Who Made God
September 28, 2010 | 
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Who Made God? And Answers to Over 100 Other Tough Questions of Faith Edited by Ravi Zacharias & Norman Geisler / ZondervanHow can there be three persons in one God? Why does God allow evil? What is the origin of the universe? Did Jesus rise from the dead? What about other faiths, such as Islam, Mormonism, Hinduism, reincarnation and Buddhism? Expert evangelical apologists answer all these tough questions-and many more. |
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Is Christianity Really Real?
Is Christianity really real? If so, where is it? Anyone can claim to be a Christian, and many do, who don’t have a clue about what it really is, because, deceived by their own imagination and conscience they want to define it in their own terms and superstitious beliefs. Any “new-age” ideas will work for many people, but, just to be safe, they want to be known as Christians. That can not be it. Or, in many cases, leaders are just charlatans exploiting a religious Christianity based on a perverted interpration of scripture. Then there are those who have been taught to interpret and teach scripture in a way which ignores the reality and meaning of the New Covenant. The Bible tells us how to know the real thing and the real Christians.(John 13:35)
I can understand why many young people have doubts, when preaching seems to be simply a way of controlling your life by guilt, fear and expectations, rather than teaching the “newness” of life which Christ taught for the New Covenant way. It is important to know that the “New Covenant” and the “New Testament” are not the same thing. See/join this discussion “New Covenant Interpretation” (Romans 7:6; 6:4; Hebrews 10:14-20)
In many seminaries, professors are teaching students how to make Christianity a religion. When these students get into their denominational work, they then teach and preach that Christianity is not a religion, it is a relationship, but then they usually mix in their religious church rules and performance expectations. A religion would be something similiar to what the Pharisees promoted; a set of church rules to live by in order to be a good Christian, obedience and commitment. On the other hand, a true relationship is based on “walking in newness of life” which is the New Covenant way.
It is easy to recognize the difference. Does your church frequently teach on obedience, commitment, sin, motivation and fear, rather than love, grace and the freedom of being a child of God and living a Christian life? Or, worse than that, do they teach one way one time and another way another time? (John 13:34; Mark 12:30-31)
But don’t give up on the Bible, it is actually spot-on for all of life’s circumstances and relationships and for what happens in this world. But, you must be born-again in order to interpret its meaning correctly in a nonlegalistic and selfless way. Somehow, if you are really “born-again”, over time, the Holy Spirit will help you understand what the scripture really means and it will change the frustrations of your heart. (See this article for what being “born-again” is all about.)
Don’t let ill-informed preaching influence your personal views. Study scripture yourself from a “New Covenant” perspective and see if it is really real. If it begins to make sense, that may be the Holy Spirit calling you to repent of unbelief. Being a born-again believer is simply repenting of your unbelief not making a commitment to resolve all sin in your life.
Walking by faith, then, is simply believing God for what He has done and what He says He will do in Scripture, in all of life’s situations, opportunities and circumstances. Walking by faith, is not trying to avoid sin and sinful thoughts. You learn to walk (think and act) where God is, not where your mind wants you to go.
What Does “In God” Mean To Me?
There are also terms such as “in me”, “in Christ”, “in the Father”.
Sometimes it is just an object of belief, other times it is a spiritual identity kind of like DNA is a physical identity.
This new spiritual identity is called being born-again, so it is not just a commitment to a cause like “Semper Fi”. It is an actual spiritual indwelling of God into “us”. So, spiritually we are also “in God”. Rom 8:11
This is the essence of the “new covenant”, which is called a “new and living way”. We now walk in this “new and living way” rather than by written laws and commandments or our own conscience. John 6:63 2Cor 3:6
Christ taught under the law and explained the “new way” which was coming. The Apostles did not understand that part of what He was teaching until the Pentecost.
Many people still do not understand this “new way”, because they may have been taught according to the “Flesh” rather than according to the “Spirit”. (Motivational teaching always speaks to the flesh. Much of Scripture may also speak to the “Flesh” if it is not studied with an understanding of the New covenant.) So, they live according to a mixture of “law” and “grace”. For some, it is easier to grasp rules and try to live those than it is to understand the freedom of Grace and live because you really know what it means to be “in Christ”.
A few scripture references:
Read the rest of this entry »
Let Scripture Tell You The Plan
True Christianity must be based on correct interpretation of the meaning and message of Scripture as enlightened by the Holy Spirit in the heart of a true believer. Thus, any systematic christianity taught by seminaries and churches is by definition a pseudo christianity or simply a christian philosophy of life. Anyone espousing a legalistic form of christianity is most likely presenting his or her own ideas based on their conscience. Conscience is not how God speaks to us. Quite the contrary, conscience is that part of a fallen nature which allows humans to think that they can be; like God, apart from God.
Much of the Bible is about a particular legalistic system, knowledge and use of this part of the Bible, to promote fear, without understanding and explaining God’s purpose and Grace in the New Covenant is a gross misunderstanding of the Bible. Have you ever noticed, that people with a strong conscience, usually want to tell other people how they should live.
Here is the plan. Read the rest of this entry »
No Condemnation
This is one of my all-time favorite books. Dr. Narramore is a Professor at Biola. There are several extremely helpful chapters and concepts in this book.He makes a strong case that human “conscience” was derived from “the Fall” and contrary to how many Christians think. It is not the way God talks to us. In fact, the conscience is why humans think they don’t need God. They can be self-sufficient. Or, that the conscience was given to humanity by God, so they can know what is right and wrong.
Another significant theme is that “guilt feelings” should never be used to motivate anyone.
The Two Covenants
This is an example of a book about the two covenants, which misunderstands what the New Covenant is. This is an old-time-religion book. I think he writes according to what his professors taught him and not according to a personal understanding of scripture.
He says the primary purpose of the New Covenant “is to meet the need for a power of not sinning.”(Pg.56). Wow, it sounds like some type of power is transfered to us in order for us to defeat sin in our life. How is that working for you?
Later he says “The great blessing of the New Covenant is obedience; the wonderful power to will and do what God wills.”(Pg. 123) Obedience is a term related to a law or a rule, but New covenant Christians are not under the law.
The New Covenant has two commandments both based on love. It is not possible to be obedient to these commandments. Love simply becomes a duty if it is done for obedience.
So. this is a good study in what the New Covenant is not.
I read a book like this critically and probably get as much or more out of it than one with which I agree.
Hebrews 8:10-12; 10:5-10; 10:17-18
Ephesians 1:7-8
Colossians 1:21-22
2Corinthians 3:5-6 3:7-11; 5:18-21
The Rebirth of Orthodoxy
Thomas C. Oden, a leading theologian describes the unexpected resurgence of a New Christian Orthodox — post denominational, flexible, and rooted in ancient beliefs.
Here is an interesting excerpt from pages 84-85 of the book.
Comparative Trajectories of Two Methodist Radicals
Not until I recently explained to younger friends how closely my path had followed the same trajectory as that of Hillary Rodham Clinton did they grasp what I was saying about my history. It seems odd now, but Hillary was working out of precisely the same sources and moving in the same circles as I in our formative years. In fact, our two trajectories almost mirrored one another until the early seventies. I fell much harder for Marxist ideology than she ever did, but we made many of the same ideological stops along the way.
Why do I mention this? Because Hillary’s pattern clarifies where I once squarely located myself ideologically, only later to reverse myself and disavow previous opinions. My education paralleled hers (Yale, Methodist activism, moving ever leftward), both in the ideas we held and the people by whom we were mentored. We were both avid followers of Saul Alinsky, a pragmatic urban organizer and unprincipled amoralist. Hillary became intrigued by situation ethics, the subject on which I wrote my dissertation. She learned her tough amoral activism from Alinsky and her view of history from quasi-Marxists, just as I did. She once revealed that she had saved every copy of motive magazine, the progenitor of much of her religious and political radicalism, and so have I. That magazine fueled me intellectually during my heady years as a pacifist, existentialist, Tillichian, and aspiring Marxist, and its editors (Roger Ortmayer and B. J. Styles) were old friends of mine. In those days I trusted completely the Methodist radicalism of motive. It set the leftist momentum of all my thinking, as it did Hillary’s.
Hillary’s chief mentors in Chicago included dear friends of mine, Joseph and Lynn Mathews, and their associates in the Ecumenical Institute of Austin, Texas (later to become the Ecumenical Institute of Chicago), where some of my writings were embedded in their standard curriculum. I went to Yale more than a decade before Hillary did, but we had many threads of mutual friends and almost a total congruence of values in those early days. Her former pastor and mentor, Professor Don Jones, remains my close colleague in ethics at Drew University. During her years in the White House, she belonged to one of the most politically radical local congregations among United Methodists.
When I look now at Hillary’s persistent situational ethics, political messianism, statist social idealism, and pragmatic toughness, I see mirrored the self I was a few decades ago. Methodist social liberalism taught me how to advocate liberalized abortion and early feminism almost a decade before the works of Germaine Greer and Rosemary Radford Ruether further raised my consciousness.Once Completely at Home with Modernity
I left seminary having learned to treat scripture selectively, according to how it well it might serve my political idealism. I adapted the Bible to my ideology an ideology of social and political change largely shaped by soft Marxist premises about history and a romanticized vision of the emerging power and virtue of the underclass. Though during this time it was largely knowledge elites (professors, writers, movement leaders) rather than the underclass that shaped my views, I nursed an inordinate confidence in my own ability to define the interests of the poor.
Like all broad-minded clergy I knew, I tried hard to reason out of modern naturalistic premises, employing biblical narratives narrowly and selectively. I could plead for social change and teach hearers to take pride in their good intentions and works; but I was not prepared to communicate the saving grace of God on the cross, which I experienced oniy at some vague and diffuse level and would never have thought of personally attesting publicly.
The Astonished Heart
Robert Farrar Capon is an Episcopal priest. On page 101 he tells how a true body of believers might start a new group when a marginal church dies.
WHERE HAS THE CHURCH BEEN, AND WHAT HAS IT BECOME?
According to Robert Farrar Capon, the answers to these questions are
in many ways dispiriting. Although the church has done much good,
it has also made numerous blunders in its checkered history. Chief
among them is that it has lost its astonishment over the Good News
of the gospel – the gift of salvation we receive from Christ.
By taking readers on an illuminating ramble through the history of the
church, Capon shows how we have lost this sense of astonishment
by making Christianity into a religion that focuses on requirements and
restrictions rather than on the Good News, and by turning the church,
which should be a body of believers, into an institution that empha-
sizes its corporate functions to the detriment of its gospel message.
After exploring all the ways in which the church has mis-embodied
itself over the centuries, Capon .explains how the church today might
re-create itself. The key, according to Capon, is recovering the gift
of astonishment with which it began.
Capon is fully alert to both the tragedy and the comedy of church
history, and he covers this uneven ground with great heart and great
humor – and genuine hope for the future of the church.
ROBERT FARRAR CAPON is an Episcopal priest and the author of
many widely popular books, including The Romance of the Word;
The Mystery of Christ; Health, Money, and Love; and a trilogy on Jesus’
parables – The Parables of the Kingdom, The Parables of Grace,
and The Parables ofJudgment.
ISBN O-8028-D7’91-7
Cover design by Stephanie Milanowski
____ I 1\WM B EERDMANS
PUBLISHING Co 9 780802 807915
Grand Rapids/Cambridge
The Inescapable Love of God
The following is based on content from his book. “Universalism, Calvinism, and Arminianism: Some preliminary reflections.
When I first began interpreting the New Testament along universalist lines, I was struck by how many regarded such an interpretation as not only mistaken, but utterly unreasonable and heretical as well. I found that a good many of my Calvinist friends, who did not regard Arminianism as heretical (only mistaken), and a good many of my Arminian friends, who did not regard Calvinism as heretical (only mistaken), were united in their conviction that universalism is both mistaken and heretical. This curious response started me thinking. Why should Calvinists regard universalism as any more heretical than Arminianism?–and why should Arminians regard it as any more heretical than Calvinism?
As I reflected upon these questions, I also began to reflect upon the following inconsistent set of propositions:
(1) It is God’s redemptive purpose for the world (and therefore his will) to reconcile all sinners to himself;
(2) It is within God’s power to achieve his redemptive purpose for the world;
(3) Some sinners will never be reconciled to God, and God will therefore either consign them to a place of eternal punishment, from which there will be no hope of escape, or put them out of existence altogether.
If this is indeed an inconsistent set of propositions, as I believe it is, then at least one of the propositions is false. Calvinists reject proposition (1); Arminians reject proposition (2); and universalists reject proposition (3). But in fact we can also find *prima facie* support in the Bible for each of the three propositions. So one day I sat down and, setting aside disputes over translation and sophisticated theological arguments, began to review the obvious.
In support of proposition (1), one might cite such texts as II Peter 3:9: “The Lord . . . is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance”; I Timothy 2:4: God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth”; Romans 11:32: “For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all”; and Ezekiel 33:11: “As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn away from his way and live . . ..” All of these texts seem to suggest that God sincerely wants to achieve the reconciliation of all sinners, and that his failure to achieve this end would therefore be, in some important sense, a tragic defeat of one of his purposes.
Similarly, in support of proposition (2), one might cite such texts as Ephesians 1:11: God “accomplishes all things according to the counsel of his own will”; Job 42:2: “I know that thou canst do all things, and that no purpose of thine can be thwarted”; Psalm 115:3: “Our God is in the heavens; he does whatever he pleases”; and Isaiah 46:10b & 11b: “My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose . . . I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it.” These texts seem to imply that God is able to accomplish all of his purposes–including, therefore, all of his redemptive purposes. And in addition to these texts, a number of others seem to imply that God has both the will and the power to bring all things into subjection to Christ (I Corinthians 15:27-28), to reconcile all things in Christ (Colossians 1:20), and to bring acquittal and life to all persons through Christ (Romans 5:18).
But finally, in support of proposition (3), one might also cite such texts as Matthew 25:46: “And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life”; II Thessalonians 1:9: “They shall suffer the punishment of eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might . . .”; and Ephesians 5:5: “Be sure of this, that no immoral or impure man, or one who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.” These texts may seem to imply that at least some persons will be lost forever and thus never be reconciled to God.
After a quick review of these texts in my own mind, one point struck me as altogether obvious: Anyone who takes a position with respect to our three propositions–whether the person be a Calvinist, an Arminian, or a universalist–will end up denying a proposition for which there is at least some prima facie biblical support. And in that respect universalism is no different from either Calvinism or Arminianism. So I found myself, at this point, wanting to put several questions to those who would simply dismiss universalism as heretical: If it is not heretical for the Arminians to believe that God, being unlimited in love, at least wills (or sincerely desires) the salvation of all (proposition (1)), why should it be heretical for the universalists to believe this as well?–and if it is not heretical for the Calvinists to believe that God, being almighty, will in the end accomplish all of his redemptive purposes (proposition (2)), why should it be heretical for the universalists to believe this as well? And finally, if it is not heretical to accept proposition (1), as the Arminians do, and not heretical to accept proposition (2), as the Calvinists do, why should it be heretical to accept both (1) and (2)?
Now as a matter of logic, there is a possible answer to this last question. If the biblical warrant for proposition (3), or a doctrine of everlasting separation, were overwhelmingly greater than that for the other two propositions, then one might conclude that only (3) could not reasonably be rejected. But nothing like that seems to be true at all, and here, at least, is how I see the matter. The biblical warrant for proposition (1), that God wills the salvation of all, is simply overwhelming–so overwhelming that those who worry about heresy, as I do not, ought to regard Calvinism, not universalism, as heretical. The biblical warrant for proposition (2), that almighty God will eventually accomplish all of his redemptive purposes, is likewise exceedingly strong, as the Calvinists have always insisted. And proposition (3) is the weakest of the three. For only (3) seems to rest upon controversial *translations* as well as controversial interpretations; and whereas (1) and (2) seem to rest upon systematic teachings in Paul, the texts cited on behalf of (3) are typically lifted from contexts of parable, hyperbole, and great symbolism.
Others will no doubt assess matters differently. But to those who claim, as many do, that everlasting punishment is clearly and unmistakably taught in the New Testament, I would put this question: Which of our other two propositions would you then reject? Would you deny that God wills (or sincerely desires) the salvation of all human beings?–or would you deny that he has the power to accomplish his will in this matter? And finally, why do you believe that the biblical warrant for proposition (3) is stronger than that for propositions (1) and (2)? It is not enough, in other words, merely to cite the standard proof-texts in support of (3). For if (3) is true, then either (1) or (2) is false. To provide a full biblical defense for a doctrine of everlasting punishment, therefore, one must show that the biblical warrant for (3) is stronger than that for (1) or stronger than that for (2)–a daunting task indeed! And I know of no one who has even tried to build any such comparative case as that. So why do so many regard it as heretical to reject a doctrine of everlasting punishment, but not heretical to limit God’s love or to limit his power? Which view does more, in the end, to undermine the glory and the majesty of God?”
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