Why should we take sides?
Why should we seek to see our party, our way of thinking about things, people like us, succeeding?
How easily does what we think of as seeking to stand up for God become seeking to stand up for ourselves against others who do not see themselves as serving any less faithfully than we ourselves are?
God has made it clear that he will prevail. He has shown that those who oppose him will fail.
So why take sides?
Our battle is not against flesh and blood.
There is a lot said and a lot written about people having the Holy Spirit. I thought it would be worth clarifying what I think to be the fairly clear teaching of the Bible and the testimony of experience. I am writing this partly in reaction to reading Greg Haslam's essay “Be Filled with the Spirit”, which I refer to from time to time, but you don't need to have read it to understand what I'm saying.
One of the problems with incomplete teaching from the Bible is that when we have experiences which do not fit with that incomplete teaching, there is a danger of saying that the teaching we received was incorrect, even though it was actually incomplete. So it is with the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
This is very much the “traditional position”. All Christians receive the Holy Spirit when they become Christians.
Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.
Romans 8:9-11, ESV
There doesn't seem to be any way to deny this. If we don't have the Holy Spirit, we don't belong to Jesus, and we don't have new life. All Christians receive the Holy Spirit.
But just because we have the Holy Spirit, that does not mean that we have the fullness of experience of the Holy Spirit.
And if someone asks “Surely we got it all automatically when we believed?” Dr Lloyd-Jones replied “If you have got it all, why are you so unlike the New Testament Christians? Got it all? Got it all at your conversion? Well, where is it, I ask?”
Filled with the Holy Spirit by Greg Haslam in Preach the Word
This having the Holy Spirit but not having a full experience of the Holy Spirit is commonly misinterpreted by Pentecostals as not having the Holy Spirit at all. But as we have seen, all Christians must be indwelt by the Spirit, otherwise they are not Christians. So what more is there?
It's important when we're talking about these things to use the same language as our translations of the Bible use. That is because otherwise we'll end up talking a different language to the Bible, and we'll misunderstand it.
The Bible does talk about a second-level experience of the Holy Spirit, called in most modern English translations “being filled with the Spirit”.
Being indwelt by the Holy Spirit isn't always obvious. Being filled with the Holy Spirit generally is, as a quick look through the New Testament shows.
Being filled with the Spirit is mentioned 10 times in the New Testament, 9 of them by Luke. In Luke 1, John the Baptist is filled with the Spirit even in the womb as part of his job of proclaiming Jesus. His parents, Elizabeth and Zechariah, are both filled with the Spirit and the result is that they praise God for what he is doing in Jesus. In Acts 2, the apostles are filled with the Holy Spirit, and speak in tongues, then preach about Jesus. In Acts 4, Peter is filled with the Holy Spirit and preaches, then later all the disciples are filled with the Holy Spirit and preach. In Acts 9, Saul/Paul is filled with the Holy Spirit, his blindness is healed and immediately he begins preaching. In Acts 13, he is filled with the Spirit again, and confronts the false prophet Elymas. Again in Acts 13, the disciples are filled with the Holy Spirit as they rejoice despite persecution. And in Ephesians 5:18, we are commanded to “be filled with the Holy Spirit”, which is a continuous imperative - “go on being filled in the Holy Spirit”. The consequences of being filled with the Spirit in Ephesians 5:18 are “addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.” (Eph 5:19-21, ESV)
From that, there are a few points we can make about being filled with the Holy Spirit.
I strongly suspect that the programmatic reference for being filled with the Spirit is Micah 3:8
But as for me, I am filled with power,
with the Spirit of the LORD,
and with justice and might,
to declare to Jacob his transgression
and to Israel his sin.
Micah 3:8, ESV
Being filled with the Spirit is about being empowered to proclaim God's word.
Because being filled with the Spirit is much more obvious than just receiving the Spirit, it also seems to happen when some kind of external evidence that the Holy Spirit has come is needed. The classic example of this is in Acts 10-11, with the first Gentile converts. Peter is preaching at the house of a Roman centurion called Cornelius (though he has to be told specifically in a vision to go there), and Cornelius and co start “speaking in tongues and extolling God”, which is classic Acts behaviour for being filled with the Spirit. Peter sees this as evidence that they have received the Spirit, and hence that Gentiles can become Christians too, which seems to come as a surprise both to him and to the church in Jerusalem (Acts 11:18).
Reflecting on my own experience, it seems to me that my conservative background often but not always tends to downplay being filled with the Spirit, and play up receiving the Spirit. It wouldn't at all surprise me if that sort of emphasis was what led to the heresy which observed people being filled with the Spirit and concluded that they were receiving it for the first time.
One of the mistakes which most annoys me at times is in the language we use when talking about being filled with the Holy Spirit. It is not a case of us having more of the Spirit. The Spirit is not a liquid of whom we can receive more. The Spirit is a person. Being filled with the Spirit is not us having more of the Spirit, but the Spirit having more of us. It is being surrendered to the Spirit, so that we are not actively opposing what the Spirit is seeking to do in us.
The other phrase used a fair bit in the Bible, is “baptism in the Holy Spirit”. In charismatic circles, I usually hear this used either (heretically) as referring to a reception of the Holy Spirit after conversion or as a synonym for being filled with the Spirit (so Greg Haslam). In conservative circles, I usually hear it as referring to initial reception of the Spirit.
Most of the New Testament references are unclear as to which they refer to. Jesus is said to baptise with the Holy Spirit. which is symbolised by the Holy Spirit visibly descending on him at his baptism. Pentecost is described as being baptism with the Holy Spirit, but as we have seen, Pentecost is both receiving the Spirit and being filled with the Spirit. Ditto with Cornelius receiving the Spirit in Acts 10-11.
But Paul helps us out. In 1 Corinthians 12, he wrote:
For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.
1 Corinthians 12:13, ESV
We were all baptised in one Spirit into one body. That makes it pretty clear it's something which affects all Christians and so is to do with reception of the Holy Spirit rather than filling with the Holy Spirit.
Phew.
There's an interesting discussion of gender differences (partly from an evolutionary biological perspective) here. It's interesting - the idea that men have a higher standard deviation in most traits explaining why women do better at things such as GCSEs where the distribution is squashed down at the top end (a decent proportion get A*, there is no A****, more get A*s than Fs) and why men do better when it is squashed up at the bottom end (e.g. wages, where there is no upper bound but there is often a minimum wage).
The whole thing reminds me that I have yet to come across a good theology of gender. Anyone got any ideas?
Some of the basics are clear - male and female are different but of equal value. There's something called "headship" which men have in marriage, but the exact nature of that is disputed. Men and women are mutually dependent upon one another.
But so many of the details are obscure. I think the Bible doesn't spend a lot of time on it, partly because stereotyping doesn't work. Maybe that's the answer - that each situation needs to be worked out individually, on the basis of some very broad principles and wisdom.
Any ideas? Helpful books on theology of gender?
This is a film about the life of Martin Luther, roughly from 1505 (when he decided to become a monk) to 1530 (Augsburg Confession).
As a retelling of the story, it gets the main details right, but often skips over stuff. I guess it's over 2 hours as it is though, so probably couldn't have had more detailed scenes in the disputations, for example. I'd have been happy watching a 4 hour version, but some people might not.
Some of the details did annoy me though. Had they researched Luther's preaching / lecturing style, or did they just make it look modern? How could Luther cite the Bible with verse references when they weren't invented until the middle of the century? Had Melanchthon actually taken his name as early as it is used of him here? (he was born Philipp Schwartzerd).
But for a basic biographical introduction to Luther, it was pretty good. And it's a moving story. It's a real shame it didn't seem to be released at the cinema in the UK, and it's not available in most DVD shops.
Here's a thought that came out of a discussion I was having with a friend last night, sparked by the realisation that neither of us felt especially part of the churches we'd been going to for the last year, whereas both of us had been core members of churches before that.
The maximum number of people who can attend a church congregation is generally limited by the size of the building, seating, etc.
The maximum number who can feel as if they belong to a church congregation is much smaller. It is generally limted by the layout of the building - specifically the number of people who can comfortably socialise in the space used, given the layout.
One big factor, for example, would be that if the seating is in tightly packed rows, only the ends are effectively useful for socialising because there isn't sufficient room to turn around otherwise, and people can't move freely into or out of the row.
Just a thought, but it intuitively seems right.
I went to see the Bourne Ultimatum with some friends last night.
What sets this apart from pretty much every action film I have seen is the quality of the filming and editing. It's deliberately largely done with handheld cameras, and often with shots lasting less than 1 second, especially during action scenes, which gives it a very breathless feel. You can't always see exactly what is going on during fights, but that is deliberate and it works very well. It's more like you're in the fight, or in the car crash or whatever. And then when it calms down, there will be a long, fairly still shot with little happening except the ruins of what just got destroyed, again fitting the pace.
Plotwise, the film is fairly simple. Jason Bourne tries to find out who he is by running after whoever he thinks might know. There are some clever bits, but it's the filming that really makes this a great film, and it doesn't have the kind of plot holes or cheesiness that makes Transformers, for example, so difficult to watch. Definitely worth seeing at the cinema.
Alan Wilson points to an interesting comment on the Guardian website. Are the Guardian writers essentially functioning as unprincipled trolls to try to get readership up and hence increase ad revenue?
There were a load of animal rights protesters in Oxford today. There usually are outside the site where the medical primate research stuff happens, but this time they were doing a big protest through the middle of Oxford.
I'm all for people's rights to public assembly and all - I can see that it's potentially a right I might quite want to use in the future, but sometimes the people who use it make me want to get out the (possibly apocryphal) Brown note generators.
Anyway, today's lot seemed especially concerned about a monkey named Felix. Their concern is of course commendable, though some fusspots might think that on balance Felix the monkey should probably be a lower priority than Darfur or Iraq or whatever.
I was tempted to get up and give a rabble-rousing speech. Something along these lines (with appropriate pauses and so on):
Friends, we have come here today to say that this must end!
They must stop all experiments on animals now, or we will stop them!
Free Felix now!
They say this is medical research!
But they are cutting Felix's brain out!
We will not let this continue!
Not while we and our children are alive!
If they want to do experiments, let them use us instead!
Who will volunteer to take Felix's place?
But I didn't.
I've spent a fair bit of the last week in Deuteronomy, with the help of Gordon McConville's excellent commentary. Here's another of the things that struck me:
Deuteronomy 15 contains three groups of laws. Roughly summarised, they are:
Debt release: Debts between Israelites are to be cancelled every seven years. Lending to Israelites who are poor is compulsory, even if the year for debts being cancelled is coming up. While poverty is seen as something that will not be eradicated (v11), it is nevertheless to be aspired against (v4).
Manumission: There was a form of indentured slavery in certain situations, which was very different from slavery as later practiced by the Arabs, British and Americans (among others). These laws put a maximum period of 7 years on it, with the expectation of very good treatment and tell the "owner" to send the "slave" off with very generous gifts.
Firstborn: God claims the firstborn of all animals, and they are to be eaten in a kind of communal party.
What was striking about this was thinking about the underlying implications. There's a lot of talk about a "social contract" now - that we agree to pay taxes and obey the law in return for living in this society. But that kind of thought seems hugely foreign to Deuteronomy. For a start, I'm not at all sure it recognises ideas like private property in the modern sense.
Property, especially land, is seen as belonging primarily to God, and is God's to give graciously to whomever he wants. For example, in Israel, permanent financial transfers of land seem to have been prohibited. The rich being expected to lend to the poor is interesting as well - it doesn't have all of the rubbish baggage associated with a welfare state where the state is seen as obliged to provide and keeps it much more personal, but at the same time it undermines the idea that the property of the rich is actually theirs. Ditto with the debt release and the manumission - property is only seen as being loaned for a limited time rather than actually as owned in the way we'd understand it now.
And yes, I see recognition of that at times in the church with things like
For all things come from You,
And of Your own we have given You
1 Chronicles 29:14b, NKJV
But I don't think we actually live like it most of the time. We tend to see our property as ours, and we choose to give some of it away, rather than seeing our property as God's, and us as borrowers of it.
