The Love Problem

It's popular these days to bolster the current conception of God's all-inclusive love from the life and ministry of Jesus. We know that God is perfectly revealed in Jesus and if we want to know what God is like, we can look at Jesus' life and glimpse his Father's character. And what Jesus reveals is Love pure and simple. He is loving, healing, never judging, etc. etc. Love. Love. Love. Sounds so soothing. Yeah, it's been bugging me. I seem to react to being soothed. So I looked for this loving inclusive Jesus and I can't find him. Parable after parable, teaching after teaching, Jesus emphasizes the haves and the have-nots, the ones who obey and the ones who don't, the sheep and the goats. His message is not the kind of thing I think of when I think of all-inclusive mercy and love. He seems so often instead to be giving a warning, if not of righteous judgement, then of a simple cause and effect situation in which if you don't take God's hand offered you, there is no other hope.

And I find it makes sense to me. You see, I'm very impressed with the problem of Sin. Mind you, it's a past tense problem. God has already dealt with it. But what a solution! If the only way to deal with sin was this all-in approach where the GOD OF THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE AND ALL POSSIBLE UNIVERSES has to become one of his creation and die, then sin itself must represent an unfathomable rift, something God can't fix merely with his loving merciful character, but through the means of the cross and all that comes with it, that is, the life, death, resurrection and return of his Son. And from everything Jesus and the other New Testament writers seem to say we have some part in appropriating that solution. It's not merely thrust upon us. We are called to repent and believe (act out?) the good news. Otherwise we are on the outside, whatever that looks like.

Two different "use the offered solution" scenarios come to mind. The first is my health. I would like to live healthy to a full age and still be running in my eighties. But I have no hope of getting there then without eating healthy and engaging in daily exercise now. The second is patching software on a computer. If a program has a specific vulnerability to attack and the developers of that software have published a fix for it, there is no hope that your copy of the software is safe from the specified attack unless you actually install their fix.

So the problem these days seems to be God's love measured against the fate of all those who won't "exercise," who won't "install the fix," who won't turn and follow him, who look at his absolutely gob-smacking-ly appalling sacrifice and find it just isn't to their taste. I think it's not actually fair. What do you call an act of spending everything he had to redeem us? Well, that's got to be Love, I'd say. Having accomplished this great salvation, what about those who reject the offered life ring? What is he supposed to do with them? It's simply unfair to make it his fault if they refuse to be helped. I'm not saying that some of the current rethinking of our ideas of hell and damnation isn't healthy. We need to rethink our stuff all the time. But I am saying that some of the current "God is all love" thinking, where he manages to save even those who don't want him anyways is a little like the nonsense about him making a stone that is too big for him to lift.

And generally speaking, barring nonsense poetry, which I admit I do enjoy, I'm opposed to nonsense.

Ancientry

I'm noticing an uptick of a certain type of marketing of our faith, a new emphasis, ironically, a new emphasis on the word "ancient." Signage, websites, and whatnot proclaim an offering of "ancient" faith. People are exploring "ancient" faith in online blogs and communities. Interest is growing in old writings, old liturgy, etc. Older cultures in the Christian stream, the Orthodox and Catholics delight in this because of course to them belongs the largest aggregation of years, the greatest seniority, the most ancientry.

It's all tosh. We are bowing down before numbers. 'Many' years, 'many' lives of men are not long in comparison to, for instance the lifespan of an angel, or God himself. God is the Ancient of Days. All of man's past is as the grass... And is two thousand years ago really ancient times? Is this not the new age of the Spirit? Is this not the promised time of the kingdom of God? The time that all the (actually) ancient prophecies were pointing to? ..

What's at stake here? Three things. First is the equality of all believers, those long ago and those present. If God is the same God as revealed by Jesus, then our access to him is or ought to be the same as for all our past brothers and sisters. If we venerate the past, we can never attain or even surpass it.

Secondly it is not normal or right to treat the past church as the glorious time that we must get back to. That verse in Proverbs about the path of righteous growing brighter and brighter must surely be God's ideal for the church. That glow has to be on the future, not the past. Somehow we have to believe that the best is yet to be, that we "ain't seen nothing yet!" If not, we're doomed. And besides, any such attempt to return to the first church is doomed to failure. We are not of the same culture and never can be.

Thirdly, if we can divest ourselves of this idea of ancientry, if can see ourselves as being in the same moment, the same new day, as the first century church we might be free as necessary to undo prior mistakes or make new choices in the church without feeling any guilt. We might be able to rethink stuff. It might be as simple as turning around to get the (oops!) forgotten camera before a holiday trip. But if we cling to our ancientry we're locked into whatever came before. All the historic responses to bygone cultures are immutable decisions that handcuff us against actually dealing rightly with today.

A False Dichotomy

Ever heard this one? "We believe in the Spirit and the Word!"

It's a bit of a blast from the past, I'll admit, but it's still around, if not in slogan form, and people still think this way so I thought I'd have a go at it.

What is implied by a statement like this is that there is a need to strike a balance between the Holy Spirit and the Holy Scriptures. And it sounds nice, doesn't it. Such a pretty double alliteration -- H. S. and H. S. -- so it must be true. But let's rethink this. The Holy Spirit is God, yes? and the Holy Scriptures are what? the Bible. So what we have here is God balanced against a collection of writings. And yes, we try to cook the accounts a bit by claiming the perfection and inerrancy of the book, but still can we really ever claim that there is something lacking in God such that he needs a book to balance him?

And yet we do need a balance. We need a balance between one man's perception of what the Spirit is saying and another's. But that is not God vs. a book. That is the church reaching consensus as described by the phrase, "it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us." And the written record is part of that process, but not as the balancing agent...

Also just for fun (!) I did a quick search in my Bible study software to find out if we are really right in constantly applying the phrase "word of God" to the bible. Just wanted to find out how it's actually used by Bible writers. So I searched for "Word of God" or "Word of the Lord" and came up with 299 references and tried to identify how to define the phrase by close context.

233 times (mostly O.T.) it refers to a present prophetic message/commandment or the experience of receiving such a message by the prophet.
38 times (obviously N.T.) it refers to Jesus' teaching and/or the Gospel as taught by early church missionaries.
10 times it refers to Law or existing commandment. One of these usages is by Jesus himself.
14 times the definition is not obvious from near context. This is mostly in Psalms. The psalmist praises the word of God and you are expected to already know what he's talking about.
3 times it's used to describe the process of creation i.e. God created by the "Word of the Lord."
1 time it is Jesus himself.

At any rate, this, I think, is at odds with the current use of the "word of God" as synonymous with "the Bible," Which gives the false dichotomy implied by our opening catchphrase a final uppercut and leaves it down for the count. 1 2 3...

Paul vs. Charismatics

Here's a blast from the past.

Do you remember how the non-charismatic church  pilloried and attempted to shame the excited and glowing ones who had just received what the Pentecostals call "The Baptism of the Holy Spirit" and were speaking in tongues all over the place?

Can't you just hear a dignified and affronted deep bass voice quoting I Corinthians, "All things... decently and in order" and "...there must be interpretation..." and stuff like that in the face of people whose hearts were leaping at the joy of knowing in their hearts for once that "this stuff is really real -- and I'm doing it!!!"

And then listen to the creaking strain as of ship's timbers (it actually only shows up in movies nowadays) as the charismatics struggled to bring their practise in line with that which they all revered as a rule book even though it's really a corrective letter by a fellow disciple addressing a church that he himself planted.

And now listen to the silence. Do you hear anyone breaking the rules and speaking in tongues anymore?

Leadership...

Luke 12:41-46

Peter said, “Lord, are you telling this parable for us or for all?” And the Lord said, “Who then is the faithful and wise manager, whom his master will set over his household, to give them their portion of food at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whom his master will find so doing when he comes. Truly, I say to you, he will set him over all his possessions. But if that servant says to himself, ‘My master is delayed in coming,’ and begins to beat the male and female servants, and to eat and drink and get drunk, the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know, and will cut him in pieces and put him with the unfaithful.

What does the job of leadership entail? According to Jesus in the above passage, it means taking care of and feeding fellow servants and not exploiting them. The servants belong to the master, not the manager. They have their work cut out for them. They don't need the manager to tell them what to do. They just need to be taken care of. Who'd want to be a leader under those conditions? I mean what about the perks?

Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places

I think I may have just (at least for a time) solved something for myself that I have been bothered about for quite some time. The question is "how do we honestly approach the New Testament?" Why would I ask such a question? Well I've been noticing something about what we do with the New Testament. It seems to me that everyone draws the line somewhere. Every different group and their teachings chooses what part of the New Testament to take literally and which to pass off as cultural detritus or explain away some other how. Complementarians say a women is to function at a reduced authority level in the church but they don't make them wear head coverings. Egalitarians say that none of the directions about women in authority apply anymore. Catholics say Jesus' directive not to raise anyone to fatherhood doesn't apply to them. Surprisingly, many of these groups still want the New Testament to be a rulebook, maybe a playbook. They still hold to some form of belief in the authority of scripture, specifically the New Testament. It's a belief that seems to be something to preserve at all costs in the face of mounting reasonable doubt. I recently had a Facebook discussion with someone with serious cred in the area of biblical scholarship over the complementarian/egalitarian issue in which I gave the option of simply disagreeing with Paul's attitude to women and thereby dismantling the inerrancy doctrine. His response intrigued me. He thought that maybe Paul was being sarcastic and obviously overstating the case to demonstrate how silly the bigoted arguments were. Maybe he was right. But what he didn't seem to register, at least not publicly, was that still dismantles inerrancy. If you are intimate enough with the text to pick and choose based on nuances like that, then you still don't have the rulebook that people want. And the truth is that at some level every group picks and chooses. So even they don't have the rulebook -- they don't have the very inerrancy they nonetheless espouse as a Capital Letter Doctrine. (sometime I'll do a post on Capital Letter Doctrines.)

Then there are things that I just don't agree with anymore. One example occurs to me. "Don't let the sun go down on your wrath" literally applied in today's late bed time culture means trying to solve a complex emotional issue when you are not emotionally equipped to do so. Just makes things worse.

In the face of this I, myself, have experienced the presence of God in this same book that I troubles me so. To pick one example of many, I have been present when reading a passage from, say, one of Paul's epistles has brought sudden positive change in my friend's life. So I am compelled to say that this is a great book. God is there when we read it. And it's been worth preserving. Without it we would not even have a starting place to think these God thoughts at all. Think of it. We in the western world have no oral tradition any more and haven't had for centuries and we have a multiplicity of languages. There is no chance at all for us to ever have heard of Jesus if there hadn't been a New Testament to read and translate into our native tongue. Still, my wish is for honesty when we approach it. So what do I do with the New Testament?

First of all I propose the following, something I never thought of before though I don't know why. Try this statement: The Old and New Testaments are fundamentally different books.

 The Old Testament consists of history, God addressing his people, wisdom and worship literature. It's written against the backdrop of a people called to live out the Kingdom of God in a physical location led by God's appointed agents -- judges and later, kings. Each of these was anointed to be such by a unique presence of the Spirit of God that was not shared with any other. Their calling and anointing made them utterly unique. As well as anointed leaders God himself provided, codified for his people a framework, system of laws to govern it as any sensible temporal nation state with a state religion would functionally need. And God kept on addressing his people directly through prophets, bringing correction as the waywardness of humanity kept on rearing its head in their degenerating practise. Much more could be said.

The New Testament consists of history, Jesus addressing his disciples, and disciples addressing other disciples and one book of visions. Similar to the Old Testament in some ways, yes, but don't forget that it's written against the backdrop of a brand new reality. Instead of the Kingdom of God being established by a nation state with all the attendant nation state needs, and instead of being governed by uniquely gifted leaders, the people of God all have the Spirit of God as a fulfilment of God's promise to write his laws on their brand new "hearts of flesh." Patriarchal leadership has been explicitly dethroned by Jesus himself. (Yes, you can tell that the "call no man father" passage is very important to me) And there is no longer a written code. Even the Sermon on the Mount, which can rightly be compared to the giving of the Mosaic Law on Sinai, is not a set of rules but rather a series of challenges which cut much deeper than laws to deal with our heart motivations first, and our actions second. But a large portion of the New Testament is, in comparison to the Old, really a new thing. Suddenly we have the People of God discussing Him, the meaning of his works, and a host of other things. With each other. I'm not saying it hadn't happened before. The rabbis had been discussing God for many years and writing it down, too, I'm sure. But this kind of talk has now for the first time actually made it into the central holy book. And that's significant because it dominates at least a half of the New Testament. For most of the Epistles we actually only get one side of the conversation. But it is evident to me that there really is a conversation. Which should not surprise us because Paul is not Moses the Law Giver. In the new regime of the Spirit he is the actual equal -- in a way Moses was not -- of all the believers he is admonishing.

So here's where things get messy. "What? No Law? How will we know what to do?" Well, I'm sorry to say that Jesus has one answer and but the church has another. Jesus promises that the Holy Spirit will be our guide. The church has turned instead to the New Testament, that book without a formal code to use as law, and has proclaimed itself to know more than the original writers that this collection of letters and so on is not just what it appears but is the actual authoritative Law of God. (OK, so they say 'Word of God' but they treat it very similarly to how the rabbis treat Torah, that is, a book to be dissected and have every last drop of theological and practical meaning wrung out of, lest we ever find ourselves actually following the real example of the characters in the bible and finding out the answers to our problems from the Holy Spirit ourselves.)

Let's think about the formation of the first century church. It was a subversive underground movement, with pressures from the inside and outside. But it was able to govern itself pretty well. "It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us" is a phrase that should haunt our churches. The all-togetherness of it is staggering. Since when have we been able to decide like that? Think of Paul being sent out by that church and forming new churches run by elders. Maybe with the hope that someday they would all grow up to be able to perceive what "seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us." But no, that's not what happened. Elders became presbyters, priests, bishops, overseers, pastors, and so on. But Paul was doing what worked in an authoritarian culture and no one can fault him for that. And he naturally keeps in touch with the churches he's started, writing letters to address specific and maybe unique issues in churches he has left behind. But he's definitely making it up as he's going along. In Athens he tries what is now called apologetics. In Corinth, the focus is on miracles. From a reading of the first section of I Corinthians, one gets the impression he never wanted to try the apologetics thing again. All of this is pretty consistent with the new regime of the Spirit, the mustard seed conspiracy, the yeast that works its way into the whole lump of dough. Constant development. Experimentation. Change. Where it all falls down is where the church looks back on his and the others' amazing lives and says that those were the good old days. Instead of a vibrant example, we look back and see a template. Instead of a conversation in which we are equal players, we see a playbook. And this is what I see as the basic message of inerrancy. We can never get it as right as they did, because they, in some counter-intuitive fashion, so unlike any other fledgling movement, got it right the first time. We can never progress beyond what they were, because unlike us, they were able to articulate perfectly every essential doctrine of our faith. But this is utterly inconsistent with the idea of a church where every member is an anointed agent of God, with an 'earnest' of the Spirit, making them equal with all other members, past, present and future. It's also utterly inconsistent with a church that is flexible enough to be able to truly incarnate the Gospel in new cultures enabling them to speak its truths in their native cultural languages.

So where does this bring us -- this idea that maybe, just maybe the New Testament is not a rulebook but rather the working papers of our fellow labourers whose distance from us is a matter of time and culture but not unattainable uniqueness? Well, for one thing, maybe we would not waste so much time becoming entrenched about issues like whether or not a woman is allowed to teach or lead. The reality is that women are teaching and leading the whole world over. Mother Teresa is a woman. Her wise sayings are cropping up everywhere and teaching us all sorts of things we need to know. Women are leading governments. But, as the saying goes, I digress. Many other examples exist of the church majoring on minors. Ultimately, we would be less concerned with getting doctrine exactly right and be able to focus on doing what Jesus told us to do.

Hey, in my heart I'm seriously starting to apply Paul's famous statement about the Old Testament -- "all scripture is inspired by God" to the New Testament again. as I haven't done for years. But I'm convinced that we have yet to really grasp what 'inspired by God,' so easy to grasp in the literal sense, really implies. I also am fascinated by the absence in that famous statement of an affirmation of its final authority. No, Paul uses the word "profitable," instead of "authoritative" as if maybe teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness are already proceeding in the context of the guidance of Spirit and we just need to be reminded, as a support for that, to use the scriptures, too.

So back to my half-humorous title. (I smiled when I thought of it anyway.) The New Testament is not a new 'Law and the Prophets' and even though it's become traditional to do so, I maintain that you shouldn't use it as such. Wiser heads than I have talked about it being an unfinished story which the church is still involved in progressively writing. At any rate when this --here I link to a blog post by Rachel Held Evans about John Piper's personal rules regarding receiving teaching from women. Read the post. He seems almost talmudic in his legalistic convolution-- when this, I say, is possible, we've gone off the rails into 'Looking for law...'

I'm trying to bring this thing to a conclusion but I maybe leaving it open-ended might be just as good. This discussion will continue on it's own. This is just an instalment.

Shatner-izing the Great Commission

Make Disciples.

This has been well emphasized recently, but it's worth saying again. The emphasis in the Great Commission was not on the "Go" but on the "Make Disciples." The rest of the verse tells you how.

Teaching them.

Implies some actual effort to impart something. Theology? Actually no.

To Obey everything.

Wow. Knowledge and belief is not emphasized, not even mentioned. Obedience. I'm sure you can't stop humanity from theorizing. But first comes obedience.

I.

Jesus own teaching outranks the apostles... and the epistles.

Have commanded you.

Implication: We are the successors of the apostles and their intended equals. If we are recipients of the same commands, it follows that we are the recipients of the same resources...

To do.

Yeah. Bold words. I may or may not have scratched the surface of this in my life.