Heaven, the Soul, and the Afterlife (Begins Monday Night, Sept. 16!)

 

Live at Redeemer, and live-zoomed.

Four 1-hour sessions.

9/16, 9/23, 9/30, 10/7

8-9 PM EST

Cost: $5 (or free if that helps)

Register at hsrm.org - HERE. 

What happens to us when we die?

What will the afterlife be like?

How does the Bible describe the afterlife?

Why is it important to understand that you have a soul?

How can we know that persons have souls?

Will we be with our loved ones in eternity?

What will we do for all eternity?

How does belief in everlasting life inform 

how we now live on earth?

How do we talk with our children about death and the afterlife? (Co-taught with Linda.)

Spiritual Maturity - It Takes a Lifetime



(Pear, on my neighbor's tree)

Our neighbor has two old pear trees adjacent to our property line. I am allowed to pick them. In late summer any unharvested, mature pears fall onto the ground. 

It takes a whole season of connectedness for the pear to mature from what began as a flower. The pear-as-flower-bud is immature. It is far from fully formed.

In the spiritual life things are the same. The new Jesus-follower is young and, ipso facto, immature. This is not a criticism, just a reality. Just as Mc-Pears don't exist, neither does Mc-Spirituality. Yes, they can know Christ and be known by Christ. No, they are not and cannot be, e.g., a "mature worshiper." 

As a pear-flower matures into an edible pear, a baby Christian can mature into Christlikeness. This is a process. It takes time. Praise God for Jesus-followers who are young adults. If they live lives that abide in Christ, like branches attached to Jesus the Vine, they will grow towards maturity. But they cannot, at their age, be "mature," because this takes time.

"Maturing" is not some "quality time" thing, as if a pear would decide to spend a few quality hours attached to the tree. Spiritual maturity requires constant attachment, being broken and re-broken by God, over time, so as to be more greatly formed in Christ. This is how spiritual oak trees are made.

The flower-blossom-pear is in it for the long haul. So am I. And, probably, you, if you are reading this. To mature spiritually requires a lifetime. 

Continue dwelling in Christ.

Be patient. Long-suffer.

Stay attached. 

***
My books are:

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God. 

Leading the Presence-Driven Church.

Deconstructing Progressive Christianity

31 Letters to the Church on Discipleship

31 Letters to the Church on Praying

Encounters with the Holy Spirit  (co-edited with Janice Trigg)

Jesus Is Looking for Followers, Not People Who "Make a Decision"

Custer Airport, Monroe

To the Church in America: Focus on making disciples, rather than providing programs to entertain and hopefully retain the deciders. 

Jesus commanded us to make followers. Invest resources in this. 

Many make "decisions" for Christ and stop there, or fade out. Some of these deciders become disciples - praise God! Others don't.

Jesus is not trying to get people to some decision point, with discipleship as a nice, but unnecessary, add-on. For Jesus it's all about being a disciple and following after him. It's in following Jesus that we come to see that a person's decision was real.

Is it possible to make a decision to follow Christ as Lord and not follow him? No, it's not. It makes as much sense as saying, "I have decided to take up the game of golf," and then not take up the game of golf. Or, proclaiming in front of hundreds of people, "I have decided to eat this banana," and then proceeding to not eat it.

Here is Dallas Willard's definition of a "disciple" of Jesus:

"A disciple is a person who has decided that the most important thing in their life is to learn how to do what Jesus said to do. A disciple is not a person who has things under control, or knows a lot of things. Disciples simply are people who are constantly revising their affairs to carry through on their decision to follow Jesus."

Disciple-making is not popular in American entertainment-driven, consumer churches. For one reason, disciples cannot be microwaved. But a life of slow-cooked Jesus-following is vastly more satisfying, as any of Jesus' disciples know.

***
Two of my books are:

Leading the Presence-Driven Church.

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God.

Better Is One Experience Than a Thousand Theories

 

(Art Arfons and his "Green Monster")

When I was a teen, my father took me to watch fast cars race a quarter mile at the Rockford Dragway. The steward of the dragway was a friend of dad. We were given pit passes to see the cars and drivers up close. 

That night was special. A drag racer named Art Arfons was there, with his famous “Green Monster.” This vehicle was a jet engine fastened to the frame of a car. As we entered the pit we were handed ear plugs. The Green Monster held the world land speed record of 576 mph. It went from 0-60 in three seconds. It was loud! At the time, my mode of transportation was a red Nash Rambler. It accelerated from 0-60 in three minutes. It, too, was loud, but for different reasons. 

That was an exciting night! It was made even better when dad’s friend showed me his car. It was a 1963 Ford Shelby Cobra. Just the name “Cobra” exudes danger, in a way “Rambler” does not. I have an image of my Rambler sauntering, strolling, and meandering down the quarter mile strip on its way to a picnic. 

The Cobra went 0-60 in five seconds. Dad’s friend looked at me and asked, “Would you like to ride with me to open up the evening?” Yes (power!). And no (danger!).

I said yes.

I sat in the passenger’s seat, and went for the fastest quarter mile I had ever experienced. What teenaged boy didn’t like fast cars? That night I grew in knowledge of power and speed. I had seen magazines and television shows on drag racing. I loved looking at cool cars. But all the reading in the world did not compare with experiencing the Shelby Cobra for myself. 

In this book I am arguing that churches must be presence-driven, because experience gives knowledge that theory cannot. Better is one quarter mile raced, than a thousand automotive theories read. 

It is the same with God.

- From John Piippo, Leading the Presence-Driven Church, Kindle Locations 132-147

We Belong to Alliance Defending Freedom

 

           (With Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary doctoral graduates

             - a long time ago!)

Our church belongs to Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).

Michael Brown has a nice article on ADF. I was not aware that Bill Bright founded ADF.

See "We Need to Change Both Hearts and Laws."

You Have a Calling in Life

 

                                                                  (Amish country, Ohio)

In my first year as a Jesus-follower I felt God calling me to me the youth pastor of the Lutheran church I grew up in. Our church did not have a youth pastor. For Sunday after Sunday an announcement appeared in the church bulletin which read: "Please pray that we would find a youth pastor." I shared my sense of calling with our pastor. He agreed. I stayed for three years before moving, as a result of another call from God.

I experienced God calling me to study at a theological seminary. I was called to study, to learn, to research. My three years at seminary have been so valuable for me!

During that time God called me to be an assistant pastor at First Baptist Church of Joliet, Illinois. Linda and I were there for seven years. 

We left Joliet when God called us to be campus pastors at the Baptist Student Center of Michigan State University. We were there for eleven years. We loved campus ministry!

In our tenth year there we sensed God was going to call us elsewhere. He did. We came to Monroe, Michigan, to serve Jesus at Redeemer Fellowship Church. We are in year thirty-three!

Within this adventure Linda and I have experienced countless secondary callings. Like today, as God is calling us to reach out to some people. These callings give our lives meaning and purpose. Were there no God, then there would be no calling, no "vocation," and life would be without ultimate meaning and purpose. (Note: Os Guinness, in The Call: Finding and Fulfilling God's Purpose for Your Life, distinguishes between primary and secondary callings.)

A main way we experience God is by being called, and then, often in retrospect, seeing how God was in this all along.

Jacob Shatzer defines, in Transhumanism and the Image of God: Today's Technology and the Future of Christian Discipleship, "vocation" as "all of those experiences and insights that our lives are guided by Another, that we are responding not to inert nature that bends to our will, but to another Will, with whom we might live in covenant relationship, and to Whom we will be ultimately accountable.” (29)

Shatzer says a calling from God has four elements.

1. A call implies a caller, one doing the calling.

2. Often the call is to something the person hearing the call doesn't want.

3. Callings almost always lead to hardships that the person has to work through in order to obey.

4. The greatest danger is being distracted from the goal. Shatzer writes: "Often we act like making the wrong choice is the biggest problem. If we are responding to God’s call, the biggest danger is that we become distracted from that call by focusing on something else." (30)

Shatzer writes:

"Our society is very different from one shaped by this notion of calling, because we prioritize power and control. We don’t want to respond to a Caller. We seek knowledge so that we can control rather than participate in a larger community. In fact, “Power has become the centerpiece of a new kind of harmony, one based no longer on the ‘right relation of things’ in a world that both begins and ends in mystery, but it is a harmony that comes from control.” Control diminishes relationship; the will of one alone is expressed, and conversation and communion are lost. A loss of vocation that emphasizes the individual will and promotes the desire to control prevents the propagation of genuine community."
(Ib.)

Our current cultural malaise, angst, loneliness, and existential dystopian tendencies is partly, if not largely, due to the lack of meaning and purpose that logically follows from the absence of a Caller. 

***

Two of my books are:

Leading the Presence-Driven Church

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God.

The Meaning of "Nothing" in Heidegger

Martin Heidegger

Michael Gelven introduced me to Martin Heidegger's Being and Time when I was an undergraduate at Northern Illinois University. Gelven is one of the best teachers I've ever had. He combined brilliant scholarship with an ability to communicate it to lesser beings like myself. His method of teaching and evaluating become the one I now use in all my teaching.

In my seminary studies I did an independent study with theologian Tom Finger on Being and Time. Thank you, Tom, for taking that time with me. I'm certain I understood very little of what Heidegger was saying and doing. Yet being-taught by Gelven and Finger served and still serves as helpful in now understanding Heidegger, I think, more than I did forty years ago.

Let me try with some "later Heidegger" bullet-points + auto-commentary.

• Heidegger-studies are usually divided into study of the Heidegger of Being and Time, and the "later Heidegger."
• I'm looking at Heidegger apart from his involvement in Nazism, an unfortunate development.
• Theologically, to understand Bultmann and Tillich one must understand Heidegger.
• If Heidegger is interested in God, his is a non-metaphysical God.
• Traditional ontology understood persons in terms of their relationship to "things"; in terms of the way things are. In doing this humanity was "led astray" by being.
• "Being" was the center of Heidegger's thought.
• Heidegger's term for human being was the German word Dasein. Literally, Dasein simply means "being-there." Heidegger uses this term to indicate that humanity must be studied in terms of its own structure rather than in relation to other "things."
• Heidegger speaks of Dasein as being "thrown." That does not mean there is a "thrower." Rather, as James Robinson has written, Dasein's "thrown-ness" "relates it to Dasein's own projection of itself. Dasein is grounded in nothing outside itself." ("The German Discussion of the Later Heidegger," by James Robinson; in The Later Heidegger and Theology, eds. James Robinson and John Cobb. I find Robinson's writing on Heidegger clear, and am using his essay for my bullet-points.) With this in mind, consider this quote from Heidegger, who says that the aim is "to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself." (In Anthony Thiselton, The Two Horizons, 26)
• This is the meaning, in Heidegger, of "nothing." Dasein is grounded in "nothing" outside itself. For Heidegger there is "nothing" beyond Dasein. Robinson writes: "Dasein, held out into nothing, is beyond all beings, and has in this sense attained ultimate transcendence, the goal of metaphysics." Heidegger explains this in his lecture What Is Metaphysics? (Sartre's "nothingness" in Being and Nothingness is both indebted to Heidegger's phenomenology of being and misunderstands Heidegger and goes in a direction that is non-Heideggarian.)
• For Heidegger, there is nothing beyond Dasein, not a transcendent God, not to the universe as "the sum total of all beings" (Robinson, 11), and not to some Cartesian subject from which a world of things can be established. Beyond Dasein, nothing lies. The answer to the metaphysical question that haunted philosophers from Plato to the present is: "nothing." As Robinson says, "the answer to the metaphysical question is at the same time the end of metaphysics." (12)
• Keep all of this in mind in order to understand Tillich's idea of God as the "ground of being."
• Bultmann is indebted to Heidegger's phenomenology of being in the being of Dasein. The idea of hermeneutics is purely descriptive. Bultmann says, in regard to Heidegger's hermeneutics, "I learned from him not what theology has to say but how to say it." (In Thiselton, 28)

Serious students of Christian theology need to come to grips with the influence of Heidegger's anti-metaphysical phenomenology of Being.

As for "nothing," two interesting (but non-Heideggarian) studies are: Nothing: A Very Short Introduction, by physicist Frank Close; and Jim Holt's excellent Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story. 

Welcome to the Age of Cheap Grace

 

                                                (Lake Michigan; Pentwater, Michigan)

In 1970 (yikes!) I became a follower of Jesus. I was twenty-one. (Now, you do the math.)

One of the first books recommended to me was Dietrich Bonhoeffer's monumental The Cost of Discipleship. I didn't grasp it all at the time. But I did understand Bonhoeffer's distinction between "costly grace" and "cheap grace." It reminded me of the apostle Paul, when he wrote, What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? (Romans 6:1-2)

Eric Metaxas, in his biography of Bonhoeffer, argues that the Lutheran Church's drift into cheap grace was a factor in allowing Hitler to come to power. (See Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy; see also Tim Keller's Foreward.) 

Metaxas says that cheap grace means "going to church and hearing that God just loves and forgives everyone, so it doesn’t really matter much how you live." Anyone who believes that and self-refers as a follower of Jesus has drifted into heresy.

Tim Keller writes that, today, we live in an age of cheap grace. "Many Christians want to talk only about God’s love and acceptance. They don’t like talking about Jesus’ death on the cross to satisfy divine wrath and justice. Some even call it “divine child abuse.” Yet if they are not careful, they run the risk of falling into the belief in “cheap grace”—a non-costly love from a non-holy God who just loves and accepts us as we are. That will never change anyone’s life." (Foreward to Metaxas.)

***

Two good reads on the meaning of 'grace' are...

Philip Yancey, What's So Amazing About Grace?

Michael Brown, Hyper-Grace: Exposing the Dangers of the Modern Grace Message

Abortion and the "Whatever" In the Womb

(Church, in Columbus, Ohio)

(I'm re-posting this to keep this ball in play, as things are again intensifying.

It is important to understand why I, and others like me, are so against abortion.

For us, the conceptus/embryo/fetus is a "human life." So, to abort is to kill a human life.

I am against killing innocent, defenseless, voiceless human lives. I think you would be, too, if you believed the inborn being was a human life.

So, the human-life-killer [rightly named if the inborn being is a human life] claims "women's rights over their bodies" include a woman's right to kill a human life, which also happens to be their daughter or son.

If the inborn being is not a human, then there's no problem killing the life inside, since we kill non-persons all the time.)

This happened in 1984.

X was twenty-two years old when she asked to meet with us. She said, "I have something I need to share with you." We waited for X to call. She didn't.

X was in our church family. When we saw her again she said, "I am going to call you. I need to share something with you."

We waited. She didn't. And she said the same thing the next time Linda and I saw her.

We waited again. She called. Linda, X, and I met together.

"I have something I need to tell you," said X, with her head hanging down. We waited. For thirty minutes. Finally X said, through breathless tears, "Two years ago I had an abortion."

And X wept and wept.

Why did X weep? Why so sad, X? Because in X's mind, she killed her child.

At this point I am glad some of you were not there with X, because some of you believe X did not kill her child. Some of you believe that what X thought was her child was a non-person, a lump of fleshy matter, and nothing more. You would have told X that the "whatever" in her uterus was not really her child. You would have counseled X that she really didn't kill her child, and because it wasn't her baby, and yes it is wrong to kill babies and children and persons, it wasn't any of those things. You would have euphemistically counseled her that she was simply exercising her "reproductive rights." I am thankful you were not there to comfort X with these philosophical (not scientific) ideas. They would not have helped her as she grieved at the thought of her child now being two years old.

X knew that killing her child was wrong. X was brought low over choosing herself over her baby. This is why X wanted to talk with Linda and I. X wanted to know how she could go on with her life. We talked with her about forgiveness, and the amazingness of God's mercy and grace. This is the only answer we know of that could help and heal X. And, BTW, we all need this. Understand this, and you will understand Christianity.

Abortion, says Pope Francis, is "genocide." The Pope has compared abortion to "hiring a hit man to resolve a problem." 

The Pope has said: “How can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other vulnerable beings, however troublesome or inconvenient they may be, if we fail to protect a human embryo, even when its presence is uncomfortable and creates difficulties?”

The core issue, which is lost in all the current political obscurity, is the nature of the "whatever" in the womb. Is it a human life? X knew it was.

(See the argument here. And here.)

***

If you have had an abortion, 

or supported an abortion, 

and are suffering as a result, 

please contact us.  

johnpiippo@msn.com 

A Note on the Utopian Myth of "Progressivism" and "Progressive Christianity"

 

                                                        (The River Raisin, in Monroe)

One of my objections to "progressive" Christianity is the belief in cross-epochal "progress," of the moral and spiritual kind. But this is not compatible with a Christian eschatology. Moral and spiritual progressivism is a utopian myth.

For example:

"A message repeated throughout [philosopher John] Gray’s work is that, despite the irrefutable material gains, this notion is misguided: scientific knowledge and the technologies at our disposal increase over time, but there’s no reason to think that morality or culture will also progress, nor – if it does progress for a period – that this progress is irreversible. To think otherwise is to misunderstand the flawed nature of our equally creative and destructive species and the cyclical nature of history. Those I spoke to in Basra needed no convincing that the advance of rational enlightened thought was reversible, as the Shia militias roamed the streets enforcing their interpretation of medieval law, harassing women, attacking students and assassinating political opponents."

- Andy Owen, "Reading John Gray in War"

Gray, BTW, is one of my favorite atheistic philosophers. I've read several of his books.