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I recently tussled with the idea of predestination as part of an assessment I did for my MTS program. The task was really to design a way of teaching predestination in a way that doesn’t require your listeners to have a BTh, but true to nerdular form, I ended up writing a companion essay to think through the issues more fully and get my head straight on what the Bible teaches on predestination.

The main surprise for me was that the whole doctrine is really not as hard as I thought it would be. In fact, I suspect people get hung up at one of three points and remain stuck there because predestination is one of those things that doesn’t neatly slot into our Western, rationalistic, logic-oriented minds (privately, I do wonder if this will become less of an issue as pluralism sinks in as an acceptable way of assessing ideas). The three points where I reckon most people run aground are:

1. The idea that God predestines some and not others to eternal life. This is understandable; to accept this, it requires us to defer to God and acknowledge that He has not chosen to predestine everyone to eternal life, but rather some to eternal life and some to eternal punishment.
2. The tension between God’s sovereignty (or, as Packer would argue, His Kingship) and human responsibility for sin (or, God’s role as Judge), seeing as the two are made plain in Scripture but appear irreconcilable. If God is sovereign and all our thoughts and ways are known by Him and subject to His will, how can we be held accountable for our sin? For a related difficulty, see point one above.
3. The question of falling away – specifically, if God has predestined His elect, and someone who appears to be elect falls away, were they really elect in the first place?

I could write a lengthy article about these, but I won’t (perhaps I will make my essay available, for the interested). But, I will say this – could it be that our biggest problem with predestination, as a doctrine, is not that it is nonsense, or unfair, or inconsistent, but rather that we are sometimes unwilling to adopt a position of humility and accept that God’s ways are higher than ours? The conflicting, seemingly-incompatible truths presented by the Bible may cause our minds to bristle and may spawn questions which appear to have no answer. This, though, should not lead us instantly to disillusionment. Rather, perhaps we should acknowledge that our human wisdom is finite and accept that we will not always be able to wrangle Biblical truth into a logically-consistent framework. The tensions and difficulties we encounter are no doubt frustrating, but there is also comfort in the knowledge that God would not have created such tensions and difficulties if such things were meant to be skimmed over.

What are your thoughts on predestination? What difficulties do you have with this doctrine when it is taught?

I first preached the Word in a church context back in May 2006. I was kindly given a go at the lecturn for a new preacher’s night, which was an initiative to give people a chance to write and present a sermon based on a passage of their choosing. I chose Ezekiel 37 and ended up preaching what ended up sounding like an essay on the text, with something about Jesus shoehorned in at the end. The feedback was kind, but, I feel, avoided the truth about the negative aspects of my style and my approach to the text – in hindsight, I realise that I didn’t really approach the passage from a ‘whole Bible’ perspective and didn’t devote much time to looking at how the passage is fulfilled in Jesus, which is a shame, because it’s a golden picture of redemption and recreation and humble obedience to the true King.

Preaching is now part of my job description, and I recently had a go at giving a Bible talk as part of a series on Daniel. Fortunately, my trainer saw fit to give me Daniel 5, which lies in the narrative section and not the acid-trip apocalyptic section, but the challenge remained to conquer the weaknesses of my first attempt. The initial draft blew out to 4,500 words, but with some effort and painstaking trimming, I got it down to a reasonable 3,000 words which still managed to communicate my intentions. I feel that it went off OK on the night.

Did I manage it? You can decide – listen to my efforts right here and see what you think.

Is the emerging church thing passe yet? I am only just getting my head around it and I am fascinated and disturbed in equal parts. I really enjoy learning about it and talking with people about it, but I am wondering if it is a dated issue by now. I am in the process of slowly compiling some thoughts on this, provoked by our time spent in staff meetings reading Dan Kimball’s The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations (2003), but here are some preliminary thoughts.

Firstly, the emerging church defies description. I have read several attempts to define and capture the emerging church movement(s?), though none that have really gained any credence. It seems that there are different degrees of ‘emergence’, and these degrees appear to stem from different thinkers or leaders who are a part of this movement(s). For example, Brian McLaren appears to be one of the more influential leaders of the emergent church, but his thinking on the topic seems to be more liberal-theology than Dan Kimball, whose book is heavily focused on culture and the arts over theology. Appropriately, no-one who I have read claims that the emerging church has a central manifesto or set of articles of faith – much like the postmodernity that it clings to, emergence claims that it cannot be boxed. Instead, it feels more like a series of ‘works-in-progress’, always moving towards something rather than saying, ‘this is what we are’. I’m not sure what it is they are moving towards, though. It smacks of narrativism.

Secondly, and relatedly, the emerging church is characterised by mystique. There is a (renewed?) fascination with the unknown and the unknowable. I have read (though I am yet to rediscover this source) that there is a tendency to be somewhat agnostic about God’s character – we cannot know all about God, in our limited human wisdom, so we should embrace a more mystical view of Him. I wonder if this goes hand-in-hand with the generally liberal theology that is coupled with the emergent church movement(s) – to create a spiritual experience for today’s savvy non-churchgoer who is suspicious of the more traditional church, it seems that many thinkers and leaders in the emergent church(es) have abandoned hard-fought-for fidelity to the Bible. Emergents seem to advocate a view that we cannot know God through His Word, so we must turn to other ways to find Him – experience, meditation, music, the arts. I wonder, then, if the emerging church has more in common with gnosticism than Biblical Christianity.

Thirdly, I am yet to read a coherent and cogent analysis of postmodernism which validates the emerging church’s foundation. Dan Kimball’s book devotes some time to talking about postmodernism, but I am not convinced that he is really engaging with postmodernity and its associated epistemological underpinnings. For example, I think he has failed to appreciate what the word ‘deconstruct’ means – he seems to use it as a synonym of ‘take apart’ (which, on the surface, is what it literally means), whereas the word takes on more nuance when discussing postmodernity, suggesting an analysis of meaning in texts and language and how meanings shift when read in light of certain contained assumptions. I am also dissatisfied with Kimball’s rendering of modernism (and, to some extent, postmodernism) as a homogeneous caricature with little nuance or detail.

Fourthly, I get the feeling the emerging church is generally more critical of the ‘institutional church’ than of postmodernism. Perhaps this is an unfair statement, but so far, the general attitude towards ‘traditional’/‘seeker-sensitive’/‘institutional’ church in Kimball’s book is that it works for ‘moderns’, but not ‘postmoderns’. But he then appears to let postmodernity drive his proposed new way of structuring church, without really critiquing whether that’s appropriate.

Fifthly, there are some positives to the emerging church, despite my grouchiness. It prompts us to take a good look at culture and subculture and assess how church interacts with those around us. It promotes the need to take the gospel to the unchurched (i.e. those who have no Christian experience or roots and have little to no exposure to Biblical Christianity in their lives). It challenges us to rethink methodology and how we ‘do’ church gatherings. It demands that we confront issues that we are perhaps scared to confront.

I am working on being more lucid about all this soon (with references! I promise!).