Category Archives: Theology

Theology

What Happens When the Church Is Married to Nationalism? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

One of the most important historical facts about the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer was his reaction to the Nazi take-over of the Lutheran state church in Germany in the 1930’s.  Eric Metaxas, in his magnificent biography of Bonhoeffer, devotes an entire chapter to Nazi theology.  The program developed by the Nazis to coopt religion in Germany is of seminal importance to Christians today and in the future.

Metaxas starts by describing Hitler’s approach to Christianity:

One sometimes hears that Hitler was a Christian. He was certainly not, but neither was he openly anti-Christian, as most of his top lieutenants were. What helped him aggrandize power, he approved of, and what prevented it, he did not. He was utterly pragmatic. In public he often made comments that made him sound pro-church or pro-Christian, but there can be no question that he said these things cynically, for political gain. In private, he possessed an unblemished record of statements against Christianity and Christians.

According to Hitler, Christianity preached “meekness and flabbiness,” and this was simply not useful to the National Socialist ideology, which preached “ruthlessness and strength.” In time, he felt that the churches would change their ideology. He would see to it.

But Hitler’s lieutenants were far more anti-Christian than he was.  Metaxas traces the plans of Hitler’s henchmen:

Since Hitler had no religion other than himself, his opposition to Christianity and the church was less ideological than practical. That was not the case for many leaders of the Third Reich. Alfred Rosenberg, Martin Bormann, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and others were bitterly anti-Christian and were ideologically opposed to Christianity, and wanted to replace it with a religion of their own devising. Under their leadership, said Shirer, “the Nazi regime intended eventually to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists.”

Metaxas singles out Himmler as particularly hateful of Christianity:

Himmler was the head of the SS and was aggressively anti-Christian. Very early on, he barred clergy from serving in the SS. In 1935 he ordered every SS member to resign leadership in religious organizations. The next year he forbade SS musicians to participate in religious services, even out of uniform. Soon afterward he forbade SS members to attend church services. For Himmler, the SS was itself a religion, and its members, postulants in its priesthood. Many SS rituals were occultic in nature. Himmler was deeply involved in the occult and in astrology, and much of what the SS perpetrated in the death camps bore Himmler’s saurian stamp.

Heydrich, another of Hitler’s top officials, famously said, “Just you wait. You’ll see the day, ten years from now, when Adolf Hitler will occupy precisely the same position in Germany that Jesus Christ has now.”

Rosenberg, another important figure in the Nationalist Socialists, was tasked with putting together a thiry-point program for the future National Church of the Third Reich.  According to Metaxas, “Rosenberg’s plan is some of the clearest proof that exists of the Nazis’ ultimate plans for the churches.”  Below are some excerpts from that plan:

13. The National Church demands immediate cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible in Germany. . . .     

14. The National Church declares that to it, and therefore to the German nation, it has been decided that the Fuehrer’s Mein Kampf is the greatest of all documents. It . . . not only contains the greatest but it embodies the purest and truest ethics for the present and future life of our nation. 

18. The National Church will clear away from its altars all crucifixes, Bibles and pictures of saints.     

19. On the altars there must be nothing but Mein Kampf (to the German nation and therefore to God the most sacred book) and to the left of the altar a sword.     

30. On the day of its foundation, the Christian Cross must be removed from all churches, cathedrals and chapels . . . and it must be superseded by the only unconquerable symbol, the swastika.

Those were the plans of the Nazis, but an interesting question to answer is, “How did the Lutheran church in Germany react to the attempted Nazification of their church?”  In part 2 of this post series, we will look at that question.

Theology

Should the Word of God Be Preached in Church?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Well, yes, of course, but that’s not the view of all pastors who call themselves Christian.   I just finished Eric Metaxas’ brilliant biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and I was struck by Bonhoeffer’s view of the liberal churches in Manhattan during the early 1930’s.  In a fascinating season of Bonhoeffer’s life, he visited New York City to study at Union Theological Seminary.  What he found at the liberal seminary and the liberal churches around the seminary profoundly shocked him.

During this period in America, the battle between the Christian fundamentalists and the liberals was in full swing, and Manhattan was the epicenter of the struggle.  As Bonhoeffer became familiar with the students at the staunchly liberal Union Theological Seminary, here is what he found:

There is no theology here. . . . They talk a blue streak without the slightest substantive foundation and with no evidence of any criteria. The students—on the average twenty-five to thirty years old—are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are unfamiliar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, laugh at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level.

If this was the condition of the seminary, the nearby churches were just as bad.  

Things are not much different in the church. The sermon has been reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events. As long as I’ve been here, I have heard only one sermon in which you could hear something like a genuine proclamation, . . .  One big question continually attracting my attention in view of these facts is whether one here really can still speak about Christianity, . . . There’s no sense to expect the fruits where the Word really is no longer being preached. But then what becomes of Christianity per se?

Bonhoeffer continues:

In New York they preach about virtually everything; only one thing is not addressed, or is addressed so rarely that I have as yet been unable to hear it, namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross, sin and forgiveness, death and life.

If the Word of God is not preached in a church, then what is?  In Manhattan during the 1930’s, here is what you could expect:

So what stands in place of the Christian message? An ethical and social idealism borne by a faith in progress that—who knows how—claims the right to call itself “Christian.” And in the place of the church as the congregation of believers in Christ there stands the church as a social corporation.

Sadly, there are still “churches” that are stuck in the liberal mode of the 1930’s.  Just as Dietrich Bonhoeffer was repulsed by these churches in the early twentieth century, so should we be in the early twenty-first century.

His words ring true.  What we need to hear from our pulpits is the “gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross, sin and forgiveness, death and life.”  My wife and I thank God that he led us to a church 14 years ago where our pastor, Dr. Rick Byrd, has consistently preached the Word of God, week in and week out.  If you cannot say the same about your pastor, it may be time for you to move on.  You are being starved of the bread of life.

Eastern Orthodox, Theology

What Is the Eastern Orthodox View of the Atonement?

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Post Author: Darrell

Many of those in the Protestant and Catholic traditions are familiar with the Penal Substitutionary Theory of the Atonement (hereafter referred to as Substitutionary Atonement).  However, I have found many to be unfamiliar with the predominant atonement view held by those in the Eastern Orthodox Church, which is commonly called The Recapitulation Theory.

The Recapitulation Theory dates to very early in the Church.  Many believe it had its beginnings with Saint Irenaeus in the second century.  We find it throughout the writings of the early Church Fathers.   Saint Athanasius, the giant of the Nicaean Council, wrote a wonderful book in AD 318 which explains the overall view very well.  It is titled On The Incarnation and was originally written as a letter to one of his disciples.

Substitutionary Atonement focuses on Christ’s suffering and death as the price for man’s sin.  In many ways, the model for Substitutionary Atonement is a courtroom.  Due to his sin, man needed to be made right with a perfect and just God.  Therefore, Christ came to suffer and pay the price in our place, i.e., He substituted Himself for us.  Now, in the courtroom of God, those who accept Christ as their Lord and Savior are judged innocent.  They have a forensic righteousness imputed upon them.

The Recapitulation Theory agrees that God needed to deal with man’s sin.  Man was separated from God as a result of the fall and, left to his own devices, was incapable of returning to God.  However, Recapitulation sees the model through which God dealt with man’s sin as a hospital rather than a courtroom.  Instead of viewing the atonement as Christ paying the price for sin in order to satisfy a wrathful God, Recapitulation teaches that Christ became human to heal mankind by perfectly uniting the human nature to the Divine Nature in His person.  Through the Incarnation, Christ took on human nature, becoming the Second Adam, and entered into every stage of humanity, from infancy to adulthood, uniting it to God.  He then suffered death to enter Hades and destroy it.  After three days, He resurrected and completed His task by destroying death.

By entering each of these stages and remaining perfectly obedient to the Father, Christ recapitulated every aspect of human nature.  He said “Yes” where Adam said “No” and healed what Adam’s actions had damaged.  This enables all of those who are willing to say yes to God to be perfectly united with the Holy Trinity through Christ’s person.  In addition, by destroying death, Christ reversed the consequence of the fall.  Now, all can be resurrected.  Those who choose to live their life in Christ can be perfectly united to the Holy Trinity, receiving the full love of God as Heavenly bliss.  However, those who reject Christ and choose to live their lives chasing after their passions will receive the love of God as hell.

Because of its focus on unification between God and man in the person of Christ, Recapitulation places great importance on the teaching that Christ is both fully man and fully God.  If Christ did not have both natures, He would have been incapable of uniting humanity to divinity, which was the entire purpose of the Incarnation.  As Saint Gregory of Nazianzus said in the fourth century, “That which is not assumed is not healed, but that which is united to God is saved.”  The doctrine of the dual nature of Christ came to the forefront with the third Ecumenical Council in AD 431.  During this council, the Church answered the Nestorian heresy and affirmed Christ’s humanity and divinity and upheld the title of Theotokos (Mother of God) for Mary.  By giving Mary this title, the Church believed we would preserve the teaching of the dual nature of Christ.  If Mary is the Mother of God, then, by necessity, Christ truly is God.  In addition, since Mary is both human and Christ’s mother, Christ is also fully human.

Philosophy, Theology

Who Is God? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 1 of this post, we looked at Edward Feser’s first 2 gradations of conceptions of God.  In this second part, we will finish looking at the last three gradations and than talk about why this is important.

Grade 3: God is not an object or substance alongside other objects or substances in the world; rather, He is pure being or existence itself, utterly distinct from the world of time, space, and things, underlying and maintaining them in being at every moment, and apart from whose ongoing conserving action they would be instantly annihilated.  The world is not an independent object in the sense of something that might carry on if God were to “go away”; it is more like the music produced by a musician, which exists only when he plays and vanishes the moment he stops.

None of the concepts we apply to things in the world, including to ourselves, apply to God in anything but an analogous sense.  Hence, for example, we may say that God is “personal” insofar as He  is not less than a person, the way an animal is less than a person.  But God is not literally “a person” in the sense of being one individual thing among others who reasons, chooses, has moral obligations, etc.  Such concepts make no sense when literally applied to God.

According to Feser, “Grade 3 is the conception of classical philosophical theology: of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and other such thinkers.”  Grade 3 captures Aquinas’s doctrine of analogous language to describe God.  “God is not personal, or good, or powerful, or intelligent in the same sense in which a human being is, but He can nevertheless correctly be described in these terms if they are understood analogously.”

Grade 4: God as understood by someone who has had a mystical experience of the sort Aquinas had.

Here, Feser is referring to an experience that Aquinas reported late in life where he experienced God in a deeply profound way that made him feel like all his previous conceptions of God were totally inadequate.

Grade 5: God as [those in heaven] know him now, i.e., as known in the beatific vision attained by the blessed after death.

Feser adds that grades 4 and 5 are only attainable if “granted supernaturally by God,” while grade 3 is “about the best we can do with unaided reason.”

So where does this leave us?  I think I want to address two audiences.  First, since Grade 3 is the highest Christian conception of God without being granted a supernatural vision from God, it follows that Grade 3 is the conception that skeptics should address when they are challenging the attributes of the Christian God.  A skeptic who is constantly challenging grade 1 or grade 2 is not dealing with the best of Christian philosophy and theology; he is ducking the fight to score easy points.

Second, since Grade 3 is the highest Christian conception of God without being granted a supernatural vision from God, it follows that Grade 3 is the conception that every Christian adult should attempt to understand.  Merely stopping at grade 1 or grade 2 is an intellectual cop-out.  Grade 3 stretches human reason about as far as it can go and so it represents the apex of Christian theology.  That’s where all Christians should want to be, at the apex.

Philosophy, Theology

Who Is God? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Is God a bearded old man living in the sky somewhere or is he completely unknowable?  Both of these conceptions of God are held by various religious believers.  When presenting a Christian conception of God on this blog, we have striven to follow the traditional, mainstream views of the church as elucidated by Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, and similar thinkers.  If I were a skeptic of Christianity and wanted to critique the Christian conception of God, this is the conception I would address.

Edward Feser, in his book The Last Superstition, laments that very often skeptics do not even attempt to engage the traditional conception of God, but a much simpler conception.  To help readers understand his point, he offers five gradations of conceptions of God, from simple to more complete.

Grade 1: God is literally an old man with a white beard, a kind if stern wizard-like being with very human thoughts and motivations who lives in a place called Heaven, which is like the places we know except for being very far away and impossible to get to except through magical means.

Feser notes that Grade 1 “represents a child’s conception of God, and perhaps that of some uneducated adults.”  This does not mean that Grade 1 is totally without merit.  “Some individuals, and certainly young children, find it difficult to understand God in anything but grade 1 terms, and such imagery can be more or less useful in giving them at least a rudimentary idea of Him.”

Grade 2: God doesn’t really have a bodily form, and his thoughts and motivations are in many respects very different from ours.  He is an immaterial object or substance which has existed forever, and (perhaps) pervades all space.  Still, he is, somehow, a person like we are, only vastly more intelligent, powerful, and virtuous, and in particular without our physical and moral limitations.  He made the world the way a carpenter builds a house, as an independent object that would carry on even if he were to “go away” from it, but he nevertheless may decide to intervene in its operations from time to time.

Feser explains that “Grade 2 represents the conception of some educated religious believers, of popular apologetics, and of arguments like Paley’s ‘Design argument.'”  Grade 2 is better than Grade 1 because it eliminates the “limitations inherent in physical imagery, which cannot apply to God.”

There are are three more grades to go and we will cover them in part 2 of the post.

Eschatology, Theology, Will of God

Can We Mess Up God’s Plans?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Hardly, yet many Christians seem to forget this fact.  God gives us the privilege of participating in the cosmic drama that is unfolding under his direction, but his script leaves nothing to chance.  We don’t need to fret over whether His plans will succeed; we already know the end of the story.

Theologian Robert L. Hubbard Jr. captures this well in his Joshua commentary.  Speaking of Joshua’s farewell speech in Josh. 23, Hubbard says the following:

The genre of farewell speech reminds readers that God’s plan outlives all of us.  It was in full swing long before we were born and will remain so long after we are gone.  It outlived Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Deborah, David, Elijah, Ezra, Esther, Mary, Peter, Paul, John, Irenaeus, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Jonathan Edwards, D. L. Moody, Mary Slessor, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King Jr.

This blunt reality is both humbling and liberating.  It humbles by reminding us that, however large a swath we cut through history, the kingdom advances without us – and, at times, in spite of us.  It liberates us by reminding us that ultimately its success does not depend on our efforts – that we do not have to get everything done in our lifetime.

Rather, we sow seeds whose harvest others will gather, lay foundations on which others will build, and open doors that others will enter.  We are among the cast of players in the drama of history, but the entire company is huge.  And, of course, the starring roles ultimately belong to God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Well said, Dr. Hubbard.

 

Philosophy, Theology

What Happens to Us When We Gain New Knowledge?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

OK, I admit we’re in deep waters with this question, but I’ve been studying epistemology, the investigation of human knowledge, for the last few months and I have run across a short section in a book I’m reading that struck me as particularly profound.

Before I discuss that section, I want to share a common question that people ask me.  The question is this: “Why do you read and study so much?  What’s the point of it all?  Is there no end to your search for knowledge?”  Generally these are people who don’t know what to think of all the books I read, of the blog posts I write, of the seminary courses I take.  To them, it might all be a colossal waste of time.

The only way I can answer this question is that once I started studying the teachings of Christianity, my mind literally awakened to an immense world that I never knew existed.  Since that time, I have felt an incredible drive, almost a primal need, to learn as much as I can about God, humans, and the world we live in – in that order of importance.  I can’t get enough of it and I don’t think I ever will.

Is something wrong with me and people like me?  Sometimes I wonder, but then I ran across a passage in a book that explains why I do what I do – why I want to know things.  The book is An Elementary Christian Metaphysics by Joseph Owens and is one of the most difficult books I’ve ever read.  It is as abstract as you can possibly get, because the book is mostly about the concept of existence, of what it means for something to exist.  There is no more basic subject than that, and thus it makes for abstract reading.

So what does the book have to say?

Through sense cognition a man is able to become [in his mind] one by one the . . . things he encounters in his daily life.  He enriches himself with their forms as he perceives each of them [as they really are], and conserves the forms in his imagination.

Think about this.  We actually become the things we perceive as we bring them into our mind.  We are enriched by the things we come to know and we are able to preserve these things in our mind even after we stop seeing them.

Through intellection [man] is able to transcend the confines of the here and now, and become objects whose extent is unlimited.

How does this work?  We are able to identify common natures in things, and once we identify a common nature, we are able to know all things that possess that common nature.  For example, when we understand the concept of humanity as a nature, we now understand what all humans are like in their common humanity.  We can know what humans were like in the past, in the present, and in the future without ever seeing all instances of human beings.  That’s amazing when you think about it.

Though remaining an individual he is brought into a life that bursts away from the ghetto of his immediate surroundings and extends as far as do the natures of the things with which he comes in contact. . . . Through science he can enrich himself with myriad forms that could never impinge themselves on his immediate cognition.

The intellect and the ability to know things expands the universe far beyond what a man can directly see or hear.  How far can man go?

In grasping the [existence] of sensible things . . . he has the starting point from which he can reach [God].  By intellective reflection [man] becomes himself . . . and is himself in a way that enables him to dominate his own activity.  Knowing his own actions through reflection he has starting points for the investigation of spiritual nature.

Thus we are the only animals that can reach God by reflecting on ourselves.  We see that we have a spiritual nature, that we have a mind, that we think, feel, and will.  As Owens reminds us, this reflection provides the starting point for us to know that God exists.

Owens concludes:

The kinds of things that a man can know through his intellect are consequently unlimited. . . . Intellection, therefore, is able to enrich the knower cognitionally with the form of anything whatsoever.  Those forms remain with the knower permanently as [intellectual likenesses] in which the thing may again be actually known at any time.  There need be little wonder, then, that Aristotle saw in intellection the supreme happiness and destiny of man, and that according to the Christian the Beatific Vision is the ultimate goal of human living.

I believe that God has placed the desire to know in all humans, and that He has given some of us extra doses of that desire.  That is why I want to know.  Why has God given man the desire to know?  Because the pursuit of knowledge, for the Christian, eventually culminates in the ultimate human experience, seeing God in the Beatific Vision.  It doesn’t get any better than that.

Religion, Theology

Does God Pose an Authority Problem for You?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Many of the people I know who reject God or who have crafted a God that makes no demands on them have a fundamental problem with authority.  They don’t want anybody telling them what to do.

For a person who wants complete autonomy, who chafes at the thought of anyone having authority over them, a creator God who makes demands is way inconvenient.

Many people who believe in God, but also have this authority hang-up, create their own version of God.  This God gives them what they want when they want it.  He approves of everything they do, as long as they are just trying to be happy.  He encourages them to follow their desires, wherever they lead.  C. S. Lewis compared this God to a senile, old grandfather who never says “no” to his grandchildren.  You want chocolate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner?  No problem!

Is this the Christian God?  Philosopher Paul Moser answers the question:

It would be a strange, defective God who didn’t pose a serious cosmic authority problem for humans.  Part of the status of being God, after all, is that God has a unique authority, or lordship, over humans.  Since we humans aren’t God, the true God would have authority over us and would seek to correct our profoundly selfish ways.

If you are “worshiping” a God who makes no demands on you, you’re worshiping no God at all.  You’re just trying to find a deity to make you feel good about your selfish choices.  What’s the point?

Bible Interpretation, Difficult Bible Passages, Theology

Was the Mosaic Law Meant to Be Permanent?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

No, it wasn’t.  Not only does the New Testament book of Hebrews make clear that it was temporary, but the Old Testament itself promises a new covenant in Jer. 31 and Ezek. 36.  Should we completely ignore the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament where the Law is found, as hopelessly irrelevant for Christians today?

Not exactly.  The Torah does contain timeless commands that reflect God’s nature, but it also contains temporary laws that are directed at a deeply sinful people living in a flawed culture during a specific period of time in history.

Philosopher Paul Copan describes the situation in his book Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God:

When we journey back over the millennia into the ancient Near East, we enter a world that is foreign to us in many ways.  Life in the ancient Near East wouldn’t just be alien to us – with all of its strange ways and assumptions.  We would see a culture whose social structures were badly damaged by the fall.  Within this context, God raised up a covenant nation and gave the people laws to live by; he helped to create a culture for them.  In doing so, he adapted his ideals to a people whose attitudes and actions were influenced by deeply flawed structures.

At the beginning of the Torah, God lays down the ideals for mankind in Gen. 1 and 2.  According to Copan, those first two chapters “make clear that all humans are God’s image-bearers; they have dignity, worth, and moral responsibility.  And God’s ideal for marriage is a one-flesh monogamous union between husband and wife.”  But the subsequent historical narrative, as recorded in the remainder of Genesis, and then Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, is characterized by humanity’s precipitous fall into moral degeneracy.

How did God choose to move Abraham and his flawed descendants in the right direction?  After all, they had moved far away from the ideals laid down by God in the Garden.  We find in the Torah that God decided to meet them where they were, to accommodate imperfect, human-created social structures in order to move his people in the right moral direction.  Thus, the Mosaic Law (starting in Ex. 20) ends up being focused on a specific people living at a specific time.

Copan elaborates on God’s plans:

We know that many products on the market have a built-in, planned obsolescence.  They’re designed for the short-term; they’re not intended to be long-lasting and permanent.  The same goes for the the law of Moses: it was never intended to be enduring.  It looked forward to a new covenant (Jer. 31; Ezek. 36).

Copan quotes biblical scholar N. T. Wright: “The Torah is given for a specific period of time, and is then set aside – not because it was a bad thing now happily abolished, but because it was a good thing whose purpose had now been accomplished.”

Difficult Bible Passages, Heaven, Sin, Theology, Top Ten Posts of 2010

Can God Be in the Presence of Sin? – #3 Post of 2010

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

The Bible clearly teaches that God is morally perfect and holy, that he hates sin.  Habakkuk 1:13 says that God is too pure to look on evil.  Christians often say that God cannot allow any sin in his presence.

But, this is not the whole story.  There are also several instances in the Bible where Satan and other demons are said to be in God’s presence (e.g., Job 1:6; 2 Chron. 18:18-21; Rev. 12:10).  In addition, the prophet Isaiah, himself a sinful man, was in the presence of God, as recorded  in Isaiah 6.

We also know that God is omnipresent, which means he is present everywhere.  “‘Am I only a God nearby,’ declares the Lord, ‘and not a God far away?  Can anyone hide in secret places so that I cannot see him?’ declares the Lord.  ‘Do not I fill heaven and earth?’ declares the Lord” (Jer. 23:23-24).  If he is present everywhere then he cannot but be in the presence of sinful creatures.

So what are we to make of all this?  I think the simple answer is that Habakkuk 1:13 is a commentary on God’s moral perfection and holiness.  It is not meant to be a statement about proximity.  In fact, the full rendering is, “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil.”  But we know God does not literally have eyes!  God is spirit (John 4:24) and does not have a physical presence.

The Bible teaches that God is opposed to sin and evil, that he is holy and righteous.  We know that eventually he will quarantine evil from good when he creates the New Heaven and Earth (Rev. 21).  At that time, God will physically separate those who love him from those who don’t.  Those who love him will no longer be in the presence of sin from that point forward.

Until then, God tolerates the presence of sin in order to accomplish his purposes with mankind.  Thank goodness, because if God truly could not be in the presence of sin, none of us would be here!