I am saddened by what I see going on in the leadership of some of the churches around us.  There are loads of things being done and accepted in the name of relevance, tolerance, sensitivity and freedom.  But the main one at the moment and the focus of this post is about Pastors flaunting their perceived liberties.

I have been following many different discussions about the consumption of alcohol on a bulletin board site that is listed in my links.  It will not be there after I am through writing this because I am tired of seeing people in a leadership capacity in my denomination flaunting their liberties in direct conflict of their vows.  I am not denying the freedom we have in Christ.  I actually believe that the grace of God for the redeemed is probably covering more than we think.  So what is my problem?   

The Bible addresses the issue of alcohol in many places.  It never condemns but does warn of some dangers in its consumption.  Do a search for alcohol and you will find this in many, many scriptures.  Too many to list here.  But again, I emphasize that it does not condemn drinking alcohol.  It does however, not only condemn, but actually commands us to not be drunk. 

So the first question is; what is drunkenness?  Is it falling down and passing out; or is it a certain blood alcohol level; or is it simply the alteration of our normal state of mind, like a “buzz”?  I don’t know.  But I will say that I lived in Germany for three years in a culture where drinking alcohol was just a normal part of the culture.  You could buy beer at McDonalds.  I saw firsthand a culture that drank alcohol with no agenda other than to have something to drink.

But in America, most, note I said most, people drink to achieve at the very least, a change in their state of mind, an altered consciousness.  They want to loosen up or be different than whom they are and if they are like the way I used to be, they are trying to get high or drunk.  And that is going directly against the word of God. 

But there are quite a few people proclaiming that they do drink alcohol, but only in moderation.  So what is the problem?  Well, in other denominations I don’t know if there is one.  But as far as the Church of God goes, we all made a commitment to certain doctrinal precepts and practical commitments when we became members.   This is an excerpt from the practical commitments we agreed to uphold.

One of the primary benefits of our liberty in Christ is freedom from the domination of negative forces (John 8:32, 36; Romans 6:14; 8:2). We are counseled not to put ourselves again under bondage (Galatians 5:1). Therefore, a Christian must totally abstain from all alcoholic beverages and other habit-forming and mood-altering chemical substances and refrain from the use of tobacco in any form, marijuana and all other addictive substances, and further, must refrain from any activity (such as gambling or gluttony) which defiles the body as the temple of God or which dominates and enslaves the spirit that has been made free in Christ (Proverbs 20:1; 23:20-35; Isaiah 28:7; 1 Corinthians 3:17; 5:11; 6:10; 2 Corinthians 7:1; James 1:21).

Now some are arguing about drinking not being a sin and that they will never preach that it is.  That is okay with me.  I see nothing in the preceding statement saying that this must be preached about as sin.  Some are also saying that it is alright to drink moderately since it is not a sin.  And to this I also say okay.  But here is where the problem comes up and why I am saddened and close to angry.

Jas 5:12  But above all, my brothers, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your “yes” be yes and your “no” be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation.

Deu 23:23  You shall be careful to do what has passed your lips, for you have voluntarily vowed to the LORD your God what you have promised with your mouth.

As I said, when we became members of this denomination, we actually let it pass from our lips that we would uphold these practical commitments.  Members should search their hearts and see if they are truly honoring God by not letting their “yes” be yes.  But that is between them and our Lord. 

But Pastors and leaders, or those claiming to be, are the ones that upset me.  Why?  Because I want to follow a leader I can TRUST.  If you only follow 99.5 percent of the vow you made, as one pastor boasted, then you might as well not follow the rest.  At least that is the way I see it.  If I can’t totally trust you to have the integrity to adhere to your vows, I can’t trust you at all.  And you have people’s lives in your hands.

I am probably the first one to question beliefs and doctrine in my church.  And as I said, I do not see that the Bible teaches that all alcohol consumption is sin.  There are other things, such as gluttony being sin, which is a whole lot clearer. But there is nothing unclear about James 5:12 or Deu 23:23 in the least. 

If they believe the practical commitments are wrong, outdated, or unbiblical, which I believe some of them could be, there are other options for them.  They can follow the proper procedure to change them or leave the denomination.  If I wanted to drink a beer as bad as some of them evidently do, then I would surrender my membership immediately.  Some of us seem to love ourselves a little too much. 

Pastors and other leaders, instead of flaunting their liberties about the consumption of alcohol,  need to be the first to stand and say that they will honor their vows.  If they do not then they will answer for it someday.  Their liberty about alcohol is overruled by the lack of liberty to lie.  As for me, I would never submit myself to them or sit under their leadership. 

How could I?  I am sorry but, I can’t trust a liar.

Love you all

Have you ever seen a display of skilled acrobatics?  The twisting, and the turning, and the bending, and the seeming ability to tie the human body into knots seem almost impossible to someone, like me, that on some mornings find it painful to tie my shoes.  The flexibility and the agility displayed looks painful and amazing at the same time.  It goes to show you that almost anything can be made to appear in ways that were not intended, like the human body. 

I read a couple of sites occasionally that are mostly made up of Calvinists.  I do it to stay informed and also because I have a need to test my beliefs to see if I am in error.  These people paint an amazing but troubling, picture of God.  One that makes Him so meticulous in His control, so omniscient He already knows what I am having for lunch on June 12^th 2011, so omnipotent that no one can even be presented as in opposition to His will, above and outside time and yet still able to relate to us in time, and so locked in rigidity that it seems even He is not free to do other than He has done.

It just doesn’t make sense. 

How do these conclusions allow for real free will?

How do these conclusions make anyone other than God responsible for evil?

How do these conclusions make sense of Gods own words describing His responses to prayer and repentance?

How do these conclusions allow or have room for the dynamic loving relationship He wants with us all?

I could go on and on with the questions.  But you probably see what I am talking about.  The answer to the how is that they have made up or coined so many phrases to describe their different justifications for everything, that it is like watching great acrobatics.  They know their argument well and twist, bend and toss it out in a way that even those who do not believe the way they do, fall prey to using the same terminology because of the agility of the argument. 

Some of the people that I know personally use the same words and don’t really know what they are implying. 

I read these other blogs and come away with my head swimming in amazement that so many can give an answer to my questions, yet really say nothing at all.  And they use many, many words to do it.  Maybe that is it.  I just don’t know as many words or how to say things in enough ways. 

I am a simple man.  Only a High school graduate.  But I am willing to dig.  But not willing to learn acrobatics or gymnastics to interpret the Bible.  While the display of acrobatics is amazing, it has to hurt.  Especially if you ever give up on the continual training needed to keep up the necessary flexibility. 

Do we really have to twist and turn and even tie ourselves into knots to understand God?  The love of God just does not seem to be that mysterious to me. 

Love you all

Some people will find everything I said in my last post repulsive and heretical.  The very idea that I would try to limit God is intolerable and immediately calls into question my trust in the Bible.  I want to assure all that the Bible is first and foremost where I go to find wisdom and understanding. 

What I do not find particularly trustworthy is the traditions of man.  We all seem almost incapable of leaving our preconceived beliefs out of our discussions and interpretations.  That includes me.  But some will say, who are you to question the conclusions of the great theologians of the past such as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, etc.  Even the most prestigious contemporary scholars such as Sproul, Piper, and McArthur hold to the view of absolute exhaustive foreknowledge.  Although that is not the terms they would use.  So who am I?

These theologians have concluded that God is so far above us and different from us that the views I am bringing to the discussions here are seen as simply trying to bring Him down to my level.  But ask yourself this. 

When God said let us create man in our own image, did we or did we not inherit emotions or states of mind such as wonder, surprise, excitement, awe, hope, optimism, and other positive human qualities? These good qualities had to come from God; we did not develop them ourselves. Therefore, what is so illogical about a God who also gives himself the luxury of experiencing awe, wonder, surprise and hope? Or is our God a being that has always been devoid of surprise, wonder, and exploration?  As naturally He would if He already saw everything.

In a view that holds to God having to react to our choices we see a God that loves and enters into a relationship with us.  In a view that holds to God being outside of time and far away and already knowing everything before it happens we actually place limits on God that the Bible just does not show us.

Taking the idea of absolute exhaustive foreknowledge at face value, let’s go farther back in time, even before any being in any world, or even in heaven, existed. Only God exists. God sees everything happening.

Can God do anything different than what God foresees happening?

Foreseeing everything that will happen, how can God choose to not create the angels and especially Lucifer?

So what is in control, time or God?  Prescience or God?

Do you see how a known future seems to force even God under its determining flow?

At this strong, absolutely knowable future level, then even God doesn’t have a choice in creating what He has foreseen. Does it really make sense for God to create all the pain? When you really think about it, in this scenario, how can we not argue over foreknowledge while the rest of the world wonders why we bother?  It must have been foreseen. 

Here, some of you may say, “that is just the mystery of salvation,” but when one confronts the true horror of unnecessary human suffering repeated billions of times through earth history, a God who knew it all along, even before Lucifer, becomes either despotic or controlled by time itself.

Do you see how in the theodicy problem, responsibility has to be placed on God if He knew exactly what was to happen?

Do you see how making God know the future absolutely makes God a slave to the stream of time as well?

All of this comes from the Greek deification of time itself, as Chronos, and making the gods and themselves dependent on Fate.  This is fatalism.  It is very similar to Calvinism, although you will never hear one admit it.  Richard Rice said the following in a book called The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God…

“If at creation God knew with absolute certainty that man would fall, He was not risking the moral harmony of the universe in making man: He was simply sacrificing it.” 

And that sacrifice is not the one shown to us in the Word of God.  Instead we see a different sacrifice because of the fall, the sacrifice of Himself. 

If God does truly, absolutely, foreknow all that is ever to happen, I simply cannot see that true free will is possible.  And the thought of having no free will would make me kiss Christianity good-bye.

In the classic science fiction series, Dune, the complete story is about a family who gain the power to predict the future, but discover that they are in fact creating the future.  Their prescience actually created and they are then trapped in their creations. The first in the line is Paul Atreides.  He seeks the power of prescience but, when he obtains it and has it long enough to realize the nature of it, he just wants to die.  But he can’t until it is the right time to die.  Which will be when he foresaw it. 

The last “god emperor” of Dune decides to breed people whose actions cannot be predicted so no one will ever gain this power again. The thing he ultimately craves is someone who will surprise him.

How else can God truly delight in us if not in our ability to “surprise” Him with our right choices?

Pro 12:22  …but those who act faithfully are his delight.

Jos 24:15  …choose this day whom you will serve, …

It seems Joshua believed, as I do, that we have a choice. 

Love you all

The modern Christian conception of God does not actually come from the Bible. Instead, its roots can be found in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. And the God of Greek philosophy is far more remote and inhuman than the one portrayed in both the Old and New Testaments. This has created a tension in the field of theology that does not really answer any of the questions that the atheist or the hurting lost souls of this world so desperately need.

I have been in a few discussions on this site and in my class on Wednesdays about these concepts.  Some might even call them arguments.  There are a couple of us that get a little passionate about our beliefs. 

There are different aspects to classical theism that I do not subscribe to and I have attempted to create a dialogue about such things as Gods omnipotence, His omniscience, and other attributes and how they relate to a proper understanding of the reality of spiritual warfare. 

In my group of brothers and sisters in Christ I have not found much resistance with the idea that we have free will or that God does not definitively control all things.  The area of most resistance, surprisingly, has to do with God’s foreknowledge of events and free will choices. 

I do not believe we can actually have free will or make true choices if God already knows the choice.  How can I not make the choice He has already seen?  But some seem to think my question should instead be, how can God’s or anyone’s prior knowledge interfere with (cause to happen or prevent from happening) my present choice or future decision to act?

A friend made this statement, “I know that I will not rob a bank today. That does not mean I don’t have a choice. I know what my choice will be, yet I can freely choose.”

My answer is that if God knows the future like you or me, then there is no free-will problem. In fact, this comparison of divine omniscience to human inferred knowledge is essentially what I hold to be true, instead of the sovereign view which would say that God knows, unlike you, that you would most definitely not rob that bank. You know you would not, based on your knowledge of who you are, and God knows you would not, based on the same thing.  Not on the basis that He has already seen your day come to its conclusion.   

I’d like to raise God to be higher than this view.  I believe God knows more than us, namely every possible choice we can make. I believe God just doesn’t know in the absolute sense, which choices we will make until we actually make them.

The fact is that we all “know” things that don’t actually happen the way we expected.  What if someone, at gunpoint, forced you to rob a bank?  That would force you to do something that you knew at the beginning of your day you would not do.

To really understand the classical view I am talking about, this concept of infinite divine foreknowledge as put out by classical theism, we must see it as having zero contingency.  If God absolutely knows what will happen before it happens, then there is neither meaning nor responsibility for human choice. This determinism is the foundation of most of the moral complacency of Greek fatalism. The common view of the sovereignty of God is really due to the scholastic merging of Aristotle’s thoughts, not from study of the very dynamic God of the Bible.

Let’s take a look at a logic problem.

1.    God’s having absolute foreknowledge implies that if I mow my lawn on Saturday afternoon, then God saw at an earlier time that I would mow my lawn on Saturday afternoon.

2.    Necessarily, all that God has seen is true and absolute.

3.    No one has the power to make a contradiction true.

4.    No one has the power to erase someone’s past knowledge, that is, to bring it about that something known in the past by someone was not known in the past by that person.

5.    No one has the power to erase someone’s existence in the past, that is, to bring it about that someone who did exist in the past did not exist in the past.

6.    So if God foreknew that I will mow my lawn on Saturday afternoon, I can refrain from mowing only if one of these conditions is true:
(i) I have the power to make what God has seen false.
(ii) I have the power to erase God’s past foreknowledge.
(iii) I have the power to erase God’s past existence.

7.    Alternative (i) is impossible. (This follows from steps 2 and 3).

8.    Alternative (ii) is impossible. (This follows from step 4).

9.    Alternative (iii) is impossible. (This follows from step 5).

10.  Therefore, if God foreknows that I will mow my lawn on Saturday afternoon, I do not have the power to refrain from mowing my lawn on Saturday afternoon.

Work on that one and I leave you with this thought based on years of actually believing it and still not seeing an answer in the classical view of absolute exhaustive foreknowledge.

One of atheism’s strongest condemnations of Christianity is, if God (if there is one!) absolutely knows what will happen, why does he allow the world to go on with all of its atrocities and horror?  Why doesn’t He change things? Why did He even bother?

I know from experience that none of your answers will satisfy.

Love you all