After Orthodoxy?

Jefferson Bethke: "It's not a religion; it's a relationship" and other un-Christian statements

2012-01-14T14:33:00.007-05:00

I often hear the mantra that describes Christian faith that goes as follows: "It is a relationship, not a religion." The mantra has become the theme of a very popular YouTube poem by Jefferson Bethke, which attained vast popularity recently, over a million hits. While I genuinely like the guy's stuff, finding him an eloquent artist, his message is deeply flawed in regards to religion.

The fundamental question is whether Christianity is a religion or a relationship. My answer is simply "yes." In other words, to draw distinction between "religion/relationship" or "Jesus/religion" is to draw a false dichotomy, one that will inevitably be counter productive. The distinction is between true and false religion, not religion and Jesus. Whenever I hear the mantra, "It's not a religion, it's a relationship," I firstly cannot help but think people don't have a clue what a "religion" is, but even worse, they have no clue what a relationship is.

In the 18th century, deist critics of Christianity advocated that they could have a relationship to Christ without the messy mambo-jumbo of the institutional church, which they saw as the religion of humans, not God. They saw no need for gathering for worship, routine study of the Scriptures (which eventually was downplayed as the product of man-made religion also), mocking ecclesial ethical imperatives, preferring the life of autonomous conscience. This tendency of "down with religion; up with relationship" eventually proceeded to locate faith in a highly individualistic description of positive experience, devoid of concrete ethical direction, and even further devoid from the belief in Christ.

Ironically, for the deists, discounting religion, its rituals and routines, destroyed relationship, and so does any evangelical that buys into this mal-thought musing. But that is to be expected: relationships do not function without routines and rituals established by the participants to co-exist. Take the example of a household: A household is based on some amount of routines of chores and schedules in order for it to function properly and so that all members are cared for. These rules and schedules end up becoming the "liturgy" by which people in the household are able to relate to each other meaningfully and effectively, minimizing miscommunication and maximizing co-operation. Parenting is, in one regard, the disciplined effort (or the "disciple-ship") to initiate children into the healthy rituals of bedtimes, hygeine, eating healthy, and homework, all in effort to prepare the child to have a productive relationship with the world around them. Routines and rituals, rehearsed countless times without question as to become second nature, forms the basis of most necessary behaviors needed to function in the world meaningfully, whether something like driving a car to playing the piano to playing sports to knowing how be a good spouse or parent.

Christianity is a religion because all life is structured religiously.

So, when Christians buy into this naive thesis that Christianity is not a religion, this logic inevitably is firstly untenable to any church-going disciple, but secondly, destructive as belief in Jesus becomes divorced from the very normative provisions that he gives the community to relate to him and others meaningfully. Faith is not learned overnight. It is learned using the habits that the Church's liturgy of weekly worship and discipleship attempts to initiate the person into. As St. Cyril once said, "No man can confess God as Father without confessing Church as mother."

Christianity when it asserts itself against its own rituals gives way to church-less, de-personalized deism; deism strays to agnostic individualism, this to atheism, and atheism to the despair of nihilism.

To criticize ritual is to make Christianity unlivable. To forget that there are good rituals is to forget that humans are predisposed to engaging in a plurality of false ones. To not look for true religion and true relationship through it, to Christianity as the liturgy celebrating the restoration of all things into right relationship, will inevitably dissolve into the false religion, the idol of individual with its destructive cult of profit:

Since God's presence could not be found in any normative embodied site in the human situation, as all sites of the human condition are intertwined socially, God was therefore nowhere. Yet due to the collapse of the church's role to regulate life by enacted grace came the insertion of a new and much more terrible religion: secular capitalism. Now that the transcendence of God's holy, generous, all-forgiving, and all-giving love is not the standard by which all human social life is oriented, the usurper that now aims to consume all life into its abyssal totality is the market, the cult of profit, where its cannibalistic hungry longs without cessation to dominate all life, commodifying all reality into its sacraments of transaction, acquiring wealth for no other reason then to keep the mindless ritualistic repetition of consuming and acquiring going on eternally, world without end.

If we don't talk about Christianity as the true religion, we cannot even consider why Walmart is a false religion.

Is this what Jefferson Bethke means or intends? Obviously not. He states that he loves the Church and Scripture, but his conclusions do not correspond to the premises he spells out. Religion, for him, is just a set of rules, rituals, and repetition (and these are therefore, in principle wrong, for him), and Jesus is the opposite of these, and therefore, Jesus cannot be related to by his own commandments and community.

My question that I would like to voice as I dance on the cliff of speculation is why does he, a person he admits was raised in the church, need to talk about Jesus and religion this way? I cannot help but think that people that talk about Jesus in this way have turned their own view of "not religion, but relationship" into something deeply religious in another way: religion as wish fulfillment.

What I am about to say, I will admit is profoundly critical, but I do so because I empathized completely with who this person is and was as a boy growing up in the Church: As he speaks of Christ, Christ seems at many points less the person of the Gospel narrative, much less the Lord of the Church, and more like a psychological crutch, a projection of the mind providing therapeutic alleviation for his boyhood protestant guilt complex, a complex induced by a community that has repressed most healthy forms of sexuality and emotion out from visible site, much less from gracious treatment. The projection of the religionless and all so friendly Jesus becomes the Freudian religion of wishful thinking against his own (and, like I said, my own also) sub-conscious admission that the religion that he has been brought up with is in fact devoid of the social practices of grace he wishes for yet cannot find in any tangible, embodied way. To admit that "Jesus" saves people from "religion" when the only religion a person knows is acquired through the content and structure of evangelical preaching and church life implicitly causes the self-damning critique that Jesus not only saves us from religion but also saves us from our own Christianity.

However, perhaps, there is truth in this, if he is willing to take it to its fullest conclusion: if he is willing to grant that Christianity is a religion, that his religious Christianity is the true religion, yet it is this Christianity that Christ, the Christ of the Gospel, came to show the failure of, the failure of all religion, even true religion - as Christ on the cross dies the irreligious death of a god-forsaken man, forsaken by religion as well - while still ordaining this religion for righteous purposes, then perhaps he is able to understand the true mystery of the cult of the cross.

Perhaps we preach this religion/Jesus dichotomy because we realize we all too often need and make our Christianity have to be perfect and sufficient. Then and especially then it becomes false in need of salvation. Perhaps Christianity is the true religion for no other reason that it alone can fully understand that the severity of its failure through Christ, and also through Christ not collapse into abyssal terror before the gaze of transcendence.

Charles Wesley and Universal Salvation

2012-01-08T00:51:00.005-05:00

In preparing a lecture on the doctrine of election, I stumbled across these interesting quotations from Wesley's hymns and letters, where he expresses a full yearning for universal salvation.

As I looked up in the secondary literature, Wesley, while being perhaps one of the greatest evangelists of all Christianity, certainly of evangelicalism, was also, oddly enough, a hopeful universalist (or perhaps, more correctly, he was not a universalist, but rather he hoped that God was). Far from demotivating ethical behavior or evangelism, the prospect of universal salvation propelled his deep love of sharing and living the Gospel.

From the Hymn, "Would Jesus have a Sinner Die?"

O let thy love my heart constrain,
Thy love for every sinner free,
That every fallen soul of man,
May taste the grace that fond out me;
That all mankind with me may prove,
Thy sovereign, everlasting love

From his Letter of Dr. Chandler, "London, April 28th, 1785,"

Will they not? Alas for them,
Dead in sin who Christ refuse!
He did all the world redeem,
All unto salvation choose;
Sinners come, with me receive,
All the grace he waits to give.
In ourselves the hindrance lies,
Stopp'd by our own stubborn will;
He His love to none denies,
He with love pursues us still;
Sinners come, and find with me,
Only heaven in His decree.

These hymns demonstrate the repulsion Wesley had for Calvinistic theology (whom I count myself apart of, believe it or not), which he held downplayed evangelism due to its implicit double predestination (denounced as heretical in Christian history by minor and papal councils in 853-63), which meant the gospel was not for all people, technically (which hyper-Calvinist thinkers did hold).

Interestingly enough, Wesley did believe in the depraved and undeserving state humans are in, believing in hell in the fullest possibility and capacity, but grounded his doctrine of election, not on some mystical, undisclosed, arbitrary choice, as Calvinist theology implicitly does, functionally being agnostic to the actual revelatory desire of God to save humanity. Wesley saw the doctrine of election as the expression of God's desire to see all people saved (1 Tim 2:4) and all to come to repentance. Therefore, he grounded it on Christ's supreme victory that "reconciled to himself all things...by the blood of the cross" (Col. 1:19). Calvinists, in quite inconsistent fashion, uphold the cross as the highest moment in God's being, yet deny the complete victory over sin at the cross by love as the doctrine of limited atonement implies that not all sin was conquered by God's love in Christ. The reprobate's sin will only be treated, not with love by the authority of the cross, but infinite wrath coming from another moment in God, apparently of equal or higher authoritative value. As a Calvinists, I can only admit to the deep inconsistencies that reside in my tradition and thinking.

Thus, if one grants God's will to elect all to salvation and God's complete victory over sin, its hold over humanity - God's children - and its effects on the human hearts, at the cross (as John Tyson notes in his introduction, Charles Wesley, pg 37), while he could not discount the freedom of humans, a God given ability, to choose to ultimately reject God. Nevertheless, in the event that God had unmerited grace on him before Wesley could and would choose redemption, Wesley was filled with hope and compassion for all other sinners like him that were just as unworthy as he was but to whom God had expressed his loving will. Thus, in his poetry, Wesley hoped and expected that God would have the same mercy he had on him for all.

Don't Worship What You Know

2012-01-04T22:16:00.005-05:00

Here is a bit of a fascinating dialogue from Nicholas of Cusa's, Dialogue on the Hidden God, who was a German polymath and a Cardinal in the 15th century. He was a theologian, philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, and a jurist. Easily one of the intellectual greats of his time, if not of human history. For all his knowledge and brilliance, he maintains that God is beyond this, in a beautiful piece of Christian mysticism that looks to God as the ineffable one:

Pagan: What are you worshiping?
Christian: God
P: Who is this God that you worship?
C: I do not know.
P: How can you so earnestly worship that which you do no know?
C: Is is because I do not know that I worship.
P: It is amazing to see a person devoted to that which he does not know.
C: Is is even more amazing to see a person devoted to that which he thinks he knows.
...
P: I ask you, Brother, to lead me so that I can understand you concerning your God. Tell me what you know about the God you worship.
C: I know that everything I know is not God and that everything I concieve is not like God, but rather God surpasses all these.
P: Therefore, God is nothing.
C: God is not nothing, for this nothing has the same name "nothing."
P: If God is not nothing, then God is something
C: God is not something, for something is not everything. But God is not something rather than everything.
P: You affirm marvels - the God you worship is neither nothing nor something; no reason can grasp this.
C: God is beyond nothing and beyond something, for nothing obeys God in order that something may come into Being. And this is God's omnipotence, by which God surpasses everything which is or is not, so that thus that-which-is-not obeys God just as that-which-is obeys God. For God causes not-Begin to enter into Being and Being to enter into not-Being. Therefore, God is nothing of these things that are under God and which God's omnipotence precedes...
P: Can God be named?
C: That which is named is small. That whose magnitude cannot be conceived remains ineffable.

Reflection:

I often get a slight repulsion from Christians when I express the idea that God is ineffable. Some equate this with a denial of revelation. This of course denies the fact that God reveals himself to be ineffable, which is a bit of a paradox, but then again most of Christian theology is. At Mount Sinia, Moses asks God for a name. God responds, "I am who I am," which Christian theology has long since equated with the idea that God is nameless and ineffable. To give one's name meant a sort of magical control over the person or god in ancient society. God, here, gives a name that is essentially a non-name: I simply am, I exist however I exist, no idea encapsulates me.

I think the dislike of God's ineffability goes deeper for some Christians, deeper than this mere knee jerk reaction. I think we are afraid to think of God as ineffable, beyond all our concepts, all our words, even the words he gives us to speak to him with and about him with.

We are afraid of the unknown, thus God, for our sake, must be knowable, nothing hidden. If God is fully consumed within the knowable, God is, in a sense, made tame, safe. This satisfies the human need for security, but risks God becoming an instrumentation of the human ego. God becomes something to be manipulated, to appease our sensibilities. In short, we make him, or our concept of him, an idol.

All theology, even orthodoxy, can become idolatry if it creates an idolatrous image where there should be an icon pointing to God's sublimity.

Can we bare to have our idol's smashed? What lies beneath the veil of immenance?

We look to the world, measuring and weighing it, calculating its movements in order to control it, yet we must face the facts that the earth is still not subdued by humanity. Our technology is but magical thinking compared to its power. So too with God.

In the sheer realization of the awesome power that is God's ineffable Being, will we cower in our finitude? Will we fall into despair at our shame before a God that gazes down on us, confronting us as a force of terrible, unconcerned, apathetic wrath? In darkness of the sheer trepidation of transcendence, what good are our doctrines? To what cure can our therapeutic theologies offer us?

If we let our doctrines be idols, we miss out on something better. A moment of something so incredible, it must not be put into words...

When all words are rendered silent, all concepts un-corespondant. When we stare out into oblivion, in our shame, our sin, our sadness, having nothing left to justify us, our souls dangling over the infinite abyss of nothingness. When that great terror strikes our Being...

There God meets us. He meets us when he should not, according to our doctrines. Silently he says, as the infinite abyss of darkness itself, beyond all expectation, "I will have mercy on whomever I have mercy."

There we discover that God's infinity is not based on the unbridgeable gap of holiness (bridgible only be wrath), but is manifested only by infinte, boundless love.

The Gift of Death: A Poem on Loosing One's Mom at Christmas

2011-12-30T22:49:00.010-05:00

“Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.”
- T. S. Elliot, Little Gidding

Two years ago, my mother, Susan Jean Reimer, died of her breast cancer that spread throughout her body, particularly her liver, which shut down and directly caused her passing on the 17th of December. We had her funeral on December 23th. That Christmas morning we all sat staring at a Christmas tree, fully decorated but with no gifts...

Christmas is a collage of color
a saturated spray of lights and ornaments
reds, greens, whites, and

advertising for the perfect gift

for oneself but

they all seem to lose their focus
in memory's eyes
blurring
into flickering pixels

Christmas time breeds the insatiable anxiety

of needing to buy for everyone on one’s list

for gift exchanges with 20 dollar spending limits

gift cards to Walmart and Tim Hortons

“you’re a coffee drinker aren’t you?

I could not remember

What did you get me?"

gismos that come with gift receipts

maintaining friendships of contractual transaction

that winter was so cold

an absence of warmth
wind that stung like the kisses of a razor
with an omnipresent draft
no warmth left
I don't remember there being any snow...
a white Christmas only of the sterile eggshell hallways

resemblances are still everywhere
ticking of clocks, blinking of musical lights

the background hum of a television...
like the institutional ambiance of the hospital
breathing pumps, nurses' footsteps
always paging Doctor So And So
always alive with activity yet always slowly dying

into the banal silence of white noise

asking innocent interrogating questions

“if God loves you so much

why is he letting your family die?”

Henderson Hospital in Hamilton was rebuilt in the 50's
to accommodate the massive influx of post-war babies
now the hospital has been transformed
into palliative care wards for those same babies
who are now all dying of cancer
this is where modernity came to die
with comfort measures

a well-sedated death

we all thought she would get better
she insisted she would

right till the very end
At some point optimism became

an obstruction to true healing
not all healing is physical
my dad died two years prior of pancreatic cancer
he died a healthy man

I remember the call from my aunt
"come now, she does not have much time"
we have never had enough time...
whether in life or death or
in the small fortune

I paid to those
damn parking meters

she was getting more tired
eventually she would just keep sleeping
her body shriveled in limbs
bulging in her stomach with fluids from her organs
that her body could no longer drain
her jaundice eyes stared out blankly
her breathing choked out gurgles
like a coffee maker percolating with fluid filled lungs

most of my adult life, I never felt my mother was proud of me
she would say to others
"this is my son, he is going to become a pastor"
then at dinner
"you should become a doctor, lawyer, architect
a somebody-else
who speaks properly, without stuttering
without that haircut, without that acne
without that girlfriend"

who I eventually married
formulaic unoriginal nagging
"if you only did x, then you would have y"

she long since left the church
"the Church is full of judgmental, narrow-minded, un-spiritual people"
myself included
spirituality that meant the freedom of self-reinvention
through multiple lovers
in shopping trips and cruises on other people's money
followed up in fortune-tellers, pendulum
and meditations from The Secret
or The Urantia Book
"why trust the Bible when you can experience God on our own?
The Urantia Book told me this

you should be more open-minded
did you know the Bible teaches reincarnation?
the church has suppressed this

somewhere
my friend from the Unity Church told me this
you would know this if you weren't so closed minded"
almost a decade of theological education

that she helped pay for
rendered impotent

in moments of emasculatory condescension

at some point we will all have to accept our parents

in the way we wished they would accept us…

is God not a parent also?

I come in to the hospital room and sit down with her
I hold her hand
"I am here Mommy, I am not going to leave"
I recite her favorite story
Robert Munsch, Love You Forever
she wakes up for brief moments
the Gift

of a smile of pride peeks out from beneath
her medicated cloudiness
one of the few I had ever seen of hers
smiling at me

Pastor Don came by for a visit
read Psalm 23
"is the Lord your Shepherd, Susan?"
she nodded
"then do not be afraid"
her tense muscles relaxed for the first time

everyone wants to say how unfair a death bed confession is
until they witness the sublime Gift of seeing one lost child
finally realizing in the final mortal hours of despair
that she is coming home

no one can experience their own death
we only experience death through
the faces we see ourselves in
the Gift of a witness
as close as possible one can know

the promise
"it shall be well, it shall be well,

in all manner of thing, it shall be well"

her last breaths drew near

family gathered

and friends who pledged themselves as family

they looked to me to pray
I prayed thanking God for my mom
for the Gift of her life

“we return her to you, thankful”

and as I prayed

her breathing stopped

that Christmas we all sat around a tree with no gifts...
that is because

we already had plenty

all through giving one back

A Prayer for Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-16T23:18:00.022-05:00

Father,
Father of all,
"In whom we live and move and have our Being,"
Father of children that do not see you has their Father,
Thank you for your child, Christopher Hitchens.
Thank you for his honesty, his passion for justice,
His integrity, his delightful wit.
Thank you for his life, his work, his voice.
May we remember him as you remember him.
Give us the blessing that is to mourn.
Comfort your blessed ones,
Now, as we mourn.

Father, your Spirit is all justice and all truth everywhere,
Your Spirit is the breath of all the living,
You knew his heart better than he did,
You understand why he said the things he said.
He was a critic of your Church.
Perhaps we gave him reason to.
Yet he spoke longing for truth and justice.
Was that your Spirit there?
Give us "eyes to see and ears to hear"
Those precious faint glimpses and whispers
Of you in the most unlikely of places,
In unbelieving faces.

Your child did not believe in your Son,
Perhaps because of us, your Church,
Your body was not being the body.
If so, punish us, not him!
We failed to be a light in the darkness,
A light to the nations,
A light to the lost.
We became a blight. We lost sight.
We lost him.
We are lost.

Lost we pray,
We cannot help but pray,
We pray as Moses prayed,
When you say, "I will destroy them all,"
He prayed, "Forgive their sin,
But if not,
Then blot me out of the book of life instead."
Can we pray this?
I do not know.
I don't think Moses knew.
God knows.

O Lord, the call to be your body, its responsibility frightens us!
O how we have failed to take up our own crosses!
It is too heavy! We are too weak!
We stand again before you
Prepared for judgment.

Now we plead with you.
You have relented before and said,
"I will not come in wrath," when you said you would,
If you carried out your full wrath, no one would live.
God of infinite mercy, incomprehensible hope,
"You have mercy on whomever you choose to have mercy,"
And so, you relent out of your unfathomable grace!
Your mercy knows no bounds.
At least for our sakes, we hope it does!
Every time we apply criteria,
You show them to be Chimera.
You have surprised before with your grace,
Surprise us now! Show us your face!

You have hope for us when we loose hope for ourselves.
We nailed you to the cross,
Yet you prayed, "Forgive them they know not what they do!"
We denied you,
Yet you appeared to us in our betrayal and said, "Peace to you!"
You had unmerited grace on us in our unforgivable sin.
Undo our deeds and bring Chris to your light.

How could we blaspheme our own salvation by refusing to pray,
Refusing to hope for the salvation of another undeserving sinner
In life or in death?

You desire "all to be saved."
You have promised to "wipe away every tear."
You will proclaim that one day "there will be no more curse."
You have "reconciled all things to yourself" through the cross.
You have all glory, authority, honor, and power.
At your name every knee will bow and tongue confess.
In that day, we will be silent before your judgments.
We will accept whatever you decide.
But if your will is salvation, if your way is love,
Until that day, we plead,
"Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?"

We pray because you are a God that permits his friends to speak with him
In intimacy, in honesty, in authenticity, but most importantly, in audacity.
We are allowed to pray boldly, so hear our prayer!
As Abraham, Moses, and your Son did,
We pray, Lord, this: Have mercy on your children!

We pray now for a prodigal son that in this life never came home,
We pray that you would welcome him home,
Not because of what he did, what he believed, or what he chose,
But because of who you are.

God who became man, who became flesh, became sin, a curse, and death,
Man for all men, flesh for all flesh, sin for all sinners,
Cursed for all under the curse, death for all dying.
You descended into hell to harrow it, that death may have no sting.

When Christopher died, we know you died with him.
We know that his life is as precious to you as your own.
Lord, if he truly and ultimately did reject you,
May that be his choice not yours.
You are the election by your Word,
And elected yourself to rejection.
So that the rejected may be elected
To the hope of resurrection,
To the hope that you truly will be
"All in all."

Thus, we hope, hoping against all hope,
Hoping since our own hope is that
There is hope for the hopeless,
Hoping that your hope,
Would be his hope too.

In your name,
We pray,
Amen.

Adam and Eve: Patterns of Equality

2011-12-14T10:39:00.004-05:00

The heart of Genesis Two is about understanding the man and woman’s relationship, which is one of equality, complementarity, and companionship. Some will use this passage to support the argument that men are always leaders in authority over women, either in marriage or the church, on the basis that Adam is created first and names Eve. However, this is problematic for a few reasons.

1. Man and woman as humans are created simultaneously in Genesis 1:27. Both are in God’s image and likeness and both were given power to rule the earth. Authority to rule the earth is equally shared between man and woman as God’s representative images to creation.

2. Man is incomplete by himself. This story was retold to young men, who were studying to possibly become young rabbis, thus man is the first character, in order for the reader (a man) to see himself in the story and realize that he is not complete without his companion, nor is he better or autonomous over her, as positional view of authority operates through.

3. “A helper” in this passage does not strictly mean servant. It actually has an ironic meaning. It is also used to describe what God does for Israel. Thus, the term denotes something more like rescuer, like a companion that gives vital aid to a fellow soldier in war. Positional authority structures are maintained through sovereignty over the other. For instance, governments (particularly corrupt ones) have positional authority over citizens via their power to issue punishments against disobedient citizens. Does a marriage really work like that? Generally if there is a leader in the marriage, it is through a natural dynamic where the leader is only such by the recognition and support of the one that trust the leader. That is not positional authority, that is relational leadership.

4. The rib taken from the man seems to symbolize equality. If a piece was taken from the head or feet, the symbolism would invoke either headship or servitude.

5. The man confesses the woman is “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh” which connotes oneness of being. If nothing is other than one's spouse, if they share all their being, is there really a basis for position over?

6. “She will be called Woman for out of man this one was taken” is an interesting phrase. The man names her “Woman” (her name is changed to Eve only after the fall), in other words, he names her with his own name. Names indicated titles and authority and if, let’s say, a king named his son with his own name, that indicated likeness and the potential of succession. Similarly, with the man, woman is named that as she is “out of man.” Hebraic commentators have pointed out that woman can mean the “direction of man,” which indicates that man finds his humanity in the woman. This deconstructs masculine authority since manhood is only possible by the affirmation of a loving feminine presence.

7. To illustrate point six, also notice that in the next chapter, the woman is the one that the serpent converses with as if she is the one in authority. Some commentators, who do not affirm equality of roles and authority in marriage, point out that the serpent may be trying to subvert the very authority structure God ordained: men leading women. However, if that were the case, why did the man not step in and say “I am in charge, serpent, talk to me.” He was standing there with them! Based on the self-emptying transfer of power over to woman (all of the man is now found in and transfer to the woman) in the naming passage, it seems that the man is actually acting within the authority structure that the he set out, thus the serpent spoke to the woman. It is based on this failure that woman is cursed to desiring mastery over her husband, but her husband will dominate her.

This patterns indicate a very different undercurrent in Scripture regarding the essence of gender.

Thoughts on Adam: Literal, Literary, and Historical

2011-12-01T11:25:00.004-05:00

Have been blogging about the controversy concerning the historical Adam. You can look at previous posts in my archive. This post is a set of notes I prepared at a theological discussion I took part in among Fellowship pastors a few week ago. The discussion was interesting, respectful, and productive. I hope you find these notes similar. The basic argument that Adam is not a historical person, or rather that the historical Adam is not the basis of the reality and doctrines tied to Adam. Adam’s reality is literal, literary and real, but not necessarily historical.

Now, I will get into genre and make an argument for interpreting the texts in a second. However, first, I will point out a few facts that constitutes this controversy:

1. Archeological Evidence: Homo erectus appeared on the earth 1.8 million years ago, homo sapiens appeared about 200 000 years ago in Africa. Fossil records demonstrate immigration patterns that show humans living in Africa at 200 000 years ago, moved into the Middle East by 125 000, to South Asia by 50 000, Australia by 40 000. This presents a difficult problem for young earth (YE) creationists, who try to reconcile this evidence with a historicized reading of Genesis as 6000 years ago. They would argue a carbon dating problem, that carbon dating is inadequate, and that would attempt to say these dates are false. This is deeply problematic for several reasons. First, these fossil ages are corroborated not only be several types of carbon dating methods but also by geological evidence. Second, the carbon dating argument might be able to argue for inaccuracy in the dates, but it cannot reconcile all the dates to the time frame that YE creationists require, having a disparity between homo erectus and the appearance of humans in Australia alone of over 1.7 million years, let alone dinosaurs among others. One carbon dating adjustment cannot reconcile multiple dates with such a vast disparity.[1] YE creationist have asserted that dinosaurs may have been on the earth at the time of the Flood, however, that would suggest that the carbon dates of similar animals that were alive at the same time would have the same age, which they do not. If Genesis two is referring to two historical people, either there were people on the earth before them (rendering the doctrine problematic if founded on their historicity), or the time that Scripture gives (approx. 6000 years) is grossly inaccurate (rendering the text grossly inaccurate, if read historically).

2. Genetics: a historical Adam and Eve are often argued on the basis of a mitochondrial Eve and a Y-chromosome Adam. However, this evidence has been misappropriated. First, there has been shown that there are multiple mitochondrial Eve’s, and second, the link to a primal Y-chromosome is far older than what YE creationists want, thousands of years removed from the anticipated age of a primal mitochondrial Eve. The genetic-molecular evidence for a historical Adam and Eve is highly deficient.

“In contrast to this common evangelical understanding, the scientific picture is rather different. Mitochondrial Eve, though the most recent common matrilineal ancestor of all humans, was but one of a large population living about 180,000 years ago. So too for Y-chromosome Adam: he has also a member of a large population, and he lived about 50,000 years ago.”[2]

Does evolution and the age of the earth contradict the accounts of Scripture? I would answer that based on what and how Scripture speaks, there is no contradiction. Scripture, based on the genre, does not speak to the material origin of humanity that science would observe…

3. Differences between Genesis One and Two/Three: Both passages mention Adam in his particularity, yet evangelicals want to read both as historical or one as literary and the other as history. In the first chapter Adam is made after animals, made the same time as Eve, and his name represents both himself and Eve, representing all humanity. In chapter two, Adam is made before Eve, animals made in between them. In the first chapter, creation happened in a week, the next, all creation occurred in a day. If we want to make Adam historical, since both passages refer to Adam yet describe him in a different sequence in creation, the questions become “Which Adam? Why is one literary and not the other?”

4. Process of composition/authorial intention: While Moses most certainly wrote the original draft of the Pentateuch, there seems to be editing and recrafting according to different sources. Modern textual critics date the final form of the text to the time of Ezra, after the exile to Babylon. Babylon is the final background for the final form of Genesis, particularly Genesis 1-11. Moses wrote the original form for a people that came out of slavery in Egypt. Even if Moses wrote the final form of Genesis 1-3 (which is unlikely given the nature of the manuscripts that we have), which appears at the time of Ezra, the Babylonian and Egyptian mythologies were in the culture for hundreds of years before that. The stories of Genesis 1-3, were written to people that knew these stories, and thus these myths form the readers base understanding and the authorial intention via the contrast between the two. Therefore, a more natural understanding of these accounts is not as pure history, but rather as anti-pagan polemical stories, recrafted using these ancient myths to show the contrast between the God of Israel and the pagan gods.

5. Final Form: Some might get uncomfortable with the notion of a process of composition by multiple redactors as somehow an affront on biblical inspiration. However, inspiration probably does not refer primarily to propositional content of Scripture as originally written,[3] so much has its moral effect of the final translated form used in the church. Inspiration means breath (an invisible force that affects things) not word. It is an allusion to the breath of life that Adam receives to live. Similarly, Scripture is inspired in that it offers us the power to live, namely, to live righteous before God in his eternal life. Moreover, the final form of the text does not destroy the truth of the text, but merely shifts the priority of the truth of Scripture from a once for all event of writing to a providential view of God’s guidance of the process of composition.

6. Genre: the previous point suggests that these stories are deliberately crafted as theological polemics. This suggests that their genre is similar and so also their truth function (how they present truth to us). Gordon Wenham therefore suggests that the genre of Genesis 1-11 is “origin story” or “proto-history.” In other words, stories that are used to understand what the meaning of history is.[5] If this is the genre, then the truth of the text (its inerrancy) must be understood through the genre, not despite the genre.[6] The difference between them (Christian and pagan stories, that is) being the theological truth (not historical or scientific precision) of what is taught: God, not a false prophet, is the story teller, tell us things about himself using these stories.

7. Genre and the Gospels: Some might argue that “If Adam and Eve are not historical then how can the Gospel’s be taken seriously?” I would point out that the genre’s are different. One is mytho-poetic, the other is theological eyewitness account. Paul saw Jesus, but Paul received Adam by story retold.

8. Genre and Romans 5: Historical Adam advocates look almost solely to Romans chapter 5, which mentions Adam and Christ in the same sentence as one being the fulfillment of the other. Based on this, they argue that Adam had to have been historical as it formed the basis of Paul’s argument. However, this commits an interpretive fallacy by way of prioritizing one text over the foundational text. In other words, we must look at Genesis 1-3 and discern what the genre dictates there in order to understand how Paul is using it, not vice versa. If we understand that Paul is utilizing stories mytho-poetic in nature, than that is what he is assuming when he employs them as being real.

9. Reference and Genre: These previous points suggest how the referentiality of the text works. No doubt Paul and previous Israelites did understand Adam to be “real.” However, think of it this way, everyone would believe the serpent did speak and that this event was real, however, if a woman ran into their village terrified by what she thought was a talking snake, people would not have hesitated to call into question this womans sanity. Why is that? It is cause of how a reference of the mytho-poetic text works. Reality in a narrative is more than reference to an event in the historical past. A narrative is a crafting of elements of the past event plus the deliberate crafting of it into a coherent story plot (I sincerely doubt that Abraham’s life as it happened occurred in perfect chiastic structures!) plus one’s interpretation (including their theology) plus the recrafting of the narrative to constantly apply to the present listener. Thus even the purest forms of ancient history was communicated in such a fashion to form pedagogical paradigms for the present listens to hear, memorize, see themselves in, and learn from. Thus, to reduce mytho-poetic text, especially ones in Genesis 1-11 to our modern notion of pure history, actually historicizes them, refusing to look for the narrative crafting that makes the story instructive and applicable to all listeners.

10. Mythology and Doctrine: Often people state in this conversation that if Adam was literary or mythological, the doctrines associated with him are null and void as well. However, this betrays just how the mytho-poetic cosmology affects many doctrines that we hold, which we do not see as bound to the ancient cosmology that they were communicated to us from. Liberals argue that the virgin birth (and Christ’s sinlessness with it) is problematic because it was constructed on the premise that a woman was not active in contributing material to the fetus, and thus Christ was sinless because all his (what we could call “genetic”) material came from God’s seed. Similarly, liberals argue against the ascension of Christ and the descent of Christ into hell because these passages are predicated on the premise that heaven was literally and spatially “up” in the sky and hell was literally and spatially “down” in the ground. Similarly, YE creationists insist (as inverse mirror images of their liberal brethren, who also want to the text reductionistically as science) that the universe had to be made in six temporal days because the command to rest on the Sabbath is predicated on the basis that the universe was made in six days and God literally rested on the seventh (now, seeing that God is described as getting tired, if one is to maintain God’s omnipotent perfection, we might what to take that as an indication that it should be read in a more symbolic fashion!). Moreover, Psalms describes the world resting on pillars. Job describes the world as having a hard dome. Genesis 7 describes the rain occurring from trap doors in this dome. Since evangelicals affirm none of these as legitmate material depictions of the composition of the universe, nor as defeats for any of the doctrines communicated by them, we ought to infer that Adam and Christ in Romans 5 can be interpreted likewise. Imagine someone arguing that just because the Psalm and Job depict God as slaying Rahab and Leviathan (both mythical creatures) that obviously God to, since they are mentioned in the same sentence, must therefore be a myth. It is a bit ridiculous!

11. Reference and the Word of God: I have already covered how the genre communicates reference, but I must point out that given the cosmological assumptions of the people of the day and the doctrines sometimes described through these assumptions, one might ask, “Why would you maintain these as true and not as mythology as the rest of pagan literature? Why make an exception for Genesis 1-11 where one wouldn’t for the Epic of Gilgamesh?” The reason is simple: It is the Word of God. The biblical text means more to us than simply what it originally meant not by nature of the words of the page or its genre, but because Christians, who have been awaked to new life by the power of the resurrection, preached to them through the Word in the Spirit are bound to seeing the canon of Scripture as a whole as the text the Spirit has chosen to speak through, then, now, and in the future till the second coming. If one is to look for a reason why Scripture is ultimately true and meaningful in anything other than the reality of God’s being itself, one is deeply misguided. Liberals see ultimate truth and the ultimate indications of truth to be in physical reality. Christians see reality and truth fundamentally found in God act and being, which is in and through his Word. Thus, the Word of God, any passage of any book in any genre, is true for no other reason than because it is the Word of God.

12. Christ as the Fullness of Time: Since the Word of God is truth, that God’s being is what true existence is, and that Christ is the Word of God, Christ also is the ground of all the truth of history. Christ is the fullness of time, and the cross is the culmination of the ages. Our view of time might be one which flows from events A (creation) to B (cross) to C (eschaton). However, a theological view of time, from an eternal perspective (as best we can understand as temporal beings), is one flow from the Word of God at the cross out to what was lost in the fall and what will be defiant even at the eschatological end. Time is the right and left had of Christ. Christ’s truth renders true or false, legitimate or illegitimate, the events of our past and the hopes we have in the future. Therefore, Adam does not make Christ true, Christ renders Adam true! Without Christ, Adam is meaningless.

13. Adam as Paradigm of Humanity and Presence of our Curse: In Genesis one, Adam is used to designate a plurality of persons, men and women, representing all humanity through the particularity of his name. In the second creation story, something different transpires regarding his identity: Notice that Adam as a particular person is not named or identified as a named person until chapter three, in the curse. Before that, he and Eve are not named. They have the generic designation, as if they are not particular people, but rather paradigms for all humanity. Why would a story teller do something so deliberate yet odd as delaying the identification of the main characters of the story? This is done to indicate that Adam represents all humans when they choose, like he chose, the choice of idolatrous power in the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and results in the fall, curse and true death. It is because we choose to act on our freedom in ways God commands us not to that we are in Adam, not merely because we inherited traits form a primordial ancestor.

14. Adam and the Origin of Human Depravity: Now, to be clear, however, the doctrine of Adam does not fall apart if such a person did not live 6000 years ago? No, we can affirm that since Adam is a paradigm for all people at all times, as long as people have been in existence, they have been sinning. All people including Jesus, inherited the potential of terrible evil as part of the conditions of their freedom as humans in reality. However, while we grew up to choose to act on this evil, Christ did not, and thus became the true Adam, the true depiction of ideal humanity.

15. What about Natural Evil?: When we think about the fallenness of creation, by only understanding the fall as a past and totalized event, actually belittles the doctrine of creation. What I mean by this is that the earth was “formless and void,” which connotes something negative and chaotic. Some theologians interpret the chaos as a result of the primal fall of Satan that preceded humanity, thus corrupting creation. God in Genesis one is bringing the chaos of the cosmos into order and harmony and God continually says “this is good.” Even now, we must model this ethic of pronouncing by persistently seeing beauty and innocence still here in creation, despite Satan’s attempt to make creation into something chaotic and destructive and despite our failed stewardship, which is recognized at the curse. Thus, if we understand total depravity as an inherited and total quality, that the innocence of creation is a thing of the past, we actually demean what we are called to look for and celebrate in reality now despite sin. On the flip side, we also have a mentality that seems to dictate that any uncomfortable aspect of reality is the result of the fall: suffering, discomfort, death, taxes. However, many theologians maintain that humans were always mortal because our finitude implies it. However, it is only when sin is there and the possibility of life without God and his hope, that is true death, that is when we will “surely die.” Thus, by the principalities of Satan, and the goodness of finite existence, we can understand.

16. Adam as Failed Destiny: Irenaeus, recovered by Barth, Pannenberg, and Grenz, understood Adam as the immaturity of humanity, which fails to achieve maturity, the final goal of our existence. In other words, we are all children of Adam because our destiny is similar: we all fail to achieve perfection through obedience to God and therefore will die in a state of hopelessness. In Romans 5, the context of this is the preceding verses in that chapter mention that believing humans will be saved in the future (v. 10), made possible because Christ died for the ungodly. These seem to form the premise of how we are in Adam or in Christ. Our present is ungodly obedience, but our future is one of reconciliation and the hope of the resurrection.

[1] See this link on the age of the Earth: http://biologos.org/uploads/questions/Ages_of_Earth_and_Universe.pdf. Or this link on the reliability of carbon dating: http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Wiens.html#believe.

[2] Here is a popular article that is very helpful: http://biologos.org/blog/understanding-evolution-mitochondrial-eve-y-chromosome-adam.

[3] “as originally written” is often understood within the ETS and the Fellowship as an axiom not saying inspiration only applies to the autographs, but rather as biblical scholars, we must understand and translated the bible using data going all the way back to the beginning.

[4]

[5] Or “Saga” for Karl Barth, CD, 3.1.

[6] This is the argument of Kevin Vanhoozer’s reformulation of truth, language, genre, and biblical inerrancy: the inerrancy of a text works through the truth conditions present in its genre. In other words, if a genre is mytho-poetic, the text is still inerrant in what the origin story presents truth as, namely, theological truth in narrative form.

We Are All Prophets

2011-12-01T09:20:00.004-05:00

Why study the prophets? Who is a prophet?

^NRSJoel 2:28 Then afterward I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions

The prophetic voice/vocation is something, in some capacity, for all the people of God. Prophets were the representative of God to the people and the representative of the people to God. We are called to by this as the body of Christ (the true prophet).

The prophetic authority was the highest teaching authority for the people of God, yet here Joel prophesies that all people would share in it, young, old, men and women. This is a profound statement of equality and anti-hierarchy, one that we often forget as conservative evangelicals. In charismatic circles, we turn the nature of prophesy into the opposite, sometimes: prophesy becomes something specialized and unique, instantly elevating some above others, potentially creating cults of personality. The prophets yearned that there be no tiers or classes of Christians, that all believer would be priests and prophets, including women, children, the poor and elderly. The power of the Word is a power shared with all God's people.

^NRSJeremiah 20:9 If I say, "I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name," then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.

While hearing speech from God and communicating that to the people, a prophet is someone who has a particular passion that is similar to the one in God’s heart. Hearing God's voice, does not make a person a prophet; having God's heart does. We are not all called to have supernatural pieces of knowledge, but we are all called to have this heart of the prophets, to yearn for the same things they yearned for, to hope their hopes, and to have a broken heart for the things their hearts broke for. Their hearts orient us to God’s heart, which is in pain over the injustice of the world.

They were people on a journey, being taught God’s heart

^NRSJeremiah 15:15 O LORD, you know; remember me and visit me, and bring down retribution for me on my persecutors. In your forbearance do not take me away; know that on your account I suffer insult. ¹⁶ Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart; for I am called by your name, O LORD, God of hosts. ¹⁷ I did not sit in the company of merrymakers, nor did I rejoice; under the weight of your hand I sat alone, for you had filled me with indignation. ¹⁸ Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? Truly, you are to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail.

¹⁹ Therefore thus says the LORD: If you turn back [one possible translation: “if you repent”], I will take you back, and you shall stand before me. If you utter what is precious, and not what is worthless, you shall serve as my mouth. It is they who will turn to you, not you who will turn to them.

Jeremiah (quite rightfully) calls on God to avenge him and destroy his enemies. However, Jeremiah loses hope on the people. In fact, we begins to manifest a self-righteous disposition that eagerly waits for vindication against the people he is called to love. Have we ever had that disposition? Thus, God rebukes him and threatens to destroy him instead, unless he repents! Being a prophet does require utter disgust for even the most commonplace of sins, yet that cannot every allow for the people of God to lose hope and love for the lost or disobedient people.

Hosea – this prophet was told to marry a prostitute and love her. Then when she cheated on him, God showed Hosea that this is how he feels with Israel. Can we even think of how absurd this is: the idea that God would ask someone to marry a prostitute?! Yet through this marriage, Hosea is taught how God feels hurt at our sins, moreover how God nevertheless, has unconditional love and affection for people that do not return that love.

They were iconoclasts, traitors, and courageous critics against injustice and idolatry:

“What manner of man is the prophet? A student of philosophy who turns from the discourses of the great metaphysicians to the orations of the prophets may feel as if he were going from the realm of the sublime to an area of trivialities. Instead of dealing with the timeless issues of being and becoming, of matter and form, of definitions and demonstrations, he is thrown into orations about widows and orphans, about corruption of judges and affairs of the market place. Instead of showing us a way through the elegant mansions of the mind, the prophets take us to the slums. The world is a proud place, full of beauty, but the prophets are scandalized, and race as if the whole worlds were a slum.”[1]

Jeremiah 34-39 – Jeremiah rebukes the entire nation, proclaims his nations destruction, tells the king to his face he will be destroyed, then gets imprisoned then after that, shoved in a well! When he was let out, he proclaimed judgment just more boldly then before. Jeremiah was a true radical. The dude had balls, make no mistake, and for that he was persecuted to no end. The prophets embody the value of standing up for what you believe in and speaking out for what’s right. If Jeremiah were around today, we would probably hate him. He would offend our theologians and enrage our pastors. He would walk around unpretentiously slaughtering every sacred cow that we have.

^NRSAmos 7:12 And Amaziah [the high priest] said to Amos, "O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there; ¹³ but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king's sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom." ¹⁴ Then Amos answered Amaziah, "I am no prophet, nor a prophet's son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees, ¹⁵ and the LORD took me from following the flock, and the LORD said to me, 'Go, prophesy to my people Israel.' ¹⁶ "Now therefore hear the word of the LORD. You say, 'Do not prophesy against Israel, and do not preach against the house of Isaac.' ¹⁷ Therefore thus says the LORD: 'Your wife shall become a prostitute in the city, and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword, and your land shall be parceled out by line; you yourself shall die in an unclean land, and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land.'"

Interestingly enough, Amos here does not think of himself as a prophet, but as a simple farmer that has a message from God. Amos is not well educated like “professional prophets” were.

Amos rebuked the people of God and the high priest told him not to prophesy anymore, so Amos rebuked him too! Amos denounced the leader of his religion. Could you imagine a Catholic saying these words to the Pope?

^NRSHosea 10:13 You have plowed wickedness, you have reaped injustice, you have eaten the fruit of lies. Because you have trusted in your power and in the multitude of your warriors,

Hosea denounced the power and security of Israel itself. Military power was seen to be a reflection of a god’s glory and their approval of the nation. God promised protection and military victory to Israel, however, Israel wanted the same military power as surrounding nations, which were built, as any empire is, on war, economic corruption, and exploitation. The prophets were the first people to denounce the construction of empires as idolatry, even their own religion/people’s empire constructed in the name of their God! This is a profound social critique for this time.

^NRSIsaiah 1:12 When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; ¹³ bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation-- I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. ¹⁴ Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. ¹⁵ When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.

Isaiah is denouncing the most cherished practices of his religion, even the very heart of his religion: the Sabbath, sacrifices, prayers, festivals etc. These things were done unrighteously (even thought they were seen to be righteous actions!). Are we able to have that kind of self-critical faith? Often our doctrine is viewed as something unrevisable and undoubtable, as if our doctrine can never result in an idolatrous mode of living. Here Isaiah criticizes the very heart of the Old Testament people’s faith, saying that the mode in which they are living is idolatrous, even though technically they were believing and practicing the faith accurately to what the law prescribed. Even our best theology and ethics can become idolatrous if we practice them without seeking God in a deeper and more loving way.

Preachers of Doom or Poets of Hope?

^NRSIsaiah 2:4 He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

Popular readings of the Prophets make them out to be messengers of doom, of an angry trigger happy God. Not so. While we must take serious God denouncement of evil, we must interpret that in life of the justice and hope that comes through it and after. The prophets were serious about evil, not because they were obsessed with evil, but because they were inspired by the beauty of hope. They were not so much sick of the present world as yearning deeply for what the world could be that God will enact one day.

Isaiah expresses a poetic longing for the day that weapons would be made into farm equipment. Now, this may not be a strict prophesy as in this will happen literally this way in the future. Prophets are not fortune tellers, nor did they have absolute certainty about what the future events looked like, how and when they would happen etc. In the new heavens and new earth, there might not be a need to farm at all. Nevertheless, prophesy, when the prophets heart is one with God’s heart, there is a yearning that is God’s yearning that inspires this poetry that communicates God’s vision for a perfect world.

We may not be able to recycle tanks in order to make them into combines and tractors (at least not yet, perhaps), but this passage inspires us to think in terms of global restoration, which God is bringing about. This is a profound statement to any worker for social justice, saying, "It can happen, it will happen! Have hope!"

By the way, this verse is printed on the outside of the building of the United Nations. This shows, in my opinion, just how much "secular" society rests on the hope that the Judeo-Christian way of thinking bestowed to western society.

^NRSIsaiah 25:6 On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. ⁷ And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; ⁸ he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken. ⁹ It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the LORD for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

Isaiah was a master poet. He was able to depict the hope of God in beautiful and inspiring detail. This is the greatest role of the prophet: firstly to denounce the evil of this age, to denounce the proud of this world on behalf of the poor and the exploited, but secondly, to pronounce a message of hope for all people, comforting all people with the hope of God’s mercy and will to see a just future, one where even death is defeated.

Our role to a world caught in cycles of despair is to say, “Look, this is the God, that the world is waiting for! A wonderful God that does wonderful things that will one day make the world a wonderful place!”

[1] Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets, I:3. READ THIS BOOK! IT IS INCREDIBLE!

Neither-Nor: A Sermon on Paul’s Social Revolution

2011-11-24T10:41:00.005-05:00

This sermon uses elements from a previous sermon I preached on Galatians 3:28. The present sermon did not get into the gender implications that the Galatians sermon got into.

This is a revolutionary text. Have you ever thought of the Bible as “revolutionary?” It’s not the first word the pops into our heads. Why is that? I think it is because we tend to think of Marxist revolutionaries of recent memory when we think of the word “revolutionary:” Lenin, Stalin (the revolutionaries of communist Russia), Fidel Castro (the revolutionary that is now the president and dictator of Cuba), Che Guevara.

Now our North American history tends to paint these men with a pretty harsh brush, but rightfully so. We see them as violent revolutionaries, who encouraged dictatorship and censorship, all by using violence and anarchy, the prescriptions that Karl Marx, the 19^th century founder of communism, set out. That is true. But what propelled these men to be so radical, to the point committing acts of violence? You see these people when they read the writings of Karl Marx, they were inspired; they had a dream cast for them, something that appealed to that deep longing we all have for justice, equality, and freedom, a dream of a better world, a class-less society, a society free from oppression. However, in order to carry out that vision of how reality should be, they concluded, and this is where they went wrong, that violence was an appropriate means, justified by the end they hope to achieve. Freedom was only possible by dictatorship. Peace only possible through power. Justice only possible through violence.

Thus, in the wake of the many Marxist revolutions, in Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, etc. countless crimes against humanity have occurred. Sadly and Ironically, Hundreds of thousands of people have died in this quest, this particular vision of how to transform reality and find justice.

It is these people that we describe as “revolutionary,” but the fact of the matter is, as we look at scripture, particularly the passage today, we find that the Marxist vision of justice and how to get justice was simply not revolutionary at all. Some would say that it is because they were too radical. However, I want to say to you this: far from being too radical, they were not radical enough! Not as radical as Paul. You see, Paul was a revolutionary, one of the greatest revolutionaries, second only to Jesus. Have you ever thought about Paul this way?

Paul defied the world of his day, and his writings challenge us now. He was among the best and brightest of his religious society and he forsook his religion, his family, and his heritage, in the name of justice. The name of Jesus. He went from persecuting Christians to leading them, which that would be even more radical than a terrorist becoming a US soldier, or Stephen Harper becoming leader of the NDP. It would be weirder than that. He then went out to spread the message of Jesus to an Empire that worshiped Caesar. Caesar’s titles were Prince of Peace, Lord of Lords, Son of God. Paul dared to say otherwise. Paul said these titles rightfully belong to Jesus.[1]

Paul, banished from his own people and religion, turned around and defied the most powerful person on the planet, whose empire was one of largest, most powerful, but also the most corrupt, and oppressive. The Roman vision of justice, yet again, was through violence. Peace through power. The only way to have a free society is to control society and manipulate people, whether it is their subjects that could rebel, or their household slaves that would run away, or even their own women and children, who had to be controlled and kept in constant submission, in order for men to keep power. Paul once again said otherwise: If a person wants justice, if they want freedom, they must not live by violence, they must do something even more radical: they, the just, must live by faith.

They must trust that they are free through what Christ did.

Recap:

Turn to Col. 3: we are going to read the entire section so we can zoom in on the specific scripture we are tackling this week. Last week I spoke about what it means to be “in Christ,” this profound mystery that at the cross, the infinite one became finite, the eternal one came into time, the kingdom of the universe became a slave and a criminal, the blessed one became a curse, the holy one became sin, the living one became death. Some of you are probably still making sense of that, so I must apologize for this week’s sermon also, it probably will only serve to perplex you even more. The primary question that might capture this puzzle is this: If Christ became all these things for us, what does that mean for us if we are supposed to be the active body of Christ in the world?

NRS Colossians 3:1 So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, 3 for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory. 5 Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry). 6 On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient. 7 These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life. 8 But now you must get rid of all such things-- anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. 9 Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices 10 and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. 11 In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!

Galatians 3:28 offers this parallel:

²⁸ There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. ²⁹ And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise.

The promise of Abraham is disclosed by Peter in Acts 3:21: that the whole world is waiting “until the time of the restoration of all things that God announced long ago through his holy prophets.” Particular Abraham as Peter says in verse ²⁵ “You are the descendants of the prophets and of the covenant that God gave to your ancestors, saying to Abraham, 'And in your descendants all the families of the earth shall be blessed.'” Paul has a similar thing in mind in this passage as the entire book is expositing what it means, as it says in Colossian 1: 19-20, “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, ²⁰ and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”

This is a tremendous hope, hope that you can build a society on. When I said this passage was revolutionary, I was not kidding. For all the hang ups we have with our culture, there is perhaps one thing that should be prized: our society’s sense of equality, rights, and dignity. We often take these things to be, as the important phrase from the US constitution says, “self-evident.”

But the truth of the matter is that people do not automatically understand that all people should be valued and given irrevocable rights. In fact, a simple look at the horrors of our history and more sadly our present show that we don’t automatically understand this. Western society is unique to how it understands that humans have innate dignity, rights, and freedoms, but we are slowly forgetting the importance of these values. We are forgetting their importance because we forget where they came from. So, where did we learn that people should be treated this way?

I want to suggest to you that is from scripture (big surprise!), from texts like this, that western society developed its sense of morality.[2] For over a millennia and a half, Christianity was a primary religion of the Western world, and it was through Christian thinkers that the idea of human rights were developed, based on the idea that all humans were God’s children, born in God’s image, the image of their creator.[3] Christian thinking has been revolutionary for most of western history. It was been revolutionary so long, Christians have told the western world so many times these truths, that when Christianity was pushed out of the public sphere, the general public still continued to believe these things, but forgot where they came from. They just assumed they were self-evident.[4]

What’s worse than forgetting where these values came from and their importance is the fact that Christianity is often seen as an enemy of social change. If the message of Scripture is so revolutionary, then why have Christians as of late been so bad at bringing about change in the world? Why have Christians been seen as a holier-than-thou group, judgmental and ultimately uncaring about those that do not conform to their standards? Why are Christians seen as a group just like any other, obsessed with numeric growth like any other organization, ultimately unconcerned with those that are outside their community?

Let look at the text for insights.

Now if we notice that argument of verses 5-11, the argument has a bizarre flow, at least on first glance. First he talks about bad practices like fornication and greed, which he calls idolatry (which seems odd), then he talks about evil uses of speech like wrathful words and filthy or abusive language, but then he ends the thought with saying that there is neither Greek or Jew, barbarian (who were the northern European enemies of Rome, from Brittan, France, and Germany) Scythians (who were the enemies of Rome that lived east of Rome in Russia), neither slave nor free, and in the Galatians passage he also adds “neither male nor female.” What do those have to do with one another? What does having sex outside of marriage and swearing have to do with this reality that there is neither Greek nor Jew?

Well this passage betrays the simple fact that we have typically preached this passage as not having anything to do with one another, and ironically misses the point. Ironically by preaching a letter verse by verse, we end up forgetting that the entire letter is making an interconnected argument.

So what is Paul arguing here? Well it is perhaps better to start with what he is not arguing for here, which Brian Walsh in his commentary, Colossians Remixed, called the “middle class piety of politeness.” What is that? Well, let me give two examples that illustrate the severity of what that means.

During my undergrad, I heard a preacher that I really respected get so passionate about a certain topic that we ended up swearing. I was utterly offended. In fact, it bothered me so much that I decided to do a research paper for an ethics class on the biblical uses of language, the central thesis of which was that swearing was wrong. When I met with the professor about it, he gave me a list of scriptures to check in the original languages that would help me in my study. He gave them to me with a smirk on his face. He gave me three scriptures, one from Isaiah, another from Jesus, another from Paul. In the English, these seemed quite unoffense, yet when I checked the commentaries, I found that these words were in fact swear-words. Isaiah says that “all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.” Does not sound particularly offensive, however, when I checked it in the original Hebrew, the word there referred to a woman’s menstrual rag, which according to the law, was something deeply ceremonially unclean and culturally was something utterly disgusting. Now for the prophet of God to call the priests of his religion and all the people’s righteous actions like this, this constituted perhaps the worst and most filthy use of language in the Hebrew language. He did so to communicate the level of disgust God has for what his people are doing. Paul and Jesus, said similar things to denounce the people in Aramaic and Greek, but of course, we find these passages translated with euphemisms as well, in some cases purposes mistranslated.

Of course, I was shocked. I actually felt somewhat betrayed by the bible translators. So, I went to my professor and asked, “Why hasn’t anyone talked about this? Why is the Bible translated with euphemisms rather taking the words more literally?” And the professor, seriously said these words, which summarize the “middle class politeness” quite well, he said, “Spencer, how could we translate the Bible that way? We wouldn’t want to make the Bible offense to people.” Ironically, by reading a middle class, westernized sense of politeness and propriety into the Bible, we smother the raw emotions of scripture, words meant to wake up the sleepy people of God to action to a dying world. We hide the true scandal of the bible, embarrassed at its implicit offense to even our own lives, saying we don’t want to offend people. Isn’t that what liberals argue in order to water down the gospel? Ironically, the “middle class piety” that runs deep in liberal churches runs just as deep in evangelical ones.

Here is another story that illustrates what Brian Walsh, I think means by the term. I met a person down at the University of Toronto, who in a class expressed deep concerns with the way church was being done today. He made reference to this tendency in the church. I was intrigued, so I thought I would ask him after class what he was getting at and what his background was. The guy was the father of a Baptist minister, interestingly enough. He mentioned that when he was growing up, his church insisted that everyone had to where expensive suits and dresses to show proper respect to God. However, none of the members of that church were from the neighborhood, which had gotten quite poor and rough over the decades after the inception of the church. The church members had no friends in the community. The church members all lived in the suburbs outside the community. They came from well-to-do, well-educated families that had not experienced abuse or divorce, and thus, being Christian and going to church came quite naturally to them.

However, one Sunday, the guy watched a young girl, scantily dressed, hair dyed pink, walk into the church, after extinguishing a cigarette. The greeters greeted her, but did not make their customary ideal chit-chat. She sat down at the back. No one sat with her. She looked utterly out of place. The service commenced, and afterwards the girl sat there. Finally, after speaking with other members that were somewhat offended by her dress, the pastor came over. Before the girl could speak, the pastor said, “next time you come to church, I hope you dress more respectfully.” The girl began to speak, only it seemed that her English was neither proper nor clean, which the pastor seemed visibly repulsed by her for. She mentioned that she had gotten kicked out of her boyfriend’s place, and had no place to go, apparently, this girl out of poverty, having no family, resorted to living with your boyfriend. To which the pastor got even more upset. She mentioned that she had nowhere else to go and that her life was falling apart, and she was wondering if the church would pray for her, and ask if God would let her boyfriend, her only real family and financial support, take her back. This was the last straw for the pastor, “You come into the house of God, smoking on premise, dressed like that, talking like that, unapologetically living in sin, and you want us to pray that we ask God to let you go back to living in sin with your boyfriend? How dare you. You need repentance not your boyfriend!” The girl, shocked, ashamed, and scared, quickly left. Seeing that she left without saying any prayer to Jesus, the pastor announced that unfortunately not everyone who is preached the good news will repent and be saved. To which, the members congratulated their evangelist for standing up for the purity of the Gospel.

The guy telling me this story, had seen the girl from school. She occasionally showed up, but after that day, she never came to class again. In fact, no one, to his knowledge, saw her again.

As I heard this story, I said to the guy, “So, how is your relationship with your father now?” He responded by saying, “We don’t speak.” I said, “Because of that?” He responded, “Yes and no.” What do you mean?” I said. “Well, shortly after,” he said, “I stopped going to church and I eventually told my dad that I couldn’t believe the same things he did. I told him that I am not a Christian anymore. I wouldn’t believe the same things. He told me if that was the case, if that was how I was going to live my life, then I have also chosen that I am not welcome in the family anymore.”

I stood there shocked. Here was, I guess, an atheist now who was a pastor’s son, who knew the Christian faith better than anyone, who stopped being a Christian because he saw in his father’s faith something profoundly wrong, and when he called his father on it, his father disowned him. This is what I mean by the dangers of “middle-class piety.” It is a holier than thou sensibility that is only made possible by comfortable finances that ends up being invested in and perpetuating the very thing Jesus tore down: the barrier between God and man, the barrier between holy and sinful, the barrier between blessed and cursed.

Last week I pointed out that Christ destroyed the barrier between God and man by coming into the world of impure flesh, eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners, uttering things that were blasphemous to the law of the day, opposing the very power that promised peace in the empire at the cost of brutality, and becoming at the cross a man under the curse of the law, becoming a sacrifice of sin for sinners everywhere. God is now with us, reconciling all things back into his holiness, as Paul says, by coming into the darkness and showing it the light. Ironically, God to bring us back into holiness, did not have a holier than thou mentality! He refused to. And for that, Paul says, “Christ is all in all.”

So what does that mean for us if we are to be the body of Christ? I think it has remarkable social implications that we have been ignoring. Understanding the first part of the passage in light of the later shows the purpose of what language and action is meant for. If we don’t interpret the earlier in light of the later, we fall into a “do’s and don’ts religion” and can end up perpetuating a “middle class piety” that is addicted to the separation, the same comfortable hierarchy, between holy and unholy that Christ came to reconcile and overcome by radically including those that were excluded from his kingdom.

Back to the Question

So I’ll return to my initial question, what is Paul getting at here? Paul very much wants us to end any sinful practices and very much wants us to have good wholesome speech, for anyone who insists on these will have to answer to God’s wrath, but there is a reason why, a reason that allows us to understand these commands without falling into a “do’s and don’ts religion” that he denounces earlier. It seems that he is trying to interpret the letter of the Law through a higher Spirit of the Law. What do I mean by that? Paul was preaching to a Gentile audience that lived in a Roman colony. Rome was an idolatrous society that delighted in its depravity. Its religions had drunken orgies. Its market place was brutal and corrupt, being built on slave trade and prostitution, brought about by the armies of Rome going out to conquer the world of non-Romans, who were an affront to the superiority of Roman’s gods, namely, its emperor, who claimed to be a god on earth.

The whole society from top to bottom was built on idolatrous set of lies, lies that were often spoke subtly and politely, that propagated the belief that Roman men were superior to women, thus adultery and fornication was permissible by powerful men regardless of the harm it caused their wives and families, free Romans are more deserving than poor, thus poverty, slavery and prostitution was good and necessary to the health of the empire’s business, and the empire should stop at nothing to bring all lesser humans under its rule, particularly the barbarians and the Scythians, thus condoning and requiring brutal wars and even genocide.

In order to keep this idolatrous system going, certain practices and beliefs had to be vigorously maintained. Greed, rape, and wrath had to be condoned at an institutional and societal level. False ideas had to be propagated, and were often propagated very subtly and even very politely, without ever uttering an offensive word, statements like women were less in the image of God than men, Romans were more human that non-Romans, free people were more important that slaves. Participating in these beliefs meant participating and condoning in a degenerate form of life that perpetuated cycles of violence and abuse. And all these beliefs found there root expression in Caesar’s brutal assertion of power, his claim to inherent superiority over other people and authority to treat them as ruthlessly as he willed, his claim that he was a god among men and that this is what gods do, his idolatrous claim that “Caesar is lord.”

Brian Walsh in his commentary points out that these practices are a part of what he calls “discourses of violence,” which are ways of living and speaking that are rooted on lies and abuse which end up perpetuating lies and abuse. To focus on the simple do’s and don’ts that Christians tend to make this passage about, he says, is “narrow and uncreative.” It forgets that there are messages and actions in the world right now that take the Lord’s name in vain, yet don’t even mention God. Polite words that utter things utterly blasphemous. Subtle things that are utterly filthy and abusive. Or that there are actions being promoted by the rich that don’t fall into the typical don’ts of church piety, that often seem quite sensible and reasonable, that perpetuate a degenerate state of life far worse than one desperate non-Christian girl trying to escape poverty by living with her boyfriend, as un-ideal as that is. To live and speak in these ways, as Paul says, is to commit idolatry, to deny the image of God that he made us in, and forget the reconciliation between all things that Christ has bought with his blood.

Paul stood up against the most important and most powerful man of his day, and dared to say otherwise, a stand that would eventually cost him his life. Paul dared to say to people that people were meant to live for something more, something more beautiful, life in the image of their creator, an image that recognized the inherent equality between men and women, the ideal of equal treatment of men and women, rich and poor, Romans and non-Romans, all made possible by the equality that Christ showed by dying the death as one such forgotten human being. And in the resurrection the Father asserted that Christ is lord, not Caesar.

The incarnation was an event where God came down to be equal with humanity, and because of this the kingdom means the subversion of any power that does not engage in that same sacrificial humility and servant hood for others. This was utterly revolutionary.

Now the funny thing is this, who got the most upset with what Paul was saying initially? Who were the first to condemn his vision of all the children of God loving and respecting each other as equals? It wasn’t the Romans first, it was the people of God, the Jews, Paul’s country men and God’s chosen people!

The foundation of Paul’s claim was that Christ made God’s blessing available to all people, all they had to do was trust it, that it was available to all sinners by dying the death of a sinner for all sinners. Christ died a death of one excluded from the blessings of Israel, as if he was not even a Jew. Because of that, all people could now become children of God without being Jewish, without having to recognize Jewish ethnic superiority, without having to buy into the Jewish military agenda. Jewish Christians did not like this. They insisted that to be a Christian, to get God’s blessing, you had to be Jewish. You had to dress Jewish, talk Jewish, eat Jewish. Paul said otherwise.

Neither-Nor: Neither Jew Nor Gentile

Paul’s response was to claim that there is neither “Greek or Jew, Circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free,” and in Galatians he adds, “male or female.” Now for most of Christian history, we have interpreted these as spiritual values, not physical ones.

Let me illustrate using the slavery value, when Martin Luther proclaimed these values, he proclaimed them as spiritual, not physical, all people are spiritually equal in Christ, not physically or socially, and the spiritual has nothing to do with the physical. And because of this, Martin Luther, condoned slavery because he did not think owning human beings infringed on their spiritual equality.

The values were applied during the American civil war as Baptist preachers in the south preached that the abolition of slavery was liberal and unbiblical. There is no passage in the Bible, they claimed that commands the abolition of slavery, so who are we to think otherwise. Thus, the church became a socially regressive force in the world. Is this what Paul meant?

When Paul meant there was neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised,” he physically instituted that equality with the abolishment of circumcision, the physical identification mark that separated religious Jew from unclean Gentile, or saved Jew and unsaved Gentile. All had a place in the New Kingdom of Christ in faith, there was no ethnic hierarchy. Paul, in order to get his people to realize that the separation between God and man had truly been abolished, abolished the very means by which people identified themselves as holy and religious.

So when we look at how Paul lived out this first value, rather than separate the value from reality, Paul radically including non-Jews into the family of God, changing everything. He lived but this spiritual reality as a social value.

If we see this with that value, we can understand the revolutionary nature of Paul’s writings in other matters.

Neither Roman nor Non-Roman

He said there is no longer barbarian or Scythian. What does that mean. Barbarians and Scythians were non-Romans. They were the enemies of Rome. People who Rome fought against and wanted to conquer to bring under the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome, which ironically was not particularly peaceful.

Paul saw the empires lust for war and blood shed to be an affront on the idea that we are all made in the image of the creator, made with dignity and meant for peace and harmony. So, Paul set out to disarm the lies that motivated Rome to go off to war. Rome went to war because it felt that Romans were superior to non-Romans, so Paul began to say that there is neither Roman nor non-Roman, barbarian or Scythian, all are equal, all are made equal in Christ.

War is not possible when one side does not think it is better and more deserving than the other side. War is not possible without these differences. Paul dissolved these differences and thus the basis for war.

What does Paul’s teaching look like today? As we look out at a world that is being torn apart with war and rage due to racial differences? Could we say that in Christ there is neither American or non-American, neither Israeli nor Arab, neither black nor white nor Hispanic nor Asian, and why not, throw in neither Toronto Maple Leaf nor Montreal Canadiens nor Detroit Red Wings, too!

Neither Slave nor Free

Let’s return to slavery. Now, based on a static, by the letter, approach to interpreting scripture, devout Christians in the past have actually used the Bible to defend slavery, as I pointed out. We are appalled by this. But again, if you go by the letter of scripture, there actually is no scripture that says slavery is in and off itself wrong, especially if you interpret this passage as spiritual not a social value. There is no passage that says owning a human being as property is sinful, there is no direct passage that says slavery is abhorrent. In fact, Christian preachers quoted passages like the one in Ephesians that said slaves need to submit to their masters, or the passage in Philemon where Paul actually tells a run away slave that going back to his master is actually the right thing to do! Passages like this show the danger that the Bible poses if we do not read for the Spirit rather than simply the letter.

But the question arises: Why isn’t there a direct abolition passage in Scripture? Why didn’t Paul directly condemn slavery? Let me try to offer an explanation. Paul understood that in order to transform a society, it takes time. If a revolution happens too quick, it ends up being bloody and chaotic. The early Christians did not want this. Violence and crime is not the Christian way, it one of the things Paul says is a part of the old self. But actually, Paul was more subversive and sly than that.

Paul understood that if you want true change, you have to win people’s hearts. Hate has to be met with love; hurt has to be met with forgiveness, lies with truth, abuse with healing. Paul understood that a violent and immediate emancipation of slaves would not only cause murder, but it would also destroy the social economic fabric, as un-ideal as it was, if disrupted too harshly too quick would leave the slaves starving, worse off than before. So then how do you work change to a system like that? Paul says to slaves something subversive. He says love your masters, work for them sincerely, respect them far beyond what they deserve. Paul says to put to death the old self, which wants revenge and wrath; that’s idolatrous.

Which sounds like he is perpetuating slavery, but then he says to slave masters, do the same. You see, if you preach that all people belong to the family of God, eventually people will start treating others like family. Brothers do not enslave brothers. If a slave treats their master like a brother and a master loves his slave like a brother, eventually when the opportunity arises, the master will want to free the slave, not just kicking out him on the streets with nothing but giving him the proper care, not because the master is being forced, but because his heart has been changed.

This is the radical way of social transformation that the Christian faith holds to, one that says freedom is found not with violence but hope, not with alienating our enemies, but by treating enemies like family, not with wrath but forgiveness, not with fanatic autonomy, but rather, patient and submissive love.

Paul was the ultimate poster child for how the pen is mightier than the sword, and why love conquers all. He laid the foundation for a movement that is still producing fruit. It resulted in the abolition of slaves, but it is still going.

What would this value look like today in an age where the disparity between the rich and the poor has reached monumental levels. We all have heard of the occupy movements throughout the world, which has drawn both support and criticism across the board. What simply reality is at the heart of this complex and messy controversy that Christians need to address throughout the world? It is simply this:

To understand that all people are recipients of the promise of God, that all people in Christ are family, is to understand that if one child is starving, if one boy works in a sweat-shop making pennies an hour, if one family is forced into poverty because of corporate corruption, this is an insult to the entire family of God, this is an affront to the truth that we are all equal in Christ, and all deserve the love and respect and dignity of the family of God.

Conclusion

Of course, meeting these challenges, living out this radical vision for a restored way of life, living out this revolutionary spiritual reality require more than just a do’s and don’ts religion, it requires a change in the very heart of the individual, a change where one’s actions embody the power of the incarnation to come into the very darkest of the dark and not cave to the darkness, but rather to shine the light boldly and beautifully. These kinds of practices are listed in the next few verses, which I read, even though Tim will walk you through them in detail next week: Paul says,

¹² As God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. ¹³ Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. ¹⁴ Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

Paul is showing us that rather than shrinking away from the social injustice, idolatrous forms of power in this world, Christians need to be radically in and with the world, but taking on the world, taking hurt and healing it, taking lies and exposing them, taking violence and forgiving it, showing compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness and above all, love in the face of the very opposite of those things. This is how Christ “reconciled all things to himself.” This is how we are meant to be the body of Christ.

Let us pray. This is the prayer of Saint Francis, whose prayer I think should be our prayer now:

Lord, make me a channel of your peace;

And where there is hatred, I may bring love;

Where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness;

Where there is discord, I may bring harmony;

Where there is error, I may bring truth;

Where there is doubt, I may bring faith;

Where there is despair, I may bring hope;

Where there are shadows, I may bring light;

Where there is sadness, I may bring joy.

Lord, grant that I may seek to comfort more than to be comforted;

to understand, more than to be understood;

to love, more than to be loved.

For it is by becoming last that one become first.

It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.

It is by dying that one awakens to eternal life.

Amen.

[1] See Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat, Colossians Remixed (Downer’s Grove: IVP, 2004). Also see, Rob Bell, Jesus Wants to Save Christians (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008).

[2] Interestingly, even atheists like Jurgen Habermas have noted their indebtedness to their Christian ethical heritage. See, Religion and Rationality (Cambridge: MIT, 2002), 148-9: “For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic equalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love.”

[3] Reformational philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff argues that without a transcendent understanding of human worth, as depicted in Imago Dei, human rights are left without any possible secular, all-encompassing foundation. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 350-7.

[4] This is apart of Habermas’ theory of the “liquistification of the sacred” which explains how Western secular society employs a vocabulary of human rights without metaphysical foundation. This was possible because the content of religion was successfully translated from religious thought into publicly intelligible thought forms.

Revealed-Hidden: Or the Christ that became sin

2011-11-17T10:32:00.008-05:00

^NRSColossians 3:1-4 So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. ² Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, ³ for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. ⁴ When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.

There are some weird things happening in this passage. Notice the weird tenses of the verbs. You “have been” –past tense - raised with Christ, instead of you “will be” – future tense. You “have died,” not you “will die.” What weird language. We are not dead yet. Why are we described with Christ in this way?

It gets weirder. Paul uses this bizarre phrase: “for have died, and your life is [present tense] hidden with Christ in God.” What does that mean? What is hidden about Christ and why are we also hidden in it? If we are hidden with Christ, shouldn’t we know that we are hidden, and thus, not be hidden to us? And what is this about “When Christ who is our lives is revealed…”? Isn’t Christ already revealed? If he is revealed, why is he hidden? He came didn’t he at this point? So, why would Paul use this very strange language to talk about Christ and our connection with him…

Art Gallery – Abstract Art

A little while ago I went to an art exhibit. As anyone been to an art exhibit?

Now when I went through the pictures of the art exhibit, I came across a piece of abstract art. Does everyone know what abstract art is? When I saw it, it appeared as just a bunch of blotches and mal-formed shapes, quickly slopped on a canvas. To which my immediate impression was, like many people when they first see abstract art, was, “You call this stuff art? I could have done that!” which lead me to moving on to the next painting.

Now, I circled around after glancing through the other pieces, being in no particular hurry to going anywhere, and I glanced over and saw people starring at that same piece of abstract art. I remember thinking, these people must be just utterly pretentious people, “high culture vultures,” as they are sometimes called.

So, I went up to the picture again. Someone remarked on the level of depth of the painting. To which, I thought, “Depth? This looks like an angry child through paint on a wall, and smoshed it around with their fingers.” After a bunch of people made similar remarks, it was starting to bug me, and I had to ask, “What do you see in this thing?” To which, the response was, “Don’t you see it? Don’t you see?” That was not particularly helpful, “See what?” I asked. “The depth, the richness, the beauty of it all.” That was quite vague. I was starting to get a bit frustrated. I wanted something much more objective, simple, and precise. “See what?” I asked again. The only answer of the one person was, “I cannot put it into words. But there is a way to approach art that sees deeper. Always try to do that.”

Of course, that sounded a bit like this person was a culture vulture and a bit condescending too, but I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. He did not say it rudely. So I stared at this piece of art. I stared and puzzled. Then I puzzled and stared. Nothing. It’s just a bunch of color blotches.

I remember trying to go cross-eyed thinking that maybe this is one of those 3D picture things that were really big back in the 90’s, but nothing. Anyways…

At some point during this, my sense of objectivity gave way, and I began to look at the piece with more speculation. I began to notice that some shapes looked like animals and people, but not really, there were vague resemblances, because as I focused in on the shape that I saw, it seemed to vanish into the other forms. As I looked at the colors, some felt very happy, some richer and more elegant, some cooler, even sad. I found that some areas of color reminded me of warm memories I had; some, sad memories, oddly enough. As I did this, the painting seemed to almost pulsate with these different resemblances as my eyes travelled back and forth along the canvas. None of the resemblances were actually there in the painting, but it was weird to see the painting invoke them, while simply being a bunch of blotches of color.

Now I don’t know for sure, but I think this I what the guy was getting at. While I initially just saw a mindless spray of haphazard colors, I began to notice that the painting made me think of people, places, things, sensations, and all sorts of things, while not actually technically depicting them in the simple blotches of color.

I went home that day intrigued. I began to read about famous abstract artists. One such guy, the guy who painted the picture above, was Kandinsky.[1] This guy was the father of all abstract painting. Now, he developed his technique, oddly with very religious motives. See, his work sought to place into an image, something that was invisible. More accurately, he sought to show the art world that there is an invisible, even spiritual dimension to all of life, something that made life meaningful and beautiful, something that could not simply be reduced to what was where physically on the canvas. How did he do that? He used abstract painting.

See if he painted something concrete, people would focus on the explicit forms. However, if he abstracted images, he noticed that these abstractions animated the canvas forming multiple forms. Often in painting, he would take dozens of colors and mixed them to form one single color so that if someone starred at the area of the canvas they would get the sense of multiple layers of undertones in the color. Often he would mix forms and lines together so that as the viewer’s eye would follow, no end point could be found, no resolution, only more shapes, more paths of sight, more meanings. People could potentially never run out of new impressions to be seen in his paintings, even though the painting never changed. Even though to stare at the painting objectively, none of these impressions were strictly there in the painting, through the painting, through the visible, something invisible was provoked, something that you miss if you just skipped over it and did not try to immerse yourself in it. Something multi-faceted and deep was revealed that was hidden in the simplicity of the blotches of color. This something in his art, Kandinsky argued, was similar to how the spiritual rested in the physical world, hidden in plain sight, waiting for people to notice its depth.

…

Like what Kandinsky said, the depth of reality in art is similar to the depth of spiritual realities. How often do we miss the depth of what is right in front of us? In church we recite bible passages; we listen to sermons; we reenacted the manger scene and the crucifixion scene in Sunday school on Christmas and Easter. We often summarize what Christian faith means in neat one liners like John 3:16, or a couple one liners like the “Roman’s Road” approach. We want to make everything explicit and clear and simple.

We end up finding that we are told the story so many times, so many times in digestible tid-bits, the story becomes common, mundane, routine, even boring. We end up gazing upon the cross and seeing just the same old Jesus that we saw before. We say we want depth, but we don’t bother to go deeper. In doing so, we look at the cross, and say, just like a piece of abstract art that we don’t appreciate and say, “yep, there it is…anyways…” and we just want to move on to something more exciting.

Ironically what happens is our own beliefs, our teachings, even our doctrine, by becoming simple and shallow, sometimes gets in the way of just how deep and unfathomable the revelation of Christ is. God is the "image of the invisible God" do we treat Christ the same way we treat beautiful images of abstract art, artwork attempting to communicate the ineffable and the invisible, but get overlooked as boring? Something lies hidden before us in plain sight, waiting to be revealed in its depth.

Every time we think we can hold God in the palm of our hands, the Holy Spirit reserves the right to pull a magic trick!

Ransom and Renewal: Do we really comprehend what happened at the cross?

Saint Irenaeus, (funny name, it sounds like is but is made out of metal), was the first theologian of the church, a student of the Apostle John’s disciple, and he said that that the apostles understood what happened at the cross in two ways, first God paid the price in Jesus, God ransomed us back from Satan second, in doing so, we renewed what was lost and tainted into something good again.[5] He, as Paul says earlier in Colossians, “reconciled all things to himself,” (Col. 1:20). How did he do this?

I have a friend that was/is a recovering alcoholic. What got him to change? He said it took someone who was there, who had experienced the same depravity and despair, who had hit rock bottom, who knew everything he was going through, who had cried out to God in the same way and was able to find a way out. This is what God became.

God became. Those are funny words, right? God should not become anything, he is God, changeless, eternal, infinite, sovereign. But Scripture says that God became man, “The Word became flesh.” (John 1:14) What was infinite became finite. What was eternal came into history. What was perfect Spirit took on the form that was imperfect and tainted: flesh, with all its emotions, desires, urges, and temptations. Jesus felt it all.

And what happened when Christ lived as God himself in the flesh? He got himself into a lot of trouble. What was the (human) reason for him being nailed to the cross? John tell us that Jesus claimed that, “before Abraham was, I Am, the Father and I are one,” and as he uttered those words, people were enraged and picked up stones to throw at them. Jesus, as a man under the law, claimed equality with God, that God and him are one, that there was no more barrier. And according to the letter of the law, this was blasphemy. If you can imagine that, the author of the law comes to abolish the problem the law is attempting to fix, to fulfill the prophesy the law foretells, but by the very imperfection of the law, the law cannot even allow the messiah, when he did show himself, to identify himself as God. A bit of a catch 22, right? Jesus as the fulfillment of the law claimed the very thing that the law says you cannot claim: God and humans are one.

Have you ever thought of Christ’s sinless, holy words as simultaneously blasphemous? Can you understand now why Jews don’t and can’t accept Jesus? This is why the Pharisees were so angry. It never occurred to them that Christ was God and could say these things; all they saw was the letter of the law that they used to justify themselves. All they saw was a man under the law guilty of blasphemy, threatening to destroy their religion and their power.

The Jews arrested him because he claimed to be God with us. Roman had him executed because he opposed the order of the empire. To Roman, Jesus was what we would think a terrorist to be today. And because of this, Christ was tried and found guilty, cursed and put to death.[6] Do we really comprehend this? We often say weird things like “It only appeared that Christ died,” or, “Christ died in his humanity not his divinity.” We also often use the language that Christ “took on” our sins, as if he was wearing them like a backpack on the cross. But Paul actually says something far more radical. In Galatians 3:13 it says, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us.” Similarly, and even more striking, Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us.” Jesus even said these unfathomable worlds on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Which make you wonder, we understand that Christ was our sacrifice for sin, but do we really understand what it meant that he was our substitution?

Did Jesus truly know for sure he was going to be resurrected? Yes Jesus knew the prophesies, but he does admit certain things were kept from his knowledge by the Father here on earth. S0 what was going through his finite mind when he willingly decided to take the place sinners, to truly choose their death for their sake? Did he for a moment, in that moment of despair, understand that we was going to suffer in hell in everyone else’s place for all eternity? Did he truly feel the whole weight of what it meant to live apart from the Father? Did he feel that this was it, that there was no hope left for him? That the Father had truly abandoned him in the place of all sinners? Jesus Christ died the death of a blasphemer, Christ became a curse; Christ became sin;[7] Christ became a tortured form, forsaken by God, abandoned by God, becoming all that “God” is not.[8] God was finally, "God-with-us." But how is this possible?

And I am sure some of you are asking yourselves this: why did I not notice this before!

God has a simple plan, so simple it is unfathomable: If we insisted on rejecting him and choosing death and hell, God in his love, would become the rejected and come into death and hell, to as Paul says, “reconcile all things to himself.” This brings us to the heart of the thing that is hidden yet is revealed in plain sight.

The mystery of how the infinite one became finite, how the all-powerful one became weak and humble, how the holy one became impure and even sin, how the blessed one became a cure, how the author of the law was accused of blasphemy, how the living one became death is that God is in his very being love.[9]

Our life is hidden in Christ because of the depth of the beauty of what Christ’s perfect love did, a love stronger than darkness, despair, and death. Christ is our life, because Christ put the place of a godforsaken sinner, dying the death of a blasphemer, substituting himself as a sacrifice at the cross.

Our salvation is not that we choose the form of holiness, it is that God, the holy one, choose to dwell in the form of impurity. Our salvation is not simply because we are blessed to be chosen, it is because Christ, the elected one, elected himself to bare the curse of being rejected[10]. He did this so that no one who has rejected God can say, “God did not die for me. God has not given me a way out.”

Christ is our life because he became our death. Our fate is hidden in him because he was revealed in the glory of the resurrection. Thus Paul says, “We have died with Christ and yet we have been raised with Christ,” Christ’s death is our death, and Christ’s resurrection is our resurrection. God showed in his faithful son Jesus, who has obedient to death even death on a cross, that someone who was judged a blasphemous sinner as we are, put under the curse of the law as we are, and deserves to die on a cross and to be sent to hell as we are, has a way out, has hope!

Christ resurrection is our resurrection. This we must trust.

My application is this, let us understand that powerful implications for what this means for us as the Body of Christ. Since we have realized that our life is in Christ, that Christ is our life, that we have died to our sin as Christ died at the cross as our sin, let us take Paul’s encouragement seriously. Let us live the life set on heavenly things. Let us stop choosing enslavement to worldly things, be hidden in Christ, secure in his being, and participate in the glory that will one day be revealed in its full measure.

But also let us be the body of Christ, and not hide from the world, behind some pretentious notion of holienss. Let us love the rejected ones and even be rejected with them in order to show them Christ's election of sinners to forgiveness, hope, healing, and holiness. If there is a person that we are thinking, “that person is despicable, wretched, dangerous, and I want nothing to do with them. I don’t want to be near them.” Let us go and be Word made flesh there. Let us go into the darkness to shine the light.

Let us go and be the resurrection where there is only a grave.

[1] Michel Henry, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky (New York: Continuum, 2009). This is a beautiful mediation and phenomenological analysis on abstract art and spirituality.

[2] See Slavov Zizek, The Puppet and Dwarf.

[3] Of course, there are many scriptures referring to Christ saving us from the “wrath that is to come.” In the case of 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10, it should be noted that wrath here does not refer to the final judgment but to a historical events of wrath that the world and the church experienced, particularly the fall of the temple at the hands of the Romans, the subsequent persecution by the Romans, which ultimately ended with the fall of the Roman empire (Babylon, as Peter describes and John prophesies). Wrath in the Bible often refers to a corporate judgment in which the people of God will also experience, some even dying in the process, but the righteous ultimately being vindicated over the unrighteous and the immature are refined in and through the fires (1Cor. 3:10; Malachi 3:2). Thus, wrath as both historical and corporate meanings for the people of God, who are indeed saved in wrath but also go through the wrath. This interpretation is quite foreign to the “Left Behind” theology that sees these passages as referring to final wrath in the final judgment in our future after some bizarre reconstituted Roman empire and anti-Christ emerges (whomever those will be, I have heard everything from the Pope and the Catholic Church, to Obama and the liberal US, a Muslim leader and the Arab world, to the Chinese). Not only do I find this “crystal-ball” approach to the book of Revelation simply unhelpful and prone to our own projections into the text, and not only do I find the fact that evangelicals refuse to discipline false prophets that make these prediction that don’t come true, but evangelicals refuse to recognize that the early church, those whom received the prophesies of John’s Apocalypse, understood them to come true within their life time, or shortly thereafter. For this reason, I am a devout supporter of the “Preterist” view of eschatology. See, Harold Eberle and Martin Trench, Victorious Eschatology (Yakima: Worldcast Publishing, 2007).

[4] To clarify, hell in this case, has both present meanings as reference to the powers of death and evil active in the world that enslave people to death, as well as to a future destination for the individual, like the physical grave and the lake of fire.

[5] See Against the Heresies.

[6] See Jurgen Moltmann, Crucified God, particularly chapters 4 and 6.

[7] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 1.2, sect. 15.

[8] Ibid., 193. I place, unlike Moltmann, God in quotation marks, since I would see the true essence of God, that does not change, to be limitless love, thus, God at the cross is truly God, even thought he is in the form that we would least expect “God” to be.

[9] This points out a problem in evangelical theology that refuses to listen to classical Christian theology, which traditionally sees love as the organizing attribute of God through which all others are possible and must be understood. Any time another attribute is put on par or elevated above limitless love (like wrath, holiness, infinity, sovereignty, etc.), the mercy of the incarnation is rendered problematic and even unnatural to God.It remains the cross into a scandal, not to the Greeks but to Christians! See my lecture on impassibility for more info on that. God acts simply in a way that upsets are own expectations of what God should and could do.

[10] For an incredible discussion on a truly Christological view of election, see Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 2.2, Part One.

God must Change!: Or Impassibility is Passe

2011-11-16T14:11:00.005-05:00

These are my notes for a lecture I gave at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto, where I am a Teaching Assistant. The lecture was the first half of a debate style lecture between me (arguing against impassibility) and the other TA, arguing in the affirmative for impassibility. This lecture reflects on the assigned reading by David Yeago, whom I often reference.

For this lecture, I will be defending the concerns of those theologians that are profoundly worried about the language of impassibility and immutability when used in Christian theology. There are many schools that have expressed these concerns, all of which I will draw off of here and there to present the case: Jewish “pathos” theology (Abraham J. Heschel), German theologians of hope (Wolfhart Pannenberg and Jurgen Moltmann, Moltmann being the much more extreme of the two), and North American Baptist open theists (Clark Pinnock). So, without further ado, where are some concerns and arguments for minimizing the notion of divine impassibility:

Arguments against Impassibility

1. Pagan Influences: The fundamental worry of the language of impassibility is that it finds its origin in Greek philosophy, influences that got much stronger and got adopted less and less critically in the age of Enlightenment. In other words, their contention is the language of impassibility is pagan in origin will forever cause problems for theology if it is constantly employed. Moreover, if impassibility implies what Greek philosophy sees as its natural consequence, the results of the attribute when applied to the Christian God, is ultimately incompatible. The fundamental contention is that impassibility, as defined through Greek philosophy, renders love as an imperfection, contradictory to the work of the incarnation. Here are two examples from Greek philosophy, which demonstrates the problems inherent in the Greek version of the notion:

a. Plato: God for Plato (or gods, Plato appears as a theist, polytheist, and a pantheist at different parts) seems more like an ideal principle of goodness, the highest ideal, coupled with the Demiurge, a pre-existent creative entity. This being for Plato is the highest conceivable being in beauty, rationality, and goodness, and therefore, immutable, timeless, and impassible. However, because of this, this being cannot be incarnate or reveal himself in physical reality as this would imply change. Moreover, since this being is perfect, this being needs nothing, experiencing a “blessed state” of neither “joy nor sorrow nor pleasure.”[1] This impassible God is self-sufficient and therefore needs nothing, desires nothing, nor cares about anything, and thus, does not love.[2] In fact, love is a supreme imperfection, invoking desires with all their chaos and woe. Thus, for Plato, “Love is a great demon.”[3]

b. Aristotle: God for Aristotle was not much better as he saw God as highly connected with metaphysical motion, Aristotle’s primary object of inquiry. Aristotle’s “unmoved mover” is a causative principle of all things unaffected by secondary causes, and therefore, no secondary cause (like humans) could influence the first cause. Because he receives no causes back upon himself, he does not even technically have knowledge of creation. He is just an eternal mind, eternally contemplating himself in an almost narcissistic manner. God again, does not reveal himself, nor would he want to. Aristotle states, “Since he is in need of nothing, God cannot have need of friends nor does he have any.”[4]

Thus, Moltmann, echoing the words of Dostoevsky, cries out in disapproval of any theology that would draw off Greek thinking to construct a doctrine of the Christian God as impassible (if it means that) saying, that according to the biblical account of life, God, and love, “A man who experiences helplessness, a man who suffers because he loves, a man who can die, is therefore a richer being than an omnipotent God who cannot suffer, cannot love and cannot die.”[5] If God is impassible, this “would make God a demon.”[6]

2. Church History: Through early church history, theologians come very close to affirming the Greek notion, and thus, their exegesis sometimes results in reducing a lot of other qualities of God that are depicted in the Old Testament to just anthropomorphism. This is done at the expense of writing off any passage that expresses God as having emotions like anger or different features like a face or hand as the “silly ideas of the Jews,” which should be a red flag for good Bible believing Christians! Nevertheless, the Fathers did ultimately seem to reinterpret the terms to be compatible with God as loving and able to reveal and incarnate himself into the world. Yeago does the same thing in that he locates God’s impassibility and unchangeability not in all Christ’s seemingly diving characteristics, but primarily in God’s essence of “limitless love” (219). However, the questions that open theists ask then are these: What if the language of impassibility was simply a cultural given of the day, a common vocabulary at the time that the Fathers employed as a polemic to show the superiority of Christianity to philosophy (which like how Justin Martyr interpreted the logos passage in John 1:1 to mean the logos of philosophy as a polemic)? What should we do with it now if the word just does not mean what it did before and often gets in the way? Should we still continue to use a word that only applies to the love of God, not other attributes that we automatically associate with deity, such as omnipotence, infinite, transcendence, etc. As Wolfhart Pannenberg has argued the consequences of this well: by not looking to love in the Trinity as the center of the identity of God and the organizing structure of all God’s other attributes, qualities like immutability, infinity, and simplicity gradually were set in opposition to God’s Triune nature, eventually disposing of the Trinity and even Christ’s deity all together in the heyday of deism.[7] Thus, it is helpful to point out that these different theologians critiquing impassibility all are reacting against a certain pull in theological history that has ended up in an imbalance. Protestantism created a tension between God’s love and mercy and God’s sovereignty, holiness, and infinity that still plagues many Reformed theologians today. If the attributes of immutability, omnipotence, infinity, or holiness are the organizing attributes of God, the most fundamental attributes of his Being, the attributes from which all the others proceed out of, the incarnation and crucifixion becomes theologically problematic. Consider these Scriptures and whether they are possible through an over-prioritized notion of impassibility:

a. “The Word became flesh.” (John 1:14).

b. “And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.” (Luke 2:52)

c. “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us.” (Galatians 3:13)

d. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)

e. “…but [he] emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” (2 Phil. 2:7-8)

If one places all the traditional qualities of divinity as unchanging, incompatible and contradictory to God coming into history, body, darkness and death, the incarnation is rendered problematic even unnatural to God. Thus Moltmann states this (as an example of both the merit and the extremes of his theology):

Between the Trinity in its origins before time and the eschatological glorifying and unifying of God lies the whole history of God's dealings with the world. By opening himself for this history and entering into it in his seeking love through the sending of Christ and the Spirit, God also experiences this history of the world in its breadth and depth. We must drop the philosophical axioms about the nature of God. God is not unchangeable, if to be unchangeable means that he could not in the freedom of his love open himself to the changeable history of his creation. God is not incapable of suffering if this means that in the freedom of his love he would not be receptive to suffering over the contradiction of man and the self-destruction of his creation. God is not invulnerable if this means that he could not open himself to the pain of the cross. God is not perfect if this means that he did not in the craving of his love want his creation to be necessary to his perfection. The history of the Son and of the Spirit therefore brings about even for God himself within the Trinity, an experience, something "new."[8]

While there seems to be “changes” in the person of God the Son, the only way that these changes are compatible with his eternal deity is if impassibility does not refer to these things, but rather, refers primarily to God’s limitless love that always remains the same. Yeago affirms this, as I already said. But does not love imply a kind of effect on the lover?

3. Covenantal Relationship: Impassibility is helpful to remind us that God is beyond the corruption of the world and beyond the powers of the world. So much that misery caused by evil is not a part of an ideal, redeemed world, it is not apart of God nor apart of God’s will for the goal of the cosmos. Moreover, it is helpful to maintain that God is impassible in the sense that he cannot be manipulated by humans. However, as far as being able to account for God’s free dealings with the world, the term begins to get in the way. There is never a point in creation that God did not have a intimate relationship with his creation. In the creation account, God gives his spirit of life as the basis of all living things, designing the cosmos for participation in him, especially humans who are made in his image and likeness, which implies that God has freely invested and opened himself up to the lives of humans from the very beginning. Having this resemblance, containing the divine breath as the basis of our life, God freely has created his creation for dynamic relationship with him.

a. Genesis 18: On the basis of his covenantal relationship, God is bartered with and even is talked down by Abraham. Each time God announces how he is going to destroy Sodom and Gamorrah, Abraham tries to barter with him, arguing that he should not destroy the city if there are righteous people still left in it. This does not seem to make sense for a theology of impassibility, which would imply that prayer or speech with the divine does not actually change the course of events or the mind of God. Here God simply seems pleased to engage in this relationship.

b. Genesis 32: Jacob wrestles with God here, insisting God bless him where God had previously refused. Jacob walks away with a busted hip, but God relents and blesses Jacob. God seems, by his own volition, to be affected and moved in opinion.

c. In more radical cases, ancient Jewish commentators saw this bond that God choose to be so close that while God is beyond all things, he has willfully chosen to make his deity vulnerable and dependent on his children, wagering they (not him) would vindicate him as the loving deity he is as the ultimate display of superiority over other gods: “The impious rely on their gods, but the righteous are the support of God.”[9] Tannaitic commentators have argued that Isa. 43:12 (“You are my witnesses, says the Lord, I am God”) suggests causality and dependence: You are my witnesses, therefore, I am God, and therefore, when you are not my witnesses, I am not God.[10] Heschel insists, even paradoxically, that God is such a supreme being that he has the power to choose that “God is in need of man.”[11]

4. Prophetic Pathos: Contra Yeago (228), it seems that the one God, identified in the Old Testament, is a God that firstly does change (particularly his mind and will in situations) and secondly does suffer. Consider these Biblical passages for both:

a. Change of mind: Exodus 32-34: Here Israel make a Golden calf and God is moved with rage, disowns his people, and says, unconditionally, that he will destroy them and start over with Moses. Moses acts quickly and pleads with God, even later, offering himself in their place. Because of this, God “changes his mind about the calamity he was about to do.” The story of Jonah has the same thing occur in it (God says he unconditionally will wipe out Nineveh, but changes his mind) as the text being a sustained allusion to this account.

b. Prayer? Now, if these conversations (Abraham and Moses) form the basis of what prayer is like and what it does, we can have great confidence that God hears our prayers and even considers them to the point that out of love he may even change his mind. This is significant in that many Fathers did not think that prayer did anything to change God’s actions, but rather only served to bring people closer to what God’s will was already. While prayer does do that as well, to say that it only does that, seems to downplay the beauty of intercessory prayer depicted in Scripture. If God is impassible, prayer does not do much, and this even makes God sound fatalistic.

c. Suffering: Isaiah 16:9-11: The prophet communicates this oracle to those that God is punishing and the message is that God himself is weeping with them as he punishes them in his wrath: “Therefore I weep with the weeping of Jazer…I drench you with my tears…your grain harvest has ceased. Joy and gladness are taken away from the fruitful field…Therefore my heart throbs like a harp for Moab [which isn’t even God’s covenant people!] and my very soul for Kir-heres.”

d. Denouncement of impassibility: If impassibility is construed as Plato describes it, there are actually many passages in the prophets that denounce those who say God is beyond good and evil, neither one nor the other, remaining unaffected by the suffering of people: “I will punish the people who rest in their complacency on their dregs, those who say in their hearts, ‘the Lord will not do good nor will he do harm.’” (Zeph. 1:12, cf. Ezek. 8:12; Isa. 40:27)

e. Moved with Compassion: It is precisely the pathos of God that moves God with compassion to forgive his people for no good reason other than he loves them. While the human thing to do would be to come in wrath, God is moved with compassion: “Shall I give you up, O Ephraim!...My heart is turning within me. My compression grows like a flame. I will not execute my fierce anger, I will not again destroy Ephraim; For I am God and not man. The Holy One is in your midst, and I will not come to destroy.” (Hosea 11:8-9)

5. Trinity: This attribute (boundless love) indicates that if one understands that the Being of the Triune God as impassible, it is only possible through the receptivity of the persons of the Trinity. The Father is only Father unless affected by the love of the Son and Spirit and vice versa.[12] Each person of the Trinity lives through the other persons by loving and being loved by the other persons in eternal, perpetual reciprocal relationality. Within the Trinity, each person is not an unmoved mover, but a moved mover or a moving mover. Moreover, the incarnation, Christ’s becoming into the flesh, can be understood from this Trinitarian dynamic (Yeago, 235), which means that this movement of relationships within the Trinity not impassibility and forms the basis for the incarnation. As the Son eternally moves (not staying still) from the Father out into infinity, the Son also bring infinity back to the Father in worship. If we understand God as impassive and unchangeable, it is only through a deeper perpetual movement of love, loving and being loved. It is like staring at a clear sheet of the ocean’s surface and concluding the water is still, only to find out that there are mammoth perpetual currents gracefully rushing alone miles beneath.

6. Love in Freedom is the Common Ground: At the end of the day, a theologian that expresses contentions with impassibility and a theologian that devoutly holds to impassibility, if they are both careful Christian theologians, sound very similar and have a lot of common ground. One will say “God does not change, because he is constantly loving.” The other will say, “God changes, because he is constantly loving.” Either way, the doctrine that God is a Triune Being of love is central, first and foremost, thus making this debate feel often like a battle of semantics. While one expresses contentions over the language and the other expresses devotion, both should always be founded on biblical reflection on the incomprehensible mystery of Christ’s love. As Moltmann meditates on the love of God at the cross, he demonstrates that this is his core motive, while again showing the possible extremes of the viewpoint:

The suffering and dying of Jesus, understood as the suffering and dying of the Son of God, on the other hand, are works of God toward himself and therefore at the same time passions of God. God overcomes himself, God passes judgment on himself, God takes the judgment on the sin of man upon himself. The cross of Jesus, understood as the cross of the Son of God, therefore reveals a change in God, a stasis within the Godhead: “God is other.” And this event in God is the event on the cross. It takes on Christian form in the simple formula which contradicts all possible metaphysical and historical ideas of God: “God is love.”[13]

7. Rahner’s Rule: As the above quotation suggests, a lot of this debate boils down to how one interprets the rule that “the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity.” What I mean is that if God is his revelation, and his revelation does come into history and has a progression of unfolding to it, in what way can we as people, who know only by revelation, say that this historicity is not a part of God himself? In what way is this historical progress apart of God? Do the events of the incarnation constitute something “new” for God, as Moltmann suggests? This causes a deep worry on the impassibility supporters side as it begins to sound like some form of process theology: that God is reduced into history and not truly beyond or omnipotent over history. Thus, the ongoing uneasiness of many theologians with a complete and outright rejection of the term “impassibility.” Yet even Yeago inevitably refers to the eternal, impassible God in a temporal or sequential fashion as he admits that we can only think in temporal terms: Father as origin, Son as present, Spirit as completion or telos (176, 195). This, there seems to be deep conundrum here, better yet, a paradox that lies at the heart of how we think about this issue: God the transcendent one, who does not change, who is beyond time, is known to us because he chooses to change and become immanent to us in history (particularly in the incarnation), yet as he comes into time, he reminds us that he is more than what is in time and history, revealing to is in time that he is eternal and in the flux that he is unchanging, unchanging meaning, first and foremost, that God is in his essence limitless love. Between these two points in the paradox, we must walk, albeit as if we are walking a tightrope above to chasms on either side, in which we look at our rope and hide that it is invisible.

Interpreting Impassibility

[This section was not in the lecture, as it was meant as a recap or conclusion for the class not the debate.]

I. Impassibility first and foremost refers to God’s essence as limitless love, anytime it is applied strictly to another attribute (infinite, transcendence, holiness, etc.), the incarnation is rendered in some way unnatural to God.

II. In light of Rahner’s Rule, it might be helpful to understand the rule as “the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity, but that does not mean that all there is is the economic Trinity,” but rather “we only know the immanent Trinity through and as the economic Trinity.” As Aquinas might say, we do not know what the immanent Trinity is in this regard, but only that it is. To speak about the immanent Trinity beyond pointing out this paradox might only be done in an apophatic mode, which might simply mean that we cannot put it into words at all.

III. In the end, this question might be as helpful and answerable as asking what God was like or doing before creation.

IV. Or it may be helpful to use this distinction in an analogous fashion to the conceptual distinction between the human and divine natures of Christ. There is no real distinction between the natures, but to separate them gives us a greater appreciation of what Christ was and did as fully God and fully man. Similarly, impassibility might firstly help us understand what is perfect in God that he is bringing his creation out of. So much that suffering is not a part of God’s essence, it is not a part of the redeemed world that God is bring us to. Secondly, impassibility might help us better appreciate what God could have been if he was like the cold and aloof Greek gods, but choose not to be because of his love.

Spencer Boersma

Monday, November 14, 2011

[1] Plato, Philebus, 33.

[2] John Sanders, “Historical Considerations,” in The Openness of God, ed. Clark Pinnock (Downers Grove: IVP, 1994), 62-63.

[3] Plato, Symposium, 202e.

[4] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1159a.

[5] Jurgen Moltmann, Crucified God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 223.

[6] Ibid., 274.

[7] Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), I:290.

[8] Jurgen Moltmann, Church in the Power of the Spirit (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 62.

[9] Genesis Rabba, 69.3.

[10] Abraham J. Heschel, Man is not Alone (New York: FSG, 1979), 244.

[11] Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (Peabody: Prince Press, 2003), II:15.

[12] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, I:273-275, 308-319, 322-323. Pannenberg relies almost exclusively on Athanasius to construct his doctrine of the Trinity on this point.

[13] Moltmann, Crucified God, 193.

The Real Adam and the Historical Adam (Part Six)

2011-11-15T12:33:00.003-05:00

Links to Peter Enns Blog

Here some links where Peter Enns discusses some ideas about the real Adam without a historical Adam, which seem quite helpful. The later links get more and more clarified.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2011/11/talking-to-pastors-about-adam-and-evolution-options/

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2011/11/talking-to-pastors-about-adam-and-evolution-models-1/

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2011/11/talking-to-pastors-about-adam-and-evolution-models-2/

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2011/11/recurring-mistakes-in-the-adamevolution-discussion/

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2011/11/more-recurring-mistakes-in-the-adamevolution-discussion-2/

The Real Adam and the Historical Adam (Part Five)

2011-11-11T23:21:00.004-05:00

In Christ or in Adam: Understanding Our Sin and Christ’s Sinlessness

Now, if God is the story teller, then the Bible is true because it is God’s Word (and for no other reason that than ultimately), therefore, in a sense, Adam is made true by the Word of God, that is Christ. Without God, the story of Adam would be useless and false. Similarly, if all Scripture gave us was scientific facts, it would also have no power to save us and bring us to God, who is ultimate truth, ultimate reality. Compared to the true existence that is to live in Christ, all physical reality, all science is false.

In this regard, Adam is very real as our origin because he is made meaningful in Christ as the new Adam, our destination. While we think in terms of creation to eschatology, it might be helpful to think of God’s perspective and truth being the opposite, working from eternity into time, and thus from the eschaton, the final act, to creation. While we see Christ as one point in sequential time, one blip in the sequence of one thing happening after another, Scripture understands Christ as the “fullness of time.” Thus, it is through him that true history, true time is understood. Rather than seeing Christ’s meaning as dependent on Adam’s historicity, we might think of the Adam reality as being made meaningful by the full revelation of Christ in history. After all, does a non-Christian realize that they have been “in Adam” as a sinner truly (and truly meaning, authentically enough to understand the depravity of it and the necessity of repentance from it) until they are in Christ, the new Adam? Does a person truly understand the reality of being under the curse without having the hope of its destruction in the eschaton. Past and future is but the right and left hand of Christ, using both has he wills, make them true or false as he wills.

Now, after all those prefatory remarks, let us approach Genesis two and three in more detail.

As I have already pointed out, if we read these first chapters as history and science, then we end up rendering the text false. If these details cannot be understood as strictly historical or scientific, it would be inconsistent to try to rip Adam’s character out of the story and call it historical without the rest. This becomes quite evidence and difficult as Adam is introduced as a person in the sixth day in Genesis one, made after the creation of animals and simultaneously with woman, where the man in Genesis two is made before animals and at a different time than the woman! For the person that wants to interpret Adam as strictly historical, or wants to bracket Genesis two off as more historical then Chapter One, they will also have to answer the question of “Which Adam and when?!”

Second, a notion that I want to point out is that Adam seems to be a representative type or figure identified as representing all humanity. Adam in that passage means both the man and the woman, thus Adam as Adam in Genesis one seems more like a personification of all humanity than a particular person.

Now, notice something even more profound. Translators and commentators skip right over this! When does Adam get named as a particular person in the second creation story? Many translations do a sloppy job and say right off the bat Adam is identified. But that is not so! For most of the story the character is only known as “the man” (ha’adam not Adam). Notice that Adam in the second chapter only really gets called “Adam” as a named person in the curse (chapter three a chapter later) and likewise with Eve afterward. Until that point the characters are generic even de-personalized: “the man” and “woman.”

Why would a story teller delay this rather important detail? It is only in the curse, something in which all people find themselves in as finite, fallen creatures, that Adam and Eve are truly real particular people in the text. This I think points out that Adam and Eve have more a typological purpose, one that makes the meaning of these characters or people real. Adam and Eve only become real as we realize that we are under the fallenness of the curse, the curse that we all choose to act and be under. As we are in the curse, we are in Adam. These are the interpretations of St. Irenaeus and Athanasius in Church history, which I think comports better with our Evangelical sensibilities of an age of accountability (which contradicts an Augustinian or Reformed understanding of inherited guilt). In this regard, Baptists might have a much closer connection, or can be greatly reinforced in their theology of adult baptism, if we looked to Eastern Orthodox theology (which looks to Irenaeus and Athanasius, etc.).

Romans 5:12 points this out: “And so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned.” We have not simply inherited our curse from Adam against our will (which is a problem that the Augustinian formulation of that doctrine presents). Athanasius doctrine, interestingly enough, asserts that humans were created pre-curse as still finite, thus in a way mortal. Death, true death, for Athanasius is not that people can simply die as finite people, it is the possibility that occurs when sin causes the life apart from God’s love, which is eternal life, true life. Death is only true death if one lives and dies not knowing the peace of God.

Anyways I digress, Adam is real, as real as our sin is real, as real as we are all sinful, willfully corrupted by a world that is not as it should be, willingly eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (which is death) instead of the Tree of Life, willingly embracing a world that has not been brought to perfection in Christ’s eternity. We chose our sin, which is far more important for our theology than any pre-existing ontological conditions of sin. We chose to have Adam as our father, where we should not have, where Christ did not choose even though he was born into the same flesh, into the same ontological conditions of fallenness as every other person is, tempted with every temptation as we are in every way. We have all sinned therefore we are all in Adam.

Christ did not choose father Adam, he chose his Heavenly Father, obedient to become flesh to renew the flesh, become under the cursed for the cursed, unto death on the cross for those that deserve death on the cross. While Christ did not choose Adam, he took on our Adam-ness: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22).

The Real Adam and the Historical Adam (Part Four)

2011-11-11T23:19:00.004-05:00

How is Adam Real?

So, how could we understand that we are under the guilt of the curse and the conditions of a fallen world through Adam that may not be bound to a historical-scientific understanding of Adam’s reality? For this, I suggest an allegorical or literary meaning (which may have been the way Augustine even understood it – am currently researching that right now).

If we understand them as stories that God is using to explain unexplainable realities to humans, we can understand that God is telling us about two characters that explain our true origin, beyond what humans could ever be able to answer for ourselves (i.e. via science). Science and secular history may be able to offer all sorts of accounts of how humans evolved and where ancient hunter gathers popped up tens of thousands of years ago, but these have very little explanatory power when we ask ourselves “Where did all things come from? What does it mean to be truly human? Why is the world the way it is? What is the telos of the cosmos? Why do humans long for transcendence for their meaning in life beyond the physical?” For these answer, only deeper spiritual answers will ultimately do. This is why God tells us about Adam and Eve. As I explained with Leviathan, regardless of whether these people existed according to science and secular history, Adam and Eve are quite real. The story of Adam and Eve is told by God as a history of humanity deeper than secular science and history, and thus, the story did happen and, since we are all “in Adam” before we are “in Christ.”

Is there evidence in Scripture that Adam should be read allegorically? There is evidence that Paul understood Adam in this way. Adam is at times portrayed as a typological pattern from where all people spiritually have come from (i.e. sin, corruption, loss of innocence) to a new redeemed reality, more real than the first. Romans says, “Adam, who was a type [or pattern] of the one who is to come” (5:14). Now, if Paul was understanding Adam as a reality that God has told via an inspired story that becomes our history at a deeper level than our understand of science and history, Paul could and does speak of Adam as “in the past” while not strictly belonging to empirical history as we would understand it. Adam’s “past-ness” can be understood the same way that beings like Leviathan, Behemoth, and Rahab are understood as in our past, yet would be considered literary.

Now, some would use the world the derogatory word, "Mythology." When I use, if I use, the word “mythology,” I use it in a very different way than Greek false mythology. The obvious difference between pagan false mythology, the “fabricated myths” (denounced as false in 2 Pet. 2:3), and Christian “myths” (if we call it that, perhaps “origin stories” are more accurate) is that God is the story teller, not false teachers. Thus, Christian “myths” as inspired stories that communicate truths deeper than physical reality, communicating knowledge deeper than what humans can physically attain, actually demythologize our false mythology. (This understanding of the origin stories in Genesis is how many medieval theologians understood their genre).

I am reminded that when C.S. Lewis brought J.R.R. Tolkien to faith, Tolkien’s biggest objection beforehand, as a professor of literature, was that he felt the Bible could not be believed because it was full of “mythology.” To which Lewis responded, “of course it has mythology! But it is true mythology!” The answer was apparently quite convincing for Tolkien!

Now, our modern sensibilities just recoil at the thought of using the world “myth” to describe a story in the Bible, however, I think our culture, as it slowly rejects modernity’s obsession with science is also slowly understanding the inherent explanatory power of a meaningful story. The structure of narrative actually precedes epistemological or worldview structures in our brains as our stories, whether based on a story told to us or on our own narratives based on our own experience, form the lens by which all higher levels of cognition operate. In other words, rather than story requiring scientific validity, narratives actually form the core by which science is able to operate. In this regard, we much look to the stories of Scripture, whether in Genesis or Jesus’ parables, and ask ourselves, “What are these stories teaching us through their narrative presentation that is more powerful and beautiful than if they were simply a list of textbook facts?” As I have said before, sometimes fiction’s tell us facts that science knows nothing of, especially when God is the story teller.

The Real Adam and the Historical Adam (Part Three)

2011-11-11T23:11:00.004-05:00

Evangelical Additions to Adam

That being said, what does that mean for Adam? While before we get to that, we have to ponder the meaning of our doctrines that are connected to a historical Adam, particularly original innocence and original sin. Now these doctrines, as we frame them, is actually foreign to the apostolic witness. It was theorized in the way we understand it a few hundred years later by Augustine. Augustine, in many ways, invented the ideas of original sin, inherited guilt, and so on. In other words, before Augustine, these doctrines just were not framed the way they were as we know them.

Now, what we have done with Augustine, (or at least how he have come to understand Augustine - Augustine is always more complex than we give him credit for) is that we understand our fallenness to be something that was passed on from generation to generation through the seed of males. Jesus was sinless because he was born only of a woman, and thus, did not receive inherited guilt. Thus, all people are guilty of sin (except Jesus) at the point of our birth. Now, Augustine insisted that infants must be baptized in order to secure them from the curse, so that if they die they do not go to hell before they had a chance to profess faith. Reformed Baptists do a funny thing here and insist against the necessity of infant baptism by recourse to an “age of accountability” which seems to contradict the true reality of inherited guilt on all people at any stage of life. That gets really sloppy when we think through what the connection between age, accountability, and innocence entails (i.e. are the mentally handicapped safe? What about those with emotional harm and mental illness? What is the difference between them and those that physically have not heard the gospel, the unevangelized? What about those that heard the Gospel but never heard the Gospel in a convincing way? So on and so forth). I’ll get back to the tension between Baptist ecclesiology and its awkward marriage with Augustinian-Reformed hamartiology (doctrine of sin). I say that as a Baptist that deeply appreciates both Augustine and Calvin, but I also say that as an honest theologian.

Now this account of how sin gets passed along is in itself problematic as modern science has shown that the anatomy of reproduction is not the same as how the ancient near east understood it. The ANE understanding of reproduction was that the material by which the human came was exclusively from the man. The woman was merely the “soil” for the man’s “seed.” Now, we would all understand that women give the egg and her chromosomes to the baby. Thus, here would be a good example that if the doctrine of Christ’s sinlessness is tied to a scientific understanding of reproduction in Mary’s virgin birth and a genetic account of inherited guilt, the doctrine is rendered problematic as Mary would have passed on her fallenness in the same way.

Just as our sinfulness is not simply by our inherited guilt (as I will show, we inherit guilt because we choose it), Christ was truly the new Adam and sinless (because he did not choose to sin), not because he was born of a virgin. If so, if we make Adam into a historical-scientific entity, Christ would have received the same material, the same inherited guilt. His virgin birth by a woman is a doctrine meant to support his deity and humanity together against the Gnostics and Arians (who denied one or the other), rather than his human sinlessness per se.

The Real Adam and the Historical Adam (Part Two)

2011-11-11T18:13:00.003-05:00

The Word made Strange: History and True Stories

To reiterate what was said in a previous blog post, notice that that the entire creation process, which took an entire week in chapter one, is described as happening in one single day (v.4). Also notice that the order of creation is fundamentally different: Genesis One has animals then the man and then the woman, Genesis Two has the man, all the animals, then the woman. Moreover, the rivers in Genesis two actually flow in the wrong direction: they flow into Eden not out of. Thus, if we read these stories as scientific or strictly historical passages, we actually have to admit that these passages, on these scores, are contradictory to each other, and therefore false. This suggests that the genre of these passages is different than that of pure history, as we would understand it. These passages seem to be in the genre of inspired story or allegory.

So, my question is, as I attempt to connect my own dots, is whether understanding this passage in regards to Adam as a story rather than history undermine the doctrines that we construct through these passages? I am going to explore the possibility that there is no problem here: that the “real biblical Adam” is not a “historical Adam,” or that the reality of Adam and his doctrinal-theological teaching associated with this reality is not bound to the historicity of his character.

Now, most evangelicals would simple say that “real” must be scientific or historical. This is a problem in its own right, since we have imposed a modern sensibility of truth (truth as empirical correspondence) onto the text, which ironically means evangelical sense of biblical inerrancy ends up being quite liberal as the text’s authority is reduced to scientific authority. Of course, our sensibility of biblical inerrancy seems to presuppose that stories are errant since they are fictions and therefore “not real.” But let me ask you this: Why cannot God tell stories? Cannot God tell us about “real” things through stories? Jesus did with parables. If Jesus was God incarnate, then he was also truth incarnate. This means that if Christ told stories to communicate truth and reality, so can the rest of the Word.

With that in mind, the Hebraic understanding of meaning is something that simply does not comport with our cultures notion of “history” or “reference.” For example, the Bible refers to the monster Leviathan as real. Leviathan was a sea monster so big its tail coiled around the sea floor. Now, evangelicals do not think Leviathan exists. Most if not all evangelical commentators view this entity as a figural, mythical creature that came from the culture. This is firstly an ironic admission for people that insist on every (other) passage must be timeless, objective, factual truth in the modern sense. Second, it points out that the Hebraic sensibility was that something could have reality and meaning, but not necessarily have historical validity. If a modern person asked an ancient Hebrew whether they thought Leviathan exists, they would probably say “yes.” However, if you were to insist on getting a Hebrew to proof this or demonstrate the existence historically, the person would probably just stare at the modern person with a confused look on their face. Now, this in turn makes us, as modern people, stare back going, “How then is this true if it is not historical or scientific?”

This simply points out that the culture of Scripture is different than ours and we need to respect that. A bad rendering of our doctrine of biblical inerrancy absorbs the world of Scripture into the modern world. This cannot happen! Scripture is a place where the sky has a hard dome, man are made from breath and dirt, a place where donkeys talk, the sun stands still, and virgins give birth. Scripture is a weird place that does not fit our modern sensibilities of meaning and truth. It is an affront to our understanding of truth, really, and it must be respected as such.

Quite frankly I would very bored with Scripture if all it gave me was scientific facts! Thankfully, when the Word was made flesh, it was also made strange!

The Real Adam and the Historical Adam (Part One)

2011-11-11T17:05:00.002-05:00

A Disappointing Discussion

I have noticed a lot of hoopla happening regarding the question of the historical Adam. Quite frankly I am a bit disappointed with the discussion.

This discussion began with a professor at Calvin College (I believe he was a social scientist, not a theologian), who under permission by the dean, published a paper arguing that there is no genetic or archeological evidence of a historical Adam. The professor was shortly afterwards forced to “retire” early by the president of the college, who got the man to sign a gag order as part of his retirement package. In other words, the president forced him to resign (out of fear that the college would lose financial support) and forced him to sign a document saying that if the prof spoke about being forced to resign, the college could sue him. Now, theology aside, this is utterly dishonest university politics, let alone Christian scholarship. The fact that the president would force the man to sign a gag order is simply shameful. It was only the friend of the prof who ended up speaking out.

My question as a Christian scholar is was this the appropriate way to deal with this individual? If he had honest questions and evidence to add to the discussion, we need to discuss it, discuss it with him, and in truth let him think through the hard questions and see where he goes. Anything less hurts the intellectual credibility of our institutions and our faith.

That said, his thoughts have given me a lot to think about. Is the real Adam a historical Adam? This issue has one massive conundrum for theology that we need to honestly acknowledge: If we interpret that all of truth of the reality of Adam is located in his historicity, then in the event that this professor’s thoughts are vindicated, we have just rendered one of the foundational doctrines of our faith, and all doctrines we connect to that, as null and void. However, if we undermine the reality of Adam, particularly those parts that seem to speak of a historical meaning, we end up demeaning a potentially vital origin for our faith. So, with these catch 22 stated, let me try to think this problem through.

Which is the greater risk? Well some would very rigorously insist that if we lose the historical Adam this is the greater risk. However, we must keep in mind that in reformation history that great devastation that occurred when the Reformers insisted on a geocentric cosmology, that is the scientific and historical nature of Genesis One, the ancient cosmology of a flat earth, domed sky etc., that these were directly taught in Scripture as revelatory fact (rather than as a inspired contextualized story as I have argued for). The monumental upset that occurred when Copernicus was vindicated over and over, when science was able to improve lives where the Church plotted and bickered against people, rendered the Reformers polemics against the astronomers fatal to themselves: They insisted that people must choose the Bible or the astronomers, the Word of God or the Word of foolish men. The monumental failure of Enlightenment Protestantism was to not have considered the possibility that they could be wrong, to the loss of many, many souls. While some people will disagree with the following reflection, I am simply, as a theologian, attempting to cover our bases, asking the difficult questions, for the sake of the possibility of the loss of many future souls. We cannot protect our congregants by fear mongering and saying if we reject the historical Adam, we risk to have the whole faith come crashing down. If we frame it that way, eventually one bold individual, one professor or scientist, may quite innocently cause the whole thing to come crashing down. It happened after the Reformation with Copernicus and the heliocentric universe; it could happen now with the historical Adam.

Thoughts on Fellowship Convention on Baptism

2011-11-09T22:58:00.005-05:00

I had the pleasure of going to the Fellowship’s national convention this week, in which a doctrinal amendment was proposed regarding Baptism and Communion (or the Eucharist or the Lord’s Table). The speaker explained that a motion had gone forward to remove the language of Baptism as preceding the Lord’s Table based on the fact that most Fellowship Baptist Churches are simply not practicing this order. This I found to be an interesting point to ponder for a couple reasons:

1. As an issue of methodology, if this is a legitimate amendment, this indicates that the nature of our confession of doctrine implies that by reflecting on the practice of our churches, we can deduce the implicit theology that we have not articulated yet. This seems to reverse, whether legitimately or illegitimately, the idea that theory (doctrine) precedes practice, or more importantly, that theology is constructed by reflecting on what the local church implicitly beliefs in its way of being, rather than theology being constructed by theologians from above first, then imposed on the believer and local church after.

As a theologian, I find this in principle humbling and troubling: troubling because I am a theologian that sees the value of precise theoretical reflection to refine the doctrine of the church for the church. However, there are many instances in Church history where the practice corrected the doctrine. The most notable instance is with the Arian controversy. Let me explain: During the Arian controversy, most theologians at the time actually sided with Arius saying this theology was the most theoretically precise. However, as Athanasius pointed out, this was not what the local churches confessed or practiced in its prayer life. In other words, Athanasius corrected the theologians by pointing out what the practice of the churches was, which was the practice of praying and confessing the three and oneness of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, co-equal in deity. Thus, secondly, I find this issue humbling, as a theologian, since I must confess that theologains do not rule the church, nor bishops, nor a magisterium, nor an ethereal doctrinal statement. Baptists in particular believe in the confessional autonomy of the average believer and their local church to explore, live out faith, and reflect on that through the leading of the Spirit in the Word, and our doctrine must reflect that leading and reflection, not in the university, not attempting epistemological and theoretical precision, but in the life of the church, through the life of the church, as the church lives and loves and listens to the Spirit.

2. That being said, I have heard a lot of people say, “How did the early church practice it?” This is both a helpful and an unhelpful question. It is helpful in that we must be faithful to the tradition we have received, to listen to all the guidance of all the saints throughout time. However, is the Bible’s meaning and practice bound to the first century? Do we have to practice all things exactly the way the ancient near eastern Greco-Roman churches practiced things? If we insist that our practices must correspond to the ancient church, we would find that many of our practices are not as they were practiced, and even more, probably even shocking to a first century believer (one of which would be Baptism).

Moreover, the nostalgia of perpetually wanting to get back to a certain golden age of church practice is quite unhelpful. Nostalgia is necrophilia. We will never be in the same context as the early church or as the Reformation. These things had their day, eventually lost momentum and died off. Things like the Enlightenment happened. Things like the fracturing of Christendom and secularism has happened. These were unique challenges that the Church had never faced before and forever changed the way the Church did Church. While the Church will always be in its essence the body of Christ, how that looks will change from time to time. While we can learn and must listen to the Great Tradition of faithful believers that passed on a witness of what orthodox faith looks like, let me say the uncomfortable and often unwelcome fact that now is not then, and there is no way back; we must move forward; we cannot reproduce the pass; we can only attempt faithful re-appropriation lead by the Word and Spirit.

3. I was really quite surprised at just how many pastors really did not feel strong about the order of Baptism preceding the Lord’s Supper (and thus wanted to drop it). While many muttered that this party was clearly accommodated to postmodern individualist culture, their reasons for wanting to remove the statement were to use the Eucharist to evangelize, to invite people into the church. Thus, I am very reluctant to accuse any in this party of accommodation to their culture. This is an atrocious fallacy that makes the discussion disingenuous. If we are to have an honest discussion in the Church as Bible believing pastors, we should not accuse any of accommodation, and then look to Scripture to make assertions to test and reflect on, offering arguments for and against without ad hominem attacks (Unfortunately, I find that most theology is essentially an ad hominem: don’t listen x he is a y, where y is anything from a postmodernist to an equalitarian to a universalist or a liberation theologian). I think the fellowship should organize formal debates by advocates of different positions to educate and argue through the issues in a more thorough matter.

Now, given that the party that does not see Baptism as a necessity to partake in communion, I had an interesting thought: did Judas take communion? See, it seems that the motive behind removing the necessity is to invite people into the community, into the unconditional love of Christ. For this, it seems that the Eucharist is prefigured in the work of Christ in eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners. This is profound for our notion of church purity: Christ, according to the Jewish sensibility of purity, by communing with these people, was making himself impure. Paul says that “for our sake, he who had no sin, became sin.” Christ’s purity was his radical invitation to live with the unrighteous as one of them to the point of dying as one of them. What ecclesiological implications does this have, let alone for the Lord’s Supper?

In the Lord’s Table narrative, the institution of the sacrament is sandwiched between the betrayal narrative of Judas and the betrayal prophesy of Peter. What are the gospel writers communicating in telling the narrative that way? It may be significant to our understanding of the sacrament to know that Christ invited his worst betrayers into communion as he knew and foretold their betrayal. Understood this way, we must not impose a pharisaic sensibility of purity in the order of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper as the Lord’s Supper is truly the communion of the sinless one with those that betrayed him, those that committed unforgivable sins, where invited to eat of Christ’s flesh and blood, becoming one with him. Christ ate with tax collectors, traitors, and sinners, and because of this, we participate in the life of God, to eat at his family table.

4. One person spoke of the necessity of looking to typological prefiguring of Baptism and the Eucharist in the Old Testament. This point got me thinking. He argued that because the crossing of the Red Sea is understood as a prefiguring of Baptism, and that this precedes the eating of manna which is understood as prefiguring the Eucharist bread, Baptism must precede the Eucharist. I agree that he must read Baptism and the Eucharist through a typological and theological prefigure in the Old Testament, but then I ask two things: First, the Passover, the very ritual that the Lord’s Supper was enacted in and through as the event of the New Covenant through the Old, occurred before the crossing of the Red Sea, the prefigure of Baptism.

Now, if the basis of the Eucharist is in the celebration of Passover, as Jewish Christians were brought to faith, they were participating in a pre-Eucharist before realizing the fullness of the Covenant (New and Old) that is made complete in Christ and celebrated in the Eucharist as the true Passover. This may indicate that one can engage in the activity of the Eucharist before Baptism, but only the fullness of the meaning of the action is understood through Christ, after repentance and the action of Baptism.

5. That being said, I personally, I find the order of Baptism and Eucharist to have a sequential pattern. The highest argument for this and all our theology is the life of Christ. Christ was baptized as an adult (thus we believe in adult baptism) and he instated the Eucharist post-Baptism. Thus the most true and meaningful and beautiful expression of the Eucharist is only through Baptism, through the water, to the bread and wine, the flesh and the blood.

6. Therefore, as a mediating position between those that argue for Baptism preceding participation in the Eucharist and those that argue in the non-necessity of Baptism for invitation into the Eucharist, maybe the possibility of practicing both in our local churches as they see fit, if all churches recognize that the full meaning of Communion, while it can be taken by any person as Christ ate with sinners, tax collectors, and even those that betrayed him, its celebration of the cross, its remembrance of Christ’ sacrifice, its “participation in the body of Christ,” is only made possible through the purity of repentance, and thus through Baptism and thus, after Baptism.

7. I am fully aware that neither side will probably find my musings satisfying. They, both, will either see my synthesis as attempting to claim two contradictory things, committing either compromise or bad conservatism. To which I happily admit to the impossibility and absurdity of my thoughts, submitting to the collective decision of our Fellowship as guided by Word and Spirit.