It was in January 1982. At this time I was in seminary doing doctoral work in Dallas, we had two young boys and Kay was pregnant with our third son.  I started hearing about a new movie that I had to go see. This struck me as strange in a couple of ways. First I was getting this recommendation from other Christians and from church as well as from classmates. Why was the strange? 28 years ago in Dallas the Christian community was still very very conservative and generally looked at film from a very skeptical perspective. At that time Evangelicalism was still just emerging from the culture denying attitudes of fundamentalism. Why were Christians who were generally averse to films recommending this movie? The movie itself had a strange name, Chariots of Fire. As I heard the title what came to mind were visions out of Ezekiel's prophecies. But the movie was supposed to have some kind of a Christian theme about it. As I dug deeper I learned that one of the main characters was named Eric Liddell, a young Christian Scotsman who had competed in the 1924 Olympics in Paris and had in fact won a gold medal.

Needless to say Kay and I went to see the movie. It was truly inspiring. I have seen it several times since the initial screening and never cease to be amazed by the depth of character and the courage displayed by Eric Liddell. For those of you who don't remember (or are maybe too young to remember), the movie opens at the funeral of one of the major characters, Harold Abrahams and then the story is told in flashback. At the end of the film we see the credits of what it was that Harold Abrahams accomplished during his life. His accomplishments were impressive particularly in light of the fact that he was Jewish in a very Anglican University. After listing Abrahams impressive accomplishments the next screen informed us that Eric Liddell and become a missionary to China where he died in a Japanese internment camp in 1945. His epitaph was "all Scotland mourned."

Several years later in my first year of teaching at Simpson College in San Francisco, I was using Millard Erickson's Christian Theology as my major textbook. In the chapter on the nature of sin Ericsson quoted at length from the book Shantung Compound written by Langdon Gilkey. I was so impressed by the quotes that Erickson lifted from Gilkey's work that I bought the book and read it. The book is the true story of Gilkey's experience in a Japanese internment camp in China during World War II.  Gilkey was at that time a young liberal optimistic professor of English who had recently graduated from Harvard University with a degree in philosophy. Gilkey tells us that he viewed the internment at the Shantung (Weihsien) Compound as a grand experiment.

 During the war he and the other expatriates in China were rounded up and placed into an internment camp. Although told that the camp would provide every comfort of Western culture he soon discovered that the only thing Western about it was that it was located on a former Presbyterian mission compound. In this small compound, about the size of one city block were housed several thousand Westerners. These were by and large the best of society, Americans, Brits, Australians, businessmen, diplomats, educators, professionals (bankers, lawyers, doctors) as well as monks and missionaries (and hookers).

As I said he viewed this as a grand experiment because the people were by and large good people. They were educated. They were religious. They were moral. They represented the best of society. As an optimistic young liberal Gilkey saw this as an opportunity to create the ideal society. The book is about Gilkey's education in human nature. What is so fascinating is that by the end of the book we see that his optimism is gone. Simply his own experience brought him to something close to an orthodox understanding of original sin. This was not because of cruelty from the Japanese captors. Unlike the Japanese prison camps where soldiers were starved, tortured and worked to death, in the internment camp four Japanese merely guarded the walls and left the internal administration of the camp to its inhabitants.

What he observed was the interaction of the “good” people in the camp.  Particularly sobering for me is that Christian missionaries do not come off well. As a group they were aloof and self-righteous. They came up with pious sounding rationale for their self-serving behavior. They would not associate with the “sinners,” lest they be polluted. The two significant exceptions were the Salvation Army missionaries and the Jesuits.  The Salvation Army people were dedicated to service, including doing all the dirty jobs, such as cleaning latrines, that no one else would touch. The Jesuits receive special mention because of their ability to mix freely with the “sinners” and not be affected by the sin.

About two thirds of the way through the book Gilkey describes the work of a younger missionary from Scotland who took it upon himself to organize and minister to the young people of the camp. The teenagers had nothing to do and as teenagers will, were getting into trouble. He had a tremendous effect on the morale of the high schoolers. But to everyone's dismay he was struck down and died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. That man was Eric Liddell.

All this has been brought back to my attention this past week. I have taken the forgiveness class (Freedom to Love Again [freedomtolove.info]) that I wrote last summer for EduPlex Ministries and have repackaged it as a seminar. For the past three Sunday evenings I have given this seminar at a small Baptist church in the Bay Area.

This past week as I was wrapping up the three-week series an elderly gentleman (whom I will call Frank)  who had been there every week (and with whom I have had an acquaintance for about 10 years), was taking issue with the whole idea that we can find a measure of spiritual emotional healing by forgiving those who have injured us. He insisted that there is no real healing this side of heaven. Frank is a man who has been a pastor for much of his adult life and is now retired. He insisted that the only way that we can see any meaning to suffering is to view it as a result of the sovereignty of God. He also is quite resistant to the current emphasis among contemporary theologians on God's love, mercy and forgiveness.

Last Sunday night all pieces fell together. I discovered that as a child, Frank was an MK (missionary kid) who grew up in China. His parents sent him away to mission boarding school when he was four or five years old. He shared with me that at that school he was beaten with canes every day and, in his own words, "that wasn't the half of it." He went on to tell me that he had been one of the internees in the Shantung (Weihsien) compound. He insisted that the fact that he was removed from the missionary school to the compound was his salvation from the hell of torture that he underwent daily at the school. He said that all his life he has borne the emotional scars of the abuse he suffered at the hands of the Christian school authorities. He survived by stuffing his emotions and memories deep into his subconscious. But in recent months the events have come back to haunt him again and again and again.

Tragically the only avenue he had for survival was holding onto the fact that God is sovereign and righteous and he repays those who do evil. He grew up in an era when it was not permissible to open his heart to anyone. Because of this he remains spiritually and emotionally in great pain to this day.

In the mid-1980s when I was first teaching at Simpson College there was a great controversy in the Christian and Missionary Alliance (of which Simpson College [now University] is a part) about requiring that children of C&MA missionaries be separated from their parents and sent to boarding schools. Paul Young (author of The Shack) was one of those C&MA MKs (missionary kids) who was sent away to boarding school and there, suffered years of abuse. Recently the C&MA has concluded an investigation of conditions in the schools to which the MKs had been sent and they offered a formal apology for the abuse that they had been forced to endure.  Lest you think I am singling out one group here, this same dynamic has been repeated in other mission schools where children of missionaries from various different agencies were sent because conditions (not necessarily mission board policy) did not allow the parents to oversee the education of their own children.  One of my high school friends, the son of Overseas Crusade missionaries in South America, was sent to a mission school. There he too suffered abuse.  He never recovered from the pain; he became a drug addict and died in his early 40s.  

Abuse unaddressed, whether it be emotional, spiritual, physical or sexual, leaves lifelong wounds (I will not call it scars, because scars imply healing of some sort).  Despite Frank’s protestations that there is no healing this side of heaven, and that all such talk is just psychobabble, my experience of seeing and working with  abuse victims up close and personal over the past fifteen years tells a different story.  I know that substantial healing can take place.  I have watched victims of sexual abuse move from a place of being totally consumed by the pain, to a place where they are again functional human beings who are no longer bleeding emotionally, but have come through a healing process and have seen God work in marvelous ways in restoring them to spiritual and emotional health.

Unfortunately, the healing has usually come apart from a church context.  Both Philip Yancey as well as Henry Cloud and John Townsend have made the sobering but profound observation concerning alcoholics:  in AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) people look worse but get better, whereas in the church people tend to look better, but get worse.

Is the church missing something important here?  I for one think so.



Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade.
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley

Kay looked at me the other day and asked me if I knew that since 29 October I have been away from home 23 nights. (That doesn't include the week long getaway that she and I had the beginning of December) I knew life had been crazy the last month or so but I hadn't realized how crazy that it has been. I was in Sofia, Bulgaria for twelve days teaching two classes… The Trinity, and Patrology (the theology of the early church fathers). After just two nights at home I was off for a five-day conference in Phoenix. After another two nights at home I was off for two days in Redding teaching at Tozer Seminary. Then the week after Thanksgiving it was off to Redding again for another two days at Tozer. And include during this time two more days teaching a class for Tozer Seminary in Sunnyvale here in the Bay Area and a few evening classes at Koinonia .

All that to say during the past month and a half I have hardly had time to think let alone write. But this evening I had an experience that has impelled me to the keyboard. Kay and I just got back from watching Invictus, the new film from Clint Eastwood starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon that tells the story of Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black President and his vision of using the Springboks (South Africa’s rugby team that had functioned as a symbol of apartaid and oppression to the country’s blacks) as a vehicle to unify the severely racially fractured country in its quest to win the World Cup in 1995. The story itself is historically accurate.  But rather than be a dry description of those happenings nearly fifteen years ago, it brings to life those events in quite an amazing way.  The story the film tells is nothing short of gripping. (Note: As Hollywood does regularly, the film takes some liberty with the historical details of the story.)

News reporter Alexandra Zavis who was in South Africa during these events writes:

Of all the improbable images I carry in my head from covering those first heady days of South Africa's new democracy for the Associated Press, this one stands out. The film "Invictus," directed by Clint Eastwood and based on a book by journalist John Carlin called "Playing the Enemy," captures this extraordinary moment when history really was made on a sports field.

LA Times, December 15,2009

As you may know, I love film. In fact I have taught classes in seminary on Theology and Film on several occasions. The power of film is the power of the story to incarnate truth. And Invictus does just that.

As you probably know Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison in South Africa labeled as a terrorist for his work in opposing the apartheid system that oppressed not just the blacks but all who were not racially pure with full European ancestry. Early in his career he took Gandhi’s non-violence as an example (BTW Gandhi got his start in South Africa). 

Ecclesiastes 7:7 observes: “Surely oppression drives a wise man crazy, and a bribe drives a person mad.” So it was for Mandela.  As the pushback from the government came bringing more repression, he became convinced that non-violence would not prevail.  He and his group began targeted bombing of critical facilities, being careful to avoid human causalities.  The Government labeled him a terrorist. Arrested and imprisoned, he suffered beatings, boredom, and depravation as he lived in a 6x8 foot cell, and broke rocks for labor.  During this time he also read and thought.

In 1990, with apartheid unraveling Mandela was released from prison and became the leader of the anti-apartheid coalition of groups dedicated to end the hateful system.  It was he who led the negotiations that ended apartheid in South Africa, and he who became the nation’s first democratically elected black president.

As he took the reins of power fear shuddered through the white minority who feared a bloodbath of revenge.  But Mandela had grown over the decades.  He had learned that the way to victory, the way to unification, and the way to healing was not through revenge, but through forgiveness.

This type of forgiveness is not conditional on apology, for an apology would never be offered.  It is an act of free unconditional grace. Where revenge is foresworn and the damage is borne by the one who has been hurt.  We say that grace is free and unconditional, but there is also a pain in grace.  In his latest blog Baxter Kruger speaks of the “pain of grace.”

“To be gracious is to hurt,
for it is not merely to wink at a problem,
but to enter into it and bear it personally,
to endure it, in love and mercy and patience.”

Mandela personified grace, healing and reconciliation.  He practiced what he preached.  As a result of his example and influence South Africa set up the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission in an attempt to heal the abiding wounds of Apartheid. “

Witnesses who were identified as victims of gross human rights violations were invited to give statements about their experiences, and some were selected for public hearings. Perpetrators of violence could also give testimony and request amnesty from both civil and criminal prosecution.

The TRC, the first of the nineteen held internationally to stage public hearings, was seen by many as a crucial component of the transition to full and free democracy in South Africa. Despite some flaws, it is generally (although not universally) thought to have been successful. [Wikipedia, sv  “Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa)”]

Recently I have been studying deeply issues of forgiveness, abuse, injustice reconciliation, and the person of God and the work of the Holy Spirit in the world. As I sat in the darkened theater and watched the images and heard the dialogue I was overwhelmed as these themes wove themselves together as the story unfolded. In a very real sense Invictus became a lens that focused these themes together in sharp relief.  As we walked out of the theatre I turned to Kay and said “I sense the fingerprints of the Holy Spirit are all over that film!”

Over the past several months I have been heavily involved studying and reflecting anew on the person of God. I became convinced over 20 years ago that our western understanding of the trinity had departed from the understanding articulated by the early church at the Council of Nicea and the explication given by Athanasius and the three great Cappodician theologians: Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus.  It was they who unpacked the implications of the pre-incarnate Son being homoosias (of the same substance/being) as the Father. Contrary to the Greek concept of God as a passionless, detached “unmoved mover,”  the early fathers understood that the Trinity stood at the center of any Christian understanding of God and that the three persons, Father, Son and Spirit were in a dynamic relationship of love.  Some of the fathers spoke of this relationship as a magnificent divine dance.  God is fundamentally tri-personal existing in a life of self-giving love.  As the Apostle John flatly states, “God is love.”  And while it may be self-evident, I will say it anyway: “Love, by definition, demands relationship!”

I am heartened by stirrings of the reassertion of this reality within evangelicalism. Within the past couple of months the book The Misunderstood God: The Lies Religion Tells Us About God, by Darrin Hufford was released.  Hufford’s thesis is that if indeed God is love then the apostle Paul’s exposition of the nature of love in 1 Corinthians 13 should give us some profound insight into the nature and being of God. (A corollary of this would seem to be that God in his Trinitarian fullness is the source of love seen in his creation.)  Similarly Andrew Farley’s The Naked Gospel: The Truth You May Never Hear in Church explores related themes from a slightly different perspective. (Both of these books are written on a popular level rather than in technical theological jargon.)

Forgiveness is something we all talk about as being foundational to Christianity. (Foundational to forgiveness is love.) The first Bible verse that many of us learned states: “For God (the Father) so loved the world, he gave his only-begotten Son (i.e. His unique and eternal son with whom He was in face to face relationship for all ante-mundane eternity) so that everyone who believes in him will not perish (or be lost) but have eternal life (participation in the very life of the Trinity).”  Love is foundational to forgiveness; forgiveness is vitally wound up in justification by faith alone.  To vastly oversimplify it, we are declared “not guilty” by God because of the sacrifice of Christ—we stand forgiven, totally, forever and unconditionally! 

If we are honest, while we cling to the fact that we are forgiven, we are ourselves not good at forgiving others.  Oh we don’t have much trouble brushing off minor offenses but those who have betrayed us and inflicted damage?  Here we do not want to forgive, we want justice, or better yet, revenge.  Yet refusing to forgive, however imperfectly, keeps our souls from healing and perpetuates hatred and violence.

During the past several years I have been confronted with injustice and oppression in an up close and personal fashion as I have ministered in Bulgaria.  We as Americans think of racial oppression in terms of the Black-White divide in American culture (or maybe the apartheid of South Africa).  I have witnessed the oppression of the Roma people (gypsies) in a manner reminiscent of the ghettos in which the Jews were for centuries placed in Europe.  Jewish ghettos in Europe were not an invention of the Nazis; rather they were instituted centuries ago during the Renaissance by Christian political authorities who marginalized Jews because of their non-Christian beliefs.  The Gypsy people too are historically non-Christian who migrated westward from the Indian sub-continent about a thousand years ago.  As a people group they settled mainly in Eastern and Central Europe and remain unassimilated to this day.  The song “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” popularized by Cher in the early 70’s reflects the majority population attitude toward them to this day.  In Bulgaria, under Communism, the government erected walls around gypsy communities to further separate them from the larger population. The Roma people in Bulgaria are largely illiterate to this day, and it has only been in the past couple of decades or so that the gospel has begun to penetrate these closed communities. Bulgaria specifically and eastern and central Europe generally stand in need of racial, cultural, and economic reconciliation and justice.  I have seen a few glimmers of hope in Bulgaria, largely through the ministries of Care For All.

This past semester I taught a class on “Christian Perspectives in Contemporary Culture.”  One of the themes the class focused on was justice, not justice in the court system but justice in the economic, political and racial sense—the goal is full reconciliation.  I had the class read John Perkins work With Justice for All: A Strategy for Community Development.  Perkins has been a pioneer the establishment of justice in rural Mississippi, an area where racial hatred and oppression survives to this day.  In telling the story of his escape to Los Angeles and a better life, his conversion to Christ, and his call back to Mississippi he challenges his brothers and sisters in Christ to take the call for justice seriously as a vital implication of the gospel (a theme which we find prominently in Scripture but which somehow falls pretty much on deaf ears in the American evangelicalism).  Perhaps this is because we think of the gospel in terms of witnessing rather than understanding the gospel as being about the inexpressible  love of the Father, Son and Spirit for their creation and God’s passionate heart that has accomplished reconciliation through the person of Christ. 

As Paul says, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting people’s trespasses against them, and he has given us the message of reconciliation..” (2 Cor. 5:19 NET) or as Eugene Peterson puts it in The Message, “God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing.”



Bulgaria Update-2009

Past years I have been able to give you updates as I was ministering in Bulgaria.  This year has been quite different.  As you who have read these updates over the past several years, you know I have taught in Star Zagora, a small (pop. about 75,000) city in central Bulgaria whose claim to fame is that it is the oldest city in Europe.  I have taught at the Theological College which is about ten years old and is sponsored by the Church of God.  A chief thrust of their ministry is toward the Gypsy population.

This year was very different.  While the Church of God still maintains the school in Stara Zagora they are in process of moving the center of their educational ministry to Sofia, the capital, with a population of about 3 million in the greater Sofia area.  Many of their classes are held in conjunction with the other theological faculties associated with the University of Sofia.

My classes (I taught 2) were held at the Assembly of God college campus located about 20 miles north of downtown in a residential area.  The look and feel of the institution is very different than in Stara Zagora.  The buildings are old—well over a century and the plumbing is primitive (e.g. don’t flush the toilet paper because it clogs the system!).  The local culture of the college is far more reserved than in Stara Zagora, and the only people that spoke English (more than a few phrases here and there) were my translators.

The week started off slowly—I was suffering both jetlag and from a cold that was affecting my mental clarity and my voice.  That evening I started on the antibiotics my physician had given me before I left in case I got sick.  By the next day I was doing much better.

The first class, Dogmatics (what we call Systematic Theology in the US)  lasted until Wednesday noon.  We surveyed the development of Trinitarian understanding as well as the subjects of Man and Sin. My translator, Tanya is one of the faculty members who teaches Old Testament.  She did quite well but struggled with some of the theological terms.  (Theology and OT have different technical vocabularies.)  Wednesday afternoon through Friday . 

Tanya my translator for 1/2 the weekThe second class was Patrology (the thought of the early church fathers up till about A.D. 600). I covered the major figures  and then the students expressed a real interest in Christology (the doctrine of the person of Christ),  so I switched gears and covered the development of Christological understanding up through the Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451.  My translator was Kostadin, Tanya’s husband and acting Academic Dean of the College.  He was far more comfortable in his role and we developed a good rapport .

As the week progressed the students warmed up and began to ask many questions—this opened up the opportunity for some lively and probing discussions of theological issues that tied directly into their ministry situations. I am always hesitant to say too much in a cross-cultural situation lest I  transgress cultural mores. But the nature of the questions demanded a frank openness that would “let the chips fall where they may.” 

The questions were both illuminating and troubling.  Illuninating, in that it gave a look into the mentality of the Bulgarian Church in a way I had not seen in Stara Zagora—there the pastors were mostly gypsies who had been believers for just a few years.  Here we were looking at a protestant church culture that was generations old.

From the discussion I learned that the protestant community is stuck in an authoritarian system that mirrors the larger culture.  Pastors on the whole are not open to training the next generation of leaders.  The system is one which is locked in a survival mentality and is not looking toward growth.  I suspect that this comes from the four decades that Bulgaria spent under communism where the church literally struggled to survive.  (In talking to Dinko he reminded me that while communism lasted forty years, Bulgaria itself has been insubjection for foreign powers for centuries.)  But the change in the political situation has not changed the survival mentality. 

There is a mentality undergirded by a perfectionistic theology that is more concerned with outward appearances and abstaining from "sinful" practices than with embracing the grace and freedom offered by the gospel.

There are those actively working to break this mentality.  Our good friend Dinko Zlatarov has founded a church in Sofia where he regularly challenges the prevailing mentality of self-righteous legalistic churchianity.  Likewise Dinko’s brother Stefko has founded a new church in Stara Zagora that looking to inculcate grace into the community.  But from the sample I have seen, their perspective is the exception rather than the norm.

Kostadin and Tanya, Dinko and Petia, and Stefko all represent a new hope for the Bulgarian church—please keep them in your prayers.

 

Love it, or hate it after a year and a half it is still ranked #2 on the New York Times “Bestseller List “in the Paperback Trade Fiction. This is an incredible feat for a book that the author wrote as a Christmas present for his children with no plans to publish.

Regardless of its weaknesses, The Shack has struck a raw nerve with the Christian public and even in the wider culture.  As a piece of fiction it strikes at the heart of issues that many of us struggle with, and offers a perspective that is born out of the author’s own personal struggles.

The Shack raises the deep gut-wrenching questions of life, questions many of us dare not reveal to anyone that we even ask: questions of God, His goodness, His justice and the like.  As I have looked in depth at the story I see five major questions/themes that through the narrative:

•     What is the nature of forgiveness?  Why do we find it so difficult?

•     How do we deal with the personal pain caused by sin and evil that we have suffered and has become a part of our very identity?  Is it possible to let go or be freed of this weight we carry around?  The image that comes to mind here is from the film The Mission.  At one point as part of the condition of becoming a Jesuit  monk Robert De Niro’s character, Rodrigo Mendoza, drags the armor and weapons of his former life as part of his penance,.  These are tied to him by a rope. He crosses rivers and climbs mountains dragging the symbols of his past.  One of the monks cuts the rope and the weight tumbles down the mountain into the raging river below.  Rather than being grateful for being set free, he goes down the mountain and reattaches the weight and continues on the difficult journey. Rodrigo Mendoza’s past, the past from which he seeks release, has become so much a part of him that he cannot let it go—it has become a key part of his identify.

•      Who is God? The refrain from the Bette Midler song  “God is watching us, God is watching us from a distance,”  gives a lyrical picture of the vision of the person of God that most of us imagine.  But, is He the stern and distant Judge that looks down over the balcony of Heaven  keeping tabs of our crimes and misdemeanors?  This is a dominant theme in our western theological tradition that goes back to Augustine (5^th century) and Tertullian (3^rd century).  Interestingly this is not the view of the early church, especially the view of those such as Athanasius who were instrumental in forging our doctrine of the trinity as expressed in the Nicene Creed.

•      How can we assert the goodness and omnipotence of God in light of evil and suffering in the world?  This is a problem philosophers and theologians have wrestled with for millennia, and one that has become acute in the wake of the Enlightenment.  It still remains in great debate today. 

•      How do we relate to God?  Clearly Scripture portrays God as holy and just.  We speak of grace but the issue of sin, as breaking the Law of God, is ever before us.  If God is so holy that he cannot look at sin, how is it possible to know him in any real way?   

These are the questions.  To address them I am in process of writing five online courses through EduPlex Ministries (EduPlex.org) .  The series is entitled Beyond The Shack.  The first course was released last week, the rest are on target for release over the next three months.  Below are the course descriptions from the EduPlex website.

These courses are offered in two formats:

1. Coached: you and a group of students meet online to process the material with a professional life coach.
2.  Independent Study: you as the student interact with the material on your own
   
   

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BEYOND THE SHACK Course Series

Beyond the Shack is a revolutionary, high impact, life-changing experience that engages the student in a deep and satisfying emotional connection to God:  beyond rules, guilt and pain into relationship, joy and power!  An exhilarating journey of discovery!  A remarkable integration of teaching, coaching, social interaction and contemplation!  The unique integrated coaching takes you beyond knowledge to actual experience of deep spiritual truth.

Course 1 - Freedom to Love Again
                     Pain & Guilt: Neutralizing the Poison

When others hurt us, abuse us or commit horrific crimes against us, where is God in all of this and how could he possibly ask us to forgive?  Forgiveness: Possible or Impossible? addresses the theme of forgiveness in The Shack book by William P. Young, and highlights the three distinct types of forgiveness, commonly taught as one.  The course teaches common forgiveness myths, the dangers of premature forgiveness, and explains how to experience true freedom from those who have hurt us.  If you are still feeling wounded by another, then this course is especially designed for you.  Experience healing and a new freedom of your heart as you develop a loving and lasting relationship with God and others.

Student Comments:  "I really liked the interaction with the other students on the conference call and was surprised at how fast a bond began and people started opening up."  "I liked the fact that there were seasoned staff on the call to ask the questions and keep the group on track."

Special Introductory Price, Limited Time Only!
          Basic Course $29
          Course with coaching $59

Now Available!  

Course 2 - Breaking the Chains that Bind
                     Escaping the Past That Defines You

When abuse is experienced, whether it be verbally, physically, sexually or even spiritually, it can result in entrenched feelings of fear, guilt and shame.  If left unaddressed, abuse sets the victim up for repeated cycles of frustration, failure and addiction.  In this The Shack study, we expand on the themes of healing the hurts of our lives. 

Are you living with a great sadness because of how others treated you?  To what extent has your past negatively affected your identity?  How do you identify abuse and its influence in your life?  The course features outstanding personal stories of people impacted by abuse.  Hear the personal story of William P. Young’s childhood of abuse and how he learned to cope and survive conditional love.  Discover and experience God’s unconditional love for you, regardless of your past or present.  Discover your new identity that breaks the chains of the past, and releases you into a future of joy, peace, and success.  This course will be a great encouragement in your life!

Special Introductory Price, Limited Time Only!
          Basic Course $29
          Course with coaching $59

Available late October 20

Course 3 - Who is God, Really? "I'm Not Who You Think I Am"
                     The Triune God and Loving Relationships

Picture God in your mind.  What does He look like?  What face do you place on God?  An angry policeman?  An absentee father?  A puppeteer with you at the end of the strings?  These and many other false concepts about God can keep us trapped in a cycle of relating to God through unhealthy motives.  Do you relate to God in fear, guilt and shame?

There is a better way!  This course teaches on the nature of God as being both deeply personal and forever loving.  The following topics are discussed:  How does our relationship to our parents—especially our fathers—impact our understanding of God?  What are the boxes into which people place God?  Is your box too small? Why the Trinity is critical to your understanding of your greatness.  How Christianity is different from all the other religions of the world and its implications for daily life.   Learn the surprising discovery of C. S. Lewis and how it changed his life forever.

Special Introductory Price, Limited Time Only!
          Basic Course $49
          Course with coaching $79
Available November

 Course 4 - If There is a God, Why So Much Pain and Suffering?
                     Making Sense of Pain in Our World

Do you find yourself asking God, “Why did you let this happen?” Coping with a personal tragedy and loss becomes compounded when sorting out God’s role in the midst of our pain and confusion.  If He is so loving and all-powerful, then why did He not stop the circumstances from occurring?  These are the questions asked by the main character in The Shack book by William P. Young. 

This course highlights the themes of pain, and asks the tough questions of God.  Will it ever get better?  God’s role in tragic events and losses is examined, and the student is equipped to process his or her own journey with helpful ideas and insights by those who have personally traveled down that road.  Those who take the coached version of the course will find it to be much more helpful in processing this material.

Special Introductory Price, Limited Time Only!
          Basic Course $29
          Course with coaching $59

Course 5 - Walking in Paths of Joy and Freedom
                     Forget the Rules; It’s About Relationships

Do you find that your relationship with God and others is more defined by rules rather than giving and receiving within loving relationships?  Is it hard for you to extend grace and mercy when people mess up or fail you?  Is God only a great lawgiver and judge or is He one of continual forgiveness and the God of second, third and seventy chances? 

This The Shack study is designed to help students learn how living just by the rules of life can actually rob you of the true value and joy of life.  You will learn the incredible power of a grace-filled life and how it can transform your relationships into those of deep feelings and affection for others.  Walk in joy and true freedom, and a profound sense of well-being – just as God intended.

Special Introductory Price, Limited Time Only!
          Basic Course $39
          Course with coaching $69

Available early February 2010

Charles Hodge  

During my seminary career, although I majored in New Testament, I spent much time studying, particularly Historical Theology, and more particularly Reformed Theology in America. (In fact I went on to do my Ph.D. in Historical Theology.) Although I studied at Dallas Seminary, considered the bastion of Dispensationalism I did not buy wholly into the system. Instead I fell in love with the Princetonians: Charles Hodge, A.A. Hodge and particularly B.B. Warfield of whom it has been said had the theological mind of a Charles Hodge and a Wm. G.T. Shedd rolled into one. It is also said that after Jonathan Edwards, Warfield was the greatest theological mind ever produced in America. Warfield particularly had a razor-sharp mind and studied the positions of his theological opponents so he knew what they believed better than they did. As a result he could spot weaknesses in his opponents’ positions a mile (or more) away. He did not resort  to name-calling, nor did he twist his opponents positions wB. B. Warfieldhen involved in argument. Rather like Irenaeus the great second century opponent of Gnosticism thought the best way to discredit an opponent’s position was to give it a full exposition, working out the hidden assumptions and propositions. When this was done the opponent’s position would fall under its own weight, as discredited. I loved the logic and the clear thinking and the closely integrated system. In short it was supremely rational. The Princetonians also had a reputation for a warm personal piety (See Andrew Hoffecker, Piety and the Princeton Theologians).

Twenty-five years ago, when I was just starting my career as a Professor of Theology and I was doing research for my Ph.D. dissertation I traveled to New York City to read the Briggs Papers housed in the Library of Union Theological Seminary across the street from Colombia University at Broadway and 122^nd I spent two weeks pouring over Briggs’ personal correspondence. Charles A. Briggs was Warfield’s great theological opponent in the 1880’s and 90’s with whom he battled over the question of biblical inerrancy. During my research,  I discovered a darker side to the Princetonian tradition. That darker side involved an absolute devotion to the Westminster Confession as the pinnacle of theological achievement that could never be improved upon. Charles Hodge boasted that a new idea never arose at Princeton. Warfield, although a much better theologian than Hodge never wrote a systematic theology because he believed that his mentor’s Systematic Theology could not be improved upon. They adopted a mentality which Briggs labeled orthodoxism "Orthodoxism assumes to know the truth and is unwilling to learn; it is haughty and arrogant, assuming the divine prerogatives of infal­libility and inerrancy; it hates all truth that is unfamiliar to it, and persecutes it to the uttermost." St., near Harlem.

I also discovered a deep dichotomy between the head and the heart. Charles Hodge, as representative of the Princetonian position, displayed a great antipathy for any emphasis on the subjective nature of Christianity. At one point he stated: "The idea that Christianity is a form of feeling, a life, and not a system of doctrines is con­trary to the faith of all Christians. Christianity always has a creed. A man who believes certain doctrines is a Christian." (Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review 29:693.) This stress on the objective nature of the Faith has led to the charge that Princeton was rational­istic in its approach to Christianity. Numerous historians and theologians have contended that the Princetonians compartmentalized faith and life. For example, C. R. Jeschke states of the Princetonians:

 The strict compartmentalization of formal theology and the life of piety that came to prevail at Princeton reflected in part the growing irrelevance of traditional modes of thought and inherited statements of faith for the needs of the church in a rapidly changing world. The fact that Hodge and his colleagues, like most of their contempo­raries, were unaware of the sickness in the theological body, only permitted the condi­tion to worsen, and heightened the reaction of the patient to the cure, when its true condition was finally diagnosed. ("The Briggs Case", p. 56.)

Back to my discoveries in the Briggs papers, it was here that I saw the practical outworking of the Princetonian position. Briggs’ uncle, Marvin Briggs who had studied at Princeton Seminary had been soured on the whole mindset that surrounded the Princetonian pre-commitment to the Westminster Confession. Charles Augustus BriggsWhile studying in Germany he writes to Marvin, "I have one course . . . on System­atic Theology which seems to be your detestation. However the subject is treated differently from what you had at Princeton. Prof. Dorner goes back to the Bible as his first step . . ." (B. T. 1:27). Several months later he wrote: "It is unfortunate for you that you were educated at Princeton where there is an incarnation of doctrine and everything is looked on from that standpoint. Here in Germany . . . everything is looked upon from a scriptural standpoint. The only difficulty is there is too little reverence for Scripture as the Word of God and too great an exaltation of human reason as arbiter over it" (B.T. 1:42. Underscoring original, italics added). Later in the same letter he characterized Princeton's system as "pernicious."

 I also discovered that while the Princeton theologians themselves were able to maintain a warm personal piety with their commitment to the system, the graduates of Princeton were not. it is not too much to say that many even among the Old School read only the theological material of the Princetonians. This fact contributed to a cold creedal orthodoxy among a significant contingent of the Old School with its stress on pure doctrine. Even the great Greek grammarian Basil L. Gildersleeve, himself a Princeton graduate, decried the “baleful influence of Princeton” stating that there was from there “very little hope of a generous vivifying force” (Letter from Gildersleeve to Charles Augustus Briggs, Briggs Transcripts, 5.470 (Twelve ledger books hand-copied by Emilie Grace Briggs comprising a transcription of Charles Briggs’ personal correspondence, Union Theological Seminary Library). Many letters from Princeton grads were in Briggs’ correspondence. What comes through the written lines is a cold rational commitment to truth which touched the head but bounced off the heart.

 Why is this important for us today? Because we see the same spirit within the academic wing of evangelicalism. We see theology that has reduced the truth of God to timeless abstract propositions. A theology that puffs up the knower with pride that he or she is committed to the truth, and even reduces love as another proposition to be parroted rather than a relationship to be experienced.

When I was in college and again in seminary I took courses in the doctrine of God (Theology Proper). These courses examined in depth the issues of the existence and attributes of God. They also delved into the philosophical proofs for God’s existence as formulated by Thomas Aquinas, Anselm of Canterbury and others. I learned how to classify the divine attributes as communicable (those which are common to both God and humanity) the incommunicable (those which characterize God alone). The first definition of God that I learned as a junior in college stated “God is spirit, infinite and holy.” I later became familiar with the Westminster Confession’s definition of God (a bit expanded from the above definition!). Chapter II of the confession states:

I. There is but one only, living, and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions; immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute; working all things according to the counsel of His own immutable and most righteous will, for His own glory; most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him; and with all most just, and terrible in His judgments, hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty.

II. God has all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of Himself; and is alone in and unto Himself all-sufficient, not standing in need of any creatures which He has made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting His own glory in, by, unto, and upon them. He is the alone fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things; and has most sovereign dominion over them, to do by them, for them, or upon them whatsoever Himself pleases. In His sight all things are open and manifest, His knowledge is infinite, infallible, and independent upon the creature, so as nothing is to Him contingent, or uncertain. He is most holy in all His counsels, in all His works, and in all His commands. To Him is due from angels and men, and every other creature, whatsoever worship, service, or obedience He is pleased to require of them.

III. In the unity of the Godhead there be three Persons of one substance, power, and eternity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. The Father is of none, neither begotten nor proceeding; the Son is eternally begotten of the Father; the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son.

That is quite a mouthful, and it is biblical. Each of the statements cites numerous verses as proofs of the truth of the statement. But does it get to the point?

As I did my doctoral work in historical theology I discovered that the preoccupation of the ancient church was with the Trinity—a topic that was barely covered in my courses on the doctrine of God.. The more I learned the more I became convinced that the Trinity had to be our starting point in talking about God. And when we talk about the Trinity we are in the realm of the personal and relational.

My classroom training had taught me that the most basic attribute of God was holiness. That was the essence of God. I became convinced that while God was Holy, the biblical concept of holiness was related to “set apartness,” to God’s “otherness” rather than being a moral concept (Note: in the OT we have things as diverse as pots and pans and prostitutes described as holy—so whatever “holy” is, it is something other than absolute moral rectitude)

I am a great fan of both CSI and NCIS. Both TV shows deal in criminal forensics and in nearly every episode we find a murder involved. If there is a murder, there is an autopsy. We are brought into the autopsy room as the pathologist dissects the body of the deceased to see what killed him or her.

What does this have to do with our understanding of God? Actually quite a lot. In an autopsy or by studying a book on anatomy we encounter the structure of the human body. We see its various parts. We examine them individually, and we learn quite a bit about how we as human beings are put together.

But if in our study of God we dissect Him and split Him up into various parts do we really get to know Him? No! God is personal and relational! We no more learn about the personal nature of God by examining his attributes than we learn about the person and life of the murder victim on the autopsy table by his/her dissection.

The path to knowing God is through Jesus. If we place any kind of wedge between Jesus and the Father we commit a serious error. (Is heresy too strong a word here?) Thomas asked Jesus to “Show us the Father.” Jesus’ reply was, of course, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” The opening chapter of his gospel John says that no one has seen God (the Father) at anytime. The only-begotten Son/God (textual problem here) who is in the bosom of the Father, he has explained (exegeted) him.

God as Trinity exists in an eternal dynamic relationship of self-giving love. Daniel Migliore had noted:

The Trinitarian persons are not self-enclosed subjects who define themselves in total separation from one another. Instead in God “persons” are relational realities and are defined by intersubjectivity, shared consciousness, faithful relationships, and the mutual giving and receiving of love. (Faith Seeking Understanding, 68) .

According to classical trinitarian theology, the three persons of the Trinity have their distinctive identity only in their deepest relationship with each other. They "indwell" each other (as the technical Trinitarian concept perichoresis suggests), “make room” for each other and are hospitable to each other, or to use another metaphor, they are united in an exquisite divine dance. (Faith Seeking Understanding, 70) (italics added. This concept of the great dance is found in the early fathers of the church.)

The Trinity’s love is shown first in creation. Creation did not come out of boredom, loneliness or necessity. The divine Trinity is complete in itself and gains nothing from our existence. The only explanation for why there is anything at all is love. Love is creative and expansive. Creation must be grounded in the love of God that desires to share relationship with his creatures, just as redemption is grounded in the self-giving love of God.

I close with some observations from Thomas Torrance in his The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons presents a breath-taking view of the trinity (though not for the faint-hearted—it is not an easy read, but it is utterly magnificent) says,

“. . . [I]n the unlimited freedom of his love, God created the world out of nothing, and did not grudge bringing into being an altogether new reality utterly different from his own.” (237) “. . . God is not limited by our feeble capacities or incapacities, but in his grace and outgoing love he graciously condescends to enter fellowship with us . . . In his love of us and for us God freely wills not to be without us and wills to be with us as those whom he has eternally chosen to coexist with himself and share his eternal love. . .[H]e does not want to be alone without us or want us to be alone without him” (4) “It is in the Cross of Christ that the utterly astonishing nature of the Love that God is has been fully disclosed, for in refusing to spare his own Son whom he delivered up for us all, God has revealed that he loves us more than he loves himself. And so it is in the Cross of Jesus Christ above all that God has exhibited the very Nature of his Being as Love and has irrevocably committed his Being to relationship with us in unconditional Love.” (5)

Revisiting The Shack

After over a year, The Shack remains on the New York Times bestseller list. As of this writing it is still number #2 under the heading of trade fiction. An impressive achievement from an author who never set out to have his work published in the first place. I addressed some issues around the book in a blog last fall. I continue to see reviews that either love or hate it. There seems to be very little middle ground. The book has obviously hit a raw nerve in American culture. It is communicating something about God that people are hungry to hear. The question is, “is the message feel-good New-Age Oprah style vacuous spirituality, or is the message more substantive?” And if it is more substantive is it orthodox? Or heretical? (Note here: heresy to have any meaning must mean something more than, “I don’t like it.” Or “I’ve never heard this before.” See my discussion of heresy in The Survivor’s Guide to Theology, 33-35; 145-151; 190-195.)

This second blog on the topic is prompted by a recent critique published in the Spiritual Counterfeits Project newsletter (spring 2009), and written by an old seminary classmate and former colleague of mine. The counterpoint here is the critique given by several members of the Regent College (Vancouver B.C.) faculty in a book discussion in 2008. http://www.regentaudio.com/product_details.php?item_id=801 (I highly recommend this discussion!)

As he introduced Paul Young at a Regent College faculty discussion Dr. Darrell Johnson, of Regent said, “‘All theology is autobiography,’ that is a saying you will hear a lot around Regent College. All theology is autobiography: by this is meant that everyone develops his or her theology out of one’s own experience of life with God.”

Paul Young clearly articulates that The Shack is a metaphor or parable. “It is a fiction story. . . The Shack is not a systematic theology, it is not the Bible. It is a fiction story. But inside that story I wrote my pain. And I wrote my process. And I wrote the conversations I had over the years as I unwound all the junk. And I wrote God as good as I know how. And all I can tell you is He is better than I wrote Him.”

I suspect that It is the sometimes brutal honesty of the telling of the story that has resonated with audiences all over the country and the English speaking world. Paul Young gives voice to the questions, pain and anger that we are afraid to voice. Afraid that God will banish us for questioning. Afraid that our Christian friends will look down on us for saying out loud what we all fear. Afraid to look unspiritual. Afraid to be seen as imperfect.

I don’t want to plow the same ground of my earlier blog. But I do believe that it needs to be repeated at the outset that (William) Paul Young (like me he goes by his middle name) calls this book a parable, a parable of his own spiritual journey, a journey that includes a childhood of incredible abuse and damage that was left unaddressed until Young was thirty-eight years old. As a parable, any critique must take into account the genre. Any legitimate critique must also understand the context and the intended audience (his own children).

One of the repeated criticisms is that of the portrayal of the Godhead. Critiques have charged the book as teaching modalism/Sabellianism, the ancient heresy that God is single and unitary and does not exist in three persons but reveals himself historically in succession as Father (in the OT) as Son (in the Gospels) and as Spirit (beginning with Pentecost). To illustrate this, I am son, husband, and father. These are three aspects of my being, but I am one undifferentiated person. This heresy was prominent particularly during the third century and was roundly rejected by the early church a generation before the council of Nicea. Some critics of The Shack charge that this heresy is portrayed in The Shack through the author’s portrayal of Papa as having scars that mirror the crucifixion scars of Jesus. In the critique by the faculty of Regent, two of the theologians mention discomfort with this imagery suggesting that a more appropriate image might be a wound to the heart of Papa, rather than the nail prints in the hands. (Significantly they do not accuse him of heresy!) Young’s response to this was he was trying to give an image of the Apostle’s imagery in 2 Cor 5:19. “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself. . .” As I hear what Young was saying here is that he was trying to illustrate in concrete form the doctrine of the perichoresis of the persons of the trinity, i.e. each member indwells the other, shares in the experiences of the other, and participates in some sense in all the activities of the other two persons. The members of the trinity share a unity of life that is unparalleled by human beings. Whether this was the best image to try to convey this understanding can be debated.

Other critiques have suggested that instead of operating from an orthodox Trinitarian framework , the book falls into tri-theism. This heresy is on the other end of the scale from modalism/Sabellianism. (Note: there is an old saying that if you are being attacked by both sides of an issue you are probably somewhere close to the correct position.) The Spiritual Counterfeits Project review says, “God is presented as The Three Musketeers with shades of Tritheism, the ancient heresy that He is actually three deities.” (p. 5) The critique goes on to say that “in the Bible no one ever sees the Father because God dwells in inaccessible light.—no one can see Him and live.” While the reviewer is accurate in his comment about anyone seeing the Father in the Bible, the criticism is irrelevant at this point. The portrayal of the Father and the Spirit in the book are accommodations rather than images of who the Father is in himself. No one believes that the Father is a large black woman and despite the images on the Sistine Chapel, anyone familiar with Christianity knows that the Father is not an old gray-haired man with a flowing beard). I find it interesting that in his parables Jesus has no hesitation in portraying characters clearly identified with God the Father in human form.

Paul Young has become a close associate of C. Baxter Kruger, Ph.D. (This might be characterized by an orthodoxy by association defense.) Kruger (perichoresis.org) obtained his degree at Aberdeen University under J.B. Torrance and wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on T.F. Torrance, one of the premier English speaking theologians of the 20^th century. These theologians are adamant about the centrality of historic orthodox trinitarianism as defined by the councils of Nicea and Constantinople. They rightly, I believe, decry the way that western trinitarianism (both Catholic and Protestant) has lost the personalistic and relational focus that the Eastern Orthodox tradition has been able to keep at the center of its worship and theology. In the west, the doctrine of God has become abstract and focused upon the divine attributes especially transcendent majesty/holiness, at the expense of personal relationship characterizing the members of the trinity. But the Torrance brothers go further, focusing on the presentation in John’s gospel (particularly John 15-17) they insist that there is a personal indwelling of both the Father and the Son within the believer that is the basis of intimate personal communion of the believer not only with the Spirit but with the triune God. This is a spiritual reality that cannot be pictured literally, it must be pictured analogically. This is the approach Young has chosen in The Shack, despite the inherent difficulties/dangers. Again, remember the genre.

Hand in hand with the above critique is the “cheekiness” and lack of reverence in Mack’s interchange with the members of the Godhead. All we need do is read the Psalms to see a repeated “lack of reverence” in the Psalmist’s addresses to God particularly in the lament Psalms. Tremper Longman and Dan Allender have discussed these at length their The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions About God. Significantly, we find that God hears us in our anger and our pain. He is looking for honesty in us, rather than being worried that we do not respect Him by raising questions and issues even in anger. If this is true in the OT, how much more so in the NT where we have the example of Jesus who according to Hebrews 4:14-16 understands our weakness because he has been tempted in all ways like we are.

This leads to the next major critique; that The Shack denies hierarchy within the Trinity. This critique comes from several different sources and is one brought up by the Spiritual Counterfeits critique. “The root of all authority, hierarchy and relationships is the Godhead. Paul Young crafts his godhead after the image of the rebellion-driven counterculture.” (p. 5) What is fascinating is that this very issue has become a hot button within the very conservative Evangelical Theological Society. Several prominent Evangelical theologians, including Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware, are vociferously asserting an eternal hierarchy of authority within the trinity, a hierarchy that inheres in the very being of God, while asserting at the same time that all three persons share equally of a single divine essence. (Sorry if this is getting a little technical.) On the other side is another group, whose most visible spokesman is the Australian Kevin Giles, arguing that within the trinity there is no hierarchy. What makes this issue more heated is that this issue is used by each side to bolster its position on gender relationships. (This makes the whole discussion agenda driven in what I consider to be an improper way, but the question of the intra-Trinitarian personal relationships remains.) Within the past two weeks I have finished reading Evangelical theologian Millard Erickson’s latest work: Who’s Tampering With The Trinity? What makes this work significant is that Erickson does not have a horse in the race with reference to gender relationships. His analysis is careful and dispassionate. He presents each position descriptively and often in the words of the proponents of each position. He lays out the criteria for evaluation of the two positions then examines the evidence, biblical, historical, philosophical, theological and practical. He presents criticisms of argumentation on both sides and ends up addressing the question “So Who’s Right?” While he sees some problems with the articulation of each position, he concludes that each position falls within the boundaries of historic orthodoxy. However, in the last three pages he clearly concludes that those who are advocating eternal hierarchy have serious problems in maintaining their position. That is

“that it contains elements that logically imply an unorthodox dimension of the doctrine of the Trinity . . . the idea of ontological equality [i.e. equality of essence or being] combined with the eternal and necessary supremacy of authority of the Father over the Son and the Holy Spirit. . . I believe this is an unstable position. For if one member is always and everywhere functionally superior to the others, there must be an ontological basis for the difference. In other words, while explicitly rejecting the idea of ontological subordination, this view actually implies it and thus contains an implicit ontological subordination. (257)

He goes on to note that the historic pattern is for succeeding generations to work out the implicit propositions of their professors, and cites numerous examples of this phenomenon. Having just stated this he says, “I therefore echo Giles plea to the gradationists [i.e. those who are advocating eternal hierarchical authority], ‘Go back. You are going the wrong way’.” (258)

He continues:

Please think through the implications of your view, observe the body of evidence against it, and reconsider the idea of the eternal functional superiority of the Father over the Son and the Holy Spirit. There is no shame in modifying one’s view when confronted with considerations one may have overlooked. In fact, it is a mark of strength to possess a continuing open mind. (259)

This is getting long, so I will cut it short recognizing that I will revisit the topic with more observations in the coming weeks. To summarize what we have here looked at briefly. The basic issue of the nature of Trinitarian reality has been addressed. I believe that much of the criticism arises from a lack of historical understanding in breadth of explanation of Trinitarian relationships within the tradition of historic orthodoxy (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant). The second major critique again with reference to Trinitarian relationships objects that the denial of hierarchy within the intra-Trinitarian relationships is grounded in counter-culture rebellion. This is patently false . In fact Millard Erickson has demonstrated that those arguing for intra-trinnitarian hierarchy have implicitly endorsed the type of subordinationism that gave rise to the Arian heresy in the fourth century and has been revived by the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the past century and one-half. Third we have looked very briefly at the difficulty arising out of trying to portray in concrete terms the reality of the intimate spiritual relationship that the believer is to have with Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

God and the Ordinary

My wife, Kay, was born in the jungles of the Amazon in Peru, her parents were missionaries with Wycliffe Bible Translators where she lived on a compound with nearly 100 missionary families. Everything that was done there was somehow related to translation of the Bible into the many as yet unwritten languages of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin. What has been accomplished among the tribal peoples of the jungles in Peru is nothing short of miraculous. But, transferring a missionary kid who's whole life has been immersed in an environment where the dominant value of life is the visible furtherance of the gospel among those who have never had even an opportunity to hear, to the secular environment of Western culture is a recipe for crisis, or if not crisis at least for ongoing tension.

When we first got married over 35 years ago, this tension was not immediately obvious. I was involved in full-time ministry with Youth for Christ in Orange County, California. During that time, Kay assisted me in ministering to the high school kids of Costa Mesa and Irvine. When I left Youth for Christ, we packed up our trailer, and headed to Dallas Texas, where for the next 10 years I was involved in ThM and PhD study. In 1984, ten years and one month later we left Dallas. We set our sights on the San Francisco Bay area, where I had been hired as Asst. Prof. of Theology at Simpson College. Her life was focused on the home, raising the children. As the children grew and got off to school. It became necessary for her to venture out into the workplace. Feeding four voraciously hungry boys on a professor's salary became more than a challenge. It became an impossibility (at one point our food bill was regularly larger than our monthly rent!).

As she moved out into the workplace, the tension of the secular versus sacred raised its ugly head. It wasn't that she objected to working, but if she had to work outside the home, she wanted to be involved in something that counted for the Kingdom, to be in some kind of ministry work. Many, many nights when she would come home, she would share her frustration. She was working in an office for an electrical contracting company and although there were several Christian friends who worked in the office with her it was still a secular job. It wasn't involved in building the Kingdom. Several years later, she changed jobs. She was now an executive assistant and office manager in a small financial planning firm. But in some cases, this was even worse. She was faced day-to-day with the pursuit of money and felt the tension between God and mammon. About 2 ½ years ago, she changed jobs again. She is working at a small startup company that manufactures a medical device to deal with chronic back pain. Again, it is a secular environment, although in this job she loves the environment and the people, even though she is the only Christian in the office. However, she continued to feel the sacred-secular tension.

As a student of the Reformation, I have been convinced for decades that the sacred-secular tension that my wife feels and that many who have grown up in the evangelical community feel, arises from a misreading of Scripture, and a misunderstanding of the nature of God and his relationship to creation. Beginning in the ancient church there was a wedge driven between the material and the spiritual with a corresponding wedge drawn between the secular and the sacred. During the medieval period, this wedge became a veritable wall. Anyone who was serious about his or her own salvation became a priest, monk or a nun (speaking in broad brushstrokes here). Also during this period the incarnation of Christ and his full participation in the same type of life that we share faded into the background and He became progressively viewed as the divine judge who condemned humanity for its failure to achieve the standard of perfect legal righteousness. (By the way, it was during this period that the we see the rise of Marion devotion as well as the cult of the saints in an attempt to find a sympathetic intercessor who would get the ear of the righteous judge.) This was the issue that tortured Luther—he hated the righteousness of God for it was the basis on which he damned sinful humanity. Ultimately, Luther discovered the true nature of divine righteousness. It was this discovery that kicked off the Reformation.

Luther and the other first generation Reformers went further—much further. They rejected the idea that matter was tainted. The creation had been blessed by the Creator and declared to be “very good.” With this understanding, the sacred-secular dichotomy had been healed. But over the generations the rift appeared again. In the nineteenth century it opened again with a vengeance and infected and still afflicts many evangelicals to this day. (The development here is a bit complex so I won’t get into it now. Suffice it to say that the rise of Liberal Theology with its emphasis on the Social Gospel played a major part here, as did the apocalyptic pre-millennialism that advocated radical separation from the world and dedication to missions and evangelism. Involvement with the world is, after all, like polishing brass on a sinking ship.)

In all this we have lost sight of the nature and implications of the most basic and foundational doctrines of Christianity—the trinity and the incarnation: that God is three eternal persons who live in constant and perfect loving relationship, and that the eternal Son of the Father has joined himself to the totality of human nature, not just for thirty-three years, but for eternity. To stop and reflect, really reflect upon these two truths staggers the mind.

C. Baxter Kruger, in his work The Great Dance, does just this. At one point he reflects:

What are we to make of the fact that as the son of God lived out his sonship, his divine life, he did so as a carpenter? Think of the hours and hours spent in the shop, the years of apprenticeship, the days and months and years hammering and cutting and carving and sanding. What are we to make of the fact that the vast majority of God's time on earth was spent in such ordinary, mundane activity? Have you ever thought about that? Most of God's time on Earth was not spent in what people call "full-time ministry." The incarnate son spent more time making things with his hands than he did preaching.

When you stop to think about it, when the Trinitarian life of God worked its way out in human existence, it was all very ordinary. I am aware of the supernatural things that happened in Jesus. I am aware of the astonishing miracles. But I would hazard a guess that the Son of God, ate more meals than he performed miracles. I know that the incarnate Son healed the sick, but I also know that he made a lot of tables. He had a lot of conversations with regular people, grew up in a family of brothers and sisters and cousins, celebrated birthdays and went to parties.

For at least a moment in history, human laughter, human sharing, human compassion, human love, human fellowship and camaraderie and togetherness were all more than human. For at least a moment of history, carpentry and the delight of making things and helping others, human excellence and the pride and joy of creativity in design and moving from design to completed product, were all more than merely human. They were the living expression of the humanity of God, the living expression of the incarnate Son, living out his divine sonship, the living expression of a man utterly baptized in the Holy Spirit. (62)

Certainly the fact that the Incarnate God worked at a secular and ordinary job, gives the lie to the idea that it is only “the spiritual” that matters. The eternal Son of God, by, through and for whom the entire universe was created, out of love and compassion for His creation, united himself eternally to humanity in its ordinariness and its physicality. This is the basis for meaning in everything we do: the heroic, the “spiritual” and the ordinary. All are important because God himself has, out of his overflowing and gracious love, joined himself to us as human and in the process brought humanity into eternal relationship and participation with God. Peace and joy have come to my wife as she has accepted and embraced participation with God in the ordinary.

Shortly after I posted my recent blog entitled “The Coming Evangelical Collapse?” Time Magazine featured as its cover story an article entitled “10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now.” (Number three on Time’s list, was “The New Calvinism.”) On the surface, this appears to be a blatant contradiction to the thesis of The Christian Science Monitor article concerning “The Coming Evangelical Collapse.” As strange as it may seem I would suggest is that it is not.

The reasons for this are several-fold. Evangelicalism as it has manifested itself in America, and as a subculture has historically been a tradition that is “heavenly minded.” Its roots are sunk deeply into pietistic spirituality arising from a post-Reformation reaction to cold doctrinal orthodoxy within confessional Lutheranism in Germany, as opposed to what can legitimately be called a Reformed or Puritan spirituality/worldview.

As such, evangelicalism has historically had a tremendous problem in being involved in “the world.” During the 19^th century as revivalism was institutionalized in America, spiritual life was privatized and became unrelated to other areas of life. (What mattered was “my personal relationship with God/Jesus.” etc., gone were larger senses of responsibility to community and society.) In a real sense what happened in 19th century American Protestantism mirrored the emerging liberal theology in Germany which saw truth as derived from the feelings (German: Gefeuhl) as opposed to having a rational undergirding.

The divide between the sacred and the secular realm of existence that had characterized Roman Catholic Christianity throughout the Medieval period and, which had been rejected by the Reformers of the 16^th century was reintroduced into the larger American evangelical psyche.

In the Reformation and the following Puritan era there had been a very healthy integration of the spiritual with all other areas of life, because God the Reformed/Calvinistic tradition had pronounced creation/ material order very good. (Leland Ryken has demonstrated the vital embrace of the created order by the Puritans in his excellent and very accessible study work Worldly Saints: the Puritans as They Really Were). As the nineteenth century progressed, Protestantism, which at this point was in some sense evangelical, progressively withdrew from cultural engagement in the world and society and abandoned that realm to the rising tide of secular studies and perspectives. American historian Richard Hofstadter notes that 19^th century American evangelicals

"withdrew from intellectual encounters with the secular world, gave up the idea that religion is a part of the whole life of intellectual experience, and often abandoned the field of rational studies on the assumption that they were the natural province of science alone." (Anti-Intellectualism in America, 87)

What we see happening among evangelicals during this period is a slipping into a dualism characteristic of Plato, and adopted by later Gnostic teaching: “Spirit(ual) is good; Material is evil (or at best bad or something to be put up with and distracting from the really important- the spiritual). Added to this was the rise of Dispensational theology with its imminent apocalyptic expectation that involvement in the world, politics, and even society at large was “like polishing brass on a sinking ship.” Lest you think that this attitude has changed, one of my former colleagues preached a sermon on ecology about a dozen years ago in which he concluded that we don’t need to be involved in these issues because it’s all going to burn anyway! (I must admit that I find these attitudes theologically and exegetically bankrupt as well as crazy-making.)

Evangelicalism is a “big tent” description for early twenty-first century Protestantism. But such has not always been the case. As used in the latter half of the nineteenth century in the U.S., the term referred to the mildly Calvinistic theological descendents of the New School Presbyterians in the mid-nineteenth century; it incorporated the arising dispensational movement in the early days of the twentieth century during the era of the “Fundamentalist-Modernist debates. The key doctrine for Evangelical identity during the decades of the early to mid- twentieth century was that of the inerrancy of Scripture. This was the sole doctrinal plank of the Evangelical Theological Society when it was founded in 1948. A central mark of the Fundamentalist/Evangelical tradition was its devotion to and knowledge of the Bible, not only by pastors and scholars, but also on the lay level. Originally the designation did not include those of the Holiness tradition nor of the emerging Pentecostal tradition nor the Southern Baptists. Each of these traditions maintained their own separate identities.

While there was some movement in the ensuing decades, “The Jesus Movement” of the late 60s and 70s with its Pentecostal roots was the catalyst that broke down the barriers between the traditions just mentioned. By the mid-1970’s Evangelicalism was in the process of shedding its fundamentalist-separatist roots and begun to think about engaging society on the scholarly level as well as embracing culture on a popular level.. While as I mentioned in the previous blog the scholarly engagement has been fairly successful, on the popular level the engaging of culture as been a disaster. Knowledge of scripture and theology has ceased to be an identifying factor of our tradition. In seeking to embrace culture evangelicalism was squeezed into the contemporary cultural ethos.

Today theological and biblical knowledge is at a nadir (at least I hope it won’t get any worse!). The upshot of this is that contemporary evangelicalism is intellectually vacuous and largely impotent. Hence the predicted collapse.

But what does this have to do with Calvinism? Much in every way—but I will get to this in a moment. First I quote a couple of paragraphs out of The Survivor’s Guide to Theology.

We can illustrate the importance of theology by means of the skeleton and the jellyfish. When we look at a skeleton, we can be reasonably sure it is dead. The life that once held these bones together is gone, and these bones are now held together with pins and wires. This is how many people view theology: lifeless and a collection of ideas that are held together by the artificial means of complex rationalizations and arguments. Then there is the jellyfish. A jellyfish can live for a time on the beach but cannot do anything. It lies on the sand in a pulsating blob, unable to do anything except possibly sting a passerby. The jellyfish, like the skeleton, has a problem. While the skeleton has structure without life, the jellyfish has life without structure. The lack of structure, or a skeletal system, causes it to be ineffective at doing anything on land.

A structure such as a skeleton will allow us to accomplish the task of living life, but this does not mean that just any structure will do, that one structure is as good as another. Years ago I worked with a person who as a child had fallen from a tree and broken his arm. The physician who attended to him was drunk and set the arm improperly so that in the healing process a deformity developed. My colleague could still use his arm, but it was not fully functional because the structure that supported his arm inhibited his movement. (18)

When I gave this illustration in class a number of years ago, one of my students who was a chiropractor became so excited he blurted out excitedly, “That’s right! Function follows form!” Function follows form.

Improper [or inadequate] theological structures may give the illusion of being intellectually and spiritually harmonious and in line with Scripture, but the reality shows otherwise. In the pilot episode of the original Star Trek series, broadcast as “The Menagerie,” Captain Christopher Pike (Captain Kirk’s predecessor) is imprisoned on the planet Talos 4. The inhabitants of the planet exhibit him and a beautiful young woman in their zoo. The plan is for them to mate and ultimately populate the planet. Pike learns that the Talosians are experts at illusion and that this is why his escape attempts keep failing. When he is finally successful and is about to leave the planet, he tries to take the young woman as well, but she refuses to leave. He discovers that she, like everything else he has experienced, is not as she appears. She is human, but she is not young and beautiful. She is the sole survivor of a scientific expedition stranded on the planet years before. Badly injured in the crash of her spaceship, she had been nursed back to health by the Talosians. But they had never seen a human before and consequently did not properly set her broken bones, and she ended up hunched over with twisted limbs. In this ugly condition, she could not face other humans. She could live a functional life, but the underlying structure of her body could not support normal existence. Her twisted structure cut her off from contact with normal humans. (19)

Evangelicalism has become a movement without a true underlying structure or true worldview. Those of the true Reformed theological persuasion have never been an integral part of Evangelicalism. While numerous Reformed scholars and theologians contributed to The Fundamentals which were published in the second decade of the twentieth century in opposition to the rising tide of Liberal Theology which was crashing like a Tsunami over the Protestant theological landscape, they declined to identify themselves with the movement because they viewed it as reductionistic and a compromise not only of Calvinism but of Historic Christian Orthodoxy.

The theological and intellectual poverty and vacuity of evangelicalism was vividly pointed out to me many years ago by Dr. Dan Allender (now President of Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle) in a presentation he was giving. Dan, as an aside in his lecture pointed out that the Evangelical tradition has never been able to produce great works of art or literature. Other Christian traditions, the Orthodox, the Catholic, the Anglican, the Reformed have all produced great masterpieces but you can not name one great Evangelical artist or author of literature—our worldview does not allow us to. (neither Tim LaHaye & Jerry Jenkins nor William P. Young (The Shack) nor even Thomas Kincade qualify here!)

The great late nineteenth and early twentieth century Dutch theologian, Abraham Kuyper demonstrates the sweeping vision of the Reformed faith in his Lectures on Calvinism, delivered at Princeton Seminary in 1898. He delivered six lectures that demonstrated the intellectual, theological and spiritual vigor of world and life view of the Reformed faith:

Lecture 1: Calvinism as a Life System
Lecture 2: Calvinism and Religion
Lecture 3: Calvinism and Politics
Lecture 4: Calvinism and Science
Lecture 5: Calvinism and Art
Lecture 6: Calvinism and the Future

Those unfamiliar with Kuper will need an introduction to him to appreciate the power of his position. He was not just an academic theologian who built castles in the clouds. Throughout his career he edited a daily newspaper. He was the founder of Amsterdam Free University. He was a member of the Dutch Parliament, and served for four years Prime Minister of the Netherlands. Last, but not least he was one of the two the leading Dutch theologians of his generation. (The other was Herman Bavinck.) Kupyer stridently advocated the Reformed concept of bringing all things under the Lordship of Christ and backed up that insistence in his own life story.

To most within our circles when someone mentions Calvinism, the image that comes to mine is the TULIP, or the doctrine of divine sovereignty, or of predestination. Such thoughts betray our profound ignorance of the vitality of its theocentric worldview and all encompassing vision of reality.

In the midst of an age of anthropocentric theology and postmodern abdication of truth, it makes perfect sense to me to see the reemergence of historic Reformed Theology/Calvinism (not simply the popular bumper sticker caricature Calvinism as the TULIP).

If Evangelicalism collapses as the sociologists and pollsters are predicting, will a new incarnation of Reformed theology arise out of the ashes?

Under Cover: Authority, Obedience (& Abuse?)

A couple of weeks ago I was asked by a friend from out of state to look at a book, Under Cover by John Bevere, although the book is not new it is just now making the rounds among the leadership of his church. This friend is a layman who has been a Christian for many years and has seen many fads and movements come and go, as have I. He reacted quite strongly to the teaching as it is being explained around his church noting that those who are reading the book are insisting that God speaks to our pastor and our pastor speaks to us. We have no right to question what the pastor says. We are bound to submit and obey. He saw great similarity between this teaching, on spiritual authority and covering=spiritual protection with the Shepherding Movement/Discipleship Movement of the 1970’s and 80’s which was founded by Bob Mumford, Derek Prince, Charles Simpson and Don Basham as a result of moral failure in a charismatic ministry in South Florida.

The teachings of the movement focused upon accountability, obedience and submission to spiritual authority. From the idea of submission to authority, to the equating of the authority of the leader to the authority of God, has proven historically to be a short step. What happens is that the leader’s voice is equated with the voice of God and those who disagree are seen as in rebellion. In the Shepherding Movement, this step was taken and the movement became controlling and abusive. Ultimately both Mumford and Prince repented of their errors in teaching and left the movement.

Another movement with similar practices founded in 1979 was the Boston Movement. (renamed :International Churches of Christ (ICC)). New members are required to meet with older members daily. New members who disagree with older members are told they are rebelling against God. Submission to church leaders is demanded. New members are told whom to date, how to spend their money and how to spend their free time. In 2003 Kip McKean founder of the Boston Movement resigned confessing that the church leaders “[had] engaged in financial mismanagement, legalism, dishonest statistical reporting, and abusive teachings, and have ignored critics.”

Last week I talked to my pastor, who although he is solidly Reformed in his theology now, comes out of a Pentecostal background. He shared that this type of teaching is common in Pentecostal circles noting that within Pentecostalism there is a love of invoking OT imagery and drawing theological conclusions from that imagery without taking into account a substantial discontinuity between the ways God established for Israel and the fact that there has been a tremendous change under the New Covenant inaugurated by the “Christ Event” (the death, resurrection & ascension) followed by the inauguration of the church at Pentecost. Drawing upon OT imagery Pentecostalism stresses particularly the authority/power/rights of the minister as God’s anointed one.

Bevere’s thesis is that submission to spiritual authority gives covering and protection. Conversly, to disobey spiritual authority is to place oneself in the arena of Satan with the clear implication that one who disobeys by failing to submit to spiritual authority is open to demonic attack. The same is true if the spiritual authority is challenged. He says:

“If those under authority take the yoke of judgment upon themselves as judges over their established leaders, they no longer are submitted to established authority, but have elevated themselves as judges over their leaders. Their hearts are lifted up in pride above the ones God placed over them. They have exalted themselves over the ordinance and counsel of God.” (116)

Bevere makes many good, right and true points. We do not live in a spiritual democracy and authority is something with which we as twenty-first century Americans have great problems with. Living less than 20 miles from UC Berkeley I regularly see bumper stickers with the slogan “Question Authority” boldly emblazoned on them. But although I recognize this as a problem I have serious problems with Bevere’s approach and his whole thesis on several different levels, some methodological, some exegetical, some theological.

What follows are more or less disconnected observations and specific examples of problems and issues that jumped out at me as I read. These criticisms are by no means exhaustive, and the weightiest are at the end.

· Intended or not, and despite all the claims to humility, I sense an underlying arrogance. The first time I ever sensed this type of arrogance in an author was many years ago when I first read The Light and The Glory by Peter Marshall and David Manuel. That book is a reinterpretation of American history that makes the argument that America is the new covenant nation akin to ancient Israel. As one reviewer said, “It is not good history. It is not even good fiction.” Nevertheless it has become a favorite among the homeschoolers in the US. (But I digress.) What absolutely drove me crazy was that the authors’ repeatedly invoked the leading of the Holy Spirit to substantiate their claims that theirs was the right interpretation. Likewise, Bevere invokes the voice of God throughout the book telling him in words that his teaching is the truth. These claims place an author above criticism, because to take issue with these claims is to reject divine revelation. While I don’t want to get sidetracked about prophecies and words of knowledge I do want to mention that in 1 Thess. 5 Paul tells (or as Bevere might say: commands) his readers to:

not treat prophecies with contempt.

But examine all things;

Paul is apparently telling his hearers not to reject prophecies, but to examine them, and hold fast to those which pass muster but reject those that are evil.[1] To put this another way, what the Lord says to one individual must be verified by the church as a whole. It is not a case of “God speaks to the pastor and the pastor speaks to us.” We are all sinful, and depraved and prone to interpret our own deep desires as the word or will of God. (As a parenthetical note: this issue with central authority is particularly rooted in the mindset of the Western [Roman Catholic and Protestant] churches. Authority in the Eastern Orthodox Church is and has always been communal.)

My wife tells the story of when she was first in college one of her classmates told her that God had told him that she was to marry him. Her response? “God has not told that to me.” (I have heard this from numerous female college students over the years that young men whom they hardly knew were told by God that the particular girl in question was to be their wife. Apparently young men (with raging hormones) are sensitive to the voice of God and the young women are not!

Years ago when I first taught at Simpson College, I had a student who was so “in tune with God” that as he was walking down the corridors of the college he would carry on a conversation with God. This was not normal prayer. He was hearing God’s responses to what he verbalized within the hearing of all. (He was one of the first students I met at Simpson and I wondered what I had gotten myself into.) Over the next two years he matured quite a bit and decided to go to my alma mater Dallas Seminary.

He graduated and became a pastor in Hayward, the next city over from where I have lived for 25 years. I haven’t seen him since he returned to the Bay Area but I recently found out some of what had gone on in recent years. He was convinced that God had told him to move his inner city blue collar church to the suburbs about 15-20 miles away. The church dutifully followed his lead as the will of God. The congregation however did not fit in the suburbs. Things went from bad to worse and the church fired him as their pastor and called another pastor. But since God had called him to this church he wouldn’t leave. It got so bad that finally the church had to call in the police and have him arrested for trespassing.

· As an exegete and a theologian I have a tremendous problem with the way Bevere handles the text of scripture. He nowhere builds a case with solid exegesis and theological thinking/ reflection that his thesis is valid. Instead he assumes from the first paragraph that he is right and mixes stories, prooftexts and examples drawn out of context from the breadth of scripture and from his experiences. His prooftexts are often pulled totally out of context and treated as timeless aphorisms rather than time-bound, culture-bound and context-bound statements that cannot simply be lifted out of their contexts without doing violence to their meaning. Likewise, he regularly leverages one biblical story against another and bridges them with anecdotes that tie the parts together artificially to make them serve his agenda.

As one who teaches Hermeneutics (biblical interpretation) on the seminary level I must say that if one of my students submited an assignment that applied such interpretive practices, I would give the paper a failing grade and instruct the student to rework the assignment using proper hermeneutical method.

· With reference to exegesis, he occasionally appeals to the meaning of Greek terms but employs sources that are out of date, and even these he uses improperly, building cases from lexical definitions and forcing those lexical definitions into contexts in which they do not fit. He seems to have little to no grasp of the universally understood hermeneutical principle that meaning is determined by context.

On other occasions he redefines terms to fit the point he is hammering, e.g. in James 2 he redefines works as “obedient actions” and quotes James 2:20-24, 26 substituting “obedient actions” for works throughout. (217)

In his exposition of the verse “rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft” (1 Sam 15:23) Bevere attempts to retranslate the verse as “rebellion is witchcraft” since the Hebrew text infers the “is .” Again, he plays fast and loose with the meaning of the text as understood by the translators who are expert in Hebrew, to make points homiletically.

He then continues to build a case that since rebellion is witchcraft those in rebellion fall under the curse placed upon those who practice witchcraft. In this context he takes Paul’s rhetorical question to the Galatian churches, “O foolish Galatians, Who has bewitched you . . .? He states: “The bewitchment involved in disobeying God’s word, not any curses that sorcerers conjured up, Why? Because rebellion is witchcraft! In essence the church in Galatia came under a witchcraft curse because of disobedience.” (76)

· Years ago, I wrote my Th.M. thesis on the book of Galatians (for those who are interested, I applied the method of Discourse Analysis to the entire books of Galatians. It is posted at: http://www.bible.org/series.php?series_id=73 ) This was a slow and painstaking analysis that took more than four hundred hours to complete. The point was to trace the argument (the case Paul was building) of Galatians. I discovered something remarkable. Everything stated in Galatians leads up to or flows from Galatians 5:1: "For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm then and do not be subject to the yoke of slavery.” In chapter 1 he calls down imprecations from heaven on anyone who would corrupt the simple gospel of Christ: “. . . If we (or an angel from heaven) should preach a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be condemned to hell! As we have said before, and now I say again, “if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let him be condemned to hell!”

Paul was here talking about the simplicity of the gospel which was being compromised by those who wanted to add the Torah (Jewish law with all its ceremonies and particularly circumcision as its sign) but the application is wider. Many teachings have arisen over the centuries that promise protection, provision, perfection and the like. They sound good at the front end, but the results are bondage.

The phenomenon of spiritual abuse is not new. In 3 John 9 the apostle recounts spiritual abuse under the guise of authority in the person of Diotrophes.[2]

· There is a radically different ministry of the Holy Spirit in the OT as opposed to the NT. In the OT the priest was truly that, a priest who stood between the worshiper and God. In the OT not even the priests were regularly indwelt with the Holy Spirit, and the High Priest was only allowed into the actual presence of God once per year, on Yom Kippur. At the death of Christ the veil of the temple was rent top to bottom signifying that access to the very presence of God was now available to all. This leads directly into the New Testament concept of the priesthood of all believers and the reality that all believers partake equally of the Holy Spirit. Each is indwelt personally. Paul goes so far on one occasion as to identify each believer as a temple of God through the presence of the Spirit. Each believer has direct access to God without having to go through a priest or a minister. We are members of one another. A dominant image is the church is that of the body. It is not that of a spiritual aristocracy that is responsible only to God and not to the rest of the believers. There are different roles, clearly, but they are roles of service, not the authority of a dictator.

· While perhaps less problematic than some of the other weaknesses underlying the book I find a strain of ethical absolutistism that denies that there are any gray areas in moral judgments. Every situation has a right and a wrong. I believe that this position, while on the surface is attractive it is not ultimately defensible. This feeds into his thesis that we must be under cover, submitted to our spiritual authorities so as not to sin and incur divine judgment.

· In the second section of Under Cover “God’s Direct Covering,” Bevere discusses the nature of sin claiming a definitive understanding from 1 John 3:4, “Sin is lawlessness.” This claim is utterly reductionistic. I hear in the background John Wesley’s definition of sin as “a conscious act of willful disobedience (to a known law) .” While this approach on the surface claims to treat sin seriously, in reality it utterly trivializes sin, reducing it to an act of the will, a choice.

In fact in the Old Testament these sins (of willful disobedience) could not be atoned for by sacrifice. Both biblically and theologically sin is radical (from the Latin radix meaning root). If sin were merely an act of the will all we would need is strong wills to defeat it. In reality sin goes to the depth of our being. There is no part of our existence that has not been touched by its tentacles. Radical fallenness calls not for reformation, but radical redemption.

· More problematic yet is the framework in which Bevere builds his teaching. This framework is legal rather than relational. As I noted earlier, much of what Bevere has to say is true and right, but the framework in which something is presented has a profound effect on the way it is taken in. Merely having all the right pieces is not enough.

In the late second century Irenaeus, the great bishop of Lyons and opponent of Gnosticism wrote:

“Their manner of acting is just as if one, when a beautiful image of a king has been constructed by some skilful artist out of precious jewels, should then take this likeness of the man all to pieces, should rearrange the gems, and so fit them together as to make them into the form of a dog or of a fox, and even that but poorly executed; and should then maintain and declare that this was the beautiful image of the king which the skilful artist constructed, pointing to the jewels which had been admirably fitted together by the first artist to form the image of the king, but have been with bad effect transferred by the latter one to the shape of a dog, and by thus exhibiting the jewels, should deceive the ignorant who had no conception what a king's form was like, and persuade them that that miserable likeness of the fox was, in fact, the beautiful image of the king” Against Heresies 1:8:1 (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103108.htm)

Another example of framework affecting the way a doctrine is taken in can be seen in the difference in presentation of the doctrine of predestination between Calvin and Theodore Beza, his successor at Geneva. Calvin does not discuss the topic of predestination until book three of the Institutes of the Christian Religion after he has discussed at length the grace of God and the experience of that grace when the believer is incorporated into Christ. With that context having been set, he discusses predestination in the context of the love and acceptance of the believer vouchsafed by both the witness of the Spirit in the heart of the believer and the promise of Scripture. Beza, on the other hand, moves the discussion of the concept of predestination from the doctrine of salvation and places it under the doctrine and attributes of God. While not changing the teaching, this repositioning of the doctrine of predestination changed the whole tenor of its truth. In Calvin it functioned as a comfort, under Beza and the later Reformers it gave the feel that God was distant and arbitrary and that man (oops—I need to be politically correct) human beings were but marionettes whose strings were being pulled. It was a cold I-it relationship rather than a warm personal I-thou relationship (to use Martin Buber’s terminology).

My point here is that Bevere places his discussion within the framework of performance, the framework of slaves not sons and in so doing existentially compromises the transforming effect of the gospel in the life of the believer.

· Bevere quotes Romans 13:1ff as an absolute command, and then broadens it from the context of civil authorities/rulers to the sphere of spiritual authority.

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except by God’s appointment, and the authorities that exist have been instituted by God. So the person who resists such authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will incur judgment. (NET)

In its context judgment refers clearly to the police and court system. In the shift to spiritual authority Bevere turns this judgment into a direct spiritual judgment from God—something nowhere even suggested in the passage.

Quoting these verses alone make them sound absolute, however if we are even to look at the book of Acts and Galatians, we get quite a different picture.

Early in the book of Acts the apostles are arrested in the temple and ordered not to preach about Christ and the resurrection. The response was not one of obedience and submission—remember the Sanhedrin were both political and religious authorities in Israel (under the higher authority of Rome)—instead there was a challenge (Acts 4:19ff) on the occasion of their first arrest, and flat out defiance on their second appearance before the Sanhedrin (Acts 5:27ff).

Paul too, on the basis of his Roman citizenship regularly challenged the Roman authorities when they overstepped their bounds and attempted to have him flogged without trial.

Even more telling is Paul’s confrontation with Peter in Antioch (Gal. 2:11ff). While Paul had received his call directly from the Lord, Peter had acted as his mentor in some fashion (Gal. 1:18) [3]. What is remarkable is not only that Paul had the audacity to confront Peter publicly (Peter was the preeminent apostle in the early church and one of the inner circle of three that accompanied Jesus during his earthly ministry) but he did it without a private meeting first. (Horrors—he did not follow Jesus’ teaching in Matt 18:15ff). When the truth of the Gospel was at stake normal protocol did not apply!

· This brings us to the rule of conscience. Keeping rules is a much easier way to live one’s life than being informed by a conscience. Rule keeping does not call for moral acumen and judgment. One just has to know the appropriate rule/law and apply it in a given situation. Conscience is a complex part of our being. It is that aspect of our being which serves as our moral compass, but it does not come from the factory “pre-programmed.” We might say that we are hard-wired for moral judgment; the software is slowly programmed over the years of our childhood. The context in which our conscience is programmed makes all the difference in the world. Is that context one of love, condemnation, or conditional acceptance? As has been noted:

. . . where the inevitable demands in child training are involved without first establishing a relationship of trust, moral training becomes a punitive, fear-ridden, process in which “goodness” is reduced to the avoidance of evil rather than the attainment of positive virtue. The child feels he must earn parental affection through external righteousness in this context of conditional love. His conscience then becomes negative, inflexible, and unreflective and his sense of guilt an unhealthy one. This is the conscience of the moralists who “tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law” (Matt 23:23). Just as acceptance of the positional doctrines frees the Christian to fellowship with Christ and these doctrines mature him, so the experience of trust prior to the invoking of demand lays a foundation of grace under moral instruction which frees the child to grow morally and spiritually. What is taught is important. The emotional climate in which it is taught is equally important. Either it is infused with the spirit of Christ or the Spirit of the Pharisee. Neglect of either right content or right spirit in moral instruction is detrimental. (ZPBE, s.v conscience)

Conscience forms a vital part of the Christian’s spiritual life. In the vision of the Apostle Paul conscience plays a supreme place, more important than law itself. We find that to violate one’s conscience is a supremely serious affair (even if one’s conscience has qualms about things that are objectively permissible), and to induce another to violate his conscience even more serious. We are above all called upon to do what we think is right, and under no conditions are we to violate our conscience even if told to do so by someone we respect as a spiritually mature individual or a spiritual authority. To follow the example or instruction of a more mature believer or spiritual authority when we are not convinced of the rightness of the action brings upon us condemnation. In the words of Paul it leads us to “destroy ourselves.” (1 Cor 8:11) (Time does not permit me to develop this further but read both Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8. Note here how the contemporary church has inverted the definitions of weak and strong!)

· The issue of legalism: As noted above the teaching of obedience to spiritual authority leads naturally (and I do not think that it is too much to say) inevitably to legalism. Paul Morris, Ph.D. a pastor and theologian and one of the co-workers with Chuck Colson in the early days of Prison Fellowship has written a magnificent article entitled “Legalism—the original sin?” (http://reform-network.net/?p=1462) What follows are excerpts from that article:

In the rabbinical teachings, it is called the Mishna, the first section of the Talmud, and sets forth early oral interpretations of the Scriptures compiled about 200 A.D. If Judaism has turned the interpretation of Scripture into a prodigious legal elaboration of its rules and sanctions, we Christians have turned it into an art form. We have made legalism the primordial philosophy of the practice of faith. This leads us to this definition of legalism:

Legalism is a philosophy of religious practice wherein faith is expressed by

adherence to a command and obedience infrastructure.

Of course, it is only attempted adherence, and it is more sophistry than philosophy. But we define it so owing to the fact that legalism represents a point of view. A philosophical stance of perspective. That perspective is to view relationship with God through the lens of obedience. A distinctive of this view is that short of obedience, relationship is severely fractured at best and does not exist at worst.

To the extent that a believer perceives God (and his representatives: e.g., any human religious authority) as a Commander and himself as an obeyer; to that extent, he is a legalist. If the foundational structure of his faith is built on this legal paradigm, then by definition, he is a legalist. Or perhaps it would be kinder to say that his faith is suffering from the disease of legalism.

Morris takes Bill Gothard and his Institute for Basic Youth Conflicts as a prime example of the mind of the legalist.

Gothard and others like him preach faith as form; structure. People flock to it because they see such form as the "answer" to their dysfunctional lives. They have not discovered the core and foundational being of love and how it affects behavior. They have not discovered it or they do not believe it. In either case, they have succumbed to the paralyzing disease of legalism.

When religious addicts create a toxic faith system, God is lost in the process. In God's place, rules are implemented that serve only to further the empire of religious addiction. As new people come into the toxic faith system, they are indoctrinated into the rules rather than strengthened in a relationship with God. The rules reinforce addiction, not faith. Addiction leads to conformity to a predictable pattern of behavior, often blocking faithful following of God. It is hard for these toxic faith practitioners to realize that Christ put down the rigid, legalistic system of the religion of His day. They become even more dysfunctional.

It is not long before they learn that consistent application of the formulistic, sequential steps they were taught in the seminars do not work. They are far too simplistic to apply uniformly to life's multitude of complexities. And sadly, their faith becomes so deformed and twisted by the mountains of rules, formulas and "answers," that if it were possible, they would abandon it altogether. They drown in their mishnas.

It is appalling that the one thing Jesus said sets believers apart from non-believers is so profoundly discounted. The quintessential irony is that believers wish to become like non-believers: governed by law instead of love and grace. It is painfully obvious that if people learned to love and respect one another; if people perceived one another through the eyes of compassion; if people actually followed the "golden rule," there would be no need for the making of laws. Plainly, there is a compelling need for civil and criminal law. But the people of God should not philosophically identify with this secular ethic. Believers should lead the way and help the spiritually impoverished to know that we are "Christians" by our love. A love demonstrated by acts of love toward them and toward our relationships with each other.

The Law has served abundantly well to demonstrate that we need the redemption that belief in the death, burial and resurrection in Jesus Christ brings. The Law has indeed brought us to Christ. Without it, we might have missed him. With it, we see how evil we are and how desperately we need his love, forgiveness and grace. In this the Law has succeeded beyond our ability to imagine.

Now having been accepted by God in this grace, the Law no longer functions as a standard by which believers are measured. When faced with a moral choice, the force of love compels us to choose right instead of wrong. But if we do not, the Law will not crush us because it has already crushed Christ. We are forgiven. We are picked up, brushed off and encouraged to go and sin no more. If we do, we are picked up again and told the same thing. And again. And again, ad infinitum.

Relaxing with Depravity:

St. Francis of Assisi [this is an incorrect attribution—it is from the “Serenity Prayer” written by Reinhold Niebuhr] was prayed, "Lord grant that I may accept the things I cannot change . . . " Acceptance of reality may seem the obvious and logical thing to do. Yet why is it so difficult? Why should Francis pray such a prayer?

That we are a sinful people, that I am a sinful man is a fait accompli -- an established fact. Francis Schaeffer observes: "In the area of morality, . . . man cannot escape the fact of the motions of a true right and wrong in himself; not just a sociological or hedonistic morality, but true morality, true right and true wrong. And yet beginning with himself he cannot bring forth absolute standards and cannot even keep the poor relative ones he has set up. Thus in the area of morality, as in rationality, trying to be what he is not, as he was made to be in relationship to God, he is crushed and damned by what he is."

Why do we as believers "try to be what we are not?" Why do we struggle? Why do we fight this fight? It is a lost cause. We will never win it. We cannot be anything other than what we are. If that is true, then we must accept it if we are ever going to transcend it. Paul the apostle observed, "By the grace of God, I am what I am." In this remark he was not boasting of his person or position. He was not boasting at all for it follows upon these words, "For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God." This man who could never do what he wanted to do and often did what he did not want to do came to rest only in his relationship with Christ. He learned this, ostensibly from God. He told the Corinthian believers of his struggle:

To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

We will not debate the identity of Paul's thorn, but we can describe it: It was evil! He perceived its origin as coming from Satan. Three times he pleaded with God to remove this evil thing. Three times he was refused. "My grace is sufficient," said the Father. "You must learn to relax in my grace, Paul." is the message behind these words. The apostle was no different than any of the rest of us. He too, was an evil man. When faced with a moral choice, out of love for his Savior he chose right -- most of the time -- perhaps. But there were times he chose wrong. There were times in which the beloved apostle was a jerk. Does that surprise us? It shouldn't. It should comfort the rest of us jerks. The benefits of such rest become obvious: "For when I am weak, then I am strong." With convincing erudition and acumen Feuerbach notes, "But I cannot have the idea of moral perfection without at the same time being conscious of it as a law for me. Moral perfection depends, at least for the moral consciousness, not on the nature, but on the will -- it is a perfection of will, perfect will. I cannot conceive perfect will, the will which is in unison with law, which is itself law, without at the same time regarding it as an object of will, i.e., as an obligation for myself. The conception of the morally perfect being is no merely theoretical, inert, conception, but a practical one, calling me to action, to imitation, throwing me into strife, into disunion with myself; for while it proclaims to me what I ought to be, it also tells me to my face, without any flattery, what I am not."

We are indeed, what we are -- and that by the grace of God. We will never be any different because of our weak attempts to observe perfect standards. If a choice is to be made between Law and Love, we must choose Love. That is what Jesus did repeatedly. We can only do what sinful people do who in some measure allow the Holy Spirit to empower them.

"We can say personality is shown by that which thinks, acts, and feels. Let us think of acting. Here is will and action -- but everything cuts across my will. I would do a certain thing, but I cannot put my will into infinite action, unlimited action. Even in the small area of a painter's canvas, I cannot do it. I cannot have an unlimited action in the smallest things of life, let alone the largest. And so if I am demanding infinite freedom, whether it is in the whole of life, or in a small area of life, I cannot have it; I cannot be God in action and practice. So again I fall to the earth, crushed with natural tensions in myself, and I lie there like a butterfly that someone has touched, with all the lovely things gone from its wings."

To learn to relax in grace means to release the burden of responsibility in keeping the Law to God. What are God's expectations of us? God demands perfection. We cannot meet that demand. That is why Christ died. Only in Christ are we made perfect. God expects us to sin. "He knows our frame, that we are but dust." notes the psalmist. God is relaxed with the fact that we are sinful because he has cared for it in the death of his Son. There is nothing left for us to do but to understand this basic truth from the Old Testament:

He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. "When a frightened or injured child gives himself over to his mother, comes to her and is wrapped in her loving arms, he possesses greater security than he will ever know as an adult. There may be a very ferocious storm and gale-like winds pounding against the walls of the house, lightning turning the sky to moments of fire and thunder shaking every bone in his body, but the child will not fear. He is safe, he is secure. He has surrendered himself to his loving mother and places all his confidence and trust in her." -- Fr. Franklyn McAfee.

For whatever the terrible thorns or storms in our lives, we too will find great rest and comfort in the loving acceptance and forgiveness from the One to whom we surrender ourselves.

Conclusion

I want to wind this up by saying that while I find Bevere’s position as taken particularly in the early portion of Under Cover utterly problematic on many levels, and truly dangerous to the spiritual health of the church, in the latter part of the book he tries to qualify some of the positions he has taken early in the book. The problem I see is the qualifications, which are well stated and carefully articulated, cut against the larger broad brush strokes that he has painted from the beginning.

As I said earlier, much of what he says is good. But the framework he uses is one that is the cyanide in the Kool-Aid. While he may not go down this path himself, working out the implicit presuppositions of his teaching, I don’t have to be a prophet to foresee that his followers will. And when they do they will unleash a new torrent of spiritual abuse that effectively undermines the freedom produced by the gospel and enslaves God’s children in chains of bondage. In so doing they will come under the same curse that Paul pronounced upon those who were adding to the gospel Paul proclaimed to the Galatian church.

[1] “The Christian must not uncritically accept—or reject—spiritual teaching but must be careful in all matters to distinguish the good and hold on to it. He will thus avoid ‘evil in any form’ (Phillips).” NIV Bible Commentary on 1 Thess 5:20-21, Pradis Edition (Grand Rapids: Zondervan 1994).

[2] Diotrephes appears to be an influential person (perhaps the leader) in a local church known to Gaius, but to which Gaius himself does not belong. The description of Diotrephes as one who loves to be firstacknowledge the written communication mentioned by the author at the beginning of v. 9 (and thus did not recognize the author’s apostolic authority), and furthermore (v. 10) refuses to show any hospitality to the traveling missionaries (welcome the brothers) already mentioned by the author. It has been suggested that the description “loves to be first” only indicates that Diotrephes sought prominence or position in this church, and had not yet attained any real authority. But his actions here suggest otherwise: He is able to refuse or ignore the author’s previous written instructions (v. 9), and he is able to have other people put out of the church for showing hospitality to the traveling missionaries (v. 10) suggests he is arrogant, and his behavior displays this: He refuses to

[3] See the note http://net.bible.org/bible.php?book=Gal&chapter=1#v41