The Christ Files

Themes: Apologetics

We just finished watching The Christ Files with people from Church.

Historian Dr John Dickson sets out to discover what we can know for certain about the life of one of history’s best known and most influential figures. In a captivating journey across the globe, Dr Dickson examines ancient documents and consults the world’s most respected historians and scholars. Beginning with the Gnostic Gospels, he criss-crosses continents on a search back through time for the historical sources that reveal the real Jesus— a search for The Christ Files. (source: www.thechristfiles.com.au)

It’s really good, and I have a high sensitivity towards cheesy Christian TV.

I have to confess that my overriding emotion while watching the programme was jealousy toward John Dickson – travelling all over the world and meeting the great and good of Biblical scholarship.

Emma and I are hoping to take a few copies of the DVD’s with us to South Africa.
If you haven’t watched it, do.
You can get a copy here.

I also discovered when I was watching the credits that my cousin, Dave Sheerman, did the music for the production.
(Hi Dave)

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Immanentism

Themes: Apologetics, Critique, Philosophy, Society

“If there is an intellectual direction in the culture that has developed over the last few centuries it is that which
is rather barbarously labelled ‘immanentism’. That is to say, the phenomenon which at once characterises a culture and sets for Christian theology its central problem is the widely accepted belief that the world can be understood from within itself, and not from any being or principle supposed to operate from without. Examples are to be found everywhere, from the characteristic modern ‘experience’ of being alone in the universe to the brash technocratic optimism that sees in modern knowledge the key to the solution of all problems.” (Colin Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 2-3)

I generally hate generalisations about anything, especially about cultures. But I also (evidently) don’t have a problem with being slightly contrary, so I’ll come out with it and say, I think Our Colin has nailed the cockroach to the wall with this one.
I just wish ‘immanentism’ was slightly easier to pronounce, then I could start accusing all sorts of people of being it.
It certainly seems influential in many Christian attempts to rethink the presentation of the Gospel to our culture (think emergent church), and in the prevalence and brand of eschatology fashionable in theology (think ‘new creation’ rather than ‘heaven’).
You might have to think a while to join the dotted lines, but they are there, and they aren’t that dotty.

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Persuasion in Mark

Themes: Apologetics, Exams, Gospel, On Language, Reading Scripture

The recent essay I had to write for our New Testament 1 course has given me a lot of food for thought*, particularly with regard to the techniques employed by Mark in seeking to persuade us that Jesus is the ‘Christ, the Son of God.’

Have you ever thought that if you or I set out to convince someone that they should follow Jesus, give him their personal allegiance to the point of death, that we probably wouldn’t be content to simply present a narrative?

I’ve just come back from a mission week where we were engaged in a whole range of evangelistic presentations. We gave out CD’s and knocked on doors. I sat in on a ‘dialogue meeting’ (question and answer time with Christians and non-Christians), and spoke at a Chapel service. Each activity was designed to engage with people and persuade them that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.

Yet we didn’t once engage in the form of persuasion and teaching that was employed by the writers of the Gospels.

I really don’t want to fall into the sad, trendiness, of those ‘Evangelists’ who want us to simply tell each other our ‘stories’. Narrative theology is all the rage at the moment and it has been very influential in thinking through how we preach and proclaim God’s word. It helpfully reminds us to be attentive to the form in which God’s word presents truth. It’s good to remember that the literary form of the scriptures isn’t just an accident of history. There are no accidents in history.

So why does Mark tell a story where he (and we) might reasonably have chosen a more direct form of argument?
I thought about this a lot while I was working to understand the overall significance of the feeding miracles for Mark’s presentation of Jesus.

I think the feeding miracles form a piece of the interpretative framework which Mark is unfolding for the reader. By that I mean, Mark isn’t just writing a narrative of Jesus’ life. He’s writing a narrative that will have a certain effect on the reader. Mark is creating a framework that is designed to create a reader who will encounter the events of Jesus’ death equipped to understand them as (among other things) the climax of Jesus’ kingly provision for his followers.

Mark establishes a resonance in the mind of the reader through his description of events. As you progress through the narrative, Jesus’ breaking bread to feed the hungry crowds, echoes in his breaking bread for his disciples at the Passover.
Jesus’ compassion, his power, his superabundant provision, are in the mind of the reader as he or she comes to the final meal that Jesus shares with his disciples. As the bread is broken once more, Mark adds the final touches to the framework through which the reader will encounter the death of Jesus.
The narrative structure of Mark is intended to create a reader who is capable of understanding the true significance of the disturbing events at the end.

Mark faced the difficulty of presenting a message to individuals who could not possibly have the framework of experience to understand its significance. How could anyone hear of the execution of a man for blasphemy and come to the conclusion that he is the answer to our seeking after God? In itself, the death of Jesus is a deeply ambiguous event.

We face the same problem as we seek to share the message of Jesus with people who are completely unequipped to understand it. On a practical level, the average Aussie doesn’t see themselves as occupying the same narrative world as Jesus, our questions about life seem different, the history of answers to these questions – the culture we share seems very removed from the world of the New Testament. On a spiritual level, the average Aussie is unable to understand the message of Jesus due to darkness and ignorance brought on by rebellion against God.

For anyone to encounter Jesus, his life, death, and resurrection – and to correctly understand the significance of these events – requires that they themselves be transformed into the kind of person capable of understanding. This requires the spiritual work of removing blindness. And it also requires the approach taken by Mark and the Gospel writers. The person will need to be transformed by the narrative so that they come to occupy the same thought-world, so that the reader is shaped to stand at the correct vantage point, the proper angle, from which to view the cross.

That’s why its fascinating to study the narrative techniques by which Mark does this shaping, and to wonder how we could apply similar techniques to our engagement with people.
Who’d be interested in writing an evangelistic book along these lines?

*topic of the essay was “What is the significance of the feeding miracles for Mark’s presentation of the ministry of Jesus?”

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Starting a Declaration

Themes: Apologetics, preaching

Then Paul stood in the middle of the Areopagus and said: “Men of Athens! I see that you are extremely religious in every respect. For as I was passing through and observing the objects of your worship, I even found an altar on which was inscribed:

TO AN UNKNOWN GOD

Therefore, what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. (Acts 17:22-23 HCSB)

4 Questions:

How would you go about starting a conversation about Jesus?

What about a conversation, not just with a friend but with city?

How would you begin, not a conversation but a declaration about Jesus, to a city?

If we were to translate Paul into Martin Place, how would he begin?

Any thoughts?

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On what we don't know… (II)

Themes: Apologetics, Forgiveness, On Knowing God, Prayer, Sin

How do we not know what we are made to know?

‘If humanity is made for the knowledge of God, why is it that many people do not feel the need of this knowledge, or seek God out?’
Original Post

We need to step back again for a moment. It seems at this point every step forward needs careful prodding with the toes first to make sure we are on firm ground.

To say ‘I know’, could equally be a statement about facts or about relationships.
“I know how many elephants live in the zoo” and “I know Bob the Elephant keeper” are two different forms of knowledge.

In the Biblical world view (and increasingly in the post-modern world view) both these forms of knowledge are bound together. There aren’t any such things as ‘Facts’ bare, naked, and objective. There are only interpreted facts, given in relationships, through testimonies, and in the context of experiences.

Our lack of knowledge of the ugliness and evil of sin, and of our dire need for restoration to friendship with God, is an ignorance of certain primary facts about the world and it is ignorance of our primary relationship.

In every sense our knowing is broken.

How did this come about? How did knowledge get broken?

If Christ is the self-evident Word of God, [the way in which God is known] why do so many people reject him? The answer lies in original sin, that original rejection of God’s word by Adam in which the whole human race is involved.
Graeme Goldsworthy, According to Plan, p. 60

It is interesting to note that the first time Knowledge is mentioned in the Bible it is not in the context of the relationship between Humanity and God. It is in the description of the forbidden tree as ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’.

(What a strange plant, was it a weed?)

It certainly wasn’t an Apple Tree – this tree has no species, it is unique – named for its unique fruit. This is the tree – the fruit of which gives knowledge of good and evil.

As Adam stretched out his hand to take and eat he was wreaking a change upon the world that was profoundly to do with knowledge. Human rebellion against the word of God had fundamental consequences for our knowledge because, at this one point above all others, our knowledge-as-facts and our knowledge-in-relationship was intimately bound together.

There is a long history of speculation about what it means to have the ‘knowledge of good and evil’. Some have understood this to mean factual knowledge, i.e., what good and evil are, (what the rules are). Others have taken this knowledge to be experiential, having the first hand experience of good and evil. Still others have taken this to have some sort of sexual referent.

The difficulty for all these understandings is that later in the Genesis narrative we hear God saying,

“Since man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:22 HCSB)

The forbidden knowledge at the heart of human rebellion seems to be, knowing good and evil, as God knows them.
What is God’s knowledge of good and evil?
God’s knowledge is autonomous knowledge. It is not knowledge of what is good and what is evil as defined by ‘the moral law’, it is not experience of good and evil (God has no evil in him).
God’s knowledge of good and evil is the knowledge that defines good and evil.
God knows good and evil because he decides what good is, and what evil is.

For Adam and Eve to eat this deathly fruit was an arrogant grasping at the prerogative of God.
Rather than to continuing to know God (and through knowing God to know the world)
Adam and Eve sought to know like God.
Humanity sought to decide for itself what good is, and what evil is.
They did this, first, by deciding that it was good for humanity to eat a fruit of which God had said, ‘don’t eat!’

The knowledge of good and evil is a colossal thing. It is fundamentally a narrative, a system of meanings that locate our identity and purpose. This narrative had begun with the First Word,
“Let there Be…”
…And there was.”
God had given us identity and purpose. He told us the story into which he had placed us.

But in the Fall, Adam substitutes his own story, a new framework of meanings, and thereby deafens himself to the word of God.

The conclusion of this long answer is that our darkened understanding of who we are (that we are fallen) is a consequence of our grasp for moral autonomy. We have so thoroughly substituted our own definitions of good and evil, which is to say, our own fundamental narrative, that we cannot correctly identify our state from God’s perspective.

And all this is a very long winded way of restating Paul’s conclusion in Romans 1.

“For though they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became nonsense, and their senseless minds were darkened.” (Rom 1:21 HCSB)

Which finally, wearied I’m sure, and very much overdue, brings us back to the really important question:
How do I show my friend that our rebellion against God is horrifying, evil, and disgusting – not just intellectually credible? And how do I do it with humility and gentleness?

We live faithfully, in faith, with faithfulness.

We trust and remain loyal to the Creator who is alone able to utter those decisive creative words that can utterly alter our thinking.
This trusting of God is expressed in speech, life, and prayer.

No actions on our part alone can bring a fellow human to knowledge of God,
but they are the vehicles through which the Creator God has chosen to express himself.

So we trust God through speaking the truth, which is ultimately the true story, the gospel announcement of the Death and Resurrection of God’s King through which the God’s Kingdom has come, meaning that the hour of judgement is at hand, though there is salvation for those who seek it.
Already it is an incomprehensible story.

And in the light of this story we will live incomprehensibly. As the Christian begins to comprehend the world and our place within God’s future, our values and priorities are derailed from the tracks in which they used to run. Certain things which appear to others as insane sacrifices are now ‘worth it’ for the Christian. The shape of our thinking is changed, the centre of our hope moves forward.
For the person who is not a Christian, watching as these lives are lived, they do not make sense, the Christian life will be simply incomprehensible.

And we pray. This sounds like such a weak answer after such a long build up. However, I’m more and more convinced, through reflecting on God’s word and seeing my own perversity, that unless God acts to change something in our perception of the world we can never see him. Our minds really are darkened – this is not just a nice turn of phrase.
Unless God gives us the interpretive key, this world-of-a-text remains a mystery, indecipherably encoded.

No one comes to know the truth about God or themselves without God taking a prior action to give this knowledge. The individual is powerless. In fact, all the individuals involved, other than God, are powerless. We are as equally powerless to stir up another person from their blind danger as that person is themselves.

Which is why we are to be humble and gentle in our prayers, and in our speech and action.

In our humble prayers we admit before God that we are unable to save the people that we love but that we trust that he can and that he desires to do so.

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On what we don't know… (I)

Themes: Apologetics, On Knowing God

‘If humanity is made for the knowledge of God, why is it that many people do not feel the need of this knowledge, or seek God out?’

What I’m wrestling with at the moment is why that one thing doesn’t seem so self evident most of the time.[humanity is made for the knowledge of God] Perhaps I am suppressing the truth by my wickedness. Perhaps that’s really the essence of sin—not really believing that and acting accordingly. I guess it is then in my own sinful self-interest to avoid that particular piece of knowledge.

I know a couple of my friends are wandering away from the faith at the moment, because they don’t really see why they need God. Knowing that our primary function and greatest good is knowing him is completely opaque to them. Deep down they don’t really believe that they’re all that bad, and for the most part they’re happy in their comfortable middle-class, tertiary educated lives. How do I show them that our rebellion is horrifying, evil, disgusting–not just intellectually credible? And how do I do it with humility and gentleness?
original post

There are a lot of questions here, but I want to think about the final one first. How do we show our friends, and the lost world at large, the enormity of the evil and ugliness resulting from the Fall?

I’d be tempted to talk about the homeless couple who sleep outside our door. We talk to them (Emma more than me), we keep the Church toilet open, we try to connect them with the various refuges and drop-in centres around the city. Every night when I get up to go to the toilet in the night I can hear them coughing downstairs. Every time I think about it I’m ashamed, and guilty, and frustrated. There is very little I can do but I know that the world shouldn’t be this way. People aren’t meant to live like that. Something went wrong somewhere. And it’s the height of ugliness and arrogance to think, ‘my life’s ok’, when other people sleep on doorsteps. All our lives are somehow not ok when people live like that.

But I doubt that’s the right way to approach the question with a friend. If I was that friend it would either drive me into guilt and self-sacrifice to try to make things better, or it would just make me angry with God and avoid my own responsibility.

For the same reason, though the ugliness and evil of human rebellion is blatantly evident in every edition of every newspaper (and even more evident in the Daily Telegraph) This evidence, or any recitation of the litany of pain that is everywhere being uttered in our world, is unlikely to convince someone who doesn’t already see it through the knowledge of Christ.

We could point to the hidden ugliness within each individual, the secret shame that we bury deep down, and which are still there even for comfortable, educated, middle-class Australians. No one ever goes through life without standing in front of the mirror and thinking ‘failure’. At least no one you could even begin a conversation with.

But we would run into more problems. What right have I to point out the failures of someone else and tell them to repent before God. I know well enough the ugliness inside me. If it is a friend I’m talking with, they probably know my inside ugliness as well. I’d only end up sounding like a pompous hypocrite. Or they would hear and despair; or hear and try to work harder; or hear and think that in the end the good and the bad in them will probably balance out.
But the reality is, the last thing we’d do is turn to God for an answer.

Maybe if we were to wait for the right moment? I’ve heard Christians express this thought plenty of times, I’ve probably said something like it myself. If we wait, maintaining our friendship and witness until that moment comes when the fiction slips and breaks down. Maybe standing beside a grave the ugliness and evil of the world will become apparent.

But lots and lots and lots and lots of people stand beside graves and look bleakly at the ruin of a world, but not many look to God, even when they have Christian friends beside them.

C.S. Lewis gave us an image in the Narnia Chronicles which expresses the tragedy very well. It’s the Dwarves in The Last Battle who are thrown into a smelly old stable and find themselves in Aslan’s Land. But they’ve told themselves so firmly and so long that they have been thrown into a stable that they are unable to see anything else. The evidence is all around them but they interpret everything through the grid of what they believe should be there – seeing a great banquet as donkey slops.

We read the facts and evidence that is presented to us in the world through an interpretive framework which shapes all these things into a story. A story that explains what is wrong, how it could be fixed, and where we fit in. But if you have the wrong framework, if you are telling yourself the wrong story, no amount of evidence will change what you see. You will simply read it into the shape of what you already know. (this is the point at which the post-modern critique is so profound).

As Christians however we know (there’s that word) that the world has a real, true story. There is a correct interpretation but it can never be arrived at through deduction (adding up 1+1=2) or induction (gathering evidence), the key to truly understanding the story only comes through revelation. Revelation is the foundation of Christian knowledge, and the foundational form of all knowledge.

The truth is that the knowledge of Christ in the gospel interprets our world for us, just as it interprets the Bible for us. Christ is the wisdom from God through which we learn to see the world; through which the events of experience are given coherence and relationship, to form a story.

Without knowing Christ, there is no true knowledge of the world.

But that fundamental question keeps drawing me back. How do we not know what we are made to know?

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