Dwelling In Perplexities

God has moved out of the fortress of pedestrian certainties and is dwelling in perplexities. 

He has abandoned our complacencies and has entered our spiritual agony, upsetting dogmas, discrediting articulations. 

Beyond all doctrines and greater than human faith stands God…

Deeper than all our understanding is our bold certainty that God is with us in distress, hiding in the scandal of our ambiguities. 

And now God may send those whom we have expected least to do his deed—strange is His deed; to carry out his work—alien is His work” (Isaiah 28.21).*

*Entire post is an excerpt from Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity by A.J. Heschel; S. Heschel ed., p. 293.

Love Wins

If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing.

If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.

Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.

Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete...but when full understanding comes, these partial things will become useless.

Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.

Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.

Christus Victor

Fundamental to the Christian faith is the idea that Jesus died for sins (1 Cor 15.3). But what does that mean?

We have looked at the Ransom, Substitution and Moral Influence models and finally we will present the Christus Victor Theory (CV).

CV (Christ victorious) states that Christ's death and resurrection victoriously overcame the hostile powers that held humanity in subjection. Those powers are understood as the devil, sin, the law, and death.

The name CV was coined by Gustaf Aulen in 1931. He argued that it was actually the oldest theory on the atonement, noting that almost every Church Father supported it including Irenaeus, Origen, and Augustine.

Aulen posited that theologians have misunderstood the view of the early Church Fathers, noting that they were less concerned with the actual payment of ransom to the devil (Ransom Theory), and more with the theme of our liberation from sin and death.

What CV does especially well is reject the legal nature of the other models, especially the Substitutionary model (PS) and the problems inherent with them. In PS God is seen (wrongly) as an angry judge and Jesus is our attorney who works out a deal to get us off the hook and out of hell.

All we have to do is believe that the legal transaction has occurred with Jesus as our substitute and we are freed. Because how we live is not key to the legal arrangement it is easy to separate one's belief from one's actions.

In CV, however, what Christ accomplishes for us cannot be divorced from what he then accomplishes in us, namely our participation in the way of life and his cosmic victory over all things that stop us from living as he desires us to live. 

Through Christ, God revealed himself (Rom 5.8, cf. Jn 14.7-10); he reconciled all things, including humans, to himself (2 Cor 5.18-19; Col 1.20-22), he forgave our sins (Ac 13.38; Eph 1.7); gave his Spirit to us allowing us to faithfully represent him (Rom 8.2-16 ); but he also was victorious over the hostile powers of evil, death, and destruction (Jn 12.31; 1 Jn 3.8; 1 Cor 15.25).

Of the four main views, CV is the most comprehensive and seems most able to incorporate all of the positive qualities of the other views, while maintaining Biblical as well as intellectual credibility.

Genomic Revolution

I have long thought that our ethics need to catch up to our medicine. If what this video presents is true, we really need to start having some conversations, lest we find ourselves in an actual Brave New World.



Please leave your comments below!

The Demise of Guys

I posted this on FB a while back. It's too good not to put up here:

Smoke, Drink, Cuss, & Chew

What if you never got drunk? Never smoked? Never cussed? Never "went too far?" Some people would applaud you, after all, these are the characteristics of a "godly person."

But what if upon further examination the products you consumed made you guilty of far greater evils? What if the phone you used, the clothes you wore, and even the food you ate, did tremendous harm to people both here in the U.S. and abroad?

Would you still be righteous? Would you still look godly? Often the acts that do the most harm are those that go unseen or unnoticed, but how do we most often judge people's character?

It is interesting to me that Jesus' strongest condemnations were against those who "looked" pious and godly, but were involved in systematic evils that robbed people of their humanity. 

Are we living the life that we are called to in all of our choices, or just those that are made public, that make us look good?

People of the Book

The book of Ezra-Nehemiah tells the story of the Israelites return from the Exile, the rebuilding of the Temple, and the commitment of the community to be a "people of the Book."

It details how Israel vowed to break the cycle of disobedience that brought about the Exile, by focusing on Torah.

Torah is the name of the first five books of the Bible and contains the 613 commandments (Hb. mitzvot) Yahweh gave to Israel. These laws outlined the way Israel was to live in order to be blessed by God and in turn be a blessing to the whole world (Gen 12).

Among the many laws, the Israelites were called to love each other, to care for the immigrants living among them, and to worship only one God. This set them apart as minorities in a polytheistic world that did not live by such ideals.

Part of being a "people of the Book" was understanding how the Book applied to their lives. This was especially challenging because it had been over 700 years since the Torah was given. So we read in Neh 8.8 that, "they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that people understood the reading."

We are called to be a "people of the Book" as well; people who center our lives around the ideas and events of Scripture.

So we, living thousands of years after the Bible was written, have to wrestle with the text to interpret and apply it. But this just may be what it means to love the Lord with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind and there is no greater mitzvot than that! 

For a couple interesting examples of the Bible interpreting the Bible, see Ex 21.2-11 vs. Deut 15.12-18, as well as this post.