Conversion or Catharsis?

There’s a lot of debate in my denomination right now about the impact and influence of Calvinism, the theological legacy of the 16th century Swiss Reformer whose emphasis on human sinfulness and Divine sovereignty left an indelible mark on Protestantism in all its forms including Baptists. That debate has usually coalesced around the doctrine of election, or more specifically, predestination. But I don’t think Calvin’s doctrine of election is the real issue facing Baptists right now. Rather, I think it’s his soteriology (doctrine of salvation) and his insistence on a “regenerate church membership;” that is, that the church will insist on salvation actually changing a person rather than merely saying they’re changed when they’re clearly not. While most Baptists would agree with  Calvin on the necessity of the regenerate life for the believer, actual church practice is often quite different. Talk to most pastors and they’ll tell you that the number one issue they deal with day in and day out is an unregenerate church membership - pagans masquerading as Christians and wreaking havoc in the church. A “salvation” that leaves me just as pagan as I was before I was “saved” isn’t worth the trouble.

Ecclesiastical Orphans

Preaching guru Fred Craddock, retired from Emory’s Candler School of Theology, often quips: “Anyone who can’t remember any farther back than his or her own birth is an orphan.” He was speaking about the postmodern penchant for individuality and concomitant lack of interest in history and context that tends to disconnect and detach us from any corporate, collective, or contextual sense of the self. We’re like orphans isolated and independent, experiencing the world without family, without memory, without history, without perspective. His point is that humans require context, historical perspective, to know who they are. We are not sui generis creatures, isolated, insular, independent. We are contextual creatures, connected in a nexus of relationships that includes both the living and the dead. Lose the context, forget those connections, and we forget who we are, what we’re about, why we’re here, and where we’re going.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

The new year always brings a deluge of decisions, doesn’t it. Is this the year I finally quit my job? Is this the year I lose that ten pounds? Is this the year I ask her to marry me? It’s amazing, isn’t it, how a simple act such as turning a page on the calendar can precipitate so many choices.

Or does it? According to Jerry Coyne, a professor at the University of Chicago, there are no choices to be made, really. What we euphemistically, and somewhat quaintly, refer to as our “decisions” and “choices” are really nothing more than brain chemistry (see his op ed piece in USA Today titled “Why You Don’t Really Have Free Will”). Working from the latest neurobiology, he argues that we are really just “meat computers” in which our brains are “...programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output.” What we incorrectly call our “decisions” or “choices” are really just the way our brains happen to work, nothing more. There is no supra or extra biological or chemical consciousness warranted...or needed. Our will itself, Coyne argues, may be little more than an evolutionary trick played on us by our brain chemistry to help us to “connect the dots” of our actions which, in reality, are nothing more than unconscious biological and chemical processes. “The ineluctable scientific conclusion,” he writes, “is that although we feel that we're characters in the play of our lives, rewriting our parts as we go along, in reality we're puppets performing scripted parts written by the laws of physics.”

Which Jesus?

Back in the late 60’s when I was a freshman in college I ran across a book that was one of those “eye opening” experiences for me. The book, by John Wick Bowman, was titled Which Jesus? It was Bowman’s attempt to provide the reader with what was, at that time, the current state of the research on the so-called Quest of the Historical Jesus. Albert Schweitzer had defined (though not begun) the “Quest” at the beginning of the last century with the publication of his book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906). He was reacting to the publication (by scholars like H. S. Reimarus, Ernst Renan, D. F. Strauss, and Wilhelm Wrede) of what has been called the “Liberal Lives of Christ,” highly imaginative “biographies” of Jesus all of which minimized (or eliminated) his deity and magnified his humanity (as the German title of Schweitzer’s book made clear: von Reimarus zu Wrede: Eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, “From Reimarus to Wrede: A History of the Life of Jesus Research”). The sticking point in most of these “Liberal Lives” was the fact that the canonical Gospels consistently portray Jesus as a first-century Jewish apocalyptic prophet who heralded the end of the world and the advent of the Kingdom of God in his own life and ministry.

Advent

“God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God…who for us and for our salvation came down” is how one of the early creeds of the Church put it. “It,” of course, is Advent. From the Latin adventus meaning “coming,” the word describes a period of preparation, four weeks in length, during which for centuries the Church has remembered and reflected upon Christ’s first “coming” and anticipated His final “coming.” It begins today and culminates on Christmas Eve.