David Lipscomb: A New Take on an Old Story

Actually, what follows is not a new take on the Babel story at all. It was a fairly common hermeneutical move during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, when they sat you down in Sunday school and taught you about the tower of Babel, I suspect it was never intended to be an illustration of the evils of government. How did Lipscomb and so many others make this hermeneutical leap? Let's see:

It is clear that human government had its origin in the rejection of the authority of God, and that it was intended to supersede the Divine government, and itself constituted the organized rebellion of man against God. This beginning of human government God called Babel, confusion, strife. It introduced into the world the organized development and embodiment of the spirit of rebellion, strife and confusion among men. God christened it Babel. It soon grew into the blood-thirsty, hectoring Babylon, and subjugated the surrounding families, tribes and kingdoms to its dominion, and became the first universal empire of the earth, and maintained its sway until the days of Daniel.

When we consider that God and the early inhabitants of the earth named things, persons, and institutions from their chief and distinguishing characteristic, it cannot be doubted, that God
intended in calling this first government established by man "confusion," and in so speedily confusing the language of its founders, to foretell that the chief and necessary results flowing from the displacement of the Divine will and the establishment and perpetuation of human government, would be confusion, strife, bloodshed, and perpetual warfare in the world. The results have vindicated the truth of the prophecy couched in the name. The chief occupation of human governments from the beginning has been war. Nine-tenths of the taxes paid by the human family, have gone to preparing for, carrying on, or paying the expenses of war.

All the wars and strifes between tribes, races, nations, from the beginning until now, have been the result of man's effort to govern himself and the world, rather than to submit to the government of God. I am not intimating in this, that human government is not necessary, I believe that it is necessary, and that God has ordained it as a punishment to man for refusing to submit to the government of God and it must exist so long as the human family or any considerable portion of it refuses to submit to the government of God. Human government originated in the rebellion of man against his Maker, and was the organized effort of man to govern himself and to promote his own good and to conduct the affairs of the world independently of the government of God. It was the organized rebellion of man against God and his government. The essential character of this government, as portrayed by God will be given here-after.

Lipscomb's hermeneutical lens, not to mention his grasp of ancient history, may leave something to be desired, but, for my part, after I first read this interpretation of the Babel story, I never looked at the beginning of Genesis the same way again.

The Wisdom of Roger Hines

The April-June of the Magnolia Messenger, which I am still receiving without ever having subscribed, includes an article by Roger Hines on the difference between secular pluralism and Christian pluralism. I'm not entirely sure I agree with his use of the term "pluralism" in this context--and I certainly don't agree with all the points he makes throughout the article--but his comments on the divisive way that secular culture treats difference in a paradoxical attempt to construct unity has distinct Vernard Eller overtones:

Secular pluralists teach that the differences are the determining factors in any interaction with people. The ultimate determiner of how one views marriage, how one views public policy and the role of government, how one views religion and its role in society, how one views human life in the individual and the group with which the individual aligns himself or herself. The group determines truth.

This is seen even in how groups view the Bible, not as containing a timeless message that calls one to subordinate the group to the lordship of Christ but as a message that the group can adapt to fit its own goals. So, the members of the group (i.e. liberation theology, feminist theology, black theology, gay theology, Marxist theology) view the relevance of the gospel in relation to how it relates to what they deem important.

Thus, by its very nature, secular pluralism is divisive and self-serving.

Customized Christianity: Ethics à la Carte

The following is one of a multi-part response to an article by Jim Burklo entitled "How To Live As a Christian Without Having to Believe the Unbelievable." For an introduction to these thoughts, see Burklo's Bible.
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I have made a number of arguments against Jim Burklo’s vision of a believable Christianity over the past week. I criticized his willingness to assume an oppositional relationship between faith and practice, his inability to distinguish between marginal and central biblical stories and truths, his dangerous Christology, and his selective hermeneutic. All of these, however, are part of a broader flawed attempt to collapse religion into ethics. It is only by elevating ethics to the status of comprehensive and exclusive truth that he can effectively disregard the doctrine, dogma, and fantastic stories that he believes hinder people from finding genuine Christianity. Unfortunately for Burklo, Scripture gives us every indication that ethics are rooted in theology, conditioned by soteriology, and aimed toward eschatology (just to name a few of those evil, confusing categories that label trivial matters).

Burklo, as mentioned repeatedly, believes that the central message of the Gospel is the Sermon on the Mount. Far be it from me to ever stand in the way of someone trying to refocus Christians on the Sermon on the Mount, but the majority of Protestant Christianity is going to have a bone to pick with Burklo. And rightly so, as there seems to be a general consensus that, if a single passage encapsulates the gospel, the real text of central importance is John 3:16. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Look at that. We have a theological statement about the nature of God flowing into a soteriological statement about the mechanism of salvation flowing into an eschatological statement about the eternal destiny of humanity. Do you notice what’s missing? Any mention of ethics. This has been the animating sentiment of so much of Protestantism, precisely because of its antinomian character, from Luther’s sole fide to the now widespread evangelical idea (specifically derided by Burklo) of a personal relationship with Jesus.

Certainly, I am part of a generation that wants to correct the stress on faith without ethical strictures, but there is much to commend Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus (one of those passages where Jesus is speaking but Burklo apparently isn’t listening, as there is nothing about social justice) as a good synopsis of the purpose of the Incarnation. The biblical text is not the narrative of the struggle for a moral principle to take root among moral actors but of a perfect God trying to reconcile to Himself a willfully imperfect creation. This reconciliation, the New Testament makes very clear, takes place not with Jesus preaching on the mountain top but with him dying on the cross, being buried in the tomb, and conquering death in the resurrection. Christianity is not an ethical system which we can be convinced to believe but a comprehensive experience of a personal God that radically shapes more than just our ethics.

Otherwise, the poor are left to hope in the moral regeneration of the world for their deliverance. The sick are left to hope in the dedicated work of altruistic physicians for their healing. The oppressed are left to hope for a people powerful enough to enact their liberation but righteous enough not to use that power to oppress. It’s a false hope, an empty hope, very much like faith in an unresurrected Christ is an empty faith. Faith in Christ and hope for an inbreaking kingdom are realities which transcend how we treat one another. They have to do with the totality of existence, and all of reality falls inside the scope of Christian faith.

Genesis, historical or not, teaches us about the nature of the physical world and God’s relationship to it. The Psalms reveal the human character, both as it is and how it can be when it allows itself to be transformed, more than just morally, by the redeeming power of God. Job guides us through the problem of evil and, centuries before the greatest philosophers the world has known would reach the same conclusion, declares that it is irresolvable (but nevertheless God). The prophets instruct us on the interrelatedness of piety and social justice, a lesson Burklo could stand to revisit. Micah introduces us to a vision of the culmination of reality which will define not only Judeo-Christian eschatology but the whole of Western civilization’s utopian vision: peace, fertility, leisure, uncoerced global unity, and the eternal pursuit of knowledge.

Most, if not all, of these themes are taken up explicitly or alluded to by Jesus in his ministry and, if we are going to accept the validity of the biblical account, they must be engaged by Christians as well. We cannot simply call them trivialities, hindrances in the way of creating a heaven on earth (something which Burklo doesn’t seem to believe that Scripture explicitly states is beyond the scope of human possibility). God’s transformative work is not limited to human behavior. Being in Christ is a total transformation, and that includes those pesky truths that Burklo encourages us to ignore. We may never understand them perfectly and we may dispute about them until the second coming, but pursing those truths is part of the great pursuit of perfection, of conformity to the image of Christ.

And, of course, an unwillingness to engage these doctrines and stories, the marginalization of everything that isn’t explicitly command in the social ethics of Jesus, has profound and tragic implications for ethics. Burklo relishes the fact that “Jesus said nothing about [homosexuality and abortion] whatsoever in the New Testament. There’s no hint in the Bible that these topics mattered to him at all.” While the factual accuracy of much of this may be disputed, the real issue is with Burklo’s logic. By the same reasoning, Jesus never mentioned eugenics and therefore there is no reason to assume that the actions of Nazi Germany bothered him. He certainly didn’t talk about atomic weaponry and therefore the atrocities in Nagasaki and Hiroshima probably wouldn’t have mattered to him. After all, harkening back to the points about the divine sparks, Truman probably reasoned that the bomb was how many Americans thought they could express love for the Pearl Harbor widows.

In truth, Jesus presented a radically different view of reality, and more than presenting it, he inaugurated it. The mission of Christ was not primarily one of persuasion. It was one of redemption, and it is impossible to crack the pages of Scripture and think otherwise. The greatest change achieved when he ascended into heaven was not that he had presented a wonderful new ethos for people to construct their own heaven but that he had made of himself the conduit through which humanity might find themselves reconciled to God—which, it turned out, is “heaven.” Trying to take Christianity and customize it, sanitize it, by saying, “I like the ethics but not the other teachings” (i.e. doctrine, dogma, and stories) is a little like saying, “I’m a Muslim but only because I feel compelled to make a trip to Mecca once in my life.” Religions are not like buffets: “none of that ‘I’d rather gouge out my eye than go to hell’ nonsense but I’ll have a double helping of the meek shall inherit the earth.” They stand or fall on the strength of their interrelated features. Frankly, without a benevolent, personal deity who became incarnate as an expression of love to recreate the world and me with it if only I choose to allow myself to be transformed, the Sermon on the Mount doesn’t make sense. If I’m imagining my most pleasurable world, my “heaven on earth,” I’m ashamed to admit that liberating the oppressed is a lower priority than legalizing marijuana and prostitution. Certainly turning the other cheek doesn’t sound heavenly at all.

Customized Christianity: Do As I Say, Not As I Do

The following is one of a multi-part response to an article by Jim Burklo entitled "How To Live As a Christian Without Having to Believe the Unbelievable." For an introduction to these thoughts, see Burklo's Bible.
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In spite of his unorthodox view of the nature of Jesus and his divine spark, Burklo does put an appropriate stress on Jesus as the central figure in the Christian religion. It is his thought, his teachings, and his deeds which need to take critical importance rather than Calvin or Wesley or Luther or Campbell (to steal an old and mostly unfounded intra-Protestant polemic). Unfortunately, Burklo thinks that it is appropriate, for whatever reason, to be very selective about what in those human documents about Jesus are really important and which are not.

We have already observed that Burklo was prepared, inexplicably, to declare the unique passage in Matthew 5-7 the central message of the gospel and the resurrection, retold by all four gospel writers and Paul, doesn’t really matter. This is really reflective of a broader fallacy for Burklo of paradoxically trying to affirm what Jesus said and reject what he did. He admits that Jesus’ moral teachings are hard to swallow, but insists that therein lies their moral force. Then, in direct contradiction, he declares the stories about Jesus hard to swallow and therefore expendable. It isn’t just the resurrection imperiled by Burklo’s Jeffersonian attempts to purge the Bible of the unbelievable. In the course of listing all the things Jesus doesn’t mention, he points out:

The Sermon on the Mount makes no mention of believing in miracles, believing the doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ, believing in the Trinity or the Apostle’s Creed, or even “accepting Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior”.

Ironically, in the previous entry we noted that one of the core features of Burklo’s vision of love is healing the sick. It’s unfortunate that, in spite of that commission, Christians are being instructed to disbelieve the miraculous healing stories. Not to mention the famous reply of Jesus to John, “the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them.” Having made clear already that he doesn’t believe in miracles and especially not in resurrection, Burklo makes Jesus a liar or at least his human biographers. If that’s the case, why should we even bother to take the all-important Sermon on the Mount all that seriously? Perhaps it is just hyperbolic or distorted or metaphorical. Perhaps turning the other cheek isn’t a hard and fast rule. Perhaps God really isn’t all that invested in the success of marriages. Of course, that’s the way Christians throughout the centuries have treated the famous sermon, but the strength, the cornerstone of Burklo’s vision of Christianity is the weight it gives the radical ethical challenges presented in the Gospel. Unfortunately, his own vision of biblical credibility compromises the integrity of his favorite passage.

It isn’t that I believe you can’t be a Christian without believing that Jesus walked on water. As someone who has taken my fair share of criticism for doubting the historicity of numerous Old Testament narratives, it would be hypocritical to impose that standard on anyone. The real problem is that the blithe way in which Burklo treats essentially all the deeds of Jesus directly contradicts and undermines the confidence he has in the moral teaching of the Gospels. There is at least a greater deal of intellectual honesty and consistency with groups like the Jesus Seminar that apply rigorous scholarly criteria to determine what the historical Jesus might actually have said, and approach the entire Gospels with a heaping dose of doubt. Burklo has decided what he wants the gospel to be—love, defined as God and the divine spark within all of us and the social justice impulse of Jesus’ recorded ministry—and invested only those passages of Scripture with credibility. It is not convincing as an objective hermeneutic, as appealing as it may be as a sanitized, politically correct incarnation of the faith.

Of course, it isn’t merely the stories about Jesus’ life that Burklo takes the knife to. He also makes no positive mention of any non-ethical teachings of Jesus or even those ethical teachings which might not fit neatly into his social gospel. That, however, is the content of my next and final complaint.

Children's Bible Commentary

Here's an amusing anecdote relayed by Theodore Roosevelt in a letter to Emily Carow in 1900. It's an adorable look into the mind of a child, perhaps the most astute and convicting hermeneutical tool available in Christianity--adorable, that is, if you can overlook references to the racist archetype:

The other day I listened to a most amusing dialogue at the Bible lesson between Kermit and Ethel. The subject was Joseph, and just before reading it they had been reading Quentin's book containing the adventures of the Gollywogs. Joseph's conduct in repeating his dream to his brothers, whom it was certain to irritate, had struck both of the children unfavorably, as conflicting both with the laws of common-sense and with the advice given them by their parents as to the proper method of dealing with their own brothers and sisters. Kermit said: "Well, I think that was very foolish of Joseph." Ethel chimed in with "So do I, very foolish, and I do not understand how he could have done it." Then, after a pause, Kermit added thoughtfully by way of explanation: "Well, I guess he was simple, like Jane in the Gollywogs": and Ethel nodded gravely in confirmation.

Revelation as History

History is fundamentally an exercise in hindsight, and, if you believe the old adage, it is always written by the winners. It is, at its heart, a looking back on the past in an effort to order it and interpret it based on a more perfect knowledge. The historian knows who wins and who loses, and can make judgment based on that knowledge. History, for example, allows us to see from the beginning what never could have been known at the outset of the Civil War, that the Union would prevail and that American society would be committed to personal over corporate liberty and national government over state governments.

It has been sometime since I finished my little devotional commentary on Revelation, and I think enough time has passed that I can safely muse about the book once again. It seems to me that the purpose of Revelation may best be understood by reading the book not as prophecy or even as the narrative of a past mystical experience but as history. Revelation takes the reader into the future (or, perhaps more accurately, into the eternity of God) in order to look at the past. (Of course, whether this is the past in a preterist or a historicist or an idealist sense is up for debate.) We are granted the perfect knowledge of a God who stood not only at the beginning of history but who is already standing atemporally at its end. Armed with that knowledge, we can look back at "the past," which includes our present, with the kind of "objective," critical eye that historians look at the past. We can know that God and His righteouness will prevail. We can know that our own deeds will be subject to judgment. We can know that a horrible defeat (more horrible than Sherman marching to see, for certain) awaits the devil and his cohorts.

It is history at its finest and its most ironic. It is wonderful because it allows us to look back into the past with a knowledge more perfect and more comprehensive than even the most learned historians. It leaves no ambiguity about the outcome; it has all the certainty of decided fact. Yet it teases our minds because the "past" which it writes so authoritatively about is not only our past, but our present and our future. It cannot properly be called prophecy because it does not say, "I predict this will happen" or even assume a tone of anticipation. It is history because it declares frankly, from the perspective of transcendent eternity, "This is what happens." Live accordingly.

The Wisdom of Peter of Damascus

In his Treasury of Divine Knowledge, Peter of Damascus presents a more perfect way of reading the Scripture by reminding us that true hermeneutics is moral rather than theoretical and that understanding and application are so paradoxically intertwined as to never be possible in isolation:

For this reason the fathers say that we ought to search the Scriptures assiduously, in humility and with the counsel of experienced men, learning not merely theoretically but by putting into practice what we read; and that we ought not to inquire at all about what is passed over in silence by Holy Scripture...For the Lord commands that we should search the Scriptures above all by means of bodily and moral actions, and in this way find eternal life.

Re-Reading Revelation: An Invitation (Ch. 22)

I realize that, from the outset, I promised that this series would be about how you can read Revelation rather than how you should read it. I have done my best to hold true to that promise, trying to offer a way for the troubled Christian to engage Revelation without being overcome by the hairsplitting nuance of Christian eschatology. This final thought will try to tread the fine line between describing a facet of the book and prescribing a hermeneutic for it. A problem arises, however, in that the final section of Revelation has something critical to say of the way that most people today read Revelation. The conclusion of the text, which traditionally ties any literary work together, specifically lends itself to something other than a strictly eschatological interpretation. In other words, John spends a great deal of time talking about the end but that vision of the future is not an end in itself. John tells us "what must soon take place" with another purpose in mind.

He is not shy about revealing that purpose to his readers either. In fact, from the beginning, John announces how he intends his readers to receive his work: "Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near." The sentiment is paralleled in the final passage: "And behold, I am coming soon. Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book." What precisely does it mean to "keep" the words of a prophecy? Certainly John is not talking about merely possessing them. The NIV renders the term as "take to heart" and the NASB as "heeds." John himself gives no shortage of clues about what he means. Consider these verses which follow after the call to "keep" the words of Revelation:

-- When John falls down to praise the angel, the messenger repeats one of the central commands of the book: "Worship God."

-- "Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near. Let...the righteous still do right, and the holy still be holy."

-- "Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay everyone for what he has done."

-- "Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life and that they may enter the city by the gates. Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and the sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood."

It is almost as if, realizing that he is running out of papyrus, John feels the need to hammer his point home with a quick repetition of essentially the same command: obey. In a way that ought to be telling to modern readers, John does not spend his final moments in an exposition of the cryptic future that he predicts. Instead of stressing the when and the how of Jesus' coming, he merely assumes that coming and proceeds to tell us how we should respond. "The Spirit and the Bride say, "Come." And let the one who hears say, "Come." And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price." With these words, we discover that Revelation is not a history book written cleverly in advance of the events it records. It is an invitation to the lost and an exhortation to the found. Jesus is coming soon. How will you react to that good news?

The beauty of realizing this overarching message and purpose for Revelation is that it transcends all our petty disputes. The wonderful, terrible God of judgment offers salvation to His church and solicits a response of obedience and praise from it. That message--more clearly and surely stated than any eschatological supposition--applies to the pre-millennialist and the post-millennialist alike. This preterist and the idealist are both compelled to read His glorious works and fall down at the feet of the Son of Man. The outpouring of God's wrath convicts us all, regardless of where (if anywhere) you want to locate the rapture relative to the tribulation. That is not to say that some of these issues are not mentioned in Revelation or that there discussion may not be relevant, to an extent. It is merely an effort to demonstrate that John has an intention for his text that our modern descent into polemical madness has caused us to forget--or at the very least to subordinate to petty squabbling. That Jesus is coming seems to be enough for the author and when he is coming seems to be precisely the kind of irrelevant thinking Jesus warned us against. John tells us what our first response to his text should be, and it isn't to construct an eschatological timeline. The Spirit invites us to come, to wash our robes, to persist in holiness, to worship God, and to relish the blessings we have as those who have heard and kept the words of the prophecy. "Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!"

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For a full list of "Re-reading Revelation" posts, see Re-reading Revelation: Statement of Purpose.

The Trojan Horse of Error

The July edition of the Gospel Advocate has a scathing article denouncing the most recent update of the NIV as "a Trojan horse of error that will destroy the faith of many." The author further charges the translators with having suffered an "erosion of faith" and embracing "the errors of current Protestant theology that [the translation] poses a threat to sound doctrine." In short, "the updated NIV is a greater danger to faith than any other major English version of Scripture."

While I certainly do not agree with all the changes being made, I am equally opposed to this kind of alarmist language which attributes to the discretion of translators the power to make or break faith or distills differences of opinions into a loss of true Christian piety. I find the spirit of the article objectionable, but--since facts are more easy to quantify an objection to--I will turn to the two features of the translation which the author.

The first supposed flaw of the updated translation is its embrace of feminist theology. As expected, this takes the form in part of a shift toward gender inclusive language. A general skepticism is, of course, warranted by the politically motivated shift to take gender exclusive language from a language that has gender inclusive terms and translate it into gender inclusive language in a language that is notoriously resistant to gender inclusivity. Certainly the more intellectually honest approach is to leave the text as it stands and allow readers to infer inclusivity rather than to misrepresent the language in an effort to offer what the translator has decided is an accurate representation of the spirit. Where I stop short, however, is joining the author in his judgment that "the feminist agenda is rampant in the revised NIV."

What the new edition displays is at most an overcorrection for centuries of failures--due mostly to the shortcomings of English, but perhaps in part to the androcentrism of our culture--to correctly render genuinely inclusive biblical language. For every Acts 18:27, which the author points out scandalously implies that "the sisters were involved in writing the letter" of introduction for Apollos, there is a counter-example such as 1 Corinthians 7:24 which, in the traditional gender exclusive, is theological nonsense. In fact, the verse in 1 Corinthians provides a particularly potent example. The 1984 NIV, which the articles author voices few if any objections to, renders the text "Brothers, each man, as responsible to God, should remain in the situation God called him to." Taken literally, Paul seems to free women here to do as they please relative to their social status: slaves can revolt, wives can desert, and so on. Of course, such a suggestion is nonsense since Paul only verse before explicitly included women in his teaching. What's more, the verse itself does not have the gender exclusive "each man" as the translator renders it. It merely says "each" and leaves the reader to supply the noun (which in this case is probably the gender inclusive, grammatically masculine term anthropos). It is almost as if the newer translation gets it right in rendering the text "each person."

In fairness to the article's author, however, there is more to the "feminist" shift than simple gender inclusive language. Specifically, the author cites a change in the language of 2 Timothy 2:12, which the old version rendered "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent" but which in the new edition reads "I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet." Outrageous, no? The author suggests that, with this shift, "the revised NIV is parroting theories advocated by feminist theologians" which allow for a woman to lead provided she is offered this authority rather than seizing it for herself. While clearly not the scholar of feminist thought that the article's author is, I can certainly tell you that the shift from "have" to "assume" (which is within the semantic range of the term authenteo) does not change the four principle features of this verse: (1) women cannot teach, (2) there are restrictions on women's authority, (3) women ought to be quiet. The fourth, of course, is that this passage will still represent the number one reason that feminists are angry at the Bible no matter how you try to blunt the translation.

The second flaw, which curiously is offered less space than the feminist invasion, is the way the new NIV seems to undermine a young earth theory of creation. The author notes a troubling "attempt to destroy a literal reading of the creation account" through "imposed" formatting which "indicates the creation narrative is to be
read as poetry." The article takes aim at those who would capitulate to theories of an old earth or evolution which just happen to be en vogue at the moment. "The translators of the NIV brush aside a literal understanding of creation and reduce all difficulties to poetic incidentals. You don’t want to believe in six days of creation with God specially calling everything into existence? No problem. The opening section of the revised NIV lends itself to theistic evolution or any other theory you might want to embrace." What the author does not address is how simply breaking the text up into metered lines can somehow open up new hermeneutical possibilities not before available. Does he not realize that theories of theistic evolution and non-literal readings of Genesis antedate not only this aesthetic change by the editors but also such trivial historical events as the fall of the Roman Empire. Not being a scholar of Hebrew, or much of a poet, I have no idea whether or not the decision to represent Genesis 1 as poetry is warranted. I am, however, quite certain that a literal reading of the Genesis text is not dependent on the text's formatting as prose any more than a non-literal understanding is dependent on a poetic presentation. The change in text alignment is certainly not, as the author's subtitle claims, a "Destruction of Foundations" unless one's faith is founded on the span of time it took God to create the earth.

Given my largely agnostic views about the scientific origin of the universe, I find the author's protestations about Genesis 1 misguided but mostly innocuous. In contrast, it is always so unnerving for me, as someone with thoroughly conservative views about gender economics, to hear the hue and cry raised over any incursion of "liberal" or "feminist" sentiments into translations. Do we really believe that the biblical view of man- and womanhood is so vague, so fragile that it can really be undermined by translational subtleties? More importantly, what does it say about Christians when we inject such vitriol into these issues. I believe that women should stay out from behind pulpits. I do not believe that their failure to do so constitutes a lack of faith, a surrender to liberal, secular feminism, or a disqualification from salvation. While I know many, the Gospel Advocate author likely included, disagree, but even so the perceived (and I cannot stress that term strongly enough) endorsement of a different gender economy by the translators of the new NIV surely does not represent, on their part, a lack of faith, a surrender to liberal, secular feminism, or a disqualification from salvation. The divisive rhetoric that says that it does is what undermines not only all prospects of Christian unity but also any hope of evangelism in a world which already believes that Christianity's métier is infighting and unbridled dogmatism. It is, in short, bad form.

Re-Reading Revelation: Statement of Purpose

There is perhaps no more contentious issue in biblical studies than how to interpret Revelation. There are certainly more important issues, more uplifting issues, more fruitful issues for our examination, but for whatever reason--most likely because the cryptic nature of the book allows for such a breadth of interpretation--nothing inspires the kind of doctrinal knockdown-dragout fights that Revelation does. Today, of all days, is the perfect day to illustrate this, as I assume that once again Harold Camping's predictions will have fallen short of expectations. No matter if you are a radio evangelist, a theologian, an exegete, a minister, a layman, or (as I am) a historian, one can easily weary by looking at contemporary and historical disputes over premillennialism versus postmillennialism versus amillennialism versus millennialism and more. At a more basic level, there are preterists and historicists and idealists and futurists and probably -ists so remote in their thinking that they have yet to find a label. A thousand issues which ultimately transcend Revelation inevitably get bogged down in its enigmatic imagery.

In a recent discussion with someone about a thoroughgoing preterist approach to the text, I made the suggestion that we might all be better off if we could just set aside the eschatological questions we bring to the text and read Revelation for the many truths it reveals about God: who He is, what He does, and how we ought to respond to Him. In reflecting on that conversation, I realized that it had not been since my early youth--ignorant as I was of the complex of controversial questions which the book generated--that I had read through Revelation for anything other than polemical purposes.

I propose to remedy that now and in the process to share what I believe are some of the eternal (and incontestable) truths which Revelation has to offer readers that have little or nothing to do with the what, the when, or the how of the end of the world. As a disclaimer, I should clarify that I do not think that Revelation is totally without anything to say on these matters. Clearly, the text raises important questions about God's ultimate plan for the world, questions that require serious thought. I am by no means a full-fledged idealist (or really a full-fledged anything). I do believe, however, that there are ideals which the author of Revelation, assumed to be John, embeds in the text, those that he wants to teach to his audience and those which are implicit by virtue of their common faith in a single God. It should not be forgotten that while the eschatological questions which dominate the study of Revelation are certainly valid, they are probably not primary. John was, after all, writing to comfort and strengthen an audience in a time of intense trial. He was not writing an academic treatise on the end times. The approach that will be taken here will be to look at Revelation as a spiritual text from an apostle to the languishing churches. The truths which will be the focus will be those that resonated with the foremost desire of the audience for salvation, for vindication, and for a glimpse (a revelation, if you will) of the God whom they served. In re-reading Revelation with these specific principles in mind, Christians can be enriched and find strength and solidarity in a text which has been the source of so much divisiveness.

List of Entries:

Encountering Jesus (Ch. 1)
Letters (Chs. 2-3)
Throne Room (Chs. 4-5)
Seals and Trumpets (Chs. 6-8)
Two Woes (Ch. 9)
Kingdom Come (Chs. 10-11)
Great Battle (Chs. 12-16)
Fall of Babylon (Chs. 17-18)
Joy and Judgment (Chs. 19-20)All Things New (Chs. 21-22)
An Invitation (Ch. 22)

Songs of the Church (Excursus 1)
Three Angels (Excursus 2)

Original Sin and Theodicy

In reading about original sin and the Fall for my course in systematics, I was presented with a number of equally unsatisfactory options for understanding the Genesis narrative, Adam and his role in transmitting sin to humanity. Either Adam was a historical man who represented humanity in the primordial garden federally or naturally (either as the representative human or as the natural father of all mankind) or he is merely a symbol, a narrative device that depicts the existential reality of the origin of sin in all of us. All these interpretations seem to mistreat the text in my view. I certainly am inclined to think of the Genesis narratives, particularly the creation narratives as etiological and so in some sense the story must be about the origin of sin in the world. More critically, however, I read the Fall narrative as primarily theodic.

It is easy for exegetes or even simple readers to pick up in Genesis and read these stories from the implied standpoint of the narrative, to mentally enter into a world that predates the Fall and then to anachronistically read modern questions of origins into the story. That, I believe, is the root of many problems, not the least of which is the young earth reading of the text. In general this is the cause of a great deal of fundamentalist misunderstanding of Genesis. The concern for origins as mere objective facts is undeniably a modern construct.

With this in view, I think it is safe to assert that the origin of sin as objective fact is not the primary concern of the text. This leaves the mystery of what is. To answer this, it is necessary to reverse engineer the question that might give rise the answer given in the text. My first impulse is to offer “Why do we experience suffering?” In reality, however, this question is better answered not by pointing to the original sin itself but to the result of sins. Thus, the curse which is issued as the divine response to sin where the idyllic state is stripped from humanity and it is left to the cold, cruel creation answers that question.

The original sin itself, in my opinion, answers the question which arises from “Why do we experience suffering?” If the answer to the former is “as a result of sin,” then the natural question (with its implicit accusatory tone) arises: “Why did God allow us to sin?” It is as a response to this question that I think that the actual narrative of the original sin – as distinct from the narrative of the results of that sin – finds its true purpose. It declares with certainty that even when God gives it every advantage, even in a state of bliss, if humanity is given the freedom to choose evil it will work out a way to do so. It strips away human excuse for sin. If we try to claim that we live in a dark, dangerous world where survival seems to depend on selfishness, deceit, theft, and violence the biblical authors remind us that we love the simple freedom of choosing so much that we chose evil even in a world that was neither dark nor dangerous.

This interpretation even gives some light to the juxtaposition of Adam and Christ in the New Testament. Adam is the old humanity that sinned even when there was no “need” to. Christ, in contrast, inaugurates the new humanity by refusing to sin even in the fallen world that we feel necessitates ethical compromise. Just as in Adam, who sinned in spite of every advantage, we find a humanity without excuse, in Christ we find a humanity excused and redeemed into a new life that permits freedom from sin.

Those are, at least, my humble thoughts on the matter being by no means a biblical scholar. I would welcome any biblical critique of that understanding, particularly with regard to the Christ-Adam dichotomy which I have never studied in depth.

Knowing God...in the Biblical Sense

More than any of my very outspoken and radical stances, my belief about the suprarational nature of God (or the "illogicalness" of God if you prefer) has caused the most controversy. As an ardent proponent of non-resistant pacifism and "Christian anarchy," and an equally outspoken opponent of therapeutic and eugenic abortion, I find it somewhat odd that the simple and somewhat esoteric assertion that God could make A equal not A should engender the most antagonism toward me. (For previous posts, see my response to Ron Highfield and Barton W. Stone.) I would like to think that somehow people sense the inherent threat to their worldview that comes from admitting that God is not constrained by logic. On the one hand, atheists have objected, I feel, because they know that a God which cannot be logically assaulted cannot be assaulted. On the other hands, Christians have objected because their theology and, more critically in some ways, their biblical hermeneutic is based on the supremacy of logic. (Interestingly, through the influence of John Behr I can no longer understand why our biblical hermeneutic is not founded primarily on the supremacy of Christ.) There is something frightening about the possibility that we might not be able to put God in any box at all, not even the box of logic. There is an understandable anxiety about the fact that the Creator may not be able to be circumscribed and thereby made impotent by the creation.

Nevertheless, I firmly believe this to be the case. I would gladly argue the point for the rest of my life using nothing but rhetoric, existential appeals, and unaccompanied quotes from church fathers, theologians, and even, strangely, rationalist philosophers. Yet, I feel compelled to address the question biblically, in part because I know that I can never convince anyone in my own movement without making direct appeal to the Bible, and then only through the preferred hermeneutic of Baconian induction. Conveniently, regardless of how I feel about the ultimate validity of the strict application of logic as a hermeneutical tool, even when all the instances of divine revelation are lined up neatly for the reader, the God of illogic is revealed and vindicated. That is, in part and crudely, what I propose to do here.

The Bible is replete with stories of God's self-revelation to humanity. In fact, one might even go so far as to say that the Bible is the story of the history of humanity coming to know God. If I had the time and inclination, I could make an exhaustive list of all theophanic activity in Scripture, and I am confident that my conclusion would be the same. I would gladly demonstrate that no one in Scripture arrived at God rationally. Each was called by God apart from the powers of his or her own intellect. Moreover, it would be a pleasure to show that these callings and the regular inbreaking of God into reality was more often explicitly contrary to logic rather than in line with it. I do not, however, have the time or inclination.

So let it suffice to examine the text more generally with special attention paid to a representative example: Moses and the burning bush. With the arguable exceptions of Adam and Eve and the disciples at Mount Tabor, no one experienced a more direct revelation of God than did Moses. He heard God's voice directly and frequently. More importantly, he would even "see" God at one point in his life. For all the spiritual intimacy typified in David or the faith typified in Abraham, no one compares to Moses in terms of direct personal contact.

The burning bush, moreover, as the beginning of the long and close connection of God with Moses represents a particularly potent example to demonstrate the irrationality of God and His self-revelation. It is not merely that Moses did not discover God after contemplating the logical inevitability of a supreme being. It is not enough that Moses encountered God rather than deducing His presence. Moses experienced God in a way that was supremely irrational: a bush which while on fire was not consumed. The experience of God was not merely overwhelming within the bounds of reason but violated the principle of reasons which govern existence. Modern science only serves to elucidate this story by highlighting its blatant idiocy. Fire, we know, is no independent thing, merely the visible byproduct of the process of rapid oxidation. In other words, there is no fire without consumption since fire is itself only the tangible product of consumption. A fire that does not burn anything is an impossible contradiction, a square-circle right in the Bible.

Hallelujah to the impossible contradiction. This is the God of Israel, the violator of reality and the defier of the "laws" of reason, the precepts of logic. This is the God we see manifest throughout the Bible. The God who parts the waters, who turns water into blood, who turns water into wine, who turns water bitter, who makes water come from a rock, who walks on water, who destroys the world with water, and redeems the world with water. Sometimes the sun stops. Sometimes the earth swallows people up. Sometimes storms quiet. Sometimes food multiplies. Sometimes people raise up from the dead.

That last one is my favorite, if for no other reason than I believe I will get to experience it myself.

We do not grasp God logically in the same way that I do not understand my love for my wife logically. Even if we concede that science can exhaustively explain my love for my wife in neuro-chemical terms (and I think this would be unnecessarily generous), I do not understand my love for her as biological. My love for her is experienced irrationally. In the same way, even though some may delude themselves into believing that they may approach God through unadulterated logic, humanity does not understand God rationally but existentially, and even then as an irrational experience. We do not believe that seventy-two mathematicians went into seventy-two different rooms and emerged seventy-two days later all holding identical translations of Euclid's Elements into Koine. We do not believe that 318 logicians made the trek to Nicaea in order to confirm as orthodoxy that A =/= ¬ A. If we believe the tradition (and I see no reason not to), then we believe that seventy-two Jews, contrary to all reasonable expectations, produced identical translations of the highly irrational stories just outlined and that 318 bishops assembled at Nicaea to confirm the radically illogical orthodoxy that A = ¬ A.

John Locke was confused to speak of the reasonableness of Christianity and his confusion is like an epidemic in the Christian consciousness. We worship the reasonableness of Christianity and the logic of its rational God like an idol. With all the trouble caused by the biblical anthropomorphisms of a God who speaks and walks, with hands and eyes and a mouth, there is no more perilous anthropomorphism than the rash assumption that God is logical and reveals Himself logically. By insisting that God must conceive of reality as humanity does, must interact with creation as humanity does, and must operate within the same binding strictures that humanity does we come closer to making God over in our image than if we were to insist He had hands. In fact, I am ready now to confess that it is easier for me to suggest that God may have hands than to insist that He must be logical. The former speaks only of the possibilities open to an unfettered deity while the other is the supreme fetter which ties Him down and make Him little more than an unspeakably powerful wizard in a children's story.

The God of the Bible does not behave logically and people do not arrive at Him rationally. It is, therefore, quite inappropriate as far as I'm concerned to suggest either that God is the solution at the end of a metaphysical equation or that God is bound in any sense by the mathematics that produce such equations. If God is real, and He is, He necessarily transcends logic, and nothing demonstrates this more clearly than His activity in the world as recorded in Scripture.

The Way the Bible Reads the Bible

I am always delighted, though never surprised, to find serious flaws in the application of the supposed ideological presuppositions of the Churches of Christ. (It’s that immature, rebellious child in me that likes to lash out at my spiritual parentage.) It was a major turning point in my spiritual development when my wife asked the very innocent question, “Where does the Bible talk about selecting elders?” It took about two hours for us to finally conclude that the Bible not only never outlines the democratic selection process so popular in the Churches of Christ but actually speaks exclusively of an appointment process. Another month of posing my wife’s question to every professor I could lay hands on did little to impede my growing realization that the very framework of Restorationist belief and practice was in fact little more than a thin façade hiding rationalism and capitulation to a nineteenth century culture that is now obsolete. Calling Bible things by Bible names, doing Bible things in Bible ways, speaking where the Bible speaks and being silent where the Bible is silent - in short, restoring the first century church based only on what can be derived from Scripture - make for good slogans and bad founding principles.

My most recent reinforcement of this dismal perspective came during a course I took under Fr. John Behr at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. In the course, he addressed at length the importance of a person’s theological presuppositions in forming one’s hermeneutical presuppositions. In the context of juxtaposing Jewish and early Christian hermeneutics, Fr. Behr discussed some of the most basic beliefs about the character of Scripture in general which were shared by Jews and Christians as well as the theological disparities which yielded such radically different interpretations of the text. He made the point in passing that our own presuppositions have made it very difficult to conceive of Scripture in the way the early church did. Even simply understanding why it is certain fathers, or even the apostles, understood a text the way they did requires a complex harmony of history, theology, and exegesis. The modern person has no less a distinct starting point for biblical interpretation than did the Jews who rejected early Christian “misappropriation” of their Scriptures.

The Churches of Christ are no less guilty of this charge. In spite of claims to be restoring a first century church, a simplified Christianity with an authentic Christian mindset, Churches of Christ adopt the same basic hermeneutical launching point as most major Protestant denominations. They cling quite readily to principles of interpretation which locate relevant meaning first and foremost in a thorough and accurate exegesis of the text. Quite contrary to antique views of Scripture which held a text to be cryptic and perpetually speaking to the present, modern hermeneutics begin by stripping away any sense of mystery through scientific evaluation of what a text meant in the past. If that should happen to give insight in the present, all the better, but that is by no means an inherent characteristic of Scripture as such.

In fact, Churches of Christ may be guiltier than other groups. Their acceptance of historical-critical presuppositions is logically prior to their engagement of Scripture. The historical concept of a first century church in need of restoration and the critical belief that the plain sense of Scripture is readily accessible are the founding beliefs of the Restoration Movement which thus cloud every engagement with Scripture. Only by accepting fundamentally unbiblical ways of engaging the Bible a priori can the Churches of Christ uphold “key” beliefs, e.g. the plurality of elders, the radical autonomy of the local church, and a capella worship.

Were we to apply the “Bible things; Bible ways” principle to hermeneutics, the result would not be a historical-critical framework which locates meaning in right exegesis. That assertion ought to be self-evident, but a few simple examples should suffice to prove it nevertheless. Matthew 13:35, Mark 12:10, Luke 4:21, John 5:39, and Acts 2:16 serve as obvious illustrations of the primarily Christological interpretation of the Scriptures in the Gospels and Acts. The same basic hermeneutic continues in the epistles, e.g. 1 Cor 15:13 and 1 Pet 2:6. Other interpretations of the Scriptures include ecclesiastical (1 Tim 5:18) or theological (Gal 4:27) appropriation of Old Testament texts. The common thread, of course, is that none of these interpretations of Old Testament texts (and perhaps a New Testament one in 1 Tim 5:18) adopt the rationalistic interpretive strategy on which the Churches of Christ base everything from their ecclesiology to their deepest theology. There is little regard, if not positive disregard, for the historical context of a passage. Meaning, for the New Testament authors at least, comes not from human evaluation but only when God has “opened the Scriptures to us” (Luke 24:32).

As a closing disclaimer, let me clarify that my point is neither to undermine historical-critical hermeneutics nor to propose primarily Christological hermeneutics as an alternative. My purpose is only to illustrate a deficiency, even hypocrisy, in the way Stone-Campbell churches (of which I am a part) apply their hermeneutical presuppositions. There is a great deal of discord over a variety of issues based on whether or not the Bible approves of them. Can we have extra-congregational superstructures? Can we have instruments in worship? Can we have kitchens and gyms and fellowship halls in church buildings? What does the Bible say about this? This last question is often the first question posed. The original question, if consistency is to be maintained, would be “What does the Bible say about how to read the Bible?” Frankly, I am of the opinion that anyone honest enough to pursue that question first will be unsatisfied with the implications of the answer. I admit, however, that someone who genuinely undertakes to do Bible things in Bible ways is better than someone who only pretends to do so.