Do You Know What You Believe?

As I am afforded the opportunity to preach and teach the Word of God, there is one thing that is noticeable far above anything else: Christians do not know what they believe.

There are very few Christians who understand their faith and consequently are not able to give a reasoned presentation of what they believe and why they believe it. This signals that we are lacking the knowledge of key essentials of the faith, particularly in this generation.

There's nothing wrong with not knowing something; it becomes problematic when we choose to remain in the darkness of ignorance.

This blog will focus on essential Christian doctrines; primarily from a Protestant perspective.

Let's simply start with some base definitions. What is doctrine? Doctrine means "teaching." It is a belief (or a system of beliefs) accepted as authoritative. For Christians the authoritative book of doctrine is the Bible which we believe to be God's infallible Word that has been preserved for us.

In his book, “Unmasking The Cults” - which addresses cults of Christianity (as defined by theology), Dr. Alan W. Gomes writes,

"Central doctrines" of the Christian faith are those doctrines that make the Christian faith Christian and not something else.

The meaning of the expression "Christian faith" is not like a wax nose, which can be twisted to mean whatever the speaker wants it to mean.

1. The Christian faith is a definite system of beliefs with definite content (Jude 3)

2. Certain Christian doctrines constitute the core of the faith. Central doctrines include the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the bodily resurrection, the atoning work of Christ on the cross, and salvation by grace through faith. These doctrines so comprise the essence of the Christian faith that to remove any of them is to make the belief system non-Christian.

3.Scripture teaches that the beliefs mentioned above are of central importance (e.g., Matt. 28:19; John 8:24; 1 Cor. 15; Eph. 2:8-10).Because these central doctrines define the character of Christianity, one cannot be saved and deny these. Central doctrines should not be confused with peripheral issues, about which Christians may legitimately disagree.

4. Peripheral (i.e. non-essential) doctrines include such issues as the timing of the tribulation, the method of baptism, or the structure of church government. For example, one can be wrong about the identity of "the spirits in prison" 1 Peter 3:19) or about the timing of the rapture and still go to heaven, but one cannot deny salvation by grace or the deity of Christ (John 8:24) and be saved.

5. All Christian denominations — whether Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant — agree on the essential core. The relatively minor disagreements between genuinely Christian denominations, then, cannot be used to argue that there is no objectively recognized core of fundamental doctrine which constitutes the Christian faith.

- Source: Source: Alan Gomes, Cult: A Theological Definition, excerpt from "Unmasking The Cults" Zondervan Publishing Company (May 11, 1995)

Stay tuned for the next blog: Man's Problem, God's Solution.

Race, Religion, and Politics: The Black Christian Perspective

This is an old article I did during the primary season that I posted on another blog of mine that you may want to check out.

The historic nature of this year’s election season, in particular the Democratic race, can be described in one word: historic. Politics may not be your “cup of tea”, but when a democratic national debate can effectively compete with the viewers of the ever-popular “American Idol”, it assures us that we are living in an extraordinary, if not unparalleled moment in our nation’s history.

With respect and due deference to the African-American plight in America and how much further we have yet to go, let’s pause for a moment and “smell the flowers” as it were, and look at how far we’ve actually come: for the first time in America we have two traditional minorities, an African-American male and a white female, one of which will have the opportunity to be a candidate for President of the United States. This is not to discount the enormity or importance of what Jesse Jackson accomplished in 1988, (Barack and Hilary are both standing on his shoulders), but the meteoric rise of two non-traditional candidates in an arena largely dominated by white males is exceptional and unmatched in our nation’s history. Call it what you want, but this is history in the making.

This year’s political race has even injected new vernacular into our everyday conversation. We’ve become more familiar with words like divisive, incendiary, and substantive, just to name a few. We’ve witnessed a genuine interest from the college demographic, not seen since the 70’s. Sitcom and reality favorites have had to take a back seat to presidential debates featured on the same night. Voter turnout has skyrocketed to historic highs while major sporting events have played second fiddle to breaking news in the current political arena.

It has been the “War of Words”, as each candidate is forced to choose each word so carefully as not to offend or become an affront to current or future supporters. They are constantly under microscopic critique, assessment, and evaluation each primary and caucus as voters are faced with decisions that will undoubtedly change the course of American history.

So as we thankfully, yes thankfully, come to the close of yet another Bush era, what roles do race and religion play in a society that is set to make a paradigm shift that certainly will become the reference point of gender and race progressivism for generations to come?

As African-Americans I think that it is extremely difficult to see ourselves outside of the experience of slavery, educational and economic genocide, societal prejudices, and years of social injustice. It has been just 44 years since we were given the right to vote. Black executives (men or women) in the public and private sector are as noticeable as growing grass, the disparity in public education in minority vs. white neighborhoods has actually increased since Brown vs. Board of Education, and housing in minority neighborhoods, in particular African-American neighborhoods is so disproportionate to that of whites living in the same city, is egregious and unacceptable in this day and age.

And so it is a natural response that we begin to look for a savior of sorts, someone like us who looks like us, but has been chosen to rise above the issues that have tyrannized us for years, someone who is brazen, bold, and gallant, who will lead the way to freedom and justice. The African-American has had many “saviors.” Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, (yes, even Malcolm ya’ll), Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King, Jr., just to name a few, and I do mean just a few. The question now is where does Barack Obama fit into the scope of African-American “deliverers?” Is he the one? Is he our Neo? Can he deliver us from this matrix of monotony and ennui?

Drum roll please…

Sadly, the answer is no.

The answer would be the same if we were talking about Kwesi Mfume, Al Sharpton, (don’t laugh) Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, (again, don’t laugh) J.C. Watts, Condoleezza Rice, Roland S. Martin (start watching CNN for crying out loud), or any other black leader for that matter. None of them could provide the permanency of freedom, equality, and justice that we as a black nation are looking for.

None of them.

None of them have the power to stop racism. None of them have the power to bring about true justice and equality, and fellowship among all men and women. Admittedly, they have the power to change the laws of the land, but they don’t have the power to transform the human heart.

As we remember our struggle in light of what lies ahead the words of Frederick Douglass seem to reverberate louder than ever when he stated, “Without struggle, there is no progress.” And even more pointedly the words of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, whom we know as the Strong Deliverer, when he said, “In this world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)

Barack Obama-44th President of the United States of America

By now you know that Sen. Barack Hussein Obama is the 44th President of the United States of America.

As I listened to Charlie Gibson on ABC announce Obama's landslide victory, I remembered a scene from the second edition of the Matrix trilogy. Shortly before the "keymaker" died he gave Neo a key to a room. Inside of that room Neo met the architect of "The Matrix." Much to Neo's dismay the architect of the matrix began to intimate to Neo that though he was "The One" he has not been the only one and even though he may succeed now, eventually things will snap back like a rubber band into the hands of those in powerful, namely the architect and his cohorts.

He gives Neo two choices; save the city of Zion or save the love of his life, Trinity. Neo of course is moved by love (don't miss that) and choose Trinity. However, before he walks out of the door he looks at the architect and he says, "You better hope we never see each other again."

The imagery is powerful. As I started to think about the architect's words when he said, "There have been five versions before you and you're no different", my mind went back to Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Medgar Evers, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, and now Barack Obama. What the architect didn't understand is that though many had came before Neo, things would now be different and it was in his best interests that they didn't meet again under the same circumstances. Obviously, in the final episode Neo did conquer the matrix by giving himself.

The way was paved for Barack Obama. Many tears were cried, much blood was shed, and many lives prematurely taken, but it proved to be worth it. You may not have voted for him, but just as social conservatives encouraged liberals to accept and pray for George Bush and invoke Romans 13, now I ask those same liberals to do the same for Barack Obama. Whether we like it or not, God chose him. We may not know for what purpose he chose him, but time will reveal that mystery.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new President, Barack Obama. He needs our prayers.

God In History

One thing that I appreciate about my studying church history is that it causes you to broaden your mind concerning the work, will, and the presence of God throughout the history of the world. Intuitively and theologically we understand that God is present. We understand that he possesses all power. We have landed on the correct conclusion that he knows all things and that his knowledge is not limited by time and space, but he preexists outside those limitations, simply meaning that he is before the beginning and he continues after the end. When we meditate on the fact that God is not affected by temporal things, it become all the more amazing to consider that at the same time God can express feelings towards his creation and still declare absoluteness in his character. This is an amazing thing to ponder, not to analyze, but to experience awe at the splendor and grandeur of God.

Isaiah in his description of the Messiah said that he was wonderful. It's interesting when you discover that wonderful doesn't mean wonderful in a modern context. Wonderful to us means great, marvelous, magnificent, etc. And of course, Jesus is all those things and more. When Isaiah used this word he uses a hyperbole to attempt to explain a God that he has been given a vision of but cannot seem to grapple with the essence of who he is...and so he calls him "wonderful." The word wonderful simply means "difficult to understand", "incomprehensible", or "beyond finding out." Later in his book, which I like to call the Old Testament Gospel, Isaiah declares that "there is no searching of his understanding."

In the five weeks that I have been in my Modern Church History class at Fuller Theological Seminary I am again (this is second stab at graduate seminary) going through a deconstruction of sorts of my personal theology. The deconstruction is not designed to cause you to abort your faith, but in a sense "test" the theological ground that you stand on to verify if it is a sure foundation built on the Word of God. If after the process of deconstruction one finds that their faith has been eradicated, there is a positive chance that it may not have been present initially as previously perceived.

However, in my deconstruction, out of all the wars that have been fought over the faith, out of all of the coerced conversions, the creeds that magnified classicism, sexism, and racism above the knowledge of God, the stain of Roman culture that diluted the simplicity of the apostle's doctrine, I still see the mighty hand of God and I marvel at the presence, power, and love of Jesus Christ to permeate our inconsistencies, misunderstandings, and outright misrepresentation of the kingdom of God, and look past our faults and see our real need.

God is an awesome God and he loves us more than we will ever know.