...for we do not preach ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your servants for Christ’s sake
At least for homosexuals who don’t believe in God, the critical concern in their contact with Christians who hold to a conservative theology (ie. who don’t believe that same-sex desire/intercourse is part of God’s original plan for creation) is not the question of whether their homosexuality will send them to hell.
Think about it: if they don’t believe that God, heaven or hell exist, then this particular question can’t be a ‘real’ concern that grinds against them and causes their hackles to rise whenever they meet a Christian believer.
No, the real concern (at least in most cases) is surely:
Some stories are as devastating as they are hopeful.
Take the story of Nico, the prisoner endowed with an unspeakably beautiful voice. Every year he appears before the board of the prison and sings for them yet all they can do is
The freedom of the human will “is” a reality… but it is always relative to the domain in which the human subject resides. Thus a sinful human can only choose from amongst a variety of sinful options, for these are the only ones his dominus (the devil) offers. This is why regeneration (the enlightening and animating work of the Holy Spirit) must precede faith in Jesus. (Col 1:13; 2 Cor 4:6; Isa 9:2; Gen 1:3)
Everyone knows that in real life fairy-tales and politics don’t mix… recent events in the UK notwithstanding. But they should.
To understand why, we need to start a bit further back – with anthropology. Reformed theology regards the Bible’s teaching on anthropology as being reducible to the following idea: since the Fall of humankind into sin, the power of “contrary choice” (the ability to choose between ethically righteous and ethically sinful options) has been taken away and replaced with “alternative choice” (the ability to choose among various sinful ethical options).
This reality is made manifest through our politics.
There is a gospel according to Tim. It is might speak about a Christ and his death on a cross for my sake, but it flows from a God created in my image, who conforms to my own sinful likes and dislikes, my flawed personality and my pride-ridden insecurities… and if you follow it, it will send you straight to hell.
There is also a gospel according to (insert your name here). It too will probably speak of a Christ and his death on a cross for your sake, but it will look different to the gospel of Tim. Let’s say that due to my personality, I am the kind of guy who
Jesus speaks of a basic principle that works in people’s lives:
“Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” (Matt 23:12)
What is he saying here? Simply this – that a false reckoning of oneself (arrogance) leads to humiliation, whereas a right reckoning of oneself (humility) leads to dignity and honour.
This is one of the most primitive truths of the Bible; indeed, when we view it in light of the cross of Christ, it stands as the most fundamental principle of the universe.
Before we get there, however, just to point out the universality of this principle, let us consider
Ponder anew what the Almighty can do If with His love He befriend thee.
In a recent survey conducted in the Law/Economics/Politics Faculty of the University of Athens, an overwhelming majority of students declared that, for them, the greatest value of all was “freedom”.
The immediate difficulty that arises from such a conclusion is the fact that freedom is such a broad term
Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. When [the Holy Spirit] comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment. (Jesus in John 16:7-8)
Whether you are a Christian or a non-Christian, it is highly likely that you have been puzzled about the role and significance (if any) of the Holy Spirit in your life
“‘Scuse me, while I kiss the sky.” (Jimi Hendrix)
The average woman or man on the street – upon questioning – has quite a positive picture of Jesus in his or her mind. Surveys usually reveal people’s admiration for his compassion for the poor and downtrodden and his revolutionary teaching in the Sermon on the Mount (“turn the other cheek and all that”).
But when the cross is brought up, this admiration is swiftly transformed into evasiveness, bewilderment and even ridicule. People simply cannot conceive of why, after all the good he has done in his life, Jesus suddenly gets it into his head that he’d like to be noble and try and ‘save us from our sins’. Such ideas as ‘sin’ and ‘propitiation’ are considered barbaric, unworthy and
We demonstrate our true attitude towards God by our attitude towards the idea of charity.
On the surface, we all love the idea of charity. We give to charity, we claim to believe in it, we hold high hopes for it… but we find it very difficult to receive. And this demonstrates our real attitude not only towards charity, but towards God. Both practically in our lives and spiritually in our souls, we are simply too
More and more people today are recognising that the word, “atheism”, is the greatest misnomer of them all. For in ‘real’ terms, all people have an object of worship. A-theism means to be ‘without God’ but an atheist is not without a God as such; he/she has simply rejected a particular God or selection of Gods.
After watching the election debate on immigration last night, it struck me that Nick Clegg’s policy on immigration is the perfect illustration of our attitude to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Why did Clegg have to backtrack on his rhetoric of ‘amnesty’ for illegal immigrants?
I had never written a song before last week but I was inspired somewhat whilst reading Psalm 17. Carry on reading (and listening) to see the result:
Wretched whore of a thousand lies
You tell yourself and then despise
The darkness of the life you live;
You hate your soul and can’t forgive.
Oscar Wilde was easily one of the finest brains ever to grace the British Isles. Not only was his mastery of the English language supreme, but his clarity of thought and ability to gauge the ‘reasons behind the reasons’ was second to none.
Of course I cannot agree with Wilde’s conclusions, that no external source could be the basis for the authority of the individual, “But whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must be nothing external to me. Its symbols must be of my own creating.” These words point (as put perfectly by Imogen Black) “to an existentialist crisis, a man coming to realise that he has nothing but his own perceptions for truth who has made a god of himself.” Yet at the same time, despite this relativising of truth, which the Christian worldview cannot abide, I’m not sure that Wilde’s preferred vision of religion was so far removed from the kind of religion that Christ actually produced. Today I came upon this gem:
When I think of religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Everything to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. (De Profundis, letter written in 1905)
If we unpack this statement, it proves to be quite revealing. Let us examine each statement in turn and compare it to the religion imagined by Jesus
The Wildian ‘ritual of agnosticism’, born out of the general existential crisis common to all humanity, at the final analysis is simply a yearning for the kind of religion that only Jesus Christ provides.
In the end, we see that Oscar Wilde’s desired “alternative religion for the faithless” is actually describing the Christian faith. Perhaps he realised this before he died, perhaps not. The question is: do you?
I watched “The Invention of Lying” a few months ago and didn’t really know what to make of it at the time. Of course it goes without saying that I’m a huge fan of Ricky Gervais’ comic genius so it was inevitable that I would find the film fairly amusing and clever at times (although not as good as “Ghost Town”)… but the film also clearly had a strong agenda; what to make of its final message?
Now that I’ve had a bit of time to reflect, it seems that the only conclusion I can come to is that the premise of the film is not actually very inventive. Ironic.
So what is the premise? Gervais makes no attempt to hide the fact that the film is based on one main idea: that the stories behind religion in general and the Christian faith in particular are little more than ‘invented’ fairytales. The conclusion is that even though the reality of this world amounts to nothing more than the bare facts of science, people actually need made up stories (aka. ‘lies’) to give them hope, meaning, excitement, purpose and expectation. (Another subtext was that fat guys need this kind of world, that goes beyond the bare facts of science, or else they would have no hope of getting beautiful women – but I guess that was just part of Gervais’ brilliantly self-deprecating humour!).
In the context of the film, the ‘fairytale’ that Gervais’ character makes up which signals the advent of lying is basically a religious system concerning a place in the sky ruled by a man in the sky who can provide a hope beyond death. This is what the people buy into with the result that it creates excitement, gives him power and initially leads to a more pleasant atmosphere, although this eventually breaks down (the implication being that belief in God is not actually beneficial for society or human flourishing).
Ultimately the thing that disturbed me most about the premise of the film was not so much the thinly veiled dig at Christianity; that is not really a novelty anymore. Neither was it the fact that Gervais has typically misrepresented most of the essential facts of Christianity; ideas such as God creating the world already full of evil and suffering and Christianity as a system of works-based salvation are completely alien to the Bible yet this too was to be expected from an atheist lobby that knows only how to caricature and misrepresent Christianity…
The message that disturbed me most was rather the one which emerged out of Gervais’ own secular framework. It was the message that promoted a ‘correct’ picture of reality where there are no (ultimate) happy endings and neither is there any real and ultimate justice, as in these ‘fairy stories’. In order to comfort his dying mother, Gervais’ character invents heaven, giving her the hope of a future, a purpose for her existence and a happy ending. Even though he ‘knows’ that there is no such thing as heaven and that her death will swallow up any meaning her life ever had, he retreats to the use of made up fairytales to help her in her final hour.
There are three problems here for the secularist:
The fundamentalist secular gospel – that there are no ultimate happy endings – might be coherent with the facts of science. But Gervais, in pointing us to a reality beyond the bare facts of science only ends up reinforcing the plausibility of the Christian narrative.
So how does the plausibility of the Christian narrative lead to faith in the Christian God?? And I will close with this.
C.S.Lewis put it best when he wrote that in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, “myth became fact”… All the myths and fairytales of human history could only ever have been seen as dim shadows and uncertain estimations of the nature and workings of the ultimate being who must be both benevolent and just. Yet in the person and work of Jesus Christ, the expectations of these myths were finally realised. The cross sees the ultimate dispensation of justice as well as the ultimate bestowal of love. Each person who trusts in this God is guaranteed by the resurrection of Christ that their relationship with the ‘man in the sky’ is assured. How? Because the ‘man in the sky’ became a man of flesh and died to redeem us and the world.
The film ends up being not very inventive at all, since the dreary, unimaginative world of bare facts is put forward as the real one and the world of myth, meaning and purpose as the false one.