Money as spiritual power

Attached to this blog entry is a work in progress – currently called “Money and Christ”.

Open Office freedom lovers click here.

Microsoft Word economic slaves click here.

This paper is a tirade against “Stewardship” – the false domestication of one of the great Gods of this world – Money.

We can not avoid Money – particularly in a modern urban environment – it is an absolute necessity. But money is also a spiritual power and a competitor to God in the minds of men. The counsel of the Pharisees was the doctrine of “Corban” – similar to “stewardship”. The counsel of Jesus is much more interesting and daring…..

Since this is a work in progress I would welcome criticism and suggestions for improvement.

The Post Modern revival of Creationism

I have been really shaken by the way so many brothers in ministry have embraced Creationism.

It seems they feel justified in rejecting virtually all Geology, Astronomy and much of Biology on “presuppositional” grounds. Since they believe science is ruled by atheistic (i.e. naturalistic) assumptions they feel no shame in teaching a simple and wooden Bible literalism which over-rides all these others ways of finding truth.

They have a radical doctrine of the fall of man which concludes that all human effort to understand our environment is so sinful that it is bound to be guilty and wrong. Natural philosophy (science) and speculative philosophy are denounced as projects of “autonomous man” – that hopelessly wicked brute who will concoct and embrace any lie which enables him to contradict the literal meaning of Bible texts.

This arrogance does not befit the Christian. Did not John Calvin (and the ancient fathers before him) teach us about divine “accommodation”. That if God did not stoop to our level in the scriptures we could understand nothing of him? That we only see through a glass darkly.

It is true that when Calvin said God “lisps” he was referring to anthropomorphic Bible language about the Divine Being (Link Here). But since God also understood the immensity of creation through Time and Space and the complexity of its structure is it not clear that He used similar “Baby Talk” when teaching of creation? When scripture says “He also made the stars” it gives no clue that there are hundreds of thousands of galaxies each of which contains a million stars (typically) around which orbit an unknown and unknowable number of worlds.

The separation of earth and sea depends on plate techtonics working over time spans we cannot conceive without which this globe would be under a mile of water. But God has left it to us to work out the details.

In the same way, the making of Adam from earth (the same earth from which the animals sprang a day earlier) tells us that we share an earthy nature with them but that unlike them the breath of God has been given to us in a special way – Genesis 2:7. Modern Biology may have related us so closely to the animals that it makes some Christians uncomfortable but it seems God’s word has given us the main gist in an amazing brevity.

How could scripture have given a summary of what we now know through Science without becoming a tortuously complicated set of documents? The great message of redemption through Christ would have been buried in a vast divinely inspired encyclopaedia! Copying by hand would have taken a longer time than cathedral-building. And since, to this day, scientists are very aware how little we still know I guess a scientifically accurate Bible would need to be bigger still.

Actually, Creationism is characterised by a guilty “autonomy”. The third law of thermodynamics and all sorts of sample data are twisted. Only men who “know” they are right are capable of the special pleading and selective reporting of these people. Check out the patient work of talkorigins.org or Christians in Science who try to call people back to their senses and away from idealistic philosophy pretending to be either Bible Study or Science.

I fear so much of this patient work is wasted. Creationists are post-moderns. Like all the other sects they interpret the universe from their own vantage point. They deny that unbelievers are capable of finding or recognising truth. They inhabit an island of knowledge cut off from a mainland of sinful pseudo-knowledge which the rest of us inhabit.

Christians like myself who claim both to trust scripture and believe in an Old Earth, big bang cosmology and biological evolution are anomalies who are best seen as closet unbelievers or dupes of the system.

I note that many 19th c. calvinists had no great problem with Old Earth geology and early evolutionism because they had a world-view which included a strong providence, a real but limited natural theology and the doctrine of scriptural accommodation. Why are we abandoning that wisdom now?

Where did my soul come from?

I wonder how much real biblical teaching on human nature is given in churches.  What is taught is often Greek dualism (with soul and body being two distinct kinds of existence) usually seen through the thought of René Descartes. Sometimes it is tripartism (spirit, soul, body).

Both these views are untenable if one takes seriously both scripture and science. In Hebrew and modern thought human beings are a psychosomatic unity which can described in various terms: mind/body, soul/flesh, spirit/soul/body, heart/appearance, outward/inward etc.

It is possible for Spirit and Flesh to be separated and the saints in Paradise and the spirits in Hades are in that strange position. But this is not natural or normal – it is the result of the catastrophe of death. Without bodies we exist only as shadows or resting souls.

But what is “Spirit”. In Genesis it is the breath of God which He lends us for life and takes back to Himself in death. Often, it is best translated as “mind” or “energy” or just “life”. But “spirit” has no substance or definition. It can only exist either as a function of a human nervous system or as something preserved in God’s memory and by His will.

Brain Science is showing us that many of the traditional characteristics of the soul are connected with our brains so intimately that there is no real dividing line between body and soul. There is simply personality.

Personality is responsible to God and is made in His image. The very concept of personality was worked out by Christians trying to describe the Triune God revealed in scripture and their experience. The living trinity is One God subsisting in three persons. You are one flesh subsisting in one person. The “spirits of just men made perfect” in heaven are personalities waiting for their new substance, the “Spiritual” body which will be material but not “flesh” in the sense of being naturally resistant to the desires of the spirit.

In Cartesian and Greek thought the soul is immortal in itself. It is a substance yet radically different from earthly substance.

Modern life sciences are undermining this picture. If we define human personality as an immaterial soul residing temporarily in a bodily shell then we will feel threatened by the more materialistic view of both consciousness and personality emerging from the structure of our bodies.

If we see things biblically we should be grateful that naturalistic philosophy is catching up with revealed reality.

The Easter Sabbath

I am writing on the Easter Sabbath, Saturday 7th April. This is the quiet day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday and I am wondering about that Sabbath day when Jesus body lay still and uncorrupted. Is that not the model Sabbath?

The Reformed tradition normally speaks of the Sabbath as a “creation ordinance” and downplays Jesus’ own radical re-evaluation of the Sabbath. But if Jesus is the centre of all God’s purposes who was marked for slaughter “before the foundation of the World” then did God not have THAT SABBATH in mind when he inspired the writer of Genesis.

Consider the word of Jesus spoken at dusk at the end of the sixth day of the week (remember Jewish days end at Sunset) – “It is finished”. Is it not related to the statement of Genesis 2:1-3.

It depends whether you see the death of Jesus as merely mending creation or whether this you see this universe as God’s purposed setting for the revelation and exaltation of Jesus Christ.

I think scripture teaches us that the central story of the creation is NOT the story of its beginning but, instead, is the story of Jesus Christ and what He has achieved. So the “rest” of God on the Seventh Day is a reference to that day the holy body of His Christ would lay on stone in a tomb outside Jerusalem.

Jesus rested from His works before He was raised to see their fruits on Easter Sunday, the first day of the New Creation.

Hebrews 4 tells us that we who believe enter his rest now – note the tenses in Hebrews 4:3 -as we rest from the works of death and live to Christ. The promised “rest” is not our Resurrection which seems to be full of activity and life, just like the resurrected Jesus. Still less, is it the rest of inactivity in the intermediate state in what is popularly called “heaven”.

No, it is the peace of resting from rebellion and wilful sinning. The body of Jesus rested on Easter Sabbath, His battle with evil successfully finished. We must be done with rebelling and enter that rest.

“Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts…”.

Let us share in the death to sin won on Good Friday, let us share the holy Sabbath of our Lord and refrain from all sin and backsliding, and anticipate our share in the glories of Easter Sunday.

Caught between two poles?

In Evangelical thought there are two poles which pull at the fabric of our thinking. The Dispensational Pole and the Covenantal Pole. (OK, there are lot’s of other pushes and pulls but let me keep it simple).

Dispensationalism has been so thoroughly debunked that anyone who still holds to it has to be some sort of obscurantist (please note that put-downs are banned on this site unless they hide behind long words) . Since few users of this site will be interested in the Dispensational view I think it might be more useful to challenge some of the assumptions of our covenant theologians.

I first heard of Covenant Theology when my Anglican vicar used it to justify baptising babies; you know the argument :

(1) Baby boys were circumcised to show they were children of the Old Covenant;

(2) Baptism is roughly equal to circumcision so we therefore baptise baby boys (and girls) into the New Covenant.

It sounded forced then and it still does.

The Anglicans have an extra layer of incredibility with the role of God-parents who contribute faith by proxy on behalf of the baby being wetted.

For all that supposedly glorious history I think that Covenant Theology has been about the need to justify various hangovers from the mediaeval Roman mess. These hangovers are state “churches”, infant baptism, and unregenerate congregations. The Covenant guys venerate the memory of the “magisterial reformers” who were in reality far too much creatures of their own times to complete the process of Reformation by God’s Word.

I also believe there is a nostalgia for the time when men like Knox, Zwingli and Calvin were a force in the land and the voice of the “Church” echoed in the corridors of power.

In fact, they were all failures in that the institutional churches they created have long since decayed. The derided anabaptists and their spiritual heirs are still here whereas Presbyterianism only really thrives as an argumentative bunch of sects in North America.

Anglicanism is healthy where a baptist-like churchmanship dominates in some ex-colonies and it is sick where Catholic or Reformed Anglicans are in charge. The only white dominated overwhelmingly evangelical diocese of which I am aware is New South Wales, Australia which has been blessed by the congregational ecclesiology of Moore College for many years.

Those of us who disbelieve covenant theology are likely to be considered pietists who lack a sense of history.  We are told we fail to see that the unity and consistency of God demands that there can be only one covenant between God and Man.

Few of us deny that, since God and Human Nature remain the same, there will inevitably be commonalities in the way He has related to us but to claim that there is really only one covenant of grace seems to be going beyond what is written or even logical.

I believe that we have been weakened by this one-eyed view more than we realise. The radical nature of the New Covenant has been downplayed and the revolutionary way in which the People of God are now defined by the work of the Holy Spirit is often obscured. The incarnation and death/resurrection of Jesus has changed everything and some things have even been abolished.

My belief is that the healthiest expression of church life is only possible where there is a baptistic understanding of the church as gathered by the Spirit to the Son of God through faith and repentance created by the Word of God.

Presbyterian/Anglican theology obscures the Divine process of Church Building and leads to a bureaucratic, institutional or cultural model of church life. It “objectifies” the people of God into a sociological grouping and downplays the supernatural nature of conversion and faith. The work of the Spirit is regarded as essential but virtually undetectable.

The result is that congregations can not be trusted with decision making so church officers and synods and presbyteries must manage them. The New Israel has been numbered and gathered into an organisational net to appear more like Old Israel.

No one denies there is continuity between the two ages but it is a continuity of relationship. Many of the Covenant promises and requirements addressed to Israel are now addressed to the whole world rather than the institutions called churches and the regenerate are now gathered by the voice of their Shepherd into congregations of those who are being redeemed.

We do not need to multiply covenants like the dispensationalists but we also need to recognise that the New Covenant has truly superceded the old way of the Legal Code. Instead of being defined as the Children of God by a fence of laws, rites and traditions we are defined by the presence of Christ in the Gospel by the Holy Spirit as the centre around which we gather in churches.

Another problem of the covenantal denominations is their tendency to dominate national life. This has led to reactions in places like Switzerland, England, Holland and Scotland where eventually this domination has been overthrown by populations seeking liberation from overbearing churchmen. Nearly everyone was glad to see the back of the squabbling Puritan Jihadists in 1660.

Both Covenantal Calvinism and Roman Catholicism have some responsibility for the aggressively secular climate we are now in. Even the two categories of “Church” and “State” in which so much thinking is still expressed are deceptive and unbiblical.

We are sometimes stuck behind the start line when it comes to thinking about the world we live in.

I pray that the Lord, the God of Israel, will bless this website so that we can do some positive reflecting on His Word.