Since Rob Bell wrote his new book, Love Wins, there has been quite an incredible amount of conversation about heaven and hell (which I conclude is a good thing). For many Christians though, this book also became the reason to label Rob as a heretic.

So what exactly constitutes heresy? I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I found the following list elsewhere on the internet:

1. Denying the divinity of Jesus Christ.[ Jehovah's Witness]
2. Denying the virgin birth of Jesus Christ.
3. Denying the incarnation.
4. Denying the doctrine of the Trinity [one GOD, three persons].
5. Denying the human nature of Jesus Christ [one person, two natures]
6. Denying the necessity of the death of Jesus Christ as atonement for our sins.
7. Denying the efficacy of the atoning death of Jesus Christ.
8. Denying the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.
9. Denying the visible return of Jesus Christ in the Power and Glory of the Godhead.
10. Denying the bodily resurrection of all the dead.
11. Teaching that there are multiple god's in the universe. [Mormonism]
12. Teaching there are multiple ways to heaven (other than through Jesus) {I added this one}

Now of course I agree with this entire list, but here’s the thing – as far as I can tell – so does Rob Bell. What Rob is saying is that we might not be aware of all the possible ways in which someone can “come to Christ”. He brought up the OT, apostle Paul, (others too) and suggested that none of them ever said a sinner’s prayer. Check out this quote from page 115:

“Will everybody be saved, or will some perish apart from God forever because of their choices?
Those are questions, or more accurately, those are tensions we are free to leave fully intact. We don’t need to resolve them or answer them because we can’t, and so we simply respect them, creating space for the freedom that love requires.”

Basically he is saying, “you don’t know who’s going to heaven or hell, so quit being judgmental and starting acting in love.” He then goes on to suggest that people might get a 2nd chance after death (something I don’t personally believe), but that you could continue to reject Christ eternally. Does that make him a heretic? One of the damned? “Farewell Rob Bell”? Where exactly is the line you cross that makes your heresy damnable? If you choose to deny #2 or #8 on the above list, is that enough?

The average Christian is not an avid reader of philosophy. Even fewer Christians would bother to read atheist books, blogs or articles, and unfortunately sometimes we miss things that should be grabbing our attention.

One of my heroes is Dr. William Lane Craig who is probably the most feared Christian apologist in atheist circles. Richard Dawkins (who wrote The God Delusion – a NY Times best seller) has refused to debate him so many times it’s really embarrassing to their side. Finally on Friday night at Notre Dame, Sam Harris (author of The Moral Landscape and another giant in the atheist field) agreed to debate Dr. Craig regarding whether you can have objective moral values and duties if there is no God.

You probably didn’t hear about this in church, none of your friends were talking about it, it wasn’t going to make the news anywhere – but I can tell you – in the apologist/atheist/philosophy circles this was a big deal.

Dr. Craig absolutely annihilated Sam Harris on this. Seriously – it wasn’t even close. Sam finally abandoned the topic altogether and started trashing the God of the Bible, the problem of evil, etc – none of which had anything to do with the topic at hand. What was so awesome was that Dr. Craig knew he could not lose this debate, reasoned that Sam would just use it as a platform to trash the Bible, and pulled out a copy of a book called Is God a Moral Monster by Paul Copan and suggested everyone read it if they wanted answers to what Sam was saying. He was then able to say that none of this had anything to do with what we were debating, reinstated both premises in the argument and easily triumphed.

We need more people like William Lane Craig that understand physics, logic, theology, and academia every bit as well as our atheist counterparts do. How many kids at Notre Dame left that debate with a renewed faith in God? How many atheists, agnostics and enemies of Christ are doubting their position after such a thrashing? All I know is that I was personally blessed watching that debate and found myself thanking God repeatedly for Dr. Craig.

My community group read the book “Radical” by David Platt and one of the challenges in the book was to commit to read through the entire Bible in a year. It’s been awhile since I’ve done so, so I thought it would be good to accept the challenge and read the entire Bible again.

Reading the Bible this quickly is difficult for me as I always come across things I’d like to dig deeper into, but nonetheless must keep going. I’m way past this part in my reading but I cannot get Genesis 22 out of my head. I was always taught that God will never ask you to do anything that contradicts his Word in the Bible. If that is true, how do we reconcile that God told Abraham to kill his son? If I told anyone that I have heard directly from God that I was to harm my daughter, all of you would rush to tell me I had definitely not heard from God. Yet Abraham had heard from God. He didn’t tell anyone what he was going to do because everyone would have said he was delusional or crazy.

What an amazing example of “obedience”, “faith”, and “belief”. If Abraham had tried to kill Isaac simply because God told him to, that would only constitute obedience (this is what I see the church trying to accomplish and it doesn’t work). To have faith requires the possibility that you may be proven wrong. To believe something is to have an assurance that you are right. So if Abraham truly believed God would not have him kill Isaac - that would really not be a true test of his faith. Instead, he believes he must kill him (because God told him to) but at the same time have faith that Isaac will not die (or at least be brought back to life)!

This blows my mind – Abraham is the man.

Most of you know I try to go out and get a beer with at least once a month with my neighbor who is an agnostic. He and I have become very close friends. He is a screaming, bed-wetting, left-winged, socialist democrat and I’m about as far to the right as you can get since I’m a Libertarian.

Last night was our planned night to go out. He called me and said that he would be a little late since his wife (a social worker) had something come up at the last minute and would tell me about it when we went out.

As it turns out, a 13 year old girl was wandering down MY STREET. One of my other neighbors was out walking and saw this girl; she approached her and the girl told her that she had just escaped from her family who was abusing and raping her. This neighbor took her back to her house and called….guess who….my friend’s wife who is the social worker. As it turns out, she had walked miles and miles trying to get away from her family and just happened to walk down my street.

So I look at my friend and say, “Why are you sitting here with me? Don’t you need to be home consoling your wife and making sure she’s ok after dealing with something so evil?” He looked quizzically at me and said “This is what she deals with every single day. You think she’s more shocked because one of them wandered over to our street?”

So the non-Christian social worker who makes $28K per year and already had 40 similar cases now gets to deal with one more disgusting case. I exclaim “that’s outrageous!” His reply? “You voted for Nikki Haley (tea party/Republican governor of SC). She’s announced she’s going to cut funding even further, so I guess (wife’s name)’s job will just have to get a little tougher.”

Now the bad news….ready? My friend told me the police will come and most likely take the child back to her family. The testimony of a child isn’t worth much unless it can be substantiated.

I’m a true political libertarian. I don’t believe that someone’s need gives them a claim to someone else’s property or time. They do however, have a claim on us via our claim as Christians. Where is the body of Christ? Why don’t we scream for justice for the least among us? How can we just pretend that girl is not really there? She’s there! She exists! What in the HELL are we doing?

Craig Gross is the founder of xxxchurch and witnesses to porn stars at porn conventions. I have read his book "The Gutter". What do you guys think of this?

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/09/07/my-take-jesus-loves-porn-stars/

Since I grew up in the Baptist church, we never really discussed how God relates to us or God’s providence in general. Baptists generally just don’t discuss it. I’ve had many discussions with other Christians in the past, but never really took the time to exegetically research my position.

I spent the last 2 months reading 3 books in the following order: Why I am not a Calvinist by Jerry Walls and Joseph Dongell, The God Who Risks: A Theology of Divine Providence by John Sanders, and Why I am not an Arminian by Robert A. Peterson and Michael D. Williams. I prayed often while reading this material and you need your Bible handy to do constant research and verify the passages quoted.
I could write a huge lengthy blog post about all of this as it is very fresh on my mind – but I won’t. I will quickly outline what my findings were as follows:

CALVINISM

PROS:
1. Completely explains God’s foreknowledge and election because he preordained it.

2. Easily explains how God can know the future with certainty (prophecy)

3. Very consistent theology that has few logical holes (philosophically sound). I will admit that when I first undertook this project I expected to be able to attack it from a philosophical standpoint but my respect for the position has changed greatly.

CONS:
1. Predestination to hell seems unavoidable to me. I mean individual predestination to hell before the world was ever created, before Adam ever sinned. I’ve not seen a sound logical argument that explains it otherwise.

2. Must define “free will” in the compatibulist sense (this is a huge difference). HOWEVER - when I read Scripture sometimes I feel like this is exactly what I see in the unsaved.

3. Makes God the author of evil (I read lots of attempts to remove the blame for evil from God but they really seem like very weak arguments to me).

4. Makes passages that say God wants everyone to be saved seem disingenuous at best. How can God want everyone to be saved, yet make 100% certain that some people (by His sovereign choice) will not? Calvin argued that there must be 2 wills in God. I’m not on board.

5. Must label all passages of God changing His mind or experiencing sorrow, etc as God “talking baby talk” to us (or “lisping” to use Calvin’s term). I find this particular point distressing. If God sometimes “baby talks” to us and sometimes does not, how do we determine which is happening?

ARMINIANISM

PROS:
1. “Free will” defined in the libertarian sense (common use of the term)

2. God is not the author of evil

3. God truly would like everyone to choose Him but will not force them to do so.

CONS:
1. More difficult to determine how God can know the future with certainty. Simple foreknowledge has its issues (especially with answered prayer) as does Molinism. I did not realize this problem until I undertook this study.

2. Must explain terms regarding election and predestination as corporate not individual despite some passages seeming to be very individual (Pharoah).

3. Must accept doctrine of prevenient grace that is not necessarily provable by Scripture (but many verses can be used to support the idea of the position).

OPEN THEISM (Dynamic Omniscience)
PROS:
1. Ability to easily explain all the Bible texts of God changing His mind, feeling sorrowful, being disappointed, etc.

2. The only theology that truly explains how God can relate to us personally, can answer prayer, responds to us in real time, etc.

CONS:
1. Must accept the idea that God knows all things past and knows all things present but CANNOT know the future with certainty. This is explained by saying the future is not a “thing” to know – it hasn’t happened yet. If people genuinely have free will then knowing exactly what they will do is not possible – it’s like knowing what a square triangle looks like.

2. Difficult to explain prophecy if there is no future. This is explained by saying God will bring it about, but the method of bringing it about remains open. This does explain why prophecies are sometimes very vague.

So where did I end up? About where I started. No theology explains all the Bible passages perfectly harmoniously. God can create any universe He wants. Jesus was God and Jesus certainly limited his power and knowledge while He was here, so God can limit his sovereignty if He wants. Maybe the Baptists are right on this one…..

I’ve been reading The Method and Message of Jesus’ Teaching by Robert H. Stein this month and I’m about 1/3 of the way through. It is not the easiest book to read and it would be better suited for a classroom, not so much for reading on an airplane or lounging in your living room.

Strangely enough, I listened to Andy Stanley’s podcast on Monday from his sermon he did on 1/31 called “Taking Responsibility for your Life: Embrace your responsibility”. Andy said that Jesus’ parables had one central point in each parable – the details of the parable are NOT important and many of them would never happen or might even not be possible. He then went through the parable of the talents and explained all Jesus was trying to say was that you need to leverage what you are given for God, regardless of the amount you are given. He said the fact that the lazy servant hid his talent (gold was Andy’s translation) in the ground is an example of this; no one would hide $300,000 worth of gold in the ground for safekeeping as there were much safer ways of taking care of that gold that were far easier.

This sermon coincided with exactly what I was reading about in the book. The earliest church fathers such as Origen, Augustine, and Tertullian all treated the parables as allegories. For example in the parable of the good Samaritan, the man is walking from Jerusalem to Jericho. Origen said that the man was Adam and that Jerusalem is paradise and Jericho is this world. Martin Luther said Origen’s interpretation was worth “less than dirt” but he had a similar allegorical translation of the same parable. Reading Andy Stanley’s message into this parable – the fact that he was going to Jerusalem to Jericho is irrelevant and he might as well have been going from Manhattan to Brooklyn.

So who’s right? Why did the earliest church fathers read so much into each parable and why does Andy Stanley (and Robert H. Stein for that matter) believe that there is usually only one main point to each parable and that the details might even be irrelevant?

It seems to me that pastors, bloggers, book writers, whoever – can make Jesus say whatever they want by either allegorizing everything about a parable or ignoring the details of the parable.

As for me, I’ve been trying to just lean on the Holy Spirit as I read the Bible personally. I’ve been begging Him to remove preconceived notions and just speak directly into my life and to clear my head of all the “noise” made by others (no matter how well meaning that particular “noise”). The result has been the blessing of a true peace as I read the Scripture – a peace that lets me know that God is huge and no amount of study will ever let me wrap my head around Him. Makes me wonder if my daughter has the right idea when she points at the sky and says “God is way way WAY up there!” and then runs through the yard without a care in the world….