Tebow in the Lions' Den

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

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

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

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.

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)

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

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

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

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?

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.