Mark Byron

1 Samuel 16 Does not Compute

Here's an interesting passage that I had to deal with in our Sunday School lesson. It's a passage from 1 Samuel 16 that I've read before but I must have excused the cognitive dissonance that the stuff that I will put in italics is giving me now (I'll use NIV)-

¹⁴ Now the Spirit of the LORD had departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the LORD tormented him.

¹⁵ Saul's attendants said to him, "See, an evil spirit from God is tormenting you. ¹⁶ Let our lord command his servants here to search for someone who can play the harp. He will play when the evil spirit from God comes upon you, and you will feel better."

¹⁷ So Saul said to his attendants, "Find someone who plays well and bring him to me."

¹⁸ One of the servants answered, "I have seen a son of Jesse of Bethlehem who knows how to play the harp. He is a brave man and a warrior. He speaks well and is a fine-looking man. And the LORD is with him."

¹⁹ Then Saul sent messengers to Jesse and said, "Send me your son David, who is with the sheep." ²⁰ So Jesse took a donkey loaded with bread, a skin of wine and a young goat and sent them with his son David to Saul. ²¹ David came to Saul and entered his service. Saul liked him very much, and David became one of his armor-bearers.

²² Then Saul sent word to Jesse, saying, "Allow David to remain in my service, for I am pleased with him." ²³ Whenever the spirit from God came upon Saul, David would take his harp and play. Then relief would come to Saul; he would feel better, and the evil spirit would leave him.

Yes, that is an evil spirit from God. Some translations go with harmful rather than evil, but it is coming from God per the passage. That sort of shoots down the "God is good all the time" meme that we've come to know. A quick search on God's goodness comes up with Joshua 23:14-16(NIV)

¹⁴ "Now I am about to go the way of all the earth. You know with all your heart and soul that not one of all the good promises the LORD your God gave you has failed. Every promise has been fulfilled; not one has failed. ¹⁵ But just as every good promise of the LORD your God has come true, so the LORD will bring on you all the evil he has threatened, until he has destroyed you from this good land he has given you. ¹⁶ If you violate the covenant of the LORD your God, which he commanded you, and go and serve other gods and bow down to them, the LORD's anger will burn against you, and you will quickly perish from the good land he has given you."

Square that with 3 John 11(NIV)-

"Dear friend, do not imitate what is evil but what is good. Anyone who does what is good is from God. Anyone who does what is evil has not seen God."

If we take John and the two OT passages at face value, God's never looked Himself in the mirror.

We either have a much more malevolent God that we normally teach in evangelical circles or the OT passages are of another era. However, it may work well in a hell-fire-and-brimstone milieu; Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God would likely fit into the meme of a vengeful, lightning-bolt-slinging deity.

One could go with some sort of dispensationalist approach and say that the OT passages were from another era, accurate for an old-school God but not for a new covenant God. However, that throws out the "God never changes" meme out the window, since we have a God who actively delivers evil in the OT and one who can't stand the stuff in the NT.

Another route, anathema to most evangelicals, is to chuck Sola Scriptura out the window; just say that those two verses really don't mean what they're saying. However, that kicks the backstop out from under evangelical thought, once you've allowed selective editing of the Bible, all bets are off and you're quickly off into the Church of What's Happinin' Now.

I managed to fudge the issue with our three-year-old class, just focusing on Daniel being helpful as a shepherd and a harpist and casting Saul as being depressed and sad because he had second-guessed God one time too many; that got the message down to a rug-rats level without butchering the story. However, the adult message is still giving me a lot of theological indigestion.

How do you square this circle, denizens of the Peanut Gallery?

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Spaghetti Monster

This is almost a Twitterish thought

(1) People are naturally guilty; we know we're sinners even if we don't have a concept of sin per se.
(2) People long for a way to get rid of that guilt.
(3) In the absence of God, they struggle to find a way to ditch that guilt, often feeling guilty of merely existing.

For instance, I recall surfing into a History Channel show Life After People, where they look at what would happen if humans were to suddenly disappear from the picture. We already see PETA take offense at Obama swatting a fly, might the next step be people opposing antibiotics on the grounds that the microbes have just as much right to exist as we do?

Speaking of which; I recall the the old Guinness record book had On the Antiquity of Microbes as the shortest poem-"Adam had 'em."

Mother Earth becomes a stand-in for Father God for many folks, where environmentalism takes the niche that religion use to; carbon offsets can even be viewed as a modern-day penance to Gaea.

We don't have to apologize to the universe for being; Jesus already took care of that at Golgotha.

Pick-Up Jesus

I was working with the 2-year-olds on Palm Sunday today. Eileen and I run herd over the group; she does most of the logistical stuff, but I have a decent gift for telling stories in little-people terms.

How to explain the significance of the palms and the donkey? The palm branches were the loose equivalent of a red-carpet treatment, paving the path of their hero.

The donkey... well, that was a sign of humility and peace; you have lots of war horses but few war donkeys (you in the back right, no Democratic hermeneutics on that one, please). The analogy I gave is that your big shots of today would come in on a limo or other fancy car, whereas a donkey is more of a simple beast of burden, more of a pick-up truck than a limo.

Pick-up truck Jesus? Yes. He wasn't ministering to the fat cats,  but the average joes. The Beatitudes wasn't a country club lecture, but instead was aimed at comforting and encouraging the masses.

Pick-up Jesus sounds like a country-song looking to happen or a morph off of Lift Him Up or We Want to See Jesus Lifted High, but it fits His message. Some other folks have played with this analogy-here's a book "Jesus Is Coming to Get Me in a White Pickup Truck" and a poem, Jesus Drives a Red Pickup Truck.

We have the lyrics, all we need is the music.

Revisiting Charismatic Origami

What's Charismatic Origami? That's what you call a five-fold ministry ;-).

Someone from Detroit Googled (or Comcasted) in for that post with the query "can one person posses all of the 5 fold ministry gifts?"

I might be a bit late to answer, but I'm not sure what the gift of apostleship would look like. I can picture what gifts of teaching, pastoring and evangelizing would look like; many good missionaries and capital P Pastors will have all three. ]

Some may have operate in a gift of prophecy. Some may have an spiritual ear that might be given knowledge that the person has no earthly reason to know.

If that's a bit too out their for you, such a gift can also be seen in the ability to deliver existing scripture in such a way that it speaks loudly and clearly to the age; Pastor Davd has it, in my opinion, in this post on our bunker mentality in the church. He's not a Pentecostal (I might add "yet" after this other post on a Blackaby book on the Holy Spirit), but when he's on, he has a speaking-truth-to-power vibe that feels prophetic.

However, I'm really not sure how to look at having a gift of apostleship. In modern charismatic circles (not so much in capital P Pentecostals), a spiritually strong preacher can get the title as an honorific. Unlike the guidelines for elders/deacons listed in the NT, we don't have a good definition of what is and isn't an modern apostle. Here's one Pentecostal guy who's made a stab at it; it would seem to be indicative of some sort of super-preacher who has the ability to lead and advise other pastors and to operate boldly in the Spirit, working miracles.

I'm not sure I'd trust folks who would look to be given the title of apostle, since the NT folks are a very hard act to follow. Self-proclaimed apostles, or ones christened such by other modern apostles, tend to be loose theological cannons; in charismatic circles, apostles seem a dime a dozen, a bit like a Kentucky Colonel.

You may have a loosely-defined office of apostle, but it seems to be something other than a gift per se. The other four ministries can be both office and giftings, but I don't think apostle would be a gift; if we have it, it would be a recognition of who the person is rather than what they do in particular. However, given the problems revolving around self-styled apostles in the modern day, I'd rather leave that honorific back in the first century.

Creation Wars: Hiding a Bigger Issue?

A bit of a flap is happening north of the border, as science minster Gary Goodyear is under fire for not whole-heartedly backing evolutionary theory. Damian Penny has some bloggage on the issue from his secular-libertarian standpoint. The general gist, which we've seen south of the border as well, is that religious conservatives are anti-science if they don't buy into evolution.

One thing that crossed my mind this afternoon is that scientists might have a different reason to shout out any doubts on evolution is that it brings the prospect of a personal God into the mix. Whether a boss goes with a literal young earth creation stance or buys into Darwin hook, line and sinker is actually secondary; it is more of a marker of whether you're going to bring a tighter set of ethical standards to the mix that will give a researcher a bit less freedom to maneuver. Interestingly, it would most likely not be in the realm of evolutionary biological research.

I've yet to hear anyone state that theologically conservative folks in authority have vetoed research on the grounds that it's advancing evolutionary theory. A creationist would probably like to see more research, for it will (if they are right) find more holes in naturalistic evolutionary theory that only a Creator can fill. It may cast doubts on young-earth creationism, that things seemed to take longer than six literal days to do, but it should settle the issue eventually.

What I think (warning-very broad brush) scientists are more worried about with a creationist is that the creationist, by definition, will generally believe in a capital G God that has moral standards. That's going to make some research problematic, if it runs afoul of a naturalistic utilitarian paradigm. Embryonic stem cell research is one area that this shows up, but it also extends to various end-of-life issues, where utilitarians are quick to want to pull the plug on negative NPV projects people.

A creationist boss will have tighter ethical standards on research than on average, at least one that buys into the idea of a hands-on God. That, rather than the debate on how life got started and came to be in its present form, seems to be what worries the naturalistic side of the aisle.

At least that's what's floating through my head at present. Is there something to that idea?

Funky Worms

Eileen and I had lunch out at Olive Garden this afternoon, with Eillen having chicken Alfredo. That always brings me back to a classic Far Side cartoon where (if memory serves) the bird at the restaurant exclaims "This is pasta! Who got my Worms Alfredo?"

It also brought me to the quip that Catholics used to get by on a Diet of Worms. I remembered the term and vaguely recalled that it was of the counter-Reformation era holding a mental placeholder close to the Council of Trent, but had to look up the details. As it turns out, it was where the Catholic establishment in Germany officially declared Martin Luther heretical after calling him in and having him stand by his heterodox (at least by 16th century Catholic standards) writings.

One interesting note is that the German origional per Wikipedia is the Reichstag zu Worms. History buffs will note at Reichstag was the term for the German legislature in the early 1900s; it was the Reichstag fire of 1933 that was used an excuse for the Nazis to start taking dictatorial control.

I hadn't thought that Diet in that context was a synonym for congress, even though we hear about the Japanese Diet as their legislative branch.

Oh, in case the title gave you an earwig, here's the Ohio Player's classic.

21 Theses

Here is an interesting post from Michael Spencer, a.k.a. the Internet Monk. He's been running a Jesus-Shaped Spirituality sub-blog for a while and has a new post on the IM blog describing 21 characteristics answering the question "What does Jesus-shaped spirituality look like?"

There is a lot of food for thought, the vast majority of it good and none of it bad to my eye. Point 18 looking for a "...hopeful, optimistic eschatology of the Kingdom of God..." might not sit well with Left Behind-style premillennialists, but it looks like a church most of us would like to hang out in.

The one thing that gets at me is a focus on one third of the Trinity, that (if I can use some of Eileen's seminary-speak) seems a bit too Christological. Part of that might be a clash between Spencer's Baptist background and my Methodist-raised, charismatic-leaning background. Baptist are very Jesus-centric, while my Methodist upbringing (emphasis on my, Rev's Hall and Heyduck; your mileage may vary) tended to be more generically theistic and charistmatics will have an increased focus on the Holy Spirit.

"What's wrong with being Jesus-centric?" I hear from various sides of the Peanut Gallery. Sorry if I hear it with a drawl that begs a Jeff Foxworthy "Nothin' wrong with that."

First, He's who came down to die for our sins and demands both respect and worship.

Secondly, he's our example of what the rest of the Godhead looks and acts like; just like the identical twins Juan and Amal, if you've seen Juan, you've seen Amal.

Thirdly, focusing on Jesus and what He did for us is a remedy for a lot of heresy that focuses on either denying His divinity, denying His equality with the Father or denying the need for His death on the cross; most heresies start with one of those and a lot of modern liberal Christian shortcomings can flow from downplaying one or all of those.

Fourthly, living things out missionally, being the Body of Christ, being "Jesus to the world" as the song goes, is best done using Jesus' life as a template for proper ministry.

So, we could do far worse than being Jesus-shaped. My personal bias would be to use God-shaped and to make sure to keep the Holy Spirit in the loop, but it's not a bad direction to lean towards. A Spirit-shaped spirituality can wind up going off on butt-ugly tangents a la Todd Bentley, while a Jesus-shaped one is a bit less prone to theological error.

Jesus-shaped and Spirit-led? That might work.

I'll likely be coming back to that post for more food for thought; it's one honkin' big buffet of spiritual thought.

A Modular Faith

Here's an interesting finding from Barna's latest research (hat tip to Richard at Bandits no More)-

By a three to one margin (71% to 26%) adults noted that they are personally more likely to develop their own set of religious beliefs than to accept a comprehensive set of beliefs taught by a particular church. Although born again Christians were among the segments least likely to adopt the a la carte approach to beliefs, a considerable majority even of born again adults (61%) has taken that route. Leading the charge in the move to customize one’s package of beliefs are people under the age of 25, among whom more than four out of five (82%) said they develop their own combination of beliefs rather than adopt a set proposed by a church.

One of the interesting aspects of modern evangelical life is that people belong to churches that they agree with rather than agree with the churches they belong to. If you changed denominations as an adult, you're more likely to have moved to a church that matches your doctrine than to have your church mold your doctrine.

For instance, I'm hanging my hat at present at a Southern Baptist church. Is my flavor of Christian doctrine based on the Baptist Faith and Messagedoctrinal statement? No, but the BFM makes a decent run of expressing an orthodox evangelical doctrine.

Can good teaching mold one's core beliefs? Yes, especially if you've been raised in a particular church. However, the similarities between most evangelical churches make it easy to adapt. There is a core faith that makes a basic model which we add features to like a car or computer.

Do you want Calvinist bucket seats or Arminian bench seats? OwnStar prophetic guidance system? Young-earth rim wheels? Padeobaptist sprinklers or a credobaptist spa/dunk tank? All of the above can be add-ons to the evangelical basic mini-van model.

Changing churches will mean either adding a feature or stowing a feature or two, but the basic model doesn't change much. It comes with Jesus as Lord and Savior standard, a Trinitarian drive system, Bible Steering and a Holy Spirit shock absorber system. Those basics make it easier for people to make minor changes.

 

 

Paul and Palin

This WaPo piece got in my craw yesterday, especially since Eileen and I have officially joined our local Baptist church. Author David Walters can't get the idea that folks like Gov. Palin are OK to conservatives as secular leaders but not OK as church leaders; he's dwelling on The Baptist Faith and Message's male-only stand on pastors.

It always has amused me that there seems to be only one fundamental on which the male leaders of conservative Roman Catholic, evangelical and pentecostal Protestant, Mormon, Orthodox Jewish and Muslim denominations all agree: A woman cannot lead their congregations or denominations.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, yes. The Right Rev. Margaret Thatcher, no. President Mary Robinson, yes. Rev. Mary Robinson, no. Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, yes. Imam Benazir Bhutto, no. Prime Minister Prime Minister Golda Meir, yes. Rabbi Golda Meir, no. President or Vice President Sarah Palin, yes. Pastor Sarah Palin, never.

How do these guys keep a straight face? How do they explain this to their American daughters: "Honey, in America you can grow up to be anything you want, except the pastor of our church."

Well, sir, its something called the Bible. We try to take it at face value. Here's my take on woman's ordination from July. Here's my conclusion-

It's an easier exegesis to say that Paul thinks women ministers would be a bad idea than to try to loophole your way to a co-ed ministry. It also doesn't help that the churches that do allow women pastors tend to be the churches that are the least orthodox on their theology. When Paul's position on women is ignored, a lot of his other positions on salvation and discipleship also get thrown under the bus as inconvenient stuff from another era.

The egalitarian side of me would like to see a co-ed pastorate. However, the Bible-reader seems to come to the conclusion that it isn't quite right. That's not to say that women can't minister effectively, but that they'll often be doing so in a church that typically doesn't respect the Gospel in its entirity.

Most folks of my generation have become egalitarian, willing to accept any competent person as a potential elected official. For instance, I won't be voting against Barack Obama because he has a black dad; that's actually a selling point. I'll be doing so because his stance on the issues will be leading us in the wrong direction on most issues of contention.

We've come to understand that we'll occasionally be taking orders from a woman in a secular setting. The outgoing academic dean here at Sullivan U (my boss' boss) is a woman, my Smarthinking supervisor is a woman and my boss when I worked at Hurley Medical Center was a woman. Eileen pointed out the the CEO of her firm is a woman. If you're going to insist on male authority up your entire chain of command, you're going to serverly limit the places you can work, not to mention the states like Alaska and Michigan than have women governors.

Also, even the Pauline epistiles that are used to defend a male pastorate have primarily a church application. Not everyone agrees with me on that (thanks to Matt Brown for the link), but trying to use that kind of heumanutic to bar women from any leadership position will make you unemployable in this culture; at least I'd be hard pressed to find an all-male leadership team in this day and age outside of a very small business.

I don't think Paul is envisioning Sarah Palin here in his take on woman church leaders. There were occasional female leaders in the Old Testament like the judge Deborah and occasional foreign ruling queens. Once he got the idea of representative democracy down and the idea that everyone's allow to vote and serve, Paul might be cool with Palin.

Of course, he'd have a bit of Archie Bunker in him from his first-century upbrining, so I might be wrong.

However, the thing going for Palin is that the Archie Bunkers in the electorate are going to have more issues with Obama than they will with her, both on ethinic background and on politics. I'm looking at a very small percentage (1% would be high) who'll vote for Obama because there's a woman on the other ticket. They might do so if it's a doofus woman on the other ticket, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Where "Christian" and "Bethlehem" are Dirty Words

The first part of the title is a bit of joke, since Christian needs to be followed by Laettner to be a dirty word in Lexington (the former Duke center and 1992 Olympian hit a famous buzzer-beater that beat UK in 1992's NCAA quarterfinals).

Bethlehem is another such word. If followed by Baptist, it raises hackles in some anti-Calvinist circles, since Bethlehem Baptist in Minneapolis is John Piper's church. Piper is probably the most noted of Baptist thinkers pushing a more Reformed theology; here's a Christianity Today piece on him from 2006.

Anyways, we have at Victory Baptist a good new worship pastor from Minny-sota, yah, you betcha, named Tim Stokes.

Tim had an early interest in and passion for worship. While completing a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Minnesota, he led worship as a volunteer at Bethlehem Baptist Church. Tim then moved into a part-time worship position at Faith Baptist Church in Minneapolis from 2001-2008. At the same time, he also owned & operated a computer networking business.

After a season of wrestling with the Lord, he sensed the Lord was calling him to pursue worship ministry as a vocation. His heart for worship ministry is rooted in his conviction that “We were made to be worshippers for eternity, to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. The goal of my life is to do all I can to encourage others in this pursuit.”

For folks fearful of Cal-vin-is-em creeping into the church, a Bethlehem Baptist pedigree is fighting words. Enough so where our pastor left the fact off the resume that got shown at church when Tim was getting hired so that he didn't set certain factions off; the anti-Calvinists in the pews got upset when they found it on his bio after he came on board, despite having a mainstream Baptist theology. Pastor David has had to apology last week for that bit of editing.

I knew about Piper coming in; that 2006 piece had been on my radar when it was out and had read of him in the evangelical Blogosphere, but didn't know that Bethlehem was his church. Since I had "Minnesota" in my mental Piper file, I was about 80% sure it was Piper's church, but had to Google to double-check.

If you want to spook a anti-Calvinist some more, I can point out that "to glorify God and enjoy Him forever" is a lift from the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

Q. 1. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God,[1] and to enjoy him forever.[2]

Yes, the advantages of having a wife who went to a Presbyterian seminary; my Reformed knowledge went up a bit hanging with her for six years.

That scares me a bit, that (1) we'd have a big chunk of a church that is scared of Reformed theology and (2) it's a big enough chunk where the pastor feels led to edit a resume to shield an otherwise good hire from unfair fire. Especially when I have a wife who has a strong Reformed background and I lean in that direction.

It seems like many Southern Baptists work at defining themselves by what they aren't as opposed to what they are. They aren't Calvinists, they aren't Pentecostals, they aren't modernists or post-modernists.

Thankfully, other folks, like Tim Stokes and David Head, are busier being evangelical Christians who are also Baptists; if anything, Tim's worship style leans a bit towards the charismatic without being outside of Baptist propriety. Hopefully that won't set anyone off.

There was a time last week when I heard the above story that I wanted to walk out; if there's a big chunk of the church who would have issue with Piper, they'll have issues with Eileen and I. However, the people who'd like to pie Piper aren't the church, and the people in charge seem to work at being evangelical Christians first and foremost and are Baptist second.

The Runaway Host Post

The Eucharist has been in the news as of late, after a UCF student pocketed a consecrated wafer last month and getting some death threats for his stunt; he's in the process of getting kicked out of the student Senate. Evolution maven PZ Meyers stirred the pot a bit more, blogging about looking to score a wafer in order to desecrate it.

It's always a bit amusing to see secular folks trashing Catholic stuff, like militant gay-rights activists sabotaging services. If you wanted to fight fire with fire, what would you do? There isn't anything a secular person treats as sacred. You can't hang a condom in effigy in retaliation or soak a copy of The Origin of Species in holy water as payback to Meyers; it would be a waste of good water, anyway.

The question that comes to mind for me as a non-Catholic is this; when does the wafer become the Body of Christ? Since you need a priest to properly do a Eucharist (if I understand Catholic doctrine correctly), would it become transubstantiated (if I can verb that) sometime during the service, possibly when he holds it up and declares "The body of Christ"?

For instance, you can buy communion wafers in bulk; if you bought a case of 1000 wafers, do you have a thousand Bodies of Christ? Probably not. For $14.95 plus shipping, Meyers can have a field day and build a mural of the Ascent of Man out of painted wafers, except they haven't been consecrated.

To question the point further, what is the status of the wafers that weren't used in that service? There are most likely going to be some spares; one would think that they're ordinary wafers until getting called into action during the Eucharist.

If a consecrated wafer gets pocketed, like in the UCF case, it is still the Body of Christ in his pocket, or does the host get untransubstanciated once it gets out of its proper role?

Consider this a shout-out to the Catholics in the Peanut Gallery; I don't want to be too flip, for I understand that the Eucharist is the centerpiece of Catholic worship, where the Church interacts with Jesus in a real way that reaches across time and space. If I understood the majesty and mystery of that a bit better, I might think about crossing the Tiber, for it's something that Protestants (especially Evangelicals; some liturgical churches have a high view of Communion) lack.

I know that the folks who are issuing death threats are overreacting; that's a given. However, the hue and cry over a pocketed wafer seems overblown. My first thought is that Jesus is a big boy and can fend for Himself, ask Ananias and Sapphira.

Feel free to give me a second thought.

Pre-Modern Preaching in a Post-Modern World

On our trip last week, we would up staying overnight in Pensacola. As we were having breakfast at the hotel, I saw a old-school Smyrna Baptist Church across the street. As I remember, the sign had out front had this 2-by-3 grid of distinctives.

Fundamental                           Evangelical

Independent                           Missionary

KJV 1611                               Traditional

Thanks for the last one, Sherlock; I wasn't sure if I might find a happening praise band in a King-James-only self-defined fundamentalist church ;-).

The Gospel is getting preached there, if their Web site is any indication. However, it doesn't exactly seem seeker-friendly, where people who don't come from a old-school independent Baptist background would be drawn to them.

The adjective "pre-modern" comes to mind for where Smyrna is at; their theology is flash-frozen at about 1930, where the majority of people in town were theological conservatives, modernity was seen as a corrupting influence, and new translations of the Bible were seen as corrupting and watering-down the Gospel, thus leaning them back to the un-watered-down King James as their linchpin. When most people bought into a old-school take on things, you can get by in your spiritual rhetoric to hearken  back to Biblical basic without having to do a lot of convincing.

One of the problems I see with a lot of Southern Baptist rhetoric is that they often come at things in such a pre-modern mind-set; "The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it." That's well and good, but such rhetoric will often leave a modern listener unmoved. The post-modern, who doesn't get the concept of the capital-T Truth that can be found in the Bible, has tuned you out five minutes ago. The modern listener, who goes by more of a scientific, hypothesis-testing framework, wants you to reason with them rather than get dictated to.

For instance, rhetoric on creation can leave people cold if they aren't being reasoned with; for a modern listener, discussion of intelligent design, where you can point out the ain't-gonna-happen odds of life developing on its own without some outside guidance, is going to work far better than pounding them over the head with Genesis. However, folks who learned their rhetoric in a pre-modern framework will tend to just state their chapters-and-verses a notch louder rather than try to reason with the modern listener.

That type of reasoning can be done within a orthodox Gospel-preaching context. One good book on that line is Josh McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict, that looks to rationally walk through the Bible and supporting documents of the era to make the case for the Gospel. For instance, you can back up the Resurrection by pointing out that if Jesus' body didn't go bye-bye, somebody's got the corpse. If the Romans or the Jewish authorities had the body, they could squash the new Christian faith in the bud by producing the corpse of Jesus. If the early church folks hid the body, they died martyr's deaths for a bold-faced lie, which seems unlikely. That leaves the historic version of a risen Christ the past of least resistance, since any other option would have people acting very strangely if they were in possession of the corpse.

Moderns want to be reasoned with. Post moderns want to experience God, not just hear about him; for the post-modern, you're going to witness best with your life, letting the observers "taste and see that the Lord is good" through how you walk the walk.

Bloggers are used to debate and fact-checking; old-school Baptists sometimes aren't. That's probably why a lot of Baptist pastors and officials are uncomfortable with blogs, since they have to use lines of reasoning and presentation that they're not used to having to deal with. They're often used to dictating to people and have to adjust when folks don't say "How high?" when they say "Jump."

We're in a world where most folks have to be persuaded into jumping into the River of Life; drill sergeant preaching doesn't cut it anymore.

Godly Self-Esteem?

We had to go to the southern side of Houston for the baptismal service yesterday, and scooted down US-59 past Lakewood Church's  new digs at the old Summit basketball stadium downtown; that's Joel Osteen's joint.

I was reminded of a verse from Steven Curtis Chapman's Blind Lead the Blind-

There's a preacher in a nice church
Anchored in the heart of town
People flock to hear his eloquent delivery
He talks of Jesus how he can please us
But the cross cannot be found
Makin' theory out of facts until they're all deceived
And the lost lead the way
And more hearts are led astray

In the past, I pictured such a church as being one of those old-brick mainline churches, where traditional theology has been chucked out the door in order to fit into modern culture; the need for a personal Savior that has moral standards that need to be followed is what generally goes in such churches.

However, a lot of mainline churches have adopted a Social Gospel ethic of helping the poor and railing against middle-class hedonism. Such orthopraxy isn't bad, but needs to be matched with orthodoxy, a theology that maintains the classic Gospel of a savior that died for us and a human sinfulness that needs to be died for and personally responded to.

What Osteen does is maintain orthodoxy (on the basic points of faith, he's a fairly orthodox evangelical) and shoves communal orthopraxy out the airlock. His message is of self-help with the Holy Spirit's help, of using scriptural truths to improve our lives rather than focus on improving the lives of others, of focusing on what the Holy Spirit can do rather than what Jesus did on the cross. That's a more pleasing Jesus than what your stereotypical brimstone-merchant Baptist would bring to the table.

There are a lot of people who lack self-confidence and need an ego boost from a preacher that holds up the Bible and says to folks that you're created in God's image, that He don't make junk and that God will equip you to do the things He said his believers will do. Is that half Dr. Phil and half old-school Gospel? Yes. However, it seems to scratch a big enough itch in Houston where the church generates enough cash flow to pay for a nine-figure overhaul of their new stadium-church.

I run into a lot of night students in my college teaching job that lack confidence that could us a bit of that positive attitude. It does set people up for disappointment when the real God delivers a bit slower than the Osteens of the world advertise. That doesn't mean there isn't a place in the American spiritual marketplace for some spiritual confidence-building.

Thus, I was taken a bit aback by Randy McRoberts' suggestion of anti-Osteen theological sabotage at the bookstore. We could use better books that Osteen's on how to gain confidence in yourself as a child of God, but there is a niche that he his filling; it's up to more orthodox Christian to come up with a better way of expressing that love of God to the struggling folks, of providing a sense of godly self-esteem that doesn't flow from a Word-of-Faith theology that misrepresents God.

God's Two Minute Drill?

I'm still wrapping my mind around Todd Bentley. I haven't watched any footage of the revival as of yet, but I got a snippet of his preaching in this YouTube of Bentley at Toronto via Phoenix Preacher.

He reminds me a bit of Mike Warnke, the Christian comedian/preacher of the 1980s, whose backstory of Satanism and drug-dealing proved to be fabricated. I'm not suggesting that Bentley's checkered pre-conversion past is made up, but his exuberant preaching style reminds me of Warnke, who was a hot commodity on the CCM circuit in the 80s before his keister got fact checked. Such colorful histories make for great "testimonies."

What concerns me about Bentley is his view of God, which seems a notch away from mine.

In the YouTube piece at about the 4:30 mark, he talks about a vision where he's snatched up out of a church service he's attending; "I'm in heaven on an operating table and ... I think I'm in an autopsy room or something." He gets tied down to the table by four angels, sawed him open with a miter saw, gutted him, and start taking small white boxes and stuff Bentley like a turkey; here's my stab at a transcript-

...and I heard the verse "I desire truth in the inward parts."
I said "God, what's happening here?" and He said

"Todd, this is something that I'm doing in the church today. It's an acceleration. I'm supernaturally imparting the character, the revelation and the knowledge that I need the church to have so that they can do the work that I need them to do, because the laborers are few."

He said "I don't have the 30, 40 years to prepare a vessel.  Moses, 40 years, 80, years, I don't have that; I'm doing something quick. There's going to be people who get saved and I'm going to open them up and supernaturally place inside of them ten years of knowledge and wisdom and even character because of the fruits of the Spirit. These boxes represent character attributes."

Can that happen? Yes; I'm not one to put God in a box.

Is that happening? I think not. I don't think that God has to run a two-minute drill in order to equip His people. God is beyond time and knows what He'll need down the line.

It's long been a shtick among preachers, especially those of a premillennial take on things, to focus on now being the time; you can't tell when Jesus is coming back, and he's coming back soon, so we need to save all the people we can before they all get left behind when the Rapture comes. Pentecostal premillennialists will add the idea that signs and wonders will kick up a notch when the end is near, and the end must be near if all that stuff is happening.

However, this seems to be going beyond that and portraying a God who's having to run a no-huddle offense. That seems to run counter to the classic concepts of God as omniscient and omnipotent; He can act in a hurry, but shouldn't need to act in a hurry.

Later on in the tape, Bentley talks about a major manifestation of the Spirit at his hotel room after the conference and notes that things were so intense, the room above his caught fire. God's not a god of collateral damage; He or His angels can work at point X without harming point Y next door or above it.

I can live with people getting "slain in the spirit" and getting healed miraculously; it happened in the Bible and has been know to happen from time to time today. A lot of people will train their fire at such Pentecostal stuff, but I don't think that's the problem with Bentley in the long haul.

What I see as wrong with Bentley is that he pictures a God that's a loose cannon. Yes, like the line about Aslan, God isn't safe, but He's good, but the God I've grown to know has that cannon firing with laser-beam precision. He doesn't need no steenking spotters to direct fire.

Bentley's version of God is running late, creates collateral damage and has to make up for lost time. It looks a lot like the god of Open Theism, where their deity has an unclear view of the future and may have to call an audible now and them when things don't go by plan. It may well be that some of his visions are more internally inspired than divinely inspired; Bentley seems to be missing the mark on that vision story.

You can't run a hurry-up offense all game long without a lot of substitutions; people burn out after a while. The same tends to happen with people who buy into that the-future-is-now mentality and through everything into furthering the revival.

Having a sense of urgency about serving the Lord's not bad; it beats the heck out of the rest of us, who are mostly sitting on our hands. I recall the quip from DL Moody about liking the way he did evangelism better than the way the critic didn't do it. However, such revivals have a way of burning people out, especially when the rhetoric and prophecies about a grand future for the move of God start to not live up to reality.

Revivals are fun, but we have to come back from the mountaintop and live our daily lives. It's living out things in a sustainable level that will be difficult for the revivalists to do and what scares me a bit about Bentley and company.

It's OK to huddle, to think, to absorb and take time to discern. It's easy to jump into the next New Thing, especially if you're in a charismatic culture that thrives on such stuff; it's hard to check whether a preacher's visions are from God of from last night's burrito, especially when you're conditioned to be open to New Things.

However, such new things need to be of God if they're to be followed. Bentley might cite a nice piece of scripture from Psalms in his vision, but it doesn't mean that his vision may well be a personal collage of CSI and badly-done Arminian theology.

God can use flawed characters, but we need not follow every burrito-burp; check out how a teaching meshes with Scripture and what you already understand of God before taking a preacher at face value. They're human.

In Bentley's case, his God is a bit too much of a loose cannon and has a bit too much emphasis on immediate response and action. He might be used by God in some ways, but I'd be leery of taking stock in him as a pastor and someone to follow.

I left a Vineyard church  here in metro Lexington we were looking at making our church home when they started to get too hyped up about the Lakeland Revival; I don't quite trust Bentley and I don't trust pastors who put too much trust in him. That's not to say that good things aren't happening in Lakeland; I just can't quite buy into Bentley's theology for the long-haul.

Salvation and a Fuller Gospel

I think I may have my blogging muse back after a rough patch. Let's put it back on the road with the beginning of a discussion that takes me back to a Michael Spencer post from last week where he rips "Christless preaching."

In fairness, the sermon was on an older testament story, but I am holding the preacher responsible for somehow preaching a Christian sermon, not a motivational talk.

...

Let me suggest that if the sermon I heard represents what we have to look forward to in evangelicalism, then being post-evangelical means that Jesus matters, the Gospel is the Biblical good news and faithfulness to either requires an intentional removal from what is happening in evangelicalism. Post-evangelicalism is a place to stand in the midsts of a tide that has washed everything out and left the flotsam and jetsam of a crumbling, degraded culture on the beaches of a vacillating, deluded church.

When a preacher can stand in the pulpit, hold the Bible, represent a significant church and the training of a major school, claim to expound the meaning of the Bible and never even once mention Jesus or the Christian good news at all, there’s something monumentally wrong at work.

“Houston, we have a problem….Jesus has left the sermon.”

Not entirely. The God of the Old Testament includes Jesus as part of the Godhead. Jesus didn't start existing in Mary's womb, He goes back to Day 1 and before.

However, the incarnate Jesus who died on the cross for us is a no-show in such sermons, and Baptist custom is that every sermon should have some sort of evangelistic content; while Spencer is a bit of a maverick Southern Baptist, he's a Southern Baptist nonetheless. In the Southern Baptist churches I've been in over the years, part of the closing altar call will include a call for people wanting to be publicly come forward and proclaim Jesus as their Lord and Savior. It's awkward to slap that at the end of a sermon that doesn't have much evangelistic content.

Should every sermon be required to have a overtly evangelistic message, just in case unchurched and unsaved Joe Schmoe wanders in that day (and that day only) and has that one shot at hearing the Gospel? If you give him a nice sermon on one of God's attributes out of the Old Testament or a Holy Spirit-centric sermon out of one of the epistiles, he might not hear that Jesus died for his sins.

That's entirely possible, but unlikely in our culture. If Joe caught a Jesus-free sermon at that church, he's likely to be witnessed to in some other fashion along the way at other services or by other people crossing his path.

Salvation is very important, and the focal point of the Gospel, but it isn't the entirety of the Gospel. Discipleship is also important, as is learning about God in His entirety, including the Father and the Holy Spirit.

One interesting footnote on that front comes from Willow Creek, the home of seeker-friendly, moving towards a discipleship of mature believers format; Matthew Lee Anderson has this comment-

Fundamentally, seeker sensitive churches are built on the premise that the mission of the church is to win new converts.  By subordinating all discipleship and church activity to this end, seeker-sensitive churches fail to acknowledge the intrinsic goodness of the fellowship of the people of God.  In other words, they miss out on the eschatological character of the Church–there is no “Church triumphant” in the seeker-sensitive ecclesiology, as the Church exists fundamentally to win converts rather than to encounter and worship the Living God.

The difference is, I think, crucial.  If the ultimate end of the church is saving people, then the only adequate basis for those activities that do not immediately result in salvation–and here I think of the creation and promotion of art–is the salvation of lost souls. However, if the goal of the church is to experience Holy Communion–that is, to dwell in the presence of Jesus Christ, through his Spirit, as His body–then art, music, dance, business, etc. need no further justification for their existence.  The church can engage in them because they are human activities and intrinsically worthwhile.

This is, I think, the chief deficiency of a seeker-sensitive ecclesiology, and many evangelical ecclesiologies.  When non-believers become Christians, what type of life have they been saved to? A life of saving other non-believers is good, but ultimately insufficient, for it is not the sort of life that one can–or will–live in heaven.

That's not to say that Southern Baptists are "seeker-sensitive" but they are salvation-centric. If you don't work on what it means to be a Christian once your saved, you have a lot of loose cannons that are saved but have no clue how to interact with God and their fellow man other than to get folks to recite the same prayer they just went through.

Salvation is important, but it isn't the entirety of the Gospel. My mind goes to the euphemism "Full Gospel" that some Pentecostal types use to describe themselves, insinuating that garden-variety evangelicals avoid the parts of the Gospel that include the Holy Spirit as a hands-on day-to-day player in our lives today.

An overly-salvation-centric Gospel presentation (yes, there can be such) will underplay discipleship and learning about God as a whole. Most folks don't have that problem, since a salvation message isn't PC, requiring folks know both that they are sinners in need of a savior and that a Savior is there at the ready to accept them as-is. It's easy to sugar-coat that issue in a secular setting, but it's also easy to get off on a fire-and-brimestone tangent, where we focus on our sinfulness and our need of a risen Savior.

An Indivisible God

In mathematics, irrational means a number that can't be expressed as a fraction of two integers, that can't be expressed as a ratio. There are plenty of irrational numbers; square roots are often irrational, and the numbers pi and e are irrational as well.

That doesn't mean that such numbers are irrational in the logical sense of lacking rationality. You just can't boil them down to a fraction.

I likened God to the number e in an earlier post, which brought the comment "How can you say that God is irrational?"

God isn't irrational in the logical sense, but is too complex to boil down to a fraction. God's infinite, so doing anything mathematical on infinity is problematic. e's timeless property of being its own derivative was my poetic device for understanding how to incorporate God into marginal analysis.

However, God does divide in three without losing anything. He's both indivisible and three at the same time; you want irrational, there's irrational.

Yet that irrationally-divided God is the source of all rational thought. Not everything needs to make sense to a math major in order to make sense.

God on the Margin

I was teaching my Managerial Economics class last night and was working on a profit-maximization problem with my class. In such cases, you find your profit-maximizing point where your marginal profit equals zero, or alternatively, where your marginal revenue equals your marginal costs.

However, I was working with a profit function in the example. To find the marginal profit, you have to take the derivative of the profit function.

A quick Calculus for Dummies: A derivative states what amount of change is happening in a function at a given point in time. For a straight line, the derivative would be the slope, so that the derivative of 4-6x would be -6 and the derivative of  5+3x would be 3.  Quardratics get a bit funkier, so that the derivatives of 3+4X-5X² would be 4-10X and the derivative of  2+6X-0.3X² would be 6-0.6X; the basic rule is that constants drop out, anything times a simple X turns into the leading number and stuff in the form of aXⁿ turns into nax^(n-1). Our profit function "jumps the shark" and hits a maximum point when it hits a slope/derivative of zero.

The punster that I am, I quickly asked whether Muslim economists would be allowed to take the derivative of the profit. The two Arab students in class laughed along with the rest of class; no fatwas are out on me as of yet. It's well known that pictures of the Prophet are off limits to good Muslims, so could you take the derivative of the Prophet?

Bringing the concept into the Christian realm, I wondered what the derivative of God would be. If God is a constant, God drops out of any equation. Thus, God isn't a factor in any marginal decision-making if He's merely a constant.

However, God is always a factor, or at least should always be a factor. God isn't a constant, He's e.

That's not a typo. e is a number, like pi, an irrational number that's 2.71 to two digits. It's what you get if you did (1+1/n)ⁿ as n goes out to infinity. In finance, we use e for continuous compounding; the future value of a dollar at i% per period for n periods is (1+i)ⁿ for conventional compounding, but eⁱⁿ for continuous compounding.

e is thus a timeless number, having some potent applications. In calculus, the derivative of e^x is e^x. It's it's own derivative. If you have e^f(x), it's derivative is the derivative of f(x) times e^f(x). What's inside of e changes, but not e itself.

God's a lot like e. If things are If you and God are in an equation, you may change, but God doesn't; he not only stays constant, but constant in a timeless manner; He refuses to be left out of a marginal equation.

If God is merely a constant, never-changing item, He can be tossed from our decision-making process. That's far too often the view of the world.

However, God needs to be more than just a constant in our lives, but a timeless part of our personal equation that refuses to go away no matter how many derivatives you take.

The Power of the Not Yet: Part I- For Whom Tolle Tolls

I haven't seen a whole lot of press on this, nor a lot of coverage in the Blogosphere, but B.O.'s buddy Oprah was seriously touting a rather New-Agey book, Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth, not just as her book-of-the-month, but with a 10-part weekly webinar; part one on Monday night had 500,000 people trying to get in, frying Oprah's servers. A New Server or Two might be an order.

I'm not sure how much this 10-week study will impact things, but this might be one of those Next Big Spiritual Things that we might want to keep on radar. If Oprah's devoting a big chunk of her personal creditability on it, there will likely be some water-cooler talk on the book, given that four million copies of the critter have been sold.

Tolle's shtick can be summed up by a previous book of his, The Power of Now (here's an interview on the book), where he focuses on getting past our past and living in the present, the Now. However, he does so from a Buddhist-flavored standpoint, borrowing from Christian literature just enough to appeal to the American listener. While there is a germ of truth that we could use to leave a lot of the baggage of our past behind, the Gospel is more that Carpe Momento.

I'm not sure who first coined the phrase (a Google last night didn't come up with a good answer), but "the now and the not yet" is often used in reference to Kingdom of God in orthodox Christian circles.  Real spiritual power and authority goes beyond Tolle's Now and into something timeless.

In that context, Romans 8(NIV) was one verse that came to mind.

      

²²We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. ²³Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? ²⁵But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

If we are focused on the moment, there isn't much room for hope, for hope is not something that seems to be in Tollian paradigm. There is a future that we need to be focused on as well as a present.

More on this later; I have a faculty meeting to attend to now.

Jesus' Brother?

One of the sticky points from today's NYT piece on Mike Huckabee is here

Chapter 3 [of Proverbs, Huck's daily read] also contains the admonition to ‘‘keep sound wisdom and discretion.’’ Huckabee is, indeed, a discreet fellow, but he has no trouble making his feelings known. He mentioned how much he respected his fellow candidates John McCain and Rudolph W. Giuliani. The name of his principal rival in Iowa, Mitt Romney, went unmentioned. Romney, a Mormon, had promised that he would be addressing the subject of his religion a few days later. I asked Huckabee, who describes himself as the only Republican candidate with a degree in theology, if he considered Mormonism a cult or a religion. ‘‘I think it’s a religion,’’ he said. ‘‘I really don’t know much about it.’’

I was about to jot down this piece of boilerplate when Huckabee surprised me with a question of his own: ‘‘Don’t Mormons,’’ he asked in an innocent voice, ‘‘believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?’’

Yes they do, in fact. If you Google "Mormon Jesus Satan Brothers" the second link goes to a LDS.org page that's part 3 of a Gospel Principles package. Here's a passage from their description of how Jesus was chosen for the job

We needed a Savior to pay for our sins and teach us how to return to our Heavenly Father. Our Father said, "Whom shall I send?" (Abraham 3:27). Two of our brothers offered to help. Our oldest brother, Jesus Christ, who was then called Jehovah, said, "Here am I, send me" (Abraham 3:27).

Jesus was willing to come to the earth, give his life for us, and take upon himself our sins. He, like our Heavenly Father, wanted us to choose whether we would obey Heavenly Father's commandments. He knew we must be free to choose in order to prove ourselves worthy of exaltation. Jesus said, "Father, thy will be done, and the glory be thine forever" (Moses 4:2).

Satan, who was called Lucifer, also came, saying, "Behold, here am I, send me, I will be thy son, and I will redeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost, and surely I will do it; wherefore give me thine honor" (Moses 4:1). Satan wanted to force us all to do his will. Under his plan, we would not be allowed to choose. He would take away the freedom of choice that our Father had given us. Satan wanted to have all the honor for our salvation.

Discussion

• Who is our leader and Savior?
  
• Who besides Jesus wanted to be our leader?
  
  

Jesus Christ Became Our Chosen Leader and Savior

After hearing both sons speak, Heavenly Father said, "I will send the first" (Abraham 3:27).

Jesus Christ was chosen and ordained to be our Savior. Many scriptures tell about this. One scripture tells us that long before Jesus was born, he appeared to the brother of Jared, a Book of Mormon prophet, and said: "Behold, I am he who was prepared from the foundation of the world to redeem my people. Behold, I am Jesus Christ. . . . In me shall all mankind have life, and that eternally, even they who shall believe on my name" (Ether 3:14).

When Jesus lived on earth, he taught: "I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me. . . . And this is the will of him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day" (John 6:38, 40).

It does appear that Jesus and Lucifer are both sons of God based on this LDS web site; a LDS spokewoman took issue

The authoritative Encyclopedia of Mormonism, published in 1992, does not refer to Jesus and Satan as brothers. It speaks of Jesus as the son of God and of Satan as a fallen angel, which is a Biblical account.

 

A spokeswoman for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said Huckabee's question is usually raised by those who wish to smear the Mormon faith rather than clarify doctrine.

 

"We believe, as other Christians believe and as Paul wrote, that God is the father of all," said the spokeswoman, Kim Farah. "That means that all beings were created by God and are his spirit children. Christ, on the other hand, was the only begotten in the flesh and we worship him as the son of God and the savior of mankind. Satan is the exact opposite of who Christ is and what he stands for."

However, she never answered the question, deflecting it with the comeback that it's Mormon-bashers who bring the issue up. However, that doesn't mean that your doctrine says that they weren't brothers, ma'am; your own web site says that they are. The Encyclopedia might not mention it, but that doesn't mean that Satan's status as God's black-sheep son isn't part of Mormon doctrine.

In general, Huckabee has politely ducked questions about the LDS' heterodox theology, letting that one brother line slip. In politics, a faux pas is a accidental telling of the truth; that's what Huckabee did in that piece.

"Five-Fold Ministry? I love origami."

Andy Jackson's fighting off a bad cold and is asking for prayer. At least one's headed your way, sir. If it is really a cold, prayer is going to work far better than the antibiotics he's on, since a cold is a virus and isn't affected by antibiotics; all antibiotics can do is fend off secondary bacterial infections.

However, that's not what yanked the chatty ring today, it was his next post, which I'll cut and paste whole.

Mike Bickle’s International House of Prayer movement is rooted in a specific view of the end times that they call “Apostolic Pre-Millennialism.”

Biblical Studies of the End Times: Mike Bickle and other IHOP–KC leaders teach each Saturday night on understanding biblical end-time prophecy. The focus is on equipping forerunners to be a voice preparing the way of Lord and exploring Scripture to show how we as the Church are to respond in the End Times. Learn what God has said about the events of the last days through both Old and New Testament writers.

What are your thoughts?   I encourage you to blog on this viewpoint.

Kansas City raised some eyebrows, for there was a charismatic prophetic movement coming out of there a few years back, and Bickle's name rung a distant bell from the modern-day prophet circle. Here's the "money graf" from Bickle's Wikipedia-

Bickle was formerly pastor of Kansas City Fellowship (now the Metro Christian Fellowship). He was the Senior Pastor to the "Kansas City Prophets" in the 1980s and 1990s, which included Bob Jones, John Paul Jackson and others.

Note that this Bob Jones here has no relation to the Bob Jones University folks; BJU's is capital F Fundamentalist Baptist and would have nothing to do with these over-the-top charismatics. My dad has heard the prophetic Jones speak at least once; I recall dad driving down to Flint to hear him speak.

Here's part of a post I did back in 2005 on these modern-day prophets; I pick up after talking about a small "word of knowledge" that I had passed on while chaperoning at a Vineyard youth retreat-

That type of ad-hoc personal prophecy isn't as problematic as the geopolitical prophecy that goes on in the background of the charismatic world. [Michael] Spencer mentions Rick Joyner in his list of questionable folks; his Morningstar ministry has a small but loyal following in charismatic circles.

Other modern prophets in that circle like John Paul Jackson, Bobby Conner and others are part of a subculture of sorts in the charismatic world; they run in similar circles as the televangelists, but aren't televangelists per se. I made the metaphor that TBN's Paul Crouch is Johnny Carson and the prophets are the stand-up comics who come on and get free publicity. Some are pastors, like Joyner, while others are full-time prophets. The Elijah List is something of a prophetic clearing house; that's not to be confused with the Elijah House counseling ministry class that I've been taking as of late.

Even though I'll have occasional encounters with this prophet class (here's one about two prophets visiting Winter Haven and another where a retreat used some John Paul Jackson material), I'm not comfortable with them. I've seen too many friends place too much stock in their geopolitical pronouncements. My title of "Prophet-Worship" might be a bit over the top, but there is an unhealthy focus on the prophetic in many circles and an unhealthy level of respect for these modern-day prophets. From some of my church friends, I've heard talk about what "the prophets were saying" that seemed very discomforting in that the seemed to be ceding authority that belonged more with the local church or with one's own discernment.

That "prophet-worship" is my biggest fear when I look at Bickle's escatology.

I don't have a problem with Bickle adopting a post-trib rapture, whereas your standard-issue Left Behind-style premillennialist will be pre-trib. I still like the line from my old Vinyard pastor in Midland, Don Milton, who quipped that he was a pan-tribber; he'd wait to see how it panned out.

I don't have a problem with the theology of an increase in spiritual activity and spiritual manifestations as the end times approach; there are a number of passages that will point towards that.

What bothers me most is his theology, more in practice than theory, is buried in part IV, section G, that the church "...will be led by the apostolic ministry. God will restore the five–fold ministry (Ephesians 4:11–13; Revelation 18:20)."

Let's do a quick check of Ephesians 4:, I'm using NIV here-

¹¹It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, ¹²to prepare God's people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up ¹³until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

Here's my take on this from 2005-

Those last three offices in verse 11 (evangelists, pastors and teachers) aren't going to be too much of an issue for Joe Evangelical, but the idea of modern-day apostles and prophets may well be. Even among charismatics and Pentecostals, the idea of people acting in the gift of prophecy is accepted, but the idea that someone has the job of prophet is a bit of a stretch to some, myself included.

I've noticed an increasing trend in charismatic circles to place a bit too much trust in such modern-day prophets.

That is the biggest problem I see with Bickle's theology, but it is more one of praxis than of theology. I could wrap my mind around the idea of one of the guys or gals at church who had a special gifting for prophecy to have the title of "prophet," but even then, we would need to have discernment as to whether it was God or last night's burrito that was talking to the prophet.

That discernment seems to be sorely lacking in that Bickle-JP Jackson-Joyner universe. I've seen fans/followers of theirs take what "the prophets" are saying a bit too much at face value and without a lot of questioning.

That lack of discernment also can sometimes get coupled with spiritual cockiness, where the prophet and his posse see themselves as God's instrument to transform their city or state; we saw a "Transformation Florida" in the early 00s that was "all hat and no cattle" as they'd say in Texas, and a similar group of prophetphiles (that sounds a bit better than "prophet-worshiper") are working on a Transformation Michigan.

That will often lead to disillusionment when the transformation doesn't come, and can also put the overreaching believers at peril if they start taking on demonic strongholds without proper thought and backup. Far too many spiritual Pickett's Charges have happened from people thinking they were God's gift to their town and were ready to kick Satan's butt; unless you have God at your back, Satan can kick back even harder.

Such ministries have a tendency to split churches, as prophetphiles will want their pastor to get with the prophetic program and the pastor may discern differently; the prophetphiles can often become a fifth column in a church, dominating prayer meetings and spreading an alternative theology from what the church generally focuses on. It can also lead to a lack of discernment of doctrine, turning over their ability to question to their chosen shepherd.

Can there be modern-day prophecy? I'm enough of a Bapticostal to say yes.

Can there be modern-day prophets? In theory, yes, but the current crop seems to be a bit too full of themselves to be trusted.

That's my big worry with such theology. It may be OK in theory, but the five-fold-ministry types seem to produce flawed prophets and prophetphiles with an impaired spiritual immune system to fight off false doctrine.

Are There Liberal Premillennialists?

Drudge has the bold-print headline this evening " HOLY OBAMA: 'WE CAN CREATE KINGDOM ON EARTH'".

B.O. was preaching/speaking at a big Pentecostal church in Greenville, SC, Redemption World Outreach Center, this morning, it has a white lead pastor, but as many big Pentecostal churches do, it has a multi-ethnic following.

During the nearly two hour service that featured a rock band and hip-hop dancers, Obama shared the floor with the church's pastor, Ron Carpenter. The senator from Illinois asked the multiracial crowd of nearly 4,000 people to keep him and his family in their prayers, and said he hoped to be "an instrument of God."

"Sometimes this is a difficult road being in politics," Obama said. "Sometimes you can become fearful, sometimes you can become vain, sometimes you can seek power just for power's sake instead of because you want to do service to God. I just want all of you to pray that I can be an instrument of God in the same way that Pastor Ron and all of you are instruments of God."

He finished his brief remarks by saying, "We're going to keep on praising together. I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth."

That last statement might have been mistaken by Drudge. If taken literally, it could point towards a postmillennial theology that has man winning the world for Christ and only have Jesus return later after a thousand years of church rule.

However, Obama could also be talking about the intangible Kingdom of God that exists even today; that would seem to be more up the churches alley. That distinction might not register with the under-churched or those not familiar with evangelical and Pentecostal rhetoric.

As I read the piece, I reflected on the idea that the vast majority of premillennialists are conservatives; you're unlikely to see too many liberal premillennialists, for the pessimism about the future makes them less likely to spend a lot of effort making the world a better place economically, if they think that the Second Coming's just around the corner.

Economic liberals would be more likely to be post-millennialists or amillennial. It would seem to be more consistent with their economic desires to make the world a better and fairer place for the long haul.

Does the Peanut Gallery know of any economically liberal premillennialists? That would be an interesting package.

The Totally Depraved Worker, or Imago Dei?

I'm still digesting a comment that one of my Basic Supervision students had Friday night. I was talking about the financial theory concept of agency costs. One version of it looks at selfish workers looking out for their own best interest (e.g low-level workers goofing off or higher-level workers voting themselves nice perks) rather than the interest of the firm; things like profit-sharing, employee stock ownership plans and stock options are frequent remedies for agency costs.

One of my students commented that 80% of the workers where he worked at wouldn't be motivated much by such equity bennies, that the reward for hard work was their basic paycheck and that they weren't quite the self-centered beasts that I was portraying them as. When I dropped back five yards and paused for a moment, I started to agree with him.

Back when I was taking my management classes in the late 80s, one of the current constructs was Type X and Type Y management. Type X managers assumed that their workers were lazy and untrustworthy and thus needed micromanagement and a very short leash. Type Y managers assume that workers were generally smart and hard-working and give them much more authority, more independence, and less micromanagement.

The idea is that most of us would hate to have a Type X drill-sergeant manager and would respond better if given a longer leash. There are some folks who need tight supervision, but they tend to be in the minority. Management courses of the era were trying to lead folks away from that drill-sergeant mentality and to a more trusting management style.

However, the thing that hit me was that our religious rhetoric in evangelical circles might lead us to a Type X attitude. If we look at the huddled masses as a bunch of totally depraved fallen sinners who are worthless without God, we could assume that folks are up to no good unless they're tightly controlled. Financial and economic theory often falls in along that sinner paradigm, assuming self-centered greedy folks who only respond to economic stimuli.

A Biblical factoid that would argue for a more Type Y approach is that we're all God's children made in the image of God. While we are all sinners and need a Savior to be made right with God, we're not living like we're in a Mad Max movie in our day-to-day lives. People are cultured to function cooperatively in society and have a lot of the rawest selfishness trained out of us; a two-year-old will scream "Mine!" but an adult will generally act in a more civil manner. We may not like living in a cooperative manner all the time, but we know that it makes things go more smoothly in the long run.

We're far from perfect, but we're also far from being perfectly imperfect. We may be totally depraved as per salvation, but are something far short of level of depravity that in the context of being a citizen and worker.

Might we be better off if we start looking at our fellow men at the workplace and in the public square as good-but-flawed folks in need of a Savior? I think so. Far from perfect, but still reasonably good, by and large.

Mountie God or Surfer God

One of the things that struck me on re-reading the piece on Piper from last September was his view of "God's glory and breathtaking sovereignty." That describes Dave's view of God from last night's conversation.

God's not just good, He's great and awesome. When we try to raise the role of man up, we often inadvertently knock Him down a peg by taking things out of His portfolio.

The following analogy just hit me after looking at the history of TULIP stemming from a response to the "Remonstrance" of five Arminian talking-points. It's a little over-the-top bordering on a straw-man, so I'll apologize in advance to the Arminians in the Peanut Gallery.

Let's compare that breathtaking sovereignty of the Calvinist God to the laid-back God of the Arminians- "Yeah, you can decide to accept Me as your Lord and Savior if you like. Or if you don't want to, no big. If you want to flip me the bird and tell me to get lost, that's honky-dory; if you want to spend eternity in the smoking section, I'm not getting in the way. If you want to change your mind later on and think I'm one big manure bag, I can live with that; we can rebook your final trip to end up at Sloughfoot International without any cancellation fee. It's your call."

That deity has had a few 'ludes too many. The God of the Bible is a jealous God, One who cares, not one who's stoned out of His gourd and doesn't give a rip. He didn't book a long vacation and launch some salvation-bots who nudge people in the right direction but don't keep people from going the other way if they want.

I don't discount free will, especially on the small things. On the big things, Reformed doctrine seems to make more sense than our surfer-dude Arminian deity.

There's also a good case to be made for a charismatic Reformed theology. If we have an Arminian deity who doesn't care whether you accept Him or not, why should He care if you need to find a job or need to get over a sinus infection? We need a God who gives a damn, who's willing to go to bat for us.

TULIP can be cold at times, effective writing off a set of humanity to eternal damnation. However, that hands-on, Mountie God who always gets His man (or woman) is a lot more comforting overall than a laid back surfer-dude deity who doesn't care as much about you.

Once again, if I hurt some feelings, it wasn't intended to. Feel free, as always to put in your $0.02 worth.

Functional Arminianism

Eileen and I were over at some church friends of our that go back at least six years; we met them at the Vineyard church in Midland we got married in five years ago. That couple left the Vineyard in 2004 to go to the same small charismatic church that we wound up moving too about a year later.

We left that church around Christmas; they left this march, moving to a new PCA Presbyterian church in Midland. That was a bit of a jump for Dave, since he had been going to charismatic/Pentecostal churches since he came to the Lord two decades ago. He hasn't lost his charismatic theology, but mourns the lack of spiritual quality control in the modern charismatic church and needed to back away from the "new things" that too often aren't God things.

What surprised Dave was that when he started to look at what his personal theology was, with a very high and awe-full view of God, his theology seemed to click in with Reformed theology, thus fitting in well with the theologically-conservative Reformed Presbyterians. What he also noted was that most evangelical churches are functionally Arminian even if they don't have that in their statements of faith.

We can break down non-confessional evangelical denominations into three basic buckets: Holiness, Pentecostal/Charismatic and Baptist. There are a few denominations that don't neatly fit here (we might make Evangelical Free, Christian and Missionary Alliance and the Churches/Disciples of Christ honorary Baptists) but it will work for a quick-and-dirty discussion.

(1) Holiness [e.g. Wesleyan, Nazarene, Church of God (Anderson)]

They have an avowedly Arminian theology, looking at a prevalent saving grace that is extended to all; it's up to us to RSVP for our salvation.

(2) Pentecostals/Charismatics

Many Pentecostals have roots in Holiness churches if traced back to the early 1900s. Even ones that aren't officially Arminian will tend to lean in that free-will direction when dealing with various spiritual gifts and the general power of prayer; if the believer isn't getting relief from an issue after lots of prayer, it often is assumed that it's the believer's fault.

There's also the assumption in many charismatic circles, especially the Vineyard, that everyone has the tools to act in the Gifts of the Spirit, and assumes that people can get personal revelation as to how to pray for and minister to people. That's putting the person in the driver's seat more than the Spirit.

(3) Baptists

Baptist will often have a Reformed view of theology; Charles Spurgeon is one historical heavyweight in that camp, while John Piper is a modern Baptist in the Reformed camp. However, many Southern Baptists are leery of tiptoeing through the TULIPs. Bill Curtis commented thusly- "Despite the fact that the 2000 BF&M [Baptist Faith and Message] accommodates evangelistic Calvinism, there are some who are trying to identify it as
heresy."

Quite a few Baptist resist applying any coherent theology, even rather tame ones like the BF&M preferring to go with the Bible alone. That will often lead to a more free-will take on salvation, especially when you have very mission-oriented folks who don't like the Limited Atonement idea and want to have a fighting shot of saving everyone.

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I'm not quite ready to go to a confessional evangelical church like a PCA Presbyterian or a Missouri or Wisconsin Synod Lutheran; I'm not a fan of infant baptism for one thing. However, there are reasons why we will want to, as evangelicals, take a critical look at where Arminian theology, whether stated directly or by default, takes us.

Functional Arminianism tends to lift man up and knock God down a peg, taking a few items out of His portfolio.  Salvation is up to us. If you're an functionally Arminian charismatic, miracles are up to us, for we need enough faith for God to act. That takes away from God's sovereignty, God's glory and God's power.

That's not to say that there aren't Arminian folks in the Peanut gallery who don't have a high and grand view of God. However, it does lead to us grabbing the wheel away from God a bit too much.

The Tiberian Shuttle

The Blogosphere is an interesting place, where I have friends of various church backgrounds, including Catholics. That's not as common in meatspace, where you will often hang out with people from your church and not talk theology with your friends from outside of church.

I might be a bit different in that regard. Back in the late 80s, I was a part of a pan-evangelical Bible study on Tuesday nights. One of the ring-leaders of the group was a Catholic guy; quite a few of that large group were Catholics, but they all had an evangelical style faith in Jesus as their Lord and Savior. We had folks from Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian and Pentecostal backgrounds as well; we just knew to check our denominational differences at the door.

One family in my circle of friends is Catholic. Kate was raised high-church Episcopalian, and found it easy to cross the Tiber when she married a Catholic guy. They're going to a Eastern-rite Catholic church in nearby Bay City in order to avoid the liberalism of the standard-issue Catholic churches in Midland; they have a stronger love of the Lord than many, if not most, of the Protestants that make up the core of that circle of friends. A few of them read this blog, so I don't want to be too harsh on the crew.

In short, I know of quite a few Catholics that would qualify as evangelical, even if they accept some doctrines that seem a bit quirky and extra-biblical to me. However, I disagree with orthodox Presbyterians on baptism and disagree with Baptists on how active the Holy Spirit is today; that doesn't mean I can be friends with them and make common cause on the 99% of the theology that we do agree on.

The story that prompted this post is that of Francis Beckwith, a high-powered evangelical scholar who grew up Catholic and returned to his childhood faith earlier this year.

However, in January, at the suggestion of a dear friend, I began reading the Early Church Fathers as well as some of the more sophisticated works on justification by Catholic authors.  I became convinced that the Early Church is more Catholic than Protestant and that the Catholic view of justification, correctly understood, is biblically and historically defensible. Even though I also believe that the Reformed view is biblically and historically defensible, I think the Catholic view has more explanatory power to account for both all the biblical texts on justification as well as the church’s historical understanding of salvation prior to the Reformation all the way back to the ancient church of the first few centuries.

Moreover, much of what I have taken for granted as a Protestant—e.g., the catholic creeds, the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, the Christian understanding of man, and the canon of Scripture—is the result of a Church that made judgments about these matters and on which non-Catholics, including Evangelicals, have declared and grounded their Christian orthodoxy in a world hostile to it.  Given these considerations, I thought it wise for me to err on the side of the Church with historical and theological continuity with the first generations of Christians that followed Christ’s Apostles.

That last paragraph is interesting. Catholics can hit a sore spot when they ask orthodox Protestants why they accepted the early Catholic church on things like the makeup of the Bible, the Trinity, and the classic creeds like the Nicene Creed and not accept the modern-day Catholic church. My quick-and-dirty take is that two millennia of tradition has brought quite a bit of extra-biblical teaching to the mix that is hard to justify from a biblical standpoint.

However, there is a solid point to be made to bow to traditional takes on theology, since heterodox theology is likely to be wrong. We're usually cocky enough to think that we're the exception to the rule, but one should tend to give the traditional faith the benefit of the doubt.

What makes the Beckwith situation interesting was that he was president of the Evangelical Theological Society. While he isn't going back on the doctrines that make up the ETS' statements of faith, you're going to have plenty of folks who aren't going to accept a Catholic as an evangelical, especially if they're from a Lutheran or Reformed background which have their roots in anti-Catholic rebellion of a half-millennia ago. Peter Sean Bradley posts on one such blogger who wants to keep the bad-blood going in the 21st century and trashes Beckwith for his choice of church.

I'm not going to be one to join in the trashing. While it isn't my choice of churches, I know of far too many evangelical Catholics to want to get into that food fight, at least not on the side of throwing mashed potatoes at Beckwith.

The Road to Zion

An interesting Jewish sect called Neturei Karta was in the news earlier this year when they went to Ahmadinejad's Holocaust conference. They don't deny the Holocaust, but don't like Israel's present existence, preferring to wait for the Messiah to come and set up a real Israel. They're a staunchly Orthodox sect, seeing themselves as the real spiritual guardians of Jerusalem and are disdainful of the rather secular nature of modern-day Israel.

Needless to say, they're not exactly popular amongst other Jews. Their unorthodox (pun not intended) take on Israel, coupled by sucking up to various anti-semitic folks like the PLO, Farrakhan and Ahmadinejad, makes them personae non grata in Zionist circles.

They were back in the news this week when a fire broke out at one of their main synagogues in metro New York. Given their ideologically toxic nature, arson was suspected, but further investigation is pointing to a garden-variety fire, not arson.

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Not that I agree with these folks, but they do bring up an interesting point to ponder in my mind. Is modern-day Israel something that Christians should be going to the mat for as a precursor of the theocratic Israel that will be around in the End Times? Your miliage will vary, as preterists and post-millenialists will see things differently than your garden-variety premillenialist.

There are a lot of variables in our support of Israel. There is a humanitarian component; since Jews are almost uniformly crapped on around the world, they need a country of their own, lest another Final Solution be brought upon them.

There's also a geopolitical and economic component; they're a functioning free-market democracy (albeit one that limits the rights of their Arab citizens) and American ally in a part of the world where both are rare. While far from perfect, they look very good compared to the economically lagging monarchs, despots, theocrats and dysfunctional tries at democracy that make up the modern Middle East.

However, what the Neturei Karta meme brings to mind is the spiritual component of our support. If you're of a premillennial bent, you don't want to get on God's bad side by backing the foes of His Chosen People. Even if you don't think you're a short-timer on the planet and are expecting Jesus to come back any time now, you'll often have a soft spot for Israel as the people who God chose to give us the Old Testament and from whom Jesus came to earth with.

This might not be the government that ushers in the Second Coming; there might well be a later government that will be the one that will be there when Jesus returns. Do we need to prop up this government at all costs and risk WWIII in order to keep in God's good graces?

How much of our support of Israel should flow from that spiritual angle? What sayeth thou?

A Child of God

It's not been a good stretch for me financially or career-wise the last two and a half years and I haven't been the happiest camper along the way. I've tried to approach things with hope and good cheer, but I've been too busy relying on my intellect and my education to really see the big picture.

I made yet another trip to Florida this week. Neither accounting job that was a possibility when I left a week ago has come to fruition. Both may materialize at a later date. I interviewed for one on Tuesday and may get offered the job next week, but given the large number of people being interviews (about 10) my chances aren't that good. The other may come into play as tax season approaches.

I've spent the week doing clerical work at a steel manufacturer, collating benefit reports and stuffing envelopes. I'm a good envelope stuffer; I get to do all the big plants. I didn't need four college degrees to be a good envelope stuffer, but neither did some of the gals helping out need their college degrees to be good envelope stuffers; many of them were trading U of South Florida stories today.

I also don't need four degrees to be a child of God. Reality check-none of Jesus' original disciples had a BS or a BBA or an M.Div. In fact, the degrees tend to get in the way, as I try to think my way through things that I should be praying through.

In the long run, the most important thing is that I'm a child of God, fearfully and wonderfully made and a co-heir with Christ of God's kingdom. That's more important than what degrees I have, what job I do or how much money I have in the bank. It's something that creditors or the government can't take away from you and is more valuable than all of Bill Gates' wealth.

I've intellectually understood that child-of-God status, but it really has hit home as I sit alone in a extended-stay hotel room, keeping half a eye on the World Series while preparing to head back to the Michigan cold tomorrow. The loneliness that I've felt has given way to a peace of mind that I am loved and that my needs will be met.

Pray that it stay that way as I return to a lame job environment and the Michigan cold and lots of free time for Ol' Sloughfoot to get me to have a pity party.

Needing God

I had dinner by myself at a Perkins restaurant last night on my way back from Florida. I don't eat at "sit-down" restaurants much by myself, since the 10-15 minutes between ordering and getting your food is awkward by yourself; sometimes, a newspaper can be decent company, but after 12 hours on the road, I wasn't in a reading mood.

After giving Eileen a quick call, I had time to kick back and rest for a minute. The background music turned to Glenn Campbell's Wichita Lineman; I've heard that song umpteen times over the years, but this part of Jimmy Webb's lyrics hit me hard in ways that it hadn't before- "and I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time."

The first pass came as a longing for Eileen, getting ready to get back to Midland in about four hours after being by myself in Florida for three weeks. Three weeks was far too long to be apart. Webb was likely thinking about a missing woman as he wrote those lyrics.

However, I took a second look at those lyrics, and thought that it applies to our relationship with God. We need Him in our lives more than we want Him. Few believers will want to say that they don't need God, but there are plenty of times where we really don't want Him running herd over the lesser angels of our nature. We need Him to do that, but we frequently don't appreciate it.

One big evangelistic outreach that's run ads on Christian radio for a while has its phone number as 888-NEED-HIM. Note that they don't have it down as 800-WANT-HIM. We may sing "You're all I want, you're all I ever needed," but it's the latter that's going to be far truer than the former.

We need God more that want Him, and we want Him for all time, and the Nazareth Lineman is still on the line. He's not going anywhere, and wants us to want Him as much as we need Him. We won't quite get there, but it's worth trying.

Antiuniformitarianism

For years, I've heard that the longest word in the dictionary was antidisestablishmentarianism. The speaker at the church I visited this morning, a professional creationist named Grady McMurtry, might be described as an Antiuniformitarian. Palmeto's Church on the Rock seemed to lean towards the charismatic side of the evangelical aisle, but I didn't see any overt manifestations; the worship included a couple of flag-waivers and an overdose majority of Hillsong/Darlene Zschech stuff.

To the lecture/sermon. He gave an interesting history of evolution, including a truck load of late 18th-early 19th century French free-thinkers such as Lamarck who predated Darwin by decades. An interesting concept that McMurtry dwelled upon was the concept of Uniformitarianism. The Wikipedia entry states it as

the assumption that the natural processes operating in the past are the same as those that can be observed operating in the present. Its methodological significance is frequently summarized in the statement: "The present is the key to the past."

For the growing number of Enlightenment folks, if you take the miraculous out of the mix, then the changes they saw in nature had to take more than the few thousand years you have if you take the Genesis time-line straight-up.

It was geologists who championed uniformitarianism, most prominently early 19th century geologists Hutton and Lyell. Lyell's Principals of Geology, advancing an old-earth uniformitarian world-view (although the definition of old-earth was a frequent target of derision for Dr. McMurtry, pointing out the evolving time needed for evolution from hundreds of millions in the 1800s to various billions in the 1900s) was a big influence on Charles Darwin; his grandfather Erasmus Darwin had been an evolution advocate, but Charles gave it the definitive treatment.

The other key area of derision for McMurtry was the circular logic in using key fossils to identify strata, then using the strata to pinpoint the age of a new fossil. It assumes that the animal in question was only around during that era and died out after that; many species' extinction, like the coelacanth, have been greatly exaggerated.

One of the interesting points to the message was that he focused more on tearing down evolutionary theory by pointing out the flaws in the fossil records, like tall fossilized trees sticking through millions of years worth of strata. It really doesn't build up the case for creation. You had a crowd that was predisposed to believe in the Biblical story and wanted some information to shoot down the evolutionary drum-beat within modern culture.

I don't think the presentation would have made Joe Sixpack off the street turn into a young-earth creationist. What it was designed to do is to make fun of and discredit the evolutionists, of which McMurtry did a good job. It didn't even turn me into a young-earth creationist; I'm open to a less-than-hyper-literal take on Genesis 1.

However, I would like to head into the young-earth camp if I saw some good scientific evidence for it rather than seeing how bad the evidence is against it.

Who's Your Abba Daddy?

Here's an interesting report that Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion put out on people's opinion of God. This seems to be the full report, but my WiFi hookup is too wimpy to download it. USA Today has a write-up on it.

Here's the big-picture synopsis-

• 31.4 percent believe in an Authoritarian God, who is very judgmental and engaged
• 25 percent believe in a Benevolent God, who is not judgmental but engaged
• 23 percent believe in a Distant God, who is completely removed
• 16 percent believe in a Critical God, who is judgmental but not engaged

Most of the Peanut Gallery would be in the first two camps. I'm still figuring which one of those first two I fit into. I think God is more a deliver of blessings to the faithful than a zapper of the unfaithful; He will tend to let the unfaithful stew in their own natural juices rather than bringing down lightning bolts.

More on this later.