Committed Critic

One of my deepest faith commitments is that God wants the church to be a unified Body made up of many different parts. This week’s post is the first section an essay I’ve written on the topic.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Young nor old didn’t make the list in Galatians 3:28, but perhaps it should have, for the sake of today’s American Church.

Our culture has a merked tendency to segregate itself generationally –– toddlers to day care, kids to classrooms, college students to dorms, “real” adults to work, older adults to home alone, everyone watching television or surfing the web to avoid interaction with whoever is around. Cell phones and email have reconnected people in important ways, but they bring their own problems. Churches, opting not to fight the cultural tide, provide Sunday school classes and social activities for every demographic. Generational alienation, not suprisingly, characterizes many churches.

Churches for the Ages

One response to this generational divide is to try to circumvent it. In The Emerging Church, a sort of guidebook for reaching Generation X with the Gospel, Dan Kimball describes a new breed of churches that draw generational lines almost intentionally. While mega-churches find greatest success with Baby Boomers, Kimball suggests strategies for developing new churches to involve and convert Generation-Xers, a group that often struggles to find a place in Boomer churches. Kimball quotes Rick Warren: “No single church can possibly reach everyone. It takes all kinds of churches to reach all kinds of people.”

In one sense, Warren’s approach is based on sound enough reasoning: churches want to grow and reach the lost, and congregations often find greater success programming for a particular demographic than integrating many different kinds of people into a single group. Commonalities, after all, bring people together. I myself for two years during seminary participated in a small group of young adults who shared weekly Bible study and Sunday lunch. The fellowship we experienced was powerful and valuable.

I question, however, whether it is the primary fellowship to which God has called the Church.

To be sure, the Warren/Kimball model has proved wildly successful in bringing about church growth and leading countless people to become Christians. Warren argues persuasively in the Purpose-Driven™ Church that churches must determine their purposes and focus their efforts only on meeting those purposes.

For Warren, finding a church’s evangelistic target –– the kind of person a particular church can best reach –– is a key to achieving the purpose of reaching the lost. And of course, evangelism does need to be tailored to its intended audience. However, I will argue that gathering all different kinds of people into one community under the fellowship of the Gospel is also one of our indispensible purposes. If so, churches must not build their programs with such a narrow target in mind.

I suggest that a biblical understanding of the Church as the Body of Christ prohibits us from planning our congregations around reaching particular “target” people. Rather, it requires us to allow the Gospel to bridge differences which normally separate people. Unfortunately, churches in the U.S. are already divided up in every way imaginable –– denominational, generational, social, racial. Most of us attend churches primarily made up of and led by one demographic of people or another. The broad task of overcoming divisions is likely to be painful and protracted, and I am hardly qualified to point the way.

I want to offer a more modest proposal, that we take preliminary steps towards bridging such gaps by crossing generational lines within each congregation to form meaningful cross-generational relationships. This means first that believers will commit themselves to building relationships within existing multi-generational churches rather than following Kimball’s model of starting new congregations tailored to a particular group.

Second, I will suggest a place where such bridging of generations is perhaps most needed. It is, ironically, an area in which well-meaning parents and ministers often intentionally accentuate the division: the relationship of teenagers to the rest of the congregation.

There is more to follow next week, but I would be very interested in whatever thoughts or questions this raises for people.

One of the more apparently out-of-place exchanges in Luke, it seems to me, occurs at the last supper. Jesus, preparing to give himself up to the authorites for crucifixion, tells his disciples to arm themselves with swords:

And Jesus said to them, “When I sent you out without purse or bag or sandals, you didn’t want for anything, did you?”And they said, “No, nothing.”

Then he said to them, “But now, whoever does have a purse should pick it up––and likewise whoever has a bag––and whoever doesn’t have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one. For I tell you, this writing must be fulfilled in me: ‘Indeed, he was considered one of the lawless.’ For indeed, it has its fulfillment in me.”

So they said, “Lord, we have two swords here.”

And he said to them, “That’s enough.” (Luke 22:35-38)

According to messianic expectations, it would make perfect sense for Jesus to tell his followers to get swords. He was about to be ambushed, and weapons could come in useful. Perhaps, the disciples may have reasoned, Jesus had finally decided to set aside his non-violent ways and take his throne by force.

But there’s a problem: What use are two swords to twelve men? They’re about to face an angry mob, and two swords are enough? What are Jesus and the other nine disciples supposed to do?

The story soon overturns the disciples’ expectations anyway:

While he was still talking, suddenly a crowd came, with the one called Judas, one of the Twelve, leading them. He walked up to Jesus to kiss him, but Jesus said, “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?”Then, when those with Jesus saw what was happening, they said, “Lord, should we strike them with the swords?” And one of them struck the slave of the Chief Priest and cut off his right ear.

But Jesus responded, “No more of this!”, and he touched the ear and healed it. Then Jesus said to those before him––the Chief Priest and the captain of the temple, and the elders––“Have you come out as if you were after a bandit, with swords and clubs? Every day when I was with you in the temple, you didn’t stretch out your hands against me, but this is your hour––the authority of darkness. (Luke 22:47-53)

This second story seems to explain why the apostles didn’t need more swords, but the problem remains: Why did Jesus tell the disciples to bring swords at all if he didn’t want them to use them? Presumably he didn’t simply change his mind in the middle of the story.

I would argue that the two swords at the last supper were “enough” precisely because they weren’t meant to be used. Jesus isn’t intending the swords to serve as weapons, but rather as props. The two swords aren’t enough to fight with, but they are enough to fulfill the scripture: “Indeed, he was considered one of the lawless.” The swords, then, create a sort of miniature drama whereby a rabbi and his disciples are transformed into a band of criminals, just in time for an angry mob to come hunting them down.

The important point, though, is that they’re a rather pathetic band of criminals, with no chance of fighting off the mob. When one of the disciples does try to defend himself, he manages only to cut off a servant’s ear. Jesus, of course, heals the ear and again says, “That is enough.” One swing accomplished what the swords were for.

It is precisely the disciples’ inability to defend themselves that allows Jesus to confront the Chief Priest and his mob the way he does: they show their own weakness and injustice by arranging for a clandestine, violent confrontation with a man who poses them no physical threat but whom they have been too afraid to arrest in daylight.

Thus the arrest on the Mount of Olives is loaded with an irony that is not lost on Jesus. The two swords Jesus’ disciples hold highlight the absurdity of the situation by portraying Jesus’ disiples as the very thing the Chief Priest’s response suggests they are. In the end, Jesus manages to use the entire scene to mock the most important Jews in Jerusalm for gathering late at night and pulling together a gang of ruffians in order to subdue the Rabbi Jesus and his mismatched, and only nominally armed, band of disciples.

In Luke’s portrayal, Jesus is above all innocent, and the arrest of a band of disciples as if they were a gang of bandits emphasizes the injustice of the crucifixion.

Irony in the Divine Drama

In addition to its place in Luke-Acts, I think this episode works as a commentary on the nature of evil and injustice as they are confronted by the kingdom of God.

In Christ, God engages the world with truth rather than with force; but because the world is no match for Christ’s truth, it uses violence to take advange of his refusal to use force. This is something we witness (and some of us experience) every day, and it can be excruciating for those who suffer––believers or otherwise.

What makes Christians different is that we get the irony of the story. Take away the irony from Luke’s Gospel, and all you have is a horrible injustice perpetrated against an innocent man. But careful readers have two key advantages: (1) recognition that the kingdom of God is present even if invisible, and (2) knowledge that resurrection will follow death. This fundamentally changes the meaning of Jesus’ death in Luke’s Gospel, and it fundamentally changes the meaning of the life and death we experience.

If there is no kingdom and no resurrection, then we (humans) are indeed to be pitied. But knowing the reality behind the appearances, even if it still can’t make suffering meaningful, does remind us that our world––which comes at night with swords and clubs to attack the truth it cannot defeat in daylight––may yet be redeemed.

There can be a big difference between the Bible stories you learned in Sunday school (or in the movies) and the details of the stories when you actually read them as an adult. Most of the time, the adult version is a lot cooler.

So for example, we all know that Charlton Heston’s Moses demanded of Pharaoh: “Let my people go!”

What’s interesting is that, in the Bible story, even though Moses does say those exact words, they are only the start of a sentence. And what he goes on to say makes a huge difference in the meaning of the story:

Let my people go, so that they may celebrate a festival to me in the wilderness. (Ex 5:1)

The catch is, the festival God instructs Moses to request is supposed to be for just a few days (see Ex 5:3), after which the Israelites will come back to Egypt and resume their slavery. But that clearly isn’t what God actually has in mind.

As readers, most of us assume that Moses’ request is for a permanent exodus of the people; and this is natural enough, since God has already told Moses that they’re leaving for good (Ex 3:8); we assume God wouldn’t tell Moses to lie.

But as the story goes on, it becomes clear that what Moses is asking for is quite different from what God has planned.

None of this is particularly hidden in the story. Pharaoh clearly starts to catch on to what Moses is doing (e.g., Ex 10:10), and he tries to put restrictions on Israel’s departure. Moses, in response, manufactures excuses to cover up his true intentions. When Pharaoh tells them to sacrifice within the land, Moses claims that the Israelites’ sacrifices are too offensive to the Egyptians (8:26). When Pharaoh says they have to leave their children in Egypt—obviously an attempt to make sure the Israelites will have motivation to return—Moses insists that all the people must be present for Yahweh’s festival (10:9). And when Pharaoh says Israel must leave some of its cattle behind (10:24), Moses insists that they will only know which cattle to sacrifice once they arrive at their place of worship (10:26).

We could try to construe each of these excuses as legitimate, but it looks far more like a shrewd game of cat and mouse between Moses and Pharaoh.

The Sting

This much, it seems to me, is fairly clear from a simple reading of the story, and even many casual readers have no doubt noticed it before. However, there’s another angle to the deception that most translations obscure. Exodus 12:35-36 describes how the Israelites leave Egypt:

The Israelites had done as Moses told them; they had asked the Egyptians for jewelry of silver and god, and for clothing, and the LORD had given the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. And so they plundered the Egyptians.

I don’t know about everyone else, but this always seemed strange to me. Clearly God could manipulate the Egyptians into doing whatever God wanted, but still it seems as if it should make more sense.

There’s a simple solution that I think makes far more sense of the story than the traditional interpretation. The words translated “asked” and “let them have” in the NRSV above take their meaning from context; in this context they can be better translated “asked to borrow” and “lent.” In other words, the Israelites were told to “borrow” their neighbors’ valuables when they knew––but the Egyptians didn’t know––that they would be leaving almost immediately. After the plague of the first-born, Israel would depart the country before the Egyptians had a chance to ask for everything back. That’s why it was called plundering

Ancient and modern interpreters have often glossed over the passage to make Israel appear more honest, but that’s hardly necessary. The deception, as it turns out, is exactly parallel to the one God and Moses were attempting against Pharaoh: asking for something on loan, but planning all along to keep it permanently.

Who is this God?

The only real problem with this story is that it challenges some of our ideals about God. If God were going to bring Israel out by force, why use deception? And isn’t God supposed to be completely honest, by God’s very nature? God can’t lie, right? Isn’t that what Hebrews 6:18 says?

For what it’s worth, there’s probably a better interpretation of that Hebrews passage, relating it to a particular oath God took toward Abraham rather than to divine honesty in general. However, that may be beside the point. Passages like the Exodus story challenge us to consider parts of God’s work that don’t fit with pious sensibilities. God isn’t, after all, Christian, and there is such a thing as a command for humans that God doesn’t have to obey.

In this case, I think the point is that God’s triumph over Pharaoh and over Egypt is total. God is not content merely to free Israel from slavery, but rather God intensifies the situation to bring judgment and devastation upon Pharaoh and his people.

And even then, God could have gone ahead with the plagues even if Pharaoh had let the Israelites go immediately. It seems, then, that God’s purpose was not to force Pharaoh’s hand but to humiliate him. God wanted Pharaoh to bring destruction upon himself, and if he wasn’t going to fall for God’s ruse, he was going to be brought down by his own stubbornness. The plundering of the Egyptian people just added insult to injury.

That’s not the God we want to model our behavior (or our national policy!) after, but it appears that it is Yahweh, the God of the Bible.

See James L. Kugel, Traditions of the Bible, 553–557.

Cody asked a couple of questions I really like concerning my previous post. Since I don’t think I can answer them briefly, I’ll do it in at least a couple of different posts. Here’s the first question:

Do you find the Word of God (or word of God) in other sources as well (ancient or modern)?

This could refer to at least two different kinds of sources: non-biblical sources from within the Christian faith, and non-Christian sources from other religions. For this post, I’ll try to address the latter. Basically, do other religions reveal the Word of God?

To begin with, I should say that I consider this an open question. I feel like you have to say that God can reveal Godself in any way at any time, assuming we believe in a God who is free. Some people try to get away with limiting God’s revelation by claiming that God has already announced, in Scripture, that Scripture is God’s final revelation; they would judge, then, that they’re not limiting what God can do but only holding God to God’s word, as it were. (I wish there were a less cumbersome way to write in gender-inclusive language…) This is an attractive idea, especially since it would limit the amount of data theologians have to work with. However, since Scripture appears to contradict itself in any number of places, insisting that God always behave in agreement with Scripture (as if it’s monolithic) is hugely problematic.

Because of this, I’m convinced that there may well be truth from God revealed outside of Scripture. This is hardly a stretch for a Christian, since at least one passage in the Bible says God is revealed outside of Scripture. Paul writes in Romans 1:19-20: For what can be known about God is plain to [the wicked], because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.

Do other religions reveal the Word of God?

Although I am open in theory to other sources of revelation, practically speaking I don’t think the Word of God is found elsewhere. That’s my short answer.

For my long answer, I’ll start out by kind of showing my cards, and then afterwards I’ll explain what I ground my view in.

First, I’m decidedly not a pluralist. Part of the reason I place so much weight on the Christian scriptures is that I believe God indeed intends for the Gospel of Jesus Christ to be the truth by which all experience of God is mediated. So in addressing other religions, I would follow the view that seems to be endorsed by Paul in Athens in Acts 17. We should seek common ground for discussing God with people of other faiths, but to the extent that their understandings of God differ from the God revealed in Jesus Christ, we should regard them as wrong.

This favoritism toward the Christian tradition, I think, pretty much constrains my answer as to whether the word of God is revealed in other religions. Claiming that Jesus is the ultimate revelation of truth is tantamount to saying that God isn’t revealed in other religions, since their claims to truth would have no independent claim to credibility. If they’re only true when they happen to agree with the Bible, then they don’t have any real credibility. They may be interesting texts to reflect on, but that hardly means they contain God’s special revelation.

Personally, I would claim that the world’s religions are human efforts to understand God based on natural theology, human experience, reason, and creativity. The natural theology those religions engage is fine, as far as it goes, but their human efforts to further define the truth about God, I would say, are more or less futile. Beyond recognizing the existence of a transcendent God who created the world, we are hopelessly reliant on God’s own self-revelation to learn anything true about God. Judaism, in this reading, is based on scriptures that are true but incomplete. The Koran’s truth, I would say, is basically derivative from the Jewish and Christian traditions is uses.

That, essentially, is how I view the relationship between Christianity and the other world religions. No offence is intended, of course, and I assume that many adherents of other religions would make claims about my faith that are similar to those I have made about theirs. If you’re not a pluralist, it’s kind of the nature of the beast.

To say that other relgions involve human efforts hardly gets me off the hook in defending Christian theology. It appears that the Bible is also a product of human thinking and work, so someone might ask whether we can sift the truth from it any better than from the Koran. Exactly how to get at that truth contained in the Christian scriptures is an exceedingly complicated process, and I think (as many do) that ultimately it depends on study, prayer, and discernment within Christian communities.

The best I can do for now is explain why I think it’s reasonable to see the Christian faith as claiming universal validity as, roughly speaking, the one true religion. Basically, I’ll try to show why I think the Bible is incompatible with religious pluralism.

How could it be the only truth?

One difficulty with my position is that I can’t deny that God can reveal Godself in other religions, even in ways that contradict the Christian scriptures. The reason I still argue that God doesn’t reveal Godself in other religions is that pluralism appears to contradict not just occasional passages of the Bible, but rather the major presuppositions concerning the person of Jesus Christ throughout the entirety of the Christian canon. The problem is the combination, consistent in the New Testament writings, between (1) Jesus’ historical particularity and (2) Jesus’ universal significance.

First, let’s consider Jesus’ historical particularity. If we were only talking about God in the abstract, and not Jesus the historical person, we could say that different religions simply had access to different parts of the truth about God. But historically speaking, it seems clear that the other world religions don’t have equal access to facts about Jesus. Islam is the only other religion I know of whose scriptures have any doctrinal claims about Jesus, but the Koran can only make claims as a work written by a later interpreter, in contrast to the authors of the Christian scriptures, at least some of whom had access to eyewitnesses of Jesus’ ministry.

Some would claim that other early Christian groups had access to true traditions about Jesus, and this is certainly possible. Various traditions later condemned as heretical, such as Gnostic groups, may have been founded based on teachings of people who were as closely connected to Jesus as the authors of the canonical Gospels. The problem is that efforts to connect any of the extant Gnostic texts (i.e., those we have copies of) to real historical traditions independent of the New Testament are questionable; in other words, most Gnostic texts appear to be simply re-interpretations of the New Testament. It is commonplace these days for people who resent Christian orthodoxy to gravitate to Gnostic texts and lend them more historical credibility, it seems to me, than they merit. While their hypotheses could be correct, a responsible historian lends more credibility to the best available evidence.

And as boring as it sounds, the New Testament writings are probably the most credible historical sources, by far, for Jesus and his disciples. That doesn’t make them pure history by any means, but it does suggest they have a credibility that later writings lack. If the earliest Gnostic groups had their own real traditions that they could trace back to Jesus, it appears that those traditions aren’t available (or at any rate, identifiable) to us anymore. And it’s quite possible that those traditions simply didn’t exist until later, and that they have no real link with the historical Jesus or his immediate disciples.

The second point I mentioned above is the universal significance that the New Testament ascribes to Jesus. Almost every book in the NT is written from an apocalyptic perspective, anticipating a universal end of time with Jesus as the key figure. Modern theology tends to set this aside by emphasizing Christianity as an existential religion, whose goal is more about experience of God, finding meaning in life, and improving / redeeming the world around us. But from the apocalyptic perspectives of, e.g., Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, and the author of Revelation, religion deals with an objective reality that includes a coming day of judgment that all people will face.

The closest thing to a non-apocalyptic perspective among the NT Gospels is John, which in certain senses de-historicizes salvation by making it present now rather than focused on the future. However, it still speaks of the last day (e.g., John 6:40), on which humans will be raised to be judged. Furthermore, even if salvation is somewhat de-historicized, Jesus remains decidedly historical as the Word of God who became flesh at a real point in time and lived a genuine human life. John has that historical Jesus make claims such as, “I am the Way, and the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except by me.” If the Exclusive Way to the Father became flesh in a particular place, it is difficult to see (by the definition of exclusive) how another religion could claim to reveal other ways to that same Father.

The point of this is not to use proof texts to make a point, but rather to suggest that the basic perspectives of the New Testament writings point to a universal application of the story of Jesus that is difficult to reconcile with pluralism. Jesus was a real historical person, so we can’t envision him as an idea that is revealed in different ways in other religions. Yet all the earliest interpretations of his person and ministry (at least those that are still extant) saw him as having a universal significance that leaves little room for interpreting him as just one of a variety of religious figures such as Buddha or perhaps Gandhi.

Other ways out

We could simply say that the New Testament is wrong on these points, that these interpretations of Jesus’ person and mission were simply created by early interpreters and used to shape the scriptures. But if those foundational elements are inaccurate, it is difficult to say why any of the NT’s teachings should carry continuing validity.

In the end, many people will conclude that the Christian tradition is deeply flawed and yet wish to keep what they can of it. For me, however, this amounts to wishful thinking––picking and choosing religious beliefs according to what appeals to us and then suggesting they are most likely true.

Whether my own beliefs are wishful thinking as well remains to be determined. However, I still think there are very good historical reasons to conclude that Jesus’ New Testament interpreters drew their primary ideas (such as apocalypticism) from real teachings of Jesus, and that a great deal of what they wrote is trustworthy historically and not just as a faith tradition. To make the case more specifically, I’ll have to put off for future posts.