Been thinking it is time for a change … but not sure what … Kingdom Come is rather temporary and kinda cheesy … any thoughts?
I’ve been thinking about The Drunken Mystic … but that might be too much like a Jackie Chan movie …
Anyway, thoughts would be appreciated.
Peace.
Well, we gotta start here, right? I mean, it is “Christianity” and all.
One of the main theological and doctrinal challenges the early Church faced was from something called gnosticism, which was kind of a Greek philosophy that found its way into the Church since Gentiles were exponentially getting saved there in the first century. Since John the Apostle was one of the later writers (the only one of the twelve to die a natural death), he deals with it the most in his Gospel and then in his letters.
But even before gnosticism, the doctrine of the person of Christ was really important. It was even important to Jesus: “Who do you say I am?” “Before Abraham was, I AM.” You know, stuff like that. Even in Paul’s letters, statements were made about Jesus that blows my mind. “He is the only potentate (power)” “Through him all things were created, and by him all things consist and have their being.” And Paul is not necessarily guarding against gnosticism there, but obviously felt the need to establish the supremacy of Christ. The Jews alone attacked the doctrine that Jesus was the Son of God, the Messianic promise, come in the flesh to establish a new Kingdom. This was a doctrine important from the very beginning of even Jesus’ own ministry.
And like everything else, there is nothing new under the sun. The issue still exists today. This is a blog, so I’m not going to go over EVERY little idea of the person of Christ, but I will give a little summary off the top of my head.
Christ is eternal and uncreated, begotten of God, present at creation, and as stated before, the focus of it. He is the only Son of God, manifested in human form, conceived in a virgin, fully God and fully man, lived a sinless and righteous life, was crucified unto death and rose again a couple days later. Now he is seated at the right hand of God and enthroned upon the hearts of those who truly love and follow Him. One day He will return to establish a culmination and eternal expression of the Kingdom that is now being spread.
God has given Christ a name above all names and therefore there is no other way by which men can be saved. Jesus is Himself the only way to true and eternal life. Every other way is death.
I could go on, but you get the idea. I could give scripture for every one of those statements, but you can get on biblegateway.com just as easily as I can.
Of course we have other “christs” that people love to believe in. He was just a good teacher, a good man, some liberal political revolutionary, or just one of many ways or gods. All in all, the problematic doctrines on Christ center on a denial of His ultimate divinity and His exclusive work because believing in those things demand that a person actually change in order to be associated with Him. We still have people who have to try to diminish who He was and is and will be in order to deny truly following Him.
Either way, the view of Christ infects everything in Christianity. That seems like a “duh” statement, but I don’t think it is focused on enough. A high view of Christ empowers the disciple and the Church to victory and love; a low view of Christ is defeatist and very worldly.
A little hint on teaching about Christ. I don’t know that you can go too far in ascribing power and might and glory to Him as a person. Statements like “I am the Alpha and Omega” and others are either hyperbole or absolutely true and only a hint in our puny brains of the immensity that is Christ. Where you you get in trouble is when you equate Him with darkness and finiteness and sin. That caused Jesus to teach on something called the “blasphemy of the Holy Spirit”, which is kinda scary, so I’d believe the other way, if I were you.
In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis’ popular argument is still the best. Either Jesus was who He said He was or He was a liar. If He was who He said He was, that necessitates a decision so extreme on our part as to seem absurd to a world that doesn’t believe. If He was a liar, then we can believe nothing of what He said. It is intellectually dishonest to pick and choose His words for a personal or political agenda and not accept the whole teaching of someone who claimed to be the only Son of the only God, THE Son of Man.
Peace.
I’ve been threatening to write this series for a while, so here goes.
I’ve been in the Church long enough to both get really charged by differences in doctrine and also pretty disgusted. You still see both extremes in modern Christianity. You get the people that just don’t care what you believe about Jesus: “You think He was an alien from Venus? Cool! I’d love to hear more about that!” And then you get the Christians that make everything heresy: “You think Jesus ate blackened fish instead of raw? Heresy!”
Obviously I’m making light, and obviously there is a balance somewhere inbetween.
Doing organic/simple/housechurch has been an interesting experience. Combined with the Hospitality House ministry I was a part of in Korea, the years have taught me that there are a lot of different people with a lot of different doctrines out there. And in a normal, neo-traditional fellowship, you’d hand them a doctrinal statement they have to sign off on and then hold them to it whether they really felt convicted about it or not since you had the control of who got to speak and teach.
But if you believe, as we do, that every true disciple of Christ has the gift of the Holy Spirit and is able to bless and contribute, even in the worship meetings, then certain personal doctrines and perspectives start to show up and either you make it a big deal or you don’t.
There are many guards against this, but for some, even in organic church, the answer is still a strict set of beliefs that you either agree with or there’s no fellowship. We don’t really have that, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t doctrines that are problematic enough to challenge and correct. And we have.
Our particular group is very diverse in doctrine. And I would guess most fellowships are pretty diverse … you just don’t get to see it because the system doesn’t allow teaching except by an ordained few. But we have people from just about every type of background.
A lot of doctrinal differences, from my experience, come down to two people who have been taught an aspect of the Kingdom and then define strict truth according to that thing that God has taught them about.
I’ll give an example. Let’s say Bob has really been studying and learning about how the Trinity is one and unified in every way. Then we have Tom who has been dealing with the three separate persons of the Trinity and how distinct they are and their roles and such. Then these people meet, both convicted of their own positions, and they are so busy calling each other heretics that they don’t realize that they are both probably right and could really learn from one another instead of contending.
Hopefully I didn’t just really offend anyone even with that example, but if I did, that would probably just prove my point.
On the other hand, there are doctrines that the early Church was really concerned about, things that when taught were considered dangerous to the Truth of Christ and His work in His people. These are dealt with in the Bible, even in some extreme cases to cut off fellowship. That’s what this series will be about.
And you know what? It might surprise you what they are and what they are not. Not to get too ahead of myself, but there is no biblical evidence that people refused fellowship over whether you believed you could lose your salvation or not. Of course I hold my belief on the issue, and I’m not even saying it’s not important, just not as important as you might think … at least if we really believe the Bible.
Anyway, you’ll get the first one tomorrow if you’re still reading this without wanting to punch me.
Peace.
Just going to focus on a couple things here today. Lot’s happening, but I don’t necessarily need to cover it all here.
I want to first comment on a very dangerous pattern from the Obama administration and, by extension, the Democratic party here in their first six months of total power.
Twice (that I’m covering here) the White House has kept independent studies under wraps until after a vote on the issue in question.
Example one. A vote coming up on a program for school vouchers. The Democrats made lots of noise how there was no evidence of its success and how they are a failure and all that. All the while there was an independent study done on the school voucher system in DC that found them very successful, and while it was ready before the vote, the White House did not release it until after.
Example two. A recent vote to raise taxes on production of energy that supposedly causes global warming came up a couple weeks ago in the House. The bill was delivered on a Friday afternoon (hundreds of pages long) and the vote scheduled for the very same Friday afternoon, which gave congressmen and women mere hours to read, respond, and try to debate a bill that would have massive impact on energy prices in a major recession. Also, that’s right, an independent study by the EPA, the government itself, saying no correlation can be proven between certain types of energy production and global warming, was witheld by the White House until after the vote.
This is a direct abuse of power to control the flow of information to push an agenda, even when the facts say otherwise. We could also talk about the hoopla and fear mongering that went on before the passage of the “necessary” “stimulus” bill … didn’t some of us learn from the last president to maybe not use fear and “crisis” language to get our country involved in something stupid? I guess the Democrats didn’t.
Meanwhile, the education of our children continues to suffer when a real solution for improvement is available, and energy prices are on the verge of skyrocketing during a deep recession based on faulty assumptions, and now our country will be trillions of dollars in debt to a spending package that has done little if anything for our economy.
This doesn’t seem to be the open, honest, transparent administration open to bipartisanship and dialogue to find the best solution. Starting out of the gate, it’s been quite the opposite.
The next thing I’d like to discuss is scapegoating. I’m fairly skeptical of any agenda, political or otherwise, that is accompanied by scapegoating.
To define, scapegoating is placing blame on an individual or group of people, in this context to justify demonizing and punishing them. Usually it is a small, easily identifiable group. And political scapegoating happens when you need to blame a group to take something away from them.
Some conservatives have done it with “Muslim extremists” and “terrorists.” Not that these are not real threats, but to use them in order to push an agenda or to restrict the freedom of others or just overreact, I’m skeptical about that.
With liberals, it is the rich. Anyone making money and being successful, no matter how deserved for hard work and ingenuity, is targeted and demonized … unless they are a celebrity that votes Democrat.
The rich are blamed for poverty and recessions and everything else under the sun. And so the rich can then be punished … mainly overtaxed and their companies overregulated. And of course they become the bad guys in most of our movies.
Are there bad men who happen to be businessmen and rich? Sure they are, but we’ve got greedy people everywhere.
And demonizing the rich doesn’t seem to take into account how many of the wealthy in our country make genuine contributions, create jobs, and are full of compassion.
Just to name two. Rick Warren, a pastor, ended up making lots of money after he wrote a successful book. He gives 90% of his income to charity. Or Truett Cathy, founder of Chic-fil-a, has more money than he can count and gives gobs of it to charity … not to mention he’s even closed one day a week and takes care of his employees better than any other fast food chain.
These are men of God who are amazing examples to us all. Of course Hollywood won’t do a movie on Truett Cathy or Rick Warren because they are men of God. They’d rather make a movie about a gay mayor.
There are more examples of rich people full of compassion and integrity and contribution, people who didn’t need the government to tell them to give.
The point is, you shouldn’t have to demonize and punish one group of people to help another, and yet that has been the liberal manifesto like they got it out of a Marxist handbook. Judging someone by the amount of income (without taking into account the character of how they spend it) is just as faceless and ignorant as judging someone by the color of their skin or nationality or creed.
And what is even more sad is that the modern neo-communist is also either ignorant or in denial of every national experiment in history to force equality of station. All it does is take away freedoms, increase the abuses and waste of government, and spread poverty instead of prosperity.
Peace.
In a weird week, both Becca and I lost our grandmothers, our mother’s mother. Arlene Force, Becca’s grandmother, died on a Thursday. My grandmother, Josephine DeWitt, died on a Sunday.
I’ll let Becca talk about her own grandmother, who for all she endured in the name of what was right, quietly, will receive great reward in heaven.
But I’d like to take some time to talk about Jo DeWitt for a moment.
She lived in West Virginia most of her adult life, although she was born in Maryland. She was the oldest of nine kids, and Jo’s mother died in childbirth along with the ninth. Jo was left as a youngster to care for all her siblings. Then at a young age she agreed to marry Harry DeWitt, my grandfather and raised five children, of which I am the firstborn son of her youngest child.
As a kid, we lived far away in a distant, flat, hot land called Alabama. Every Christmas we would make the long drive up to a different, mysterious land of mountains and snow called West Virginia. In those days we had a thing called “the radio” and we listened to such songs as “Country Roads”, singing them at the top of our lungs as the old Dodge Aspen traversed windy mountain roads to get to where my grandparents, all four of them, lived at the time. It was the 70′s. For those of you who weren’t there … it was awesome.
Jo DeWitt’s house was where we usually stayed, and for the first decade or so of my life, that was where I had Christmas morning, presents waiting for me under the tree. Christmas evening would be a grand party where the whole DeWitt clan would congregate in Jo’s house, eat fudge and sugar cookies, get rug burns from the shag carpeting in the basement, and receive presents. It was as idyllic as you can imagine. Norman Rockwell himself would have yelled “halt!” just to try and capture the moment on a canvass.
When I was younger, we called Jo DeWitt “Mom.” When I asked about this strange behavior as a child, I was told that Jo didn’t feel she was old enough (or looked old enough, for that matter) to be anything resembling a grandmother. I think she had great-grandkids before someone could wrestle her wiry frame to the ground and force her to take the “Grandmother” moniker. It was probably my cousin Jo Marie.
Which leads me to one of the most important aspects of Grandmother. Jo DeWitt was always quite the lady. She never looked frumpy or wrinkled. She held court from her recliner throne in full regalia of fashion and exquisiteness. And she liked her house to be as impeccable as she looked. She was always beautiful.
One summer my parents went to Ireland without me and left me and my brother and sister with Grandmother for two weeks or so. It was supposed to be only one week with Grandmother, but my Grandpa got sick and so the other set of grandparents couldn’t take us for the other week. My Aunt Twila did help out, but we were mostly there with Grandmother.
Our misbehaviour was off the charts, if you could ask Grandmother about it. As the years went on, how bad we were took on mythical proportions, legendary status, up there in Grandmother’s mind with Pearl Harbor and the assassination of JFK. I don’t doubt it. It was the only time I heard her cuss. But as I get older, I start to blame it more on the sugar rush from all those little pink candies she had stashed all around the house … and that she probably needed a cigarette.
Well, the years passed and families got bigger and grandparents got older, and we didn’t have the Christmas dinner together anymore. It is the natural way of things, but last week, sixteen of the eighteen grandchildren got together there in that old house with new carpeting and pigged out and told funny stories. It was the kind of healthy noise and laughter that house hadn’t had in a while.
More recently, somehow Grandmother and I got to talking about death and heaven. I told her, “Heaven is a noisy place, you know.”
To which Grandmother answered, “Oh, I hope not.” She kinda liked the peace and quiet.
My sister, Gina, and I tried to assure her she would like the noise, but we weren’t able to convince her.
As she grew closer to death, and as we all knew it was soon, names were placed on items in the house that we might want. Bicentennial plaques and naked baby paintings were claimed.
But my Grandmother had 60+ decendents (grandkids, great-grandkids, and great-great grandkids), of whom she was fond of saying, “Not a bad one in the bunch.” And I cannot disagree, honestly, when I looked out at most of them there at her funeral.
If I could put my name on something, it would be that. Next to an eternity with Christ, what better reward than to get to the end of your days, see those that have emanated from your body and say, “Not a bad one in the bunch.” I can’t think of one.
Good thing about that is … there’s room on the bottom of that one for everyone.
She will be missed. She has been missed, but praise God she’s in a much better place.
Peace.