Multiple Integrities

How do I as a Christian act towards other Christians who disagree with me? There's still a disagreement rumbling on in the evangelical bit of the C of E about women leading churches, and whether it should happen or not. Years ago, when they changed the rules so that women were allowed to lead churches, some people thought it was a bad idea - basically this was because they thought that men and women were different but equal and that the Bible said that the differences should be reflected in the jobs that men and women do in churches. The C of E then introduced the idea of two integrities, which meant that people could believe either that women should be allowed to lead churches, or that they shouldn't, and that we'd all try not to offend the other lot.

That's a great idea, and actually it comes out of being humble when we try to understand the Bible. I know that I'm not omniscient, even if I can use long words. I know that I don't understand things perfectly and that other people might have a better idea. And so I try to believe what I think the Bible teaches, and I let what other people think and have thought it teaches affect what I think, but if someone else who is doing the same disagrees with me, we talk about it and I try to understand where they are coming from, and then maybe one of us changes our mind or maybe we agree that the other person's position makes sense but we agree to disagree.

But that doesn't mean it's acceptable for people to believe whatever they want. For example, the Bible is very clear that Jesus is God, in a way that I am not. To my mind, the distinction comes either when people get to the point of saying “well, the Bible might say that, but I disagree with it”, or if they go dramatically against what the Church has always thought if it's an area where the Church right through history has agreed on something.

What seems to be happening in some circles in what passes for evangelicalism now is that some people seem to be rejecting other people's ability to conclude stuff they disagree with from a passage. So, for example, some people say that Christians shouldn't be allowed to believe that the differences between men and women should affect which jobs they can do in a church, whatever the Bible teaches.

To my mind, if someone can say “Believe me, rather than what you think the Bible says” then they're not being an evangelical Christian.

Character Studies

I question the validity of much biographical preaching and Bible studies billed as character studies of Biblical figures. Almost by their very nature, by their chosen starting points, such efforts begin by looking in the wrong direction. It is as if Scripture cries "Behold your God!" (cf Is 40:9), and we reply "Thank you, but we have found something more interesting to us."
Dale Ralph Davis, Judges

Of course, there is still a place for some biographical preaching and character studies, but only when it is using the life of Nicodemus (or whoever) to point us to God.

Bad, Bad, Bad Applications

Sometimes preachers get their applications wrong, and it annoys me. I can see what the passage says; I can see what the passage means, but I have no idea whatsoever how you can say it applies like that.

Of course, sermons should be applied. People should be made uncomfortable; they should see that not everything is the way it should be, and they should see what to do about that. But there are good ways of doing that and bad ways of doing that. One good way is to establish “timeless truths” that the passage teaches, and then apply them to specific situations today – God does not want people to steal, so don't take stationery supplies from work for personal use, for example (though that's a bit obvious). Another way is to establish a correspondence between situations then and situations now, but you need to be able to show it works. For example, the disciples being called to follow Jesus is like us being called to follow Jesus. Daniel's prayer in Daniel 9 is a model prayer for us, and so on.

On the other hand, it is quite easy to do that wrongly – to establish a false connection between the past and the present and end up with unregulated analogy, or to say that just because something happened in the past it is a good example for us to follow. So David killing Goliath, instead of being about how the kingship of God's unlikely king is confirmed (which is what the context suggests), is treated as if it is about us needing to kill the problems in our lives.

Often preachers don't show their working, as to how they get from the passage to the application, or even make it so that the application dominates the sermon. But there's a small gap in the way the congregation sees it between preachers not showing their working and preachers not doing their working or doing it wrongly. So we're told that Ephesians 2 is about how to handle conflict situations at work, for example, or that Haggai 1 is about the 17 qualities of a truly inspirational leader, and there's no evidence given.

With this in mind, I give you some (tongue in cheek) applications of Bible passages:

The Naomi Principle

How should we go about proactive leadership in the Church? How can we stop the decline of congregations while avoiding burnout, keeping ourselves fresh and always making sure to have the time for our families and hobbies? How can our churches stay relevant to culture? I give you, the Naomi principle, from that great woman of God who led Ruth to faith:

Wait, my daughter, and see what happens...
Ruth 3:18, NIV

Esther's Secret of Success

How can we succeed at work? Lets take advice from Esther, who rose from being a young orphaned Jewish girl to being the queen of the whole Persian Empire. From Esther, we learn the following key secrets of success:

• Always be willing to act like a trophy for the boss (1:10-12)
• Get the best beauty treatments possible. (2:9)
• The best way to the top is to sleep with the boss (2:12-17)
• Don't forget to ruthlessly destroy anyone who crosses you (8-9)

Learning Pastoral Skills from Nehemiah

I'm sure that sometimes we have all come across people we disagree with on certain issues. Is it right for Christians to go to the cinema or not? What about if it's an 18-certificate film? Well, we can learn a lot from Nehemiah about how to handle these little differences.

And I confronted them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair. And I made them take oath in the name of God
Nehemiah 13:25, ESV

Coping with Regret

Or how should we cope with doing something we regret? Well, I'm sure we could all learn from a man who spent three years learning personally from Jesus himself.

Then Judas bought some land with the money he was given for doing that evil thing. He fell headfirst into the field. His body burst open, and all his insides came out.
Acts 1:18, CEV

Worship As You Like It? - Sotirios Christou

I got given a copy of this book, so I thought I might as well read it and review it.

On one level, it's a very strange book. The author's name (Greek for "Christ's Salvation") is cool. The whole book seems to be in black 12pt Times New Roman - even the headers, titles. Even the front cover`uses Times, but that's bigger and blue and makes it look as if WAYLI should spell something.

The first 60% or so of the book is a look at the Biblical theology of worship, but pretty much only using the Old Testament, Hebrews and Revelation. What he says is all true. I'd have thought most of it was pretty obvious to someone who's read the Bible a few times through and was awake. It's odd that he writes in a very academic style, and cites a lot of scholars, but usually only to say things that I think are pretty obvious anyway.

The next 40% of the book is an engagement with contemporary charismatic worship. He's affirming of a lot of it, and makes some good criticisms - for example observing how much of it is centred on the worshipers' response rather than the God they are meant to be worshiping, or the lack of Trinitarian focus.

On the other hand, there are large sections he doesn't critique at all. For example, while earlier he sees the danger of essentially emotional manipulation in worship, at the end he assumes that what is described by worship leaders as "coming into the presence of God" actually is coming into the presence of God. It's an interesting idea, but I have yet to see it adequately theologically grounded in anything other than people's subjective experience of what could look to an outsider like a form of emotional masturbation.

At the end of the day, it was an interesting read, but the first 60% seems disconnected from the next 40%, and while many of his criticisms and useful thoughts are spot on, and his analysis of Wimbur's theology of worship (for example) is useful, there are a lot both of important criticisms he misses and things that he criticises that are fine - for example he suggests ditching powerpoint in favour of hymnbooks - and he doesn't externalise himself enough from charismatic worship to provide a proper description of the underlying theology. Oh, and he desperately needs an editor to spot the spelling mistakes, extra spaces, eccentric punctuation, inconsistent spacing, etc.

Donkeys

While I was in Israel, one of the locals said something interesting. He said that many of the paths in use were created by donkeys, and had often been there for thousands of years. The reason he gave for this was that donkeys allegedly always take the easiest route from A to B, even over difficult terrain. That got me thinking.

It should be reasonably easy to set up a situation with a donkey and a mathematically well-defined surface, and to see whether it does indeed take something very close to the minimum energy route from A to B, and what sort of distance this holds over. Does it work as far as the eye can see? How does it cope with variable terrain types - e.g. mud, solid grass, rocks? Does it follow the sort of route that would be predicted by a proper mathematical minimum energy route, or does it follow a local energy minimization, or even just a picking a vaguely easy route for the next 20m that leads in the right sort of direction?

I'm sure there's a PhD project in there somewhere, for a mathematician who likes donkeys...

Shechem, Abimelech, Baal-berith

I was reading the particularly unpleasant Judges 9 this morning, and a minor detail struck me. Most of the plot of Judges 9 takes place in Shechem.

Now Shechem comes up quite a lot in the early bits of the Bible. It was the site of a rather painful episode in Genesis 34, where the prince of Shechem rapes Jacob's daughter so some of his sons take revenge.

But it was the site of a lot of good things too. It was where God had appeared to Abraham for the first time after he reached the Promised Land (Genesis 12:6-7). It was where Jacob's family finally rejected idolatry (Genesis 35:4). It was a city of refuge, where someone could flee to to avoid blood feuds and get a proper trial (Joshua 21:21).

But most importantly, it was the site of Joshua's final speech and public farewell in Joshua 24. It was where the people promised solemnly to obey God even though Joshua said they couldn't.

Then Joshua said to the people, "You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the LORD, to serve him." And they said, "We are witnesses." He said, "Then put away the foreign gods that are among you, and incline your heart to the LORD, the God of Israel." And the people said to Joshua, "The LORD our God we will serve, and his voice we will obey." So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day, and put in place statutes and rules for them at Shechem. And Joshua wrote these words in the Book of the Law of God. And he took a large stone and set it up there under the terebinth that was by the sanctuary of the LORD. And Joshua said to all the people, "Behold, this stone shall be a witness against us, for it has heard all the words of the LORD that he spoke to us. Therefore it shall be a witness against you, lest you deal falsely with your God."
Joshua 24:22-27, ESV

Then we come to Judges 9. Judges is a remarkable demonstration of how God's people keep on needing to be saved, and throughout the book their saviours get less and less conventional, and morally more and more compromised, and the people cry for help less and less. And right in the middle, we get Judges 9 and the story of Abimelech. Normally in Judges, the people need saving from some foreign invaders. In Judges 9 they need saving from their own ruler – Abimelech. I could go on about the story for ages, but I just want to focus on one tiny detail.

The story is set in Shechem – the town of the covenant (covenant in Hebrew is berith), where less than 200 years before there had been a sanctuary of the LORD (Yahweh). Now, what is the main religious institution there? The temple of Baal-berith – Baal of the covenant. Their problem wasn't that they'd all suddenly gone apostate and all decided to become Muslims or Canaanites. It wasn't that there had been lots of immigration of Baal-worshippers. The temple, in the town of Yahweh's covenant, was to Baal of the covenant. It was a process of syncretism. They had blurred the worship of Yahweh and the worship of Baal. They'd taken what they knew to be true about God, and mixed it with what they wanted God to be like, or what the Canaanites around them said God was like until in the end they couldn't tell the difference between the true God and false gods.

And it struck me that there's so much danger of us doing the same. Yes, sometimes it's obvious, like when someone claims to be 100% Muslim and 100% Christian. But sometimes it's smaller. Like when we take ideas from society about what God is like and mix them up with the truth until we can't tell the difference. Does God really punish sin? Does Jesus really claim to be the only way to God? Does following Jesus really mean dying to ourselves and making ourselves nothing so that Jesus can be everything to us? Does God really value humility more than entertainment, or love more than soundness?

Are we really following the God who has revealed himself, or are we following our own ideas or someone else's ideas about what he should be like?

Shifting the Argument

This is one of those arguing techniques that Christians have a very unfortunate habit of getting caught out by. I don't know whether people use it deliberately or not, but it seems to work.

The idea goes something like this:

[Person 1]: I like shepherd's pie
[Person 2]: But it's often got overcooked peas in and they are horrible
[Person 1]: No they aren't - they're the best bit

Because people's pride has got involved or something, they want to defend against what the other person says, even if it slightly misses the target. So in the above example, they went from defending a reasonable contention - that shepherd's pie is nice - to a completely unreasonable one - that the overcooked peas are the best bit. If you think that example is bad, there are some more real-life ones later.

Here's a responses that would have kept the argument on track.

[Person 1]: I like shepherd's pie
[Person 2]: But it's often got overcooked peas in and they are horrible
[Person 1]: But in shepherd's pie they are transformed by their surroundings so that they are actually quite nice and they make their surroundings nicer too. One of the best things about shepherd's pie is the way it takes rubbish things, like overcooked peas, and makes them good.

Here are some examples of how Christians have got sidetracked like that.

In the 1800s, pretty much all the non-Christian scientists, and some Christian scientists, thought that Darwin's ideas were pretty neat, and that they might well explain how complex animals came to exist. Other Christians didn't - they didn't think that Darwin's ideas made too much sense and they believed in a God who could do things differently if he wanted to. For people who didn't believe in God, evolution was the only way to explain how complex animals came to exist, so there wasn't so much choice.

Over time, the conversation went something like this:

[Christian]: Evolution didn't necessarily happen - I know that God could have done it directly if he wants to and the scientific evidence isn't conclusive.
[Atheist]: Evolution happened. There's lots of evidence.
[Christian]: Evolution didn't happen.

It's as if there's a pressure to force people into holding the opposite position to the person they are arguing with, which Christians are particularly vulnerable to. In fact, I might state that an an aphorismy thing.

In any argument, there is a psychological pressure towards holding an intellectual position diametrically opposite to that of one's antagonist.
"Allister's first rule of arguments"

Sadly, I think we can see the same in the McGrath/Dawkins debate. It's as if the following has happened.

[McGrath]: [explains Christian theology]
[Dawkins]: God doesn't exist, [attacks religion in general].
[McGrath]: God does exist [defends religion in general]

But that is silly. We don't believe that religion in general is true. When it comes to Islam, Hinduism, etc, we should largely agree with Richard Dawkins. What we should be arguing for is not the general existence of God and religion in general, but the specific divinity of Jesus Christ.

The result of that debate is that we get steered off into discussing whether God exists in the abstract, when the whole point of Christianity is that God is not abstract. He walked round on the Earth 2000 years ago.

That last bit is kind of a synthesis of my thought and the third hand comments of a tutor here - John Lennox. When he debates Dawkins (and they've got a booking), I hope the debate would go more like this.

[Lennox]: [Christian theology] i.e. Jesus is God
[Dawkins]: God doesn't exist, [attacks religion in general].
[Lennox]: I agree with you on most of that, but Jesus was quite clearly God [insert evidence here], so there must be a God, and the question is how we make sense of that and what we do about it.

Quote - Richard Hooker

We had rather followe the perfections of them whome we like not, than in defectes resemble them whome we love.
Richard Hooker

Richard Hooker

Serious respect to Richard Hooker (1554-1600). He manages to be iconic for vast swathes of the Church of England, because he is big on what most people think is important about their own group.

So theologically, he was pretty much Calvinist. Some people tend to argue with that - it's mostly because they haven't read enough of either Hooker or Calvin and think that just because Hooker disagreed with a bunch of people who called themselves Calvinists means that he disagreed with Calvin too. He didn't. The people he disagreed with went a long way beyond Calvin.

Most Calvinists automatically rejected stuff if it was what the Roman Catholics said. A chap called Cartwright even argued that it was safer copying the Muslims than the Roman Catholics. But Hooker didn't, and that was both unusual and mature of him - lots of people still haven't got to this stage in their thinking 400 years later.

Where Rome keepeth that which is ancienter and better; others whome we much more affect leavinge it for newer, and changinge it for worse, we had rather followe the perfections of them whome we like not, than in defectes resemble them whome we love.

This meant that Hooker was much more into ceremonies and so on than most of the people he agreed with theologically, because he saw that visual stuff can often have a bigger impact than just words.

The end which is aimed at in setting down the outward form of all religious actions is the edification of the church. Now men are edified when either their understanding is taught somewhat whereof in such actions it behoveth all men to consider or when their hearts are moved with any affection suitable thereunto; when their minds are in any sort stirred up unto that reverence, devotion, attention and due regard which in those cases seemeth requisite. Because therefore unto this purpose not only speech but also sundry sensible means besides have always been thought necessary and especially those means which being object to the eye, the liveliest and most apprehensive sense of all other, have in that respect seemed the fittest to make a deep and a strong impression...

Hooker was also big on radical inclusivity - he wanted to get as many people as possible coming into churches and feeling welcome, though he recognised that that didn't mean they were saved or Christians, but it meant they could hear and see and maybe understand more.

So what can we learn from Hooker? For me, the main thing is a reminder not to ignore ideas just because they come from people we don't like or disagree with.

Commentaries I Recommend

These are commentaries I personally recommend, which means I have used them quite a bit and really like them. I have plenty of other commentaries, some of which I expect I will like just as much when I use them a bit more, but I haven't yet used them in enough detail to be able to recommend them publically. There are even probably some I can't remember at the moment, but I'll put them up here when I do remember them.

In my earlier series of review on commentaries, I categorised them as paperback / hardback / heavy. Here, I think I prefer to distinguish by purpose. So the first commentary listed is something I've found helpful devotionally. The second is something I find helpful for getting to grips with the passage at a deeper level. Before I started at theological college, I'd have found one from the first column fine for work on preparing a sermon. Now I'd tend to use more...

It's worth adding that I find this site useful, but often over 10 years old so misses the best of the new. This page does a similar thing to what I am doing, but more years down the line.

Commentaries in square brackets are ones I haven't used enough to recommend properly, but which look excellent.

Genesis: / [Waltke]
Exodus: A Motyer (BST) /
Leviticus: /
Numbers: [G Wenham] /
Deuteronomy: C Wright (NIBC) / G McConville (Apollos)
Joshua: DR Davis (Focus) /
Judges: DR Davis (Focus) / Block (NAC)
Ruth: I Duguid (REC)/ [Block (NAC)]
1 Samuel: DR Davis (Focus) /
2 Samuel: DR Davis (Focus) /
1 Kings: DR Davis (Focus, but see this) / I Provan (NIBC) but light
2 Kings: DR Davis (Focus) / I Provan (NIBC) but light
1 Chronicles: Wilcock (BST) /
2 Chronicles: Wilcock (BST) /
Ezra: / [Williamson]
Nehemiah: Brown (BST) / [Williamson]
Esther: I Duguid (REC) / [Jobes (NIVAC)]
Job: C Ash ("Out of the Storm") / [Clines (Word)]
Psalms: see here
Proverbs: / [Longman (Baker)]
Ecclesiastes: I Provan (NIVAC) / Provan (NIVAC)
Song of Songs: [Gledhill (BST)] /
Isaiah: Webb (BST) / A Motyer (IVP), [Oswalt (NIC)]
Jeremiah: / Holladay (Heremneia)
Lamentations: / [Berlin (OTL)]
Ezekiel: C Wright (BST) / [Block (NIC)]
Daniel: /
Hosea: / McComiskey (Baker)
Joel: /
Amos: Roy Clements (When God's Patience Runs Out) /
Obadiah: /
Jonah: RT Kendal (paternoster classics) /
Micah: DR Davis / [Waltke (Eerdmans)]
Nahum: /
Habakkuk: J Lamb (Keswick) /
Zephaniah: JL Mackay (Focus) /
Haggai: /
Zechariah: B Webb (BST) /
Malachi: /
Matthew: / D Carson (EBC)
Mark: / RT France (NIGTC)
Luke: / [Bock (Baker)]
John: / D Carson (Pillar)
Acts: J Stott (BST) / [Bock (Baker)]
Romans: J Stott (BST) / T Schreiner (Baker)
1 Corinthians: / [Thiselton (NIGTC)]
2 Corinthians: R Clements, (the Strength of Weakness) /
Galatians: R Clements (no longer slaves) or Stott (BST) /
Ephesians: J Stott (BST) / [O'Brien]
Philippians: / [O'Brien]
Colossians: / [O'Brien]
1 Thessalonians: [Stott] /
2 Thessalonians: [Stott] /
1 Timothy: [Stott] /
2 Timothy: [Stott] /
Titus: [Stott] /
Philemon: / [O'Brien]
Hebrews: /
James: D Moo (Pillar) / D Moo (Pillar)
1 Peter: W Grudem (Tyndale) /
2 Peter: /
1 John: J Stott (Tyndale) /
2 John: J Stott (Tyndale) /
3 John: J Stott (Tyndale) /
Jude: /
Revelation: Richardson (Revelation Unwrapped) /