Theology

Anyone can read the gospel, believe and be saved.  What then?  Besides entering into a more appropriate relationship with God, any such person would thus have a worldview they need to understand enough to explain.  Such a person would also have to figure out where to go and what to do.  Oh, and did I forget to mention church? Yeah, which church should one go to?  The fact that controversy surrounds the gospel and all of scripture makes the concept of scripture, as revelation, somewhat oxymoronic.  What is "revealed" is a mystery.  A great deal has to be figured out like a Sudoku puzzle.  We're given a few constants and a lot of variables to manipulate in search of clear, uncontroversial solutions.  Some of the main or more important constants are the goodness of God, the reality of sin and evil, the canon of scripture, the history of Israel from Abraham to Moses to Christ, the law and the gospel, the eternality of the soul, and ...

How forgiveness is justified and whether forgiveness is granted seems to depend on two entirely different conditions. Even though the atonement justifies any choice of God’s to forgive, the atonement is no guarantee that he will forgive. Remember, there is a hell. Some people aren’t forgiven. The condition, we have to meet, in order to receive forgiveness is just to believe and trust that God will forgive. There’s not much to that condition—just believe and trust and that’s all. But I don’t think we want to say God grants forgiveness just because he has some quirky penchant to be permissive of unrepentant sin and evil. And we can recognize the problem here without feeling the need to discover some way in which forgiveness is merited. In fact, we can and should hold a firm stance on that point. Belief and trust cannot even be characterized as meritorious thinking. While there is a deontological sense to thinking correctly, (“Deontological” is a fancy word for having the characterist...

I seriously doubt, despite what so many religions and their followers imply, that the God of merit making people is who they think he is.  In fact, I seriously doubt he is a God any of those people really love.  To love him, they’d have to be convinced that he loves them.  But what are they taught?  They are actually taught that his love is conditional—his favor is contingent on good behavior.  Commonsense alone should tell us that love, which one must earn, is not love. In the last analysis, sin and evil, ironically seem to reduce to the failure to follow a child-like commonsense which accepts that we are sinners whom God has forgiven--unconditionally. Children know that forgiveness from their parents is evidence of great love worthy of reciprocation.  Of course, there is more to sin and evil than failing to realize this because even when we understand these things, we still struggle with temptation.  And we can wonder all day about why temptation...

The book of Job teaches us two things--one, that we are never to consider God obligated to protect us from evil; and two, that people, like Job’s comforters, can and do loose favor with God for making the mistake of thinking God would be unjust to abandon us to evil.  No one should fail to understand, as Job’s false comforters had, that a righteous person, for all his righteousness is still at God’s mercy.  Job’s so-called friends, who thought Job must have been guilty of something before the catastrophes struck—guilty of something that would explain the catastrophes as a judgment of God, missed the point that God can do whatever he wants with us and we just have to accept that we are at his mercy.  A person can and should thank God for his providence but not with a mind that says, “I deserve all these good things because of how good I am.”  The idea that God is just is not false but we have to understand that he is no less just if he abandons us to evil.  He ...

The notion that Moses had introduced a religion that was all about how to earn God’s favor through strict adherence to a system of laws misses the point that the cultic animal sacrifice rituals for atonement or forgiveness were an integral part of that system precisely because there was no one who could do all that the law required.  The difficultly and hence inevitability of failure and hence need for forgiveness did not arise because any one law or command was formidable, but rather because of the sheer volume of such laws and of the need to persistently follow all of them.  There seems to have been an intentional irony to the fact that God demanded perfection which he knew no one was capable of.   Anyone who completely did all that was required by the law could not boast that he was perfect because to do completely all that the law required meant admitting that one needed forgiveness.   What did a person need forgiveness for if he had done all the law requi...

The resurrection showed that the one resurrected has power over life and death and helped substantiate the revelation that Christ was God and hence that what was said about him by eye witnesses was revelation.  More specifically, the written account of his life, was destined to be scripture because his life was the life of God incarnate.  Is a qualification needed here? Of course there is.  Anyone can write a so-called account of the life of Christ and that wouldn't be scripture much less revelatory (not all scripture is revelatory).  So what made the gospels scripture?  Do we say, "Well, the gospels were all written by Christ's apostles?"   We could say that; but what about Luke?  Luke's work had the stamp of approval from the apostles.  So, yeah, apostolic authority still factors in.  But this essay isn't about how canonicity is established, though a very worthy topic.  This is about the three related events--the incarnat...