Dr. Platypus

The fifty-first Biblical Studies Carnival is now posted at Anumma, the blog of G. Brooke Lester. It’s a keeper!

Walter Russell Mead explains why:

To mistake an ideology or a social model for the transcendent and always surprising (and irritating!) Kingdom of God is, technically speaking, the sin of idolatry.  It is to worship the work of our own hands.  What makes it worse is that to some degree in the mainline churches we have replaced faith in the scripturally based and historically rooted doctrines and values of the Christian heritage with faith in progressive social thought….

I want to be clear here.  Liberal mainline Protestantism is not just a ghastly mistake and a return to literalism and fundamentalism is not the way out of the current impasse. The great historical riches and insights of the mainline denominations are more important than ever today.  The liberal, questing spirit that refuses to take ancient truths for granted and that challenges historic orthodoxies in the light of lived experience has a vital and necessary place in the life of the church.  It’s important that the mainline churches halt their disintegration and decline and regain the strength to play their role in the American religious system.  I am not writing all these terrible things about bishops because I want them to fail.  God has work for the mainline church to do, and God’s work in the world will suffer if we fail.

But the Blue Beast cannot save American society and it cannot save the mainline church.  Until we come to terms with these truths and start living them we can neither help ourselves nor do much to help anybody else.

(And in case you were wondering, conservative politics isn’t the gospel, either.)

(H/T: JesusCreed)

Why do so many people who have an unwavering faith in the Bible do such stupid things with it? That’s not quite the way David Ker puts the question, but he is struggling with how to teach people to do better. His thoughts are worth a read. He begins,

This is my fourth year teaching exegesis to Mozambican Bible college students. I walk a fine line between getting the students to interpret the Scriptures properly on one hand and to not apply it incorrectly on the other. It is a given among my students that the Bible is God’s Word. It is inspired. All of it is profitable. Every passage and verse has wisdom and application for us today. But this high regard for the Bible frequently leads to nonsense and often downright heresy. That’s because, simply put, not everything in the Bible is applicable to us today.

He makes some interesting suggestions about improving the soundness of one’s exegesis, which will no doubt be more compelling for people of some theological persuasions than for others.

Here are some comments from around the blogosphere about the Lenten season that has now arrived:

Ash Wednesday by Joshua Hearne reminds us that

As we prepare to journey with Jesus through the desert that leads to Golgotha, we must take time to prepare for what it will cost both us and our Lord. We know that Easter will follow shortly in the devastation of that fated day because Jesus has come to offer life more abundant and not even death and sin will prevail over him. But, we cannot see that day from here. So, we must take time to prepare for the journey.

Clean Week and the Start of Lent by Mark Olson. This year the Western and Eastern church calendars agree in placing Easter/Pascha on the same day, April 4. Here is a brief glimpse at how my Orthodox brothers and sisters are welcoming the Lenten season.

Lenten Memory by Amy Cannon. Amy observes,

While it’s nice to know that advertisers were not the ones who invented long holidays, it is particularly probable that no marketing agency would ever come up with Lent. For Easter (and Passion Week as a whole), the Church has historically taken a different route of preparation than starting up the celebrations early. Lent is preparatory for the remembrance of Christ’s Resurrection because of its contrast to that fact of utmost joy, rather than its continuity with it. Lent is meant to be privative, the fast before the feast, a reminder of why we need God’s intervention in the world in the person of Jesus.

Ash Wednesday Inspiration from The High Calling by Mark D. Roberts describes a Presbyterian’s pilgrimage toward Lent.

Ashes to Ashes: One Baptist’s Reason for Observing Lent by Michael Westmoreland-White does the same thing from a Baptist perspective.

Gospel in the Dirt by Beth Felker Jones ends with a Lenten challenge:

Dust is a public testimony to who we really are. It strips away our facades. When we leave the church and run into friends and neighbors, they find it hard to look away from the dust on our faces. The problem, though, is that most friends and neighbors don’t know the biblical referents the dust contains and so can’t see the witness to our true human condition that is written on our faces.

So we’ll have to do something to translate.

We’ll have to speak the truth of that dust, not only in the marks on our foreheads, but with our words and our bodies. Perhaps our dirty faces can be a little means of grace. Perhaps they can be a nudge from God, the push we need to live out the truth of repentance in our everyday lives. Perhaps they can prompt in us the courage to go public with the truth that we are dust and to dust we shall return.

The February edition of Baptists Today contained a letter to the editor expressing one Baptist’s opinion of ecumenical catholicity. In his words, BT “really opened a serious can of worms” in its December issue by running an article suggesting that Baptists could stand to be a bit less legalistic when it comes to receiving new members who were first discipled in other Christian denominations that practiced infant baptism. In the words of this letter-writer,

It is quite ironic that on the 400th anniversary of Baptists, one of their major publications should give space to attacks on believer’s baptism. With the December issue, the traditional definition of a Baptist church, “a body of baptized believers,” goes out the window.

It is also quite ironic that, in making this charge, this brother is found to accuse (among others) John Bunyan, one of the biggest names in Baptist history, of betraying the “traditional definition of a Baptist church”—for Bunyan was an advocate of the same policy of “open membership” that the offending article proposed nearly 400 years ago! In fact, if the letter-writer had acquainted himself with George R. Beasley-Murray’s Baptism in the New Testament—an exegetical tour de force by a Baptist scholar of impeccable academic and ecclesiastical credentials—he would have known that receiving Methodist, Catholic, etc. members without requiring re-baptism has in fact long been the majority opinion among British Baptists. That doesn’t mean that “open membership” is the correct policy for Baptist churches to embrace (although I think it is), but it does mean that some Baptists have thought so since the 1600s, and in some parts of the world the majority of Baptists still do today.

On this Shrove Tuesday, however, I mostly want to discuss the second part of the letter. After some rather condescending remarks about Christians in other denominations, the writer continues:

Also, not content to wreak so much havoc in one area, this same issue of Baptists Today tries to justify the liturgical ceremonialism and the papist trappings that our predecessors in the faith rejected and condemned.

The writer has a problem with liturgical ceremonialism. So do I when it gets in the way of an authentic relationship with God. The thing is: everybody has a liturgy and a ceremony! Growing up, there were certain phrases that I knew were going to be a part of any prayer that certain people prayed—even though they were all ostensibly praying extemporaneously! “Father we just want to….” “Lead, guide, and direct….” “Bless the giver and the gift….” You get the idea. We all get into ruts. That’s as true for the preacher or deacon in the sport coat as it is the one in the Geneva gown or the alb. Perhaps a new pastor at this writer’s church will some day suggest fiddling around the the order of service they’ve used for the past fifty years and we’ll see how much ceremonialism he’s willing to justify.

As to the “papist trappings” (do people still use the word “papist”?), I have pointed out in my old series on Ancient Christian Worship that many of the specific customs that apparently offend the writer go back to pre-Constantinian times. So do many customs that I have never seen or even heard of being practiced in any Baptist church—the sign of the cross, remembrances of departed saints, daily Communion, etc. (Okay, I make the sign of the cross when I receive Communion, but I don’t think anybody else does.)

The writer is of course correct that historically Baptists have rejected or even condemned these practices. But where do you draw the line? The Charleston tradition of Baptist worship featured clerical gowns, a structured order of service, responsive readings, and so forth. It was far more “liturgical” or “ceremonial” than the evangelical fervor of the Sandy Creek tradition. The New Testament itself indicates the first Christians continued to follow certain liturgical ceremonies they learned from their Jewish heritage: chanting the psalms, set hours of prayer, set prayer forms (such as the Lord’s Prayer), etc. Once you concede that God might in fact be honored by people putting some forethought into worshiping well, you open the door to at least considering the possibility that some customs of the greater church might be worth reclaiming. Just because some people might do them emptily doesn’t mean we can’t try to do them right.

It seems that some Baptists no longer identify Lent as the useless self-mortification and works (autosoterism) that it is. Most Baptists have stood for “faith alone” and rejected such ascetic practices as fasting, meatless Fridays, cutting tonsures in the hair, clerical garb, flagellations, and acts of penance as being the outward show of Pharisees.

When I was young, I did in fact identify Lent as “useless self-mortification and works.” Of course, that was before I knew anything about it! Since then, I have had the opportunity to read the Bible, where I learned that fasting was a common practice in both Testaments, and that it happened sometimes privately and individually and sometimes corporately as part of a group. (The members of the leadership group at Antioch were fasting together when God instructed them to set aside Paul and Barnabas for missionary work.) I also learned—and I admit I learned this as much from personal experience as from biblical study—that I’m not especially good at being holy or resisting temptation, so it would probably be a good idea for me to give special attention to these areas from time to time.

Like all Baptists (at least all the ones I know), I believe that a person’s standing before God is a matter of grace. I categorically reject the idea that anything I can do can make God love or accept me any more or less than he already does. But I also have a theology that is bigger than the “plan of salvation.” God loves me just the way I am, but he loves me too much to let me stay this way. Therefore, it is appropriate for me to search both Scripture and the witness of Christians who came before me for wisdom that will help me grow in my discipleship. Since I am firmly rooted in the “Free Church” tradition, I consider myself free to embrace whatever helps me keep my focus on Jesus, be it fasting (Mt 6:16-18; Acts 13:3), meatless Fridays (a subset of fasting), meaningful haircuts (Acts 18:18), symbolic clothing (Rev 4:4), or appropriate acts of restitution or penance (Mt 5:23-26; Jas 5:16). (I can’t find a biblical justification for flagellation, nor do I want to go looking for one. But seriously, has this person ever observed Baptist Christians literally whipping themselves in their religious fervor?)

He concludes,

I am Baptist. If I needed ritualism or if I thought God enjoyed seeing people lighting candles (magical vehicles for sending up prayers through sacrificial flames), I would join some faith tradition that features such religious frippery.

I am also a Baptist. I don’t need ritualism in the sense that I need more than the grace of God, but as a card-carrying member of the human race, I do need religious forms of some kind—that is a fact of anthropology and sociology.  I can’t get away from them, so I had better admit that fact and get on with choosing good ones. I doubt God cares one way or another about whether people light candles, but I know he likes the prayers that accompany them. And I do know (because I’ve read Exodus and Revelation) that God loves symbolic acts of worship.

Therefore, tomorrow night I’ll join with the other members of my Baptist church in receiving ashes on my forehead as a reminder of my humanity, my mortality, and my desperate need for more of Christ, his teachings, and his grace.

Our church is listening to the New Testament during the forty days of Lent. Through our partnership with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, every church member who wanted one has been given an MP3 version of the New Testament. We will be listening together and continuing the conversation online.

You can also download audio Bibles for free (in many different languages!) from the good folks at Faith Comes by Hearing.

The latest Biblical Studies Carnival is now posted at Abnormal Interests. I’m not sure how to do math involving both Roman and Arabic numerals, however.

Michael Byrd shares a very nice quotation from Kevin Vanhoozer:

“Catholicity” signifies the church as the whole people of God, spread out over space, across cultures, and through time. “We believe in one … catholic church.” The evangelical unity of the church is compatible with a catholic diversity. To say that theology must be catholic, then, is to affirm the necessity of involving the whole church in the project of theology. No single denomination “owns” catholicity: catholicity is no more the exclusive domain of the Roman Church than the gospel is the private domain of evangelicals. Catholic and Evangelical belong together. To be precise “catholic” qualifies “evangelical.” The gospel designated a determinate word; catholicity, the scope of its reception. “Evangelical” is the central notion, but “catholic” adds a crucial antireductionist qualifier that prohibits any one reception of the gospel from becoming paramount. (Drama of Doctrine, 27).

To those of you who would embrace both terms: Do you think of yourself as an evangelical catholic or as a catholic evangelical?

If I were betting I’d bet that Jim Somerville doesn’t practice glossolalia. I’m quite certain, however, that he understands what the Bible says about it.

Greg Boyd: “I Told Mennonites to ‘Go to Hell’ (and they liked it!).”

My kind of preacher.