Genesis 4 – 6(ish)

So I just figured out that if I keep going at this rate, it’ll take roughly two years to work my way through the whole of Genesis. Well, at least I have an excuse… we’re busy getting ready to move back to the States at the end of the month. It’s been a fun few months in the UK, but it’ll be nice to be back.

Anyway, I got back into Genesis this morning. I don’t know exactly where I am, because the version I’m using doesn’t have chapter or verse numbers. (Which is kind of refreshing, reading the Bible like an actual book.)

This is where the story gets depressing for a while. Eviction from the garden is followed quickly by the world’s first murder, followed by more murder, followed by a list of people who seem to live for ridiculously long periods of time, followed by God finally throwing his hands in the air and deciding he’s had enough.

But at the beginning of Genesis 4, God hasn’t given up on creation. He’s still fighting for it. When Cain gets ticked over the whole prime-sheep-versus-leftover-fruit incident, God pulls him aside and gives what sounds vaguely like a coach delivering a halftime pep talk. God seems to think Cain can actually beat back the sinful impulse that wants to rule over him.

Cain doesn’t listen. He decides life would be better without his annoying little brother. Then God shows up and asks Cain where Abel is. Cain responds, famously, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Um, that would be a yes. Remember that whole “it is not good for the man to be alone” thing? If community and companionship are woven into the fabric of creation, then the whole thing hinges on whether we take responsibility for each other. Individualism and “each to their own” are poison to God’s creation.

Cain’s life becomes a story of what happens when we reject the idea that we are our brother’s (or sister’s) keeper. The alternative is a life of “restless wandering.” And that is Cain’s fate. He is driven out. Sent away.

Cain understands that he’s not being let off easy. He complains someone might kill him (kind of ironic, for a guy who probably hasn’t had time to wipe the blood off his hands). What surprises me is that God doesn’t go for the death penalty. Not only that, but he threatens to punish anyone who lays a finger on Cain.

Why? It’s not as if the capital punishment isn’t in the Bible. It’s mentioned as the penalty for a number of crimes — and not just murder. So whatever happened to justice? Retribution? Deterrence?

Apparently God already knows what we’ve yet to figure out after all these years. The only thing violence ever leads to is more violence. In the words of the great theologian, Commissioner Gordon from Batman Begins (I know, I know, he doesn’t get to be commissioner until the Dark Knight): “We start carrying semi-automatics; they buy automatics. We start wearing Kevlar; they buy armor-piercing rounds.”

Maybe God’s mercy on Cain is his attempt to short-circuit the escalation. Apparently, God still thinks we’re worth saving from our worst impulses.

Unfortunately, a few generations later, a guy called Lamech loses the plot. He seems to think being Cain’s descendant means he’s got a divine license to kill. What he doesn’t realize is that God’s protection of Cain was meant to stop the violence, not give his descendants free reign to wreak havoc without fear of reprisal.

Things are looking pretty bleak. But there are threads of hope. Which is exactly what you’d expect in a world filled with the “knowledge of good and evil.”

In some ways, Adam and Eve got exactly what they were promised when they ate the forbidden fruit. In Hebrew, to “know” can be a euphemism for intimacy… as in, “Adam knew his wife, and nine months later, out popped Cain.” Knowledge isn’t just intellectual awareness of something; it’s an experience of it.

Knowledge can also imply control over something, as in, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you” (Jeremiah 1). Which may explain why the thought of possessing the “knowledge of good and evil” was so tantalizing to Adam and Eve. It meant control. Power.

In reality, it meant engaging in an endless (and often losing) struggle against evil… as in, “Sin desires to have you, but you must master it” (Genesis 4).

But the good news is, if there’s knowledge of evil, then there must be knowledge of good, too. All is not lost. The ground still yields food. Women still give birth and perpetuate the human race. While some of Eve’s descendants, like Lamech, make violence; others make tools and musical instruments. Some even call on the name of God.

Even at its worst, God cannot bring himself to give up on the world. Not entirely, because there is still good to be found in it — in the person of Noah.

For me, the stories of Genesis 4-6 are a reminder that we’re meant to participate in the struggle between good and evil here and now, not sit and wait for it to be settled in some distant future apocalyptic event. It is this world that God cares about, and this world that he still hasn’t given up on.

Genesis 3

So this is where it all goes wrong.

Maybe it’s because I’ve grown up with this text, from flannelgraph to grad school, but I don’t think I’ve ever stopped to appreciate how bizarre this story really is.

Two trees — one gives life, one gives knowledge of good and evil. God sets just one rule: don’t eat from the tree that gives knowledge. A talking snake arrives and chats up the woman (who shows no sign that talking with snakes is unusual). The snake convinces her that God doesn’t want to share his powers and gets the woman and her husband to eat from the knowledge tree. While waiting to become like God (as promised by the snake), the man and woman realize their clothing-optional lifestyle has become a source of embarrassment and decide to cover up. God shows up for a game of cosmic hide-and-seek, followed up by the world’s first game of “not it” — man blames woman, woman blames snake, snake eats dust. God sentences the woman to painful childbirth and the man to perpetual yard work. To be followed by death for all. God then padlocks the Garden of Eden because it turns out the snake was partly right: the man and woman have become like God. So God decides to put a safe distance between humans and the tree of life, assigning some unfriendly cherubim (who’ve apparently traded in their diapers and cupid arrows for a giant flaming sword) to block the way.

Anyway, Eve gets a lot of flack for misquoting God’s command. She understates the positive. God said, “You are free to eat from any tree…” which Eve downgrades to, “We may eat fruit from the trees…” And she exaggerates the negative, saying that they may neither eat from nor touch the knowledge tree. (God never said anything about touching the tree.)

But I think we’re a bit hard on Eve. Let’s not forget — particularly if you read Genesis 1-3 as literal, play-by-play historical narrative — Eve wasn’t there when God gave the command. She must have heard it from Adam who, according to one ancient Jewish interpretation, deliberately exaggerated the command to deter Eve from going near the tree.

In any case, at least Eve had the right idea, even if she got some of the crucial details wrong. The snake willfully distorts what God said, turning a prohibition on one tree into blanket, garden-wide ban.

Under the circumstances, I sometimes wonder why God doesn’t show up sooner — not to make up Eve’s mind for her, but to set the record straight. To make sure he’s being quoted properly, if nothing else. After all, he’s the one who’s being mischaracterized as an overbearing tyrant.

But he doesn’t step in. He lets Adam, Eve, and the talking snake carry on. Which doesn’t turn out well for any of them.

The traditional interpretation is that the tree represents a test, a choice between doing things God’s way and doing them our way. Between letting him decide what’s best or pretending we know better.

But maybe there’s another element to the test. Maybe God doesn’t step in because he’s testing not just their faithfulness to him but to each other. If the ancient Jewish interpretation is right, then Eve depended on Adam to accurately convey what God had said — both the positive (you are free to eat your fill of any tree) and the negative (except the knowledge tree). Once Eve takes a munch of forbidden fruit, the text reveals that Adam was by her side the whole time. Which means even here at the decisive moment, he had one last chance to set the record straight. To offer an alternative to the snake’s view of things.

Adam and Eve didn’t just fail God; they failed each other. Just how badly is obvious in the aftermath of the fruit-eating incident, when Adam blames God for for creating the woman in the first place. The same woman to whom Adam once said, “At last! Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.”

One last thing about this test. I’ve heard a lot of sermons on the importance of trusting God and how Adam and Eve failed to do so. I’ve only heard one sermon about God trusting us — and how much he risks to do so.

Think about it. To entrust his creation to us — a creation that’s better than good, it’s good seven times over. To put a tree that could ruin everything smack in the middle of it — a tree that gives the knowledge to become like God. Because that’s one point about which the snake apparently wasn’t lying. God himself says it: “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.”

We’ve come a long way, armed with this knowledge. We don’t have to wait long to read about the first murder (Genesis 4). Or the first war (Genesis 14).

In the last century, the phrase “mutually assured destruction” entered our vocabulary. It was an attempt to explain what kept the US and the Soviet Union from the brink during the Cold War: the understanding that a nuclear attack would lead to a series of escalating counterattacks, resulting in the total destruction of both countries and perhaps the entire planet.

God makes a world where we have the ability to destroy each other. Granted, he may intervene to keep the worst from happening, and maybe that’s the real reason the Cold War never went nuclear. Even so, we’ve shown ourselves capable of inflicting a lot of damage.

But if God gives us the ability to choose such a destructive path, then he must give us the option to choose another way, too. A path that leads away from the forbidden tree and toward all the other trees that are good to eat from. A path that leads away from violence and destruction and toward peace and life. A path that leads away from independence and autonomy (which is what Adam and Eve were after) and toward dependence and harmony with God, each other, and creation.

Genesis 2 (creation remixed)

So there are not one but two creation stories in Genesis. And they’re very different. It’s like rewinding the film, zooming in on one bit, and changing the camera angle all at once.

Genesis 1 describes a creation where everything goes according to plan. Genesis 2 is a more intimate portrait of a creation that still needs work.

The sequence is different in Genesis 2. Again the writer arranges the details a certain way to make a point, but it’s a different point this time.

In Genesis 1, humans are created last and seemingly handed a ready-made world, formed and filled to perfection. In the Genesis 2 version, “no shrub had yet appeared and no plant had yet sprung up” when it says God gathers a handful of dust, breathes into it, and creates a man. What’s even more interesting is the apparent reason for this alternate sequence: “there was no one to work the ground.”

Genesis 1 describes a God powerful enough to create the universe all by himself. Genesis 2 suggests this same God creates Adam, the first man, so he can partner with God in the ongoing act of creation. God designs a world where he needs someone to work the ground. Otherwise, no shrubs. No plants.

This need for partnership and connection seems hardwired into the creation itself (…almost as if God prefers it this way!). In Genesis 1, everything is “good.” The writer can’t stop telling us how good it really is — seven times, as if he thinks we’re in danger of forgetting. In Genesis 2, it feels like someone has slammed on the brakes. Not only is there something “not good” about creation; it’s God himself who says so. And what is “not good,” according to God, is the man’s solitary state.

Adam needs a “helper” — you’d be forgiven for thinking the word suggests inferiority or subservience, but the fact is, elsewhere the Bible uses the exact same Hebrew word for God (Psalm 27:9, for example).

What Adam needs is a partner, a companion, an equal — as he realizes when he says, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” That word “now” could be translated “at last!” or “it’s about time!” Adam instantly recognizes that he and the woman were made for each other.

And this may be the thread that holds Genesis 1 and 2 together. Nearly everything about these stories seems different. Even God’s name changes. In Genesis 1, he is elohim, the supreme, all-powerful God. In Genesis 2, it is YHWH, the personal, covanental God who partners with people to shape and change the world. But the need for relationship is found in both stories.

In Genesis 2, creation is “not good” until Adam is no longer alone. Back in Genesis 1, we read that “God created human beings in his own image… male and female he created them.” Scholars have offered loads of theories on what it means to be made in God’s image. But the one I find most the most intruiging is actually the one that says I am not made in God’s image (not completely, anyway), but that we are made in God’s image.

By myself, I am an incomplete representation of the God who made me, because I was not made to exist in a vacuum. Not according to Genesis 2, which says a state of perpetual solitude is “not good.” And not according to Genesis 1, which says, “In the image of God… he created them.“

When we seek connection, partnership, relationship with each other, that’s when we experience the divine spark that God has apparently put in us.

The other thing both stories reveal together… In ancient times, to bear the “image” of the king or the emperor was to represent him to others, to show the king’s subjects who he was and what he was like.

As a male, I do not fully represent who God is or what he’s like. It’s only “male and female” together that, according to the text, represent the image of God.

While I intend to carry on praying to God my “Father,” the debate over whether God is essentially masculine or feminine ultimately misses the point. Without both male and female, we cannot possibly hope to understand God.

The God who is, according to Jesus, our Father is also the God who “gave birth” to the Israelites (Deuteronomy 32:18). The God who sent his Son to earth is also the God who comforts his people like a mother comforting her children (Isaiah 66:12-13). And I won’t even tell you what some scholars think the term el shaddai, one of the Bible’s many names for God, means.

Far from being an invitation for the PC police to purge our liturgy of masculine references and replace with them neutralizing alternatives, this leaves us free to go on calling God our Father (which, after all, is one of the most common characterizations of God in the Bible) because this communicates something essential about who God is — but it does not communicate the whole of it. That’s why the Bible is filled with all kinds of rich imagery to help us understand God.

That’s why he made human beings male and female… because it takes both to show the world something of who God is.

Genesis 1 (T.S. Eliot, ecology, and free-range birds)

Reading Genesis 1 brings back fond childhood memories of listening to and occasionally joining in discussions (yes, I was and still am a nerd at heart) about the origins of the universe. Is the earth 6,000 years old or 6 billion? Are the “days” of Genesis 1 literal, 24-hour spans of time, or are they simply a literary device meant to hold the story together? The opening lines of the Bible have been dissected with scientific rigor and made to support one argument or the other.

But you wouldn’t use bunsen burners and microscopes to analyze Robert Frost or T.S. Eliot. And that’s what the opening lines of the Bible are. Genesis 1 reads more like poetry than prose — and definitely more like poetry than scientific text.

Which is pretty cool, really. For Jews and Christians, whatever else these words may be, they are in some way God revealing himself to us. God decides to start a conversation, and his first words take the form of a poem.

When I read Genesis 1, it hits me: the God behind these words is a God who values beauty. Not just beauty in what he creates (which the text calls “good” not once but seven times — very significant to Jewish readers); he values beauty in the description, too.

The first words of the Bible are not that concerned with the how of creation. They’re all about the who (God) and the why (for us). The details are carefully arranged not to make a scientific point but a theological one — about who God is and the way the world was meant to be.

(Although, if theology is the study of God and how he relates to the world, then a point about theology is a point about everything, really.)

God begins by creating a world that is formless and empty. It’s dark. Unfit for human (or any other) habitation. But his presence — the spirit hovering over the deep places of the world — changes everything.

The progression of creation is significant — again, not for scientific but theological reasons. The world is formless, so God starts off by giving it form and definition — light/dark, water/sky, sea/land. It’s also an empty world, so then he goes about filling with all kinds of living creatures — plants, birds, fish, wild animals. (You get the idea that God likes variety.)

The acts of creation are arranged in order of importance; the last thing created is the most important, the crowning achievement, the reason for everything else. Which, if you’re a woman, should make you feel pretty good about being created second in Genesis 2’s version of the story.

Back in Genesis 1, though, it’s not until human beings appear that the writer is able to say creation isn’t just “good.” It’s “very good.”

God is making a habitat suitable for humans. And then, like a landlord closing the deal with his tenants, he hands over the keys and tells Adam and Eve to take good care of the place.

Which is one of the things that fascinates me about this chapter. The Bible’s first command to humans, sometimes called the “cultural mandate,” is a command to look after the planet. Scholars will tell you that the Hebrew concepts of “subduing” and exercising “dominion” over the earth have more to do with stewardship than endless consumption. The image here, literally and figuratively, is one of cultivating a garden, not pouring concrete. (Not that I’m against concrete.) And cultivation is not just about what you take from something; it’s about what you put back into it, too.

So wherever we stand on the causes of climate change or the politics of environmental regulation, words like “eco-friendly” and “sustainable” are Genesis 1 ideas.

Something else fascinates me about Genesis 1, something I noticed for the first time when reading it this week. The very first blessing spoken by God in all of the Bible wasn’t given to humans. It was given to fish and to birds. It’s same word, barak, that appears a few lines later when God blesses human beings. Which has me thinking about something I saw on TV this weekend…

Channel 4 just finished re-airing Hugh’s Chicken Run, a documentary exposing the realities of intensive (battery) chicken farming. When it dawned on the presenter, a UK celebrity chef named Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (which is just fun to say), that intensive chicken farms weren’t about to open their doors to him and his film crew, he decided to build his own farm, raising intensive and free-range chickens side by side.

Intensive chicken farming isn’t pretty. Thousands of bird crammed into a windowless barn 24 hours a day, with practically no room to walk around and no opportunity to be outside in a chicken’s natural environment. They spend all day and night standing or sitting in their own feces — legs burned and bodies blistered by the ammonia.

Around 95 percent of the chicken we we eat is farmed this way.

Not long ago, this wouldn’t have bothered me in the least. My reaction would have been, “Who cares? They’re chickens. Food.”

But in Genesis 1, chickens get the first blessing. So maybe we ought to ask: is this how we were meant to treat a creature blessed by God?

I don’t consider myself an animal rights activist. I’m an enthusiastic meat eater. There’s a (free-range) chicken in the oven as I type this, and in the end, he met the exact same fate as his intensively farmed cousins. I’m OK with that. But many cultures before ours believed that it was important to respect the food they ate. When did that change?

Something about a chicken existing in its natural environment before it ends up on my dinner plate seems to fit the created order of Genesis 1 better. Maybe that’s because one of the lessons of Genesis 1 is that it matters how we treat the creation, how we treat other living things blessed by God — even if they were put on this earth for our benefit.

After all, this is God’s planet. And how we treat an object is an extension of how we treat the object’s creator or owner. What we do with this earth reveals what we think of its maker.

(They won’t all run this long, I promise.)

P.S. Another reason to eat free-range chickens? A side-by-side nutritional comparison with intensively farmed chicken showed that free-range birds have higher protein content and less fat.

Geneva

I was in Geneva (and a few neighboring French villages) for some meetings earlier this week. After the work was done, we had time to wander around this infamous city of neutrality and bureaucracy.

Our wanderings included a climb to the top of St. Pierre Cathedral, where the Protestant reformer John Calvin preached for nearly 30 years back in the 1500s. Calvin’s followers left their mark on the cathedral, stripping it of virtually all things aesthetic (with the exception of the stained glass windows), but it’s still an amazing sight today.

A good part of my faith journey was influenced by the lawyer-turned-theologian who preached in this cathedral, even if I’m no longer persuaded by the “five points of Calvinism” that were canonized by his followers at the Synod of Dort in the early 1600s. (I think the Calvinist notion of predestination depends on a far too individualistic reading of the scriptures.) But regardless, the older I get the more comfort I find in being part of a heritage that’s so much bigger than myself — John Calvin and all.

Anyway, here are some pictures.

Calvin’s cathedral

View of Geneva from the top of the cathedral

the Jet d’Eau and Mont Blanc

walking from Switzerland to France (ok, it wasn’t a long walk…)

By the way… should you ever find yourself in a restaurant where the menu is entirely in French, remember… just because the item “blah blah blah prosciutto blah blah blah” appears in the list of salads doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a salad with prosciutto on top. It may just be a giant plate full of nothing but… prosciutto.

Evangelical recovery

Several prominent evangelicals released a statement today called The Evangelical Manifesto. Definitely worth reading.

The statement and its signers seek to define evangelicalism in a way that, after 30+ years of Dobson/Falwell/Robertson holding the megaphone, may sound a lot like someone trying to put new spin on an old idea. But what this manifesto proposes is nothing more (or less) than a return to evangelicalism in its most classical, authentic sense.

This is evangelicalism as John Newton and William Wilberforce knew it.

Not surprisingly, James Dobson declined to sign it, citing a mostly unspecified “myriad of concerns.”

What I love most about this manifesto is its humility. The signers distance themselves from some of the more extreme expressions of evangelicalism in recent history—without becoming strident or self-righteous… or falling into the trap of making little more than a desperate appeal for acceptance.

Here are some of my favorite bits. But really, you should skip this part and download the whole thing…

As followers of “the narrow way,” our concern is not for approval and popular esteem. Nor do we regard it as accurate or faithful to pose as victims, or to protest at discrimination. We certainly do not face persecution like our fellow-believers elsewhere in the world. Too many of the problems we face as Evangelicals in the United States are those of our own making. If we protest, our protest has to begin with ourselves….

As the universal popularity of such hymns and songs as “Amazing Grace” attests, our great hymn writers stand alongside our great theologians, and often our commitment can be seen better in our giving and our caring than in official statements. What we are about is captured not only in books or declarations, but in our care for the poor, the homeless, and the orphaned; our outreach to those in prison; our compassion for the hungry and the victims of disaster; and our fight for justice for those oppressed by such evils as slavery and human trafficking….

Above all else, [evangelicalism] is a commitment and devotion to the person and work of Jesus Christ, his teaching and way of life, and an enduring dedication to his lordship above all other earthly powers, allegiances and loyalties. As such, it should not be limited to tribal or national boundaries, or be confused with, or reduced to political categories such as “conservative” and “liberal”….

First and foremost we Evangelicals are for Someone and for something rather than against anyone or anything. The Gospel of Jesus is the Good News of welcome, forgiveness, grace, and liberation from law and legalism. It is a colossal YES to life and human aspirations, and an emphatic NO only to what contradicts our true destiny as human beings made in the image of God….

We call for an expansion of our concern beyond single-issue politics, such as abortion and marriage, and a fuller recognition of the comprehensive causes and concerns of the Gospel, and of all the human issues that must be engaged in public life. Although we cannot back away from our biblically rooted commitment to the sanctity of every human life, including those unborn, nor can we deny the holiness of marriage as instituted by God between one man and one woman, we must follow the model of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, engaging the global giants of conflict, racism, corruption, poverty, pandemic diseases, illiteracy, ignorance, and spiritual emptiness, by promoting reconciliation, encouraging ethical servant leadership, assisting the poor, caring for the sick, and educating the next generation. We believe it is our calling to be good stewards of all God has entrusted to our care so that it may be passed on to generations yet to be born….

The other error, made by both the religious left and the religious right in recent decades, is to politicize faith, using faith to express essentially political points that have lost touch with biblical truth. That way faith loses its independence, the church becomes “the regime at prayer,” Christians become “useful idiots” for one political party or another, and the Christian faith becomes an ideology in its purest form. Christian beliefs are used as weapons for political interests. Christians from both sides of the political spectrum, left as well as right, have made the mistake of politicizing faith; and it would be no improvement to respond to a weakening of the religious right with a rejuvenation of the religious left. Whichever side it comes from, a politicized faith is faithless, foolish, and disastrous for the church—and disastrous first and foremost for Christian reasons rather than constitutional reasons….

We Evangelicals trace our heritage, not to Constantine, but to the very different stance of Jesus of Nazareth. While some of us are pacifists and others are advocates of just war, we all believe that Jesus’ Good News of justice for the whole world was promoted, not by a conqueror’s power and sword, but by a suffering servant emptied of power and ready to die for the ends he came to achieve. Unlike some other religious believers, we do not see insults and attacks on our faith as “offensive” and “blasphemous” in a manner to be defended by law, but as part of the cost of our discipleship that we are to bear without complaint or victim-playing….

On another note, today’s SojoMail, a weekly update from Sojourners (which included a feature on the Evangelical Manifesto) had what might be one of the more ironic pairing of banner ads I’ve seen…

Awesome. (I know… Rebecca St. James hardly qualifies as “rock star” material, but still… it’s a LITTLE funny…)

Happy 490th birthday, Protestantism (a few days late…)

It’s easy to forget—what with that other holiday that falls on October 31… last Wednesday marked 490 years since a hefty German monk posted his 95 Theses (apparently, this title was preferable to “Nearly 100 Reasons Not to Like Those Pointy-Headed Romans”). He nailed them (his theses, not the pointy-headed Romans) to the door of the church in Wittenberg (which, as all good theology students—and Germans—know, is pronounced with a V, not a W.)

Some Protestants have attempted to reclaim the last day of October in honor of their forefather Martin Luther, christening it “Reformation Day.” I even saw a poster at work advertising a Reformation Day Hymn Sing (which seems like the perfect way to threaten would-be trick-or-treaters if they misbehave).

Luther was one of my favorite theologians to read in seminary, mostly because of his raw humanity. Luther was a hothead. He was a reactionary. He probably flailed his arms and spat when he talked. The man drank and cursed—while preaching, no less. (Well, the cursing, anyway.) He had a twisted sense of humor which he kept to the end. (On his deathbed Luther announced that the worms were about to get a very fat doctor to feast on.)

And I haven’t even gotten to his dark side yet. The man who ignited the Reformation was anti-Semitic. (Back then, a lot of people were anti-Semeitic, but that’s no excuse, especially when the object of your worship is a Jewish rabbi.)

When European peasants rebelled against the nobility (being on the butt end of feudalism apparently wasn’t all it was cracked up to be), Luther didn’t just fail to counsel the nobles to show restraint. He did the opposite, urging the ruling class to “smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly.” Luther compared peasants to a “mad dog” that must be struck down before it strikes.

Luther also had his quirks, like arguing with the devil—out loud. In one of his writings, he claimed that once the devil started prowling in the kitchen below his room, making all kinds of racket just to distract him. (I hate it when that happens.)

One of my favorite things about Luther was his personal journey—especially the way he encountered God’s love. Luther spent much of his young adult life in terror, convinced that God, angry and vengeful, was about to strike him down at any moment for some unknown sin. Luther was an obsessive-compulsive confessor, badgering his priest and mentor, Johann von Stauptitz, who finally told Luther to come back when he had some real sins to confess. Luther admitted to hating God. But when he finally discovered the implications of grace—that God is for us, not against us—he was transformed. Previously consumed by his fear of God, he was now consumed by his love for God.

Mostly I wonder what Luther would make of the Reformation he started, almost 500 years on. It’s no secret that Luther meant to reform the Roman Church, not break from it. It wasn’t until being excommunicated in 1521 that reformation turned into revolt. Luther thought he was doing the Pope a favor by writing the 95 Theses—alerting a benevolent but naive ruler to the abuses being perpetrated in his name. (Little did he know at the time that indulgences being sold to Germany’s pious peasants were funding the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.)

Luther distanced himself from what he considered the more extreme elements of the Reformation. He condemned one of his colleagues, Andreas Karlstadt, for rejecting infant baptism and claiming the bread and wine of the Eucharist were nothing more than symbols of Christ and not a means of grace.

Still, perhaps thanks to his rediscovery of grace, sometimes Luther an amazing ability to share it with others—even those he disagreed with. (Luther was neither perfect or consistent in this regard, which makes the bright spots in his story even more amazing.)

A year after denouncing Karlstadt, Luther took in the former colleague in his moment of need. After publicly excoriating Johannes Tetzel, Europe’s most famous indulgence salesman, Luther comforted him on his deathbed, writing, “Don’t take it too hard. You didn’t start this racket.” Six years after being alienated from his spiritual mentor, Luther maintained that Staupitz was his “most beloved father in Christ.” Luther even said, “If it had not been for Dr. Staupitz, I should have sunk in hell.”

That’s the Martin Luther I like best.

Then again, I almost forgot to mention the ex-monk’s profound thoughts on matrimony. “There is a lot to get used to in the first year of marriage,” he wrote. “One wakes up in the morning and finds a pair of pigtails which were not there before.”

Dr. Phil, eat your heart out.

Mark Driscoll and the Reformed-Emergent smackdown, pt. 5

At last, like a bad boxing film series that just goes on and on, we’ve arrived at part 5. (Unlike some boxing films, however, there will be no part 6.)

5. The danger of freezing the Bible

I have no doubt Mark is passionate about the Bible and passionate about Jesus. Describing his own movement near the end of his speech, Mark says:

What tends to be driving this stream is a return to expositional Bible teaching that is theologically motivated and Jesus centered.. The sermons in a lot of these churches…tends to be at least an hour. The repentance of sin and trust in Jesus is continually heralded. The way they distinguish themselves from older Reformed theology is that they’re nice.

Not bad (especially the part about being nice!). But each of us must confront the possibility that sometimes what we are advocating or defending is not the Bible, but our view of the Bible.

For example, one of the reasons Mark criticized Rob Bell is because of Rob’s belief (inspired by William Webb’s book Slaves, Woman & Homosexuals) that we must look for the trajectory of scripture. This view, known as the redemptive movement hermeneutic, teaches that it’s not always enough to look at the words of a single passage of scripture. We need to look at the whole Bible and try to see where God is moving.

Mark claims this interpretive method represents “the pinnacle of academic arrogance” because he says it is based on the assumption “that we are more enlightened and that our culture is more enlightened than Paul or Jesus or Moses.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The idea behind the redemptive movement hermeneutic is that God’s plans for humanity often unfold over time—and that sometimes we can discern the trajectory of God’s plan by moving through the scriptures… by asking how they spoke to people way back when and how they speak to us today.

Take slavery. The Bible never prohibits owning another human being, yet virtually every Christian alive today understands slavery to be incompatible with God’s design.

We know it to be true because we recognize the seeds of this idea being planted in Genesis 1, where human beings are created in God’s image. We see glimpses of the trajectory of God’s plan in the Torah, where Israel is held to a comparatively higher standard in its treatment of slaves—even though the Bible still falls short of banning slavery outright.

When Paul shows up, he argues there is no distinction between slave and free, encourages slaves to seek their freedom (without disobeying their masters, however), and even pleads with a slave owner to welcome back his runaway slave as an equal in Christ.

But still… our rejection of slavery as a moral evil is not based on any direct command from scripture, but rather our understanding of the trajectory in which God is moving.

Mark disputes the notion of a trajectory in the Bible—particularly when it comes to the question of a woman’s role in the home and the church. (He actually misquotes scripture at one point, suggesting that the Bible says a man should be “the head of his household.”)

Mark claims the “same argument is being used for homosexuality and all kinds of other things,” even though the whole purpose of Webb’s book is to demonstrate how the redemptive movement hermeneutic takes you one direction on some issues (like slavery and gender equality) and a another direction on some other issues (namely, homosexuality).

The redemptive movement hermeneutic has inspired me to hold a bigger view of the Bible. A Bible-with-a-trajectory-to-it is a more dangerous book because it can make even more demands of me. I have to wrestle with it even more—asking not only, “What are the words saying?” but also, “Where is God moving?”

Contrary to what Mark says people like me believe, I don’t look to my own intellect or the surrounding culture for answers. They are to be found in the revelation of God in scripture and in the person and work of Jesus.

So there you have it. I respect Mark, but I see a few things differently than he does.

I want to be someone who’s not afraid to engage in the big conversation about faith and life and Jesus.

I want to be someone who embraces the best from many different Christian traditions—Reformed, emerging, evangelical, etc. (And that’s just to name some of the traditions we encounter in our Western, predominantly white culture. We shouldn’t stop there. We should explore what Christians in places like Africa and Asia are saying, too.)

I want to be someone who does not misquote or misrepresent those I disagree with. I want to accept and even celebrate the fact that people like Mark—though they have a very different understanding of the Bible—are every bit as devoted to Christ.

I want to be someone who embraces the whole Bible—even when it challenges me to go beyond my own preconceived notions.

Last (to quote Doug Pagitt) I want to be the kind of Christian who refuses to treat those with different perspectives as enemies. I want to be someone who believes that “since I am supposed love my enemy anyway, I might as well get a friend out of it.”

Oh, yeah… and:

Mark Driscoll and the Reformed-Emergent smackdown, pt. 4

Three down, two to go…

Here’s part 4 (or use these links for part 1, part 2, and part 3.)

4. The danger of forgetting the best of your own theology

To me, one of the most interesting comments Mark made is one I mentioned in yesterday’s post: “If you don’t love Jesus, you’re a bad Bible scholar.” Does this mean that Christians shouldn’t listen to anything non-Christians say about the Bible? Coming from someone who embraces a Reformed tradition, this seems almost anti-intellectual.

So does the opposite hold true? If you love Jesus, does that automatically make you a good Bible scholar? What happens when two people who both claim to love Jesus have very different interpretations of the Bible? Should we conclude that one of them (the one whose interpretation conflicts with ours, naturally) must be lying about his or her reverence for God? Does a difference of opinion give us the right to cast doubt on their devotion?

Back to the original question. If someone makes no claim to be a follower of Jesus, does that automatically disqualify them from saying anything useful about the Bible? Should be plug our ears and hum when they speak?

It’s here that I think Mark may have forgotten one of the greatest contributions of the Reformed theology he embraces.

Now I don’t consider myself to be Reformed (not with a capital “r” anyway). I’ve been there before… and moved on. I’m a recovering Calvinist. The more I study the scriptures, the less I’m persuaded by the classical Reformed view of predestination.

However, there’s at least one thing from my experience with Reformed theology that I’ve held onto. To me, this something is arguably one of the key elements of a Reformed worldview: the notion that in a world created by God, we as Christians can celebrate truth wherever we find it because all truth is God’s truth.

This is what common grace is all about. God does not just give good things like sun and rain—or wisdom and knowledge—to the righteous (Matthew 5:45). Which is why it’s so dangerous to say something like, “If you don’t love Jesus, you’re a bad Bible scholar.” Sure—if you don’t believe in the resurrection, I may not take your word for it what happened after the crucifixion, but that doesn’t mean you can’t teach me anything about the life and times of Jesus.

On three different occasions, the apostle Paul quotes pagan sources. He did so in writings that came to be regarded as sacred scripture (Acts 17:28; 1 Corinthians 15:33; Titus 1:12-13). He even refers to a Cretan philosopher as a “prophet.”

Paul was comfortable using the ideas of people who didn’t know or love Jesus to express biblical truth. Why? Because Paul lived with the confidence that all truth is God’s truth—that (to paraphrase Jay Kesler) we can overturn every rock in the pursuit of truth because there’s nothing that’s going to jump out from underneath and eat God.

Maybe reading books by the likes of Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan isn’t necessarily a bad idea after all.

Tomorrow, part 5: the danger of freezing the Bible.

Mark Driscoll and the Reformed-Emergent smackdown, pt. 3

And here’s the third installment of my thoughts on Mark Driscoll’s speech on the emerging church (or you can read part 1 and part 2)…

3. The danger of guilt by association and selective quotation

Toward the end of his speech, Mark had some good things to say about the importance of incarnational ministry. He understands that “the world has changed” and that “the assumptions of modernity no longer hold.” He talked about the need to be about both “God’s Word and God’s world.” On the whole, pretty good stuff.

But as good as Mark’s comments on incarnational ministry, some of his criticisms of the emerging church were equally careless.

At times, he blended a more-or-less accurate assessment of emerging Christianity with something less than the whole enchilada. Like when he said emergents believe in having conversations about what God said—true—as well as whether God meant what he said—not necessarily true. (I’ve linked to it a couple times already, but for a good introduction to the emerging church by someone who understands that it’s not a monolith, go here.)

Another example was when Mark addressed Rob Bell’s comments on the virgin birth in his book Velvet Elvis. According to Mark, Velvet Elvis “actually calls into question the virgin birth of Jesus Christ.” He even characterized Rob as saying, “‘Now I believe in the virgin birth, but I’m just saying we don’t need it.’”

What’s interesting is the way Mark combined direct quotation (reading an excerpt from Velvet Elvis) and loose paraphrase—without telling his listeners which was which. By doing this, Mark misrepresented what Rob actually said. In Velvet Elvis, Rob affirms his belief in the virgin birth as part of the historic Christian faith—one he wants “to pass… on to the next generation.” Rob’s point (at least what I took from it) was that for him, even if the virgin birth were somehow disproved, he would still find Jesus more compelling than anything else out there. That’s not the same as saying, “We don’t need the virgin birth,” or calling it into question.

Elsewhere, Mark criticizes Rob’s use rabbinical sources in his interpretation of the New Testament because, in Mark’s words: “If you don’t love Jesus, you’re a bad Bible scholar.” (Never mind that the oral traditions of rabbis like Hillel and Shammai predate Jesus.)

But the rabbinical sources can help us better understand Jesus because much of what he taught was interacting with other rabbinical interpretations of scripture. Jesus himself, though he lived before the term rabbi evolved into a formal title, followed many of the common practices of rabbis—such as choosing a select group of disciples and teaching in the synagogues. Many of the sayings and even exact phrases Jesus used (such as “binding” and “loosing” in Matthew 16:19) come straight out of the rabbinic tradition.

Here again, Mark builds his case on selective quotation—or more precisely in this case, no actual quotation at all. He says that Rob “holds up rabbinical authority as the key to Bible interpretation and hermeneutics.” In the more than three-and-a-half years I spent at Rob’s church, I don’t remember hearing him claim that rabbinical authority is the key to biblical interpretation. The reality is that Rob, like most good pastors and teachers, uses a number of sources to help him better understand the scriptures.

Elsewhere, Mark goes after Brian McLaren, but his criticism rests largely on Brian’s endorsement of a few books—including one by John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg (who are not evangelicals) and another by Steve Chalke (who is evangelical). Of Crossan, Mark says he “does not give us anything biblical regarding the person and work—including the resurrection—of Jesus.”

I’ve read two of Crossan’s books and one of Chalke’s. I’m smart enough to know I don’t agree with everything they write—particularly Crossan, who doesn’t believe Jesus rose from the dead. But that doesn’t mean they can’t offer some valuable insights that I can benefit from. I’m also smart enough to know that endorsing a book doesn’t necessarily mean you agree with everything that’s in it, either. Listening to people with different perspectives is part of what sharpens us.

Mark—and others—may have legitimate reasons for disagreeing with someone like Brian McLaren. But any case they wish to make would only be stronger if they built it on what the person actually said and not who they’re associated with or which books they read.

Tomorrow, part 4: the danger of forgetting the best of your own theology.