Pacifism

In the springtime, when kings go out to battle, it is worth pleading with Christians to reconsider our prevailing ethos of war. I might as soon question the ethics of oxygen than the American military juggernaut. We have so deeply cast our lot with our armed forces that it is difficult to locate where the church ends and Americanism begins. But the Scriptures clamor to be heard on this very point and to them we must go.

There are basically two categories of warfare in the Old Testament. First, God used his covenant people Israel as an instrument of judgment on surrounding nations. It was generally total warfare, a nasty business of razing cities to the ground, sowing salt, executing survivors, kidnapping virgins, collecting foreskins, and dashing babies to bits. The second category of war was that of secular nations used by God to judge and then were judged by God for judging. It was live by the sword and die by the sword - no sooner did God judge Israel with Assyria than he judged Assyria for her wickedness in the matter (Is 10).

Contra wishful thinking, America is not the new Israel. In fact, Israel is not even the new Israel. If you are looking for support for a secular government to be used by God to judge another nation and in turn be blessed for her efforts you won't find it in the Old Testament. Try Greek mythology. If you are looking for a "just war theory" - taking the word war from the OT and baptizing it in some of the humanitarian kindness from the New - you won't find that either. Try Augustine or Geneva.

There's no space to cover Romans 13 here. Suffice to say that it would take some fantastic hermeneutical gymnastics to balance America's worldwide jurisdiction over sovereign states on the point of the sword mentioned there.

Generally a defense for warfare is drawn not primarily from the Bible but our predicament, concerning Hitler, Al Qaeda, Darfur. At best this is thinly veiled scorn for the naivety of our Lord who failed to foresee this. At worst its blatant disregard for everything he said about laying down rights and taking up the cross.

Jesus said "blessed are the peacemakers" and Paul, "for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh"; and yet somehow we've spiritualized the peacemakers and materialized warmongers. Its long overdue for the burden of biblical proof to reside with the war makers.

Carey: An Unlikely Ally

I just finished S. Pearce Carey's biography of William Carey, and was surprised time and time again with some of the positions Carey took on issues.  It seems the new monasticism has got nothing on this guy.  Here are a few:

-  Carey refused to eat sugar because, at the time, it was grown, harvested, and produced by slaves.  

-  Carey was absorbed in the politics of his time.  As a Brit he supported the American and French revolutions.  

-  Carey was an avid gardener and horticulturist.  When he first moved to India he supplemented the money he was receiving from England by being an indigo farmer.  This infuriated the people that sent him to India, because of the potential for him to get too involved in "worldly affairs".  He later founded an agri-horticultural society in India.  He lamented that, 

 

"in one of the finest countries in the world the state of agriculture is so abject and degraded, and the people's food so poor and their comforts so meagre.  India seems to have almost everything to learn about the clearing of jungles, the tillage of wastes, the draining of marshes, the banking of river courses, the irrigation of large areas, the mixing of composts and manures, the rotation of crops, the betterment of tools and of transport, the breeding of stocks, the cultivation of new vegetables and herbs, the planting of orchards, the budding, grafting and pruning of fruit trees, and the forestation of timbers.  Their only orchards are clumps of mangoes crowded together without judgment.  The recent introduction of the potato and the strawberry suggest what might be done.  Many British farms have quadrupled their produce, since they pooled their information and experience through agricultural societies."  

-  6 years or so after Carey's ship had landed on India 3 families joined his mission.  The families decided that they should all live together, and hold everything in common for the sake of minimizing expense and also to promote Christian fraternity.  

-  Despite translating parts of the Bible into 35 different languages, Carey also translated many works of Indian classic literature.  One of these works is the epic Ramayana, more or less the Indian equivalent to the Iliad.  This was a projected 10 volume work, but all their work was destroyed in a fire after they had completed 3 of the volumes.  After the fire it had to be put down.  The Ramayana project was wildly controversial in England, with Baptist pastor and friend of Carey, Andrew Fuller, calling it, "that old piece of lumber."  Yet, Carey and his companions saw it as an essential element of their work.

-  During some delirium Carey was having because of a leg infection he chided his doctor for wearing a red coat, thinking him to be a military officer.  Carey yelled at the doctor, "How dare you come to me in that read coat?  Don't you know that God Almighty has decreed that all war shall be abolished."  The doctor withdrew, and returned in a black coat, but he was immediately recognized and rejected.  Though he was delirious Carey never accepted that this exclamation was out of line.  "There were truths in my delirium whose force I wish to feel, and for whose triumph to strive, to the end of my life."  

All this, and yet his name is so rarely brought into the current holism/prioritism conversation.

  

The Dark Side of Christ

Surely darkness is a poor metaphor for the Light of the World. And yet most of Jesus' forward looking parables are arrayed in sinister linings. Like chiaroscuro, his ominous shades of horror add a third dimension to our Savior. The One who would bruise no reed and smolder no wick invited hearers to peer into ghastly scenes of One who will account for every offense in bitter weeping and anguished gnashing.

These parables of tenants, wedding feasts, and minas tell a different story than the soft gospel of a God who punishes begrudgingly, caught in the awkward position of conjuring up wrath to prove his justice. No, he comes as an insulted father, a deceived debt reliever, a pained vineyard owner, and a king whose rule has been jeapardized. He comes enraged to "put those wretches to a miserable death", to "destroy those murderers and burn their city", to "bring them here and slaughter them before me". And all the beseeching, begging, pleading falls on deaf ears. He is merciless.

If Jesus is able to grant "joy inexpressible" to his beloved, who can put words to the grisliness that awaits his enemies? If he is the Creator of our bodies and the intricacies of our nervous system, he is able to inflict pain beyond our wildest nightmares. And if he sustains vast complex galaxies by his word, he is able to uphold this place of torment forever and ever.

We do no favors when we fumble the doctrine of hell - when we feign the complications of Gehenna, bemoan more loudly the present plight of the oppressed, take torture out of the gospel, and make Jesus appear squeamish around blood.

But if we come to grips with such terror, we will find in it something worthy of the brutality of the cross.

Religion as a Bull Market?

Okay, so maybe it's tacky to post a link to another blog. Forgive me this once. I thought this was interesting, if not because Richard John Neuhaus is using a clever typology to create a cleverer typology then because it seems relevant. Here's a key excerpt:

If the subject of the future of Christianity is reformulated as the future of religion in this society and the world, there is, from a historical and sociological perspective, nothing to worry about. For as far as one can see into the future, religion is a bull market. In America, where more than 90 percent of the people say they believe in God and well over 80 percent claim to be Christians of one sort or another, Christianity is a bull market. We can debate until the wee hours of the morning whether this is “authentic” or “biblical” or “orthodox” Christianity, but the fact is that this is the form—composed of myriad forms—of the Christian movement in our time and place. (www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1240)

I am continually vexed by these sorts of questions… and discussions on Shane Claiborn.

Cheers!

Hebrew and Greek Fonts

I have been trying to get Greek, and Hebrew fonts for the blog, and just found out that you have to copy and paste the specific texts from a website that has the texts in unicode.  For Hebrew you can use http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0101.htm

For Greek you can use http://www.greekbible.com/index.php

There you go if anyone wants to do it.  

בְּרֵאשִׁית, בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים, אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם, וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ

Βίβλος γενέσεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ υἱοῦ Δαυὶδ υἱοῦ Ἀβραάμ. 

Alex Luc and Gen. 3:22

Dr. Alex Luc in my Hebrew class this evening brought up an interesting point about the Hebrew text of Gen. 3:22 that I had never heard before.  

Our English Bible's generally translate that text, "Then the Lord God said, 'Behold the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil..'"  This, according to Luc is a dubious translation.  There is another, and possibly more appropriate way this text could be read.  The Rabbis in some of the Targums translated it, "Then the Lord God said, 'Behold the man has become as a loner [or has become alienated], from it (the tree) knowing good and evil...'"  This is not to say that Adam has been alienated from the tree, but has made himself alone, alienated from God on account of him gaining the knowledge of good and evil from the tree.  Dr. Luc puts a break between two of the words in the Hebrew that are joined in our Bibles.  The two Hebrew words generally translated "like one of us" are k'hd, this word translates, "as/like one", and mmnu, which can be translated as "from" and then the first person plural ("from us"), or "from" and then the third person singular("from it/him").  Our English Bible's, and the LXX opt for the former, "from us", while Dr. Luc goes with the latter "from it".  The main syntactical reason to take this word as "from it", is that the other six times this construction is used in the early chapters of Genesis it is used to refer to the tree that was in the midst of the garden, not used to denote the first person plural.

This has an interesting theological application.  If Dr. Luc's reading is correct, it removes any idea from this text that Adam and Eve's sin elevated them to some higher god-like status.  God created man in his own image, and it is confusing to say that the fall perfects, or expands that in any way.  It seems more sensible that Adam's sin alienated him from God, on account of his innocence being lost in knowing the difference between good and evil.               

A letter to Shane and Chris

Shane and Chris,

My wife and I are indebted to you guys for your bold, prophetic voices. In your words and walks, you are re-imagining what our faith looks like against the prevailing script of “technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism” (Brueggemann). As a family gearing up to do church-planting among the poorest neighborhoods in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, we resonate deeply with your call to the church to take seriously Christ's own words and walk amongst the desolate.

Huge swaths of the church still consider doctrine a list of truths to be affirmed rather than acted, conversion more decision than demonstration. It seems wherever we look to the right to put words to our faith, we must sacrifice hearing the things closest to God's heart for our lives. But wherever we look to the left to put action to our faith, doctrines get sheepish, scurrying into the shadows of a looming concern for the poor. Talk of sin gets befuddled, talk of hell squeamish, and in the end we're hard-pressed to find a problem worthy of the solution of the cross.

We fear Jesus for President dabbles in the latter. You guys borrow heavily from liberation theology to paint broad strokes of the biblical narrative - a tradition the church has much to glean from. But by reading the Scriptures exclusively through the lens of God's interaction with regimes, they are muffled. Likewise, in your book, the stories of triumph over wicked political powers are shouted while the Bible's most prominent theme of God reconciling sinful man to himself through Christ is whispered ambiguously. There is one mention of sin, to assure us it's not the yoke Jesus frees us from (111); more attention to the hell of poverty on earth and even doubts (?) of an eternal one (290ff); and more excitement about the "conversions" of car engines and renewable energy sources than the sheep Christ came to claim (308). No faith in a desperately needed Savior. No atonement. No justification. No reconciliation. No salvation.

I realize these are "buzz words" for Bible thumping (or Bible humping, as my co-worker says) fundamentalists. And there is a desperate flight in my generation of all things fundamentalist. But they are the words of Scripture - to whom else may we go? If others have embalmed them and decorated their narthexes with their death, that is a travesty. And yet we can still do nothing less than watch the Spirit breath life into these words through us, reattaching them to the cross-bearing lives they belong to.

Again, we sincerely applaud your audacity to defy the comforts of Christendom for the cost of the cross. But we are equally desperate to hear men and women boldly making sense of that cross in light of the Scriptures - "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us".


David and Julie