Easter

Today is Easter - the Sunday where we celebrate what we celebrate every Sunday and every day. So, in reality it is a normal day. But, it's nice to have special commemorations. We spend 364 days each year debating subtle issues of doctrine. We spend this one day solely dedicated to the one event that gives any doctrine meaning. Without this, Christianity is a religion and a philosophy. With this, we know the way to the restoration of how things should be.

Tim Keller's "The Reason For God"

At the moment I'm reading a book by Tim Keller called The Reason For God. It's an apologetics book of sorts. (Not quite sure if it's aimed primarily at an unbeliever or rather at people interested in learning about how to do apologetics with at least certain kinds of unbelievers. I really like its overall thought process. The target audience of the arguments are non-religious, pluralist people. Basically, it's a two step approach. The first step is to take their specific doubts and reformulate them as statements of faith (faith in something other than Jesus, of course, but faith nonetheless), and you illustrate why their faith in the form of "doubt" requires just as big a leap as faith in Jesus. Then, once the person realizes that their belief system is no more rock solid or based in "objective observation" (that is, once they doubt their doubts), you present some clues for why Jesus is plausible and good.

This deviates a bit from rationalist forms of apologetics where arguer accepts the rational premise (any true statement is provable through argument based on some set of secular premises). Indeed, anything proved through logic cannot actually be automatically held to be true, since logic is always circular, because to use logic, we have to assume that logical conclusions are true, which is unprovable within logic. And indeed, there is no logical proof for God, nor is there a logical disproof, and even the strictest rationalists accept that at some level.

So, in any case, it's a good read. (Actually, I haven't finished the book yet, but the first 3/4 of the book was good.)

A church's statement of faith

I've been thinking a bit about how to build an official statement of faith for a church. One reason I was thinking about this was that statements of faith have become "statements of obscure doctrine". That is, sometimes churches will put out statements of faith will the goal to distinguish themselves from other churches. For example, bullet point number one on a recent statement of faith that I read was that the King James Version translation of the Bible was the only valid translation, mentioned above far less important things, like the saving Grace of Jesus Christ. Now, I do understand the need to sometimes make statements of doctrine in the statements of faith, because their are a handful of Christian-like religions that take a lot of the same character names and a lot of their actions and teachings, and then build a false religion around them. But, in any case, I don't think the King Jame Version should make it to any noticeable position on any statement of faith.

So, this lead me to the thought of how one would write a good statement of faith, and here's what I got so far.
1. Start with Mark 12:29-31. A teacher asks Jesus what the most important commandment is. The reply is
“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
2. Clarify the commandment by answering the questions it doesn't ask. For example

• Who is the Lord? (The Lord is not an imaginary God, one among many, etc. The Lord is the creator of the universe and He is Jesus Christ, redeemer of humanity.)
• How do we know who the Lord is? (The Bible, the Holy Spirit, etc)
  
• What is love? (Love isn't a feeling of affection!)
• What does loving with all your hear, soul, mind entail? (Probably such things as humility, gratitude, praise, obedience, acceptance of grace, etc.)
• Who is your neighbor?
• What does it mean "as yourself"? (Engaging is self-destructive behavior does not give you permission to engage in neighbor-destructive behavior, for example.)

With those two commands, listed as the most important by Jesus Himself, you can probably cover all the teachings that are actually important enough to separate a follower of Christ from a follower of a religion. If you want to get into other thoughts about doctrine, you can do that in another document. I don't think it's inherently wrong, for example, to have a translation of the Bible that you think is superior than other translations, because there are probably some poor translations out there. And your view of the end times may affect how your church goes about certain things. However, to put those things at the core rather than Jesus Christ seems like a pretty risky thing to me.

God's money

In homegroup right now, we're doing a small study on the topic of money. This is a pretty big topic, because God talks an awful lot about money in the Bible and Jesus said that where our treasure is, there our heart will be also. Notice the tenses as well, it says that treasure leads and the heart follows. So, if you put your money in a direction that you don't want your heart heading, your heart will head there nonetheless. And, indeed, we know this is true. If we just bought a new house, our heart will be in the house. If we just invested in a business venture, then our heart will be in the venture, and so forth.

I'll be facilitating this upcoming Wednesday's discussion, and the broad theme is that all money is God's money and God is just entrusting it to our care. That's a pretty big deal as well. The book we're basing the study on is The Treasure Principle by Randy Alcorn. Unfortunately, I think Alcorn makes one critical mistake in the chapter (which I think causes some diversions through the rest of the book). He seems to embrace the modern western notion of money manager - that is, someone that you give your wealth to for the purpose of growing it. One right of the money manger is to draw a salary. And he basically says that we can draw a salary from the money that God has given us for the purpose of subsistence. I think that misses the point of money manager. Rather, the Biblical image of a money manager is the image of a steward. The steward of a household manages the household finances, just as we are entrusted to manage God's finances, but the steward is a member of the household. So, the roof over his head is his Master's roof and he eats at the Master's table. He does not draw a salary for subsistence. Rather, his subsistence comes from the Master. This lines up with 1 Corinthians 10:31 where Paul talks about doing everything, even eating and drinking, for the Glory of God.

So, even our subsistence belongs to God and shouldn't be viewed as a salary out of God's money.

Some background

Some time in late 2010, my church started talking about the Porterbrook Network theological training program. Basically, it's a 2-year program that bears some resemblance to seminary, in that it covers a things both with breadth and depth and does so in a systematic, purposed manner. (Here's the syllabus for those who care.) The thought intrigued me and I went to the orientation session and decided to sign up. (The course is self-study with frequent meetings with other participants from church.) As soon as I got the materials, I started diving in and found them to be of quite high quality. They did a particularly good job addressing the post-modern, relativistic, cynical culture that we live in today.

So, anyhow, for those of you who haven't lived in both Germany and the US, Germany is usually about 10 years behind the US "culturally". That is, there's a certain lag with fashion trends, entertainment, smoking trends, etc. (By the way, that statement is neither positive nor negative. There's no reason that any country should run the same cultural course as the US at all, so it's not an inherently negative thing to run the same course at a different time.) However, with regard to religion, Germany is a good 20 years ahead of the US. If you thought the US was heading down the path of relativism, Germany's already made it.

So, that got me to my crazy thought. Maybe we (we=my family) should move to Germany and work to share the love of God with the people of Germany. This thought rather surprised me, since I never thought of myself as the church-planting type of evangelist and since I also was never particular excited about the thought of living in Germany long-term. However, something about the way the true Gospel was presented in terms that post-modern people connect with, lead me to think that this may really be something that God would like me to do.

Nadja and I have been discussing the idea back and forth for a number of weeks now, and it is by no means our firm intention. Even if it does become a firm plan, it wouldn't be until early 2013 at the earliest that we'd move over. So, there's still plenty of time for things to be formed differently or completely changed. However, the idea is fairly exciting. Indeed, if there's something that would convince me to make our next move to Germany (cold) rather than South Florida (gloriously warm and on the water), then it has to be a big deal.

What it's all about

Hi everyone, if there is anyone. My church's teaching pastor Jeff Ramsey suggested using journaling as a method of having something to reflect back on over the course of one's spiritual development. Since this is the age of over-sharing, I'm going to publish my musings. But this post contains no thoughts. It's more of a testing-testing-1-2-3.