Fair warning: I’ll probably be stuck on definitions. In fact, I’m in the process of writing a blog post about it right now. I’ll add a link to this one once the other is complete. (Here’s the link: Bloody Sacrifices and Salvation.)
Here’s the viewer:
I read Joshua 24, including Joshua’s farewell speech today. There are quite a number of texts in this chapter that are quoted regularly without any knowledge of their source or of the circumstances. One is Joshua 24:15 “… as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” Now there’s a pink elephant in the room, the genocide of the Canaanites, which is generally ignored. I will just point out that it cannot actually have happened quite that way, because the Canaanites survived in large numbers, as the book of Judges tells us. Yet there’s still the issue of the claim. That’s a shocking point in a story, but I’m going to ignore it today myself.
I’m interested in the fact that the call to faithfulness presented here, described as a torah, or instruction (v. 26, “written in the book of the torah of God”), is embedded in a story. Joshua goes way back to give us the shocking information that Abraham worshiped other gods. There is a much abbreviated presentation of the history that has brought the Israelites to this place.
But the use of story is also challenging. In the book of Jonah, God behaves in unprecedented ways. The book or Ruth presents a story that stands in contrast to specific instructions regarding the Moabites. While Daniel is commended for keeping to Torah, Esther appears to live without people realizing she’s a Jew.
The actual stories present a much more complex picture of God related to his people and God’s people in their activities, ethics, and theology. The story of Samson in Judges is one of those surprises. We can dress it up for Sunday School as a servant of the Lord carrying out his mission for his people with miraculous support, but it really reads like someone who couldn’t ditch the stupid and kept stumbling into ways to kill Philistines, the enemies of Israel. He ends up kill a few thousand while committing suicide.
I believe that theology is easy, but life is hard. Yes, we can debate theology all day, and it’s pretty near impossible to understand the trinity. A pastor friend of mine told me that with the trinity, if you think you understand it you probably don’t. But face it, as much as we enjoy debating theology, mistakes in the classroom have little impact.
When they get into real life, however, theological ideas can end up healing the sick or burning people at the stake. And everything in between. That’s the value, I believe, in reading stories and placing all our theology in real life as much as we can.
It’s not that there’s no truth. It’s not that there’s no right or wrong. It’s just that life manages to scramble our hopes of always having a clear knowledge of it. That’s why we need to exercise our faculties so we can tell.
And when we read stories, and live our lives, we need to go deeper than just finding the moral. If you find just one moral of a story, you probably haven’t thought of it enough. If you learned just one thing from an experience, spend some more time thinking about it.
Life is hard. Theology can help you.
But only if you hone your theology in real life.
(Image credit: Adobe Stock [105521664]. I have licensed this image, but it is NOT public domain.)
Tonight I’ll be interviewing Dr. William Powell Tuck about the practice and value of preaching. Here’s the viewer.
Scot McKnight (whose work I deeply appreciate) quotes Dennis Prager (whom I rarely read) on his site, talking about the difference between the “left” and “liberals.” You can follow the link to read what set me off.
Labels are necessary if we are to communicate. Words are, pretty much, labels. All labels have limitations. The word “tree” can evoke different meanings. Different people might have different boundaries between a tree and a shrub, for example. That’s why we have words, and not just a word. We have phrases, clauses, sentences, and yes, even paragraphs. You use those to explain the detailed boundaries of the way you are using a particular label.
The problem is not labels. The problem is the misuse of labels. Politics gives birth to lots of misuse because those in politics want to have shorthand ways of vilifying opponents. So we take a group’s label, find all the bad things done by anyone who might fit that label, and apply them to the entire group. That’s why we have videos from liberals (as defined today, not the century old definition used by Prager), showing stupid conservatives. This is supposed to leave us with the impression that everyone on the right is an idiot and knows nothing.
In turn (and I don’t care who went first, just “in turn” in terms of this rant), we have conservatives producing videos of stupid liberals.
Wow! I am so utterly dumbfounded! There are stupid Republicans. And Democrats. And liberals. And conservatives. And Christians. And non-Christians. And …
The only thing we should get from such videos is a low opinion of the people who make them.
My problem with these labels is that while I know stupid people who hold a variety of positions, I also know intelligent ones. Intelligent conservatives, liberals, progressives, leftists, rightists, and so forth. I find no sense in which you can determine intelligence by political position. Further, I know of no way to discover how charitable someone is through a label. Sure there are surveys, but do you really want to assume that a survey applies to each person you meet? I find it much easier to just talk to them and then listen.
My father, for example, was a vigorous opponent of what he called socialized medicine. Yet he gave away medical services or charged less than the market would bear all his life. He never turned anyone away over money. He died as John Wesley suggested with very little. Without a doubt he cared, cared deeply, and did something about it. I’m sure my conservative friends will applaud.
But there are others, “leftists” if you please, who believe very firmly that everyone should have medical care. They don’t believe private charity can accomplish it, so they work to make it available to everyone using the mechanism of government. Their purpose is not to “get” the drug companies, the health care equipment manufacturers, or the doctors. Their purpose is to provide better health care for more people. They aren’t evil. They take a different approach.
There’s plenty of room to debate these approaches. But none of this will happen if we assign all possible evil characteristics to our opponents, and all possible good ones to our allies.
One of the characteristics that will prevent any movement toward unity is the desire to vilify groups of our opponents, not by labeling them, but by misusing their labels or by mislabeling them.
A little generosity in the use of labels would go a long way. And no, don’t assume I blame most mislabeling on the right because the quote that set me off was from Dennis Prager. This issue has plenty of blame to go around. Several times.
(Featured image credit: Openclipart.org.)
I’m embedding this interview with Dr. Herold Weiss, author of Meditations on the Letters of Paul, as it provides some background for understanding some of the discussion of the terminology that I’m doing right now in working through Paul. I find it very helpful in clarifying the issues.
Students at UC San Diego are trying to solve a really serious problem.
(Because of the way this theme works, you need to go to the actual post to get the link. At some point I’ll try to figure out how to change that.)
This will continue the discussion, dealing more with definitions. In the area of soteriology (the study of salvation) we frequently make the same statements in terms of words and structure, yet mean something quite different by it. “Jesus died on the cross to save us from our sins” means quite different things, depending on who is saying it.
With a tip of my hat to James McGrath, I would like to call attention to this post by Jonathan Bernier. I think it brings up some rather important points. This is not an answer to your questions, but rather a bit of guidance in how one answers questions accurately. To quote:
The critical historian is one who formulates a question, attends to the data relevant to answering that question, weighs possible answers, and then affirms that answer which handles the relevant data best.
But you need to read the whole thing to get what author Jonathan Bernier means by that.
Everybody, well almost, says they want Christian unity. It’s one of those Sunday School answers. It’s like saying, “Everybody who loves Jesus raise your hand” in a Sunday School class.
But when you raise your hand for Christian unity, what do you mean? What is your vision?
I’ve been thinking of this as I hear various people talk, and asking myself what I would hope for. We can easily be just as disunited about unity as we are about anything else!
It seems to me that there are several possible aspects of unity, and not all of them necessarily work together.
I’m sure I could come up with more if I spent time. I might also distinguish any sort of unity as inward or outward looking. Inward looking unity unites us (as we define us) against them, while outward looking unity unites us because we can thus better serve both us and them. These are kind of polar opposites, and most actual cases would fall variously between.
When talking about Christian unity, however, we also have to consider what it is we are uniting. This might fall under unity of doctrine, but it could also be classified as unity of culture. We can end up calling for unity of all conservative evangelicals, just plain evangelicals, liberals/progressives, charismatics, pentecostals, etc., because in our minds that is what “Christian” is. I’ve encountered people who sought the unity of everyone who believes in Jesus. After all, believing in Jesus, they tell me, is all that matters. But when you drill down, they mean very specific things by “believing in Jesus,” such as believing in Jesus in the sense of penal substitutionary atonement.
I say all this to suggest that we do need to think, and hopefully think clearly, about what we mean when we call for unity.
I like the use of metaphors in discussing this, and two metaphors came to my mind as I thought about writing this post. First, dancing. You might think of a dance school or even a dance conference or gathering of some sort. The way I see this is that there are a myriad of things that are called dance, and one person might even think what someone else does isn’t really dancing. At a school or a large gathering, you will likely have a variety of styles, from individual displays to large groups. You’ll find different styles of choreography. Everybody dances, as they see it. There’s a structure and an organization, but the boundaries are blurred as some creative people break the rules. As long as nobody gets violent, everyone can have fun.
Second, I see a river. The river has tributaries, currents, eddies, changes of channel over time, turns, blockages, and may even, as it arrives at the sea, divide into a river delta. A water molecule may take many different roads along the river path, but in general, the water gets to the sea.
These two metaphors speak two me of common purpose and destination, with intervening differences. They also save me, I think, from going to far in defining someone else’s unity. (I want you to feel the internal contraction is assigning ownership of unity to a person, of a unity of different unities.) You can be a middle of the river water molecule or one who tries all the currents and eddies or spends time in quiet pools near the shore as the river meanders along. You can be in the contests for the traditional dances, or out playing with styles that are seeking recognition. You might get dipped out of the river and used for someone’s shower or bath, or even to flush a toilet before you get back to the river. Gotta love mixing those metaphors, or at least stirring them.
What is your vision of unity?
I want to briefly reflect on the sacraments. This is not so much a general theological reflection as a personal comment, expressing my own position on this. As I said a couple of days ago regarding hearing the voice of God, in a spiritual movement there is much listening, much hearing, and much creativity. Structure comes in to resolve this chaos into a tighter community, but structure also often works to kill it. Thus we have a closed canon. None of us can be spiritual in a New Testament sense precisely because we have a New Testament, or even more precisely because we have a New Testament regarded in this manner. Both structure and freedom (even chaos) have value in community, but they also are at war with one another.
Herold Weiss, in his book Meditations on According to John, makes this comment (p. 152):
The sacraments were established toward the end of the first century when Christianity was becoming institutionalized and starting to create official channels through which the Holy Spirit could flow under ecclesiastical control.…
This is structure fighting the chaos that results when people listen to God for themselves, or think they are doing so. God’s presence when two or three are gathered is a nice thing, but the organized church much prefers that God’s presence be manifested in groups of two or three hundred, or perhaps thousand, led by an ordained minister, supported by an adequate staff. Breaking out the bread and wine at lunch with a couple of friends, praying over it, sharing it (along with, say, a nice dish of pasta), and feeling the presence of Jesus is not sanctioned by church law.
In thinking about this I think I have a very high view of the sacraments in that I believe that Jesus is really present, that there is something different about communion or the Eucharist than about our common meals. Where I differ from the normal high view, I think, is that I don’t really think God cares that much about our church laws. If two or three friends shared their food and drink with the intention of truly inviting Christ to be present, I think he will be, regardless of ritual, ordination, or the structure in which it takes place. It can happen in a bar as you share beer and pretzels.
Indeed, if someone accepted Christ and a totally unordained person dips them under the water, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, I think they have been buried with Christ and will come up in newness of life.
I suspect that the same actions in some of our buildings, performed by persons chosen and ordained for the purpose, sometimes fail to accomplish anything. People just get wet or take a morsel or bread or wine. It depends on the hearts, I think, which God truly sees, and I do not.
I’m not planning to go on a crusade of sacraments outside the church. The reason for this is not the success of the sacrament itself in mediating God’s presence. Rather, I think that God’s call is to community. I would ask the folks with beer and pretzels to find more people with whom they can share the presence of Christ. I would ask them to build bonds and form communities.
Contrary to the idea that the communion meal should remain separate from our secular meals, however, I believe God’s intent is that the communion meal take over from the secular, that more and more of our lives become sacred. We learn to distinguish, as Leviticus says, the holy from the common, but we do so not in order to segregate them, but in order to allow the holy to draw into itself the common until all is holy.
I believe that’s about as high a view of the sacraments as one can have.
