Evangelicals, however, long held out. Intellectuals among them proposed a variety of theories to explain the apparent discrepancies between “science” and Scripture, including the Day-Age theory, the Gap theory, Catastrophism, Progressive Creationism, and so on. But in recent years many “evangelicals” have given up the task and have simply capitulated on this issue, the issue of the historicity of Adam and Eve, though many have attempted to affirm the activity of God as ultimate creator.

Vern Poythress, polymath and Professor of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary, has just published a remarkable essay in World Magazine in which he takes on the claims in recent scientific literature that alleges the the smallest “bottleneck” of human beings that could have existed at any time in the past is in the thousands, though it might be in the low thousands.

If you wish to take a half hour and read this critique of prevailing scientific theory, go here

At several points the article gets really dicey, but one in particular. Galli offers several quotes from Bell's new book, What We Talk Abut When We Talk About God, including this one: “So, when we talk about God, we're talking about our brushes with spirit, our awareness of the reverence humming within us, our sense of the nearness and farness, that which we know and that which is unknown” (page 91). Galli's comment? “Bell believes our knowledge of God is grounded not in doctrine, not in the Bible, the preached Word, the sacraments, our institutions, or even what Jesus revealed (all ways theologians ground our knowledge of God), but in our experiences and our intuitions–especially that sense that many have that there is a deeper reality in, with, and under this life. This is an appeal to general revelation, how God makes himself known naturally to the world.” In the course of the rest of the assessment, Galli indicates that he has no serious problem with such intuitive forms of spirituality, indicating that he wrote an endorsement for Margaret Feinberg's book, Wonderstruck.

Those of us who have followed Bell's writings and career have watched him fall deeper into the morass of murky liberalism. The quote above could have been written by Schleiermacher or even by Joseph Campbell (and no, I am not equating Bell with Campbell). But what is odd is that Galli, editor of Christianity Today, considers the quote from Bell to be perfectly appropriate. What is more, he seems to be saying that finding God in general revelation, rather than in Jesus or the Bible, is perfectly fine and leaves one's evangelical credentials intact.

By the end of the article Galli indicates that he does not think Bell's overall method is right. We do need the Bible, and Jesus in order truly to express that faith once delivered to the saints. But the concessions he makes along the way are troubling.

What would Harold Lindsell and Carl F. H. Henry think? We knew for years that CT was drifting. Is it now becoming the new Christian Century?

Chad Owen Brand

You can read Galli's article here

Maureen Dowd is hardly the voice of conservatism in American politics. She normally toes the Democratic Party line, or, at the least, takes her stand with the left-leaning voices on everything from abortion to foreign policy. But anyone reading her editorial column in yesterday's New York Times would have wondered if her column had been hijacked by Greta Van Susteren or even Laura Ingraham. She blisters the White House and the State Department in light of the new revelations coming out concerning Benghazi. She refers to the original Susan Rice talking points as “mythological” and actually refers to President Obama as “Barry.” She is already getting heat from the political left, but you have to admire her for actually making some of us hopeful that at least one editorialist at the leftist NYT has suddenly remembered what the press is supposed to be doing. While the rest of them are fawning over Obama to the degree that you expect to see him signing autographs at the end of each press conference, Ms. Dowd has remembered what it means to call the Administration to task. For a look at the whole article go here

Let me first say some things about the value of the book. It begins by laying out a biblical doctrine of the nature of sin. It depicts human sin as universal, pervasive, irrational, deceitful, hardening, enslaving, debasing, and defiling. It explains that sin is both internal (a bad heart) and external (a bad record). The book then explains in no uncertain terms a Reformation doctrine of justification. Leiter depicts the fact that in justification, God has “put down his gun,” and given us eternal life (p. 41).

Leiter then gives an exposition of the doctrine of regeneration. He shows, rightly, that Scripture uses a variety of metaphors and images to explain what regeneration means. When I teach the doctrine of regeneration in Systematic Theology I lay out the message in very much the same fashion as this author does. Regeneration means that we are new creatures, new men, that we have a new heart, that we have been given a new birth, a new nature. It also means that we have been united with Christ in his crucifixion and his resurrection. Regeneration entails the truth that we are no longer “in the flesh,” rather, we are “in the Spirit.” We are now seated in the heavenly realm in Christ. We are no longer sold under sin, but have the righteousness of Christ. We are no longer under the law, but under grace, and are not now in Adam, but in Christ (pp. 47-130). All of this is true, and is crucial for Christian people to understand.

At several points the author asserts doctrinal beliefs that are quite controversial. At some of those points I am in agreement with him. In chapter nine he gives his view that the Christian has a new nature of righteousness, and only a nature of righteousness. In other words, the Christian does not have two natures, one of sin and another of righteousness. I agree completely! Christians are “good trees” (Matt 7:15-20). A few years ago the Christian rock group Petra recorded a song called “Jekyll and Hyde” in which they portrayed the Christian life as something like that fictional character. While intuitively we may feel that way sometimes, that is not exactly what Scripture teaches. Leiter also contends that since we have been saved, we are no longer in the flesh but in the Spirit, and we can never again be in the flesh. That is exactly what the Apostle Paul teaches in Romans 8:1-11, and I concur. The author also believes that regenerate persons will be in the process of growing in grace and in obedience to the Lord, and, generally speaking, I think that is correct.

So, what's the problem? The problem is not in his exposition of these ideas, but in the inferences he draws from these ideas. I am convinced that Leiter's case is flawed at three basic points: his understanding of “the flesh,” his understanding of the believer's relationship to the law of God, and his failure to examine Scripture texts which counter his main argument.

First of all, what does Scripture mean by “the flesh”? Here is Leiter's definition: “The flesh is the unredeemed physical body viewed as the place where sin still tries to assert itself” (p. 85). In other words, “the flesh” is the body. The soul or spirit has been redeemed, but the body is still a place where sin makes its presence known. This is not a novel idea, but it is not an adequate interpretation of the biblical teaching on “the flesh.” In several places in the book Leiter makes it clear that he is drawing on the work of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones. For instance, Lloyd-Jones, in dealing with a passage that addresses “the flesh” in the life of a Christian (Gal 5:17), calls the flesh, “the sensuous part of our nature” (Romans 7:1-8:4), p. 70. Paul reminds the Galatians that they are to walk in the Spirit, and he warns them that they might still walk according to the flesh (Gal 5:16-18). As believers we are not “in” the flesh, but we might still “walk in” the flesh! Paul's language here might be daunting, but it is important to follow the biblical model. The Christian has a new identity in Christ, but he or she also knows what it is like to live in a different way, and that sinful way of life is always luring us back, back to a life that finds its happiness in the pursuit of that which brings momentary pleasure, but which is contrary to God's Word.

The second issue has to do with the role of the law in sanctification, or, as Leiter would put it, in the life of the regenerate. Leiter writes, “The Christian is free from the law as an external rule that contradicts his real nature and desires” (p. 118). He goes on, “The righteous man has no need for such external restrictions, since he is restrained by his own holy nature” (p. 119). For Leiter, the law is internal, written on the heart. And as a result, as we grow in grace, we will have little need for the external law, whether found in the OT or the NT. Really! The Apostle Paul did not concur, since many of his writings contain explicit and sustained expositions of the moral implications of the gospel. In the Reformation Luther generally saw little need for the “third use of the law” (the law as instrument of sanctification), while Calvin believed it was necessary since humans are still subject to self-deceit regarding their walk before God. In a casual reading of Leiter's book one would think of him as more in the Calvin camp than in the Luther camp. Perhaps not.

Third, Leiter fails to examine texts which call his thesis into question. There are many passages which demonstrate that there are real believers who have not progressed in their spiritual walk in the way they should have. The most specific is in 1 Corinthians 5, where a man “has his father's wife.” Paul passes his own judgment to consign the man's flesh to Satan, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. Paul considers the man to be a believer, albeit an inconsistent one. Leiter's theology seems to have no place for such a person, but the Corinthian correspondence is filled with such examples.

This is where it really gets interesting. If one compares Leiter's theology to that of, say, Keswick interpreter Watchman Nee, the parallels are fascinating. In his book The Normal Christian Life, the Chinese Christian leader also argues for a life of almost pristine Christian obedience and devotion. The difference between the two is that Leiter believes such a life is based on genuine regeneration, while Nee argues that it comes after a second experience of grace. Leiter would reject this second blessing, but in his theology the net effect is the same. Something approaching Christian perfectionism is the goal.

I have suggested that Leiter is in some ways closer to Luther than to Calvin. If that is the case, perhaps he should remember another Luther dictum. Luther argued that Christians are “at the same time righteous and sinful.”. We never get beyond the proclivity to sin in this life. Spurgeon once said that the really big repentances come late in the Christian experience. The closer you get to God the more you realize that you are not yet close enough. Of all the problems of the Leiter book, the most egregious is that he seems to believe that texts that speak of the greatness of our salvation can be fully realized in this life. I would call that soteriological triumphalism. Our salvation is “already/not yet.” The fullness of our salvation lies in the future. It can be sweet in this life, but it will be sweeter in the life to come. Leiter has taken us a bridge too far in understanding the nature of salvation in this age. In a sense he has done us a service, but it is also important to recognize that his exposition must not be followed uncritically.

Chad Owen Brand

In the world of the New Testament age, there were three basic ideas about what happens when a person dies. The Epicureans and their ilk held the view that when you die, that is it. You are dead. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die, and that is it. Like the old song says, “Is that all there is? Then let's start dancing.” On the other hand those who followed the Platonist or the Stoic teachings believed that people have an eternal soul, one that existed before we were born and that will continue to exist after we die. At death, that soul goes some place, though there was disagreement among them about exactly where the soul went. People who still held some commitment to the old Greek and Roman myths thought the soul went to the underworld, while Plato had taught that it goes back to “god” or to the world of the Forms.

Many (but not all) Jews believed that in some sense, when we die, we go to God, since there are passages in the Old Testament that hint at that (Psalm 23:6), but even more, that at some future point, there will be a resurrection of the body. Daniel 12:1-3 teaches that this is the case, and Jews in the period between the Old and New Testaments had incorporated that revelation into their theology, or at least most of them had. Therefore, they expected that at some point in the future, the Day of the Lord would come, and he would rescue them from their enemies, raise the dead, and God would rule the world in righteousness.

Enter Jesus. On several occasions, especially late on his ministry, Jesus predicted his imminent death and subsequent resurrection (see esp. Mark 8-10). The disciples would have known about resurrection, but his words baffled them, since they had been taught that this would only happen at the end of the age. Jesus knew, and the NT writers would later make explicit, that in some sense Jesus was inaugurating a new age. His bodily resurrection bright about the age of the Kingdom of God as a possible reality in our lives. And his resurrection demonstrates what the eventual future is for all of the saved. Not an eternity in a bodiless existence in heaven, but an embodied existence in a resurrected body living forever in the presence of the Lord on a renewed earth (Revelation 21-22).

What is the meaning of Easter? It is that all of those who trust in Christ as Savior will one day rise from their graves, will receive glorified bodies no longer subject to sin or corruption, and they will dwell on the renewed earth, serving the Lord with gladness through all eternity. Think about that between now and March 31.

For an excellent treatment of this subject, go here:

Chad Brand

On the subjects of electric, cars, environmental expert Bjorn Lomborg has just published an article in the Wall Street Journal with some very “inconvenient” facts. Carbon emissions are of course the real evil monster in the whole debate over cars and climate change. OK, so, let's assume for the moment that carbon dioxide is bad for the planet (something in no way proven). But let's just take that assumption as valid. The Journal of Industrial Technology and the MIT Technology Review (hardly right-wing PACs) have warned that those who own electric cars should not drive them too many miles, and have also confirmed that a great deal of CO2 emissions are involved in the manufacturing of the batteries for these vehicles and in the constant charging of the batteries.

These vehicles are regularly touted as “emission-free.” The fact is, that if electric cars are driven 50,000 miles, they will on the average emit 15 ounces of CO2 per mile (in part due to the lithium battery pollution) while gasoline powered cars will emit on the average 12 ounces per mile.

Now, who's the environmentalist?

Check out the article here:

Green Cars Have a Dirty Little Secret

Posted with Blogsy

I have to say that I was skeptical about Daniel-Day Lewis as the great president. Could the star of Last of the Mohicans and Gangs of New York pull off such a different kind of role? Well, he did, and he did so spectacularly. No, he did not look exactly like Lincoln, and no, he did not look quite as haggard as the real Lincoln of 1865, but he played the role with all of the home-spun humor, the occasional verbal malapropisms, and the passion for his country that the sources have given us as characteristic of the real man. The ambiguity of home life, with his difficult wife and the strained relationship with son Robert, are handled with great sensitivity but are also presented in all their stark reality.

There were some problems with the film. At the start of the film the president is shown talking with some soldiers, two of whom are black, and who claim to have been at Gettysburg.  There were blacks at Gettysburg with the Confederate army, but the United States Colored Troops (a regiment of black Union soldiers) was not at Gettysburg. Also, toward the end of the film, as a sort of penultimate climax, after the Thirteenth Amendment is ratified by the House, Thaddeus Stevens is pictured going home to his mistress, who is black, to let her read the amendment and rejoice with his after his long struggle for emancipation. Thaddeus Stevens did have a quadroon housekeeper named Lydia Hamilton Smith. Stevens never married and there were rumors about some sort of relationship between him and Smith, but no historical evidence has ever been produced proving this claim. It makes a nice little flourish to the story, but responsible historical scholarship would probably have dictated leaving that out.

The film demonstrates in no uncertain terms the absolutely crucial need for passing the Thirteenth Amendment. Teaching history, I have found that students often do not understand this. They assume that, since Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation January 1, 1863, that emancipation was a fait accompli. Not so! Spielberg brings this out vividly. The Proclamation was an Executive Order that was applied to a war-time situation. Slaves were “freed” in order to encourage them to abandon their masters and flee to the North. This would have two effects. One, it would make them candidates to serve in the Union Army and thus help the Northern cause. But even more than that, it would eliminate their crucial role in helping the Southern economy in farming and other necessary tasks while the vast majority of the white work force was at war. The film does not bring out these latter two issues, but it does make clear that the Proclamation would have little force in the South once a truce had been effected. Only a duly prosecuted law, and in this case an amendment to the Constitution, could make that happen. Without this amendment, all of the bloodshed of the war, while it would end in the restoration of the Union, would not have accomplished the other aim–the emancipation of the slaves, and with that the reaffirmation of the Founding Fathers’ clarion cry, that “All men are created equal.” In the long run, if the Civil War was about anything, it was about that. Even the restoration of the Union was really about renewing and reapplying that conviction to a new generation.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the film was the detailed presentation of the give-and-take in governmental wrangling. Lies and half-truths were bandied about on both sides in the debate over this very important issue. Lincoln is shown at times to be something of a fascist (in the original meaning of that word), as he suspends habeas corpus to prevent the secession of Maryland, he withholds important information from his cabinet and Congress, he uses back alley and strong-arm tactics to get his way. Thaddeus Stevens makes compromises with his earlier more hard-line abolition position. Men change their votes with the promise of lucrative positions once they leave office. To the viewer who thought such politics was invented by FDR or LBJ, this film may be something of a revelation. The fact is, some of that has been around ever since there was government. Remember what Augustine taught us: government is itself one of the effects of the Fall. No Fall, no government.

We all enjoyed the film very much. Tommy Lee Jones’s portrayal of Steven was brilliant, and Lewis’s Lincoln is unforgettable. If you have not yet seen the film, go see it. See it on the big screen. You will have a deeper sense of why it is that “Now he belongs to the ages.”

Chad Brand

For decades by 1860, the year of Lincoln’s election, preachers in America had debated whether or not the Bible encouraged or even condoned slavery. The issue is complicated, and we deal with the hermeneutical and biblical questions on slavery elsewhere in this book, but the point is that preachers and theologians in the 19th century came to differing conclusions, with some noting that the Bible allows slavery and others that it did not. For American Protestants at mid-century, what the Bible articulated as truth was truth. The “evangelical community” in America had always emphasized the fact that “the Bible is the Word of God in a cognitive, propositional, factual sense.” “If the Bible was God’s revealed word to humanity, then it was the duty of Christians to heed carefully every aspect of that revelation.” Even when German scholarship was calling those things into question, and the British began a slow drift of following in their steps, American evangelicals were holding firm. Not all American churchmen, of course. The Puritan Congregationalists had begun the drift into Unitarianism in the latter third of the 18th century, and the German scholarship was encouraging some of them to continue that trend. Edward Everett was the first American scholar to earn a Ph.D. in a German university, and in 1820 he brought German biblical criticism to Harvard. By 1852 Horace Bushnell was calling for a new understanding of the Bible that brings it into alliance with poetry, and that to take it literally or to believe in its infallibility is a mistake. Bushnell called for a rejection of the “old theology” (orthodoxy) and the substitution of a new theology in which the Bible is mined only for its images and in which Trinitarianism and orthodox Christology are replaced with an “instrumental” view. It is stunning to imagine that the denomination that claimed John Cotton and Jonathan Edwards would be the first in America to slide into liberalism! But Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists, the three largest denominations in 1850, were committed to the inspiration of the Bible, “from Genesis to maps.”

The slavery conflict began to change all of that. By 1860 some few American elites were abandoning the Bible as a source for knowledge, truth, and morality. Some of the first such Americans included jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., elite literati like William Dean Howells, and politicians like William Henry Trescot. William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist we have cited previously in our study, was not quite so negative toward the Bible as those men, but he made it clear that “to say that everything in the Bible is to be believed, simply because it is found in that volume, is . . . absurd and pernicious.” This conviction allowed Garrison to discard texts from the Bible that seemed to promote slavery as a benign, or at least as a neutral matter. No one would ever accuse Garrison of being either benign or neutral toward slavery! In 1860 and 1861 American Christian people were forced to decide what they believed the Bible taught about slavery. Even though the war early on was not a war for abolition but for restoring Union, no Southerners and few Northerners could retain an attitude of neutrality to what many believed to be the cause of the war that was killing its boys, and eventually its civilians.

The problem was for them, the question, “How do you know who’s right on the question of slavery in the Bible.” Equally scholarly people stood on both sides of that hermeneutical question, North and South, Baptist and Methodist, Presbyterian and Catholic. James Henry Thornwell, Southern Presbyterian, had written, “The Scriptures not only fail to condemn slavery, they as distinctly sanction it as any other condition of man. The Church was formally organized in the family of a slaveholder [Abraham].” This was the theological crisis. “The theological crisis of the Civil War was that while voluntary reliance on the Bible had contributed greatly to the creation of American national culture, that same voluntary reliance on Scripture led only to deadlock over what should be done about slavery.” The failure to find a solution would lead many of the denominations in America in the next decades to begin to doubt the intrinsic authority of Scripture, doubts which were flying over Europe already, but doubts that would have a new twist in the American context because of the Civil War.

A secondary issue on the biblical question of slavery is that the discussions of it were often not well nuanced, on either side. Southerners who defended slavery on the grounds that it was allowed in the Old Testament, failed to note that biblical slavery was not race based. In the Old Testament also, slavery was generally not life-long servitude, but was only temporary. Abolitionists also failed to be nuanced, arguing that New Testament salvation demands abolition, but forgetting Paul’s words to Philemon. In the heat of battle, many words were uttered, but there was often a lack of clear thinking on the matter on both sides of the debate. That was the theological crisis over Scripture that was raised, and as we shall see in a bit, that lingered on after the war and created a crisis of authority in the major Christian denominations. In fact it may have been the defining epistemological issue in the distinctly American denominations in the years after the war.

[We are grateful that the war resolved slavery, even if it did not resolve the black-white issue. That would linger on for another century in terms of the legal battle and is still with us today in the wickedness of men's hearts. As the great nineteenth century scholar Philip Schaff once noted, "This war may resolve the slavery issue, but it will not resolve the negro issue." Only the Lord can do that. Happy New Year!]

Chad Owen Brand

First, my positive evaluation. Peter Jackson worked his usual cinemagraphic magic in the production of the film. The 48-frame per second film process has apparently put some people off, but I actually liked it. It did at times make the film look surreal, but you expect a little surreal with the subject like this, to a degree (more on that later). The sets and the photography were, as anticipated, breathtaking. I like Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins. He played Bilbo very believably and seems to have imbibed the spirit of the character from the book. The Dwarves comport themselves in a manner similar to Tolkien’s treatment of them, with just the right combination of bluster and buffoonery, of bravery and naivete.

There were some truly magnificent scenes, although they were the scenes that were a bit away from the action, so to speak. The “Unexpected Party” was one of the best, though it was perhaps a bit over the top in the athletic way that Thorin’s company cleaned up after dinner. Another good scene was the encounter with the Trolls. It departed from the book in both dialogue and the way the encounter ended (somewhat), but you can forgive some license in such matters. I imagine Peter Jackson thought the original dialogue was a little too out of date for a modern audience. C’est la vie! The other great scene was the encounter between Bilbo and Gollum and the “Riddle Game.” It was nearly intact from Tolkien and it played out pretty much as it has in my mind the over thirty times I have read it.

I could offer a few other affirmative comments. The way Jackson filled in the pre-history at the beginning of the film with the account of Smaug’s conquest, the battle at Moria and the subsequent history of the pilgrim wanderings of the Dwarves is related in a way different from the telling in the original, but it was effective. Also the council at Rivendell between Elrond, Gandalf, Galadriel, and Saruman is never related directly in either TH or Lord of the Rings (LOTR), but there is an allusion to some exchange of information between these persons in LOTR, so I thought that it worked OK.

That is the positive. You may want to stop reading here.

There was several aspects of the film that simply did not work at all. One of the most obvious (to me) was Radagast. The Brown wizard does not appear at all in TH (though he is named by Gandalf when he first meets Beorn), and gets only a few lines of dialogue and one or two other mentions in LOTR. But here he is a major character. Not only that, he is a buffoon. LOTR does not present him in an especially positive light, but it does not depict a fool with bird feces running down his hair and beard. (He apparently keeps a couple of small birds under his cap and has not the sense to let them out to do their business.) Further, when he shows up to inform Gandalf about the Necromancer, he gets enlisted in an attempt to divert the Orcs away from the fleeing Company. He does so by driving a sleigh led by giant rabbits. Now TH has a few outlandish animals such as those that serve Beorn, so I am not going to get worked up about the rabbits (who do not appear in TH), but Radagast, who is supposed to be diverting the Orcs and Wargs, keeps leading them back to the Company, thus requiring Elrond and a company of Elves to provide the rescue. Again, forget the fact that none of this is in TH; the whole scene was an erratic distraction and added perhaps only to provide one more action scene in a film already glutted with more action than is found in the entirety of TH. And remember, this is but the first installment of a three-part series.

Since I have brought up Radagast, let me address his new information that he gives to Gandalf. In the film, Radagast makes an excursion to Dol Guldur where he discovers the Ringwraiths gathering and the presence of another sinister being, the Necromancer, whom we learn in LOTR is actually the return of Sauron, who had supposedly been destroyed 3,000 years before. Radagast finds there a Morgul blade that he gives to Gandalf as evidence. Anyone who is remotely familiar with the map of Middle Earth (I mean, even if you have only glanced at it for a few seconds) will know that this is patently impossible, since Radagast lives somewhere between 100 and 150 leagues from Dol Guldur. Even with those speedy hares on the front of his sleigh, such a journey would take many days, perhaps weeks, even at rabbit-warp! Even in Middle Earth the laws of physics have some application!

Did I mention the laws of physics? Enter the goblin cavern with me. I could address several issues here, such as the comical Great Goblin (he is not a comedic figure in TH) or the sheer ineptitude of the Goblin warriors who do not inflict a single serious wound on the Dwarves, but I will only mention one issue. There are several significant falls on the part of the Company in this scene, including one where the Dwarves and Gandalf plummet somewhere between 100 and 200 feet down into a chasm on a wooden platform, but somehow the platform remains intact, none of them falls from the platform, and none of them is hurt when they hit bottom. Again, this is an alternative universe (or something like that), but the laws of physics seem to apply to everyone in this world except the heroes. It just gets a little trying at times.

What of the Morgul knife that Radagast discovered? He gave to it Gandalf, who then at the “little council” with Elrond and company in Rivendell produces it as proof that the Morgul Lord whose body is supposed to be buried in a grave unassailable, has somehow returned. That is not the story that Tolkien gave. The Ringwraiths wandered in shadows after the first fall of Sauron; they were not buried in some secure cemetery guarded by the ghosts of Elves past. The point is, why change the story when it serves no purpose? This part of the narrative added nothing to the overall story line.

There was much added violence to this account in comparison to TH. I imagine that this was to reconnect with audiences of the previous three films, films in which there were plenty of battle scenes. I understand that. But it detracts from the actual story of TH which is less of an account of an eschatological war (which LOTR was) than the story of a simple Hobbit who finds the courage and ingenuity to do things that no one, except Gandalf, would have thought possible. But it is here that the film goes most terribly awry.

Bilbo is pictured throughout TH and LOTR as a simple Hobbit who found the strength to do remarkable things. He has flaws, but they are common flaws. He is forced to steal for food when in the dungeon of the Wood-elves, but that is understandable. He perpetrates some immoral actions, such as lying to Gandalf and the Dwarves and later becomes possessive of the Ring, but this is attributed to the influence of the Ring on him. He is in a war, but he is untainted by the war. Most importantly, Bilbo never kills anyone. It is not that killing in war is wrong. Far from it. But in TH that task was reserved for Dwarves, Elves, Wizards, Men. Bilbo never killed anyone, not in the entire story. But in Peter Jackson’s The Unexpected Journey (TUJ), Bilbo kills an Orc in the final battle scene. It was brave, justifiable, and climactic. He saved Thorin’s life. But it was unnecessary and, contrary to the other changes from TH to TUJ, it really does change the whole narrative. It makes the Bilbo from the final few pages of TH a different Hobbit. That Hobbit was still a little naive, still a little homespun, a little “ridiculous,” to use Tolkien’s term from LOTR, but his hands had not been stained with blood, even if it were only Orc blood.

Some people ought never to have to go to war. Women, children, the mentally infirm, and Bilbo Baggins (though not all the other Hobbits) remind us that there is a corner of the world of humanity (or Hobbitry) that ought never to be tainted by the most awful, even if necessary, demand of taking someone’s else’s life to preserve freedom and liberty. Let Bilbo do his mission in TH, an important one, but he should not have had his hands stained in that way.

My thoughts. Go see the film.

Chad Owen Brand

Of course, there are great temptations not to preach on sin(!) Brian McLaren tells us that this is not the way to reach Gen-Xers. Robert Schuller told us this was not the way to reach Boomers. Harry Fosdick told us this was not the way to reach Moderns. I am sure we could find such sentiments all through history, and the reason is that we do not like to be told that we are sinners, and so, preachers who preach on sin take the chance of alienating their congregations, or at least some members of their congregations. Here is the problem with that fear—at a certain level the task of preaching is precisely to alienate. We are to expose the sinfulness of the congregation by preaching the gospel, and such gospel preaching includes preaching on sin. If we are unwilling to do that, then we are, in A. W. Tozer’s words, “water-boys of the pulpit.” Let me explain what I do mean by alienation, and what I don’t mean by it.

Both Paul and Jesus begin their gospel presentations with a discussion of sin. After a few introductory words and a preliminary consideration or two, Paul spends two and a half chapters at the opening of Romans discussing the sinfulness of humanity—all humanity. And of course, he does so eloquently and passionately. These words are endemic to the gospel itself, since, in telling the gospel story we have, presumably, to tell why Jesus ever came to die on the cross in the first place. Without sin, there is no beautiful manger scene (and of course, it was not all that beautiful, anyway); without sin, there is no healing of the sick or raising of the dead; without sin there is no Sermon on the Mount. Here is the point: sin is the context in which all of those things took place, and so, we cannot preach the gospel without preaching on sin. In other words, you cannot tell people about their best life today until you remind them first of their worse life yesterday (or today).

Paul is not alone in this. Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, after some preliminaries, expounded on the sinfulness of humanity—all humanity. In Matthew 5 beginning in verse 21, Jesus, in this wonderful inaugural message in Matthew, in which the gospel is explained with great clarity, expounds on six commandments and the ways in which the Jews were, on the one hand, misunderstanding them, and, on the other hand, breaking them. I have space here to elaborate on only the first two. Jesus addresses the laws against murder and adultery. He makes it clear that the common understanding of those laws is superficial, and in his truly authoritative fashion, he says, “Amen I say to you that you shall not live in a state of settled anger with your brother; Amen I say to you that you must not stare at your sister to lust.” Those two sins indict the entire human race. And this is something that was obvious even to pagans. In Greek mythology Ares, the god of war, was romantically linked to Aphrodite, the goddess of sex. War and sex. Anger and Lust. They seem opposite, since anger pushes the other away while lust lures the other close, but they are actually very similar. At the root of each lies the ego. “I have decided you are unworthy. I have decided to want you.” They are different in content but similar in intent. Even the Greeks knew there was a link between these illnesses, and that even their gods were infected with the disease. Of course, by the time the Greeks were anesthetized by the Romans, they no longer cared.

So, for Jesus, as well as for Paul, an explication of sin is an essential, a non-negotiable part of the gospel proclamation.

How deeply this infection runs in modern culture! So, do we simply let the disease take its toll, or do we do something about it? Let me tell you—their momma is not going to do anything about it in many cases. In a day when Baptist septuagenarians are shacking up, just who is going to try to keep the fox out of the hen house? Well, if no one else will do it, then the pastor gets the call. And he should. And he better.

The preacher must declare that un-repented sin itself is alienation. The unrepentant sinner is alienated from God—either as a non-believer or as a believer under discipline from the Lord. The unbeliever, even the one in my church or your church on Sunday morning, stands in danger of hell-fire, as Edwards reminded us in his famous sermon. Curiously, in Jesus’ even more famous sermon, after discussing the sins of anger and lust, he said exactly the same thing. “If you do not deal with your sins of anger and lust, you are in danger of hell-fire.” Let me tell you something, fellow pastor, your members will not all faint if you occasionally use the word “hell” from the pulpit. (Well, not all of them!) I know the word was probably over-cooked at one time in history, but under-cooking is no more palatable than over-cooking.

So, we preach on alienation, but not in order to alienate. We preach on alienation in order to reconcile. So, when you preach on sin, do it with tears in your eyes and not a flash of anger. (Don’t preach against anger angrily.) When you preach on sin and alienation, do it recognizing your own sinfulness and alienation. Admit that you, too, have been where they are, and that you are not the expert come here to lecture them on getting their lives right. You are simply the one who got out of the mire before they did, so that you could throw them a rope of rescue. But when you preach on sin, make it clear that this is a crucial moment. With both anger and lust, Jesus said, “Do something now! This is not the time to mull it over. Get out now, or you may be in hell by morning.” Preachers need to remind themselves of that, too.

Chad Owen Brand