A Time to Laugh

Through Heaven’s Eyes

Send a Shepherd to Shepherd Us!

When Mommy comes down with a cold, we all kinda chill. Gavin was having trouble sleeping, and Isaac is on the brink of being napless altogether. So we pulled out Prince of Egypt. That has to be one of my all-time favorite movies. I never get tired of it.

Watch that entire clip up there. The creators really capture the burden of the God’s people in Egypt and then the courage of Jochabed. When you think about what children meant to the Israelites — how even in the womb they are part of God’s promise — it’s no wonder that, unlike their pagan contemporaries, murdering the babies was the worst insult.

Isaac and Gavin were both mezmorized at those alligators, hippos, and sailing vessels. As was their Mommy. Isaac gets very concerned about Moses in his basket cradle — a perfect chance to explain that God was always watching over him, as He says He watches over us.

And that led to Isaac, of course, changing the broom into a shepherd’s staff and the pillows into sheep. Gavin was Rameses, and I got to be the Mommy. I don’t know which Mommy — the Hebrew or Egyptian one — I actually was, but I guess I was a bit typecast. We re-enacted the plagues and the parting of the Red Sea too.

So today we read the story in our favorite storybook. I’m so tickled to see how both the film and the book highlight the world’s need for a Savior and how God takes care to deliver us. Amazing.

Merry Christmas!!

Grant has a little Christmas gift that a friend passed along. Enjoy!!

Amen.

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

I bind unto myself the name,
The strong name of the Trinity;
By invocation of the same.
The Three in One, and One in Three,
Of whom all nature hath creation,
Eternal Father, Spirit, Word:
Praise to the Lord of my salvation,
salvation is of Christ the Lord.

Prayer of St. Patrick

Thankful

A Week of Feasting

If you wanna talk food and history, come on over to Mona Faye’s Kitchen. Lots of good memories and some recipes for the festivities.

See? I’m not the only one.

From Phil Johnson:

The evangelical movement right now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, is in a spiritual condition not very much different from the medieval church just before the Protestant Reformation. Think about it. Luther had to deal with Tetzel, the charlatan fund-raiser who went through Europe promising people miracles in return for money so that the Pope could build St. Peter’s church in the Vatican. We’ve got at least a dozen Tetzels appearing daily on TBN, promising people miracles in exchange for money so that Jan Crouch can make the sets of their television studios gaudier than any room in the Vatican while she adds enough pink hair extensions to rival the Dome of St. Peter’s.

The medieval church was overrun with superstition and ignorance. We’ve got people reciting the prayer of Jabez every day who are convinced that it’s a magic formula that will bring them wealth and good luck.

The medieval church had Leo X and Machiavelli. We’ve got Bill Gothard and Gary Ezzo.

The medieval church saw a decline in doctrine and morality in the church and a corresponding increase in corruption, scandal, and man-centered worship. All of that is true today.

Worst of all, in the medieval era, the gospel was in eclipse and people were so woefully ignorant of biblical truth that men in Martin Luther’s time could complete seminary and enter ministry without ever having learned “the first principles of the oracles of God.” We’re well on the road to that same situation today. Many seminaries are deliberately eliminating biblical and theological courses and replacing them with courses in business and marketing. And Christian leaders who call themselves evangelical are actually encouraging these trends.

And the solution isn’t to be more conservative, more hard-core, more punishing. Frankly, that’s as pagan as anything.

At My End. . . .

The Atonement: Tell me the Old, Old Story

Andrew asked under The Drama of Grace 2 post that if Christ sets us free to be comedians, then why did He have to die in the first place? The question seems to be a big enough one in Protestant theological discussions that I thought I’d draw more attention to it.

It seems that this is another false dichotomy that fundamentalism feels the need to cling to. Either Christ’s death was a necessary ransom to be paid to Satan (people actually say this!), or you don’t believe in the Gospel. Either God has to hit and only then hug, or else He’s a wimp. Or either God hates the sin(ner) or He loves you. Well. . . . no.

I’ll defer to the seminary professor to explain (emphasis mine):

The cross of Christ shows the gravity of our sins. It is true, because the cross was necessary. It shows what God needed to do in order for us to enjoy forgiveness. In light of his opponents arguing it was not necessary for God to become a man and die, Anselm said, “You have not yet considered the seriousness, the severity of sin.” That is exactly the problem. It is certainly the problem of modern men and women who conceive of God along the lines that Packer called, “A Santa Claus theology.” God is the great grandfather in the sky who loves everybody and certainly is not holy and just and would never judge anyone. The Bible’s picture is far different. God is both holy and just—and also loving—and He bears in Himself the brunt of the punishment that our sins deserve. The cross shows many things, the love of God, the Justice of God, the wisdom of God, and so forth. It also shows the depth of our need. It shows our sins, offense to God who did not spare His own Son to save us. . . .

There was and it still continues an anti-legal atmosphere whereby the legal notions of the biblical faith were attacked: God as Judge, sin as violation of the law of God, the atonement understood in penal terms, and a notion of the Last Judgment and God as Judge. Now, it would be unfair, it would be a misrepresentation of the Christian faith, to say any one of those is the only way of looking at God, sin, the cross, or the Last Judgment. But it is also wrong to try to purge that element out. That actually constitutes creating our own religion and making the Bible answerable to our own likes and, in this case, dislikes. I give Louis Berkhof a lot of credit. He has the legal-penal dimensions all the way through his theology book—although he overplayed it a little bit—but for the most part he has a richer and fuller treatment, whereby those things do not dominate. He does not define sin only as breaking the law. In his day, it would be easy to do it because of the attacks on the legal aspects of the Christian faith. Law is one of the ways God presents Himself as Law-giver, as our need, as Christ meeting our need, and as salvation in terms of justification. You take law out of justification and it is meaningless. Justification is God the Judge declaring guilty sinners righteous because of the Son of God. And likewise, there is a big last judgment motif in Scripture in which God’s people will be publicly justified and declared righteous and the wicked will be publicly condemned. God will settle accounts; He will do things right. . . .

There is a godly sense in which God needed to be propitiated, not in the pagan sense of propitious, of God demanding His pound of flesh or some notion of a blood-thirsty deity, but in the fact that God is holy and just and is unable to forgive without satisfying His own holy anger. Does it not make you just very thankful for the cross and for what the Savior did? When you look your sin in the face you see the punishment that you deserve, namely hell, and then see Jesus taking the equivalence of hell. Obviously, if He was still suffering eternal conscious unishment on the cross, He could not save anybody so there was a substitution. In three hours, the God-man suffered the equivalent of eternal punishment. It is because of who He is, the infinite-finite one, the Creator-creature, the God-man, that He was able to make that substitution. I am not pretending to understand the divine mathematics in the matter, but there was a substitutionary atonement. There is a sense in which God needed to be propitiated, as seen in Romans 3, and which He was propitiated. There is, of course, a sense in which He did not need to be propitiated, and that would be pagan notions of propitiation.

The legal metaphor to describe Christ’s death is in the Scripture and in the Christian tradition that followed. I wouldn’t dismiss that. I couldn’t. But there are other metaphors. Scriptural metaphors. Gustav Aulén is more thorough than I could be on a blog. He highlights the early Church’s preference for Christ as Champion. Little did I know that this idea is making a resurgence in theologically conservative circles. And it makes me smile! Some use the idea of a new “drama” with Christ as the Hero. Timothy Keller is “entering the culture’s stories and retelling them with the gospel.” Sound familiar?

Lest you think I’m blindly jumping on the latest theological bandwagon, I’m aware of the criticisms. There are some caveats, of course. Metaphors, like theology, are always imperfect. That same seminary professor nuances it even further when he describes Aulen’s book Christus Victor:

This is the most influential book on the cross in this century. Gustav Aulén is from a Scandinavian thematic school of theology and the theme that he picked up was that of victory. He correctly saw that Christ’s death was presented as victory in the New Testament. He set that against the reigning liberal notion of his time, which was the moral influence theory. He also, unfortunately, set it against the reigning conservative view at the time that Christ died to pay the penalty of our sins and in terms of a legal picture. He was right in seeing victory, and the words “Christus Victor” mean “Christ the Champion.” Those words have come into Christian theology. We talk about a Christus Victor—Christ the Champion—motif. They have just come in, and as the blurb on the cover of the book says, “This is a theological modern classic.” It has problems as well. The good thing is he emphasized a theme that had been neglected by liberals and conservatives alike. The bad part is he said it was the only theme in Irenaeus, in Luther, and in the New Testament. He says that Hebrews is mainly about Christ the Victor. No, Hebrews is mainly about Christ the Priest and the Sacrifice. So there is a reduction in his method, but still there is a lot of good and it is a very important book. He certainly did not argue for the importance of the moral influence theory. He argued for the importance of the Christus Victor theory. He called it the dramatic theory in which Christ in His death, and especially resurrection, conquers the powers, the world, Satan, the grave, hell, the law, and any other enemy you could name—and he is right. He simply overemphasizes one correct idea to the disparagement of other correct ideas.

So Aulén recovers an ancient metaphor that was cast aside. He may be a little careless with a few facts, but his product is a good one.

Awhile back a friend recommended the Jesus Storybook to me. And as we’ve read about Goliath, Daniel, the three Hebrews in the fiery furnace, and today Joshua, I’ve used this book with my boys. My friend filled me in on another little factoid about the author today: she’s writing from this Christ as Champion perspective. No wonder the stories sound so refreshing! They all point to Christ as our Hero and what God has done for us in liberating us from tragedy!

Like I said in a previous post, insisting on foregrounding a single metaphor for Christ’s atonement isn’t really the point. The Text Itself uses several. And I just have to agree with Derek from Shark Tacos on this one (and I concluded as much in my previous conversation with Andrew):

I would say that the adequate plea for forgiveness is (apart from any theory of the mechanics we may have) simply that God offers forgiveness in Jesus Christ and we accept that offer acknowledging our need as sinners. It is not ultimately our job to explain how God brought about our salvation, it is ours to respond to it in faith.

I just love to tell the story . . . .of Jesus and His love!!

Frames of Acceptance and Frames of Rejection

Yes, we all know that Fundamentalism reads things as black and white. But there’s more to it than just that. That’s not telling the whole story.

Fundamentalism bifurcates all of life. Everything is forced into an either-or. These dichotomies are not just false in the cosmic sense. They are false to everyone outside of their boundaries. If you’re not conversant in their own reasoning, it’s nothing short of baffling. These act as rhetorical boundary markers to determine if you’re in or out of the subculture. A few I’ve heard:

• Just two choices on the shelf, pleasing God or pleasing self.
• Either Grace is irresistible and missions is irrelevant, or Grace is resistible and missions is paramount.
• Either you let God be Lord of your life or you don’t. 
• Either God controls sanctification, or the believer does.
• Either you believe you are totally evil, or you are a perfectionist. 
• Either you believe in penal substitutionary atonement, or the Cross is irrelevant.
• Either you believe in following rules, or you believe in license.

These are no different than the pesky question: “How long have you been beating your wife?” Any attempt at nuance or explanation is dismissed as unorthodox. In essence, Fundamentalism is just not comfortable with Both-Ands:

• I can both please God and please myself. I must please God above all.
• Grace is both irresistible and I’m compelled to express it.
• When you are redeemed, God is Lord of your life. You don’t “let” Him do anything.
• I work because God works.
• I am both full of sin and totally unable to save myself and a redeemed and wholly loved child of the King.
• Christ both took my punishment and gives me a new story to tell to the world.
• Love God and do what you want.

Again, I’ve done my best at creating a casuistic frame of acceptance that would resonate within the ethic of Fundamentalism. I think it’s clear that those efforts failed. It’s just too brittle of a frame of rejection.