On December Five-and-Twenty

Repost from 5 years ago.

Well knock me over with a feather.

The commonly-told explanation for the early Christians choosing the date of Christmas - that it was piggybacked onto a gift-giving Roman holiday Saturnalia, in and effort to woo pagans over to celebrating the birth of Jesus? Turns out it's likely not true, according to Biblical Archaeology Review. It's a good example of how hearing a plausible theory that explains some of the data can cause you to forget what you already know. I had known that the very earliest Christians didn't pay much attention to Christmas at all. Easter was the big deal, as it should be. And if you'd asked the question in the right way, I would have answered that over the next few centuries, the Church were concerned with distancing itself from pagan customs, not embracing them and co-opting them. That came much later, when it was making a more concerted effort to convert my ancestors in northern Europe. But I breezed right by those known facts because the Saturnalia (plus a few other pagan celebrations) theory sounded so plausible.

The most loudly touted theory about the origins of the Christmas date(s) is that it was borrowed from pagan celebrations. The Romans had their mid-winter Saturnalia festival in late December; barbarian peoples of northern and western Europe kept holidays at similar times. To top it off, in 274 C.E., the Roman emperor Aurelian established a feast of the birth of Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun), on December 25. Christmas, the argument goes, is really a spin-off from these pagan solar festivals. According to this theory, early Christians deliberately chose these dates to encourage the spread of Christmas and Christianity throughout the Roman world: If Christmas looked like a pagan holiday, more pagans would be open to both the holiday and the God whose birth it celebrated.

Despite its popularity today, this theory of Christmas’s origins has its problems. It is not found in any ancient Christian writings, for one thing. Christian authors of the time do note a connection between the solstice and Jesus’ birth: The church father Ambrose (c. 339–397), for example, described Christ as the true sun, who outshone the fallen gods of the old order. But early Christian writers never hint at any recent calendrical engineering; they clearly don’t think the date was chosen by the church. Rather they see the coincidence as a providential sign, as natural proof that God had selected Jesus over the false pagan gods.

(CWCID: First Things)

Oh Foolish Galatians

We finished week 4 of thirteen today. What I have learned, in no particular order.

I am increasingly convinced the South Galatian theory is correct. Thougb Acts 15 seems at first glance to be similar to Galatians 2, that is largely a result of our love for associating narrative and the sparseness of other accounts of meetings between Paul and Peter. Acts 9 and 11 certainly make as much sense, and likely more, as the associated meetings between them. The newer theory fits better with Paul's extensive use of Hebrew scripture in his proof and discussion of the matter of Law. This has always seemed an odd tack to take with pagan converts in the mountains of North Galatia, where there were few Jews, but makes more sense if it is the southern cities being addressed, where there were more Jews. Thirdly, the harsh tone Paul adopts seems over-the-top for a small rural congregation he purports to love. It does not seem out-of-place in addressing a entire region which has been involved in a controversy which seemed settled, but now some are falling back. Lastly, it makes more sense that it is Jewish converts who might be tempted to be Judaisers, rather than a group of pagan Gentile converts.

It is not only the 1st C church which falls into law rather than faith, of course. Every modern group - evangelicals, Catholics, fundies, mainstreamers - all find their own law to slip back into. We notice other people's failings in this remarkably well.

My class shot down my idea that grace is more often found in dealing with problems in community rather than in one-on-one dealing with the Lord. I think they are right and I was wrong. Both have their place, but I think I put them out of order.

Paul's tone is much like a parent's, starting with an irate "You have brought shame upon the family...use the brains God gave you...I can't believe you were so stupid..." but moving to "I have such high expectations for you...I don't like having to yell at you...you have done wonderful things in the past, why not now..."

Though we understand what the words slave, servant, free mean, and we know about inheriting estates that have been in the family for generations, we don't really understand this analogy of Paul's well. It is not our world, but one that we can only experience from afar. Our picture of "slave," includes cotton fields more than cooks and tutors, and "servant" conjures up English manor houses or Newport RI. Inheritance these days tends to be more liquid.

Heresies

Ben Quash and Michael Ward edited Heresies, a series of sermons on many of the early heterodox opinions in the church and why certain doctrines were rejected in favor of others. It starts out as a set of pretty decent summaries, then limps downhill.

I've always had a hard time keeping them straight, all the Montanists, Donatists, docetists, Marcionists and whatever. Some of the writers thought there was an observable trend that heresies were attempts to avoid one problem so thoroughly that an opposite error emerged. Others thought that the vagueness and ambiguities of heresies, especially those propounded by mystics, made it difficult to identify if there was much wrong for quite a few years. I don't think either generalisation holds for long. What did fascinate was the perseverance of some heresies in the folk beliefs around the Mediterranean, and modern emergences of old falseness.

What they did convince me was important about all this is that people putting forth bad ideas often insist on them and force a crisis. Rank-and-file believers would often just as soon be left alone - which is why many orthodoxies did not reach final form for centuries after Christ. But heretics often have that push, that bulldog tendency, or a desire to be a somebody and have followers (not all). Secondly, they often rely on a few scripture sections to the exclusion of others to prove their points.* They force the doctrinal issue, as everyone else has to sit down and thumb through a lot of NT books and argue to decide what, precisely, do we believe the right doctrine to be?

But all in all, you might do better just reading the Wikipedia articles. This has a lot collected in one place, which is nice, but not enough. I bought it for Ben and will send it along, but don't be surprised if you see his copy in a used bookstore in Spring, TX.

*Now there's something that continues into the modern day...

Heresies

I am finishing the last of the pile of used books I bought Ben for his birthday - one figures that out of six, at least a couple will suit - which I may discuss in some depth when I finish. Until then, two things caught my attention, It examines the early heresies of the church, with some discussion of how those have played out in later centuries. Yet it doesn't have a bad word to say about the heretics themselves nor the doctrines they put forward. Heresy is not used as a near-equivalent to blasphemy, sacrilege, or denial of belief, but as a precise term for doctrines that look at first as if they could be true. Heresies are theories about Christ that had a following at one point, and had to be examined closely for their implications and faithfulness to all scripture, not just one section.

The second interesting bit was an unpursued analogy to color in describing the nature of Christ. I pushed it a little further for my own amusement. Consider God to be blue, and humanity yellow. The dual nature of Christ, recognised quite early though a full doctrine of Trinity took longer, was difficult to get one's mind around. Still is. Was Jesus, then, essentially blue, but painted over to look yellow? Or essentially yellow, somehow covered in blue? After much wrestling, it was decided that neither was a true picture: Jesus was fully blue, and fully yellow. That led to a next set of questions: can we say that Jesus was green, then? Much debate, and as these things go, the debates were not often gracious. No, not green. Jesus is not a hybrid, new thing, but very blue, and very yellow. Hmm. Striped, then, whether in bold flag-stripes, concentric circles, or a million imperceptible, interpenetrated stripes? No, not that either.

Well then, what? Something can't be both blue and yellow. It has to fit one of the descriptions above. But it doesn't, and by AD 450 or so, there was eventual agreement that this is as close as we can get with our limited understanding. Analogies for mysteries are worrisome, but they are all we have. We like to come up with analogies for the Trinity. A Sunday school favorite is the apple, with skin, flesh, and seeds. It's a terrible analogy - we don't eat the seeds, the skin has no contact with the seeds, what exactly is the tree in this whole process... but we seem to feel we should try something to make it clearer. God as coach, putting down his clipboard and whistle and playing goal as a demonstration for we humans...well, it captures something, but it obscures just as much. The problem is with the arrogance of believing that we've got this mystery under control with our analogy - and yes, I have heard stupid persons, when discussing the Trinity, bring up some favorite analogy as if it settled everything, and the rest of us need discuss no more.

There is a tradition of mystic understanding of mystery call the apophatic, the understanding by negation. God is not this, God is not that. But its practitioners are quite clear that one cannot start from there, but must first build up a structure, from which pieces are discarded: not thus...not thus...not thus... The practice is more common in the Eastern churches, but CS Lewis fans will recognise that he uses apophatic techniques in his descriptions of God often*. We see something of this in the creed from the Council of Chalcedon in 451 - after several positive statements about the nature of God and Christ, a whole section turns to statements in the negative.

...inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten...

(An intro to the Creed of Chalcedon here.) *Start with Narnia, Screwtape, and Great Divorce, and very especially Till We have Faces for this.

Oh Foolish Galatians

I will be leading a book study at church this fall, and I am 90+% certain I'm doing Galatians, one chapter at a time, then something from the next 3 books for the second half of the class.  I do almost as well on the fly as I do with careful planning,* so leaving that open is not a problem, but an adventure.  In my initial browsing, following a rather obscure trail I am unlikely to feature much in the class, I ran across this by NT Wright, which impressed me greatly.

I had liked Wright before, but I have noticed previously that you get really excited about an author when you are looking for an answer, and his is on the top shelf.

*Actually, that is unknown.  I've never done careful planning.

The Final Commandment

Exodus 20:17 You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

Chances are you haven't heard many sermons preached on this*, nor had it show up in structured Bible studies, or Christian video series. It may show up in devotionals, but I seldom read those, so I can't say. Actually, perhaps there has been a run on it on radio, CCM, retreats, and I just haven't heard. My knowledge of evangelical culture spiked briefly at Veggietales, and then fizzled out. But I'm betting it's still an underused commandment these days. We are more likely, in fact, to self-righteously engage in it, Christians openly resenting the wealth of others. We don't even disguise this especially well. It leaks out all over social and political discussions denouncing materialism or making environmentalism a central portion of our practical faith.

I originally thought to say how much human beings everywhere resent seeing others get wealth, but I think that is going too fast. When someone who we perceive as being part of our peer group gets more of anything of value - money, attention, prestige, mates - our feelings about ourselves take a dip. The happiness research is pretty solid on this, that much of our experience of wealth or poverty is relative. We feel bad if we think we aren't measuring up. By stereotype, this is more true of men than of women, but I don't know if that is true. We have a wealth of patched-up defenses against these bad feelings. We increase our estimate of luck or unfairness to the success of others or (perhaps imaginary) failures of ourselves; we resolve to be less attached to worldly status and material things; we strive harder; we undermine the successful. As with our attempts to banish pride, lust, or sloth, these attempts to eliminate envy have only mixed success.

Also by stereotype, conservatives imagine they can get ahead under the current system and want everyone to do well, excepting that they do better - almost, but not really, a generous sentiment; liberals want to bring down the wealth of others while keeping their own the same, with the same result. (I have actually heard people say this quite explicitly, wanting Groups X and Y to not make so much, so that in the more equitable wealth distribution "society" will be more appreciative of higher values - not coincidentally, the things that they just happen to be good at. It would be a Better World, doncha know. Usually, it's not so explicit, but just leaks out all over the place. I'm thinking of Bill McKibben here, because he's in the news again.)

Coveting is about thoughts, and is something of a transition, a come-deeper version of the other commandments. When Jesus makes his supposedly alarming statements about thoughts of murder or adultery being the spiritual equivalent of the act, He wasn't bringing out anything new. Jews had long earlier figured out that the Commandments forbade more than what is seen at first glance - that kissing your neighbor's wife was not quite in the spirit of things, and heavy petting was right out, even if there was no adultery. They knew that defrauding and cheating were a kind of stealing, and had picked up that worshiping other gods didn't necessarily involve altars and dead animals. Jesus pushes this to the extreme, partly because it's ultimately true, but partly to create a contrast with Pharisaical well, technically, we're still keeping the law because of how we define "work"...

But it wasn't all that new. People were horrified at taking things that far, but they got the idea right away. They weren't stupid. I think the expansive, even vague 10th C was part of what led them on to the deeper understanding.

Coveting seems universal, and worms its way into our thoughts without our even noticing. It destabilises cultures and makes us less happy, and subjectively less prosperous. Buddhism, and to a lesser extent Hinduism, attempt to address this via the strategy of wanting less, and ultimately wanting nothing. Some Christians use this approach as well, and there is certainly a good deal of scripture to support the idea. Yet somehow that wanting-for-nothing, that satisfied-with-little solution rings hollow if it is combined with a resentment for others who don't do that - and I think that is often what leaks out, though the speaker denies it. I think it is always the danger, that the person who makes 5 Giddles a week believes he is righteously limiting himself by not seeking one of those fields where people make 50 Giddles a week. That was I, years ago, and I am not entirely clear of it. Given Luther's description of humanity as a drunkard on a horse, falling off one side and then the other, or CS Lewis's description of leaning so far away from one side of the boat that we fall out the other, coveting may be an uncommon sermon precisely because it is the one we don't want to hear.

*You probably haven't heard much on 9C either: v.16 You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. Sometimes you can get a thoughtful discussion going reminding us that this includes a lot of things that we aren't fully sure are true, such as gossip, people's motives, using adversarial law arguments (entirely appropriate in their real context) in persuasive or political discussion, and most fun conversation at all, really. Another day

Farewell To Alms

Gregory Clark thinks the help we give other nations does worse than no good at all. He thinks it actively harms them. This is troubling as an American, certainly. It is much more troubling as a Christian.

Christians are used to their generosities doing no good at all. We rather expect that will be the case many times. It is ours to give, and then the matter is out of our control. We even accept, more reluctantly, that our gift may go to wrong purposes, that in the free will of the recipient are many of the evils common to mankind, and our nickel may go to the devil.

When we know that the gift will harm, however, does the picture change?

Let me make a distinction that will become important in the discussion. There may be a conflict here between what we are to do as Christians, and what we are to do as Americans. Both the right and the left, though in different ways, have their Americanism interpenetrate their Christianity, and their faith invade their picture of what it means to be American. Actually, the left and right do this the same way, just on different topics.

As I was reading Clark's A Farewell To Alms, I kept thinking, and sometimes saying to my wife, this is very troubling. I noted previously my willingness to believe writers too easily; a third of the way through I noticed him getting something wrong about Christian history, then drawing an unwarranted conclusion from linguistic information. I became more suspicious, and decided he had Jared Diamond envy, drawing widely but not always accurately from other fields to support his point.

Still, this only weakened his argument and made me cautious. It did not eliminate it, and by the time I had finished the book I thought he had made a strong case that the poorer nations of the world have had their poverty increased, not so much by our trade with them, but by our efforts to lift them and help them. It is not colonialism per se that has reduced their standard of living, but their cultural decisions - possibly quite justified in their previous contexts - in response to income from trade. Put briefly, more money turned into more people, rather than a higher income for a stable population. That is what humankind (not to mention plants and animals) has always done: used increased resources to increase the population and fill the environment. Traditionally, that is the best way to keep out competitors.

So now their babies don't die so much - a good thing; and they live longer because of medical things we can help them with - another good thing; and they can grow more food per acre, and transport their goods, and trade more freely - all good things. Which ends up with too many people and gradual downturn in income per person - very bad things.

Conservatives will dislike Clark because he doesn't think that free markets and good government will solve things for poor nations; liberals will dislike him because he thinks that the west is prosperous because of our culture and even our genes. He makes a pretty good case for both, though. His first chapter is a summary of the book, and I recommend it. In fact, I give the summary four stars, but the book only three.

What all this means for Christians, going on medical and agricultural missions to far places, I hope to discuss at length. I don't have an answer I am fully comfortable with. I think I am going to have to relook at Christian charity in general in order to get any farther.

What We Hear

Many verses of scripture or teachings from the pulpit are general in their direction. When God tells us "To obey is better than sacrifice" is certainly true. But you might hear "obey" as primarily meaning be kind, while I hear give up material goods, and Harry over there hears head for Thailand to preach. So also with "take up your cross," or "love one another." Because they can mean many related things, we can gradually settle on the one picnic table in the park we like best.

This is a glory of the faith, and I believe it is entirely intentional. But all good things carry their own dangers. We each hear, a thousand times in our Christian lives, a reinforcement of our particular prejudice of what the most important part of the gospel is. Whatever you are hearing as the main theme of the faith, especially if you think other Christians are neglecting it - just don't see what is so obvious to you - step back. Your danger may be great.

The Most Important Thing

What's the most important thing in the Christian faith?

I've heard people make a variety of claims, in books, in preached sermons, or in unsolicited irritable declarations.

Evangelism - I mean that whole "Go ye into all the world" was the last teaching Jesus gave, right?

Scripture - because without that, we can't know anything, right? It'd be all up for grabs.

Worship. Isn't that what we were made for?

Grace. That's what sets Christianity apart from other faiths.

Prayer. Self-denial. Sacrament. Forgiveness. Community. Faith. Discipleship. There are a lot of nominations here, and I'll bet I've missed some good ones. Some of them have a pretty good claim on being the center. Of course, that is because a lot of these lead pretty quickly to several others, and can be seen as various doors, perhaps, into the presence of God, which is where we are ultimately bound. There is no need to see these as competitors when they are partners.

Yet the competition among them does seem to be much of what divides us. These splits are the modern version of "I am of Apollos; I am of Paul." We note that those other groups get part of it right, but just don't put enough emphasis on X. When we get huffy and extreme about it, we say that they "deny the importance of X." Pretty strong language that. And sometimes justified. Yet I think the abuse is far greater.

Because of my cast of mind, I am better equipped to declare what things are not the center than what things are.

Scripture. The earliest Church didn't have written scriptures and seemed to do just fine. If you want to enlarge the definition to include The Teaching Of The Apostles Which Eventually Got Written Down As Our Bible, then fine. But I haven't been getting the impression that's what most Bible-centered Christians mean when they say "scripture." They mean Book. Written down. Further, there were many ages in the church, and still places in the world, where written scripture was not available, or not widely understood. Yet many of those Christians were obedient souls who I am sure we will see in heaven.

We got print-focused when the printing press came in. Just prior to that and relatedly, what we now call witchcraft grew up as a branch of science, rather a descendant of alchemy, with it's exact-wording spellcasting and incantations. The age-of-exploration dependence on the Bible as a magic book that carried the gospel and protected believers from harm and sin - that's not the opposite of witchcraft, that's a cousin.
Caring For The Poor. As with Scripture, this is a good thing twisted into something less-than-Christian. Jesus's words throughout the NT are not about the poor, but about the brethren. The Jews were in one tribe. Jesus told them he was declaring a new tribe, first identifying them as Jews that chose the kingdom, then hinting and finally declaring that non-Jews were going to be welcome into this new tribe of believers in the kingdom. This tribe was going to be characterised by their devotion to each other, their forgiveness of each other, their sharing with each other. Looking over Jerusalem, He speaks of how their love for one another will be the mark that distinguishes them. At no time does he expand this to include the poor in general, or the nations of the world generally. Paul's teaching is the same, focused on the new community, and throughout the first century, observers of the Christians note how they are devoted to each other, not to the poor in general, or their neighbors in general, or any other category other than the church. Paul collects for other churches in distress, never for the poor of the next town. And it should be embarrassingly obvious and not necessary to point out, but it is: there isn't the remotest hint of Christians being encouraged to lobby the powerful, whether secular or religious authorities, on behalf of the downtrodden. We might wish Jesus had said that. We might say that he sorta kinda did, but put it in terms people could understand then (and we of course can fill in those blanks for Him now). We might believe He would have said that if He'd thought about it. But it's just not there.

As Christians became more influential, and eventually came to rule societies, the question of whether generosity should be extended generally became important. Certainly, in most of the western nations which give us our tradition of how we are to treat the general poor, all communities were in some sense Christian nations (however pagan they might remain and how poorly they understood Jesus), and thus all the poor were part of the Church, and the structures we built in weren't clearly divided between Christian poor and non-Christian poor, because the latter category didn't occur to people much. Not until about 1800, when prosperity of Christian lands started to become more general, and people were floating theories of what was the most ethical way for nations to behave - theories as diverse as Adam Smith and Mother Ann Lee and Joseph Smith and Karl Marx - did Christians really get rolling with any idea that Jesus came to teach us to share with the poor of the whole world. Before that, the Christian focus was more on denying oneself - not seeking after riches, taking up one's cross - than on general almsgiving.

It would be an exaggeration to say that many cultures have in practice, whatever they might say in theory, regarded virginity, especially for women, to be the most important marker of the faith. An exaggeration, but not a falsehood.

Tolerance is a big favorite of people outside the church, especially if they were church-raised. The reasoning, if any, seems to be that Jesus loved different people, so therefore they're all fine. He thought Samaritans were okay, which was shocking, so we just extend that to understand that Jesus thought that all kinds of people are cool, and it's only ignorant Christians making up their own rules who say any differently. This is ludicrous, because Jesus never said that Samaritans were fine and certainly not that Samaritan culture was just as valid as Jewish culture, but only that Samaritan individuals were as eligible to embrace the kingdom of God as Jews were. Paul, Peter, and the early church expanded that to include any sort of people who could become members of God's kingdom. They never said that those people were already there, or that their cultures were as valid as Jewish culture. It's a secular value, not an entirely bad one, that is a big favorite these days, as Unselfishness was the apogee of secular values a generation ago. So people who don't like to think very hard decide that if it's such a great value, someone as great as Jesus must've been foursquare behind that.

There's more false centers, if y'all want to have fun with this.

Of this list, which would I say is the worst, the furthest from the center? Eh, probably whichever one I heard most recently that torqued me off.

The Core

At the fireworks last night - rather disappointing, BTW (spoiled, I guess) - we briefly discussed Evangelical Covenant principles of agreement on the important points of the faith and freedom in the less-crucial. This stemmed from my son's recounting a question he had received at the information booth that morning - were we more Wesleyan or Calvinist in our theology?

The difficulty, of course, is that we don't all even agree on what are non-negotiable points of Christianity and which are less important. The Evangelical Covenant has some families who baptise infants, and some who hold to the importance of believer's baptism. (We have disagreement about that even in the family. Tracy and I consider infant baptism to be scriptural, Jonathan and Heidi had Emily dedicated instead of baptised. We're correct, of course, but what can you do?) A full-immersion Baptist would be unlikely to consider that a peripheral point. We take the Lord's Table only once a month in our congregation, and real presence is believed by some (us, again) and not by others. There are those who would find that looseness and lack of focus on the Sacrament to be a point too crucial to overlook in choosing a church.

CS Lewis had a paragraph or so on just this problem, with better examples. I am going to guess it is Mere Christianity, but it is evidence of my loss of grip on the Lewis corpus that I can no longer instantly tell you where it's from.

I may write a bit on what I see as the core.

Reflections On The Second Commandment

This was one of the earliest topics I picked up on this blog. As it is not an entirely common view in this era - or in any era since the inventing of the printing press, actually - I probably should write about it more. I should write about it every month until everyone rolls their eyes and is sick of it, actually. The link a short post from 2006. Please read it.

The injunction not to take the Lord's name in vain has nothing to do with bad language, or with oaths. It is about false prophecy, a fairly common theme of scripture. We should not forge God's signature under our own opinions. Yet many Christians, do this, and do it often. They say "God wants us to..." or "The Scriptures clearly teach..." or "Jesus said..." and I don't think they have anything near the proper caution about this.

No, the word caution is much too mild. Whenever we make a claim for what God's opinion is on any matter whatsoever, we should imagine Jesus dangling us over a cliff, held by our shirts, looking at us intently and asking "Are you absolutely sure that is what I want people to hear?" We should be petrified to make any pronouncement. I think the idea of death or torment for getting it wrong should cross our minds. If we are quoting directly from the Scriptures, giving no hint of interpretation, then perhaps we are safe.

Example: At camp meetings and revivals back in the day, some preachers would give an altar call, and on the basis of many scriptures and their own personal experience would declare unto the people that God wanted them to come forward and commit their lives to following Jesus, turning from their previous ways. They would state right out loud "Jesus wants you to come forward this night, say the sinner's prayer, and give your life to Him." Every evangelical can cite, right of the top of his head, a few dozen places in scripture where that statement could be justified.

Yet I would still shrink back from such a declaration. I would phrase it as a question: "Is the Lord calling you...?" Or I would qualify it as an opinion based on scripture study "I believe that this may be your last chance. I believe God may be calling you tonight..." I would stress the general call; I would even hellfire-and-brimstone a story of a sinner who did not respond and died in a car accident the next night; hell, I would lie and make up stories about healings and conversions before I would let the words "Jesus is telling you to come forward this night..." escape my lips unless I was absolutely sure of what I was saying.

Because maybe it's next year. Or maybe the darkest mutterings of Calvinism are true and this is one of the damned, who will use my arrogant declaration for greater evil. Or maybe I've misunderstood completely and coming forward is irrelevant. Or maybe he came forward a dozen years ago and I am subtly teaching him to doubt his salvation. Or maybe, maybe, maybe, a hundred other things I never considered.

I believe all Christians should shrink back in horror from declaring God's will with any certainty, unless they dragged almost weeping like Isaiah or Micah or Habakkuk, or in the NT, Peter, or John of Patmos, barely daring to speak but compelled for the sake of the Gospel. We are held out over the cliff, our destruction spreading below us.

It is the Second Commandment, right? The first thing God wanted us to remember once we had first recognised Him. Don't put words in my mouth, y'hear?

In the current era, it is the apolitical who offend most in this way, those who believe that they have discerned the will of God for the world, as the recent 5/21 catastrophists were (I admit I don't even remember what they were called or who that guy was who led them); next, the religious right offends, jumping in almost reflexively on particular issues, declaring "God says..." Well, maybe so. They may have read the scriptures rightly, and have understood God correctly on any or all of their issues. But I get nervous about that certainty. The fear is not in them. There is a stretch, imperceptible at times, that says because God forbids homosexuality among his people, therefore He just MUST want homosexuality to be against the law in a pluralistic society, or MUST be opposed to civil unions. Well, maybe so. But the NT actually says almost nothing about what we should be convincing the secular powers to do.

Which leads to the more quietly stated, yet I think ultimately more dangerous violations of the Second Commandment by the religious left: the absolute assurance that they are declaring God's will for society, yet seldom making it ultra-specific. They are flexible on the details of the legislation, and eager for new ideas. Yet they have no one among them who questions the basic approach. They declare with confidence, even offhandedly, that they know what Jesus intends.

Let me step back from that a bit. I have framed this in terms of the political issues, because as a recovering socialist, I am still drawn to the political questions which make the news. But those may actually be the peripheral issues to God. My reading of history would certainly suggest that Jesus originally, and then the greatest minds of the Church thereafter, were not much concerned with the political issues of their days - there is almost nothing from any of them about Christians trying to influence the secular governments, on any level, about policy toward gays, or the poor, or women. That is our prism.

Rant over. Release the hounds, as Tigerhawk says.

Narrative Voice

I have never taken well to discussion questions at the end of the chapters of any book I am reading. It always seems an affront - an intrusion and a condescension. I have heretofore thought that it was just the general banality and obviousness of the questions, some being merely bad, others being worse.

Today it occurred to me that the change in narrative voice may be what is so jarring. When the usual text is running along it is simply the author talking, perhaps to himself, perhaps to you, but either way, demanding no response unless the force of his ideas rises to the level of demand. Discussion questions change the voice. The author is now putting you on the spot to speak, and to answer. I find that insulting. Who granted that permission? Not I, certainly.

I noticed this today because Devin Brown's questions are quite good. Worth answering, even. Yet I resent them nearly as much as the insipid questions of maddening, spoon-fed Bible studies.

I put myself in the author's place. When one is writing or speaking, one has (or imagines) an audience. Interacting with that audience seems not only allowable, but polite. Seeking the opinions of the others present does not seem that different from explicating a point while considering what their understanding and previous experiences might be.

Yet as a reader, it is quite different, as if one went to a sermon or a public lecture and was called upon to answer and recite.

And yet, how to get people to address specific questions that the author thinks are key?

Have We Got a Choice? MWBOT7

First up: whatever we come to understand about salvation and election, we should be aware that the common rhetoric of evangelicals is surely wrong on this. Evangelical theologians may make the right distinctions, and evangelicals who ponder these things over time may come to get it, but the language used in revival/camp meeting/street evangelism falls into the heresy of Semi-Pelagianism, and even Pelagianism itself. They insist that your act of choosing is the determining factor in one's salvation. Choosing is, if you will, a "work" that one must perform to be saved.* As I noted, evangelicals who read the Bible seriously do note the times Jesus states that they did not choose but have been chosen, and enter the long, messy discussion about what, precisely, is occurring in this interaction between God and man.

I won't give my opinion on the matter because I no longer know what it is. And it's off-topic anyway.

I would like to set the stage for talking about choice in the NT but setting out two OT stories for your contemplation. In Exodus 7-11 God talks about Pharaoh's heart hardening. I wouldn't rest an entire doctrine on it, but there does seem to be a switch in the middle. Up until chapter 9, the scriptures say that Pharaoh hardened his heart. After that, they say that God hardened it. As God says in chapter 4 that He will harden it, the change may be unimportant. And second, the story of Naaman, in 2 Kings 5, healed by Elisha by washing in the Jordan. He almost doesn't do it, being insulted that Elisha did not come down to him. But his servants talk him into it by repackaging Elisha's words so that they don't carry any insult. So Naaman nearly missed healing because of being unwilling to listen.

Moving to the NT, particularly Matthew and John. The whole concept of Jesus preaching, teaching, and explaining seems incompatible with any idea that the people he was speaking to have no choice, or no ability to choose him. Yet there are many verses which suggest exactly that. The end of John 5, and in the positive, John 15. Matthew 17, perhaps.

There is in fact a range of description in the gospels about how much choice we have, and I think this is intentional. But the bulk of them seem to fall into two strongly-related possibilities: 1) The choice has already been made by the hearers, a product of many choices over the years which they cannot now undo, and 2) This is their last chance. All the signs and miracles, even the most primitive one of "He gave us food," which Jesus criticises as been even beneath "He did miracles" as a reason - all these are brought out in a final attempt to get their attention. The speaking in parables - a way to get behind people's defenses and perhaps see what applies to them but they deny - are a last-ditch strategy to slap them to their senses. We moderns think of parables, and miracles, and rescues as charming introductions to the idea of Jesus - and I see little harm in using them that way in the instruction of children and new believers. But Jesus seems to say the opposite: you have had many chances. The result of your choices is now being revealed. In the early chapters of Matthew He says "you must change, you must grow, you must turn." By Chapter 7 He is already saying "I sense some are rejecting me," which progresses to "Some have rejected me," and "There will be very few." By Chapter 21 He is telling the frightening parable of the vineyard.

Peter's affirmations in Matthew 16 are described as being not quite his, but from God the Father and from Satan. Yet Peter's choice is hidden in there somewhere. We think of Christianity as affirming the principle of human agency, of choice, and leading to ideas of freedom and the value of the individual, and of freedom. And so it does, but perhaps only in comparison to everything else, because the NT certainly provides no ringing endorsement of how free we are to make moral choices at any given moment.

*My favorite on this was the old Baptist preacher who explained God votes for you, the Devil votes against you, and you cast the deciding vote. It's discouraging to think we still have to refute Zoroastrianism, let alone Pelagianism, at this late date.

Adult Sunday School

I will likely be teaching again. Team-teaching this time, if we can work it out, which is something I'm less used to.

The topic is identifying and using one's gifts, so that new people can integrate into the life of the church, and others can look at their possibilities with fresh eyes. Exactly what we should be doing, really.

Here's my long-standing worry: I have a peculiar horror of Christians attributing the direct action of God to entirely natural talents. Oh, he's really an anointed speaker...she has a gift of discernment... and the like. I likely object because I saw too many cases where it was claimed, but clearly untrue. Discernment turned out to be nothing more than an awareness of current evangelical fads; anointing which was nothing more than cliches delivered with energy. I could blame it on having been in a 1970's Jesus Freak culture, but I think I had that discomfort right from the start. Natural abilities are perfectly good things, also given by God, and talents we are responsible for. Acts 6 seems a good model for assigning responsibilities. You will notice that the requirement is that they are generally "full of the Spirit and wisdom." No one is testing them whether they have "gifts of administration," nor whether they have experience in administration. Either/both seems fine.

I believe in directly bestowed spiritual gifts. I am now unsure whether such gifts are given permanently, though I was originally taught this was the case. But I accept that they can be given for an occasion, because I have seen them, and even displayed them in specific situations. I don't know that I can identify a spiritual gift that has been enduring in me. I have nominations, but not entire confidence.

I suppose my worry is that we will encourage chuckleheads to be even more chuckleheaded. But in our congregation, the opposite is more likely to be the problem. Suburban congregations are more in danger of being spiritually tentative than of suddenly deciding they should be "totally changed into fire," as the Desert Father Abba Joseph said. Instead of worrying about this, perhaps I should encourage it.

Nice Bit Of Reasoning

Joe Carter over at First Things made some defense of capital punishment from a Christian perspective, and one of the commenters made the very challenging statement

David B. Hart once told me and a room full of students that one of his chief definitions of an incompetent moral theologian is one who thinks he can justify capital punishment from the teachings of Paul or from the Gospel of Christ.

Well, them's fightin' words in their extremity, so I started thinking about the possible lines of Hart's thought, and what might be said in response.

Let me note here that I no longer have an opinion on capital punishment, or rather, only a coward's opinion. Because we are no longer a nomadic or impoverished village society, and can afford to spare a few people to keep dangerous criminals separate from the population, capital punishment is no longer the only practical choice. As with teachings on divorce, the Christian can understand that some things were allowed by the law as an accommodation in the OT, but might be superseded now. The increased danger of getting the wrong criminal as a society's population increases makes caution, and perhaps even forbearance, more reasonable. For these reasons I am uncertainly against capital punishment. I am aware of the arguments about deterrence, bringing repentance to a focus, and the possible psychological need humans have for justice. I don't reject these arguments, I just don't think about the issue much, and haven't for decades. Perhaps I should revisit it.

I was pleased then, when Hart wrote a followup essay at First Things. He anticipated my objections - or perhaps I should say that the objections I tried on covered most of the better ones - and answered them nicely. I don't know that he has entirely convinced me. For that, I will likely need some repetition and reflection. But my experience reading the essay was similar to reading many of Lewis's God In The Dock essays in my 20's: an initial disagreement, brought sharply into question by solid logic.

It's a nice bit of reasoning.

Social Reform

I consider it a great error to read the NT, and especially the words of Christ, as documents of social change.

That society has changed and does change (and I think for the better) as a byproduct of the spiritual change of allying oneself and devoting oneself to the Kingdom of God is an excellent thing. But to retroactively apply our ideas of social progress back on the gospel, as if making good governments were Jesus' main point - or even one of his main points - is a dangerous stretch. You can only get there by making large assumptions, generally unwarranted

For clarity, I am referring to all sets of political ideas that grew up between 1750-1850 that we feel the NT must, just must, be in favor of: socialism, nationalism, communism, free market, self-determination. They are good or bad on their own merits, and have their derivations from NT ideas or not. But they can only be derivations, never the command. The Church had no earthly power at the time of the NT, and the distinction between believers and authorities was clear. As the church moved into the authority business itself, the way back was sundered.

Testimony

Retriever has a post about her ambivalence listening to testimony at a churchwomens event she dragged herself to out of duty.

"Testimony Sunday" is a catchphrase in our family, based on an experience we had while church-shopping when Jonathan was almost 8 and Ben almost 4. We visited an independent Baptist congregation that friends attended, and happened to come on Testimony Sunday, a three-hour marathon. Interesting how various people see this variously. My wife liked it at first, though began to weary of it as we crossed the 100-minute mark. The friends we were honoring with the visit to their church were mortified: Sue Byrd swore she could see the steam escaping from my ears. Benjamin was initially fine - the Sunday School teachers had released the children, with some annoyance at having been left holding the bag, thank you very much, after 90 minutes, and while most of them were antsy, Ben had found a pile of books and was lying comfortably in the aisle, oblivious to those stepping over him. But at 3.9 years, he wasn't reading at a high level, and exhausted everything in his range and several outside it, in the next hour. At two-and-a-half hours, women were coming up to the microphone for second helpings of testimony giving, and I was growing homicidal.

Jonathan thought this was the coolest church service ever. Having only been to Lutheran services to that point, the idea of church where people would get up and cry and talk about their alcoholic parents and being beaten, going to school in awful clothes, having only bread and milk for food for a week - or alternatively, having husbands that went off for "affairs," - we had covered in our Ten Commandments teaching that "adultery" was stealing someone else's husband or wife, and I think he dimly grasped that something like this was up - and the police coming to your house or being teased at school... well my goodness, this is the most interesting church we have ever been in, Dad. Can we come back next week?

He didn't know from Baptists yet, that next week was going to be lots of scripture memorization and a few choruses of singing "Trust and Obey." Anyway, at Retriever's event

The speaker continued describing how at 15 she had become suicidal and been sent away to some teen center. And then I tuned partially out. Wondering "What are you leaving out?"

Yeah, exactly. Your terrible, neglectful Mom that you are kicking up and down the narthex in this testimony - what's her side of this?

It's not accidental that testimonies grew up as a major part of the church culture on the frontier and in the black church, where people were mobile and there wasn't going to be a lot of fact-checking. Christians of my age may remember what happened to Mike Warnke, who had the misfortune to straddle the old fundamentalist culture where people took you at face value and expected the same, versus the new evangelicalism where earnest young college students delighted in doing research about Christian topics.

WWJWMTD?

Joe Carter at First Things has an essay which includes the best summary of my discomfort with the WWJD trope I have read to date. The rest of the essay has much to recommend it as well. I like quoting Carter - partly because I often disagree with him, and it tells me I am liking the actual idea, not just repeating what pals of mine would say. (Though I suspect I would like him just fine in the flesh.) But also because he's not afraid to write bluntly and cleanly.

If he were walking the streets of America he would likely still be doing the same thing. But is this what we should be doing? Not necessarily. We are not Jesus; we are his disciples. Our mission is not his mission but the mission he assigns us. The question we should keep constantly before us is “What Would Jesus Want Me To Do?” But then WWJWMTD isn’t as easy to embroider on a bracelet or fit on a bumper sticker.

I have read longer expositions, but this captures it all, quite succinctly. Christ's mission and our mission are related, but not identical. We fall too easily into wondering "what would Jesus do with this poor wounded kitty trapped in a tree?" - into the mentality that says "This is a good thing. Jesus likes good things. Therefore Jesus would want me to do this." We can see it best, perhaps if we move the dial in the opposite direction that WWJD thinkers usually want to point us. What Would Jesus Say? Well, He might say "Depart from me you evildoers, I never knew you." Yet it still might be our part to say "As chair of the pastoral search committee, I would like to thank each of you for accepting this task." WWJD might not always be a soft answer.

I can make it a touch simpler, "What Would Jesus Have Me Do?" but either way I think the switch in focus is essential. I don't think it's a mere technicality, where youth pastors roll their eyes and say "you're right Madison, there were only eleven apostles at that point, according to some commentators who have a specific definition of apostle." It's the opposite. It is those who would refuse to make the distinction that are playing with technicalities, trying to make bricks with less straw. The two questions will often have the same answer. But sometimes, they will be profoundly opposed.

When you get into the habit of making this adjustment every time, of What Would Jesus Have Me Do instead of What Would Jesus Do, it gets easy to see through the word games that people play trying to pull a fast one on you. Who Would Jesus Bomb? What Would Jesus Cut? Once you know that it's a stupid question and must be reframed, it's not so hard to get to the real questions they are asking: What Would Jesus Say Is Too Much Injustice When You Have The Power To Stop It, or What Would Jesus Say The Government Should Provide?

Which is nowhere near as much fun to ask, because you don't get to kick people in the balls and feels self-righteous over that.

Three Parables

The current adult study at church is a NT survey by the Okenga Institute – distance learning from Gordon Conwell Seminary. I have liked these courses, not merely because they challenge my assumptions about Scripture and the faith, but because of how they do it. I find that many things I thought I knew have a pretty slender foundation. I have been told things over the years about when various NT books were written and why. It’s a pastiche of information, some of it dating back to confirmation class in 1967 with Rev. Willard Soper. Bill would have been in seminary thirty years before that, and his professors in turn … well, you get the idea. Much of the rest comes from writings or sermons by evangelicals pretty close to the fundamentalist side of things, or the introductions and notes for each book from study Bibles. Or whatever everyone else at various Bible studies had been exposed to.

It doesn’t mean that any of that information is wrong. I simply note that the supports for what we think we know are often weak.

In discussing the 25th chapter of Matthew, the instructor mentioned almost offhandedly that these three parables of judgment had been arranged thematically to connect with Matthew 24, in which Jesus speaks of his eventual return. For no reason I can identify, I have always treated the gospels, especially the Synoptics, as chronological. I figured these three parables showed up then because that was about when Jesus said them, at least according to Matthew’s memory. That they might be specifically chosen to be part of a package about judgment, though they had been uttered weeks or even years apart, had simply never occurred to me.

So let’s look at them as a package, rather than three individual parables. This is unlikely to make things simpler at first, because these three are among the most troubling of parables: The Wise and Foolish Maidens; The Servants and Talents; and The Sheep and the Goats. Read them over – at least glance rather than work entirely from recollection.

The first thing I’m noticing is that judgment is going to work out very, very badly for some people, and they are going to be surprised at this. This is Jesus talking, red-letter direct quotes, and he is quite clear that some are going to be condemned. He tells the foolish maidens “Truly, I don’t know you.” The goats he tells “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” The third servant he tells “And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Hyperbole to make a point? Maybe. But it sure sounds to me like he means it.

Second, I notice that the lack of generosity shown by the wise maidens to the foolish is in sharp contrast to the behavior applauded in the sheep of the third parable. I recognise that the Wise and Foolish Maidens isn’t about generosity, and parables are supposed to have but one focused meaning, but still – it’s quite a difference. Similarly, the Parable of the Talents seems to tell us to take enormous risks, and the Sheep and the Goats is at least compatible with that. But the first parable counsels the opposite: be cautious. Be overcautious. Again, not the main point of the story, but the different tone is unmistakable. Taken as a group, however, they are consistent. The wise maidens don’t help the foolish, the first two servants don’t help the third, the sheep don’t help the goats, and Jesus is down with that. You snooze, you lose.

Third, I’m not seeing a strong element of grace in these parables. It looks like works from here. I can make them fit with a little effort, but even as I do, I wonder if I am stretching and rationalising in order to fit a theory of my own rather than what the Scriptures are trying to tell me.

Fourth, there is the phrase in the Sheep and the Goats about the least of these, and Jesus’s brothers and sisters. We leap to the conclusion that the first of these means “poor people,” and the latter means “everyone,” but we are drawing heavily on modern misreadings of the parable of the Good Samaritan for those meanings. Consistent with the actual meaning, the text seems to be saying we should be generous to a new group of people – people who follow Jesus, not simply everyone. That’s rather troubling, to think that the order is to be generous to our new family, those other Christians. Not very American. Not very melting pot/multiculti/religious tolerance. Though that is consistent with some other things Scripture says. John 17, 1 John 4.

Relatedly*, notice that there is nothing about government or even collective action here. I grow weary of those Christians (left or right, depending on the issue), who seem to regard that as a mere technicality because they cannot conceive of work being done any other way. I go more to the opposite extreme, wondering if the sheep get any credit for of the good works done by sheep-influenced governments, or credit for keeping goats out of office. They might even incur blame for these things, as they could conceivably be regarded as tricking others into thinking they have done good works when they haven’t. Jesus never goes near those ideas – and given the sharp examples here of how he judges people who we might think got it almost right, we might fearful of presuming too much.

So I'm acknowledging that it's difficult and puzzling. What say you?

*That was an entirely futile paragraph put in for my own pleasure. It will have absolutely zero effect on those in both the social justice or Christian America movements. I despair of them ever being able to examine their assumptions in this area.

Purgatory

"Shall we, perhaps, in Purgatory, see our own faces and hear our own voices as they really were?"
CS Lewis Reflections on the Psalms

In my case, that would be brutal.