Eternal Perspectives

The scene in Jerusalem in the days and weeks immediately following the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples and the conversion of thousands must have been wild. People who had come from all over Europe, Asia, and Africa for the Feast of Pentecost were now staying longer than anticipated. There was likely a housing shortage and – without question – a financial crisis as the visitors stayed around to learn of the new faith in which they had trusted the eternal destinies.

To alleviate the monetary crunch, many of the new believers sold land and property and donated the proceeds to the apostles. This is first documented in Acts 4:32-37 when Joseph (aka Barnabas) sold some real estate and gave the profits to the church. His behavior was note-worthy enough to be recorded by Luke. Then follows the familiar story of the status-seeking couple Ananias and Sapphira:

But a man named Ananias, with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property, and kept back some of the price for himself, with his wife’s full knowledge, and bringing a portion of it, he laid it at the apostles’ feet.
But Peter said, ‘Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back some of the price of the land? While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not under your control? Why is it that you have conceived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to men but to God.’
And as he heard these words, Ananias fell down and breathed his last; and great fear came over all who heard of it. The young men got up and covered him up, and after carrying him out, they buried him.
Now there elapsed an interval of about three hours, and his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. And Peter responded to her, ‘Tell me whether you sold the land for such and such a price?’ And she said, ‘Yes, that was the price.’
Then Peter said to her, ‘Why is it that you have agreed together to put the Spirit of the Lord to the test? Behold, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out as well.’
And immediately she fell at his feet and breathed her last, and the young men came in and found her dead, and they carried her out and buried her beside her husband. And great fear came over the whole church, and over all who heard of these things.

This is a curious thing: Peter asks the wife about the amount and she, perhaps fearful that she might betray or dishonor her husband – whom she still believed to be alive – stuck with the original story even though she knew it was a lie.

In short, she submitted to her husband.

What else could she be expected to do? It would be Peter, after all, who some years later would command wives:

In the same way, you wives, be submissive to your own husbands so that even if any of them are disobedient to the word, they may be won without a word by the behavior of their wives, as they observe your chaste and respectful behavior. – 1 Pet 3:1-2

“Without a word,” Peter says. The word for “submit” in this passage (forgive me the word study) is hupotasso, the definition of which includes (among other things) “to submit to one’s control, to yield to one’s admonition or advice, to obey, be subject.” Clearly this is what Sapphira was doing. Why the harsh response to her?

Well, it would appear that there are at least two reasons. The first goes back to the sin of Achan in Josh 7:1-26. His sin defiled the entire nation at the beginning of their conquest of the promised land and he and his family paid dearly for it. Luke seems to be deliberately connecting Achan and Ananias in this regard, thus stressing the importance of purity and holiness in the church.

Second, and more to the point, Sapphira could not hide her sin behind the veil of obedience to her husband. Her offense was not merely against Peter, the now-recognized leader of the church. As the NIV Application Commentary says,

When we lie to the church, we lie to the Holy Spirit. We see the developing theology of the church here. In 5:11 we find the first of twenty-three times that the word ekklesia appears in Acts. Saul/Paul finds out later that when he persecuted the church, he was persecuting Jesus (9:4). Later he expresses the treasured teaching that the church is the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:27; Eph. 4:12; 5:23). – emphases mine

To lie to the leaders of a church – including my own, local church – is to lie to the Holy Spirit; to persecute a church – a true church – is to persecute Christ. Sapphira had responsibilities that superceded her duties to her husband and her responsibility to obey the Scriptures regarding submitting to him. Her duty to God came first, not her less-important duty to her husband.

To me, this could have been parallel to Abigail’s disobedience to her husband in 1 Sam 25:1-42 rather than to Achan’s sin. Sapphira should have followed Abby’s example and “betrayed” her husband by telling the truth. She didn’t, however, and died because of it.

There are, then, limits to a wife’s submission to her husband. Sometimes exceptions to the rule are obvious; sometimes they are not as clear. As a husband, I would do well to ask myself why my wife is not submitting in such situations. As a wife, she would do well do ask herself to whom she owes greater allegiance.

For both of us, we must know the Scriptures well enough to understand the hierarchy of responsibilities and dutes we have. And we must pray for wisdom to know which to obey when there is a conflict between two of them.

The following are selections from Chapter Two of Love Your God With All Your Mind, Sketching a Biblical Portrait of the Life of the Mind, by J.P. Moreland (click link in sidebar to purchase):

Unfortunately, sincerity is not enough for powerful Christian ministry. We must also have an accurate biblical understanding of what we are to be about . . . According to the Bible, developing a Christian mind is part of the very essence of discipleship unto the Lord Jesus.

Our Lord is a God of reason as well as of revelation . . . His very word is true (John 17:17) , and His church – not the university - is the pillar and support of the truth (1 Timothy 3:15) . . .

The God of the Bible requires teachers who diligently study His Word and handle it accurately (compare 2 Timothy 2:15) and 1 Timothy 4:15-16) . . . The Buddhist is to leave his mind behind, but the Christian God requires transformation by way of its renewal (Romans 12:1-2).

1. Revelation is truth . . . When we affirm that the Bible is a revelation from God, we do not simply assert that God as a person is known in and through it. We also mean that God has revealed understandable, objectively true propositions . . .

2. How does the Holy Spirit help us understand the Bible? … (more…)

No, I didn’t misspell either word.

It seems to me that everyone’s life – whether a Christian or not – can be categorized under one of two headings: Hisstory or mystory.

I am either living the life that God desires and am being conformed to the image of Jesus Christ – which is His-story – or I am living for myself and conforming to the world – which is my-story.

So which will it be, Hisstory or mystory? It is a choice I make every minute of every day of my life.

I am but a layman in matters of intelligent design v. Darwinian naturalism, but I will ask my question nonetheless (and perhaps so display my ignorance):

Doesn’t “natural selection” imply intelligence? If “natural selection” somehow knows that one mutation is superior to another, how does that knowledge originate?

As I warned, I may be demonstrating my ignorance and am perhaps involving “myself in great matters, or in things too difficult for me,” but I’m curious.

Help?

As I found while working through a book for Mind & Media, reviewing a book takes a long time. This is especially true if the book is a bad one – as my recent undertaking certainly was. So, rather than try to analyze or review another book immediately, I thought I would glean a few books from time to time: hopefully this will provide you with enough information and incentive to buy the book for yourself (I’m only going to do this with good books!).

I am presently reading through J.P. Moreland’s 1997 book Love Your God With All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul. Here’s a sampling of the first chapter, “How We Lost the Christian Mind and Why We Must Recover It.”

The Loss of the Christian Mind
in American Christianity

Historical Overview

1. The emergence of anti-intellectualism. [F]rom the arrival of the Pilgrims to the middle of the nineteenth centruy, American believers prized the intellectual life for its contribution to the Christian journey . . . In the middle 1800s, however, things began to change dramatically, though the seeds for the change had already been planted in the popularized, rhetorically powerful, and emotionally directed preaching of George Whitefield in the First Great Awakening in the United States from the 1730s to the 1750s . . . [Marsden:] ‘anti-intellectualism was a feature of American revivalism’. . . (more…)

Escaping the Matrix:
Setting Your Mind Free to Experience Real Life in Christ
by Gregory A. Boyd and Al Larson

Publisher: Baker Books
Release: April 2005
Price: $11.19
ISBN: 0-8010-6533-X

Gregory A. Boyd is senior pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, MN. He is the founder and president of Christus Victor Ministries and former professor of theology at Bethel Seminary in St. Paul. He is a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary (Ph.D.) and Yale Divinity School (M.Div.).

Al Larson is a nationally board certified counselor and president and founder of Dynamics of Growth, Inc., which provides counseling to families and individuals. He is also the founder and developer of Cooperating with God for a Change (c), a new concept in Christian counseling. He has M.A. in psychology from Liberty University and a Ph.D. in clinical pastoral counseling from the Minnesota Graduate School of Theology.

Disclaimer: This book was given to Eternal Perspectives by Mind & Media as a gift from Baker Books for the purpose of this review. Eternal Perspectives is not affiliated with Baker Books and is not paid for the review.

Overview of Escaping the Matrix

In some way or another most of us are “stuck”–in a secret sin we can’t control or maybe by an inability to stand up for ourselves. In this book, the authors use the vehicle of The Matrix film trilogy to argue that our struggles with habitual sin, thought patterns, damaged emotions, and phobias happen because we do not know how to take charge of the way we experience reality. The authors draw on biblical and psychological insights to provide practical resources for helping believers escape the matrix of the world system that ensnares them. While this book is aimed at the newest generation of Christian readers, all ages will be inspired by the book’s innovative strategies for experiencing a deeper life in Christ.”

Authors Gregory Boyd and Al Larson provide their solution for problematic sanctification in this blend of neuropsychology, experiential psychotherapy, and soteriology. The book uses the movie as a metaphor for sin, salvation, and sanctification and encourages readers to “take the red pill” in order to enter into a deeper and more joyful experience of the life of Christ.

The book is divided into two parts: What Is the Matrix? and Escaping the Matrix. Each chapter (there are nine in all) has an exercise at the end designed to empower the reader to implement the emphases of the chapter.

The authors stress that the world in which believers live is under the control of Satan – referred to as the “Architect” throughout the book – and is hostile to the purposes of God. Drawing tight parallels between the world as depicted in The Matrix and that revealed in the Bible, they ask a series of questions to strengthen the connection:

What if the real world not only mirrors the movie “The Matrix” in terms of the splinter we all have in our brains but also in its explanation of this splinter? What if it’s true that we allow the neurological activity in our brains to be significantly controlled by forces outside of ourselves? What if at least some of what we think is real is actually an illusion? And what if this is the explanation for why we don’t consistently experience ourselves as being what Scripture says we truly are?

“What if there really is a Matrix that holds us in bondage?”

This Matrix, the authors argue, exists in the neurological networks that exist in every person’s physical brain. Comparing the brain to a computer, the world system exists as a Matrix of “neurochips” that determine thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Life in the Matrix is a perpetual cycle of triggers and deterministically activated neural-nets that we did not choose to have installed . . . Under the right circumstances – the right trigger – the neurochip is activated. Once activated, it deterministically communicates a message and creates a feeling as part of its message, and it does so in a fraction of a second, beneath the level of consciousness. To the extent dictated by the neurochip, you are a slave, a neurochip- controlled robot that will experience reality according to whomever or whatever installed the neurochip in you.”

The Matrix of neurochips creates an illusion, the authors explain, leading us to experience the world inaccurately: it is a “holographic virtual reality we experience in our minds.” To the extent that Christians are not living according to their new, true identity in Christ, they are like the people in pods in the movie: enthralled and captivated by a fantasy.

The solution is multifaceted but essentially can be summarized as “living as a resurrected Neo” (the hero of the movie), since “Jesus is the true Neo.” It involves becoming a “detective” of our minds, “uninstalling” the Satan-installed neurochips that perpetuate the illusion, and learning to claim the truths about our new identity in Christ. To accomplish this, Boyd and Larson provide nine exercises to free the mind of the believer:

1. Assessing our bondage to the Matrix;
2. Becoming a detective of your mind;
3. Discovering the modalities of memory;
4. Learning to adjust your inner world;
5. Experiencing Jesus;
6. Exercising faith in your true identity;
7. Silencing the judger and releasing the lover;
8. The “Theater of Life in Christ,” and,
9. “Setting faith” for the true you.

Central to the exercises and critical for “escaping the Matrix” is the practice of imaginative prayer or “cataphatic spirituality,” which the authors describe as a

“traditional form of spirituality that involves praying with (not to) mental and physical images . . . It is most fundamentally rooted in Paul’s teaching that we are transformed by mentally beholding the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor 3:16-18; 2 Cor 4:1-6).”

Evaluation of Escaping the Matrix

(more…)

Donna, in response to Philip Yancey’s article about worship being much more than just the music during a service, left the following comment to my post pointing to it:

In all the time I have spent in church, I have always associated ‘worship’ with music because that is the only context in which I heard the word mentioned. I remember when it hit me for the first time about a year ago that worship isn’t about the music. I was reading casually (not studying) in Genesis 22 where Abraham was taking Isaac to sacrifice him, and stopped when I read:

22:4 Then on the third day Abraham lifted his eyes and saw the place afar off. 5 And Abraham said to his young men, ‘Stay here with the donkey; the lad and I will go yonder and worship, and we will come back to you.’”

I couldn’t get past that passage. They went to worship? It sounds funny now, but I thought ‘It didn’t say anything about musicians going along on the trek’, and that is when I realized that there was something I had not been told in church about worship.”

I attend a Bible church and am your basic hands-in-my-pockets or clasped-behind-my-back kind of guy when it comes to singing during the service. Not everybody shares my superior view of this practice, however, and so I notice those individuals who raise their hands while singing. I have learned to let them be who they are and enter into the presence of God however they see fit (like they really needed my permission to begin with).

Being the way I am, I sometimes find myself wondering why no one raises their hands during the offering. (more…)

Stacy at Media Soul draws our attention to an interview in Beliefnet with the author of a new book on sex and single Christians. Stacy writes,

As a therapist I found this article to be extremely truthful because most of the unmarried Christians I see in my office have had or are currently engaging in sex. Some of my clients like to negate oral sex as not being real sex, but the truth is that any sex outside of marriage is sin, and it’s totally wrong.

As a distant colleague, I found the article to be an accurate depiction of what I, too, have heard in my consulting room. There is a lot of sexual activity going on among unmarried believers that falls outside the bounds of what God has ordained to be appropriate, i.e., sex within marriage.

Someone once said that the problem with premarital – and, I would add, extra-marital – sex is not that too much is given, but rather not enough is given. That is, sex is only right within a relationship where a permanent commitment has been made. Without that kind of commitment, sex is more of a fantasy than a reality, a purely physical experience that strips the act of its deeper emotional and – especially – spiritual dimensions. We are little different in those moments than two dogs hooking up in the park or someone masturbating while viewing porn.

This is a struggle, obviously, for single people – whether Christians or not – but it is also a danger for those of us who are married. To have a shallow or incomplete theology of sex is to fail to enter into and enjoy the fullness of a wonderful gift from God. None of us every fully achieve the glory of sex, but without knowing its true purpose and design we will stray far from the ideal. We won’t even begin to approach it.

Philip Yancey, whose writings I find to be somewhat uneven – he is either deeply profound and moving or somewhat trite and boring; but, then, who is not? – has nailed an important point on Christianity Today’s website.

In an article entitled “A Bow and A Kiss,” Yancey decries the recent equivalence of worship with music. Hopefully, the following quotes will prompt you to read the article in full:

How did it happen that the word worship became synonymous with music?”

For several months my church went on a hunt for a “worship pastor,” and a parade of candidates auditioned with their guitars and backup groups. Some of them prayed, yes: “Lord, just, you know, really be here tonight with us, just let us know you’re here.” None showed much knowledge of theology, and assuredly none led us toward anything like awe. Worship today means loudly filling every space of silence.”

Redman continues exploring the borderland between friendship and fear, for authentic worship encompasses both. It is the proper response when a holy God extends to flawed human beings an invitation to intimacy.”

Please read the whole article. It’s an important corrective to an unfortunate drift away from experiencing God.

Christianity History and Biography has an article on Middle-Earth available online. “Good and Evil in Middle-Earth” is written by Ralph C. Wood, University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University. Wood discusses the Christian underpinnings of J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic works.

Note: see my previous post below, or click here.

A couple of other things that I would pray for Godbloggers if I actually did pray for Godbloggers:

Ears to Hear

We don’t seem to do a very good job of listening to one another; I am no exception. There are times when I am reading a post that I am struck by an idea and chase it wherever it leads, all the while continue to “read” the post in front of me. (We all tend to do the same thing when in a conversation or argument: we’re thinking about what we’ll say as soon as the other person shuts up.) Then I either write my own post or enter a comment that is only tangentially connected to the original post. Whatever the author was actually saying turns out to be just a springboard for my own vain thoughts, and I lose the value of another’s input.

Perhaps even more frequent – and more tragic – is when someone disagrees with us on our blog and writes a comment to that effect. We are prone to respond defensively to criticism, whether it is constructive or not, offered in love or not. We do not always give their point of view a proper hearing, feeling offended instead and responding with a dismissive retort. And the discussion goes downhill from there.

Of course, we also hijack one another’s comments section. Somehow we cannot discipline ourselves to follow the lead of the blogger and instead take the discussion off in our own direction, usually to our favorite little hobby horse or pet peeve. When we do that, however, we discourage and frustrate an in-depth exploration of that issue or idea the author initially put before us. It is as if we ignore her points in order to make our own. Another opportunity to learn is lost.

We like the sound of our own voice; we like to see our own words on the screen before us. After all, who can say it as well as me? Which leads to my last and, perhaps, most important non-prayer for the Blogdom:

Humility

Whether we are or not, we often come across as arrogant and having an inflated sense of our own importance. Our blogs sometimes are ethereal examples of Paul’s warning: “Knowledges makes arrogant” (1 Cor 8:1 c). Humility, says James Sire, is a virtue without which “every virtue begins to become a vice.” In his section on intellectual virtues in Habits of the Mind, he writes,

Lack of humility – arrogance – is, in fact, one of the most frequent charges against intellectuals . . . The real problem, however, is not the charge that you are arrogant but the distinct possibility that you actually are.”

Quoting Weaver, he continues:

‘What do you desire? Vain glory? Profit? Then you are but a pseudo-intellectual.’ We must take our cue from the great Christan intellectuals of the past: They knew ‘that the proud theologian was a living contradiction in terms.’”

Middleton:

It’s not the childlike asking of questions or the honest admission of doubt that will get you into trouble with God. It’s the unstinting belief, the confidence, the certainty that you – that I – have all the answers, either because we’re smart, or because we’re honest, or because we’re scientific, or because we’re Christians, or because we have a Reformational worldview.”

It does no injustice to Middleton to add, “or because we have a Dispensational theology, an Arminian perspective, a Kingdom Theological approach, or any other system of doctrine that forms our worldview.” One of the best lessons I learned in seminary was Dr. Bruce Demarest first presenting and then dismantling Covenant, Dispensational, Kingdom, and Promise-Fulfillment theologies in order. The lesson? No system of theology can do justice to all the material; all fall short and either distort or omit critical passages or principles. Therefore, hold your theology firmly but gently: you are undoubtedly wrong at many points.

(Dr. Demarest, by the way, was one of the more humble men I have ever met. Although he has a remarkable mind and trained under F.F. Bruce to gain his doctorate in New Testament, he never held it with an attitude of superiority – even when some Moody Bible Institute students verbally attacked and ridiculed him in class. I caught a glimpse of Christ through him.)

Still borrowing from Sire, who quotes Neuhaus:

Few things have contributed so powerfully to the unbelief of the modern and postmodern world as the pretension of Christians to know more than we do . . . If Christians exhibited more iintellectual patience, modesty, curiosity, and sense of adventure, there would be fewer atheists in the world, both of the rationalist and the postmodern varieties.”

Don’t get off on election here: his point is valid and important. We are not very attractive at times, neither to unbelievers nor to one another. One more quote:

Describing the state of knowledge centuries ago, Thomas Aquinas said, ‘No philosopher has ever been able completely to know the essence of even a single fly.’ He was right then. And Lewis Thomas is right in our age: ‘We do not understand a flea.’”

Why we act as though it is otherwise is a reflection of our immaturity. There are, of course, many things that we can know with certainty: they are the declarative statements of the Bible. But the moment we venture into interpretation, we should take with us ample caveats and sufficient humility to allow that we might be wrong.

We do not possess omniscience. We have but a smattering of wisdom. We have much to learn, even from the most unlikely of sources. If we do not learn, if we cut ourselves off from those who “have nothing to say to us” because they are from a different tradition, then we have no one but ourselves to thank for our continuing ignorance and inevitable stagnation. We do not walk in wisdom when we do so.

I have written elsewhere about my concerns that too many unqualified people are making dogmatic, general statements about matters they do not fully understand. In some ways, this is a counter-balance to that post. We do need to be discerning but we should never dismiss someone’s observations without having first listened. All deserve to be heard, although not all should be given the same authority when they speak. We must be discerning enough to reject what is false, but humble enough to admit when they are correct and we are wrong.