Category: Bible Study

Ted Haggard (mis)Interprets James

imageAfter doing immeasurable harm to the brothers and sisters of New Life Church, the members of the National Association of Evangelicals, and to the Church of Jesus Christ at large, Ted Haggard is again placing himself into a leadership position as he plants the new St. James church in Colorado Springs. The new body draws its name from the Epistle of James from which Haggard quotes verse 2:17 “..faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.” and witnesses to the number of times in the past three years that he and wife Gayle have been the recipients of love in action. This is a noble application of the verse Ted, but what is the definition of faith? Is it to sin boldly so as to receive more grace?

Apparently he didn’t read any further in the book. Verse 3:1 of this practical letter says “Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.” There’s a higher standard Ted, a standard for those who influence the lives of so many others. “We all stumble in many ways.” (3:2) How true! None of us is sinless but we pursue holiness with a vigor that is unmatched.

And we do it every day to the furthest extent of our Spirit-led abilities so that when we step up to pulpit we have the integrity to look into the eyes of those that God has seated before us and to speak the Gospel into their lives…

…without having to worry about our hidden lives being revealed.

Are those who take to seats in St. James church going to know that Haggard has been pursuing holiness rather than drugs and sexual liaisons? What accountability will he have this time that he did not before? The nagging question that burns in the minds of many right now is whether or not the standards of holiness will be relaxed to accommodate the very behaviors that precipitated his previous fall. Will the standards be such that God will be present when the body is gathered?

As a brother in Christ I take seriously my responsibility to Ted. I love him and extend all measure of grace to him and his family and pray for nothing but redemption in his life. I believe that the Lord’s grace has blanketed and forgiven his sin and worked to knit together the Haggard family and make it whole. On the other hand, I don’t believe that he should be stepping back into the pulpit and leading a new body at this time. Had he placed himself under the leadership of another pastor and the accountability of another Elder board for some time to demonstrate a restored soul and measure of integrity this move would make sense but not this way. If God has called him back to the pulpit then I’m moving out of the way as fast as I can. If Ted has called himself back to preaching, it’s my responsibility to take his measure in accordance with the scriptures.

“Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” (James 1:2-4)

Radical Strength from the Discipline of Solitude

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” (Mt 4:1-3)

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Dallas Willard reminds us that “solitude is the most radical of the disciplines for life in the spirit.” Until we have developed the discipline of seeking out solitude we cannot know the full presence of God unfettered by the myriad distractions of life. We pray and our thoughts wander to the other things on our desk or the sound of the neighbor’s dog barking. We worship but break the communion with the spirit by focusing instead on the bright shirt worn by the man three rows ahead. Submission is weakened by ego and meditation interrupted by scattered thought. The Christian who separates herself into the desert finds herself distanced from these enemies of discipline and completely open to the descending presence of the Lord.

The benefits of solitude extend to our other spiritual disciplines. The account of Christ entering the desert to be tempted is often read quickly to get to the temptations but this does a disservice to the text. We take note of the fact that Jesus seeks out the solitude for forty days before being tempted. He immerses Himself in the full presence of his Father and the Spirit to build the strength necessary to face the tempter. He fasts, removing all external influence so that he is single-mindedly prepared to face whatever will come. We can learn from this to build our own spiritual muscle. In solitude we know nothing and no one other than God. He becomes our sole center without any opportunity for distraction.

Our desire for solitude will be misinterpreted by others. Our friends and loved ones will want to know why we seek to be apart from them but we must be diligent in pursuing our life of discipline. Ultimately, the Father deals with each of us individually and corporately but we are not free to substitute one for the other. We must be willing to walk away into the desert leaving companionship and distraction engendered by those who surround us even though they have our best interests at heart.

Grace and peace to you..

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Who’s Up for (the exciting conclusion to) An Honest Reading? John 6:37-40

Theological discussion in various venues often pits one position of belief against its opposites. Supporters of one position or another like to issue proposition statements of the form ‘If they would give _____ an honest reading’, ‘once I gave ______ an honest reading’,’ you can’t read _________ honestly and still believe’ or various other permutations that are meant to couch the idea that your position is unsupportable in the light of clear interpretation. In other words, the veiled inference is that theological presuppositions have colored your interpretation of the text and if you would put them aside and engage an honest reading of the text, you would certainly see the validity of the opposing position. Let’s see if that’s a valid argument…

image Before we jump into the conclusion of this series, let’s have a look at how proof-texting works so that the danger in the practice becomes apparent. Suppose we want to ‘prove’ the horrible doctrine of infanticide exists in the Bible. [Atheist polemics use this argument all the time.] The proof-texter searches the Scriptures looking for individual verses or passages that appear to support this abhorrent practice so that they can proclaim the ‘truth’ that God approves the killing of children for pleasure or sustenance and they find these passages:

Psalm 137:9 -  he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.

2 Kings 6:28-29 – She answered, “This woman said to me, ‘Give up your son so we may eat him today, and tomorrow we’ll eat my son.’ So we cooked my son and ate him. The next day I said to her, ‘Give up your son so we may eat him,’ but she had hidden him.”

God killing the first born, the Flood, etc. Okay, a quick show of hands. Who believes that God advocates or even suggests a doctrine of infanticide?

No one? Why not?

Because we know the dishonesty of pulling a passage from its context to try to make it match our desired meaning. We know that we are not free to dismiss the surrounding circles of context in the process of developing doctrine and yet, we continue to do so.

The Honest Reading

In the previous post we looked at the importance of making sure that the language we are reading (in this case English) holds the same meaning in the text as it did in the author’s original language. In the passage we are studying, there weren’t any surprises for the honest reader but the reader who wants to load a theological presupposition into the passage might find a bit of difficulty.

Continue reading “Who’s Up for (the exciting conclusion to) An Honest Reading? John 6:37-40”

Who’s Up (today) for An Honest Reading? John 6:37-40

image Theological discussion in various venues often pits one position of belief against its opposites. Supporters of one position or another like to issue proposition statements of the form ‘If they would give _____ an honest reading’, ‘once I gave ______ an honest reading’,’ you can’t read _________ honestly and still believe’ or various other permutations that are meant to couch the idea that your position is unsupportable in the light of clear interpretation. In other words, the veiled inference is that theological presuppositions have colored your interpretation of the text and if you would put them aside and engage an honest reading of the text, you would certainly see the validity of the opposing position. Let’s see if that’s a valid argument…

All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”  (Jn 6:37–40)

It’s All Greek to Me

Yesterday we looked at the various contextual levels in which the reader encounters a bible passage. To avoid mishandling a text or inappropriately proof-texting out of context we need to recognize the material that surrounds the passage to varying degrees of immediacy. We close by turning our attention to the language used by the original author and how well our modern translations accord to the original meaning of the words used. This will come as a shock to some but the Bible was not delivered in Elizabethan English. God elected to transmit His truth through authors in Hebrew and Greek for the most part and if we are going to delve beyond our English (or whatever translated language we read) we need to dive into the original texts. Caution is advised here; words in Greek and Hebrew often have ranges of meaning just like their English counterparts and it is easy to manipulate the interpretation of a passage

Continue reading “Who’s Up (today) for An Honest Reading? John 6:37-40”

Who’s Up (again) for An Honest Reading? John 6:37-40

image Theological discussion in various venues often pits one position of belief against its opposites. Supporters of one position or another like to issue proposition statements of the form ‘If they would give _____ an honest reading’, ‘once I gave ______ an honest reading’,’ you can’t read _________ honestly and still believe’ or various other permutations that are meant to couch the idea that your position is unsupportable in the light of clear interpretation. In other words, the veiled inference is that theological presuppositions have colored your interpretation of the text and if you would put them aside and engage an honest reading of the text, you would certainly see the validity of the opposing position. Let’s see if that’s a valid argument…

All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”  (Jn 6:37–40)

A Text Without a Context May Be a Pretext

We closed our discussion yesterday with a brief discussion of the necessity for recognizing context in interpreting biblical texts. In all cases, we want to avoid the interpretive error of proof texting which, unfortunately, has become a substitute for sound exegesis. In our pursuit of an honest reading, let’s have a look at the context in which this passage occurs, starting from the immediate and moving outward.

Continue reading “Who’s Up (again) for An Honest Reading? John 6:37-40”

Who’s Up for An Honest Reading? John 6:37-40

image Theological discussion in various venues often pits one position of belief against its opposites. Supporters of one position or another like to issue proposition statements of the form ‘If they would give _____ an honest reading’, ‘once I gave ______ an honest reading’,’ you can’t read _________ honestly and still believe’ or various other permutations that are meant to couch the idea that your position is unsupportable in the light of clear interpretation. In other words, the veiled inference is that theological presuppositions have colored your interpretation of the text and if you would put them aside and engage an honest reading of the text, you would certainly see the validity of the opposing position. Let’s see if that’s a valid argument…

All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”  (Jn 6:37–40)

Given the earlier promise of Jesus recorded by the Evangelist John in 3:16-17, the power of the good news that brought many to believe in Samaria recorded in 4:39, and his repetition of the earlier promise for any who believe spoken in 5:24, an honest reading of this passage leads the reader to two conclusions.

Continue reading “Who’s Up for An Honest Reading? John 6:37-40”

Tozer on Time on the Telephone

Blackberry Logos Android iPhoneYet another inducement to add my Logos software to my telephone flashes onto the screen and I’m tempted. Wonder of wonders! To be able to access my bibles and commentaries while standing in line at Safeway or conjugate Greek verbs while sitting at a red light! Exclamation point!

I am no Luddite and I respect the ability to enjoy a bit of scripture while riding BART or on a break at work but there is a danger implicit in this ever lengthening path of compression. The portability of the device encourages us to ‘squeeze in’ our time in the scriptures. Rather than being deliberate about setting aside an appointed hour and reinforcing this appointment by arranging our well worn bible in our prayer closet, we are drawn into an increasingly fragmented life that is now defined by the brevity of tweets and chirps, giving God 140 characters of our life at a time.

A.W. Tozer, prescient as he was, wrote about this danger back in 1950. In The Divine Conquest (now, God’s Pursuit of Man), he wrote:

In my creature impatience I am often caused to wish that there were some way to bring modern Christians into a deeper spiritual life painlessly by short,easy lessons; but such wishes are vain. No shortcut exists. God has not bowed to our nervous haste nor embraced the methods of our machine age. It is well that we accept the hard truth now: The man who would know God must give time to Him. He must count no time wasted which is spent in the cultivation of His acquaintance. He must give himself to meditation and prayer hours on end.

Perhaps the laptop and a pocket bible should be our limit.

 

Grace and peace to you.

Theological Craftsmanship

imageWhen we last were together, we had worked through the distinction between our embedded and deliberative theological understandings. Though there’s nothing wrong with the embedded theological understandings that we carry around, a problem arises when life crises challenge these beliefs. We have second thoughts and sometimes, doubt about what we know. A new crisis of faith is added to our current troubles, burdening the believer rather than giving them the answers they seek. 

Crafting Theology

Before crisis arrives, all Christians should be involved in developing a foundation for their theological understandings. This does not mean that we start from scratch and create a new, personal set of theological tenets that the world has never seen. Theology is our calling to process all that we can gather about God and to craft a strong base of knowledge supporting our embedded beliefs. At the crucial moment when we are seeking to understand how God could allow a child to be taken from their parents a solid and unshakeable foundation is necessary. Those pillars are only built from a deliberate effort.

Theology is said to be crafted as it utilizes raw materials to fashion an end product. In the case of theology, the end product is a new or more substantial theological understanding and our raw materials are the scriptures and the thinking that has preceded our own efforts. These materials are subjected to a three step process of interpreting, correlating, and assessing an idea that stretches and works our theological muscles and, in the end, through this effort supplies us with a new, better, and stronger way of understanding our God and our relation to Him.

Interpretation

We interpret the meanings of things all day every day. Words, images, sounds are all interpreted by each of us and we all bring a unique perspective to the process. As our interpretations become relatively stable, they begin to form our views. Collected together, the views form a viewpoint that allows us to interpret things on a larger scale. For the Christian, interpretation is performed from the perspective of faith. God and our belief in and understanding of who He is influences our perspective on everything. For example, abortion viewed through a perspective that includes God as Creator is much different than a purely clinical view. Recognizing our perspective and its depth, or lack of depth, is the first step in crafting a theological viewpoint.

Correlation

Correlation is the act of discovering the relation between two things if it exists. If it does not, the word can take an active sense as well as we bring two things into relation. A Christian in the process of theological reflection will often be called into the give and take of correlation as he seeks to bring the perspective of God’s people into correlation with other perspectives. These might come from outside of the faith community or they might be an opposing point of view from within the larger Church that differs from your own.

This process is not without conflict. Ask yourself first if you are able to see things as others do. Are you able to fully understand their perspective? Responsible theology requires that you do so. This is a source of much strife within the Church as proponents of one theological view refuse to make the effort to understand how the views of another believer have come to be or why they are supported.

Assessment

When one of your Christian views or viewpoints becomes relatively stable in your mind as representative of truth, there is one final step that occurs in order to set it. An assessment of the position you have crafted pushes it through a series of filters so that you can judge it to be good or bad. The four most common questions asked are:

  • Is it valid?
  • Is it understandable?
  • Does it have moral integrity?
  • Is it appropriate from a Christian standpoint?

Each of these is not equally applicable. A Christian may not be in the position to state whether or not an idea is valid but the plethora of documented positions can certainly aid us in evaluating whether or not we are in the ballpark. Moral integrity, on the other hand, is easier to assign. If your proposed view dooms all babies to death, contrary to centuries of Christian belief, the morality of a god who makes this proclamation would certainly be in question. A view impeded by this filter would likely be a candidate for reformation or to be discarded.

Being a Craftsman

Reflecting on your faith and what you believe requires the same love and attention to detail that a craftsman applies to a piece of furniture that she creates. It requires the ability to examine a view from all perspectives and to have a framework to evaluate different aspects of the position. Experience and maturity round out process, resulting in a pronounced ability for the Christian to understand life and humanity in a way that honors and upholds God and their faith.

 

 

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Psalm 60 With God We Will Gain the Victory

imageYou have rejected us, O God, and burst forth upon us; you have been angry – now restore us!

You have shaken the land and torn it open; mend its fractures, for it is quaking. (vv 1-2)

Those who read the Psalms devotionally or at random often fail to notice exactly how much of the Psalter is composed of pleas for restoration and paeans to God’s faithfulness in doing so, ‘one more time.’ In verse after verse the psalmist is hemmed in by his enemies and threatened with destruction. He raises his eyes and voice to the heavens and asks God where he is in this time of travail. In every instance, the same answer comes back: “I am here.”

Our lessons in coming to this observation are twofold. The most difficult of the two is to come to the realization that God will turn away from us during different seasons of our lives. The duration may be brief or endure for a long time but the scriptures clearly demonstrate that we risk the the turning of His Face.

You have shown your people desperate times; you have given us wine that makes us stagger. (v3)

Whether the purpose be our redemption through repentance and the subsequent restoration or to enable a larger purpose in His plan, God may cause us to suffer. Do we trust Him in this struggle? Are we willing to be sacrificed for the larger purpose of an eternal plan. To God, our lifetime is but a second; to us it is an eternity of testing. Surely He knows this but can we learn this lesson and shift our perspective into eternity, lifting our eyes from the rocky ground in front of our feet?

The second of the lessons enables us to endure the first. We can trust in God completely. We can dismiss worry and erase our doubts knowing that He is perfectly good and that whatever state we find ourselves in perfectly aligns with His eternal course for history.

But for those who fear you, you have raised a banner to be unfurled against the bow. (v4)

We can unfurl the banner of the gospel, swath ourselves in the good news, and march forward. If our rejection is brought about our own behaviors we can turn from them and seek the restoration that God willingly extends. If our separation is a part of the larger purpose we can be faithful, knowing the ultimate good will come of it. As the Psalmist shouts,

With God we will gain the victory, and he will trample down our enemies. (v12)

Image by ronny andre