The Helper

(High above the Earth)

A lone spectral figure races against the dark backdrop of the heavens, relentlessly scanning the planet. Suddenly up ahead a beam of light shoots up from the depths of Middle America, piercing the clouds and fading into the ionosphere. Instantly accelerating to blinding speed, the ghostly entity dives towards the light’s source, a long, glowing, meteoric tail stretching brightly behind him.

(Meanwhile, somewhere in the American Midwest)

“Call on him! Call on him! That’s all you need to do. He will help us.” The young girl was breathless with excitement.

The boy knelt on the floor, his head bowed, hands clasped together with fingers pointing skyward. His eyes were closed and his lips moved in a fast and urgent whisper.

There suddenly came the sound of a roaring wind, rising louder and louder, like a fast approaching freight train. The window curtains began to wave about crazily and a pile of papers on a nearby desk fluttered around the room like moths in a whirlwind. A blinding white light filled the space and both teenagers threw themselves down on the carpet, hands over their eyes. Instantly in the middle of the room there appeared a man of light, hands on hip, cape swirling about his shoulders. On his chest were written the bright glowing letters; H.G.

The girl peeked up through her fingers. “He’s here! He’s here! He has come to help us!”

(Later, at the dining room table)

“So now you see why we called for you. We need your help” said the girl. “If we don’t pass this exam then we won’t be accepted to Canon College next fall.”

“The temptation to cheat is so strong. Can you please help us!” His eyes wide in panic, desperation filled the boy’s voice.

The figure seated across from the boy and girl was so bright with light that it was impossible to look directly at him, yet no visible features were discernible and he seemed to lack material substance. There was a soft filminess about him, a somewhat translucent quality to his presence, like maybe he was there yet also somehow not there. A low voice emanated from deep within.

“You were right to call on me, kids. With my help you will be able to accomplish your task. Here, take this and keep it someplace safe.” He reached across and placed something in the girl’s hand. “Now that my work here is finished, I must be going.”

“But why can’t you stay with us? When will you be back?” the girl cried.

“I can’t stay; others need my help. But remember; I am always there for people of righteousness. Just call on me and I will come!“ At that moment he rocketed out of his chair and in a rush of blinding light and energy shot through up through the ceiling, leaving behind a swirling mist of shimmering particles.

The room began to settle back to normal. “Holy smokes! He’s gone!” said the boy breathlessly. “What was that he gave you?”

Slowly opening her hand they saw a square of folded paper. Carefully she opened it up and, reading what was on it, she began to smile, tears of joy running down her cheeks. “The answers! He gave us the answers to the exam! Oh, thank you! Thank you!”

They both ran to the window and looking up they saw a blazing comet streaking towards space, and a voice crying “Up, Up and Awaaay!”

An Over-Commitment to Scripture?

There is an interesting article over on the CT blog site. It concerns remarks made by J.P. Moreland at a recent gathering of the Evangelical Theological Society. He strongly voiced his objectiona to the  ‘bibliolatry’ among American Evangelicals:

“In the actual practices of the Evangelical community in North America, there is an over-commitment to Scripture in a way that is false, irrational, and harmful to the cause of Christ,” he said. “And it has produced a mean-spiritedness among the over-committed that is a grotesque and often ignorant distortion of discipleship unto the Lord Jesus.”

The problem, he said, is “the idea that the Bible is the sole source of knowledge of God, morality, and a host of related important items. Accordingly, the Bible is taken to be the sole authority for faith and practice.”

….more provocative was Moreland’s argument about why evangelicals became over-committed to the Bible. Rather than developing a robust epistemology in response to secularism, he said, evangelicals reacted and retreated. Now evangelical theologians aren’t allowed to come to any new conclusions about the truths in Scripture, and they’re not allowed to find truths outside of Scripture. As a result, he said, they’re engaged in “private language games and increasingly detailed minutia” and “we’re not seeing work on broad cultural themes.”

These are just a few of his remarks and the rest of the article may be viewed at:

http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctliveblog/archives/2007/11/postcard_from_s.html

J.P.Morleand is the Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University in La Mirada, California. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.P._Moreland

The Bible in Five Acts

I very much enjoyed N.T.Wright’s book on Biblical authority, “The Last Word.” In it, he illustrates an innovative way of looking at scripture in its entirety, a way which avoids many of the pitfalls that we encounter when trying to corroborate writings that appear to have diverse, even opposing points of view. He calls it the ‘Bible in Five Acts’ and the following is a more in depth description that I found on the NT Wright web page: http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Bible_Authoritative.htm

Let me offer you a possible model, which is not in fact simply an illustration but actually corresponds, as I shall argue, to some important features of the biblical story, which (as I have been suggesting) is that which God has given to his people as the means of his exercising his authority. Suppose there exists a Shakespeare play whose fifth act had been lost. The first four acts provide, let us suppose, such a wealth of characterization, such a crescendo of excitement within the plot, that it is generally agreed that the play ought to be staged. Nevertheless, it is felt inappropriate actually to write a fifth act once and for all: it would freeze the play into one form, and commit Shakespeare as it were to being prospectively responsible for work not in fact his own. Better, it might be felt, to give the key parts to highly trained, sensitive and experienced Shakespearian actors, who would immerse themselves in the first four acts, and in the language and culture of Shakespeare and his time, and who would then be told to work out a fifth act for themselves.[5]

Consider the result. The first four acts, existing as they did, would be the undoubted ‘authority’ for the task in hand. That is, anyone could properly object to the new improvisation on the grounds that this or that character was now behaving inconsistently, or that this or that sub-plot or theme, adumbrated earlier, had not reached its proper resolution. This ‘authority’ of the first four acts It would consist in the fact of an as yet unfinished drama, which contained its own impetus, its own forward movement, which demanded to be concluded in the proper manner but which required of the actors a responsible entering in to the story as it stood, in order first to understand how the threads could appropriately be drawn together, and then to put that understanding into effect by speaking and acting with both innovation and consistency. would not consist in an implicit command that the actors should repeat the earlier pans of the play over and over again.

This model could and perhaps should be adapted further; it offers in fact quite a range of possibilities.Among the detailed moves available within this model, which I shall explore and pursue elsewhere, is the possibility of seeing the five acts as follows: (1) Creation; (2) Fall; (3) Israel; (4) Jesus. The New Testament would then form the first scene in the fifth act, giving hints as well (Rom 8; 1 Car 15; parts of the Apocalypse) of how the play is supposed to end. The church would then live under the ‘authority’ of the extant story, being required to offer something between an improvisation and an actual performance of the final act. Appeal could always be made to the inconsistency of what was being offered with a major theme or characterization in the earlier material. Such an appeal—and such an offering!—would of course require sensitivity of a high order to the whole nature of the story and to the ways in which it would be (of course) inappropriate simply to repeat verbatim passages from earlier sections. Such sensitivity (cashing out the model in terms of church life) is precisely what one would have expected to be required; did we ever imagine that the application of biblical authority ought to be something that could be done by a well-programmed computer?

I think this is a neat way of looking at the Bible; as God’s dramatic achievement that has yet to play out – a play in which we all have important roles. Wright’s idea puts a more relevant twist on an old theme. People like George McDonald Fraser, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, CS Lewis, Tolkein, and lately Frederick Buechner and John Eldridge have all made the connection between the message and the medium, especially as it pertains to stories of mythic dimensions. We are all recieving our own stage directions and it’s important to make sure that we are listening to the director himself and not some of his flunkies. It is a good idea to spend some time making sure that the ‘back story’ hasn’t gone through any unnecessary and dangerous ‘re-writes’ that may have been made to meet the agendas of some of its self-appointed sponsors.

To point this analogy in another direction – too many cooks spoil the broth. God’s given us the ingredients, the untensils, even the kitchen to work in. Play with it, have some fun. Just remember that Jesus has spelled out certain basics, that if ignored, could result in a ruined recipe. But we can take joy in the fact that God is forgiving and will gladly help us to pick up where we left off.

N.T.Wright on the Enlightened Church

We are all children, grandchildren or at least stepchildren of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and have cause to be both grateful for the consequent privileges and anxious about some of the consequent problems.

So says N. T. Wright, in his little yet important book “The Last Word: Scripture and the Authority of God – Getting Beyond the Bible Wars“. In a brief chapter devoted to the challenges that the church has faced from the Enlightenment, Wright talks of how Modern thinkers have successfully proposed that all the Earth’s sordid history had been making its way to this pivotal point, the point where humanity had finally come of age. From that point on, through the auspices of science and philosophy, mankind would thrive as it never had before. War, suffering and disease would soon be things of the past.

This meant that the Enlightenment was offering its own rival eschatology, a secular analogue to the biblical picture of God’s kingdom, inaugurated by Jesus. Christianity had declared that God’s Kingdom had been decisively inaugurated by Jesus himself, particularly through the death and resurrection. This sense of a one-off historical moment in the first century, however, had been so muted in much Christian theology – eschatology being replaced by systems of salvation and ethics – that the Enlightenment’s cuckoo-in-the-nest move was made all the easier, and has in fact often gone unremarked. It was this eschatological takeover bid which caused Enlightenment thinkers to pour scorn on the Bible’s picture of the coming Kingdom, in a move which is still taken for granted in many circles today; first, to misrepresent it (“All the early Christians expected the world to end at once”) and then to rubbish it (“They were wild fanatics, and they were proved wrong.”) This “we-know-better-now” move, so characteristic of various strands within Enlightenment thought (and now forming part of the mental and emotional landscape of most modern Westerners), disguised the fact that the Enlightenment’s alternative was equally wild and fanatical: the belief that world history, up until now a matter of darkness and superstition, had turned the decisive corner – in western Europe and North America in the eighteenth century! – and come into the light, not least through science and technology.

The Enlightenment proposed a new perspective and a new solution to the problem of societal evil. Not to be outdone, the church caved in;

Much would-be Christian thought (including much would-be “biblical” Christian thought) in the last two hundred years has tacitly conceded these huge claims, turning “Kingdom of God” into “the hope for heaven after death” and treating Jesus’ death , at the most, as the mechanism whereby individual sinners can receive forgiveness and hope for an otherworldly future – leaving the politicians and economists of the Enlightenment to take over the running, and as it turns out the ruining, of the world. (This political agenda, by the way, was of course a vital part of the Enlightenment project: kick “God” upstairs, make religion a matter of private piety, and then you can organize the world to your own advantage. That has been the leitmotif of the Western world ever since, the new philosophy which has so far sustained several great empires, launched huge and horribly flawed totalitarian projects, and left the contemporary world thoroughly confused.) Scripture itself, meanwhile is muzzled equally by both sides. It is squelched into silence by the “secularists” who dismiss it as irrelevant, historically inaccurate and so on – as you would expect, since it might otherwise challenge their imperial dreams. Equally worrying, if not more so, it is squashed out of shape by many of the devout, who ignore its global, cosmic and justice-laden message and treat it only as the instrument of personal piety and the source of true doctrine about eternal salvation.

In an attempt to “prove” the Bible true to those “Enlightened” critics its defenders strove to demonstrate it’s historical accuracy by redefining what a “literal” interpretation meant:

There is a great gulf fixed between those who want to prove the historicity of everything reported in the Bible in order to demonstrate that the Bible is “true” after all and those who, committed to living under the authority of scripture, remain open to what scripture itself actually teaches and emphasizes. Which is the bottom line: “proving the Bible to be true” (often with effect of saying, “So we can go on thinking what we’ve always thought”), or taking it so seriously that we allow it to tell us things we’d never heard before and didn’t particularly want to hear?