of male/female; he goes on to say, 'the definitive creation of man consists in the creation of the unity of 2 beings'. He goes on to talk about the meaning of the body itself, what he calls 'the spousal meaning of the body' as an important component of this complementarity. This is to say that the very maleness and femaleness of the body has meaning, and is part of what it means to bear God's image on earth. The body itself enables us to bear God's image in the union of male and female in unity.



In talking about this in chapter 2 of  his book Genesis in Space and Time, Francis Schaeffer points out, "male and female constitute one whole,  become one flesh. Man, with a capital M, equals male and female..." This is to say that to fully bear God's image requires both male and female in union.


All of these agree that marriage bears God's image in a special way. This image requires complementarity and fruitfulness, as shown in the verses immediately following where the man and woman are blessed and the blessing specifically involves fruitfulness to multiply. This is clearly about much more than companionship; it is about being God's image on this earth, living out His image here and now. The fundamental purpose of marriage is to bear God's image on this earth in a way that male or female alone cannot do.


Same-sex marriage cannot do this. It cannot because it denies the basic meaning of the body by joining 2 bodies not designed to be joined; it cannot because of its inherent sterility rather than an inherent design to be fruitful; it cannot because it lacks the differences between male and female natures that must join to more completely bear God's image.


Most evangelical churches totally fail to teach the importance of marriage in bearing God's image on earth. That is a huge failure. Is it any wonder that there are so many divorces in the church now, since we don't seem to know the fundamental purpose of marriage?

The Triumph of Romanticism in the Supreme Court

The ruling in the Supreme Court last week to legalize homosexual marriage in the U.S. culminates the long history of romance becoming the sole cultural basis for marriage. Unfortunately it extends that mindset to unions that are also contrary to nature and contrary to the Biblical concept of marriage.


C. S. Lewis in his book The Four Loves spends a lot of time talking about how the falling-in-love experience is never adequate as a foundation for true love, love as described in the Bible such as in I Corinthians 13. He points out that following romantic love as the great authority in life is nothing new but has been especially ascendant in Western culture since the rise of the  romantic poets and romantic composers about 200 years ago. He makes clear that following the lead of romance often results in nothing more exalted than adultery, injustice, destruction of families and breaking of vows regardless of how soaring and exalted that in-love experience may be. Lasting love  ('caritas' in Latin, 'agape' in Greek), he goes on to explain, is more often controlled by such things as justice, fidelity, self-sacrifice, and self-denial.


Both the Bible and Lewis point out that there are a great many times when falling in love is not an acceptable reason for marriage. The Bible is especially emphatic about not marrying those outside the faith, regardless of whether you are in love. It is also clear that falling in love when you are already married or falling in love with a near relative (incest) are not acceptable reasons for marriage. The Biblical injunctions against homosexuality make it clear that falling in love with someone of the same sex is not an acceptable reason for marriage. There are many other cases, such as falling in love with someone vastly different in age, in which it is not a good idea even if it may not be immoral. There are a great many cases where falling in love is not an acceptable reason for marriage.




And while falling in love often provides the motivation to get married, it is never enough to sustain a marriage. Again the The Four Loves makes a very strong case that the love of I Corinthians 13 requires that things like justice, fidelity, self-sacrifice and the keeping of vows be the basis of a marriage, not falling in love.




In our culture the rise of romance as the only basis for marriage began to take its heavy toll with the rise of no fault divorce. This kind of divorce is based on the idea that no longer having the 'in love' experience is justification for divorce, and requires acceptance of the idea that falling in love is the basis of marriage. If marriage were based on more solid ground, then falling out of love would not be a basis for divorce. Having accepted the idea that falling in love is the foundation of marriage, it only made sense to see falling out of love as the basis for divorce.


If falling in love is the foundation of marriage, then falling in love is also the basis for sexual intimacy. From there, it is a very short step to accepting falling in love as justification for sex as soon as you fall in love, without waiting for marriage. So the rise in the cult of romance has resulted in easy divorce and also the rise in living together without marriage.


The church has been all too complicit in this. The church exalts the idea of falling in love as the basis of marriage just as the secular world does. The teaching of the Song of Solomon as a guidebook for marriage does exactly that, proclaiming romantic love as the foundation of marital bliss; yet, the Bible itself looks at the phase of Solomon's life in which the Song was written and proclaims it vanity (Ecclesiastes 2:8) and sin (I Kings 11:1-8). Some say the Song is a picture of Christ and the church but the extreme sensuality of the Song contrasted against the totally non-sensual nature of Christ's love make that view untenable in my mind. The teaching of the church about the Song is typical of the victory of romanticism in the church as well as in the broader culture, and this romanticism has paved the way for viewing homosexuality with this same romantic mindset. If falling in love is the main issue, then gender should not matter.


The fruit of the triumph of romanticism is clear: rampant divorce, rampant out of wedlock births and cohabitation, rampant adultery and fornication, and rampant homosexuality. In every case children are damaged even more than their romance-obsessed parents.
It will not be enough for the church to continue to speak out about the sin of homosexuality; the church will have to abandon its obsession with romance as well.


There are other issues with the decision of the court, issues about constitutional law and the court's disregard of the legislative process, but it seems to me that the acceptance of the ruling by much of the public has nothing to do with their concept of constitutional law: it is all about their complete acceptance of the cult of romance.