While we’re on the subject of the gospel and the Gospels, I was excited to hear about the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope to be build in the mountains of Chile.
This promises major breakthroughs in New Testament scholarship. With this massive new …
What? Ohhh. Well, that’s pretty cool too.
Cliff Vaughn offers a list of 10 “funny” Bible passages. I’m not sure Vaughn’s list is really 10-for-10, or even 5-for-10, but this bit with Peter and Rhoda in the book of Acts probably qualifies:
When he knocked at the outer gate, a maid named Rhoda came to answer. On recognizing Peter’s voice, she was so overjoyed that, instead of opening the gate, she ran in and announced that Peter was standing at the gate. They said to her, ‘You are out of your mind!’ But she insisted that it was so. … Meanwhile, Peter continued knocking. …
The Sermon on the Mount includes an unpleasant corollary to the Golden Rule: “With the judgement you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.”
At Box Turtle Bulletin, Jim Burroway artfully applies this principle to Kirk Cameron and Pat Robertson, illustrating why the people they’re insulting don’t regard their cheerful sincerity as a reason to ignore the insult.
Sierra at No Longer Qivering offers a short Bible study on Malachi 2:15-16 — the “God hates divorce” passage often used in patriarchal religion to cudgel women in abusive marriages:
How did a verse that so obviously tells men to be kind to their wives and not to leave them destitute become a verse that tells women they have no right to leave an abusive marriage? … God hates divorce, indeed, but not because it ends a marriage. He hates it because it hurts women.
Chaplain Mike and Matthew Paul Turner both look in horror on John Piper’s response to the deadly tornadoes that struck earlier this month, which Piper called the “Fingers of God.” Piper illustrates the monstrous consistency of Calvinist theodicy, writing:
God alone has the last say in where and how the wind blows. If a tornado twists at 175 miles an hour and stays on the ground like a massive lawnmower for 50 miles, God gave the command.
Chaplain Mike is rightly appalled. “The best response to any event in life, but especially tragic events,” he writes, “is love not words.”
Fortunately, congregations in Henryville and in Coshocton County agree with Chaplain Mike, not with Piper.
David Barton regards Jesus with the same level of honesty, respect and reverence that he shows for the Founding Fathers — which is to say that he twists Jesus’ words, takes them out of context, and pretends they mean their opposite. Kyle Mantyla reports on Barton’s claim that Jesus said employers don’t have to worry about being “fair” to workers:
David Barton uses the Bible, in particular Matthew 20:1-16, to promote an ultra-right-wing economic view by claiming that Jesus opposed the minimum wage and any sort of employment discrimination laws.
… Barton takes a parable about the Kingdom of Heaven and transforms it into a Biblical justification for laissez-faire capitalism, anti-unionism, and employment discrimination and does so by attributing to Jesus words that Jesus himself put in the mouth of an unnamed landowner in order to demonstrate God’s generosity.
When Barton cites Matthew 20, it is not some parable about God’s love, but rather a lesson in right-wing economics in which Jesus himself hires workers for his vineyard and tells those who complain about wage discrimination that they can take a hike if they don’t like it because employers have no obligation to be fair to their workers.
Barton’s take-away from this parable is “Whatever is fair has nothing to do with it. That’s not their responsibility to be fair.”
The landowner in the parable exceeds the demands of fairness. He goes beyond “fair” to magnanimously give some people more than they deserve.
Barton reads it backwards, as though the landowner were failing the demands of fairness, giving some people less than they deserve.
Stinginess offends justice. Magnanimity does not. Barton reverses that.
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