August 27, 2019

August 27, 2019 By

Pauline / Biblical Soteriology: Faith and Works, Grace and Merit / Hyperbole (“No one is good”)

This is an installment of my replies to a series of articles on the epistle to the Romans (written by St. Paul) by Dr. David Madison: an atheist who was a Methodist minister for nine years: with a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies from Boston University. His summary article is called, “Bad Bible Theology: Paul’s Letter to the Romans: Let me count the ways…that Paul got it wrong” (2-26-18). He devotes a paper to each chapter. Unless he repeats himself (a bad habit of his) or descends to sheer biblical skepticism (which I have less than no interest in), I will reply to all. 

The introduction is basically a catalogue of rank insults, where he calls St. Paul “a crank” and a “delusional cult fanatic” and “the prototype for Christian crazies” and “an obsessive-compulsive mediocre thinker and bad theologian” and “an embarrassment.” He adds: “how can anyone take this guy seriously?” That about covers the “content” there. Bears poop in the woods, brats throw fits, squirrels walk telephone lines, and the prevalent anti-theist brand of atheists insult Christians. Ho hum. What else is new?

Dr. Madison’s words will be in blue below.

*****

Dr. Madison calls his critique of Romans chapter 3, “Paul the Apostle and the Hogwarts Factor: For Paul, sin was a disease of the soul…he was sure he knew the cure” (2-24-17) 

For Paul, sin was a disease of the soul…he was sure he knew the cure 

Thanks to countless cartoons, we all know the iconic image of St. Peter perched at a desk, with his big ledger book, surrounded by fluffy clouds, just outside the Pearly Gates: You get to enter heaven if you’ve got enough good deeds to your credit. While most Christians—I suspect, I hope—know this scene is comic book stuff, they do go along with the theology behind it. In fact, they know this in their guts. That is, God lets you in if you’ve been a good person. If you’ve been bad or nasty, then your odds go down. Isn’t that just fair play, common sense? After all, heaven is called your Eternal Reward.

Well, all Christians agree that salvation is by God’s grace. They differ on the relationship between faith and works, but not as much as many think. Protestants, of course, teach faith alone, but they do not deny the importance and necessity of (non-salvific, non-justifying) good works. Both Luther and Calvin taught that these works would necessarily flow from a true, genuine, authentic faith. And of course the book of James famously stated:

James 2:14 (RSV) What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him?

James 2:17  So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. 

James 2:20-22 Do you want to be shown, you shallow man, that faith apart from works is barren? [21] Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he offered his son Isaac upon the altar? [22] You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by works, 

James 2:24 You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.

James 2:26 For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so faith apart from works is dead. 

Consistent with this biblical teaching, Scripture, in fifty passages about final judgment, mentions works every time, and never “faith alone.” And Jesus, asked by the rich young ruler how he could attain eternal life, asked if he kept the commandments (works), and then told him he had to sell all he had and give it to the poor (a good work). Faith was never mentioned.

No Matter How Good You Are

But the New Testament requirements for making the grade are not really that simple, thanks, in large part, to the theology of Paul. He didn’t see eye-to-eye with Peter anyway, so giving Peter a desk at the Pearly Gates wouldn’t have been his idea. That’s a story for another time, however.

Paul recoiled at the idea that anyone could deserve to be granted eternal life. There was no way to merit it. His Letter to the Romans stands in the way of this intuitive approach,i.e., adding up your good deeds to get into heaven. So now let’s open our Bibles to Romans, chapter 3. Atheists who want to make the case that the good book is not all that good should know how bad the Book of Romans is.

Yes; of course Paul teaches salvation by grace through faith. But he doesn’t exclude the necessity of works, or the notion of merit. In other words, he doesn’t teach Protestant soteriology, which Dr. Madison, as a good former Methodist, mistakenly thinks the Bible teaches. And he doesn’t disagree with Peter’s theology. When he rebuked him, it was for behavioral hypocrisy, not false doctrine. Here is what Paul taught:

Romans 2:5-13: “But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed. For he will render to every man according to his works: To those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are factious and do not obey the truth, but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury. There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. For God shows no partiality. All who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified.”

To summarize: The concept of “demerits” is present (verse 5). Differential rewards for works (by implication, differential “merit”) exist (verse 6). Eternal life is correlated with well-doing (verses 7, 10). Divine wrath is due to disobedience (verses 8, 9). Obedient doers of the law shall be justified (verse 13; a striking similarity to James 1:22-23; 2:24).

The theme of obeying the gospel, or the obedience of faith, is also common in St. Paul’s writings (for example, Rom. 1:5, 6:17, 10:16, 15:18-19, 16:25-26; 2 Thess. 1:8; cf. Acts 6:7; Heb. 11:8).

Judgment, according to Paul in Romans, is also according to works, just as Christ also explicitly taught. This is a theme that runs through St. Paul’s writings (for example, 1 Cor. 3:13, 4:5; 2 Cor. 5:10; Gal. 6:7-9; Col. 3:23-25).

Romans 1:17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.”

Romans 15:17-18 In Christ Jesus, then, I have reason to be proud of my work for God. For I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has wrought through me to win obedience from the Gentiles, by word and deed,

1 Corinthians 3:8-9: “Each shall receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building.”

1 Corinthians 15:10: “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God which is with me” (see also 1 Cor. 15:58; Gal. 5:6, 6:7-9).

Philippians 2:12-13: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”

St. Paul again regards faith and the human cooperation of works (labor) as two sides of the same coin, both proceeding from grace. Elsewhere, the apostle writes of the “works of faith” and related concepts (1 Thess. 1:3; 2 Thess. 1:11; Titus 1:15-16). Faith and works are not at all incompatible in all these Pauline passages. Salvation is described as a struggle, a process, a goal — not merely an abstract, past, instantaneous event.

In verse 9 he mentions “the power of sin”—it’s not that people just commit sins, rather sin is an indwelling force. To make the point, he culls a few of the gloomiest texts from the Old Testament to show how bad people are, functioning under this power. Paul can have his Hallmark moments, but these verses (vv.10-18) will never end up on sentimental Christian greeting cards. There isn’t enough space to quote them all here, but v. 12 and v. 13 are representative:

“All have turned aside, together they have become worthless; there is no one who shows kindness, there is not even one ” and “Their throats are opened graves; they use their tongues to deceive. The venom of vipers is under their lips.”

These passages are, of course, examples of typical Jewish hyperbole, or exaggeration: not to be taken absolutely literally. For example, Jesus said, “No one is good but God alone” (Lk 18:19; cf. Mt 19:17). Yet He also said: “The good person brings good things out of a good treasure.” (Mt 12:35; cf. 5:45; 7:17-20; 22:10). Is this a contradiction? No; Jesus is merely drawing a contrast between our righteousness and God’s, but He doesn’t deny that we can be “good” in a lesser sense. We observe the same dynamic in the Psalms:

Psalm 14:2-3 The LORD looks down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there are any that act wisely, that seek after God. [3] They have all gone astray, they are all alike corrupt; there is none that does good, [Hebrew, tob] no not one. (cf. 53:1-3; Paul cites this in Rom 3:10-12)

Yet in the immediately preceding Psalm, David proclaims, “I have trusted in thy steadfast love” (13:5), which certainly is “seeking” after God! And in the very next he refers to “He who walk blamelessly, and does what is right” (15:2). Even two verses later (14:5) he writes that “God is with the generation of the righteous.” So obviously his lament in 14:2-3 is an indignant hyperbole and not intended as a literal utterance.

Such remarks are common to Hebrew poetic idiom. The anonymous psalmist in 112:5-6 refers to the “righteous” (Heb. tob), as does the book of Proverbs repeatedly: using the words “righteous” or “good” (11:23; 12:2; 13:22; 14:14, 19), using the same word, tob, which appears in Psalm 14:2-3. References to righteous men are innumerable (e.g., Job 17:9; 22:19; Ps 5:12; 32:11; 34:15; 37:16, 32; Mt 9:13; 13:17; 25:37, 46; Rom 5:19; Heb 11:4; Jas 5:16; 1 Pet 3:12; 4:18, etc.).

St. Paul is not a “doom and gloom” / morose sort of guy at all (let alone a fanatic nut: as Dr. Madison futilely tries to paint him). One has to continue reading in Romans. He builds his case of God’s plan of salvation, explaining the relationship between the old and new covenants, and the primacy of faith and grace in both. The climax of this portion of his epistle is the magnificent, triumphant, bright and sunny chapter 8. In the meantime, it would be good for folks to understand how biblical hyperbole works. I’ve provided a quick summary aid above.

[passing over the generic, stock, anti-supernaturalist arguments (or rather, bald assertions) — inaccurately caricatured as “magic” and “hocus-pocus” –, as the goal of this series of counter-replies is to exegete Paul and Romans, as opposed to being an apologia for the supernatural and miracles, which is a completely separate and complex discussion.]

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Photo credit: The Apostle Paul (c. 1657), by Rembrandt (1606-1669); possibly also by his workshop [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

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August 26, 2019

August 26, 2019 By

God’s Fair Judgment / Soteriology / God Knowing Our Thoughts / Chosen People

This is an installment of my replies to a series of articles on the epistle to the Romans (written by St. Paul) by Dr. David Madison: an atheist who was a Methodist minister for nine years: with a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies from Boston University. His summary article is called, “Bad Bible Theology: Paul’s Letter to the Romans: Let me count the ways…that Paul got it wrong” (2-26-18). He devotes a paper to each chapter. Unless he repeats himself (a bad habit of his) or descends to sheer biblical skepticism (which I have less than no interest in), I will reply to all. 

The introduction is basically a catalogue of rank insults, where he calls St. Paul “a crank” and a “delusional cult fanatic” and “the prototype for Christian crazies” and “an obsessive-compulsive mediocre thinker and bad theologian” and “an embarrassment.” He adds: “how can anyone take this guy seriously?” That about covers the “content” there. Bears poop in the woods, brats throw fits, squirrels walk telephone lines, and the prevalent anti-theist brand of atheists insult Christians. Ho hum. What else is new?

Dr. Madison’s words will be in blue below.

*****

Dr. Madison calls his critique of Romans chapter 2, “Is the Church really filled with hypocrites? No.: But the apostle Paul noticed a few… “ (2-10-17).

Paul goes on this rant against hypocrites although he had never visited the congregation in Rome. Near the end of the letter, in chapter 16, he says “hi” to quite a few people whom he knows there, so maybe he had reports of unsavory conduct. In 1:11 he had written, “I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you.” Hence his strong words against hypocrisy; maybe he’s giving advance warning?

We can give him credit for impatience with hypocrisy, but then nasty Paul resumes the rant. God will run out of patience: “…for those who are self-seeking and who obey not the truth but wickedness, there will be wrath and fury. There will be anguish and distress for everyone who does evil” (vv.8-9). Wrath, fury, anguish, distress. Paul’s message here reminds us of John the Baptist’s severe words for the religious leaders who came out to hear him preach: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee the wrath to come? …even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” (Matthew 3:7-10) Yes, there are Hallmark moments in Paul’s letters, but there is uncompressing severity as well. Don’t get carried away bragging about a ‘god of love’ in the New Testament.

I dealt with this false idea that God’s judgment or reference to it by His creatures (like Paul) is somehow supposedly immediately an evil, wicked thing, in the previous installment. No need to go over old ground . . . But we see that Dr. Madison will often be repeating himself once again: a hallmark of his attack against the Gospel of Mark also.

Can It Be? A Hint at Secular Ethics?

Again, to his credit, Paul saw that being in God’s favor didn’t depend on being Jewish, i.e., in the company of those who had heard God’s law for centuries. “For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but the doers of the law who will be justified” (v. 13). No matter who you are, you can qualify, and I find vv. 14-15 startling; did Paul really realize what he was saying: “When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness…” Do instinctively…written on their hearts…their own conscience bears witness? Atheists who argue that we don’t need religion to behave morally embrace these very concepts.

I wondered aloud in my previous reply how Dr. Madison would deal with this. I thought he might deny that Paul wrote it. Instead, he gives him credit, and calls this “secular ethics.” It may be part of secular ethics (although those don’t usually reference God), but it is also Christian ethics and always has been. I give Dr. Madison credit as well, for recognizing and praising this portion that he would agree with. Not bad: to be written by “a crank” and a “the prototype for Christian crazies” huh? 

I noted this passage way back in 2003, in one of my more “conciliatory” papers about atheism.

But Paul is caught in a major contradiction here, because he really doesn’t mean what he says in verse 10, i.e., that glory, honor and peace are for everyone who does good. The heart of Pauline theology, so earnestly embraced by Luther, was justification by faith, as stated so bluntly by Paul in Romans 10:9: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” No amount of ‘doing good’ will do the trick.

There is no contradiction. This is simply Dr. Madison the former Methodist, interpreting Paul the way Protestants do. Paul teaches precisely what Catholics hold, regarding justification and salvation, as I have shown in many papers:

St. Paul on Justification, Sanctification, & Salvation [1996]

Romans 2-4 & “Works of the Law”: Patristic Interpretation [2-16-01]

St. Paul on Grace, Faith, & Works (50 Passages) [8-6-08]

Justification: Not by Faith Alone, & Ongoing (Romans 4, James 2, and Abraham’s Multiple Justifications) [10-15-11]

St. Paul’s Use of the Term “Gift” & Infused Justification [2013]

“Catholic Justification” in James & Romans [11-18-15]

Philippians 2:12 & “Work[ing] Out” One’s Salvation [1-26-16]

‘Doers of the Law’ Are Justified, Says St. Paul [National Catholic Register, 5-22-19]

The Invasion-of-Privacy God

No surprise: personal monotheism is stated here with a vengeance. Paul is confident that, on the Day of Judgment, “…God, through Jesus Christ, will judge the secret thoughts of all.” (v. 16) God will judge your thoughts! The theologians who came up with this idea discovered the formula for terrorizing people.

“The theologians” didn’t come up with anything. This was part of God’s revelation. It’s called omniscience: i.e., God knows everything. Thus, this would include human thoughts. It was taught in the Old Testament long before Paul was born:

1 Chronicles 28:9 (RSV) …the LORD searches all hearts, and understands every plan and thought.… (cf. 1 Ki 8:39; 2 Chr 6:30; Ps 44:21; Is 66:18; Ezek 11:5; Mt 6:8; Lk 16:15; Acts 1:24; Rom 8:27; Heb 4:13)

Psalm 147:5 Great is our LORD, and abundant in power;  his understanding is beyond measure. (cf. Job 36:4; 37:16; Is 40:28; 46:10; 48:3; Acts 15:18)

I suppose it would be a source of terror for unrepentant sinners on judgment day. But of course, that’s not God‘s fault. They chose to reject Him.

Jesus was in the same camp (at least as depicted by those who created the fictional Galilean peasant); he claimed that the hairs of our head are numbered—and the deity knows as well the thought-crimes inside our skulls: lust is the equivalent of adultery.

Yes He was. This hits upon a major component of atheism, or the subjective reasons for atheism. The atheist (or any unrepentant, active sinner) doesn’t like the idea of God watching over them and knowing what they are doing. That goes against the desire for human autonomy and freedom that we all have or tend to have. And so the easiest way to get rid of this “cosmic supervision” is to deny that God exists.

I once had a parishioner who was worried that people were watching her through the TV. Crazy, yes, but just drop the TV, and that’s what personal monotheism is: God is always watching you. Who thinks it’s cool to have cameras—installed by the state, our boss, landlord or a god—spying on us in our bedrooms and bathrooms—indeed, everywhere? And with the capacity for getting inside our heads. This evil theology should be off-putting to decent people.

See what I mean? Dr. Madison demonstrates for one and all precisely what I just stated (and I am answering as I read: as is my usual custom and modus operandi). I would say that “decent” Christians aren’t offended by this. It’s simply part of Who God is: omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent. This knowledge (of God and our awareness of it) should cause us to reform our bad behavior. But if a person doesn’t want to do that, then he or she would be hostile to all these related ideas: hence also to God; and so they reject Him and deny that He exists.

As for the folks who have lost their faith and mourn its passing, Christopher Hitchens asked why—why would you want it back? Personal monotheism is totalitarianism: you can’t even have ‘secret thoughts’ without God knowing. Heaven, Hitchens said, is a celestial North Korea. He couldn’t imagine anyone yearning for it.

Right. I submit that he can’t imagine anyone who wants to hold on to sinful behavior and thoughts, contrary to God’s will, liking the idea that God knows all their thoughts.

Paul and Jesus should rub people the wrong way because they claimed to be on a first name basis with the Invasion-of-Privacy god. Beware all who position themselves this way—and posture accordingly. They rate themselves as supremely qualified to tell the rest of us what to do. As we go through the Letter to the Romans we will see that Paul specializes in just that.

God’s messengers tell us what God revealed about Himself. Why would anyone expect otherwise (on the assumption that God exists)? So, don’t blame them; blame the God Who motivates and sends them.

A Positive Note at the End 

Paul had little patience with the notion of Chosen People. So being circumcised was irrelevant; this outward mark on the flesh counted for nothing:

Well, it wasn’t nothing when Paul had Timothy (half Jewish and half Gentile) circumcised (Acts 16:1-3).

“Rather, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart—it is spiritual and not literal. Such a person receives praise not from others but from God” (v.29).

A nice sentiment indeed . . . 

All this shows is that Paul agreed that all the rituals of the Mosaic Law were not binding on Gentiles. But it doesn’t follow that the Jews were not the chosen people, or that Paul denied that they were. Romans 11 puts the lie to the latter:

Romans 11:1-2 I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. [2] God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. . . . 

Romans 11:17-18 But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the richness of the olive tree, [18] do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you. 

Romans 11:26-29 and so all Israel will be saved; as it is written, “The Deliverer will come from Zion, he will banish ungodliness from Jacob”; [27] “and this will be my covenant with them when I take away their sins.” [28] As regards the gospel they are enemies of God, for your sake; but as regards election they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. [29] For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.

See also Romans 3:

Romans 3:1-4 Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? [2] Much in every way. To begin with, the Jews are entrusted with the oracles of God. [3] What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? [4] By no means! Let God be true though every man be false, as it is written, “That thou mayest be justified in thy words, and prevail when thou art judged.”

Romans 3:31 Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law. 

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Photo credit: Saint Paul Writing His Epistles (c. 1620), attributed to Valentin de Boulogne (1591-1632) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

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August 22, 2019

August 22, 2019 By

Dr. David Madison is an atheist who was a Methodist minister for nine years: with a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He believes we are not at all sure whether Jesus in fact said anything recorded in the Gospels. The atheist always has a convenient “out” (when refuted in argument about some biblical text) that Jesus never said it anyway and that the text in question was simply made up and added later by unscrupulous and “cultish” Christian propagandists.

I always refuse to play this silly and ultimately intellectually dishonest game, because there is no way to “win” with such a stacked, subjective deck. I start with the assumption (based on many historical evidences) that the manuscripts we have are quite sufficient for us to know what is in the Bible (believe it or not). 

Dr. Madison himself — in his anti-Jesus project noted above, granted my outlook, strictly in terms of practical “x vs. y” debate purposes: “For the sake of argument, I’m willing to say, okay, Jesus was real and, yes, we have gospels that tell the story.” And in the combox: “So, we can go along with their insistence that he did exist. We’ll play on their field, i.e., the gospels.” Excellent! Otherwise, there would be no possible discussion at all.

His words below will be in blue.

*****

He wrote an article called, ” ‘This Howling Conflict between Mark and John’: Yet so many Christians don’t seem to have a clue” (10-26-18).

Even if there wasn’t a Beloved Disciple, there is a Beloved Gospel—and that would be John, in which Jesus has a superhuman commanding presence. Well, as seen through the eyes of adoring faith. For those who aren’t so adoring, that ‘commanding presence’ looks more like bragging, insufferable egregious egotism. Which is what can happen—as in John’s case—when the author isn’t even trying to depict a real human. . . . Mark was schooled in Greek tragedy . . . and constructed his Jesus story accordingly, i.e., he made Jesus a real human who agonized over his fate; Mark assumed that even the Son of God could do that.

But John would have none of it; a human Jesus was out of the question. As an exercise to shock Christians out of faith-complacency, I suggest that they read Mark and John back-to-back. It should jump out at them, . . . If they aren’t puzzled—if they aren’t alarmed—then they’re not paying attention. Someone is lying about their Jesus. . . . 

John . . . doesn’t even mention—as do Matthew, Mark, and Luke—that Jesus was distraught [during the time when His Passion was imminent], . . . 

Really? Not human, and not distraught?:

John 11:32-33, 38 (RSV) Then Mary, when she came where Jesus was and saw him, fell at his feet, saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” [33] When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled; . . . [38] Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb; . . . 

John 12:27 “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? `Father, save me from this hour’? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour.”

John 13:21 When Jesus had thus spoken, he was troubled in spirit, and testified, “Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.”

Dr. Madison cites Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr.:

• “The Synoptic story of Gethsemane raised two critical questions that are nearly impossible to answer. First, if Jesus was alone when he prayed, then how can anyone know exactly what he said? Second, if Jesus was on such intimate terms with God, then how can their wills be so dramatically out of sync at the very end of the story? John’s evangel cuts the complicated Gordian knot of such questions with a very simple answer: Jesus didn’t pray that way.” (p. 74)

• “If the Synoptic story of Gethsemane is a story about praying in the face of temptation prior to betrayal, then John’s is no longer the same story at all.” (p. 74) . . . 

• “…John had to erase the dramatic episode that Mark located in Gethsemane—a powerful story about prayer and temptation, about the sheer humanity of Jesus’s doubts and the awful depth of his suffering. Mark’s tragedy hinges on the fact that we are witnesses to the collision between two wills, a tragic struggle for self-definition in which we are invited to participate and to recognize as our own. John simply cannot tell a story like that because his theology cannot allow for a collision of wills between Father and Son or for a divided picture of Jesus.” (p. 76) Remember these key words: his theology cannot allow. . . . 

Ruprecht makes it starkly clear that Mark and John thought very differently about Jesus. . . . 

• “… we modern people must work very carefully, with more finally developed historical habits, to be able to feel the shock that John’s evangel might have created in an ancient Christian audience that knew and admired Mark’s version. The power of Marks performance has something to do with Jesus’s passionate humanity, something to do with compassion in the face of unimaginable suffering, and it has everything to do with tragedy. John turned all this upside down by writing an anti-tragic evangel in which Jesus’s humanity is muted and all compassion, much like the wavering disciples, has fled.” (p. 101) . . . 

“Gethsemane admits a level not just of humanity, but of actual doubt, and that Luther finds completely unacceptable in the Savior of humankind.” (p. 174) . . . 

Unbeknown to most of the folks in the pews, the New Testament is a minefield of conflicting, contradictory theologies—as well as portraits of Jesus that cannot be reconciled. Oblivious to all this, they show up to worship. It’s comforting to hear nice verses read from the Good Book on Sunday morning. So there was a howling conflict between Mark and John? That would be too much information.

There is no supposed “collision of wills between Father and Son” in the Synoptic Gospels. Jesus made it clear (as recorded in those three Gospels) that His will was fully in line with the Father’s will that He suffer and die for the sake of all men. There is no hint that He disagrees with that or that he “doubts”; only that He is agonized over what is to come (as any human being would be):

Matthew 26:36-42 Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsem’ane, and he said to his disciples, “Sit here, while I go yonder and pray.” [37] And taking with him Peter and the two sons of Zeb’edee, he began to be sorrowful and troubled. [38] Then he said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch with me.” [39] And going a little farther he fell on his face and prayed, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.” [40] And he came to the disciples and found them sleeping; and he said to Peter, “So, could you not watch with me one hour? [41] Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” [42] Again, for the second time, he went away and prayed, “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, thy will be done.”

Mark 14:32-36 And they went to a place which was called Gethsem’ane; and he said to his disciples, “Sit here, while I pray.” [33] And he took with him Peter and James and John, and began to be greatly distressed and troubled. [34] And he said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch.” [35] And going a little farther, he fell on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. [36] And he said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible to thee; remove this cup from me; yet not what I will, but what thou wilt.” 

Luke 22:39-42 And he came out, and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives [where Gethsem’ane is located]; and the disciples followed him. [40] And when he came to the place he said to them, “Pray that you may not enter into temptation.” [41] And he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, and knelt down and prayed, [42] “Father, if thou art willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” 

Likewise, the unity of the wills of Jesus and God the Father was also expressed by Jesus in John’s Gospel: “And he who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what is pleasing to him” (Jn 8:29); “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? `Father, save me from this hour’? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour” (Jn 12:27); “I lay down my life, that I may take it again. [18] No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again; this charge I have received from my Father” (Jn 10:17-18) 

Moreover, Jesus shows no inclination whatsoever to not willingly suffer and die for the purpose of redemption, and indeed, rather casually predicted what was to come, over and over: as seen in all four Gospels:

Matthew 16:21 From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.

Matthew 17:22-23 As they were gathering in Galilee, Jesus said to them, “The Son of man is to be delivered into the hands of men, [23] and they will kill him, and he will be raised on the third day.” And they were greatly distressed. 

Matthew 20:17-19 And as Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, he took the twelve disciples aside, and on the way he said to them, [18] “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem; and the Son of man will be delivered to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death, [19] and deliver him to the Gentiles to be mocked and scourged and crucified, and he will be raised on the third day.” 

Matthew 26:1-2 When Jesus had finished all these sayings, he said to his disciples, [2] “You know that after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of man will be delivered up to be crucified.” 

Matthew 26:31-32 Then Jesus said to them, “You will all fall away because of me this night; for it is written, `I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.’ [32] But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.” 

Mark 8:31 And he began to teach them that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.

Mark 9:31 for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of man will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him; and when he is killed, after three days he will rise.” 

Mark 10:32-34 And they were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them; and they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid. And taking the twelve again, he began to tell them what was to happen to him, [33] saying, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem; and the Son of man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death, and deliver him to the Gentiles; [34] and they will mock him, and spit upon him, and scourge him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise.” 

Mark 12:1-11 And he began to speak to them in parables. “A man planted a vineyard, and set a hedge around it, and dug a pit for the wine press, and built a tower, and let it out to tenants, and went into another country. [2] When the time came, he sent a servant to the tenants, to get from them some of the fruit of the vineyard. [3] And they took him and beat him, and sent him away empty-handed. [4] Again he sent to them another servant, and they wounded him in the head, and treated him shamefully. [5] And he sent another, and him they killed; and so with many others, some they beat and some they killed. [6] He had still one other, a beloved son; finally he sent him to them, saying, `They will respect my son.’ [7] But those tenants said to one another, `This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ [8] And they took him and killed him, and cast him out of the vineyard. [9] What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants, and give the vineyard to others. [10] Have you not read this scripture: `The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner; [11] this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?”

Luke 9:22 . . . “The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” 

Luke 9:44 “Let these words sink into your ears; for the Son of man is to be delivered into the hands of men.” 

Luke 18:31-33 And taking the twelve, he said to them, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written of the Son of man by the prophets will be accomplished. [32] For he will be delivered to the Gentiles, and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon; [33] they will scourge him and kill him, and on the third day he will rise.” 

John 2:19-21 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” [20] The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” [21] But he spoke of the temple of his body. 

John 3:14 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, 

John 8:28 So Jesus said, “When you have lifted up the Son of man, then you will know that I am he, . . . 

John 10:15, 17-18 . . . I lay down my life for the sheep. . . . [17] For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again. [18] No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again; this charge I have received from my Father.” 

John 12:23-24 And Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of man to be glorified. [24] Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. 

John 12:31-33 “Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out; [32] and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.” [33] He said this to show by what death he was to die. 

John 13:1 Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. (cf. 14:18-19, 27-29)

John 16:5 But now I am going to him who sent me; . . . (cf. 16:7, 16-22, 28; 17:13)

There is no imagined “difference” or “contradiction” in these respects (or any other) between Mark and John, or Matthew and Luke, and John. It’s simply one of many “Madison myths.”

***

Photo credit: Christ in Gethsemane (1886), by Heinrich Hofmann (1824-1911) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

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August 13, 2019

August 13, 2019 By

Gospels as “Con Job”? / Parables & Repentance / Old Testament Sacrifices & Jesus / “Weird” Mark 16 / Why Jesus Was Killed

This is an installment of my replies to a series of articles on Mark by Dr. David Madison: an atheist who was a Methodist minister for nine years: with a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies from Boston University. His summary article is called, “Not-Your-Pastor’s Tour of Mark’s Gospel: The falsification of Christianity made easy” (Debunking Christianity, 7-17-19). His words will be in blue below.

Dr. Madison has utterly ignored my twelve refutations of his “dirty dozen” podcasts against Jesus, and I fully expect that stony silence to continue. If he wants to be repeatedly critiqued and make no response, that’s his choice (which would challenge Bob Seidensticker as the most intellectually cowardly atheist I know). I will continue on, whatever he decides to do (no skin off my back).

Dr. Madison believes we are not at all sure whether Jesus in fact said anything recorded in the Gospels. The atheist always has a convenient “out” (when refuted in argument about some biblical text) that Jesus never said it anyway and that the text in question was simply made up and added later by unscrupulous and “cultish” Christian propagandists.

I always refuse to play this silly and ultimately intellectually dishonest game, because there is no way to “win” with such a stacked, subjective deck. I start with the assumption (based on many historical evidences) that the manuscripts we have are quite sufficient for us to know what is in the Bible (believe it or not). 

Dr. Madison himself — in his anti-Jesus project noted above, granted my outlook, strictly in terms of practical “x vs. y” debate purposes: “For the sake of argument, I’m willing to say, okay, Jesus was real and, yes, we have gospels that tell the story.” And in the combox: “So, we can go along with their insistence that he did exist. We’ll play on their field, i.e., the gospels.” Excellent! Otherwise, there would be no possible discussion at all.

*****

Dr. Madison called his Introduction to Mark, “Getting the Gospels Off on the Wrong Foot: The strange Jesus in Mark’s story” (1-19-18).

The Christian church has managed to pull off one of the biggest con jobs in history.

One readily perceives that Dr. Madison is perhaps not the most objective and fair observer of the Christianity that he forsook, doesn’t one? Sun Tzu, a contemporary of the prophet Jeremiah, wrote in The Art of War in the 6th century BC: “If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

The laity trusted their priests that Christ the Redeemer was all that mattered; hence the down-and-dirty details in the gospels went unnoticed. 

Ignorance is always at a premium in any large social / religious [or any type of] group — no argument there. Take a look at, for example, any combox at the Debunking Christianity site where Dr. Madison posts, for ample confirmation. But this is silly as a sweeping generalization, since all Catholics, at least, have heard a great deal of Bible reading from the pulpit (especially the Gospels) at Mass every week. We’re not as stupid and clueless as Dr. Madison would like his readers to believe. And he’s not nearly as “smart”: as I continue to repeatedly demonstrate, if I do say so: insofar as he thinks he has made mincemeat of the Bible. 

If you accept the Jesus of Mark’s gospel, you are well on the way to full-throttle crazy religion.

Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we? Dr. Madison, I submit, exhibits far more fanaticism and distemper in his anti-theist atheism than the average Christian I have known (and I’ve known a million of them these past 42 years).

The other gospel writers, in their spinning of Jesus fiction, carried on the tradition of invention, . . . 

As I stated in the generic introduction above, I will not entertain arbitrary and foolish silliness of this sort (just to make that crystal clear). I’m here to defend the text as we have it and to show that Dr. Madison’s assertions are logically fallacious or factually incorrect.

Gospel experts, of the apologetic Christian variety, won’t hear any of this. . . . they devote their careers to smoothing out rough edges and erasing Jesus blemishes.

And Dr. Madison devotes his Bible-bashing “career” (or prevalent pastime?) to running from every critique of his arguments; or at least that’s how it’s always been with me, thus far, and I am a professional Christian / Catholic apologist, after all. I make arguments that I find plausible and defensible (or else I wouldn’t bother making them), and I can hardly change my mind if there is no counter-reply at all.

In the many instances in my life where I have undergone a major change of mind, it was always through substantive but cordial interaction with critics of a different view. Thinkers engage in back-and-forth dialogue. But demagogues and propagandists split at the first whiff of opposition to their infallible ideas.

(1) Jesus was an exorcist. 

This is most vividly illustrated by the story in Mark 5:1-13, in which Jesus transfers demons from a severely mentally ill man into a herd of pigs. See what I mean by full-throttle crazy? Mark depicts Jesus talking to, bargaining with, the demons. Is this really the worldview that Christians these days want to adopt? Well, maybe so, since many Christians believe in ghosts, angels and dead saints who hear prayers—and demons, apparently.

Yes, this is Christianity. We believe in all those things, including Satan. But of course, this would lead into a huge exterior discussion on Christian ontology / metaphysics and the existence of the supernatural. It’s simply too complex to get into in the middle of textual discussions. Dr. Madison obviously has a virulently anti-supernatural view, and he is on the level of thinking anyone who believes in these things as nuts. There is no discussion with that, and I can’t follow every rabbit trail that he brings up, anyway, or I wouldn’t have enough time in my entire life to reply to his hostile contentions.

(2) Jesus tried to fool people by teaching in parables. 

Of course, this doesn’t make sense. What was Mark thinking? But here it is, Mark 4:10-12, which includes a quotation from Isaiah 6:9-10:

“When he was alone, those who were around him along with the twelve asked him about the parables. And he said to them, ‘To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.’”

I thoroughly disposed of this objection in my paper, “Madison vs. Jesus #7: God Prohibits Some Folks’ Repentance?”

It’s odd because—ooops—in John’s gospel, Jesus doesn’t teach in parables.

That’s correct. But Jesus does talk (as recorded in the Gospel of John) in many metaphorical or proverbial (non-literal) ways that bear resemblance to the synoptic parables. For example:

John 2:19-21 (RSV) Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” [20] The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” [21] But he spoke of the temple of his body.

John 3:8 The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit.

John 4:13-14 Jesus said to her, “Every one who drinks of this water will thirst again, [14] but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

John 6:35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.

John 10:11 I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. (see also 10:1-10, 12-18, including Jesus calling Himself “the door” three times)

John 11:12-14 But if any one walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him.” [11] Thus he spoke, and then he said to them, “Our friend Laz’arus has fallen asleep, but I go to awake him out of sleep.” [12] The disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will recover.” [13] Now Jesus had spoken of his death, but they thought that he meant taking rest in sleep. [14] Then Jesus told them plainly, “Laz’arus is dead;”

(3) Jesus believed in human sacrifice to get right with God.

This is a vestige of animal sacrifice superstition, and is a fine specimen of magical thinking: How can killing an animal cancel human sin? Why would a good god set up such a scheme?

I guess in the same way that He set up the animal kingdom, including meat-eating, which also required the killing of animals (which is also a feature of evolution and nature: construed as utterly self-governed [i.e., materialistic evolution], without any supervision by God). Or is Dr. Madison a vegetarian? Something tells me that he is not.

It’s not that animal blood has intrinsic magical or curative properties. It’s simply the symbolism that God ordained: to show human beings the seriousness of sin. The writer of Hebrews expressly denied that the old covenant system of animal sacrifice actually took away sins:

Hebrews 10:1-4, 11 For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices which are continually offered year after year, make perfect those who draw near. [2] Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered? If the worshipers had once been cleansed, they would no longer have any consciousness of sin. [3] But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sin year after year. [4] For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins. . . . [11] And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. 

Even in the Old Testament, there are many indications that the sacrificial system was to be abolished, and was never the most important thing: righteousness and obedience to God’s commands were that:

Proverbs 15:8 The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the LORD, but the prayer of the upright is his delight.

Amos 5:12, 14, 21-24 For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins — you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and turn aside the needy in the gate. . . . [14] Seek good, and not evil, that you may live; and so the LORD, the God of hosts, will be with you, as you have said . . . [21] I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. [22] Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, I will not accept them, and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts I will not look upon. [23] Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. [24] But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Jesus reflected these thoughts in the New Testament:

Matthew 9:13 “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice’. . . .” (cf. 12:7)

He was citing the Hebrew Bible:

Hosea 6:6 For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings.

In other words, if and when the Israelites were rebellious against God and His laws and wicked, their sacrifices (far from being “magic”) meant absolutely nothing to God, and accomplished nothing. This is a constant motif in the Old Testament. The law, including these animal sacrifices, was never intended from the beginning to save men. Grace and faith in God; Jesus’ redemption accomplished that. Hence, Paul writes:

Galatians 2:16  yet who know that a man is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ, and not by works of the law, because by works of the law shall no one be justified.

Galatians 3:10-12, 19, 21-26 For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, “Cursed be every one who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law, and do them.” [11] Now it is evident that no man is justified before God by the law; for “He who through faith is righteous shall live”; [12] but the law does not rest on faith, for “He who does them shall live by them.” . . . [19] Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, . . . [21] Is the law then against the promises of God? Certainly not; for if a law had been given which could make alive, then righteousness would indeed be by the law. [22] But the scripture consigned all things to sin, that what was promised to faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. [23] Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed. [24] So that the law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. [25] But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; [26] for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.

Mark would have us believe that a Galilean peasant got it into his head that he was selected for this mission (10:45): “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” 

He didn’t get “it into his head”: He always knew this, being God and the Second Person of the Holy Trinity from all eternity. Hence, He expressed in many ways, in the Gospels, that He was God.

How can Christians not notice that a human sacrifice to placate God is bad theology?

It’s not a sacrifice as classically understood: like the Aztecs taking some poor child up one of their pyramids to have his or her heart cut out while they were alive, or the heathen tribes who lived around the ancient Israelites, who sacrificed their babies to Moloch (throwing them into a fire). Those things are barbaric.

But this was an act by God (Jesus) to voluntarily suffer and die on our behalf (Mt 20:28; 26:53; Mk 10:45; Lk 19:10; Jn 6:51; 10:10-18; 19:10-11; Gal 2:20; Eph 5:1-2; Phil 2:5-8; 1 Tim 2:5-6; Titus 2:13-14), just as we (to use an imperfect analogy) honor heroes who sacrificed themselves so that others can live (for example, the two young men recently who lost their lives in two of the horrible shooting massacres). This is what Memorial Day is about.

(4) Jesus preached that the Kingdom of God was immanent—and he was wrong. 

The present world order was about to be wiped out, indeed “before this generation passes away”—and it would not be pretty. There would be massive human suffering to mark the initiation of the Kingdom of God. Please, Christians, read Mark 13 and seriously ponder how this fits in with your view of what would Jesus do. Calamities are a sign that God’s get-even theology will be realized; the tone of Mark 13 is urgency, with the closing words “keep watch.” Of course, no Kingdom arrived. Mark 13 is an example of religion gone off rails and closely matches the demented ramblings of the apostle Paul. John Loftus is right in describing Jesus as a failed apocalyptic prophet.

I already demolished this in my earlier reply: “Dr. David Madison vs. Jesus #3: Nature & Time of 2nd Coming.”

(5) Jesus the great moral teacher fails to show up.

[. . .]

Moreover, there are comments in this gospel for which Jesus deserves demerits; we expect far better from a great moral teacher. His counsel on divorce at 10:9, for example, is inexplicable and irresponsible. Yes, we can understand that God created male and female—and expects a man to leave his parents to get married. But that does not mean that God has been matchmaker for every couple that ever was: “Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” In fact, this is a mindless non sequitur—and has caused so much misery.

I dealt with this in my paper, Madison vs. Jesus #4: Jesus Causes a Bad Marriage?

Jesus gets a very poor grade as well for this bit of cult fanaticism, 10:29-30: “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.” You will be rewarded for leaving your family? You’ll get a new set of relatives and new houses? How can Christians be comfortable with this?

This is covered in my paper, Madison vs. Jesus #5: Cultlike Forsaking of Family?

(6) [What] did Jesus mean with this list?

What more could you want? It’s the resurrected Jesus who explains that “those who believe” will be able to do these five things (Mark 16:16-18):

1. Cast out demons (yes, we’re back to demons)
2. Speak in new tongues
3. Pick up snakes
4. Drink any deadly thing
5. Lay hands on people to heal them

Those who want to distance themselves from this text can point out that these verses were not in the original gospel: Mark 16:9-20 is a later addition. No one knows where this part of chapter 16 came from. But those want to dismiss these verses are admitting that fake news about Jesus made it into the New Testament. Alas, however, we don’t know where any of Mark’s gospel came from; maybe it’s all fake news. This list may not be from the mouth of Jesus, but whoever thought it up certainly had a goofy take on Christianity.

But, hey, here’s the challenge for apologists who insist that the gospels are based on eyewitness accounts and highly reliable oral tradition. These six items I’ve listed: Do you really want to argue that these reflect authentic Jesus information?

Yes.

Is this strange Jesus the one you want?

It’s not strange if rightly understood. What is strange is an educated man like Dr. Madison routinely getting things dead wrong in his analyses of the Bible and Jesus. I wrote about this topic, too, in this post of mine: Dr. David Madison vs. Jesus #2: Weird & Fictional Mark 16? He obviously recycled a lot of these whoppers in his more recent podcasts that I refuted. But (hate to break the news) simply repeating a lousy argument doesn’t make it any stronger.

Maybe, after all, there’s a glimpse of history at Mark 3:21, where we find that Jesus’s family wasn’t too thrilled about his vocation. “When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind.’”

That sounds about right to me.

Yeah, me, too (but for the opposite reasons). Great human beings are routinely vastly misunderstood. For example, here is the gist of what Plato wrote about the cause of Socrates’ persecution and death, in his Apology:

At his trial, Socrates is accused of two things: impiety (asebeia) against Athens’s gods, by introducing new gods, and corruption of Athenian youth, by teaching them to question the status quo. He is accused of impiety because the Oracle at Delphi said there was no wiser man in Athens then Socrates, and Socrates knew he was not wise. After hearing that, he questioned every man he met to find a wiser man than he.

The corruption charge, said Socrates in his defense, was because by questioning people in public, he embarrassed them, and they, in turn, accused him of corrupting the youth of Athens by the use of sophistry. (“What Was the Charge Against Socrates?,” N. S. Gill, ThoughtCo., 11-28-18)

That sounds very familiar. Jesus’ enemies (mostly the scribes and Pharisees) accused Him of blasphemy and impiety because He claimed to be God, and also the Messiah. This upset the apple cart (to put it extremely mildly), so they sought to kill Him:

John 5:15-18 The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. [16] And this was why the Jews persecuted Jesus, because he did this on the sabbath. [17] But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working still, and I am working.” [18] This was why the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the sabbath but also called God his Father, making himself equal with God.

John 10:30-36 “I and the Father are one.” [31] The Jews took up stones again to stone him. [32] Jesus answered them, “I have shown you many good works from the Father; for which of these do you stone me?” [33] The Jews answered him, “It is not for a good work that we stone you but for blasphemy; because you, being a man, make yourself God.” [34] Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your law, `I said, you are gods’? [35] If he called them gods to whom the word of God came (and scripture cannot be broken), [36] do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, `You are blaspheming,’ because I said, `I am the Son of God’

Matthew 26:63-66 . . . And the high priest said to him, “I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ [the Messiah], the Son of God.” [64] Jesus said to him, “You have said so. But I tell you, hereafter you will see the Son of man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven.” [65] Then the high priest tore his robes, and said, “He has uttered blasphemy. Why do we still need witnesses? You have now heard his blasphemy. [66] What is your judgment?” They answered, “He deserves death.” [clearly applying to himself the famous messianic passage, Daniel 7:13]

John 7:1 After this Jesus went about in Galilee; he would not go about in Judea, because the Jews sought to kill him.

John 19:7 The Jews answered him, “We have a law, and by that law he ought to die, because he has made himself the Son of God.”

Jesus, like Socrates, went against the established religious orthodoxy and the corrupt status quo (even using Socrates’ own famous questioning “method”), and had to be killed for it. They started saying He was demonically possessed and that He cast out demons by demonic power (Mk 3:22), to which Jesus retorted, “a house divided against itself cannot stand” (Mk 3:25).

And people said “He is beside himself” (Mk 3:21) because Jesus had (heaven forbid!) healed people (Mk 3:1-10). And (also very much like Socrates’ case) people (filled with pride then as now, if they lose an argument or are shown to be wrong) didn’t like how He overcame them with His socratic questioning:

Luke 14:5-6 And he said to them, “Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well, will not immediately pull him out on a sabbath day?” [6] And they could not reply to this.

Mark 3:1-4 Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. [2] And they watched him, to see whether he would heal him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him. [3] And he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come here.” [4] And he said to them, “Is it lawful on the sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent.

Luke 20:19-26 The scribes and the chief priests tried to lay hands on him at that very hour, but they feared the people; for they perceived that he had told this parable against them. [20] So they watched him, and sent spies, who pretended to be sincere, that they might take hold of what he said, so as to deliver him up to the authority and jurisdiction of the governor. [21] They asked him, “Teacher, we know that you speak and teach rightly, and show no partiality, but truly teach the way of God. [22] Is it lawful for us to give tribute to Caesar, or not?” [23] But he perceived their craftiness, and said to them, [24] “Show me a coin. Whose likeness and inscription has it?” They said, “Caesar’s.” [25] He said to them, “Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” [26] And they were not able in the presence of the people to catch him by what he said; but marveling at his answer they were silent.

Matthew 21:23-27 And when he entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came up to him as he was teaching, and said, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” [24] Jesus answered them, “I also will ask you a question; and if you tell me the answer, then I also will tell you by what authority I do these things. [25] The baptism of John, whence was it? From heaven or from men?” And they argued with one another, “If we say, `From heaven,’ he will say to us, `Why then did you not believe him?’ [26] But if we say, `From men,’ we are afraid of the multitude; for all hold that John was a prophet.” [27] So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And he said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.

Matthew 21:45-46 When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they perceived that he was speaking about them. [46] But when they tried to arrest him, they feared the multitudes, because they held him to be a prophet.

So sure, this is why Jesus was unpopular in some circles (the same ones that had Him killed), and this should not surprise anyone. Great men and women are often persecuted up to and including death. The parallels between Jesus and Socrates are striking, but not shocking at all, with even a rudimentary knowledge of history and the usual prominent flaws of fallen human nature (jealousy, pride, arrogance, lust for power, outmoded and corrupt traditions, excessive desire for fame and adulation, etc.).

***

Photo credit: Jesus Healing the Paralytic at the Pool of Bethesda (1592), by Palma il Giovane (1544-1628) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

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August 8, 2019

August 8, 2019 By

This is an installment of my series of replies to an article by Dr. David Madison: a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, who has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. It’s called, “Things We Wish Jesus Hadn’t Said” (Debunking Christianity, 7-21-19). His words will be in blue below. Dr. Madison makes several “generic” digs at Jesus and Christianity, in the written portion (it details a series of 12 podcasts):

A challenge for Christians: If you’re so sure Jesus existed, then you have some explaining to do. A major frustration is that, while believers are indignant at all the talk about Jesus not existing, they don’t know the issues that fuel the skepticism—and are unwilling to inform themselves.

Yes, I’m up to the “challenge.” No problem at all. I’m not threatened or “scared” by this in the slightest. It’s what I do, as an apologist. The question is whether Dr. Madison is up to interacting with counter-critiques? Or will he act like the voluminous anti-theist atheist polemicist Bob Seidensticker?: who directly challenged me in one of his own comboxes to respond to his innumerable attack-pieces against Christianity and the Bible, and then courageously proceeded to utterly ignore my 35 specific critiques of his claims as of this writing. We shall soon see which course Dr. Madison will decide to take. Anyway, he also states in his post and combox:

[S]o many of the words of Jesus are genuinely shocking. These words aren’t proclaimed much from the pulpit, . . . Hence the folks in the pews have absorbed and adored an idealized Jesus. Christian apologists make their livings refiguring so many of the things Jesus supposedly said.

The gospels are riddled with contradictions and bad theology, and Jesus is so frequently depicted as a cult fanatic—because cult fanatics wrote the gospels. We see Jesus only through their theological filters. I just want to grab hold of Christian heads (standing behind them, with a hand on each ear) and force them to look straight ahead, unflinchingly, at the gospels, and then ask “Tell me what you see!” uncoached by apologist specialists, i.e., priests and pastors, who’ve had a lot of practice making bad texts look good. . . . I DO say, “Deal with the really bad stuff in the gospels.” Are you SURE you’ve not make a big mistake endorsing this particular Lord and Savior? That’s the whole point of this series of Flash Podcasts, because a helluva lot of Christians would agree, right away, that these quotes are bad news—if no one told then that they’ve been attributed to Jesus.

Of course, Dr. Madison — good anti-theist atheist that he is — takes the view that we are not at all sure whether Jesus in fact said anything recorded in the Gospels in the first place. I don’t play that game, because there is no end to it. It’s like trying to pin jello to the wall. The atheist always has their convenient out (when refuted in argument about some biblical text) that Jesus never said it anyway [wink wink and sly patronizing grin], and/or that the biblical text in question was simply added later by dishonest ultra-biased Christian partisans and propagandists. It’s a silly and ultimately intellectually dishonest game, and so I always refuse to play it with atheists or anyone else, because there is no way to “win” with such an absurdly stacked, purely subjective deck.

In my defense of biblical texts, I start with the assumption that the manuscripts we have are quite sufficient for us to know what is in the Bible (believe it or not). Going on from there, I simply defend particular [supposedly “difficult”] texts, and note with appropriate argumentation, that “here, the Bible teaches so-and-so,” etc. I deal with the texts as they exist. I don’t get into the endlessly arbitrary, subjective games that atheists and theologically liberal biblical skeptics play with the texts, in their self-serving textual criticism.

Dr. Madison himself (fortunately) grants my outlook in terms of practical “x vs. y” debate purposes: “For the sake of argument, I’m willing to say, okay, Jesus was real and, yes, we have gospels that tell the story.” And in the combox: “So, we can go along with their insistence that he did exist. We’ll play on their field, i.e., the gospels.”

Good! So we shall examine his cherry-picked texts and see whether his interpretations of them can stand up to scrutiny. He is issuing challenges, and I as an apologist will be dishing a bunch of my own right back to him. Two can play this game. I will be dealing honestly with his challenges. Will he return the favor, and engage in serious and substantive dialogue? Again, we’ll soon know what his reaction will be. A true dialogue is of a confident, inquisitive, “nothing to fear and everything to gain” back-and-forth and interactive nature, not merely “ships passing in the night” or what I call “mutual monologue.”

*****

Dr. Madison’s 11th podcast of twelve is entitled: “On Matthew 10:34-39, Jesus came to bring a sword, and to set family members against one another”. Here is the passage:

Matthew 10:34-39 (RSV) “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. [35] For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; [36] and a man’s foes will be those of his own household. [37] He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; [38] and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. [39] He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it. 

This quote is among those that really drags Jesus down and disqualifies him as a great moral teacher. . . . Why don’t Christians say, “Maybe we’ve made a mistake, worshiping this guy”? . . . People who love the colossal ego of Jesus as portrayed in John’s Gospel won’t be bothered by the arrogant Jesus on display here in Matthew 10. . . . Can we stop talking about Jesus as the Prince of Peace? And just think of the damage that this text has done in fueling Christian fanaticism. “We’re carrying the sword of Jesus,” said the Crusaders and the persecutors of the Inquisition. . . . C’mon! This is really despicable. There is  no way to spin this to make Jesus look like a good guy. . . . Cults preach like this. . . . These words put Jesus firmly in the tradition of cult fanatics, who want undiluted devotion to themselves. . . . This is unhealthy religion, that damages people. It’s bad theology.

Matthew 10:37 provides the key to this whole passage, and in fact, helped to explain the issue dealt with in Podcast #1: Jesus supposedly telling His followers to hate their families. The point is that they are to love Him the most (the absence of which in the Bible is the sin of idolatry). And he informs them that there will be great costs involved in being His disciple (10:38), though these will result in ultimate fulfillment and reward (10:39). Jesus seems to virtually be citing Micah 7:6: 

for the son treats the father with contempt, the daughter rises up against her mother, the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; a man’s enemies are the men of his own house.

He utilizes a literary device described below and His discourse is partly a prophecy that Christianity was in fact to cause a division in society and in the world ever since: i.e., many people didn’t like it then, just as they don’t today, which is why there is more persecution of Christians now, than at any time in history (according to even a secular magazine like Newsweek).

Sometimes, families are split, and there have been even civil wars over religious matters. Try to be openly, publicly Christian in, for example, Saudi Arabia or Iran today, and see how well things go for you. Why is it that churches are being attacked in alarmingly great numbers all over Europe? According to one article:

Countries like France and Germany have seen a spike in violent vandalism, desecrating cherished churches and Christian symbols in recent months and years.

According to the German news site PI-News, every day in France, two churches are desecrated. They report 1,063 attacks on Christian churches or symbols like crucifixes, icons, and statues in France in 2018, marking a 17 percent increase from the year before.

It’s because there has been opposition to Christianity from the start. Christianity severely critiques the world-system, and the world doesn’t like it one bit. It’s not rocket science, then, to understand what Jesus was expressing here. It’s only the literary genre that is confusing folks like Dr. Madison. What He was driving at is made perfectly clear in the larger context (which Dr. Madison — like virtually all atheist “exegetes” habitually do — completely ignores):

Matthew 24:16-18, 21-25, 28 “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. [17] Beware of men; for they will deliver you up to councils, and flog you in their synagogues, [18] and you will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake, to bear testimony before them and the Gentiles. . . . [21] Brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; [22] and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But he who endures to the end will be saved. [23] When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next; for truly, I say to you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel, before the Son of man comes. [24] “A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master; [25] it is enough for the disciple to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master. If they have called the master of the house Be-el’zebul, how much more will they malign those of his household. . . . [28] And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” 

This is the backdrop, and this explains Jesus’ meaning:

1) The world has hated Me, and so they will hate you also, as My followers.

2) This hatred will extend even to families, where non-Christian families may persecute Christians in the family.

3) If your family hates you, you have to choose between it and your ultimate allegiance to God [and I am God].

Jesus doesn’t desire or will or endorse or sanction any of this, which is Dr. Madison’s central and utterly erroneous point (as is quite obvious, I think, in 24:16-28 above). He is simply stating it in a typically pungent Hebraic / Semitic style. And he is using a literary technique, which has a name: Metonymy (or, Change of Name / Noun).

In my Installment #1, I mentioned Bible scholar E. W. Bullinger, who described and explained “over 200 distinct figures [in the Bible], several of them with from 30 to 40 varieties.” His 1104-page tome is called, Figures of Speech Used in the Bible (London: 1898). It’s available for free, online. Bullinger devotes no less than 75 pages to Metonymy (pp. 538-612) [see the entire section in a nice format online]. He defines it as follows:

The Change of one Noun for another Related Noun.

. . .  Metonymy is a figure by which one name or noun is used instead of another, to which it stands in a certain relation.

The change is in the noun, and only in a verb as connected with the action proceeding from it. . . . 

Thus it will be seen that Metonymy is not founded on resemblance, but on relation.

When we say that a person writes ” a bad hand,” we do not mean a hand, but we use the noun ” hand ” for the characters which it writes.

Metonymy is of four kinds: viz., of the Cause, of the Effect, of the Subject, and of the Adjunct.

I. Metonymy of the Cause is when the cause is put for the effect: i.e., when the doer is put for the thing done; or, the instrument for that which is effected; or, where the action is put for the effect produced by the action. (p. 538)

Metonymy of the Cause is the kind that occurs in our disputed passage, which Bullinger cites under his examples (p. 548). He comments on Matthew 10:34: “That is to say, the object of His coming was peace, but the effect of it was war.” In other words, Jesus’ technique (rather common in prophetic-type utterance in the Old Testament) was to speak poetically, as if He directly caused or willed what He only directly “caused” by being the object of the displeasure and disagreement of those who would reject Him and His followers.  So He says:

I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother . . . He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.

This is poetic expression, utilizing Metonymy of the Cause, where “the cause is put for the effect”. But His literal meaning may be paraphrased as follows: 

I came to bring peace, but the effect is, rather [in some cases], a sword [serious conflict]. The [undesired] result of my coming [in extreme cases] will be a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother . . . [If it tragically gets to this point] He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me [which love would be idolatry].

I’ve seen war movies, where a commander of so many soldiers said to another commander, “I killed 14 of my men.” OI remember being jolted by that when I first heard it. Then, after a moment’s reflection, I “got” it. This is the same sort of non-literal language. Of course, literally, his soldiers were killed by the enemy; they were the cause, not the commander, who did not desire this outcome. But he put it that way because he was trying to express, in his understandable human feeling and compassion: “if I had not sent these men into battle, onto the front lines, they would still be alive [i.e., I ‘killed’ them].” 

That is true, but it’s not direct cause. Likewise, Jesus is talking in this same way, saying in effect: “If I had not come and taught what I teach, then we wouldn’t have families being divided as a result.” In that sense only, He caused it, but not directly. Hence, “I bring a sword.” The division is directly caused by those who choose to engage in it, and to persecute folks for following Jesus.

Robert H. Stein wrote a very helpful article entitled, “Jesus’ Use of Figurative Language.” He states:

Jesus evidently prepared his teaching, putting it into literary forms using the metaphorical, exaggerating, impressionistic language of a culture that loved to tell stories. This helped his listeners remember easily what he taught. . . . Jesus thought his hearers were capable of understanding figurative language and he expected them to do so, . . . 

He goes on to list (with many examples) many of the literary forms Jesus used: simile, metaphor, poetry, proverb, hyperbole, puns, paradox, a fortiori, use of [Socratic] questioning (I have written about that, myself), irony, synecdoche, personification, paranomasia, and anthropomorphism (that I have also described at length).

Pulpit Commentary, for Matthew 10:35, sagely states: “Christ would leave in his hearers’ minds no room for thinking that he was ignorant of what the immediate result of his coming would be.” 

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Photo credit: The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer, by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

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August 7, 2019

August 7, 2019 By

This is an installment of my series of replies to an article by Dr. David Madison: a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, who has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. It’s called, “Things We Wish Jesus Hadn’t Said” (Debunking Christianity, 7-21-19). His words will be in blue below. Dr. Madison makes several “generic” digs at Jesus and Christianity, in the written portion (it details a series of 12 podcasts):

A challenge for Christians: If you’re so sure Jesus existed, then you have some explaining to do. A major frustration is that, while believers are indignant at all the talk about Jesus not existing, they don’t know the issues that fuel the skepticism—and are unwilling to inform themselves.

Yes, I’m up to the “challenge.” No problem at all. I’m not threatened or “scared” by this in the slightest. It’s what I do, as an apologist. The question is whether Dr. Madison is up to interacting with counter-critiques? Or will he act like the voluminous anti-theist atheist polemicist Bob Seidensticker?: who directly challenged me in one of his own comboxes to respond to his innumerable attack-pieces against Christianity and the Bible, and then courageously proceeded to utterly ignore my 35 specific critiques of his claims as of this writing. We shall soon see which course Dr. Madison will decide to take. Anyway, he also states in his post and combox:

[S]o many of the words of Jesus are genuinely shocking. These words aren’t proclaimed much from the pulpit, . . . Hence the folks in the pews have absorbed and adored an idealized Jesus. Christian apologists make their livings refiguring so many of the things Jesus supposedly said.

The gospels are riddled with contradictions and bad theology, and Jesus is so frequently depicted as a cult fanatic—because cult fanatics wrote the gospels. We see Jesus only through their theological filters. I just want to grab hold of Christian heads (standing behind them, with a hand on each ear) and force them to look straight ahead, unflinchingly, at the gospels, and then ask “Tell me what you see!” uncoached by apologist specialists, i.e., priests and pastors, who’ve had a lot of practice making bad texts look good. . . . I DO say, “Deal with the really bad stuff in the gospels.” Are you SURE you’ve not make a big mistake endorsing this particular Lord and Savior? That’s the whole point of this series of Flash Podcasts, because a helluva lot of Christians would agree, right away, that these quotes are bad news—if no one told then that they’ve been attributed to Jesus.

Of course, Dr. Madison — good anti-theist atheist that he is — takes the view that we are not at all sure whether Jesus in fact said anything recorded in the Gospels in the first place. I don’t play that game, because there is no end to it. It’s like trying to pin jello to the wall. The atheist always has their convenient out (when refuted in argument about some biblical text) that Jesus never said it anyway [wink wink and sly patronizing grin], and/or that the biblical text in question was simply added later by dishonest ultra-biased Christian partisans and propagandists. It’s a silly and ultimately intellectually dishonest game, and so I always refuse to play it with atheists or anyone else, because there is no way to “win” with such an absurdly stacked, purely subjective deck.

In my defense of biblical texts, I start with the assumption that the manuscripts we have are quite sufficient for us to know what is in the Bible (believe it or not). Going on from there, I simply defend particular [supposedly “difficult”] texts, and note with appropriate argumentation, that “here, the Bible teaches so-and-so,” etc. I deal with the texts as they exist. I don’t get into the endlessly arbitrary, subjective games that atheists and theologically liberal biblical skeptics play with the texts, in their self-serving textual criticism.

Dr. Madison himself (fortunately) grants my outlook in terms of practical “x vs. y” debate purposes: “For the sake of argument, I’m willing to say, okay, Jesus was real and, yes, we have gospels that tell the story.” And in the combox: “So, we can go along with their insistence that he did exist. We’ll play on their field, i.e., the gospels.”

Good! So we shall examine his cherry-picked texts and see whether his interpretations of them can stand up to scrutiny. He is issuing challenges, and I as an apologist will be dishing a bunch of my own right back to him. Two can play this game. I will be dealing honestly with his challenges. Will he return the favor, and engage in serious and substantive dialogue? Again, we’ll soon know what his reaction will be. A true dialogue is of a confident, inquisitive, “nothing to fear and everything to gain” back-and-forth and interactive nature, not merely “ships passing in the night” or what I call “mutual monologue.”

*****

Dr. Madison’s tenth podcast of twelve is entitled: “On Mark 11:22-24, Jesus gets demerits for saying this about prayer.” Here is the latest “outrageous” saying of Jesus (or, oops, the fanatical cultist evangelists who supposedly made up His words):

Mark 11:22-24 (RSV) And Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. [23] Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, `Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. [24] Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

This is a shallow, silly promise, and Jesus gets major demerits for this. . . . Jesus was wrong. . . . How much damage has this teaching caused? How many very devout people have prayed with all their might for a sick child to be cured, but the child dies? And then — far from blaming God for not delivering — they beat up on themselves for not having (you guessed it) enough faith. This damages people. This is harmful religion. . . . Jesus sounds like countless other cult fanatics that have come and gone in human history. . . . Why aren’t Christians themselves shocked by the cheap gimmickry? . . . baloney that Jesus has taught about prayer . . . 

First of all, of course this — especially the “mountain” reference — is a use of hyperbole (exaggeration to make a point), which we have thoroughly dealt with in installment one of this series of twelve rebuttals, and so need not reiterate here. It’s simply exaggeration, to make the literal point: “you can do some truly extraordinary things through faith and prayer.”

And (equally obvious) we all speak like this today, all the time. We observe people who are rather confident in their abilities in various areas, who will say, “I can do anything!” No one takes it literally. Or one can think of married couples who truly believe that their love can “conquer all”, or a parent telling a child who is now a young man or woman, considering a career: “you can do anything you want with your life. The sky’s the limit!”

These things are common because exaggeration or hyperbole is present in all languages and cultures. The problem is that a double standard is often applied to the Bible and Jesus: as if the ordinary complex aspects of language somehow don’t apply in those cases. They do; and this double standard or miscomprehension is the cause of countless atheist errors and fallacies in their endless polemical attacks.

Ironically, in this very podcast, Dr. Madison was discussing the parable of the fig tree, that occurs earlier in the same chapter, and states: “seeing the story in the context of this chapter, it seems to be Mark’s metaphor for the destruction of the Jerusalem temple . . . it is a literary device.”

Great! This is truly progress, as Dr. Madison has now recognized the perfectly obvious fact that the Bible contains literary devices and various genres, which include things like metaphor, exaggeration, anthropomorphism, and various non-literal poetic specimens. Yet he can’t see this when it comes to the text we are presently examining. And he — more often than not –, misses them altogether.

He does make a good point that there are many Christians (who interpret the passage as he is doing: as if Jesus intended it absolutely literally) who read this and think that God answers absolutely every prayer and heals absolutely everyone, just for the asking, and/or with enough faith in the person praying or the one afflicted.

This is indeed an actual and serious problem among far too many Christians, and a legitimate concern. But it comes from ignorance and stupidity in Bible interpretation (precisely the same error Dr. Madison is committing in every podcast in this series). These folks are taking things literally that were never intended to be so.

Again, I have dealt with both these errors in other papers, and so will cite them here. I addressed the “unanswered prayer ‘problem'” in my article, “No Conditional Prayer in Scripture?”: one of my 35 refutations of atheist Bob Seidensticker, which he has utterly ignored and left unreplied-to. Here are two instances, where the Bible shows that not all prayers are or should be answered:

Prayer is conditional upon being consistent with God’s will. So if we pray (to use an extreme example) for a difficult neighbor to be struck down and not able to talk or walk, that wouldn’t be in God’s will and God wouldn’t answer it.

1 John 5:14 And this is the confidence which we have in him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us.

James 4:3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.

Even something not immediately immoral or amoral wouldn’t necessarily be in God’s will, because He knows everything and can see where things might lead; thus may refuse some requests. When Jesus says “ask and you shall receive,” etc., it’s in a familiar Hebrew proverbial sense, which means that it is “generally true, but admits of exceptions.”

Moreover, St. Paul’s petitionary prayer request for God to remove his “thorn in the flesh” (thought by many Bible scholars to be an eye disease) was expressly turned down by God (2 Cor 12:7-9). I gave a few other examples in that paper:

The prophet Jonah prayed to God to die (Jonah 4:3): “Therefore now, O LORD, take my life from me, I beseech thee, for it is better for me to die than to live.” (cf. 4:8-9). God obviously didn’t fulfill the request, and chided Jonah or his anger (4:4, 9). The prophet Ezekiel did the same: “O LORD, take away my life” (1 Kgs 19:4). God had other plans, as the entire passage shows. If we pray something stupidly, God won’t answer. He knows better than we do.

Jesus also tells the story (not a parable, which don’t have proper names) in Luke 16 of Lazarus and the rich man, in which two petitionary requests (in effect, prayers: 16:24, 27-28, 30) to Abraham are turned down (16:25-26, 29, 31). Since Jesus is teaching theological principles or truths, by means of the story, then it follows that it’s His own opinion as well: that prayers are not always answered. They have to be according to God’s will.

But wait! Bob says, after all: “The Bible has no qualifiers” and “No limitations or delays are mentioned [for prayer].” Really? It’s sort of obvious, by now, ain’t it?: that Bob often is quite ignorant of what the Bible actually teaches. He displays his biblical illiteracy and ignorance rather spectacularly . . . 

Now, one might say that, “okay, some of these are obvious examples where God wouldn’t answer, because someone would be harmed. But why wouldn’t God answer all prayers for healing, because that is a good thing, and He has the desire and power to do so, if He is an all-loving and omnipotent Being?”

And that leads to the large, complex area of healing, as taught in the Bible and Christianity. The fact is that the Bible does not teach that everyone would or should be healed for the asking, or with enough faith. It’s not nearly that simple. I have already provided the example above of the Apostle Paul, who certainly had enough faith and holiness. It simply wasn’t God’s will to heal him. We don’t know all the ins and outs of why God heals in some instances and not in others.

We don’t know everything and can’t figure out everything God does. We should never logically expect to, given other truths expressed in the inspired revelation that all Christians accept, since He is omniscient and our knowledge is very limited. But I’m here to inform anyone who will listen what the actual biblical teaching about healing is. I documented it at great length in my paper, “Divine Healing: Is It God’s Will to Heal in Every Case?”

Sometimes people are supernaturally healed; most times they are not, or are healed through natural means that came from thinking and brains and medical science, by means of the abilities to learn that God gave us. And sometimes prayers are unanswered, per the reasons above.

There is nothing whatsoever in this passage — correctly understood — that is “shallow, silly, wrong, harmful religion, sound[ing] like countless other cult fanatics, cheap gimmickry, baloney . . .” It’s Dr. Madison (in his ludicrous felt superiority to our Lord Jesus) who has been shown to be “silly” and “wrong”: as throughout these ten installments. There are many people who have a hard time properly interpreting the Bible, and he is assuredly one of ’em.

***

Photo credit: Healing of the Blind Man (1871), by Carl Bloch (1834-1890) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

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August 7, 2019

August 7, 2019 By

This is an installment of my series of replies to an article by Dr. David Madison: a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, who has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. It’s called, “Things We Wish Jesus Hadn’t Said” (Debunking Christianity, 7-21-19). His words will be in blue below. Dr. Madison makes several “generic” digs at Jesus and Christianity, in the written portion (it details a series of 12 podcasts):

A challenge for Christians: If you’re so sure Jesus existed, then you have some explaining to do. A major frustration is that, while believers are indignant at all the talk about Jesus not existing, they don’t know the issues that fuel the skepticism—and are unwilling to inform themselves.

Yes, I’m up to the “challenge.” No problem at all. I’m not threatened or “scared” by this in the slightest. It’s what I do, as an apologist. The question is whether Dr. Madison is up to interacting with counter-critiques? Or will he act like the voluminous anti-theist atheist polemicist Bob Seidensticker?: who directly challenged me in one of his own comboxes to respond to his innumerable attack-pieces against Christianity and the Bible, and then courageously proceeded to utterly ignore my 35 specific critiques of his claims as of this writing. We shall soon see which course Dr. Madison will decide to take. Anyway, he also states in his post and combox:

[S]o many of the words of Jesus are genuinely shocking. These words aren’t proclaimed much from the pulpit, . . . Hence the folks in the pews have absorbed and adored an idealized Jesus. Christian apologists make their livings refiguring so many of the things Jesus supposedly said.

The gospels are riddled with contradictions and bad theology, and Jesus is so frequently depicted as a cult fanatic—because cult fanatics wrote the gospels. We see Jesus only through their theological filters. I just want to grab hold of Christian heads (standing behind them, with a hand on each ear) and force them to look straight ahead, unflinchingly, at the gospels, and then ask “Tell me what you see!” uncoached by apologist specialists, i.e., priests and pastors, who’ve had a lot of practice making bad texts look good. . . . I DO say, “Deal with the really bad stuff in the gospels.” Are you SURE you’ve not make a big mistake endorsing this particular Lord and Savior? That’s the whole point of this series of Flash Podcasts, because a helluva lot of Christians would agree, right away, that these quotes are bad news—if no one told then that they’ve been attributed to Jesus.

Of course, Dr. Madison — good anti-theist atheist that he is — takes the view that we are not at all sure whether Jesus in fact said anything recorded in the Gospels in the first place. I don’t play that game, because there is no end to it. It’s like trying to pin jello to the wall. The atheist always has their convenient out (when refuted in argument about some biblical text) that Jesus never said it anyway [wink wink and sly patronizing grin], and/or that the biblical text in question was simply added later by dishonest ultra-biased Christian partisans and propagandists. It’s a silly and ultimately intellectually dishonest game, and so I always refuse to play it with atheists or anyone else, because there is no way to “win” with such an absurdly stacked, purely subjective deck.

In my defense of biblical texts, I start with the assumption that the manuscripts we have are quite sufficient for us to know what is in the Bible (believe it or not). Going on from there, I simply defend particular [supposedly “difficult”] texts, and note with appropriate argumentation, that “here, the Bible teaches so-and-so,” etc. I deal with the texts as they exist. I don’t get into the endlessly arbitrary, subjective games that atheists and theologically liberal biblical skeptics play with the texts, in their self-serving textual criticism.

Dr. Madison himself (fortunately) grants my outlook in terms of practical “x vs. y” debate purposes: “For the sake of argument, I’m willing to say, okay, Jesus was real and, yes, we have gospels that tell the story.” And in the combox: “So, we can go along with their insistence that he did exist. We’ll play on their field, i.e., the gospels.”

Good! So we shall examine his cherry-picked texts and see whether his interpretations of them can stand up to scrutiny. He is issuing challenges, and I as an apologist will be dishing a bunch of my own right back to him. Two can play this game. I will be dealing honestly with his challenges. Will he return the favor, and engage in serious and substantive dialogue? Again, we’ll soon know what his reaction will be. A true dialogue is of a confident, inquisitive, “nothing to fear and everything to gain” back-and-forth and interactive nature, not merely “ships passing in the night” or what I call “mutual monologue.”

*****

Dr. Madison’s eighth podcast of twelve is entitled: “On John 6:53-57, eating the flesh of Jesus and drinking his blood are the key to eternal life”. Here is the passage:

John 6:53-57 So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; [54] he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. [55] For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. [56] He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. [57] As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me.

It’s hard to come up with a better example of magical thinking. How in the world could eating flesh and blood, even if it belonged to a God, bestow eternal life? . . . These verses in John’s Gospel are grotesque magic . . . eating a God to live forever is not real world thinking. It’s magical thinking. It’s bad religion; it’s bad theology. . . . What an embarrassment that this text ended up in the New Testament.

Dr. Madison makes two major points about this text. First he argues that it echoes elements in other mystery religions before or during the time of Jesus; therefore, it is immediately suspect, and was simply yet another deceitful technique used by cult propagandists Mark, Luke, and now John (or whoever he thinks put the Gospel that bears his name together), to put onto the lips of Jesus. He sees this as a disproof of the claim that Jesus even said what He did in John 6.

But it’s by no means certain that when an idea has some aspects within it that were previously present elsewhere, that in and of itself, it disproves the later idea. Why would anyone think that? Yet this is common playbook / talking-points of both atheists and dissident theological liberals, when approaching historic Christianity and the Bible. Let me provide three analogies or word-pictures to reveal the blatant fallacy involved here:

1) Modern astronomy and the theory of gravity both contain ideas which were present in the prior field of astrology; namely: distant bodies have an influence on the earth. Does it follow that, therefore, gravitation is untrue, simply because of this fact? No, of course not. Astrology had hit upon some truths, while also espousing many falsehoods. And in fact, Isaac Newton was neck-deep in the antiquated pseudo-science of alchemy and other occultic beliefs, at the same time he did legitimate, ground-breaking science; and early astronomers like Galileo, Copernicus, and Kepler, were equally enthralled with astrology, even while they made their momentous contributions to modern astronomy and physics. By the way, St. Thomas Aquinas 300-400 years earlier, and St. Augustine 1100-1200 years earlier, both rejected astrology. Historical truth is much more interesting than revisionist historical fiction.

2) It’s often noted that there is a Deluge account in the Epic of Gilgamesh; therefore, this casts doubt on the story of Noah’s Flood. But why would it? Is it not more plausible to assert that if in fact (for the sake of argument) such a major Flood had occurred, that other cultures besides Hebrew culture would more likely know about it, rather than not? Say for the sake of argument that the Bible had mentioned Halley’s Comet. We now know that it passes by the earth every 76 years. No doubt many cultures have some written record of observing it. But if the Bible had happened to mention it, it would immediately be suspect because non-Hebrews also wrote about it? Clearly not.

3) Several cultures for centuries used mold in order to help people heal. Later it was discovered that the antibiotic penicillin was derived from mold. Is it therefore to be rejected as a result? Nope. This is shoddy reasoning. The Wikipedia article. “History of penicillin” noted:

Many ancient cultures, including those in Egypt, Greece, and India, independently discovered the useful properties of fungi and plants in treating infection. These treatments often worked because many organisms, including many species of mold, naturally produce antibiotic substances. However, ancient practitioners could not precisely identify or isolate the active components in these organisms.

A similar argument can be made regarding aspirin. The Wikipedia article notes: “A precursor to aspirin found in leaves from the willow tree has been used for its health effects for at least 2,400 years.” My own family has taken white willow bark for many years to treat pain.

In fact, Catholic apologist G. K. Chesterton, in his masterpiece, The Everlasting Man, argued that it is precisely to be expected, and is an argument in favor of Christianity, that there are many precursors to it: especially in the paganism that flourished in the previous 500 years or so. Anglican apologist C. S. Lewis, in his book, The Abolition of Man, has a section at the end (“Illustrations of the Tao”) in which he shows (and rejoices in) many similarities of world religions.

Young Lewis (very much like myself in my teen years) was enthralled with Norse mythology and Wagner’s operas, etc., and was an atheist. He became a theist after a discussion with J. R. R. Tolkien, in which the latter noted that “Christianity was a true myth.” It had never occurred to Lewis that there could be such a thing as a myth that actually happened. I have written about supposed “pagan elements” in Catholicism: which is a charge that anti-Catholic Protestants often make. It’s fascinating to now see an atheist former Methodist minister use the same fallacious tactic:

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The second argument Dr. Madison makes (if we can even call it that), is that this eucharistic discourse is merely a species of “magic” (and of a grotesque sort at that). What he calls “magic” (and ironically again, this is an old talking-point of anti-Catholic Protestant fundamentalism as well) is simply sacramentalism. Briefly defined, the word means; “use of matter to convey grace.”
*
I don’t intend to write a mini-treatise on sacramentalism in this reply. Readers may consult my articles for that purpose (just as they can read about the exegesis of John 6 and eucharistic theology on that web page of mine: including extensive exegetical arguments in favor of the literal interpretation). Suffice it to say that it is a very common theme or motif in the Bible:
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Heartfelt Sacramentalism (Not Mere Charms) [1996]Why do Catholics Believe that Sacraments are Necessary? [2002]

Sacraments & the Moral Responsibility of Their Recipients [8-26-06]

Are Relics & Sacraments Mere Magical Charms? [2007]

Dialogue on Sacramentalism, Holy Objects, and Relics [2-26-09]

 

Bible on Physical Objects as Aids in Worship [4-7-09]

Sacraments: Bible & Church Fathers (vs. Calvin #34) [9-25-09]

The Biblical Understanding of Holy Places and Things [National Catholic Register, 4-11-17]

 

Biblical Evidence for Sacramentalism [National Catholic Register, 8-29-17]

Obviously, Dr. Madison is not likely at all to be persuaded of a full Catholic eucharistic theology (or any theology at all). He’s a hostile apostate. But I think perhaps he could be made to see at least (and many others can grasp) that it is not mere “grotesque magic.” He asks, “How in the world could eating flesh and blood, even if it belonged to a God, bestow eternal life?” Well, it can because an omnipotent God decreed it to be so, just as the Bible also teaches regeneration and salvation by means of water baptism.

If one thinks that it is weird to eat Jesus’ body (even in the “eucharistic manner” that we believe in, as opposed to literal cannibalism), then maybe an analogy would help. Jesus made it Himself in the passage under consideration. First He stated:
John 6:31 “Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’ ” 
Here Jesus starts to make the analogy between food for physical nutrition and “special food” for spiritual nourishment. He had just miraculously fed the five thousand in the passage preceding this discourse. This is a common technique in the Bible. Likewise, a parallel is made in 1 Peter 3:20-21 between Noah’s Ark saving him and his family from drowning; preserving their physical lives, and being saved spiritually through water of baptism. Then Jesus started saying that He was the bread of life:
John 6:35 . . . “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.”
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John 6:48-51 “I am the bread of life. [49] Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. [50] This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die. [51] I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever . . .”
Then He made it clear that He was not merely speaking metaphorically, but literally about His real, substantial, bodily presence in the Holy Eucharist:
John 6:51b-52  “. . . the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.” [52] The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” [followed by the text that Dr. Madison cites]
Then Jesus ties it all together, to make sure that no one misses the analogy:
John 6:58 “This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live for ever.”

Jesus makes a similar parallel with the woman at the well:

John 4:9-14 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samar’ia?” For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. [10] Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, `Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” [11] The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep; where do you get that living water? [12] Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, and his sons, and his cattle?” [13] Jesus said to her, “Every one who drinks of this water will thirst again, [14] but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” 

John 7:37-38 On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and proclaimed, “If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink. [38] He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, `Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.'” 

Revelation 21:6 . . . To the thirsty I will give from the fountain of the water of life without payment. 

This is biblical sacramentalism. It’s nothing unusual at all. It’s what the Bible teaches. Whether one rejects it, is another matter, but the Bible does unmistakably teach it. In this case,  it make perfect internal sense: just as physical food gives biological nourishment, eucharistic “food” gives spiritual nourishment and grace.

Sacramentalism exists in the first place because God knew that human beings could relate a lot better to physical, concrete things that conveyed grace, rather than purely abstract grace. And He knew that they could grasp analogies, parables, and parallelism.

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Photo credit: Jesus and the Samaritan Woman (c. 1585), by Paolo Veronese (1528-1588) and his workshop [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

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August 6, 2019

August 6, 2019 By

This is an installment of my series of replies to an article by Dr. David Madison: a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, who has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. It’s called, “Things We Wish Jesus Hadn’t Said” (Debunking Christianity, 7-21-19). His words will be in blue below. Dr. Madison makes several “generic” digs at Jesus and Christianity, in the written portion (it details a series of 12 podcasts):

A challenge for Christians: If you’re so sure Jesus existed, then you have some explaining to do. A major frustration is that, while believers are indignant at all the talk about Jesus not existing, they don’t know the issues that fuel the skepticism—and are unwilling to inform themselves.

Yes, I’m up to the “challenge.” No problem at all. I’m not threatened or “scared” by this in the slightest. It’s what I do, as an apologist. The question is whether Dr. Madison is up to interacting with counter-critiques? Or will he act like the voluminous anti-theist atheist polemicist Bob Seidensticker?: who directly challenged me in one of his own comboxes to respond to his innumerable attack-pieces against Christianity and the Bible, and then courageously proceeded to utterly ignore my 35 specific critiques of his claims as of this writing. We shall soon see which course Dr. Madison will decide to take. Anyway, he also states in his post and combox:

[S]o many of the words of Jesus are genuinely shocking. These words aren’t proclaimed much from the pulpit, . . . Hence the folks in the pews have absorbed and adored an idealized Jesus. Christian apologists make their livings refiguring so many of the things Jesus supposedly said.

The gospels are riddled with contradictions and bad theology, and Jesus is so frequently depicted as a cult fanatic—because cult fanatics wrote the gospels. We see Jesus only through their theological filters. I just want to grab hold of Christian heads (standing behind them, with a hand on each ear) and force them to look straight ahead, unflinchingly, at the gospels, and then ask “Tell me what you see!” uncoached by apologist specialists, i.e., priests and pastors, who’ve had a lot of practice making bad texts look good. . . . I DO say, “Deal with the really bad stuff in the gospels.” Are you SURE you’ve not make a big mistake endorsing this particular Lord and Savior? That’s the whole point of this series of Flash Podcasts, because a helluva lot of Christians would agree, right away, that these quotes are bad news—if no one told then that they’ve been attributed to Jesus.

Of course, Dr. Madison — good anti-theist atheist that he is — takes the view that we are not at all sure whether Jesus in fact said anything recorded in the Gospels in the first place. I don’t play that game, because there is no end to it. It’s like trying to pin jello to the wall. The atheist always has their convenient out (when refuted in argument about some biblical text) that Jesus never said it anyway [wink wink and sly patronizing grin], and/or that the biblical text in question was simply added later by dishonest ultra-biased Christian partisans and propagandists. It’s a silly and ultimately intellectually dishonest game, and so I always refuse to play it with atheists or anyone else, because there is no way to “win” with such an absurdly stacked, purely subjective deck.

In my defense of biblical texts, I start with the assumption that the manuscripts we have are quite sufficient for us to know what is in the Bible (believe it or not). Going on from there, I simply defend particular [supposedly “difficult”] texts, and note with appropriate argumentation, that “here, the Bible teaches so-and-so,” etc. I deal with the texts as they exist. I don’t get into the endlessly arbitrary, subjective games that atheists and theologically liberal biblical skeptics play with the texts, in their self-serving textual criticism.

Dr. Madison himself (fortunately) grants my outlook in terms of practical “x vs. y” debate purposes: “For the sake of argument, I’m willing to say, okay, Jesus was real and, yes, we have gospels that tell the story.” And in the combox: “So, we can go along with their insistence that he did exist. We’ll play on their field, i.e., the gospels.”

Good! So we shall examine his cherry-picked texts and see whether his interpretations of them can stand up to scrutiny. He is issuing challenges, and I as an apologist will be dishing a bunch of my own right back to him. Two can play this game. I will be dealing honestly with his challenges. Will he return the favor, and engage in serious and substantive dialogue? Again, we’ll soon know what his reaction will be. A true dialogue is of a confident, inquisitive, “nothing to fear and everything to gain” back-and-forth and interactive nature, not merely “ships passing in the night” or what I call “mutual monologue.”

*****

Dr. Madison’s seventh podcast of twelve is entitled: “On Mark 4:11-12: Jesus taught in parables to keep people from repenting and being forgiven”. Here is the passage:

Mark 4:11-12 (RSV) And he said to them, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; [12] so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again, and be forgiven.” 

Bizarre Jesus quote . . . Jesus teaches in parables so that people won’t turn and be forgiven. . . . It clearly doesn’t make sense at all. Is Jesus serious? Parables are meant to fool people, to keep them in the dark?

Mark 4:11-12 is a common scriptural / Hebraic way of expressing God’s judgment and His providence (while not denying that ultimately men decide their own eternal fates, by either accepting or rejecting God’s grace). Romans 1 explains it:

Romans 1:18-25 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. [19] For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. [20] Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse; [21] for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. [22] Claiming to be wise, they became fools, [23] and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles. [24] Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, [25] because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever! Amen.

Note that the onus lies upon the people who “suppress the truth” and are engaged in “all ungodliness and wickedness” (1:18). They choose in their own free will to disobey God, then the text says that “God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity” (1:24). In other words, He didn’t cause their rebellion; He only allowed them in their free choices, to rebel.

The same dynamic is seen in the juxtaposition between Pharaoh freely hardening his heart, which is then applied to God (in a limited sense) doing it (which means that He allowed it, in His providence; He didn’t ordain it). I explain this at length, in two papers.

A fourth similar example occurs in the book of Job. Satan comes to God and challenges Him to allow him to torment Job. God responds, “Behold, he is in your power; only spare his life” (2:6; cf. 1:12). So it is clear that Satan is behind the direct persecution of Job. But later, the text refers to “all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him” (42:11); that is (properly interpreted, with knowledge of the multitude of Hebrew literary devices), allowed in His providence. Then it is reported (now literally) that God “restored the fortunes of Job, . . . and the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before” (42:10) and “blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning” (42:12).

2 Thessalonians (written by St. Paul, as was Romans) is a fifth example, and it expresses precisely the same dynamic as we see in Romans 1 and the other three examples above. Men rebel in their wickedness (“they refused to love the truth and so be saved”: 2:10). Then it is stated (as a forceful hyperbolic manifestation of God’s providence and His permissive will) that “God sends upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false, so that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness” (2:11-12).

It’s not a contradiction. This way of speaking is common in the Bible. When Paul talks about wicked men, he is being literal; but when He talks about God, it is hyperbolic and a form of sarcasm. 2:10 makes it quite clear what caused their damnation: “those who are to perish, because they refused to love the truth.” Even 2:12 again reiterates that man’s rebellion was the cause of the demise of the damned: not because God willed and ordained it from all eternity. The Gospel of John teaches the same thing:

John 12:37-40 Though he had done so many signs before them, yet they did not believe in him; [38] it was that the word spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled: “Lord, who has believed our report, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” [39] Therefore they could not believe. For Isaiah again said, [40] “He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they should see with their eyes and perceive with their heart, and turn for me to heal them.”

Coffman’s Commentaries on the Bible, in its treatment of the Old Testament passage cited in John 12 (Isaiah 6:9-10) states:

What is prophesied in this passage is the judicial hardening of Israel in their rebellion against God. The prophecy is stated in different forms. Here it appears imperatively; but in other places the prophecy is referred to as self-accomplished as in Acts 28:27, or as having occurred passively as in Matthew 13:13-15. Here, as Dummelow pointed out, “The result of Isaiah’s preaching is spoken of as if it were the purpose of it.” . . .

The classical example from the Bible is that of Pharaoh, of whom it is stated ten times that “Pharaoh hardened his heart …” after which it is said that, “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart.” God never hardened anyone’s heart who had not already hardened his own heart many times. Thus it was said of this prophecy that Israel had themselves shut their ears, closed their eyes, and hardened their hearts.

Thus we may say that God hardened Israel, that Israel hardened themselves, and further, that Satan hardened their hearts. “The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving” (2 Corinthians 4:4). The “blinding” of this passage and the “strong delusion” of 2 Thessalonians 2:11 KJV, and the “working of error” (2 Thessalonians 2:11, ASV) are all designations of exactly the same condition described here as “hardening.”

The key to understanding lies in the parallel passage of Acts 28:27, which the commentary above describes as “self-accomplished” rebellion. This shows the same dynamic as the “hardened hearts” passages. In the overall context of Acts 28, we don’t see the language of God deliberately blinding them, etc. We see their own choices causing these things. Hence, we see references to “others disbelieved” (28:24); then the Isaiah passage is cited, but in a milder fashion, followed by “Let it be known to you then that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles; they will listen” (28:28). In other words, these hearers would not listen. It was their fault; they were rebellious. God didn’t cause that.

Likewise, here is how Jesus put it in Matthew 13:13, 16: “This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. . . . their eyes they have closed . . . But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.” If one looks at the larger context of John 12:37-40, one can also see that it is man’s rebellion, not God’s foreordination, that causes the disbelief and wickedness:

John 12:37, 47-48  Though he had done so many signs before them, yet they did not believe in him; . . . [47] [Jesus] If any one hears my sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world. [48] He who rejects me and does not receive my sayings has a judge; the word that I have spoken will be his judge on the last day.

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Photo credit: The Pharisees and the Sadducees Come to Tempt Jesus, by James Tissot (1836-1902) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

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August 6, 2019

August 6, 2019 By

This is an installment of my series of replies to an article by Dr. David Madison: a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, who has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. It’s called, “Things We Wish Jesus Hadn’t Said” (Debunking Christianity, 7-21-19). His words will be in blue below. Dr. Madison makes several “generic” digs at Jesus and Christianity, in the written portion (it details a series of 12 podcasts):

A challenge for Christians: If you’re so sure Jesus existed, then you have some explaining to do. A major frustration is that, while believers are indignant at all the talk about Jesus not existing, they don’t know the issues that fuel the skepticism—and are unwilling to inform themselves.

Yes, I’m up to the “challenge.” No problem at all. I’m not threatened or “scared” by this in the slightest. It’s what I do, as an apologist. The question is whether Dr. Madison is up to interacting with counter-critiques? Or will he act like the voluminous anti-theist atheist polemicist Bob Seidensticker?: who directly challenged me in one of his own comboxes to respond to his innumerable attack-pieces against Christianity and the Bible, and then courageously proceeded to utterly ignore my 35 specific critiques of his claims as of this writing. We shall soon see which course Dr. Madison will decide to take. Anyway, he also states in his post and combox:

[S]o many of the words of Jesus are genuinely shocking. These words aren’t proclaimed much from the pulpit, . . . Hence the folks in the pews have absorbed and adored an idealized Jesus. Christian apologists make their livings refiguring so many of the things Jesus supposedly said.

The gospels are riddled with contradictions and bad theology, and Jesus is so frequently depicted as a cult fanatic—because cult fanatics wrote the gospels. We see Jesus only through their theological filters. I just want to grab hold of Christian heads (standing behind them, with a hand on each ear) and force them to look straight ahead, unflinchingly, at the gospels, and then ask “Tell me what you see!” uncoached by apologist specialists, i.e., priests and pastors, who’ve had a lot of practice making bad texts look good. . . . I DO say, “Deal with the really bad stuff in the gospels.” Are you SURE you’ve not make a big mistake endorsing this particular Lord and Savior? That’s the whole point of this series of Flash Podcasts, because a helluva lot of Christians would agree, right away, that these quotes are bad news—if no one told then that they’ve been attributed to Jesus.

Of course, Dr. Madison — good anti-theist atheist that he is — takes the view that we are not at all sure whether Jesus in fact said anything recorded in the Gospels in the first place. I don’t play that game, because there is no end to it. It’s like trying to pin jello to the wall. The atheist always has their convenient out (when refuted in argument about some biblical text) that Jesus never said it anyway [wink wink and sly patronizing grin], and/or that the biblical text in question was simply added later by dishonest ultra-biased Christian partisans and propagandists. It’s a silly and ultimately intellectually dishonest game, and so I always refuse to play it with atheists or anyone else, because there is no way to “win” with such an absurdly stacked, purely subjective deck.

In my defense of biblical texts, I start with the assumption that the manuscripts we have are quite sufficient for us to know what is in the Bible (believe it or not). Going on from there, I simply defend particular [supposedly “difficult”] texts, and note with appropriate argumentation, that “here, the Bible teaches so-and-so,” etc. I deal with the texts as they exist. I don’t get into the endlessly arbitrary, subjective games that atheists and theologically liberal biblical skeptics play with the texts, in their self-serving textual criticism.

Dr. Madison himself (fortunately) grants my outlook in terms of practical “x vs. y” debate purposes: “For the sake of argument, I’m willing to say, okay, Jesus was real and, yes, we have gospels that tell the story.” And in the combox: “So, we can go along with their insistence that he did exist. We’ll play on their field, i.e., the gospels.”

Good! So we shall examine his cherry-picked texts and see whether his interpretations of them can stand up to scrutiny. He is issuing challenges, and I as an apologist will be dishing a bunch of my own right back to him. Two can play this game. I will be dealing honestly with his challenges. Will he return the favor, and engage in serious and substantive dialogue? Again, we’ll soon know what his reaction will be. A true dialogue is of a confident, inquisitive, “nothing to fear and everything to gain” back-and-forth and interactive nature, not merely “ships passing in the night” or what I call “mutual monologue.”

*****

Dr. Madison’s sixth podcast of twelve is entitled: “On Mark 12:30, Jesus’ command to love God at the all-all-all level.” Here is the passage in question:

Mark 12:30 (RSV)  and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.

Our ever-wise critic of God and all things biblical and Christian, Dr. Madison, pontificates about this as follows:

We are dealing with a colossal case of cosmic narcissism. God expects, God demands, God gets off on human adoration? . . . How does this possibly make sense? . . . This makes God seem like an insecure monarch . . . Here’s Jesus trying to make us love God. No thank you. A God who is top-heavy with ego . . . this is bad theology; this is bad religion. . . . mindless cult fanaticism. . . . The God of the Bible is a horrible God: so much anger and wrath.

The Bible teaches that God is in need of nothing:

Acts 17:24-25 The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by man, [25] nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all men life and breath and everything.

I basically dealt with this issue in my paper, “Why Do We Worship God? Dialogue with an Atheist” (5-11-18). I wrote:

If we’re talking about the supreme being of the universe, then the respect, leading up to worship and praise, is all that much more to be expected, and the natural state of things.

God “needs” no worship whatever because in Christian theology, He needs nothing. He’s completely all-sufficient and self-sufficient. It’s for our sake that we “render unto God’s what is rightfully God’s.”

I cited my friend, Deacon Steven D. Greydanus in this paper. He explained it very eloquently:

[N]othing that happens, nothing we do, can diminish or increase God or his beatitude in any way. We say metaphorically that our sins anger or grieve God and that our virtues delight him, but this is analogical language. He cannot become any happier or sadder than the infinite beatitude he enjoys necessarily and absolutely. . . .

Worship is not something we offer to God to make him happy. Rather, in worship we grow closer to God to our benefit. Worship, like virtue, knowledge of truth, and appreciation of beauty, is for our good.

I added:

I searched “demand worship” in my online RSV Bible and it never appears. God does say in the Ten Commandments: “You shall have no other gods before me. . . . you shall not bow down to them or serve them” (Ex 20:3, 5). It is the purpose and nature of such worship that [atheists] are not grasping. As I have explained, it’s for our good, not God’s. Why does God give His commands, which include monotheism and worship of Him alone?:

Deuteronomy 4:40 Therefore you shall keep his statutes and his commandments, which I command you this day, that it may go well with you, and with your children after you, and that you may prolong your days in the land which the LORD your God gives you for ever.

Deuteronomy 5:33 You shall walk in all the way which the LORD your God has commanded you, that you may live, and that it may go well with you, and that you may live long in the land which you shall possess.

Deuteronomy 6:18 And you shall do what is right and good in the sight of the LORD, that it may go well with you, . . .

Deuteronomy 12:28 Be careful to heed all these words which I command you, that it may go well with you and with your children after you for ever, when you do what is good and right in the sight of the LORD your God.

Deuteronomy 28:1 And if you obey the voice of the LORD your God, being careful to do all his commandments which I command you this day, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. [all the blessings God will give them are then listed in 28:2-14; then 28:15 states, “But if you will not obey the voice of the LORD your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command you this day, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you.” This is followed by a list of calamities in 28:16-67.]

It’s always the same, and this is the story of the Old Testament and the ancient Jews. God tells them to follow His laws and commands and everything will be wonderful for them. They will have manifold blessings. Then they decide not to and to rebel against God and it goes terribly, just as God said it would. And then these same men (and atheists today who think like them) blame God rather than their own stupidity and stubbornness. But if we sum up what God wants, as expressed in the Bible, here it is:

1 Timothy 2:3-4 . . . God our Savior, [4] who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

Atheists are simply projecting human emotions onto God, as if He is some sort of high maintenance drama queen who needs constant attention.Ironically, this is what fundamentalists often do, too (hence they tend to reject anthropopathism and anthropomorphism, which entail non-literal concepts). They are both unsophisticated, improperly thought-through views (i.e., referring to this one topic of worship). And [atheists] want to make Him a despot and tyrant, which is not at all how the Bible presents Him. . . .

We don’t worship God because He needs it (He needs nothing and is entirely self-sufficient), but because we need it, as a fundamental attribute of a human being, who came ultimately from God in creation and through parents in procreation. God made it that way because He knows that we are most happy and fulfilled living as He intended it to be: in as close of a union with Him as possible. Likewise, the parent knows that children will be happier if they accept both the love and correction of the parents. If they reject both, they will likely have problems in their lives. . . .

We’re saying that God is inherently infinitely greater than we are. He created the universe. He gave us life (as parents also do in a lesser sense). He loves us and blesses us in so many ways. So we praise Him and worship Him for Who He is.

Another partial analogy would be how we act towards those we are in love with. Look at any love poems and you find rapturous praise, lavish, over-the-top compliments, placing this loved one at the very center of our existence and the meaningfulness of our life and indeed our happiness and fulfillment. So we praise and compliment in the most extravagant ways.

Yet when it comes to God (even trying to imagine the Christian God for a second: that you reject or deny) you can’t comprehend that we praise and worship Him because of what we believe His loving, all-benevolent nature is; because He created us and fulfills us when we serve Him, and due to all the wonderful things He has done or made possible to do. What is so mysterious or difficult to understand about that, truly baffles me. I don’t have a clue.

But if you redefine what God is like (the ubiquitous arbitrary, capricious tyrant of the atheist imagination), then yes, I can see why you couldn’t comprehend worship of a Being like that.

The RationalChristianity.Net site offers some further insight on the question:

Some people object that God doesn’t merely accept worship, he demands it. They picture God as an egotistical or even insecure tyrant who insists that everyone tell him how great he is. This is not an accurate portrayal, for God’s command to us is, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Dt 6:5), not “Tell me five times a day how wonderful I am.” Worship is included as part of God’s command to love him, for it’s a proper expression of our love for someone who is perfect and so much above us in every way. If it’s fitting for us to praise our friends and family when they do well, how much more appropriate it is for us to praise a perfect God! When we love God and realize how awesome he is, worship and praise are natural results.

God’s instruction to worship him is only a demand in the sense that God’s other moral laws are demands. God doesn’t command us not to murder because he’s a dictator, but because it’s morally right (and therefore ultimately in our best interests). Similarly, God tells us to worship him because it’s the proper way for us to relate to him and because it’s to our benefit to do so (see above).

Something else to consider: If God were vain, one would think that he would want pictures and statues of him everywhere, yet he commanded that no one make images of him. Instead, he told the Israelites to keep copies of his commands everywhere (Dt 6:6-9), so that they would remember them and obey them and receive blessings as a result (Dt 6:18).

I would add that God is also eager to share His glory (hardly a quality of a “narcissist”), as I have documented. And God also praises human beings:

Romans 2:29 . . . His praise is not from men but from God.

1 Corinthians 4:5 . . . Then every man will receive his commendation from God.

The Christian attitude is: “We love, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). God’s love (which we can reject, because He gives us that freedom) is very tender, and is compared to a mother hen and her chicks:

Matthew 23:37 O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!

Scripture is chock-full of passages detailing God’s intense love for human beings.

Apologist Glenn Miller has offered eloquent and wise thoughts on this topic, as usual, with which I shall close:

I had by this time discovered that a person’s happiness, well-being, and personal actualization was bound up with the number and intensity of “healthy” relationships maintained–with family, with other people, with authority, with secondary groups, with institutions, with self, with ‘nature’, with God. Defining ‘healthiness’ within a relationship typically involved ‘working within the structures that inherently defined the relationship’. For example, if I were a child, it was healthy to respect my parents. If I was a parent, it was healthy to encourage and urge my children to develop. If I was a citizen, it was healthy to be “conforming” but still “dissenting” enough to make a contribution to the development, goals, and effectiveness of the institutions.

So, if one of my primary (if not THE primary) relationships in life was that of my relationship to the God of the Universe, then my happiness/well-being/actualization would be adversely affected by an improper, dysfunctional, or ignored relationship with the Living God. It is ultimately restrictive/destructive for a person to have healthy relationships in only a few of the major areas–we generally must have at least a ‘working’ relationship with ALL of the relationships (that we are members of). And too, if a person is ‘doing well’ in all of the relationships, but IGNORING/FIGHTING God, their internal health is not at the highest level it should be.

If the ‘structures of the relationship’ with God involves an awareness of His qualitative and quantitative differences from me (suitable to encourage me to honesty with, and dependence on, Him), then for God to seek for me to admit these differences was a matter no longer of just intellectual honesty, but now was a matter of seeking after my happiness, well-being, and actualization. It was now to my benefit (given the very definition of what I was as a creature!) to do this. And, accordingly, it didn’t look quite as ‘pathological’ for God to desire this!

***

Photo credit: [Max Pixel / CC0 public domain license]

***

August 5, 2019

August 5, 2019 By

This is an installment of my series of replies to an article by Dr. David Madison: a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, who has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. It’s called, “Things We Wish Jesus Hadn’t Said” (Debunking Christianity, 7-21-19). His words will be in blue below. Dr. Madison makes several “generic” digs at Jesus and Christianity, in the written portion (it details a series of 12 podcasts):

A challenge for Christians: If you’re so sure Jesus existed, then you have some explaining to do. A major frustration is that, while believers are indignant at all the talk about Jesus not existing, they don’t know the issues that fuel the skepticism—and are unwilling to inform themselves.

Yes, I’m up to the “challenge.” No problem at all. I’m not threatened or “scared” by this in the slightest. It’s what I do, as an apologist. The question is whether Dr. Madison is up to interacting with counter-critiques? Or will he act like the voluminous anti-theist atheist polemicist Bob Seidensticker?: who directly challenged me in one of his own comboxes to respond to his innumerable attack-pieces against Christianity and the Bible, and then courageously proceeded to utterly ignore my 35 specific critiques of his claims as of this writing. We shall soon see which course Dr. Madison will decide to take. Anyway, he also states in his post and combox:

[S]o many of the words of Jesus are genuinely shocking. These words aren’t proclaimed much from the pulpit, . . . Hence the folks in the pews have absorbed and adored an idealized Jesus. Christian apologists make their livings refiguring so many of the things Jesus supposedly said.

The gospels are riddled with contradictions and bad theology, and Jesus is so frequently depicted as a cult fanatic—because cult fanatics wrote the gospels. We see Jesus only through their theological filters. I just want to grab hold of Christian heads (standing behind them, with a hand on each ear) and force them to look straight ahead, unflinchingly, at the gospels, and then ask “Tell me what you see!” uncoached by apologist specialists, i.e., priests and pastors, who’ve had a lot of practice making bad texts look good. . . . I DO say, “Deal with the really bad stuff in the gospels.” Are you SURE you’ve not make a big mistake endorsing this particular Lord and Savior? That’s the whole point of this series of Flash Podcasts, because a helluva lot of Christians would agree, right away, that these quotes are bad news—if no one told then that they’ve been attributed to Jesus.

Of course, Dr. Madison — good anti-theist atheist that he is — takes the view that we are not at all sure whether Jesus in fact said anything recorded in the Gospels in the first place. I don’t play that game, because there is no end to it. It’s like trying to pin jello to the wall. The atheist always has their convenient out (when refuted in argument about some biblical text) that Jesus never said it anyway [wink wink and sly patronizing grin], and/or that the biblical text in question was simply added later by dishonest ultra-biased Christian partisans and propagandists. It’s a silly and ultimately intellectually dishonest game, and so I always refuse to play it with atheists or anyone else, because there is no way to “win” with such an absurdly stacked, purely subjective deck.

In my defense of biblical texts, I start with the assumption that the manuscripts we have are quite sufficient for us to know what is in the Bible (believe it or not). Going on from there, I simply defend particular [supposedly “difficult”] texts, and note with appropriate argumentation, that “here, the Bible teaches so-and-so,” etc. I deal with the texts as they exist. I don’t get into the endlessly arbitrary, subjective games that atheists and theologically liberal biblical skeptics play with the texts, in their self-serving textual criticism.

Dr. Madison himself (fortunately) grants my outlook in terms of practical “x vs. y” debate purposes: “For the sake of argument, I’m willing to say, okay, Jesus was real and, yes, we have gospels that tell the story.” And in the combox: “So, we can go along with their insistence that he did exist. We’ll play on their field, i.e., the gospels.”

Good! So we shall examine his cherry-picked texts and see whether his interpretations of them can stand up to scrutiny. He is issuing challenges, and I as an apologist will be dishing a bunch of my own right back to him. Two can play this game. I will be dealing honestly with his challenges. Will he return the favor, and engage in serious and substantive dialogue? Again, we’ll soon know what his reaction will be. A true dialogue is of a confident, inquisitive, “nothing to fear and everything to gain” back-and-forth and interactive nature, not merely “ships passing in the night” or what I call “mutual monologue.”

*****

Dr. Madison’s fifth podcast of twelve is entitled: “On Mark 10:29-30, on Jesus’ promise of a hundred-fold return if people give up families and houses.” Here is that passage:

Mark 10:29-30 (RSV) Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, [30] who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. 

All the Gospel writers were propagandists for the early Jesus cult. They wanted followers who would be loyal to nothing but the cult. Not even family should matter. . . . This is what cult fanatics do and say. They make outrageous promises . . . Christianity has specialized in this deception, as has so many other cults throughout the ages. . . . This Jesus quote is utterly mindless . . . Now Jesus enthusiasts, Jesus defenders may say that this is just exaggeration to make a point. But it falls into the pattern of cult leaders making wild promises to sucker people in. This is religion at its worst: right there in the Gospel.

Protestant apologist Glenn Miller responds to this sort of charge in his article, “Jesus versus Family Values?” (1994):

  1. This is not an ‘updated’ set at all…the OT is replete with similar passages in which one’s commitment to God must supercede all other relationships (so Deut 13, where family entices someone to violate the covenant with Yahweh, or I Samuel 2, where the priest Eli is judged by God for ‘honoring his sons more than Me’–with the attendant de-moralization of the nation). If one’s relationship with God is the primal and ultimate relationship in one’s existence, then from the relationship will develop the strength, commitment, and wisdom to grow healthy relationships with family…the biblical witness is consistent in this throughout…
  2. Also, in the times of Jesus, as he is inaugurating the New Covenant, there were some calls to radical forms of discipleship. The apostles were called to ‘abnormal service’, but were never free to neglect their responsibilities to their families…For example, Peter brought Jesus to his sick mother-in-law (Matt 8) and most of the apostles traveled with their wives during their itinerant ministries (I Cor 9.5)…if someone had to ‘leave’ it was typically due to radical disagreement over basic values–but we are not given the option of not providing for the needs of those left behind.
  3. In some cases, people whose lives were touched by Jesus wanted to leave family and travel with him, but he instructed them to go back and minister to their families (e.g. Mrk 5.19)
  4. But for all these qualifications, it still must be maintained that God must form the core priority over all priorities (for the balance and strength needed to be able to meet all priorities)

Catholics would say that this refers to what we call the “evangelical counsels.” Jesus is not making this scenario mandatory for all followers. He simply cites the fact regarding certain highly devoted Christians: “there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake.” Parallel verse Luke 18:29 phrases it as “there is no man who has left” while the corresponding Matthew 19:29 reads “every one who has left”. This is the language of voluntary heroic renunciation, not universal requirement. It’s a vast difference. And it demolishes Dr. Madison’s present insinuation.

And that puts the lie to the derogatory references to Christianity as a “cult” repeatedly made by Dr. Madison in his podcasts. If the intention of either a real Jesus or the supposed evangelist-“propagandists” for an imaginary “Jesus” was to require this extreme sacrificial renunciation of everyone, then the text would have plainly stated and required that. What would have prevented a bunch of lying deceivers from doing that?

But it doesn’t, and one should note also that Jesus said this in direct response to his leading disciple, Peter, having said, “Lo, we have left everything and followed you.” He didn’t completely forsake his entire family, because Jesus healed his mother-in-law (Matthew 8:14-15). To hear Dr. Madison tell it, Jesus should have said, “why do you mention and bring Me to your sick mother-in-law? Did I not tell you to hate your families and utterly forget about them [see my first reply], in order to follow Me?” But He didn’t do that, did He? He healed her.

And this is consistent with other passages having to do with the evangelical counsels (see a great explanation in the Catholic Encyclopedia). For example, Jesus said:

Matthew 19:9-12 And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery.” [10] The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is not expedient to marry.” [11] But he said to them, “Not all men can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. [12] For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it.” 

The Apostle Paul teaches the same thing: marriage is the usual norm, but in some cases, it is good to sacrifice good and holy marriage for the sake of Christian service:

Marriage

1 Corinthians 7:2 But because of the temptation to immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. 

1 Corinthians 7:9 But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion. 

1 Corinthians 7:28 But if you marry, you do not sin, . . . 

1 Corinthians 7:36 If any one thinks that he is not behaving properly toward his betrothed, if his passions are strong, and it has to be, let him do as he wishes: let them marry — it is no sin.

1 Corinthians 7:38 So that he who marries his betrothed does well; . . . 

1 Corinthians 9:5 Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a wife, as the other apostles . . . ?

Voluntary and Heroic Celibacy

1 Corinthians 7:7-8 I wish that all were as I myself am [single / celibate]. But each has his own special gift from God, one of one kind and one of another. [8] To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do.

1 Corinthians 7:32, 35 I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; . . . [35] I say this for your own benefit, not to lay any restraint upon you, but to promote good order and to secure your undivided devotion to the Lord. 

1 Corinthians 7:38 . . . he who refrains from marriage will do better. 

1 Corinthians 9:15 . . . I have made no use of any of these rights . . . 

Freedom to Follow One’s Own Life Choices and Callings

1 Corinthians 7:17 Only, let every one lead the life which the Lord has assigned to him, and in which God has called him. . . . 

This is the furthest thing from mandatory requirements, forcing every Christian to give up the pleasures of family and married life. To find that, one must look to the ancient Gnostics, who taught that sex was literally evil. That has never been mainstream Christian (and especially not Catholic) teaching. One could note fringe sects like the Shakers, who required celibacy of all members. Of course, that was a view destined to render them extinct, as they pretty much are today. At its height in the mid-19th century, it only had 6,000 adherents. Today there is exactly one remaining community in Maine. It has two members.

Dr. Madison seems to think that Mark and Luke came up with this tyrannical requirement that every Christian ought to utterly forsake his or her family. That would (if it had ever actually obtained) have reduced Christianity to the status of the tiny Shaker sect, which is historically ridiculous, just as this entire podcast and what it insinuates is beyond ludicrous.

***

Photo credit: The Healing of Peter’s Mother-in-law, by James Tissot (1836-1902) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

***

 

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