“Lot raised his eyes and saw all the vicinity of the Jordan, that it was well watered everywhere ... So Lot chose for himself all the vicinity of the Jordan.”
I have a friend.
He and I made our commitment to live for the Lord around the same time. But I stayed in our home area, and he went away to Hollywood to make his fortune.
This post is going to be about Calvinism’s least favorite word.
For those who don’t know, Calvinism is the belief that God is like Fate ... a big, inexorable, controlling force that decides everything in the universe long before you get a chance to, and allows no place for free will. Calvinists talk about “the sovereign decrees of the Almighty”, or just “sovereignty” for short, by which they mean you have no choice. Even your willingness to be saved, they say, has to be irresistibly pressed upon you from above. “Faith”, they say (misreading Ephesians 2:8), is a “gift” — but one like no gift you’ve ever had; it’s crammed down your unwilling throat by an arbitrary God. They even say that regeneration, the new birth, has to be done to you without your agreement, and before salvation — before you can hear and respond to the gospel. God is the puppet master and you’re on the strings.
If I sound lunatic in saying all this, don’t worry; Calvinists stand squarely behind it. Just ask them.
Some proposed solutions to theological problems are a bit too easy. They hold up only so long as you don’t examine them too carefully.
In yesterday’s Anonymous Asks post, I talked about the value of the Law of Moses to Christians. I made the argument that Christian standards come from the apostles and writers of NT scripture, not from the Law of Moses (except, of course, indirectly in many cases). When the Lord Jesus fulfilled the law, he made obsolete the Old Covenant under which Israel had received its law from God.
That fact often confuses Christians. If some parts of the Law of Moses are now obsolete, how can we tell which ones we are no longer to practice and which remain valid?
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“What principles can we put into practice when it comes to Sabbath rest?”
I am finding this question and variations on it increasingly common in online forums with large numbers of younger commenters from theological systems in which Replacement Theology is a major tenet. In a way this makes sense for them. If indeed, as their system teaches, the people of God are a continuum from Abraham (or earlier) to present day — if the Church is Israel and Israel the Church — then why not practice Israel’s Sabbath rest in some form?
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A Christian man looking for a wife thought his Facebook connections might help, so he inquired on the social media site recently about churches in his area where he might find higher than average numbers of single women. As he put it, “Same faith is a priority.” No kidding.
Much to this poor fellow’s surprise, the response to his query was most unfavorable. “Church isn’t for dating!” was the most common reaction.
Really? That’s a new one on me.
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Polygamy was a problem very early for Israel. Jacob, the father of the nation, married a pair of sisters, also siring children by both their handmaids. If his household had been a shining example to his descendants, we would probably have seen much more of this, but a careful reading of the Genesis text shows how many problems, great and small, were a product of the perpetual bickering and factional jealousies within Jacob’s family, including one near-murder.
Despite the lasting impression of sexual excess that David and Solomon left behind, polygamy in Israel was relatively rare. It could be that Jacob’s cautionary tale left a lasting impression.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
We’ve talked a lot about Calvinism here over the past two years. We have not talked very much about Open Theism, also referred to as Dynamic Omniscience, which might be said to be Calvinism’s very near-opposite.
By the time the Evangelical Theological Society adopted the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy in 2006, their decade-long internal debate over Dynamic Omniscience had pretty much petered out. ETS president Tom Schreiner says that for the ETS at least, the debate has “simmered down”.
And yet today the Global Christian Center still lists what it calls the “Open Theism Controversy” among its nine most important issues facing the evangelical church.
Tom: This particular idea about God is clearly not going away. In a nutshell, Immanuel Can, what is Open Theism?
“The medium is the message”, said the great philosopher of mass media, Marshall McLuhan.
It’s his most oft-quoted line, since it’s so often true. When you have a message to send, you’ve got to be very careful about the form (i.e. the “method” or “medium”) in which you’re sending it, or the message itself can become horribly distorted.
It started with a comment from Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of Defense, about the building of the third temple in Jerusalem. Hegseth is a Christian and to some appeared a little too eager to see it happen.
Then Doug Wilson responded with a post about the challenges he believes another temple presents for dispensational theology. Doug generously acknowledges that like other Christians, dispensationalists believe the Christian church replaced the temple service in our present era in God’s plans and purposes. We also take Bible prophecy literally wherever that seems reasonable.
But Doug believes the rebuilding of a temple in Jerusalem is going to be a troublesome issue for dispensationalists.
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I was reading a Puritan Board discussion the other day about the morality of human desire that got me thinking.
Believers on both sides of the ongoing divine determinism argument can probably agree scripture teaches that neither Christians nor unbelievers are able to perform any eternally valuable works without the help of God in some sense. Commenters cite a long list of verses including John 15:5 and Psalm 127:1 to make the case.
Fair enough, I can buy that.
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“Is Mary the mother of God?”
There is a kind of childish logical syllogism drawn by some in which the budding theologian goes from the true statements “Mary was the mother of Jesus” and “Jesus is God” to “Mary is the mother of God”. The final claim is simply untrue, not to mention blasphemous, depending on what those who say it or write it intend by it. The error is a decent example of the informal fallacy we call false equivalence, which involves consciously or unconsciously substituting one term for another in a syllogism where the terms are not precisely identical. Asparagus is a vegetable. That does not make it the only type of vegetable in existence.
Think of it this way: if Jesus is God, does that mean God is Jesus?
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On Wednesday of this week, I tackled critics who set in opposition the gospel preached by the apostle Paul and the teaching of the Lord Jesus in the synoptic gospels, alleging they disagree, particularly with respect to the issue of Christ’s atoning sacrifice on the cross. One critic I quoted claims Paul invented the atonement concept out of whole cloth. In response, I pointed out we should hardly expect to find fully developed teaching about atonement in the gospels, which record for the most part what took place leading up to the cross, and do not attempt to explore its implications.
Instead, I argued, in the synoptics we should expect to find hints, premonitions and suggestions that our Lord was doing something far grander and more significant in dying than simply paying the traditional price exacted from prophets for telling the truth.
Lo and behold, that is exactly what we find.
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Hebrew language and law distinguish between that which a man dedicated to God and that which he devoted. Both involved setting something apart, but the latter was set apart irrevocably. If a man devoted some object to the Lord, it became “most holy” or “consecrated”, set apart such that he could not buy it back for his ordinary (profane, common) use. The word for that is ḥāram, from ḥērem, meaning “cursed”. In the context of war or when under the sentence of capital punishment, the same term is variously translated “completely destroy”, “utterly destroy” or, my personal favorite, “devote to destruction”.
That word appears here in verse 11 in association with the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead, who refused to come to Mizpah and fight on behalf of Israel against Benjamin.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
In a poem entitled “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”, Robert Browning wrote these words:
“That way
Over the mountain, which who stands upon
Is apt to doubt if it be meant for a road;
While, if he views it from the waste itself,
Up goes the line there, plain from base to brow,
Not vague, mistakeable! what’s a break or two
Seen from the unbroken desert either side?
And then (to bring in fresh philosophy)
What if the breaks themselves should prove at last
The most consummate of contrivances
To train a man’s eye, teach him what is faith?”
Tom: Wow, I can relate. Immanuel Can, are Christians supposed to admit we ever have moments when we struggle with doubt?