I had unwittingly been conditioned through these various facets to become rigid and declarative rather than open and inquisitive. It wasn’t until I got married that I realized how one-sided my conversation skills were (that’s a funny story for another time). Also, ubfriends gives us a unique opportunity to sift through and review our conversations. It’s been a wonderful insight because it helps me to see just how self-centered my communication often is. We don’t even begin to see this in real time conversations because we’re trying to think on our feet, constantly trying to protect our respective worldviews.

The reason why I like ubfriends is because we can have dialogues in which, even though we may deeply offend one another, we want to understand this way of life that we’ve been priveleged to be accepted into, which is Christ’s community. It necessarily entails us asking ugly, unsettling and downright upsetting questions. But in the midst of it we find perhaps more questions but also real beauty/glory and and a realization that we share more commonalities than we initially perceived. It is very difficult for me to experience this type of phenomenon in the ubf community for reasons that have been stated ad nauseam here and elsewhere. But my relentless prayer is that someday we may have real dialogue in that community.

You know, my hunch is that the female readership for ubfriends is quite high but perhaps they are reluctant to comment because the communication style seems one-sided and too abrasive. I don’t like watering down my communication style at all, but maybe as you and brian stated we could do better somehow.

Also, I appreciate the greg Boyd links you sent. I’ll watch them some time soon and let you know what I think in a manner that is as one-sided as possible, lol jk. I remember listening to a lecture series by Don Carson on the NT use of the OT. He humorously stated that we needed to first get past the huge elephant in the room which is how do we reconcile the fact that almost all of the NT authors seemingly butcher and abuse the OT text without any apology. Anyway I need to relisten to that as well.

I’m still seeking my “stance”, finding my own voice. For now I my stance is “outlaw theology” and “1 point Calvinism.” I still consider myself outside the gates of Christendom. I believe the body of Christ, the one holy catholic apostolic Church is far bigger than Christendom.

If someone asks me if I am a Christian, my answer is a non-hesitant “no”. I do claim to be following Christ and believe the gospel of grace, peace, kingdom, glory and salvation through the forgivness of sins.

Yes indeed. Talking to an unredeemed ubf person is like nailing jelly to the wall. And that is the problem. They couldn’t give a rat’s patooky what doctrinal stance you have, as long as you buy into the ubf heritage ideology and behavior modification program. (Ok end of firestorm :)

I went through the entire book with someone I was mentoring and I thought to myself, “wow even i didn’t know these basic things in detail even after being in ministry for several years.” And to those in ministry older than myself, they also found that it presented some basic, yet challenging and eye-opening truths that had never been taught or which haf been forgotten and under-emphasized.

I’m not sure if ubfs focus on sa (though poorly articulated) is the main cause for this. I was recently talking to a ministry leader in chicago about a theological issue and one of his concluding remarks was that ubf doesnt take any hard doctrinal stances, so he wanted to take an open-handed approach to what we were discussing. I felt as though this was disingenuous, for ubf is insistent on passing on it’s “scripturally based” heritage points. Might this insufficient system be a primary cause of ubfs lack of creative thinking? I don’t want to set off a firestorm with this comment because I’ve enjoyed our convo sans ubf. Just thought it fit the context here.

In any case, the story of the woman caught in adultery reverberates through my soul every time I hear it. It reveals the beauty of Jesus and I fall in love with Him all over again. It shows me the rush of the ravishing love God displayed when he said “but on the man himself do not lay a finger.” Job 1:12.

So I believe our relationship with Jesus grows in some similar way as young children grow into manhood or womanhood. We indeed needed rules and if we are children we only hear a rule in John 8:10-12, we should realize we have much growing up to do.

Sorry, blowing off some steam again.

One simple point that is clear to me is this: If we are constantly conscious of repenting of our sin and loving God by obeying commands, then we have blinders on and don’t see the people around us, even right next to us. Perhaps to “keep our eyes on Jesus” means “keep looking at those around you, your enemies, your neighbors, your friends, your family, your strangers, etc.”

Even though I think Danaher contradicts himself in his book at one point, Danaher nails this thought so very well in this higly provacatve but accurate statement (emphasis mine)…

“With respect to God, we will always be the beloved, having a human love that desires to acquire rather than to impart and create. Thus, if we are to be like him, and have his kind of love, it must be toward other human beings and not toward God. Although we cannot be God’s lover, we can be the lovers of other human beings and have the same love for them that God has for us. We are the body of Christ, and God uses us to pass on his seed and thus impregnate others with the same words of life with which we have been impregnated.”
==========
Eyes That See, Ears That Hear: Perceiving Jesus in a Postmodern Context (James P Danaher)
– Highlight Loc. 934-36

One of my concerns is that some in the church (not speaking about you, Ben) regard this kind of gospel preaching — which is rooted solidly in the modern western tradition of law and guilt — as the only kind of preaching that is truly biblical. And then if seekers don’t respond, they’ll assume it’s because the seekers are hardhearted, unrepentant, etc. and write them off.

Another of my concerns is that I don’t see how this kind of preaching leads to maturity in disciples. Do we measure maturity by how much they smile as they happily and willingly obey laws? By how much they gush about God’s grace upon their lives, about how much they disobeyed and then were forgiven of their disobedience? By how free they feel because they are no longer under condemnation? It seems to me that one of the shortcomings of certain evangelical discipleship programs is that, by presenting the SA based message over and over (far more than Jesus did) we unwittingly ask people to continually return to their conversion experience and dwell in it and make it the main story of their lives, rather then helping them to understand how to live in the radical new economy of the kingdom.

Are we ignoring the admonishment of Hebrews 6:1-2? “Therefore let us move beyond the elementary teachings about Christ and be taken forward to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death,and of faith in God, instruction about cleansing rites, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment…” It seems to me that Tchividjian’s article is just re-laying the foundation.

Brian, your quoted text from Tullian is my exact sentiment.

Dave, I hear you, though I still love creative ways of getting to Christ and the gospel, such as his concluding paragraph.

Also, might this be an alternative explanation of what Jesus wrote:

Lord, you are the hope of Israel;
all who forsake you will be put to shame.
Those who turn away from you will be written in the dust
because they have forsaken the Lord,
the spring of living water. Jer 17:13

Perhaps it was a statement of judgment upon the teachers, who would most likely be familiar with this passage. After all, the previous day Jesus offered streams of living water, which was the holy spirit or God’s very own presence and substance. And maybe this is another declarative way of jesus identifying with Yahweh as he often does in John’s gospel. But then why didn’t they stone him for blasphemy? Perhaps they were suddenly convicted by the holy spirit of their abandonment of God despite their intense religiosity. Did they just have a mind-blowing epiphany or someting? Just my speculation.

“Aha!” we cry. “See! Jesus tells her to shape up! He leaves her with an exhortation!” But look at the order of Jesus’ words: First, he tells the woman that he does not condemn her. Only then does he instruct her to sin no more. This is enormous. He does not make his love conditional on her behavior. He does not say, “Go, sin no more, and check back with me in six months. If you’ve been good, I won’t condemn you.”

I am so glad to hear someone articulate this in this manner. Whenever I hear “go and sin no more” it is in the conttext that condemnation awaits us if we have any “unrepented sin” when we die. I’m certain every human being has unrepented sin at the time of death, and repenting of our sin isn’t the point. The point, as Tchividjian makes well, is forgiveness of sins. How much we repent after that may affect our lives now, but does not affect our condemnation status.

Yes, we tend to be “irons sharpening iron” or maybe just peacocks ruffling feathers? In any case I find these discussions helpful for learning about each other. I’m not really so interested in learning “the truth” about the bible, but about learning who people are.

The problematic issue for me, Joe, is just as you observed, that we haven’t made a space for others to join in. DavidW or a few other men might push their way in from time to time. But as you say, our “strongly personal elements are there, but they are hidden below the surface. I think this is one reason why this forum is male dominated, and why (regardless of the topic being discussed) some readers feel intimidated and are afraid to join in, because they haven’t become fluent in our language, the language of positions and facts and principles.”

I wonder how we could make such a space? Do our silent readers even want such a space? Or maybe they are content to be entertained by our knuckle fights? In the end, we won’t know unless someone contacts one of us privately or here with ideas. Until that happens, I think our crazy, messy dialogues will just continue.

I will say that by being part of this conversation on ubfriends the past 4 years has helped me get to know a little more about you (Joe), Ben, Chris, Vitaly, Gerardo, JohnY, and all our ubfriends.

One thing I do believe now rather firmly is that there are multiple, faithful ways to approach Scripture within the bounds of Christian orthodoxy and the Christian tradition. Some of these sit well with modern conservative evangelicals, and some don’t. None of them is airtight. None of them is uniformly better than others. I think it is possible (even necessary) to learn how to read the Bible critically as well as religiously. By critically, I mean that we should be willing to not take everything that we see (especially in the OT) at face value if we see images of God that are distinctly unChristlike. We need to seek alternative explanations if necessary. There’s a long tradition of that in the church going way back to the early church Fathers and, I believe, to the apostles and Jesus himself. That kind of restructuring of the OT is an intrinsic part of the gospel. If we are preaching from the pulpit, I think we can do this in ways that truly honor Christ.

If you have time, here are a couple of sermons by Greg Boyd that attempt to do this. I don’t think Boyd has all the answers or even the right answers. He is careful to say that he doesn’t. But I find his approach very helpful and compelling for many people who cannot understand why so much of the Old Testament and even parts of the New Testament are, at the surface, inconsistent with what Jesus reveals about the character of God. Some people will push back against Boyd, and that’s ok. But I think we ought to at least hear him out. He’s an important voice in the conversation.

A sermon about how to understand imprecatory Psalms and violence in the OT:

http://whchurch.org/sermons-media/sermon/gods-shadow-activity

A sermon about how to understand male-dominated rules and slavery in the NT:

http://whchurch.org/sermons-media/sermon/whos-the-boss

As I look back over the intense conversations going on here over the last 2 days, I’ve noticed how often we address one another by making declarative statements. It seems to me that, as ubf members, as modern evangelicals, and as men, we have been socialized to talk to one another that way: by stating our positions (posturing) as if our statements are truth. We speak to one another with authoritative voices and project a degree of certainty in our positions which we do not actually possess. And we often forget that we are addressing real flesh-and-blood people in the context of messy human relationships. So the “dialogue” becomes: Person A states a position as if it were hard fact. Person B feels intuitively that what A said isn’t right, so B responds with a flurry of declarative statements and presents them as hard facts. The back-and-forth conversation between people is a highly personal interaction, but on the surface it appears to be impersonal, all about abstract ideas and principles. The strongly personal elements are there, but they are hidden below the surface. I think this is one reason why this forum is male dominated, and why (regardless of the topic being discussed) some readers feel intimidated and are afraid to join in, because they haven’t become fluent in our language, the language of positions and facts and principles.

David, sorry for that digression. The reason why I said those things is that I think there are lots of people who, like you and I, are actually quite confused by a lot of what we see in the Bible. The models of divine inspiration that we were given don’t (to use a scientific term) have the predictive validity that they ought to have; they don’t do a very good job of describing the texts that we actually have before us. We didn’t notice that before. The reasons why we didn’t notice that might be a mixture of fear (as you pointed out yesterday) and huge amounts of confirmation bias. When something comes along that loosens us out of our firm position (like a mildly unsettling sermon by Joe Schafer at West Loop) then a tiny crack opens in our minds and suddenly new information, evidence that doesn’t support our previous too-strong beliefs, starts to pour in. We find ourselves in a an awkward state of liminality (an awesome word, one of my new faves) that allows us to engage in thinking that is exploratory rather than confirmatory. The liminal state is very scary. But in my experience, it’s where we can really learn to walk by faith, trusting in God, in ways that we never did before. And when our minds are in that liminal state, the floodgates of learning are opened, and we can learn so much and grow at a much faster rate than ever before.

Personally, I think that the liminal state can be very good for discipleship. It’s the time when we are most open to God. Unfortunately, the popular models and methods for Christian discipleship seemed designed to get people out of liminality as soon as possible and into a state of premature certainty and premature commitment.

“Brian, if you’re still in this convo, rightly defining love is a major component of understanding God’s actions in the bible as well as our interpersonal actions of love toward one another, our enemies included. I wonder if we could understand Jesus’ and Paul’s imprecatory statements in light of true, Trinitarian love which “does not delight in evil…” Perhaps this holds part of the answer. – See more at: http://www.ubfriends.org/2014/02/04/critique-my-sermon-on-wrath/#comment-12452

Surely I’m still here :) This is all a lot to process for me. I’m having much difficulty because the words we use here are all bound up to ubfisms. I need to unbind such things. So far I’ve unbound grace and love and justice, but haven’t gotten much beyond that yet! Danaher’s book “Eyes that see, Ears that hear” helped me quite a bit.

In any case I agree that we should rigthly define many things.

For now I just want to point out two word definitions that I think is getting mixed up here. The two words are “bad” and “wrong”.

Can something be bad and yet not wrong?

“bad” means failing to reach an acceptable standard. “wrong” means failing to be just or fair; something immoral or unethical.

Both are failures, but in different ways. So when Joe speaks of “bad theology” I don’t cringe. I think the Law and the Psalms and the Prophets contain some “bad theology” in that lots of the thinking was temporary and foreshadowed the Messiah. They were right to do this, so we cannot way the Psalms, etc are wrong. I’m thinking all parts of the bible can only be best understood today in light of THE standard, Jesus. Based on this approach I have some comments on your comments. I’ll see if I can respond later today sometime.

(And thanks for your discussion with yourself!)

“They [these hard sayings] are not statements of personal vendetta, but they are utterances of zeal for the kingdom of God and his glory. To be sure, the attacks which provoked these prayers were not from personal enemies; rather, they were rightfully seen as attacks against God and especially his representatives in the promised line of the Messiah.” http://www.theopedia.com/Imprecatory_Psalms#note-2

That statement is a bit of a stretch to me. Also I didn’t realize that Jesus and Paul made some imprecatory statements: Matt 26:23-24, 1 Cor 16:24, Gal 1:8-9, Gal 5:12 and even a personal one in 2 Tim 4:14. In light of these verses arguing from the point of view of progressive revelation appears to become a somewhat untenable stance. This opens up an entirely new way of looking at scripture though. Am I thinking rightly here?

I’ve seen that some churches impose the Law on people by enforcing their preferred doctrine, ideology, methodology, liturgy, ecclesiology, eschatology, etc by communicating it as non-negotiable by insisting that “This is what the Bible teaches.”

This then just makes people like unthinking clones without critical thinking, or it makes them legalistic and moralistic. It also somehow makes them anal, rigid and inflexible in ways that do not communicate the freedom and rest that the Trinity of the gospel gives. That’s why Christians sadly often fail to communicate the abundant life Christ promises to his followers (Jn 10:10b).

“This pastor has urged his congregation to pray imprecatory prayers against some folks that blew the whistle on his violations of the separation of church and state laws (i.e. he endorsed Mr. Huckabee on letterhead church stationery and urged his congregation to do the same).

His supposed Biblical precedent for this is the imprecatory psalms of David. I don’t know what seminary this pastor went to, but boy has he misunderstood those psalms. They don’t reveal the will of God in such matters, rather they shed God’s light of truth on what is in the wicked heart of human beings, including in David’s heart, that old murderer and adulterer. Praying for someone to bash the Edomite babies’ heads on the rocks ought to even give Brother Dobson the willies.” http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/2007/08/pastor-approves-cursing-your-enemies.html?m=1

Correct me if I’m wrong but witherington seems to imply that God inspired David to write the imprecatory psalms partly so that future readers could be given a negative example of prayer.

If so my follow-up question is that since david is the shepherd of Israel how is it that he could have disseminated bad theology? We could see that it’s errant in light of the gospel, but how would David’s contemporaries know that? I suppose that this is one of the tragic implications of israel’s reluctance to accept god as their true king.

Vpi theory is one way to reconcile human agency mixed with divine inspiration. Its framers assert that the holy spirit guided the biblical authors to write ( verbal) absolutely everything (plenary) that god wanted them to write all whilst communicating this through their respective cultural lenses. Sounds plausible but as I said, not airtight. For instance how then would witherington or yourself make sense of this knowing that david inserted some of his own ideas about god, that were perhaps wrong or exaggerated, into what was to be inspired text? I suppose you could say that since the bible is a progressive revelation it’s to be understood that we wouldn’t see crystallized, orthodox theology until later on in the bible. Perhaps this is a satisfying explanation to some but it still leaves me feeling a bit uneasy. And you know that what most evangelicals would do with the psalms is try to crowbar some gospel or crystalized theological meaning into it. They would begin by saying, “Oh no, no, no this is what david actually meant…”.

Since Ben quoted Galatians 5:22-23 I’m sure Ben is trying to say that the OT law is no longer binding on Christ-followers because the Spirit is our “binding” and against the fruit of the Spirit there is no law :)

Just kidding!

Anyway thanks for this epic yet messy discourse guys and gal. I’m not sure we know what we are saying but I’m glad we are discussing sermons and a whole range of topics. We just can’t expect to have smooth well-articulated perfect conversations.

Now I’m going to take a bubble bath with some rum.

I agree that Gal 5:22-23 should be evident as identifying marks in every Christian life. But why not? Partly incomplete doctrine, poor teaching, all egged on by our three enemies–the world, the devil and ourselves that are ever before us.

I’m not exactly sure what you’re trying to get at.

And if the Trinity is real, shouldn’t we experience them? The fact is that the doctrine of the Trinity didn’t emerge out of thin air, nor is it merely an analysis of Scripture. The early church formulated the doctrine of the Trinity as their best description of how they actually experienced God.

Did I get to talk with you at West Loop? I’ve got an awful memory. If the apostles had memories like mine, there’s no way they could write inerrant accounts of Jesus.

It’s interesting that most evangelicals attempt to define exactly what scripture is as if they have fully understood the intention of God when he inspired the Bible. My hunch is that many hold this stance out of fear. Like you said, it is a jarring notion to think that we don’t have all of the answers, that to have our view of scripture augmented will somehow snatch the footing of our faith from underneath us. I’m reading History of Interpretation by F.W. Farrar. It’s a considerably long overview of theories of scriptural interpretation/inspiration throughout history. He quotes one scholar as saying:

“If you ask me, for a precise theory of Inspiration, I confess that I can only urge you to repudiate all theories, to apply to theology the maxim which guided Newton in philosophy, hypothesis non fingo, and to rest your teaching upon the facts which God has made known to us.”

I think it’s an audacious statement to say that we’ve figured this thing out. Also, whenever we settle staunchly on one view, we tend to make an unnecessary wall of hostility out of it thereby excluding others who don’t hold said view.

One example is the insistence on the theory of verbal plenary inspiration by evangelicals. While this sounds very plausible, I don’t think it’s an airtight theory. For instance, why do other valid Christian faith traditions, Catholic and Easter Orthodox, include different books in their cannons? Also, it seems as though we have to greatly massage some bible passages which seem to say factually, and sometimes theologically, different things in order for VPI to hold. What do you personally think of VPI theory?

You’re quite right that it is hard to set forth a positive vision of the kingdom.

My short answer for an abundant life is intimacy with the Trinity. How does one attain that? Different strokes for different folks (I was going to say blokes, sorry!). I like to say that we need to avail ourselves to God, so that God might extend his grace to us on his terms.

I want to take scripture seriously. I believe it is divinely inspired. And yet it is a human document that was produced by historical human cultural processes. One of the processes that occurred during the first century is a rapid evolution of understanding about what Jesus’ death, resurrection, ascension and Pentecost meant, what they revealed about God, and what they revealed about the church and Jewish-Gentile relations and how God’s kingdom plan is unfolding in history. Since we don’t know precise dates for the books of the NT there’s a lot that we can’t tell. But that evolution of understanding must be reflected in the NT. This kind of discussion can be unsettling for people who hold certain doctrines about Scripture because they tend to think that acknowledging any elements of ordinary human cultural processing would only detract from the divine inspiration and inevitably plant unhealthy doubt. But I tend to think that models of inspiration that don’t allow for natural cultural processing will inevitably produce a kind of unhealthy faith.

“In the face of severe abuse, active intervention is the most loving thing that a loving being can do. Not to do so would be unloving. – See more at: http://www.ubfriends.org/2014/02/04/critique-my-sermon-on-wrath/#comment-12437

I cannot process the “passive and active wrath of God” presently. As someone mentioned here recently love is usually presented as an action. The trickly part is staying within the definitions in 1 Corinthians 13:1-13.

If I had been in your group, I would have raised lots of questions though. For example, I would have pressed you to describe your vision of the abundant life and then explain more about how Jesus brings it about. It’s easy to talk about how money and success don’t buy happiness etc. but much harder to set forth a positive vision of the kingdom that can capture people’s imagination and generate powerful hope.

The Relationship of Love to Evil. We can safely begin by saying that any teaching about God’s ultimate dealing with sin and sinners must be consistent with His love. The problem for us humans is how to bring together everything we know about God without creating unacceptable contradictions. How should love respond to evil? Does love always sit back and wait for evil to resolve itself by itself, or does love at times intervene actively to prevent evil from carrying out its harmful designs? I propose that active intervention may be the most loving thing that a loving being, divine or human, can do. Several years ago I heard a couple of stories that illustrate the point well.

The first story is about a family in which the father sexually abuses his daughter. One day he goes into the girl’s bedroom, and a few minutes later the mother hears the daughter crying out, “No, Daddy, No! Please, Daddy, stop!” So the mother goes to an adjoining room, kneels down, and prays for God to intervene.

In the second story, the teenage daughter of a black sharecropper gets pregnant, but she hesitates to tell her parents, because she fears that her father will kill her. Finally, however, it becomes impossible to hide the evidence, so before her father guesses the problem, she approaches him on the front porch of their cabin. When he learns that she’s going to have a baby, he attacks her violently. In the midst of her screams, the front door to the cabin bursts open. The girl’s mother leaps out, points a rifle at her husband, and shouts, “You strike my daughter one more time and you’re a dead man!”

The question is, which mother showed the most love for her daughter—the one who prayed passively or the one who intervened actively? I think the answer is obvious. In the face of severe abuse, active intervention is the most loving thing that a loving being can do. Not to do so would be unloving.

The exception is 1 John (which most believe was written after Revelation) where he seems to focus more on the love of God as well as the love of believers toward one another. Could it be that since he wrote this letter after the destruction of Jerusalem his gospeling came from a place of deep reflection upon God’s ability to rescue his people even in the midst of cataclysmic destruction? And with all of the dust settled (though Christians were increasingly being persecuted), he felt secure because he drew deeply from the well of God’s love. He realized that the one thing that trumps any and all kinds of fear is God’s divine, perfect love. That the most important aspect of the fellowship of believers, despite persecution from within and without as well as the impending return of Christ, is love for God and love for each other. When all else passes away, love will endure for all of eternity.

And perhaps wrath is a key feature of Paul and Peter’s preaching because they had this idea that Jesus was returning very soon and that God would judge the world with finality? Maybe a huge part of the good news of Jesus’ message, to them, was that it was not only a way to reconnect with the Triune God but in so doing also a way to escape his divine wrath.

Anyway, despite the prominence of surprise endings, the Bible seems to be clear that if we don’t harbor love for the Triune God and one another then we cannot say that we truly belong to him. Could this be a criteria for salvation? I think that our proclamation or confession of Jesus as Lord should come from genuinely experiencing his love. This is what convicted me from your sermon; that if we truly experience the love of the Trinitarian God, then it will so radically change us inwardly that it will yield some outward manifestation, namely in how we acknowledge God on a daily basis as well as by how we love others. Any thoughts on this?

I think a reason why some of us are exasperated with some of our older leaders is that they absolutely refuse to give their personal opinion, because they firmly believe that as leaders whatever they say and do must be representative of UBF as a whole. That’s why it’s hard for some of them to honestly express their own personal opinion.

I’m digressing of course. I regard the tree of life as the abundance of life that God intends for us to live both individually, corporately, communally, even cosmically (Jn 10:10b). But since we lost access to the tree of life, such an abundant life that God intends for us cannot reach its utmost fulfillment. That’s why famous rich successful people are not necessarily happier that poor struggling masses of people. Sometimes the converse might be truer. Happiness and fulfillment comes from God and from the life that God gives us, which we lost when we could no longer access the tree of life.

This ultimate restoration of the life God intends for us will happen with the ushering of a new heaven and a new earth (Rev 21:1) when Jesus returns as a Bridegroom to claim his Bride, the church. Till then, we will live with a sense of hopeful anticipation of “already” and “not yet.”

I don’t think this is a SA articulation, is it?

And that God will actively apply plagues to people who add stuff to Revelation that is not actually there. Maybe a scary warning not to use the book to build elaborate shaky theories about things that God has kept hidden?

And that God will actively take away a share in the tree of life from those who take stuff out of Revelation. The eternal-security forces can’t be liking that.

Interpreting the Bible well is really hard!

I’m not exactly sure how I would handle those verses right now. I am in a state of transition. I am keenly aware of how I used to read into every part of the Bible a message of individual salvation in terms of life after death. But I’m trying to take off those glasses and imagine how the apostles would have read those verses. I don’t have an apostolic eyeglass prescription yet.

Honestly, I don’t follow what you meant when you said, “we spoke about how success, fame, popularity and wealth cannot fulfill us human beings because the tree of life is no longer physically accessible to us in this world.” I don’t see how the part after the word “because” relates to the part before it.

Looking over Revelation 22, I noticed that the tree of life is for the healing “of the nations.” I noticed that this was testimony specifically addressed “to the churches” (i.e. for Christian communities) and not simply for all individuals everywhere no matter who they may be. And I noticed that the invitation to come and drink the water of life is in the present tense and has immediacy. Somehow I sense that this passage is not merely giving us hope as individuals for eternal life in the future; there’s something valuable here about our corporate life as God’s people in the present, and maybe about that life playing a role in healing the nations. Going through the gates into the city may be more of a present reality than I have always thought.

How else might you handle Gen 3:24 and Rev 22:14?

As I reflect on meeting with people in small groups for life discussion and/or “loose informal Bible study” (I rarely meet people one on one anymore and have not used question sheets for several years), I actually do not force SA down people’s throat. Depending on what we are discussing, I usually quote a verse or start from some life story.

On Mon we discussed Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s death by heroin overdose in a small group. I could have said, “He didn’t accept Jesus who died for his sins.” (Of course, no one knows whether he did or not.)

But since we were discussing about the tree of life, we spoke about how success, fame, popularity and wealth cannot fulfill us human beings because the tree of life is no longer physically accessible to us in this world (Gen 3:24). Our only hope is to access this tree again by washing our robes first (Rev 22:14).

I didn’t speak about SA but about how much we humans need to know the life that God intends for us to live.

Sorry for just rambling. I actually hardly ever use the phrase SA in sharing, teaching or preaching.

“That was too much for Festus. He interrupted with a shout: “Paul, you’re crazy! You’ve read too many books, spent too much time staring off into space! Get a grip on yourself, get back in the real world!”

But Paul stood his ground. “With all respect, Festus, Your Honor, I’m not crazy. I’m both accurate and sane in what I’m saying. The king knows what I’m talking about. I’m sure that nothing of what I’ve said sounds crazy to him. He’s known all about it for a long time. You must realize that this wasn’t done behind the scenes. You believe the prophets, don’t you, King Agrippa? Don’t answer that—I know you believe.”

Striving for gospel preaching that tries to cut people to the heart is a laudable goal. But sometimes it falls flat, not because the speaker isn’t passionate, but because he fails to address the points of cognitive dissonance that are serious barriers to faith and discipleship.

If a person doesn’t understand in what sense Jesus could have died for him, and if the preacher doesn’t have a clear and satisfying explanation but just asserts it with passion (not accusing you of anything here) then pushing for the heart won’t work very well.

The death of Jesus was an actual event in space and time. To pull it out of its historical context and then proclaim by faith that it now applies to everyone everywhere is a huge leap. To take one historical event and construct universal principles from it and then proclaim those principles as absolute truth is a huge leap. It sits squarely within a western modernist framework that doesn’t resonate with lots of people right now. There are all sorts of objections to making that leap, objections that are quite real and sound and need to be identified and addressed with solid answers. (Just identifying the questions can be extremely hard.) Some of us sense we are called to do that hard work of figuring these things out. These are precisely the things that Newbigin focused on in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. His reasoning is hard to follow but very useful and important. He saw the failure of this western modernist framework in India and brought those experiences back west. These things may be head issues but they are also heart issues.

But I am who I am. I am me. I am humbled to the ground because I am compelled to obey what the Spirit is directing me to do, which is to speak the gospel in a prophetic manner with my own “karcher” voice and accept all kinds of disparaging labels and eye-popping condemnations and surprised/shocked looks (those who read my comments here must think I’ve become insane).

“Thanks, Brian, Do you think a non-church, Bible illiterate audience might understand #5 more than #1-#4?”

I don’t know. I don’t guess at what message will affect any audience at any given time. I just know that #5 has been beaten to death (pun intended) and many people don’t respond to that right now. Perhaps if we explored the vastness of these messages people wouldn’t be leaving churches. I find the churches where people are actually going to (Such as my own Grace Community) are churches with leaders who articulate the other messages well. I’ve been cut to the heart through worship, whereby the glory of Christ is lifted up, for example.

“Given you have a few minutes of opportunity to share the gospel with someone who is fairly open (or not open), would you actually choose #1-4 over #5?”

Absolutely :) I would actually listen for the Spirit to direct me what to say, whithout overthinking it. In fact I would speak what the Spirit directs me to say regardless of consequences out of my utmost obedience to the gospel and to the Spirit (as I’m doing now :)

I read what you’re saying. I could conceivably agree with #1-4. I’m not saying it is wrong, or unbiblical. But it has no emotive or emotionally engaging sentiment to me. It is rather abstract and impersonal. But someone dying for me in my place out of love for me cuts straight to the heart.

Maybe #5 gets old to some Christians. (I suspect it is because it is poorly and incomprehensively presented.) My thought is that it should never get old. I am not denying that Christ is my King, my Lord, my Messiah, my Prophet and Priest, my Advocate, my all in all. But the fact that he is my Substitute, Sacrifice and Lover cuts to the heart more than the others. Maybe that’s just me.

The most moving Hollywood stories involve someone dying for someone else. Sorry for a bad cheesy example, but Titanic comes to mind.

To force fit all this into one SA theory or one statement just doesn’t work for me and apparantly for a lot of other people. I simply can no longer be convinced that I am personally responsible for Jesus’ death. And right now it is the other gospel messages that cut me to the heart.

In the passage you mention, the people present were “cut to the heart”. This is “katenugesan te kardia” in Greek– “severely troubled and made sorrowful.” The Holy Spirit used Peter’s message to evoke a state of mind in which they were ready to respond to the Gospel in faith.

How could the Spirit do this apart from preaching “Jesus died for you out of love for you”?

First of all as I and Joe and Sharon repeatedly said, you are correct. The Spirti can and does convict of guilt, showing us that we have broken the law and are in need of the atoning sacrifice in our place, who is Jesus on the cross. The gospel message related to this is that message of the kingdom. This message is very moving to me, and surely this message of the gospel impacted my life and continues to impact me.

What I find wrong with your articulation above is the individual, personal blame and responsibility for killing Jesus. To say “Jesus died for me out of love” is correct. But to extend that and say “I personally am responsible for killing Jesus” just seems incorrect to me.

And furthermore, my bigger point is that there are at least 4 other major ways that the Spirit does convict and “cut to the heart”.

1. The gospel message of Jesus’ glory that cuts to the heart because Prophet Jesus fulfilled the Law/Prophets/promises and touches our shame.

2. The gospel message of God’s grace that cuts to the heart because Priest Jesus forgives us and touches our sin.

3. The gospel message of God’s peace that cuts to the heart because Author Jesus narrates our faith and touches our curse.

4. The gospel message of God’s salvation that cuts to the heart because Messiah Jesus was born and touches our death.

And yes, as you are saying I agree this is correct:

5. The gospel message of God’s kingdom that cuts to the heart because King Jesus died for us and touches our guilt.

What I genuinely and truly do not understand is how a believer might be cut to the heart other than by knowing (through the work of the Holy Spirit) that someone loves them to the extent of dying for them.

And I don’t ever want to define my spirituality as a reaction against SA. I am consciously reacting against some aspects of SA, but as I do I want to remain focused on Christ. (And the Trinity. Because the real Jesus is a Trinitarian Jesus.)

But let me digress for a moment by talking about UBF. There are people who have told me, “Joe, you have some good ideas. Why don’t you help UBF by gently and respectfully bringing those ideas into the UBF community?” When they say that to me, I get ticked off, because you know how hard I tried to do just that. UBF will tolerate some new things to a point. But very quickly, the UBF organism’s immune system sounds the alarm. “Intruder detected! Intruder detected! Foreign ideas present!” The white blood cells identify the intruder, surround it, begin to chew it up and spit it out.

Or to abruptly change the metaphor: Suppose UBF were a Christmas tree. (Maybe it’s a sick tree. Maybe it’s a scrawny, deformed Charlie Brown tree, but there are Charlies out there who love it and see beauty in it. That’s beside the point.) Some people think that you can dress up the tree by hanging some more ornaments on it. To some extent you can. But many of us have tried and found that, after a point, the ornaments can’t be hung because there are no hooks and no places to attach the ornaments. The tree humors you for a while but soon it says, “No more” and just rejects your ornaments. Some people seem willing and able to spend the rest of their lives hanging around, cajoling the tree into accepting the new ornaments. But others of us can’t or won’t. We won’t spend the rest of our lives trying to beautify the UBF tree because that is not what God really wants of us. Life is not all about UBF! There’s a whole forest of trees, and God cares about the forest, and about the big wide world beyond the forest. Focusing on the one dysfunctional tree and trying to help it when it clearly does not want to be helped becomes at some point a waste of one’s valuable life.

OK, now I want to switch over from talking about UBF to talking about the gospel. Some people seem perfectly content and happy to hang around the tree of substitutionary atonement. Some can find find a meaningful faith and community within the SA virtual community. (That community is looser and more diverse than UBF.) Some have a satisfying vocation making new ornaments and hanging them on the SA tree. But sooner or later, we encounter very useful ideas, very faithful Christian ideas, that the SA body doesn’t want to tolerate; the SA immune system gets activated and tries to immobilize and expel them. Or we find really nice and beautiful ornaments but cannot find hooks for them or branches to hang them on the SA tree. We get frustrated because the situation is, well, quite frustrating. And then someone comes along and says, “Joe, you have some good ideas. Why don’t you stop criticizing or hurting people’s gospel faith and use your talents for constructively helping people to deepen their gospel faith?” But when they say “gospel” what they really mean is SA because they don’t know that there is anything faithfully Christian besides SA. And I get ticked off because they haven’t got a clue that for a very long time now I have been trying to do exactly what they said I should do, and it hasn’t been working.

Perhaps, but in this case I would suggest “third option” or trinitarian thinking.

If someone, out of love for me, died for a crime that I deserved to die, it cuts to the heart by the work of the Holy Spirit.

Yes, no one can dictate how the Holy Spirit cuts to the heart. Yet, shouldn’t there be some plausible explanation or articulation exactly as to how the Holy Spirit cuts to the heart apart from someone dying for you out of their love for you?

Ben, I just cannot believe you are being honest here. You don’t know about the homosexuals in Chicago ubf? Maybe you don’t hang out, but surely you do know who they are?

Regarding this topic, I’m glad to know that there are some in ubf (such as in Toledo ubf) who are openly admitting they are gay. I haven’t hear the reaction yet though.

“Might this be a significant reason why our readership is down?”

This makes no sense to me. I sent you the statistics from Google. We have a steady average of about 200 unique readers per day. The readership is only down relative to the big spike during the ISBC. Maybe you can explain further what you are getting at here?

“Joe, Brian, It does not seem to me that this prior comment of mine was addressed: “I’m really not sure how a believer at any time would be cut to the heart if they were not responsible in some real way for the death of the Messiah. – See more at: http://www.ubfriends.org/2014/02/04/critique-my-sermon-on-wrath/#comment-12409

Here is the first part of my reply in regard to how someone could be cut to the heart apart from the way you mention. I’m not saying your way is bad, just that there are many other ways to be cut to the heart.

“Ben, I see the job of “cutting to the heart” as the job of the Holy Spirit. Surely it is the Spirit who convicts? John 16:8
In Acts 2:37, how can we be so sure what “this” refers to? Does “this” refer only to “…whom you crucified..” Might it also or instead refer to the Lordship and other teachings Peter spoke?
My point is not that no one can be cut to the heart from thinking they crucified Jesus. Maybe someone could. My point is that such a teaching is wrong (can someone be cut to the heart by the Spirit through wrong teaching? Maybe.)

Also we Christ-followers have no right to usurp the Spirit’s role in deciding how to convict. The Spirit is quite creative I think and can surely “cut to the heart” in a million different ways.
– See more at: http://www.ubfriends.org/2014/02/04/critique-my-sermon-on-wrath/#comment-12394

But being an introvert who is for the most part not sociable or outgoing, I do not engage well with outsiders. Based on Eph 4:11, evangelist is my weakest attribute. But if someone introduces me to gays or non-believers I will not judge or condemn them or “impose my doctrine” on them. I do primarily want to be friends and share life and stories as much as and as far as they want to go.

On the other extreme, might be the “do nothing” hyperCalvinists.

But I really do not think that it is the fault of SA. I regard it as the fault of our fallen humanity that causes us to pervert something true and beautiful into something it is not.

It’s like John McArthur’s Strange Fire conference where he virtually condemned a half billion charismatics to hell.

This is just sinners being sinners who misconstrue theology to their own inkling and inclination.

Would not a “both/and” approach be better than an “either/or” stance?

I’m not trying to get into a discussion specifically about homosexuality. This is part of a serious question. Who decides what is truly loving? The one who says that he is loving, or the one who is supposed to be feeling that love but might not be feeling it?

My own experience is that UBF assumes SA, without ever using the term. (Several times when I mentioned “penal substitutionary atonement,” some people looked as though they thought I was trying to show off.) Without using the term, yet for the most part the assumed SA was rarely ever taught well with beauty, mystery and majesty. But when I began reading and listening to Tim Keller and others, I was floored at how SA just completely captivates my soul with beauty, mystery and majesty.

To my sentiment, SA incorporates eternal life and the glorious hope of the kingdom of God.

Because of a deep appreciation of SA, I think that I am able to fully embrace homosexuals from my heart without cringing and without being judgmental or critical.

I believe that all of this is the work of the Holy Spirit in my heart.

Might such Christian leaders be any different from the so-called “super apostles” Paul talks about in Corinthians, or about those who preach the gospel out of envy and rivalry and not out of goodwill (Phil 1:15)?

I agree that the gospel is a bottomless ocean. I agree that many problems in the church is a result of reductionism and reductionistic teachings.

But I also know that knowing more or better theology does not make one a better Christian, and that some who know very little are wonderful Christians. I’m not advocating that one should not study and know more. I personally love to read and study. But it is so obvious that one who reads and knows more can just as easily fall into sin (pride, arrogance, dismissive of others, etc), as one who does not.

I really think that many of us who went through UBF (or other churches, such as the recent iHOP article) got screwed up in some way. Now it seems like many things that we were taught or learned in UBF (or iHOP or our original church), we seem to regard as inferior, sub-par, bad or simply downright wrong. I personally don’t think this is healthy.

UBF implicitly communicates “in or out,” “either/or.” Are we not doing the same thing?

Once some of us may have tragically idolized UBF, myself obviously included. But are we now idolizing “anything not UBF” to use as ammunition against UBF?

I’m not trying to be funny. The kickback against “anything UBF” seems to be quite palpably strong on this ubFRIENDS site. This is just my subjective sentiment and opinion.

Might this be a significant reason why our readership is down?

These questions are difficult but for me they are extremely important. They cut to the heart of what it means to faithfully believe, understand, articulate and proclaim the gospel in these postmodern times.

Your last paragraph above hits the nail on the head. You said it in a stronger way than I would have. But the answer is basically yes. I do believe that substitutionary atonement (SA) is one way of articulating or explaining some aspects of the gospel. The kernel of SA falls within the realm of faithful gospel preaching. But let me give the harshest version of what I am trying to say. I will make it intentionally harsh, just to make my point. The next two paragraphs contain intentional exaggeration. But they do reflect some of what I truly think and feel.

Yes, in many circles (e.g. UBF), SA has been seriously dumbed down. Yes, SA has been made tribal/sectarian; there are many tribes within the church that are functionally centered on SA rather than on Jesus Christ and God himself. Yes, SA has often been infused with lots of ideas about God’s character that are misleading or downright wrong. SA fails to explain a lot of what I see in the New Testament and especially the Old Testament. SA doesn’t jump out of the four gospels and Acts as the main story that the evangelists and apostles told. So although SA can be found in the Bible, to say that SA is the overarching story of the Bible seems, well, seriously unbiblical.

And Ben, even though I will honor your testimony and believe that SA resonates with you at a deep level, there are many of us for whom it fails to touch our souls or capture our imaginations. And that’s not because we haven’t read enough of Piper, Grudem, etc. It’s not because we are ignorant, foolish, stubborn or willfully rebellious. It’s not because we can’t bear to hear the hard truth about ourselves and our own sinfulness. It fails to do for me what many preachers (for example, Francis Chan) are continually promising that it must do, to lead us into a deep love relationship with God. In many cases it has failed to make mature, loving, attractive, irenic Christians. And in many places it has failed to build church communities that are diverse, open, loving, attractive, amazing pictures of the kingdom. It just does not strike me as amazingly beautiful. And it has failed to give me a big-picture imagination and guidance about how to address many of the thorny ethical issues of the day (e.g., homosexuality) that have become flashpoints of conflict and culture war.

I do not claim that everyone, or even most people, are like me. But I have anecdotal evidence that significant numbers of people sense what I sense, even if they don’t have the vocabulary to explain it. There are self-identified Christians who cannot bear to be told that we have to go back to drink from the SA well again and again because it is the deepest and purest well or the only well. There are self-identified nonChristians who are attracted to Jesus himself but who cannot come into church environments because the SA version of the gospel doesn’t captivate them with beauty. It has failed to give me a faith that truly speaks to me in my own language, a faith that fits who I am and who I want to become. And it has failed to show me how the gospel of universal truth (Jesus is the only way to God) can address the deepest and hardest questions of all people in this pluralistic world.

So please understand why I sense the need to stop trying to make SA the center of my spirituality for a while and search elsewhere for spiritual nourishment. I don’t want to diss anyone who is deeply satisfied with SA. But I need to look for an articulation of the where Jesus’ vision of the kingdom is at the very center of the proclamation, not an addendum, and where the cross is at the very center of that kingdom vision. McKnight and Wright are helping me a lot in that regard. They don’t have all the answers. But they have shown me that my gospel boat is very leaky; in fact it has lots of holes. I don’t yet know how to plug those holes. But I’m doing the best I can.

God made Christ to be sin for us (2 Cor 5:21).

Christ became a curse for us (Gal 3:13).

Christ suffered for sins (1 Pet 3:18).

The entire OT sacrificial system of shedding the blood of an innocent animal to atone for man’s sin was pointing to One who would shed his blood for the sin of the world (Jn 1:29).

God’s manifold ways and wisdom in saving fallen humanity is surely beyond our comprehension. But countless millions through out the centuries perhaps have come to Christ because they personally felt responsible that their individual personal sin caused Christ death.

I’m still convinced that presenting this to the world is not butchering the teaching of salvation–both individually and corporately. I’m really not sure what the kickback to this is, as though it is some sort of horribly unbiblical teaching.

I do not mind listening to Tom Wright and McKnight. But I said in a previous comment that I highly doubt if a secular non-churched Bible illiterate audience will understand their cerebral and intellectual presentation of the gospel to any significant degree. It really does not seem emotive or emotionally engaging to me to cause any sinner to be cut to the heart.

But to understand that man’s life of willful sin and rebellion caused the death of an innocent One is the simple elementary gospel. This would be shallow enough for a child to swim in and deep enough for the most profound theologian.

So I’m really not clear what the objection or kickback is, as though SA is an inferior, incomplete, dumbed down or tribal/sectarian or even bad/wrong version of the gospel, or that SA is somehow diminishing or obscuring a better or purer form of the “true” gospel.

I’m curious why Peter never addressed “fellow Romans”? Or did he and I’m just missing it?

Like I mentioned above a case could also be made that an entire community “killed” Jesus, in fact maybe we could say all humanity “killed Jesus”. But I see no case for placing such guilt on individual people, like I once believed.

In Acts 2:37, how can we be so sure what “this” refers to? Does “this” refer only to “…whom you crucified..” Might it also or instead refer to the Lordship and other teachings Peter spoke?

My point is not that no one can be cut to the heart from thinking they crucified Jesus. Maybe someone could. My point is that such a teaching is wrong (can someone be cut to the heart by the Spirit through wrong teaching? Maybe.)

Also we Christ-followers have no right to usurp the Spirit’s role in deciding how to convict. The Spirit is quite creative I think and can surely “cut to the heart” in a million different ways.

I hear what you are saying. For many years I cowered in fear and guilt thinking that I killed Jesus. But I no longer have such fear or guilt. Perfect love has driven out such fear.

Peter addresses “Fellow Israelites” and point out a fact (not blaming them) that the Israelites of that generation (not all Israelites) did kill Jesus. Why extrapolate this to make substitionary atonement “work”? In Acts 3 we see the same thing, “Men of Israel”. The “you killed Jesus” message was for the Israelite generation of that time and merely a fact, not meant to be taken so literally that we send a holocaust to all Jews and not meant to be preached to Gentiles.

Hebrews declares rather boldly that even this sin of killing Jesus does not preclude Jews from the forgiveness of God and does not prevent them from being saved. So because of Hebrews we avoid the anti-Semitic accusation.

I see no need to go beyond the text here. And if someone preaches to me that I must believe I or my sins killed Jesus, I just laugh.

So I see preaching “You killed Jesus” to us Gentiles as simply wrong, but not beyond what the Spirit could use to convict. Is there any example of such teaching to Gentiles in the bible? If so then I would have to modify my position.

My stance is that if God’s love is unconditional and grace is fully unmerited, then we could not possibly do anything sinful enough to be responsible an individual level to warrant the teaching that we Gentiles killed Jesus. The only way to claim we Gentiles killed Jesus would be to put conditions on God’s love and bar up the way to grace with human merit.

The question then remains could we corporately create enough sin to be responsible? I don’t see how but maybe someone has an argument here.

I think the point of Peter’s sermon is that God does *not* hold the Jews responsible for killing Jesus. I believe the promises in the OT and NT tell us that in the end God will forgive Jews and anyone who is His enemy, and He will do so in a perfectly just manner.

And finally I believe the basis for my thoughts here are again rooted in Romans 9:1-33, especially Romans 9:19-26. I really believe none of the events on the cross were directly caused by human effort or sin, though certainly related. The events are rooted in God’s will to demonstrate his love.

That is precisely the subject of a fascinating lecture by N.T. Wright. It’s the *third* lecture in this series:
http://www.cslewisinstitute.org/audio/by/album/finding_and_following_the_true_jesus
If you have an hour to spare sometime, listen to it. But be forewarned: for those of us who have been conditioned to think of sin primarily in terms of individual guilt, the ideas are initially confusing and mind boggling.

(http://www.catholic.com/magazine/articles/what-no-salvation-outside-the-church-means)

Also, a segment of the Jewish crowd were not local dwellers who killed Jesus, but were visitors during the Passover. Also, Jesus’ own Jewish band of disciples also did not go along with killing him. So, then “you killed the author of life” did not apply to the visitors, nor to the disciples (the 12 and the 120), the women who followed him, and to all believers for the next 2,000 years to this day.

I’ve asked this before: but I’m not sure what the conviction of sin would be by proclaiming the gospel as King Jesus being the fulfillment and climax of Israel’s story.

I’m really not sure how a believer at any time would be cut to the heart if they were not responsible in some real way for the death of the Messiah.

Firstly, I deeply appreciate your treatment of the trinity and how it helps us to understand not only the love of God but who God is. After about four years of being a Christian and basing everything around the SA model, Christianity began to become dull and predictable (though this is probably more of a reflection of my shallow understanding of SA at the time, but still, after hearing SA ad nauseam, I had this nagging feeling that there should be more). Around that time I began listening to Mark Driscoll’s doctrine series. Driscoll made the first lesson about the trinity because he realized it’s importance in helping the church to frame it’s attitude aright toward God and one another. This began a pivotal point in my Christian life.

Shortly after this I learned of the term “perichoresis” or the divine, happy dance as you put it. Then there was the “unio mystica” which you describe as the God head indwelling us and us indwelling it in some mysterious and glorious fashion. These truths blew my mind at the time and still do when I meditate on them.

The doctrine of the trinity also made SA complete, at least for me, in a sense. It informed me that there was much more to Christianity than Jesus’ death and resurrection, though these are unquestionably indispensable truths as well as the necessary starting point of our union with the Triune God. I love hearing sermons and illustrations that unpack the trinity; it never gets old. To me, apart from the crucifixion event, it is one of the most breathtaking and beautiful aspects of Christianity. It also helps us to understand the true devastation of sin; it separates us from this Triune God who’s love, joy and fullness are incomprehensible. So when we break faith with God we are missing out on so many levels.

Anyway, enough of my gushing about the trinity. I also have a comment about your treatment of wrath. While I agree that what Paul is describing in Romans 1 is the passive wrath of God, we also clearly see his active wrath, not only in the OT, but also in the NT as well. If we turn to Romans 2 we immediately see language that is indicative of active wrath (Rom 2:5-9). Also, if we have a problem with God’s active wrath in the OT, then we will have major problems with this in Revelations, namely Rev 19:11-21. Presumably, Jesus metes out justice upon his enemies with finality in that passage.

I would argue that God’s active wrath is actually an attribute of his love. I’m never one to say that “yes God is loving, but…”. No, anger and love are part and parcel of one another. God shows his active wrath toward his enemies in order to take pernicious and entangling evil completely out of the presence of those he loves. From another point of view, his wrathful judgment against those who are evil is actually a mercy to them for if he did not completely destroy them then they would live in an eternity of anguish and separation from him. This paper gives a decent treatment of both God’s active and passive wrath: http://www.atsjats.org/publication_file.php?pub_id=10&journal=1&type=pdf

This stood to me from the link: “I was in the hospital for a suicide attempt and stayed for ten days.”

A related teaching based on the wrath of God presentation of the gospel is that suicide is the “unforgivable sin”. I contend that suicide is NOT the unforgivable sin, for the same type of reasons that I reject the “I killed Jesus” thinking. Both are wrong and harmful as far as I can tell.

See a concrete example in this testimony. Quote: “They kept saying, ‘Curtiss, it was your sins that did this to Jesus. You crucified him.'”

(No, I’m not commenting again, just providing a relevant link ;-)

But it seems that you made an immediate jump from Peter’s “you” (meaning the Jewish people as a whole, who corporately committed the heinous crime of rejecting Jesus the true God of Israel as their king) to your “I” (meaning you as an individual, who are guilty of all sorts of personal infractions). Before making that quantum jump, I think it behooves us to pause and linger for a while in the actual historical context, to think more about what Peter’s words meant to him and to that specific group of people at that specific time. If we do, it may shed some new light on (a) the corporate nature of sin, (b) the historical flow of God’s redemptive plan at that time, (c) the nature of Jesus’ kingdom and kingship, how/why the people rejected it, and many other things that we (as individualistic postEnlightenment western evangelical Protestants) have tended to skip over. It seems to me that, in a split second, your mind took a passage that is squarely about “the King Jesus gospel” (in the McKnightish vein) and switched it over to the language and framework of “the plan of personal salvation.” When we make that switch uncritically and quickly, many important gospel themes can get lost in translation. It can get over-spiritualized, losing many of the immediate space-time implications.

But I did no such thing. None of us killed Jesus. The only way to make such a foolish claim now is by cognitive dissonance, where we hold the fact that I did not kill Jesus in tension with the thought that I did kill Jesus in some spiritual sense.

This teaching then causes us to have numerous contradictions in our relationship with God and with others, and even to have contradictory thoughts when we preach the gospel.

To be honest, Ben, I’ve noticed this contradictory nature of your articles and comments all over ubfriends. I think it stems from the thought “I killed Jesus”. Perhaps you didn’t kill Jesus?

A 5 star sermon must literally melt the soul of humanity, as Chris Brown and Andy Stanley did at the 2013 Global Leadership Summit or how some of Spurgeon’s sermons have done.

Yet, through the death and resurrection of Christ, God demonstrated and proved to me without a shadow of a doubt that he does not count my sin and rebellion against Him, but fully, completely and perfectly vindicated me out of his unfathomable love for me and for the world.

I am not saying that this is the only way to present the gospel. But this is the gospel of grace and love that I hear that moves me to love, submission, surrender, gratitude, and willing obedience to his revealed will for me.