1st Corynthians

Revival Can Begin with Today's Young Adults

2012-01-30T13:09:00.002-05:00

I’m being deeply enriched as I’m reading George Marsden’s landmark biography Jonathan Edwards: A Life. In one chapter Marsden describes a remarkable revival that took place in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1734-35, where Edwards was serving as pastor.

By 1734 (Edwards was 31 years old), the spiritual and social condition of the young adults of Northampton, Mass. was dismal. The prevalence of premarital sex had risen dramatically, even to the point that pregnancy out of wedlock lost much of its stigma so long as the couple married following conception. This was partly because the parents of these young people were distancing themselves from the strictness of their own upbringing. But it was also aided and abetted by economic forces. A land shortage—partly driven by property consolidations widening the gap between wealthy and less propserous landowners—prevented young people from starting families on new farms, so they were stuck living with their parents with no immediate economic prospects. The average marriage age rose considerably to 28 or 29 for men and 25 for women. With real adulthood postponed, these young adults were living without purpose; youth culture revolved around taking advantage of days off working for their parents to hit the party scene at local taverns instead of attending church activities scheduled on those days.

Then in April of that year one of the young men in a hamlet a few miles away from the town center died of a sudden illness. Edwards, who had nearly died of illness twice himself, preached a gripping funeral sermon about the precariousness of life and the pointlessness of the kind of lives the young people were living in light of death and the next life. The young adults there were deeply affected. Edwards returned and called a service just for that age-group soon after, and these young adults quickly began showing evidence of conversion—changed lives.

Soon this wave of conversion spread to young adults all over Northampton and from them to all generations, from children to the aged and everyone in between, men and women, high and low, rich and poor, free and slave. Virtually the entire town was converted. People of all kinds were meeting in homes to pray and encourage each other through Scripture and singing the new worship music being churned out by the likes of Isaac Watts. During the 14 months of the revival, physical and mental illness virtually disappeared from Northampton. The revival spread to other towns along the Connecticut River, and similar phenomena occurred in New York and New Jersey. This was an intense local precursor to the Great Awakening that swept all the colonies about five years later.

What amazes me perhaps even more than the miraculous work of God in this revival is where the revival started. It started among young adults whose social situation and culture are shockingly similar to those of young adults today. Just like in Northampton in 1734, premarital sex is commonplace, there is a widening wealth gap and bitterly difficult conditions for getting hired into a promising economic future, the marriage age is high (28.4 for men and 26.5 for women in 2009), young adults are living with their parents at high rates, the Jersey Shore ideal is in, and church attendance among young adults is not.

But it was among these very people, the group that the church was least successful in reaching, that the revival began. It began because of a sobering tragedy, a God-soaked pastor who cared deeply about them and loved them enough to tell them the hard truth, and a sovereign work of the Holy Spirit. And once it caught, it transformed every segment of society.

The soil today among young adults may be even harder to till. Puritan Northampton’s young adults had a set of doctrinally sound basic beliefs that Edwards could refer and appeal to. But as Kenda Creasy Dean reports in Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church (which, by the way, you have to read), young people today regardless of religious self-identification are largely devotees of the parasitic religion of “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” and are virtually ignorant of the gospel. On the other hand, perhaps this is an advantage—perhaps today’s young people’s ignorance has kept them from being inoculated to the Christian message. But in either case, God has already proven that he can launch an incredible spiritual awakening from young adults just like the ones in America today. This drives me to prayer and gives me great hope.

It's Here: "On Freedom and Destiny"

2012-01-25T19:17:00.000-05:00

It’s official: my first book, On Freedom and Destiny: How God’s Will and Yours Intersect, is in print and able to be purchased online. I’m delighted that it is finally available to the reading public. I hope you enjoy it, and I look forward to hearing your comments.

What follows is the bulk of the introduction to On Freedom and Destiny, subtitled, “Why I Wrote This Book.”

Tell me if this has ever happened to you: you’re in a social gathering with some good friends and new acquaintances. Everybody is warm and open and relaxed, because they know that they are in the company of like-minded people. So everyone at the gathering, including you, is speaking candidly and unguardedly, without fear of offending anyone or putting their foot in their mouth.

At a brief lull in the conversation, you reach for the chips and salsa on the coffee table just as one of your newly-met fellows says, “Did you hear what [presidential candidate] said today? Is he a boob or what?” Your stomach and throat tighten, because you made a small campaign contribution to Candidate Boob last week, and you’re looking forward to your complimentary campaign bumper sticker arriving in the mail. Suddenly you’re grudgingly thankful that the sticker wasn’t already on your car when you pulled up to the house. To your consternation and disappointment, the others gathered around the coffee table take up the taunt against Candidate Boob. You’re the sole exception. And you wonder, how did this happen? Ten seconds ago I thought I was in the company of friends. I thought I was accepted. Now I find out that if they know who I’m voting for, they’ll think I’m an idiot or something worse.

Maybe you’ve never experienced this unsettling feeling around a political candidate, but you’ve probably felt it in some context. There’s nothing that feels quite like other people assuming they know what you think, because everybody thinks that, or because only morons or infidels would think the opposite. Or maybe they neither endorse nor deny your position but simply ignore it because they have never considered it before.

I felt something like this where-do-I-fit-in feeling when I read an essay by a friend a few years back. A portion of his essay read: “Underlying all of Judeo Christian [sic] theology is the concept of ‘free will,’ which essentially means that every person is free to choose right or wrong.” This statement and others like it make me rather uncomfortable, because though I am a Christian, I am not sure I can sign onto it. It all depends on how one defines “free will” and “choose.” I had a hunch that what I mean by those things aren’t what my friend had in mind. Apparently my beliefs on free will weren’t even on my friend’s radar screen, or if they were, he believed at the time that they are outside the bounds of Judeo-Christian theology. Now if this were one essay by one guy, this would not be a big deal. But I know dozens of Christians who would agree with the statement I quoted above without a second thought. It would not even cross their minds that there are concerns about it from within the historic Christian faith. Or if they do know there are concerns―well, the people who came up with them must be way out in left field.

This book contains what I think regarding freedom and destiny and why I think it. Admittedly, it is written to persuade, but it is also written to explain. I cannot count the number of times I have encountered an opportunity to express my beliefs on these issues and have totally failed―either by mixing up my words, or by starting in the middle instead of at the beginning, or by not having enough time to express myself, or by being easily offended, or by avoiding discussion altogether. This book is first of all my opportunity to explain myself thoroughly to all my friends and relations in a way that I cannot possibly do in conversation.

Yet I also write because I feel like I have some obligation to do so. See, I have changed my mind radically on these matters, and I think a radical change like that carries with it a special responsibility to explain the new thing in a way that’s comprehensible to people who know only the old thing.

So what are we talking about? The answers to a number of questions:

How does God relate to time (ch. 1)?
How does God get his way (ch. 2)? (A.k.a., what’s the deal with predestination?)
What does it mean to have free will, and how is it compatible with predestination (ch. 3)?
Is it possible for people to have a personal relationship with God if their lives are predestined by him (ch. 4)?
What does it mean for Christ to set us free and how does he do it (ch. 5)?
What is the nature of evil, and what is necessary for someone to be guilty of it (ch. 6)?
Does God’s plan force people into hell (ch. 7)?
If God wants everyone to be saved, why aren’t they (ch. 8)?
Why is there evil in the world (ch. 9)?
If God predestined everything, why would we do anything (ch. 10)?
Do the answers to these questions make any practical difference (ch. 11)?
What makes “Free Churches” free (ch. 12)?

Before we dive in, a couple of disclaimers. First, I’m a pastor. In my preaching and teaching and writing for my church I spend almost all of my time talking about non-negotiables, things that are clear from Scripture that are necessary for us to know and act on for our salvation, things that if someone disagrees with they are risking the state of their soul. This book is different. Don’t get me wrong―I think the issues contained in this book are important or I wouldn’t be writing about them. However, there are other things that are more important. A person can thoroughly disagree with a whole lot of what I write here and still be saved. I don’t believe that a person can thoroughly disagree with the Nicene Creed and still be saved. So let’s keep this stuff in perspective. But if the things in this book are important but not that important, why am I taking the trouble to write about them at all? Exactly because there is room for a diversity of opinion on these questions, and many American Christians don’t realize that. They think their answers are as non-negotiable and straight-ahead obvious as John 3:16, and I’m writing to demonstrate that that’s not so.

Second, I am an evangelical Protestant Christian assuming that most people reading this are something like me. Therefore my work carries certain unargued presuppositions (for instance, about the divine inspiration and reliability of the Bible) that I share with most of my audience. Christians from other branches of the faith (and even some from my own) may not share all of these assumptions with me; nevertheless, I expect them to be able to enjoy this book as well because of the common ground we do have. I even believe that non-Christians may enjoy this book, as long as they keep in mind that I have made little attempt to meet them where they are. In any case, if something here sets you thinking in a profitable direction on the road to knowledge and life, more power to you.

To purchase your copy of On Freedom and Destiny, click here.

Whoa

2012-01-25T15:14:00.000-05:00

What Should Jesus Look Like?

2012-01-23T14:33:00.001-05:00

Dan Buttry, American Baptist International Ministries Global Consultant for Peace and Justice, has written a great article on artistic depictions of the face of Jesus. What should Jesus look like? Is it okay to portray him like oneself and one's neighbors look? If so, why? Though he leaves out the question about whether we should portray him visually at all (an important one), where he goes with the answers he does give ends in a thought-provoking meditation on the doctrine of the Incarnation. Enjoy.

Nice, Kind, and Good

2012-01-17T23:13:00.001-05:00

I think we’ve made a mistake by teaching our kids (and being taught by our parents) that we ought to be nice. And if it’s possible to change how we talk, we should stop. This is because “nice” as we commonly use the term means multiple things, and some of them are better than others.

“Nice” can mean “kind.” That means you recognize when someone has some weakness or vulnerability and gently extend help to that person. Kindness is produced by the Holy Spirit and is always a good thing.

“Nice” can also mean “courteous.” You don’t behave rudely toward anyone but act according to cultural standards of politeness and propriety that are a ritual way of demonstrating respect for others. Courtesy is a sort of foundational expression of regard for one’s neighbor, so this is also a good thing, at least in all but the most extreme circumstances.

“Nice” can mean “friendly” or “pleasant.” When you meet someone in a social gathering for the first time, you smile and make small-talk that puts others at ease. This can also be an expression of love, and it is also very useful. But though we should strive to put it into practice, this is easier for some than for others just because of their outgoing temperament, not because of any special virtue.

“Nice” can also mean “doesn’t make people feel bad.” This definition of “nice” isn’t just about the nice person but also about the reactions of the people around the nice person. So the same person may be considered nice by less easily offended people and not nice by easily offended people. In such a case, “nice” doesn’t describe the virtue of the nice person but rather the virtue of the people around him or her.

My problem with expecting and teaching people to “be nice” is that, depending on what we mean by “nice,” being nice can be very honoring to God or very dishonoring to God or in some cases just not as important as we make it out to be.

As I said before, being kind is always pleasing to God, and I hope that when we teach our young children to “be nice,” this is the main thing we’re trying to urge on them. And in fact, maybe we should stop saying, “Be nice,” and start saying, “Be kind,” instead to keep things clear. It’s also very appropriate to raise them to be nice as in being polite, so we should keep things going there.

But though it is a fine thing to desire and expect people to be nice as in friendly, let’s not put too much moral stock in it. Con artists are nice—a person can be nice and yet have nothing but the worst intentions for their neighbor. Also, as I said before, some people are nice not because they’re especially good but because they’re good at being nice. It’s a natural talent like being a good athlete or musician. This isn’t bad; in fact, it’s good. But its goodness is like good art that is pleasing to the eye, not like goodness that pleases the moral sense.

The diciest definition of “nice,” in my opinion, has to do with other people not feeling bad. Now, don’t get me wrong: not making people feel bad matters. If you have two ways to do something, and one way will make people feel bad and the other way won’t, then do the way that won’t. That’s not only kind (the really good sort of “nice”) thing to do, but it’s also smart. The problem is that when many people get their feelings hurt, they immediately conclude that the person who hurt them wasn’t nice. If being “nice” is such a great virtue, then their hurt is a marker that the other person is immoral. And maybe the person was. But maybe not. Because lots of holy, righteous people in history have made other people feel bad. Jesus did it all the time, and we know that he was the kindest person the world has ever seen, the living expression of God’s kindness to people who don’t deserve it.

Because all these different meanings are lumped together in the word “nice,” and because Sunday Schools and such, hopefully meaning “Be kind,” tell the children of Christians, “Be nice,” there are many, many people who think that not upsetting other people is the essence and goal of Christian living. They might not put it this way exactly. But how often have you heard someone say (or said yourself), “What So-and-So did is un-Christian,” when what they really believe is, “I don’t like what So-and-So did because it hurt my feelings and ticked me off.” Maybe the problem is with what So-and-So did. Maybe the problem is what the person did who was ticked off by So-and-So. Maybe So-and-So was truly exhibiting love, which both is “kind” and also “is not glad about injustice, but rejoices in the truth” (1 Cor. 13:4, 6). Maybe the person who is upset by how “not nice” So-and-So is is really just a bit too attached to injustice and falsehood.

So, as I’ve proposed before, let’s back way off trying to be nice and instead zealously pursue being kind, and let’s teach our kids to do the same.

Announcing "On Freedom and Destiny"

2012-01-03T23:16:00.001-05:00

I'm pleased to announce the publication of my first book On Freedom and Destiny: How God's Will and Yours Intersect, which will be available for sale online within the next few weeks. Here's the cover:

Let me help you read the back:

"Everything happens for a reason." + "Everyone has free will." = ???

You've heard people quote these sayings. Maybe you've said them yourself. But sometimes you wonder, if each person is free to make their own choice, how could it be for any "reason" outside themselves? On the other hand, if God has a reason for every choice we make, does that mean that he is the one making it?

Join pastor and blogger Cory Hartman for a journey through the deep waters surrounding these questions. The trip is full of surprises as no simple truth is quite as simple as it seems, but Hartman brings penetrating clarity to these mysteries without taking the mystery away. Whether or not you follow him to the end, you won't forget this odyssey through the issues that shape the choices we make and the lives we live.

"Cory Hartman's On Freedom and Destiny is both biblically grounded and philosophically informed. Using many insightful illustrations, Hartman explains the key issues related to the problem of reconciling human freedom with divine sovereignty. He ultimately shows how these teachings are compatible. Even readers who disagree with the book's thesis will profit immensely from reading this book." –Jim Spiegel, professor of philosophy and religion, Taylor University, and author of The Benefits of Providence: A New Look at Divine Sovereignty

"Very few pastor-theologians get the balance right between being intellectual and being accessible. Cory Hartman does an admirable job in this book of writing material that is thoughtful, deftly written, and challenging but also eminently accessible for regular guys like me. This book comes from the trenches of pastoral ministry, the pages of Scripture, and the heart of a disciple of Christ who is striving to know Him more and proclaim His gospel." –Ted Kluck, award-winning co-author of Why We Love the Church: In Praise of Institutions and Organized Religion and author of Facing Tyson: Fifteen Fighters, Fifteen Stories

Why Do We Think We Can Make a Better Bible than God?

2011-12-21T15:21:00.000-05:00

The Gospel of Mark is known to be kind of weird, weird enough that it appears that Matthew and Luke and even arguably (and much more extremely) John wrote their Gospels for the purpose of correcting or improving Mark. I happen to find it strangely delightful that the Holy Spirit inspired four people to record the same story because each thought that the efforts of the ones who preceded them weren’t good enough, and for the purpose of a full canon they were all correct, even though the God who inspired them was perfectly satisfied with every detail of each book as an individual work. For a really insightful article on this that cleverly compares Mark to Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace, see here.

But back to Mark. His Gospel is all middle—it barely has a beginning and is missing the end. He puts extreme emphasis on Jesus’ miracles, at least in quantity, at the expense of his teaching (see John for the reverse). And sometimes Mark phrases things in a way that just doesn’t sound right. Sometimes it simply isn’t grammatically elegant (Luke in particular likes cleaning up these flubs), but other times the way Mark puts something genuinely alarms orthodox people.

An example of this that struck me lately is in the portion of Mark where Jesus is disputing with the Pharisees about divorce (10:2-12). You might recall that the Pharisees ask Jesus if divorce is permitted under Jewish law, and when Jesus answers by asking them to recite Moses’ teaching, they respond by quoting a portion of Deuteronomy 24:1-4—as Mark records it, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her” (10:4). Then Jesus replies, “He wrote this commandment for you because of your hard hearts. But from the beginning of creation he made them male and female. For this reason a man will leave his father ad mother, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate” (vv. 5-9).

The bulk of Jesus’ answer is a quotation of Genesis 1:27; 2:24. But if you look carefully at the beginning of Jesus’ answer, it looks like he’s saying that Moses made humanity male and female. Look at it again. Pharisees: “Moses permitted a man to . . . divorce her.” Jesus: “He wrote this commandment for you because of your hard hearts. But from the beginning of creation he made them male and female.”

Wait a second—Moses made them male and female? Impossible! Heresy, even! This can’t be what Jesus said, and it certainly wasn’t what he meant, so we had better change it. Fortunately, many before us already have, going all the way back to the apostolic generation itself. Matthew rephrased Mark to say that “from the beginning the Creator made them male and female” (Matt. 19:4, my emphasis). Although the oldest and most reliable ancient manuscripts of Mark we possess say that “he made them male and female,” most manuscripts say that “God” did it, the result of Christian copyists who concluded that “he” couldn’t possibly be original, so they changed the text. These later, inferior manuscripts were the basis of the King James Version, which has “God” in Mark 10:6. However, nearly all modern versions, which were translated by scholars working with better manuscripts who know that “God” isn’t original to Mark’s text, put the word there anyway to make the subject of the sentence clear.

But my question is, what if they are “making clear” the wrong subject?

Let’s stop and think about this for a second. Is there anybody who believes that Jesus believed that Moses, a human being himself, created humanity in the beginning of creation, and not God the Father? Does anybody believe that either the Pharisees Jesus was talking to or Mark or Mark’s original readers thought that Jesus believed that? In fact, if you went to a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea that had never heard a word of Scripture in their lives and read this to them, would any of them conclude from this that a human being named Moses created humanity? Of course not; it’s simply absurd. So why is it so important to insert the word “God” in Mark 10:6?

In fact, what if saying “God made them male and female” actually obscures Jesus’ point? What if Jesus was actually trying to say that from the beginning Moses made them male and female, as Mark’s text simply suggests? If Jesus was indeed saying that Moses made them male and female for some strange reason, then the attempts of the church for 2,000 years to make this “clear” has confused what Jesus wants us to hear.

If so, what might Jesus have been communicating to the Pharisees by “he made them male and female”? In short, Jesus isn’t just teaching about divorce. He’s teaching about interpreting Scripture.

“Some Pharisees came . . . to test him” with a question about interpreting and applying Scripture and the tradition of the elders. There are a few things to note about Jesus’ answer to their challenge. First, when asked if divorce is lawful, Jesus cut through tradition and pointed them to Scripture: “What did Moses command you?” not, what did this or that rabbi (or pastor/author/Bible teacher or pope/council/church father) say in his interpretative judgment? This is particularly noteworthy because there was a debate among the Pharisees at that time over what constituted legal grounds for divorce based on the interpretations of two rabbis (Hillel and Shammai). The Pharisees’ debate comes out more in Matthew’s version, where Jesus takes sides in it, but in Mark’s version Jesus ignores that question entirely as well as the rabbis themselves and focuses simply on what the Bible says.

A second thing to note—a lesson I’m trying to learn as a pastor right now—is that he didn’t just give them the answer, but he made them look for the answer themselves.

Third, Jesus challenged the Pharisees’ selective interpretation of Scripture. When Jesus asked them, “What did Moses command you?”, the Pharisees went straight to Deuteronomy 24, which was handy, because it happened to be the text that said what they wanted to hear. Jesus’ response is telling: “He wrote this commandment for you because of your hard hearts. But from the beginning of creation he made them male and female.” The Deuteronomy text is late in the Mosaic corpus. But at the beginning of that corpus, in the account of creation, Moses put man and woman on papyrus (he “made them”) “male and female . . . and the two will become one flesh.” The Pharisees were taking the Deuteronomy text in isolation, out of its setting in the overall Mosaic corpus and the narrative of Scripture as a whole. That’s not a legitimate interpretation, Jesus maintains. You can’t understand what Moses, inspired by God, writes in Deuteronomy apart from what he writes in Genesis. The same Moses who allowed divorce in Deuteronomy portrays husband in wife in Genesis as inseparable. If you make a serious effort to understand Moses, Jesus asserts, you can’t avoid the conclusion that divorce exists in Deuteronomy 24 because the Fall exists in Genesis 3 after the good creation of humanity in Genesis 1-2. And if God’s reign is indeed near, as Jesus relentlessly proclaimed, then preparing for that kingdom means adapting one’s habits in relationship with others to the pure new creation, not complacently accepting the habits of the fallen old one of which divorce, unfaithfulness, and sin-hardened hearts are corrupt features.

What Jesus says in this passage, along with the rest of Scripture, should assuredly form our mindset toward divorce. But it should also form our mindset toward Scripture itself. We, like the Pharisees, can be so accustomed to the teaching we’ve received—even if it’s as recent a vintage as last year’s bestseller—that we can’t keep straight what the biblical text says versus what an interpreter says. We need to be redirected to Scripture supremely.

We also need to be directed to Scripture in total, not just the passages that we’re most comfortable with. We have to take the entire text seriously, neglecting nothing. And though it is almost inevitable (and sometimes desirable) that certain parts of the Bible become keys by which we understand the rest, we must be critical of what we take to be those keys. The Pharisees unthinkingly took Deuteronomy 24:1-4 as one of their keys; Jesus asserted that Genesis 1-2 was the actual key by which Deuteronomy 24 should be understood. We too can pick the wrong interpretive key and not know it and thereby distort our understanding of the whole thing.

Ironically, Jesus’ teaching about Scripture in this particular text is obscured by centuries of Christians doing the very things Jesus rebukes. Rather than looking squarely at what Mark says, we’ve been distracted by what copyists, interpreters, and translators say he said. To be fair, one of those distractions has been Matthew, and as a biblical author it’s crucial that we not neglect what he said either. But we’ve taken Matthew’s version of the story as the interpretive key to Mark such that it has swamped the latter text and substituted a false unison for the harmony of their distinct and complementary voices. Our penchant for using Matthew as a shorthand for Mark prevents us from looking at all of Scripture.

We would be wise to ask God humbly in prayer to correct us when we think we can phrase or organize the Bible better than he can. I hope we keep getting better at receiving what he gave us.

How a College Football Game Changed My Understanding of Church

2011-12-08T14:42:00.001-05:00

Last Saturday I took my 10-year-old son Jack to Heinz Field in Pittsburgh to watch our favorite college football team, the Syracuse Orange, play the Pittsburgh Panthers, and I discovered some things I wasn’t looking for.

I had been looking forward to this game for months, and even the few weeks before when I bought the tickets I was still hopeful that the game would “mean something” with respect to the conference championship. So I spent the extra money for tickets in the block of seats that Pitt sold to Syracuse for resale. If this was going to be a huge game, I wanted to be able to give full-throated support to the team in a crowd of like-minded fans.

As it turned out, the game couldn’t have meant less for the conference championship, though it was still important for two 5-6 teams trying to end the season at .500 and mediocre bowl eligibility. But my decision to get seats in the Syracuse section was a great one. Jack and I got to yell and cheer and go crazy immediately in front of about four rows of SU students doing the same thing. We bellowed at the field with them when the defense forced Pitt into a 3rd down. We joined in their spontaneous cheers of “Let’s go, O-range!” We learned Syracuse’s first-down cheer. After one touchdown I even heard the words to the fight song for the first time as the students broke into it in lieu of the marching band. If I can help it, I’ll never go to a game again without sitting as close to students as possible.

The game had some great moments, but it ended in heartbreak—a fumble returned for a touchdown by the opposition on what could have been the game-winning drive with about three minutes to go, virtually sealing the Orange’s losing season. It was the next to last of a series of head-in-hands groaners that included ten penalties and six turnovers amid other less easily quantified errors. Immediately upon the backbreaker, a throng of fans in my section leapt for the exits as if their seats were suddenly electrified just as I’ve seen in the Carrier Dome on TV too many times. Jack and I waited until the bitter end before leaving our seats, forgetting to linger until the team came over to sing the alma mater with the student spectators.

The game ended stunningly early at 3:00—Syracuse had a drive in the 4th quarter that consumed an absurd amount of clock—so we decided to try to find where players might come out of the stadium and hang around until they did. We walked around the outside of the stadium to the opposite end where we found two sizable clumps of people—about two thirds Syracuse and one third Pitt—on either side of a gate in a high, chain-link privacy fence, the way kept clear for the coach buses we glimpsed on the other side by yellow-jacketed security people. This nondescript entryway under a highway on-ramp and next to a four-lane road was one of the least pedestrian-friendly spaces I’ve ever stood at, I think, but we were pretty sure we found the right place.

After a while we watched a trickle of players emerge from the gate one-by-one. It was easy to tell the teams apart, the Pitt players dressed in a uniform warmup suit and the Syracuse players dressed in coats and ties. That’s when the surprises started for me. First, I could recognize almost none of the players, despite knowing all their names and being able to give a moderately accurate account of their performance over the season. I had assumed therefore that I “knew” them, but I didn’t: I couldn’t even pick most of them out of a crowd. Second, I was surprised by how small the Orange were. Granted, no offensive linemen emerged from the gate, but I was probably one of the three tallest people in the crowd, only one of the three being a football player. And few of the players looked like their muscle-bound physiques were bursting out of their suits. This observation is a testimony to the talent level of the team at the present time; it would be different if I was waiting for players from LSU. But the third surprise is probably true of nearly all college football teams: these players are young. They look like the 20-year-olds that they are—men, but barely. We’re spending so much money and putting so much pressure on boys, I thought. What are we doing? And how much money are people making off these ordinary-looking young men, I wonder.

Each player that came through the gate quickly found his parents, often accompanied by the player’s siblings, girlfriend, friends of the family. They hugged and kissed each other. They shook hands with teammates’ parents. An occasional picture was posed and taken. Some (in my honest opinion, not enough) looked dejected and barely making it after giving away their fifth consecutive loss, squandering a 5-2 start and finishing last in the conference. But for the most part smiles abounded.

One player seemed to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders—his successes and failures on the field were many and conspicuous, but only the latter would be remembered. He was the first player to come out of the gate that I recognized, and when I bent down to point him out to Jack my son identified him before I did. Unexpectedly, the player proceeded from the gate right towards us: his father was standing next to me. “Are you okay?” the dad quietly asked.

The pair hugged. “Yeah,” the son murmured unconvincingly. They started walking away to get a few moments of privacy when I suddenly had an idea.

“Excuse me, Mr. ________, you have a fan here,” I heard myself blurt out. I thrust Jack in front of me.

The player and his father turned around. “Oh . . . yeah,” he said, looking down at Jack, not knowing what to say. He stuck out his hand and shook Jack’s, who stood frozen, awed at the presence of greatness.

“I’m a fan, too,” I said as the player looked up. We shook hands. As his young, miserable, hangdog eyes locked with mine, I said what I could: “Hang in there. Have a good rest of your year.”

He politely thanked me and turned. His dad was about to follow but stopped. Smiling, he looked down at my son. Keep working hard, he said. Hit the weights. I thanked him in place of Jack, who was still dumbstruck. Then they disappeared behind the crowd.

We hung around a bit longer pointing out the players that we knew until the team was recalled within the fence for departure. We waved with the gathered families at the tinted windows of the three coach buses driven by men in orange hats as they pulled out of the stadium. Then we walked, chattering, across the Heinz Field parking lot to the wide walkway along the Allegheny River, the tall buildings of downtown Pittsburgh standing majestically in the late-afternoon sun.

I was moved by what we had experienced standing in the midst of these young men embraced by their fathers, especially by the player we met and his father. I thought about the games my father took me to that I’ll always remember. I thought about how my son would always remember this day, the first time we had ever done something this special as just the two of us, an island of fun and joy amid the churning waves of homework, discipline, shuttling, chores, exasperation, and fatigue.

“I love you, Jack,” I said out of the silence.

“I love you too,” he answered.

As we continued on I reflected on what I had witnessed that day among the fans. This was a road game, so nearly every Syracuse fan there was highly committed. But I observed two different kinds of commitment.

One kind of fan that I saw I would call a member of the fellowship, most obviously represented by the students behind me in the stands and the parents outside the stadium gate. The members of the fellowship are a social and emotional part of the program itself even though they don’t suit up and take the field. There are usually personal relationships that bind them to those that do. They come to the game to support the team—that is, they are there for the team, not the other way around.

The other kind of fan that I saw was the entitled spectator. Entitled spectators are highly invested in the team also, but in a different way. They spend a considerable amount of their time and money on the football program as a major source of their entertainment in place of other entertainment options. They are loyal enough not to yield the program as their first entertainment option easily, but they are also paying customers who expect bang for their buck, and bang includes winning. They are not there for the team; the team is there for them.

It was easiest to tell the difference between members of the fellowship and entitled spectators when things went wrong. Everybody suffered. But you might hear loud sarcasm, anger, and cynicism from entitled spectators that you wouldn’t hear from members of the fellowship. An entitled spectator might boo but a member of the fellowship never would, because that would be like booing oneself. When the game was clearly unwinnable, many entitled spectators hurried away like they were late for their firstborn’s birth while members of the fellowship silently remained with the players.

That’s when it clicked: I see the same thing in my church.

My church has members of the fellowship. They come to church for the church’s sake. That’s what motivates them to give and serve and hang in there when times are bad. When things go wrong they are grieved with their fellow members, not against them. When worship is over they hang around chatting and smiling, because they like being with their fellow members and don’t want to say goodbye too quickly. They are one.

My church also has entitled spectators. They come to church to receive a religious experience. They also give and may serve, but they do so to ensure a place that provides them what they like on Sunday morning. When they have gotten what they have paid their religion dollar for (which includes paying their time) they leave immediately, the cost of hanging around no longer worth the benefit.

My church also has casual spectators. These are like many of the paying customers at Syracuse’s home football games, people who enjoy coming for the entertainment value when it suits but don’t have a lot of loyalty to or interest in the organization itself.

I am confident that every church, including yours, has the same groups of “fans” that mine has. But there is a crucial aspect of a church that makes it very different from a college football program. In a church you can have people who are “members of the fellowship” and “entitled spectators” at the same time.

Some of the people at my church (and perhaps yours) are entitled spectators when it comes to the church as a whole, worshiping loyally and giving devotedly but doing so for themselves. But the same people are members of the fellowship with respect to a smaller group in the church: a program, a Bible study or Sunday School class, a ministry, a circle of friends that spends time together on their own time. In addition, there are people who are members of the fellowship of the larger church who function toward subunits as entitled spectators (or casual spectators, or nothing).

So here are come big questions for churches.

How does a person go from being nothing to being a casual spectator to being an entitled spectator to being a member of the fellowship?

Is it desirable for a person to skip over the step of “entitled spectator,” and if so, is it possible?

What is the numerical balance between these four groups in a healthy, growing church?

Is it a problem for a church when there is a fellowship subgroup inside it with members that are committed to that fellowship as members but are committed to the whole body as entitled spectators?

If it is a problem, what do you do about it?

If the desires of members of the fellowship of the whole church conflict with the desires of entitled spectators of that church—especially when those spectators are members of the fellowship of their own subgroup—how is the church to resolve that conflict?

Is it a problem when an entire church is a collection of fellowships that all function as entitled spectators toward the whole?

I can’t answer these questions yet. But I do know that both with churches and college football programs movement from one group to another is sometimes possible. At the game last Saturday I crossed the line from entitled spectator (though not the grouchy kind) to member of the fellowship. It started the preceding week when I wrote to the head coach and he actually replied. It continued sitting in front of the students. And it concluded standing with the parents. Unlike most members of the Syracuse football fellowship, no other member really knows my name, but I know that I am a member nevertheless. I went to the game last Saturday because I wanted to have a good time watching it and in hopes that it would “mean something.” In two years when the teams play in Pittsburgh I’ll go again because I have to be there. If my team is there, it automatically means something, and I’m going for them.

When you gather with your church or a portion of your church this week, consider: what kind of fan are you?

A Rant about Worship Music and Choosing a Church

2011-12-03T12:00:00.000-05:00

Here are some thoughts on worship music and being part of a church. I’m going to start by giving you my worship music résumé—not so I can boast, but because I think you need to know some of my background to understand where I’m going with this.

I began playing the piano to accompany worship in youth settings in 9th grade. By the end of high school I was frequently leading worship from the piano. The music I was leading was almost exclusively contemporary worship songs, which I genuinely enjoyed. Meanwhile, however, my favorite worship music was classic hymns, particularly Reformation and post-Reformation German chorales and 18th-century English hymnody (such as settings of the lyrics of Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley).

Although I was going to major in college in music composition, I quickly changed my major to biblical literature, but I still minored in church music. I continued to have occasional worship-leading opportunities in traditional, contemporary, and blended situations. As a freshman I was tapped by the director of the college’s Chorale to write the program notes for our traditional worship-oriented concert tour. As a junior I planned, oversaw, and led a Maundy Thursday service of songs (of various styles), prayers, and Scriptural readings. As a senior I led the student body in hymn singing in chapel not quite once a week and sang and played in the contemporary worship band in chapel about as often.

I also played in the jazz band, which was valuable preparation for joining the choir and worship team (on keys) of the multiracial church that I joined in seminary. All worship songs in that church, including hymns and white contemporary music, were recast in the urban gospel idiom that I had to pick up in addition to learning a new corpus of songs. I succeeded, but I never played like a native; you could always hear typically white motifs in my hybrid style of playing, sort of like speaking another language with an accent.

In both the churches I have served as pastor I have introduced contemporary songs and style into a traditional worship setting. In some cases, particularly in my first church, I did it by playing and teaching the music myself.

This variegated experience has given me a range of skills. I can play the piano by reading sheet music, by improvising off the harmonization of a hymn in a hymnal, by reading a lead sheet or chord chart of a contemporary song, or by listening to a song and generating an accompaniment off the top of my head. I can sing a song I’ve never heard before—written-out soprano, alto, tenor, or bass—by sight, and I can also improvise a harmony by hearing the melody. I can write out a chord chart, sometimes with different options for the chord progression, by hearing a song, and I could even arrange one by writing it all out (for keys at least), though it’s tedious and I don’t care for doing it. I’ve even written a few worship songs myself. I can play or sing in a band and lead a congregation in singing while doing so. In sum, there are many church musicians in the world that are more talented and more skilled in their craft than I am, but there are fewer who have as broad a skill set as I have.

I go on so long about my worship music qualifications to demonstrate that I have more reason to be a worship music snob and critic than almost anyone I have ever met and almost anyone you have ever met.

And I make that assertion to set up another: when I hear about a person who chooses to attend (or cease to attend) a church because of the worship music, I get one step closer to going ballistic, and I don’t think I have many more steps left.

There are a few reasons for this.

One is, to my knowledge—and please show it to me if I’m not seeing it—there is not a shred of biblical support for selecting who you are going to gather to worship God with based on whether you like the music they sing. I can’t think of a single verse that even hints that that might be a godly idea. Again, if you know of one, please let me know. (I admit, this sounds harsh—I promise to nuance it slightly by the end of this post. But I basically mean what I say here.) Actually, closely related to this is my belief that it’s hard to find much biblical support for making an individual choice about what Christians you’re going to gather with for any reason. But that’s probably getting off onto a different topic.

Another reason I might go crazy is that if anybody has a beef with the level of excellence of worship music in a church that I’m a part of, it probably bothers me more. And if God put me there, I’m not leaving because of it, so you shouldn’t either.

While I’m on the subject, the week-to-week quality of music in the multiracial church from my seminary years was, at least for the first couple years, the highest quality of music in any church I’ve spent a significant amount of time in. Some of the musicians in that church were good. I was just trying to keep up a lot of the time, but the minister of music was good, as in recording-on-keyboard-for-major-gospel-artists’-albums good. But I’ve got to tell you, there were a lot of times that I got really frustrated with music in that church.

Even though I loved the new songs and idiom I was picking up, I missed the music I knew from previous places in my life. I really missed it. I remember a few days before Easter one year I was making small-talk with the minister of music (my best friend in the church). I said, “So, getting ready for Easter, huh? Your basic ‘Christ the Lord Is Risen Today’?” His eyes got wide and he took a step back, and we both knew that I had just uncovered an awkward racial misunderstanding/faux pas for us both, as it had never crossed his mind to do that hymn, much less that whites in the congregation might be taking it for granted that we would sing it, and as I was making a cultural assumption that could suggest an entitlement attitude to blacks in the congregation. So on Easter the music minister perfunctorily led us from the Hammond B3 organ in “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” as I played along on keyboard, sort of embarrassed and still unsatisfied by the whole thing.

And yet, I learned just to accept things like that. I was convinced that God wanted me in that church, that therefore I would worship him no matter what the music was. I also decided that the worship music that I loved that would never be done in my church I would sing to him when I was alone. That was simply all there was to it.

Related to worshiping no matter what the music is, I have another story from a completely different setting. I was at an ecumenical worship service at the cathedral near where I minister now, and it naturally was liturgically “high”—a blend of Roman Catholic and Mainline/Magisterial Protestant liturgy, which to the untrained, low-church Evangelical all seems the same, though I’m quite sure that the Catholics and Lutherans and Presbyterians and Episcopalians there were all keenly aware of what in the service differed from their own traditional worship. Anyway, the speaker was the main ecumenical guy for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops who used to be a parish priest in Alaska in an overwhelmingly Protestant (especially Evangelical) community. As he was recounting what he learned about ecumenism in that setting he made a comment I’ll never forget: “I learned that to Evangelicals, ‘worship’ means ‘music.’ ”

I don’t think he meant it as an insult, but I find his assessment not only completely true but completely damning. Of course “worship” means “music” to us! How many times have I heard (well, in one sense, probably not enough), “The worship was really great today,” and of course the person is referring to the time we spent singing. But where in the Bible do we see worship reduced to singing? Of course music is regularly portrayed as a component of worship in the Bible, but never in isolation. In the Old Testament the biggest component of worship is sacrifice (which to the Catholic mind is still the case, preserved in the Eucharist), but we also see prayers and the reading and teaching of Scripture, and in the New Testament we also see prophecy and healings as components of worship (and the Lord’s Supper too), and over it all we have that great commandment to offer our very bodies as living sacrifices that by living our lives we might worship God (Rom. 12:1). But to a huge proportion of Evangelical Christians, if they don’t connect emotionally with the music that day, they conclude that “worship” was no good. How pathetic.

What are you bringing to worship? In the Old Testament no one came to worship God empty-handed. It was a contradiction in terms. In the small-group worship settings of New Testament churches “each one has a song, has a lesson, has a revelation, has a tongue, has an interpretation” (1 Cor. 14:26). So what are you bringing to your worship event? Are you bringing yourself? Your mind? Your emotions? Your money? Your children? Your service in the nursery or handing out bulletins? What do you contribute to worship when you gather with the saints? Are you giving it your best effort? Are you prepared? Or are you expecting someone not merely to conduct you but to drag you mindlessly into something blissful like a TV show did the night before? If the worship leader invites you to pray the words of a biblical psalm, are you going to grunt it thoughtlessly (if at all) or are you going to pray it with your whole voice and your whole heart like David did when he was trying to avoid getting his head chopped off?

Before I conclude let me swing back to the comment about biblical support for choosing a church based on how much you like its music (i.e., that there isn’t any). One essential quality of a church is that the “whole counsel of God” is taught there. Of course, no church pulls this off completely, but you should at least expect an effort. One thing that really bothers me about worship music that’s stuck in one particular idiom as it is in the great majority of churches of all types is that it tends to get stuck in a narrow doctrinal and/or devotional rut too.

Each era/culture/idiom of music expresses particular things to God and about God well. From the Reformation German chorales I learned the nature of God and his world. From the 18th-century British hymns I learned the immensity of both sin and redemption. 19th-century American hymns by Lowell Mason, Fanny Crosby, and others taught me to love and devote myself to Jesus. Turn-of-the-century “gospel songs” by Ira Sankey and the like taught me that Jesus makes life better and it’s okay to be happy about it. I really disliked the Gaithers’ songs when I was a kid, but now that I’m older they speak to me, saying that through all the ups and downs of life Jesus is supremely to be desired. The white worship songs of the past thirty years taught me to express all my emotions to God directly and one-on-one. The black songs taught me that I don’t need a reason to praise God other than that he’s God, even when I have nothing else.

If I didn’t have any one of these styles in me, my worship of God would be poorer and thinner as a result. And that’s why I just don’t understand and will never understand the vast majority of Christians who hold their narrow worship-music preference more tightly than an article of faith, and I don’t understand churches that do it either. I don’t know how a church can truly teach the whole counsel of God and meanwhile worship him with a set of songs that all say basically the same thing.

Meanwhile, if you come to my church and then leave because you didn’t like the music, I will try hard and probably successfully to smile and be pleasant about it and wait to pop my cork at home when you’re not around. And if my church becomes the kind of church that people flock to because the music is so good . . . man, I don’t know what I’m going to do. But I won’t be happy about it. Because if I was starting a church from scratch in this day and age, and if somehow all the verses about making music to the Lord disappeared from the Bible, we might not sing a darned thing.

Two Responses to God's Interruption

2011-11-30T16:42:00.001-05:00

At Christmas we celebrate the birth of Jesus, our Savior, but in the Gospel of Luke we read about two important and miraculous births: John (the Baptizer) to Zechariah and Elizabeth and Jesus to Mary and Joseph. Both of these supernatural conceptions are announced by Gabriel the angel. The reactions of those Gabriel tells sound the same at first, but they’re actually significantly different.

Gabriel tells Zechariah that his wife, who has never conceived a child and is past childbearing age, will conceive a child (John) who will be filled with the Holy Spirit in the womb and grow up to act like the prophet Elijah returned. Zechariah’s response is, “How will I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years” (Luke 1:18).

Gabriel tells Mary that even though she is a virgin, she will conceive the successor to King David (Jesus) who will be called the Son of God. Mary’s response is, “How will this be, since I am not intimate with a man?” (v. 34).

In both cases, it looks like the person Gabriel tells is shocked and can’t quite believe that this is going to happen. But Gabriel condemns Zechariah to be mute until John is born “because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their proper time” (v. 20), yet Gabriel gives no rebuke to Mary at all. What gives?

I think we see the answer if we look more carefully at what Zechariah and Mary say. Zechariah says, “How will I know this?” Zechariah received a message from an angel in the temple. You would think that that is how he would “know this.” But Zechariah still doesn’t know it, because he doesn’t yet believe the message or the messenger.

By contrast, Mary says, “How will this be?” Mary assumes that this conception will, in fact, happen. She just wants to know how, which gives Gabriel a chance to cite the power of the Holy Spirit (v. 35). Mary believes from the outset.

Zechariah and Mary respond differently to major change wrought by God. Even though the change is for the better, it requires substantial adjustment of life and mindset and has costs that come with it. Even though Zechariah has been praying for years for a son (v. 13), at first he is unwilling to adjust to the reality that now he is getting one. He is skeptical and set in his way (a way that he doesn’t prefer, but he is still set in it) and not ready for God’s disruptive blessing. On the other hand, Mary’s response to God’s interruption has been lauded and echoed in the church for centuries since: “Look, the Lord’s slave. May it be done to me according to your word” (v. 38).

Jesus’ first coming was an interruption. His second coming will be too. And in his grace God interrupts our lives even now, sometimes with things that look like trouble at first. Mary is our model for how to respond to God when he brings disruptive change into our lives: with total, obedient submission to him.

Fame

2011-11-22T11:00:00.001-05:00

Before I reach the end of this paragraph, I'm going to make a rather vulnerable personal confession. I have mixed feelings about this kind of thing, especially in a venue like the internet that can be read (theoretically) by every soul on the face of the Earth. Such public confessions can be helpful, inspiring, and thought-provoking to others (for classic examples see the psalms of David and the Confessions of Augustine). More often they are grotesque and embarrassing (and either repellent or addictively fascinating as a result). In fact, stay tuned for an upcoming blog post that addresses this very subject. But here and now, for the purpose of edification (we’ll see how it goes), I am going to make my vulnerable personal confession: for most of my life I have really, really wanted to be famous.

Now I expect you have some notion of how vulnerable I have made myself by admitting this. If not yet, hopefully by the end of this post you will. I expect you’re beginning to see how blazingly egotistical I have been and/or currently am, and like Charlie Sheen’s winning! I am putting it out there (though not quite as shamelessly) for your righteous judgment. Nevertheless, I’m not that worried about being judged for admitting that I’ve really, really wanted to be famous, because I think that most people reading this want to be famous too, or at least you know what wanting that is like. I actually believe this is a very common thing, which I’ll demonstrate in a bit. But I’ll talk about it along the way of describing my personal journey with respect to fame (yep, more awkward confession ahead).

It started a long while ago—I don’t know when, but it had to have been in childhood. Like you I absorbed stories in books (including the Bible) and TV and movies. Every story has a hero. The hero’s journey differs from story to story (though always falling into a few relentlessly predictable, cross-cultural categories; for more info see here), but the hero is always present. Like you I loved the stories. In particular I loved the story of the weak, inexperienced, or disregarded man or boy who takes a perilous journey and masters superhuman skill (physical, spiritual, or intellectual—the latter my favorite) to lead the tight-knit forces of good against impossible odds to defeat the forces of evil. I loved this favorite story of mine so much that, like you, I intended to live it. (Perhaps you didn’t know that you intended to live your favorite story, but if you think about what you daydreamed about and played pretend about and thereby practiced when you were a child, you’ll see what I mean.) In many ways I was strong and well-regarded as a boy, but in a few ways that were crucial to me I was weak and disregarded. I intended to correct that by living my beloved story, without knowing of course that that’s what I was intending.

I want to pause for a moment to point out that there was nothing inherently bad in what I was doing. Not only is it entirely natural—indeed, I think God made us this way—but also every story that deep and resonant in humankind accurately depicts the person and work of Christ from one perspective. Therefore, to live such a story faithfully, relying on Christ to live it in and through oneself, is to become like Christ, which is the goal of our salvation. But that’s a topic for another time.

Anyway, the thing about stories is that the hero is the center of attention. In fact, in most stories (i.e., written in the third-person limited or in the first person), the hero absolutely dominates the reader’s or viewer’s attention. And so when one goes about living one’s favorite story, one dominates one’s own attention and expects to be the center of attention of every other character in the story too—all the other people in one’s life. That’s what I did, again without knowing it.

Now, the hero in a story isn’t trying to be famous. The hero simply is famous because, unknown to the hero, readers are reading about him or her and viewers are watching him or her. The hero is just living the hero’s life, doing the hero’s job. Very often within the story the hero will become famous as a fitting conclusion to the narrative (the final, wordless scene in Star Wars, Episode IV comes to mind), but even in such endings fame was never the hero’s goal or intention. But to the reader or viewer who is trying to mimic that story, becoming famous as a result of living out the story is naturally expected and even becomes the objective. In addition, the imitator is only conscious of one person who is narrating his story: himself. So he automatically assumes the center of attention.

I broke gender-neutral character in those last sentences because that’s what I personally did. It became more pronounced—and awkward—during adolescence. I dreamt of being Aragorn at Helm’s Deep, of being Churchill during the Blitz, and in my social and spiritual world I tried to live accordingly with all the success and then adulation those heroes earned. Unfortunately, being a hero when the rest of the world doesn’t know they are characters in your story can lead to embarrassing and goofy results. Nevertheless, it also occasionally produced wonderful results, moments when really good things got done, people were really helped, and I took a step closer toward living the purpose for which God had created me that resonated with those stories.

But meanwhile, whatever benefits to the world may have resulted from me being the center of my story, there was the constant corruption of the brute fact of wanting to be the center, wanting people to look at me and tell me how wonderful I was. As a devoted lover of Jesus through adolescence and into young adulthood, I knew that this was sinful and battled it. But I often missed or neglected it, usually (because I was on my way to becoming a pastor by then) in the name of what I would accomplish for the kingdom of God, which I usually was careful to phrase “what God would accomplish through me for the kingdom of God.” Because again, I knew that that was right. The Spirit within me rejoiced at Galatians 2:20 and 1 Corinthians 15:10, but my flesh craved my own glory. Within me was the desire to be glorious by reflecting the Lord’s glory like the moon and also the desire to radiate my own glory like a rival sun, and I was very conscious of both desires, especially during my seminary years.

It was not long after that, while I was at my first church as pastor, that I read David McCullough’s biography of John Adams. I found a kindred soul in that important man, but no place more than in his repeated admonition to himself and others through his entire life about how terrible a vice ambition was—a vice that he hated in himself but that drove him to perform incredible acts of service to the United States that millions have inherited the benefits of. I knew that I had a lust for glory, a lust to be Number One, but I also knew that this wickedness was woven tightly together with a desire that God himself had built into me to be exactly the hero that he had created and saved me to be for his glory and honor and for the benefit of the world.

Through all those adolescent and young-adult years I experienced fame occasionally because I was good at things and I got to do them in public, particularly things of a musical or religious nature. But there were a couple of experiences with fame in my first pastorate that started to reshape my understanding of it. The first was just being a pastor itself. My first call was very humble and very challenging: a crumbling (physically and institutionally) urban church of a few dozen mostly elderly people in an immigrant neighborhood, a church whose last good days were in the Kennedy administration and whose best days were in Taft’s. The church was still enduring a traumatic situation with the previous pastor when I came and much was in disarray. It was the kind of task that only a crazy, desperate, or God-compelled person would do, and I happened to be all three. In fact, it was the perfect situation for someone who wanted to live out the story that had enchanted me my whole life, and I threw myself into it wholeheartedly. Modest as the ministry was (the eyes of the flesh would likely call it pathetic), it was still the first time that I had a captive audience of people to look at and listen to me every week, and even within a small orbit, being the center of attention is what fame is. But I found that what came along with fame and the heroic story was a whole lot of really hard work with seemingly little payoff and occasionally downright suffering and despair. In the stories I was used to, the very difficult, painful, and demoralizing times always had a bit of romance and nobility around them, but that’s not how they were in real life. In real life they totally sucked; there’s really no better way to put it. The tedious parts in the stories (like all the walking in any journey tale) are elided by the author into a page or two so as not to lose the reader’s attention. But in real life you endure every second of them in all their boring, unabridged dreariness. And this is intrinsic to fame; I’m sure it’s true of almost everyone who has earned fame and maintained it for any appreciable length of time: the stuff beyond the camera’s eye that no one else sees, regardless of how their story differs from mine.

As it happened, after all that hard work and tedium I concluded my ministry in that church with my personal story unconcluded. I left the church far more stable and better off than I had found it, which was well worth celebrating and giving thanks for, but it hadn’t turned around. The hero didn’t win; the miracle didn’t happen. So I went to my next church, which though still small was considerably larger than the first and where I was correspondingly more famous both within the church and in the community. And sure enough, the work was much harder and the suffering much, much more severe.

But I’m getting ahead of my story. The second thing that I discovered about fame while I was at my first church actually had nothing to do with being the pastor of a church. It had to do with being a contestant on Jeopardy! Really. Now it happens that when you’re a contestant on Jeopardy! (I’m just warning you for when it happens to you) you sign a legal waiver about as thick as a phone book that may yield Sony Pictures Studios and/or the estate of Merv Griffin the rights to your firstborn child. But one thing it definitely says is that you can’t tell anybody (except, the non-lawyer contestant coordinators tell you, your spouse and your boss, maybe your parents) that you’re on the show or what happens while you’re on it under penalty of death (or something). So it wasn’t until two days before the air date that I told everyone I knew all over the world that I was going to be on the show if they happened to want to tune in. That night we had a party at the church parsonage with guests from at least three different social circles of my wife’s and mine to watch the show. And I won (with “What is Indiana?”). Celebration reigned. The phone calls started pouring in, then the e-mails the next day. People I had lost touch with were finding me and congratulating me. I was featured on my college’s website and in their alumni publication, also (strangely) the Marion (Ind.) Chronicle-Tribune. (Note: I’m not from Indiana. That’s where my alma mater is.) I was stopped by strangers at stores. I spoke to my son’s kindergarten class. It was amazing. This was, like, real fame—people nationwide seeing me, strangers knowing my name. And most powerfully of all, finally, really, indisputably being the center of attention of basically everyone I knew or perhaps had ever known. It was awesome.

Then, the next night, I lost (by missing “What is ‘queue’?”). It was funny: I knew I was going to lose, but I found myself weirdly hoping that what would happen on TV would differ from what happened in a studio in Culver City two months before. The run ended 24 and a half hours after it began. I got a few calls and a few e-mails, and then that was it. Everyone (Alex Trebek included) went back to their own lives, being the central characters in their own stories, and I was back to being much lonelier in mine. And in that moment I understood for the first time why certain celebrities do utterly embarrassing, self-disgracing things to keep themselves on TV and celebrity mags: the attention of other people is the most addicting drug on the planet. I had a one-day dose of it (well, portions of it lingered through the week), and I already felt a sharp jolt in the withdrawal. Frankly, I don’t know how actual celebrities who have grown accustomed to it over years and then lose it handle the experience. (I guess like Sunset Boulevard.)

A little later, while I was at my next church, I had some other experiences that continued the shift in my attitude toward fame. A big part was my deepening relationship with my friend Ted, whose writing career had begun to blossom, and I was eagerly living that with him and cheering him on. Over the years I got to see Ted dealing with the accoutrements of fame that I wouldn’t have known or expected: not only being famous but then not being famous, but also being famous but not being as famous as that guy, being famous but getting flamed on message boards, being famous but struggling to land the next project and provide for one’s family, being famous but wrestling with sucking up to someone more famous to keep working. It was also through Ted that I found myself in the living room of someone else who was just starting to be famous, then later became fairly famous (in one Christian sphere). That person seemed not terribly unlike me, and as months and years passed I found myself wanting a seat at the same table of fame he had been invited to but realizing that I wasn’t going to get one. It was the identical experience of looking enviously at the cool kids’ exclusive lunch table in junior high. That renewed experience sickened me, and it sickened me that I was sickened by it.

Ted was also the person who pointed out to me that it has only been fairly recently that a pastor would even consider that he might become famous. For a long time (though not in all times and places) being a pastor was like being a plumber: you could expect a lifetime of doing a humble job with a modest degree of being known and respected in a local community, and that was it. In the Megachurch/Conference Circuit/Book Deal/Blogosphere Era, however, stocked as it is with celebrity pastors, every pastor thinks at some time or another, “If I just get ________ to happen in this church, people will know my name too” (see earlier post). We may or may not indulge that thought, but we can’t help thinking it.

But then I realized that pastors aren’t the only ones thinking this. We have even more recently entered the Facebook/Twitter/YouTube Era, in which everyone thinks this. Everyone has the opportunity to “Broadcast Yourself” courtesy of YouTube, and everyone has a shot of their cute video going viral and landing oneself on The Today Show. Everyone (in theory) gets to have “followers” eagerly following them on Twitter to gain intimate access to their lives. And everyone can make themselves the center of attention on Facebook, whose very structure is designed to enable a person to construct their public persona (“Here’s what I like . . . here’s what I do . . . here’s what I’m thinking . . . ”) around which the rest of one’s world can revolve. Everyone, no matter how small the circle, can make oneself the center. Everyone can be famous—or at least try to.

Please don’t think that the irony that I am analyzing this and exposing my soul on my own blog named after myself is lost on me. I can say, though, that I’ve (at least half the time) gotten beyond writing here for the sake of who or how many might read. My journey with fame, particularly the aforementioned hard work and suffering associated with it, has brought me to a point that I never thought I’d come to. It’s a point where I’d rather not be famous, a point where I like the notion of proceeding through a whole life of not being known and not having to pay the costs associated with being known. That sentiment is not total; I feel the old, vain urge reemerge from time to time. But my general attitude, I think, is over that. That might be godliness. It might be simple, natural maturity. But it might also be fear.

Because here’s the thing: the Bible says not to seek fame (that’s how I take the prohibitions against “selfish ambition”), but it doesn’t say not to have it. Lots of godly people in the Bible had it, and they had it not because they strove for it but because it came as a result of doing exactly what God wanted them to do. (Moses and David spring to mind.) I think that God has had me on a journey to come eventually to prefer being unknown to being famous, but that’s not the final stop. The next stop is to prefer God being famous such that it really doesn’t matter whether I am famous or not. Note that this is not quite the same thing as what precedes. No doubt it is preferable to desire to be low than to desire to be high, because this is what Jesus did. But this calculation is still about self—it’s about where I am. Much better to say, “God, if me being a nobody will work to accrue to your fame in this world, then I will do that. But if me being a somebody will do it, then I will do that instead. I really don’t care one way or the other as long as you get more fame in this world.” That is really what Jesus did.

In the end, my long-held and now only barely surrendered desire to be famous has, at its root, doubt. When I want to be famous in this world, I quite simply doubt the reality of the kingdom of God—I doubt that it is here; I doubt that it is coming; I doubt that it is precious like the treasure hidden in the field or the expensive pearl; I doubt that it contains rewards that far surpass those of this age; I doubt that it is eternal. And when I seek God’s kingdom, I don’t reject my fame so much as I embrace his. I have faith, without which I cannot please God, because I believe that he rewards those who earnestly seek him (Heb. 11:6). I realign myself in the solar system of glory: no longer desiring to be kindled into white-hot flame but happy to bask in his blazing radiance, reflecting it brightly to all who see me, revolving around him forever as the center.

The Mentality of Spiritual Wealth

2011-11-15T15:31:00.001-05:00

So let me tell you what's been blowing my mind for the past few days.

On Monday I attended a workshop based on (but just scratching the surface of) a book entitled Bridges Out of Poverty: Strategies for Professionals and Communities, which is based on the work of educator Ruby K. Payne. The basic premise of the book is that the differences between the upper class (inherited wealth), middle class, and lower class (generational poverty) are at least as much mental as financial.

An interruption here to clarify that last sentence. First, the book asserts that these three classes are not neat, airtight categories. All people fall along a continuum from extremely poor to extremely rich without clear lines separating when one group ends and another begins. Second, this is looking at patterns of wealth over generations. So a person isn't considered to be in the upper class based on how much money the person has but based on how many generations the person's family has had that much money. So also with the other classes. Consequently, depending on the fluidity of the society there may be many people who don't fit neatly into any one class because their family's position has moved up and down over time. Third, in this schema the middle class is a broad category, encompassing everyone from financially stressed but thrifty, steadily employed folks to self-made millionaires. What binds together such disparate people is their common approach to the world.

That brings us back to where I left off. Bridges Out of Poverty investigates the differences between "old money," the middle class, and the generationally poor that go far beyond how much money they have. The classes think differently and approach the world differently. They have different beliefs about what money is for; they view and use time, food, and humor differently; they have different reasons for wanting to be a charming, affable person; their families are structured differently; and they have different motivations that compel them toward different concepts of their destiny.

Here's an example. A typical person accustomed to poverty is focused on immediate survival, so their view of time doesn't extend much beyond getting through the present moment, and money, when acquired, is to be spent immediately toward that objective. If such a person receives a windfall—as large as signing a huge professional athletic contract or as modest as an Earned Income Tax Credit refund—that amount of money doesn’t change the person’s basic approach to money and time. Since getting through the moment is what matters, since money is to be spent, and since there is little belief that a person’s choices can change anything about their destiny, the temporarily rich person still uses the money like a poor person, using it to generate momentary satisfaction with one’s friends and thereby burning through it rapidly.

While the typical person in generational poverty has the small time horizon of a day or two, the typical middle class person has a time horizon stretching over weeks, months, years, or a lifetime. For this person, money is meant to be managed, not spent, so that it will last through some defined, intermediate future. But the typical heir of “old money” looks much farther than that. For this person, ensuring that their needs are met is a non-issue. But they recognize that their status and security is the result of generations prior and carries with it the responsibility to extend it to generations to come, so money is meant to be conserved and invested. A generationally wealthy person’s time horizon extends far beyond the span of their own life in both directions.

This got my wife and me thinking, what are the applications of these observations to spiritual wealth, as for example in 2 Corinthians 8:9: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that although he was rich, he became poor for your sakes, so that you by his poverty could become rich”? All of us started out spiritually poor, and everyone who is in Christ has become spiritually rich (see e.g. Eph. 1-3). But not everyone who has received these riches has had the change of mind to start living like a rich person.

Some people received the riches of God’s grace to be forgiven and reconciled to himself and were delighted about it. They were cleansed and guaranteed eternal life. But sometimes they doubt it once they’ve committed a sin. They wonder, am I really saved? Will God really forgive me? They fall down and plead for God’s mercy or avoid him in fear, a corner of them hoping that he will still include them in his family. All they’re looking for spiritually is assurance of salvation, because they’re not confident that the mercy they received yesterday will carry over to today. If they think about anything else, it’s about getting God’s help to get through some earthly crisis right now—sickness, divorce, etc.—or the hope that someday in heaven it won’t be like this anymore. This saved individual has all spiritual wealth in Christ but lives like a poor person, entirely focused on the present moment, questioning whether the mercy of God is available and then using his gift of salvation—perhaps also using corporate worship—as an escape from a hard life, and that’s all.

Some Christians act like the spiritual middle class. They also are delighted to be saved by grace, but they long for something more. They recognize their present lack of Christ-likeness and see in Jesus the great resources to enable them to change and become godly in their thinking and conduct. Their spiritual time horizon extends from conversion until death, and they are looking to receive and manage the resources of God’s grace to develop a career of holiness over the course of their earthly journey—or at least until old age, at which they may retire from the spiritual ordeal and live off the dividends of godliness that they spent their Christian life steadily amassing. Because these Christians look beyond the day-to-day far enough to see the gap between who they are and who God wants them to be, they invest themselves heavily in a variety of means of spiritual growth (daily Bible reading and weekly small groups come to mind). However, they do not invest themselves heavily in anything that extends Christ-likeness beyond themselves.

But some Christians begin to recognize just how much spiritual wealth they have received in Christ, and it changes their approach to their spiritual life. They act like the wealthy people that they are. They give little thought to whether God’s grace is sufficient to save them and keep them though they never cease to be thankful for it. Likewise they do not doubt that God will exercise his mighty power to conform them to the image of his Son and keep them to the end though they do apply themselves to that end. Their main focus is on extending the wealth they have received in Christ to future generations, spiritual sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters who in turn will pass on the riches of God’s grace to still others. They think far beyond their own life’s journey and into the life-journeys of others, journeys that they know will be reunited with theirs for eternity. These Christians seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and though they may be financially poor they make many spiritually rich, because though they have nothing, they know they possess everything. Their engagement in the church revolves around taking the wealth of Jesus by whatever means God makes available to those who have not received it yet.

The fact that a person may be financially poor yet behave like a spiritually rich person indicates that just as one’s earthly possessions don’t necessarily correlate to one’s heavenly ones, one’s worldly mindset may not correlate to one’s spiritual mindset either. In other words, a person could handle the riches of this life as a poor person does but handle the true riches of eternity as the wealthy do. Even so, I can’t help but wonder if a person’s bias toward handling spiritual wealth is naturally influenced by their approach to material wealth. I also wonder if each church has a collective spiritual worldview as poor, middle-class, or rich like individuals do. America is a predominantly middle-class nation, and most of its churches are composed of mostly middle-class people. Are most of these churches spiritually middle-class too? Are most of them bent on salvation and spiritual growth but missing the boat on mission? Might that explain why Christian books sell as fast today as ever yet the percentage of disciples of Jesus in our nation’s population stays the same decade after decade? What would a host of churches that think like spiritual “old money” look like? Or rather, what would our nation look like if it was filled with such churches?

Penn State and Our Longing for Perfection

2011-11-10T10:59:00.001-05:00

In a must-read blog post, Ted Kluck has perfectly delineated the moral of the Penn State tragedy that unfolded this week. Please check it out.

When Becoming Nothing Is an Improvement

2011-11-08T21:26:00.003-05:00

Yet another good article from Francis Frangipane. Its title (copied as the title of this post) says it all. God creates something out of nothing, and what he creates is good. So being nothing can be a fine thing. Enjoy.

Anniversary Redesign

2011-11-02T10:38:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was the two-year anniversary of 1st Corynthians. Even though the frequency of posting is down from those zealous and buoyant early days of the blog, the fact that it's still going with some regularity is, I've found, no small feat in the world of blogging, where bloggers start with high hopes and great ambition that comes crashing down when no one is paying you to do it. So the fact that it's still going after two years is something to celebrate, and I'm celebrating by redesigning the look of the site. I hope that you like it enough to keep reading for the next two years.

Tebow in the Lions' Den

2011-11-01T17:40:00.000-04:00

Hey, readers. Long time, no post. Sorry about that. I do have a number of ideas in the proverbial hopper that I want to get onto the blog and will soon.

Until then, I direct you to a post by Ted Kluck on certain Detroit Lions' mockery of Tim Tebow's trademark post-touchdown prayer. I don't hide the fact that I like Ted's post a great deal. But I also find the comments unusually interesting. It's fascinating seeing Evangelicals who engage in groupthink in so many matters having such contrasting opinions of Tim Tebow's public persona.

And along those lines, have you given thought to how comfortable you will be with Tim Tebow as an Evangelical gatekeeper? For a long time when the media wanted an Evangelical (or, as they usually named it, Fundamentalist) quote they would go to a few "reliable" sources—Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson come to mind, and eventually James Dobson and Ralph Reid. But in the middle of the last decade—I think the turning point was the reelection of George W. Bush—the media started digging deeper and discovering more diversity and more of the beating heart of Evangelicalism than the tiny number of talking heads had given them access to. But as time goes on the media could grow tired of putting in that much work and look for a new gatekeeper. Tim Tebow's playing days will likely be over by then and his post-football public career (Congress?) will have begun. Do you think he'll represent you well on Meet the Press? For my part, I like him as a spokesman better than Falwell. I'm not sure how much better.

The Purifying Judgment

2011-10-18T16:44:00.000-04:00

In 3:16-4:1 of his book, the prophet Isaiah proclaims a searing warning of doom on the women who live in Jerusalem. Though at the time of the prophecy those wealthy women were richly adorned, pampering themselves in their beauty and strutting with pride, their city would be devastated, and they would be widowed, befouled, degraded, and desperately impoverished in the process.

But then Isaiah's prophecy takes a jarring turn.

At that time
the crops given by the LORD will bring admiration and honor;
the produce of the land will be a source of pride and delight
to those who remain in Israel.
Those remaining in Zion, those left in Jerusalem,
will be called "holy,"
all in Jerusalem who are destined to live.
At that time the sovereign master will wash the excrement from Zion's women,
he will rinse the bloodstains from Jerusalem's midst,
as he comes to judge
and to bring devastation.
Then the LORD will create
over all of Mount Zion
and over its convocations
a cloud and smoke by day
and a bright flame of fire by night;
indeed a canopy will accompany the LORD's glorious presence.
By day it will be a shelter to provide shade from the heat,
as well as safety and protection from the heavy downpour [4:2-6].

There are certain principles that I have learned to employ when reading Old Testament prophecy from an apostolic, New Testament perspective. One of these principles is, when I see "Jerusalem," first I look at what fulfillment there might have been for the Jerusalem of the time of the prophecy. Then I look for a fulfillment for the church. I do this largely because of Paul's teaching about two Jerusalems, earthly and heavenly, in Galatians 4:21-31 (compare to the similar typology in Heb. 12:22-24) and because John's vision of the New Jerusalem also seems to be a symbolic way of describing the church (compare the wife/bride imagery in Eph. 5:22-33 with Rev. 19:6-9; 21:1-22:5—which, by the way, has significant implications for interpreting the Book of Revelation). This interpretation of the apostles is linked to Jesus' claim to fulfill all the Old Testament Scriptures in himself and to the picture of the church as the body of Christ. I mention all of this because perhaps this interpretive principle will prove helpful to you when you read the prophets as well.

But I also mention it because it elevates the power and import of Isaiah's prophecy for us. What does God say through Isaiah is his ultimate plan for the church?

The church will experience prosperity and blessing arising from harmony with the earth.
All believers will be holy—the special possession of God by association and affinity with him.
The filth and degrading results of our sins will be scoured away.
We will be overshadowed by the visible presence of the God who saved us even more broadly than what the Exodus generation experienced (a canopy as opposed to a pillar or local cloud).
We will be permanently protected from all trouble.

Could there be a more wonderful destiny for the church than this? But let's look at the third part of this, God's cleansing of the degrading filth of our sins. The NET here says that the Lord does this "as he comes to judge and to bring devastation" (v. 4). A literal rendering of the Hebrew is "by a spirit of judgment and by a spirit of burning." "Judgment and . . . burning" may describe God's attitude as he washes and rinses, or it may describe the Holy Spirit's role in this process (or perhaps these are the same thing). But either way, judgment and burning are part of God's plan for his people, part of his indescribably wonderful destiny for them. It reminds me of a similar prophecy by Malachi that in one breath describes the coming Lord as "a refiner's fire" and "a launderer's soap" (3:2).

But it also reminds me of what Jesus and the apostles say about the church's experience of cleansing judgment. Jesus says when describing the end of the age that

they will hand you over to be persecuted and will kill you. You will be hated by all nations because of my name. Then many will be led into sin, and they will betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will appear and will deceive many, and because lawlessness will increase so much, the love of many will grow cold. But the person who endures to the end will be saved. . . . For then there will be great suffering unlike anything that has happened from the beginning of the world until now, or ever will happen. And if those days had not been cut short, no one would be saved. But for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short [Matt. 24:9-13, 21-22].

Let's understand this clearly. God's plan is for there to be vicious persecution of the church and enormous suffering, in part so that people who claim to be Christians but are not truly among those chosen by God will show their true colors and betray the rest, will follow false teaching, or will launch themselves headlong into sin. That way those who remain true will demonstrate themselves really to belong to God and be saved. This painful sifting is a judgment on the church, but it is not to condemn it (how could it be?) but to purify it.

What Jesus is talking about sounds like some really big and bad thing that's going to happen in the future, at the very end. But the apostles believed that this had already begun in their lifetimes. Peter wrote to his persecuted readers,

Dear friends, do not be astonished that a trial by fire is occurring among you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice in the degree that you have shared in the sufferings of Christ, so that when his glory is revealed you may also rejoice and be glad. . . . For it is time for judgment to begin, starting with the house of God. And if it starts with us, what will be the fate of those who are disobedient to the gospel of God? And if the righteous are barely saved, what will become of the ungodly and sinners? [1 Pet. 4:12-13, 17-18].

Paul echoes this theme when talking about the Lord's Supper. He warns the Corinthians that if a person eats the body of Christ (the bread) without paying due respect to the body of Christ (the church, i.e., his/her brothers and sisters in the Lord), then that person "eats and drinks judgment against himself. That is why many of you are weak and sick, and quite a few are dead. But if we examined ourselves, we would not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned with the world" (1 Cor. 11:29-32). Once again, God is scouring away sins from Christ's bride so that she may be perfectly radiant and able to receive the immeasurable, loving blessing that he has for her.

This all sounds like a downsizing process for the church, and in one way it is. But this winnowing can and often does go hand in hand with numerical growth. Peter and Paul wrote of this purifying judgment of the church during one of the most (perhaps the most) explosive periods of growth in the church's history. And Jesus himself promised that the end of the age would not only feature persecution, apostasy, betrayal, and false doctrine, but also that "this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole inhabited earth as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come" (Matt. 24:14).

This pattern happens to the universal church throughout the ages, and it happens to local churches as well. God wants to give his people so much, but he comes with fire and judgment, with soap and hot water to make us fit to receive it. He will get what he wants—a purified church. But to a certain extent how we experience his purification lies in our hands. Granted, many great saints have suffered severely for nothing other than doing the right thing, just like Jesus did. But then there are saints like the sick and the dead in Corinth. Their physical affliction was a judgment for thinking entirely about themselves and disrespecting their brothers and sisters while partaking of such a holy thing as the Lord's Supper. Ultimately they are saved; their sickness and even premature death was God's discipline to shield them from being condemned with the world. However, God was bent on removing sin from his people on this earth even in the 1st century, and if the only way to remove the sin was to remove the sinning believer as well, then so be it.

And that's really the choice we have. When we became part of the church, we were enrolled in a cleaning machine. The excrement and blood and vomit on us, the residue of our sinfulness, will be removed from the church; there's no question about it. The only question is whether we cling to our sinfulness so tightly that the only way to get rid of it is to get rid of us. In the end, after our resurrection, we'll all rest under the glorious canopy of cloud and fire in the New Jerusalem, but how we get there is another issue.

I don't know about you, but I want to hate my sin and its results in me. I want when God comes to scour me clean to be delighted to let that stuff go. I don't want to make his job and my experience any more difficult than it already is. And the last thing that I want is for my experience in the church in this life to be one of getting yanked out of it somehow because I refused to let my sin get yanked out of me. I would much rather linger with the saints and experience the foretaste of the glory of the Jerusalem to come.

The Worship of David

2011-10-15T21:28:00.000-04:00

So my quest through 1 Chronicles continues. It's going slower because I'm engaged in another study right now and am only squeezing in about a chapter a week. But the pace of the book itself generally picked up after moving out of the opening genealogies in chapters 1-11 and into the reign of David. But then it ground into intricate and difficult territory again.

See, with a few notable exceptions, the Chronicler uses 1 Chronicles 12-21 to mirror the account of David's reign in 2 Samuel. But while 2 Samuel ends with the sin of David's census and the punishment that followed it, the Chronicler uses that episode as a hinge into a long account (chs. 22-29) of how David made preparations for the temple that Solomon would build on the very spot where David's offering stopped the plague. (Incidentally, this was also the spot where God provided Abraham with the sacrificial substitute for his son Isaac.)

The bulk of this third and final section of 1 Chronicles, specifically chapters 23-27, is back to the kind of material that we find in the genealogies—tedious and confusing (though less of the latter). There is great detail about which families were engaged in temple service, who the contemporary heads of the families were, in what order they served, and what exactly they did. But this section also portrays a different David than we see elsewhere—not the valiant warrior, the persecuted outlaw, the ardent lover (of women physically and of men emotionally), the revered monarch, or the passionate mystic. This David is the consummate organizer, one of the roles we are used to seeing his son Solomon play.

But while Solomon applied his organizational talent to the civic life of the nation, we find that David invested it in Israel's religious life. After the conquest and settlement of Canaan, some priests worked at various local "high places," but there was no organization and no central place of worship. The Levites, who had been completely centered around transporting the mobile tabernacle, lost their jobs almost entirely when the tabernacle stopped moving. In these chapters of 1 Chronicles David institutes a massive reform of the nation's religious life, assigning specific roles and responsibilities to priests and Levites, organizing their activity, and bringing the worship of Yahweh a long step closer to complete centralization.

Though this is a "different David" than the one we might be used to, we could learn a lesson by not pressing the difference too far. David was a worshiper in his bones. Both the emotion and individuality of his psalms and the nitty-gritty details of his Levitical reorganization are genuine expressions of his worshiping identity (though very different ones).

Many of us, either personally or just culturally, have emerged from an era in which worship was assumed to be a ritual produced by careful organization. Significant resources (time, money, people, skill, and thought) of the worshiping community were bent toward making an event happen on Sunday morning with mostly inflexible and meticulously prescribed steps. And if the worshiping community that gathered for that event successfully followed those steps—prelude? check; choral introit? check . . . —then everyone could go home satisfied that worship had taken place.

In the Jesus Movement of the 1970s a new concept of worship emerged that was radically different. Even if the community was gathered, worship was believed to be deeply individual. Ideal worship was spontaneous (even if over time what had once been spontaneous imperceptibly became routine). And worship wasn't about the steps the group took but the intensity of emotion one experienced in the presence of God.

These starkly contrasting understandings of worship clashed for decades (in many places even now) in what came to be called "the worship wars." All most people could see most of the time were two different styles of music and their respective corpuses of songs. But the music was just the expression of a more basic clash between two different ideas of what worship is. These two concepts of worship have appeared in many places and times throughout Christian history, not infrequently clashing as in America in the last few decades. Each keeps arising not because one is of God and the other is the devil's repeated attack on the church. They keep arising because they are both biblical. One is the worship of the David of 1 Chronicles. The other is of the David of the Psalms.

It is essential that we recognize that these two different concepts of worship came from the same David. It was the same David who worshiped God by painstakingly organizing which clan of Levites sang on which week of the year and who also composed the embarrassingly personal songs that those Levites sang. Despite how most people today are inclined to see these concepts of worship as an either-or, they are a both-and.

As I stated previously, many people today are emerging or have emerged from a culture of worship that seemed to be nothing more than a ritual checklist that a person could sleepwalk through and not know the difference (and unfortunately many still do). These people believe they have been liberated from captivity and don't want to go back, so they are suspicious and defensive toward anything that smacks of ritual, considering it to be spiritually inferior. Though their sentiment is understandable, they must remember the example of David. The world has never seen a worshiper as Spirit-filled, wholehearted, and genuine as he, but he was keenly concerned with liturgy and structure. He could even be called a traditionalist, because the purpose of his innovations was to sustain the tradition of the Exodus in the new setting of a settled nation. It is also worth noting that the most avant-garde worship leaders today are those who were baptized into "contemporary" worship style and who have begun blending it with such ancient rituals as the Christian Year, the Stations of the Cross, and prayer candles, because they sensed that the worship they had been leading was missing something.

David is the quintessential worshiper both in the passionate intimacy of his psalms and in the liturgical exactitude of his reforms. Would that each and all of us worshiped like David.

In Christ's Image Training

2011-10-03T15:17:00.000-04:00

From time to time I link to an article by Francis Frangipane, a teacher whose wisdom and insight I respect. Pastor Frangipane consistently lists four concepts that form the substance of his life, teaching, and ministry: Christlikeness, humility, prayer, and Christian unity. These are constantly exhibited in his writing.

One of Pastor Frangipane's ministry endeavors is a distance-learning program in those four fundamentals called In Christ's Image Training. There are several levels of certification and accountability including a free written materials-only version.

I want to make clear that I haven't taken this course myself and can't comment on it from personal experience. But I have yet to be disappointed or uneasy about anything I have read by Pastor Frangipane. I'm mentioning this here in case that there is some reader who is hungering for Christlikeness, humility, prayer, and unity that the Holy Spirit stimulates to take this course.

I Feel Your Pain. Period.

2011-09-30T14:35:00.000-04:00

There's a clever lyric by Stephen Sondheim in his masterwork (and my favorite musical) Into the Woods in which Little Red Riding Hood, right after her close encounter with the Wolf, recounts what she learned from the experience. She concludes, "Nice is different than good."

This op-ed piece by David Brooks, "The Limits of Empathy," makes a related point. Empathy, he says, is a valuable skill in social relationships, but it is neither a substitute for nor a motivator to actual good deeds for other people. In terms of Christian development, it is a reminder that the goal of discipleship isn't niceness but Christlikeness. It's also a reminder that there is more (though not less) to being a good church than being nice. There's also being godly.

The Age of Insecurity: A Meditation on College Football Realignment (and Stuff)

2011-09-19T17:27:00.000-04:00

I'm a Syracuse University Orange fan. You may know that as of yesterday my school is partly responsible for blowing up Division I Football Bowl Subdivision conference affiliations (and goodness knows what else). I say "partly" not only because they were joined by the University of Pittsburgh in their move from the Big East Conference to the Atlantic Coast Conference, and not only because the ACC accepted them, and not only because Texas A&M started the latest round of tremors by seeking to leave the Big 12 for the SEC, and not only because last year the Pac-10 became the Pac-12 while Nebraska made the Big 11 (I mean, 10) into the Big 12 (I still mean 10, or do I mean the B1G, however you pronounce that?), etc.

I also say "partly" because media giants, most prominently The Worldwide Sports Leader, ESPN, will not stop fidgeting until they find the most lucrative way to present college football to the consuming public, which is to say never. And I say "partly" because such media giants looking to sell more "news" to an already supersaturated public will report any speculation via unnamed sources or outright opinion to get another view, listen, or click until such speculation comes true. And I say "partly" because I'm one of the people who keeps clicking.

(Incidentally, I think conference realignment should be reclassified as a metasport, that is to say, a sport about a sport. It is its own competition with its own fan base and definition of winners and losers. It actually could gain enough of a following to make it attractive to keep going year after year [I mean, season after season]. One could even imagine a fan who cheers on his favorite school in the metasport without ever watching a game in the actual sport. The games on the field would really just be practice for the real thing of jockeying for position to be the school with the best affiliations.)

The weird relationship between the desires of the schools and the desires of the media that broadcast and promote the schools seems to me to represent perfectly the overall life of our civilization, probably in more ways than I know. Simply stated, perception is reality: confidence produces the conditions that confidence should be based on, and lack of confidence does the same. In this case, the administrations of Syracuse and Pittsburgh believed their conference to be unstable. As a result of their belief, the conference became unstable. I don't mean by this that they had no sound reason to believe that their conference was unstable, but I do mean that if they had drawn the opposite conclusion from the data at their disposal, they might have changed their environment by making it more secure rather than less. In the same way, they believed that the ACC was more stable, and now, thanks in part to their action, it is. Prophecy fulfilled, wish granted.

Our entire communal life is dominated by the same principle at work. If actors in financial markets believe the economy to be stable, their consequent actions cause it to be stable. If they believe it to be unstable, their actions destabilize it. If businesses believe that there is rising demand for their products and services, they will hire more people, which puts more money in their pockets, which creates more demand. If they believe that demand is stagnant or declining, they will make hiring decisions accordingly with similar results. If workers believe they are going to lose their jobs, they will save their money, which, because it isn't transferred to businesses by purchases, causes workers to lose their jobs.

It's not always economic either. If people in a neighborhood believe that it is safe to walk at night, then they will walk at night, see each other, and keep each other safe. Otherwise they will stay inside with the shades down, and those few who do walk will be exposed to danger. If people believe that they will be attacked imminently by terrorists, then they are terrorized. It even happens in churches. If people believe that a church is on the rise, it will grow. If they believe that a church is in decline, it will.

When FDR proclaimed that the only thing to fear is fear itself, he was on to something.

What fascinates me about the seismic shifts in college athletics is that the insecurity there exemplifies the insecurity that is reaching its way into almost every area of our lives. It has been quite some time since individuals and institutions had so little confidence in and among each other. Just as colleges feel insecure and lack trust that their conferences will be able to meet their needs, so also is businesses' lack of trust that the market will sustain increased hiring. So also is people's lack of trust that governments can govern, that banks won't trigger another catastrophe, that employers will retain one's job, that one will have the money to pay for college (for self or children) or retire or care for an aging loved one, that a severe illness can be treated and won't thrust one into poverty, that society won't devolve into moral disaster, that churches won't collapse amid an emerging generation with scant relationship to religious institutions. Pessimism has become the assumption—and the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Syracuse and Pittsburgh's move stimulated a small but significant burst of (ironic) commentaries denouncing the immorality of the colleges' decision and college sports in general in very strong terms. It got me thinking about what the biblical, Christian evaluation of conference realignment ought to be. There is definitely immorality about it, but I'm not sure that blunt accusations of greed, hypocrisy, and so forth form the place to start. I mean, without a doubt, sheer ego in certain colleges and their leaders has a lot to do with why this school does this and that school does that. And ego breeds hypocrisy real quick. But I'm not sure that greed is quite the thing to accuse college presidents of. These are, after all, nonprofit institutions. The money they get from sports isn't lining owners' pockets but funding all manner of things that the universities are trying not to gouge students for any more than they already have to. If there is greed in this it belongs with the for-profit enterprises that cover, distribute, and promote the games on the field. But I also hesitate before railing too hard against the avaracious ways of Big Media. The executives of ESPN/ABC, Fox, CBS, and the like have to satisfy shareholders or else they (and a whole lot of people working for them) lose their jobs. And the shareholders just happen to include anyone who owns a slice of a mutual fund directly or through a pension board. In other words, anyone who wants to retire someday. You know, like us.

Where I see the immorality the most is not so much in individual institutions' individual decisions—in most cases the complexity of those decisions puts them beyond my capacity (and responsibility!) to judge. But I see immorality in the overall environment in college sports (and, again, our society as a whole) in which the relational qualities that God displays and requires are fast disappearing.

"The conference" as a concept is a web of mutual relationships. (Consider other meanings of its synonym "league.") At root, at any level of competition, it is a shared agreement that greatly reduces the headache for teams of figuring out and scheduling who we're going play this year. Obviously, as it so often does, money complicates, distorts, and even perverts that web of relationships. Painfully often, the result is a breach of what Israel called hesed—faithful kindness in covenant, which God never fails to show to us, even to his own hurt. The more hesed fails to appear, the less there is to go around and the less it's even expected. A world without hesed is a world without justice, and a world without justice is a world without shalom. And shalom—peace, wholeness, perfection—is what God created the world and humanity especially to exhibit as a reflection of its Creator. In sum, whether any of us can accurately fix blame to individual actors in the world of college sports (we can't, God can), the shredding and shedding of relationships amid this tectonic shift tells us that something is profoundly wrong.

And that, ironically, is where I see moral good in college sports realignment. Because despite my assertion that perception is reality, that's not entirely true. There is always reality that persists underneath whether it is perceived or not. Despite the perception a few years ago that investment in real estate was a sure thing and that home prices would never stop going up, there was the uncomfortable reality that not everyone pays back their loans all the time. No web of relationships in this world—private or public, personal or business, between individuals or between institutions or between each—is as stable as it seems. "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." When one web unravels suddenly and shockingly, when there is the ever-present fear that all the others will unspin themselves, it is a disturbing reminder of the impermanence of this sin-infected age, a slap across our face. Meanwhile, the only reality that does persist, constantly chafing against the Babels erected against it, is that God's kingdom is forever. We only achieve the security and the stability we long for if we give up our hopes to find it in any "conference" but his.

"The God of heaven will raise up an everlasting kingdom that will not be destroyed and a kingdom that will not be left to another people. It will break in pieces and bring about the demise of all the other kingdoms. But it will stand forever" (Dan. 2:44). Hallelujah.

A Spectrum of Scripture Skeptics

2011-09-17T12:36:00.000-04:00

I had a really good theological education from high school to college to seminary. But one thing that was not so good about it was a tendency of my theologically conservative teachers to paint all theological liberals with the same brush. A notable example was that during my college days the Jesus Seminar had recently wrapped up and was still big news. For those unfamiliar with this, the Jesus Seminar was a colloquium of highly skeptical scholars who met together to assess the five Gospels (yes, five—they included the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas) and give their collective opinion of what in the Gospels genuinely happened or Jesus said, what definitely didn't, and a couple gradations in between. (Their published report can be found here.) Unfortunately, I was left with the mistaken impression that all theological liberals—and by extension all clergy (though not necessarily scholars) trained by theological liberals, and by further extension all members of churches pastored by those clergy—took the same skeptical, anti-supernatural approach to the Bible as the Jesus Seminar.

Now my impression wasn't entirely without merit. Once I went to a Mainline church that acquaintances of mine occasionally attended. The semi-retired parson started his sermon by reading Romans 3:27-30 (we're justified by faith, not works) and James 2:24-26 (we're justified by works, not faith alone) and concluding from this, which any halfway-decent seminary student could explain, that the Bible is a useless mass of contradictions. His conclusion was that the Bible doesn't matter as much as "the Bible you are writing." I know—gag. (By the way, I'll give you the halfway-decent seminarian's answer another time.)

Nevertheless, that experience doesn't reflect all Liberal Protestantism. My opinion was corrected in a remarkable class I took during seminary at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University called Religion, Politics, and Public Policy in the U.S. The student makeup of the class was very religiously diverse, and my bigotry against Liberal Protestants was thoroughly challenged (particularly by the Liberal professor). I found that it's as unfair to assume that all Liberals disbelieve that Jesus rose bodily from the dead as for Liberals to assume that all Evangelicals hate gays. It's never good to take the extreme edge of a movement as a reliable sample of the bulk of that movement.

I learned that just as there are different ways that believers under the conservative umbrella regard Scripture, there are different ways that people in the liberal camp do too. There is a broad and diverse spectrum from the Jesus Seminar on the left to those who believe that God audibly dictated the Scriptures word-for-word (in the King James Version), every sentence of which is to be interpreted literally (including, "The trees of the field will clap their hands" [Isa. 55:12]?) on the right.

I'm currently leading my church's youth group through a curriculum developed by a publishing house of a liberal Mainline Protestant denomination. So far it's great stuff (I hope to review it on the blog at the end of the school year), but sometimes I cut or reframe lessons because I don't agree. A couple of these have to do with the Bible, and I want to quote from them here as examples of a Liberal take on Scripture that is a lot more respectful than the Jesus Seminar but still raises some concerns.

A lesson that examines how the Bible is true contrasts biblical stories that enjoy significant scholarly support on extrabiblical grounds with those that don't. Then it concludes,

For the very first people who heard these Bible stories, the difference between a factual historical account and a really powerful story didn't really exist. For them a Bible story could be very true indeed whether or not anybody could prove that it actually happened. The important thing for them was the meaning behind the story, that it demonstrated the character of God, the God they knew was active in their everyday lives and throughout history. You see, their faith was never in the story at all or in the storyteller or even in the pages of a book. Their faith was in God.

The lesson raises a good point that we easily overlook about the difference between the ancient writers and readers and ourselves, because the differences are significant. The ancients tended to be less precise in their accounts than we would be. They often don't have a high regard for putting things in chronological order but rather tell, flash back, jump ahead, and retell in confusing ways if it gets a point across better than retaining the actual order of events. (Think of the last time you recounted a conversation you had with someone else for an example of this.) They never intend to report "objective" history—every story they tell is to prove a point and is intentionally shaped according to that bias, so fact and opinion (which may in fact be a true opinion) are always blended. And for all we know, some biblical authors may have intentionally employed fiction to get points across like novelists do today, but back in those days their works weren't published with "NOVEL" stamped on the back cover, so it's harder for us to tell which in the canon is which.

But to say that ancient readers didn't distinguish between fact and fiction at all or care about the difference is a big stretch. The ancient Israelites and early Christians couldn't have faith in God detached from faith in at least some (I would say nearly all) stories about him. In fact, that's exactly what sets the religion of the ancient Israelites and Christianity apart from every other religion we know of. You could totally discredit the existence of Buddha and still have Buddhism. You can't eliminate Jesus and have Christianity. Mohammed's revelation was witnessed by no one but Mohammed and was detached from any historical events. Part of God's revelation to Moses was witnessed by the entire Israelite nation, and all of it rested on the claim that Yahweh historically brought Israel out of Egypt, the land of slavery.

In fact, it was this very feature of the ancient Israelite religion and Christianity that won new adherents. Rahab of Jericho shifted her allegiance to Yahweh and the people of Yahweh not because of a powerful story that expressed truth detached from fact but because all of Jericho had heard the report of what he had actually done in Egypt and across the Jordan. Likewise, time and again the apostles insisted that "we are witnesses of these things" (e.g., Acts 3:15)—factual events that led to the inescapable conclusion that Jesus is Lord and Christ. And in these cases people did indeed believe the story because they believed the storytellers were credible. (How else would one come to believe it?) Even if one were to argue that these stories in Joshua and Acts are themselves fictional (I don't), at the very least they reveal the point of view of the ancient Israelites and early Christians that their claims about God rest on historical fact, which sounds more "modern" than many today would like to admit. (In fact, one could argue that biblical religion is where the modern obsession with fact sprang from.)

Another lesson in this curriculum examines how on occasion the Bible contradicts itself. It doesn't examine foolish, so-called contradictions like between Paul and James that I mentioned previously but rather blunt, literal, factual details that anyone who looks at them can see don't line up. For example, the lesson points out that in his resurrection account Matthew (also Mark) says that there was one angel; Luke (also John) says there were two. (If you add Mark and John in the mix you run into other problems, like whether the angels appeared inside or outside the tomb and whether they were present before or after the women showed up, plus other weird issues that I think can in fact be reconciled.)

The lesson does a good job of pointing out this fact about the Bible that conservatives prefer to avoid, and it rightly points out that God's inspired Word was written to direct people to him, not to itself, that God is God, not the Bible. However, it concludes by saying, "It doesn't matter if there was an earthquake at Jesus' tomb or whether the tomb was open before or after they got there or if there were guards or if it was an angel or two men or a tree that told Mary and Mary that Jesus was risen. What's important about the story is that Jesus had risen."

Really? Those recorded details, even conflicting details, aren't important? That's a strange claim to make in light of a previous lesson in the curriculum that did such a great job of explaining how the Bible and its authors were inspired by God. It's a strange claim given Jesus' own opinion of Scripture (in his day the Old Testament) that it couldn't be broken (John 10:35) and that neither the tiniest letter ("jot") nor serif that distinguished one letter from another ("tittle") would disappear from it until everything had been accomplished (Matt. 5:18). It does matter whether there was one angel or two—not in the sense that the resurrection of Jesus rests on it, but because no matter how many angels were actually there, God wanted Matthew and Mark to say that there was one and he wanted Luke and John to say that there were two. I can't tell you why in this particular case, because I don't know. But I believe that it's intentional, because every word of Scripture is inspired by God, and everything that God does is intentional, and everything that God does matters.

Liberals who are relatively close to the center of Christian thought about Scripture have some important things to teach Evangelicals, because they are willing to look squarely at some things that we would rather ignore. We owe it to the God who inspired Scripture to grapple with the relationship between truth and fact in his Word from the perspective of original authors and readers. And we don't love the Bible as fervently as we claim to if we refuse to get close enough to it to see and acknowledge its relatively few direct, factual self-contradictions. But examining these things gives us no excuse to conclude that occurrences that we think are unlikely are therefore fictitious or that the only thing that matters is the big picture while the details are irrelevant. God is still the God of all Scripture—even the incredible, even the details.

If Parkour Were a Central Tenet of Evangelicalism

2011-09-14T16:43:00.000-04:00

You have to read this, because it's just plain silly. Thank you, Ted Kluck. (Note: Check out the comments on his post also, including the one by Yours Truly.)

Christlikeness and the End

2011-09-07T16:18:00.001-04:00

According to the Bible, what has to happen before Jesus comes back? World War III? The rebuilding of the Jewish Temple where the Dome of the Rock now stands? Jews flocking to faith in Jesus? Global evangelization? An earthquake big enough to detach California from the continental United States? A one-world government? Worldwide mass-imprisonment and -murder of Christians?

(Answers: Some yes, others no.)

How about the Church purified into mature Christlikeness?

Huh?

Read this great article by Francis Frangipane. No view of the end times is complete without the concept he discusses there.

Back to the Future?

2011-09-05T16:16:00.000-04:00

What would you do when you saw an e-mail in your inbox with the subject, "FW: LET'S PUT CHURCH FIRST AGAIN"?

Please check out this great post by Zach Bartels at Dispatches from the Heart of the 42 Months. Zach found this e-mail forward unusually thought-provoking, and I agree with him. Fortunately though, Zach's response is even more thought-provoking. It's a great reminder to me to be a bit less critical of others than I might be, but it's even better as a meditation on the "GODS" that "the Good Old DayS" can become. Check it out.

He Became King for Us

2011-08-22T14:01:00.001-04:00

1 Chronicles 14:2 reads, "David realized that the LORD had established him as king over Israel and that he had elevated his kingdom for the sake of his people Israel."

Allow me to rephrase this verse in light of the person and work of the Son of David, Jesus the Messiah: Jesus realized that his Father had established him as king over new, true Israel—i.e., the people composed of those of all ethnicities and cultures who have received God's promise of salvation through faith in the Messiah (see Rom. 9:6-8 through ch. 11; Gal. 4:21-31)—and that he had elevated his kingdom for the sake of that people.

Have you considered that Jesus is exalted as King for our sake, not just for his own? We think frequently that he became human without ceasing to be God for our sake and that he died on the cross for our sake. We also might mention that he rose from the dead for our sake. But he also ascended into heaven for our sake, is establishing his reign for our sake, and will come again for our sake.

It is for our sake that Jesus has all supremacy and authority and you and I don't. It is for our sake that he is vastly important and that any importance we might have is derived from him. It is for our sake that he is in a position to command and that we are in a position to do nothing but obey. This is all for us.

The lavish love of Jesus and the supreme dominion of Jesus are not in conflict. They aren't even two sides of the same coin. The uncompromising authority of Jesus is how he loves us. It is out of his intense compassion for us that he took the throne.

Jesus and 1st-Century Judaism

2011-08-18T11:58:00.000-04:00

The Judaism of Jesus' day had three main components whose roots you can see in the Old Testament.

One component was the temple and the worship associated with it. Its Scriptural roots are in the Levitical laws of Moses, after the exile it is expressed in the temple/priest-and-Levite focus in Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, and in Jesus' day it was championed by the Sadducees (i.e., the high priestly family and its partisans).

The second component was the law. Its roots are in the bulk of Moses' legal corpus, after the exile it appears in the person of Ezra the scribe and in his and Nehemiah's reforms pertaining to intermarriage, the Sabbath, and so forth, and in Jesus' day it was championed by the Pharisees in local synagogues.

The third component was the coming reign of God. Its roots are in "day of Yahweh" prophecies throughout the prophets, during and after the exile it takes on an increasingly apocalyptic tone and style in Daniel and in parts of Ezekiel and Zechariah, and in Jesus' day it was championed most forcefully by insurrectionist Zealots and by the kind of community that lived at Qumran and wrote/transcribed the Dead Sea Scrolls.

These three components are not discrete categories. Most likely the mass of Jews were influenced by and held to all three of them. Even the leaders of these components held to all three for the most part despite their emphasis on one in particular.

Jesus, in his person, life, and teaching, adopts all three and transforms all three.

Jesus maintains that temple-worship is crucial, but he maintains that his body itself is the temple. Paul describes the church as Jesus' body and thus the temple of God so that anyone who is part of it can worship, as Jesus said, "in spirit and in truth." The author of Hebrews points out that Jesus' sacrificial death gave access to the true temple in heaven to those who believe in him.

Jesus insists that the law will never go away but also that he is the living fulfillment of it, the one Paul calls "the goal [telos] of the law" (Rom. 10:4), the one the author of Hebrews says establishes a new covenant. What distinguishes the new covenant and its law from the old one is not its content but its location—it applies inside a person's heart and mind, not outside on a person's body—and its permanence—Christ's sacrifice and the forgiveness that comes from it is once-and-for-all. Anyone associated with Christ is by nature a lawkeeper because that person keeps the Living Law himself who transforms his or her nature into Jesus' own by his Spirit.

Jesus relentlessly asserts that the reign of God is close, but he insists the the reign of God is an invisible reality that exists wherever there is someone who submits to it and to Jesus, its king, even now despite the powers-that-be. It's a reign that's not of this world but works invisibly through all of it like yeast through dough. The reign of God will become visible when Jesus returns in glory but will be inherited only by those who receive it now while it's hidden by receiving Jesus himself.

In sum, Jesus takes the physical temple, law, and coming reign of Judaism and converts them into a spiritual temple, law, and coming reign all located in himself but which have physical results in the behavior of those who believe in him.

In the Jewish revolt against Rome in A.D. 66-73, the physical temple was destroyed. In that war, the Kitos War of 115-117, and the Bar Kochba Revolt of 132-136, attempts to establish a physical reign by force were crushed. The only options that remained to Judaism in the second century were the physical law on the one hand and the spiritualized versions of temple, law, and reign in Christianity on the other. From that time on, almost all Jews chose the former.

It is interesting that with the founding of the state of Israel the physical reign of Judaism has at least partially been reestablished after a long hiatus (partially in that it is not a legal theocracy). It is also interesting how many Christians are eager for Israel's physical law, physical reign, and (as they hope) physical temple to reappear and coalesce given that the church has confessed for 2,000 years that we already possess the true and eternal forms of all three in Christ. (That's probably a post for another time.)

Oh Great—Not Another Blog Post about Rob Bell's "Love Wins"

2011-08-09T01:02:00.000-04:00

This is a post I didn't expect to write on a book I didn't intend to read. But sometimes, when enough people tell me or ask me about a book that I don't want to read, I feel pastorally obligated to buckle down and read it—see also The Da Vinci Code and The Shack. (For the record, Love Wins is much better than The Shack. It's also more nutritious than The Da Vinci Code but much less exciting.)

I'm not going to write a review of Love Wins. Such a review would include a list of what I thought was good about the book, which is a fair amount. In fact, a person could get saved reading Love Wins. (I know a guy who got saved reading Hal Lindsey's The Late, Great Planet Earth, and Love Wins is better than that too.) It would also include a point-by-point refutation of what I thought was wrong with it as well as a list of dangling questions I have about Bell's thought that arise from avenues he starts down but doesn't fully explore, Scripture texts he leaves unconsidered, and his own self-contradictions. But I'm not going to write that review for three reasons:

Why should I add to the bloated amount already written on the topic (and thereby, perversely, sell more copies of his book)?
Why should I contest Bell on ground Bell has chosen? (I'll contest him on my own ground at another time.)
Why should I write a review that you don't want to read?

Because if you're like me, you don't really want to know what Rob Bell says in his book. If you did, you'd read the book. What you want to know is how what Bell says differs from what you say. Unfortunately, since I don't know you, I can't answer that. But I can tell you how what Bell says differs from what I say. Contrary to what I believe, Rob Bell contends that:

There is a judgment that entails punishment for some, but it isn't permanent (or, to be precise, it may not be permanent, which is a "better story" than otherwise), and therefore all will ultimately be reconciled to God.
Repentance is necessary for salvation, but the opportunities to repent don't cease at death or judgment.
Christ alone saves but not necessarily through faith in his name.

There's more that Bell says and more that I might say, but these are the differences that are fairly straightforward (or at least as straightforward as he gets).

These assertions by Bell make some people angry, including some who are preacher-types like Rob Bell and I are. But after reading the book, I don't think that preacher-types who disagree with Bell get in a tizzy just because of Bell's content but because of a technique he employs in presenting it.

I am the kind of preacher who very often says things like this when I preach: "Now when this says [English translation of Bible verse], the original text comes across with a meaning more like [the meaning it's more like]." I do this all the time. Many other pastors do too. When we say this kind of thing, here's what we're really saying: "Unlike you, I've studied [Hebrew/Greek] for many years. I've studied this passage in that language. I think the translation of this passage that you're used to is at worst misleading and at best inadequate. So I'm going to tell you what you would see in this passage if you knew as much as I do. Now, it's almost impossible for you to independently verify that what I'm saying is true. I know this, but I'm asking you to trust me that I know what I'm talking about and that I'm not lying to you and that you'll benefit more from listening to me talk about this verse than from reading it out of the translation you have by the team of scholars that translated it."

When pastors like me say this, we actually think that people do in fact set aside the words in front of them in black and white (to a point) and trust what we're saying just because we want them to. And not only that, but we believe that when we say, "The original Hebrew says . . . ," or, "It says in the Greek . . . ," that that's like playing the ace of trump—people just immediately bow down before the unassailable authority of what we're saying. Chances are, people aren't nearly as impressed as we think they are (or as we are with what we're saying, or, at our best, as we are with God's Unvarnished Word itself). But I think that to some limited extent people do believe us and do yield to what we teach when we play the Original Language Card.

What infuriates some preacher-types, I believe, is that Rob Bell plays the Original Language Card too. He plays it often and he plays it well. Some of the time he is right on; he says things we would say. Other times he acts smarter than he is and he mangles the original text in ways that take doctrine in directions that perplex us. This causes preachers' blood pressure to rise for two reasons. (1) He stole our weapon and he's using it against us. It's like patent infringement. It's not fair. (Obviously this is a petty, stupid, childish reason to get upset, but I think it's lurking in some preacher-types.) (2) If Rob Bell plays the Original Language Card and I play it back to refute him, which of us will people believe? I'm used to playing that card to trump other people's inaccuracies if I have to, but I can't trump trump. If people really blindly follow anyone who plays the Original Language Card (as we assume they do), then Rob Bell will lead a whole lot of people in a bad direction. But if they don't follow him, then maybe they don't really follow me when I play the Original Language Card either, and that's disconcerting in its own way.

One more thing about Rob Bell and Love Wins. At one point in the book he gives a short list of giants of Christian history who supposedly agree that punishment isn't permanent and all individuals will eventually be reconciled to God, which Bell thinks is the best interpretation of Scripture. It would have been nice of him to cite his sources. But whether or not they actually agree with him, a question remains.

There is a line that separates two kinds of errors of faith and practice. On the one side are errors that a person can hold and yet adhere to the faith. For example, Paul thought that people who refused to eat meat that had been sacrificed to an idol because (as they thought) the meat had been tainted were wrong, but he didn't doubt their loyalty to the gospel so long as they didn't force that belief on the rest of the church. On the other side of the line are errors that a person can't hold and believe the message of Jesus; to maintain such an error is effectively to be part of a different religion altogether. For example, John insisted that people who denied that Jesus was the Christ, which John defined as being the preexistent Son of God come in human flesh, were alienated from the faith. In fact, he calls them "antichrists."

So there is definitely a line that divides errors that disconnect from errors that don't, but it's a fine line, and sometimes it can be quite difficult to know which side of it a given faulty assertion is on. Rob Bell asserts that even if people don't agree with him, they have to admit that he's on the Christian side of that line (though he recoils from talking about "lines"—one way he says it is, "[T]he historic, orthodox Christian faith [is] a deep, wide, diverse stream that's been flowing for thousands of years, carrying a staggering variety of voices, perspectives, and experiences," including his own [pp. x-xi]).

This is the only lingering question I have from reading his book that's really important. Whether or not Bell is right in what he asserts, does he have the right to assert it and still be considered Christian? If he's wrong, how wrong is he?

It may take generations of wrangling over Bell's assertions themselves (which, as he openly admits, aren't original to him) to come to a conclusion—matters this weighty aren't decided at the speed of tweets. (Yes, I'm calling out @JohnPiper, though no doubt he is part of the Church's struggle to an answer.) But it's a serious and urgent question that everyone who disagrees with Rob Bell should be thinking about. As the years go on, more and more people will enter our churches who take Bell's position. We need to start figuring out if we can have the same Church in common, if all of us can legitimately share the name "Christian."

How Narrow is "the Narrow Road"?

2011-08-02T15:59:00.001-04:00

Here is a challenging, humbling, and stirring word from the incomparable K. P. Yohannan of Gospel for Asia.

What We Read the Bible For

2011-07-27T11:40:00.004-04:00

If you've been a Christian for any length of time, you know (I sincerely hope) that you're supposed to read the Bible. But you might not have realistic expectations as to what you're supposed to get out of it when you read it. I think that there are three things that we read the Bible to get:

Information. We read to learn stuff about God and his work in history (by which I mean the past, the present, and the future).
Insight. We read for the "Aha!" moments, the times that we recognize a new truth about ourselves or about how to live life wisely and well in God's sight.
Intimacy. We read to spend time with the Triune God, engaging in the deeply personal conversation with the human race initiated by the Father concerning the Son inscripturated through the Holy Spirit.

Now the fact is, you're not going to experience all three of these every time you read the Bible. That's totally okay. For one thing, not every passage of Scripture lends itself to each of these three things equally, and for another, God gives us what we need when we need it, which will vary from day to day.

But it's also worth noting that different approaches to reading the Bible tend to produce different results. The biggest factor is how much we read or try to focus on at a time. To oversimplify it for the sake of a rule of thumb, reading big chunks (like in a read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year plan) most readily yields information, reading medium-sized chunks (say, half a chapter in the epistles) produces insight, and repetitious meditation on very small portions (like a verse or two) is the most fertile for intimacy.

Of course, as I said, this oversimplifies matters greatly—the correlation is not neatly one-to-one as my rule suggests, and of course we can receive information and insight at the same time, for example. We're also capable of reading a large section, narrowing to a smaller subsection within it, and narrowing still further to a tiny portion during a single time of reading. But I mention this because keeping it in mind as you read the Bible may help you to get the balanced diet of information, insight, and intimacy that you need.

Crazy

2011-07-25T11:40:00.000-04:00

Mark has a curious way of telling two stories at once that we tend to separate: Jesus' response to the teachers who accused him of throwing out demons by the power of Satan, and Jesus' mother and brothers trying to get face-time with him. We separate them because Matthew puts them back to back but doesn't tell them as a single story, and also Luke does the same and obscures the connection further by putting the actual arrival of Jesus' family elsewhere in his book. But as Mark tells the story, Jesus' family comes to take Jesus away forcibly, believing him insane; then Jesus responds to the scribes' accusation that he is possessed by Beelzebul; then the family arrives and Jesus asserts that his real mother and siblings are those who do what God wants. (This suggests another reason that we probably separate the two stories: Mark's version portrays Jesus' family in an uncomfortably bad light.)

A few things stick out to me here.

The world is so unused to seeing evil defeated that they think that there must be evil behind it when it happens. And they are so unused to seeing people do what God wants that even seriously religious people think that people who do must be crazy. This shows how screwed up is the world we're living in and how badly we go against the grain when we even get started really displaying the reign of God.

And yet, Jesus never stopped going against the grain. I don't know how I would persevere if people accused me of being pure evil or if my close family believed that I need to be involuntarily committed to a psychiatric unit. But Jesus did. He never stopped going against the grain because he was remaking the grain. That's what the reign of God is all about.

Of those who opposed, misunderstood, and even slandered him that day, some remained in it stubbornly but others turned around. The scribes, or at least most of them, stayed stuck in their opposition to Jesus. But his mother and brothers became part of the backbone of the church. Never count out those who think you're crazy because of your obsession for God's reign, especially those who, like Mary, have once heard the good news and humbly received it.

The Seen and the Unseen

2011-07-12T16:13:00.000-04:00

By faith [Abraham] lived as a foreigner in the promised land as though it were a foreign country, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, who were fellow heirs of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with firm foundations, whose architect and builder is God [Heb. 11:9-10].

For our momentary, light suffering is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison because we are not looking at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen. For what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal [2 Cor. 4:17].

And the world is passing away with all its desires, but the person who does the will of God remains forever [1 John 2:17].

Ever seen a science fiction or fantasy movie in which a character knows that what appears to be his or her world isn't real, that it is actually a short-lived construct from which one will emerge into reality at any moment? What would it be like to live believing that?

It would be living like Abraham . . . like Paul . . . like John . . . like Jesus. It would be the ordinary Christian life.

How Modern Bible Translations Are Too Readable

2011-07-08T08:00:00.002-04:00

Imagine that you are one of the enlightened souls who adores J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings as one of the most awe-inspiring creative literary works in the English language (in case you don't already). Now imagine that you read The Lord of the Rings in a new "translation" that renders all of Tolkien's intentionally archaic-sounding prose and poetry into the idiom of contemporary, suburban, middle-class Americans. Can you imagine how much it would suck? I mean, really, it would be amazingly bad. Tolkien's masterpiece depicts fictitious foreign cultures, and the terms he uses and even the grammar itself evokes a world that is totally different from our own. His genius is that when you read any of his works it truly feels like you're reading a long-lost manuscript from a strange place and time.

The truth is that the cultures in which the Bible were written are also strange places and times, very different from our own. But contemporary translations make them sound remarkably like us. Of course, in their humanness, the characters are indeed remarkably like us. But the cultures they operate in aren't like ours, and in modern translations the foreignness and weirdness of the biblical landscape are not adequately preserved.

This is my problem with gender neutrality in Bible translations (replacing "he" with "they" or "he or she" or "that person" or something like that). Now hear me loud and clear: in many, many cases, I'm in favor of gender neutrality. For example, in most (though not all) cases the Greek word ánthrōpos should be translated "human" or "person" instead of "man," as it has traditionally been rendered. In fact, in most cases I would bluntly call "man" an inaccurate translation. And I think that if it's possible to avoid using "he" or "him" in non-gender-specific contexts without snarling the grammar, we should definitely do it. But some translations make biblical characters and authors sound more enlightened and non-sexist than the average American walking down the street in 2011, which of course is laughable because they absolutely weren't. And sometimes it does screw up the overtones of the text. The new Common English Bible translates 2 Tim. 3:16-17, "Every Scripture is inspired by God and is useful . . . so that the person who belongs to God can be equipped to do everything that is good." "Person who belongs to God" replaces the traditional "man of God" here. The new translation is employed for two reasons: (1) the Greek word "person"/"man" is the aforementioned ánthrōpos, and (2) we want women to know that this Scripture pertains to them too. But there are two problems. (1) The Greek phrase employed here is the same as that employed in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) for the phrase "man of God," which throughout the OT is a technical term referring to a (male) prophet. Paul is intentionally calling Timothy a "man of God" with all the accumulated meaning of the OT phrase, an association that is lost in the gender-neutral translation. (2) Notwithstanding our desire for contemporary women to know that this verse applies to them, the fact is that its context is a personal letter to one male, Timothy, and we should translate it according to that context, not contemporary relevance.

More literalistic Bible translations get a lot of situations like this right. But even those translations sound much too much at home in the 21st century. And here's where I start wishing for things that are impractical, undesirable, and crazy, but I still think would be totally cool.

How much thought have you given to the names of people and places in the Bible? They generally fall into two categories: the names you can pronounce because we've adopted them into modern English (e.g., Jerusalem, Peter) and the ones you can't that frustrate you. My stance is that all of them should frustrate you (see also, Tolkien). See, our transliterations (a transliteration is using English letters to spell out words from other languages) of biblical names are terrible, generally because they've usually gone through another language or two before they wind up in English. So you see the letter j in all kinds of Old Testament names like "Elijah" even though Hebrew has no sound like the English "j"; it should be y instead. It would be so cool if all of our transliterations were redone to better match the languages they came from.

When you read about David, for example, you might as well be reading about your next-door neighbor, because "David" is, frankly, an English name. But "Dawíd" isn't, and the king of Israel (I mean, Yisra'él) who had that name wasn't your next-door neighbor but a crazy guy who played the harp and took wives and slaughtered Philistines (I mean, P'lishtím) in hand-to-hand combat at the drop of a hat. But when you read about a guy named "David" in 1 & 2 Samuel (i.e, Sh'mu'él) it doesn't sound exotic—dare I say, like "fantasy"?—enough. This is important, because when you get too comfortable with the biblical text you thoughtlessly import all sorts of modern Western assumptions into it that you would be automatically more cautious about if you were immediately hit by the foreignness of the setting.

To take this one step further, in the New Testament we shouldn't settle for transliterating Greek transliterations from other languages into English. If the authors of the NT transliterate a Hebrew name into Greek, and then we transliterate that into English, we're two steps removed from the original word and we fail to notice how odd that Hebrew name would have sounded to the original, Greek-speaking audience. By contrast, check out this translation of mine of Luke 2:1-4:

Now it happened in those days that a decree went out from Caésar Aúgustus [pronounced KAI-sar OW-goo-stoos] that a census be taken of all the inhabited earth. This was the first census taken while Quirínius as the governor of Syría. And everyone was proceeding to register for the census, each to his own city. And Yoséf also went up from Galilaía, from the city of Nazarét, to Ioudaía, to the city of Dawíd, which is called Bet-Léhem, because he was of the house and family of Dawíd.

I'm not claiming the translation is perfect, but I'm trying to show the multicultural dynamic present in so much of the New Testament. We have here names from three languages—Latin (Caésar Aúgustus, Quirínius), Greek (Syría, Galilaía, Ioudaía), and Hebrew (Yoséf, Nazarét, Bet-Léhem, Dawíd)—that depict three cultures jostling in the same space, which is exactly what was going on at that place and time, and which is essential background knowledge for reading the New Testament. The divergent sounds of the three languages themselves help to bring that across.

But it's not just names that should make reading the Bible harder. Much of the Bible is poetry, and it should be harder to read too. In all languages, poetry tends to use stranger words than prose, and it tends to bend sentence syntax in weird ways to accomodate the poetic form or just to be artistic. One example of this in Hebrew poetry is to have two successive lines that say the same thing in different words but to leave the verb out of the second line. In English it sounds weird, so even literalistic translations put the implied verb back in the second line to make it sound right. I say we leave the verb out, even if it does sound strange. Hebrew poetry ought to sound strange. It is strange. It probably sounded strange to the Israelites (I mean, the Yisra'elím) themselves. Similarly, one of the idiosyncracies of Greek poetry and poetic-sounding prose was to have massively long, run-on sentences that went on forever but might not even be actually complete (subject-predicate) sentences. We very understandably break those up into short, complete sentences so that they're comprehensible (e.g., in Eph. 1:3-14), but wouldn't it be fun to leave them as crazy, long-winded monstrosities set in poetic verse? Again, to the original readers/hearers passages like this sounded kind of "out there" too, and additionally this way of setting it reminds us that we're dealing with a foreign culture when we read the Bible.

We should also employ more loanwords from the original languages in translation. A loanword is a word or phrase from another language that gets used because one's own language doesn't have the right term to describe what one wants to describe. Through the centuries, English has been especially good at picking up loanwords (in fact, you could argue that the entire language is a hodgepodge of loanwords). French has been the source of a lot of our loanwords: esprit de corps, fiancé, croissant, coup de grace, tour de force, hors d'oeuvres, etc. They're not really English words, but now they're a part of our language. Why don't we use loanwords more often when translating the Bible rather than use an inferior English rendering for a hard-to-translate Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek word? A great example of a potential loanword is the Hebrew hésed. In the KJV it's translated "mercy," in the NASB "lovingkindness," and in the NIV "love." It means faithful kindness, covenantal love. It is the virtue or action of showing compassion and mercy and kindness and helpfulness to the person that you have sworn loyalty and faithfulness to in a solemn covenant. It's a concept that arises out of cultural norms that are as different from ours as the Hebrew language is different than ours. So why not just write out hésed in translation, like, "Give thanks to the LORD, because he is good; his hésed is forever" (Ps. 136:1)? Put a glossary in the back of the Bible to explain what hésed is and be done with it. Readers will learn the word and then begin to get the fullness of the meaning of it as they encounter it in the Bible over and over again. For that matter, we should transliterate loanwords from other languages in the text as loanwords in English too. For example, in Old Testament passages that have the Persian loanword tirshatha, we should use that and then explain it in a note instead of using the English gloss "governor." More cross-cultural fun.

Finally, and I know this is a biggie and impossible, we should print the name of God in the Old Testament as "Yahweh" instead of our awkward, capitalized "the LORD." I know why we don't do this—this is a far, far too intimate, careless, and even blasphemous way to handle the name of God from the perspective of Jews, and it would be a major obstacle for us in talking with Jews about our respective religions. So it's probably a bad idea. But a guy can dream. It sure would be nice to read a Bible that, when it speaks of "the name of the LORD," actually gives his name. It would sound a lot more like the Old Testament too. Along similar lines, "Jesus Christ" should be "Yéshua Khrístos" (see grouping of names from different cultures above) unless "Christ" is being used as a title, in which case we translate it forthrighly as "the Anointed One"; thus "Christ Jesus" is "the Anointed Yéshua." This is also a controversial translation policy, but unlike with "Yahweh," we can't claim that it's impossible because of interfaith dialogue or evangelism.

So translation teams and publishers, when you've released a product that is as unreadable as this while also being as readable as what I suggested in my previous post, call me. Until then, I'll stick with the translations I have.

How Modern Bible Translations Aren't Readable Enough

2011-07-06T08:00:00.000-04:00

In the best film ever made, The Princess Bride (go ahead and quote me on that), Vizzini (Wallace Shawn) notes two of the classic blunders: "The most famous is, 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia,' but only slightly less well known is this: 'Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.' " To these must surely be added, "Never conclude that there's no room in the marketplace for another English translation of the Bible."

Occasionally I'm asked questions like, "What's the best Bible translation?" or "Is ________ a good Bible translation?" My answer is usually something like, "That depends. What do you want it for?" which doesn't help anybody since no one thinks about that before they ask. My opinion is that just about every translation of the Bible is good enough in the abstract, though depending on what you might use it for—in-depth study, teaching 2nd-grade Sunday School, recitation in a worship service, quotation on a blog, etc.—some are better than others. I admit that I do have my favorites, but I still maintain that there is validity to every significant translation that you have probably read or heard of. (That includes the King James Version, by the way, or at least the New King James. Even though I don't see value in reading a translation into Shakespearean English unless you're a 17th-century Englishman, nevertheless in particular passages I think that those old translators often made some very insightful judgments.)

Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart, in their classic book How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth (3rd ed., 2003—if you haven't read it before, get it now), employ a spectrum diagram to explain Bible translations. At the one pole is "literal," which is an attempt to render the ancient languages word for word, even maintaining sentence structure if possible. Taken to the extreme (which none do) this kind of translation is incomprehensible since the grammar of those languages is so different from contemporary American English. The opposite pole is "paraphrase," which really is not so much a translation as it is someone's complete rewrite of the Bible based on their interpretation and impressions of another translation (usually). The middle area of the diagram is labeled "dynamic equivalence." This is an attempt to translate the text not "word for word" but "thought for thought" so that the ideas in the text as they would be received by ancient readers are preserved in modern language for modern readers. Fee and Stuart located all major English Bible versions (at the time) along this spectrum so that the reader can see where they fall in translation philosophy and in relation to each other. (Apparently Fee and Mark L. Strauss wrote a book published in 2007 entitled How to Choose a Translation for All Its Worth that I'm sure goes into this in more detail and is probably really good.)

The objective of every translator is to get the material into the target language so that the modern reader receives it—both understands it intellectually and feels it emotionally—exactly and as fully as an ancient reader would. Sometimes this is easier than others. Sometimes it's impossible. And different translation teams have different philosophies about how to do this. But every modern translation I've seen—I mean it: every one, whether the philosophy is more toward the literal or more toward the readable—has the same two problems: (1) it's not readable enough; (2) it's too readable.

Here's what I mean when I say that these translations aren't readable enough. First of all, I really support the efforts of some of them to employ English as it's commonly spoken and even written today, which features, among other things, a whole lot of contractions. Our language also features phrases like "a whole lot of" which are excellent translations of some phrases and terms in the original text but haven't shown up in English translations in the past because they sound too colloquial. I like the fact that things like this are finding their ways into Bible translations now, especially because much of the biblical text includes ancient colloquialisms (especially in dialogue). But no matter how painstakingly readable and contemporary these new translations try to be, they are still so under the sway of the King James (ironically) and centuries of church usage that some portions of the Bible and its language refuse to be liberated. Let's take a couple of New Testament passages as examples.

Exhibit A: John 3:16. Here's how it's rendered in the New Living Translation (1997), one of the more paraphrastic ("readable") translations in the dynamic equivalence school: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life." It sounds almost exactly the same as every other version's translation of this text. But we have two problems in the first three words (I won't even get into "perish"). First, who in present-day America uses the word "for" as a conjunction? No one. But here it sits in this conscientiously "readable" translation. The Greek word gar underlying "for" either means "because" or introduces some kind of explanation of what precedes (like, "See, . . . "), and it should only be translated in one of these two ways or (as context demands) omitted entirely in modern translations. Now, perhaps you didn't know that there was text that preceded John 3:16, but there is. As the NLT says it, "And as Moses lifted up the bronze snake on a pole in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him will have eternal life, because [gar] God so loved the world. . . ." That's how it should go, anyway.

But the second problem in the first three words of John 3:16 is the word "so." Every American English reader of John 3:16 believes that "so" means "so much," because if we ever used "so" in this part of a sentence (note: we wouldn't) that's what we would mean. Every student of Greek (not to mention scholar) knows that the word translated "so" here (hoútōs) doesn't mean "so much"; it means "like this" or "in this way" (in this context). They all know that John 3:16 should read, " . . . because this is how God loved the world. So he gave his only Son. . . ." But despite that they all know this is the best way to render it in English, you can't buy a "readable" translation that puts it like this.

Exhibit B: The Lord's Prayer (Matt. 6:9-13). Every translation starts with, "Our Father in heaven" and then some attempt at a contemporary rendering of "hallowed be thy name." I admit that this is a really tricky one, because the text assumes a concept of holiness that is foreign to most contemporary people (which I've blogged about more than once, for example here). It's probably impossible to get it exactly right. But the one thing that every translation can get right if they want to is how to handle the Greek "third-person imperative" in "hallowed be thy name" and "thy kingdom come." An imperative is a verb that says what someone demands to happen. In English we have only have the imperative in the second person, that is, when we're directly talking to someone else: "You over there—open that window." "Open" in that sentence is an imperative; "you" indicates that it's the second person. In addition to the second person, Greek also has a third-person imperative. In all kinds of English translations it is consistently rendered "let," like, "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly" (Col. 3:16). In some versions of the Lord's Prayer it shows up as "may," like, "May your name be kept holy" for "hallowed be thy name." But "let" sounds like I'm allowing you to do something, and "may" sounds like you may do it if you want. Not strong enough. Fortunately, English has a word with more force: "must," like, "your name must be sacred" for "hallowed be thy name." Why doesn't "must," or at least "should," show up in the translation of every third-person imperative in the New Testament?

While we're on the Lord's Prayer, let's talk about the kingdom of God. Readers of this blog know that I love talking about the kingdom of God. You may remember that the kingdom of God isn't a place (like heaven for example) but the "kingship" of God, his acknowledged authority to rule as king. It is more accurate to call it "the reign of God." I know this because every biblical scholar knows it, and I was taught it repeatedly in college and seminary. It's the very first thing they all tell you in a class when they bring up the kingdom of God. And yet these same scholars who all know this and teach it to all their students continue to this day to employ the term "kingdom of God" instead of "reign of God" in every contemporary, readable Bible translation.

So these are just some examples of why contemporary translations that intend to be readable still aren't readable enough. In the next post I'll tell you what I mean when I say that contemporary translations, including more "literal" ones, are too readable.

The National Day of Prayer and the Kingdom of God

2011-07-04T07:00:00.002-04:00

[Note: This letter refers to a National Day of Prayer event held in one county. It is not intended to insinuate anything about the parent, sponsoring organization known as The National Day of Prayer or NDOP events held in any other localities.]

Dear S,

I was honored to be asked to participate in the National Day of Prayer service [on May 5], and I appreciate your patience with me as it took me a few years to make good on your invitation.

However, at present I can't say that I'm interested in discussing how to increase the attendance at the event, because I am personally conflicted about the event. On the one hand, the unity of the Church is of great importance to me, and to gather with other believers to pray is a substantial step toward the unity that Jesus prayed for in John 17 that glorifies God and testifies to the world about the truth of the gospel. But on the other hand, there were some assumptions in prayers, comments, and songs at the last event that I do not share and in some cases strongly oppose.

(I should interrupt myself here and affirm a few things. First, I am convinced that your desire to please the Lord is pure and that your service is a fragrant sacrifice to him. I have nothing but warm gratitude and admiration for you. And I have faith in the integrity and desire to please the Lord of everyone involved with the event. And if at all possible through the flat medium of e-mail, please hear that I'm baring my heart here, and this has more to do with what that heart beats for and bleeds for than anything else. I'm writing because I think you deserve to know what I'm really thinking, and you don't deserve for me just to dance around things and blow you off.)

Perhaps I can explain where I'm coming from best by stating what I strongly stand for, much of which I put into words in our prayer circle at the end of the event. I am convinced that all believers' truest, most basic, most important citizenship is in the kingdom of God, the heavenly kingdom that has broken into this world in Jesus Christ and that will transform this world fully and finally when he appears again. (Relevant Scriptural references include Phil. 3:20-21; Dan. 7, esp. vv. 13-18; but there are many more examples.) This kingdom includes members of all nations, and when it comes fully it will replace and eliminate all earthly kingdoms, including the United States of America. Until that day comes, we live as aliens and strangers in this world that is not our real home. We American believers actually (should) have more in common with citizens of God's kingdom of other earthly nationalities than we do with our own countrymen who don't believe.

Nevertheless, for as long as we live in these bodies we are also citizens of these earthly kingdoms, in our case the United States. Like the Jews who were exiled to Babylon and were aliens and strangers there, we are urged to "seek the welfare [peace, shālōm] of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to Yahweh on its behalf; for in its welfare you will have welfare" (Jer. 29:7). So asking God to bless America, working hard for its good, and sacrificing for its safety are entirely appropriate things to do. But even those things must stand in light of the ultimate promise that God "will restore your fortunes and will gather you from all the nations and from all the places where I have driven you . . . and I will bring you back to the place from where I sent you into exile" (v. 14)—the kingdom of the Son he loves.

The bulk of my problem with the thrust of the National Day of Prayer service was my sense that the assembled group desired to save something that won't be saved (and presumably shouldn't be saved)—namely, the United States as we know it—on account of confusing it with the kingdom of God, which is eternal. The confusion between America and the kingdom was most evident in some of the songs, one that compared the flag flying "forever" with Jesus' sacrificial death for sins, another that promised that "America will bow, and the eagle will soar." The passion of the event seemed to be toward recovering or propping up the health, strength, and permanence of America, because obviously (so the reasoning goes) America is God's people and that's what God wants. The passion was not for the triumph of the kingdom of God that will take the place of America (and all other governments) when Christ returns.

At least some of what drives the zeal for America to be restored seems to be (for some, at least) the story that once upon a time all Americans were Christians, and America itself was Christian (whatever that means), and we've lost that, and that's why we have problems, and we're asking God to get it back. I think that's what people mean by "revival." Probably due to a combination of my generation, my understanding of history, and the fact that I haven't lived most of my life in a culturally Christian place like this county, I'm not really interested in revival. I want "vival"! I mean that I'm not looking for our community and nation to go back to the good thing that it once was. I want us to become the followers of Jesus that we've never been! The Church needs revival. The world needs to be saved for the first time. And that's what I care about. I really don't care much about saving America. I care a great deal about saving Americans. And whatever is truly good about America will live on in them for eternity even when America is no more.

So if I'm going to gather with others to pray for America, what I want to pray for like our lives depend on it is that spiritually dead Americans will be born to new life for their own sake and for the sake of the kingdom of God. I want to pray that Satan will be vanquished across the full sweep of the Bible's moral vision, which is far broader than just abortion and other social hot-buttons, important though those are. And I want to pray that the Church globally, not merely in America, would live up to the full measure of the stature of Christ. And if I quote 2 Chronicles 7:14 ("If my people, who are called by my name . . . ") then I'll mean it in New Covenant terms, by which I mean that if all believers in Jesus Christ around the world (God's new people) pray, then God will heal the entire earth by sending his Spirit to renew it and his Son to re-create it.

S, I'm not writing this to preach at you or haul off at you. I just believe—passionately, as you can see—that despite the good intentions at work in the National Day of Prayer event, it seems to prioritize this age and this nation at the expense of the age to come and the holy nation that God made from all those who believe, which is where our heart belongs.

I truly hope that this explanation actually builds you up and doesn't tear you down, even if it makes it more difficult or impractical for us to work together. Thank you for reading, and be blessed. If you'd like to dialogue more, please call.

Grace and peace be yours.
Cory

Another Surprise in 1 Chronicles: The Devastating Exile

2011-07-02T08:00:00.000-04:00

People who think that some parts of the Bible are a waste of time are wrong. I know this in part because I'm continuing to pore through one of the biggest, time-wastingest parts of the Bible, the genealogies in 1 Chronicles (see earlier post), and I'm learning stuff that isn't purely trivial. I've recently made my painstaking way through the genealogies of the tribe of Judah (2:1-4:23). I'm not going to lie to you: this took some serious time. And I admit that the ratio of time spent to divine insight received is probably higher in these two and a half chapters than in any other part of the Bible I can think of. But insight came nevertheless.

The insight is that the genealogies of Judah are a strange, quiet, unexpected exhibit of how devastating the exile was, how small the surviving and returning remnant was, and how arduous the reestablishment of Jewish society in its homeland was.

The genealogies of Judah are wildly uneven. Great detail is given to some parts of the family tree while other parts are gapingly neglected. For example, nearly the entire set is dominated by the descendants of Judah's son Perez. His twin brother Zerah gets three verses (2:6-8). All of the descendants of Perez in the set come from his son Hezron; none of the descendants of Hezron's brother Hamul are listed. This kind of thing happens repeatedly through the generations delineated here. Then there are weird decisions about which lineages get more attention. On the one hand, it's hardly surprising that the ancestry and immediate family of David get a good bit of space, as well as the sons of his wives and the line of kings extending even to their postexilic descendants (which, sad to say, lines up with neither Matthew 1 nor Luke 3, though Matthew is a smidge closer). But why in the world do we get 13 generations of the descendants of Sheshan, not one of whom we know anything about (except that Sheshan may be the same guy three verses earlier who comes five generations after Hezron's son Jerahmeel)? And there are other weirdnesses too, like people who appear with alternate names like Chelubai in 2:9, who for the rest of the section is called Caleb (not that Caleb) except in 4:1 where he's called Carmi. Similarly, the last group of genealogies appears to be a miscellaneous category where bits and pieces of family lines go that generally aren't connected to anyone else. The famous "prayer of Jabez" (whoever that is) is found here as also are fragmented descendants of Shelah, Judah's third son, that include the cryptic note in 4:22 that "the words are old." Trust me, I could go on.

It seems that the Chronicler (perhaps Ezra), writing during the resettlement after the exile, is trying hard to reconstitute a sense of nationhood and family that was almost destroyed by the deportation. One can imagine him interviewing his fellow returnees, asking them what they know and remember and if any of it had been written down anywhere. He takes all he gets and tries to put it together into a coherent whole, but vast amounts of information are missing because the records and the descendants themselves are either scattered through the Persian Empire or didn't survive the destruction, and what little remains is enigmatic and conflicting with no one to answer the questions.

The situation of the returnees to Judea from exile must have been something like the settings of post-apocalyptic movies a la The Road Warrior, The Postman, etc. It certainly wasn't (quite) as lawless with the Persian military nearby, but the remnants of physical destruction, the depopulation, and the social and psychological effects of the loss of so many people are hard to imagine. We cannot wrap our minds around the severity of God's discipline of his people and the intensity of his wrath, nor can we fully grasp the miracle of how he preserved a remnant through it all out of his faithful love, for the purpose of his master plan.

The Reception of the Holy Spirit: Applications

2011-06-28T23:43:00.000-04:00

I hope that in the last few posts I've demonstrated from the Bible that the Holy Spirit is received by believers in Christ in two ways: within for regeneration at conversion and upon for power usually subsequent to conversion. I want to conclude with some points of application that I think make or break our effectiveness as servants of God.

1. We get the Holy Spirit upon us by asking for him. When we looked at the Spirit upon, we saw that receiving and maintaining the Holy Spirit in this way is actually commanded in Ephesians 5:18-21 and 2 Timothy 1:6-7. Never in the New Testament are believers commanded to receive the Spirit within, because it would be to no purpose—a person who is still dead in their transgressions and sins has no interest in receiving the Holy Spirit, much less ability to do so. The Spirit takes the initiative to enter the person and bring him or her to life. But once the person has been awakened, God calls that person to receive the Holy Spirit upon to empower his or her confession of Christ.

So, how does a person answer God's call? Fortunately for us, it could hardly be simpler, and Jesus lays it out plainly:

So I tell you: Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks the door will be opened. What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead of a fish? Or if he asks for an egg will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him! [Luke 11:9-12]

All we need to do is ask! That's it! We know that Jesus is talking about the Holy Spirit upon, not within, in large part because this text appears in the Gospel of Luke, and as we've seen, Luke speaks of receiving the Holy Spirit exclusively in terms of the Spirit upon. Jesus says that everyone who asks the Father for the Holy Spirit receives him. Everyone! It's a guarantee! Now, the timing isn't guaranteed. Precisely how the Holy Spirit manifests himself in your life, aside from boldness to proclaim the glory of God in Christ, is not guaranteed either. And though the trigger is asking, there's a big difference between a casual, half-hearted request and the kind of prayer that the apostles and company engaged in continually for ten days before the Spirit fell upon them on Pentecost. God wants to see that you're serious. Nevertheless, at root, receiving the Holy Spirit upon you is as simple as asking your Dad.

2. Why do we expect evangelism to work if we're not filled with the Holy Spirit?  It is amazing how we rely on our own efforts when it comes to evangelism. For one, we are so obsessed with technique and program. Technique and program can be useful tools, but trying to bring someone to faith in Christ just using those tools is like trying to build a house with tools but no builder to wield them. Moreover, 90+% of Christians don't even make the attempt to evangelize; they're scared and feel inadequate. Why would they evangelize if they don't have the power of the Holy Spirit that both makes them effective in evangelism and implants a drive to be bold about their faith that they can't resist?

We are so wrapped around words when it comes to evangelism—"what do I say?" We're afraid that if we say the wrong thing, we'll screw everything up. Well, words are important. In some cases, a misplaced preposition is the difference between the gospel and heresy. But at the same time, words themselves, even God's Word itself, aren't expected to change anybody's life alone. The perfect articulation of the gospel, by itself, will always be met with hostility or more likely an indifferent shrug. The Word converts people because of the power of the Holy Spirit on the person who speaks it and in the person who hears it. The New Testament knows no other kind of conversion. Paul says, "My conversation and my preaching were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and power, so that your faith would not be based on human wisdom but on the power of God" (1 Cor. 2:4-5). Shockingly, verbose Paul goes even further two chapters later when he bluntly asserts, "The kingdom of God does not consist in words but in power" (1 Cor. 4:20, NASB).

Jesus actually told his closest followers, witnesses of his life, death, and resurrection, people whose minds had been opened to understand the Scriptures, the best-qualified evangelists in history, to stay put and not to tell anyone their life-changing message until they had been clothed with power from on high. When the Spirit then came, 3,000 were saved in one day. Centuries later, if we aren't seeing people repenting of sin and coming to Jesus, and we also don't see evidence of the Holy Spirit upon us and our churches in power, should we conclude that this is merely a coincidence?

3. The laying-on of hands needs to make a comeback.  It appears to have been a pattern going back to the earliest days of the church to lay hands on people after they had been baptized into the name of Jesus in water and ask the Lord to baptize them in the Holy Spirit. (In a previous post I noted this in Acts 8:16-17; 19:5-6; and it's implied in 2:38). Has Christ in heaven baptized people in the Holy Spirit apart from this process? Certainly; Cornelius and his household are a prime example. But the laying-on of hands after water-baptism seems to have been established as the typical procedure.

In baptistic traditions like my own, we need to bring this back. This past Easter, when believers that I baptized came up from the water, I laid my hands on them and prayed for God to pour out his Spirit on each one. In traditions that baptize infants (paedobaptistic), the laying-on of hands still figures in to the rite of confirmation, and it does traditionally relate to the gift of the Holy Spirit as he came on Pentecost (see, e.g., the Compendium of the Catholic Catechism, nos. 265-268). But the significance of the act needs to be emphasized, particularly in light of the two modes of reception that I've been talking about (which is not always made clear in paedobaptistic traditions).

In addition, in the run-up to baptism or confirmation the candidates need to be taught about the baptism of the Holy Spirit and encouraged to seek it for themselves. We read in an ancient document called the Didache (did-ah-KAY), which was probably written while some of the apostles were still alive, "And before the baptism, let the one baptizing and the one who is to be baptized fast, as well as any others who are able. Also, you must instruct the one who is to be baptized to fast for one or two days beforehand" (7.4). What are they to be fasting for? The text doesn't say, but I think they were all praying with fasting that the Holy Spirit would fall upon the baptized. We need to revive this practice or something like it. I plan to do so the next time I prepare people for baptism.

4. Don't stop asking.  We've seen that although the baptism of the Holy Spirit is a single event that inaugurates the experience of the Spirit upon a believer, nevertheless those who are so baptized may be filled repeatedly ever after. Therefore, we must never cease to ask to be filled ever more with the Holy Spirit, or to use the term Paul employed to Timothy, to "reignite the gift of God." Those who have been baptized in the Holy Spirit have not "arrived." That baptism is the beginning of experiencing the Spirit in his fullness, not the end. It is worth remembering the example of Saul/Paul, Barnabas, and their colleagues in Antioch (Acts 13:1-4), who served God with fasting and prayer, out of which they heard the Holy Spirit tell them to set apart Saul and Barnabas for a special mission. They then laid their hands upon them and prayed with more fasting before sending them out. If those spiritual giants repeatedly called on God for more power, shouldn't we?

5. Our significance comes from being baptized into Jesus, not baptized in the Holy Spirit.  While we're on the subject of Christians who haven't "arrived" because of their experience with the Holy Spirit, I might as well take a swing at charismatics and Pentecostals. It is painfully common that those who have received the Holy Spirit upon themselves quickly turn toward those who have not received the gift that way and insinuate that they have a problem, that they are somehow defective. Now, from one angle there's some truth to this in the sense that, as we've seen, being filled up by means of the Holy Spirit is a command of the Lord, because it is a necessary ingredient to fulfilling other commands like proclaiming the gospel everywhere. Properly, it is not an optional thing.

However, it should not escape our notice that Paul the Apostle wrote three whole chapters of one of his letters to address the very issue of how those who have been empowered by the Holy Spirit should treat other believers: 1 Corinthians 12-14. In this amazing passage of Scripture Paul insists that all believers have been baptized by means of the Holy Spirit's regenerating, cleansing work into the one body of Christ, and all have been given him to drink as part of salvation (see earlier post). All—Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, and I would add young or old, educated or uneducated, hip or square, traditional or contemporary, high-church or low-church, spiritually strong or weak, and even charismatic or cessationist—are of Christ through faith. So any denigration of those who have not yet been baptized in the Holy Spirit is denigrating a member of Christ's body that each other member needs for health and survival. Go read 1 Corinthians 13 again: it wasn't written to be read at weddings but at "full gospel" worship services.

I've met charismatics who tie themselves in knots about their saved friend or family member who hasn't shown evidence of being filled with the Holy Spirit. Would you please just chill out! Go ahead and pray for them, but also remember what Jesus said when his disciples returned after healing and throwing demons out of people: "Nevertheless, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names stand written in heaven" (Luke 10:20). No matter how great the Spirit upon us is and no matter how badly neglected this reality is in many quarters today, the salvation bought by Christ and effected by the Spirit within every believer is an incomprehensibly greater gift.

6. "Wives, submit to your husbands" doesn't make sense apart from the Spirit upon.  This point of application is quite different than the ones that precede it, but I think it's worth mentioning.

"Complementarian" is a label that belongs to those who, on the basis of Scripture, view men and women as equal in value but who also maintain that leadership in the home and in the church are roles specific to men to fill. A major plank in the complementarian platform is Ephesians 5:22-33, in which Paul commands wives to submit to their husbands and husbands to love their wives and thereby to act out the relationship between the church (wife) and Christ (husband). Complementarians rightly point out that even though "submit" and "love" often look alike in the daily grind of marital life, they are not strictly the same, and to say that they are is to suggest a heretical equivalence of function and leadership between Christ and the church on the basis of the parallel with husband and wife.

"Egalitarians" are people who, on the basis of Scripture, hold that though the work of Christ does not abolish men's and women's distinct sexual natures in this life, it does abolish differentiation in rank and role on the basis of different sexual natures. Ephesians 5:22-33 is not their favorite Scripture passage. (Galatians 3:28 is.) But since it's in the Bible and they have to deal with it, egalitarians point out that Ephesians 5:22—"Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord"—is not a complete sentence in the Greek; it is actually close to the end of a sentence beginning in v. 18. Connected to the verse before it reads, " . . . submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ, [including] wives to your husbands as to the Lord." Egalitarians argue that the submission of wife to husband is just a subset of the submission that all believers, male and female, are to show to each other, and in terms of grammatical analysis I believe that it is impossible to disagree with them.

However, both complementarians and egalitarians generally fail to consider "Wives, submit to your husbands" in light of the verb that heads the whole sentence in v. 18. The whole sentence says (as I translate it), "Don't get drunk with wine . . . but use the Spirit to get full, with the result that you speak to each other with psalms . . . return thanks always . . . and submit to each other in the fear of Christ, including the wives to their husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. . . . " In other words, wives submitting to their husbands hinges on wives being filled up through the Holy Spirit upon them.

Now, this does not mean that wives on whom the Holy Spirit has not fallen do not need to submit to their husbands as to the Lord. But it does mean that telling a wife who is not living in the fullness of the Spirit to submit to her husband puts the cart before the horse. It may be ethically correct but it is not pastorally wise.

To grossly simplify things, imagine two different scenarios in a Christian family in the province of Asia. In the one the wife is strong-willed and rebels against the leadership of her husband, doing her own thing despite his wishes. The reactivity she displays toward him suggests that she's missing something within herself that causes her to be emotionally wrapped around him in an unhealthy way. She is somehow empty and needs to be full of what really fills just like the alcoholic in v. 18 does. She needs to be filled by means of the Holy Spirit. Once she receives him, out of that fullness she has the confidence that enables her to submit to her husband without feeling like she's losing herself, because she knows that God has given her a purpose and authority through the Holy Spirit that her spouse cannot take away. In the other scenario, the wife is bossed around, perhaps abusively, by her husband; she is weak in the relationship in addition to her vast social weakness in her ancient community. Now instructing her to submit to her husband is really not helpful, because already her submission out of fear results in her being crushed. Fortunately, she becomes saved by grace and instructed about the gift of the Holy Spirit. When she receives the gift of the Spirit upon herself, she is so transformed and emboldened, just as the disciples were at Pentecost, that her husband hardly recognizes her. In fact, far from being won over to the faith, he is feeling threatened by the enormous supernatural confidence displayed by his Spirit-filled wife. It is only now that it is appropriate for the wife to be instructed to submit to her husband and to direct her spiritual power according to love rather than using it to upend the order of the household.

In both of these situations, the instruction for wives to submit to their husbands doesn't make practical and pastoral sense unless they are filled up by means of the Holy Spirit upon themselves. How much damage has accidentally been done to women who have been counseled to submit to their husbands without first being instructed properly about the power of the Holy Spirit, without which the command to submit is in some way inapplicable?

Finally . . . I hope you've gotten something out of this series on the reception of the Holy Spirit. I can truthfully say that studying this subject has changed and is changing my life and ministry. I can't imagine how many others in the church would be changed if they examined the New Testament carefully and faithfully on this matter and took its implications seriously.

If you'd like to hear more, especially about how this doctrine relates to the mission of the church, view or listen to my sermon "Taking the Show on the Road" (in the list midway down the page). An even better message is a lecture that preaches like a sermon by Mark Driscoll called "The Spirit-Filled Missional Ministry of Jesus." You have to be a devotee of Reformed theology to get everything he's saying (both he and his audience are), but even if you're not you'll still be built up.

The Reception of the Holy Spirit: Flexible Terms and Blended Situations

2011-06-21T00:47:00.002-04:00

Now that we've looked closely at the New Testament's teaching and verbiage related to the Spirit within and the Spirit upon, it's valuable to look at instances in which the line between these two modes is blurred. First we'll take a look at vocabulary that New Testament authors employ to describe both the Spirit within and the Spirit upon, and then we'll look at situations in which the Holy Spirit's activity cannot be easily separated into the two modes because he is being received in both ways at roughly the same time.

In my previous post I noted that a metaphor for the Spirit within is water while a metaphor for the Spirit upon is fire. Another metaphor for the Holy Spirit is wind—fitting since the Greek pneuma can be translated either "spirit" or "wind" (or also "breath") according to context. In John 3:5-8, Jesus speaks of those who are "born of the wind [Spirit]," which we know from earlier in the chapter (and saw previously) refers to the Spirit indwelling the believer and bringing him or her to new life. (Indeed, such persons are born of water as well as wind.) However, Luke records that when the Holy Spirit came upon the believers on Pentecost, the tongues of fire upon them were also accompanied by the sound of a rushing wind (Acts 2:1-4). It seems that "wind" is a flexible metaphor for the Holy Spirit that can apply to him either within or upon the believer. We see the same flexibility in the metaphor of oil by which the believer is anointed by God. Paul and John use the term "God anointing with the Holy Spirit" with respect to the Spirit's indwelling work to establish, give hope to, and instruct the believer (2 Cor. 1:21-22; 1 John 2:27). By contrast, Luke uses the same term to refer to the descending Spirit's work to empower God's servant (Acts 10:38).

You may have noticed by now an interesting diversity among New Testament writers. The three writers who talk the most about the Holy Spirit are John, Paul, and Luke. (Peter does as well, but we don't have nearly as much of writing from him to go on.) Most of the time, though by no means always, when John and Paul write about the Holy Spirit they talk about the Spirit dwelling within all believers to attach them to God in Christ. Luke, on the other hand, exclusively talks about the Spirit coming on believers to embolden and empower their confession of Christ. So for example, some of the most common terms for the reception of the Holy Spirit in Scripture are "God giving the Holy Spirit" (and the less common "God sending the Holy Spirit") and the believers "receiving the Holy Spirit." Paul and John usually use these terms to refer to the Spirit within. Luke always uses them to refer to the Spirit upon.

Before moving ahead there are a couple of rare terms that appear in Jesus' Upper Room Discourse in the Gospel of John that require discussion. Three times in John 16:7-15 Jesus refers to "the Holy Spirit coming to" his disciples. Jesus says that the paráklētos would come after he ascended into heaven and that the result would be powerful conviction, which are things we expect of the Spirit upon. But the result of the Spirit coming to the disciples was also that he would guide them into all truth, which we expect from the Spirit within. This is another flexible term. The other odd term is "the Holy Spirit being/remaining with" Jesus' disciples, which appears twice in John 14:16-17. The Holy Spirit had already been with them, but Jesus wanted them to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit so that he would be with them forever. The explanation that makes the most sense is that the Holy Spirit was with them in and on the person of Jesus himself. When Jesus returned to the Father, the Spirit would go too unless and until he was sent to the disciples themselves. But this term has no bearing on how the Spirit would be received, whether within or upon or both.

Interestingly, just as some terms mix the two modes of the reception of the Spirit within and upon, the practical situations of some believers in the New Testament (and hopefully today as well) show a similar mixture. The most obvious example is the household of Cornelius, which I talked about last time. For these Gentiles, their belief in the gospel and regeneration seem to have come simultaneously with their baptism in the Holy Spirit and speaking in other languages, even before water-baptism (Acts 10:44-48)! The two modes of receiving the Holy Spirit blended into a single experience. Another noteworthy example is "the gospel coming by the Holy Spirit" to the Thessalonian believers (1 Thess. 1:5-6). The evidence that they really believed the word—that is, were really converted through the Spirit's indwelling, regenerating work—consisted of the powerful miracles, rock-solid confidence, and joy amid suffering that the Holy Spirit upon them had given them just as he had to the apostles themselves. (The obvious authenticity of the Thessalonians' faith is probably akin to "being a letter written with the Holy Spirit [like ink]" as Paul describes the Corinthian believers in 2 Cor. 3:2-3.) In the same way, in Galatians 3:2-5 Paul describes the Galatian believers as "beginning by the Holy Spirit," which suggests conversion (through the Spirit within), asserting that they would be foolish to finish by the flesh. (Indeed, the approach they should have been taking in their Christian lives is outlined in 2 Cor. 3:17-18: "the Holy Spirit transforming" them into the glory of the Lord visible in the clear preaching of Christ.) But in the same section Paul also describes "God providing the Spirit" to them in terms of the supernatural miracles God was working among them (through the Spirit upon). With the Thessalonians, the Galatians, and presumably the Corinthians, when they received the Holy Spirit, the one mode of reception naturally led to or involved the other.

There is an intriguing biblical example of this process breaking down in the case of the recipients of the letter to the Hebrews "being partners in [God's grant of] the Holy Spirit." Hebrews 6:4-6 states that anyone who has become partners in the grant of the Holy Spirit—which the author equates with being enlightened and tasting the heavenly gift, the good word of God, and the power of the coming age—can't be renewed to repentance if they fall away. The way I look at this is that if the readers had experienced the power and conviction by the Holy Spirit that the Thessalonians had experienced, but unlike them (1 Thess. 3:5-8) they later demonstrate that their faith had not been genuine because they turn away from the gospel, they won't be brought back to repent again as they had done ingenuinely the first time. Despite their initial seeming acceptance of the message, they really had been "resisting the Holy Spirit" just as the Jewish Council had (Acts 7:51-53). The Spirit was upon those who spoke to them as he had been on Stephen and perhaps on genuine believers among them as well. They all could see, hear, and feel the power of God and were impacted by it whenever they got together. It led them to make a confession. But the Spirit had never actually entered into them and brought them to life. So their reception was really a nonreception, merely a temporary place in the community in which the Spirit had truly been received by some.

So what do we learn from all this? First, even though the Spirit comes to the believer in two ways, within and upon, sometimes New Testament authors could be messy about how they described it, according to their interests, using certain terms in a generic, nonspecific way. Second, life itself could be messy, with people being converted through the Spirit within and being empowered by the Spirit upon more or less simultaneously—or at least, even if this did not happen often to many individual believers, it was how the church as a collective unit experienced it. In fact, this seems to have been a pretty common experience in the missionary situation of the first century.

In the next post I'll present some thoughts on the "so what" of this whole investigation.

The Reception of the Holy Spirit: The Spirit Upon

2011-06-07T17:04:00.000-04:00

In my last post I wrote at length about how every converted believer in Jesus Christ receives the Holy Spirit within and about the blessings that come from that. In this post I'm going to do the same about the Holy Spirit upon the believer, another mode of receiving the Spirit that is available to every believer but that is distinguished in significant ways from the Spirit within. As in my previous post, I'll be looking at this by listing the terms in the New Testament that refer specifically to "the Spirit upon" and digging a little bit deeper into a passage or two.

The logical place to start, like I kicked off my previous post, is with the New Testament terms "the Holy Spirit descending/coming/falling upon" and "being/remaining/resting upon" the believer. These terms appear almost exclusively in the writings of Luke (the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles), which is a theme you'll see through today's post and which I'll talk more about in my next one. The absolute most important thing to notice about the descent of the Holy Spirit onto believers is that everyone on whom the Spirit rests is imbued by him with supernatural power and boldness to testify to God's plan of salvation through Jesus Christ. This testimony is often called prophecy. This pattern extends from Simeon, who prophesied when he saw the infant Jesus in the temple (Luke 2:25-35) to the believers on whom the Spirit fell in Ephesus in Acts 19:5-6. In many cases, including in Ephesus, the Holy Spirit caused people to speak in other languages ("tongues"), but in all cases they were fired up to talk about Jesus in whatever language they could. Appropriately, the descent of the Spirit on Pentecost (Acts 1:8; 2:1-4) was promised by Jesus as "being clothed with power from high" (Luke 24:49). The Spirit-empowered testimony of these believers was so powerful that it demanded a reaction from those who heard it. Many believed; others responded with hostility and persecution. Thus Peter observes that "[i]f you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory, who is the Spirit of God, rests on you" (1 Pet. 4:14).

Two interesting and exceptional cases of people on whom the Spirit descended are Mary the mother of Jesus and Jesus himself. For them, the descent of the Spirit didn't merely empower them to testify to God's plan of salvation in Christ but to accomplish it, Mary in her conception of the Son of God (Luke 1:35) and Jesus in his perfect life, death, resurrection, ascension, and return.

All four Gospels record the Holy Spirit coming down on Jesus at his baptism in water by John (Matt. 3:16; Mark 1:10; Luke 3:22; John 1:32). Throughout Acts we see an interesting relationship between the descent of the Spirit and water-baptism. When the Holy Spirit fell on the believers on Pentecost, we can assume, though it is nowhere explicitly stated, that those people had all previously been baptized by John or by Jesus' disciples. But in his exhortation that day Peter made the connection between water-baptism and the Spirit's descent when he urged his listeners to "[r]epent, and each one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit" (Acts 2:38). In both Acts 8:16-17 and 19:5-6 we see people being baptized in water into the name of the Lord Jesus, and then at or after that baptism apostles laid hands on them and the Holy Spirit came down. The exception in Acts is when the Holy Spirit fell on the Gentile household of Cornelius (also described as "God pouring out the Holy Spirit") before they had ever been baptized in water. But exactly because the order of events was so unusual, Peter reacted by baptizing them in water immediately (Acts 10:44-48). (I'll talk about the example of Cornelius more in my next post.) The significance of these accounts is that baptism was administered to people who had repented of their sins and placed their faith in Christ. These were people who had been born again to the best knowledge of those who baptized them, which means that they already had the Holy Spirit within them and had already been "washed/baptized by means of the Holy Spirit" as discussed in the previous post. Receiving the Holy Spirit at or after water-baptism through the laying on of hands, however, was a different thing.

Here we see the contrast between "being washed/baptized/immersed by means of the Holy Spirit" and "baptism/immersion in/of the Holy Spirit." As recorded in all four Gospels, John the Baptist said that just as he immersed people in water, the one who came after him (Jesus) would immerse people in the Holy Spirit and fire (Matt. 3:11; Mark 1:8; Luke 3:22; John 1:33). (It is interesting to note that a metaphor for the Holy Spirit within is water, but the metaphor for the Spirit upon is fire, as indeed he appeared on the believers on the day of Pentecost.) Three of the situations that Luke describes as the Spirit coming upon believers he also describes as Jesus baptizing people in the Holy Spirit as John had predicted (Acts 1:5 [fulfilled in 2:1-4]; 8:14-17; 19:1-6). In short, the baptism of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit coming upon the believer are the same thing.

The terms "descending/coming/falling upon" (and also "baptism in/of the Holy Spirit") refer to an initial event that launches a believer's experience with the Spirit upon his or her life. The terms "being/remaining/resting upon" describe the ongoing experience of the believer who has received the Holy Spirit upon him- or herself. The terms "being filled with the Holy Spirit" and "being full of the Holy Spirit" have a similar relationship. Luke uses the term "being filled with the Holy Spirit" in just the same way that he uses "falling upon" and "baptism in the Spirit" in that it describes a single, discrete episode in which the Spirit fills a person with himself. The only difference is that filling may also happen to believers who have already been baptized in the Holy Spirit, and they manifest the same boldness and power they showed the first time they were filled (as, for example, in Acts 4:29-31). Therefore, unlike when the Spirit falls on someone, which occurs at most once, fillings with the Spirit may happen repeatedly. Luke uses the term "being full of the Spirit" to describe the ongoing character of someone who has been (perhaps frequently) filled with the Spirit. In fact, "full of the Spirit" is often tied to character qualities such as wisdom and faith (Acts 6:3, 5).

To sum up the differences we've seen between the Spirit within and the Spirit upon so far, the Spirit within brings a person's spirit to life as they believe in Christ while the Spirit upon gives the believer boldness to make that profession everywhere. The Spirit within is God the Father's baptism of the believer's conscience to cleanse from sin, reflected subsequently in water-baptism, while the Spirit upon is Christ's baptism of the believer in the Holy Spirit that generally comes with the laying on of hands after water-baptism. One additional crucial difference between the Spirit within and the Spirit upon is that believers are never commanded to seek or take responsibility for the Spirit within, but believers are commanded to put themselves into a position to receive or maintain the Spirit upon.

One such command is Ephesians 5:18-21, which says, "And do not get drunk with wine, which is debauchery, but be filled by the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making music in your hearts to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for each other in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ." First I need to make a rather technical observation. In the phrase "be filled by the Spirit," "by" is the Greek word en that I talked about in the last post, and it has the same definition of "by means of" here that I talked about there. So "being filled by means of the Spirit" is like "the cup was filled with a pitcher," not like "the cup was filled with water." Paul is saying, "Look, don't use alcohol to fill the emptiness in your life. That's what the Holy Spirit is for! Use him to feel full." The result of having the Holy Spirit make us full is a special power to testify to Jesus with our mouths. We sing to him, we thank God because of him, and we even employ his name when we speak words that give each other preference over ourselves. These are all things God commands us to do, and we will only do them effectively if we obey the command to be filled by means of the Holy Spirit.

Another such command is in 2 Timothy 1:6-7, where Paul exhorts his protégé, "I remind you to rekindle God's gift that you possess through the laying on of my hands. For God did not give us a Spirit of fear but of power and love and self-control." Without a doubt, "God's gift" that Paul refers to in verse 6, as Peter did in Acts 2:38, is the Spirit he mentions in verse 7, a gift that came through the laying on of hands and is described with the metaphor of fire. "Reigniting the Holy Spirit" is Timothy's continual responsibility in order to retain the power, love, and good sense necessary to fulfill his duty as a servant of the gospel.

In conclusion, in the New Testament the Holy Spirit comes upon the believer who receives him usually (though not always) through the laying on of hands following baptism in water. The result is supernatural power to bear witness to Christ. Though baptism in the Holy Spirit happens once, the manifestations that come at Spirit-baptism may be repeated through many times of filling with the Spirit thereafter. And though we have not seen yet in our study how a person goes about getting and maintaining this gift, we have seen that as believers it is our responsibility to take the initiative to do so.

The Reception of the Holy Spirit: The Spirit Within

2011-05-30T22:00:00.031-04:00

In my last post, which introduced this series on the reception of the Holy Spirit, I proposed that the New Testament describes two ways that a believer receives the Spirit, which borrowing from biblical language itself I described as the Spirit coming within and the Spirit coming upon. In this post I will list the terms used by New Testament authors that refer exclusively to "the Spirit within" and interpret some of the major passages that talk about this mode of the reception of the Spirit.

The natural place to start is with the terms "the Holy Spirit being/dwelling/remaining in" the believer. The Bible says little about what exactly this is or how it happens (aside from God the Father giving him), but we do know outcomes of the Spirit's indwelling. The Spirit makes the individuals and churches in whom he dwells into temples of God (1 Cor. 3:16; 6:19; Eph. 2:22). Another outcome of the Spirit's indwelling is knowledge of the truth: learning it (John 14:16-17; 1 John 2:27), speaking it (1 Pet. 1:10-11), and guarding it (2 Tim. 1:14). Most importantly, we know that the Holy Spirit dwells in every regenerate believer from a single, but decisive, biblical passage: Romans 8:5-11. According to Paul in Romans, if the Holy Spirit is not in someone, that person thinks and functions according to "the flesh" (which is hostile to God and rebellious against his law), cannot please God, does not belong to Christ, and is headed for death. By contrast, if the Holy Spirit is in someone, that person's spirit is alive, he/she thinks and functions according to the Spirit and is at peace, Christ himself is in that person, and God will eventually raise that person's mortal body from the dead into an immortal body as he did Christ's. In other words, the characteristics and attitude that we expect (and God demands) from a true Christian only belong to the person in whom the Spirit dwells. The person without him cannot possibly be saved. For example, Jude describes false teachers who are destined for eternal damnation in Jude 18-19 as "not having the Spirit."

The Holy Spirit gives new, eternal life to all those in whom he dwells, life of a quality that can't come from any other source. So we see "the Holy Spirit giving life" in John 6:63, "being made alive by means of the Holy Spirit" in Galatians 5:25, and "the Holy Spirit flowing" out of the center of the believer like running (literally, "living") water in John 7:38-39. The imagery of new life continues with the terms "being born of/by/according to the Holy Spirit." Only those who have been born by the Spirit can see and enter the kingdom of God. Only they can recognize each other as kin (John 3:3, 5, 8), and they are misunderstood and persecuted by those who have only been born naturally (i.e., according to the flesh; Gal. 4:23, 28-29).

The indwelling of the Spirit is necessary for God the Father to take ordinary, wicked people and make them into his holy nation. Thus we read of "God choosing [believers] by the sanctification of the Holy Spirit" in 2 Thessalonians 2:13 and 1 Peter 1:2. God chose all believers in the truth to be saved, to obey Christ, and to be cleansed by Christ's blood, which he accomplished by sanctifying them with the Holy Spirit. Likewise believers are "washed by means of the Holy Spirit" by God to be saved by his mercy, regenerated within, declared innocent, sanctified, and made heirs of eternal life (1 Cor. 6:11; Tit. 3:4-7). Of course, until Christ's work on the cross, the Jews assumed that they were and would always be God's holy people and that they were inducted into the people of God by circumcision. But Paul talks about the heart "being circumcised by means of the Holy Spirit," by which any person, Jew or Gentile, becomes a real Jew in God's sight and truly keeps God's law (Rom. 2:29; cf. Col. 2:11-14). Further, it was a given in both Jewish and Gentile thought-worlds that only a holy person could access a divine being in its temple. For a Jew, naturally, that not only entailed being Jewish but for progressively closer access being a Levite or a priest or the high priest himself. But Paul uses the term "having access to the Father by the Spirit" to define the awesome privilege belonging both to all Jews and to all Gentiles through Christ (Eph. 2:18).

Paul repeatedly points out that "having the Holy Spirit" in the present gives believers confidence that God will complete his saving work in the future. All who belong to Christ will receive eternal life in their mortal bodies through the Holy Spirit (Rom. 8:9, 11). The promised resurrection is described as a future redemption, God's purchase of the believers, and indeed, the fact that they have the Holy Spirit already marks them as having been bought with a price (Rom. 8:23; 1 Cor. 6:19-20). Along these very lines, the terms "God giving the Holy Spirit as a pledge [or 'down payment']" and "God sealing [believers] with the Holy Spirit" represent the confidence believers can have of their eventual resurrection because of the Holy Spirit whom God has given them now (2 Cor. 1:21-22; 5:5; Eph. 4:30), a gift closely connected to their faith in the gospel (Eph. 1:13-14).

Another couple of terms remain that pertain to the Spirit within, and they come from one tricky verse, 1 Corinthians 12:13, which reads, "For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body. Whether Jews or Greeks or slaves or free, we were all made to drink of the one Spirit." Some of the evidence that these terms—"being baptized by means of the Holy Spirit" (which I'll explain shortly) and "the Holy Spirit being given [to believers] to drink"—are connected to the Spirit's indwelling in all believers is the universal scope of the text. Paul insists that we were all baptized into one body by the one Spirit and all made to drink of the one Spirit, and he even gives some examples of opposites according to the flesh (Jew/Greek, slave/free) that are encompassed by the one Spirit's work. (This is reminiscent of the "one baptism" referenced in Eph. 4:5 and "the commonality of the Holy Spirit [my translation]" in 2 Cor. 13:14(13).) It is also notable that Paul made this statement to a church suffering from chronic and severe unity problems, much of which revolved around some people claiming to be more spiritual than the rest because they demonstrated spectacular manifestations of the Spirit that others lacked. Nevertheless, Paul insists that this baptism by means of the Holy Spirit is common to all believers.

Now it would be easy to claim from this passage that "the baptism of the Holy Spirit" is universally received by all believers at conversion as another aspect of the Spirit's indwelling work. But despite the presence of the terms "baptize" and "Holy Spirit" here, this verse does not actually refer to the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The key is the Greek preposition en. In languages in general, prepositions are notorious for being really flexible. (For example, look up "on" in an English dictionary and count the definitions.) In many places, the Greek word en means "in." A pertinent example for our study is Matthew 3:11, which I should introduce by pointing out that the Greek word baptízō, translated "baptize," was actually a run-of-the-mill word meaning "immerse" or "dip": "I [John] baptize/immerse you in [en] water . . . but he [Jesus] will baptize/immerse you in [en] the Holy Spirit and fire." However, another very common meaning of en is "by means of," that is, the tool or instrument that you use to accomplish something. As it happens, the phrase "en the Spirit" occurs several times in 1 Corinthians 12, and in all cases it means "by means of the Holy Spirit." So we see in verse 3, "[N]o one can say, 'Jesus is Lord,' except by [en] the Holy Spirit," and in verse 9, "[T]o another faith [is given by God] by [en] the same Spirit, and to another gifts of healing by [en] the one Spirit." Judging from the pattern of usage Paul already established in this chapter, it is most likely that "in [en] one Spirit we were all baptized into one body" is best rendered "by means of one Spirit we were all baptized into one body." In other words, God the Father used the Holy Spirit to baptize us.

The distinction between "in" and "by means of" is more than grammatical hair-splitting, because it indicates that the baptism Paul mentions here is not necessarily the same as the baptism in/of the Holy Spirit promised by John the Baptist in the Gospels. So what kind of baptism is it? Most likely, Paul is using the metaphor of baptism—which, I again stress, was an ordinary, non-churchy word meaning "immersion," like what you'd do to your dirty pots and pans—like he uses the image of "washing" in 1 Corinthians 6:11 and Titus 3:4-7 mentioned previously, which refers to the removal of sin. This washing/baptism by the Spirit aligns neatly with Paul's description in Romans 6:1-11 of being "baptized into Christ Jesus," which removes sin from us and us from sin, and which is the spiritual reality that physical water-baptism reflects and expresses (and those in sacramental traditions believe enacts). So the physical rite of baptism in water parallels God's action of washing off our sin by the indwelling Holy Spirit when we believe, and so the rite of baptism initiates us all into the visible church in parallel with the indwelling Holy Spirit's work to initiate us into the invisible church composed of those God knows who truly believe.

This work of the Holy Spirit and all his activities listed in this post are performed by the Spirit when he rests within a person, which he begins doing in all genuine, regenerate believers in Jesus Christ at the moment of conversion.

The Reception of the Holy Spirit: Introduction

2011-05-28T22:53:00.000-04:00

"Have you been baptized in the Holy Spirit?"

This is what my new acquaintance inquired of me, seated across from me at lunch on a cold December day last year. I nervously looked down, afraid of what uncomfortable relational pressure I might be about to undergo. "Well, the answer is yes, I have," I began, "but let me ask you what exactly you mean by 'baptized with the Holy Spirit' to be sure I'm answering your question accurately."

The remainder of that conversation (which wasn't as awkward as I had feared) propelled me into a quest to nail down once and for all the answer to the question, what exactly is the baptism of the Holy Spirit as the Bible describes it? Now, for me the question was not, "Are the 'charismatic' gifts of the Spirit available today?" or, "Do post-conversion 'fillings' with the Spirit happen?" I've long said yes to both of these. The specific question is, how does the baptism in the Holy Spirit fit with them? Is it concurrent with and/or the same as regeneration, or does it happen at water-baptism, or is it a "second blessing"? Implicit in these options is the question, does a person have the Holy Spirit in any respect prior to being baptized in the Holy Spirit? And perhaps one more question of a practical nature is, how does a person know if he or she has been baptized in the Holy Spirit (particularly if it does not happen at conversion)?

After digging deeply and widely in the New Testament, I've concluded that the overall doctrinal heading for this investigation should be "the reception of the Holy Spirit," not least because "receive" and "give" and their cognates are the most common words to describe the Holy Spirit coming into contact with a person—much more common than "baptism," for example. I've also concluded that there are indeed two distinct ways to receive the Holy Spirit that can be summed up by two prepositions. When we are saved, brought from darkness to light, we receive the Spirit within. This is the regeneration that makes our dead spirits live, awaken to the gospel, and believe in Jesus. But there is another kind of receiving the Spirit, and that's the Spirit coming upon. This reception of the Spirit usually happens after conversion though for some it happens at the same time; also, a regenerate Christian who does not want the gift might never receive it. The primary effect of the Spirit coming upon is a boldness to talk about Jesus that compels both the speaker to speak and the hearers to respond (one way or another), and miraculous manifestations may also occur. (Incidentally, this summary of mine is essentially what my lunch partner believes.)

For the next few posts I'm going to detail my evidence for this position from Scripture. My approach will be to list the many terms that the NT writers employed to refer to the reception of the Holy Spirit and sort them into three categories: those that refer to the Spirit coming within, those pertaining to the Spirit coming upon, and those that in one way or another blend the two. We'll see that different NT authors employ some of the same terms in different ways, which is one of the factors that has bred confusion on this subject over the centuries. But I hope that we'll also see that precision and conviction on this doctrine is of crucial importance for the Church to fulfill its mandate in the world.

Reading the Bible and Friendship with God

2011-05-25T12:00:00.000-04:00

Imagine you have a friend who is friends with a really important, famous person. When you first become aware of this connection, you enjoy hearing details about the VIP's off-camera life from your friend, because they make you feel closer to this person that you've seen in the media but never met. After a while your friend might say, "This VIP friend of mine is coming through town next week. Come with me and I'll introduce you." When your friend makes the introduction you and the VIP have a brief, cordial chat, but if the three of you are standing around for much longer you soon become a spectator as your friend and the VIP carry on a more substantial conversation suitable to the intimacy of their relationship.

Some time later your friend says, "Hey, my VIP friend is coming to town again, and I thought it would be cool if I got some friends together to hang out." So you go, and because recreational activities can mix people together and level the relationships, you have some more genuine interaction with the VIP yourself in the small group. When the activity is over, though, the VIP takes an interest in you individually. You get coffee with the VIP and your friend, but this time the VIP is asking you questions, and most of the interaction is between the two of you with only occasional insertions by your friend. A week later you get a call from the VIP, and you set up a time to hang out one-on-one. Your relationship has now evolved to the point that it stands on its own without the friend who brokered it even being around.

I think that the development of the time that we spend with God follows the same path as this parable that I just told. We start just by hearing about God from someone who knows him well by listening to sermons in person or in recordings or by reading books or blogs. Then we have a conversation with God himself by reading the Bible, but it's cursory, just a verse or two before we spend the great bulk of our time reading what someone else says about God, as in "daily devotionals" like Our Daily Bread (or as Zach Bartels calls it, Our Daily Crouton). From there we move to a Bible study workbook that requires us to engage with God in Scripture more deeply, reading longer passages and answering questions about them, but that time is still in a setting contrived by someone else and consists mostly of that author's commentary. If we seek greater closeness with God, we move on to some means—a particular Bible or book or mentorship by a trusted friend—by which we read God's Word ourselves, but there's still some orienting material that gives us a clue of what to look for and how to go about it before we dig in. Finally, we graduate to reading the Bible alone, spending unmediated, one-on-one time with God with no director but the Holy Spirit.

There are two lessons we can draw from this pattern. First, each of us has developed to a particular degree of intimacy with God in our hearing and reading of Scripture. We can still enjoy and be nourished by less intimate interactions with God mediated more by other people, just like if we have a close friend we can still enjoy sharing that friend with others in a group setting. But if we're used to a particular degree of intimacy with God, and then for a period of time all of our time with him is in a less intimate setting—like if we're used to reading the Bible with little guidance and then spend several weeks in a daily devotional—we starve for God and our relationship with him suffers. That's true even if the same level of intimacy that starves us is a rich banquet to someone who isn't as far along.

Second, our development in spending intimate time with God progresses through stages. Unfortunately, many people stick, satisfied, at one stage, and fail to mature. A person who has been a Christian for forty years but has never moved beyond listening to sermons or reading Our Daily Bread has as close a relationship with God as someone who makes occasional small-talk with a friend of a friend, regardless of how long they've been doing it (and their life shows it). So it is good for us to consider what stage we're in and how we can meet the challenge of going to the next one. If you're used to listening to others talk about God but never read the Bible yourself, why not practice reading a daily devotional? If you're used to those, invest time in a Sunday School class or Bible study that requires moderate homework in a workbook based on the Bible. If that kind of thing is familiar to you, pick up a book like How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart, Developing Intimacy with God, by Alex B. Aronis, or The International Inductive Study Bible to guide you into substantial time in the Scriptures directly. And if you're accustomed to those kind of things, isn't it time to take the training wheels off and read on your own?

For whatever stage you're in, God wants to be an intimate friend to you. How close are you willing to be to him? What are the consequences of holding back?

I Love Matt Papa

2011-05-23T10:30:00.000-04:00

I was thinking that this post should be filed under the category of "Cory Reviews Media That's Been Around Long Enough That All the Reviews Should Have Been Written Already." (Aside 1: I would consider making this a post label, but it's too long. Aside 2: If you check out my book reviews, you see that almost all of them fall into this category. See also here. Aside 3: Wait for my review of Jaroslav Pelikan's 5-volume The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, published 1971-89.) That's because I'm about to ramble about Matt Papa's 2008 worship album Your Kingdom Come.

But then I discovered on the artist's website, which calls the release "the new album," that I wasn't so late after all, because Papa hasn't released another full-length work since entering Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary as Your Kingdom Come was being completed.

It figures. I've been listening to this album at least every other day for several weeks and I don't see signs of it letting up. What makes it fun is great musicianship. But what keeps me coming back is how every song is soaked in Scripture. Biblical phrases abound in the lyrics. They proliferate so naturally in Papa's songs that one gets the impression that he isn't trying to make Scriptural songs at all; it's just that he himself is so soaked in Scripture that it can't help but infuse his music.

Other elements of the album grip me deep within as well, including the fascinating interplay between Papa's hard-rocking, modern style and his conscious commitment to the historic Church through the ages. I can't remember any contemporary Christian tune employing part of that ancient liturgical staple, the Gloria Patri (specifically the part, "as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen"), as Papa's "Alive" does. "Alive" itself is a good example both of Papa's cleverness and his good theology. The tune begins with eighth-note chords in the upper range of the piano accompanied by sleigh bells, and the first words are, "Bells are ringing, children singing." Christmas song, right? Wrong—this is an Easter hymn: the words continue, "Christ is risen, Christ is risen."

Another example of Papa's knowledge of church history, as well as his musicianship, is the unexpected insertion before his song "Prepare the Way" of a guitar reduction of the familiar introduction to J. S. Bach's chorale prelude "Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme" ("Sleepers Awake"). (Once I discovered this blog post by Papa in which he declares Bach to be one of his heroes, as yours truly does, my esteem for Papa turned into a full-on man-crush.) And if those credentials were not enough to validate Papa's commitment to the historic Church and the Great Tradition of doctrine through the ages, there is one of my favorite cuts on the album, "Trinity," which is about—well, you guessed it. Seriously, how many Christian songs have been written in the last few decades on the central doctrine of the Christian faith? But this ought to be expected of a musician with a rich doctrinal statement (and he calls it a creed!—wow!) on his website as well as a "mantra" of biblical principles that guide his ministry.

The songs on Your Kingdom Come generally fall into two thematic categories. One category, which includes the songs already mentioned, are songs of adoration to the Triune God, especially the risen Christ. The other category is a bracing challenge and exhortation to the Church to proclaim the gospel in word and back it up in deed to all nations in light of the authority of Christ and his coming judgment. The prime example is the eponymous track of the disc, "Your Kingdom Come," which happens to be my favorite cut of them all, a vigorous, rousing anthem of God's coming kingdom and the Church's plea to be engaged in it. This group of songs also includes the frankly harsh "Woe to You," a chastisement of false Christianity steeped in Jesus' declamations in the Gospels, and "Where Is the Difference," reminiscent of Keith Green's classic "Asleep in the Light." (Come to think of it, Papa kind of looks like Green.)

Keith Green

Matt Papa

The music on Your Kingdom Come also breaks down into two categories following the two main themes. The songs of adoration are more likely to be piano-driven and reflective. Despite the fairly simple and sometimes cyclical chord progressions, the musical interest derives from the lush dissonances and harmonies formed by the backing synth pad, the melodic line, or instrumental counter-melodies. The kingdom/mission songs on the other hand are more likely to be guitar-driven, straight-ahead rock, usually with the kind of hard edge that you expect from a band at a youth event. These songs have the gripping energy and beat that make you want to move. And of course, getting the Church to move is Papa's point.

It's been a long time since an album worked its way so deeply into my thoughts and passions, actually forming those thoughts and passions, as this one has in the past few weeks. And in fact I can't remember an album ever eventually forming my preaching as this one has as an internal counterpoint to the series I'm currently preaching in the Gospel of Luke. Luke is about the kingdom coming in Jesus in the power of the Spirit. (Regular readers know my restlessness over the Church's reflection on the kingdom of God, and I'll be blogging at length about the Holy Spirit real soon.) This is what Your Kingdom Come is about at its core. I think Papa would be pleased that his musical sermon is forming spoken sermons. As he says on his website, "Songs are sermons people remember. I often don't remember a sermon I heard yesterday, let alone a year ago. But with songs, there's a hook, and people remember it. So that's why I want to write with Scripture. I don't want to waste time."

The Least of the Nations

2011-05-15T16:12:00.000-04:00

I've started reading through 1 Chronicles intensively for the first time, and some of you are already beginning to yawn, because you know what 1 Chronicles starts with: genealogies. Lots and lots of genealogies. Lots of lists of names that you can't pronounce that don't seem to be of any value. But I'm going through it with a fine-toothed comb anyway. These lists were very important to the Jews after the exile at the very least so that individuals could establish their authentic Jewishness and in some cases Levitical or priestly office (for why this was so important, see here). As I immerse myself in 1 Chronicles I can't help but start to look at the world from the perspective of a postexilic Jew, which sheds light on a great deal of the Bible and sometimes provides spiritual insights in surprising ways.

For example, the very beginning of 1 Chronicles gives the lineage of Adam to Noah's sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth and then gives an overview of the nations descended from them in parallel with Genesis 10. This sketches the entire ethnographic world that the Israelites knew in very broad strokes. Some of the nations listed here we know very well (e.g., Mizraim/Mitsráyim = Egypt). Others we have only a vague idea of and still others we don't know anything about at all. But you can't pore over this list, painstakingly cross-checking every name with other biblical references and examining commentators' speculations, without getting the picture of a world that to the Israelites was really, really big with really, really huge nations that were already taking up all available space. As the genealogy narrows telescopically down the line of Shem to Abraham and then from all the nations descended from Abraham to Israel itself, you get a sense of the tininess of God's chosen people in their crowded world. For example, Egypt/Mizraim had a ten-generation head start on Israel to multiply and populate territory.

This is the backdrop of Moses' admonishing reminder to Israel that

you are a people holy to the LORD your God. He has chosen you to be his people, prized above all others on the face of the earth. It is not because you were more numerous than all the other peoples that the LORD favored and chose you—for in fact you were the least numerous of all peoples. Rather it is because of his love for you and his faithfulness to the promise that he solemnly vowed to your ancestors that the LORD brought you out with great power, redeeming you from the place of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt [Deut. 7:6-8].

God loves using the small, the weak, the few, and the undeserving to accomplish his work and reveal his glory. The Bible gives example after example of it. And in church history we see examples of it too, (e.g., the Moravian Church). Ironically, the power that God exerts through the small frequently makes the small big, and then as we view it we become seduced by bigness. (Solomon might be a telling example of this.) But even then, out of the drifting, seemingly successful big thing, God will again bring new life out of the small thing within it. This cycle should remind big churches, ministries, and movements of God to be humble and small ones to be hopeful. The small should also be cautious not to envy the big but to seek the God who is faithful to his promises.

Friendship: More than You Thought

2011-05-10T22:38:00.001-04:00

Friendship is one of those features of life that most of us experience and make assumptions about but rarely talk or think about in the abstract. Nevertheless, Western civilization has been entertaining a conversation about friendship since Aristotle began it 2,500 years ago. Modernity has made this conversation more important for us than ever. Mobility has increased, so people are living further from family networks and are seeking to create networks of friends to replace them. New communication technologies are redefining what a friend is in common parlance, with Facebook obviously being the prime example. What impact do these developments have on the drift of our friendships, on our happiness, and on our walk with God?

Lee Spitzer has added his voice to the ancient conversation in his book Making Friends, Making Disciples: Growing Your Church through Authentic Relationships, published by Judson Press (2010). My friend Lee has probably reflected more on friendship from a Christian perspective than any other living person, or at least more than any you're likely to come across. His book provides a welcome and fascinating window into a typically unexamined part of our lives.

The heart of Lee's meditation on friendship is an exercise that employs a deceptively simple diagram that he terms "Friendship Circles." The diagram assumes different levels of intimacy in our friendships with different people. By seriously asking, "Who are my friends?" and examining which we have shared more of ourselves with than others, we gain a fascinating view of our relational world. Like all good self-examination exercises, the data we put onto the page has been within us all along, but we are unable to recognize its import until we see it outside of ourselves.

Lee brings a wealth of insights out of the Friendship Circles exercise in connection with other research, such as the number of total friends (250) and close friends (20) a human is capable of having, the number of close friends belonging to the average American (10), and the number of friends necessary to stave off loneliness (8 to 12 close ones). He also makes forays into such provocative territory as the relationship between Facebook friends and actual friends, the unique qualities and risks of opposite-sex friendships, and who Jesus' friends were according to the Gospels.

The example of Jesus is interesting because of his dual nature. As a human, Jesus models good, healthy friendship patterns for us, and indeed most of Making Friends, Making Disciples has to do with how our friendship patterns might be made as beneficial as possible. But as God, Jesus also models how God has reconciled his enemies to himself to make us his friends, and even more interestingly how God has his own "Friendship Circles" in which some (Abraham, for example) are exceptionally close. This portion of Lee's investigation not only raises the question, "How close a friend am I to God?" but much more importantly, "How close a friend is God to me?"

Lee Spitzer is convinced that our friendships, actual and potential, are gifts that God has given us that can be submitted to and employed by him for his kingdom and glory. Properly understood, our friendships give clues to what God desires to do in, through, and around us. They form the substructure of all evangelism and discipleship, and a healthy, balanced web of friendships within a church is an essential ingredient for a healthy and faithful body. Making Friends, Making Disciples explores all these themes. Meanwhile, Lee has continued his meditations, expanding still further his understanding of friendship and how God uses it. Let's hope he's making plans for a sequel.

What God Celebrates

2011-05-02T10:35:00.000-04:00

Like the rest of the world I was surprised last night by the announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. military personnel in Pakistan. Though it is probably naive to believe that this is the end of Islamic terrorism, it is still a remarkable milestone. A lot has happened in the nearly ten years since the 9/11 attack.

As I saw footage of the crowds that were spontaneously gathering in American communities and celebrating bin Laden's demise, I wondered how happy God is about bin Laden's death. I remembered Ezekiel 33:11, which says, "As surely as I live, declares the sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but prefer that the wicked change his behavior and live." I also remembered a provocative Christianity Today (online) interview with Brother Andrew in 2007, in which he asked, " 'Have you prayed for bin Laden today?' That question should shock a lot of Christians. Of course we haven't!" (I haven't.) "That is why he is what he is. We have an evangelical black list of people we don't want to see in heaven and put bin Laden on top."

I do believe that there is justice in bin Laden's violent death. He was a criminal and a murderer; he shed human blood and by humans his blood was shed (Gen. 9:5-6). And therefore I believe that there is an appropriate, justified satisfaction at his death, even for God. But it is not really worth celebrating for Christians. There is far more celebration among the angels of God in heaven over the child who said he was sorry for his sins and trusted in Jesus this morning than there is for bin Laden's death.

Religion without Borders

2011-04-27T07:00:00.001-04:00

How much better would the world be if religious people who do really good things to help people would just leave behind those outmoded doctrinal particulars that do nothing but divide people? Well, actually . . . .

Jeff Johnson: Pastors' Imperfections and Connecting with God

2011-04-25T12:00:00.000-04:00

This video contains a short message by Jeff Johnson, the author of Got Style?: Personality-Based Evangelism. I'm privileged that Jeff is the member of the pastoral staff of my church's American Baptist region who is focused on supplying wisdom and resources to congregations and connecting them to each other for joint ministry. At a training event for people who help churches without a pastor to get linked to one, Jeff gave this brief talk about the imperfections and foibles of every pastor that God calls and about how important it is for us to separate from our busyness to connect with God. Enjoy.

"Family" ≠ "Christian"

2011-04-23T12:00:00.000-04:00

So here's something that peeves me.

I think it was when I was a kid in the 80's that the word "family" got to be more and more popular in Christian circles. Most likely some of the impetus came from the radio program (later ministry/political action juggernaut) Focus on the Family, which was accurately named, because the program consisted of child psychologist Dr. James Dobson Focusing on the Family. But then the word "family" started showing up more and more places. You started hearing churches refer to themselves as "a family church" (meaning what exactly?). At some point (I don't know when) a retail chain called Family Christian Stores emerged. And eventually it became routine for "family" to be used as sort of a fuzzy synonym for "Christian" (specifically "Evangelical") in Christian branding in the hopes (I guess) that it would feel socially nice and improve the Evangelical image. So you had "family [i.e., conservative Christian] values," "family [i.e., Christian] radio," the American Family (i.e., politically super-conservative Christian) Association, and so on. (Feel free to use the comments section to list examples that I missed.)

I hate it when the term "family" is used as a synonym for "Christian." Hate it, hate it, hate it.

One reason that I hate it is that the word "Christian" puts Christ front and center. Nothing else should be in his place.

But another reason is that family isn't good.

Well, I should clarify that. Family is an essential feature of the human race, which God created in his image and called good. So family, as God created it, is good. And substitutions or innovations in family, as God created it, which the human race has toyed with since Lamech took two wives, aren't good and in fact are ultimately devastating.

But family, just like the rest of human nature, was perverted by our fall into sin. So family is just as good as human beings are. It's also just as sick, depraved, and vicious as human beings are. And I'm not just talking about extreme cases of child abuse or domestic violence. I'm talking about ordinary families' ordinary interactions, because this is exactly what the Bible describes.

I was reminded of this again because a number of us in my church are going through Beth Moore's study The Patriarchs together, which examines Genesis 12-50, in which the main characters are Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, and in which much (probably most) of the drama concerns their interactions with their wives, siblings, relatives, and slaves. It had been quite a while since I had gone through Genesis, and it was jarring once again how grossly sick and messed up this family (as Christians, our family) was. And yet, much of the time the stuff they do is not all that far-fetched; you've probably seen some of it in your own family and in families that you know well.

So when we use the word "family," let's be clear about exactly what family is. Family is not by itself virtuous. Family is under a curse because of sin and desperately needs to be redeemed. And let's not delude ourselves into thinking that our churches will be stronger if we can just attract families into them. The families that we attract are the very ones that need the transformative grace of God in order to be pleasing to him, and if they resist that grace then they have the potential to bring an entire church down. And let's finally remember that the family that Jesus really cared about consists of those who "hear the word of God and do it" (Luke 8:21), a family united by his blood alone with God as its Father.

The Church mustn't view family in any other sense than the way the Bible views it. Our failure to do so provides a safe haven for idolatry—the worship of our families, our kids, our marriages, our elders—and all manner of wickedness that idolatry gives birth to.

So please, I'm begging you, use "family" when you mean "family" as the Bible describes it. Use "Christian" when you mean "Christian." And don't mix them up.

"Pastor-Scholar" Postscript: Advice to My Former Self

2011-04-20T14:19:00.001-04:00

In an unexpected and timely twist, I recently received an e-mail from my seminary asking alumni to submit advice for this year's graduates that will be bound in a booklet that each will receive. Below is my submission. I'm grateful for the moving experience of putting it into words, even if it (at least the good parts) doesn't make the cut for the booklet. I'm including it here partly as a sort of sequel to my earlier post about my seminary but mostly because you might be in a situation where this advice would be encouraging to you.

I haven't met you, but I love you. Since I can't see you, I can't give you a hug, and since I don't know you, I can't advise anything but what I would advise myself when I graduated with an M.Div. eight years ago.

It is tempting to believe that earning your degree prepared you for ministry. It didn't. It prepared your brain for ministry. That is essential, and there is no seminary better at doing that than this one. But pastoring isn't something that's thought or written or even spoken. It's something that's done. And you can't prepare for most of it except by doing it. And much of that can't be simulated by Mentored Ministry, because you're not faced with it until you sit in that chair and bear the title of pastor.

You'll find that you never have enough time for anything. For example, no matter what they told you preparing a sermon looks like, it's almost never going to work out that way. You'll find yourself continually unprepared, not having written a flawless, well-researched exegetical paper and converted it into the crystalline Big Idea with perfect supporting illustrations for that week. Fear not, beloved. You have been preparing to preach that sermon since the first day you read that passage as a new believer and probably longer ago than that. God wastes nothing.

Beloved, you don't know what you don't know, and it won't do you any good for me to try to tell you. But don't be afraid. As you do your job you'll find out, and you'll have the opportunity to learn what it is. And yet more that you don't know that you don't know will emerge. It never ends. Learn not to be afraid of your ignorance. Learn to accept it, laugh at it, embrace it, be humbled by it, revel in it. Ignorance is not nakedness if you're robed in Christ's righteousness.

Never forget the reminder of the most brilliant mortal God ever spoke through: "Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up." You can't ultimately go wrong by loving the people God has given you to love. And beloved, you are loved. No matter what you think you need to do or your world thinks you need to do, at the end of the day, the only thing that your Father wants from you is to accept his love for you and to love him in return, wherever you are, honored or ignored, successful or middling, content or in anguish.

And beloved, if you are that student who has been ground into powder to get to this day, if you are limping across the finish line and cannot celebrate the passage, if you don't know where you're going next, if you feel abandoned and forsaken, if you are living in a famine of hearing the voice of the Lord, hear me: he still loves you, and he's so proud of you. He may be asleep in the back of your storm-tossed boat as it's going under, but he hasn't left it.

Look me up if you want to talk. And be blessed of the Highest One.

Love,
Cory Hartman
M.Div. '03

Good Questions

2011-04-18T13:36:00.004-04:00

Tim Geoffrion hasn't blogged for a few months, but I'm glad he broke his silence. This is a real, raw, searching, genuine post about some questions that he's asking himself that really challenged me.

The New Look: Let the People Be Heard!

2011-04-15T22:30:00.000-04:00

To the loyal readers of 1st Corynthians:

I have altered the color scheme of this blog. The red background is still very warm but less "hot." The text is a tad darker and larger. My intent is to make the blog more readable but still keep its unique look to set it apart from the other 892,306,461,547,392,091,728,972,107,308 pages on the internet (when I counted earlier this afternoon).

But at the end of the day, my friends, it's all about you. (Take that, Rick Warren!) So let your voices be heard! Do you prefer:

(A) The new look.

(B) The old look. (No guarantee I can recreate it, though.)

(C) A more conventional, neutral-colored, dark-text-on-pale-background look.

Do We Need More "Pastor-Scholars"?

2011-04-15T22:20:00.000-04:00

This month I got an unusual e-mail from the seminary I graduated from that announced a new scholarship program for the best and brightest. It includes total coverage of tuition and fees, preferred on-campus housing and a stipend to apply towards it, an allowance to buy even more books than required for one's classes, and community-building experiences with other scholarship recipients. This is a very expensive, primo opportunity for a select few to be developed, according to the announcement, into "pastor-scholars."

My initial rapid-fire responses to this announcement went like this:

What an awesome opportunity for somebody.
Good for the seminary and some wealthy donor for putting up so much cash to make seminary more financially feasible.
Wait a second—why didn't I get help like this when I was in seminary and nearly bankrupting myself financially and otherwise to get through?
This sucks.
Then again, I wouldn't trade my very difficult seminary experience for a different one, because God intended it to make me who I am, which is much more useful as a pastor than I would have been otherwise.
Maybe nobody should get this scholarship. Maybe everyone should have to suffer.
Probably not.

Then after going through these quick reactions, my mind settled with curiosity on this term "pastor-scholars" and began pondering it. And lest you think in the meditation that follows that I'm unfairly critiquing an isolated, accidental phrase, I've seen it repeatedly in subsequent communications from the seminary. This is a deliberately chosen term; it is branding.

So, what does my seminary mean when it says that it wants to produce "pastor-scholars"? Here are some possibilities.

"Pastor-scholar" may mean a scholarly pastor. This person fits the conventional pastor mold but does so with a scholarly mind and the ability to grasp and interact with scholarly material which he or she employs in ministry to non-scholarly people in the church in a way that they can understand it. We can certainly use more of these people. I hope that I'm this kind of person.

"Pastor-scholar" may also mean a pastoral scholar. This person works in the academy teaching and writing but has some pastoral experience in his or her past and perhaps still serves as a pastor part-time, especially on an interim basis, in the present. This scholar incorporates his or her pastoral experience into instruction of budding ministers in college or seminary. We can definitely use more of these people too.

I think that my seminary would be (and is) delighted to have both of these kinds of people among its alumni. But I don't think that either of these are what they mean by "pastor-scholar." I speculate that what they mean by "pastor-scholar," whether they're consciously thinking this through or not, is a particular breed of Christian celebrity.

Now, when I think of Christian (and here I mean Evangelical) celebrities, I think of three main categories (plus miscellaneous). Some Christian celebrities are rare mainstream celebrities who have at some point made a claim to be a Christian. Others are musicians who record openly Christian music. And the third main group are pastor/speaker/author types. I lump these roles together because it is frequently hard to tease them apart. Though there are certainly Christian celebrities who do one but not all of these, it is by no means unusual for a person to have the official title of Senior (or as it's called now, "Lead") Pastor of some church and also to have their own quarter- to half-page of the CBD catalog for their books and spinoff merchandise and also to be a regular feature of the conference (summer camp for adults, especially other pastors) circuit.

Different corners of the Evangelical world have their preferred pastor/speaker/author celebrities. For example, one corner follows the church growth group, guys who started with 30 members and now have 30,000 and write very simple (to the point of bland) stuff for the Average Joe. Then there's the crowd that follows the searching, tattooed, flirtatiously liberal, iconoclastic, hipsterish celebrities. And then there are the followers of the proudly orthodox, often quarrelsome, always thinky celebrities that smart people like to read because they feel smarter after they've read them. It is this last celebrity type that I think my seminary means by the term "pastor-scholar," whether or not that's what they think they mean.

Why do I think that this is what they mean by "pastor-scholar"? Well, for one, these pastor-scholars are so darn popular. But more importantly it's because they are the most successful-looking examples of exactly what this seminary designed itself to produce.

Every kind of marketed product has a "category essence," which is the heart of the meaning of that product. For institutions of higher learning, the category essence is smarts: every school promises that you will end up smarter by going there. Now, within that category, schools differentiate themselves: "Smart and Competitive," "Smart and Socially Concerned," "Smart and Practical," "Smart and Creative," and so forth. But some schools (for example, schools of the Ivy League) go the whole way with the category essence and brand themselves as "Super-Smart"—in other words, even for smart places, we're "wicked smaht" (as they say in New England). My seminary thinks of itself exactly this way, as one of the two or three Evangelical seminaries in the country or even the world with the highest, deepest, and most penetrating thoughts (and among those few seminaries the most orthodox one, it thinks, so I guess "Smart and Pure" describes its brand well too). It attracts students with big brains by promising to give them even bigger brains, and it consistently delivers on its promise. The mission, the model, the method (required courses), and the material (required reading)—especially at the main campus—aim together to produce what the seminary considers to be a well-prepared pastor: that is, a highly intelligent and knowledgable one.

I know this, because I was exactly that student that the seminary tries to attract, and I came out of it with all the cognitive equipment that they wanted me to have (and some other weird stuff that I picked up along the way, but that's another story). I can relate so well to a current student whose "goal," according to a recent donation appeal from the seminary, "is to become a scholar-pastor [there it is again] contributing to the field of theology and preaching 'in the mold of Jonathan Edwards.' " Seriously, I might have actually said those exact words as a seminary student. My fervent dream was to unite the Academy and the Church in my very person, because I believed (and still believe) that they desperately needed each other. I could see myself getting a Ph.D., writing books, and teaching on an adjunct basis in a college or seminary while devoting myself to ordinary believers in a place far removed from the ivory tower and giving them the benefit of this learning. I revered historical figures like Edwards and Augustine who appeared (at least with my limited knowledge) to do this very thing.

But during those years, when I was faced with the question, hypothetically or practically, which road I would choose if I could only be a scholar or a pastor, I always chose the route of the pastor, because I knew that that's what God had called me to. And that led me to where I am today. And now, going on eight years after graduating with six and a half years of pastoral ministry under my belt, I realize that the life of a true pastor-scholar is generally impossible. There just isn't enough time to be committed waist-deep in the holy swamp of ministry in the church and also to be cloistered in a library writing articles that hardly anyone understands. Maybe if you're celibate and think that free time and hobbies are for sissies then you can pull it off. But if you have a family that you don't utterly neglect and are even remotely well-rounded, there simply aren't enough hours in the day. I'm not saying that a pastor can't sneak in a Ph.D. at some point or that a scholar can't serve on an elder board. I'm just saying that both pastoral ministry and scholarship are demanding pursuits, and only phenoms like Edwards or Augustine (and admittedly I don't know how well they actually pastored) can make it work.

And that leads me back to the question, do we need more pastor-scholars? Because frankly, I question whether the thinky pastor-scholar celebrities consumed by Christians today are doing either job all that well. How can they really be pastoring, what with so many weekends doing guest speaking gigs, weeks on sabbatical preparing their next tome, and hours reading and reviewing ten books a month on their blogs? Sure, they're preaching most Sundays and probably doing a terrific job in the pulpit, and they're probably doing a good job taking elders and other pastoral staff on retreats to think deep, visionary thoughts together. And maybe in churches their size these are the best things they can possibly do. But surely other people in their mega- or mini-megachurches are doing the dirty work of interacting pastorally with actual, beat-up, flawed human beings, right?

Likewise, these pastor-scholars aren't really scholars. What they write is assuredly scholarly in that it's thoughtful, well-written, critical, and informed by the work of scholars. But the actual work of scholars is, to most people, painfully tedious, researching microscopic subject areas ("the objective use of the genitive case in the Pastoral Epistles") and slaving away writing manuscripts that hardly anyone will read. Those writings that someone else (e.g., a pastor) might actually use (e.g., a scholarly commentary) still require an enormous amount of time doing very detailed work to research and compose; these pastor-scholars aren't writing works like that. And of course, scholars do this kind of work in scholastic environments where they spend a lot of time grading papers and attending faculty committee meetings. Pastor-scholar celebrities aren't doing these things. They may have done these things for a while just like they may have really pastored for a while, but they're not doing it now.

So do we really need more of these people for the good of the Church? I don't think we do. We certainly need more scholarly pastors and pastoral scholars, but not pastor-scholars of the celebrity type. But it wouldn't surprise me in the least if my seminary hopes that some more pastor-scholars like this will be birthed from its new scholarship program. They fit the seminary's ideal of pastors as big-brained scholars-in-residence in churches. They will further raise the seminary's prestige among potential big-brained students (and donors). And the seminary has produced such people in its past.

Now, as I conclude I need to make one final comment that perhaps you are anticipating. When I say that we don't need more pastor-scholars, some of me means that in a straightforward way, but some of me means, let's put a cap on the number of pastor-scholars, then remove one, and I'll take that guy's place. Because frankly there's a substantial part of me that dreams of doing what these guys do—have my CBD section, be featured at conferences all over the place, get a hip black-and-white head shot for the brochures, receive fan e-mails (and I guess hate mail) every day, give the occasional quote to the national media, spend all week with my head buried in books, articulate ministry principles that underlings put into practice, and preach to the thronging masses on Sunday. And you may have observed that with my little church and my out-of-the-way blog and my obscure forthcoming book I'm trying to do the very same thing, but I'm just much less successful at it. And truthfully I do long to take four years out of my life (maybe when the kids are grown) and get a Ph.D. So I admit that envy might partially be driving this post, and obviously that's evil. But at the end of the day, if I really had the opportunity to go to the other side where the grass is so obviously greener, I don't think I would—at least not today—if I wouldn't really tend a flock once I got there. That's because as far as I know, I'm called to be a pastor. Not a pastor-scholar.

Nehemiah and the Selfhood of Israel

2011-04-14T01:23:00.000-04:00

At some point in my life of learning the Bible I was introduced to Nehemiah as the guy who rebuilt Jerusalem's wall. That's true—Nehemiah led a third wave of returned Jewish exiles (though perhaps a small one) to Judea 13 years after Ezra did and 91 years after the first wave came back and Jeshua and Zerubbabel started rebuilding the temple. But rebuilding Jerusalem's wall was not the most important thing he did. As a matter of fact, the wall is completed toward the end of the sixth chapter of Nehemiah's 13-chapter book. His project was much larger than the impressive construction of a fortification in 52 days.

Nehemiah's actual work was the reconstruction of a conceptual wall between the Jewish people and their neighbors in the same vein as the work of Jeshua and Zerubbabel and Ezra before him (the last of whom also worked with him). Nehemiah's main challenge was the porous boundary between returned Israel and its neighbors. The failure or absence of this boundary revealed itself in situations in which the people of God and their neighbors were so intermingled as to be indistinct from one another. The lack of a boundary was caused by Israel's failure to grasp and maintain its uniqueness, which in turn facilitated the invasive behavior of prominent Gentiles. Nehemiah's objective was to reestablish Israel's national selfhood. Doing so required Israel to know and be committed to who it was, which in turn required them to know and commit to who they were not.

Nehemiah's first step in his campaign was to build Jerusalem's still-ruined wall. It is instructive to note why Nehemiah felt that the ruin of the wall was such a bad thing. The report he received about the returned Jews was that "[t]he remnant that remains from the exile there in the province are experiencing considerable adversity and reproach. The wall of Jerusalem lies breached, and its gates have been burned down!" (1:3). When asked by the Persian king what is wrong, Nehemiah replies, "Why would I not appear dejected when the city with the graves of my ancestors lies desolate and its gates destroyed by fire?" (2:3). And after he surveys the condition of the wall, he urges the exiles, "You see the problem that we have: Jerusalem is desolate and its gates are burned. Come on! Let's rebuild the wall of Jerusalem so that this reproach will not continue" (2:17).

The problem of the broken wall wasn't physical safety, because hardly anyone was living there anyway and because Nehemiah had no intention of setting up an independent Jewish state with defenses against the Persian military (contra his enemies' slander in 6:6-9). The problem of the broken wall was reproach, shame, and embarrassment before the nations, exemplified by the desecration of the graves of the Jews' ancestors. It is worth remembering that shame first appears in Scripture with the sin of Adam and Eve. Prior to their fall they were both naked but unashamed. In their perfect state their sense of who self was to be was so powerful that it could not be threatened even when completely exposed. But when sin entered them, they had to erect a physical barrier between themselves and others—clothes—to cover their emptiness and to make an artificial delineation between where oneself stops and the world starts. Jerusalem's wall was that artificial delineation for the Jewish people. Without it they were naked and ashamed and subject to total violation as a people by their neighbors. If allowed to continue, the boundary would become so vaporous that they would cease to be a people altogether. With the Persian army nearby, the wall of Jerusalem was unnecessary for security, but it was essential for the self-concept of the Jewish nation.

Nehemiah instinctively knew this, and that's why he concentrated his early effort on the wall. While the people built the physical wall, they were also building the conceptual wall between themselves and non-Jews. They were relearning who they were and who they weren't. This immediately led to problems with certain prominent Gentiles among the Jews' neighbors who had become accustomed to having considerable sway in the Jews' affairs. Nehemiah was leading the people to push them out of the Jewish sphere and back into their own, and so their resistance grew more and more furious. Once again, note that the Jews' physical safety wasn't threatened until after they had been working on the wall. Prior to the reconstruction physical safety was a nonissue because Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem enjoyed their influence in the Jewish community. It was only after they recognized that a line was being drawn and they were on the opposite side of it that violence from them became a real danger.

Nehemiah's intention to reestablish the self of the Jewish people ties together all his activities. He enforces the Law of Moses with respect to forbidding lending at interest to fellow Jews, and 5:8 implies that he led a campaign to buy back Jewish slaves of Gentile masters in order to prevent that forced intermingling. Similarly, Nehemiah connected all Jews living in Judea to the genealogical record that had been composed when the first exiles arrived, and on that basis he enforced the ban on intermarriage as Ezra had. Much of what Nehemiah did was centered in the temple as the heart of what made the Jews, Jews, once again following the pattern Ezra had set. So a major focus for Nehemiah was requiring the traditional contributions to be brought into it for its upkeep and the maintenance of the priesthood. Nehemiah continued to encourage Ezra's agenda to teach people the Law of Moses and how to follow it (especially the Sabbath), and he took part in a major covenant renewal ceremony that rehearsed Israel's history. All these efforts reinforced the boundary between the Jews and the nations and reminded the Jews that they were unique.

Nehemiah has frequently been cited as a premier biblical study on leadership. I agree wholeheartedly, but not because Nehemiah effectively gets things done (though he does). It's because Nehemiah depicts the real-world trials and tribulations of a leader who is trying to elevate the cohesion and maturity of character of his organization in the face of forces within and without that relentlessly try to keep it stuck in the dysfunctional mess that it was when he got there. A major lesson of Nehemiah is that true leadership always produces sabotage that makes the leader feel painfully alone. Not only does this leadership temporarily lead its followers from false peace into openly dangerous conflict, but it also invites roundabout pushback by those who are outwardly compliant but actually undermining reform. The most glaring example in Nehemiah is that, try as he might, he could not get Tobiah the Ammonite permanently out of the community of Israel. The very leaders of the people were joined with him through marriage and tried to broker a truce that would compromise Nehemiah's mission. While Nehemiah was back in the Persian capital serving the king for a spell, his whole renewal project began to degenerate, and Tobiah managed to carve out a nice room for himself in the very temple, courtesy of the high priest of all people! When Nehemiah returned he promptly threw Tobiah's belongings out and cleansed the place and likewise reasserted his other lapsed reforms. Since he couldn't build the wall again with the symbolic significance that that entailed, he did the next best thing, which was to hold a grand and elaborate dedication ceremony for it twelve years after it had been built.

That ceremony included a reading from the Law that Nehemiah summarized like this:

On that day the book of Moses [presumably Deuteronomy] was read aloud in the hearing of the people. They found written in it that no Ammonite or Moabite may ever enter the assembly of God, for they had not met the Israelites with food and water, but instead hired Balaam to curse them. (Our God, however, turned the curse into blessing.) When they heard the law, they removed from Israel all who were of mixed ancestry [13:1-3].

The identification of the Ammonites and Moabites as people to be forever excluded from the assembly is significant, because Tobiah was an Ammonite and Sanballat was a Moabite (from Horonaim), and these were Nehemiah's two main adversaries. However, in the very passage that the Jews heard that day (Deut. 23:1-8), God affirms that Edomites and Egyptians are allowed in the assembly of Yahweh. In his zeal for purity, Nehemiah seems to have overlooked that part and led the people to exclude all foreigners from Israel.

It is at this point that Nehemiah seems, ironically, to have overstepped his bounds. It is one thing to exclude who you aren't because you are establishing who you are. It's another thing to establish who you are in reaction to who you don't want to be. That seems to be the case here. Indeed, there is no hint in Nehemiah that the very purpose of Israel's strong identity as the "kingdom of priests and holy nation" of Yahweh is for the redemption of all the nations. A new kingdom and nation would have to be established to become the conduit of that blessing—provided it remains as holy in its own way as Nehemiah wanted the Jews to be.

Ezra Postscripts: Secondary Separation, and Serving in a Mainline Denomination

2011-04-05T17:00:00.000-04:00

Before I complete my short series on purity in the post-exilic Judean community with a post on Nehemiah, I want to make a couple of follow-up comments to my last post on Ezra. That post demonstrated how Ezra exemplified an Old Covenant assumption that when the holy/clean make contact with the common/unclean, the holy/clean are compromised. In the New Testament, however, this is not always the case. Contact itself does not defile; otherwise Jesus would have been defiled by the incarnation itself, not to mention what he did (whom he touched, whom he conversed with, etc.) in the flesh. Nevertheless, the saints (i.e., the holy people) may still be defiled, not by mere contact with ordinary people, but by lingering wickedness within themselves that leaks out in the midst of settled alliances with ordinary people. My two comments in this post have to do with some difficult practical applications of this principle.

My first comment has to do with what's sometimes been called "secondary separation." Secondary separation goes like this: I'm separating myself from all impure people, especially professing Christians who aren't living the life right somehow, and I'm avoiding interaction with them as much as possible. But you're a good one, so I'm in relationship with you. But then I find that you aren't separating yourself from all the people that I'm separating myself from. So I have to separate myself from you because now you're compromised, not because you're doing or saying anything wrong yet but because you're in relationship with the wrong people. For example, I love Bob the Christian Pastor/Speaker/Author/Celebrity; I own all his books, go to his conferences, and follow his tweets. But then I get the bad news that Bob appeared at the same conference or signed the same public statement or blurbed the same book with a Charismatic (or Anti-Charismatic) or Fundamentalist (or NIV-user) or Catholic or Liberal or Prosperity Guy or Whatever, so now I question Bob the Celebrity's integrity and might not be able to lead the small group material that he wrote anymore, even if I haven't seen any evidence that he promotes anything that I disagree with.

To use a term from the last post, I wonder what Christians' "purity maps" are, especially the purity map of a person who engages in secondary separation. The purity map has boundaries between holy and ordinary, probably multiple gradations in fact, and there is fear of corruption if a boundary is crossed. It occurs to me that the impulse behind secondary separation is remarkably akin to the approach to cleanness established in Moses' Law, encouraged by Ezra, and practiced by the Pharisees in Jesus' day. Uncleanness for them was like a contagious disease, like cooties; and if you've been infected, even if you're not showing the signs of it yet, I need to get away from you so that I don't get infected too.

People with this bent to separate might have a noble motive of seeking to remain pure and holy, but they live like they're in the old dispensation, because Jesus never acted anything like this. He wasn't afraid that people he made contact with or people that they made contact with would corrupt him, and he never taught his followers to worry about it either. Actually, the group of people that Jesus did urge separation from were hypocritical Pharisees and Sadducees, the very people who were so concerned to remain apart from everybody else.

It seems that people with a secondary separation mindset identify themselves very closely with the people that they are in relationship with, so closely that they can't distinguish between the actions of the people that they are in relationship with and their own actions. In other words, if my friend goes out to dinner with Mr. Dangerous, then I think I did too, so I have to retreat. The inability to distinguish between self and the people self is connected to doesn't look very healthy to me. In fact, it doesn't seem to me to be the evidence of great faith but the evidence of great doubt—doubt that I'm holy because of the blood of Christ, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and adoption by God the Father, and doubt that he will see my sanctification through to the end.

Nevertheless, as I take issue with secondary separation I don't want to lose sight of the genuine concern for purity in the New Testament. Contact with the unholy can't defile us. But a settled arrangement of linked values, goals, agenda, and journeys with the unholy can, because it brings out in us what ought to be put to death. That leads to my second comment, which is about the challenge I have knowing exactly how to put this into practice as a pastor in a Mainline Protestant denomination, the American Baptist Churches USA (ABC).

First, some explanation is in order. The term "Mainline" doesn't mean "mainstream." It refers to Philadelphia's Main Line, which passes (or used to pass?) through the swankiest part of Philadelphia and was dotted with churches of old, well-established, well-endowed denominations. Mainline Protestantism refers to those WASP-ish, generally northern, "establishment" denominations. These denominations happened to take a decidedly liberal turn theologically in the 20th century.

My denomination, the ABC, is unusual for a few reasons. It is the most conservative denomination of the Mainline. It is also the most liberal of the Baptist denominations in America. And it is one of the few denominations—perhaps the only one—that is far enough from its WASP-ish roots that it has no ethnic majority. In short, it is outrageously diverse. On one end are conservatives who practice such fierce separation that they have no relationship with any other churches and are American Baptist only in name. On the other end are people who by profession and practice are Unitarian Universalist in everything but name. And all kinds of folks are in the middle. It's a tent that's so big that I wonder if anyone fits under it (kind of like the old Yogi Berra-ism about a restaurant that's "so crowded nobody goes there anymore").

Another thing that makes us unusual is that the ABC is more a federation than a denomination. Congregations opt into associations, associations into regions, and regions into the denomination. Most of the denominational apparatus itself is a set of separate, cooperating boards. There are ties (including legal ones) that bind all the constituent parts together, but a feature of this bottom-up structure is that, basically, no one can tell anyone else what to do.

This explains the ABC's curious stance on the issue of homosexuality that has vexed every Mainline denomination. I've had people tell me that they know of the ABC as the Baptists who are in favor of homosexuality. That's because there is a small but energetic minority of Baptist churches that include as members, marry, and ordain homosexuals. Some associations have actually ejected these churches from membership, but the "Welcoming and Affirming" churches have joined other ones and remain connected to the denomination. Despite this, the denomination actually has an official public statement on homosexuality that says, "We affirm that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching." (Yep, that's the whole statement.) So our corporate statement expresses disagreement with homosexual practice, but our structure isn't designed to facilitate enforcement of corporate statements on member churches—and more to the point there generally isn't the will to do so.

I'm not going to get into what my denomination ought to look like, in my humble opinion. The sticky question, and the one that matters more, is what do I do? Am I corrupted because I am in league with the ungodly since there are some in my denomination who deny central premises of Christian doctrine (including the word "doctrine" itself) and endorse sinful practices? Or am I pure despite their presence, and in fact might I be an agent of sanctification within this fellowship?

The book of Jude has a lot to do with this dilemma. Most of Jude's letter uses lavish images of purity and pollution to condemn false teachers and demand total avoidance of them and their wicked ways. But at the end Jude writes, "And have mercy on those who waver; save others by snatching them out of the fire; have mercy on others, coupled with a fear of God, hating even the clothes stained by the flesh" (22-23). Though Jude's insistence on intolerance of falsehood remains unwavering, he views propagators of falsehood and those tempted by it in different categories. The propagators are to be rejected completely. Those who are being unknowingly influenced by it, on the other hand, are to be treated with mercy that reaches out to save. It is a fearful mercy that recognizes the potential that oneself might be led astray if not careful, but it is mercy nonetheless.

In my relatively short time as an American Baptist, I have encountered a very small number of people who actively and openly propagate ungodliness, deny the gospel, and exalt unregenerate human opinion over the Word of God. But most people don't do that, even people that could fairly be called Liberals. I have to say, this surprised me. My upbringing and even more so my college and seminary educations conditioned me to believe that every Liberal was an axe-grinding, 19th-century German higher critic who woke up in the morning chomping at the bit to identify more parts of the Bible that didn't really happen. But that's simply not so. Liberals can no more be fairly reduced to a caricature than Evangelicals can. Most of the Liberal-tilting American Baptists that I've met, including clergy, are genuine folks who read the Bible respectfully, desire to follow Jesus, and show evidence of salvation. Some of these people are also dangerously open to the false teachers. But that doesn't prevent me from having a relationship with them. As a matter of fact, my relationship with them (in addition to others' relationships with them) is more likely to counteract that falsehood than anything else. I often find that if I show that I want to listen to them, they become very interested in listening to me. I also find that some of what they have to say, far from being false, actually drives me to uncomfortable passages of Scripture that I might avoid if I only let myself talk to people who already agree with me.

Now having said that, I do stand in a dangerous place. My denomination is not pure like it should be and in fact is much more afraid of the journey to purity than it is of the effects of pollution. I don't have much hope that it's going to improve in purity in the short term. I could become corrupted. On the other hand, there are many within it "who have not stained their clothes" (Rev. 3:4) who are leavening the whole thing as well as living as salt and light in the world, and there are many who are wavering who yet might be snatched from the fire. And God has been clear with me that I'm not to go. So I think I'll stick around.

When the Holy Meets the Unholy: Ezra and the New Testament

2011-03-29T21:44:00.001-04:00

Sorry for the long gap between blog posts! No, I haven't forgotten about 1st Corynthians. I've just had to generate so much output for other, non-bloggy things that I haven't had the time left for here. But I'm bursting with things I want to blog about, so hopefully April will be more content-rich than March.

Now on to the topic for today. When Ezra the scribe led a second group of Jewish exiles back to Judea, he was immediately confronted with a problem. "The people of Israel, the priests, and the Levites have not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands who practice detestable things . . . ," said the Jewish leaders. "Indeed, they have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and for their sons, so that the holy race has become intermingled with the peoples of the lands. Worse still, the leaders and the officials are at the forefront of all this!" (Ezra 9:1-2). In order to understand the significance of the problem we need a general understanding of the concept of purity expressed in Scripture as "holiness" and "cleanness." (The following is heavily influenced by David A. deSilva's Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture, which I blogged about in a previous post.)

It's most helpful to think about purity by thinking about dirt. Dirt is "matter out of place." For example, if I am gardening and spreading peat moss-enriched topsoil on my flower bed, it is "earth" or "soil." But if I accidentally track some of it into my house, it becomes "dirt." What changed? Not the substance but its location. Human beings organize our worlds with invisible but extremely powerful definitions of where stuff should be. Not all human beings or human cultures draw the lines in the same places, but all of us do it somehow. If something crosses one of those lines, it becomes dirt, and we abhor it.

All religions contain "purity maps" that proceed from the same impulse. These maps put divine beings at the center and mark everything else, especially us humans, exactly where we can be positioned and not be considered by those divinities as "dirt." One's holiness is one's position on the map. A person is born with a particular degree of holiness based on his or her household/clan/caste/tribe/nation, sex, and/or order of birth among his or her siblings. For Israel, this came to be depicted architecturally by the layout of the temple, particularly according to the reconstruction by Herod the Great.

In the center was the Most Holy Place (Holy of Holies) where only God could dwell, with the exception of the yearly visit of the high priest on the Day of Atonement. The next level outward was the Holy Place, where other priests occasionally served to burn incense, change the showbread, etc. The next level outward was the Court of the Priests, where they made sacrifices, and next to that was the Court of the Israelites, where Jewish men who were offering sacrifices entered with their gifts. The level after that was the Court of Women and the wider court outside it, where all Jewish laity could gather. Beyond that, separated by a low barrier, was the Court of the Gentiles, where non-Jews who desired to worship the God of Israel could stand and pray. And we might even extend the topography to the Antonia Fortress just outside the temple complex where the idol-worshiping Roman garrison was stationed. You notice that each ring of the temple complex corresponded to a type of person. The further in you could go, the holier you were from the perspective of the God of Israel. If you look at it from the opposite direction, everybody outside the level of holiness where you stood was considered "common" or ordinary—holiness is specialness, because you can enter where most can't.

A related concept is cleanness. If holiness defines how close you could be to the Holy One and not be considered "dirt," cleanness describes whether you were allowed at the present moment to function at your level of holiness. Your holiness was connected to unchangeable characteristics of your identity (such as Levite, Israelite, male, firstborn). Your cleanness on the other hand came and went. Everyone was unclean sometimes. For example, if you touched a dead body (say you were a pallbearer for a relative) then you would be unclean for a week (provided you followed the appropriate purification ritual in Num. 19:11-13). There was nothing sinful about this (though sinning was also considered to be contracting uncleanness within), but it meant that while you were unclean you couldn't be present in worship at your typical level of holiness. You temporarily became "dirty." In fact, you were excluded from the whole worship system until you became clean again, and if you made contact with anyone else you would make that person unclean too (think cooties).

Now one reason it is so useful to conceive of holiness and cleanness—or rather their opposites, commonness and uncleanness—in terms of dirt is what we do with dirt when we find it. We eradicate it, at the very least pushing it into its proper realm but often trying to annihilate it altogether (think squashing a bug in your house that you would ignore outdoors). The mental maps humans impose on reality are so powerful that arguably the most dangerous place for any substance on earth is anywhere that a human believes it to be dirt. God reveals himself as dealing with dirt the same way. This is why appearing in his presence is so terribly dangerous—one is positioned for imminent obliteration. (See for example Isaiah's response to his vision that he, a common Israelite, was standing in the Most Holy Place, with "unclean lips" no less.)

It is also useful to think of commonness (vs. holiness) and uncleanness (vs. cleanness) as dirt because the presence of dirt makes things dirty. It is not that the presence of non-dirt makes things clean. If a sock comes in contact with soil, the sock becomes dirty; the sock doesn't extend its cleanness to the earth that makes contact with it. The same is true with holiness and ritual cleanness. If the holy mixes with the common, it becomes unholy; the holy doesn't elevate the common to holiness. And as has been said before, if the clean contacts the unclean, the clean becomes unclean, not the other way around.

This leads us back to the problem Ezra faced. "The people of Israel . . . have not separated themselves from the peoples of the nations who practice detestable things," and as a result the dirty deeds of the nations were by contact defiling God's people and making them unclean. Furthermore, "they have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and for their sons, so that the holy race has become intermingled with the peoples of the lands," and the result of these marriages between the holy and the common were common, unholy children.

This wasn't mere accidental behavior. Moses' Law made room for marriage between Israelite and Gentile in a particular circumstance: if in war Israel annihilated all men from a community by sword or enslavement and took wives by force. This is a jarring and rather horrific thing for us to contemplate (which is probably the topic for another post), but the point is that that kind of marriage was compelled from the Israelite direction only. Any other marriage, particularly in that place and time, was a bilateral negotiation not between two individuals but between two entire families. These families were wedding themselves to each other through the union of the couple, which is why royal marriages were often used to cement peace treaties between nations. This is the kind of intermarriage that the returned exiles were engaging in. The intermarriages were a sign of a close fraternization to the point of union between the people of the Holy One of Israel and the worshipers of pagan deities without number. To push the point one step further, it was an intermarriage between Yahweh and empty idols and the demonic shadows behind them.

Therefore, when Ezra heard this news, he ripped his tunic, tore out some of the hair on his head and beard, and sat down, dumbstruck and devastated, all day long. Then at the time of the evening offering he cried out to God for mercy (vv. 3-15). The Jews had brazenly violated God's explicit commands exactly as they had the first time he had given them, when Moses led Israel out of Egypt toward Canaan. The persistent willingness of the God's holy people to make themselves unholy, of the people he had cleansed to make themselves filthy, was what led God to treat them like the dirt they insisted on making themselves. It was for this reason that God had ejected them out of the land he promised them like someone sweeping dust off his or her porch. And yet, despite all that Israel had done, God still had enough mercy to take a remnant of these defiled people and bring them back for another go. And yet they went ahead and soiled themselves again—even the holiest among them, the priests! Ezra was terrified that this time God would not only remove them from the land but wipe them out so that they would cease to be a people at all (v. 14).

As Ezra wept and prayed, a crowd gathered around and joined him. And in their contrition and desire to repent, they settled on a drastic solution that Ezra administered: they divorced their non-Jewish wives and disowned the children of those unions (10:1-8). Perhaps if they removed their defilement as much as they could and sincerely pled for forgiveness, God would be willing to spare them and not scour them away again. It was a shocking move, but if the holy became common and the clean became unclean when the two mixed together as the Law indicated, then it was a perfectly logical course of action.

It was for this very reason that the appearance of Jesus over 400 years later seemed so illogical. With Jesus, when the holy intermingled with the common, the holy wasn't corrupted; instead, the common was sanctified. When the clean contacted the unclean, the clean wasn't defiled; rather, the unclean was cleansed. Simply put, Jesus could not become impure; to the contrary, he purified what he touched.

This contrary pattern began in the incarnation itself when Holy God became united with human nature—sin-affected human nature cursed with mortality no less. That abhorrent mixture should have polluted God, but instead it redeemed human nature in the very person of the Son of God. As a matter of fact, Matthew goes out of his way to note four unholy (by ethnicity) or unclean (by behavior) women in Jesus' ancestry, women who were partners in exactly the sort of marriages that made Ezra tear his clothes (Matt. 1:1-17; esp. vv. 3-6). But their ultimate offspring wasn't unholy—he was the Holy One himself! Indeed, one might suggest that the Son sanctified his mothers.

The pattern continued in the actions that Jesus took. In encounter after encounter that in our day we don't immediately see the drama in, Jesus violates norms of purity by physically touching and being touched by people who ought to defile him, with the result that the impure are purified. Jesus doesn't merely speak the word, "Be healed," to the leper (as he does, for example, for the centurion's slave). Instead he touches the leper, whose disease causes uncleanness, and says, "Be cleansed." Then he commands the leper to undergo the appropriate ritual with the priest at the temple according to the Law "for a testimony to them" that a new and superior purification is taking place (Luke 5:12-14). This entire episode is backwards. Jesus should have fled from the man whose skin disease was obvious, but the physical contact, rather than infecting Jesus both physically and ritually, results in the purification of the one afflicted. The offering at the temple is perfunctory—it is simply a sign to those under an old regime of holiness and cleanness, because the actual cleansing has already happened by Jesus' authoritative declaration. We can multiply examples of this from the Gospels. Two that particularly jump to mind are the menstruating woman who touched Jesus' garment to be healed (and was mortified when she was discovered, because she had covertly made the entire jostling crowd unclean by contact) and the forgiven, once-immoral woman known to engage in unclean sexual behavior who kissed, anointed, wept on, and wiped Jesus' feet. You can understand why the Pharisees, the theological descendants of Ezra in 1st-century Judaism, were as vexed about Jesus as Ezra had been about the returned exiles centuries before.

Jesus' example signaled a profound departure from Old Covenant assumptions about purity. No longer is it a given that the pure are always polluted by the presence of the common and unclean. God, who in his perfection is under no threat of defilement, has chosen to transgress those boundaries for the purpose of sanctifying and cleansing the human race. Obviously this stretches in the most profound way to include Christ's saving work on the cross. The blood of the Perfect One radically and irrevocably makes common people into the holy people of God and cleanses all their moral and ritual filth. The Old Covenant purification system could not do this. As the author of Hebrews points out (emphasis mine):

[The Law is] completely unable, by the same sacrifices offered continually, to perfect those who come to worship. For otherwise would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers would have been purified once for all and so have no further consciousness of sin? . . . By [God's] will we have been made holy through the offering of the body of Jesus once for all. . . . For by one offering he perfected for all time those who are made holy (Heb. 10:1-2, 10, 14).

The pattern of purity in Jesus extends still further to his ascension. Not only did his offering of himself give believers access to the holiest of holy places in heaven where God dwells, but then in his name God gave believers the gift of the Holy Spirit. In the most shocking leap over purity boundaries yet, the Holy One himself now lives inside human beings with mortal flesh and a vicious sinful nature. But rather than the Holy Spirit's presence vaporizing every body he enters, he actually converts our bodies—and our collective body, the Church—into his holy temples!

The amazing work of God to make the holy/clean transform the unholy/unclean rather than the other way around leads us to a very unusual New Testament parallel with Ezra's situation. Like Ezra, Paul had to deal with the situation of a holy person married to an unholy spouse. But Paul's viewpoint was, at least on the surface, completely the opposite of Ezra's:

To the rest I say—I, not the Lord—if a brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is happy to live with him, he should not divorce her. And if a woman has a husband who is not a believer and he is happy to live with her, she should not divorce him. For the unbelieving husband is sanctified because of the wife, and the unbelieving wife because of her husband. Otherwise your children are unclean, but now they are holy. But if the unbeliever wants a divorce, let it take place. In these circumstances the brother or sister is not bound. God has called you in peace. For how do you know, wife, whether you will bring your husband to salvation? Or how do you know, husband, whether you will bring your wife to salvation? (1 Cor. 7:12-16).

For Ezra, when the holy Jew married the unholy Gentile, the Jew's cleanness was compromised and the children of that union were unholy. But for Paul, when a holy Christian is married to an unholy unbeliever, the unbelieving spouse is actually sanctified through that union, as are the children that come from it. Now, there is some question as to what this sanctification is. We know from what Paul says at the end of the quoted passage that this sanctification is not tantamount to salvation as it is in the Hebrews passage quoted previously. But perhaps this leads us back to the idea of the Christian's body (and the church generally) as the temple of the Holy Spirit. Earlier in 1 Corinthians Paul says, "If someone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him. For God's temple is holy, which is what you are" (3:17). Because God lives in the believer, God jealously guards that believer. That includes the believer's body, which of course is still imperfect and shouldn't be fit for a holy God, but he guards it anyway. In fact, if an unholy person attempts to harm the holy temple of God, imperfect though it is, God will sweep him away as fiercely as he did when the unholy came into his presence in the Old Testament. (See, e.g., 2 Sam. 6:6-11 for an example of God's anger against someone who breaches the boundary of holiness and yet also blessing for those who abide near it at the proper distance.) The same appears to be true for the Christian's household. God is living in that household in the Christian who lives there, and so he considers the household his sacred dwelling, worthy of protection (particularly because the unbelieving spouse has allowed God into it by remaining married to the believer in whom God dwells).

And yet, despite the difference between Paul and Ezra on the subject of holiness in a mixed marriage, there is similarity too. Ezra's situation involved holy people who chose to become united with the unholy. Paul's situation involved an unholy person who became holy through the work of Christ after being married. When Paul turns to the subject of a holy Christian considering marriage, however, he draws the same line that Ezra does: "A wife is bound as long as her husband is living. But if her husband dies, she is free to marry anyone she wishes (only someone in the Lord)" (1 Cor. 7:39). A holy person mustn't willingly choose to be united with the unholy. Paul states this strongly and unequivocally in a profound passage that doesn't just relate to marriage but to any wide-ranging, settled alignment of purpose between believers and unbelievers:

Do not become partners with those who do not believe, for what partnership is there between righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship does light have with darkness? And what agreement does Christ have with Beliar? Or what does a believer share in common with an unbeliever? And what mutual agreement does the temple of God have with idols? For we are the temple of the living God, just as God said, "I will live in them and will walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people." Therefore, "come out from their midst and be separate," says the Lord, "and touch no unclean thing, and I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters," says the All-Powerful Lord. Therefore, since we have these promises, dear friends, let us cleanse ourselves from everything that could defile the body and the spirit, and thus accomplish holiness out of reverence for God (2 Cor. 6:14-7:1).

Here we see the paradox of holiness in the New Testament. In the Old Testament it was simple: when the holy/clean touches the common/unclean, the holy/clean is defiled. The New Testament is more complex. On the one hand we have the example of God himself in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, who flagrantly transgress all normal purity boundaries and rather than be defiled, they transform what they touch. In at least some circumstances (such as a converted spouse), the same thing operates through believers too. On the other hand, we see here in 2 Corinthians that it is still possible for a holy person to be defiled by contact with the unholy. How do we sort this out?

Well, despite that this is a cliché answer, it seems to be that we must be "in the world but not of it," which is a paraphrase of what Jesus prayed on behalf of his disciples:

I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. . . . I have given them your word, and the world has hated them, because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but that you keep them safe from the evil one. They do not belong to the world just as I do not belong to the world. Set them apart [sanctify them] in your truth; your word is truth. Just as you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world. And I set myself apart on their behalf, so that they too may be truly set apart (John 17:11, 14-19).

Jesus makes clear that he has sent his disciples to be in the world and transform it with the truth exactly as Jesus did. Their presence in the world wouldn't automatically defile them; instead, they would effect change in the world. However, they were not to be like the world they were in, and for this reason they would be resisted and hated by the world under Satan. Notice how Jesus employs the language of holiness here: "Set them apart/sanctify them," just as Jesus himself is sanctified and set apart even though he is "God with us."

This goes right along with guidance that Paul gives the church at Corinth (notice how often they pop up in this investigation of holiness?). A member of that church was sleeping with his father's wife, and Paul insists that they must discipline him by excluding him if he refused to repent. He concludes,

I wrote you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people. In no way did I mean the immoral people of this world, or the greedy and swindlers and idolaters, since you would then have to go out of the world. But now I am writing you not to associate with anyone who calls himself a Christian who is sexually immoral, greedy, or an idolater, or verbally abusive, or a drunkard, or a swindler. Do not even eat with such a person. For what do I have to do with judging those who are outside? Are you not to judge those inside? But God will judge those outside. Remove the evil person from among you (1 Cor. 5:9-13).

Notice how Paul makes clear that he has no intention of gathering the church into a "holy huddle" that has no contact with the outside world. The church is not defiled by contact with the world but rather is the means by which the world becomes sanctified. However, if the church tolerates worldly, unclean behavior within itself, then it does become defiled and risks the judgment of the Holy One (cf. Rev. 2:12-29). The defiling element must be purged.

This is the very same way that Jesus and the apostles describe individual holiness and cleanness. Jesus said,

"Don't you understand that whatever goes into a person from the outside cannot defile him? For it does not enter his heart but his stomach, and then goes out into the sewer." (This means all foods are clean.) He said, "What comes out of a person defiles him. For from within, out of the human heart, come evil ideas, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, evil, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, and folly. All these evils come from within and defile a person" (Mark 7:18-23).

A clean person, like a clean church, doesn't become unclean by contact with the unclean on the outside. He or she becomes unclean by the unclean things that are already inside and leak out. (For comparison, note my earlier post on keeping the Law within.) Likewise, interacting with an immoral person doesn't defile the Christian, just like it didn't defile Jesus. But when a Christian develops intimate ties with an immoral person, the immoral person's influence reveals the unholy motives, values, and agenda that were already lurking inside the professed believer. This is the resolution of the New Testament paradox of purity. The world itself cannot defile us, nor can the people in the world. But the lusts in our sinful nature that are titillated by the world and its people can make us impure, and when indulged, they do.

Two Yeshuas and the Samaritans

2011-03-07T14:05:00.000-05:00

This is the first post of a short series exploring how the Jews who returned from exile in Babylon to their homeland dealt with the non-Jews who surrounded them as depicted in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah. We'll see similar themes throughout, but because I have to start somewhere I'm going to proceed through chronologically beginning with Ezra 4:1-5.

Ezra 1-6 (except for a "flashforward" in 4:6-23) describes the first return of Jews to what would be called Judea and the beginning of rebuilding the temple during the reign of the Persian King Cyrus (Kurush) and then the completion of the building during the reign of Darius (Darayavahush) I. When they settled in Judea, the returned exiles reestablished the temple site as the place of worship and built an altar there (3:1-6). The following year they started the reconstruction by acquiring materials and organizing themselves (3:7-9) and by laying the foundation of the temple (3:10-13). When other inhabitants of the area saw what the Jews were doing, they wanted to participate, so they talked to the two chief leaders of the project, Jeshua, the high priest, and Zerubbabel, who later succeeded Sheshbazzar as the local governor of the Jews under the authority of the governor of the province "beyond the River [Euphrates]" (which comprised the territory extending eastward from the eastern shore of the Mediterranean).

The Jews' neighbors phrased their request, "Let us help you build, for like you we seek your God and we have been sacrificing to him from the time of King Esarhaddon of Assyria, who brought us here" (4:2). Apparently these folks had a lot in common with the Jews, right? Zerubbabel and Jeshua didn't think so; they replied, "You have no right to help us [or, 'We have nothing to do with each other to'] build the temple of our God. We will build it by ourselves for the LORD God of Israel, just as King Cyrus, the king of Persia, has commanded us" (v. 3).

Why so harsh? What was the problem? Well, the Jews' neighbors had indeed been making sacrifices to Yahweh, but not exclusively. They were worshiping Yahweh as part of a whole pantheon of gods. After the kingdom of Israel (the northern half of the entire Israelite people in contrast to the southern kingdom called Judah) was annihilated and many of its people were deported by the Assyrian Empire, the Assyrian King Esarhaddon eventually relocated other people from elsewhere in his empire to Israel. These immigrants were being eaten by lions sent by Yahweh, so to appease "the god of the land" the new arrivals started to worship him too (2 Kings 17:24-41). So though their descendants 150 years later were indeed worshiping Yahweh, their worship and probably even knowledge of him was not in accord with the laws God had given Israel through Moses, most notably in that they were worshiping other gods right alongside them.

Jeshua, Zerubbabel, and the rest of the leaders were rightly wary of allowing these folks to join them in building the temple. Israel's relentless tendency since meeting God in the Exodus was to worship Yahweh while worshiping other gods in idol form at the same time. Their persistence in this practice was what led God to exile them in the first place as he had first warned centuries before. They knew that serving shoulder to shoulder with these worshipers of other gods would lead them right back down that road.

And yet I can't help but suspect that Jeshua and Zerubbabel's response was overkill. Because even though God was crystal clear in his Word about the danger of fraternizing with worshipers of other gods, he also told Israel to expect that other nations would come to them asking to worship the True God with them (e.g., Isa. 2:1-4). That looks like what the Jews' neighbors, at least some of them, may have been doing here. This may have been a pregnant opportunity to teach the ignorant nations the truth about Yahweh that the Jews wasted out of a legitimate but disproportionate concern for the purity of their worship.

Ironically, the Jews' ability to worship Yahweh in purity was impaired as a result of them spurning their neighbors. Jealous and enraged, the non-Jews intimidated the Jews and bribed officials close to the successive kings of Persia to withdraw and withhold their support for the Jews' project, and construction of the temple lapsed for 14 years. The hostility escalated from there. About three quarters of a century after Ezra 4:1-5 took place, the Jewish scribe Ezra led Jewish men to divorce their Gentile wives and disown their children from those marriages (which I'll discuss in my next post). One can only imagine the seething resentment those children had toward Jews once they grew up. In the days of Nehemiah there was the threat of physical violence from the Jews' neighbors, some of whom were the descendants of those rejected by Jeshua and Zerubbabel. Back in Ezra 4:1 we see the original party in the dispute introduced as "the enemies of Judah and Benjamin." Without a doubt they were enemies after they heard Jeshua and Zerubbabel's response, not to mention when Ezra recorded the history a few generations after it happened, but I wonder if they were enemies from the start and if they had to be.

Four centuries later, the descendants of those who had been relocated to the old northern kingdom of Israel were known as Samaritans, and the enmity between them and the Jews had continued to simmer through all that time. By then the Samaritans' religion was much closer to Judaism, but it still had some of its own quirks. This hostility between the Jews and the Samaritans frames the ministry of a second High Priest Yeshua who appeared on the scene. ("Jeshua" and "Jesus" are different transliterations of the same name, "Yeshua.") Jesus took an entirely different approach from Jeshua and Zerubbabel. He responds with grace when a Samaritan town refuses him hospitality. He tells a story to a Jewish legal scholar in which a Samaritan is the model of adherence to the Law. He converses with a Samaritan woman whose sexual promiscuity recalls her ancestors' spiritual promiscuity, asserting that though the Jews have the facts from God, a day had already begun in which pure worship would be defined by Spirit and truth and could be entered into by anyone. And because he considers the residents of this woman's town part of the harvest that the Father gave him to reap, he stays there and many more believe in him. So it isn't surprising that some time after Jesus' ascension to the Father unholy, heterodox Samaritans would hear the gospel and believe and receive the Holy Spirit with power.

The contrast between the two Yeshuas' responses to the Samaritans seems to me to be a sort of parable of the tension between purity and mercy, two essential but paradoxical virtues that God wants us to exhibit. Jeshua and his contemporaries leaned all the way towards protecting their purity and made scant attempt to show mercy to seekers ignorant of the truth (the indication of an exception perhaps being Ezra 6:21). By contrast, Jesus was able to show mercy to Samaritans without his purity being tainted in the slightest. We'll look at how Jesus was able to do this along with the nature of purity and holiness next time.

Self-Interview about Same-Sex Marriage (3)

2011-03-05T16:09:00.001-05:00

I sat down with myself recently and asked myself some questions about same-sex marriage (part 3 of 3).

Do you think you will prevent same-sex marriage from becoming a legal and accepted part of American life?

Lately, no. The fight has ebbed and flowed with each side trading the momentum and the upper hand. We are still a significant distance from same-sex marriage being recognized in a widespread way in the United States. But the trends are pointing in that direction. I've observed a few things lately that don't really mean much of themselves but are indicators of our current trajectory. (1) A Pew poll shows increasing acceptance of same-sex marriage since 1996 with fewer than 50% (though still a plurality) opposing it now. (2) Apple's rejection of the Manhattan Declaration app (which I previously blogged about), labeling it "defamatory, offensive, mean-spirited or likely to expose the targeted group to harm or violence" and "objectionable and potentially harmful to others," and the almost total lack of media coverage of this story. (3) The Obama administration's recent decision not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in federal court. (4) An unusually bold comment by a conservative-leaning pundit I highly respect, David Brooks, that, though he "worr[ies] about a president not defending a law that's on the books," nevertheless, "on the substance I certainly agree with his position. I think he's moving toward the right position . . . maybe moving a little too slowly, and too slowly for the country, [for] which I think this is becoming a nonissue."

So why do you continue to speak against it?

Well, for one thing, it ain't over till the fat lady sings. As I said, this controversy has gone back and forth, and I don't know what's going to happen next. So what I write and say might still have a tiny influence. There could also be game-changers that we haven't foreseen yet. For instance, the huge turnout of blacks and Hispanics in California to elect President Obama in 2008 also contributed to the ballot initiative to amend the California Constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman the same year. Demographic changes because of immigration—especially if immigration reform is passed that allows many illegal immigrants to become citizens—could dramatically reshape the landscape on this issue.

But the main reason that I speak is that one job of a Christian, particularly a preacher, is to be a witness to truth. God appointed the prophet Ezekiel to be like a watchman, someone who foresees impending danger and shouts a warning. God made clear to Ezekiel that if someone chose not to heed Ezekiel's warning he was responsible for his own fate. But if Ezekiel saw the danger and did not warn the people, then their death was Ezekiel's responsibility. As it turned out, the people were destined not to heed Ezekiel's warning, but that did not make his prophecies useless. When the disaster came, there was a witness that it had come as a result of rebellion against God's law, not just military failure or political mismanagement. Perhaps someday we will be in a similar position, and the things that believers say now will ultimately point people to God and turn them to him. That would be a great thing, even if it is very unpleasant getting there.

What will you do if same-sex marriage becomes legal and mainstream?

Well, I will continue to maintain the standards I always maintain for the marriages I perform, whatever the consequences happen to be. I probably won't talk about it a whole lot, because there are other, bigger fish to fry, but I will maintain my position when it comes up. I expect to continue to hold to it even if younger generations of Christians think I'm a judgmental stick in the mud. If a government illegally restricts my freedom of religion on these grounds, I'll submit to being arrested. But I also want to be open to being corrected from the Word of God if in fact I've confused what the Lord has said with what I think.

So, do you have any hope for your position?

I have hope in something even more powerful. I have hope in the kingdom of God. I have hope that Christ will return and take sovereign authority over the whole world and set it up the way he wants it. I have hope that as I preach that message, people will believe and be saved on that great day. And I have hope that nothing can stop that. No one has ever lived in a community with perfect laws. Though a community will thrive in part because of how perfect its laws are, the community of my primary citizenship does have perfect governance and cannot be overcome by any other. I don't need to live in an ideal state to be happy, because in Christ I already live there, and I always will. And I am confident that more and more people will by God's grace opt to live there too no matter what our earthly communities become.