JUSTIFICATION AND JUSTICE: “Mohler and Wallis Debate Justice and the Church.”

Despite the clarity of the concerns (and the accuracy of each side’s worries), I left wondering whether the language of “integral” or “implications” for the relationship of social justice and the gospel is ultimately insufficient to capture the nuanced relationship between social justice and the unique, unrepeatable sacrifice that Christ made on our behalf.

While (with Mohler) the gospel is clearly paramount within the New Testament, it is only intelligible when set against the failure of individuals and societies to act justly toward each other and God as described in the Old Testament. The sacrifice of Jesus solves the problem of our relationship with God and, consequently, the brokenness of our relationship with each other. In the way the Law was given before the gospel, the call to social justice precedes the gospel, but only made possible and intelligible by the gospel.

In other words, the demands of social justice are something more than merely implications of the gospel. They are also conditions that help us see the gospel’s uniqueness, for we bear witness to that shalom inaugurated at the cross. Framing the gospel/justice relationship this way potentially reveals their inter-relationship more accurately than describing justice as a one-directional “implication” of the gospel. It opens the possibility that the church has unique insight into the nature of social justice (Christian ethics) that is not itself the same as the gospel. And this framing avoids making social justice something that is brought into the atonement in ways that potentially undermine its distinctiveness.

Neither this hasty proposal nor the debate between Wallis and Mohler will resolve the question of whether social justice is an essential part of the church’s mission. It was not, of course, intended to. Yet progress is often made by understanding the questions more deeply, and seeing the internal dynamics of an issue with greater clarity. On both respects, last Thursday’s debate was an unquestionable success.

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THEOLOGY QUESTION OF THE DAY: “Do Joel Osteen and I Worship the Same God?”

Let me be serious. I don’t know if Osteen’s God is different than mine. What I do know is that there are characteristics and motivations in his God that are completely opposite of mine. My God allows suffering and pain for His own purpose. My God is a potter, who has sovereign right over His creation. My God does what He will, not what I will. My God is loving, but He is also one of great indignation. My God does love everyone, but He also created a terrible place called Hell for his enemies. My God does not have it high on His agenda for me to be rich (or even pay the bills).

I also know that this theology, while motivational for a time, destroys lives. It builds false expectation. It makes people put their trust in characteristics of God that just do not exist. When these characteristics fail (and they will fail —ever heard of “death”? It is hard to escape no matter how positive your thinking is), then, in these people’s minds, God has failed. I have seen too many people doubt or walk away from the “Jesus” that they created when he failed to heal them of their cancer or when he could not seem to get them a job. But the question is Did they walk away from Jesus or from Daikoku-Sonja (aka Jesus)?

Here is the question: Where does one draw the line? When has ones description of God become so foreign to the biblical God that it should thought of as a different god with the same name? After all, a name does not mean much if that which the name represents does not mirror its true characteristics.

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FAITH & REASON: “Moving Forward the Science & Religion Debate.”

If faith and reason are like two wings of a bird, and if the pursuit of scientific knowledge can help us in our search to know God, then why do we read so much about religion and science being in conflict? As I often tell my students, public debates about many topics related to religion are dominated by extremes. As Rice sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund shows in her book Science Vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think, two of the most outspoken intellectuals in the religion and science debate, Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins, do not fully represent the views of either non-religious or religious scientists.

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A RICHER VIEW OF FREEDOM: “Q&A: Tim Keller on ‘The Meaning of Marriage.’”

One of the paradoxes you talk about is how the commitment of marriage actually produces freedom: the freedom to be truly ourselves, the freedom to be fully known, the freedom to be there in the future for those we love and who love us. Why do you believe that the commitment of marriage is viewed as largely anything but freeing today?

Our culture pits the two against each other. The culture says you have to be free from any obligation to really be free. The modern view of freedom is freedom from. It’s negative: freedom from any obligation, freedom from anybody telling me how I have to live my life. The biblical view is a richer view of freedom. It’s the freedom of—the freedom of joy, the freedom of realizing what I was designed to be.

If you don’t bind yourself to practice the piano for eight hours a day for ten years, you’ll never know the freedom of being able to sit down and express yourself through playing beautiful music. I don’t have that freedom. It’s very clear that to be able to do so is a freeing thing for people, with the diminishment of choice. And since freedom now is defined as all options, the power of choice, that’s freedom from. I don’t think ancient people saw these things as contradictions, but modern people do.

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HAPPY 400^TH BIRTHDAY! “Long Live the King!”

One additional issue is pertinent in relation to the issues Ryken opens up. It concerns the relationship between the KJB as a literary masterpiece and the KJB as the word of God. What, in particular, should be said about those readers who esteem the literary qualities of the KJB but pay no heed to its spiritual message? T. S. Eliot’s dictum in response was unequivocal: “Those who talk of the Bible as a ‘monument of English prose’ are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.” Gordon Campbell in Bible says something similar. When he writes of Mary Wollstonecraft and the many in her train who praise the KJB for its “pure and simple style” but no longer embrace Christian faith, he speculates that “readers who had abandoned belief in God created substitutes to fit God-shaped holes in their spiritual lives.” One of those substitutes, in Campbell’s reckoning, could be reverence for “the works of Shakespeare and the KJV” as “a kind of idolatry.”

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RELIGION & POLITICS: “Occupy movement is largely secular.”

There have been flashes of religious activism, even deeply religious moments, in the protest movement that has spread across the country this past month. Some have suggested that the Occupy camps themselves have some hallmarks of a religious movement, with their all-embracing idealism, daily rituals, focus on something larger than the self.

But as the recent incident involving West suggests, the movement also has served to point out not just the gulf between haves and have-nots in modern America, but between the religious right and not-so-religious left.

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XN PR: “Christianity’s Image Problem.”

Jesus’ PR problem isn’t going away. It’s a problem over two-thousand years old. And no amount of mocking other Christians will solve it. Ironically, the more you strip away Jesus’ modern PR problems, the more you discover the original PR problems Jesus made for himself.

So what box are you in? Are you part of the problem, part of the solution, or part of the peanut gallery, chuckling at passersby? Hey, I know I’ve been all three. I can’t say any of it has helped Jesus’ PR.

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DOES HE HAVE A CHOICE IN THE MATTER? “Cool News of the Day: Pelagius to be rehabilitated?”

But Pelagius has enjoyed something of a comeback these days, with modern Christians often focused on building self-esteem rather than emphasizing the depravity of the soul, and bumper-sticker theology like “Jesus is my best friend” replacing John Edwards’ “sinners in the hands of an angry God” sermons.