The Gospel of the Kingdom of God is the Only True Gospel: Part 4
End Times Preachers, Predestination, and Living in the Moment

It does seem like there has been an abundance of end times "prophets" lately... and being wrong over and over again doesn't seem to discourage them. Scripture, also, doesn't seem to discourage them.

Acts 1:6-8
6So when they had come together, they were asking Him, saying, "Lord, is it at this time You are restoring the kingdom to Israel?"
7He said to them, "It is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority;
8but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth."

Yet we still seem fixated on fortune telling. We want to know the future. And futuristic "prophets" aren't the only ones guilty of this. Everyone, including myself, who harbors what Bonhoeffer, in his book Life Together, refers to as "wish dreams", or those idealistic notions of the way the church, community, or the Kingdom should be, is living in and looking for significance in the future. Others want to live life in the past. They try to recapture past great experiences (be they "spiritual" or "worldly") or are bound to the past through guilt or regret. In both situations, we are led astray.

Ecclesiates 3

1 There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven:
2 a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,

3 a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,

4 a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,

5 a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,

6 a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,

7 a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,

8 a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

9 What does the worker gain from his toil? 10 I have seen the burden God has laid on men. 11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

TIME - Everything has its proper time.

How is the Christian to know when it is the proper time? The only way to know the time for any activity is to live with God in the NOW. If we live in the past, we miss it. If we live in the future, we miss it.

For example: You can only love those who you are with now in a real way. That doesn't mean that you don't "love" other people when you are not with them, but when you are not with someone, your love for them is abstract. It's an idea. It only is fulfilled in reality when you are present with them and acting on the idea.

Christ speaks over and over again about the importance of learning to live in the immediate:

Matthew 6
25"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? 26Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?
28"And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 31So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' 32For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

I know I especially like to dream big dreams. I like to think about what my destiny is... the great things that God has in store. I like to think about the way the Church OUGHT to be. I like to dream about what community SHOULD be.

I am coming to learn that I will never know these things until I learn to walk in the moment. If I aim at dreams, I will miss them. If I aim at destiny, I will miss it.

If I aim to walk with God, submitting to his rule and reign now, in this life, I cannot miss it.

Eph. 1
3Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ,
4just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love
5He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will,
6to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.

The word "predestined," which has caused so much strife in the church, means "To mark out before-hand." One gets the image of a pioneer, creating a trail that others will follow, digging a well, making preliminary shelter, so that when he returns with settlers, the way will be made easy for them. God has already laid out work for us to do, but we must hear from him... we must live with him in the moment if we are to not miss this work.

Ephesians 2
10For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.

This is where we fail. A while back ago, in a similar post with a similar title, I wrote about Nehushtan, the bronze serpent that had been used to heal people in the desert under Moses, but was later smashed by King Hezekiah since the Israelites started worshipping it. We take the gifts of God and make them rules for others to follow, lifting them and obedience to those rules up above God, who gave us the gifts. This is where we fall short.

For example, we see that Jon is doing "X" activity, and that God has blessed it. We get the misguided notion that, if WE do "X", that God will bless it as well. Then we wonder why we fail.

The minute we get into judgment and comparison, we fail. The rule of God is NOT living by rules, but living by HIS RULE, and there is a world of difference.

So all of our expectations, all our "wish dreams," for what the church should be, for what community should be, for what ministry should be, for what the Kingdom should be must be nailed to the cross of Christ. We must learn to live in the immediate, continually asking God how He would use us, then being receptive to His guidance. After all, the only ones we can love in reality are those we are with now.
posted by Stephen at 9:56 PM | |

 
Christian Camo
Mark posted a link to this on his site. Make of it what you will.

Where did a put my Testamints?
posted by Jimmy at 5:50 AM | |

 
Still Doubting

I thought that this post by Terry over at Monastic Mumblings was a great and pertinent post, considering that many people seem to be uneasy about other people's doubts about Christ.
posted by Stephen at 8:38 AM | |

 
The Gospel of the Kingdom of God is the Only True Gospel: Part... um... 3?

Blogger doesn't like me either, now. For some reason it would not let me make some simple additions to this post, and ended up deleting the whole thing. Thank goodness I had a backup.

This is just a reminder of a basic thing that I said a while back ago, as it pertains to an obscenely long post that I'll be putting up in a couple of days.

There is no true gospel but the gospel of the Kingdom of God... the gospel of God's reign and rule in our lives today, and his desire to bring his reign to earth today through you and me. All other gospels are incomplete gospels that lead to division rather than unity, strife rather than peace, and disillusionment rather than fulfillment.

Here are some links to related past posts:

Part I
Part II

posted by Stephen at 11:42 AM | |

 
Was Jesus a Myth?
Part 1: The Question Itself

One issue in tackling this question is that there are not very many serious scholars (past or present) who have held the view that Jesus was entirely mythical. While there are many scholars who would question the historical validity of the Gospel and New Testament accounts of Jesus by saying (in varying degrees) that elements of the story are "mythical" or "legendary", only a handful would claim that the first century Jewish teacher Jesus never existed.

Will Durant in Volume 3 of his series The Story of Civilisation, Caesar and Christ, said this of the Jesus' existence:

"The Christian evidence for Christ begins with the letters ascribed to Saint
Paul. Some of these are of uncertain authorship; several, antedating A.D. 64,
are almost universally accounted as substantially genuine. No one has questioned
the existence of Paul, or his repeated meetings with Peter, James, and John; and
Paul enviously admits that these men had known Christ in his flesh. The accepted
epistles frequently refer to the Last Supper and the Crucifixion.... The
contradictions are of minutiae, not substance; in essentials the synoptic
gospels agree remarkably well, and form a consistent portrait of Christ. In the
enthusiasm of its discoveries the Higher Criticism has applied to the New
Testament tests of authenticity so severe that by them a hundred ancient
worthies, for example Hammurabi, David, Socrates would fade into legend. Despite
the prejudices and theological preconceptions of the evangelists, they record
many incidents that mere inventors would have concealed the competition of the
apostles for high places in the Kingdom, their flight after Jesus' arrest,
Peter's denial, the failure of Christ to work miracles in Galilee, the
references of some auditors to his possible insanity, his early uncertainty as
to his mission, his confessions of ignorance as to the future, his moments of
bitterness, his despairing cry on the cross; no one reading these scenes can
doubt the reality of the figure behind them. That a few simple men should in one
generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so loft an
ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far
more incredible than any recorded in the Gospel. After two centuries of Higher
Criticism the outlines of the life, character, and teaching of Christ, remain
reasonably clear, and constitute the most fascinating feature of the history of
Western man."[1]

This seems to me to be the general consensus of the vast majority of historians.

Historical research into the life of Jesus has gone through several stages of development, driven in part by new discoveries and insights into the history of first century Palestine and in part by the dominant world-view of the day. The stages of development can roughly be categorized as (bold shows dominance of concept):

• Pre-Quest (prior to 1778, Jesus of history=Christ of faith)
• Old-Quest (1778-1906, Jesus of history?Christ of faith)
• No-Quest (1906-1953, Jesus of history cannot be known, only the Christ of faith)
• New Quest (1953-Present, continuity between Jesus of history and Christ of faith)[2]

James H. Charlesworth, an expert in the documents and history of Early Judaism & Christian origins, would say that since 1980 a new phase has developed which he simply terms "Jesus Research" because it isn't driven by a theological/ideological "quest" to find Jesus but is driven by a search for historical and cultural realities.

When looking at the breakdown of the "quests" it is easy to see how the prevalent thought of each was not only affected by current world-views, but also had impact upon the popular thinking within the church (usually trailing by 20-50 years). For example, in the minds of most Christians today the unknowing emphasis is on the "Christ of Faith" rather than the historical/cultural situations surrounding the life of Jesus and his followers. It is interesting that some of the best work being done on the historical and cultural setting of Jesus and early Christianity is outside of the Seminaries and is not being done by theologians. Seminaries tend to focus on theology rather than history. This is due to the profound impact of theologians like Albert Schweitzer and (primarily) Rudolph Bultmann during the "No Quest" stage. Schweitzer, in reaction to the 19th century "lives of Jesus" (that tended to portray the Jesus of history as simply reflections of Victorian thought), said this about Jesus:

...the truth is, it is not Jesus as historically known, but as spiritually risen
within men, who is significant for our time and can help it. Not the Jesus
of history, but the spirit which goes forth from Him and in the spirit of men
strives for new influence and rule, is that which overcomes the world."[3]

Bultmann echoed these thoughts by saying:

I do indeed think that we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and
personality of Jesus, since the early Chrisitan sources show no interest in
either, are moreover fragmentary and often legendary; and other sources about
Jesus do not exist.[4]

During the "quests" scholars have made plenty of statements like these concerning the nature of Jesus and his teachings. I think much of the "Jesus as pure myth" thinking has developed out of misunderstandings/misinterpretations of some of these statements.[5] Some of these scholars, such as Albert Schweitzer, were well known, and their words had a large impact in the way people have perceived the "historical" Jesus. Bultmann may not have been so well known, but as I mentioned earlier, his thinking and theology has impacted the approach to Jesus in many seminaries. However, it is important to note that Bultmann himself would never have accepted the notion that Jesus was pure myth: "Of course the doubt as to whether Jesus really existed is unfounded and not worth refutation. No sane person can doubt that Jesus stands as founder behind the historical movement whose first distinct stage is represented by the Palestinian community."[6]

Interestingly, one of Bultmann's own students, Ernst Kasemann, would be someone who-- combined with new insights into Early Judaism and Christian origins from documents such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, Nag Hammadi library, and a collection of works called the Old Testament Psuedepigrapha--effectively ended the "No Quest" stage of Jesus research that held to Bultmann's concept that "nothing could be known" about the historical Jesus. In his speech The Problem of the Historical Jesus delivered in 1953, Kasemann argued that "history is only accessible to us through tradition and only comprehensible to us through interpretation." He then went on to explain that the Gospels are interpreted traditions but they do record historical information and memory.[7]

Today research into the historical Jesus is going strong by scholars of different backgrounds, ideologies, and creeds. The conclusion of most historians is that the Gospels do record a large amount of history. They may be biased works of faith, but it is a faith tradition that only makes sense in light of historical realities about Jesus. Even the Jesus Seminar (which is generally viewed as a theologically liberal gathering with low views of the history contained in the Gospels) has stated that 17% of the words contained in the Gospels could be original to Jesus.[8] This is quite an advance from the Old Quest and No Quest perceptions of Jesus. The reality is that we know more about the first century teacher Yeshua min Nazaret and Saul from Tarsus than any other figures from Early Judaism . [9]

Although his works are so often quoted by apologists when replying to the question "Is Jesus a Myth?" that it borders on cliche, I think the words of C.S. Lewis are appropriate:

"...as a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the
Gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I
am quite clear that they are not the same sort of thing. They are not
artistic enough to be legends. From an imaginative point of view they are
clumsy, they don't work up things properly. Most of the life of Jesus is
totally unkown to us, as is the life of anyone else who lived at that time, and
no people building up a legend would allow that to be so. Apart from bits
of the Platonic dialogues, there are no conversations that I know of in ancient
literature like the Fourth Gospel. There is nothing, even in modern
literature, until about a hundred years ago [from the 1940s] when the realistic
novel came into existence." [10]

The conclusion is that for most historians the Christian sources of the New Testament are valid sources for accepting the reality of Jesus' life. Interpretations of that life may vary, but Jesus was not simply a myth.

The complete series will look something like this:
Part 2--Documents Outside the New Testament
Part 3--The Jewish Jesus and the Gentile Church
Part 4--What did Jesus claim about himself
Part 5--What conclusions can be drawn about Salvation

NOTES
[1] Will Durant. The story of civilization. Vol. 3, Caesar and Christ (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935), 555.

[2] W. Barnes Tatum. In quest of Jesus, rev. and enl. ed. (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1999), 79. For a quick overview of the quests up to the 1980's, Chapter 5 of Tatum's book is excellent.

[3] Albert Schweitzer. The Quest for the Historical Jesus, translated by W. Montgomery (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1968). This source is available online at http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/schweitzer/.

[4] R. Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, trans. L.P.Smith and E.H. Lantero (London, 1934; reprinted 1958). This source is available online at http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=426&C=277.

[5] These scholars are not using the word "myth" to mean something completely contrived. However, the popular understanding of "myth" usually means a complete fabrication. This combined with the historical skepticism towards the Gospels in the Old and No Quest stage was a set up for misinterpretation of the scholars words.

[6] Bultmann, Jesus and the Word.

[7] James H. Charlesworth, “The Foreground of Christian Origins and the Commencement of Jesus Research.” In Jesus' Jewishness: exploring the place of Jesus within early Judaism. Shared Ground Among Jews and Christians, vol. 2 (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 81

[8] Robert Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The five Gospels: the search for the authentic words of Jesus : new translation and commentary (New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1993), 5.

[9] Charlesworth.

[10] C. S. Lewis, "What are we to make of Christ". In The Grand Miracle and Other Selected Essays on Theology from God in the Dock (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), 113.

posted by Jimmy at 11:30 AM | |

 
Questions About Jesus
There are so many things about Jesus which I believe that I have rarely been asked to put down in written form. Lately, some people have asked good questions which are helping me put my beliefs into some kind of cohesive thought as a response. Here are three questions that have been presented to me lately:

1. Was Jesus a myth? (I think this question may be popping up more often than we assume)
2. Did Jesus claim to be God? (Also, did his early followers believe he was God?)
3. How does salvation work in terms of eternity? (who goes to heaven or not)

I'm working on a written response to a couple of these. I was wondering how others might respond to these questions.

UPDATE: I've moved this post to the top again as it seems to be an ongoing conversation. I should be posting my response to question #1 soon.
posted by Jimmy at 9:01 AM | |

 
Forget Ports...Let Them Give Us Hotels
Ok...this is real. Tennis at the top of a huge hotel in Dubai.


posted by Jimmy at 7:10 AM | |

 
An Open Post to Dan Paden
This post has been removed because the issues involved have been resolved from my perspective. I have left the comments in place for those who want to make further input.

Let's get back to better things.
posted by Jimmy at 8:41 PM | |

 
Christianity

Student [walking by my desk, noticing the cover of the movie Ghandi which another class had watched]: Ghandi. I did a report on him last year. Good guy.
Me: Yeah, great guy.
Student: Yeah...it's too bad he's burning in hell right now.
Me: In Hell? Is that what you think?
Student: Yeah, he didn't believe in Jesus. [Student exits room]
Me [to two remaining students]: Well, I guess that's it. That's what Christianity has come to...it's an easy way to decide that a person who gave his whole life to helping others in the model of Jesus can burn in Hell, and another person who is totally selfish and caught up in himself can say "Jesus is Lord" and go to Heaven.

It may help you to know that this student is one of those barely alive types who moves through life in smugness and a dull haze.
posted by Jimmy at 8:31 PM | |

 
Donald Miller on Searching for the Gospel of Jesus
Great article at Christianity Today which adapts some of Miller's Searching for God Knows What material.

Excerpt from the article:

Greg said he'd seen a pamphlet with four or five ideas on it, ideas such as man was a sinner, sin separated man from God, and Christ died to absolve the separation. He asked me if this was what I believed, and I told him, essentially, that it was. "Those would be the facts of the story," I said, "but that isn't the story."

"Those are the ideas, but it isn't the narrative," Greg stated rhetorically.

"Yes," I told him.

Earlier that same year, I had a conversation with my friend Omar, who's a student at a local college. For his humanities class, Omar was assigned to read the majority of the Bible. He asked to meet with me for coffee, and when we sat down, he put a Bible on the table, as well as a pamphlet offering the same five or six ideas Greg had mentioned. He opened the pamphlet, read the ideas and asked if these concepts were important to the central message of Christianity. I told Omar they were critical, that basically this was the Gospel of Jesus, the backbone of Christian faith. Omar then opened his Bible and asked, "If these ideas are so important, why aren't they in this book?"

"But the Scripture references are right here," I said curiously, showing Omar that the verses were printed next to each idea.

"I see that," he said. "But in the Bible, they aren't concise like they are in this pamphlet. They're spread out all over the book."

"But this pamphlet is a summation of the ideas," I clarified.

"Right," Omar continued, "but it seems like, if these ideas are that critical, God would've taken the time to make bullet-points out of them. Instead, He put some of them here and some of them there. And half the time, when Jesus is talking, He is speaking entirely in parables. It's hard to believe that whatever it is He's talking about can be summed up this simply."

posted by Jimmy at 8:28 PM | |

 
Panel—Hummer or Honda? What Should a Pastor Drive?
Click here to read short insights from four different pastors. This was from Christianity Today/Leadership Journal from last fall.

Some interesting and divergent quotes:

"I love to drive....I prefer anything fun and fast. Basically, I think pastors should drive whatever fits their personality. In the end we should choose to drive whatever we want."--Erwin Raphael McManus, Mosaic, Los Angeles (his site and his church's site)

"Pastors who spend more on their car than they contribute to the poor disturb me, just like pastors who use their car to help perpetuate an 'image'. A car is not something that makes you culturally relevant. In fact, pastors prove their irrelevance if they act like the rest of the world when purchasing a car. "--Dave Terpstra, Next Level, Denver (his church site)

What do you think?
posted by Jimmy at 6:12 AM | |

 
Relativism?

So, we learned from the last post that relativism is this huge problem because it's keeping people from voting Republican.

Okay, I jest. I must say that the boogey-man of relativism occassionally scares me, too. It's rather amazing to sit in a room full of students and have them tell you that it's okay to cheat on high school tests because "high school doesn't really count anyway. We're never going to really use this stuff, so it really doesn't matter if we cheat a little. What matters is that we get good grades so we can go to college. THEN it really matters." These words are from a conversation that I had in my philosophy class last semester, and it was agreed to by about 60% of the class. That, I admit, is frightening.

However, is it really relativism that we're worried about? I would argue that it's ultimately something deeper. It sure LOOKS like relativism. Yet, if you ask any typical citizen, high school age or otherwise, if they think that what Hitler did could ever be justified, much less by the perceptions of the society that condoned it, the vast majority would say "no." So our kids DO have absolutes, whether it's fashionable to recognize them or not. There are places where they will draw the line, and they reveal this in their speech and in their lifestyles every day.

So what IS it, if not relativism? Once again, Thomas DeZengotita advances a theory that I find highly plausible.

Now consider this, drawn from research done by a seventeen-year-old senior on the origins of ethical relativism in lower grades: he gives a precocious ten-year-old Lawrence Kohlberg's famous "you find a lot of money in a paper bag on the sidewalk what do you do?" dilemma. The fifth grader decides (completely predictably, though he sees himself as defying convention) that it would be right for him to keep it, but, for another person, it might be right to take it to the police, for another, to donate it to charity -- and, in general, that there are different rights and wrongs for different people and who can say more? In an inspired moment, the interviewing senior suggests maybe God? The fifth grader asserts his (again, completely predictable) agnosticism in magnanimous tones. He knows that weak and ignorant folk somewhere out in the boondocks might find his enlightened views unbearable. But he is willing to entertain the hypothesis that God exists and acknowledges that, if he does, "God could have a different opinion from mine."

Now that's empowerment. This is a kid who definitely feels good about himself. This is a kid to whom a lot of people have been very nice. This is a flattered self if there ever was one.

By the time that fifth grader is finishing high school, he will get the joke, but his sense of entitlement will be just as absolute; indeed, it will have merged completely with is sense of personal autonomy.

He wants to believe that anything is possible for him, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else - for others enjoy the same entitlement, we are talking about the decent majority here, kids with domesticated ids.

What the flattered self enjoys by way of options in the mediated world in general gets expressed philosophically as that notorious "relativism" that conservative critics -- ever suspicious of theory, glued always to the surface of phenomena -- blame for everything they don't like and/or understand about contemporary culture.

Which is a lot.

So what is the deeper issue? What's fueling this relativism? The ability to pursue individual enrichment through the use of private resources by convincing other people how necessary your product or service is... the fact that our needs and wants are constantly appealed to so that we might give others the opportunity to satiate them... the fact that we have attempted to make every aspect of our lives a matter of choice... the availability of options in each of these areas growing in number, exponentially, each contributing to the answer to that single, all-important question, "Who do you want to be?" Our kids do not completely lack a sense of morality; they're overly flattered! It's not that kids don't believe in absolutes. They simply believe in options. It's not relativism that's the problem. It's the fact that everything about our culture (and conservative Christians contribute to this mightily) screams for freedom. Objective reality limits our options, which is one absolute: people's options should not be limited.
posted by Stephen at 11:17 AM | |

 
Christians Can't Get Enough of That Worldview Junk

I wouldn't gripe about this stuff if freaking James Dobson wouldn't send me emails advertising for it. It's your own fault, Doc. Quit sending me unsolicited emails.

Oh, by the way, I am now thoroughly convinced that Christians need to stop selling their messages. Either that, or quit marketing them as if they have the answers that are "vital" and "necessary" for us to live a "proper" Christian life. If you really believe that you're book/seminar/dvd could mean the difference between someone's immortal soul spending eternity with God or in hell, and you withhold it because someone doesn't cough up sufficient funds,... well... maybe YOU could live with the cosmic weight of that responsibility. I couldn't.

Now, on with the show. George Barna has sent the entire evangelical world into fits over his statistic that a "dismal 9 percent" of born-again Christians have a "biblical worldview." I'm going to assume that everyone is familiar with this favorite vocabulary word of the evangelical community at this time, but what is a "biblical" worldview?

A biblical worldview is based on the infallible Word of God. When you believe the Bible is entirely true, then you allow it to be the foundation of everything you say and do. That means, for instance, you take seriously the mandate in Romans 13 to honor the governing authorities by researching the candidates and issues, making voting a priority.

And this, in itself, is a microcosm of the problem in its ENTIRETY! According to Dobson, the infallible word of God tells us we should vote! If you don't vote, you're either 1) not taking the authority of the Bible seriously enough, and thus, are a member of that 91% that is wrecking Christendom, or 2) you're in flagrant rebellion against the commands of God as stated in his infallible word. Nevermind the fact that, when Romans 13 was written, NO ONE VOTED! Voting itself would have been considered an absurdity. 1000 years later, it would have been considered heresy by the Christian church!

This exposes the fallacy of the thought. A biblical worldview means that you acknowledge the Bible's authority and that you do what it says. Problem: what if there is disagreement about what it's telling you to do? Who wins? My guess is that it's the people with established institutional power, or money. Those guys seem to win a lot.

In order to avoid the complications caused by logic and reasonable thought, Barna came up with a handy questionaire to be able to assess the "biblicalness" of your worldview.

Do you have a biblical worldview? Answer the following questions, based on claims found in the Bible and which George Barna used in his survey:
1. Do absolute moral truths exist?
2. Is absolute truth defined by the Bible?
3. Did Jesus Christ live a sinless life?
4. Is God the all-powerful and all-knowing Creator of the universe, and does He still rule it today?
5. Is salvation a gift from God that cannot be earned?
6. Is Satan real?
7. Does a Christian have a responsibility to share his or her faith in Christ with other people?
8. Is the Bible accurate in all of its teachings?

Some beliefs are obviously core. If you call yourself a follower of Christ, then the very definition of the phrase requires you to accept certain things as true. However, most of these questions, such as the "absolute moral truth" question, have become so burdened by socio/political and cultural baggage that they have ceased to mean anything. Most people don't understand the true weight of such questions, anyhow. To throw these questions around your average church's sunday school youth group and accept the answer as being valid is naive at best and manipulative at worst.

So why, according to Dobson, do we not ALL have "biblical worldviews." Could it be because everyone lives in different circumstances that inform their worldviews differently? No, you relativist!

Because we live in a selfish, fallen world, these [unbiblical] ideas seductively appeal to the desires of our flesh, and we often end up incorporating them into our personal worldview. Sadly, we often do this without even knowing it.
For example, most Christians would agree with 1 Thessalonians 4:3 and other Scriptures that command us to avoid sexual immorality, but how often do Christians fall into lust or premarital and extramarital sexual sin? Is it simply because they are weak when tempted, or did it begin much earlier, with the seductive lies from our sexualized society?

So if you sin sexually, it isn't because you are a human being who gave in to sexual temptation as humans have since the dawn of time. It's because you obviously don't give the bible the authority that it deserves.

So, why is this important?

If we don’t really believe the truth of God and live it, then our witness will be confusing and misleading. Most of us go through life not recognizing that our personal worldviews have been deeply affected by the world. Through the media and other influences, the secularized American view of history, law, politics, science, God and man affects our thinking more than we realize. We then are taken “captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ” (Colossians 2:8).

What I find immensely humorous about this is that these people probably don't realize how much this applies to them and their own worldviews. See my above comments about giving away "the message" then ask yourself why they're charging$120 a pop to attend their "training seminars."

However, by diligently learning, applying and trusting God’s truths in every area of our lives — whether it’s watching a movie, communicating with our spouses, raising our children or working at the office — we can begin to develop a deep comprehensive faith that will stand against the unrelenting tide of our culture’s nonbiblical ideas. If we capture and embrace more of God’s worldview and trust it with unwavering faith, then we begin to make the right decisions and form the appropriate responses to questions on abortion, same- sex marriage, cloning, stem-cell research and even media choices. Because, in the end, it is our decisions and actions that reveal what we really believe.

AHA! And so we find out what it's really about. If you don't have a biblical worldview, you won't vote the way WE WANT YOU TO VOTE! Remember, voting is an activity mandated by God. But that's not all! HOW you vote is also mandated by God. So get out there and mark the "R" at the top of your ballot, soldier!
posted by Stephen at 8:20 AM | |

 
Realities
The guys over at Radical Congruency have a good post on this and the growing church convention culture (and its price tags):


posted by Jimmy at 5:13 PM | |

 
Marco Funk had a good point in the comments section in response to the "guilt and fear" thread regarding Bono's statements at the prayer breakfast. I wanted them posted here:

I hate it when fear and guilt, as a motivational tool, is used but backed by lies; lies like: you're gonna go to hell if you don't do such and such, or believe this way. It is untruthful to say that we worship a God who sits up in heaven just waiting to throw us in hell.But if 'fear' and guilt come as a result of truth being told, then it is a sign that authentic confession and repentance is needed.After hearing Bono's speech, I needed to confess and repent of my own implication in the greed of North America (I'm from Canada).But, after Bono's speech, I was also given a vision of something better... if not a vision of the already-but-not-yet kingdom of God that is breaking its way into our world and history. This vision inspires me to hope...If hope is the fruit of Bono's message, then possibly the fear and the guilt I experienced from his message might be a kind of 'holy pruning' that was much needed for me... but also more importantly for Bono's audience.
posted by Stephen at 8:03 AM | |