Great is the Lord 1

Last updated on: May 10, 2010 at 6:21 am By Scot McKnight

I am reading and blogging through Ron Highfield’s new book called Great Is the Lord: Theology for the Praise of God

. This opens our series; it’s a serious volume for theologians and pastors, but it’s faith angle gives the book a doxological approach that makes the heart sing and makes theology what it should be.

How’s this for an opening paragraph observation? Starting with Gregory Nazianzus, Highfield quotes him: “It is more important that we should remember God than that we should breathe: indeed, if one may say so, we should do nothing else besides” (3). Doxology is where theology begins and leads.

How do you know God? How do you ‘know that you know’ God? What can be known of God through observation of reality and creation? Do you think ‘natural revelation’ is adequate for salvation?

Highfield turns to Revelation and makes these fundamental claims: God wills to be known and God’s revelation begins in God’s self-knowledge and God’s good will to make himself (GodSelf) known to us. Seemingly simple but absolutely foundational to all theological claims. This counters Plotinus and the apophatic tendencies to make knowledge of God less than knowable and known. “Unlike the absolute ‘One’ of Plotinus, the three-in-one God knows himself fully, and consequently he can know the world and make himself known to others” (6).

Revelation means four issues emerge:

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Telling Our Story – The Story of Jesus (RJS)

Last updated on: December 3, 2011 at 9:03 am By RJS

This last week I (RJS not Scot) have spent my commute listening to the audio from the Wheaton Theology Conference: Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N.T. Wright. This is fascinating stuff – I recommend it highly. I put up a post in dialogue with the speakers at the conference on Tuesday, and want to think about this a bit more today. Tuesday we discussed history as apologetic, but there is another facet to this discussion of Wright’s work – the gospel vision.

The power of our ability to convey the gospel is intimately connected with our ability to cast the gospel as story. It is hard to develop passion for – or even intellectual belief in – a series of facts and propositions. All good politicians and all good pastors know this. The conflict between science and faith is, I think, at root a conflict of story. The conflict of fact, empirical observation, is purely secondary. This goes beyond the typical science vs. faith discussion though – it isn’t primarily an issue of evolution, creation, or Intelligent Design. In our increasingly educated and secular world we do not present the story in a fashion that makes sense, that captures heart, mind, and imagination.

We discussed the importance of telling our story in a couple of posts lately – Telling Our Story and Telling Our Story – The Story of Genesis. Today I would like to consider Wright’s work on Jesus in the context of story, and the impact that this telling of the story has on our ability to present the gospel. The questions today are simple:

How important is story in the presentation of the Gospel?

What is the story we have to tell?

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Jesus, the Land and Christian Thinking Today

Last updated on: April 28, 2010 at 12:00 am By Scot McKnight

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Most evangelical Christians, because they’ve been taught to think this way, simply believe that Israel’s presence in the Land today is not only a God-given promise, but there is a future eschatology tied to that presence in the Land. In fact, many today think the Temple will be rebuilt and Israel will rule in the Land. In other words, many think Israel’s recognition as a nation and having their “location” in the Land of Israel today is by divine-appointment in such a way that it both fulfills promise and portends a fuller possession of the land someday.

But not all are so sure, and very few Christians today have given a serious look at what the NT says about Land — and how little is actually said about the Land. And those who have studied it have written technical books very few read. Until Gary Burge: Jesus and the Land

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Gary Burge, professor at Wheaton (and my predecessor at North Park), soberly and fairly and responsibly sketches every text in the NT to provide what amounts to two things:

1. A theology of “land” in the NT and among early Christians.

2. A challenge to so much of today’s “holy land” theology.

The big point: the NT shows no territorial theology; the “land” promise expands in the NT beyond Israel’s border; most of what many say today is not therefore supported by the NT itself. The early Christians did not see the land promise as theirs. Ownership of the land is not a Christian issue. The land is about historical remembrance, the land has become Christ himself and we are “in Christ,” and we are both “landless” (not in the holy land) but “landed” (we have a location in this world).

CT and the Historical Jesus

Last updated on: April 13, 2010 at 12:09 am By Scot McKnight

Some of you may have seen our piece in Christianity Today called “The Jesus We’ll Never Know.” The essence of my article is that “historical Jesus” studies, the official Historical Jesus enterprise, has a major goal: finding what the real Jesus was really like. By that I mean the HJ enterprise wants to get behind the Creeds and behind the Gospels to discover what the human Jesus was like — and in doing this the HJ enterprise is about creating a new Jesus, a Jesus who differs from the Gospels and the Creeds because it will shear away any faith accretions and any legendary embellishments and any theological overlays.

The fundamental point I am making is that the HJ enterprise, by definition, creates a 5th Gospel. And there is no “consensus” 5th Gospel. Each HJ scholar comes to his or her (few women have entered into this discussion) own conclusions, no two scholars completely agree, and to a person tends to “believe in” the Jesus that is created.

The “Historical Jesus” (of the HJ enterprise) fashions a Jesus by examining the data (Gospels and ancient texts and archaeology etc), subjecting the data to rigorous historical methods, finding what genuinely survives, and the putting together what is left into a portrait of what the real Jesus was like.

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What Role Naturalism? 1 (RJS)

Last updated on: April 26, 2012 at 8:50 pm By RJS

After our rather spirited discussions of Intelligent Design over the last couple of months I think it would be useful to consider the concept of methodological naturalism, both its purpose and its limits.

Although there are technical philosophical definitions that vary somewhat – on a practical level methodological naturalism is the underlying principle in modern science that there is a continuity of cause and effect accessible to testing and rational synthesis. The universe is comprehensible and obeys set laws. Scientific research seeks to understand these laws and processes, to discern how they have operated to produce what we see around us, and to utilize them,as good stewards for the good of all (OK … ideally as good stewards for the good of all).

It is sometimes claimed that science is religiously neutral. This is generally true in principle – but often not in practice, public rhetoric, or application. There is a rather old (1997) two-part article by Alvin Plantinga that I would like to use to focus a conversation today. You can find it here: Methodological naturalism? Part 1 and Part 2. From my reading I suggest that this article misses the mark in some rather serious ways – but also has some excellent insights and opens some significant topics for discussion, especially in Part 1.

In Part 1 Plantinga presents three examples to use in the exploration of religious neutrality in science. (1) Altruism, (2) Evolution (especially common descent) and (3) Cosmic fine tuning. As we look at his examples and consider the following questions:

Is scientific investigation of these questions religiously neutral? and What role does methodological naturalism play in the investigation of each of these questions?

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After You Believe 1

Last updated on: March 9, 2010 at 12:06 am By Scot McKnight

This is our first post in a new series on Tom Wright’s newest book, and today I want to settle on his central question and his central answer.

The central question Tom Wright asks in his new book, a book that belongs with Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

and Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
, is this question: What are we here for (after we believe)? That is, what is life for between faith and heaven?

How would you answer these questions? Do you agree with Wright’s answer?

This question is the subject of his new book: After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters
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There are two basic options for constructing a moral life, and Wright proposes a third.

Option one: follow the rules.

Option two: discover yourself.

Option three: transformation of character.

The thesis of the book, then, is the development of virtue that forms a person into genuine transformed, Christian character.

Liberated from Legalism 1

Last updated on: March 2, 2010 at 12:02 pm By Scot McKnight

I want to begin a series on how Galatians helps us see that we are liberated from “legalism.” This series will normally not be a midday series, but today it will be. I should have posts on this topic both Thursday and Friday. I will begin this series by defining legalism, and then freedom, and then examine the elements that liberate us from legalism.

After years of teaching Galatians and pondering legalism in Paul’s mind, I’m convinced many get confused about what the word “legalism” means. Thus, folks say “That’s legalism!” So some rubble needs to be cleared out first.

How do you define legalism? What is a good illustration of legalism for you?

Legalism is not believing in the importance of law or rules or authorities; it is not rules themselves; legalism is not even following kosher laws. More often than not, this sort of definition of legalism — equating it with rules — comes from someone who has been told to do something they don’t want to do. (As a teenager telling her parents that a 10pm curfew is “legalism.”)

So what is it?

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The Creeds at the Jesus Creed: David Opderbeck

Last updated on: February 26, 2010 at 5:43 am By Scot McKnight

The Problem with Paleo-Orthodoxy

I’m taking a break from my usual “Law” columns to write about something that’s been bothering me a bit. We have been talking here on Jesus Creed about the value and importance of the early Christian Creeds. It’s been suggested, for example in the recent book “Deep Church” by Jim Belcher, that the ecumenical Creeds provide a basis for marking the boundaries of Christian theology. This approach is often referred to as “paleo-orthodoxy.” The problem, in my view, is that it doesn’t work. In fact, I think the paleo-orthodoxy approach is opposed in significant ways to the “post-conservative” ethos that originally drew me to the emerging church conversation and that subsequently led me to participate in the Jesus Creed community.

Do the ecumenical Creeds establish firm boundaries for Christian theology? Is pale-orthodoxy consistent with or opposed to the emerging / post-conservative / “third way” ethos?

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Law at the Jesus Creed: David Opderbeck

Last updated on: January 15, 2010 at 6:42 am By Scot McKnight

Seven Theses on a Missional Approach to Law

In response to some of my “Law” posts here at Jesus Creed, a few commenters have expressed consternation over my criticism of some “conservative” Christian perspectives on the law. As I’ve tried to express in response to some of those comments, my primary concerns have to do with how “law” is understood in relation to the mission of God. As I’ve said before, in my very humble opinion, the North American Church’s participation in the “culture wars” over the past thirty years or so has been, by and large, missionally unproductive at best.

At times, I might agree with the “conservative” perspective on what the law ideally should say – as I do, for example, concerning the law of abortion. However, even in those cases I’m often troubled by the place legal advocacy seems to occupy in “conservative” political theology, by the methods and rhetoric used to advance that theological agenda, and by the effects these dynamics have on spiritual formation in the Church. And, it’s true that, in some cases, I think the “conservatives” are advancing political priorities that fail to reflect what I understand from scripture, tradition, reason and experience to represent a faithful reflection of God’s priorities.

In short, I think the political theology that prevails in the North American Church is insufficiently “missional.”

In this post, I’d like to advance some very preliminary theses about what a “missional theology of law” should look like. What do you think about these Seven Theses? How does “law” relate to the “mission of God?” What should a “missional theology of law” encompass?

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Evangelism: Jesus Style

Last updated on: December 29, 2009 at 2:05 pm By Scot McKnight

For a long time I’ve thought we needed a sensitive, historically-nuanced study of how Jesus interacted — at the gospeling level — with his contemporaries. But the book I had in mind couldn’t be in search of the “method” of Jesus or the “program” of Jesus, and the reason I say this is because Jesus didn’t have a “method” or a “program.” And neither did he have a technique. So the book would have to be sensitive to the variety of ways Jesus interacted.

That book arrived on my desk not long ago and I’d like to give it a high recommendation. It’s by Jerram Barrs and it’s called Learning Evangelism from Jesus

.The book contains 15 studies and it does not synthesize them into the golden nuggets that will make you evangelize just like Jesus. Each study sifts through the text with solid observations and then has lessons that reflect how Jesus related to that person in that context. Instead of moralizing at this point, Barrs simply observes and connects what Jesus did to our lives.

I like the sensitivity to context and the variety that emerge from this careful study. Well-written and from a Reformed perspective.