"God has revealed the true righteousness of his purposes in the just and merciful gospel of his Son."
Such are the closing words of the second of two related articles on Unbelief and Doubts by Rev Michael Jensen in the June 2011 and November 2011 issues of Eternity - a magazine distributed to churches from Sydney.
Taken on its own it all sounds good doesn't it? However, if you had read the content of both articles carefully you ought to have noted the sowing of seeds of tares along with seeds of wheat by Rev Jensen.
In the earlier of the two articles (Unbelief) Rev Jensen recalls a time in theological seminary when a lecturer asked students to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 6 as to doubts of faith - a 6 indicating a considerable degree of doubt. Rev Jensen felt the only number he could circle with integrity was 6 and he did so. It is evident from the article that he still has doubts today and seems to take comfort in declaring "... there are many Christian leaders wrestling with doubt. " From this position he offers advice to (and appears to affirm) doubters, commencing with the assertion that "the Bible itself speaks from within the experience of doubt." I refute this assertion. There is a gulf between faith and doubt and there are degrees of perception in faith (Heb. 11:1,39). The authors of the books of the Bible had faith in God while not necessarily knowing all the mind of God. Psalmists expressing concern at a circumstance they experienced were not doubting God - for they appealed to God - but, instead, were expressing frustration at not knowing the mind of God in their situation and/or sought delivery from circumstance. The man Job was similarly placed.
Lack of faith is always associated with elevating worldly reason above what God has said (His Word). Those commended for their faith (Heb. 11) are commended for putting worldly reason in submission to the Word of God. They may not have perceived with their eyes (or their mind's eye) fully what God was going to do but they trusted God and will be rewarded with perfection.
Having manufactured a case for doubt from an errant premise Rev Jensen goes on to again disseminate his dangerous view in the November issue of Eternity. After introducing a spurious example of failed doomsday 'prophet' Harold Camping - who obviously doesn't trust the Word of God - Rev Jensen asserts an affinity with Camping and many Christians (obviously including Jensen himself). He alleges a widespread "disappointment and frustration with the uncertainty that necessarily accompanies faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Basically, we just want more certainty than we have been given. And yet, we cannot, we do not, have a knowledge of everything we would wish to know about. This leaves us - well, where does this leave us? Feeling insecure perhaps - or at least, with an insecurity that we seek to, fill with certainties. We would like to know because a little extra knowledge would surely anchor our faith more securely against the winds of doubt that come blowing through from time to time."
This is serious stuff! Moving in the circle of doubters and faithless as he apparently does Rev Jensen attempts to paint the majority of Christians as like-minded and moves on to, in some way, justify lack of faith whereas the Bible says otherwise.
I know, I know, some will accuse me of taking Rev Jensen out of context for, they will say, he goes on to say there is such a thing as "right doubting" (?) and he exhorts Christians to trust, ultimately, in the gospel revealed in Jesus Christ. However, it is the other things he says that dangerously affirm doubting the Word of God and this ought to ring alarm bells for others as it does me.
When he makes statements in the article like "We cannot explain history. In fact, to attempt to do so is a kind of blasphemy. If we could explain God in this way, or know his mind, he would not be truly God." Rev Jensen goes too far, particularly in respect to his discouragement of attempting to know the mind of God. The Apostle Paul encourages knowing the mind of God (Col. 1:9-10) and (Rom. 12:1-2).
Looking beyond Rev Jensen's rounding-off of his articles on Unbelief and Doubts with words of encouragement to persevere I fear what is really going is that Rev Jensen is attempting to justify his trust in worldly reason at the expense of trust in the Word of God. How could you not say that a man is struggling with trust in the Word of God when earlier this year on his blogspot an inquirer asked whether from the mention of Noah in the genealogy contained in Genesis 5 we can conclude that Noah was a real person, Rev Jensen replied with words to the effect of "not necessarily"?
Sadly, Rev Jensen is taking many people down a perilous path to unbelief. For his sake and the sake of others I encourage him to take heed of the words of Bishop J. C. Ryle more than a century ago in his work "Practical Religion" where he says on page 114 " ... the Bible no doubt contains hard things, or else it would not be the book of God. It contains things hard to comprehend, but only hard because we have not grasp of mind to comprehend them. It contains things above our reasoning powers, but nothing that might not be explained if the eyes of our understanding were not feeble and dim. But is not an acknowledgment of our own ignorance the very corner-stone and foundation of all knowledge? Must not many things be taken for granted in the beginning of every science, before we can proceed one step towards acquaintance with it? Do we not require our children to learn many things of which they cannot see the meaning at first? And ought we not then to expect to find 'deep things' when we begin studying the Word of God, and yet to believe that if we persevere in reading it the meaning of many of them will one day be made clear? No doubt we ought so to expect, and so to believe. We must read with humility. We must take much on trust. We must believe that what we know not now, we shall know hereafter, - some part in this world, and all in the world to come."
Eternity magazine, reaching into many churches as it does, has a responsibility to consider carefully what it puts into church buildings. The consequences are eternal when the subjects of doubt and unbelief in the Word of God are left so open-ended and inadequately handled as Rev Jensen leaves them.
Sam Drucker
Showing posts with label Rev Michael Jensen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rev Michael Jensen. Show all posts
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Spirit of Marcion Remains Abroad. (Part 2)
"Watch out for false prophets, they come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognise them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit." (Matthew 7:15-18)
In Part 1 of this blog I cited extracts of Rev Michael Jensen's opinion piece in the June 2010 edition of "Eternity" a publication disseminated around the Episcopalian Diocese of Sydney. Rev Jensen dealt with the struggle of some to reconcile the God of the Old Testament with God revealed in Jesus Christ in the New Testament.
Rev Jensen recalled Marcion in the 2nd Century AD who rejected the God of the Old Testament and chose only selected texts of the New Testament to have a faith of his liking. Marcion was labelled a heretic but that did not stop adherents over several centuries pursuing beliefs he espoused. Rev Jensen presented an acceptable case against Marcion and his like but some phrases he used jolted my attention because they have application to a pitiful aspect of current day theology within the Diocese of Sydney. I'll repeat them in part hereunder and point out current day comparisons:
"Marcion's project was essentially two pronged. On the one hand, he challenged the integrity of the source of our knowledge about God, the Bible."
On the subject of Creation the overwhelming trend with students coming out of the Diocesan theological seminary is to dilute the message of Genesis 1 of its strength. Instead of accepting the traditional reading of Genesis 1 from the early Church, the Reformation, the Puritans, the Great Awakening of 18th Century to well into the 20th Century; latter day influences such as Kline, Blocher, Wenham and Kidner have caused many within and outside the theological seminary to strip Genesis 1 of its genre of Historical Narrative or Prose. This hatchet job on the first book of the Bible opens the door to all manner of propositions as to what the author (God through Moses) is saying. Hence we have assertions such as: Genesis 1 only teaches the Sovereignty of God and nothing else; Genesis 1 is a reaction to Enuma Elish the Babylonian creation myth; the repetitions, rhythm, numbers and chiasmus make it "mysterious" and "a historical;" and, finally, the disjointed "framework hypothesis" propounds theme at cost of detail.
This is all what you would expect to see arising from the "Eclipse of Biblical Narrative" as observed by Hans Frei who I cited in Part 1 of this blog. Further, it has one purpose and that is to accommodate Darwinism in one form or another and the popular form is Theistic Evolution.
Further, this is all an attack on the nature of God revealed in Jesus Christ. I quote again from Rev Jensen so readers can see his inconsistency:
"They [Theologians like Irenaeus of Lyon] realized that Jesus was not revealing a new God but the same creating and law-giving God. Whatever Christian theology did from that point on, it had to do with the creator and law-giver as identical with the God revealed in Jesus. Marcion had (it turned out on a closer reading of the Bible) drawn a false contrast between the God of Israel and Jesus Christ."
Theistic Evolutionists, whom Rev Jensen gives aid and comfort to in other places, either consciously or unconsciously draw a false dichotomy between the Son Creator through whom all things were made, and Incarnate Son. They say the Son Creator used a slow, death and suffering filled, dead-end riddled process which continues today yet they acknowledge the Son Incarnate undertook miracles wholly and instantaneously. What they fail to acknowledge is that the miracles undertaken by the Son Incarnate were of a nature, process and design to affirm his Person as Creator. How can Theistic Evolutionists miss this obvious connection? Because they have an a priori, a commitment to Darwinism to the relegation of knowledge of Jesus Christ , the Word, the Son and Creator.
As such, they repeat the errors Marcion. Like Marcion, they reshape parts of the Bible. Like Marcion, they emphasise, almost to the exclusion of all else, "a faith of the resurrection and the Spirit". They fail to preach all of Christ.
To cite Rev Jensen again:
"Though it [the Church] had to—and still has to—manage some tricky parts of Scripture, it had far more to lose by going with Marcion than it stood to gain."
Scripture can be tricky according to the degree of faith. There are degrees of faith. Pray to God for greater faith. Coming to terms with God who made the covenant through Moses with Israel and the new covenant ushered in by Incarnate Son is limited by us, not by God. There is a big plan of God which angels long to look into (1 Peter 1:12) and even those of us mortals who have God's Spirit dwelling within can be left wanting. Notwithstanding a desire to know more I will now venture to offer some thoughts on the nature of God revealed in the Old Testament and his dealings with man. To help me in this I will cite some words uttered by Rev William Romaine, 1714 - 1795AD when he preached on Psalm 107:10-16 during the period of the Great Awakening in the 18th Century.
The ministry of William Romaine occupies a chapter in J. C. Ryle's "Christian Leaders of the 18th Century" and the author makes the following observation about him:
"I turn from Whitefield, Wesley, and Grimshaw, to the fourth spiritual hero of the last [18th] century - William Romaine. In doctrine and practical piety, the four good men were, in the main, of one mind. In their mode of working, they were curiously unlike one another. Whitefield and Wesley were spiritual cavalry, who scoured the country, and were found everywhere. Grimshaw was an infantry soldier, who had his head-quarters at Haworth, and never went far from home. Romaine, in the meantime, was a commander of heavy artillery, who held a citadel in the heart of a metropolis [London], and seldom stirred beyond his walls. Yet all these four men were mighty instruments in God's hand for good; and not one of them could have been spared. Each did good service in his own line; and not the least useful, I hope to show, was the Rector of Blackfriars, William Romaine."
The writer of Psalm 107 knows something of the nature of man and God and how God responds to those willing to turn to him out of their rebellion. The first and great rebellion came from our ancestor Adam and has characterised man ever since. I defer now to some advice from William Romaine:
"And God had given to Adam greater gifts and abilities, with innocence to enable him to use them aright, than to any of his descendants; and had, with the most tender affection, counselled him against that very temptation by which he was most liable to be seduced - therefore when he rebelled against God and contemned [sic] the counsel of the Most High, it was the most horrid rebellion that a creature could commit against its Creator. And it was far from cruelty in God, it was an act of justice without severity, to suffer him to fall into the pit which he had dug for himself, and there to be taken by the enemy, and committed a prisoner to darkness and the shadow of death, and to be fast bound with misery and iron. But it may be enquired, why are we subject to his misery? Because we could not but be involved in his guilt. His treason corrupted his blood; and being corrupt in the fountain, it could not but be corrupt in the streams which issue from it. We see a standing instance of this in the book of nature; a corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit. And we have a clear evidence of it in the book of God; which declares, that coming from a corrupt stock, we are altogether corrupt and abominable, being by nature children of wrath. And we have incontestable proof from the equity of our own laws, which not only punish treason with the loss of life in the traitor himself, but also with the loss of honours and estate in his descendants to the latest posterity."
All descendants of Adam bear this stamp - like Adam we have our being as a thought (concept) from the great I AM i.e. Father, Son, Holy Spirit (in base term - Life). Speaking of all creation, the Apostle Paul says "in him [the Son] all things hold together." (Col. 1:17) Our being depends solely on him who is good and all he created was good, even very good.
Sadly, our ancestor Adam rebelled against the great I AM thus separating himself from Life. This is death and we, as descendants of Adam, bear the same rebellious nature and condition. It has been a mercy of the great I AM to continue a sustaining of the contaminated creation through the Son (Col. 1:17) so as to work a good work - a new creation inhabited by those who turn to him in true repentance.
I regard the Parable of the Lost Son (Luke 15:11-32) as an excellent picture of our plight and the love of the great I Am. Read it.
Did you understand this? This son already wants the portion of his inheritance. In Bible times after the father died, the eldest son received two thirds of the inheritance, and the youngest son received one third. So it was a worthwhile portion to receive. However, the younger son cannot wait for he wants it now. We may say, he actually prays for the death of his father. He is also one who has rights, for he asks for his goods. Then he does not come as a beggar, but comes as one with a right. "Give me my goods." But let us not be hasty to cast stones, for indeed, the lost son dwells very close to us, "My goods!" Yes, we too have received many goods. Our good health, our daily life, our gifts and talents. And for what purpose do you think we have received all this? We have received this in order to serve the great I AM in this world, and in order to one day receive the full inheritance.
And now in this parable we see the father is silent. That is something very striking. We see here offended love, which also a silent love. No there is no one who can feel what that was for that father; his son before him in the room, a son no longer content with his father's love. He steps upon his heart, upon his heart of love and now adds to the grief of his silent father. There in Eden, we trampled upon the great I AM's heart of love. We did that willingly, there was no reason to stray from the obedience to the great I AM. Do you know what the worst is? There is now a breach which cannot be repaired by us. Returning now to the parable, now the father silently gives the goods to his son. The sin is so great, now things can never again come aright. He has offended love, he has despised love.
There he goes, where to? Well, to a far country, yes? How far away from his father? Over there, one lives with sports and entertainment, and here, another keeps himself busy with his religion - a religion not born of God. Thus man dances through this far off land, without the great I AM. But this world is not just a dance. It is a school. A school of suffering and we learn this until we draw our last breath. We have to learn who we have sinned against, we have sinned against the great I AM's love! Now what that love accomplishes at this school is what we learn in the continuance of this parable. The lost son finally realises his sorry state and sees that even as a servant he is better placed in his father's house. He resolves to return in full repentance and faith.
While yet a distance away his father sees him coming and, with tears, runs to his son. He meets him, throws his arms around him and kisses his returned son. The great I AM does this for you and I in his Son, Jesus Christ. He meets us while we are yet far off. More than this, we are made clean. We are made fit to live in the presence of the great I AM. As the father in the parable has the best robe placed upon the returned son so you and I who return are washed by the righteous blood and clothed with the righteous garment of the Son (Rev 3:18). Only by this means are we admitted to the Father's house yet it is offered willingly by a loving Father. In receiving we are adopted into the Son. What privilege! What an inheritance!
What, I hear you ask, about the Amalekites, Canaanites etc and false teachers within Israel whose being was cut short without more time to turn to the great I AM in repentance? He knows the heart of all. He knows those who will turn. He knows too what a snare those people would be to Israel in their relationship with him. We see a picture of this within our own body. We know today that a mutating cell within our body can be a cancer which grows to suffocate life from the body. The best means of dealing with cancerous cell(s) is to get to it early and cut it out completely even taking some of what may be healthy cells to ensure that all the cancerous cell(s) is removed. This is done by Physicians in love is it not? In a like manner, Israel was to remove from its nation and surrounds that (those) which was a hazard to the life of their relationship with the great I AM. In his love, the great I AM was prepared to help Israel in this.
Well, this posting is quite long. I must end it. In closing, I urge readers who are in the Church to test the spirits. Beware of those false teachers who tamper with and excise passages of Scripture. Every tree is known by the fruit it bears. Test the spirit of understanding in the work of the great I AM in creation. Was the order of creation a process of faulty, mutation riddled life forms including vegetation (bad fruit) by a "bad tree" or was it an order of whole and very good life forms by a "good tree" (later spoiled by sin of the creation)?
Sam Drucker
In Part 1 of this blog I cited extracts of Rev Michael Jensen's opinion piece in the June 2010 edition of "Eternity" a publication disseminated around the Episcopalian Diocese of Sydney. Rev Jensen dealt with the struggle of some to reconcile the God of the Old Testament with God revealed in Jesus Christ in the New Testament.
Rev Jensen recalled Marcion in the 2nd Century AD who rejected the God of the Old Testament and chose only selected texts of the New Testament to have a faith of his liking. Marcion was labelled a heretic but that did not stop adherents over several centuries pursuing beliefs he espoused. Rev Jensen presented an acceptable case against Marcion and his like but some phrases he used jolted my attention because they have application to a pitiful aspect of current day theology within the Diocese of Sydney. I'll repeat them in part hereunder and point out current day comparisons:
"Marcion's project was essentially two pronged. On the one hand, he challenged the integrity of the source of our knowledge about God, the Bible."
On the subject of Creation the overwhelming trend with students coming out of the Diocesan theological seminary is to dilute the message of Genesis 1 of its strength. Instead of accepting the traditional reading of Genesis 1 from the early Church, the Reformation, the Puritans, the Great Awakening of 18th Century to well into the 20th Century; latter day influences such as Kline, Blocher, Wenham and Kidner have caused many within and outside the theological seminary to strip Genesis 1 of its genre of Historical Narrative or Prose. This hatchet job on the first book of the Bible opens the door to all manner of propositions as to what the author (God through Moses) is saying. Hence we have assertions such as: Genesis 1 only teaches the Sovereignty of God and nothing else; Genesis 1 is a reaction to Enuma Elish the Babylonian creation myth; the repetitions, rhythm, numbers and chiasmus make it "mysterious" and "a historical;" and, finally, the disjointed "framework hypothesis" propounds theme at cost of detail.
This is all what you would expect to see arising from the "Eclipse of Biblical Narrative" as observed by Hans Frei who I cited in Part 1 of this blog. Further, it has one purpose and that is to accommodate Darwinism in one form or another and the popular form is Theistic Evolution.
Further, this is all an attack on the nature of God revealed in Jesus Christ. I quote again from Rev Jensen so readers can see his inconsistency:
"They [Theologians like Irenaeus of Lyon] realized that Jesus was not revealing a new God but the same creating and law-giving God. Whatever Christian theology did from that point on, it had to do with the creator and law-giver as identical with the God revealed in Jesus. Marcion had (it turned out on a closer reading of the Bible) drawn a false contrast between the God of Israel and Jesus Christ."
Theistic Evolutionists, whom Rev Jensen gives aid and comfort to in other places, either consciously or unconsciously draw a false dichotomy between the Son Creator through whom all things were made, and Incarnate Son. They say the Son Creator used a slow, death and suffering filled, dead-end riddled process which continues today yet they acknowledge the Son Incarnate undertook miracles wholly and instantaneously. What they fail to acknowledge is that the miracles undertaken by the Son Incarnate were of a nature, process and design to affirm his Person as Creator. How can Theistic Evolutionists miss this obvious connection? Because they have an a priori, a commitment to Darwinism to the relegation of knowledge of Jesus Christ , the Word, the Son and Creator.
As such, they repeat the errors Marcion. Like Marcion, they reshape parts of the Bible. Like Marcion, they emphasise, almost to the exclusion of all else, "a faith of the resurrection and the Spirit". They fail to preach all of Christ.
To cite Rev Jensen again:
"Though it [the Church] had to—and still has to—manage some tricky parts of Scripture, it had far more to lose by going with Marcion than it stood to gain."
Scripture can be tricky according to the degree of faith. There are degrees of faith. Pray to God for greater faith. Coming to terms with God who made the covenant through Moses with Israel and the new covenant ushered in by Incarnate Son is limited by us, not by God. There is a big plan of God which angels long to look into (1 Peter 1:12) and even those of us mortals who have God's Spirit dwelling within can be left wanting. Notwithstanding a desire to know more I will now venture to offer some thoughts on the nature of God revealed in the Old Testament and his dealings with man. To help me in this I will cite some words uttered by Rev William Romaine, 1714 - 1795AD when he preached on Psalm 107:10-16 during the period of the Great Awakening in the 18th Century.
The ministry of William Romaine occupies a chapter in J. C. Ryle's "Christian Leaders of the 18th Century" and the author makes the following observation about him:
"I turn from Whitefield, Wesley, and Grimshaw, to the fourth spiritual hero of the last [18th] century - William Romaine. In doctrine and practical piety, the four good men were, in the main, of one mind. In their mode of working, they were curiously unlike one another. Whitefield and Wesley were spiritual cavalry, who scoured the country, and were found everywhere. Grimshaw was an infantry soldier, who had his head-quarters at Haworth, and never went far from home. Romaine, in the meantime, was a commander of heavy artillery, who held a citadel in the heart of a metropolis [London], and seldom stirred beyond his walls. Yet all these four men were mighty instruments in God's hand for good; and not one of them could have been spared. Each did good service in his own line; and not the least useful, I hope to show, was the Rector of Blackfriars, William Romaine."
The writer of Psalm 107 knows something of the nature of man and God and how God responds to those willing to turn to him out of their rebellion. The first and great rebellion came from our ancestor Adam and has characterised man ever since. I defer now to some advice from William Romaine:
"And God had given to Adam greater gifts and abilities, with innocence to enable him to use them aright, than to any of his descendants; and had, with the most tender affection, counselled him against that very temptation by which he was most liable to be seduced - therefore when he rebelled against God and contemned [sic] the counsel of the Most High, it was the most horrid rebellion that a creature could commit against its Creator. And it was far from cruelty in God, it was an act of justice without severity, to suffer him to fall into the pit which he had dug for himself, and there to be taken by the enemy, and committed a prisoner to darkness and the shadow of death, and to be fast bound with misery and iron. But it may be enquired, why are we subject to his misery? Because we could not but be involved in his guilt. His treason corrupted his blood; and being corrupt in the fountain, it could not but be corrupt in the streams which issue from it. We see a standing instance of this in the book of nature; a corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit. And we have a clear evidence of it in the book of God; which declares, that coming from a corrupt stock, we are altogether corrupt and abominable, being by nature children of wrath. And we have incontestable proof from the equity of our own laws, which not only punish treason with the loss of life in the traitor himself, but also with the loss of honours and estate in his descendants to the latest posterity."
All descendants of Adam bear this stamp - like Adam we have our being as a thought (concept) from the great I AM i.e. Father, Son, Holy Spirit (in base term - Life). Speaking of all creation, the Apostle Paul says "in him [the Son] all things hold together." (Col. 1:17) Our being depends solely on him who is good and all he created was good, even very good.
Sadly, our ancestor Adam rebelled against the great I AM thus separating himself from Life. This is death and we, as descendants of Adam, bear the same rebellious nature and condition. It has been a mercy of the great I AM to continue a sustaining of the contaminated creation through the Son (Col. 1:17) so as to work a good work - a new creation inhabited by those who turn to him in true repentance.
I regard the Parable of the Lost Son (Luke 15:11-32) as an excellent picture of our plight and the love of the great I Am. Read it.
Did you understand this? This son already wants the portion of his inheritance. In Bible times after the father died, the eldest son received two thirds of the inheritance, and the youngest son received one third. So it was a worthwhile portion to receive. However, the younger son cannot wait for he wants it now. We may say, he actually prays for the death of his father. He is also one who has rights, for he asks for his goods. Then he does not come as a beggar, but comes as one with a right. "Give me my goods." But let us not be hasty to cast stones, for indeed, the lost son dwells very close to us, "My goods!" Yes, we too have received many goods. Our good health, our daily life, our gifts and talents. And for what purpose do you think we have received all this? We have received this in order to serve the great I AM in this world, and in order to one day receive the full inheritance.
And now in this parable we see the father is silent. That is something very striking. We see here offended love, which also a silent love. No there is no one who can feel what that was for that father; his son before him in the room, a son no longer content with his father's love. He steps upon his heart, upon his heart of love and now adds to the grief of his silent father. There in Eden, we trampled upon the great I AM's heart of love. We did that willingly, there was no reason to stray from the obedience to the great I AM. Do you know what the worst is? There is now a breach which cannot be repaired by us. Returning now to the parable, now the father silently gives the goods to his son. The sin is so great, now things can never again come aright. He has offended love, he has despised love.
There he goes, where to? Well, to a far country, yes? How far away from his father? Over there, one lives with sports and entertainment, and here, another keeps himself busy with his religion - a religion not born of God. Thus man dances through this far off land, without the great I AM. But this world is not just a dance. It is a school. A school of suffering and we learn this until we draw our last breath. We have to learn who we have sinned against, we have sinned against the great I AM's love! Now what that love accomplishes at this school is what we learn in the continuance of this parable. The lost son finally realises his sorry state and sees that even as a servant he is better placed in his father's house. He resolves to return in full repentance and faith.
While yet a distance away his father sees him coming and, with tears, runs to his son. He meets him, throws his arms around him and kisses his returned son. The great I AM does this for you and I in his Son, Jesus Christ. He meets us while we are yet far off. More than this, we are made clean. We are made fit to live in the presence of the great I AM. As the father in the parable has the best robe placed upon the returned son so you and I who return are washed by the righteous blood and clothed with the righteous garment of the Son (Rev 3:18). Only by this means are we admitted to the Father's house yet it is offered willingly by a loving Father. In receiving we are adopted into the Son. What privilege! What an inheritance!
What, I hear you ask, about the Amalekites, Canaanites etc and false teachers within Israel whose being was cut short without more time to turn to the great I AM in repentance? He knows the heart of all. He knows those who will turn. He knows too what a snare those people would be to Israel in their relationship with him. We see a picture of this within our own body. We know today that a mutating cell within our body can be a cancer which grows to suffocate life from the body. The best means of dealing with cancerous cell(s) is to get to it early and cut it out completely even taking some of what may be healthy cells to ensure that all the cancerous cell(s) is removed. This is done by Physicians in love is it not? In a like manner, Israel was to remove from its nation and surrounds that (those) which was a hazard to the life of their relationship with the great I AM. In his love, the great I AM was prepared to help Israel in this.
Well, this posting is quite long. I must end it. In closing, I urge readers who are in the Church to test the spirits. Beware of those false teachers who tamper with and excise passages of Scripture. Every tree is known by the fruit it bears. Test the spirit of understanding in the work of the great I AM in creation. Was the order of creation a process of faulty, mutation riddled life forms including vegetation (bad fruit) by a "bad tree" or was it an order of whole and very good life forms by a "good tree" (later spoiled by sin of the creation)?
Sam Drucker
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Spirit of Marcion Remains Abroad (Part 1)
"Watch out for false prophets, they come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognise them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit." (Matthew 7:15-18)
Our Lord Jesus renders a caution to all who are his. From the inception of the Church his words have required constant consideration and application.
I am reminded of this in reading the June 2010 edition of "Eternity" a paper put out from sources within the Episcopalian Diocese of Sydney. On page 8 an opinion is offered by Rev Michael Jensen on the question "Can we get rid of the Old Testament God?" Rev Michael Jensen is son of Archbishop Peter Jensen and was one of the "young bucks" who railed with venom (although Rev Jensen has since claimed his words were misunderstood) on Biblical Creationists who argued their case on a "Your Sydney Anglicans" online forum in 2006 on the subject "Peace with Evolution".
In his "Eternity" article, Rev Jensen quotes from 1 Samuel 15:2-3 where God is recorded as having ordered the complete destruction of the Amalekites - men, women, children and animals - and then Rev Jensen raises the subject of Marcion and the struggle the early Church had in dealing with a breakaway group who would not have the God of the New Testament identified with such a God of the Old Testament.
Briefly, Marcion lived in the 2nd Century AD and was considered by some historians to be the son of the bishop of Sinope (now Sinop in modern day Turkey). Marcion rejected the Old Testament and almost all of the New Testament, including the accounts of the incarnation and the resurrection, basing his teachings on ten of the Epistles of St. Paul and on an altered version of the Gospel of Luke. His tenets included a belief in the eternity of matter, which was later developed by the Greek teacher Hermogenes, and a dualistic interpretation of God, whereby God is divided into the just God of Law, who was the Creator of the Old Testament, and the good God, the infinitely superior deity revealed by Jesus Christ. As such, Marcion was denounced as a heretic. Nevertheless, in adherents, Marcionism flourished and was second only to the established church until about the 4th Century AD whereupon it commenced fading away over the course of several centuries.
Rev Jensen rightly dismisses attempts such as Marcion's to separate the God of the Old Testament from the God of the New Testament. It is, however, with some irony that I read the line of argument employed by Rev Jensen. I cite extracts of his argument herewith:
"What kind of a God is this? Is it possible that the God of Jesus Christ could speak of himself as the author and engineer of evil? Do we read here of the deity authorizing —even commanding—genocide, whose horrors we know only too well? Is he somehow murderous? Could he really have his creation's best interests at heart to be responsible for such chaos and impurity? Does he have a dark heart, a demonic side?
Consider how this contrasts (apparently) with the gospel of love and faith and freedom preached by Jesus and Paul—the words of healing and forgiveness. Can we really accept these as being from the same God?"
and
"Marcion's project was essentially two pronged. On the one hand, he challenged the integrity of the source of our knowledge about God, the Bible. While there had been some attempts to collect a list of the agreed and approved books of the Christian Scriptures prior to Marcion's appearance, Marcion was now offering an alternative and established list of writings, held together in his mind by a common theme. Marcion and his followers could, they claimed, point to a common body of teaching in written form. Here, he said, was an end to disagreement about the extent of Scripture. Here was an end to Christian embarrassment about the sheer Jewishness of the Old Testament with its seemingly irascible and cantankerous God.
On the other hand, Marcion had a particular vision about the nature of the Christian faith itself. What he had picked up on was the radical nature of Paul's critique of our natural religious assumptions. He could see the sheer newness that is offered in a faith of the resurrection and the Spirit, which is an end to dead legalism. This was the genius of Christianity, Marcion had decided, and he went about cutting out pieces of Scripture that didn't fit, to such an extent that he was left with not much. It's a strategy that many writers of our own time still try."
and
"Theologians like the great Irenaeus of Lyon (d. 202 AD) now appealed explicitly to the dramatic narrative of the whole Bible to show how Jesus as the second Adam fits in to [sic] the promises and patterns given in the Old Testament. They realized that Jesus was not revealing a new God but the same creating and law-giving God. Whatever Christian theology did from that point on, it had to do with the creator and law-giver as identical with the God revealed in Jesus. Marcion had (it turned out on a closer reading of the Bible) drawn a false contrast between the God of Israel and Jesus Christ.
So, the church chose the harder way: it decided that even if having the whole Bible meant coping with and addressing some apparent tensions, it would have to do this if it were to be a faithful and obedient church and true to its nature—true to its Lord. Though it had to—and still has to—manage some tricky parts of Scripture, it had far more to lose by going with Marcion than it stood to gain."
All I have cited from Rev Jensen will cause the hairs on the back of Biblical Creationists to bristle because, while dismissing the heretical views of Marcion, Rev Jensen does not elsewhere apply the argument to Theistic Evolutionists. Instead, he accommodates their Marcionlike mishandling of the Creation account in Genesis 1.
Theistic Evolutionists arrive at their odious doctrinal position by walking a similar path to Marcion and later centuries' advocates of Higher Criticism and Liberal Theology.
Hans W. Frei in his essay "The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative - A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics" published by Yale University Press in 1974 nails the latter day shift in theology. To requote Frei in his introduction, "Western Christian reading of the Bible in the days before the rise of historical criticism in the eighteenth century was usually strongly realistic, i.e. at once the literal and historical, and not only doctrinal or edifying. The words and sentences meant what they said, and because they did so they accurately described real events and real truths that were rightly put only in those terms and no others. Other ways of reading portions of the Bible, for example, in a spiritual or allegorical sense, were permissible, but they must not offend against a literal reading of those parts which seemed most obviously to demand it. Most eminent among them were all those stories which together went into the making of a single storied or historical sequence."
It was not to remain that way. Many contributers to biblical scholarship and many complex threads brought about a great shift in how the Bible was to be read and understood. Dr Conyers Middleton, an English commentator with sceptical leanings, thought that it didn't matter whether Genesis 1-3 were allegory or fact, since its meaning was the same in either case - "that this world had a beginning and creation from God; and that its principal inhabitant man, was originally formed to a state of happiness and perfection which he lost and forfeited, by following his own lusts and passions, in opposition to the will of his Creator."(ibid)
Middleton went on to explain his preference for an allegorical reading of Genesis 1-3, "I am the more readily induced to espouse this sense of it , from a persuasion, that it is not only the most probable and rational, but the most useful also to the defence of our religion, by clearing it of those difficulties, which are apt to shock and make us stumble as it were, at the very threshold."(ibid)
Through the efforts of Johannes Cocceius, professor of theology in the University of Leyden, the two things - literal or narrative reading and historical reference - were beginning to come apart as the concept of 'Salvation history' was advocated. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, 'higher criticism' felt the crucial texts for the hermeneutical question in theology were the supposedly revelatory salvific narratives. Each narrative had to be examined in its own historical context and its own right. Gone was dogmatic unity and authority of the Canon. By this time, the story of Jesus Christ was apparently considered historical but not the Mosaic creation account. However, the story of Jesus Christ was not to remain immune.
Frei observed with the emergence of religious apologetics at this time, the loss of narrative reading. To quote him again, "It is no exaggeration to say that all across the theological spectrum the great reversal had taken place; interpretation was the matter of fitting the biblical story into another world with another story rather than incorporating that world into the biblical story. No one with any sort of theology or religious reflection at all wanted to go counter to the 'real' applicative meaning of biblical texts, once it had been determined what it was, even if one did not believe them on their own authority. Hence the right-wing and mediating theologians agreed that the New Testament made the affirmation about Jesus being the Saviour literally, and that it was to be understood that way (though this agreement did not always cover either the miracles he was reported to have performed or those with which he was purportedly associated, especially the virgin birth; nor as we have noted, did it cover literal acceptance of such Old Testament accounts as the six-day creation or the fall, in the book of Genesis). And those on the left of course denied that one has to or can take this affirmation literally."(ibid)
I'll leave Frei there but allow me a moment to direct readers to the landscape of church scene. What do you see? As one media commentator observed recently "Liberals did not remain in the Church." They do still remain to some degree in the church (notice the distinction between Church and church) but whether they are Christian is dubious. Roman Catholicism was quick to adopt liberal views on Scripture and the fruit of it, in my experience, is that Roman Catholicism is a prolific breeder of atheists. Many atheists with whom I have communicated tell me they were once Roman Catholic and they are today promoters and influences for atheism. The Uniting Church of Australia (ex Presbyterian, Methodist and Congegational) is in serious decline following adoption of liberal theology.
The Episcopalian Church in Australia is divided into high and low church. The high church is characterised by empty pews and abandoned buildings. The low (evangelical) church is characterised by a false health indicator of influx of evangelical escapees from the Uniting Church and genuine health indicator of disappointments in outreach endeavours.
Such a poor state of health resembles the life of ancient Israel when it failed to heed the word of God recorded by Moses and spoken by the prophets.
More can be said but this blog is long enough. I have therefore separated it into two parts. Part 2 will be posted in a few days and will address points raised by Rev Jensen, the nature of God and the present need of the Church.
Sam Drucker
Our Lord Jesus renders a caution to all who are his. From the inception of the Church his words have required constant consideration and application.
I am reminded of this in reading the June 2010 edition of "Eternity" a paper put out from sources within the Episcopalian Diocese of Sydney. On page 8 an opinion is offered by Rev Michael Jensen on the question "Can we get rid of the Old Testament God?" Rev Michael Jensen is son of Archbishop Peter Jensen and was one of the "young bucks" who railed with venom (although Rev Jensen has since claimed his words were misunderstood) on Biblical Creationists who argued their case on a "Your Sydney Anglicans" online forum in 2006 on the subject "Peace with Evolution".
In his "Eternity" article, Rev Jensen quotes from 1 Samuel 15:2-3 where God is recorded as having ordered the complete destruction of the Amalekites - men, women, children and animals - and then Rev Jensen raises the subject of Marcion and the struggle the early Church had in dealing with a breakaway group who would not have the God of the New Testament identified with such a God of the Old Testament.
Briefly, Marcion lived in the 2nd Century AD and was considered by some historians to be the son of the bishop of Sinope (now Sinop in modern day Turkey). Marcion rejected the Old Testament and almost all of the New Testament, including the accounts of the incarnation and the resurrection, basing his teachings on ten of the Epistles of St. Paul and on an altered version of the Gospel of Luke. His tenets included a belief in the eternity of matter, which was later developed by the Greek teacher Hermogenes, and a dualistic interpretation of God, whereby God is divided into the just God of Law, who was the Creator of the Old Testament, and the good God, the infinitely superior deity revealed by Jesus Christ. As such, Marcion was denounced as a heretic. Nevertheless, in adherents, Marcionism flourished and was second only to the established church until about the 4th Century AD whereupon it commenced fading away over the course of several centuries.
Rev Jensen rightly dismisses attempts such as Marcion's to separate the God of the Old Testament from the God of the New Testament. It is, however, with some irony that I read the line of argument employed by Rev Jensen. I cite extracts of his argument herewith:
"What kind of a God is this? Is it possible that the God of Jesus Christ could speak of himself as the author and engineer of evil? Do we read here of the deity authorizing —even commanding—genocide, whose horrors we know only too well? Is he somehow murderous? Could he really have his creation's best interests at heart to be responsible for such chaos and impurity? Does he have a dark heart, a demonic side?
Consider how this contrasts (apparently) with the gospel of love and faith and freedom preached by Jesus and Paul—the words of healing and forgiveness. Can we really accept these as being from the same God?"
and
"Marcion's project was essentially two pronged. On the one hand, he challenged the integrity of the source of our knowledge about God, the Bible. While there had been some attempts to collect a list of the agreed and approved books of the Christian Scriptures prior to Marcion's appearance, Marcion was now offering an alternative and established list of writings, held together in his mind by a common theme. Marcion and his followers could, they claimed, point to a common body of teaching in written form. Here, he said, was an end to disagreement about the extent of Scripture. Here was an end to Christian embarrassment about the sheer Jewishness of the Old Testament with its seemingly irascible and cantankerous God.
On the other hand, Marcion had a particular vision about the nature of the Christian faith itself. What he had picked up on was the radical nature of Paul's critique of our natural religious assumptions. He could see the sheer newness that is offered in a faith of the resurrection and the Spirit, which is an end to dead legalism. This was the genius of Christianity, Marcion had decided, and he went about cutting out pieces of Scripture that didn't fit, to such an extent that he was left with not much. It's a strategy that many writers of our own time still try."
and
"Theologians like the great Irenaeus of Lyon (d. 202 AD) now appealed explicitly to the dramatic narrative of the whole Bible to show how Jesus as the second Adam fits in to [sic] the promises and patterns given in the Old Testament. They realized that Jesus was not revealing a new God but the same creating and law-giving God. Whatever Christian theology did from that point on, it had to do with the creator and law-giver as identical with the God revealed in Jesus. Marcion had (it turned out on a closer reading of the Bible) drawn a false contrast between the God of Israel and Jesus Christ.
So, the church chose the harder way: it decided that even if having the whole Bible meant coping with and addressing some apparent tensions, it would have to do this if it were to be a faithful and obedient church and true to its nature—true to its Lord. Though it had to—and still has to—manage some tricky parts of Scripture, it had far more to lose by going with Marcion than it stood to gain."
All I have cited from Rev Jensen will cause the hairs on the back of Biblical Creationists to bristle because, while dismissing the heretical views of Marcion, Rev Jensen does not elsewhere apply the argument to Theistic Evolutionists. Instead, he accommodates their Marcionlike mishandling of the Creation account in Genesis 1.
Theistic Evolutionists arrive at their odious doctrinal position by walking a similar path to Marcion and later centuries' advocates of Higher Criticism and Liberal Theology.
Hans W. Frei in his essay "The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative - A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics" published by Yale University Press in 1974 nails the latter day shift in theology. To requote Frei in his introduction, "Western Christian reading of the Bible in the days before the rise of historical criticism in the eighteenth century was usually strongly realistic, i.e. at once the literal and historical, and not only doctrinal or edifying. The words and sentences meant what they said, and because they did so they accurately described real events and real truths that were rightly put only in those terms and no others. Other ways of reading portions of the Bible, for example, in a spiritual or allegorical sense, were permissible, but they must not offend against a literal reading of those parts which seemed most obviously to demand it. Most eminent among them were all those stories which together went into the making of a single storied or historical sequence."
It was not to remain that way. Many contributers to biblical scholarship and many complex threads brought about a great shift in how the Bible was to be read and understood. Dr Conyers Middleton, an English commentator with sceptical leanings, thought that it didn't matter whether Genesis 1-3 were allegory or fact, since its meaning was the same in either case - "that this world had a beginning and creation from God; and that its principal inhabitant man, was originally formed to a state of happiness and perfection which he lost and forfeited, by following his own lusts and passions, in opposition to the will of his Creator."(ibid)
Middleton went on to explain his preference for an allegorical reading of Genesis 1-3, "I am the more readily induced to espouse this sense of it , from a persuasion, that it is not only the most probable and rational, but the most useful also to the defence of our religion, by clearing it of those difficulties, which are apt to shock and make us stumble as it were, at the very threshold."(ibid)
Through the efforts of Johannes Cocceius, professor of theology in the University of Leyden, the two things - literal or narrative reading and historical reference - were beginning to come apart as the concept of 'Salvation history' was advocated. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, 'higher criticism' felt the crucial texts for the hermeneutical question in theology were the supposedly revelatory salvific narratives. Each narrative had to be examined in its own historical context and its own right. Gone was dogmatic unity and authority of the Canon. By this time, the story of Jesus Christ was apparently considered historical but not the Mosaic creation account. However, the story of Jesus Christ was not to remain immune.
Frei observed with the emergence of religious apologetics at this time, the loss of narrative reading. To quote him again, "It is no exaggeration to say that all across the theological spectrum the great reversal had taken place; interpretation was the matter of fitting the biblical story into another world with another story rather than incorporating that world into the biblical story. No one with any sort of theology or religious reflection at all wanted to go counter to the 'real' applicative meaning of biblical texts, once it had been determined what it was, even if one did not believe them on their own authority. Hence the right-wing and mediating theologians agreed that the New Testament made the affirmation about Jesus being the Saviour literally, and that it was to be understood that way (though this agreement did not always cover either the miracles he was reported to have performed or those with which he was purportedly associated, especially the virgin birth; nor as we have noted, did it cover literal acceptance of such Old Testament accounts as the six-day creation or the fall, in the book of Genesis). And those on the left of course denied that one has to or can take this affirmation literally."(ibid)
I'll leave Frei there but allow me a moment to direct readers to the landscape of church scene. What do you see? As one media commentator observed recently "Liberals did not remain in the Church." They do still remain to some degree in the church (notice the distinction between Church and church) but whether they are Christian is dubious. Roman Catholicism was quick to adopt liberal views on Scripture and the fruit of it, in my experience, is that Roman Catholicism is a prolific breeder of atheists. Many atheists with whom I have communicated tell me they were once Roman Catholic and they are today promoters and influences for atheism. The Uniting Church of Australia (ex Presbyterian, Methodist and Congegational) is in serious decline following adoption of liberal theology.
The Episcopalian Church in Australia is divided into high and low church. The high church is characterised by empty pews and abandoned buildings. The low (evangelical) church is characterised by a false health indicator of influx of evangelical escapees from the Uniting Church and genuine health indicator of disappointments in outreach endeavours.
Such a poor state of health resembles the life of ancient Israel when it failed to heed the word of God recorded by Moses and spoken by the prophets.
More can be said but this blog is long enough. I have therefore separated it into two parts. Part 2 will be posted in a few days and will address points raised by Rev Jensen, the nature of God and the present need of the Church.
Sam Drucker
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