Life in the Spirit

Once again, from my most recent journal entry:

Romans 7 contains one of the most human pictures in this epistle so far. In the middle of some intriguing but admittedly abstract explication upon the relationships among Law, sin and God, Paul shoves theology aside for a moment and explains something that anyone, of any religion, can relate to.

In a couple sentences, he sums up the frustration of every child who wants to please her parents; of every husband who wants to do right by his wife; of every person who wants to do what she knows she should, but finds it easier and more natural to do something else instead.

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Acts 22

From my most recent journal entry:

Back when The Point was first launching its North Brunswick congregation, I remember Tim asking why we thought non-Christians were so hostile toward Christianity and the gospel. There were the expected answers about pushy Christians engaging in drive-by evangelism, like the annoying fellow who tries to strike up a conversation so he can give you a tract; somebody mentioned some of the scandals that rocked Christianity in the 1980s, like the Bakkers and Jimmy Swaggart, or the more recent scandal of child molestation in the Catholic church; and someone else mentioned the sometimes pugnacious behavior of prominent evangelical leaders like Jerry Decker* and Jason Falstaff.* And someone probably mentioned that the gospel runs counter to all the values of the world.

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Sermon on the Mount

An excerpt from my Wednesday journal entry:

Over the centuries, rabbis and other teachers had added a second layer to the Torah, much of which is recorded in the Babylonian Talmud, an oral law that served as a fence around the sacred Torah. The idea was that if you followed the oral traditions, you wouldn't inadvertantly break the requirements of the Torah. For instance, the Torah forbids boiling a kid in its mother's milk; thus, it is forbidden to mix meat and dairy, so that there is no risk of accidentally breaking the Torah proscription. The Torah forbids working on the Sabbath, so rabbis imposed a limit on how much walking a person could do – a Sabbath day's walk – so that no one accidentally would walk too far and break the commandment.

Jesus is also setting a fence around the Torah, but in the opposite direction. If someone wrongs you enough that you want to kill him, he says, clearly you must address your anger, rather than simply struggling for the self-control so you don't kill him. The unsettled rage may one day still lead to murder, if it was that strong in the first place. Similarly, while some folks have gone to the extreme route of suppressing women, blaming them for every act of lust a man commits, even for rape or adultery; Jesus says it's the man's responsibility to control his attitudes toward women.

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Matthew 4

From my journal entry yesterday:

To me the most interesting part of Matthew 3-4 isn't the story of Jesus' baptism. It's the temptation in the wilderness, when Satan appears to Jesus and challenges him to find out whether he's really the son of God. ...

I'm going to contend that Jesus probably didn't think of himself as the Son of God at this point. I think he saw himself as a person who believed strongly in God, perhaps even as someone with a unique understanding of God, but I don't think he had any notions of his own divinity at this point. When he went to be baptized, I think he was trying to draw closer to God and to understand the Voice that he had heard calling him for years. And when he came out of the water and heard that selfsame Voice say "This is my son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased," he got more confused than ever and went out into the wilderness to sort it all out.

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Journal #1

From my own Bible challenge journal:

Moving along, we come to what for me has long been one of the iffy parts of Matthew. It really seems like he's cherrypicking the verses he wants to cite as prophecies about Jesus, doesn't it? He quotes Isaiah 7:4, the virgin will be with child; Micah 5:2, out of Bethlehem will come a ruler; Hosea 11:1, "out of Egypt I called my son"; and Jeremiah 31:15, a voice heard in Ramah, Rachel weeping for her childern. And then he has one about "He shall be called a Nazarene," but no one really knows where he got that one. I've heard it linked to a few, including one about a branching bush in Isaiah, but each one's a stretch.

Which, of course, some of the others are as well.

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Old Square Toes

Monday night at Bible study, as we were reading the Parable of the Sower, Dean Zimmerman and I touched very lightly on the question of Satan: his identity, his role, and his relationship to God. It was a tangent, so we moved on without discussing it in-depth, but I'm curious to hear what others have to think.

Many, if not most, Christians in America regard Satan as chief among the Fallen; that is, they believe that Lucifer was created as the highest of all angels, second in power and authority only to God. His status led to pride, and when he discovered that God intended for humanity to be pre-eminent among his creations, Lucifer rebelled and became Satan, the adversary, leading a third of the heavenly host in rebellion against God. They failed, were cast out of heaven, and are marking time until the Judgment, doing what they can to mar God's creation. Lucifer went from being an angel to becoming the Devil, and the angels who rebelled with him became demons.

The difficult thing about this, for me, is that it's largely extrabiblical if not unbiblical. The story I just summarized is found in the book "Paradise Lost," by John Milton, rather than any of the 66 biblical books Protestant Christians consider to be canon.

The ancient Hebrews considered the Satan -- it was an office in the heavenly court -- to be an agent of God, rather than an evil creature bent on the ruin of God's plans. His job was to take a contrary view so that the truth could be determined through a thorough cross-examination, a role much like the "Devil's advocate" we use in argument today.

We see this principally in the book of Job, where ha-Satan comes before the Presence. There is no remonstration or hostility expressed, just the question, "Have you considered my servant Job?" and the response, "Does Job love you for nothing? Look at all you've given him." The role also surfaces in the parallel accounts of the census David took in the latter days of his reign, in 2 Kings and in 1 Chronicles. In one account, God incites David to take the census and then smites him; in the other, ha-Satan makes the suggestion. (You also can see ha-Satan at work in the life of Ahab, when the prophet Micah describes an angel that suggests putting a lying spirit into the mouths of Ahab's prophets so that Ahab will go to battle and be slain.)

That view of ha-Satan is not entirely what we see in the New Testament, but I want to suggest that that is largely because we're reading the New Testament through the filter of our preconceptions. The tempting in the wilderness is similar in nature to the testing of Job, to see what Jesus is made of; and even the "demons" of the New Testament are better rendered as "unclean spirits," which I find works well too. The afflictions described in the gospels -- epileptic fits, self-inflicted injury, aphasia -- can be seen as coming from a medical or psychological condition, which also would qualify as an "unclean spirit" in a poetic sense.

The view of Satan as subservient to God did shift to the more familiar dualistic one during the intertestamental "silent period," a borrowing from Zoroastrianism, another Eastern religion practiced near Judea. (Not entirely surprising, since a lot of Jesus' teaching style is Socratic, undoubtedly an influence of the Seleucids and the other Hellenizers in the hundred years before Jesus' birth.)

Precisely because it is late in coming, I think we need to view such a dualist God/Satan view of the world with some suspicion. Don't we say that older revelation is the standard by which we gauge newer revelation? If it weren't for passages of Scripture like 2 Isaiah, which speak of God's desire to bring the Gentiles into his kingdom, or for places like Zechariah, that very clearly foretell the Crucifixion, it would be harder to see a connection between the Tanakh and Christianity as we know it and practice it today.

So, thoughts? Where does everyone stand on this Satan thing, and why?

christians and profanity

From "Toward an Evangelical Theology of Cussing":

Conservative evangelical Christians have long been known for shunning all sorts of behavior considered by others to be morally neutral or enjoyable. Whether it’s drinking alcoholic beverages, smoking tobacco products, playing cards, going to movie theatres, dancing, or even drinking coffee, “fundamentalist” Christians are often viewed by outsiders as having a God who is not only a white-clad, frowning prude, but also a “Cosmic Killjoy.”

However, the study of cussing, kakalogology, has a less refined history among Christians in general and evangelicals in particular. This lack of definition has caused many outright offenses and some extremely awkward social situations. These range from blurting out words that sound mischievously like curse words but are, in fact, not, to a teacher or preacher’s hesitancy to utter the word “hell” in reference the place of eternal torment.

What does the Bible teach concerning cussing? Can there be a Christian consensus on kakalogology? How are we to determine, in an age of words that did not exist in biblical times, what is appropriate and what is foul? If the Christian is to avoid uttering certain terms, we need to know what those are so we can at least keep an eye on them. And if there is a world of vocabulary available for communicating God’s message, shouldn’t we also be free to use it?

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