Seven Days That Divide the World – John Lennox

I know that the whole creation / evolution argument is (or should be) old hat now, but it still rumbles on in some corners, and seems to be very much live in the USA. Maybe it's just that I got fed up of the poor reasoning on both sides of the argument and dropped out of it a while ago.

John Lennox is one of the best writers and speakers in the debate at the moment. His previous books God's Undertaker and Gunning for God are among the best I've read on science/religion and apologetics, so I was expecting good things of this one too. I wasn't disappointed. Well, I was, but not to start with...

The first three chapters are the best thing I've read on the creation / evolution debate in a long time. Lennox frames it by using the heliocentrism debates of the 16th-18th centuries to show that one generation's dogmatic insistence on one interpretation of the text in the face of science is another generation's mad over-literalism.

The next chapter is a bit of a let down. Lennox debunks a lot of the common myths in the creation / evolution debate but ends up committing himself to the odd view that the universe is old, that apes evolved but that Adam and Eve were a direct creation. In doing so, he argues that young earth creationists should accept that their view flies in the face of the scientific evidence but ignores the significant genetic evidence that we share ancestry with apes just as much as they do with each other. It seems to be almost a worst of all possible worlds view – he avoids over-literalism in the understanding of Genesis 1 and affirms the importance of scientific evidence, but then ignores the scientific evidence on the basis of what looks like an over-literalistic reading of a single verse. Alternatively (i.e. from a YEC point of view), he rejects large amounts of what the Bible says in favour of dodgy science, but still tries clinging onto one bit of it.

Chapter 5 is closer to a return to form. Lennox examines what the point of Genesis 1 actually is, if it isn't to teach specific details about how the universe came to exist. There are still weaknesses in this chapter though – Lennox doesn't really get into the culture at the time Genesis 1 was written, so only sees some of how Genesis connects with today's culture. He doesn't point out how it shows God as the consistent and sole creator of the universe, which is so important for understanding of science. Of course Lennox believes that, but it's easy to miss it in Genesis 1 unless you see it as in part a reaction to the polytheistic creation narratives of surrounding cultures. Another example would be Genesis giving people the status that the other nations gave to their kings.

There's some of that in the appendices, when he discusses whether the Genesis account is derived from the Babylonian one, but Lennox never really draws out the significance of the important contrasts. The other appendices are pretty good, but never really get to the height of the first three chapters. The book is well worth the price just for those.

Cranmer on Gosnell

Cranmer has done an excellent post about the Kermit Gosnell trial.

"The nation cries out for a latter-day Shaftsbury or Wilberforce in Parliament who will bang on about this barbarism ad nauseam, day after day, week after week, until something is done about it."

Some of the comments are slightly confused though. It's perfectly consistent to be anti-abortion but pro-death penalty. After all, the babies haven't done anything wrong, and it's still possible to believe that we can do something that forfeits our right to live. I don't think the death penalty is appropriate though - I think there's too much potential for abuse with wrong verdicts and so on.

In fact, from a logical point of view, it's much easier to be pro-death penalty and anti-abortion than vice versa.

Dallas Willard on Grace and Success in Ministry

Methinks I need to read some more of Dallas Willard's books. He recently went to be with his Lord and Saviour...

What's Wrong with Calvinism?

If you had to describe my theology, you could do a lot worse than “Calvinist”. If I'm wrestling with a difficult question, I often look at what John Calvin wrote on it and I find myself agreeing far more often than I disagree with him. I'd certainly put his name on any shortlist of theologians who have influenced my thinking. Yet "Calvinist" isn't a label I'd claim for myself, and this is why.

John Calvin died in 1564, but by the early 1600s a big argument had grown up between his followers and a Dutch theologian called Arminius. In 1619, at the Synod of Dort, Calvinism was “clarified” by the famous five points, which were a reaction against Arminianism. And I guess that's the start of the problem. I agree with all five points as they were understood by Calvin, but I think that all of them need clarification and qualification – any of them can be easily distorted.

The Five Points of Calvinism:

Total Depravity – Everything that we do is contaminated by our sin, so that nothing we do is completely pure.
Unconditional Election – God's choice of people is not due to anything inherently good about them.
Limited Atonement – Jesus' death is only effective for those who put their trust in him
Irresistible Grace – We can't thwart God's sovereign plan.
Perseverance of the Saints – Once people put their trust in Jesus, they will keep on trusting him.

It is easy to misunderstand any or all of the five points. For example, total depravity rightly means that nothing we do is ever entirely pure, but it is often understood to mean that everything we do is always wholly bad. Even the name suggests the wrong interpretation!

But even worse is that the five points were originally intended as a summary of the disagreement between Calvinism and Arminianism, but instead they have become a summary of the whole doctrine of Calvinism. Calvin wrote his Institutes of the Christian Religion as an attempt to summarise Christian doctrine on its own terms rather than in reaction to anything else. He tried to put the areas of controversy into their proper place rather than up front. But because Calvinism is so often defined by the five points, it becomes distorted so that predestination is the main point rather than a subsidiary one. For example, Calvin discusses predestination in book 3, section 21 of the Institutes, but Berkhof, the 20th Century Calvinist, puts it in Chapter 1 of his Systematic Theology. You end up with a bad caricature of Christianity, with some parts emphasised out of all proportion and others ignored completely.

As a result, Calvinism has become very life-denying. Calvin was willing even to affirm the good in idolatry – that it showed that people were hungry for God (Institutes, 1.3.1). When Paul was in Athens, he affirmed things that were good about their religion and philosophy. But when I hear many Calvinists preach today, they only preach sin, and they often preach that every action of their hearers is only evil all the time, to which the simple response is “If that's what you think, then you're obviously wrong.” Why should people who have a strong doctrine of the remnants of God's image in people reject that those people are still capable of good? Not good that earns salvation, but good nevertheless?

The “tradition” in Calvinism is to be very negative about pretty much all forms of human culture – art, drama, literature, etc. There are of course some Christians who seem to go overboard the other way – who are always praising whatever is new or interesting in culture without really critically engaging with it. But surely the right way for us to proceed is via seeing and naming the good, and recognising and engaging with the bad as well.

I think Tim Keller is a brilliant example of a better way. Doctrinally, I don't think he'd disagree with Calvin on much, but he seems to be very good at avoiding positions which are just reactive against something else. For example, on culture he writes: “our stance towards every human culture should be one of critical enjoyment and an appropriate wariness”, which is about a million miles from the stereotypical Puritan Calvinist rejection of human culture.

Calvinism's attitude to culture is just one example. The distortion of Biblical Christianity which happens when we see the five points of Calvinism (or other disputes of the Reformation) as central rather than as peripheral affects all sorts of areas, almost invariably for the worse.

The Trajectory Argument for Gay Marriage

I wish I was wrong about homosexuality - it would make life so much easier if there were even a half-decent Biblical or theological argumet for the legitimacy of committed same-sex sexual relationships. But I've never seen one, and so my conscience is held captive by the Word of God.

One of the really poor excuses for an argument in favour of gay marriage is what is sometimes called the trajectory argument. Steve Chalke spends about half his time on it here. It goes roughly as follows:

There are several things in the New Testament which the NT writers seem fine with but because of our years of reflecting on the Bible and doing ministry in a changing culture we now realise are wrong - the obvious examples are slavery and banning women from teaching. The Church's attitude to homosexuality is another one of those.

The danger with this argument is that in this form you can apply it to just about anything where the Bible disagrees with contemporary culture - where it applies and where it doesn't becomes just a matter for individual conscience, and the Bible loses its prophetic power to challenge our ways of thinking when we are too deeply shaped by our culture. We need some kind of clear control to see when a development is legitimate and when it isn't.

The best such control is trajectory - when we compare the New Testament to the surrounding culture, and see which direction the Bible moves the culture in. We can see this argument can be valid by thinking about the Civil Rights movement in the US. They campaigned for small steps to be made in terms of desegregating schools - they didn't campaign for a black President immediately. And that's pretty much what the Bible does with slavery. In a society where masters had strong rights over slaves but slave revolts were brutally suppressed, the Bible condemned slave trading and masters beating their slaves, and called slaves and masters brothers. It is clearly heading towards the abolition of slavery, even thought that move would have been unacceptable in the Roman society of the day.

We could say the same about polygamy. Polygamy is never portrayed positively in the Bible, and in the NT, it is banned for church leaders. The trajectory is clearly towards monogamy.

But what about when we look at the trajectory for homosexuality? In the above link, Steve Chalke summarises the situation in the ancient world fairly well:

It is common knowledge that from the early Republican times of Ancient Rome it was considered natural and unremarkable for adult males to be sexually attracted to and to pursue teen-aged youths of both sexes. Pederasty (a homogenital relationship between a man and a pubescent boy outside his immediate family) was regarded as normal and condoned... Though same-sex relations between women are not as well documented, the Romans generally had far more flexible gender categories than our contemporary society.

If anything, Chalke underplays it. The Romans also allowed same-sex adult sexual encounters, as long as it was a high-status man initiating. But most of the New Testament was written in and to culturally Greek areas, which were even more permissive - see here for example. And into that society, the New Testament and the early church advocated that sex belongs inside heterosexual lifelong marriage, and not outside. There is no hint of other relationships being potentially equivalent to marriage. There is no question of homosexual relationships being equal to heterosexual marriage, even though that would have been more accepted in the society of the day than at any time since.

The huge problem with the trajectory argument for allowing same-sex marriage is that the trajectory is in exactly the wrong direction.

Steve Chalke and Homosexuality

It is being widely reported that Steve Chalke has "come out" in favour of gay marriage. Here's his paper on it, and here are some more resources on it. Peter Ould, whose thinking I generally find very helpful on issues around homosexuality has started a reply here, which show that Chalke's work on the Bible passages is somewhat lacking.

I agree that at times the church has been guilty of hatred of people who experience same-sex attraction, and that we need to repent of that. However, I don't think we should change the Biblical understanding of marriage in order to do that - that would seem to be something of an extreme over-reaction.

I'd want to add three more questions for Steve Chalke:

1. Why do you put people into boxes marked "homosexual" or "heterosexual"? Isn't that part of the problem?

2. Is there any evidence in the Bible either that sex outside marriage should be permitted or that marriage should not always be between a man and a woman?

3. Do unhappily single people have the gift of celibacy?

Unbelievable - the Slaughter of the Amalekites

As you may have noticed, I've been blogging quite a bit about the Amalekites in 1 Samuel 15. That's because I've been doing a bit of work on them because I'm in a debate on the radio tomorrow - on Justin Brierley's show Unbelievable. It's at 2:30pm, on Premier Christian Radio.

For those who are interested in reading a bit more about the Amalekites and where I'm at with understanding them at the moment, I've created a dedicated page to pull together stuff I've written on the issue.

But Isn't God a God of Love?

Absolutely. John tells us that God is not just a God of love, but God is himself love. Twice in the New Testament it tells us that "God is love". That love is primarily seen in God's love within the Trinity. From all eternity, and into all eternity, the Father, Son and Spirit love each other with a perfect, all-consuming, all-embracing love. But that love also overflows to us. God loves us so much that he seeks to include us in his inter-Trinitarian love.

But love is not something fluffy. If necessary, love will fight to protect what it loves. In the same book it tells us that God is love, 1 John, it also tells us that "God is light, in him there is no darkness at all". God is love, and that love opposes the darkness that would seek to dethrone the Trinity, or seek to harm God's people.

Sometimes by the way that we reject God, by the way that we fight against him, we force him to oppose us. The Amalekites did that. And when God fights against someone because they fight against him, he does not like to do it. He does not rejoice in the death of sinners, but rather that they should turn from their wickedness and live. (Ezekiel 18:23) God's judgement is described in the Bible as his "strange work" and his "alien task" (Isaiah 28:21). It doesn't come naturally to him.

This tension reaches its climax on the cross. We see right through the Old Testament that in order for God to bless the world through his people, he must destroy those who oppose them. And in the cross he does both. The Second Person of the Trinity, God himself, becomes a man to be God's own people; to be the means of blessing to all the world, and also to become the man who must suffer and die. God bears his own punishment on sin so that we, the guilty ones, can be free.

Yes, God is a God of love. He is a God of love who loves so much that he defends what he loves, and when he loves his own enemies, he defends them by taking the punishment on himself. This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to bear our sin.

Amalekites - What About the Children?

We've already seen that there were lots of ways out for individual Amalekites who wanted to run away. We have seen that the primary intention of God's command in 1 Samuel 15:3 is to stop the Israelites profiting from the destruction of the Amalekites. But given that command what about children who remained? Would they have been killed?

Probably, yes. And that's hard to say.

But think about the situation. We've seen that the Israelite army was huge and slow-moving - that there was plenty of time for people to get away. Whose fault is it if children stay behind for a battle? Whose fault is it if a parent takes their children to war and the children get killed?

It's the parents' fault, isn't it? Let's take an example from WW2. Just before the D-Day invasion, the Allies parachuted troops into France to secure vital bridges and so on. The normal orders for such troops is to take no prisoners, just like for the Israelite army. Now suppose they are faced by a column of German infantry, and the column includes women and children, who are also fighting. Whose fault is it if those children die? Is it Churchill's, for ordering that the troops take no prisoners? Or is it their parents' for making them fight when they should be keeping them safe?

Same here.

Were the Amalekites wiped out?

If God's command to Saul in 1 Samuel 15 was exhaustive - if God was commanding a genocide, then we would expect the Amalekites to be wiped out. After all, Saul is only criticised for taking plunder, not for sparing them. He thinks he obeys Samuel's command (1 Sam 15:20).

But that's not what we see. In 1 Samuel 27:8, there are still Amalekites around for David to raid. In Esther, Haman seems to be descended from the kings of the Amalekites. They weren't wiped out, therefore God didn't command a genocide.