There's Nothing New Under the Sun

There’s nothing new under the sun. These words were uttered by the person whom the Bible esteems as the wisest man who ever lived (that is, before Jesus of Nazareth came along). En. Ecclesiastes 1:9; 1 Kings 3:12; 4:30; Luke 11:31.

      I’m not sure about you, but I descend into silent grunts whenever I hear someone make the outlandish statement that what they have to say is brand new, completely original, and hasn’t been said before.

      I’ve yet to find this statement to be true. And I’ve yet to meet a human being who could make such a statement without lying through his or her teeth (whether with calculated deliberation or in conceited ignorance). Such over-the-top rhetoric is not only profoundly arrogant, but it has few points of contact with reality.

      Being a student of church history, I have never personally met a true spiritual or theological trailblazer. Most of the people I know who are turning the sod on various aspects of the Christian faith are exploring pathways that have been populated by others in the past. None of it is brand new or completely original. As Dr. Laurence Peter once put it, “Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear, but forgetting where you heard it.” Anyone who doesn’t admit to that is bluffing.

      Consequently, what you will read in this book has undoubtedly been said by someone else in some other place at some other time or in some other era. I have often made the following statement when invited to speak somewhere: “If you’re looking for new revelation, you’ve got the wrong guy.”

      I have no new revelation. In fact, I have never met a person who had new revelation. Nor do I possess any “heavy revy” to dish out (that’s cute shorthand for “deep and heavy revelation from God.”)

      I am a person who firmly believes what Solomon said, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” In fact, all of what we have in the New Testament is found in the Old Testament—in types, images, allegories, and shadows. There is one exception, however. “The mystery” that Paul of Tarsus so passionately spoke about in his letters. That was a genuine case of “new revelation.” Unquestionably so.

      To put a finer point on it, there’s only one revelation, and there’s only one Revelator. The revelation is Jesus Christ. The Revelator is the Holy Spirit. And we stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. It is only by God’s marvelous grace that we can (perhaps) see further than they did.

      While I’m banging this particular drum, let me add that I don’t believe that there are any elite Christians. And I certainly don’t believe that there are any elite Christian workers or ministers. I believe that the simplest saint who has met the Lord Jesus Christ is as holy, as valued, and as cherished in the sight of God as the apostle Paul, Martin Luther, John Wesley, Watchman Nee, C.S. Lewis, Billy Graham or any other name that you wish to insert into that sentence.

5 Questions for Francis Chan

Frank Viola asks Francis Chan 5 incisive questions.

The Experience of the Body of Christ

      The Experience of the Body of Christ. Every genuine Christian is a member of the Body of Christ. If Christ dwells in you, then you are membered to His Body. But there is something that I call the experience of the Body of Christ.

      The experience of the Body of Christ is the experience of Christian community. By “community,” I do not have in mind a commune or communal living. I’m rather speaking of a group of Christians who see themselves as genuine family, who are intensely involved with one another’s lives, and who are pursuing their Lord together all throughout the week. I’m speaking of a face-to-face, shared-life community.

      Ray Stedman called this experience “Body life.” Watchman Nee called it “church life.” I often refer to it as the experience of the Body of Christ, where a believer encounters in living color the interdependence, the mutual participation, the diverse-but-unified giftings, the oneness, and the shared life of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ on this earth.

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Author Frank Viola on Good Reads

Frank Viola's books

GOD'S FAVORITE PLACE ON EARTH
BEYOND EVANGELICAL
EPIC JESUS
REVISE US AGAIN
JESUS MANIFESTO
FINDING ORGANIC CHURCH
FROM ETERNITY TO HERE
REIMAGINING CHURCH
PAGAN CHRISTIANITY
THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE NT CHURCH

Click here to read the rest of Frank Viola's Good Reads page

Heaven's Race Card

The Zimmerman trial and the tragedy that surrounds it has captured the world’s attention. Including that of the body of Christ.

Media coverage has heightened passions on both ends. Conversations about race, law, injustice, prejudice, guns, etc. are all being argued and inflamed.

In this article, we don’t want to weigh in on the public debate. Instead, our passion is to encourage God’s people everywhere to transcend the debate that the world is holding on its own terms by seeing ethnicity through the eyes of our Lord. There is only one race, the human race, which is comprised of different ethnic groups (Acts 17:26).

We want you, dear Christian, to take your cue from the New Testament believers, for they can teach us a great deal about this subject.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

God's Eternal Purpose

Do you think that someone could agree with you completely about what the church is and could be but disagree about the form a local church should take (i.e. traditional, denominational church vs. house or organic church)?

Absolutely. In fact, Christians from a wide variety of church forms and expressions have endorsed the book: Ed Stetzer (Baptist), Alan Hirsh and Dan Kimball (Missional), Shane Claiborne (New Monastic), Myles Munroe and James Goll (Charismatic), Brian McLaren (Emergent), Greg Boyd (traditional evangelical church form), Leonard Sweet (Methodist, and who knows what else!), Michael Spencer (New Covenant-Reformation), Ralph Neighbor (Cell Church) are just some of them. In addition, I‘ve received a fair share of enthusiastic mail from Anglicans on the one hand and Reformed folks on the other, both of whom have resonated strongly with the message of the book.

All told, From Eternity to Here is a book written for all of God‘s people irrespective of which church forms and structures they might embrace.

Read the rest at Frank Viola From Eternity to Here

Author Frank Viola on N.T. Wright and F.F. Bruce

From Frank Viola:

"My favorite New Testament scholar of the 20^th century was the British scholar F.F. Bruce. Bruce was a bright and shining light” in 20^th century evangelicalism. He was prolific, churning out high quality work year after year. He had the rare ability to write academic books as well as popular (accessible) books. Bruce’s specialty was Jesus and Paul
.

F.F. Bruce also understood the importance of chronology in New Testament studies. Consequently, he published a translation of the New Testament that put all of Paul’s letters in chronological order. (Yes – cough — F.F. Bruce was a major inspiration for me. Hence, I credit him in my Untold Story of the New Testament Church.)

In addition, Bruce was a powerful apologist, substantiating the historicity of the Gospels in the face of 20^th century liberalism. To top it off, F.F. Bruce was a capable theologian as well as a New Testament exegete (a rare combination).

Enter N.T. Wright. Another British evangelical scholar.

N.T. Wright is the 21^st century equivalent to F.F. Bruce. What Bruce did for evangelicalism in the modern world, Wright is doing for evangelicalism in the postmodern world.

Like F.F. Bruce, N.T. Wright is remarkably prolific, he has the rare ability to write academically as well as popularly, he specializes in Jesus and Paul, and he is an effective and compelling apologist. (Wright has brilliantly excoriated the arguments of liberal scholars who traffic in historical Jesus studies.)

Like Bruce, Wright is both a theologian and an exegete, and he wrote his own translation of the New Testament (though not in chronological sequence).

To my mind, N.T. Wright is the new F.F. Bruce."

Source: Frank Viola interviews N.T. Wright