Porpoise Driven Life

I dunno...still a little fishy to me.

Heresy Helper

Yeah...I know. It's not really a meaty "Theology Thursday" post. But I'm low on time and have surgery coming up next week. Whattayawant?

Thanks, Sacred Sandwich!

Losing God the Father

Last Spring, a seminary friend of mine was invoking his privilege as a senior to give one sermon at the midweek chapel service. The senior sermon serves as an opportunity to share something of your faith with the community that, for two or more years, has been part of shaping that very faith. There are basic, "broad middle" sermons. Some sermons that question the person's call after 2.5 years of education. Many sermons that criticize the Bush administration. And a plethora of GLBT, Social Justice, or other standard Christian Left sermons. Fine and dandy.

But my friend was called in to the dean's office. His crime? He dared to use masculine pronouns and speak of God the Father. Apparently, inclusive language isn't meant to include half of the population.

Don't get me wrong. Inclusive language in regards to humans is a good thing (though it can make for poor writing in the hands of less-skilled writers). It's a seminary policy to use inclusive language.

But a recent Touchstone article asks, "What are we losing?"

A lot of feminist and post-modernist theologians talk about how people have felt excluded by masculine god-talk. (Which, let's be clear, is MASCULINE, but not necessarily MALE.) They want to jettison 4,000 years of linguistic reflection on the basis of 40-60 years of empowerment talk. But I don't think they've thought through all the implications. They can tell you why they don't want masculine god-talk, but have a harder time justifying the alternative they propose.

Do you know why masculine god-talk is important? Please feel free to use the comments section to elucidate. And stay tuned...the vicar is about to stir things up.

New Posters at Spurgeon.org

Here's a teaser

Here's a hint: When people say they want Jesus apart from the Bible or the apostolic witness of the historic church, they're just giving you their own time-bound ideas packaged in religious nicetude and riding on the coat-tails of "mere" Christianity.

Jedi Jesus

Introducing
The Star Wars Savior

JEDI JESUS

Now with improved SMITESABER action!!!

Only uses the Light-of-Men Side of the Force.

h/t Windstar Embroidery

If You Thought They Messed Up the Olympics

This little gem is from the English (Engrish?) subtitles on a Chinese-made hack of Star Wars Ep III.
Believe it or not, Anakin Skywalker would be an improvement over some of the folks I know that got "made" [ministers] by the Presbyterian Church.

Archaeological Affirmations

Since turnabout is fair play, here's an interesting archaeological tidbit.

It seems the seal of one of the enemies of Jeremiah has been unearthed. The Paleo-Hebrew script reads Gedalyahu ben Pashur, who served as minister to King Zedekiah (597-586 BC).

Gedaliah (as we know him in the English transliteration) petitioned King Zedekiah to shut Jeremiah up. They won their case and threw the prophet into a cistern.

What's the takeaway?

1) Just because you occupy a place of influence with people who have power does not mean you are with people who have authority. Zedekiah and his advisors had all kinds of power...but because they refused to listen to the one man who had God's authority to speak, we hold them in no esteem. Indeed, we'd scarcely know or care about them except that they have a part to play in the life of the man who spoke with authority - the man who spoke God's words.

2) If you want to be part of a faith tradition that makes a real difference in the world, make sure your faith tradition has actually interacted with the world. All kinds of New Agers and non-realists in religion insist that faith is an entirely subjective experience. The only "objective" element is what happens when you act like a better person or some such.

Well, while I can't disagree that changing us changes the world, I would say that it's difficult to see the difference between that sort of religion and a philosophy of life.

There is a God...someone out there, who also chooses to make a dwelling place with humankind. If you know that you can't make it on your own, then you just might need something more than your own inner reserves. And if you're going to trust in that something, you'd better make sure that something can act.

Christianity affirms that God acts in history, pointing to the incarnation of Jesus Christ as proof that God does indeed choose to be with us and for us, rather than against us or apathetic towards us. And we have the Scriptures which detail how God has stepped into historical events and changed their course or guided the people.

If your faith can't make that claim and have it backed up by rational evidence, may I have the privilege of pointing you from the shifting sands of life to a faith built on bedrock? A faith that consists of loving relationship with the Rock himself?

True Colors of the Season

The two colors most widely associated with Christmas (in the Western hemisphere, at least) are red and green. Well, as the guys at Acton keep reminding us, Green is the new RED.


Of course, there's plenty of green to be made by going Green. Al is raking it in since being run out of politics. Hey...jet fuel is expensive, gang. More than that, he needs capital for his start-up cap-n-trade system. And he has to have hush money available for when the scientists start finding serious holes in his Armageddon scenarios. (especially when it's contrary to his "established fact of man-made warming in the last century")


Look...Al is a creative guy. I'll bet that if he wasn't trying to save the world or invent the internet, he could have single-handedly scabbed the Screenwriter's Guild walk-out. But his creativity (er...divinity? PRAISE THE GORACLE!!!) needs to cool it. This global warming nonsense is going to cost developing nations their chance at making the earth a suitable habitat for mankind.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, I also hate it when corporations try to pander to Christians with crappy products. They hope that making some relationship to Christianity is going to fuel sales. Unfortunately - as is the case for the minute-ecocrusaders - Christians are in lines waiting to hand their green over for the pap as well. sigh....

Putting the Mental in Fundamentalism

One of the chief problems in dialogue between fundamentalists and progressivists is a lack of proper epistemological foundations. (I know -- you probably want to change channels before I get started....). Epistemology is, in essence, the science of how we know stuff. If someone says that they know the world is going to end, a good question to ask is "How do you know that?" There are lots of people in both camps who believe they know far more than they do. But when the point is pressed, it's often the case that the knowledge rests in someone else's experience (an author they read, "the news," etc...). That's pretty much the case for all of us outside of our narrow range of familiarity and expertise.

The world is a complicated place. We don't have time to become first-hand experts on everything, so we choose to trust experts who have done that hard work. I have to trust that the guy under the hood of my car knows what he's doing. He learned from other people who spent time under the hoods of cars, who in turn learned from still others (as well as having experiences of their own). This is how knowledge works in the real world - by tradition (from the Latin trāditiō [tradō] , "a giving up, delivering up, surrender" or "pass on"). The expression "Let's not reinvent the wheel" is based on the pragmatic truth that we aren't always (or even most of the time) in a position to improve the way we do things. If you don't rely on some tradition, you'd always have to experiment (and would have no time to actually live).

People of all sorts receive traditions that they don't test, but accept prima facie (especially when there's an authority figure behind it). When I was a fledgling medico, I took it on faith that the tradition handed down in textbooks on physiology were solid and well-tested. I didn't see any need to go out and perform bio-chemical experiments to verify everything they said. The same is true for pretty much every discipline (save, perhaps, philosophy). We accept on authority what we haven't the time, skills, or necessity to pursue further. That's life, and don't let anybody shame you for being realistic.

In the arena of human religious experience, America has gone overboard with denouncing spiritual authority and tradition. While most people couldn't get past two sentences on why they believe in materialistic evolution ("well...I'm not an expert!" "Everybody knows that...so there's no need in pressing the matter further!" "It's in textbooks!"), if you dissent from that position you are expected to be an encyclopedia of refutational data. It's not fair, but that's how evolution deniers are treated. (Global Warming deniers are in the same boat, though the second the shoe is on the other foot, authority is appealed to.)

I think that the general populace has a fundamental misunderstanding of how biblicists approach the world. They seem to think that when we find conflicts or disagreements between what is encountered in one area of human experience and what is revealed in Scripture, that we just mindlessly toss out the contrary. Nothing could be further from the truth. We do not believe that we have the right to toss out evidence from either book of God's revelation (i.e., the created order and the Scriptures).

Cornelius Van Til said that there's no such thing as a brute fact or a mute fact. Every fact is tied to its creator and finds its meaning and significance in relation to God. (Mikhail Bakhtin makes much the same point in terms of literary addressivity and authorship - so you see postmodernists also acknowledging this truism.) As people who have been convinced of the trustworthiness of the Scriptures by a supernatural working of the Holy Spirit (WCF 1.1), we are intellectually compelled to align every fact we encounter in relation to its creator. We know from the Scriptures that the whole created order has fallen into disrepair. We also know that our own heart (the Biblical word for the seat of intellect and will) twists our experiences and hides the truth from us.

Because we know that we have a corrupted source of information in the fallen natural order and are incapable of perceiving the truth through our own devices, we set every truth claim against the backdrop of Holy Writ. We are not free to throw out what we find in nature, but are compelled to seek the personally-perceptable order placed therein by a rational, personal God.

As for the special revelation - the Holy Scriptures - it's not the fundamentalists who feel free to rearrange the Word to our liking (vide supra).

Towards a Theology of Invective

Michael Bauman has lots of good thoughts. Here's a snippet from his work on a theology of invective:

We Christians rightly recognize Christ as the very embodiment of love. But Christ was no bleeding heart, and He was no invertebrate. The “gentle Jesus meek and mild” never existed. He is a nineteenth and twentieth century fiction. The historical Jesus was another matter altogether. At various times, and when the situation demanded, the real Jesus publicly denounced sinners as snakes, dogs, foxes, hypocrites, fouled tombs and dirty dishes. He actually referred publicly to one of his chief disciples as Satan. So that his hearers would not miss his point, He sometimes referred to the objects of his most intense ridicule both by name and by position, and often face to face....

The objection raised by the invertebrates that Jesus spoke aggressively only to self-righteous Pharisees simply misses the point. Any sinner who rejects repentance, or any sinner who holds repentance at bay because he somehow believes it is not for him, is self-righteous.

See the rest here.

Esoteric Presbyterianism

A certain minister in good standing with my presbytery has a church member who actively promulgates (in writing, lectures, etc.) the following doctrines:

• The infinite and eternal Godhead manifests through a cascading hierarchy of divine entities, energies, and laws. The divine entities include the Solar and Planetary Logoi, Sanat Kumara, the archangels and angels, the Hierarchy of Masters, and ourselves. A cosmic entity of even greater power and consciousness than the Solar Logos is associated with the star groups: Ursa Major, Sirius, and the Pleides (sic; Pleiades, ed.).
• At every level the divine force is expressed first through a triplicity and then a septenary. The triplicity is referred to in Christianity as the Trinity. The septenary consists of the seven rays. Together, the triplicity and septenary can be compared with the ten sephiroth of the Kaballah.
• The Christ--the World Teacher--is the head of the Hierarchy of Masters and the embodiment of divine love on Earth. Two thousand years ago the Christ overshadowed the Master Jesus to create the "historic Christ."
• The Hierarchy of Masters owes its origin to an impulse from the star Sirius, which forms the heart center of the cosmic entity mentioned above.
• The great dramas of human history, such as the life of the Historical Christ, are part of a larger story that also includes the world's myths and legends.

I'm left shaking my head in wonder that a Presbyterian minister endorses this stuff without any mention that the whole idea of "emanations" from the "pleroma" of the Godhead is nothing more than a rehashing of the Gnostic heresy. (No news yet as to whether this guy is the new Sunday School Supervisor.)

I understand the fascination with mystical and esoteric thought. In fact, I did an independent study in Jewish Mysticism while an undergrad, and further work on Merkabah Mysticism in a class on Apocalyptic Literature in seminary. But to broadcast approvingly with no guidance as to where it crosses the line and steps outside of Biblical Christianity - especially on a blog that's part of one's teaching ministry - seems rather...incomplete.

Don't get me wrong. I like John as a person. We have a tremendous amount of stuff in common. He's a damn-decent human being. But that doesn't stop me from being critical of heresy - and this one is full of it.