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ISBN: 978-0-9820385-9-8
Publisher: Pilgrim Platform
Copyright: ©2012 by Phillip A. Ross
195 pages

195 pages
by Phillip A. Ross

Dedicated to

Marietta College
Faculty
in the hope of Christ’s
wholeness & healing

Introduction

A couple of years ago a friend asked me about my interpretation of 2 Peter 3:12: “waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn!” Are we to take it literally? And if not, why not? Isn’t the plain reading the right reading most of the time? I’ve thought a lot about the questions, issues and concerns regarding this and address them here, sometimes somewhat indirectly.

I knew that I couldn’t just jump into Second Peter without dealing with First Peter first. So, I worked my way through First Peter and published that book as Peter’s Vision of Christ’s Purpose in First Peter (Pilgrim Platform, Marietta, Ohio, 2011). There Peter wrote to the fledgling saints who fled Jerusalem prior to its destruction in a.d. 70 in order to help them understand that God had not and would not abandon them. On the contrary, God inhabited them as they fled in order to take the gospel of Jesus Christ to the world through them.

Peter wrote a lot about the end, as my friend noticed and was concerned about. And because contemporary Christians have been inundated with end times scenarios and Dispensational concerns for a couple of generations now, there is a lot of concern that the world is nearing the end of history. Peter was also concerned that “the end of all things is at hand” (1 Peter4:7). It was at hand when Peter wrote, and it is still at hand today.

However, the end that Peter mentioned is the translation of the Greek word τέλος—telos, which does mean end, but it means it as in end purpose or final purpose. The end that Peter was talking about was the purpose of God for Jesus Christ. God was using Jesus Christ to bring the gospel of salvation to the Gentiles, to humanity, to the world. Consequently, Peter was not suggesting that God’s purpose was the destruction of the world. Rather, God was working to save the world. God’s message was and is a message of hope not hate, of love not loathe, of construction not destruction, of peace not war, and of suffering not fulfillment. That message continues in Peter’s second letter.

Consequently, just as First and Second Peter stand together, so my books on these letters also stand together. They also stand together with a third book, The True Mystery of the Mystical Presence, by Phillip A. Ross & John Williamson Nevin (Pilgrim Platform, Marietta, Ohio, 2011). These three books were written during the same period of time and all three are intended to be a kind of trilogy regarding the renewal and reformation of Christianity in the 21^st Century, Lord willing. Two are dedicated to local churches and their pastors in the hope to encourage reading and discussion of Christian unity among groups of Christians that don’t speak to one another much, and this one is dedicated to Marietta College faculty. Why drag the college into such an effort? What do academics and Christianity have in common? And why Marietta College?

The connection pertains to the founding purpose of the earliest American colleges and universities generally, and to Marietta College because I live in Marietta. When the city of Marietta was founded, in 1789 by an act of Congress, the vision for the city (settlement) was for it to become a beacon of light and a launching pad for the growth of the nation. Marietta was founded on the “western” frontier, before the Louisiana Purchase (1803).

In 1830, the Reverend Luther Bingham established the Institute for Education, the precursor of Marietta College. Bingham was a Congregational minister and sought to use the Institute to educate the young in the fundamentals of Christianity, a common pursuit of Congregationalists from the time foot was set on Plymouth Rock.

The early years of the American Experiment were wild and heady as a host of theological controversies swept the fledgling nation. One of the most significant was the Unitarian Controversy. Conrad Wright reports that “Within the span of one generation, from 1805 to 1835, approximately 125 churches of the Massachusetts Standing Order, most of them in the eastern part of the state, became Unitarian.” The Standing Order was the name of the Congregational church society that provided oversight regarding ecclesiastical polity. Wright continues, “There was controversy and schism in a number of well-publicized cases, but in many more instances the churches became liberal through a gradual drift of opinion.”¹

In February 1835, as the Marietta Collegiate Institute and Western Teachers’ Seminary was granted a new charter to confer degrees, thus changing the name of the institute to Marietta College, its founders and instructors began the search for the College’s first president.

By that spring, the first trustees of the College identified a Congregationalist minister from Park Street Church² in Boston and former attorney as their choice for Marietta College’s pioneering president.

The Rev. Dr. Joel Harvey Linsley was one of eight children born to New York judge, the Hon. Joel Linsley and Levina Gilbert. A graduate of Middlebury College, he studied and practiced law during the first seven years of his professional life, though his passion for ministry became too great to resist. By 1822, Linsley, having resumed his religious studies, was ordained and began his first role as church leader at the South Congregational Church³ in Hartford, Conn., in 1824. When the trustees at Marietta College sought him out, he was the leading the Boston church.

When Linsley began his work at Marietta College, he was part of the five-member faculty and was in charge of the Department of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, in addition to his fund-raising duties. For several months, he served as the minister of Marietta’s First Congregational Church.⁴

Like almost all early American colleges, Marietta College had been founded by Christians for the purpose of advancing Christian education generally, and to provide for a local supply of educated Christian clergy. And like almost all of the early American colleges it has abandoned its first mission as the development of Modern science and technology seemed to suggest that religion issued from superstition and ignorance. This idea was a product of the Enlightenment and the new fascination at the time with Darwinism.⁵

Because the movers and shakers of Marietta were cut from the cloth of New England social visions and values, it’s a sure bet that they did all they could to be on the cutting edge of social “progress,” but at this point had not succumbed to Unitarianism, the root of religious and social liberalism. The Unitarian Society in Marietta was founded in February 1855 by Nahum Ward (1785-1860), a prominent land speculator, philanthropist and Marietta mayor.

The point of this historical tangent is to suggest that the abandonment of historic Christianity⁶ by early American intellectuals. This abandonment was not unique to Marietta, but at this time it was mostly a New England phenomenon. It’s presence on the “western” frontier of Ohio provided a source of religious conflict, and was an error of serious proportion that today lies at the root of the current American crises that has grown worldwide in its scope.

What crises? At this writing the world is entangled with serious financial, ecological and social crises that are of American origin and export.⁷ And I am here suggesting that the root of these crises is the abandonment of historic, trinitarian Christianity by the American intellectual elite that found its voice in Unitarianism. It is at the heart of the religious and social conflicts that have been part of Marietta’s long and fractious history.⁸ It has taken a long time for that abandonment to trickle down to the masses in Marietta and in American society generally, but its embrace by American society at large has succeeded in overturning many Christian values and virtues.

What will be a curiosity to many people at this point is my accompanying tenet that, contrary to much popular opinion, Christianity is not fundamentally an academic endeavor. Academics can and have served to both help and hinder the cause of Christ in the world. The Apostle Paul dealt with this issue in his letters to the Corinthians, particularly in his discussions of the foolishness and folly of the Corinthian church leadership. The foolishness he referred to was Greek philosophy, or the mindset of the pagan Greek academy.⁹ Western Christianity has mostly missed this point and most academicians continue to ignore religion generally and historic, trinitarian, biblical Christianity in particular.

My purpose in dedicating this volume to Marietta College is to call both Marietta and academia to reevaluate the reality and divinity of Jesus Christ in the light of real Christianity, science, history and philosophy. Obviously, the difficulty will be to reveal and define “real Christianity.” In part, that is the mission of this trilogy of books. A further difficulty will be to help academicians understand that real Christianity is not found in books or ideas, though books can point to it. Real Christianity is not an abstract idea but a living Person who is able to live through others, though not perfectly.¹⁰

Part of the purpose of these books is to question the reigning paradigms of liberal arts education and liberal Western society, and to challenge academia to reexamine Christianity without its prejudices. It is my hope to suggest the ultimate religious questions in a fresh way so that they can be understood to reside at the very heart of what it means to be a human being. Who are you? Who am I? Who are we? What is humanity? What is the purpose of existence? Why bother? Academia needs to refocus its passion for the narrowness of intellectual minutia in order to engage the breadth of the greater concerns of purpose and wholeness of humanity and the world. Peter’s concern regarding the end or purpose of the world, the end or purpose of Jesus Christ, is particularly suited to address such issues and concerns.

My prayer is not that my work will be adequate to this task—it won’t be. No one knows that better than I do. Rather, my prayer is that Christ will use this work to accomplish His purpose for it. The world is far more complex, odd, interesting, dangerous and valuable than any intellectual endeavor can possibly reveal. Science, math, physics, history, psychology, sociology, etc., are simply inadequate to the task of understanding the world apart from Christ—and yet that is exactly what the world and the current academy are trying to do!

No serious academic in any secular institution can earnestly consider the claims of Jesus Christ as a component of academic study or research, much less attempt to support or justify them, because the institutions themselves have adopted a widespread and vicious prejudice against such views. Thus, secular educational and academic institutions have taken on the task of ideological indoctrination and abandoned the idea of genuine liberal intellectual freedom—and they have done so in the name of progress! The discipline of liberal arts in such institutions has become every bit as culturally narrowminded and authoritarian as any of the religious, fundamentalist extremists that they so virulently abhor.

It is far past time to realize that in Christ all of these various academic endeavors will be far more robust than they are apart from Christ. The academy simply must discover its own presuppositions and prejudices against Christ and Christianity, just as Christians must drop theirs about the academy. The problem is not academics or liberalism, but Godlessness. Indeed, the Bible is much more liberal than most liberals believe, and much more conservative than most conservatives believe. The liberal/conservative para­digm is simply inadequate to biblical truth.

God’s role in academia, as in all of life, is analogous to the relationship of the whole to the part. The whole is not simply like another part of a different sort, but is of an entirely different order. Yet, the value of the whole to the sum of the parts is incalculable—there would be no whole apart from the different order.

Indeed, forgiveness and freedom in Christ, part of the function and wholeness of God, means that we are free from our own history, free from our bondage of every kind to the past, free from our errors and sins, and free from our self-definitions and delusions. This is so because the root of Christianity is not in the past, but in the future. The reality of Christ beckons from the future as the only sure hope for the broken wholeness of the world.

Part of the problem that academia has with Christianity is that Christians don’t actually represent Jesus Christ very well, which is unfortunately true. This also means that churches don’t represent Christ very well, either. Sadly, this is also true. But it is understandable once you have come to realize who Jesus Christ actually is and who (and what) we as human beings actually are. The gulf between perfection and sin is so wide that is it unbridgeable apart from Christ. How could the finite ever truly represent the infinite?

The gulf between our status as broken sinners and Jesus’ status as the only begotten Son of God cannot be bridged from the human side, but only from Christ’s side. Unfortunately, this means that those who deny, denigrate and disregard Jesus simply do not receive access to the bridge. No one keeps them from it but themselves and their own narrowminded fear of the actual depths of reality. Consequently, people will always fail to comprehend the Lord apart from a willingness to seriously engage with Him.

Thus, it is to the engagement of such a consideration to which this trilogy of books is dedicated, and particularly this volume on Second Peter. However, it must also be mentioned that there is an order to the trilogy, and that order is to begin anywhere except with this volume. Please read The True Mystery… or Peter’s Vision of Christ’s Purpose… first, and please reserve judgment until you have read and understood all three.

It will be best to read these books socially—in a group—as a book study or in a reader’s club rather than privately because they try to reveal a glimpse of the multiplicity of perspectives in the trinitarian Godhead. To “grock” this means that listening to other people’s perspectives is important to the process. These books also attempt to make our own presuppositions and assumptions more clear to us. Oddly, it is often easier to see those of others than one’s own, but little is more important than seeing our own. Again, listening to other people will help in the process. The books are also full of language that is intended to elicit questions and discussion. The questions and issues raised are not all answered. To miss the discussion will be to miss the amazing diversity and surprising presence of the unity of the body of Christ.

What the careful reader will discover in this trilogy of books is a view of Christianity that is quite different from what they have been taught or what they have absorbed from their childhood, upbringing, Sunday School teachers, public school teachers, seminary teachers and/or American culture generally. However, it must be emphasized that this view is not novel or new. Rather, it is actually quite old and has been mostly forgotten by Christians and their churches. What is new about it is what we have learned about our world and our history. What is new is our Twenty-First Century perspective.

Then again, I am not simply regurgitating old Christian doctrine for Twenty-First Century consumption. Peter’s central insight is that the revelation of Christ in the lives of Christians is intertwined with history in such a way that history itself impacts how we see and understand Jesus Christ. Historical reflection increases the scope and/or depth of the perspective from which we are able to understand Christ and His mission to the world. Christ doesn’t change, nor does His mission. But over time faithful Christians are able to incorporate what history teaches us about humanity and our world into what we know and understand about Christ and His mission. Consequently, our appreciation for Christ and His mission grows as we apply the lessons of our own history to biblical Christianity, and as we apply the lessons of historic Christianity to our world. There is a kind of reciprocal or symbiotic relationship between Christianity and history (or the development and maturity of humanity). It’s not perfect, but it is there.

First Peter provides Christians with hope for the future of humanity as Christianity left its Jerusalem “nest” with Christ’s mission for the world. It provides a message of hope in the face of struggle and suffering as Christianity first undermines the paganism of Roman culture in order to provide the foundation for Christian culture. The transition, said Peter, will be difficult—but rewarding.

Second Peter continues this same theme, but acknowledges that the transition process may be more difficult than first expected because there were false teachers who had successfully entered the ranks of the earliest churches, and were actively working to destroy God’s plan of salvation in Christ. Indeed, the unfolding of God’s plan for the salvation of humanity has taken much longer than any of the biblical writers first thought, though it has not surprised God in the least. Nonetheless, said Peter, stay true to Christ because the process of His progressive revelation in history will continue to provide true guidance.

John Nevin believed Peter and did his best to provide an historically progressive, though also ancient, understanding of Jesus Christ and His ongoing mission to the Modern world. Nevin found Jesus Christ to provide the highest, most inclusive and superior religious realization and teaching known to Man. Nevin’s study of world religions showed him that all religions seek union with God in one way or another. But Christianity provides the only way or means for such union. And though Nevin wrote a century and a half ago, his research, findings and presentation of Christ’s role in the process of union with God stands undiminished and untarnished for the Twenty-First Century.

This ancient/contemporary view of Christianity not only re­quires participation from the various Christian denominations, but it provides the means for such cooperative participation through the correction of various denominational errors. Nevin left no denomination or other world religion unscathed as he unleashed Christ’s mission to the world. Nevin’s work provided the same services for the science and academics of his time (late 1800s). Though Nevin was not aware of the sweeping changes that have come to science and academics from the fields of quantum mechanics and higher mathematics, I believe that his essential insights and understandings can and will not only survive such interaction with them, but will thrive on it.¹¹

It is in the light of these things that I dedicate these books to the churches and academies of the Twenty-First Century. No doubt, my optimism appears overly bold, and especially to those who have long ago stopped thinking in such broad categories. The Modern academic experiment with Godlessness, which has strangled such thinking, continues to reveal its own paucity as it crashes on the fractured foundations of its own Godless and immoral assumptions and its misguided hope for the freedom to sin without consequence.

I am convinced that both the churches and the academy will benefit from the discovery that science and religion are not only not opposed to one another, but that their actual harmony in Christ is exactly what the Twenty-First Century will need to succeed. This harmony is part of the inheritance gained by Christ for the world. Godspeed!

Phillip A. Ross
Marietta, Ohio