Oddities

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}

Occam’s Bible Razor

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This weekend I promised some folks on another site that I would take a look at the idea of the Priesthood in the same manner that I looked at Apostleship. I was tackling my idea that the formal office of priest has passed away and is now only owned by one person, Christ. No mortal human “priest” exists to carry on the role Christ now does for all of us. (Backstory: this is mostly my attempt to counter the growing trend in evangelical circles to make the father in a family some new form of “family priest,” an idea that has no history that I can find in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library or any of the writings of Jonathan Edwards.)

Well, in the course of getting ready for an apologetic examination nonpareil, I ran into a huge problem with the Greek word “presbuteros” (from which we get the word “Presbyterian”, the key meaning being “elder”) which some who support a distinct role of “priest” want to use in the same way that we use “hiereus” (high priest). The “presbuteros equates to a modern NT priestly role” seems so tortured to me that trying to disqualify presbuteros in order to make my point is maddening. Frankly, I’m not prepared to write a dissertation on this, what I saw as a simple subject before it got obfuscated.

Cross on BibleAnd that brings me to my whole point.

Jack Deere once wrote that if you take someone who has no experience with the Bible or Christian doctrine at all and you sit that person down to read the Bible through for the first time, that person is not going to come away from the Bible a cessationist. Now I realize that’s a whole ‘nother topical hornet’s nest, but the idea is what I want to hold onto here. Likewise, Leonard Ravenhill, one of my favorite authors and preachers, once said that one day someone is going to sit down with the Bible and truly believe it and then we’re all going to be ashamed.

Does Occam’s Razor apply to the Bible?

William of Occam stated quite simply:

Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.

Or in 21st century English:

The simplest answer for explaining something is most likely to be true and is to be preferred.

Perhaps we need to recover this same perspective when it comes to reading the Bible.

Now this is not to say that we can strip the depth of meaning out of the Scriptures. No one man can take in all the breadth of knowledge and beauty the Bible contains. But what if the simple, first-through reading of a passage of Scripture is closest to its true meaning? Some of our most debated doctrines today seem quite tortured when theologians start beefing about Greek verb declensions. Why not just read a passage and let the very first thoughts you get about it serve as the basis for belief? Does the Holy Spirit demand that we parse verb forms in order to get to “the real meaning” of the Bible?

The older I get the more this bothers me. I think Deere may be right. It’s only after most new Christians are exposed to us “mature” believers that they start to temper their initial excitement at reading the word of God. “Oh, so it doesn’t really mean that?” is not the kind of attitude we should be encouraging in spiritual beginners. I know I get tired of hearing some people try to dissect John 14:6 by using tortured logic to say that Jesus isn’t really saying He’s the only way to be saved. I’m sorry to say this to the text-floggers out there, but I think that is exactly what He is saying. Doesn’t a first reading of that passage say that? Don’t you have to contruct an elaborate deconstruction of that passage in order to get it to say something entirely different from what it seems to say on a first reading?

I’ve noticed that several apologetics blogs are starting to emerge. That’s great. We need good apologists. But I also think that perhaps we are losing the basic truth of “the first read.” I know that I wish I could strip away twenty-eight years of “Bible learnin'” to be able to read a text with a first-timer’s eyes. Maybe then I could be the man of Ravenhill’s aphorism and go on to be far more than the critics would contend I could be.

So all I ask is, why are we making it all so difficult? Anyone else here desiring an Occam’s Bible Razor? (I hear Family Christian Bookstores is looking to sell a titanium one for $14.98, but don’t quote me on that!)

“Eat His Body, Drink His Blood”

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Christians today think that the worship song “revolution” that we are experiencing is something new. But for those of us who have been firmly planted on the Earth while it has gone ’round the sun forty times or more, this trend is nothing new.

Catholics like Ray Repp brought a new folk mentality to worship music around the time of Vatican II. This trickled over into Protestant churches a few years later, especially within liturgical denominations. Songs like “I Am the Resurrection,” “Lord of the Dance,” “Pass It On,” and “They’ll Know We are Christians By Our Love” all were big hits when I was growing up in the Sixties. We sang them regularly as kids and even saw a few of them creep into the adult services in the Lutheran churches I was a part of at the time.

Despite the fact that I routinely sang Larry Norman’s “I Wish We’d All Been Ready,” the one song that always seemed the strangest to me was “Sons of God”:

Sons of God, hear his holy Word,
Gather ’round the table of the Lord,
Eat His body, drink His blood,
And we’ll sing a song of love,
Hallelu, hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah!

As a young person, I found this song (very Catholic, but heartily sung in our Lutheran church at the time) always hinted at a mystery far beyond what I understood whenever the communion meal was served. But now that I am older, I find the whole thing very eerie.

As I mentioned, I grew up Lutheran. And despite the fact that no one in the Lutheran Church today will agree on this, I was taught a consubstantiation position on communion. This differs from the Catholic transubstantiation in that the bread and wine were not “magically” transformed into the body and blood of Christ before the communicant partook of the elements, but rather “something mystical” happened to those elements after they were consumed. At least that is how I understood all this in my younger days.

Later, I wound up in the Presbyterian Church. I found that their take on communion—simply a remembrance done out of the command of Christ—to be highly lacking in any sense of the transcendent, unlike my Lutheran experience. This is not to say that I grasped what I’d been taught, but the evasiveness of responses to my pressing questions to older Lutherans was bothersome. I never did get a complete handle on the Lutheran view, and if any five Lutherans of varying ages were pulled off the street in your town today, they’d all have a different take on communion, I’m certain.

Now I am not of the cannibalistic sort, but despite the fact that I’d probably get a knot in my stomach singing “Sons of God” today, something has been lost in evangelical and charismatic ranks when it comes to communion. I’d love to see us come to some higher treatment of the communion meal. It deserves more than we are giving it.

I am firmly convinced that in many ways we have simplified too greatly the entire idea of communion. A complete meal hosted in the home is more what I hope to see, and some house churches have gone this way, but I also hold out hope that an invocation and celebration of the wine and bread would entail more than the casualness we bring to it. We have lost too much mystery in our meetings, and where better to restore it than in communion?

What is your take on communion? What are your reminiscences and joys over the communion meal? What would you like to see done differently? And lastly, do you feel that we have lost something in the transcendence of the meal itself?

Blessings!