I was wondering the same thing, initially. I re-read your post about three times trying to find the link before I realized there just wasn’t one.

Digressing back to the point, you’re certainly right that Jesus set about to leaven existing communities with the gospel and redeem them; no argument at all there. But I share Nathan’s reservations about the way you’ve made the point.

“Let us do good to all, especially to those who are of the household of faith,” would seem to imply that such a household — a community — exists. The collection for the saints of Judea during the famine (2 Cor. 8-9) would seem to be a concrete expression of that community. Bringing it closer to home, the people with whom I regularly eat the Lord’s Table are a community; in fact, the community is constituted by that practice (among others). When we gather on Sunday to worship, we enter the heavenly tabernacle together, approach God’s throne together to seek His mercy, and offer the New Covenant sacrifices of praise together; again, we are unavoidably constituted by this practice.

I don’t see how a church planter could avoid ‘creating’ a community. There wasn’t a church there before, and now there is. That’s both a local community in itself and the local outpost of a much larger community, an empire whose capital city has not yet descended from heaven.

My principal problem with the flood of ‘how to create community’ books is not that they’re trying to create community, but the terminally silly means they’re using to do it — Super Bowls and tailgate parties, nachos and beer instead of the means God gave us: prayer and praise, bread and wine. Don’t get me wrong, I love nachos and beer, but that’s a big step down from the body and blood of Christ. Having turned ‘church’ into a Frankenstein patchwork of hoedown, country club and lecture hall — and thereby emptied the means God gave us of all their significance — we’re letting all kinds of nonsense rush in to fill the gap. Instead, we ought to be mining the riches of what God gave us, and way too often, that’s just not happening.

(Btw, a good read on this would be Peter Leithart, _Against Christianity_ from Canon Press. It would probably tick you off in spots, but you’d absolutely love it.)

His forever,
Tim Nichols

Ohhhhhhh ok I get what you mean now. Yeah man I agree with you completely then! (harder to communicate through text than you would think eh?) Darn guess there isn’t anything to debate then. oh well. lol

I have seen those posts on the Talents and thought it was pretty interesting. Never thought of it the way Jeremy put it before so it made me think a bit!

Jeremy and I have discussed the Parable of the Talents (Matt 25:14-30). Bruce Malina and other Context Group members take the position that the unprofitable servant is actually the hero of the parable, and that the Master is an exploitive patron, rather than God or Jesus. Jeremy agreed with them (don’t know about now, he’s still studying it). Since it was a limited-good society, they see the good and faithful servants as being those who exploited the poor for the benefit of the master. I still stand for the traditional FG interpretation that the unprofitable servant is an unfaithful believer. I added that the unprofitable servant is thus shamed and loses reward. I see God as the Patron, and the issue of talents as an allegorical way of expressing activity for the Kingdom of God using familiar social realities (but in keeping with Mark 4:10-12, 24 and Matthew 13:11-16, the peasants may have taken it too literally and thus missed the whole point – thinking that the unprofitable servant is the hero when he’s really not). Plus, the context of the passage (24:3-25:13 and 25:31-46), in conjunction with Luke 19:11-27, makes me confident that 25:14-30 is obviously dealing with believers and rewards. My reading is an honor/shame reading that fits the traditional FG reading, unlike Malina’s reading.

Tim, excellent insight!

oh and we aren’t really arguing, it’s just friendly debate lol. I love debate cause even if you are wrong you still learn something

Seems to me like I’m reading good points on both sides of the guilt/shame discussion, but I’m not sure we need to argue about which one is better, or which we ought to have.

Consider instead what the gospel offers to each sort of culture. To a shame culture, the gospel offers vindication to God’s people when every knee bows before Christ — but challenges them to accept vindication before God’s throne as the only one that matters. Honor there is true honor; shame there is true shame; nothing else remotely compares.
To a guilt culture, the gospel offers forgiveness through Christ — but requires that we accept God’s estimation of both our guilt and our forgiveness, rather than our own. Guilt before God is guilt indeed; God’s forgiveness is forgiveness indeed; nothing else compares.
In both cases, the effect is to cast down idols — in the one case, the idol of societal opinion, and in the other, the idol of individual moral sense — and to return God’s valuation of us to center stage.

If believer A is from a shame culture, and believer B is from a guilt culture, and both of them have thoroughly learned the lessons of the gospel, what unites them will be a shared theocentric culture, in which shame is shame before God at the judgment seat and guilt is guilt before God at the judgment seat. I submit that the difference between those two is not really worth talking about.

His,
Tim Nichols

the Greco-Roman cultural influence on people in the Bible is very clear (for a lot of different reasons).

Good thing I took those history classes / philosophy classes on ancient Rome. this is one of the first times they have come in handy.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O88-patronclientrelationship.html

my bad on the supporters I jumped the gun cause it was on the homepage.

But yeah my original post still stands.

And I’m not saying that they weren’t honor societies, I’m saying that the points they were making about honor societies having no guilt was bunk, and that honor societies are somehow superior (look at how great things are in the Middle East today). I’d also point out how the Jews were influenced by Greek/Roman culture in that time period so even if they were heavily honor driven they had other cultural influences.

In that article they also tried to argue that there were NO guilt societies at all in Bible times, then later on mention Greek writers were the first ones to come up with our modern guilt. I guess they forgot where and when the Greek culture had influence.

/unrelated note, they think the end times already happened according to that myth page. how do they validate that view? Nero as the antichrist?

“And now the categories:

Persons who teach heretical or questionable doctrines.
That people who can’t even teach proper doctrine are on this list is terrifying in itself. T. D. Jakes, #1 on the list, teaches a form of modalism; he may do so in ignorance, but it speaks badly for Christianity that someone this ignorant is in such prominence.

Others I would put here are Osteen, Warren, the 2 Crouches, Meyer, McLaren, Schuller, Hagee, Hayford, Hinn, Haggard, Dollar, and Parsley.

Osteen has fallen for feelgoodism to the point that he refuses to teach about God’s judgment. He’s gone the “itching ears” route. See our entry on Osteen on in the November and December 2008 E-Block here.

My issues with Warren are laid out in my review of his book The Purpose Driven Life. Christian occupation with this book and its related programs has now (since I wrote the review) gotten to the point of being disastrous. The book and programs appeal to modern American individualism and selfishness and do little or nothing to conduct serious spiritual growth or contextual understanding of Christianity.

I recommend the resources here (a site where you can also find more info on some of the others named here).

The Crouches are known for being indifferent to correct doctrine and/or teaching false doctrine, and for inviting guests onto their televsion programs who promote heretical doctrines. One might even say that they are indifferent to the point of hostility. Hayford is their pastor and so shares in the guilt, but has in the past, on his own, offered some questionable teachings on spiritual warfare.

Meyer, Schuller, Dollar and Parsley all to some extent teach or encourage “prosperity” (“name it and claim it”) doctrines (as does Osteen, though I think naively).

Hagee emphasizes dispensational eschatology to an irrational extent. (As an aside, I was surprised to not see Tim LaHaye on the list, but maybe he’s #51.) See my review of his work in the May-June 2009 E-Block.

I don’t think I need to comment on Hinn, unless someone reading just arrived from Mars. (The planet, not Texe, which is 2 Rs anyway.)

McLaren is part of a movement that tends to dodge giving answers and say that settled doctrines are open for discussion. They do this in part because they don’t have the knowledge they need. This isn’t heresy per se but it is couterproductive. I am also compelled to put Bell in this category.

Questions about Haggard’s orthodoxy have been raised enough by serious sources that I feel he should be put here. I’m also not too sure how much good is done by someone who writes a book like The Jerusalem Diet and now has been seriously scandalized. If he weren’t here, he’d be in category 2:”

Read the full article at http://www.tektonics.org/af/christianmyths.html

Again, I’m FG, so I won’t agree that faith is loyalty based on performance. I would say that as a client God expects loyalty. If it’s not there, I lose rewards only. And I’m not a partial preterist like JP is.