One In Jesus

GraceConversation Resumes Tomorrow

Posted on June 17, 2009 by Jay F Guin

Todd and I have been busy, and we’ll begin posting our response tomorrow.

Posts will come in two batches, as follows:

First Two Grounds of Apostasy

Statement of Position on Apostasy
Faith and Repentance
The Unity of Faith and Repentance
The True Nature of Repentance
Two Conservative Theories of Grace
The you-must-confess-repent-make restitution-and-ask-forgiveness theory
Romans and the Salvation of the Mature
Romans and Accepting Each Other
1 John and Walking in the Light
Objections Considered
Critique of the Conservative Position

Third Ground of Apostasy (to come one week later)

Salvation Other Than by Faith
Exegesis of Galatians
Adding to Faith and Repentance
Why Adding to Faith Damns

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Missional Living

Posted on June 17, 2009 by Jay F Guin

I’ve got this weird attitude toward Mark Driscoll and his Mars Hill church in Seattle. I can’t help but admire the guy’s work and much of his writing. But his neo-Calvinism bothers me (the Calvinism part, not the neo-), and the way he pushes for male leadership in the church is a bit over the top. Nonetheless, anyone who wants to plant a thousand churches in 10 years has the right heart.

And so I read his blog called “The Resurgence” — sometimes for the wisdom and sometimes for the weirdness. But I enjoy it. And here’s some real wisdom that a member of his staff posted the other day that I’ve been meaning to share for a while — Continue reading →

Posted in Missional Christianity, Uncategorized | Tagged All, Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill Church, missional, The Resurgence | 2 Comments

Backgrounds of the Restoration Movement: Gnosticism, Part 3

Posted on June 16, 2009 by Jay F Guin

Another area where Platonic thought crept into the church is in our understanding of the “soul” and the afterlife. In Biblical usage, our bodies will be resurrected. Indeed, “resurrection” specifically refers to the reanimation of the body. However, in Greek thought, the soul survived death but not the body.

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul speaks of a “spiritual” resurrected body, which we often take to mean a disembodied body (you see my point), but which really means a body “from the spirit,” not “made of spirit.” Our resurrection body, Paul says, will be like Jesus’ resurrection body, and the fact of Jesus’ resurrection with a spiritual body proves that God can and will do the same for us.

The early church actually taught that belief in a bodily resurrection was essential to salvation. And yet, it wasn’t long at all before the Greek version of the afterlife became orthodox, and the notion that we might have resurrection bodies became peculiar, even unattractive. You see, to a Greek, the physical is bad and salvation means escaping this world. But to the Jew, salvation meant repairing this world and returning to the Garden — two very different things.

And so, what does this have to do with the modern church? Where do we see this kind of thinking in current evangelical Christianity? How do the Churches of Christ partake of this error? Continue reading →

Posted in Restoration Movement, Uncategorized | Tagged All, Church of Christ Links, creation, Gnosticism, Plato, Restoration Movement, resurrection, salvation | 13 Comments

MDR: Response to a Reader’s Question

Posted on June 15, 2009 by Jay F Guin

Several days ago, I posted a question from a reader soliciting the readers’ thoughts, and the responses are much appreciated. I thought I’d share what I wrote to the reader. Now, I was responding to a longer version of the email, but had to shorten it for the readers’ use due to privacy concerns, so I’ve also edited my response a bit.

I’d like to note an interesting difference. I didn’t say much about the rightness or wrongness of the marriage of the young man and woman, because the reader had already acknowledged his agreement with my views on the issue. Rather, I mainly commented on the difficulties the doctrinal disagreement caused within the church and the staff — and the pastoral implications from the couple and the church.

However, the readers have largely discussed the rightness of the remarriage. Of course, my series on MDR was several months ago. Continue reading →

Posted in Divorce and Remarriage, Uncategorized | Tagged All, divorce, marriage, remarriage, scriptural divorce | 2 Comments

Backgrounds of the Restoration Movement: Gnosticism, Part 2

Posted on June 15, 2009 by Jay F Guin

The essential idea was that to become pleasing to God, the Christian had to master certain secret knowledge (hence, the name). The truly holy were separated from the lower-level Christians by their superior knowledge.

(1 Tim 6:20-21) Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to your care. Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge, 21 which some have professed and in so doing have wandered from the faith. Grace be with you.

As the Wikipedia says,

Above all, the central idea of gn?sis, a knowledge superior to and independent of faith made it welcome to many who were half-converted from paganism to Christianity. The Valentinians, for example, considered pistis (Greek: “faith”) as consisting of accepting a body of teaching as true, being principally intellectual or emotional in character.

The early church branded the Gnostics as heretics, and yet some elements of Gnosticism were absorbed by Christianity — not so much directly from the Gnostics as by syncreticism from the same cultural roots that gave rise to the Gnostics. Continue reading →

Posted in Restoration Movement, Uncategorized | Tagged All, Church of Christ Links, cilice, Gnosticism, Restoration Movement | 6 Comments

On Spiritual Formation Done Right: A Reader’s Story

Posted on June 14, 2009 by Jay F Guin

I get emails —

Jay, I read your son’s post and it prompted me to reflect on my own life ~ and that’s why I’m sharing it with you ~ although you already know most of it. (He’s so bright! Thank him for me.) Somehow it seemed appropriate that I put down on paper the story of my own past few years. Maybe it will simply go into the file for progeny ~ my granddaughter perhaps. And maybe it will be tossed. We are our own most personal frame of reference, and I do like to remember what the Lord has done in me, as the song says. It fills me up.

Thank you always for your part.

Pat

Reflections on a Birthday

Today I am 66 years old. I’ve led a charmed life in every aspect ~ emotional, physical, educational, material and intellectual, for the most part. Religiously, I have the best of credentials as a member of the Church of Christ. Continue reading →

Posted in Spiritual Formation, Uncategorized | Tagged All, Church of Christ Links, Jack Exum, spiritual formation | 2 Comments

Backgrounds of the Restoration Movement: Gnosticism, Part 1

Posted on June 14, 2009 by Jay F Guin

This summer, my church is taking a break from its usual approach to adult Bible classes and going back to a more traditional approach — each class has a different subject. I thought I’d teach some new material on the Restoration Movement, tracing its roots all the way back to the First Century. I have no interest in trying to prove the continuity of the Churches of Christ back to Pentecost. That’s not the point of the series at all. Rather, the idea is to show through history how we became the people that we are.

And when I speak of being the people that we are, I don’t mean in contrast to the Baptists. I mean in contrast to what God meant for us to be. The goal is to help us see how various patterns of thinking have crept into Christianity (in the broadest sense) and how we in the Churches have sometimes rejected those errors while sometimes buying into other errors. Why reject some and not others?

We’ll see how it goes. Continue reading →