Looking Up at Jesus, Not Looking Down on Others

Something stood out to me in the March 4, 2014 Daily Bread devotional: “Looking up to Jesus prevents us from looking down on others.”

I can identify with this: rather than nitpicking others, why not look up to Jesus?

There are versions of Christianity that focus a lot on relationships with people: fellowship, accountability, being brothers and sisters, etc.  I, however, tend to gravitate to the versions that try to tell us how to cope with people, since I often do not fit in, and I tend to take people’s inventory for them.

I read Van Moody’s The People Factor, and one point of his that I appreciated was that we work for God, not for human beings.  Moody is drawing here from Colossians 3:23, where the author exhorts slaves to obey their masters.  Maybe the verse has a shady background and historical application, but I can still identify with the concept of seeking to please one, God.  Other people will not necessarily appreciate what I do, but I have to believe that God does.

Of course, I wouldn’t want for others to be nice to me just because they are seeking to please God; I would want for them to be nice to me because they like me.  But who am I to judge?  Maybe I should go back to square one: look up to Jesus, so that I am not looking down on others, evaluating their motives, real and imagined.

Book Write-Up on Jesus: Miriam's Child, Sophia's Prophet

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza.  Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet: Critical Issues in Feminist Christology.  New York: Continuum, 1994.

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza is a feminist biblical scholar.  I read her book, In Memory of Her, back when I was an undergraduate.  I liked that book for two reasons.  First, it argued that the Jesus movement was non-patriarchal and egalitarian.  That resonated with me, as one who wanted to believe that the Bible was progressive rather than regressive.  Not only would that make me feel better about God, but it would also give me a way to respond to atheists who said that the Bible was sexist and patriarchal.  I realize that Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s approach to Scripture was more nuanced than the way that I was applying it—-that she actually sees regressive and potentially liberationist voices within the Bible—-but I figured that I could take what I liked, and leave the rest.  Second, I vaguely recall that Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza argued that the Greek word adelphos in the New Testament could apply to both men and women.  The New Revised Standard Version was being criticized at the time for gender inclusive language—-for saying “brothers and sisters” rather than merely “brothers” or “brethren.”  I was impressed that Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza defended the idea that adelphos could mean brothers and sisters, not through an appeal to political correctness, but rather by pointing out how the term was used in the New Testament.

I did not take a class with her when I was a student at Harvard Divinity School.  I was aware that she employed a “hermeneutic of suspicion” when it came to the Bible, and I much preferred what Richard Hays called the “hermeneutic of trust” (as I understood that).  I understood the hermeneutic of suspicion to a suspicion of biblical writings, as if they reflected attempts to reinforce oppressive power structures, and that did not agree with my desire to believe that the Bible was God’s word, illuminated by the Holy Spirit.  Moreover, I thought that she tended to reduce biblical studies to political issues, whereas I believed that Christianity should have a significant spiritual component.  I do not know if I was understanding the hermeneutic of suspicion or her overall stance correctly, and perhaps I would have done well to have audited one of her classes and just listened (I would not have been brave enough to take her class for a grade!).  I did not, though, but at least I can still read her writings!

Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet: Critical Issues in Feminist Christology is a critique of other feminist theologians and scholars (including critics of In Memory of Her), and it also explores issues in feminist Christology.  Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s desire is for a democratic society of justice and social equality, and one of her problems with a number of feminist theologians and scholars is that she does not believe that their ideologies or arguments are sufficient to dismantle patriarchy or oppression, but may even reinforce the current system and its mindsets.  A lot of her book seems to me to be an exploration of the pitfalls that can come with doing feminist theology.  One may want to argue that Jesus was a step-up from the oppressive patriarchy of the Judaism of his day, for example, but the problem there is that such an argument reinforces anti-Judaism and maybe even supersessionism, ideas that have had disastrous historical consequences.  One may note that wisdom was a feminine manifestation of God within the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, or that Mary is significant within Catholicism, but could these notations lead to a reinforcement of gender stereotypes?  Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza quotes someone who recalled her negative experiences in Catholic school, and how the nuns appealed to Mary in an attempt to encourage girls to be passive, quiet, and submissive. 


Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s approach, it appears to me, is to identify potentially liberationist ideas within Jewish and Christian traditions, and to encourage society to acknowledge those, which could perhaps lead to society’s betterment.  Rather than saying that Jesus was a step-up from Judaism, why not note the liberationist tendencies within Judaism, such as the female heroine Judith?  Why not stress Mary’s call for the dismantling of oppression in the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55)?  While wisdom literature may reflect a sexist society or sexist groups, one could point to wisdom groups that may have been open to women: consider the Therapeutae.  Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza also appears to gain hope from the empty tomb traditions, in which Jesus appears to women after rising from the dead and goes before them.  She supports encouraging women to work for equality and democracy, and she seems to believe that, on some level, the Jesus movement was doing so by being a movement of equals, against a system of prevalent patriarchy, classism, and oppression.

A question that enters my mind is whether we can pick and choose what we like in a religion.  Why do the liberationist tendencies within Christianity have a truth value of reflecting the will of God, whereas the patriarchal tendencies do not?  I do not know how Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza would answer that question, or if she would even accept my framing of the question or its premise.  Perhaps her focus is more on the social consequences of theological ideas rather than their truth value.  Or, alternatively, perhaps she actually does believe that the liberationist tendencies within Christianity are authoritative because they reflect how the early Jesus movement was, whereas patriarchal aspects of Christianity came later and primarily reflected the patriarchy and sexism of the surrounding culture, rather than anything distinctly Christian.  Perhaps she believes that Jesus really was a prophet of sophia, wisdom, a feminine manifestation of God.

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza also seemed to me to have a problem with Paul’s conceptualization of Jesus as Lord.  For one, she appears to see that as part of a sexist narrative in which a woman brought sin into the world and a man came to earth to fix that.  (Whether or not Paul blamed the woman for the Fall, some of his ideas became a part of that Christian narrative.)  Second, she is quite critical of oppression and authoritarianism, and so she may believe that seeing Jesus as Lord reinforces an authoritarian mindset, as opposed to the discipleship of equals that she prefers.  I believe that seeing Jesus as Lord can give people the hope that God will one day end oppression.  Does Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza envision more of a bottom-up than a top-down process, in which people work for equality and encourage society to embrace equality voluntarily?

Believing in a Personal Devil

At church this morning, the pastor opened his sermon with an anecdote.  A seminary student was asked if he believed in a personal devil, and he responded that he did not.  The people who asked the question were concerned about whether the seminary student would make a good pastor, and someone suggested that they not worry about it: in pastoring a church, the guy said, the seminary student will come to believe in a personal devil!

This anecdote made me think about whether or not I believe in a personal devil.  I was certainly raised to believed in one, and so that belief is a part of me, somewhere.  On the other hand, my education has told me that the devil was only part of later stages of Jewish religion, and that Christianity inherited that belief from there.

To be honest, I do not worry much about a personal devil.  My challenge is dealing with myself and my own sins and flaws.

Psalm 150

Well, this is my last post about the Book of Psalms for my weekly quiet time!  My first post of this series was published (on my blog, of course) on December 4, 2010.  That means that I have been doing weekly posts on the Book of Psalms for over three years.  Time went by fast!  Near the end of this post, I will talk about what I have learned, overall, but, first of all, I want to mention some items from my study of Psalm 150.  Interestingly, the items do not concern Psalm 150 so much, but rather points that intrigued me as I was reading interpretations of Psalm 150.

For one, there was an article by Anthony Ceresko: “Endings and beginnings: alphabetic thinking and the shaping of Psalms 106 and 150.”  It appeared in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly 68/1 January 2006, pages 32-46.  In a footnote, Ceresko quotes from page 598 of Norman Gottwald’s The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel.  Gottwald was contending that ancient Israel’s reliance on the alphabet was consistent with its more democratic set-up.  Gottwald states that “The older hieroglyphic and syllabic scripts with their complex burden on the memory were well suited to imperial-feudal monopoly, whereas the alphabetic script contributed to a democratization of language and thus to the celebration of a people and its deity in a new social system.”  This is an intriguing proposal.  I have some difficulty accepting it, since the Canaanite city-states which Israelite peasants supposedly revolted against or left also used an alphabetic script, and my understanding is that they were not exactly democratic or egalitarian.  But it is still intriguing.  Admittedly, the alphabet was probably easier to remember than the hieroglyphic and syllabic scripts, and that could be why it was invented: so that people outside of the elites of the elites, such as traders, could have access to written language.

Second, there was a comment by Cyril of Jerusalem, which I read in the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, the one about Psalms 51-150.  Essentially, Cyril was responding to a question: How can we even talk about God, if God is incomprehensible?  Cyril’s response is that we cannot drink down an entire stream, yet we can still drink what we need.  Our eyes cannot take in all of the sunlight, but sunlight can still benefit us.  Of course we will fall short of a perfect understanding of God when we worship, but that does not mean that we should not worship.  Cyril quotes Psalm 150, which exhorts all that has breath to praise the Lord.  I would not say that Cyril answers the question adequately, but he does mention things that are worth thinking about.  I would say that we do have enough understanding of God to worship, even if our understanding falls short, due both to the greatness of God, and also our subjectivity in conceptualizing God.

Now, for what I learned about Psalms.  What particularly interested me was the different settings that interpreters have ascribed to the Psalms.  In my younger years, I would interpret the Psalms in reference to David, as if David were the author.  In some of my graduate school years, I interpreted many of them in light of the annual creation-and-renewal festival, in which God defeated chaos and renewed the cosmos, a la Mowinckel.  These past three years, however, I have learned about different views: views that regarded certain Psalms as eschatological, views that dated them to the time of the Maccabees, views that related them to David’s life, views that said certain Psalms concerned Hezekiah’s time, views that dated certain Psalms to the exile or post-exilic periods, and views that sought to apply them to Christ, while employing creative interpretations when that did not appear to work.  A question that I have long had is why there is so much in the Psalms about oppressors, or enemies conspiring against the Psalmist.  Who would write a piece about this?  Who would have the power to do so?  What purpose would such a piece serve?  Well, I encountered a variety of scenarios: such Psalms were about David on the run from Saul or Absalom, Israel suffering under foreign oppressors, some king trying to deal with palace intrigue, a bloke with complaints coming to the Temple to pray, or Christ.

I have said this more than once, but I will say it again: I was not expecting to enjoy my study of the Psalms as much as I did.  I long regarded the Psalms as rather boring, as the same praises or complaints repeated over and over.  I do not want to minimize the euphoria or the harsh conditions that stimulated the creation of many of the Psalms, but I thought that I would get bored reading the Book, and that I would not find much to write about the Psalms.  But I turned out to be wrong.  The vast majority of Psalms had something interesting, largely because there is disagreement or ambiguity about what some of the verses mean.

One thing that I did not do in my study was to address the story that all of the Psalms as a whole try to communicate.  I focused on each individual Psalm, rather than what all of them may say when one considers them all together, in terms of their order, for example.  I am not beating myself up over this, but I am just noting it as one deficiency in my study.  There are people who have sought to explain the order: E.W. Bullinger did so in light of the Pentateuch, Bob MacDonald sees a story throughout the Psalms, and some argue that there is an overall Messianic pattern in the Psalms’ arrangement: that the Psalms are arranged so as to communicate Israel’s desire for a Messiah.  This may be something for me to probe in years to come.

The next book that I will study for my weekly quiet time is I Chronicles.  I chose this book largely for practical reasons.  I already have the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture for this book, which is convenient.  The Word Bible Commentary for I Chronicles was inexpensive.  So I Chronicles it is!

Service and Happiness

My church started a new Bible study last night.  We’re going through The Easter Experience: What If What Happened Then Changes Everything Now?  Last night’s lesson focused on how one can become happy and arrive at a sense of purpose by serving others.  It looked at John 13, where Jesus washes his disciples’ feet.

Does serving others make the person serving happy?  It can, I suppose.  I know that focusing on myself and my own wants and needs does not make me happy.  Back when I was an undergraduate, I did a variety of service jobs: working at a nursing home, tutoring, etc.  Those were happy times.  It was important for me to get outside of myself.

I am a bit doubtful, however, about whether service is always the sure path to happiness that people think it is.  If that were the case, then servants and housewives would be the happiest people in the world!  Some are, but not all are.  Service is still important, though, because otherwise the world would be a colder place than it currently is.  I have to appreciate those who have helped me, whether they be Christians or non-Christians.  They inspire me to want to help others.

How can I serve?  Well, I can say that I serve through blogging, and, in a sense, I do.  And yet, there is so much self-promotion and self-centeredness that accompanies my blogging: me wanting attention, me wanting people to admire me for being brilliant, me being upset when they don’t.  That does not mean that I will give it up, for it does help me, and perhaps others.  What I need is a different attitude about it.  Rather than being upset that someone visits my post just to look for information, without then going on to click “like” or to follow my blog, I can hope that the person found what he or she was looking for.

There are probably other things that I can do to serve.  The challenge is to motivate myself to do it.

All of that said, I like this Bible study so far.  It gets into practical spirituality rather than controversial issues.  I was quiet last night at Bible study, for I wanted to hear what others had to say about service and humility.

Book Write-Up: The Abomination of Desolation in Biblical Eschatology

Desmond Ford.  The Abomination of Desolation in Biblical Eschatology.  Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1979.

I used to listen to Desmond Ford at one of the churches that I attended as a child.  The church’s leader would play for us tapes of Ford’s lectures and sermons, and that would be our message for many a Sabbath.  I also read Ford’s magazine, Good News Unlimited, as well as two of his books: The Forgotten Day, which is about the seventh-day Sabbath, and Daniel, which Ford wrote while he was still a Seventh-Day Adventist.  The Abomination of Desolation in Biblical Eschatology was Ford’s dissertation for the University of Manchester, where he worked under the supervision of renowned evangelical scholar F.F. Bruce.

I decided to read this book because I wanted to see how Ford interacted with the historical-critical method.  The “Abomination of Desolation” appears in the Book of Daniel, and also in Mark 13 and parallel passages in Matthew and Luke.  The concept, albeit not the term, appears to be in II Thessalonians, and Ford argues that it is in the Book of Revelation, as well.  Many scholars would identify the Abomination of Desolation in the Book of Daniel as what Antiochus Epiphanes did to the Jewish Temple in the second century B.C.E., and they would say that in Mark 13 the Abomination of Desolation relates to the Roman invasion of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.  These scholars tend to believe that both biblical writers were expecting an imminent eschatological intervention by God in (or close to) their own time, as God would overthrow evil and set up a new kingdom on earth.  But time passed, and this eschatological intervention by God apparently did not occur, neither in the second century B.C.E., nor in the first century C.E.  This poses a problem to a number of Christians.  Are Daniel and Mark 13 still indicators of what God will do, or are they simply dreams that were frustrated and invalidated?  How did Desmond Ford, one who believes that biblical eschatology is still relevant to today, interact with biblical scholarship that arguably undercuts the truth of Christianity?  Moreover, Seventh-Day Adventists tend to read into Daniel and Revelation things that arguably do not relate to those books’ original historical settings, such as events in medieval and Reformation history and the founding of the United States of America.  Did Ford hold these views when he was writing his dissertation, and, if so, how did he make his case within an academic world that largely focuses on the original historical contexts of biblical writings as the key to understanding their meaning, a world that would probably view Adventist eschatology as anachronistic in its treatment of the Bible?

In his dissertation, Ford quoted from a number of German and French sources, and I did not translate them while I was reading it.  Perhaps I should have, but I wanted to get through the book, and I did not want to devote a lot of time to looking up words or putting lengthy passages into Google Translate.  Consequently, my understanding of Ford’s position may be incomplete.  But I will share what I did get out of his dissertation.

Ford believes that the eschatological discourse in Mark 13 goes back to the historical Jesus.  He thinks that Jesus could have predicted the destruction of the Temple, the same way that some of the figures Josephus mentions predicted the destruction of the Temple.  (Notice that Ford does not appeal to Jesus’ supernatural ability to know the future.  While Ford critiques some of the presuppositions and conclusions of many biblical scholars, he still plays their game, when it comes to methodology.)  According to Ford, Mark 13 is also consistent with some of the details that Mark mentions about Jesus’ ministry: Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple, Jesus’ cursing of the fig tree, etc.  Ford appears to be open to the idea that Jesus in Mark 13 anticipates an eschaton that will surround the Roman occupation of Jerusalem.  Was Jesus therefore wrong, since that eschaton apparently did not materialize in 70 C.E.?  Ford does not think so, for he notes conditional elements to Mark 13.  Mark 13 states that the end will not come until the Gospel spreads to all the world, and that Jesus neither knows the day nor the hour of the parousia.  Perhaps, according to Jesus in Mark 13, the end would have come had the Gospel been preached to all the world, or had the Jews converted, Ford appears to argue.  That would have facilitated the triumph of the good.

Does Ford believe that Mark 13 will have a future fulfillment?  I would say that he does.  My problem is that I am not entirely clear as to the extent to which Ford believes that the Abomination of Desolation is historical, and the extent to which he believes that it is more general, or related to our future.  Ford thinks that the Abomination of Desolation in Mark 13 concerns the Roman armies invading Jerusalem.  However, while he does argue that II Thessalonians 2 and the Book of Revelation draw from Mark 13 as a source, he does not appear to interpret II Thessalonians 2 and Revelation primarily in reference to their historical contexts, or the events of 70 C.E.  He argues that the man of sin occupying the Temple in II Thessalonians 2 does not relate to the Jerusalem Temple, but rather is symbolic for the man of sin usurping the prerogatives of God.  Ford is open to the possibility that, say, the things that the Roman emperor Caligula did with respect to the Temple may have influenced Paul’s narration in II Thessalonians 2, and that the force restraining the man of sin may somehow relate to the Roman empire. (I was unclear as to where exactly Ford stood on this: He argued that the Holy Spirit was the restraining force, but he also appeared to be associating the Holy Spirit with the common grace that was behind the law-and-order within the Roman empire.)  Ford ultimately maintains that II Thessalonians 2 goes way beyond these historical events, and also way beyond the events of 70 C.E.  Ford in his discussion of Revelation has a similar policy.  Ford acknowledges that the Book of Revelation was for suffering Christians in the first century, but he largely resists interpreting Revelation in reference to first century people and events.

Does Ford believe in dual fulfillments of prophecy: that prophecy can have a historical fulfillment, but also a more general or end-time fulfillment?  Maybe.  He notes that the Book of Daniel re-applies Second Isaiah’s prophecies about the doom of Babylon, and he argues that Jesus believed that Antiochus did not exhaust the fulfillment of the Book of Daniel’s Abomination of Desolation.  Overall, my impression is that Ford was trying to situate the Abomination of Desolation within ancient history, in accordance with historical-critical standards, and yet that he was trying to give it a more general or end-time application, as well.  In my opinion, he could have done that more crisply and neatly than he did.

Book Write-Up: The Devil Walks in Mattingly

Billy Coffey.  The Devil Walks in Mattingly.  Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2014.

Jake Barnett is the sheriff in Mattingly, and his wife, Kate, does good deeds for the local poor.  Both are racked with guilt because they feel responsible for the death of Phillip McBride twenty years earlier, back when they were in high school.  As Jake and Kate attempt to cope with their guilt in their own ways, a variety of things are happening.  Phillip is haunting Jake’s dreams.  A mentally ill man named Taylor Hathcock is murdering and attempting to murder, with the conviction that life is a dream and he is benevolently waking people up.  A young woman named Lisa, who reads philosophy and feels rejected, unloved, and sad about the death of her mother, becomes attracted to Taylor and begins to believe his rants.  There is also a man named Justus, who shot at two people years before, and whom Jake and Kate do not want around their son, Zach.

The book really came alive to me after page 200.  Before that point, I had a hard time getting into it, but I diligently read on.  I am glad that I stuck with the book and got to see how its mysteries were explained and resolved.  The book is about forgiveness, moving on with life, insecurity, fear, reconciliation, and love.  Some of its theological reflections resonated with me, while others did not.  The book is rather deep and thought-provoking, though.

Note: I received a complimentary review copy of this book through the BookLook Bloggers (http://booklookbloggers.com/) book review bloggers program.  The program does not require for my review to be positive, and my review reflects my honest reaction to the book.