Trolling the God Blogs

When all other inspirations for blog topics fail, a tour of the God blogs is sure to provide some pithy observation or two worthy of Duckian deconstruction. And today does not disappoint. From the New Attitude conference, via Adrian Warnock's blog, I found this gem:

Who killed Jesus?

The Father. The Father killed the Son. Feel God's love for you revealed in this verse. He crushed his son. For you. He crushed Him. He bruised him. He punished him. He disfigured him. He crushed him. With all of the righteous wrath that we deserved. That's what the Father did.

So great was his love for sinners like you and me.

If any single quote could encapsulate why I am not a Christian, this one, by C J Mahaney, has to be it. The sheer, hideous inanity of a god that demands a blood sacrifice from an innocent in repayment for the sins of the guilty is beautifully captured here. It is a theology that captures the worst aspects of an archaic moral worldview, one that promulgates the barbaric idea of blood guilt and blood sacrifice. Modern Christians gasp in horror at those cultures that carried on the cultural values of this mindset, such as the Aztecs and their human sacrifices, or the honor killings practiced by many Islamic cultures today. Yet their central theological mystery, the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of Christ, is premised on the very same archaic view of honor and morality as these throwback cultures represent. I don't get it. How does a modern Christian, brought up in an ethos if personal responsibility and individual dignity spout sentiments like the above without a hint of moral vertigo?

Some days I wax paranoid about the impending Christian theocracy, as does Andrew Sullivan. But then I read a Christian blog like Evangelical Outpost and realize that the chances of all the competing Christian sects ever pulling together a consensus government are between nil and next to nil. In this instance, Joe Carter is debating with his readers whether Andrew Sullivan is a Christian:

I believe my friend Tim Challies has inadvertently created just such an arbitrary and unnecessary division between believers. Following the reasoning he outlines in a recent post, for example, he would have no legitimate warrant for considering me to be a “Christian.”

In his post, Tim uses my remark about Andrew Sullivan being a “brother in Christ” as the catalyst for working out what he believes on the issue of whether we have an “obligation to assume” that someone is a Christian. Tim is a sharp thinker and while I don’t always agree with him, I’m invariably impressed by his attempts to think critically about matters of theology. Unlike my posts, which meander and stumble from premise to conclusion, Tim’s essays tend to be systematic and move directly to the point.

This precision, though, can make it easy to overlook the deeper, hidden implications of his arguments. For example, I was initially bothered by the fact that his conclusion left us with no obligation to assume that any Catholic is a Christian. Only later did I realize that his conclusion left us with no obligation to assume that any Southern Baptist is a Christian either.

The central premise is found in his claim that:

…in order to assume that a profession of faith is genuine, the person must attach himself to a "true" church. How we define a true and false church has been the source of much dialogue and disagreement in the centuries since the Reformation, but I am inclined to agree with the three marks proposed during the Reformation and which are summarized in the Belgic Confession, Article 29, which says "The marks by with the true Church is known are these: If the pure doctrine of the gospel is preaching therein; if she maintains the pure administration of the sacraments as instituted by Christ; if church discipline is exercised in punishing of sin; in short, if all things are managed according to the pure Word of God, all things contrary thereto rejected, and Jesus Christ acknowledged as the only Head of the Church."

Tim concludes that “When a person has made a profession of faith and is a member in good standing of a true church, as defined by these three marks: the preaching of the Gospel, the administration of the sacraments and the exercise of church discipline, I believe that we are under an obligation to assume that this person's faith is genuine.”

While I consider the Belgic Confession to be a magnificent creed and a beautiful exposition of doctrine, I also believe it to be significantly flawed. In order to understand the requirement for “pure administration of the sacraments” we have to look at Article 34: The Sacrament of Baptism:

For this reason we believe that anyone who aspires to reach eternal life ought to be baptized only once without ever repeating it-- for we cannot be born twice. Yet this baptism is profitable not only when the water is on us and when we receive it but throughout our entire lives.

For that reason we detest the error of the Anabaptists who are not content with a single baptism once received and also condemn the baptism of the children of believers. We believe our children ought to be baptized and sealed with the sign of the covenant, as little children were circumcised in Israel on the basis of the same promises made to our children.

A “true church” is, according to this confession, one that adheres to infant baptism as a “pure administration of the sacrament” of baptism. That means me, John Piper, Al Mohler, and the 16 million members of the SBC are apparently spending our Sundays at a “false church.” (The same could be said for Tim himself since he is a “Reformed believer attending a Baptist church.”)

It's been 2000 years, and Christians still can't agree on who is a Christian. Such theological axle wrapping by men who share a common culture, language and faith is not a good sign for the prospects of national, let alone international ecumenical unity. This is a faith, after all, that slaughtered thousands of its own over doctrinal disputes. As Skipper rightly pointed out on another occasion, Christian sectarianism is the greatest guarantor of religious freedom that we could hope for.

And lastly this discussion of what Christianity has to learn from Islam by John Mark Roberts on the One True God Blog:

It is easy enough to see the weaknesses of contemporary Islam, but in the battle for hearts and minds globally we need to ask a harder question. What are the strengths of Islam? Islam is to be commended for holding the line against the naturalism that so infects much of the modern West. Some religious liberals act as if religion is the frosting on the cake. The cake is made by secularists who allow World Council of Churches Christians to decorate and elaborate on a structure that is fundamentally hostile to religion. Islam has not been foolish enough to fall for that!

And how would Mr Roberts "hold the line" against the infection of naturalism? Treat the teaching of science as a heresy? Much of what we celebrate as the success of the West over the past 500 years can be attributed to the development of a healthy naturalist outlook on the world and its phenomena. Our technological society would not be possible without it. Islamic society, with its technological backwardness, its religious obscurantism and its superstition, is a direct result of its "holding the line" on naturalism, yet Roberts imagines that we could have somehow acheived our success with our eyes planted firmly in the Bible and nowhere else.

Second, Islam has not given into more radical forms of feminism. The West, and Christianity in general, is to be commended for advancing the truth that women and men are equal in substance before the eyes of God and should be equal in the eyes of the law when the relevant fact is being human. However, some Western folk have gone further and attempted to reduce the differences in function between men and women. To pretend that men and women are the same in terms of calling is not sensible and flies in the face of centuries of experience. Men and women do not experience the world the same way and the reasonable man standard (as the law is beginning to recognize) is not the same as the reasonable woman standard. Western society in a post-Christian era seems good at producing lawyers and doctors but bad at making mothers and fathers. However, there exist millions of moms and dads in traditional Christian communities that are defying this trend. Fessio is right to point to homeschool moms as the hope of the future. He will be interested to know that I have been calling home schools the new monasticism since the early nineties!

Crediting Islam for not giving in to the excesses of feminism is like crediting Jack the Ripper for not repressing his anger. The Islamic model of gender relations is so far beyond the pale of civilized behavior, so much worse than even the worst excesses of modern feminism, that to see any positive light in regard to it is sheer lunacy and moral blindness.

Moslem are free to preach in London not because of secularism, but because Christianity developed there. The good ideas of the Middle Ages, became the better polity of the Victorian era. The bad ideas of the Victorians, including their smug colonialism, were slowly giving way to better ideas at the dawn of the twentieth century if secularism had not short circuited their development. The long struggle against Darwin, Marx, and Freud distracted us from being able to make further progress. However, even in that fight we stayed true, for the most part, to the theological lessons learned. Christians did not kill Darwin, but let him live in great comfort. We may not have liked Freud’s views, but did not declare a jihad against psychology. Instead, we (for the most part) listened, learned and argued. We had created a culture that made it possible for Darwin to attack the views of ninety percent of the English world and we stuck to the liberty even when we did not like the result.

The struggle against Darwin prevented further Christian progress? Boy, I'm a master of excuses, but even I would count that as a stretch. What is he talking about? Roberts wants to simultaneously see the modern West as the highest expression of Christian truth, while denigrating those secular influences that played a major part in enabling the advances that he applauds, and pointing to the barbarities of the past as represented by Islamic culture, which is the direct antithesis of everything the modern West is, as a source for moderating influences on supposed secular excesses. I've not read a more confusing worldview by a supposed proponent of Western values in some time.