I originally posted this at Apologetics, but it got waylaid into a heated Calvinist-arminian debate, which isn't really the point! So I thought I'd try agian here and see what transpires:
I've recently got around to reading a long-recommended book on the ministry of the Holy Sprit, by John Taylor (former president of CMS) called 'The Go-Between God'. It is stimulating reading, and he makes several very valid and challenging points. Of these I wanted to highlight one point that I found particularly helpful and illuminating.
Most sociological and theological viewpoints are based on the notion that the present (for individuals and society) is pretty much determined by the past; what we do, how we are brought up, what happens to us over the years leads, by an inevitable process of cause and effect to what we we are now, and, ultimately, to what we become. By contrast, a central part of the Christian message (shared by Juaism and, to an extent, Marxism) goes directly against that assumption, positing a prophetic dynamic, whereby the present is determined by a divinely ordained future. Thus throughout the Old Testament, the prophets point to a divine intervention which will come about 'in the fulness of time' and cut across the existing progress of events - Israel will be liberated from her captors, the Messiah will come to save God's people from the consequences of their sins, God will 'do a new thing', creating a 'new humanity', righting wrongs and bringing freedom to the 'captives' of historical determinism. Again, in the New Testament, we have the hope of being 'set free' from the past, the 'bondages' created by past actions, and enabled to realise the 'new creation' within us that will be made complete in the Day of Salvation - God's Holy Spirit at work in us is creating in us today something which bears little or no relation to our past, but looks forward to a heavenly perfection yet to be fully revealed. Thus, 'where the Spirit of the Lord is, their is liberty' - the old 'law of sin and death' is overruled, and a new 'law' of life begins to draw us onward and upward, freeing us to do what, previously, our old self, shaped by our past, had held us back from.
That's a very poor synopsis of Taylor's case; any reactions?
Anthony
I've recently got around to reading a long-recommended book on the ministry of the Holy Sprit, by John Taylor (former president of CMS) called 'The Go-Between God'. It is stimulating reading, and he makes several very valid and challenging points. Of these I wanted to highlight one point that I found particularly helpful and illuminating.
Most sociological and theological viewpoints are based on the notion that the present (for individuals and society) is pretty much determined by the past; what we do, how we are brought up, what happens to us over the years leads, by an inevitable process of cause and effect to what we we are now, and, ultimately, to what we become. By contrast, a central part of the Christian message (shared by Juaism and, to an extent, Marxism) goes directly against that assumption, positing a prophetic dynamic, whereby the present is determined by a divinely ordained future. Thus throughout the Old Testament, the prophets point to a divine intervention which will come about 'in the fulness of time' and cut across the existing progress of events - Israel will be liberated from her captors, the Messiah will come to save God's people from the consequences of their sins, God will 'do a new thing', creating a 'new humanity', righting wrongs and bringing freedom to the 'captives' of historical determinism. Again, in the New Testament, we have the hope of being 'set free' from the past, the 'bondages' created by past actions, and enabled to realise the 'new creation' within us that will be made complete in the Day of Salvation - God's Holy Spirit at work in us is creating in us today something which bears little or no relation to our past, but looks forward to a heavenly perfection yet to be fully revealed. Thus, 'where the Spirit of the Lord is, their is liberty' - the old 'law of sin and death' is overruled, and a new 'law' of life begins to draw us onward and upward, freeing us to do what, previously, our old self, shaped by our past, had held us back from.
That's a very poor synopsis of Taylor's case; any reactions?
Anthony
