Category: Doctrine

Opinions, Heresy & Unity in Christ: Judging and Despising Believers

Let us pursue what makes for peace and for building up one another

kevingdrendel2 Comments

I am not sure how to write about the things that I believe God has laid on my heart today. I will start, though, by explaining the combination of things that give rise to my thoughts, and I will try my best, relying on the leading of the Holy Spirit and whatever wisdom I have, in humility and full reliance upon the grace of God, to address these things that weigh on my heart today

My thoughts rise out of a combination of my daily scripture reading and regular podcast listening. I have been reading through the New Testament on a year long plan created by the Bible Project. I am in Romans 14 today. These are some excerpts from Romans 14 that stand out:

“Now receive the one who is weak in the faith, and do not have disputes over differing opinions….
“Who are you to pass judgment on another’s servant? [speaking of followers of Christ as servants of God]….
“But you who eat vegetables only – why do you judge your brother or sister? And you who eat everything – why do you despise your brother or sister? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God….
So then, let us pursue what makes for peace and for building up one another.”

Romans 14:1,4, 10, 19

I have not reproduced the entire Chapter here to be efficient with space, but I encourage anyone who wants to dig in deeper to read all of Romans 14. I have added emphasis where the text has spoken to me.

Paul’s example of eating meat vs. not eating meat is one that doesn’t divide people in churches today, though it might divide vegans and vegetarians from “meat eaters” in our contemporary secular society. (What we eat and our religiosity about it has divided people, I guess, for 2000 years.)

“One person believes he may eat anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables. Let not the one who eats despise the one who abstains, and let not the one who abstains pass judgment on the one who eats, for God has welcomed him.”

Romans 14:2-3

Frankly, people tend to become divided over just about anything and everything. Paul uses the example of eating and of sacred days to illustrate his point about not despising and not judging each other when we have disagreements:

“One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. The one who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord. The one who eats, eats in honor of the Lord, since he gives thanks to God, while the one who abstains, abstains in honor of the Lord and gives thanks to God.”

Romans 14:5-6

Paul says that each of us must give account to God for our own lives. Each of us must follow our own consciences that guide us with the help of the Holy Spirit, and we need to allow space with an attitude of grace for other people to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling in the same way.

Of course, we also have the Holy Spirit to guide us. How our own consciences and the Holy Spirit guide us is a bit of a mystery, though. They are not the same things. We have the Holy Spirit, but we also have our individual consciences. Paul references them both in his writings, and each plays a part in the way we understand and follow Christ in our lives.

The Holy Spirit, of course, is infallible, but our consciences are not.

And, that is the rub. We have this treasure in earthen vessels. We are finite beings, and our individual (and collective) perspectives are limited by the age we live in, the country and culture we are born in, our own abilities, experiences, and myriad factors that influence and shape us. How we internalize and process what the Holy Spirit “says” to us is going to vary from person to person and from people to people.

I recently heard someone say that we each approach Scripture from where we sit. People sit in difference “places” in respect to the Gospel at different times in history, in different cultures, and in different areas of the world. Experts in missions warn of the danger of unwittingly smuggling in our own human perspectives when we take the Gospel to different people groups.

The differences in perspective are not just factors for disparate people groups in far flung regions of the world. People in the seemingly homogenous sphere of the United States of America in the 21st Century are not so homogenous – even among Bible-believing, Jesus-loving people.

I’ll give you an example that stopped me in my tracks in 2016. Polls report that about 80% of people who identify as evangelical (which means white in political polls) voted for Trump, while 80% of blacks who attend church on a regular basis and are theologically conservative did not vote for Trump.

These are people who would largely agree with each other on traditional Christian values, but they “sit” in different places in respect to how they live out following Jesus politically. For white evangelicals, abortion is the political benchmark. For churchgoing blacks, racial and minority issues are paramount.

I should not have to say that God grieves all injustice and all sin. It’s easy to label each other “white supremacists” or “woke progressives” and miss the obvious fact that we all claim Jesus as our Lord and Savior. We all have the Holy Spirit to guide us, and we do the best we can from where we sit to follow the Spirit and our consciences.

Having listened to many black voices since 2016 (because I realized I was missing something), I learned that most black Christians believe that abortion is wrong. They believe in traditional family values, and they are at odds with the Democratic party on those issues. I also learned that a large segment of those “white evangelical’s” in political polls don’t even attend church more than once or twice a year, if that.

Another less controversial example from my own life illustrates what Paul talks about in Romans 14. I grew up in a family of responsible social drinkers. Family gatherings included a “cocktail hour” before meals, but I never observed family members getting drunk.

During my rebellious youth, and before I became a believer, however, I was a reckless, irresponsible drinker. I drank often and to great excess. When I became a Christian, I didn’t touch alcohol for many years, and I was tempted to believe that no one else should either.

My views on this subject have been tempered by the wisdom that comes with age and experience and the gentle grace of the Holy Spirit. Paul would say I was weak in my faith, and I admit that I became judgmental over it because I projected my weakness onto everyone else.

Paul says in Romans 14 that people who are weak in their own faith become judgmental. The danger of people who have a strong faith and a secure conscience is to despise those who are weaker. Paul urges us to resist both tendencies.

But, let me get to my point. I am increasingly concerned with judgmental attitudes over issues on a par with eating, drinking, and sacred days are doing damage in the modern Church. Paul would say that we need to focus our attention on “pursu[ing] what makes for peace and for building up one another.” Unfortunately, we spend far too much energy judging each other and tearing each other down.

This is nothing new, of course. Paul wrote an entire letter to the Church in Corinth that he led off with this exhortation:

“I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to agree together, to end your divisions, and to be united by the same mind and purpose.”

1 Cor. 1:10
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Thoughts on the Great Commission: Our Finite Tendency to Miss What God is Doing in Our Time

What are we missing? What dogmatic understanding have we clung to that is correct in some aspect, but not completely accurate?

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Go into all the world and tell the gospel to all creation

‭As I read through the New Testament this year as part of my daily reading plan, I have finished the Gospels, and I am well into the Book of Acts. As I read through the Gospels, I was mindful of the context in location, time period, and the history of the area and the people of Israel, surrounding nations, and the Greco-Roman world leading up to the time that Jesus walked the earth. I have also been mindful of the sweep of this history as it has played out since that time to the present day.

As a believer in the story of God revealing himself to human beings in this history that we continue to live into, I am also mindful that this time was pivotal. God becoming incarnate (taking on human form and fully living into His own creation), is the centerpiece of our story. It ties the story together from the beginning to the end that will play out into the future fulfillment of God’s ultimate plans.

Abraham and his descendants have been the focus of this story from the time that he heard God encouraging him to leave his family and homeland and strike out to a land God would show him, full of the promise descendants as numerous as the sands of the shores of the sea and the stars in the sky. But the story has taken an unexpected turn – unexpected, at least, for those descendants who have been living into this story for millennia by the time of Christ.

But it shouldn’t have been unexpected. That original promise to Abraham included blessing for all the nations of the earth. This was God’s plan from the beginning – from the creation of Adam and Eve and the command to “be fruitful and multiply.”

The covenant God made with Moses with those descendants of Abraham, however, took on a life of its own – at least as far as they perceived it. They were (more or less) faithful to that covenant. At least, they clung to that story despite their failings to be faithful and despite their myopic view of what God was doing.

It was myopic because they lost sight of God’s intention to bless the nations of the earth through them. This blessing was embedded into the original promise to Abraham, and it was always intended to be part of the story. Yet, they had lost that thread.

Thus, when God entered into the story to move it along and begin to work out the thread of His ultimate plan, they didn’t recognize Him. The people God chose through whom He would work out this plan unwittingly resisted it.

Yet, God in His sovereignty was not surprised by this. He used their resistance to move the story forward. Jesus knew this when he read from the Isaiah scroll in his hometown synagogue:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Luke 4:18-19

When Jesus told them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing”, they were not ready to receive it, though the fulfillment of it was long-awaited by them. Jesus knew their rejection of him would be the catalyst God would use to unfold the rest of the story:

“Jesus said to them, ‘Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ And you will tell me, ‘Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.’”

Luke 4:23

Jesus, the fullness of God in human form (Col. 2:9), knew he would die at the insistence of his own people, but this was meant to be.

“And being found in appearance as a man,
    he humbled himself
    by becoming obedient to death—
        even death on a cross!”

Pjilippians 2:8

God worked through this people He chose to prepare for the time He would enter the story, and their rejection of Him would be the turning point.

Continue reading “Thoughts on the Great Commission: Our Finite Tendency to Miss What God is Doing in Our Time” →

St. Augustine on the Literal Meaning of Genesis

How Augustine read Scripture in light of experience and reason.

kevingdrendel2 Comments

People cite the great church father, Augustine, in defense of the view that the earth is only thousands (rather than billions) of years old. Indeed, I believe this was (more or less) Augustine’s view, based on the science and knowledge that was available to him in the 5th Century when he lived. Augustine believed the earth was young.

That isn’t the end of our understanding of Augustine, though. To understand Augustine, we might be aided by a basic review of the mythological, philosophical and scientific views that were prevalent in his world at the time.

According to my inquiry on Bing Co-Pilot, the mythology of the time didn’t attempt to date the age of the earth. Science (such as it was) also had not established a position. Philosophy, however, provided two opposing views.

The philosophical camps were led by Aristotle and Lucretius. Aristotle argued that the earth was eternal, and Lucretius argued that the earth formed relatively recently (based on a lack of records prior to the Trojan War). (The Trojan War dates to the 11th or 12th Century BCE.) Thus, the two competing views in Augustine’s day were 1) eternal earth or 2) young earth. There was no inkling in Augustine’s time that the earth might be very old, but not eternal.

Interestingly, Aristotle’s view of an eternal earth shifted to an eternal universe, and that view became the accepted scientific view that lasted well into the 20th Century. This was Einstein’s view when he developed the Theory of Relativity.

The past eternal view of the universe was only debunked and rejected by the scientific consensus in the second half of the 20th Century, and then only very reluctantly. (Even now, some scientists demonstrate a desire to find support for a past eternal universe, but support for that view seems to get thinner and thinner as time goes on.)

In the uncertain stew of mythology, philosophy, and science in the 5th Century, Augustine acknowledged that a literal, 6-day reading of the creation story in Genesis is not an irrational interpretation. That is basically how he put it.

He didn’t endorse that view, however. He thought the better view was that the “days” in Genesis 1 do not correspond to earthly (24 hour) days. Even in his exploration of a “literal” reading of Genesis, Augustine incorporated allegorical nuance.

Augustine did not believe that “literal” and “allegorical” meanings were mutually exclusive, and neither did most of the early church fathers. What Augustine and the early church fathers meant by the “literal” meaning of Scripture was what the people who wrote the original words literally meant and how the audience to whom they communicated understood them.

In this effort to understand what the writers meant, the early church fathers assumed that the original meanings included metaphor, symbolism, and literary devices. None of the early church fathers (that I am aware of) argued for the modern sense of strict literalism in the interpretation of Scripture.

Though most early Christians believed literally in the historicity of the biblical accounts (to use a modern term), they also accepted the richness of allegorical meaning in Scripture at the same time. In fact, the metaphorical meaning of Scripture was assumed to be the deeper, more spiritually significant meaning.

Augustine (along with Clement of Alexandria and Origen) ultimately rejected the calendar-day view of the Genesis creation story in favor of instantaneous creation with a kind of day/age view of the creation passage in Genesis. The great Jewish theologians, Philo and Hilary of Poitiers also took this view that God created the earth instantaneously.

We should recognize that the day-age view that Augustine and others preferred was probably not the consensus, but it also wasn’t considered heresy. The theology and the philosophy were unsettled, and science had not yet developed as we know it. The Church allowed for robust disagreement on the age of the earth, because it was not considered essential doctrine.

I should stop here, at the risk of pointing out something you already know, and look at the meaning of the Hebrew word, יוֹם (yom). This word is translated into the English word, day, in Genesis 1. As with most Hebrew words, yom has many nuanced meanings and applications, both literal and figurative. The various meanings include:

  • Day, as opposed to night
  • Day as a division of time
  • Day as defined by evening and morning
  • Day as in a time (like harvest)
  • Day as in an age or epoch of time

In addition to the definitions, most Hebrew words have both literal and figurative meanings and applications. Thus, Augustine’s position that the days in Genesis can be read to mean an “earthly” or “ordinary” day did not exclude the idea of applying them more figuratively. That duality is consistent with the way Hebrew words and Hebrew language works. This built-in literal/figurative duality of Hebrew words informed the thinking of the early church fathers.

Augustine is famous for preferring allegorical readings and applications of Scripture. In his early two-volume work on Genesis in which he took issue with the Manicheans, Augustine explored the position that the days in Genesis are seven epochs of redemptive history corresponding with seven stages of the Christian life. (See Did Augustine Read Genesis 1 Literally? by Gavin Ortlund citing De Genesis contra Manichaeos 1.23.35-1.25.43, in Augustine, On Genesis, 62-68.)

When Augustine set out to write a “literal” interpretation of Genesis, he didn’t mean what people today might think he meant. Even his “literal” reading of Scripture was not strictly literalist. It was an attempt to understand what the original writers (literally) meant and what their audience understood it to mean.

Science in St. Augustine’s day was not advanced enough to weigh in on the age of the earth, but Augustine was a strong proponent of understanding facts and objective truth. The science of his day, for instance, had settled the spherical shape and circumference of the earth. That the earth was round and even the size of the perimeter of the earth was well established and understood among academics since before the time of Christ. (It is purely a myth, for instance, that Columbus had to convince people the earth was not flat.) Augustine’s view of scientific knowledge and its relationship to Scripture is what I want to highlight here.

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Diving for Pearls in the stories of Dustin Kensrue and Mark Driscoll

Dustin Kensrue’s music is as good as ever, but it comes with the melancholy of what used to be.

kevingdrendel8 Comments

I recently spent some time listening to Dustin Kensrue’s new album, Desert Dreaming. I like his music, and the new album is good. The first song I heard, though, reminded me of the rumors that he has walked away from orthodox Christianity:

When I left town, I was swept up
With the visions of a man from Galilee
Along the way, I lost my bearings
I got swallowed up by sins of certainty

The heart of sedona

The words to this song triggered a desire to research the truth. Kensure was an impactful Christian musician who wrote the worship album of the year not to many years ago. I wondered, therefore, why he walked away (if indeed he did).

I learned that Kensrue was a former worship leader for Mars Hill, the failed church that rose to the heights of evangelical influence with many campuses, only to collapse with the failings of its erstwhile leader, Mark Driscoll.

Listening to the song, Heart of Sedona, off Kensrue’s new album, Desert Dreaming, gave me pause. The words seem to confirm the rumor, and the story seems all too familiar lately.

His music is as good as ever, but it comes with the melancholy of what used to be. Or maybe it never was. It’s hard to know how to process the deconstruction of someone else’s faith.

Given the back story (involvement in a failed church movement), I suspected his “deconstruction” (and many other artists who seem to have followed a similar path) may be symptomatic of some malady that has infected Evangelical Christianity.

My entre into Kensrue’s story begin with the article, It’s Not Enough: Dustin Kensrue’s Turning Away, which is where I learned that Kensrue was intimately involved in the toxic environment of the Mars Hill church movement led by Driscoll, a controversial and polarizing personality.

I had heard of the rise and fall of Mark Driscoll and the Mars Hill Church, but I did not jump on the curiosity bandwagon when people associated with Christianity Today produced the podcast, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. I only heard about it, and I had listened to a discussion of the podcast on another podcast. Therefore, I finally felt a need to hear it firsthand to gain some perspective.

The podcast describes the talent and bravado of Mark Driscoll, who was also polarizing and toxic and seemingly proud of it. Driscoll was staunchly reformed in his theology with a cultish personality and a flair for the dramatic. He attracted people on the edges of faith in the notoriously countercultural Seattle area. I summarized some of my thoughts on what I learned in Keeping It Real for the Church: Talent in Tension with Character)

I have also gone back, now, through the tweets highlighted in the article I noted above, and I have poured over Dustin Kensrue’s Twitter (X) feed to gain further insight. These things give me additional food for thought in considering the “deconstruction” of Dustin Kensrue as it relates to the American Evangelical Church.

Though I have spent considerable time researching these things, my thoughts remain preliminary and exploratory. I am not certain that I have gained sufficient perspective to be clear or certain of any conclusions, but all this seems to confirm my sense that the story is symptomatic of a problem with the American Evangelical Church.

In fact, the original article I found, itself, seems to be symptomatic of issues in the American Evangelical Church. These issues may also be reflected in current American culture, affected as it is by social media. I apologize for the length of this article, but I am afraid I do not do much more than scratch the surface here.

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A Facelift Proposed on the Doctrine of Inerrancy

God guided the circumstances in which the biblical literature was divinely inspired, and God approved the final product

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The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy is just a little older than my Christian faith. It was relatively new when I first read the Bible in college and when I first asked Jesus to be the Lord and Savior of my life. I have wrestled with the idea of inerrancy from the beginning of my Christian life until now.

It isn’t that I don’t think the Bible is the “word of God”. It isn’t that I don’t have a “high” view of the reliability, integrity, and divine nature of the Bible. It isn’t that I don’t think the Bible was inspired by God and should be relied on as His word to us to follow.

I believe all these things, but I have issues with statements on inerrancy that seem to push what the Bible says about itself beyond what it says.

Finally, I have found some similar thinking in two of the great Christian thinkers of our time: Mike Licona and William Lane Craig. In his blog, Risen Jesus, Licona introduces a paper to the world that he wrote and presented at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological society.

In the paper, Licona cites Craig in support of a new proposal on inerrancy. First, though, he explains some of what is problematic with the Chicago Statement. I am not going to restate the points he makes here. You can read the paper, CSBI Needs a Facelift, yourself, but I will summarize it for those who don’t have the time or inclination to read the original (though it isn’t long).

Licona starts with the two main verses that provide the inspiration (pun intended) for the doctrine of inerrancy: 2 Timothy 3:16 and 2 Peter 1:20-21. At the center of this are the words “God-inspired” or “God-breathed” which are English translations of the Greek word, “theopneustos“.

Licona traces the history of the use of the word, theopneustos, prior to the 3rd Century. The word was not often used, and it was used in very diverse contexts. Licona quotes a commentary on 2 Timothy, stating, “Theopneustos does not have enough precision to go beyond the basic idea that the Scriptures came from God.” and he concludes:

Therefore, 2 Timothy 3:16 does not contribute as much to our discussion as we may have first thought. So we should be cautious not to read more into it than Paul may have intended.

The 2 Peter 1:20-21 text speaks of prophets who were “carried along by the Holy Spirit.” Licona observes that the Greek word translated “carried along”, pherō, is also used by Philo “to describe how prophets received revelation from God, during which time they had ‘no power of apprehension’ while God made ‘full use of their organs of speech.’ Josephus likewise used this word to say that “God’s Spirit put the words in the mouths of the prophets” (quoting Licona, who paraphrased Josephus).

The 2 Timothy passage and the 2 Peter passage express different ideas and give rise to different pictures of how God speaks to/through people who authorized the writings of the Bible. some writings purport to be prophetic and some do not expressly adopt that attitude. The Chicago Statement assumes that both passages mean the same thing, but most biblical scholars disagree with that conclusion.

Licona goes on to summarize some phenomena in the text of the Bible that suggest a “human element in Scripture”. Licona concludes from this, “Although [the human element] does not challenge the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture, it does challenge the concept of inspiration imagined by [the Chicago Statement].”

These issues with the ambiguous meaning of the Greek words and the very different images of God working to convey His “Word” through people (God-breathed and carried along by the Spirit), can be reconciled with a “new” paradigm, says Licona. This paradigm was suggested by Craig in 1999.

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