The 'the Gospel' Really Means

The angels visited the shepherds and announced
'glad tidings.' But what would a 1st century
audience have taken those words to mean?

We often use the phrase “the Gospel” as short-hand for the message of personal salvation, and also a formula for how a person gets saved.

In his book What Saint Paul Really Said, Tom Wright suggests that this may be too small an understanding of the Gospel. In its original context, the “Gospel” included the message of personal salvation, but it also involved a lot more.

Tom Wright shows that the New Testament use of the phrase 'the gospel' (which essentially means 'good news' or 'glad tidings') is rooted both in Isaiah's prophecies as well as the political context of the 1st century Roman empire. Understanding this historical background is key to being able to correctly interpret the references to 'the gospel' that we find throughout the New Testament. 

At least, that is what I suggested in an article I published this morning at the Colson Center. My article shows how the New Testament references to 'gospel' were drawing upon a background that may not be in place for us, leading us to misunderstand what the gospel even is. To read my article on this, click on the following link:

The Meaning of the Gospel

Gnostic Trends

Dr. Michael Philliber opens his recent book Gnostic Trends in the Local Church by recounting how the Christian section of his local bookstore recently became bloated with books by pro-Gnostic authors like Elaine Pagels and Marvin Meyer. Around this same time, Philliber found that he was bumping into people whose idea of mature spirituality echoed the impulses of ancient Gnosticism. For example, it was becoming increasingly common for people to say to him, “I consider myself a very spiritual person, but I’m not into organized religion.”

These experiences prompted Dr. Philliber, who is a PCA minister and a good personal friend, to do a controlled survey on just how pervasive Gnostic trends have become within the contemporary church. He chose three churches in his area that were dissimilar in size, racial makeup, and theology, although they all professed to be orthodox. One of the participating churches was his own reformed Presbyterian congregation.

Philliber approached members of all three congregations with survey questions ranging everywhere from what people thought of the bogus history in The Da Vinci Code to whether they considered the body to be the soul’s prison house.

Among Philliber’s primary concerns was to discover how much of a foothold what he calls “anticosmic dualism” had made within the church. “Anticosmic dualism” refers to the Gnostic belief that the material world is a cosmic blunder, and the corollary antithesis between the physical and the spiritual realms.  Although few Christians would agree that the material universe is a cosmic mistake, it is customary to find believers de-emphasizing the physical dimensions of the faith (i.e., history and the sacraments), or to accept an itinerary of salvation that ends, not with resurrection, but with eternal disembodiment.

I am excited to see Gnostic Trends in print since I had the opportunity, not only to read Dr. Philliber’s excellent Ph.D. thesis on which his book is based, but to help connect him with a publisher. But I was also interested in the book since it confirms many of the observations I have been making in my ongoing series of Perspective articles.

Keep reading...

Manners, Warrior Women, Gay Marriage, Essential Oils and Calvinism

In my Perspectives Column at the Colson Center, I have started a series on what Edmund Burke has to teach us about good manners. The first installment in this series is online here. As this series unfolds, I will be going deep into the reasons why manners are important for civilization.

On the website 'Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy', I have contributed an article looking at the problem of 'gay marriage' from an Eastern Orthodox perspective. You can read my article by clicking here.

The illustration from my article
'Mixed Companies'

I persuaded my friends at Salvo Magazine to put my last article online, so that those who are too poor to subscribe to the magazine can still read my latest contribution. The article is titled 'Mixed Companies' and explores the implications in the Pentagon's decision to allow women to officially serve in ground-combat positions. 

As our family continues to enjoy using essential oils, I have been posting quite a bit about essential oils on my other blog 'Grasping the Essence.' Some of my recent posts include an article about using essential oils to help with headaches and migraines, an article about citrus oils, a post about essential autumn oils to help fight colds and flu, and a post about how friends of mine can become wholesale customers with Young Living essential oils.

Finally, my friend Brad Belschner has a fascinating discussion on his Facebook wall right now about what is allegedly a big problem in the deep structure of Calvinism. Is Calvinism able to adequately deal with human grief? Is there a significant difference between Calvin and Calvinism? Does reformed theology present a de-historicized account of God's sovereignty? These are some of the many questions that are being addressed (from all sides of the theological spectrum) by this fascinating discussion.

The Church as Mother

In my 2009 publication The Twilight of Liberalism, I discuss how the church is our mother. I point out that Christ movingly evoked maternal imagery in Luke 13:34. The Church, like a good mother, takes responsibility for teaching her children (Rom. 12:7), equipping them for good works (2 Tim. 3:16-17) and helping them when they are sick (James 5:14). The Church, like a good mother, has a mandate to provide materially for her children (Rom. 12:8,13; 2 Cor. 8,9), even redistributing wealth among her offspring (2 Cor. 8:14-15) so that none go without. Through the institution of baptism the Church, like a good mother, washes her children. The Church, like a good mother, provides accountability (Gal. 2:1-2; 2 Tim. 4:2; Titus 2:15; James 5:19-20), discipline (1 Cor. 5:1-13; 1 Tim. 5:20), and has genuine authority (2 Tim. 4:2; Titus 2:15; Hebrews 13: 7 and 17). The Church, as a good mother, gently draws us to our Father.

On Self-Regulation

"Those who have never learned to be responsible and self-regulating have difficulty conceiving solutions to life’s problems apart from the extremes of complete antinomianism, on the one hand, or complete totalitarianism on the other." Saints and Scoundrels, page 169

____________

Read my columns at the Charles Colson Center

Read my writings at Alfred the Great Society

To join my mailing list, send a blank email to robin (at sign) atgsociety.com with “Blog Me” in the subject heading.

Click Here to friend-request me on Facebook and get news feeds every time new articles are added to this blog.

A Zero-Sum Approach to the Eucharist

In James Jordan's article, 'Doing the Lord's Supper', he writes

"Paul says that Jesus took bread and gave thanks. He does not say to "set apart the elements from common use." He does not say to "invoke the Holy Spirit upon the elements." He knows nothing of any "consecration of the elements." There is no act of consecration of bread and wine. This means that there is no change in the status of the bread and wine. Just as God gives us life when we eat dead meat and vegetables — food that will rot if we don’t eat it — so He gives us New Kingdom Life when we eat bread and wine in the liturgy. By refusing to consecrate the bread and wine, we affirm that the grace of the sacrament comes from the Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life."

It is an interesting move to suggest that refusal to consecrate the bread and wine affirms that the grace of the sacrament comes from the Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life. Matthew and Mark explicitly say that Christ blessed the bread. Did he bless it with something other than the Spirit?

Jordan goes on to say, 

"Asking the blessing before we eat at church is no different from asking the blessing before we eat at home. There is no other 'setting apart' involved."

I haven't read enough of Jordan's theology to situate his remarks in a larger doctrinal framework, but taken on the surface this seems indicative of a deeply unsacramental mentality which has much in common with modern evangelicalism but little resonance with the historic understanding of the church.

I wonder whether this is just another example of the zero-sum type of thinking that I identified in my article, 'A Critical Absence of the Divine: How a ‘Zero-Sum’ Theology Destroys Sacred Space.' I recalled how

Earlier in the month I asked a young theological student if he thought that asking God to bless our meal made any actual difference to the food. He said that it couldn’t possibly make a difference because then a human work would be achieving something. His words echoed Arthur Pink’s discussion of prayer in The Sovereignty of God, in which he took violent exception to an article on prayer where the author had declared that “prayer changes things, meaning that God changes things when men pray.” This also echoes Jeffrey Meyers‘ approach to prayer in his lecture on the Eucharist in the 2010 Auburn Avenue Pastors Conference: “The Necessity of the Reformation”. Significantly almost Meyers’ entire argument against the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist rested on the fact that it involved manipulating God through a human work. If carried to its logical extension, this approach comes very close to Jonathan Edwards’ complete elimination of secondary causality. If human work cannot achieve anything, if human work cannot be the instrumental means of causing God to do certain things (‘manipulation’ is simply a pejorative way of talking about secondary causality), then I am left wondering what the purpose of supplicatory prayers even is. Even though the reformed tradition has the categories for a robust theology of secondary causation (how many times have you heard that if God wills an end, He also wills the means to that end?), we tend to be uncomfortable with God working through means. Our default modus operandi is to think we are giving more to God by granting less to creation. The notion that God can be manipulated by human works is deeply problematic, even though the doctrine of God’s sovereign decrees ought to immediately situate such works in a context that renders them compatible with, rather than in competition to, our understanding of Providence.

Further Reading

• From Eucharist to Pulpit
• The Holy Spirit and the Animated Cosmos

____________

Read my columns at the Charles Colson Center

Read my writings at Alfred the Great Society

To join my mailing list, send a blank email to robin (at sign) atgsociety.com with “Blog Me” in the subject heading.

Click Here to friend-request me on Facebook and get news feeds every time new articles are added to this blog.

Human Engineering: The New Frontier for Climate Change

For Salvo 14 I wrote an article about population control as the new solution to climate change, titled ‘Baby Freeze  Is Population Control the New Solution to Global Warming?‘ I just read an article today which suggests that population control may not, in fact, be the final frontier for climate change. Some academics are now suggesting that the key to battling climate change is not to reduce the human population so much as to change it, to modify human beings to be the sort of people who cooperate with climate change plans.

“If it is so hard to change the climate to suit humans, why not alter humans to suit the changing climate, philosophers from Oxford and New York universities are asking.”

Thus opens a revealing article published by the Sidney Morning Herald, titled, ‘Final frontier of climate policy – remake humans.’

 

Those who have watched the video I posted on Transhumanism on the Salvo blog will know that plans to genetically modify human beings are already afloat, which is why these new climate change proposals should strike us as really spooky. In the article Catherine Armitage summarizes the content of a forthcoming paper published by Matthew Liao of New York University and Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache of Oxford University. Here’s what Armitage writes about the paper, which is set to be published in the academic journal Ethics, Policy & Environment.

They suggest humans could be modified to be smaller, dislike eating meat, have fewer children and be more willing to co-operate with social goals.

Behavioural changes might not be enough to prevent climate change even if they were widely adopted, and international agreements for measures such as emissions trading are proving elusive, say Matthew Liao of New York University and Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache of Oxford University.

So human engineering deserves serious consideration in the debate about how to solve climate change, they write in a coming paper for the academic journal Ethics, Policy & Environment.

A person’s ecological footprint is directly correlated to size, because larger people eat more than lighter people, their cars need more fuel to carry them and they wear out shoes, carpets and furniture sooner than lighter people, the authors write. They suggest hormone treatments could be used to suppress child growth, or embryos could be selected for smaller size. 

Reducing consumption of red meat could have significant environmental benefits, the paper says, citing estimates that as much as 51 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock farming. They say people who lack the motivation or willpower to give up eating meat could be helped by ”meat patches” on their skin to deliver hormones to stimulate their immune system against common bovine proteins. 

"Eating ‘eco-unfriendly’ food would induce unpleasant experiences,” the authors say. 

Better educated women have fewer children, so human engineering to improve cognition could reduce fertility as ”a positive side effect from the point of view of tackling climate change”, the paper argues. 

Pharmacological treatments such as the ”love drug” oxytocin could encourage people to act as a group and boost their appreciation of other life forms and nature, the authors say.

Further Reading

• Baby Freeze  Is Population Control the New Solution to Global Warming?
  
• Transhumanist Arms Race

Those who have watched the video I posted on Transhumanism will know that plans to genetically modify human beings are already afloat, which is why these new climate change proposals should strike us as really spooky. In the article Catherine Armitage summarizes the content of a forthcoming paper published by Matthew Liao of New York University and Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache of Oxford University. Here’s what Armitage writes about the paper, which is set to be published in the academic journal Ethics, Policy & Environment.

They suggest humans could be modified to be smaller, dislike eating meat, have fewer children and be more willing to co-operate with social goals.
Behavioural changes might not be enough to prevent climate change even if they were widely adopted, and international agreements for measures such as emissions trading are proving elusive, say Matthew Liao of New York University and Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache of Oxford University.
So human engineering deserves serious consideration in the debate about how to solve climate change, they write in a coming paper for the academic journal Ethics, Policy & Environment.
A person’s ecological footprint is directly correlated to size, because larger people eat more than lighter people, their cars need more fuel to carry them and they wear out shoes, carpets and furniture sooner than lighter people, the authors write. They suggest hormone treatments could be used to suppress child growth, or embryos could be selected for smaller size.
Reducing consumption of red meat could have significant environmental benefits, the paper says, citing estimates that as much as 51 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock farming. They say people who lack the motivation or willpower to give up eating meat could be helped by ”meat patches” on their skin to deliver hormones to stimulate their immune system against common bovine proteins.
”Eating ‘eco-unfriendly’ food would induce unpleasant experiences,” the authors say.
Better educated women have fewer children, so human engineering to improve cognition could reduce fertility as ”a positive side effect from the point of view of tackling climate change”, the paper argues.
Pharmacological treatments such as the ”love drug” oxytocin could encourage people to act as a group and boost their appreciation of other life forms and nature, the authors say.

Further Reading
Baby Freeze  Is Population Control the New Solution to Global Warming?
Transhumanist Arms Race
- See more at: http://salvomag.com/blog/2012/04/human-engineering-the-new-frontier-for-climate-change/#sthash.di5FZgOH.dpuf

Gender Neutralizers Attack Pregnancy

Given the widespread assumption that being equal means being the same, and combining this with the premise that being equal is always a good thing, many in our society are now wanting to eradicate all gender distinctions.This was a point I made in my Salvo feature, ‘Gender Benders  Is My Sexual Identity an Accident Just Waiting to Happen?‘

But there remain some final barriers to ushering in the gender-free utopia. Perhaps the most pervasive barrier is the problem of pregnancy.

You see, pregnancy constantly reminds us of the one thing that the new social architects would like us to forget: that men and women are different, and have different lived experiences in the world.

You just have to read the newspapers to see that the gender-eradicators are not unaware of the problem that pregnancy poses to their project of a unisex utopia.

Keep reading...

The Gender Wars

In a ChangePoint article, “How Gay 'Marriage' Became Plausible,” I talked about the way 20th-century feminists have attempted to homogenize the gender polarity. “Homogenizing the gender polarity” was my over-intellectualized way of referring to the unisex tendency -- the move to eradicate all distinctions between the sexes.

In that article I suggested that the only reason 21st-century society even has the categories to consider a concept like gay “marriage” is because feminists throughout the 20th century had consistently worked to blur the distinctions between men and women.

 

Nine days after the aforementioned post was published at the Colson Center, an article appeared in Slate.com which alerted me to the fact that the flow of gender confusion also works the other way round. That is, while it is true that blurring the distinctions between the genders can lead to concepts like gay “marriage” obtaining acceptance, it is also true that societies which accept same-sex marriage tend to open the door to further (and perhaps even endless) redefinitions of what it means to be a man or a woman.

Keep reading...

Why Obama Would Like to Go to War With Syria

Obama is being forced into a diplomatic solution for the Syrian
crisis that does not advance his interests for the Middle East

In an article I published yesterday for Christian Voice, I argued that war with Syria would advance Obama's interests. I suggested that the issue of chemical weapons is just a smoke screen because America was covertly supporting the Syrian rebels long before the recent issue came up (as they are also supporting Muslim rebels in Turkey and Jordan). I point out that even if Obama must opt for Russia's recent diplomatic proposal, this is as much a concession to his lack of support and doesn't help to advance America's long-term interests in the region. 

You see, gaining control of Syria is central to America’s long-term ambition of crippling Russia. Russia has never been a team player, while their prioritization of national interests creates barriers to the spread of global consumer markers.

Russia has a strong naval presence along the major Syrian ports of Latakia and Tartus, giving them access to the Mediterranean. If Syria falls into the hands of America, then so would these strategic ports.

Oil is another important issue that I drew attention to in my Christian Voice article. In order for the West to suppress Russia and gain control of the energy markets, they must gain control of Syria. Currently oil is supplied to Western Europe through Russia’s Druzhba pipeline. Syria is a key alternative energy transit route to Europe that would break the West’s dependence on Russia. That is why, in 2009, America supported Qatar’s proposal for a gas pipeline from the Gulf to Turkey that would travel through Syria to the Mediterranean and into Europe. But al-Assad refused to play ball, making deals with Russia instead, and refusing to let the Qatar pipeline pass through their land. If the United States assists in a regime change in Syria, then they will be in a position to control the future government of the nation, enabling them to revisit the Qatar pipeline idea.

Syria is also the site of a proposed pipeline controlled by Iran and its allies, which would supply Western Europe and undercut America’s energy interests in favour of Russia. America is against this idea, but to prevent it from happening they must control Syria.

To read more about this, click on the following link to be taken directly to the article I wrote yesterday:

Why Obama Needs a War With Syria

Israel's Return from Exile and the Sheep and the Goats

The parable of the sheep and the goats seems to me to be about Israel returning from exile, which happened in and through the ministry of our Blessed Lord. The parable  begins with Daniel’s Son of Man coming in His glory to assume dominion of the kingdom. He gathers all the nations before Him and He makes a great separation, as He does in the other parables. This time, the separation is pictured in terms of a shepherd separating the sheep from the goats. As in the other parables, this separation subverts the expected categories: those who thought they were faithfully serving the king receive only curses and are cast into exile with the devil, while those who were faithful to Jesus’ and His people are rewarded.

Following the proposal laid out by N.T. Wright in his book Jesus and the Victory of God, I would suggest that Jesus believed all this was happening in and through His ministry for the very generation He was addressing. The judgment on unbelieving Judaism to which this parable, like the others, so clearly point was not something reserved for the end of time, as if Jesus was talking about heaven and hell or His final coming. Rather, it was a warning about the very imminent destruction that God had in store for unbelieving Judaism. In hindsight, and with the rest of the New Testament to guide us, it is not hard to see this destruction in terms of what happened to Jerusalem at the hands of the Roman in AD 70, when God’s vengeance was let loose against those who had persecuted the true Israel (Christians). But while Jesus’ message was specifically focused on the nation of Israel, the principle is international in application. Thus, throughout the present age, God continues to separate the sheep from the goats by judging or rewarding nations that help or hinder the progress of the gospel (pictured as their response to “the least of these My brethren”).

The obvious Danielian backdrop to this particular parable helps to clinch the fact that it has nothing to do with Christ’s second coming. In Daniel 7, the coming of Son of Man is not His coming to earth. Rather, it is in the other direction: He comes to heaven from earth. When He does so, He takes His seat with the Ancient of Days and assumes dominion of His kingdom (Dan. 7:13-14). The parallels between Daniel 7:13-14 and Matthew 25:31 are too obvious to overlook. By invoking Daniel’s picture to His hearers, Jesus is identifying Himself with Daniel’s Son of Man, showing that He too will be coming to the heavenly throne of the Ancient of Days, to assume dominion of the kingdom in glory. When He does this, He will vindicate the true Israel. As N.T. Wright puts it:

"In Matthew, the other parables in chapter 25 are focused, not on the personal return of Jesus after a long interval in which the church is left behind, but on the great judgment which is coming very soon upon Jerusalem and her current leaders, and which signals the vindication of Jesus and his people as the true Israel. There is, of course, a time-lag to be undergone, but it is not the one normally imagined. It is not the gap between Jesus’ going away and his personal return (the ‘coming of the son of man’ in the literalistic, non-Danielic sense); it is the time-lag, envisaged in Matthew 24, between the ministry of Jesus and the destruction of Jerusalem. This time-lag will be a period in which, in Jesus’ absence, his followers will be open prey to the deceit of false Messiahs, and will face a period of great suffering before their vindication dawns."

Keep reading...

'Christoplatonism' and Modern Funeral Liturgies

In my article for the Colson Center titled, 'Raised a Spiritual Body', I pointed out that because the doctrine of bodily resurrection has so often been sidestepped for a Platonic doctrine of the soul’s immortality, and because it is often assumed that we will enjoy immortality in a disembodied state, Christian thinkers have often assumed that there is something unspiritual about our material existence. Instead of seeing the great antithesis between the spiritual and the material, we fall into the error of seeing the great metaphysical divide being between the spiritual and the material.

This false dualism, which Randy Alcorn calls “Christoplatonism” in his excellent book "Heaven," has had a huge impact on our understanding of death. The notion that the dead are in heaven waiting for their resurrection bodies has largely been eclipsed by the false idea that going to heaven is itself the primary Christian hope. This has had a major impact on Christian funeral liturgies.

In his 2009 publication The Christian Funeral, Thomas Long explored some of the subtle theological shifts that have occurred in Christian funeral rites. He wrote that a “disembodied, quasi-gnostic cluster of customs and ceremonies” now surround the Christian funeral. This network of “quasi-gnostic” customs exists in tension to the more traditional elements which also pervade funeral liturgy. To quote from Long,

“Often today two rival theological understandings battle it out for the soul of the funeral. To put it starkly, on the one hand, there is the gospel. The one who has died is an embodied person, a saint ‘traveling on’ to God, continuing the baptismal journey toward the hope of the resurrection of the body and God’s promise to make all things new. On the other hand, there is a more ‘spiritualized,’ perhaps even gnostic, understanding of death. The body is ‘just a shell,’ and the immortal soul of the deceased has now been released to become a spiritual presence among us, available through inspiration and active memory. In this view, the body, no longer of any use, is disposed of, but the ‘real person’ is now a disembodied spirit. It is therefore not the deceased who is traveling, but the mourners, on an intrapsychic journey from sorrow to stability.”

To read more about this, click on the following link:

Raised a Spiritual Body

Why We Shouldn't Interfere in Syria

The Obama administration has been helping the rebels in
Syria with potentially disastrous results.

According to the New York Times, the first 50-man cell of fighters who have been trained by the CIA, are beginning to sneak into Syria to help try to overthrow the government. While America officially debates whether or not to formally go to war, the Obama administration is quietly helping the rebels anyway, independent of congressional approval. Syria can now be added to Obama's long list of undeclared wars.

Let's not forget our history here. The intervention of America and Britain in Iraq resulted in a hard-line Islamic takeover and the eviction or extermination of the native Christians living in Iraq, as Andre Doran showed in his must-read article 'How the Iraq War Became a War on Christians and Why Supporting Syria's Rebels May Extinguish Christianity in its Oldest Environs.' Doran explains that many Iraqi Christians died, while countless others fled to Syria where they thought they would be safe. And now Western powers are seeking to empower the very forces that are persecuting the Christian population in Syria.

Iran was a parallel situation in the mid 20th century, as I discussed in my article 2010 article 'Foreign Policy.' Our interference in Egypt was another case in point, leading to more killing of Christians, not less, as I showed in my article 'Egypt: I Did Warn About This.' Let's not make the same mistake again in Syria!

On my other website I recently posted an article about how the West is helping to destroy Christianity in Syria. I pointed out that a problem with American and Britain involving itself in Syria’s conflict, apart from the fact that it is none of their business, is the simple fact the Western powers have chosen to support the wrong side. No one is claiming that al-Assad’s authoritarian government has been godly; however, the prospect of what might emerge if his government is overthrown is almost unthinkable.

If the rebels do succeed in overthrowing the government, the worst case scenario could be a repeat of what happened in Yugoslavia during the late 90s, after Western troops supported Islamic Albanian rebel groups seeking to overthrow the government. Once the Muslim rebel groups had successfully separated from the lawful Yugoslavian government based on Serbia, they formed the, so called, Republic of Kosovo. Christians living in Kosovo were then targeted for destruction and sacred monasteries that were hundreds of years old were levelled to the ground.

These concerns are based on the fact of what is happening right now. The very rebels who are being armed by the West have been systematically wiping out entire villages of Christians in Syria. To read my article about this, click on the following link:

How the West is Helping to Destroy Christianity in Syria

Russian President, Vladimir Putin, recently warned President Obama about the possible consequences of rash intervention in Syria. Echoing comments I made in a 2010 article titled 'Is Obama a Man of Peace?', Putin appealed to Obama as a Nobel Peace Prize winner, asking him to consider carefully whether war with Syria is really in the interest of world peace. It is definitely worth watching at this time of international insanity.

  

Further Resources

• 'Why America Should Stop Meddling in the Middle East'
•  Soros' Doctrine Legitimizes America's Undeclared Wars
• 'Interventionist Foreign Policy'