The Soul and New Creation (RJS)

Last updated on: April 14, 2015 at 9:01 am By RJS

The next couple of chapters in John Polkinghorne’s little book The God of Hope and the End of the World address the questions of personhood, the soul, and new creation. Christianity hope is founded in God and his work in the world through Jesus, the Messiah of God; it is founded in the reality of resurrection – individual, personal, physical resurrection. But resurrection and the age to come lead to questions of their own.

What is the essence of a human person?

What is the soul? What is preserved or resurrected?

What will new creation be like?

New creation can’t simply be more of the same (subject to decay and the never-ending increase in entropy). But it also doesn’t seem likely that it is simply beautiful scenery, peace, and singing alleluia in timeless eternity. In the new creation we continue to live, learn, and experience.

What is the soul? Polkinghorne asks “What is it that will connect our present life to our future life in that new world whose character will be so different?” The human psyche is attached to a material body in an inseparable fashion. Psychology and neuroscience are making this ever clearer. A simple dualistic view of body and soul simply doesn’t seem appropriate. We are better described as animated bodies than incarnated souls. Polkinghorne ruminates on the nature of the soul.

Whatever the human soul may be, it is surely what expresses and carries the continuity of living personhood. We already face within this life the problem of what that entity might be. The soul must be the ‘real me’ that links the boy of childhood to the ageing academic of later life. If that carrier of continuity is not a separate spiritual component, what else could it be? It is certainly not merely material. … What does appear to be the carrier of continuity is the immensely complex ‘information bearing pattern ‘ in which that matter is organised. This pattern is not static; it is modified as we acquire new experiences, insights and memories, in accordance with the dynamic of our living history. It is this information-bearing pattern that is the soul. (p. 105-106)

This information bearing pattern requires some kind of material body, but it is not simply material. In this way of thinking, the preservation of the human soul depends on God’s faithfulness and re-embodiment in resurrection is an act of God. Simply put, immortality is not an intrinsic feature of human existence, body or soul. The connection between a material body and the ‘real me’ is complete. Death is a real end. This means that immortality is (and always was) a divine gift. God is in control and death need not be the ultimate end. God can, and in Christian belief will, re-embody the “information bearing pattern’ that constitutes the human ‘soul.’ Polkinghorne goes on:

In other words, there is indeed the Christian hope of a destiny beyond death, but it resides not in the presumed immortality of a spiritual soul, but in the divinely guaranteed eschatological sequence of death and resurrection. Only a hope conceived of in this way can do full justice to human psychosomatic unity, and hence to the indispensability of some for of re-embodiement for a truly human future existence. The only ground for this hope – and the sufficient ground for this hope, as we have already emphasised – lies in the faithfulness of the Creator, in the unrelenting divine love for all creatures.

Although the discussion thus far is focused on individuals, Polkinghorne suggests that there is a significant relational and collective dimension to the ‘information bearing patterns’ (souls) that comprise the individuals. Resurrection will involve a perfected incorporation of believers into the ‘body of Christ,’ the church, imperfect and yet so necessary even in this life. Individuals are resurrected into community and relationships intact, healed, and continuing.

What kind of world will the resurrected re-embodied soul inhabit? The current world is the kind of world God purposed. The ongoing development and unfolding history is part of his plan. This includes natural history in the development of the universe and the diversity of life and and it includes the unfolding of human history. This is a world of transience.

The age to come, new creation, must involve a real discontinuity and have a fundamentally different character. From our current perspective we simply cannot know how this will work and must take it on trust. Although the current world takes the form it does as part of God’s plan, Polkinghorne notes “there is no reason to suppose that the Creator can not bring into being a new creation of a different character when it is appropriate to the divine purpose to do so.” (p. 114) He looks to scripture for some hints as to the form the new creation will take.

Sacramental. “The new creation will be wholly sacramental, suffused with the presence of the life of God.” (p. 115) Paul talks about resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 concluding that the unfolding of events is “so that God may be all in all.” Revelation 21 provides the same kind of image for the new heaven and new earth.

I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. v. 22-23

Inconceivable. As a physicist by training and early career, Polkinghorne (theoretical physicist, professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge) takes his thoughts in ways that don’t occur to most Christians. Eternity and eternal life present something of a conundrum. The laws of nature in the new heavens and new earth will not be exactly the same, making it hard to imagine. Polkinghorne continues:

Yet it seems a coherent hope to believe that the laws of its nature will be perfectly adapted to the everlasting life of that world where ‘Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more,for the first things have passed away’ (Revelation 21:4), just as the laws of nature of this world are perfectly adapted to the character of its freely evolving process, through which the old creation has made itself. (p. 115-116)

There will be discontinuity within continuity. There is continuity as the new creation is a ‘redeemed transform of the former’ and discontinuity in the nature of the matter and laws adapted to the eternal imperishable. Paul tells is that ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.’ (1 Cor 15:50) This is a mystery, but it must be.

Polkinghorne points out that God’s total creative intent is seen to be intrinsically a two-step process. The original good creation followed by new heavens and new earth.

Temporal. Time seems an intrinsic part of being and Polkinghorne argues that the new creation will not be a timeless world of eternity. It will contain music – defined by the temporal progression of sound – and is better described by analogy to glorious music than to a beautiful, but static, sculpture. The new creation will continue to be a dynamic reality with an ongoing unfolding fulfillment of God’s plans on a different plane.

Music should indeed be our guiding image, not sculpture. Each one of Bach’s thirty Goldberg variations is perfect in itself and we do not need to opt for just one of them. They present us with change without either repetition or loss. It is the exploration of the endless variations of divine perfection that will constitute the harmony of the heavenly realm. How otherwise could finite beings encounter the Infinite? (p. 120)

We will continue to grow, learn, explore, and experience in the new heavens and the new earth in the presence of God. There is no static final picture presented in the New Testament, and certainly not in Revelation.

In Christian hope we don’t go to heaven when we die, at least that isn’t our ultimate destiny. We enter into a new creation. A bustling city, a glorious concert, an image of serenity.

How would you describe new creation?

What does the future hold?

If you wish to contact me, 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.

Dangerous or Not? … We Can’t Ignore Joshua (RJS)

Last updated on: April 9, 2015 at 6:39 am By RJS

We’ve now finished Iain Provan’s book Seriously Dangerous Religion with subtitle: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters. In the postscript to his book Provan sums up his argument. There are a variety of different worldviews at play in our world each with its own particular story of the past. In this mix of stories some claim that the biblical story is an outgrown superstition, with the Old Testament focused on tribal gods and bronze age ethics and the New Testament not much better. The biblical Old Story is said to be downright dangerous. Provan counters and concludes:

It is this Old Story, I propose, into which we still need to read ourselves even in these late modern or postmodern times, as many have done in earlier times if we want to understand who we are and how we ought to live. In fact, it is this Old Story that provides the most secure foundation upon which to build the better future for humankind (and for the planet) for which many of its detractors are looking. It is an Old Story that is big enough and deep enough and long enough to ground a New Age—whether that age is “axial” or not. (p. 409)

Provan’s book is excellent, and I learned much from reading it and interacting with the questions he raises. The Old Story is is big enough and deep enough and long enough to ground a our age and many ages to come.

Still important questions remain. Provan is an Old Testament scholar and his book is focused on the sweep of the Old Testament. He is particularly intent on countering the claims that the Old Testament is, quite simply, a problem. He does this with a detailed discussion of what the Bible really teaches. In some areas he did this quite well – in others, perhaps not so well. A commenter on the last post accused him of stacking the deck to make his point.

That’s cherry picking.

Let’s try a different set of questions.

Is collective punishment justified? Can we ask that question instead?

(The commenter goes on to relate this to the current Israel-Palestine conflict – see the original comment if interested.) The warfare described in Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1 Samuel can certainly raise some important questions here – as can some of the passages in the prophets calling down judgment on various people groups.

And a second comment after I made a short response to the first:

I’m working off your summation above, which seems to pitch softball questions with acceptable answers. You could interview Nixon, and if you asked the right questions, you could paint a (selective) portrait of a man that is very positive. And then you could question why people ever had a problem with him in the first place. Dawkins and others have criticized barbaric bronze-age morality in the Old Testament. If you selectively pick and choose what moral issues and examples you tackle and how, of course you can at the end of it sit back and say, “well there’s no problem to see here. Why all the criticism?”

These comments raise important points. I have some thoughts in response and welcome thoughts from others as well.

First, Dawkins and others who have criticized “barbaric bronze-age morality in the Old Testament” can be accused of cherry picking as well – this time picking the particularly bad, worm infested, rotten cherries. These passages are present – but it is also true that justice, generosity to the poor, care for the weak, the powerless, the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner among you runs through the Old Testament. This theme is inescapable and overwhelming – and it certainly is not “barbaric” morality, in the bronze age or any other age. It is no more justifiable to negate this ethic running through the Old Testament than it is to ignore the “problem passages.” The real shame is that so many Christians, while purporting to believe the Old Story ignore this deeply running theme.

Second, it is clearly true that people can and have used the Bible and (so-called) biblical faith to justify some pretty terrible actions. It is true of some Jewish groups in the Israel-Palestine conflict, it was true in the Spanish inquisition, and it was true in a range of executions Europe. I am sure that we can find other examples as well. Does the fact that the biblical story has been used in this fashion make it intrinsically dangerous? The question can be looked at in the context of many similar questions. Is evolutionary biology dangerous because it was/is used to justify eugenics? Is Capitalism dangerous because it has been used to justify oppression? It is not enough to point to specific incidents to declare an idea of any sort intrinsically dangerous. Humans are good at twisting things to nefarious ends.

However, valid case can be made that The Old Story is intrinsically dangerous if it actively teaches and encourages violence and warfare. There is an important question to be addressed then, regarding the nature of the Old Story. Here I agree with the criticism of Provan’s approach to some extent. While I don’t think he cherry-picks the positive, I do think he avoids many of the hardball questions and gives less than satisfactory answers to others.

Provan suggests that some of the features of the Old Testament are accommodations to the bronze age ancient Near Eastern culture in which the original hearers/readers lived and/or to the reality of broken human relationships. Support for such an approach is found, for example, in the response Jesus gave concerning divorce “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning.” Polygamy, concubines, and many of the specific laws enumerated in Leviticus may fall into similar categories … not so much “because your hearts were hard” but because this was how the local culture functioned. The overriding theme is holiness rather than the details of practice … this applies to defiling skin diseases and defiling molds and practices in sacrifice and many more. The Old Story is not a long list of precise commands for all time, but is summed up as Jesus said, love the Lord your God with heart, mind, soul, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.

But this still leaves the herem warfare of Deuteronomy, Joshua and 1 Samuel to be reckoned with … which gets to the heart of the first challenge above. Provan gives a brief suggestion that this warfare was justified by the immorality of the Canaanites and others, but doesn’t really dig into this issue in any satisfactory manner. In chapter 3, addressing the question “who is God?” Provan responds to one of Richard Dawkins’ critiques:

The Joshua narratives concern, precisely, the long-overdue judgment of a patient and merciful God on “jubilant” but corrupt human culture.⁴⁶ They have nothing to do with the kind of imperialistic conquest or ethnic cleansing that Dawkins’ modern examples evoke. There is no idea in biblical literature that the Israelites had any “right” to the land of Canaan.⁴⁷ Nor has ethnicity anything to do with what happens, in this literature, to the Canaanites. They are driven out of the land (to the extent that they are driven out)⁴⁸ because they are wicked—just as the Israelites themselves are later driven out of the same land, for the same reason.⁴⁹ The Joshua narratives are, in the end, one kind of answer to the question of Psalm 94 (“how long?”)— a persistent, biblical question.⁵⁰ How long will injustice be allowed to stalk the earth; how long will the cries of the oppressed go unheard? Even-handed justice lies at the heart of the matter—as it typically does, when biblical authors (and sometimes biblical characters) describe or reflect upon war. (p. 71)

The endnotes attached to this section are long – sometimes useful, other times less so. Note 47 provides a useful discussion of the promised land as a gift from God. Note 48 points out that the narrative uses hyperbolic language and it is clear that the conquest was not as complete as some passages of Deuteronomy and Joshua (e.g. Joshua 10) make it seem. Provan concludes the note, “It seems, in fact, that we are dealing here with hyperbolic language that is fairly typical of ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts and that we should not interpret it as claiming anything more than that Joshua won comprehensive military victories.” (p. 420) This is an important point and one we need to recognize. On the other hand, notes 46 and 49 emphasize the “just” nature of God’s wrath and the guilt of the Canaanites and later the Israelites. I find Provan’s comments on this “justification”, frankly, far less convincing and the conclusions drawn from this line of reasoning can be and has been dangerous at times.

Does the the Old Story, the biblical story, teach or even allow that we as God’s people should be the arms of his wrath and vengeance?

Within certain beliefs of the nature of scripture – particular views of inerrancy and infallibility – I don’t think there is any satisfactory solution to the problem of Joshua.

Still consistent with the truthfulness and authority of scripture there are, perhaps, some solutions worth considering.

It seems as though the language is hyperbolic and the reality less devastating. The Old Testament itself belies the total destruction of the Canaanites or any of the rest of Israel’s foes. The language may reflect a literary genre and style of the culture that we do not completely appreciate.

There is a clear trajectory in the Old Testament that talks about each generation suffering the consequences of its own sin. The sins of the fathers will not be held against the sons. Such should guide our actions (as should the love of our enemies commanded by Jesus). Herem warfare is not the norm in the biblical story.

It seems possible that the way in which the story is told could reflect a wish that everything likely to contaminate Israel religiously had been utterly destroyed – as though this would have kept them from following a path of destruction. If the text was edited into the form we have it in the exilic and post-exilic period this should, perhaps, be considered.

Not everything related in the Old Testament is actually good – it is simply what happened. It can and does reflect the ancient Near Eastern bronze age culture and the real emotions or real people. God works through deep failings and with both insiders and outsiders.

All of these points could be discussed in much more detail.

Most importantly – we need to read and consider the whole sweep of the Old Testament, and neither fixate too strongly on problem passages or brush them carelessly under the rug. I don’t think that the biblical story teaches or even allows that we as God’s people should be the agents of his wrath. We are not called to purify the land or to establish a holy kingdom by force. I don’t think that the Old Testament teaches this, or even teaches that Israel was called to do this. Israel was called to love the Lord their God and worship him alone and to act in an ethic most of us would admire – He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8)

Is the Old Story dangerous?

Why is the biblical faith for our age good news?

If you wish to contact me, 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.

It Takes a Church to Educate a Christian

Last updated on: April 8, 2015 at 6:25 am By Scot McKnight

Here is a simple claim I make: everything we learn about the Christian life we learn in our church. That may turn some off, but hear me out: we are not alone in anything we do; we are in a context of others in what we learn; the “context” for Christian living is a church; therefore, we learn the Christian life in the church. Some, in fact, learn the Christian life in an anti-church mode, but it is still in the context of church.

Which leads to this: What is the church actually like?
And to this: What kind of Christian life would you learn from your church?

Now I want to contend…. that the shape of your church shapes your Christian life. This is why some have jumped ship on their local church, or local church completely, and are seeking for a better way.

That is, they have left the church not simply because it didn’t meet their needs or live up to their expectation or that it fell short of their theology or preaching standards. No, I’m contending that some leave their local church because of the person that church is making them or could make them!

What is a church designed by God to be like? Two Bible verses from Paul create a kind of church that many of us don’t know, that many of us want, and that many of us know will re-shape what church is like but also what the Christian life will look like. (This is not idealism; this is reality.)

From the NRSV:

Gal. 3:28 There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

Col. 3:11 In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!

My contention now is clear: if this is what a church is supposed to be like, what I call “a fellowship of differents” and not a fellowship “of the sames,” then the Christian life will be about learning to dwell with those who are both like us and not like us. Just a few lines after Paul said what is found above in Colossians 3:11, he said this:

Col. 3:12 As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. 13 Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14 Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. 15 And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. 16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God. 17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Hardly a trace of individual growth but instead a focus on what a fellowship of differents, a church, needs in order to dwell in peace, love, and justice with one another.

First, what the church is; second, what the Christian life looks like.

So some questions from you from my book A Fellowship of Differents:

We should see different genders at church. Do we?

We should see different socioeconomic groups at church. Do we?
We should see different races at church. Do we?
We should see different cultures at church. Do we?
We should see different music styles at church. Do we?
We should see different artistic styles at church. Do we?
We should see different moral histories at church. Do we?
We should see different forms of communication at church. Do we?
We should see different ages involved at church. Do we?
We should see different marital statuses at church. Do we?

Even more, if the church is a mixed salad in a bowl..

We should understand the Christian life as a fellowship. Do we?
We should understand it as a social revolution. Do we?
We should understand it as life together. Do we?
We should understand it as transcending difference. Do we?
We should understand it as honoring difference. Do we?
We should understand it as enjoying difference. Do we?
We should understand it as love, justice, and reconciliation. Do we?

I propose to you today then that the verses in Colossians 3:12-17 above are the kind of Christian life one lived in fellowship with others (alike and different) rather than one simply concerned with how “I” am growing in “my” relation with God.

More Believable Today: What is? The Gospel Story

Last updated on: April 4, 2015 at 11:41 am By Scot McKnight

Charles Moore:

Last Sunday, however, I did see a good play about Jesus, though it was not so described. It was simply the Gospel – this year, St Mark’s – for Palm Sunday, the last Sunday before Jesus was crucified, in our local church. Every Palm Sunday, the story of the Passion is read, and because it is much longer than the usual Gospel, it is voiced as if on stage. A member of the congregation reads the narrative; others take the other parts, such as that of Peter; the rest of us call out the cries of the crowd (“Crucify him!”), and the priest speaks the words of Jesus. This method recognises the inherent drama.

Nowadays, I find I can absorb these so often repeated words more readily than in the past. When I was a boy in that semi-Christian, respectable, peaceful England which the Sixties was in the process of undermining, I found the story moving, but somehow improbable. Why on earth would people want to kill Jesus? He was blatantly a peaceful and decent chap, it seemed to me. Wasn’t it all just a silly mistake, or at least the result of a fanatical culture so remote from my own experience as to be almost incomprehensible?

It seems much more believable today. Every week, a charity called the Barnabas Fund sends me a “persecution update”. This Holy Week, its reports include a Muslim mob in Egypt storming a village where Christians were recently beheaded, and two motorcyclists opening fire on a church in Lahore. On Maundy Thursday, the Feast of the Last Supper, al-Shabaab invaded a Kenyan university and killed 147 students for being Christians. In the Middle East, Christians (and not only, or even chiefly Christians) are murdered in scenes that resemble the punishments on Golgotha, although the technology of death is more advanced and the executioners have the additional fun of filming it.

I Don’t Have to be a Conservative or … (by Allan Bevere)

Last updated on: April 2, 2015 at 7:41 pm By Scot McKnight

“No, I Don’t Have to Be a Conservative, a Moderate, or a Liberal– And You Can’t Make Me!” (by Allan Bevere)

Ever since the French Revolution, politics has been seen in terms of a left-right spectrum. The further Left you go (it is assumed), the more you will favour forms constricting an aristocratic authority, loose structures, plenty of voting about everything and ultimately anarchy. The further Right you go (it is equally assumed), the more you will want a controlling government, producing law and order, proper and firm justice, plenty of people to tell you what to do and ultimately dictatorship.

Of course, pressed too far this doesn’t work. When a left-wing government gets into power it quickly passes all kinds of laws to tell people very precisely what they may and may not do. When a right-wing government gets into power they may very well be under pressure to allow for a good measure of ‘freedom’ for the business community at least, and may want to reject ‘big government’, which often means government by interfering bureaucrats. Life is never quite as simple as we think” (N.T. Wright, Acts for Everyone, Part 2, p. 166).

This quote from Tom Wright, opens his commentary on Acts 23:1-11 where St. Paul is standing before an inquiry of the Sanhedrin and divides the council by appealing to his belief in the resurrection. Wright notes that New Testament scholars have tended to approach this passage as a right/left issue (more left he says since most scholars lean left), but Wright reminds us that this is a first-century text and so interpreting the passage in this way is not that simple.

I have said before that I refuse to be bound by the modern left/right continuum in thinking through theology, ethics, and politics. The responses from many people to my claim have become all too predictable. Some assume that since I claim neither position, then I must be a moderate, someone who is halfway between the two extremes. This assumes that the left/right continuum remains in place and I am just in the middle; but this mischaracterizes my position. I am not a moderate because I think the left/right continuum is simply incoherent. Thus to be a moderate on that continuum is also incoherent.

Another response I get is that since I refuse to claim allegiance to the left or to the right, then I obviously have no convictions and/or I wish to remain above it all refusing to become involved in the mess that is theology, morality and politics.

The assumption here is that in order to be a person of conviction and one who participates in the important matters of life, I must place myself somewhere on this left/right continuum. Anyone who knows me knows that I have very deep convictions on many matters, but once again, the left/right continuum is treated as an ontological reality that cannot be dismissed any more than one can deny they need air to breathe. For many the rejection of the modern left/right continuum makes about as much sense as saying that 2+2=5.

And finally, there are those who say to me, please tell me more about your views so I can understand? How does your view look? Of course I am always happy to clarify, but what I have found is that no matter how often I clarify, I still get the same request for clarification from the same people over and over again. While I do not doubt the sincerity of these folks, I have come to the conclusion that those who cannot seem to grasp my views are unable to do so because they are so trapped into left/right, liberal/conservative, Democrat/Republican, either/or thinking, that my views just appear too incoherent. But what I want to suggest in this rather long post, is that it is the modern left/right continuum that is incoherent, and that is why I reject it.

So, I have decided that what needs to be addressed, which I hope will clarify, at least a little more clearly, is how the modern left/right continuum even came to be in the first place and why it is so problematic. In this post I am leaning heavily on Crispin Sartwell’s excellent essay, “The Left-Right Political Spectrum Is Bogus.” Sartwell clarifies Wright’s reference to the French Revolution:

Transcending partisanship is going to require what seems beyond the capacities of either side: thinking about the left-right spectrum rather than from it. The terminology arose in revolutionary France in 1789, where it referred to the seating of royalists and anti-royalists in the Assembly. It is plausible to think of the concept (if not the vocabulary) as emerging in pre-revolutionary figures such as Rousseau and Burke. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation of “left” and “right” used in the political sense in English is in Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution in 1837, but the idea only crystallized fully with the emergence and under the aegis of Marxism, in the middle of the 19th century. It was not fully current in English-speaking countries until early in the 20th.

This is important because it means that the left/right way of looking at the world has not always been the way people have looked at the world, which one would not know by talking to many people on both sides who seem to assume the left/right spectrum as essentially woven into the fabric of the universe. Of course, even if one acknowledges that the left/right continuum is context dependent, that does not necessarily mean that it is incoherent. Sartwell insists otherwise. “The arrangement of positions along the left-right axis– progressive to reactionary, or conservative to liberal, communist to fascist, socialist to capitalist, or Democrat to Republican– is conceptually confused, ideologically tendentious, and historically contingent. And any position anywhere along it is infested by contradictions.”

Sartwell gives plenty of examples of why the left/right axis does not work, and I encourage everyone to read his piece before passing judgment on his argument. There is not enough space to go through his examples, but one extended quote will suffice.

The left-right spectrum is often characterized in terms of two extreme poles. One way to see that this is incoherent is that these poles can be defined in mutually incompatible ways. It’s awfully strange that Rand Paul and John McCain belong to the same political party and are generally held to be on the same end of the political spectrum. I’d say they each disagree more profoundly and substantially with the other than either disagrees with Barack Obama, for example. Some of the most historically salient “right-wing” movements are monarchism, fascism, fundamentalism, and libertarianism, which have nothing in common except that they all have reasons to oppose Marxist communism, and vice versa. Yet they also all have similar reasons to oppose one another. Toss in David Brooks Burkeans, security-state neocons, and so on, and you have a miscellany of unrelated positions.

The left pole, meanwhile, could be a stateless society of barter and localism; or a world of equality in which people are not subordinated by race, gender, and sexuality; or a pervasive welfare state; or a Khmer Rouge reeducation regime. The Nazi Party, Catholic Church, hereditary aristocracy, Ayn Rand capitalists, and redneck gun enthusiasts are all on the same side of the left-right spectrum. So are hacktivists, food-stamp officials, anti-globalization activists, anarcho-primitivists, and advocates of a world government. It would be hard to come up with a less coherent or less useful way of thinking about politics.

If Sartwell is right that the left/right spectrum is an incoherent way of thinking about politics (given our current state of dysfunctional government do we really wish to disagree?), I insist that it is also an incoherent way for Christians to think about politics as well as theology and ethics. Why is it that for many Christians the liberal/conservative spectrum is of more significance than (for example) the Wesleyan/Calvinist axis? And if you think this is not the case, just read all the social media memes that clearly suggest that if Jesus were here today he would be a liberal Democrat or a conservative Republican. Either suggestion is a flat-out distortion of the life and ministry and the message of Jesus.

There are other spectra one can utilize in theological reflection. Indeed, why is it that many Wesleyans and Calvinists view the Wesleyan and Calvinist traditions through the lens of the liberal/conservative spectrum, which I suggest distorts both? I am too often astounded (even though I no longer should be) by those trying to squeeze their Wesleyanism into their liberal or conservative mindset, putting Wesley in servitude to liberalism or conservatism. Why are the latter categories more determinative than the former for too many in the church? Why must my deliberations on theology, ethics, and politics be seen through the liberal/conservative lens?

In this Holy Week when we worship and observe and reflect upon what Christians believe is the most significant week in human history, let us consider weaning ourselves away from what Stanley Hauerwas calls the sterile and uninteresting conservative/liberal options, and instead work to see our theology, ethics, and politics directly through the lens of the death and resurrection of Jesus, without the liberal/conservative filters.

I am not suggesting that if we manage to do this all the disagreements we Christians have will be resolved, but I am suggesting that if we truly attempt to do so, our disagreements will certainly look less conservative or liberal… and more Christian.

A Dancing God?

Last updated on: March 29, 2015 at 6:39 am By Scot McKnight

That fussy but relentless atheist philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, as he always does, lays it on the line when it comes to the Christian belief in an eternal heaven of goodness, saying,

The “most contemptible of all unrealisable promises” generated by the Christian gospel is the impudent doctrine of personal immortality.”

So where did that conviction take him?

A new pride my ego taught me, and this I teach men: no longer to bury one’s head in the sand of heavenly beings, but to bear it freely, an earthly head, which creates a meaning for the earth.

Jerry Walls aims to counter Nietzsche’s approach in his new book, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: A Protestant View of the Cosmic Drama, and he does so successfully — and with some panache! Before we get to his counter to the man he calls his “favorite atheist” I sketch the seven themes of heaven in Walls’ portrait, and in doing so I observe that many theologians who believe in heaven don’t have the courage to put realities to their convictions. Walls does:

1. It is the ultimate romantic comedy: the human story comes to a comic end.
2. The answer to our deepest longings.
3. A new heaven and a new earth: an embodied reality of newness.
4. The death of death.
5. A reunion of truth, beauty, and goodness.
6. Celebration of the best of human culture.
7. At home with God.

These seven big ideas about heaven are biblically solid, non-speculative, and inherent to what the Bible says about heaven.

Walls anchors his chapter in two ideas:

First, happiness. Aristotle, Pascal, and Wesley are just three who affirm that humans seek to be happy, and he eschews any superficial sense of happiness for a deep-seated happiness.

We have a built-in hard drive to desire happiness, but what if that hard drive is a guarantee of frustration, a mechanism that ironically assures our unhappiness because it can never be fully realized? Are we, through no fault of our own, born with an “addiction” for happiness in a universe where it can never be satisfied? (23)

And, second, love.

Indeed, we can take this a step further and point out that there is a deep connection between our yearning for love and our desire for happiness. Only if we love and are loved can we be truly and deeply happy. For many people, the essential key to happiness is to find their soul mate, the perfect relationship that they believe will fulfill them and at last provide the happiness they crave (23).

Now back to Nietzsche, for Walls contends Nietzsche’s biggest problem with the gospel was its view of love, God’s love, God’s love made manifest on the cross. Two words from Walls now on love:

So here is a paradox; indeed, we can call it the love paradox. [f we love God most of all, we are thereby inspired to love other things more deeply and truly than we would if we loved them more than we love God.22 To see God’s face in heaven will not mean that our interest in other people and other created things will diminish or even that we will love them less. Rather, it means we will see God clearly in all his good gifts, and we will love and enjoy them even more as a result (38).

Nietzsche simply could not conceive of love like this really existing, and this was the deepest reason he found the idea of heaven preposterous. And this, I want to emphasize, is the watershed issue. Is Dante right that love moves the stars, or is Nietzsche right that the will to power makes the world go round? Do the strong inevitably dominate the weak like those birds of prey that carry off lambs, or is ultimate truth both more surprising and more beautiful than we could ever have guessed?

Nietzsche’s Alpha was the will to power, so he could not imagine an Omega where perfect love is the order of the day. But if the Trinity is the Alpha and the Omega, then heaven makes perfect sense. If the Trinity is bedrock reality, then love is the very heart of the meaning of life. And when perfect love achieves its ends, we may hope to find the perfect happiness we crave, the perfect comic end of the cosmic drama.

In the end, Walls thinks of God in a way that means God is the dance itself:

No doubt C. S. Lewis had these church fathers in mind when he noted “that in Christianity, God is not a static thing—not even a person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance” (26).

A New Perspective Anglican Ponders a Presbyterian’s Luther

Last updated on: March 29, 2015 at 6:45 am By Scot McKnight

This is not an April Fools day post. It’s a post appreciating the greatness of Martin Luther, with whom I’ve had my own struggles. I, of course, love his accomplishment in the Protestant Reformation, wish more would be made on the part of many in seeing how political that movement actually was, think his posing of law over against gospel is not only a false dichotomy but shatters the biblical narrative, and of course I know what he did to both Anabaptists and Jews. Yet… yet… yet… Luther must be seen for the Titan he was.

So, when I heard that one of my favorite church historians had written a book on Luther and the Christian life, I had to read it… and it is a very good book that I recommend enthusiastically: Carl Trueman, Luther and the Christian Life: Cross and Freedom (Wheaton: Crossway, 2015).

The book is about the Christian life but Trueman keeps a constant eye on the pastoral life and pastoral implications of Luther’s theological understanding of life. A pastor can read this entire book for its pastoral theology with great profit.

Carl’s got a way with words, and this one illustrates his indirection — and wit — for a big sweep of Luther:

For Luther, as someone not gifted in the matter of understatement, Anabaptists were allies of the Antichrist, another point of undoubted discomfort for modern evangelical appropriations of his theology. Not only was he a militant, unrepentant paedobaptist; he also ascribed rather negative eschatological significance to his opponents on this score (141).

Trueman loves Luther as a man and learns from him as a theologian and pastor and husband:

Over twenty years ago, I was being interviewed for what would prove to be my first tenured appointment at a university. Halfway through the ordeal, one of the interviewers asked me, “If you were trapped on a desert island, who would you want with you—Luther or Calvin?” My response was reasonably nuanced for a reply to an unexpected question: “Well, I think Calvin would provide the best theological and exegetical discussion, but he always strikes me as somewhat sour and colorless. Luther, however, may not have been as careful a theologian, but he was so obviously human and so clearly loved life. Thus, I’d have to choose Luther.” Later that day, I was offered the position of lecturer in medieval and Reformation theology (195).

In some ways Trueman’s task is to yank Luther from the clutches of some evangelical uses of him and his theology, not to show how Luther differed over and over with Roman Catholicism. Thus, Trueman knows his audience, knows what needs most to be said, and this book does it. But there is no idealizing of Luther in this book:

With a figure like Martin Luther, the tendency will always be to make him a hero or a villain. The stakes are so high in the Reformation debate, and Protestant and Roman Catholic identities so wrapped up in responses to him, that the temptation of a black-and-white, morally and theologically straightforward approach is significant. Yet even this brief overview of his life reveals not only the connections between his biography and his theology but also the human contradictions and failings that were part of who he was and what he did. His stand at Worms is magnificent; his later writings against the Jews are nauseating. What are we to do with him? (54)

Because Trueman has been teaching Luther for so many years he stands above the normal readings and points us all to what is most important to how many read Luther today:

The key texts for the popular evangelical understanding of Luther were all in place by then: The Ninety-Five Theses, The Heidelberg Disputation, The Freedom of the Christian Man, and The Bondage of the Will. One or two great texts were yet to be written (the great commentary on Galatians being the obvious example), but on the whole these four titles cover the working canon through which most Protestant evangelicals approach Luther (160).

Trueman probes other writings to sketch how he views the Christian life but that life is formed in a public context with surges of response, reaction and opposition. In that context Luther’s view of the Christian life comes to the surface:

In a sense, the details are no longer important: the precise issues and practices to which Luther was reacting have long since vanished. What is important is the theology on which the theses were built: the theology of humility and the costliness of grace. Though Luther probably did not realize it at the time, these struck at the heart of the medieval sacramental system and thus at the authority of the church. In criticizing indulgences, Luther also did what is always guaranteed to precipitate a reaction: he hit the church where it hurts most, in her revenue department (38-39).

In his sketch of Luther’s life as the context for his theology and view of the Christian life, Trueman offers this proposal of when the Reformation began — not with the pinning of the 95 theses but… the Leipzig debate where Luther “also added that papal supremacy was a relatively recent innovation” (42). He drove — pounded — a wedge between the gospel and the Catholic Church’s teachings:

Arguably, this is the moment when the Reformation truly began in earnest, for it was then that the implications of Luther’s otherwise piecemeal attacks on indulgences and theological method became clear. If Luther was right, if humility was the key to salvation, then the whole medieval system needed to be rejected, and the papacy was wrong. Leipzig made this clear, along with the fact that there was no middle ground (42).

In the term humility (a theology of the cross and glory) Luther’s central note of the Christian life is heard. As Trueman says it

Luther believed that, outside of Christ, he was dead in trespasses and sins and desperately wicked. His attitude toward the Jews confirms his own opinion of himself (53).

Thus, for Luther at the core of the Christian life is justification by faith and this cannot be emphasized too much and it gets deeper and deeper into the heart of a theological view of life — he digs into the sinful heart to discover what grace means. This is not the Reformed experience so much as it is the Lutheran experience, and I pull here three quotations:

In the medieval understanding, justification was a process of growing righteous via the impartation of Christ’s righteousness connected to the infusion of grace via the sacramental ministry of the church. Thus, justification was simply one part of a much larger structure (67-68).

Thus, a man may appear outwardly righteous (before the world) but in reality be inwardly unrighteous. Likewise, he may appear outwardly unrighteous and indeed despicable but inwardly be perfectly righteous before God. This distinction is absolutely basic to Luther’s understanding of justification, for it is the basis upon which he asserts that no external thing (in terms of works righteousness) can actually affect standing before God (68).

We noted earlier how Luther in 1517, and even on into 1518, was committed to seeing humility as the key that made someone a passive recipient of God’s grace. By 1520, humility had been absorbed into, and transformed by, his broader understanding of faith as trust in God’s Word (68).

Salvation then, justification then, is epistemological and experiential all at once: it is the joyful exchange of Christ’s alien righteousness to us and prompts gratitude in spades. This then creates a new kind of life, a life of cross-shaped and grace-shaped freedom, the kind of freedom that is a theology of the cross and grace and death and resurrection and not one of happiness, victory or abundance:

Freedom for Luther must be understood through the incarnation and the cross: it is freedom to serve others and freedom to die for others. The whole of the Christian faith, and therefore the whole of Christian ministry, needs to be constructed in light of who God is for us as he is revealed in his incarnate Son hanging on the tree at Calvary (75).

The logic of the cross says that weakness and death, painful as they are, have been utterly subverted by God in Christ, that pain and mortality have ironically become the means of strength and power, and that the grave itself has become the gateway to paradise. And that is the lesson of justification by grace through faith too: the outer man may well be fading away, but the inner man goes from strength to strength (77).

Now hear this: Luther’s theory of the Christian life is corporate, ecclesial and centered in the fundamental categories of Word and sacraments.

For all of the post-Bultmannian [read: new perspective?] criticisms of Luther for developing an individualistic theology, in practice his emphases are really rather corporate: Word and sacrament demand a corporate context (79).

OK, fair enough,but I would say it is still quite individualistic for there is precious little interest in the church as community. Church is where a priest/pastor preaches Word and hands out sacraments. That is, go to church, hear the sermon, live out the catechism, take eucharist so you can live a responsible Christian life in the public sector. Perhaps I’m missing something here but I don’t see much community focus in Luther’s view of the Christian life. Having said that, I resume where Trueman was:

If the definition of ministry is set by Word and sacrament, so is the substance of the Christian’s life. Luther’s emphasis on Word, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper should surely point believers toward how they should understand their lives: the church service is fundamental to Christian discipleship. The answer to spiritual weariness, fear, and those dreaded Anfechtungen that afflict the Christian is found not in anything special or extraordinary as the world understands it. That is what the theologian of glory desires. Further, every theologian of glory probably thinks of himself as unique and thus as having special problems that require special solutions. The theologian of the cross, however, while acknowledging that every Christian is unique in that every Christian is a specific individual, also understands that the answer to every unique Christian’s problem is actually very general, and the means are very ordinary. The answer is always Christ crucified for me, and that Christ is found in Word and sacrament (158).

Running this, however, is his theology of law and gospel, a theology that will drive a human to the experience of humility and grace — the cross’s primary impact on the human. Hence, law and gospel run rampant and we find something very similar today in the beliefs of pastors like Tim Keller, Tullian Tchividjian and J.D. Greear, though probably not with the dark themes we see in Luther’s approach to preaching law in order to shatter the confidence of the congregants:

The distinction underlies much of the theology of the disputation but is explicit in thesis 26: “The law says, ‘do this,’ and it is never done. Grace says, ‘believe in this,’ and everything is already done.” Fundamental to Luther’s understanding of salvation, and thus of the Christian life, is the antithesis between doing and believing, between trying to earn salvation and receiving salvation in Christ, between works and faith, between law and gospel (91).

The task of the preacher, therefore, is to take the Bible and to do two things in every sermon: destroy self-righteousness and point hearers toward the alien, external righteousness of Christ (92).

Thus, as the law’s function is to bind and to crush, so the first task of the minister is to preach the law in such a manner that it does this. He must hold before the congregation a vision of the transcendent glory and holiness of God, and force congregants to see just how catastrophically far short of that they all fall. His task is not that of the typical American televangelist: giving people a pep talk and helping them have a good self-image and more confidence in themselves. For Luther, those are the lies of Satan. The preacher’s task is first and foremost to shatter self-confidence in his audience and to drive them to despair.

Once the preaching of the law has driven a person to despair, then the minister is to declare the gospel and point to Christ. That is what the gospel is: an account of the life, work, and significance of the Lord Jesus Christ, as Luther makes clear in his preface to the New Testament: “The gospel, then, is nothing but the preaching about Christ, Son of God and of David, true God and man, who by his death and resurrection has overcome for us the sin, death, and hell of all men who believe in him.” Thus, preaching represents dramatic movement from exposing the folly of self-righteousness and cultivating despair and humility to providing comfort in the Lord Jesus Christ, the promise of whom is grasped by faith (92).

In one of these sermons, he makes a most memorable statement about the power of the Word:

I will preach it, teach it, write it, but I will constrain no man by force, for faith must come freely without compulsion. Take myself as an example. I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force. I simply , preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept [cf. Mark 4:26-29], or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything (94-95).

Thus, we are back to the church context for the Christian life:

This points toward one of the striking aspects of Luther’s approach to liturgy: the church’s gathered worship is a catechetical exercise, not in the sense of catechisms that operate by question and answer, but in the broader sense of the school of faith. Gathered worship is intended for the education of the people in sound theology upon which to build their lives (103).

Luther’s vision is comprehensive:

Given Luther’s concern that worship fulfill a pedagogical/catechetical function, it is perhaps not surprising, though certainly impressive, that he sees the whole week as providing an opportunity for structured Christian education through the various liturgies of the church. Monday and Tuesday, the service is to focus on teaching about the Decalogue, the creed, the Lord’s Prayer, baptism, and the Eucharist. These are the established elements of Christian catechesis from the Middle Ages, and Luther clearly assumes them as foundational to the Christian life. Wednesday is to be devoted to teaching from the Gospel of Matthew, as Saturday afternoon is to be devoted to the Gospel of John. Thursday and Friday are to focus on other New Testament writings. Sunday is the big day, with multiple services and three sermons devoted to the Gospels. The overall purpose is “to give the Word of God free course among us” (104).

If anything, Luther values the pastoral life far more than most:

… the minister’s first calling is to be present with those for whom he has oversight. We might even borrow Lutheran terminology from elsewhere: the minister’s presence in his parish is not to be merely symbolic; rather he is to be there as a real presence: in, with, and among his people. This will not only inform his preaching such that it speaks more directly to the particulars of his people’s lives; it will also allow for catechizing, over which the minister has responsibility, and for the one-to-one confession and absolution that some delicate consciences require (108).

And Luther’s honesty comes to the surface in Trueman’s portrait, an honesty that leads to reflections on how to recover one’s fervor:

First, when I feel that I have become cool and joyless in prayer because of other tasks or thoughts (for the flesh and the devil always impede and obstruct prayer), I take my little psalter, hurry to my room, or, if it be the day and hour for it, to the church where a congregation is assembled and, as time permits, I say quietly to myself and word-for-word the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and, if I have time, some words of Christ or of Paul, or some psalms, just as a child might do (119-120).

What then comes to the fore in Luther’s theology of the Christian life?

1. Law and gospel
2. Cross and grace
3. Humility
4. Church receptivity
5. A private/social life shaped by the church’s teachings
6. Joy and fun.

A Tossed Salad (RJS)

Last updated on: April 13, 2015 at 6:09 am By RJS

When I was growing up we had tossed salad with dinner quite often, especially during the summer. My dad would make the salad, with tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, radishes, and such, cut up small and tossed together, well mixed. When we had company he would also make the salad and the mixed up tossed together nature would get comment. He used no salad dressing, only some celery salt and pepper. The rest of us often added dressing (I’m partial to blue cheese myself). Today I will add bacon bits, croutons, and cheese to the mix as well. In his new book A Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God’s Design for Life Together Scot uses a metaphor of a salad bowl to describe church – the way it too often is as opposed to the way it should be. He would approve of my dad’s salads, a mixture of flavors unspoiled by a strong and uniform dressing.

I read A Fellowship of Differents over the weekend and heartily recommend the book. It will make a good discussion starter in a wide range of situations, raising important and thought provoking questions.

The point is simple, but not easy. As a good tossed salad, the church should be a mixture of different kinds of people, not a uniform gathering of “likes” – the same age, race, culture, class, education, or even precisely the same theology slathered over with uniform tastes. The church is not called to be a melting pot. Scot adds personal reflection to his book, and I will take the same liberty. I was fortunate to grow up in a church with a broad range of ages, educational levels, and income. The racial mix was rather (but not completely) uniform – however, this matched the surrounding community. We were not fundamentalists, and tolerated discussion and a range of views on many kinds of issues. Not big on “end times” discussions, with something of a range of views in the church. There were also a range of views on the age of the earth. I learned later that our pastor had played a role in keeping the local conference of our denomination from adopting a young earth type position. We were not separatists – but we certainly viewed ourselves as different from the surrounding culture. And this shaped the way I view the local church – even yet today.

Scot comments:

So here’s my claim after that romp through the church of my youth: Everything I learned about the Christian life I learned from my church. I will make this a bigger principle: a local church determines what the Christian life looks like for the people in that church. Now I’ll make it even bigger still: we all learn the Christian life from how our local church shapes us. These three principles are a way of saying that our local churches matter far more than we often know. (p. 15)

The message I learned growing up was that we were different, not on grounds of strict theology, but because we were not “Sunday morning Christians” (like those Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Episcopalians). Today I realize that many of the others were as committed as we, but this was the message I picked up at the time. Church wasn’t something we did for an hour or two each week, but a community we were a part of and were committed to. This certainly shapes my views today – church focused on a short staff run service for one hour a week hardly seems real. Community requires a much larger range of opportunity for participation and interaction. Small groups were not a part of the church I grew up in, and although I’ve had some good experiences in small groups in later years, I remain convinced that they can’t bear the entire load. Small groups are too homogeneous – generally intentional gatherings of peers rather than a fellowship of differents. We need a broader range of interactions.

No local church is perfect, but the local church matters. And the form it takes and teaches shapes the people who attend. The question then becomes “what form should the church take?” Throughout A Fellowship of Differents, Scot looks to Paul’s letters, the various early (imperfect) churches described, and the picture of Christian life Paul envisions. There is far too much in the book for one short post, so I will focus on a few points that stuck out as I was reading.

We is bigger than me. Chapter 10. Christian life and the Christian church isn’t about the individual. Scot suggests that there are two major challenges to the importance of church in America. The first is the myth of the perfect church.

We are given in America the power of choice, and religion has become a smorgasbord to choose your own church based on its ability to live up to your own preferences. This leads to the first thing we need to observe about the actual New Testament pattern, one [Roger] Williams managed to avoid and one many today do not want to acknowledge: we are a messy family.

There never was a golden era when the church “did church” perfectly. Sometimes well-meaning people suggest the first-century was a golden era, but anyone who reads the New Testament knows that there were problems within weeks! In Jerusalem, ethnic rivalries meant Greek-speaking widows were neglected, and at Corinth its members were forming personality cults. (p. 111-112)

There is no perfect church. “The church was and is today the most radical social experiment in history.” (p. 113) We are called to be a part of this experiment.

The second challenge is the myth of self-reliance. Roger Williams epitomized the search for the perfect church. Henry David Thoreau leads us on the path of self reliance. “At the heart of the American psyche is the Self, and Thoreau helped form the American Me so that it is bigger than the American We or the church We.” (p. 113)

But We is bigger than Me. “The Bible’s focus – read it from beginning to end and you will see this – is on what God is doing in this world through the people of God. Page after page, chapter after chapter, book after book – sixty-six of them in all – the Bible tells the story of Israel that morphs into the story of the Kingdom and the story of the Church. … the Me Story is contained within the We story.” (p. 114)

This means that we, as the people of God, share life.

The best word for church in the whole New Testament is not the word church, a word for a gathered assembly. The best word for church is fellowship, which simply means that we share life with one another. That is precisely what happened to the first Christians when the Spirit of God plopped them al together in those house churches across the Roman Empire. Such an odd box of differents. (p. 115)

…

The We of fellowship, then, is spiritual, it is social, and it is financial. But fellowship is not something we create; it is the result of God’s work in us. When God’s people live in fellowship with one another, when they “do life” together, the church embodies the gospel about King Jesus and people respond to the gospel about him, When they live in fellowship, the Me finds its joy in the We. It’s messy, believe me, very messy, but no matter what the mess, the gospel is at work to turn messy people into holy people, even if it takes a lifetime (or more). (p. 116)

It is in the day to day messiness of a local church that me becomes we, not in any individual regime of spiritual formation.

Faithful folks, not heroes. A second point that stuck out for me as I read came in Chapter 15. First a definition. Faith means trust and faithfulness means trust over time of faith over time. Thus faithfulness can only be measured after the passage of time. “What the church needs most is not heroes of faith, but faithful followers of Jesus. ” (p. 164)

A few themes on faithfulness from the chapter: (1) Faithfulness happens when God’s strength is unleashed in us as we look on, to lean on, God. It isn’t a matter of having enough grit and determination. (2) Faithfulness is the result of a lifetime of daily commitments. Prayer, focus, and dozens of small decisions and choices in the forward direction. Faithfulness requires effort, even as it doesn’t depend on grit and determination. (3) Most of us are ordinary Christians, and its okay to be an ordinary Christian. I’d say that all of us are ordinary Christians. Some are called to a more heroic life by circumstance, but most of life, and particularly a life of faithful following involves ordinary life.

Scot concludes:

In the evening of life, I want God to say of me that I was an ordinary person who lived an ordinary Christian life empowered by the extraordinary grace of God my whole life long. … How about you? (p. 169)

Amen.

And this means that the church as a fellowship should be concerned with discipleship and faithfulness.

We need the Spirit of God, and God’s gifts. The final section of A Fellowship of Differents focuses on flourishing. The history of the church is a history of fraction, friction, and separation.

The hope of this book is that that history will be reversed by a renewed commitment to be the church that God designed, a church that flourishes in a salad bowl fellowship of differents.

But there is gospel – resurrection and new creation news here: the Spirit can take our abilities and transcend them, then take our inabilities and transform them into the gracious power of unity. To flourish, then, we need to be Holy Spirit people. The only way the church cam be God’s kind of church is through the power of the Spirit. Only the Spirit empowers us to transcend differences and to transform our preferences into love for others. (p. 195-196)

Scot runs through the importance of the Spirit in Paul’s letters (it comes up all the time). I am going to finish with one point. Each of us (ordinary Christians) has the Spirit and each of us (ordinary Christians) has gifts for the sake of the church. The will flourish as the people of God and a fellowship of differents when all of these gifts are nurtured, encouraged, and used.

The Spirit makes us bigger than a collection of (contentious) individuals.

How does the Spirit make us bigger? By assigning us a gift in the big cosmic mission of God. Through the Spirit’s gifts, we become participants, actors on the divine stage, people gifted by God with an assignment and responsibility in the church of God. We must also see the paradox here that God’s gifts makes us bigger by making us needier! How so? What we learn from the gifts is that God gives to us a gift, but he gives to everyone else a gift too, so that we need one another if the body of Christ is to function well. (p. 208)

There is no all encompassing list of gifts in the letters of Paul, although there are several lists that provide important examples. Scot points out that instead of looking to lists for guidance we should be asking “What is the Spirit gifting me to do in the fellowship?” This will identify gifts and callings. A local church flourishes when it encourages and uses the gifts of all in its body. Individual Christians flourish and grow when they are using their gifts as a part of the people of God.

The church I attend today is much like the church of my youth. It has been a church that encourages and uses the different gifts in the congregation. A church is not called to be a business with a business plan for growth and a CEO with a staff for implementation. Nor is it a weekly worship service (with “child care”), relegating fellowship to a small group of people “just like me.” A church is called to be a fellowship of differents and a family that stands together through thick and thin, ups and downs, to be the people of God.

In what way is your church a fellowship of differents?

What is the church called to be?

If you wish to contact me, 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.

“Celebrating” an Execution (by Jeff Cook)

Last updated on: March 23, 2015 at 8:25 pm By Scot McKnight

A good reminder of 1st Century realities.

Jeff Cook lectures on philosophy at the University of Northern Colorado. His thoughts on the cross can be found here: Everything New (Subversive 2012). You can connect with him atwww.everythingnew.org and @jeffvcook

Celebrating an Execution

This week Christians all over the world will celebrate an execution.

In the sixth century BC, the Assyrians developed a new way to kill people. Early cultures the world over punished murderers and other scoundrels by hanging them from a cursed tree, but the Assyrians realized when they crucified someone, they commanded respect. The sight of a crucifixion inflicted a horror which the Assyrians found more valuable than simply executing a criminal. Crosses were able to mutilate and dishonor so severely that everyone noticed, everyone was shocked, everyone adapted, everyone was transformed by the power of the cross.

Crosses were the nuclear weapon of the ancient world.

Empires were first created and maintained because of the fear of crucifixion. Because of its power, Alexander the Great adopted crucifixion and brought it to the Mediterranean in the 4th century BC. The Phoenicians introduced it to Rome, and Rome became an empire in part because it perfected the art of crucifying people. Quintilian, an adviser to the emperor, described his own philosophy of crucifixion, “Whenever we crucify the guilty, the crowded roads are chosen, where most people can see and be moved by this fear. For penalties relate not so much to retribution as to their exemplary effect.”

If you lived in the ancient world, it’s likely you would have seen scores of people executed on a cross. If someone in your town was crucified, you would have heard them die, seen their agony, and watched their bodies decompose on your way to do business. On a crucifix, the executed often hung for days until their organs failed and their bodies succumbed to shock. In order to maximize its gory effect, victims would often be severely beaten before being tied, or even nailed to a crossbeam. After a victim died, the corpse was left to bake under the sun, and after a few weeks the mangled body of a man, woman or child would simply rot and fall off their cross. Victims often wore signs around their necks displaying the reason for their death, making it clear to all not only what activities ought to be avoided, but also who was in charge—because crucifixion was not about killing someone. Killing a person is easy.

Crosses were billboards. Crosses unveiled who was king.

Looking back on history one truth is certain. In the ancient world, crosses communicated to everyone that the violent, the brutally ambitious, and the merciless reigned over the earth. Crosses were not just the way people died. Crosses were instruments of slavery. Crosses announced the rule of death, evil, dysfunction and despair.

But this is no longer the case.

The world itself has miraculously changed for the cross is no longer an icon of death but a symbol of lasting life. The cross is no longer the tool of a dysfunctional world but a sign that this world is being remade. The cross is no longer a picture of oppression or despair; the cross no longer screams out that God is absent or that death is the future of all.

Because of Jesus, the cross has a different message.

Christians celebrate the death of Jesus this week because his cross announces that all that was once sick can be restored, that evil will not have the last word, that God has not abandoned us like so much trash but has approached us in a fundamentally new way. In the pantheon of potential deities Jesus is unique and worthy of celebration, for he alone took what was most foul and disgusting in the whole history of the world—the crucified man—and through the cross announced his ability and intention to making everything new.

And It Was Very Good (RJS)

Last updated on: March 25, 2015 at 9:09 pm By RJS

John Walton’s new book The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate explores a topic at the center of much of the controversy between science and Christian faith. Following the format used in his earlier books The Lost World of Genesis One and The Lost World of Scripture the chapters are organized according to propositions about the text and its interpretation. The first five propositions summarize concepts from the first two books and his more scholarly book Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology. These propositions focus on the nature of scripture and the interpretation of Genesis 1 to provide a necessary foundation for the move into Genesis 2 and 3 and the problem of Adam. Today’s post will outline the major ideas in this foundation.

Genesis is an Ancient Document. The better we understand the ancient context, the better we will understand the message of the text. Walton will often remind us that Genesis was written for us but it was not written to us. As scripture it is for everyone, but this does not remove the need for continued study and interpretation. Every translation involves interpretation.

Some ideas in the text are incidental arising from the ancient Near Eastern culture, they are not part of the message of the text. For example, Genesis assumes that the waters above are separated from the waters below by a solid dome of some sort. Most people until very recently would have had no trouble believing this and it was a common view in the church, as the picture from Lucas Cranach included in Luther’s bible illustrates. Today we know this isn’t true and most don’t feel that this “error” undermines biblical authority. Likewise, we no longer view people as thinking with their intestines, even though this language is used in the text of scripture. Genesis isn’t a science text and it isn’t teaching science. We would do well to remember this and to avoid reading modern science back into the text or out of the text.

The need for expertise and scholarship to dig the depth of meaning from the text is simply a fact. We all walk alongside and stand on the shoulder of others as we read and study the text. Walton goes on:

Such study is not a violation of the clarity (“perspicuity”) of Scripture propagated by the reformers. They were not arguing that every part of Scripture was transparent to any casual reader. If they believed that, they would not have had to write hundreds of volumes trying to explain the complexities of interpretation at both exegetical and theological levels. They were, instead, trying to make the case that there was a “plain sense” of Scripture that was not esoteric, mystical, or allegorical and could only be spiritually discerned. Everyone could have access to this plain sense. (p. 22-23)

A better understanding of ancient Hebrew, ancient Near Eastern culture, literature, expectations, genres, styles, daily life, all of these will improve our understanding of Scripture. We need careful scholarship and we all need to pay attention to this scholarship.

Creating Focuses on Establishing Order by Assigning Functions. This is a big part of Walton’s overall argument. When we read Genesis 1 with modern eyes it seems obvious that the point is the material creation of the world. Before we can draw such a conclusion, however, we should dig into the text in its original context. Within the ancient Near East creation involves establishing order rather than producing material items. It isn’t that the latter is out of the question, it just isn’t the primary focus.

Our translations can illuminate and also obscure the ancient meaning of the text because every translation involves interpretation. Walton argues that the words translated made or created in Genesis 1 generally refer to establishing order or assigning function rather than to material creation. For example, “God made two great lights” could as easily be translates as “God provided two great lights” in the same way that God provided families for the midwives who defied pharaoh.

Genesis 1 Is an Account of Functional Origins. The starting point of Genesis 1 is a time without order or function. The actions of the seven days are aimed at establishing order. Separating light from dark and naming the times “day” and “night” establishes order. Separating the waters above from the waters below is also an act of establishing order and providing a space for life between these two expanses of water and regulates the weather. Separating dry ground and water naming them “land” and “seas” is an act of establishing order. The land then produces vegetation at God’s command.

In days one through three, we find that the discussion centers on the ordering of the world in terms of what could be identified as the major functions of human existence: time, weather, and food. These three would be recognized by any culture in any place, as they represent what all humans have recognized as providing a framework in which we exist. (pp. 37-38)

Day four establishes lights in the sky – sun, moon, and stars, functionaries to govern the time produced in day one. These are not divine, but rather lights with designated functions. They separate and govern day and night and they “serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years”. It is not clear that the ancient Israelites regarded these as material objects at all. On day five God installs functionaries in the sea and air – sea creatures and birds. It is significant that the sea creatures, often thought ot as “chaos creatures” in the ancient Near East are assigned functions in Genesis. On day six God says “let the land produce living creatures.” In this text we should probably see an emphasis on a continuing process rather than a one time act of material formation. Walton suggests that the text might describe what the ancient person witnessed when young, birthed out of sight in seclusion, emerged from the land. The land gives forth animal life.

Also on day six humans are “made” to perform a specific function as the image of God in the world. The image of God pertains to the role and function of humans, to the identity God has given humans, to humans serving as God’s substitute in the world, and to the relationship between God and humans. It applies to humans as a group, regardless of age, ability, or inability.

Walton sums up using an analogy of house versus home. Genesis 1 is concerned with ordering and filling a home, not with building a house. It uses the common understanding of the ancient audience to describe how God ordered and prepared the home.

God Orders the Cosmos as Sacred Space. Rest on day seven is the object of creation. This is when God comes to dwell in the home that has been prepared.

Sacred space is the result of divine presence and serves as the center and source of order in the cosmos. In this “home story,” God is not only making a home for people; he is making a home for himself, though he has no need of a home for himself. If God does not rest in this ordered space, the six days are without their guiding purpose. The cosmos is not just a house; it is a home. (p. 49)

And a few pages later, a summary of Walton’s proposal:

If the period of seven days is related to the inauguration of the cosmos as sacred space, it represents the period of transition from the material cosmos that has been prepared over the ages to being the place where God is going to relate to his people. It has changed from space to place. The seven days are related to the home story, not the house story – the ordering and establishing of functions, not the production of material objects. (p. 51)

When God establishes functional order, it is good. The Hebrew word translated good in Genesis and elsewhere in the Old Testament does not refer to unadulterated perfection. Conclusions based on the assumption that God’s “good” is identically equal to perfect are not warranted. Elsewhere in the Old Testament, the word is used to refer to God, indicating that he acts in good ways. It is also used to refer to humans where humans are good. Ecclesiastes 9 is a case in point. Here the text refers to humans who are good in contrast to those who are sinful. Good cannot mean unadulterated perfection. Finally, the word translated “good” is used to refer to things that are functioning in their designed role. “How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity!” Psalm 133:1.

I would conclude that “good” refers to a condition in which something is functioning optimally as it was designed to do in an ordered system – it is working the way God intended. (p. 55)

As a pilot might run down a preflight noting that all is functional, God is declaring each piece of his ordered creation good.

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day. God has prepared the order necessary for his plan. Humans are called to be agents in this plan – the continuing ordering process as they are fruitful and multiply, filling, subduing, and ruling. Some non-order remains, but the order that has been established is good and very good.

From here we can turn in the next proposition and the next post to the human ˀādām.

Do you find Walton’s proposal that Genesis 1 describes the creation of functional order convincing?

What is the purpose of this functional order?

What role should humans play?

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

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