Mission as Participation in the Divine Nature

The mission of God's people, then, is not some external structure built by the church itself - a program or strategy devised by an institution. Sending is mission is a participation in the life of God. The mission of God's people, in this dimension of sending and being sent, is to be caught up within the dynamic sending and being sent that God the Holy Trinity has done and continues to do for the salvation of the world and the revelation of his truth.
Christopher Wright, The Mission of God's People, p.211

Not Going Where God Wants?

Roger Carswell has written a really challenging piece here about how most evangelicals seem to want to go to where there are already plenty of Christians rather than where there are few. I know lots of people in that category, but I know a fair few who would rather go where Christ is not known, and they are a real encouragement to me.

HT Tim Chester.

The Death of Osama bin Laden

‘As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, people of Israel?’
Ezekiel 33:11, NIV

I've been meaning to write this post ever since I heard about bin Laden's death, but it's been a very busy couple of weeks. It raises all kind of questions, but I'm going to think about three of them. Was what happened just? Was it right? And should Americans have rejoiced the way they did?

First, was it just?

Osama bin Laden had personally declared war on the US. He claimed responsibility for and delighted in the events of 9/11, and clearly intended to continue to do such acts whenever he was able to do so. Had the USA captured him and put him on trial in any court in the world (except possibly those operating under Sharia Law), he would have been found guilty, and in any court that allowed the death penalty, he would have been sentenced to death. There was no possibility of reasonable doubt about his guilt, or about the seriousness of his actions. The killing of Osama bin Laden was, without a doubt, just.

But was it right?

That is a harder question. Was it right for the US to send a team of heavily armed Navy Seals into Pakistan without permission and to assassinate an unarmed man? Again, perspective helps here. The US is at war in Afghanistan, a war which had as one of its major aims to kill or capture Osama bin Laden. The war spills over the border into Pakistan, and Pakistan is officially on America's side in that war.

For the US, acting without Pakistan's permission was a necessary part of the operation. If they had asked for permission, they would have put the Pakistani government in a difficult position. Either they grant permission, in which case they get even more protests from their own population, or they refuse it and lose all US support. Far better for the Pakistani government not to have to make the choice at all. Furthermore, had the US told Pakistan of its intentions, the Pakistani authorities are sufficiently compromised by links to Al Qua'eda that it is highly likely that bin Laden would have been notified and enabled to escape. In addition, if any country (except Russia or China) had been knowingly harbouring bin Laden, it is likely that the US would have if necessary declared war on them to get at him. Much better for them, and much better for the host country, not to have to bother.

Was it right to kill bin Laden given that he was unarmed? I have already pointed out that he would have been sentenced to death anyway, so the only issue is the manner of his death. If one is in battle, and a sniper has the opportunity to shoot the enemy commander, they do not worry too much whether or not he is armed at the time. Even if it was not in battle, if in WW2 a German tank column was moving through Europe, and a British sniper caught sight of the German General Rommel and shot him, even if he was not even carriyng a gun at the time, that would be regarded as perfectly legitimate. And bin Laden clearly thought he was at war with the US. I don't see what the moral difference is.

In addition, there are problems associated with keeping bin Laden in prison. It would provide an incredibly high-profile target for protests and suicide bombings, and it could be argued it was far better tactically to kill him and bury him at sea. Having said all that, I think if it would have been possible to capture and put bin Laden on trial, that may have been even better.

I don't mean better from the point of view of justice at all - I mean from the point of view of what bin Laden seemed to understand so little about - mercy. Of course he didn't deserve it - if he had deserved it, it wouldn't have been mercy. To allow him the possibility of repentance would have been a very merciful thing. Of course, to allow him the possibility to give a memorable speech inciting the Muslim world to unity and hatred of the West would have been a very dangerous thing, so it would have had to be handled carefully.

And so we come onto the question about whether it was right to rejoice. I think relatives of those killed in 9/11 could have rejoiced. But ultimately God does not rejoice in the death of sinners, but rather that they turn from their wickedness and live. If bin Laden had turned around and become a force for peace in the world, even a living demonstration of the power of God to change sinners, that would have been cause for rejoicing. As it is, it seems that he is just one more unrepentant sinner going to Hell. That isn't something to rejoice in, especially when we recognise that it is what we deserve too - it is where we would be but for the grace and mercy that God has shown us.

History of Homosexual Theology

Concerning homosexuality there has been absolute unanimity in church history; sexual intimacy between persons of the same gender has never been recognized as legitimate behavior for a Christian. One finds no examples of orthodox teachers who suggested that homosexual activity could be acceptable in God's sight under any circumstances. Revisionist biblical interpretations that purport to support homosexual practice are typically rooted in novel hermeneutical principles applied to Scripture, which produce bizarre interpretations of the Bible held nowhere, never, by no one.

from here.

Royal Wedding

What a day! What a celebration! It's great to know that we can still all get behind celebrating something as wonderful as a Royal Wedding!

Of course, it also reminds us of the glorious reality behind marriage. My wife predicted a whole spate of Christian posts on it, but I've not seen that many. The best however, has to be this one from Barry Cooper (who is famous for not being Rico Tice). Quotes below.

But we can focus too much on sin. Today is a day where a Royal Prince, who will (God-willing) one day be King, marries a commoner, and she therefore becomes Royal. What a great picture in itself of what God has done for us!

In a shocking revelation, the palace has confirmed that the Prince has married a prostitute.

The woman has not yet been publicly named. But sources close to the palace have revealed that as well as being a serial adulterer, she is also known to be a notorious drunk, an inveterate liar, and a grievous hypocrite.

When asked why he would set his love on such an undeserving bride, the future King replied, “I have always loved her. I loved her from the very beginning, before she even knew me. And I will continue to love her, regardless of who she is. Nothing can separate us, not even death.”

Some have complained that, given her profession, such a woman could never become Queen. But the Prince was unrepentant: “If I am King, and I choose to marry her, then she becomes Queen. Whatever she may be, her status changed forever when I joined myself to her. Whatever she may do, she has been irrevocably welcomed into my family. Everything I have is now hers. And everything she has, I have taken upon myself.”

Derren Brown - Miracles for Sale - Review and Critique

These people always cause trouble. Their minds are corrupt, and they have turned their backs on the truth. To them, a show of godliness is just a way to become wealthy.
1 Tim 6:5 (NLT)

Last night, Derren Brown did a TV expose of American faith healers. There's a link to the website here. I thought a lot of it was good and well done, but it could have been significantly better.

Brown started with a crowd of volunteers, and then picked and trained one to become a fake faith healer, using some of the techniques he was sure that many of the "real" fake healers were using. His target was specifically the faith healers linked to the so-called Prosperity Gospel who teach that in order for God to bless you the most, you need to give the most money to them.

I don't doubt that there are plenty of such people. The Bible warns about them (see above). I've written against the "prosperity gospel" before. I thought it was especially good how Brown at al worked alongside Christians and Christian organisations in trying to expose the con artists.

One of the problems they had was getting enough publicity in the US. Most churches were surprisingly well-guarded about letting Brown's fake faith-healer preach or publicising his event - encouragingly so. It was also encouraging that Brown decided not to use a US Christian publicist, for fear of destroying his business when it became clear that they were fakes.

Critique

Brown is of course dead right that a lot of "faith healers" are manipulative charlatans. But there are others too. I'm sure that some are well-meaning and wanting to see God at work, and get easily tricked into faking stuff without realising they're doing it, and then misled into running after money. I'm sure too that others are genuine. I have a friend whose leg was miraculously healed, and who has a letter from his NHS consultant to that effect.

One of the key ways of telling the difference is their attitude to money, sex and power. If they are getting rich from their status and their ministry, then I would suggest they aren't genuine. Maybe some of the healings might be, but their hearts are clearly in the wrong place. Jesus did lots of miraculous healings; the apostles did miraculous healings, but they didn't get rich from them - they got killed.

The well-known Christian leaders I have the most respect for are the ones who are either on fixed salaries / stipends (as in most of the C of E), or who have set up trusts so that they personally don't get book royalties, donations, etc (as Rick Warren, John Piper, etc) and are instead paid by the church they work for. They also make sure they don't profit in other ways - strict rules about accountability and so on. Billy Graham famously didn't allow himself to be unsupervised with any woman except for his wife - he'd even refuse to go along in a taxi if the driver was female.

Healing on the Streets is an informal British movement which got briefly referenced. When that sort of thing is done as publicity for big rallies with financial appeals, as with Derren Brown's examples, it may well be faked and wrongly motivated.

I'm pretty sure that most of the British stuff is in a different category. Let me explain. I've been to a big conference where we were encouraged to go out and pray for people on the streets. Not to fake stuff, but to go out and do it. I've also seen the leg lengthening thing done in that context, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't done like Derren Brown did it with the loosening of shoes. I think it was to do with posture and the angle the person was sitting at on a cheap plastic chair - if you slip slightly to the left because someone is pulling your left leg, it appears to become longer. I'm not sure if the person showing us that knew that he was faking it, but I know that "miracle" is easy to fake, even if you don't realise you're doing it. I know people who do Healing on the Streets, and they're genuine about it - they're doing it because they want to see God blessing people rather than to get money, sex or power, and they're not trying to do fake healings like on the film. I also know that God does sometimes heal people genuinely.

I know too that God does sometimes give people words of knowledge about others. It was interesting to see how they faked it on the programme, but the existence of a fake does not imply that real ones don't exist.

Lessons for us

I help to run a bi-monthly Service of Prayer for Healing and Wholeness. And it's really important for us to be clear that we're not in it for financial gain. So we don't, and we shouldn't take collections at services where we pray specifically for healing.

We should be clear it isn't about personalities - I read somewhere that best practice is only ever to pray for healing in pairs or groups, so that you never know which person's prayers led to any healings that happen and so detract from any possible personality cult. The Biblical model is that it should be done by the elders (plural) of the church, with anointing with oil, and that seems right. There is one person who heals, and it's Jesus, not me.

We should be clear in our attitudes that it's about us serving and laying ourselves down for others, just as Christ has done for us. If attention ever starts to drift onto us or onto the healings, push it back onto Christ, because that's where it belongs.

We should also be clear to distance ourselves from those who think that godliness is a means to financial gain. And that's partly why I welcome Derren Brown's programme.

Sexual Revolution: Defend It, If You Can

This is a brilliant article, which argues from good old-fashioned ethics that the sexual revolution has been and continues to be a Bad Thing. Here's his conclusion - I'd love to see an attempt at a response from someone who disagrees...

In other words, let the sexual revolution be justified on grounds of the common good. I believe it fails that test miserably, with evidence that is weighty, obvious, manifold, logically and anthropologically deducible, and clearly predictable by wisdom both pagan and Christian. Let them make their case, rather than asserting a principle that, in reality, would destroy the very idea of the common good. For if we cannot appeal to the common good in a matter so fundamental, I do not see how we can appeal to it in any other.

It's worth adding that I know we are now living after the sexual revolution, and there's no point trying to pretend otherwise.

Alternative Vote Referrendum

In the UK, we're about to have a referrendum on whether to change the voting system. Here's a video that explains some of the issues. And I know it ends up pro-AV. I'm not sure which way I'd vote - at the moment it's more likely I'd go for Alternative Vote than First Past the Post. If someone can point me to a sensible argument for FPTP, I'd be happy to consider posting that too.

Evangelism and Nominal Christians

I was reading a short article the other day by Dan Clark, author of "I'm a Christian, aren't I?", and it got me thinking.

90%+ of the training I've had in evangelism has been assuming that the people I'm speaking to don't already think they are Christians. 90% of those I meet who don't attend church regularly already think they are Christians but don't show much sign of it in their lives - they're nominal.

Of course, it's not for me to question the reality or otherwise of their faith. But at the same time, it is clear that just claiming to be a Christian isn't enough, and I as a minister should be helping them know, love and serve Jesus better.

So...

Anyone read Dan Clark's book?
Anyone know other good resources for specifically helping nominal Christians know God better?

Did God Have a Wife?

“Did God have a wife?” was the title of a programme on BBC2 yesterday. I didn't bother watching it, because that series isn't about presenting new evidence; it's about recycling old arguments that have been refuted but still hang around like a bad smell in the atheistic corners of the theology faculties of the world. And it depresses me to see the stupid things that people get paid to say on TV and other people accept is true.

Here's their basic argument:
YHWH is the Hebrew personal name for the God of the Old Testament. Someone found an inscription in the area of Israel from the Old Testament period saying “YHWH and his Asherah”. Asherah was a female goddess. Therefore, so the argument goes, the ancient Israelites said that God had a wife, called Asherah. And what you see described in the Old Testament are the attempts to stamp it out.

Here's some background you probably need in order to understand the situation: The main gods in the (“pagan”) Canaanite pantheon around 800BC were called El, Asherah and Ba'al. El and Asherah were married, Ba'al was their son. But Ba'al and Asherah were comparative newcomers – they don't appear on the scene much before 1500BC. So at the time the books of Kings are set, it's El, Asherah and Ba'al; at the time of Abraham, it's just El and some worship of the Sun and Moon.

Now, when Abraham was around, God revealed himself to him as “El”, or variants of “El” like “El Shaddai”, “El Elyon” and so on. I've written more about that here. The traditional argument is that “El” was how they remembered the true God, and Ba'al and Asherah were later additions. The Hebrew conception of El is similar to the Arabic Al, which was later picked up by Mohammed as Allah... It's also similar to the Latin “Deus” and the English “God”, which are used both as a title for the one God but also as labels for the many gods in a polytheistic pantheon.

But at the time of Moses, God revealed himself by the name YHWH as well as El – YHWH is used as a name that's associated with God's promises and with the fact that they come out of Egypt. Interestingly, God first uses the name when Moses basically asks him which God he is, because Moses grew up in polytheistic Egypt. When there is only really one God worshipped at the time of Abraham, God is fine going as just “God”, but when there are lots of gods around, he adds the name YHWH.

So by the time you get to the books of Kings, the followers of Moses' religion use El and YHWH for the same God. Elijah, who is one of the big figures in that religion in about 800BC even had a name that meant “El is YHWH”. The followers of Canaanite paganism had three main gods – El, Asherah and Ba'al. And so the question is whether the two religions were actually merged.

Right, so now to the argument.

The way that ancient history works is that there is often some kind of text that describes what happens. If you're lucky, it's from roughly the same time as the events it describes. If you're very lucky, there are two or more texts. And there may be some archaeology as well, which usually won't be enough to put a complete picture together. Ancient history tends to treat the text as basically reliable, unless there is some contradictory evidence from archaeology or unless the events described are impossible. We shouldn't discard the narrative account unless it clashes with archaeology – that's bad history.

That means that we need to think about what situation the Bible actually describes from about 900BC to 500BC. And what we see is that the people of Israel consistently sliding back into worshipping other gods, starting off with the gods of the Canaanites like Ba'al and Asherah under kings like Ahab and Ahaziah, and moving onto worshipping the gods of the nations around them like Chemosh and Molech. So according to the Old Testament, what you get is people trying to merge Judaism with Canaanite paganism. You get people building Asherah poles in the temple, for example. And the prophets (the ones the OT calls “true prophets” anyway) are consistently criticising them for doing so.

My point is this:
If the Old Testament account is right, then you'd expect that many of the Israelites were worshipping YWHW alongside Asherah and trying to merge Judaism with Canaanite paganism. So you'd expect them to be making statues saying things like YHWH and his Asherah. You'd also expect the OT prophets like Elijah to be condemning them for it.

Does it mean that God had a wife? No.

So what's new?