Archive for category Theology
Love Your Enemies
Posted by Erik in Church, Ecclesiology (Church), Theology on February 7, 2012
In the midst of terrorism and presidential elections (and sometimes I am not sure which people take more seriously), remember that historically human government has opposed the work of the Church far more often than government has supposed us.
Rather than complaining about the way the government makes life difficult, the followers of Christ should accept difficulty as a statement of reality. We cannot walk around with a chip on our shoulders, expecting to get special or even fair treatment from the world system.
Picturing the Church
Posted by Erik in Church, Eschatology on February 7, 2012
In the Christian Scriptures, the church is depicted in a number of metaphors and images. This varied imagery has led to a lot of crazy theology when taken too far, and not a few whacked out worship songs that I refer to as “prom songs for Jesus.”
Among the images we have in the Scriptures are:
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A flock of sheep
Harvested wheat
Lit lamps
Candlestands
Virgins at a wedding
Some fish in a net
A man made from two men
Christ’s body
Christ’s bride
Pillars in the temple
Participants in a marriage feast
For the next couple of days, I will be writing some posts on these images as they appear and hopefully clarify some issues that have arisen over the years.
Bloggers and Church Authority
Out of Ur posted an interesting discussion from the Elephant Room that touched on non-pastor bloggers and authority in the church.
In the panel discussing the topic are a couple of my favorite pastors: Matt Chandler and Perry Noble. I have respect for their ministries primarily because they have respect for God’s word. Also present were David Platt and Mark Driscoll, both of whom are also solid (if Driscoll is annoying and rude sometimes, he comes from a long tradition of cranky, rude preachers I have known and even liked).
What intrigues me about this conversation is that several of these guys blog extensively, especially Perry Noble. I felt that the article tried to give the impression that these guys were attacking blogging. I don’t think that was the case. They were, however, expressing concern about bloggers who God has not placed in pastoral ministry who are challenging and attacking those He has.
This is a very real issue. While I have several online friends who are not pastors and blog on Christianity, I do not view them in the same way I do other pastors. Whether people want to accept it or not, the Scriptures are very plain that pastors are uniquely gifted among the church (Ephesians 4, 1 Peter 5). We should never take leadership cues from those God has not chosen, gifted and called.
It is simply too easy to sound authoritative when you have no biblical authority.
That might upset the online Christian community, but it is biblically true.
Go Deeper!
Ed Stetzer recently wrote in Facts and Trends that the “Elephant in the Church” is the lack of robust disciple-making. He writes:
Many churches are now rediscovering ways to push more depth from the Sunday morning stage, better ways to assimilate the crowds into small groups and discipling relationships, more organic ways to nurture spiritual formation, and stronger ways to create missional expansion in their communities and around the world.
I have to say, I balk at the term “push more depth” because you can’t push depth. You can only explore it. Depth is not something to be possessed or controlled. You can’t “push” it.
Think of a kid in a swimming pool. If that child is not comfortable diving under the water and going down to the bottom, then it does not matter if the pool is 4′ deep or 20′ deep. The depth is present, but that does not mean the kid is going to explore it.
If you ask me (and I know no one is), the problem with the church today is not that we are not pushing depth but rather that we are out of our depth. The Bible teachers in most churches do not have the knowledge of the Scriptures necessary to take people on a “deep” journey through the Scriptures.
After growing up in a home where original languages were dinner table topics and discussing theological vagaries was just what my dad and I did, what most people consider “deep”, I consider elementary. This is not to sound condescending, but more often than not I find myself listening to a peer asking a question and thinking, “How did you not already learn this?”
But the reality is that for the most part, pastors are told that their job is to preach a good sermon and build a big congregation. They are given a basic, one-dimensional education on the Scriptures and then told to go out and get people to confess Christ.
You can’t “push” depth, especially if you’ve never seen the depths yourself.
What the church needs more than people “pushing depth” is people with true knowledge of the Scriptures. We need people who can do more than read the newest, most popular book and then teach it to congregations. We need people who can do more than design snazzy logos and preach entertaining messages.
Depth is not pushed. It is has to be explored. You have to get into it, get used to it and then go deeper. You have to train and think, then learn to present the dive in such a way that others go with you. You have to study theology, explore exposition. You have to spend more time studying the Scriptures than you do planning your organization.
Most sermons I hear are from the wading side of the pool. I don’t know about you, but I enjoy hearing the messages that come from a 20′ dive.
Straddling Realities
Posted by Erik in Church, History, Ecclesiology (Church), Eschatology on January 25, 2012
Yochanan b. Zecharyah was a Jewish teacher and prophet known to the Christian world as John the Baptist. In the gospel of Luke, he is Jesus of Nazareth’s second cousin and the son of a Jewish priest.
Appearing at the beginning of all four gospels and described as the “forerunner” of the Messiah and the last of the Hebrew prophets, John straddles the line between the days of the prophets and the “Day of the Lord.” If we are to believe the gospels, then we must acknowledge that the authors of those books saw John as the end of an age.
Every gospel tells his story a little different, but in all them John’s message was simple: Repent, for God’s Kingdom is at hand. There was nothing complex about this message. John was saying that God was coming, and the time had come to get right. To drive home the point, Luke quotes the prophet Isaiah:
Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.
Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall become straight, and the rough places shall become level ways, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God. (Luke 3:4-6 ESV)
It was hard to miss or misinterpret John’s message, and yet for all of our supposed ability and intelligence, we miss what he was saying.
Jesus is the Kingdom of God. He is the Temple of God. He is the Lord’s Messiah. And we live in “The Day of the Lord.”
John represents all that was Hebrew, all that was rabbinical. John is a Jew declaring the end of Judaism and setting the stage for the Messianic Age.
That’s why John’s message is not normative for the Church today. The era he lived in is over. The Law and Prophets are fulfilled in Jesus. The Hebrew epic has been completed and has been transformed into something more. Now what has been anticipated is at work.
The Kingdom is not somewhere we go when we die. It is the One who died for us. Heaven is not some other reality. It is the fully realized reality of Jesus and His resurrection. It is not this life somewhere else, but this life as something else. We are being transformed into Christ’s image, collectively.
The Kingdom is being realized imperfectly now, but will one day be fully realized when Jesus returns. But that does not make it any less real now. We do not perceive it or live it all the time, because we are blinded by sin and restricted by the forces of this world and its would-be usurper who styles himself the Prince of This World, Satan. But make no mistake. Jesus is the Kingdom, and those found in him are citizens of that Kingdom.
Genre: Poetry
The Old Testament was composed almost entirely in Hebrew. First and foremost, Hebrew is the language of Scripture. In other words, Hebrew is a language quite literally formed around its use in the composition of sacred writings.
This means that Hebrew has a unique structure and style. It is highly poetic, almost intentionally designed for uses that our own language struggles with. In English, poetry requires us to almost force the language into rhyme and rhythm. (Anyone who has had to try to compose a haiku in English knows that English is terrible for rhythmic poetry.)
In biblical Hebrew, words have specific syllabic structures and make different forms through somewhat complicated but almost ubiquitous rules. This means that rhythm and rhyme come quite naturally to the language.
As a result, the vast majority of the Old Testament is poetic in nature. It has to be because it is in Hebrew. This poetry is often lost in translation because English simply does not have the apparatus to express ideas the way Hebrew does. (In case you’re wondering, no English version does Hebrew poetry like the King James translation did. English was malleable enough at the time that the translators could bend it to conform to Hebrew. The same is not true of English today, which is why the King James translations often feel alien to us.)
Hebrew poetry employs a huge number of techniques, often rhyming ideas and cycling through images in ways we never would see in translation.
For example, consider the first chapter of Genesis. It is an intricate, carefully phrased poem. The author spins the entire poem around the number two. The entire thing is symmetrical. Watch:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:1, 2 KJV)
In Hebrew, the word heaven is dual. English and most European languages lack this form, but it is used for things that are inherently two parts: like arms, eyes, legs, but also the “heavens”.
Think about all the ways that the “heavens” are dual in nature. There is a night sky and a day sky. There is a clear sky and a storm sky. There is the air we move through and the air “up there” where the birds fly. The depth of the simply grammatical form is tremendous.
Now, watch the dualities that emerge. The earth is “without form” and it is “void” – duality. There is “darkness” upon the face of the deep and the Spirit of God broods upon the face of the waters (also a dual form, by the way).
The author sets up a symmetry of duals and then he presents his narrative of the earth’s origin. At first glance, it looks like a linear narrative. God creates this on day one, then this on day two, etc. But look deeper.
DAY 1: Light and Dark Day 4: Sun, moon and stars
DAY 2: Separates the waters from the sky Day 5: Forms fish and birds
DAY 3: Forms dry land Day 6: Forms land creatures
See the dualities? In the first set of days he creates habitats. On the second set, he fills them with life. And even in that, there is a duality. You can spend hours, even days and weeks just marveling over how intricately constructed the poem is. (Trust me, I have.)
So much of the Hebrew Scriptures are written with this kind of artistic flair. It is dangerous to just read the Old Testament like it is a textbook. Poetry is not just limited to the Psalms and a few passages in Genesis either. Fully 2/3 of the Hebrew Scriptures are poetic. Whole books of the prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel are poems. Poetry was the height of Hebrew composition. If it wasn’t poetic, it wasn’t worth reading. Even the levitical law has a poetic sensibility.
This is why I recoil every time someone refers to the Bible as a “User’s Manual” or “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.” It is nothing of the kind. Much of the Bible cannot be read like a manual or instructions. It would be like trying to form philosophy based on reading Shelley as if he were a commentary on politics or Dante as a geology text. It simply cannot be done.
One of the hallmarks of poetry is that the individual parts fall apart if you miss the main idea. If you read poetry line-by-line and try to analyze the lines in isolation, you entirely miss the point. Poetry is not about precision. It is about emotion and connection. It is relational language at its best.
How does one read Biblical poetry? How do you recognize it as what it is?
First, read the Scriptures in large pieces rather than in snippets.
Second, don’t analyze. Receive. Let the words resonate, bounce around in your head for awhile. Don’t be afraid to not understand what you read in the specifics.
Third, read in community. In the culture that gave us the Scriptures, reading was something you did together. You discussed the ideas; you let them stand up to communal scrutiny and appreciation.
One word of warning, however. Just because it is poetry, do not think that the Scriptures were not intended to be read literally. Poetry is often far more truthful than prose. There is often more fact of the human condition in the lines of a poem than there are in the sections of a textbook.
Massive Shift
“Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” (Luke 1:28-33, ESV)
Newton’s law of gravity requires that all objects in the universe act upon every other object in the universe. This attractive force is by far the weakest force in the universe, but on a planetary level, it is quite effective. Basically, Newton’s law explains why everything in the universe is where it is and moves the way it does. That is quite a bit of influence.
Massive objects draw less massive objects toward them. This drawing is the reason the earth orbits the sun. For half the year, the earth is falling toward the sun, accelerating as it falls. Then, the earth whips past the sun and the tremendous energy generated in the fall sends our planet rocketing out away from the sun. Over the next few months, the earth slows, losing its inertia until it reaches a point where the pull of the sun’s gravity overwhelms the inertia of earth’s motion. Then the earth begins its descent again.
It is the mass of the sun that keeps the earth orbiting year after year, and the balance of the gravitational attraction and inertial force sets up the environment we live in. It is the reason we live – the reason any life exists on earth.
Were another object in the universe to exert a greater gravitational force on the objects in our solar system, a massive shift would occur. In fact, the system would be torn apart and reordered according to that powerful influence.
Why bring all of this up?
When the angel appeared to Mary and revealed that Jesus would not only be conceived in her virgin womb but would also be the Son of the Most High and would rule a kingdom that would have no end, he was announcing a massive shift. The entire universe – the entire way people thought the universe operated – was shifting to a new orbit, a new order. Upheaval would give way to order.
Everything was changing.
As strange as it might sound, we still live in that upheaval and change. When the ancient prophets looked down the annals of future history, the time from Christ’s advent to the setting up of His eternal kingdom were compressed into a single event they called “The Day of the Lord.” They saw no difference between the time of the early church and today or a thousand years from now. They were all part of the massive shift that Jesus’ advent would usher in.
It is convenient to think that somehow our age is an age of stability, but in reality, the entire universe is still being re-ordered into the eternal, endless and timeless kingdom of Jesus Christ. Every object of our world is shifting out of the orbit of self that began with Adam and into the orbit of Jesus Christ.
We are not yet what we will become, and Christ is not yet done.
The Virgin Birth, post 5
After the message on Sunday, my friend Matt asked a couple of good questions about Mary and the virgin birth. Both were valid questions worth considering, and both are questions that people have struggled with as they read the Scriptures over the years.
Question #1: Why Don’t We Hear About Mary and Joseph later in the Bible?
Joseph: First, let’s wrestle with Joseph’s place in the gospel narrative. In the gospel of Luke, Joseph’s primary qualification was that he was of the lineage of David. So Joseph gives Jesus a certain qualification to take the throne of David as king.
Aside from that, Joseph leads his family in a Scriptural way, taking Jesus to Jerusalem for a dedication, providing for the family, and bringing Jesus to the temple at the age of twelve for Passover (Luke 2). In Matthew, an additional narrative includes Joseph taking his young family to Egypt to wait out the death of Herod the Great (Matthew 2:13-23). Other than that, the Scriptures are silent on Joseph. Joseph is called to a very specific role, a very limited role, in the upbringing of Jesus. That seems to be all Joseph is needed for.
Mary: Mary, however, continues in her role and relationship with Jesus through his life. She appears at his birth, she appears at his death. And she appears after his death, with the disciples in Acts chapter 1. Her place as the vessel that God uses, transfers into a relationship with Jesus. Now, many Christian traditions over emphasize Mary’s role and make her–well, the mother of God. That is completely unsubstantiated in the biblical record.
While Mary accompanies Jesus and even seems to have participated in some form in his adult life, her role is not primary. In fact her role seems to be entirely that of a caring mother for whom her oldest son (Jesus) has an obligation and responsibility to care for. So, she is with him out of necessity. He provides for her family because that’s what a good son does. And she remains with him, traveling with him when she can, living with the disciples, because she is his mother, not because she is divine, or co-redeemer, or in any way shape attached or connected to his work as Savior.
Question #2: Why did God choose Mary?
The Scriptures never tell us why God chose Mary and not another woman. There were certainly many virgins of marriageable age at her time and in times previous. Virgins kind of occur naturally, so they are never hard to locate. There must have been something unique about her and the Scriptures do record that Gabriel the Angel refers to her as “full of grace” or “greatly favored.”
The Roman Catholic tradition holds that this statement implies that Mary was in some way conceived without sin, called the “Immaculate Conception”, but there is no biblical basis for this. What the angel is telling Mary is that she has been chosen.
Grace is never a part of the human beings existence. It is imputed to a human being by God’s sovereign choice. So Mary is not “full of grace” because of something she has done or the lifestyle that she has lived or some kind of immaculate miracle at her birth. She is “full of grace” because God has chosen her.
Luke does give us an indication that God was setting up a scenario of interrelated miracles. Mary’s family, including her cousin Elizabeth, are participants in the unfolding of Jesus’ advent. Elizabeth conceiving and giving birth after menopause, when she had been barren, is miraculous and acknowledged to be so by many. This first miracle opens the door for a second and greater miracle – Mary conceiving and giving birth before sexual activity. The first miracle makes the second miracle more conceivable (pun intended).
Luke also gives us indication that Mary was uniquely placed as both the cousin of a priest’s wife and also betrothed to the descendent of David. This unique combination sets her son up to fulfill both the Law and the Kingdom.
But really, do we know why God chose her? Good genetics? Good complexion? Nobody knows. Any statement made about the reasons that God chose Mary would be completely and utterly hypothetical.
It is often confusing and befuddling that God chooses the people he chooses to do the things he has chosen to do. His choices are rarely the logical ones. And the people that we would choose almost never the ones that God chooses. And as my father often reminded me, “where the Bible is silent the wise and be like the Bible.”
What is important is that God chose her. God chose Mary. She was “overshadowed” by the Spirit of God, conceived in her womb a child, and that child was born, lived, died on the cross, and was raised again to life by God, declared to be the son of God (Romans 1:6), and is our Savior and King Jesus Christ. We don’t know why very fulfilled the role she did, but she did and she was the mother of our Lord.
The Virgin Birth, post 4
The gospel record in Matthew and Luke makes it clear that the early church embraced the idea of Jesus’ miraculous conception in the womb of Mary. But one of the chief criticisms of the doctrine of the miraculous conception is that the rest of the New Testament is silent about it. If the doctrine was important to the early church, why didn’t the apostle address the issue?
The answer to this question should be self-evident. Why retread something that is spelled out so plainly? Luke leaves absolutely no room for a variety of interpretations. The apostles could not improve on his direct statement. Jesus was conceived of the Holy Spirit in the virgin womb of Mary and was born naturally to her thereafter.
What more is there to add to it?
The problem lies not with the gospel record or the apostles but with the extraneous interpretations made by many in the medieval church. The miraculous conception was expanded to the virgin birth and then to the immaculate conception of Mary herself. This was done to theologically explain Christ’s sinlessness.
Remember that the medieval church, what we call today the Catholic traditions (and to a lesser extent the Orthodox traditions), viewed sexuality as inherently sinful. Thus, it was simple to render Jesus naturally sinlessness by amplifying the necessity of the miraculous conception. To do that, he had to become an asexual creature. I will simplify the thousand years or so of logic and philosophy to a simple syllogism:
- Sin passes from Adam
- Adam is male
- To not have sin, therefore, you must not have a human father
Up to this point of the syllogism, I really have no problem with it. I think it is somewhat extraneous, but it makes good sense. But the medieval theologians kept going.
- But women sin too
- Jesus’ mother must not have sin either
- Therefore, Mary must have been conceived without sin as well
Using logic and philosophy rather than Scripture, the medieval church eradicated any human nature for Jesus and made him logically sinless as well as practically. Jesus could not sin because there was nothing human about him.
This necessity to rid Jesus of his human ancestry descends from an ancient heresy called gnosticism, which was itself descended from a philosophical school called neo-platonism. The main tenet of gnosticism is that all material things are sinful and all spiritual things are righteous. Although not fully gnostic, the medieval church adopted this position concerning sex – which is physical and material, and therefore evil.
The miraculous conception thus became much more than it was originally. The gospel writers did not include the virgin birth so they could evolve a theology. It was included because it was true, and that was enough for them. The apostles did not expand upon it because they did not see it as a theological point. It simply was the way God chose to give Jesus to the world.
No theology hung on the virgin birth, and that is a good position to take even today. The apostles accepted that Jesus was without sin, without having to explain it. We would be wise to do the same, accepting the Scriptures at face value and not reading into them.
We might be able to look back into the record and make theological observations after the fact, but we must be cautious not to overreach the apostles in this endeavor and see things they did not.
The Virgin Birth, post 3
In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary.
And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”
And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her…
…In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And all went to be registered, each to his own town. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the town of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child.
And while they were there, the time came for her to give birth. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. (Luke 1:26-38, 2:1-7, ESV)
That’s it. That is the entirety of the Scriptures’ report on the miraculous conception and birth of Jesus. Between these passages in Luke and the passage in Matthew we talked about yesterday, we have the entire witness of the Scriptures about the miraculous conception of Jesus.
This passage is more direct about the implied meaning of the word virgin. Mary says, “How will this be, since I am a virgin.” In Greek, this is not the word parthénos but a phrase – andra ou’ ginōskō. This means, “I don’t know a man” and it has an idiomatic sexual context. She has never had sex, and since Mary is apparently pretty knowledgeable in the area of biology, she knows that pregnancy is fairly impossible without sex.
Mary’s words amplify that the early church clearly believed she had been a virgin when she conceived Jesus. Matthew might be somewhat ambiguous but there is no way to get around Luke.
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