Tod Bolsinger

Weblog: The Virgin Birth? Come on! - Christianity Today Magazine

If Time and Newsweek are the only sources of information for a thoughtful Christmas season for the skeptics in your life, encourage them to check out this CT post that points out that the author did not interview a single evangelical scholar on the issue.
Link: Weblog: The Virgin Birth? Come on! - Christianity Today Magazine.

But because the article begins by seeking a middle ground between skepticism and belief, it would have been helpful to include scholars who find historical, reasonable explanations for what gives these modern scholars so much trouble.

I will be preaching on the Virgin Birth this weekend at my church, so I'll be reading all of this material with a little extra attention. As one who finds the Virgin Birth both credible and necessary for Christian faith, it's important to make sure that we don't allow skeptics to do all the talking. I'll have more to say tomorrow, but the final paragraph of the CT blog is worth pondering for today.

Even for the skeptic, the story of Jesus' birth is compelling. The son of God born to a virgin, the jealous ruler who slaughters a generation, the Magi who come to pay tribute, the king born in a manger, God with us.

Maybe the news angle isn't why so many people disbelieve the story, but why so many people cling to it.

A Touchable God…

We humans hunger for the spiritual made tangible.  Yesterday I commented upon the yearning for a touchable deity that is found both in the sincere veneration of relics and in the somewhat absurd (but equally sincere?) interest in religious images found in odd places (like the face of Mary “seen” in a grilled cheese sandwich).  We want a God we can grasp. 

Luke 8:42-47
As he went, the crowds pressed in on him. Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years; and though she had spent all she had on physicians, no one could cure her. She came up behind him and touched the fringe of his clothes, and immediately her hemorrhage stopped. 45 Then Jesus asked, “Who touched me?’’ When all denied it, Peter said, “Master, the crowds surround you and press in on you.” But Jesus said, “Someone touched me; for I noticed that power had gone out from me.” When the woman saw that she could not remain hidden, she came trembling; and falling down before him, she declared in the presence of all the people why she had touched him, and how she had been immediately healed. (NRSV)

When preachers exegete this scene from the ministry of Jesus, two points are usually made: 1) Jesus’ self-awareness of power going out from him, 2) Jesus healing someone without even trying. 

While both are certainly worth noting, there is an even more basic point that is most often overlooked: The woman didn’t fall dead on the spot.  For that matter neither did any of the crowd’s people who “pressed in on him.” 

You see, if as we Christians believe, that Jesus was God in the flesh, it is remarkable that what happened to others who tried to touch or even look at God DID not happen to her.  Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, God is portrayed as so awesome, so fearsome, so holy that a mortal cannot see God and live (Exodus 33:20). 

The power of this holiness extends even to the “containers” of God.  In one of the most disturbing scenes in the Bible (2 Samuel 6) a group of men join David in returning the Ark of the Covenant to the people of God (This is not Noah’s boat, but the container of the tablets of the Ten Commandments and that which held the very presence of God on earth—remember the final scene of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”).  They put the Ark on a brand new cart pulled by oxen.  When the oxen shook the cart a guy named Uzzah reached out his hand to steady the Ark—and was struck dead.

The juxtaposition of a man dying for touching the “container” of God, and a woman being healed for touching the “clothing” of God is certainly a stark contrast.  Maybe when we bid on a sandwich with the face of Mary or go to see the bones of a long dead saint, we are only trying to get a glimpse of something that would otherwise be so awesome that we fear we couldn’t stand it. 

Jesus’ coming into the world bridges the gap between Creator and creature, Divine and mortal, holy and profane.  Without Jesus, it is impossible even dangerous for humans to reach out and touch the Divine.  But in Jesus, God comes amongst us and puts himself within our grasp. 

Relics and the Ridiculous: Yearning for a tangible Deity

Yesterday as I was tooling down the freeway, I came upon a radio interview with a woman who had sold half a ten-year old grilled cheese sandwich on e-bay for $28,000.  The sandwich was bought by a casino who now features it in display under glass as a tourist attraction and good luck charm. Now, before you race to your griddle and grab the American slices, you should know that this particular grilled cheese sandwich had on it the image of Mary, the mother of Jesus.

Diana Duyser said that she's not a particularly religious person, but did think that the sandwich with the vision of "the virgin Mary" was a mystery that brought her good luck for the ten years that she kept it in a plastic container surrounded by cotton balls.  She told the radio hosts that she had made almost $70,000 in gambling winnings during those years. (Part of the miracle she stated was that after ten year the sandwich hadn't deteriorated.  Personally, I'll bet she made it with Velveeta slices.  Those things could make it through Armageddon in one piece.)

Though she has sold the Virgin Mary Sandwich, she is going on tour with it to "share it with the world."

Now, as odd as this might seem, in another serious story, Pope John Paul II gave to the Eastern Orthodox church relics believed to be of St. Chrysostom and St. Gregory Nazienzen that they had held for 800 years.  The Pope gave the relics "back" to the Orthodox church as a gesture to heal rifts between the two churches.

So, what is the significance of things like these? Certainly not theological.  Our faith does not depend on such items.  But does it not point to a deep yearning by all people for a "touch" or "taste" of the Divine?  Tommorrow, I'll say more about the Christmas incarnation and the "touchable" God.

Are We Awed Yet?

One of my favorite things about Christmas carols is that so many people can sing them by heart.  One year after going to the "Messiah Sing-along" at the Music Center in Los Angeles, I had the memorable experience of walking in a crowd of people descending the stairs and slowly making their way out of the building when someone started spontaneously singing a Christmas carol.  Immediately almost everyone joined in.  It was a wonderful simple moment. It seemed as if EVERYONE knew the words, and in knowing the words knew the message.  Or did they? 

In this advent series I have been re-considering the incarnation, that is the belief that in Jesus the triune God took on a human body so that he could be one of us and be with us.  Today I simply want us to pause to consider the incongruity of a world that is so familiar with the holiday words, but often misses the wonder of the message.   

Colossians 1:15-17 says: He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers-all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

Jesus is the invisible God, the creator and sustainer of all things, made visible for us.  Or as we sing in this line from a favorite Christmas carol: "Veiled in flesh, the Godhead see."

How many times have we heard that verse or sung those words without the wonder they deserve?
How often have we heard the Christmas story or considered the notion of God becoming flesh and dwelling among us without stopping to gasp?
How many Christmases have come and gone without pausing from the holiday hurly-burly to think about what all of this means? 

Think about it this way.  The God who made all of this earth and every flower, every raindrop, every different snowflake and every line in the fingerprint of your little finger once walked upon this planet.  He who made it all went through it all.  The Triune God, the great I AM, the creator of heaven and earth became a kid with dirty diapers, a boy with a sweaty head, a teenager who felt embarrassed when his mother hugged him, an adult who drank wine at parties, wept at the death of a friend, and made his brothers and sisters frustrated in confusion.

And because he did, we have a human face to show us the face of God. Is God's final word revealing himself.

Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, ^but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son,^ whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. ^He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains^ all things by his powerful word. (Hebrews 1:1-3)

God's self-revelation was not delegated to an angel, a prophet, or a holy writ.  God took on a human form and lived amongst us, even as it will say later in Hebrews in the most mind-boggling idea, being made "perfect through sufferings." (Heb 2:10)

But, what is most awesome to me  is not that God gave up his divine powers to become a human, but the reason why he did it: 

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested^ as we are, yet without sin. (Heb 4:15)

God took on a human face, and that human face suffered every human indignity so that God could also be our great high priest.  In the incarnation we find the great lengths that the Creator-King went to redeem creation and save his subjects.   Every action full of grace, every action from the first word of Genesis to the final consummation in Revelation an expression of the God-who-is-love. 

Isn't that worthy of our awe?

Adventus Interruptus: A Modern Day Slaughter of the Innocents

While driving home from church on Tuesday I tuned into Hugh Hewitt's radio show and was surprised to hear Hugh, Mark D. Roberts and David Allen White talking about a report out of the Netherlands of doctors who have been euthanizing severly deformed infants. Mark has since posted three times on this modern-day slaughter of the innocents and links to others in the blog world who are deftly commenting on this most shocking and disturbing news. While I will likely enter the fray with my own reflections in an upcoming sermon, allow me to yieled my time to these able blog friends.  Link to Mark's series and other links.

Chuck Colson offers this perspective on the Groningen Protocol.

Ultra-Extreme Makeover

“The transfiguration of bodiliness is the goal… Faith as understanding is the beginning; the lived gestalt of faith is the purposed end.”
(Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 233)

Yesterday we considered the first implication of the incarnation: God came to be with us, so that we can be with him.  But there is actually another implication of the incarnation that may even be more amazing and harder to believe.  God became like us, so we can become like him. (And you thought all those plastic surgery shows were “extreme makeovers”?)

As Jürgen Moltmann has written about the resurrection, we can assert about the incarnation.  Because as Paul taught the Christians in Romans 8:29, the ultimate purpose of God is not just that his creatures will be with him for eternity, but that they will be transformed to be like him.

“For those whom (God) foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son…”  Conformed to the image of God’s Son.  God’s plan from before time began was not just that we’d come to believe in God. It was not ultimately to have a “personal relationship with God.” It was not just helping us escape hell and get to heaven.  God’s original and ultimate intention for all of his creatures is the “transfiguration of bodiliness”—that we would become like Jesus, the one who is God in the flesh.  That’s why God came here—to make us like him.  Jesus is not just the God who has come to earth so we can be with him, Jesus is the God who has come to earth so that we can become like him—so that we will act like him.  Jesus is both the means to being with God and the model for living like God.

This is the very point that Paul is making in Philippians 2.  While for those of us who are seekers or skeptics, the good news of the incarnation is a challenge to believe so that we can be with God, for those of us who are believers there is a different challenge: A challenge of living--of displaying in our lives the very character of God. 

Paul teaches the Philippians about the incarnation, not so that they would understand a theological construct, not so that they would get a star on their Sunday School chart, but so that they could better understand how they are to live with each other. 

(v. 3) Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.  (This is the way you should act, Paul tell the Philippians.  And this is your model…)

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God

as something to be exploited, 7 but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. (NRSV)

This is the ultimate goal of the incarnation: that we who are God’s creatures will become like God—so we can reveal God. 

If God is only known through God’s actions, then how is God known today?  There aren’t many burning bushes, Jesus died on the cross a long time ago.  How does God act for showing his character today?  Here is the sobering answer:  Through the Church.  Christ acts through his Body.

In 1 Corinthians 3:16, Paul asks, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?”  While this verse is often interpreted to mean that God dwells in each individual Christian, it is clearly speaking to the corporate body, the Church.  The Church replaces the temple as the dwelling place of God on earth.  Further in 1 Corinthians 12 and also in Ephesians 3-4, Paul refers to the Community as Christ’s body that together reveals or glorifies God.  God reveals himself through the Church.  This led Dietrich Bonhoeffer to call the Church, “Christ existing as community.”

If Christ is present today as the Church, and the Church is God’s means of self-revelation to the world, then the Church is called to live and act together in such a way as to demonstrate God’s character.  In other words, (following Rahner's Rule from my last post) If "God is as God acts," then the Church should act as God is.  The basis of Christian life together must be to reflect or embody the very actions and character of God. 

My friends, whether we want to believe it or not: We are the incarnation today. 

• We are the “strangers on the bus”, the “slobs”, the lowly servants. 
• We are the ones who appear in people’s lives to show them the face of God. 
• We are the ones who reveal to the world God’s personality and character. 
• We share the good news that God came to be with us, so that we can be with him. 
• We show the world through our lives that God became like us so that we can become like him. 

Book Review: It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian

Link: Amazon.com: Books: It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian: How the Community of God Transforms Lives.

Church planter and pastor Steve Wright has written a nice 5 star review of It Takes a Church. Steve used it as a resource for a men's group with encouraging results.

“I only wanna be with you”

As I have been writing these reflections of implications on the incarnation, a riff from a Hootie and the Blowfish song keeps running through my mind:  “I only wanna be with you.”  Could it be that the heart of God is so filled with sappy sentiments that the incarnation is little more than fulfilling a love song?  Could God really have gone to such great lengths because he “only wants to be with us”?

There is a theological rule that says that while humans sometimes act in ways that are contradictory to their character, God always acts as God is. (It is called "Rahner's rule" after theologian Karl Rahner who put it forth.)  That is, the God who is revealed through his saving work is necessarily identical to the being of God in himself, (whether he is saving us or not).  In other words, “if God is truly the God of Jesus Christ, then that is what he is like eternally.”  In the ministry of Jesus, the revelation of the character of God and the saving communion are both made known.

For is, this means that if God came to this earth and showed us what his face looks like, then in Jesus, God has expressed himself in our reality, which means that we have a record, a documented account of what God is like, cares about and wants from us. 

And one of the very first implications of the incarnation is that God came to be with us so that we can be with him. He didn’t just come for a visit; he came to complete a mission .  He came to seek and save the lost (as it says in Luke 19:10), he came to draw all people to himself (as Jesus said in John 12:32) he came so that all who call on his name could become children of God (John 1:12) and—most importantly—become conformed to the image of (God’s) son (as Paul wrote in Romans 8:29).

Over the next couple of days I will draw out some implications of the incarnation. 

But let’s spend a minute looking at this first key point: God came to be with us, so we can be with him.

Consider this, if the God who created the universe and everything in it actually became a human being and live  Then wouldn’t that be the very best thing that ever happened?  Wouldn’t that say something incredible about us? 

Wouldn’t that say that we are not just accidental beings, but instead we are beings who have a Creator and ruler who so cares about us that he meddles in our lives? 

Our God came to earth to show himself to us, to reveal his nature to us and participate in created life. This means that God has walked in our shoes, experienced our world and understands personally what it means to be a creature.  This means that God is not distant, God is not disinterested.  In fact it is just the opposite.  God is personally interested and involved with us, God loves us and wants to be with us. 

Even though the Scriptures teach and our experience confirms that we have rebelled against him, rejected his commands, tried to live without him, ran from him and sought to be the god of our own lives.  Even though as it say in Isaiah 59:2, “Your sins have cut you off from God” (NLT). 

Even so, God came to be with us, so that we could be with him. 

That’s the first part of the incarnation.  God came to do what we cannot.  We cannot reach him.  We are not good enough, strong enough, smart enough, or holy enough to make it to him on our own.  So he laid aside his divine attributes and came to us. 

But God didn’t just come as a great human, a powerful rich, inspiring human, but the lowest kind of human; he looked like a lowly servant, “a slob like one of us, a stranger on the bus.”  Someone that anyone could  relate to.  That’s what is implied in Philippians 2:6-7: “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,7 but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”

Why?  He wants us—all of us—to be with him.  This is first invitation of salvation.  This is heaven coming down for us.  We who were created to be with God, can be with God.  Not because we have made it to God, but because God has come to us.  God came to be with us, so we could be with him. 

This is great news.  Great and disturbing.  Great and challenging. 

You see, if God did come to us to meet us on our terms, than he has also revealed who he is as he is.  And that means that we now have to acknowledge that God has a particular personality.  That God cannot just be whatever we want him to be.  That he has been revealed definitively in Jesus Christ and that we now have to believe in him as he is. 

Writing to cynics and skeptics, the second verse of Joan Osborne’s lyrics from “One of Us” pose a challenge:

If God had a face what would it look like

And would you want to see

If seeing meant that you would have to believe

In things like heaven and in jesus and the saints and all the prophets?

Because that is exactly what happens if we believe that God has come to be with us: if we want to be with God, we have to believe in God as God is.