The following is taken from the conclusion of my book, God Shows No Partiality.
vulgar homiletics
dave barnhart's reflections on preaching, teaching, and life
The following is taken from the conclusion of my book, God Shows No Partiality.
What I have found in teaching the Bible in both the academy and the church is that the people who believe in the Bible most literally are often the least literate about it. They may have memorized favorite scriptures that support their ideas of what their faith means, but they do not often take trips through the minor prophets, and they have no idea what the Babylonian Exile was. They are essentially writing their own Bibles, and the versions they come up with have little to do with the actual history and social movements that created the religion of ancient Israel or that gave birth to the church. When I press literalists about their interpretation of scripture, asking them to explain contradictions or inconsistencies in their favorite texts, they invariably will complain that I’m reading too literally, that I’m nitpicking or reading too closely.
My gripe with progressive Christians, on the other hand, is that they have often ceded the Bible and Christian history to Christian fundamentalists and literalists. They have been on the defensive, relying on generalizations and failing to engage believers with powerful Biblical rhetoric. Having been wounded one too many times by scripture-wielding exclusivists, perhaps they are reluctant to engage scripture on social issues at all.
But the history of the early church and God’s activity among us is a powerful witness. In writing this book, I have hoped to challenge progressive Christians to actively engage the Bible—not with proof-texts and scriptures cherry-picked to support a given position, but with thoughtful exploration using the best scholarship available.
Doing so will inevitably lead to resistance. There are plenty of people who believe they own the Bible, and that it is their right to clobber people with it. Sometimes these are unwinnable battles, and engaging them is a waste of time. In one well-known parable, Jesus describes hearers of the gospel as different kinds of soil (Mark 4:1-9) and the seed planted in them faces different obstacles to its growth. There are many reasons people may resist this message: demonic resistance, selfishness and materialism, or social pressure. Yet the slogan I have been promoting in this book is one the world needs to hear. By making it better known, we will transform the Bible from a sword into a plow. Perhaps instead of waging a war against sword-wielding Christians who will not be convinced, we can plant new seeds among those who are receptive to the Good News. At the end of the parable, after all, there is a harvest—thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold.
If you, dear reader, are someone who does believe that God shows no partiality (Acts 10:34), if you look forward to the day that the powers and principalities are unmasked, there are some practical things you can do to turn the rhetorical sword the Bible has become into a plowshare that helps bring new life. Here are some practical steps.
First, Christians who believe in the salvation of the world should delve deeply into scripture. It is essential to study the Bible closely, to listen thoughtfully to what the authors say and do not say. Do not accept the pious reflections of preachers or the footnotes of popular study Bibles as the word of God. Read multiple translations, and be open to diverse interpretations. Ask how a given scripture might sound different to a white man, a black woman, or a religious or political prisoner. Ask what situations the authors faced and what voices they were arguing against. Study the Bible with people who have diverse theological opinions so you can hear with new ears. Be willing to read against the grain.
Second, if you want to resist those who use the Bible as a weapon, you must exceed them in good works. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is essentially a long discourse on how the new community should not only reject the principles of the Christian Pharisee faction, but distinguish themselves in practice. Their righteousness “must exceed that of the Pharisees” (Matthew 5:20). If progressive Christians want to be taken seriously by the world, they must out-pray, out-give, out-do, and out-sacrifice their fundamentalist siblings. They may not remain, as one pastor friend describes them, “tippers instead of tithers.” They must live lives of exceptional moral conduct and generosity. If they do not, they will face two consequences: they will lose their social persuasiveness and they will become hypocrites themselves. This exceptional moral conduct is not just a matter of surface religiosity. It is about a transformation that happens to the soul (Matthew 5:44).
Third, you must spread the good news. The word “evangel” literally means “good message.” Fundamentalists tend to be evangelical because they believe they are saving people from hell in the afterlife. Progressive Christians are trying to save people from hell in this life, but they often fail to be evangelical even though I believe their good news is often more compelling and more exciting. I believe the news is just as good now as it was in the first century. If we do as Jesus instructed and spread this good news to all the earth, then burgeoning Christian movements in developing countries will not criminalize homosexuality or silence the voices of women. People in America will not be able to reject Christianity out-of-hand as intolerant and irrational—but only if this message spreads.
...for you do not regard people with partiality… - Mark 12:14
For there is no partiality with God - Romans 2:11
...both of you have the same master in heaven, and with him there is no partiality. - Ephesians 6:9
...there is no partiality. - Colossians 3:25
“I now truly understand that God shows no partiality…” - Acts 10:34-35
...what they actually were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality. - Galatians 2:6
“God shows no partiality” was a commonplace slogan in the early church, and if Christians had driven cars in the first century, it would have been plastered on their bumper stickers. It was a phrase well known in first-century Judaism, but it came to have new significance for the early church which admitted women, children, foreigners, Gentiles, and eunuchs into their community. In Jesus, God had been revealed as a God who shows no partiality, who was interested in breaking down barriers between male and female, slave and free, Jew and Gentile.
I’ve just finished writing a book titled “God shows no partiality.” My hope is that we would reclaim this slogan from our past and then proclaim it as a way of thinking about the politics of identity in our world today (especially race, sexuality, and religious pluralism). I trace the way the early church thought about religious food regulations, circumcision, and the role of women, children, and foreigners, and how those earliest Jewish Christians began to think about their relationship to their culture.
My hope is that this slogan would become well-known again, and that no argument about “how Christians should think about X” would take place without reference to this part of church history. I wish devout believers would plaster this slogan on billboards, instead of theologically questionable ones signed by God, and would wear this on T-shirts, instead of Christian imitations of corporate logos.
Here is the link to buy the book.
Here is the link to buy the bumper sticker (or other gear).
I do not own any rights to this slogan, by the way. These are the words of Paul, and Luke, and other early Christian writers, not mine. “God shows no partiality” is the NRSV translation, but there are other ways of translating the Greek. I do hope that people feel free to take it, remix it, and post it all over the place. I look forward to seeing what kind of art others may make of it. This is a meme we need to revive, and celebrate, and push far and wide.
The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, God Shows No Partiality. Given Rush Limbaugh’s recent insults toward Sandra Fluke, I thought it might be appropriate to share this ancient story. “Slut shaming” is a toxic aspect of our culture. I won’t say much more about Limbaugh’s comments, since others are doing such a good job of it already. But I do feel it’s important to point out that the Bible (which is often recruited to justify policing women’s sexuality) contains several stories that turn the tables on men who use such tools of social control.
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One good example of an “unmasking” story is the drama of Tamar and her father-in-law, Judah, in Genesis 38. Tamar’s husband dies unexpectedly, leaving her with neither a source of financial support nor a male heir. In the tradition of their culture, the responsibility for providing her with a male heir falls to her brothers-in-law. Unfortunately, the middle brother also dies when he tries to cheat her out of an heir.
Judah grieves over his two lost sons. According to their tradition, the duty of providing Tamar with a child now falls to Judah’s youngest son. Having already lost two sons to this woman under mysterious circumstances, Judah hems and haws about whether he will allow his youngest son to make love with Tamar. Years pass. Tamar is stuck at home, shamed and seemingly abandoned by God and her in-laws.
Tamar then comes up with a ploy worthy of classic theater. She learns that her father-in-law will be going on a business trip to the city of Timnah, so she disguises herself like a prostitute and seduces him while he’s away from home. Like modern cheats, he may have believed that “what happens in Timnah, stays in Timnah.”
After he has returned home and forgotten about the affair, he learns that Tamar is pregnant. Outraged that she has “played the whore,” he commands that she be burned to death. Just as she is being dragged from her tent to her death, she produces evidence that he, Judah, is the father. Filled with shame, he admits “she is more righteous than me” (v. 26).
Like many great stories, Tamar’s tale plays with the boundaries between right and wrong. On the surface, she is a wanton, a black widow, and Judah is the pillar of the community who speaks for society in sentencing her to death. But God shows no partiality, and knows that Judah is a hypocrite. God takes the side of Tamar, the woman seemingly trapped by circumstances beyond her control who uses her sexuality to win her freedom. Even situations that human beings consider scandalous violations of propriety, God may see as acts of justice.The story itself unmasks something ugly about our society. Even today we use double standards when judging men’s and women’s sexual behavior, holding women to a higher standard while excusing men’s bad behavior by saying, “boys will be boys.” Legislators and popular evangelists still loudly condemn what they perceive as sexual immorality even as they cheat on their spouses and sleep with prostitutes. This story in the first book of the Bible works as a subtle critique of anyone who would use the Bible to police others’ sexual behavior. There is more to the story than the surface appearance of things, the author says.
In the New Testament, Matthew mentions Tamar as one of four women included in Jesus’ genealogy (Matthew 1:3). All four women are involved in similarly scandalous stories, which indicate Matthew’s awareness of a divine (and somewhat feminist) pattern in Jesus’ ancestry. Jesus, like Tamar, will be judged by an unjust system and sentenced to death. Jesus, like Tamar, will be vindicated in a radical reversal that will unmask the earthly powers.
Before we get into wedding season, I want to share some thoughts and opinions that I hope will be helpful to couples doing wedding planning. This is from a pastor who has done more weddings than he can count, and who has given pastoral care to people before their weddings and after their divorces.
The average cost of a wedding in the U.S. is $27,000 ($24,000 in Alabama). That means there are a significant number of weddings that are far, far more costly than this.
Now, I like a good party as much as anyone. Jesus apparently did, too (see Matthew 11:18-19 and John 2:1-11). In fact, one of the best metaphors for the Kingdom of God is an extravagant wedding party (Matthew 22). So I’m not opposed to elaborate celebrity or royal weddings.
But I tell couples who visit me that I’ll make them a deal. “Do four pre-marital counseling sessions with me and take them seriously,” I say, “and I’ll give you the $50 chapel-wedding special: A handful of guests, a heartfelt homily, and I’ll personally drive you to the airport. If you elope to a Caribbean island for your honeymoon and take me with you, I’ll do it for free.”
Your family and the wedding industry will try to sell you a “special day,” but no amount of fairytale photo-ops will make a bit of difference in the long run. Neither Kim Kardashian’s nor Charles and Diana’s opulent weddings made up for their spectacularly public marriage disasters. What makes the day special is the years of memories you will build together after the fact. If you put those memories in the bank, then a single faded Polaroid will have far more sentimental value than an entire wedding album of professional artistic photographs of you and your ex-spouse.
Look, I’ve heard too many preachers complain that people focus too much on the wedding and not enough on the marriage, and I recoil from our cultural tendency to hate on women and the things some women value, or to coin terms like “bridezilla.” As I said, I’m pretty sure Jesus enjoyed elaborate wedding parties. Recent research indicates that we are more likely to regret missed opportunities to enjoy ourselves than to regret spending money, so I don’t think it pays to live in the future too much.
But I really want every couple in their 20’s to think about what $27,000, or even $7,000 invested in their first home, or their kid’s college IRA, or paying off their student debt would mean. I’m nearly forty, and I have an eight-year old kid I’d like to send to college one day. I don’t regret our large wedding, which my wife made affordable by making her own wedding dress and baking her own wedding cake (!). I do sometimes think about ways we could have made smarter financial decisions in our 20’s, though.
When I served a small country church, my neighbor once visited our parsonage and pointed to a corner in our living room. “My husband and I were married in that corner right there,” she said. There were four people who witnessed it. She and her late husband were married for several decades. While I do not believe there is a correlation, inverse or otherwise, between what someone spends on their wedding and the length of their marriage, I think it’s important to point out that there is NOT a correlation. There are all kinds of superstitions and cultural assumption about what you must do to be married, and they are all false. You don’t need a white dress, or a tux, or a dinner, or, frankly, even clergy (gasp!) to have a wedding. The absurdity in our cultural debate over gay marriage is that what traditionalists think about weddings, marriage, and the sanctity thereof really has very little to do with the Bible at all.
A wedding can be a great way to reconnect with friends, to celebrate with family, and to build memories. It can even be a brief glimpse of heaven. But, like life, in the end it is bound by time, an event which can be cherished but never possessed, and its value depends on what you do with it. People often point out that half of marriages end in divorce (a statistic which is not entirely true). They seldom point out that the others end in death. It is important to celebrate life in the midst of death, and to remember that in all things we are oriented toward a God and a mission that is larger than ourselves, and it is by God’s grace that we have companions on the journey.
If your desire is to throw a big party for your friends and family to show them how much you love them, and to thank them for their support of you, fantastic. Have a great, big wedding. But if this is supposed to be your special day, and it’s important enough to you to give glory to God in a worship setting and invite clergy to officiate, then think about what will really glorify God. If Jesus were to show up at your wedding, how would you make him smile?
10. Gives those of us too tired from Christmas craziness an excuse to wait on putting away the Christmas tree.
9. Allows theological re-education of decoration Nazis who demand that all greenery come down on December 26th.
8. Air travel is slightly less taxing and bothersome at Epiphany than during Christmas, or than traveling to Bethlehem 2000 years ago.
7. Plenty of leftover and discounted wrapping paper available for Epiphany presents.
8. No creepy Big-Brother-like Elf on the Shelf spying on kids for Epiphany.
5. Kids born on Christmas often get named Noel, Christian, or Nicholas. Kids born on Epiphany get bad-ass names like Gaspar, Melchior, or Balthasar.
4. Gives Shakespeare fans an excuse to watch or re-read “Twelfth Night” which, depending on the production, may not be appropriate for the kiddies.
3. With twelve drummers drumming, nobody notices if you are out of rhythm.
2. There are as yet no animated films of magical flying creatures who save Epiphany.
1. Nobody has to remind anyone of “the true meaning of Epiphany.”
I’ve only once had the opportunity to look straight at a solar eclipse through polarized and darkened lenses. You cannot look directly at the sun without protection, of course, or you will risk permanent damage to your eyes. I had to share the lenses with other students, so I only had a few seconds to see the black disc of the moon blocking out the sun, and the corona that looked like liquid light seeping around its edges, its tendrils of superheated gas snaking around it. After I passed the sunglasses to another boy I had to go back to looking at the shoebox pinhole camera we had made in class to observe the eclipse, but looking at a feeble dot of light on the paper was nothing compared to that fleeting glimpse I had of the heavens. I couldn’t help sneaking furtive glances at the sun, trying to recapture that vision. It hurt my eyes and filled them with tears, but as I blinked at the ground I could see it there, the afterimage burned into my retinas. The image was everywhere I looked: on the grass, against the wall of the gym building, on the faces of my friends, but it was inverted. When I blinked I could see a white disc surrounded by a black sun.
We were in the outfield of the baseball diamond, and the mid-day darkness was nothing like twilight. The sky was a uniformly dark blue-gray, and the cars in the parking lot seemed flat and two-dimensional. In my memory the voices of my fellow classmates come to me muffled, as though we were all underwater.
I’ve said before that I’m not a model Christian. I believe in God about eighty percent of the time. But on days when I believe in God the most, this is one of the images that comes to mind.
I’m going to ask you to put on a pair of glasses. Perhaps they work by magic or by some kind of alien technology. Like the specially polarized sunglasses, they allow you to see things that would be otherwise invisible or even harmful to you. Like the plastic glasses in a movie theater, when you slide them onto your face, blurry and nonsensical pictures snap into three dimensions, leaping off of the screen. Like microscopes and telescopes, they allow you to see objects on a scale that would otherwise be impossible to observe or comprehend. We won’t use these glasses to look at physical reality. We will use them to look at a spiritual one.
A giant ball of light, many times larger than our own sun, burning with the intensity of a billion stars, hovers millimeters above a tiny, dark bubble. This super star is the love and grace of God, and it fills the entire sky. It looks less like the sun than the sea, stretching into infinity beyond the horizon, roiling and boiling in every direction, and our visible universe is a tiny ship on its surface. Our world is within a darkened bubble, a speck against God’s bright expanse.
Now zoom in to that bubble.
Living creatures walk about within the darkened sphere. They eat, make love, carry wood and water, wage wars, spoil their land, grieve deaths, celebrate holidays, and give birth largely unaware of the burning, passionate love and grace that surrounds them.
The liquid light that surrounds their bubble has only one desire: to know them and be made known by them. The very presence of God pushes against the sphere with intense pressure, but it is prevented from collapsing and crushing the bubble by its own restraint. If you listen closely you can hear groaning and creaking as of water pressing against the hull of a ship. If you listen even more closely, you hear that it is not mere groaning but actually words. You can distinguish a multitude of voices murmuring, “Not yet. Not just yet.”
Now zoom in further on one of the clusters of people walking about within the darkened bubble. A town wakes up in the thin light of their own dawn, and stumbles about their daily business of living. They eat breakfast, clean their homes, and read the news of the day that reinforces all their fears about money, violence, and each other. The light around each of them wavers. Sometimes what they see, hear, say, and do darkens the space around them. Sometimes they brighten it.
As you watch them, you notice that each of them seems to be trailing a thread, no thicker than a hair. They seem to be completely unaware of it. Tiny beads of light flow through this thread and into each person, and they give off a dim glow. In the glow of their light you catch glimpses of beauty you would otherwise miss in this darkened place.
The word for this kind of art is chiaroscuro. It’s the interplay of shadow and light. Seventeenth-century painters like Rembrandt and Rubens would use it to create some of the most memorable and dramatic paintings of their age. You feel sorry that most of them cannot see it.
Follow the thread and you see that it is actually a microscopic tube or channel. It stretches away from them up and out, to the very edges of the sky, and the liquid light flows from the ocean of grace high above into their very bodies.
These channels of light are folded into another dimension, and if you tilt your head at just the right angle you can see across this other plane, like looking at a flat television screen from the side. From this angle you can see that the people within the bubble are not separated from the sea of grace at all, but that it presses up right against them, surrounds them, even buoys them up even while they are completely unaware of it. Grace seeps into them and into their world like water through a membrane. Again, they have no clue.
You notice that each person shines their light in a different way. Some of them radiate a steady warm glow, like a lightbulb, and others are drawn to their light for comfort. Some of them shine with a harsh intensity, and aim their light into dark places. Shadows and things that live in the dark flee from their presence. Some of them flicker, like a candle, sputtering somewhere between faith and doubt, but even in the darkest places the darkness cannot overcome their light. When these light-bearers come together they become like a campfire in a dark wood, and people gather there to swap stories and sing songs.
I doubt that this allegory needs much explaining, but I think it is a good image to help us understand the Christian faith. We feel alienated from God in a world damaged by sin. God is both far-off and close-at-hand. God invites us to be agents of grace and tells us, in the words of Jesus, that we are the light of the world, and that we should let our deeds shine before others so that they may see our good works and give glory to God (Matthew 5:14-16).
This picture isn’t new, of course, and it isn’t unique to Christianity. The Greek philosopher Plato lived four centuries before Christ, and every student of philosophy knows his Allegory of the Cave. Plato imagined that we were like prisoners who have grown up watching a shadow play on the wall of a dark cave. We mistake the shadows of this world for reality. When we are freed (by philosophical clear-thinking), we turn and are momentarily blinded by the flickering firelight in the cave. We recognize that the things we thought were real, the shadow-puppets, were only illusions. Struggling up and out of the cave, we are blinded again by the light of the real world. When our eyes adjust, we recognize that the shadow plays we’d grown up with were imitations of these real things, and the firelight an imitation of the light of the sun.
Plato even had a version of the “gospel,” which means “good news.” Plato said that newly freed prisoners would attempt to return to the cave and free their fellow prisoners with news about the outside world. Unfortunately, the freed prisoner would face disbelief from fellow prisoners, and even persecution. Sometimes people prefer the comfort of their chains to the dangerous freedom of the real world. One Biblical author makes the same observation: “...the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light” (John 3:19).
One of the ways that Christianity differs from Plato’s philosophy, though, is that according to the Bible, we cannot free ourselves from our own chains by right thinking. Our intellectual philosophy is as corrupt and darkness-prone as our beliefs about money, or sex, or power. Reason itself can be corrupted to serve whatever power controls it. We can be freed only by the action of God’s own self. For early Jewish philosophers, this meant that God’s Law in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) was like the light of God entering into the world. In fact, the world was created for the very purpose of revealing Torah. This was the light by which humans should live.
This other reality, this divine order that the Torah pointed toward, had another Greek name. Logos. It is the Greek word for “word,” but it has more implications than merely something that you say. We can hear echoes of its meaning in words like biology (the study or philosophy of living things) or anthropology (the study or philosophy of human beings). The divine logos is something like the principle upon which everything exists. Jewish philosophers ate this language up. Their Bible began with the story of God creating the world by speaking, “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3), and bringing order out of chaos. For them, Torah was the logos of God. When God spoke words to Moses on Mt. Sinai and gave him the commandments, God revealed God’s intention for how people should live and society should be ordered. When God speaks, God creates a new world and illuminates it. When God speaks, God creates a new human society with God’s Law. When God speaks, God creates order out of chaos.
When the Jewish philosophers considered their own history in the light of Greek philosophy, they understood being a light to the nations in a new way. By bringing the Torah to the world and being an example of a holy and just nation, Israel would become a marker of God’s mercy toward all of creation.
Christians used the same language for Jesus. It is not philosophy or Torah that bring the light of God into our darkened world, they said. It is Jesus himself. In the Bible, John 1:1 says that Jesus was the logos of God.* Jesus is the Word of God. He is not a passive set of instructions, or a way of thinking. He is a liberating, active being. The one who comes to free us from our chains in our darkened prison is not someone who has been freed by his own philosophizing about abstract things. He is light from beyond the sky, God’s own self acting in our world and in human history.
For Christians, Jesus reveals God’s intention for the world, which is to free all people and bring light to our darkened world. Before he is born, a relative says, “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet in the way of peace” (Luke 1:78-79). After he is born, an old man at the Temple takes him in his arms and says that the baby will be “a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people, Israel” (Luke 2:32). When Jesus begins his ministry, he goes to his hometown of Nazareth and says he has come “to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18-19).** His own people chase him out of town, so he goes to settle on the north shore of Galilee in the town of Capernaum. Matthew says that this fulfills another prophecy: “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death, light has dawned” (Matthew 4:16).*** In John’s gospel, Jesus flat out declares it: “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12).
But it wasn’t enough for Jesus to simply show up and be the light of the world. His goal was to get his followers to continue his work bringing the light and grace of God into the world, advancing what he called “the kingdom” or reign of God. “Y’all are the light of the world,” he tells his disciples (Matthew 5:13).**** Paul later says that Jesus has given his followers “the ministry of reconciliation” between humans and God (2 Corinthians 5:18). Collectively, those who follow Jesus, who are light-bearers and agents of grace, are actually his physical presence, his broken-and-resurrected body walking in the world (1 Corinthians 12:12).
So in this season, at the darkest time of the year, we celebrate Christmas. We string lights on Christmas trees and share gifts and tell stories because we want to become channels of grace. We want to shine in the darkness, to bring more grace, more love, and more light into the world. What we experience of this broken, darkened world is not all there is. Eclipses end. Dawn breaks. The porous barrier between heaven and earth crumbles, and the light breaks in.
It has become popular for Christians of all varieties to describe Jesus as “radical” or “revolutionary.” The popularity of this language stems in part from the tendency of young adults to be suspicious of the institutional church, and so its more entrepreneurial and adaptive leaders have appropriated the language of revolution to demonstrate solidarity with the generation who are largely missing from church pews. “We don’t like the institutional church, either!” we say. “Look how radical we are!”
My fear is that people will (and have) become cynical when they learn(ed) that this “radicalism” is simply the same theology repackaged. Jesus is “radical” in that he emphasizes the love of God, or forgiveness, or austere living, or strict personal morality and individual responsibility. The “Jesus revolution” means radically embracing the status quo. We reject “materialism,” as though there were a huge block of people who espoused it, or “hypocrisy,” as though we could ever tell if we were being hypocrites.
I think part of the reason is the way we read the gospels. Of course, the hero of any given gospel story is Jesus, and the bad guys are the stodgy Pharisees. Jesus, radically committed to the idea of a loving God that is bigger than religious regulations, heals people on the sabbath. The Pharisees, hypocrites that they are, go apoplectic.
But what if Jesus were deliberately provoking controversy? What if instead of just applying his religious philosophy, he actively sought out confrontations?
I heard Amy-Jill Levine point out that the people who Jesus healed were seldom emergency cases: a woman with a bad back, a man with a withered hand, a man born blind or lame for forty years or paralyzed. If any of us tried to make an appointment with a doctor for a Saturday, we’d be told the same thing the Pharisees told Jesus: do it after the weekend. These are chronic cases! Is there blood spurting from an open artery? Shortness of breath and pain in the chest? Weak pulse or high fever? No? Then it can wait. Except that Jesus wants an excuse to deliberately violate the sabbath. He is provoking controversy.
It happens again in Mark 11 when Jesus “cleanses” the temple. In the other gospels, Jesus just strolls in and starts flipping tables. In Mark, though, he arrives too late, after the crowds have gone home. So he goes away and comes back the next morning to stage his big demonstration. I think Matthew and Luke exclude this detail because they (and most Christians) don’t like the idea of Jesus being late to something—as if being late would cast doubt on his omniscience, and punctuality is a divine virtue that Christ simply MUST have. But Mark’s gospel makes it clear that his temple tantrum is a planned event. Jesus, again, seeks out controversy.
The parables he tells frequently poke fun at religious expectations that God would make Israel a great nation. Instead of a cedar, Jesus says the kingdom is like a mustard weed. Jesus compares God bringing in the kingdom to a woman polluting holy bread with leaven. When he told these parables, his listeners would have thought that he was being insufficiently patriotic (not to mention that he hung around with traitors and collaborators like tax collectors). He was blasphemous and treasonous. Imagine a preacher saying from the pulpit, “The Kingdom of God will appear and spread like a potent fart in silent a chapel. Judgment day will be like Bernie Madoff getting out of prison. If you want to follow me, be more like a devout good-hearted Muslim who prays five times a day. God is like your gay lover who welcomes you back even after you’ve slept around.” Can you hear the shouts of outrage? Can you see the faces twisted in fury? Is one of those faces yours?
As shocking as these statement might have been, and in spite of being, for Christians, the instigator of a “New Covenant,” most of what Jesus preached was consistent with everything the Pharisees already knew and believed: Love God and love your neighbor. He paraphrased a saying from Rabbi Hillel, who said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to another.” So it wasn’t merely that Jesus was bringing in some new kind of radical theology. He chose to demonstrate it and promote it in radical ways. In the same way, the biggest obstacle for following Jesus today has little to do with theology. There’s plenty of excellent theology and philosophy of religion out there. It’s about what Christians are willing to do, the bullies they are willing to face, and the non-violent, non-coercive measures they are willing to take to proclaim their message.
Part of what makes Jesus “radical” or “revolutionary” is his method. He seeks out opportunities for conflict to make his religious points. He stages demonstrations. He is sarcastic and provocative, exactly the way both mainline and evangelical churches usually are not. In fact, I know plenty of conservative Christians who are incensed and irritated at Occupy Wall Street, who are easily offended by statements they consider blasphemous, who recoil from troublemakers and extremists, describing them as lazy, arrogant, entitled ne’er-do-wells. They want Jesus to be radical and revolutionary within the boundaries of acceptable social company. A Jesus who agitated for economic and religious reform by turning over tables in department stores during Black Friday would be arrested, and most Christians would look on with approval, because while it’s okay to talk about such things, there’s such a thing as going too far.
There are times, of course, when the church does actually look like the Body of Christ. When churches gather to protest injustice against those least able to resist. When they create counter-narratives and parables that resist the powers and principalities. When they raise objections that others consider treasonous and socially dangerous.
It wasn’t Jesus’ philosophy or religious ideas that were radical or revolutionary. It was his willingness to plunge headlong into the controversy, proclaiming the good news, knowing that ultimately he would have to interpose his very body. This is the difference between revolutionaries and the rest of us wannabes.
Many preachers and theologians point out that according to the Law of Deuteronomy (22:20-24), Mary could have been stoned for adultery if it became general knowledge that she was pregnant out of wedlock. I think the reason people make this claim is to add to the dramatic tension in Matthew 1:19. In this telling, Joseph becomes a hero: he not only protects Mary from public embarrassment, he actually saves her life.
While it may have been technically legal to stone Mary for adultery, in actual practice such harsh application of the law was rare. For one thing, Roman rulers did not tend to approve of locals taking trials for capital crimes into their own hands. This is why Jesus was handed over to the Pilate for execution in John 18:31. If there was any killing to be done, the Roman officials preferred to do it themselves, and they did not take kindly to lynch mobs enforcing their own justice. This may be one reason the story of the adulterous woman in John 8:3-11 was such a political trap. If Jesus agreed with the fundamentalists, he would be put at odds with the Roman government. Her accusers were using her as bait.
The other reason execution was unlikely was that although Old Testament law may often sound harsh, in practice the Jewish courts gave huge benefits to the accused, such as requiring two eye-witnesses for any crime (Deuteronomy 19:15-20). Early Jewish writings say that courts who sentenced more than one person to death in seven years were condemned as “murderous.” I don’t know what adjective they would use to describe our own legal system.
While it heightens the drama to suggest that Mary could have been killed, Matthew’s text is most plain. It says Joseph didn’t want her humiliated. I think this fact alone should be enough for him to be described as “righteous.”
This could have come from an episode of Vicar of Dibley:
Someone emailed one of our Sunday school teachers this link, with a brief note complaining against Adam Hamilton’s “heresy.” This was my reply:
Hi, ________, and thanks for the link you sent me. I was especially interested to see Adam’s response to Rev. Rives, which I think is appropriate, well-reasoned, and gracious. Probably more gracious than I would be, because I hear in Rev. Rives’ words a resentment of the popularity of Adam Hamilton whose church, the campus of which is only 22 miles away, is doing amazing ministry in their area. (Here is a map). I think what really chafes Rives is being in Hamilton’s shadow. I will confess that I myself am somewhat envious of David Platt, best-selling author and pastor of the Church at Brook Hills, who I disagree with theologically, but I would never suggest that he is not Christian or that he is a heretic. He’s doing great work, he loves Jesus, and I respect him for that. Although his view of the Bible is probably closer to Rev. Rives’ than to Adam Hamilton’s, and I disagree with him about the nature of salvation and the interpretation of the Bible, I recognize that a good tree produces good fruit. I wish Rev. Rives could see the same thing about his local “rival” mega-church pastor. Their approaches to the gospel are not going to reach the same populations of people. I am happy that people with a more literalist understanding of the Bible have places to go to church that will challenge them to live out the gospel.
As for Mr. Rives’ letter, I’ve written a rather lengthy rebuttal, some of which is material I use in my Bible class, but I hope you will find it useful when people insist to you that a literalist reading of the Bible is the only legitimately Christian approach.
First, questioning the theological perspective of the author of Deuteronomy does not mean questioning the inspiration of the Bible. Adam is questioning the theological perspective of the author of Deuteronomy. He is not advocating that the book be thrown out of the canon, or that it is not relevant to Christian life today. Jesus himself quotes Deuteronomy 6:4-5 as the most important commandment in the Bible.
But the author of Deuteronomy 28:68 says that a consequence of Israel’s idolatry would be that the Lord “will bring you back in ships to Egypt by a route I promised you would never see again.” A relevant question here would be, “Does God go back on God’s promises?” I think most people would say no, even though it says it there in black and white that God would do precisely that. In the same chapter, the author writes that God says the punishment that would fall upon disobedient Israelite cities was siege, famine, starvation, and cannibalism to the point that a refined gentlewoman would “begrudge food to the husband whom she embraces, to her own son, and to her own daughter, begrudging even the afterbirth that comes out from between her thighs, and the children that she bears, because she is eating them in secret for lack of anything else, in the desperate straits to which the enemy siege will reduce you in your towns” (28:53-57). The author goes on, “…the Lord will take delight in bringing you to ruin and destruction” (28:63). Are we to take this literally, as timeless theological truths about God which we should accept uncritically? Moses and Abraham, heroes of the faith, both recoiled from this kind of indiscriminate punishment of entire populations of men, women, and children. Ezekiel likewise portrays God very differently: “I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord God. Turn, then, and live” (18:32). This is a very different attitude from taking delight in ruin and destruction.
Jonah, on the other hand, like some of the more bloody-minded authors, eagerly desired to see such happen to Nineveh, yet God reprimanded him for his bloodthirstiness, especially considering the “one hundred twenty-thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals” (Jonah 4:11). God was appalled that Jonah didn’t even consider the children and cattle. So which is more reasonable: that human beings were using hyperbole to describe the wrath of God in Deuteronomy, or that this is an accurate picture of the God revealed in Jesus Christ (or the God revealed in Jonah)? Does this mean that God changed, or that human beings were using hyperbole, or that human beings’ understanding of God changed over time?
Thousands of years ago, Jewish scholars recognized that there is a theological conversation going on within the pages of the Bible. We can hear the conversation happening when Deuteronomy and Joshua forbid intermarriage, but the author of Ruth points out that foreigners can be more faithful than natives. Ezra commands a mass divorce of hundreds of foreign women, but Malachi judges this policy harshly when he says that “God hates divorce,” and Jesus does the same when he forbids divorce except in the case of adultery. First and second Chronicles attempts to soften David’s rougher edges and establish his religious bone fides (arguing that he helped build the temple, even if he didn’t actually complete it). In Mark, Jesus’ disciples are numbskulls, while in Matthew and John they say, “now we understand.” The authors, editors, and compilers of the Bible had no problem putting all of these contradictory stories in the Bible and calling them authoritative books of the canon. Even Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher and a contemporary of Jesus, recognized that in the Torah we have some stories which are clearly meant to be read not as history, but as allegories which expand our understanding of who God is. What we have canonized in our Bible is not one monolithic and entirely-consistent viewpoint, but a millennia-long conversation of a community that encounters God in powerful and startling ways.
People who try to argue for a literal interpretation of scripture are forced to do intellectual acrobatics to make these divergent points of view consistent. They do so because they believe they are being faithful to the Bible, but I believe that they are forcing the Bible to say what they think it should say, rather than letting the authors of the Bible speak for themselves. If I believe the authors are inspired by God – even the author of Deuteronomy 28 – should I not allow them to speak? The Deuteronomist and some other writers of the Torah clearly had a theology which believed that the wicked and the righteous are rewarded or punished for their deeds in this life, and that children and other people who are “collateral damage” are simply swept up in God’s wrath because God “punishes children for the iniquity of parents to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me.” That is what they believed, regardless of what I believe. For me to try to portray their belief as consistent with my own would be dishonest both to myself and to the authors.
Yet hundreds of years later, Jeremiah would say that God does not work this way, and that people will no longer say that children will be punished for the sins of their parents, but that “All shall die for their own sins” (31:29-30). Job spends more than 30 chapters disputing these theological perspectives. And hundreds of years after Jeremiah, Jesus would argue that even this view was too simplistic (Luke 13:1-9), but argued that all stand under judgment and any given misfortunes that happen to people are not necessarily because they are more wicked than anyone else. This is a radical change from the belief that children are punished for the sins of their parents, or that all are punished in this life for their sins by cataclysms and misfortunes.
Now, if someone wants to insist that God does punish cities by making women eat their own afterbirth and children, I guess that’s their business. Fred Phelps and those who picket soldiers’ funerals certainly believe along these lines. But I doubt even Rev. Rives would go there. So it is not the case that Adam Hamilton rejects the authority of the Hebrew Bible, or pits the Old Testament against the New. He, along with many other contemporary Biblical scholars, are simply not literalists. They perceive a conversational, nuanced picture of God emerging from God’s history with God’s people.
My second objection to Rives’ characterization of Adam Hamilton is that he mislabels this perspective I have outlined as Marcionite heresy. Marcion’s heresy was that the God of the Hebrew Bible and of creation was a different God than the one proclaimed by Jesus Christ. This is not what Adam Hamilton has claimed. He has instead claimed that the author(s) of Deuteronomy have some perspectives and ideas about God he does not share. He has not claimed there are two different Gods, or that the God who the Torah describes as having “steadfast love that endures forever” is not present in the Hebrew Bible. The God of Jesus Christ is clearly the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and we see in Jesus a continuation of the redemptive work that God has been doing since their time.
Marcion also could not abide the contradictions between the Gospel stories, so he streamlined them all into a modified version of Luke. In this way I would argue that Rev. Rives’ is more guilty of Marcionite heresy than Adam Hamilton is. Like most literalists, he wants to make the Bible consistent, and he will ignore the actual words of the text to do so. The Bible never says of itself that it is “totally true and trustworthy.” 2 Timothy 3:16 says that all (Hebrew) scripture is “God-breathed and useful” for teaching. It does not say inerrant, or infallible, or any variation of “true and trustworthy” (which is a phrase at the end of Revelation). These are man’s [sic] words about the Bible, not God’s. If we want to say “every word of the Bible is true,” then when we consider passages like Deuteronomy 28 we will need to ask, “true in what way?” Certainly it cannot all be literal truth. People who want to make the Bible the Word of God do so at the expense of the Gospel of John, who says that *Jesus* is the Word of God. It is this Jesus who is the lens through which we are to read the Bible, who is the proper interpreter and theological measuring-stick. By elevating the Bible to a place it never claimed for itself, they make the Bible into an idol, and replace the Word of God (Jesus Christ) with their own words about the Bible (the doctrine that it is true and trustworthy, inerrant or infallible as long as you interpret it in such-and-such a way).
I could press this point, and ask, “Who is the real false teacher here? Who is replacing the Word of God with the words of human beings?” But I will not do that. Instead, I will extend grace to such folks, and recognize that they are trying to be faithful to God. If they bear good fruit, that’s fine – I wish them well. But if they use the Bible to attack straw men, they had best be careful since the weapon they wield is “sharper than any two-edged sword,” and it cuts both ways. They had better be ready to use the actual text of the Bible instead of their generalizations and abstractions about it.
So, to sum up, those are my two objections to Rev. Rives’ letter to Adam Hamilton. First, Adam is not pitting “Old Testament against the New,” but intelligently applying Biblical scholarship to shape his congregation’s theological understanding of contemporary issues. Adam is faithfully engaging a millennia-long dialogue about who God is, a conversation begun in the Hebrew Bible between diverse authors and that continues into the New Testament, and he is using Jesus Christ as the interpretive lens through which he reads the Bible. And second, Adam’s view is not a kind of Marcionite heresy which amounts to a dangerous “false teaching.” It is completely consistent with scripture, tradition, reason, and experience, and thoroughly orthodox in that it affirms the Trinitarian nature of God and the centrality of Jesus Christ as the foundation of our faith. In this he is thoroughly Methodist, and I am glad that he is one of “our” pastors.
Again, thanks for the link. I hope what I’ve written is helpful.
Peace,
Dave
[edit] - A friend just tweeted this article by the amazing A.J. Levine and Doug Knight, which makes many similar points.
Many church websites have an “about us” menu, usually located at the top of the screen. Somewhere in this drop down menu will be something like “Our Beliefs” or “What We Believe” or “Our Statement of Faith.”
Here is the one from the National Association of Evangelicals. Note the order of the items.
Here is the one from Willow Creek. Again, note the order of the items.
You can click around various church and denomination websites, but the trend is pretty clear. Statements by independent or non-denominational churches go like this:
1. Bible
2. God
3. Jesus
4. Salvation (which will tend to mention something about the unsaved being resurrected unto eternal damnation, language popularized by Scofield).
I find it fascinating that usually the first thing on the list of beliefs is about the Bible. In the Articles of Faith of the Methodist Church and the Confession of the Evangelical United Brethren (which are here), the first item is “God.” This is generally true of most mainline denominations.
The order of these articles generally go:
1. God the Father
2. God the Son
3. God the Holy Spirit
4. Potluck suppers (just kidding)
5. The Bible
The Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, generally considered the measuring sticks of orthodox Christian belief, say nothing about the Bible.
There is some criticism that mainline denominations are fuzzy in their beliefs. I do not think this is generally true. If you look at the historic confessions, they are pretty specific. In fact, they are specifically against certain things which were probably very important to people in the 18th century. With the rise of fundamentalism in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, people saw historical-critical study of the Bible as a threat, and consequently newer statements of faith begin with defense of belief in the Bible.
For me, historical-critial method and other academic study of the Bible is a faith-builder, not a faith-destroyer. I am glad that there are multiple voices, theological opinions, and layers of the Bible. It makes it much more like real life. I like to think of the Bible the way Stanley Hauerwas describes in the following quotation, as a drama to be interpreted and lived out in community under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit:
Religious belief is not just some kind of primitive metaphysics, but in fact it is a performance just like you’d perform Lear. What people think Christianity is, is that it’s like the text of Lear, rather than the actual production of Lear. It has to be performed for you to understand what Lear is — a drama. You can read it, but unfortunately Christians so often want to make Christianity a text rather than a performance. - Stanley Hauerwas
The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over… and that means the time of religion in general. How do we speak of God—without religion, i.e., without the temporally conditioned presupposition of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on? How do we speak in a secular way about God? (DB, Letters and Papers from Prison, April 1944)
Our earlier words are therefore bound to lose their force and cease, and our being Christian today will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action among men. (DB, Letters and Papers from Prison, May 1944)
Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. (St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:8-10)
For fools speak folly, and their minds plot iniquity:
to practice ungodliness, to utter error concerning the Lord,
to leave the craving of the hungry unsatisfied,
and to deprive the thirsty of drink.
The villainies of villains are evil;
they devise wicked devices to ruin the poor with lying words,
even when the plea of the needy is right.
Isaiah 32:6-7
We typically think of fools as people who do things that are impractical or silly, but for many Biblical authors, folly is immoral. Someone who is a fool has a flawed worldview; he lives only for himself. “A fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God,’” says the Psalmist (14:1), which is less about intellectual atheism than it is about practical atheism. I know atheists who live with a profound sense of being part of something larger than themselves, who see a tragically unrealized nobility in humanity that we Christians call “the image of God.” I also know Christians who hold orthodox doctrines about Christianity who are practical atheists, who in their behavior act as though there is no God who liberates slaves and works justice for the poor. These are people “who utter error concerning the Lord,” such as “God helps those who help themselves” (which is not in the Bible). The specific practices Isaiah mentions are:
1) teaching wrong things about God (uttering error about the Lord)
2) depriving the hungry and thirsty of food and drink
3) using rhetorical sleight-of-hand to refuse justice to the poor (devices to ruin the poor with lying words).
I’m sure there are plenty of folks who believe that I teach wrong things about God. That may be so. I am sure that I am wrong about a great many things. But one thing I’m fairly certain of is that doing 2) and 3) to the poor, the hungry, and the thirsty, mean doing those things to Jesus (Matthew 25:31-46). I’m also fairly certain that being an apologist for wealth inequality and claiming that God isn’t concerned about such things qualifies as teaching wrong things about God.
I’m not quite as black-and-white as Isaiah about the identity of sinners and the righteous, but I think I take his point when he says:
The sinners in Zion are afraid; trembling has seized the godless:
“Who among us can live with the devouring fire?
Who among us can live with everlasting flames?”
Those who walk righteously and speak uprightly,
who despise the gain of oppression,
who wave away a bribe instead of accepting it,
who stop their ears from hearing of bloodshed
and shut their eyes from looking on evil,
they will live on the heights; their refuge will be the fortress of rocks;
their food will be supplied, their water assured.
Isaiah 33:13-16
Again, the language used to describe those who oppress the poor, who seek bribes, who endorse bloodshed is “godless.” They are fools.
To those who dismiss Christian calls for social justice, who see no Biblical basis for critiquing our national economic, domestic, and foreign policies, I can only ask:
1) What is a bribe? Is it not the unhindered influence of money in politics and justice, in lobbyists who write legislation which then gets made into law?
2) What is oppression, and who gains from it? Clearly Isaiah believes there is such a thing as oppression, and that there are people who earn money from it. What would that look like, hypothetically? Isaiah and other Biblical writers seem to believe that the poor are easy marks for oppressors, and that oppressors can extort money from them not only with guns and steel but with words. How would that work? How do you oppress someone with words?
3) Why does Isaiah seem to link the oppression of the poor together with teaching wrong things about God? Again, what would that look like? How could someone’s theology lead to oppression of the poor?
The fool says these things are unrelated. There are no poor. There is no oppression. There are no oppressors. We’re not doing anything wrong. Isaiah says: that’s just damned foolishness.
Awhile back I posted about church names. Naming a church or a new ministry venture these days is a tricky thing. It depends on how you want the name to function. Does it tell you something about the church? Is it purposefully traditional? Does it describe your theology or your community? Here are some real-life examples off the top of my head: Trinity. Lifechurch.tv. Church of Grace. Church of the Reconciler. Horizon Fellowship. Sacred Tapestry. Encounter God Ministries. St. Andrew’s. All-Saint’s. Community Church Without Walls. Church at Brook Hills. What do these names tell you? What images do they convey?
I’m interested in naming a church whose objective is to help post-Christian people (those who have been burned by or turned off to church) become followers of Jesus, whose worship will be expressed through art, music, and storytelling, but whose main expression of church life will be networked small groups. So I’m creating a twitter hash tag to brainstorm and collect ideas (#churchnames), whether they be good, bad, weird, or amusing. I’ll post a list here when I’ve collected some.
I’ve noticed that words like “revolutionary” and “radical” and “insurrection” get appropriated by companies whose business it is to sell advertising to churches. These days, everyone agrees that Jesus was a revolutionary, that he was interested in “the common people,” and that he resisted the status quo. In one way, this is a tremendous victory for Biblical scholars, theologians, and social activists who have been talking about this stuff for the last few decades. In another, it’s a sad example of the way religion gets twisted to serve the interests of the powerful: All you have to do is repackage the same tired old fundamentalist theology in a book and slap the word “revolution” on it, use some hip stock photography, and try to market yourself as edgy to a world that’s tired of your message: “Just believe in Jesus and try harder.”
You can try to reclaim the words, of course, and infuse them with different meaning. I often try to highlight the metaphorical power of words and breathe new life into words that have become cliche. But sometimes it is good to abandon a word for a while and explore how other languages approach the same subjects. For example, the word “Christianity” often becomes problematic to the people who believe and practice it. The Jesus movement of the first century just called it “The Way,” and some people prefer to think of their faith in these words.
I like the Korean and Japanese word “do,” as in Tae Kwon Do, or Judo. It shares the same word stem as “Tao,” which means “way,” but it denotes a thing that you practice, whether it is body movement or meditation or whatever. This is not just a set of beliefs, though there are beliefs that go along with the practice. It is an art and a way of life. Sometimes you go to a dojo (“place of the way”) to practice with others, but you also practice it on your own. Some people like to think of their church as a spiritual dojo, perhaps with or without the more combative connotations.
How would we think of Christian faith differently if we described it as “Jesus-do?” Practicing the way of Jesus?
