Undeception

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.

Today James McGrath published a post on an intersection between LOST and biblical studies. I know, who would have thought he’d do something like that? Check it out if you don’t believe me.

The gist of the post was that neither the Bible nor LOST are inerrant and that we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing far-fetched and overwrought theories that explain away internal tensions or the limitations of the authors/writers. Good point. But as a way of highlighting a couple shortcomings of some of the techniques of biblical criticism I’ve recently noticed, I’d like to explain why I find his specific example of inconsistency within LOST to be somewhat wanting.

If you haven’t seen LOST yet, you are forbidden to read the section between the spoiler alerts, on pain of being banned from the Internet. (Oh trust me, I’ll know.) Just pick up reading after the closing spoilers tag — you should still be able to catch on to my point.

***SPOILERS FOLLOW***

It’s not too much of a stretch to consider that MiB may have also been sent on the same time-lurch that JL et al were; if there’s a plot hole, it’s in that, but it’s conceivable that because he was using CS’s body and CS was a “passenger” of 815, he also participated in the time skipping (for that matter, why was it only the Oceanic people who participated?). How he appeared specifically at the frozen wheel is still unanswered, but it’s not going to great lengths to imagine that:

1) the MiB of all people would know the entrance to the wheel that was used by whoever completed work on the wheel in the first place; JL got in the hard way, but it’s likely there was another way. Or that…

2) before the Island started to “skip the groove,” MiB was already there in that underground place (which was presumably behind the Orchid, considering the sonar image Pierre Chang saw). Perhaps MiB went there waiting for this to occur, given that he was the one who told Locke/Ben to turn the wheel in the first place.

Now, these explanations I gave aren’t necessarily to be attributed to the writers; indeed, they probably hadn’t considered who built the wheel or how the well got filled in or anything else like that by the end of Season 4. However, unlike the Bible, I think it’s actually quite faithful to what LOST tried to be for us to attempt to imaginitively fill in the holes (so to speak).

Still, barring the nitpicky details they couldn’t have conceived of, we shouldn’t go too far in assuming a plot hole in the placement of CS at the frozen wheel as soon as a straightforward answer isn’t immediately available.

Oh, there are certainly plot holes in LOST; far more troubling to me than McGrath’s example is CS’s appearance to MD on the freighter (but I could be missing something here, too). Here’s my beef with the “Christian and the wheel” issue: by the time of the fourth season finale, I seriously doubt that the writers hadn’t plotted out what the CS apparition and the Smoke Monster actually were. In fact, if I’m not mistaken they had already confirmed via the official podcast that at least some instances of CS were the Smoke Monster. Presumably they already knew that Smokey was a human using CS’s body, and that this man was using JL to get his body; CS’s last words to JL, “Say hello to my son,” ended up being an instrumental plot point in getting JS to reconsider a return to the Island.

Whether you agree or disagree with my reasoning here, maybe we can at least agree that although the writers are undoubtably fallible, it’s an unjust insult to the showrunners’ ability to plan (or their intelligence) to just assume they dropped the ball before looking at plausible ways in which they may have justified writing plot points like CS and JL at the wheel.

***END SPOILERS***

Welcome back, benighted non-LOST folk.

What the foregoing highlights is the truism that although we shouldn’t think the writers of LOST or the Bible were more than human, we should be careful not to think them less either.

I’m a huge fan of biblical studies, and I always take the chance to read a good rethinking of biblical data. A good bit of the biblical criticism I’ve been reading lately presumes for the authors of the New Testament an undue level of  ignorance, a predisposition to (self-)delusion, and/or ulterior motives, all of which are assumed to be perpendicular to an honest (or even a vaguely accurate) presentation of facts. “Sure, they said this, but they couldn’t have meant it. Because [insert ulterior motive here], surely they constructed their story to convey this:…”

What I don’t find very plausible is that, although both Judaism before Christ and Christianity by the second century was self-conscious about moral purity (such as honesty), there was somehow a huge lapse in moral and ethical consciousness concurrent with a predilection for spinning good yarns in the face of the facts just when it came time to write the NT — which just happened to be centered around the exaltation and exemplification of Jesus as a preeminently righteous Jew! Given what we know of the ethics behind Judaism and the Christianity that emerged, I would like to see a little more presumption of sanity and altruistic motive on the part of the early Christians.

This bothered me about a recent post from (the usually excellent) Ken Schenck that confidently asserted an alternative history not only absent from but contradictory to the actual texts we have. In a strange way, this and other attempts seem to be based upon an ironic desire paralleling that of inerrantists, viz. to iron out the whole NT into a cohesive story. Biblical scholars are just more likely than inerrantists to disregard chunks of their material in order to do so. No doubt this is a worthy pursuit for academics, but it must be recognized to have its limits. Biblical scholars rightly eschew tidy concordism with the text and harmonization attempts; the accuracy and continuity of Scriptural testimony is impeded by the fact that the biblical writers were fallible and had motives other than a dispassionate explication of facts. However, they must also adequately realize the extent to which modern scholarship’s accuracy is impeded by the same limitations. Or should we assume that every scholar working has no motivation other than “just the facts, ma’am” and a superhuman ability to uncover and reassemble those facts?

To be sure, there are some fascinating suppositions in Dr. Schenck’s post that are completely plausible to me. Let me state emphatically that I fault scholars not for coming up with brilliant alternative hypotheses, but 1) for being too confident that an alternative hypothesis, any hypothesis, must always trump the actual text and 2) for quixotic confidence that disbelieving this author here and tweaking the motives of that author there will unearth a pristine, complex narrative relic that will “almost certainly” tell us something. My problem is with the presumption that if we steamroll every text in search of an obscured subtext we’ll uncover a coherent narrative leading us to the historical “real story” behind it all. It’s fun to try, of course, but given the characteristically dynamic nature of historical and textual criticism of the Bible, I doubt very much if many conclusions we can be “almost certain” about are in the cards any time soon. How often has this sort of historical methodology been independently and conclusively demonstrated to have accurately reconstructed a situation that actually existed?

I’m no inerrantist, and I’m certainly not saying we should view every biblical text with an assumption of “history until proved a fairy tale”. We should dig down as far as we can, prying up the surface to get a peek of what lies beneath each text. Criticism of the Gospels is quite interesting, and I have gone on record saying that I find many of the Jesus Seminar’s positions to be intriguing and likely to be true. But a lot of it presumes at best a clumsy moral ambiguity in the presentation of historical material, and self-conscious disregard for known facts in favor of self-serving agendas at worst. We can find ulterior motives and dubious agendas behind any number of good actions on the part of well-intentioned people. My main point, I suppose, is that just because we can imagine clever alternative scenarios doesn’t mean we should feel unduly confident in them. Like the authors of Scripture, we’re only human, after all.