Doomsday Approaches (RJS)

Last updated on: November 5, 2015 at 6:24 am By RJS

A couple of weeks ago I put up a post (Just the Facts Please) on Jonathan Hill’s short book Emerging Adulthood and Faith. This book describes some of his research into the faith evolution of young adults today – trying to separate the influence of stage of life from historical and generational effects. A wise response to the apparent exodus of younger adults from the church depends on the nature of these influences. Today I would like to look at the conclusions that Hill draws from his research.

Why do doomsday scenarios carry such appeal? Hill suggests three reasons:

“First, our own social experience strongly colors how we frame the problem and interpret the data, yet our personal experience can frequently be an unreliable guide.” (p. 61)

There is a distortion in perception that arises from the ways we receive data. Personal stories are powerful and true, but the ones that “stick” are the stories from the margins, not the mainstream. Hill points out that many Americans feel that violent crime is up while the data shows that homicide, for example, is markedly down since 1990 and at about the same level as the 1950’s. “All violent crime has been declining, yet public perception of crime—largely filtered through mass media and politicians—is systematically in error.” (p. 61-62) The stories told in the Christian community carry the same kind of bias.

Second, generating crises in the Church can be an efficient and effective way to mobilize the faithful to action. (p. 62)

Sociological study of social movements can identify techniques that succeed in building a community.

Elites must work on generating an interpretational framework that identifies a specific problem, then identifies the source(s) of the problem, and finally provides a potential solution in the form of collective action. Further, the entire interpretational framework must align with existing grievances in recruits, otherwise collective action will fail. The temptation, then, will be for leaders in the Church to frame concerns about the next generation of Christians in such a way as to result in action by the rank and file, even if these interpretations are not entirely accurate. (p. 62, emphasis added)

Grabbing onto a crisis works to build a cohesive following.

Last, there is a fairly large gap between the ideal concept of Christian faithfulness and the “lived religion” of ordinary
believers. (p. 62)

There is a tendency to idealize the past and see the current trends as a significant deviation. One thing the longitudinal studies show is that this is not really the case. While there is a clear generational loss of youth from the Catholic church the same cannot be said for Protestants, particularly “evangelical” Protestants. Beyond these longitudinal studies, there is a temptation to believe that the current state is the result of a serious religious decline and the historical evidence (although sketchy) doesn’t really support this. A so-called “Christian” nation didn’t necessarily mean deeper, or more wide-spread, devotion.

What about emerging adulthood? There is a real tendency for emerging adults to be less religious than either children or older adults. That it is primarily a stage of life issue rather than a generational change doesn’t make it less of an issue although it may change the approaches we should take. More discipleship, engagement, and community, less emphasis on the need for massive overhauls.

Hill looks at the sociological analysis of social scripts. Most emerging adults (or for that matter most people of any age) do not give much thought to the social scripts that define the parameters for their actions. These scripts are shaped by many different factors include family, schools, churches, and the mass media. Because there is a “faith script” in our culture that makes church something important for “a good and happy life,” it doesn’t really require attendance or involvement during the years of emerging adulthood. Hill notes that it is frustrating to interview emerging adults about this because they don’t really give coherent explanations. There is not an intentional walk away from faith practices, but they simply do not seem relevant for the stage of life.

How can a Church respond, providing a compelling counter-narrative? Hill suggests that we don’t need to make Christianity “relevant,” especially not by mimicking the forms of secular culture.

After all, that approach too often baptizes the very practices that need to be countered. …What this approach fails to recognize is that the very form taken by popular culture often contains tacit pictures of the good life and human flourishing. (p. 66)

One response should be to teach youth to read the cultural liturgies of the surrounding culture rather than to simply respond to or adopt them. Engage in discussions that question and teach our young (and older) people to think. This will happen when it comes from youth group, the overall orientation of the church, and most importantly, the family.

Hill offers some reflections:

The church is a place of Christian worship, and worship is something to which all of God’s people are called. Church is not about learning how to be a moral person (though that is what the dominant narrative they hear tells them); it is a place where immoral individuals go in order to receive the grace of God. It is a place where a people collectively profess how they have fallen short and are collectively pardoned though the cross. Worship places the gospel of grace at the center of life. It is a necessary source of continual sustenance for the Christian,
not an optional add-on to faith. (p. 68)

He concludes by noting that some of the social forces that lead to the absence of emerging adults from the church may be stronger than in the past, but they are not new. Both the church and the culture seem to reinforce each other … leading to a view that church (participating in this worshiping fellowship of Christians) is not really relevant for their season of life (raised, but not yet raising children of their own).

The only way to combat this is through recognizing, and countering, the ways that these beliefs were formed. Thankfully, there is a deep well of Christian teachings and practices that work to do just this. As we ponder how to deal with the contemporary challenges of emerging adults, perhaps it is time to turn away from the latest marketing technique and toward this ancient wisdom. (p. 69)

When doomsday approaches we need doomsday approaches. But these are not sustainable for the long haul, not in the life of an individual and not in the life of a church. Eventually they will fail to engage as we all tire out or move on. As a church, in worship, fellowship, discipleship, evangelism, there should be an intentional effort to engage and involve people of all ages and stages of life.

How can we develop a culture of community and engagement?

How can we involve emerging adults (and older adults) in our congregations?

What does it mean to be relevant?

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.

White Heresy, Black Heresy (by Austin Fischer)

Last updated on: November 5, 2015 at 6:18 am By Scot McKnight

White Heresy, Black Heresy (by Austin Fischer)

There’s a lot of talk about heresy nowadays. Much of it is sloppy—ad hominem accusations carelessly slung at those who have the audacity to disagree with us. But heresy is a helpful and inevitable concept, whether we think in terms of bounded sets (this belief is “out of bounds”) or centered sets (this belief is “a long way from center”). So I was delighted by Justin Holcomb’s cover page article in October’s Christianity Today: “How to Define Heresy.”

It was a great read—clear but charitable; simple but informed; reminding evangelicals of the centrality of things like the Nicene Creed. For example: “If a believer genuinely accepts the Nicene Creed, they should not be dubbed a heretic.” Amen!

But this morning I started re-reading James Cone’s black theology classic, God of the Oppressed, and received a startling reminder:

Heresy—as defined by white theology—and heresy—as defined by black theology—are two very different things.

White heresy (or what “official” Christianity would simply think of as heresy[1]) is all about wrong ideas. White heresy is about bad doctrines. White heresy is about attaching incorrect predicates to the noun “God.” White heresy is about orthodoxy. As Holcomb says, “Traditionally a heretic is someone who has compromised an essential doctrine…”

And this is an important way of defining heresy. We see it in the Bible. The zealous Jews who were teaching the Galatians they had to be circumcised appear to be singled out by Paul as heretics (Galatians 1:6-9, 5:2-12). Those who deny that Jesus is the messiah come in the flesh are condemned in 1 John (2:18-24, 4:1-3). The false teachers of 2 Peter 2. Examples could be multiplied.

But white heresy isn’t the only the only kind of heresy.

The central event of the Old Testament is not creation but exodus. Ask a Jew who Yahweh was and they would not recount the creation story but the exodus story. Yahweh, from the beginning, was, first and foremost, the God who liberated Israel from slavery. This is the paradigmatic moment in Jewish history; the action from which all theology springs. God does not unleash his infinite power to flex his muscles to the delight of his cheering section. God unleashes his infinite power to crush empires and gather up the damned and forsaken into a community called beloved and free.

Black theology has understood this better than most, and white theology has much to learn from it. In blunt terms, white theology works from above while black theology works from below, and heresy looks a lot different from below than it does from above. From above, heresy looks like a breakdown in orthodoxy. From below, heresy looks like a breakdown in orthopraxy.

[As an aside, I trust it is obvious I’m not saying black theology is less intellectual than white theology—I’m saying something close to the opposite. Following Cone, I’m saying that white theology often works under the delusion that it is more intellectual, objective and universal; that white people “do not recognize the narrowness of their experience and the particularity of their theological expressions. They like to think of themselves as universal people.”[2] This is a delusion sustainable only because we do not think of our whiteness as whiteness but universality; we assume the truth is most clearly seen from a white perspective; we think we’re more intellectual but in reality we’re just “more white.”]

Heresy, as defined by black theology, is about failure to do justice. Black heresy is about christening social, political, and economic structures that perpetuate systemic white supremacy and systematic black oppression, poverty, and humiliation. Black heresy is about affirming justification by faith while denying the racist foundations of America prosperity. I’ll give Cone the floor…

“Heresy refers to any activity or teaching that contradicts the liberating truth of Jesus Christ…

What actions deny the Truth disclosed in Jesus Christ? Where should the line be drawn? Can the Church of Jesus Christ be racist and Christian at the same time? Can the Church of Jesus Christ be politically, socially, and economically identified with the structures of oppression and also be a servant of Christ? Can the Church of Jesus Christ fail to make the liberation of the poor the center of its message and work, and still remain faithful to its Lord?…

Any interpretation of the gospel in any historical period that fails to see Jesus as the Liberator of the oppressed is heretical. Any view of the gospel that fails to understand the Church as that community whose work and consciousness are defined by the community of the oppressed is not Christian and is thus heretical.”[3]

And black heresy is in the Bible too.

Think of the prophets, skewering the false piety of the rich Israelites.

“How the faithful city has become a harlot,

She who was full of justice!

Righteousness once lodged in her,

But now murderers.

Your silver has become dross,

Your drink diluted with water.

Your rulers are rebels

And companions of thieves;

Everyone loves a bribe

And chases after rewards.

They do not defend the orphan,

Nor does the widow’s plea come before them.”—Isaiah 1:21-23

“I hate, I reject your festivals,

Nor do I delight in your solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer up to Me burnt offerings and your grain offerings,

I will not accept them;

And I will not even look at the peace offerings of your fatlings.

Take away from Me the noise of your songs;

I will not even listen to the sound of your harps.

But let justice roll down like waters

And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”—Amos 5:21-24

Think of 1 John, condemning the one who hates his brother alongside the one who denies Jesus is the messiah come in the flesh (1 John 4:20). Think of Jesus, sending the goats into eternal punishment because they failed to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, take in the stranger, visit the prisoner—not because they “believed” inaccurate things about “God.” Examples could be multiplied.

White heresy is real and needs to be addressed, but it can also be a rather luxurious problem to deal with. Whites sit atop the pyramid (like, say, Pharaoh) and argue about how to properly arrange the mental furniture (“Should the sofa go here…or here…or here?”). Spending days, weeks, months, and years properly arranging mental sofas is a luxury most people don’t have unless they’re the “official” theologians: affluent, cultured whites. Cone muses that if Luther had been a black slave in America, he probably would have been less concerned about the ubiquitous presence of Christ at the Lord’s Table and more concerned with whether Jesus “was really present at the slave’s cabin, whether slaves could expect Jesus to be with them as they tried to survive the cotton field, the whip, and the pistol.”[4]

I would imagine that many white slaveholders had a perfectly orthodox Christology.

They were also heretics.

And as long as whites fail to understand what heresy looks like from the bottom, we will teeter on the edge of heresy.

And so in the end, I suppose I actually disagree with Holcomb, because if you genuinely accept the Nicene Creed but habitually trample the humanity of the oppressed at your feet, you’re a heretic. If you do theology to avoid doing justice, you’re a heretic. If you acknowledge the Trinity but ignore the slave, you’re a heretic.[5] And any attempt to reserve the dropping of the theological atomic bomb—“heretic”—solely for wrong beliefs and not also for unjust patterns just shows how deep the delusions runs.

And so, “Woe to us, white, bourgeois theologians! For we meticulously parse Greek words, and arm-wrestle over the New and Old Perspective on Paul, and endlessly theologize over the finer points of foreknowledge. And yet, we have neglected the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness.”

Those who have ears—let them hear…or be a heretic.

[1] And this should not surprise us considering whites have been the major shapers of “official” Christian thought from the beginning.

[2] James Cone, God of the Oppressed, 14.

[3] Ibid., 33-34.

[4] Ibid., 13.

[5] And by designating someone a heretic, I’m not referring to my opinion about his or her “eternal destination.” I’m claiming that a belief or behavior is deeply unfaithful to the way of Christ and to orthodox Christianity.

Complementarians Respond to Egalitarians

Last updated on: October 31, 2015 at 2:29 pm By Scot McKnight

John Stackhouse’s Partners in Christ may be the most honest book ever written in the complementarian-egalitarian debate; it is without doubt the fairest book on the topic I’ve seen.

This honesty begins with method. In essence, anyone who claims his (or her) view covers all the evidence is overcooking the claim. Notice these words of candid method:

… the task of Christian theology is not to arrive at the one, timeless, seamless answer that fits everything nicely into place without strain and without remainder. The task instead is to formulate an interpretation that does the best job, relative to the other options available, of explaining most of the most important data, and as much of the remainder as possible. The fact, then, that my paradigm does not explain a particular detail as well as does another interpretation must be acknowledged in the interests of both Christian honesty and the humble openness we should all maintain in hopes of having our ideas improved. For if I dismiss a contrary datum or interpretation, explain it away, or otherwise circumvent it, I miss an opportunity to reconsider and reconstruct my interpretation for the better. But the fact that my paradigm does not explain every detail as well as does another interpretation in any particular case doesn’t mean that it isn’t overall the best one that is currently available. And if it is the best one available, then it is the one we ought to adopt (93).

You might read it twice. Christian theology often cannot cover it all but must settle for the best explanation available. Take, as John does, the complementarian claim that the Trinity supports that view, or the egalitarian claim that the Trinity supports that view. The complementarian thinks functional subordination supports female subordination while the egalitarian thinks the perichoretic equality of the person supports that view.

Stackhouse:

The first, and perhaps last, troubling thing to notice here is that this argument is deployed by both complementarians and egali tarians. Both sides, that is, think that they can win points by referring questions of (human) gender to the doctrine of the Trinity. So if both sides think that x proves their point, then likely x isn’t going to be terribly helpful. …

All orthodox Christians affirm that the members of the Trinity are indeed coequal. We also affirm that the Son and Spirit willingly submit to the Father. Moreover, we affirm that the Spirit humbly bears witness, not to himself, but to the Son (94).

For my part, I think the complementarians get the better of this sort of argument. The Father is always pictured in the Bible in the supreme position vis-a-vis the other members of the Trinity. It is to the Father that Jesus prays, and it is to the Father that he instructs us to pray in the Lord’s Prayer. It is the Father to whom the Son always defers. And the Holy Spirit is sent by the Father in the name of the Son (96).

You might then wonder why Stackhouse is on the feminist side of this debate. Here’s why, and he’s right:

The problem I have with the complementarian reference to the Trinity in regard to gender is that it is a bad theological move to attempt—by anyone, on any side of this issue. Any strong parallels between the inner life of the Trinity and human relationships just aren’t there. For one obvious thing, the Trinity is/are three and when it comes to gender we are instead talking about two. For another, the divine Father and Son are depicted as, yes, two males, and even the biblical pronouns for the Spirit are masculine [neuter?]—even though our theology reminds us that neither God nor any of the members of the theology reminds us that neither God nor any of the members of the Godhead is actually male. Finally, it is in Genesis 1 that we encounter the introduction of the idea of human beings—male and female created in the image of God. And in this passage there is no explicit reference to the Trinity at all. Indeed, nowhere in the Bible does an author draw permanent implications from the nature of the Trinity to human relations (96).

He discusses 1 Cor 11, though the posts I have had this year about Lucy Peppiatt’s book shows that using 1 Cor 11 for most any intepretation is problematic — in fact, the passage is most likely involves citation of opponents and counterarguments — but this is what Stackhouse comes to:

In the context Paul is addressing, patriarchy is indeed affirmed by the pattern of Christ’s deference to the Father. And one key implication of the passage is that women do not have to feel that they are less valued by God because they are called to submit to their husbands, for Christ our example has submitted fully to his Father. Whether, however, Paul (and the Holy Spirit) intends to go beyond this justification of Christians submitting for the gospel’s sake to the current social custom of patriarchy to decree patriarchy as an eternal principle of gender relations is exactly what my model disputes (97).

The use of the Trinity analogy is a recent argument, it is used by complementarians and then critiqued and reused by egalitarians; the analogy at best breaks down and — to be honest — is the ultimate trump card that will not cooperate with the design of its argu-ers.

Here are some other problems he takes on:

The submission of wives to husbands and the care of husbands for wives provides an important picture of the relationship of God with Israel and, later, of Christ with the church. To assert an equal partnership of women with men today thus recklessly disposes of this lovely and important pattern of how God relates to Gods people (98).

The pastor is a priest, an intermediary between God and his people. Thus he stands in for Christ, the great Mediator, and only a male person can properly represent Christ in this role since Christ was male (102).

History shows us that women emerge in church leadership only in pathological situations—extreme revivalism, schismatic groups, and the rise of cults (105).

Christian feminism is simply a capitulation to secular feminism—it is a case of sheer worldliness, of conforming to a secular cultural agenda (108).

This kind of argument can be used to support the legitimization of homosexuality (111).

If women don’t stay home, children will be neglected (117).

If this paradigm of gender is to be accepted, then the church should still not only tolerate, but comply with, patriarchy today in the many parts of the world that still practice it—and that is repugnant (120).

Each of these claims is dealt with honestly and fairly.

How Our Culture Challenges Church

Last updated on: October 31, 2015 at 10:53 am By Scot McKnight

Each of us is implicated in culture’s challenging the very idea of church and the way church is to function as church. The Western world, North America, the USA, and in particular Christians in that culture challenge church at its core. This is not about youth culture, this is not about the youthicization of the church, this is not about being relevant or being irrelevant.

This is about the ontology of Westerners squaring up to the ontology of the church, and church people and leaders squaring up to what we are facing.

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First, Western culture increasingly believes the fundamental problems of life are systemic and social, and are to be resolved through social progress and most especially through social engineering in public education. The Christian school movement, in other words, seems to be every bit the same theory: the way to “fix” society is by social engineering but through Christian education.

Second, Western culture tends to believe in the inherent goodness of humans and that society and systems corrupt that original goodness. The idea of original sin has fallen off the map for most social theorists, which implies as well that importance of regeneration unto transformation has as well.

Third, Western culture believes its laws are created by the people, they are for the people, and when the people shift the laws will need to shift with them. Laws then are not simply some kind of moral inscribing of what is proven to be true and right by nature but are instead the expressions of the will of the people, and their moral rightness is assumed but not questioned until the individual or the people decide the laws are in need of revision. “Laws” in the Bible are perceived as revelation from divine authority.

Fourth, Western culture then increasingly locates authority in the people, in fact, all the way down to the individual person. The locus of authority is the people, not the truth and not the leaders and not the laws. Congregationalism then is an ecclesial mirror arrangement to the Western sense of “we the people.” The Bible does not know congregationalism. Neither Israel nor the church voted on its laws, the teachings of Jesus or the mandates of the apostles. Voting becomes the way to find the truth of “we the people” and the conclusion of the vote has moral authority (if one agrees with it) because it has been established as the people’s will. Because the will of the “we the people” is the law, all the people are equal. Equality, then, is inherent to Western culture — though universal sufferage took generations to establish in law and has yet to find its way into the soul of each person in the Western world. Equality then is an idea but not a conviction for many, if not most.

Authority, mind you, is not to be found in Scripture or in the authorized, patient, careful interpretation of Scripture but in the will of the people.

Fifth, one’s commitment to society, to state, to the authorities, to the institutions, or to the establishment is voluntary and the moral authority of the laws of that society is good only so long as the individual person can believe in and commit themselves to those institutions. This means people have “rights” on the basis of laws they have created and with which they agree.

Sixth, the leaders of Western societies are the will of the people and need to change if the will of the people changes. The authority of the leader is given to him/her by the people and for the people.

Now this leads me to say this about commitment to a church: since authority has shifted over time from monarchies to democracies and therefore to individuals in those democracies, individuals form their own commitment levels to churches on the basis of their own lights. Each individual then forms a kind of church contract based on whether or not and the degree to which the individual agrees with that church’s “laws.” Here’s what I mean: since laws are perceived in the Western world as agreements the people have made and chosen to live with or under, church people in the Western people perceive themselves as the authorities when it comes to their churches. This is not so much “rebellion” as it is Western.

Churches in the Western world then are largely comprehended by “we the people” to be something created by “we the people.” Churches are the choices of like-minded individuals to be in fellowship with one another on the basis of a common sense of authority residing in “we the people.”

Tell me, pastors and church leaders, is this your people?

The Western history of politics, if I may make a sweeping statement about the biggest drift of all, is a movement from monarchies to aristocracies (or oligarchies) to democracies. The church got its ontology in a world of monarchies and emperors and kings (ancient Israel, 1st Century Rome) and found expression in that context. The church’s very ontology is monarchy or, better yet, christocracy. Western culture is the drive to a more and more radical form of democracy as a form of resistance to monarchy, which makes the church ambivalent and culturally at least countercultural if not irrelevant if it wants to be Western.

In other words, American culture challenges the church at its deepest levels. In the church the authority is God in Christ through the Spirit but in culture authority resides in the individual and in the will of “we the people.”

In other words, Western culture is very much indebted to Montesquieu and probably more to Jean Jacques Rousseau, who were behind Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, and are behind this post.

That is Wisdom! (RJS)

Last updated on: October 25, 2015 at 2:44 pm By RJS

The last passage considered by Walter Moberly in his excellent book Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture is Job 28 read in context with Job 1-2. We looked at this chapter earlier when working through the book of Job (Oh Where Wisdom? (Hint – Not in Science)). Moberly agrees with John Walton that Ch. 28 is a wisdom poem spoken by the narrator. Tremper Longman III, on the other hand, reads the poem as spoken by Job. Both choices have merit, and the precise context of the poem is difficult to place with certainty.

The book of Job is a thought experiment. No reading of Job is complete without consideration of the genre and setting for the speeches that comprise most of the book. First, Moberly agrees with Longman and Walton that this is not a historical account. It is “an example of narrative theology, in which the imaginative world of a story is used to explore and commend a particular understanding.” (p. 257) The book of Job is a parable of sorts designed to make a point, not a historical account of a wager between God and Satan.

We shouldn’t get hung up on the loss suffered by Job’s wife, the deaths of his children and servants, or by the (in)justice of it all. This simply isn’t the point of the story. Job’s family and wealth serves to indicate his situation in the story. Job’s family and servants are more akin to props in a play than to real persons. Job is portrayed as an exemplary human (“the most glowing and positive character depiction in the whole Hebrew Bible” (p. 245)) His wealth is fabulous and his piety exemplary. God himself commends him to the opponent and God makes no qualifications. His undeserved suffering set the stage for the speeches. The opponent (ha-sātān) should not be viewed as Satan; the appellation is not a proper name, but the description of a role. “[He is] an otherwise unknown member of the heavenly court – “the satan/opposer” – about whom we know only what we are told here: he gets around on earth so as to be familiar with its inhabitants (vv. 7, 8a), and, as we shall see, asks awkward questions.” (p. 248) Both Walton and Longman agree with this (see The Accuser is Not Satan).

Moberly suggests that the question at issue in Job is “Can a human relationship with God be anything other than self-serving, and if so, how could one tell?” (p. 257) In his commentary Tremper Longman phrases the question a little differently: “The main question addressed by the book of Job, is who is wise?” The answer according to Longman is that wisdom is found only with God and that the only appropriate human response is fear of the Lord. John Walton in his commentary sees the purpose of the book of Job as addressing the question of suffering in the world, with the conclusion that we must trust the wisdom of God.

Where is wisdom found? However one reads the rest of the book, the poem of chapter 28 is focused on wisdom. “The poem begins with an elaborate account of human ability to discover that which is widely held to be supremely precious: silver and gold.” (p. 263) Moberly uses the NRSV and I will follow suit:

Surely there is a mine for silver,
    and a place for gold to be refined.
Iron is taken out of the earth,
    and copper is smelted from ore.
Miners put an end to darkness,
    and search out to the farthest bound
    the ore in gloom and deep darkness.
They open shafts in a valley away from human habitation;
    they are forgotten by travelers,
    they sway suspended, remote from people.
As for the earth, out of it comes bread;
    but underneath it is turned up as by fire.
Its stones are the place of sapphires,
    and its dust contains gold.

That path no bird of prey knows,
    and the falcon’s eye has not seen it.
The proud wild animals have not trodden it;
    the lion has not passed over it.

They put their hand to the flinty rock,
    and overturn mountains by the roots.
They cut out channels in the rocks,
    and their eyes see every precious thing.
The sources of the rivers they probe;
    hidden things they bring to light.

This is followed by a refrain:

But where shall wisdom be found?
    And where is the place of understanding?
Mortals do not know the way to it,
    and it is not found in the land of the living.
The deep says, ‘It is not in me,’
    and the sea says, ‘It is not with me.’

Humans have a remarkable ability for reason and invention. In the ancient world the mining of silver and gold is an impressive example. In our day it might be something different connected with the limits of our science and technology. But the fact remains that human ingenuity and resourcefulness is not up to the task of obtaining and controlling wisdom. “In the places and by the means whereby they discover and get hold of other things, humans cannot get hold of wisdom.” (p. 263)

Nor can humans purchase wisdom.

It cannot be gotten for gold,
    and silver cannot be weighed out as its price.
It cannot be valued in the gold of Ophir,
    in precious onyx or sapphire.
Gold and glass cannot equal it,
    nor can it be exchanged for jewels of fine gold.
No mention shall be made of coral or of crystal;
    the price of wisdom is above pearls.
The chrysolite of Ethiopia cannot compare with it,
    nor can it be valued in pure gold.

Wisdom cannot be bought, it is not that kind of thing. Even a king’s ransom is insufficient for the purchase of wisdom. All human resources, reason, ingenuity, wealth, and power are unable to locate and secure wisdom. Wisdom is not a resource of the earth. This passage is followed again by the refrain with variation:

Where then does wisdom come from?
    And where is the place of understanding?
It is hidden from the eyes of all living,
    and concealed from the birds of the air.
Abaddon and Death say,
    ‘We have heard a rumor of it with our ears.’

Where then is wisdom?

God understands the way to it,
    and he knows its place.
For he looks to the ends of the earth,
    and sees everything under the heavens.
When he gave to the wind its weight,
    and apportioned out the waters by measure;
when he made a decree for the rain,
    and a way for the thunderbolt;
then he saw it and declared it;
    he established it, and searched it out.
And he said to humankind,
‘Truly, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom;
    and to depart from evil is understanding.’

Wisdom is established and known to God. God has revealed to “man” [᾽ādām] the way to wisdom: the fear of the Lord and departing from evil constitutes wisdom. “Job’s unswerving adherence to God in the midst of disaster and desolation represents true wisdom and understanding. Thus if we readers/hearers want to know what wisdom looks like, we should look at Job – and, in principle, emulate him.” (p. 265) The refrains shouldn’t be read as though wisdom is entirely outside the grasp of humans. Rather wisdom is not something obtained through ordinary human means. It is obtained through reliance on God.

Moberly works through a number of different readings of the chapter, and objections that are raised in other venues. First, this chapter is not a summary of the whole book of Job and there is more that can be learned from the speeches and epilogue. However, wisdom as the fear of the Lord is an answer, if not the only answer, to the question posed by the book. Second, it is interesting thing is that both skeptical scholars and some literalist Christians have a rather wooden approach to the text, failing to recognize the genre and sophistication of the book of Job in general and this poem in particular. Some skeptical scholars argue that the conclusion – wisdom is to fear the Lord and depart from evil – is dull, shallow, simplistic, boring, conventional piety.

Admittedly, piety can be dull and dim. But need it be so? People who bear great hardship with faithful patience and courage are deeply admirable if one has the privilege, usually a humbling privilege, of knowing them. Perhaps to some extent the issue is the age-old problem of how to make goodness appear imaginatively interesting. (p. 277)

In his epilogue Moberly outlines his reasons for choosing the eight passages we have worked through in his book. With respect to Job 28 he notes:

The wisdom that is in focus in Job is not, I argue, the wisdom for getting on well in life generally, such as is articulated in Proverbs. Rather it is the wisdom that arises when a person, like Job, has to walk uncomprehendingly through devastation and darkness. This wisdom, though it has an intellectual component, is primarily a matter of integrity and faithfulness, for Job (unlike the reader) never comes to understand the reason for his affliction. (p. 282)

We are called to faith and trust in God. The call to faith and trust, to wisdom, runs through the Old Testament. The fear of the Lord in the Old Testament is further shaped to faith in God and in Jesus his messiah in the New Testament. Christian faith follows on and learns from Job’s unswerving adherence to God.

Moberly’s book is an excellent and thought provoking ramble through key issues in Old Testament theology and the reading of the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed readings it (one of my top purchases this year). It was published in 2013 or it would be a top nomination for book of the year. This final chapter was no exception.

In what sense is wisdom the fear of the Lord? Does this need to be qualified?

Is wisdom as the fear of the Lord merely a banal platitude?

Is Job an illustration of this wisdom, one that we should emulate?

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.

A Proposed Model for Egalitarians: An Honest Tension

Last updated on: October 25, 2015 at 2:49 pm By Scot McKnight

We think with and inside models or theories. What does a model of egalitarianism look like? John Stackhouse proposes a model in his new book Partners in Christ: A Conservative Case for Egalitarianism.

Before we get to his model, a point about method: we can construct a model on the inductive method by examining all the bits and pieces and theories or we can enter into a model with the expectation of challenging a model by examining the evidence and the counter theories. Stackhouse proposes that model, and I have to say that this is the way most of us think about most topics. Think about how we think about politics or economics: how many of us have examined the facts and the theories vs. how many of us have a theory and the modify it as life takes us on its journey?

Here are two approaches to his model. After growing up in a conservative complementarian and patriarchal model, Stackhouse’s mind changed over time into an egalitarian model. Thus, he begins with what life presented to him:

I did not want to think that the Bible was hard to understand about gender, however. I wanted to think simply and clearly about it. In particular, I wanted to be a feminist all the way (back before feminist became the “f-word” that no decent person would use in public). I believed in women and men as coequal partners before God, bearers together of God’s image, with no job or role or responsibility closed to either of them except where sheer biology dictated that only one sex could bear children. This simple position made the most sense of the world around me, made the most sense of my experiences of capable women both within and outside the church, and made the most sense of my relationship with my wife. But an egalitarian position did not make the most sense of the tradition of the church, and neither did it square with a number of Bible verses that seemed forthrightly to forbid a woman from exercising coequal leadership in the family or the congregation (44).

So he articulates his model in these terms:

I propose, then, a paradigm of gender that does, indeed, draw no lines between men and women as to role in home, church, or society— beyond those required by biology (45).

But this must be examined and challenged at places. So he begins with equality. He states the proposal this way:

There are lots of scriptural clues, therefore, to indicate that the egalitarians are right: God originally intended women and men to be coequal partners in stewarding the earth, without one being subordinate to the other, and God has never rescinded that mandate. Indeed, in God’s renewal of all things, in his great salvation plan to restore shalom, men and women will treat each other as they were intended to treat each other—and we already see this renewed order in the inbreaking of the kingdom evident in the New Testament (48).

But he is willing to let this be challenged in the following considerations, and I call this Stackhouse’s honest tension:

First, the testimony of most of the Bible—from Genesis 3 until the last epistles of the New Testament—bespeaks an overwhelming pattern of patriarchy. Men are in charge, and they are supposed to be in charge, for almost all of the Bible.

Second, God depicts his own relationship with Israel, and then Christ’s with the church, in terms of a patriarchal marriage of nonequals.

Third, Jesus did indeed welcome women into his circle of disciples—but not his inner circle.

For his part, Paul does recognize and affirm women’s service to the church. But he also expressly forbids (at least some) women to teach or have authority over (at least some) men (at least sometimes).

Good models consider it all; the best models consider it all in the best way. Stackhouse will move in the rest of this book with that model and these tensions.

The strategy is one of divine accommodation to the human condition for the sake of the gospel mission but, in light of the inbreaking of the kingdom of God, we are to see the kingdom over time to begin to be seen more and more. He states this in a question:

What would our understanding of gender look like, however, if we took the “already, but not yet” principle seriously? What if we were to expect, instead of one extreme or the other, an appropriately paradoxical situation: a slow and partial realization of gospel values here and there, as God patiently and carefully works his mysterious ways along the multiple fronts of kingdom advance? (55)

Here is an example of what this looks like:

I suggest that Paul is guided by the Holy Spirit—even used by the Holy Spirit perhaps without his full awareness of the implications—to do two good things simultaneously: (1) to give the church prudent instruction as to how to survive and thrive in a patriarchal culture that he thinks won’t last long; and also (2) to maintain and promote the egalitarian teaching that is evident throughout the Bible and dynamic particularly in the career of Jesus and that in the right circumstances will leave gender lines behind (67).

And this:

when society was patriarchal, as it was in the New Testament context and as it has been everywhere in the world except in modern society in our day, then the church avoided scandal by going along with patriarchy, even as the Bible ameliorated it and made women’s situation better than it was under any other culture’s gender code. Now, however, that our modern society is at least officially egalitarian, the scandal (ironically enough) is that the church is not going along with society, not rejoicing in the unprecedented freedom to let women and men serve according to gift and call without an arbitrary gender line. This scandal of keeping women subordinate to men impedes both the evangelism of others and the edification—the retention and development of faith—of those already converted (71).

Patriarchy, then, for him is a divine accommodation and not the will of God. This is seen in the parallel to slavery.

So he comes to this conclusion about his model, to accommodation, and to a redemptive movement in history:

the fundamental practical question today is this: What is God calling Christians to do in regard to gender when society itself shifts to egalitarianism? I am arguing that there no longer remains any rationale for the woman to remain in the once expected role of dependence and submission—just as there isn’t any rationale for the grown-up child to keep acting as if he requires his parents’ direction as he did when he was little. When, under the providence of God and the ongoing, spreading influence of kingdom values, society opens up to the abolition of slavery or the emancipation of women, then Christians can rejoice and, indeed, be in the vanguard of such change—as we have been in both causes. The dark irony remains today, I repeat, precisely in Christians lagging behind society and still requiring a submissive role for women—a posture that now is a scandalous mirror image of the scandal that egalitarianism would have caused in the patriarchal first century (91).

Steve Jobs: A Review (by Gary Black, Jr.)

Last updated on: October 27, 2015 at 6:09 am By Scot McKnight

I’m an Apple guy. My first computer was a Macintosh Classic. That beige little box of magic allowed me to get on the World Wide Web for the first time, open an AOL account and send my first email. All of which happened circa 1991 for about $1000. I had no idea what I was doing, even less about what I was getting into. However, I learned an invaluable lesson. Apple provided me a safe and stylish means through which I could cautiously enter the scary unknown wilderness that was (and still is) the “new world” of technology. Apple let me earn my “merit badge” in personal computing and I’ve been loyal customer ever since. (There was that short experiment with Windows in college, but let’s not go there.)

Trailer and Image

For me and countless others, Steve Jobs was the technological prophet that led us into the freedoms this new world offered. Over time, despite the hiccups here and there, the Newton being one, he kept pulling back the curtain on the possibilities of this promised land. I didn’t have to know anything about computers to use my Mac. I still don’t. That’s why I’ve now got more Apple devices in my home than any other product brand….save Hanes underwear. Jobs and Woz made great products. And they left a trail of great ideas for their progenitors to follow. All of this to say….I’m an Apple guy.

So, it has been with great lament that since Jobs’ death my naiveté about the man behind these great products is dying a hard and difficulty death. Jobs, it turns out, lived a life much more comparable to Machiavelli than Michelangelo. As a longtime fan of Aaron Sorkin’s work I eagerly anticipated how this gifted writer would portray the complexity and brilliance of one of my generations most iconic characters. I wasn’t disappointed with Steve Jobs. In anticipation of the movie I also picked up a copy of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs and recently watched Alex Gibney’s well researched documentary The Man in the Machine. I’m not surprised that what Sorkin, Isaacsson and Gibney each focus on in their own unique ways is the extreme juxtaposition between the public persona and the private reality of Jobs personal character. What we learn in gritty detail is that there wasn’t a very good man standing behind a slew of great products.

Sorkin highlights this reality with a script that is equal parts profundity and poignancy matched only by Michael Fassbender’s unblinking portrayal of Jobs’ narcissistic intensity. As we have come to expect, Sorkin places his characters in a plethora of moral dilemmas that reveal their conflicted, duplicitous, and yet wounded humanity. These agonizing human histories come to the audience at a sometimes-dizzying pace as the camera follows the actor’s “walking and talking” around the set. You know when some weighty interaction is about to occur because everything comes to a stand still while we watch a blazing toe to toe delivery of rhetoric that would tongue tie an auctioneer. Sorkin is at his best when his characters discover and un-muzzle their subconscious drives and fears. These are thoughts and feelings most of us experience, but few will ever articulate them as accurately or courageously as Sorkin’s pen.

This is especially true of Sorkin’s portrayal of Jobs. We should think deeply about Jobs’ choices and worldview. If, like Jobs, I had to choose one dialog that might make a significant dent in the universe, I would select the confrontation with Jobs and Wozniak (Seth Rogen) in the third act. Jobs and Woz stand together not so much as enemies but as two halves of the American conscience as they air their very old and long suffering laundry in front of a sparse crowd of not so shocked postmodern, pre- millennial on-lookers. It’s the highlight of the movie in part because of the hauntingly crucial question they bring to the fore, and which is currently floating across our national consciousness. “Can a great person also be a good person?” Is this still possible in America? In the world? Do we even care? The importance of answering this question well is as crystal clear as my new MacBook Air Retina screen. This is certainly not a new question. Moral philosophers such as Aristotle and Xenophon would likely cock their olive wreathed heads to the side and wonder out loud if we’d lost the entire plot of life. Ancient Jewish writers and rabbis would suggest not knowing the answer to such a question reveals one is perilously close to losing one’s soul. New Testament Gospel writers pointed to the example of Jesus as one who answered that question, with a flourish, once and for all. Yet here we are, in the most technologically advanced, educated, prosperous, and liberated societies in the world, with no clear consensus on this most basic of human issues.

What Jobs’ life and legacy reveal is that we don’t have much of an idea of what a higher good is, or the common good. We do however, have a very good grasp of what consumer goods are along with what is “good” for me. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has, for a while now, been increasingly translated to pertain to only “my” life, “my” liberties, and “my” happiness. Jobs is the poster boy for the “me” life. He made amazing, life changing products. But it is also true that his legacy suggests he did not live a heroic life, one that we would want our children to model. Jobs seems to have lost the idea of what human greatness requires. Perhaps he was too busy trying to change humanity and human existence with great inventions. It seems he forgot what it was to love and be loved in the process. That’s not good. It’s a tragedy. Just ask his daughter. The ends do not justify, validate or forgive the means. The journey matters. Alice in Wonderland taught us that how we travel is often where we will arrive.

When we watch and discuss the recent presidential debates, it seems we are now as willing as ever to turn a blind eye to the means our leaders will employ as long as the end is to our liking. With the rising popularity of certain candidates that lack even the most rudimentary levels of respect and civil decorum , it may be that as a people we are now choosing to live in a political reality where image⎯not moral character and substance⎯ is all that matters. Isaacson calls this a Machiavellian-esque “reality distortion field” that caused Jobs used to distort the truth and which caused himself and others enormous degrees of suffering and pain. Reality simply doesn’t bend that easy. Even for Steve Jobs.

There is no doubt that under Jobs tenure Apple made a beneficial impact on a large portion of our world and nudged us closer to the common good. But somewhere he became unmoored, untethered from the simple but profound truth that making goods, selling services and accumulating money is not the same as possessing virtue, moral knowledge, goodness, truth and love. Somehow he was, and perhaps we are becoming a people more and more willing to trade the idea of accumulating “goods” for that ancients thought of as the eternal concept of “the Greater Good.”

Sorkin and his team have written a wonderful postmodern morality play. Our ancient Greek forbearers, along with the gospel writers and Shakespeare would be pleased at this effort. Jobs life, triumphs and tragedies present us an opportunity to inspect our own moral choices. His life provides us with the gift of a window to consider what it might be like to attain the whole world, and yet lose everything that deeply matters. He gives us the opportunity to stop for a little while and think about more than the price of Apple’s stock, or how we can upgrade as soon as possible to the new iPhone but instead contemplate the value of our soul, what we gives our lives to, what is important to us and why.

Many will say Job’s legacy is found in his unparalled aesthetic genius. Others will say it was his ruthless devotion to push the boundaries of conformity. I wonder if his greatest contribution may be the institutionalization of the slogan “think different” which remains the sustaining mantra that not only drives Apple’s product development but maintains the ethos of Apple’s sizable customer base. Others will honor his audacious confidence that one person can still change the world. All of these are sizable contributions, but would any of these traits alone make one a hero? A person to he emulated and exemplified to future generations? Can a great leader be a good person? Is there any other way?

Under Jobs’ creative mastery Apple has helped untold millions navigate the stormy waters of the technological revolution. But he won’t be helping me look to the future in order to traverse the larger existential journey of seeking true meaning and significance for my life. In fact he did just the opposite. He sent me back to the oldest, and most enduring truths of human knowledge. There is no substitute for a virtuous character. Virtue starts and ends with the human heart radically devoted to the highest good. That is something no technological revolution will ever change. In the end, the movie both literally and figuratively leaves it a bit fuzzy how Jobs’ life ended. I think Sorkin and director Daniel Boyle seems to lean toward with the sage wisdom of the likes of Jesus and Aristotle. Humanity’s greatest potential is realized in the courage to face the truth, the hope of redemption, and the unspeakable joy that comes from loving others as oneself. This is the stuff of which heroes are made.

There’s still no app for that.

-Gary Black, Jr. PhD.

Asst. Professor of Theology and Contemporary Culture, Azusa Pacific University

The Seven (by Jonathan Storment)

Last updated on: October 20, 2015 at 8:21 am By Scot McKnight

A few months ago, I had just finished reading Rebecca DeYoung’s wonderful book Glittering Vices and at the same time I was listening to a sermon podcast of a preacher mentor of mine on the topic of freedom.

After listening to a few sermons, I gave my friend a call and asked him if he was doing a series on the seven deadly sins, and he told me he wasn’t. They had actually done a church-wide survey asking everyone where they needed freedom in their life. Every sermon he was doing was addressing the most common topics of bondage the church family found in their lives.

The reason I asked this question, and the reason that I found this interesting is that these are the topics the church was struggling with: Envy, Pride, Lust, Greed, Anger….You can probably see where this is going. I find it fascinating that across very different streams of Christian tradition, over a thousand years separating us, and incredibly different cultures, the human heart has not changed.

Think about this, 1,600 years ago some monks decided to go to the desert to be alone with God and work on becoming more like Jesus. They were trying to leave the problems of the world behind, but discovered after much silence and solitude that they had brought the problems with them. There is a great irony in the fact that these guys went to the desert to have a great vision of God. They created communities to become pure and it was only then that they discovered their own sin.

In the words of C.S. Lewis:

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness – they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means – the only complete realist.

In many ways, that is exactly what the desert Fathers were, realists. They were the first Christian psychologists. The only main difference was that their work came by self-examination on their own soul. And while the Desert Fathers left the world, eventually the world came to see them, because they discovered that there are certain things that only those who do the hard work of Christian repentance and self-examination can really know. For a thousand years after their discovery of the nature of the human heart, Christians used the work of these Desert Fathers as a spiritual tool for confessing, and repentance, and becoming more like the people God intended for us to be. As a preacher who cares a lot about discipleship in a local church, and about being a better disciple myself, I think it is time we started learning from them again.

N.T. Wright once said that

Christians seem to me to divide into two groups nowadays: the first lot don’t think that sin matters very much anyway, and the second know perfectly well that it does, but still can’t kick the habit.

I think that is right. We don’t get discipleship these days because we have such a shallow view of sin, and a pretty pessimistic view of how we can actually not be captured by it.

Think about how helpful and hopeful this view of sin is. The language vice is apt, because each one of these sins slowly takes away your freedom to do anything else. Each one has a tightening grip that slowly squeezes away our ability to live.

But it is also hopeful because in the words of Rebecca DeYoung,

Our confession can be fine-tuned. Rather than praying in general for forgiveness of sin, or reducing all our sin to pride or generic selfishness, we can lay specific sins before God, ask for the grace to root them out, and engage in daily disciplines – both individually and communally – that help us target them. Naming our sins is the confessional counterpart to counting our blessings.

I have found that having some familiarity with these capital vices is incredibly helpful pastorally. Because so often the symptom that brings someone to see me is not the biggest problem that they actually have, and they (I) often are unaware of what that bigger problem is, or how to go about addressing it for a chance at actual change.

Evagarius, one of the Desert Fathers, knew this. His concern was a practical one to describe the guises of demons.

To expose the camouflage of demons…I like that.

For example, if it weren’t for the Desert Fathers, I never would have considered suggesting to a young man struggling with pornography to consider fasting from food, but over the past few months I have, and for surprising reasons we found that it helped!

Without the Desert Fathers I wouldn’t have realized that the root sin behind workaholism is often sloth, or that gluttons can often be very thin. Sins don’t look like the parodies we’ve made of them.

And so, to expose the camouflage of demons, for the next few weeks, I would like to talk about the seven deadly sins, and why, as pastors, we need to have some familiarity with what they are and how they work. I am going to be borrowing from several different resources: Will Willimon’s Sinning Like a Christian; Dennis Okham’s Dangerous Passions, Deadly Sins; Seven by Jeff Cook; Vainglory, and Glittering Vices by Rebecca DeYoung; and Broken Gods byGregory Popcak

Until then, is anyone else seeing what I am seeing? Have you found the seven deadly sins helpful as a way of talking to people about the nature of sin?

Creation Beyond Genesis (RJS)

Last updated on: October 20, 2015 at 9:07 am By RJS

The next chapter of Kyle Greenwood’s new book Scripture and Cosmology: Reading the Bible Between the Ancient World and Modern Science looks at the range of creation or origins narratives in the Old Testament. Genesis 1 is the obvious place to start, but it is far from the only passage that deals with God’s role as creator. In fact he identifies thirteen different Old Testament passages that should help inform our interpretation of the creation narrative taught in Scripture.

It is clear that the Bible as we have it is not a collection of propositions and facts. It is much closer to a diverse narrative telling of the relationship between God and his people, Israel and the church. Greenwood starts by bringing up the so-called synoptic problem. The four Gospels relate the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus but do so in different ways each with a different focus and slightly different purpose. The differences in the synoptic Gospels are particularly relevant to his point … who approached Jesus about the sick slave of the centurion, the centurion himself (Mt 8:6) or his friends (Lk 7:6)? Or for that matter, when did the fig tree wither, immediately (Mt 21) or by the next day (Mk 11)? These kinds of differences don’t discredit the Bible, but instead “demonstrate the multitextured nature of the biblical record.” This is not a discrepancy to be resolved but rather input that should inform the way we expect truth to be related in the narrative form of Scripture.

The thirteen different pictures of creation provided in the Old Testament are similar. They come in different forms with somewhat different purposes. These are not equivalent to the methods section of a scientific paper, but a narrative telling of relationship. The genres include stylized prose and poetry, not journalistic reports.

Genesis 1 is the most familiar creation narrative in the Bible. Greenwood notes that “While it is a stretch to call Genesis 1 “poetry,” it is clear that it is highly stylized prose. The style of Genesis 1 is unlike any other prose in the Hebrew Bible.” (p. 106) The structure with three days forming creation followed by three days filling creation has been noted by many of the authors we have discussed over the last several years. This is the first clue that it is not a scientific methods account of origins. The author describes God as placing a roof over the earth to hold back “the waters that were above the dome” (1:7) This is not exactly the view of the earth that we hold today. The author had a three-tiered view of the cosmos that was common to the culture, but not in agreement with our modern view. That this ancient view was not corrected is another clue that the purpose of the creation account is not a scientific methods account of creation.

Genesis 1 has a theological message. Among other things it is antimyth. The sun, moon, and stars are merely God’s creations. The occupants of the seas are God’s creation. The waters are held back and released by the word of God.

Genesis 2 provides a different (complementary) view of creation. The order of events is different – a clue that we don’t have a simple journalistic account in either chapter. More importantly, the Garden of Eden is a type of temple.

That Eden represents God’s temple, the intersection of heaven and earth, is evident from tabernacle and temple descriptions elsewhere in the Bible (e.g. Ex 25-40; 1 Kings 6; Ezek 47, Rev. 21-22). More specifically, Eden closely resembles the holy of holies. Both are populated with fruit trees (Gen 2:9; 1 Kings 6:29-35), with the Tree of Life occupying the center (Gen 2:9, 1 Kings 6:29-35, Rev 22:2). Rivers flow out of Eden as they flow out of the temple (Gen 2:10; Ezek 47:1, Rev 22:1), an especially relevant concept since the Tigris and Euphrates flow into the Persian Gulf rather than out of a common source. Both Eden and the temples were adorned with precious metals (Gen 2:11-12; Ex 25:10-31; 1 Kings 6:20; Rev 21:18-21). Angels guard the entrance (Gen 3:24; Ex 25:17-22, Ezek 1:5-11; Rev 21:12). All these factors point to the conclusion that Eden was not simply paradise for Adam and Eve; it was the intersection of heaven on earth. Eden was God’s sanctuary. It was the center of the cosmos. (p. 111-112)

Genesis 2 describes the preparation of God’s temple in the cosmos.

Exodus 20:8-11 recounts God’s creative process in terms of the three-tiered view of the universe. “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them.”

Nehemiah 9:6 makes a similar statement: “You alone are the Lord. You made the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all their starry host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them.“

Job 38 describes creation as well. “In the opening thirty-seven verses of God’s monologue, God poetically describes the cosmos in terms of its three tiers and their principle parts. … God is in control over all three tiers of creation – earth, heavens and seas.” (p. 113-114)

Psalm 8 Humans are given dominion over the occupants of the three tiers of the cosmos – the birds of the sky, the beasts of the field, the creatures of the sea.

Psalm 19 Creation, more specifically the highest tier of creation, the heavens, declare the glory of God. The sun moves across the whole earth illuminating the whole during the day.

Psalm 74:12-17

But God is my King from long ago;
he brings salvation on the earth.

It was you who split open the sea by your power;
    you broke the heads of the monster in the waters.
It was you who crushed the heads of Leviathan
    and gave it as food to the creatures of the desert.
It was you who opened up springs and streams;
    you dried up the ever-flowing rivers.
The day is yours, and yours also the night;
    you established the sun and moon.
It was you who set all the boundaries of the earth;
    you made both summer and winter.

This is another description of creation. God established the sun and the moon and set the boundaries of the earth. Note as well that all three tiers are described. In addition to heavens and earth, God split open the sea and conquered the sea monsters; an image reminiscent of some of the Mesopotamian myths.

Psalm 104 “provides the most extensive account of creation outside of Genesis 1.” (p. 116) God creates the heavens (2-4), the earth (5-23) and the sea (25-26).

There is the sea, vast and spacious,
    teeming with creatures beyond number—
    living things both large and small.
There the ships go to and fro,
    and Leviathan, which you formed to frolic there.

Whereas in Psalm 74 God’s power was demonstrated through the subjugation of the sea, in Psalm 104 God’s greatness is exhibited by the sea’s friendly creatures, including Leviathan, who plays in it. Here Leviathan is not a sea monster needing to be tamed, but just another of the sea’s inhabitants. (p. 117)

Psalm 136:1-9

Give thanks to the Lord of lords:

to him who alone does great wonders,
who by his understanding made the heavens,
who spread out the earth upon the waters,
who made the great lights—
the sun to govern the day,
the moon and stars to govern the night;

God made everything.

Proverbs 8:22-31. Here God is the source of all wisdom and has created everything with order and purpose.

Isaiah 40:12. “Each of the three parts of the cosmos was carefully apportioned by according to [God’s] specifications. … The waters (seas) were measured by the handful. The heavens were sized according to the span of his hands. The earth was weighed on scales, and its dust calculated with a gauge.” (p. 118)

Conclusions: Greenwood draws this together with several observations (quoted or paraphrased here from p. 119):

Six day creation is not a running theme. Aside from Genesis 1 the order of creation is more closely related to the ancient cosmological structure than it is to the structure of a week. The six days come up only twice – in Genesis 1 and as an allusion for Sabbath in Exodus 2o.

All of the accounts are poetic in nature. They use literary devices to convey the concepts. No part of the Bible takes a “scientific” approach to creation. It is literary and theological.

God is the author. The various creation accounts conform to the notion that God is the author of all aspects of the created order.

God is sovereign. There is no epic battle with creation.

The three-tiered cosmos runs through all of these accounts. The cosmos is divided into heavens, earth, and seas, and God is maker of all three.

God as creator of heavens, earth and seas is a common theme running through the Old Testament. A six-day creation is not. We see multifaceted poetic descriptions of creation using a variety of literary devices to convey meaning. The six-days of Genesis 1 is one of these devices; a literary format among other literary formats used to tell of creation. Like the variations found in the synoptic Gospels, these variations in creation accounts should help us understand the message and format of Scripture. We shouldn’t force it into a mold of our own making.

How do these various picture of creation help us understand Scripture?

How do they help us understand God as Creator?

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.

Churchianity is Biblical!

Last updated on: October 10, 2015 at 9:59 pm By Scot McKnight

By David G. Moore. My college friends and I used Churchianity in the most derisive way possible. We loved saying how going to church didn’t make you a Christian anymore than walking into a car garage made you a car.

Growing up, Scot McKnight did not mock church like I did, but he now has some hard-hitting, dare I say radical things, to offer in his book, A Fellowship of Differents .

In November of last year, I interviewed Scot on his terrific work, Kingdom Conspiracy

Since Scot McKnight is the proprietor of Jesus Creed he hardly needs any formal introduction here.

The following interview was conducted by David George Moore. Dave blogs at www.twocities.org.

Moore: I am wondering if your two books, Kingdom Conspiracy and A Fellowship of Differents, were self-consciously organized in a way akin to Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. As you well know, the first three chapters of Ephesians lay important groundwork theologically while the last three chapters show how it is to be worked out.

SMcK: At some level theologically, Yes, but not at all intentionally. In fact, I wrote A Fellowship of Differents (=FoD) a year and a half before I wrote Kingdom Conspiracy. When I began teaching Paul at Northern Seminary I wanted to incorporate spiritual formation into the curriculum, and to do that I wanted something that was lay accessible, new perspective, and focused exclusively on how Paul envisions the Christian life – as an ecclesial life not just a personal Christian life. I had to write that book so for the first year that’s what I did – and the students read it and offered feedback. Zondervan had some lag time because of shifting jobs and a major location move and some editorial changes… and I stopped work on FoD and began to write my kingdom book, finished it, and then returned to FoD.

Moore: You clarify important biblical terms like grace and holiness. I believe A.N. Whitehead said most debates are fruitless because the opposing sides use the same words, think they are pouring in the same basic idea, when they really are employing different meanings for key words. How common a problem is this for us American Christians when it comes to words like grace and holiness?

SMcK: I don’t have stats for such things, but my experience is that lay people both don’t think (or care!) about terms all that much and so, Yes, there is great confusion about the terms. Grace, for instance, has been defined over and over in terms like “God’s riches at Christ’s expense” or “God’s mercy to those who don’t deserve it,” but one has to ask if people have actually looked at the term “grace” in the NT to reduce the term to such ideas. (In fact, the term grace is expansive and now John Barclay’s exceptional study, Paul and the Gift, has taken the discussion to brand new levels – blowing apart some of our reductions.)

Moore: You make the claim that “we all learn the Christian life from how our local church shapes us.” Unpack that for us while interacting with the place of so-called parachurch ministries like Northern Seminary. Aren’t some parachurch ministries better suited to provide things, even spiritual nourishment of a sort, the church can’t?

SMcK: I’m using in this claim the great work of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. They distinguish primary socialization from secondary socialization; the former referring to what we learn as “real” from our parents and primary teachers (grade school, church leaders) as children; the second refers to what we learn on top of that and used to modify our primary socialization. On the basis, I contend we learn the Christian life from our local church – the one we grow up in. Parachurch ministries may reform us, as in secondary socialization, but they can only reform what is there. Many of us, even in our 50s and 60s and beyond, still have strong instincts based on our primary, ecclesial socialization.

Moore: I’ve seen some well-intended attempts at greater diversity within churches. Most fall flat. They seem to get lost in the thicket of catering to every worship style, and forget how diversity does not just come from simply organizing for it, but in submitting to the Spirit of God. There must be a living reality. What are your thoughts on greater diversity being attempted by both organizational efforts and yet remembering the church is a living organism?

SMcK: Let us agree that diversity is the name of the church, and this is absolutely established by Galatians 3:28 and Colossians 3:11, not to ignore Paul’s entire mission and the story of the church in the Book of Acts – and Revelation’s vision of the new heavens and new earth is a heaven filled with people from the whole world.

That’s our basis.

Somehow, someway, every day and every night, we must strive to be inclusive of all God’s people and not satisfy with the friendships of common race, economic status, education, and community.

Yes, many do fall flat and Korie Edwards’ study of the multi ethnic church, The Elusive Dream, is a good reminder of how difficult the challenge is. It is difficult, I contend, in part because of our history of segegration in all directions and partly because our ecclesiology is not designed to live in such a “salad bowl” of differents.

It begins when you and I meet with those who are most unlike us and learn what it means to embrace such persons as brothers and sisters. We will learn the vision in the doing, not in the thinking.

Moore: Whenever I visit a church to teach Sunday school, I mention right away that there are no “sacred cows.” People truly are free to ask me about anything. I share my testimony of being a “serial doubter” and underscore that the struggles others carry don’t threaten me. It is common to have people come up to me, some with tears in their eyes, explaining that they have never been in such a safe place. How can we go about making church a place where everyone feels comfortable sharing the questions that haunt them?

SMcK: By (1) sharing our own questions and doubts and (2) by modeling embrace of those who have doubts and questions, and (3) by walking with others as they journey into such questions and doubts. The approach of giving answers often offends more than heals.

Moore: The Person and ministries of the Holy Spirit seems almost impossible to get right. Some churches overemphasize Him while other churches make you wonder if they believe in the trinity. Speak to both groups.

SMcK: Ah, that’s the trick: the more we talk about the Spirit the less we are doing what is right and the less we talk about the Spirit the more distant the Spirit becomes. The focus of the Bible is The Father in the Son through the Spirit. We must make the circle complete as often as we can – teaching about all three, praying in all three, and anchoring all of our theology in the Trinity. Many in our churches need far more Spirit, and if we do – we need to concentrate on the Spirit for a good spell.

Moore: Bear with me on the longer ramp up, but it is needed with this question. Pretty much everyone says the size of the church does not matter. You can have big, healthy churches and small, unhealthy ones. The baseball bat analogy is sometimes used. The argument asserts that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with bats, but they can be used to bludgeon someone to death. So bigness is not inherently bad, but what you do with bigness may be destructive.

To put my own cards on the table, I am no longer so sure. I know of churches where they claim to be too big to serve communion. Many big churches (arbitrarily, I will put bigness at 1000 plus people) have home groups so everyone feels they are part of a “church within the church.” I’ve seen many problems with these, not the least of which is what I call “forced friendships.” People feel the pressure to share intimate details with people they are just starting to know. Do you have any major concerns over the unique challenges big churches face, especially in applying what you have challenged us with in A Fellowship of Differents?

SMcK: good question. Gene Appel once told me there’s nothing a small church that a megachurch can’t do, and I think he’s right. But, it must be worked at in completely different ways in megachurches. Let us take Andrew McGowan’s taxonomy of the core early Christian practices (or disciplines): meals, Word, music, initiation, prayer, and time (calendar). All churches can put up a pulpit and stand someone behind it and say “Now give it to us!” So Word can be covered. Music can be covered easily, as can elements of prayer and time. But there are some things that can’t be done when 1000+ are gathered: pastors can’t offer pastoral prayers, people can’t pray for one another, meals can’t be eaten in any kind of intimate setting … so megachurches that don’t intentionally breakdown the whole thing into small groups of 30 or 15 and fewer, simply can’t practice the kind of body life the NT teaches.

What this might mean the most is that we dare not equate a Sunday service of any sort with fellowship in Christ. It might be but it might not be, and the larger the gathering the more likely we will have people come and listen and sing and go home. That is consumeristic church and not church as fellowship.

How many men did Gideon initially gather?