Author: Brandon Foster
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Saturday at last, and the best kind too. Spring is in full swing making the world feel warm, lazy, and all together pleasant. The workweek is finished as are my weekend chores. The day is still young, so I decided to head over to my favorite coffeeshop. I like to sit on the patio, do some reading, think a little, and people watch. With my left hand I am holding my page saved while with my right I lift my coffee up for a drink. Sip. Aaaah. Iced caramel Macchiato, perfect.
Out the window pedestrians pass. Some are rushing off to some unknown destination, others are doing some light shopping, even others seem to be enjoying the warm Saturday like I am. I am near enough to hear the cars passing by which gives the general environment a pleasant hum which actually goes well with the coffee shop rock playing. I can’t quite tell what song is playing, but it sounds like its from the early twenty-tens. My mind must have wandered because a car honking startles me. When my eyes refocus I see two men walking toward each other on the sidewalk outside the shop.
The man on my left has long hair pulled into a loose bun. While the majority of his hair is still held, there are plenty of strands tumbling out. he’s wearing a fitted button up shirt with it unbuttoned to create a very low V-neck. He has wide brim glasses that may or may not be used to improve eyesight. To complete his ensemble, he has skinny jeans and dress boots. A coffee cup with what looks like a sarcastic sticker on it is in his right hand. After looking at him for a second my eyes shift over to the mac approaching him.
This man could not have been more of a complete opposite. The first guy looked like a skinny city boy, but this man was a solidly built country boy. His hair was cut short with a camo ball cap resting on his head. He has a plain shirt on and worn fitted blue jeans. He also had used cowboy boots that had definitely seen some use.
AdvertisementsThe way they were approaching almost seemed like they were about to confront each other, but at what seemed to be the last second, they slightly shifted to allow more room for the other and continued on by. A quick glance and the encounter was over. It was both a weird moment and a completely boring one.
The reason why I am telling this story is to make a point. A round about one, but one non the less. The two men I just described represent the two main concepts of masculinity. The one on the left represents one ideal while the one on the right another. The interesting thing about it thought, is that I cannot say which ideal belongs to whom. This is because our perception of the person depends on our internal biases.
I grew up near Los Angeles. I lived there during my formative years of high school and college. Because of where I grew up, I tend to have a lean toward the skater, punk, or hipster looks. On the flipside, I tend to not look as favorably on those who dress redneck.
All too often we treat people based on our first impressions which usually comes from the way a person presents themselves. We look at how someone is dressed, and we assume things about them. Take our hipster friend for a second. We could assume that he spends too much time and money on how he looks. Based on that idea we could take it a step further and say that he probably is weak, isn’t the best worker, has never done a hard day’s work in his life, and lets women walk all over him. Or we could say that he is well dressed and put together, meaning that he is organized and disciplined. He most likely has a professional white-collar job.
Similarly, we could do the same experiment with our country boy. Based on his clothing we could either say that he is a hard worker who isn’t afraid to get dirty or he doesn’t care for his stuff which is why they are tattered. He could either be a skilled trade-worker or an unread redneck. As for his love life, he could be a family man or misogynistic abuser. As you can see, first impressions can say quite a bit, and half of it depends on our stereotypes.
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Do you believe in fate/destiny?
Short answer? Yes. As a historian I have read countless versions of fate. About every civilization has done form of fate/ destiny. Theists and well as atheists believe in some force that weaves the universe together. I think this is an undeniable reality.
As a Christian I would go a step further. While many philosophies might hypothesis about some unknown ambiguous concept that pushes us toward a goal, I believe that it has a name. God is the weaver of our tapestry. I know a lot of people do not like that idea, but I find it much more comforting to know that a loving being is guiding me than an impersonal force.
AdvertisementsNot only is this weaver a conscious being, He also made me personally with a purpose. That is such a beautiful thing. So many religions out there (and yes atheism is a religion) believe that we are worthless scraps of matter only to live for nothing and die for nothing. God on the other hand, made us unique and with gifts. Every single person has a gift. Gifts to use to bring hope and joy to others.
But I can take this one more step. This Weaver desires to continue this person relationship throughout our entire lives. He didn’t just mold us to watch us play out our lives from a distance. He wants to be up close. He desires to walk and talk with us every day.
So, do I believe in fate? Yes, but I believe He is so much more.
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Meekness is a virtue that is defined as being humble, modest or having self-control. It also can be defined as having a calm temperament, not getting angry easily, and having self-control. We usually associate meekness in one of two ways. When someone is called meek in a positive way, they are meaning that the person is controlled or can show restraint. A calm person can also be called a meek person. Contrastingly, negative comments mean that a person is submissive or passive. Submissive passive people tend to be overlooked and useless to society.
Temperate people do not challenge the status- quo, they do not hold people accountable, and they do not love correctly.
there are those that believe meekness to be a quality necessary to be virtuous because it shows respect for others and their feelings. The definition of meekness is “the quality or state of being mild.” This means that it has to do with how you treat others and not necessarily how physically strong you are. This is a virtue that all people should have, but unfortunately, not everyone does.
It is fascinating to me that our definitions of meekness can come so close to the point, and yet still miss it. The definition of meekness stated that it is mild. But mildness means “amiably gentle or temperate in feeling or behavior toward others.” The problem with this definition is that it does not match what Christians are called to be. We are not to be temperate toward others.
Temperate people do not challenge the status- quo, they do not hold people accountable, and they do not love correctly.
The world’s definition of love is more akin to kindness. Kindness does its best to not hurt anyone or anything. This is why kind people do not encourage people to grow, because doing so might make a person feel upset, sad, or depressed. Kindness does not speak the truth to a person because speaking the truth to a person can make them angry or frustrated. Temperate people try to keep the status-quo. Christians are not called to be temperate.
I do agree with some parts of the world’s definition of meek though. Being meek does mean being self-controlled, but not passive. Self-control means that I will contain myself in situations that call for it. There are times when a person needs to contain their emotions and reactions, and there are times when a person needs to react at the moment.
AdvertisementsWith that said I think it is time to define the true Christian definition of meekness. As I said, I do believe that meekness is self-control, but it is so much more than that. self-control is important for everyone, but it is more important for those that can cause harm. Meekness, in my opinion, is best defined as “strength under control; power restrained.” To me, this encapsulates a better picture of meekness. A usual synonym for meek is tame. People believe that meek individuals are tame and will not, or can not, stand up for themselves or others.
The best analogy is a feline. There are housecats and tigers. One produces fear while the other we want to pet. One has been a terror for centuries while the other sleeps most of the day in sunbeams. I am sure you can tell which is which. Housecats are ferocious beasts…to mice at least. They might have a nasty scratch, but no one fears for their life from a tame housecat. Unless you are deathly allergic, but that is for a different reason.
Tigers, on the other hand, have been the scourge of south-east Asia. They have been the dedication for art, architecture, and myths. Their raw power and ferocity cast them far away from being tame. Housecats are classified as tame, while tigers are called feral.
Even feral housecats are still mostly tame, and tame tigers are still mostly feral. Meekness is closer to a tame tiger than a feral housecat.
We are called to be a tiger. Ferocious, but controlled. We too often try to be housecats. De-clawed and passive. We lay around and fight for nothing. We need to, I need to, reawaken the tiger within and tear down corruption as Christ did. We need to make Satan shake in fear, and we need to burn sin away. We view sin as something sort of bad, not completely detestable. Meekness is what begins this fight. Before we fight, we must first become meek.
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Fate, the hand of God guiding us towards the destination He desires, or an unknown impersonal force pushing us towards an unknown goal by something that doesn’t really have feelings.
Hi, I’m Brandon Foster from Foster of Vlog. Today we’re going to look at one video to show the example of what I’m talking about, how our culture views fate.
Like most things, there are really two different sides. Primarily, you have the Christian side, especially the reform side, which views a very, uh, predestine type of fate where God pushes, pulls, and has a direct influence in what we do. His way is the way that goes, whatever he wants, wins. The other side is free will, where there is no God.
God does not really push or pull. Uh, if he does exist, he doesn’t really do much to change anything. Now there is a view in the middle, and this is kind of where I want to talk about, and this middle view kind of meshes both. . It’s kind of the predestine view of the reformed, but it’s also the kind of do what I want, but there’s something pushing and pulling, but it’s not a personal being.
This is what I want to focus on today. And to me, this is really one of those areas where I think that we actually do understand and we truly do. that there is a being that uh, or at least there’s something, maybe not necessarily a being, but there’s something that drives us. There’s something deep down here (heart) and here (mind) that we can tell is pushing us towards something.
Um, again, reformed Christians think that’s God. We believe that God is the pusher and puller of the world. He created it, he authored it. He spoke it into being with one word, and from then he has been continually molding the world. Um, this middle path is trying to keep that molding going, but they want to remove God.
But before we continue too much, let’s watch the clip that I want to show us and then we’ll continue our discussion.
“Kids, I’ve been telling you the story of how I met your mother, and while there’s many things to learn from this story, this may be the biggest. The great moments of your life won’t necessarily be the things you do. They’ll also be the things that happen to you. Now, I’m not saying you can’t take action to affect the outcome of your life.
You have to take action, and you will, but never forget that on any day, you can step out the front door and your whole life can change forever. You see, the universe has a plan, kids, and that plan is always in motion. A butterfly flaps its wings and it starts to rain. It’s a scary thought, but it’s also kind of wonderful.
All these little parts of the machine constantly working, making sure that you end up exactly where you’re supposed to be, exactly when you’re supposed to be there, the right place at the right time.”
So as you can see from that clip, this show, for those who are not aware of the name, this show is called “How I Met Your Mother,” and it is about this character Ted. Now, Ted, throughout the whole show is dictating to his children the story of how he met their mother. Um, hence the title of the show, and a theme he talks about a lot throughout the whole show is this concept of destiny. He’s looking for the one, the one that Destiny has prepared. and he talks about the universe quite a bit. The universe has this plan. The universe did this. What is the universe trying to say to me? And when I first watched it as a, you know, a young adult, I more chuckled at the whole universe concept.
But now as I’ve gotten older, and especially this last run through, that scene struck me. and it struck me not because of the, you know, absurdity of the universe of looking towards a impersonal created, you know, object and thinking that it has a plan for you.
While that is absurd, it’s neither here nor there. What really got me was how close the writers for this show got In dictating or depicting a reformed view of life in Christianity, we believe, as I’ve said, that God is dictating what happens. God, may not control every aspect, but there are key events in every person’s life that, or at least in most people’s life, that God says will happen.
And no matter what we want, God is pushing us towards that. This show shows that that’s not just a reformed belief, that that belief is written, is etched inside of all of us. We all feel the pull towards that type of understanding. We truly believe that there is something out there that is guiding us towards God or towards an event. Um, and I think we all understand. We like to fight it. Um, but we all believe that. This is why our culture, and for most of human history, we have had certain things like tarot cards, we’ve had things like seances, you know, speaking to the dead, and they can tell us what we should do in our lives because somehow the dead have a view into the world that we can’t.
This is why we do Zodiac signs. You know, when you were born dictates who you will be and who you will get along with. And a person with one sign should be friends with another or shouldn’t be friends with others. And we crave this kind of box to put ourselves in. We want to be in the box because the box guides us. It’s the idea of walking either down a corridor with lights and walls, and we feel protected. Or it’s like walking through a deserted jungle, or what you feel is deserted, and you feel vulnerable. That is the difference. We crave the corridor. We still want to choose things, and that free will is still definitely a thing, but we crave that there is something guiding us toward the destination, that it is not just fully up to us, and that every decision is either do or die. We crave that thing to, you know, give us the pushes and the shoves toward what we want. This show shows that Ted, through this whole story, which starts when he’s in his middle twenties, ends when he’s in his middle-late thirties.
So for about 10 years, he is craving what he calls Destiny. And this is a pinnacle scene in that storyline. And I thought it’d be an interesting exercise to take what the writers had written, and tweak a couple of pieces and replace when they say universe or machine or anything abstract and turn it into a reformed thought.
So the universe would be God. And I thought it’d be very interesting to see how reformed this line actually is if we did that. So the rewriting goes like this.
“kids, I’ve been telling you the story of how I met your mother. And while there are many things to learn from this story, this may be the biggest, but the great moments of your life won’t necessarily be the things you do. They’ll also be the things that happen to you. Now, I’m not saying you can’t take action to affect the outcomes of your life. You have to take action and you will, but never forget that on any day you can step out the door and your whole life can change forever. You see, God has a plan kids, and that plan is always in motion. A butterfly flaps its wings and it starts to rain. It’s a scary thought, but it’s also kind of wonderful. All these little parts of God’s plan constantly working, making sure that you end up exactly where you’re supposed to be, exactly when you’re supposed to, the right place at the right time.”
That sounds extremely reformed. and it’s so fascinating that a very liberal show in a very liberal country can be so conservative and so reformed. They were this close, an inch away from hitting reformed Christian theology. And I think this is one of the things that is fascinating about humanity and reality.
We are never that far from God. God is always right there, but that little gap is something that, one, we can’t breach on our own, and two, we will never want to breach. We want to parallel next to God without having Him. And that’s what makes us such an enemy of God. Scripture talks about, or Paul writes in scripture, that we are enemies of God.
Certain Christians want to please God, but they wanna do it on their own terms. The story of Abraham kind of gives that example. But what really makes us so antagonistic to God is we want to take everything he’s done, everything about him, and rewrite him out of the story.
And that is what is kind of crazy. We desire Something. A thread of destiny, of fate, to tie all of us together to tie everything in a tapestry of beauty. But we don’t want the weaver, we want the thread. We want beauty. We want connectivity. We want our destiny, but we don’t want the person weaving it. We want it to weave itself, and yet we complain when things aren’t personal. It’s a big thing Americans complain about. Well, we want it to be personally tailored to me it’s like, one, none of us are that special. Two, we have a personal being, God, who wants to have a personal relationship with you. He wants to be there with them, and yet we want to throw him out because we don’t like the idea of consequences.
This is something I’ll talk about a little bit more in my next video as we continue through this series, but we want the father without the judge. We want the action without the consequence. We want fate without responsibility. And that is what’s fascinating and very interesting about our society and society, I think in a hole across the entire globe, we are this close when we talk about God, our theology is this close at any given day, but we want to write God out of it.
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Hello, Brandon Foster here from Foster A Vlog, today I want to discuss a video by none other than Brandon Robertson. He is a well-known progressive pastor and he is always talking about his views of progressive Christianity and just his theology in general. And today he’s specifically talking about his concerns with the way conservatives approach the Bible.
As someone who is more conservative, especially a conservative Christian, I want to react and discuss what he has to say. So let’s get this started.
“Can I share with you one of my major frustrations in discussing the difference between progressive views of the Bible and conservative views of the Bible?”
Well, yes, Brandon. You most certainly can.
“The conservative view of the Bible is so cut and dry, black and white, and simple. They say the Bible is the inherent word of God. There are no errors as you understand it is what it means, and you need to accept it as the absolute truth on all matters that it talks about.”
Now, there are two parts to this. First, no, Christians do not just believe that when you read scripture, you take the surface understanding and you. It’s not what conservative Christians believe. There are those who do believe that. I believe those who fall more under the fundamental camp actually believe that concept. They believe that what you read is what it is, and the literal interpretation of the Bible. That is exactly how you’re supposed to interpret that.
He’ll talk about this more later, but I’ll hint at it now. conservatives take the scripture and we dig. We pretend to be archeologists going through a literary dig site, and we try and uncover every small facet that we can, but we’ll talk more about that in a.
“This makes it really easy for a conservative Christian to pick up the Bible and say, I read a passage, it made me uncomfortable, or I disagreed with it, or I didn’t understand it, but I’ve gotta believe it because it’s the word of God and that settles it.”
Now, this I do agree with when you come to the Bible, whether you agree with it or not, if you believe that the Bible, as he said before, is God’s holy word and is one collection of a lot of other people’s writings, all coming through the Holy Spirit and writing something, then yeah, you have to walk away with going, I’m confused. I don’t fully agree, but I’m going to wrestle with this through the Holy Spirit until I come to where God is. We go to God. God does not come to us. God does not come down and go, you know. You. You can believe how you want and I’ll just have to deal with it. That’s not what God does. We have to wrestle with the scripture until we come to God’s understanding,
“but we literally look, but we literally look at no other book in the world like. Especially when it comes to ancient literature. When we study ancient literature, that’s not the Bible. We need to learn the culture, the context, language, the beliefs and backgrounds, and philosophies of the world from which that text comes from to begin understanding what the text is actually saying.”
Again, he’s not wrong when you come to scripture, just like any other book, you have to understand who was the author. You have to understand what was the culture. You have to understand what language it is. You have to go back to that language if you can, and see what the meanings of those words are. That’s what translators do.
They look at all those things and say, well, this word can mean A or B, but depending on the context, you can know what A and B are most of the time, there are still some sections that are a little ambiguous, and we do the best we can. We come at it humbly and again through the Holy Spirit. And we discuss what we think the word is, and that’s why we have different translations.
Translation A may take the word this way, translation B may take the word that way. Neither is wrong, but you. You need to understand where they’re coming from. That is very important. But again, it doesn’t fully matter what all those things say. It is very important, but you still have to look at it through the lens of God, through the lens of the holy spirit.
That is our foundation. We start with the Holy Spirit and then we move into literary criticism. Basically, it sounds like he switches it, he does literary criticism, and then he moves through the spirit.
“Of course, conservative theology doesn’t hold the Bible to those standards. And when progressives come in and say, well, actually, we need to look at each book of the Bible and each chapter of the Bible and ask, what is the context? Who is the author? Who is it being written to? What was the intention? What’s the purpose? What was the belief systems in that era of history? Conservatives say, look at you just twisting the Bible. Look at you doing all these gymnastics instead of just accepting what the Bible plainly says.”
This I do not agree with. He is saying again, conservative Christians do not have critical literary analysis of scripture. I don’t know where he’s getting that from. There are those who don’t. I am sure there are plenty of pastors out there who do not. I have heard the statement by some that, uh, if they were given the original documents in Greek or in Hebrew or Aramaic. that they would cling to their King James Bible or they would cling to their English version, whichever they use.
That is foolish. That is completely unbiblical thinking. We go to the sources, we go to the oldest manuscripts we have, and we translate it from that. We go to the sites, we go to Israel, we go to Babylon, we go to these places and. as much information as we can. The idea that conservative Christians in our analysis of scripture, kind of just flip through the Bible willy-nilly is completely ridiculous.
I don’t know who he’s talking to, but it’s wrong. It’s very wrong. I have books like this, which is a thick tome of just the book of Genesis. As you can see. Genesis, if you can read that and it goes through, the culture. It goes through the language, it goes through the customs. It explains things in a deeper way than someone can just get by glancing through the Bible.
I have read the Bible off and on cover to cover since I was 12. That’s when I was baptized. I’m 29. It’s been 17 years where I’ve read scripture and there are things reading this breaking down scripture verse by verse that I did not. And there are things that I kind of knew that became clearer. There are customs that did not make sense, or I didn’t even know I was missing until I read something like this.
And the idea that conservative Christians don’t do that is preposterous. Of course, we do. We just do it differently than you do. And again, we come through all of those areas. We come through the critical analysis of s. through the Holy Spirit. And I’m assuming Brandon Robertson doesn’t. He reads scripture and then he walks off with all the critical theory and then he’s like, well, I’m just gonna stop there. I don’t want to go further. And whether that’s a conscious or unconscious thing, I have no idea. , he just walks off of what he wants to think. And it is ridiculous to think that conservative Christians do not apply critical theory to the study of the Bible we have had for centuries. Now, again, as I’ve talked about in other videos, it wasn’t really popular to do it before rationalism, the age of reason wasn’t really a thing. They did a little. But it wasn’t very popular. It is now popular to do so. So Christians have done it for multiple centuries. Let’s finish what he has to say. and in a conversation or a debate, the conservative way seems superior because it’s so clear.
“Anybody can understand the conservative argument that you should be able to believe everything in the Bible. Pick it up, whatever it says, just take it as you understand it, and that’s the truth. But that isn’t true. That’s not what the Bible is. For starters, the Bible’s not one book, but a library of books written by dozens of people over thousands of years in different places around the world, in different languages with different philosophies and political situations. And so when we look at the Bible, we need to ask each individual book and even each individual chapter, when was this written? Who’s writing this? To whom is it being written to? What is the purpose? What genre is this text? And as you do those things, as you ask those questions, you begin to unpack layers of meaning in the text that are not obvious if you’re just reading it from your modern perspective with a surface level.”
Again, I agree to a point, the Bible is complex. It is written by 40 authors, give or take a few, over 1500 years in multiple different languages, multiple geographical locations under multiple regimes, and lots of different life events. Some are written by kings, some are written by peasants, and some are written by women.
And while that does add complexity to the Bible and he is correct, the Bible is a very complex book. No conservative Christian would argue otherwise. But what we argue is that though it is a complex book written by so many people, there is an undeniable theme throughout the entire book just to take the.
Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1, connect in a way that is just mind-boggling. When John talks about, “in the beginning was the word” and Genesis talks about “in the beginning was God,” there are parallels, and that was on purpose. He wrote it to have those parallels. And again, when you read through scripture, and you understand the cultural and linguistic context like I was talking about a second ago.
Suddenly those parallels become so numerous that you cannot come out without thinking that there is a hand guiding all of it, and that is what conservatives believe. We believe that independent people wrote all these books in their moments. They were obviously talking about things in the. , but there was a hand guiding the Holy Spirit was guiding them in their own words to the destination that God wanted.
It works on so many different levels. It is so complex and that is something that we can all agree on. Conservative Christians are not saying otherwise, but it’s the outcome that we disagree with. He’s talking about how he reads it all and it’s so complex and so this or so. that you can’t ask the question, what does something mean?
“You can’t ask why is it a certain way. All you can do is just kind of go bit by bit piece by piece. When you engage the Bible from that historical-critical perspective, you unlock so much that’s not there on a basic simple surface-level reading of the text. The problem is, again, that the progressive way of interacting with scripture is complex. It’s not black and white, and so when somebody asks. So question like, well then what do you actually believe in the Bible or about the Bible? It’s impossible to simply answer that question because I need to know what text you’re talking about and what topic the text is on, and who wrote the text and what the purpose of that text was. The Bible is a complex library, and our engagement with it should be nuanced and complex. I believe the Bible is an incredible book. It is one of the foundations of my faith. I love studying it. I love teaching it, but I don’t just take every word as literally true because that’s not what the authors. and there’s his problem.”
That is the main issue with what he is saying. He does not take the Bible as his ground level, his foundational document for his faith. It’s one of them, but it’s not the foundation, and that is the difference between conservative and progressive Conservatives. Take the Bible as our founding. , and yes, there are parts of the Bible that are not literary.
You have poetic sections of the Bible. Psalms and proverbs are poems. Of course, we don’t take those, literally, they’re poems. But what we do take literally are the histories, are the gospels are the epistles. We take the letters theologically, literally. We don’t take them figurative. . That’s ridiculous. If we take taking the Constitution and going, eh, it’s just some, you know, letter to the people, it doesn’t matter much.
That’s how we take it. And so the idea that we don’t take everything in the Bible literally is kind of a duh. But that is our foundation. That’s our starting point, and that is our ending point. We take what the gospels and what the Bible says, honestly and. , and that is what the difference between a conservative and a progressive Christian is.
He takes things that we would take literally very clear one, same sex attractions, and Brandon Roberton is a same sex attractive person, and the scriptures that talk about it, they will navigate around until he gets what he wants out of it or what he believes. The ambiguous writing is. . Conservative Christians don’t do that.
When something is commanded, whether we like it or not, we have to suck it up and come to what God wants. We have to understand what God desires. And that is the big difference between conservatives and uh, progressives. And in many cases, that’s like one degree of difference. It is such a minute difference, but it has such a powerful.
impact on the way we live, live our lives, and that is what makes progressive Christianity so dangerous. They just tweak things just a little bit and suddenly they are an entirely different continent theologically than conservatives.
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