Some people think they know where history is taking us and are quite happy to declare boom-booms on those who take exception, the boom-booms declared with a long finger pointing at them with the accusation they will be on the “wrong side of history” or, perhaps more damaging, they will be “left behind” or “irrelevant.”

The irony is that in a world where “manifest destiny” or “discerning God’s plan for America” or even connecting something bad (9/11) with something else bad (same-sex sins) are objects of scorn, it is more than a little surprising that we now have some who know where history is going. It comes from those on the Left and the Right.

From the Left, from Lynn Stuart Parramore, we get this observation about where history is going: religion is dying, so cheer up secularist:

With fire-breathing religion figuring anew in global conflicts, and political discussions at home often dominated by the nuttery of the Christian right, you might get the sense that somebody’s god is ready to mug you around every street corner. But if you’re the type who doesn’t like to hang your hat on organized religion, here’s a bit of good news: In America, your numbers are growing.

There are more religiously unaffiliated people in the U.S. today than ever before. Starting in the 1980s, a variety of polls using different methodologies have come to the same conclusion: people who do not identify with religious labels are on the rise, perhaps even doubling in that time frame.

Some call them “nones”: agnostics, atheists, deists, secular humanists, general humanists, and people who just don’t care to identify with any religious group. It’s not exactly correct to call them nonbelievers, because some still have faith and spirituality in some sense or another. A 2012 Pew study noted that 30 percent of these people believe in “God or universal spirit” and around 20 percent even pray every day. But according to the latest research, Americans checking the “none of the above” box will make up an increasingly important force in the country. Other groups, like born-again evangelicals, have grown more percentage-wise, but the nones have them beat in absolute numbers.

The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute has documented this sea change in its American Values Atlas, which it released last Wednesday. The fascinating study provides demographic, religious and political data based on surveys conducted throughout 2014. According to PRRI director of research Dan Cox, “The U.S. religious landscape is undergoing a dramatic transformation that is fundamentally reshaping American politics and culture.”

But John Gray, who points to the progressive theory of history at work in Sam Harris in an article in The Guardian, called “What Scares the New Atheists,” thinks the opposite might be the case so there is less cheer for the secularist here:

Harris’s militancy in asserting these values seems to be largely a reaction to Islamist terrorism. For secular liberals of his generation, the shock of the 11 September attacks went beyond the atrocious loss of life they entailed. The effect of the attacks was to place a question mark over the belief that their values were spreading – slowly, and at times fitfully, but in the long run irresistibly – throughout the world. As society became ever more reliant on science, they had assumed, religion would inexorably decline. No doubt the process would be bumpy, and pockets of irrationality would linger on the margins of modern life; but religion would dwindle away as a factor in human conflict. The road would be long and winding. But the grand march of secular reason would continue, with more and more societies joining the modern west in marginalising religion. Someday, religious belief would be no more important than personal hobbies or ethnic cuisines.

Today, it’s clear that no grand march is under way. 

Yes, Sam Harris more or less subscribes to a secularization theory that pretends to know where history is going but the facts are not all in his corner. What’s clear to Parramore is not clear to Gray.

And from the strident Right Jeannine Pirro overtly asks why President Obama accuses his opponents of being on the “wrong side of history,” which means both the President and Pirro know what is the “right side of history” and where it is headed:

You know Mr. President, why does it feel like you’re on the wrong side of things, on the wrong side of history? Why are you not working with Egypt and Jordan to eliminate ISIS. Both are Arab Muslim nations willing to identify the enemy as Islamic extremists.

Evidently Pirro knows where history is headed too, and it is in the opposite direction of Parramore and the President (as she constructs him).

I hear the same claim about the “right side of history” and the “wrong side of history” in the same-sex marriage or same-sex relations in the church crowds.

I wonder about this argument, this argument about the “right side of history.” No, in fact, I don’t wonder. It’s wrong. Here are my reasons why those who know where history are wrong:

1. They make history inevitable progress in their direction. This is simple hermeneutics, or put more simple, it’s hermeneutical colonialism. In fact, those who know the “right side of history” and the “wrong side of history” are judgmentalists through and through. They not only know history is moving where they are or want to be but they sit in judgment on all those who disagree. They are censorious — and both Parramore and Pirro illustrate the point.

2. They make history presentist. That is, what is happening now is not only progressive improvement but what is now is always better than what was before. Which means, far more often the advocates are wind sniffers who, now having counted up the tilt of numbers, have thrown in their lot and are ready to sanctify it with this specious argument that is is where “history is going.” We should pause only for a moment to know that presentist arguments would have justified — in other days — slavery, Stalinism and Hitlerism, and the inequality of African Americans, women and undocumented workers.

3. They destroy biblical eschatology. Instead of taking their cues from the biblical vision of the kingdom of God in the future (where Jesus will be Lord over all in consummation) they ask Jesus to join their presentist historical progressivisms and so sanctify their discernments as God’s divine plan. Tom Wright in some of his newest books — both Surprised by Scripture and Simply Good News — has taken shots at this theory of progress and countered with a kingdom vision of where history is actually headed.

4. They claim omniscience. Not overtly but the subtler form is all the more noticeable. When you can tell us where history has been and where it is headed, and you can say you are on that side, you have just made a claim bigger than Hegelian theories of the Spirit. You claim, like Deuteronomy, that you know the divine mechanisms at work in history and you pronounce some awful boom-booms on those who will not join. That is, these folks stand in with prophetic words from God.

5. They claim omniscience by assuming a futurist stance where all things will be as they think. It won’t be, and all history proves this. Whether one is a utopian or a postmillennialists, history doesn’t cooperate. Nor will it. Why? There are too many dissenters. That’s a very good thing.

6. They destroy both diversity and freedom. I give two examples: Back in the early decades of the 20th Century some American thinkers and literati knew where history was headed — toward socialism and communism. When it turned up vicious, brutal and murderous, they didn’t always back down but many sulked off to a quiet corners. Others switched sides. Back in the 70s and 80s some conservatives thought the church would be destroyed if women were allowed to be priests or pastors and some liberals thought it would save the gospel and the church and religion in America, and where are we now? Some are against and some are for women pastors. (The same will be the case with same-sex relations in the church and America — diversity.) But there’s a sinister side in all this: to announce that history is headed in any direction is to tell those who don’t agree with that side that their freedom to disbelieve is in jeopardy. It takes all kinds to compose a world and the “wrong/right side of history” people need to defend freedoms. We need freedom and freedom will mean diversity, and that’s what the world is about.

7. They seek to centralize their vision in order to impose conformity rather than to solicit the majority view based on the freedom of choice. These specious historians are top-down thinkers, whether from the Left or the Right. Common response to failure are to press even harder for the centralized vision and to blame the failure on the dissenters. The way to win is to get more votes, make more laws, and impose the laws on the blinkered dissenters. What this produces is resentment, and resentment will find a way for expression.

Posted originally at this site on March 9.

One of the common objections to evolutionary creation relates to the lack of evidence for macro-evolution as opposed to micro-evolution. Most people have no problem with evolution of a sort producing variation within species. Many will even accept the evolutionary formation of new closely related species (e.g. domestic dogs, wild dogs, wolves, foxes, jackals, and coyotes from a dog-like predecessor). But whales from even-toed ungulates (i.e. the group that includes pigs, camels, and hippos)?  This strains credulity. The evidence for common descent, however, is powerful, buried in the bones and the genes. This is worth a closer look. Today I am going to start a series that looks more closely at the evidence, beginning with Robert Asher’s book Evolution and Belief: Confessions of a Religious Paleontologist.  Dr. Robert Asher is Curator of Vertebrates in the Museum of Zoology at the University of Cambridge.  His research focuses on the morphology and interrelationships of living and extinct mammals.   His book provides a fascinating and quite readable explanation of the evidence for evolution, concentrating on examples in mammalian evolution (his area of expertise).

But what does this have to do with the virgin birth?

The first chapter of Evolution and Belief looks at the relationship between science and religion. Asher discusses such issues as agency and cause, methodological naturalism, and design.  One of the examples that Asher uses is the virgin birth. His take on this is quite different from that of most evangelicals, but then Asher is not an evangelical, and like many he explicitly disavows the designation.

Robert Asher is not an atheist; he does not rule out the existence of the supernatural or spiritual. He is, as he describes himself, a religious paleontologist.  He sees design in creation, but doesn’t see design and randomness as opposites.

The equations “purpose = God” and “randomness = atheism” are contingent upon some preconceived notion of order, and we humans have no choice but to understand “order” from our own desperately parochial perspective. The fact that we find it difficult to appreciate the creative power of apparent randomness does not mean that God suffers from this problem too. This very simple observation was made by Darwin in all six editions of the Origin: “We  naturally infer that [complex organs have] been formed by a somewhat analogous process [to human design]. But may not this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man?”

… Recognizing that the “intelligence” of a creator applied to phenomena such as the origin of life or the cosmos – issues wholly beyond the scope of evolutionary biology – might work through techniques that resemble randomness to a human strikes me as perfectly reasonable, even if it is not amenable to rational (dis)proof. In contrast, requiring that God’s style of invention has to resemble our own, as do many creationists and atheists alike, seems extraordinarily presumptuous and vain. (p. 14)

At the end of the chapter he turns the discussion to miracles, and especially the miracle of the virgin birth of Jesus.

Matthew 1:18 relates the claim:

This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit.

Joseph responds to Mary’s pregnancy by planning to divorce her and an angel in a dream reiterates the claim “what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” Luke 1:34-35 records Mary’s response when told she would conceive and give birth to a son, the Messiah.

“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?” The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.

The very idea of a miraculous conception, that a virgin conceived and bore a son, hits a nerve in our secular Western society – both modern and postmodern. Frankly is it unscientific.  Robert Asher does not see acceptance of the virgin birth as traditionally understood to be either reasonable or necessary. This doesn’t mean that he throws the Bible out. On the contrary he sees the gospels as basically trustworthy with much of of the New Testament (especially Paul’s letters and Mark’s gospel) written “well within the range of an oral tradition based on eyewitness accounts.” (p. 24) Asher’s reasoning about the virgin birth is rooted in his understanding of cause and effect in science.

However, does this enable me to believe in an actual human being born of a virgin? No it does not – at least not in a biological sense, which is how most people understand this question and how, therefore, I should answer it. Female humans do not give birth unless they have been inseminated. As he was a human being, I infer based on what I know of biology that Christ would have developed in His mother’s womb, from zygote to morula to embryo to fetus. … (p. 24)

Everything that I understand about human biology indicates that He, too, had a biological father. There is no doubt, however, that this father was perceived as divine by his followers. As a human being, of course Christ had a biological father; it is not rational to believe otherwise. … Simply stated, Christianity is my faith. It is not an unshakable faith, nor do I believe literally in many parts of the Bible. Indeed, much of the text of this chapter disqualifies me as a theist Christian by most evangelical standards. Nevertheless, Christianity seems to me a legitimate account of the agency behind life, and while the causes of life’s diversity are fascinating, they are not of immediate relevance to this faith. (p. 25)

This paragraph from Asher is rooted in a discussion of miracles, because the virgin birth, or more accurately virginal conception, if true in a biological sense, is a miracle. It is an intervention by God into the natural order. Jesus was fully human, therefore he carried DNA that came from two sources – male (he had a Y chromosome) and female (Mary’s we presume).  If the male source didn’t come from Joseph in the usual way it had to come from somewhere. Whose DNA was it? Would it have traced to Joseph? Was it something else entirely synthesized by God for this purpose? Asher doesn’t bring this question up specifically, but he does focus in on the question of intervention. Rather than quote a large segment I will choose a few particularly pertinent sections:

Let me phrase this differently. Do I believe in miracles? If by “miracle” you mean a spontaneous failure of a natural law due to the contrary influence of some supernatural agency, then no. … However, this is not at all the same thing as denying the existence of a divinity, including the Christian sort. … The “do you believe in miracles?” question assumes an opposition between “nature” and “god” that is wholly our own fabrication, as if the two compete with one another for our attention. This question presumes a philosophy that the two things are independent, even antagonistic – but I don’t think they are. Rather one is an expression of the other. God cannot “intrude” into the normal operation of nature because, the way I see it, nature is a part of God; it represents God’s thought, or laws, in action. He cannot intrude upon himself. (p. 25-26)

Asher’s view of the virgin birth is shaped by his understanding of biology, of cause and effect, and by his view of God. There are scientific, philosophical, and theological reasons to question the traditional view of the virgin birth.

Another perspective. There are other ways to look at the issues surrounding the virgin birth though. The Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne comes to a different conclusion in his short book Testing Scripture. Dr. Polkinghorne is a scientist, a theoretical physicist and Professor at Cambridge before he became an Anglican priest.  He understands the scientific concepts of cause and effect. He takes Scripture seriously, but not with the assumptions of inerrancy common in American evangelicalism.  Still, Dr. Polkinghorne accepts the virginal conception of Jesus.

Luke, very explicitly in his story of the Annunciation (1.34-35), and Matthew, more obliquely (1.18), both assert the virginal conception of Jesus. Christian tradition has attached great significance to this, often rather inaccurately calling it the ‘virgin birth’. Yet in the New Testament it seems nowhere as widely significant as the Resurrection. Paul is content to simply lay stress on Jesus’ solidarity with humanity: ‘God sent his Son, born of woman, born under the law’ (Galatians 4.4). The theological importance of the virginal conception lies in its lending emphasis to the presence of a total divine initiative in the coming of Jesus, even if this truth is much more frequently expressed by the New Testament writers simply in the language of his having been sent. Jesus was not opportunistically co-opted for God’s purpose when he was found to be suitable, but he was part of that purpose from the start. The virginal conception is a powerful myth, and I believe that in the religion of the Incarnation the power of story fuses with the power of a true story, so that the great Christian myths are enacted myths. On this basis, I find myself able to believe in the virgin birth, even if the motivating evidence is less extensive than for the belief in the Resurrection. (p. 68-69 Testing Scripture)

Interaction not Intervention. Robert Asher sees the virginal conception as proposing an intervention by God and rejects it on this basis. John Polkinghorne looks behind the  statements at the reason for the story.  One of the most important criterion for thinking through the incredible claims in scripture is God’s interaction with his creatures rather than his intervention in his creation. The miracles ring true when they enhance our understanding of the interaction of God with his people in divine self-revelation. The virginal conception is part of the Incarnation, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us”. The magnificent early Christian hymns quoted by Paul in Col 1.15-20 and Phil 2.6-11 catch the essence of this enacted myth as well. Where did the male DNA come from? I rather expect that if we could do the genetic testing it would trace back to Joseph. After all, the Messiah comes from the house and lineage of David. The genealogies in Matthew and Luke both run from Joseph to David.  But Jesus was not merely a man, “opportunistically co-opted for God’s purpose.”  He is the Word become flesh.

It makes no sense to try to defend the virginal conception, the resurrection, or any of the other signs or miracles related in the New Testament, separate from the story of the Gospel, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as God’s Messiah. In the context of God’s mission within his creation the miracles make sense. Separate from this they will never make sense.

Is there an important distinction between intervention and interaction?

Why do you believe in the virginal conception? Or if you don’t, why not?

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net.

If interested you can subscribe to a full text feed of my posts at Musings on Science and Theology.

The showdown in Pauline scholarship today is between the new perspective, in particular as articulated in the narratival theology of NT Wright, and apocalyptic theology as articulated by J. Louis Martyn and those who follow him (e.g., M. de Boer, B. Gaventa, D. Campbell). Samuel Adams, in his new book The Reality of God and Historical Method, weighs in at the level of method — historical method vs. theological method. His method is far closer to the theologians Karl Barth and T.F. Torrance than to any historian. His contention is that the historical method of NT Wright cannot get to the theology we need.

Before we get to Adams’ take on apocalyptic theology as he understands it, I must register a methodological failure on his part and then a fear I have of his approach. Here’s how Samuel V. Adams fails NT Wright. Adams’ concern is whether NT Wright’s critical realism method is adequate or sufficient for articulating theology. What Adams does not do is examine where Wright actually does theology: Why not use Wright’s Surprised by Hope or Simply Christian or even his After You Believe? What Adams fails to do is engage Wright where he does theology and instead imputes a theology to him.

My fear? That apocalyptic theology too much looks like a kind of gnosticism. That is, the only way to know God is by knowing what apocalyptic theologians know, and what this means is that one must be born again to know this kind of knowing. (This is the second section’s emphasis of this chp.) That is, soteriology and reconciliation are pre-conditions for knowing. Perhaps I overstate, but I must register this fear of the approach. There is then an emphasis on God’s revelation in Christ and less emphasis on the incarnation as a reality in history — and God trusting us to make sense of that incarnated reality. Is there not at work in a historian like Wright the belief that God can reveal himself in history — pre NT writings in fact — in Jesus and that humans are accountable to make sense of what they see and what they hear. 

Adams explains “Apocalyptic, Continuity and Discontinuity: Soteriological Implications for a Theology of History” in chp. 3. Adams:

In its simplest form, the argument of this and the following chapter is that an apocalyptic theology is a truly theological commitment to the reality of God for theology. And this reality affects every discipline related to theology. For hermeneutics, this means that revelation contextualizes us. For epistemology, this means locating theological knowledge in the historical event of Jesus the Messiah, an event that is soteriologically defined and so known only in the actuality of reconciliation. £01 history and anthropology, this means that Jesus’ ongoing historical subjectivity and his enhypostatic union with humanity in his singular human identity is central and determinative. For the individual who would know God, for the human who would be subject, the reality of God is only given as one participates in Christ’s knowledge, his humanity and his history, in and through the Spirit; and this can all be seen and known in terms of the Christian act of baptism2 with its controlling motif of death and resurrection (109).

Thus, on 110 Adams proposes how the Bible is to be read as an instance of “active passivity”:

This means that reading Scripture is a human act determined, not by general hermeneutical theory or rules of reading, but rather by the reality of the God who speaks in and through the Scriptures (110, but this has to be some kind of false dichotomy).

[Again,] :t. The only way of describing this in hermeneutical language is to work backward from Gods self-revelation to an understanding of what reading Scripture entails in the light of the primacy of the act of revelation (112).

So what then is “apocalyptic theology”? (The issue is that apocalyptic is a genre of literature and apocalypticism is a worldview, more or less, while apocalyptic theologians are redefining it.) Thus, Campbell:

When Martyn speaks of Paul’s apocalyptic gospel, he generally means to signal certain interrelated concerns: the gospel is visited upon Paul and his churches essentially unconditionally, by grace and by revelation. All Paul’s reasoning is conditioned in the light of this initial disclosure and hence proceeds “backward” …; the apostle’s epistemology is emphatically retrospective (114).

This is what brushes up against gnosticism somehow: what is known is by grace, only those who know this grace can know what needs to be known; all the others are wrong or left out in the dark. In other words, apocalyptic means revelational (114). Adams asks this question: “… where the gospel finds its contextual home. Does it rely on a prior understanding of a story, a narrative or worldview, of which it makes sense; or does its novelty sweep every story and context off the table and start all over again?” (115). [False dichotomy.] Thus, in spite of what apocalyptic means to historians,

The difference to which the apocalyptic theologians point is that, for them, apocalyptic names a unique event, the revelation of God in Jesus the Messiah, which brings with it its own self-determining context. This does not make sense hermeneutically unless the context is at once the condition, the gift of subjectivity to the knower, upon which the revelation is dependent (115).

[Hear this line then:] Apocalyptic theology denies, on theological grounds, the priority of the contextual axiom of hermeneutics (116).

Adams makes the important claim that this does not relativize history but its recontextualization (117). In fact, on the same page he says Wright himself provides a structure that permits this apocalyptic theology that creates a new reading of the Bible’s narrative, but which cannot be read forwards but only backwards. He offers “a more nuanced (1)-solution-plight (2) structure.” This he thinks Wright does not explore theologically or epistemologically enough. Play for play, now Adams seeks a similar kind of nuance:

Now, we need to be absolutely clear at this point. This does not mean that we somehow know Jesus apart from history, or outside of any cultural or linguistic context, or even worldview. And it does not mean that we must somehow speak of Jesus apart from his historical context—as if it makes sense to call Jesus Christ apart from the history of Israel. What it does mean is that this history is powerless to provide the context for understanding Jesus apart from the positive act of God unveiling himself and providing the condition of reconciled subjectivity to see and to know that unveiling (119). [Which means] Apart from Gods act of self-revelation in Jesus Christ, we cannot know him as he truly is, the God-man, because such knowledge cannot be had on the basis of historical or other forms of finite human knowing (119). [One might ask why that particular formation — God-man — is chosen to be the content of revelatory knowledge.]

Adams thus says it’s an issue of priorities: the hermeneutical approach, which is Wright’s critical realism, subjects God/Jesus to a human construct while the theological approach, which is the apocalyptic approach, will “subject all worldviews and contexts to the freedom of God’s sovereignty over his own self-revelation” (119). It is important to Adams that a theological and epistemological apocalyptic theology be distanced from both literary apocalyptic (1 Enoch) and that kind of apocalyptic worldview. In the end, then, “apocalyptic theology” is to begin with God’s act of grace and salvation in Jesus Christ. Apocalyptic is an event.

There is a stubborn argument here that unless one admits into the epistemological process the content of Jesus as He Who makes sense of the whole, one cannot do history properly, while this stubborn commitment also means that that content cannot be known through the normal processes of reasoning (history in particular). It’s a very strong either-or with big red flags being thrown up. My reading of NT Wright’s four volume work has been that there is an already existing narrative that is already revelatory and that contains revelatory events that are continuous with the story of Jesus Christ (Jesus, Paul, Peter, John, et al) but that that already existing narrative experiences a powerful newness (a revelation, an apocalypse, an irruption, a discontinuity) in Jesus Christ by virtue of the resurrection and that new creation narrative leads the historian to see what was in the previous narrative all along but not seen well enough. In other words, there is for Wright an apocalyptic dimension that does not force the either-or one sees in Adams’ apocalyptic theology. Adams’ method, so it seems to me, poses a discontinuity with the existing narrative that renders the content of the new revelation de-historicized and dis-incarnated.

Many of you know my PhD supervisor (Doktorvater) was James D.G. Dunn, and I entered under his teaching in the midst of Jimmy’s famous Christology in the Making, in the introduction to which he mentioned his long term project — Christianity in the Making. Well, it’s done! And a huge congratulations from me and the Jesus Creed blog community to Jimmy for such a colossal accomplishment. Jesus Remembered and then Beginning from Jerusalem and now the big and thesis probing Neither Jew nor Greek: A Contested Identity. The three books — if read consecutively– take you from Jesus into the legacies of Paul, Peter and John.

This is one of the truly great academic accomplishments of the 20-21st Centuries.

I will begin a lengthy series of posts on NJNG beginning today, but it begins with an interview with Jimmy.

    On your first question:  I confess that as I began to work on NJNG I wondered whether I might be rounding it off with a §50.   I didn’t aim for that goal and simply followed out the sequence of impacts from the first generation through the next 100+ years.   §§41-44 for the first ‘impact’ made it doubtful whether the rest could be laid out in only 6 more chapters.   But after §§45-46 it soon became evident that I need give only one chapter to each of Paul, Peter and John.   So that, quite naturally, the final summary and reflection would be §50.   Not really very important, but I confess to feeling rather good about it!

What surprised you most as you wrote the three volumes? or at least NJNG

What surprised me most?   Several things, I guess.

One was the character of the Synoptic tradition:  that in the ‘same but different’ formats, the ‘same’ enabled us to gain a very clear picture of Jesus and the impact he made in his ministry, and the ‘different’ allowed us to see how that shared memory was used and reflected on in a limited way, ‘limited’ as compared with John and subsequent Gospels.   It was that sense of the Synoptic tradition as deeply respected and yet freely formulated which gave me a strong sense of the direct continuity between Jesus and the first generation of Christians and the direct continuity between Jesus and the Synoptic tradition.   My objection to so many attempts to explain the Synoptic material is that the focus is far too much on what has been read back into the tradition and too little on the tradition as evidence of the impact and continuing impact of Jesus on his disciples and first generation followers.

Another was the controversial character of the impact of Paul.   His mission to take the gospel to Gentiles transformed the movement which became ‘Christianity’.   But it was also an important factor in the earliest form of the movement, ‘Jewish Christianity’ being little by little ‘left behind’ until it ‘fell off’ and Christianity became too much affected by a growing anti-Judaism.   Was Paul entirely a good thing?   We, as Gentiles, say, Yes, of course.   But was something important, even vital to ‘Christianity’ left behind? So, what did Christianity lose when it lost ‘Jewish Christianity’ and lost too much the sense of its Jewishness?

I was also fascinated by the fact that so little can really be said about Peter in the post-Easter days – and yet he was regarded so highly (first Pope and all that).   Was he indeed a ‘bridge man’ between the more controversial figures, Paul and James?

And John.   With the freedom he displayed in presenting Jesus, what doors did he open, where does he take us?   Too bad, I’ve been saying locally, now that we worship in our local CofE, that in lectionary terms we work on a three year cycle – one of the Synoptics each year, but never John providing the principal sequence – a sign that he ‘fits’ only awkwardly?
 

So says Carry Nieuwhof:

Of all the mysteries that shouldn’t be mysteries, why most churches remain small is perhaps the greatest.

I’m sure there are a few leaders who want to keep their churches small, or who don’t care about growth.

But most small church leaders and pastors I meet actually want to reach more people. They want to see their mission fully realized. They hope and pray for the day when they can reach as many people as possible in their community.

But that’s simply not reality.

The Barna group reports the average Protestant church size in America as 89 adults. 60% of protestant churches have less than 100 adults in attendance. Only 2% have over 1000 adults attending.

As a result, the dreams of pastors of most small and even mid-sized churches go unrealized. Why?

I outlined 8 reasons most churches never break the 200 attendance mark in this post, but today I want to drill down deeper on one that kills almost every church and pastor: pastoral care.

If pastors could figure out how to better tackle the issue of pastoral care, I’m convinced many more churches would grow….

So how do you deal with this?  Have the courage to shift care to the congregation.

The best answer I know of for pastoral care in a larger church is to teach people to care for each other in groups.

Groups based care isn’t just practical. It’s biblical.

It’s thoroughly biblical: going back to Exodus 18, when Jethro confronted Moses about doing everything himself.

Even Jesus adopted the model of group care, moving his large group of hundreds of  disciples into groups of seventy, twelve, three, and then one.

A clip is circulating of Robert Jeffress, pastor of FBC Dallas, using Romans 13 to argue that the Christian response to the Paris attacks is “borders and bombs.” It got me curious about Romans 13, so I went back to my trusty New Interpreter’s Bible to see what the trusty N.T. Wright has to say about it. Below is a summary of Wright’s commentary, with a few reflections on them and Jeffress’ comments in light of them.

Wright argues that, despite some understandable arguments to the contrary, Romans 13 is in fact a general statement about ruling authorities. In essence, in this time between the times where God’s new world is on its way but not quite here, government is something God has put in place to preserve some measure of justice and order and to prevent the world from falling into complete anarchy and chaos. To disagree with this general sentiment is to endorse actual anarchy, which, on the whole, is far worse than government, even though government can certainly go horribly wrong.

That said, this is a general statement about governments in general and Paul, obviously, is not writing government a blank check, much less telling Christians they should obey government no matter what. A quick perusal of the book of Acts reveals a very complex relationship between the Christian and “government.” The apostles clearly defy their rulers when their rulers ask them to do something that violates faithfulness to Christ (Acts 4:23-31). Paul harshly condemns the high priest, and while he (kind of) apologizes for speaking so sharply once he is told he is speaking to the high priest, he certainly doesn’t take back the content of his rebuke (Acts 23:1-5).

And this is the tension Paul is negotiating. He has said things (both here in Romans and elsewhere) that completely subvert the gospel and rule of Rome and Caesar. He has made it clear that Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not. Wright’s proposal is that all of this could have led many Christians into a sort of over-realized eschatological anarchy in which Christians try to overthrow government in the name of Christ. He points to the riots under Claudius and Jewish revolutionaries as examples of actions the early Christians might be tempted to emulate. That, claims Wright, is why Paul is saying this particular thing to these particular people: “Romans 13:1-7 issues commands that are so obvious that they only make sense if there might be some reason in the air not to obey the civic authorities.”[1]

In summary, Romans 13:1-7 is a general statement about the general good of governments, spoken to remind Roman Christians that even in a world where Jesus and not Caesar is Lord, Caesar still has a place: “This is Paul’s basic point—government qua government is intended by God and should in principle command submission from Christian and non-Christian alike.”[2]  So far, so good. Now things get tricky.

In Wright’s mind, Romans 13 is of very little relevance to issues of just war; issues of nations going outside their borders to employ violence in the name of justice: “Romans 13:1-7 is about the running of civic communities, and the duty of Christians toward them. It does not mention or allude to the interactions between difference civic communities or nations. It was because of this that later Christians developed a theory of ‘just war’ to argue at a new level that under certain circumstances it may be right to defend the interests of a nation or community, by force if necessary…”[3]

Simply put, when we ask Just War questions of Paul in Romans 13, we are asking questions Paul probably did not have the ability to ask. Obviously, the modern notion of the nation/state was simply not something for which Paul had a category.[4] As is often the case, we are going to the Bible looking for an answer to a question that the writer did not know how to ask, much less answer. So while we might well make reasonable arguments for Just War, we cannot use Romans 13 to do it, at least not in simplistic fashion. This seems to be precisely what Jeffress is doing—taking massive hops, skips, and jumps that fail basic principles of exegesis. That or he has worked through it and just completely fails to show his work.

Another question we wish Paul addressed directly here is what to do when the governing authorities are evil and wicked and clearly violating God’s justice. This question is particularly important for us, living as we are in the blood-stained aftermath of so many totalitarian governments. We, rightfully, cringe at the notion of Nazi Germany being a “servant of God” to whom we should submit.[5] And as our African-American brothers and sisters have pointed out, it is clearly not always the case that rulers are only a cause of fear when you are doing wrong. Sometimes they are a cause of fear if your skin is a certain color.

While Paul fails to directly address this question, we ought not pretend he was naïve to its existence. Paul knew what it was like to suffer before authority wielded in unjust ways, as did Christ. We’re left to speculate, but given the example of Paul and Christ, it seems Christians have strong ground to rebel against the injustices of government, all the way to the point of martyrdom, but not to the point of anarchy (though I’m very open and sympathetic here to the criticisms of many liberation theologians who claim this doesn’t go far enough, at least in some circumstances). Again, the general “God-ordained-ness” of governments does not assume governments always act justly and are above rebuke. Martin Luther King Jr.’s rebellion against state and local governments is one such example.

Finally, a point where I feel Wright doesn’t swing and miss so much as he fails to swing all together…

The tension of Romans 12:14-21 and Romans 13:1-7 is palpable. In Romans 12:14-21, Christians are told to bless those who persecute them, never pay back evil for evil to anyone, never take vengeance. It is said in absolute terms. Then comes Romans 13 and its words about God bringing wrath on evildoers via government. How do we reconcile this?

Wright contends Romans 12:14-21 condemns private vengeance, which can be individual or corporate (in the form of, say, a lynch mob).[6] Given that he feels “private vengeance” can also be corporate, we should be clear that private doesn’t just mean personal, but any vengeance not done by legitimate government authorities.

And here’s why I feel Wright fails to swing. He seems to imply that Romans 12:14-21 is a piece of general advice to all people; namely, vengeance/wrath “is the point at which the authority [government] must do what the private individual may not do.”[7] But (and here’s the key point) Romans is not a letter filled with general advice to all people; it is a letter written to Christians. Romans 12:14-21 is not advice for all private individuals; it is advice for all Christians. Paul is not saying, “Government inflicts the wrath that private individuals aren’t allowed to.” Paul is saying, “Christians do not take vengeance; government does.”

This of course begs that nagging question regarding a Christian’s relationship to government and whether or not a Christian, who is never to pay back evil for evil to anyone (12:17), can faithfully participate in a government that is called to do this precise thing (13:4). It is difficult for me to imagine Paul telling Christians to never repay evil for evil to anyone as “private individuals” and then forget about all that when it came to participating in government. Or in Jeffress’ terms, I cannot imagine Paul telling Christians, “As individuals, advocate turning the other cheek. As American citizens, advocate bombing the hell out of ISIS.”[8] It is tough to avoid the conclusion that Romans 13 most likely says something close to the exact opposite of what Jeffress claims it says.

There are no easy answers here, and perhaps that’s why Wright decides to let the pitch go by.[9] Some find arguments from silence compelling (i.e. Peter doesn’t tell Cornelius to quit his job as a centurion, ergo, God is ok with it). I do not. Scripture’s clear words against Christians participating in violence make a much stronger argument than a silence or two. Others have suggested Paul could not conceive of the possibility of a Christian serving in government, given his historical situation. I think there’s lots of truth there, though I’m unsure of its implications. Others point out that there are non-lethal ways of enforcing justice and bringing wrath on evildoers and Christians should work in government to move government in that direction. I’m open to that.

Personally, I’m very sympathetic to those who fear what would happen if Christians radically embraced non-violence and withdrew from government to whatever degree involvement in government was involvement in bearing the sword in the name of vengeance. I don’t quite know what that would mean or look like. It scares me. But my fears and your fears do not get to neuter what the text says and a Christian response to Paris deserves better exegesis. Perhaps we will find sound, Christian reasons to buck (what appears at least) to be the clear teaching of Scripture, but if we are to do so, we need to be far clearer about the grounds for such a decision.

In the end, I’m just another person with no easy answers but the failure of many Christian leaders to clearly articulate the questions is frustrating. My suggestion: if we want to see some bombs dropped, then let’s cancel the next presidential debate and instead get Jeffress, Wright, and Hauerwas in a room together!

[1] Wright, NIB, Romans, 722.

[2] 719.

[3] 720.

[4] 716.

[5] Or to feel the dilemma even more, if Romans 13 is a blanket divine endorsement of the authority of all governments, it’s difficult to see how ISIS is not a legitimate government appointed by God.

[6] 723.

[7] 721.

[8] To be fair, I’m assuming Jeffress thinks Christians can and should participate in government, but given that his Twitter tag for the clip explained his words as the Christian response to the Paris attacks, I think it’s a safe assumption.

[9] It probably also has something to do with his Anglican sensibilities.