Welcome back.

Welcome back.  What's been happening?

So, in the years if hiatus, a few things have changed and a few things have not.  A hotelier-cum-reality show star has become the most powerful man in the world.  Homosexual marriage is now the law of the land.  Celebrity culture dominates the landscape, from every corner of the globe.  Terrorists and their sponsors (same thing) use every means at their disposal to disrupt normal society.  And free speech is now illegal in its birth country.  

But some things do not change.  Unborn babies are still being murdered at an astonishing rate.  Un-hinged gunmen are still shooting up gun-free zones.  And arguments around these divisive topics seem to generate more heat than light.

So why come back to this little, un-visited corner of the blogosphere?  Good question.  Perhaps we need to vent, some place other than Facebook.  Perhaps in a form that requires longer word structures than 140 characters.  Perhaps there is something worth saying which will be said...at least occasionally.

This blog is named for the Second Thief, crucified with Jesus, traditionally known as Saint Dysmas.  Like our namesake, this blog knows his abject humility before God's Righteous Lamb.  He knows he is justly condemned for his crimes, while Jesus is innocent and un-stained.  And like Dysmas, he prays that his Lord will take him up into Paradise at the renewing of the world.

And this Dysmas will have things to say...at least, occasionally.

Mary, Mary Quite Contrary

We Protestants seem to be more uncomfortable with Mary the mother of Jesus than centrist Republicans are with Sarah Palin.  We cannot criticize her because that would be risky, but we certainly cannot praise her because that is too close to worship.

Okay, so the comparison breaks down pretty quickly.

But it seems to be the case that we talk to each other about Mary at very specific times and in very specific ways.  We use carefully chose words so as not to cross the imaginary line between “respect” and “worship”.  I read a blog post from a sincere and well-meaning Baptist pastor (I am presuming that he is) about Mary.  He asserts that we should “venerate (or worship) her but that we should hold her memory in great honor” (sic).  This view is not dissimilar from what many of my fellow-traveler evangelicals would also hold.  But it seems to me that a confusion reigns in the minds and hearts of Protestants over this Mary enigma.  Perhaps some discussion is in order.

In the first place, what is the difference between “honor” and “venerate”.  Several versions of a typical thesaurus list them as synonyms, close cousins with “revere”, “cherish”, and such.  What practical difference is there for the believer?

In the second place, why the cautionary tone?  About what are Protestants in a dither?  Perhaps a little reflection on the Great Commandments might be in order.  The LORD gave Israel Torah.  Prominent in Torah are the Ten Commandments, of which we find the first:

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.  You shall have no other gods before me.

Exodus 20:2-3

Jesus taught that the Shema captured the Greatest Commandment:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.  Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

Deuteronomy 6:3-4

So, an aversion to false worship is well grounded in our Hebrew roots heritage, and also affirmed by our LORD Himself (Matthew 22:36-40).  And if someone were to worship the created thing (that is, Mary) rather than the Creator (the Almighty One) he would be engaged in false worship (perhaps it could be called “idolatry”, but this would be a loose definition).

But what then do we make of Mary?  How should we regard her, if we want to give her the respect, honor, veneration, etc. she is due, without veering into idolatry?

The reasons for giving this consideration are significant.  Firstly, she is the very model of the humble follower: “I am the LORD’s servant.  May your word to me be fulfilled,” she said, foreshadowing her son’s words in the Garden (“not my will, but Yours be done”).  Her character and submission are exemplary for all Christians since then.

Perhaps most obviously, she is the very first human to be “Christ-bearer”, a calling we are all asked to undertake.  Hers is a literal bearing of the Messiah.  And as such, she is Mother of God. 

This one, I think, gives us Protestants some trouble.  “Wait a minute, Dysmas,” they might say to me.  “Nobody gives birth to God.  He is the uncreated one who existed before all things.”  To which I will answer: was Jesus not born?  And is Jesus not God?  “But Dysmas, she gave birth to his human nature only.”  And I will reply, humbly but firmly, mothers do not give birth to natures.  They give birth to children.  Is Jesus fully God and fully man?  (This was settled way, way back in church history at the Council of Ephesus – yes, THAT Ephesus – when Nestorius’s heresy was refuted.)  Mary is the Mother of God, a role she took on and carried willingly and humbly, perhaps even with the knowledge that He was born to die (Luke 2:35).

So, how then shall we live (with regard to our treatment of Mary)?  I agree with the blog writer who says we should honor her (without the Protestant condescension which seems typical).  And as “honor” and “revere” are really the same, I am going to go so far as to say I will revere her.

After all, Elizabeth gave us the model, when – filled with the Holy Spirit – she proclaimed upon greeting the God-bearing Mary: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear!”

Saved from Death, not saved from sin

“Jesus came not to make bad men good, but rather to make dead men live.

This phrase is often said by many Christian teachers (Fr Stephen Freeman, Ravi Zacharias, Rev Robert A Connor, Leonard Ravenhill, etc.).  According to Zacharias, this is a fundamental difference between the Way and other moralizing religions: it is about conquering DEATH (as St. Paul writes in 2 Corinithians: “where is your sting, Death?”).

The Orthodox takes this underpinning a bit further, or rather, carry out the theological implications to their ends.  Our disease is not sin; that is merely a symptom (perhaps the chief symptom).  Our enemy is Death. 

In meditating on this premise, I have been brought to consider the Jewish feasts which Jesus and His followers celebrated year-by-year for all their lives.  As Christians who have been adopted into – grafted into – the family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we do not usually keep those Feast Days in any religious way.  And we tend to read about them as facts of history.  Some of us may read of them as symbolic types which have their true fulfillment in Messiah.  Okay.  Good enough.  And I am not writing to complain about “Judaizers who want Goyim to become Jewish” or “anti-Nomians who reject any rules”.  Rather, this is a narrow consideration of the meaning and significance of Passover.

The story of Passover is God’s deliverance from the Angel of Death who afflicted the firstborn of all Egypt (and anyone who did not shed the lamb’s blood and decorate their doors with it).  Passover did not forgive their sins or atone for their sins.  Passover’s sacrifice delivered from Death.

Jesus died on the Cross at Passover as our Sacrifice Lamb.  His shed blood is our escape from Death, just as the blood on the first Passover was Israel’s escape (Israel and anyone who came under their tent).  The angel of Death passes over us because of what Jesus did, as the one perfect sacrificial Lamb of God.

Jesus came to make dead men live.

Nate Pyle over at From One degree to Another has written about the man's responsibility in the lust problem.  Find it here.  He is spot on right.

Authority

How do we know that Scripture is “scriptural”? 

February 9, 2012

Among the range of various local evangelical church’s statements of faith is usually – perhaps even first – some affirmation about the perfection of Scripture.  The National Association of Evangelicals places it first in their list of seven essentials:

We believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God.

From my own home church, an EFCA body, is this:

2. We believe that God has spoken in the Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, through the words of human authors. As the verbally inspired Word of God, the Bible is without error in the original writings, the complete revelation of His will for salvation, and the ultimate authority by which every realm of human knowledge and endeavor should be judged. Therefore, it is to be believed in all that it teaches, obeyed in all that it requires, and trusted in all that it promises.

These representative evangelical statements both assert the infallibility of the Bible (as long as it is confined to the 66 Canonical books only, and does not include the so-called Apocryphal books).  While the NAE leaves the implications of its statement as inferences one must draw, the EFCA’s draws those implications out more concretely.

Leaving aside the differences in form, function, and priority, I am shocked into a question about the assertion itself.  From whence comes the authority to make these declarations about the Bible?  How do we know such things – how do we dare assert such things – about ancient manuscripts?

To borrow a bit from the ancient Scribes who questioned Jesus: “Who gave this authority?”

Is there Sex in Heaven?

This title is a line borrowed from the brilliant philosopher, Peter Kreeft.  But it's not the subject of this post.  Sex is.  Heaven is not.  What about sex?  It is both everything and nothing, all at the same time.


"We live in such a relentlessly consumer-driven culture that we begin to see ourselves as products on display." - Frederica Mathewes-Green


There are few social critics and theological thinkers are wonderfully poetic as Frederic Matthewes-Green.  She does well with the written word, but she also does well with the spoken.  Her talk on the meaning of sex at the Veritas Forum in February 2011, is relentlessly engaging and consistently thought provoking.  

What Must I Do to Be Saved?

I am a big fan of Professor Scot McKnight ever since I saw him speak at a Youth Specialties conference awhile back.  I love his "The Blue Parakeet" and "Jesus Creed".  Both of them are challenging, thought-provoking works which will lay assault to sleepy spiritual apathy.  Now he's written "The King Jesus Gospel" and he is blogging about questions his readers are asking.


The question of what comprises the gospel and how we are compelled to respond to it hits us where we live and concerns questions I have been asking quite a bit recently.


I was taught that salvation comes only after reciting the so-called Sinner's Prayer.  McKnight says that this prayer "emerges from the soterian gospel which has for years invited people to pray a prayer to 'receive Christ' or to 'ask God’s forgiveness in Jesus Christ' etc."  His answer is worth reading.