Considering the Circus

When you’re a kid, there are few things more exciting than a circus.  When you are the parent … there are few things as frustrating.  And enjoyable.  We experiences all of that and more on our recent trip to the circus while on vacation.  Seen thru the eyes of faith, there are few things that more clearly give us a vision of the creation mandate.

There is the blessing, and the curse.  You see people subduing part of creation.  The trainers have various animals performing prepared routines.  While this could lead to exploitation, it isn’t necessarily the exploitation of the animals.  We see people exercising the authority God gave humanity at creation.

We also witness some performers mastering the “laws of nature” to perform great feats that exceed our imagination.  I love to see people do such things.  It is a glimpse of glory.

Then there is the curse.  Sometimes people and animals are exploited.  Some of the performers are treated like, or act like, sexual objects.  One of the performers had a very casual and scarily seductive way about her.  Sex can sell, and she was using it to keep her job.  That’s sad because her skills exceeded the other women she was working with.  They were more awkward.  She seemed a natural, but the look on her face seemed to invite more than admiration of skill.

The curse is also seen in the crass greed.  They had some good sale pitches.  For instance, peanuts were only sold for 5 minutes and might include a coupon for a free balloon.  The stick of the balloon won by the girl in front of my kept hitting me and poking me.  Not so much fun.  But I felt like Pilgrim at Vanity Fair: buy this, eat that, ride this…. The onslaught was non-stop, and my kids would have been willing victims.  Thankfully, we don’t carry much cash so they didn’t get all the pony or camel rides, popcorn, etc. that their hearts desired.

So, our recent trip to the “one ring circus” was filled with glory and depravity.  It is a microcosm of life.  And I find that interesting.

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Considering the Marrow Controversy & Legalism

Here are my notes from Sinclair Ferguson’s lecture on Legalism in the Marrow Controversy.  As an interesting aside, I’m currently reading Costly Grace which is a modern application of Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship.  Many of the formulations there sound much like the conditional grace which plagued the Pharisees and the Church of Scotland.  That bears more thought.

Legalism

Robert Trail:  men who take a middle way have more kindness toward that extreme toward which they move than that from which they come.

John Simpson has been accused of propogating Arminianism.  He would later teach Arianism.  He was merely warned not to grant too much to natural reason.  The General Assembly had been moving away from free grace and toward legalism.  They were kind to this halfway house to full blown legalism.

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Still Considering The Shack

Yes, I still have not read The Shack (see Tim Keller was not the last person on earth to read it, I might be).  I personally know a few people who have.  I’ve tried not to engage them about it too much- things tend to get tense fast where this book is concerned.

For some reason there have been a spate of blogs posts & reviews of late.  They interact with the book in a variety of ways.  And the comments show the typical polarization taking place.

Tim Keller has a typically good number of impressions about the book.  He mentions some positives about the book (including the use of narrative to convey theology), and some concerns he has (including the theology conveyed in this narrative).  Those concerns center on ideas present in the book that undermine biblical, historic, orthodox Christianity.  One pertinent concern is that it really does not prepare anyone to meet the God of the Bible.  The god portrayed is a more post-modern, neutered deity who fails to recognize the relational nature of sin, and how the Law reveals love.  If we are expecting people to become Christians after reading this, the bait & switch tactic is unloving and unfair.  It is unloving to our neighbor, and to God (whose character is misrepresented, which sounds like bearing false witness to me).

Al Mohler laments the lack of evangelical discernment in this whole affair.  He addresses one of the defenses of the book- that it is a work of fiction, not a theological treatise- quite well.

The theology of The Shack is not incidental to the story. Indeed, at most points the narrative seems mainly to serve as a structure for the dialogues. And the dialogues reveal a theology that is unconventional at best, and undoubtedly heretical in certain respects.

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