Jung: wrong again!

Richard Noll, in his book "The Jung Cult" writes, quoting Hinkel: 

"...it is indeed a central part of Jung's repudiation of traditional Christianity that offered a God that was distant, transcendent, and absolute."

And how wrong this is.

The Bible tells of a God who is in intimate fellowship with his creatures, then after their repudiation of him, provides a means of regaining that communion.

The God who dwells with his people in their imageness, in propositional communication, in the Tabernacle and Temple, is among us in Christ, who upon leaving us provided the gift of his indwelling Spirit and the family of the faithful.

This is God who is close, who seeks man for fellowship...for man's good. Who has shown us his proximity and relatable connection by performing the creation within the basic delineation of our existence: in a series of days, cementing that relational connection first in the Sabbath then in the person of Christ Immanuel.

How to do missions.

The importance of creation in ground floor evangelism, from a missiologist at Fuller.

 

Panel | N. T. Wright, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, and Scott Sunquist - YouTube 

 

Wright's response, while very theologically helpful, is dead from the get go because he disparages the timing of creation. And the theology is good: even for a venue like Fuller!

 

I think these guys live in a split world. Wright for instance in his NT theology is about as non-Platonist as one can get, but in his anthropology and cosmology is as 'forked tongue' as a pagan with a Platonic context.

 

TE/LA-ers seem to have platonised the creation and placed it in some form of 'upper story', mysterious, inaccessible and defying description (and so unteachable). Yet, this is the God who speaks; who reveals himself to man who he made in his image for fellowship. It is contradictory and without scriptural foundation for them to overturn this in the most important relational passage in the Bible: Genesis 1 ( to 3:8). On their terms Wright obscures God's act of initiating fellowship, and hides it from we who are to be rulers of that  very creation as his image-bearers: thus his primary act of identity and his chief credential for worship is hidden and inaccessible. How can creation reflect his glory when he's not told us its glorious basis? Sounds like a shell game!

But Wright is wrong in his disparagement. It is essential that days are days because by them God engages his creation in its terms: makes an ontological grounding for fellowship by the terms he created to delineate our experience of his creation. This underscored by using the days that he made as basic to his engagement with his creature who will go on to reflect him; not in some ineffable mystical miasma, but in this real world of the days in which our God created and robustly ground our relationship with him.

The direct coupling of event with word in the days plays an important role in showing also the God is the Lord of these days and of the creation, completely government the creation with his direct action and evaluation that underwrites his pleasure in the result. There is thus no room for pagan fantasies, unstated intermediaries (Hebrews 11:3 has a role here too). This also makes the Sabbath of the Covenant also pregnant with the glory of his creation and love of his creature.

 

Wright dashes all this into a Platonic bowl of pottage with his denial of the basic organizing tempo and connection of creation to our world.

A theological pivot

Most Christian discourse related to Genesis 1-3, particularly by those who want to read it as a piece of direct text (i.e., taking the days as they are calibrated), spend far too much time on the content...which we can all read, and too little on the theology.

Ken Ham, for instance, never seems to really get to the theological implications of the 6 days of creation.

They are the orientating basis for our understanding of God, the creation and ourselves in the creation and in relation to God. God shows that he is not distant but near to us, executing the creation in the days he made for our fellowship with him (and this flows onto the grandeur of the Sabbath in the Covenant with Israel); he also shows that his word is the immediate cause of the creation. This demonstrates direct connection with the creation and gives force to the 'good's, and the final 'very good', further reinforcing God's intimate connection with the creation which culminates in Genesis 3:8 with God actively in the garden seeking Adam and Eve in fellowship. This is utterly different from any pagan myth.

The days, being 'our terms' are clearly located in real history, our history. But they do more: they underscore that they are in the concrete reality of the world we are in, (contrary to monist dreams), they form the intellectual basis for or understanding of reality (contrary to materialist dreams), and show it's goodness for our habitation and care (contrary to pagan spiritualism, platonic mind games, and Gnostic deceit).

The immediacy of creation also side-lines any notion of secondary or intermediate causes, either of which push God away from his creation and denigrate it's spiritual (godly) significance as the place of fellowship and where man reflects God's image and of us. Psalm 8 celebrates this intimacy that results.

McLaren and Christ?

McLaren's view of God, has further ramifications.

His view of Christ must also be in peril. If he has dragged the creator into his creation, merging him with it in the manner of all monist flavours, from Evolution to Animism; he must have a similar parlous view of Christ.

In short, if he doesn't know who God is, he can't know who Christ is.

He cuts God off from the real concrete creation, so Christ can no longer be Creator! (John 1:1-3, Col 1: 16-18 as the most explicit data, but the whole  Colossians passage is relevant: 15-20.).

The Incarnation is the reprise of the creation! The Creation identified God, and thus his Christ; as 'creator' in whose image we are and so gives us our basic identity. The Incarnation is the founding of the Kingdom of God that will be consummated in the New Creation as creature dwells with Creator in eternal fellowship..

Thus, Christ as the Fullness of God embodied (Col 2:8-10) is no stranger to the Cosmos. He is the creator who created in the days of our history. His action in the days contextualizes both the theophanies recorded throughout the OT and the Incarnation as their summation. That is, this is his creation and he is not an alien within it. The Incarnation is the coda on this great biblical theme of God with his people in his image, being their creator. Now in the Incarnation, announced as redeemer as well.

'God with us' in the Incarnation follows as a familial act, a personal event in the same concrete reality as the creation event authored by the same person. This person (God in Christ) first demonstrating his presence and direct connection with the creation by action realized within the terms of the creation he has created (that is a set of defined days that are real in that creation) cohesively with his objective. He now stepping into that creation, again in its terms: in a man. The intimacy of God with us shining forth to us, his image-bearers.

And that's why a real concrete creation as set out directly in Genesis one is more than important, it is pivotal in the most profound way.

McLaren has missed every point the Scriptures make!

Also see A Theological Pivot

What McLaren misses.

Progressive futurist theologian, Brian McLaren, once a conservative evangelical, calls for a new definition of God as "a bigger, non-dualistic, non-binary God." He prefers a God who is "in the story, not outside of time and space like a prime mover or divine watch maker" McLaren's god is not different from us; he actually is us. Non-dualistic is another term for non-binary, since "dual" also means "two." These are broad simplified ways of describing reality. Things are understood either through the rubric of oneness or two-ness: non-binary or binary, non-dualistic or dualistic. This sounds ridiculously simple, but it is deeply theological.

From Jones, P. Whose Rainbow? 2020. Ezra Press, Grimsby, p. 22.

 

McLaren clearly has nothing in his previous theology that leads him to understand the relation between God and creation. His only recourse is to place God either remotely from the creation, or contained within it! I hazard the guess that he relegates the days of creation to fiction, myth, symbolism or fantasy, which removes God from 'the story' and reifies his complaint; because it is these very days, set out as real concrete days, that prevent us conceiving God as either indifferently and impersonally distant from or impotently internal to the creation. They show that God is in, and the originator and Lord of 'the story'.

The days are the days that delineate our life domain and his acting in such days, explicitly brings that activity into our history.

God is present within our world in the very existential terms of our world that denominates history. This is a God who is close, whose love is demonstrated in intimacy of action in creating the real concrete place for fellowship of man with God, man equipped for such fellowship by being like him, in his image reflecting him into the creation as his agents. The intimacy of God and creation is driven home in Genesis 3:8: God in the garden (presumably God the Son) in pursuit of fellowship with the creatures-in-his-image! Nothing like the pagan fictions about improbably flawed gods contained within the cosmos, such as Enuma Elish.

 

No other religion is remotely like this: knowing God in direct contact with the domain of human life, but also prior to and outside that domain as Creator. They all either internalize or depersonalize and remove the 'god' as a knowable thing, or diffuse it throughout everything and equally unknowable.

 

Not a sermon that one would hear in most churches!

 

Also see McLaren and Christ.

And A Theological Pivot

7 more tips for choosing a church.

You were, I hope, much helped by my tips for choosing a church. Stick to that set and you'll go far!

But that's not the end of it. There are more tips that you need to bear in mind.

1. comfortable pews
2. good wifi
3. good acoustics and excellent hi-fi PA speakers
4. no air blowers in the toilets (paper towels, please)
5. good transitional shelter at the entrance: a porch or foyer, and automatic doors
   
6. no check-ins, not even pretend ones.
   
7. humble but well designed foyer with nicely built brochure display

Stick to this list and your facilities will be comfortable, show respect for the users and visitors and suggest that you care about your premises; seeking the biblical standard for created things: "very good".

Let's get into it!

A local church announced to its members in its latest community newsletter a reorientation to 'making disciples'.

Nice.

I wonder what they were doing before.

But even if they felt they were deficient in this basic function of church, good that they are now working on it.

One of the elements of this was set out as 'proclaiming' the gospel.

Now it gets tricky.

To just encourage people who have never consciously 'proclaimed the gospel' to now do it is not enough. People need to be trained, have practice, and be clear about their general objective.

I grew up in a church where after baptism, we were urged to 'tell everyone about Christ'. For a 12 year old this was a daunting prospect. Where to start? I barely knew myself what I would say; I could barely articulate to myself my own faith.

I'm sure most people, as I was at 12, now in that church, are in a similar position.

So we need training!

What to train?

Firstly, as per most churches, almost no one knows anything about the Bible or Christian faith; a sermon does not do it; nor does a life-time of them.

There are two elements to this first piece: 

1. Bible: an overview of its content, basic structure, history of composition, and history of its passage to us today; this might also deal with common 'objections' to its veracity.
2. The 'worldview' of the Bible, or its description of reality and where the gospel fits into this. My previous blog on the 5 aspects of God with us could be the basis for this.

The next piece is The Seven Basic Questions.

A Christian should be able to fluently and flexibly answer 5 basic questions about their faith, plus 2:

1. Why do you believe in Jesus, or 'why are you a Christian/follower of Jesus/Yeshua/Christ?
2. Why do you believe God exists?
3. Why do you accept the Bible as authoritative?
4. Why do you go to Church
5. Doesn't science disprove the Bible/your religion?
6. Aren't all religions basically the same?
7. How can there be a God of love with so much evil in the world (and what about the God of love who sends people to hell?).

The final warp-up is the conversation; again, two aspects:

1. Opening conversations about faith matters, or steering a conversation appropriately to them.
2. Dealing with counter claims.
   

Number 1 can be tricky for some people, so this is where much work needs to be done. Number two is comparatively simple: its about asking questions and probing the answers. Greg Koukl's Tactics book is very helpful for this.

Above all, in communicating your faith, is respect of the other person, kindness in the conversation, and only going as far as it is going. Don't expect every conversation to get anywhere near a 'conversion' conversation.

Number 1 springs from a common ground between the person and the Christian. The prior conversation is the foundation for this common ground, but an important one to keep in mind is  Paul's words in Romans 1, and Luke's in Acts 17, reporting on Paul's address in Athens.

Then its practice, de-briefs with Christian friends, and continual reading, thinking and self-education. The church must support this in continued formal education mini courses, or short seminars.

God with us

My Advent thoughts.

This season on the traditional church calendar: the first season of the church year, importantly is about 'God with us'.

The incarnation of our Lord is the highlight of this, as we celebrate his nativity on 25 December. But it is only one, albeit, the pivotal one, of the five movements of God's dwelling with us.

They are: Creation, Tabernacle/temple, Christ, Church, New Creation.

If you are fitting this to a teaching cycle, you could either handle Creation in the week prior to Advent, or combine together either Christ and Church, or Church and New Creation; either paring could be argued as acceptable.

1. Creation

God shows his dwelling with us in two ways in the creation account: that he acts concretely in the stream of historical time and material space that we are in as his Image-bearers; and that, as his Image-bearers 'like' him are created for fellowship with him.

In Gen 3:8 is that here God is doing what love does: seeking the beloved. God is in this passage demonstrating the consequence of 'imageness' (communion with the creator) and instantly its inversion in his being turned against by his creature's rejection of him.

2. Tabernacle/temple

In drawing out Israel to be his people God has a purpose: dual, I suspect. Firstly to demonstrate who he is towards them (the loving God of grace), enacted in calling them into the fellowship for which humanity was created, and to be his people to those around; negatively as the instrument of his judgement against the Amorites, etc, positively as the vehicle of the proclamation of his grace.

The purpose is unfolded in the ceremonial tabernacle/temple where God's presence is represented amongst his people. The cosmos-as-temple is because of sin, contracted to this 'circle of grace' and fellowship.

In this it is the vehicle to bring Messiah to the cosmos, the world, and his salvation from our own perditious choices.

3. Incarnation

God takes on human nature and form to be in his Creation and to deal with our sin, dying to resurrect to show his victory over the forces of darkness.

4. Church

The church is called to make disciples: proclaim and grow disciples in community of the faithful; being, thereby 'salt and light' in the dark world.

5. New Creation

Our destiny as the church, in all its members, is to worship God forever in his New Creation; as the old is done away with and a new material/spiritual world is made. In this world we worship God in our renewed state: acting, thinking, relating in step with his gracious love as we, with him in Christ, rule the new world: that is; be responsible for it under God's perfect auspices.