This is a guest post from frequent commenter Arcamaede, who follows the climate change news very closely. I asked him to lend his “fair and balanced” perspective to this question. Often, it’s assumed that “as evolutionary science, so climate science” — either scorning both or upholding both unequivocally. Might there be cause for a more nuanced approach?
~ Steve
___________________________________________________
If you haven’t heard about “Climategate” then you do not follow the issue of climate change!
In brief, Climategate is the controversy that erupted after the release of thousands of emails from the CRU (Climate Research Unit) of the University of East Anglia which detailed serious scientific misconduct among climate scientists there (and in other similar institutions throughout the world). That misconduct was in the form of suppressing dissenting views as well as data that conflicted with the views of an inner cadre of high level climatologists.
So what does this have to do with evolutionary science?
Some Christians in the ID (and YEC) movements have seized upon this in an attempt to substantiate their own claims that evolutionary science is suspect due to similar behavior.
Of course this objection is not new. Before I made the transition from YEC to Evolutionary Creation, I recall one minister (who had a PhD in Biology) appealing to this in his lessons on Creation. He told the story of a professor of evolution confessing that evidence for human evolution would fit in a peach basket. (The professor purportedly retracted his statement when he discovered the questioner was a Creationist!) More recently, the movie Expelled strove to document suppression of dissent and opposing data.
Both climate science and evolutionary science are legitimate sciences. Both practice the scientific method.
The mature, refined, conclusive evidence of how evolution works comes from genetics as well as other fields. Conclusive evidence of how the climate works is still evolving (no pun intended) and has not had nearly as much time as evolutionary science to amass data and interpretations with the same level of confidence.
In short, we’re not going to see common descent overturned by a future discovery any more than we’d see gravity overturned or find that the world was flat after all. But we will indeed see changes in understanding the workings of the climate.
What would possess an intelligent, well-trained scientist to misbehave as has been done with Climategate? Hubris is a large factor. One could also argue greed and political agendas being others. That the whole issue of climate change has grown into the political (and monetary) arenas would be hard to deny.
But would other scientists behave like that?
I was trained in the area of Physics from the age of 18 until age 23. One of the factors that led me to leave after my first year of my PhD was the horrible level to which ego drove the whole endeavor of science. It just wasn’t the idealistic endeavor I’d been led to believe it was. (I later learned by age 29 that it was the same in Christian ministry.) There is no question in my mind that scientists (and Creationists) are vulnerable to pride.
I recall as a Physics student that our department was broken into three factions: two warring and one trying to stay out of the way of the the two. The whole (20 year!) war was over one faction catching a mistake in another’s presentation! Additionally, when one faction had a member come into “power” that faction falsified student evaluations in order to give their enemies low marks.
But that’s what the whole peer-review process is intended to minimize. Unfortunately in the case of climate science, the people steering the whole process are a rather small number within the discipline of climatology. It’s a relatively new field (less than 50 years) with lots of exciting questions to answer. Marking territory in this sets your name up in lights for potentially decades or centuries.
What about evolutionary science? It’s also subject to ego battles. A lot of the major discoveries have been made. But it’s an established field.
Quick! Name me one living popular evolutionary scientist who has made a monumental discovery in recent years?
Bet you couldn’t name one! That’s because there aren’t any (though a friend noted that James D. Watson is still alive). Sure, discoveries are being made but “Darwin” is a name everybody knows — maybe even “Huxley”, perhaps “Wallace” if you really know your history. The guys who remain are people like “Dawkins”, a man who has no real discoveries to his credit. He’s just a biology writer — he’s not considered a significant player. (Which largely explains his inflated ego and the way he conveys his atheism.)
The peer review process works adequately in evolutionary science due to its age and the huge number of practitioners. These are things that climate science will have when it’s been around as long as evolutionary science.
Then there is greed. Climate science is a cash cow. For the high level people involved at the CRU it means millions of dollars in research grants each year. Evolutionary science on the other hand (while receiving funding) is not the place to go if you want big money. Unless you write a really popular book containing nothing original!
(Another interesting tidbit learned from Climategate is that the relationship between CRU members and oil companies. For those of you who would want to read a bit more about the issue of academic freedom and corporations you might take a peek at this discussion.)
Then there is agenda. This really steps outside of the scientific arena and puts us into the political one. Here’s an analysis that makes it clear that the political leanings of some climate scientists biases their work.
Can the same thing be said of evolutionary science? Well, yes, but in a totally different direction. A primary case in my mind is the objection of some to the appointment of Francis Collins to his position at the NIH. This, however, does not reflect on any particular bias to the evidence for evolution (or show any particular attempt to hide counter-evidence) but just shows how a person’s worldview can make them into a bigot.
A different, tangential question is, “Do humans influence climate?” The answer is, “Yes.” But like anything in science the corollary question is, “How and how much?” The answer is, “We know many ways that humans influence climate but the full impact and how to mitigate that impact is still debated among climatologists.” Or, as a popular but controversial climatologist put it recently:
The so-called “greenhouse effect” is real. The question is how much will this effect be, and this is not a simple question. There are also questions being raised as to the very sign of some of the larger feedbacks to add to the confusion. Our purpose here was to merely point out that the addition of absorbing gases into the atmosphere must result in warming, contrary to some research currently circulating that says to the contrary.
On the evolutionary science side, there are absolutely no empirical data that would allow us to even question it as a valid explanation. The only objection is one based on a (shaky) literal theology. (Intelligent Design does not invalidate evolution, folks!)
I was encouraged to write this little post because I see a lot of misinformation on all sides of these issues. Some Christians attack the solid science of evolution. In the climate controversy, we have Christians on many sides of the aisle mixing their theological perspectives in their understanding of the science. The extremes I have in mind are:
1. God won’t allow us to destroy the environment.
Actually, the Bible makes no such promise. We’re quite free to make the whole world a wasteland.
2. The Bible is environmentally sensitive.
The cultures that wrote the Bible were not environmentally sensitive by our terms. They deforested. They executed wholesale slaughter of animals. The concept of a time when man was somehow “one with nature” just never happened.
3. The environment doesn’t matter.
John MacArthur once said, “I’ve told environmentalists that if they think humanity is wrecking the planet, wait until they see what Jesus does to it.” This is a view based on a strain of fundamentalist literalism which is foreign to the original audience of the text of Scripture.
The Bible says zero about environmental issues. Any attempt to make it say anything is anachronistic. The question of climate issues will be settled through careful science and reflective thinking of humanity.
We need to let our understanding of the the history of science influence our understanding of the text of Scripture. By no means should we let the empirical contexts implied in Scripture distort our present understanding of scientific data. So where does that leave the place of Scripture in science?
Scripture remains a gateway for believers to be inspired to participate in scientific endeavor. Those of us who are believers can use science to better understand the works of God, and so deepen our understanding of Him.
My friend Travis Jacobs recently mentioned on a podcast the fact that despite popular Sunday School renditions, the actual Genesis account of Noah never mentions his evangelistic efforts, nor even so much as a warning to his fellow men of the impending cataclysm. (Travis also noted ironically that one source for the Flood story that does feature an evangelistic Moses is the Q’uran.)
I suppose a possible contributor to the near canonization of this portrait of Noah as spurned evangelist is the later Jewish and Christian ethic that views judgment as contingent upon spurned chances for repentance (cf. especially the Book of Jonah). Yet it appears from the Genesis account taken purely on its own terms that God had already chosen who was going to survive, and that was that; the door was effectively sealed shut before the ark was even constructed, so why should Noah have wasted his time? (Compare the unconvincing justifications for the reasoning behind evangelism coming from the Reformed — and don’t miss the role Noah’s righteousness played in his election! But that’s beside the point.)
The tradition underlying Matthew 24.36-42 shows Jesus citing specifically the sudden, unexpected nature of the Flood: “And they knew nothing until the flood came and took them all away. It will be the same at the coming of the Son of Man” (v. 39).
Surely the most influential contributor to the Noah the Evangelist tradition is one obscure passage in the NT: 2 Peter 2.5 refers to Noah as a “preacher of righteousness”. Now, whence the tradition underlying that remark? As I already noted, it’s certainly not in the text of Genesis, nor does it appear to be present during the time the Gospels were written. Could it have just been, as many evangelicals would prefer to think, a divine revelation to the Apostle Peter?
This is exceptionally unlikely. The authorship of 2 Peter has long been contested. In fact, it was routinely omitted from canon lists as late as Origin and the Muratorian Fragment up until Athanasius included it in his apparently influential canon. Far from bearing the weight and authority of the Apostle whose name it bears, it stoops so low as to quote Jude, which itself quotes an obviously spurious Enoch. It is regarded by most scholarship to be among the very last — if not the last — of the books of the NT to be written.
I speculate that this particular Noah tradition in 2 Peter is yet another evidence for a late, post-apostolic date for this book. Barring 2 Peter from the discussion, our first evidence for the tradition is in Pirke De-Rabbi Eliezer, a work of aggadic midrash dating from the early second century. Aggadah is a component of the midrashic Jewish commentaries that reflects folklore and legend, and in particular the Pirke De-Rabbi Eliezer gives us our earliest attestation of a few Jewish traditions. So was Rabbi Eliezar’s account of Noah’s unheeded warnings an indication of an earlier tradition?
Perhaps, but it is nonetheless interesting that this tradition was apparently obscure enough to escape the notice of Matthew’s Jesus and (ostensibly) that Gospel’s target audience, which was almost certainly thoroughly Jewish. Even if this tradition were extant in the apostolic period in which Matthew was first distributed, the off-handed allusion 2 Peter makes to Noah the “preacher of righteousness” implies a much more widespread familiarity with the tradition than we find in Matthew. If, as I suspect, Rabbi Eliezer was among the earliest influential teachers to paint this picture of Noah, then 2 Peter would date sometime after this tradition’s general acceptance and saturation, a period certainly postdating the Apostle Peter’s death in the mid-first century and probably not predating the early to mid-second century.
But that’s just me. Does anyone know of any related research?
Michael Patton, a man I respect immensely, has just reminded his readers that, “The palatability of a doctrine does not determine its veracity.”
This is a principle based in logic, of course. As a case in point (which was probably also his post’s inspiration), he brings up many Christians’ emphasis on the love of God disproportionate to their acknowledgment of the wrath of God. He defends the Reformed view of God’s nature and character by his playfully caricatured example of an objection:
“God’s love? Oh yes, give me two helpings of that. God’s wrath? Pass. I don’t have enough room and it does not sound good. God’s grace will be great, but I will have to skip the atonement—too bloody and odd. Predestination? Sovereign election? No way!”
In the end, he admits that, “For the most part, I find Christianity very palatable. Grace, love, righteousness, our future hope, the restoration of all things, etc. are all doctrines that I would gladly take from a smörgåsbord. But,” and this is his main point,
when it comes to things that are not quite so palatable and lovely, I must take them too as my final authority is not that which is reasonable to my taste buds, but that which God has revealed in His word.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. That sentiment is fully consistent with a view of Christianity that views the Bible as the final, crystalized, and most importantly complete version of all truth, revealed personally by God. But if we are more consistent in the typical evangelical belief in “progressive revelation”, which despite arguable limitations correctly acknowledges mankind’s understanding of God as a trajectory, jet-powered and steered by the example of His Word, Jesus of Nazareth, we find less justification to ignore the nuanced sense of God found in the New Testament even in the interests of bowing to the authority of texts that speak of God as a wrathful deity perpetually on the warpath against those who transgress His moral code.
There are certainly plenty of those texts. And let’s be clear: the Old Testament repeatedly describes God as merciful, overflowing with lovingkindness and tender mercies, and in the New Testament we do indeed hear much of a coming judgment said to be officiated by Jesus himself. But who can doubt that the understanding of God in the New Testament has developed more fully into a God for all humanity and not only Israel, a God who sends His shepherd out to seek and save the lost?
“Ah, but there is still judgment against sin, even in Jesus’ own teachings.” This recognition does not erase the wrath of God, but it does focus it on things other than mere abstract moral transgressions or ritual violations, and instead seems to target particularly those things which hurt other people. Can we miss the fact that the judgment described in the Olivet Discourse is characterized as a punishment of specifically those who, even despite their outstanding morality and fidelity to prescribed rituals, utterly fail to fulfill God’s primary mission for them, which is revealed to be ministering to God by working in the interests of compassion? An intolerable system that fleeced the poor and obstructed the worship of the needy seems to have been the source of Jesus’ sole example of “wrath” in the Temple. (Note also that those endlessly tortured in the lake of fire in Revelation are not disobedient humans, but otherworldly forces of evil who have offended God most grievously by leading humanity away from Him.)
In a guideline largely alien to the Old Testament, Christians are told that they must imitate God’s character as nearly as possible. Yet although we are sundry times called to do so specifically by loving and forgiving one another, we are never told to be wrathful, to hold people to standards too high to reach, or harbor unforgiveness of those who have actually committed grave sins. We are instructed to be holy as He is holy, but are never led to demand holiness from one another except for the purposes of restoration. Paul tells the Corinthians to judge within their congregation, to be sure, but remediation is stated as the goal for church discipline in 1 Cor 5.5. If we are to judge those “inside” our community (v.12) in the hopes of eventual reformation, is it unthinkable that God should exercise His judgment on those “outside” (vv. 13) for the same reason, and more successfully?
So even if Michael Patton agrees with many other theologians among the Reformed that there are Scriptures that depict God as intent on inflicting a singularly loveless, hateful pain upon those who offend His standards, shouldn’t any theologian trying to understand God’s heart use the whole tenor and testimony of Scripture in order to do so? Are we not justified in being loathe to characterize God as a tyrant, individual scriptural illustrations of God’s anger notwithstanding? Should we put God’s love on par with God’s wrath as if one arm was extended to embrace the wayward son and the other to pitilessly strike him down?
Here I am being influenced by, or perhaps rather I am finding my lifelong suspicions unexpectedly articulated in, the ideas of George MacDonald. This passage from his sermon Justice (already referenced on this blog) makes the point that God would prefer us to err, since err we must, on the side of the most loving view of God we can imagine:
The lord of life complains of men for not judging right. To say on the authority of the Bible that God does a thing no honourable man would do, is to lie against God; to say that it is therefore right, is to lie against the very spirit of God. To uphold a lie for God’s sake is to be against God, not for him. God cannot be lied for. He is the truth. The truth alone is on his side. While his child could not see the rectitude of a thing, he would infinitely rather, even if the thing were right, have him say, God could not do that thing, than have him believe that he did it. If the man were sure God did it, the thing he ought to say would be, ‘Then there must be something about it I do not know, which if I did know, I should see the thing quite differently.’ But where an evil thing is invented to explain and account for a good thing, and a lover of God is called upon to believe the invention or be cast out, he needs not mind being cast out, for it is into the company of Jesus. Where there is no ground to believe that God does a thing except that men who would explain God have believed and taught it, he is not a true man who accepts men against his own conscience of God. I acknowledge no authority calling upon me to believe a thing of God, which I could not be a man and believe right in my fellow-man. I will accept no explanation of any way of God which explanation involves what I should scorn as false and unfair in a man. If you say, That may be right of God to do which it would not be right of man to do, I answer, Yes, because the relation of the maker to his creatures is very different from the relation of one of those creatures to another, and he has therefore duties toward his creatures requiring of him what no man would have the right to do to his fellow-man; but he can have no duty that is not both just and merciful. More is required of the maker, by his own act of creation, than can be required of men. More and higher justice and righteousness is required of him by himself, the Truth;–greater nobleness, more penetrating sympathy; and nothing but what, if an honest man understood it, he would say was right. [emphasis mine]
This reminds me of one observation highlighted by Rachel Held Evans in her delightful new book Evolving in Monkey Town. “His ways are higher than our ways” is an oft quoted justification for claims made about God’s inexplicable behavior. What Rachel notes is that this verse actually showcases God’s desire to show mercy, once that verse’s context within Isaiah 55 is identified: “Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts; and let him return to the Lord, and He will have compassion on him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon. ‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are you ways My ways,’ declares the Lord” (vv. 7-8). Rachel explains:
Isaiah 55 provides an entirely different framework for thinking about God’s justice, because it suggests that we have it backward — the mystery lies not in God’s unfathomable wrath but in his unfathomable mercy. God’s ways are higher than our ways because his capacity to love is infinitely greater than our own. (p. 136)
And if this weren’t enough dynamic quotes for one post, I can’t resist recapitulating another that I posted as an entire entry a few days back, this time resituated amongst the thoughts that prompted me to publish that entry in the first place. It’s from none other than the true father of the Reformed, St. Augustine, who nonetheless understood these points I have made and voiced them more succintly and profoundly by far:
Whoever thinks he understands divine scripture or any part of it, but whose interpretation does not build up the twofold love of God and neighbor, has not really understood it. Whoever has drawn from scripture an interpretation that does fortify this love, but who is later proven not to have found the meaning intended by the author of the passage, is deceived to be sure, but not in a harmful way, and he is guilty of no untruth at all.
Without assuming, as the inerrantist must, that every Scripture speaks univocally, we may still recognize a clear emphasis upon love and forgiveness throughout the NT that we should not feel guilty about focusing on. In the Synoptics, Jesus is depicted identifying the greatest commandments as a love for God that is somehow codependent upon love for our neighbor; in John, the “new” commandment Jesus gives is to “love one another” as exemplified by his own love; in Paul, the greatest of all virtues – above faith itself – is “love” for one another after the model of God’s selfless love toward us; the author of 1 John feels comfortable defining God’s very nature in this way: “God is love”; another well known and only apparently contrastive description of God is found in Hebrews 12.28, where He is described as a “consuming fire” — but surely we must see in that metaphor the OT motif of a fire of refinement, the end of which is purification and not destruction!
If after all God’s wrath is a force of His nature dueling with His love, not subject to His love as MacDonald insisted, then surely we will be forgiven for upholding the noblest view of Him possible, that of a God who is, at bottom, Love personified — especially since such an understanding is securable by the deafening testimony of Scripture. Beyond our beliefs or our incredulity, our faithfulness or our failings, the greatest of these is still love.
I’ve been watching the back-and-forth between Jerry Coyne and Karl Giberson. Apparently there has been a video produced for USA Today that features them in a conversation answering the question, “Are science and religion compatible?” that has not been put online yet. I think we know their answers, though.
Karl Giberson of the BioLogos Foundation, of course, finds faith and science completely compatible. Incompatabilist atheist Jerry Coyne actually insists that he does also, at least provisionally: “…if and only if ‘compatibility’ meant only this: ‘can someone be religious and also be a scientist/accept science? ‘” He goes on to clarify by reiterating that people are capable of inconsistency and holding beliefs that are in tension with one another, which is what he thinks science and faith are. Ever the incompatibilist, Coyne attacks the common Christian claim that there are “two ways of knowing”, one that is empirical and discernable only by observation, and one that does not depend upon physical observability. Says Coyne, “This—the disparity in ‘ways of knowing’—is the true incompatibility between science and faith.” He accuses Giberson and other compatibilists of failing to address attacks on the validity of the kind of religious epistemology that is “immune to rational scrutiny”. Because rational scrutiny is indeed applied to theology by believing theologians and philosophers all the time, he appears to be defining “rational” as laboratory-driven, or perhaps motivated by empirical evidence alone. He makes a point to dismiss the validity of holding beliefs merely acquired by culture and tradition, which of course any believer would do as well, but he implies that any beliefs initially acquired by any means other than deductive reasoning or empirical observation is necessarily invalid.
Although I’m sure he doesn’t believe this in all areas of his life, Coyne argues as though the only information a reasonable person should permit himself to accept is that which is demonstrable beyond a reasonable doubt in the laboratory or, somewhat incongruously, demonstrable beyond all uncertainty through logic and reason. The incompatibility between Giberson’s view and Coyne’s view is not between a faith perspective and a scientific perspective but between a qualified trust that what we experience may be real even if not empirically demonstrable and an implicit and unquestionable trust in the validity of only those experiences which are empirically demonstrable.
My thought is that instead of insisting upon “two ways of knowing” as compatibilists are indeed fond of doing, perhaps we should emphasize distrust in the adequacy, reliability, and universal relevancy of observation and empirical verifiability. If post-modernism has taught us anything, it’s that “knowing” is merely happening to be convinced of that which is true, and it doesn’t altogether matter how we are convinced. To be sure, some ways of becoming convinced are more useful for science than for daily life – and Giberson et al. would agree - but being convinced that your wife loves you and that harming children is wrong are beliefs that, if not “immune” to reason, at least show “rational inquiry” to be not unfailingly relevant or adequate to inform our experience. As long as scientists like Giberson promote science in scientific endeavors, Coyne should be happy with the underlying purpose of BioLogos, which is at bottom to bring more Christians on board with the rationalist “way of knowing” when approaching science. But perhaps there are things beyond brute facts that influence incompatibilists’ behavior.
I think it’s safe to say that this is one post that most of my liberal Christian friends won’t be sharing with their friends.
I firmly believe that Christians should be preoccupied with the plight of the marginalized and the remediation of social injustice. I, too, have evolved considerably from my conservative Christian background and rejected the “Jesus is a Right Winger” presupposition characterizing the stereotypical American evangelical. However, time and again I am reminded that I am something of an anomaly among post-evangelical/liberal Christians (whatever you want to call me). My theological evolution did not result in some sort of flipped switch that automatically turned me into a Democrat-supporting left-winger. I do not assume that the ideal way of going about addressing social concerns is through the government or that those skeptical of the state’s ability or moral authority to do this are selfish cretins who hate the poor and destitute. In fact, I think that the use of force that the government depends upon is often responsible for creating and perpetuating their plight.
At present I have no plans here at Undeception to debate the various and sundry reasons, both moral and practical, that I oppose wielding government mandates, the threat of publically sanctioned violence, in order to alleviate social problems. I intend this post to be a one-off statement, the kind of thing I might link to during other discussions in the future, but not any sort of opening salvo. I already tried doing the theology/politics thing on this blog, and I don’t think I’m going back.
However, in this one post, I wish to state for the record my belief that when people seek to influence voluntary interactions using involuntary power structures, particularly the kinds of structures run by power-seekers who have every reason both to promise the moon and to ensure that it stays within only their benevolent grasp (i.e. politicians), a vast array of unintended consequences, moral hazard, and artifacts of force will result, making truly voluntary structures wholly preferable. There is no end to the number of politicians who will seek and be granted power after promising to throw unending money at problems or propose attractive sounding schemes to address them, but one of the many devastating unintended consequences is that such publically funded charity has endangered inherently more calculated private endeavors by cutting away at our disposable income through confiscation and, more insidiously, by giving our society (and, indeed, the Church) the impression that voluntary forms of charity have been superseded by a superior broker of charity; truly it is said that no one competes with the government.
Our exemplar of social concern, Jesus of Nazareth, made a point to avoid placing himself in or ingratiating himself to the extant power structures, even though he ostensibly could have done one or either quite easily; rather, the powers-that-were recognized him as a threat to the very foundations of their coercive methodology, not just their refusal to use it to bring free healthcare and stabilize private industries. Statist Christians on both the left and right wing preach against theocratic tendencies: leftists decry the right wing’s attempts to restrict behavior not deemed to be Christian (such as homosexuality), but as a seemingly unquestionable principle they advocate using the state to enforce social justice and other such demands of godly morality that they believe in.
As I said, I don’t want to use this site to debate the particulars of political philosophy. What I would like is for socially conscious Christians to examine their assumptions about which political reality will best bring about their ideals and not simply adopt the political philosophy of the vocal progressive Christians they learned their theology from. I think there is much common ground that we can claim when we stand up for the disenfranchised and beg our evangelical brethren to not simply assume that “people are only poor because they are lazy” or the like; I agree that conservatives tend to turn a blind eye to the dangers of big business (but the Left also needs to recognize that the chief of these evils is their weapon of choice: inviting the government in to grant them all sorts of privileges and immunities). And you know, it doesn’t bother me so much when someone just happens to be gullible enough to trust government to do the most good because it has the most power (red flag!). But because they continuously broadcast their assumption that a socially conscious Christian will therefore vote a confiscatory, redistributivist political agenda, I feel compelled to ask, “Are you sure that the state really serves the interests of social concern in the way you think it does?” I invite you to read the news from a classical liberal/libertarian perspective from resources such as Reason Magazine or the Cato Institute. Suffice it to say that there is plenty of evidence that the more power we give to the state, the more we will all end up suffering.
(By the way, if you’re one of those people who believes that classical liberals/libertarians are un-Christian – or that Glenn Beck is a spokesperson for us – I invite you to read these rejoinders from a site I enjoy: 1, 2, 3.)
“God desperately wants an intimate relationship with you!”
Relax, I’m not going to spend the entire post bagging on this claim and those who make it. I will spend the greater part of this post explaining the problem that many Christians have with that statement, but you might be surprised where I end up — I certainly am.
Recently a friend pointed out how frustrated he was with this particular evangelical meme. I, too, have been annoyed by just such claims before. “Cerebral” Christians like myself are usually critical of those who simply trust what they think they know about God, since we have – not infrequently correctly – identified many of their beliefs as erroneous understandings that are sometimes counterproductive to the Christian mission. Surely no small part of the disgust that many feel toward those who typically speak of an “intimate relationship” with God issues from a sense that these evangelicals are stereotypically not as close to God as they seem to think they are: for these, daily prayer times, emotional worship services, and a commitment to avoiding “the world” seem to be the central components and hallmarks of a robust “relationship” with God, but this more often manifests as a general out-of-touch heaven-mindedness. In effect, it all sounds so make-believe, and a disappointing deficit of healthy fruit this type of “relationship” seems to produce bears that out.
Many of us shake our heads when we hear someone make the above “intimate relationship” claim because it seems so self-centered. In contrast, biblical worship consists of more than nice, positive feelings about God, immaculate and unquestioned doctrine, a disgust with grave moral sins, and the fond, firm conviction that we are buddies with Jesus. It is also characterized by a resolve to whittle away at the small niggling sins, such as bad attitudes, selfishness, gluttony, judgmentalism, etc. and to develop Christ-like attitudes such as a genuinely passionate compassion that begins with a profound awareness of the most tangible needs among humanity. The Gospels present Jesus’ teachings as preoccupied with righteousness, which, far from merely harping on the importance of some ritually distinctive and esoteric moral code, he instead fulfilled by spending the rest of his time meeting the physical needs of the destitute and railing against unproductive religiosity. Consulting the life of Jesus as displayed in the Gospels, we come away with the impression that both personal holiness and active participation in somehow bringing about God’s ideal world order of peace and love are the most recognizable characteristics of God’s kingdom. And yet evangelicals are, as a group, among the least concerned with meeting physical needs among Christians, due to an unnerving conviction that what sick, poor, and hungry people really need is to repent and get in on that “intimate relationship” with God.
Another important reason some Christians look askance at the statement in question is that the claim is being made that God is pursuing a relationship with us in a way that is not at all likely if we understand “intimate relationship” in the same way we mean that phrase in human terms. However immanent we believe He is, God is undeniably also transcendent, and not likely to engage in even the most metaphorical sort of “pillow talk” with us, except perhaps through media such as Scripture or through the encouragement of one another. He interfaces with us in a much less direct fashion than we are taught to approach Him; the statement should perhaps be more accurately phrased, “God wants you to pursue a relationship with Him in which you want desperately to be intimate with Him.” He is God, so if He really did “desperately” want a relationship with us, surely He’d be more successful at performing His side of the bargain. As a frank Catholic friend of mine likes to point out, “What’s up with this ‘personal relationship’ deal? I can’t pull up a chair and have a chat with Him like I can with a human being. I can’t hear Him talking the same way He can hear me.” It seems one-sided: He knows every thought, emotion, and unseen desire of ours, but we strain to discern His thoughts about everything relevant to the living out of our lives, our future plans, etc. There’s something about the “intimate relationship” expression that would have to be considered metaphorical in a way that doesn’t seem to be recognized among those who are wont to use the expression.
However…
Surely it is telling that some of the kindest and most godly people I know would speak of their relationship with God in just this way. As I become more convinced that Jesus modeled our ideal relationship with God, I begin to see that our pursuit of holiness and a singleminded determination to actualize the Kingdom of God through our righteous acts should indeed be motivated and characterized by a desire for “intimacy” with God in the sense of a oneness of purpose and a carefully cultivated love for His ways. I have come to the conclusion that there is something important missing when we go about doing good deeds and fulfilling righteousness without a personal dimension and a recognition of the initiative God takes with us, calling us to understand what MacDonald called God’s “fatherheart” and thereby motivating our actions beyond rote legalism. It’s not enough to either just believe the way God wants us to believe or to do what God wants us to do — our righteousness should be undertaken as a response to God’s love for us and an attempt to develop the love in ourselves that motivates God Himself.
I’m not really talking to anyone but myself in this post. I am a mostly “cerebral” Christian who has recently come under the conviction that God is indeed pursuing me in ways beyond the ethical or the intellectual. He wants us to participate in His plans for the world, behaviors and attitudes that aren’t simply a divine demand motivated by abstract principles, but are foremost an expression of His love for us. When I recognize God as the Father who revealed His Word to us in the person of Jesus, who desires all sin systematically and surgically purged from my life so that I can be ever closer to Him, how can I come to any conclusion other than that God does desperately desire for intimacy with us?
Yes, granted, it’s a less blithe and more costly brand of “intimacy” than is often conceived by those who use the expression above (and we are right to call them on this), but it’s the kind of relationship I recognize that I most desperately desire and need.
I wanted to share this excellent article that answers, mostly via Scripture, many if not most of the arguments of Calvinism. In an admirable show of the author’s critical thinking, while he certainly rejects the Calvinist doctrine of election and predestination, he still refuses to embrace what he considers to be overwrought and unconvincing alternatives such as a corporate election, pleading ultimate ignorance:
Election is true, but is shrouded in deep mystery. It is one of the secret things that belong to the Lord our God (Deut. 29:29). Calvinists and Arminians both err when they make precise statements about the nature of election. God has not told us whether or not there are conditions attached to it and we should not venture into it with such bold assertions.
Now, while I’m fully in favor of admitting ignorance and not pretending certainty where none exists, I think that some of the mystery surrounding election and predestination is due more to misleading, uninformed readings of the NT than to an innate, intractable ambiguity there. In another display of reasonable thinking, the article’s author remarks, “Perhaps further theological works by thoughtful Christians will reveal a more satisfactory resting place for our convictions.” I happen to think that the understanding of election I’ve come to is fully credible and consistent with a fair treatment of the texts of Scripture, so I’d like to offer the following as a supplement to his otherwise extensive critique of Calvinism.
Recently I noticed a friend on Facebook referencing Exodus 33.18-19:
Then Moses said, “Now show me your glory.” And the LORD said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the LORD, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.
What probably piqued his curiosity (I conjecture — he made no comment) was the last sentence of this interesting passage, which was quoted by Paul in Romans 9.15 as part of a passage that has been famously championed by Reformed Christians to support the doctrines of predestination to life and reprobation.
While someone might be tempted, by way of synecdoche, to reference the Ex 33.19/Rom 9.15 quotation as a way of affirming God’s choice to save some and damn others, we should note that the negative aspect is wholly absent in the original Exodus passage: we have no clear indication that God’s remark, meant only to highlight His goodness manifesting as mercy, was intended to imply the converse of that mercy. Yet notice Paul’s creative use of this verse in Romans 9 to do something like that, when he sets up a contrast with God’s mercy and His dealing with Pharaoh, synthesizing the two in the statement, “Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden” (v. 18).
At any rate, Exodus 33.18-19 taken on its own terms is a far cry from ‘double predestination’. Here the emphasis is on broadening, not arbitrarily circumscribing, the scope of His merciful dealings with humanity. I believe that this is the key to election as articulated by Paul.
Only those insistent upon ignoring Paul’s overarching argument can find a subdivision of all humanity into two classes, “saved” and “damned” in Romans 9-11. We shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that the “vessels of honor, vessels of wrath” passage ends at Romans 9.22. On the contrary, Romans 9 through 11 is a sustained argument culminating in chapter 11: his point is that the “hardening” of Israel described in chapter 9 was only undertaken as a temporary measure and as a means to extend mercy to more, namely the Gentiles:
Again I ask: Did [the Jews] stumble so as to fall beyond recovery? Not at all! Rather, because of their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious. But if their transgression means riches for the world, and their loss means riches for the Gentiles, how much greater riches will their fullness bring! . . . Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. (Romans 11.11-12, 25)
Paul is saying that God only “hardened” the hearts of “natural”, ethnic Israel as a means to extend His grace outside ethnic Israel. Only recognizing this greater argument allows us to understand Paul’s justification of God in 9.18: “Therefore God has mercy on whom He wants to have mercy – including that scoundrel Jacob and those scoundrels the Gentiles, like it or not – and He hardens whom He wants to harden – even His own chosen people, like it or not.”
But it doesn’t end there for those whose hearts He had hardened: “Consider therefore the kindness and sternness of God: sternness to those who fell, but kindness to you [Gentiles], provided that you continue in his kindness. Otherwise, you also will be cut off. And if they do not persist in unbelief, they will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again” (11.22-23). This again shows continuity with Jeremiah 18, the background passage of the potter and the clay analogy in Romans 9, in which the potter refashions rather than discards the “marred”, uncooperative clay.
To recap, Paul’s argument is that God’s mercy is so great and unrestrainable that, at least in certain times in redemptive history (e.g. Esau vs. Jacob, Pharaoh vs. Israel, natural Israel vs. the believing Gentiles), He will even “harden” the hearts of some of His own people if by doing so it will further His redemptive plan. Yet even those “cut off” will be restored upon their repentance (presumably posthumously).
“Ok, that sounds good for Israel. But what of Esau? Pharaoh?”
Well, laying aside the not-insignificant fact that such stories are not even likely to have actually occurred historically, perhaps we should turn to Paul’s conclusion to his argument in 11.32:
For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.
So what if He ends up extending mercy to all? Returning to the original intent of Exodus 33.19, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”
For Paul, the mere thought elicited a beautiful spontaneous doxology in the closing verses of that chapter (11.33-36):
Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable his judgments,
and his paths beyond tracing out!
“Who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been his counselor?”
“Who has ever given to God,
that God should repay him?”
For from him and through him and to him are all things.
To him be the glory forever! Amen.
Most of the hullaballoo surrounding Knapp-gate seems to have blown over for the time being, but its implications and the probability of similar future incidents continue to grow.
Undeniably, a crucial aspect of Christians’ discomfort with Jennifer Knapp’s stance is that she is “unrepentant” as a lesbian. That charge only works from outside, however, in that from her standpoint, homosexuality is not sin at all. This is considered to make her situation even worse — she’s living in denial! Surely she’s being selective in her use of Scripture, twisting it to make it mean what she thinks it should based upon her experience!
But is interpreting Scripture based upon prevailing sensibilities so unparalleled among her critics? Take, for example, the clear teaching in both the Old and the New Testaments, coming from the mouth of Jesus in fact, that charging interest on loans (called usury in Bible-ese) to fellow believers is a reprehensible, inexcusable practice. Lending money was considered a form of charity and as such undeniably played into Jesus’ fury at the “moneychangers” in the temple and in the social situation of the earliest believers in Acts who shared all possessions.
As I recall, the late Christian financial advisor Larry Burkett advised his evangelical audience not to charge interest among believers based upon this firmly biblical teaching. I can’t say that I’m surprised that Burkett’s once widely-broadcast counsel on this matter has not had much longevity; lending money is bifurcated, conveniently enough, into instances of necessity/charity vs. voluntary business transaction (as with banks), and usury now is taken to mean not “interest” but “excessive interest”.
I’m not saying that these categorizations and redefinitions are illegitimate; among other uses, charging interest actually makes a good deal of sense as a mechanism to allocate scarce capital. What I am saying is that the moment evangelicals (usually unconsciously) fly right past the clear teaching of the text to justify something they feel is common sense, right, and fair, they are in the same territory as those who creatively reinterpret/ignore Scripture for things which evangelicals steadfastly oppose, such as women in leadership or homosexuality. I, too, have found just about every justification for homosexuality based upon reinterpretation of Scripture to lack credibility. Yet evangelicals should not too quickly affirm their knee-jerk impression that those believers who “ignore” or reinterpret Scriptural condemnations of causes such as homosexuality or women in leadership are such unnatural aberrations, or rather, they should not harbor the illusion that they themselves are somehow exempt from unnatural or aberrant beliefs about Scripture despite their own unavoidable interpretive incompetence.
What evangelicalism needs most is a swift kick in the pride. Evangelicals must learn to recognize that even their beliefs are conditioned by things other than the text — are sometimes even directly at odds with the text; to acknowledge that no human may legitimately claim or imply the unimpeachability of his opinion merely by adorning it with the words, “The Bible says…” in place of the more accurate statement, “I interpret certain passages of Scripture to mean…”; to grant that even knowing what the Bible says is no guarantor that one knows the meaning or value of what it says. Humility needs to come home to the Church, that institution built in honor of, but too rarely in imitation of, our exemplar who “…humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death—even to death on a cross” (Php 2.8). Humility, in doctrine as much as anywhere, should be the very hallmark of our faith. Newsflash, American Christians: it’s not.
I know, two “quote of the day” posts in a row. But this one, which I found in a biography of George MacDonald I bought and read as a teenager, was too good to pass up, and like the best quotes of the day, it needs no comment.
I cannot say I never doubt, nor until I hold the very heart of good as my very own in Him, can I wish not to doubt. For doubt is the hammer that breaks the windows clouded with human fancies, and lets in the pure light. But I do say that all my hope, all my joy, all my strength are in the Lord Christ and his Father; that all my theories of life and growth are rooted in him; that his truth is gradually clearing up the mysteries of this world.
George MacDonald
Whoever thinks he understands divine scripture or any part of it, but whose interpretation does not build up the twofold love of God and neighbor, has not really understood it. Whoever has drawn from scripture an interpretation that does fortify this love, but who is later proven not to have found the meaning intended by the author of the passage, is deceived to be sure, but not in a harmful way, and he is guilty of no untruth at all.
Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana
Although the term “penal substitution” is not uniformly familiar, the concept itself is something that the majority of American Christians accept as the official summary of how Christian salvation works. In essence, there is tension between God’s justice and His love: our sin offends God in such a way that His wrath can only be appeased through punishment, from which the fortunate among us are exempt by virtue of Jesus’ sacrifice applied to us (= salvation). Yet historically, there are several other ways of thinking about salvation.
Ken Schenck recently pointed out that the Lutheran understanding of justification as “legal fiction” in which God decides to ignore that we ever sinned by the imputation of Jesus’ righteousness to the elect is somewhat in contrast to the OT understanding of what God’s righteousness:
But the Jewish background to the idea of the righteousness of God points in another direction. For example, Psalm 98:2 says that “The LORD has made his salvation known and revealed his righteousness to the nations.” See how much this verse has in common with Romans 1:17? It mentions God’s righteousness and speaks of it being revealed. It also has a sense of this revelation going out to all the nations, just as Paul understood the gospel to be for the Gentiles as well as Jews. The verse does not speak of us becoming righteous, but of God’s righteousness as he brings about the salvation of Israel.
When we read that God “reveals” His righteousness in Romans 1.17 and His wrath in the next verse, we tend to come away with a picture of God as fed up with sin and on a rampage, His patience and mercy expired and His vengeance overdue. God’s righteousness is both the poison and the antidote: those who fall short of it justly get consumed, but those on whom it is bestowed through identification with Jesus are saved. Yet as we saw in Psalm 98, righteousness and salvation tend to run parallel rather than perpendicularly in Paul’s Scripture, the OT:
This psalm is not the only place where God’s “righteousness” and his “salvation” are mentioned parallel to one another. The second half of Isaiah (chaps. 40-66) was of great significance to the earliest Christians, and Paul himself occasionally alludes to these chapters (e.g., Rom. 15:21). These sorts of parallels between God’s righteousness and the salvation he is bringing permeate them. The Greek version of Isaiah 51:5 Paul used says, “My righteousness draws near quickly, my salvation will come out like a light. The Gentiles will hope on my right arm.”
The bad news is that all have sinned: God’s action to save, the deliverance of God, is the good news.
So when Paul says that “the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel” in Romans 1:17, he is talking about God’s relationship with his people and in particular God’s propensity to save his people, God’s “saving righteousness.” Righteousness is a relational term in Jewish thought. It is not about some abstract quality God has but about a specific way that God relates to his people and the world.
Richard Beck has up a fantastic post composed primarily of quotes from George MacDonald’s “unspoken sermon” entitled Justice, in which Beck’s summary of MacDonald’s view bears a strong resemblance to the above observations:
Too often in discussions about hell and God’s justice it is argued that God’s justice (manifested in sending you to hell) is in tension with God’s mercy and forgiveness. That is, God will either punish you or forgive you. It’s a binary, an either/or. Heaven or hell. Justice or mercy. Punishment or forgiveness.MacDonald rejects all these as false dichotomies. Justice is mercy. Punishment is forgiveness.
This conception of justice has dramatic implications for our view of the atonement. Can eternal punishment satisfy God’s justice? How is God’s anger “righteous” if, as the OT authors believed, it is His righteousness that impels Him to save? Beck says that for MacDonald, “Punishment alone doesn’t bring either ‘justice’ or ‘salvation.’ Punishment is only ever a tool toward these ends.”
This sermon hosts one of MacDonald’s — or anyone‘s — most eloquent missives against penal substitution theory:
The device [of substitutionary atonement] is an absurdity—a grotesquely deformed absurdity. To represent the living God as a party to such a style of action, is to veil with a mask of cruelty and hypocrisy the face whose glory can be seen only in the face of Jesus; to put a tirade of vulgar Roman legality into the mouth of the Lord God merciful and gracious, who will by no means clear the guilty. Rather than believe such ugly folly of him whose very name is enough to make those that know him heave the breath of the hart panting for the waterbrooks; rather than think of him what in a man would make me avoid him at the risk of my life, I would say, ‘There is no God; let us neither eat nor drink, that we may die! For lo, this is not our God! This is not he for whom we have waited!’
(His next words give me goosebumps:)
But I have seen his face and heard his voice in the face and the voice of Jesus Christ; and I say this is our God, the very one whose being the Creator makes it an infinite gladness to be the created. I will not have the God of the scribes and the pharisees whether Jewish or Christian, protestant, Roman, or Greek, but thy father, O Christ! He is my God. If you say, ‘That is our God, not yours!’ I answer, ‘Your portrait of your God is an evil caricature of the face of Christ.’
If you’re like me, you’ll struggle to shake off the nagging feeling that MacDonald’s glowing portrait of God and His love might be too good to be true. MacDonald is aware of these misgivings, and explains them:
Truth is indeed too good for men to believe; they must dilute it before they can take it; they must dilute it before they dare give it. They must make it less true before they can believe it enough to get any good of it…Unable to believe in the forgivingness of their father in heaven, they invented a way to be forgiven that should not demand of him so much; which might make it right for him to forgive; which should save them from having to believe downright in the tenderness of his fatherheart, for that they found impossible. They thought him bound to punish for the sake of punishing, as an offset to their sin; they could not believe in clear forgiveness; that did not seem divine; it needed itself to be justified; so they invented for its justification a horrible injustice, involving all that was bad in sacrifice, even human sacrifice. They invented a satisfaction for sin which was an insult to God. He sought no satisfaction, but an obedient return to the Father. What satisfaction was needed he made himself in what he did to cause them to turn from evil and go back to him. The thing was too simple for complicated unbelief and the arguing spirit.
You owe it to yourself to read Richard Beck’s entire post.
Daniel Kirk today expressed well my feelings about and disillusionment with theology (which I have written about here).
Reflecting over the course on The Cross in the New Testament that he just completed teaching, he writes:
Three big take-aways from both the lecture and the readings are these: (1) when the NT talks about the cross it is infinitely more concerned with how we live lives of faithful discipleship than it is with how the death of Jesus “works” to save us; (2) there are numerous models of “atonement” in the NT that address different facets of the problem of the human condition; and (3) penal substitution might be less pervasive than you think, and probably needs to be rethought in more biblical categories.
With one of my favorite lines in biblioblog history, Kirk notes, ”The problem with ‘knowing’ how the death of Jesus works is that it keeps us from being able to see how the NT writers talk about it.“ That hit me in the pit of the stomach: despite my railing against it, I recognize the lingering tendency on my own part to view various biblical texts from some unifying principle that may not apply to all the texts equally.
One needn’t even completely reject inerrancy in order to recognize different authors’ perspectives on theology as not entirely overlapping, so long as we maintain the difference between truth, the facts as they are, and theology, our attempts to interpret facts.
And this is why I’m more broadly skeptical of erecting any theological statement, howsoever so broad it may be, as the “grid” through which we read the scripture. The spiral of reading scripture and theological articulation must always allow for scripture to come back and correct the faith of both the individual and the church.
It occurs to me that the prevailing assumption of concordism underlying the way we systematize theology is the actual problem, not the theologizing itself. Our goal as people who value the testimony of the authors of Scripture is to discover the unique theologies of Mark, of Romans, of Colossians, of Hebrews, etc., and we must never expect them all to coincide in every detail. We must use different utensils to pour out the different soups on the table, or else we’re likely to attribute to one soup or other a flavor that is actually alien to it.
Systematization of theology cannot proceed without our recognizing that the various theologies within Scripture do not always neatly coincide. Nor should it be taken for granted that the picture they provide, even when painstakingly pieced together properly, will be complete and exempt from critical analysis.
Kirk ends with a statement of quote-of-the-day caliber:
Theology: no better friend, no worse master.
Why do I even blog at all, when people like Daniel Kirk are writing such gems?
A fascinating discussion from two conservative evangelical scholars on the subject of the historical Jesus took place on last weekend’s episode of Unbelievable.
Adam Bradford, defending his book The Jesus Discovery, presented some interesting arguments in favor of the idea that Jesus was a lifelong participant in the religious community, trained from adolescence and recognized as an authority right up until the events that unraveled his rapport among the Jewish leadership and got him killed. David Instone-Brewer countered that Jesus, as a simple itinerant peasant from backwater Nazareth, was always an outsider to the Jewish leadership, as is commonly inferred from the Gospel of Mark especially.
Both sides were engaging and respectful. A brief pericope representative of the exchange: Bradford was arguing that Jesus would only have been allowed to drive out the money-changers and continue teaching within the temple habitually afterward (Lk 19.47) if he were recognized as having authority as a teacher, whereafter the host iterated, “Must have been some kind of authority he had then,” prompting Instone-Brewer’s quick and dry response, “Well, he had a whip in his hand…” All in all, I found most of Instone-Brewer’s rebuttals to be the more convincing, but there definitely seems to be something to Bradford’s contention as well.
Also coming available over the weekend was the ninth podcast in Dr. Phil Harland‘s enjoyable series on Historical Jesus studies, this one entitled Jesus in the Context of Educated Groups and Leaders, in which he described Jesus’ affinity, but not necessarily his identification with, first century groups such as the Essenes.
It’s intriguing to hear all the ways of approaching the topic, “Who was the man Jesus?” Conservative evangelicals typically react to this question with an indignant, “I can tell you who he was — the Bible tells us all about him!” But even conservative evangelical scholars such as Bradford and Instone-Brewer answered a basic question of Jesus’ background, whether he was a self-taught peasant preacher or a learned maverick rabbi, in completely different ways based upon indistinguishable hermeneutic sets approaching the same biblical data. The other expected response, “Does it matter? He’s Lord either way,” is not so easily answered, either: his background is a vital piece in determining what Jesus’ idea of his own mission was, which then informs our understanding of what it was he was sent to do, how exactly he accomplished it, and how we are to emulate him to our world.
He begins with a starkly stated proposition:
The factual contradictions within Scripture or between Scripture and extrabiblical sources cited in my previous blog are not, in my view, the most serious difficulties that Christians face in the Bible. More troublesome are those cases where a biblical text espouses ethical values that not only contradict other biblical texts but strike us as down-right sinister or evil.
He then goes on to highlight the clear incongruence between Mat 5.43-45 and Deu 20.16-18.
Says Sparks, “These words from the lips of Jesus and the Law of Moses are profoundly different. How can one biblical text admonish us to love our enemies and another command Israel to commit genocide against ethnic groups because they have a different religion?”
I am quite familiar with most of the involved justifications for the ritual act of consecration-by-destruction, or “ban” as it used to be called, known as ḥerem. In my undergraduate Apologetics class (or was it Deuteronomy?) I devoted a paper to arguing how truly ethical and even merciful it was for God to want those men, women, children, and babies murdered.
Sparks notes that many apologists, such as myself in that paper long ago, have argued that the shock we feel when reading about the ḥerem is merely a clash between modern ethics and older sensibilities. However, it’s important to note that the clash with the ethics of the Hexateuch begins not with us in (post-)modernity but occurred with the very onset of Christianity. It is clearly Jesus’ ethic that clashes with ethics that justify ḥerem. Sparks reminds us that even the early church struggled to justify the ritual slaughter of human beings; he specifically notes Gregory of Nyssa, but I’d also like to point out that the kernel of Marcionism was popped in the heat of that friction long before.
Sparks points out how important it is for evangelicalism to admit and come to grips with these tensions:
Even if conservative Evangelicals can create eccentric scenarios that seem to preserve the doctrine of Biblicistic inerrancy, the straightforward evidence against this doctrine is so palpable that the doctrine should never be granted any kind of fundamental status in the Christian faith.
I hope you read the whole post.
An amusing example of Christianese getting misappropriated in an inspirational context showed up in our office newsletter. One of these things is not like the other…
What Makes a Dad
Author Unknown
God took the strength of a mountain,
The majesty of a tree,
The warmth of a summer sun,
The calm of a quiet sea,
The generous soul of nature,
The comforting arm of night,
The wisdom of the ages,
The power of the eagle’s flight,
The joy of a morning in spring,
The faith of a mustard seed,
The patience of eternity,
The depth of a family need,
Then God combined these qualities,
When there was nothing more to add,
He knew His masterpiece was complete,
And so, He called it … Dad
Most of us glanced through it and passed on. But one co-worker without a Christian background sent out an email asking, ”What the heck does ‘faith of a mustard seed’ mean?”
Most of us who are familiar with the phrase missed this bad formulation — “of a mustard seed” here implies possession, not a comparison or other association. When we understand the original context (Mat 17.20), it becomes apparent how nonsensical this particular line is. Even understanding it not as a mustard seed’s faith but as a mustard seed’s worth of faith is problematic: who would include “has a bare minimum, but adequate, amount of faith” in a list of otherwise hyperbolic attributions of virtue?
This is a reminder of the human tendency to take the familiar for granted when it suits us. Mr. or Mrs. Unknown, being only vaguely familiar with the now cultural expression “faith of a mustard seed,” apparently reproduced the phrase in an almost stream-of-conscious way without parsing it. It also underscores, as my blog often does, the value of taking every chance we get to reexamine our assumptions and presuppositions from the outsider’s perspective. How many of our theological constructs need reexamination of context?
Last week I read an abysmally misleading article from Pastor Jim Wallis arguing for political involvement in social justice concerns thusly: “Amos instructs the courts (the government) to ‘Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts’ (Amos 5:15).” Only problem is, “courts” here refers to a gate or courtyards, manifestly not the courts of justice with judge, jury, etc. Whether this undermines Wallis’s point is immaterial: he’s clearly been misled by an ambiguous translation of the Hebrew sha`ar, represented as courts in the NIV, for instance.
Yet from what I read of the various bibliobloggers hailing this article’s progressive political agenda, which are the same group of people typically most critical of outright dumb biblical interpretations, I didn’t see any of them point this out. I have to wonder, though, would I have pointed this out if Wallis were arguing in favor of something I agreed with, for fear of undermining the larger point?
Would pointing out the small error, mentioned almost in passing, be a worthy endeavor? In this case, I think so, because if there’s anything that we should be wary of, particularly if we’re as allergic to using the Bible to motivate politics as progressives generally claim to be, it’s convenient but erroneous prooftexting.