Judgmentalism

Mr. Spock Says, “Highly Illogical.”

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Mr. Spock--and the discerning of spirits?Everyone’s favorite Vulcan, Star Trek‘s Mr. Spock, was forced to deal with illogical humans on a daily basis. But as any casual observer of the show knows, Spock was routinely stymied by the fact that the illogical humans got results. He was even forced to think like them on occasion. In one classic episode, Spock blew the mind of some robots even more logical than himself by resorting to illogic in order to save the crew of the Enterprise.

In the battle over cessationism, I was thinking today about a piece of illogic that strains the credibility of those who champion cessationism. For those unfamiliar with cessationism, the proponents claim that the supernatural gifts of the spirit ceased with the deaths of the apostles. A quick reminder of those gifts:

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills.
—1 Corinthians 12:4-11

Beyond the enormous issue of asking when the gift of faith passed away, the one that I am not getting is the logical assertion by cessationists that the gift of the discerning of spirits has passed away.

Any quick read of major cessationist authors reveals a loop of illogic that would probably send Spock into fits: the fact that cessationists claim to be able to discern that the spirit behind the modern charismatic gifts is not the Spirit of God.

Think about that for a second. If that gift has passed away, then what are cessationists using to discriminate the spirit that is fueling the charismatic excesses they despise? Are they using the very gift they claimed passed away?

Truly this is a loop of illogic that Spock would have had an aneurysm over.

{Photo of “Mr. Spock” copyright Paramount Pictures}

Who I Am & Why Cerulean Sanctum—Part 4

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In what is hopefully the final entry in this last month’s series covering my life’s journey, we come back to where we left off—at the Vineyard in 1989.

I came to the Vineyard after most of the leadership left the Presbyterian church I had been going to. Many of my friends and some of those leaders wound up at the Vineyard and I followed them there.

Now this does not mean that I was unfamiliar with the Vineyard. In fact, I"Fog in the Redwoods" by Dan Edelen had been listening to the worship CDs they had and loved the purity of what the Vineyard was trying to accomplish, recovering a worshipful attitude. I even recommended the church to some friends, so it was not a difficult leap for me.

It seems like an eternity ago, but at one time the Vineyard was highly controversial. Sadly, this was largely due to some poor choices the Association of Vineyard Churches (AVC) made in their attempt to remain on the “cutting edge” of the charismatic movement. But I’ll get into that later.

I started teaching classes at my new church and was heavily involved with the prayer team, the latter being a natural outgrowth of my desire to be an intercessor. Still, I was beginning to realize I had some unfinished business elsewhere.

After a few months at the Vineyard, I felt a calling to finish my education, eventually getting on at Wheaton College in the Christian Ed department. I attended a Vineyard church at Wheaton and encountered actual persecution for doing so. To this day, Wheaton acts like the AVC doesn’t exist. Being a charismatic at Wheaton was definitely no fun. The Kansas City Prophet movement blew up while I was there and I was forced into defending it by some profs who liked to put the lone charismatic on trial. The whole movement gave me the heebie-jeebies actually, so it was no fun trying to keep others at the school from throwing out the charismatic baby with the prophetic bathwater.

Truth is, Wheaton was stifling. I found the lack of openness to anything but what people grew up with to be a grind on me spiritually, so it was nice to get back to my Vineyard home church with my degree and my love for the Lord intact. In the earlier days of the AVC, there was a great emphasis on grace, and that was healing.

But what started with the Kansas City Prophet movement showed the dark underbelly of the Vineyard, too—an unwillingness to scrutinize “new moves of God” more fully before jumping on board with their imprimatur. The worst part was that when these new moves fizzled or their leadership fell into error, no one in the Vineyard would stand up and try to explain to the people in the seats what happened and why.

I met my wife, whose background was Evangelical Friends (the same denomination John Wimber had come from), in 1994 and she started coming to the Vineyard, too. I think it was a good thing for her, but we would not stay in that church for long. After getting married in 1996, I took a job with Apple Computer and we moved from Ohio to Silicon Valley.

Finding a church in California was something we thought would be easy, but we had a false start at one Vineyard church there before finding another Vineyard in Palo Alto that was a good place for us. We were at that church for almost four years.

Before we left for California, I asked the pastor of our Vineyard in Ohio to not let the church become a clone of Willow Creek. While at Wheaton I had done a year-long study of the Willow Creek ministry model and had come away seeing that what others were billing as the model of the future was actually an emperor with no clothes. I viewed that model as lowest common denominator Christianity and the last thing I wanted to see was that model being adopted at our Vineyard church. Little did I know how prophetic my warning would be.

After returning to Ohio in 2000 to address the ill health of my parents, we found our old Vineyard church had swallowed the Willow Creek ministry model hook, line, and sinker. Seeker sensitivity had become the new mantra and everything that had been good about the church had been dumbed down and laminated in order to not offend anyone.

But the Gospel is offensive to many people and you lose something by trying to take the cross and sin out of the equation. When my wife and I moved later to the far eastern portion of Cincinnati, we were now faced with an hour-long drive to the church. I’d just buried both my parents and we’d had our first child. After moving, we lost our primary source of income and were truly in the pits. When we needed to hear about the Lord most, we were instead getting sermon messages about self-esteem.

Things got better for us as we looked past our church for the spiritual strength we could not get there any longer. We also realized the importance of being local, so after a long withdrawing period we finally split from the Vineyard after fifteen years and have recently found a wonderful, small non-denominational charismatic church just a few miles from where we now live.

And that’s the whole story!

As for Cerulean Sanctum, this blog was actually born out of another blog I started in 2001 (does that make me a blog pioneer?) that looked at current events from a Christian perspective. But out of my dissatisfaction with the direction our Vineyard church in Ohio had taken, I felt a calling to change the blog to reflect the growing unease many Christians were feeling with the church growth movement, spiritual deadness in many congregations, foolishness in the charismatic movement, and “mega-Churchianity.” Many of us are reading the Bible and thinking, How come churches today are not like the one we see in Acts? That’s a very good question that we show much reluctance in addressing.

I want to tackle these issues because we cannot ignore them. The future of the Church in America depends on us using God’s wisdom to be strong and wise.

My heart is for the Church as it is expressed in America. I know where we can be because I’ve seen glimpses of how astonishing the Church can be when we are living out the truth of Jesus Christ in its fullness. But rather than this being the norm, too many Christians are settling for something far less. My prayer is that Cerulean Sanctum can be a nexus for people who are looking for more than lowest common denominator Christianity. I hope to inspire people to think more critically about many of the fads in Christian circles and to call us back to the true heart of the Lord.

Some would classify that as prophetic and perhaps it is. But that is why I am here. I hope you can be edified by the discussion here, and that together we can grow to become the Church God has always desired us to be.

Blessings on you all. Thanks for stopping by.

On the Brink of a Quantum Singularity with Calvin and Arminius

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Last year, the well-known physicist Stephen Hawking admitted he was wrong about one of his pet theories concerning black holes. In the rarefied academic air, this amounted to a near recanting of biblical proportions. But Hawking’s admitting that his formulas can’t accurately describe what takes place in the physics world within a black hole was no death knell for his career. The truth is, no one has been able to accurately describe what happens on the brink of a quantum singularity.

If you don’t already know, black holes form when very large stars die and collapse in upon themselves, creating an incredibly dense piece of matter—a quantum singularity—whose mass is so enormous that it warps the fabric of space itself into a giant, nearly bottomless well. If you’ve ever seen one of those parabolic coin games where you roll a coin along the edge and it progressively travels in tighter and tighter circles until finally falling into a hole at the end of the funnel, then you’ve seen the basics of a black hole at work. Once matter gets trapped beyond a certain point of the black hole’s tug of gravity (the “event horizon”), that matter, be it dust or even a massive star, can’t escape the gravity grip of the singularity, in the process possibly being totally destroyed even down to the subatomic level.

Physicists for years have tried to explain the physics behind black holes and their singularities with astonishingly little success. The problem is that all the physics we hold dear (from Einstein’s relativity theories to Maxwell’s equations) cease to work the closer one gets to a quantum singularity. Physicists see cracking the physics behind a black hole as one of the true Holy Grails in physics. Whoever manages to do it will join the pantheon of greats right up there with Albert E. himself.

This brings us to John Calvin and Jacobus Arminius.

You’ve probably heard those names tossed about if you’ve been a Christian longer than a year or two. Both of these men proffered different takes on the “quantum singularity” of Christian theology, how people technically come to (and stay with) Christ.

Let’s take a look at the basics of each:

Five Points of Arminianism

  • Conditional Election – Election is based on the faith or belief of men.
  • Universal Atonement – The atonement is for all, but only believers enjoy its benefits.
  • Saving Faith – Man, unaided by the Holy Spirit, is unable to come to God.
  • Resistible Grace – The drawing of the Holy Spirit can be resisted.
  • Uncertainty of Preservation – This doctrine was left open to inquiry.

Five Points of Calvinism

  • T = Total Depravity – Man is completely a sinner, without any hope of helping himself.
  • U = Unconditional Election – God elected saints to salvation when they had no merit at all. God did not look down upon the earth and see some sinners believing, therefore elected them to salvation, but He looked down upon the earth, and saw all were sinners, therefore elected some to salvation.
  • L = Limited Atonement – The atonement is limited to the elect.
  • I = Irresistible Grace – It is impossible for a sinner to resist salvation once the Holy Spirit begins drawing him.
  • P = Preservation – A saved person will be saved forever, and will live a holy and Godly life.

(Thanks to Pastor Wayne Reynolds for the quick overviews of Calvinism and Arminianism.)

These two streams of belief divide the Protestant world almost in half (there are other belief systems that don’t adhere perfectly to either stream, but they are not majority groups.) Most American denominations that arose out of the Second Great Awakening follow Arminianism and, technically at least, are the Evangelicals we hear so much about. Churches like The Assemblies of God or Methodists are representative. The “Old Line” Presbyterian or Reformed churches are Calvinist, but have muddied the water by occasionally assuming the title “Evangelical” in order to sound like they are up to date with the rest of the Protestant churches out there.

These two streams have slugged it out for a long time. Interestingly enough, the blogosphere is becoming a battleground for these two points of view, with blogrolls developing that highlight bloggers who ascribe to one view or another. I have read so many blog posts lately that can be condensed to “Only Calvinism is Truth” that I have lost count. Anyone who has stumbled into such a debate can attest to the viciousness that often results in defense of one position or another.

Now comes the point in this post where I alienate every single one of my readers.

A physicist like Stephen Hawking is brilliant enough to be able to describe the way virtually all of the universe works from a physics standpoint. He can tell you how it is possible to hit a kilometer-wide target on a moving planet, something NASA does effortlessly (most of the time). He can tell you how gravity works, and light, and the weak force, and electromagnetism…in short, virtually everything we know about how the universe works, he can explain. But he can’t explain what happens on the brink of a quantum singularity.

Likewise, I wonder if John Calvin and Jacobus Arminius are not in the same bind as Hawking when it comes to theology. I contend that perhaps what Calvin and Arminius are trying to describe are the edges of where Jesus wants His true followers to be. It is possible I think, that God never intended us to be hanging out at the brink of the theological quantum singularity Calvin and Arminius address.

Another way of looking at this: If you have teenagers or have ever worked with them, you know that on the issue of sex it is inevitable that you will get asked the question, “Well, how far is too far?” Wise people understand that this is actually the wrong question, but the kids don’t. I suspect that this may be the case in the Calvin/Arminius debate, too.

Take a look at the issue of Preservation of the Saints, for instance. Arminians typically believe it may be possible to wander away from God and lose one’s salvation. Calvinists would argue that this is impossible, contending that if such a thing were to happen the original nature of a person’s “conversion” would be suspect.

But isn’t this like the black hole issue? Jesus calls us to be His disciples and the point of being a disciple is to stay at the Master’s feet, not to toy around with “How far can I wander away and still be saved?” Nor is it a matter of saying, “I can get away with just about anything because He won’t cast me out.” Don’t we see how both of those are skirting the edges of where we need to be as disciples? Those are “brink of the quantum singularity” thoughts—not where the Lord wants us to focus. Sadly, a lot of people get sucked out of the rest of the Christian universe and get stuck at the event horizon of such ideas, forever trapped by the power of one stream or the other. This results in a great number of causalities out there in the pews.

We all know people who have been crushed by their struggles at the brink of this theological quantum singularity. But there is a whole universe of faith as a disciple where those forces don’t have to tug us down a hole. In truth, they may very well be moot points for a person who seeks only to please the Lord in all he or she does.

Ours is a love relationship with the Lord of the Universe. This is more important than the mechanisms that get us there and keep us there. Discipleship is like a marriage between Christ and the disciple—divorce is out of the question and the engagement is merely a formality once the marriage is consummated. We can’t live like the man who asked to bury to his parents, or the one who looks back over his shoulder at what is being left behind.We simply cannot live at the brink; true disciples want to be in the center of the Lord’s will. We do what the Lord asks and are content in doing so.

And maybe that is where the Lord would prefer we all be.

I know this is a contentious issue. R.C. Sproul is probably already scratching my name off his mailing list. So if you have comments, please feel free to leave them—with all humility and love for the brethren, of course. (In other words, take a deep breath and count to ten before you post!)