Monthly Archives: August 2009

Augustine Our Contemporary

Posted by on August 31, 2009 1 comment

It seems a fair consensus that in Augustine’s journey to Christianity there were three major issues with which he had to deal. Certainly these could be expressed variously but they seem to come down to 1) a problem with the idea of humanity being created in God’s image (since God is absolute transcendent spirit, how could people with bodies bear God’s image?); 2) a major problem with the barbaric and violent depictions of God in the Old Testament; and 3) an intense desire to adequately explain the origin of evil.

In all this Augustine is not facing concerns far different from what most people face in considering the Christian faith today, with the exception of the first concern. The obsession with the immaterial One is certainly not in vogue today as it was in Augustine’s. However, the other two issues seem to be front and center among the questions that most modern people have if they seek to intellectually examine the merits of the Christian faith. In short, Augustine is far more of a theological familiar than a stranger when it comes to questions leading to faith. Does this show Augustine’s massive influence over the nature of Christian reflection, or is it merely a reflection of what questions of faith must normally involve? Perhaps both.

Why Education is Important

Posted by on August 28, 2009 39 comments

Because if you have no college degree, there’s a good chance you’ll end up on Fox News.

Augustine Week

Posted by on August 28, 2009 37 comments

Let me begin, appropriately, with a confession: I have never read Augustine in any thing approaching the depth that he merits. Obviously this is an unacceptable situation. To that end, I have decided to declare this coming week, beginning on Sunday, to be Augustine week. Barth and Yoder will be put aside, movies and my latest HBO series’ will not be viewed (by the way, Ben you may want to check out Carnivale at some point if you haven’t already).

For this week I will be doing a complete readthrough of the Confessions (which I’ve never done before) and I’ll attempt to read as many sections as possible from de Trinitate. So, to that end, I need some feedback from those who have read more of de Trinitate: What segements of the book are really the must-reads would you say?

Should be a good week of reading and posting. Stay tuned. And join in if you wish. Let the reading of Augustine spread!

God With Us!

Posted by on August 27, 2009 Comments Off

More from Barth’s stirring sermons:

God with us! That is too strong a contradiction, not only over against our sins and sufferings but also against the nature of our existence down to the very deepest depths of its roots. God with us! That conflicts too much, not only with our unrighteousness, but more yet, with our righteousness; not only with the atrocities of history, but more yet with history’s supposed progress and achievements; not only with the misery on earth, but more yet, with the supposed happiness and satisfaction on earth. God with us! That subjects our total human nature to a judgment, to a No, that will leave nothing left of us, and will bow us under a grace, a yes, that we cannot comprehend. God with us! That is not only a better man, but a new man; not only a beautiful world, but an other world; not only a higher life, but an eternal life. God with us! That is redemption, but real, all-embracing serious, and therefore radical redemption. That is the fire of which Jesus spoke, the fire that wants to come forth out of the glow that He started. Hence the impossibility for us to look right into the glow; hence our helplessness in the presence of Jesus, now as then. Hence the earthquake, the disquietude, the confusion which inevitably arises, when the word of reconciliation is really preached and heard. Hence the alternative (either-or) with which we are inevitably confronted when we understand what is at stake. When we come to close to the glow in Jesus. (p. 118-19)

I have come to kindle fire upon the earth…

Posted by on August 27, 2009 2 comments

Barth has an awesome sermon on Luke 12:49 reflecting on Jesus’s statement that he came to kindle a fire on the earth:

Jesus used this strong word very consciously: I am come to kindle fire. Whatever gets into fire is not only changed, but it is transmuted in a manner unheard of, into something different from what it was. Wood ceases to be wood when in the fire; it becomes ashes and gas, light and warmth. Jesus meant to say: such transmutation, such radical change is what I bring and give. Just so he purposely used that other strong word: I am not come to bring peace, but a sword, the sword that brings death, that is, not just a change and an improvement in this existence with which we are acquainted, but a transition from this existence to an entirely unfamiliar one. Let us think for a moment that that which Jesus is and that which he wants, this Immanuel! God with us! is true; that it is not simply in the Bible, and spoken by a minister in the pulpit, but that it is simply true. What then? Clearly then something new begins, something as different from all that now is as ashes, gas, light and warmth are from wood, death from life.

~ Karl Barth, “Fire Upon the Earth!” in Come Holy Spirit, 118.

This notion of radical transmutation, of the supreme novum that Jesus brings about in achieving our salvation is what we are talking about whenever we talk about “apocalyptic.”

The Power of God

Posted by on August 25, 2009 21 comments

In regard to understanding the nature of God’s power, a subject that is much misunderstood and contended over in theological discourse I have found no one as helpful as Arthur McGill. McGill’s book, Suffering: A Test of Theological Method is one of the most under-read books out there. I strongly suggest that everyone get a copy (and a copy of his other book, Death and Life: An American Theology).

In light of recent discussions I think it is worthwhile to quote extensively from McGill on the issue of God’s power. I’ve yet to find another treatment of this issue that puts everything quite as well as McGill does:

It is possible to speak of “evil” as that which contradicts the good of man. But for the Christian life it is not man but God who determines what evil is. The Bible therefore speaks of evil as that which opposes God’s will, or as that which mocks God’s power, or as that which abuses God’s goodness. If God within himself is an eternal interchange of self-giving between the Father and the Son, we must now try to see why acts that are designed to hurt and cause suffering are essentially evil. It is obvious that such acts contradict the good of man when man is a victim of suffering. but in what sense do they also stand opposed to God?

Violent suffering is the product of excessive power. It shows that one thing is able to dispose of something else, is able to break it and shatter it. It represents, therefore, the decisive way by which any agent can prove that it has power over another thing. If God had no character of his own but were simply the bearer of any and every sort of power, if he acted always to vindicate himself at the expense of other things and n that sense were the absolute intensification of all power, then he would have to be honored as the supreme agent of violence. Then all torturing and degradation, all action by which one creature uses his superior power to exploit the weakness of others and to subject them to his control and domination would be an expression of God’s kind of power.

But by his life and teachings, Jesus makes perfectly clear that the divinity active through him is not Absolute Power. That divinity is not a potentially tyrannical force that might just do anything at all, such as produce square circles or smash the world to pieces. Within himself God is the life and power and energy whereby the Father generates the Son as his perfect equal in all regards and the Son adores the Father as his perfect in all regards. Therefore, in his outward actions toward his creatures, God does not act by some other kind of life or power. The energy that informs all his dealings with men is the energy of his own being.

Thus, when God moves toward his creatures, he does not exercise his powerfulness by subjecting them to his domination, or by shattering them with his superior force so as to demonstrate their helplessness before him. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is not brute power raised to the nth degree. This God exercises his powerfulness by his giving, by how much he nourishes his creatures, by how much he communicates his own reality to them. To be sure, their being lifted by him into life may involve pain to them. But this pain is only a means for their elevation not an enhancement of God at their expense. Because of his essential nature as the loving community of Father and Son, God cannot act without conferring something of himself on those toward whom he acts.

Therefore, should God will that certain creatures dry and shrivel up, losing their vigor and life, he does not attain this by acting upon them positively with violent force, for “force is no attribute of God.”[The Epistle to Diognetus] He simple withdraws his action from them. In these terms, then, a creature’s misery and death can only be the result of God’s inaction and absence, not of his active presence.

This leads us to a judgment about the behavior of creatures. When they use force to exploit the weakness of others and by this means establish their superiority and domination over others, they are not then acting by the power of God, they are not then being vitalized by the life of God, and they are not then proceeding in accord with the will of God. In short, they belong to the realm of evil. As Jesus said:

“You know that those who are supposed to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. . . . For the Son of man . . . came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for man.” (Mark 10:42-45)

If Jesus is the revelation of the essential power and life of God, then men cannot do violence to one another for their own self-expansion within the area of his Lordship. So far as they do this, they are exercising a powerfulness that contradicts the power of God. They have turned from light to darkness. (p. 84-86)

This is as good a statement about the true nature of God’s power as you are likely to find anywhere. Too many Christians are still tempted to think God’s power merely in terms of unconstrained, raw power. As McGill shows, this is precisely the wrong way to think of God’s power. Rather God is powerful in that God gives, loves, nourishes, sustains, and transfigures. The author of the Epistle to Dignetus was indeed right that “force is no attribute of God.” Rather the power of God must always and everywhere be understood as the power of the cross and resurrection.

Imitators of God?

Posted by on August 25, 2009 65 comments

There is an undeniable stream of thought in the New Testament epistles that call believers in Christ to imitate God. The most clear of all these is Eph 5:1: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children . . .” (cf. 1 Cor 11:1; 1 Thess 1:6; 3 John 11). This stream of thought is vital, both to the Christian doctrine of God and the practice of Christian ethics and mission. Certainly our imitation of God is grounded into our incorporation into Christ by the Spirit. That is clear throughout the New Testament. The call to imitate God is not moralistic in any sense, let alone some sort of call to supererrogation. Rather it is a call to be conformed, in reliance on the Spirit of Christ, to the image of God revealed in Christ. The remainder of the passage in Ephesians bears this out explicitly: “. . . and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Eph 5:2). To imitate God is to live, to abide in the mode of Christ’s own agape which was revealed in his cross and resurrection.

The point of all this is to say that when the New Testament calls us to imitate God, it is clearly calling us to take on the agapeic qualities of Christ. For the New Testament authors, this is what God is like. To be like God is to live in and practice the radical agape of Christ through the Spirit of Christ whom God has sent to us.

As such, any image of God which seeks to curtail, modify, or circumscribe this vision of God-as-agape is to be rejected. Any portrait of God’s moral character that seeks to “balance” the love of God as revealed in Christ with God’s “other attributes” is to be rejected out of hand. The litmus test for this lies in the call to be imitators of God. Would anyone be pastorally comfortable calling people to imitate God’s supposed overflowing wrath against sinners? Of course not. The claim is then made that we are not to imitate “those” aspects of God—those are God’s prerogative, not ours, it is claimed. However, the New Testament does not make any such distinction between God’s supposed attributes. The New Testament simply calls us, as those led by the Spirit, to be conformed to God’s own moral character, which is the character of Christ. We are not called to imitate God’s “nice side” and leave God’s “dark side” alone. We are called instead simply to imitate God. And for the New Testament this means manifesting the radical agape of Christ. This is what God is like and anything that seeks to balance or mitigate this is foreign to the New Testament and the nature of Christianity itself.

In short, if your theological image of God is one that you’re not willing to call people to imitate, you probably have some false ideas about God. Any God that cannot be imitated in a way that is moral, righteous, and worthy of praise by human beings is not the God that the writers of the New Testament knew.

Threaded Comments Stay

Posted by on August 24, 2009 4 comments

Well, I think the results are definitively in:

Do You Like Threaded Comments?

Yes: 66.67%
No: 33.33%

Threaded comments have won by a landslide in last week’s poll. As such they will be staying in place. However, I have increased the number of levels down that they can go. Hopefully that will help their clarity in threads where the comments tend to multiply.

John Piper’s False God (3)

Posted by on August 24, 2009 47 comments

In answering some comments I came across some more crazy stuff from Piper on what he believes about his god and evil. Try this one on for size:

After the planes flew into the Twin Towers in New York, I was interviewed and people would ask me, “Where was God in this?” I said, “Well, God could have very easily blown those planes off course by a little puff of wind, and he didn’t do it. Therefore God was right there ordaining that this happen, because he could have stopped it just like that.” Everybody who believes in God should say that, because that is how powerful he is, as it was said of Jesus, “The winds obey him” (Matthew 8:27). And so just a simple wind by the command of Jesus would have blown those planes away and they would have crashed and 60 people would have died instead of thousands of people. But he didn’t do that. Why is it comforting to believe that?

The answer is because there are 10,000 orphans who wonder if they have a future. Will they have a future if God isn’t powerful for them? I’m coming to those families and I’m saying when they ask me, “Do you think God ordained the death of my daddy?” I say, “Yes. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. But the very power by which God governs all evils enables him to govern your life. And he has total authority to turn this and every other evil in your life for your everlasting good. And that’s your only hope in this world and in the next. And therefore, if you sacrifice the sovereignty of God in order to get him off the hook in the death of your daddy, you sacrifice everything. You don’t want to go there.”

The sovereignty of God, while creating problems for his involvement in sin and evil, is the very rock-solid foundation that enables us to carry on in life. Where would we turn if we didn’t have a God to help us deal with the very evils that he has ordained come into our lives? So yes, absolutely, I believe in the sovereignty of God and I believe in its comforting effects.

Please take note: “Where would we turn if we didn’t have a God to help us deal with the very evils that he has ordained come into our lives?” Come again? If God wasn’t the one bringing down evil on us, who would we turn to for help? It doesn’t get crazier than that.

Piper’s god is a crazy sociopath, not the God and Father of Jesus Christ. I don’t feel like I’m making any sort of stretch in saying that.

John Piper’s False God (2)

Posted by on August 24, 2009 17 comments

As already noted, for John Piper evil, suffering, and death are all ultimately determined and decreed by his god as part of his own plan for self-glorification. For Piper this is inestimably a good thing. Because God is God it is good for God to seek to magnify himself in all things. And, moreover the presence of suffering and death in the world adds to God’s glory in that through these events God’s wrath and justice are manifested in the world. This is a crucial point. God’s wrath against sin must be displayed through the inflicting of punishment in order for God’s glory to be seen.

And, since this god has determined every specific event of suffering—all for the sake of his glory—it follows that all human suffering and death that takes place is willed by him and brings him greater glory. Thus, for Piper it is of the utmost importance that, rather than blaming his god or being angry with him in events of suffering and death we ought instead to rejoice in the fact that through these displays of his wrath against sin, Piper’s god is glorified.

As such, then I submit that on Piper’s view of god it is actually immoral for Christians to be angry about suffering and death in the world. In fact, it is absolutely essential that Christians be delighted about it because anything that contributes to his god’s glory is worthy of delight. Thus, Piper is supremely inconsistent in his constant opposition to abortion. Piper’s god requires aborted babies in order that god’s wrath against sinful human beings. Remember we are all born totally depraved; the fetuses deserve what they get! However, Piper is utterly inconsistent about this, in his constant opposition to abortion:

Abortion is a God issue, and I think the first way you see that is in Psalm  139 where it says “I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (verse 14). And the language that is used is that a baby is knit together in its mother’s womb. Well who’s the knitter? The knitter is not nature. The knitter is God, which means that what’s happening in a woman’s tummy is that God is at work. God is making a human being.

Now, you don’t mess with that. You just don’t get in God’s face and say, “Let me at it! I’m going to take it out! I’m going to chop it into pieces.” You don’t do that.

And you don’t do it for God’s sake. God gives, God takes away, God makes babies. We don’t make babies. We put the pieces together through sexual relations and God causes a being that never was and now is and always will be to come into being.

In complete contradiction of his whole doctrine of god, here Piper says that in committing abortions, human being interfere with and circumvent his god’s own work, getting in the way of his god’s attempts at creating life. But how is this possible, since Piper’s god is ultimately in control of everything and, in fact, actively determines all events of human death and suffering for the sake of divine self-glorification?

The point of all of this is to again underscore how deeply demonic Piper’s  god is. Piper’s god loves to see people suffer and die because it glorifies him. Piper’s god needs and desires aborted babies. If Piper or his followers were to be consistent in their attempts to follow this god, they would praise him for every baby that is aborted. If they truly delighted in this god’s glory, they would sing songs of praise whenever a baby was aborted, whenever a bomb fell on a random home, whenever an orphan was denied care. All of these events of suffering and death glorify their god—they should love them.

The fact that Piper cannot be consistent with his view of god is just another sure sign of the false and demonic nature of the theology he espouses. And it constitutes yet one more reason why the false god of Piper should be abandoned in favor of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in the Spirit comes to us “to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.” (Isa 61:1)

John Piper’s Latest Statement

Posted by on August 21, 2009 35 comments

"In a controversial sermon yesterday, John Piper argued that gay men would be cured if they could only experience the joy of squeezing a good pair of breasts."

Credit for this one-liner goes to Ben Myers. You funny, funny Aussie.

Threaded Comments

Posted by on August 21, 2009 2 comments

Alright, I’m taking a poll here because I know people are a bit divided on this one. Do you guys like having threaded comments here or would you prefer them to be standard format?

Results are in.

More on the tornado God didn’t send against the gays

Posted by on August 21, 2009 10 comments

Greg Boyd has a good and even-handed rebuttal to John Piper’s raving comments about how God sent a tornado to warn the Lutherans not to accept gay clergy. Boyd should be respected for taking this kind of measured and rational tone with something as ludicrous as Piper’s claims. I’m sure I could take some sort of lesson from him. . .

Here’s just one of his points:

One has to wonder why God would single out the ELCA’s discussion of homosexuality as worthy of a tornado hit while by-passing so many other serious issues. To give one example, there are over 400 distinct passages encompassing over 3,000 verses in the Bible that address issues related to poverty. Compare this with homosexuality, a topic that is explicitly mentioned a total of two times in the Old Testament and three times in the New. On top of this, the most frequently mentioned reason God judged cities and nations in the Old Testament was because they failed to care for the needy. And, finally, if there’s any sin American churches fail to seriously confront, it’s this one.

In light of this, wouldn’t you assume that if God was going to send warnings and/or inflict punishment with tornados he’d strike some of the many American churches and denominations that condone, if not Christianize, greed and apathy toward the poor? Yet John would have us believe that God had his tornado skip past these churches (and a million other punishment-worthy locations, like child sex-slave houses) in order to damage the steeple of a church because the people inside were wrestling with issues related to homosexuality. If John is right, God’s priorities must have radically changed since biblical times.

More on the Karl Barth Blog Conference

Posted by on August 21, 2009 Comments Off

If any of you still haven’t been following this year’s ongoing Karl Barth Blog Conference, make sure to check it out. Here are the essays that have been posted thus far:

John Piper’s False God (1)

Posted by on August 21, 2009 30 comments

In light of some of the requests that surfaced in my last post on the danger that John Piper poses to the church and its mission, I’ll be posting, over the next little while a few reflections on precisely how his theology is dangerous and false. First off, one of the central issues arising from John Piper’s doctrine of God, which he gets from Jonathan Edwards, is the claim that God requires sin and evil in order for God to be fully manifest and glorified. Without sin and evil, God’s glory would be veiled and incomplete. In his famous book, Desiring God, Piper approvingly quotes the following segment from Jonathan Edwards’s Concerning the Divine Decrees:

It is a proper and excellent thing for infinite glory to shine forth; and for the same reason, it is proper that the shining forth of God’s glory should be complete; that is, that all parts of his glory should shine forth, that every beauty should be proportionably effulgent, that the beholder may have a proper notion of God. It is not proper that one glory should be exceedingly manifested, and another not at all.…

Thus it is necessary, that God’s awful majesty, his authority and dreadful greatness, justice, and holiness, should be manifested. But this could not be, unless sin and punishment had been decreed; so that the shining forth of God’s glory would be very imperfect, both because these parts of divine glory would not shine forth as the others do, and also the glory of his goodness, love, and holiness would be faint without them; nay, they could scarcely shine forth at all. If it were not right that God should decree and permit and punish sin, there could be no manifestation of God’s holiness in hatred of sin, or in showing any preference, in his providence, of godliness before it.

There would be no manifestation of God’s grace or true goodness, if there was no sin to be pardoned, no misery to be saved from. How much happiness soever he bestowed, his goodness would not be so much prized and admired.…

So evil is necessary, in order to the highest happiness of the creature, and the completeness of that communication of God, for which he made the world; because the creature’s happiness consists in the knowledge of God, and the sense of his love. And if the knowledge of him be imperfect, the happiness of the creature must be proportionably imperfect. (Concerning the Divine Decrees, 528, emphasis added. On page 350 of Desiring God)

Piper follows this quote up with his own hearty approval: “God is more glorious for having conceived and created and governed a world like this with all its evil” (p. 351). Think on this quite carefully. For Piper God’s glory would be incomplete without all of horrors that have taken place in the history of the world. Every instance of death, suffering, murder, rape, torture, and mutilation—God needs them. God wants them to happen because without them, he would not be fully glorified. And God’s own (monadicly conceived) self-glorification, for Piper God’s sole and utter goal in the world.

Obviously this theology is deeply incoherent and does not square with Scripture, or the church’s traditional teaching concerning evil (for Augustine and most of the church after him evil is privation, not something that could “add” to the display of God’s glory). But what is worst about it is its pastoral and ethical consequences. A God who needs evil to be himself will surely garner a people who have no interest in stopping evil or comforting those who suffer. Indeed, as the Scripture explicitly tell us to imitate God (Eph 5:1), this theology implicitly encourages Christians to perpetrate violence and suffering against those who are seen to deserve it (whether or not Piper would endorse this is not the issue—his theology logically demands this conclusion whether he admits it or not).

As such, it is vital for us to see and recognize that the God proclaimed by Piper and his ilk is a false God. An idol that desperately needs to be dethroned. The omnipotent demon that Piper worships is not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and the sooner all Christians realize this the better off we will all be.

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