Undeception

Tim Bulkeley writing in December’s Bible and Interpretation seeks to explain what he sees as a widening disconnect between those who understand the Bible in light of academic research and most other lay Christians who live faith-led lives, e.g. the televangelist and young earth creationist crowds carefully quarantined from intellectual scrutiny.

Bulkeley believes that this divide has been exacerbated by the insularity of the academic approach to biblical studies. Even seminaries, he writes, “have increasingly bought into [the] modern and post-modern styles of Bible reading,” many of which, despite being “exciting, challenging, and intellectually satisfying,” he deems too beholden to “materialistic practical atheism.” So even many Christians initially interested in deepening their academic understanding of the faith by going to seminary find themselves more attracted to less intellectual and indeed anti-intellectual forms of Christianity. His solution is

…not to offer more, and more entertainingly presented, instruction in neuro-reflexological readings of biblical texts. Nor is it a good dose of minimalist historiography. The effective response is simpler than that, and more radical. Offer religious readings of the sacred texts to religious students. Recognize and celebrate their (our?) faith, and explore the texts within that framework, with spiritual goals in view. Such a study would not focus almost exclusively on the last century or two of scholarship. Rather it would give students a sense of how our spiritual ancestors wrestled with the texts. Thus revealing that our predecessors read the Bible using a range of non-literal hermeneutics, and how they read parts in the light of the whole. Particularly it would show that Christian readers in the past understood everything in Scripture in the light of the story of Jesus. After such a course of study our seminary students will be able to withstand the wiles of the Fundamentalists, whether of the atheist or the creation scientist varieties. 

Bulkeley doesn’t much address the other, perhaps more likely reaction to solely critical approaches to the Bible, namely faith abandonment, focusing more on the essential escapism that motivates and perpetuates Christian faith skeptical of mainstream academic analysis of the Bible, but he does state that the medicine he prescribes will prevent both brands of “fundamentalism”.

I am uncomfortable with some of his characterizations of the contributions of non-confessional, “secular” tools of biblical and historical research, but I do agree that teaching Christians what to think about their faith should be something other than merely deconstructive. It is no crime against the scholarly understanding of Scripture to present it without undermining faith in the Christian God, either through the wrecking ball of critical scholarship or starvation brought on by concentrating on everything but personal faith. Recognizing that you can’t get a daily devotional out of each and every passage doesn’t preclude an abiding awareness of the meaning of God we have inherited from the community of faith we are heirs to.

On this blog, I have sought on multiple occasions to examine the reasons why critical studies have in my life been the reflex of a healthy personal faith and not been considered an attack upon it. When reading Bulkeley’s post I was reminded how differently my own introduction to critical scholarship was, and I’d like to take this opportunity to offer an example of a satisfying presentation of Scripture as analyzed by critical scholarship that is pervaded throughout by a deep reverence for God and for the men whose testimonies of their evolving understanding of God are chronicled in the Bible.

When I was in undergrad and starting to wrestle with the nature of the Bible, I happened upon the recently late Catholic scholar Lawrence Boadt’s Reading the Old Testament among the books my dad had accumulated for some theology courses he took when I was a youngster. Although in some need of a revision incorporating more recent critical scholarship, I still think this book holds up fairly well, not only as an introduction to the study of the Old Testament, but especially as a template for what an approach to the Bible looks like that takes its mind from honest biblical scholarship and its heart from within the “faith of our fathers, living still.”

Therefore, the Son of Man is also Lord of the Sabbath.
ὥστε κύριός ἐστιν ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου καὶ τοῦ σαββάτου. [Mark 2.28]

When most modern English speakers sing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”, my guess is that they (as I once did) equate “Lord Sabaoth his name” with “Lord of the Sabbath”. In fact, Sabaoth is a transliteration of the Hebrew for what most translators render in English as “of hosts” or “of armies”. This was an early Israelite conception of God as warrior king, the leader of armies, Yahweh Sabaoth. Despite its phonetic resemblance (which is notably less in the actual Hebrew word), the Hebrew word underlying Sabbath is etymologically unrelated to Sabaoth.

I was just wondering today when reading this passage, which appears in all three of the Synoptics with slight variation, whether these misleadingly similar Hebrew words were so unintentionally misleading. “Lord of the Sabbath”, as far as I’m aware (and that’s not very far, admittedly), is not a title that existed prior to this pericope. Could this be a subtle apocalyptic allusion to the well attested title κυριος σαβαωθ ‘Lord Sabaoth‘?

In Mark, the first Gospel written and the source of the Matthew and Luke parallel passages, the similarity to κυριος σαβαωθ is fairly obscured due to the syntax: four discrete lexico-grammatical units intervene “lord” (κυριος) and “of the Sabbath” (του σαββατου), which it should be noted has an article that does not belong in the LXX phrase κυριος σαβαωθ. Add to this the fact that the book of Mark gives us little reason to  suppose the author expected his audience to catch the pun. So on first glance, there appears to be little to commend the idea that this was an intentional double entendre.

Matthew might be a different matter. This author is likelier by far to paint Jesus in terms deeply embedded in Jewish Scripture and also expect his audience to get it. He situates this statement amidst other occasions of Jesus’ railing against the religious leaders and speaking of an imminent time of “judgment unto victory”.  And interestingly, he rewords the saying in a way that brings κυριος and του σαββατου closer together and moves them to the front of the sentence, pushing “Son of Man” to the end: κυριος γαρ εστιν του σαββατου ο υιος του ανθρωπου. If there is an allusion to Yahweh Sabaoth, it’s still subtle, but it seems plausible that Matthew cued off of Jesus’ statement as cited by Mark, who was probably oblivious to the similarity, and drew the connection in an oblique fashion. Luke seems to follow Matthew’s rewording here.

On the other hand, I’m still left asking the question, why “Lord of the Sabbath”? Whence this claim to an unprecedented title? The phrase looks very much like a metanalysis, an uninformed re-analysis, for “Lord Sabaoth”. If I may add to all the suppositions in this post so far, I suggest that this saying goes back to an historical claim made by (or about) Jesus, that “the Son of Man is Lord Sabaoth,” the commander of the Lord’s armies, which is obviously the context in Daniel, the likely source of Jesus’ favorite self-descriptor, “Son of Man”. To Gentiles this no doubt sounded more like “Lord of the Sabbath” than anything else they were familiar with, and when speaking of the likely historical incident of Jesus breaking Sabbath restrictions, such a folk explanation would have suggested itself quite naturally to the author of Mark. In short, perhaps Mark’s explanation of this title associated with Jesus is analogous to the inference made by most modern day singers of “A Might Fortress”.

I’m sure I’m not the first to flirt with these ideas. Can anyone suggest any scholarly treatments of such a hypothesis?

To get much out of this post, you need to read or already be familiar with the following story from 2 Samuel 14.1-14:

Now Joab son of Zeruiah perceived that the king’s mind was on Absalom. Joab sent to Tekoa and brought from there a wise woman. He said to her, ‘Pretend to be in mourning; put on mourning garments, do not anoint yourself with oil, but behave like a woman who has been mourning many days for the dead. Go to the king and speak to him as follows.’ And Joab put the words into her mouth.

When the woman of Tekoa came to the king, she fell on her face to the ground and did obeisance, and said, ‘Help, O king!’ The king asked her, ‘What is your trouble?’ She answered, ‘Alas, I am a widow; my husband is dead. Your servant had two sons, and they fought with one another in the field; there was no one to part them, and one struck the other and killed him. Now the whole family has risen against your servant. They say, “Give up the man who struck his brother, so that we may kill him for the life of his brother whom he murdered, even if we destroy the heir as well.” Thus they would quench my one remaining ember, and leave to my husband neither name nor remnant on the face of the earth.’

Then the king said to the woman, ‘Go to your house, and I will give orders concerning you.’ The woman of Tekoa said to the king, ‘On me be the guilt, my lord the king, and on my father’s house; let the king and his throne be guiltless.’ The king said, ‘If anyone says anything to you, bring him to me, and he shall never touch you again.’ Then she said, ‘Please, may the king keep the Lord your God in mind, so that the avenger of blood may kill no more, and my son not be destroyed.’ He said, ‘As the Lord lives, not one hair of your son shall fall to the ground.’

Then the woman said, ‘Please let your servant speak a word to my lord the king.’ He said, ‘Speak.’ The woman said, ‘Why then have you planned such a thing against the people of God? For in giving this decision the king convicts himself, inasmuch as the king does not bring his banished one home again. We must all die; we are like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up. But God will not take away a life; he will devise plans so as not to keep an outcast banished for ever from his presence.’ [NRSV]

David was heartsick over his son’s estrangement, but apparently he believed that accepting Absalom would be an unjust response to his son’s violent revenge. After all, Absalom had had his half-brother killed.

Nathan advises King David (image via Wikipedia)

Joab did not try to argue that there was a problem with “banishing” or somehow punishing a wrongdoer. But by appealing to David’s nature as a good king and as a loving father, traits of God that Christians would later emphasize, Joab suggested through the Tekoan woman’s charade that making any such punishment final without the ultimate intent to restore was in contradiction to something David believed about God’s own nature. Two chapters earlier, David had learned through a similar ruse by the prophet Nathan that God would go through drastic measures to restore David to righteousness. So in the end, Joab revises David’s opinion that his justice must exist in tension with forgiveness — and he does so by appealing to the nature of God Himself.

—————————

My arguments above are fairly convincing, I think. At least I was convinced when I first wrote it all down.

But then things broke down for me. I looked back at ch. 12 (Nathan the prophet’s indictment of David’s sin), which is obviously linked to ch. 14 here: in both chapters, David is tricked by one of his advisors into making a judgment against his own instincts, etc. The thing that destroyed it for me was “God does not take away life”: in ch. 12, that’s exactly what God did with Bathsheba’s first son! This made it look for all the world as though David was actually getting duped by Joab, tricked into ignoring the lesson in the Uriah/Bathsheba incident, the lesson that God punishes life for life. By this logic, the brother in the “widow’s” fake story should have been killed. Moreover, the heeding of Joab’s counsel here appears to have had the deleterious effect of enabling Absalom’s treason in the next chapter. This made my take on the passage look like a classic case of confirmation bias: I had liked Joab’s message because I agreed with it. And so this post you’re reading languished in the scrap heap for three months.

Today, however, when I began thinking over it again, I began to revert to my original interpretation. I might personally believe that “what God did with Bathsheba’s first son” amounted to “taking away life” – but would an ANE writer/reader have put an infant in the same category as a mature adult?  I really don’t think so; children were no doubt doted on as they grew, but in such societies they were viewed much more as objects, commodities, and hence as signs of blessing. Read in this light, it appears that Joab may actually be appealing to (exploiting, perhaps) the example of the Uriah/Bathsheba incident accurately: God did not take away David’s life in compensation for his killing of Uriah, but “devised a plan” to restore David without taking [what the original audience would have considered] a full-fledged person’s life away. Punishment was necessary, but God would be satisfied with less than equal compensation in the interests of restoring “an outcast” into “His presence.” This would mean that here we have another voice in the Old Testament crying out that God’s punishment is restorative, not retributive.

The other misgiving I had on my second reading, that Joab’s counsel was proved wrong by Absalom’s later traitorous actions, is actually answered somewhat easily by the context. Absalom’s treacherous behavior should probably be seen as the result of David’s failure to adequately implement the plan of restoration, which should necessarily have included addressing the issue rather than ignoring the problem: when Absalom returned, David gave the order that the two should not come into one another’s presence, which in essence was only a superficial amendment of the policy of estrangement that Joab was trying to change. Things remained this way for two more years (vv. 24, 28), and the situation was finally resolved only by Absalom’s desperate scheming, which again went unpunished. We are left to infer that Absalom’s discontentedness with David’s rule and desire to reign in his stead were at least exacerbated, if not caused (we see no political ambitions on Absalom’s part before the Amnon/Tamar incident), by David’s unwillingness to address problems, which should be seen as a recurring criticism of David’s administration by the author: consider that Absalom’s revenge on Amnon for raping Tamar was only necessary because David refused to punish him (2 Sam 14.21).

How do you interpret Joab’s message to David? Was the audience supposed to view it as essentially correct? Or am I merely guilty of confirmation bias?

A Christmas Carol for 1862, the Year of the Trouble in Lancashire

by George MacDonald

The skies are pale, the trees are stiff,

The earth is dull and old;

The frost is glittering as if

The very sun were cold.

And hunger fell is joined with frost,

To make men thin and wan:

Come, babe, from heaven, or we are lost;

Be born, O child of man.

.

The children cry, the women shake,

The strong men stare about;

They sleep when they should be awake,

They wake ere night is out.

For they have lost their heritage—

No sweat is on their brow:

Come, babe, and bring them work and wage;

Be born, and save us now.

.

Across the sea, beyond our sight,

Roars on the fierce debate;

The men go down in bloody fight,

The women weep and hate;

And in the right be which that may,

Surely the strife is long!

Come, son of man, thy righteous way,

And right will have no wrong.

.

Good men speak lies against thine own—

Tongue quick, and hearing slow;

They will not let thee walk alone,

And think to serve thee so:

If they the children’s freedom saw

In thee, the children’s king,

They would be still with holy awe,

Or only speak to sing.

.

Some neither lie nor starve nor fight,

Nor yet the poor deny;

But in their hearts all is not right,—

They often sit and sigh.

We need thee every day and hour,

In sunshine and in snow:

Child-king, we pray with all our power—

Be born, and save us so.

.

We are but men and women, Lord;

Thou art a gracious child!

O fill our hearts, and heap our board,

Pray thee—the winter’s wild!

The sky is sad, the trees are bare,

Hunger and hate about:

Come, child, and ill deeds and ill fare

Will soon be driven out.

I love the sights, sounds, and smells of Christmas. My enjoyment of the season has grown even more since having children to share these joys with. The nativity plays, the extra desserts, the nighttime drives through the neighborhood to look at the Christmas lights, and the beautiful carols and spiritual songs all excite me. But Christmas has always seemed more than the sum of these things. If I had to name it, I’d say that underlying it all is a peaceful, reverent sense of holiness.

There will be, and already have been, plenty of blog posts written to tell inerrantists and other traditionalist Christians how Matthew’s and Luke’s birth narratives are different and contradictory, why Jesus probably wasn’t born in a stable or cave adjacent an inn, why he might actually have been born in Nazareth, etc., etc. Regardless of the motivations of these writings (which in many cases come off as downright Grinchly), many of them are probably correct.

But whether or not there ever was a manger, whether or not he was born in Bethlehem because of Quirinius’ census — indeed, whether or not he was even born of a virgin, the fact remains that Jesus was born. Our Lord was once a helpless baby. As a Christian I believe that the Word of God was made flesh among us, and that Word was nowhere whispered so subtly or simply than it was then. Wherever the birth narratives lie on the continuum of historicity, from accurate historiography to theological stylings of older legends and rumors to the ex nihilo literary craftsmanship of the authors, the theology remains crystal clear: in, under, and through those stories, God’s message through Jesus, that His heart lies with the humble and those through love willing to be humbled, is proclaimed.

This excerpt from Pope Benedict’s XVI’s 2006 Midnight Mass homily beautifully captures the essence of why I am touched in a fundamental way by the Advent of Jesus, historical details notwithstanding:

God’s sign is simplicity. God’s sign is the baby. God’s sign is that he makes himself small for us. This is how he reigns. He does not come with power and outward splendour. He comes as a baby – defenceless and in need of our help. He does not want to overwhelm us with his strength. He takes away our fear of his greatness. He asks for our love: so he makes himself a child. He wants nothing other from us than our love, through which we spontaneously learn to enter into his feelings, his thoughts and his will – we learn to live with him and to practise with him that humility of renunciation that belongs to the very essence of love. God made himself small so that we could understand him, welcome him, and love him. The Fathers of the Church, in their Greek translation of the Old Testament, found a passage from the prophet Isaiah that Paul also quotes in order to show how God’s new ways had already been foretold in the Old Testament. There we read: “God made his Word short, he abbreviated it” (Is 10:23; Rom 9:28). The Fathers interpreted this in two ways. The Son himself is the Word, the Logos; the eternal Word became small – small enough to fit into a manger. He became a child, so that the Word could be grasped by us. In this way God teaches us to love the little ones. In this way he teaches us to love the weak. In this way he teaches us respect for children. The child of Bethlehem directs our gaze towards all children who suffer and are abused in the world, the born and the unborn. Towards children who are placed as soldiers in a violent world; towards children who have to beg; towards children who suffer deprivation and hunger; towards children who are unloved. In all of these it is the Child of Bethlehem who is crying out to us; it is the God who has become small who appeals to us. Let us pray this night that the brightness of God’s love may enfold all these children. Let us ask God to help us do our part so that the dignity of children may be respected. May they all experience the light of l ove, which mankind needs so much more than the material necessities of life.

from Benedict XVI’s Christmas Eve 2006 homily

Review: The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It)
Author: Thom Stark
Wipf and Stock, 2010
Chapter 5: “Making Yahweh Happy”

After coming to terms with the conclusion of the last chapter, viz. that most of the Old Testament texts present Yahweh as a thoroughly typical Ancient Near Eastern deity, the assertion that human sacrifice was originally considered normative for Yahweh worship seems not at all surprising. In fact, although chapter 4 was characterized by more involved argumentation, including some necessary backgrounding in extra-biblical sources and ideas, in this chapter Stark was able to rely more on the biblical texts themselves, many of which I found to be more blatant – or stark, if you will – in support of his claims.

As I have noticed in other chapters, the most ambitious part of Stark’s argument comes first, and it is what this review will focus upon. Stark contends that the ANE practice of child sacrifice underlies certain prescribed rituals within the Law of Moses.

“They have built shrines to Baal, to put their children to the fire as burnt offerings to Baal — which I never commanded, never decreed, and which never came into my mind.” (Jeremiah 19.5)

This will be one of the first verses cited against Stark’s contention. But first let’s look and see what evidence he cites in its favor.

“The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me. You shall do the same with your oxen and with your sheep; seven days it shall remain with its mother; on the eight day you shall give it to me.” (Exodus 22:29b-30)

This passage will no doubt be considered to just as easily describe not a slaughter but a mere dedication to God, such as with Samuel, and a way of building up a herd of livestock for the Levites. But further examination makes that possibility seem the less likely.

For one thing, as Stark explains, Exodus 34.19-20 shows that actual death is required when God claimed “all that first opens the womb”, because here the method of giving the unclean animal to God is death in the usual fashion of sacrificing unclean animals, i.e. breaking the neck. As if sensing our discomfort reading that, the writer of Exodus 34 hastens to add that all human sons will be substituted for. But as Stark importantly points out, the logic that accepts human sacrifice is still there: Yahweh, like the other Canaanite gods, actually deserves to bask in the fragrance of burning firstborn children, but could and perhaps should be appeased by sacrificing another animal in their stead.

This is a far cry from Jeremiah’s blatant assertion cited above that the requirement was never in God’s mind. What makes the most sense of these contradictory commands in chs. 22 and 34 is the supposition that 34.20 was written as clarification (for different reasons, scholars have long considered ch 34 to date from a later period), incorporating into the Law what was likely to have been the actual practice for quite some time. That is, we have little enough reason to believe that the sacrifice of the firstborn was ever a thoroughgoing norm in the ANE, but rather a sign of extreme devotion, capable of eliciting either the special honor (as with Abraham, discussed in this chapter) or the intervention (as with Mesha, discussed again in this chapter) of the deity to whom the child was sacrificed. The Exodus 22 passage, then, is likely to have been read as an affirmation that the very lives of the firstborn were considered to have been owed to Yahweh; in forbearance, and in accord with typical ANE practice, the life of an animal was acceptable as substitute. Exodus 34 was later written or edited so as to make substitution, an only theoretical exception that actually functioned as a rule, into the rule proper.

Another reason to believe that Exodus 22′s command to give the firstborn to God was based in ANE practices of human sacrifice is that we have evidence of multiple Old Testament prophets acknowledging it — and trying desperately to change it, by various means.

As we saw above, Jeremiah’s approach was to just flat out deny the authority of that law altogether. The Book of Jeremiah comes from a time late in Israel’s history in which the prophets were trying to do everything possible to distinguish Israelite religion from the religion of the non-Israelites in their midst. Jeremiah, argues Stark, picks up Hosea’s novel practice of relegating the originally generic title baal ‘lord’, hitherto applied as honorific to Yahweh, to foreign gods alone, in contradistinction to Yahweh. Jeremiah then uses that artificial distinction to further alienate the practice of child sacrifice: Stark believes that during Jeremiah’s ministry there was still child sacrifice to the baal we call Yahweh occasionally occurring in Israel, and Jeremiah employed the strategy of having Yahweh essentially complain, “You are sacrificing children to a ‘lord’, but not me. I never wanted that to happen.” The very fact that Jeremiah feels he has to put forth an argument that Yahweh never wanted human sacrifice shows that he is responding to a contrary position among his Yahweh worshiping contemporaries. In other words, Jeremiah seems to be responding to a group that maintained that the practice was indeed acceptable, or even normative, for Yahweh worship; from our reading of Exodus 22, it certainly sounds like Jeremiah is attempting to fix the Law in much the same way that the editor of Exodus 34 did. It’s an attempt to correct Israel’s archaic understanding of God.

Next, Stark shows that Ezekiel goes about criticizing the practice a different way altogether:

“Moreover, I gave them laws¹ that were not good and rules by which they could not live; I corrupted them through their very gifts, when they offered up all their firstborn, so that I might make them desolate, so that they might know that I am Yahweh.” (Ezekiel 20.25-26)

Here is even more decisive evidence that there was a ritual of sacrificing firstborn sons, reflected in Exodus 22, construed by devout Israelites like Ezekiel as coming from Yahweh Himself. Ezekiel’s solution, which both Stark and I find unacceptable but well-intentioned, was to argue that God was the source of that practice, but that it was instituted by way of judgment. Ezekiel agrees (with us) that the law was “not good” — thank heaven! — but his solution shows that he thought that God would be vindicated by admitting that it was a bad requirement inflicted as punishment. This reasoning is contradicted in the teaching of Jeremiah 31.29-31 and Deuteronomy 24.16 , which both repudiate the idea that the (firstborn) sons should be punished for the sins of their fathers. Here again, Stark illustrates his assertion that Scripture is an argument with itself.

Although he discusses the Abraham and Isaac sacrifice scenario, one angle that he didn’t mention was the possibility that this story was used as a justification for substituting animals for humans. When God Himself stepped in and denied the necessity of Isaac’s death and provided an animal substitute, the pious Israelite was assured that what God really wanted was a resolve to give all to Himself, since even Abraham was relieved of the painful duty of child sacrifice. I know little enough of the literature, but I expect this possibility has been thrown about before.

This is all but a thumbnail sketch of the material in this chapter, and I haven’t even discussed some of his other evidence that helps demonstrate that human sacrifice was not originally so “pagan” as we tend to think. There is valuable commentary on Jephthah’s unfortunately hasty vow, the should-have-been-obvious-but-somehow-completely-escaped-me relation of human sacrifice to the ḥerem (essentially a ritual genocide), and more. If my summary has been especially unconvincing, you owe it to yourself to read his much better and more complete discussion for yourself.

I leave convinced of the basic points of Stark’s argument. But if I had to offer a criticism, it is that Stark sets many good tentpoles but casts a canvas too small to cover them. By this I mean that he evinces many convincing passages within the Old Testament to bolster his claim that human sacrifice was once an official part of Yahweh worship without also offering a satisfyingly complete picture of what this really looked like at any point in time. Thus the reader is left drawing scant conclusions hardly more developed than this: some early Yahweh believers reflected in some parts of the Old Testament believed that human sacrifice was not a bad thing, maybe even a good thing, but they may or may not have regularly gone about practicing it systematically, and later writers seem to be opposed to it, although we don’t know exactly why. These ambiguities are probably not entirely his fault; I imagine that there is considerable scholarly debate over the details, and Stark probably assumed it would dangerously thin out his argument if he were to call attention to this. In deciding not to offer even a conjectural picture, he may have underestimated the strength of one of the primary stipulations of many in his audience: someone with an orderly, airtight system will not suffer their system to just be reduced to shambles, but will insist that it be replaced by a similarly orderly, airtight system. This demand is not deliverable, of course, but I think that even a provisional attempt at sketching out a slightly more complete picture of what “making Yahweh happy” actually looked like throughout OT times would be likelier to convince the skeptical. And my hunch is that Stark is just the man to make such a plausible suggestion.

_________________________________________
¹ Beware the NIV here: Stark explains that the translators took an unwarranted license in translating this phrase to say, “God gave them [over to] bad statutes…” The bracketed words do not appear in any version of the OT text — they were added in a clearly inaccurate eisegetical move. The text is clear that Ezekiel thought that God gave the statutes to them directly; He did not give them to the statutes. Naughty NIV! But at least they agree with Ezekiel that such statutes were in fact bad, and agree with us that God did not give them!

Synchronicity in the blogosphere can be almost spooky.

I was sitting in the library working on my dissertation a few days ago when an interesting thought occurred to me out of the blue. I floated it among some of my friends something like this:

If the universalist is right, everyone will be reconciled to God in the end. To many believers, universalism is a dangerous doctrine because they fear that evangelism will suffer, and so if universalism turns out to be wrong, more people will perish as a result of their having been lulled into a false sense of security. But the Reformed should have no bone with universalists: if the Calvinist is right, God’s people will go to heaven regardless. It is only those who reject unconditional election and irresistible grace who should find universalism to be a threat.

Although this statement leaves untouched the question of the universalist’s and the Calvinist’s precise beliefs about evangelism as a Christian responsibility, the general consensus was that this is fairly airtight reasoning. In part I offered it as an attempt to show a huge class of universalism’s most vocal critics (the Reformed) that their core reasoning bore more affinities with universalism than they might care to admit. But my main point was that, despite the common belief that universalism is not merely a harmless false belief but one which poses a severe practical problem, i.e. it supposedly encourages a tapering off of evangelism, this is in fact only a valid fear if one believes that God is not sovereign over salvation. It is only the non-Calvinist who needs be wary of any pragmatic ill effects (as opposed to biblical or theological problems) of universalism.

In discussion with my friends, I came to realize that I, as someone who shamelessly flirts with universalism and shamelessly casts aspersion on many of the hideous conclusions of Reformed soteriology, fall equally-but-inversely under my own critique. I realized that if Ido indeed entertain the possibility of universalism, I could not maintain an unequivocal objection to at least one of the petals of T.U.L.I.P.: irresistible grace.

My friend Drew Smith then pointed me to a post written the day before, in which Roger Olson pointed out how universalism typically relies upon one of the same presuppositions underlying the so-called “doctrines of grace”, viz. that God will have His way in the end — they merely differ on the character of God and His way (although this is a dramatic difference). Olson objects to both views on the same basis: the free will objection to universalism and Calvinism, the problem of God somehow overriding human wills in order to force Himself upon us.

Drew also pointed out a post from last month by Eric Reitan, an excerpt from his upcoming book on universalism dealing specifically with the objection to universalism from free will. Well, it just so happened that the heretic universalist Joel Watts pointed out another blog post published today voicing the free will objection to universalism/Calvinism, which was also defended by Rod of Alexandria, who memorably characterizes universalism as “predestination with a smile on its face.” Interestingly, as evidence for the validity of the thought I had in the library, I’d like to note that all of the above-cited objectors to universalism are non-Calvinist, Wesleyan-leaning Christians.

But of course I was unaware of all of this when I was sitting in the library on Friday, and was already preparing to blog on the topic. Almost makes me think that this is all a part of some great divine plan set in order before the foundations of the world…almost.

I have a few thoughts on the free will objection, which I don’t find particularly persuasive, but I won’t really go into it here. For a start, however, be sure to read Eric Reitan’s post, and this from me/MacDonald as well. What are your thoughts?