Normally on this blog I offer theological reflections on various topics or talk about some aspect of my writing or speaking ministry. Today, however, I’d like to introduce to you my precious 23-year-old son, Nathan (Nate).

Nathan lives with Shelley and me along with his two cats, Cuddles and Gina. He enjoys on-line video games, going to movies, working with clay and scaring the daylights out of people with surprise attacks. He loves being goofy, especially as a way of making his little nephew and niece laugh.

Nathan has faced his share of challenges in life. Years ago he was diagnosed with “high functioning autism” compounded with a learning disability. Nathan has always been aware that he is a little different, and this awareness has been the source of a good deal of pain. He yearned to fit in, but never quite knew how to do that. As you might expect, going through the Special Ed program throughout his school years was brutal for him. He continues to struggle with anxiety and depression, although he is making tremendous progress in this area.

It has only been in the last several years that Nathan has come to accept his disability. In fact, he is slowly learning how to embrace it as something that gives him a unique perspective on life. The main way Nathan expresses his uniqueness is through art, especially with clay. Nathan creates the most interesting “creatures.” Each piece expresses a little bit of the uniqueness Nathan is coming to affirm in himself. He once said, “Hey autistic and artistic sound the same!” He sometimes refers to his pieces as “autistic/artistic creations.”

Nathan has hundreds of clay creatures all around our house. Friends and family have purchased some of these pieces from him, which has been such an encouragement. Many times when his creatures are purchased Nathan will go into a funny little story of how he was inspired as he worked. Nate’s creatures make him laugh. Nate’s creatures and stories make all of us laugh.

One day a friend was buying a box of creatures and in Nate’s excitement he blurted out, “I bet there are more people that would be interested in my art!” That inspired our friends Julie, Terri and Marcia, along with Shelley, to work with Nathan in making his art available online. They assumed I would mention this endeavor for them. And, of course, I am honored to be the first to publicly announce my son’s artwork at Nate Creates. There you will find Nate’s creatures and a short story of each piece, imagined as a way of capturing the unique artistic - autistic character of the young man behind it. Nate will be adding to his artistic inventory on a regular basis.

Thank you for allowing me to introduce my son, the artist, to you.

Greg

As  I mentioned in “Latest News” on the Home Page of this website, I just had an article published in Religious Studies. It’s entitled: “Two ancient (and modern) motivations for ascribing exhaustive definite foreknowledge to God: A historic overview and critical assessment.” In this article I attempt to demonstrate that two driving motivations that led early Christians to assume God knows the future exhaustively as a realm of definite facts (rather than partly as a domain of possibilities) derive from pre-Christian pagan philosophy. I argue that both of these motivations are misguided. If you’re interested you can access the article on-line in the Essay section of this website (under “Warning — Egg Head Essay“).

Also, I thought some of you might be interested in an update on Jesus Versus Jehovah, the book I’m currently working on. Pulling together all my ideas and research surrounding the issue of how to reconcile the violent God of the O.T. with the crucified God of the new has thus far been a marvelous experience! I was going to put this project off another five years (until I completed Myth of the Blueprint), but I’m so glad I didn’t. It’s been coming together nicely.

The core of the book is structured around six “principles.” Just to provide a little “heads up” as to the direction I’m going, here’s a short definition of each principle.

The Christocentric Principle: All of our thinking about God must be rooted in Christ. Jesus reveals what God has always been like. We thus need to read the Old Testament “through the lens” of Christ.

The Principle of Incarnational Flexibility. If Jesus reveals what God has always been like, then God didn’t start being “incarnational” with the Incarnation. Rather, God has always been willing to humbly “embody” himself within our fallen humanity and has always “borne our sin.” The portrait of Yahweh as a nationalistic, law-oriented, violent-tending warrior god is the result of God condescending to “embody” himself within our barbaric and deceived views of him in order to work toward freeing us from them. (The reference to “god” rather than “God” in this previous sentence is intentional, since I argue God takes on the semblance of a sub-Christ-like “god” when he condescends to work within our fallen framework). Like Nanny McPhee, God is willing to appear as ugly as he needs to in order to free us from our ugliness and eventually reveal himself as he truly is to us (which is what takes place in Christ).

The Principle of Contrastive Pedagogy. Though you’d never get this reading the Old Testament itself, Paul tells us that the most fundamental reason God gave the Law was to increase our sin and, by way of negative example, drive us to Christ. I argue that when we read the Old Testament through the lens of Christ, we can say the same thing about the nationalism and violence of God’s program in the Old Testament. It tells us more about what God is not like and how not to build his Kingdom than it tells us what God is like and how we are to build the kingdom. When Jesus shows up, he reveals a God and a Kingdom that invalidates nationalism, is rooted in empowering grace (not law) and is utterly free of violence, for it is centered on loving and serving enemies.

The Principle of Punitive Withdrawal. When Jesus was crucified, God delivered Jesus up to wicked humans and “the powers.” Moreover, by entering into solidarity with us in our spiritually oppressed and fallen condition, Jesus experienced God-forsakenness. Since all of our understanding about God must be centered on Christ, Jesus’ abandonment and God-forsakenness should form the center of our understanding of how God punishes sin. He does so by withdrawing his protective presence and turning people over to experience the consequences of their decisions — a truth that is confirmed throughout the Old Testament. God’s “wrath” is his withdrawal.

The Principle of Cosmic Conflict. Jesus’ ministry as well as the whole of the Old and New Testaments reveal that the world is engulfed by cosmic forces of destruction. Like a dam being opened, when God withdraws his protective hand to bring judgment, the powers are allowed to carry out their evil intentions and chaos ensues.  Yet, whenever God “pours out his wrath” by withdrawing himself, he does so with a grieving heart and for the ultimate purpose of bringing healing and redemption.

The Principle of Responsible Identification. Though he was in fact all-holy, on Calvary the Son of God identified with our sin to the point of bearing our guilt. So too, the Father is said to have afflicted his Son (Isa. 53) though in fact he merely allowed wicked powers using wicked people to crucify Jesus. When we read the Old Testament through this lens, we find God frequently identifying himself as the agent of violence, though the context makes it clear that he is merely allowing violent agents to do what they want to do. God is portrayed as doing what he actually merely allows.  There are historical and exegetic reasons for this, but the theological reason, I argue, is that God has always been a God who takes responsibility for all that he allows — even though he detests much of what he allows. This is how God bears our sin and why he takes on the semblance of a nationalistic, law-oriented warrior god.

I argue that each of these six principles are rooted in Christ and confirmed throughout Scripture, and they take us a long way in reconciling the crucified God with the violent portrait of God found in the violent strands of the Old Testament.

I hope to have the book finished and sent to a publisher by the summer of 2010. If God so leads you, keep me in prayer as I continue work on this book. I’d appreciate it.

Blessings on you!

GB

Life has been crazy busy. For one thing, our upcoming Ultimate Compassion Conference has added a lot of things on a lot of plates at Woodland Hills Church the last few weeks. I’ve also been absolutely obsessed with writing Jesus Versus Jehovah. When I get into a “zone” of writing and reflection like this, I find it hard to think about much else. I also don’t sleep much. Anyway, the book is coming along great (the first draft of 12 of the planned 14 chapters are now done).

On top of this, I just spent the weekend participating in the Why Everything Must Change conference in Toronto.  This was a marvelous conference stressing the need for followers of Jesus (and others) to wake up and respond to the massive suffering caused by injustice around the world. I felt honored to be a part of this and came in contact with some amazing people engaged in some marvelous ministries that confront injustice.

During and after this conference I had a wonderful time hanging out with Paul Young, author of The Shack. Paul is a wonderful, humble and insightful human being who really knows Abba’s heart and has a remarkable ability to communicate it in fresh ways. (If you haven’t read The Shack, I strongly encourage you to do so).

I also spent some time with Bruxy Cavey, Teaching Pastor of The Meeting House in Toronto and author of The End of Religion. I love this guy! It’s SO refreshing to meet a pastor of a megachurch (I’m told The Meeting House is second largest church in Canada) who is so humble and who obviously doesn’t give a crap about opinion polls. Bruxy also totally gets the outrageous loving heart of Abba, the centrality of non-violence for Jesus-followers and the utterly anti-religious nature of the Kingdom. Do you know how incredibly rare it is to find pastors who hold and teach these convictions — especially pastors of large churches? To say I felt a kinship with this brother is a massive understatement.

Finally, I also had a chance to wine and dine a bit with Baxter Kruger whose theological work I’ve long admired. His Jesus and the Undoing of Adam is a great little work that (among other things) brilliantly articulates the view (which I share) that the Incarnation was not God’s “Plan’s B”: it was rather the focal point of creation from the start. This has massive and marvelous theological implications. Anyway, my evening with this wild man from Mississippi, together with a host of fun-loving and slightly renegade Canadian pastors and theologians, is not one I will soon forget.

Later,

Greg

Just want to let you know about a conference that will be held at Woodland Hills Church on poverty and the call of God to do something about it.  It’s entitled Ultimate Compassion and it begins Friday evening, Oct. 30th and runs through Saturday, Oct. 31st.

Here’s why we’re hosting this conference: An increasing number of American Christians are waking up to how central this issue is to God, as reflected by its pervasive emphasis throughout Scripture.  Praise God for this!  Unfortunately, the majority of western believers who live above the poverty line don’t really understand poverty and thus don’t know what they can do to address it.  In fact, as  Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert demonstrate in their butt-kick’n book When Helping Hurts (Moody, 2009), more often than not Christians do more harm than good in their sincere attempts to help. We need to understand the complexities of poverty.

This Conference is meant to not only inspire activism, but to also provide practical knowledge on how to effectively minister to the poor.  I will join Efrem Smith, Jin Kim and Sandra Unger as keynote speakers and we will offer two breakout sessions during which people can attend a workshop of their choice.

For more information, visit www.UltimateCompassion.com. Hope to see you there!

Some of you probably have encountered the recent painting, “One Nation Under God.” Artistically speaking, it’s an excellent work. Theologically speaking, it incarnates, in the most graphic form imaginable, the sin of nationalistic idolatry. It’s sort of an artist’s rendition of The Patriot’s Bible which I reviewed on this blog some time ago. You can see the painting here. As you scroll over each character in the painting a commentary by the artist on why they were included pops up. I’d like to offer a few comments on several characters in this painting.

At the center of the painting, of course, is a very European looking Jesus holding the American Constitution. This document, the author claims is “[I]nspired of God and created by God fearing, patriotic Americans.” One might think that this outrageous modification of the traditional view that the Bible alone is the inspired Word of God would be enough for Christians to lose interest in this work, but I suspect it won’t. It’s not clear why this artist believes the Constitution is divinely inspired, though I suspect it’s the same reason other patriotic people throughout history have thought their foundational documents and causes were divinely inspired. This is simply the way nationalistic idolatry works. People just know that God (or the gods) is on our side and against our enemies. It’s obvious, right? Nothing in history has caused more bloodshed than this arrogant and unfounded assumption. Nor, I submit, is anything more contrary to the Kingdom Jesus brought than this assumption.

Moving on, an F-16 pilot is honored to be in the presence of Jesus. The artist comments that this fighter represents all those pilots who have given their lives to preserve freedom. The people these pilots have slaughtered with their bombs and bullets are unfortunately not present. This too is typical of idolatrous nationalism: it gives divine sanction to our spilling of blood while ignoring, if not demonizing, those whose blood we have spilled.

Thomas Jefferson stands close to Jesus, of course, which is a little odd since he is famous for insisting on the separation of church and state and for cutting out all of the miraculous elements of the New Testament. He found the doctrine of the Incarnation to be especially revolting. Something similar must be said of the inclusion of Thomas Payne. He is honored to be in the presence of the pro-American Jesus because he was a Founding Father, wrote pamphlets fueling the American Revolution,  and was an Abolitionist. The artist does not mention that Payne also wrote pamphlets and books vigorously attacking Christianity and all religion. As an Enlightenment Deist, he and other Founding Fathers objected to any belief in supernatural occurrences, such as the virgin birth or the resurrection. I can’t imagine Payne or Jefferson being too happy about being co-opted as cheerleaders for the pro-American Jesus.

The former slave Fredrick Douglas is also present, which is a bit ironic, especially in light of the thoroughly European Jesus he’s revering. Douglas famously proclaimed that the Christianity of white America has nothing in common with the Christianity of Jesus. I think he would vigorously join Jefferson and Payne in protesting their inclusion in this idolatrous painting. Also ironic is the inclusion of John Adams, since it was he who wrote in the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” It’s hard to imagine him applauding the intense fusion of church and state in this painting.

Another famous Founding Father who is given the honor of being present with the Constitution-holding Jesus is James Madison. He seems to have been a decent enough fellow, unless you happened to be one of his slaves who tried to get free (many of the Founding Fathers owned slaves). He is reported to have nailed one rebellious slave to a barn yard door by his ear, despite signing a Constitution that declared all men to be created equal!

I was a little surprised to find the folk hero Davy Crockett included in this painting. But it must suggest that Jesus was highly invested in keeping Texas part of the Union rather than going to Mexico, to the point of affirming Crockett’s valiant killing of Mexicans to keep this from happening.

A particular interesting character surrounding Jesus is a civil war soldier who is crying. The artist explains that his tears are because the civil war was the only war in which “American fought against American, and brother against brother.” Apparently the many other wars we have fought were not between “brothers,” which is why no tears need be shed over them — even if those we are fighting are fellow Christians. Close by we find an American Revolution Soldier who is said to represent those “brave men who fought against all odds in defeating Britain in the Revolutionary War.” The British, of course, were Christians. In fact, they felt a divine obligation to keep Americans under the authority of the King because the Bible says all authority is given by God and Christians are to submit to the authorities they are under (Rom. 13:1-7). But we killed more of them than they us, and since this artist apparently is happy about this, our Revolutionary soldier gets honored next to Jesus while British soldiers are excluded. One of the most demonic aspects of idolatrous nationalism is that it tends to give people within one’s nation more value than those outside it, especially if those outside are in conflict with one’s own nation. Jesus died to tear down just these sorts of stupid, violence-tending walls (Eph. 2:13-14).

There are many other loathsome aspects of this idolatrous work that could be mentioned, especially regarding the people present in “Satan’s corner” (on the lower right corner), but enough has been said. The bottom line is that someday, people from every tribe and every nation will gather around Jesus (Rev. 7:9-10) and I assure you he won’t be holding a particular nation’s Constitution! The chief business of the church is to model this beautiful unity-amidst-diversity in the present. We are to manifest a Kingdom in which there is no male or female, Jew or Greek, rich or poor, American or British, and in which there is no violence.

This painting is a perfect illustration of the sort of primitive tribalism and diabolic nationalism that keeps Christians from doing this. It must, I believe, be renounced in the strongest possible terms.

If you’re interested in viewing an inspiring painting of the true Jesus and the true Kingdom, go here

Greg