James' Thoughts and Musings

Josh's Balanced Post on the Mark Driscoll Controversy

2012-01-28T17:38:00.000-05:00

Here is a relatively balanced post on Mark Driscoll at Joel Watts’ blog, Unsettled Christianity. It’s by Josh, a doctoral student in sociology. I am definitely a part of the anti-Driscoll crowd that Josh discusses (even though I have occasionally written positive things about Mark Driscoll). Some of that is based on things that I have seen or read Mark Driscoll say, which comes across to me as pompous, narrow-minded, dogmatic, and controlling. Some of that comes from my own negative experiences with evangelicalism, which have nothing to do with Mark Driscoll specifically, but which come to my mind whenever I see Mark Driscoll perpetuate his macho brand of Christianity, or tell people to believe such-and-such, or promote accountability within small groups.

I agree with Josh that Mars Hill church, broadly speaking, is probably not a cult. It’s most likely like a lot of evangelical megachurches. If I were to go to Seattle and to visit the services, I seriously doubt that I would be pressured to do anything—-or that people there would notice me at all. Consequently, I should not judge people who go to Mars Hill—-and I won’t, as long as they don’t get in my face telling me what I should do.

Moreover, perhaps not every small group at Mars Hill is bad. People can probably have rewarding experiences at Mars Hill’s small groups. And yet, even though Josh is correct that we have only read Andrew’s side of the story (for background, see the links here), and that there’s a likelihood that a miscommunication was going on (and I’d say what tips me off to that is that Andrew feels that he repented, whereas the church officials get the impression that he has not), the controlling tone of the repentance contract and the notice to the church’s social community that Andrew is being disciplined turn me off from wanting to be a part of a church like Mars Hill, or any evangelical church that stresses small groups and accountability. Sure, I do not have to judge the entire movement. But I can decide for myself where I want to go when it comes to church.

Josh had good advice, both for those who are anti-Driscoll, and also for those who are pro-Driscoll (perhaps because they go to his church). The post is worth the read.

Leslie Keeney on Mark Driscoll's Definition of Successful Ministry

2012-01-28T12:46:00.001-05:00

I’ve been enjoying Leslie Keeney’s posts on Joel Watts’ blog (see here), and so I was pleased to learn that she has her own blog, the ruthless monk. Leslie is a graduate student at Liberty University, where she is pursuing a Masters of Philosophical Studies.

In a recent post, Why Our Definition of “Successful Ministry” Is Problematic, Leslie takes aim at some remarks that Mark Driscoll made in an interview with Justin Brierley. Here are some excerpts from her post:

“At one point in the interview with Bierley, Driscoll berates the UK church for being cowards. As proof of this cowardice, Driscoll demands that the Brierley ‘name one, good Bible teacher that is know across Britain. You don’t have one, that is the problem.’ Then, later in the interview when Brierley revealed that his wife pastors a church, Driscoll responds by asking about the size of the church ‘You look at your results,’ he says ‘and you look at my results and look at the variable that is the most obvious.’

“Now, several bloggers that I read (and probably many more that I don’t) recognized the obvious cultural biases in these statements. To Driscoll—and thousands like him—the ‘success’ of any church or ministry is measured by the number of people saved and the number of celebrity preachers created. I would go one step further and say that not only do most U.S. churches see growth and celebrity as proof of success, but that many of these same people assume that our standard of success must, necessarily, be the measure of success used by the rest of the world. In his hubris, Driscoll reveals the American church’s self-centered belief that our model of church should be the model for the church universal…

“We can all name any number of ‘successful’ celebrity pastors who espouse bad theology. We can also all name any number of charismatic non-Christians throughout history with huge followings and evil intentions. History demonstrates over and over again that being famous and influential is not evidence that a person is speaking the truth…

“In response to the Driscoll dust-up, Andrew Jones posted a wonderful piece about the differences between American and UK churches. In addition to being a world traveler with first-person experience in a wide variety of Christian communities around the world, Andrew lived in both the US and the UK for several years. In his post ‘The English Church that went up a Mountain, but came down a Hill,’ Andrew lists several significant differences between the two countries, including a suspicion of religious celebrities. According to Andrew, the Fresh Expressions movement in the UK has established 3000 Christian communities in the last few years, they just haven’t produced a ‘big-name’ teacher. By American standards, is this a ‘successful’ ministry?”

Well said, Leslie.

The Benefit of a Doubt

2012-01-28T12:02:00.000-05:00

I’d like to revisit my post yesterday, Was Romney Sincere?

I quoted conservative columnist Ann Coulter, who was talking about Romney’s 1994 run against Ted Kennedy for the U.S. Senate, when Romney was attempting to convince Massachusetts voters that he was pro-choice. Coulter said the following:

“Nearly two decades ago, when Romney was trying to defeat champion desecrator of life Sen. Teddy Kennedy, he sought to remove abortion as a campaign issue by declaring that he, too, supported Roe v. Wade. (Nonetheless, Kennedy ran a campaign commercial against him featuring a Mormon woman complaining that Romney, as a Mormon elder, had pressured her not to have an abortion, but to give the child up for adoption. Are you getting the idea that Massachusetts is different from the rest of America, readers?)”

When I first read this, I was puzzled. Would Ted Kennedy and the liberals in Massachusetts really criticize Mitt Romney for encouraging a woman to have her baby and to give the child up for adoption rather than having an abortion? I suppose that there are some liberals who would be appalled by a woman not choosing abortion. They may see the fetus as a mere blob of tissue and think that the woman is holding herself back and giving in to religious extremists by having the child, and so they’d encourage her to have the abortion. But my impression (based upon the liberals I know and have read or seen on TV) is that many liberals would not be rooting for the woman to have the abortion. They’d want for her to make her own choice, based on what she thinks. And, while they most likely would not want for Mitt Romney or the government to pressure the woman to have the baby, I doubt that they’d see Romney as evil for doing so as a private citizen. But that’s my impression, and I could be wrong.

It turns out that there may be more to the issue, though. This article by Charles Johnson on Romney and abortion is worth reading. Johnson says: “In 2007, Judy Dushku recalled a published anonymous article in her feminist Mormon magazine, Exponents II, by a Mormon woman who wanted to have an abortion in 1990 when Mitt Romney was a stake president. (The article did not mention Mitt Romney by name, but Dushku later identified him.) The woman, Carrel Hilton Sheldon, has since come forward. Sheldon claims that Romney worked very hard to prevent her from having an abortion, even though her doctor (also a Mormon and past stake president) said her pregnancy might take her life. The woman ultimately had the abortion.”

The article to which Johnson links says the following, quoting from a New York Times article:

“In 1990, Exponent II, a Mormon feminist magazine that Ms. Dushku, the Suffolk University professor, helped found, published an article by a married mother of four who recounted her own experience after doctors advised her to terminate her pregnancy when she was being treated for a potentially dangerous blood clot. Her bishop got wind of the situation, she wrote, and showed up unannounced at the hospital, warning her sternly not to go forward. The article did not identify Mr. Romney as the bishop, but Ms. Dushku later did. Now the woman has come forward, identifying herself in Mr. Scott’s book as Carrel Hilton Sheldon. (Through Ms. Dushku, she declined to be interviewed.) ‘Mitt has many, many winning qualities,” she is quoted as saying, “but at the time he was blind to me as a human being.’”

See here and here.

I do not know if that was the case that Kennedy was talking about (for Romney encouraged women not to abort more than once), but it would make sense to me if it was. I doubt that Massachusetts liberals would see Romney as evil for thinking that abortion was wrong and for gently seeking to persuade a woman to have her baby and to put the child up for adoption rather than choosing abortion. But they would have serious problems with Romney doing so in an arrogant manner that callously disregarded the life and health of the woman, especially when giving birth could cost her life. (And I say this while remembering that the Mormon church allows abortion to save the life of the mother, and that Romney’s current pro-life position contains a “life of the mother” exception. Perhaps Romney the elder did not feel that the woman’s life was at risk.)

But I not only give Massachusetts liberals the benefit of a doubt (as opposed to seeing them as monstrous fanatics rooting for women to have abortions). I do the same for Republicans, too. For example, I read an article yesterday on a liberal site, New Hampshire GOP Introduce Bills To Roll Back Domestic Violence Laws. These bills may very well undermine domestic violence laws (and there is discussion in the comments section about whether they will do so). But I seriously doubt that the Republicans introducing these bills actually support domestic violence. Why? Because I don’t think that people are thoroughly evil. Proud? Yes. Selfish? Yes. Greedy? Yes. But actively rooting for people to be hurt? I don’t think so.

Psalm 61

2012-01-28T09:30:00.000-05:00

For my weekly quiet time, I will comment on select verses of Psalm 61 in the King James Version, which is in the public domain.

To the chief Musician upon Neginah, [A Psalm] of David.

¹Hear my cry, O God; attend unto my prayer.

²From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I.

According to Marvin Tate, the end of the earth refers to a distant place (Psalm 19:5; 46:10; 135:7; Deuteronomy 13:7; 28:49, 64; Isaiah 5:26; etc.). What is the setting for the Psalmist crying out to God from a distant place? One view is that Psalm 61 is about David's flight from Absalom: David (as king) is away from his home and from God's sanctuary in Jerusalem because he is fleeing from Absalom, and so David cries out to God from where he is----a distant place----with the hope that God will lead him back to Mount Zion, the rock that is higher than David. A second view is that Psalm 61 is about a king who is at war, away from his home. The king either is sacrificing at Jerusalem in anticipation of his time away from home, or he is crying to God at the battle site. Tate notes that the Egyptian king Rameses II prayed to a god while he was on a distant campaign in Kadesh, and Sigmund Mowinckel appeals to I Samuel 14:33ff.----in which Saul builds an altar during a battle----to demonstrate that a king could call out to God in a cultic fashion even when he was far away from the official sanctuary. A third view is that Psalm 61 is by Jewish exiles, who are distant from their homeland and who want for God to restore them to the land of Israel as well as re-establish the Davidic monarchy. A fourth view is that the "end of the earth" is metaphorical for distance from God: the Psalmist cries out to God even when he feels far away from God. And a fifth view is that the "end of the earth" relates to the netherworld, and that the Psalmist is crying out to God while he is on the brink of death. Mitchell Dahood holds to the netherworld interpretation.

What is the "rock that is higher than I"? One view is that the Psalmist is asking for God to help him to overcome obstacles that are impossible for him to surmount by himself, which means that the higher rock is an obstacle. Another view is that the higher rock refers to God, who is called a rock throughout the Psalms (Psalm 18; 28:1; 42:9; etc.), and that the Psalmist here is expressing his faith that God is higher and stronger than he is, which is why the Psalmist is depending on God. A third view is that the Psalmist is saying that he is drowning and that he needs a rock that is higher than he is----since a higher rock is where he can be safe from the waters. The Septuagint has something different: in the rock you did lift me up. According to Tate, the Septuagint's understanding of that verse lacks mimmenni ("than I").

³For thou hast been a shelter for me, and a strong tower from the enemy.

⁴I will abide in thy tabernacle for ever: I will trust in the covert of thy wings. Selah.

⁵For thou, O God, hast heard my vows: thou hast given me the heritage of those that fear thy name.

⁶Thou wilt prolong the king's life: and his years as many generations.

The Hebrew that the KJV translates as "as many generations" is kemo dor va-dor, which literally means "as generation and generation". As Tate notes, dor va-dor often means "a succession of generations with no defined end" (Psalm 10:6; 45:18; Joel 2:2; 4:20). So is the Psalmist asking God that the king might live forever? But the Davidic king was a mere mortal, so how could he live forever? Different explanations have been proposed. One explanation is that the ancient Near East used larger-than-life language about kings. Kings were told to live forever (I Kings 1:31; Nehemiah 2:3; etc.), for example. Marc Brettler in the Jewish Study Bible states that the description of the king's life as perpetual may reflect the notion that the king was close to being divine (Psalm 45:7). A second explanation is that the king is hoping that his dynasty might last forever, meaning that v 6 is about the king's dynasty rather than the king himself. The fourth century Christian exegete Theodore of Mopsuestia goes with this solution, and he relates this verse to the hope of the Jewish exiles that God will re-establish the Davidic dynasty such that it is perpetual, so that they would no longer have to fear or experience captivity. A third explanation is that David is conflating himself with his descendant, Jesus Christ, who lives eternally. A fourth explanation is that David is asking that his example might be known for many generations, even after he dies. And a fifth explanation is that v 6 concerns David's hope for an afterlife.

The Targum for Psalm 61 maintains that v 6 is asking God to give a king a life that lasts for many generations. Because it does not believe that God is redundant in repeating the word "generation" in the phrase "as generation and generation", it maintains that the two generations are referring to different things. According to the Targum, the Psalmist is saying that the Messiah's years will be like the generations of this age and the generations of the age to come, meaning (it seems) that the Messiah will live for a very long time. The Jewish exegete Rashi, however, goes a different route, for Rashi says that David is hoping that his years will be as long as a generation, seventy years, meaning that Rashi believes that David is asking here, not for an unrealistically long life, but rather for God to rescue him from pre-mature death so that he can live a full life----a life that is as long as a generation. At the same time, in his interpretation of v 4 ("I will abide in thy tabernacle for ever"), Rashi says that David is hoping to praise God in this world and in the World to Come, meaning that Rashi is bringing the afterlife into his discussion of v 4.

I'll discuss briefly a relevant point: Did Judaism believe that the Messiah would live forever? The Targum appears to say so, and, in John 12:34, some Jews tell Christ that the law says that the Christ abides forever, which is why they are baffled by Jesus' statement that he will be lifted up. The Book of Jeremiah, however, does not seem to envision a single Davidic monarch who will live forever, but rather it envisions the restoration of the dynasty itself, which will have more than one king (Jeremiah 33:26). At some point, a belief in a restored and perpetual Davidic dynasty was replaced by a belief in a restored and perpetual Davidic individual. (Or things may have been more complex than that, since perhaps different people had different ideas.)

Because the king is referred to in the third person in Psalm 61:6, interpreters have wondered if the king is saying this Psalm about himself, or if other Israelites are speaking about the king. Tate says that the king could speak about himself in the third person, for we see that in Jeremiah 38:5 and in fifth century B.C.E. Phoenician inscriptions. But Tate is open to the possibility that other Judahites are asking God to prolong the king's life. A possible setting for that would be the events right before the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E., when people of Judah asked God to protect their king----Zedekiah, and Jehoiachin, the king in exile.

⁷He shall abide before God for ever: O prepare mercy and truth, which may preserve him.

The Septuagint has something different for the second clause, namely, "Who will seek out his mercy and truth?" (Brenton's translation). According to Tate, the Septuagint is taking the word translated in the KJV as "prepare" (man, from m-n-h) as the Aramaic particle man, which can mean "who?" or "what?". My guess is that the Septuagint may be understanding the word that the KJV translates as "may preserve him" (which is from the root n-ts-r) to refer to seeking out because n-ts-r can mean watching, or observing. According to Theodore of Mopsuestia, the Psalmist is asking who will seek out God's mercy and truth that the Israelites might be restored to their land. The MT, however, may be saying that mercy and truth uphold the king's throne, either because God's mercy and solidity keep the king reigning, or because the king's reign is rooted in upholding goodness and truth, or perhaps both.

⁸So will I sing praise unto thy name for ever, that I may daily perform my vows.

In Charles Spurgeon's Treasury of David, William Gurnall says that prayers without vows are blank, for we should praise God for his mercy that he shows us, or serve God (in some manner) with what he grants us. I personally do not make vows before God, for I hope that he will help me out of his love and pity for me, not because I make promises. Moreover, I would not tell God to (say) give me an academic position in religion and offer in return to defend God's truth of conservative Christianity because I don't believe that conservative Christianity is the full truth----or, more accurately, I prefer for scholarship to be open rather than forced into a conservative Christian mold. But I can see Gurnall's point that we should somehow honor God in our prayers----that we should do more than ask God for stuff.

Was Romney Sincere?

2012-01-27T19:04:00.000-05:00

Ann Coulter recently wrote that Mitt Romney is a true conservative. In his 1994 Senate race against Ted Kennedy, Romney affirmed his support for Roe vs. Wade. Now, however, he claims to be pro-life. Ann Coulter states the following about this:

“Romney’s one great ‘flip-flop’ is on abortion. (I thought the reason we argued with people about abortion was to try to get them to ‘flip-flop’ on this issue. Sometimes it works!) Nearly two decades ago, when Romney was trying to defeat champion desecrator of life Sen. Teddy Kennedy, he sought to remove abortion as a campaign issue by declaring that he, too, supported Roe v. Wade. (Nonetheless, Kennedy ran a campaign commercial against him featuring a Mormon woman complaining that Romney, as a Mormon elder, had pressured her not to have an abortion, but to give the child up for adoption. Are you getting the idea that Massachusetts is different from the rest of America, readers?) Romney changed his mind on abortion — not when it was politically advantageous, but when it mattered. As governor of liberal, pro-choice Massachusetts, he vetoed an embryonic stem cell bill and ‘worked closely’ with Massachusetts Citizens for Life. The president of MCL recently issued a statement saying that, ‘since being elected governor, Mitt Romney has had a consistent commitment to the culture of life.’”

Coulter appears to be saying two things, which may be contradictory. On the one hand, she is saying that Romney went from being pro-choice to being pro-life when he was Governor of Massachusetts, which is basically Romney’s story. On the other hand, she seems to be implying that Romney only pretended to be pro-choice when he was running against Ted Kennedy because Romney sought to “remove abortion as a campaign issue” in a state that was rabidly liberal.

If the latter is the case, then I have serious issues with Mitt Romney. Here’s why: According to an article in Salon by Justin Elliott, a close relative of Romney died in an illegal abortion in 1963, which was prior to Roe vs. Wade. This lady was the sister of Romney’s brother-in-law. When Ted Kennedy in 1994 was attacking Romney for being “multiple-choice” on abortion, since Romney opposed abortion yet said that he wanted it to be legal, Romney sought to buttress his pro-choice credentials by talking about how the death of his relative shaped his views on abortion. Romney fired back to Kennedy:

“On the idea of ‘multiple-choice,’ I have to respond. I have my own beliefs, and those beliefs are very dear to me. One of them is that I do not impose my beliefs on other people. Many, many years ago, I had a dear, close family relative that was very close to me who passed away from an illegal abortion. It is since that time that my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter. And you will not see me wavering on that.”

I hope that Romney was sincere when he was speaking those words, and wasn’t just using his relative’s death to score political points. I would be disgusted at an insincere use of such a tragedy for political gain. But I would understand Romney appealing to that tragedy to explain how he became pro-choice.

Segal on Paul, Judaism, and Conversion

2012-01-27T08:00:00.000-05:00

I'm continuing my way through Alan Segal's Paul the Convert. I have two items:

1. For this first item, my understanding may be flawed, but, for the purpose of interaction with this book (however imperfect that interaction may be), I'll still say how I am understanding Segal's argument. Segal says at one point that instantaneous conversions were looked down upon in the ancient world, since many people preferred for conversions to occur after a period of education. Paul's conversion was instantaneous, even though it was followed by a degree of education within the Christian community, for Paul does quote Christian teaching that was handed down to him. At the same time, although Paul's instantaneous conversion was unusual compared to how conversions back then often took place, there are (according to Segal) a few places in ancient Judaism in which conversion is accompanied by some sort of ecstatic experience, which is what Paul undergoes.

This item is about conversion, so I will highlight another point that Segal makes about that topic. Segal does not believe that Paul was simply a Jew who was embracing and proclaiming the one whom he believed was the Jewish Messiah. Segal acknowledges that there were Jewish-Christians who fit this description, which means that they were technically not converts, for they were remaining within Judaism, on some level. (My understanding here may be flawed, however, for Segal does argue that joining a new religious community with its own set of values is an element of conversion, and it is the case that Jews who became Jewish-Christians joined the Christian community, even though they also remained part of the larger body of Israel, by worshiping at the temple, etc.) Paul, however, was a convert from one system of thought to another. He went from being a Pharisaic Jew to being one who viewed the Torah as temporary and did not think that Gentiles (or, presumably, he himself) had to observe its ritual requirements to be part of Israel (but, according to Segal, Paul did regard the moral requirements of the Torah, the Noachide Commandments, to be binding on Gentiles). Paul was a convert, not a Jewish-Christian. (Paul was a Jew and also a Christian, but not a Jewish-Christian, the way that Jewish-Christians were.)

2. I turn now to the Noachide Commandments, the laws that many rabbis believed were binding on Gentiles, whom they did not think had to observe the entire Torah. Segal argues that this belief emerged because conversion to Judaism was stigmatized in the first century C.E. Josephus' story about Izates (see here) shows that Gentiles did not like for their Gentile rulers to become circumcised, and so there were Jews who held that Gentiles could please God and honor the Torah without circumcision. And, in the late first century, in the aftermath of Jewish revolts, there were Roman imperial attacks on proselytism. On page 112, Segal says that some Jews thought Gentiles should obey the entire Torah, whereas others held that Gentiles could observe the Noachide Commandments to please God, since conversion would result in a blacklash from Gentiles----against the converts and also against the Jews.

Andrew's Brother, Stephen, on Rigid Doctrines and Real-life People

2012-01-26T13:19:00.002-05:00

I wrote yesterday about Andrew’s experience with church “discipline” at Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill Church, which has been a prominent topic of discussion throughout the Internet over the past few days. On Matthew Paul Turner’s site, there is an excellent piece by Andrew’s brother Stephen. Stephen makes a point that, in my opinion, is important and poignant:

“One reason I count Lars von Trier’s 2003 film Dogville, starring Nicole Kidman and Paul Bettany, as one of my favorite films, one I’m constantly recommending, is because I see a part of myself in the character played by Bettany, someone more interested in hypothetical situations and ideas than in how they affect the real flesh-and-blood people surrounding him, with the tragic consequences playing out on the stage over the three hours von Trier takes to tell the story. It is one of my biggest regrets today, when I look back at the years I was a fundamentalist, that when my mother was struggling with the idea of divorce from my father – an action she had been counseled to take by multiple sources for legal purposes, partly so that his inevitable future financial troubles would not destroy the new life she was trying to piece together – that I was for a long time strongly opposed to it, because, I was sure, ‘the Bible is clear.’ It didn’t matter that this course of action was only considered after God, my father said, had told him to kill her and us kids, or that a judge had already issued a permanent restraining order. The Bible was still clear. Sin was still sin. Divorce was wrong. I was, it should be noted, being faithful to the ideas I had learned growing up in church, convinced that principles are always more important than people, that everything is always black and white, ambiguity be damned.”

Conversion, Exalted One

2012-01-26T08:00:00.001-05:00

I started Alan Segal's Paul the Convert. There were two interesting items in my reading so far. First, Segal attempts to demonstrate that Paul indeed was a convert, against thinkers such as Krister Stendahl who maintain that Paul merely saw himself as one who was called to be a missionary to the Gentiles, not as a convert from one religion to another. According to Segal, Paul contrasts his life then and his life now as well as talks about his transformation, and that fits our understanding of conversion. While Segal acknowledges that Paul did not say that he repented----when repentance, according to Judaism and Christianity, was a key ingredient of conversion----Segal says that Paul was a convert according to definitions today, not necessarily according to how conversion was conceptualized in Paul's day. (UPDATE: I may be misunderstanding Segal here, for he later appears to argue that Paul was a convert according to ancient standards.) Segal says that Paul leaves out repentance, in part, on the basis of Paul's statement in Philippians 3 that he was blameless in his observance of the law before he came to Christ. But, in my opinion, repentance and transformation are similar, and Paul did believe that where he was as a Christian was better than where he was as a Pharisee.

Second, Segal talks about the belief in Second Temple and subsequent Judaism (albeit not rabbinic Judaism) that God has exalted certain human beings (i.e., Enoch, Moses) to a status of heavenly ruler, and sometimes has even given them his own name. I've asked before why the early Christians believed that Jesus had a divine sort of status. Did Jesus claim that for himself? Maybe Jesus did not, but his followers believed that he was a special and a righteous man and applied to him what others applied to Enoch and others: they said that God exalted Jesus to become a heavenly ruler. I don't know.

Mark Driscoll's Church "Discipline"

2012-01-25T12:57:00.001-05:00

I’d like to share some links on Mark Driscoll’s program of church discipline at Mars Hill Church. These links are about a young man named Andrew, who was recently subjected to that discipline.

Matthew Paul Turner, Mark Driscoll’s Church Discipline Contract: Looking For True Repentance at Mars Hill Church? Sign on the Dotted Line.

Matthew Paul Turner, Mark Driscoll’s ‘Gospel Shame’: The Truth About Discipline, Excommunication, and Cult-like Control at Mars Hill.

Dr. Robert Cargill, how much more evidence do you need? mark driscoll’s mars hill church is a cult.

Sarah Moon, Mark Driscoll, spiritual abuse, and fluffy bunnies…

This is why I am very reluctant to get involved in conservative Christianity. This church has a right to run itself as it sees fit, but I don’t have to be a part of it. And I do not believe for a moment that I will go to hell on account of that! I’ll stick with mainline Protestantism, or attending Catholic churches. As a Catholic told me in response to all of this, the Catholic church dealt with the issue of sin and repentance years ago by setting up the confessional. You sin, you confess to a priest, and you go out of the booth and try to live the right way. There doesn’t have to be meeting after meeting with church officials, who are eager to exercise their “authority” and to show how spiritually superior they think they are. There doesn’t have to be a threat hanging over the person’s head (even if it is merely implied) that those officials will go public with what the person did wrong if the person doesn’t play ball. Heck, even the so-called evil “world” knows better how to restore people than Mark Driscoll’s church! If I wanted healing and restoration, I’d pay for a therapist rather than listen to Mark Driscoll make an ass out of himself every week or experience “discipline” at the hands of his cultish church.

Some will tell me that I’ve only read one side of the issue. In a sense, that is true. But Turner in his posts above links to Mars Hill’s discipline contract as well as the church’s letter to church members about Andrew. I can tell from the self-righteous, controlling tone of those documents that this is not a church with which I’d like to associate.

“But Mark Driscoll is being biblical”, some will tell me. Many actually care about this. Personally, I would not subject myself to spiritual abuse, even if it technically were “biblical”. But, for those who care about whether something is “biblical”, I wonder if there is a reasonable way to apply Matthew 18. I mean, not all evangelical churches are this cultish. Mark Driscoll’s church is applying Matthew 18 and other passages about church discipline in a specific manner, but are there other legitimate ways to apply those passages?

My advice for people reading this: If you attend a conservative Christian church that practices this kind of discipline, don’t limit your social circle to that church. That way, it won’t hurt as much if you are kicked out or disciplined, for you will have other friends.

My hope is that people will call Mark Driscoll out on this. I like it when people stand up to bullies, especially bullies who pompously think that they have some divine mandate. Rachel Held Evans called out Mark Driscoll a couple of times, and that got his attention (whether or not he knew he was responding to her specifically)—-as he responded with a degree of humility one time, and with defensiveness another time. As Dr. Cargill says in one of the comments, it would be nice if this could get on the national news!

Ben Witherington's Critical Methodology and Apologetics

2012-01-25T08:00:00.001-05:00

I finished Ben Witherington III's Jesus the Sage. I have two items:

1. Are the Gospels fiction, or are they historical? Witherington says on page 154:

"I have argued elsewhere that the ancient popular biography provides us with our closest analogies for the genre of the Gospels...There are certainly many other options besides pure fiction and photographic recall. For instance, it is possible the Gospel writers have used material of some historical substance and a broad historical outline of the life of Jesus, coupled with their selection, editing, and arrangement of various pericopes according to their various theological purposes."

On the TV program, Faith Under Fire, Witherington said that the Gospels contain eyewitness testimony, and that the testimony is reliable (even though the Gospels were written about forty years after the events that they clam to narrate) because the Mishnah states that disciples were able to remember vast amounts of material that their teacher taught them. Witherington notes that Luke claims to draw from the testimony of eyewitnesses, and that both Matthew and Luke carefully use the sources that they have, such as Mark, showing that they were responsible historians. For Witherington, there is a good chance that Mark wrote the Gospel of Mark and that Luke wrote the Gospel of Luke, even though these Gospels are formally anonymous, for the second century church would not attribute Gospels to non-eyewitnesses or to non-apostles unless those figures actually wrote them (and Mark and Luke were not apostles). Regarding Matthew, Witherington does not claim that Matthew the apostle was responsible for the Gospel of Matthew's final form, but he does suggest that the Gospel contains traditions going back to Matthew the apostle. And, if my impression is correct, Witherington appears to believe that John wrote the Gospel of John, and he notes that the end of the Gospel says that it represents eyewitness testimony. You can watch or listen to Witherington making his points here and here.

Is this consistent with what Witherington argues in Jesus the Sage? I'd say yes and no. In both, Witherington maintains that the Gospel authors used sources, and he is confident that these sources, on some level, reflect the historical Jesus. At the same time, I think that Witherington in Jesus the Sage is more sensitive to the fact the the Gospel authors had ideological and theological agendas and were not simply recalling what actually happened. He criticizes scholars for unjustifiably (at times) preferring Luke's forms of sayings over how other Gospels' present them, and he attributes that to the scholars' attraction to Luke being less Jewish and apocalyptic in his presentation of the sayings (page 215). Witherington also proposes to uncover what is authentically Q by peeling back the layers that obviously reflect Matthew and Luke (and one can see the characteristics of Matthean and Lukan interaction with sources by looking at their use of Mark). Witherington affirms that Matthew softens Mark's portrayal of the disciples as dense in their failure to understand Jesus, and he also discusses differences between the synoptic Gospels and James. For example, Witherington notes that James does not really talk about the inbreaking Kingdom of God through Christ.

Regarding John, Witherington does not believe in Jesus the Sage that the Gospel of John goes back to John the Galilean son of Zebedee, for there is not much in that Gospel about Jesus' Galilean ministry or the sons of Zebedee. But Witherington does acknowledge that the Beloved Disciple could have been a Judean eyewitness to Jesus as well as the source of traditions that made their way into the Gospel of John (whose present form came from someone other than the Beloved Disciple, according to Witherington). This is similar to what Witherington said about Matthew on Faith Under Fire. Another point: In Jesus the Sage, Witherington says that Peter in the Gospel of Matthew is given a scribal authority to bind and to loose. Does this imply that there were written sources going back to the original disciples of Jesus, according to Witherington?

I think that the passage with which I opened this item, the one from page 154, is a reasonable way to see the Gospels: they are not a photographic recall of events, but rather they are the result of a process of using sources and composing a work that accords with the ideologies of the Gospels' writers. Some, or even many, of these sources may go back to eyewitness testimony. But a significant part of uncovering the historical Jesus is sifting what is ideological in the Gospels from what is historical----though it is possible that the ideological can overlap with the historical, as Witherington seems to believe when he regards the Gospels of Matthew and John to be accurately depicting Jesus as one who claimed to be wisdom itself.

2. On page 353, Witherington says: "Kings were often said to have miraculous births in antiquity, and Jesus is no different." In my opinion, this differs from Witherington's defense of the historicity of the virgin birth in his blog post, The Virginal Conception----Miracle on Nazareth Street, where he argues that the virgin birth is historical because (1.) Matthew and Luke had to get the idea from somewhere, and there were no true parallels in the ancient world, and (2.) the story was embarrassing within that honor and shame culture, so it was most likely not made-up. Based on what Witherington says on page 353 of Jesus the Sage, I can argue that early Christians could have attributed to Jesus a miraculous birth to show that he was like other kings (even if other kings were not said to be the products of a virginal conception).

Santorum and Romney on People Who Lost Their Homes

2012-01-24T12:22:00.001-05:00

I’m watching the NBC Republican Presidential debate that was on last night. Something that stood out to me was that both Rick Santorum and also Mitt Romney expressed compassion for people who have lost their homes to foreclosure. Rick Santorum says that he supports allowing people to deduct off of their taxes money that they lost in a bad home deal. And Mitt Romney is criticizing the Dodd-Frank law because it hinders people from being able to renegotiate their mortgage.

In my opinion, this is a step up from where Republicans have been. I remember Bill and Hillary Clinton in 2008 proposing that people be allowed to renegotiate their mortgages so that they could keep their homes, and (although John McCain adopted that idea in his own campaign) right-wingers considered that to be unconscionable! They called it a bail-out. They said that people should be held responsible for their mistakes, and that people should recognize that not everybody can live in a house. Their approach was “They made their bed, let them sleep in it”. So it’s refreshing to see Republicans—-a right-winger like Rick Santorum, and Mitt Romney (whatever he is)—-proposing policies of compassion for people who have lost their homes. But it would also be saddening if Dodd-Frank were actually inhibiting people from being able to renegotiate their mortgages. That makes me wonder which party I should vote for. I think that, overall, the Democratic Party is more compassionate towards the middle class and low-income people than are the Republicans. And yet, some Democratic policies may do more harm than good.

James Carville and School Choice

2012-01-24T12:00:00.000-05:00

I applaud Democratic strategist James Carville for speaking at National School Choice Week in New Orleans (see the video here). School choice has its positives and its negatives, and I will not debate it in this post. But I admire people who think outside of the box of their own ideologies—-whether those people are on the Right or the Left. Should the money that is spent on school choice be used instead to make public schools better? I can see legitimacy in that point of view. But a lot of the African-American people in the video are probably not right-wing Republicans, and yet they are happy to be given a choice regarding their kids’ education.

Witherington on Jesus as Wisdom

2012-01-24T08:00:00.000-05:00

On page 204 of Jesus the Sage, Ben Witherington III states:

"What is especially daring about the idea of Jesus taking the personification of Wisdom and suggesting that he is the living embodiment of it, is that while a prophet might be seen as a mashal or prophetic sign, no one, so far as one can tell, up to that point in early Judaism had dared to [suggest] that he was a human embodiment of an attribute of God----God's Wisdom. Indeed, as M. Hengel has remarked to me, no known person in early Judaism other than Jesus between the time of Alexander and Bar Kokhba was identified with the personification of Wisdom. Some explanation for this remarkable and anomalous development must be given, and the best, though by no means the only, explanation of this fact is that Jesus presented himself as both sage and the message of the sage----God's Wisdom."

According to Witherington, there are parts of the Q source in which Jesus identifies himself with wisdom, as when Jesus affirms that he is greater than Solomon, to whom a lot of wisdom literature was attributed. Witherington believes that the association of Jesus with wisdom (which is different from simply saying that Jesus said wise things) could very well go back to Jesus himself, for others in early Judaism did not identify themselves with wisdom, and Q had to get from somewhere the idea that Jesus was that particular attribute of God. I wonder why one couldn't just say that Q decided to associate Jesus with wisdom. The question would then be why it chose to do so. What was it about Jesus that led some people to conclude that he was more than a mere holy man, but was actually wisdom itself, or even a divine sort of being? And, if Jesus claimed that he himself was wisdom, what are the implications of that? Are we placed in a variant of C.S. Lewis' trilemma: that Jesus is who he says he is, or he is insane, or devilish? Not many sane people, period, make the grandiose claim that they are the actual embodiment of wisdom, and such a claim would probably have been even more revolutionary or extraordinary in first century Judaism.

In his chapter on the hymns about Christ that are in certain New Testament books and epistles, Witherington says that wisdom helped people who were seeking a way to conceptualize Jesus without violating monotheism. In wisdom literature, wisdom was a hypostasis or attribute of God, and hymns about Christ try to conceptualize Jesus' pre-existent state in terms of that. At the same time, Witherington argues that the hymns do not necessarily adopt the whole ideology of wisdom literature, for wisdom literature tended to regard wisdom as created, whereas Witherington appears to believe that the pre-existent Son was begotten, not made. Consequently, Witherington interprets the statement in Colossians 1:15 that the Son is the firstborn of creation to mean, not that the Son was the first to be created, but rather that the Son is pre-eminent over creation. Similarly, when God in Psalm 89:27 promises to make the king his firstborn, he's referring to the king's pre-eminence, not his origin before all things.

Not Stupid, but Learning

2012-01-23T11:45:00.001-05:00

I don’t like it when people call me or other people “stupid” for not knowing something. I mean, unless people calling others “stupid” had all knowledge inside of the womb or from birth, then there was a point in time when they learned what they currently know. So why am I stupid, just because I’m not omniscient? I have to learn things, too.

Cynic Jesus? Aramaic Original? Sabbath for the (Jewish) Man? Penalty for Helping?

2012-01-23T08:00:00.000-05:00

I have four items for my write-up today on Ben Witherington III's Jesus the Sage:

1. A question that Witherington addresses is whether or not Jesus was influenced by the Cynics. There are issues that are relevant to this, such as the influence of Greek culture on first century Palestine; the existence of Cynics in Gadara, an area that is close to Galilee, along with their dates; similarities and differences between Jesus and the Cynics; and the question of the direction of influence----if Jesus influenced the Cynics, or vice versa. Witherington tackles these questions, some of which are debated. There are differences of opinion about the extent of Hellenism in first century Palestine. While there were Cynics in Gadara, Witherington states that they date after Jesus, and yet they overlap in time with sources about Jesus (i.e., Q). There are similarities in the sayings of Jesus and those of the Cynics, but nothing about Jesus' lifestyle was distinctly Cynic, for he was not crass, he did not abhor all institutions, and he did not promote a back-to-nature worldview. And Witherington acknowledges the possibility that Jesus could have influenced the Cynics. Although Witherington is open to the chance that Cynics influenced Jesus, on some level, my impression is that, overall, he sees no necessary connection between the two. Witherington says that the Cynics and Jesus could have had similar sayings because both independently made similar common-sense observations about life.

2. On page 101, Witherington argues against a scholar who claims that there was an Aramaic original for the Wisdom of Solomon on account of its occasional clumsy Greek and Semiticisms. Witherington says that this could be due to the author's knowledge of Scripture, and that people don't say that there were Aramaic originals to Paul's letters, even though Paul uses "Greek malapropisms and Semiticisms"!

3. Mark 2:27 says that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Sabbatarians have appealed to this verse to argue that the Sabbath is a creation-ordinance and is for all people, not just the Jews. On page 168, Witherington appears to go that route, at first, for he notes that the Sabbath was made after man. But then he says that the Sabbath was made for the "(Jewish) man".

Something that I found interesting was Witherington's reference to Jubilees 2:18ff., which says that the Sabbath was kept in heaven, but God created Israel so that there would be a people keeping the Sabbath on earth. For Witherington, Mark 2:27 is the opposite of Jubilees, which is essentially saying that the Jewish people were made for the Sabbath!

4. On page 194, Witherington talks about why the priest and the levite did not help the wounded man in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Essentially, if the man died while they were helping him, they would become defiled, and thus they would be unable to handle the tithe and to feed themselves and their families. Witherington also refers to Mishnah Berakhot 7:7 (which I cannot find), which states that "he that suffers uncleanness because of the dead is unqualified until he pledges himself to suffer uncleanness no more for the dead." Witherington asks if the priest or Levite, if they helped the man and he died, would jeopardize any opportunity for themselves to attend to their own family members who'd die. Witherington inquires if the priest and the Levite considered the man to be dead, perhaps to make them look guilty. But, overall, Witherington argues that Jesus was elevating the moral above the ritual.

Light Is Quiet

2012-01-22T14:47:00.000-05:00

At church this morning, the pastor’s sermon was about light. The pastor was going into the characteristics of light, and he was drawing spiritual parallels. For example, the pastor said that light makes no noise, and that, similarly, believers should not brag about their good deeds or seek self-advancement.

Many people love humility. I happen to admire it, myself. A while back, I read one of Lou Cannon’s biographies about Ronald Reagan, and Cannon noted that Reagan when he was an actor did not seek to exalt himself in scenes. Rather, Reagan offered suggestions on how scenes could be better, even if that detracted from his own prominence in them. Humility can project a genuine self-confidence.

At the same time, we’re often told in life to toot our own horns in order to survive in this world. That’s the way the world works. I remember being in a Bible study group, and we were studying the story of Joseph, and someone observed that Joseph was not pointing at himself when he recommended that Pharaoh appoint someone to oversee the kingdom during the famine. Joseph did not seek his own advancement, but rather God was the one who enabled him to rise.

That may happen, at times. But there are also times when people do not try to advance themselves, and the result is that they toil unhappily in obscurity. Dating, getting a job, etc., is partially about self-promotion—-selling oneself, in short, bragging. And yet, there does need to be humility even in that. As Dale Carnegie says, the way to win friends and to influence people is to be others-oriented—-to be concerned about them, to show how you can help them.

On some level, I appreciated what the pastor said about light being quiet, for I myself am a quiet person. As a result, many Christians may conclude that I am not others-oriented, since my quietness hinders my social interaction. But can one be quiet (as opposed to being a social butterfly) and yet serve God? I hope so.

Complacency and Newt

2012-01-22T13:29:00.000-05:00

I fear that liberals and Democrats are becoming complacent about the 2012 Presidential election. A number of times, I have heard or read liberals and Democrats express hope that Newt Gingrich will get the Republican nomination because he will be easy for Barack Obama to beat. I wonder why. Because of his marital history? Please. In my opinion, the lesson of Newt’s victory in South Carolina last night is that even many Christian conservatives are willing to disregard that, for they think that Newt has a greater chance of defeating Barack Obama. If the decision is between Barack Obama and Newt in the general election, Christian conservatives will vote for Newt, regardless of his sordid past.

How about the moderate or the swing-voters? I doubt that they’ll care much about Newt’s marital history. To them, Newt can easily come across as an intelligent man with a grasp on the issues of the day—-even if they might find him pedantic. President Obama, in my mind, does not have much of a record to run on. Saying that Obama captured Osama Bin-Laden will only go so far, in my view, for my impression is that this has become old-news. Although there are some jobs that are being created and Obama perhaps did prevent the United States from plummeting further into an economic abyss, people are still feeling the pinch of a bad economy. They could easily turn to Newt—-not so much because they love him, per se, but for the same reason that incumbents often get the boot: because people want a change, whatever it is.

Liberals and Democrats should not be so complacent, therefore. Even if Newt wins the nomination, it’s not smooth-sailing for Obama. Far from it.

Niche

2012-01-21T12:20:00.001-05:00

I’m watching the Sound of Music right now. What stands out to me is how Maria was not considered to be an asset to the abbey, and yet she could find another place where she was useful: as a governess for the Van Trapp children, and then as their mother and the wife of Baron Von Trapp. In the past, I have felt that I am useless if I cannot be useful in every single situation in which I find myself. “I wasn’t good at this here, and so why should I assume that I’ll be good at that there?”, I have thought to myself. “And where was God in those bad experiences?” I am definitely in favor of me evaluating why I wasn’t good at “this here”, and what I could have done better (if anything)—-as long as that doesn’t degenerate into me beating myself up and dwelling on the past. I should not allow past mistakes or bad experiences to discourage me, for there may come up situations that are better—-that are my niche, in short. Should I be continually on the search for my niche? Sure, as long as I recognize that I should be fulfilling my responsibilities right now, even if not all of them fit into my niche. Not every situation is pleasant all of the time, even when I am more in my niche (as occurs even now). But some situations are a better fit for me than others.

Psalm 60

2012-01-21T09:30:00.000-05:00

For my write-up today on Psalm 60 and its interpreters, I will post the Psalm in the King James Version (which is in the public domain), then I will comment on select verses.

To the chief Musician upon Shushaneduth, Michtam of David, to teach; when he strove with Aramnaharaim and with Aramzobah, when Joab returned, and smote of Edom in the valley of salt twelve thousand.

"Shushaneduth" may simply refer to a musical tune, but some have asserted that the meaning of the term is significant in regards to the Psalm. "Shushan-eduth" means "lily of testimony". For Sigmund Mowinckel, the term concerns looking to the lilies for divine testimony about what is going to happen, the same way that the budding of Aaron's rod revealed God's will in Numbers 17:21-25. E.W. Bullinger relates this superscription to Psalm 59, but I think that some of the issues in Psalm 59 are also in Psalm 60, and so I'll share his interpretation of the superscription when I discuss Psalm 60. For Bullinger, the lily of the testimony concerns Israelites keeping the Passover in the second month after they have missed the Passover in the first month, due to uncleanness or being on a journey (Numbers 9:10-11). For Bullinger, the lily is associated with the spring, which is when the Passover takes place, and the testimony concerns the law in Numbers 9:10-11. According to Bullinger, Israel has missed the Passover because she has been overrun with enemies and thus has been preoccupied, and so she has to keep the Passover in the second month.

The Targum, the Midrash on the Psalms, and Rashi maintain that a topic in the superscription is the covenant that Jacob made with Laban not to transgress Laban's boundary of Aram, or Syria (Genesis 31). According to the Midrash and Rashi, the lily is the Sanhedrin, and the testimony relates to the agreement that Laban and Jacob made. The question is this: Did David break Jacob's agreement with Laban when David took over Syria? The Midrash and Rashi answer in the negative, for Syria broke the agreement first. Balaam was from Syria (Numbers 23:7), and he came to Israel to curse Israel on behalf of Moab. And Judges 3:8 indicates that Syria ruled Israel at some point. Because the lily, the Sanhedrin, pointed this out to David, David did not feel that he was violating Jacob's agreement with Laban in taking over Syria.

The Septuagint translates the term to mean the ones who shall be changed. According to Marvin Tate, it is understanding the phrase as "al-sh-shanim od", which means "concerning one who yet changes", and he refers to a view that this superscription signals that Psalm 60 is about experiencing a change for the worse.

¹O God, thou hast cast us off, thou hast scattered us, thou hast been displeased; O turn thyself to us again.

What puzzles interpreters who relate the Psalm to the superscription is this: The superscription states that this Psalm concerns David's defeat of Syria and Edom. If David is the winner, then why is he complaining in Psalm 60 that God has scattered Israel? Different explanations have been proposed. Augustine avers that Psalm 60:1 reflects the sentiments of David's defeated enemies, not David himself. Many contend that the issue in Psalm 60 is that David's army is fighting Syria in the north, but that Edom has attacked Israel from the south, and so Israel is in dire straits. Another view is that David's battle against Syria is taking a while and is having disastrous consequences for Israel. Some believe that David is reflecting back on Israel's predicaments up to the point that the superscription mentions----the dire experiences of David and Israel throughout history. And then many maintain that the Psalm actually has nothing to do with the events of the superscription, but that Psalm 60 concerns pre-exilic Judah after the time of David, or Judah's fall in 587 B.C.E., or the time of the Maccabees.

²Thou hast made the earth to tremble; thou hast broken it: heal the breaches thereof; for it shaketh.

According to Marvin Tate, this verse indicates that Judah's straits are really dire, and he does not seem to believe that Edom attacking Israel from the south while David is fighting Syria is dire enough to be described in terms of an earthquake. For Tate, the earthquake is figurative for the fall of Judah to Babylon in 587 B.C.E., for that indeed did entail the collapse of the nation (though some scholars would observe that many Jews stayed behind in Judah during the time of the exile). Interestingly, the Midrash on the Psalms contains the view that the earthquake was literal: that the earthquake was disrupting Joab's battle against Israel's enemies, and so David asked God to heal the breaches of the earth.

³Thou hast shewed thy people hard things: thou hast made us to drink the wine of astonishment.

God is being blamed for Israel's predicament.

⁴Thou hast given a banner to them that fear thee, that it may be displayed because of the truth. Selah.

The Hebrew word translated as "truth" in the KJV is "qeshet", with the final letter being a tet. There are two understandings of this word. One view is that the word means "truth" or "certainty", on the basis of such passages as Proverbs 22:21, Daniel 2:47, and Daniel 4:37. The idea here may be that God is rallying Israel to victory against her enemies so that she can fulfill her mission as the people of God (which accords with truth), or that God is helping Israel to succeed out of his faithfulness (which pertains to truth, or certainty). Another view is that the word means the same thing as the "qeshet" that ends with the letter tav, and that particular word means "bow". In that case, the verse could mean that God is rallying Israelites to battle under a banner so that they might escape the bow of their enemies, or that a banner on the walls of Jerusalem is summoning the Judahites into the safe city so that they can be safe from the enemy bows.

⁵That thy beloved may be delivered; save with thy right hand, and hear me.

⁶God hath spoken in his holiness; I will rejoice, I will divide Shechem, and mete out the valley of Succoth.

⁷Gilead is mine, and Manasseh is mine; Ephraim also is the strength of mine head; Judah is my lawgiver;

With the exception of Judah, these are areas that belonged to the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Some contend that David is anticipating ruling these areas, or is thinking back to the time when he did not possess them and God gave them to him. Advocates of this view note that, in II Samuel 2, many of these areas followed Ish-bosheth, the son of Saul, rather than David----until David possessed them. Or vv 5-6 could reflect Judah's hope that she will one day possess the North, which is overrun by foreigners after 722 B.C.E., or exiled Jews' desire that God will defeat her captors and give her back the entire land of Israel. Some have related these verses to the time of the Maccabees, when post-exilic Jews had an army and made incursions into the north.

⁸Moab is my washpot; over Edom will I cast out my shoe: Philistia, triumph thou because of me.

The idea here is that Israel or God will possess Moab and Edom. According to the Intervarsity Press Bible Background Commentary, Moab may be Israel's washpot in the sense that she will wash Israel's feet as a servant. The "shoe" could refer to walking the land as an indication of possessing it (Genesis 13:17), Israel's feet being on the neck of their defeated enemies (Joshua 10:24), or the transfer of possession of Edom from Edomites to Israel, for, in Ruth 4:7, the transfer of a shoe meant the transfer of a kinsman's right to Ruth and pieces of property from one of Naomi's kinsmen to Boaz.

Why is Philistia told to triumph, or to rejoice? One view is that Philistia is told that it will be treated well under David's rule, and that this foreshadows the benefits that the Gentiles will experience under Christ. Another view is that Philistia is being told sarcastically to triumph: Are you rejoicing, oh proud Philistia? And Tate refers to possible ways to emend the text. There is significant overlap between Psalm 60 and Psalm 108, and the equivalent to Psalm 60:8, Psalm 108:9, says "over Philistia I will rejoice". And the Septuagint for Psalm 60:8 says that the Philistines were subjected to the speaker (as if "hitroai" is from resh-ayin-ayin, which relates to subjection).

⁹Who will bring me into the strong city? who will lead me into Edom?

This could refer to a wish by David or a pre-exilic Israelite king to subjugate Edom. Or it could concern a desire by Jews in 587 to flee to Edom for refuge when the Babylonians were destroying Judah and Jerusalem. But, as many post-exilic biblical writings indicate, Edom was no friend to Judah during this time. Obadiah, for instance, lambasts Edom for plundering Judah and for hindering Judahites attempts to escape. People who argue that v 9 is about an attempt to escape to Edom think that v 11 is talking about this issue when it despairs in the help of man, for the Judahites sought refuge in Edom, but Edom let them down, and so the Judahites felt that God was the only one they could trust.

¹⁰Wilt not thou, O God, which hadst cast us off? and thou, O God, which didst not go out with our armies?

¹¹Give us help from trouble: for vain is the help of man.

¹²Through God we shall do valiantly: for he it is that shall tread down our enemies.

My Impressions of Newt Gingrich: From My Conservative Days to Now

2012-01-20T18:40:00.001-05:00

A friend of mine (who is a liberal) asked what is the appeal of Newt Gingrich, considering that so many people know about the morally deplorable things that he has done in his life. Granted, after reading about what Newt’s ex-wife, Marianne, said about him in her interview with ABC last night, I doubt that I would want for Newt to be my best friend. But I would like to share here how I have found Newt to be an appealing figure, both when I was a conservative, and afterwards.

I first heard of Newt when George H.W. Bush was President. Bush was trying to hammer out a budget deal with the Democratic Congress, a deal that would include tax increases. And Newt as the minority whip in the House was boldly standing up against Bush and the Democrats. Although I had not yet seen Newt speak (I knew about Newt from Insight magazine), I admired him as a principled conservative, in a time when the Republican President appeared to be abandoning Republican values.

In 1994, when the Republicans took control of the Congress, I finally got to watch Newt on TV. I was watching him on Meet the Press, and there were many things that I was admiring about him at that time: his boldness, his mouthiness, his conservatism, his ability to answer questions in an articulate manner. I felt that the liberals (i.e., the media, the Clintons) were a powerful elite, which believed that it was beyond criticism, and so I enjoyed watching Newt abrasively challenge them. When the interviewer on Meet the Press told Newt that Hillary Clinton disapproved of Newt’s idea to put disadvantaged children in orphanages, Newt replied that Hillary was an elitist who did not realize that babies were being thrown into dumpsters. When the interviewer asked Newt about school prayer, Newt referred to a child who got in trouble at school for saying grace. Newt criticized Clinton’s Surgeon General, Jocelyn Elders, for her extreme views—-and, surprisingly, Elders left the office not long thereafter.

Then there was the whole Connie Chung controversy, where Newt’s Mom told Connie that Newt called Hillary a “bitch”. Connie promised Newt’s Mom that this would be their little secret, then she featured it on television. When Bryant Gumbel was interviewing Newt and was about to ask him about this, Newt stopped Bryant right there. Newt said that his Mom made Connie Chung brownies (perhaps implying that his Mom was naive when dealing with the media), and that this entire issue was being blown out of proportion. I loved Newt then, especially as I saw Bryant Gumbel’s arrogant, befuddled, “How dare you” expression on his face. And I loved the bumpersticker that said, “Newt’s Mom Was Right—-Connie’s One, Too”.

Over time, as Newt served as Speaker, my impression was that he was getting less confrontational, which disappointed me somewhat. I guess I was hoping that he’d be telling the Clintons and the media off throughout his tenure! But I found something that I admired about Newt even then: When he was found to be wrong (i.e., in terms of ethics), my recollection was that he usually came clean about it. Some of you may have different memories about that, but I’m just saying what I remember.

When I moved more to the Left, I admired Newt for other reasons. I thought that he was intelligent, and I also appreciated that he sought conservative solutions for problems that often disturbed liberals, such as the rising cost of higher education and health care, environmental problems, etc. I think that it’s a good thing when somebody points out why the status quo does not work, and what can be done instead. Something else that I have admired about Newt is that he is willing to debate anyone, anytime, and anywhere. Jon Huntsman was a minor player in the race for the Republican nomination for President, but Newt was willing to sit down and have a one-on-one debate (or, actually, it was a constructive conversation) with him.

And I liked it when Newt appeared before an African-American church in South Carolina and faced tough questions. Newt did not have to appear before that church, for many African-Americans do not vote Republican. But he did so, and that (in my mind) demonstrates character on his part. I remember an episode of The West Wing, in which a white cop shot an African-American kid. An African-American church was holding a memorial service, and Democratic candidate for President, Matt Santos (played by Jimmy Smits), attended and spoke there, whereas Republican candidate Arnold Vinick (played by Alan Alda) did not even show up. I was a Republican at the time, and I was disappointed that Vinick did not show up to that. That’s why I was so impressed that, in the realm of real-life, Newt Gingrich spoke to an African-American church and listened to people’s concerns while he was there.

There are many things that turn me off about Newt: his opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque (the Cordoba Center), his mischaracterization of the history of Cordoba in opposing that Mosque, his hypocrisy, his belief that tax-cuts for the rich are a way to revive our economy, the way that he comes up with good ideas but does not follow through on them, etc. And then there are some things about him that I simultaneously like and dislike: his arrogance, for example. His pomposity can turn me off at times, but I doubt I would admire him as much if he did not have the chutzpah that he does! I may not vote for Newt Gingrich, but I can definitely see his appeal.

Wisdom Literature: Elite, Popular, or Both?

2012-01-20T08:00:00.001-05:00

I started Ben Witherington III's Jesus the Sage.

On page 6, Witherington says that mass literacy is a modern phenomenon, for writing in the ancient world took money and leisure----both in terms of the cumbersome and expensive writing materials, and also in terms of the writing itself. Witherington states that "Surveys of as literate a culture as ancient Egypt suggest only a 1-10% degree of literacy." (Yet, see Witherington's blog posts on Jewish literacy in the time of Jesus: here, here, here, and here.) For Witherington, a significant amount of wisdom literature was produced within the royal court, for there are indications that the authors were advisers to the king, plus their agricultural references indicate an upper-class milieu. At the same time, Witherington maintains that wisdom literature could be preserving oral material from a variety of sources: "rich and poor, family, clan and court" (page 6). Witherington says that there is a lack of evidence for the existence of royal schools during Israel's monarchical period, which is when he dates Proverbs, since he does not see any exilic or post-exilic themes within it (but he dates Ecclesiastes to the Hellenistic Period, on the basis of its late Hebrew and its themes). For Witherington, when Proverbs refers to instruction from the father and the mother, it is talking about the family, not the school.

An interesting point that Witherington makes is that biblical wisdom literature such as Proverbs was seeking to provide an alternative to fertility religions. It warns about sexual immorality and it makes wisdom at most "a personification of an attribute of God or perhaps of God's creation" (as opposed to being a goddess, perhaps; page 10). (Witherington seems to presume, at least here, that sexual acts were a part of ancient fertility cults, when that is disputed by scholars, at least when it comes to Ugaritic and other ancient Near Eastern religions.) He also states that wisdom literature sought to make Yahwism applicable to Israelites' day-to-day lives, since Yahwism tended to focus largely on major events of Israel's history rather than daily life, which was more the focus of fertility cults. Although Witherington ascribes an elite milieu to wisdom literature, he also appears to believe that it was relevant to many other Israelites.

The Upside and the Downside to Christian Conservatives' Opposition to Newt

2012-01-19T12:26:00.000-05:00

A lot of my Christian conservative friends are supporting Rick Santorum over Newt Gingrich in the race for the Republican nomination for President. They dislike Newt's history of adultery, while Santorum strikes them as a principled, morally-upstanding conservative. According to this story, influential Christian conservative leader, Dr. James Dobson, "made a strong pitch for Rick Santorum's wife — and noted that Callista Gingrich was her husband's 'mistress for eight years,' questioning whether that's what people want in a first lady, three sources told POLITICO."

Part of me likes this, and part of me dislikes it. The reason that part of me likes it is that I am glad that Christian conservatives are acknowledging that the Democrats do not have a monopoly on sin----that Republicans, even conservative heroes, have done wrong in their lives. Often, I feel that this insight is missed in partisan debates!

The reason that part of me dislikes it is that I can somewhat appreciate Newt's desire to start anew with his life. Whether he's sincere or not, I don't know. But we've all made mistakes and should be able to start afresh. I just wish two things: (1.) that Newt would apologize to his ex-wife, for with repentance should come at least an attempt towards restitution or reconciliation, whether it's successful or not, and (2.) that conservatives who realize that nobody's perfect would cut other people some slack----such as the poor, people who are victims of the American health care system, etc.----as opposed to judging them.

Individuality, Community, and Alienation

2012-01-19T08:00:00.002-05:00

I finished Texts and Responses. I'll use as my starting-point something that Paul Flohr says on page 222:

"[He is unable] 'to accept the natural aloneness of the ego.' He thus seeks union with the world, but it is 'refused him, because it is not the Thou (das Du) but the I of the entity that he encounters, and...I-ness rejects union.' 'The real locus of duality,' Buber observes, lies in one's ability to accept the separateness of his ego and to view the world as 'other than I.'"

I'm not going to pretend that I understand what all of this means. So are we alienated from the world because we see the world as other than ourselves, or because we do not accept that it is other?

I think that it's important to acknowledge commonalities with the rest of the world, and also to remember that taking care of the "we" can take care of the "me". Many of us have a stake in the community benefiting. At the same time, it's good when we can love others even when they are different from us, when we can appreciate individuality. Can refusing to accept our own uniqueness and individuality alienate us from the rest of the world, rather than bringing us closer to it? When we cannot accept what is special about ourselves, can we truly appreciate what is special about others?

Patriarchal Torah, Jeremiah and Josiah, Rabbis on Proselytes, Censored, Disinterested Love

2012-01-18T08:00:00.000-05:00

I started Texts and Responses: Studies Presented to Nahum M. Glatzer on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday by His Students. This book dates to 1973. I have five items:

1. Joseph P. Schultz has an excellent article entitled "Two Views of the Patriarchs: Noahides and Pre-Sinai Israelites". Did the patriarchs observe the laws of the Torah? According to the Book of Jubilees, the answer is that they did, to a certain extent, but the revelation that they received of those laws was incomplete and would be completed for Israel at Sinai. Philo presents Abraham as observing the natural laws that were obligatory for the Greeks, meaning that, for Schultz, he did not hold that the patriarchs kept the entire Torah. At the same time, Schultz states on page 59 that "there is a rabbinic concept found in Philo, but most likely pre-dating both Philo and the rabbis, that the patriarchs came to the observance of the law through their own powers and reasoning though aided by God." Josephus in Antiquities focuses specifically on the commands that Scripture explicitly states the patriarchs kept (i.e., circumcision), without commenting as to whether or not they observed other laws that were later given at Sinai. In Against Apion, however, Josephus refers to certain Noahide laws, which rabbinic Judaism later held were binding on Gentiles (who did not have to observe the entire Torah). Within Talmudic literature, however, we come across the view that the patriarchs knew and observed the oral and the written Torahs.

Schultz discusses variations of the Noachide commandments, such as some lists that contain honor for parents (which is absent from other lists). A question scholars have asked is why some Jewish thinkers portray the patriarchs as Noachides, whereas others affirm that they kept the entire Torah. For Schultz, the rabbis who said that the patriarchs kept the law were not trying to refute Paul's dramatic separation of God's promise to Abraham from the Torah, but rather they were seeking to connect the patriarchs with a central event of Israel's history, Sinai. Regarding the view that the patriarchs were Noahides, Schultz says that this view encouraged potential converts or coverts. He may mean that the Noahide laws were viewed as training wheels for Gentiles on the path to conversion.

2. Arnold Wider wrote "Josiah and Jeremiah: Their Relationship According to Aggadic Sources". The Babylonian Talmud asks why King Josiah consulted Huldah rather than Jeremiah after Josiah heard the Torah, with its threats of destruction for the sins of Israel. The Talmud does not maintain that Josiah failed to consult Jeremiah due to Jeremiah's youth or inexperience (as do some biblical scholars), and so it offers other proposals: that Josiah wanted a milder response, since women and more inclined towards mercy than men; and that Jeremiah was helping the ten tribes that had returned, so he was not available for Josiah to consult.

3. Jochanan H.A. Wijnhoven wrote "The Zohar and the Proselyte". Wijnhoven goes into rabbinic attitudes regarding proselytes. There was a positive attitude that affirmed that proselytes to Judaism were especially beloved by God because they received God's Torah without beholding the terrible fanfare at Sinai. But there were also negative attitudes: that proselytes were not as conversant with Torah as were the Jews, that proselytes converted out of fear rather than love, that they took too long to convert, that they delayed the Messiah's coming, and that they technically were not children of Abraham. Wijnhoven also discusses some ideas within the Zohar, and I will not describe that in detail but will only mention two things that stood out to me. First, there was a view that Sinai was cleansing for Jews, and that Gentiles are still unclean because they did not experience the events of Sinai. Second, there was an idea that the third generation from a proselyte became a genuine Israelite. A proof for this was that God called Jacob Israel, and Jacob was the third generation from Abraham, a proselyte.

4. Sidney Steiman wrote "High Holidays Liturgical Variations Among Ashkenazim and Sephardim". On page 101, Steiman refers to a part of the Aleynu prayer that drew criticism from church censors during the Inquisition. It said, "For they worship and bow before idols and vanity and pray to a God that saves not." Christian censors thought this was attacking the Christian godhead, but rabbis then responded that the Christian god was not in view here, for that prayer was written by Rav in Persia during the third century C.E., and Rav was attacking Persian religion rather than Christianity. Still, according to Steiman, that part of the prayer disappeared from prayerbooks "by the end of the sixteenth century".

5. Arthur Green wrote "Rabbi Nahman Bratzlaver's Conflict Regarding Leadership". On page 154, Green quotes Rabbi Nahman's discussion of a dream: "I then recalled the story of a Besht who, when he heard he was to have no place in the World to Come, said: 'I love God without the World to Come!'"

It's good when a person can admire God, even when he is not the beneficiary of God's goodness. Or I guess it's good. Maybe it's not good. Why would I love God, if he is not good to me? I think that people who say that they're willing to be damned for the glory of God, or that they love God even if they will not receive a reward in the afterlife, are simply blowing smoke. They're trying to show off how spiritual they are.

Two Extremes

2012-01-17T12:53:00.001-05:00

There was an insightful comment by Stephen under Rachel Held Evans’ post, The problem of biblicism. Stephen states the following:

“If one has to attend 3-4+ years of seminary and do a PhD, all the while being informally mentored by other evangelical academics, in order to put “biblicism” into practice, then it’s a failure. The continued protestations of inerrantist gatekeeping intellectuals only serves to show their elite intellectualist and doctrinal model of what Christianity most basically is: the production and consumption of complex and sanctioned evangelical theological discourse. This practically makes their version of Christianity unavailable to 97% of people since the requisite material, social, and economic conditions for participation in their model of Christianity are only available to a minority of people.”

I wonder: Why would God reveal his will for us using a book that contains the writings of historical periods, cultures, and languages that are different from our own? Should it take a Ph.D. to understand the will of God—-especially when Ph.D.s and seminarians themselves disagree about what the Bible means?

I don’t want to go to the other extreme, though, the extreme that says “God revealed his will to common people, not to intellectuals, and so therefore I have the authority to beat you over the head with my interpretation of the Bible, even if there’s no scholarship backing it up, and you have to accept that as a ‘Thus saith the Lord’.” Okay, I paraphrase! I characterized some of that view accurately, and, near the end, I was giving my opinion as to where that position has led. In any case, I’m uncomfortable with both extremes.

Blackout

2012-01-17T12:36:00.001-05:00

There may be an Internet black-out tomorrow (among certain sites) in protest of two controversial pieces of federal legislation: SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act, or HR3261) in the House of Representatives, and PIPA (S968) in the Senate. There is fear that these pieces of legislation, if enacted, could threaten freedom of speech on the Internet. To learn about the case against SOPA and PIPA, see Craigslist’s article, and also the article and short video by WordPress.

Liberals and conservatives are on both sides of this issue. As you can see here, Democrats Chuck Schumer and Diane Feinstein are on the same side (the “pro” side) as Republicans Lamar Alexander, Tom Coburn, and Ben Quayle. On the side that is against these bills, you have Nancy Pelosi, Michele Bachmann, and Rand and Ron Paul.

Fortunately, the bills may be revised (see here), and President Obama has pledged to oppose any bill that will threaten free speech. I may very well call my Senators and representative tomorrow, though, since there are powerful and wealthy interests that are supporting these bills.

This site lists the U.S. Senators with their office phone numbers. And this site provides information on members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Concluding Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume 1

2012-01-17T08:00:00.000-05:00

I finished Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume 1: The Complexities of Second Temple Judaism. I have two items:

1. On pages 502-503, Roland Deines says that the Pharisees viewed themselves as sanctifiers of Israel, a remnant that, like leaven, leavens the entire dough. They sought to show the nation the path of righteousness. On page 501, Deines states large parts of the Jews saw the Pharisees as normative, legitimate, and authentic in their interpretation of God's will, even if not all of these Jews strictly followed Pharisaic halakah. This is interesting----that the Pharisees were not entirely exclusive, and that many Jews could respect yet not obey the Pharisees.

2. E.P. Sanders argued that Second Temple and Tannaitic Judaism largely did not promote salvation by works, for they held that Jews entered the covenant by God's grace, but that they stayed in God's covenant by trying to obey and by availing themselves of the means of atonement when they failed. But D.A. Carson does not think that such a formula precludes Second Temple Judaism from having a merit-based component, in areas. After all, if Jews had to obey to stay in the covenant and to be saved, then that is a merit-based system of salvation. Granted, not every Second Temple and Tannaitic voice was like that. The Testament of Moses, which may date to the first century C.E., maintains that God's election cannot be undone by disobedience (page 197). Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1 affirms that all Israel has a share in the World to Come. But this volume demonstrates that there were Second Temple works that embraced a merit-based system of salvation.

Is It Orson? Star Trek Voyager Anniversary

2012-01-16T12:46:00.000-05:00

I have two entertainment items for today:

1. On Desperate Housewives, who is the one who is leaving Bree notes and ran over Officer Chuck with a car? We know that it’s a man, for, last night, we saw his hands on the steering wheel of his car as he was watching Bree. Here’s my guess: it’s Orson Hodge! He ran over someone before—-Mike Delfino. He was married to Bree for a while. But the question is this: How, if it is him, did he find out that Bree and her friends buried the body of Gaby’s abusive stepfather? Of course, the way that these ladies have been blabbing, it’s a wonder if anyone does NOT know by now! But the person who left the note knew early on, when it was supposedly a tightly-kept secret.

2. Today is the seventeenth anniversary of Star Trek: Voyager! I love this series, probably more than other Star Trek series that I have seen. I like the one where Harry debunked a group’s beliefs about its afterlife, and yet learned from Captain Janeway at the end that perhaps the people’s souls go somewhere after death. I like the one where the Doctor (or, actually, a copy of the holographic doctor) awakens in the future and sees a misrepresentation of Voyager and its crew—-as part of a people-group’s history. There are so many awesome episodes! I watched Voyager when it first came on, but I fell in love with it when it was in syndication, probably because I was older at that point and could identify with things on it more.

Martin Luther King Day 2012

2012-01-16T12:15:00.001-05:00

For my post today on Martin Luther King, Jr., I will use as my starting-point something that David Marshall says on pages 113-114 of True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture:

“American magazines like Time and Atlantic Monthly have followed the lead of these [skeptical] scholars with cover articles on the ‘historical Jesus.’ If you’d lived by the Sea of Galilee in the First Century, the articles within implied, life would have proven tamer than the Gospels say. Storms would have risen and fallen with the prevailing winds. The blind stayed blind, and the dead, dead. As for the charismatic young teacher, Jesus…It seems he was a sagacious young radical who stirred up some scientifically-preliterate peasants. As the years passed, his disciples garbled and exaggerated his deeds. One gathering of scholars called the Jesus Seminar voted on Jesus’ ethical teachings: the few which were his, and the greater portion, which they say got thrown into the mix by later enthusiasts.”

I have not been a fan of evangelical apologetics, with all of the arrogant chest thumping that accompanies them. But, when I read this passage from Marshall, my immediate thought was “How sad!” In my opinion, it would have been sad had Jesus not performed those miracles—-miracles that healed the brokenness of this world and gave people happiness and hope.

What’s this have to do with Martin Luther King, Jr.? King himself held some pretty liberal views theologically—-and I would not be surprised if some of them overlapped with the sorts of approaches that Marshall critiques. But King still believed in the power of God to help him to heal a broken world. He believed that the words that the Gospels attribute to Jesus could somehow challenge people and be a means to make the world a better place. King had a dream. Has that dream been fulfilled, or disappointed? A little of both, I think. But, in the end, I hope that his dream does not fall flat.

I remember hearing Pastor Tim Keller say that the Gospel gives the hope to people working for social justice that they are on the winning side—-that their dream for justice would one day be realized. Martin Luther King was motivated by this hope. I think that whatever justice we achieve in this society will be imperfect and incomplete, for we are flawed human beings. But I also believe that there are areas in which society progresses, and that justice, whenever and wherever it exists, is right, important, and beneficial, and is thus worth the effort to promote, effect, and protect.

Qumran Exclusivism

2012-01-16T08:00:00.000-05:00

In this post, I will draw from two essays in Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume 1: The Complexities of Second Temple Judaism: Markus Bockmuehl's "1QS and Salvation at Qumran", and Roland Deines' "The Pharisees Between 'Judaisms' and 'Common Judaism'".

I will be making some broad, brush-stroak remarks, without getting into specifics or the primary sources that Bockmuehl and Deines cite. If you are interested in these things, you can probably get the book from your library through Inter-library loan. The issue that I will comment on is salvation within the Qumran community.

According to Bockmuehl, the Qumran community believed that only those inside of it would be saved from God's wrath, and there is a difference of opinion within Qumran documents about whether or not outsiders would repent in time to be saved. There is a liberal view that outsiders may see the truth of Qumran's views and rally behind it, but there is also a view that the vast majority of outsiders have refused to seek and to know God's will, and so they will be punished. Deines refers to a Qumran sentiment that the simple folk outside of their community were deluded by Ephraim, which perhaps refers to the Pharisees, and Deines states that Qumran thinkers believed that Qumran's influence was not as great as that of "Ephraim". According to Deines, the statement in certain Qumran documents about human beings having no righteousness means that humans have no righteousness of their own, for their righteousness comes from being a part of God's community. But does that mean that members could sin boldly and find assurance of their salvation in their membership in God's community? I don't think so, for Bockmuehl states that the Qumran community was clear that, although purificatory rites existed for atonement, these rites did not atone if the person was not repentant.

"Gingrich Faces Tough Questions at Black Church"

2012-01-15T14:04:00.001-05:00

The Associated Press had an excellent article this morning, “Gingrich faces tough questions at black church”. Although most African-Americans do not vote Republican, Newt Gingrich spoke before an African Methodist Episcopal church in South Carolina. And he got to hear some negative reactions to his rhetoric. Some of his audience feel that Gingrich is implying that their communities have not even been trying to help their own young people. And they also have questions about Newt’s workfare proposal for kids as well as his statement that Barack Obama is a “food stamp” President.

I applaud Newt Gingrich for speaking to this church, and I also applaud people in his audience for asking honest and tough questions. I think that the Republican Party can only reach out successfully to African-Americans if it makes a genuine attempt to see where they are coming from. Many may feel that Newt is clueless on race, and they could be right on that. But Newt at least put himself in a position to listen to African-Americans’ concerns, as well as to clarify some of his own policy proposals.

Witnessing and Authenticity

2012-01-15T12:04:00.000-05:00

The sermon at church this morning was about evangelism, and, yesterday, I read a guest post on Rachel Held Evans’ blog by Jamie Arpin-Ricci, entitled On Selling Jesus.

Arpin-Ricci’s post had a clip from the movie, The Big Kahuna. You can read Arpin-Ricci’s summary of the movie and watch the clip for yourself, but, in the scene that Arpin-Ricci shows, the Danny Devito character (named Phil) rebukes an evangelical Christian for trying to “sell” Jesus to a potential client. Phil makes a lot of profound points: about how trying to sell people something dehumanizes them, about how we should ask people about their lives without an agenda, about how maturity is realizing that we have done things to regret, and about how character comes when we recognize that life is short and that the world will go on without us. Although Phil was against evangelicalism, viewing it as selling something to fulfill a religious obligation, my impression was that Arpin-Ricci and some of the commenters were trying to say that evangelism was okay, but they were wanting to find a way to combine it with some of the things that Phil was promoting (i.e., humility, acknowledgment of regrets, brokenness), while avoiding the pitfalls that Phil was talking about (i.e., using people, taking advantage of problems people have in seeking opportunities to sell the Gospel, etc.).

At church this morning, the pastor was talking about how salvation should not end with the individual, and he quoted Rick Warren’s statement in The Purpose-Driven Life that “It’s not about you.” The pastor was applying those insights to the importance of sharing Jesus with others. He said that the Gospel is contagious because it is good news that makes us happy, and so we should share the Gospel with others.

I’ve never found the Gospel to be something that makes me happy, per se. I’ve long felt that it says that we are saved by grace through faith alone, and yet it incorporates works into the equation—-through such concepts as repentance, good fruit being evidence of salvation, etc. The result of that for me has been spiritual insecurity. Moreover, I’d have a hard time evangelizing because essentially I’m sharing a message that cannot be proven, or that has some pretty serious problems (i.e., God doing or commanding things in the Bible that offend our moral sensibilities). I’d have difficulty defending a message that doesn’t make much sense to me. I suppose I can offer to pray for people in trouble, and hope that they’re not the types who will nitpick me about whether there is a God, or whether God truly answers prayers.

I am, however, drawn to some of the concepts that are in The Big Kahuna and in this morning’s sermon: honesty, authenticity, genuinely caring about others, humility, recognizing something bigger than myself, etc.

The Video "Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus"

2012-01-14T10:04:00.000-05:00

For some reason, the YouTube video “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus” has been a sensation, even though the guy on that video essentially says things that have been said before: that religion is about us doing things for God, whereas Jesus is about what God has done for us; that religion makes us slaves, whereas Jesus says that we are sons; that religion is rote and empty ritual; that religion does not feed the poor, etc.

What has amazed me has been the unexpected responses to this video, from people I would expect to agree with it. Christians whom I would expect to parrot the banal line of “It’s not a religion, but a relationship”—-and this includes both people who fit into evangelicalism and also people who have become disenchanted with it—-have rushed to critique the video. They say that religion is not a bad thing—-that Jesus was religious as an observant Jew, that religion provides a concrete way for people to express their love for God, and that religious institutions actually have helped the poor. And then there is one lady who has become disenchanted with both religion and the Christian conception of Jesus, and she remarked, “Saying Jesus isn’t a religion is like saying weed isn’t a drug.”

Who’s right? In my opinion, they all are, in a sense. They’re speaking from their own experiences, and they’re appealing to elements of reality. Some of the critics of the video are so hung up by whether or not the guy is defining “religion” correctly, that they don’t pause to consider that he may have some valid criticisms somewhere in there. But they do well to point out that religious institutions can be good: they can be a tool for spiritual enhancement, they can at least make people conscious of the need to help others, etc. Religion can be a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing. It’s good to have different voices that can highlight the positive, while warning about pitfalls.

Psalm 59

2012-01-14T09:00:00.000-05:00

For my weekly quiet time this week, I'll blog about Psalm 59 and its interpreters. I'll post the Psalm in the King James Version (which is in the public domain), then I will comment on select verses.

To the chief Musician, Altaschith, Michtam of David; when Saul sent, and they watched the house to kill him.

This refers to the events of I Samuel 19, when Saul's men were surrounding David's house to kill him, and David's wife, Michal, helped David escape when she let David down through the window and hid an idol under his bed.

¹Deliver me from mine enemies, O my God: defend me from them that rise up against me.

²Deliver me from the workers of iniquity, and save me from bloody men.

³For, lo, they lie in wait for my soul: the mighty are gathered against me; not for my transgression, nor for my sin, O LORD.

⁴They run and prepare themselves without my fault: awake to help me, and behold.

⁵Thou therefore, O LORD God of hosts, the God of Israel, awake to visit all the heathen: be not merciful to any wicked transgressors. Selah.

Even conservative Christian commentators and preachers have puzzled over this verse. Why would David ask God to visit the heathen---the goyim, or Gentile nations----when those were not the people giving him problems in I Samuel 19? The people giving him problems there were fellow Israelites, right?

Different solutions have been proposed. John MacArthur appears to go on two routes. First, he says that David wrote Psalm 59 when he was king and was involved in dealings with foreign nations. The idea may be that David is considering the threats that Israel is facing from her foreign enemies and is thinking back to the time when his life was threatened by an aggressor, namely, King Saul. Second, MacArthur states that David had the gift of prophecy, which (to me) implies that David wrote this Psalm when he was on the run from King Saul, and he foretold Israel's problems with foreign enemies.

The Orthodox Jewish Artscroll commentary says that David, as he suffers, is expanding his horizons: David prays not only for himself, but also for all who suffer from oppression and persecution. C. Marvin Tate says that the idea in this Psalm is that the Psalmist wants God to show no mercy to all wicked people, whether they be foreign or domestic.

John Gill says that David here means that his enemies are behaving like the heathen in the way that they are treating him. And the Jewish commentator Rashi supplies some words, proposing that David is asking God to judge the wicked according to the statutes of the nations. I do not know entirely what Rashi means here. Does he mean that David wants for God to judge his enemies according to the way that the Gentiles judge the wicked, or that David hopes that God will judge his enemies the way that God judges Israel's foreign oppressors? I think that the latter is more likely.

Two more possible solutions come to my mind, and I say this with the recognition that many biblical scholars do not associate the Psalms with the events of David's life, but rather maintain that the superscriptions were added later. I wonder, though, if interpreters who do apply the Psalms to David's life have thought of these solutions: First of all, could Saul have used foreign mercenaries to surround David's house? Second, in a similar vein to the proposal of the Artscroll commentary, perhaps David during his flight was thinking of his own suffering at the hands of Saul, and also Israel's insecurity at the hands of foreign nations. While David was on the run from Saul, Israel experienced problems from the Philistines and the Amalekites, and David in I Samuel 27 and 30 defeats Amalekite aggressors. The responsibility of the king was to defeat Israel's foreign enemies, and David, even while he was on the run from Saul, was demonstrating his own suitability for kingship when he was concerned about Israel's predicament at the hand of foreign enemies and (with God's help) acted to defeat them. Are there interpreters who have regarding Psalm 59:5 as a sign of such concern?

⁶They return at evening: they make a noise like a dog, and go round about the city.

What I heard and read on a continual basis was that dogs in the ancient world were not pets, but were scavengers. Indeed, many dogs were scavengers, and I think that the enemies here are being likened to scavenger dogs. According to Marvin Tate, the image here is of dogs sleeping in their dens during the day and hunting for food at night. But Tate also questions the blanket statement that dogs could not be pets in the ancient world, for he cites verses in which a dog was a companion (Tobit 5:16; 11:4; Matthew 15:27; Mark 7:28). I think of Odysseus' dog in the Odyssey, who faithfully waited for his master to return.

I agree with Tate that "They return at evening" is part of the scavenger-dog imagery. Rashi, however, says that the idea here is that David's enemies slander him before Saul during the day, then they return at evening to watch David's house in order to kill him. Regarding the phrase "and go about the city", the Jewish commentator Radak says that Saul and his men are patrolling the city just in case David slips out of the house. But David did slip out of the house, and he managed to escape from the city! I guess Saul and his men were not patrolling the city that well!

⁷Behold, they belch out with their mouth: swords are in their lips: for who, say they, doth hear?

⁸But thou, O LORD, shalt laugh at them; thou shalt have all the heathen in derision.

Nelson's Study Bible contrasted God's derisive laughter at the heathen with God's pleasure in his people (Psalm 147:11; Zephaniah 3:17). I appreciated this point because I've heard preachers stress that God laughs----at the fall of the wicked! They're usually seeking to refute the ideas of prosperity teachers, or to counter the notion that God is a heavenly Grandpa who does not care about our sins. But, in my opinion, it's important to see God as someone who is happy, and not just when the wicked are falling. I also have issues with defining the wicked as all who do not accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior, as many Christians do, for the Psalm portrays the wicked as schemers who love bloodshed. Of course, I should take heed to myself that I never become like that, but I do not believe that most people (including non-Christians) fit that description.

⁹Because of his strength will I wait upon thee: for God is my defence.

¹⁰The God of my mercy shall prevent me: God shall let me see my desire upon mine enemies.

In the Hebrew for this verse, the Hebrew for "my desire" is not there, and so the King James Version has supplied those words. There are other translations that supply "vengeance". I liked what Christopher Wordsworth said in Charles Haddon Spurgeon's Treasury of David: that God is making the Psalmist look on his enemies. For Wordsworth, the Psalmist hopes to look on them, not with fear, but calmly, as did Stephen when he was being stoned (Acts 6:15).

¹¹Slay them not, lest my people forget: scatter them by thy power; and bring them down, O Lord our shield.

This has been a notorious verse within the history of biblical interpretation, for Augustine appealed to this verse to argue that the Jews' subjugation was divine punishment for their rejection of Jesus, and that they served as a warning to God's people of the ill consequences of unbelief. Many Christians agreed with Augustine's interpretation, to the point that they themselves sought to insure that the Jews were continually subjugated. As G. Sujin Park notes, however, John Calvin departed from this view. Whereas Augustine related Psalm 59 to Jesus' passion, in which (according to the Gospels) the Jewish authorities and some of the Jewish people were key players, Calvin read it primarily in light of David's predicament at the hands of Saul. For Calvin, v 11 means that God does not destroy our enemies immediately, but he allows them to remain for some time so that we would continue to trust in God, rather than forgetting him. Calvin's interpretation, to a large extent, lacked the anti-Judaism that was characteristic of other Christian interpretations of Psalm 59.

I deplore the anti-Judaism of Augustine's interpretation, as well as the horrible use that Christians have made of it throughout history. But I thought that Augustine's commentary on the Psalm, overall, had a profound homiletical point, once you take the issue of Jews and Gentiles out of the picture. According to Augustine, God brought down the Jews because of their pride and their contempt for the Gentiles, but he exalted the Gentiles because they were viewed by God's people, Israel, with disdain. Augustine believes that both, however, should exalt Jesus Christ, the corner-stone. When you take the whole issue of Jews and Gentiles out of the equation, you have what may be a valid point: that God gives us what we need spiritually, whether that be humbling or exaltation, but that we should all come together and keep our focus on God and his goodness. That does not mean, however, that we should judge those going through a hard time (even ourselves) as people who are being humbled, or that we should oppress others, as if we are God's instrument of judgment.

There have been different interpretations of Psalm 59:11. A prominent one is that the Psalmist wants his enemies to survive in a state of abjection so that they could be an example to God's people of the consequences of wickedness. Some believe that the Psalmist desires that his enemies die a slow death, not a quick one. A few interpreters, however, actually think that the Psalmist is hoping that God will keep the wicked alive because the wicked will not be aware of God when they are dead. Is there hope here that the wicked will repent?

Although I like the concept of hope for the redemption of the wicked, I do not think that this is what is going on in Psalm 59. In vv 11-13, the Psalmist appears to be hoping that the wicked will be destroyed, and that this will teach God's people and the rest of the world about God and his standard of righteousness. In v 11, he wants this destruction to be gradual, and Tate argues that the Psalmist is hoping that the wickedness of the wicked will prove to be their destruction. I think that v 12 supports this. In v 13, however, the Psalmist may be hoping that God will consume the wicked quickly. Perhaps the Psalmist changed his mind, as he allowed his anger to take over, or he simply hoped that God would dispose of the problem swiftly, since the wicked were continually threatening the Psalmist's safety.

¹²For the sin of their mouth and the words of their lips let them even be taken in their pride: and for cursing and lying which they speak.

¹³Consume them in wrath, consume them, that they may not be: and let them know that God ruleth in Jacob unto the ends of the earth. Selah.

¹⁴And at evening let them return; and let them make a noise like a dog, and go round about the city.

Citing Meiri and Metzudos, the Artscroll commentary states that what we see here is the punishment fitting the crime. Notice that this verse is like v 6. The idea is this: In v 6, the wicked are prowling about hungrily, like dogs, hoping to devour the Psalmist. That is their crime. In v 14, the Psalmist hopes that the punishment of the wicked will include them prowling about hungrily, like dogs, only in an abject state in which they do not find satisfaction. The punishment of the wicked is similar to their crime.

W.O.E. Oesterley, however, says something different. His idea (if I understand him correctly) appears to be that the Psalmist is acknowledging that the wicked will continue to prowl about hungrily, but that the Psalmist has chosen in vv 16-17 not to focus on that, but rather to focus on God and God's goodness.

¹⁵Let them wander up and down for meat, and grudge if they be not satisfied.

¹⁶But I will sing of thy power; yea, I will sing aloud of thy mercy in the morning: for thou hast been my defence and refuge in the day of my trouble.

¹⁷Unto thee, O my strength, will I sing: for God is my defence, and the God of my mercy.

A Source of Wisdom

2012-01-13T18:08:00.000-05:00

January 12′s Our Daily Bread was interesting to me. In that entry, Julie Ackerman Link says that people often stop her friend Anna on the street when they are looking for directions, and Julie goes into different reasons for this: that Anna looks honest and trustworthy, that she looks like she knows where she’s going, and that she attracts the lost. Julie then goes on to say that, spiritually-speaking, believers have purpose and direction, in that they know where they’re going and how to get there. Julie states that “When this kind of confidence is evident to others, the lost will look to us for direction.”

One reason that this entry stood out to me was that people have often asked me for directions on the street, and I don’t know why. Usually, I don’t know the answers to their questions. But maybe they ask me because I have an innocent-looking face and, because I wear glasses, I look like a brainy sort of person who might be able to give them directions.

Another reason that the entry stood out to me is that I’ve admired the motif of Christians being able to offer wholesome, reasonable advice to the rest of the world. I once watched a late-night movie on the Trinity Broadcasting Network about a high school student who wished that he had never become a Christian and got to see what he and his high school would be like without his Christian witness. When he was a Christian, he offered a jock helpful advice about relationships—-advice about listening, about love, about honesty, etc. In the alternative reality in which he was not a Christian, however, he was messing around with the jock’s girlfriend, and so the jock was trying to kill him!

I think also about the testimony of Michael Landon’s second wife, Lynn (the mother of Michael Landon, Jr.): Lynn came to Christ on account of her hairdresser, who imparted to Lynn a lot of good advice and wisdom that she gained from her relationship with Christ. I like the concept of Christianity being reasonable and sensible in the real world—-something that can help people to look at life in a positive way and to deal with their problems responsibly. So often, Christianity has not struck me as overly reasonable. Maybe that’s (at least partially) because I tend to leave out common-sense when I approach it.

Infant Morality, Afterlife in Qumran and Philo, Philo's Trinity

2012-01-13T08:00:00.000-05:00

For my write-up today on Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume 1: The Complexities of Second Temple Judaism, I have three items:

1. On page 376, David Hay discusses Philo's view on the moral propensity of infants and children:

"Philo's theory of human development in stages views the child as 'pure wax,' inexperienced in both good and evil. Because of the early development of the passions and defects of education, however, a child turns to evil before it is attracted to virtue under the guidance of reason."

This is somewhat like the Christian doctrine of original sin, but not entirely. The Christian doctrine of original sin (as I understand it) is that humans are born with a corrupt nature and thus need to be regenerated. For Philo, infants and children indeed have a propensity for evil, since the passions develop early and they lack education. But the solution is for them (according to Philo) to get to the age where they can embrace reason and thus subdue the passions. At the same time, Philo does not rule out a role for divine grace in helping people to arrive at virtue.

2. I read some about Second Temple Jewish beliefs regarding the afterlife. On page 395, Marcus Bockmuehl says that, except for 4Q385 and 4Q521, there is uncertainty about the extent to which the Qumran community "believed in a general resurrection", and yet "the Community clearly did affirm a belief in some form of heavenly life after death." On page 388, Bockmuehl quotes 1QS 4:7ff., which forecasts for the righteous "healing and great peace in a long life, multiplication of progeny together with all everlasting blessings, endless joy in everlasting life, and a crown of glory together with a resplendent attire in eternal light" (the words of 1QS 4:7ff.). Those who succumb to the spirit of falsehood, by contrast, will "experience shame and afflictions, eternal destruction by God's wrath, and eternal annihilation 'in the fire of darkness'" (Bockmuehl's words), and Bockmuehl cites 1QS 4:12-13; 4Q280 2:4-5; and 4Q286 7.ii.5-11. I'm curious as to how Qumran regarded eternal destruction and annihilation. Is this annihilationism or eternal torment?

On page 371, David Hay refers to Philo's Praem. 152, in which Philo asserts that a proselyte to Judaism will have a place in heaven firmly fixed, whereas "the noble born who has falsified the sterling of his high lineage" (whom Hay understands to be Jews who have apostasized) will go down into Tarturus and "profound darkness".

3. Many Christians contend that the three angels (if you will) in Genesis 18 are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Interestingly, on page 377, Hay states that Philo had a similar, albeit different, understanding. For Philo, the three beings were God "and his two senior Powers, the Power of Punishment and the Power of Mercy" (Hay's words).

David Marshall: "Guan Yin"

2012-01-12T12:57:00.000-05:00

I read Chapter 8 of David Marshall’s True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture. This chapter is entitled “Guan Yin”. Guan Yin is an East Asian goddess of compassion. Marshall opens this chapter with a story about a man’s concubine and his son. The son hated his father’s concubine because his father paid more attention to the concubine than to his wife, who was the son’s mother. On a family picnic, there were bandits nearby, and the son planned to kill his father’s concubine, thinking that the bandits would be blamed. But the concubine cried out to Guan Yin, and the son could not lift a finger against her. The son eventually became an official in Taiwan, and he told an American friend that the concubine was immoral, but that Guan Yin, a compassionate bodhisattva, desires to save every sentient being, regardless of how moral or immoral they are.

(On a side note, what would Marshall do with this story? It’s an eyewitness account of an event that appears to be supernatural. Does this account verify the existence of Guan Yin, the way that Marshall believes that the Gospels as eyewitness accounts support the truth of Christianity?)

Marshall believes that there are parallels between Guan Yin and Jesus. He quotes Guan Yin as saying: “Yes, the world has need of me, even if I have to die. My love can overcome death.” At the same time, Marshall does not think that, overall, Guan Yin has challenged immorality in China. Marshall talks about brothels in China. “Guan Yin has been worshipped [in the Dragon Mountain Temple] for a hundred years without disturbing business”, Marshall says on page 97. “She reaches out her thousand arms to the brothels, one for each girl in the district, and draws back…cash.” Marshall says that China needs an intolerant Savior, one who gets angry and overturns tables in standing for justice.

But Marshall tells a mythical story about Guan Yin that depicts her as transformative. The story dates back to 1102, and it’s about Miao Shan, an incarnation of Guan Yin in China. Miao Shan’s father (a king) had her killed because she would not marry his choice to be her husband. Wikipedia’s summary provides more details: the suitor was wealthy, and Miao Shan offered to marry the suitor if her father would ease suffering in aging, illness, and death. According to Marshall, after her death, she went to hell. But Miao Shan transformed hell, as “Irons fell off prisoners” and “Ogres learned to smile” (page 94). When her father became sick, Miao Shan visited him and healed him after plucking out her eyes. Marshall states that the king repented in response to his daughter’s gesture, and she became whole again.

The wikipedia summary tells a variant of the tale, which discusses what happened when the executioner sent by the king tried to kill Miao Shan, and failed because she had some sort of supernatural protection:

“Miao Shan, realising the fate the executioner would meet at her father’s hand should she fail to let herself die, forgave the executioner for attempting to kill her. It is said that she voluntarily took on the massive karmic guilt the executioner generated for killing her, thus leaving him guiltless. It is because of this that she descended into the Hell-like realms. While there she witnessed first hand the suffering and horrors beings there must endure and was overwhelmed with grief. Filled with compassion, she released all the good karma she had accumulated through her many lifetimes, thus freeing many suffering souls back into Heaven and Earth. In the process that Hell-like realm became a paradise. It is said that Yanluo, King of Hell, sent her back to Earth to prevent the utter destruction of his realm, and that upon her return she appeared on Fragrant Mountain.”

Essentially, Miao Shan took the guilt of her would-be executioner, went to hell, and liberated suffering souls, on the basis of her own good karma that she had accumulated in her incarnations. She does sound like Jesus, in a sense. I am not an expert on Chinese religion, so I do not know if some maintain that Miao Shan was based on Jesus, or if scholars think that there are simply common themes that appear across different cultures.

These are beautiful stories. I do think that it would be better if Guan Yin stories encouraged more social and moral transformation, but that’s a problem that all sorts of religions have, including Christianity: they can get to the point where they sanction the establishment rather than challenging it. As far as China needing an intolerant savior (Jesus) is concerned, I can see Marshall’s point—-if the savior is intolerant about moral matters, or issues pertaining to social justice. But intolerance concerning doctrinal points? That doesn’t make as much sense to me.

New Torah? Chaunivistic Tannaim? Free Prayer?

2012-01-12T08:00:00.000-05:00

I have three items for today's write-up on Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume 1: The Complexities of Second Temple Judaism:

1. On page 280, Philip Alexander states: "The question of whether or not there will be a new Torah in the messianic age is raised in some rabbinic sources, but in general the idea is rejected. See W.D. Davies, Torah in the Messianic Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1952)...The subject became important, however, in later Jewish mysticism. The Zohar raises the question of whether the Torah, which, as it stands, addresses a broken, imperfect, sinful world can apply to the world to come when the fractured state of the broken world will be mended (see Isaiah Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of Texts, vol. 3 [London: Littman Library, 1991], 1078-1121). It looks forward to a new Torah for the new age, as do, apparently, some form of modern Hasidism..."

I wrote some about this topic here, but I'd do well to read more about it. In my reading yesterday, I came across a Second Temple Jewish idea that the evil inclination will be destroyed in the eschatological era, but I did not jot down in my notes the exact reference. Does a change of circumstances entail a change in the Torah? If people will be inherently good in the Messianic era, will they need a Torah to tell them what to do and to punish them for infractions? I think that there are some rabbinic references that indicate that the Messianic era and the World to Come will be different from life today, and so the Torah will be different. But many contend that this opinion is marginal within rabbinic Judaism.

2. On page 291, Alexander states: "See also Pisqa 31, 'The name of God rests upon Israel in greatest measure'; Pisqa 344, God loved Israel more than the nations. Further Pisqaot 345 and 315, 'I am going to make you dwell alone in the age to come, and none of the nations will benefit from you in any way.' There is an ongoing tension in rabbinic thought over the role of Israel as an elect people within humanity as a whole. One chauvinistic strand of thought stresses the idea that Israel alone is benefitted by her election. Another strand, however, sees Israel's election as ultimately benefitting humanity as a whole. She plays a priestly role within humanity, bearing divine revelation and the knowledge of God. Tannaitic literature tends to take the more chauvinistic line."

This is of interest to me, since I have been reading a lot about Judaism's view on the salvation of the Gentiles and the question of whether or not Gentiles had to observe the Torah. I have read that Tannaitic literature, such as the Mishnah, expresses skepticism about proselytes. But then there was Hillel, who welcomed proselytes. It would be interesting to trace chauvinism and universalism in Second Temple and rabbinic Judaism----both Tannaitic and also Amoraic rabbinic Judaism----and to seek to account historically for whatever phenomena is found.

3. On page 287, Alexander quotes Mishnah Avot 2:13, which exhorts Jews not to make their prayers a fixed form, but rather to plea for mercy and to supplicate God. But my experience of Judaism is that it has fixed prayers. If I want to hear extemporaneous, free-flowing prayer, I'd go to a Pentecostal service, not a synagogue or temple.

Life of the Party, Converted Not Saved, Ask a Muslim

2012-01-11T10:38:00.000-05:00

I have three items for this post:

1. John Shore had an excellent post a few days ago entitled “The Life of the Party”, which was about Jesus’ first miracle of changing water into wine at a wedding party. Jesus was not condemning or criticizing people, but he was enhancing their enjoyment of the party . John says that the following is the lesson:

“I think he’s telling us to just be with people. If we’re with someone who’s soda is running low, we should ask if we can get them another soda. If their wine glass is empty, we should fetch ourselves a glass, and ask them if they’d like any more. If they’re smoking, we should act like we don’t mind their smoke blowing on us, and get them an ashtray. If they’re eating french fries, we should at least try not to steal one when they’re looking the other way. If they’re wearing a nose ring, we should tell them it looks cool, and maybe ask them if it hurt them to get it. When it comes to engaging others—all others—we don’t have to wonder what Jesus would have done. The Bible’s really clear about telling us, over and over again, exactly what he did do when engaging others. He loved them. He didn’t assess their worth, or evaluate their moral standing, or in any way determine their quality before he loved them. He ‘simply’ loved and respected them, exactly as they were.”

A few days ago, I wrestled with how Jesus approaches the issue of the family (see here). At times, Jesus comes across to me as a wild-eyed cultish apocalypticist, one who divides the world into clear categories of good and evil and demands that people leave their families to be his disciple. His moral requirements appear to be unrealistic, making one wonder if anyone could be in the Kingdom of God if they had to conform to such high standards. But, on the other hand, in his interactions with people, Jesus comes across as approachable, even to sinners—-as one who wants to enhance what is good rather than asking us to give that up. Jesus enhanced family life, for example, when he healed or raised from the dead people’s sons or daughters.

A while back, when I was more of a Christian conservative, I was debating a liberal (who later went on to become press secretary for a prominent Democratic politician) over the issue of school prayer. He referred me to that passage in which Jesus told us to pray in secret rather than publicly, and I responded by appealing to incidents when Jesus prayed in public, as occurred when Jesus fed the multitudes. This guy then asked me over and over (since I was not answering his question) whether we should follow Jesus’ words, or his actions. To this day, I still wonder about how to answer that question (assuming that Jesus’ words and actions are even in conflict).

2. My reading of Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest has been interesting—-not exactly edifying or inspiring, but interesting. In my reading yesterday, Chambers essentially said that a person can be converted without being saved. Conversion is when one’s eyes are opened—-when he’s enlightened. Salvation, however, occurs when one has received the gift of God’s forgiveness. Chambers ventures a guess that most so-called Christians are converted but not saved, for their eyes are opened—-and he may mean by this that they have some awareness of God, the correct way of life, and Christian doctrines, and even enough sense to accept these things as true. But they have not received God’s gift of forgiveness. I wonder why they have not requested and accepted this gift, if they indeed have not (since there are many who have said the sinner’s prayer whom some evangelicals would not consider to be saved—-such as Christians who fall away, or who do not bear spiritual fruit, or who say the sinner’s prayer within the context of what evangelicals would consider a cult, such as Mormonism or Jehovah’s Witnesses).

3. Rachel Held Evans yesterday published her post, Ask a Muslim (Khurram Responds), in which Muslim Khurram Dara answered questions. I did not find the post to be as meaty as I hoped, for I expected a detailed exposition and explanation of Islam’s doctrines. Khurram admitted that he was not a religious scholar or expert on Islam. But I thought that he made a good point when he said that American Muslims should get to know others in the United States. I think that there’s something to that. The more that the two interact, and the longer that the interaction takes place, the less that non-Muslim Americans will view moderate Muslims as a threat and as the “other”.

Post-Mortem Salvation, Mercy for the Righteous, Elihu

2012-01-11T08:00:00.000-05:00

I'm continuing my way through Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume 1: The Complexities of Second Temple Judaism. I have three items:

1. Richard Bauckham talks about the Apocalypse of Zephaniah, which could date anywhere from the first century B.C.E.-the first century C.E., and its origin could be within Second Temple Judaism or even Christianity. The Apocalypse of Zephaniah has a view that was unusual within Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity, according to Baukham, and that is that there is an opportunity for the wicked dead in the abyss to repent----at least prior to the last judgment. After the last judgment, however, the Apocalypse of Zephaniah concurs with other Jewish and Christian writings that the opportunity for repentance has passed.

2. On page 181, Bauckham discusses recipients of mercy. According to IV Ezra, or at least the "unconverted Ezra" in that book, God shows mercy to sinners who lack good works, not to the righteous. II Baruch and the Enoch traditions, by contrast, hold that God's mercy is specifically for the righteous, who have plenty of good works and yet are imperfect. This reminds me of a couple of things. First, there is Jesus' statements in the synoptic Gospels that he came to call not the righteous, but sinners. Second, I thought of how some scholars have characterized the position of the Judaizers whom Paul criticizes: that they already were good on account of their works, but that they still needed forgiveness (presumably through Christ's sacrifice) to take care of those few areas where they are imperfect. But Paul had a much dimmer view of humanity's sinfulness and predicament.

3. On page 200, Robert Kugler talks about the Testament of Job, and how Testament of Job 43 says that Elihu was possessed by Satan and thus lost his wealth. This interested me because I have long wondered how to regard Elihu's contribution to the Book of Job, which contains some of the same points that Job's other friends have made, and yet may also set the stage for God's rebuke to Job that Job does not know much. Elihu is not condemned at the end of the book, in contrast to Job's other friends, and scholars have said this is because Elihu's contribution was added later. Those who do not believe in those kinds of layers, however, have different explanations, such as one saying that Elihu was young and so God didn't criticize him, thinking that Elihu didn't know any better. It's interesting to see how Elihu is regarded within the History of Interpretation, and I see that the Testament of Job viewed him quite negatively.

I appreciated how the Jewish Encyclopedia characterized Elihu's speeches (see here): "God is the educator of mankind, who punishes only until the sinner has atoned for his sin and recognizes his wrong-doing. Then God has attained His object, to 'bring back his soul from the pit, to be enlightened with the light of the living' (xxxiii. 17-30). Elihu, therefore, holds a middle ground, maintaining that God neither 'takes away judgment,' nor sends suffering merely as a punishment, but acts as the educator and teacher of mankind (xxxiv. 5; xxxv. 1, 14; xxxvi. 10, 22)."

John Dickinson; Tim Tebow and John 3:16

2012-01-10T15:19:00.000-05:00

I have a couple of items for today:

1. I was watching the John Adams miniseries last night with my Mom and her husband. John Dickinson (played by Zeljko Ivanek, whom I know from Heroes) was a member of the Continental Congress who was opposed to the American colonies going to war against Great Britain, for, while he acknowledged that Great Britain was infringing on the colonists’ rights, he wanted to find a peaceful resolution. A lot of times, when he spoke, he was heckled by his opponents, and John Adams engaged him in debate and even called him an imbecile. When Dickinson spoke soon before the Continental Congress voted on independence, however, the whole room was quiet. Everyone—-even his opponents—–let him have his say. Why? One reason may be that, by that point, the colonies’ resolution to become independent from Great Britain was largely a given, so why not let Dickinson give his final warning, before they declared their independence? Another reason is that Dickinson’s speech is good for the movie, in that it demonstrates the risk that the American colonies were taking when they declared their independence and set themselves on the path to becoming a new nation. You can see Dickinson’s speech here.

2. I’d like to comment on Tim Tebow and John 3:16. The speech community in which I largely run—-the one that is cynical about religion—-has criticized quarterback Tim Tebow. They say that he’s parading his religion, when Jesus told his disciples to pray in secret and not in public. They say that the numbers 3-1-6 in Tebow’s plays do not demonstrate that God is affirming Tim Tebow—-for, while Tebow threw a ball for 316 yards, we don’t have the number 316 when those yards are converted to meters, plus why should we assume that 3-1-6 is about John 3:16 , when there are other Scriptures that have 3-1-6? They challenge the notion that God takes sides in football games, when there are so many problems in the world.

But maybe God is affirming Tim Tebow. That does not mean that God is a Broncos fan (even though my late uncle might disagree with me on that!). I don’t think that God cares about who wins football games. But Tim Tebow is acknowledging his dependence on God. He is allowing his faith to inspire him, and to enable him to be an inspiration to others. Perhaps God is honoring that. And, in the process, that encourages us to turn to God—-not so much to win football games—-but to receive strength and to be a means for good in the world.

Unintentional Sin?

2012-01-10T08:00:00.001-05:00

I started Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume 1: The Complexities of Second Temple Judaism. In this post, I will quote what Daniel Falk says about the definition of the righteous in the Psalms of Solomon (first century B.C.E.), on pages 46-47:

"It is not the absence of sinning that defines the righteous. The psalmist readily confesses that they sin, using some of the same terminology for the sinners. Nevertheless, the language applied to the righteous is only that of failure and lapse...They are never called 'sinners'...or accused of being unrighteous or lawless. Rather, their sins are unintentional and out of ignorance, and when they sin they willingly submit to God's discipline, atone for their sins, and are vigilant to root out sins from their household. They know and confess that God's judgments are just. The 'sinners' sin habitually...and do not recognize God's discipline but curse and sin all the more..."

I wonder what constitutes a sin that's unintentional and out of ignorance. I can see a person unwittingly violating a ritual taboo, but a moral law? I have a hard time calling a moral sin unintentional or out of ignorance (even if the Bible, Judaism, and Christianity considered certain unintentional sins to be in areas of morality). Even if a person is weak and part of him does not want to sin, there is still a part of him that does want to do the sin, otherwise he would not do it, right? This question is of interest to me because I have long heard Christians say, "What marks a true Christian is that he does not want to sin, and, when he does sin, he abhors his actions." Of really? Well, if he abhors sin and does not want to commit it, why does he do it?

Or there are Christians who respond to the argument of some gay Christians that "everyone sins" with "Yeah, but we do not approve of our sins, whereas gay Christians desire to continue their sinful lifestyle." But, if Christians do not truly want to sin, why do they sin? I'm not saying that I'm sinless, by any means. But I no longer try to prove to myself or anyone else that I am a "true Christian".

David Marshall: "Buddha Walks the Silk Road"

2012-01-09T11:01:00.000-05:00

I have three items for my write-up today on Chapter 7 of David Marshall’s True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture. This chapter is entitled “Buddha Walks the Silk Road”.

1. On page 82, Marshall critiques the Buddhist belief in reincarnation: “Buddha didn’t want to believe in rebirth. In [the movie Little Buddha], he called it a ‘curse.’ And of course, Buddha was right. Life has meaning as a story. But what if after every chapter, you forget the chapter you just finished? What if (to use another Little Buddha example) you make on false move and spend 500 lives as a goat? If the Asian view of reincarnation is correct, this world is like a slope in hell up which we each push our boulder, each time to have it crash down on us again.”

I agree with Marshall’s critique. But is the Christian doctrine of eternal torment in hell that much better? One problem I have with hell is that, as Marshall notes, life is a story. It just does not make sense to me for a person to live and to grow and to learn lessons and to love and to be loved and to suffer, and then to die and go to hell just because he failed to accept Jesus Christ as his personal Savior before his death. The story sounds incongruous, to say the least. Some people I know who believe in reincarnation (and these are not Easterners, but people from the West) think that reincarnation makes sense because it gives us opportunities to learn lessons that we may not have learned in a previous lifetime. I wonder how efficacious the lesson would be, though, if we cannot even remember the previous lifetimes, or even this lifetime after we die and become something else. But perhaps my Western friends who believe in reincarnation would respond that the lesson is still inside of us, even if we don’t remember the exact details of how we learned it, or what the lesson was.

2. On pages 87-90, Marshall critiques Buddhism because it undermines family bonds. After all, Buddhism began when Siddhartha left behind his family to seek Enlightenment! On page 89, Marshall comments on another scene in Little Buddha: “To kill desire for spiritual fellowship with beings who are external to ourselves and different is to kill our humanity. It is indeed like giving our children over to an ogre. Yet, in another scene this same monk showed how even trained Buddhists have too much of the image of God on their souls to fully give their hearts to the ogre called ‘detachment.’ The Old Master died and was buried, his successor found. The American boy was ready to go home. The Tibetan monk who brought him to India from America choked back tears as he said goodbye, saying to the boy’s father, ‘I’m afraid I’m not a very good example of Buddhist detachment.’”

Some of you reading this who did not see the movie may wonder what is going on. I won’t summarize the movie in this post, but you can read about it here. Essentially, the point that Marshall is making is that Buddhism promotes emotional detachment from friends and family, since attachment is what leads to suffering, but that even some Buddhists feel sad when somebody close to them dies, and that is because they have the image of God on their souls. I like Marshall’s appeal to the image of God—-the notion that none of us is far from knowing about God’s goodness, on some level, since God’s image is upon us. But what about the things in the Bible that offend people’s moral sensitivities—-the slaughter of women and children in the Conquest, for example? And, speaking of detachment, what about Jesus’ exhortations to his disciples to hate or to leave their families (Mark 10:29; Luke 14:26)?

I don’t think that Jesus in the Gospels was against family, in an overall sense. He raised a man from the dead and restored him to his mother (Luke 7:12-15). He told someone from whom he exorcised demons to go home and to tell his friends what God has done for him (Mark 5:19). He criticized Pharisees for dishonoring their parents (Mark 7), as well as lambasted divorce while presenting marriage as a life-long bond that no man can put asunder (Matthew 19).

Moreover, one reason that Jesus believed that the disciples should prefer him over their families was that he knew that many of them would be placed in a situation where they would have to choose, for families would be hostile towards Christianity and would even persecute it (Matthew 10:36; Luke 12:53). But it also appears to be the case that the disciples were expected to leave behind their families and to travel with Jesus. Jesus praises the disciples for doing so in Luke 14:26. When a man wants to follow Jesus but asks that he first be allowed to say farewell to his family, Jesus likens that to putting one’s hands to the plow and looking back. Perhaps Jesus was afraid that the family would persuade the man not to follow Jesus. Or maybe Jesus thought that the apocalypse was so urgent that there wasn’t time to dilly-dally by saying good-bye to one’s family. In any case, there is a sense in which Jesus promoted a sense of detachment from family, even though that’s far from being the whole story, for Jesus also affirmed family-ties—-in his healing ministry, in his teaching, in his example (at times), etc.

3. On page 85, Marshall talks about how the Taiwan Chinese have adapted Buddhism to their culture: “Taiwan Chinese have more temples per capita than anyone else in the world. Most Taiwanese answered my survey by telling me they went to the temples and believed in Buddhism. They had positive feelings toward Siddhartha: ‘With great compassion he saves people who are in distress.’ ‘(He was) a person who loved people.’ But, when asked the purpose of life, few if any said ‘to escape suffering’ to ‘to attain detachment.’ Almost no one believed in reincarnation. The only one of the Four Noble truths that seemed to have stuck in most minds was the idea of right conduct, thought and attitude, which in any case Chinese believed long before Buddhism came to China. If I were to pick an antonym for what the vast majority of Chinese really think, it might be ‘Buddhism.’”

Buddha promoted detachment as a way to alleviate suffering, which is consistent with monasticism. But many Chinese like marriage and family and happiness and prosperity, or fu. As a result, they have adapted Buddhism to their culture. This reminds me of what one of my commenters, Looney Fundamentalist, said under my post, “David Marshall: “The Pursuit of Happiness”", after I talked about Marshall’s statement that Buddhism is opposed to desire. Looney has Chinese relatives and lives in Taiwan, and he said the following:

“With all my Chinese relatives, the notes on the Eastern religions always bring in a disconnect. I had listened to several lectures on this subject recently from a western professor that reinforced this. The only thing I have ever heard prayed for by Buddhists is health, wealth and good grades. i.e. the prosperity gospel on steroids.”

McKnight on Matthew 23:15

2012-01-09T08:00:00.001-05:00

I finished Scot McKnight's A Light Among the Gentiles. Like Martin Goodman in Mission and Conversion, McKnight questions the idea that Second Temple Judaism had an active missionary program to the Gentiles. Matthew 23:15, however, says that the Pharisees travel on sea and on land to make one proselyte. How do Goodman and McKnight explain that? Quite differently. For Goodman, Matthew 23:15 is saying that the Pharisees try to convert other Jews to Pharisaism. McKnight, by contrast, says that what is going on is that the Pharisees are encouraging Gentile God-fearers----Gentiles who are interested in the Torah and observe some Jewish customs----to go all the way and to become circumcised. McKnight refers to Josephus' Antiquities 20:40-42, in which the Jew Eleazar encourages the Gentile king Izates (who is devoted to the Torah) to become circumcised (see here). Eleazar was not an active missionary, traveling specifically to convert Gentiles to Judaism. But he did try to persuade Izates to go from being a partial convert to being a full convert. Because this sort of thing was going on in Jesus' day, McKnight interprets Matthew 23:15 in light of that.

Not Being a Hypocrite

2012-01-08T19:05:00.000-05:00

At church this morning, the Prayer of Confession contained the following lines:

“Forgive us, God of light and author of love…if we have denied in word or deed the Christ who died for us…if we have been different people on Monday than we are on Sunday…”

For me, this means that my public face and my private face should be similar. On the ABC program The Middle, a theme of one of the episodes this season was that we often give our best behavior to strangers, but not to our families. Granted, it’s good to be able to be ourselves around our loved ones, within our comfort zones. Home may be a place for more honesty about our struggles and our feelings than we express in the outside world. But home should not be a place for rudeness.

As far as denying Christ in word or deed goes, I wonder what this means. If it means denying Christ by being complete jerks, then I can see the point of the prayer. I think that a significant element of worship is to be a good person, and to do what the pastor exhorted in this morning’s service: to see the world and the people in it through Jesus’ eyes of compassion. If the prayer means that I have to make a bold stance for evangelical Christianity before others, however, then I have a problem with that, since I have issues with evangelical Christianity. I don’t think that I should get to the point where I bash evangelical Christianity to gain approval by other people—-whether they be atheists, or cynical Christians, or ex-Christians, or people adhering to non-Christian religions who have beefs with evangelical Christianity. But I do believe that I should be honest about what my problems are with certain belief systems—-perhaps for me to find answers or some way to move on. Unfortunately, there are times when the line between the two is pretty thin! Moreover, it would be nice if I could sincerely fall in love with Jesus. Then, if I do proclaim him, it isn’t out of some religious obligation that I feel, but is out of love and appreciation for Jesus and his qualities.

Kepler and Intelligent Design; Alan Brill's Interview with David Carr

2012-01-08T18:26:00.000-05:00

I learned of some excellent links today:

1. Rachel Held Evans links to an article by Paul Wallace, Intelligent Design Is Dead: A Christian Perspective. The reason that Wallace’s article is good is that it contrasts Johannes Kepler with advocates of Intelligent Design. Both believe in God and maintain that God designed the cosmos. But the difference between them is this: a belief in design inspired Kepler to inquire into the nature of the universe. Advocates of Intelligent Design, by contrast, appeal to gaps in our knowledge to support their belief in a designer, which means that their belief in design discourages rather than encourages inquiry. I appreciated Wallace’s article because many Christian apologists like to appeal to Kepler to argue that theism and science are not mutually contradictory. Perhaps they’re not, when theism promotes inquiry rather than discouraging it and exploiting our gaps in knowledge.

2. Charles Halton at Awilum links to Alan Brill’s interview with biblical scholar David Carr, who teaches at Union Theological Seminary. Carr talks about the fluid scribal transmission of texts in the ancient world (traditions transmitted, and yet changed), and he also straightforwardly addresses provocative and profound questions, such as:

“How is JED + P different from JEPD? What’s the practical difference? Is the work scholars do on the basis of this theory going to be more productive than the work currently done using the older theory? How?”

“How should the average person know who to trust if the field changes so often? What would you tell the simple reader who with their uneducated eyes thinks that scholars are just stating their personal opinions? How is it a scientific field?”

“Do you have any thoughts on revelation? or the separation of history from theology?”

I liked how Dr. Carr called the second question a fair question, before he proceeded to offer a judicious answer. And I enjoyed his answer to the third question, which brought into the discussion his Quaker and Methodist background.

The GOP Debate, Contraception, and Anti-Christian Bigotry

2012-01-08T12:01:00.002-05:00

This will be a rambling post about two issues that came up in the GOP Presidential debate last night.

1. Mitt Romney was befuddled about the contraception issue (see here). It’s odd that Mitt Romney—-a graduate of Harvard Law School—–was unaware of the Supreme Court decision Greenwald vs. Connecticut, which struck down state laws against contraception as a unconstitutional violation of the right to privacy. But I don’t think that this will hurt him, the way that Sarah Palin’s inability to mention Supreme Court decisions to Katie Couric hurt her. Mitt Romney is able to demonstrate that, overall, he is intelligent and has a grasp on key issues, even if constitutional law is not one of them.

Was Mitt Romney correct to say that the question about allowing states to ban contraception was silly, since states do not want to ban contraception? I don’t think that there’s a movement to ban condoms or diaphragms, so, from a certain perspective, the question was silly. The morning-after pill has been challenged by attempts to define life as beginning from conception, however. I once got into a debate with a relative on the morning-after pill and whether it is an abortifacent or a birth-control pill that prevents fertilization. From my reading last night, what I found was that it’s a little of both: it aims to prevent fertilization, but, if it fails to do that, then it prevents the union of the fertilized egg with the uterus.

I support birth control that prevents fertilization, for, if that is consistently used, then abortion will not be as much of an issue. But I do believe that life begins at conception. And I do not think that abortion is relevant to the right to privacy, for I see it as a human life issue, not as a privacy issue. Will I vote for the Republicans over this? No, because I believe that chipping away at the social safety net and America’s manufacturing base—-as Republican policies have done (in my opinion)—-encourages more abortions, in that it makes having more children more difficult for families.

2. Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry decried anti-Christian bigotry, and here are some remarks they made about what they had in mind:

Newt Gingrich: “Should the Catholic Church be forced to close its adoption services in Massachusetts because it won’t accept gay couples, which is exactly what the state has done? Should the Catholic Church be driven out of providing charitable services in the District of Columbia because it won’t give in to secular bigotry? Should the Catholic Church find itself discriminated against by the Obama administration on key delivery of services because of the bias and the bigotry of the administration?”

Rick Perry: “When we see an administration that will not defend the Defense of Marriage Act, that gives their Justice Department clear instructions to go take the ministerial exception away from our churches where that’s never happened before, when we see this administration not giving money to Catholic charities for sexually trafficked individuals because they don’t agree with the Catholic church on abortion, that is a war against religion. And it’s going to stop under a Perry administration.”

I’ve talked some about these issues here and here. My position is not exactly crisp, but I want to maintain two principles. First, I’d like for homosexuals to be free to marry and to receive the legal benefits of marriage, and also to be free from discrimination in housing and employment. Second, I’d like to respect the religious freedom of people to disapprove of homosexuality and not to sanction that way of life. It would be great if these two things could co-exist. In many areas, they can: gays can marry, but conservative churches do not have to be forced to conduct the ceremony or to ordain practicing homosexuals. But there are areas in which the two can come into conflict. What if a church owns a hospital and does not want for it to hire homosexuals? What if a conservative Christian owns an apartment complex and does not want for homosexuals to live there? I think that such a judgmental attitude is inconsistent with the evangelical mantra of hating the sin but loving the sinners. But do conservative Christians have a religious right to discriminate?

I wonder, also, if there is a way to make everyone happy, in certain areas. Why should the Catholic Church’s adoption services be required to send kids to gay couples who want to adopt? Why should Catholic charities be denied federal funding because they do not provide access to abortion or birth control (see here)? I mean, that helps no one, and it ends up denying help to a number of people. Maybe a solution is for there to emerge adoption services that are more open to gay adoption. Let the Catholic church’s adoption services hold to its beliefs, but let there also be alternatives out there to its adoption services.

George Stephanopoulos Returning to ABC This Week

2012-01-07T23:03:00.001-05:00

Tomorrow, George Stephanopoulos will be returning to ABC This Week, taking the place of Christiane Amanpour. I have enjoyed Christiane’s tenure on the program, particularly the debates that she moderated on Islam and big government. But I will be glad to watch George tomorrow. I did not care for George Stephanopoulos back when he was working for the Clinton Administration, for he came across on television as a pompous, arrogant, liberal know-it-all. I admired him, however, because he had a sharp mind. I started to like Stephanopoulos when he wrote an honest book about his experiences in the Clinton Administration, both good and bad (entitled All Too Human). And, whereas he struck me as narrowly partisan when working for the Clinton Administration (which I suppose is to be expected), I appreciated an interaction I heard between him and Sean Hannity on Republicans and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When Hannity pointed out that many Republicans voted for that bill, George responded that many great achievements in history have been bipartisan.

Nice People and False Doctrine

2012-01-07T11:00:00.001-05:00

Is it okay to attend a church where you like the people, even if that church is teaching false doctrine, with which you disagree? I’m not talking about the Presbyterian Church (USA) that I attend, but rather a post that Teresa Beem wrote on her blog, It’s Okay NOT to be a Seventh-day Adventist. Her post is entitled NICE PEOPLE, and she criticizes progressive Adventists who do not take seriously Adventism’s end-times scenarios, Ellen White, the Investigative Judgment, etc., but they remain within Adventism because they like the people. And they do so, even after Teresa shows them that the Investigative Judgment is not Scriptural!

Personally, I can attend a church even if it teaches “false doctrine”—-as in doctrine that does not line up with every single teaching of the Bible. It’s abusive doctrine that I cannot stand. If a church teaches me that I am loved by God and that I should be loving and compassionate towards others, then I am satisfied with that church’s teaching, and (provided that the people are somewhat friendly), I can go there, even if some of their doctrines are off. In my opinion, the notion that a doctrine can be “biblical” or “unbiblical” is rather illusory, for the Bible is a diverse document, and it can be interpreted in so many different ways. Plus, even churches that are the loudest about adhering to the Bible do not follow the Bible entirely. How many of them believe that God punishes sons for the sins of their parents?

Take the Investigative Judgment, the Adventist idea that Christ in 1844 entered the Holy of Holies in heaven and is now going over our records. Is this view biblical? There are arguments against it, and arguments for it. Arguments against it are that there are passages about Christ being in the holiest place—-right beside God the Father—-long before 1844. In addition, I interpret that passage in Daniel about the sanctuary being cleansed in reference to the Maccabees, not 1844—-though I can understand how interpreters who are not sensitive to the historical contexts of biblical books (i.e., William Miller) can arrive at 1844 from the Book of Daniel. The argument for it is that there are passages about Christ coming with his reward for the saints in his hands, which implies that he has judged their works before his Second Advent.

What concerns me is not whether or not the Investigative Judgment conforms technically to the Bible. Rather, what concerns me is whether or not it makes people feel more secure or less secure. Do they envision Christ in heaven nitpicking their every move and removing them from the Book of Life, or do they picture Christ lovingly forgiving their flaws? If the spiritual effect of a doctrine makes a person feel insecure and worried all of the time, then there’s a problem.

But I can fellowship with people who have odd doctrines. I tend to avoid Adventism because I find it to be overly-dogmatic, but my point is that I am open to fellowship with groups that have nice people. As long as the teaching of the group promotes the notion that God is loving and wants us to be loving, I can eat the meat and spit out the bones. But if there are too many bones—-bones that make me feel spiritually insecure—-then I’d have second thoughts about being in the group.

Psalm 58

2012-01-07T09:30:00.001-05:00

For my weekly quiet time this week, I will blog about Psalm 58 and its interpreters. I'll post the Psalm in the King James Version (which is in the public domain) and comment on select verses.

To the chief Musician, Altaschith, Michtam of David.

¹Do ye indeed speak righteousness, O congregation? do ye judge uprightly, O ye sons of men?

Translated literally from the Masoretic Text, the verse probably reads: "Truly, the silence of righteousness will you speak? Will you judge uprightly, sons of man?" The Hebrew word that I translate as "silence" is ailem (as in AY-LEM). The point here, according to many commentators, is that the Psalmist is rebuking judges for their silence in not executing righteous verdicts: they are not doing their job of speaking out for righteousness, in short. Although the verbs of this verse are in the second person plural, many interpreters have sought to relate them to individuals, perhaps thinking that the verses are directed at both the individuals and also the people in the individuals' party. Rashi says that David is speaking these words to Abner, rebuking him for not standing up for righteousness by telling Saul that David is innocent and that Saul is wrong to pursue him (see I Samuel 26:14). Keil-Delitzsch propose that Psalm 58 concerns Absalom, who sought to undermine David's authority by acting as a judge at the gate.

Others emend the text, in some manner. One approach is to read ailim as elim, "gods". That could mean that the Psalmist is criticizing the gods of the Gentile nations that are persecuting Israel (Sigmund Mowinckel), or that the Psalmist is saying that the judges of Israel act in a divine capacity or even assume that they are like gods, when actually they are mere sons of men. Mitchell Dahood thinks that the word is "rams", which he deems to be a metaphor for rulers. And the Septuagint and Jerome simply maintain that the word is ulam, "truly".

²Yea, in heart ye work wickedness; ye weigh the violence of your hands in the earth.

The Hebrew root for the word that is translated as "weigh" is p-r-s. That can mean to weigh, or to ponder, or to prepare a path (see here). The wicked are being berated for carefully thinking about ways to do evil, or for proudly surveying their evil deeds, or for preparing to do violence as their heart works wickedness. (Marvin Tate argues for the last one.) The last interpretation teaches a lesson about how bad thoughts can lead to bad actions, if one is not careful.

³The wicked are estranged from the womb: they go astray as soon as they be born, speaking lies.

I heard some Christian commentators appeal to this verse to support the doctrine of original sin, the notion that we are all born with corrupt moral natures. Quite a few noted that children do not have to be taught how to lie, since it comes naturally to them, whereas they do have to be taught to tell the truth! Jewish interpreters whom I read, by contrast, did not apply v 3 universally, but rather to specific wicked people. The orthodox Jewish Artscroll commentary states that the point here is that the Psalmist's enemies have such a propensity for evil that it appears to be inborn. The Midrash on the Psalms affirms that God sanctifies the righteous in the womb, as God did for Jeremiah and the Servant (Jeremiah 1:5; Isaiah 49:1-3), whereas the wicked are evil even inside of the womb. Both the Midrash and also Rashi cite Genesis 25:22, which refers to struggling that occurred in the womb of Rebecca. Their argument is that wicked Esau was doing violence to Jacob even in the womb!

I think that there is a sense in which we are all inclined towards evil, though I seriously doubt that every single one of us is as wicked as the Psalmist's enemies in Psalm 58 and other Psalms. Not all of us take delight in plotting our next deed to hurt the innocent! And yet there may be some people who are born with especially destructive tendencies, but hopefully they can be acculturated to behave themselves as responsible members of society.

Something that has long challenged me about the Psalms is that I do not know many people whom I would label as absolutely evil, and so I often have a hard time identifying with the Psalmist's characterization of his enemies. Even those who do not particularly like me do not try to destroy me, nor do they get a kick out of plotting ways to trip me up. I'm sure that there are people like that in the world, but, fortunately, they haven't targeted me (yet). Their evil deeds may be rooted in jealousy, or anger at having been hurt, or selfish ambition. Saul and Absalom may have attacked David for any or all of these reasons. (Saul was jealous of David, and Absalom was upset that Amnon had raped Tamar, Absalom's sister.) But there are some who are so bored with life that they actually do entertain themselves by plotting mischief. In my opinion, it's important for us to be extremely cautious about attitudes that can snowball into destructive deeds.

I think that human nature is often too complex for us to say that wicked people are born that way, which is what the Psalmist is essentially saying, even if there may be a grain of truth somewhere in that proposition. But when we are the objects of somebody else's attack, it's easy for us to conclude that our attacker is evil----that he has no redeeming qualities and was probably corrupt from his birth. Being a victim can lead one to make generalizations about the victimizer, as does the Psalmist.

⁴Their poison is like the poison of a serpent: they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear;

⁵Which will not hearken to the voice of charmers, charming never so wisely.

The point here is that the Psalmist's enemies are so intent on destruction that no one can persuade them otherwise. They are deaf to morality and reason.

⁶Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth: break out the great teeth of the young lions, O LORD.

Some argue that the point here is that the Psalmist wants God to rob his enemies of their ferocious power, the way that removing a lion's teeth would make the lion less harmful and unable to eat people and animals. Jo Ann Hackett and John Huehnegard, however, refer to instances in ancient Near Eastern literature in which breaking the teeth is a punishment for a breech of contract. Perhaps both are going on here: the breechers of contract are being likened to lions!

⁷Let them melt away as waters which run continually: when he bendeth his bow to shoot his arrows, let them be as cut in pieces.

Vv 7-9 are difficult verses, but they are essentially the Psalmist asking God to cut short the deeds of the wicked. The second clause, "when he bendeth his bow to shoot his arrows, let them be as cut in pieces", could be saying that the wicked will shoot arrows and the arrows will hopefully fail to destroy the Psalmist and others, or that God will shoot arrows that will destroy the wicked.

⁸As a snail which melteth, let every one of them pass away: like the untimely birth of a woman, that they may not see the sun.

Charles Spurgeon had an interesting comment on the second clause----"like the untimely birth of a woman, that they may not see the sun." He says that those who are unregenerate are like aborted fetuses because they do not mature to the manhood that God desires people to attain, and they do not see the light of God in this life and the next. I think that it would be an incorrect and an insulting generalization to say that non-Christians are immature or do not see some (or a lot of) light of what God is about, for there are plenty of non-Christian thinkers (i.e., Buddhists, Taoists, atheists, etc.) who are quite mature, insightful, and wise, in terms of such things as empathy and compassion for others (even enemies), making peace with life, etc. For me, however, there have been times when Christianity (or some theistic spiritual path) has stood between me having that kind of spiritual life, and me being consumed by immaturity (i.e., pride, lust, anger, hatred, jealousy, etc.). So a part of me appreciates Spurgeon's point, even if I do not view it as a cart blanche summary of all of humanity.

⁹Before your pots can feel the thorns, he shall take them away as with a whirlwind, both living, and in his wrath.

The image here could be one of two things. One proposal is that the Psalmist is asking God to stop the wicked deeds of his enemies, the same way that a whirlwind could come along and interrupt a guy cooking his dinner. In this scenario, the wicked are looking forward to enjoying their evil deeds, as the guy cooking his dinner is eagerly anticipating his meal, but God cuts that short. The other proposal is that the Psalmist wants God to stop a thorn before it can mature, for the Hebrew word that the KJV translates as "pots" can also mean "thorns". The idea here may be that the Psalmist desires for God to nip his enemies' deeds in the bud, to stop the enemies and the deeds before they become worse.

¹⁰The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.

Why do the righteous wash their feet (or, in the Septuagint, their hands) in the blood of the wicked? John Gill says that people whose feet are washed feel refreshed, and so the righteous feel refreshed by God's punishment of the wicked. Augustine affirms that God's punishment of the wicked encourages the righteous to repent of their own sins, to wash their hands spiritually, if you will. And Theodore of Mopsuestia, a fourth century Christian exegete, states that the righteous here are disassociating themselves from the wicked, as Pilate disassociated himself from Christ's persecutors by washing his hands (Matthew 27:24). Some have appealed to Isaiah 63:3-6, which is about God treading the winepress of the wicked.

This verse is troubling because it presents the righteous rejoicing in the ill fate of the wicked, which goes against the principle of love for enemies that is in both the Hebrew Bible and also the New Testament (Exodus 23:4; Proverbs 24:17; 25:21; Matthew 5; Luke 6; Romans 12). Some have affirmed that the downfall of the wicked is indeed a cause for rejoicing, since the wicked whom God destroyed are no longer wreaking their destructive havoc on the earth and its inhabitants. In my opinion, there is legitimacy to that point. But the Midrash on the Psalms attempts to add a degree of humility to the discussion when it says that only those deemed worthy by God to destroy the wicked can legitimately rejoice in their destruction. The Midrash probably wants us to ask ourselves: Is any of us truly worthy?

¹¹So that a man shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous: verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth.

Redemption, Paper Tigers, a Real Man

2012-01-06T19:01:00.001-05:00

I have a couple of links to share today:

1. John Shore had an excellent post yesterday entitled From a Christian Woman Who Chose Abortion. My impression is that the point of the post is not that abortion is an acceptable choice for a Christian woman to make. Rather, it’s about humility and treating people with understanding and compassion rather than judging them. The woman who wrote to John once stood in front of her church and boldly proclaimed that she would never have an abortion. Later, however, she found herself is dire straits. She says:

“I had just had a baby; he was four months old when my father died after spending a month on life support. I didn’t even know I was pregnant until about a week after my father’s funeral. I had been given every kind of sedative and tranquilizer medication during that month and after the funeral. I was left with a broken mother, three kids under six years of age, a husband out of work, and a very shaky marriage. I had complications with all my pregnancies, but no one told me my life was at risk. No one said, ‘It’s your life, or your baby.’ I prayed, ‘Dear Lord, I cannot do this. What am I suppose to do? Do I give up my three children, and my mother who needs me desperately right now?’ Because I knew that, in the mental state I was in, I would not make it through another pregnancy. So I quickly made the arrangements and went through the process like a robot.”

On whether or not she made the right decision, I can see both sides. On the one hand, her choice was certainly understandable, since she was in dire straits—-financially, in terms of her health, etc. Pregnancy takes a toll, and raising another child is quite costly, especially when the family is already struggling financially. On the other hand, if abortion is murder, would it not be unacceptable even in dire straits, since we don’t tolerate infanticide regardless of what the situation is? But John did not tell her that her decision was right. He was telling her that she could move on from this—-confident about God’s love for her.

I especially appreciated the following statement that John made:

“You were young when you went before your church to say how you would never have an abortion. That’s such a young thing to do: it’s so immature, so obviously an effort to be praised, to belong, to assert a winning identity. And it’s so informed by one of the primary defining qualities of youth: moral certainty. Young people can only see right and wrong in clear, black-and-white terms; they haven’t yet developed an appreciation for the infinite means by which moral blacks-and-whites become infinite shades of grey. The real failure with your experience lies with the adults who encouraged and allowed you to make such an insipid speech. An actually mature person would have told you to sit down, and be quiet. Who wants to hear a young person bragging about their moral superiority? The only reason they let you make that speech is because it served their own agenda: they essentially used you as propaganda, and no two ways about it. That’s a shame on them—but no shame to you. You’re not guilty of anything there except being young. And that (thank God!) is no crime.”

I like this statement because I hate it when conservative evangelicals act like they’re so morally superior. But, in a sense, this was also a mirror in front of my face. It’s easy for me to make dogmatic moral pronouncements, without taking into consideration the weight of issues: dire straits in which people may find themselves, shades of gray, etc. Hopefully, I’m growing in this area.

2. Bruce Gerenscer has an excellent post, God a Jokester or Do Candidates for President Have a Hearing Problem?

It’s about how candidates like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann talk like they have some divine mandate to run for President. We’ve seen this sort of thing before. William Martin, in With God On Our Side, says that Pat Robertson said that God told him he (Pat Robertson) would become President. And Mike Huckabee in 2008 said that God was blessing his campaign for the Presidency. But we see how these campaigns turned out!

I get sick of conservative evangelicals claiming to have a divine mandate, or some special knowledge about what God wants. What am I to conclude? That opposing them is opposing God? It gratifies me, therefore, when their endeavors fail (at least their endeavors for power, not their attempts to, say, help the poor). It reveals them to be the paper tigers that they are!

3. Susan Wise Bauer reviews Mark Driscoll’s book, Real Marriage. I appreciated some of the following lines:

“His definition of manliness is surprisingly Southern; in the very first chapter, he explains that he came back to the church as a young man because he finally found a congregation with a manly pastor (he had been in the military and bow-hunted) and masculine men (farmers, hunters, and one guy with 13 children). Men are to be tough in business (there will be no questioning of American economic norms in this book) and tender with women and children, who are weak. Wives are ‘crystal goblets,’ beautiful and fragile; men are ‘thermoses,’ strong and protective. Men are to lead, women to submit, although submission is carefully redefined as ‘respect’ and leadership as ‘taking responsibility.’ Men, Driscoll says, are meant to be breadwinners…[Driscoll states:] ‘First, a guy needs to grow up by moving out of his parents’ house, paying his own bills, worshipping his God, and taking care of himself. Second, a man is then able to pursue a noble woman in a noble way.’ Actually, most good Israelite boys tended to stay home until their fathers brought them their brides.”

I seriously doubt that I would fit Driscoll’s definition of a real man. I don’t bow hunt. I’m not the ruthless, assertive type. At this moment, I’m not financially independent. Should I work on some of these things? I think so. I’m on a path towards a career, even if I have not arrived yet. And perhaps I should work on being less timid and at least a little more assertive, although I should also maintain a gentle, friendly quality that can put people at ease. If I can find a way of being that works for me, and that helps me and other people, then why should I worry about whether I fit Driscoll’s definition of a real man? What would be the point of me beating up on myself? In my opinion, not living up to Mark Driscoll’s standards does not equal disappointing God.

A Proselyte Who Wants to Take the Passover...

2012-01-06T08:00:00.000-05:00

I started Scot McKnight's A Light Among the Gentiles: Jewish Missionary Activity in the Second Temple Period. The topic of this post will be a debate that McKnight discusses on page 81. The sources that McKnight cites are Mishnah Eduyoth 5:2, Mishnah Pesachim 8:8, Tosefta Pisha 7:14, and Babylonian Talmud 92a.

The subject is this: Suppose that a Gentile converted to Judaism on Passover eve. Can he partake of the Passover? The House of Shammai, in a rare display of leniency, says yes, even if that Gentile has not been circumcised. All he has to do is immerse himself and he can eat his Passover offering in the evening. The House of Hillel, however, says that the proselyte must be circumcised to eat of the Passover. And, if he became a proselyte on Passover eve, then he won't be able to partake of it, for a person who is circumcised becomes clean after being sprinkled on the third and the seventh day after the circumcision. That means that the proselyte would become clean (and thus eligible to eat the Passover) a week after the Passover.

There are questions that I have about this. First, how would the House of Shammai address the circumcision requirement for eating the Passover in Exodus 12:44, 48? Second, when does a Gentile become an official proselyte? Apparently, it is not at circumcision, for the Gentile in the discussion appears to be a proselyte before he has even been circumcised, or even immersed. Third, why must the proselyte be sprinkled on the third and the seventh days after circumcision in order to become clean? Numbers 19 prescribes that sort of sprinkling for those who have touched a corpse. Is circumcision a sort of contact with death? And, fourth, would a proselyte who cannot take the Passover be able to eat it the next month, which is what Numbers 9 prescribes for the Israelite and the resident alien who cannot partake of the Passover on Nisan 14 due to corpse impurity or being away on a journey?

David Marshall: "Congratulations, Get Rich"

2012-01-05T11:58:00.000-05:00

I have two items for my write-up of Chapter 6 of David Marshall’s True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture. The chapter is entitled “Congratulations, Get Rich”, and it focuses on fu, which is happiness, or prosperity.

1. On page 73, Marshall states: “Only a fraction of traditional Chinese cures have been tested in Western laboratories. How many valuable secrets are hidden on back shelves and in the knapsacks of herb salesmen? Health is an esoteric art in China, and many remarkable drugs are likely to vanish if folk medicine is neglected.”

I love this passage! Why? Part of the reason is that my Grandma and my Mom owned a health food store for many years. Part of it is the notion that perhaps the East has things to teach the West, which means that the West doesn’t have all the answers. And part of it is the sense of mystery that’s there.

2. On page 78, Marshall states: “We don’t need to be ashamed of our animal desires; the mouth was formed to be filled with food, as the dirt was to grow plants. Yet it also implies God must be the foundation of our most basic pleasures. Man does not live by rice alone. We are also made to know God.”

I agree with this balanced approach. But there is a strong tradition of asceticism within Christianity, and at least part of the reason is things that show up in the New Testament. Here are some passages in the KJV. Some of them have been interpreted in the history of Christianity to tend towards asceticism, whereas others perhaps can be interpreted in that direction:

Matthew 6:19-20: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal…”

Matthew 5:28: “But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”

Matthew 19:12: “For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.”

Luke 12:33: “Sell that ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth.” (The audience here is, not the rich young ruler, but Jesus’ little flock. So Protestants can’t say that Jesus’ command to sell possessions applied only to that one rich man!)

I Corinthians 7:1-9: “Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband. The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife. Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency. But I speak this by permission, and not of commandment. For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that. I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, it is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.” (Here, Paul appears to tolerate and even encourage sex within marriage, but there has been a long-standing belief that he is presenting celibacy as better.)

Granted, there are New Testament passages that tend in the opposite direction. Jesus came eating and drinking (Matthew 11:19; Luke 7:34). Jesus changed water into wine at a wedding (John 2). Hebrews 13:4 praises the marriage bed. I Timothy 4:3-4 criticizes ascetics who sought to forbid marriage and the consumption of certain meats, which were made to be eaten with thanksgiving. But there also appears to be a tradition that there is something special about voluntary poverty and celibacy, and that tradition seems to be present in rudimentary stages within the New Testament. And this tradition was influential throughout the history of Christianity, which explains monasteries, Origen castrating himself, Christian disdain for sexuality, Christian misogyny, etc. Elaine Pagels talks about this in her book, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent.

What’s my point? Marshall’s argument throughout this book has been that China should embrace Christianity, or, more accurately, the Christianity that he believes is of the Bible. For Marshall, Christianity preserves the best of Chinese culture and religion, while also lacking the deficiencies within them. In the case of fu, Marshall maintains that Christianity is all for bodily pleasures and prosperity, but that it wants for us to also worship God—-for God to be the foundation of our pleasures. But my point is this: Christianity has come in so many shapes and sizes that it’s hard to say that “Christianity” will meet China’s desires and needs. Is the tradition of Christian asceticism consistent with China’s regard for fu? Marshall could then say that the Christianity that he’s promoting is the biblical one, but I think that many different forms of Christianity are biblical, in some sense: they just emphasize different passages.

Greenwald, Rozen, and Coulter

2012-01-05T10:25:00.000-05:00

I have some political links to share:

1. Glenn Greenwald has a thought-provoking article in Salon, entitled “Progressives and the Ron Paul Fallacies”. I appreciate this article for two reasons. First, it illustrates how the American political process—-especially its polarization of red vs. blue—-gets to be pretty ridiculous. Greenwald astutely remarks:

“Then there’s the full-scale sacrifice of intellectual honesty and political independence at the altar of tongue-wagging partisan loyalty. The very same people who in 2004 wildly cheered John Kerry — husband of the billionaire heiress-widow Teresa Heinz Kerry — spent all of 2008 mocking John McCain’s wealthy life courtesy of his millionaire heiress wife and will spend 2012 depicting Mitt Romney’s wealth as proof of his insularity; conversely, the same people who relentlessly mocked Kerry in 2004 as a kept girly-man and gigolo for living off his wife’s wealth spent 2008 venerating McCain as the Paragon of Manly Honor.”

Second, Greenwald talks about how Ron Paul is addressing important issues, such as the negative effect of the drug war on minorities and the killing of Muslim children in war—-under the current administration. I plan to vote for Ron Paul in the primaries but not in the general election, if he makes it that far, because I find some of his positions to be extreme and harmful. But I appreciate him bringing certain issues to the table and talking boldly about them.

2. Laura Rozen has an article, Rick Santorum’s foreign policy: combative hawk–and, according to Bono, “defender of the vulnerable”. It discusses Santorum’s Catholicism and how that shapes his foreign policy. Essentially, Santorum is a hawk, yet he promotes compassionate policies regarding the vulnerable in the world.

I applaud his support for compassion. I do not, however, agree with his view that the private sector should handle welfare, since I do not think that the private sector has the resources to do so fully (and even someone from a private charity told me this). Both the public and also the private sectors should help the poor.

3. Ann Coulter has a funny line in her latest column: “Newt Gingrich…took $1.6 million from Freddie Mac (his latest excuse is that he got only $35,000 of that money and the rest went to “overhead” — there’s a great fiscal manager)…”

I like this because I find Newt Gingrich to be pompous, even though I admire him for his policy-analysis.

Goodman on the Noachide Laws

2012-01-05T08:00:00.000-05:00

I finished Martin Goodman's Mission and Conversion. What I'll focus on in this post is the Noachide laws, the seven commandments that parts of rabbinic Judaism held were binding on Gentiles (whereas Jews had to keep the entire Torah).

In Babylonian Talmud Bava Kamma 38a, we see the assumption that most Gentiles did not obey the seven Noachide commandments, and Rabbi Joseph in Babylonian Talmud Avodah Zarah 2b goes so far as to say that the Gentiles "were so incapable of keeping the laws that they were released from them" (Goodman's words on page 115). While Rabbi Joshua b. Hananiah affirmed in Tosefta Sanhedrin 13.2 that "the righteous of all nations have a share in the world to come" (Rabbi Joshua's words), presumably by keeping the Noachide laws, Rabbi Judah in Tosefta Sotah 8:6 states that all of the Gentiles knew of the Torah in their own language and ignored it, and so they deserved to go to hell. Rabbi Judah's opinion implies that Gentiles were somehow obligated to the Torah. And, in Babylonian Talmud Hullin 13b, an opinion attributed to Rabbi Hiyya b. Abba in the name of Rabbi Yohanan says that Gentiles outside of the land of Israel are technically not idolaters but merely follow their own ancestral customs. According to Goodman, this "seems to imply that such gentiles should be allowed to practise paganism as long as they are outside the holy land" (page 119). And so there was some diversity within rabbinic Judaism on the Noachide laws.

On page 151, Goodman refers to the view that belief in the Noachide laws developed after Hadrian in the first century C.E. prohibited circumcision, as a way for the Jews to say that Gentiles could be saved apart from the ritual of circumcision. Goodman disagrees with this view because he thinks that state opposition should have stimulated missionary zeal among Jews rather than dampen it. But the view (which Goodman attributes to William Braude and J. Juster) does intrigue me because I wonder why Jews under Hadrian would want to show that Gentiles could be saved apart from converting to Judaism. Was it to convince others that Jews were not xenophobic, as they were often accused of being? Was it to garner support from Gentiles in a time when they (the Jews) were vulnerable?

David Marshall: "Son of Heaven"

2012-01-04T13:54:00.000-05:00

I have three items for my write-up today on Chapter 5 of David Marshall’s True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture. Chapter 5 is entitled “Son of Heaven”.

1. On page 55, Marshall states: “Lao Tse wrote that he who was ‘without thought of self’ would be able to ‘accomplish his private ends.’ Chinese history is full of notable examples. Confucius passed up official posts to remain untainted. In the shadow of Qin’s burial mound, Han Wei founded the great Han Dynasty by listening to people and avoiding pretense of god-hood. Nationalist founder Sun Yat-Sen won a revolution but in the interest of peace, allowed his rival to rule. In the Gospels we find evidence that God had the same idea: that Absolute Power could accomplish great things in the guise of weakness.”

The impression that I have gotten from what I have read so far of Marshall is that he believes that the positive moral elements of the Bible constitute evidence for its divine-inspiration (albeit not the only evidence). But how can one say that, when people in non-Christian cultures and religions are able to arrive at the insight that (say) humility is good, an insight that conflicts with people’s tendency to exalt and to benefit themselves? I’m open to saying that God is able to instruct people throughout the earth, in all sorts of cultures. Marshall argues this, on some level, when he presents Christianity as ingrained within all people, explaining the presence of Christian-like themes in different cultures. I personally am not going that far, however. I’m just acknowledging that God may illuminate people throughout the world about certain moral principles.

I guess my problem is with an apologetic argument that a specific religion (Christianity) is from God and is authoritative because it has good principles. Even if Christianity takes good principles further than other religions do, I think that an atheist can easily make the argument that Christians are arriving at moral insights on their own, without divine revelation. As I’ve said, I’m open to the concept of divine illumination, but my problem with Christian apologetics is that there is often a variety of ways to interpret so-called evidence, and not all of those ways support Christianity being the one authoritative religion.

2. In my post here, I mentioned some of the inadequacies that David Marshall believes are present in Confucianism, weaknesses that (according to him) Christianity does not have. I forgot to mention one inadequacy, which Marshall discusses on pages 59-60. Confucius said that, if you’re a government official, and you learn that your son has been embezzling funds, then you should bend the rules for your son’s sake. There’s much to admire about such grace and loyalty to family. But, as Marshall points out, this outlook has caused problems, such as nepotism. Emperor Qin went the other direction, according to Marshall, when he elevated rules over relationships, as he “made public office a prize to be won through diligence rather than birth.” Marshall can see strengths and weaknesses in both perspectives. Marshall believes, however, that “this conflict disappears” for followers of Jesus, who base their roles on the love of God that fills them, and who feel free to rebel when human authority goes too far.

I guess my issue here is with Marshall’s implication that Christianity makes ambiguity go away, in terms of the issue of justice and mercy. I don’t think that it does. For one, the question of when people should receive mercy and when they should get justice—-and how to balance mercy and justice—-is not always cut-and-dry, even from a Christian perspective. In my opinion, if a son of a Christian official embezzled funds, that official probably wouldn’t want for his son to go to jail, since that would result in the son having a record that could impact the rest of his life, the son facing threats in jail, etc. And yet, the official would desire for his son to learn that certain things are wrong, and he’d fear that the son facing no consequences at all would not help him in the long run. What should the official do? It’s complex. Christianity may offer some principles as guidelines, but it doesn’t make ambiguity go completely away.

Second, I can understand why Marshall believes that Christianity is a revolutionary religion, a religion that promotes rebellion against authoritarianism. After all, Jesus overturned tables in the temple, as Marshall notes more than once. At the same time, Marshall should at least wrestle with the fact that prominent strands of Christianity have historically promoted submission to unjust authorities, on the basis of such passages as Romans 13. John MacArthur is not getting his idea that the American Revolution was a bad idea out of the clear blue sky! He’s drawing from an influential Christian tradition.

3. On page 60, Marshall states: “It’s one thing for a leader to call himself ‘lord’ from a palace surrounded by walls and bodyguards…But suppose a rebel should march openly into the capital. Suppose his followers shout praises to God for the ‘new order’ he brings. Suppose only a band of weak-kneed fishermen and a couple rusty swords stand between him and the Emperor. Imagine, to top it off, he won’t let his side fight. What can you say about a revolutionary like that? Either he is a fool. Or he has a plan.”

Marshall may be expressing his admiration for Jesus here, or he may be making an apologetic argument—-that Jesus would only do something that weird if he was who he said he was. Perhaps it’s both. Can I think of another explanation for why Jesus would rebel and not even allow his disciples to fight—-as if Jesus had a death-wish? Why would any rational person—-especially someone who imparted wise teachings—-do such a thing? Perhaps Jesus did indeed expect for his death to accomplish something in terms of the imminent kingdom of God. Scholars have debated this, but there are some, such as Albert Schweitzer (if I’m not mistaken), who maintained that Jesus had a purpose behind proceeding towards his death. But does that mean Jesus was right? There are many people who die for causes. That doesn’t mean that their causes are divinely-authoritative.

At the same time, I would like to believe in a silver lining: that Jesus accomplished something with his death. I have problems with that being mixed up with Christian exclusivism, but perhaps I can believe that Jesus’ death was redemptive, on some level, without being the sort of person who believes that people have to believe one way in this life to avoid going to hell.

Unless (Blah Blah Blah), You've Not Experienced God

2012-01-04T12:45:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, in Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest, I read the following (see here):

“The only possible way to have full understanding of the teachings of Jesus is through the light of the Spirit of God shining inside us. If we have never had the experience of taking our casual, religious shoes off our casual, religious feet— getting rid of all the excessive informality with which we approach God— it is questionable whether we have ever stood in His presence. The people who are flippant and disrespectful in their approach to God are those who have never been introduced to Jesus Christ. Only after the amazing delight and liberty of realizing what Jesus Christ does, comes the impenetrable ‘darkness’ of realizing who He is. Jesus said, ‘The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life’ (John 6:63). Once, the Bible was just so many words to us — ‘clouds and darkness’— then, suddenly, the words become spirit and life because Jesus re-speaks them to us when our circumstances make the words new.”

I have a variety of reactions to this, all of them negative.

First of all, I get sick of reading or hearing Christians say (and I paraphrase), “If such-and-such is not true in your life, then you obviously have not met God, or Jesus Christ.” In Chambers’ case, it’s approaching God with respect and reverence rather than informally and flippantly. I once heard another preacher say that, if we’re not extemporaneously thanking God for every beautiful thing we see in life, then we’re probably not in Christ. But why exactly is that my fault? I said the sinner’s prayer years ago. If I have not had a genuine encounter with God, isn’t that on God and not on me?

It also interests me that people have different ideas about how to approach God. Some say we should do so with reverence and with respect, not informally. Others, by contrast, say that we can freely talk to God as if God is a friend. Both make dogmatic claims that they have experienced God. Both, at times, make judgments about whether or not other people have truly experienced God. But who are they to judge others, when they can’t even agree on what constitutes evidence for a true spiritual experience?

Second, what Chambers says about Jesus’ words making sense to us once Jesus re-speaks them to us in our situations reminds me of a conversation I had with an evangelical Christian not long ago. He said that he truly began to understand the Bible after he accepted Jesus into his heart, and that those who do not know Christ do not understand spiritual things. Now, I’m not suggesting that this gentleman does not understand the Bible. He has been trained in biblical exegesis, and so he is able to make a reasonable and cogent interpretation of biblical passages. But, in my opinion, he understands the Bible insofar as he practices principles of biblical exegesis. Reading the Bible and believing that it conforms to some grand evangelical narrative that evangelicals are projecting onto the text at the outset does not strike me as understanding the Bible. Sure, once my friend became a Christian, he received a worldview that made sense to him, but that is not the same as understanding the Bible—-in terms of its diversity, its interaction with historical circumstances, the original meanings of its writings, etc.

But do I believe that God can make the text come alive to us in a way that’s enlightening and applicable? I believe so. That doesn’t happen all too often with me. But, while an a-ha experience is good, I don’t think that I have to have that to read the Bible and to find wisdom for my life. Also, regardless of what Chambers or anyone else says, God loves me, whether or not I have some dramatic encounter with him.

Beginning Goodman's Mission and Conversion

2012-01-04T08:00:00.000-05:00

I started Martin Goodman's Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire. Goodman's argument so far is that Jews before 100 C.E. did not have an agenda of seeking to convert Gentiles to Judaism. But does not Matthew 23:15 say that the Pharisees go about sea and land to make one proselyte? According to Goodman, that passage is referring to Pharisaic attempts to convert fellow Jews to Pharisaism, not their efforts to convert Gentiles. Goodman acknowledges that there were Gentiles who converted to Judaism, but there was ambiguity within Judaism about whether or not they were considered fellow Israelites as a result of their conversion.

Goodman surveys Jewish literature and concludes that Judaism before 100 C.E. largely believed that idolatry was stupid, but not prohibited to Gentiles. There were some strands (such as the Septuagint) which even encouraged the Jews to respect the names of Gentile gods. An exception would be the Wisdom of Solomon, which lambastes Egyptian idolatry. While there was a hope that Gentiles would convert to the worship of the God of Israel in the eschaton, they were not expected to do so in the present day and age. On pages 60-61, Goodman acknowledges that Jews may have even considered themselves "religious mentors" to Gentiles, as the Jews encouraged the Gentiles to admire the Jewish way of life, respect the Jewish God, and be ethical. But Goodman says that this is not "an impulse to draw non-Jews into Judaism in the present."

Goodman also does not think that the Jews' pagan contemporaries sought converts. While the Romans encouraged the imperial cult within the empire, they did not have a mission outside of its borders to win converts. And the Cynics were rather exclusivist.

There were a couple of interesting items in my reading. First, on page 24, Goodman mentions Plutarch's dismissal of the belief of Euhemerus that the gods were "ancient humans, deified by a grateful posterity for their great deeds". This reminded me of the Wisdom of Solomon's attempts to account for the origins of idolatry. Second, on page 54, Goodman states that Gentiles embracing monotheism would have had to leave Gentile society. I think this is because polytheism was an integral part of that society, even if there were Gentile thinkers who gravitated towards a monotheistic notion of the divine (without, of course, feeling that they must abstain from the public worship of the gods). Third, I appreciated Goodman's discussion about intimacy on page 25: "As in human friendships, not many people can strike up a close friendship with everyone they meet. Most people will remain neutral or mildly benevolent towards those with whom they have no time to forge a firmer bond."

Ron Paul on Racism; Mark Driscoll on Marriage

2012-01-03T12:47:00.002-05:00

I’d like to share a couple of links:

1. Here is a YouTube video, “Busted! Ron Paul racist rant caught on tape!”

The title of the video is ironic because the video goes on to show that Ron Paul passionately stands up for African-Americans. He opposes the war on drugs and favors treatment for addiction instead, one reason being that the war on drugs has disproportionately targeted minorities, when there are whites who have addiction problems, too. Paul also opposes the federal death penalty because it, too, tends to target minorities. And Paul affirms that racism is actually inconsistent with libertarianism, which treats people as individuals rather than as groups.

I can see Paul’s points, here, and I appreciate his concern for minority issues. I may vote for him in the primaries. But I’d have a hard time having him as President because I do not believe that libertarianism will help the vulnerable. I think, for example, that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a good idea—-all of it—-for people are not always going to do the right, fair thing on their own. I also cringe at Ron Paul’s opposition to laws against sexual harassment (see here). I can see his point that, say, telling a crude joke in the workplace should not be made into a federal case. But I also think that a woman should be able to take legal action if her employer is making her employment or professional advancement contingent on having sex with him. Paul’s statement that the woman should seek employment elsewhere if she does not like her current job-environment strikes me as insensitive. It does not consider the difficulty of finding a job, as well as women’s vulnerability, as they seek to maintain their personal dignity while also feeding their families. So, in my opinion, Ron Paul is a mixed bag when it comes to understanding the plight of the vulnerable.

2. Rachel Held Evans reviews Mark Driscoll’s Real Marriage. I have not read the book, but, from what I know of Driscoll, her critiques strike me as spot-on. Driscoll, for instance, has a certain conception of what being a real man is, and he seems to look down on those who do not fit that mold. I also agree with Rachel that the Christian conservative teaching that women should submit to their husbands is a one-sided reading of Scripture, for Esther did not blindly obey her husband when she appeared before him at risk of death. But, like Rachel, I appreciate Driscoll for saying that husbands and wives should be friends, and, while his admission of his personal flaws does raise the question of whether we should view our pastors as infallible oracles, I do admire his vulnerability and his willingness to grow. In my opinion, conservative evangelicalism has good and bad points: it teaches men to love, honor, and respect women, rather than seeing them as sex-objects, and it also encourages men to admit when they are wrong. Yet, that co-exists with a patriarchal mindset.

Going Out on Faith?

2012-01-03T12:20:00.001-05:00

I don’t plan to blog through every single entry in Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest, but I’ll blog about entries whenever I feel like doing so.

In the January 2 entry, Oswald Chambers says the following:

“Have you been asking God what He is going to do? He will never tell you. God does not tell you what He is going to do— He reveals to you who He is. Do you believe in a miracle-working God, and will you ‘go out’ in complete surrender to Him until you are not surprised one iota by anything He does?…Let the attitude of your life be a continual willingness to ‘go out’ in dependence upon God, and your life will have a sacred and inexpressible charm about it that is very satisfying to Jesus.”

I like this entry better than the one yesterday (see here) because it emphasizes getting to know God for who he is, rather than trying to discern what God is supposedly doing. My problem, though, is that even this entry assumes that we can be dogmatic about what God is doing. If the idea is that I should trust God to provide for my needs, then I’m cool with that (though, of course, I would ask why there are so many people in the world whose needs do not appear to be provided for). But if the point is, say, that God may want me to be a missionary, and so I should go out on faith, then I’d have issues with that, for I’d wonder how I can even be sure that God would want me to be a missionary (and I’m just using an example here).

I’m not overly dogmatic about what God is or is not doing in my life or in the world, for I do not know. But I do try to trust that God is full of love and grace, whatever happens, and hopefully that can influence me to make good decisions that help myself and other people. That will not stop me from praying for things, but I don’t really believe that God has some grand plan for my life with which I need to be in tune. But, as I said, I hold on to God’s love and grace.

On a somewhat related note, see Bob Greaves’ post here.

Wrestling with David Marshall's Depiction of Jesus, and Conservative Evangelicalism in General

2012-01-03T11:43:00.003-05:00

For my write-up today on David Marshall’s True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture, I’ll feature three quotes from Chapter 4, “The Tao of Revolution”, then I will ramble on about God, Jesus, and Christianity.

Page 44: “Human nature yearns for God. Even the most atheistic ideology can only disguise or pervert this drive. [James' note: Marshall often talks about how Communist nations have practically idolized or promoted the idolization of Communist leaders, such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc.] Recent mass suicides and murders by cults in Tokyo, Texas and Switzerland, are extreme examples of what happens when people set the wrong altar on Mount Tai.”

Page 45: “Sometime later my friend [who was involved in the occult] felt so depressed she decided to step in front of a car. (I learned firsthand in Taiwan how common suicidal impulses are among those who do business with spirits.) At that moment a stranger came up to her and told her, ‘Don’t kill yourself. God loves you.’ She became a Christian.

“What do you do when you don’t believe in spirits, but at night your house shakes and invisible feet stomp across your hall? On my first visit to China, friends I was traveling with met a young woman with this problem. Atheist professors and Buddhist priests were unable to help her. She’d become a nervous wreck and lost many pounds. My friends prayed with her and both house and occupant found peace.”

Page 50: “Which should China choose; the Way of Loyalty, or the Way of Rebellion? She needs both. Not just two teachers who attract two different kinds of people. [James' note: Marshall's referring to Confucius, who emphasized family loyalty, and Mao, who conducted a revolution that brought a mixed-bag of reforms and terror.] She needs a sage who binds disparate strands of morality into a single thread and joins broken fragments of truth. China is looking for a leader, humble and kind like Confucius and with his integrity. She also needs a general who is bold enough to reach for Heaven: a man with fire in his soul. Somebody who stands against oppressors and says, ‘Love the weak or face the wrath of God.’ The ancient realist Hsun Tzu wrote of human nature, ‘Crooked wood needs to undergo steaming and bending by the carpenter’s tools; then only is it straight.’ Two thousand years ago in Israel a carpenter opened shop—-not to work wood or stone, but human hearts.”

Although I have critiqued Marshall’s arguments, Marshall’s depiction of Jesus still attracts me. Marshall presents Jesus as someone who was kind and compassionate, who healed others in a quiet and low-key manner and was a champion of the sick, the poor, and the marginalized. And Marshall talks about how these features of Jesus inspired his followers throughout history to care for others and to bring about reforms.

But I’d have a hard time going back to conservative evangelicalism—-with its smug attitude, its judgmentalism, its obsession with doctrinal points that strike me as irrelevant to the human condition (i.e., whether water baptism is a requirement for salvation, Calvinism, etc.), its view that its simplistic narrative and “answers” adequately take into account the complexities of life (i.e., the nature of unbelief, the struggles of homosexuals, the existence of different religions, etc.), its exclusivist tendency to look down on people who behave or live their lives differently, its marriage to the Republican Party, its discouragement of learning different facts and points-of view (which is not true of all or even most conservative evangelicals, but I have noticed a tendency towards that within conservative evangelicalism), its belief in hell for all who do not believe exactly one way, its chest-thumping support for Israel, as if God takes sides in such a complex issue, and the list goes on. I’m not just criticizing others here, mind you. I’m also criticizing the way that I was back when I was more of a conservative evangelical. And, although I dislike my current bitterness and realize that my present state is far from ideal, I do not want to go back to where I was. Even if I’m attracted to Marshall’s depiction of Jesus, Christianity has so much baggage in my mind that I fear that my attraction to this compassionate Jesus would turn out to be a mere blip on my mind’s radar.

I just gave you a list of problems I have had with conservative evangelicalism. Now I’ll list areas in which my hopes in it have been disappointed. Conservative Christianity emphasizes community, but I have a hard time fitting into groups. Christianity says that Jesus changes people, but I find that I’m the same person—-shy and introverted. I’ve gotten to the point where I feel that I have to deal with myself as I am, and to make the most out of that, rather than trusting in a god to make me something completely different and beating up on myself when that does not take place.

Do I long to worship someone? In a sense, I do. That’s why I have liked certain celebrities or politicians or characters in books, television, and movies. I wouldn’t exactly say this means that all of human nature “yearns for God”, for there are plenty of people throughout the world who do not worship the God of the Bible, Judaism, and Christianity, either because they’re atheists, or they have a depersonalized depiction of God, or they equate God with the cosmos, etc. But I believe that, for me personally, I need to look to a power greater than myself. I’ve been told all of my life that the object of my adoration should be God, but, to be honest, I never really understood why that particular being should receive my admiration or adoration. God seems at times to be too distant or abstract to me. Threatening me with hell or punishment does not increase my adoration for God. Perhaps I can focus on the compassion and humility of Jesus, but, to be honest, there are times when Jesus in the Gospels strikes me as an apocalyptic, my-way-or-the-highway, know-it-all, conditionally-loving psychopath. It’s hard for me to “adore” God, per se. But perhaps my faith needs to be destroyed for it to be reborn. Maybe there is garbage in my previous depictions of God that needs to go, and I can then embrace God in a more positive, healthy way.

Marshall’s stories about spirits stood out to me because I have long admired Jesus’ authority over unclean spirits. It makes me feel safe, especially when I watch a scary movie or hear stories about demons. I desire security in this scary world. But there are people in non-Christian contexts who believe in a higher power who subordinates demons, or spirits. Can I believe in the concept, without accepting the baggage of evangelical Christianity?

I’ll stop here.

Jesus' Death in Acts; Matthew----Jew or Gentile?

2012-01-03T08:00:00.000-05:00

I finished Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity, volume 1, and I have two:

1. S.G. Wilson states on pages 157-158: "...the soteriological significance of Jesus' death is never made explicit in the missionary speeches and is rarely apparent elsewhere in Luke-Acts. [T]he most that can be said is that 'Luke has taken over certain traditions regarding the meaning of the death of Jesus but he has not in any way developed them or drawn attention to them.' The longer reading in Luke 22:19-20 and the reference to the church as having 'been obtained by his own blood' in Acts 20:28 are not to be overlooked, and a practical theologia crucis, understood as a daily bearing of the cross modelled on the careers of Jesus and his apostles, is clearly a matter of some interest to Luke. Yet the failure of Luke to develop the positive notion of Jesus' death as an atonement, even though he is aware of it, means that there is little to counterbalance the negative emphasis on Jewish culpability. Of course, this is not necessarily a deliberate move on Luke's part, for it may well be that Paul's concentration on this theme makes him, rather than Luke, the exception in early Christianity, or that the atonement was an inner-church theme and not part of the missionary kerygma. The effect, however, whether intended or not, is that our attention is focused without distraction on the accusations against the Jews."

I found this interesting because some have argued that Luke does not believe in blood atonement and that the few passages that do refer to it are interpolations. Wilson sees those few passages as authentic, however, and he maintains that Luke knows of the notion that Jesus' death was for blood atonement but does not develop it. The result is that the Jews in Acts bear a significant amount of onus for Jesus' death, which is not even given much redeeming value in Acts. At the same time, Wilson does note that the Jews in Acts act according to the plan of God when they kill Jesus.

2. On pages 184-187, Benno Przybylski (which I will abbreviate as "BP") argues against G. Strecker's idea that a Gentile Christian was behind the final redaction of the Gospel of Matthew. Some of Strecker's arguments resemble those of John Meier and Michael Cook, who contend that Matthew was not a Jewish-Christian Gospel.

First, Strecker says that Matthew 5:43 reveals ignorance of the Jewish tradition, for it says that Jesus' audience has heard that you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. Strecker states that such a concept is not in the older rabbinic tradition. BP responds, however, that it "could easily reflect teaching similar to that of the Qumran sectarians as expressed in 1QS 1.10 or 9.21."

Second, Strecker says that Matthew is unaware of Hebrew parallelism, for Matthew 21:1-9 presents Jesus riding two animals in fulfillment of Zechariah 9:9, when Zechariah 9:9 is not saying that the king will ride on both an ass and also a colt. Rather, Zechariah 9:9 is using Hebrew parallelism (repeating a thought), which means that the ass and the colt both refer to one and the same animal. The argument that Matthew does not understand Hebrew parallelism is used by John Meier and Michael Cook. But I agree with BP: the rabbis themselves took parallelism literally at times, just like Matthew. For example, BP cites Psalm 28:5, which says that "He will break them down and not build them up". This looks like parallelism because a thought is being repeated. But the rabbis believed that God did not repeat himself superfluously, and so the Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael Shirata 6 held that Psalm 28:5 refers to two separate things rather than being a repetition of one idea: "He will break them down" relates to this world, and "and not build them up" pertains to the World to Come. See my post here for more information on Matthew 21 and Zechariah 9:9.

Third, Strecker says that Matthew 12:11 contradicts Jewish law. Matthew 12:11 says that the Pharisees believed that one could pull his sheep out of a pit on the Sabbath. According to BP, "Strecker argues that according to rabbinic law the owner could feed the animal or even help it to help itself but he could not actually lift it out." But BP responds that Matthew may be going with a minority rabbinic opinion, or that popular practice was more liberal than the majority rabbinic view.

David Marshall: "The Teacher and the Tyrant"

2012-01-02T12:51:00.004-05:00

In this post, I’ll blog about Chapter 3 of David Marshall’s True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture. This chapter is entitled “The Teacher and the Tyrant”. I have two items:

1. On page 28, Marshall states:

“Kindness towards inferiors was not a common attitude in Confucius’ day. Kings murdered to steal wives or even for target practice. The prevailing sentiment was that the best purpose a subject could serve was to die for his lord. Confucius taught that the first duty of a king was to care for the common folk, though.”

Overall, I enjoyed Marshall’s chapter on Confucius, for I had not read much about this particular religious figure up to that point. The reason why that passage on page 28 stood out to me, however, was that it made me think of an implication that Marshall often makes in the books of his that I have read so far. Marshall often points out areas in which the Bible or Christianity is superior to other religions—-superior in the sense that it is more humanitarian, or meets spiritual needs more effectively—-and his implication seems to be that the Bible or Christianity is divinely-inspired and authoritative on account of this. But does a person arriving at a revolutionary insight that we should treat people well mean that the person is divinely-inspired? Would Marshall say that Confucius’ religion was divinely-inspired and authoritative? (See here for an article that refers to Confucius’ other revolutionary thoughts.)

I seriously doubt that Marshall would say that Confucianism is on the same level as Christianity in terms of divine inspiration. In subsequent chapters, Marshall discusses what he considers to be weaknesses of Confucianism, such as Confucius’ God being overly distant, and Confucius’ tendency to ignore women, when husbands “need a teacher who sets an example [of] how to love and respect women—-who cares for virtue in women” (page 43). For Marshall, Christianity does not have these inadequacies of Confucianism, for Jesus bridged the gap between heaven and earth as well as modeled a respectful treatment of women.

Marshall also maintains that Christianity does not have the inadequacies that have resulted from the abuse of Confucianism (abuse that cannot necessarily be blamed on Confucius himself). Marshall praises Confucianism for its emphasis on honoring parents, but, in China, that concept has been abused, as (for example) some believe that a son should die if his father wants him to do so. (UPDATE: Marshall goes on to say on page 43, however, that Confucius thought people should obey their parents even when the parents are wrong.) For Marshall, Christianity has the sorts of positive concepts that are in Confucianism, such as honor for parents and Jesus’ covenant-faithfulness (which is not to say that Confucianism believes in Jesus, but rather that it emphasizes faithfulness to one’s family and obligations). But Christianity also is revolutionary in that it challenges authority when it is unjust.

Marshall obviously believes that Christianity is superior, but is he also open to the possibility that, on some level, people in other cultures and religions can be divinely-inspired, too? He talks at great length about what he considers to be truth in other religions—-a belief in a Supreme God, a hope for atonement, etc. Could that be due to God’s inspiration, in his opinion?

As an undergraduate, I once talked with a religion professor of mine about Christian exclusivism. He was an Evangelical Free pastor, but he also was learned about other religions and open-minded. Our class had just watched The Message, a movie about Muhammad, and it intrigued me that Muhammad stood up for the worship of one God as well as social justice. I wondered if Islam could have been inspired, in some sense, by God. Some of my evangelical friends said that Islam was from Satan and was a counterfeit (and this was years before 9/11), but I was interested in my professor’s take. He essentially said that we do not know on whom God’s spirit can rest. Who is to say that God is not in other religions, inspiring people to know him a little better and to take a stand for what is morally right?

2. Now I’ll turn to the “fact-checking” part of my post, and I am open to gentle correction, since I know little about Chinese religion. On pages 30-31, Marshall says that Confucius hoped for a sheng ren, a holy man or sage who would benefit others and would even be willing to accept death in order to effect benevolence. While later disciples believed that Confucius was a holy man, Confucius did not consider himself to be such. Marshall quotes Confucian scholar Chen Jingpan, who states that this ideal Sage for whom Confucius hoped “was thought of as being in the same category as the Divine Being of whom the Superior Man should always stand in awe.” According to Marshall, Confucius did not believe that he found such a person in his time. But Marshall, of course, thinks that Jesus fulfills that expectation.

I did some google searches, and I found some interesting things. Professor Nick Gier of the University of Idaho states in his notes here that Confucius thought that anyone had the potential to become a junzi, which is an ideal person. Regarding the sheng ren, Gier has the following notes: “Sheng ren sage[;] god-like—-true mediators between heaven and earth[;] Yao, Shun, Yu and King Yen[;] focus: cosmological”. The part about the sheng-ren being god-like and a mediator stands out to me, since that sounds like the Christian conception of Jesus.

Gier refers to places in Confucius’ Analects in which Confucius denies being a sheng ren (7:26, 34; 9:13), but he does believe that Confucius’ deems himself to be a junzi in 9:13 (which I cannot see, but you can check out Confucius’ Analects for yourself here). Bier quotes Zaiwo, who wrote in Mencius that Confucius was superior to Yao and Shun, and Bier says that these were sage kings, which may mean that they were considered by Zaiwo to be sheng rens. But I do not know if Confucius considered them to be such. Marshall says that Confucius did not think that they deserved such a lofty title!

I found on the wikipedia article about Confucius the following: “Confucius stressed the development of lǐ through the actions of sage leaders in human history”. “In the early Confucian tradition, lǐ was doing the proper thing at the proper time, balancing between maintaining existing norms to perpetuate an ethical social fabric, and violating them in order to accomplish ethical good. Training in the lǐ of past sages cultivates in people virtues that include ethical judgment about when lǐ must be adapted in light of situational contexts.” In wikipedia’s article on li, we read: “Acting with Li and Ren led to what Confucius called the ‘superior human’ or ‘the sage’.”

There was a pro-Islamic cite that quotes Confucius, but, unfortunately, it did not provide a reference:

“The superior man honors / respects / acknowledges ( WEI ) three things ( in his life ). He acknowledges the Decree of Heaven ( wei Ming ). He honors the Saying of Sages ( Sheng Ren ) and he honors the Great Leaders ( Ta ren )’. The small/common (men) ignore (the teachings) of the Sages, despise their teachings or gain no benefit from it.”

If this is an accurate quote, and if the wikipedia article is correct, then Confucius probably believed that there were sages or holy men before his time, for they left a tradition that he thought could help others to become holy men, or good people. He may have even thought that anyone had the potential to become that. But he recognized that the standard was high, and he felt that he fell short.

Linville's Carnival and Babinski on C.S. Lewis and Josh McDowell

2012-01-02T10:55:00.001-05:00

Jim Linville’s Biblical Studies Carnival is now up! And, while I was looking at Dr. Jim’s site, I noticed that ex-fundementalist Edward Babinski is on his blogroll, and I decided to visit Babinski’s blog. Babinski has an excellent post contrasting C.S. Lewis with John McDowell. Conservative Christians have long told me and others to read C.S. Lewis, hoping that Lewis will somehow convince us to adopt their brand of Christianity. The thing is…Lewis was much more liberal than many of the people who recommend him, not to mention more thoughtful and likeable.

What Costly Act?

2012-01-02T10:37:00.000-05:00

I read a handful of daily devotionals, and, this year, one of them will be Oswald Chamber’s My Utmost for His Highest. I didn’t care much for what Chambers said yesterday, but maybe I’ll be able to eat the meat and spit out the bones as I read him this year, or to see how even the bones can have some profound, redemptive point.

Here’s the reading for January 1. The topic is surrender to Jesus. Chambers says the following:

“It is absolute and irrevocable surrender of the will at that point. An undue amount of thought and consideration for ourselves is what keeps us from making that decision, although we cover it up with the pretense that it is others we are considering. When we think seriously about what it will cost others if we obey the call of Jesus, we tell God He doesn’t know what our obedience will mean. Keep to the point— He does know. Shut out every other thought and keep yourself before God in this one thing only— my utmost for His highest. I am determined to be absolutely and entirely for Him and Him alone.”

I guess my question is: What would God want me to do that is so costly to me and to others? And how would I even know that it’s God who wants me to do that, and not my own obsessive-compulsiveness or guilt-tripping of myself, sometimes in response to what some Christian dogmatically proclaims is the “will of God”?

Sanders on Paul's Stripes and Mission

2012-01-02T08:00:00.001-05:00

I started Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity. I thought that E.P. Sanders' essay, "Paul on the Law, His Opponents, and the Jewish People", raised some interesting points. Here are two items:

1. In II Corinthians 11:24, Paul says that he received thirty-nine stripes from the Jews five times. Sanders notes that, from a Jewish perspective, stripes were administered as punishment for certain crimes against the Torah. So which crime did some Jews believe that Paul was committing? Sanders wrestles some with this question by considering what ancient Jewish sources have to say:

"It is fruitless here to search the list of things in Mishnah Makkoth for which the rabbis decreed corporal punishment. For one thing, the rabbis themselves extended the list of those to be punished by the thirty-nine stripes to include those for whom the Bible decreed 'cutting off' (Mak. 3:15). More to the point, it is intrinsically probable that the Diaspora synagogues had at their disposal only two punishments, ostracism and thirty-nine stripes. We know from 1QS 7:1, for example, that in Qumran even blasphemy (according to the Bible a capital offense) was punished by separation from the community. One may reason qal-va-homer that the Diaspora synagogues could not and did not execute people guilty of capital offenses. The administration of the thirty-nine stripes was probably the only punishment available in the Diaspora to be applied to transgressors who kept showing up to the synagogue. The penalty, in other words, probably covered so many transgressions that the crime cannot be precisely specified just by learning the punishment."

But what was Paul's transgression, in the eyes of certain Jews? Was it blasphemy, since the Gospels present the Jews considering claims that Jesus made (i.e., to have authority to forgive sins, to be the son of God, etc.) to be blasphemous? Sanders maintains that Paul bringing Gentiles into the people of God without requiring them to be circumcised was his transgression. According to Sanders, the Jews considered the Christian movement to be Jewish, and so they thought that Paul was bringing Gentiles into Israel without circumcision. Circumcision was serious, according to Judaism, for God told Abraham in Genesis 17 that those in Abraham's community who were not circumcised would be cut off from their people.

Sanders also notes that the fact that Paul was even beaten indicates that the Jews considered Paul to be part of their community and thus under their authority. This, even though Paul relates in I Corinthians 9 and Galatians 2 that he did not consistently live like a Jew under the Torah.

2. On pages 88-89, Sanders states: "It is true that Paul says that 'to the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews' (1 Cor. 9:19), just as it also says that he preached from Jerusalem to Illyricum (Rom. 9:15). Yet his own description of his career (Gal. 1-2) seems to exclude any possibility of his having preached in Jerusalem, just as the Antioch incident (Gal. 2:11-13) shows that in a mixed church he did not live like a Jew. In short, it is hard to know when Paul could have preached in Jerusalem, and it is hard to know when he actually lived like a Jew in order to win Jews, since he clearly did not do so even in Antioch. I do not have at hand a precise literary category for Rom. 15:19 and 1 Cor. 9:19, although a student of rhetoric may. Perhaps the term 'hyperbole' will be adequate...In any case, the statements that he preached in Jerusalem and sought to win Jews do not accord with the rest of his descriptions of his career."

I do not understand all of Sanders' argument, but I can somewhat see his point: Paul in Galatians says that he was entrusted with the mission to the Gentiles, whereas Peter was the apostle to the Jews, and Paul does not live like a Jew when he is in a mixed community of Jews and Gentiles. For Sanders, that does not mesh with Paul's statement in I Corinthians 9 that he also had a mission to the Jews and behaved as a Jew in order to win Jews.

I have doubts that we should speak in absolutes when it comes to Paul's career, for perhaps he preached to Jews before he was entrusted with his mission to the Gentiles, or he sometimes expanded his mission a bit. Sanders' skepticism about Paul's statement here is interesting, though, because Daniel Fraikin in the very next essay, "The Rhetorical Function of the Jews in Romans", states on page 95 that "We should remember in this respect that the audience, from a rhetorical point of view, is not the actual congregation of people hearing the speech but a construction of the speaker." Fraikin here reminds me of Andrew Das, who argued that Paul wrote Romans primarily to Gentiles, and that his address to Jews is purely rhetorical and is not addressed to actual Jews in the Roman congregation. Paul is making a point to Gentiles when he addresses Jews: that Gentile Christians are part of the community of God because everyone has sinned and Christ is thus how people (Jews and Gentiles both) enter God's community. (But Fraikin also says that Paul addresses Jews, so I'm not sure that he's making the exact same point as Das.)

Sacrifice?

2012-01-01T14:05:00.002-05:00

For my write-up on church today, I’ll use as my starting-point the prayer of confession:

“Eternal God, we celebrate the courage of kings who left their homelands and their own people to follow a star; we marvel at their quest to honor a child whose power was announced in the heavens above; we would do anything to be a part of their story—-as long as it requires little effort or sacrifice on our part. Forgive our feet of clay, O God. Open our shut-up hearts to the mystery made known in Christ, that others may behold in us, the blessings to be found in journeys worth taking. Amen.”

Part of this prayer rubs me the wrong way. What’s wrong with doing a good deed that does not require much effort or sacrifice? Why does there always need to be a sacrifice? I remember reading a book of sermons by John Henry Newman, and I did not finish the book because Newman seemed to be implying that I’ll go to heaven if I do good works that are inconvenient to me—-and he actually used the word inconvenient. I once read a comment by a Christian that was criticizing those who simply donate money to their local food pantry, without actively involving themselves in ministering to the poor. But isn’t it good when people give something, even when they’re not particularly sacrificing?

I led the liturgy today. One lady there has taught in the public school system, yet she is terrified of getting in front of the church to do the liturgy! I was curious as to why, and she responded that kids are not as judgmental as adults. She also said that she liked to feel a sense of peace when she was at church, and so she avoided getting up front to lead the liturgy. But she told me that she helps the church in other ways. And she does. Whenever our church has a rummage sale, or something like that, she is out there all day—-monitoring the tables and keeping the books. In my opinion, it’s best when we can serve by doing what we’re good at, rather than trying to do things with which we’re not all that comfortable. As Paul said, Christians have different spiritual gifts. Not everyone is a healer, an evangelist, etc.

But I do think that there’s a place to be stretched, to come a little bit out of our shells or comfort zones. But how does one distinguish between avoiding something that one is perhaps not good at—-something that can disrupt one’s peace of mind—-and a deed that one probably should do in order to grow a bit?

David Marshall: "The Sun Rise from Mount Tai"

2012-01-01T13:17:00.001-05:00

In this post, I’ll blog about Chapter 2 of David Marshall’s True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture. This chapter is entitled “The Sun Rise from Mount Tai”. I’ll use as my starting-point something that Marshall says on page 19:

“Throughout history, China has felt the Presence of One whose nature images carved in wood or even words carved in stone seemed inadequate to express. He wasn’t like ‘gods’ and ‘goddesses’ of popular legend. I doubt China took most of its myths much more seriously than we take soap operas. As Frena Bloomfield said, the Chinese gods ‘Are there to be fooled, and the Chinese are there to fool them.’”

In a similar vein, Marshall on page 17 refers to a monument on Mount Tai that is blank because an emperor was dissatisfied with all of the inscriptions that his scholars proposed. On page 19, Marshall states that the emperor was left without words when it came to the Supreme God, and that there are no idols for Tian (heaven), as exist for other gods.

On pages 19-20, Marshall elaborates on the Supreme God of China. He quotes passages from Chinese literature warning against trifling with heaven and affirming that heaven hears all that is secret and cannot be deceived. Contra those who believe that Tian is an impersonal force or “An abstract concept of universal harmony”, Marshall quotes passages in Chinese writings that present Tian as intelligent, loving, and actively interested in humanity. He also refers to Chinese creation stories.

The passage with which I opened this item, the one on page 19, appeared to downplay the importance of gods and goddesses in China, as if the Chinese people have not taken them seriously. Elsewhere in this book, however, Marshall seems to grant that they are quite important to many Chinese people. On page 45, he states:

“In regard to the occult, the example China’s First Teacher [Confucius] set was incomplete. He steered clear of both gods and human demagogues—-both sensible policies. But China as a whole has seldom been able to avoid either entirely. Mt. Tai became cluttered with idols, and the minds of the people with demeaning superstitions. Why? Because China knew her ‘Heavenly Parent’ only from a far distance. Her wisest teacher, who felt an ideal father was distant from his son, also sensed no special closeness to God. He did not know how to bridge the gap between Heaven and earth, or fully understand why it needed to be bridged.”

Here, Marshall is saying that idolatry exists in China as an attempt to bridge the gap that many Chinese people feel between humans and the Supreme God, who is considered to be distant.

On page 53, Marshall says:

“But in the grain of Jewish Scripture were hidden germs of revolution, too. ‘Do not make for yourselves any carved image, of animals below, of stars above…’ Some may think the idea of a Jealous God to be outdated or provincial. But the hostility of the Jewish prophets to ‘idolatry’ was the most subversive concept in the ancient world. It sounded radical to Israel’s neighbors, and when these teachings reached a China that had accustomed itself to lesser gods than Huang Dian Shuang Di, it sounded just as radical. ‘Pluck the tablets of the family altar and throw them in the fire. Take a sledge hammer to all the gods on Mount Tai but one. Leave your idols of stick and stone and worship the One True God who made Heaven and Earth.”

Here, Marshall appears to be saying that idolatry is so endemic to China that the anti-idolatry message of the Hebrew Bible is revolutionary to the nation. That differs somewhat from what I take to be Marshall’s usual argument in this book: that Christianity fits Chinese culture because Chinese culture has prominent elements that are similar to Christianity.

Now I’ll do a little “fact check” on what I read in Marshall, though, as I’ve said before, I am open to correction, and I do not consider anything I write here to be the final word. I also can’t vouch for how good my sources are, but I’m consulting them to see if there is an alternative to the picture that Marshall presents.

Marshall’s presentation to Tian as personal appears to check out. The wikipedia article on Tian quotes primary sources (i.e., Confucius) that acknowledge a personal dimension to Tian, as Tian is one who makes decrees, has a will, can reject, etc. And yet, there is also a sense in which the Supreme Being, Shangdi, is regarded to be transcendent rather than imminent, and so he rules through lesser beings (see here). But there may be diversity or nuance in how the Chinese conceptualize Tian, for some members on the China History Forum maintain that prominent Chinese philosophers regarded Tian as impersonal rather than personal (see here).

A while back, I wrote a post that discussed an essay in Understanding Poets and Prophets: Essays in Honour of George Wishart Anderson by A.C.C. Lee, entitled “Genesis 1 from the Perspective of a Chinese Creation Myth”. I’ll quote something that I say there, since Marshall talks about Chinese creation stories:

“The myth of P’an-ku states that P’an-ku came from primordial chaos, and that he separated the yin (earth, female, darkness, coolness) and the yang (heaven, maleness, brightness, warmth), which entailed the separation of the heaven from the earth. When P’an-ku died, his body became the things on the earth—mountains, rivers, etc. People were transformed from the parasites on his body—from ‘the finest essence of breath which becomes the human spirit’ (page 194). Notwithstanding their lowly origin, however, humans are still ‘invited to unite with heaven and earth’ (page 195). Lee sees similar themes in Genesis 1: separation, humans having a lowly origin while containing a noble sort of breath within them, etc. But Lee also acknowledges differences: the Chinese myth does not have a god who is from outside of nature, plus it lacks creation ex-nihilo. (Lee may believe that creation ex-nihilo is the teaching of Genesis 1, but I am not certain if that is Lee’s stance. But there are many scholars who argue otherwise, maintaining that, in Genesis 1, God is organizing chaos into cosmos, rather than creating material out of nothing.)”

There appear to be strong differences between the creator P’an-ku and the God of Genesis 1, for P’an-ku comes from primordial chaos and dies, and his body becomes things on the earth, such as rivers and mountains. But there are some Chinese stories about Shangdi and Taiyi preceding P’an-ku (see here). The story of P’an-ku reminds me of Purusha in the Indian Rig Veda (see here). I’d like to use that point as a launch-pad to ask a question. There are different kinds of creation stories throughout the world: creation ex-nihilo, creation from chaos, creation from a cosmic egg, creation from the body parts of a primordial being, etc. See here and here for details. Marshall has often implied that the appearance of Christian-like themes in different cultures supports the truth of Christianity. My question is this: Why can’t the cross-cultural appearance of un-Christian-like themes support the truth of non-Christian-like accounts of creation? Perhaps commonalities across cultures have a sociological or an anthropological explanation, rather than being evidence that the truth of Christianity is written on people’s hearts.

Regarding Mount Tai, perhaps Chinese people do revere Shangdi or Tian when ascending it. I do not know. But the wikipedia article on Mount Tai says that the supreme god on that mountain is the Emperor Lord of Mount Tai, and that some traditions say he is a descendant of Pangu (whether he was from one of the parasites on Pangu, like other human beings, I do not know). On the blank monument, all the wikipedia article says is this: “The Wordless Stela stands in front of the Jade Emperor Temple. Legend has it that the emperor who commissioned the stela was dissatisfied with the planned inscription and decided to leave it blank instead.” It does not say why the stela was left blank, but there could very well be more to the issue than wikipedia tells us.

Overall, Chinese religion appears to be complex. Marshall probably acknowledges that, but he believes that there are salient elements of it that prepare the Chinese people for Christianity. Sure, there are elements that overlap with Christianity, and I’m sure that those elements prepare certain Chinese people to embrace the Christian religion. But Marshall acknowledges that there are also elements that repulse people from Christianity, and that there are many Chinese people who do not believe that Chinese religion is consistent or compatible with the Christian belief system. Can we truly say that the Chinese religion is a tutor to Christ, when the Chinese religion is so complex and far from monolithic?

2011 on My Blog and Other Blogs

2011-12-31T13:31:00.001-05:00

Some bloggers I know have been listing their top posts for 2011, or their favorite posts from other blogs. I’ll be doing something like that in this post.

My Blog

On my blog, my focus this year was largely on my reading for my comprehensive examinations in rabbinics and Hebrew Bible. I like a lot of the posts that I wrote for that, especially the ones about John Van Seters’ work. Van Seters, in my opinion, is not always the easiest author to read, but there was a sense of satisfaction that came to me when I took a look at some of his arguments and broke them down so I could understand them, and my process for doing that was blogging. I am also glad that I got to write some posts that can be a source of information for anyone interested. For instance, I had long heard that the camel was not a domestic animal in the time of Abraham and that Genesis is thus inaccurate on this issue, and I also knew about scholars who disagreed with that claim. But I did not know what the evidence was, pro or con. As a result, I did some research and I wrote a post about it: The Domestic Camel.

Also in 2011, I have done a weekly blog post on the Book of Psalms. Before I got into this project, I was afraid that blogging through the Psalms would be rather boring, since many of the Psalms say the same sorts of things. Well, so far, I have blogged about Psalms 1-57, and I’m not bored yet! Each Psalm, in my opinion, has its own eccentricities. There are hard verses, and interpreters have different views about what those verses mean. The whole experience of researching the Psalms and their interpreters has been satisfying, and it’s gotten better with time.

Other posts have been a pleasure for me to write. I have enjoyed reading about Second Temple and rabbinic views about the Torah, and whether or not Gentiles had to observe it. I was glad to finally read Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois for Black History Month, since I heard about them on one of my favorite miniseries, Roots: The Next Generation, but I did not know precisely where they differed. Women’s History Month was also good, for I learned about feminist and womanist Christology, as well as feminist constructions of history. In the process, I have taken a look at my own theology and approach to the Scriptures—-Do I pick and choose what I will believe in the Bible, and, if so, what is my criteria?

Starting in 2011, I began to attend a Presbyterian Church (USA), which is walking distance from where I live. I have appreciated the hospitality of the people there. I think that blogging through my church’s Bible study on Tim Keller’s The Prodigal God helped me to get more out of it. My favorite post from that experience was The Am Ha-Aretz, Sinners, and the Prodigal Son.

My blog has gained new readers and commenters this year, and I have appreciated their insights, as well as the insights of long-time readers. I’d like to highlight one interaction that I had that taught me a valuable lesson. In my post, Childs on the Covenant Code and Exodus 24, I said that Exodus 21:21 says that if a master beats his slave and the slave gets up after a day or two, then the master will not be punished. I had long assumed that the law was saying that the master would not be punished if the slave survived the beating, but he would be punished if the slave died. Paul D., however, brought to my attention translations that said that the law is saying something different: that the master is not punished if the slave lives for a few days and then dies. I checked out the Hebrew, translations, the Septuagint, and Jewish and Christian commentaries and learned that there was a strong tradition that interprets the verse as Paul does, but there were a few that read it my way. I guess my lesson there was that what I assume the text means is not necessarily what the text means, or the only way that the text can be interpreted.

I did not blog as much about entertainment as I have in previous years, but there were a few posts that were meaningful to me: my post on my favorite 15 Smallville episodes (which I posted on the day of the final episode), and my post on the Temple Grandin movie. I also enjoyed writing about Terra Nova (see here).

Other Blogs

I read a lot of blog posts, but I did not always pay attention to who was writing them. One controversy this year was over Rob Bell’s Love Wins, which has been accused of promoting universalism (the view that all will be saved in the end). I really appreciated one post that I read (whose author I forget) that argued that there are different ways to interpret the Bible on this issue, which contradicts the claim of my conservative Christian friends that Rob Bell and his supporters were neglecting the plain words of Jesus and were preferring their own wishes instead. I think that there are different ways to interpret passages in the Bible. Universalists choose to take Paul’s statements about Christ saving all or reconciling all literally, and they harmonize what the Bible says about eternal punishment with that concept—-by noting that eternal punishment can be a temporary period of correction, since eternity in the Bible is not always forever and a Greek word for punishment can mean correction. Other Christians, by contrast, believe that eternal punishment is literally eternal punishment, and so they harmonize the passages about God saving or reconciling all with that particular concept—-by saying that God is offering to reconcile all but that people still need to believe, that all does not necessarily mean every single person but rather people from every group, or that salvation does not always mean eternal salvation. In my opinion, none of these groups is being unfaithful to the Bible. They’re just prioritizing different things, and harmonizing other elements of Scripture with what they choose to prioritize.

I’ve learned of new blogs this year, which I really enjoy: JohnShore.com, Fallen From Grace, Think and Wonder. Wonder and Think…, Respectful Atheist, and The Screaming Kettle. Some of these are from atheists, and some are from unconventional Christians. I have appreciated their honesty and also their tactfulness, which sometimes coexists with their edginess.

I’d now like to highlight some of my favorite posts or series for this year:

Rachel Held Evans had some excellent posts in her “Ask A…” series. Ask a Gay Christian, by Justin Lee, was my favorite, for Justin struck me as a person who recognized and respected that people (including himself) are in different places on their spiritual journeys, and so he did not look down on gay Christians who chose celibacy. Justin Taylor’s post, Ask a Calvinist, was also good. I did not expect to like it because I hate Calvinism and find a lot of Calvinists to be self-righteous and annoying. But Taylor was quite judicious and tactful in his presentation.

From Rachel’s blog (see here), I learned about David Nilsen’s blog, and I really appreciated his series on teaching children about the Bible and his family’s reasons for leaving one church to search for another.

Finally, I have enjoyed some of Rodney Thomas’ posts. His critique of William P. Young’s The Shack was excellent. I liked it because I consider The Shack to be an overrated book, and it was interesting to see how the book actually reinforces stereotypes. Rodney’s thanksgiving post was also good because it sought to transcend the usual patriotic and politically-correct narratives about that holiday.

I’ve enjoyed 2011, and I wish you all a Happy New Year!

Psalm 57

2011-12-31T09:30:00.000-05:00

For my weekly quiet time this week, I will blog about Psalm 57 and its interpreters. I'll post the entire Psalm in the King James Version (which is in the public domain) and comment on select verses.

To the chief Musician, Altaschith, Michtam of David, when he fled from Saul in the cave.

"Al-Tashchith" means "Do not destroy". This could simply be a tune to which the Psalm is to be played, or it may serve to highlight that David (to whom the superscription relates the Psalm) is asking God not to kill him, but rather to deliver him from his oppressors.

¹Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me: for my soul trusteth in thee: yea, in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge, until these calamities be overpast.

Jewish interpreters have sought to explain why the Psalmist says "Be merciful unto me" twice, since there was a view among many Jews that the Psalms were divinely-inspired, and they did not believe that God would be redundant and repeat himself without good reason. Rashi says that the first "Be merciful to me" is the Psalmist's hope that God would help him not to kill someone else in his affliction, whereas the second "Be merciful to me" is the Psalmist asking God to protect him (the Psalmist) from being killed. The Midrash on the Psalms offers a couple of more interpretations. According to one view, the first "Be merciful to me" is the Psalmist asking God to keep him from stumbling into transgression, whereas the second "Be merciful to me" was the Psalmist's request that, if he did transgress, he might return to God in penitence until the calamities that expiate his sins have passed. According to another view, the first "Be merciful to me" is asking for God to protect Israel and the Temple, whereas the second "Be merciful to me" expresses hope that God will protect Israel in exile from the hostile kingdoms. I like Rashi's interpretation the best because it not only asks for God to protect us from harm, but also requests that we might not harm others.

²I will cry unto God most high; unto God that performeth all things for me.

The Hebrew root that the KJV translates as "performeth" is g-m-r, which means "complete" or "bring to an end". What is the significance of this word in v 2? In the orthodox Jewish Artscroll commentary, the opinion of Metzudos is cited, and it states that v 2 is saying that God will fulfill his promise that David will succeed Saul, for "complete" and "fulfill" are rather synonymous. Mitchell Dahood argues that g-m-r means to "avenge", perhaps because God is perfecting or completing the rhythm of life when he punishes a wrongdoer or gets rid of oppression. The Septuagint understands v 2 to be saying that God deals bountifully with the Psalmist. The Septuagint may be translating a manuscript that has g-m-l rather than g-m-r. G-m-l means to reward, and the word is used with the preposition al elsewhere in the Book of Psalms (i.e., 13:6; 103:10; 116:7; 118:17).

³He shall send from heaven, and save me from the reproach of him that would swallow me up. Selah. God shall send forth his mercy and his truth.

A literal translation of the Hebrew is "He will send from heaven and he will save me he reproached the ones panting after me Selah." The KJV translates chereph, "he reproached", as a construct noun, "the reproach of". But it's a verb. The KJV may have a reason for its translation, for Rashi understand the verse similarly. But others have sought to treat chereph as a perfect verb, which is what it is in the Masoretic. Some contend that the verse is saying: "He shall send from heaven and save me. He that pants after me reproached. Selah. God shall send forth his mercy and truth". Others, however, say that God in the verse is the one reproaching, which means that the verse says: "He shall send from heaven and save me. He reproached one panting after me. God shall send forth his mercy and truth". Keil-Delitzsch go with the view that the oppressor is the one reproaching, for God in the Hebrew Bible is often the recipient rather than the giver of reproach. But the Septuagint and the Targum understand God to be the one who is reproaching----God reproaches the oppressor.

⁴My soul is among lions: and I lie even among them that are set on fire, even the sons of men, whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword.

This verse may simply be comparing the Psalmist's enemies to lions, but I liked what Keil-Delitzsch had to say. For Keil-Delitzsch, David is saying that he is close to lions while he hides from Saul in the cave, and David feels safer around them than he does around human beings! You can at least reason with human beings, but they also take their aggression to more devious levels than animals do. In my opinion, humans are harder to deal with than animals.

But the verse may just be calling the Psalmist's enemies "sons of men" to highlight that (however dangerous they may seem) they are mere mortals and thus are powerless against God, as Psalm 56 emphasizes. This is the view of Theodore of Mopsuestia and Erhard Gerstenberger.

⁵Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens; let thy glory be above all the earth.

⁶They have prepared a net for my steps; my soul is bowed down: they have digged a pit before me, into the midst whereof they are fallen themselves. Selah.

⁷My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed: I will sing and give praise.

⁸Awake up, my glory; awake, psaltery and harp: I myself will awake early.

"I will awake early" literally says "I will stir dawn", as if the Psalmist himself is bringing about the dawn. There are different views as to what this mean. E.W. Bullinger essentially goes with the King James Version, and he treats the phrase as figurative for the Psalmist getting up early, as if the Psalmist is waking up the dawn by getting up before the dawn comes. Rashi takes this a step further by saying that David playing his instruments in praise of God will wake up the dawn. Another view is that the Psalmist is bringing about the dawn by praying for it, and "dawn" is understood here as God delivering the Psalmist from his afflictions (Psalm 46:6; 90:14; 143:8). Orthodox Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch states that the verse means that people can use their spiritual resources to turn the night of affliction into the dawn of a new day. Hirsch may be saying that we can feel better amidst harsh circumstances by using our spiritual resources, or that we can actually change those harsh circumstances for the better through our spiritual resources. The latter sounds rather Word-of-Faith-ish, but I would not be surprised if there are biblical voices that accord with that sort of view.

⁹I will praise thee, O Lord, among the people: I will sing unto thee among the nations.

¹⁰For thy mercy is great unto the heavens, and thy truth unto the clouds.

¹¹Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens: let thy glory be above all the earth.

N.T. Wright on the Virgin Birth

2011-12-30T18:59:00.000-05:00

Claude Mariottini on his blog has a link to an article by N.T. Wright on the virgin birth of Jesus. Wright’s article is entitled Suspending Scepticism: History and the Virgin Birth. In my post here, I’ll interact with a few of Wright’s defenses of the historicity of the virgin birth. I’ll only be scratching the surface of what Wright’s article is about, however, and so I’ve linked to it here so that you can read it for yourself.

1. Here are some quotes from Wright, which make essentially the same point:

“…there is no pre-Christian Jewish tradition suggesting that the messiah would be born of a virgin. No one used Isaiah 7:14 this way before Matthew did. Even assuming that Matthew or Luke regularly invented material to fit Jesus into earlier templates, why would they have invented something like this? The only conceivable parallels are pagan ones, and these fiercely Jewish stories have certainly not been modelled on them. Luke at least must have known that telling this story ran the risk of making Jesus out to be a pagan demigod. Why, for the sake of an exalted metaphor, would they take this risk – unless they at least believed the stories to be literally true?”

“Smoke without fire does, of course, happen quite often in the real world. But this smoke, in that world, without fire? This theory asks us to believe in intellectual parthenogenesis: the birth of an idea without visible parentage. Difficult – unless, of course, you believe in miracles, which most people who disbelieve the virginal conception don’t.”

This appears to be similar to Wright’s argument in defense of Jesus’ resurrection. In that case, Wright argued that first century Judaism did not expect the Messiah to rise from the dead before the eschaton, and that Messianic movements generally folded after the death of their leader. For Wright, the fact that the Jesus movement continued after Jesus’ death and claimed that their founder was risen had to be due to some reason, and Wright believes that reason was the actual resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Similarly, in the area of the virgin birth, Wright’s argument seems to be that the notion of the virgin birth of Jesus had to come from somewhere, and, for Wright, the most plausible explanation is that it came from the fact that Jesus was born of a virgin. Wright does not believe that Matthew or Luke got the idea from pagan stories, which first century Jews anathematized, plus Luke was already putting himself at the risk of making Jesus out to be a demigod, in the eyes of his Jewish audience. For Wright, as I understand him, Matthew and Luke believed in the virgin birth of Jesus, and they got that idea from its occurrence.

I’ll list three problems that I have with this argument. First, why couldn’t the virgin birth have simply been an original idea that Matthew and Luke came across and included in their works? The fact that an idea is original does not mean that the idea has any grounding in reality. There are all sorts of original ideas out there! Second, why couldn’t a first century Jew absorb ideas from pagan cultures, while still opposing paganism? We see that sort of thing a lot in the Hebrew Bible: things are said about the God of Israel that other nations say about their gods, such as Baal. By drawing on these motifs, the writers of the Hebrew Bible may be saying that the God of Israel is the one who truly does the deeds that pagan nations attribute to their own gods. Why couldn’t something similar be going on with the virgin birth story? Third, and this contradicts the first problem that I listed, I think that the idea that Jesus was born of a virgin could have come from something other than its actual occurrence—-that the concept, in a sense, has a Hebrew precedent. In the Hebrew Bible, there are stories about figures who are born when their parents are really old, and such births can be described as miraculous. Why couldn’t a Christian come along and suggest that Jesus’ birth was miraculous—-and even more astounding than the births of the Old Testament figures—-for Jesus was born, not of a woman whose womb had dried up, but of a woman who had never even known a man?

2. “Of course, legends surround the birth and childhood of many figures who afterwards become important. As historians we have no reason to say that this did not happen in the case of Jesus, and some reasons to say that it did. But by comparison with other legends about other figures, Matthew and Luke look, after all, quite restrained. Except, of course, in the matter where the real interest centres. Matthew and Luke declare unambiguously that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived. What are we to make of this?”

My impression is that Wright here is making the sort of argument that many evangelical apologists (such as David Marshall) have made: that the Gospels’ stories about miracles are more reliable historically than non-Christian miracle stories because the Gospels are more restrained and low-key than the non-Christian miracle stories. I wonder what this proves, though. Perhaps the main thing we can conclude is that the Gospel writers were simply imitating the style of the Hebrew Bible, which was low-key in its description of miracles.

3. Wright makes the following statements:

“Further, anyone can say that Matthew made it all up to fulfil Isaiah 7:14 (‘the virgin shall conceive’). Since Luke doesn’t quote the same passage, though, the argument looks thin. Is Bethlehem mentioned only, perhaps, because of Micah 5:2-4?”

“What then about his central claim, the virginal conception itself, dropped almost casually into the narrative, with no flourish of trumpets? Some have argued, of course, that there is instead a flourish of strumpets: Matthew has taken care to draw our attention to the peculiarities (to put it no stronger) of Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Batlisheba, presumably in order to warn us that something even stranger is coming; or perhaps to enable us, when the news is announced, to connect it with God’s strange way of operating in the past. He is hardly likely on this occasion, however, to have made up the story of Mary’s being with child by the Holy Spirit in order to ‘fulfil’ this theme.”

I can see Wright’s point that Matthew did not make up the virgin birth story, for the concept of Jesus’ virgin birth also appears in Luke, and their stories are so different that they appear to be independent. Both could have gotten the idea that Jesus was born of a virgin from a common source. I also agree with Wright that Matthew 1 is trying to show that the strange circumstances around Jesus’ birth do not detract from Jesus being the Messiah, for God in the past was involved in peculiar situations, such as births from Gentile women, some of whom engaged in trickery or sexual immortality. Matthew is responding to something. But what? Could it have been a prominent belief that Jesus was a mamzer? Matthew does not believe that Jesus was a mamzer, for he has the tradition of the virgin birth, which could have been developed by someone else in response to the charge that Jesus was a mamzer. I guess my point here is that the fact that Matthew did not invent the virgin birth and was seeking to defend Jesus from a charge does not show that the virgin birth happened.

Image, Soul, Body

2011-12-30T08:00:00.000-05:00

I finished Christianity in Jewish Terms, and I have three items:

1. Tikva Frymer-Kensky has an interesting essay on "Religious Anthropology in Judaism and Christianity", which concerns human beings being made in God's image. Frymer-Kensky argues that the rabbis thought that meant that human beings look like God, and this overlaps with the Hebrew Bible, which said that humans were in the image of God in a world where there were statues and likenesses of various deities. Many Christian thinkers, and later Maimonides, tended to view the image as intellect or as our resemblance to God in a moral or spiritual sense (which was defaced by the Fall). According to Frymer-Kensky, the view that the image of God was intellect came from "Greek philosophers, notably Plato and Aristotle, whose idea of God was intellect and who believed that the human intellect was the divine element in humans" (page 329). It's intriguing that the rabbis believed that humans physically looked like God, when they were insistent that God should not be represented with a graven image or likeness. Christianity, however, maintained that God became a human being and showed people a likeness, and yet it tended to prefer a spiritual interpretation of the image of God.

I liked what Frymer-Kensky said about John Calvin on page 332: "Even Calvin, who emphasized the depraved and deformed nature of the fallen human being, nevertheless admonished people to look at the image of God in all humans, to look beyond their worthlessness and to see the image of God." I think this is good advice, even if I don't go as far as Calvin in my beliefs regarding human sinfulness. There are people I do not like. But I should look beyond what I don't like about them to see the image of God within them----their intellect, whatever morality they have, etc.

2. William Schweiker on page 353 says that the Bible does not have a belief in an immortal soul. Genesis 2:7 says that the human being "becomes a living soul...when a divine source of life is breathed into dust" (Schweiker's words). Schweiker considers the Hebrew Bible's teaching to be that the soul comes from God and dies at death, and he believes that Jesus also rejected Greek ideas about an eternal soul. "For Jesus", Schweiker states, "the 'soul' is not immortal; it is not, as it was for Plato and others, trapped in the prison of the body." Paul, too, did not have a picture of the soul escaping the shackles of the body, according to Schweiker, for Paul contrasted the whole person (flesh and spirit) with alienation from God. For Paul, one could be reconciled with God as a full human being, without one's soul leaving the body.

Some of this overlaps with my Armstrongite and Seventh-Day Adventist background, but not all of it. Those denominations regarded the soul to be the full human being, both body and spirit. Schweiker, however, seems to regard the soul as what animates the body. Schweiker just does not think that the biblical authors regarded the soul exactly the same way that Greek philosophers did, however: as an immortal substance that lives on after death.

What the "truth" is on this, I do not entirely know. I can see the Armstrongites' and Seventh-Day Adventists' point that we are souls rather than having souls, for man was said to become a living soul. Plus, the soul is said to hunger, which is arguably bodily (i.e., Proverbs 10:3), unless the Hebrews had a different understanding of how hunger worked. At the same time, the soul does appear to be something that leaves the body after death (Genesis 35:18). Moreover, if the Hebrew Bible teaches that the soul dies with the body, then why are the dead kings conscious in Sheol in Isaiah 14?

On Jesus, the passage that comes to my mind is when Jesus says we should fear God, who can cast body and soul into hell (Matthew 10:28). In my mind, that calls into question the Armstrongite and Adventist view that the soul is a combination of spirit and body, for why would Jesus say that God can destroy body and spirit+body in hell? That sounds rather redundant. Still, Jesus in this passage does not regard the soul as inherently immortal.

Regarding Paul, Paul desires at times to be free from his body of death (Romans 7), and he talks about being absent from the body and present with the Lord after he dies (II Corinthians 5:6-8). At the same time, Schweiker is right that Paul did not view his bodily state as utter alienation from God. But there is debate about how Paul conceived of resurrection, as spiritual (I Corinthians 15) or as physical (Romans 8:23). Perhaps Paul, like elements of first century Judaism (according to Josephus), believed both in the survival of the soul after death and also the resurrection. Armstrongites and Seventh-Day Adventists often treat these ideas as in competition with one another, as if you can't believe in both, but some people in the first century did believe in both. Yet, even if Jews thought that the soul survives death, they did not go as far as Plato and other philosophers in denigrating the body altogether.

3. On page 390, I read the contrast between Augustine and the Manicheans, by John Cavadini. Augustine was a Manichean before he became a Christian. Manicheans "taught that human beings have an intrinsically evil nature as part of their makeup", and that the "body and all that is associated with it is evil, and the urges that come from it are the source of sin." Augustine's conception of original sin was different, however, for it held that our corruption was the result of free will (perhaps Adam's, or our own choice to do evil----Cavadini does not say) rather than an evil nature inside of us, plus it maintained that human nature was weak yet good, that human nature was something that God created good and yet fell.

On the one hand, this looks like a debate in semantics. We have good and evil within us. The Manicheans attribute the evil to some evil nature apart from our makeup. Augustine thought that the evil was actually a corruption of the good. On the other hand, perhaps where the difference matters is that Augustine would believe in the redemption of the physical, whereas the Manicheans would simply dismiss the body as evil and perhaps beyond help.

David Marshall: "Is Jesus a 'Foreign Religion'?"

2011-12-29T12:00:00.002-05:00

A few days ago, I started David Marshall’s True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture, which was Marshall’s very first book. In terms of readability, there are things that I like so far, there are things that I don’t like so far, and there are many things that I like and dislike simultaneously! True Son of Heaven is definitely more pleasant and easier to read than the last David Marshall book that I went through, Jesus and the Religions of Man, a good book, but one that is quite heavy! At times, though, I feel that True Son of Heaven reads like a tourist manual, and that bores me somewhat. But I have been enjoying the anecdotes, as well as gaining some education in Chinese religion, history, and culture (though I do plan to “fact-check” some stuff, if you will).

I have three items from Chapter 1, “Is Jesus a ‘Foreign Religion’?”:

1. On page 3, Marshall says: “Many Westerners…feel troubled or embarrassed at Christian missions. ‘Does everyone need to believe the same?’ They ask. ‘Why require people to give up their own prophets and wise men to accept a western Savior?’ Some western intellectuals feel the absurdity of preaching European doctrines to China with special intensity. After all, this is the land of Confucius and Lao Zi, the origin of paper, modern kilns, and gun powder, whose grand public projects and remarkable art work defined civilization while great European cities were still rude market towns. What does she need our religion for?”

Of course, Marshall’s aim in this book is to refute that claim by demonstrating that Christianity is consistent with (and even, in a sense, foreshadowed by) Chinese culture. But I appreciated that passage on page 3 because I often feel that Christianity is arrogant to believe that everybody should believe exactly alike.

At the same time, as I have read other books by Marshall (The Truth Behind the New Atheism and Jesus and the Religions of Man), I have come to appreciate how Christianity has promoted morality in other cultures, challenging practices that are repulsive and yet that many in other cultures may have found perfectly acceptable. I think of the practice in India of widows immolating themselves. A friend of mine has done graduate work in multicultural studies, and she has gotten flack because she does not believe that the West should tell Islamic societies to stop female genital mutilation. Granted, she agrees that female genital mutilation is a horrible practice, but she maintains that change must come from within those societies, not imposed from without, which she considers to be a pretty futile enterprise at the outset. I can see her point. But I still admire Christians who go into other cultures and stand up for what’s right, who do not let cultural relativism hold them back from championing the oppressed and the marginalized. But there is some place for cultural relativism, in my opinion. For example, why should we assume that Western capitalism is the right system for every country on the face of the earth?

2. On page 5, Marshall relates to us a message that came from a Voice. The message said: “I didn’t just come with the missionaries. I have been there all along. I made China.”

I appreciated that because I’d like to think that every person on the face of the earth is on God’s radar—-and that God actually loves them rather than desiring to send them to hell. For Marshall, Jesus Christ has been in China all along, preparing the way for that nation to hear and to receive the Gospel. But can the Chinese be saved by embracing the elements of their own culture that overlap with Christianity, without believing in the Gospel that they hear from Christian missionaries?

3. Something that I plan to do as I read this book is to compare what Marshall says about Chinese religion with what I read elsewhere (primarily on the Internet). I will probably use wikipedia quite a bit, primarily to get an alternative perspective. I realize that wikipedia has its limits, but I don’t claim to be writing the final word on the subject of Chinese religion. I’m just exploring. On page 5, Marshall states the following:

“Here, I learned, like the high priest in Jerusalem, one man came once a year to ask pardon for a nation. Whom did he appeal to? ‘Tian:’ a Supreme God identified with Heaven who could not be represented by idols. As in Jerusalem, here, too, the sacrifice of animals would bring Heaven’s mercy. The emperor even brought many of the same creatures to the altar.”

A lot of that checks out with what I read in wikipedia’s article on Shangdi (the Supreme God) and the Temple of Heaven. The article on Shangdi states the following:

“From the earliest eras of Chinese history, Shangdi was officially worshipped through sacrificial rituals. It is the first and foremost important ritual of the state. Shangdi is believed to rule over natural and ancestral spirits, who act as His ministers. Shangdi is thought to be the Supreme Guide of both the natural order and the human order. The ruler of China in every Chinese dynasty would perform annual sacrificial rituals to Shangdi at the great Temple of Heaven in the imperial capital. During the ritual a completely healthy bull would be slaughtered and presented as an animal sacrifice to Shangdi. It is important to note that Shangdi is never represented with either images or idols. Instead, in the center building of the Temple of Heaven, in a structure called the ‘Imperial Vault of Heaven’, a ‘spirit tablet’…inscribed with the name of Shangdi is stored on the throne, Huangtian Shangdi…During an annual sacrifice, the emperor would carry these tablets to the north part of the Temple of Heaven, a place called the ‘Prayer Hall For Good Harvests’, and place them on that throne.”

Some creationist sites refer to primary sources, such as the prayer that the emperor used at the annual sacrifice, or Chinese creation stories (see here and here). I read here that the Ming Dynasty completed the Temple of Heaven in 1420 A.D., not B.C. Could Christianity have influenced China, in some fashion? Marco Polo, a European who traveled to China, lived in the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries, which was prior to 1420. And yet, the wikipedia article mentions references to Shangdi from before the time of Christ, sometimes way before. But when did the aniconism enter the picture?

I found different things about Shangdi on the wikipedia article. Yes, the emperor sacrificed to him in the Temple of Heaven, but there’s also the statement that the Chinese did not sacrifice to Shangdi directly, at least during the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 B.C.E.), but rather to other spirits and deities. There was a sentiment that Shangdi was transcendent and not very approachable. And, even at the Temple of Heaven, there is an acknowledgement that other gods exist. But, according to the wikipedia article on the Chinese view of monotheism, there were some pre-Christian Chinese schools of thought that were closer to monotheism. This article (by an unnamed someone), however, actually says that “From the earliest times of Chinese history, and especially before the Zhou Dynasty…Shangdi was worshiped as the Supreme Deity of the ancient monotheistic religion of China.”

I’ve also come across the view that Shangdi was an ancestor in a couple of places (see here and here).

I wish I could find better sources online, say, by people with doctorates in Asian studies, or people who refer profusely to primary sources, which I could find online or in a library, or Asians themselves. But I have to start somewhere! Overall, I would not be surprised if China had rituals similar to those of the ancient Hebrews, since many peoples have desired a good harvest, and have sought to atone for misdeeds that they believe could hinder that. As far as Shangdi goes, in general, he appears to be the Supreme Being, but conceptualization of him has been slightly in flux, as far as I can see.

Suffering, Preparation

2011-12-29T08:00:00.000-05:00

I'm still reading Christianity in Jewish Terms. I have two items:

1. I read about suffering in this book. Something that Leora Batnitzky said on page 208 stood out to me: "R. Akiba, R. Eleazar b. Jacob, and R. Meir suggest...that the Jewish people suffer not only because God loves them most but also because they are, and have the capacity to be, better than others are." That intrigued me because I'm interested in the topic of Jews and Gentiles, according to Judaism.

But I also read about the issue of suffering being redemptive. Suffering makes us compassionate towards others. But does that mean suffering is good rather than evil, since it has a positive end? Should we go about hurting others, since we're technically helping them in doing so by making them better people? According to the thinkers whom I read in this book, the answer is no. Suffering has no inherent value, for it is evil, but God can use suffering to make us better. Perhaps one could add to this that God does not cause suffering in an attempt to build our characters. If we lose our legs in an accident, for instance, that's not God trying to teach us a lesson. But God can still teach us through that experience.

2. For this item, I'll draw from Menachem Kellner's essay, "How Ought a Jew View Christian Beliefs About Redemption?" Over the past few days, I have blogged about Maimonides' view on Christians, and that will be the topic of this item, as well.

On page 273, Kellner quotes Maimonides' Mishneh Torah, specifically "Law of Kings" XI.4. According to Maimonides, Christianity and Islam prepare the way for the Messiah, in that they make certain topics familiar to the Gentiles, such as the Messianic hope, the Torah, and the commandments. Although Christianity holds that the laws have lost their validity or are no longer binding, Maimonides says, it is still making Gentiles aware of the commandments, and they will acknowledge that they are mistaken about the law being invalid when the true Messiah comes.

More on Christ in the Rig Veda (with a Question Mark)

2011-12-28T11:46:00.000-05:00

This will be a post about David Marshall, but it will not concern his book that I am currently reading: True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture. Rather, it will revisit his argument in Jesus and the Religions of Man that the Indian Rig Veda talks about someone who is like Jesus Christ. See here for my last post on this topic.

My problem with Marshall and the source that he used for this claim, Indian Christian Mr. Mandapaka, is that they did not cite primary sources in a manner that was accessible to me, and so I was not able to check them out to see if Marshall and Mr. Mandapaka were interpreting them correctly (as far as I could make such a determination, of course, with my limited knowledge of Hinduism). Their citation of primary sources was not specific enough, or I did not know enough about Indian Scripture to be able to track down the references that they were mentioning. But I found a blog post that actually cited the Rig Veda chapter-and-verse. The blogger calls himself Jl, and my impression is that he is an Indian Catholic. Jl links to the testimony of Aravindaksha Menon, a former Brahmin priest who converted to Roman Catholicism after studying the Vedas and concluding that they predicted Jesus Christ. (See also here for more references.)

What I’ll do here is two things. First, I will do a search on the one whom Jl considers to be the Jesus figure in the Rig Veda, Prajapathy, and see what I find. Second, I will post Jl’s reference to the Rig Veda (in whatever translation he is using), then I will search for the reference or a summary of it online and write what I found and concluded. I’ll link to what I find so that you can have access to the sources and make your own determination.

First of all, who is Prajapathy, which Jl says means “man savior”? I hate to use wikipedia as my source here, but just remember that I’m not writing this post to be the final word on the subject. Wikipedia states the following (see here): “In Hinduism, Prajapati…’lord of creatures’ is a Hindu deity presiding over procreation, and protector of life. He appears as a creator deity or supreme God Viswakarma Vedic deities in RV 10 and in Brahmana literature. Vedic commentators also identify him with the creator referred to in the Nasadiya Sukta…In later times, he is identified with Vishnu, Shiva, with the personifications of Time, Fire, the Sun, etc. Śrīmad Bhāgavatam 8.8.16 cites Viśvákarma is one of the prajāpatis, the sons of Lord Brahmā who generate progeny. He is also identified with various mythical progenitors, especially (Manu Smrti 1.34) the ten lords of created beings first created by Brahmā…” The article then goes on to list ten Prajapatis. Later, the article states: “The name of /PRA-JĀ[N]-pati/ (‘progeny-potentate’) is etymologically equivalent to that of the oracular god at Kolophōn (according to Makrobios), namely /PRŌto-GONos/.”

I’m not sure what to say here! I suppose that there’s some overlap between Prajapathy and Jesus, in that both are creators, yet (in some sense) come from somebody else. I don’t see anything about the sacrifice of Prajapathy in that article, but perhaps wikipedia does not say everything that can be said about him. I notice that there can be more than one Prajapathy in some Hindu traditions, and that seems to differ from Christian claims about Jesus (though, at the same time, Christianity does teach that all believers are sons of God). There also appears to be a difference of opinion as to how to translate the term “Prajapathy”. Jl says it means “man savior”, but wikipedia translates it as “lord of creatures” and says later on that the term is equivalent to “progeny”, which makes some sense, since Prajapathy presides over procreation. Whether Jesus can be considered a god of procreation and a protector of life, well, I don’t know. Somewhat, I guess.

Second, the references to the Rig Veda. After giving you the translation that Jl uses, I’ll be drawing from Ralph T.H. Griffith’s translation of the Rig Veda (see here), and, when appropriate, wikipedia’s summary.

Rig Veda 10:90:7: “At the time of sacrifice, the son of God will be tightly tied to a wooden sacrificial post using iron nails by hands and legs, he will bleed to death and on the third day he will regain his life in a resurrection.”

Griffith’s translation says: “They balmed as victim on the grass Puruṣa born in earliest time. With him the Deities and all Sādhyas and Ṛṣis sacrificed” (see here). The context appears to be the sacrifice of Purusha and the use of his parts to fashion elements of the cosmos and also the Indian caste system. You can read wikipedia’s article on Purusha here. As with Prajapathy, I have a hard time understanding or clearly conceptualizing what Purusha is: his name means “man”; he is the self that pervades the cosmos; deities called the devas dismembered him and used him to make the moon, the sun, and the wind; he was a primeval giant whom the gods sacrificed; he is the personification of absolute truth; and he is pure consciousness.

Rig Veda 10:121:1: “In the beginning, God and his supreme spirit alone existed. From the supreme Spirit of the God proceeded Hiranya Garbha, alias Prajapathy, the first born of the God in the form of light. As soon as he was born, he became the saviour of all the worlds.”

Griffith has: ” IN the beginning rose Hiranyagarbha, born Only Lord of all created beings. He fixed and holdeth up this earth and heaven. What God shall we adore with our oblation?” (see here). I don’t see anything about Prajapathy being the savior of all the worlds, though, apparently, Hiranya Garbha does sustain the cosmos. The only explicit reference that I see to Prajapathy (by the name “Prajapathy”, that is) in this chapter is in v 10: “Prajāpati! thou only comprehendest all these created things, and none beside thee. Grant us our hearts’ desire when we invoke thee: may we have store of riches in possession.” As far as I can see, this chapter is exhorting people to praise this god as the creator and sustainer (although other gods are acknowledged to exist).

Rig Veda 10:90:2: “This man, the first-born of God is all that was, all that is and all that will be. And he comes to this world to give recompense to everybody as per his deeds.”

Griffith has: “This Puruṣa is all that yet hath been and all that is to be; The Lord of Immortality which waxes greater still by food.”

Purusha does mean “man”, so I can understand where Jl is getting “This man”. I don’t see anything about an impending judgment, though.

Rig Veda 10:90:16: “This (sacrifice) is the only way of redemption and liberation of mankind. Those who meditate and attain this man, believe in heart and chant with the lips, get liberated in this world itself and there is no other way of salvation.”

Griffith has: “Gods, sacrificing, sacrificed the victim these were the earliest holy ordinances. The Mighty Ones attained the height of heaven, there where the Sādhyas, Gods of old, are dwelling.” What I get from this (which could be wrong) is that the gods went to heaven after sacrificing Purusha and making the cosmos out of him.

I don’t know why Griffith’s translation and the one that Jl is using are so different. Jl does not claim to be presenting a targum—-a mixture of translation and interpretation—-but rather a translation, period. (At least that is what I gather from his format.)

David Novak on the Noachides

2011-12-28T08:00:00.000-05:00

I have two items for my write-up today on Christianity in Jewish Terms, and they draw from conservative Jew David Novak's essay, "Mitsvah":

1. Yesterday, I talked about the Noachide commandments that rabbinic Judaism believed were incumbent upon Gentiles. One of them is a prohibition on idolatry. I asked about Judaism's stance on Christians----whether Judaism believes that Christians are idolaters and thus in violation of the Noachide commandment. I referred to David Ellenson's essay in this volume, which says that the rabbis did not care for Christian conceptions of God (such as the Trinity and the incarnation), but that Jews after the twelfth century began to see Christianity as monotheistic and thus in accord with the Noachide rule. Ellenson said and documented, though, that Maimonides regarded the Christians to be idolaters under Talmudic law.

Novak's essay, however, presents a slightly different picture, or at least it adds another consideration. Maimonides addresses the issue of the righteous Gentiles who will have a place with the Jews in the World to Come. While Maimonides believed that certain moral laws were "rationally discernable" and that "Gentiles can thus live a moral life that is consistent with what Jews regard to be minimal non-Jewish morality" without reference to the Bible (page 118), he thought that the righteous Gentiles were those who followed the Noachide laws specifically because they were laid out in the Torah (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah: Melachim 8:11). According to Novak, Christians fit this description because they saw their morality as "fundamentally biblical in origin" (page 118).

2. At Hebrew Union College, a professor of mine once said that Judaism holds that Gentiles of other religions (other than Judaism, that is) are righteous before God if they follow the Noachide commandments. That did not seem correct to me because one of the Noachide commandments is against idolatry, and wouldn't that invalidate the righteous state of several people of other religions, many of whom worship gods other than the God of Israel? Novak actually addresses this issue (on some level) on page 119: "...it...seems that when the rabbis saw Gentile respect for the other Noahide laws, especially the respect for human life involved in the prohibition of bloodshed, they had a tendency to regard any cultural vestiges of idolatry in such societies quite leniently." I wonder what "cultural vestiges" means, though: How idolatrous did one have to be to move from the status of "righteous Gentile" to "unrighteous Gentile"?

Links and Devotional

2011-12-27T11:21:00.001-05:00

I started David Marshall’s True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture, and, while there certainly were some provocative or interesting passages in there that I want to highlight, I’m going to take a break today from blogging about Marshall’s work and instead share some items that I found in my reading, both on the Internet and also in print:

1. David Nilsen of the blog, The Screaming Kettle, was listing the guest posts on his blog for this year, as well as quoting a passage from each one of them. There were two posts there that stood out to me. One was by David’s sister, Shan, and it was entitled A Spectator Along God’s Highway. The other was by Dan McMonagle, and it was entitled Church Transition or Weird Dream.

a. Apparently, I’ve read and recommended Shan’s work before. Some time back, Rachel Held Evans recommended Shan’s excellent post, Why can’t church be more like the smoking section?, and I recommended that to others. The post that David recommended in his list of guest posts was Shan’s very first guest post on his blog, “A Spectator Along God’s Highway”. That post really spoke to me. The passage that I most appreciated was the following:

“I had believed earnestly during times of prayer and meditation and bible reading that many things were the ‘still small voice of the spirit’ leading me to believe or feel or do things only to later understand those either could not have been god or god was not kind. Either way, that left me in serious trouble. Either I can not hear/discern/know the spirit’s voice (and couldn’t, even in times of the truest obedience and faith I’ve had) or what god says is cold hearted and critical with no view to truly help me grow. I don’t want to believe the fault is god’s (or the word ‘god’ doesn’t really mean what I think it means), so that just leaves me to blame; basically I’m screwed. I’m just a broken down gypsy with no ride home — I want to get there from here, but I can’t walk fast enough and I have no wheels.”

That passage resonated with me because I have long struggled with how to identify the voice of God. Some Christians or spiritual people tell me that God’s voice is comforting and reassuring; others tell me that God’s voice is corrective and convicting. It gets complicated when conservative Christians say that the comforting and reassuring voice is really Satan speaking sweet nothings into our ear, and when the “corrective and convicting” voice is a mere put-down that makes me feel inadequate and does not help me to grow. I also identify with Shan’s metaphor of being a broken down gypsy with no ride home, for, in a number of areas (spirituality, career, blogging, relationships), there is a place where I would like to go, and I do not know how to get there. I don’t know how to get to the place where I am finally good enough and can feel at peace. I feel like I’m wandering in the wilderness, and I have no idea how to get to the Promised Land!

I liked what one of the commenters under Shan’s post, Robin, had to say:

“After 9 years of enforced proximity in the bus, I was tired of buses and freeways and the hustle and bustle and abuse of the ‘Christian’ life. I made a beeline for the forest. And there, for perhaps the first time in my life – I feel like I truly encountered God. I’d spent a life-time hearing about Him, but the noise of all the people trying to tell me who He was and what He wanted from me, often completely hindered my ability to hear from HIM! I’ve spent the last 6 years in the woods, and it has been wonderful. Hard, painful and incredibly demanding at times, but blessed and amazing at the same time. And, like Elijah and the Israelites, God was faithful in providing for my every need. I was happy in the forest and had no interest in returning to the highway ever again. Occasionally I would visit friends who invited me for a ride on their bus, but one ride was always enough to re-damage my soul, and left me with no desire to return.”

I identified with Robin’s comment because, for me, it does get tiring trying to appease other people’s beliefs as to how I should live the “Christian” life. I like solitude. Maybe I can hear from God in that solitary and quiet place. At the same time, unfortunately, I am also the sort of person who would like to be told what to do and to believe. Then, I could pat myself on the back when I do those things. Otherwise, I don’t know if I’m doing well or badly. So, in my opinion, there are advantages and disadvantages to spiritual freedom and spiritual slavery.

b. Dan McMonagle says the following in his post:

“In our church hunt, there were two churches we considered – a church plant from the same denomination about 10 miles away, and an older, more conservative church with about 120 members just a few blocks from home. We would have preferred the laidback, casual atmosphere of the denomination we were used to, but Valerie was also leading a small youth group of mostly un-churched girls, and she didn’t want to drop them. The older church had a youth group that we could merge with, so we visited them first. We also tried to visit the more casual church, but God had other plans. The Sunday we drove there, I didn’t bring a map and we couldn’t find the junior high where the church met (pre-GPS). After we stopped three different people and none of them knew where the school was, we figured we weren’t supposed to be there. So, we headed back to the conservative church a block from our home. And naturally, the pastor’s sermon was on point for where we were, and so we gave in: ‘Ok, Lord, if this is where You want us, we’re in.’”

I’ve heard stories about experiences that were similar to this. Looking back, I can think of times when I have yearned for some message that could uplift me, and I walk into a random church hoping to find that message, only to walk out of the church at the end of the service feeling disappointed. But there have also been times when the opposite has occurred: I actually do feel uplifted when I walk into a random church and hear a message.

What I liked about that passage from Dan’s post, though, was that it reinforced to me how I could spiritually grow in all sorts of houses of worship: mainline Protestant, evangelical Christian, Catholic, Unitarian-Universalist, Reform Jewish, Conservative Jewish, etc. (Not that Dan is saying that people should venture outside of Christianity, but that is the lesson that I’m getting from his post, even if that was not his original intent.) I tend to assume nowadays that a conservative evangelical church could offer nothing that I’d want, but that’s not necessarily true. Obviously, there are some places that I’d prefer to avoid: churches that emphasize getting doctrine exactly right, churches that obsess over Calvinism, churches that emphasize “accountability”, etc. But I think that there are a variety of settings in which I can learn about living a good, spiritual life with a healthy mindset.

2. I appreciated something that I read in Our Daily Bread last night: “Don’t worship God to gain his benefits—-you already have them”.

When I lived in New York City, I’d listen to Dennis Kiszonas’ radio program, Grace for Today. It was very dispensationalist in its orientation, and its message was that today is a time in which we are saved solely by grace through faith, which is looking to God to justify us. I remember its Thanksgiving program one year, and Kiszonas was saying that we can be thankful because we are saved by grace, and God has already given us spiritual blessings: we are assured of a place in the good afterlife, we have God’s love and favor, etc. Consequently, Kiszonas said, when someone cuts us off in traffic, we don’t have to get all upset about it, for we are saved by grace.

That was an outlook that I yearned for—-an attitude of hope, one that believed that God was for me rather than against me. My experience in the Christian religion and my reading of the Bible often taught me the opposite: that God approved of me if I obeyed, that I was a mistake because I was introverted and God wanted me to be an extrovert who reached out to people and witnessed, that I could only be saved if my faith produced good works, etc. I wanted to feel God’s love and grace.

Nowadays, I’m not sure of what I believe. Will I enter the good afterlife? I hope so. I no longer fret about going to hell, but, come to think of it, I’m not persuaded that Christianity has a corner on knowing the truth about what the afterlife will be like. Do I enjoy God’s approval? I hope. I just assume that I have it. But I’m not persuaded of that with every fiber of my being.

Ellenson on Christians as Idolaters (Or Not)

2011-12-27T08:00:00.001-05:00

I started Christianity in Jewish Terms, which has essays by Jews and Christians. The essay that I really enjoyed last night was by David Ellenson, who is the President of Hebrew Union College, which is where I go to school. Within rabbinic Judaism, there is a prominent belief that Jews have to observe the Torah, whereas Gentiles to be righteous only have to obey seven Noachide commandments. One of these commandments is against idolatry.

There's a good chance that I'll be talking about the Noachide commandments tomorrow. Today, I'll focus on a question that Rabbi Ellenson addresses: Did Jews believe that Christians were in violation of the Noachide commandment against idolatry? I have heard from Jews that to worship a man as God (as Christians do to Jesus) is idolatry. So are they saying that Christians are idolaters? And, as a professor I once had at Jewish Theological Seminary asked, what are the implications of Christians being idolaters on the presence of churches in Israel? Do Jews believe that Christian idolatry is polluting the holy land?

I don't have the answer to all of these questions, but I do think that Rabbi Ellenson shed a significant amount of light in his contribution to this book. According to Ellenson, writings in the rabbinic period (i.e., the Jerusalem Talmud Berachot 9:1; Exodus Rabbah 29:5) lambast Christian doctrines, such as the Trinity and the incarnation, and a negative attitude toward Christianity "and its visions of God had hardened in many Jewish precincts" by the Middle Ages. In addition, Maimonides considered Christians to be worshipers of idols, in his comments on Mishnah Avodah Zarah 1:3 and the Mishneh Torah (Hiclhot Avodat Zarah 1:3). But, starting with the twelfth century in Christian Europe, there was a tendency to view Christianity as a form of monotheism and the worship of the one true God, the God of the Bible, who created the heavens and the earth. Jews were forbidden to associate another personality (such as Jesus) with God, a practice that is called shituf. But Gentiles could do so, according to normative Jewish law, without violating the prohibition on idolatry, perhaps because, in their minds, they were worshiping the one true God.

Completing Marshall's Jesus and the Religions of Man

2011-12-26T10:30:00.000-05:00

I finished David Marshall’s Jesus and the Religions of Man. I read the Appendix, which tackled the Crusades, Inquisitions, pogroms, and witch-hunts. I won’t go into great detail about Marshall’s arguments in this section. I wrote this post in response to similar arguments that he made in The Truth Behind the New Atheism. There were some things in the Appendix to Jesus and the Religions of Man which were different, and they certainly deserve consideration: that the Salem witch hysteria was starting by girls who were flirting with black magic, that the trials did not follow biblical procedure, that an imperial mindset played a role in the Crusades, etc.

On the whole imperial mindset issue, I wish that Marshall had applied that to the topic of anti-Semitism, or (more accurately, perhaps) anti-Judaism. Unlike Marshall, I’m very hesitant to say that the New Testament had nothing to do with anti-Judaism within Christianity, for, in my opinion, the division between Christianity and most of Judaism played a role in the church’s stigmatization of Jews. This may very well have started out as a debate between Jews, as Marshall and other have argued. After all, even the Old Testament continually criticizes the children of Israel. But criticism of Israel became more of a stigmatization of the “other” as more and more Gentiles entered the church, and the portrayal of the Jews as hard-hearted and as corrupt in both the Old and also the New Testament played a significant role in how Gentile Christians conceptualized the Jews. I don’t believe that was the only factor. The New Testament certainly does not command Christians to humiliate or slaughter the Jews, for it tells people to love their enemies, to be humble, etc. While I maintain that the Bible played a role in how Gentile Christians viewed the Jews, I think that the notion that Jews should be subjugated and treated as a defeated people comes from other things, such as triumphalism, an attitude that is consistent with an imperialist mindset, but not with New Testament principles.

I have two other thoughts, which take some of Marshall’s arguments as their starting-point, even though they do not entirely relate to Marshall.

First, on page 309, Marshall refers to a critic who told him: “You’ll say they’re not real Christians. But you have to take the bad with the good. Christianity has changed many lives for the better, but it has also done a lot of harm.” Does Marshall argue that those who were responsible for the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the pogroms, and the witch hunts were not real Christians? At one point, Marshall refers to those responsible for one of those atrocities as alleged Christians. But he also acknowledges in this Appendix that there were true Christians who participated in those examples of gross wrong-doing.

I’ve always hated the evangelical argument that those who were involved in atrocities were not real Christians. I was once talking with a Christian conservative fanatic who was continually bashing President Obama and Muslims. When she was expressing outrage that American Muslims are allowed to practice their religion in the U.S. military and referred to Muslim atrocities throughout history and in the present, I told her about atrocities that Christians have done. She responded that those who do not love other people are not true Christians. I thought what she said was ridiculous. I mean, what right did she have to be so smug and judgmental? Is she showing love when she stigmatizes an entire group of people? Is she saying that true Christians cannot make mistakes? What makes her think that she’s so perfect? I admire Christians who are willing to admit that they and others can err in judgment, not Christians who act like they’re the “true Christians” while those who fall short (sometimes dramatically) are merely “professing Christians”.

Second, Marshall talks a lot in this book about the good that Christians have done. Before reading Marshall, I thought that was a rather trite argument. I mean, I used it often against atheists and non-believers back in the days when I was a conservative evangelical! But what I have concluded after reading Marshall is this: it can easily become a trite argument because I and others have used it as such—-as a mere debating point. It’s one thing to use a predictable conservative Christian debating point in an attempt to score, to make myself look good, and to make my opponent look bad. It’s quite another thing altogether to step back and to admire those who put their necks on the line so that the oppressed, the marginalized, and the disadvantaged can have a chance, and (even more) to realize that I may have an obligation to help, too. I’m not criticizing Marshall here, for he has done humanitarian work, such as combating the sex trade. When reading his polemics, I often wish he would show more humility, but I know that I am not always humble in the battlefield of online and print debates.

The next book that I will read will be Marshall’s very first book: True Son of Man: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture.

Do You See It?

2011-12-26T08:00:00.000-05:00

I finished Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume 2: The Paradoxes of Paul. This will be a rambling post.

D.A. Carson wrestles with a tension in Paul, who presents Jesus as the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures (as if the Scriptures predicted him), yet also says that the Gospel was hidden in the past but came to be revealed with the coming of Christ. Carson asks on pages 397-398: "How can the very things that are said, on the one hand, to be predicted in the past and now fulfilled, be said, on the other, to be hidden in the past and only now, in the fullness of time, revealed?" I've heard this issue addressed by dispensationalist Christians. There are dispensationalists who do not believe that the Hebrew Bible predicted pieces of God's plan, since Paul calls these pieces mysteries that were unknown before the coming of Christ. These mysteries include the presence of both Jews and Gentiles in one body (the church), and some have even suggested that the idea that Christ would die for humanity is not in the Old Testament. If my memory is correct, I read one dispensationalist interpreter a while back who said that Isaiah 53 only says that Christ will die for the Jews, and so it does not predict Christ dying for the Gentiles as well. Christ dying for the Gentiles was a mystery that became revealed after Christ's death and resurrection.

Carson's conclusion is that, for Paul, the Scriptures themselves contain the mysteries (and this is probably the view of many non-dispensationalist Christians). On page 433, Carson states:

"[Paul] is never saying to his Jewish peers, 'You silly twits! Can't you see that my exegesis is correct? I used to read the Bible as you still do, but I understand things better now. Can't you see I'm right?' Rather, while insisting that his exegesis of the old covenant scriptures is true and plain and textually grounded, he marvels at God's wisdom in hiding so much in it, to bring about the unthinkable: a crucified Messiah, whose coming and mission shatters all human arrogance, including his own."

That quote brings a lot of things to my mind: the arrogance of some conservative Christians who are so baffled that Jews do not see Christ in the Hebrew Bible; the view that I got growing up that God needed to "open our minds" to see certain truths in the Bible (namely, Armstrongite doctrine), since so many people in the world did not see those truths. I used to attend a Seventh-Day Adventist church, and a person there who married into Adventism was coming to believe that Christians had to observe the seventh-day Sabbath. He asked why so many people were so stupid that they did not see that! When I told someone else about this, he replied that this guy should be humbler, for he himself was stupid at some point and did not believe in the Sabbath.

Personally, I don't think that people who do not see Armstrongite or Adventist doctrines in the Bible are "stupid". They simply have another interpretation of the Bible. They highlight things that Sabbatarians explain away (i.e., Gentile-Christians in Acts 15 not having to observe the law), whereas Sabbatarians highlight issues that Sunday-keepers may have a hard time dealing with (i.e., the law and the Ten Commandments are praised in the New Testament, yet they claim that we don't have to observe parts of it).

Henri Blocher in this volume says that Paul's doctrine was counter-Scriptural, in a sense. On page 490, he states: "[There] is the staggering audacity of Paul's combination of words: God who justifies the ungodly (Rom 4:5)!...God is doing what he expressly forbids (Deut 25:1; Isa 5:23; Prov 17:15), God is doing what he said he would not do (Exod 23:7)!" But perhaps one could come back and say that God doesn't justify the ungodly when they are unrepentant, but God does when they are repentant.

I thought that Blocher's summary of the New Perspective's stance on solution-to-plight was the clearest that I have read so far. According to Blocher, New Perspective interpreters say that Paul before he became a Christian thought that sin was not a terrible problem, for the law had means of atonement. But Paul learned that Christ came to redeem people from their sins, and so he concluded from that "solution" that the plight of humanity was much worse than he had previously believed: that the law was not sufficient to atone for sin. But Blocher critiques the New Perspective on this point because it makes the Gospel rather than the Law the way the Paul came to the realization that we're all sinners, whereas Paul in Romans says that the knowledge of sin comes through the law.

Christmas 2011

2011-12-25T13:30:00.001-05:00

Last night, I went with my Mom and her husband to Christmas eve mass at a Catholic church. This morning, I went to my Presbyterian Church (USA).

As those of you who have read my reviews of David Marshall’s works can probably tell, I can easily become skeptical when it comes to the Bible and religion. I had some of that skepticism last night, as I wondered how exactly I should feel during the service, when I was not even certain that we were celebrating a real event in history! But some things in that service, and in this morning’s service, and in my reading of Marshall made me more of a believer in Christianity. I thought about the stories about Jesus doing good for people, as well as what David Marshall says about Jesus’ humility (even though Jesus also made quite exalted claims about himself in the Gospels, as Marshall points out), and how that has inspired many followers of Jesus to love the sick, the oppressed, and the marginalized, and to do so with humility. The priest last night talked about the light of God and virtue, and prayed that these things might subsume the vice that is within us. I thought about John Calvin’s assertion that all people bear the image of God, which may mean that we all are like God in possessing the capacity to love, morality, a degree of intellect, etc., even though Calvin would say that the image has been defaced by sin. Then, there was this morning, when the pastor talked about the restoration of God’s full image in us through Jesus Christ.

I didn’t think much about the atonement or who is going to hell or heaven. I thought more about Jesus manifesting a divine sort of benevolence, and the hope that Christianity offers that we can become good, too. I think that everyone has a degree of light when it comes to God, for all people realize that there is some standard of goodness (whether or not it is “absolute”). This is true for those who believe in Jesus, and also for many who do not. I prefer to think about how Jesus fits into that light, rather than focusing on how those who don’t believe in Christianity will go to hell.

One more thought: I grew up in an Armstrongite denomination that did not keep Christmas, and I used to talk with Jehovah’s Witnesses, who also did not observe it. Both decried how Christmas reduces Christ to the status of a baby every year, when Christ is a king. I have to admit that I was puzzled by some statements that I heard in both church services: when we prayed to the infant Jesus last night, and when the pastor this morning asked in his sermon what our gift will be to the newborn Christ. I mean, Jesus is not a baby anymore! But I also found a great emphasis on Jesus’ kingship in Christmas—-in the services, with the songs that we sung and the Scriptures that we read. Contra Armstrongites and Jehovah’s Witnesses, we were celebrating Christ as king in our telling of the nativity story.

I’m glad to be with my Mom, her husband, and our kitty cats this Christmas. It’s much better than the years I was alone during the holidays! I hope that, whether you are alone or with people, you will have happy holidays this year.

David Marshall: "Jesus and the Religions of Man"

2011-12-25T12:57:00.003-05:00

Today, I’ll blog about Chapter 13 of David Marshall’s Jesus and the Religions of Man, which is entitled (like the book itself) “Jesus and the Religions of Man”. I have four items:

1. On pages 295-296, Marshall attempts to refute the argument that the Gospels were written long after the time about which they’re writing and thus are unreliable. Marshall states that the Gospels date only decades, not centuries, after Jesus’ death. Based on my reading and experience in academia, I attest that even the vast majority of liberal scholars would agree with that. That means that many eyewitnesses to Jesus were alive when the Gospels were written. Marshall says on page 296 that “the Gospels enjoyed a considerable advantage in this respect over all other ancient literature” (page 296), which may mean that the Gospels are closer in date to the events that they narrate than is other ancient literature to the events that they narrate.

I interacted some with this argument of Marshall in my post here. A question that I have is this: Does the existence of eyewitnesses to Jesus while the Gospels were being written mean that the Gospels are infallible or historically-reliable? Paul in Galatians and II Corinthians refers to people in his day who were proclaiming another Jesus, or another Gospel, and they were getting followers. Apparently, people could get things wrong about Jesus and successfully propagate their claims even when there were eyewitnesses to Jesus who were still alive, and those eyewitnesses were not able to stop those alternative Gospels. So why should we assume that the canonical Gospels are reliable on the basis of eyewitnesses to Jesus being around when they were written?

I remember Marshall asking in The Truth Behind the New Atheism why new atheists are so dogmatic about the Gospel authors never having met Jesus, for they were most likely alive when Jesus was. Who knows? Marshall may be right. This issue has been debated. But if eternal hell is the penalty for not accepting the Gospel authors’ message, then you’d hope that God would give us more than a “maybe” to support the Gospels’ status as eyewitness testimony.

On whether Marshall is correct on how the Gospels compare with ancient literature, my guess would be “yes” and “no”. There are histories that were written long after the events that they narrate, but there are also some histories that are quite close to the events. I think of Josephus’ account of first century Judaism. Josephus is not accepted carte blanche by historians just because he wrote close to the time of the events that he narrates, however, for Josephus had a bias and an agenda in writing his history (i.e., to convince the Romans that not all Jews were rebels and that the Pharisees should rule). Josephus has to be sifted for what we can safely say is historical, as do the Gospels.

I realize that Marshall tackles these issues in more depth in this and other books, which I will read. But I’m just raising some informal questions.

2. On page 306, Marshall addresses the issue of contradictions within the Gospels. He says that there were contradictory accounts about the 1999 shooting at Littleton, Colorado, for, while eyewitnesses agreed that a young lady was shot for saying that she believed in God, there were differences about where, and some did not even hear her say that. Marshall quotes Jefferson County investigator Gary Muse, who said, “Any time you have a traumatic situation, even if only one person is killed, every testimony is different.” Marshall also quotes scholar Paul Maier, who affirms that differences in the resurrection accounts tend to demonstrate their authenticity, for that shows that there is more than one account to the event, and that the early church was “too honest to iron the story out” (Marshall’s words).

How much contradiction can we tolerate before we conclude that the Gospels are not eyewitness testimony? This is a huge question. I agree with Marshall that differences among the Gospels by themselves do not disprove that the Gospels are eyewitness accounts, or perhaps contain eyewitness accounts. But some things should be taken into consideration, such as the ideologies of the authors. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John present different images of Jesus. The Jesus of Matthew and Luke is more Torah observant than the Jesus of Mark. And the Jesus of John is quite different from the Jesus of the synoptics, for John’s Jesus is quite open about who he is, whereas the synoptic Jesus is more secretive. Whether or not the Gospels contain eyewitness testimony, that testimony comes to us through ideologies and subjectivity. And the question that many have asked is: Can all of these different pictures of Jesus be simultaneously true? Historical Jesus scholars seek to get behind the ideologies of the Gospels to determine what might be historical.

Does the existence of ideologies within the early church show that it was dishonest or uncommitted to truth? No. I don’t think that our only options are (A.) to believe that the Gospels are practically transcripts of what really happened (or at least generally true, which is probably what Marshall thinks), and (B.) to see a conspiracy in the early church to suppress the truth and to promote its own agenda. The early church was honest to preserve the Gospels, with all of their contradictions. Perhaps they couldn’t do otherwise, since the Gospels were so popular among Christians! But the early church had an ideology and an agenda, as did the rabbis, who also tolerated (even encouraged) a degree of variety and contradiction. That should be taken into consideration when determining what may be historical, and what we cannot necessarily trust as historical.

3. On page 307, Marshall offers his own view on the star of Bethlehem, which appears to be based on Paul Maier’s work. For Marshall, the phenomenon was a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation of Pisces. Jupiter represented the highest god, Saturn was seen as the defender of Palestine, and Pisces was associated with Syria and Palestine. In The Truth Behind the New Atheism, Marshall dates this to 6 B.C. This interested me because Rick Larson dates the star to 3-2 B.C.E. and says that it was Jupiter gliding past Regulus (which means king) within the constellation of Leo, a lion, the animal that is a symbol for Judah. (UPDATE: That's not entirely accurate, for Larson actually thinks that the star occurred later and was Venus coming into conjunction with Jupiter. But he believes that the events of 3-2 B.C.E. caught the magis' attention and alerted them to the birth of a king of Israel. See my post here.) My impression from this (unless you want to say that the Star of Bethlehem appeared in both 6 B.C.E. and some years later) is that people can make a good story out of all sorts of phenomena, depending on where and when they choose to look.

4. On page 301, Marshall says that people he knows (or knows of) who make the sorts of claims Jesus made usually have serious issues (i.e., womanizing, being troubled, etc.), whereas people like Jesus generally do not make grandiose claims about themselves. Marshall mentions Gandhi. Marshall’s point here may be a variation of C.S. Lewis’ Lord-Liar-Lunatic argument: that Jesus obviously is sane and of good character, and so we can trust his claim to be God.

I could then respond that Jesus did not claim to be God but that Gospel authors (particularly John) are putting their Christological beliefs into Jesus’ mouth. But then I’d have a question: Why did Paul and John believe that Jesus was divine? What influenced a few Jews to adopt this sort of belief, when their culture was staunchly monotheistic? Marshall states in The Truth Behind the New Atheism that C.S. Lewis asked this sort of question in response to the argument that Jesus’ claims are mere legend: Were the Gospel authors crazy to portray Jesus as divine? Do their writings display craziness? If not, then maybe they are true. Or so the argument (as I understand it) goes.

Did the early Christians get their belief in Jesus’ divinity from Jesus himself? Granted, not all sects in early Christianity believed that Jesus was divine. There were Jewish-Christian sects that did not, and, while they date to the second century, they claimed to have originated earlier than that. But Paul appears to portray Jesus as a divine sort of figure. So does John. Where did they get this belief? What led some early Christians with Jewish backgrounds to conclude that Jesus was more than just a good, pious man with a special connection to God, but was in some sense divine himself? People have tackled this question, appealing to possible analogies in Judaism (i.e., wisdom, Philo’s belief in the logos, how lesser beings could carry the name of YHWH) and Gentile culture (i.e., god-men, saviors). Different perspectives on this issue deserve study, in my opinion. The claims that Jesus makes for himself in the Gospels had to come from somewhere (either himself, or those who wrote the Gospels), and for some reason.