Real Predestination

I've written elsewhere about the primacy of worship in the theological enterprise, rather than straight rationality. Whereas Aristotle might say (depending on translation) that man is a "social" or "political" animal, and whereas many college students might say that man is a "party" animal, I think the Biblical definition is inescapble that man is, at his core, a worshipping being (my apologies for the male-centric language -- no offense is intended). The effect of this on theology is at least two-fold: we can only understand the mysteries of the Christian faith (and there is much irreducible complexity) by worshipping and theology that is understood in worship is inherently historicized. The latter point is what I wish to attend to now (although the former is very vital -- if my book of Chalcedonian faith ever gets written, I'll be dealing with that).

What is meant by "historicized theology" is theology that is relevant for the life of the Church. Or, to put it negatively, historicized theology is the opposite of philosophical theology. Many in the Calvinist Tradition (the "Geneva Rite," I suppose), end up worshipping a philosophical God, especially concerning the doctrine of predestination. We talk about the "eternal decree" and the "double will" of God, about the necessity of reprobation, and other things that are, frankly, more philosophical than Biblical (to be clear, they are derived from the text, not necessarily imposed from an outside system). Predestination, then, gets turned into a caricature such as can be seen in Love Wins by Rob Bell, which he bases his whole argument against. In the end, this "god of the philosophers" ends up producing a very troubling sort of theologian (I should know, I've been through this ghastly "phase"): an arrogant know-it-all who, instead of being humbled by God's grace, cannot wait to shove the esoteric knowledge down the unsuspecting Arminian's (or whatever) throat.

What might a "historicized" predestination look like? Consider Romans 8. Here (St.) Paul is discussing God's plan for the world through Jesus the Messiah -- the restoration of all creation into the "liberty of the sons of God." A beautiful picture. It is this picture that is capped with Paul's great assertion that God has "predestined [us] to be conformed to the image of His Son." That is, God is remaking the world right now, God is remaking us right now, God is going to do it through this strange and wonderful collusion of His love, His justice, and His power. And, He's given us His Spirit so that we can fruitfully tag along. Instead of the abstract, eternal decree, Paul seems to be describing predestination as a very this-worldy phenomenon (whether the plan originated before or after the Fall seems to be quite beside the point), the brunt of which is this: God is doing this great work, He's equipped you to be a part of it, don't you want to orient your life and the life of your community correspondingly?

Here is where worship comes in. We do not worship a remote, far-off god who, even if he could hear prayers it would not matter; instead, we worship the God who created the world "and everything in it" and who is actively remaking the eagerly-waiting world, who gives His Spirit now to us so that we might join Him, and who guarantees success in the endeavor. There are no words that can truly express the worship that bubbles up in me when this Gospel is proclaimed -- thank God for the Psalms and liturgy, to supply my dumbstuckness with a voice! "Open my lips, O Lord, and my mouth shall proclaim Your praise!" This worship, then, this moment where the Spirit joins the community in union with the Messiah, sends us out into that "eagerly waiting" world to hear the news that its captivity has ended, its sins have been paid for, and it is time for the "seasons of refreshing to come."

Even so, come Lord Jesus.

Why Christians Need the Final Judgment

The stereotypical view of Christians is that we believe that "we" (however that is defined) go to heaven and everyone else goes to hell. That Jesus has given us a card that not only gets us out of hell, but out of punishment altogether (we wouldn't want any overtones of purgatory, now would we?). We, I use "we" intentionally as I am not apart from this, seem to have forgotten about the last, or final, judgment. We need to remember.

We need to remember because Jesus does not give us a free pass to do and be whatever we want. Disinheritance is a real option, even if we don't talk about it much. Those who, even though they claim Jesus, worship other gods -- whether actual other 'divinities' or money, self, sex, war, whatever -- won't inherit this Kingdom, so say the Apostles Paul and John. When Jesus calls a man, as Bonhoeffer witnesses to us still today, he calls him to come and die. Die to his old life, his old ways, his old self and identity. But Jesus does not stop there, he calls us to die daily. The last judgment calls us to this: we must die not only to our sin, but to our ecclesial pride ("we have the right interpreation" -- whether that interpretation is based on the latest findings of historical science or the oldest traditions of the Fathers), to our legitimizations of power and lust and war that hurt the least of these, or aggrandize the truly evil. It is true that Paul gives hope that in the last reckoning we will be "saved, yet as through fire," but this is also a day of gloom: have you cared for the least of these? If not, do not be surprised when they rise up against you, either in the here and now, or in the judgment. Have you cut off hand or gouged out eye to enter life maimed? Or are you going to go to hell whole and secure?

I'm meeting more and more people who aren't convinced of the Gospel because they see no difference between Christians and pagans. In fact, Christians are often arrogant, isolated, and stand-offish. I'm seeing more and more people turned away from the Gospel because we hide behind our theologies, which often serve those in power instead of the One enthroned above, who calls us (both Old and New Testaments) to love our enemies, to take care of the poor, the widow, the orphan, to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God. They see us engage in wars that decimate Christian populations in other parts of the globe (for example, the wars persecuted by our current and former presidents have been the direct cause of the slaughter of many Assyrian and Palestinian Christians) because the cause of godless democracy is more important than the cause of Christ. Judgment always begins in the house of God, we must not forget.

The Cross is foolishness. It doesn't make sense. It never has. It never will, God willing. We adopt arrogant attitudes when we think that our position is logical and obviously true in the world's way of reckoning things. Nobody wants to look like a fool, even though that is what the Apostle Paul calls us to. Apologetics has never started with this premise because it seems self-defeating. That may be so. But apologetics has never converted an empire, not even the Roman Empire, certainly not the American Empire -- the foolish work of Christians to exercise, not their own political dominion, but the dominion of Christ in healing the sick, educating the poor, interposing between power and wealth and the disenfranchised and weak, dying to self and for others, that is the blood of the martyrs which is truly seed, as Tertullian rightly saw.

Maybe the faith of the martyrs is what we need to recover. We are not even willing to give up our favorite TV shows, much less our lives for the cause of Christ. We have stopped believing that it is better to die for Christ (in both the literal and metaphorical senses) than to live in this world. We have decided, like the rich young aristocrat, to go away sad with our many goods, rather than forsake all and follow the Christ. No wonder they don't believe; we are telling them to follow One who we don't even know.

Whether we are rich or poor, male or female, Jew or Gentile by descent, black or white, slave or free, we must sit loose to the things of this world, even as God has entrusted them to us. Certainly, there may be rich Christians, but those riches are not yours -- they are Christ's, to be used according to his rule (which he gives us guidelines about in both Old and New Testaments, and shows us wisdom through Church history). There will be poor Christians, our poverty is to Christ, who became poor for our sakes. We must forswear envy and jealousy of those in power and with wealth. Has God called us poor or to be poor? Then follow the poor Christ and minister to your fellows in privation! Has God made you a male? Follow Christ the Man, the only guide of manliness -- who chastises those in power, builds up the lowly and downtrodden, and calls all to repentance (no one gets a free go, rich, poor, male, female). Are you a female? Follow Christ the Groom, who values women as no man ever has (read the Gospel of Luke): be the woman who God has made, Eve redeemed, a picture of how the Church is to act.

It is time to live in light of the final assize, it is time to act like Christians, the humble servants of the King who rules through the Cross.

Closing Time

Another school year has ended. Another set of students, some that I've gotten to know quite well, are gone. Maybe forever. Bethany and I wondered, when we were in college, how professors managed after pouring their lives into students for 4+ years to just let them go. Now that I've been teaching half a decade, I still don't know. It is hard. But it is good.

It is good in a way that is hard to explain. I'm not so far from graduation myself that I've forgotten how the 'real world' seemed. We were frightened and bitter in no small measure that all our education had not prepared us for taxes and leases and car payments and gas bills (we then realized that this was not education's job, but ours). I cannot believe that it will be much different for other students that I've seen graduate -- some go out and conquer, some just go out, some get conquered.

It will be 6 months after graduation for some of them to learn what we strove to teach them freshman year. For many others, it will be much longer, if at all. Our public school paradigm of careless knowledge dumping (this is an overstatement, of course) does not work with Wisdom -- you cannot teach wisdom, you can only point the way and say 'The Lord precedes you; walk in faith." That is a hard lesson for me to follow, much less an 18 year old. But we point as we walk, knowing that they will quickly overtake us. We hope for postcards.

It is rarely the "good" student (the A+ student, stereotypically) that really shines. Too many years of working the system can damage your ability to really grow (I speak from experience -- my own shining, if indeed there is any, comes from my decade long "dark night of the soul"); those who get Bs and Cs, who scrape by it seems, often make something of themselves in ways that are refreshing and surprising -- they break the industrial paradigm and seek green pastures, so to speak. They often remember to send postcards. They are the ones, it seems, who when pointed towards the Way actually make it on the narrow road. Obviously, this is not always the case: sometimes the "successful" student does it, sometimes the "failure" does also. Often times "average" students don't make it. Maybe it is just that I have a few who have shined so brightly that I think immediately of them.

At the end of a semester, it is good to be a teacher. It is hard. But it is good.

Send postcards.

More on Chalcedonian Life

Given the various comments and discussions generated by my first post on this topic and some new developments of thought, I'd like to expand on what I said towards a more practical appropriation.

Part of the difficulty is that whenever we speak of the "two natures" or "hypostatic union" of Christ, the discussion quickly gets railroaded by philosophical problems. What is the "divine nature"? What is "human nature" (this one is especially tricky now that the NIV -- amongst others -- has unhelpfully made the flesh to be the essential 'sin nature' of man: another reason to avoid that translation, I suppose)? How does these things relate to discussions of "substance"? In the life of the Church, important as these questions may be, many believers' eyes roll into the backs of their heads and they wonder how Christian doctrine can be so (1) boring and (2) impractical. In the last post, I tried to spell out how our union with Christ (our own "hypostatic union" as it were) is effected and made actual through common worship. The question was raised: what about the time we aren't in common worship? This is where a discussion of nature is helpful.

Whatever else "nature" may be, it is the record of action. A human is what a human does. God is as we see Him working in creation and redemption. So, if we are becoming more and more "conformed into the image of the Son" (Rom. 8), it means that we are doing the work of the Son. This is vitally important. We often act and believe as if Christ did his work on earth and ascended and basically is done working until the Second Coming. However, if we believe that the Father and Jesus share the Spirit, and that the Spirit has been poured out on "all flesh" (Joel 2 and Acts 2), we believe that God through the Son and Spirit is still working -- in fact, He is the primary actor in history (even today), and we join His work. All our work, whether the work of worship (we join in the worship by the Son to the Father; the Father blesses the Son and all those united to him) or our daily vocation, is the work of Christ: he is building his Kingdom, he is beautifying his Creation, he is bringing peace and release from all the effects of sin. So, whatever our work is, should be patterned after the work of the Son: we are, after all, "seated" (that is, enthroned) "with him in the heavenly places" (Eph. 1). This can give us great comfort, that we are not only not alone, we are not the instigators of the work, Christ is. However, if our work is to be a function of his reign, then our work -- whatever it is -- needs to take on the character of his action (or nature). What is Christ's nature? The Gospels make it clear: he is the compassionate One, the One who seeks out the poor, the lame, the blind, the outcast, the leper, the sinner and calls them to repentance and cleansing. He is the One who confronts power and privilege with the Gospel of self-giving, calling all the rich and comfortable to share with those who are united to him, building up one Man, one humanity that differs from the old, adversarial way of being (Gen. 3).

Is our work, our daily theosis (whether this be a "job," raising a family, being a student, etc.), following this pattern? Or are we "conformed to the world" whether it is in needing the right pay-scale or the proper amount of vacation days, or even being too far away from parish or home to be of any service to the poor, outcast, or sinner in our midst? The reign of Christ will change us (remember, it is his work!), but he has graciously called us to repent of the old forms of life, whether outright pagan or the "American Dream," so that we might join him in his work freely. So, it is not just common worship, but our common life in our everywhere places that show forth this active work of God's Spirit (His very Life!) and how we look, from glory to glory, more like the Son who has saved us and is redeeming the world.

Remembering

It is easy to get frustrated -- and despondent -- when you forget not only what you are working for, but whom. I don't mean this in the exclusively divine sense ("I work for Jesus!"), but also the human. Last year, at seminary, was one of my most fruitful years in terms of insight and joy -- I had a spiritual awakening and I also knew who I was studying for. This year I seem to have lost a bit of zest. Apart from often feeling buried in work (but that is not a new feeling), I've lost focus. This year I've been concentrating on making professorship my career. It has made me miserable. I like being a professor. I can easily see doing it for years and years (even though my post a couple of days ago might seem to argue against that). But if I am just working on getting a secure job, I'm working for the wrong reasons. In that regard, I've never been particularly ambitious: working to 'get ahead' just does not interest me.

But this week, I've been reminded of who I work for, who I study for, and who I am ambitious for: the community of saints here in Beaver Falls. Why study theology? To draw the community together to worship God and to realize His Kingdom in this place. Why make coffee? To draw us together in conviviality and fellowship. Why bake bread? Man shall not live on bread alone, but he does -- every once and awhile -- need good bread. Companion comes from the idea of eating bread together. Thinking this way energizes my living and my work and draws me into tighter union with those who are also united with the Messiah.

This is the reason that my dream -- however nascent! -- of starting a bakery here never dies. This is the reason that my hope of reestablishing the fresh water spring in our neighborhood is growing into action. God has not only called me in general, but called me here with these people and others who He will call.

The need for theological education

We had a nice Harvest Co-op meeting tonight about the development of variegated co-ops in our local community (or at least the parts I got to hear -- various duties call). One aspect of building local community that has struck me as necessary, and particularly neglected, is theological education for youth. I don't mean theoretical or philosophical/speculative theology (whether Trinitarian or over heady matters like 'free will/predestination' that our youth tend to love), but rather building wise, mature Christian men and women able to effectively join their ecclesial neighborhoods (or, in that wonderful old way of speaking, parishes). Due partly to ecclesial communities that only recognize the authority/worth of ontologically ordained members ("priests") or that relegate the eldership to bureaucratic matters, the Church produces either sycophantic yes-men or dependent moochers (obviously, these are extreme categories): Christians that either tow the party line in an obnoxious, arrogant way or those that can never seem to be freed from some besetting sin, even though they have been united with the Spirit for years, or even decades (I speak here, in both cases, from experience).

Part of the difficulty of this, at least in traditional Protestant circles, is that we have no idea what we are training our children to be. We want them to join the Eucharistic fellowship (assuming here that most are not paedo-communion sorts), but don't have any adequate means of explaining why that is important. We don't think, also, of the ecclesial of being the fundamental social category of existence: we are the Body of the risen Christ primarily, with all other categories (race, gender, nationality, job/vocation, etc.) coming out of that primary mode of being. So, we don't know how to teach our youth the importance of God's Word and the absolute claim to obedience that God makes on all of life, nor do we know why.

My proposal, then, is to reinvigorate this primary Christian education. It needs to be straight-forwardly Biblical, with an emphasis on the text as we have received (and we are supposed to be guarding) it. That is, we cannot let our students get lost in the morass of historical-critical ways of thinking (this is not, by the way, to minimize the importance of historical study of the text -- it is important, but it is not primary for developing wise citizens of God's Kingdom). Instead, the text must be allowed to stand as it is, warts and also (and what glorious, Chalcedonian warts they are!), especially since it is often the text in itself that points (and re-points, and re-points) us to God in Christ. From experience, I have seen that students are intrigued by, for example, the coat-and-goat theme of Genesis. But deeper than that (since that is largely a surface level literary facet), we see what we are supposed to do -- in the here and now -- through the text: we are to be guardians (Adam, the priests, etc.) of the Bride (Eve, Israel, the Church) for the world (east of Eden, the Gentiles, those outside the Church). The text, if read with an eye of faith that is attuned to the reading of faith seeking understanding, sees these things. Then, the Law is about -- not salvation in the limited sense of final destination -- but guarding the gifts that God has given me and requires at our hands. The Wisdom books (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, etc.) teach us how to navigate this world that God has given us and will more fully give us. And the list could go on.

Obviously, this is just a start. Wisdom as a goal (rather than sin-management) requires discipline, which requires some sort of binding authority structure. Are we willing to grant such things to our elders (and, in the image pattern of God, require it at their hands) and live by them? Are we willing to become lay-elders, training our children and the children of our neighbors, if the formal eldership is asleep at the wheel? Are we willing to submit to God in His Word, or shall we continue to have the State teach our children what it means to be citizens -- what it means to be wise administrators of what we have?

The Excitement is Gone

I've been teaching at the collegiate level for almost 5 years now. I wonder, often, about what in the world I'm doing. I was raised to believe, both by family and by the Church, that I could change the world. But what happens when the world doesn't change? What happens when you meet students that, for no apparent reason except maybe that you are scheduled to teach them at 8 in the morning, absolutely despise you? The irrationality of what I do, at these times strikes me.

I'm asking these things rhetorically, but with a certain poignancy. I know of professors, brilliant men and women who could change the world, who are burned out by the politics, the narcissism, the you-name-it of education. As a young professor who has his career yet ahead, I weep for these but also hide it in my heart. That will be me some day. I don't say 'might' because these are far better, far stronger people than myself. I'm already feeling the burn as I try to speak for wisdom over monetary comfort -- a worthwhile and futile pursuit in any age. In the end, Jesus often looks exactly like Mammon.

Here, maybe, is the danger of the Protestant rejection of the monastic economy. In trading out a life of constant worship for one of work, we declare loudly who our God is. This is not to say that work is a bad thing -- it certainly eagerly awaits the revelation of the sons of God -- but in our desire to demythologize 'calling and vocation' away from monastic and 'religious' orders we have not ably reenchanted the concept away from a baptized Weberian secularism. Work shall save us by giving us material comfort, high status, and a sure sign of God's blessing in our lives. We tell our students to investigate their 'worldviews' to gain a sense of deep 'calling,' which, for many, looks like the job they came into college to get. The point of cognitive dissonance is not reached until either mid-life or, possibly, post-college quarter life when the debt stacks high and the ability to be content just working for the glory of God has been sapped out by such winsome talk of 'purpose' and 'vocation.'

What we may, instead, want to start preparing students for is the necessity of being despised. For all the glamor and idealism of 'calling' I find myself being stepped on by adolescents. I see my mentors dragged through the mud casually by teens who consider themselves benefactors of the college. I also see students, told that God has a specific purpose for them, struggling -- tearfully -- to make any sense of it: for if God Himself has a purpose for me, it must involve clarity, direction, and some glory. God must be calling me to something 'special.'

Possibly would it be better to simply say that God has called you to become a mature person, a citizen of the Kingdom, doing work that just needs to be done? Do we really need to fill our heads with illusions of grandeur of how God is going to change the world through us? God changes the world through suffering -- there is the message that we don't hear. You want to be called by God? Come and die.

The Chalcedonian Nature of Common Prayer

When believers gather together under the one Head, Jesus the Messiah, especially when they celebrate Eucharist (or communion) with him, they act as the one Body of Christ. Our human natures are joined to, and changed by, his human nature. At the same time, through the Spirit, God joins Himself to the community that is praying. This is especially true when the Psalms are being recited/chanted/sung, for they are the prayers of Christ to the Father. This joins the divine (God in the Spirit) to the human (God in Christ), creating a moment of theosis in the daily life of the Christian community. This theotic moment, especially when pursued in the morning-evening pattern, gives a redemptive framework to the day: all that occurs between the moments of special union with God is offered up to God. The creation, instead of being negated, is rightly ordered and given its full meaning in the economy of worship found in the Trinitarian structure of God's work in the world.

The Primacy of Worship

More and more, the deeper I get into theology (and, therefore, into the intricacies of philosophy) the more I need to worship. It is too easy to lose sight of the Object of my study. I have been caught up in plenty of theological debates, both edifying and destructive -- it is what, years ago, led to my desire to give up the whole enterprise, but which led further to the "fire within my bones" that this calling of teaching and disciplining engenders. Theology should start in worship and lead to worship.

Further into that, though, worship de-abstractizes theology. It is easy, even if ultimately disconcerting, to debate the relationship between God's creational sovereignty and the 'problem of evil.' We abstract evil and we abstract God and ultimately make them into a dualistic dancing pair of irresolvable and eternal scope. In worship, though, we "proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes," and bring this problem squarely into the realm of human existence: we do not know how or why evil came into the world, but we do see Jesus, hanged on the Cross to bear the weight of sin and evil and so exhaust it and provide a way out for us humans. We hear the call to proclaim this death and even to join in his sufferings for the sake of the world. Worship of the transcendent God grounds us in the reality of created, embodied existence. The God that we serve is no construct of the Platonic Deists, but the God who has deigned to dwell among us, even though the greatest heavens could not contain or limit Him. The God who wipes away tears. The God who, even though it is often hard to see, is bringing the world out of its long and hard night into His daytime. In the midst of this, the Cross and the eschaton, the 'problem of evil' is not resolved in any intellectually satisfying way, but the problem seems to pale in comparison with the rich, and real, love of God in Jesus Christ.

The same goes, in many ways, with Trinitarian theology. Many who are close to me know of my struggles to comprehend and, at times, to believe in orthodox theology. It is inherently mysterious -- we do not have all the appropriate information. It arises out of worship, though: how do we worship the one God through Jesus the Messiah and by the Spirit? How can that be reconciled with biblical monotheism? From here, of course, it is easy to get ethereal and esoteric and philosophical...and confusing. Many of the defenses of Trinitarian doctrine (and much of the brunt of anti-Trinitarian doctrine) comes from exactly this point: the abstraction of God. However, all these problems and quandaries and quagmires pale in the light of Jesus himself: the one who acts out God's restoration of the world through his suffering and death and is raised to the very right hand of God the Father. This grounding in history, while it doesn't answer every question we might bring about the exact relationship between the Father and the Son, does send us back to worship in grateful thankfulness for the work of God the Father in the Son of God through the Spirit of God. We cannot, in worship or in life, speak of God without in the same breath speaking of Jesus and the Spirit: the history of God revealing Himself to His creation will not allow it.

And is this not salvation? "To know you, the true God, and Jesus the Messiah whom You have sent," that is, to worship God amongst His community by living the truly human life of Jesus Christ amidst the world.

Rethinking It All: The Lectionary

M.D. Goulder, in a series of well-worth-reading books, proposed a controversial account of how the Synoptic Gospels got their final form: as liturgical pericopae for the Jewish Torah lectionary system. By no means is his argument air-tight, but it is well worth considering. From the book of Acts, it seems clear that various Jewish holy days were still important to early Christians, if not binding upon Gentile converts. However, the liturgical year would still have been in place and attractive to these amalgams of Jewish and Gentile worshipers. So much so that "Quartodecimanism" (or celebrating Easter always on the 14th of Nisan, as Jews start Passover) controversy created major splits in the early Christian community -- possibly because it would be easy for many converts to return to the communities that they originally hailed from (Rodney Stark argues this point, in The Rise of Christianity, for Chrysostom's invective against Jews in his time). Later, of course, the standard Church year would arise, not celebrating festivals of Passover, Tabernacles, and the like, but instead Easter, Christmas, Lent, and Pentecost (not, notably, in that order). Being from a staunch Scottish Presbyterian background which holds to the so-called "Regulative Principle of Worship", I knew little about this or its historical background. My own study has led me to the conclusion that not only is the Church year a good thing in its own right, but that a return and reformulating of the traditional lections are greatly needed in the Church today.

If Goulder is right (and I think, with certain modifications and provisios, that he is), then the key to understanding why some of the NT books are the way they are, and the key to the Synoptic problem lies not with "Q" or some such mythological construct of the scholars, but rather within the life and activity of the Church. The Bible is, was, and always shall be the Book of the Church (which is why, not incidentally, the text of the book is important, but I've already argued for the Byzantine text tradition elsewhere). This Book, read properly -- that is, liturgically -- opens up vistas of interpretation for the common man, not just the cloistered clergy or lofty academic. The Book of the Church becomes the Book of the Community of God.

Ordered lections guard the people of God, as well, from well-meaning ministers who always face the threat of Marcionism. Many churches rarely, if ever, read from God's Torah or the Prophets. Many concentrate either on Paul or the Gospels, to the neglect of other parts of Scripture the interpret these things properly. A lop-sided view of the faith, or a fear of the Torah, or some such thing often arises ("we're New Testament Christians"...whatever that means!). Having lections requires the discipline of reading through the Bible once a year (this is assuming daily lections, but I've also heard of three year or even monthly patterns of lections), leaving nothing out as "unseemly" or "not Gospel" (as if any word from God was not a reflection and expression of the Word of God -- no part of Scripture is mere "straw"!). Lections force us to confront what we do not wish to confront in Scripture, that it is not a book of religious niceties, but God's story about His redemption of the world through His Son (Israel as type, Jesus as fulfillment), even in the messy bits of human life. We do not, understandably, want to be confronted in worship by the Levite's concubine, or even the atrocity of the Crucifixion, but we must be: the story of Sodom must be balanced by that in Judges -- the "people of God" commit worse crimes that the most flagrant pagan, even to crucifying our own Lord! The Scriptures leave none exempted, but also bring all in (such is the beauty of recapitulation): the Messiah, crucified by the world and the people of God, is made alive and offers new life to those whom had murdered him, and all their descendants, whether Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female.

However, this does not mean that I endorse any particular lectionary system. Being associated with the Anglicans here in Beaver County, I've had a little bit of experience with their system. It isn't perfect, as no lectionary can be. However, since the time of the early Church is past us, and we have seen a revival in interest in Jewish-Christian relations, it may be time to match up our readings with that of the old Jewish year, while still retaining, in full, the Christian year. This does not imply celebrating Jewish feasts (although reading the Megullah of Ester on Purim was extremely edifying), but rather remembering the olive tree in which we are grafted. If we were to match up our Gospel readings with the various Torah readings (John with Genesis, Matthew with Exodus, Acts with Deuteronomy, etc.) we might find vistas opened up in our relationship with our estranged older brothers in Abraham, we would see how the Messiah Jesus really is the "goal/apex of the Torah" as Paul puts it in Romans. Would this require a sizable amount of Bible reading daily and on Sundays? Yes. Would this require our ministers to bring their unwieldy sermons under control to fit all the readings and their expositions into a reasonable time frame? Yes. Would it require a greater understanding of Scripture by the common worshiper? Yes and amen, but it would build it also, especially if our translations were not wooden "religiousy" sounding blah-factories, but rather the earthy, allusive translations that these texts call for: ever had a pastor bring out the Greek or Hebrew about a passage and compare it with the language in another passage from a different book? Why don't our translations reflect those beautiful word-plays and obvious recapitulations of wording, rhythm, style? The Bible is essentially an aural book, meant to be read-aloud, to be chanted and sung, to be repeated until the words, rhythms, syntaxes, and allusions permeate our minds and shape our very way of thinking everyday.

Much work to be done, but it is good work for the people of God.

The Christmasization of Life

I'm not going to tell you to put Christ back in Christmas, nor am I going to tell you of it Saturnalia origins, nor am I going to rail about consumerism.

Instead, I want to expand the Advent season to include the whole year. I really want Christmas in July, but not in the usual ways. Whatever else Christmas is about (and it is about a lot of things), it is about the ontological change of the aeons -- the coming of Messiah to bring the "olam haba", the age to come, into fruition. Christmas, then, is about living in a different mode of existence -- not in the way of the old world, but in the way of the new age come in Messiah Jesus. In many ways, this new age is defined by 'righteousness', which has a multivalent definition. The aspect of its meaning that I find most significant at this point in the year is 'set in right relationship'.

So, for Christmas, maybe these presents might be an option (and can even be given last minute):

-Forgive someone who has hurt you, even if they are not seeking or do not want forgiveness
-Seek forgiveness from someone you hurt, especially if you have since lost contact with them
-Break bread with an enemy and listen to their viewpoint, even if you still end up disagreeing with them
-Mediate between two warring parties
-Confess your sins
-Adopt a child

Of course, this need not apply only to human-to-human relationships, or to divine-human ones.

-Care for the neighborhood stray
-Adopt an animal that has been abused
-Stop using destructive means to control pests
-Eat right (which means learn how to cook and bake)

The list could go on, and I'd love to hear your stories/ideas of how you are making Christmas an integral part of your, your family's, your neighborhood's, and your environment's lives.

Rethinking It All: God

I blogged about Athanasius, the (in)famous Alexandrian bishop three years ago. I have had reason, by way of Seminary to revisit this seminal thinker. Now that I am actually studying the nuts and bolts of Church history (instead of taking potshots based on strawmen and secondary interpretation), I can see where Athanasius is coming from in his critique of the Arians. This is, and remains, no small issue.

Arius, if nothing else, was defending a credible understanding of the Biblical God, revealed in Jesus the Christ, in line with Greek philosophy. I say 'credible' because in Greek thought, it worked. The problem, though, is what the Platonic milieu he spoke in meant by the multivalent word 'God'. For the thorough-going Platonist of that era (and who wasn't?), God was totally transcendent, wholly other from Creation -- so much so that he/she/it/they could have no real contact with said Creation, in other words, there could be no mixture of "essence" or "nature" or "substance". This God fit the Greek criteria of impassibility, unmoveability, and immutability. The problem was that, in some way, the Word of God (however conceived) was revealed as "becoming flesh" (Jn. 1:14) -- if the Word was fully God how could he/it commingle with the created flesh of Jesus? But positing a difference in "nature" or "essence" (the infamous 'ousia'), the Greek transcendence problem could be overcome. And leave the Church, substantially, with two divine sources, or two Gods. If the Word was God, he/it could not suffer and salvation could not happen. Therefore the Word was "god" in a lesser, derivative sense and so could.

Athanasius' response is ingenious and complicated. Suffice it to say that he was very concerned to stress the reality of the divine nature of the Word, equal with God and the human nature, at least of the body/flesh, of the hypostatic union known as Jesus. The Word must be God to save; the Word must be made flesh so that man could be saved. He ran the risk (and may have fallen headlong into -- it is hard to tell) of both Sabellianism and Apollonarianism.

In doing so, though, Athanasius effected a fundamental shift in the world of thought, quite unconsciously: by using Platonism he effectively destroyed the overall system. It is clear that Athanasius held to a similar conception of the divine substance as other Platonic thinkers: separate, impassible, etc. However, he also defined "death" as disintegration of the person, that it total solitary self-reflection without reference to another outside (cf. Zizioulas in Being As Communion, this is a fundamentally Eastern way of understanding personhood), which is a very close description of the Platonic God! In the Wholly Other's place, though, he substituted a more Biblical understanding of a God that is transcendent, but also extremely near in Jesus the Messiah. This God is one of intimate and everlasting relationship, which is his definition of life. To have a share in this God (theosis) is to have life, instead of sharing in the god of death and non-existence (being not in relation to anyone else). While he did not take this idea to its logical limits, it was (and is!) pregnant with possibility, especially in undertaking some sort of understanding of the economy of salvation, how God gets things done.

The interesting piece, historically, to add is that whenever the Platonic god raises his ugly (and totally other) head, various heresies come along with it: with the rise of Deism (extremely Platonic) we have the reemergence of Sabellianism, Adoptionism, and other forms of Unitarianism, such as the Jehovah's Witnesses. When God is thought of in relational terms, no such heresies exist: note that the detached, otherworldly Trinity of the Western Church has led to many such outbreaks in history, but the Eastern tradition has had no such 'luck'.

The historical accomplishment, even if flawed at some levels, of Athanasius and the Cappadocians after him, needs a heavy reassessment by Christian thinkers. A God in relation is necessarily a God for us, revealed in Jesus the Messiah and in the Spirit of God, Spirit of Jesus. Let the doxology flow.

Reprive: A Breath, A Wind, The Spirit

What if we've gotten the gospel the wrong way around? I've heard a preacher recently regale his congregation about how we cannot keep the Torah, and we need to keep it perfectly to be save, and that's why we need Jesus to keep it perfectly so we don't have to. Breathless...and backwards, I think.

Were Adam and Eve in a perfect relationship with God before He gave His command? Were the Israelites delivered from slavery in Egypt before the Sinai theophany and the descent of the Torah? While we were still in Exile (as Jews) or outside of God's family (Gentiles), did the Messsiah die for us and welcome us in? Is grace first or obedience first?

There is no question that we are supposed to live as God has intended His human creatures to live and that there are dire consequences if we opt to do otherwise. Sin, living outside of God's proscribed limits, has consequences -- far reaching and destructive, even to disinheritance. Sin is a fact in the human condition and it has permeated into every facet of existence. Whether or not we perfectly obey Torah, live as the wise creatures we are supposed to, we still inherit the Adam's rebellion and his curse. We need the action of God before any sort of obedience truly matters. It is here that Jesus comes in, taking the curse of Israel's disobedience and the Adam's as well upon himself, exhausting all wrath and fulfilling justice. His completely Torah-obedient life did not take away our duty, but was necessary for him to be able to have a curse-reversing death: only the obedient was worthy to undo the unworthy action of the disobedient. Jesus' death, as Messiah the faithful Israelite, establishes us in the Kingdom of God: his life was a prerequisite to that obedience. Since he himself did not need to be rescued from the dominion of sin, he could effect the new Exodus in his death.

And he lives, for death could not hold him, he needed no rescue, but due to his faithful obedience had the authority to take his life up again. His Spirit-animated existence now he passes onto us, we who have been incorporated "in him". What God has done in Jesus, he intends to do in His whole human creation, and what He does in the humans, he intends to do for all creation.

A breath of fresh air.

Rethinking It All: The Last Withdrawal

It is time, dear reader, to draw this series to a close. I have much more that I would like to say concerning the Church year, lectionaries, and other things regarding worship specifically, but I must stop here. There is much changing where I am and I won't have a chance to speak to those things for the time being -- more time in Arabia is needed before anything can be confidently said.

What have I learned through all of this? In many ways I cannot answer that confidently: I suffer from the same pop-Protestant aversion to anything about my religion other than just "Jesus is the answer." The freedom given us, at least prima facie in the New Testament, coupled with the dearth of historical information about how the first century Church actually operated, leads to an almost hopeless morass of various opinions on how we should live and worship today. Not to mention the ambiguity on matters of Torah observance, ecclesial polity, and the continuation of the Spirit today. I honestly want to throw my hands in the air in distress and disgust.

At the same time, some of the conversations that this series have sparked amongst my friends have been truly enlightening. Micah's question, "What does YHWH require of you?", has become a regular and lively query. It is very humbling to me to see other men and women bow themselves to the simple, yet incredibly difficult, demand of obedience: training our eyes, ears, hearts, minds, and hands to listen carefully, to be careful, and to act in a peaceable and gentle way.

It is the simplicity of the demand that proves to be a stumbling-block. For what does it mean to be faithful in our circumstances? We have Torah to guide us, it is true, but we must not let that be our focus, otherwise we will tithe on the mint and cumin, but forget the weighter matters of peace and compassion. Compassion seems to be the main focus of Jesus' ministry even: compassion to neighbors, to socially and religiously outcast, to the ostensible enemy. Not because sin should be pooh-poohed, but instead because the real battle lies elsewhere, with the Satan, not with Rome or sinners.

But we are distracted. Debates on the meaning of justification (endless it seems), on ecclesial polity, on the state of Israel in prophecy, and so on, take our attention away from obedience. We are left with a high view of our rational skills and sophisticated rhetoric. However, the woman on the street, abandoned by her husband and with no marketable skills, finds no comfort that you are "of Wright" or "of Piper", "of Luther", "of Calvin" or "of Ratzinberger". She sees, rightly, through this game as a play of power and money, of status and pride, of mint and cumin. The Enemy, the real enemy, has us ensnared and confused. We know the Scriptures but haven't the foggiest of what they actually mean. We know our responsibility to the poor, outcast, widowed, hungry, naked, but act on it through our Republican or Democratic proxies all too willing to enforce "equity" and "justice" through brutality and theft. And the Church is powerless to do anything because we are too tied into it: how can we proclaim peace and reconciliation to our "enemies" within the gates of the Church when we are so eager to bomb the infidels out of existence because they threaten, even if just theoretically, our comfortable way of life? We are distracted.

In many ways, this rethinking has been a quest for significance. When Paul sojourned in Arabia, he found his calling being strengthened and confirmed by his reading of Isaiah and the Torah. In his work was the fulfillment of many of God's longstanding promises: Israel restored through the Messiah, the Gentiles brought near to worship the true God. I continue to probe and pry the mysteries of God, but have not yet found myself in Paul's shoes. All the better for now, I suppose, I am not yet sanctified to the priesthood that God calls all his people to.

And so the sojourn continues for me. I cry out that God has left me and me alone to rethink, but I know there are at least 7,000 who have not bowed their knees to any other God. I am no Elijah, nor a Paul, but I am trying -- feebly -- to follow in their footsteps. In an age where everyone is a role model, we desperately need these men of faith, and of failure, to show us a better way.

Rethinking It All: Jesus the Jew

I was recently approached about publishing this little series. I have agreed, although now I feel the intense need to go back and rethink the rethinking. Something about being in "official" print. Blogging, in my mind at least, is about one or two steps below self-publication in a plastic binder. This all, in other words, needs a serious gussying up.

I remember vaguely when it first dawned on my that Jesus was a Jew. Not that I didn't know it, but much of the Christianity I'd encountered was content to let his ethnic background be a bit of embarrasing (and somewhat unnecessary) familial history. In other words, aside from historical accident, it wasn't important. Once the realization that it was important -- that Jesus' Jewishness formed his mindset, his symbolic universe, his way of discourse, and who and what he cared about -- the rethinking really began. If I could remember the date, I would say it was the date that I became uncomfortable with evangelicalism and an overly systematic understanding of the faith. My exposure to what is called Biblical Theology (basically, in an extremely reductive way of saying it, reading the Bible as a story and drawing theological conclusions from that) both from the Tyler theonomists and Geneva helped me along this path. There was something important, vitally important, about understanding Jesus as a Jew. Missing that understanding stunts a very vital part of the faith. Included in this are why his mission was to the "lost sheep of the house of Israel" instead of the more general "mankind"; why the Bible seems to be relatively unconcerned with divinity claims, but bends over backwards to confess and prove that he is the Messiah, the promised Jewish king who would also be lord over the gentiles/nations; why apocalyptic texts aren't talking about the end of the physical world, but the corrupt nature of the world-systems that inhabit God's good creation; why circumcision is a big deal in the early Church and not later; and the list could go on. The path to this understanding has been endless fruitful in my attempts to be obedient to the faith and in my knowledge of the one we call "Lord and Christ", but it also has been endlessly frustrating because nary a conversation happens or a sermon gets preached that I don't get riled up over what happens when this basic paradigm is misunderstood or ignored altogether. Blessing and cursing live, as always for a spiritual leper like myself, next door to each other.

The thing that has grasped me lately, though, has been an off-shoot of all of this: I am a Gentile. I was born a Gentile, I will die an ethnic Gentile. I can no sooner become a Jew than a leopard can change his spots. So, when I approach Jesus, I am not just divide by the servant-master principle, but also by a deep cultural divide. Of the Jews are the promises, the covenants, the beautiful Torah, the election, the patriarchs, the kingdom, and salvation. I am but a former idolater, rescued from the no-gods of my ancestors, and placed firm footed amongst the worshipping company of those who have held the true God as the only god for millennia. If I am seeking to understand this Jesus and what he has said, I must develop a certain cultural sympathy to a people that has been at the apple of God's eye since Abraham (this is not to say that modern Jewry can be affirmed as it stands, it still has the same need as Gentiles to bow to the Jewish Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth). I approach as the other to this wholly Other.

So now I see that we must approach the Scriptures in a totally different way, not only through Jewish eyes, but also through Middle Eastern eyes as well. This causes a significant problem, though: what about the perspicuity of Scripture? The perspicuity doctrine would state that everything necessary for "salvation" (a tricky word to define as it is) is understandable by anyone straight from the text of Scripture or the "preaching" (yet another one of those words) of it. If we take a cultural understanding to be necessary, doesn't that just add a layer of elitist hierarchy for the common folk to be part of God's people? Yes and no.

First off, the basic confession is that "God raised Jesus from the dead and Jesus is therefore Lord". One can read or hear Scripture and get the basics of this confession down, be changed by the Holy Spirit, and have a saving faith. However, like the Ethiopian eunuch, there is much to misunderstand. What do we mean by "raised from the dead"? (Still) leading NT scholar Rudolph Bultmann would say it means "the disciples got a sense of Jesus' presence after his death" -- a highly influential opinion in large swaths of Christianity. Others would say that Jesus' physical body was raised from a physical grave, albeit changed in significant ways (see the Gospel of John, for example) -- this is the confession of much of Christianity from the earliest days and fits in not only with the Biblical record, but with a cultural understanding of what "resurrection" is. Another question that arises is the word "lord". What does it mean? What does it not mean? (That might be the more important question). There are a variety of answers in the public square, but while many may do justice to some part of the linguistic range of the Bible's use of the term in reference to Jesus, many do not fit at all, even traditional understandings fall into this sometimes. So, again, the answer to the above question is: yes and no.

Secondly, there has always been an interpreter in the Church: that father to the son on Passover, the Levite to the common folk in rural ancient Israel, Ezra, Jesus, Paul and the apostles. Whether that role needs to be clouded with "ordination" or not is another issue for another day. What is needed is men (and women) of solid character -- in other words, those whose lives reflect their obedience to the faith -- who take upon themselves the burden and privelege of studying the Scriptures deeply, not just at a linguistic or exegetical level, but at the cultural, historical, economic, and sociological levels: to know not just the words, but their deep contexts, embedded in real history that we can know, albeit often times through a glass darkly. Once this has happened, and the people of God are trained to do this for themselves (they must first see the need of total discipleship!), will the Jewishness of our Messiah really mean something: he will be confessed by all to be appointed by God as both Lord and Messiah.

Rethinking It All: The Revelation

This topic is scary for a number of reasons. One the imagery used in the book scared me so badly when I was younger that I was more receptive to hear the Gospel, even if the viewpoint presented then does not represent my viewpoint now. Second, because neither Luther nor Calvin wrote anything of substantive length on this book -- fools rush in where angels dare to tread.

But my purpose here is not to challenge any eschatological system or put forward a new one. The debate there is intractably muddled. I spent a good chunk of my life wandering amongst dispensationals, postmillennials, amillennials, preterists, and futurists to know the dead ends that there lie.

Instead I wish to speak of worship. Putting "worship" and "Revelation" in the same sentence is, in some parts of my denomination, tantamount to taking the proverbial mark. The worship scenes in the Revelation involve non-Psalm tunes, musical instruments, incense, and other heterodox accoutrements to some. I've heard tell that we cannot use any of the material in this book to account for our styles of worship because it is symbolic, therefore the Regulative Principle somehow does not apply. Whatever one thinks of this is, at least in this post, of no concern to me, maybe I'll address it another time.

What I do wish to speak about is the contention that it does apply to our worship today, specifically the claims of the late David Chilton in his magnum opus The Days of Vengeance. Chilton takes a hard look at the liturgical structure of the book, showing in very detailed ways that the book is really a Day of Atonement/Yom Kippur ceremony, except about the destruction of apostate Jerusalem (in AD 70, mind you) and the vindication of faithful Israel (the Church composed of Jew and Gentile). So far, so good. However, Chilton often makes the point that this should be the model for our worship: with the bishop/pastor representing God, the elders gathered around him, etc. It leads to a very High Church ecclesiology, with especially the pastor having an almost godlike status (and, if reports are to be believed, this is often what happened in Tylerite churches, to much ill effect and spiritual damage, but I cannot corroborate those rumors). It is here that I think Chilton misses a very important facet of Revelation (and, to be fair, it is no fair to pick on someone who has been deceased over a decade -- I mean no ill will to him and have learned much from his commentary and other writings). Revelation is not modeling a pattern for continuing Temple-like worship of the Church, but rather showing forth the last Temple liturgy that was accomplished with the Messiah's eschaton (the life, death, resurrection, ascension, and vindication of the Messiah through the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70). Revelation, then, if I am correct (and these are very preliminary thoughts) is a book that finalizes the old order of things, showing that the Messiah has truly fulfilled all that the Temple was and stood for, in a cosmic way, once for all time, and so now in the New Jerusalem, the Church adorned as a Bride, there is no Temple save the Lord God and the Lamb in its midst. Temple worship of any sort is fulfilled in the Messiah.

This, of course, does not mean that worship is done, but instead we must look to the very fruitful model of the synagogue as the early Christians did.

All Theology is Local

If a pastor/priest/preacher whatever is not in tune with their local community, both insiders and outsiders, they cannot do their job -- at best they will be ineffective, at worst they will be incredibly damaging. The trouble, then, will systematics is that it is theology abstracted from place and time. If your pastor is a systematics person, pray for them to be rooted and resist any attempts to make theology esoteric or trivial or over complicated. All theology is local.

Rethinking It All: Symbolic Interpretation

Reading through The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism has brought up a few things that I have not considered in a long time: interpretive maximalism. This idea, proffered by James B. Jordan and expounded by David Chilton in his magisterial Days of Vengeance, looks for symbolic resonances throughout Scripture. In many ways, it is sort of a "Scripture interpreting Scripture" on steroids. The thought behind it is that in an aural and oral society, verbal and symbolic resonances would be easily picked up by the hearers with a minimum of forward allusions. The classic example, if I remember correctly, is that of Abimelech's death in the book of Judges. He, an enemy of God's people, is killed by having a woman throw a stone upon his head. The verbal and symbolic import of the text, though, (not to mention syntactic parallels) ties it in with the promise of the redeemer in Genesis 3: an enemy of God's people, the serpent, is killed by the seed of the woman crushing his head. The key symbols here are the enemy, the woman, and the head-crushing (compare, once again, Sisera and Jael elsewhere in Judges). It is not, of course, an exact parallel, but rather an evocative way of telling a story. The idea of "intertextual echo" proffered by Richard B. Hays is in some respects similar, but his has to do more with narrative underpinnings, rather than symbolic repetition.

In reading an essay in Jewish Roots by Margaret Barker, these ideas came running back. While Ms. Barker tends to be into what I might call the strange side of interpretive maximalism (believing YHWH to be the son of El Elyon, for example), some of the resonances that she brings up about the high priest in ancient Israel deserve closer attention. Sometimes, when interpreting Scripture, it can be easy to stick just with rational and narrative analysis, which have arguably been the Protestant's bread and butter since inception. Oftentimes, as Barker proves unwittingly, this sort of symbolic interpretation can lead into some weedy territory, which the early Reformers wanted to avoid, especially as they saw it in some allegorizing in the Catholic tradition. To avoid symbolism in the Bible, though, is to throw the proverbial baby out with the (equally proverbial) bathwater. Care, of course, must be exercised and other interpretive methods must be used to balance the symbolic. Once this is the case, though, the symbolic can then be used in tandem with historical, narrative, and theological interpretive criticism to further probe the meaning of Scripture in its original context and for us today.

The difficulty, as I see it, is reconstructing anything like the ancient symbolic worldview. Our symbolic universe, replete with the goddess Freedom and her entourage, is hard enough to pin down since our public discourse is largely demythologized. Instead of the evolving hand of Marduk, we speak of evolutionary processes. Instead of the cruel mastery of Mammon, we talk about economic determinism, both capitalistic and socialistic. The list, as always, could go on and on. The ancient worldview, at least the ancient Israelite shared (with significant variation and mutation) by the Biblical authors, is populated by angels and demons, primeval "welter and waste", gardens, serpents, nudity and clothing, names and Names and naming, blood crying out from the ground, and wanderers with marks of protection, just to mention some of the symbols from the first chapters of Genesis. We hear talk of the earth, the heavens above, the waters in division, and the grave below: so temporal space is conceived tripartite, with the sea in league with the underworld. This symbolism is powerful and still resonates today, but with a muted voice. Reclaiming it in a post-secular, post-Enlightenment world may be impossible for life, but essential, at least, for understanding the Biblical mindset.

One of the things that Barker argues is a symbolic tie between the high priest's work and Jesus' acclamation in Philippians 2. I've heard interpretations using Adam and Israel and the Servant (all of which have very good points, but that it for another time), but never the high priest. The parallels that she draws are quite intriguing, if I ultimately disagree with her overall interpretive scheme (she has a hammer of Temple symbolism and therefore everything is a Temple nail). It is an occasion to further study in a passage that I love and deeply lack understanding of (most of the Biblical passages that I keep returning to in my studying and questioning I deeply lack understanding). But it must be carefully tempered, otherwise we may develop symbolic worlds that make sense to us, but separate us from the realities that they are supposed to point us towards.

Rethinking It All: Theonomy

My formative years of learning about what the Christian faith means in the day-to-day ethics of living came from the relatively small, but quite outspoken group known as the Theonomists or Christian Reconstructionists, headed by such luminaries as RJ Rushdoony, Gary North, and Kevin Craig. While practical application differed between the various schools of theonomists (how many schools? as many as there were theonomists), the exegetical base established by Greg Bahnsen seemed to be reasonably normative. That is to say, the Torah has abiding moral and legal principles for life in a post-resurrection world, which should not just be applied in a private or "spiritual" sense, but in the public realms of jurisprudence and legislation. In other words, "God's Law or Chaos" (so says a bumper sticker I have in my collection).

For many years, I have come under flak for being sympathetic to the theonomic cause. (I prefer the appellation 'theonomic' over 'Christian Reconstructionist' largely because of political differences inherent in those titles.) One professor even labeled the movement as 'demonic', albeit in some jest. The vitriol of many theonomic writers, especially North and David Chilton, occasioned this sort of derision. Looking back on some of their more polemic writings (especially "Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators"), it doesn't strike me as odd in the slightest that theonomists were, by and large, a lonely bunch. I still hold onto the basic tenet and exegesis: the Old Testament, especially the Torah on which the whole is built, is fundamentally important to the Christian Church and we ignore it or 'spiritualize' it to our own peril. The Torah of Moses does have very significant things to say not just about our individual, private or family lives, but also about our public and political discourse, especially in an increasingly antagonistic pluralist polytheist society (for many in the Church, I realize, the realities of the demonic side of the 'principalities and the powers' is a reality that the North American branch of the Church has not yet fully understood or contended with, but we are starting to feel the pressure).

My rethinking comes along the lines set forth, not only by the theonomists, but by much recent and erudite scholarship that is pouring over the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. That is, the ever present, and apparently and paradoxically divise, debate about Paul and the Torah, whether on the more scholarly level (Westerholm, Sanders, Wright, et al) or the more popular Lutheran-esque revisions (Piper and company). When thinking about this, though, it is important to set it in proper historical context, especially as we find it in the book of Acts: how does the relation of the Torah ("holy, just, and good") to the Gentile converts work?

In reading Marcus Bockmuehl's Jewish Law in Gentile Churches and Mark Nanos' The Mystery of Romans, I have been introduced to the halakhic concept of how Gentiles were supposed to act in the land of Israel if they wanted to be part of the common life and the worship (however limited they might experience it) of the one true God. These regulations are found primarily in Leviticus 18-20 (further confirming my suspicions that the Church's ignorance of this book has been theologically deadly) and consist mainly of three categories: idolatry/blasphemy, blood regulations (both dietary and 'blood shedding'), and sexual immorality. Interestingly enough, these same things appear in Acts 15 under the auspices of the Apostolic Decree, a document drafted to answer the question "What must Gentile converts to the Messiah do in order to be saved?" Of course, here, a redefinition of soteriology is in order -- in Acts the question is not "how does one get into heaven" but "how does one have a place in the eschatological community that will have a place in the age to come". Salvation is never primarily individualistic (although it does involve the individual), but speaks of how we are to be truly human now, in anticipation of God's final plans for creation (for example, Rom. 8).

These categories (which in later Rabbinic thought would be categorized under the heading of "Noachide Laws") give the theonomist much to think about. Many of the laws to Israel were exactly that, to Israel as it lived in the land. The relevance to diaspora Judaism has been much debated in Jewish circles, and Christians should consider the relevance to ethnic Jews who follow Messiah, as they are the restoration of "the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (of course there is much debate here). But to the Gentile who believes in Messiah? It would seem that many of the laws, especially concerning 'ritual' or Sabbath or kosher or circumcision, do not have anything to say to the Messianic Gentile. These are the things that make Jews Jews, and Paul says (and the Apostolic Decree confirms) that "there is neither Jew nor Greek" (that is, Jews are Jews who follow Messiah, Gentiles are Gentiles who follow Messiah, they do not need to become the other). In thinking about public ethics, then, it becomes important not to overstate the theonomic case, but what is there in Lev. 18-20 and Acts 15 (not to mention Ex 20, the Ten Commandments, but that is another story for another time) must be studied and understood. In many ways, it seems, the New Testament understands the Gentile converts to not be a separate institution, but a part of God's eschatological community, which includes the restored Israel of which I've spoken in previous posts. The Church, then, is to be neither Gentile nor Jew, but builds off of what God started with Israel and forms something new, where the distinctions between Jew and Gentile are relativized in Messiah, but certainly foundational ethical principles form the basis of continued community life, in both intra-community dialogue and table fellowship and also in public discourse and legislation.

The Limits of Competence

I have been raised and reared under the Gospel of Excellence. If everything we do is supposed to be "to the glory of God", then (the assumption goes) everything we do must be excellent, because only excellent things are worthy of the glory of God. However, having lived under that burden for many years now, I'm beginning to see that the assumption entailed in it are incorrect.

Anyone under the burden of "perfectionism" knows that ultimately perfection is unattainable, but the drive to grasp it shoulders guilt upon us. So we try harder, and fail -- maybe a little, maybe epically -- and we try again to get it just right. I wonder, though, if this call to perfection might be part of Adamic pride, the desire to be as God without reference to God. If so, then it is a peculiar sin, since even God did not make all things perfect: ask any farmer about their marginal land, ask any carpenter about marginal wood, ask a coffee roaster about 'defect' beans, etc.

Instead, I would like to proffer the idea of competence: we work not for perfection, but for fit. To return to a bit of agriculture (or gardening, if you prefer), marginal land is not rendered useless by its status as marginal. Instead, special care and consideration is needed to make proper and sustainable use of that land (sustainable being understood as use that preserves or improves the fertility and integral structure of the land). Sometimes its best use, its most competent use, is being marginal: a barrier between the rows of crops and the 'wild'. However, if our agriculture standard is 'perfection' (and that usually is defined in an industrial economy as 'efficiency'), then marginal land qua marginal land is useless. It must be (incompetently) turned into row land, which makes it unsustainable and is deeply damaging to the structure of the land and the humans who are to care for it, as Wendell Berry might point out.

Competence, then, involves a few neccessary things that distinguish it from 'perfection': humility to see and know the work, land, idea, people as they really are; care to get into the marginal parts of life along with the 'better' elements and to understand them; place, since no thing is ultimately disconnected from where it grows, whether we are speaking of plants or ideas or factories. 'Perfection' or 'excellence' are, in the end, Platonic ideas, ideas beyond the reach of man that make us feel trapped in our creatureliness; competence embraces creatureliness, yet mourns sinfulness (not the same thing!), and makes the best of its created circumstances. Competence is thrifty -- even apple peels can have copious amounts of canning pectin rendered from them. Excellence ends up being wasteful, as apple peels cannot contribute to a larger goal (pectin is never the goal in perfection). The idea of scale really does hit home here: competence can be content with the small, with excellence is always striving for the 'big' solution to the 'big' problem.

Developing competence, of course, is no easy thing. Especially since competence is so wide ranging: one can be 'excellent' in only a few things; one can be competent in many. Consider just the duties of a house husbandman: carpentry, plumbing, painting, mechanical maintenance, care for animals, care for wife and children, etc. Competence in these things is developed over long periods of time and in conjunction with community (we observe and help others to build these skills). Excellence in any of these things, apart from a conscious disciplined career choice, is impossible for us -- I certainly will never understand the full inner workings of my car, but that doesn't mean that I cannot use and maintain it properly.

Excellence, however, is still needed. I strive for excellence in my theology and in my coffee roasting -- however, excellence must itself come by way of competence. Only when I have learned to care for these things as concrete entities, as placed things, can I develop them to their greatest potential.

Interlude: The Psalms

Dear Reader and Fellow Rethinker,

I appreciate your patience with this series of posts -- I do not know how many will be a part of the whole or even if I will "finish". In many ways, I hope that I do not, for that would call for another rethinking: I am not infallible and I must be allowed to disagree with myself. In some ways, this Arabian process is one of self-discovery -- but not in the sense of "self-actualization" but rather the sense of "it is no longer 'I' who lives, but the Messiah who lives within me". This process changes me, brings me to repentance, and is conforming me to an image of the Messianic Other. It is uncomfortable, and (as a friend tells me) dangerous considering some of the ties I have in the Christian world. But it is something that must be done and has been pressing on me for years.

Which brings me to the Psalms. My religious tradition uses only Psalms in corporate worship. It is one of the things that led me to embrace the tradition and which has caused this rethinking: in many ways that tradition is being consumed in the gnostic modernism that I described earlier, I do not wish it to be. The Psalms can be an antidote to that tendency.

The Psalms are, really, God's song-book. Whether or not a Church tradition makes use of them says much about that tradition. Many "evangelical" traditions forswear them or relegate them to "personal devotion", if that. The vapidity of much modern Church music does not need to be recited here, instead I would like to examine some of the positive aspects of the Psalms.

The Psalms connect the Messiah's Body and Bride with its past. This is a collection of works that span around a half-millennium in time, from the foundation of the Kingdom to the initial return from exile and speak of the common hopes of Israel. If the full restoration of Israel is important in understanding the New Testament, then the Psalms are indispensible: the themes of forgiveness, restoration, vindication, triumph, and God's royal sovereignty pervade the poems and songs. In that light, it is important, though, to recognize that even though we sing these songs and they do have modern applicability, they are Israel's songs. Those of us who are Gentiles in the faith must see them in their proper historical and eschatological light before we just take them as our own. When we sing of vindication over enemies, let us remember that God has done this in the death and resurrection of the Messiah. When imprecations are sung, let us remember that the Messiah is the conquerer and that the enemy may not be the Romans or the Taliban or whoever, but "the last enemy that shall be defeated is death". When return from exile is longed for, let us remember the book of Acts and our responsibilities towards the historically called Israel "according to the flesh", for the "gifts and calling of God are irrevocable".

The Psalms emphasize the community that God has called, not just the lone individual. We are called by the Messiah not to be individual brides, as if Jesus were some cosmic polygamist, but to be a part of -- to participate in -- his one Bride, the Church, made up of Israel and righteous Gentiles together praising God. Even those songs that are spoken from an individual point of view are often the king singing, giving them an undeniable Messianic cast. Those of Asaph often express the individual longing to be back in the community, amongst the throng of worshippers (such as Psalm 42/43). The individual finds meaning and purpose in the midst of this worshipping community, who share songs and history, who are called into being, not by themselves, but by the Shepherd.

The Psalms remind us that not everything is well, that there remains mighty acts of God for us to participate in, pray for, worship God for, and so on. There is exile still, there is sin, there are enemies, death still reigns over much of the world. But the Messiah has conquered and is conquering through that worshipping community. If man fell into sin by his selfish idolatry, what is true salvation but the restoration of worship and koinonia between man and his Creator? All is not well, but the Messiah reigns (Psalm 2) and the troubled history of Israel (Psalm 105-106) has brought the mighty act of God on the cross of Jesus of Nazareth to bear on the whole world.

The Psalms remind us that we know God, not by idle speculation or theological dogma, but through His acts in history to restore, redeem, and recreate. God is a revealer, but He does so through acting in history, especially through His chosen ("salvation is from the Jews"), culminating in their representative and our Lord, Jesus the Messiah. Christian knowledge is not esoteric, not far off, not the exclusive provenance of the priestly caste (regardless of ecclesial nomenclature), but the common property of His people and knowable by all who would investigate these things which "were not done in a corner".

The Psalms tell us that even though the public works of God are available to all -- Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free -- they ultimately lead us to recognize the Creator's great unfathomability: "how unsearchable are your works". God acts, we can understand, but let us not think that we have exclusive or exhaustive knowledge of God's doings or plans: "the secret things are God's, but the revealed things are our and our children's".

The Psalms, in other words, form important cornerstones for Christian worship and keep us grounded in the full history of God's mission in the world: Abraham to Israel through Moses to David past the exile to the Messiah and the ingathering of the Gentiles, of which many of us are. In the great words of the Psalmists: Praise Yah!

Rethinking It All: The Primacy of Acts

When thinking about the ideas of simplicity and clarity in theology, one quickly runs into a fasinating doctrine from the Reformation: the perspicuity of Scripture. Perspicuity means clarity (why they don't use that much more clear word is beyond me) and has to do with the idea that the necessary things to believe for one to be a part of the people of God are accessible to anyone. I love this idea, but too often our understand of what we must believe for salvation is clouded by centuries of minutae from systematic theology: justification, the innards of trinitarian speculation, whatever eschatology we call home, etc. Instead, looking at Scripture, it is (with a few exceptions that prove this rule) a story -- exactly the story that we need in our postmodern/modern malaise and loss of certitude, exactly what we need to found and sustain a community such as I describe in the last post. In other words, what is necessary to believe is the mighty acts of God. These are relatively clear and point the way to being explained by the apostles in the New Testament. In that regard, if we are to reassess and understand New Testament theology, how it connects to the Hebrew Bible, and how the whole story fits together, primacy in interpretation must be given to Acts: the perspicuity of Scripture practically demands it.

However, how well do we know Acts? In some ways, due to its classification as a "historical" book, it often is slighted or ignored: where are its great discourses into Christology? Or Justification? Or any other doctrine that props us up against our theological enemies? Usually, when people start reading Acts, they begin to notice that their theology doesn't stand up to it, so they say that Acts is "early", "primative", "undeveloped", "not a credible witness", "perfunctory", "not normative" or something of the sort. Acts does not have a high christology, or concentrate very much on justification, and seems to up end any eschatological speculation (why, after all, does Peter say that his audience was in the last days? More on that anon). Acts humbles overly spiritual and overly intellectualized theologies both, and therefore gets tossed in the dust bin. Even if a Church or denomination claims to be centered on the "Word of God", rarely is Acts preached through or even mentioned -- except maybe to note the ostensible tension between it and Galatians, with Galatians always coming out on top as being Paul's "more mature thought". Whenever data that doesn't fit hits an entrenched worldview, it is often ignored or belittled until the evidence mounts so high as to create a paradigm shift or a breakdown of the sacred canopy. I know this because I do it myself, hence the need -- the desparate need -- for rethinking, for Arabia. Acts must send us to Arabia, to hear with fresh ears and to see with fresh eyes the magnalia Dei, the wonderful works of God.

Key, it has become clear to me, is the disciples question in the beginning chapter. "Will you at this time restore the Kingdom to Israel?" Often times, at least in all the commentaries I've read and all the sermons I've heard, this is considered a juvenile or completely off-base question: how, after all, can the disciples still be thinking and speaking in such earthly terms? How can they consider Israel important at all since the Messiah has come? But notice that Jesus does not chide them or say "O you of little faith" which was his common way of addressing their former failure to understand: "It is not for you to know the times and eras that the Father has set by his own authority, but you shall be my witnessess in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and unto the ends of the earth." In other words, they had not asked a wrong question, but the answer was not going to be given to them at that time. However, if we understand a little bit of the basic Jewish eschatology of the time (and I'm thankful for )Mark Nanos for bringing this obvious point to my attention), we know that the restoration of Israel from exile, to its position of God's wise stewards of Creation and ruler over the nations, was expected before the Gentiles could come into the true worship of the one God. Note the prevalance of this theme in Jeremiah 30-33: Israel is restored to God's favor, then the Gentiles worship alongside of them.

What happens in the book of Acts is that through the proclamation of Jesus as "Lord and Christ" (code, as it were, for the functions that the Messianic King was to have -- Anointed One over Israel "Christ" and Lord over the Gentiles), Israel is being restored: their sins are forgiven, the Spirit of God rests on them instead of the Temple, and the are united with the Messiah. The tricky part comes when Cornelius believes and receives the Holy Spirit, just like the Jews. This is unexpected, as it is generally believed at this time that the Jews will have a precedence over the Gentiles in the Kingdom -- lord to servant, if you will. For the Gentiles to become full members of the people of God, to become children of Abraham, they will -- in the mind of some Christian Jews -- be circumcised and take the full burden and privelege of Torah upon themselves. Not so say Peter and James and Paul, but instead they must comport themselves like changed Gentiles, "righteous Gentiles" in the Apostolic Decree (Acts 15). But the point is, since Israel is restored through the work of the Messiah and the proclamation thereof, the Gentiles can come into the Kingdom as equal participants, not as "second-class citizens" (basically the argument of Romans and Galatians). This is why Paul's ministry continues throughout to be "to the Jew first and also the Greek" -- Israel must be restored, then the Gentiles can enter in alongside as equals, both vindicated (justified/acquited) as God's people based on their faith in the Lord Messiah alone.

Reading Acts in this way, with the dual focus on the restoration of Israel and efficacy of the witness "unto the ends of the earth" calls for a rereading of the epistles: how do the situations and controversies in Acts find their expression in Paul's dense rhetoric in his letters; how about Peter; or John? Once situated thusly, I've been finding in my reading that the epistles make a lot more sense -- they speak to genuinely first century issues -- not to fourth century or even sixteenth century ones. That does not make them any less relevant, though. We live in a storied world, where Acts (not to mention Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Esther, Ezra-Nehemiah, etc.) makes up a vital chapter in our corporate history -- denying its validity would be tantamount to saying that because we don't relive the American Revolution constantly, it must not be important (which maybe the British wouldn't mind?). Such a devaluation of history in the Church bespeaks a prevalent and pernicious gnostic influence: only the timeless is important, history is important only if it teaches us lessons for today. May it never be in God's Church! Instead, we continue the narrative of Acts in our local parishes: we are witnesses, not to "personal conversion" but to the resurrection of the Messiah, to the restoration of Israel, to the in-gathering of the Gentiles to the true worship of God. What Jesus "began to do and teach" continues, by the Spirit he and the Father share, in the workings of the Church qua Church in the world today -- there is no need to relay the foundation of the Messiah and his apostles, but to build the Temple of God upon it (I Corinthians 1-3). Many of the lessons in the book, of course, do have contemporary relevance, especially since the arrogance of Jew over Gentile has been radically reversed in Church history: instead of Gentiles needing to become Jews, often times it is Jews that must become, not Jewish followers of the Messiah, but Gentiles!

It is high time for us to reconsider the role of Acts in our thought, actions, and worship as the people of God.

Rethinking It All: The Church

In some ways, it is rather odd to start rethinking with the Church. After all, the Church is emphasized only in the New Testament (it is in the Hebrew Bible, but not in the same capacity) and only after the work of the Messiah brings the eschatological fulfillment of Israel's hopes to bear. History, however, has shown that the Church -- where Christians of all stripes live and move -- has not been particularly faithful to its mission or even to its constitution. From early on, it has been gnosticized and mysticized beyond any reasonable recognition of an institution that would have grown out of Temple and synagogue. However, this is where we most fully image the Messiah, as his body, so the Church is indeed one of the forgotten emphases of the faith, one that desparately needs to be recovered before any positive steps can be taken in the redemptive acts of God in the world.

Rather than talking about the marks of the "true" Church, which could be classified as one of the most damaging and violent debates of all human history, re-examining the difference between visible and invisible Church is in order. I am used, in the past, to speaking of the invisible Church as being those who "truly are in faith" as opposed from the "masses" who populate the pews. Philip J. Lee, in his wonderful Against the Protestant Gnostics, calls this what it is: gnostic elitism, leading to a bifurcated people of God, the superspiritual versus the moderate or the normal. Really, this gnostic belief is the same as the Judaizers, only in different terminology: you must be circumcised to be a part of the Messiah's people, or, you must have "true" faith to be part of the Church. Since we can never know for certain whether or not anyone other than ourselves have "true" faith, we must rely instead on the visible Church as our means of defining the community of God's people. In other words, as far as humans are concerned, those who are united with the Messiah are those who unite with his people in worship -- which seems to be Paul's argument throughout the book of I Corinthians. To take it a step further, though, the argument can (and should) be made that the only real example of what the Church is, is found in the local parish. The Church, the true Church, is made of a collection of real people in real places that have participation with the Messiah through faith and therefore have participation with each other, the Messiah's body. The word koinonia, which often is translated rather dully as "fellowship", has this double edge to it: we participate in the Messiah, so we participate with each other. The idea of the imago Dei finds its fullest expression here as well: if the Messiah is the imago, and we are united with the Messiah, even called by his name (12:12), then we -- as the body -- are imago Dei as well. (A quick note to say that this does not mean that either individuals or those outside of the Church are not imago Dei, but the Church qua Church is the expression of the renewed, redeemed imago found in the Messiah).

What then of the invisible Church? We do have the "wheat and tares", however I'm not sure if that parables applies outside on the historical division between those who are allegiant to the Messiah and those who are not, evidenced at AD 70 and AD 135. We do have a wonderful model to consider, though, in the book of Revelation. In God's throne room, where the seer John is taken up, we see not only the redeemed of Israel (the symbolic 144,000), but also ones from "every tribe, tongue, nation in the earth". While we normally experience the Church only on the local level of real people that we know and can interact with, when we worship the one true God, we join the rest of those who are outside of our parish community in heaven, so that the Messiah's body is one on the local level and one worldwide.

The question becomes, and quite relevant, what makes the Church itself? The word itself, ekklesia, comes from the idea of being "called out"; called away from being destructive and dehumanizing, called into a mission of living a truly human life in the midst of sin -- characterized by hospitality, mutual submission, and self-giving. In an earlier post I talked about the unfortunate marriage of religion and power, or probably better put, religion and violence. The New Testament is clear, it seems to me, that the Church is the court of the Messiah, his Session if you will: Paul says that those "called out" are "seated in the heavenlies with the Messiah" -- that seating, of course, is next to the one enthroned at the right hand of God the Father. However, that rule is not to be "live the Gentiles who lord it over their subjects" but rather "the greatest among you shall be the servant of all". The rule of the Messiah turns all other rule, by what Paul calls the "principalities and powers", on its head, openly shaming all those who call themselves the "true authority" or the "answer". The Church, the visible Church wherever it is, is supposed to lead this -- by leading lives characterized by love, mutual edification, and worship of the true God, who is the Creator and, through the Messiah, is the Redeemer of Jew and Gentile.

Rethinking It All: Part Two

One other figure in the Bible that sojourned in Arabia was Elijah. Like Paul, he went there to seek God, asking similar questions: how can these things be? In his case, it was about the idolatry of Israel and the impending destruction at the hands of those idols. For Paul, it was how the God of Israel's righteousness could be revealed in the death of the Messiah. My own escape has clarified, at least a little bit, the historical crises that confront us today (all history is crisis, a golden age has never been).

One of the most alarming trends that I have been a witness to is the prevalent defection from the faith: one strong Christians hanging their hats elsewhere or nowhere at all. At the start of my Arabian adventure, I was there as well -- I have almost left the faith a number of times in the last decade (rethinking, after all, does not come without its perils). By the grace of God, by which I mean the resurrection of Jesus, I have not left -- but I have not been left unscathed.

People change allegiances for a variety of reasons: I am not here to comment on any individual reasons for doing so. If you have left the faith, you know them and you know whether or not they are good reasons. My place, and I would argue most everyone else's, is not to judge your reasons, but instead to try and figure out what exactly it is that is creating and nurturing the environment for those reasons to exist in.

One of the most obvious to me, for I keep running headlong into it, is the dissolution of the old certitudes. Any superficial student of history knows that it is ridiculous to call Christianity a religion of peace: early on it was coopted for the purposes of violence and power, and it has been comfortable in that position. The railing of many "Christians" in our day and age about politics sounds oddly familiar to the railings of elder Christians who argued for the establishment of denominations: the State "defends" the Church with the sword against all enemies, whether heretics or homosexuals or infidels or (insert whatever your church tradition is against). Digging a little deeper into history (ever repeating) it is also easy to see that the Church is in no position to separate itself from this history, since its very theology since the 4th century has been concerned with nurturing and furthering the relationship between Christ and Caesar. I do think Christianity is a religion of peace, but only once it is separated from its dependence on power to assert and maintain its claims.

But this is only one of the old certitudes that have been shattered. The rise of modernism with the Enlightenment was seen by many as a deathblow to Christianity ("God is dead and we have killed him" for example). Christianity adapted and adopted adeptly and became thoroughly modernist, even those branches (American Reformed churches, for one) that clung to an older, "purer" fundamentalism: instead of decimating the division between doctrine and experience (or facts/values, faith/science, whatever dualism you want) the church solidified it in its actions, but denied it in its words. So now we have Christians quite content to say their prayers as a private action, believe in their own salvation (in opposition, of course, to everyone else), but yet not be noticibly different from those who adhere to none of the teachings of the Messiah. Postmodernism, in many ways, has shown that form of Christianity to be a sham: it is all about power, about sex, about money, about the tenets of Nietzsche, Freud, or Smith instead of Jesus. But, as any student of pomo knows, no story replaces the shattered myths, leaving us without a sacred canopy to give direction and meaning.

Now we live in a storied world, as before (even though we denied it), but it is not a coherent or cohesive story: it is many stories, almost all in opposition, vying for credibility, for power, for the 'means of production', for cultural change. Which story to follow, which 'ism' to grasp onto, is the question of the day, even if it is unconscious or implicit. I have seen many students crash upon the waves of consumerism, of 'hard-headed realism', of various forms of theodicy, and not come out the other side. If we believe that God exists to make us happy, or wealthy, or comfortable, or understanding, or anything other than a fellow crucified disciple of Jesus, then our worldview will shatter upon the rocks of the fallen world. Many students have written in papers recently that their main goal in life is to 'be happy', in a sort of morbid (and moribund) christian Utilitarianism. Mill and the Pleasure Principle coopt Christ and the Crucifixion. In a world of competing stories, how can we say what is right or wrong for anyone else (always a good question) or for ourselves? The restrictions, the boundaries, the limitations of the covenant are forgotten because we have no story to bind us to them: our Exodus has been so overly spiritualized that it means absolutely nothing. If our ultimate goal is to attain individualism in heaven, then it makes sense to seek it pre-emptively on earth.

In the midst of this, I feel somewhat like Habbakuk: how is this better? The violent Babylonians of Modernism and Postmodernism cannot really be the scourge that will eschatologically cleanse the people of God! But like Habbakuk, I must realize that my eyes do not see clearly, that the violent -- whether Christian or pagan -- do not ultimately triumph, but the meek shall inherit the earth.

Rethinking It All: Part One

In my mind, one of the most important historical bits of Scripture for my personal life is when Paul says (in Galatians) that after his meeting with Jesus at the Damascus Road, he went to rethink everything for over a decade in Arabia. That passage has caused much consternation over what exactly I should do with the training I have received and nurtured for close to a decade. The more I read of historically-based exegesis, the more troubled I become with the history of Christian interpretation, the history of ecclesial activity (especially the confluence of theology and power), and the basis of present Christian devotion and worship. In many ways, I feel completely outside the pale of this long-standing historic community. I've called it my "postmodern Protestant dilemma" (those interested can look up the link). It is, and will remain, a critique from within -- I am a follower of Israel's Messiah and the Gentiles' Lord. I do not critique out of spite, but out of gratitude for the grace I have received in that Messiah. My writing and thinking revolve around the twin foci of being faithful to God's revealed Word (a faithfulness that does not equal correctness necessarily) and God's redeemed people (both Jew and Gentile who worship the one true God in the Messiah).

My start down the road to Arabia began with a simple premise: the broad outlines of God's mission and work in the world should be comprehensible to all of God's people, even if that comprehension comes from the Spirit rather than 'rationality'. In other words, if an idea/doctrine takes a clergyman to understand, then it probably is there to legitimate power rather than a part of God's revelation. In many ways, I still hold to this premise, but what I have found is that the simplest of things can, upon further investigation, but intricately complex. I understand how a car goes, but I could not tell you the intricacies of a driveshaft, powertrain, or fuel-injection (God bless you if you can). The other premise is that a doctrine or theology must be practical. This one has been harder to hold onto -- many teachings in the history of the Church were practical for that time, but have devolved into abstract, ahistorical concepts now. I learned this, interestingly enough, from pagan philosophy: Plato's battle with the Sophists produced amazingly complex philosophy that was practical in his time, but seems so disconnected now (and has destroyed much theology because of it). These two premises, clarity and simplicity still drive my thought. They have, though, both been chastened. Might I even call them mature?

Even though I teach Bible, I still feel in Arabia. I know I have said things that I do not now agree with: theology must be understood as a human endeavor -- anyone claiming the title of 'mouth of God' perpetuates a dangerous and damaging lie (Let those who have ears hear). The power that comes from the burden (yes, a burden) of teaching the Bible is frightening: I am influencing those for whom the Messiah died. Anyone who teaches that is not scared to death of that should not teach, ever. That fear is a necessary part of my Arabian experience: I have been humbled, and continue to be humbled, but this calling from the Most Holy God. Reading student essays this last semester brought this home to me: are we teaching our students well enough to be independent of their teachers? When erudite non-Christians challenge them on their allegiance to the Messiah, will they be able to stand? I fear the worst.

And so I remain rethinking it all. Some of the conclusions I have come to have rocked my world, so to speak. I have had to hold tightly at points to the resurrection of Jesus as the only fixed point in my faith. In the end, it is not my knowledge that leads me into the life of the age to come; he is my Lord and he holds me in his hands. I mean that in a significantly different way than I did years ago. It is no mere religious trifle or pleasantry, but rather the only way I can speak about my everyday reality: the Messiah loved me and gave his life for me and now the life that I lead must be in the Son of God.