Dwelling In Perplexities

God has moved out of the fortress of pedestrian certainties and is dwelling in perplexities. 

He has abandoned our complacencies and has entered our spiritual agony, upsetting dogmas, discrediting articulations. 

Beyond all doctrines and greater than human faith stands God…

Deeper than all our understanding is our bold certainty that God is with us in distress, hiding in the scandal of our ambiguities. 

And now God may send those whom we have expected least to do his deed—strange is His deed; to carry out his work—alien is His work” (Isaiah 28.21).*

*Entire post is an excerpt from Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity by A.J. Heschel; S. Heschel ed., p. 293.

Love Wins

If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing.

If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.

Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.

Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete...but when full understanding comes, these partial things will become useless.

Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.

Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.

Christus Victor

Fundamental to the Christian faith is the idea that Jesus died for sins (1 Cor 15.3). But what does that mean?

We have looked at the Ransom, Substitution and Moral Influence models and finally we will present the Christus Victor Theory (CV).

CV (Christ victorious) states that Christ's death and resurrection victoriously overcame the hostile powers that held humanity in subjection. Those powers are understood as the devil, sin, the law, and death.

The name CV was coined by Gustaf Aulen in 1931. He argued that it was actually the oldest theory on the atonement, noting that almost every Church Father supported it including Irenaeus, Origen, and Augustine.

Aulen posited that theologians have misunderstood the view of the early Church Fathers, noting that they were less concerned with the actual payment of ransom to the devil (Ransom Theory), and more with the theme of our liberation from sin and death.

What CV does especially well is reject the legal nature of the other models, especially the Substitutionary model (PS) and the problems inherent with them. In PS God is seen (wrongly) as an angry judge and Jesus is our attorney who works out a deal to get us off the hook and out of hell.

All we have to do is believe that the legal transaction has occurred with Jesus as our substitute and we are freed. Because how we live is not key to the legal arrangement it is easy to separate one's belief from one's actions.

In CV, however, what Christ accomplishes for us cannot be divorced from what he then accomplishes in us, namely our participation in the way of life and his cosmic victory over all things that stop us from living as he desires us to live. 

Through Christ, God revealed himself (Rom 5.8, cf. Jn 14.7-10); he reconciled all things, including humans, to himself (2 Cor 5.18-19; Col 1.20-22), he forgave our sins (Ac 13.38; Eph 1.7); gave his Spirit to us allowing us to faithfully represent him (Rom 8.2-16 ); but he also was victorious over the hostile powers of evil, death, and destruction (Jn 12.31; 1 Jn 3.8; 1 Cor 15.25).

Of the four main views, CV is the most comprehensive and seems most able to incorporate all of the positive qualities of the other views, while maintaining Biblical as well as intellectual credibility.

Genomic Revolution

I have long thought that our ethics need to catch up to our medicine. If what this video presents is true, we really need to start having some conversations, lest we find ourselves in an actual Brave New World.



Please leave your comments below!

The Demise of Guys

I posted this on FB a while back. It's too good not to put up here:

Smoke, Drink, Cuss, & Chew

What if you never got drunk? Never smoked? Never cussed? Never "went too far?" Some people would applaud you, after all, these are the characteristics of a "godly person."

But what if upon further examination the products you consumed made you guilty of far greater evils? What if the phone you used, the clothes you wore, and even the food you ate, did tremendous harm to people both here in the U.S. and abroad?

Would you still be righteous? Would you still look godly? Often the acts that do the most harm are those that go unseen or unnoticed, but how do we most often judge people's character?

It is interesting to me that Jesus' strongest condemnations were against those who "looked" pious and godly, but were involved in systematic evils that robbed people of their humanity. 

Are we living the life that we are called to in all of our choices, or just those that are made public, that make us look good?

People of the Book

The book of Ezra-Nehemiah tells the story of the Israelites return from the Exile, the rebuilding of the Temple, and the commitment of the community to be a "people of the Book."

It details how Israel vowed to break the cycle of disobedience that brought about the Exile, by focusing on Torah.

Torah is the name of the first five books of the Bible and contains the 613 commandments (Hb. mitzvot) Yahweh gave to Israel. These laws outlined the way Israel was to live in order to be blessed by God and in turn be a blessing to the whole world (Gen 12).

Among the many laws, the Israelites were called to love each other, to care for the immigrants living among them, and to worship only one God. This set them apart as minorities in a polytheistic world that did not live by such ideals.

Part of being a "people of the Book" was understanding how the Book applied to their lives. This was especially challenging because it had been over 700 years since the Torah was given. So we read in Neh 8.8 that, "they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that people understood the reading."

We are called to be a "people of the Book" as well; people who center our lives around the ideas and events of Scripture.

So we, living thousands of years after the Bible was written, have to wrestle with the text to interpret and apply it. But this just may be what it means to love the Lord with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind and there is no greater mitzvot than that! 

For a couple interesting examples of the Bible interpreting the Bible, see Ex 21.2-11 vs. Deut 15.12-18, as well as this post.

What's Next?

Bishop Mark Dyer has said that "every 500 years, the church has a rummage sale." Phyllis Tickle expands on his thesis in her book, The Great Emergence.

I have not read the book, but do find Dyer's thesis intriguing: 500 years ago the church experienced the Reformation and the beginning of the Protestant Church.

500 years before that was The Great Schism, which split the state church of the Roman Empire into Eastern (Greek) and Western (Latin) branches. Later they would be known as the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church, respectively.

500 years prior was the Council of Chalcedon and the Fall of Rome. And 500 years earlier than that, was the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

It should be noted that this is a Judeo-Christian phenomenon, as the Fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity came 500 years before Christ, ending the 1st Temple era and ushering in the 2nd. And 500 years prior to that was the United Monarchy of Israel.

I certainly see the pattern, and notice that major events have occurred regularly for the past 2500 years, but I'm not sure I would call them all "rummage sales." So what do you think? Are we on the cusp of another radical shift in the Church?

People Don't Like You

It's OK if people don't like you. It took me a long time to come to grips with that. I think mainly because I struggle with basing my self esteem on what others think of me.

My wife has a brilliant saying, "If everyone likes you, you are not being true to yourself."

Jesus warned his followers of this in John 15, "If the world hates you, remember it hated me before it hated you."

The Greek word for "world" here is kosmos, which literally means "something ordered" or "ordered system." We get our English word cosmetic from it, which means to "order one's face."

When Jesus uses this term he is speaking about a way of "ordering the world" that does not harmonize with God's way.

Jesus told his followers they will be hated by people who build themselves up by stepping on others; who abuse the poor and only love those inside their "circle."

If you are hated because you reject a system that marginalizes others and has no room for love, grace, and mercy - Congratulations! You are in good company.

Their World

There are multiple creation stories in the Bible. Most are familiar with Genesis 1 and 2, but Job 38-39 and Psalm 104 also speak of God's creative activity. 

Ps 104 has God setting the "earth on its foundations" and establishing boundaries for the mighty waters (cf. Gen 1.2). Water was a symbol of chaos in the ancient world and the Bible makes very clear that God controls all such forces. 

Foundations of the earth are also mentioned in Job's references to creation (Jb 38-39; cf. Is 48.13; Hb 1.10).  When we investigate these passages on their own turf, without projecting our understanding of the cosmos on them, we get an image of the ancient world that looks like the picture below:

You can see in the image the "highest heavens" and the "waters above heaven" (Ps 148.4). Notice the dome of Gen 1.6-8, "Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters that separate waters from the waters."

When we look at this image we see a world very different than our own. Which makes perfect sense because the Bible was not written "to us" but is written "for us." 

We recognize that this means that to get the most out of our Bible reading, we must study the world of the Bible. In doing this, we see that God spoke to people according to their understanding of the world. 

This is yet another example of God meeting us right where we are; of him being intimately concerned with our lives and wanting each of us to know him in a way we can comprehend.

Baggage

Is it possible to meet people without bringing the "baggage of the past" into our interactions with them? In other words, do we allow each of our encounters with others to be fresh, unstained by people's past shortcomings? 

This isn't to say we should return naively time and time again to a merchant that rips us off, or to a significant other who abuses us, but we should allow people to change. 

This might be a great opportunity to treat others as we want to be treated; to give people the benefit of the doubt. 

Many of those who have wronged us may have no idea how their actions affected us. In this way it would be unwise for us to assume that they are constantly malicious - that attitude would only increase the distance between us. 

The Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6 is followed by a line that should cause us to pause: "For if you forgive others when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive you."

Meeting others fresh, forgiving them for harm they have done us, is foundational to the health of our lives and our communities. May we have the grace and mercy to forgive as we have been forgiven.

Liberated From Ignorance

There are at least two sides to every story. But tragically most of us don't take the time to learn the other side. 

We become comfortable with our way of looking at the world. We get lulled into apathy, forgetting the necessity of being stretched, of growing.  

But we must fight against this. We must surround ourselves with people who think differently than we do. Who challenge us. We must read books from authors not in "our camp," and dialogue with those of different backgrounds.

We must educate ourselves, for education has the incredible ability to liberate us from ignorance.

We must investigate both sides of all issues - including issues between us and other people. We must seek advice from others, for it is the "fool that thinks his own way is right" (Pr 12.15).

We must especially undertake this challenge in the volatile area of religion. When a person feels God is on his or her side, there is nothing that can stop him or her. And this is scary. History testifies that religious extremism is responsible for all sorts of horrific evils. 

Let us break the cycle of ignorance-fed hatred; of the US vs. THEM mentality that leads to so much destruction. And above all, let us love for there is no greater virtue (Col 3.14).

Competing Powers

Constantine

Two of Jesus' disciples ask him for a favor, "Can we sit at your right and left in your glory?" (Mk 10). To which Jesus replies, "You have no idea what you're asking." 

The disciples were waiting for Jesus' revolution; counting down the days until he gathered up his army and kicked the mighty Romans out of Israel once and for all. They wanted to make sure they that were all set to help Jesus rule in his new kingdom. 

But in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus' "glory," or the coming of his kingdom, was his death, and thus to "sit at his right and left" was to occupy the crosses to his right and left as he was crucified. This is why he tells them they have no clue what they are really asking for. 

He goes on to explain that the Kingdom of God doesn't work like earthly kingdoms. There would be no rulers in this new community and the would-be leaders were to be servants, looking to the needs of others before their own. 

Followers of that Kingdom would experience the power of selfless living, looking out for the marginalized, caring for the poor, and renouncing violence (Mt 5). Their commitment to these values in a culture of oppression and violence, brought upon the early church decades of persecution. 

This meant that on a national scale it was easy for Christians to live by Jesus' power narrative - they had no power. But this all changed in the 4th century CE, when the Roman Emperor Constantine became a Christian and effectively made it illegal not to be one.

From that point on, western Christians would struggle with a question of loyalty:  Do we buy into God's definition of power, where we lay down our lives for others, or do we remain loyal to this world's definition, where we gain through others' loss?

Change Your Name

All these Biblical characters have something in common: Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Peter, Paul. They all received new names after they had an encounter with God. 

There is tremendous power associated with a name. A name equals identity and reputation. 

This is why the Bible's collection of universal wisdom, Proverbs, tells us that "a good name is to be chosen rather than great riches (Pr 22.1)." 

What we do, comes from who we are, and the Bible's way of speaking about who we are is our name. So we ask ourselves, is my name one of integrity? Love? Kindness? Mercy? 

When people hear my name do they think of someone who looks out for those who can't look out for themselves? Who gives selflessly? Who is free of judgement? 

Name changes in the Bible were symbolic of the life change spawned by an encounter with God. If we claim to have had an encounter with God, but are not different for the better, maybe it is time for a name change.

This Is Spiritual

An exploration of God's good world. This is my kind of worship.

AC/DC

AC/DC is an Australian hard rock band popular for songs like "Highway to Hell" and "Hell's Bells." 

Such song names led to speculation that the band might be Satanic and that AC/DC stood for "Anti-Christ/Devil's Child." 

One of my professors in school grew up with Malcolm and Angus, the brother's who founded the band. He then toured with them for a number of years as their sound tech. 

He told us the name AC/DC actually came from a sticker on an Australian vacuum cleaner that read AC NOT DC. He also explained that the song title "Hell's Bells" came from a bell hop at a London hotel who always said, "Oh Hell's Bells!" every time something went wrong.

The idea is you can't believe everything you hear. We all walk in varying shades of ignorance depending on the subject matter, so it's probably best to go straight to the source when confronted with things that concern us. And if you can't get to the source? Suspend judgment.

Moral Improvement

Fundamental to the Christian faith is the idea that Jesus died for sins (1 Cor 15.3). But what does that mean?

We have looked at the Ransom and Substitution models and in this post we'll check out the Moral Influence Theory (MIT). 

The MIT suggests that the purpose of Jesus life, death, and resurrection was to bring about positive moral change. To change the world by spreading love from one person to the next (cf. Mt 28.19; Jn 15.13).

This view was held by almost all early church writers including Clement, Ignatius, Origen, Irenaeus, and Augustine. It was reformulated in the 12th century by Peter Abelard in reaction to Anselm's Substitution theory.

It is a "subjective" model where Christ changes humanity vs. an "objective" model, like Substitutionary Atonement, where God is changed by Christ. In the MIT, God does not require Christ's death to satisfy divine justice and so no change in God is effected by the cross.

Instead in the MIT, God is primarily concerned with whether a person's inner character is good or evil. We are to follow Christ's example of selfless love (cf. 1 Pt 2.21), even if as with him, it costs us our lives.

The MIT has many strong points, including its recognition of the numerous passages in the NT that speak of God's final judgment according to moral conduct, as well as those that speak of the life change Jesus came to motivate (cf 1 Cor 3, Mt 25). 

It has been critiqued for not taking sin or God's wrath seriously enough, as well as promoting salvation by works.

The majority of the critiques, though, come from a lens that has been clouded by the Substitution model, where the focus is primarily on Jesus' death. Instead, the MIT focuses on the whole story, including the movement that was birthed out of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection and its trans-formative impact on the world. 

As with all the models, the MIT should not be seen as the only way to view the Christ event, but rather another piece in the beautiful mosaic God created two-thousand years ago. 

Next Post in the Series: the Christus Victor Model

Producing Life

Jesus is approached by a dad with a serious problem: his twelve-year-old daughter is dying. So he asks Jesus to come and touch her, hoping this will make her well (Mk 5).

Jesus agrees and sets off towards the man's house, but he's not alone. A large crowd is following him and in that crowd is a woman who also has a serious problem: she has been bleeding for twelve years. 

This condition leaves her ceremonially unclean (Lev 15) and cuts her off from full participation in her community. In the ancient world things like sex, birth, and death were mysterious and powerful, and thus taboo, so any association with them made a person unclean. 

Because of this she wasn't supposed to touch anyone, but she touches Jesus. This act miraculously heals her.

Unfortunately her healing took time and during this delay the twelve-year-old dies. Jesus continues toward her home anyway, and when he arrives he finds her family mourning.

He asks the family why they are making so much commotion and tells them "the girl is only sleeping." They laugh at him, but then he touches her, telling her to wake up, and she is restored to life.

The woman bleeding for twelve years and the twelve-year-old who is brought back to life, symbolize Jesus' restoration of Israel. Israel was made of twelve tribes and in healing these women, he is restoring life to the "life producers" of Israel. 

The Rapture

The idea of The Rapture, where Jesus snatches people up into heaven while they are driving their cars, asleep in bed, or walking with a friend, comes mainly from a misunderstanding of 1 Thess 4.16-17:

For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel's call and with the sound of God's trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever.

Here the author Paul is describing the return of Jesus to the new earth (cf. Rom 8:18-27; Rev 21:1; Is 65:17, 66:22). So the idea is not escaping to somewhere else, but actually staying here and inhabiting the remade world. 

This makes sense when one understands that in 1 Thess 4, Paul is conjuring up images of a king returning to his homeland after victory in battle. The king is met by his citizens in the open country and then escorted back into the city. 

There is an image of people "meeting the Lord in the air," but it is followed by the assumption that they will immediately return to the newly remade world.

The word rapture comes from the Latin translation of the Greek word for caught up in 1 Thess 4.17. The idea of such an event was popularized by John Nelson Darby in the mid 1800s and further propagated by books (and movies) like the Left Behind series. 

Belief in The Rapture is amazingly popular in the US, but is not widely accepted in Christianity as a whole. So this Saturday, rest easy. Nothing is going to happen, certainly nothing that looks like The Rapture.

For a Biblical perspective on the Second Coming of Jesus, see N.T. Wright's book, Surprised By Hope

I Don't Believe In God

When I worked as a Medic I worked 12 hr shifts. Some days the time flew, other days the clock seemed to move slower than it did when I was in detention in Jr. High.

Slow days meant lots of time to get to know coworkers. I remember chatting with a new partner one time when the conversation moved to religion. I told him about my education and work in the church and he said, "I don't believe in God."

I asked him which God he didn't believe in and he described his strict religious upbringing, where he felt God was nothing more than an old man in the sky who judged his every deed. 

He also talked about how his parents put on "Sunday Faces" appearing one way to their church friends and living much differently the rest of the week.

I told him I didn't believe in that God either. I told him I believed in a God who revealed himself in Jesus, who looked out for those who couldn't look out for themselves; who spent his time chillin' with "sinners," and saved most of his words of condemnation for religious people. 

I shared my belief in a God who through his every action embodied love and wanted nothing more than for people to experience life to the fullest, embracing what it meant to be fully human. It was a great conversation. 

Maybe the idea is to ask lots of questions. Ask people to clarify when they present ideas that are different than your own. 

Get them to share their story. You may find it very similar to yours. You may even find there are some versions of God you don't believe in, and that is a good thing.

Penal Problems

For the last few days we have been discussing the models used to explain what Jesus did when he "died for sins" (1 Cor 15.3).

First and foremost, we must keep in mind that they are only "models." They seek to direct our attention to the mystery of what happened when God became flesh, died, and then rose again (Rom 11.33ff). 

When speaking about God, we (and the Bible as well) are limited by language. So we use parables, analogies, and metaphors, all in an attempt to paint a picture of what it looks like when the Infinite interacts with the finite.

The last post in the series introduced the Penal Substitution model (PS) and today we will look at it a little closer. As a review, this model essentially says: We deserve punishment for our sin and God punished Jesus instead of us. 

PS is a model we use to point us to the "fact" that our sins are forgiven, but does not explain the intricacies of "how" exactly they are forgiven. When we focus on the "how," all of the models run into problems, but especially PS. 

Take for example the problems that arise when we take passages that speak of Christ's work on our behalf, such as Rom 3.25, 1 Jn 2.2, 4.10, and misinterpret them. Those passages clearly state that Christ is an "atoning sacrifice" (Gk. hilasterion/hilasmos - mercy-seat/sin offering) for us.

But the question is: how did the sacrificial system work? Sacrifices in the Hebrew Scriptures did not "take the place" of the wrong-doer, rather they fulfilled cultic rituals as a part of the Covenant and paved the way for forgiveness. It has always been God's forgiveness, often without sacrifice, that restored people to him (cf. Jonah, Mic 6.6-8). 

But Jesus was a sacrifice and one picture we get of him is as the Passover Lamb (John 19). We might think that this picture suggests that Jesus died "in our place," but that's not the role of the lamb in the Passover story. 

There the lamb's blood was used as a sign to mark those who belonged to God and save them from God's wrath. So in the end we see that saying Jesus was a sacrifice for us does not necessarily mean God punished him "in our place."

With that said, there are places in the NT that do speak about Jesus dying "in our place" (Gk anti cf. Mt 20.28, Mk 10.45). But there are many others where language about Jesus dying "for us" does not mean "in our place." Those verses would be much better translated "for our benefit." We should let each passage speak for itself and not force them to say things they are not saying.

Finally, PS argues that Christ died so we don't have to. But what about the very prominent NT theme of participation in Christ's death (cf. Heb 13.11-16, Rom 6.1-4, Gal 2.20), where we put to death the "old way," the way of sin death, and disorder and are "raised" to new life (2 Cor 5.14ff)? In this way Jesus doesn't prevent our death, he actually brings it about.

There are many other critiques of this model, some valid, others not. In the end, PS captures the power behind a number of "pictures" in the NT about the Cross, but it is limited, and we need the other models in order to most fully grasp the beauty of the Christ event. 

Next post: The Moral Influence Theory

For more on this issue check out Packer's well argued view of PS. It covers pros an cons fairly but is limited by its inaccurate understanding of the Mosaic Law.

Active Theology

Theology: it sounds like a fancy word but it really just means "words about God." I wonder where most Americans learn theology? Where are we presented with the most "words about God?"

I find most people don't actually read the Bible, and even those that do read a verse here, or a chapter there. Which is fine for individual application - it couldn't be bad to meditate on a verse about "giving thanks" or "loving people we don't like" - but such reading does not tell the whole story.

What about church? Surely we encounter theology in Church? Most church services today contain two major blocks of theology: the Music (most often mislabeled as worship), and the Message. 

I know pastors who spend 30+ hours a week preparing a sermon, laboring over every detail of their message. Then they present those ideas, some in incredibly dynamic ways, but none-the-less to a passive audience. 

What is the effect of such a presentation? The latest studies in how we learn best suggest we are active learners - we need to participate to really "get it". 

Where we do participate is during the music. It's rarely the sermon points that get stuck in my head a week later, but the music does. Why is that? For one reason, it's the 7/11 model - same 7 words repeated 11x. 

This may annoy some church-goers, but if the idea is communicating words about God and wanting those words to stay with people, this model works: we participate, we are physically active, not passive, we repeat (sometimes ad nauseum), and weeks after the ideas communicated in the songs stay with us. 

Two questions then. One, if the goal of a sermon is getting people to retain theology, should we adopt a more participatory model of communication? 

Two, if the majority of effective theology is being presented through music, are we spending enough time making sure the theology we communicate is what we endorse?

Substitute

Medal of Honor

Fundamental to the Christian faith is the idea that Jesus died for sins (1 Cor 15.3). But what does that mean? 

Yesterday we looked at the Classic (Ransom) theory, and today we'll tackle the Satisfaction (Substitution) model. This theory started around 1000ce with a monk named Anselm.

Anselm didn't like the Ransom view because it gave the Devil too much power. He had a hard time believing God could owe Satan anything and instead argued that it was we who owed God something: honor. 

Sin had robbed God of honor, but the problem was that humans were incapable of the obedience required to restore that honor, and so only a special being he calls the God-man (Jesus), could save the day. 

In Anselm's day, living rightly stored up honor, almost like a piggy bank. He saw Jesus' perfect life, culminating in his innocent death, as the ultimate piggy bank, able to pay the world's debt to God because of sin. Christ's piggy bank was then substituted on behalf of ours, making God a happy camper again.

But what if the problem wasn't God's lost honor? What if it was God's justice that sin called into question? This idea was developed by people like Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, who felt that Christ's death did not repay God for lost honor, but rather paid the penalty of death that had been the consequence for sin all along (Gen 2.17, Rom 6.23). This view is known as the Penal-Substitution theory.

The Penal-Substitution theory argues that justice required God to punish humanity for sin, but God sent Jesus to bear the penalty. Jesus was even convicted as a criminal and sentenced to death, which made him the perfect substitute for us and satisfied God's wrath.

But even Aquinas and Calvin disagreed. Aquinas believed that Christ's death paid the penalty for all humanity, whereas Calvin felt it was limited only to those whom God had picked to be saved.

Next Post: Penal Problems

Ransom

Fundamental to the Christian faith is the idea that Jesus died for sins (1 Cor 15.3). But what does that mean? 

Christians have been debating the significance of the Christ event for 2000 years and over that period at least three major theories have surfaced: the Classic (Ransom), the Satisfaction (Substitution), and the Moral Influence (Idealistic).

Over the next few posts I want to look at these three views and ask what it might mean for us that the church has been wrestling with this for 2000 years and continues to do so.

First the Classic or Ransom theory. This theory is the earliest of all and uses passages like Mark 10.45, to argue that Christ was given as a ransom for humanity. The texts do not specify to whom the ransom was paid, although most early Christian writers argued it was to Satan.

According to this theory, Adam and Eve sold humanity to the Devil when they sinned and justice required a ransom be paid to the Devil for our release. God then tricked Satan into taking Christ as a ransom, and justice was satisfied. Poor Devil gets hosed though, because Jesus resurrects, leaving him to play all by himself. 

Before you write this this theory off as absurd, you must know that it was the dominant way of understanding Jesus' death for close to 1000 years, and is still held by some traditions today. 

One of the problems with it is the fact that nowhere does the Bible speak about the ransom being paid to Satan (or God for that matter), so any elaboration on those passages is destined to be conjecture.

It is interesting though, that the majority of Christians found it a valuable way to speak about Jesus for more than a millenia. It may not be how you understand things, but such an observation leads me to ask: I wonder which ideas I have about God will one day been seen as disconnected and inaccurate?

Next Post: The Satisfaction or Substitution Theory

Deus Ex Machina

Deus ex machina is Latin for "God out of the machine." It refers to cheesy Greek plays that used a crane (Gk. mekhane) to lower actors that played gods onto the stage.

The "gods" would then bring resolution to seemingly inextricable problems in the plot and bring the play to a close. 

The Greek tragedian Euripides (ca. 480 BC – 406 BC) used the "crane" in more than half of his plays. Aristotle criticized the use of the Deus and argued that the resolutions of a plot should arise from the previous actions in the play.

A more accurate translation of idea into English might be "God from our hands" or "God that we make." The "God of the gaps" idea seems to unapologetically take advantage of this. Instead of seeing God in every detail of the physical world, God is used to fill the gaps in our scientific knowledge.

The result of this thinking, is the more we discover, the more God is relegated to domain of the useless. I wonder how often we employ a Deus ex machina?

When we only wheel God into the narrative to fill the gaps of our understanding, we aren't engaging the Creator of the cosmos, but rather a "God that we make." May we instead embrace the tension and the beauty of seeing God as an intrinsic part of every area of our world.

Shine

Head In A Hole

I have always struggled answering the question, "What is your most embarrassing moment?" Mainly because I have lived my entire life quite free of embarrassment. That all changed tonight. 

I had a brief speaking part in our 5 and 7 o'clock Good Friday services. I had memorized my couple minutes of material and the 5 o'clock service went off without a hitch. 

But after effortlessly pronouncing my first few lines in the 7 o'clock service, my public speaking nightmare came true: a sheer meltdown of my cognitive abilities. I couldn't for the life of me remember my lines. 

After painfully ad libbing for a moment, I fessed up and told the audience I needed to get my notes. So I strolled off stage, grabbed my notes and walked back on the stage. 

I regained my composure, threw the notes on the stage, and set into my part only to freeze up again and have to grab the notes a second time. This may have happened a third time - I'm not sure. Was there a hole anywhere I could crawl into? 

Finally, I got into a little bit of a rhythm and was able to end well. 

I have been public speaking for over ten years and have never had anything like this happen. People's support of me was incredible and I acknowledge the value these character forming experiences have for me as a person.  

I grew leaps and bounds tonight in the areas of mercy, empathy, and humility, and while I hope to go my whole life without ever having something like this happen again, I highly doubt I'll have that luxury. In the end it's experiences like these that make us better people.  

I Deny the Resurrection

Filling Space

Jesus tells a parable: "An unclean spirit goes out of a person, and it wanders through the desert looking for a place to rest, but it finds none. So it says, 'I will return to my house (the formerly possessed person) from which I came.' 

It comes, finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings along seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and live there; and the person is worse off than before."

In the ancient world things were "unclean" that conflicted with the god one served. The Israelites for instance, considered other nations unclean because of their opposition to Israel's values.

Israel even had a whole slew of rituals in place to help a person become "clean" who had forfeited his or her purity by associating with things not "of God." 

The person in Jesus' parable did well by "evciting" the thing that was contradictory to the heart of God. But they didn't fill their life with anything else, and so they were incredibly susceptible to the things that drug them down in the first place. 

How many of us have seen this, either in our own lives or that of others? We give up something, become better for it, but don't take action to replace the vice with virtue and end up falling even further than before.

Here's to ridding ourselves of things that run contrary to the heart of God, and then filling those spaces with things that make us more who we are supposed to be.

Donkey!!

Jesus walked on water, calmed storms, and healed people, but did you know he could ride two donkeys at the same time? 

That's what Matthew tells us in his version of Jesus' life (Mt 21). In preparation for his final entry into Jerusalem, he records Jesus instructing his closest friends to go into a village and find a "donkey, and a colt with her and bring them to me." 

They bring the two animals to Jesus, throw their jackets on both animals and then Jesus hops on both of them! Matthew tells us Jesus did this to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, "Tell the daughter of Zion (Jerusalem): Look your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey" (Is 62.11, Zech 9.9). 

The other gospels only have Jesus riding on the colt and make no mention of two animals, so why would Matthew tell the story this way? It is most likely because he saw Jesus as the literal fulfillment of the words from Zechariah. 

He is so serious about rooting these events in the authoritative Hebrew scriptures, that he chooses to ignore the poetic force of the passage and instead interprets it literally. 

Mentioning the smaller donkey after the first is a way of strongly emphasizing the humility and peacefulness of the one riding the animal: "Your king is so humble and peaceful, that he rides on a donkey...not just a donkey, but a baby donkey."

Jesus rode into Jerusalem being touted by his followers as the triumphant deliverer of Israel, and Matthew more than any of the other gospels presents the strongest contrast between Jesus and the rulers of the day. 

Jesus rides into Jerusalem on two animals, struggling to keep his balance, on his way to inaugurate a revolution of peace. In this revolution people lay down their lives instead of taking them, and what could be a more brilliant picture of their peaceful founder than that.

Taking Back the World

We live in such incredible tension. The world around us is filled with incalculable beauty and yet unimaginable tragedy:

Pinochet's crimes against the Chilean people remind me of what Crossan says, "The primary goal of the Church is to take the world back from the thugs":

The affirmation that Jesus is Lord, is an affirmation of a world view that is wholly different than what we typically experience. May we find the strength to truly love others as we love ourselves and so change the tragic tide of history as we partner with God as he restores this broken world. 

Peel Me

I peeled apples tonight. Some of them were bruised and mushy in spots, but I was able to strip away the bad parts and still use them.

It takes me forever to do this task (one usually assigned by my wife), so I had lots of time to cogitate.

The process got me thinking about a line in Psalms where the author says, "Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any hurtful way (Hb. derek, path) in me, and lead me in the lasting way (Hb. derek)" -Ps 139.23-24

What a painful process that is! I usually know the harmful "paths" I walk before I even ask. It's the act of peeling away the bad that hurts. 

But I am better without it. I am better without the sarcastic comments that cut others down; better without the selfish actions that rob others of joy; better without the thoughts that drag me to places I don't want to be. Peeling makes me better. 

The World Outside Ourselves

The heavens are telling the glory of God (Ps 19.1)....but what if we can't see them?

Spending time in nature grounds me. Witnessing the grandeur of the cosmos gives me perspective. Recognizing the beauty of creation gives me hope. 

A nurse I know who takes care of people as they near the end of their lives, always asks her patients whether or not they gardened. An odd question, but after years of collecting peoples answers, she has noticed a definitive difference between both the physical presentation, and the emotional attitude of people in relation to their answer. 

Those who did garden, complained less, were generally healthier, and seemed to have a perspective that the world did not revolve around them. Those who didn't garden were often grumpy, sickly, and appeared years older than they actually were. 

We were created to spend time in creation (Gen 1.28), gaining perspective and tapping into the life giving harmony that comes from acknowledging that we are not the center of the universe.

Spelling Sin

Hebrew Letter Aleph

Hayt, is the most common word for "sin" in the Bible. When transliterated into English the word ends with a "T", but in Hebrew it ends with a silent Aleph, the first character in the Hebrew alphabet. 

Things like a silent letter in such a powerful word did not go unnoticed by the Rabbis, whose specialty was squeezing profound meaning out of the smallest details.

Rabbi Baal Shem Tov, who is considered the father of Hasidic Judaism, was once asked by a student why the letter is even in the word. 

The Rabbi responded, "We all know that Aleph is the first letter of the alphabet and represents the first cause, root, and essence of all existence - God." 

He goes on: "The letter Aleph is silent in the word for sin in order to teach us that when a person commits hayt it is a sign that God's presence is not being 'pronounced' in his life. The sinner has temporarily forgotten the Aleph of the world."

It is a struggle to place God at the center of my life. But the more I acknowledge the Aleph the more I feel I am living as I was made to live.

Quote from R. D. Zaslow's Roots & Branches: A Sourcebook for Understanding the Jewish Roots of Christianity Replacement Theology, and Anti-Semitism.

Making Each Other Better

Does she make you a better person? Is he helping you become most who you are supposed to be? Are they building you?

I find the answers to these questions provide tremendous insight into our relationships. 

They remind me of a line in the NT book of Hebrews, "And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds." The idea of the verse is to engage in relationships whose byproduct is love.

The Greek word for provoke, is paroxysmon, which is where we get the English word paroxysm, "a sudden outburst of activity." In Greek it means "to spur on, provoke, or incite."

It is actually very interesting the word paroxysmon is used here, as it is essentially the only example in the Bible where the word is used in a sense of provoking something good. All the other examples would be more akin to a sibling provoking his brother or sister to the point of rage (cf. Deut 1.34; Acts 15.39, 17.16).

I wonder how many of our relationships need a "sudden burst of activity?" Or a not so subtle kick in the butt? 

If our relationships aren't making us better people; if they aren't producing love and the things that make the world a better place, it might be time to bust out the spurs!

Jesus, Why Are You Different?

Jesus gets arrested. That much is clear. But how it happened is less clear. Mark's version portrays a Jesus who has very little control.

He uses violent verbs to describe the arrest and tells us Jesus is basically manhandled and then deserted by his best friends.

John presents things a little differently. He notes that not only do the religious big wigs come to arrest Jesus, but they bring with them a speira, or band of some 600 soldiers. 

Jesus, "knowing all that was going to happen, asked them, 'Whom do you seek?' and they said 'Jesus of Nazareth.' And he said to them, 'Ego eimi,' 'I am'" - which is the same titled used in Greek for Yahweh.

Upon hearing this, the crowd "drew back and fell to the ground." Another round of this takes place, sans the falling, and then Jesus instructs the crowd to let his disciples go and he is "arrested and tied up."

Comparing these two events may lead us to ask how the arrest actually took place. But that's the wrong question. The fact that the event took place is probably a better concern. After that we might ask: Why did the authors present their versions the way they did?

When we ask that, we find that Mark more than likely wrote to a persecuted community and presents Jesus as one who suffers, is rejected and left all alone. He, through the Spirit of God, presented Jesus in a way that most fit the needs of his community. He presented a Jesus they could relate to.

John on the other hand, views the events of Jesus' life through the lens of the resurrected Christ. This is why Jesus knows the future in John, and seems so incredibly in control. That's because after the resurrection the community realized who Jesus actually was. He was Yahweh in human form.

The unique angle of these stories tells us something about the heart of God: he is incredibly concerned about meeting us right where we are. That's why there are four gospels, each meeting our needs in different ways, at different times. 

I Won't Do That Again

God has a serious problem. Shortly after creating human beings, they start offing each other. Brother killing brother at that.

Things really go downhill from there and in the end the earth is filled with so much evil and corruption that God decides to wipe the whole slate clean with a massive flood. 

He does preserve humanity by picking one guy and his family to carry on the human race. After the flood, God repeats his instruction to "Be fruitful and multiply," but he adds a stipulation not to kill each other. Seems like a fair request.

Then God makes a covenant with humanity, committing to never again use a flood to destroy the earth and its inhabitants. A covenant in the ancient world was a formal agreement between a superior and an inferior party, with the superior establishing the pact with the inferior. 

A ceremony was typically involved and in this instance God ceremoniously lays down his weapon, the bow (Hab 3.9-11), facing away from humanity, as a sign of his commitment not to flood the earth again.

Next time you look to the sky and see a rainbow, let it remind you of a God who is deeply invested in the world and who is desperately concerned about evil. Think about how he was genuinely puzzled by the condition of the world (Gen 6.6ff) and so he set a plan in motion to make it better.