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The Beautiful Victory of the Cross and the Table of Aslan

November 14, 2011 in Atonement, C. S. Lewis, Gospel, Mark D. Baker, Salvation with 34 Comments

'Christus Victor' photo (c) 2007, Randy OHC - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Last week, I wrote about my belief that the cross is too beautiful to fit many popular theologies.  It isn’t beautiful in itself, for a Roman cross represents the power of Empire, a power that is always opposed to the way of Jesus.  Rather, the beauty is in the One who chose to endure unjust suffering, knowing that the grave would not be able to hold God’s Messiah down!  The beauty is in a Jesus who models what it means to love our enemies while humbly reminding us that we all were God’s enemies (Romans 5.10).

One thing that I’m convinced of is that God did not pour out Divine wrath against Jesus on the cross in order to be appeased. This view, as Mark Baker states, “can too easily lead to a situation in which we might conclude that Jesus came to save us from God.”[1] I plan to nuance this statement in future articles, but for now it suffices to say that we need alternative ways to think about the cross.

In fact, part of the problem is that we’ve limited the cross to one primary explanation (God’s wrath being poured out on Jesus as a substitute for sinners to appease God’s bind to the Law).  I want to suggest that the New Testament gives multiple images and metaphors for expressing the multifaceted significance of the cross.  Today, lets explore one of these through the lens of a popular story.  Notice that this is one example of how substitution can still be present in atonement theology without the appeasement of God’s wrath (which, as popularly understood, isn’t in the New Testament). Continue Reading…

The Binding of God: Genesis 22 as a Test Case for Open Theism in the O.T. (part 8) [Problem of Evil]

September 2, 2011 in (Series) The Binding of God [Open Theism], C. S. Lewis, Foreknowledge, Open Theism, Theology with 7 Comments

In what follows, you will read an “academic paper” in which I explore some elements of open theism (the link is to a brief introduction to open theism).  This is a view of God’s foreknowledge that is controversial, but still in the evangelical family of belief.  The most well known Christian leader who holds to this view is Greg Boyd.  This will be a nine part series.

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Why This Discussion Matters

Discussions about free will and sovereignty often lead to theological abstraction and argumentation, which rightfully leads one to wonder: What’s the point?  Why talk about what God may or may not know?  Why create more division over forms of Calvinism and Arminianism?  Do we not remember that it is discussions like these that lead to church splits? While these questions represent my initial instincts, I have become convinced that these issues truly matter for the people of God.  “The binding of God” offers a test case for thinking about God’s knowledge of how events will turn out, and his reliance on people who willingly choose to carry forward his mission through their obedience.  This leads to the primary practical application that God’s openness yields.

The Problem of Evil

Suffering in the world is perhaps the greatest mystery that any person, culture, or nation has to face.  No one is exempt from the reality that our world is broken.  Shalom is a distant hope, but certainly not a lived experience.  As we observed earlier, shalom was lost because humans freely chose to rebel against God’s original ordering of the world.  Freedom created a crisis that has not relented.  Through Abraham God began the work of responding to the brokenness in creation and through Christ’s resurrection and eventual return, shalom will be realized once again.  But between now and then, we must deal with the problem of evil in a concrete fashion. C.S. Lewis, in his book The Problem of Pain states the following about evil in the world: Continue Reading…

C.S. Lewis Should Be An Evangelical Reject Too! (John Janzen)

July 18, 2011 in C. S. Lewis, Evangelical Reject, Guest Contributors with 37 Comments

I am one of the ones who, after reading Kurt’s post on evangelical rejects, felt even more at home [link: article and follow-up]. Coincidentally, I read the post the day after listening to an interview with Richard Rohr, where he mentioned that it was vital for people who desire to be change agents to stay on the “inside edge” of their faith communities. His point was that once you position yourself on the outside, it is much easier for the resisters of change to write you off as irrelevant. You are then a heretic, and heretics are best ignored – not engaged.

I am not good at staying on the inside edge. I find it easier to take an all-or-nothing sort of stance. I remember years ago having a discussion with an evangelical friend. We were discussing salvation – who will make the cut, and how exactly Jesus is going to sort us all out. I was telling him how my views were being altered by, among other things, a passage from C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle that seemed to suggest that salvation might be possible for those outside the explicitly Christian fold. The discussion ended with him telling me that if that is what I believed, then I couldn’t really call myself an evangelical anymore. Continue Reading…

C.S. Lewis on Creation, Fall, & Evolution – Quote to Ponder (5/15/08)

May 2, 2010 in (Series) Quote to Ponder, C. S. Lewis, Evolution with 23 Comments

The following is a repost from the very early days of this blog.  This was about 4 months after the question of evolution and the Christian faith had been raised as a possiblity rather than an obvious antithesis.  I now hold to what is popularly (well, not that popular in Christian circles, yet) called: theistic evolution or Creational evolution or biologos.

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The following is a quote from CS Lewis about the creation of humanity. Most will be surprised by how he viewed the beginning of Genesis (most likely as Hebrew poetry rather than an exact detailed explanation). How does this raise questions about the current science wars for you?

For long centuries, God perfected the animal form which was to become the vehicle of humanity and the image of Himself. he gave it hands whose thumb could be applied to each of the fingers, and jaws and teeth and throat capable of articulation, and a brain sufficiently complex to execute all of the material motions whereby rational thought is incarnated. The creature may have existed in this state for ages before it became man: it may even have been clever enough to make things which a modern archaeologist would accept as proof of its humanity. But it was only an animal because all its physical and psychical processes were directed to purely material and natural ends. Continue Reading…

Quote to Ponder: C.S. Lewis on Creation of Humanity and Fall

May 15, 2008 in (Series) Quote to Ponder, C. S. Lewis, Evolution, Theology with 5 Comments

The following is a quote from CS Lewis about the creation of humanity. Most will be surprised by how he views the beginning of Genesis (most likely as Hebrew poetry rather than an exact detailed explanation). How does this raise questions about the current science wars for you?

For long centuries, God perfected the animal form which was to become the vehicle of humanity and the image of Himself. he gave it hands whose thumb could be applied to each of the fingers, and jaws and teeth and throat capable of articulation, and a brain sufficiently complex to execute all of the material motions whereby rational thought is incarnated. The creature may have existed in this state for ages before it became man: it may even have been clever enough to make things which a modern archaeologist would accept as proof of its humanity. But it was only an animal because all its physical and psychical processes were directed to purely material and natural ends. Then, in the fullness of time, God caused to descend upon this organism, both on its psychology and physiology, a new kind of consciousness which could say “I” and “me,” which could look upon itself as an object, which knew God, which could make judgments of truth, beauty and goodness, and which was so far above time that it could perceive time flowing past…. We do not know how many of these creatures God made, nor how long they continued in the Paradisal state. But sooner or later they fell. Someone or something whispered that they could become as gods…. They wanted some corner in this universe of which they could say to God, “This is our business, not yours.” But there is no such corner. They wanted to be nouns, but they were, and eternally must be, mere adjectives. We have no idea in what particular act, or series of acts, the self-contradictory, impossible wish found expression. For all I can see, it might have concerned the literal eating of a fruit, the the question is of no consequence. (C.S. Lewis, Problem of Pain, 68-71)

Can the Bible and some form of creational evolution exist together?