Theology Central
Theology Central exists as a place of conversation and information for faculty and friends of Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Posts include seminary news, information, and opinion pieces about ministry, theology, and scholarship.An Introduction to Marcus Borg
Christians ought to know their opponents. In recent years, one of those opponents has been Marcus Borg, now deceased, formerly professor of religion and culture at Oregon State University. Borg’s life was a constant journey toward the theological Left. I heard him lecture when he was in Minneapolis in 2011. He was an engaging and fascinating speaker whose views were well beyond the liberal mainstream.
If you want a nice little introduction to Borg, here is a piece in the Christian Century by Thomas G. Long. It’s a good summary with a focus on Borg’s last contribution.
Facts, Interpretation, and Reality
The boys over at Westminster Seminary are fond of saying that there are no brute facts. They are correct. That does not mean, however, that there is no reality to which all truth claims are corrigible.
And now comes a reflection from Arminian theologian Roger Olson. He rejects the suggestion that we can know brute facts. He also rejects anti-realism. He favors a version of critical realism.
If these are unfamiliar categories to you, then you owe it to yourself to read Olson’s piece. He’ll give you a bit of recent intellectual history. Then he’ll apply it.
Here’s the point and the “rub.” My own experience and observation of my culture—North American academia—leads me to believe that many people with tremendous influence—even where their names are never heard or known outside of academia—have adopted the belief that because of the sociology of knowledge, critical realism or even anti-realism (belief that “knowledge” never even comes close to matching reality-as-it-is if such even exists), because of the “social construction of reality,” all that’s left to us is rhetoric. The traditional ideas of “facts” and “arguments” are simply “old school thinking.” Since that is the case, many movers and shakers of culture believe, there is really no “line” between argument and rhetoric.
Metzger’s “Text of the New Testament”
Bruce Metzger’s The Text of the New Testament is a standard tool in NT textual criticism. The work is now in its fourth edition. I’ve just learned that it is available in several electronic formats, free for downloading at Archive.org.
Ooops!
“On further reflection and prayer,” (and perhaps great pressure from the internet), popular evangelical author Eugene Peterson retracted his hypothetical willingness to do a gay marriage. “To clarify, I affirm a biblical view of marriage: one man to one woman. I affirm a biblical view of everything,” Great, . . . I think. One wonders how a seasoned man like Peterson could make such gaff. But at least he changed his mind.
Sliding further into the abyss
Popular evangelical author Eugene Peterson, in an interview with Jonathan Merritt of Religious News Service, stated that the issue or homosexuality and the church may be over. If he were pastoring today, he would preform same-sex unions. This has caused numerous comments across the evangelical spectrum. See here, here, and here. Lifeway may pull all of his books, some 135 titles, from their shelves. Good for them! It is sad when a Christian leader of the influence of Peterson makes such a stunning reversal. Lovers of biblical truth will weep over this news.
Michael Kruger Challenges False Claims about Early Christianity
Labeling these claims as “fake news,” the president of Reformed Theological Seminary explains why certain popular beliefs about early Christianity are false.
- Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
- The divinity of Jesus was not decided until the council of Nicea in the fourth century.
- Christians did not have a “Bible” until the time of Constantine.
- The “Gnostic” Gospels like the Gospel of Thomas were just as popular as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
- The words of the New Testament have been radically changed and corrupted in the earliest centuries.
Bill Barrick’s Book Recommendation of the Week
See it here.
McCune on Membership in the Body
[1 Cor. 12:13] says, “We were all baptized into one body.” The “we all” transcends the local church at Corinth for a couple of reasons. (1) The addressees of the epistle imply or designate a wider audience than the local church at Corinth (1 Cor 1:2). The latter part of the clause, “with all who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,” seems to enlarge the address of the letter, as does a similar clause in 2 Corinthians 1:1 (“To the church of God which is at Corinth with all the saints who are throughout Achaia”). (2) Paul was undoubtedly not a member of the church at Corinth at the time of writing, yet he and those to whom he was writing were members of the same body (see similar instances of “we” in Rom 12:5 and 1 Thess 4:17, where Paul was almost certainly not a member of the churches to which he was writing).
Rolland McCune, A Systematic Theology of Biblical Christianity, Vol. 3, p. 208.
The SBC and Calvinism
The Southern Baptist Convention may be poised for a new round of conflict over the doctrine of Calvinism. A few years back, a group of SBC leaders formed a movement dubbed traditionalism to reclaim the SBC from Calvinism. At the recent SBC meeting in Phoenix, Eric Hankins, author of a statement of traditionalism, delivered an address that has some Southern Baptists wondering if they have a future in the convention. Hankins wants the seminaries that use some other doctrinal statement than the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 to abandon their historic confessions in favor of an Arminianized edited FBM which makes explicit the rejection of all things Calvinist. Stayed tuned for more details.
Assisted Suicide? Well, No.
The Central Bureau of Statistics in the Netherlands has posted the numbers for assisted termination of life (deaths due to medical decision) in 2015. The most interesting figure is the one in the upper right hand corner. These are the people whose lives were taken “without request”–431 of them. These were not assisted suicides (there were 150 of those). These were not people being euthanized (there were 6.672 of those). These were simply people whose lives were medically extinguished without their consent. That’s what we used to call murder, isn’t it?
Want to know where assisted suicide leads? Look at the Netherlands.
Questions and Answers on Revelation
Mark Hitchcock of Dallas Seminary delivers a 45 minute video lecture responding to questions on the book of Revelation. You can also enroll in a free course on Revelation on the same web page.
Liturgical Dance?
Here is a video of three men performing a concert dance to the Largo from Glinka’s Trio Pathétique in D Minor. The occasion is an offertory at Tim Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. The audience responds with applause after the performance. No pulpit is visible, but the elements appear on the Lord’s Table beneath the stage.
[vimeo 200056401 w=640 h=360]
Perhaps I should state that I have no principled objection to concert or theater dance. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m one of only a handful of Baptist fundamentalists who have visited the grave of Rudolf Nureyev in Paris. The question is not whether concert dance is in principle a good thing. The question is not even whether Christians ought to be able to enjoy concert dance. The question is whether concert dances (think of ballet) ought to be incorporated into worship. Not everything that can be done in everyday, mundane life ought to be brought into the assembly for worship.
That question is complicated by the fact that some form of dance was pretty clearly included as an element of Old Testament worship. The 150th Psalm actually commands “everything that has breath” to praise God with the dance. This imperative leads me to think that God is pleased with at least some dances in at least some places on at least some occasions.
The question is whether services of the New Testament Church are among those places and times, and whether this particular kind of dance is the sort that ought to be offered. I’m inclined to answer that question in the negative, for more than one reason.
First, the New Testament nowhere indicates that God expects the Church to offer dance as part of its worship. There is no New Testament command to incorporate dance into our liturgy. There is no example of a single church doing so. There is no teaching at all about how or when such a thing would be done. Nothing in the New Testament would lead us to believe that God takes pleasure in dance that is offered during the assembly.
Second, we no longer have any idea what sort of dance would please God. It is fairly clear that some dances definitely would not please Him (more on that in a moment). But we have no biblical teaching and no living tradition that would help us conceptualize an appropriate dance form for incorporation into liturgy.
Third, it is doubtful that the churches of the New Testament could not possibly have done anything like the dance that was presented to Redeemer Presbyterian. This dance form is modern, unknown to the churches of the New Testament. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that any New Testament congregation occupied a facility with a stage that would be suitable for this kind of dance.
Fourth, the tradition of dance that we have inherited is a tradition of corrupted dance. Some dances are simply frivolous. They should be excluded from the church for the same reasons that we exclude frivolous poetry, music, and preaching (we do exclude those, don’t we?) Other dances (beginning with the waltz and including virtually all ballroom dances, not to mention popular social dancing) are designed to be sensual. Of these dances it is rightly said that they are a vertical expression of a horizontal action. To bring them into worship is necessarily to introduce impurity.
But what about art dance? What about ballet? Isn’t that what the three guys are doing?
Even art dance is not all one thing, and it is not the only thing. It is not one thing because (especially since Diaghilev, Bakst, and the Ballets Russes) it has focused increasingly upon spectacle. Part of the spectacle often includes the physical form of the dancer. Not accidentally, dance costume is often designed to reveal the form of the body, even when it conceals the actual flesh. The costumes of the three dancers at Redeemer Presbyterian are not exceptions to this rule.
Of course, some modern concert dance is simply and deliberately sensual. Isadora Duncan did more than anyone to move modern dance in that direction, and she has plenty of followers. “Art” and “indecency” are not mutually exclusive categories.
Furthermore, why take concert dance as a template for liturgical dance at all? It is not the only thing. Why not copy marching bands or drum and bugle corps? Why not appropriate traditional ceremonial dances?
The answer to all these questions is really the same. Neither Scripture nor the Christian tradition provides us with any clear guidance. In the absence of such guidance, and in the absence of any New Testament pattern or requirement to incorporate dance into worship, I think it is better left alone. We have no way of introducing liturgical dance that is not raw innovation, intruded into the biblical requirements for Christ’s church.
Being Under the Law
NY firefighters free trapped Hasidic Jew from fallen Torah safe.
Glad we’re under grace!
Gene Veith on the Joint Declaration on Justification
Both mainline Lutherans and mainline Reformed are signing on. So are mainline Methodists. I’d comment, but Veith says everything I would want to say.
What Is Capitalism?
As an increasing number of evangelicals grow hostile toward capitalism, it’s useful to have a simple definition. Writing for the Intercollegiate Review, Paul Mueller provides that kind of simple definition. He also discusses several varieties of capitalism, detailing strengths and weaknesses. For example,
Unfortunately for us, the outcome of both the public-private partnerships of the Bush administration and the social consciousness and corporate responsibility of the Clinton and Obama administrations has been what people are increasingly calling “crony capitalism.” Under crony capitalism, private owners of the means of production use the coercive power of government to advance their own interests. While we see high-profile cases of large corporations receiving government favors in the news, cronyism runs deep in our society through zoning and permit laws, occupational licensing, and numerous other barriers to free entry into the economy and free competition. These protective rules enrich incumbents at the expense of consumers and would-be competitors. But another effect of crony capitalism has been the increasing power of the Washington bureaucracy to direct economic activity—undermining capitalism itself.
Did Hobby Lobby Do Wrong?
“This is what you call a terrible testimony,” says Michael Heiser, scholar-in-residence at Logos Bible Software. “Simply disgraceful and dishonest. Sure, lets lie and break the law so we can can fill out our Bible museum. I hope this goes viral and shames the whole lot of them.”
On the other hand, Jeffrey A. Tucker writing for the Foundation for Economic Education says, “The attack on Hobby Lobby is incoherent and unjust.” He defends the retailer against accusations of hypocrisy after the $3 million fine. “What Hobby Lobby was doing could have finally saved this sacred history on behalf of the whole of humanity. . . . Hobby Lobby deserves praise, not condemnation, for these actions. “
Oh, This Is Just Peachy
“Make America Great Again” is now a CCLI licensed Christian worship song. See Jonathan Aigner at Ponder Anew.
Hoc Est Corpus Meum
Apparently, transubstantiation cannot occur without gluten. The Pope declares that the Eucharist cannot be celebrated with gluten-free bread.
The bread used in the celebration of the Most Holy Eucharistic Sacrifice must be unleavened, purely of wheat, and recently made so that there is no danger of decomposition. It follows therefore that bread made from another substance, even if it is grain, or if it is mixed with another substance different from wheat to such an extent that it would not commonly be considered wheat bread, does not constitute valid matter for confecting the Sacrifice and the Eucharistic Sacrament. It is a grave abuse to introduce other substances, such as fruit or sugar or honey, into the bread for confecting the Eucharist. Hosts should obviously be made by those who are not only distinguished by their integrity, but also skilled in making them and furnished with suitable tools.
Somebody Finally Noticed
Joe Thorn writes on “Entertainment and Worship” for Tabletalk Magazine. His thesis?
One of the more dangerous drifts happening in our local churches today is within our corporate worship. In many churches there is a de-emphasis on the means of grace (Scripture, prayer, and the sacraments or ordinances), and a reliance on entertainment. Some try to balance the two in the name of reaching more people with the gospel, but there is an inescapable danger in overvaluing entertainment and implementing it in corporate worship.
Say it ain’t so, Joe!
UW Eau Claire Drops Restriction against Religious Teaching
The University of Wisconsin Eau Claire includes community service among the learning requirements for its students. To meet this requirement, students were permitted to engage in activities that involved teaching and persuasion, but they were not allowed to engage in religious teaching or persuasion. Believing that this policy discriminated against their religious activities, students filed suit against the university.
In an out-of-court settlement, the university has dropped the policy and has agreed to pay the fees for the students’ attorneys. Read about it at Religion Clause.
APPLICATION & AID