Theophonics

It is amazing how things from our childhood stick with us all the way up through adolescence and into young adulthood. For the sake of our readers that may not recognize the reference made in the title, let me explain. When I was a kid, there was a show called “Ren & Stimpy,” that came on Nickelodeon. The title of this post reflects the title of a song that originated in that show. Stimpy invented a helmet that would transform the wearer into a person driven only by happiness. He used his invention to turn the ordinarily grouchy and downtrodden Ren into a spastically joyful lunatic. This atmosphere spawned the song and subsequently destroyed a large portion of their house. We are not lucky enough to have helmets that cause us to break into instantaneous happiness, but we do have a God that can help us find that place without one.

Now I know that happiness and joy are two different states of mind, and I won’t get in to the literal or grammatical implications of either. For the sake of today’s post, let’s just treat them as very close cousins. When one becomes a Christian, God makes Himself available for a whole variety requests. Happiness and joy are two of the things that God offers us. I do not hold to the belief that once we’re saved everything will be happy. I actually dislike “Happy Jesus” theology, and I will definitely discuss that at a later time. I do believe that God wants us to be generally happy, but I also believe that God allows us to go through difficult times to allow us the ability to grow. And in these times, happiness and joy are choices that we have to make.

I have found in my personal life that pessimism is much stronger than optimism. That might not be true for everyone, but humans do share an attraction to pessimism. It’s in our nature. The choice to remain happy and joyful is a much harder one when things are going poorly. That’s where God’s availability becomes a true asset. He wants us to rely on His strength to get through the rough patches, not our own.

God’s power is greater than anything in this world. And if we are truly honest with ourselves, the reason most of us give up happiness and joy is because we try to use our lesser power to overcome these obstacles alone. It is very easy to come upon the proverbial mountain of trouble and become discouraged. We mire ourselves down with trying to find a way out of the situation. We try to tunnel under the mountain. We try to go around the mountain entirely. We even try to tackle the job of climbing over the top of our troubles sometimes. Occasionally we might find our way to the other side. But if we try to do it alone, we miss one of the easiest options. We could allow God to lead us.

God knows the best routes through our problems. He knows the easiest and least rocky paths. He has a whole array of gifts to give us that can help us through problems. And sometimes, God might simply remove the mountain altogether. He can do that. He’s God. This doesn’t mean that our trek will be perfectly easy every time. But with God it’s always easier. There is no way that we can change many things that happen to us. God, on the other hand, is bigger than any mountain, and His strength is limitless. And knowing that we’ve always got a Father that loves us is a great way to overcome the negative and choose to be happy and joyful.

Of course, there is the possibility that some of you all might not have God to fall back on. The good news is that He’s always open for business. He’s got a place for you already. The eternal love and support of God are easily accessible. Those of us that have already claimed a personal relationship with Christ have the same things available. We can be happy and joyful through everything. It’s just not always an easy thing to do.

Nehemiah 8:10- Do not be grieved, for the joy of the LORD is your strength.

On the way back from school today the guys I ride with and I had a conversation about the goings on of the church. We are all ministers called by God to train ourselves theologically, and we are all members of the same denomination. One thing that came up was the subject of “church hopping.” This spawned from a larger issue of why the Christian Church is universally in decline. The subject of hopping came up from how many of the “growing” churches within Christianity are merely getting members that new to that church. These people are already churched and they are often discontent with one church, or even denomination, and choose to switch to another looking for more fulfillment. This is not real growth, just rearranging numbers on a page to give the appearance of growth. Real Kingdom growth comes when someone is reached with the Gospel that either has been churched but never accepted Christ as Lord and Savior; or even better, when someone who has never been reached at all makes the same decision. But, that is a tangent for another blog.

Today’s topic is indeed “church hopping.” First off, this only deals with people that have conscientiously joined a church with the intent to stay. If you are not currently active in a church and need to find one, church hopping is perfectly acceptable. That, coupled with copious prayer, is how you find a church in the first place. I am not admonishing someone who is earnestly trying to find a church to fellowship with others in.

I want to say that there are situations when someone must legitimately leave the church they are attending to go to another one. This often comes when God physically moves you to another location. All three of us here at Theophonics can relate to that. Despite the fact that we all grew up in the same hometown, none of us currently live in that said town anymore. I am the closest to that town, and I live around 100 miles away. Not that drastic a change, given the scope of our world, but it’s hard to maintain fellowship with a church that is over an hour and a half away.

Another situation arises when God calls you to another church for reasons you might not understand. You could still live in the same exact place, but God has work for you in another congregation. Sometimes this is because there is a need at that second church that God wants you to fill. Sometimes it is to wreck the calm complacency that has held you back from true Kingdom service. Much less often, it could be because the pastor at that church has gone off the deep end and the majority of the people are lemming-ing after him. Regardless the reason, there are God-Willed reasons why someone should leave a church for another one.

However, there are plenty of reasons that someone should not leave a church. These all boil down to selfishness and pride. When someone says “I don’t like the music,” “This preacher isn’t Calvanistic enough,” or “This preacher is way too Calvanistic,” chances are they are looking at surface issues. If you don’t like the music, maybe you need to ask God to open your heart up to new expressions of worship. Worship has nothing to do with music; it has to do with giving God the glory and honor that He as God deserves. If the person’s theological stance, within reason, is not up to your snuff then maybe God is trying to teach you other aspects of Him. I add “with reason” because there are people who do preach unbiblical doctrines that need to be avoided, it falls under the “gone off the deep end” clause above.

Between the three of us in the car today, all serving at different churches, we have seen the same couples make the rounds between our churches. They get upset, offended, mad, and then storm off to the next church of our denomination on the road. They have managed to attend, for about a year and a half each, every major church within two nearby cities trying to find one that doesn’t offend them. It could be that our denomination is not theologically in tuned with what they want. If that is the case, I beg them to find one that is so they can become active in it. But I’m almost willing to put money on the notion that they are not going to be happy till they fully surrender their service in the church over to God. God will put us in circumstances that will not make us happy. Jesus sweated drops of blood before going to the Cross, He begged over and over to not have to die, but He fulfilled His duty anyway. The point is not our temporal happiness; it’s about us being faithful to God.

Hosea 6:6 For I delight in faithfulness, not simply in sacrifice; I delight in acknowledging God, not simply in whole burnt offerings.

I have had several jobs in the past that are related somehow to the Christian faith, and the issue of personal religious belief is always covered in interviews. I both enjoy and dread this section of the hiring process. I really like to talk with other Christians about my beliefs, but I am always wary of the other members of the discussion being offended by my stance on particular issues. The reactions I’ve managed to view range from appreciative acceptance to immediate disgust to deadpan silence. I will eventually get around to talking about all of these issues, but today I wanted to talk about denominations.

Since the beginning of Christianity, there have been discussions held on what exactly Christians should or should not believe. Some people have come up with truly great ideas, others obviously wrong ideas, and others still ideas that fall in the grey of indecision. Despite these varying ideas, the Christian Church existed in a singular official body until 1054 AD. And those two bodies, the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, existed for several hundred more years before substantive other Christian denominations emerged. I know that some of you might make the case that these churches were oppressive of new ideas at times, and I totally agree. I only mention the history of the church to show that multiple different accepted and theologically sound denominations of the faith have been around for less than half the time Christianity itself has existed.

The Christian Church today has dozens of different denominations across the world. These individual denominations all have their own way of doing things; otherwise, they would be part of some other denomination. The point I would like to make is a rather obvious one, but you may have never considered the full implications of it. Even though there are differences in the views of particular denominations, the belief in Christ is what makes them Christian. Baptists and Methodists go to the same heaven as Presbyterians and Episcopalians if the basic belief in Christ is present. The same God that answers prayers for Catholics works in the lives of the Pentecostals that worship down the road. According to the Bible, we are one church. We are the singular body of Christ. And He is the one savior for us all.

Why then is there such tension between these different denominations? We no longer have the political and legal pressures that Europeans had in the 1500’s. We no longer have wars fought over allegiance to a particular clergy member. And we no longer have to be a part of a particular church to get the right to vote in a colonial American city. We are completely free to choose whichever denomination, or religion to extend the point, that appeals to us. And therein lays the problem. It is subtle, and it is rarely spoken of, but it exists.

When we get to pick our own denomination, we as competitive beings see it as a chance to join a team. We want our team to be the best, and we want other teams to do badly. And now you are angry with me for implying that you want another church to fail. But let’s examine how true that statement really is. If a soul won for Christ is the same regardless of the denomination, shouldn’t we be down in the trenches of the world working shoulder to shoulder with all Christians? But we don’t.

We look at other churches, and all too frequently we don’t look for Christ. We look for the people that might not look the same. We look and see people of a different color. We see that that church doesn’t sing hymns any more, or they sing nothing but hymns. We see the errors of the members of the church. Those people lift their hands in worship. Those people kneel down and recite prayers. Those people use real wine in their communion services. But what we don’t see is the fact that Jesus is the savior of everyone. We don’t see that His love for those people is no different than His love for us.

I don’t want to come across in an accusatory manner. I also don’t want anyone reading this to interpret this post to mean “Aquinas hates denominations and thinks I’m going to Hell if I’m a member of one.” The beauty of the modern Christian church is that we do get a choice of how to worship God. If one church doesn’t suit you, there is probably one that will. But let us not forget that church is ultimately about serving God, and it is not about what we can get out of it. And once modern Christians realize that multiple Biblical and true approaches to worship exist, we can begin to work together. We’re all working towards the same goal anyway.

Romans 12: 4-5- For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.

When speaking about the Bible, especially in English speaking countries, there is no version that remains in the spotlight of controversy more than the King James Authorized Version (KJV). There are people who will defend the KJV as the only “real” Bible to their graves. There are others who will oppose the KJV to their own graves as well. What about this simple translation makes it so controversial? I will say up front that I don’t belong to either “camp” surrounding this particular translation of the Bible. I truly do straddle the fence on this issue, and honestly everyone else should as well.

I have overheard someone say that the reason that more modern translations don’t use red lettering is because they aren’t the actual words of Jesus, the KJV was. I wanted so bad to say that the publishers of those versions didn’t choose to put red ink on the pages of the Bibles in question, but I kept my mouth shut. Let’s face it, though, that is the reason the Gospels didn’t have red lettering. I said it last time and I’ll say it again. The Bible was not written in ANY form of English. It was written in Hebrew and Greek. The New Testament wasn’t even written to be a Bible, it was written as a series of letters to explain why Jesus was the Old Testament Messiah, what He did, what He expects His followers to do, and how they should go about doing it. The Old Testament wasn’t even canonized as the Old Testament till 70 years after Jesus’ death. It took another 200 years before the New Testament was recognized.

Back on topic, my main problem with the KJV is mostly practical. The version dates back to 1611, hence the name “1611 King James Authorized Version of the Holy Scriptures.” That is not the problem. The problem is in the intervening 400 years (minus 2) the English language has changed and evolved into something else entirely. When was the last time you greeted a buddy on the phone with, “Verily I saith unto thee, good sir, how hast thine day faired?” Case in point, Microsoft Word is trying to auto-correct words in the previous sentence. If you have EVER done that, congratulations, you are a nerd. (I say this knowing full well I have said something similar to my compatriots on the blog here.) The language doesn’t hold water today. Hence, I study the New King James Version. It keeps the original structure and translation, and only changes the grammar to fit in better with today’s English language.

Some try to argue that the KJV is a horrible translation of the Scriptures, as a Greek scholar I can say that is a bunch of bull. The KJV is all in all, the best translation of its Greek subtext I have seen to date. The original translation committee states in the introduction that they did the best they could with the resources on hand. They also encouraged future laborers to continue their work when better resources presented themselves. My problem with the Greek to English aspect is not the translation, it’s the Greek itself.

This is an area that Theophonic Polycarp and I disagree on, but I really dislike the Textus Receptus. I won’t get into all of the details, but it was compiled by a single person using only a handful of manuscripts because he was trying to beat a team of people who had been working for some time already to print. It’s kind of like the Playstation and the X-Box 360. They won a lot of support from fans because they were the first of their generation to reach the market. The TR was the first officially published Greek New Testament, and so it had already caught on when the other work was published. I’m not saying it’s a bad work, and for its day it was surprisingly accurate. But whereas Erasmus had only a hundred or so manuscripts, modern compilers have access to hundreds of thousands of manuscripts to find the most accurate version of the original letters that they can.

The bad mostly comes from the age of the text. There are better copies of the original Greek language out there today than there where 400 years ago. The TR is based mostly on texts that dated to within the last millennium, over 1000 years from the writing of the New Testament. There where no Hebrew texts that dated before 400 AD, also 1000 years after their writing. Archeology has turned up pieces of text that date to within 150-200 years of Jesus’ life. The English language itself has changed over the last 400 years. There are translations that use more modern English to convey the words of the Scripture writers to us.

The good about the King James Version comes from it being the first legitimate copy of the Bible in English. People like William Tyndale gave their lives to see the Bible made available in the language of the people. Up to that point you had to learn Latin or Greek to read Scriptures, and the general public could barely read their own native tongue. People where given the right and ability to study God’s Word on their own; they didn’t have to rely on preachers or scholars to tell them not only what the Word meant, but what it said in the first place. Regardless of how well it has conveyed itself into the modern era, the KJV is still a copy of God’s Word. As Holy Scripture, it contains power and authority, the power to change lives for eternity. It has its place in history, and it has its place today. It is not the best, nor is it the worst. If it impacts lives, then it still deserves the right to speak for itself.