Monthly Archives: August 2018

Guarding Your Freedom

In this excellent piece, my online friend Dave Carringer paraphrases part of what I call the ‘letter of Freedom’; St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians:


Don’t be deceived; you’ll have to guard the liberty Christ gave you. Remember, it was for freedom alone He made you free! The ‘law’ isn’t restricted to just 10 rules on a rock. Any stipulation or requirement you strive to live for will keep you from bearing the natural fruit living from Him will produce in your life! Oh, they won’t bombard you at first; but will subtly slide your neck in the yoke one rule at a time.

It may start like “just add this in the spirit”… or “just cut this off in the flesh”… but once you agree to just one of their rules, they won’t stop until they have you straining to keep their whole list! And you’ll be cutting something off all right… YOURSELF… from the Life giving flow of Grace and Truth already within you! Trying to ‘do’ a certain thing or ‘stop doing’ other things to please God… will profit you absolutely nothing. He’s already pleased with you because of Christ IN you, who came with all the faith you need which flows beautifully unrestricted through His Love. You’re not under any form of ancient ‘agreements’ made with any other people groups… but are simply free to Live & Love as sons and daughters of God.

Understanding this alone will produce more lasting fruit in your life than you’ll know what to do with! Of His fullness you have received… and you are complete IN Him; so do yourself a favor and cut yourself off once and for all from anyone or anything that says you need something else! (Galatians 5:1-6 dcv*)


*’Dave Carringer Version’ – i.e. his own personal paraphrase 🙂

Christianity vs. Biblicism

Here’s a superb piece by the renowned Christian thinker and pastor, Brian Zahnd.

During my ‘Dark Night of the Soul‘, one of the things that Father God set me free from – in this case, quite forcefully – was the idea that the Bible is the be-all and end-all of the Christian faith, and that its ‘authority’ trumps even that of the Holy Spirit. This is one of the fruits of ‘Biblicism’, which Brian describes in his piece below.

Here’s the piece, which I think is well-written, balanced, gentle and informative.


Christianity vs. Biblicism
Brian Zahnd

(This is my foreword to Keith Giles’ excellent new book, Jesus Unbound.)

As modern Christians we are children of a broken home. Five centuries ago the Western church went through a bitter divorce that divided European Christians and their heirs into estranged Catholic and Protestant families. The reality that the Renaissance church was in desperate need of reformation doesn’t change the fact that along with a reformation there also came an ugly split that divided the church’s children between a Catholic mother and a Protestant father. In the divorce settlement (to push the metaphor a bit further) Catholic Mom got a long history, a rich tradition, and a unified church, but all Protestant Dad got was the Bible. Without history, tradition, or a magisterium, the Bible had to be everything for Protestant Dad — and Protestants have made the most of it. For five hundred years Protestant scholars and theologians have led the way in biblical translation, scholarship, and interpretation, giving the Christian world such notables as Martin Luther, John Calvin, Jacob Arminius, John Wesley, Karl Barth, C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, T.F. Torrance, Walter Brueggemann, Stanley Hauerwas, Fleming Rutledge, Richard Hayes, N.T. Wright, to name a few.

But with Sola Scriptura as a defiant battle cry there always lurked the temptation to place more weight on the Bible than it could bear, or worse yet, a temptation to deify the Bible and make an idol out of it. This has become increasingly true among the more fundamentalist clergy and congregations who are suspicious of higher education and unwilling to read their Bibles with the help of biblical scholars the caliber of Brueggemann, Hayes, and Wright. So while pretending to “take the Bible as it is,” the fundamentalist reads the Bible through thick lenses of cultural, linguistic, political, and theological assumptions — interpretive lenses they are unaware of wearing.

This has led to the thoroughly modern and peculiarly Protestant problem of Biblicism. Biblicism is an interpretative method that reads the Bible as a “flat text” where every verse is itself “the word of God” and carries the same authority as any other verse. Biblicism, in effect, attempts to make the Bible the head of the church. Where Catholics err in seeking to give ultimate authority to the Pope, Protestant Biblicists err in seeking to give ultimate authority to the Bible. What Christians are supposed to confess is that Christ alone is the head of the church. The risen Christ said to his disciples, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given unto me.” With his wry British wit, N.T. Wright reminds us that Jesus did not say, “All authority in heaven and on earth is given unto a book you chaps are going to write.” The irony of Biblicism is that for all its claims about giving final authority to the Bible, in reality Biblicism enables the individual reader to remain their own private authority. So if you don’t like Jesus’ explicit call to an ethic of nonviolence, you can always appeal to the wars of Joshua and David to countermand the Sermon on the Mount. This is how you use Joshua to trump Jesus. Perhaps the most clever way to ignore the commands of Christ is to cite an opposing chapter and verse. By reading the Bible as a flat text and selecting the corroborative proof-text, you can gain a biblical endorsement for nearly anything — including wars of conquest, genocide, women held as property, and the institution of slavery. This abuse of the Bible has a long and well documented history.

One of the chief problems of Biblicism is that it fails to make the vital distinction between the Bible and Christianity. Christian faith is a living tree rooted in the soil of Scripture. We cannot remove the tree from the soil in which it is rooted and expect it to survive; but neither are we to think that the tree and the soil are the same thing! They are not. Put simply, the Bible and Christianity are not synonymous. Yes, they are connected, but they remain distinct. Scripture is the soil; Christian faith is the living tree. They are connected, but they are not the same thing. So if the Bible assumes that slavery is both a tolerable and inevitable institution (see Ephesians 6:5), even explicitly stating that slaves are slaveowners’ property (see Exodus 21:21), that doesn’t mean this is the Christian ethical position on slavery. Christianity is not a slave to the Bible — Christianity is a slave to Christ! Out of the soil of Scripture grows a mature Christian faith that is not only able, but required to oppose all forms of slavery in the name of Jesus. Rooted in the soil of Scripture, Christianity is capable of growing an ethical bough of justice called abolition.

Since the canon of Scripture is closed, the soil of Christian faith is unchanging. But that doesn’t prevent the living Christian faith itself from growing, changing, developing, and maturing over time. Of course, how it grows and changes will often be a matter of fervent debate within the church; and the deeply fractured nature of the church compounds the complexity of this problem. Nevertheless, to understand Christianity as a living tree rooted in the soil of Scripture enables the church to grow in new and redemptive ways within God’s moral universe. To say that Christian faith is forever rooted in Scripture, yet distinct from Scripture, is both conservative and progressive. Conservative in that it recognizes the inviolability of Scripture. Progressive in that it makes a vital distinction between the living faith and the historic text. But to claim that Christian faith is one and the same with the Bible is a fundamentalist mistake that is ultimately untenable. For example, I’ve seen Biblicists backed into a corner trying to defend the Bible by saying, “sometimes slavery is a good thing.” This is Biblicism at its worst.

The ancient orthodox alternative to modern heterodox Biblicism is to say what the church has always said: Jesus Christ is the true Word of God. The Bible is the word of God, only in a penultimate sense. The Bible is the inspired, canonized witness to the Word of God who is Jesus Christ — the Word made flesh. Only Jesus Christ is the inerrant and infallible, perfect and divine Word of God. We come to accept the Bible as authoritative in the ongoing conversation about Christ that is Christian theology through the witness of Christ and the church — not the other way around. Without first appealing to Christ and then secondly to the church, we can’t even account for how the Christian Bible came into being. The risen Christ commissioned the church to bear witness to the gospel throughout the world. In the course of obeying Christ’s commission the church composed, collected, and canonized certain writings that became the New Testament. But we don’t start with the Bible; we start with Jesus and the church. Why? Because Jesus is Lord, not the Bible. Christians worship Jesus, not the Bible. Jesus is the head of the church, not the Bible.

In reading Jesus Unbound: How The Bible Keeps Us From Hearing the Word of God, some readers will regard Keith Giles as controversial. I insist this is not so. Giles’ approach to the Bible is not novel or modern — it’s the orthodox way the Church Fathers read the Bible in the formative centuries of Christianity. It’s modern fundamentalist Biblicism that should be regarded as controversial and ultimately rejected as heterodox. But I also understand that a Biblicist approach to the Bible is the default position inherited by most American evangelicals, which is precisely why Giles’ book is so helpful, so timely, and so important. So as you begin your reading of Jesus Unbound, be assured that you are on solid ground — and keep your Bible close at hand, because as a lover of Scripture, Giles will refer to it over and over again. Both Keith Giles and Jesus Unbound are firmly rooted in the Bible.

BZ

(The artwork is the 6th century Christ Pantokrator mosaic in Hagia Sophia.)


Click here for the link to the original article


Since this is based on an American article, the links to the book in the article go to Amazon.com. For the book on the UK Amazon site, click this link.

To My Readers

I’ve been writing this blog now for more than three and a half years, and it seems like time has just flown! Up until now, I have been posting an item roughly twice per week, and I would imagine that my readers have become used to that posting frequency.

This is just a quick note, then, to let you know that I’m not going to be posting quite as often from now on, nor as regularly. This doesn’t mean that I’m stopping writing; I’m just not going to be writing quite as much. But the take-home message is: ‘don’t worry!’; I will still be writing things 🙂

Rather than having you check back every few days, it may be helpful for you if you sign up to my notification list so that you get an email every time a new blog post is published. The system for doing that can be found in the right-hand column of any blog page.

Thank you all for frequenting my blog. It means a lot to me.

 

The Wisdom of the Wise

We’ve all come across these people. You know the situation: you’re on a forum and you make some comment implying that you are intelligent/educated/well-versed in Bible history, theology, or your Bible college education, or indeed anything. Not meaning to blow your own trumpet, of course, but just to illustrate that you probably know just as much as anyone else how to at least talk about the incomprehensible – and yet, so close to us – Being we call God.

And then some oik comes along and tries to puncture your entire balloon by declaring that ‘God frustrates the wisdom of the wise’, or some other such comment designed to put him/her on an ‘equal footing’ with you as far as shooting down your qualifications, education, wisdom, experience or whatever.

And in some ways, they’re right. Not only do none of us have a ‘monopoly’ on the knowledge of God, but also God is capable – and willing! – to give wisdom to anyone who asks for it, having realised their lack! (Jas 1:5) If God can speak through animals, children or even a glorious sunset, then He can speak through anyone, educated or not.

But, to me, it’s quite obvious when certain ignorant* people are just parroting Scriptures that they have been taught, without understanding. In many ways, they are “…seeing but never perceiving, hearing but not understanding…” (Mk 4:12, Mt 13:13-15 fulfilling Isaiah 6:9) and they can’t imagine anyone knowing more than they do. Or, it might just be that they are afraid of feeling ‘small’ in the things of God and say these things to bolster their own confidence. I don’t know; being Autistic, I find it difficult to relate to others’ feelings. (And I wouldn’t presume to make any assumptions about what others are thinking, either).

In this essay, then, I would like to address this problem by describing the differences between certain types of ‘wisdom’.

Now, it’s funny, but as I have mentioned before on my blog, I don’t come across all that well in face-to-face discussion; I’m not all that articulate!

But I am still a professional man, Bible College educated and with two University degrees in science (a Bachelor’s and a Master’s), and I have been recognised in the past as a Polymath – that’s someone who is very good at a lot of things. I say this not to boast, but to set the stage for this piece in which I would like to try to address the problem that a lot of Christians seem to have with people who are clever and/or knowledgeable.

While I fully understand that some people who are not all that clever may feel belittled, maybe threatened or put-down by others appearing smarter than they are, I firmly believe that it takes all sorts. Everyone has value, and intelligence and knowledge are only two of a whole multitude of amazing abilities that humans have. We can create fire and cook wonderful meals. We can kick a football with such accuracy in terms of mass, speed, trajectory and such that it arrives in a specific spot in space and time, hopefully beyond the goalkeeper’s reach. The ‘keeper’s brain is also performing a set of automatic calculations which might – just might – help him to put his body, or at least his hand, in a place that will stop that ball going in the goal. We can drive vehicles at speeds that our brain was never designed to cope with; even a standard 70mph is a phenomenal speed compared with the speeds our bodies were originally supposed to move at: usually up to 3-5mph, and certainly no faster than 20mph, at least not without steroids 😉 Even driving a car, then, is an utterly amazing thing to be able to do, a thing which is not rendered any less clever and special because most adults can do it; that it’s not rare does not make it any less amazing.

So, just because one does not have all that much intelligence or knowledge – two ‘abilities’ which are supposedly highly prized in the world today, although sometimes I doubt it – does not mean that one has to belittle those who do have them, and particularly when that belittling is likely in response to one’s own insecurities. It’s vitally important to remember that we each have our own talents, and they are all amazing in their own right. And we are all equally valued by God.

I know that many Christians immediately answer an assertion of intelligence with a Scripture salvo containing the idea that ‘God frustrates the wisdom of the wise’ and all that sort of thing. Let’s address some of those Scriptures, shall we? In that passage about the ‘wisdom of the wise’, in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2, St. Paul is talking about the wisdom of the world; the fleshly wisdom that comes only from a non-spiritual person (1Cor 2:14). There’s more about this passage below. Sure, St. Paul wrote about all his former ‘spiritual education’ and theological knowledge being ‘rubbish’. But that, firmly in its context  (Phil 3:8), was what he thought of the stuff he considered he ‘knew’ before he met the Risen Jesus.

In other words, Paul was saying that, compared with what he was learning in Jesus, the Wisdom of God personified, the former things were indeed a load of old rubbish, of no remaining value whatsoever, fit for nothing but to be thrown away as worthless!

But here’s the thing. An educated believer is not someone whose intelligence God frustrates. No; instead, He builds them up in wisdom and knowledge so that they can be of service to their fellow believers. In other words, God gifts the body of Christ with intelligent people so that they can use their gifts for the common good. This is what I am doing with my blog – I hope! The Secret of the Lord and all that…

If nothing else, the sometimes complex and convoluted theology of Paul should be a case in point for what happens when a highly intelligent person gets hold of the Gospel and applies it with the wisdom of God, and then uses that wisdom and knowledge for the building-up of others. He brings out points of theology that can satisfy both the simple and the wise, who can go into as much or as little depth as they want to do – as long as they acknowledge that there are some parts they don’t understand as well as they do others. And so, Paul’s writings have survived nearly 2,000 years and are known and loved word-for-word by millions of people worldwide, and they continue to build people up, right up  to this very day.

I could go further with this and quote the two main Scripture passages used by people to attempt to bring down, or level, those of high intelligence. But I won’t; I would instead encourage people to respect their own intelligence and read it for themselves, and hear what Jesus is saying through the words. The passages are 1Cor 1:18 – 2:16, in which St. Paul quotes from Is 29:13-16. Those (1Cor and Isaiah) are the two main passages that spring to my mind at the moment. Interestingly, this Isaiah passage is also a passage that Jesus quotes (Mt 15:9, quoting Is 29:13) about how humans make up their own religious rules, and in fact these are the ‘wisdoms’ that Isaiah declares that God is going to frustrate, and St. Paul’s reference to that Scripture in the context of man-made religious rules is no coincidence. In fact, it strongly suggests to me that Paul is referring to human wisdom in things involving spiritual matters. In these things, things about which we really don’t have an awful lot of clue, if we’re honest, the wisdom of men is pretty useless and only those things revealed to us by the Spirit have any value anyway (Jn 16:13; Jn 16:13 KJV)

And so, please let’s not belittle or otherwise disregard the intelligence of the intelligent, or the wisdom of the wise; not when they are people of the Spirit speaking of spiritual things; not when their wisdom is rooted in the Cross and the Resurrection and all that Jesus did there. By all means, we should take only what we need and what speaks to us in what they are saying, and discard the rest. But let’s not knock it. We will already know that, in fact, the Bible praises wisdom greatly, and if we want that to be true for us, how then can we discount all (even Godly) wisdom, and count it all worthless? That’s just plain daft. The first four chapters of the Book of Proverbs are full of exhortations to wisdom; we cannot discount it simply because others have it. In fact, mocking those who are wise is also not all that clever an idea, mainly because you miss out on what they have to contribute.

How long will mockers delight in mockery
And fools hate knowledge
– Prov 1:22

…and also, comparing ourselves with others isn’t always a healthy thing to be doing either. Personally, I prefer just to rest in who I am in Christ, use the gifts He has given me for the benefit of others, and rest in His Presence. There’s no better place to be.

*Ignorant in its true sense: being in a state of not knowing. A state which we are all in, to some degree, but some more than others.

Moses the Prat

Why, in the light of Jesus, we no longer need to follow the ways of Moses

Some might be offended by this, but from very early on in my Christian walk, I have considered Moses to be a complete and total prat.

In fact, I once voiced that opinion (in fact, my words were “…actually, I think Moses was a bit of a wally”), and was told that I would, one day, have to answer for that. Hmm, yeah, right 😉

Well, here I am doing it again, and on a world-wide platform, no less.

I mean, he was a volatile man with a terrible temper; a murderer; a religious cult leader (he had absolute power and authority, that he claimed were ‘God-given’); and he was the equivalent of an organised crime leader in that he had a bunch of killers at his beck and call. Consider the episode of the Golden Calf. If you haven’t read the story, it’s in Exodus 32. Moses comes down off that mountain and finds the people worshipping an idol – a golden calf – and, despite pleading with God for the people with some compassion, Moses ends up in a total radge and gets a bunch of thugs to go through the camp killing people indiscriminately. Not the kind of bloke you’d want to go down the pub with for a pint.  And this is Moses the ‘Servant of God’ (Rev 15:3, Heb 3:5, Num 12:7 et al)  we are talking about here, remember.

Then, on another occasion (Numbers 15:32-36), Moses decides that ‘God told him’ to kill (or at least, to get his thugs to kill) some random bloke who may even have been an innocent foreigner who just happened to break some Sabbath law that he maybe didn’t even know about. And then the very next verses in that Numbers passage go on about some pretty little tassles with coloured thread that you can look at and feel good about. I mean talk about dysfunctional religion… I really don’t like some parts of the Bible, and Numbers is the pits, it really is. There are some nuggets and gems in there, but you have to dig pretty deep – and survive all the other tripe in there – in order to find them.

And supposedly Moses wrote that book, although I understand that most scholars nowadays do not hold this to be correct. But if Moses had written it, it wouldn’t surprise me. It’s right up his street. If you were going to give the Bible an enema, Numbers is where the tube would go. Or maybe Deuteronomy. Anyway, I could go on for ages quoting examples of how Moses justified himself by effectively saying ‘God told me to do it’ and essentially displayed all of the characteristics of an abusive church leader of one of today’s way-off-beam churches, but at a time in history that was at least three thousand years ago. It seems that, in some quarters at least, little has changed. In some ways, it’s quite worrying: I have actually heard and read many purported men of God put forward the idea that Moses is a ‘model’ leader. Actually, it’s Jesus Who models the ideals of leadership qualities, not Moses. If you are ‘under’ a leader who claims Moses as his model, get out of there fast! Run as far as you can, as fast as you can! It’s especially scary that the words of Moses and violent stories from the Old Testament (especially the story of David and Goliath) are used far more to indoctrinate educate children in Sunday School than are the words of Jesus. But I digress.

Suffice it to say that I see Moses, and the religious views of the Old Testament (OT) inspired by his teachings, to be the archetypal example of how not to pursue faith in God. Essentially, Moses tried Law and it didn’t work (Rom 3:20; Gal 2:16). And in fact the huge take-home message of the OT is this: Religion based on rules and regulations does not work. Sure, the main thing that the OT does is to lead us to Jesus, but one of the primary ways in which it does this is to show us the futility of Law-based religion.

And, while I have learned valuable lessons from Moses, especially on the how-not-to-do something level, I have recently come to a further conclusion which sheds a lot of useful light on how we interpret the older parts of the Bible today, and try to apply its ‘teachings’ as principles in our modern era.

You see, I realised that it is completely unfair for me to judge Moses by today’s standards; that was just the way people were back then, even (and especially?) the ‘pious’ ones. Moses was on a different part of his spiritual walk, in an entirely different time, world and culture from ours, in an utterly different and indeed completely alien era, when their belief systems were very, very different from those of anyone today. Or so I would hope, at any rate. Those people were only just beginning to adapt to the idea of the One True God being different from the gods of other nations, and not simply being just another tribal deity. So, Moses was a man of his time. True, I still think he was a prat, but he was a prat of his time. Let’s give him the benefit of that.

In fact, the Hebrew people of that time too were also a product of their times and circumstances. Everyone else – all the other nations: the Philistines, Hittites, Jebusites, Midianites, Edomites, Amalekites, Moabites, Egyptians, Amorites, Canaanites, Babylonians, Assyrians – had vicious gods; the Hebrews thought theirs wasn’t much different, at least at first, until His continued revelations to them gradually showed them more of what He is really like. And so they said things like ‘God told us to [perform an atrocity]’ whereas actually it was just the way they did things back then.

Anyway, from the Old Testament, we now jump forward to the New Testament (NT). On the Mount of Transfiguration (Mt 17:1-8; Mk 9:2-8; Lk 9:28-36), Jesus’s disciples observed Him in the company of the previous ‘greats’ of the Jewish faith – Moses and Elijah. It is widely agreed in this context that Moses represents the Law, while Elijah represents the Prophets. And so when Peter says, “Let me make three tents for you all”, Moses and Elijah disappear and the voice of God says, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!” The timing of this announcement is important. Whereas Peter wants to give Jesus equal standing with Moses and Elijah – which in his eyes, would have been an honour indeed –  by making three equal tents for them, the simultaneity of the three events of Peter’s offer of the tents, the disappearance of the ancient guys and the words of the Voice of God are effectively saying, ‘No! These guys, and what they represent, are not important anymore; from now on you need to listen to My Son, Who is not equal to Moses and Elijah, but is in fact much, much greater‘. As of that day, the Law and the Prophets have been superseded, and they are no longer the way in which God relates to people. And while Moses and Elijah generally got their way through religious bullying and genocide, the way of Jesus was diametrically opposed to those kinds of methods.

In this pivotal event in the Jesus story, God was saying, “Look, from now on we’re doing things differently. We’re no longer doing things using the crude and often barbaric methods of mere humans, no matter how much they are in My favour; no, now we are doing things My Son’s way”. Not only this, but also that Jesus was – and is – the perfect revelation of God to humanity. ‘He who has seen Me has seen the Father’ (Jn 14:9). In fact, one of the major, if more subtle, of the story arcs of the Scripture is that of humanity’s changing view of God, right from being just like all the other vicious tribal gods of the region, right up to, eventually, Jesus showing us what the Creator is really like. And there is no need to assume that this arc does not continue to this day; God is continually revealing His nature to humanity in ever-increasing measure, and still this is through Jesus Christ.

 So, yes. Moses , in addition to being an utter prat, was also a mass-murderer, a thug and a cult leader. I accept this and I accept why he was like this.

But what we are saying here is that, since the coming of Jesus the Anointed One (which is what ‘Christ’ means), Moses has been superseded.
In fact, he has been completely superseded.
The mature, revealed and fully-developed view of how we relate to God is now through Jesus, and no longer through Law.

This is the testimony of the entire New Testament; indeed, this is why the Testament is known as ‘New’. John begins his Gospel with it: “For the Law was given through Moses; Grace and Truth came through Jesus Christ” (Jn 1:17); the Transfiguration account states it, as we have already seen; and St. Paul continues the claim with his assertions that we are no longer under Law, but under Grace, in Rom 6:14 and several other similar passages. Moses is no longer relevant, except in certain circumstances where believers preaching the Gospel need to relate to people who are still ‘in’ the old system of Law in order to save them from those systems (see 1Cor 9:19-23 for examples of this tactic).

So, what this means in practice is that yes, we can allow that Moses was a product of his time, and excuse his behaviour that way. But it also means that we neither can, nor should we, try to import the cultural attitudes and laws of Moses’ times into our present day faith and religious structures; it just doesn’t work, and most of it would be illegal nowadays anyway. Especially all that crap about killing the donkeys…  We just shouldn’t be trying to imitate the way they were back then, a) because Jesus has superseded it all with His way of Love, and b) because it is no longer relevant and is indeed a step in the wrong direction, and c) who wants to be like Moses, for goodness’ sake? A good read of the book of Hebrews will reveal that the Old Covenant has, in Christ, already been superseded by the New Covenant, and a major part of this succession is that the Law of Moses, and all the superstition, savagery and religious manipulation that Moses represents, is gone forever and is no longer relevant to the believer.*

In fact, the entire burden of fulfilling the Law has been borne by Jesus, however that works. Jesus said, “I did not come to abolish the law of Moses or the writings of the prophets. No, I came to accomplish their purpose” (Mt 5:17 NLT). And, once their purpose had been accomplished, they are no longer necessary, except in the vestigial sense I mentioned above. When we live a life in the Spirit, all the burden of the Law is taken care of and is not only fulfilled by Jesus and Him living His Life through us by His Spirit, but is actually made obsolete (Heb 8:13). This is what makes it a New Covenant; it’s no longer a dead covenant but in fact a ‘new and living Way’ (Heb 10:19-23). It’s also the primary reason why we need to read the Scriptures – all of them – through the lens of Christ, Who embodies and demonstrates Grace and Truth, rather than the lens of Moses, who represents the Law. If we deny this, then we deny our liberty from the Law and are essentially no longer aware of the benefits of that liberty; indeed we have ‘fallen from Grace’ (Gal 5:4)

No, the whole burden of our having to keep the Law is now indeed obsolete. This is because it is now Life in the Spirit that makes us free to follow Jesus and live His Life. In my article, Licence to Sin, I explain how the life in the Spirit means that we can live sin-free and walk freely with God.

Wouldn’t you like to be in that position? Wouldn’t you like to be free of the influence of others’ judgement on your life and actions, pretending to be in the name of God? “Whoever claims to live in Him must walk as Jesus did” (1Jn 2:6) This is not a test of true faith, nor is it a command. This is a simple statement that those who live in Him must walk as Jesus did because that is their natural tendency. That’s just the way things are, it’s saying. “As He is, so are we in this world” (1Jn 4:17). This is the nature of the New Creation. This is a statement of fact.

And it’s a statement of fact about You. Yes, you reading this. This is who you are. You are in Christ. Not in Moses, nor indeed in ‘Adam’, but in Christ.

And there is no going back. Once we have been included in Christ, the life we live is not any longer our old life, but is the New Life in Christ! (Gal 2:20)

Oh, hallelujah! Why be all tied up in Moses any longer? Step into Christ, into His liberating death and His Life-giving Resurrection, and His joy-giving Spirit. And live, live, live!

Yes, Moses may well have been a prat. But you are not in Moses; you are in Christ, and He is the One Who is in you.

Rejoice!


*I make the distinction between believer and unbeliever here, because Paul says that ‘through the Law, we become conscious of sin’ (Rom 3:20b). Once a person believes in Jesus, that person no longer needs to be ‘conscious of’ or indeed worry about sin at all, ever again, because it has all been dealt with at the Cross, and the believer has appropriated that for themselves. This is part of what it means to be a New Creation in Christ. If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new is come! (2Cor 5:17)


Top picture in this article is an obvious photoshop of legendary actor Charlton Heston as Moses in the 1956 movie The Ten Commandments. My apologies to the late Mr. Heston for my shredding of the character he played 😉

Carrot and Stick

A few weeks ago, the brilliant Jeff Turner posted this superb piece on Facebook. This essay really grabbed my attention because it’s one of the things that God has been saying to me for a couple of years now. I will let you read it first, and a few of my own comments follow:

I don’t aim to offend with posts like the one that follows, but there are certain things I can’t help but say. Not because I aim to tear down this or that movement, but because I long to see people find freedom from the madness they willingly and hopefully submit to.

I’ve watched people who are dear to my heart, give literal decades of their lives to movements that are going absolutely nowhere. They are movements that lack mobility, based not upon helping hurting people (though, that’s a bit of an overstatement, as there are factions within these larger movements that certainly DO focus on exactly that) but upon pumping up the masses to expect a fresh wave of revival, or a “new thing” which God always seems to be on the verge of doing.

Year after year, decade after decade, the prophecies, promises and proclamations keep coming: “God’s getting ready to do this! God’s raising up that! We’re entering into a season of this! etc…” The fact that almost none of these promises ever materialize is ignored though, and the faithful are moved to heap guilt upon themselves, believing that if they’d only prayed harder, fasted more, or lived more consecrated lives, that something would have happened. They shoulder the guilt and responsibility that belongs to the irresponsible leaders who made the empty promises, blame themselves lacking in devotion, and determine to try harder next time. That isn’t to say they aren’t complicit, in that they never ask questions of their leaders, but, still, he guilt is misplaced. They pray, pray and pray some more, but the promises and prophecies never come to pass.

Eventually, when weariness sets in, the leaders switch gears, and begin emphasizing the necessity of spiritual endurance, and preaching about not giving up on your breakthrough, revival’s right around the corner etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum. This keeps the faithful…faithful, but also enslaved. They are hopeless devotees to a system founded on false hope. When the falseness of the hope begins to be revealed, however, they’re simply given bigger and flashier things to hope for.

But year after year, decade after decade, nothing changes.

And why does nothing change? Because instead of devoting ourselves to bettering humanity, we hide in prayer closets and prophecy clubs, begging God to act, and telling each other things are about to change. Deep inside, though, we know we’re lying. Once it becomes apparent that the movement we’ve been longing for is still a ways away, gears are shifted again, and now the faithful are told that God is raising up people to pray in the movement that God wants to raise up – which apparently He can’t raise up until we ask Him to do it. A lot. Now it’s not about expecting revival, but expecting God to raise up prayer warriors to pray in the revival. Which begs the question of what was it they were doing all those previous years, then? And why exactly would God need for us to pray for Him to raise up people to pray to Him so that He could do something He already wants to do? Any way you cut it, it’s madness. Faithful and devout madness, to be sure, and the tenacity and devotion of those involved is a marvel, but it’s madness all the same.

If you push a button on a vending machine and the screen says “all out,” you move on and press another button. And sometimes to an entirely different machine. And sometimes you even give up on vending machine cuisine altogether. Would it not be mad to stand pressing the same button for years, hoping that suddenly things would change? If something doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, and you move on, but these popular prophetic movements don’t allow you to move on. They’ve employed and trained an army to stand behind you and whisper in your ear, “Keep pressing that button! Don’t get weary in well doing. Harvest is on it’s way, breakthrough is coming, but don’t stop pressing or you might miss it!” If you’d only tune out their voices and press a different button, or move on entirely, you could get on with your life. But the fear of “what if they’re right and I miss out?”, and that niggling thought of “were the hours and hears I spent pressing the button just wasted, then?”, spur you on.

This madness has to end. Your life is too beautiful a thing to keep imprisoned in such insanity!

Dear friends, I mean no offense, but I know this insanity all too well. I’ve been trapped in such movements in my past, and almost destroyed my life and everything precious to me because of them. There is no hope in clinging to these sinking ships. There’s an abundant life waiting for you just a few short steps outside of the prison of unfulfilled prophecies and unanswered prayers that you’re living in. You don’t have to stay trapped and bound. There’s hope for you. You need not waste another moment. Run for your life, and find freedom and rest in Christ!

There’s a better way.

– Jeff Turner

Here is the link to the original Facebook post

And I think that’s so well said. It’s essentially carrot and stick. This is the carrot: God’s doing something new! Tomorrow! Which of course never comes! – and the stick is of course Hell. Surprise, surprise; predictable and boring.

So what happens is that you live every day looking forward to better things, and not appreciating today for what it is and how God wants to walk with you today. And all while under the threat that if you so much as put a toe wrong (that is, outside the church’s particular ruleset) then you’re toast forever. And that without butter, too.

But TODAY is the day that the Lord has made; today is the day of salvation. Living in the moment is all He expects us to do; anything else is just wasting our lives on wishes. I wrote an article on this sort of thing about a year ago (in fact it was exactly a year before Jeff wrote his post, on the 12th June); here it is:

Today is the Day of Salvation

No, life is for living – right now! – and in the freedom from fear (1John 4:18) that knowledge of God’s perfect Love gives.

Be free!


Postscript: I do believe, however, that revival is always just hanging over our heads, and God just waits to pour out His Grace and mercy on those who will receive it. That includes you and me, and it includes us right now. I also believe that God is indeed doing a ‘new thing’ in this day where He’s making it clear what He’s like, and making it clear whom He includes and whom is welcome with Him, and this despite what the church think about it. (Shall I do this and not tell Abraham? (Gen 18:17) It would appear that Abraham is not listening!) And, as usual, the religious are being left standing and the ‘sinners’ are going into the Kingdom ahead of them (Mt 21:31)


Header Image credit: Berger and Wyse

The Relentless Logic of the Evangelical Hell Doctrine

Be warned: this is a very dark essay, mitigated only by the fact that I am describing what I consider to be wholly incorrect doctrines.

Today I’m going to look at the terrifying and indeed relentless ‘logic’ of the Evangelical doctrine of Hell, and the fate of everyone who ever lived*. But first I need to make some points clear.

Firstly, please remember that I am writing this from the point of view of Evangelical doctrine, as I used to believe it, 20 years ago, and which is still believed by most Christians of that persuasion today. I do know what I am talking about, because I was schooled in this horrific doctrine.

Secondly, I now reject the doctrine utterly, as completely false. Humans do not suffer endless torment in this Hell place once they die. I consider it to be a man-made invention, inspired by mediaeval interpretations of Scripture towards a public even more ignorant than they are now (ignorant in its proper sense of ‘not knowing’), mediaeval literature such as Dante’s Inferno, Islamic theology from the Koran, Greek mythology and many Pagan ideas as well as Babylonian mythology too. If the Christian Scriptures are interpreted through such ‘filters’, then it is no wonder that such a terrible concoction, as the Hell doctrine actually is, exists. That, and its promotion from the desire of crooked people from time immemorial who desire control over others. But that doesn’t mean it’s true; far from it.

Most gentle Christians, if asked about this doctrine, will usually say that they do believe in Hell, but that they have not really thought about it all that much. They are just believing – loosely – what they have been taught.

In this article, therefore, I am writing almost entirely about the ‘nasty’ churches and harsh Christians who aggressively and overtly espouse doctrines that damage the idea of a God of Love; I am not talking about the majority of decent churches who simply live their Christian lives for Jesus, doing good in a quiet way (1Thess 4:11)

To digress for a minute, I would bring up the subject of ‘cherry-picking’. That is, selecting Scripture verses or other evidence that supports your own point of view, while ignoring or otherwise disregarding other evidence that contradicts that point of view. This is nothing new, of course, and many Bible characters, including Jesus, did it regularly. This is actually because of the style of debate that Rabbinic scholars used, and unless one is familiar with that, it can be quite bewildering and confusing.

There are those in the Church who, for whatever reasons, like to major on the ‘bad news’. I am working on an essay on this idea at the moment, and I will publish it in due course. And so, I have noticed recently that the bad-news mongers only cherry-pick the bad verses, while at the same time accusing people like Universalists (those who believe everyone will be ‘saved’), for example, of only cherry-picking the ‘good’ verses.

It seems to me that these kinds of Christians, who, incredibly, consider themselves ‘joyful’; the bad-news mongers who nevertheless believe they are purveying a ‘loving God’ and ‘good news’, would rather assume that everything about their god is bad. He sends people to Hell. He punishes people for their sins. He’s wrathful. He likes people dashing babies against rocks because it says so in the Psalms (Ps 137:9, in fact, if you’ve never realised that Scripture exists). It seems that for a religion that purports to be joyful, it’s actually not. They have a facade of ‘good’, and many if not most churches do indeed do a lot of good in the world, but actually their ‘good news’ underlying everything is actually very, very bad news indeed. In fact it is actually the worst news there could possibly be. The most horrible nightmare you ever had does not compare with this stuff.

Let’s take a look.

Jesus said in Matthew 7:13-14 that ‘narrow is the way, and few are those that find it’. I know from personal experience that most Evangelicals infer from this that those who do not find that ‘way’ are toast in eternal punishment, because the verse also says that the ‘broad’ way leads to destruction. This is always interpreted by Evangelical Christians as meaning that this ‘destruction’ is in the eternal, everlasting torment of Hell. There is, however, actually no direct link between this passage and the classic ‘Hell’ passages, for example Luke 16:19-31; the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. This conceptual link between the ‘broad road’ and its ‘destruction’, and that this ‘destruction’ happens in Hell, is actually an assumption made by humans when trying to support the doctrine of Hell.

Maybe you don’t believe this is standard Evangelical doctrine? May I suggest you take a look at the interpretation of the ‘Narrow Way’ passage’s entry on GotQuestions.org, a website explaining standard Evangelical doctrine. It even says there that ‘We are not to be concerned with the number who will or will not enter’ – how callous is that? Grr…. Also take a look at the gross assumptions layered over the Rich Man and Lazarus story – another ‘classic’ Hell passage as mentioned above – in the ‘explanation’ of that parable on GotQuestions. It says there that, “Jesus teaches here that heaven and hell are both real, literal places”, and actually the whole, horrific doctrine is laid out there as true, non-debatable and horrible in its harshness, although I must allow that at least they have come clean and said what they actually believe, honestly, in black-and-white.

Let’s summarise, then, by saying that the Evangelical belief is that a) Hell consists of real, conscious, everlasting torment after death for all those who do not believe in Jesus (death is of course seen as the final deadline for finding that belief); and alongside that, b) Very few people will find the way (Jesus) Who rescues them from that unimaginable fate. Let’s also add c) In order to ‘find’ Jesus, people must adhere to the Evangelical methods of doing so – saying the ‘sinner’s prayer’, for example, being baptised, obedience to leadership, tithing, belief in Scripture as inspired, inerrant, infallible and to be taken literally. That’ll do for now.

But let’s go back to Matthew 7:13-14. Let’s look at it again:

From this verse – few are those that find it – it follows that actually few people will be ‘saved’ – they will ‘find’ the narrow way that leads to life – and the corollary to this is that most will therefore go to Hell. My very conservative estimate would be that, if that doctrine is true as stated, about 99.9% of people will end up there, according to Evangelical doctrine and given the number of people ‘reached by the Gospel’, by the time they die, with the ‘correct’ Gospel message**.

I would therefore pose this question: What kind of parent would bring a child into the world, knowing that there is a better than even chance that that child will eventually burn forever in Hell? Who would dream of bringing a child into that sort of situation? Why would you want to do such a thing? It would be sheer folly of the highest order and an abdication of responsible parenthood even before they become parents. It would be absolutely stupid to have children if you know that they will more than likely, statistically speaking, be amongst those who will burn forever. Who would want to do that? In order to try to justify the concept of children going to Hell, in many cases even before they are even conscious, they make up totally unbiblical ideas like the ‘age of responsibility’ and claptrap like that. This is an utterly man-made construct; it’s not Biblical at all, and furthermore, Jesus TOLD us that few will be those who find the way. Therefore, age of responsibility notwithstanding, most of your children will go to Hell according to those Evangelical doctrines.

Some would say Oh well, God is just, He’ll work something out. He’ll do the Right Thing. But if god is constrained by the rules that the Evangelicals say he is, there is no escape there either. There are no exceptions at all: children; the mentally ill; aborted fetuses. No. Evangelical doctrine holds that god is constrained by his ‘justice’; his rules of punishing sin, being unable to bear anything that is not holy, and his rules of justice which state that all sin must be punished or at least borne by someone, even an innocent victim. But even if that victim did his best – and Evangelicals believe that Jesus, that innocent victim, indeed ‘did it all’ – even then, most people will burn. Jesus effectively said so in Matthew 7:13, and there’s no getting away from it. Of course, it’s always ‘someone else’ that’s going to burn, not those who believe they are the ‘Elect’. But still, if there are people who, by accident of health, geography, family background or for any other of a host of reasons cannot say or understand the ‘sinner’s prayer’, then they are going to burn. No exceptions. And so that means that the sacrifice of Jesus was 99.9% worthless, or at least it will be worthless for 99.9% of people.

The ‘good news’, then, is that a very few people will find the ‘way’, and the rest will burn forever in unimaginable agony. Linked with my earlier paragraph, the ‘bad-news monger’ will say ‘Yes, god is loving, ah but, he’s also holy and wrathful and righteous and all sorts of other stuff’. They prefer the ‘bad’ verses over the ‘good’ verses.

The doctrine of Hell is the single most repulsive doctrine in all of Christendom. If it were true, the Bible would be full of warnings and references to it – but it’s not. Would it not be fair of God to make it absolutely crystal clear? But that there Bible is in fact not clear on many things, and it’s especially not clear on this.

Just to reiterate: the gospel that contains a Hell doctrine is NOT a gospel – it is not good news. It is the worst news that there could possibly be.

Let’s make it personal, shall we?: most of the people you know, love and/or have ever met will be toasting in Hell for all eternity.

There is no escape; there is no recourse other than to a 0.1% effective (at best) Saviour, if indeed 99.9% of all people who ever existed will end up in Hell. These are not good odds, I would say. I would also say that this Jesus, as depicted in this doctrine, is not all that effective a Saviour, is He? How can that be called ‘Good News’??

If you believe in the Narrow Way doctrine, and you believe in Hell for those (most people) who will not find that Narrow Way, then these terrible, terrible things are what you must believe.

All the Church socials, all the outreach, all the best coffee in the world and all your social projects designed to reach the poor or the Lost; they are all a waste of time and are simply papering over this most terrible news: that actually, no matter what you do or how hard you try, most of the people who ever lived – including most of your family, friends, colleagues and loved ones – will be tormented forever. These points are relentless, irrefutable, despair-inducing, inescapable and hopeless. There is no hope in this gospel.

This is the relentless, uncompromising logic of the Evangelical doctrine of Hell. This entire logical sequence is what you must believe, if you believe in the Hell doctrine.

Think about it.


I am sorry to finish this essay on such a low note, but this is intentional because I wanted to show that this darkness and despair is what the Hell doctrine actually represents. For more on this subject, and a little more light in the tunnel, please visit my Hell Resource Page which is somewhat more positive. The one gleam of light I can offer right here is that I believe that these doctrines are completely untrue. Remember I have written this all from the point of view of an hypothetical Evangelical who actually believes it’s all true.


Header image shows the gate of the concentration camp at Auschwitz I – Birkenau, Poland; the atrocities committed here pale into insignificance compared with the horrors of Hell as espoused in Evangelical doctrine.


*I have to say that this essay has been written at a great personal cost. In looking at, and researching, the Evangelical doctrine of Hell, I have looked again at the most horrific doctrinal ideas I have ever seen, against which the Holocaust pales by comparison, and realised that this stuff is really and truly believed church-wide as standard doctrine. Even though not all churches are Evangelical, still one of the supposedly foundational beliefs in the Western Christian church at the moment is this Hell doctrine. It’s simply incredible. People like me, who reject the concept of Hell as a place of eternal conscious suffering, are usually ostracised in churches if we so much as mention that it might all be wrong. I see my wonderful God’s Name blackened beyond recognition; I see Jesus’s death as wasted (according to their doctrines anyway) and all this sort of stuff. I have felt my blood pressure rise; the whole concept has made me tearful, stressed and deeply saddened. I have felt physically ill because of it and it has made me sick to the heart. Such is the vehemence with which I reject this doctrine, and all the damage that it does, and such is the burden that people like me bear. Difficult is the Narrow Path indeed, and it is a very hard road indeed.


**There are a number of other factors involved in my reaching that 99.9% figure, but the main one is that it’s only about 0.1% of people in the world, at the most, that believe in the standard Evangelical ‘salvation’ model, and since it’s the Evangelical claims I am describing here, this is the figure I am using here so that the essay is consistent in its claims about Evangelical doctrine.