1. Jesus is not God. God the Father alone is God. He alone is Yahweh. God is a Person, not a human person, but a Person nonetheless. There is no such thing as a non-person Godhead or Triune God. And God is One Person, not three.
2. God is not impassible. He can and does suffer. He has experienced all the suffering that every human being has ever experienced whether spiritual, mental, emotional or physical. He created man to experience suffering for the purpose of creating him in his perfect likeness. Mankind is a family, an organic and spiritual unit, a body with Jesus as its head. Human suffering is a necessary part of mankind’s journey toward spiritual maturity. Somehow suffering within the human family is necessary for learning how to love. Even those human beings who die at birth, profit from the suffering of their fellow human beings as they are intimately connected with the entire human race. It is this human spiritual interconnectedness that enables Jesus’s life, suffering and death to have a decisive impact on each individual member of the human race. Jesus’s work on the cross saves even those who have never heard of him on this side of the grave.
3. The earth is young. God created the physical Universe comparatively recently. The diversity of life on this planet is due to God’s direct creation from nothing. If evolution has made any contribution to life, it would be top-down, one kind of canine to many canine types, evolution and not bottom-up, bacteria to brain, evolution.
4. Adam and Eve were never perfect. God did not create Adam and Eve to be in his perfect image. They represented the perfect Natural Man and not the Man of the Spirit. They needed a Savior even before they sinned. They would not have sinned had they been created in the perfect image of God. Before they sinned they were innocent but not perfect. Jesus was the first human being to be made in the perfect image of God. The source of their rebellion was their wisdom which was not under God’s authority.
5. The angels did not rebel. On the other hand, God created the angels to be sinless with the perfection that angels were meant to have. They did not rebel against God. Satan, the devil and demons are not fallen angels. They are spiritual powers that man’s rebellion has released into God’s creation. They derive their power from mankind’s spiritual energy. They do not have personhood which they, nevertheless, can mimic by possessing a human being. The Serpent in the Garden of Eden was Eve’s own wisdom speaking to her. The fruit of her rebellious wisdom, the Fall, became the source of her humiliation.
6. The sovereign will of God determines man’s eternal destiny. The creation of the New Man of the Spirit is an act of the sovereign will of God in the life of the individual human being. Just as the First Adam did not come into existence through an act of his free will so the New Man cannot come into existence through an act of human free will. The Natural Man, consisting of Adam and his descendants, is unable to understand or do the things of the New Man of the Spirit of God. God, through his sovereign choice, determines the timing and extent of the re-creation of the individual human being into the Man of the Spirit. The Natural Man cannot change himself into the Man of the Spirit by an act of free will inasmuch as true freedom of the human will is the result of salvation, not its source.
7. God will save every human being. God, through his work in Jesus of Nazareth in his life, obedience in suffering and in his death and resurrection will accomplish his desire which is the final salvation of each and every human being. Human beings are saved by God’s work, which is a work of creation, a new creation. This new creation is made possible through the loving and obedient faith of Jesus of Nazareth. Human faith in Jesus plays a role, but not a primary role in human salvation. Judgment Day and the Lake of Fire are for the purpose of saving the lost after God has raised them from the dead. Everything that God does is for the good of human beings, something Eve did not believe when she gave in to her rebellious wisdom.
8. Jesus healed and perfected mankind by his suffering and death. Jesus’s death was not for the purpose of satisfying God’s wrath or God’s justice. Jesus was not our substitute in paying a price for our salvation. In having Jesus going about preaching and healing and finally giving himself up for scourging and crucifixion, the Father was creating a new humanity, a new humanity who would be the spiritual descendants of the New Adam, Jesus. In perfecting Jesus through his baptism of fire, God was perfecting all of humanity who would become one with Jesus in faith and in their own suffering. In Jesus the old creation is done away with and the new creation is born. In the new creation all things are made through Jesus. God’s work of saving mankind is an act of creation and not a courtroom drama where an innocent party pays the penalty for the crime of the guilty. The guilt of the sinner is remedied through God’s forgiveness and mercy, a forgiveness and mercy that, nevertheless, is dependent on the guilty being made whole through the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus’s suffering and death were meant to heal the wounds of sin rather than being a work of appeasing an angry God. Jesus was a physician, not a lawyer.
9. Friendship with the world is forbidden. The believer in Jesus is to be in the world but not of it. The believer cannot be of the world because to be of it necessarily involves the believer in the sin of idolatry. The person of the world is of necessity a worshipper of the false gods of the world. One of the false gods of the world is the nation state. One of the demands made by the nation state of its citizens is their willingness to kill and be killed on its behalf. The believer, however, is a citizen of the Kingdom of God and is not truly a citizen of the nation state in which he was born or naturalized. Killing for the nation state is not the same as killing in self defense because killing on behalf of the nation state involves the sin of idolatry. The nation state cannot but be a god to any person willing to kill on its behalf. To avoid the sin of idolatry, the Christian should not be a part of his or her nation’s military establishment. And should avoid such acts of worship as saluting the flag or saying a prayer of allegiance. Besides the question of idolatry, the Christian vocation is antithetical to participation in the wars of the nation states. The Christian has a special vocation as Christ’s ambassador to the world which is to lead the world toward peace while reconciling human beings with one another and with their Creator.
10. Biblical chronology needs to be reconsidered. This is a minor point, but I believe that the biblical chronology of Bishop Ussher to be in error. In my opinion the biblical chronology of the Patriarchal Calendar method is closer to a correct chronology than any other. In this chronology, God created mankind’s first parents, Adam and Eve, in the year 11,013 BC. The flood of Noah’s day occurred in the year 4990 BC. Abraham was circumcised in the year 2068 BC. Most chronologists accept 1447 BC as the biblically supported year for the Exodus. King David began to reign in 1007 BC.
11. God does everything for the wellbeing of mankind. Soli Deo Gloria. Human beings should realize that everything of worth in the individual human being’s life and everything of worth in human civilization comes from the hand of God. Human beings should worship and give glory to God alone. This understanding is true and beautiful. However, theologians and the average Christian misinterprets the phrase, “soli Deo gloria” to mean that God somehow benefits from the worship and glory that he receives from human beings. The reverse is true. Everything that God demands of human beings is for the good of human beings. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob energetically condemned human sacrifice. And beyond this, he was never personally in favor of animal sacrifice. God allowed human beings to sacrifice animals in their worship of him because of the human need for this practice. Human beings were simply too afraid to approach God without animal sacrifice. This fear was an unholy fear unlike the respect that God demands of human beings. All of the divine laws surrounding OT animal sacrifice were for the purpose of bringing order to Jewish worship and of requiring some show of real love toward God through obedience to these laws. When the Israelites began to show their indifference and contempt for God in their failure to abide by the laws surrounding temple animal sacrifice, then God revealed his dislike for this human practice. All that God demands from human beings is for the sake of human welfare and happiness. We human beings simply cannot experience joy and contentment without a loving, respectful, and grateful attitude toward God. God hates sin because sin brings death and unhappiness to human beings. Sin prevents human beings from having the full life that God wishes them to have. It may be possible for human beings to find some happiness in this life apart from a loving relationship with God, but a human life that is to last forever must be raised to a much higher level. And this fuller everlasting life is not possible without an intimate relationship with God. Human beings must be perfect as their heavenly Father is perfect if they wish to enter into an intimate relationship with God. It is God’s will that all human beings reach this level of perfection in love. And this Divine desire is what is behind all of human experience with God and with fellow human beings on this side of the grave.
12. There are two kinds of salvation. The words that the Bible uses for the concept of salvation are “yasha” in Hebrew and “sozo” in Greek. These two words have a great variety of meanings depending on the context. To be saved can mean to be delivered from military defeat, or to be healed of a disease. They can have the meaning of escaping premature death from war or natural disaster or even accident. And they can apply to the nation or tribe rather than to individuals. Oddly, in view of how these words are used by Christian preachers in their Sunday sermons, these words are rarely used to signify being saved from some harm in the afterlife. For Jesus and other NT personages such as John the Baptist’s father, Zechariah and Simon Peter salvation is about being saved from sin and spiritual and physical death on this side of the grave.
13. Humans are qualitatively different from animals. Animals do not suffer as God did not create them with the power of consciousness, a power that persons alone possess. Consciousness is a function of personhood or selfhood which human beings share with God, albeit by analogy. If animals were to experience pain and suffering, this would greatly undermine the theology of human suffering, especially the theology of Jesus’s suffering. Since animal suffering would appear to be meaningless, this meaningless suffering would imply the lack of meaning in human suffering.
This understanding of the animal kingdom suggests to the Christian believer that it is somewhat inappropriate for Christians to have pets. This is so for three basic reasons. Firstly, without consciousness with its concomitant selfhood, animals are more like biological computers than human beings. An individual animal is an “it” and is not a “who”. And just as it is inappropriate for human beings to love material things such as cars, houses, money, trees, mountains etc., it is likewise inappropriate for human beings to love animals, pets or otherwise. God and human beings are the only appropriate objects of human love. Secondly, when Christians have pets, which they love, they are teaching the world that human beings differ only quantitatively from animals, not qualitatively. Having and loving pets therefore lends support to neo-Darwinian materialism. Human beings are simply a higher form of ape. Lastly, by loving animals as one would love a human being, Christian pet owners overvalue the life of animals thereby undervaluing human life.
This undervaluing of human life leads to governmental efforts at limiting human population growth in favor of protecting animal habitat. The cultural elite wish to drastically reduce the world’s human population by limiting the number of children born to a couple. These elite are determined to use the force of law to limit couples to one or two children, and they use their influence in government, education and the media to encourage women to abort their babies. They work to make abortion morally acceptable to human society, all in the name of animal welfare. Nature is worshipped and the human being is the number one enemy of this Nature God.
I realize how upsetting my comments about pets must be to many readers of this blog. This makes me very sad and brings to mind some problems with my philosophy. It is quite understandable why God would not allow some poor animal in the wild, who has had his leg torn off, to lie there for hours in excruciating pain. This pain would serve no purpose as far as I can see. But, talking about pets, why would God make it appear to human beings that these beloved animals are feeling pain, if they are not? The same goes for the pet’s appearance of experiencing pleasure. Why the appearance of it, if they are not at all conscious of any pleasure? Pets do appear to be much more than complex biological computers. Why this appearance of consciousness if it doesn’t exist? Does God give the appearance of these feelings in animals for the sake of his human creatures?
It may be that God does intend to give some happiness to human beings by giving some rudimentary consciousness to animals that become pets. We do know that some animals that live among humans take on habits that mimic humans. They differ from the same animal that lives in the wild. I have read that dogs in the wild do not bark. I avoided ascribing rudimentary consciousness to animals because of what C.S. Lewis wrote in the first edition of his “The Problem of Pain.” He wrote that being conscious is like being pregnant; there are no degrees of consciousness. I certainly did not want to discuss this topic, but I felt I had to say something about it in attempting to understand human suffering and its connection with God’s work of saving human beings from their lovelessness. The mystery of human pain and suffering is distressing enough. I wanted to do away with the unfathomable mystery of animal suffering by denying it even exists.
The Spirit Disagrees 