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The Life and Legacy of John Calvin

2012-01-19T11:16:00.001-08:00

The Life and Legacy of John Calvin

When pro-reform supporters regained power in the city councils, Calvin was urged to return and continue his work in Geneva. Martin Bucer, the reformer at Strasbourg, was reported to have employed Farel’s earlier strategy: If Calvin refused to resume his ministry he will be acting like Jonah who tried to run away from God! In September 1541, Calvin reluctantly accepted the request and picked up preaching from the Bible passage where he had left off three years ago. Timothy George commented, “In this way Calvin signaled that he intended his life and his theology to be, not a device of his own making, but a responsible witness to the Word of God”.

Click here to read the life and legacy of John Calvin

Love God With All Your Mind

2012-01-08T08:09:00.001-08:00

Love God With All Our Mind

I found out that for many Christians an intellectual understanding of what we believe and why you believe is not important as long as you have an experiential feeling in your heart! The heart is what you used in a relationship with God but the brain is what you used while studying science, computers, economics and history in school. There is a separation of the heart for spiritual stuffs and the mind for secular stuffs like dinosaurs. When that happens, no wonder our faith has so little impact on how we do our work or studies in the world. And no wonder our ‘daily activities’ outside the church has very little to do with God or the gospel.

But the Bible seems to say: “Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world but be transformed by the renewal of your minds”. It doesn’t say “Be transformed by the removal of your minds”! So we don’t need to remove our brains in order to be a Christian. In fact, renewing our mind with God’s truth and kingdom values is crucial to our spiritual growth.

The following is sermon transcript for today's sermon at Klang Presbyterian Church

Love God With All Your Mind

Book Review: Conformed To His Image

2011-09-13T04:28:00.001-07:00

Book Review: Conformed to His Image (Kenneth Boa)

Spirituality is very much woven into the very fabric of life in Asian cultures. Even more modern-minded and upwardly-mobile generation of younger Malaysians gravitate to feng shui paraphernalia, bomoh medicine and yoga gurus for the promises of health, prosperity and self-fulfillment. A similar awareness and hunger for spiritual renewal is also evident amongst Christians, but how is an authentic biblical spirituality any different from that of their surrounding cultures? What are the distinctive marks of Christian spirituality?

In his book Conformed to His Image: Biblical and Practical Approaches to Spiritual Formation, Kenneth Boa seeks to provide a more comprehensive and balanced approach to the spiritual life from a biblical perspective. He describes spirituality as a “Christ-centered orientation to every component of life through the mediating power of the indwelling Holy Spirit” (page 19). It is analogous to a pilgrim’s journey which starts with our embrace of God’s free grace and progresses through lifelong faith and obedience in Christ. Even though the book is designed as a college or seminary text, it is highly readable with chapter overviews, helpful charts and emphasis on practice. There are thought-provoking questions at the end of each chapter intended to lead us to reflect and apply what had been learnt earlier. I would heartily recommend it as an excellent, balanced and indispensable resource for small groups, churches and lay leaders who seek a deeper spirituality as well.

Click on the Scribd Document above for a summary and review of this book

Liberation Theology: The Gospel and Solidarity With The Poor

2010-05-01T00:58:00.000-07:00

Although liberation theology is by no means monolithic, certain broad emphases are discernible in how its practitioners understand the function of theological reflection. In contrast with abstract metaphysics that seem disconnected with ordinary life, liberal theologians stressed that theology should proceed in dialectical relationship with the common experience of oppression and poverty. The theologian is not a disinterested and neutral observer.

Rather his or her commitment to the poor against unjust structures which dehumanize God’s children becomes the particular, concrete context for critical reflection on praxis in light of God’s word. Committed action comes first, reflection follows as a second step. An understanding of liberation theology cannot be acquired by mere learning without actively taking the first step of embarking on its path.

Latin American Liberation Theology: The Gospel & Solidarity With The Poor

Why On Earth Are We Here For?

2009-12-20T00:48:00.000-08:00

Presented a talk on "Faith And Love" at Uniten Christian Fellowship or TECHFLOW on Wednesday with the transcript here.

Below is my assignment on "The Search For Meaning in Life", teasing out the relevance of Ecclesiastes in Malaysian society

“What is the point of living if everything ends in death? Why on earth we are here for?” These perennial questions about the purpose of life are often raised by most sensitive and reflective people around the world. But our socio-cultural context, in different degrees, influences how we answer that question. Many Malaysians of Chinese origin like my friend (let’s call him “Meng”) are descendants of immigrants who had risked the sea, worked hard and lived frugally to strive for a better future. Like many Malaysian Chinese who live in urban centers, Meng inherited his ancestors’ spirit of diligence and resilience. Wealth accumulation and education for his children (so that they in turn could have better opportunities to make a living) become top priorities since these factors provide a measure of security when he can hardly depend on anyone else for support.

If religion is often a projection of human needs/fears as Freud suggested, then perhaps we can interpret the motivation behind his cultural beliefs like consulting feng shui consultants before setting up a business, the Ching Ming practice of burning paper money for the deceased or the Chinese New Year tradition of welcoming the god of prosperity. It may be observed that the functional god in his life is Money. The pursuit of wealth and the dream of striking a lottery jackpot provide his meaning for existing, sense of security and significance. “Seize the day (Carpe Diem)!” is his life slogan. He would say, “Since we will all ultimately end up in the grave, let’s live with gusto, work hard and play hard and squeeze all the fun and excitement out of the ride”.

The psychologist Viktor Frankl suggested that the will to fulfill a meaning in life is the primary motivational force in humanity. Those who lack a meaning worth living for and find an inner void within their hearts experience ‘existential vacuum’. This is a widespread phenomenon in a rampantly industrializing economy where traditional values are lost. Existential vacuum manifests itself in boredom, addiction (i.e. workaholic, alcoholic or substance abuse), despair, the will to money, apathy or unbridled sexual libido. That could be an apt description of many city dwellers like Meng. What relevance would Qoheleth, the writer of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, have for people like him?

I think Qoheleth would present an unpleasant challenge to those whose pursuits focus on earthly goals that we find ‘under the sun’. All these toils, projects and pleasure are ultimately transient, impermanent and ultimately profitless. Although wisdom, wealth and backpacking in exotic places have temporal benefits, we do not take any gain in life with us when we die. We come into this world alone and empty-handed, so shall we leave it. In the long run, there is no net gain. There is “a time to be born and a time to die” (3:2). “We all come to the end of our lives as naked and empty-handed as on the day we were born. We can’t take our riches with us” (5:15). It is like chasing after the wind. Vanity of vanities! Not only do we face the certainty of death, we also face the uncertainties of life. No one knows what would happen to his hard-earned wealth even in this lifetime since injustice (3:16) or bad investment (5:14) could overtake us anytime. The Chinese proverb “Wealth does not pass three generations” has often been proven correct with nepotism, poor management and power struggles occurring in Chinese family enterprises. Who can tell if his successor will not squander his wealth (2:18-23)? While all human needs (i.e. food, shelter, clothes) can be satisfied, human greed for money is inherently insatiable. When we try to fill up the vacuum in our hearts with material things, we end up consuming more with ever-decreasing joy with each additional purchase (5:10-11).

But Meng may wonder, “Why should my worldly ambitions be profitless if it gives me a sense of worth and security? And why must life be eternal in order for it to be meaningful?” Atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel would probably agree that human life viewed as a whole is absurd apart from God but insist that we could still find life subjectively meaningful as long as we don’t wonder if it fits into some larger purpose. Entertaining such thoughts is a sign of taking ourselves too seriously. Existentialists like Sartre would probably urge us to create a self-customized meaning and define our own essence from our bare existence. Without God, there is no objective, cosmic meaning in life. But it also makes all sorts of subjective meanings possible.

Some may even argue that an infinite life would be meaningless because we will get tired of it eventually. Consider Karl Popper who said, “There are those who think that life is valueless because it comes to an end. They fail to see that the opposite argument might also be proposed: that if there were no end to life, life would have no value; that it is, in part, the ever-present danger of losing it which helps bring home to us the value of life.” Life is perceived to be worthwhile and significant only because mortality awaits us, bringing a sense of poignant urgency to our transitory lives. Albert Camus’ solution to the urgent question of “Why live and not commit suicide?” is basically a call to stoically face the tension of absurdity.

However, there remains a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction for most people in conceding that our lives are not connected to something bigger than ourselves. The significance of a movie snapshot depends on how it contributed to the conclusion of the whole story (of which the captured moment is a part). Only when we see that connection would we conclude the meaning of that picture as part of a comedy or a tragedy. Unless we know how the story ends, we do not know its significance or meaning. This existential vacuum becomes more acute when we consider the gross injustices that were committed and appeared unpunished in the lifetime of their perpetrators. Qoheleth rightly observed that “even in the courts of law, the very place where righteousness and justice are supposed to be guaranteed, wickedness may be present” (3:16). In this moral context, the demand for a cosmic meaning in life is not motivated not so much by hubris but by justice. The philosopher Immanuel Kant saw that ethics are practically meaningless without God and the afterlife. If death is an abyss of nothingness, then the victims who suffered for a righteous cause under oppressive regimes have ultimately faced a meaningless death. In contrast, Qoheleth offers the alternative of a solid confidence that God will “judge every deed under the sun, whether good or bad, hidden or not” (12:14).

Ethics and significance in life make sense only when we presuppose God.

For most people, there is an existential dissatisfaction with accepting that at the bottom of our lives, there is no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. But the moment we look up and see if life as a whole makes sense, the question of ultimate meaning comes back to haunt us. No wonder we desperately seek escapism from confronting this horrible abyss of nothingness by drowning ourselves with subjective meanings like work, relationships, leisure and power. This ‘coping mechanism’ needs to be maintained diligently because God had “put eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out what God does from beginning to the end” (3:12). There is an internal God-given preoccupation (3:10) whereby human beings are able to transcend the present moment and survey the past and think of the future. Yet they were not able to find out or change what God had determined, and so, their sense of vanity is aggravated. For God so works that men should fear Him (3:14).

William Lane Craig put it like this: “If each individual person passes out of existence when he dies, then what ultimate meaning can be given to his life? Does it really matter whether he ever existed at all? It might be said that his life was important because it influenced others or affected the course of history. But this only shows a relative significance to his life, not an ultimate significance. His life may be important relative to certain other events, but what is the ultimate significance of any of those events? If all the events are meaningless, then what can be the ultimate meaning of influencing any of them? Ultimately, it makes no difference”. For Qoheleth, a transitory life is meaningful as we choose responsibly to live in the fear of God and to keep his commandments (12:13). This is a perspective on death that is not mere passive acceptance, but one which urges us to enjoy life each day that God has given as a gift (3:12-13, 22).

In 2:24-26 Qoheleth affirmed that the ability to have carefree enjoyment is “from the hand of God.” Only when we embrace the reality that life is transient would we be liberated from greed, lust and despair and turn to God as the source of our significance. Ironically, by fearing God and keeping His commandments on marital faithfulness, honest labor and wise living, we are empowered to enjoy these temporal blessings to the full while we live. Leong Tien Fock wrote, “Since we have no say over whether we could take with us what we have when we die, which can happen at any time and without prior notice, how can we say that we own the things we work for? We do not even own our very life! They are not allotted to us as such. What is allotted is only the enjoyment these things can give us while we still “own” them. To appreciate this reality we need to view this world the way a child views a child-care center full of toys. What is “allotted” to him is the enjoyment of whatever toys he gets to “own” while he is there, but he cannot take any of them with him when he leaves. It would be foolish of the child to spend the few hours he has at the center busy looking out for and gathering his favorite toys, and then guarding them, as if he could bring them home, and in the process miss the opportunity to enjoy any of them.” Instead of making temporal wealth, pleasure and wisdom our idols, we can worship the Giver and thereby, enjoy these gifts truly as we put them in the proper perspective.

Last but not least, it is true that a transient life evokes a certain poignant urgency as Popper says. For example, we appreciate our loved ones more if we know we will lose them for good one day. However, Christian theism goes beyond that to claim that such relationships and significant endeavors may not terminate in death. Would that really diminish the meaning of life? The notion that eternal life would be boring and meaningless is based on the unproven assumption that the joys of heaven would be exhaustible. But why should we assume that in order to advance a strawman argument? Christian theism actually affirms that apart from the joys of reunion with loved ones and fulfilling work that awaits us in the renewed creation, we will spend eternity in relationship with the inexhaustible God Himself.

Theologian John Piper put it this way: “God is infinite and wills to reveal himself to us for our enjoyment of his fullness forever. Yet we are finite and cannot at any time, or in any finite duration of time, comprehend the limitless, infinite fullness of God’s glory… Therefore the implication is that our union with God, in the all-satisfying experience of his glory, can never be complete, but must be increasing with intimacy and intensity forever and ever.” There will always be more of God to discover, learn and savor since finite creatures will never exhaustively know Him. Therefore, glorifying and enjoying God forever remains the meaningful purpose for humanity. From his grace, we can accept and enjoy the good gifts of His creation – be it challenging achievements, authentic relationships and beauty.

Pictures courtesy of Animal World and Stu's View and Philosophy @ Fort Hare and Ginside

Book Review: Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl

2009-12-13T00:52:00.000-08:00

Questions about life’s meaning and suffering which were formerly handled by priests or rabbis are now increasingly confronted by psychiatrists and doctors. In his bestseller Man's Search for Meaning, Dr Victor Frankl highlighted the distinctive of logotherapy, also known as the “Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy”, as the idea that “the striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man”. Therefore, for logotheraphy, the focus is on the will to meaning in contrast to the will to pleasure of Freudian psychoanalysis and the will to power stressed by Adlerian psychology. While Freud and Adler tried to discover primal drives latent in the past, Frankl focuses rather on the meanings one is called to fulfill in the future. In his moving autobiographical account of experiences in a Nazi concentration camp, he observed how prisoners who lost hope in the future would be subject to mental and physical decay.

According to Frankl, man’s search for meaning is not a derived projection from more basic instinctual drives or sublimations. Otherwise it would lose its ability to challenge or summon him to live or even die for these values. Unlike Sartre’s axiom that existence precedes essence, Frankl’s existentialism asserts that the meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves but rather we discover it as ‘something confronting existence’. Those who lack a meaning worth living for and find an inner void within their hearts experience ‘existential vacuum’. This is a widespread phenomenon of the twentieth century due to the loss of traditional values and rampant industrialization, manifesting itself in boredom, addiction, the will to money, apathy or unbridled sexual libido.

As a Christian, I applaud Frankl’s critique of the determinism prevailing in much of psychoanalysis that reduced man to nothing but a victim of hereditary or environmental conditions. We share the hope that a ‘rehumanized psychiatry’ would replace the tendency to treat human minds as machines and focus on mere techniques. Indeed, Frankl’s view of man is biblical in the sense that man has both the potentials of behaving like a swine or a saint. Man’s dignity lies in him being created in the image of God and yet marred by the depravity of sin. However, Frankl has an overly optimistic view of human freedom in which even the most evil persons are ultimately self-determining. Through restricted by conditions, they are free to change their own destiny. In the Christian perspective, fallen man is in need of divine rescue and inner liberation before such a change is possible. As long as his basic orientation is self-centered, the outward change merely vacillates between hedonism and legalism. ‘Existential vacuum’ (and its symptoms) express in modern terms Augustine’s ancient prayer that our hearts are restless until they find fulfillment or satisfaction in God.

Read on for the rest of the article

The Reason For Our Hope

2009-11-28T04:25:00.001-08:00

Audio Sermon on 1 Peter 3:13-16 Giving The Reason For Our Hope can be downloaded here. We need to communicate the gospel clearly, lovingly and compellingly by being thoughtful, informed, honest and humble ambassadors for Christ. We embody the gospel with our lives and declare the gospel with our words. We need to show the world a community worth seeing and a faith worth thinking about.

Giving a Reason for Our Faith

Monkeying With The Selfish Gene

2009-11-12T07:06:00.000-08:00

Listen carefully the next time you overheard an argument in office or at home. For you may just stumble upon a powerful clue for God’s existence!

In his bestseller Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis observed that when we quarrel, we would often appeal to some higher Moral Law to which the other party is accountable. For example, it is common to hear people argue like this: “That’s my seat, I was here first”, “Give me a piece of your orange, I gave you some of mine” or “How do you like it if someone did the same to you?” Such arguments do not merely express our displeasure at someone’s behavior. They are actually appealing to a standard of right and wrong which we expect others to know about and ought to follow. Otherwise it would be as futile as claiming that a footballer had committed a foul without some agreement about the rules. This transcendent and universal Moral Law is a signpost pointing to God who is the Lawgiver.

But not everyone would agree. Popular writers such as Richard Dawkins and Robert Wright have tried to show that rudimentary forms of moral cognition can be found in animals as well. Here is a discussion on whether natural selection can account for morality as we know it available in the latest edition of Kairos Magazine.

The Selfish Gene: Monkeying With Morality

Loving The Enemy

2009-10-19T08:51:00.000-07:00

(Matthew 5:43-48) 43"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' 44But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Sermon Audio on "Loving The Enemy" can be downloaded here with group discussion questions.

Salam 1Malaysia! We are continuing a series of sermons based on the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus spells out what it is like living as the people of God’s Kingdom, what it means to be a community that follows after Jesus as their King. He is challenging the kind of empty religion that looks good on the outside but is corrupted on the inside. Many people think, “I’m morally okay since I’m not a serial killer or I don’t sleep with someone else’s wife. When I swear in God’s name, I don’t break my oath. I’m basically quite a good person lah.” But Jesus goes deeper than the outward, external action. He zooms in to our inner hearts, our hidden motives and secret intentions. “No, that’s not good enough. You have heard that it was said that… But I tell you this…”

You should not commit murder in your heart with hatred. It is a sin to commit adultery in your heart with lust. Your word is your bond. Tell the truth in what you say. Don’t need to swear at all.

Again we see how radical Jesus’ message was to his original audience and to us today. He is not abolishing the Old Testament Law by lowering the standard. Instead He is fulfilling the purpose of the Law by going to the root of the problem. Sin must be dealt with radically in our heart. And this is the “righteousness that surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law”. It’s not just following the letter of the law, but also keeping the spirit of the law. It is obedience that comes from the inside out.

In the passage we read just now, Jesus does the same thing again. You see, the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself is not something new. It’s also found in the Old Testament. In Leviticus 19:18, it says, “'Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself.” But as time went by, the people in Israel began to limit love only to their fellow Israelites. Who is my neighbor? Only my own people. My relatives. Those who share my race and religion. So I’d love them exclusively. The rest are not my neighbors so I can hate them. Some folks (like the Qumran community famous for the Dead Sea Scrolls) would go around saying, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy'. But they heard it wrong. The part on ‘hating your enemy’ was not there in the biblical text.

So Jesus sets the record straight: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.” In that famous parable we call “The Good Samaritan,” an expert of the Law asked Jesus this very question: “Who is my neighbor?” Then Jesus told him this parable which most of us know by heart: “A man was robbed, stripped, beaten and left half dead. A priest happened to walk past, and when he saw the man, he quickly moved on. Then a Levite who works for the temple saw him but ignored his needs as well. Lastly, a Samaritan stopped and took pity on him. He took care of him and paid for his medical fees. Now who is a neighbor to that victim?”

In those days, the Jews did not associate with the Samaritans due to many racial, religious and political reasons. Hmm… If that sounds strangely familiar to us in Malaysia, it’s because we too have different ethnic and religious groups living side by side with each other but with precious little contact and understanding in between. By telling the parable, Jesus subversively expanded the definition of a ‘neighbor’ to go beyond friends and families and include even the Samaritans. A neighbor is anyone in need whom you can help.

So He broke down the walls of hate by including even outsiders as a neighbor to be loved as well. Instead of rejecting sinners, prostitutes and tax collectors, He ate with them in fellowship meals. This is how the Kingdom of God looks like. To those who think “I’m a loving person. I love my own people”, Jesus says “Your love is too narrow. It’s selective on who you want to love. Don’t pick and choose. Love your enemies also.”

But it’s so hard, almost impossible to love our enemies, right? Pray for those who persecute me? Are you serious? This is something that I struggle to learn as well.

On a personal level, there are people who purposely hurt us or anger us for no good reason. Some play office politics and give us an unfair deal. How can I love someone who offended me, betrayed me, insulted me and broke relationship with me? Do you know someone like that?

In certain societies, the decision to follow Jesus may mean losing your job, your loved ones and even your life. Persecution is the cost of discipleship. Although in Malaysia, it has not come to the point of martyrdom, we still experience milder forms of persecution like the destruction of church buildings, the ban on the word ‘Allah’ in our Bahasa literature, restrictions on the liberty of conscience for some Malaysians and so on. Sometimes persecution can come in the form of the insults, ridicule, false accusations and gossips.

So how should we respond when we experience things like that?

Do you remember that Star Wars movie called “Return of the Jedi”? I watched it as a kid and one of Soo Inn’s ecommentary uses it as a helpful analogy. In the movie, the hero Luke Skywalker tried to avoid fighting the bad guy Darth Vader, who was also his own father. But when Darth Vader threatened to turn Luke's sister to the Dark Side, Luke went crazy and chopped off Vader's mechanical right hand. Then the evil emperor, who was observing this duel, made a tempting offer: "Good! Your hate has made you powerful. Now, fulfill your destiny and take your father's place at my side!" (Finish him off!)

And the evil emperor is right – there is a kind of power that comes with fear, anger and hate. To those who have a tidak-apa attitude when it comes to suffering or injustice in the world, they may never get angry at anything. And if we are too engrossed with the comforts of life to care much for the suffering around us, then probably we need to be more concerned about what God cares about and be more aware of what’s happening out there.

But for some of us who care deeply about social justice, poverty, human rights… it is often easy to get angry, depressed and furious at unjust things happening in our country especially when those responsible often don’t pay for what they have done. And it’s tempting to surrender ourselves to rage and hatred. At first, our righteous anger is directed against real injustice… That righteous anger gives us motivation and power to fight evil. But when we are angry, it can also quickly lead to unrighteous anger and careless decisions… Soon we draw the line between good and evil along the lines of us against them… of one race against another (we are the good guys, they are the bad guys) when in reality, the line of good and evil cuts across every human heart. When hatred and anger consumes us, we are drawn towards the Dark side.

At the climax of that Star Wars movie, young Luke Skywalker refuses to choose the dark side. He refused to deliver the final blow. Instead, he threw away his light saber and chose to suffer and die for being true to the Light. Yet it is his very "weakness" that inspires his father Darth Vader himself to love once again and to reject the dark side in his final moments. The Jedi knight saved the galaxy through his weakness.

When Jesus says: Love your enemies, He didn’t ask us to do anything that He himself is not prepared to do first. And He already did it on the cross when He forgave and prayed for those who crucified him saying “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34) Come to think of it, aren’t we all in fact sinners who have rebelled against God and we were once His enemies? Yet Christ died for us that we may be reconciled.

This does not mean that our Christian response to evil must be passive. In Romans 13, we know that the state is granted authority by God to bear the sword and punish the wicked. So Christians can and should use all legal means at our disposal to fight evil and corruption.

But we are not to repay evil with evil, but with good. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Jesus is calling us to let go of our bitterness, vengefulness and personal vendetta. The path of the kingdom is love (even to our enemies), prayer for those who persecute us and the willingness to suffer for Christ.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who suffered so much in Nazi Germany during World War 2, said "This is the supreme command. Through the medium of prayer, we go to our enemy, we stand by his side, and we plead to God for him."

Still, this is not something easy to do. Where do we get the power to do the impossible? We cannot do it unless by the empowering grace of the Holy Spirit.
In the Bible passage today, I think we can find some powerful reasons or motivations for us to love our enemies. The first motivation is found in verse 45: “So that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.”

What does that mean? John Piper explains it this way (and I quote) “This does not mean we can earn our way into God's family by loving our enemies. Rather it means that when we love our enemies, we prove ourselves to be in God's family. If you love your enemies the way God loves his enemies, then you show that you ARE a child of God. You are seen to be a child of God… You can't earn the status of a child. You can be born into the family or you can be adopted into the family. You can't work your way into it. Jesus means that loving our enemies shows that God has already become our Father, and that the only reason we are able to love our enemies is because he loves us first...” End quote.

And how did we become part of God’s family in the first place? How did we get adopted as a child of the Father? It’s through forgiveness… By grace, God in Christ has forgiven us (His enemies) even though we don’t deserve it… When we look at the horror of our own sin and then look at the holiness of God, we see our utter hopelessness. But the good news is Christ has taken our punishment on the cross so that we can be reconciled with our Father and be adopted into His family. Our wrongs have been freely forgiven through faith in Christ.

Have we not experienced God’s forgiveness and grace? If we have been forgiven so abundantly by God, how can we not forgive others? If we have truly known God as our Father, surely this relationship ought to overflow in love for our enemies as well. How can we not forgive after having been forgiven so much?

The second reason or motivation to love our enemies is this: It’s because God causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

In other words, we are called to imitate our Father in Heaven who makes no distinction between the just and the unjust when sending good gifts of His creation. His kindness is lavished on both moral and immoral people. He sends rain and harvest to the padi farmers in Kedah, the farmers in Kelantan, the pineapple farmers in Sarawak – it doesn’t matter if they voted for Barisan Nasional or Pakatan Rakyat, it doesn’t matter what they believe or don’t believe.

So we love our enemies because that is how God treats His enemies. He causes his planet to rotate for the evil and the good, and produces oxygen for the righteous and the unrighteous. John Calvin describes it as a divine kindness that is common to all. Some people call it ‘common grace’. But this grace is not saving grace. It does not mean that God will not punish the wicked and reward the righteous one day. Of course, He will ultimately do that.

And it’s important to keep this in mind. Because what makes it so hard to let go of our anger is the overwhelming sense that the person who offended us does not deserve to be forgiven. If the hurt is deep and great injustice was committed against us, there is a valid sense of moral outrage. We feel that if we forgive this person, we trivialize the seriousness of that wrong he has committed. This evil must not be forgotten or ignored. So how do we resolve this tension of unconditional love on one hand and the cry for justice on the other?

Part of the answer is found in God’s promise of final judgment. Because God alone is the perfect Judge, we are freed from the personal craving for revenge. The question is: “Do you trust God to set things right? Do you believe He sees the issues and the offender’s motives far better than what we can see? His justice is purer and wiser than ours. We can’t improve on His judgment. And He has promised there will be a day of reckoning… Will you trust Him as the perfect Judge?”

Consider Romans 12:17-21 “Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord. On the contrary: "If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

We don’t take justice into our own hands because the ultimate Punisher is God. Our motives are mixed at best. Our judgments are limited in perspective. But He sees all and His eyes are pure. So don’t take revenge, leave room for God to repay.

In fact, this is also the example of Christ Himself. 1 Peter 2:21-23 “When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly.”

So leave room for God’s wrath. Entrust yourself to God who judges fairly. Justice shall be served but in the meantime, we need to be set free from the craving for revenge. We do so by imitating God who shows His kindness to both the wicked and the righteous. We do so by trusting in God’s promise to deliver justice. Be perfect just as our heavenly Father is perfect. The word ‘perfect’ doesn’t mean we can be 100% without sin in this life. It actually means: Be “complete”, be “all embracing” in your love just as God is merciful and all-inclusive in His love.

The third motivation to love our enemies is this: If we love those who love us, how are we different from the tax collectors? And if we greet only our own brothers, do not even pagans do that?

Don Carson gives us some background on tax collectors: In those days, a Roman citizen can literally buy a territory in the Roman empire and he would have rights to collect taxes from that place. Then he can outsource the collection to the local “Ah Long” or ‘Mafia’ type of people. They in turn outsource to others to collect taxes from the rakyat. These tax collectors would have a quota to hit, and they can keep skim off the rest of the money for themselves. Corruption goes all the way up this multi-level tax ladder. As a result, tax collectors were despised as traitors of their own people.

But even tax collectors have friends. At least they can have lunch with other tax collectors. Despicable though they may be, they have their own ‘in’ group. Even the pagans (those who do not worship Yahweh) greet their own brothers, so how is the church any different if we only love and greet those who love us in return? It is when we love our enemies that people will see something peculiar in the church.

To be salt and light in the world, we must live as a radically different kind of people. If we only love people who are lovable and beautiful, how are we any different from everyone else?

Loving our enemies displays the distinctiveness of the Kingdom in a fallen world that has seen too much of violence, hatred and bloodshed. It’s a radical counter culture.

OK fine – But is this Christian ideal of loving your enemy practical or not? Does it really work in a fallen world like ours? Chairman Mao Zedong once said (The Little Red Book, 1964): “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” You want social change? Use force, violence and the will-to-power. So can this message of Jesus about loving our enemy really change the world?

I think it can. Let me encourage you with the real life story of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. He was a pastor and civil rights activist who struggled against racial segregation and discrimination. Do you know that in the 1950s there was a custom in the southern parts of America that African-Americans had to sit at the back of a bus? On the 1st of December 1955, Mrs. Rosa Parks, an African-American woman was arrested by the police for refusing to stand and let a white bus rider take her seat. It would be the spark that lights up a revolution. Martin Luther King, a pastor in the city and other community leaders called a meeting and a big crowd came to the church. The decision was made to boycott the bus company in protest. For 381 days, they would walk or carpool to work instead of taking the bus. This is an example of civil disobedience.

In retaliation, his home was bombed by terrorists. His wife and their baby daughter escaped without injury. When he arrived home he found an angry crowd waiting to take revenge. But Dr. King told them to go home: "We must learn to meet hate with love".
Eventually in 1956 the Supreme Court declared that local laws for racial segregation on buses were illegal. The boycott was a success. As a symbol of reconciliation and victory, Dr. King and a white minister, Rev. Smiley, shared the front seat of a public bus together.

Throughout his career, he was jailed and beaten many times. In the end he was assasinated at the age of 39. Through it all, he did not retaliate with violence but with forgiveness. The legacy of his life transformed a whole nation without causing bloodshed and continued to inspire civil rights movements all over the world. This is not an idealistic pie in the sky … It can be done. It has been done.

Of course, his example is not perfect but I think we Malaysian Christians can learn a lot from his model of balancing the New Testament ideal of unconditional love with the prophetic justice of the Old Testament. It is not enough to just talk about love we need to also care deeply for justice. It is not enough to get angry over injustice we need to promote righteousness in a way that loves our enemies.

With this story in mind, listen to these famous words by Martin Luther King when he preached on the same Bible passage on loving our enemies. Listen for its prophetic relevance to how the church should live in Malaysia today.

He said: “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend. We never get rid of an enemy by meeting hate with hate; we get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity. By its very nature, hate destroys and tears down; by its very nature, love creates and builds up. Love transforms with redemptive power.

The relevance of what I have said to the crisis in race relations should be readily apparent. There will be no permanent solution to the race problem until oppressed men develop the capacity to love their enemies. The darkness of racial injustice will be dispelled only by the light of forgiving love. For more than three centuries American Negroes have been battered by the iron rod of oppression, frustrated by day and bewildered by night by unbearable injustice and burdened with the ugly weight of discrimination. Forced to live with these shameful conditions, we are tempted to become bitter and to retaliate with a corresponding hate. But if this happens, the new order we seek will be little more than a duplicate of the old order. We must in strength and humility meet hate with love… Time is cluttered with the wreckage of communities which surrendered to hatred and violence. For the salvation of our nation and the salvation of mankind, we must follow another way. (What is this other way?)

He goes on: While hating segregation, we shall love the segregationist. This is the only way to create the beloved community.

To our most bitter opponents we say: "We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with spiritual force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory." End of Quote

This is the way of the cross. This is how we setup signposts of the Kingdom that points to a different way of being human. Not through hatred but through love for our enemies.

Bringing this closer to home, I wonder how can we apply this in our Malaysian context? Recently we hear of disturbing news of intolerance in our country like the famous cow-head incident. There was a protest against the proposed construction of a Hindu temple in Shah Alam where some irresponsible people stomped and spat at the head of a cow, a sacred animal for Hindus. It was a clearly provocative act, with threats of violence.

Or the recent case of two Muslim journalists who sneaked into a Catholic church as spies to take Holy Communion, then spit out the host (bread) and took photographs of it to be published some more. This is a sacrilegious act to Catholics who believe the host to be the real body of Christ. And the internet went on overdrive with angry condemnations.

For such a time as this, how should we as Christians respond?

I don’t have any easy answers and this may sound naive but just wondering (and I invite you to imagine with me. Maybe you can come up with more creative and better ways of doing it). I wonder: What happens if the Church or individual Christians issue a calm statement that what these people have done is wrong, and relevant authorities should investigate and charge if any law is broken. But at the same time, we also say, “We forgive you for what you have done. You may have been manipulated by people with vested interests. We would like to meet you personally, sit down over coffee and listen to what you have to say and why you behave like that. Maybe we can find a win-win solution”. I wonder how the society would react when we respond in love and respect when insulted and provoked like that? Would it make Malaysians sit up and take notice: “These Christians are really out of this world lah”?

For such a time as this, the world is watching. They are asking: “Which community has beliefs that make its members treat people in other communities with love and respect- to serve them and meet their needs? Which community's beliefs lead people to demonize and attack those who violate their boundaries?" (Keller) For such a time as this, the world is looking for answers.

When we encounter intolerance, fear and racial tension in our beloved country, may we also receive wisdom and courage from the Holy Spirit to find creative ways to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us… This is the way of the cross.

Will you be part of this culture of peace in a time of racial polarization? Will you follow Him even if it costs a great deal?

A Christian Perspective On The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

2009-08-26T08:49:00.001-07:00

The global community was rudely shocked by the stark reality of jihad on 11th September 2001 when hijacked planes crashed into iconic buildings that symbolize American economic and military power. In response to the specter of religiously-inspired violence, the subsequent ‘war on terror’ would loom large over the early years of the 21st century.

At the center of this worldwide unrest is the long-standing Palestine-Israeli conflict that continues to be a source of its political and religious impetus. Orthodox Jews honor Jerusalem as the city of peace that once housed the temple of Yahweh. Christians make pilgrimage to the Promised Land where Jesus Christ once lived, was crucified and resurrected. Muslims treasure the city as the third holiest site in Islamic history. With the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1949, many adherents from these three major faiths have staked a claim in supporting or opposing it in the name of God or Allah.

However, the idea of ‘holy war’ is not unique to Islam. In the book of Joshua, a scriptural text embraced by both Jews and Christians, we would find the concept of Yahweh as a warrior waging battle against Canaanite deities and nations through His covenant people Israel in the conquest of the Promised Land. In some military campaigns, the Israelites were divinely decreed to utterly destroy an entire population of men, women and children (Joshua 6:18-19).

This raises difficult moral dilemma for sensitive believers as well as concerns that such warfare narratives may be used to justify violence and genocide today.

In this paper I would attempt to answer three questions: “What is Old Testament teaching and justification for ‘Yahweh war’ in the conquest of Canaan? How should Christians perceive the continuity and discontinuity of these Old Testament concepts in light of New Testament revelation of Jesus Christ? Finally, what are the resulting theological implications for how we understand the establishment of the modern state of Israel?”

Yahweh War and Modern Israel

The Day God Showed Up On Earth

2009-08-03T05:40:00.000-07:00

Preached a pre-Christmas evangelistic sermon today based on the themes from Tim Keller's sermon The Purpose of Christmas. Audio sermon can be downloaded here

Text: 1 John 1:1–4
Topic: Incarnation
Big Idea: Because the Word became flesh, we have a joy that transforms our lives.

This is what Scripture says: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.”

Introduction: Good morning, church and friends! Christmas is just 4 days away. Are you feeling the holiday mood yet?

I know for many people, this is the season to be jolly. It's a time to celebrate, sing carols, throw parties, receive presents and lots of merry making. As we wrap up the year 2008, it’s also a time to relax, go on a holiday with family and have some well-deserved fun. And yes, sales promotions are everywhere. It’s a mad rush to shop till we drop.

Or if you are in the retail business or have sales target to achieve, Christmas is the season to be busy. It’s a crazy time to close deals, meet datelines and lots of profit making. For Christians, we may be just so stressed up with many church programs and activities, endless rehearsals and singing practices.

But for others, Christmas is the season to be depressed. Psychologists have found that many people experience a sad and anxious mood during and after Christmas. Statistics for suicide also increase. The reason goes something like this: “Everyone is supposed to be happy and be with their family during the holidays - since I am not, there must be something wrong with me”. This ‘holiday blues’ is most keenly felt if we are separated from loved ones. The loneliness, tiredness and isolation become more intense when there is pressure to look happy at parties or gatherings. The contrast can be very depressing.

But if we are not feeling Christmassy yet, that's ok. Because Christmas is not about Christmas. It’s not about sales promotion, Santa Claus or all that jazz. Christmas is all about Christ. That God has not left us alone. He showed up on planet earth to rescue us. The baby born on that first Christmas night two thousand years ago was called Immanuel, God with us. His presence is with us even now whether we feel Him or not.

And the scripture passage today taken from 1st Letter of John tells us what Christmas is all about. It says something radical about God and how Christmas can transform our lives whether we feel happy, busy or sad today.

Firstly, Christmas tells us something radical about God.

If you understand the word incarnation, you'll understand what Christmas is about. And the meaning of incarnation is nicely captured in the song we sang just now “Hark the Herald angels sing!” The second stanza goes like this:

Christ by highest heaven adored
Christ the everlasting Lord!
Late in time behold Him come
Offspring of a Virgin's womb
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see
Hail the incarnate Deity
Pleased as man with man to dwell
Jesus, our Emmanuel (meaning, God with us)
Hark! The herald angels sing
"Glory to the newborn King!"

Incarnation simply means that God took on flesh and blood and showed up on planet earth as a human being. Amazingly, He decided to come as a helpless baby born of a virgin girl. He did not come as some sort of violent, conquering warrior.

In the Bible passage we read just now, the apostle John tells us that Jesus the Son of God has appeared to us. He is the Word of life who was “from the beginning”. That means: He existed long before the heavens and the earth were even created.
People have always wondered about the universe that we live in. Sue May told me a story about her friend who never had much interest in God and one day she went scuba diving and so amazed to see a whole new world underwater so beautiful that by the time, she came up from the water, she believed in God.

I wonder if you too have ever looked up to a starry sky and feel a sense of cosmic wonder: “How come we exist in this universe? Why is there something rather than nothing? Where do we come from?” Suppose that in the beginning there was nothing. If there was absolutely nothing at the start, there won’t be anything now. Because out of nothing, nothing comes. No cause, no effect.

But something does exist today and not only that, if we look around us, everything that we observe has a beginning and was caused to exist by something else. For example, I have a beginning and my existence was caused by my parents, and my parents came to exist because of my grandparents, and if you rewind all the way back, even the universe has a beginning. Scientists called it the big bang. But what caused the big bang? Who is the big banger?

There must be something or someone that has always existed from the very beginning. In ancient times, the Greeks called that eternal force that holds the universe together Logos. The Logos (translated as the word) gives life to human beings. The Chinese also have a similar idea in the Tao that brings harmony to opposite forces of ‘yin’ and ‘yang’.

So when the apostle John spoke of the “Word of life”, the people understood what he was talking about. He’s talking about the Logos that made all things to exist, brings order to chaos. The Logos has always existed, it is eternal, uncreated since the very beginning of time…

But then John went on to say something radical that they never thought of: “Guess what? This Logos is not something abstract or a philosophical system. It’s not even an impersonal force that you can manipulate by hiring a fengshui master.”
The Logos is a person. He is someone who knows, makes choices and can communicate with us. He is relational. From the Gospel of John, we read: “In the beginning was the Logos, the Logos was with God and the Logos was God. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men.… The Logos became flesh and dwell among us.”

That’s what Christmas is about. The God who is from eternity stepped into time. He took on flesh and blood and moved into our neighborhood. The invisible has become visible, the spiritual has become physical. The ideal has become reality. In other words, God has become human without losing His divine nature. It’s a profound mystery -Jesus is not just fully man, He is fully God.

To appreciate just how radical this is, we can compare it with what other religions tell us about God. On one hand, in Islam/Judaism, God is so high above the creation, so transcendent that incarnation is impossible. It’s scandalous to think that God could take on human nature. On the other hand, in some Eastern religions like Hinduism/Buddhism, God is so close to the world, so immanent that reincarnation is normal. It happens to everyone. Everybody has a divine spark in us. So not all religions are the same…

Listen to these words from Tim Keller: But Christianity is unique. It doesn't say incarnation is normal, but it doesn't say it's impossible. It says God is so immanent (near us) that it is possible, but he is so transcendent (high above us) that the Incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ is an earth-shaking, history-changing, life-transforming, paradigm-shattering event. Christianity has a unique view on this that sets it apart from everything else.

So who is Jesus? He’s a teacher but not just a good teacher. He’s a prophet but not just a human prophet. He’s so much more. He is the transcendent God who became incarnate. He’s not a far away God. He is God with us.

Secondly, not only does Christmas tell us something radical about God, it also tells us something historical about Him. The story of Jesus actually happened in space and time. On earth. In Israel. Two thousand years ago.

Unlike the wonderful stories we find in the Hikayat Ramayana, for example, it is not meant to be read as a myth. They cannot be just wonderful fairy tales that teach us moral lessons.

Imagine if I were to say to you that my late Grandmother appeared to me in a dream last night and gave me the recipe for a magic soup that gives eternal youth. And I can sell it to you for a thousand ringgit each. Could you examine this dream to see it’s true or false? You can’t because you have no access to my dream.

But imagine again if I were to say to you that she appeared to me at the Sunway Pyramid skating rink at 12 p.m. yesterday in front of more than one hundred shoppers and ice-skaters who can confirm this event… ah ha… now that’s different… that is an open public event … it’s something you can investigate, you can check out the facts, interview the witnesses and so on… it’s something historical you can verify…

The apostle John says: We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard. We saw His miracles. We heard His teachings. With our very own eyes. With our own ears. Our hands have touched Him, this person who is Eternal Life. This Jesus of Nazareth.

So these records of Jesus were written based on eyewitness accounts, people who have seen and heard Jesus while He was still on earth.

If the resurrection of Jesus was made up, it would be easily shot down by hundreds of eyewitnesses in Jerusalem who saw him crucified and buried. His enemies would be just too happy to show off his tomb and the story will die off very quickly. But the eyewitnesses did not contradict the empty tomb. Instead, people were invited to check out the facts with about five hundred witnesses who saw Jesus appeared after His resurrection from the grave.

The point of Christmas is that Jesus really lived, and he really died. It happened in space and time. He did these things in public. It is open to public examination and invites us to investigate its claims.

But you may wonder: What’s the big deal about something that happened so long ago? I live a good and moral life. That’s most important anyway, right? It doesn’t matter what happened in history. I don’t steal or murder, God will surely accept me.

But that’s salvation by good works. Trying to impress God by how good we are and then God owes us a ticket to heaven.

The bad news is you and I are both separated from God and God is so holy that there has to be punishment for our sins. In our deepest heart, if we look at ourselves in the mirror honestly, we know that we are simply not good enough judging by our own standard, not to mention God’s holy standards.

Suppose you are driving your car to work or school one day and you ran the traffic lights and got caught by the police. You cannot say: “Tolong-lah Encik, don’t give me the saman. Just now, got nine traffic lights, I also follow the rules. I only ran one out of ten traffic lights lah...”

If this excuse can’t help us with the local police, it cannot help us on Judgment Day to say “God, I know I have committed many sins but look at so many good things I have done also.”

“If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives.” (1 John1:8)

Why did Jesus the son of God come to earth? The good news is not that He came to tell us: “Try harder, live a good life and then earn a ticket to heaven.”

The good news of Christmas is that Jesus Christ came to earth, lived the perfect life we should have lived, and died on the cross to pay for our sins (He took the death that we deserved). So when we turn away from our sin and trust in him and what he has done for us, we are accepted freely by God. We are rescued by grace alone. That’s why He came: To save us from our sins.

If these things didn't really happen in history 2000 years ago, then we can't be forgiven by grace. And we are still carrying the crushing burden of condemnation and sin on our shoulders.

But the good news is God incarnate did come and lived and died for us. The witnesses heard him, saw him, touched him and proclaimed him. Because it happened in history, we have hope, forgiveness and acceptance from God.

Do you know Jesus as your Lord and as your Savior? Would you trust in what He has done for you today?

Full audio sermon can be downloaded here.

Thirdly, because Christmas is radical and historical, it invites us to a personal relationship with God.

If you see who Jesus is and why He came to earth, God became flesh and lived the life you should have lived, died the death you should have died — then Christmas invites you to know God personally. That means we can have a friendship, fellowship, an intimate communion with God himself. We become truly free and truly ourselves in the context of a love relationship.

The apostle John says, "Our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son." This word fellowship, which is koinonia, means that we now have a basis to be reconciled with God.

He is no longer vague or far away in heaven. He has shown Himself to us. So we don’t need to guess what God is like and what He wants from us, He has come personally to tell us. Now He has a human face.

And if some of us here are spiritually seeking and you want to know what it means to be a Christian: Well, it means you come into a relationship where you acknowledge God as the Father, who loves and cares for you as a father cares for a child. You call God “Father”. And you receive Jesus the ultimate expression of God’s saving love, as your Lord and Savior. And the Holy Spirit lives in you and gives you the power to know and follow Him. Then through baptism you express this immersion into a love relationship with God.

So Christmas is an invitation by God to say: “Look how far I've come to be near you. Now draw near to me. I don't want to be a concept; I want to be a friend.”

Lastly, Christmas invites you to be passionately incarnational.

If we know Jesus personally as our Lord and Savior, we have the hope of eternal life beyond the grave. God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.

But when many people think of eternal life, they think of cartoons of people floating around in fluffy clouds, wearing white gowns with a harp in their hand and a halo on their head. So the idea is to escape from this physical world, and treat life on earth here and now as a temporary transit point to heaven. But the danger of that is we can be so heavenly that we are of no earthly good. It creates a mentality where we withdraw from life and focus only on the afterlife.

We see the poor oppressed and the environment destroyed and we shrug, “Oh well, this world’s gonna burn anyway so I just wait for my time to go to heaven.” No wonder many people see religion as a drug that makes us insensitive to pain and oppression happening around the world.

But the Christian hope of eternal life is not like that. It is not about running away from reality. The future of the gospel is a new heaven and a new earth. This world will be renewed, not abandoned. The hope of Christians is the resurrection, where we will be raised to eternal life in an incorruptible glorified physical body. Because God himself took on physical flesh and blood and invaded this planet, we long to see the presence of God's kingdom come and His will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Because the rightful king of the world had entered human history. All unjust rulers are at risk. Dictators like king Herod, Roman Caesar, Satan, Sin, Death, Injustice, Pain, Disease, Hatred - their days are numbered. The worst they can do is give death but even death is conquered by the resurrection.

The King had come. The kingdom of God had broken into history, bringing healing and hope, peace and life. Christmas marks the beginning of God's mission to recapture the world for Himself.

So as His followers, we are also invited to imitate Christ be living incarnational lives. We also enter into other people’s worlds, as he entered ours. We seek first to understand then be understood. We enter into the world of their thinking as we try to understand how others look at life and how they see the gospel. We come into the world of their feeling as we try to empathise with their pain. And we come into the world of their living as we live, embody and demonstrate the gospel in the orang asli village, at the low cost apartments at Angsana and Mentari.

In conclusion, Christmas tells us something radical and historical about God – he has come to earth and revealed himself supremely in the person of Jesus the Messiah. Because of who Jesus is and what He has done for us, Christmas invites us to love God personally with all our heart, mind and strength. It also frees us to get involved in the lives of other people by embodying God’s kingdom on earth.

If the present creation will not be abandoned but transformed, then in the meantime, we are to work here-and-now looking forward to that final vision. So that our community and church could be a foretaste, a glimpse or movie preview of its future glory. Incarnational spirituality is lived out in down to earth realities, where we do business, how we cook in the kitchen, when we play with our children, study, love and do exercise, infusing everyday life with fresh authentic meaning. The gospel must be embodied with our lives and proclaimed with our words.

Think about that the next time someone wished you "merry Christmas" this year!

Loving God With All Our Mind

2009-08-03T05:35:00.001-07:00

Mark 12:28-34 (sermon audio download available here)

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?" "The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.'31The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these."

"Well said, teacher," the man replied. "You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices." When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.

Have you ever wondered what happened to the dinosaurs? How did those giant lizards become extinct? And did the Bible ever mention anything about them? Have you ever asked these questions before? I suspect quite a number of you have.

I came to know Christ as a 15 year old student in secondary school. That’s not too long ago. As a curious new believer, I began asking how the Genesis account of creation in seven days explains those interesting dinosaurs you’d find watching Jurassic Park or National Geographic. So hoping to get some answers, one fine day I picked up the courage to ask my science teacher who is also a Christian. I asked him: “Why did God create dinosaurs and let all of them die, ah? Were the dinosaurs safe inside Noah’s ark? Did the flood drown all of them?” He gave me “one kind” of look and then asked me another question in return. He said: “Tell me. Does God answer your prayers?”

I was a bit shocked at first. “Er… Don’t blame me la… I didn’t pray for the dinosaur’s extinction ok!” Maybe he sensed that I was confused, so he went on, “Aiya… If God has answered your prayers, why do you need to ask so many things?” So if you have an experience that God is real in your heart, why bother thinking so much?

From that day on, I found out that for many Christians an intellectual understanding of what we believe and why you believe is not important as long as you have an experiential feeling in your heart! The heart is what you used in a relationship with God but the brain is what you used while studying science, computers, economics and history in school. There is a separation of the heart for spiritual stuffs and the mind for secular stuffs like dinosaurs. When that happens, no wonder our faith has so little impact on how we do our work or studies in the world. And no wonder our ‘daily activities’ outside the church has very little to do with God or the gospel.

But the Bible seems to say: “Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world but be transformed by the renewal of your minds”. It doesn’t say “Be transformed by the removal of your minds”! So we don’t need to remove our brains in order to be a Christian. In fact, renewing our mind with God’s truth and kingdom values is crucial to our spiritual growth. Last month, I was working in Vietnam and met an American lady on a tour bus who works for a research program, trying to find a cure for cancer. As we talked, she told me that she envies her Christian friends for their faith. She says “It’s so easy for them but it’s hard for me to believe because as a scientist, I’ve been trained to think critically and ask questions first”. So I encouraged her, “Sometimes people ask questions not because of unbelief, but because they are serious about the truth”. Then I recommended her a book by a famous Christian scientist and hope it’s helpful to her.

To a lot of people, when you wish something is true but suspect that it actually doesn’t exist you need faith. And when you know for sure that something isn’t true and you still believe in it, then you must have very great faith indeed. But biblical faith is not like that. True faith involves knowledge, agreement and trust. For example, I can examine that this is a chair, it has four legs. That’s knowledge of the facts. But knowing alone is not enough, I must agree that yes, this chair is strong enough to support my weight. But knowing and agreeing alone won’t do me any good unless I put a personal commitment to rest my weight on that chair. So faith has both objective facts as well as personal trust.

In the passage we read just now, Jesus calls us (his disciples) to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our strength, with all our soul and with all our mind. This is the great and first commandment that sums up the entire law. True Christian spirituality involves our whole being - heart, head and hand. Our feeling, thinking and doing are all involved.

If we do not love God with all our heart, what happens? Our spiritual life will be all head knowledge but there is no real passion, desire or joy in it. We merely analyze God but we don’t worship Him. And if we do not love God with all our strength, then no practical fruit comes out of our beliefs. It’s NATO “No Action Talk Only”. Next Sunday Pastor Aik Khiam will preach on the Great Commandment of Jesus in more detail so…

Today I just want to zoom in on loving God with all our mind and ask 3 questions:
- Now, what happens if we do not love the Lord our God with “all our mind”?
- What are some practical benefits of developing a Christian mind?
- If this is important and practical, what can we do as disciples of Jesus to follow after God’s thoughts? To disciple our minds to love God…

So I hope to suggest why the role of the mind is so crucial to our discipleship, how a renewed Christian mind can be intensely practical (not just theoretical) and how we can go about loving God with “all our mind” as a church.

Many of us know about Billy Graham… he’s a great evangelist who has probably preached the gospel to more people than anyone else through radio and TV broadcasts and mass evangelistic rallies. Almost 30 years ago, the Billy Graham Centre was launched with a mission to help churches to evangelize. At the dedication service, they invited a Lebanese Christian named Charles Malik to deliver a very challenging message. He said: “I must be frank with you: the greatest danger facing American Evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind as to its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough… The problem is not only to win souls but to save minds. If you win the whole world and lose the mind of the world, you will soon discover you have not won the world. Indeed it may turn out you have actually lost the world.” In other words, he’s saying, even if the whole world become Christian in name but their thinking is still captured by worldly patterns, then it may turn out that we have actually lost the world. If he is right and I think he is about a very common neglect to care for the life of the mind not only in America but also in Malaysia, then perhaps it is appropriate for us as a church to spend a bit more time exploring how we may love God with ‘all our mind’. So that’s one reason to devote a whole sermon on this aspect of obeying the Great Commandment. Not because the other areas are not important, but because there is such widespread neglect for such a crucial need today.

So what happens if we do not love the Lord our God with “all our mind”?

Nowadays, information about anything under the sun is just a Google search away. We cannot totally isolate ourselves or our loved ones from ideas… even dangerous ideas or deceptive philosophies out there in the market.

And if we do not submit our thinking to God’s truth, then obviously our minds will be easily influenced by worldly ways of life. We may still call ourselves Christians but we absorb notions about wealth, about sex and about success from MTV, popular movies or Youtube without even knowing it. Our thinking will be shaped by the patterns of the world, all those big words like hedonism that says (Life is short. Grab all the fun you can get), or consumerism (I shop till I drop because my social status depends on what I buy) or pragmatism (Whatever. As long as it works, I don’t care how you do it), and all sorts of other ‘ism or philosophies about life.

If we do not care for our mind, we may also run around with lots of programs and activities (giving an appearance of vibrant spiritual life) but we don’t stop and reflect “Why are we doing this? Is this biblical? We may do things right but are we doing the right things?” Or we may also run the danger of emotionalism – that means, having lots of misguided passion, having lots of zeal but without wisdom. Sad but true, I’ve come across some sincere but seriously misguided people who slither on the floor like snakes, roar like lions, bark like dogs because they mistakenly believed that is what God wanted them to do. Truth without emotion produce dead orthodoxy but emotion without a true vision of the greatness of God produces a shallow frenzy. The Father in heaven looks for worshippers who worship in spirit and in truth. Passionate feelings for God rooted in sound doctrine about God will express itself in songs, shouts, tears, silent awe, confessions and obedient lives. Head and heart and hands…

Last but not least, if we do not know what we believe and why we believe, then our evangelism or our witness of the gospel will suffer. We will lack boldness because we are afraid of the questions people may ask. When I have lunch with some colleagues, we usually talk about work, the economy, Malaysian politics or family stuffs. And there’s a guy who is very shy and has no opinion when it comes to topics like these. But if the conversation suddenly turns to football, then his eyes will light up and he cannot stop talking. Why? Because he knows a lot about football and he can offer expert opinions on anything relating to football like Shebby Singh. So he’s not shy or quiet anymore. It’s the same when it comes to sharing the gospel. That’s why 1 Peter 3:15 says: “Be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you for a reason for the hope you have in Christ.” This command to be ready with a reason or defence for frequently-asked questions from sceptics and seekers is not given to an elite group of scholars or intellectuals. No, it’s for the whole church. Be prepared. Be equipped with answers. Then boldness kicks in.

But if it is so important to love God with our mind, why do many Christians often downplay the role of the mind when it comes to spiritual things? When it comes to secular knowledge, we say “Ah Chai: Stop your computer games, study harder, memorize these facts and pass all your exams”. We encourage them to devote much time to read books and use their minds. But when it comes to theological knowledge, we say “Who needs theology? Aiya, don’t think so much la... Just have more faith. Read books ah? Where got time? Busy la…” This common suspicion towards the role of the mind in our spiritual life may sometimes be caused by misunderstanding certain Bible passages. For example: “What’s the use of reason since Jesus says we should have faith like a child? (Matthew 8:13) Didn’t the apostle Paul say Knowledge puffs up our pride (1 Corinthians 8:1) so we should stop pursuing knowledge?”

But actually, a childlike faith refers to a humble, dependent trust in God. It is the humility and dependent trust of a helpless child that Jesus praises. He is not encouraging childish thinking. The apostle Paul wrote, “Brothers, stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.” (1 Corinthians 14:20) When he wrote that knowledge puffs up, he is warning us against a proud attitude that show off one’s spiritual knowledge for self-promotion instead of using it to build up each another. The real problem he’s getting at is arrogance, not knowledge in itself. So our proper response is humility and love, not ignorance. There are people who are knowledgeable and yet humble just as there are people who are proud and know a lot. But it is also possible to be arrogant and ignorant at the same time. I’m in the consulting line and sometimes people say of consultants: “Know a bit but pretend to know it all”. Gordon Fee: why must we choose between ‘fool on fire’ or a ‘scholar on ice’? Lord, help me to be a “scholar on fire”. Not everyone is called to be a scholar, but we should all be disciples of Jesus whose minds continually grow in knowledge and hearts continually burn with passion.

Q2: OK, fine but is it practical or not? This business about developing a ‘Christian mind’ - Isn’t it just theoretical, head knowledge that does not help us live properly?

When Doctor Wendy and I look at the same skin problem, we “see” radically different things. She can observe more because with years of study, her mind is filled with relevant medical concepts that enable her to look for the right things and tell me whether it’s a basal cell carcinoma or not. Whereas I can stare at the sore all day and not see what she saw. Believe me, this ability to see is something very practical. It can make a difference between life and death. Similarly, if your mind is equipped with biblical concepts like creation, sin and redemption, you are able to look at life and the world and see things that others don’t even notice. You can see beyond surface appearance in world events, culture or people and discern truth from error, right from wrong, beauty from ugliness.

Although there is some truth to the perception that scholars always argue over irrelevant issues, the best theologians actually help us to gain wisdom for life. After all, a good theory is a very practical thing. When I don’t know the way to KLCC, having a good map helps me decide whether to turn left at this junction or right at that traffic light. The map itself is not KLCC but just a theoretical model of the real thing. But if the map is accurate, it can be very useful. In the same way, an accurate mental map of reality guides our navigation through difficult decisions in the world.

Because what we believe to be true has a powerful influence over how we should live. For example, if we view human life as just a biological machine, we won’t be terribly inclined to treat it with much dignity or respect. But if we see human beings as more than biology but also a person made in the image of God with infinite worth, it compels us to treat life as sacred and other people with dignity and respect. Sound theology is practical when it connects to life and flow from the head to the heart and to the hands. True knowledge and living experience should enrich each other.

And if we are serious about our witness for the gospel in a multi religious society like Malaysia, we need to intentionally raise up a generation of confident, informed and winsome ambassadors for Christ. We can preach with all the fervor of a Billy Graham but win only a beggar here and there if we allow the intellectual atmosphere of our society to oppose the gospel by sheer logic. The strategy is not retreat and isolate ourselves in a safe little corner. But to cultivate a robust Christian worldview that understands and engages culture. To do that, we need to provide thinking tools that empower our youths and children, so they will learn how to evaluate what’s true and good on their own. My wife Grace is scheduled to deliver tomorrow. Newborn babies get a vaccination jab which contain some virus or bacteria so that their immune system can be developed. Similarly, we can boost up our spiritual immune system by being informed of what other religious beliefs are first and be equipped to evaluate them from a biblical perspective.

Today, there is an urgent and serious need for us to explore how the church as a redeemed community in the world responds to issues like racism, inter-religious harmony, economic inequality, caring for creation, the spread of infectious diseases, and ethics in medical technology. Since the gospel is public truth (not just private experiences), we have a responsibility to speak sensibly in the public square, through the media, in places where these crucial and practical issues of life are discussed and decided. We cannot address these burning issues in our Malaysian society without faithfully and diligently applying our minds to connect God’s word with God’s world.

Lastly, if the mind is crucial and practical to our spiritual life and witness, how then shall we recover and develop a Christian mind in ourselves and in others? (Q3)

Here are four simple suggestions which are by no means exhaustive:

a) Our mind needs to be fed. You are what you eat. If you eat junk food, your body will be weak or sick. You are what you read also. If you read healthy, solid books, your mind will also develop strong mental muscles or habits. There is no short cut. Let’s start small: Have we read the whole Bible at least once? LT Jeyachandran: If we don’t even know what’s inside this book, why do we believe it is God’s word?

b) Memorizing bible verses and facts alone doesn’t mean that we have developed a Christian mindset. Our minds need exercise. We need to re-imagine creatively and critically how to apply the biblical teachings of creation, sin, and redemption to life issues we face daily in the marketplace as a lawyer, artist, businessperson, teacher, healthcare workers etc. Advertisement: The church library has invested in many interesting helpful resources to equip us to do just that. Start with your own interests and passions.

c) If you are a student, do you think Christianly about the subjects you learn in school or college? I once met a student in church who was studying psychology at HELP Institute. So I encouraged her: “Wow, that’s an interesting field. There are many areas in which psychology overlap to what the Bible teaches about the soul. Some faculty members like Dr Goh Chee Leong are committed Christians”. What she told me next broke my heart: “You know what, most Christians would frown when they hear that I’m doing psychology and you are one of few people who actually encouraged to pursue it”. I know there are some theories in psychology that may be incompatible with the Christian faith. But in every discipline, including law, economics, arts and science, you’d find some theories which do not fit well with our beliefs. If we discourage people from studying and run away then who’s going to get in there and do better psychology, better economics and better science from a biblical outlook? Speak to the pastors and see how you may discern what is true, beautiful and right expressed in these disciplines of your research. They could well be your “fulltime ministry” in future.

d) Volunteer to join or lead evangelism groups like Alpha or Christianity Explored where small groups are trained in the art of giving a reason for our faith in Christ. So you learn to handle frequently asked questions from seekers with humility, confidence and knowledge. When you are stumped once, just say “I don’t know but I’d find out for you” – then go home and do your homework, ask around and get back to them. That way, all of us learn to grow in our journey of faith.

Can you imagine what the transformation of our spirituality and witness in society looks like when our minds are regularly renewed with such practices? It is a lifelong project that requires lots of energy and time, but the effort will be worth your while. And you’ll never know just when a curious young believer may approach you with questions like “Why did God create the dinosaurs?”

You know what, recently, a student in MMU asked me about the dinosaurs and how they fit in Genesis. Ask and you shall be asked in return.

Do you know how I answered him? Basically I gave him a few possible Christian answers to that question, some pros and cons in each theory depending on how you look at the fossils and how you understand the book of Genesis. But in the end, the Bible is not meant to be a biological textbook to tell us everything about dinosaurs. Genesis tells us who created the universe and why everything is created, but its main purpose is not to tell us specifically how it all came about. Then one female student chipped in: “If God didn’t create dinosaurs, we won’t have any petroleum today! Our cars depend on fossil fuel ma...” And I thought “Ya hor… Have you ever thought of becoming a theologian?”

The point is this: Loving God with “all our mind” does not mean that we can understand absolutely everything about God and His ways. Because God is God, and we are finite creatures, there will always be mystery. And some of our questions will only be answered when we meet God one day. That should not be an excuse for us to be lazy in our thinking, but it is a needed reminder that there is a limit to our ability to reason and sometimes, all we can do is save up our questions for heaven… To ask God when we finally meet Him face to face…

Let us pray.

Salt And Light For The World

2009-08-03T05:34:00.001-07:00

Download Sermon Audio here

Matthew 5:13-16 "You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men. 14"You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. 15Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”

Good morning church! We have just started a series of sermons based on one of the greatest sermons ever preached - the Sermon on the Mount as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew. Last week, Rev Wong preached on what it looks like to be people living under the Kingdom or the Rule of God, to be a people who follow after Jesus as King. We found out that those who inherit the kingdom of heaven are the poor in spirit, meek, merciful, peacemakers, they thirst and hunger for righteousness, the pure in heart. Here Jesus is laying down what it means to be blessed under His Kingship and what this alternative way of being human looks like.

When Mahatma Gandhi was once asked about how to solve the problems between Great Britain and India, he picked up a Bible and opened it to the fifth chapter of Matthew and said: "When your country and mine shall get together on the teachings laid down by Christ in this Sermon on the Mount, we shall have solved the problems not only of our countries but those of the whole world."

He’s onto something there. When Gandhi put into action his non-violent struggle for the independence of India, it inspired civil rights movements all over the world. Yet the Sermon on the Mount is not just about Jesus telling people to be nice to each other. There’s a bit of that, of course, but you don’t need to go up the mountain to learn that. Some monks or spiritual gurus climb up the mountain to get away from the worries and problems of this world and devote themselves to a life of meditation. But others go up the mountain for less peaceful reasons.

Historian NT Wright gives us some background: “In the time of Jesus, the hills above the Sea of Galilee also used to be the hangout (or lepak place) for holy revolutionaries, for outlaws ready to fight the pagan Romans and bring in the kingdom of God - by force if necessary. Up in the hills there are caves; a generation before Jesus, some of the revolutionaries had been smoked out from these caves by King Herod”.

Many first-century Jews were expecting a Messiah who would pick up the sword and ride out to destroy their enemies like Aragorn in the movie LOTR. And there were many wanna-be messiahs like that … They usually ended up dead (crucified on a Roman cross). In any case, this kingdom of God business is really quite dangerous. It comes with a stern warning: Don’t try this at home.

Given this historical background, you can imagine when Jesus first gave the message we now call Sermon on the Mount, saying things like “Repent! The kingdom of God is at hand”, he would have looked like someone gathering followers for a new movement, inviting people to sign up for a great cause. He was calling his hearers to a new way of being Israel, a new way of living as God’s people for the world. It would have felt more like a political rally than a philosophical lecture today.

But how will this kingdom of God come about?

Try to imagine (if you can) just how radical Jesus’ message was to his original audience when He says: “Yes, the kingdom of God is here. Yes, the LORD YHWH Himself is come at last to usher in His divine rule over all the earth. But who are the blessed people entering into this Kingdom? They are the meek, the peacemakers, the poor in spirit, the merciful, those who mourn, those persecuted for righteousness…”

You can almost hear His audience go: “Hello? What’s going on here? Are you sure Jesus didn’t say “Blessed are the war-mongers… Blessed are those who are strong, brave and violent for they will kick the Roman army out of Israel forever?! And what’s this business about turning the other cheek? No way. We should be the ones giving out persecution, not receiving it!”

But to Jesus, the way of the Kingdom is not through waving the sword (or waving the keris in our Malaysian context). The way of the kingdom is through bearing the cross. God’s kingdom turns the values of this world upside down and inside out. Yet it’s the only way to live. It’s the only way to be the people of God. The Sermon on the Mount is an exciting and yet dangerous manifesto for change in the world. Jesus did not go up the mountain to escape the world’s problems. Instead He is starting a revolution. But it’s a revolution of love. The Kingdom of God is here as a present reality today. And it’s subverting the world order as we know it.

In the Gospel passage we read just now, Jesus used two metaphors to describe the influence that His followers would have on society: "You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world." If we live our lives the Jesus way, according to the vision laid out in the Sermon on the Mount, we will make an impact in a spiritually decaying culture. If we become who we were meant to be, we cannot help but be shining light to a world surrounded by darkness.

Will you sign up for this movement? Will you be part of this revolution of love?

John Stott puts it this way: "Jesus calls his disciples to exert a double influence on the society - a negative influence by arresting its decay and a positive influence by bringing light into its darkness. For it is one thing to stop the spread of evil; it is another to promote the spread of truth, beauty and goodness." — John R. W. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on The Mount.

John Stott and Tim Keller are two Christian leaders who have reflected deeply on how the church can be salt and light in the world today so I’d like to draw out three implications from these metaphors based heavily on what they have written:

The First Implication is this: Be radically different, don’t compromise

In the old days, people do not have a fridge (or refrigerator) so salt was used primarily as a preservative. Salt prevents food from going bad or rotten and slows down the process of decay. But if salt is mixed with sand, for example, it is no longer effective as a preservative to delay corruption. It has become useless and gets thrown out on the streets.

In a similar way, as salt of the earth, the church has a preserving influence in a spiritually decaying society. Every day we read of depressing news in the papers, how crime rates, sex scandals, corruption cases and racial tensions have gone from bad to worse. The more rotten the world becomes, the more it stands in need of salt.

But to do that, the Church needs to maintain her integrity as salt of the earth. If it has compromised its purity or gets mixed up with worldly values, then it loses its saltiness and is no longer of any use.

In every culture, there are always areas where we would find tension or opposition against Kingdom values and also areas in culture where we would have find some common ground. For example, in the rural Muslim heartlands of Kelantan, what Jesus taught about sexual purity in the Sermon on the Mount would make a lot of sense. But they would find Jesus’ command to turn the other cheek and love your enemy quite hard to swallow.

In the more urban, more liberal places like Bangsar or Sri Hartamas, what Jesus taught about non-violence and forgiving your enemies may be easier to accept. But what He taught about sexual purity would seem strange, even offensive. “Wah! Look lustfully also cannot ah”. So they would have a problem there.

That tells us something important: The gospel (because it is God’s word) will never fit in perfectly well with any human culture including our own. And it is always tempting for us to downplay or ignore the offensive parts and harp on the bits we find easy to digest. So as we spend some time exploring the Sermon on the Mount in the next few weeks, we need to allow ourselves to be confronted again and again by the challenge of Jesus. There are some parts that are easy to accept – that’s great, but don’t stay there. Move on. You’d also find there will be parts, especially those parts of His teachings that are hard to accept – we need to slow down and let them challenge and transform us again.

Because if we just pick and choose what we like to hear and ignore those that challenge our lifestyles, we run the danger of domesticating the gospel. That means we water down the gospel to fit nicely into our own biased cultural baggage. Instead of being countercultural, we have compromised with the world. We have lost our saltiness. Our gospel has become too small and too tame. And too lame

Sometimes in our eagerness to be ‘relevant’ and ‘reach out’, it is tempting for us to be so attracted to the surrounding culture that we downplay the centrality of the gospel and stress more on an emotional fix or self-help advice. Some may even downgrade the importance of truth in the name of cultural engagement.

But to be salt of the earth, we must live as a radically different kind of community. Not just as individuals. Jesus says we are "a city on a hill" that reflects God's glory to the world. We are called to be a countercultural community within the earthly city of Kuala Lumpur. And the way we treat sex, money, success and power should point to an alternative (and more authentic) way of being human.

For example, when it comes to sex, our Malaysian culture either makes sex into an idol or we have a phobia of sex. I came across a local magazine slogan that says “In Lust, We Trust!” instead of “In God We Trust”. That’s making sex into an idol. Malaysian politicians say crazy things all the time but one f’ler said something like this: “Ladies, you must cover up your face or else the guys can’t control themselves! And it’s all your fault!” That’s phobia of sex. But the Kingdom people should be different. It avoids both extremes of hedonism and prudishness. It is a community that so loves and cares for its members that sexual purity makes sense. Because sex is so precious, we do not cheapen it but rather celebrate it in the context of an exclusive, self-giving commitment. That means abstinence outside of marriage and faithfulness within marriage.

Regarding money, the Kingdom people encourage a radically generous sharing of time, energy and resources to social justice and the needs of the poor, the immigrant, and the physically weak. Jesus’ Kingdom turns the world upside down: You must die to live. You must lose to gain. Weakness is strength. Joy in the midst of suffering. Love those who persecute you. Pray for those who hate you. It is not the strong or the violent who will inherit the earth, but the meek.

Which brings us to the question: Are we radically different like that? Or are we just the same? Are we worshipping a Jesus who only exists to provide us with health, wealth and comfort? Are we transforming culture or are we just conforming to culture?

If all the Christians in Malaysia were to suddenly disappear today, would anyone notice? Would it have big, small or no effect whatsoever on Malaysian society? What do you think? Are we salty enough? Am I?

The Second Implication is this: Be creatively engaging, don’t isolate

You know, darkness is not a thing. It has no force of its own. Darkness is simply the absence of light. When light is turned on, darkness is gone. The very presence of light dispels darkness. As light of the world, we reflect God’s truth to a world in darkness through word and deed. “Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven”
So just being different is not enough, the kingdom community must also be in touch with the society at large. Salt does nothing good if it stays in the saltshaker. Light does no good if you hide it under a bowl. It has to permeate the darkness. If we isolate ourselves in our own little corner, separated from the rest of the world, our light won’t reach anyone else.
There’s a famous saying: “The only thing needed for evil to prosper is for good people to do nothing.” All you need to do is to fold your arms and do nothing. And darkness will have its way.

But in the past, the church at her best has been a fine example of how the gospel can transform and reform a society like ours. During the Great Awakening revival under such men of God as George Whitefield, the Wesley brothers, William Wilberforce, Lord Shaftesbury and others, the gospel was faithfully preached, churches were planted and people were inspired to take up social causes in the name of Christ. The proclamation of the gospel (in word) and the demonstration of the gospel (in deed) have always come naturally together.

Let me share a story how this can happen. You can watch it in action in a movie called “Amazing Grace”, based on the life of William Wilberforce. Wilberforce was a Christian Member of Parliament in Great Britain who worked all his life to abolish slavery of African people. (By the way, human trafficking and modern-day slavery is not a thing of the past, it’s something happening at our own doorsteps. Even in Malaysia!)

Wilberforce first launched his campaign for abolition of slavery in 1787 and lived to see it finally succeed in 1833 (just three days before his death). That’s 46 years in total! His life reminds us that social justice is a long, painful marathon. It’s not a 100 meter sprint. For the first twenty years, he suffered nothing but defeats, rejection from friends, insults from enemies, physical illness and even threats to his life. And it’s so easy to burnout.

But social justice is a community project, not a solo effort.

Fortunately for him, William Wilberforce has a group of friends who work and walk together with him. This famous small group was nicknamed “The Clapham Sect” or “The Saints”. They shared a deep conviction in the evangelical Christian faith, a long-term commitment to a social cause and a lifelong spiritual friendship. Won’t you like to be part of a cell group like that?

What’s more amazing is that in their lifetime, this little platoon of committed believers managed to start a Missionary Society, a Bible Society, they promote agricultural reform to supply affordable food to the poor, prevent cruelty to animals (RSPCA), promote Sunday school education, prison reform, improve harsh child labor conditions and championed the freedom to preach the gospel in India! It’s simply amazing… It’s both word and deed. And the impact of their work can still be felt today. So don’t underestimate the power of small, committed groups to start social change.

It’s not necessary to use political power (we don’t need to start any “Christian Rights Action Force” movement called CHRISAF). We don’t need to wait until there’s a huge Christian population to make a positive influence in society. Small groups of committed people empowered by the gospel can make a significant difference where we are!

We may not do exactly what Wilberforce did but just imagine what we can do if each small group in church creatively commits ourselves long term to at least one social cause that we are passionate about? Be it Makasih, education for orang asli village, advocacy for environmental care, evangelism amongst the surrounding student population and so on.

Let’s continue to open up the windows and let the light out! If you are not part of this revolution yet, sign up today. Talk to the pastors how you also can help out.

The Final Implication is this: Be influencers for the common good, don’t be narrow

Being salt and light implies that Christians can and should influence the wider society. Salt hinders bacterial decay. Light dispels darkness. We cannot create a perfect society today as suggested by the “social gospel”. But we can improve it.
The moment we say that, however, some people will cringe with fear. “Uh-oh. Are you trying to impose your Christian values on everybody else? Please keep your faith private ok... Keep it at home. Don’t bring it out in public.”

Well, there are many public issues that call for our prayer and action today like the ban on the word Allah in our Malay language Bibles. That has serious impact on our bumiputra brothers and sisters in East Malaysia. And the famous Lina Joy case, church buildings being demolished and yes, we need to speak up on such issues. But if we only get worked up over ‘Christian’ issues and do not care or speak up for our fellow Malaysians who are not Christians, then our social agenda is too narrow and too inward looking. We need to be influencers for the common good of all, regardless of race, gender, social class or creed. This is very much in line with our CDPC anniversary theme last month - “Loving Our City”.

Tim Keller says it so well at this point I may as well quote him in full. He says: “Christians should be a community radically committed to the good of the city as a whole. We must move out to sacrificially serve the good of the whole human community, especially the poor… the ultimate purpose of redemption is not to escape the material world, but to renew it. God's purpose is not only saving individuals, but also inaugurating a new world based on justice, peace, and love, not power, strife, and selfishness.

So Christians work for the peace, security, justice, and prosperity of their city and their neighbors, loving them in word and in deed, whether they believe what we do or not. In Jeremiah 29:7, Israel's exiles were called not just to live in the city, but also to love it and work for its shalom—its economic, social, and spiritual flourishing. The citizens of God's city are the best possible citizens of their earthly cities.

(Listen to this, I love this part) This is the only kind of cultural engagement that will not corrupt us and conform us to the world's pattern of life. If Christians go to urban centers simply to acquire power, they will never achieve cultural influence and change that is deep, lasting, and embraced by the broader society. We must live in the city to serve all the peoples in it, not just our own tribe. We must lose our power to find our (true) power. Christianity will not be attractive enough to win influence except through sacrificial service to all people, regardless of their beliefs.”

Wow! In other words, our cultural engagement must be shaped by the cross. It is sacrificial giving in the service of others. With no strings attached.
Remember the movie Lord of the Rings? The Dark Lord Sauron puts his own evil power inside a magical Ring to rule over the world. Whoever has the Ring will have great power, so powerful he can even beat the Dark Lord. Many people want to use the Ring of power for good, but eventually they themselves become corrupted and wanted the Ring for themselves. Like Gollum who became a twisted, little dark lord himself: My precioussss… Those who keep the ring for themselves shall lose it.

So what’s the solution? The good guys got a peace-loving hobbit named Frodo to do the unthinkable. His mission: “Carry the ring of power to Mount Doom and destroy it.” By doing so, Frodo is saving the world through weakness. He’s not using the ring of power but destroying the ring of power. That’s the only way to beat Sauron.
The story reminds us of our Lord Jesus who instead of grabbing power with an army of angels chose instead to carry the cross for the sake of others. Those who lose their lives shall find it. He saved the world through weakness and self-sacrifice. In the same way, true spiritual power for the church comes when we renounce coercive power and bear our cross and follow Christ instead.

A few years ago, there was a flood in some parts of Johor and some Christian volunteers were helping to distribute food/clothing to flood victims still trapped in their homes. One Christian guy saw that there is a village that was not yet covered so he said: “Let’s go there!” To his shock, some other Christians told him, “No la, it’s a waste of our time. There’s no use going to that community because we are not allowed to preach the gospel to them. It’s better if we go to this other village (mostly Chinese) because after we distribute the food we can preach to them also”. In my personal view, that’s too narrow!

Yes, the good news is the power of God unto salvation. We should not be ashamed of the gospel. Although evangelism and social action belong together (hand-in-hand), neither is a means for the other. They are equal partners. Our good works should be an expression of genuine love for our neighbor who is in need. And love doesn’t need to justify itself. It is not a means to another hidden agenda. There is no string attached.

We share the good news because we love people. As we genuinely minister to physical needs, we will find opportunities to minister to their spiritual needs as well. But we don’t show love to people primarily as an excuse to evangelize. If they don’t respond or listen to the gospel, does that mean we stop loving them?
Our social agenda must not be narrowly defined, but broad and embracing enough to include the city as a whole. That’s why we should care for issues like environmental conservation, eradicating poverty, abolishing human trafficking, and defending the human rights of women and children and so on.

A friend Marvin Wong wrote: Christian involvement in society is therefore not a part time activity that we engage in after our main task of evangelism is done, but an integral part of our overall Gospel witness. It would be inconsistent for a Christian to claim to love one’s neighbor as oneself and yet remain passive and silent when the same neighbor is in need or treated unjustly.

So here’s the big story: The Creator God has created human beings in His own likeness but they have rebelled against His loving rule. As a result, our fellowship with God is broken. Then the Creator God sets in motion this plan to rescue these rebels by blessing Abraham as the father of a great nation so that they in turn will be a blessing to all the nations of the earth. The nation of Israel was born and then redeemed from slavery in Egypt. The creator God established a covenant with Israel and appointed Israel to be a light to the Gentiles so that through its witness, the surrounding nations will come to know God and His ways. But Israel has failed her calling again and again through disobedience and unfaithfulness.

Now enter the Messiah, the King Himself has come to usher in the Kingdom of God. He will renew, restore and transform the heaven and the earth so that every part of creation is filled with the glory of God. But His kingdom is also a present here-and-now reality. God’s redemptive, missional plan is still moving forward.

His redeemed people are to live today as if the future is already present. The way we live are to be signposts pointing forward to what God’s kingdom in its future fullness would look like. The church is like a movie preview: We are to display some teasers/highlights from the full movie so people go: “Wow I wanna go see the real show”. Coming soon to a planet near you!

Will you sign up for this movement of God for the world?
Will we choose to follow a safe Jesus who exists to provide us with health, wealth, comfort, and happiness? Or do we want the real thing even when it costs us a great deal?

Let us pray…

What Is Apologetics?

2009-03-25T08:22:00.001-07:00

1 Peter 3:15-16 “But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander.”

This message was given to MMU Cuberjaya CF last nite. Wanna acknowledge materials from Stand To Reason. Imagine if the President of MMU comes into this CF meeting and says, “I need someone to represent CF and tell me more about what you are and what you do. Who would you send?” Would you send one of these guys to represent the CF? Why? (Mystery prize)

We don’t want our representatives to be rude, blur, offensive, obnoxious, fumbling clowns basically because they reflect badly on us.

Whether we know it or not, we are already representatives for Christ in our family, in our classroom, amongst our friends… We are ambassadors of Christ. We represent the King and His Kingdom in a fallen world to share the good news and show good works. People will hear our words and see our behavior and conclude, “Oh he’s a follower of Jesus so His Master must be like that also”. As ambassadors for Christ we either attract people to see God or distract people from seeing God. I’m not saying you have to be perfect, but I think we need to be real (honest).

The topic today is “Apologetics” – it doesn’t mean saying sorry or apologize all the time. It doesn’t mean trying to defend God because God doesn’t need our puny defense, thank you very much. No, Apologetics is the art of giving our friends (seekers or critics) a reason for the hope we have in Christ. It is an important part of being an ambassador for Christ in MMU. So what does it do? Why should I learn to give a reason for our faith?

Firstly, it helps us to remove some obstacles that prevent people from coming to faith (“I think Christians are so nice but how can you believe that Jesus is the only way? Isn’t that narrow minded?”

Apologetic helps us to compare and evaluate other religious claims. Especially in Malaysia where we live in a multi-religious society, there are many ways of answering the big questions in life – Where do we come from? Who am I? Why on earth am I here for? Where am I going? These are big questions that every thinking person asks. Apologetic helps us to find good answers for our origin, identity, meaning in life and destiny after we die…

It may also helps us give our friends positive clues or evidences for why we believe God exists, Jesus resurrected and the Bible is God’s word. Some people are Christians because it makes them happy, it looks cool, the music sounds great, because a boy or girl in CF is cute and so on. But it won’t last. The kind of faith that endures and transforms is faith that is based on conviction… not because it is feels cool, but because it is true… And because it is true, it radically changes our lives and priorities… Apostle Peter says: In your heart set apart Christ as Lord. He’s Lord of all or not Lord at all.

Some may ask, “If there are reasons or evidence, where is the room for faith? If I already have faith, why need reasons?” But biblical faith is not wishful thinking, but based on facts. God invites us to “Come let us reason together” in the book of Isaiah. In New Testament, we find that the apostle Paul reasoned with people in the synagogues and some of them are persuaded.

Although faith is beyond reason, it is not against reason. It is not blind faith or intellectual suicide. Faith involves knowledge (objective: This chair is strong enough to support me), agreement (Yes, it can support me) and personal trust or choice/commitment (subjective).

Ok, so how do we do it?

Here are three key characteristics of a good ambassador for Christ. We need to have
Knowledge (informed mind), Character (attractive, winsome manner) and Wisdom (artful method)

A) Informed mind: The Bible passage we read just now tells us to be ready, be prepared to give us an answer or reason for our faith. To do that, we obviously need to know something about what we really believe and why we believe the things we believe.

For example, you may play Counterstrike with your friends one day and he asks, “Eh, what is the meaning in life, ar? Bible got answer or not?” How would you answer? If you don’t know, never mind, go home, look it up in books, ask your pastor, do some research and get back to him. But if he asks same question 2-3 times, and your answer is always “I dunno” then it just shows that this is not important even to you so why should I bother?

The best part is this: Equipping yourself with biblical truth is not as hard as you may think. There are so many excellent and free resources available online these days and with Google, it is at your finger tips. (You are IT savvy people, see below). So be transformed by the renewal of your mind. The bible didn’t say be transformed by the removal of your mind. If not, you’d become conformed to the patterns of this world. Do you know how do bank workers recognize counterfeit notes?

B) Winsome Character: Peter says “But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander”

Do you know of people who win arguments and lose the soul? They can debate like champions but offend everybody with a proud, know-it-all attitude. People are just put off. But good ambassadors for Christ are humble, gentle or respectable to others. They speak the truth but they speak the truth in LOVE. There is a patient, attractive and winsome character because the ultimate apologetics is love.

When people see in our lives compassion for the weak and needy, show forgiveness to those who persecute and slander us, it will raise profound questions for our friends “Why are they so different?”

Be sensitive to the real concern behind the question. Sometimes when people ask “How can God be fair when there is so much suffering in the world?” they may or may not want a philosophical answer that God gave us freewill or has a greater purpose for suffering. There may be underlying reason behind the question: Because they are suffering personally and the question is really asking for our understanding, presence and practical help. Be a good listener and try to find out the question behind the question.

And when people don’t agree with us, relek la… No need to be defensive or angry because only the Holy Spirit could touch a person’s heart to believe, it is not up to how good we are in debating. We are called to be witnesses, not judges of people’s hearts. Allow room for God to work in them. Sometimes all we are called to do is to plant a seed and that’s ok… just leave him with something to ponder and think about… don’t feel pressured that you must get to the sinner’s prayer every single time… bcos somewhere down the road another person will water it… another person will plow the ground… another person will reap… It’s a community project, dun be pressured to do everything

C) Artful Method: Sometimes we may have the facts, and our motive is good (we mean well) but we don’t say it in a way that people can understand. Or we say it in a way that people easily misunderstands. There is a saying: “It is not what you say, but HOW you say it that makes or breaks the case”.

This is not just about packaging or tricks. It is about effective communication. The gospel message is eternal, unchanging but the ambassador learns how to adjust his method depending on the person/situation so the gospel is heard in clear and compelling way. For example, for some people who are ready, you can flip out the Four Spiritual Laws or a tract and share with them the gospel. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life… But other people turn off the moment they see a tract, looks like you are trying to sell them something, so you may want to change your method a bit…

And we need to be careful of Christian jargons or lingo that we use. It makes perfect sense to believers but doesn’t mean anything or worse, it means the wrong thing to someone who is not a believer. Like, “Jesus is the answer!” But what is the question? “You need to be washed in the blood of the Lamb”? Huh? Sounds scary… “You need to be justified and sanctified before you can be glorified”. Is there a way to rephrase that in a lingo your friends understand?

Last but not least, don’t be an answering machine. Sometimes we think we must always be the one giving all the answers. But if you look at Jesus, He very often answers a question with another question.

Question: Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?
Response: Why do you call me good?

Question: Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?
Response: Whose picture is on the coin?

Question: On what ground shall divorce be permitted?
Response: What did Moses command you?

Question: By what authority do you do these things?
Response: Answer me this – by what authority did John the Baptist do what he did?

Questions and more questions… But why did Jesus do that? Is it because he doesn’t know the answer? No. Questions are very powerful…

Because question opens up hidden assumptions: “I can’t believe in Jesus without being 100% sure first” So I asked, “But what decision have you made in life based on 100% certainty? Unreasonable criteria”

Questions can expose the heart issues or logical problems in a person’s views
“There is no truth.” “Really? Is that true? Is that absolutely true?”
“You can’t be sure of anything when it comes to God”. “Are you sure about that?”

Questions help us gather more information and clarify someone’s beliefs (ie Hinduism). Then, if he is polite, you get to share your own views later. Conversation: Not so preachy.

Questions get you out of the hot seat and reverse the burden of proof.
“There is no God.” “What do you mean by ‘God’?”
All religions are basically the same.” “In what way are religions all basically the same”?

Learn the right answers but also learn to ask right questions.

Final thought: The Gospel is offensive enough because it deals with idols/sins of people. Don’t add any more offense to it. But we dare not water down the Gospel.

Discover Your Calling

2009-03-25T08:20:00.000-07:00

Read 1 Corinthians 12:4-27 (Based on Gordon Smith's Courage and Calling and Yoke Yeow's idea with Incredibly Called) Delivered at RipTreat 2009

If you can be a superhero, who would you want to be? Why do you want his or her super powers?

Do you remember the movie The Incredibles? Or Kungfu Panda? Or Ratatouille? The heroes of each story have a deep desire in their hearts to be superheroes, a chef (Remy the Rat) or kungfu master (Po The Panda), they face huge internal and external problems that prevent them for realizing their dreams and we cheer them on when we see how they finally overcome these barriers to be what they were meant to be!

Each and every one of us is given special talents, skills, abilities and a calling from God. Not all of us have the same spiritual gift. Why? It’s supposed to be like a body when we mutually build up and bless each other with the diverse gifts we have been given. Since we cannot be experts in everything, we need each other…

First and foremost, God calls us to Himself, to a personal Father-child relationship with Him. He loves us unconditionally, there is where our self-worth lies. Secondly, He has also equipped us with abilities and called us to fulfil a purpose, mission and destiny in life.

What happens when we don’t exercise our gifts or we don’t know what God has called us to do with our lives? When people don’t discover what God had made them to be, they very often experience these symptoms

Boredom: Mr Incredible is super-strong and loves to fight crime and save people from trouble. But when he was forced to retire by the law, he earns a living filing claims in an insurance company. He’s cramped in a tin can and sneaks out at night to play super hero.

Mischief: Do you remember Dash? Wonder-boy capable of supersonic speeds but to hide his superpowers, he can’t show his true colors in school. So he must pretend to lose races in school to conceal his abilities. In frustration, he expresses his talent by putting thumb tacks teacher's butt. When people can’t express their abilities in positive, productive ways, these gifts can have a dark side.

Inferiority Complex: Violet the shy, insecure girl whose gift of invisibility helps her fade ever more into the background. When you don’t find your call or purpose in life, you may eventually believe you are good for nothing. There is no meaning or rhyme in life… you get overwhelmed with self pity, inferiority and insecurity.

Mismatch of work: I would also like to suggest to you that because many people do not discover the true superpowers, they choose a certain job or study certain subjects because everybody else is doing it, it makes lots of money or due to society expectation or because it is easier road to take. We dun stop and ask:

Is this “who I am”? Is this what God has called me to do?

Disclaimer: If you are in secondary school, this is probably not the time for you to make firm decisions on what you’d be doing for the rest of your life. So don’t go home and tell your parents “I’m not going to school anymore because I wanna go US and be American Idol”. It is a lifelong journey. You won’t find out the entire purpose of your life tonight. At your age, I want to encourage you to try new things, dun limit your ministry experience and continuously learn more about you like/dislike but it’s never too early to start thinking about these things.

What I like about movies like Kungfu Panda, Incredibles or Ratatouille is not so much the silly humor or kick-butt action, what satisfies us most is when they find the joy of finally doing what they were made to do. Like when Remy the rat creates delicious dishes instead of scavenging leftovers or when Po the Panda finally defeats the bad guy by being himself and he finds out that the secret of the dragon scroll is “There is no secret!” we cheer for these heroes.

What are you spiritual gifts? Freely you have received, freely give. A Hero is waiting to be set free in us. Only One Life To Live. Don’t Waste It.

But how do we find out what is God’s will for us? What are our spiritual gifts? Must we hear audible voices from heaven before we know it? Is there a secret spiritual formula to finding God's call? The secret of the dragon scroll is "there is no secret".

It’s not something overly difficult or mysterious. In fact, after this we will do a little survey together to help you find out more about your spiritual gifts. Would you like to find out? (Disclaimer: The purpose is to get you started on discovery not absolute answers because unless you have tried some of these ministry areas, how do you know you don’t like it or good at it? The answers will change as you explore and learn more)

Here are FIVE Questions to help us find our Life Calling

1) What do you feel joy doing? What is my deepest desire or passion?

It doesn’t mean that just because you enjoy playing Counterstrike, you are called to be a gamer. But since God put the body together, you will feel fulfilled (Yes, I feel God’s pleasure when I run, sing, write, play the guitar, serve the weak etc) when functioning in the proper area. There will be a sense of purpose, like jigsaw puzzles that fit. Look out for the sense of fulfillment, satisfaction, pleasure when you exercise a gift/ministry.

2) What are you good at doing? What are my abilities, skills, spiritual gifts, mutant powers?

Run through some of the gifts and talents in the spiritual gift survey. It's not an exhaustive list. Maybe you think “Oh, I’m good at none of these things.” But again: “Belum cuba belum tahu”.

Risks: When people ask you to serve as ushers, “Oh no, because I don’t have that gift”. You begin to avoid evangelism or prayer. And at this time, none of us have enough life experience to really know what gifts you have, Some people would rather die than say, sing in public, but when they are given training and opportunity they may turn out to be gifted singers. So explore new opportunities. Get involved in different church ministries to meet the needs of some real people, expose yourself to the needs around and see if God puts a burden in your heart.

3) What do you feel are the biggest needs of the people around you?

When you look at the world around you, what are the things that make you sad or lose sleep? Are you burdened by the suffering of poor people? Are you burdened to see that people are lost without the gospel? Do you feel angry when there is injustice or cruelty? Of course, all Christians should feel such burdens in some degree. But it’s also true that some people feel more strongly about some areas than others. And it’s okay, dun fight over it and accept that God calls people differently while learn from others. Evangelism (Alpha Course) versus Social Justice? (Angsana) Don’t insist others to be like you.

Have you felt like: “Why isn’t somebody doing something about it?” Maybe you should.

4) What is your unique personality?

God has wired each of us differently, in a unique way like snowflakes. There is no “right” personality. Our individual temperament is unique to us as our fingerprint. John Calvin once said: You cannot know God unless you know yourself. You cannot know yourself unless you know God.

- Extroverts are energized by being with people or enjoy being the center of attention. Introverts tend to be content and energized being alone, and avoid attention when in a crowd. Which is more true to who you are?

- How do you process information? Am I more inclined to trust clear, certain and concrete facts (sensate) or more inclined to trust intuition, gut feeling and imagine possibilities (intuitive)?

- Do you make decisions depending on logic/analysis or personal relationship/feeling? Thinker or feeler?

- Am I more inclined to live with order, structure and routine or do I prefer going through life with more variety, spontaneous changes? Different personality may clash in a meeting. Derive fulfillment from finishing a task or find more joy in the process?

Again, your calling is not determined by one factor. For example: “Unless you are an outgoing extrovert, you cannot be a leader” – too simplistic. There are different leadership styles, a quiet person can lead effectively also.

5) What do others in school, family, circle of friends, church community say about me?

Since spiritual gifts are designed to benefit others (edify each other), you should see positive results as you exercise these gifts. But results take time so don’t give up too quickly, give it a fair try. Sometimes it’s hard to be brutally honest with ourselves – we can be either too hard on ourselves or unable to see our own shortcomings. So we need other brothers and sisters in Christ to help us recognize and confirm our gifting. Cannot ‘syok sendiri!!’ And as a youth group, be on the lookout and encourage those who do well, affirm them to continue using their gifts, be generous in giving honest feedback and constructive suggestions or evaluations.

But you can’t consider this question alone: Sometimes even people who mean well may misunderstand us, may be biased and their feedback cannot be absolute. We need to weigh opinions of others carefully as well. Usually some truth, some exaggerations…

So there you have it: Five Questions to help you discover your calling in life
What do you feel joy doing? What are you good at doing? What do you feel are the biggest needs of the people around you? What is your unique personality?

After doing the survey:
Beware of ‘gliding on our gifts’. Sometimes our relationship with God is not that healthy or our hearts are not right (bear grudges or hatred on others) but we can still do well in our ‘ministry’ because we are gifted in it and nobody notices. Your gift can never replace what goes on inside your heart. “Lord! Lord! Look at what we have done for you” But I never knew you. (Matt 7:21) There are people who are not so gifted but because their character is godly and their relationship with God is close, people are blessed and sense the aroma of Christ in their lives.

Our gift, ability or ministry is not an extension of ourselves. It is not where your source of self-worth. Unless you see this, you’d be driven or scared, too timid or too aggressive.

If we measure our self-worth by our achievements and abilities, we will either burn out (“I must be the best otherwise I’m a failure”) or give up (“What’s the point? I’d never be good enuff”).

But the good news is Christ “loves us more than we ever dare imagine even though we are more sinful than we’d ever know”! How does that change the way you measure how valuable you are and how you use gifts? Humble boldness…

I hope this message gets you to start thinking over the next few days we are together. What is the kind of person God has called me to be? What are the needs around me that I could me in Jesus name? What gifts have he given me to bless others and glorify God?

Remember Spiderman movie: With great powers come great responsibility! Let us pray.

Thirsting After God In The Desert

2008-09-30T18:13:00.000-07:00

Sermon audio may be downloaded from CDPC website

We are continuing a series of sermons based on the book of Psalms. The great thing about these ancient hymns is they express the whole range of human emotions as we come before God. They express overflowing joy, lamentations of grief, passion and even righteous anger… The passage of Scripture today expresses desire, longing and thirsting after God in a spiritual desert.

Psalm 63: Thirsting For God in the Spiritual Wasteland
A psalm of David. When he was in the Desert of Judah.
1 O God, you are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you,
my body longs for you,
in a dry and weary land
where there is no water.
2 I have seen you in the sanctuary
and beheld your power and your glory.
3 Because your love is better than life,
my lips will glorify you.
4 I will praise you as long as I live,
and in your name I will lift up my hands.
5 My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods;
with singing lips my mouth will praise you.
6 On my bed I remember you;
I think of you through the watches of the night.
7 Because you are my help,
I sing in the shadow of your wings.
8 My soul clings to you;
your right hand upholds me.
9 They who seek my life will be destroyed;
they will go down to the depths of the earth.
10 They will be given over to the sword
and become food for jackals.
11 But the king will rejoice in God;
all who swear by God's name will praise him,
while the mouths of liars will be silenced.

Introduction: Tomorrow is my first wedding anniversary. How time flies! Almost exactly one year ago, I married Grace… we stood in this church and exchanged our marriage vows. So I plan to bring her out to a special dinner (the restaurant name is Cheapo) to celebrate our first year of marriage and look forward to many more years to come. But I won’t be giving her flowers because she thinks it’s a waste of money. But suppose I did…

Suppose that at the dinner I say: “Dear, here is a bouquet of flowers just for you." And instead of complaining about the cost, she replied: “Oh, for me? Thank you so much”…

Now imagine if I were to say to her: “Oh, don’t mention it. It is just my duty as a husband. As a responsible person, it is my obligation to give you flowers on our anniversary. So here you go”… Would she be very happy about that? Why not? Isn’t duty a noble thing to do?

You find it weird or funny if I say that because Grace is not honored by joyless duty. It’s as if I give her flowers because I have to, and not because I want to.

Imagine again a different scenario at the dinner, I gave my wife flowers and she said: “Oh for me? Why so many roses?” And this time I replied: “Dear, because it is my pleasure to give you gifts. I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather spend this evening with than with you.” Ah… is that much better? Why?

Because Grace’s worth as a person is magnified and honored when I delight in her character, her worth, her virtues, her beauty etc. And in case you still want to eat lunch later, I better stop these mushy mushy stuffs. But there is a point to this mental experiment. (This analogy is adapted from John Piper’s poem Then Let Me All My Pleasures Tell)

Many a times we relate to God in terms of rules and regulations, a list of do’s and don’ts, of duties and obligations. Of course, there is right and wrong and holy commandments that God has given us to keep. But God’s worth, beauty and manifold excellencies are not glorified by joyless duty, but by our joyful, willing and obedient delight in all that He is. We obey and serve Him because we want to, because we desire to honor and please Him. Not because we grudgingly have to. God loves a cheerful giver and a cheerful worshipper. To put it another, our duty is to delight in God. (Psalm 37:4)

And the passage of scripture today from Psalm 63 has a lot to teach us about this intimate desiring, intense longing, thirsting and hungering for God. In the life of the early church, it was highly regarded and prescribed for daily public prayers. It was a psalm of King David, whom the Bible described as “a man after God’s heart”. From humble beginnings as a shepherd boy, he was anointed by the prophet Samuel as king. He soon proved himself to be a brilliant warrior with an artistic heart; he plays the harp and composes psalms. As a king, he secured Israel’s borders and established a royal dynasty from which the Messiah the Anointed One would one day come forth. Despite all his achievements, the bible is also brutally honest to tell us that king David has also committed serious sins, not least adultery and murder. He was literally in political wilderness at least twice in his life. The first time, he was pursued by King Saul (1 Samuel 23). And the second time, he was pursued by his own son Absalom who wanted to take over his throne (2 Sam 15). It seems that this psalm was written while David escaped to the desert of Judah, fleeing from his own son. So his life was in danger. He was hiding in a desert where there is no life or water. And that is the context in which Psalm 63 was written.

In spite of many dangers and burning heat in the desert, King David still seeks after God with intense passion:

O God, you are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you,
my body longs for you,
in a dry and weary land
where there is no water.

I’d like to structure today’s message by asking three questions:
1) How do we thirst after God and be people who pursues after God’s heart? How do we seek God in a dry and weary land?

In Malaysia, we may not live in a "dry and weary land" physically, but we do live in a spiritual wasteland. In our urban and prosperous society, we are constantly bombarded with advertising from all over the place telling us that our life is not complete unless we live in a bigger house and drive a fancier car and invest in that blue chip company. Our sense of identity is tied to the things we buy, consume or own. Our slogan today is: “I shop till I drop. Or I shop therefore I am”. And all of us have to struggle daily against the omnipresent sales pitch telling us that "bigger, newer and faster are better!" It’s about “me, myself and I”. Oh, we all know that "money cannot buy happiness" but we still want more stuff that this world can offer. City folks like us have a "standard of living" to maintain. So we are always chasing that elusive fulfillment that the next purchase may bring.

Yet we strangely find many urban people are living lives of quiet desperation. People yearn for meaning and purpose in life and try to satisfy this longing with ‘stuffs’.

Herbert Schlossberg said this: (paraphrase) All true needs, such as food, drink, and companionship, are satiable. They can be satisfied but illegitimate wants - pride, envy, greed - are insatiable. By their very nature they cannot be satisfied. In that sense, materialism is the opium of the people. It’s like drugs/dadah that for a moment dulls the sense of emptiness inside. Enough is never enough. Greater quantities are required for satisfaction and each increment proves inadequate the next time." We cannot be satisfied by materialism.

It seems like we human beings have this infinitely huge hole in our hearts and we try our best to fill it up with things, sex, music, success, health, football, religion, you name it… but it leaves us empty as before. Many people think they will be really happy when something happens to them… Hit lottery… Retire… Make a million dollar… Marry this person… “I think I’d be truly happy when I’m a rich and famous superstar”.

But even celebrities are often the most unhappy people around. Because they work so hard to get to the top, thinking that they will be happy when they get there but they are utterly disappointed to find that they are still the same when they do reach the top.

Interview with Thom of Radiohead about what are his ambitions after achieving so much success in the music scene:

“Ambitious for what? What for? I thought when I got to where I wanted to be everything would be different. I’d be somewhere else. I thought it’d be all white fluffy clouds. And the nI got there. And I’m still here.”

Then why are you still making music?

“It’s filling the hole. That’s all anyone does”.

Interviewer: “What happens to the hole?”
Pause… It’s still there. (From Christianity Explored, Rico Tice)

In the movie The Matrix, Neo the main character works as a respectable programmer by day and a computer hacker by night. He lives and thinks that the world he lives in is real but it is actually an illusion, a virtual reality (called the Matrix) created to imprison his mind while his body is used as a battery to generate energy feeding the Machines. But he is blissfully unaware of it…

One day, a guy named Morpheus entered the Matrix to rescue him and leads Neo to himself:
“Let me tell you why you are here. It’s because you know something. What you know you can’t explain but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life. There is something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad.”

Perhaps you too have this splinter in your mind. Perhaps you have thought about the big questions of life: Where do we come from? Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? There’s got to be more to life than this. Something is radically wrong with this world. It’s not supposed to be like this.

But if there is no God and everything is just ‘survival of the fittest’ in a dog eat dog world, then this world is exactly what you would expect it to be. It’s natural. “Unless you assume a God, the question of life’s purpose is meaningless” (Bertrand Russell)

But we instinctively know it is not right. It’s not supposed to be this way. What’s wrong?

It’s the question that drives us. Like a hole in our hearts or splinter in our mind.

According to C.S. Lewis, "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it… Probably, earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing." These longings are clues that point us to the God who truly satisfies.

You may say: “Just because I feel the desire for char koay teow doesn’t mean that I will get it.”

But doesn’t the appetite for food in us mean that food exists somewhere? Isn’t it true that innate desires correspond to real objects that can satisfy them, such as sexual desire (corresponding to sex), physical hunger (corresponding to food), tiredness (corresponds to sleep) and relational desires (corresponding to friendship)? We have a longing that no amount or quality of food, sex, friendship or success in this world can fulfill. (Reasons for God, Tim Keller)

That is a clue that the hole in our hearts is God-shaped, only a relationship with the infinite God can make it whole again. We are made for another world.

And King David knows that! For him God is not some distant Supreme Being or impersonal Force faraway, not involved with the world. He cries out: “O God, You are my God”. This God is personal, not an “It”, He can have a covenant relationship with us.

And if we long and desire for God, then we need to seek him actively and earnestly. To be earnest is to be serious and determined. It’s not a hobby you do when you got nothing else better to do. Do we eagerly seek God with all our emotion, intellect and will? How serious are we in growing our relationship with God?
We are sometimes like the little boy who plays with dirty mud by the drain (longkang), and Mommy comes along and says, “Come, Ah Boy, don’t play in the mud. Come, Mommy bring you play at Sunway Lagoon instead.” And the boy refuses (I don’t want, I want to play by the longkang) because he cannot imagine how wonderful playing by the sea or Sunway Lagoon is like. The problem is not that his desire is too strong, but it is too weak. He settled for far too little.

Some people think of God as a cosmic policeman who frowns every time people have fun and goes around making sure that people never enjoys themselves.

But that is far from the truth. Think about all the promises in the Bible. Jesus says I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly. I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty. (John 6:34-36). At God’s right hand are pleasures forevermore. Those who lose their life shall find it. Crown of glory… Eternal life…

CS Lewis says: “If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by an offer of a holiday at sea. We are far too easily pleased.” We settle for too little…

Do we have a covenant relationship with God today? Are we too easily pleased by the temporal pleasure of this world? Or do we thirst for the infinite joy of knowing the Creator God himself? Only Christ alone can satisfy the deepest longing for meaning and love in our hearts.

Saint Augustine said, "Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee."

2) What can we do when we experience spiritual dryness and we don’t feel any passion for God?

When we don’t feel any passion for studying the scriptures, coming to church, pray or witness, does that mean that we don’t need to do these things because God is not honored by joyless duty. Do we stop doing our duty because we have no desire? What can we do then?

The answer is: No, don’t just sit and wait for the passion for God to come. We do what we need to do out of obedience anyway. But doesn’t that make us a hypocrite – I don’t want to do it but do it because I have to?

John Piper has this advice: “No, you will not be a hypocrite, if you know that joy is your duty, and repent that you don’t have it, and ask God earnestly to restore the joy even as you do good deeds. That is not the way a hypocrite thinks. That is the way a true Christian thinks in the fight for joy.” (When I Don’t Desire God: How To Fight For Joy)

That means we still do them but do so with a heart of repentance, asking God to restore our joy in Him. Because the value (preciousness) of water is not only glorified when we drink it and are satisfied. The importance of water is also glorified when we thirst and long for it when we don’t have it yet. In the same way, we honor God when we yearn for Him (even though not fully satisfied yet).

Some of us have been Christians for some time already but somehow we still don’t feel satisfied in God. What could be wrong? And we all experience seasons of spiritual dryness when we don’t feel like doing what we know we should. Very often, it could be due to willful sins in our lives or idols in our hearts. We need to turn away from them.

Sometimes before lunchtime, I have the habit of eating tid-bits or junkfood lying around the office. While waiting for the clock to hit 12 pm, my hand gets itchy and can’t resist grabbing that candy bar or munch on Pringles. So when it comes to having the proper meal, you have already lost appetite for real, nourishing food. You cant eat what you really need to eat because you are already stuffed on junkfood.

In the same way, satisfaction will never come if we claim to trust in God, but then quench our souls on the short-lived, inadequate pleasures of this world. Through the prophet Jeremiah, God said, "My people have exchanged their glory for that which does not profit… For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, to hew for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water" (Jer. 2:13)

If we do not feel a hunger/thirst to know God more (not just know about Him but a deeper personal encounter with Him) could it be because we have lost appetite by eating too much junk food? Maybe we need to go on a fast of TV, shopping, bak kut teh or whatever substitute or idol we may have in our hearts that hinder our relationship with God (Bulan Ramadhan) Something about desert is that there’s almost nothing there. There you have no one to turn to but God. Maybe we need to make a trip to the desert.

Sometimes, a season of spiritual dryness may not due to any particular sin. Some mystics call it ‘the dark night of the soul’. For example, you go for prayers and God touched you and you fell down on the floor. Wow, a wonderful spiritual experience. But then we can give too much attention on that experience, the drama of it, the pleasing sensations rather than focusing on the Savior. When we do not feel God’s presence, sometimes it may be a work of the Holy Spirit. When you feel God is far away but actually He is near you, He is weaning us away from our attachment to the pleasing, spiritual experiences so that we can love God for who He is, not for what He can give.

In the darkness of night, when he can’t sleep, King David remembers God… “On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night.” He actively recalls the spiritual encounters he had in the past… “I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory.” These memories at the temple kindle in his heart a desire and longing for God.

Why do you come to church? Is it out of habit? Because my parents bring me here? Out of obedience to Bible’s teaching? Because you like the cool music and songs? Because of the sermons? For fellowship with friends?

When it comes right down to it, there is only one reason for coming to church. It is the reason of the psalmist. We come to church, first and foremost, to be in God’s presence and seek His face. We come to church, first and foremost, to meet with God. God speaks and meets with us through our worship together, the sacraments, the preaching of the Word, prayers and the fellowship we will have later over lunch. To behold his power and glory. It’s not about us. It’s all about God.

Tun Mahathir always say “Melayu mudah lupa”. Sometimes Christians also can be quite forgetful. We also “mudah lupa”. When we experience God’s mercy or grace or answered prayers, do we store them up in our memory? Can we look back at these precious moments and when things are difficult, we can say to ourselves, “God has been faithful… God is good… He has done great things”? Do you remember?

Like King David, we need to come into God’s sanctuary with a focus to behold His power and glory and remember His grace and mercy and goodness during long seasons of darkness and loneliness.

3) How can we praise and glorify God even in a spiritual desert?

King David’s spirituality is not a form of escapism from the real world but the very essence of practical living. His situation was one of conflict and danger, enemies are bent on killing him. But this passion for God kept him going. He is assured that God is able to protect and vindicate him. He is confident his enemies will ultimately be destroyed by the sword and the mouths of liars will be silenced.

King David decided to praise God no matter what happens. Even while in danger and in the desert, there is mutual commitment: My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.

Despite the circumstances around him, he says: “with singing lips my mouth will praise you”, “I will praise you as long as I live, in your name I will lift up my hands”, “My lips will glorify you” and so on.

But how can He praise God when his life is in danger and his throne taken over by force?

If you ask him why? He would say: “Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you.”, “My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods with singing lips my mouth will praise you”, “Because you are my help, I sing in the shadow of your wings, My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.”

In short, praise is the overflow of someone who is satisfied in God. All enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise. Those of us who watch football will know this. Sometimes we watch champion’s league football at 3 am in the morning, and when our favorite team scores an exciting goal, we want to shout out: Goal! We want to sing “Glory Glory Man United!” Or “You’d never walk alone” We want to praise the scorer, turn to our friends: That was a wonderful pass from Rooney or Gerard. That is overflow of our enjoyment of the game. Imagine if you watch the game alone and you don’t dare to shout because you dun want to wake up your parents/wife. Something is missing… No umph… The joy is not complete… it didn’t lead to its climax.

So praise is the natural and joyful response of someone secure in God’s protection and satisfied in His greatness.

Our delight in someone or something is brought to completion by praise. When we see a very beautiful sunset or scenery, we just naturally feel like wanting to shout “Wow, that’s so amazing!” That praise completes our joy…

C. S. Lewis said: “I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.” When we praise the one we love, we are completing our joy.

So when God calls us to worship and praise Him, it is not out of selfishness or pride or insecurity as if He needs our praise. God forbid. Rather, the act of God seeking His own praise is the ultimate loving act. Precisely because He loves us so, He relentlessly commands us to pursue the praises of His name in our hearts. It completes our joy in Him. Think of what we would be missing if God did not insist that we worship Him. We would never know the source of ultimate satisfaction.

Jonathan Edwards commented, "The enjoyment of (God) is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied…. Fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, or children, or the company of earthly friends are but shadows, but enjoyment of God is the substance. These are but scattered beams, but God is the sun. These are but streams, but God is the fountain. These are but drops, but God is the ocean."

All the pleasures and miracles of life – good food, beautiful friendship, the colors of sunset, the gentleness of a mother or a lover, glorious music – all these are good gifts from God that we enjoy, but even they are ultimately clues to a greater satisfaction found in God alone.

Let us pray:

“King David knew what it meant to love God with all his heart, soul and mind, to be a person who goes after God’s heart.

Are you thirsting and longing for God today? When we come to His sanctuary, do we come to meet with God and behold His power and glory?

Are our souls satisfied in all that He is or are we too easily pleased with substitutes that do not last?

Do you remember God and think about Him continually?
Do you recognize His care for you in difficult situations?
Are we following hard after Him?
Can we say, “O God, you are my God?”
Are we thirsting for God the way we should?

Jesus says: I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty. (John 6:34-36)”

How Does The Church Handle Sin And Sickness?

2008-09-30T18:11:00.000-07:00

James 5:13-20

13 Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray. Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise.
14 Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord.
15And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven.
16Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.
17Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years.
18Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops.
19My brothers, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring him back, 20remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins.

We have come to the last passage in the letter of James. Its message is challenging, very practical, and action packed. I wonder as we listen to this series of sermons on the book of James, which message particularly struck you? Do you recall some lessons that are especially relevant for you?

Do not be listeners of the word only but also be doers of the word as well, to walk the talk, to demonstrate our faith by our works etc. It was a letter written to a church of poor and suffering people under intense pressure to give up and walk out of their faith, so James want to encourage them to be patient in this time of trial and testing. To rally the troops to press on in doing good.

To step back a bit, let us look again at what Pastor Caleb has preached on last Sunday: James encouraged his readers to be patient in suffering and press on till the finishing line, don’t lose sight of the Big Picture. Verse 8: “Be patient and stand firm because the Lord's coming is near… The Judge is standing at the door!” (verse 8, 9) Dun give up, Christ will return and put things right. There will be justice. He will reward those who persevere till the very end and judge those who do wickedness. To some of us, (comfortable, middle class folks in the city) the idea that God is a judge who punishes people sounds very harsh and cruel, but to people who are suffering unjustly under oppression and persecution, the news that God will finally bring justice and punish the wicked is like a drink of cool water on a very hot day. It brings hope and courage.

So now as James is wrapping up, he reminds us that there will be a glorious day when there is no more sin, no more suffering and no more sickness. God will wipe away every tear from our eyes and bring his healing justice in a new heaven and a new earth. The effects of sin will be reversed. Our decaying bodies will be resurrected into immortal, imperishable bodies that will not experience disease.

But that day is not yet come. In this side of heaven, we are not promised sinless perfection or perfect health. In the meantime, followers of Jesus (the community of faith, that we call the church) still struggle with sin and sickness.

So while waiting for that glorious day, how do we deal with them? How do we deal with sick and sickness? That’s the question I’d like to ask as we come to today’s text.

1) Verse 13: Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray. Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise.

“In Trouble? Pray. Happy? Praise.”

Sounds easy? Simple? But how many times have we caught ourselves doing just the opposite. When things go well and the sky is blue, we say: “God is good all the time, and all the time God is good. Hallelujah! Praise the lord! I could sing of your love forever…” But when trouble comes, instead of praying, we complain and grumble: “This is just not fair. How can God let this happen to me? I don’t deserve this. God doesn’t really care for us.”

Or the other side of the coin, only when difficult times come and the storm clouds gather, we rush to God begging for help. Sometimes I look back on my college days and see the ‘most spiritual’ times of my student life (when I spend the most time praying and praying hard) usually happen to be the day before exams or assignment deadlines!

But when exams over or assignment passed up, when things are going well, it is business as usual… We live just like everybody else, as if God does not exist at all. In theory, we are theists (believers in God) but in action, we are practically atheists.

Both lifestyles – complaining against God when things go bad, ignoring Him when things are well – may just show that deep down, we are really more interested in what God can give to us, His blessings of help in trouble and giving us good exam results or good job or a good husband/wife etc we are more interested in His gifts than we are in the Giver himself.

No, that’s not how we should live. This is using God. There is no communion or personal relationship or intimacy.

So how shall we then as a church handle sin and sickness?

Scripture seems to tell us this: Let bad times drive us to our knees and pray, to recognize our desperate need for God’s grace. As Thomas Merton put it, “Prayer is an expression of who we are. . . . We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment.”

And let good times be an occasion for us to be thankful for His goodness in providing for us and praise Him. Give Him glory. At all times, live before the face of God as if he’s our only spectator.

That means, in good times or bad times, all of life is to be lived before the face of God. It’s like we are living in front of the audience of ONE. Do we pray to just get things from God, or do we pray out of the sheer delight in who God is? To give him pleasure and glory because we see his worth and beauty…

2) Secondly, we come to the interesting question on sickness and prayer for healing.

If we are sick, we are encouraged to different kinds of prayer
- Personal: let him pray (v13)
- From Leaders: call the pastors/elders to pray over him (v 14)
- Corporate: pray for each other so that you may be healed (5:16)

So all believers are given the privilege to pray, not just for pastors or elders. If everyone calls the pastors when got flu or headache, he will be very busy indeed. Doctors will be out of business.

Living in this modern world, with advances in medical science, it does affect how we look about prayer and healing. As Philip Yancey says: “In former days when a child fell ill the parents cried out to God; now they call for an ambulance or phone the doctor.” Some Christians believe that miracles are only for special times in history like in the ministry of Moses, Elijah, Jesus and the apostles as signs that confirm God’s revelation. Now we have the Bible, God’s full revelation, so miraculous signs are not needed today.

I believe that James is clear that we are to ask for prayer for healing. This instruction is for the ongoing life of the church, for elders, for all of us, not just for apostles/prophets. (Verse16) “The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective” can be discouraging to us. We have all screwed up so many times, God will never answer my prayer. But “righteous” here doesn’t mean “sinless perfection”… James made a comparison to Elijah (v. 17- 18) (Wah! Super prophet! In a time of national apostasy, when the state of Israel led by a bad king and queen turn away from God, Elijah almost single handedly challenged them and brought Israel back.) But no, the point that James want to underline is the fact that this ministry of praying for healing is not for super healers. It's for regular folks. Elijah is just like us, he has his moments of courage and can fall into depression. One moment, he is bold and the next moment, he fled. He has his failures too, but his trust is in God and his faith is active in good work, he is counted as righteous by God’s grace and mercy.

On the other hand, there will be those who tell you that if you have enough faith, you can ask God and He will heal directly. You do not even need medical help. Medical help is only for those whose faith is not strong enough. If your prayer is not answered, it must be due to sins.

But we know this is not true. Last week, we saw the example of Job who suffered person tragedy and loss of health and wealth, and it is not caused by any particular sin that he has done. So we must be sensitive and not jump to conclusions. At the same time, there could be sickness that is caused by sin. (Verse 15: “If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.”)

In CDPC, if you’ve been around for some time, you’d see how our pastors have applied this biblical teaching in the community life. When there are some serious illnesses, the pastors will pray over the church member and anoint the person with oil in the hospital or in church. And thank God, there have been testimonies of healing. God’s kingdom power has broken into history in the person of Jesus and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. It would seem that God wants us to pray expectantly for healing in that reality.

But at the same time, miraculous healing is not always forthcoming. We still live in a fallen world.
I have also prayed for a friend’s mother who battled with cancer and she does not get healed, and now in the presence of God.

We have to hold in tension these two truths (we should pray in faith for healing and trust in His sovereign wisdom). There is no simple formula that works for all cases because life is messy. On our part, we pray in faith and ultimately the result is up to God’s wisdom and sovereignty.

Clearly the bible does not convey a picture of instant healing on demand. In 1Timothy 5:23 Paul tells Timothy to take a little wine with his water because of his stomach ailments. He did not instruct Timothy to claim healing for his stomach and ignore sound medical practice. Another example, Paul left Trophimus sick at Miletus (2Timothy 4:20).

So we should not see God at work only in dramatic, miraculous healings. If a person is healed through medical science, it is only because a merciful God is behind the laws that make science works. Should we not praise the God whose natural laws allow medicine to do its healing work and the skills of doctors whom he created?

There is an interesting mention about applying oil on the sick. There is no magical power in the oil. It is “the prayer offered in faith” that God responds to. It is a tangible symbol of God’s presence and the Holy Spirit’s anointing coming on the sick person.

It is also interesting to note that oil is very commonly used for medicinal purposes in ancient times. (See Isaiah 1:6 and Luke 10:34) If this is what James has in mind, then it would be very interesting that here we have both prayer and medicine being used together for healing the sick.

Why does God choose prayer – seemingly weak, ineffective?

First, God wants us to do it this way so our hearts lose their self-sufficiency. If God’s blessings just came upon us without a lot of prayer, we would be proud, assuming that a good and comfortable life is simply our right.

Second, God wants us to do it so our hearts will be prepared to rejoice in him as the author of all blessings. If God’s blessings just came upon us without a lot of prayer, we would not perceive him as the source of everything we need. In short, it is very dangerous to give us good things unless we are prepared through much prayer.

Third, when we do prevailing prayer corporately then the attainment of blessing creates community, knitting our hearts together.

3) The Community As Means Of Grace To Keep And Correct Us.

“16 Confess your sins to one another and pray for each other… 19My brothers, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring him back, 20 Remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins.”

This implies that there is such a thing as truth. If there is truth, there is also error. Truth is not ice cream, it is insulin to the diabetic. It’s not just a personal preference, truth is a matter of life and death.

Also implies a safe space where we can be vulnerable and open and trusting. Confessing our sins to another person can be scary and not a common spiritual practice, especially in evangelical churches.

But we are created and saved for community. We are not isolated, individual, independent believers. James envisions the whole church as a safe place where we help each other to deal with sin and grow in holiness. It’s a community project and a journey we walk together.

Opening up to another person is a risk. It leaves us exposed, vulnerable, open to hurt. End result is we hide and struggle alone. Eventually, some just drop out or drift away.

We must remember however that we are all sinners together. God is not finished with us yet. All of us have weaknesses, insecurities, habits to overcome and the Holy Spirit is sanctifying us and giving different people gifts, skills and wisdom to help each other.

When we share our stories, we invite others into a part of ourselves that cannot be entered without permission. It’s a big honor and privilege. Those who listen sense a welcome to delve into their own stories, to make themselves open, to trust others with their pain. This results in a purer, more authentic fellowship of people who know and love and understand each other’s needs, anxieties, temptations and sins. In this act of mutual confession, mutual forgiveness, mutual help and prayer we release power that brings inner healing.

“The great mystery of our faith is that we get closest to God when we are willing to be vulnerable, when we are willing to say ‘I need somebody else’.”—Henri Nouwen

Testimonies of victory and triumph… Weddings… We rejoice with those who rejoice, we grieve with those who grieve. If all we get are stories of victory, some may get discouraged “what’s wrong with me?” I feel a profound sense of belonging in CDPC when stories are shared about struggles that are still ongoing, how they are trusting in God in tat unresolved situation, need for healing, for an answer… These are real people facing real issues.

But how do we apply this in our lives? Maybe some suggestions from how I’ve seen some people in our church are doing it.

-Intentionally cultivate friendships of trust and openness. Maybe it could be small group. Give permission to trusted friends to ask tough questions.
-Confidentiality must be maintained, except when it endangers someone.
-I know of guys who travel a lot for work and live out of the suitcase. One day, you could be in Amsterdam or Brazil or Bangkok. They would have this agreement. Call someone when tempted especially for guys
-As a general rule, brother to brother or sister to sister confession as in some ‘emotionally charged’ situations.

So how do we deal with sin and sickness this side of heaven?

We live in a fallen world that has been corrupted by sin and we cannot escape the realities of this fallen world. But at the same time we also live in a new reality that has already begun in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But it is a reality that will be only be seen in its fullness when Jesus comes again. In the meantime, we live by faith and prayer and in communion with each other before the face of God.

Merdeka Sermon

2008-09-08T07:01:00.001-07:00

Independence Day sermon on 31 August 2008. Audio download will be available here soon.

Selamat Hari Merdeka! Today we celebrate 51 years of independence. Are you feeling patriotic today? There are many things we could be thankful for and achievements that are worth celebrating.

For example, in just about 50 years, we have transformed from an agricultural economy to an industrialized nation with a fast-growing urban middle class. You can see signs of modern progress everywhere with high-tech buildings like Twin Towers, KL Tower, KLIA and so on. By and large, we have also lived in peace together in a culturally diverse society. We live amongst Malays, Chinese, Indians, Kadazans, Ibans, Sikhs dan lain-lain. And except for that infamous 1969 riot, we have been spared from the communal violence that happened in other nearby places like Indonesia or Southern Thailand.

Having said that, there are also many weaknesses that we need to overcome if we really want to be a developed country by 2020. Before we get to that, let us turn to the passage of Scripture for today

Psalm 93
1 The LORD reigns, he is robed in majesty;
the LORD is robed in majesty
and is armed with strength.
The world is firmly established;
it cannot be moved.
2 Your throne was established long ago;
you are from all eternity.
3 The seas have lifted up, O LORD,
the seas have lifted up their voice;
the seas have lifted up their pounding waves.
4 Mightier than the thunder of the great waters,
mightier than the breakers of the sea—
the LORD on high is mighty.
5 Your statutes stand firm;
holiness adorns your house
for endless days, O LORD.

We Malaysians are living in very, very interesting times. Our newspaper headlines these days are so full of suspense and intrigue that they make even Obama look so boring in comparison. Almost every week, we have shocking revelations of sex, lies and videotapes… statutory declarations flying here and there with allegations of political conspiracies, cover-ups, spies, murder, sodomy and C4 explosives! I think someone should make a movie out of all these drama and sure can make a lot of money. Who knows? Maybe can even win an Oscar!

But seriously, I think our nation is at a crucial crossroads of sorts… winds of change are blowing and powerful opposing forces are shaping where Malaysia will be for the next 50 years. So the theme for church camp this year “For Such A Time As This” and the message of Esther is especially timely and relevant.

The last general election on March 8th (so called political tsunami) raised some interesting questions: Could we be seeing the beginning of a two-party democracy in Malaysia? Like in US, they have Republicans and Democrats. The morning after, we woke up to find ourselves living in a state ruled by Pakatan Rakyat.

Are we beginning to see that finally Malaysians have matured enough to go beyond racial politics? In the past, Chinese only vote for ‘Chinese’ parties like DAP or MCA, Malays only vote for PAS or UMNO, Indians only vote for MIC or MIC… But now we have Makkal Sakti?! This time around, we see a mood for change among Malay, Chinese and Indian communities.

But there are also fears that in this desperate moment of transition that communal violence may flare up once again. We have different ethnic and religious communities living side by side with each other but with precious little contact and understanding in between. On the night of March 8, many of us get SMS to stay at home and be careful for fear of violence.

While all these things are happening, petrol and food prices are going up. A globalizing economy is getting more competitive.

The Malays have this saying “Gajah sama gajah berjuang, pelanduk mati di tengah”. As Malaysian Christians, we watch much of the drama and sandiwara like the kancil (mousedeer) caught between two fighting elephants. We have no political power. Just a small minority. I wonder what are your feelings at this time of uncertainty?

Some of us may feel
Fed-up or ‘Jelak’: “Look at how dirty and corrupt politic is. Christians should never get involved in it.”
Cynical: “Aiya… What difference can small fries like us make la? We have been like this for 50 years, we will remain like that for another hundred years. Migrate better.”
Hopeful: “I think things are changing for the better. If So and So becomes Prime Minister, then our country’s problems will be solved.”
Confused: “Where is God in all this? What does God want the church to do?”

The passage of Scripture today from Psalm 93 points us to the throne of our sovereign God. “The LORD reigns, he is robed in majesty; and is armed with strength.”

Although we are weak and needy people, God is mighty and strong. Where is God in the midst of all these events? He is on His throne. His throne was established from eternity and will last forever. He created the entire universe, the galaxies, solar systems and everything in it out of nothing. And He sustains the whole creation and set up physical laws that keep them from falling apart.

Isaiah 40 describes God’s power in poetic terms: He measured the seas in the hollow of his hand and mark off the sky with his hand, he weighs the mountains on scales and the nations are like a drop of water in a bucket… That’s how awesome and great is our God.

Psalm 93 is an enthronement psalm that worshipfully celebrates the fact that God is the ultimate ruler in the nation of Israel. In the other surrounding nations, the king is also considered divine and their power is absolute. But for Israel, though they have a human king, but the king is ultimately answerable to the divine King and the ‘constitution’ of the nation, that is, the covenant the Lord made with Israel. No one is above the rule of law, not even the king (Deuteronomy 17:18-20)

Our human rulers like Yang Dipertuan Agong and Prime Minister and Cabinet members, state governments are ultimately God’s servants/ministers to bring justice and order in society (whether they know it or not). So our default position is to obey their authority and laws of the land and pray for them. But their authority is not absolute, there is a higher law/King that even our rulers must answer to. If the state acts and speaks as if it is god, demanding our ultimate loyalty and obedience, then it has become an idol and we have the freedom and responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

If our vision of God is too small, we’d be too impressed or depressed by men or what’s happening in this world. But if we see how awesome God really is… how majestic His rule is over our national affairs… We can still be aware of what’s happening in the world but we’d be more impressed with God. And whoever becomes Prime Minister on Sept 16 or 4 years from now… no matter how things turn out… we are reminded that God is still on the throne and His rule is everlasting. No one can frustrate his plan and purpose.

Like we saw in the story of Esther, the invisible hand of God (His providence) is quietly working behind the scenes, putting the right people at the right place to do the right things at the right time. Even the sinful actions of men, God can use it and turn it around for his own purpose. Like Haman who set up a trap for Mordecai and the Jews but it ended up as a trap that ironically backfired.

Psalm 93 also gives us a picture of chaotic, tsunami-like waves that represent all the threats and upheavals against the rule of God. But the Lord on high is mightier than all of them.
3 The seas have lifted up, O LORD,
the seas have lifted up their voice;
the seas have lifted up their pounding waves.
4 Mightier than the thunder of the great waters,
mightier than the breakers of the sea—
the LORD on high is mighty.
So our trust and confidence are anchored on solid Rock. We can take comfort that God is big enough to protect and carry us through.

Remember this scene from the movie: “The Lord of the Rings”?

Frodo, the small innocent hobbit who was given the dangerous task of carrying a powerful ring to the Enemy’s stronghold, said: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.

Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides the will of evil.

We may wish for the good old days when things are more stable… economy is growing… yet sometimes, it’s not up to us to choose or decide. But we can choose what to do with the kairos moment that is given to us, discern what God wants us to do in this small window of opportunity available today.

The sovereignty of God is not an excuse for laziness though: “Since God in control, I dun need to bother doing anything la”. No, the truth that God is sovereign sets us free from cynicism. Let me explain… For a long time, many young people are disillusioned and feel disempowered: “We are only small fries, what can we do? We can’t change anything” So they felt helpless and “tidak apathy”. They will complain and rant at the government at the mamak but they are not interested to be part of the solution.

But if our God is awesome and sovereign, and he s ultimately in control of our affairs, then no matter how difficult the problem in our country is, it’s not a problem for Him… and that should be a powerful motivation for us to action: To do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with Him. While we do these things, we await the day when Jesus will usher in his kingdom of peace and healing righteousness. So while life won’t be perfect on this side of heaven, we can work to improve it so that our church and society starts to look something like the future Kingdom of God today. It can be like a movie preview or foretaste of things to come.

In light of God’s sovereignty, how then shall we live? What can we do in this time of change and contribute to nation building? (3 applications)

1) This may sound very basic but the obvious things are usually the most important. If God is all powerful and rules over all and we are weak and powerless, the most obvious thing we can do is to humble ourselves and pray.

“And my people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin and heal their land” (2 Chro 7:14)
We need to pray for God’s Kingdom, God’s rule to come and His will be done here on earth as it is in heaven. If we do a stock take on our prayer life. What do we pray for most of the time? If our prayers are only limited to our own personal needs, it may show that we are too inward looking. We need to expand our horizon.

For example, NECF 40 days fast and prayer theme this year: “The Lord Revives: Transforming the nation through the local church”. Christians are called to pray our personal revival, then move outward to pray for the church, then the community (empower the community to work toward social justice and good governance) and government (a reformed police force that is corrupt free, impartial, competent and effective in upholding public order and peace). That’s the kind of world embracing prayer we need.

2) Abraham Kuyper: There is no sphere of life that is not subject to the sovereignty of Jesus Christ.

If Jesus is the King and Lord over all of our life, then we cannot divide our lives into neat little boxes like ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’. I don’t mean that we should form a political party called “Christian action Force” (Chrisaf) and try to make this country a Christian state. The church is called to bear the cross, not to pick up the sword. While Christian individuals could actively participate in political party, the church as the body of Christ should maintain a prophetic distance from partisanship and not be used as a tool by politicians.

What I mean is we cannot isolate the gospel from making an influence in the wider society.
We cannot say “OK religion is for Sundays and quiet time, but when it comes to my business decisions from Monday to Saturday, that’s secular stuffs so I play by different rules”…

If I’m a Christian lawyer, I can’t say: “Ok Christianity is what I believe when in church, but when it comes to the 1988 judicial crisis (In Malaysia we have the best justice that money can buy), I dun really bother”.

We can’t because God is not just interested in so called religious activities but how we conduct our lives in the marketplace. He is Lord of Sunday and the other six days also.

For example, He is interested in integrity and transparency in business practice and justice in the government:

Proverbs 11:1 “The Lord hates dishonest scales but accurate weights are his delight”.
Proverbs 29:4 “By justice a king gives a country stability, but one who is greedy for bribes tears it down.”

God has given us each one with unique abilities, skills, talents and resources. As we study in college/university or work, we begin to discover what our passion and super-powers are. These are things I like to do… These are things I am good at doing…

Spiderman said: With great power comes great responsibility. Our responsibility to redeem that sphere of life for Christ… It’s not easy, every industry has its unique challenges and opportunities.

If you are a salesperson, you are an “ordained salesperson”. You have been summoned by God to serve Him in that specific sphere of activity.
Or, if you are an “ordained lawyer”, you are called to prayerfully explore how your discipline shows signs of rebellion against or submission to Christ’s Lordship.
An “ordained environmentalist” ought to read the Scripture not just devotionally, but actively apply the biblical mandate for creation care in his work.

Whatever our calling is, we need to learn to think and live “Christianly” in areas specific to what we do – media, education, politics, business or the arts.

In humility and boldness, we should creatively integrate our faith with our vocation.

Laypeople in every facet of life – media, politics, business, education and others – should be enabled to challenge the prevailing assumptions of society in light of the gospel. Theology should not be reserved for pastors and scholars only! (Newbigin)

The biggest impact you can make for the kingdom is by being faithful to your calling and gifts that God has given you in the marketplace.

3) If God is the God of this city, Lord of this nation, King of all people groups as we have sung today, then we should work towards racial reconciliation.

The issue of race is sensitive and potentially explosive topic in Malaysia. Raja Muda of Perak, Raja Dr Nazrin Shah said this at a Student Leaders Summit 2007:

“To ensure sustained success at nation-building, Malaysians of all races, religions, and geographic locations need to believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that they have a place under the Malaysian sun. Only when each citizen believes that he or she has a common home, is presented common opportunities, given due recognition and is working towards a common destiny, will he or she make the sacrifices needed for the long haul.”

His vision for Malaysia is consistent with what many Christians have labored for in history: Martin Luther King a pastor and civil rights activist who worked to end racial segregation and discrimination in US through non violent civil disobedience: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

So how can we be a community of peace makers? How can we ensure there is a place for everyone under the Malaysian sun? When Jesus lay out how Kingdom living looks like in the Sermon on the Mount, He says: Blessed are the peace makers for they will be called sons of God.

Here is a short and by no means exhaustive list of simple things we can do

1) Intentionally cultivate friendship with people who are different from us: The people we work and play with, the friendships we make, must never be limited by race. Prejudice and misunderstanding can be removed if we interact personally with others of a different ethnic group or religion -- even if it is just one teacher, one colleague or one schoolmate.

2) Free ourselves from racism in our language. We may not say it in polite company but do we enjoy that racist joke that our friends tell or we read in forwarded mails? People are made in the image of God so they are precious and have dignity. People are people, they are not ‘babi’.

3) Help the weak and poor from other races. I think many people in CDPC are already doing it and if you like to join in, do let the pastors know. In the orang asli ministry in sg buloh and kg batu, the church helps a marginalized community through education to break the cycle of poverty. Other CDPC members are also working to resolve communal conflicts and giving tuition class to the multiracial groups of children in Subang.

4) Be informed and speak up: As Daniel Khoo who works for the Edge advised us: Read from both sides of the fence, both mainstream and not so mainstream media. Kairos magazine this month has very good articles on Merdeka and post general election analysis.

Yes, we thank God for people like Tricia Yeoh (Center Public Policy Studies), Kian Ming who writes for Malaysiakini or KJ John (OHMSI) who works for integrity and transparency in public governance, speaking sensibly on public issues. But what about ‘ordinary’ people like us? What can we do?
The media has become more open and independent these days. With the internet, blogs, TV debates and radio talk shows becoming more independent, we have opportunities to write or call in to voice our views also.

There are many issues that affect Christians today like the ban on the word Allah in our Malay language Bibles that would affect our bumiputra brothers and sisters in East Malaysia… and the famous Lina Joy case and yes, we need to speak up on such issues. But if we only get worked up over ‘Christian’ issues are involved and remain silent when it affects those who are not Christians, then we could be guilty of ‘tribalism’, we just care about people from our ‘tribe’. Or do we also care and speak up for fellow Malaysians who are not Christians? (Proverb 31)

I think we can and should. Here is one example of how this can happen.

Remember Revathi? Born Siti Fatimah to Muslim convert parents, she was called Revathi Masoosai by the grandmother who raised her. She married the man she loves Suresh in 2004 according to Hindu rites and has a 18-month-old daughter. In January last year, Revathi was detained at the Syariah Court and held at a rehab camp for six months. The authorities seized her daughter from her husband and handed the child to Revathi's Muslim mother.

The NECF together with other religious bodies organized a candlelight vigil outside Dataran Merdeka in solidarity with a fellow Malaysian whose fundamental liberties have been denied her.

A certain Irish scholar Peter Rowan wrote a good article called The Malaysian Dilemma that everyone in church should read: “Since reconciliation is at the heart of the gospel, and since the gospel transcends the barriers of race, ethnicity and culture, and since the church is the most inclusive community on earth, the local church is a community of hope in a fragmented world. In Malaysia, the church has the task of not only proclaiming the message of reconciliation to all Malaysians, but of embodying the concrete implications of that message in its community life, so that Malaysians of all races can look at a local church community and see the gospel fleshed out in a racially reconciled group of people who can work, worship and witness together.”

Won’t you like to be part of a community like that? Wouldn’t you like to celebrate diversity of races and cultures in CDPC when we gather to worship, work and witness together?

In conclusion, we live in a very interesting time in our country’s history. There’s a window of opportunity for us to get involved in transforming our nation. We need to be confident in the fact that God is on the throne, and live out His lordship in prayer, in the marketplace and in being a covenant community of diverse culture and race.

The Postliberalism of Brevard Childs

2007-10-08T02:19:00.000-07:00

By Dr Leong Tien Fock

Postliberalism, originated by Hans Frei and George Lindbeck, is one postmodern approach to theology that has captured the attention, even appreciation, of a number of evangelicals. Is postliberalism consistent with evangelicalism? By evangelicalism I mean Christian orthodoxy minus propositionalism, the view held by many evangelicals, notably Carl Henry, that propositions alone are adequate to express theological truth revealed in the Scripture. Given that so much of Scripture is poetry and narrative evangelicalism cannot be faithful to Scripture if it has no room for the imagination to complement propositions to enhance and enrich our perception of theological truth.

Henry H. Knight III in his book A Future for Truth: Evangelical Theology in a Postmodern World presents a summary of Hans Frei’s view that:

the biblical narrative is quite close to history-writing in depicting a common public world. However, in clear distinction from history-writing, biblical narratives introduce supernatural causation and miraculous occurrences. Thus to insist on a rational demonstration that these narratives either are or are not historical is necessarily to misread them; it fails to read them literally, as narratives.

The reason this is so is that, in order to determine their historical accuracy, the narratives are no longer permitted to interpret our world; rather the criteria of Enlightenment modernity are used to evaluate the narratives (pp. 100-101).

One can raise the counter-charge that Frei’s assumption that biblical narratives are “history-like” but not history because they “introduce supernatural causation and miraculous occurrences” is resting on Enlightenment modernity. It is not our purpose to carry on a debate on postliberalism as presented by Frei or George Lindbeck, which has been ably done elsewhere by notable scholars. But the debate generally excludes Bible scholars and biblical theologians. To address this lack I hereby present a paper on Brevard Child’s canonical criticism originally written as a term paper for a graduate course on Old Testament Studies at Wheaton College Graduate School.

Childs is generally regard as a postliberal and his canonical criticism questions Mark Wallace’s argument that “there is a fundamental ambiguity running through postliberalism as to whether the biblical narratives refer to any reality outside the text” (cited in Knight, 105). Since it is this ‘ambiguity’ that decides whether postliberalism and evangelicalism are compatible Child’s cannot be ignored in the debate.

This paper evaluates Childs’ claim that, though the “history-like” narratives of the Old Testament describe a historical-like world that is not historical, the Old Testament is still normative theologically for the Church. The conclusion of the paper is that Childs’ approach amounts to saying that Scripture has no inherent authority; it has authority only because the believing community (the Jews and then the Church) has chosen to grant that authority to it. A campus evangelist recently shared that there are Buddhist students in the Malaysian universities who would say that the Bible is true for Christians because they believe in it and that the Buddhist scriptures are true for Buddhists because they believe in it.

An Exposition and Evaluation of the Underlying Assumption Behind Childs' 'Canonical Criticism' of the Old Testament

One of the most recent issues in Old Testament studies is Canonical Criticism. Brevard Childs has been the most influential advocate of this approach to the Bible. Childs, however, did not and does not like to call his approach 'Canonical Criticism' because "it implies that the canonical approach is considered another historical technique (like) source criticism, form criticism, rhetorical criticism, and similar methods. Rather, the issue at stake (is) a stance from which the Bible can be read as sacred scripture."1 In other words, unlike the other 'criticisms', 'canonical criticism' is not a new procedure for biblical studies but merely a new perspective from which biblical studies is to be approached.

Childs' canonical approach germinated and sprung up from the troubled ground of Biblical Theology. It is a reaction to a reaction. The post-World War II 'Biblical Theology Movement' as he calls it, was a reaction to the Fundamentalist-Liberal controversy of the early 1900s.2 In approaching the Bible, "the Liberals were to be blamed for the loss of theological perspective, so also were the Fundamentalists at fault for their denial of valid Biblical Criticism."3 The Biblical Theology Movement offered an alternative to Biblical studies that was "beyond the liberal-conservative syndrome; ... the possibility of accepting Biblical Criticism without reservation as a valid tool while at the same time recovering a robust, confessionally oriented theology."4

But in its efforts to recover the 'theological dimension of the Bible' without a 'repudiation of the historicocritical method' and hence not returning to the 'precritical era of Biblical Study',5 the Movement was torn apart by "the strain of using orthodox Biblical language for the constructive part of the theology, but at the same time approaching the Bible with all the assumptions of liberalism, (which) proved in the end to cause an impossible tension".6 Childs' approach is a reaction to this 'impossible tension' which became one of the major causes in the breakdown of the Biblical Theology Movement.7

His goal is to recover the theological (and hence authoritative) dimension of the Bible without denying the validity of the 'assumptions of Liberalism' and yet avoid the 'impossible tension'. The 'assumptions of Liberalism' include not only the critical conclusions of source and historical criticism but also those of form and tradition criticism.8 Despite these critical conclusions about the origins and contents of the Scriptures, Childs believes we can still "take the Biblical text seriously in its canonical form"9 (emphasis added). He explains, "the search to discover the original historical contexts for the various parts of the Old and New Testaments is essentially for a number of historicocritical disciplines, such as literary, historical, and comparative religion analysis. However... an interpreter can approach the same material and use only the final stage of the literature as a legitimate context."10 For he asserts that "the relation of the diverse biblical testimonies to each other and to the reality which evoked them is ontological rather than simply historical. It was, therefore, on the ontological level that one could hope to resolve the problem of biblical unity which had become increasingly unmanageable... in the modern period."11 This means it is valid to study the Scriptures theologically in its final form or 'canonical shape'
despite the fact that the Pentateuch is not Mosaic as the Bible itself claims, but a mosaic of myths, legends and perhaps some facts; that not all the oracles in the Book of Isaiah originated from the eighth century prophet; and that the Prophecy of Daniel contains not prophecies but histories told in the future tense.

It is not our concern here to evaluate Childs' claim that the critical methods of liberalism are valid and have "perfected a whole set of new tools for understanding the historical and theological setting of the Bible."12 Neither do we wish to evaluate his claim that "the Canon of the Christian Church is the most appropriate context from which to do Biblical Theology".13 Our concern is the validity of holding both claims at the same time. We recall that he is trying to avoid the 'impossible tension' between a critical view of Scriptures and the theological (and authoritative) use of the same. Does his canonical approach to biblical theology remove the tension?

We will first pinpoint a fundamental assumption underlying his efforts to reconcile the critical conclusions with his canonical theology and then evaluate the validity of this assumption. Although his approach covers both the Old and the New Testaments, we limit our discussion to the Old Testament.

In Childs’ view, "the final canonical literature reflects a long history of development in which the received tradition was selected, transmitted and shaped by hundreds of decisions."14 '' At every stage of the transmission process, "traditions which once arose in a particular milieu and were addressed to various historical situations were shaped in such a way as to serve as a normative expression of God's will to later generations of Israel who had not shared in these original historical events"15 (emphasis added). In these 'shapings” of normative traditions, faithfulness to the original contents and contexts is however not a criterion. "At times there is clear evidence for an intentional blurring of the original historical setting (e.g. Second Isaiah)."16 This freedom to 'blurr' contents and contexts is not limited only to new material to be added to existing normative tradition passed on from the previous editors and redactors, but extended to the latter hitherto authoritative materials as well! This is to 'actualize' past materials in order ''to transmit the tradition in such a way as to prevent its being moored in the past."17 These long series
of shapings and reshapings he calls 'canon’ and the final reshaping that produced the stabilised and standardised Scriptures for all future generations he calls 'canonization'.18

This view of the canonical process is carried over to textual criticism, the goal of which is considered not to recover the 'original text' nor even the closest to it. The oldest and best attested reading may not be the 'correct' reading in the light of reshapings by later editors. Intentional changes in readings by a scribe could be a 'canonical move' to 'actualize' the text. Since the Ma-soretic text (specifically, the ben Asher tradition, since it is the one we received) is considered to be the final form, the goal of textual criticism is to recover the purest Masoretic text. Hence intentional pre-Masoretic scribal changes are 'canonical' and valid but post-Masoretic changes are not.19

The result of such a canonical process is that contents of the Old Testament as found in the present canonical shape do not reflect their original historical form in terms of contexts, purpose, meaning, etc.20 In its original context, the book of Deuteronomy may well be a seventh century document related to the 'reform programme of Josiah (2Kings 22ff.)' and had a role in the centralization of the Israelitic religion.21 But in its present canonical context it is to be treated as “a series of addresses by Moses to the people just before the entry into the promised land of Canaan... to ‘explain the Torah’... to the new generation who was about to cross into the land...”22 In the context of the canon, Deuteronomy also has a 'canonical role' in "providing the hermeneutical key for understanding the law of Moses, that is to say, the Pentateuch, in its role as the sacred scripture of Israel."23 This is true even though the Pentateuch is a mosaic of historically and theologically diverse source materials that have gone through countless editions and redactions. This means the “history-like” narratives of the Old Testament describe a historical-like world that is not historical.

How is the canonical approach to exegesis similar and/or dissimilar to the critical and evangelical approaches? According to Childs, "the usual critical method of biblical exegesis is, first, to seek to restore an original historical setting by stripping away those very elements which constitute the canonical shape. Little wonder that once the biblical text has been securely anchored in the historical past by 'decanonizing' it, the interpreter has difficulty applying it to the modern religious context."24 The evangelical approach also seeks to study the text in its original historical contexts. But unlike the critical approach, it need not ‘decanonize' it. For to the evangelical, the original historical context is also the canonical context. Hence, like the canonical interpreter, he is also studying the text in the context of the canon. But the latter approach does not see the canonical context as equivalent to the historical context. What difference does it make in terms of
exegesis? For the evangelical, the canonical context, being the same as the historical context, can be informed by contemporary historical information. For instance, Deuteronomy in its canonical context records a covenant renewal between God and the new generation of Israelites. But it has been shown that the form of the book is similar to the form of second millennium Hittite suzerain-vassal treaties. This information gives an entirely new dimension in our exegesis and understanding of Deuteronomy. For the canonical approach, Deuteronomy still portrays a covenant renewal mediated through Moses (second millennium). But extra biblical second millennium information is irrelevant since the book is supposed to be composed in the first millennium.

In other words, not all, if not most, of the events mentioned in the Old Testament need to be rooted in verifiable history (Historie). Even actual events recorded in the Bible may not be in the temporal and spatial contexts as reconstructed in the canonical 'history'. This intentional (and at times unintentional) reinterpretation and reshaping of historical content is justifiable because the intention of editors and redactors is not to transmit historically reliable information but 'Israel's theological reflections' that were to be normative for subsequent generations.25 As Sheppard puts it, "the function of historical detail in the canonical context is not always primarily to inform the reader of an ancient state of affairs. Such detail in the canonical context generally is not evidence for an historical reconstruction. For example, the present shape of the Sinai narratives is first concerned about position and order. These narratives define the theological status of the Decalogue and Book of the Covenant vis-a-vis an elect people and their leaders, rather than draw an objective picture of the event at Sinai."26 Hence "history-like detail is used chiefly as dressing or preparation for the proper hearing of a tradition which is itself neither historical narrative nor bound up in an historical incident, but rich with a peculiar contemporaneity for those who in faith yearn to hear the voice of God."27

But how can the 'voice of God' be heard from such 'theological reflections' that are not reliable with respect to the historical details that 'dress' the reflections? Childs explains, "(the canonical approach) reckons with the fact that Israel bore witness to its encounter with God in actual time and space, and yet registered its testimony in a text through a multilayered manner which far
transcends the categories of ordinary historical discourse."28 So the underlying assumption is that normative theological truth can be transmitted through transposing and juxtaposing together different fragments of historically and theologically unrelated materials from different oral and/or written sources (such as J,E,D,P) which by themselves have different contexts, purposes and meanings, etc., to create a new context (such as that seen in the Pentateuch). So Childs claims that the use of the canon as a context for theological studies frees the individual fragments of the Old Testament from the 'imprisonment' of their respective contexts to integrate into a new and unrelated context the whole of which is more than the sum of the parts.29 This is the explanation for the assertion that the unity and continuity of the Old Testament is not historical but ontological i.e., theological.

Certainly editors and redactors had the right to (if they did) transpose and juxtapose such diverse materials into a new context to communicate theological truths. The question is why should a document thus constructed be normative for Israel of old and also for the Church today? It has been noted that the 'theological reflections' thus transmitted do still reflect Israel's actual encounters with God even though the redactors had the freedom to re-interpret existing scriptures and uproot new materials from their original contexts and incorporate them into the former. But in Childs' view this 'freedom' does not represent arbitrariness. For in the transmission of Scriptures there was an inseparable relationship between the text and the community that treasures it as Scripture. The text had a continuous effect in 'shaping' the community just as the community in turn has a continuous effect in shaping the text.30 In other words, each generation of editors and redactors have themselves been affected and 'shaped' by the Scriptures they received. So when they went about shaping and reshaping Scriptures for subsequent generations they would not do so in an arbitrary way.

This view opens the way for an explanation for the authority of Scriptures in the canonical context despite the acceptance of critical conclusions. Childs hypothesizes that Israel's authoritative Scripture initially consisted of laws revealed to Moses by God who also commissioned him to write them down. These authoritative laws became the norm by which new laws were measured and added. This new corpus then became the new norm for further additions. The process is repeated through countless additions (and reshapings). In this way, materials added (and reshaped) after Moses became authoritative. But accepting critical conclusions, Childs is prepared to ascribe much fewer laws to Moses than the Bible itself does. He explains away the difficulty by suggesting that later persons who added the additional non-Mosaic laws that had been attributed to Moses did so in the name of the latter. "Thus laws attributed to Moses were deemed authoritative and conversely authoritative laws were attributed to Moses."31

Through this theologically-controlled manner of transmission the Scripture in its final form is normative for Israel, the original community of faith that was shaped by and in turn shaped the
Old Testament. "The early Church inherited the Jewish Scriptures along with its understanding of canon..."32 By accepting the Old Testament as normative for obedient life, the Church thus identifies herself with Israel as the community of faith.33

Childs' preceding hypothesis does seem to justify his underlying assumption that normative theology can be transmitted through a conflation of theologically and historically diverse materials. The assumption as a whole sounds valid. But we would like to show that it creates hermeneutical tensions with regards to some crucial theological concepts in the Old Testament. These 'theological reflections' are so intricately interwoven with historical details in such a way that unless the latter are real, i.e., the canonical context of the passage corresponds to the historical context, the validity or even the normativeness of the theology concerned is questionable.

Firstly, consider the very issue of the basis or origin of Mosaic authority. Childs has rightly noted that "Moses' role as mediator of the divine law is deeply rooted in the Sinai tradition".34 In other words, in the understanding of Israel, the laws attributed to Moses are authoritative because God revealed them to him at Sinai. "If a law functioned authoritatively for Israel, it must be from Sinai. Conversely, if it is from Sinai, it must be authoritative." 35 But in the canonical shape of the Sinai tradition, in Childs’ own words, "the revelation of Sinai (Ex 19) is integrally connected with the deliverance from Egypt."36 In fact, he adds, "the commandments are prefaced by (a 'self-introductory') formula (Ex 20:2) to make clear that they are understood as the will of Yahweh who has delivered his people from bondage... The formula identifies the authority and right of God to make known his will because he has already graciously acted in Israel's behalf ... the giving of the law presupposes the deliverance from Egypt"37 (emphasis added).

Hence, in the context of the canon, the origin of the law as well as the basis of its normativeness stand on two events, Sinai and the Exodus. If any or both of these events as described did not occur in real history, the 'theological reflections' on the basis of the revelation and authority of the Mosaic Law does not make good sense. Further, the Mosaic authority which Israel recognized in real history must originate in the real history of Israel. If the Pentateuch is a conflation of historically diverse materials and the canonical context does not reflect the historical context, Mosaic authority would appear to originate with the redactor who shaped the account relating to the same. For we have no other evidence relating to the origin of Mosaic authority. And the assumption that God did reveal to Moses authoritative laws is the basis of Childs' crucial hypothesis discussed above. His approach is thus resting on very subjective ground.

Certainly normative 'theological reflections' like the nature of God or the value of the Law can be 'dressed' in 'history-like' details much like in realistic parables. But certain 'theological reflections'
like the origin and basis of normativeness itself cannot be similarly 'dressed'. Either the canonical reflection on Mosaic authority is invalid or the historical dressings are real. Hence approaching the text in the context of the canon without repudiating critical views creates strain in certain 'theological reflections'.

Another such reflection is in the sphere of predictive prophecy in the Old Testament. According to Deuteronomy 18 and Jeremiah 28, true prophets can be identified from false ones when their words come to pass. Childs affirms that "the truth of prophecy is determined by God's confirmation in action."38 But if prediction-fulfillment occurs only in the 'history-like' details in the context of the canon that does not reflect prediction-fulfillment in real time and space what value do such 'vindications' of the authority of the prophets and their prophecies have? In fact it borders upon deception on the part of the redactor.

Strains in predictive prophecy heighten to unbearable tensions in some of the more overt predictions such as those in Isaiah. Childs believes that though Isaiah 40ff "were originally addressed to Hebrew exiles in Babylon by an unnamed exilic prophet during the sixth century,... the present canonical shape of the book of Isaiah has furnished these chapters with a very different setting. Chapters 40ff are now understood as a prophetic word of promise offered to Israel by the eighth century prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem."39

To demonstrate the kind of tensions that can emerge from a canonical approach to Isaiah 40ff, we would use Isaiah 46. Here is an oracle in which Yahweh vindicates his Uniqueness over and against the worthlessness of Bel and Nebo by his ability to predict the future. Even a critical scholar like Mckenzie understands the 'prediction' in this oracle as the rise of Cyrus and his conquest of Babylon.40 If the oracle was indeed sixth century in its original context as Childs believes, the 'prediction’ was merely a political commentary and would have had no value for the purpose it was given--vindicate Yahweh's Uniqueness. It would be silly if not stupid of the exilic prophet to use this line of polemic against Babylonian gods, especially when the Jews had already suffered under the Babylonians. It would be incredible if the original hearers took the “prophecy” seriously.

Canonical criticism assumes that such an oracle would be rooted out of its time (where it most likely did not enjoy acceptance) and planted into the eighth century. As far as Childs is concerned, the attempt is not a deliberate deception to make a political commentary sounds like a prediction. His way out of such an implication is to assert that "by placing the message of Second Isaiah within the context of the eighth-century prophet his message of promise becomes a prophetic word not tied to a specific historical referent, but directed to the future."41 With respect to a 'specific historical referent’ like Cyrus he explains that "the original historical particularity--Cyrus has become a theological construct almost indistinguishable from Abraham [believed to be fictitious]."42 By reducing a historical figure to a ‘theological construct' he removes the predictive element in the oracle under discussion. But the truth and hence normativeness of the 'theological reflection' on the Uniqueness of God and the worthlessness of idols stands on prediction. If there be no prediction in real time and space the oracle in the canonical context (eighth century) is as useless as it was in its historical context (sixth century).

It would be unnecessary to point out all the difficulties apparent in a canonical approach to the above oracle. Yet this is only one of several similar oracles. The weakness of Childs' underlying assumption that normative theology can be transmitted by conflating historically unrelated materials is thus most obvious in the area of predictive prophecy. He has said that "to assume that the prophet can be understood only if each oracle is related to a specific historical event or located in its original cultural milieu is to introduce a major hermeneutical confusion into the discipline and to render an understanding of the canonical scriptures impossible.”43 But without making the assumption that Childs here forbids, not only will the preceding prophecy against idols not be understood (as a vindication of God--its stated purpose), the prophet/redactor cannot be understood (why he would use predictive ability as a polemic when there is no prediction in reality). The issue is to evaluate the critical presupposition that predictive prophecy cannot be true in reality.

Approaching the Old Testament in the context of the canon without repudiating critical conclusions is indeed full of tension. And the tension has now been found in connection with crucial theological concepts of the Old Testament, viz., the authority of the Law and the Prophets and the Uniqueness of Yahweh over idols! Childs' canonical approach has really not removed, only reduced, the 'impossible tension’ that plagued the Biblical Theology Movement. Unless the canonical context corresponds to and is rooted in the historical context, no normative theology can be consistently developed for the Old Testament. A critical view of the latter and an authoritative theological use of the same are undoubtedly mutually exclusive. In the final analysis, Childs’ approach amounts to saying that Scripture has no inherent authority. It has authority only because the believing community (the Jews and then the Church) has chosen to grant that authority to it. It is like saying the Scripture is truth simple because the Church believes it is so.

End notes

1 . Brevard Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), 82. Hereafter, IOTS.
2. Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia: Westrainster, 1970), 19. Hereafter, BTC.
3. Childs, BTC, 54.
4. Ibid., 21.
5. Ibid., 54-55.
6. Ibid., 105.
7. Ibid.
8. Childs, IOTS, 74-79.
9. Childs, BTC, 102.
10. Ibid., 98.
11. Gerald Sheppard, "Canon Criticism: The Proposal of Brevard Childs and an Assessment for Evangelical Hermeneutics," Studia Biblica Et Theologica 4, no. 2(1974): 5. Sheppard was a student of Childs and had "the privilege of continuous private discussions" on the subject with him.
12. Childs, BTC
13. Ibid., 99
14. Childs, Old Testament Theology in Canonical Context (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 11. Hereafter, OTTCC.
15. Childs, "The Exegetical Significance of Canon for the Study of the Old Testament," Supplements to Vetus Testamentum XXIX (1977): 67. Hereafter, SVT.
16.Childs, IOTS, 79.
17. Ibid., 78-79.
18. Ibid. 58-59.
19. Ibid. 96-106.
20.This is systematically elaborated in Childs, SVT, 70-77.
21. Childs, IOTS, 205-206.
22. Ibid., 211-212.
23. Ibid., 224.
24. Ibid., 79.
25. Childs, OTTCC, 11.
26. Sheppard, Ibid., 14.
27. Ibid.
28. Childs, OTTCC, l6.
29. Childs, BTC, 99-100,109.
30. Childs, SVT, 78.
31. Childs, IOTS, 152-l55.
32. Childs, "The Old Testament as Scripture of the Church," Concordia Theological Monthly 45(1972): 711.
33. Childs, OTTCC, 15.
34. Childs, IOTS, 62.
35. Childs, OTTCC, 55.
36. Ibid., 53.
37. Childs, The Book of Exodus. A Critical. Theological Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974), 401-402.
38. Childs, OTTCC, 139.
39. Childs, IOTS, 325.
40. John L. Mckenzie, Second Isaiah. The Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 87-88.
41. Childs, IOTS, 326.
42. Childs, "The Canonical Shape of the Prophetic Literature," Interpretation 32(1978): 53.
43. Ibid., 53.

The Historical Reliability of the Old Testament

2007-09-23T22:42:00.000-07:00

By Dr Leong Tien Fock

The Bible has been subjected to an incredibly extensive and intensive scrutiny by critics. Yet, unless one only reads the critics' work, it has not only survived the trial but has in fact thrived in it. Christians should be familiar with a defense of the Bible even in the absence of an offense. For the intellectual and spiritual climate we live in is such that the claims of the Bible do not seem or feel real. We need to be able to consciously affirm in our heart that the Bible is reliable and trustworthy.

The reliability of the Bible is fundamental to the credibility of the Christian faith. All Christian doctrines, including the doctrine of the Bible as the Word of God, are based on the Bible. Given the often vicious and seemingly credible attacks on the Bible, a Christian who is confronted with them may find his faith shaken or even shattered. This essay is written with the conviction that it is possible for anyone who is not already prejudiced against the Bible (or who is at least willing to temporarily suspend such a bias) to see that there is a remarkably solid basis to believe in the reliability of the Bible.

We will focus only on the Old Testament and use three criteria to establish the its reliability: the bibliographical test, the internal evidence test, and the external evidence test. These common-sense tests, often used to test the reliability of the New Testament, cannot be said to be biased towards the Bible. For they are postulated by military historian C. Sanders in his 1952 book, Introduction to Research in English Literary History. The tests are most suitable for our purpose not only because they are not biased towards the Bible. Since they are employed in testing the reliability of general historical and literary documents, they are also most suitable because we are testing the reliability of the OT as a literary-historical and not as a religious document (thus its claim to divine origin will not be assumed).

Bibliographical test

Like many other ancient documents, we do not possess the original Hebrew manuscripts (handwritten copies) of the OT, which have all perished. Our printed Hebrew OT is based on a manuscript which was hand-copied from an earlier manuscript, which was itself copied form an earlier manuscript, and so on. Copying by hand introduces accidental errors or even intentional changes. How then can we be sure that after so many recopyings what we have today is a faithful reproduction of the original document?

The bibliographical test looks at (1) the number of extant (preserved) manuscripts we now have and (2) the time span between the earliest extant manuscript and the original document. A shorter time span means less recopyings between the extant copy and the original text and thus less corruptions, whether accidental or intentional, would have crept in. The larger the number of extant manuscripts the more materials there are to help eliminate the corruptions that may have crept in. In short, the larger the number of extant manuscripts and the shorter the time span, the more likely we can restore an authentic version of the document.

Since more than one set of manuscripts were copied from an existing set, and more sets were later copied from these sets, and so on, there were different “textual traditions” down the line. For the Hebrew OT, by AD 135 the text of a certain tradition was adopted as the standard. Hebrew OT manuscripts that were made after this time all came from this standardized text. The Hebrew text was then written basically without the vowels. Between about AD 500-950 scholars known as the Masoretes standardized the text further by adding the vowels to it. The result is the Masoretic Text, or in short, the MT.

The MT manuscript upon which our printed Hebrew OT is based is the Leningrad Codex, now kept at the public library in Leningrad. It contains the entire OT and is dated AD 1008. We have relatively few MT manuscripts earlier than this: two that contain most of the OT and several others that contain (substantial) parts of it. There are more than 3000 manuscripts from AD 1100 to the arrival of the printing press in AD 1450. But since these are copies of the earlier ones, they are of no help in detecting errors that have crept into the MT.

With so few manuscripts available to reconstruct the original OT, and the time span between the composition of the OT (1400-400 BC) and the earliest extant copy of the MT (about 900 AD) is a huge 1300-2300 years. So unlike the Greek NT, the Hebrew OT does not seem to pass the bibliographical test with flying colors.

But this is not the complete story. Space does not allow us to tell the whole story. We will tell enough to show that there is no reason to doubt that the OT we now have is essentially the same as the original.

MT manuscripts may lack in terms of quantity but not in terms of quality. Due to the Jewish reverence for their Scriptures (the OT), the scribes who copied the manuscripts were known to observe a very strict set of rules that ensured extreme care in avoiding errors. In fact the new copies were believed to be so accurate that the older copies that were damaged in any way were destroyed. This contributed to the lack of earlier OT manuscripts.

The accuracy in the copying has been confirmed in several ways. The most important is through the comparison of the extant MT with Hebrew OT manuscripts from the famous Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), the first batch of which was discovered in 1947. These manuscripts date from the 3rd century BC to the 1st century AD. That means they are about a thousand years older than the earliest MT manuscript we have. All the OT books except Esther are represented.

The discovery of the DSS thus drastically shortens the time span between the composition of the OT and the earliest extant OT manuscript, as well as multiplies the number of extant OT manuscripts. This alone puts the OT on a better footing than the respective History of Herodotus and Thucydides, which are attested by only 8 manuscripts and the earliest manuscript for each is over 1300 years later than the original. Yet according to respected NT scholar F. F. Bruce, “no classical scholar would listen to an argument that the authenticity of Herodotus or Thucydides is in doubt” because of this.

But we are more interested in confirming the unusual accuracy in the copying of the OT manuscripts. Most of the OT manuscripts from the DSS are fragmentary but there is one complete scroll with the entire book of Isaiah intact. Like most of the other OT manuscripts the Isaiah scroll came from the same textual tradition that (centuries later) produced the MT. A comparison with the MT Isaiah shows that these two texts, which were 1000 years apart in age, are more than 95 per cent identical word-for-word. The 5 per cent variation consists mainly in obvious slips of the pen or changes in spelling. Millar Burrows of Yale University wrote, “It is a matter of wonder that through something like a thousand years the text underwent so little alteration. As I said in my first article on the scroll, ‘Herein lies its chief importance, supporting the fidelity of the Masoretic tradition.’”

If the text changed so little in its second thousand years there is good reason to believe that it changed very little in its first thousand years. This means that the textual tradition that produced the MT has been accurately preserved. To further confirm that this tradition is faithful to the original, we will look at the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch.

The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the OT made between 250-150 BC. The Samaritan Pentateuch is the Scriptures (in Hebrew) of the Samaritans, who separated from the Jews probably during the 5th or 4th century BC but many claim at the end of the 2nd century BC. It is the Samaritan version of the Jewish Pentateuch. Though most of the OT manuscripts from the DSS are from the same tradition that produced the MT, there are other DSS manuscripts that can be identified as belonging to the separate textual traditions that produced the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch respectively. So the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch can be used as independent sources to confirm the fidelity of the textual tradition behind the MT. And a comparison of the three texts shows that, though there are variations indicating different traditions, overall they are essentially the same. All the major historical facts and almost all the minor details are the same.

This is not even all the evidence. No wonder Sir Frederic Kenyon, recognized by even Islamic scholars as an authority on ancient manuscripts, could say, “The Christian can take the whole Bible in his hand and say without fear or hesitation that he holds in it the true word of God [i.e., the Scriptures as originally penned], handed down without essential loss from generation to generation throughout the centuries.”

The Historical Reliability of the Old Testament I

2007-09-23T22:41:00.000-07:00

Internal Evidence Test

The bibliographical test only establishes the authenticity of the OT, i.e., what we have today is a faithful reproduction of the original manuscripts. It does not tell us if the authentic contents are themselves historically reliable. In other words, given that what we have today in the OT is essentially what the authors wrote, how do we know if what they wrote was factually true in the first place?

In the internal evidence test we determine whether the contents of the document itself point towards its reliability or otherwise. According to historian and legal scholar J. W. Montgomery, “historical and literary scholarship continues to follow Aristotle’s dictum that the benefit of doubt is to be given to the document itself, not arrogated by the critic to himself. This means that one must listen to the claims of the document under analysis, and not assume fraud or error unless the author disqualifies himself by contradictions or known factual inaccuracies.”

The OT covers a very large historical span. By necessity, we will focus on the most crucial historical events, viz., the Exodus from Egypt under Moses and the Conquest of Canaan under Joshua. Thus we will focus on the Pentateuch and the book of Joshua.

We will first use the internal evidence test to evaluate the historical reliability of these books and then use the external evidence test to confirm our evaluation.

Based on the internal claims of the OT, Jews and Christians had traditionally believed that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. But the modern “scientific” mindset is such that it naturally rejects the possibility of anything that science cannot explain. This includes the miracles recorded in the Bible. And the Pentateuch is full of them. If Moses wrote it, it will be very difficult to deny miracles without accusing him of telling blatant lies. For most of the miracles in the Pentateuch are said to be accomplished either through Moses himself or in his presence. The early critics, apparently recognizing Aristotle’s dictum of giving the author the benefit of the doubt, must have found it very difficult to reject Moses’ firsthand eyewitness accounts.

The easier way out would be to deny that Moses ever wrote those accounts. So, beginning in the 18th century, in line with the rise of the (now outmoded) anti-supernatural modernist worldview, the traditional view that Moses wrote the Pentateuch was finally replaced by the JEDP theory in mainline academic circles.

This theory (also called the documentary hypothesis) assumes that the Pentateuch is a cut-and-paste patchwork from four different documents named J, E, D, and P, all composed long after Moses died. Suffice it here to note that this theory is not based on any objective basis and it robs the Pentateuch of the benefit of the doubt. Firstly, the existence of these four separate documents is simply assumed (no one has found them). Secondly, the “evidence” for this theory is open to opposite and better interpretations. Even the apparent contradictions can be reasonably explained but again the critics would ignore or reject them.

One of the most important “evidence” for the theory is the different divine names used in the Pentateuch. It arbitrarily rules out the possibility that Moses could have used different names to refer to God. It thus assumes that whenever the name Yahweh (or Jehovah) occurs, that portion of the text must have been a cut-and-paste from the J document. And when the name Elohim occurs, the source must be the E document. There are times when the two names occur in the very same paragraph and even same sentence, resulting in incredible dissections of the text. And the JEDP scholars disagree among themselves over where to draw the line as to which portion came from which of the four imagined documents.

It is not surprising that in more recent times, even scholars who reject Mosaic authorship have argued against the JEDP theory. But this theory is still assumed in mainline academic work. According to prominent OT scholar H. H. Rowley, “That it [the JEDP theory] is widely rejected in whole or in part is doubtless true, but there is no view to put in its place that would not be more widely and emphatically rejected.... [The theory] is only a working hypothesis, which can be abandoned with alacrity when a more satisfactory view is found, but which cannot with profit be abandoned until then.” In other words, there are critical scholars who still assume the JEDP theory in their work not because they are convinced that it is true, but only because the alternative--Mosaic authorship--is totally unacceptable (to their outmoded modernist mindset).

Furthermore, we now have an objective external framework to support Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. We will focus on the book of Deuteronomy.

It is generally agreed that Deuteronomy was structured as a treaty patterned after the treaties of the ancient biblical world. Kenneth Kitchen, a respected scholar of the ancient biblical world, has shown that the structure of the treaties changed with time. He found that Deuteronomy matches the 15th/14th century BC Hittite treaties: Title/Preamble (Deut 1:1-5); Historical Prologue (1:6-3:29); Stipulations (4-26); Deposit of Text (31:9, 24-26); Public Reading (31:10-13); Witnesses (31:16-30, 26; 32:1-47); Blessing (28:1-14); Curses (28:15-68).

Moses lived in the 15th/14th century BC. Though this does not prove that Moses wrote Deuteronomy, the incredible match gives credible support to the biblical claim that Moses wrote it. The major opposing voice is that of noted critical scholar Moshe Weinfeld. He admits that the major sections of the Hittite treaties are present in Deuteronomy but refuses to come to the most logical conclusion. Instead he insists that Deuteronomy is patterned after the 7th century BC Assyrian treaties because, unlike the short curses in the Hittite treaties, Deuteronomy and the Assyrian treaties have elaborate series of curses. But the Assyrian treaties had a different structure altogether: Title/Preamble; Witnesses; Stipulations; Curses. Entire sections were missing.

Thus the weight of evidence is stacked against Weinfeld. He tries to explain this problem away. He suggests that the Historical Prologue (which gave justifications for the demands made in the treaty) and the Blessing were missing because the Assyrian emperor was too proud and arrogant to give any justification for his demands or promise any blessing. He uses tentative language like “it seems that” and “may explain” and spells out that this is (only) an assumption. He thus argues as if the critic had the benefit of the doubt.

Another critical scholar, A. D. H. Mayes, admits that Deuteronomy most closely resembles the Hittite treaties but thinks that this was because the (15th/14th century) structure was superimposed on Deuteronomy in the 7th/6th century! This and other improbable objections betray the incredible tide of (unwarranted) prejudice against Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy.

To claim that Moses wrote Deuteronomy is not to say that there was no later updating of the text by others. A clear case is the account of Moses’ death in Deuteronomy 34. Most likely Joshua, his personal assistant and then successor, wrote it. Though not mentioned in the text Joshua was most likely with Moses just prior to his death. We have evidence that he could and would follow Moses even to places forbidden to all others (see Exod 24:13-14).

Since the book of Joshua lies within our focus, let us note that Joshua 24 contains a short supplementary covenant made through Joshua (Josh 24:25) and it is also patterned after the Hittite treaties: Title/Preamble (Josh 24:1-2); Historical Prologue (24:2-13); Stipulations (24:14-25); Deposit of Text (24:26); Public Reading (absent here); Witnesses (24:22); Blessing and Curses (24:19-20).

That means, either Joshua (traditionally believed) or someone who could have been an eyewitness must have written the book of Joshua. Under the internal evidence test, and without imposing the outmoded anti-supernatural worldview, the book must be taken seriously unless there is valid reason to doubt its reliability. Critics will point out that the accounts of the conquest of Canaan in the book of Joshua contradict those in the book of Judges. Joshua 9-12 gives the impression of a complete conquest while Judges 1 (as well as the later chapters of Joshua) says it was only a partial conquest.

Recently K. L. Younger’s comparison of Joshua 9-12 with other conquest accounts in the ancient biblical world has shown that the conquest accounts in Joshua followed the standard conventions in reporting conquests, including the use of hyperbole. Specifically, we can now say on objective ground that claims of absolute total conquest (as in Josh 10:40-42) are hyperbolic and not meant to be taken literally.

Thus the biblical records documenting the Exodus under Moses and the Conquest under Joshua can be trusted as eyewitness accounts. Since myths and legends take a long time to develop these records should be trusted as historically reliable.

The Historical Reliability of the Old Testament II

2007-09-23T22:40:00.000-07:00

External Evidence Test

We have observed the dictum of Aristotle that Moses and Joshua should be trusted unless there are valid reasons to doubt them. The very nature of literary and historical evidence requires this. To justify giving them this benefit of the doubt we now look at how their testimonies stand up against evidence outside the OT.

Critics claim that there is no external evidence whatsoever to support the claim that the Exodus or the Conquest took place. One piece of external evidence for each event is adequate to prove them wrong as well as meet the requirement of the external evidence test to confirm the above conclusion of the internal evidence test. And if the OT stands up to scrutiny on these two events, which are accompanied by more miracles than any other events recorded in the OT, critics will have virtually no reason to question the historical reliability of the OT as a whole. After all, the rejection of the supernatural is fundamental to the critical view of the OT.

Numbers 33:3-50 summarizes the journey of the Israelites from Egypt to the Jordan River. It lists the stations where they camped. Of interest here is the last six stations (Num 33:45-50): Iyyim--Dibon--Almon-diblathaim--Nebo--Abel-shittim--Jordan. Traditionally, because the account was so specific and precise in detail, Bible scholars saw it as evidence for its historical reliability.

However, what was considered as a strength became a weakness in the eyes of the modern critic. Based on archaeological work at a site believed to be where Dibon was, it was concluded that Dibon did not exist before the 9th century BC. That means Dibon did not exist during Moses’ time. This is taken as an “irrefutable evidence” that the record is unreliable. This is also one of the main reasons why critical scholars deny there was ever an Israelite conquest of Canaan.

But recently Charles Krahmalkov of the University of Michigan found Dibon mentioned in an Egyptian inscription dated to 1500-1400 BC. So the city existed during Moses’ time; archaeologists just have not identified it. Furthermore, this inscription lists some of the stations along a road leading from the southern end of the Dead Sea to the Jordan River. (Comparing this with two other similar lists shows that none of them lists all the stations along this road.) The stations listed are: Iyyin--Dibon--Abel--Jordan. A comparison with the longer list in Numbers 33:45-50 shows that this was the same road taken by the Israelites. So we have an external confirmation that the account of the route of the Exodus is historically reliable.

John Garstang, who excavated the site of Jericho between 1930-1936, created excitement when he concluded that “the walls fell, shaken apparently by an earthquake, and the city destroyed by fire, about 1400 BC.... The link with Joshua and the Israelites is only circumstantial but it seems to be solid without flaw.” Unfortunately, his successor Kathleen Kenyon, after reviewing his findings and then “confirming” her conclusion through further excavations, said the city was destroyed in 1550 BC, 150 years before the Conquest. That means the biblical account was unreliable.

For 25 years this view could not be challenged because she published her conclusions without supplying the detailed evidence. An independent assessment was not possible. But 12 years after her death the detailed evidence was published. When archaeologist Bryant Wood reviewed both Garstang and Kenyon’s findings, he returned to Garstang’s conclusion that Jericho was destroyed in 1400 BC.

It is not disputed that Jericho was destroyed violently. The question is the date. One reliable dating method is to look at the design of the pottery, which changed with time, much like the design of our cars. Wood, whose Ph.D. thesis was on Canaanite pottery between 1550-1200 BC, was uniquely qualified for the job. He discovered that Kenyon came to her conclusion not by looking at what she and Garstang found but what she did not find. She looked in vain for imported pottery (suggesting luxury) in an area she herself considered to be “simple villages” giving “no suggestion at all of luxury.” Wood’s conclusion is based mainly on the pottery that Garstang and Kenyon found. Although Wood’s arguments are difficult to refute, Kenyon’s conclusion is still assumed in critical circles.

The archaeological evidence confirms the account of the conquest of Jericho in the following ways: the city was strongly fortified (Josh 2:5,7,15, 6:5,20); the attack occurred just after harvest time in the spring (2:6, 3:15, 5:10); the inhabitants had no time to flee with their foodstuffs (6:1); the siege was short (6:15); the walls were leveled, possibly by an earthquake (6:20); the city was not plundered (6:17-18); the city was burned (6:24).

Dating events in the ancient biblical world is not an exact science. And the date of the destruction of Jericho will continue to be debated. But regardless of whether the date is 1550 or 1400 BC, the uncanny similarities of the unusual circumstances surrounding the fall of Jericho as revealed by archaeology with that recorded in Joshua, should caution any fair-minded person from saying, “there is still no external evidence whatsoever that the conquest took place.”

The Historical Reliability of the Old Testament III

2007-09-23T22:39:00.000-07:00

Conclusion

We can now conclude that, based on the results of the three tests, the OT can be accepted as historically reliable. A similar analysis would also affirm the historical reliability of the NT. We must be careful of critical arguments that seem credible only because they put the burden of proof on the Bible. It is this kind of unfair treatment of an ancient document, where there are no living witnesses to defend it, that the three tests are meant to prevent. To deny the benefit of the doubt to the Bible but not to other ancient documents is to practice double standards. To reject the Biblical account on the basis of the miracles recorded is to move the debate from history to philosophy, and presumes an outmoded philosophical view.

The Bible should all the more be deemed “innocent until proven guilty,” because this principle is used even in a court of law where living witnesses are available to defend the accused. The Bible presents historical facts to communicate a theological message. The facts and the message stand or fall together. Since the message has eternal implications, a wrong verdict on the Bible has far more serious consequences that a wrong verdict in a court of law.

The purpose of this essay is obviously not intended to be the final word on the subject, especially in regards to archaeological evidence. It is to sensitize Christians to the unfair approaches critical scholars often use to attack the historical reliability of the Bible, all in the name of “objective (read modernist) scholarship.”

Select Bibliography

Geisler, Norman L. and William E. Nix. A General Introduction to the Bible. Revised and Expanded. Chicago: Moody Press, 1986.

Krahmalkov, Charles R. “Exodus Itinerary Confirmed by Egyptian Evidence.” Biblical Archaeology Review 20.5 (Sept./Oct. 1994): 54-62, 79.

McDowell, Josh. The New Evidence That Demands A Verdict. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers: 1999.

Wood, Bryant G. “Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho? A New Look at the Evidence.” Biblical Archaeology Review 16.2 (Mar./Apr. 1990): 44-58.

--------. “Dating Jericho’s Destruction: Bienkowski Is Wrong on All Counts.” Biblical Archaeology Review 16.5 (Sept./Oct. 1990): 45-49, 68-69.

Giving Reason For The Hope I

2007-03-13T09:51:00.002-07:00

Giving Reason For The Hope: The Possibility and Necessity of the Apologetic Task as a Ministry Within The Church And Her Mission (1 Peter 3:15)

As a new believer during my teenage days, I discovered apologetics through a booklet written by Josh McDowell. It came as a lifeline at a critical juncture in my spiritual walk as I tried to make sense of the claims of Christ in relation to other faiths, especially the Buddhist-Taoist tradition.

To be frank, I did not come to faith after arriving at satisfactory conclusions about the reliability of Scripture or thorough investigation on the historical evidences of Jesus’ resurrection. The decision to trust in Him as Lord and Savior followed the hearing of a simple gospel message, which convicted me of sins against a holy God and the need for reconciliation with Him through the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.

However, coming from a plausibility structure that would not take Christian claims at face value, my newfound faith launched an ongoing and often lonely intellectual struggle to understand its justifications and implications. Echoing Anselm, my pilgrimage would be more appropriately described as “faith seeking understanding”.

As time went by, I discovered other reflective people in and outside church who ask fundamental questions in life like our origin, identity, purpose and destiny. The dissatisfaction with simplistic albeit pious clichés for an answer is both our blessing and our curse. I began to feel acutely the vacuum in the local church for suitably equipped ministers who address such issues with sensitivity and knowledge.

Again, I turned to the wisdom of books by Augustine, Francis Schaeffer, C.S. Lewis and others. In this paper, I seek to explore the role of apologetics in Scripture and church history in a missional context before discussing how it may be done in the Malaysian setting.

Giving Reason For The Hope II

2007-03-13T09:51:00.001-07:00

The Possibility And Necessity of Apologetics In Scripture

Derived from the Greek word apologia, which meant “defense”, the apologetic task involved refuting objections leveled against the Christian faith (defensive apologetics) and/or providing a positive case for its acceptance (offensive apologetics).

As such, it could play a potentially crucial role in both strengthening the faith of believers and helping to remove obstacles that hinder a seeker from coming to faith in the task of evangelism.

Do we not find numerous biblical instances of reasoned arguments employed in the ministry of Jesus Himself? In His didactic dialogues with Pharisees, Sadducees and disciples, Jesus rationally answered objections, opened up hidden assumptions with well-placed questions and appealed to miraculous signs as evidence for His claims .

During Paul’s missionary journeys, we frequently find him in synagogues persuading and debating Jewish religious leaders and pagan philosophers at Mars Hill on the validity of the gospel (Acts 14:15-17, 17:2-4, 16-31, 18:4, 19:8-9) . Since Luke took care to explicitly record that some who heard his presentation indeed chose to believe (Acts 17:34), the narrative does not function as an illustration of the bankruptcy of persuasion as taught by Watchman Nee. Even some of these converts’ names (Dionysius and Damaris) were mentioned, indicating that these men from Athens eventually made an impact on church life in later years.

Not only that, we also have clear biblical injunction in 1 Peter 3:15-16 for a persecuted church to be prepared to give a credible answer (apologia) to everyone who asked for the reason why they believed. It is not just a nice suggestion or a duty for an elite group of intellectuals only. Biblical apologetics thrive or wither in the whole church as we carry out the missionary task. Interestingly, the same passage also admonished us to be gentle and respectful, keeping a clear conscience and displaying Christ-like behavior before hostile critics. How we need to vigilantly shun the besetting sins of tactless method, intellectual pride and lack of grace evident in many would-be apologists! In 2 Corinthians 10:4-6, the church is urged to take apart arguments that set itself up against the knowledge of Christ, making every thought captive in obedience to Him. Spiritual warfare is therefore not primarily about doing prayer walks around the neighborhood. Especially in a pluralistic context like Malaysia, the church needs more informed, winsome and courageous ambassadors who could engage contemporary challenges in a biblically faithful and culturally relevant manner.

However, there are also some common objections which have been advanced against the use of apologetics in favor of a simple proclamation of the gospel. For example, we are reminded of Paul’s warning “that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy” (Colossians 2:8) and “the gospel is the foolishness of God… I come not with persuasive words of wisdom” (1 Corinthian 1-2). We would do well to remember that ultimately the Holy Spirit is able and responsible to convict and renew a sinner’s heart to repentance and trust in Christ, not the cogency of our arguments. However, a more careful reading of the texts mentioned suggests that Paul was actually warning us against false philosophy, not philosophy per se. In order to beware of false philosophy, we need to be aware of them first!

As we have seen earlier, Paul himself used reasoning in gospel proclamation and his condemnation was directed against prideful intellectualism, not against reason itself (1 Corinthians 8:1). The crucifixion is offensive to human pride for the Jews sought miraculous signs whereas the Greek sophists peddle ‘wisdom’ by improving their speaking skills to persuade people with empty rhetoric, not substance. Simply put, the antidote for arrogance is humility, not ignorance (1 Corinthians 14:20). When Jesus commended the faith of a child (Matthew 18:2-4), He was referring to a child’s dependent humility, not the mental ability of toddlers, as a condition to enter the Kingdom. It is not uncommon to find proud ignoramus who are defensive and unwilling to learn from others too. Therefore, intellectual witness should not be viewed as a competitor or substitute of the Spirit’s work of illumination, but a means by which He could open spiritual eyes to see the truth. Just as the ministry of transportation is to ferry people to a physical place where they can listen to the gospel, the apologetic ministry seeks to bring them to a “cultural and intellectual space” where the communication of the gospel makes plausible sense in the worldview of the hearers.

While it is obvious that God does not need our defense, His sheep nonetheless needs protection from adverse spiritual consequences of false teachings. C. S. Lewis correctly reflects: “To be ignorant and simple now — not to be able to meet the enemies [of Christ] on their own ground — would be to throw down our weapons and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered." Therefore, Scripture seems to mandate a duty for the church to earnestly contend for the faith (Jude 3). While faith is beyond reason, it also does not require a fideistic, intellectual suicide. Biblically understood, faith involves the entire person - knowledge, mental assent as well as a personal commitment.

Giving Reason For The Hope III

2007-03-13T09:50:00.000-07:00

The Possibility And Necessity of Apologetics In Church History

Historically speaking, the apologetic task had an important pedigree and we could learn from its ancient role in the church’s mission as the gospel spread to a predominantly Gentile context. By the second century, educated converts like Justin Martyr, Theophilus of Antioch, Athenagoras and Aristides of Athens wrote substantial apologetic literature in the face of persecution and intellectual challenges from their Greco-Roman civilisation.

They do not just argue about religion but broader cultural issues like religious freedom, the meaning of education and history of nations. Justin showed appreciation for Socrates and Heraclitus as men who partook of a vague knowledge of the Logos, as honorary Christians specifically in their rejection of pagan religious practices and subsequent ostracization. While we do not know if they had much success with the pagan intelligentsia or political rulers to whom the corpus was addressed, the Apologists nonetheless provided a theological foundation on which later Christian thinkers would develop and finally replace the prevailing pagan philosophies of the day.

Although the legacy of other apologists operating in the context of mission encounter could be cited, their role has significantly diminished in the modern era. In order to glean some lessons on how apologetics at its best has served the church, I would just highlight two outstanding theologians even though their contribution was not entirely without fault . Burdened by many ecclesiastical and pastoral concerns, Augustine was a North African bishop during the fifth century A.D. while Aquinas was a widely-travelled Dominican monk in the medieval era. The former wrote his most significant treatise, The City of God, in response to an “epochal shift” occassioned by the fall of Rome while the latter was roused to encounter the rise of a sophisticated Islamic civilisation in Spain with Summa Contra Gentiles.

In a perceptive study by Curtis Chang, we could see that in their differing interaction with neo-Platonism and Aristotelian philosophy respectively, both men employed a similar rhetorical strategy to enter the challenger’s story, retell it and capture the retold story within the gospel narrative. That is, both men immersed themselves within the paradigm, authorities or story of the alternative worldview to find a shared space for dialogue, then reinterpret it to reveal tragic incompleteness or dissonant tensions inherent in its plot and finally capturing the rival stories by revealing how the ‘resolution’ is finally found in the gospel. They were not trapped behind an airtight fortress that has no point of contact with others. Neither did they lose the dramatic plot of an overarching Christian narrative.

As testament of their labor, Augustine defeated the pagans’ attempt to blame Christianity for Rome’s decline, insisted that the city of God is never coterminous with any “Christian nation” and made possible the preservation of learning in medieval churches. Without Aquinas, the church may reject wholesale Aristotelian insights on sensory-based experiment and empirical evidences, thereby crippling the emergence of modern science in the West. Their legacy of cultural relevance and biblical faithfulness should spur present day Christian thinkers to greater exploits.

Giving Reason For The Hope IV

2007-03-13T09:49:00.000-07:00

Challenges For The Apologetic Task In Malaysia

Although there has been laudable work done by organisations like Kairos Research Center and NECF Research Commission, the Malaysian church remains generally shrouded by an anti-intellectual mood that substantially hinder the development of a robust inquiring spirit so crucial for the apologetic task. As many denominations were established by British and American missionaries, the confluence of inherited dispensational-fundamentalist theology, Holiness spirituality (“Let go, Let God!”) and Pentecostal-experiential instincts coloured much of our spiritual ethos. As a result, there is a common emphasis on “the dangers of the world, the comforts of the separated piety, the centrality of evangelism, and an expectation of the End.” Other sociological mitigating circumstances could be cited like pragmatic, populist and “immediate result” activism so characteristic of the enterpreneurial Chinese immigrants’ mindset.

Unsurprisingly, Noll’s critique of the ‘scandal of the evangelical mind’ for an American setting is largely relevant here as well, posing a formidable barrier against the development of an intellectual witness and cultural mandate for many complex and current religious and sociopolitical issues facing the Malaysian church.

Also, in the minds of many Malay Muslims in Southeast Asia, there was no distinction between the arrival of Christian missionaries and the European powers which waged war, colonized their lands and controlled the regional spice trade. The Portugese, Spanish, Dutch and English colonizers fought among themselves for the spoils and cruelly exploited the local people so a deep sense of antipathy remained even today. Long after gaining national independence, the political elite in Indonesia and Malaysia considered Islam as closely linked to nationalism and regarded Christian mission as a social threat. Given such a sensitive post-colonial scenario, some Christians prefer to steer away from a robust apologetics because stressing propositional truth claims seem like a mask for Foucaultian power play and oppression of indigenous cultures.

Another significant challenge comes from a pluralistic mindset, common in Asian societies, which looked with disapproving suspicion, if not open hostility, at any religious faith that claims to be the exclusive truth. While we are obviously living in a society with diverse religious perspectives, religious pluralism is a particular perspective that these religions are equally valid in terms of access to truth and effectiveness in salvation. This view is illustrated beautifully by the ancient story of ten blind men trying to describe an elephant after touching different parts of its body for the first time . As they announced their conflicting discoveries, a heated argument ensued. Awakened by the quarrel, the Rajah corrected all of them by saying, “The elephant is a huge animal and each of you touched a part. In order to know the whole truth about what the elephant looks like, you must put together all the parts!” The moral of the story is that no religion has privileged access to the whole truth. Each religious view is a partial experience of the same Reality from its own culturally conditioned perspective. Given such a cultural milieu, it seems politically incorrect to claim superiority for any particular religion.

Doing Apologetics In The Malaysian Context

Offering diagnosis without prescription makes for light work so let us explore some proposals on how the apologetic task may be carried out in the Malaysian context. In view of many contemporary challenges, Dr Ng Kam Weng urged the Malaysian church to take proactive steps to enhance resources and nurture promising young leaders while they are still in colleges. I heartily concur with his proposal for long-term and intentional programs to equip them with necessary tools to interact with Asian philosophies and religions in an engaging method and accessible language. While there has been a resurgence of apologetic works in the American context, most of the materials were produced in response to atheistic secularism and naturalism.

A typical strategy by classical apologists like William Lane Craig, Norman Geisler and J. P. Moreland would proceed from a defence for the existence of God through various theistic arguments, the possibility of miracles and historical reliability of Scriptures. The goal is to lay a realist, historical foundation for accepting the resurrection of Christ, a crucial ‘clincher’ for the vindication of Christ’s unique claim to Deity. The Malaysian church has definitely benefited from growing evangelical scholarship in defence of the historicity of the Gospels since Muslim apologists like Ahmad Deedat borrowed the tools of liberal biblical criticism in their attempt to show that the Gospels are internally inconsistent or textually corrupt. Such apologetics will continue as long as sensational challenges from The Da Vinci Code, “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” documentary and others flood the media.

However, more often than not, we encounter alternative religious systems which already took the existence of the supernatural or spiritual world for granted. In contrast, many Western Christians too quickly dismissed such worldviews as mere superstitions or demonic, neglecting their positive cultural elements and revealing their own captivity to Enlightenment assumptions. Though commonly used in Malaysia, classical apologetics could be unwieldy insofar as it requires extensive memory and grasp of historical or scientific data. Perhaps, the effectiveness of theistic arguments from design, morality, causality and others may be applicable for agnostics or atheists who have developed a synthesis with Buddhism. But what may work for a secular atheist may not work for a theistic Muslim or pantheistic Hindu. Asian Christians need to rethink our rhetorical approach as a series of three-step, logical arguments in favor of a more dialogical engagement, meal hospitality, posing questions that invite participation or self-discovery, story-telling that involves the imagination and listening with empathy. Many people, inundated by totalizing claims of rationality, increasingly yearn for spirituality in the context of authentic community. They also want to see the fruits of our belief in embodied living and compassion for the needy before examining their validity. Having been a layperson-practitioner in various settings, I am convinced that apologetic should be lived out artfully as much as it is argued rationally, in a trust-building faith community where Kingdom perspectives are demonstrated. We should avoid a false dichotomy between truth and grace by following Jesus Christ who personified both (John 1:17).

Now, let us evaluate another influential apologetic method called Reformed epistemology. Defended by philosophers like Alvin Plantinga, Wolterstorff and others, it challenged the Enlightenment demand that everything we believe in must be supported by sufficient evidence. While some beliefs do require evidence, we cannot go on an infinite regress of proofs for every belief. Somewhere along the line, the buck stops at some properly basic beliefs which we intuitively know without inference from other beliefs. It is argued that evidences for God’s existence are not necessary for a rational faith even though such evidences may indeed exist. Echoing Calvin, belief in God emerges from an innate ‘sense of the divine’. Christians have epistemic permission to believe in God since such basic beliefs are the results of our cognitive faculties functioning successfully according to their design of producing true beliefs.

By probing hidden presuppositions behind the demand for evidences, I find Reformed epistemology helpful to deflect the burden of proof from resting solely on the believer’s shoulders. After all, how many church members in our midst could grasp such subtle philosophical nuances as found in the ontological argument? By rightly rejecting a self-defeating criteria for knowledge demanded by Cartesian foundationalism, a believer is not obligated to be a temporary agnostic or give up the faith at the pain of irrationality even if he has no access to any theistic proofs. It seems to be a workable strategy against the dominant naturalistic accounts of epistemology that Plantinga had to wrestle with. However, in a pluralistic context, it seems to open wide the door for Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims to claim ‘epistemic rights’ to their fundamental beliefs as properly basic as well.

While committed to the necessity of Holy Spirit’s inner witness to convict us of the truth, Harold Netland pointed out that various self-authenticating experiences that overcome any amount of contrary evidences could also be found in other religions. Our notions of what constitutes basic beliefs depend heavily on prior ontological and theological understanding of the nature of human beings. We cannot take these assumptions for granted especially if others do not share them. But if there is no neutral, universally rational foundation by which we could evaluate conflicting truth claims, on what basis do we privilege the Christian gospel? Is it merely one among the many we choose from due to the whims of history or culture? While postmodernism or pluralism may arguably provide a level playing field for all kinds of stories, a religious claim that has no referent beyond their respective ‘language games’ become trivial or subverted.

Influenced by Reformed epistemology, Stanley Grenz tried to answer this burning question by focusing on an ‘incarnational’ apologetics, which has impressed many emerging leaders today. He observed that the goal of all social traditions is to construct a well-ordered society. Instead of asking, “Which religion alone is true?” the question should be reformulated as, “Which religious vision provides the basis for community in the truest sense?” Although all religious traditions may contribute to societal cohesion, Grenz’s contention is that the gospel alone provides a more complete vision of the nature of community that all human religious traditions aspire to achieve since it embodies the highest understanding of who God actually is. The human search for communal relationship actually mirrors the Triune nature of the eternal God Himself as “plurality-in-unity”. The church is the visible embodiment of God’s universal purpose in the gospel to reconcile a diverse people and renew them in a gathered community as a sign of the age to come.

In the Asian context, where collective identity and relationship are stressed despite rapid erosion by modernistic individualism, I appreciate Grenz’s insights for an apologetic strategy integrally modeled in the church. However, as he himself has noted, various communities espouse different understandings of what constitutes true community. Without some common ground in our understanding of what “community” means, how could we then claim that the Christian story fulfills what they are actually seeking? And if such radically differing visions are ultimately incommensurable, it seems to undercut the claim that the gospel provides a “more” complete basis for community life in comparison. Ironically, Grenz’s proposals seem to make sense only if we do not overstate the divergence in our foundations of rationality, morality and community. This should not be surprising since different human cultures and languages do share a common humanity.

Without going back to Cartesian foundationalism, I find the structure of “incarnational” apologetics work best within a critical realist or chastened, modest, Reidian foundationalism. Again, Harold Netland is perceptive to point out that current discontent with positive apologetics owes more to the manner in which it is sometimes done and unrealistic expectations set by proponents.

Could a humble and realistic approach to positive apologetics be sustained? In my humble opinion, there is enough room in the apologetic task to draw on the strengths from different methodologies to construct a positive, cumulative case for Christian theism. Since the gospel provides the most comprehensively plausible, logically coherent and existentially satisfying explanation of the universe and our human experience, we could rejoice in the convergence of many apologetic streams. From the classical apologists, we drink in empirical evidences that demand a verdict. From the Reformed epistemologists, we learn to trust in the Spirit’s ability to produce genuine faith apart from arguments. From the presuppositionalists, we discover that unique features of human life make sense only when interpreted through a biblical outlook. With the incarnational apologists, we live out the practical demonstration of the faith in a living, ecclesical community.

Giving Reason For The Hope V

2007-03-13T09:47:00.000-07:00

No matter how we conceptualize it, the ethical criterion of truth remains a crucial challenge for the faith community. As a minority, we are called to demonstrate how a Trinitarian approach for community formation nurtures ‘unity-in-diversity’ in contradistinction from a potentially pluralistic but violent clash of civilizations or a docile state of monistic ‘dhimmitude’.

If the ultimate apologetic is found in Jesus’ prayer that His believers may be one as a reflection of Trinitarian love (John 17:21-22), our challenge today may sound like this: “How would the koinonia as an inclusive, sanctified, racially and socially diverse community of faith be any different from a monolithic ummah or a secular, fragmented individualism?” Would the church translate theology into socio-political practices that would answer our community’s yearning for racial reconciliation, public governance with integrity, peacemaking and liberation from oppression and poverty? The late Lesslie Newbigin wrote that it is precisely because we want unity that we seek the truth by which alone humankind can become one: “That truth is not a doctrine or a worldview or even a religious experience; it is certainly not to be found by repeating abstract nouns like justice and love; it is the man Jesus Christ in whom God was reconciling the world. The Truth is personal, concrete, historical.”

If the Malaysian church could thus demonstrate an alternative society that transcends ethnic, cultural, economic class and political barriers, the perception of Christianity as a Western colonial reality will be more effectively exorcised. Our apologetic should also take on board a faithful portrayal of Christ, as the Suffering Servant-King who laid aside His majesty and emptied Himself in humility to rescue and serve humanity (Matthew 10:28, Luke 22:27). The cross subverts every pretension to power by violence and de-legitimates manipulation and oppression. Although it does not guarantee innocence in its adherents, we find within the biblical meta-narrative is two inherent anti-totalizing inclinations - a radical sensitivity to suffering and God’s overarching creational intent over all, thus preventing a partisan abuse. Through the atonement of Christ, the way for reconciliation and forgiveness is made possible even for the oppressors.

In a stirring call, Engel and Dryness argued that the New Testament church made a parody of the ‘center-periphery’ mission model, which has as its starting point centers of power and wealth before moving to the periphery of those who were impoverished spiritually and physically. The book of Acts recorded how the gospel made its way from Jerusalem, an insignificant backwater of the Roman Empire to the very household of Caesar. Today, churches in the so-called Two-Thirds World need to embody the self-emptying and suffering Christ, not the imperialist Caesar. As servant-leaders, we need to engage contemporary issues in our proclamation and service for the sake of the world as significant missionary-sending contributors. In word and deed, we sensitively recognize the diversity and integrity of different cultures and ‘language games’, while holding to the significant possibility for meaningful communication as we also share a basic humanity in God’s image and live together in the same created world.

Concluding Remarks

While there is certainly indispensable necessity for worldview encounter and legitimate art of persuasion, we need to get beyond a confrontational mode of interfaith dialogue. There are also other themes which deserve our attention like interfaith dialogues in promoting common social harmony, joint action in overcoming racism, AIDS and poverty. Although the process of Islamization is a growing concern, which calls for courageous countercultural witness, the church also needs to draw from the rich resources for social programs that spring from a common theistic outlook with Islam, the national religion, as opposed to naturalistic secularism. At the same time, dialogue-in-life should permeate the rank and file in the office, classroom, factory and ‘rumah terbuka’ during festivities. That is, Christians should abandon a ‘ghetto’ mentality and actively pursue to be with the other, collaborate with them in action and discourse to understand and be understood. To be effective, the laity must be equipped to do conversational evangelism.

In conclusion, let us heed the rousing call for the apologetic task by J. G. Machen when he said, “It is true that the decisive thing is the regenerative power of God. That can overcome all lack of preparation, and the absence of that makes even the best preparation useless. But as a matter of fact God usually exerts that power in connection with certain prior conditions of the human mind, and it should be ours to create, so far as we can, with the help of God, those favorable conditions for the reception of the gospel. False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the while collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.”

Renewing The Mind

2007-01-18T09:41:00.001-08:00

Logical Fallacies (JP Moreland)

2007-01-14T08:34:00.001-08:00

Moving The Hand Of God

2006-12-14T06:07:00.000-08:00

Moving The Hand Of God: An Evaluation Of The Practical Implications Of Open Theism On Prayer Life

Some years ago, a minor theological commotion was stirred up when a Malaysian songwriter penned a catchy tune, which proved to be popular among local churches. The lyrics of the chorus went something like this:

“Every time I pray, I move the hand of God,
My prayer does the things my hands cannot do”

Some church leaders felt that it may inappropriately portray God as a puppet on strings, whose hands are manipulated by our requests. Others believed that it conveys a personal God who genuinely responds to our petitions and prayer requests.

These discussions are reliving the age-old question of how the all-knowing, all-powerful and unchanging God could be affected by our human actions[1]. Also, if God infallibly knows what will happen in the future anyway, why do we bother doing anything at all? Like it or not, our conscious or unconscious mental portraits of God have far-reaching implications on the Christian life. It is another way of saying that theology has profound pay-offs in our praxis. Therefore, it is not surprising to note both the heightened concern and excitement that followed in wake of a new model of God called “open theism”. Among other things, it proposed a portrait of God as genuinely relational and responsive to our free choices in such a way that He does not have complete knowledge of future events. The present paper will discuss its practical implications on the spiritual discipline of prayer.

Open Theism: Introduction

2006-12-14T06:06:00.000-08:00

What Is Open Theism?

Only a few decades earlier, C.S. Lewis could confidently assert, “Everyone who believes in God at all believes that He knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow.” Even my non-Christian colleagues are fond of saying, “I have no idea about what will happen. Only God knows!”[2]

However, a group of prominent scholars identified with the evangelical movement has recently rejected the classical understanding of God’s foreknowledge. David Basinger, one of its proponents, outlined some features of open theism relevant to our present discussion. Unlike Deism, the God of open theism created the world out of nothing and could intervene in earthly events by His sole initiative. However, in order to pursue a genuine relationship with human beings, He has also chosen to create us with libertarian freewill, which even he cannot totally control. [3] For this ‘creation project’ to be successful, God does not unilaterally override their freedom even if it may frustrate His desire for our highest good. [4]

Although He has complete knowledge of the past and present, God does not know everything about our future choices even though He could predict them with great accuracy. [5] In spite of such formidable accuracy, it is still possible for God to be surprised or mistaken in His predictions in any context involving freedom of choice.[6] For if God already knows that I would only eat bread for breakfast tomorrow, then I could not have chosen otherwise (i.e. skip breakfast). In libertarian view of freewill, I am not genuinely “free” unless I have the ability to do otherwise.

One of the attractive claims of open theism is its perceived resonance to Christian spiritual life. It argues that the traditional view of an all-knowing God is less compatible with our experience of prayer as a genuine dialogue with a relational God in which the future is not settled. [7] Let us evaluate these claims by exploring pastoral implications on three crucial facets of prayer - namely, our requests for God to act in our lives, seeking His will for decision-making and responses in the midst of pain and suffering.

Before we proceed further, it would be helpful to provide a brief outline of the classical understanding of God’s foreknowledge. In classical theism, the personal-infinite God created the world out of nothing and supernaturally intervened in the world. He is also supremely wise and able to infallibly foretell future events, which involve millions of human choices. Divine sovereignty over every specific event in the universe is seen as compatible with human responsibility as moral agents. [8] Genuine human freedom could also be understood as the ability to do what we ultimately want in any given situation. In this sense, freewill is not autonomous or self-ruled, but determined by a complex combination of our personal character, habits, circumstances and often-conflicting set of desires and motives. Even though God already knows that I would only eat bread for breakfast tomorrow, I am still free as long as the choice is determined by my preferences at that time. Even for those Christians who hold to libertarian view of freedom, God still foreknows the future because He is ‘beyond time’ as expounded by C.S. Lewis or by virtue of ‘middle knowledge’ as represented by philosopher William Lane Craig.[9]

Open Theism: Why Pray?

2006-12-14T06:05:00.000-08:00

Implications on A Believer’s Petitions

Would God withhold from us a blessing He intends to grant because we do not pray? Conversely, could His response to our prayer be ultimately contingent on us? How then shall we make sense of the biblical assertion that “you have not because you ask not” (James 4:2)? Open theist John Sanders cited biblical examples of God removing certain plagues at Moses’ request (Exodus 8:13, 31) and ‘changing His mind’ in response to Hezekiah’s request to let him live longer (2 Kings 20:1-6) as evidence that God really changes His plans in response to human actions. [10]

It would seem absurd to suppose that God would ‘repent’ if He already foreknew what would occur. Surely, it is not much of a conversation with God if He already knew in advance what we were going to say anyway. [11] At first glance, open theism appears to offer significant incentive for petitions and supplications since God’s action is largely dependent on a process of relational consultation with us.

Having said that, we also need to do justice to equally important texts that explicitly declare, “God is not a man, that He should lie, or a son of man, that he should repent” (Numbers 23:19). There is also a real sense in which God will not “lie or repent; for he is not a man that he should repent” (1 Samuel 15:29). John Piper proposed that taking both sets of texts seriously prevent us from conceiving God’s “repentance” in the same way as the limitations of a man. Unlike us, God is not limited by folly or lack of foresight. He changed His mind “not because it responds to unforeseen circumstances, but because he has ordained that his mind accord with the way he himself orders the changing events of the world.” [12]

That means classical theism could also affirm that God genuinely shows mercy when people turn away from sin and seek His face in prayer. But He is neither caught off guard nor ultimately held contingent upon his creatures. Instead, He infallibly plans and knows in advance even the human actions that He responds to. In doing so, some ‘distinctive’ attractions of the open theist model are lessened, if not removed. Still, it may be objected that “Since even our prayers are already ordained and foreknown by God, does it not render human action unnecessary?” But it would be like asking, “If God has eternally decreed that you should live, what is the use of your breathing or eating?” God has ordained not only that we would live, but also the means (oxygen and food) by which we should live. Similarly, God has decreed our intercessions to be the means by which His Kingdom would be established because nothing amplifies the sufficiency of God and the humility of man more than the empty hands of trusting prayer. [13] Classical theists could strongly affirm human responsibility to co-operate with God to work for a better world since God willed to accomplish his plans through human agency. Divine sovereignty should never be an excuse to neglect prayer any more than it is an excuse for not eating or breathing.[14] Rather, it is the very foundation for the efficacy of our prayers.

Although open theists may pray for divine intervention to influence and woo the sinner, ultimate self-determination still remains on the person himself. Violating man’s libertarian freedom would put His ‘creation project’ in jeopardy. As a result, we could not consistently pray for an efficacious influence that actually brings a person to faith or repentance like: “God, please take out their heart of stone and give them a new hearts of flesh. Grant them repentance and knowledge of the truth. Open their hearts so they may believe.” Such prayers presuppose God’s influence is sovereign and effectual in bringing about actual human repentance and faith. Piper explains in more detail, “People who really believe that man must have the ultimate power of self-determination can’t consistently pray that God would convert unbelieving sinners. Why? Because if they pray for divine influence in a sinner’s life they are either praying for a successful influence (which takes away the sinner’s ultimate self-determination), or they are praying for an unsuccessful influence (which is not praying for God to convert the sinner). So either you give up praying for God to convert sinners or you give up ultimate human self-determination.” [15]

While God graciously desires an intimate personal relationship with us, we need to be conscious of the vertical, Creator-creature dimension of that relationship. We do not relate to Him as equal partners. The purpose of prayer is not for us to counsel God or overcome His reluctance (Isaiah 40:13-14). Considering how God is supremely wise and benevolent in contrast with our ignorance and sinfulness, our petitions could either be inferior to the plan God has for us or be in accord with the plan He already knew is best. Therefore, God would be acting foolishly if He were to give in to our inferior wishes. Our petition should primarily be focused on aligning ourselves to His will in obedience, not changing His will by negotiation.

Open Theism: Guidance

2006-12-14T06:03:00.000-08:00

Implications on Prayer For Divine Guidance

Another crucial dimension of prayer is our requests for God’s wisdom and discernment of His will while making major decisions like a career choice or future life partner. More often than not, these critical choices in life also carry long-term consequences that may last an entire lifetime. It is important that a pastorally responsible model of God should encourage confident trust in divine guidance for our lives. At first glance, open theism seems to liberate us from the notion that God has in mind only one perfect and fixed blueprint for us. Sometimes, this popular idea of “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life” may unintentionally produce paralyzing inaction and confusion as people worry too much about being inside God’s ‘perfect blueprint’ in every single detail. God’s dynamic and flexible will is for us to grow in Christ’s likeness and realize our full potential.

However, a closer inspection yields a different picture as Basinger honestly explained that “[s]ince God does not necessarily know exactly what will happen in the future, it is always possible that even that which God in his unparalleled wisdom believes to be the best course of action at any given time may not produce the anticipated results in the long run”. Knowing all relevant factors in past and present, God could guide us based on His best prediction at a given moment. Of course, the actual outcome may not always turn out in the way that He had anticipated. Uncertainty arises in proportion with the number of human choices involved. Therefore, there is no assurance that the best advice God could give now would achieve the results He intended as someone somewhere may surprisingly frustrate His plans later.

When the circumstances are difficult, an open theist would be particularly tempted to allow a paralyzing sense of doubt to set in and wonder, “What if God is wrong in guiding me here?” Bruce Ware pressed the point and observed that “perhaps in the midst of agonizing disappointment, given this paradigm of the relation between prayer and God’s fallibility with respect to the future, an earnest but troubled believer might even contemplate praying, “Father, I forgive You for You know not what You do”. The difficulty is further compounded when we consider long-distance decisions like seeking guidance for a marriage, university application or career plans. Open theist Basinger was straightforward when he wrote, “[W]e must acknowledge that divine guidance, from our perspective, cannot be considered a means of discovering exactly what will be best in the long run – as a means of discovering the very best long-term option. Divine guidance, rather, must be viewed primarily as a means of determining what is best for us now.”

In contrast, the God of classical theism provides us with guidance from the vantage point of certain foreknowledge and infallibly able to work out all things for our good. As such, we could rest in confident trust that God’s wisdom cannot be ultimately frustrated. “To say that God is pretty good at short-range guidance but can’t really handle long-range direction is to say that, concerning the weightiest decisions we make in our lives, God has little if any solid help to give. Surely this only discourages greatly what the Bible commends throughout: trusting God implicitly with all of our lives.” Instead of encouraging trust in God’s providence, the new model seems to pose negative pastoral effects on Christian living.

Even though nothing could happen apart from the permission of God, we do not make decisions by inquiring into the unsearchable, ‘decretive will’ of God. As such, we do not need to indulge in too much introspective, navel-gazing about whether we are inside God’s ‘decretive’ blueprint. Even when we made a mistake in our decisions after due diligence and consideration, God could still work through their results to accomplish his good purposes with infinite wisdom. Rather we choose on the basis of God’s ‘revealed will’ in the form of biblical principles, taking into account our God-given opportunities, common sense, talents and deepest desires to grow in Christ-like manner and extending His kingdom. In all our responsible planning, we live before the face of God, realizing that it is the Lord’s will that ultimately prevails (James 14:13-16).

Open Theism: Suffering

2006-12-14T05:56:00.000-08:00

Implications on Prayer In The Midst of Suffering

Prayer is never more difficult than when we are surrounded by the storm clouds of tragedy, pain and suffering. Biblical heroes like Job, Jeremiah, Habakkuk and Jesus Himself were brutally honest in their agonizing prayers before God in the grip of evil. Similarly our deepest hearts and attitudes towards God are laid open by how we respond to Him in the dark night of the soul. There is a noble motivating impulse behind open theism that is the hope that a new model of God would provide a better solution to the problem of evil and pastorally responsible approach to the grieving. Open theist John Sanders was spurred on to wrestle with the issue of divine providence after the death of his brother in a road accident. Unsatisfied with well-meaning attempts to explain why God would allow it to happen, he wondered, “God, why did you kill my brother?” Wouldn’t it also be better theodicy, for example, to counsel the victims of World War II that God did not know all along how Hitler would use his freedom?

Boyd also explained that open theism logically leads us to believe in pointless evil. “[T]hings can happen to us that have no overarching divine purpose. In this view, ‘trusting in God’ provides no assurance that everything that happens to us will reflect his divine purposes, for there are other agents who also have power to affect us, just as we have power to affect others” . For example, it is pious but confused thinking to wonder about the “purpose of God” in the tragic death of a young girl caused by a drunk driver who alone is blameworthy. “The only purpose of God in the whole thing is His design to allow morally responsible people the right to choose whether to drink responsibly or irresponsibly.” Isn’t it more comforting to those who suffer to know that God didn’t know in advance the evils that had befallen them else He would have prevented them?

Despite its initial appeal, we need to beware of the exorbitant price tag that comes with open theism. Its perceived benefits lost much luster when we examine its parallel claim that despite God’s respect for human freedom, He is also sometimes able to override their choices. So the problem of evil is not significantly allayed since it would have been easy for God who knows all possibilities to predict Hitler’s war plans and prevented tragedy by removing him with a deflected bullet. If we apply this model to Boyd’s scenario of the fatal car accident, we are either forced to say, “God could have saved the accident victim but chose not to do so, because He purposefully respects the drunk driver’s freedom” (which is really another form of “greater good” theodicy in which God is in some ways involved in the tragedy) or we could say, “God did not foresee what the drunk driver would do so He is not able to save her” (which attributes a ‘caring but helpless passivity’ to God, just watching as the events spin out of His control).

In the former response, the only difference it makes in contrast with the classical view lies in what the greater purpose is: Open theists believe the good reason God permitted it was because He planned contra-causal freedom without which relationship is impossible, while Reformed theists believe the higher commitment is God’s wise purpose to display the full range of His glory in justice and mercy for the good of His people. Ultimately, both sides need to admit an element of mystery and resist the temptation to limit God’s power, knowledge or goodness in order to seek an easy escape. In the latter response, we must ask, “If the risk-taking God is unable to foresee the possible danger posed by a drunk, what hope do we have that He would fare any better with more complex risks of wars, terrorism and economic depression where millions of choices are involved? What then about the claim that God still knows all possibilities and capable of intervening at times?” We may sympathize with such a deity, but it is hardly the glorious vision of the omnipotent and wise God worthy of our worship.

Indeed, a denial of God’s foreknowledge undercuts the very hope we have that God is powerful enough to cause all things to “work together for good to those who love Him” (Rom. 8:28). “All things” include hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness or danger or sword (Rom. 8:35). Although the agency of Satan was clearly present, the author of the book of Job did not consider the presence of secondary causes as proof of ‘pointless evil’ (Job 1:12 & 42:11). Rather Job sought to understand why God had caused it and clearly attributed his calamity to the ultimate cause: “Yahweh gave, and Yahweh has taken away. Blessed be the name of Yahweh." In all His dealings, God is righteous and not the author of evil. While nothing happens apart from the decretive will of God, it does not follow that God approves the event that He ordains in itself. For example, He detests the murderous conspiracies that led to the crucifixion of Christ and grieved by the heinous crime (Acts 4:13). Betrayal is clearly against His revealed will and moral laws. Yet He wills the cross in view of the greater good (i.e. salvation of many), which would spring from and through the vicarious suffering of Christ. His decree does not however negate the responsibility of moral agents. Instead, it is accomplished through their compatibilistic agency without turning anybody into automatons.

Through the clouds of tragedy, we derive comfort not from probing the secret mind of God but from trusting in Heavenly Father’s heart of compassion and righteousness. Surely, we need to provide practical help and sensitive counsel even as we grieve alongside those who suffer. While we often cannot fathom God’s mysterious plans, we could be confident that He knows exactly what He is doing at each moment. God is still on His throne, skillfully weaving out His bright designs for our ultimate good through dark threads of adversity. It is hardly ‘comforting’ to provide the afflicted with an assurance that pointless evil has happened and gratuitous suffering could be just around the corner since God cannot foresee the freewill of drunk drivers, wicked war-mongers and demonic beings.

Moving The Hand Of God: Conclusion

2006-12-14T05:55:00.000-08:00

Conclusion: Moving the Hand of God

Although the debate would persist on many hermeneutical, philosophical and theological fronts, pastors and church leaders ought not lose sight of the real people, who still need to be counseled, encouraged and comforted in the manifold seasons of life. While every theological model of the inexhaustible God has its strengths and weaknesses, open theism has more than its fair share of difficulties that put the vitality of Christian life at grave risk. We yearn to see a more respectful and humble discourse in which the issues are framed and opposite views represented fairly.

However, we ought not treat this debate as a purely academic storm in a teacup in view of the serious practical implications the doctrine of God would have on our life and practice. Nothing short of the glory of God is at stake in the undermining of the orthodox vision of God’s exhaustive, divine foreknowledge (Isaiah 42:8-9). Countless saints in the past have learnt strength as they trust in the sovereign goodness of God like the widows of Jim Elliot and his missionary friends who were martyred in a case of seemingly ‘pointless evil’. Yet through the tragedy, God worked to bring forth the salvation of the Hourani tribe including some of the killers themselves. While we may not always see God’s purposes this side of heaven, we could afford to take big risks for the Kingdom and combat evil because the Rock our trustworthy foundation of hope is not vulnerable to risks.

Moving the Hand of God: Footnotes

2006-12-14T05:51:00.000-08:00

FOOTNOTES

1. “In A.D. 233 Ambrose referred to Origen some issues that a woman named Tatiana had brought to his attention: First if God foreknows what will come to be and if it must happen, then prayer is in vain.” Cited in John Sanders, The God Who Risks: A Theology Of Providence (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998), page 268.

2. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, (New York: Touchstone, 1996), page 149

3. Libertarian or contra-causal freedom could be broadly defined as the ability to do otherwise. To be free means there is always the possibility that we could have chosen differently. External circumstances and internal motivations may influence but never determine our decisions.

4. “God did not foreknow that we would actually sin, only that it was possible; thus he cannot be held morally culpable”. John Sanders, The God Who Risks, page 259

5. Gregory Boyd, God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God, (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), page 35 “In the open view, God knows all possibilities and all probabilities (as well as all settled realities) perfectly.”

6. David Basinger, ‘Practical Implications’, The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God, (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 1994), page 163. See also John Sanders, ibid., page 74

7. David Basinger, ibid., page 160

8. Donald Carson, How Long, O Lord? Reflections on Suffering And Evil, (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1990), pages 201 – 218. Carson provided an exegetical case for the compatibilism without trying to resolve its tension. For a more philosophical definition of compatibilistic freedom, see John Feinberg, “God Ordains All Things”, Predestination And Freewill: Four Views Of Divine Sovereignty And Human Freedom, ed. David Basinger and Randall Basinger, (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1986), pages 20-28.

9. Middle knowledge refers to the notion that God not only knows the past, present and future, He also knows other possibilities like “What would have happened in Europe if Hitler had not been born?”

10. John Sanders, The God Who Risks, page 271.

11. However, open theism affirms God’s knowledge of past and present and all possibilities and probabilities so nothing we could say in prayer really surprises Him too.

12. John Piper, The Godward Life, (Oregon: Multnomah, 1997), page 191

13. John Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist, (Oregon: Multnomah, 1996), page 146 - 147

14. One could also say with equal logical coherence, “Since God is sovereign, I will zealously pursue prayer and obedience knowing that His purpose would surely prevail and my efforts would bear much fruit!”

15. John Piper, The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God’s Delight In Being God, (Portland: Multnomah, 1991), page 226

16. Bruce Ware, God’s Lesser Glory: A Critique of Open Theism, (Apollos: Leicester, 2000), page 171

17. Clark Pinnock, “God Limits His Knowledge”, Predestination And Freewill: Four Views Of Divine Sovereignty And Human Freedom, ed. David Basinger and Randall Basinger, (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1986), page 161

18. Basinger, ibid.,page 165

19 For a real story of how Boyd interpreted God’s guidance for a woman’s happy marriage could be frustrated by sin, see Gregory Boyd, God of the Possible, pages 105 – 106

20. Bruce Ware, God’s Lesser Glory, page 171

21. David Basinger, ibid., page 163

22. Bruce Ware, God’s Lesser Glory, page 184

23. Jerry Bridges, “Does Divine Sovereignty Make a Difference In Everyday Life?” in Still Sovereign: Contemporary Perspectives on Election, Foreknowledge, and Grace, edited by Thomas Schreiner and Bruce Ware, (Grand Rapids: Baker Book, 1995), page 297

24. Clark Pinnock, Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God’s Openness, (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001), page 139

25. Gregory Boyd, God of the Possible, page 153

26. Gregory Boyd, Letters From A Skeptic, pages 46-47

27. Gregory Boyd, God of the Possible, page 191

28. Millard Erickson, What Does God Know? And When Does He Know It? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003), page 193

29. Bruce Ware, God’s Lesser Glory, page 212 - 213

30. John Piper, “Are There Two Wills In God?” in Still Sovereign: Contemporary Perspectives on Election, Foreknowledge, and Grace, edited by Thomas Schreiner and Bruce Ware, (Grand Rapids: Baker Book, 1995), page 122 - 124

31. John Piper, Beyond The Bounds: Open Theism and the Undermining of Biblical Christianity, Edited by John Piper, et. al., (Wheaton:Crossway, 2003), page 373 - 375

32. For an example of how some open theists confused the distinction between God’s decretive will and moral will, see the off-the-mark rhetoric in Clark Pinnock, “God Limits His Knowledge”, Predestination And Freewill: Four Views Of Divine Sovereignty And Human Freedom, page 161

Bibliography

1. Beyond The Bounds: Open Theism and the Undermining of Biblical Christianity, Edited by John Piper, Justin Taylor and Paul Kjoss Helseth, Crossway: Wheaton, 2003

2. Christian Theology, Millard Erickson, Baker Books: Grand Rapids, 2001

3. Creating God In The Image of Man, Norman Geisler, Bethany House: Minneapolis, 1997

4. God of The Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God, Gregory Boyd, Baker Books: Grand Rapids, 2000

5. God’s Lesser Glory: A Critique of Open Theism, Bruce Ware, Apollos: Leicester, 2000

6. How Long, O Lord? Reflections on Suffering And Evil, Donald Carson, Baker Books: Grand Rapids, 1990

7. Predestination And Freedom: Four Views Of Divine Sovereignty & Human Freedom, John Feinberg, Norman Geisler, Bruce Reichenbach, and Clark Pinnock, , InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove, 1986

8. Still Sovereign: Contemporary Perspectives on Election, Foreknowledge, and Grace, Edited by Thomas Schreiner and Bruce Ware, Baker Books: Grand Rapids, 1995

9. The God Who Risks: A Theology Of Providence, John Sanders, InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove, 1998

10. The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God, Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker, and David Basinger, InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove, 1994

11. What Does God Know? And When Does He Know It? , Millard Erickson, Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 2003

New Perspective On Paul I

2006-12-09T22:12:00.001-08:00

Evaluate the “New Perspective” on Paul’s exposition of the doctrine of justification by faith alone

Introduction

Since the groundbreaking work in E. P. Sanders’ monograph, “Paul and Palestinian Judaism”, a paradigm shift had taken place within New Testament scholarship with regards to the center of Pauline theology. Although by no means a monolithic movement, the New Perspective represents a fundamental rethinking of what the gospel really means. The present paper sought to analyze and evaluate New Perspective views on the doctrine of justification sola fide primarily through interaction with major proponents.

Some common characteristics among New Perspective interpreters are the serious attempt to place Paul within his socio-religious framework in first century Palestine, offering a more positive evaluation of Judaism and response to Schweitzer’s agenda-setting question about the center of his theology as understood from the epistles. [1] In this discussion, we would proceed by interacting with Stendahl on hermeneutical presuppositions, Sanders on Jewish socio-religious context and finally, N.T. Wright on exegesis of key passages related to justification sola fide . [2]

Before tracing the historical development of New Perspective, we must say a word about the classical perspective on Paul. Traditionally, Reformed interpreters like Luther and Calvin have painted a portrait of Paul as self-righteous Pharisee who strived to earn his salvation by observing the law and amass good works with his own effort. This form of legalism was characteristic of the Judaism of his day. On that fateful road to Damascus, Paul had a conversion encounter with the resurrected Christ. As expounded most fully in Romans, Paul came to understand that one’s legal or forensic standing before God was not based on works of the law, but justified freely through faith alone. The Law-Gospel antithesis described the function of the Law as a means to terrify the sinner with God’s justice so as to seek refuge in the imputed righteousness of Christ sola gratia (Luther) or primarily a revelation of the perfect, divine will (Calvin) . [3] Previously regarded as the orthodox article of faith on which the Church either stands or falls, the doctrine of justification sola fide was the material cause of the Reformation movement.

The Quest for the Historical Paul

However, this consensus among Paul’s interpreters has been steadily eroded over the past thirty years. Perhaps the herald of the new interpretive paradigm was Swedish Lutheran theologian, Krister Stendahl. In his essay, "The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West”, Stendahl argued that since Augustine’s Confessions, Christians have misunderstood Paul through the lens of the inward-looking, individualistic mindset of Western culture . [4] Thus, the apostle’s original concerns about the communal relationships between Jews and Gentiles were obscured. The result is nothing short of an expose of the conceptual baggage carried by the Reformers as they approach the text. In relation to justification sola fide, Tom Wright also pointed out that the church’s understanding of justification was forged in the battlefields of Pelagius against Augustine in the fifth century and Erasmus against Luther in the sixteenth century . [5] If we can’t approach the Pauline corpus with an introspective, guilt-ridden conscience in search for a gracious God, how then shall we read?

After Stendahl heralded the impending paradigm by exposing the presuppositions of Reformation paradigm, the floodgates were opened with the publication of Sanders’ influential “Paul and Palestinian Judaism.” In the preface, Sanders spoke of his attempt to “compare Judaism, understood on its own terms, with Paul, understood on his own terms.” Based on his research on ancient literature on Palestinian Judaism (as in non-Diaspora), Sanders argued that the caricature of Judaism as a legalistic religion was a historically false “straw man”. He proposed that within the pattern of religion found in Second Temple Judaism dubbed covenantal nomism, “obedience maintains one’s position in the covenant, but it does not earn God’s grace as such .” [6] Obedience is required to “stay in” God’s covenant but “getting in” was always based on God’s electing grace. In His mercy, God has chosen Israel and given them the law. Transgression is punished. However, the law has provided means of atonement for the restoration of covenant relationship. Salvation is therefore not earned but solely by grace alone. While qualifying the drawbacks of using the term “soteriology ,” [7] Sanders wrote that:

"When a man is concerned to be ‘in’ rather than ‘out’, we may consider him to have a ‘soteriological’ concern, even though he may have no view concerning an afterlife at all… covenantal nomism is the view that one's place in God's plan is established on the basis of the covenant and that the covenant requires as the proper response of man, his obedience to its commandments, while providing means of atonement for transgression ." [8]

Granted that Paul the Pharisee had reoriented himself to a new Christian community whom he had previously persecuted, there was essentially no change in his “pattern of religion”. There was no radical, salvific discontinuity between the post-Damascus, Pauline doctrines of justification by faith and the tradition of his fathers. If Sander’s historical analysis is correct, how then shall we understand the polemics of Paul that “a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law”? If Paul was interacting with covenantal nomism, a religion of grace, what do we make of his doctrine of justification by faith?

Here, Sanders argued that Paul began with a prior conviction that Jesus is the universal Savior of all, and any reference to human plight is the necessary, rhetorical outworking from that dogmatic conviction . [9] He didn’t start with any plight of humanity or a pre-conversion dissatisfaction with the Law. [10] The only problem Paul had with Judaism was: It is not Christianity. If Sanders’ solution does not appear simplistic, many New Perspective scholars were nonetheless dissatisfied with his reinterpretation of Pauline theology despite standing upon the revolutionary foundation which he laid.

Eschewing a Lutheran Law-Gospel antithesis yet discontented with Sanders’ proposal, N.T. Wright offered a more promising alternative for understanding the doctrine of justification by faith. He argued that nationalistic “boundary markers” like circumcision, Sabbath and food laws marked out the pious Jews as evidence of being God’s covenant-keepers, in anticipation of the Yahweh’s eschatological vindication of their status as true Israel . [11] Since Paul never abandoned Judaism, his fiery polemics against the works of the law should be understood within his new vocation as the apostle to the Gentiles. James D.G. Dunn, another New Perspective scholar argued rather similarly that the Damascus Christophany was primarily Paul’s calling to the Gentile mission while remaining within covenantal nomism . [12] The apostolic herald of the Christ was on a crusade to remove such culture-specific badges that separated Jews and Gentile Christians as a covenant community. We shall look more closely how Wright reformulate the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith.

To begin with, Wright argued that God’s righteousness should be understood as His covenant faithfulness to His promises to Israel, instead of the distributive justice of God . [13] Thus Luther’s notion of iustitia Dei is ruled out as a Latin irrelevance. Wright framed God’s righteousness as “that aspect of God’s character because of which He saves Israel despite Israel’s perversity and lostness… thus cognate with His trustworthiness on the one hand, and Israel’s salvation on the other. [14] Carried over to a forensic law court setting, Israel comes before the divine Judge pleading her case against her pagan oppressors. God is righteous when He is faithful to His covenant to vindicate Israel’s case as promised. Israel is righteous or justified “as a result of the decision of the court” in an eschatological fulfillment . [15]

Although Wright stresses the forensic dimension of justification, it was not about how someone might enter God’s covenant community but of “how you can tell who belongs to that community” before end-time Judgment. Justification was “God’s eschatological definition, both future and present, of who was, in fact, a member of His people… It wasn’t so much about soteriology as about ecclesiology, not so much about salvation as about the church. ” [16] The issue of salvation at the heart of Pauline theology centers on Jesus and the proclamation of His kingship. Justification is not about getting in or staying in a covenant relationship with God, but the boundary markers that indicate to us in the present who would be part of the vindicated Israel in the future.

The Case for Paul, the Apostle of Faith

If the New Perspective on Paul is right, then the article of faith upon which the Church stands or falls is shaken to the core. While some evangelicals eagerly jump on the bandwagon, other theologians offer knee-jerk response against it by pointing out its radical departure from historic creeds. Ultimately we need to evaluate these views in the following order – presupposition analysis, socio-historical context and exegesis.

To begin with, we could examine Stendahl’s thesis that Paul’s “robust conscience” necessarily precludes an acute, introspective awareness of sin as a peculiarly Western idea . [17] For example, Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in Luke 18 seems to suggest that a contrite spirit is the requirement for being “justified”. David, the Eastern Psalmist, may have a robust conscience (Psalm 17: 1 – 5) but he is also known for struggling with inward guilt in Psalm 51. These two themes seem to interplay in tension throughout the Old Testament until they find a resolution and harmony at the event of Jesus’ crucifixion. Philippians 3:6 should not be taken as proof-text that Paul considered himself to have kept the law perfectly. Colin Kruse commented, “This verse is found in a context in which Paul deals with externals, the evidences of his Jewish pedigree and piety… It is better then to understand Philippians 3:6 in terms of misplaced pride in which the apostle indulged in pre-Christian days. It does not reflect his views about the possibility of perfect obedience. ” [18]

In another significant contribution, Frank Thielman proposed that ancient Jewish literature, canonical or otherwise, contained a common pattern in which Israel’s inability to keep the law (the plight) will be cured in the eschatological future where God will free Israel to obey His commands (the solution) . [19] Instead of being plagued by personal sins, Paul was burdened by Israel’s corporate failures, which resulted in Gentile oppression. Thielman also argued that there were Jews who believed in a synergistic relation between human effort and divine grace as the means of eschatological vindication. Against such beliefs, the post-Damascus Paul wrestled valiantly in Philippians 3: 2-11 and Colossians 2:13-14. Paul’s movement “from plight to solution” could then make a lot of sense within his own Jewish milieu, not as an imposition of Western categories.

We could also note that New Perspective is itself not based on ‘presuppositionless’ exegesis. The new Paul has emerged from the terrible aftermath of Auschwitz. The Nazis’ propaganda in support of the Holocaust was shockingly dressed in Christian garb. Isn’t it tempting to construct a Paul who could easily evade charges of anti-Semitism by opposing mere boundary markers yet essentially in agreement with Judaism? Following Schweitzer’s critique of the historical Jesus project, the quest for Paul is also in danger of becoming a self-reflection of the spirit of the age . [20] Our prevailing postmodern mood in general is intolerant of religious exclusivism. In the face of imposing challenge from secularism and naturalism, N.T. Wright’s proposal to undercut the central Catholic-Protestant debate on justification, as a peripheral issue of ecclesiology, is attractive to sensitive believers who long for unity in Christ’s Body. However, if justification by faith is essential to Paul’s apostolic gospel as asserted by the Reformers, compromise would be too high a price to pay for such perceived tactical advantage . [21] As responsible exegetes, we need to identify the lens with which we ourselves interpret the data otherwise the meaning of the text is skewed. While exegesis cannot be done without a perspective provided by one’s presupposition and reading community, the text can address and even change our lens if necessary . [22]

At this point, it would be well for us to consider the socio-religious background of Paul in connection with first-century Palestinian Judaism. More recently, scholarly research into the soteriological pattern found in diverse Jewish literature from apocrypha, pseudepigrapha, Josephus, Philo, the Dead Sea Scrolls and other rabbinical traditions had cast doubt on whether “covenantal nomism” was an adequate description of Palestinian Judaism. In volume 1 of “Justification and Variegated Nomism”, the contributors’ findings seemed to suggest that Second Temple Judaism was much more complex and lack uniformity. [23] In a review, Craig Blomberg listed some texts especially 2 Enoch, 4 Ezra, Testament of Abraham and 2 Baruch that seem to favor a more legalistic theology. The data gathered by Sanders’ study can also be interpreted in support for a legalistic Judaism. For instance, the sheer number and minute detail of laws in Mishnah, that the covenant is not even mentioned in Tannaitic writings and the rabbinic explanation of God’s election on the basis of Israel’s choice to accept the covenant or on the merits of their forefathers . [24] Friedrich Avemarie’s investigation showed that rabbinic Judaism tends to hold the emphasis of “electing grace” and “works” in tension without any neat, unified system as what Sanders proposed . [25] In light of this correction, we cannot readily dismiss Paul’s admission that his pre-conversion status before God was not only based on electing grace, but also his zealousness for the law, circumcision, ancestry and legalistic righteousness (Galatians 1:14, Philippians 3:5-6).

In reality both Romanism and past/present Judaism could be more accurately categorized as “semi-Pelagian”, instead of what Wright described as “proto-Pelagian”. Both patterns of religion teach that man and God are “co-operators in salvation, that grace could complement and supplement human nature ”. [26] The issue ever hinges on the little word “sola” in sola fide and sola gratia. Hence, a more variegated construction of first century Judaism allows Paul’s polemics against the law to be understood in soteriological terms.

New Perspective On Paul II

2006-12-09T22:10:00.000-08:00

Sifting the Epistles of the Apostle

Before discussing key passages in Paul’s epistles which would have decisive bearing in the debate, we are confronted with what Kasemann called the central concept of Pauline theology - ‘the righteousness of God’ (dikaiosune theou). According to Old Testament scholars like Gerhard von Rad, it meant God’s ‘covenantal faithfulness’ to fulfill His saving promises to Israel. It seems like a necessary correction to the view of righteousness understood as conformity to an ethical norm . [27] However, the grid of ‘covenantal faithfulness’, on which the weight of Wright’s thesis rests, is too narrow to support the datum in Old Testament where God’s righteousness is also demonstrated specifically in fulfilling His punitive, non-saving promises to Israel . [28] Therefore, Mark Siefrid’s caution that the words ‘righteousness’ and ‘covenant’ are rarely used in the same context in Old Testament should be considered more seriously. [29]

John Piper offered a more plausible alternative after surveying Old Testament texts like Psalm 143 and Daniel 9: “While God’s allegiance to the covenant is a real manifestation of God’s righteousness, nevertheless the most fundamental characteristic of God’s righteousness is His allegiance to His own name… His commitment to Israel is penultimate. His commitment to maintaining the glory and honor of His name is ultimate. ” [30] It is because God’s glory should be revealed before a watching world that both His punitive justice and saving faithfulness are manifested. In Isaiah’s prediction of God’s eschatological saving acts closely related to His righteousness, the ground for Israel’s salvation is God’s passion for His own glory:

“For the sake of my name I delay my wrath and for my praise I restrain it for you, in order not to cut you off… For my own sake, for my own sake I will act, for how can (my name) be profaned? And my glory I will not give to another”. (Isaiah 48:9-11)

If the righteousness of God refers to neither distributive justice nor covenantal faithfulness but to God’s commitment to the glory of His name, how shall we exegete ? [31]

Commenting on the epistle to Galatia, Wright pointed out that the issue in Antioch was not how one may be saved, but who one is allowed to eat with? Can Gentile Christians share full table-fellowship or do they need to be marked out by circumcision as part of the covenant community? However, this proposal failed to account for Paul’s own assessment of the situation in Galatians 1:6-9. His indictment of his opponents (to the point of throwing eternal anathema) lies in their perversion of the gospel of Christ itself. The inconsistency of Jewish Christians separating themselves from Gentile believers is symptomatic of a more serious lapse in the nature of Paul’s gospel (Galatians 2:14). If the gospel is a royal announcement of Jesus as Lord, not justification by faith, why would Paul charge them of preaching another gospel that nullifies Christ’s death ? (Gal 2:21) [32]

A compelling case for viewing justification by faith as a ‘covenant-entry’ issue can be made by taking seriously the link between Abraham’s blessing and the promise of the Spirit (Galatians 3:14). Christ redeemed us that the blessing given to Abraham would be realized in that the nations would receive the promise of the Spirit by faith in Christ. Being declared as righteous through faith, apart from the law, (Gal 3:6) is the basis for receiving the Spirit and not least, covenant-entry into Abraham’s family (Gal 3:2, 6-7) . [33] Contra Wright, Paul’s discourse in Galatians does not merely indulge in peripheral bickering on how one is defined as a member of Abraham’s covenant community. Justification of the Gentiles by faith is nothing less than the ‘gospel’ announced in advance to Abraham so that the nations would now enter into his covenant blessings.

In response to scholars who envision justification sola fide as later ecclesiological issue, Seyoon Kim pointed out that Paul himself interpreted the Christophany as the pleasure of God “to reveal his Son in me” (the gospel) “so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles” (the commission) . [34] If Paul developed justification by faith much later during the Antioch controversies about the place of Gentiles, as Dunn suggests , [35] then the polemical context in Galatians 1 and 2 would make little sense. Here, Paul defended his law-free gospel, apostleship and the Gentile mission as having an inseparable and divine origin in the Christophany. If he came to realize justification sola fide apart from the law only much later, the argument would inevitably fall apart . [36] Luke’s account would concur that the commission Paul received from Christ to both Jews and Gentiles (Romans 1:16) is primarily salvific - “to open their eyes from darkness to light, from the power of Satan to God so that they may receive forgiveness of sins ” (Acts 22:16-18). [37]

Regarding the crucial passage of Romans 3:21-31, Wright argued that God had demonstrated His covenant faithfulness when He dealt with sin in the cross and resurrection so that covenant membership is now available to both Jews and Gentiles. The boasting of Romans 3:27 is the racial boast of the Jew to Gentiles, not that of the successful moralist to God. Otherwise, it does not logically follow that Paul should retort, “Or is God the God of the Jews only? Is He not of Gentiles also? ” [38] In the covenantal context, justification means that believers are declared or defined, in the present, to be true covenant members on the basis of faith, not by circumcision or natural descent.

However, the force of Wright’s argument is blunted significantly if we take note of Paul’s ad absurdum strategy in Romans 3:29. His opponents did not historically hold the view that Yahweh is a provincial deity of the Jews only. Rather, Paul is carrying his opponents’ position to its undesirable logical conclusions. Simon Gathercole pointed out that if obedience to the Torah were God’s appointed means to justification, then He would have no concern for Gentiles who did not have access to Torah . [39] Therefore it is more likely that the boasting refers to the confidence that God would vindicate Israel before the Gentiles by virtue of Israel’s election and obedience to Torah . [40] It does not necessarily imply self-righteousness, only that Paul’s contemporaries wrongly assumed that they had fulfilled the requirements of Torah. Theirs was a failure not merely to include Gentiles in the covenant, but also a failure to know God in a salvific sense, which Paul agonized over in Romans 9. There is no distinction between those who have Torah and those who don’t because all have sinned and failed to reflect the glory of God (Romans 3:23). In Romans 1, Paul indicted mankind as having knowledge of God but failed to glorify Him as God and exchanged His glory for images of the created. The centrality of God’s glory in Christ is carried over in Romans 3:21 – 31 where God’s righteousness required vindication or demonstration because of the proposal that God had left sins committed beforehand unpunished and justified sinners freely (verse 26) . [41] In contrast, to avoid playing off justice with mercy, Wright’s interpretation exhibited no such tension evident in the text. Rather, justification of God’s community is only expected of His covenantal faithfulness. The passing over of sins committed by those who dishonored God’s glory threw a long shadow over God’s “righteousness” precisely because God’s commitment to the honor of His name is at stake. Therefore the cross as a sacrifice of atonement or propitiation for sins (verse 25) was utterly crucial in order to demonstrate that God’s honor was upheld even as He justified those who believe.

With a covenantal grid, Wright also interpreted Philippians 3:2-11 as Paul’s refusal to grasp racial covenant membership, though possessing it according to the flesh, by virtue of his birth, marked out by circumcision and being a zealous Pharisee. “Faith is the badge of covenant membership, not something someone performs as a kind of initiation test .” [42] However, it is improper to suppose that ‘gaining Christ’ is not an initiatory phase in covenant membership. To “gain Christ” and be “found in Him” (verse 9) is to assume the same positional status as “having righteousness that comes from God” through faith in Christ. The latter is not a mere marker of which the former is reality. That which Paul rejected as “loss” and “refuse” was hardly membership indicators, but the confidence in “the works of the law as the basis for man’s righteousness before God” . [43] His apparent “profit” in the past (verse 7) was antithetical “gaining Christ”. To be sure, the attempt to gain righteousness of our own works and merits was not antithetical to inclusive community boundary, but the salvific, all-surpassing greatness of knowing Christ. Paul gave a similar assessment in Romans 9:31, “But Israel, although following after the law of righteousness, did not arrive at that law. Why not? Because it did not start from faith, but from supposed works.” While Wright is correct to point out that the text is not explicit about a “righteousness of God,” we should not see a false dichotomy here as the “righteousness from God” (alien righteousness which Paul received, not his own) does not preclude that possibility . [44]

After a sampling of crucial Pauline texts on justification by faith, I find that while the Reformation view may require refinement and clarification in light of the New Perspective challenge, its key features emerge from exegesis, not eisegesis. Instead of being a mere boundary marker, Paul viewed justification by faith as the only means of salvation from the wrath of God: “Since we have now been justified by His blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through Him” (Romans 5:9).

Conclusion

In summary, there are crucial insights to be gleaned from the New Perspective. Sanders put us all in his debt by refuting a simplistic portrait of Judaism and Dunn brought to our attention much-neglected sociological aspects of Pauline theology. N.T. Wright’s ongoing project on the centrality of the Kingship of Christ in the gospel poses a much needed correction to the popular concept of Christianity as an individualistic, otherworldly religious experience. I have come away breathless and challenged by the clarity and incisive insights with which Wright unpacked Paul’s proclamation as a rhetoric against pagan worldviews and political oppression.

However, if we are to understand the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith, we would do well to heed Westerholm’s call to return and read exegetical masters like Luther once again. The great ecumenical article of faith that once held together orthodox, pre-schism traditions in the East and West needs to be rediscovered, not abandoned, if genuine unity in the gospel is to be achieved . [45] I expect to see the Church’s historic understanding of justification by faith would be significantly refined, but vindicated, in the process of the ongoing debate for the glory of God and the good of His people. The practical pay-off should therefore be nothing less than a renewed zeal and urgency to a missionary enterprise that truly transcends racial and cultural boundaries.

Footnotes:

[1] For Schweitzer, only two views were credible contenders for the center of Pauline theology. He argued that “Christ-mysticism” understood in the context of apocalyptic Judaism is the center of which “justification by faith” is but a peripheral apologetic for the inclusion of Gentiles into the church.

[2] In keeping with sound hermeneutical principles, presupposition and socio-historical contextual analysis methodologically precedes exegesis of the text. I have chosen to interact with Stendahl and Sanders because of their ground-breaking contribution in the respective areas. As for Wright, his exegesis on justification seems most persuasive, refreshing and influential among New Perspective scholars I’ve read.

[3] F. Thielman, A Contextual Approach: Paul and the Law, (Illinois: InterVarsity, 1994) pages 14-27.

[4] The article was first published in English in Harvard Theological Review in 1963.

[5] N.T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the real founder of Christianity? (Oxford: Lion, 1997), page 113

[6] J. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion, (London: SCM Press, 1977), page 420

[7] For example, Sanders noted that Rabbinic Judaism is not primarily other-worldly. “What must I do to be saved?” is not a prominent query for them.

[8] J. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, page 75.

[9] Building on Sanders theory, Raisanen’s Paul and the Law went even further to argue that Paul had no consistent theology of the Law at all. For an evaluation, see J. Barclay, Paul and the law: Observations on some recent debates, Themelios, vol.12, September 1986, pages 9 -11

[10] F. Thielman, A Contextual Approach: Paul and the Law, pages 35 – 37.

[11] N.T. Wright, What Did Saint Paul really said: Was Paul of Tarsus the real founder of Christianity?, page 132

[12] J. D. G. Dunn, ‘A Light to the Gentiles’ or ‘The End of the Law?’ The Significance of the Damascus Road Christophany for Paul’ in the monograph Jesus, Paul and the Law: Studies in Mark and Galatians, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1990), pages 98 – 99. Quoted in S. Kim, Paul and the New Perspective: Second Thoughts on the Origin of Paul’s Gospel, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), page 22

[13] See Isaiah 40 – 55, Daniel 9 and Psalm 143 for the biblical warrant.

[14] N.T. Wright, What Did Saint Paul really said: Was Paul of Tarsus the real founder of Christianity?, page 96

[15] Ibid., page 98

[16] Ibid., page 119

[17] S. Kim, The Origin of Paul’s Gospel, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), page 53. Kim cited the Thanksgiving Hymns of Qumran as suggesting the possibility for rigorous Jews to sometimes doubt their ability to keep the law perfectly.

[18] C. Kruse, Paul, the Law and Justification, (Leicester: Apollos, 1996), page 83.

[19] Frank Thielman, From Plight to Solution: A Jewish Framework for Understanding Paul’s View of the Law in Galatians and Romans (Leiden: Brill, 1989) page 45. Quote was from Kruse, op. cit., page 45.

[20] Kirster Stendahl, for example, is actively involved in ecumenical dialogue with Jewish scholars via the International Council of Christians and Jews. The perceived advantage of improving post-Holocaust Jewish-Christian relation may be done at the expense of silencing Paul’s exclusivistic gospel. Is it possible that in an ironic twist, the guilty conscience of post-Holocaust Europe has now been read into the text?

[21] Luther wrote, “Nothing in this article can be given up or compromised, even if heaven and earth… should be destroyed.” Quoted in Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Pub.,1998), page 62

[22] Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, (Illinois: InterVarsity, 1991), page 412

[23] In Summary and Conclusions, Don Carson wrote that “Sanders is not wrong everywhere… he is wrong when he tries to establish his category is right everywhere”.

[24] T. Shreiner, The Law & Its Fulfillment: A Pauline Theology of Law, (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1993) pages 114 – 117.

[25] Mark A. Siefrid, The ‘New Perspective on Paul’ and Its Problems, essay drawn from Christ, Our Righteousness, published by Appolos, UK.

[26] P. F. M. Zahl, Mistakes of the New Perspective, Themelios Vol 27:1, page 7

[27] C. Hodge, Romans, (Pennsylvania: Banner of Truth, 1989), page 95. Commenting on this term in Romans 3:25-26, Hodge wrote: ‘Justice is the attribute with which the remission, or passing by, of sins without punishment, seemed to be in conflict.’ But God’s righteousness can be displayed in showing mercy as shown in Psalm 143.

[28] David Hill cited Lamentations 1:18 and Isaiah 10:22 in support for his thesis that “within the action of divine righteousness, there is a place for deliverance and condemnation, a place for salvation and for punishment”. D. Hill, Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings: Studies in the Semantics of Soteriological Terms, (Cambridge 1997), page 90

[29] M. Siefrid, The ‘New Perspective on Paul’ and Its Problems, Themelios 25.2 (2000)

[30] J. Piper, The Justification of God: An Exegetical & Theological Study of Romans 9:1-23, (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993), page 112. See also God’s Passion for His Glory (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1998).

[31] The implications of Piper’s thesis are more fully developed in Tom Shreiner’s “Paul, Apostle of God’s Glory in Christ.”

[32] N.T. Wright, What did Saint Paul really say?, page 126

[33] T. Shreiner, Paul, Apostle of God’s Glory in Christ: A Pauline Theology. (Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2001), page 208

[34] S. Kim, The Origin of Paul’s Gospel, page 57. The text was taken from Galatians 2:16.

[35] J. D. G. Dunn, “Paul and Justification by Faith” in The Road from Damascus edited by R. Longenecker, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), page 99 Quoted in Kim, Paul and the New Perspective, page 27

[36] S. Kim, The Origin of Paul’s Gospel, pages 58 – 60.

[37] S. Kim, Paul and the New Perspective, page 49. Kim also pointed out the “problematic implication of Dunn’s minimalistic view… it makes the gospel practically irrelevant to the Jews”. A Messiah who does not save Israel is a contradiction of terms! The notion that Jews have an equally valid system of salvation in Judaism, apart from Christ, is untenable. Genuine tolerance in Jewish-Christian relation should be upheld by the doctrine that man was created in the image of God, not by downplaying the central doctrine of justification sola fide.

[38] Wright, What did Saint Paul really say?, page 129

[39] S. Gathercole, Where Is Boasting? Early Jewish Soteriology and Paul’s Response in Romans 1 – 5. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), page 232

[40] Ibid, page 226. In support of his thesis, Gathercole cited Sirach 31:5, 10 as an example from the various Jewish sources surveyed.

[41] S. Westerholm, Israel’s Law and the Church’s Faith: Paul and His Recent Interpreters, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), page 160. Westerholm’s critique here may also be applied to Wright: “Although Sanders and Raisanen both concede universal sinfulness in Romans 1-3, the tenet is dismissed to the periphery of Paul’s thought.”

[42] N.T. Wright, What did Saint Paul really say?, page 125

[43] H. Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of His Theology, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,1975), page 138

[44] J. Piper, Counted As Righteous, (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 2002), page 84

[45] T. Oden, The Justification Reader, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), pages 26 - 27

Where Have We Gone Wrong?

2006-12-09T22:08:00.000-08:00

A Book Review: “Changing the Mind of Missions: Where Have We Gone Wrong?”

The Christian church is called to be faithful embodiment of the gospel and its courageous agent of proclamation in a fast-changing world. Her missionary task can be nothing less than the restoration of God’s reign over all of life. Unfortunately, the church may become more influenced by the spirit of the age than living victoriously in the redemptive age of the Spirit.

In their book “Changing the Mind of Missions: Where Have We Gone Wrong?” James F. Engel and William A. Dyrness sound the alarm that the modern missionary movement is in crisis. The signs of crisis can be detected in the church’s captivity in modern worldview, steady decline of financial support and withdrawal into monastic ghettos that disengages from the world. There is also widespread skepticism about whether Christian lifestyles are any different from others, prompting what Ron Sider dubbed as ‘the scandal of the evangelical conscience’. Instead of purveying pessimism, the authors see it as an opportunity for rethinking missions with a Kingdom perspective today.

They identify several weaknesses that beset the mission movement today due to the infections of modernity. In particular, the Church has fallen into two errors of omissions in relation to the Great Commission. Firstly, the rhetoric of fundamentalist-liberal conflict in America has resulted in either a “privately engaging, socially irrelevant” faith or a social transformation project that neglects evangelism . Even closer to home in Malaysia, it is far more common to hear sermons on ‘quiet time’, personal piety or ‘the end of the world’ than sermons on social justice, racial integration and the church’s role in Vision 2020.

The second indictment relates to the church making converts who did not graduate to become disciples. As a result of identifying success in terms of quantifiable conversions, pragmatic techniques to disseminate facts and elicit a ‘decision’ reduced disciple-making to ‘managerial missiology’ . Time-consuming, intangible process of spiritual formation like character and holiness took a backseat. While the Scripture does provide summaries like “Believe in Jesus and you shall be saved!” we need to be aware that such statements occur within the context of a sizeable narrative. Not surprisingly, mission objectives are still spelt out in terms of number of tracts distributed and the completion of world evangelization by certain measurable dateline . Fundraising strategies geared accordingly towards highlighting numerical superiority and ‘marketable concerns’ compete for ministry revenues to the extent that legitimate, less popular causes, such as leadership development, suffer.

Engel and Dyrness also propose to revise the missionary model which has as its starting point centers of power and wealth before moving to the periphery of those who were impoverished spiritually and physically . At the beginning of the modern missionary movement, missionaries from North America and Europe were sent to various parts of the world. Their legacy in education, churches and healthcare institution endures till this day. However, the Christian faith is also seen as inextricably linked to dominance and control of the colonial powers. My leftist uncle in China could easily recite how new frontiers were opened to missionaries by the barrel of the gun. Military defeats and humiliating concessions left an indelible mark on the Chinese psyche that Christianity is a ‘Western religion’. Well-meaning missionaries often find themselves caught in the position of “reluctant imperialists” .

Diagnosis without recommending a cure makes for light work. To their credit, Engel and Dyrness prescribe several directions for decisive transformation. They contend that Scriptures make a parody of the ‘center-periphery’ model. The book of Acts recorded how the gospel made its way from Jerusalem, an insignificant backwater of the Roman Empire to the very household of Caesar. Today, churches in the so-called Two-Thirds World have emerged as significant missionary-sending contributors. They are demanding a Paul-Barnabas type of partnership with Western mission agencies rather than a Paul-Timothy partnership . Expertise, resources and knowledge to develop indigenous leaders should be imparted without using them as leverage for control. Vinoth Ramachandran described a cross-cultural, mutual-listening relationship today as indispensable for faithful witness to Jesus Christ.

Part of the ‘Gracious Revolution’ would also involve the abandonment of modernity’s individualistic autonomy and “creation of communities of common people performing uncommon deeds”. Membership in a faith community is not an optional add-on to conversion. Rather than an institution, the church should be characterized more as a community, which Leslie Newbigin called “the hermeneutic of the gospel, its very message and medium” . The full potential of a local church is not realized when its role is seen only in terms of providing resources and sending missionaries. The authors propose a paradigm in which the church takes proactive ownership of specific tasks in mission in partnership with other agencies. As Emil Brunner put it, the church exists by mission as fire exists by burning.

With regards to the ‘public facts versus private values’ assumption of modernity, Engel and Dyrness call for a recovery of the Puritan’s combination of personal piety and an all-encompassing worldview which subjects all aspects of life to God. They argue that social transformation should not be reduced as a consequence of evangelism or merely a component of evangelistic strategy. Social involvement and evangelism should be ‘inseparable elements in Christ’s kingdom that embraces all of creation’. To echo Abraham Kuyper, there is no sphere of life that is not subject to the sovereignty of Jesus Christ.

I think the authors’ critique of market-driven approaches to mission is timely. Surely, evangelism should go beyond presenting 4-point propositional facts to elicit decisions that secure a ticket to heaven. The gospel must be “modeled, and then proclaimed”. Our message would be more authentic and appealing if it is incarnate in our communities of faith, foreshadowing the eschatological Kingdom. Genuine fellowship involves mutual self-emptying, servant leadership and deep sharing of lives, not just a feel-good huddle. The authors illustrated these issues through a case study of the fictional mission agency called Global Harvest Mission. I feel that the illustrative effects are not especially necessary in contributing any substantial weight to their case.

True motivation for missions is “not about selling some spectacular product, eternal life or forgiveness of sins, however wonderful these realities are” . The nature of gospel proclamation as heralding the kingship of Christ has solid historical basis in N.T. Wright’s findings in New Testament studies . I greet the authors’ call for a more holistic approach to mission that encompass the entire creation with a hearty amen. At the same time, I wished that they could have interacted with ‘passion for God’s glory’ as the primary motivation that has driven missionaries of earlier generations.

But it seems that Engel and Dyrness failed to discuss the pitfalls of postmodernism while lauding it as a “decided pendulum swing in a more healthy direction” . They are probably on target when discussing the emerging trend of people inundated by absolute, universalistic claims of rationality and a desire for the spiritual in the context of an authentic community . However, is the openness to experiment with various religions symptomatic of a hunger to discover what Schaeffer called ‘true truth’? Or is it simply the desire to choose any ‘truth’ that fits one’s own personal tastes? After all, if there is no objective truth, why not shop for the latest flavor in the supermarket of religions? Perhaps the authors could have recognized the challenge of mission in a postmodern culture includes affirming unique claims of Christ in the face of relativism.

Personally, I’m less sanguine about postmodernism being “one of the greatest opportunities of history for the Christian faith” . Michael Horton has an interesting analysis that what we call postmodern may in fact be ‘most-modern’ or a more radical form of the same old thing . Such modern features like autonomous individualism, specialized consumerism and suspicion of the past are becoming more rampant. Even if a new epoch is emerging, we should be cautious of its challenges as well.

I never cease to be amazed at how God could work out His redemptive plans in the world despite our faltering and sometimes, counter-productive efforts. The modern missionary movement, despite obvious weaknesses, has made significant strides to overcome geographical and linguistic barriers in bringing the good news of salvation to new frontiers. At its best, the emphasis on fundamental doctrines has always accompanied gospel presentation like personal relationship with Jesus, atonement for sins and justification through faith alone.

At the same time, we need to reexamine and align our approach to missions closer to the biblical model. Engel and Dyrness have rightly identified important areas that need to be urgently addressed. The church’s proclamation, kerygma, must be carried out in the context of authentic community (koinonia) and service to the world (diakonia). However, the antithesis should not be framed as “modernism versus postmodernism” because there is no unmixed blessing this side of heaven. The transforming power of the gospel should be allowed to speak to every culture, especially our own.

It is also crucial that we do not fall for false dichotomy in choosing between relationship over against propositions, story over against propositional doctrines, social action over against evangelism or humility over against convictions. The evangelical content of our message needs to be recovered and unleashed to renew the world, modeling a foretaste of the future Eschaton. If we do not put asunder what God has joined together, the missionary enterprise would have enduring relevance and render better service to God and men.

Bibliography

1. Engel, J.F. and Dyrness, W. A. Changing the Mind of Missions: Where Have We Gone Wrong? Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2000.
2. Sweet, L. (ed.) The Church In Emerging Culture: Five Perspectives, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003.
3. Wright, T. What Saint Paul really said: Was Paul of Tarsus the real founder of Christianity? Oxford: Lion Publishing, 1997.