Huffington Post on the book of Job;

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-l-watts/abusive-theology-oklahoma_b_3322696.html?utm_hp_ref=religion

ugh, I’m not sure which is worse, Piper’s perspicuous presumption that God is uses tornados to punish the wicked or Joel Watts fundamentalist interpretations of scripture propounded under the guise of liberal Christianity.

First off there’s Piper who assumes, rather arrogantly, that God is yet again using the forces of nature to punish people. Of course Piper uses examples from scripture to justify this assumption. But examples of God displaying this sort of behavior doesn’t lead to the conclusion that God will continue punishing people in the same way, unless you assume, as Piper does, that God is predictable as He predicts every course of action and must do so according to His sovereign will. Nor does this justify the assertion that every natural disaster is an instance of God’s wrath (or that He has done so in any particular instance of a natural disaster).

Now for Joel Watt’s. This is the first I’ve read of Joel (as I don’t read Huff Post that often), but so far, I’m not impressed.

"There is serious doubt as to the originality of the prologue and the epilogue, as such genres as the protestations of the innocent are found in other literary groups of the time but absent the narrative structures.”

Clearly being the liberal “scholar” that he is Joel has chosen to not give any charity to the Biblical text and practically assume that a significant portion of Job has been added to the original text. As to Joel’s claim that Job’s epilogue and prologue were probably not in the original see the book; “Book of Job” by Andrew B. Davidson; here. In any case, Watts would do well to explain why a slight difference in genre between the beginning, end and body of Job lends serious doubt to their authenticity, as the entirety of his later points rests on this assumption.

"If you strip away Jewish and Christian interpretations along with the non-original narrative features of the Book of Job you are left with a story of a man who is struck with complete misery for no reason, afraid to cry out to his god because the same God may inflict more harm. What is more abusive than a God who only shows up to inflict more harm?”

Ok, first things first, Watt’s needs to make up his mind what he is going to argue. At one point he wants to critique Piper and conservative Christianity for believing in a sadistic God, but then to prove that he asks that we take away all context and Christian interpretations of Job to see that the God Job really believed in was abusive and evil. Yah that doesn’t work. If the author wants to show that Christians like Piper believe in an evil God and use Job as evidence of that assertion, then he needs to show how, on Piper’s interpretation, God is evil. The author could also cast doubt on the authenticity of the Bible by expounding on his argument that sections of Job are forgeries but trying to do both turns this article into an unfocused mess.

Furthermore, Joel points out that the idea that God would punish or put people through suffering at all demonstrates that Piper’s God has issues. This argument from outrage doesn’t hold much weight when emotions are put aside. Watt’s fails to question the underlying assumption here that the vast majority of people are innocent. Who says? By what standard? It seems to come to Watt’s secular conclusion we must assume first a secular and not a Christian standard of morality (as long as you don’t hurt others you shouldn’t be hurt yourself). If Watt’s wants to attack the Christian view of morality, fine, but he needs to do so first if his argument from suffering is going to hold any water.

Watt’s also mentions the classic “angry God only appeased through strict obedience” notion. Again this pulls on modern sentiments of being suspicious of authority. But Watt’s also fails to support the assumption that God has no right to punish us. He wants a God who lets us live the way we want to live but give us everything our hearts desire, and to be a cuddly teddy bearish sort of God. Any idea of God that carries any sense of justice is automatically cut down to a tyrannical dictator. Now I do agree with Watts that character’s like Piper do tend to think that they have a special connection to God through which they receive revelation and instruction and that this is unbiblical and downright silly, I also fail to see how, if Christians are right about everyone being corrupted towards wickedness by sin God would be unjust or evil in demanding strict obedience, especially when, according to Christians, that same God died for our sins and offers us grace to defeat our sin and obey Him fully. This applies both to Job and to Pastor’s like Piper.

Ultimately all Christians and non-Christians are forced to make a choice, is God a malevolent manipulator bent on sending as many people to hell as He can, or does He have our best interests at heart? Is it the case that we are evil and God is good? Or are we good and God is evil? A case can be made for both, yet many assume the former over the latter (I can’t imagine why).

Also see this article for a related critique of Job: http://christianthinktank.com/aecb.html

Alpha and Omega Ministries on Molinism

http://www.aomin.org/aoblog/?itemid=4456

"The reason for having "middle knowledge" in the Molinistic scheme of things is a view that what a creature would do in any given situation is neither a matter of God's choice nor a matter of absolute necessity. In other words, God cannot (according to the Molinist) decide what man would do in any given circumstance, he can simply decide whether or not to let the circumstance arise.”

No thats not what Molinism is. I have seen this mischaracterization time and time again, how many times do I have to say it? For one thing Molinism is not like scrabble, where there God is restricted to a single collection of letters where He logically could create other letters and use them but is cannot for the sake of our freedom. On Molinism, God could have decided and can decide what man will do in any circumstance. Molinism operates on the assumption that God has chosen to give human beings free will (in a libertarian sense). Furthermore, the counterfactuals of man’s free will that God knows about includes every possible free action done in any possible circumstance. God, as calvinists generally admit, cannot do the logically impossible, so He could not simply “create new tiles” according to Molinism.

"In Calvinism, God also decides what the tiles will be. So, one might reasonably conclude, in Calvinism God's omnipotence is more expansive than in Molinism, because it extends also to the free choices of free creatures. It seems as though the Molinist's only answer is to assert that if God determines what the creature's choices will be, then those choices aren't really free.”

Yet again, Molinism doesn’t require one to believe that God couldn’t have decided what we would do in a given situation, it only requires that one hold that God could not determine what we do and still give us freedom of the will as such a feat would be logically incoherent. Unless the author proposes that God can do the logically impossible, I fail to see how Calvinism presents God as “more omnipotent” than Molinism does. The only way I can think of is by denying libertarian free and soft-compatibilism and holding to hard compatibilism which would allow God to determine our every action and still give us freedom. If this is the case it is a minor point indeed, especially since, again, Calvinists assume that God in His sovereignty must have absolute control over every event, atom and agent in the universe.

“… ultimately it comes down to a question of whether a will - in order to be free - must have an ability that it never, ever uses - the ability to do the contrary. This rationale seems to be what drives the engine of Molinism, and while many people accept this rationale, you'll never find it in Scripture.”

This bit is confusing, the ability to commit or not commit an action can never be fully “used” in the sense of making the choice to do something and not do something at the same time, that would be incoherent. The whole point of having free will is to have the capacity to do one thing or another with the determining factor being the agents will, it is not, as Calvinists seem to presume to have a desire to do one thing or another, with the determining factor being whatever or whoever controls our desires.

Corporate Election;

here. It seems a corporate view of predestination solves the problems involved in Calvinism as well as Molinism. It maintains God’s sovereignty while allowing for libertarian free will.

Reformed Theology?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNe9n5me8sg

This video gives a good representation of at least some arguments for Calvinism and reformed thought. Two arguments common to this video, among many others will be dealt with below.

The first is given by Charles Spurgeon, who essentially argues that if we freely chose to be saved we would have something to boast about. We would have contributed something to our salvation. Now the traditional Arminian response, to my knowledge, has been that God gives us grace to choose. We cannot boast in our choosing God because God gave us that ability in the first place. But Spurgeon seems to attempt to respond to this by saying that if that is true, why is it that you responded positively to God’s calling but others did not? Something must have been better in you for you to choose God while others chose death. I am not convinced by this response however. If Arminians are right and God has given us the ability to choose Him or choose death as a part of His common grace, then it seems that it is not something in us that chooses God, but the grace in us that has allowed us to. Thus we are not better than someone who has failed to respond to God’s calling, as that choice was allotted to them by God as well. On top of this, making a choice as complex as choosing what to commit our lives to can hardly be a matter of boasting. When it comes to the intellect, a man may choose to be an atheist and be perfectly rational in doing so because the information, as he sees it, seems to be best explained by atheism. I could not boast, therefore that I am of a superior intellect than the atheist simply because it turned out that God exists and I, as a theist, was correct in my belief. Thus it seems that reformed theologians oversimplify the issue and straw man the Arminian position.

This leads me to a second argument, closely related to the first that if God had given us grace to freely choose Him or not, His grace would be ineffectual. This is put in the way that if God died for everyone’s sins, the fact that not everyone is saved is proof that Christ failed. This is a case of simple equivocation. To claim that God gave us grace to freely choose to accept Him as our savior, or not, does not require us to believe that God died for everyone’s sins in a strictly penal substitutionary manner. It could simply be that, as Mark Driscoll (among other theologians) argues, Christ died as a sacrifice that was sufficient for all, but effectual only for some and that Christ’s death allotted common grace for everyone to be able to choose to follow Him, or not. Thus this argument holds no water.

You’ll note from the second half of the vid, that John Piper repeatedly states that our fallen state requires God to force a change in us that immediately makes us changed. He puts as it took Christ dying on the cross to give us irresistible grace to save us. Ironically, this seems to fly in the face of Calvinists emphasis on God’s sovereignty, is Piper suggesting that God is incapable of making His grace resistible or giving us grace that allows us to choose between Him and death? If so, does this not put a severe restriction on God’s power and Lordship?

Christian Hedonism: Pipers Perspicuous Presumptions

John Piper is well known for his view on the worship of God he has coined, “Christian Hedonism.” He states his view quite clearly as; “God is most  glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.” This seems rather uncontroversial, but Piper doesn’t leave it at that. He continues by stating that all of our actions are motivated by pain and pleasure. He points out that Blaise Pascal stated that, “all men seek happiness.” To top it all off Piper claims that the Bible doesn’t condemn people for seeking happiness, but for seeking it in the wrong places.

The great presumption of Pipers Christian Hedonism is that he equates the bi-conditional; if and only if we are most satisfied in God then He is most glorified in us, with the idea that we only are most satisfied in God when we seek pleasure from God. It is this presumption that I have issue with. For one thing scripture does warn about the emptiness of seeking pleasure and making happiness our ultimate goal. Ecclesiastes 2 describes Solomon’s seeking after all things including pleasure from worship, from riches, from women, from hard work and achievement but did not find meaning. He sought wisdom and knowledge but still did not find what he was looking for. In Ecclesiastes 12 he comes to his conclusion that we must obey God and deny ourselves to find meaning and hope. Note he does not say we should seek pleasure from God, he simply says to obey God.

Christ echoes this mentality in his life, death and resurrection. He denied Himself constantly, obeyed God, suffered and was shamed more than most, and sought not his own happiness but the happiness of others. Christ’s end goal was clearly not to be happy but to save those He created.

Philosophers have long noted this paradox of hedonism. By explicitly seeking pleasure we become miserable. The only way to find fulfillment and meaning in life is to have a worthy purpose, challenges to overcome, to make sacrifices and to learn from mistakes. This is what Piper misses. We do not seek God for the pleasure He brings us, that is our old nature speaking. Our old nature desires only happiness for its own sake. Our new nature in Christ desires the happiness of others and God for their own sake. Satisfaction in God is and was always meant to be a by-product of this pursuit. To make it the centerpiece of what it means to worship and glorified God then, is a serious mistake.

Other good critiques of “Christian Hedonism”:

http://www.thefaithfulword.org/againsthedonism.html
http://philosophicalorthodoxy.blogspot.com/2008/08/why-i-think-john-pipers-christian.html

A philosophical explanation of ethical hedonistic theories;

http://www.iep.utm.edu/hedonism/

The Importance of the Principle of Charity

One major problem with atheists, theists and people of all persuasions on the internet is that they often ignore the principle of charity. Essentially the principle of charity involves approaching a piece of literature with the base assumption that they are rational and competent. This approach involves being suspicious of irrational interpretations of literature and outright rejecting those when a rational interpretation is available. Many atheists do not employ this approach to the Bible at all but rather seem to assume that the authors of the Bible were delusional psychopaths hallucinating and worshiping a sadistic deity. This approach is a poor one because it precludes the conclusion that the authors of the Bible were stupid and or insane by assuming it from the outset.

An example of this error can be seen in Proverbs 26:4-5 which states, “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him. Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.” Sites like this; http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/pr/26.html readily claim that this verse is an absurdity and that because of verses like this the Bible should be thrown out as a stupid book. Unfortunately, any sort of literary criticism from philosophers reviewing the works of ancient thinkers to modern school teachers grading papers of students could not function given this approach. Imagine if you turned a paper in and your teacher gave you an F because he assumed that you erred in your essay when he simply misunderstood what you were saying.

In the case of Proverbs 26:4-5 the apparent  contradiction can readily be explained when the passage is interpreted as a dilemma. The author is simply pointing out that getting in a heated discussion with a fool is a lose lose situation, if you answer the fool you look like an idiot, if you don’t answer the fool, the fool looks wise. If the irrational interpretation of this passage is to be favored reasons must be given as to why such an interpretation should be preferred.

Excerpts and commentary on “Misreading Scripture With Western Eyes” Part 1

I hope to make this a long series on at least a dozen examples of the hermeneutical brilliance of this book by Randolph Richards and Brandon O’Brian. “Misreading Scripture With Western Eyes” is essentially a book that wishes to correct a major error in modern evangelical hermeneutics. That being, Christians today believe that the Bible was written to us and that we should read it as if it was written in   21st century American society. In reality the culture the Bible was written in had a completely different perspective than we do today, and when we read scripture, we must do so while keeping this perspective in mind. We do the same with language, we don’t read a verse in isolation, nor do we pretend the Bible was written in english. It is actually a really curious thing why so many scholars and theologians put such a heavy emphasis on linguistic analysis of the text today, I may even write a book on it one day.

That aside, I would like to give an example from the book that demonstrates how important an in depth study of ancient cultures is to reading the Bible.

“I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm — neither hot nor cold — I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” (Rev. 3:15-16)

This was spoken by Christ to the church at Laodicea and those who are even somewhat familiar with the Bible will know how it has been interpreted. In our western eyes we see this “either/or” statement as a dichotomy between hot, or positive, and cold, or negative. Thus to be hot is to be “on fire” for Christ and to be cold is to clearly reject Christ. Lukewarm, on the other hand, is sitting on the fence. Its interesting to note also how our society seems to condemn indecision as well. This, however, is significantly different from how Laodiceans would have interpreted this passage.

As Dr. Richards points out, two cities near Laodicea, Hierapolis and Colossae were famous for there fresh water springs. Hierapolis had astonishing geological formations produced by hot water springs. Such springs, have formed white calcium deposits which appear to flow down the mountains on which the springs reside. You can see pictures of these springs here; http://www.marmaris.org/things-to-do/pamukkale/. Colossae, by contrast, had cold water springs, which were equally remarkable. Laodicea, however, had no springs, and had to import water from these two cities. But, by the time the water got there, it had lost its remarkable qualities, leaving the citizens of Laodicea with all the lukewarm water they could drink. With this in mind, Christ’s exhortation of the Laodiceans becomes clear. Their discipleship was unremarkable, it was neither hot nor cold, just lukewarm. Thus the lessons which should be taught about this passage, it seems to me, is that we need to be careful not to just be average run of the mill Christians but outstanding in our discipleship. We should not be teaching that this passage means to tell us that God would rather us reject Him, than be a lukewarm Christian. That’s not what the text is saying.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that the Bible elsewhere doesn’t teach what modern interpreters generally think Revelations 3:15-16 teaches, which leads me to ask the question; do you the reader believe that being an undevoted Christian is worse than not being Christian at all? Why or why not?