I’ve long thought that the major problem of the media was not so much bias (though bias is evidence) but shallowness. Today Allan Bevere said it much better.
Author: henry
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Reflections on Church and The Jesus Paradigm
As a publisher I have the joy of spending a great deal of time with a book as it goes through the process of publication. I don’t expect you to read my thoughts on The Jesus Paradigm as anything like a review, but there are some special things about this book and the way it has influenced me as I worked on it.
I like to think of my business as a ministry, which is “churchese” for “service.” It is my intent to serve both the church and the community with materials that challenge and educate. Now don’t get me wrong here. For a small publisher, signing an author who has written nearly as many books as the company has published is a sound business decision. I didn’t decide to sacrifice myself in service and publish this book contrary to my better judgment. It’s a good book; it’s a book that is likely to sell quite well; it’s also a book that is kingdom building.
Now as I frequently must, let me warn you that I’m going to be writing quite a few words. I’ve been thinking about the concept “church” for a long time and struggling with many things. This is also largely addressed to a Christian audience, so it may well bore others. Read on at your own risk!
What happened with this book was that a number of things I’ve been thinking about, things that have challenged me over the years, came into sharper focus while I was editing and preparing it for the printer.
I traditionally point out about now that I disagree with some things in a book I’ve published, and that this is a good thing rather than a bad thing. That’s part of developing brand identity since in a company founded by one person, it’s easy to confuse the person with the company.
But in this case I think anyone who looks at the header of this blog and reads a few essays, and then does the same thing on Dave Black Online will be in no danger of confusing the two of us.
What I think I need to emphasize instead is just how much I agree with in this book, and the tremendous value I find even in the things about which I have reservations (ecclesiology) or differences in emphasis (hermeneutics-maybe).
In my personal testimony I note how I left church after my seminary training (MA, not MDiv) because I then regarded Christianity as a total “one-way street” surrender. I note that at the time:
Some Christians argued with me that such a total surrender as I described was not required, but I could not see a partial surrender to God at the time, and I still can’t do so.
Despite believing that, I have struggled with how to put that into practice, particularly in church life. The extent to which “church” doesn’t work, or perhaps doesn’t appear to be what it seems the Bible points to, has continued to bother me.
Let me list some of the threads of thinking that have bothered me.
(1) Again as I note in my testimony, I felt God’s call to ministry as I was registering for the second year of a pre-law program. I switched to Biblical languages. Unfortunately I found that while many people would talk about a lack of Biblical knowledge in the pews, the church had no place for a teacher who was not also ready to pastor a church. I observed that pastors got overloaded and rarely had a chance to actually teach.
(2) If you look at most pastors and then write up a job description as you might for a business, you will see a job that nobody can actually perform. Our pastors cannot lead, teach, and equip, because they are so busy doing, and not necessarily doing the things that truly go with their calling.
(3) I grew up with missionary parents who were truly dedicated to their work. By this I mean being willing to go out to serve God at risk of life and limb and at times depending on God for their next meal. I spent four years in southern Mexico, and then three in Guyana (South America) and while we were in the United States, they worked in underserved areas.
In this process I experienced a number of things:
- I experienced mission trips as loading up mules and backpacks and hiking to a village, or in Guyana getting in a boat and heading up river. This gave me a different view of “discomfort” than I have encountered in various short term missions in which I have been involved.
- I experienced worship and teaching in circumstances that varied from outdoors under trees to small, simple churches that were no more than walls and a roof. I have felt the presence of God in places most Americans would regard as unusable.
- I learned that “mission” was not necessarily something you did in somebody else’s country
(4) By contrast, I have sat in American churches that would be inconceivably luxurious while people debated the color of the carpet for hours. Somehow I just couldn’t get into it. We’re replacing chandeliers that don’t look just right; Christians somewhere else are trying to do the minimum necessary to keep out the rain.
(4) I have wondered just how we could create a church that would carry out the work of the gospel as its primary mission. I don’t like evaluating ministry purely on a numbers basis, but I believe that you can often calculate what real priorities are by looking at where the money goes and secondarily by looking at how time is used. By this measure the priority of American churches in general is neither social service nor gospel preaching but rather self-maintenance.
Enter The Jesus Paradigm. In a sense it is almost fitting that the author, Dave Black, contracted Malaria while in Ethiopia and the book was released while he was in the hospital. As I have noted recently in writing about 2 Corinthians, the person can be inextricably linked with the written message. Paul didn’t want to boast, but he had to, while at the same time defending himself from the charge of weakness by claiming that he was weak.
In some of the reviews and in comments brought to me personally there have been questions about a number of things that are either lacking in the book or that people question. I’m not going to try to defend this book by saying that every word is absolutely correct and will stand the test of time. I’m not trying to make Dave Black into a prophet or incorporate his book into the canon of scripture.
These questions relate to ecclesiology and the lack of extended practical directions, both of which I will address, and the political commentary, which I will not.
One major question has been the lack of detailed practical advice on how to put the message of this book into practice. I don’t like to criticize reviewers as a publisher, but I think that criticism misses the point.
The way you put this into practice is by prayerful, constant surrender to Jesus. Read John 6:28-29. The problem is that we want a checklist, a program, or at least a detailed guide. The fact is that we have one–scripture brought to the moment by the power of the Holy Spirit.
I recall from my experience here in Pensacola with the Brownsville Revival. Now please lay aside your issues with what was being done in that revival. I’m not pointing to Brownsville as an example. Pastors and church leaders would come from far away and they would want whatever it as they perceived that Brownsville had. So they would go back home and try to apply what they had seen at Brownsville.
They would use the same music, not just the same style but the same songs. They would organize their services in the same way. They would try to style their preaching after the revival preacher Steve Hill. Then they would wonder why it didn’t work.
It didn’t work because kingdom service is not a program, nor is it a checklist, nor is it an organizational manual. It’s a surrender.
If you don’t know how to do this, dig into Acts and the Epistles, though only after you’ve thoroughly dug into the gospels. Spend your time in prayer and study and in listening to what God has to say to you. You will find ways to put the Jesus paradigm into action.
Another issue is with ecclesiology. How can this material be applied to a different structure of church than just Baptist? Here we may certainly have many disagreements as to details. These are good to discuss with the proper spirit.
I can look at this from my Seventh-day Adventist background and now as a United Methodist, and I think that the most critical thing here s the way church leadership thinks of themselves and behaves. I believe a Methodist church pastor could spread the Jesus paradigm through the committees of teams of his church structure just as boards of elders can do so in other church structures.
But the bottom line, in my view, has to be more revolutionary, but again I think it applies to all different structures. The issue is this: Where do our resources go? Do they serve our desires or do they serve others? As I have looked at the church budgets of the churches I have attended over the last few years, the vast majority of the budget goes to buildings and staff salaries, and the staff is largely charged with maintaining the members that are already there.
As long as we’re spending the majority of our money on maintenance, we’re not going to be reaching people as we should either in social services or in proclamation of the Christian message.
This is why I’m so delighted to have the opportunity to publish The Jesus Paradigm, and yes, to have the opportunity to market it as well. It will challenge us to apply this “downward path of Jesus” (also a phrase from the book) to our circumstances wherever we are. It will direct us to Jesus himself and the early church to find ways of doing that.
I don’t think this will necessarily be simple, but I think it’s time for us to be praying, thinking, and listening for the Holy Spirit in regard to how we can accomplish it. Otherwise, our churches are just an extremely expensive and annoying form of social club.
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Incredibly Irresponsible YouTube Video
… and given the quality of some YouTube videos, that’s saying something. In this case the WorldNetDaily is also pushing the idea, though they give some weak lip service to responsibility by noting that there are other ideas out there, and being sure to credit it all to the anonymous producer. If you want to watch the video, you can go to their site–I’m not going to embed it here.
Basically, by loosely translating some Greek words from Luke 10:18 into Hebrew, mixing them with a bit of really poor exegesis (I shudder to even use the word to describe this), pretending that all this relates to Jesus speaking Aramaic, and then comparing their sounds with yet another language, the producer of the video suggests that Jesus gave us a clue to who the antichrist is, and he is–drum roll please–President Barack Obama. He covers this by reciting some data about these ancient languages that is largely not relevant to his point, but makes him sound like he knows what he’s talking about, always assuming the listener does not.
Amongst the myriad problems are:
- The “heights” interpretation of “from heaven” in Luke 10:18 is by no means established, and actually unlikely.
- Back translating is always dangerous
- Even if all translations are allowed as valid, there is no form of this statement in which Jesus would have uttered something that sounded like “Barack Obama.” In order to get that combination of sounds the speaker had to use “lightning and a high place” which would be something like “baraq ubamah” with the ‘u’ being “oo” and not “oh.”
- Even if the speaker was not completely off base at that point (though he is), there is no contextual indication suggesting that a set of unrelated sounds in here should be taken as a name. Outside of context, many relationships can be found between sounds of different languages, none of which mean anything except that some sounds are similar to other sounds.
- The claim that a Rabbi endorses the video is not supported by the banner on which it is printed, since the Rabbi only confirms the translations of two phrases, and the second of those phrases is incorrect. I suspect miswording/misunderstanding on the part of those who created the video, assuming they contacted the Rabbi mentioned at all, because no Rabbi would make the error in question.
I’ve already given this guy too much time, but I did one more thing just for fun. Since he emphasized the Aramaic relationship, I looked to see how some folks who used a similar language–Syriac–actually translated the verse. Recall the dangers of back translation. The Peshitta reads “shemaya”, a reasonably close equivalent and cognate of the Hebrew “shamayim,” the very word the video produce rejects in favor of “bamah.”
I suspect some Christians are spreading this as a joke, but it’s not a good joke. It is improper use of scripture from start to finish. It constitutes innuendo and gossip, as people are disturbed by the implications. I wish I could say that the Christian community is well enough educated Biblically to simply reject this out of hand, but I’m afraid that’s not the case.
There’s a disclaimer saying that the video is not intended to suggest that Barack Obama is the antichrist. That’s much like the church gossip who says, “I saw our pastor out with X from the choir. I’m not suggesting there’s an inappropriate relationship, but …”
The producer says he’s remaining anonymous but he’s “not ashamed of what he put there.” He should be.
(A secondary hat tip goes to Dispatches, though a friend pointed this video out to me last night.)
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Scot McKnight on Walton on Genesis 1
Scot McKnight has started an 18 part discussion of John Walton’s book The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate
. Even though I have not yet read Dr. Walton’s book, I can tell you that this is a very important discussion for Christians and that I expect much value just from reading online discussions.
This first installment, referring to chapter one of the book, examines the claim that Genesis 1 is ancient cosmology and that God spoke to the Israelites using their knowledge of cosmology. Incidentally I have been arguing this since I was in college, and it is hardly original with me. It takes a long time for this sort of thing to penetrate from theological schools to popular level books.
To summarize:
“God communicated his revelation to his immediate audience terms they understood” (17). … [page # refers to book page #-HN]
Just so. That sentence could be considered the critical and central point of my own view of inspiration. That is why I can see something in scripture that is clearly wrong–according to our understanding of the data–and yet not say it’s wrong. It was right at the time and it is right for us now, because God intends us to read as a community that continues in time, and thus we are asked to understand both the human audience (both prophet and people) and the Divine Speaker.
I would note one thing here, which is that simply seeing Genesis 1 as ancient cosmology doesn’t settle all issues in the origins debate. I’ll be interested to see what transpires in further chapters. What I have found most tricky is dealing with the fall and redemption.
I’m very eager to see the rest of this discussion and to get my hands on Walton’s book.
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Popular Exegesis – Cutting the Knot
David Ker at Lingamish has started a series in which he looks for ways to bypass the Grammatical-Historical approach to Bible study and look for ways that would allow more people to get involved in the study.
To quote:
… In fact, GHI [Grammatical-Historical Interpretation-HN] rather than illuminating the texts almost always results in muddying the waters and leaving us less certain about the “original intended meaning,” (OIM). What GHI fails to address is the need for intuitive and populist ways to arrive at Scriptural meaning leading to appropriate localized applications….
It’s a bit ironic for me that he begins his series just as I am starting to follow Scot McKnight’s series on John Walton’s book on Genesis (see my initial notes on my threads blog). This discussion of Genesis 1 illustrates what I would see as a clear case in which approaching the text without some context in terms of ancient literature in which to understand it would result in an incorrect understanding.
Having expressed my skepticism, however, I intend to follow David’s posts rather closely as I would like to get hold of any light he can shed on ways that people can reasonably and accurately study the Bible for themselves without excessive dependence on others. By dependence on others I don’t mean a proper dependence in terms of getting facts from those who have researched them, but rather the dependence that says, “A scholar says it means X so it <em>must</em> mean X.”
David is certainly pointing at a very real problem. My tendency is to believe the problem won’t be solved unless the believers in the pew decide to spend more time on their Bibles. But I’m willing to hear any shortcut that doesn’t result in each person coming out with an individual opinion without good checks on that opinion.
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2 Corinthians – The Importance of the Story
I’m reading Frank J. Matera’s fine commentary on 2 Corinthians
, and today was reading about Paul’s recitation of his history with the Corinthians as the basis for what he was about to teach them. I warn you that this post is only partially about 2 Corinthians. It is more broadly about the importance of seeing the stories involved in each passage of scripture.
The word “story” gets used a great deal when talking about Biblical interpretation these days. I want to be careful in explaining how I am using it here. I am not suggesting that we each have a story (though we do) and that any story is equally valid. Rather, I’m suggesting that the story of God’s revelation is important in understanding scripture overall, and that the particular stories of prophets, apostles, and audiences are critically important in understanding and applying passages effectively.
More than one story can intersect as well. In both letters to the Corinthians we can look at a story of God revealing himself to the believers in Corinth, using the apostle Paul and others in doing so. There is the story of Paul living out his life as an apostle of Jesus Christ. There is a story of preservation in that this content is made available to us. Finally, there is a story of God bringing his word to me and to you in our particular circumstances.
This doesn’t mean that just any story will do and that we must give equal credence to all stories. In fact, paying close attention to the stories will bring us to a more focused view of the meaning of various passages.
No commentator that I know of ignores the story of Paul’s interactions with the Corinthians. I have previously enjoyed Gordon Fee’s commentary on 1 Corinthians
, which I regard as the best single-volume, pastor accessible commentary I have ever read. Fee is very concerned with Paul’s story as indeed he must be. Similarly Matera is very conscious of that continued story in the commentary I’m currently reading. I bring these two together, because both relate the story in such a way as to preserve the unity and the coherence of both letters.
In 2 Corinthians, the story helps us see some important elements of being a servant who proclaims God’s word. Paul can sound quite boastful as he defends his own ministry and integrity. He is quite conscious of the problem as he writes, but nonetheless he knows that his integrity, his calling, and his reliability are inextricably linked to the proclamation of his gospel.
This second letter, or more likely fourth letter assuming we’re missing two, teaches that the gospel manifests itself not merely in a set of beliefs, but also in a life. It is especially important for those chosen to proclaim the gospel to display the gospel in their lives.
I think 2 Corinthians is particularly susceptible to being mined for theological quotes, because the letter as a whole is difficult, yet it so obviously contains many theological gems. But we may miss the emphasis of those gems by pulling them out of their setting.
Let me illustrate this from 1 Corinthians, which I think is also very subject to quote mining. Chapter 12 is frequently used in charismatic circles as a chapter about gifts. The emphasis is on determining just what each gift means and what the person having that gift will be able to do. But Paul is not primarily attempting to catalog gifts. His concern is with the source of these gifts and how they are to be used. He’s telling the church in Corinth that the gifts that they have are to be used in unity under the authority of the one Spirit.
Chapter 13 is a beautiful chapter, but frequently those talking about gifts and worship skip straight over it to get to chapter 14 where we’re talking about nuts and bolts again–fun stuff! But Paul didn’t just let his mind wander into some special spiritual realm in order to write chapter 13. Read it carefully with chapters 12 and 14, and you’ll see how Paul’s definition of love is also a way to describe how one uses God’s gifts under God’s Spirit. It connects closely with what precedes and follows it.
Note here that in narrowing he focus from a general treatise on gifts to a discussion of the source and purpose of those gifts, we also broaden the discussion to cover Christian behavior in general. Chapter 12 provides a pattern for using any and all of our gifts, talents, and resources, and then chapter 13 names that “love” and expands on just what it means.
Chapter 14, in turn, is frequently mined for quotes to apply to almost any worship setting, but the fact is that most of our churches do not have a worship service like the one in Corinth that they need to bring into line with God’s Spirit. Be honest now! How many churches can say that at their worship services, “each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation” (1 Corinthians 14:26 ESV)?
Yet I’ve heard verse 40 (“decently and in order”) used to argue that one can’t make any change in the bulletin at all, or that nobody other than the pastor and designated readers should speak.
Getting into the pastoral situation in which Paul finds himself would help us apply this properly. Perhaps we should move our focus from verse 40, as important as that is, and look more at verse 26. When we actually have two or more people wanting to speak at once, then we could try working on some of the other verses. Right now, most of the churches I visit are singularly short on “lessons” and “revelations” not to mention the rest.
To return to 2 Corinthians, I am getting the feeling that God is challenging me through Paul’s experience to make myself a better example of the gospel that I claim to teach.
But watch out even there, because 2 Corinthians also tells us about God using the weak. How to I make myself a better example? I let God use my weaknesses. The gospel, after all, is about grace, not about my strength or brilliance.
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How to Accomplish God’s Will
This is my second thought today from John 6:24-35, the gospel passage from Proper 13B. It’s a tightly packed passage!
In verses 28-29 Jesus says:
28They said to him, “What do we need to do to perform God’s works?” 29Jesus answered, “This is God’s work: That you put your trust [or believe] in the one who sent him.
My company just released The Jesus Paradigm by Dr. David Alan Black. This is a book about discipleship and the ministry we need to do as Christians. One of the questions I have heard most frequently about it is that with so much about doing, how is it that Christians are supposed to do. What happened to faith?
Well, one very Biblical answer is that faith is working. Perhaps if people studied John more, it would help mediate between the positions of Paul and James. Paul is talking about the uselessness of works apart from faith. James talks about the uselessness of faith without works. Jesus here tells us that faith is works.
Now this may sound heretical to many, but the fact is that we’ve departed from the teaching of Jesus on this. There is no sense in reading what Jesus has to say that Christians are going to sit around believing stuff. The sense is that belief is a profoundly life-altering thing. Putting one’s trust in Jesus is not easy or trivial. If you put your trust in Jesus, then he will change everything about you.
This is the answer to how we can do the work of disciples–we put our trust in Jesus and he works in us. At the risk of sounding too commercial, let me mention the title of another book that I publish–Disciples: Jesus With Us. Discipleship is you following Jesus in one sense, but in another it’s Jesus in you, following Jesus.
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Eating the Bread – Missing the Sign
Our gospel passage (John 6:24-35) for Proper 13B is pretty tightly packed, so I’m going to write a couple of short articles about it this morning. I’ve thought about many things as I was reading this passage, but I won’t have time to write about them all.
First of all, as I read this morning, I’m using the Greek and Hebrew Reader’s Bible, which presents the text along with lexical information, including morphology. I will have some comments on this resource as a tool later today on my Participatory Bible Study Blog. (I’ll correct that link to point to the specific post as soon as I get the notes written.)
In verse 26 Jesus tells the people that they believed not because they saw the sign but because they ate the bread. I believe many people would regard those as the same thing, and this results in a continuing misunderstanding of the role of miracles in the church and in the world. There’s a tendency to believe that seeing something that appears to be a miracle is simply a way to make people believe that God exists. If you’ve seen the miraculous event, you’ve seen the “sign.”
But Jesus here points to a different reality. Jesus didn’t produce bread for people to eat simply because he wanted some bread. He had another purpose, a deeper purpose. It was quite possible to witness what we would call a miracle, and at the same time miss the point entirely.
In modern times, particularly in charismatic or pentecostal churches, we expect God to work miracles on a constant basis to alter the physical reality of our lives. (Note that I use “we” here because I tend charismatic.) Then we complain when God doesn’t do what we think he should. But God doesn’t perform miracles for the sole purpose of altering physical reality. We’re living in the big miracle, the very universe, and then we complain when God allows (or causes) his universe to function consistently.
When a miracle comes, we are thankful for the physical result, but do we see the sign? Do we see the work that God is wanting to perform in our lives? Do we even use the results of God’s actions to build God’s kingdom?
The people who ate the bread began to think of Jesus as a good source of physical bread. And God is the source of physical bread. But the way God normally wants you to get physical bread is by following the patterns he has laid out in the universe and growing it. This bread was to point people to Jesus himself, as the bread of life.
Thought question: In what ways can we “eat the bread” but fail to see the sign in our lives today?
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A Different Look at Seeker Sensitivity
Doug Rea says all churches should be seeker sensitive, but who is seeking?