Monthly Archives: December 2015
This is supposed to be a quiet week between Christmas and a New Year.
There are these two guys duking it out in my head — two of my favorites in this world. And they seem to disagree. Both are Christian men of God, their agreements are more significant than their disagreements: they both accept Christ as one born to a virgin Mary, who died for our sins, and who rose again to become our living Savior.
Most of their disagreements I can chalk up to time. God doesn’t experience time the way people do, and He is infinite. It is therefore not surprising there are multiple solutions, akin to multiple intercepts, to the equation that maps truth about God to the finite axis of people experiencing a finite world. One example: one says communion elements become the body of Christ before they are eaten. The other says no, they are symbolic. But that second one agrees Christians form the body of Christ his church and so he too thinks the elements are the body of Christ once digested and incorporated into the Christian. They are argueing over the point in time of transformation. One stresses Jesus’s power through his disciples to bind on earth as in heaven, the other stresses the people’s decision for Christ. Often they are stressing opposite ends of a paradox that God wants us to hold — e.g. infinite grace AND infinite justice.
The two men are Pope Francis and Dr. Albert Mohler. Both are alive today and I would like nothing more than to lock them in a room and not let them out until they can agree. God does nothing by accident and it is His providence that they are sent to sharpen each other and all of us in these confusing days. Failing the power to lock them in that room, they duke it out virtually, bouncing around the neural circuits that are my brain.
Albert Mohler makes it very simple. For him it is this simple equation: Answer the question “Jesus _________ the son of God.”
It is a multiple choice question with these choices as answer:
IS (=Christian)
IS NOT (= damned to fires of destruction for all eternity)
People answer the first way cannot, to him, be worshiping the same God as the people who answer the other way. He bases this on a scriptural if and on if. The if side is John 8:19: “If you truly knew me, you would know my father also.” In case anyone thinks the folks that claim Jesus is only a man “truly know him” the same chapter quotes him as saying “Before Abraham was born, I am.” That is more than just a person, that is God. For the only if there is John 8:42 ““If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and I am here.”
Theologian Stanley Slade that said when we are saved we committing what we know of ourselves to what we know of God, and the rest of our lives we learn more about each. Sometimes we learn a lot more later, but never all.
Pope Francis says all the Abrahamic faiths worship the one God. It sounds good, and seems peaceful and generous. The trinity is a hard concept even for Christians to understand, and many have a hard time with it. Many liberal protestants and Catholics, as well as people of other faiths, can be found having a hard time. In our day, many have a hard time admitting any active inputs by God from outside the universe at all. Sending a part of God to be born human is significant outside input.
Pope Francis seems to be willing to let that mystery lie unresolved while dialoguing with people of other faiths and no or little faith. He goes off the deep end from from Albert Mohler’s perspective if he says he therefore does not recognize a commission to tell the full gospel to those people. However, he did not say exactly that (see source link). It appears to me he made a finer point: non-Christians should not be compelled to follow Christian rules before they have Christ. We must share the story of the gospel, and leave it God to meet them in person as he did for the Ethiopian — it is God’s to make their hearts leap for joy, so that they go away rejoicing. To be able to share, we must dialogue, starting in the place where they are.
I conclude for today nothing so large as a whole religion counts as able to answer Albert Mohler‘s construct. Islam, for example, is not a human heart. People who follow Islam may never have heard the true gospel — only some distorted version of it (even founders of a religion after the time of Jesus may be in that state). People who have not heard are not equipped to take the test. There can be human hearts called by God inside all religions and outside any religion. God will call them as he sees fit but in our age he has ordered Christian followers to tell the full story of Jesus Christ to all of them. After they have heard the gospel then they are ready for the test. If they are called by God, their hearts will leap at the name of Jesus and they will jump for joy at having found Him. Others will deny, sticking to an alternative set of rules that in the end do nothing for them. Only God will be judge of who has heard the gospel, not man. Many will deny multiple times before accepting.
God told Moses “I am who I am”. God’s signature is that of creator of the universe. There can’t be more than one of those. Either we worship that one or we don’t, and John 8 says if we know God we will recognize his son. However, it is not left to us to know conclusively for other people who is in each of the three sets: IS, IS NOT, NOT YET HEARD.
Jesus said in Matthew 8:10–12
10 When Jesus heard this, he marveled and said to those who followed him,
“Truly, I tell you, with no one in Israel[a] have I found such faith. 11 I tell you, many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven,12 while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
Time’s up for this round… no knock-out for either earthly dude, only for the One found in Scripture.
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There are thirteen Thanksgivings in the calendar year of the Narragansett people. Seems other Americans in our day only got 7.7% of the lesson, even though the Pilgrim’s own Bible said to always be thankful.
The very same sentence tells us to rejoice always. Notice it is a verb: something you do, as opposed to a feeling. Christmas is a time for rejoicing in memory of the arrival by birth of Jesus. We are joyous because Jesus rescued us, and we have nothing to fear, not even death itself. Consider the season practice for the rest of the year, like holding a pencil in your mouth to make you feel happier. The pencil works because it trains your smile muscles, and your smile muscles report to your brain, which controls the release of happy chemicals. Don’t try it with a lead pencil please. Christmas works because Jesus is real, and is in relationship with us today.
They put Christmas near the shortest day of the year, and not just to have more time to enjoy Christmas lights. Sunshine causes natural brain chemicals that help us feel delight. It takes more practice to harness joy in the dark. If we can do it in the dark, we can do it in other times of bad circumstance. Christmas is a catalyst, a tool in the kit, to help fill us with joy at this time of year. I hope you didn’t think it was because Jesus was born this time of year — I don’t think we know that!
Roger Williams said he could not be an effective witness about Jesus to the Algonquian in part because of language and cultural barriers. He said we had to fix the church first. As we approach Christmas, it is a good time to think about what he meant.
So much of the Algonquian language has been lost, brought through English by force and translated back generations later. To get a feel consider this exchange: Englishman: Where do your people come from? Algonquian (puzzled): From a deer? And 400 years later there is a legend of humans coming from deer.
Venison was a staple in the diet, so much of one that when disease wiped out most of the indigenous population the deer overpopulated. Maybe the Algonquian was saying we are what we eat, and no more. Many reported conversations seem literal. That does not mean there weren’t other types of conversations, it means Roger and peers didn’t learn the language of very many of them — possibly they were not conversations had in his presence.
Today we might call that a worldview difference. Today, in this age, with what seems like a common language, we have a very difficult time communicating respectfully between world views. In fact, Paul implies we shouldn’t force an individual to conform to the rules of an alternate worldview (he called the views Gentile and Jew), we should share the gospel and let God work in their lives. Of course that is very hard to do when actively committing atrocities against people. That was Roger’s other point. The English spoiled their own witness. The consequences were tragic.
The key is respect for alternative world views. Respect enables sharing. We all fail at being perfectly moral, on scales large and small. That’s why we needed something injected into the system to repair it. God’s son Jesus was introduced into this world from outside the system to save us from the consequences of our failures. No matter who we are, if we turn and follow him, he sets us free. Now, there is a reason to joyful.
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Until there is company, a still silence
Harbor ice presses the silence suppressed waves
A flutter of hope for what lies unseen beyond
A leaf of dark eternity in another prickly minute gone
Ready, waiting
For the bloom of God with us
Waiting for Emmanuel
A Merry Christmas all who wait!
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Edward Wightman was a successful merchant and left behind a family when he was burned at the stake in 1612. In fact, I went to college with one of his descendants, Bobby Wightman. The Bobby Wightman of our day is a historian, by hobby if not by trade. As a descendent, he was allowed to dress up in something resembling surgical scrub and go into a room at SMU containing an original copy of the book about the burning of Edward Wightman. He brought a professional that took no-flash pictures, excerpts of which are included in this blog post, thanks to him.
The case of Edward Wightman demonstrates three things:
First, Edward Wightman’s experience in parallel with Roger William’s shows just how hard it was for authorities to distinguish mental delusions of grandeur and other error from genuine if revolutionary inspiration. We still have troubles in our own day with distinguishing rejection of injustice in hopes of making a stronger nation from rejection of national and even human values. 
One of the charges for which Wightman was executed coincides with Roger Williams’s views: an antipathy for infant baptism.
However, that is charge number 13 of 16. Higher up on the list is the view of Jesus common to some liberal modern churches and Islam: that Jesus was a human prophet only.
Charge 8 seemed the most striking. Edward Wightman is charged with believing that he is himself the Holy Spirit. After denying Jesus a place in the trinity, he wants to claim a place for himself!
What we can’t tell from the document is if these charges were exaggerated. Perhaps he was trying to explain how the holy spirit indwells all of us, much as the inner light focused crowd that preceded the Quakers emphasized.
Much of the document reads like a litany of ideas that have been in discussion for over a thousand years. But not charge 8. That charge was either one Wightman himself believed, or was included to make sure everyone could see he had gone too far.
Second, the value of the freedoms of conscience and speech. If Edward Wightman lived in our day in a nation with the separation of church and state, his ideas would be disputed, perhaps ferociously. He might have been debunked and ridiculed by some, even while being revered by others. In our nation however, he should not have be executed unless he disrupted the civil peace. By disrupted, I mean something more harmful than interruption by peaceful protest.
Third, violence prolongs civil unrest, and the other side’s commitment. Unfortunately, we’ve seen both criminals and authorities cross the line to violent action against those with whom they disagree. As with Wightman’s executors, they create survivors dedicated to remembering and to correcting the injustice. The fact that Wightman’s descendants remember and revere him ~14 generations later is illuminating.
What Edward Wightman cannot tell us much about is the alternate decision we chose for a generation. Suppression of free speech via societal norms of “political correctness” seemed to result in a more peaceful world for a time.
However, it allowed hatred to linger in hiding. Instead of experiencing peer pressure to find common ground, quiet disrespect survived and replicated resulting in massive polarization. Simultaneously victims thought they had chances they never had. They were in essence denied the opportunity to protest against their accusers. A whole generation was interviewed by managers trained in what not to say so no one could tell if they discriminated in hiring, promotion etc. The managers could even deny it to themselves. However, the higher unemployment and remaining statistical disparities in pay do not lie. The difference in the results of musical auditions behind screens vs. in person do not lie.
It turns out the resulting silence was not peace. The results accross time are not that different from the silence of continuing injustice after execution. The only working solution we’ve found is the sometimes loud, sometimes ferocious debate — with words and demonstration.
The silent discriminators have been unmasked. The new loud discussion has begun. May we keep it to a war of words, and remember the lessons of Edward Wightman even as we reject the silent desperation of politically correct injustice.
Originally published on Medium in About Rekindled.
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A review of Reza Aslan’s Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
Reza Aslan is one of the voices in the USA media explaining Islam to Christians today. He is popular, because he makes most Muslims seem anti-extreme, a comforting thought and one that helps promote the unity of humanity against extremism in our time. I read his book about Jesus in part to calibrate his credibility. My theory is he will be similarly accurate when evaluating Islam’s faith history, and that errors in his view on Islam would not be something I can so easily detect.
The book provides valuable historical context and there is much to learn from it. However, Reza suppositions in the story at crucial junctures that seem hard to justify. Other reviewers have commented it is possible footnotes would have helped to decipher the sources of his hypotheses. In any case, these changes have consequences, and need examination.
Here are key examples I see:
Both Reza Aslan and Christian tradition have Luke and Paul hanging out together after Saul’s conversion to become Paul. Christian tradition is Luke was a respected competent historian and a likely mentor to Paul. Aslan thinks less of Luke. The divide becomes one of Luke mentoring Paul vs. Paul mentoring Luke. As with any relationship the relationship was likely two-way. Why does it matter? Because Aslan frees himself to say Luke is putting in fiction or covering truth over to create a dispute that he believes is larger than what was documented by Luke between Paul and the other apostles. In the end Christians rely on the judgement that Luke is competent by Irenaeus(2nd century), and by the Nicaean council (4th Century) that made his books part of the scriptural canon. This judgement was further confirmed by the archeological research of Sir William Mitchell Ramsey (20th Century) who said “You may press the words of Luke in a degree beyond any other historian’s and they stand the keenest scrutiny and the hardest treatment.”
1) Aslan seems to discount some scriptures while elevating others, sometimes based on historical analysis, but not always. Most Christians stand guilty of this same crime. An example Aslan does not justify well concerns the story of the Good Samaritan. Aslan clearly recognizes this parable is in response to the question “Who is your neighbor?” and that Jesus really told the parable (p. 100–101). Christians believe this story shows Jesus came for everyone. However, later in the book (e.g. p. 134–135) Aslan decides that Jesus would have had a traditional Jewish view of what the messiah should be and do and therefore that he would come for the Jewish nation only. Aslan purports the church changes the scope of Jesus’s audience. Believing Jesus to be inspired, Christians believe that Jesus saw the scriptures in ways previously unseen. Jesus would come to be the light to the nations that the Jewish people had been intended to be, but had not been faithful enough to God to fulfill to date. In the end, saying Jesus provided the new interpretations showing he would come to Israel first to be light to all the world vs. the body of Christ the Church provided the new interpretations need not be such a large distinction except that Aslan would make the divide so large as to represent two different faiths (p. 196). Scriptures Aslan finds contradictory do not seem so in their context, as other analysis (e.g. Robert Allen King: though you will have to endure some lengthy opinion to get to the detail), explains. For Christians it is Aslan that is in error, but with a cleverness, along the lines of the tradition of the serpent seducing Eve in Genesis 3. Because Christians believe God to be the final authority behind scripture, Christians believe He expects us to know it well enough to find a other author’s errors.
2) Aslan seems to actually believe what he says on page 177, that even though Jesus says “it is written” when he prophesies being destroyed and rebuilt in three days there is no such scripture. This is a beautiful case in point of Jesus putting scriptures together in ways previously unseen. He takes the substitution of messiah for the light of Israel from Ezekiel — and realizes his own body is a temple of the Lord. He is quoting Hosea 6:2 and applying these substitutional insights. These are common concepts in the Christian faith especially given the writings of Paul but would, as Aslan correctly notes, have seemed strange and novel and mysterious when Jesus first spoke them.
3 ) James the Just vs. Paul the Inspired …. hmm. Surely there was a controversy, that much is documented. However, Christians believe that is the honest tension between a man who knew Jesus as human since his childhood and one who only knew him first hand as vision and in prayer. Jesus’s transformation had to be one hard to completely comprehend. Christians can be vicious as they argue, but Luke documents that they did come out on the other side of that argument united. Great leadership allows that to happen —Jim Collins calls is facing the brutal facts — the passion in the arguments enables a better resolution. But Aslan hypothesizes that the argument never really ended, that one side of the argument was silenced in the temple destruction. Even if Aslan is correct, a Christian would have said there are no accidents, if God had wanted a remnant of that other argument to survive he would have made it so. If Luke is competent, he explicitly says the controversy was resolved while all the parties were alive.
In any case, it is Paul who seems like us, experiencing the risen Jesus in vision and prayer. We can all be like Paul, we cannot all be like James the Just. Paul’s way of meeting Jesus we can all know first hand. In that sense, Paul was the first of our kind.
Reza Aslan is most caught when he approaches the resurrection. He does a great job here. He is caught because, as he points out, the loyalty of the witnesses is a remarkable testament the depth of their testimony. Yet if he says as modern historian that a miracle occurred he will lose his Western secular credentials as historian. That is a sad fact of our age. Many would-be Christians stumble at this point. The good news Christians proclaim is you can meet Paul’s Jesus in prayer first, while unable to suspend disbelief. You can follow Jesus asking him to help in your remaining unbelief. Reza Aslan says you can also meet a James the Just version of Jesus in history … and that may be so. If one continues to pray for help with remaining unbelief, that too is good news. It may be worthwhile to get additional introduction to that historical Jesus by Craig Keener or N T Wright.
Originally published on Medium in About Rekindled
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