The Internet Monk Archives

How I Became … an Arminian

Today we continue our series on “How I Became a…”. Two weeks ago I discussed how I had become a Theistic-Evolutionist. That was one of my later theological “conversions.” Up for discussion today, is my one of earliest theological conversions, that is the transition to Arminianism.

Before going too far down a rabbit hole, let me first tell you my story. I will leave some of the theological definitions, implications, and applications to later in the post.

I grew up in a church that taught “Eternal Security.” They believed that once someone was a Christian they were “eternally secure.” Some used the phrase “Once saved, always saved.” Others used the term “perserverance of the saints.” Once someone became a Christian, they remained a Christian. They might be “back-slidden”, but if they renounced Christianity, they could never have been a Christian in the first place. Oh, and they had a lot of verses to back them up.

People in this church knew their Bibles well. We would memorize huge sections of the Bible. Our Sunday School Superintendant had his pilot’s license, and for a couple of years the Sunday School class that memorized the most verses would get a flight in an airplane as a reward. One year, a week before the competition was to end, I was swimming at a local river, and, when diving in, hit a rock. I was lucky, and it only took a week for me to recover. I used that time to memorize 60 Bible verses. That put my class over the top, and we got to enjoy the plane ride. I mention this only because although we knew our Bibles well, we knew them very selectively, as I was to discover over the next number of years.

In 1985 I moved to Ottawa and started attending a new church of the same denomination. On Sunday evenings they had been going chapter by chapter through the Bible. By the time I arrived they were into the latter parts of the New Testament. The key moment came when we were studying 2 Peter 2:

20 If they have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and are overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning. 21 It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them.

The leader quickly said something to the tune of: “Well, this passage can’t mean what it seems to mean as it doesn’t fit with what we read in the rest of the Bible, so we must look for an alternate explanation.” He then went on at length to pontificate at length about Eternal security.

The alarm bells immediately went of in my head. “What do you mean this passage can’t mean what it seems to mean?”, I asked myself.

I then decided to do two things. I would read the Bible for myself to find what other verses I could find that communicated similar thoughts to 2 Peter 2. I would also find material that supported eternal security to see what the arguments were in favor of it. My quest was easier than I might have expected in the pre-Internet age. Church leaders pointed me in the direction of H.A. Ironside treatise entitled “Eternal Security of the Believer”, the text of which is now available online. Reading this booklet actually killed two proverbial birds with one stone, because it also listed many of the passages which were used by those who held a contrary opinion.

So I read, re-read, and read H.A. Ironside’s booklet once again. My internal response: “That’s all you’ve got?”

It wasn’t long after that, that I left that church, and started looking for a Church that would have a different perspective on the issue. I wanted a place that I could look both ways to see where my new theological journey would take me. Along the way I did some reading of Clark Pinnock, who had taken similar steps. In reading him in made me feel like I wasn’t along in my journey. It was said of Clark Pinnock that “he was reputed to study carefully, think precisely, argue forcefully, and shift his positions willingly if he discovered a more fruitful pathway of understanding”. This is a mantra I would love to be able to claim for myself. Incidentally, in 2008 I started attending a new church in Hamilton, Ontario. I discovered that Clark lived just one and a half blocks from the Church. I was often tempted to knock on his door, introduce myself, and offer to take him out to lunch or coffee. Sadly I never did, and he died two years later.

This was just the first step of many steps that I took towards Arminianism. I am not going to go into any of the others, but I did want to offer a few observations about my experiences as it relates to the topic this week of how we understand and read the Bible. I also want to summarize my current position on the issue, especially for those who might think that I am a heretic!

Over and over in Evangelical churches I have heard statements like “We are a Bible believing church.” “Catholics hold tradition as the final authority, but in our church the Bible is the final authority.”

Let me make this clear. In every evangelical church I have been in, the traditions of the church, especially the pet theologies held by the given denomination, have been held in higher stead than what the Bible might communicate about the topic. When scripture is read, it is read selectively with blinkers on. You will see this again and again in the weeks to come. The difference is, the Catholics have 2000 years of tradition to back up what they believe. Most Evangelicals, have about 100 years, tops.

So what do I believe?

I believe that Calvinism and Arminianism are two sides of the same coin. One looks at Salvation from God’s perspective, the other from a human perspective. I realized I haven’t defined terms, so here is a fairly high level view of the two streams of thought.
I used to believe that one could find a systematic theology that would resolve everything. I have come to realize, like we have been discussing this week, that the Bible is a messy book, and it is impossible to resolve tensions between certain scriptures.
I believe that God is sovereign.
I believe that God, in his sovereignty, chooses to give us freedom to make decisions. Either in line with his will, or contrary to it. In the words of Bruce Cockburn, “He wanted us like him, as choosers, not clones.”
I believe that God holds us secure, and…
I believe that you cannot “lose” your salvation, but…
I believe that intentional acts of repeated unconfessed sin, and/or the intentional renouncing of Christ’s gift of Salvation will have eternal salvific consequences.
I believe that there are many who were part of God’s family, but who are no longer part of God’s family.
I believe that after renouncing Christ’s gift of Salvation it is “impossible” to return. Knowing however at the same time that “all things are possible with God.”

So that is my story in a nutshell. Feel free to jump in with both feet with comments on anything that I might have written here. On Fridays, my work schedule is busy, and it doesn’t give me much time to interact, but I do read everything, and I love all the interesting places that you take the discussions. A word of warning though, any comments about powerpoint will be censured!

IM Book Review: A Jester’s Take on the Bible

. . . the insights of these textual experts must be welcomed, even if they shake the foundations of religious dogma. To the extent they are correct, they are further iterations of the truth. And the pursuit of that truth, not self-deception or willful ignorance, is the task of religious adulthood.

• Jay Michaelson
How We Know the Bible Was Written by Human Hands

Joking decides great things, Stronger and better oft than earnest can.

• John Milton

• • •

Pete Enns wants Christians to have a grown-up faith. He encourages us to seek this maturity by addressing us with wit and panache in his new book, The Bible Tells Me So.

An important characteristic of being a grown up is that one accepts things as they are and then learns to work with them. This applies to how one approaches the Bible. Enns repeatedly encourages us to stop defending the Bible as something we want it to be so that we might read and benefit from the actual book we have before us.

If his style in doing so is like that of the court jester, so much the better. The role of the jester is to use humor and mockery to speak hard truth to power while defusing tension. The jester plays the fool in order to confound the wise. He capers about, acting the clown while making serious points and challenging the status quo.

Enns is flat out hilarious at times and his writing is always lively, often eliciting a knowing smile, a chuckle, an “Aha!” moment. Here are some of the chapter titles:

Why this chapter is so important and so dreadfully long
When biblical writers get cranky
Don’t quote the Bible at me, please. I’m God.
Good news! Our leader was executed by the Romans! Come join us!
“Why don’t you just go castrate yourself,” and other spiritual advice.

Here’s one of my favorite (funny) paragraphs from the book:

This moment was the straw that broke the camel’s back. All those beach balls I had managed to keep down below the surface now burst up through the water and shot into the air. Or, if you’re not tired of my metaphors yet, I saw I could no longer keep the sheep in the pen. I had stepped over a threshold into the light (next to last metaphor) and was staring plainly right into the face of a Bible (final metaphor) that wasn’t behaving itself and that I now knew I could no longer make behave.

Pete Enns plays the jester part, but the problem with jesters is that they threaten us and make us squirm. Some fear that the jester’s antics and subversive message will destroy the solid foundation upon which we stand.

Enns may write in a conversational, quirky, funny, self-deprecating, irreverent manner, but his purpose is completely serious. Here, in his own words, is why he wrote The Bible Tells Me So.

The Bible itself, taken on its own terms, raises difficult questions and challenges for faith. My goal for this book, then, is to assure people of faith that they do not need to feel anxious, disloyal, unfaithful, dirty, scared, or outcast for engaging these questions of the Bible, interrogating it, not liking some of it, exploring what it really says, and discerning like adult readers what we can learn from it on our own journey of faith. I want you to know that you are not being disloyal to God or “rebelling” if you have trouble accepting , for example, that God would command his people to commit genocide. I want you to know you are not alone. Hardly. And perhaps some who have walked away from any faith in God, because the Bible just couldn’t bear up under the impossible expectations placed on it, might take a second look and find a truer faith. I want pious people to see that— judging by how the Bible actually behaves— God did not design scripture to be a hushed afternoon in an oak-paneled library. Instead, God has invited us to participate in a wrestling match, a forum for us to be stretched and to grow. Those are the kinds of disciples God desires. This book, in other words, is a giant permission slip to let the wrestling begin.

The Bible Enns reads is filled with stories and poems and sayings that ancient people wrote. They describe their own encounters with God (which Enns believes were genuine) in ancient language and in the context of the ancient settings where they lived. It doesn’t look anything like the well-ordered “divine instruction manual” many Christian teachers say it is. Instead, Pete Enns says, we should accept it as a model for our own spiritual journeys today — a collection of narratives and writings as messy, troubling, bizarre, perplexing, and complicated as the lives we live in the here and now.

As he studied the Bible seriously, three characteristics of the book arrested Pete Enns’s attention and changed his mind and life:

1. God does a lot of killing and plaguing, orders others to do it (usually the Israelites), or stands by watching as the Israelites go ballistic on their own. Exhibit A is God’s command that the Israelites exterminate the inhabitants of the land of Canaan so they could move in.

2. What the Bible says happened often didn’t— at least not the way the Bible describes it. And sometimes different biblical authors have very different takes on what happened in the past.

3. The biblical writers often disagree, expressing diverse and contradictory points of view about God and what it means to be faithful to him.

PeterEnns300x300 Much of the book explores these and other head-scratching parts of Scripture.

Why did God hate Canaanites so much that he commanded genocide? And how should we evaluate the kinds of biblical interpretation that justify it?

What about all those “weird” ways by which the Bible tells stories and reflects the past? Talking animals? God himself walking and talking with people? Strange and offensive laws and regulations? The “science” reflected in Scripture — a flat earth set on pillars with a dome over it, etc.?

Why two very different creation stories in Genesis? Why different collections of laws that sometimes contradict one another? Why two “histories” of Israel that are very different from each other? Why four books about Jesus whose details don’t always mesh?

Why do various Proverbs tell us to do opposite things? Why does the writer of Ecclesiastes have such a gloomy view of life and its ultimate meaning and purpose? Why does God seem to oppose his own “wisdom” in the book of Job?

Above all, why is God portrayed in so many different ways in the Bible? At times he is lofty, sovereign, transcendent. At other times he doesn’t act like “God”! He seems more human, gets taken off guard, is forced to respond to human behavior, and capitulates to human intervention. What do we do with the “ungodlike” God of the Bible?

Why do Jesus and the apostles interpret the Old Testament in the strange ways they do?

The Bible Tells Me So tackles these questions forthrightly and gives reasonable answers, in my opinion. The conservative evangelical inerrancy crowd will not like them. But in the end, I think Enns offers a saner, more mature perspective on what the Bible actually is.

Some things I liked best: (1) his descriptions of the Bible as a “story” book and what stories do, as well as his key point that “God let his children write the story,” (2) his appreciation of Jewish interpreters and the way they approach the text far differently than Christians are used to, (3) his courage to point out the various depictions of God in the Bible — a topic I’ve rarely heard addressed, (4) his perspective on reading the entire OT in the light of the Babylonian Captivity and how that influences our understanding of its meaning and purpose, (5) his grasp on how Jesus’ resurrection changed everything about the way early Christians read the Bible.

Congratulations to Pete Enns for facing these questions with humor and transparency, and for courageously pursuing honest inquiry and accepting reasonable answers, even though this led to him being forced “outside the gate” of the evangelical inerrancy crowd. I love the fact that his faith, his humanity, his wit, and his love for the Bible have only grown stronger, more adult, and more gracious as a result.

As one who has likewise taken up residence in the post-evangelical wilderness, I deem this book a gift.

• • •

The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It
By Peter Enns
HarperOne (2014)

Fr. Ernesto: Orthodoxy and Scripture

Note from CM: Today we welcome our friend, Fr. Ernesto Obregon, to whom we turn regularly with questions about Orthodox Christianity. In this post he gives an overview of the Orthodox view of Scripture.

• • •

I was asked to write on the Eastern Orthodox view of the Bible. Let me quote from one of our scholars here in America. Dr. Jeannie Constantinou said in an interview:

First of all, the Church does not rely on the Bible for its doctrine. We don’t rely on the Bible, because the Church came first. First of all, we’re talking about Christian texts. We’re talking about the New Testament. That came after the existence of the Church, so the Church does not need to find justification for its beliefs within the Bible. The Bible is the written form of apostolic tradition, and before it was written down, it was passed along orally. It was passed along orally. What we know about Christ we know—initially, the Church knew from the oral tradition. …

Okay, well, we would say the reason why I’m saying that is because if we were to say that our Christian doctrine comes from the New Testament, for example, then what that means is that the Church existed and they had to wait around until those books were written to find out what they believed, and that’s ridiculous. The Church knew what it believed about Christ before the books of the New Testament were written.

So, the short way to phrase this is that the Orthodox Church looks at the New Testament as the record of what the Church already believed about Jesus Christ and about dogmatics. The Gospels are of supreme importance because they record the memory of the Church regarding what Our Lord did while here on Earth. The Bible is authoritative in that it records what the Church had received from the Apostles and the apostolic bands that were around them. The Bible did not form the Church, the Church formed the Bible, and the Apostles formed the Church, Christ Jesus being the cornerstone.

Having said that, there is little doubt that the Church received the writings as being true and authoritative. But, they are true and authoritative under two conditions. One condition is that they are so because they agree with what the Church had already been teaching. Second, they are so provided they are interpreted in the way in which the Church historically interpreted them. The writings record what the Church received, but they are an accurate record insofar as they also are received with the interpretation in which the Apostolic and sub-Apostolic Church had.

Finally, the Bible does not record all that the Church believed and taught, for two reasons. One, any reasonable reading of the development of the Apostolic and sub-Apostolic Church either shows that the Church immediately forgot what they were taught, or they were taught additional teachings that were not reflected in the written Scriptures. This latter idea is reflected in the Bible when Saint Paul states that, “So then, brothers, stand firm, and cling to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by our letter,” (2 Thes. 2:15).

The relationship between the Church and the Bible is complex and not simple. It is complex in that the Church received oral tradition, not written texts. What written tradition it received was mainly from the Septuagint. Many New Testament quotations from the Old Testament are quotations from the Septuagint translation of Scripture, not from the much later Masoretic Hebrew text. What it received from the Apostles was a set of oral traditions about Jesus which were not set down in writing until several decades after the death of Jesus. By that time, Saint Paul had already written some of the New Testament epistles. He based the doctrine in those epistles not on a written record but on the verbal teaching which he received and on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit who guided him into doctrinal truth. The Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 is a test of whether the doctrine preached by Saint Paul (and other members of his apostolic team) is fully in accord with the received Tradition and Teachings of Jesus.

Thus the Orthodox Church is a bit looser on verbal inerrancy in that the Bible does not form the final source of authority for the Church. But, it is tight on infallibility, provided that the Scripture is interpreted in the way in which the Early Church believed. Because the Orthodox do not rely on the Bible to be the end all and be all of the Church, verbal inerrancy is not quite as necessary a doctrine as it is for the Evangelicals. But, because the Orthodox Church believes that the Bible is indeed the accurate record of what the Church believed, it is indeed infallible, provided it is interpreted per the Early Church.

Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church does not believe that there is ongoing revelation of doctrine. At Pentecost, we received Truth. That Truth is expressed in different words for different generations in order to make it understandable, but there is one Truth. That Truth may be explained in different ways in different cultures, but that is merely to aid in understanding. Truth is Truth. It is beyond development, but not beyond changing ways to explain it to changing cultures.

The Bible is True. The Bible is Authoritative. But, the Bible is not such unless it is interpreted in such a way that it reflects the teachings of the Apostolic and sub-Apostolic Church.

• • •

For further insights, Fr. Ernesto suggests that IM readers might want to check out the following article/podcast: The Eastern Orthodox Approach to the Bible, with Dr Jeannie Constantinou at Ancient Faith Radio.

Fr. Ernesto blogs at OrthoCuban.

Another Look: The Bible — Rated “R”

First posted in 2010.

Okay, so let’s get real about the Bible.

A lot of folks have a mistaken and inadequate understanding of what the Bible is like and what it contains.

I agree with author Frederick Buechner, who says:

When a minister reads out of the Bible, I am sure that at least nine times out of ten the people who happen to be listening at all hear not what is really being said but only what they expect to hear read. And I think that what most people expect to hear read from the Bible is an edifying story, an uplifting thought, a moral lesson — something elevating, obvious, and boring. So that is exactly what very often they do hear. Only that is too bad because if you really listen, there is no telling what you might hear.

He’s exactly right. Most of us have the idea that the Bible is a nice book for nice people about nice folks who said and did nice things, where everything leads to a nice and happy ending.

Take the first book in the Bible, the book of Genesis, for example. It’s likely that many people have Sunday School images in their minds when they think of Genesis — they picture God creating the world, Adam and Eve frolicking in the Garden of Eden, Noah gathering cute little animals onto the ark and God putting a beautiful rainbow in the sky, Abraham and Sarah having a baby in their old age, and Joseph wearing his coat of many colors. Nice.

But here’s what’s in the real, unedited version:

A man and woman stand in nakedness and shame, blaming each other for what they did wrong.
An angry and envious man, lures his brother into a field, brutally murders him, and then tries to cover it up.
The world becomes so corrupt and violent that God decides to virtually wipe out the human population and start over.
Noah gets drunk, and one of his son dishonors him by committing an immoral act in his father’s bedroom.
Abraham twice tries to pass his wife off to another man to save his own skin. Later, his son Isaac does the same thing.
Abraham sleeps with one of the household servants so he can have an heir. This was his wife’s idea, but she becomes so jealous after it happens, that she angrily throws the woman and her son out of house to live in poverty and shame.
Abraham’s nephew Lot offers to let a violent mob gang rape his daughters. Lot’s daughters later get their own father drunk and sleep with him so that they can have children.
Jacob, Isaac’s son, is a deceitful mama’s boy who tricks his father and brother out of important family legal rights. He has to run away from home so his brother won’t kill him.
He goes to work for his ruthless uncle, who keeps him in virtual slavery for decades. Jacob escapes by tricking him and running away.
Jacob’s wives live in constant jealousy and competition, continually tricking Jacob and each other in an ongoing battle for supremacy in the family.
Jacob’s sons loathe one of their brothers, sell him into slavery, then lie to their father and tell him he died.
Jacob’s daughter Dinah is raped. Her brothers exact revenge by deceiving and then murdering the perpetrator, destroying and looting his city, and taking all his family members captive.
Judah refuses to find a husband for his widowed daughter-in-law, Tamar. So she disguises herself as a prostitute, tricks her father-in-law into sleeping with her, and becomes pregnant.

And that’s just the first book in the Bible. Nothin’ but a cast of dirty, rotten scoundrels.

I had a pastor friend who once told me he was planning to do a family teaching series from Genesis. I’m afraid I wasn’t very kind. In fact, I laughed out loud and said, “What are you going to talk about, how to be a complete bum and still have God bless your family?”

He didn’t think it was funny. He had a overly pious view of the Bible that didn’t allow for the ugly stuff. However, that is what Genesis (and the rest of the Bible) is like! It should be rated “R” — raw, realistic, and in some instances, even repulsive. It couldn’t be further from “nice.”

However, there is this too: the Bible insists that, even in the midst of all the muck of human sin, brokenness, ugliness and strife, a God of grace is present and working to fulfill a plan and ultimately make something new and good. The Bible is also rated “R” because its main theme is “redemption,” a story of grace that reaches into the miry pit and pulls muddy sinners out, kicking and screaming.

In one of his lesser known plays, Eugene O’Neill wrote:

“This is Daddy’s bedtime secret for today: Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue!

I encourage you to read the Bible for what it really is and says. It’s not very nice, but it’s real. And through it, God puts broken things back together.

It’s definitely a book for dirty, rotten scoundrels. Like me.

iMonk Classic: A Conversation in God’s Kitchen (2)

Note from CM: This is part two of Michael Spencer’s most comprehensive essay on the Bible (read PART ONE here). For a couple of weeks here we are focusing our attention on posts related to the Bible, its nature and purpose. This has been a hot-button issue in our generation, especially in American evangelicalism, which took a stand in the late 1970’s with The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. Michael critiqued that statement, calling it “inefficient, unnecessary, and divisive.” In a roundtable discussion published in Modern Reformation magazine, he said:

I oppose the concept of inerrancy because the word itself moves the argument, intentionally or not, into the arena of a philosophical system foreign to the apostles, Fathers, and Reformers. In short, if we are going to use the word, we will need to submit ourselves to the system from which it arose. On these terms, inerrancy is indefensible.

In today’s portion, Michael discusses what it means to say that the Bible, with all its apparent humanness, is inspired.

• • •

Second, How can I say the Bible is Inspired?

Let’s pause and take stock. I’ve said the Bible is a thoroughly human book in which human beings, involved in an experience they identify as God, select a “canon” of literature that contains a conversation about this experience of God. It is important, however, that I put forward some idea of inspiration, since orthodox Christianity requires some way to understand how God speaks in the Bible.

The original Great Books essays stated that the conversation occurs without any set dogma or point of view. The student of the Great Books is free to listen to the conversation and come to any number of conclusions about God, government, reality or human nature.

The Biblical conversation is different. While the reader is free to draw conclusions, the conversation itself is compelling in its conclusions. Because this conversation continues to a point of hearing a unique Word from God, there are limits to what we may legitimately say is being said. The proper understanding of language, culture, history and text is part of this limitation. The Biblical conversation allows great freedom, but there is also agreement that when this conversation is heard honestly, it has a common stream and focus at its center. A stream and focus that reveals a particular God, his ways, his character, his message and ultimately, his Son.

Of course, we should have modest expectations of agreement on this kind of unity in the Bible, and any community of believers that claims to hear a detailed scheme of belief in the Bible is probably listening to some parts of the conversation differently than other communities. Still, even with the diversity of conclusions we will find in listening, the Christian communities that lay hold of this conversation as “their own,” have considerable broad agreement in what the conversation communicates. On the focus of that conversation, there is no contention.

At this point I want to separate myself from any kind of Christianity that sees the Bible as teaching a highly sectarian view of Christianity at the exclusion of other views. I am not shocked that Catholics and Lutherans find the words “This is my body” to mean something different than Baptists do. I am distraught that any of these parties would fail to see that we are all listening to the same texts, and disagreement isn’t because some of us are all that much smarter or better listeners. It’s because we listen to different parts of the conversation, in different ways, and we are allowed to do so.

I love confessionalism. But I despise confessionalism that doesn’t understand and respect what other confessional communities are doing in listening to the conversation. This is why, for instance, I am not personally torn up by the infant baptism debate. Listening to the Biblical conversation, there appear to be two completely plausible conclusions on the subject. I have convictions on which is right, but I have no conviction that the other fellow is so wrong that I can treat him as if he isn’t approaching the same text as I am, with the same amount of worthy respect and reverence.

Scripture is inspired if God has, on some level and in some way, directed its production so that it says what he wants it to say. Human beings may conclude that the Bible is inspired if it demonstrates, in its content and its results, a unity of message that cannot be explained by merely human factors. Despite its humanity, despite its diversity, the Bible speaks to us a message that claims to be from God, and is coherent and clear in its claims. Such a view of the Bible grows as the Bible itself becomes aware of the conversation, and aware of the presence of God in the experience of the writers and their communities. But we should never claim that inspiration is a provable proposition. It is an assertion of faith, and that faith comes because of the presence of Jesus as the final Word of the inspired Conversation.

What I will write next is so important, that I cannot assert loudly enough the importance of understanding what I am claiming. The primary reason I believe the Bible is inspired is its presentation of Jesus. Only the activity of God in bringing a final Word into history and into the conversation can cause this conversation to have divine implications totally beyond the human realm of origin and explanation.

Jesus is all the proof I need. Either he came from God, or we somehow cooked him up on our own. Is that a hard choice?

Jesus is not the product of human speculation. The Cross and the Gospel of the Cross are outrageous. Offensive. Unthinkable. Absurd. Yet the Bible tells us that the comprehensive point of the entire activity of God in history is revealing a crucified and risen Jesus as the Lord of the Universe and the source of salvation to all who believe in him. Imagine if someone read the Great Books and said the key to all truth and reality is a crucified criminal who lived two millennia ago. Such a conclusion would be demented. Foolishness of the highest order.

Yet this is exactly what the Bible says. It offers us Jesus as the meaning of all of history, the meaning of our lives, and importantly for this essay, the final Word, the conclusive Word in the Biblical conversation.

Listen to Jesus in Luke 24, quoted above. He tells the disciples that the scriptures are inspired….because they speak of Him. Without Jesus, the scriptures make no sense. They will have no message other than the question of how this God can possibly have a relationship with people who are unfit to know him and unwilling to embrace him? Without Jesus, God is a mystery. Contradictory. Without Jesus, the Bible is not inspired. It is an unfinished symphony. A tragedy without resolution. A romance whose lovers are never united.

The book of Revelation proclaims that Jesus is the one who is worthy to open the scroll of all human history and give it meaning: Himself. It is no accident that Revelation is a library of Biblical references and historical, mythic symbolism. It is a sampling of the Biblical conversation. Jesus is the crowning Word of ALL conversations. Biblical, spiritual, economic, political, governmental. Scripture is INSPIRED BY the PRESENCE OF CHRIST throughout the conversation.

It’s evident that this approach to inspiration is not particularly interested in terms like inerrancy. I believe the search for a way to compliment the Bible enough to make every word true is one of the most colossal wastes of time ever engaged in by Christian minds. Further, the logical torture that produces approaches to scripture like young earth creationism makes me profoundly sad, because it misses the point, and misleads anyone who hears it into believing that a book whose final Word is “I am the Truth,” is really about whether there ever was a water canopy over the earth or dinosaurs on the ark.

The Bible is about Jesus. The inspiration of the Bible is the presence of Jesus in the conversation. The authority of scripture is the authority of Jesus. The “inerrancy” of scripture is that, rightly understood, it takes us to Jesus. The Law came through Moses, but grace and TRUTH came through Jesus Christ. The TRUTH of the Bible was not there without Jesus. Any discussion of inspiration that is not- eventually- about the relationship of Jesus to that part of the conversation, is useless. The distance of any part of the conversation from Jesus is the distance of that part of the Bible from what Christians mean by “inspiration.”

The very definition of straining at gnats and swallowing camels is debating the inspiration of Judges without seeing how Judges relates to Christ. When Christians feel the field of battle for inspiration is some battle in the Old Testament, they are demonstrating they are lost in the field where the treasure is buried. They are going down roads that lead nowhere if they are discussing questions ultimately unrelated to Christ and Gospel.

Christ is not a character in the Bible. He is not chapter 23-25 in a 30 chapter novel. He is the story. He is the novel. He is the only character we need to know. The entire book is about introducing him to us in pictures and language we can understand.

I want to be clear that I am not invalidating the content of scripture, particularly the Old Testament. It is the Old Testament Jesus says is about himself. Read it, he tells the Jews. It is about him. It is the Old Testament where he apparently appears on every page. But if we start seeing content in that Old Testament removed and separated from Christ, we are looking at texts apart from anything that will save us. They may inform or motivate, but they will not save. And this conversation is about the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.

My entire Christian experience, I’ve been reading attempts to defend the inspiration of the Bible logically, and apologetically. Christians fear the question “How do you know the Bible is inspired by God?” more than almost any question. I do not fear that question anymore, because I have a simple answer.

“I don’t know what you mean by inspired. If you mean, how do I know it’s right and true in everything it says, then I don’t believe in that kind of inspiration. But if you mean how do I know that the Bible is God’s true communication to me, it’s simple. The Bible shows me Jesus. The reason I believe the Bible is inspired is that it shows me who Jesus is and what Jesus means. That’s the answer to all the questions that matter to me.”

Eugene Peterson: An Invitation to the Story

As an aid to understanding the Scriptures, which he translated into the language of the German people, Martin Luther thought it important to provide prefaces to the various books in the Bible. You may recall that it was during the reading of one of these prefaces, years later, that John Wesley’s heart was “strangely warmed” as he experienced the assurance of his salvation.

Today, of course, we have a plethora of study Bibles, most of which provide similar prefaces. But I would like to recommend a little book to you today that (if you can still find it), will encourage you in your study of Scripture. If I were a pastor, this book would be part of any catechetical instruction or disciple-making curriculum. It was written by Eugene Peterson, who translated The Message version, and it consists of introductions to the major parts of the Bible and each individual book. It’s called, The Invitation: A Simple Guide to the Bible. This brief resource will provide many occasions for your heart to be “strangely warmed.”

Peterson, of course, is one of our mentors here at Internet Monk, primarily for his works on being a pastor. But we have also recommended his books on theology and biblical studies. He brings a scholar’s depth and a pastor’s wisdom and love to this small introduction.

To give you a sense of the insights he contributes that help us wrap our minds around the big story of Scripture and the simple, yet profound way he communicates, I will share a portion (edited for length) from his introduction to “The Books of Moses: Stories and Signposts.”

. . . The Books of Moses are made up mostly of stories and signposts. The stories show us God working with and speaking to men and women in a rich variety of circumstances. God is presented to us not in ideas and arguments but in events and actions that involve each of us personally. The signposts provide immediate and practical directions to guide us into the behavior that is appropriate to our humanity and honoring to God.

The simplicity of the storytelling and signposting in these books makes what is written as accessible to children as to adults. But the simplicity (as in so many simple things) is also profound, inviting us into a lifetime of growing participation in God’s saving ways with us.

An image of human growth suggests a reason for the powerful pull of these stories and signposts on so many millions of men, women, and children to live as God’s people. The sketch shows the five books as five stages of growth in which God creates first a cosmos and then a people for his glory.

Genesis is Conception. After establishing the basic elements by which God will do his work of creation and salvation and judgment in the midst of human sin and rebellion (chapters 1-11), God conceives a People to whom he will reveal himself as a God of salvation and through them, over time, to everyone on earth. . . .

[Peterson then describes the period of the patriarchs as the time of gestation. Much is unclear, but one thing is certain: there is life.]

Exodus is Birth and Infancy. The gestation of the people of God lasts a long time, but finally the birth pangs start. Egyptian slavery gives the first intimations of the contractions to come. When Moses arrives on the scene to preside over the birth itself, ten fierce plagues on Egypt accompany the contractions that bring the travail to completion: at the Red Sea the waters break, the People of God tumble out of the womb onto dry ground, and their life as a free People of God begins. Moses leads them crawling and toddling to Sinai. . . .

Leviticus is Schooling. As infancy develops into childhood, formal schooling takes place. There’s a lot to know; they need some structure and arrangement to keep things straight: reading, writing, arithmetic. But for the People of God the basic curriculum has to do with God and their relationship with God. Leviticus is the McGuffey’s Reader of the People of God. . . .

Numbers is Adolescence. The years of adolescence are critical to understanding who we are. We are advanced enough physically to be able, for the most part, to take care of ourselves. We are developed enough mentally, with some obvious limitations, to think for ourselves. We discover that we are not simply extensions of our parents; and we are not just mirror images of our culture. But who are we? Especially, who are we as a People of God? The People of God in Numbers are new at these emerging independent operations of behaving and thinking and so inevitably make a lot of mistakes. Rebellion is one of the more conspicuous mistakes. . . .

Deuteronomy is Adulthood. The mature life is a complex operation. Growing up is a long process. And growing up in God takes the longest time. During their forty years spent in the wilderness, the People of God developed from that full-term embryo brought to birth on the far shore of the Red Sea, are carried and led, nourished and protected under Moses to the place of God’s Revelation at Sinai, taught and trained, disciplined and blessed. Now they are ready to live as a free people, formed by God, as a holy people, transformed by God. They still have a long way to go (as do we all), but all the conditions for maturity are there. . . .

The Books of Moses are foundational to the sixty-one books that follow in our Bibles. A foundation, though, is not a complete building but the anticipation of one. An elaborate moral infrastructure is provided here for what is yet to come. Each book that follows, in one way or another, picks up and develops some aspect of the messianic salvation involved in becoming the People of God, but it is always on this foundation. . . .

Saturday Ramblings: September 27, 2014

It’s a beautiful fall Saturday in the Midwest, and I am rambling around Chicago this weekend, reuniting with friends and classmates from my junior high and high school days. I graduated from high school in 1974. That was in Baltimore — I moved at the beginning of my senior year. But I have always considered the kids from Downers Grove South High School as my “graduating class.” And it’s actually my 8th grade class friends that I have stayed closest to. We have reunions annually, reflecting a time in our lives when we were going through the wilderness of adolescence together in the bewildering days of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.

Today, when you comment, please state the year you graduated from high school and the school from which you graduated.

Just as it should be. From MLB.com:

There was so much discussion about how to best script the perfect moment, the ideal way for Derek Jeter to bid farewell to the Bronx in the only pinstriped uniform he ever wanted to wear. And in the end, the only way to properly handle someone who fought so hard never to come out of the lineup was to just let him play the game.

Manager Joe Girardi never moved from his spot in the dugout during the top of the ninth inning. It was Jeter’s game to play, and it was his game to end, slashing a walk-off single to right field in the bottom of the ninth inning that lifted the Yankees to a 6-5 victory over the Orioles on Thursday at Yankee Stadium.

Here’s the complete MLB postseason playoff picture (a couple of spots will be finalized this weekend). Wild card playoff games will be held on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1. OK, iMonk baseball fans, who are you pulling for?

From the sublime to the ridiculous: The pastor of “America’s manliest church” has stepped down after being charged with DWI last week for driving home drunk from a bar. Heath Mooneyham relinquished control of Ignite Church in Joplin, MO during last Sunday’s service.

Mooneyham was the subject of an article at Vocativ called, “Sex, Guns and Jesus: Inside America’s Manliest Church,” in which the foul-mouthed macho “pastor” described his church like this: “We’re just a bunch of dudes with beards and beer guts and hot wives. We love our God. We love our country. We love our trucks. And we love our guns.”

Only in the good ol’ US of A.

Does your church have choirs? An article by Cathy Lynn Grossman discusses why many congregations have moved away from choirs and choral music. But at a site on worship that is fast becoming one of my favorites, Jonathan Aigner gives 9 reasons to keep the church choir alive.

I’ve sung in choirs most of my adult life. I have directed choirs. My wife has been an accompanist and/or choir director as well, and is currently directing a choir in a small Presbyterian church. I think Jonathan has good things to say here.

Here’s a company policy you’ve gotta like. Virgin Group founder Richard Branson has introduced a new company policy that lets his personal staff take as much vacation time as they like, whenever they like.

However, some people think this might not work so well, especially in corporate environments like those in the U.S. (one of the countries where the new policy will apply). As Alexander C. Kaufman writes in the Huff Post:

Americans are infamously averse to vacations as it is. About 40 percent of U.S. workers don’t plan to use all their paid vacation time this year, according to a recent survey by the U.S. Travel Association and GfK, a market research firm. In a Daily Telegraph article that Branson cited in his blog post, Daniel H. Pink described the British perspective on vacations, which applies just as well to Americans: “[W]e view them as minor betrayals — of our obligations to customers and clients, of our responsibilities to the colleagues left behind, even of the values we hold most dear.”

Minor betrayal or not, I’m ready for another vacation, how about you? Why do Americans in particular seem so averse to taking time off?

Another Look: My View of Scripture (at this point)

Note from CM: Our usual Friday contributor Mike Bell ran into some other responsibilities and asked me to post something for today. So I thought I’d repeat this 2011 summary of my view of the Bible. I didn’t take time to thoroughly review and edit it, so I might state some minor details differently today, but overall I think it continues to capture my perspective well.

• • •

Today, I would like to present, for your consideration and discussion, a ten-point summary of my perspective on Scripture (at this point in my understanding).

The Bible is from God. It is one of the means by which God has made himself known to human beings. The various books of the Bible were composed and edited and put together under the mysterious method of “inspiration,” by which God worked mostly through normal human processes to communicate his message.

The Bible is incarnational. That is, it comes to us in fully human form, taking the words of people written in their own times, from within their own cultures, according to the genres and literary conventions common to their day, and within the confines of their own limited perspectives, to communicate God’s message.

The Bible involves a complex conversation of faith over time. The Bible contains multiple voices, a diversity of narrative and theological perspectives, and a development of thought over time. For example, Joshua and Judges present two sides of the conquest of Canaan. Ecclesiastes and Job protest the wisdom tradition represented by a book like Proverbs, which even in its own pages presents several points of view. The “history” of Chronicles presents a different scenario of the same events than we see in the books of Kings. This diversity is only a problem if we expect the Bible to be something it is not—a timeless and perfectly consistent, always harmonizable record that is precise in every detail according to modern standards of accuracy.

The Bible came to us through the community of faith. Recognizing that there were human processes involved in the final editing and canonization of the Bible also highlights how God used people to bring the Bible as a final product to the world. The Hebrew Bible was put together mostly during and after the Babylonian exile. The church took nearly four centuries to complete the canonization process for the New Testament. Our understanding of the nature, authority, and message of Scripture must take these human processes into account as well.

The Bible is the church’s primary authority (Prima Scriptura). The fact that the church functioned for the first four centuries of its life without a complete Bible means that it cannot have sole authority apart from the church, the Holy Spirit, and the apostolic traditions (the “rule of faith”). For Protestants, at the very least this means we must make a fresh commitment to learning church history, the creeds, and the early Church Fathers for a fuller understanding and practice of the faith.

The Bible is true. “True” is a better way of describing the Bible than “inerrant” or “infallible” or any such words that grow out of modern categories. After all, what is an “inerrant” poem? An “infallible” story? The Bible is true because it tells the truth about God, the state of the world, human life and death, sin and salvation, wisdom and foolishness. But most of all because it tells the truth about the Truth himself and leads its readers to him.

The Bible is God’s story. Any individual passage or part of the Bible should be read and interpreted in the light of its big picture, its overall pattern and message. The final form of the Bible tells a “Christotelic” story. From “in the beginning” to “in the end of days” the story constantly develops and moves forward to its culmination in Christ and the new creation. This story must always determine our emphases when interpreting its message.

The Bible’s central focus is Jesus. The apostles testify that Jesus taught them to see that the purpose of the Torah, Prophets, and Writings is to point to him and his good news, which restores God’s blessing to all creation. The New Testament, of course, tells Jesus’ story and accounts of the apostolic community that experienced and spread his good news. The Bible is not God’s final word, but is rather a primary witness to Jesus, God’s final Word.

The Bible does not contain every detail of God’s will for his people’s lives. In the Bible, God gives adequate instructions to guide his people to practice lives of love for God and neighbor. On the other hand, God expects that many implications of the Gospel will be worked out only over the course of time, in and through (and despite!) his people, until the consummation of the age. The Bible is not a “handbook” for living, with detailed instructions for every aspect of life. The Bible is not “sufficient” to answer all of life’s questions. It was not designed to do that, and we risk becoming pharisaical if we try to maintain that opinion.

The Bible doesn’t need me or anyone else to defend it. Christians do not need to prove that the Bible is a perfect book, free from “error” (as we define it today) in every way in order to have a secure faith or to present a case for Christ to the world. We need a credible, reliable witness that is self-attesting in its divine truthfulness, beauty, and power. This we have in the Bible.

N.T. Wright: Authority and the Public Reading of Scripture

As part of my study during these weeks when we are discussing the nature and purpose of the Bible, I have been reading N.T. Wright’s illuminating book, Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today.

I particularly like his point that there is need to clarify what we mean when we speak about the Bible’s “authority.” Affirming that authority rightly belongs to God in the context of his Kingdom rule, Wright says we must have a more dynamic understanding of the term: the Bible only has authority in the sense that God exercises his sovereign rule through it.

Thus, Wright says, Scripture’s authority does not lie in its status as a “court of final appeal” or as a compendium of doctrine, as rules for living or a devotional manual. Rather, the “authority of Scripture” must be understood within the context of God’s Kingdom and God’s mission to the world. Scripture is a primary means by which God acts in and through his people to bring healing and redemption to all creation. Note this emphasis in Jesus’ so-called “great commission” —

Jesus came and told his disciples, “I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth. Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations,baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:18-20)

While Jesus doesn’t specifically mention “Scripture” here, (1) he locates authority in himself, and (2) that authority is exercised through the church as they “make disciples” all over the world and “teach” those disciples to obey the words of Jesus. These disciple-making and teaching practices infer words (some of which are the words of Jesus himself) that are recognized as teachings representing Jesus’ authority, which is transmitted in the process of fulfilling the mission.

Christians properly apply this definition of authority when we allow Scripture to (1) lead us into worship of the God who speaks to us, (2) reorder our lives so that we take our part as his Spirit-empowered people in mission to the world.

• • •

In that context, N.T. Wright suggests that the first and most important place the church hears Scripture is in worship.

Below, Wright speaks about how “a liturgically-grounded reading of Scripture” is a key practice in having God exercise his authority in and through the church for the sake of the world.

The primary place where the church hears scripture is during corporate worship. (I shall come to individual reading presently, but I believe corporate worship to be primary.) This is itself a practice in direct descent from the public reading of the law by Ezra, Jesus’ own reading of Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth, the reading of Paul’s letters in the assembled church, and so on. However different we may be personally, contextually, culturally, and so on, when we read scripture we do so in communion with other Christians across space and time. This means, for instance, that we must work at making sure we read scripture properly in public, with appropriate systems for choosing what to read and appropriate training to make sure those who read do so to best effect. If scripture is to be a dynamic force within the church, it is vital that the public reading of scripture does not degenerate into what might be called “aural wallpaper,” a pleasing and somewhat religious noise which murmurs along in the background while the mind is occupied elsewhere.

It also means that in our public worship, in whatever tradition, we need to make sure the reading of scripture takes a central place. In my own tradition, that of the Anglican Communion, the regular offices of Morning and Evening Prayer are, in all kinds of ways, “showcases for scripture.” That is, they do with scripture (by means of prayer, music, and response) what a well-organized exhibition does with a great work of art: they prepare us for it, they enable us to appreciate it fully, and they give us an opportunity to meditate further on it. The public reading of scripture is not designed merely to teach the people its content, though that should be a welcome spin-off. . . .

More, in public worship where the reading of scripture is given its proper place, the authority of God places a direct challenge to the authority of the powers that be, not least those who use the media, in shaping the mind and life of the community. But the primary purpose of the readings is to be itself an act of worship, celebrating God’s story, power, and wisdom and, above all, God’s son. That is the kind of worship through which the church is renewed in God’s image, and so transformed and directed in its mission. Scripture is the key means through which the living God directs and strengthens his people in and for that work. That, I have argued throughout this book, is what the shorthand phrase “the authority of scripture” is really all about.

N.T. Wright goes on to urge that the practice should involve readings that tell the entire story of the Old and New Testaments and not truncate the readings. Nor should the length of the readings be pruned so that contexts are eliminated. The sermon should be closely tied to the readings, drawing out fresh insights that arise from comparing the various texts and pointing out connections that reinforce the big story of Scripture. Finally, he notes that the biblical words spoken during the Eucharist continually bring us back to the gospel, forming us as individuals and faith communities in the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

The Conservative Evangelical View of Inerrancy

I used to affirm biblical inerrancy. I’m not sure I understood it very well, even though I went through Bible college and seminary. I know I hadn’t read or studied the Bible enough to have a true “belief” about it.

I trusted the Bible. That, in a nutshell, was my position. The Bible is true. I can count on the Bible to tell me the truth. The Bible communicates God’s mind and heart to me. The Bible is a reliable witness to God’s character and works in history, culminating in Jesus Christ. God speaks through the Bible. It is filled with lively words that point to the Living Word.

While I was growing in my understanding of the Bible in the 1970’s and 80’s, a much more detailed and precise definition of “inerrancy” was emerging in American evangelicalism.

In her book, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism, Molly Worthen sketches a brief outline of the doctrine of “inerrancy” as we know it today.

She notes that inerrancy is a peculiarly Protestant doctrine (inerrantists dispute this). She traces it from the generations following the Reformation, when Protestant scholastics developed their doctrine of Scripture using Greek philosophical and rationalistic principles, to the days when the doctrine “blossomed” under the tutelage of Hodge and Warfield at Princeton Theological Seminary, who taught in the wake of Darwin and modern biblical higher criticism.

Then it was on to the fundamentalist vs. modernist battles of the early twentieth century and the development of neo-evangelicalism in response to fundamentalist sectarianism and obscurantism. Though both chose different ways of relating to the world of reason, culture, and education, both held to an inerrant Bible.

In the midst of the Cold War, the social upheavals of the 1960’s and early 70’s, and a sense of growing secularism and godlessness, in the infant days of the “Christian Right” more than 200 evangelical leaders came together at a conference sponsored by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (ICBI), held in Chicago (1978). These leaders included Robert Preus, James Montgomery Boice, Carl F. H. Henry, Kenneth Kantzer, J. I. Packer, Francis Schaeffer, R. C. Sproul and John MacArthur. They produced The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, a thorough conservative evangelical statement attributing inerrancy to the Bible’s original autographs.

Read the complete Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.

These next couple of weeks, as we discuss the Bible, its nature and purpose, we will be throwing ideas about “inerrancy” back and forth. It is important that we understand the modern concept of inerrancy as the ones who promote it define it. So, below, for your meditation today, is the summary statement from the Chicago Statement, followed by an excerpt of an article by Al Mohler, one of the doctrine’s foremost public defenders.

I’d like our discussion to focus on responding to inerrancy as its adherents define it. The full Chicago Statement is linked above, and there are links for further reading below in case you want more detail.

CSBI SUMMARY STATEMENT

1. God, who is Himself Truth and speaks truth only, has inspired Holy Scripture in order thereby to reveal Himself to lost mankind through Jesus Christ as Creator and Lord, Redeemer and Judge. Holy Scripture is God’s witness to Himself.

2. Holy Scripture, being God’s own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by His Spirit, is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches: It is to be believed, as God’s instruction, in all that it affirms; obeyed, as God’s command, in all that it requires; embraced, as God’s pledge, in all that it promises.

3. The Holy Spirit, Scripture’s divine Author, both authenticates it to us by His inward witness and opens our minds to understand its meaning.

4. Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.

5. The authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any way limited of disregarded, or made relative to a view of truth contrary to the Bible’s own; and such lapses bring serious loss to both the individual and the Church.

• • •

I do not believe that evangelicalism can survive without the explicit and complete assertion of biblical inerrancy. Given the pressures of late modernity, growing ever more hostile to theological truth claims, there is little basis for any hope that evangelicals will remain distinctively evangelical without the principled and explicit commitment to the inerrancy of the Bible.

Beyond this, inerrancy must be understood as necessary and integral to the life of the church, the authority of preaching, and the integrity of the Christian life. Without a total commitment to the trustworthiness and truthfulness of the Bible, the church is left without its defining authority, lacking confidence in its ability to hear God’s voice. Preachers will lack confidence in the authority and truthfulness of the very Word they are commissioned to preach and teach. This is not an issue of homiletical theory but a life-and-death question of whether the preacher has a distinctive and authoritative Word to preach to people desperately in need of direction and guidance. Individual Christians will be left without either the confidence to trust the Bible or the ability to understand the Bible as something less than totally true.

. . . The affirmation of biblical inerrancy is necessary for the health of the church and for our obedience to the Scriptures. Though necessary, it is not sufficient, taken by itself, to constitute an evangelical doctrine of Scripture. Evangelicals must embrace a comprehensive affirmation of the Bible as the Word of God written. In the end, inspiration requires inerrancy, and inerrancy affirms the Bible’s plenary authority. The Bible is not inerrant, and thus the Word of God; it is the Word of God, and thus inerrant.

• Al Mohler, from “When the Bible Speaks, God Speaks: The Classic Doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy”

• • •

Other Articles Defending Inerrancy:

A Roundtable Discussion on Inerrancy, at Modern Reformation (featuring Michael Spencer)

The Inerrancy of Scripture (1), (2), (3) by Tim Challies (Challies responds to Michael Spencer)

The Truthfulness of Scripture: Inerrancy (1), (2) by Michael Horton.