The Rest of the Old Old Story

What about conspiracy theories and the new world order?

I’ve heard many conspiracy theories about a new world order. There is no doubt that we are locked in a battle with satan and his agents, but it doesn’t appear to me that we are to fight him by trying to figure out how governments and rulers will arrange themselves. We fight him by staying close to God, living in righteousness, and praying. In due time, God will order things according to his will. Until then, he has given us much instruction on what we should do, which includes obeying governments, paying taxes, and praying for our leaders so that we may live godly and holy lives in peace and quietness.

To me, the easiest way to sort through difficult teachings is to jump to the end and find out what those teachings ask us to do. If they ask us to do what the Gospel and our Master ask us to do, then let us look deeper. If they ask us to do other things that are mere distractions, like researching government activities, then we must reject them and be about our Master’s business.

I got carried away and wrote a long email to a young man who wrote me. It covers evolution, church history, the apostles, the Word of God, the Scriptures, the Gospel, and what is central to Christianity.

I hate to see it simply languish in my sent folder, so here goes:

All Bible quotes in this post are from the NASB.

You wrote:>>Either you believe everything in the Bible is the inspired Word of God, being completely true, and that it is the standard for which Christians should live their lives, or you don’t.<<

To me you just made two statements, not one. The first, if I'm understanding your meaning correctly, is that the Bible is completely accurate historically and scientifically. That's a bit more narrow of a definition than "completely true."

Is the Bible “Completely True”?

There is no denying that I don’t believe the Bible is completely accurate historically or scientifically. I don’t believe the world is set on pillars (1 Sam. 2:8). I don’t believe that the sky is as hard as a metal mirror (Job 37:18). I believe that the earth moves, even though Psalm 93:1 says it doesn’t.

Of course, everyone–including you, your pastor, and everyone else you know–agrees with me on the three things I just listed. Oh, they have their excuses as to why that’s different than doubting the exact scientific accuracy of Genesis 1, but it all looks the same to me.

Do we really believe that God made plants before there was a sun? Do we really believe that there is a tree that if you eat from it, you’ll have eternal life whether God wants you to have it or not? That’s certainly what the story of the Garden of Eden suggests. God had to ban Adam … No, let’s not call him Adam. His name is Man. The Hebrew word Adam is used over 500 times in the Old Testament, and it is only translated Adam in the first few chapters of Genesis.

So, God had to ban Man and Life (Life was the name of Man’s wife) from the garden because if he didn’t, then Man would eat from the tree of life and live forever; apparently even if God didn’t want him to live forever!

Maybe that was meant to be an accurate description of the very first days of mankind, but I don’t believe that. And everyone I’ve read on the subject of how the Hebrews told stories agrees with me. To the Hebrews, “true” was not a matter of historically accurate. “True” had to do with whether it communicated truth.

I believe that the story of Man and Life not only communicates truth, but it communicates God’s truth. It’s not just a saying or a bit of human wisdom. It’s a message from God.

In that sense, I do believe that the Scriptures are completely true.

Is “scientifically and historically accurate” the correct definition of true? Well, that’s for you to decide, but I believe that is a modern, western definition that doesn’t apply very well to the Hebrew Scriptures. It was certainly not their mindset, according to every Hebrew scholar I’ve read.

Is the Bible our Standard

The other part of your statement was whether the Bible is “the standard for which Christians should live their lives.”

First, let me say that I definitely believe that the Bible is the standard for which Christians should test, though not necessarily live, their lives. If our lives disagree with the Scriptures, then we are in error. With that I completely agree, but the Scriptures teach us that we are to be led by the Spirit, not led by the Scriptures. The Scriptures can provide guidance, but we are to walk in the Spirit.

Today, we think the Bible is the center of the Christian faith.

I’m pretty certain that the apostles thought that Jesus Christ is the center of the Christian faith. I think they believed that the ultimate testimony of Christianity was that the Gospel they received from Jesus was “the power of God to salvation,” and that those who believed the Gospel received a real and powerful justification, becoming new creations.

Paul describes that concerning the Thessalonians:

“You became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia. For the Word of the Lord has sounded forth from you, not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but also in every place your faith toward God has gone forth, so that we have no need to say anything” (1 Thess. 1:7-8).

The Scriptures talk about the Word of God growing three different times in Acts (6:7; 12:24; 19:20). We tend to equate the Scriptures and the Word of God, but the apostles didn’t. They believed the Word of God is either Jesus or the entire message of God, in whatever form it came. One major form is that the Word of God lives in us, planted like a seed. It can grow because as the number of disciples multiply, the Word of God grows.

We can say that the Scriptures are the standard by which we must live our lives, but could the apostles’ churches say that? I’ve read all the writings of the second century church, and I can tell you–along with the agreement of pretty much every Christian scholar you want to check–that the New Testament writings were not gathered together until about a hundred years after Jesus died.

And do you know how they gathered the New Testament writings?

They were not gathering “inspired” writings. They were not gathering “New Testament” writings. They were gathering the writings of apostles and men who accompanied the apostles. They wanted all and any they could find.

It was the apostles who were inspired, not just their writings. (For example, see 2 Thess. 2:15 and verses like 1 Cor. 11:2 and 14:37.) The New Covenant has never been about a book. It has been about God pouring out his Spirit on all flesh, bringing them into the church, and making of them a family that would glorify his name by their love for God, their love for each other, and their disdain for the things of the world.

Boxing up God, the Scriptures, and the Gospel

I’m so sorry, dear reader, that writing like this is so limited. Today we’ve boxed everything up and made everything nice and tidy.

God’s never been that way. He’s always left questions and things we don’t understand. He doesn’t care about our fitting his grand plan into our limited human minds. He cares about our trust and obedience. He wants us to know him, for eternal life is to know him, not to pass a test on his plan of salvation (Jn. 17:3).

The Original Faith

My goal is not to convince you of things, but to let you look at the faith that’s been handed to us. The original faith consisted of a firm trust that God sent Jesus, Jesus sent the apostles, and the apostles raised up churches to preserve the truth. Those churches all had a basic “rule of faith” to keep them on the straight and narrow. The Apostles Creed is a 4th century “rule of faith.”

When you read the writings of the 2nd century church, it’s such a glorious thing to see the purity of original Christianity. They held firm to the foundation that “The Lord knows those who are his, and let those who name the name of Christ depart from iniquity” (2 Tim. 2:19). They demanded that Christians accept the basic truths, the sort of things outlined in the Nicene Creed, but after that, “sound doctrine” was much more like what is described in Titus 2 than the sort of things we argue about today.

They honored those who lived holy lives. In fact, one early Christian said, “We don’t speak great things; we live them.”

When they defended Christianity, they spoke of the divinity of Christ’s teachings and how the Spirit of God empowered them to be delivered from greed and lust and to live lives of good conscience. Further, they stood gallantly during persecution, arguing that the bravery of the martyrs was proof of the power of the Spirit of God in the lives of Christians.

Misusing the Scriptures

I love the Scriptures. I hope, as you can see, that I study them thoroughly. I pattern my life after them, and I quote them in defense of all I say. If what I say can’t be found in the Scriptures, then what I say can be rightly rejected.

But we’ve done something awful with the Scriptures in the modern era. As I read today in a George MacDonald book, there are too many people who are “more desirous of understanding what they are supposed to understand than of doing what they are supposed to do.”

We argue and fight over doubtful matters. We make our determinations of what is true based on our intellectual interpretations of Scripture, when in fact Jesus (in Scripture) taught us to judge our teachers by their fruit and not by their confident interpretations (Matt. 7).

The Doctrine According to Godliness

We need to relearn the “doctrine according to godliness” as mentioned by Paul in 1 Tim. 6:3. Because our doctrine is according to intellect and argument, rather than according to godliness, we are what Paul describes in 1 Tim. 6:4-5:

He has a morbid interest in controversial questions and disputes about words, out of which arise envy, strife, abusive language, evil suspicions, and constant friction between men of depraved minds and deprived of the truth.

Let us set ourselves to obeying Jesus Christ and honoring him by our lives.

Evolution and Doubtful Disputes

I have a web site on evolution. That is not because I think that Christians need to take a position on evolution, nor because I want anyone at all to agree it’s true. What I want is that men who have boxed up the Word of God and wrapped a book cover around him do not splinter the church of God into fighting factions over doubtful subjects.

The mark of a Christian is not that he agrees that Genesis one is literal … nor that it’s not literal. The mark of a Christian is that by the power of the Spirit of God he obeys Jesus Christ, living a life marked by the love of God.

We have enough work achieving that goal, but modern Christians have forgotten that it is a goal. They have become confused into thinking that Christianity is a mere understanding of and assent to the atonement.

Salvation is not a plan; it’s a Man, the Lord Jesus Christ.

In the last post I discussed baptism in Jesus’ name. I mentioned that those who deny the Trinity are the ones who normally bring this up.

Their belief is that God is only one person. To them, Jesus is the Father, is the Son, and is the Holy Spirit. God is "the Father in creation, the Son in redemption, and the Holy Ghost in the church."

This doctrine—which has been called modalism, Sabellianism, and "Jesus only"—is one of the oldest heresies. Sabellius and Praxeas were excommunicated for holding the doctrine in the early third century, just 150 years after the time of the apostles.

Even more interestingly, Tertullian, writing about the same time that Sabellius and Praxeas were excommunicated, explains that the majority of Christians held to some version of "Jesus only" because they were too simple and uneducated to grasp the concept of "the Trinity in Unity."

The question I want to put before us today is whether we ought to excommunicate modern Sabellians. Should we avoid fellowship with the "Jesus only" churches today?

My answer to that question is yes, but I want to qualify that answer.

Of course we have to reject them. That is the historical position of the church. It is clear that the teaching of the Trinity is what the apostles handed down to the church, and the church really cannot have rebellious members teaching things that are certainly contrary to apostolic teaching.

In this case, I’m referring not only to apostolic teaching, but to a teaching that the apostles considered important.

For us there is but one God, the Father … and one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. (1 Cor. 8:6)

That verse can be a bit of a struggle for modern Trinitarians, who don’t hold to exactly the apostolic doctrine of the Trinity, either; however, 1 Cor. 8:6 definitely flies in the face of modalist teaching. (I have a book on the subject.)

It is not just scripturally, but historically, that it is obvious that the modalists contradict apostolic teaching. The very basis of every early church creed was the Trinity!

What About Godly "Jesus Only" Believers I’ve Met?

I’ve met my share of godly modalists. I’ve met my share of hard-nosed, judgmental, critical modalists, too, but it’s not those I’m concerned about. It’s the godly ones, who actually seem to be marked with love that I’m concerned about.

"Everyone that loves is born of God," says the apostle.

Is that true?

I certainly believe that’s true, just as I believe all theological teaching that comes from an apostle. I assume that most of my readers agree because it’s in the Bible (1 Jn. 4:7).

So what about a modalist who by John’s definition is born of God?

My answer is that we attach too much to being born of God.

Being born of God is apart from works. Being born of God means that you have received the Spirit and grace of God so that you are able to obey and follow God. You must still "sow to the Spirit" and "not grow weary in doing good" if you want to reap eternal life (Gal. 6:7-10). I know that’s unthinkable heresy to a lot of people, but that’s the simple Gospel of the early church, and it’s easily justifiable to anyone who is familiar with Scripture.

We cannot ignore Scripture just because a person is born of God. We are supposed to mark those who cause divisions and offenses contrary to the doctrine we have learned. In the modern era, we take that way too far, but we are not taking it too far when we forbid a Christian to teach modalism, a doctrine which has been condemned by the church since it reared its head in rebellion to the apostles’ appointed successors and to their churches 1800 years ago.

Such a person may find mercy at the judgment seat of Christ. A modalist walking in love, as far as I can tell, may well find himself among the sheep who fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and visited the sick and imprisoned. We are not given indication in the Scriptures that people will be judged for misunderstanding the Trinity. We are given indication that they will be judged for ignoring the needy (Matt. 25:31-46).

Nonetheless, we are told to reject heretics after the first or second admonition (Tit. 3:10). Today, that word "heretics" might best be translated as "forcefully opinionated men causing divisions." The fact that they might go to heaven does not give them the freedom to trouble the saints and divide the church.

I’d be curious for any feedback, especially scriptural feedback, that you might have for me on this.

Let’s add a new dimension to this blog, and let me begin by asking you for a moment’s prayer. Together, we might be able to change a life in our spare moments doing things like this.

Today, I’d like to ask you to pray for Sue. I met Sue at the hospital, and she’s been consistently sending me little emails of encouragement as I’ve been going through my treatment for leukemia. In the meantime, Sue’s leukemia is in remission. It’s been about a year and a half. If she makes it to the two-year mark she’ll be considered cured, but we want to pray that she’s cured way past the two-year mark and that her life continues to make an impact in the life of others.

Thank you!

Baptism in Jesus Name

Okay, today’s post is from an email I wrote to a friend who’s a missionary. He’s doing great work for Christ (you can pray for him, too: Jason Fitzpatrick in Mexico), but occasionally I get to help him with some detail of history or theology. I’m very honored when I get to do that, as I don’t really feel worthy to be advising people who are doing the kinds of things Jason is doing.

Anyway, he asked about why baptism is always said to be in Jesus’ name in the Bible except that one time in Matthew 28:19.

I know Jason, and he’s a practical and insightful man. So I addressed what the real issue is, which is what do we do when we baptize. This also touches a little on the Trinity because most people who object to baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit object to the whole concept of the Trinity.

So, here it is:

*****************

Personally, I think we’re missing the point.

In the name does not mean that we’re saying his name while we are baptizing. In the name means that we are doing it by his authority or on his behalf. If we are sent out in a King’s name, it doesn’t mean that every time we do something we say, "In the name of the king I post this poster on a tree for the 375th time."

No, if someone asks us why we’re doing it, we say, "We’re doing it in the name of the king, who ordered us to do it."

So we can say, "I baptize you in the name of Jesus," and that can be baptizing in his name … IF YOU’RE SENT BY HIM TO BAPTIZE. However, if you’re sent by him to baptize, you can also say, "Welcome to the church," and it would still be in Jesus’ name. What you say doesn’t matter. Whether he sent you to baptize matters.

Thus, there is no difference between baptizing in Jesus’ name and baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, for their authority is one and the same.

Getting hung up on technicalities, in my opinion, is the work of the devil to create division among Christians. It’s okay to study such things. I have studied such things, and I recommend that others who are called to teach do the same. However, we who act in the name of Jesus must remember the heart of the one who sends us. Is he hung up on the words we pronounce? If so, then we should be, too. If he is not hung up on the exact name we pronounce, but we are, then we can say "in the name of Jesus," but we are not acting in his name; we are acting on our own.

I’m still filing away old emails from after transferring from a PC to a Mac and from the Mozilla Thunderbird email program to Mac’s "Mail."

In the process, I ran across a June 9 email from Christianity Today that focused solely on evolution, and more specifically on the historicity of Adam and Eve. That newsletter sent me to this article, titled "The Search for the Historical Adam."

The issue I want to discuss today is not whether Adam was a historical figure, though I imagine most of you know I consider the garden story an obvious allegory, even less likely to be an actual historical story than "The Prodigal Son" or "The Good Samaritan" because those don’t involve talking snakes and trees that can make you live forever (even if God doesn’t want you to!).

What I want to discuss is where we’re going to stand if we come to agreement, as I’m sure we will eventually will, that man evolved. In the 1600′s, we came to agreement that the earth moves around the sun against the literalist (and Lutheran and Calvinist) interpretation of Psalm 93:1. Eventually, and probably soon, denying evolution is going to look so foolish that Christians in general will no longer take that stand.

Anyway, an evangelicalism "expert" (an expert on evangelicalism???) at a policy center in Washington "call[ed] the new thinking the new thinking an ‘urgent’ and ‘potentially paradigm-shifting’ development with ‘huge theological implications.’"

It does have huge theological implications, but they are implications we are going to face whether we like it or not. As Francis Collins and Karl Giberson put it, "unfortunately" the concepts of Adam and Eve as the literal first couple and ancestors of all humans simply "do not fit the evidence" (The Language of Science and Faith as cited by the referenced and linked Christianity Today article).

So What Are Those Implications?

If we have to admit that Adam and Eve were not literal people and that the Garden story is the allegory that it seems to be, then where do we stand? What do we have left?

What I’m afraid of is that most Christians have nothing more than a religion they’ve been talked into with a book that they honor for reasons they do not understand. Those Christians will be left with nothing at all. For them, Ken Ham, the president of Answers in Genesis, is correct. Their whole religion will crumble.

I used the word "honor" in the preceding paragraph advisedly. I do not agree that such Christians believe the Bible. They only reverence it. Try sometime to get two "Bible-believing" Christians to agree on what the Bible says about some point of difference. It doesn’t take much effort to see that neither cares what the Bible actually says; they care only about what their particular tradition has taught them.

Today, most traditions which include people who reject evolution have taught their adherents to reverence the Bible in a way that borders on worship. They have also taught their followers to equate their traditions with accurate Bible interpretation. Anyone who disagrees with them is wrong by definition and is thus at least somewhat separated from God.

Embracing evolution for Christians from those traditions looks like leaving the faith. They have to face the following horrifying consequences, all of which violate their tradition, and each of which represents one step away from following God.

• There was death before Adam
• Our sin nature is not the consequence of the fall but the natural consequence of evolution
• The Bible is not historically literal throughout
• The Bible is errant when it comes to science

There are probably others, but we don’t need to mention them because these are enough to ensure ostracization from their denomination or tradition.

Finally, one of the worse fears these Christians have is that the only alternative to their strict literalism is a liberal Christianity that embraces homosexual pastors and exchanges holiness for social programs that are not even personal but run by governments and large organizations.

A Purely Intellectual Christianity

I want to point out here that all four of those bullet points above are nothing but statements that can be written down in a doctrinal statement. Not a single one of them is an action, nor can any of them be transformed into an action at all.

I assert that the majority of evangelical Christianity is primarily an intellectual theory. Yes, many Christians live a life that is "holy" by New Testament standards that evangelical Christians agree on: no sex outside of marriage, respect for others, kindness, regular prayer, etc.

However, this is not primary to evangelical Christianity because evangelical Christianity has a powerful emphasis on Paul’s phrase, "not of works." Living a life of obedience to the teachings of Christ has to take a back seat to acknowledging all the purely intellectual assertions of the evangelical traditions.

And those purely intellectual assertions are threatened by evolution.

Evolution and a Practical, Spiritual Christianity

I’m not afraid to see those intellectual assertions crash. They don’t belong to apostolic Christianity anyway.

Sometimes I wonder how the Bible could say things so clearly, yet so many of us miss it. Of course, I know the answer to that. Most Christians are not Bible believers; they are holders of tradition.

For example, Paul says very clear what is at the foundation of Christianity in 2 Timothy 2:19:

God’s foundation stands firm, and inscribed on it is this:
The Lord knows those who are his
And let him who names the name of Christ withdraw from unrighteousness

Now there is action, and it was primary to Paul. In fact, he said it is what is inscribed on God’s foundation, rather than all those “I believe’s” that are inscribed on denominational foundations.

I don’t know how many times evangelicals have responded to this with, "Well, Paul said sound doctrine is important."

This is sound doctrine!!

There’s only one passage that specifically defines sound doctrine. It’s the entire chapter of Titus 2. Go read it. There isn’t anything remotely similar to "no death before Adam."

In fact, it ends by saying that Jesus died "to purify a unique people for himself, zealous for good works."

Right before that, it tells us that the purpose of grace is not to convince us that we can go to heaven no matter how we live but to teach us to "deny ungodliness and worldly lusts and to live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present age."

In Romans 6:14—so that we can move out of the so-called "pastoral epistles" into the so-called "faith epistles"—Paul tells us that grace is what breaks sin’s power over us, so that we can stop being slaves of sin. There again, in Romans 8:3-4, Paul tells us that is the reason Jesus died. He says something similar in Romans 14:9, telling us that Jesus died so that he could be Lord of both the living and the dead.

This sort of theology, which as you can see I’m merely quoting from the Bible, is not intellectual. It is powerful, difficult, and puts us in a daily struggle against sin which Jesus’ death has empowered us to win.

Paul describes that struggle in Galatians 5:16-18 and again in Galatians 6:7-9. It is described very similarly in Romans 8:5-14, but my favorite description is in 2 Peter 1:3-11.

What is Christianity? It is the death of Christ to deliver us from the power of sin so that our lives can be so utterly transformed that we can be described as "born again" and "a new creation." It is the resurrection of Christ who lives in us by the Spirit of God so that our lives are noticeably divine.

That Christianity is not threatened by evolution. Who cares whether Adam evolved when we are no longer sons of Adam but sons of God? (I love the fact that 1 Corinthians 15 calls Jesus the second man, but the last Adam. He is the last Adam, whose death and resurrection creates a new race of men, the children of God.)

Since I have put myself in conflict with a proclamation from strict literalists—by whom I mean people who strictly believe that their interpretations are accurate no matter how much they don’t match the Bible—I want to make an appeal to Jesus’ standard for conflict resolution when it comes to the proclamation of his teachings:

Beware of the false prophets … you shall know them by their fruits. (Matt. 7:15-16)

You decide what message produces truly good fruit.

First of all, I mean no disrespect to an an excellent article by Dr. Edward Sri. I’m just using it as a push off to complain about how we avoid important issues.

There’s a lot of interesting points in Dr. Sri’s article, and I don’t disagree with any of them. His article is reverent and focused on practical spirituality. If there’s anything I support, it’s practical spirituality. He’s taking the Nicene Creed and talking about how it practically relates to Christians, in this case Roman Catholic Christians in particular.

Good for him. This post is not directed at him.

When are we going to tell people the more shocking news about the Council of Nicea? I cannot possibly be the only one who knows it!

No, I’m not talking about the nonsense Dan Brown put in The Da Vinci Code, which he got from the discredited books Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Passover Plot.

What I am talking about is the wording "consubstantial," a translation of the Greek word homoousios. According to Dr. Sri, the Roman Catholics are changing the translation in the Nicene Creed from the previous "one in being."

It makes no difference to me which way they translate it. Either way, the reason that the Nicene bishops used the term homoousios is because they did not believe, as Dr. Sri put it, that the son was "a distinct divine person who has existed from all eternity." Well, at least not in the way we understand the phrase.

Christians of the second, third, and early fourth centuries universally applied Proverbs 8:22 to apply to the Son of God in the beginning. They read it in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, and so they read it this way:

The Lord made me the beginning of his ways for his works.

To those early Christians, Jesus was "made" by the Father. They did not understand this to be "made" in the same sense that everything else was made. The difference between the Son and everything else is that all of creation was created from nothing. Not the Son. He was "made" from the substance of God, a process normally referred to by the church as being born or generated, not made.

To those early Christians, Jesus was quite literally the "Word" of God. To them, however, the Greek word Logos was a much bigger word than "Word." It could be translated reason, mind, or thought to them as well. In fact, here’s a very interesting description of logos by Tertullian, who wrote very early in the third century:

Observe, then, that when you are silently conversing with yourself, this very process is carried on within you by your reason, which meets you with a word at every movement of your thought … Whatever you think, there is a word … You must speak it in your mind …
     Thus, in a certain sense, the word is a second person within you, through which in thinking you utter speech … The word is itself a different thing from yourself. Now how much more fully is all this transacted in God, whose image and likeness you are? (Against Praxeas 5)

To those early Christians, the Son of God was originally only the Logos of God, that "voice" inside of God. He was not the Son until, sometime before he created everything, God "made me the beginning of his ways for his works."

Theophilus, bishop of Antioch, the apostle Paul’s home church wrote the following just a century after Paul died:

What else is this voice but the Logos of God, who is also his Son? (To Autolycus II:22)

Theophilus adds:

This is what the holy Scriptures teach us … John says, "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God," showing that at first God was alone, and the Logos was in him. (ibid.)

There was a time—though before time was created—according to the early Christians, that the Son was inside the father, not yet begotten or generated or made. What word you used for what happened didn’t matter because the generation of the Son was beyond anything that man can understand.

Arius changed all that. He made terminology important. When Arius came along, he argued that the Son had not existed prior to his creation by God, and thus the Council banned the terminology "made," even though it’s used in Proverbs 8:22.

This we all know, but what we aren’t told is that the Council of Nicea did not argue in return that the Son had always existed as a distinct person. They argued that the beginning of his existence as a distinct person was not a creation from nothing but the generation of the Logos from inside of the Father. He was, literally, a Son—"begotten, not made."

Do not let anyone think it is ridiculous that God should have a Son … The Son of God is the Word of the Father. (Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians 10; A.D. 177)

Just to drive the point home, let me point out that Athenagoras also said:

He is the first product of the Father, not as though he was being brought into existence, for from the beginning God … had the Logos in himself. (ibid.)

We can change the translation of homoousios from "one in being" to "consubstantial," and, as Dr. Sri suggests, it may be a good thing. I really think, however, that someone needs to tell modern Christians what ancient Christians meant by homoousios, which is that the Son was birthed, before the beginning, from out of God, and that he was not always a distinct person. There was a time when God was alone, and the Logos was still inside of him.

Note: Starting with the training school at Alexandria, a teaching began to arise that anything that happened before the beginning must have happened before time was created. Since time was not yet created, then whatever happened before the beginning had always happened. Thus, there had never been, according to the school at Alexandria, a "time" when the Son was not yet generated. The school at Alexandria was highly influential in the fourth century. It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that a number of the bishops at Nicea would have concurred that there wasn’t actually ever a time when the Son was still inside the Father. That does not, however, change the meaning of the Greek word homoousios in the Nicene Creed.

There’s more information and more quotes at Christian History for Everyman, and there’s even more in my book, In the Beginning Was the Logos.

From the blog: Early Church Fathers:

Today, as Protestant theologians study the Fathers of the Early Church, they are awakening to the truth of Blessed John Henry Newman’s conclusion: "You cannot study the Fathers and remain a Protestant."

Is this true?

It’s obviously not universally true because I’ve been studying the "fathers" for over 20 years, and I’m still not only non-Catholic but actively opposed to the Roman Catholic Church. I know many in the same position.

It is true, however, that a lot of Protestants who begin to study the early church fathers soon convert to Roman Catholicism, or perhaps more commonly, to an Eastern Orthodox Church.

Why haven’t I?

I do not believe that a close doctrinal agreement with the early Christianity or even the apostles is the purpose of the Gospel. The purpose of the Gospel is to bring humans into relationship with their Creator through Jesus Christ.

Roman Catholics are correct in asserting that it is not just individual relationships that God is looking for. He is building a church with Jesus as head, which will be his body. As such, unity is critically important.

It is also true that most Protestants are either unaware of this or apallingly negligent of it.

What should be my reaction to this? Because Protestants are divided, should I then consider the Roman Catholic Church the only alternative and return to it?

Should I weigh which group of Christians, Catholics or Protestants, have a more correct view of the Lord’s Supper, of baptism, or of church government?

I think not.

Jesus said that we are to judge a prophet by his fruit.

The goal, as far as I can see in Scripture, is that Christians would received the Spirit of God, walk by that Spirit, and thus experience unity, love, and a holy life, astounding the world by their lovely, united discipleship to Jesus Christ.

I’m sorry to say it, but as a person who was raised Catholic, I never saw such fruit in a Roman Catholic congregation, not even one of them. In fact, I saw nothing remotely resembling it, and I attended Catholic mass regularly in North Dakota, Taiwan, Kansas, and Germany.

I rarely see such fruit in Protestant churches, either.

Here’s the problem:

• In Roman Catholic congregations, the Mass, rituals, and a few correct beliefs have replaced discipleship. Most members show no signs of having the Spirit of God, and thus they do not have a practical unity, do not live as family to one another, and do not live holy lives.
• In Protestant churches, meetings and correct beliefs have also replaced discipleship. Further, Protestant meetings have become almost excusively evangelism meetings, not the building up of the body of Christ described in Scripture. Thus, those who are living as disciples feel forced into boring "fellowship" with those who are not disciples. They do not feel free to form as the church with only those who truly follow Christ.

I assert that it is undeniable that the Christians of the second and early third centuries would have been horrified at what passes for the church in this century, and in fact in any century since the fourth.

Would they have been so horrified that they would have left the church to form a new church composed of only those who agree with them?

I don’t know. In the fourth century, I would not have left the church, either. However, like the monks who first appeared in the fourth century, I would have found real disciples to pursue Christ with, and I would have limited my contact with nominal Christians to evangelism (including friendship evangelism).

In the 20th century, however, Christians are already split into thousands of denominations. I have written repeatedly refuting the claims of the Roman Catholic Church (for example) to have succession and to be the only denomination to be authorized by God, so I will not bother with that here.

Suffice it to say that what would have mattered to third century Christians, and possible most third-century Christians, is the local church. They would have known that the Church as a whole consists of united churches, not one hierarchy with a pope, cardinals, and archbishops over it—nor a denominational board, as the Protestants often have.

The goal of the commandment, according to 1 Timothy 1:5 is "love from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith." The early Christians would most certainly have agreed with that, and they would have rejected as Christian all who simply attended services as a spectator.

The earliest Christian writings enjoin daily fellowship, the sharing of possessions, and a walk with Christ so close and holy that reading those writings convicts the most godly of modern Christians. They knew nothing of the sort of Christianity lived by the vast majority of Catholics and Protestants.

Thus, my pursuit has remained to free Christians from their false obligation to attend "services," as though God had called them to a once a week performance. The gathering of the saints is important, but it is for the building up of the body, a place where each member exercises his gift, though most gifts are exercised in the daily lives of believers as they share their course together as one family.

I have chosen as my course to encourage the godly to be in fellowship with the godly and to treat the ungodly, even if they are baptized attenders of church, as those who need to be evangelized and delivered from their false religion as surely as a gnostic needed to be delivered from his false religion in the second century.

I do not agree with Cardinal Newman. To me, the early church fathers—at least the ones from before the fourth century when suddenly anyone could call themselves Christian—do not lead a person to the mostly nominal Catholic churches and to the later invented hierarchy that they wrongly refer to as the Church. The writings of the early church fathers lead us to deep commitment to Christ, to reliance upon the Holy Spirit, and to a Spirit-inspired close family relationship with those who pursue Christ as we do.

I think most of us have seen and probably spent time considering the following verse.

Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the basic principles of the world, and not after Christ. (Colossians 2:8)

We—especially those of us who are Protestants—know to avoid the traditions of men.

Well, that little aside is a bump in the road that could throw us way off my topic for today!

Well, anyway, we all know that verse tells us not to deviate from Christ because of philosophy, traditions of men, and whatever else seems like a good idea.

But why?

Why did Paul tell us not to deviate for the sake of all these relatively important things, things that most religions lean heavily upon? The "basic principles of the world" are a reference to common sense. They are the things we all know must be true. Paul’s example in this chapter is that we are certain that if we deny ourselves—if we "do not touch, do not taste, do not handle"—then of course we’re doing what God wants.

No, Paul says. Don’t turn away from Christ even for such seemingly obvious things.

Why?

Here’s the next two verses:

For in [Christ] all the fullness of divinity dwells physically, and you are complete in him.

I have no way of knowing if that’s a wow moment for you, but it sure was for me today.

Why are we avoiding the traditions of men and all those things that seem like good ideas to everyone, the "basic principles of the world"?

Because all the fullness of divinity lives in Jesus Christ physically, and because we are complete in him, it would be stupid to turn to anything else. Anything else is not only less, but immeasurably less. Divinity is infinite. The fullness of divinity is in Jesus, and we are complete in him.

Why would we not, then, live by the Spirit he has place inside of us rather than by all our other good ideas?

"As many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God" (Romans 8:14).

"You search the Scriptures because you think you have life in them, but these are they which testify of me [Jesus]. Yet you refuse to come to me so that you might have life!" (John 5:39-40).

There’s probably some really great title for this blog, better than "Liberal Arts and the Word of God," but I just can’t seem to find it. I thought of titles involving the right brain as well, but I thought that would mystify too many people.

So, let’s get to the point:

God doesn’t just want to speak to your left brain (the logical, exact, scientific, and mathematical side of your brain), but if you want to actually follow through on the commands of God—to avoid being a hypocrite—then you need God to speak to your left brain as well.

A friend (Adam Walker) linked to a great article on Apple and its competition with the PC, and it had the most amazing quote by Steve Jobs (Apple’s CEO):

I’ve said this before, but thought it was worth repeating: It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.

This was said concerning the iPad 2.

Last fall I sat and talked with two friends, both of whom work for Apple. They were commenting on how Apple was selling a produce, the iPad, that served no new purpose. Everything the iPad does can be done with an iPhone or a laptop.

Steve Job, by mentioning liberal arts and the humanities, says that the iPad’s appeal is not usefulness; it is beauty.

The iPad appeals to the heart.

Every good salesman knows that almost every purchase is an emotional decision, not a logical one. (I base that on numerous sales training courses I’ve been through.)

God is not a salesman, but God made us. He not only knows how we’re constituted, but he approves of it. He’s the source of it.

Thus, the Word of God, reduced to it’s left-brained, merely logical, scientific and mathematical basis, is, um, let’s say dehydrated. It’s like Carnation Evaporated Milk^™ or a military MRE (Meals Ready to Eat, which are mostly "just add water" powders and dried patties). It may have all the vitamins and nutrients you need, but very few people like to eat it.

Does this produce a different emotion than an MRE?

MRE; photo by Christopherlin, used with permission

The point of all this?

In the early days of the church, the writings of the old covenant were a rich source of spiritual insight. Christian teachers, across the board, taught that all new covenant disciples, being endowed by God with the Holy Spirit, could look into the words of the Law and the Prophets and glean spiritual truths.

An example used repeatedly in their writings: The food laws, which taught that the only clean animals were those that chewed the cud and parted the hoof, were not about food. God doesn’t care about food, and food can’t defile a man. Instead, those laws taught us that we are to be in fellowship with those that ruminate on the Word of God and separate from the world.

An example from Bible class with my kids a couple days ago: In Genesis chapter one, there is a reason that light and day are created both first and three days before the sun. Light is of first and foremost importance. We are children of the light and of the day, and our lives are to be a testimony of the Word of God. Further, God didn’t want us to think that light for us is physical. The physical light and the physical day would come later and be of secondary important. Our light comes not from the sun but from the living Word of God. In the deepest darkness, the voice of God cries, "Let there be light," and there is light.

Another common early Christian example: When the Israelites defeated the Amalekites on the way to The Promised Land, they were able to be victorious only while Moses’ hands were in the air. Why? It is because we are to learn that our victory over our enemies comes only through the cross. To the early Christians the raising of hands always represented the cross. It represented both our triumph through the cross and our access to God through the cross.

Why such pictures? Why do we have to focus on analogies, and why did God want us to have to dig, search, and be spiritual enough to find those analogies in the words of the old covenant?

The reason is that God knows that obeying his commands is more than a dry, logical choice. We are not dry, logical creatures. We have a left brain, and a right brain, and that is not some physical limitation, but the purposeful choice of God our Creator.

There is a liberal arts side to the Word of God, and that is the purposeful choice of our Father, who had made us like himself. Our life in him is imbued not just with commands and obedience, but with beauty, emotion, zeal, and excitement. We are supposed to be delighted with discovery and deeply satisfied with spiritual insights.

Alone, left to our decisions and commitment, we will falter and stumble. God has put us in the body of Christ, where we all need one another, and where our sharing is not just the nutrition of obedience to God, but the beautiful colors and rich packaging that is allegory, spiritual insight, and participation in the revelation of God.

Excursus: Can God be Silent?

This is one reason it’s so horrifying for me to hear that the revelation of God ended when the last book of the New Testament was written. (Of course, for centuries the churches would never have agreed on what the last book of the New Testament or exactly how many books of the New Testament there were.)

Did God take a vow of silence for the last 2,000 years? As the church has wandered here and there, and as both counterfeit and utterly corrupt Christian movements have arisen, God has had nothing to say in the way of correction? He has waited around for men to know about, find, and interpret a book that’s really a collection of books?

Is that what you would have done if you were God? You’d have sat silently through the last wild 2,000 years of history?

God is not like that. We wrongly attribute 400 years of silence to him in the "intertestimental period." There was no 400 years of silence. God prophesied what would be happening during those 400 years through Daniel, and the incredible and powerful history of Isreal continued as described in the books of the Maccabees. Finally, even when Jesus showed up as a baby, we read of the prophetess Anna in the Gospel of Luke. There were still prophets and prophetesses in Israel until John the Baptist, when the gift of prophecy moved to the church.

God is never silent. It’s horrifying to hear people say that he’s had nothing to say since the time of the apostles.

I’m mixing my blogs today.

On my Leukemia blog, “Thrilled to Death,” I’m writing about setting our eyes on Jesus. That requires some comments about hearing God, which goes better here. You’ll understand the short teaching you’re reading here, but if you want it in context, read today’s leukemia blog as well.

In fact, the teaching there is way more important than the teaching here, at least today. But the sidelight needs to go here, so here it is:

The general context is that I believe God has said that leukemia is not going to kill me.

So here goes:

I have some doubts about whether God really said I won’t die. A follower of Christ should always have a healthy question about whether he’s really heard God or whether he’s heard some whispering spirit or is simply deceiving himself. That’s where the body of Christ comes in. That’s where you set your opinions, and often even your hearing of God, down on “the pillar and support of the truth.” (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, see 1 Timothy 3:15.)

The body of Christ doesn’t think I’m going to die, either.

Note: By body of Christ, I don’t mean ask a bunch of people who are bound by modern traditions to agree that God always wants to heal people. They’re just going to tell you doctrine they’ve interpreted from the Bible; they’re not going to be able to listen to the Anointing which is true and not a lie, so they’re certainly not going to be able to tell you what it’s saying.

At that point, my doubts don’t matter. At that point, my job is to obey God. I am to both do and say what he’s saying.

Really? Does that work?

It’s worked for me for 29 years solid. I’m a church historian, amateur though I may be. It’s worked for the saints of God for 2,000 years.