Jason Coleman

From the post Five Final Thoughts on “Love Wins” (and then I’m finished) | Shawn Smucker

When Jesus died on the cross, two thieves died beside him. If I would have been a follower of Jesus on that day, it would have been easy for me to look at those thieves and think, “Those evil men are going straight to hell.” But what would have been unknown to me was the fact that one of those thieves looked at Jesus and said “Remember me!” Simply that. No Roman Road. No prayer of salvation. Did he even know Jesus’s name? We’ll never know. But he asked Jesus to remember him, and Jesus said he would join him in paradise that very day.

Who am I to make a judgment call on whether that person of another faith did or did not go to heaven? How can I possibly know?

From the post Imprecise Language about the Bible’s Authority: The Second Summary Statement of CSBI | The BioLogos Forum

You probably need to read the development of Dr. Enns’ argument building to this paragraph to understand it’s full import, but this is the paragraph that contains the major point of the article so it’s the paragraph that I excerpted.

It should not be presumed that Scripture’s authority in touching on the matter of creation demands a literal reading of Genesis 1. Put differently, it is not at all clear that the Spirit’s superintendence of the biblical writers means that historical and scientific accuracy is now required of a faithful reading of Genesis 1 simply because Scripture is “authoritative” and “touches” on the issue of creation. The Spirit’s superintendence might have led the ancient biblical writers to “touch” on the matter of creation according to ancient ways of understanding Scripture, not beholden to our current notions. In that case, just what we mean by biblical authority with respect to Genesis 1 becomes a far more complicated matter than CSBI lets on.

From the post Doctrinal Conformity | Unreasonable Faith

History of this type comes down to an assessment of probabilities. Stark has produced a very likely interpretation of what the passage [2 Kings 3:26-27] meant (or, rather, he’s repeating a likely interpretation that most historians agree on. He didn’t invent it.) But for someone like Hess, any interpretation that runs counter to his doctrinal position is impossible.

It’s an interesting problem: how do you hold a discussion with someone who cannot ever accept that you might have a point? No matter how persuasive or logical your arguments, they can never allow themselves to agree.

From the post The Passion, prophecy, the pedigree of proof-texting, and a podcast

Preachers and inspirational/devotional writers make whole bales of hay out of this sort of typology and similarly anachronistic readings of the OT: our congregations are led to believe that there is christological, or at very least explicitly Christian, significance to be found in seemingly every nook and cranny of the OT. … We should keep around the Old Testament not because of an erroneous assumption that it is crypto-Christian, but precisely because it’s a testimony of what faith in God looked like before Christ. Reading the Old Testament makes me glad I’m a Christian.

From the post No One Believes That The God Of The Bible Exists Anymore at Exploring Our Matrix:

To put it bluntly, classical Christianity is itself now our Old Testament…We have to use traditional Christianity in the same way as Christianity itself has always used the Old Testament. In both cases there is a great gulf but there is also continuity of spirit and religious values…When a Christian sings a psalm he knows there is a religion-gap and a culture-gap, but it does not worry him because he believes his faith to be the legitimate successor of the faith of the psalmist. Similarly, since the Enlightenment there has developed a religion-gap and a culture-gap between us and traditional Christianity, but we may still be justified in using the old words if we can plausibly argue that our present faith and spiritual values are the legitimate heirs of the old” (Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God, p.135).

From the post Progressive Christianity and the Bible

There definitely is uncertainty inherent in the progressive Christian outlook. But the view that it is a bad thing is based on a faulty understanding of “faith.” In modern English, that word has come to mean “believing incredible claims in spite of lack of evidence or even evidence to the contrary.” Historically, even in English the term meant something different, and more importantly, the Greek word usually translated “faith” in the New Testament has overtones not only of faithfulness but also of trust. Trusting is not what you do when you are certain you are right. It is what you do when you know you could be wrong. Being willing to live with uncertainty can be an expression of faith in God rather than its antithesis.

From the post Rachel Held Evans | When grace is just a doctrine

Now we could get into a rather ungraceful argument about the true meaning of grace, but as I see it, grace is about giving without expecting anything in return. It’s about cutting ourselves and one another some slack. It’s about letting go of grudges and extending love when it is not deserved. It’s about acknowledging all the brokenness within us and around us…and loving in spite of it. 

The ultimate denial of grace, then, is not to misunderstand it theologically, but to withhold it. The minute we withhold grace because of some prejudice or fear on our part, it becomes nothing more than a doctrine. 

From the Amazon.com page for the book If Darwin Prayed: Prayers for Evolutionary Mystics

Let us calmly celebrate
that we are held
by an order that emerges from the chaos,
and by a chaos that loosens suffocating structures,
and let us learn to trust
that this play of Order and Chaos
is Spirit
dancing its way
into a sanctified future.

I would like to read this book of prayers.

From the post When Being “Saved” Isn’t Enough by Shawn Smucker. The whole article is worth a read.

“Save yourself!” It seemed the common cry of everyone taunting the man being executed: passers-by, those who caused his conviction, his executioners, even his fellow criminals. “Save yourself!”

But he didn’t. He didn’t save himself, because he knew the part he played in the redemption.

If you follow this man, have you taken the bait – have you “saved yourself,” and then congratulated yourself on a choice well made, a new life found for yourself?

Or are you participating in the redemption? Are you seeking out what your part might be in redeeming the world?

Michael Horton blogs about Harold Camping being a false prophet because the predictions that he’s made haven’t come to pass. But in this paragraph he gets sloppy with his pronouns and makes it sound as though Jesus is the false prophet because his predictions failed to come to pass. “What??” some will say, but then others will reply that Jesus predicted he’d return within a generation of his ascension.

Of course, Jesus may return tomorrow, or the next day, or long after we die. We simply do not know. However, we can be sure that the errors that he teaches—quite apart from his failed predictions—are enough to regard him, tragically, as a false prophet.