Thursday, October 20, 2011

What Beliefs Identify a Christian? #2

I earlier posted about a fellow blogger who believes that there are certain beliefs that are common to all who claim to be Christian, and that those beliefs are so common that we can assume them to be true in all cases. I previously offered evidence that would tend to dispute that claim, now I offer more. These quotes are from a pastor of a mainline protestant Christian denomination, so I guess we could assume he is a Christian.

"Did Jesus Die for the Sins of Humanity, or Not? Not."

"Adam and Eve supposedly sinned in the garden and as punishment all their descendents are infused with a shot of original sin. Since God the Father needs to have his honor restored (talk about patriarchal nonsense) he kills his Son (who in the weird Trinitarian formula is really the same guy, sort of) so that everyone on planet Earth doesn't spend eternity in hell. If anyone takes twenty minutes thinking this through they can see that the whole structure is absurd. Beginning with the fact that Adam and Eve never existed."

"The great Christian doctrines such as Trinity, Creation, Sin, Christology, Atonement, and Eschatology, are no longer great. They are shadows. They don't speak of reality on a grand scale like they once purported to do. They may fill an emotional or psychological niche here and there. For more and more people they hold little interest or suasion. The world has passed these doctrines by in the way that science has left alchemy."

To be clear, my point is not that I deny or question whether this gentleman is or is not a Christian. Nor is it a desire to define, limit, exclude, or include anyone from anything. It is simply to point out that as we look at what is called Christianity these days that there is less and less that one can take for granted in terms of commonly held beliefs.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

What did the Pharisees know, and when did they know it?

John 5 45 “But do not think I will accuse you before the Father. Your accuser is Moses, on whom your hopes are set. 46 If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. 47 But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?”

There has been a lot of talk about the historicity of the OT recently. We’ve got the historical camp, the epic camp, the mythical camp (which overlaps with the epic folks) and the “it’s all a bunch of hooey” folks.
So how did Jesus treat the OT? If we look at John 5 Jesus is giving a dissertation to the religious leaders who are ticked because He healed on the Sabbath. Jesus response is essentially that He is doing His fathers business and that if His father says heal on the Sabbath, then folks get healed on the Sabbath. But He goes further, actually pretty clearly equating Himself with YHWH. Obviously this is scandalous, but what is interesting is who Jesus appeals to as witnesses. (Remember Jewish law required 2 witnesses for testimony to be accepted in a court of law). Who does Jesus appeal to, Moses. We see this same thinking in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man.
Luke 16:27 “He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, 28 for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’
29 “Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’
30 “‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’
31 “He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”
So it would appear that there is enough accurate information about Jesus for Him to suggest the following.
1. There is enough accurate information in the OT for people to repent and come to faith in Christ.
2. There is enough accurate information in the OT for Jesus to cite it as acceptable as a witness in a court of law.
It seems clear, that if folks aren’t going to believe the testimony of the OT, that they’ll have a hard time with accepting anything else.

Sunday, October 2, 2011

What Beliefs Identify a Christian?

A while back there was a bit of a fuss over someones contention that one must assume that a self identified Christian would look to the Holy Spirit for guidance.

A few years ago I would have agreed. But now...?

I was perusing the blog of an ordained Minister of Word and Sacrament, ordained by a mainline Christian denomination. This gentleman self identifies as a progressive christian as well as a minister of his denomination. He wrote excitedly about a book that his congregation was about to begin studying. This book was written by another christian who is also ordained in a leadership position in a different mainline denomination. Now one would assume that being ordained in christian denominations might suggest a certain level of acceptance of what one might call historic christian doctrine.

Yet we have this list of "12 theses for a new reformation".

1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.

2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.

3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.

4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.

5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.

7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.

8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.

9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.

10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.

12. All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

If this is what we get from progressive Christians, can we assume that there is any shred of commonly held beliefs that identify a Christian?

It seems not.