Goodbye 2012, Hello 2013

So we come to the end of another year today and we head into the 9th year of this blog for 2013.

I wish all my readers a happy, peaceful and blessed new year when it comes and hope you will continue to visit, read and comment on my blog next year.

Whatever the year ahead holds for us, may we know the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit in all we do.

Apologetics: the Battle for Hearts as well as Minds

There's an interesting guest post on Scot McKnight's blog Jesus Creed from Jeff Cook. You can read it here. Cook makes the point that too often Christian apologists think that all they have to do is win the rational argument against atheists to attract people to the faith. In debates, atheists often seem more persuasive because of the emotional strength of their argument.

Cook suggests it is high time the Christian side considered how important the emotional component of persuading the undecided is. Unless we paint an attractive and desirable portrait of the God we are inviting people to believe in, for most people they won't care how good our rational arguments are.

I think he makes a very valid point.

Merry Christmas

A very merry Christmas to all my blog readers.

This year the words that have been going through my mind over and over again come from the great prologue to John's Gospel (John 1:1-14). There we read these words from verse 14: "The Word became flesh."

In those four words the true meaning of Christmas is captured. John has already identified the "Word" as God, the God who made the world. And this "Word" is the Lord Jesus Christ. The message of Christmas is that in the birth of a baby boy in Bethlehem over two thousand years ago, the God who made and rules over everything - the God of Israel - took on human flesh and became a human being. This is what theologians call "the incarnation". It is because he came that God's plan of redemption could be accomplished. He came to bring reconcilation between God and humankind and thereby reconcilation between all things in heaven and earth.

This is why Christians celebrate his birth every year. Because "He came down to earth from heaven, who is God and Lord of all, and his shelter was a stable, and his cradle was a stall."

From his birth he was one of us in every respect, identifying completely with the poor, the hungry, the helpless and the needy.

And we need him this Christmas as much as we ever did. My prayer is that you will know Christ this Christmas and always. And may God bless you and all those whom you love now and forevermore.

Go Overboard Celebrating Christmas

I agree with Douglas Wilson's article "Go Overboard Celebrating Christmas" in Christianity Today. You can read it here:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/december-web-only/go-overboard-celebrating-christmas.html?paging=off

I think he makes a number of good points here. While it is true that there is a lot of stuff associated with the secular Christmas that is perhaps more an excuse for sin than a joyful celebration of the birth of Jesus, the temptation for a certain kind of Christian is to throw the baby out with the bathwater, put on sackcloth and ashes (metaphorically anyway) and seek to turn the celebration into no more than a sombre commemoration and a guilt trip about how messed up the world is around us.

I've always felt there's something strange about claiming to have good news for the world while we go out of our way to show the world that we Christians don't really want to enjoy ourselves too much. All pleasure is sinful after all, right?

The message of the Bible could not be further from this. I think Wilson gets it right when he says:

Do not treat this as a time of introspective penitence. To the extent that you must clean up, do it with the attitude of someone showering and changing clothes, getting ready for the best banquet you have ever been to. This does not include three weeks of meditating on how you are not worthy to go to banquets. Of course you are not. Haven't you heard of grace?

Celebrate the stuff. Use fudge and eggnog and wine and roast beef. Use presents and wrapping paper. Embedded in many of the common complaints you hear about the holidays (consumerism, shopping, gluttony, etc.) are false assumptions about the point of the celebration. You do not prepare for a real celebration of the Incarnation through thirty days of Advent Gnosticism.

Yes exactly! As Wilson concludes, grace is what it's all about. And God's grace in Christ was not a stale mince pie and a lukewarm sausage roll in a cold grey room, it was a sumptuous, lavish banquet with Michelin star cooking, champagne, laughter and song. 

That's why 'tis the season to be jolly as the carol says.

Online and On TV

My wife Laura is disabled, a wheelchair user, and a full-time mother. She has recently written an article for the charity Disabled Parents Network and then was interviewed by for The One Show on BBC1.

You can read her article here: http://disabledparentsnetwork.org.uk/a-new-mums-story/

And, at least in the UK (not sure about the rest of the world) you can watch the TV programme here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01p6rw7/The_One_Show_03_12_2012/

Advent

Happy new year to my readers - new church year that is. Today is Advent Sunday, the beginning of a new church year and the beginning of the traditional season of preparation for Christmas.

How might we mark this season? What does marking advent really mean, beyond putting up an advent calendar and beginning the Christmas countdown.

For me there are two indispensable parts of celebrating and reflecting on advent, which can be summed up as looking back and looking forward. The two activities are not unrelated of course. There is something beneficial in the looking back that helps us look forward more effectively. That is the balancing act involved in keeping advent well.

Looking back each year, we try to imagine how it must have been to be part of Israel in Old Testament times, waiting for the long-promised King and Saviour who would be sent by God, or for the characters in the New Testament stories waiting for the birth, especially Mary and Joseph. Though the events of Christmas are already long in our past, during advent, we somehow try to put ourselves back before the birth of Christ came to catch a sense of the anticipation and longing they must have felt. And so many of our Bible readings look at prophecies concerning the Messiah and our sermons and hymns at this time reflect upon the promised Messiah.

But advent is also about looking forward to Christ's second coming. Just as Old Testament Israel looked forward to the coming of the Messiah that would change the world, the New Testament church looks forward now to the second coming of the Messiah that will end the world as it is and remake it perfectly for eternity. So we also focus on Bible passages, sermons and hymns that look forward to Christ's return in glory.

I hope that this year we will seek to keep the advent season in both ways and prepare for the celebration of Christmas spiritually as we inevitably prepare for it in many practical ways too.

The Divine Spiration of Scripture

The Divine Spiration of Scripture
A. T. B. McGowan
Apollos

Professor McGowan's book is interesting but rather odd. Its main arguments are simple enough to grasp and make for interesting discussion:

• The doctrine of the Bible should not stand as a separate subject in systematic theology but form part of the doctrine of God ("theology proper") and the Holy Spirit in particular.
• We should stop referring to the "divine inspiration" of Scripture and start using "divine spiration" instead.
• We should stop referrring to the "inerrancy" of Scripture and use the word "infallibility" instead.

The ideas are clear enough, but the book takes a rather meandering path through the subject matter which mean that the main points are often lost amid screeds of words dealing with a number of different subjects. Personally, I felt this distracted from the main points.

There are also some difficulties with the main points themselves that need to be addressed.

First, to argue for a change in vocabulary from inspiration to spiration is a difficult one to sell. The word inspiration is so entrenched as a term of art in theology that it is hard to imagine it being displaced, especially by the rather odd word "spiration" which few people will even have heard of. While it is true that inspiration is often misunderstood and confused with the way purely human writings are said to be "inspired" and while it not a very accurate rendering of theopneustos in 2 Timothy 3:16 ("God-breathed" or "breathed out by God" are much more accurate and descriptive), I do not think McGowan makes a sufficient case for replacing what is a problematic term with another problematic term. It is not immediately apparent what "spiration" means. Rather than looking for a Latinate term of art to replace "inspiration," might we not be better to stick the robust Anglo-Saxon term "God-breathed" in future to describe the doctrine?

Second, one of McGowan's central arguments is that there is a divide between American theologians who argue for the concept of inerrancy and European theologian who argue instead for infallibility. Here he pits the likes of Warfield and Hodge against Kuyper and Bavinck. This view of a radical difference between the two continents is not universally accepted. The book would have been helped, in my view, if McGowan had spelled out more clearly what he actually means by infallibility, in particular how this differs from inerrancy.

Third, where we categorise the doctrine of Scripture in systematic theology is of little interest to anyone except professional systematic theologians. McGowan does not really explain why it matters very well.

Because of the book's problems, it is unlikely to achieve what McGowan would like. It seems to be destined to be a mere footnote in the body of evangelical theology on the inspiration and authority of the Bible.

Readers who want to read a more detailed review could do worse than read John Frame's review here.

Remembrance Sunday

 

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

- from For the Fallen by Laurence Binyon.

Café Theology

Café Theology 
Michael Lloyd
Alpha International 2012

It has always been one of my passions to discuss and communicate theology with clarity and simplicity while avoiding being simplistic. This difficult balancing act is more than achieved by Michael Lloyd in this book.

In some 400-odd pages, Lloyd provides an excellent, sensible overview of evangelical theology, dealing with such central subjects as creation, the fall, providence, incarnation, atonement, resurrection, the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, the End Times, and the Church.

What I was impressed by was that Lloyd manages, as well as giving a general overview, to make some very interesting arguments that I haven't come across elsewhere in my theological reading.

His chapter on the Fall was the most interesting for me in the book. Here Lloyd tackles some huge issues and tries to explain how the Fall means far more than simply that we are all sinners. It also means that the world is not exactly as how God would have it. For Lloyd this is the basis for dealing with such matters as the problem of evil and why there is so much suffering in the world from both natural disasters and moral evils.

Lloyd also touches on an idea that the fall of Satan occurred prior to the fall of humanity and accounts for death in creation among animal species even before man was created and fell. This allows him to affirm that death is as the result of sin while affirming animal death prior to humanity's fall. Thus he presents a kind of "Gap Theory" for creation.

It is not surprising that this book comes from Alpha course producers. It is an evangelical theology book designed to be read by the modern, thoughtful, 21st century Christian and would be eminently suitable for new Christians who have maybe been through an Alpha or Christianity Explored course and who wants to explore the faith in greater depth.

This is one of my theology books of the year.

The Milk of Human Kindness?

As I was walking into work today I saw a dairy lorry stop outside an office building in the city centre and the delivery man got out to deliver just six small pint cartons of milk into one of the offices. Less than a minutes' walk away from that office building there is a supermarket that sells milk.

It struck me what an enormous waste of fuel, time and money this is. Imagine that delivery driver coming into the busy city centre each day with a large refrigerated lorry, adding to the congestion and pollution, to leave six pints of milk. It probably isn't the only delivery he makes in the city centre each day, but that's hardly the point. It is an unnecessary journey, so an office can make their tea and coffee without having to go all the way (50 metres max) to the supermarket to buy milk.

Surely this is precisely the kind of waste that we as a society and as a planet can no longer afford. One lorry delivering the milk to the supermarket should really be enough for all the offices around there, shouldn't it?

These are small, apparently insignificant choices we make every day that cumulatively are wrecking the environment.

For more ideas on how we can change things to "live lightly" and ethically, check out the A Rocha Living Lightly website. They are a Christian charity working "to inspire churches and individuals to get involved in caring for God's creation through a whole variety of ways and runs a number of practical conservation projects."