Bully's Blog

Present Your Bodies as Spiritual Worship

Over the years we have emphasized the importance of ritual. Rituals are significant in the Bible, and they ought to be significant to us. We have also emphasized the importance of worshipping God with our bodies and not just with our minds. We have sought to resist the temptation that many Reformed Christians deal with, which is the idea that God gave us bodies as carrying cases to get our brains to church.

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There is an old Doctor Who episode where the crew of a crashed spaceship, after many generations, degenerated into two warring tribes, the Tesh (from the technicians) and the Sevateem (from the trained pioneers, the survey team).* The remaining wreckage became religious artifacts used for various superstitious rites which were originally very practical operations for planetary conquest.

The reason most of the Bible seems culturally irrelevant to modern evangelicalism is because it is a tool for change. Our culture has moved so far from biblical thinking, so distorted from the heavenly pattern, that we don’t recognise the original ‘cast’ when we see it. We want to change our culture, and we have the tools. We carry them around with us in leather cases. They sit in racks in the pews. But we have lost the plot. The Tesh hide in gnostic academies. The Sevateem degenerate into superstition. The alien jungle terrorises them both. They war with each other and the planet goes unconquered.

*The villain turned out to be the damaged computer which was behaving like a capricious Greek god. We have no excuse. It is not our God that is malfunctioning, but us.

Is there another choice besides Barthian gnosticism and the fundamentalists’ cultural retreat?

Van Til believed, along with Augustine, Calvin, Kuyper, and Klaas Schilder that the building of a Christian culture is a biblical imperative. Van Til castigated the Barthians for their repudia tion of a Christian culture. “For them,” he wrote, “there is no single form of social, political, economic order that is more in the spirit of the Gospel than another.” Christians today are hearing a similar refrain from within evangelical circles. If there is no specifically biblical blue print, we are left with a pluralistic blue print, no blueprint, or a postponed blue print (dispensationalism)…

Read It Takes More Than A Theory (Part 1) by Gary DeMar, here and (Part 2) here.

The Old Testament surely has a measure of built-in obsolescence. But it is the obsolescence of childhood. The New Testament, the Covenant of the Man, cannot be truly understood without a detailed knowledge of the Old. A friend posted this quote from Rudolph Bultmann: “who went on to cast a large shadow of influence over 20th century theology. Bultmann argues that the whole Old Testament narrative is of no importance to the Christian faith.”

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Is Genesis 1 history or myth?

“The expositor [of the creation narratives] must move knowingly between two temptations. On the one hand, there is the temptation to treat this material as historical, as a report of what happened…. On the other hand, there is the temptation to treat these materials as myth, as statements which announce what has always been and will always be true of the world…. Our exposition will insist that these texts be taken neither as history nor as myth. Rather, we insist that the text is a proclamation of God’s decisive dealing with his creation.

The word “creation” is controlling for such a view. The whole cluster of words—creator/ creation/ create/ creature—are confessional words freighted with peculiar meaning. Terms such as “cosmos” and “nature” should never be carelessly used as equivalents, for these words do not touch the theocentric, covenantal relational affirmation being made…. The text, then, is a proclamation of covenanting as the shape of reality…. This theological affirmation permits every scientific view that is genuinely scientific and not a theological claim in disguise.”

—Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Interpretation Commentary), pp. 16-17.

I agree that the Creation narrative sets the foundation for the structure of later Covenants, and also of the construction of the Tabernacle and Temple, but the explanation above is just a fancy dance to avoid the unavoidable bullet that is Genesis 1. So it’s a proclamation that affirms theological truth but not historical truth? No wonder the western church is in a pickle!

When faced with an issue in which you wish to fence-sit, REDEFINE the terminology:

“In the last analysis, the Old Testament doctrine of creation expresses a sense of the present situation of man. He is hedged in by the incomprehensible power of Almighty God. The real purpose of the creation story is to inculcate what God is doing all the time…. Thus the doctrine of creation expresses man’s sense of utter dependence on God.”

—Rudolf Bultmann, Primitive Christianity in Its Contemporary Setting, p. 18.

If Genesis 1 is not history, and it is not myth, it is ideology. Which makes this plain old boring gnosticism. These smart guys just don’t get it, do they?

As one of my old Bible teachers used to say, “If someone’s taking an odd position, there’s a bee in his pocket.”

or ‘Riding on a donkey’

Why do theologians use the phrase “the Christ event”? Besides depersonalising Christ’s life, is it possibly a symptom of the chronic disease afflicting much of modern theology?

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Originally posted 27 September 2008

Rev Dr Malcolm Brown papers over the Grand Canyon at
http://www.cofe.anglican.org/darwin/malcolmbrown.html

and CMI critiques his article at
Church of England apologises to Darwin
Anglican Church’s neo-Chamberlainite appeasement of secularism
http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/6048

“… it is important to recognise that the anti-evolutionary fervour in some corners of the churches may be… an indictment of the churches’ failure to tell their own story – Jesus’s story – with conviction in a way which works with the grain of the world as God has revealed it to be, both through the Bible and in the work of scientists of Darwin’s calibre.”

Rev Dr Malcolm Brown (who looks like a nice man) surely must understand that the philosophy of evolution is exactly the reason for the decline of Christianity in the west, and the rejection of what he calls Jesus’ ‘story.’ It contradicts at a very fundamental level both the Old Testament and the obvious beliefs of Jesus Himself. A child can see that. I recommend the critique of Brown’s article and would be interested to see Brown’s response. Continue reading

 

“The Kingdom of God is not advanced through politics and ideology, but through proclamation and charity.”

–James B. Jordan

“In orthodox Christianity, salvation is not primarily deliverance from Satan’s realm, for Satan has no real realm; rather, salvation is deliverance from the wrath of God. Satan’s oppression of men is but an expression of the wrath of God, and it is not Satan who must be dealt with, but the wrath of God.”

There are many descriptions of Gnosticism, but the best is that which recognizes that Gnosticism is the great counterfeit of Christianity, which has hounded it since the beginning. Gnosticism sees the issues of history in terms of knowledge and power, instead of in terms of faith and obedience. Gnosticism approaches history in terms of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, rather than in terms of the Tree of Life (which is approached on the basis of faith). Continue reading