For over 15 years I had been deeply involved in one particular faith based institution. I had given a great deal of time and energy to do everything I could to inspire people to follow Jesus more fully and completely with every aspect of their existence.

The last few years of my involvement in this church I had been doing some teaching at the many adult bible classes and it had been going quite well. Toward the end I started doing more teaching in the college group to fill a void that had been created.

As a part of this class it was my desire to teach the students that it’s ok to ask tough questions about the bible and that we shouldn’t fear these questions. One other desire was to teach the students that it’s ok to disagree theologically and that we shouldn’t let those issues divide the body, especially when they have nothing to do with salvation.

Is this all we are to God?

OK, so you know by now that the authors of this blog subscribe to the Open View of God, also called Open Theism.  It’s one of the four points of our ROCK summary of faith distinctives.  A key point all Open Theists make is that God does not know a settled, determined future–not because God’s knowledge is limited, but because no settled, determined future exists to be known.  I agree.  But in its place, prominent Open Theists describe God as knowing the vast combination of possible choices his created agents may make, comprehending and planning against these possibilities rather like an “infinitely intelligent chess player” who knows all the possible moves on the board, and has expert strategies to deal with all of them.  I’m not so sure about this part.

Ben said it this way last post on open theism:  “So does God know what i’m going to have for lunch in 15 years. Yep, he knows I will have x, or x, or x, or x, or x etc and he knows I won’t have x, or x, or x, or x etc – absolutely. Divine foreknowledge is foreknowledge none the less regardless of the manner in which it is known.“  Hold that thought…we’ll be coming back to it.

This Monday, May 30th, is Memorial Day in the United States.  On this holiday, Americans remember those who have perished in the military service of the nation.

Readers of this blog already know that I am convinced that service in any nation’s military is incompatible with the call of Jesus Christ.  But as Ronald Sider said so powerfully in 1984, just because followers of Christ dare not kill for any cause, this does not obviate the need–sometimes–to die for one.

I’d like to share with you the story of one follower of Jesus who did just that, many years ago:  St. Maximilian of Tebessa.  Maximilian, 21-year-old son of Fabius Victor, was brought before the proconsul Cassius Dion on March 12, A.D. 295, for the purpose of being conscripted into the Roman army.  According to a written account, Maximilian refused to enter the army because of his commitment to his King, Jesus Christ:  “My service is for my Lord; I cannot serve the world. I have already said: I am a Christian.”  Maximilian further refused to accept a seal denoting his commitment to the emperor, saying “I do not accept the world’s seal, and if you give it to me, I will break it, since I value it at nought. I am a Christian. It is not permitted to me to bear the lead upon my neck after [having received] the saving seal of my Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God, he whom you do not know…”

For his refusal to accept conscription, Maximilian was beheaded that day.  As he went joyfully to his death, he asked his father to give his new uniform to one of the guards.

As the nations of this world honor their fallen, perhaps it would behoove us in the Kingdom of Christ to remember those who have fallen in the service of our King.  Unlike those of earth, these gave their lives without taking other lives first…but the cost of their service was still high.  May we be found as faithful when we are challenged.

As a historical note, Prof. David Woods of University College Cork, who edited the account quoted above, actually argues that the account of Maximilian is probably a plagiarism of another martyr, St. Theagenes of Parium, whose account Woods deems more reliable, but which tells a substantially similar story.  Either is worthy of retelling.

When discussing open theism with those who have a problem with it, the idea or fear of control always seems to come out. The argument is that if God does not know the future as one set of eternally settled facts how is he in control or ultimately sovereign? Not only is there all kinds of logical problems with this fear but its rooted in the false thinking that, in the open view, God can be surprised or learns something new as a result of human action. Nothing can be farther from the truth.

I’ll explain by looking at this using absolute terms. The proponent enters the path of thinking that God either settled the future as in the Calvinist view, or simply knows it but did not cause it as in the Arminian view. The assumption is that one can only truly know the future if the future is known in absolutes.

I’ve been reading an amazing book by Abraham Heschel a leading Jewish Rabbi, theologian and philosopher of the 20th century. In his book “God in search of Man” I stumbled across a phrase that captured my attention and said so eloquently a key phrase. He said “There is in the bible God’s word to man, but there is also man’s word to Him and about Him; not only God’s disclosure but man’s insight.” I’d like to unpack that statement just a little.

Dan has fleshed out quite a bit on the notion of how we should understand biblical inspiration here. I would like to add a little color from my own perspective and studies and use Heschel’s quote as a baseline.

I’ve written against the usual doctrines of hell and eternal punishment now and again on this blog…you can see the works by choosing the Hell category from the list at right. However until we changed to WordPress I never had a good way of providing my original source material for others to evaluate or critique. This post is just to make that material available. At the following link you can download a PDF table of all the references I found in the New Testament, that I believe contribute to the question of eternal destiny, along with my assessment of who the target audience was, and what insight (if any) each reference brings to the question. Here’s the document:

http://nailtothedoor.com/eternal-destiny-part-1/hell_reference/

A common phenomenon within theological, political, and other discussions that get us worked up, is that someone frames a question as “either-or” and then others jump onto that argument as “for” one side or the other…without anybody really stopping to consider whether the question itself was properly framed to begin with.  The recent controversy surrounding Rob Bell’s book “Love Wins” seems to me a prime example of this.  The “either-or” of the Bell saga is, of course, the dichotomy of Universal Salvation on one hand, and strict Evangelical exclusivism on the other.

The rival positions are easy to characterize and even easier to caricature.  The Universalist argument covers a spectrum somewhere between “every good and sincere person will go to heaven, because that’s what a loving God would do,” and “because God is so loving, he’ll keep on trying to lovingly win even the inhabitants of hell so that eventually hell will be empty.”  In this range of thought, hell is either nonexistent, or destined for obsolescence.  Evangelicals respond with the doctrines of Original Sin and Universal Revelation, to insist that all humans are guilty before God and deserving of eternal, conscious punishment unless they deliberately and specifically appropriate Jesus’ saving work on the cross in atonement for their sins.  In this model, hell must be substantially more populous than heaven, and disproportionately populated with non-American (or at least non-Western) humanity who had the misfortune to be born where they wouldn’t grow up with the “truth.”

The controversy, and at times the vitriol, have flowed fast and furious.  But it seems to me that the vast majority of debaters have accepted without much examination, that these two extreme alternatives are all we have from which to choose.  I believe they’re both not just wrong, but badly wrong.  Part of the problem  is that both perspectives seem to circle around the assumption that what happens when we die is the point, the central focus, of faith.  As I have already written, I am convinced that Jesus’ teaching is far more concerned with the life he’s called us to live now, than with the nature of any afterlife we may encounter.  There are, however, errors to examine in both the Universalist and Evangelical positions.

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I encourage you to pop over to my friend Kurt Willems’ blog and read his post If You’re Reading This Post, You’ve Been “Left Behind.” Kurt does a beautiful job of casting what our role must be in the current “Tribulation” of this world.  Borrowing nearly every catchphrase of an eschatology neither one of us can stand, he’s got a masterful call to live as the Kingdom-of-God subversives we must be.

I want to take this opportunity to introduce my readers to my dear friend Ben Bajarin.  Ben and I have been spiritual relief valves for each other for the better part of three years now.  Though we attended the same church for over a decade, it took nearly nine years before we met each other and discovered that God had stirred some common–though unusual–thoughts in both of us, and we’ve found great refreshment in exploring theology together.  More than once, we’ve also encouraged each other when bashing up against entrenched doctrine and rhetoric that may be familiar to the church, but we believe flies in the face of the Biblical message.

Today Ben joins me as a co-author of this blog, and as you can see from his first post on the Rapture-that-wasn’t, his contributions are a valued addition.

Keep an eye out, as you’re going to see a few changes in design and presentation soon…and hopefully an increase in the frequency of posts, which has never been my strong suit.  Ben’s also going to increase our visibility on Facebook with a fan page and a few other gadgets.

The result, we hope, is not primarily increased readership or statistics…those have never been the point.  But Ben and I share the conviction that the church is in desperate need of a new reformation, and we hope in some small way to ignite those fires in a few of you.  Come along for the ride!

I suppose, because of my post title, the cat is out of the bag on my eschatology. So I’ll start this post right off the bat saying, it’s my conviction that there will be no rapture of the Church. I believe the overwhelming weight of biblical evidence in no way shape or form supports a phased approach of the coming of the Lord. Let me explain why.

Firstly (I love that word) if we study the history of this idea we will find that this whole notion of the rapture is a relatively new idea, this fact alone should cause us to pause.

There is some debate as to who came up with this idea originally but most credit it to John Darby. Darby revealed his eschatological view and outlined his idea on this so called “rapture” at the Powerscourt Conference in 1831.

It is very difficult to find any evidence of ”rapture” eschatology prior to Darby’s teaching it beginning in 1831.