Divinely Inspired

I just realized something, while commenting over at Pastor Marty’s outstanding blog:

There’s a difference between thinking God’s word is divinely inspired and thinking that every single verse in scripture is self-sufficient.

People begin, often times, by emphasizing the fact that every word in The Bible comes straight from God’s mouth.  (I think they are right, by the way.)

Then they provide a verse on whatever subject is at hand.  And that single verse is supposed to clinch whatever deal is under discussion.

There’s a faux pas here.    To suggest that any single verse is sufficient and authoritative on every issue is to take a much more radical position than to say the Bible is the word of God.

I’ll leave aside the question of how the magic verse is chosen.  The problem with this approach is bigger than the importance of context or what to do when verses seem to conflict.

The bigger problem is that this position implies that grappling with the whole bible is irrelevant.

If everything we need is in every single verse– or chapter, or book, or even testament– then why even bother with everything else?  Why not simply grab on to that smaller unit, and use it for our whole lives?  Why not throw away everything else?  Why would God even both with the whole cumbersome, confounding, confusing, and amazing bible?

It seems like the implication is that God should have come to use for some help with editing.  We could have helped him whittle the whole deal down.

The only alternative I see is this:

If every word of the bible is inspired, then every word must be given weight.  (Perhaps equal weight?  I don’t know about that.  What do you think?)

Wrestling, Part II

Click here to read wrestling, Part I.

The bottom line is that it is so easy to trivialize the idea that Jacob wrestled with God.  It is tempting to not look at the big picture.   Doing this leads first to a failure in recognizing how his whole life lead up to this event.  And this failure leads to me not recognizing how my whole life leads up to the event of my wrestling with God.

Consider his birth.  The man who would come to be known Jacob was a twin.  His brother was Essau.   Genesis 25 says: ” The boys grew up, and Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the open country, while Jacob was a quiet man, staying among the tents. 28 Isaac, who had a taste for wild game, loved Esau, but Rebekah loved Jacob.”

From the very beginning, things are not the way they are supposed to be.  The kids parents pick a favorite.  In some ways it’s understandable why each parent chose the favorite they did.  But it’s also wrong.

As I read this, this was a point of connection for me: it’s not that I think for one second that my own parents had a favorite.  And it’s not that I have a favorite among my own children.

But I can recognize that in my childhood, things were not as they were supposed to be.  Things happened that are understandable but wrong.  Even more convicting, in my own life, as a father, things are not as they are supposed to be.  I do things that are understandable, but wrong.

Nearly everything that happens later in the story can be traced back to this dysfunctional beginning.  So much of what has happened in my own life, too, can be traced back to the things that didn’t go quite right.

Early on we get a sense of the tension that rose up betweeen the brothers.  Jacob is jealous of Essau’s birth right.  I’ve never been clear exactly what this birth right is.  But it always struck me as wierd.  The boys were twins.  Essau came out first… but does beating a sibling by a few minutes at most really entitle the “older” to everything? 

At any rate, Eassau demonstrates poor impulse control and poor planning when he comes in from the hunt so very famished that he is willing to sell his birth right.  And Jacob  demonstrates a manipulative heart in setting the whole thing up.

This all connects to me: those early dysfunctions impacted me.  They lead me to do things that were wrong.  Like Jacob and Esau, I grow increasingly more responsible for the decisions I have made as I have grown up. 

We have the potential to get past our histories.  Without God’s intervention we so rarely do.  But as he grew, Jacob could have been more than a mama’s boy.  Esau could have been more than a wild child.

The parents, meanwhile, show a similarly mixed record.  The family grows powerful.  And yet the dad commits exactly the same error as his ancestors.  Rather than standing up for his wife, he convinces her to pretend to be his sister.  It’s clearly an act an of cowardice.

But none of  them manage to fufill their potential.  Essau marries people that bring misery to his family.  The mother concots schemes  to foreward her own interests.  Jacob allows himself to continue to be a mama’s boy.

In a general way, it’s both reassuring and sad to notice these things.  It’s reassuring because noticing in general the sins of biblical figures helps me to feel a connection.  They are no more or less sinful than me.  It’s sad because God wanted so much for us.  He deserved so much more.

But there’s a deeper connection for me in this case.  It’s hard to become bigger than my circumstances when those around me continue to be smaller than theres.  This does not mean I have an excuse.  It does mean that a healthy community, striving together, is where real change most often happens.

The result of this scheming and manipulating is so ironic.  The ultimate home-body mama’s boy appears to have everything he wants.  I’m not completely clear on why Esau’s blessing and birth right are so important for.  But they are clearly incredibly important.

And Jacob ends up with them both.  But what good does it do him? 

He ends up so much worse than he began.  The one thing that he wanted was so stay in his safe little home.  And as a result of the scheming and planning, he feels forced to flee.

How often do we scheme, plot, and plan?  And how often do all our of our own plans lead to the thing that we feared the most?  We hold so tightly to objects that they slip through our fingers.  We lust so desperately for more that we lose all that we have.  Our actions are so motivated by fear of losing a little that we end up losing everything.

After he flees, things go for him as they go for many of us.  His life in many ways is not dissimiliar to his parents.  Nor is it disimiliar to my own.  He makes a name for himself.  He is succesful in some areas.  He has set backs in others.  God is with him.  Sometimes he obeys God and is blessed for it.  Other times he does not obey God and he is not.

Jacob continues the patterns of his past.  He is sometimes self-serving even in his relationships with his family.  He demonstrates poor boundaries.  When he is caught trying to gather more than he has a right to, he grows afraid and runs away from his home.

His father in law catches up with him.  And he discovers that the confrontation wasn’t what he feared it would become.

Perhaps it’s just me projecting my own stuff on this.  But when Jacob’s father in law catches him, when he basically says “Look, I didn’t care about all this stuff so much as I cared about the fact that you’re taking my daughters away without offering me a chance to say good bye.”  I wonder if he suddenly realized that perhaps he didn’t have to flee his first home.  I wonder if he realized that he was a coward.  I wonder if he recognized that he didn’t have to leave the only home he’d ever known all those years before.

If he’s anything like me, he’d probably realize that God’s hand was in that.  No matter what happened, he never would have an easy time severing ties with his mother.  As long as he was there, he never really could have grown into a man.

I’m not saying that poor boundaries or cowardice are my issues specifically.  But I am saying that I have done stupid things.  And God has used even these stupid things (maybe especially the stupid things) to teach me things I’m too stubborn to learn in any other way.

Wow!  Two posts and I haven’t even reached the great wrestling match.   More on that later.

Sometimes others wrong him.  Sometimes he wrongs others.  He experiences joy and sorrow.

Theology for a math geek: Satan stole my bibles

One of the things that’s been slowly evolving through my journey as a Christian, is my serious-to-joking ratio when I talk, think, and write about Satan.

When I used the “S” word early on, I mostly thought of him as a symbol, personification, whatever.  And whenever I mentioned him I was about 10% serious and 90% joking around.

At this point, I’m about 60% serious and 40% kidding.  I think that there are times when our own foolishness gets in our own way.  And I believe that God himself sometimes tests us.  I think it’s easy to pass the buck on personal responsibility and see work that Satan is quite happy about but actually had no part in.

But nonetheless my views are changing.

An observation:

We have about 5 or 6 bibles around.  When they are at my fingertips, I read them most every day.  When they are not, I might go to biblegateway.com and read some scriptures.  Or I might not.

We are not the most organized home in the world.  But we are all vocarious readers.  I manage to keep whatever novel I’m reading around, which I also read just about every day.  I love reading scripture, I don’t think I’m trying to sabotage my ability to read it.

So I submit, more serious than not, that Satan is hiding our bibles.

There was a time I would have thought that was the most idiotic thing I’d ever heard.  Funny how things change.

What do you think about Satan?  How do your differentiate between his actions in the world and simple human sin?

 

Jubilee

There are a variety of statistics that many people point to as deeply disturbing within the American economy. These include the terrifying level of consumer debt, the widening gap between the rich and poor (the disolution of the middle class), and the generational nature of poverty, the gap between property owners and renters and of course, the subprime mortgage crisis.
I understand that some of these might be disputed. A few might appear to be getting better when viewed in the short term. But I think most reasonable people would agree that most of the above are significant problems.

I’ve always been of the opinion that God agrees. What occured to me recently was that he had plans to fight these issues.
In Leviticus 25 (and a few other places, including Jesus description of what he’s doing on Earth) we get a description of the Jubilee Year.
The background to the idea of the Jubilee Year is that every seven years the land in Israel gets a Sabbath, a year of rest. After seven of these sabbath years (in other words, every fifty years) the people of Israel were told to celebrate a Jubilee.
Furthermore, God sets up this relationship between His people and the land itself at the very beginning of the time in the promised land. Land is not an object that can be bought and sold forever. The people of Israel are reminded that they are temporary residents. They can lease thier heriditary lands for durations of time, but they don’t have the right to sell them forever. (Interestingly, this seems to only apply to farm land; most of them do seem to have the right to permanently transfer property within the walled cities.)
Here’s the remarkable thing: every fifty years, all debts are cancelled. Every fifty years, property owners return to their inherited lands. Every fifty years, those Hebrews who sold themselves into slavery are freed.
God calls out those who are succesful to take care of the others between years of jubilee. A profit is not to be made on food sold to the starving. People should buy relatives out of slavery even between years of jubilee.
These facts have all sorts of fascinating implication on Jesus’ life and mission. Maybe I’ll consider these in some other post.
The thing I’m thinking about today is the wisdom of this economic system; how many problems it would avoid. Consider the problems listed above:
#1) The terrifying level of consumer debt… The most surface result of jubilee years would be that consumer debt would be cancelled. Perhaps more importantly, though, the credit industries, aware of the existence of jubilee years, would lose the incentive to set up systems where people pay the interest on fairly small purchases for nearly endless periods of time.
#2) The widening gap between the rich and poor… Several important aspects of this gap would be flattened twice a century.

#3) the generational nature of poverty… With the knowledge that the jubilee approaches, people would not feel trapped by their lives. With the periodic chances to start over, people would feel that they had a real shot.
#4) the gap between owners and renters: In some sense, everybody owns… in a different sense, nobody does.
#5) The subprime mortgage crisis would not be an issue for fairly self-explanatary reasons. Basically, a combination of reasons #1 and #4 listed above.

I am not saying that it’s feasible to simply tack the biblical practice of jubilee years onto our economic system. (Though it’s been suggested that we apply this to debt in the developing world and this is an intruiging idea.) I am saying that God had it figured out.
One of the critical debates between extremes in today’s political divide is around the issue of accountabality and freedom. Conservatives say that we need to hold individuals accountable and free them up to make their own decisions. Progressives (liberals, whatever you want to call them) observe that corporate accountabality (in both senses of the word “corporate”) is a bigger concern and freedom includes freedom of opportunity, freedom from hunger, etc..

God’s solution honors both aspects of this important dynamic.
Individuals are freed to risk and rewarded by risking in such a system. They reap the rewards or consequences of hard work, efficiency, creativity, etc.
Safety nets, though, are created. One person’s sloth, foolishness, etc, does not impact the next several generations to come. The least among us are protected.

A bit more on the biblical meaning of community

Jesus was all about the creation of communities.

He found the rabble, the dregs, the un-cool kids.  And he just hung out with them.  They were homeless and disenfranchised and definitely not part of the dominant politcal or religious power structure.

I wonder what he thinks about the way we often do church.  (Actually, I don’t wonder.  That was a rhetorical wondering.  I actually think I know.)

The model today seems to be this: Show up to our Sunday services.  Come to our potlucks.  Show up to our bible studies.  At some point, you’ll learn our social expectations, at some point you’ll learn our code words, our specific interpretations.  Once you do these things, we’ll hang out with you.

After Jesus poured himself into his disciples he sent them out into the world.  It’s almost the first time we get all the names in one places, it’s almost the first time that we picture the twelve together, that he gives them instructions for departing.

When the twelve seperate, they are told to depend on the hospitality of those who are in the towns they journey to.  They are told to live in their homes and eat dinner at there tables.  They are told to spread his revolution.

Again, I don’t really wonder about what Jesus thinks about what we’re doing now.  But I might pretend I wonder for rhetorical effect.  In the modern era we have created these seperate categories: evangelism, mission, fellowship.

I think Christianity doesn’t get the credit it deserves for the good it does in the world… But sometimes, this goodness seems like it’s done on this imperalistic, military, wordly model.

We undertake “missions” (Where does that word come from?  It makes us sound like spies.)  On these missions, we bring the stuff we have to people we think need it.  We don’t journey to those places thinking that they might have something for us.  We set ourselves up in our encampments, and we keep trying to spread what ever we’ve got until everybody seems to have it… Then we leave.

Am I making radical generalizations?  Yes.

Does old-school approach to missions do good in the world?  Usually, yes.

Are we doing what Jesus wanted us to do in the way he wanted us to do it?  No, I don’t think so.

I have to believe it we’d stop seperating those activities… If we saw fellowship, “mission” and evangelism as expressions of Jesus love, we’d be accomplishing so much more.

If we just went out into the world and built communities on the principles that Jesus espoused, in the manner he did, we’d have groups that wouldn’t look all that much like many of our churches.  And we’d be doing good that doesn’t look like many of our missions.  And we’d be spreading the faith in a way that doesn’t look like lots of our evangelism. 

I think we’d be doing things better than the ways we’ve been doing them.

topic #2 I’m wrestling with God over: literal vs symbolic interpretation

There are some things that I’m crystal clear on.

This is not one of them.

I’ve been reviewing the issues I don’t quite have worked out.  I’ve been doing this because I’m interested in seeking out others’ counsel, and also because I want to lower the tenor of debate in some miniscule little way.  It seems like we tend to get dug in to our perpsectives, and we pretend that our way of viewing things is perfect, and it doesn’t really accomplish much productive.  I think Jesus calls us to be open in our weakness and with our weakness… But I digress.

An area I don’t have worked out: when is the bible meant to be interpreted literally and when is it meant to be taken figuratively or symbolically.

This doesn’t bother me as much as it might because I’m confident I’m not alone.  I haven’t yet found a very thorough account of criteria for consistently determining how to apply scriptural truth.

There are people who have begun this.  They can point out guidelines which sometimes help.  But there’s nobody that I’ve found with anything close to an exhaustive account.

And most of us have fairly large lists of things we think are literal and things we think are symbolic.  But it seems to me that we can’t generally explain how we came to this list. 

It appears that we do a lot of question-begging.  It seems like maybe we start with a set of beliefs and pick and choose which ones to interpret symbolically and which ones to interpret literally.   The progressives generally take more flack for this, but it seems to me that this is undeserved.  I think the progressives and conservatives tend to have different verses that they focus on taking literally.  But I’m unconvinced that one camp is more conistent than the other.

Are there gray areas between literal and symbolic interpretation?  Madeline L’Engle wrote about icons.  Icons, for her, are symbols which participate in the thing they are symbolizing.  I can almost (but not quite) get my brain around her meaning.  It seems like it might be fruitful to pursue this line of reasoning.

Might God have intended different interpretations for different eras?  I most definitely think so.  Micah Tillman’s blog (see blogroll at right) had some interesting thoughts and links on this topic that helped me clarify this issue. 

When I first ran through the topics that I’m wrestling with God over (about 3 blogs back) I had focused more on the topic of divine inspiration.  As I explore where my beliefs are, it seems like I’m not to concerned with this issue.  I’m clear that the bible is God-breathed.  There’s a few abstractly interesting questions about it, but the real direct focus of my concern is interpretation.

Looking foreward to responses,

Jeff

#1) Topic I’m wrestling with God over: Homosexuality

There are a number of areas that I haven’t quite worked out yet in terms of my faith.    The issue of homosexuality is one of them.  I want for homosexuality to be acceptable to God.  I’ve had a number of dear friends who are gay.  I believe them to be good people, well-intentioned.   Some of them were far from God.  Most of the reason they were far from God, I think, is because the church was unloving to them.

If it turns out that God says that homosexuality is wrong, then of course we don’t have the luxury of running from this.  It would be unloving to sugar coat this reality.  But this does not excuse hate-filled and even Satanic actions done in the name of Christ.

And does God say it’s wrong?  That’s the whole sticking point, I suppose.

If we cite Old Testament verses, then we’d better be prepared to do a whole variety of terrible things that most of us wouldn’t want to do.  We all know those verses, there’s no point in rehashing them here.

This leaves us with the New Testament Verses.  Jesus  doesn’t say anything about homosexuality, but Paul seems to.   This is a meaningful distinction for some people.  They seem to imply that the Gospels have a greater importance than the Epistles.    But I’m not sure it makes sense to lower the importance of something in the bible merely because Jesus didn’t say it.  If God is behind the whole bible, then he’s behind the whole bible.  If he’s not, then he’s not.  If the bible is merely a human-created attempt at wisdom then I’m going to give up on calling myself a Christian and go join a Unitarian Chuch.  At least they’re honest and upfront about the status of various religious sciptures.

Some people say that the word we render as “homosexual” is more properly rendered “temple prostitute”; they describe that the concept doesn’t really translate… That the verses that are commonly understood as prohibitting homosexuality are really condemnations of rape, polyagmy, etc.   Frankly, I’ve gotten lost in all the scholarly debate on this issue.  It appears from the outside that both groups started with the assumptions they ended up with; both groups I think are sincere and arguing for things they generally believe.  Niether side can show me evidence that seems worthy of how secure they seem in their interpretations.

I’m familiar with the research that says homsexuality occurs in animal populations.  I’ve seen the studies where it’s been caused in rats.   I know about the autopsies they’ve done in gay men and found more densely packed cells in the hypothalmus.

I know that this information can be spun in either direction: as proof that homosexuality is naturally occuring or as suggestive that it’s some sort-of defect.  I’ve seen the claims that Christian therapists can “cure” homosexuality and the counter-claims that theses “cures” are hardly ever long-term.

What I’m left with is the following beliefs… They are tenative and wishy-washy.  But they are the best I can do, based on where I’m at now.   I’m open to correction from either side of the debate, so somebody, please, fill me in:

#1) There is far more black-and-white, uncontroversial evidence that Jesus is not very happy with the idea of divorce.  I don’t say this because I think we should be hard on divorcees… I say it because I think we ought to use this as a sort of litmus test.  Do we bar divorced people from our churches?  Do we show up at divorce courts with hate mongering signs?  Do we tell divorced people that God hates their divorce even if he does love them?  If we don’t do any of the above to divorced people it seems ridiculous to treat gay people in that way.  

#2) God is infinitely loving and fair.   He’s going to judge people based on infinitely loving and fair criteria.  

#3) Whatever standards I judge people by will be applied to me. 

These 3 parameters leave me with many more questions than answers.