Bumper Snicker

More dumb theology jokes

What did the Buddhist monk say to the hot dog vendor?

"make me one with everything"

(groan)

Dumb theology joke

Two friends walk into a McDonalds, one a Calvinist and one an Arminian. As they both gazed up at the menu the clerk asked, “may I help you?”


The Calvinist replied,

“I can’t choose, you choose for me”.

The Arminian said,

“Wow, so many choices!”.

Clever, I like it! Religious mailing lists.

I Joined a Mailing List

~ by Michael Rew ~

I joined a Calvinist mailing list I was predestined to join;

an Arminian mailing list because I could;

a dispensationalist mailing list because the time had come;

a Torah-observant mailing list because I should;

an Anabaptist mailing list because I could not fight it;

a Creationist mailing list, and it was good;

an intercessory mailing list after I prayed about it;

and a prophetic mailing list. I knew I would!

I joined a Sabbatarian mailing list on Friday night,Saturday night, and Sunday night, to cover every base;

got caught up in a pre-tribulation Rapture mailing list and in a post-tribulation mailing list, just in case.

I joined a Catholic mailing list that was a piece of work;

an evangelical mailing list by God’s grace alone;

a contemporary mailing list to see what was happening;

a traditional mailing list of which I had known;

a fivefold ministry mailing list so I would be equipped to open up and operate a mailing list of my own;

an interdenominational mailing list if I missed anything else;

and a cessationist mailing list.


Then I was done.

This T-shirt Rocks

Ah yes, I love t-shirts. They have to be really cool. I really like this t-shirt because of my unending fascination and study of Calvinism and Arminianism theology. And that it's just eclectic enough that some people won't get it! And the ones that will might be upset. I might just have to buy one....

One faith, two faiths, three faiths four...Part One

Four faiths make a religion and so do many more?!?!? You probably won't get the reference unless you were a kid in the late sixties and watched "The Banana Splits".
Tip: scroll to the bottom of the page at the link and look at the theme song lyrics.

January 7, 2006 - The Wall Street Journal published an article by Daniel Golden that describes how Wheaton College was delighted to have assistant professor Joshua Hochschild teach students about medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas, one of Roman Catholicism's foremost thinkers. But when the popular teacher converted to Catholicism, the prestigious evangelical college reacted differently. It fired him.

The article goes on to describe how

"...Mr. Hochschild's dismissal captures tensions coursing through many of America's religious colleges. At these institutions, which are mostly Protestant or Catholic, decisions about hiring and retaining faculty members are coming into conflict with a resurgence of religious identity. Historically, religious colleges mainly picked faculty of their own faith. In the last third of the 20th century, however, as enrollments soared and higher education boomed, many Catholic colleges enhanced their prestige by broadening their hiring, choosing professors on the basis of teaching and research. As animosities between Catholics and Protestants thawed, some evangelical Protestant colleges began hiring faculty from other Christian faiths." (emphasis added)

Now you may think that this post will discuss the differences between Protestants and Catholics but I'll table that for a future discussion. What I'd like to address is the last sentence regarding hiring faculty from "other Christian faiths". Why is this so curious to me? The first thing I thought of when I read the article was the words of Jude (no, not "hey Jude"), the new testament writer Jude):

"Beloved, while I was making every effort to write you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints." (emphasis added)

Look at Paul's admonition to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 13:5):

"Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves! Or do you not recognize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you--unless indeed you fail the test?" (emphasis added)

My point is this - that Biblical faith is singularly expressed, not in a plurality or variants of faith that in some way "add up" to Christianity. I'll cite one more example, again by Paul in Ephesians 4:4-6:

"For there is one body and one Spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God and Father, who is over all and in all and living through all." (yes, once again emphasis added!)

Now, if I ask you to really really fast name as many Christian faiths as you could you might immediately say Catholics and Protestants. You might even start listing different Christian denominations. I like to write little jingles in my head, and to the chagrin of my colleagues sometimes even sing them! I might jingle out something like this -

Lutherans, Church of Christ and Quakers, what we all have in common is faith in our maker. Assemblies of God and Southern Baptists too - we all believe that Jesus died for you."

I should write commercials. Or maybe not. But lest I be charged with oversimplifying the issue let me be honest and admit that within Christianity, yes WITHIN CHRISTIANITY there is much difference in the expressions of faith and belief.

In the book Why I am not a Calvinist, Jerry Wells and Joseph Dongell write that

"The differences among evangelicals are not trivial, and we doubt the judgment of Carl Henry when he suggested that our differences amount to "disagreement...over a limited number of passages (Carl F.H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority) We can point to numerous issues, spanning the entire scope of scripture that spark fervent debate and often separate us into distinct colonies of worship, ministry and witness"

How's that sound for "one" faith? Well, again in the interest of striving for some objectivity as I want to be fair and not mislead anyone into a uncritical Christian "party line" let's look at a list of these so called 'differences' that Wells and Dongell collected:

1. The eligibility of women for ordination in pastoral and teaching ministries without restriction.
2. The relationship between church and state, and the viability of a specifically Christian legislative agenda for a largely secular modern democracy.
3. The nature of a wife's submission to her husband.
4. The moral status of state-sponsored violence, whether in the form of declared war, restricted peacekeeping military action or capital punishment.
5. The intersection between modern science and the Bible, with focus on the prevailing theories of the Big Bang and biological evolution.
6. The fate of those who have never heard of the gospel and of those who have only seen or heard only a distorted presentation or modeling of it.
7. The theology of the sacraments, especially baptism - it's proper mode (immersion only?), its proper subjects (infants or believers?) and the sense in which it imparts grace.
8. The appropriateness of divorce and remarriage.
9. The scope and function of spiritual gifts.
10. The degree of corrective discipline administered by a congregation to its wayward members.
11. The normative spiritual profile of the Christian life with the possibility of a real moral transformation, victory over sin and genuine Christ-likeness.
12. The viability of a clergy/laity distinction.
13. God's end time program.
14. The role of Satan and the demonic as personal, intentional and particular forces in the experience of believers.
15. The nature and scope of exorcism.
16. The nature of eternal punishment and the doctrine of Hell.

Want more? Wells and Dongell go on to expose some other of the finer points of doctrinal disagreements within the church:

1. Are human beings so fallen that they must be saved exclusively through the unilateral and unconditional action of God?
2. Is it possible for human beings to resist (successfully) the saving approaches of God's grace?
3. Does God enable all persons to respond positively to the available light?
4. Can any who were truly once redeemed through faith in Christ fail to receive final salvation?

Now with my degree in theology and especially post degree studies on my own. I have an opinion on most of the above points in both lists. But the question is, should we (Christians) ultimately divide over these differences and opine that Christianity is a religion of many faiths? Stay tuned for more thoughts coming to a blog near you soon ....

Best Bumper Stickers

I enjoy creative bumper stickers, especially theological ones:

Tribute to Bruce Metzger

In the New York Times obituaries on Friday February 16 the death of Bruce Manning Metzger is noted (born February 9, 1914, deceased February 13, 2007). Dr. Metzger was a towering figure skilled in Biblical languages, particularly koine (i.e. "common") Greek and his studies of the New Testament and Apocryphal books. Let it not be overlooked that he was also skilled and fluent in Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac, Russian, German, French and Dutch. To contrast, I'm skilled in the English dialects of Californian (like, you know) and Oregonian (vente, nonfat, no whip, extra hot raspberry mocha with a sticker and a thermal sleeve).

Dr. Metzger was best known to the general public of his supervising of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which uses contemporary English and does away with much of the exclusively masculine language of previous translations. Pronouns like thee, thou, and thine found contemporary counterparts that were more understandeable, along with eliminating verbs such as art, hast and hadst. Although Metger could be a lightning rod for convservatives, overall his accomplishements and defense of the manuscript evidence for the Bible was towering.

Why is this all so important anyway? Let me digress for a moment and provide a few thoughts on translation. The challenge is this: although the literal translation of words remains constant, language changes over time. Therefore, to be meaningful the language must be accessible to the reader. Can you think of an example? Although somewhat rough, if I say "I made an inquiry into the life of Bruce Metzger" you would know what I mean. But, to the savvy internet literati I could also say "I googled Bruce Metzger" and that meaning would be the same. Think of words that even weren't around even 15 years ago - bling, podcast.


The translator is also challenged by not only making something accessible, and yet be faithful to the original word itself balanced with context and meaning. In Biblical translation these concepts are expressed as functional dynamics and formal dynamics. Functional dynamics will take a thought for thought approach, where formal dynamics takes a word for word approach. I find it helpful in my studies to incorporate both types of translations. For example, Matthew 9:11 in the New American Standard Bible reads:

When the Pharisees saw this, they said to His disciples, "Why is your Teacher eating with the tax collectors and sinners?"

That is a formal dynamic, where the text contains the literal words "tax collectors" and "sinners". Now look at this same verse in the New Living Translation:

But when the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with such scum?”

Now to be fair the NLT does contain a footnote that references the precise translation of tax collectors and sinners. But what the NLT does is to draw out the context, to show that the Pharisees (a sect of Judiasm at that time) despised and looked down on tax collectors and sinners.

Let it be said though that Dr. Metzger was not above criticism, as some evangelicals criticized him for saying that many biblical books, like the book of Genesis, were "composites of several sources" rather than the work of individual authors. Metzger's contention that certain extra-biblical books were inspired but not canonical was also critiqued by some evangelicals, who said such beliefs undermined Scripture's inerrancy.

However, his legacy will not soon be forgotten. One of my favorite quotes attributed to Metzger is this:

"You have to understand that the canon was not the result of a series of contests involving church politics. … . You see, the canon is a list of authoritative books more than it is an authoritative list of books. These documents didn't derive their authority from being selected; each one was authoritative before anyone gathered them together."

Love it! For a personal tribute John Piper records his thoughts here. Through gates of splendor Metzger has now entered into his rest.

Book Review - Everyman

Philip Roth brings us a small (182 page) book with a big meaning. Although Benjamin Franklin is who the following quote is attributed to, a variant was also used by Daniel Defoe prior to Franklin. Franklin's version is the one that we are most familiar with:

"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."

Well, this book is not about taxes, and the last time I checked the death rate still averaged about one per person. A curious aspect of the book is that the central figure is never named. The book begins at his funeral, then re-starts with the recollections of Everyman's childhood. The transition is accomplished naturally and smoothly, and is an example of Roth's capable skills as a writer. Oddly enough, there are parallels to my own father in this book. The first is that as a young boy Everyman is hospitalized for a hernia, and next to him is another boy who dies in the middle of the night. This same exact experience happened to my father, where in Minneapolis he was admitted to a hospital (I believe for complications due to asthma) where a young boy in the bed next to him passed away. I think these brushes with death remind us all of how frail and quick life can be.

In my own childhood I had a neighbor kid who I hung out with for a brief time. Oddly enough, I don't remember his name! I suppose forty years of time can do that. Following the method set by Roth, I'll call him Everyboy. Either his family or our family moved, creating the natural rift we all experience when our relational circles change. Word came to me that he had been killed riding his bike, as he was crossing a street a car ran him over. It was an odd moment for me, that I would never ride bikes with him again. Even at that young age (I'm guess I was about 8) I was impacted by death.

Well, so was Everyman. During his childhood he views a dead sailor washed up on the shore being removed by the Coast Guard. Roth then takes us in a jump over time, simply stating without any qualification that 22 years had passed. We journey through Everyman's failed marriages, estrangement from his sons, and both love and envy regarding his brother who exhibited superior health. Through various ailments we hear Everyman's facing his mortality with statements like this:

"...but now eluding death seemed to become the central business of his life and bodily decay his entire story".

After his successful career, he takes up a lifelong passion - being an artist. This is the second parallel to my own father. Dad worked at various jobs his whole life, and now is doing what he has always wanted to do - teaching art to children. Everyman offers painting classes to other members in his retirement community, and befriends a woman who bemoans her loss of vitality and is apologetic for the physical needs she has. He tries to comfort her, but 10 days later she commits suicide with an overdose of pain medication. It is an interesting scene, where the one thing that brings relief to her life is also used as the contributor of her death.

As I read through the book, a dawning thought began to take hold of me - the central figure of this book is not Everyman, it is death and its predecessor, the decline of health as age stalks us all. Although Roth does not invest in anthropomorphic comparisions of death, the theme emerges and is always tied to the thoughts, words and actions of the figures in the book.

I suppose that the two great literary themes are love and death. In the book "The Question of God" by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi Jr. postulates a debate between Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis. In it Nicholi asks the age old question:

"How do we resolve and come to terms with what Freud called "the painful riddle of death"? Socrates said "the true philosopher is always pursuing death and dying".

Roth's answer is that as Everyman is being prepped for yet another surgery, under the effect of the anasthetic; he dreams about the vitality of his youth, the treasure of a summer day at the seashore, the perfect priceless planet that earth is and his excitement and longing to enjoy every day. Roth describes how

"He went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled, but nonetheless, he never woke up. Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start"

The question we ask is this: if we came from nothing, and we end in nothing, why do our lives mean something? In not only the Christian worldview but other religions as well, death is NOT the end of existence. But Roths seems to think so.

GRADE:

1. Literary - A+. Roth communicates his ideas fluidly and cohesively. This is an easy reading book where concepts do not need equivocation.
2. Worldview - F. Roth communicates his ideas fluidly and cohesively. Unfortunately, this is not the worldview that I espouse!
   

The New Atheists and Old Belief Systems - Part 2

Gary Wolf continues his article with a conversation with Sam Harris (you can read part 1 here) :

"As I test out the New Atheist arguments, I realize that the problem with logic is that it doesn't quicken the blood sufficiently -- even my own. But if logic by itself won't do the trick, how about the threat of apocalypse? The apocalyptic argument for atheism is the province of Sam Harris, who released a book two years ago called The End of Faith: Religion Terror, and the Future of Reason."

As Wolf reports, Harris argues that, unless we renounce faith, religious violence will soon bring civilization to an end. This autumn, Harris has a new book out, Letter to a Christian Nation. In it, he demonstrates the behavior he believes atheists should adopt when talking with Christians. "Nonbelievers like myself stand beside you," he writes, addressing his imaginary opponent, "dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well -- by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God."

Yikes! So I'm in denial of reality, suffering starts with me, and I am subject to my imagination. But you know, I'm really getting into this dialogue. Rather than being threatened I'm challenged in my beliefs and find it strangely refreshing to looking at what I believe through the eyes of someone outside of my "Christian" circle.

Wolf expresses his desire to talk with Harris - about emotion, about politics, about his conviction that the days of civilization are numbered unless we renounce irrational belief. Given the way things are going, I want to know if he is depressed. Is he preparing for the end?

He is not.

"Look at slavery," he says. We are at a beautiful restaurant in Santa Monica, near the public lots from which Americans -- nearly 80 percent of whom believe the Bible is the true word of God, if polls are correct -- walk happily down to the beach in various states of undress. "People used to think," Harris says, "that slavery was morally acceptable. The most intelligent, sophisticated people used to accept that you could kidnap whole families, force them to work for you, and sell their children. That looks ridiculous to us today. We're going to look back and be amazed that we approached this asymptote of destructive capacity while allowing ourselves to be balkanized by fantasy. What seems quixotic is quixotic -- on this side of a radical change. From the other side, you can't believe it didn't happen earlier. At some point, there is going to be enough pressure that it is just going to be too embarrassing to believe in God."

Hey, how can you not like a guy who uses words like asymptote? I'm not sure, but I believe the inference is that theists at the best and Christians at the worst created and condoned slavery. It is interesting that he seems to contradict Dawkins on the intelligence issue, that it was intelligent, nay the MOST intelligent and sophisticated people who supported the practice. Now I won't deny that many horrible things have been done in the name of religion. But some good things have also been done. Regarding the references to slavery above, an appropriate example is William Wilberforce, who after his conversion to Christianity was an effective and eloquent figure against whom slavery suffered a mortal wound.

Wolf and Harris then discuss what it might look like, this world without God. "There would be a religion of reason," Harris says. "We would have realized the rational means to maximize human happiness. We may all agree that we want to have a Sabbath that we take really seriously -- a lot more seriously than most religious people take it. But it would be a rational decision, and it would not be just because it's in the Bible. We would be able to invoke the power of poetry and ritual and silent contemplation and all the variables of happiness so that we could exploit them. Call it prayer, but we would have prayer without bullshit."

Wolf does call it prayer and describes it this way: that our reason will subjugate our superstition, that our intelligence will check our illusions, that we will be able to hold at bay the evil temptation of faith.

What is prayer anyway? To me, there are two constants in prayer that I am aware of that cross religious boundaries. First, we pray to an entity - something that exists. Second, we pray to something that is greater than us - we don't pray to equals. That's why the parody of God represented by the Flying Spaghetti Monster can be proffered.

I'm enlightened by this interview, in that I now know that the religion of atheism is supported by prayer, and that the center of the atheist worldview is nothing less than happiness. Not world peace, not justice, not the elimination of poverty or starvation, but happiness.

It's frightening to realize how much of the seeds of this worldview have been planted and are now taking root. Oh, how naive I was watching the Partridge Family after school every day and singing along with the lyrics, not knowing that the roots of atheism were being planted deep into our culture:

Hello, world, here the song that we're singin',

C'mon get happy!

A whole lot of lovin' is what we'll be bringin'

We'll make you happy!

We had a dream, we'd go travelin' together,

We'd spread a little lovin' then we'd keep movin' on.

Somethin' always happens whenever we're together

We get a happy feelin' when we're singing a song.

Trav'lin' along there's a song that we're singin'

C'mon get happy!

A Whole lot of lovin' is what we'll be bringin'

We'll make you happy!

We'll make you happy!

We'll make you happy!

Please pray for me.

The New Atheists and Old Belief Systems - Part 1

"Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try no hell below us: above us only sky imagine no possessions: it isn't hard to do nothing to kill or die for: and no religion too.. "
John Lennon

"The empty headed fool says in his heart, there is no God".

David, Psalm 53:1 (Amplified)

In the November 2006 edition of Wired magazine, Gary Wolf writes about "...the band of intellectual brothers mounting a crusade against belief in God". Wolf in his introduction explains that:

The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it's evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there is no excuse for shirking.

And the battle rages.

In the article, Wolf set out to talk to three of the most socially prominent atheists, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. Wolf wanted to find out what it would mean to to enlist in the war against faith. In this entry I'll comment on the interview with Dawkins.

Dawkins has reached somewhat of a celebrity status among atheists. Wolf talks about how

"Dawkins' style of debate is as maddening as it is reasonable. A few months earlier, in front of an audience of graduate students from around the world, Dawkins took on a famous geneticist and a renowned neurosurgeon on the question of whether God was real. The geneticist and the neurosurgeon advanced their best theistic arguments: Human consciousness is too remarkable to have evolved; our moral sense defies the selfish imperatives of nature; the laws of science themselves display an order divine; the existence of God can never be disproved by purely empirical means."

I'm a simple man. I think those are mighty fine arguments for theism. Wolf goes on to explain that:

Dawkins rejected all these claims, but the last one – that science could never disprove God – provoked him to sarcasm. "There's an infinite number of things that we can't disprove," he said. "You might say that because science can explain just about everything but not quite, it's wrong to say therefore we don't need God. It is also, I suppose, wrong to say we don't need the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. There's an infinite number of things that some people at one time or another have believed in, and an infinite number of things that nobody has believed in. If there's not the slightest reason to believe in any of those things, why bother? The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is. It is not up to us to disprove it."

That is a fascinating statement to me. There seems to be an a priori mechanism working here, where Dawkins (who without doubt is a towering intellect) seemingly retreats into a defensive mode. If I believe in God, and he does not; why wouldn't he try to disprove it? Interestingly enough, Wolf states that science, after all, is an empirical endeavor that traffics in probabilities. The probability of God, Dawkins says, while not zero is vanishingly small. That also fascinates me, because for the reasons of the neurosurgeon and geneticist mentioned above I would flip it and say that the probability of evolution, while not zero is vanishingly small. So, we are using the same argument to defend our positions. I have to wonder again, why wouldn't he try to disprove it?

According to Dawkins, "highly intelligent people are mostly atheists". This statement has inherent weaknesses. Has Dawkins interviewed all of the highly intelligent people that have ever lived? Or are living now? Or will have ever lived? Of course not. This is the statistical fallacy known as "hasty generalizations". In hasty generalization fallacies a large enough sample is not taken. If the sample is not large enough, then we risk it not being representative of the class we are studying. What if there was just one highly intelligent person who believed in God? What if there were two? Or three or four or five or a hundred or a thousand or a hundred thousand, does that weaken his argument? How can he so easily dismiss religious intellectuals on an equal or perhaps even greater plane than he, for example Blaise Pascal?

But there's more beneath this statement. By ascribing a belief system (whether atheistic or religious) to a class or segment of people based on superiority or inferiority of a trait, moral or ethical questions arise. For example, if we restate his claim he could say with the same meaning that "stupid people are mostly religious". Do you see where I'm going with this? Yep, I'll go ahead and make the leap that this kind of reasoning leads to devaluing segments of humanity. Now, I'm not saying that Dawkins is a Nazi. But, if we are just the product of blind evolution, and smarter people like us know that there is no God, then let's degrade the value of those in our society who are not as smart as us. And maybe us smart people should only marry other smart people so that we create the "master race".

I will give Dawkins points for honesty though. Dawkins openly agrees with the most stubborn fundamentalists (sic) that evolution must lead to atheism.

And on that point, we are agreed.