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randal rauser

If God Wants to Save Us, Why Isn’t Salvation Simple?

by Randal Rauser in Christian Issues

I know what you’re thinking: salvation is simple! After all, just look at John 3:16: God loved the world so much he sent his Son so that whoever believes in him will be saved. Surely that is simple, right?

It might seem so, but the closer you look, the more that initial veneer of simplicity dissolves into an unsettling complexity.
What do you need to believe to be saved?
Let’s start with this question: what does it mean to believe in Jesus?

At first blush, Paul appears to provide a simple answer to that question in Romans 10:9: “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (NIV) So believe Jesus is Lord and God raised him back to life: that’s what you need to believe to be saved.

Simple? Actually, no, it isn’t.

Here’s the problem: there are many groups outside of historic, orthodox Christianity that affirm those two claims. Mormons, for example, profess to believe that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead. Does that mean that Mormons are saved?

Many Christians believe the answer is no: Mormons aren’t saved. The reason is that while they may accept the claims of Romans 10:9, they also accept many other claims that are incompatible with orthodox Christianity. For example, Mormon theology asserts that God was once a human being who evolved to become God and that human beings can themselves become gods.… [Read more…] about If God Wants to Save Us, Why Isn’t Salvation Simple?

How I wrote an article critiquing John Piper … and got attacked by egalitarians

by Randal Rauser in Christian Issues

I recently posted an article in which I argued that John Piper’s ill-formed and poorly argued prohibition on women teaching in seminary reveals that he is sexist, i.e. prejudiced against the female sex and gender. I did not anticipate that my argument would receive resistance from egalitarians.
Trash!
One individual named Henry Imler replied:
Heirarchy [sic] within the Trinity is trash (innovation Grudem & Piper introduced to frame their argument) Complementarianism is trash; espousal of its views is trash; its lived practice is trash.
As best I can guess, Imler assumes that a condemnation of Piper as sexist on the terms of complementarianism somehow entails a morally culpable tacit endorsement of complementarianism. But this is clearly false.

Here I’m employing the very pedestrian form of argument known as assuming arguendo, the discursive device of assuming premises for the sake of argument and then showing problematic consequences based on those premises. This makes it all the more surprising that Henry Imler, an assistant professor of philosophy and theology, should seem to completely misunderstand the argument.

Garbage!

Another response came from JR Forasteros (who wrote a great book that I endorsed last year). JR wrote: “I’m really way over allowing for Complementarianism. Also misogyny. Also garbage theology.”

https://twitter.com/jrforasteros/status/955827011309723650

First observation: JR also seems to… [Read more…] about How I wrote an article critiquing John Piper … and got attacked by egalitarians

The Terrible Tragedy of Christian Fundamentalist Legalism

by Randal Rauser in Fundamentalism

Christian fundamentalists have distinguished themselves as ferocious defenders of doctrines like biblical inerrancy, a literal 6-day creation, the virgin birth, the deity of Christ, and a pre-tribulation secret rapture.

Historically, that commitment to doctrine has been complemented by an equally doctrinaire commitment to a range of ethical “don’ts.” For example, don’t drink alcohol, don’t watch restricted movies, don’t dance socially (remember the movie Footloose?), and don’t use playing cards.

Fortunately, fundamentalists had a couple innocuous substitutes for the standard deck of sinful French playing cards: Rook and Uno. And so, on Christmas vacation and at summer camp I played countless games of Rook and Uno.

How widespread was this stigma of French playing cards? Consider the results of my recent Twitter survey on Christian attitudes toward playing cards:

Frankly, those are stunning results. Almost half the people who responded were raised in a Christian church that stigmatized a deck of cards as sinful. I know what that’s like because I grew up in precisely that context. Here is an excerpt from my book What’s So Confusing About Grace? (p. 68) in which I recount one particular incident from my youth more than thirty years ago:
•REAL CHRISTIANS DON’T PLAY WITH CARDS SIDEBAR•

Yes, even playing cards. After an emotional time around the campfire
at Green Bay Bible Camp, our counselor Gord pressured us to throw
our playing… [Read more…] about The Terrible Tragedy of Christian Fundamentalist Legalism

Alarmist Evangelical Apologetics and the So-Called Post-Truth World

by Randal Rauser in Christian Issues

If you listen to evangelical Christian apologists for any length of time, you will soon hear reference to an ominous “post-truth culture” or a “post-truth world.” As Lee Strobel observed in a 2017 interview: “we see a trend toward a postmodern mindset and ‘post-truth’ culture.” And as John C. Richards, Jr. opines in Christianity Today: “culture asks us to capitulate and live as ‘law-abiding’ citizens in a new post-truth world.” Richards continues,
“Last year the assault on truth was stunning. ‘Post-truth’ was named Oxford Dictionaries’ 2016 word of the year. Americans witnessed a tension-filled presidential campaign where truth-telling took a back seat to statistical errors and talking points. People shared fake news articles that hardly met the lowest levels of journalistic integrity. The world is changing rapidly, embodying this post-truth ethos.”
This sounds dramatic and, as I said, ominous. If these apologetic reports are to be believed, the sun is setting on truth as we move into this brave dark new world where truth no longer matters. Enter the apologist who is concerned to defend the objectivity of truth and beat back the forces of darkness with astute arguments and evidence and savvy cultural analysis.

Richards is right about one thing: there was an assault on truth during the last American presidential election. And that assault on truth was indeed stunning. But that is largely due to an American presidential campaign and presidency that avails… [Read more…] about Alarmist Evangelical Apologetics and the So-Called Post-Truth World

If God wants us to be saved, why is grace so confusing?

by Randal Rauser in Christian Issues

It’s a daunting question. If God wants all human beings to be saved — and surely he does — then why aren’t the requirements of that salvation clearer? This is a central theme woven through my book What’s So Confusing About Grace? (reviewed on this blog here), a theological memoir spanning a forty year journey trying to understand the nature of God’s grace.

I started off that journey assuming that salvation was simply a matter of right belief. But over time I began to face a growing list of nagging questions that challenged that paradigm. In this article I briefly consider three of them.
What must you believe if you are to be saved?
In my conservative upbringing, conversion and faith were first of all about belief. You needed to believe particular doctrines about God and his Son, Jesus. But which statements of doctrine do you need to believe in order to be saved? The disturbing fact, as I soon discovered, is that Christians don’t agree on how to answer this question.

It is hard to convey just how disturbing this fact of disagreement was, but consider this analogy. Imagine that a deadly plague is spreading across the landscape. Fortunately, medical personnel have identified a vaccine to protect people from this terrible plague. Great news, right?

So you think. But then you discover that there is extensive disagreement among those health professionals on how the vaccine should be administered in order to make it effective. Some say… [Read more…] about If God wants us to be saved, why is grace so confusing?

Inerrancy: Still Hazy After All These Years

by Randal Rauser in Christian Issues

I grew up in a Pentecostal fundagelical church where we prided ourselves on taking Scripture seriously. That meant, among other things, a commitment to literal interpretation. From a literal six days of creation to a literal thousand year millennium, we took Scripture in what we believed to be the natural sense. And that meant reading it, ahem, like a newspaper.

Literal interpretation aside, if there was one doctrine that demonstrated our commitment to Scripture, it was biblical inerrancy. We thought of the Bible as a repository of propositions describing God and our relationship with him. And inerrancy promised that every one of those propositions was a fact. Since we imagined doctrine to consist of simple deduction from the Bible, inerrancy thereby provided confidence in the facts of Christian doctrine from creation to new creation.

Our bold and clear doctrine of inerrancy contrasted with the weak and woolly liberal descriptions of biblical authority. More than once I heard my fellow fundagelical Christians joke that trying to get a liberal clear on the inspiration and authority of the Bible was about as easy as nailing Jell-O to a wall.

That’s the way I used to see things. However, today I view matters very differently. Indeed, it now seems to me that if any view of Scripture is liable to the charge of Jell-O nailed to the wall, it is—ironically enough—that of inerrancy itself. Indeed, once we… [Read more…] about Inerrancy: Still Hazy After All These Years

Hell by Way of a Gingerbread Cookie

by Randal Rauser in Christian Issues

This post is chapter 14 of theologian Randal Rauser’s new book What’s So Confusing About Grace?, a memoir chronicling a journey out of fundamentalism and into the messy gospel of grace.

So how do people end up in hell if it is not simply because they goofed? To answer that question, I’d like to take a journey back for a moment to one day in kindergarten, just a few months after my conversion. It all started with a cookie, but not just any cookie. This was a special cookie.

First, I should provide some background. We’d been looking forward to Friday the whole week, for it was the day the entire kindergarten class would be able to decorate our very own gingerbread cookies with candies and sparkles. Then the cookies would be baked in the school oven and at the end of the day each of us would be able to take our very own creation home. My creative process went very well. I channeled the inspiration of Michelangelo as I expertly placed the sparkles in the frosting trim and planted several brightly colored Smarties buttons on the chest.

A Brief Sidebar on Smarties
Just for the record, I grew up in Canada and so I’m referring here to Canadian Smarties which are similar to M&Ms. Thus Canadian Smarties are a very different confection from American Smarties which are called Rockets in Canada. I tell you this because I want to be clear that I would never dream of using American Smarties/Rockets (chalky medicinal pellets that they are) as buttons on a… [Read more…] about Hell by Way of a Gingerbread Cookie

How Evangelical Kids Can Get Their Faith Shaken on the First Day of University

by Randal Rauser in Christian Issues

Let’s consider the first morning at university for one hypothetical 18 year old raised in a typical evangelical church subculture. His name is David.
Getting ready for university
David’s Christian leaders were seeking to grow his faith strong. And so, as he grew up in the church he was taught a deep suspicion of many views contrary to his evangelical Christian convictions. For example, he was taught that the Neo-Darwinian theory of biological evolution is wrong. But not simply that it is wrong: he was taught that it is a lie, that it is a theory on its last legs which is sustained by little more than the anti-Christian animus of those who propagate it. He still remembers the sober words of his youth pastor: “Don’t let the evolutionist make a monkey out of you.”

David was also warned about atheism. Atheists, he was taught, are godless people who hate God and repress a deep anger toward him. They don’t want to live in accord with God’s law and that’s why they reject belief in him. So they are merely fools, as it says in Psalm 14:1.

With that background, David faces his first morning as a new student at a large public university, a school with more first year students than people living in his home town. When he arrives David encounters a bewildering number of cultures and languages, to say nothing of the staggering number of life philosophies on other. The Christian subculture in which he was raised is now inundated by a tsunami of alternative perspectives he hardly… [Read more…] about How Evangelical Kids Can Get Their Faith Shaken on the First Day of University

An Atheist and a Christian Walk into a Bar…

by in Book Reviews

Randal Rauser’s and Justin Schieber’s new book (released tomorrow), An Atheist and a Christian Walk into a Bar…: Talking about God, the Universe, and Everything (Prometheus, $18), is a welcome entry into the field of Christian/Atheist dialogue. Formatted as a series of back and forth exchanges between the authors, An Atheist and a Christian Walk into a Bar sets out to model productive, irenic, and substantive conversation between these two opposing worldviews.

Inspired by the format of the book and its commitment to “pursuing and knowing the truth” by means of a conversation that is “friendly, rigorous, honest, and directed at the truth,” I asked my friend Nick Bradford, an atheist and Christopher Hitchens devotee, to read the book along with me and discuss our thoughts about it.

Dan: So tell me Nick, did the airtight logic and vivid philosophical illustrations provided by Randal persuade you to jump ship and become a theist?

Nick: Well Dan, it seems we might have read two different books. I will say it was a good read, but I am not so sure “airtight” is the word I would use. “God-of-the-gaps” is really what comes to mind.

Dan: God-of-the-Gaps, huh? Care to elaborate on what you mean by that?

Nick: Sure! The chapter on morality was where this problem was most noticeable. Randal inserted the possibility of a god into every gap, nook, cranny, and blank space there was in that chapter. He did a good job of poking small holes in Justin’s arguments, but… [Read more…] about An Atheist and a Christian Walk into a Bar…

Is it more important to believe the right things or to do the right things?

by Randal Rauser in Christian Issues

Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?”

The King will reply, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” —Matthew 25:37-40 (NIV)

Right belief and right practice: you might call them the two oars in the rowboat of a healthy Christian disciple. But if you had to choose to prioritize one of those two oars, which one would it be?

Growing up as an evangelical, the answer was simple. Belief is the starting point of salvation, in particular the beliefs that Jesus is Lord and God raised him from the dead (Romans 10:9). Salvation may require more than this in terms of belief and action, but it surely could not require less.

That idea worked for me for several years. But the more I examined that simple position, the more cracks appeared. In this article I want to consider one of them. In order to see it I want to propose a simple thought experiment, one that is based on two real life cases, one of a Christian who believed the right doctrines but acted wrongly, and the other of a Muslim who (according to Christian doctrine) believed the wrong doctrines but acted rightly.

The setting is the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Commentators have noted that this… [Read more…] about Is it more important to believe the right things or to do the right things?