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Intriguing Series of Posts on Francis Chan and Preston Sprinkle’s New Book on Hell

At Jesus Creed:

Hell is making us all think really hard about God. In order to push our thinking I am working through a few big ideas in Dr. Preston Sprinkle and Francis Chan’s recent book,Erasing Hell: What God Said About Eternity and What We Have Made Up. I have deep admiration and respect for these two men. They strike me as kind and thoughtful, and their book is worthy of our careful reading and engagement.

In the ad for the book, Chan said, “When we make statements like, “Well God wouldn’t do this would he?” Do you understand that at that moment you are actually putting God’s actions in submission to your reasoning?” And Dr. Sprinkle, in a recent comment on this blog, said, “I almost get the sense that, according to your posts, [taking God at his word] is not necessarily a good thing if his word doesn’t sit well with us. But this seems to be a crazy high view of our intellect.” These two statements summarize well an attitude many of us have when reading the Bible. Isn’t the Bible written to common people like me? Isn’t the message clear? If I read the Bible with a right heart aren’t the Bible’s truths easily understood and unavoidable?

In order to advance its most important claims, Erasing Hell applies such a perspective to the traditional interpretation of passages on hell. It says, “Scripture is filled with divine actions that don’t fit our human standards of logic or morality…We need to stop trying to domesticate God or confine Him to tidy categories and compartments that reflect our human sentiments rather than his inexplicable ways. We serve a God whose ways are incomprehensible, who thoughts are not like our thoughts” (135).

Lumping together both what the authors see as the “incomprehensible” horror of divinely mandated genocide and the “incomprehensible” goodness of the crucified Jesus, the writers say, “It’s incredibly arrogant to pick and choose which incomprehensible truths we embrace. No one wants to ditch God’s plan of redemption, even though it doesn’t make sense to us. Neither should we erase God’s revealed plan of punishment because it doesn’t sit well with us. As soon as we do this, we are putting God’s actions in submission to our own reasoning, which is a ridiculous thing for [created beings] to do” (136).

Is this right? Can the intellect be set aside? Can we avoid putting God’s word/actions/character in submission to our reasoning when reading the Bible? I don’t think so. Let me give an example of why we must think hard about *how* we read the Bible, or else we will lose the proper understanding of the Bible.

Incredible Frisbee Shots…Unbelievable

HT Andrew Sullivan:

On Taking Stock of the Historicity of the Christian Faith

From Larry Hurtado, now professor emeritus of NT and Christian Origins at University of Edinburgh:

It is, however, one of the unavoidable features of Christianity that it is a historical religion, its origins provenanced, a number of the leading figures identifiable, and with texts from the earliest period, some of which take us back to within ca. 20 years after Jesus’ execution.  So, it’s really unavoidable for thinking Christians to take seriously the historical nature of their faith, all the historical issues and approaches valid.

In fact, to my mind, it’s one of the attractive features of Christianity that it is a historical faith, and doesn’t claim to be simply some set of timeless truths (e.g., to be discovered by contemplation).   It means living with the nature of historical knowledge on a number of issues (limited by extant evidence, always provisional and subject to correction, and conclusions often disputed).  But it can be an intriguing exercise to try to project ourselves back into the setting of earliest Christian centuries, when they were having to understand what they believed had happened to them, and without the later creeds, theologians and church structures of subsequent centuries.

Christomorphic Ontological Transformation

If you’ve ever gotten into a serious theological conversation with me chances are you know of my affinity for the Anabaptist theological tradition. Now, I wouldn’t call myself an Anabaptist because there are some key places I where I break with it (like the notion of nonresistance). However, much of their theology strikes a chord in me.

I’ve been reading thought Thomas Finger’s A Contemporary Anabaptist Theology and one of the things that’s striking is the emphasis Anabaptist theology puts on personal transformation. I know that the same idea exists in nearly every theological tradition, but in particular Anabaptism makes it absolutely central. Following and being redeemed and “saved” by Jesus is supposed to do something significant to us. We’re changed because of it, and not just in the sense that we help people more often. Or that we set out to make better decisions. Yes, those are true, but the transformation isn’t just about being “better people.”

Dallas Willard calls the kind of transformation I’m talking about the development of the “character of Christ.” It’s an inner transformation that strives to remake us in the image of Jesus so much so that our impulse is to live, act, respond, and choose as Jesus did. The point of this transformation isn’t to be going around constantly asking “what would Jesus do?” but that our lives would take on the pattern of Christ’s so our impulses, reactions, and decisions match.

I’m not saying perfect Christ-likeness is the expectation. The idea isn’t to measure yourself against Jesus and note your deficiencies. It’s to immerse ourselves in the life and stories of Jesus, playing them out in our lives, and re-ordering our worlds so that we can and do become ever more Christ-like every day. The way between the guilt that comes from reminding yourself of how “fallen” you are and the vague attempts to “be better people” is one of inner transformation where we are being remade in the image of Jesus Christ.

¹⁷ Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!  [2 Corinthians 5:17 (NIV)]

David’s Secret Weapon

HT James McGrath

New Perspective on Paul

One of the more significant contributions to NT scholarship in the past 35 or so years has been the New Perspective on Paul (NPP). For some reason I’ve found myself in conversation with a few folks recently about this very topic. It all began, really, with EP Sanders’ book Paul and Palestinian Judaism in 1977. The NPP essentially takes the phrase “works of the law” (and similar phrases) from Romans and Galatians and interprets it as addressing ethno-exclusive practices in Second Temple Judaism (such as table fellowship, circumcision, etc.) and NOT as the condemnation of Jewish legalism (or, as many think of it, “works-righteousness”). NPP folks have stressed that Paul, in referring to such works of the law, was critiquing Judaism’s cultural and ethnic exclusivity, not its general legalism. A different picture of Judaism in Paul’s day is at stake – and therefore what Paul has to say about it means something different.

The NPP has pushed back against a popular (Reformation) reading of Paul that 1st century Judaism was a works-righteousness oriented faith with no grace. There are a slew of explanations to how this all works out (fancy words like “covenantal nomism”), but that’s the basic idea. The NPP’s loudest (and most famous) proponents have been folks like NT Wright and James Dunn.

Tim Gombis recently posted on this. He does a good job explaining it, even though his interest seems to be in explaining what it isn’t.