“Pastor”: Drop the Caricature (by John Frye)

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 9:53 pm By Scot McKnight

Because of the drift away from Jesus the Pastor (Shepherd), the pastoral landscape is awash with convoluted definitions of pastoral work squeezed into an American cultural mold. I desire to be a voice for and champion of the local church pastor with the understanding that Jesus is the Supreme Example of and Empowering Reality for defining the pastor.

The four Gospels are pastoral manuals written to deal with pastoral issues in the early church. Sometimes, we forget this. There is an ocean depth of pastoral knowledge in the Gospels, yet in a brief sketch, Matthew presents Jesus as a teaching pastor, a new Moses with a kingdom-of-God definition of local church life.

Mark presents an activist pastor not shrinking back from the “principalities and powers” (cosmic and structural) that threaten human life.

Luke presents the Spirit-empowered pastor engaging people in all levels of society as those deeply loved and sought out by God.

John presents the Good Pastor (John 10) whose intimate knowledge of and self-sacrifice for God’s people set a working agenda for pastors. This isn’t rocket science.

I think the most troubling caricature of pastoral work is that it is ingrown. Pastors care about the fold, the flock. Pastors drift toward being inward. Pastors apparently get so busy maintaining the community that they lose passion for expanding the community. I admit, this may be true in many cases, but don’t blame the biblical concept “pastor” for it. Many pastors seem to have a motivation to hide among the sheep and avoid the messiness of the “real world.” Using local church ministry as a hiding place needs to be named for what it is: cowardice. None of this is traceable, however, to Jesus the Good, Great, and Chief Pastor.

Let’s be honest. I think the evangelical tendency to obsess over the Apostle Paul and his letters for local church life has created this visionless, pastoral inwardness. Pauline-obsessed pastors may demonstrate this “I’m-in-my-study-don’t bother me” ivory tower view of the pastor more than anything you will find in the life and ministry of Jesus. Shepherds, pastors worth their salt, leave the flock, weather the storms, fend off the dangers, even laying own their lives if necessary. Pastors are, in essence, risk-takers. If they are not, then they are not like their Chief Pastor, Jesus. Please hear me. I am not trying to exalt the pastor over the other gifted people in leadership and laity in the church. Pastors deeply long for an activist congregation and eagerly help people discover, develop, and deploy their particular gifts, abilities, and passions for the sake of the mission of God. Pastoring is not just a gift; it is a vocation. Not everyone likes to hear this in the church these days.

Philip L. Culbertson and Arthur Bradford Shippee, eds., The Pastor: Readings from the Patristic Period present segments of the writings of the earliest local church leaders. The terms for the pastors might be different—bishops, presbyters, deacons—but the issues are just the same as current local church life. Culbertson and Shippee write, “How well we recognize ourselves in the pastoral literature of the early church” (12).

In the accidents of history, the term “pastor” became the working title of local church clergy. There was no vast conspiracy to have the term “dominate” and/or marginalize other gifted leaders. Pastors, like, Jesus the Pastor, simply cared for the day to day life of those who became God’s people. They still do.

Darwin’s Doubt and Intelligent Design (RJS)

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 9:53 pm By RJS

A couple of years ago Stephen C. Meyer published Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design as a continuation of the argument he began in Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. I’ve read Signature in the Cell, and we discussed it in a series of posts in early 2010. I have not (yet) read Darwin’s Doubt – not out of any desire to ignore the Intelligent Design (ID) debate, but rather because the most important questions in my mind are not scientific (i.e. does science leave room for God?) but theological and biblical (i.e. who is God? how does he act? and how are we to read the bible?). This is where I’ve focused most of my reading. The closest I’ve gotten to digging into the specific argument in Darwin’s Doubt is listening to the radio show Unbelievable where Stephen Meyer and Charles Marshall, an Evolutionary Biologist from UC Berkeley, discussed the book. You can listen or download the episode through the link above – it is an interesting discussion.

Although I haven’t read the book yet, and thus won’t attempt to review it, BioLogos put up a series of reviews on the book, a post by Stephen Meyer where he was able to respond to the reviews: Clarifying Issues: My Response to the BioLogos Series reviewing “Darwin’s Doubt”, followed by a wrap-up post Reviewing Darwin’s Doubt Conclusion. These posts suggest some interesting questions.

The basic argument of Darwin’s Doubt is that the explosion in the diversity of life forms and body plans in the Cambrian Period some 542 million years ago poses a problem for the general hypothesis of evolution by natural selection. The trilobite is a great example. In the Paleozoic era (542 mya to 251 mya) the sea crawled with these armored arthropods and their hard shells fossilized well. The image above is a photo I took at the Natural History Museum in Oxford last summer showing a portion of a 450 million year old slab of fossils from the Ordovician Period, about 90 million years after the beginning of the Cambrian. Trilobites galore! Trilobites first appeared at the beginning of the Cambrian as part of the Cambrian explosion. The mystery that surrounds the explosion of animal life in the Cambrian leads, in Meyer’s view, to the theory of Intelligent Design as the best explanation.

There are real challenges. Darrel Falk, who wrote one of the reviews, agrees with Meyer that there are real challenges here, and that there are big changes ahead for evolutionary biology. In fact, he doesn’t think that Meyer exaggerates the nature of rethinking that is going on in biology these days. From the perspective of a non-expert, I agree with him. By coincidence, an expert in evolutionary biology (HT BM) pointed me to a recent issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology devoted entirely to Epigenetics (v. 218(1) 2015), where several of the authors suggest that the Modern neo-Darwinist Synthesis will require extension or replacement. Denis Noble’s lead article Evolution beyond neo-Darwinism: a new conceptual framework is available free of charge if anyone is interested. This is a mainstream scientific journal with neo-Darwinist roots. The changes afoot could be minor extensions, or major reorientations, something akin, perhaps, to the move from Newtonian mechanics to quantum mechanics in physics. In fact my friend made just that analogy. The move underway in biology is from a reductionist/deterministic “Newtonian” way of thinking to a more diffuse systems and relationships oriented approach.

The developments happening in evolutionary biology represent the normal progress of science and scientific ideas. There may be a paradigm shift, but it is not a repudiation of everything that came before, any more than quantum mechanics repudiated classical mechanics. We still use Newton’s law, F=ma (force = mass ×acceleration) right alongside HΨ=EΨ. The revolution in biology builds on the modern neo-Darwinian synthesis and extends it in important new ways.

But do these mysteries and challenges mean that Intelligent Design is the best explanation? Meyer suggests that those who find Intelligent Design an unsatisfactory conclusions do so out of a philosophical commitment to methodological naturalism.

In particular, the reviews have revealed that the central issue dividing the BioLogos writers from intelligent design (ID) theorists concerns a principle known as methodological naturalism (MN). MN asserts that scientists must explain all events and phenomena by reference to strictly naturalistic or materialistic causes. The principle forbids postulating the actions of personal agency, mind, or intelligent causation in scientific explanations and thus limits the explanatory toolkit of science to strictly material processes or physical causes.

Now I find the Intelligent Design hypothesis unsatisfactory, and will place myself in the company of the BioLogos writers on this one. But this isn’t because of some commitment to methodological naturalism as defined by Meyer. Frankly, I don’t see the Intelligent Design hypothesis leading in any fruitful forward direction. The case for Intelligent Design is an argument from analogy and by inference. It seems a great leap to go from the current absence of explanation to the conclusion that Intelligent Design is the ‘scientific’ explanation for the Cambrian explosion. Once we’ve made the leap, what is the next step? Falk puts it well:

How will proponents of Intelligent Design take their biological studies from the level of the “best explanation on the basis of analogy” to a project which makes a set of positive predictions? How will they move forward by building a positive research program rather than a negative one based upon the critique of mainstream ideas? What are the biological predictions that will emerge from within their paradigm and how will they test them?

Critique of mainstream ideas can only go so far. This isn’t a logic game where pointing out a flaw undermines the whole. A valid critique leads us forward. Valid critiques of Newtonian physics led to general relativity and to quantum mechanics. Valid critiques of the modern neo-Darwinist synthesis in biology are leading us to a better and more sophisticated understanding of biology, a response that is evident today.

Where does Intelligent Design lead? It seems to me that the only way that Intelligent Design becomes the ultimate best explanation in the way that Meyer would like to conclude is if we reach an insurmountable dead end in terms of “natural” explanations. Therefore an intelligent designer is the best explanation. And we are not even close to this yet.

As a Christian I believe that God designed the world, and did so intelligently for a purpose. As a scientist I am investigating that world, the patterns, laws, and forces that guide it. There is an amazing beauty in the explanatory ability of a rather small set of postulates. But this is the world God made. The scientific explanations don’t take God out of the picture, as though we have a zero sum game, either God or nature. The hypothesis put forth by Meyer, that Intelligent Design is the best scientific explanation for the diversity of life simply doesn’t seem to add anything of value to the discussion. But perhaps you disagree.

Is Intelligent Design a useful conclusion? Why?

Where do you think it leads? What purpose does it serve?

What approach do you think that Christians should take to the study of the development of the diversity of life?

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.

Deconstructing the Bully God — NT Wright

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 9:54 pm By Scot McKnight

Good God, bad God.

That’s the problem with so much Christian theology. A bad view of God is destructive to the faith, to the church, and to the person. N.T. Wright, in Simply Good News, seeks to present how the Bible presents God and the first thing that has to be done to get this God in our minds and hearts is to dethrone the bad gods we have created.

For instance, the bully God — the bully in the sky, odd demands and gets petulant easily.

Most people today, in short, assume that the word God refers to a dull, distant, and perhaps dangerous being. Most of those who think like that try hard, not surprisingly, to believe that this being doesn’t exist. “I don’t believe in God,” said the novelist Kingsley Amis, “and I hate him.”

They are right.

That God—the dull, distant, and dangerous one—does not exist (128).

Deists, philosophers and — Wright thinks — even the Reformers got in on developing this bad, bully God:

But the Reformers, and then the Puritans, and then many other Christian movements such as the early Methodists, had a different reaction. They stressed the saving death of Jesus as the means by which the wrath of God had been averted. Often this was accompanied by great gratitude and ove. Often, however, it has left the semipagan vision of God untouched. That then produced a further reaction, which is where the modern angry atheists come in (129).

The God of the Bible — and he focuses on the Psalms — is a different kind of God from those in the ancient world. God is sovereign, holy, creator, and altogether loving and faithful. He gets his Barth on with this one:

If he is God, our primary role is not to analyze him but to worship him; it is not for us to figure him out but to let him figure us out (133).

Again, we see God in Jesus and this is the burden of Wright’s chapter, to fashion an understanding of God that takes Jesus as the one who reveals who God is by who he is himself. Wright sees three themes:

1. God is creator. Here is where a christocentric or christological framing of God changes the game:

Jesus doesn’t give an explanation for the pain and sorrow of the world. He comes where the pain is most acute and takes it upon himself. Jesus doesn’t explain why there is suffering, illness, and death n the world. He brings healing and hope. He doesn’t allow the problem of evil to be the subject of a seminar. He allows evil to do its worst to him. He exhausts it, drains its power, and emerges with new life. The resurrection says, more clearly than anything else can, “There is a God, and he is the creator of the world we know, and he is the father of Jesus, Israel’s Messiah.” That is the first part of the good news about God (137).

2. God is judge of creation. Here God judges death and sets the world right:

Nothing will be lost. All that is good and beautiful, and especially all that has been done out of love for God, out of the power of Jesus’s death and new life, and by the leading of the Spirit, will somehow be part of God’s new world (138).

3. God is lover. God creates and judges out of love.

So what does this love do when faced with broken limbs and broken lives? What does it do when confronted by denial and rejection? What does it do when humans who have the capacity to share in the innermost being of the Creator twist that capacity into its opposite, the capacity to hate and sneer and spit and snarl, to kick and stab and wound and kill? Does love then say, “Well, perhaps love is all very well when things are going fine, but now that it s all gone wrong, we’d better try the other way”? No, the good news that Jesus put into practice during his public career and that he enacted as he went to his death is this: love, faced with rejection, overcomes it with yet more love (140).

A Community of Contrast! (RJS)

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 9:54 pm By RJS

We are called to be a community of contrast, not a prophetic witness or moral judge.

Paul to the church at Corinth (ancient Roman fountain image source):

I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people.

What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside.

Philip Yancey finishes off part three of his book Vanishing Grace asking the question “How should we live?” He quotes part of this passage from 1 Cor. 5 in his discussion, but not the whole. Yet Yancey’s discussion brought the whole to my mind as I read. “God will judge those outside.” This isn’t a threat to be proclaimed. We aren’t called to prophesy doom and destruction. Rather it is an admonition to Christians to mind their own business, so to speak. We are to focus on being a community of contrast and a light to the nations. This requires a spirit of discernment within the church rather than judgment of those outside.

Yancey opens the chapter with a story where his book club was discussing a book about a patriarch of a Muslim family (written by a Muslim author) who confines his wife to home for 30 years, sexually assaults the servants, and forbids his daughters an education. Yet some of the women in his group, ardent feminists at home, hardly reacted. “It’s a different culture,” they said, “we can’t impose our values on it.” (p. 218) Yancey, on the other hand, contended that this was simply wrong. There is such a thing as right and wrong, good and evil. It isn’t all cultural and it isn’t all up to personal preference.

Yancey argues that our Western culture is adrift from moral foundations. Now this doesn’t mean that it is immoral or amoral, just that without some sense of good and evil it is hard to know where to look for guidance. At one time Christianity provided a moral foundation for Western culture, but this is losing sway. Neither the church nor Christians were ever perfect and many will claim that this loss of influence is a good thing. But it is still a loss. We don’t need religion to behave morally. However, we do need some kind of “religion” to defend any morality on an intellectual level. (I use the word religion here in the sense that Stephen Jay Gould used it – a moral philosophy, not necessarily a belief in any god or any supernatural realm.)

Christians should, we would think, be poised to provide some guidance, even in a post-Christian culture. Unfortunately we tend to focus on the wrong things. We “muddle the message of grace by piously casting judgment on society.” Through this we alienate people. Yancey recounts a radio personality who described how floods in Colorado were God’s vengeance for the sins of America, and notes “I could list scores of such moral pronouncements that foster an “us against the world” mentality rather than an “us bring grace to the world.” (p. 227)

Christians are called to lead the way – but not by prophesying doom, or by legislating morality.

How differently would the world view Christians if we concentrated on our own failings rather than on society’s? As I read the New Testament I am struck by how little attention it gives to the faults of the surrounding culture. Jesus and Paul say nothing about violent gladiator games or infanticide, both common practices among the Romans. In a telling passage, the apostle Paul responds fiercely to a report of incest in the Corinthian church. He urges strong action against those involved but quickly clarifies, “not at all meaning the people of this world. …What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside.” (p. 228)

We devote an inordinate amount of time to judging those outside the church, and drive people away. Christians have no business being self-righteous and trying to impose this on others. It works to draw a crowd, but at a cost. “High-minded moralism and shrill pronouncements of judgment may help fundraising, but they undermine a gospel of grace.” (p. 229) Yancey uses the focus on homosexuality as an example. I can tell you from experience that this tendency to prophetic judgment and imposition of values undermines the attempt to preach a gospel of grace in the community where I live and among my friends and colleagues.

There is an alternative. We can be a community of contrast as Yancey points out.

I heard an Australian pastor say that Christians often speak to the broader culture in the same way the prophets addressed Jerusalem, calling it back to spiritual revival. Actually, he said, we should be thinking of it more like Athens, a cosmopolitan secular society that views us as a marginal cult. We know how the apostle Paul spoke to Athens in his day, by seeking common ground and awakening a thirst already present in his audience. He used a similar approach with pagan Rome and Corinth, encouraging believers to become a community of contrast that shows the world a better way to live.

… Yes Christians have a role to play in bringing clarity to moral issues, but only if we listen well, live well, and engage well with the rest of society. (p. 230)

Yancey discusses a few examples where Christians have brought clarity to moral issues from Christian conviction, Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther King Jr. are two examples, but there are more.

He concludes the chapter:

Individuals an societies are not the helpless victims of heredity. We have the power to change – not by looking “down” to nature but “up” to God, who consistently calls us forward to become the people we were designed to be. A confused world urgently needs a model of what that looks like. If Christians fail to provide that model, who will? (p. 234)

There is much more in this chapter, I’ve only touched on a particular thread of ideas. But this is more than enough to start a conversation.

Should we view ourselves as prophets addressing Jerusalem calling the chosen people back to God?

Is there a better image and model? How can Christians provide a model?

What does it mean to be a community of contrast?

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.

Christianity’s Weirdness (by Patrick Mitchel)

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 9:54 pm By Scot McKnight

By Patrick Mitchel:

At particular times in the history of the church, ‘disturbers’ have emerged, protesting against the cultural captivity of the church. They have rightly seen that authentic Christianity should never be domesticated and made ‘safe’.

Maybe you can think of some ‘disturbers’. A couple that come to mind are:

Albert Schweitzer’s apocalyptic Jesus brushed aside the anaemic Jesus that had resulted from 19th century liberal theology’s quest for the ‘historical Jesus’. Schweitzer was magnificently right in his rejection of the un-Jewish and un-troubling Christ of the First Quest. His portrait of Jesus of the Gospels was far closer to the truth – even if Schweitzer finally drew the wrong conclusions about Jesus as a failed apocalyptic revolutionary.

The 20th century Jesus Seminar was in many ways a replay of the First Quest – a de-historized Jesus, shorn of miracles and the eschatological urgency of the kingdom of God. One of N T Wright’s many achievements has been his compelling rejection of the methodology and conclusions of the Jesus Seminar in his Jesus and the Victory of God. What shines through Wright’s work on Jesus is how he brings the Gospels, and their main subject, to vibrant disturbing life.

Another ‘disturber’ was the Swiss pipe-smoker Karl Barth. His protest was against a culturally captive form of Christianity, unable even to identify the threat Hitler posed. His great ‘NO’ to any form of natural theology denied that God could be reached ‘from the bottom up’. Barth’s genius was to insist on absolute otherness of God; God could only be revealed from the ‘top down’ by the triune God himself.

Thus, God, for Barth is both the Revealer and the Revelation. It is God alone who can choose to reveal himself, and he does so in Jesus Christ. It is God’s Spirit alone who can effect God’s revelation in Christ. It is a mixture of hubris, pride and naivety that leads people to believe that they can put God in a nice neat box. Barth blew up the box.

Schweitzer and Barth, in very different ways, saw clearly that when we downplay the ‘weirdness’ or ‘Otherness’ of Christianity, God and the gospel become quickly domesticated, diluted, insipid; unable to stand against evil; to give prophetic witness; to form radical and counter-cultural communities of faith; to speak of an alternative kingdom of God that has broken into this world.

It’s no coincidence that both Barth and Schweitzer spent much time considering Jesus. The Jesus of the Gospels just isn’t dull, predictable, undemanding, easily accommodated into our lives and having little to say about the broken world in which we live.

Once we lose touch with the weirdness of Christian faith, it is inevitable that we end up with a form of Christianity that is virtually indistinguishable from the wider culture.

So what are some signs that we have lost touch with the strange Otherness of Christianity?

Here are some suggestions in no particular order – feel welcome to add your own:

1. When the content of much Christianity tends to be primarily therapeutic.

God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. The church is a community where you will be loved and accepted unconditionally. The gospel will give your life new significance and meaning. God will help you navigate through the storms of life. The pastor is there to remind and encourage you that you are loved.

This is Christianity lite – a form of spiritual consumerism that promises all and demands little. God is there for you because you are worth it.

No place here for the NT’s embrace of suffering, injustice and persecution as ‘light and momentary troubles’.

No place here for the notion that being a Christian means death: death to the self; death to sin; death to an old order of existence.

2. When faith is assumed.

This is perhaps the most damaging legacy of Christendom. Everybody is ‘in’; everybody has been baptised; Christianity is natural, universal, and all-embracing. The focus of preaching and teaching is on equipping and exhorting and encouraging members to be more committed to helping the church maintain its structures and existence. Mission is marginalised and almost irrelevant.

Little place in an assumed faith for the deep mystery of the atonement: that somehow in one man’s death and shed blood, something happened of universal spiritual significance that forgiveness and freedom from sin needs to be appropriated through repentance and faith.

3. When Jesus is marginalised.

You know – things like his apparently crazy teaching on non-violence. His teaching on money and possessions. His utterly uncompromising demands of his followers. His passion for justice. His words of coming judgment. His unrelenting eschatological focus on the kingdom of God and his urgent summons to enter now.

And, to top all of this, is the NT’s exalted Christological claim that this local Rabbi was God in the flesh. A completely unexpected development; foolish nonsense to Greeks, revolting heresy to Jews, unbelievable religious jargon to contemporary atheists, a threatening universal truth claim to modern pluralists.

This is why I love this picture of Jesus by Oliver Crisp – it brilliantly captures the otherness of Jesus who resists all easy categorisation.

4. When the Spirit is paid only lip-service.

Pentecostals and charismatics rightly protest against a sort of virtually ‘binitarian’ Christianity, where the vital, central and life-giving role of the Spirit is replaced with a form of rationalism. Where there is little expectation of the empowering presence of God himself to change lives, heal, and work visibly in the church and the world.

5. When ‘God is on our side’.

I mean by this a form of religious nationalism where Christianity is co-opted to bless and sanctify our politics; our identity; our nation. ‘God bless America’. God on the side of the British Empire. God on the side of Catholic Ireland’s fight for freedom against that Empire. God on the side of [Protestant] Ulster not to be subsumed within Catholic Ireland.

God sure does switch sides a lot doesn’t he?

Once God is safely for us, then our enemies are unrighteous. Since error and heresy have no right, all sorts of horror follows. For examples, read some Irish history.

6. When we buy into the sacred / secular divide.

A nice image here is of an orange and a peach. A Christian view of life is not orange – nicely segmented into distinct categories, with spiritual being one sitting alongside work, family, leisure etc. Rather life is like a peach – one whole fruit where everything is spiritual with Jesus as the centre stone.

The sacred / secular divide attempts to neuter the universal Lordship of Christ over all of life. It reduces Christianity to some sort of Kantian subjective experience. Truth becomes individualised and privatized. The gospel is reduced and personalised. The church has little to say to the world.

7. When we lose touch with the eschatological heartbeat of the Bible.

The OT and NT look forward to a new creation; a remaking of all things within a different order of existence where death is banished. No hospitals, doctors, medicines or morgues there. A future where evil and sin will have no place and justice will be done for ever.

But this is not just away in the future sometime – the future is already here in the present. The ‘proof’ is the presence of the promised Spirit, a foretaste of God’s rule to come. The resurrection of Jesus is the forerunner of the resurrection to come for all who belong to him.

Now that just doesn’t sound ‘normal’ and rational and scientific does it? Such a vision invites scorn and ridicule (as well as joy and hope). Well, let the scorn and ridicule come for Christianity is nothing without eschatology. Whenever the church loses focus on future hope it becomes fat, lazy, complacent and inward looking.

So, any attempt to make Christianity acceptable and reasonable to modern culture by removing the ‘unbelievable’ bits is doomed to failure. Even with the best of intentions, what remains will bear little resemblance to historic orthodox Christian faith.

I’ve nothing against good apologetics (defending the historic reliability of the Bible, the historicity of the resurrection etc) but increasingly I see a Christian’s primary task as simply announcing and telling and discussing the good news as it stands – without apology, or qualification or embarrassment. (And without aggression, arrogance or coercion either).

The irony is that it’s when we take it upon ourselves to change the story and try to make it more popular and relevant, that we do the greatest damage.

In other words, let the weirdness and Otherness of the Christian gospel stand on its own two feet. This is the apostolic story that we have been given – let’s keep to the script and trust in God to do the rest.

God Nudges, Shouldn’t We Also? (RJS)

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 9:54 pm By RJS

Iain Provan, in his book Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters (Ch. 10) makes the claim that God is a gradualist. This has significant implications for biblical society, the lessons we should draw from biblical society, and the attitude we should take toward our society today.

From all of this it is clear that, in the biblical way of thinking, God does not deal with the world in an all-or-nothing way. He works with the world as he finds it, and (indeed) he accommodates himself to the world as he finds it, so that the world—and human society—may continue. When it comes to the new Jerusalem, God is a gradualist. He nudges the world slowly in the direction of this great city, rather than dropping it from heaven directly upon the world. (p.264)

The “all of this” that Provan refers to is the way God works with people in Genesis and Exodus. No one is perfect, and some are downright disgusting at times. God calls his people to goodness, and commands it, but doesn’t coerce obedience. The whole story of Genesis is an example.

Adam and Eve sin, and now ashamed of their nakedness make a belt of fig leaves to cover themselves. Now fig leaves (shown to the right) are not a particularly effective material for clothing. God supplies a much more practical garment instead.

If there must be clothing, at least it shall be proper clothing. God has essentially accommodated himself to the new reality of shame in the world, and he has become actively involved in finding the best way forward, given all the circumstances. From the perspective of the biblical authors, God remains the God who is “for us,” even in the midst of our wrongdoing and shame. When moral evil enters God’s good creation, he does not abandon his creatures but comes closer, accommodates himself further, and helps them to deal with these new realities. He aids them in finding a way to continue their journey in the fallen world, in which physical nakedness has now become problematic because of evil. (p. 254)

And this is only the beginning. Abraham lies when it seems expedient, Sarah is cruel to Hagar. God would have spared Sodom and Gomorrah for the sake of a few righteous people. Rebekah conspires with Jacob to trick Isaac, Jacob favors Rachel over Leah, Rachel steals her father’s household gods and lies about it, Joseph is insufferable, Reuben slept with his father’s concubine, and Judah, wow. Judah persuaded his brothers to sell Joseph into slavery, and he slept with a prostitute, actually his daughter-in-law. The line to David, the line to Jesus, runs from this union.

Joseph had his ups and downs in Egypt. The Lord blessed him – but he married the daughter of the priest of On. He uses the famine to gather up the wealth of the land for the Pharaoh. After taxing the people in the seven good years to lay away stores he gives them food in exchange for their livestock, and then in exchange for their land. A rather oppressive scheme resulting from the good God intended with the dreams and interpretation.

And then we turn to Exodus. With the Israelites now oppressed in Egypt, God raises up Moses to lead them out. But the tale is one of human failure after failure. The golden calf fashioned by Aaron at the request of the people is the most striking example of this failure, but it is in the company of many others.

The Law and Society. Provan turns next to a consideration of the place of the Law in the biblical story. (image source) The Law is not designed to build a perfect society. The laws concerning slaves illustrate the point. Slavery is assumed, and it is not condemned. The laws establish a clear sense of humanity of slaves, but slaves are not equal in their humanity and foreign slaves were property.

How does such a society qualify as “good”? Where is the “good”? It consists in this: that if there are going to be slaves in a society, there should at least be laws regulating their treatment. That such laws were absolutely necessary in ancient Israel is obvious from the many texts that describe people ignoring them. … There was, it seems, no natural predisposition on the part of many ancient Israelites to treat slaves well. It is good, in such a context, that laws were introduced whose aim was to ensure that slaves enjoyed a certain degree of protection from those who wished to exploit them. God himself is described as the source of such legislation and as the ultimate guarantor of its enactment. (p. 265-266)

The moral vision of the Old Testament isn’t one where slavery is celebrated. But the cultural situation is one where slavery is a reality. Provan turns to Job 31 as an example of the moral vision (again in a situation where slavery is a reality).

Importantly, virtue is clearly defined in this passage in terms that exceed what is required in the law. The law forbids adultery (Exodus 20:14), but Job claims not only to have avoided adultery but also to have refrained from looking lustfully at a girl (Job 31:1). Not only has he refrained from stealing (Exodus 20:15) but he has also not “denied the desires of the poor or let the eyes of the widow grow weary” (31:16), nor has he kept bread to himself rather than sharing it with orphans (31:17). Most importantly for our present purposes, Job has not denied justice to his slaves whenever they have brought a “complaint” against him (31:13). This is to move far beyond the terms of the master-slave relationship that are laid down in the law; it is to treat the slave as a neighbor. Indeed, the basis for Job’s approach is explicitly the common humanity of both the master and the slave (Job 31:15). Both are fashioned by God in the womb; in the language of Genesis 1, both are created in the image of God. (p. 266)

The law isn’t an imposition of a perfect society on the people of Israel. It contains concessions to the evils it seeks to restrain. According to Provan the Old Testament “does not promote slavery; it simply recognizes that slavery exists. While it exists, biblical law seeks to regulate it in a way that is appropriate to the historical and cultural circumstances at hand, measuring what is realistically possible in those circumstances.” (p. 267)

The laws concerning women are another example, including the laws regulating divorce. The Law permits divorce, Jesus said, “because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning.” (Mt 19:7) But we don’t have to go to the New Testament to learn that divorce is not the biblical moral vision. “Malachi puts the matter bluntly, when he records God himself as saying, “I hate divorce” (2:16). Divorce is, nevertheless, permitted in biblical law; a legal framework is created in which marital breakdown can be negotiated.” (p. 271)

The Law isn’t about creating a perfect society, the kingdom of God on earth. The biblical laws create order out of chaos, they set the stage for a level of stability and justice. The ritual laws are not about moral right and wrong but about “orienting the chosen people toward God in obedience.” Many of these laws seem rather obscure and pointless to us today – but they probably served to turn the Israelites, in their ancient Near Eastern Culture where such rituals were common, toward the Lord their God.

God, the Good, and the Ideal. Here is Provan’s main point in this chapter.

In summation, it is not the purpose of law in the Old Testament only to promote the biblical moral vision. The society that is built around the law is certainly called to pursue the moral vision. The fundamental commands to love God and neighbor are themselves embedded in the law, and these commands are worked out in all sorts of practical and detailed ways in the same law. In torah, however, what is ideal is always balanced with what is already “there”—in human beings and in human society—and the ideal is often accommodated to the reality. God, in biblical thinking, accommodates himself to ongoing reality, so that human society itself can continue. To put this in a different way: in biblical thinking, even God does not attempt to legislate the kingdom of God into being. It follows, then, that human beings, who are constantly exhorted in the biblical tradition to “be like God,” should likewise not attempt to do so. (p. 272)

God calls people to worship him, to treat their neighbors well, to be his image in creation. But the laws governing society are pragmatic rather than idealistic in many instances. They deal with the down and dirty culture of the time. Even the institution of a king in Israel is an accommodation to the culture.

And what does this mean for us? According to Provan:

Like God, biblical faith looks for a society that promotes righteousness in the world as much as is realistically possible, while at the same time restraining and minimizing evil as much as it can—and even redeeming evil, where it can, and turning it toward the good. It is this “middled” society that I should be helping to build, as I participate (with God) in nudging contemporary society ever more closely toward the good. (p. 278)

God is a gradualist. We have thousands of years of history and a multitude of stories, from Abraham to Moses, the judges, the kings, the prophets, the exile. I’d add the New Testament and the history of the church. If God is a gradualist we should be as well, following the biblical moral vision but calling others to it, not attempting to impose it upon them. By the way – this doesn’t mean that all laws establishing justice are bad and libertarian freedom the aim. The biblical laws do set limits on personal liberties versus responsibilities. They do create order where there would otherwise be chaos and seek to establish a level of justice for all. Rather it means having a pragmatic realism and trusting God for the future.

But we are called to live lives of love toward God and toward others.

We often think of heroes in the bible, but heroes are few and far between, and almost all (all?) have serious failings at times. What does this tell us about the nature of God and his ways?

What do you think of Provan’s sketch of the purpose of the law?

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.

Commentaries on Steroids

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 9:54 pm By Scot McKnight

Biblical scholarship has exploded when it comes to commentaries. When I was a seminary student in the late 70s finding the top commentaries on NT books was a challenge because many were out of print — e.g., A.H. McNeile on Matthew or J.A.T. Robinson on Ephesians. Then came the avalanche of one series after another of commentaries both on the OT and the NT.

Then, and it seems to me we should point our finger at R.E. Brown, commentaries got big and bigger and too big. There is so much being said about each book and each passage and each word that commentaries quite simply got too big for too many. Thus, the preacher often does not have time to read through all of Brown or Markus Barth on Ephesians or all of D.A. Hagner on Matthew or — and don’t get started about Romans.

Standard commentaries got too big to be useful to those who probably need them the most: pastors. So someone like C.E.B. Cranfield wrote a technical two volume work on Romans but then produced a preacher-friendly “shorter commentary” and hundreds of pastors sighed. This has become a bit of an art form, this shortening of commentaries, and none has done it any better now than…

Greg K. Beale, whose commentary on Revelation is like so many, too long. (Yes, I think my James is a bit long for many preachers and my Colossians-Philemon will follow suit.) But Beale’s big NIGTC has been reduced:

Revelation: A Shorter Commentary (with David H. Campbell; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015 — first book on my desk with a 2015 imprint).

Thanks Greg and David. Pastors are grateful, and not a few professors, who will not want to agree on everything said in his commentary!

Dark Magic (by Jonathan Storment)

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 9:54 pm By Scot McKnight

“What other people think of you is none of your business.” –a saying in 12 step programs

A few months ago, before the now infamous cyber attack which released Sony executive emails filled with snarky comments about what they really thought about Angelina Jolie, the NY Times ran an op-ed piece called “I know what you think of Me.”

The author, Tim Krieder wrote a paragraph that looking back seems oddly prophetic:

I’ve often thought that the single most devastating cyberattack a diabolical and anarchic mind could design would not be on the military or financial sector but simply to simultaneously make every e-mail and text ever sent universally public. It would be like suddenly subtracting the strong nuclear force from the universe; the fabric of society would instantly evaporate, every marriage, friendship and business partnership dissolved. Civilization, which is held together by a fragile web of tactful phrasing, polite omissions and white lies, would collapse in an apocalypse of bitter recriminations and weeping, breakups and fistfights, divorces and bankruptcies, scandals and resignations, blood feuds, litigation, wholesale slaughter in the streets, and lingering ill will.

In one of C.S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia, “Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” there is a scene where the little girl Lucy finds a magic book, filled with a variety of spells used to manipulate reality, and Lucy comes to a spell that lets you know what your friends think about you.

She says the spell, and the book comes to life showing her a scene of a couple of her friends riding on a train, and talking about her in not-flattering ways. Lucy begins to yell at the book, but the magic only flows one direction, leaving Lucy with information that she shouldn’t have and no outlet for how to deal with it.

Later in the chapter, Aslan confronts Lucy about her eavesdropping and tells her it is just as bad to spy on people by magic as by any other means. Aslan goes on to tell her that her friend that betrayed her may be weak, but still loves Lucy, in spite of what she said. But Lucy still knows something is lost that can never be fully restored.

I know that it is not popular, but I kind of liked Mark Driscoll. I know that is a bit like admitting to liking Nickelback or Creed. I never agreed with him on the crazy stuff, or his leadership style, but I liked him, mainly because I am a lot more like Mark Driscoll than I would like to admit.

Driscoll came of age with the internet and social media. The very thing that gave the church the catalyst was also its undoing. A few months ago, the world turned its attention to Mark’s confession that years earlier he had lurked around on the internet reading what people were saying about him and Mars Hill, and that he had joined in commenting as William Wallace II.

If you have followed this story, you know that Driscoll wrote a lot of regrettable stuff. He wrote things that were misogynistic and homophobic and hateful. He defended his honor and belittled others. The only reason I am bringing it up is because I haven’t heard anyone else say the one thing that I believe is true of me, too. I believe he said and did the kind of things I would like to say much of the time when I eavesdrop on people talking about me.

Driscoll’s sin, my sin, wasn’t just the words he used, it was the vanity of listening in and needing the opinion of others to justify himself, which I think most of us can relate to.

If this is true, please retweet this: What spying on others says about us? http://ow.ly/ItdIl

So here is my deep dark confession: I Google my name…to find out what people are saying…sometimes I do twitter searches…sometimes I find people saying good things…often it’s not.

We now live in a time, where Lucy’s magic book is a reality that we take for granted, we can know what other people are thinking about us. We live with the technology that for thousands of years would have been called “magic” and while it has great capacity for good (I am aware that I am writing this on a blog) it also has a strong capacity to be “dark magic”

The problem with this dark magic is, that in the words of Krieder:

We don’t give other people credit for the same interior complexity we take for granted in ourselves, the same capacity for holding contradictory feelings in balance, for complexly alloyed affections, for bottomless generosity of heart and petty, capricious malice. We can’t believe that anyone could be unkind to us and still be genuinely fond of us, although we do it all the time.

If we want to be known (and we do), then that involves the bad bits of us too, and if we aren’t okay with that, then chances are, our relationship to our own reputation is something more akin to idolatry.

I get the pushback here, “Shouldn’t Christians be concerned with their reputation? Shouldn’t we be open to feedback?” Yes of course, but there is a world of difference between listening to criticism and actively eavesdropping to make sure that we have enough, or the right kinds, of applause.

Idols make the promise, according to Andy Crouch, that we can be like God, idols promise us everything for the cost of nothing, but eventually Crouch warns, “Idols take everything and eventually give us nothing.” I think that is what we saw with the implosion at Mars Hill.

Recently fired Mars Hill Pastor Ryan Welsh actually touched on this:

I long for the day when the Holy Spirit’s conviction is what leads Mars Hill to repentance, rather than negative media coverage. I wait eagerly for the functional Trinity of Mars Hill Church to return to Father, Son, Holy Spirit from what seems to have become Father, Son, Holy Media.

I think that is more than Mars Hill’s problem, it is certainly not just Mark Driscoll’s problem. It is a temptation of all pastors, or at least the one writing this.

But in the words of Aslan, “It’s just as bad to spy on people by magic as any other means.”

Healing the Divide (RJS)

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 9:54 pm By RJS

Last week I posted a response to the question: Do we need to read the whole Bible? While it isn’t necessary for every Christian to read every section of the Bible, it is important that teachers, preachers, and other leaders are immersed in the entire sweep of scripture, and this includes the boring and the apparently inscrutable parts.

One reason I find this important is that a more complete understanding of Scripture helps to put many of the concerns raised about the relationship between science and Christian faith into proper perspective. Without even invoking science at all, the literalist approach, including a six-day creation reading, requires so many caveats and tweaks to make consistent with the whole of Scripture that it seems clear this isn’t the best way to be faithful to the message. Even the early church fathers recognized the twists that require something other than a strictly literal interpretation. Likewise the secular arguments against the Bible make far less sense when I am immersed in the sweep of the biblical story.

It is reassuring to see that others have come to similar conclusions. N. T. Wright [Image credit] begins his book Surprised by Scripture with an essay Healing the Divide Between Science and Religion. In this essay he notes that modern society is Epicurean – an designation he uses frequently but that often escapes me as a scientist, not a humanities major and certainly not a classicist. The point however seems simple. We tend to separate God and science. Either something is the result of natural processes or it is a result of divine action. Because science explains so much we can push God further and further away, until he is confined, powerless, to a realm far away and long ago. Or perhaps he never existed after all.

But this is a faulty view of God, and of his relationship with his creation. Natural explanations don’t remove God from the picture. He is intimately involved in his creation, “natural” processes notwithstanding. We err when we make this a zero-sum game. It isn’t. And we err when we try to force Scripture into the mold of scientific explanation. It isn’t.

So what does this have to do with the sweep of scripture? Wright’s point:

The early Christians, even Paul, did not develop a detailed doctrine of creation. They did not need to, since they inherited one: the ancient biblical vision of Genesis. But, as they well knew, the Genesis account is a highly poetic, highly complex narrative whose main thrust has nothing to do with the number of twenty-four-hour periods in which the world was made, and everything to do with the wisdom, goodness, and power of the God who made it. …

And just as the account of the Fall in Genesis 3 sits alongside the account of the rebel angels in Genesis 6, teasing the wise reader into pondering evil as a genuine mystery rather than an easily explicable (and soluble!) glitch, so the accounts of creation itself in Genesis 1 and 2 do not sit neatly on top of one another but offer two very different angles of vision. The fact that the animals are created before humans in Genesis 1 and the male human before the animals in Genesis 2 is a classic literary way, perhaps a classic Hebrew literary way, of saying that these two accounts are signposts pointing away from themselves into a third reality that remains unstated, and perhaps unstatable. Perhaps it is that further reality to which the Psalms and Proverbs are pointing when they speak of God making the world “by wisdom.” And perhaps it is that farther reality that Paul, John, and Hebrews refer to when they pick up the hint and speak of Jesus himself in the language of wisdom, as the one through whom all things were made. (p. 19-20)

When we read bits and pieces of scripture we can fixate on Genesis 1 as a scientific description, or on Genesis 2 – but it is hard to make both fit at the same time (although some always try). Wright’s reference to Genesis 3 is not one I’d heard before, but the Fall of Genesis 3 and the events leading up to the great Flood in Genesis 6 are not intended to be reconciled through a breaking of creation by human sin. Humans didn’t create the snake or cause the sons of God to find the daughters of men beautiful and to have children by them. Evil isn’t so easily corralled and tamed. We need to ponder the deeper meaning of these passages.

God’s creation in Genesis 1 is a temple God has built, “a place for his own habitation, into which he would of course place an image of himself before coming to dwell in it, to take his ease there, to be at rest. The temple in question is a the combined heaven-and-earth reality.” (p. 20) The temple of creation continues to declare the glory of God.

Still we need more. What about the sweep of scripture? Wright’s answer:

The first great cycle of narrative in the Bible is that which runs from Genesis 1 and 2 to the end of Exodus, where, despite Israel’s idolatry and sin, the creator and covenant God nevertheless comes to dwell in the newly constructed tabernacle, filling it with his glorious presence (Exodus 40). When, long afterward, the Jerusalem Temple was built, the same thing happened (1 Kings 8). That presence departed at the time of the exile, but the prophets assured Israel that the divine splendor would return one day; the New Testament writers declare, in many different ways, that it has happened – in Jesus the Messiah and through the gift of God’s spirit. Jesus himself id the true temple; then, by extension as it were, those who are gifted with his spirit become, in themselves, living temples. (p. 22)

Perhaps all those rather boring details of tabernacle (Exodus), temple (Kings), and new temple (Ezekiel) have a point in the grand sweep – but the point isn’t in the construction of a temporary, permanent, or new building. Rather they emphasize the importance of the dwelling place of God who is with us his creatures. Wright goes on:

This is how Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled, that the glory of the Lord shall be revealed for all flesh to behold – the promise of a new temple, a new creation, in which all will be invited to share. It has all come true, says the New Testament, in Jesus and then in the Spirit. (p. 22)

In the grand sweep of scripture Jesus is not the answer to the problem of an initial mess-up, but rather the one through whom we should reinterpret all of creation. Plan A not plan B.

This means, to begin with at least, that we have to read the New Testament’s big claims about Jesus and creation the other way around. We have read John 1, 1 Corinthians 8:6, Colossians 1, and Hebrews 1 as though they are simply making grand claims about Jesus; as though we know what creation is, and now we have to discover just how exalted Jesus is by being told that “all things were made through him.” But, as with Christology in general, so with the Christological claims about creation: perhaps we don’t know in advance what creation is, just as we don’t after all know in advance who God is; perhaps what we are being told in these famous passages is that we are to search for an alternative account of creation, a cosmogony, by more fully pondering Jesus himself. (p. 23)

Jesus as God’s messiah, Immanuel, God with us, as savior and king. Here is where our focus should be, even when reading the first chapters of Genesis.

The whole project of Jesus is a new-temple project, … it is a project, in other words, in which heaven and earth are brought together at last, with God’s sovereign rule extending on earth as in heaven through the mission of Jesus, climactically in his death and resurrection, and then through the similarly shaped and spirit-driven mission of his followers.

My proposal, then, is that if we want to make the real quantum leap that the science-and-religion debate badly needs, we should look deeply into the four Gospels and their story of Jesus inaugurating God’s kingdom, dying on the cross, and rising as the first fruits of new creation, and ask ourselves about the nature of the new temple, the new heaven-and-earth reality, and the new creation itself, which Jesus was modeling and launching. (p. 24)

Wow.

A post script. At one of the BioLogos gatherings several years ago a pastor (I believe it was Tim Keller) made the point that one of the major issues in the discussion of science and Christian faith is the power of the story we tell. The creationist story just plays well with audiences: a perfect creation ruined by human sin, redemption in Jesus, and new creation to come. We know that something is wrong and the story Ken Ham and others tell rings true in some important ways – but oh so troubled in others, both from within scripture and from our knowledge of the age of the earth and the course of its development. (Wright refers to some of the problems of this view within scripture, see Ronald Osborn’s Death Before the Fall for a good discussion of some of the other issues.) But it plays well for Christian audiences. The purely naturalist story (Wright’s Epicureanism) seems a valid, even probable alternative in our Western culture when the problems are unearthed. We need pastors to convey the power of the story of creation in new ways more consistent with the sweep of scripture and the nature God’s creation studied through science.

This chapter in Surprised by Scripture is (and was) N. T. Wright’s response; it was powerfully presented by him. We need to dig back into the story of scripture, look at the sweep, to see where the story goes wrong and where to take it forward. In this way we can heal the divide between science and Christianity and reach both those in the church, and those who are not. We need a Christ-centered approach from the very beginning of creation, and a God centered approach.

What do you think of Wright’s framing of the story? Should we understand Jesus through Genesis or Genesis through Jesus?

What is the sweep of scripture? Is the central point the Fall (human failing) or the Temple (God’s faithfulness and presence)?

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.

If You Don’t Get the Future Wright

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 9:58 pm By Scot McKnight

I’ll put it in theological terms first: if your eschatology gets skewed, your present follows along. Or. as NT Wright puts it, “Wrong future, wrong present.” I’m speaking of his new book Simply Good News.

Oddly enough, many today who want to get the present right are totally ignoring — claiming at times it is all speculative — an eschatology. NT Wright might point to the irony of somehow getting the present right while getting the future wrong. They wouldn’t be the first to get the future wrong, so he wants them to get the future “wright”!

One mistake is to think the first Christians expected the end of the world right around the corner. Wright says this is a “myth,” one used by these interpreters — surely Albert Schweitzer and Rudolf Bultmann are primary voices — to prop up their worldview: strip off this eschatology and you can get back to the pure experience of Jesus and Paul.

He then poses another eschatology: historical forces that will give rise to a messiah figure (he points to Lenin, Stalin and Hitler). That one created a myth. One might here have quoted Pascal’s famous words about a tyrant.

Or to anchor thinking in 1st Century Jewish apocalyptic hopes about the end, about new creation, and about deliverance from enemies. Language of the end — here he circles back to his teacher, George Caird, and his big book on Jesus, Jesus and the Victory of God — was political language about judgment. Wright contends Jesus was on about the fall of Jerusalem in good Jewish tropes.

Not because it was the end of the space-time universe but because it was the end of their world. That is how the language worked (108).

And some of the language about hell worked that way too:

“Unless you repent,” he says twice in the early paragraphs of Luke 13, “you will all be destroyed in the same way.” Read that in the fifteenth century, and it’s obvious what it means: unless you give up your sins, you will be thrown into hell for all eternity. Read it in the first century, and a very different meaning should be equally obvious: unless you turn from your crazy path of nationalist rebellion against Rome, Rome will come and do to you what it has done to everyone who stands in its path. Jesus’s contemporaries took no notice. The warnings came true (108-109).

The other eschatology, one that has occupied Wright’s attention for five years or more, is the myth of progress. That is, that history is headed somewhere quite definite and if you want to be on the right side of history come along. If you don’t, it will grind you under.

As with the chronological snobbery of the eighteenth century, which we discussed in chapter 4, so now with what we might call the eschatological snobbery of progress (110).

Again, he repeats his point: this assumes too often a God who is upstairs and we are running the show downstairs. There is hard wired, then, into the downstairs myth that progress is what this world is doing on its own. People, Wright says, want to believe this so they did and got science on their side with evolutionary theories like those of Darwin.

This myth is then applied to the political and moral realms. For all the critique of postmodernity’s critique of modernity’s myth of progress most today seem to have bought into the myth of progress. Postmodernity works when you need it; otherwise be modern.

The church at times buys into the myth of progress: evangelism of the world, apocalyptic doom stories. The latter denied by the resurrection’s theme of new creation unleashed already, the former by a denial of reality. Jesus rules, the early Christians claimed, but that didn’t mean the end of evil and injustice at once, nor did it mean a theory of progress. (By the way, progress is such a myopic view of the world and pertains more or less to the Western world cultures.) They lived as if Jesus really was ruling over all. They charted new paths and advanced bold discoveries because of that hope.

1. Standing on the resurrection we can believed and work for lasting change in all dimensions of reality.

2. Lasting change is costly.

3. Lasting change is sporadic.

4. Discouragement cannot have the last word; gloom and negativity cannot be the posture of Christians.

5. Christians must work tirelessly for lasting change: individually, church, and world.

His point is that the resurrection breaks in and unleashes transformation for each and every person (121) and he works with Philippians 3.

Christian spirituality—an awareness of the loving and guiding presence of God, sorrow for sin and gratitude for forgiveness, the possibility and challenge of prayer, a love for God and for our neighbors, the desire for holiness and the hard moral work it requires, the gradual or sudden emergence of particular vocations, a lively hope for God’s eventual new creation—is generated by the good news of what has happened in the past and what will happen in the future. All this and much, much more is what is meant by the good news in the present (121).

What were the first man and woman’s names in the Bible?