I remember with fondness my Jr. High Sunday School teacher. He put up with a lot of nonsense from me and my friends. We were the ultimate tangent-takers, attempting to derail his teaching down any number of speculative spurs. Usually we tried to steer the conversation around to the fate of people who never have an opportunity to hear the gospel preached to them. Will God condemn them?
The tables were turned on me the other night when, at the last minute, I was called to teach a class of 5th graders at the church. Improvising, I turned it into an “ask the pastor” type of event, encouraging the children to ask me anything they ever wanted to know about the Christian faith. For some reason, the questions always found their way back to dinosaurs. How do they fit in the bible?
Christians, it seems, have a perpetual desire to speculate. We enjoy taking the tangents, especially on matters where we don’t have all the answers. One of the things I have come to appreciate about John Calvin, the forerunner of Presbyterian thinking, is how cautious he was when it came to matters that were not clearly defined in the bible. He was continually criticizing the speculators.
In a passage early in the Institutes, Calvin writes that God is shown to us “not as he is in himself, but as he is toward us: so that this recognition of him consists more in living experience than in vain and high-flown speculation.” Calvin believes that God can be known. He has made the case that God is known ultimately in the bible. But he also makes the case that the bible doesn’t give us exhaustive knowledge of God. We do not know God “as he is in himself.”
To put this another way, God reserves the right to be God. We are finite. We like to speculate about questions that are on the fringes of the bible, yet if we go too far in our speculation, we take the risk of overstepping the boundaries between creator and creature. “‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord.” (Isaiah 55:8)
Instead, Christians would do well to discipline their minds around the core truths of the gospel—the things that are clear and well-attested in scripture. The Apostle’s Creed gives us a good indicator of the core message that should permeate our thinking. Paul encouraged Timothy to rebuke the speculators of his day, those who devoted themselves to “myths and endless genealogies.” (1 Tim 1:4) Paul reminded us that “these promote controversies rather than God’s work.”
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Ada Herald - Pastor's Pen Article October 22 2009
You would think me a chicken if I wrote a series of articles on Calvin and failed to mention predestination. One of the charges leveled against Calvin is that he invented the doctrine of predestination, pulling it out of thin air, as it were, making God into something of an arbitrary tyrant. In the public mind, Calvin equals predestination. While it is clearly an important part of his theology, the universe of Calvin’s thought didn’t revolve around it. It is more a spoke than a hub.
Predestination, as Calvin puts it, is “God’s eternal decree, by which he compacted with himself what he willed to become of each man” Some are ordained to eternal life; others to eternal damnation. Calvin taught this, yet the teaching didn’t originate with him. He traced it back to Augustine, who traced it back to the Epistles of Paul. Other prominent theologians held the view including Thomas Aquinas, John Wycliffe, and nearly every major Reformation figure.
Perhaps the reason the doctrine stuck to Calvin was the way his name came to be associated with the five points of Calvinism, proposed by the Synod of Dort some 50 years after Calvin’s death. The Synod highlighted predestination in its response to others who were advocating the place of free will in salvation. The Synod of Dort distilled Calvin’s teachings on salvation, and for some, this distillation remains the essence of all Calvin said, even though he wrote widely on numerous theological topics.
Calvin didn’t teach predestination simply to be controversial. For him, it reflected the teaching of scripture: in Romans 9 God chose Jacob over Esau before either of them were born; in Ephesians 1 God is said to have chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world; in Acts 13:48 Luke records that “all those appointed for eternal life believed.” Calvin felt that those who downplayed these passages were instead playing up their own opinions.
Despite his firm belief in the doctrine, Calvin recognized that predestination was hard for people to accept. He admitted that talking about predestination was itself a difficult thing, perplexing and hazardous, especially to those who were overly curious and refused to ground their speculations in scripture itself. If predestination is difficult, and if it met with such opposition, one may be justified in wondering whether it has any value.
On this point, Calvin was clear that predestination was valuable because it gave glory to God more than any other way of understanding salvation. When we were lost and unable to save ourselves, God opened our ears to hear the message of the gospel—that Jesus died and rose again for our salvation—and gave us the faith to believe it. All the credit for our salvation belongs to God, which magnifies his glory. At the same time, election gives believers confidence in their standing before God. If my salvation depends upon my choosing God, then my salvation is uncertain, because my will is fickle. My preferences change daily, but God’s are eternal.
Predestination, as Calvin puts it, is “God’s eternal decree, by which he compacted with himself what he willed to become of each man” Some are ordained to eternal life; others to eternal damnation. Calvin taught this, yet the teaching didn’t originate with him. He traced it back to Augustine, who traced it back to the Epistles of Paul. Other prominent theologians held the view including Thomas Aquinas, John Wycliffe, and nearly every major Reformation figure.
Perhaps the reason the doctrine stuck to Calvin was the way his name came to be associated with the five points of Calvinism, proposed by the Synod of Dort some 50 years after Calvin’s death. The Synod highlighted predestination in its response to others who were advocating the place of free will in salvation. The Synod of Dort distilled Calvin’s teachings on salvation, and for some, this distillation remains the essence of all Calvin said, even though he wrote widely on numerous theological topics.
Calvin didn’t teach predestination simply to be controversial. For him, it reflected the teaching of scripture: in Romans 9 God chose Jacob over Esau before either of them were born; in Ephesians 1 God is said to have chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world; in Acts 13:48 Luke records that “all those appointed for eternal life believed.” Calvin felt that those who downplayed these passages were instead playing up their own opinions.
Despite his firm belief in the doctrine, Calvin recognized that predestination was hard for people to accept. He admitted that talking about predestination was itself a difficult thing, perplexing and hazardous, especially to those who were overly curious and refused to ground their speculations in scripture itself. If predestination is difficult, and if it met with such opposition, one may be justified in wondering whether it has any value.
On this point, Calvin was clear that predestination was valuable because it gave glory to God more than any other way of understanding salvation. When we were lost and unable to save ourselves, God opened our ears to hear the message of the gospel—that Jesus died and rose again for our salvation—and gave us the faith to believe it. All the credit for our salvation belongs to God, which magnifies his glory. At the same time, election gives believers confidence in their standing before God. If my salvation depends upon my choosing God, then my salvation is uncertain, because my will is fickle. My preferences change daily, but God’s are eternal.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Ada Herald - Pastor's Pen Article October 15, 2009
I came across an obituary recently of an accomplished man. He was a military pilot in World War II and a life-long attorney. What stood out to me was another word used to describe this individual: churchman. It’s not a common word anymore. It’s a word used to describe someone who actively loves and supports the church. Perhaps it’s rare because such people are rare.
There’s a growing movement away from organized churches towards more informal, house church arrangements, where a few families gather in someone’s living room to sing and pray and share scripture. One of the scriptural supports behind the house church movement is the way the Book of Acts describes Christians as meeting in people’s homes.
A deeper look at real estate in the first century reveals a different picture than commonly assumed. In Rome for example, only about 3% of the population owned what we might call a home. Most lived in apartments. Those who owned homes were wealthy, and their homes were often large estates with multiple rooms, halls, and meeting places.
As wealthy people were converted, they would become the benefactors of the church in a particular community, opening their large complexes to the church for a meeting place. If you look at the early church at Pentecost, they were gathered in an room that held 120 people. They weren’t meeting in a three-bedroom ranch with a living room that might seat 12 adults.
People leave organized churches for a variety of reasons: the fellowship isn’t deep enough, basic decisions can get bogged down in bureaucracy, or there’s just too much hypocrisy. While the organized church may need reform, it is highly unwise to abandon it. John Calvin wrote that the church is like a nourishing mother, which feeds and guides individual believers through the preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments.
It seems strange to have to argue for this point, but organized churches have certain advantages precisely because they are, well, organized. Pastors are trained in original language study and ordained by the church; elders are appointed to protect and guide church members; membership itself is a form of accountability that leads to spiritual growth. Additionally, the organized church provides more opportunities to practice love, because you are forced to rub shoulders with those outside of your normal circles.
One of the great weaknesses of the house church movement is its parochialism. There’s a natural tendency to want to be around like-minded people, and this tendency is multiplied in this movement. The true church becomes not only those who hold the same theology, but the same politics, child-rearing philosophy, food tastes, and vaccination schedules. Such a closed community is a far cry from Acts 13, where the church leaders in Antioch included a childhood friend of Herod’s, a Levite, an African Christian, and a Roman citizen.
A Chinese Christian recently wrote an article about house churches in his native country. He pointed out several weaknesses: church leadership is unstable, meeting times are switched at random, cults infiltrate churches and take control, and the preaching is often of poor quality. The grass may not be greener on the other side. It may, in fact, be better for us to revive the word churchman, to love the local church with all its warts, working to make it a true expression of the kingdom of God.
There’s a growing movement away from organized churches towards more informal, house church arrangements, where a few families gather in someone’s living room to sing and pray and share scripture. One of the scriptural supports behind the house church movement is the way the Book of Acts describes Christians as meeting in people’s homes.
A deeper look at real estate in the first century reveals a different picture than commonly assumed. In Rome for example, only about 3% of the population owned what we might call a home. Most lived in apartments. Those who owned homes were wealthy, and their homes were often large estates with multiple rooms, halls, and meeting places.
As wealthy people were converted, they would become the benefactors of the church in a particular community, opening their large complexes to the church for a meeting place. If you look at the early church at Pentecost, they were gathered in an room that held 120 people. They weren’t meeting in a three-bedroom ranch with a living room that might seat 12 adults.
People leave organized churches for a variety of reasons: the fellowship isn’t deep enough, basic decisions can get bogged down in bureaucracy, or there’s just too much hypocrisy. While the organized church may need reform, it is highly unwise to abandon it. John Calvin wrote that the church is like a nourishing mother, which feeds and guides individual believers through the preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments.
It seems strange to have to argue for this point, but organized churches have certain advantages precisely because they are, well, organized. Pastors are trained in original language study and ordained by the church; elders are appointed to protect and guide church members; membership itself is a form of accountability that leads to spiritual growth. Additionally, the organized church provides more opportunities to practice love, because you are forced to rub shoulders with those outside of your normal circles.
One of the great weaknesses of the house church movement is its parochialism. There’s a natural tendency to want to be around like-minded people, and this tendency is multiplied in this movement. The true church becomes not only those who hold the same theology, but the same politics, child-rearing philosophy, food tastes, and vaccination schedules. Such a closed community is a far cry from Acts 13, where the church leaders in Antioch included a childhood friend of Herod’s, a Levite, an African Christian, and a Roman citizen.
A Chinese Christian recently wrote an article about house churches in his native country. He pointed out several weaknesses: church leadership is unstable, meeting times are switched at random, cults infiltrate churches and take control, and the preaching is often of poor quality. The grass may not be greener on the other side. It may, in fact, be better for us to revive the word churchman, to love the local church with all its warts, working to make it a true expression of the kingdom of God.
Ada Herald - Pastor's Pen Article October 8, 2009
John Calvin turned 500 this year. This October, I have five articles to write for the paper, which works out to one per century in honor of Calvin’s legacy. I trust this sounds as reasonable to you as it does to me.
Last week, we examined the claim that Calvin had Servetus burned in Geneva. This week, I want to take you into the beginning pages of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. The first sentence is well-known: “Nearly all the wisdom we possess…consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”
In order to possess wisdom, one must know God and know oneself. The two are intertwined. The more we know God, the better we know ourselves. The more we know ourselves, the better we know God. Unfortunately, our world is adept at inventing ways to eliminate God from the equation of true knowledge.
The problem however is that when one tries to understand life apart from God, that person lives a life of fiction. It may seem real, but it is an illusion that leads ultimately to despair. If God is the creator, and if we are made in his image, then life can only make sense in relation to him.
In Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, Binx Bolling is on a search for meaning. He talks about his vertical search, his search to understand God. After reading a chemistry book, he felt that there was no longer any need to consider God’s hand in the world. The natural world explained itself.
“The only difficulty,” Binx concluded, “was that though the universe had been disposed of, I myself was left over. There I lay in my hotel room with my search over yet still obliged to draw one breath and then the next.” With knowledge of God no longer certain or necessary, one is hard pressed to explain why he should take another breath. Life is leftover and empty.
This emptiness manifests itself continually in our world. People shop to forge new identities. We divert ourselves from the despair within through leisure and entertainment. As Binx Bolling put it, “Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.” Devoid of meaning, we take our wandering seriously indeed.
If we seek to know ourselves apart from knowing God, we are left with a false view of ourselves. We’re looking in a mirror but seeing a cartoon staring back at us. There is a reason why we feel despair and unhappiness. It’s residual knowledge of who we were really meant to be by the grace of God. Calvin helps us see this truth even today.
Last week, we examined the claim that Calvin had Servetus burned in Geneva. This week, I want to take you into the beginning pages of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. The first sentence is well-known: “Nearly all the wisdom we possess…consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”
In order to possess wisdom, one must know God and know oneself. The two are intertwined. The more we know God, the better we know ourselves. The more we know ourselves, the better we know God. Unfortunately, our world is adept at inventing ways to eliminate God from the equation of true knowledge.
The problem however is that when one tries to understand life apart from God, that person lives a life of fiction. It may seem real, but it is an illusion that leads ultimately to despair. If God is the creator, and if we are made in his image, then life can only make sense in relation to him.
In Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, Binx Bolling is on a search for meaning. He talks about his vertical search, his search to understand God. After reading a chemistry book, he felt that there was no longer any need to consider God’s hand in the world. The natural world explained itself.
“The only difficulty,” Binx concluded, “was that though the universe had been disposed of, I myself was left over. There I lay in my hotel room with my search over yet still obliged to draw one breath and then the next.” With knowledge of God no longer certain or necessary, one is hard pressed to explain why he should take another breath. Life is leftover and empty.
This emptiness manifests itself continually in our world. People shop to forge new identities. We divert ourselves from the despair within through leisure and entertainment. As Binx Bolling put it, “Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.” Devoid of meaning, we take our wandering seriously indeed.
If we seek to know ourselves apart from knowing God, we are left with a false view of ourselves. We’re looking in a mirror but seeing a cartoon staring back at us. There is a reason why we feel despair and unhappiness. It’s residual knowledge of who we were really meant to be by the grace of God. Calvin helps us see this truth even today.
Ada Herald - Pastor's Pen Article October 1 2009
Understanding the beliefs of Christian denominations is sort of like following a family tree. Differing beliefs and practices often trace back to key individuals who shaped the church in dramatic ways. Lutherans have their Luther. Methodists have their Wesley. Mennonites have their Menno Simmons. Catholics have their Aquinas, and Presbyterians have their John Calvin.
For some reason, Presbyterians find ourselves defending John Calvin from attack far more often than our friends in other denominations are called upon to defend their own spiritual ancestors. Calvin was much maligned in his own lifetime, and the standards of biographical writing in Calvin’s day, being much different from our own, have allowed myths about Calvin to stick in the Western mind.
Given that this year is the 500th birthday of Calvin (July 10, 1509 – May 27, 1564), perhaps it’s time to clear the air. One persistent misrepresentation of Calvin is that he had Michael Servetus burned at the stake in Geneva. A closer look at the episode reveals that although Servetus was burned in Geneva, he most likely would have been burned in any number of cities at the time.
In 1530, Servetus published a book titled On the Errors of the Trinity. In it, he said that the Triune God was a three-headed dog and an invention of the devil. In the 16th century, this was heresy in anybody’s book. The Emperor Charles V set down a law that anyone who denied the Trinity was punishable by death. Servetus wasn’t just attacking the church. He was attacking the state and the Empire.
He was tried by the Catholic Church and sentenced to die by burning. Had he not escaped, others would have put him to death, but he ended up in Geneva. Servetus was arrested by the City Council after Calvin reported seeing him in the church were Calvin preached.
Calvin went to Servetus in his time of imprisonment and tried to convince him to recant. He argued for a less painful death sentence than the one imposed by the Council but to no avail. Servetus was burned, and as one biographer put it, “the smell of smoke has clung to Calvin’s clothes for centuries.”
Considering the many mitigating factors surrounding Calvin’s involvement, one would be wise to resist the knee-jerk reaction, “Servetus!” upon hearing Calvin’s name mentioned in polite conversation. Instead, it would be wise to consider Calvin’s contributions to the larger church and world. “To omit Calvin from the forces of Western evolution,” as the English scholar Lord John Morley put it, “is to read history with one eye shut.”
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