“Truly, truly, I say to you, (Transcendence)

the Son can do nothing of his own accord, (Hierarchy)

but only what he sees the Father doing. (Ethics)

For whatever the Father does, (Oath/Sanctions)

that the Son does likewise.” (Succession)

(John 5:19)

The premise that the entire text of the Bible has a common structure, one which operates at multiple levels, has many implications. Besides the fact that this is clearly a miracle, there is the question of why such a limitation would be placed upon the Words of God.

This post has been slain and resurrected for inclusion in my 2015 book of essays, Inquietude.

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Those who “freed science from Moses” rejected true science.

One of the most underrated aspects of theology is the importance to God of legal witness. Not only is it rarely spoken about in evangelical circles but it is rarely mentioned as an answer to the scientistic objections of the day.

[This post has been refined and included in Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes.]

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“If your eschatology sees something other than the progressive growth and universal influence of the Kingdom of God in time and history, the success and triumph of the Great Commission, then you’d better stop drinking the Kool-Aid.” George Shubin

That was my friend George’s comment after reading this article by George Weigel from First Things.

For 27 years, the International Bulletin of Missionary Research has published an annual “Status of Global Mission” report, which attempts to quantify the world Christian reality, comparing Christianity’s circumstances to those of other faiths, and assaying how Christianity’s various expressions are faring when measured against the recent (and not-so-recent) past. The report is unfailingly interesting, sometimes jarring, and occasionally provocative.

The provocation in the 2011 report involves martyrdom. For purposes of research, the report defines “martyrs” as “believers in Christ who have lost their lives, prematurely, in situations of witness, as a result of human hostility.” The report estimates that there were, on average, 270 new Christian martyrs every 24 hours over the past decade, such that “the number of martyrs [in the period 2000-2010] was approximately 1 million.” Compare this to an estimated 34,000 Christian martyrs in 1900.

As for the interesting, try the aggregate numbers. According to the report, there will be, by mid-2011, 2,306,609,000 Christians of all kinds in the world, representing 33 percent of world population—a slight percentage rise from mid-2000 (32.7 percent), but a slight percentage drop since 1900 (34.5 percent). Of those 2.3 billion Christians, some 1.5 billion are regular church attendees, who worship in 5,171,000 congregations or “worship centers,” up from 400,000 in 1900 and 3.5 million in 2000.

These 2.3 billion Christians can be divided into six “ecclesiastical megablocks”: 1,160,880,000 Catholics; 426,450,000 Protestants; 271,316,000 Orthodox; 87,520,000 Anglicans; 378,281,000 “Independents” (i.e., those separated from or unaffiliated with historic denominational Christianity); and 35,539,000 “marginal Christians” (i.e., those professing off-brand Trinitarian theology, dubious Christology, or a supplementary written revelation beyond the Bible).

Compared to the world’s 2.3 billion Christians, there are 1.6 billion Muslims, 951 million Hindus, 468 million Buddhists, 458 million Chinese folk-religionists, and 137 million atheists, whose numbers have actually dropped over the past decade, despite the caterwauling of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Co. One cluster of comparative growth statistics is striking: As of mid-2011, there will be an average of 80,000 new Christians per day (of whom 31,000 will be Catholics) and 79,000 new Muslims per day, but 300 fewer atheists every 24 hours.

Africa has been the most stunning area of Christian growth over the past century. There were 8.7 million African Christians in 1900 (primarily in Egypt, Ethiopia and South Africa); there are 475 million African Christians today and their numbers are projected to reach 670 million by 2025. Another astonishing growth spurt, measured typologically, has been among Pentecostals and charismatics: 981,000 in 1900; 612,472,000 in 2011, with an average of 37,000 new adherents every day—the fastest growth in two millennia of Christian history.

As for the quest for Christian unity: There were 1,600 Christian denominations in 1900; there were 18,800 in 1970; and there are 42,000 today.

Other impressive numbers: $545 billion is given to Christian causes annually, which comes out to $1.5 billion per day. There are some 600 million computers in Christian use, up from 1,000 in 1970. 71,425,000 Bibles will be distributed this year, and some 2 billion people will tune in at least once a month to Christian radio or television. 7.1 million books about Christianity will be published this year, compared to 1.8 million in 1970.

The big lesson of the 2011 Status of Global Mission report can be borrowed from Mark Twain’s famous crack about his alleged death: Reports of Christianity’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Christianity may be waning in Western Europe, but it’s on an impressive growth curve in other parts of the world, including that toughest of regions for Christian evangelism, Asia. Indeed, the continuing growth of Christianity as compared to the decline of atheism (in absolute numbers, and considering atheists as a percentage of total world population) suggests the possibility that the vitriolic character of the New Atheism—displayed in all its crudity prior to Pope Benedict’s September 2010 visit to Great Britain—may have something to do with the shrewder atheists’ fear that they’re losing, and the clock is running.

That’s something you’re unlikely to hear reported in the mainstream media. The numbers are there, however, and the numbers are suggestive.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

[Some thoughts on Peter Hitchens’ The Rage Against God (and some great quotes) from Mark Thompson’s blog.]

I have been reading an immensely interesting book in the last couple of weeks. It is by Peter Hitchens, British journalist, author, broadcaster and brother of celebrated ‘new atheist’ Christopher Hitchens.

It is interesting for a whole host of reasons. It gives fascinating insight into life in post-war Britain and Hitchens has a number of penetrating insights into the way change has happened and why. His particular way of describing official Christianity’s slide into superficiality (aping rather than challenging what was happening all around it) challenges some of my own sacred cows. What is more, his breadth of experience in Africa, Soviet Russia, America and elsewhere adds both colour and depth to his observations.

Perhaps some of his most fascinating suggestions, though, arise in response to questions about why Christianity is so fiercely opposed at the moment, not just by enthusiasts such as Hitchens’ brother, but by opinion makers and power brokers all over the Western world. I’m fascinated if not yet quite convinced. Nevertheless, I’m certain his ideas bear further deep reflection.

Hear what he has to say:

Why is there such a fury against religion now? Why is it more advanced in Britain than in the USA? I have had good reason to seek the answer to this question, and I have found it where I might have expected to have done if only I had grasped from the start how large are the issues at stake. Only one reliable force stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. Only one reliable force forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law. Only one reliable force restrains the hand of the man of power. And, in an age of power-worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power. (pp. 82–3)

But what is it that they have against the Christian God? He is their chief rival. Christian belief, by subjecting all men to divine authority and by asserting in the words ‘My Kingdom is not of this world’ that the ideal society does not exist in this life, is the most coherent and potent obstacle to secular utopianism. (p. 98)

Hitchens fleshes this out in an amazing page about the significance of ‘oaths’:

… the more civilised a society is, the more power is available within it. Power cannot be destroyed, only divided and distributed. It may shatter into an anarchic war of all against all. Or it may solidify into a tyranny. Or it may be resolved into a free society governed by universally acknowledged laws. But on what basis can this be done? What agency can be used to place law above force? A law that does not stand above brute force, will not survive for long. How are inconvenient obligations, those of the banker and the messenger and the merchant, to be made binding? How are the young to [be] made to accept the authority of parents and teachers, once they are physically strong enough to ignore them, but too inexperienced in life to know the value of peace and learning?

The answer, from a very early stage, was that such contracts were made binding by solemn promises sworn in the name of Almighty God and, as Abraham Lincoln used to say of his Presidential Oath, ‘registered in heaven’. These oaths called into every contract an external power, one whose awful vengeance no man could escape if he defied it, and which he would be utterly ashamed to break. As Sir Thomas More explains in Robert Bolt’s play ‘A Man for All Seasons’, when a man swears an oath ‘he’s holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then — he needn’t hope to find himself again’.

In their utter reverence for oaths, men of More’s era were in my view as superior to us as the builders of Chartres Cathedral were to the builders of shopping malls. Our ancestors’ undisturbed faith gave them a far closer, healthier relation to the truth — and so to beauty — than we have. Without the oath, where is the obligation or the pressure to fulfil it? Where is the law that even Kings must obey? Where is Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus or the Bill of Rights, all of which arose out of attempts to rule by lawless tyranny? Where is the lifelong fidelity of husband and wife? Where is the safety of the innocent child growing in the womb? Where, in the end, is the safety of any of us from those currently bigger and stronger than we are? (pp. 106–7)

In other words, the claims of Christ are not just opposed to individualism, to personal moral and intellectual autonomy, they cut right across the hopes and dreams of those who have convinced themselves of ‘the greatness of humanity’ and ‘the perfectibility of human society’ (p. 101). And furthermore, by ignoring them we are not only impoverished but left more vulnerable than we could ever imagine.

The book is worth reading and, indeed, arguing with at points. But more than that. It challenges us to think about how we might engage our contemporaries in serious and honest debate about the directions in which we all seem to be headed.

Last night I watched a 2007 debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox on 5 of Dawkins’ theses from his book The God Delusion. Lennox (who recently visited Australia to speak at the Easter Convention here in Katoomba) was delightful and made some strong statements. Dawkins was, to me, surprisingly earnest. But I did see in Dawkins’ responses to Lennox support for the observations of David Bently Hart that I read in a recent post by Justin Taylor. The new atheists are not the same as the old atheists:

David Bentley Hart, author of Atheist Delusions (Yale University Press, 2009), reviewing 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists, laments:

How long should we waste our time with the sheer banality of the New Atheists—with, that is, their childishly Manichean view of history, their lack of any tragic sense, their indifference to the cultural contingency of moral “truths,” their wanton incuriosity, their vague babblings about “religion” in the abstract, and their absurd optimism regarding the future they long for? . . .

A truly profound atheist is someone who has taken the trouble to understand, in its most sophisticated forms, the belief he or she rejects, and to understand the consequences of that rejection. Among the New Atheists, there is no one of whom this can be said, and the movement as a whole has yet to produce a single book or essay that is anything more than an insipidly doctrinaire and appallingly ignorant diatribe.

If that seems a harsh judgment, I can only say that I have arrived at it honestly. In the course of writing a book published just this last year, I dutifully acquainted myself not only with all the recent New Atheist bestsellers, but also with a whole constellation of other texts in the same line, and I did so, I believe, without prejudice. No matter how patiently I read, though, and no matter how Herculean the efforts I made at sympathy, I simply could not find many intellectually serious arguments in their pages, and I came finally to believe that their authors were not much concerned to make any. . . .

I came to realize that the whole enterprise, when purged of its hugely preponderant alloy of sanctimonious bombast, is reducible to only a handful of arguments, most of which consist in simple category mistakes or the kind of historical oversimplifications that are either demonstrably false or irrelevantly true. And arguments of that sort are easily dismissed, if one is hardy enough to go on pointing out the obvious with sufficient indefatigability.

You can read the whole thing at First Things. He goes on to examine the “anecdotal enthymemes” of Christopher Hitchens, and later argues that “The only really effective antidote to the dreariness of reading the New Atheists, it seems to me, is rereading Nietzsche.”

“Human beings are animals whose preference for group membership is simultaneously the source of their greatest salvation and their ultimate destruction” —Xenocrates

Who has the majority of evidence to support their paradigm? Is it the Young Earth Creationists or the (mostly atheistic) Evolutionists? (Please note that as far as I am concerned, anyone else is just sitting on a very sharp fence trying to hide the pain with clever words.)

The Old Earthers, whatever their stripe (from Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens to certain young Sydney Anglicans I admire and the misguided mob at BioLogos), despite their bluff, rely on hearsay and circular reasoning. Creationist cosmologist Russell Humphreys writes:

There is a little-known irony in the controversy between creationists and evolutionists about the age of the world. The majority of scientists— the evolutionists—rely on a minority of the relevant data. Yet a minority of scientists—the creationists—use the majority of the relevant data. Adding to the irony is the public’s wrong impression that it is the other way around. Therefore, many ask: “If the evidence is so strongly for a young earth, why do most scientists believe otherwise?” The answer is simple: Most scientists believe the earth is old because they believe most other scientists believe the earth is old!

They trust in what’s called ‘circular reasoning’, not data. I once encountered such a clear example of this misplaced trust, that I made detailed notes immediately. It happened when I spoke with a young (in his early thirties, career-ambitious, and upwardly mobile) geochemist at Sandia National Laboratories, where I then worked as a physicist. I presented him with one piece of evidence for a young world, the rapid accumulation of sodium in the ocean. It was ideal, since much of geochemistry deals with chemicals in the ocean.

I wanted to see how he explained possible ways for sodium to get out of the sea fast enough to balance the rapid input of sodium to the sea. Creationist geologist Steve Austin and I wanted the information in order to complete a scientific paper on the topic.3 We went around and around the issue for an hour, but he finally admitted he knew of no way to remove sodium from the sea fast enough. That would mean the sea could not be billions of years old. Realizing that, he said, “Since we know from other sciences that the ocean is billions of years old, such a removal process must exist.”

I questioned whether we ‘know’ that at all and started to mention some of the other evidence for a young world. He interrupted me, agreeing that he probably didn’t know even one percent of such data, since the science journals he depended on had not pointed it out as being important. But he did not want to examine the evidence for himself, because, he said, “People I trust don’t accept creation!”

So, in reality, who are the free-thinkers now? Not the old earthers.

Read the full article here.

Peter Hitchens Author Interview–The Rage Against God from Gorilla Poet Productions on Vimeo.

“When I began to edit the film, something happened. I found I was being educated. And not just with arguments. I was watching a Christian life. I was seeing a Christian man.” —Darren Doane

Just watched The History Boys, a film based on an entertaining but self-indulgent West End play by Alan Bennett. Despite the fact that under Course Language and Sexual References it should also have a “gay theme” warning (but I guess that’s not politically correct), the film is hysterical is places and unwittingly highlights a fatal flaw in our culture.

I was expecting a sort of British Dead Poets Society, which it is, but from a different angle. In DPS, a heartless military-minded “bully” of a dad led to the suicide of his son who wanted to be an actor. In THB, the teacher again becomes a substitute for a father figure, but in this case there are two teachers, one at the end of his career and one at the beginning. Both are brilliant, but both are what the school’s headmaster might politely refer to as “shrinking violets.” One loves poetry and old movies and the other loves history and “devil’s advocate” debate. The students initially find it difficult to reconcile these two approaches to learning.

The history boys are a deliberately varied bunch. At least in this one there is a token Christian, and he’s not a hypocrite. But his faith is basically ineffectual, of no real benefit. The main focus is on one student who, due to his looks and his brazenness, is always the centre of attention. Every film has a message to preach, and in this picture, it mostly boils down to courage. What is wrong is that his boldness is demonstrated in destructive ways: sleeping with the school secretary and blackmailing the bullying, philandering principal. He also (absurdly) attempts to “reward” the gay teacher whose intellect he admires, with the argument that he should not just debate courageously but live courageously. Just as those Christian films where the “preachy” scene makes you cringe, the gratuitous preaching of perversity in this one is just as artificial and cringeworthy. And the student’s weak-willed “human projects” capitulate in pretty much every case. (The one true victory of the film is when the younger teacher perceives that the central student’s academic mindset is a sublime meld of the strengths of the opposite approaches of the two teachers.)

The only character with any real balls is the female history teacher, who regards history as a sad record of male incompetence. Ian Smith writes:

Francis de la Tour is in many ways the traditionalist amongst the teaching staff, somewhat worn down and disillusioned by the misogynist world she lives and works in. She’s achieved success in getting the boys to the point where they’re being considered for Oxbridge, but there’s a recognition that she can achieve no more because her strict regimen of learning the facts, writing the essays and doing the hard work of learning the basics is not enough in a world that wants original thought and ideas.

Her sharp eyes and measured wit cut through the smokescreens the various males use to excuse their spectacular failures in character, but she knows they won’t listen. In Western Culture, the best man for the job sometimes is a woman, but that’s not how the world is meant to be.

We all need to see films where people, men in particular, are seen to make costly decisions to do what is right, and despite their character flaws. That is true heroism. Courage, like love, is not an end in itself. It must be discerning and selfless. We need father figures who are neither bullies nor shrinking violets nor the cardboard cutout examples of “perfect fatherhood” from old TV shows. We find these true father figures in the Bible, but there are rare examples of this protected species alive today.

Darren Doane made some helpful comments in an article for Epistula, after making Collision with Doug Wilson and Christopher Hitchens.

…I came to Christ about six years after I graduated high school. I was a budding young filmmaker fully steeped in the ways of the world—Hollywood to be specific. That means I was a very bad man. Through God’s grace He grabbed me one day, threw me to the ground and claimed me as His own, and commissioned me to keep making films and talk about Him. (For those of you already assessing my potential run-on sentence, I would appeal to the Pauline epistles for my defense.)

Within the first few months of my Christian life I was given an audio debate between Greg Bahnsen, a Christian apologist, and noted atheist Gordon Stein. I was amazed at what I heard. Greg’s defense of the Christian faith was just music to my ears. I loved it. Some people love football or gardening or Halo3. I just loved hearing people argue. A mentor later in my life would say arguing is a virtue when done with respect and kindness. So back to that audio tape. Over and over I listened to it. It became my new Christian Led Zeppelin. This was my “Stairway to Heaven.” I would imagine what it would have been like to film the debate. How I would have done it. The music, the angles, the back-story. As the years rolled on I began to think about recreating the debate with actors. They do it with those Lincoln/Douglas debate things, why not this?

Fast forward.

About a year and a half ago I was having dinner with David Hagopian. I had met David at a memorial dinner for Greg Bahnsen. We were at the same table. David was the moderator for the Bahnsen-Stein debate. So that put him in the rock star category for me. I knew his voice from those tapes, and now I knew his face. Around that time my wife and I began to have children. This led quickly to books on children, marriage, education, church, etc. I ran into Doug Wilson’s books and had my life shattered. But that’s another story. Then education. I knew David Hagopian had experience in this area and was the closest guy I could get some advice from. We met and started talking debates and how boring they are. I had suggested that a pure cross examination debate style would be really what people want. Get to the good stuff. See people defend their positions.

Jump Ahead a Few Months.

David and I keep talking about filming debates. We start talking about Doug Wilson and his online debate with Christopher Hitchens, and before we know it, we are all talking about making a film. Wilson, Hagopian, Gary Demar, Aaron Rench, and Nate Wilson quickly became the players. Aaron Rench had set up the original debate with Doug and Christopher and was continuing to develop a relationship with Hitchens. Aaron lays it out, and Hitchens agrees to spend three days with Wilson, debating, hanging out, eating, and traveling. So the film is ready to be made, and the players are lined up.

When I began to edit the film, something happened. I found I was being educated. And not just with arguments. I was watching a Christian life. I was seeing a Christian man. I was experiencing interaction with ungodly men who want to see Christianity destroyed and exposed as ancient Stone Age myths. I could see Doug’s reactions, his temperament, his smile, his grace, his picking and choosing, and the outcome of what he did. I was being educated in a way that a book had never done. It was like meat being applied to bones. I did not have a Christian upbringing. A godly man to imitate was hard to find.

The triune Christian life is earthy and dirty. It is action. It moves and gets involved. It engages. And it takes dominion. I have spent more time with Doug Wilson by way of an editing bay and looking at footage of him living the Christian life than I have in person. But what has been captured in the film is Doug Wilson loving anti-theist Christopher Hitchens and looking to win the man, not the argument. And that is something I needed to learn—something I needed to be educated on how to do and what it looks like.

It is interesting that Doug Wilson has not only been accused of being a bully, but also of not dealing with certain situations harshly enough. He’s a leader without being a militaristic bully and he’s a man of letters without being a shrinking violet. He lives, writes and debates boldly, and sings and laughs just as boldly. He’s the full picture. Our culture really hates him sometimes, but he shrugs off criticism that would keep lesser men (like certain Democrat Presidents) up at night. I think he’s a great example of what they are looking for, a signpost to the only real Man, Jesus Christ, the perfect image of the Father.

Someone should take the ideas in Wilson’s wonderful book, Future Men, and make a movie. Imagine the West revived by godly fatherhood, where the problems in sad films like these are not just communicated in confused rhetoric but also seen to be solvable. As “old movies” they will be the history of a broken culture that had no future and is truly dead.

Michael Jensen had a great column published on ABC Unleashed, critical of the religious programme Compass:

Imagine No Religion

If you ever tune in to the ABC’s flagship religious affairs programme Compass after the bonnet drama of a Sunday night, then you could be forgiven for thinking that the group of people labelled ‘the religious’ are those who wear funny hats.

As the opening title sequence of the show scrolls by, viewers are treated to a veritable facebook of curious millinery – along with some impressive facial hair.

To the average ABC viewer, watching as they iron their work clothes, the message is clear: these people are not ‘us’. They are definitely ‘the other’: a group or groups of people to be observed, categorised, wondered at – and sometimes even frightened of. 

But is there such a category as the ‘religious’? Does ‘religion’ even exist? 

I am not convinced that it does – at least, not in the sense that the word is commonly used. The concept of ‘religion’ operates as an anthropological term, which like most academic language, enables the object under examination to be placed at a scholarly arm’s length. Like exotic butterflies, religions are to be caught in the wild, observed under the microscope, described in minute detail according to their visible forms, and then pinned to polystyrene. 

There are three enormous traps into which this method steps – and the result is a colossal misunderstanding of the ‘religious’. Categorising things is so much a part of our approach to life that we can imagine it promises more understanding of a subject than it can deliver.

The first mistake is that we think we have discovered a coherent concept because we can describe things that the various religions apparently have in common. If the religions are to be understood because of the things they seem to have in common, it is not too much of a stretch to imagine that the things they have in common are the really important things about them. 

The problem is that the massive differences between the faiths are then ironed out. After all, termites and elephants both have legs.

The second trap comes with the triumph of imagining one has discovered the single catch-all concept at the heart of all ‘religions’. The scholar with this sort of claim – and believe me, they aren’t modest about it – imagines herself sublimely objective in this, uniquely capable of divesting herself of all vestiges of her home culture and its variety of faith.

For example, it is no accident that scholars from Christian backgrounds have gone looking for a ‘God of love’ as the core idea of all other religions. It’s a peculiarly Christian way of homogenising other faiths. 

We can see this in the work of John Hick – and Hick’s lesser hack, John Shelby Spong.

Thirdly, if we think in terms of ‘religion’ we will become far too distracted by the external and cultural forms of religion. This is what I call the ‘silly hat’ problem. 

When I was chaplain at an Anglican school, I was often sent sample ‘Studies in Religion’ textbooks. They were uniformly hopeless, in my opinion, because they concentrated almost entirely on ceremonies, rituals, ecclesiastical haberdashery and religious festivals. Was this what ‘religion’ was about? 

Perhaps – if you are looking in from the outside, as someone who is not ‘religious’ in this sense. But you do not understand Christianity (I speak only for my own faith) at all by observing its outward forms. In fact, you may completely misunderstand it. 

In its most hostile forms, at the hands of a Dawkins or a Hitchens, the idea of ‘religion’ is a means of dismissing it. If you pollute the concept with enough human evil – and goodness knows, there’s plenty of that to share – you can make it start to look like a concept we’d be better off without. 

You end up implying that the lady across the road who goes to church each week is just as evil as Osama.

But more often, using the term ‘religion’ is a way of taming the phenomena collected under this heading. If it can be boiled down to its core elements, and if I can then see that these core elements are available without ‘religion’, then …well, why would I bother? 

I don’t look good in hats, and I like to sleep in on the weekends.

So, I want to invite you to (to borrow from John Lennon) ‘imagine no religion’. If you are really interested in understanding those people we call ‘religious’, then realise that that thinking in terms of ‘religion’ is getting in the way.

And what’s more, you will continue to think of yourself as ‘not religious’, if you keep believing in ‘religion’.

Why deny yourself the chance of being challenged – and even changed – by what you discover?

Jensen’s point is excellent, but he relies partly on the fact that he is speaking from within the same cultural bubble as the producers of Compass. Hats, robes and facial hair are a method of denoting special office. Bikers, Mods, Punks, Goths, Scenesters and Ganguros all communicate through clothing. Baptists wear business suits. You wouldn’t be caught dead without a tie in some circles. What does that communicate? (and imagine a world where everyone wore business suits!)

Yes, we may misunderstand a religion if we only observe the externals. But the rites, millinery and facial hair so alien to us are very often direct expressions of the doctrines of any given religion. So, where Compass focusses on the exotic externals to put religion in a tidy box, the modern western Christian thinks he can divest his faith of its expressions and boil it down to some timeless “Greek-style” ideal. [1]

Despite their abominable doctrines, these exotic, alien religions are often more in touch with the physical world, and the symbolic nature of the creation, than we are. Their doctrines unashamedly create culture. It is a richness we have lost. Our Christianity has become a victim of the detached objectivity of the scientist. Our culture of worship, bereft of any real Biblical inspiration, has nothing to draw on but the mall.

Sure, the special attire of the servant eventually becomes a desired commodity. Pharisees and phylacteries! Human nature always ends up using religious robes as a cover for hypocrisy and unjustice. [2] But so does the Supreme Court. Snakes love gardens… best place to hide! In our wisdom, we think the robes are the problem. But when their message has been distorted by opportunists and tyrants and dandies, perhaps it’s time to come up with something altogether new. [3]

The Common Ground Christian sect has a coffee shop in Katoomba. Some of their doctrines are way off (such as there being a third way between salvation and damnation, a middle road of good works for those ignorant of the gospel). Some of their doctrines are spot on. They have a sort of “postmillennial” kingdom optimism. They want to transform society, not escape it (albeit via communes!). They have a way of dressing that reflects their worldview. It communicates modesty, honour and hard work. It communicates who they are. And it sure beats business suits. While our dying culture dresses children up like streetwalkers and pierces any available orifice, what’s wrong with a bit of visible glory to illustrate an official capacity in the church?

________________________________________
[1] See Communist Theology.
[2] See Rags to Robes, and of course Jordan’s classic The Dominion Trap on Adam’s robe.
[3] All this requires wisdom. From memory, Doug Wilson refuses to wear a clerical collar because of what this has come to communicate in American culture. See his article Vestments. And check out his facial hair.

“The Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, are statements of faith that separate Christian from non-Christian. Did you see good old [anti-theist] Christopher Hitchens witnessing to that lady this last week? I’ve gotten to know Christopher pretty well and have really appreciated him. He was interviewed by a Unitarian lady minister. She was complaining in the interview,

‘Why do you always debate fundamentalists? Why do you debate the “true believers”? Why don’t you debate more liberal Christians, like myself, for instance?’

And Christopher Hitchens said, ‘Look, if you don’t believe that Jesus was God incarnate and that He died on the cross for our sins, and that He rose again from the dead, you are in no meaningful sense a Christian.’

(laughing) Go Christopher!

…The Westminster Confession does not divide Christian from non-Christian. The Apostles’ Creed divides Christian from non-Christian.”

Auburn Avenue 2010 Pastor’s Conference: The Necessity of the Reformation. Lectures available here.