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Gentiles and Homosexuals (pt. 3)

July 4, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 4 Comments

In Part 1 of this series I illustrated the danger of thinking that we as the insiders can contain the blessings of God–we might find ourselves attempting to throw Jesus off a cliff. In Part 2, I continued with a story that shows how these blessings come even to those who stand against the very purposes of God–a Roman centurion receives the blessings of Jesus’ authority.

The point of this is to show through a series of engagements with NT stories that we must not only consider how we are to act in order to please God in our standing before him, but must also consider how we must act toward our neighbor who will not so act if we are to truly please God. In all, it seems that upholding our moral standards, or obeying God more generally, as a barrier to extending the fulness of God’s blessings to the world around us is a crucial mistake that might make us more the outsider than we realize.

The quintessential example of failure to extend blessing due to adherence to the Law is the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Image: therubicon.org

The Lawyer comes to Jesus, and correctly enumerates what must be done to obtain eternal life: love God, love neighbor. Like us, he knows that both are crucial, and that the doing of one cannot be an excuse to not do the other. And, like us, he is keen to make sure he knows who this neighbor is. How far does love extend? What must it look like?

The story that ensues is familiar. But too often, we fail to dig deep enough into the failure of love that is illustrated.

The man is beaten, and lays within an inch of his life. In fact, for all that someone can tell by looking at him, the man is dead. Why is this important? It’s a crucial factor because priests were forbidden to contract corpse impurity for any but their closest relatives. In other words, for a priest, and perhaps a Levite, to leave an apparently dead man unattended to was nothing less than upholding the Law of God.

Was the man who loved his neighbor the one who kept the Law of God and thereby kept himself pure to act on the people’s behalf in the Temple service?

Was the law-keeping obedient one the person who did what was necessary to obtain eternal life by loving neighbor?

No.

The person who was neighbor to the man, and therefore acted with the love that leads to eternal life, was the non-Law-keeping Samaritan, the half-Jewish “other” who bound the man’s wounds, entrusted him to the care of the inn keeper, and paid for him to come to full health and strength.

When we wrestle with how the ordinances of God might impact our status toward outsiders, we are too often in the place of the priest and Levite–upholding the Law of God and thereby claiming that we are loving neighbor even while we leave our neighbor without food, without healthcare, without a true participation in the blessings God has given us.

These NT stories are merely about legalists who don’t really understand God’s Law. They are about people who understand all too well the Law that differentiates them and separates them from the world that lies beyond the people of God. But Jesus takes hold of the biblical storyline that demands we recognize God as the God of all–and that we extend the blessings of God as far as God’s own Lordship itself extends.

These are stories that call us to love the outsider, that demand of us that we set aside the law of God–not as a means by which we live faithfully, but–as a means by which we determine who is worthy to receive the good things that God has bestowed upon God’s people, the good things by which God pushes back the brokenness and fallenness of the world.

Love is not depicted in any of these stories as demanding that someone enter the people of God, it is depicted as a realization that God’s blessings burst beyond the people of God, enveloping even those who will not place themselves within the space marked off by that God’s rules and people.

Surprising Image

July 3, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 3 Comments

“The Son is the image of the invisible God, the one who is firstborn of all creation” (Col 1:15).

Of course he is. That’s the whole point of Genesis 1. There is a firstborn, or first created, son of God. It was humanity. And God created them to be overall creation, the image of God standing before the world, ruling the world on God’s behalf.

But no. There’s a surprise here. The Colossians hymn goes on:

“Because all things were created by him: both in the heavens and on the earth, the things that are visible and the things that are invisible” (Col 1:16, CEB).

We discover here that Adam was not simply the image, he was the image of the image. Whereas much of the NT operates with an Adam Christology, such that Jesus is seen as fulfilling the role God gave Adam at creation, we discover here that before Christ stood in the place of Adam, Adam stood in the place of the eternal Son. The one who is God’s original image not only rules over all creation, he created all the powers he made:

Whether they are thrones or powers, or rulers or authorities, all things were crated through him and for him. (Col 1:16)

The original image-bearer is the one who holds all things together.

But for all the “alls” and “everythings,” there is more. While we tend to see that the divinity is all, and sufficient, for the identity of God and God’s son, there is more to be had.

This ontological status was not sufficient for the Son to be head over all things. There was a second Adam to whom rule was given. And this human rule over the earth had to be joined to the divine. There is a new creation with a second Adam at its head.

He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the one who is firstborn from the dead, so that he might occupy the first place in everything. (1:18)

“So that.” First place in everything was obtained by an action here on earth–a faithful death and death-conquering resurrection. The enthronement now over all is not so much a testimony to his preexistent preeminence, but to his human fidelity to God even to the point of death on the cross. Humanity was created to play the role of the Son. And the Son came to fulfill the role that was always his.

He rules the world for God because he took those who were supposed to be like him, but were alienated, and recreated the cosmic space within which they might be one with God again:

“All the fullness of God was pleased to live in him, and he reconciled all things to himself through him–whether things on earth or in the heavens. He brought peace through the blood of his cross.” (Col 1:19-20)

The extent of the Son’s reign is the extent of his reconciling death: the whole cosmos has been reconciled to God. The original image did what the image of the image failed to do: faithful execute the rule of God, in God’s name and on God’s behalf, upon the earth for the sake of the whole cosmos.

The author is out of town. Comments are welcome, but I will not be participating in blog conversation this week. Also, previous installments on Colossians 1 can be found here and here.

Gentiles and Homosexuals (pt. 2)

July 2, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 5 Comments

On Thursday I began a series in which I want to develop an interpretive framework for wrestling with issues of homosexuals in civil society for those Christians who do not believe that homosexual practice falls within the realm of acceptable Christian action.

In short, the hermeneutical move is this: Christians reading the NT are now more in the place of the first century Jews than the first century Gentiles. We are the “insiders” who know what God has done to redeem and reconcile a people and what it means, at least in general, to faithfully follow this God.

In short, what we find at several key moments is that the blessings of God are not confined to the people of God–and that these blessings overflow and come to outsiders even without their agreeing to become insiders. We began with Luke 4, and the reminder Jesus gave of how the power of God to feed the hungry and heal the sick went beyond Israel in the days of Elijah and Elisha–and this enraged his audience.

It presses the question of whether we, too, are not enraged at the idea that our community might not lay exclusive claim to the blessings of God?

The decentering ministry of Jesus is visible elsewhere as well. In Matthew 8, after Jesus comes down from the mount of his famous sermon, a centurion approaches him, asking for a servant to be healed.

Gentiles are outsiders. Uncircumcised, unkosher, Sabbath-breaking outsiders.

But things here are even worse.

The Roman occupation of Galilee and Judea is a potent reminder of the failure of God’s promises in the prophets to come to fruition. The promise of being free in their own land to worship their own God under their own king is daily thwarted by military and political subjugation to Rome.

This Gentile who stands before Jesus is not only a reminder of, but an active agent in the failure of Israel to enter into the civil, religious, and political life that God has promised God’s people.

And he comes to Jesus to ask for healing. And Jesus heals his servant.

This means at least two things. One: the man saw in Jesus, the very definition of the “insider” for the new people of God, something powerful. Two: he saw in Jesus someone who would be wiling to share that power for the good of even a Gentile centurion.

He had faith in that power, in Jesus’ authority, and that it could and would be used for him.

Here, we might say, is an example of an outsider coming “in” in order to receive the blessing. But did he? Yes, he had faith in the work of Jesus. But Jesus commends him as an insider without demanding that he actually become an insider first. He blesses him, heals his servant, without the man joining himself to the Jewish people–and without the man leaving his post as one who stands against the freedom of the people of God or leaving his life behind to follow Jesus in his mission.

Questions that present themselves to us: do outsiders see anything in the church that they would want part of for themselves?

When they do see something that looks like a good–a blessing bestowed by the power and authority of God–do we willingly give to them out of the abundance of what God has given us? Or do we demand that they become like us first, enter into the community of faith in order to know the blessings of God?

Will we give outsiders our money for their food? Our medicine for their healing? Our marriage for their comfort and security? Or are these things only for those who first drop all that they have and then enter into the kingdom of abundance?

Note: I am on vacation and will be mostly away from the internet. Please feel free to have constructive conversation amongst yourselves, but I am not likely to participate!

Gentiles and Homosexuals (Pt. 1)

June 30, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 18 Comments

In Saturday’s post about homosexual marriage I made the suggestion that Christians need to develop the habit of asking two separate questions, without predetermining what the relationship between them might be. The first is, “What does God require of us as God’s people?” and the second is, “What does this mean for our life in civil society populated by people who do not, and will not, agree with us?”

I want to pick this back up today, once again focusing on those of us who are Christians and who believe that homosexual sex is sinful. I realize that there are Christians who disagree with this position, and that is its own debate. I want to keep pushing here the “so what?” question for those of us who uphold heterosexual normativity as part of our constellation of Christian belief and practice.

There is a strand of NT teaching that pushes me to keep the two questions I’m asking distinct, if not entirely separate. Why should we ask both what does God demand of us in our posture toward God and then, separately, what does God demand of us as an act of love toward neighbor?

That strand of teaching is the posture of the Jewish insiders with respect to Gentile outsiders in the NT.

In the history of interpretation, the church has made a number of mistakes in assessing the exclusivist posture of the first century Jewish community to the Gentile outsiders.

Perhaps most often the problem of early Judaism has been seen as legalism. Yes, the law was good, but early Jewish people were keeping it legalistically; or, they were keeping it because they thought that if they did they would merit God’s eternal favor and eschatological salvation.Gustav Dore, Jesus Teaching in a Synagogue

But the admonitions of Paul and the actions of Jesus point in a different direction: a surprising superabundance of grace that overflows the people of God even as that people is rightly adhering to the law that God has given them.

In Jesus’ famous sermon in Luke 4, he proclaims a jubilee year: freedom to the captives, good news proclaimed to the poor, light to those who are in darkness.

And the Jewish people marveled at the gracious words falling from his lips.

They knew themselves to be captives in need of deliverance. They knew themselves to be blind in need of light. They knew themselves to be poor in need of good news.

They were ready to sing “Amazing Grace.”

But then Jesus explodes their understanding of who the grace of God is for. There were many widows in the time of Elijah, and many lepers in the time of Elisha–but they were sent beyond Israel, beyond the people marked out as pure and holy and faithful, to feed the widow and cleanse the leper (without first demanding adherence to the Law of Israel’s God)–of non-Jewish, non-YHWH-worshiping outsider Gentiles.

And then the people were filled with rage and attempted to murder Jesus.

How are we to read this? On the one hand, we can recognize that most of us are gentiles and therefore happily included in this great surprise of God–that grace comes to us without our becoming Jewish.

And this is true.

But as those who now occupy the place of the “insiders,” the embraced and, by God’s grace, faithful people of God, we must also reappropriate this text from the point of view of its insiders. We must place ourselves not merely on the periphery as those to whom the word would come despite all apparent obstacles. We must place ourselves in the role of the insiders and be willing to hear that God’s grace will not be contained by us, and God’s blessings cannot be cordoned off to the faithful.

Of course, this is not an argument for gay marriage, but it is an argument about how we need to posture ourselves toward those we deem “other” if we are going to be faithful children of our Father in Heaven. Come back Saturday for part 2.

Christ and Christian

June 29, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 14 Comments

The past few days have seen some good, some bad, and lots of challenging conversation go by on the post about gay marriage. One of the recurring points of conflict comes from the Bible: what is it and what are we supposed to do with it?

As Christians, we are a people of the book. The scriptures witness to the redemptive work of God that comes to its fulfillment in Christ. This collection of documents is normative for Christians. It tells the stories that found our communities, it reflects on the implications of those stories for our life together. It gives rules to live by.

One of my operating theories these days is that for a people of the book our identity, our ethics, and our hermeneutics are inseparable. How we read the Bible is indicative of how we conceive of what it means to be Christian, what we think we are supposed to do will flow from these two.

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Part of the challenge of living well is that there are numerous close-calls: we can attempt to live by grace, because ours is a religion of grace; we can attempt to live in obedience, because we are called to obey and respond.

But these “close calls” are all the more wrong for their proximity to the truth.

We are not saved by grace [full stop].

We are saved by the grace of God made known and given to us in Christ.

We are not called to obey [full stop].

We are called to walk in the Spirit of the crucified and risen Christ; we are called to obey the words of the good teacher who also laid down his life for his friends.

It is Christ who makes us Christian. It is the participation in the cosmic reality that the crucified Christ is the resurrected Lord over all things. This will give us our own standard and definition of love.

What does it mean to love my neighbor as myself? Somehow, the self-giving of God for the sake of sinners who turned on the grace-giver in murderous rage will have to become our story. Not necessarily the murderous rage part–but that we step forward and love as Christ loved, that we bless the world as God blesses.

And that means loving those who are outside, beyond, and against the kingdom of God as ourselves. Loving neighbor is never antithetical to the love of God, because the God whom we are called to emulate is the God who causes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike–all the nations are blessed. Because the God whom we are called to emulate is the one who did not spare his own son but delivered him up for us all–while we were all still sinners and hostile in mind to this same God.

Believing is Doing

June 27, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 20 Comments

Last week I had some reflections on “faith” in Colossians 1: perhaps the defining aspect of Christian faith is that this faith that exists in Christ. In the opening, thanksgiving section of the letter the triad of faith, hope, and love, as it is embodied by the Colossian church(es), is Paul’s source of celebration.

He then moves into his prayer for them: that they’ll be filled with the knowledge of God’s will so that they can lead lives worthy of the the Lord. Please God; bear fruit; grow in knowledge; endure with patience; give thanks.

Protestantism has created some odd heresies. One of these is an elaboration of justification as by “faith alone” that renders the works, i.e., the everyday life of a Christian, inconsequential. For the Pauline letters in the NT, nothing could be further from the case. Paul’s missionary goal is to bring about, not faith alone, nor even faith in Christ per se, but “the obedience of faith” (Rom 1). Paul celebrates the Thessalonians’ work of faith (1 Thess 1).

The reality into which Christians enter is not merely a different set of heart thoughts (I now believe in Jesus) but a whole new sphere of life.

The paragraph ends with Paul’s affirmation that God has freed us–we are now in the kingdom of the beloved son. Not merely freed from condemnation, we are now freed to learn, to grow in the knowledge of God. Not merely free to learn, we are free to act in accordance with what we know.

To be one who exists in Christ is to have a life defined by a certain kind of actions. This is not merely the repetition of “belief” in Christ, but a whole life lived so as to please our God and Father.

Gay Marriage in New York

June 25, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Culture with 151 Comments

New York’s state legislature has approved a gay marriage bill, and governor Andrew Cuomo has signed it into law.

Photo: Pat Arnow, Wiki Commons


As the states take up this issue one-by-one, I’ll keep working out my thoughts on the issue. I think that this is a complex issue for Christians. Here’s what it comes down to for me:

As long as the state is in the marriage business, Christians should support gay marriage as an embodiment of our calling to love our neighbor as ourselves.

First, I understand that there is a strong religious argument for the “definition” of marriage being the joining of one man and one woman. However, the state is not in the business of adhering to or adjudicating religious principles.

Second, to my mind, the best possible scenario is this: (1) the state does not marry anyone or recognize anyone’s marriage; (2) the state performs civil unions for any two persons who wish to join their lives for mutual support; (3) these civil unions are performed by civil servants, not ministers of the churches; and (4) churches can marry before God whomever they deem fit to marry in accordance with their religious convictions.

However, since this is not the case, and since the state has chosen to assign certain rights and privileges to married couples, people with religious convictions have to figure out not one problem, but two.

First, what do we think about homosexuality within the context of our religious community of faith?

But then the second, related but separable question is, What do we think about homosexual marriage within the state in which we find ourselves?

Here’s where, historically, Christians have done poorly: we have failed to realize that our answer to Question 1 does not determine that we attempt to enforce that answer as we take up Question 2.

I want to suggest that even those of us who do not support gay marriage within our faith communities have an obligation to support it in civil law as an expression of our calling to love our neighbor as ourselves.

It’s difficult for Christians to imagine a world where we are truly in the minority and subject to the power of people with alternative religious convictions. Perhaps a couple of examples will help.

What if there were a law that schools could only teach evolution and had to teach evolution in Biology class? I don’t mean that public schools had to do this, but all schools and educational programs had to adhere to this. What if we didn’t have the freedom to enact our wrongheaded desire to deny evolution and embrace creationism as an alternative?

If we want the freedom to make our own religious decisions about education and our view of the world and how to best educate our children, we are required to secure for those who disagree with us about every religious decision the freedom to enact their irreligious or non-religious or differing religious understanding of what a fruitful life here on earth looks like.

Similarly, what if our law-makers increasingly enacted provisions of sharia law? Do we want people determining what we can and can’t eat based on religious convictions with which we don’t agree? We’ve grown to anticipate that our representatives in various state legislature will enact laws for justice that do not infringe on our own free practice.

As Christians, we need to learn how to hold our own religious views while seeking liberty and justice for all–not just those who happen to believe as we do. In part, this will mean that we free people to do what we would believe is wrong.

Freedom for a Real God

June 24, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts, Church with 7 Comments

Two points in Karl Barth’s articulation of the Spirit’s revelation of the Word of God to humanity deserve fresh hearing in a world that tends to go a very different direction.

One of these is the issue of freedom. I find that human freedom is one of the bedrock assumptions that most of my students bring to the text of scripture with them. Sometimes this is couched in terms of “free will” as over against a “predestinarian” understanding of how we come to be in relationship with God. But often it is not so specifically developed.

What my students assume, by and large, is that we are free, as humans, to choose for God or to choose against God as God is offered to us in Christ.

Barth Experiences God Via His Pipe

Barth challenges this assumption on any number of levels. The idea that humanity is capable due to its own ontology to respond to God is an idea he confronts, insisting that the freedom we have to be for God is the freedom which God Himself gives us by the power of the Holy Spirit.

I think Barth is picking up on a crucial thread of biblical teaching.

These days we are increasingly happy with the “atonement model” of Christus Victor. At the root of this vision of salvation is a recognition that the world is enslaved to hostile powers. Paul talks about the world being subjected to the powers of sin and death.

Christ comes to redeem.

Look at the language. Enslavement. Subjection. Redemption.

The assumption in each of these is that we are not free except insofar as we participate in the freeing act of Christ. We need to rethink what sort of freedom we do and do not have inside and outside of Christ. I don’t think that a classic Calvinist articulation is necessarily the way to go, but it is on to something.

The other place where Barth has something to remind us of is that this God for whom we are freed by the power of the Spirit is a true God who is outside ourselves.

I had a conversation once that went something like this:

  • “I spend time reading the Bible and praying in the morning.”
  • “That’s great that you clear out time for yourself. I wish I did that more.”

Without bringing too much theological critique to bear on this normal conversation, it was reflective of two very different views of the world.

I believe that when I pray and read scripture I am actually spending time with a true God and subjecting my life to, or summoning the aid of, the true Lord who reigns over the earth.

Barth reminds us that Christian celebration of the experience of the Spirit is not a celebration of our own spirits, or of finding a lost place inside of ourselves. It is the Holy Spirit of God uniting us to the Word of God who is Jesus Christ.

Good words of challenge from Church Dogmatics §16.2.

Evil and Love

June 23, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Book Reviews with 5 Comments

One of the perpetual challenges that modern, western theologians and Bible readers face is the way that scripture assumes a world where not only injustice but true evil is active. We probably wrestle with the wrong issues, for example, when talking about justification, because we don’t experience the need to be vindicated by God in the face of perpetual persecution for doing what is right.

Ours is a world where we can claim that people are inherently good–and actually believe ourselves.

But Miroslav Volf does not sugar coat the world and he perpetually summons us back to reality. Having experienced a measure of persecution during his years in Serbia and Croatia, he demands of Christians that we recognize a moral duty to call evil evil–even while summoning us to the sacred duty of loving all our neighbors (even the evil ones).

His book Against the Tide is a series of short reflections on what it means to love in the world that we actually inhabit.

The book is a collection of articles that range widely while pushing us to have our imaginations transformed afresh by the Christian story of a God who loves us and calls us to be agents of God’s love in the world.

Volf is bold. He wrestles with the story of the flood. He demands that we learn from it that God will not rest content with a world full of evil. And, he draws on the flood imagery from 1 Peter and suggests that we can read the washing of the flood as a symbol not of God washing away the evil doers, but washing us up so as to stand pure before our God.

He also insists that we call evil when talking about the actions of people. The alternatives are to deny the evil that destroys the world or to demonize perpetrators. Demonizing the evil doer makes the person an object to be exorcised, expelled, destroyed. Calling a person evil maintains their humanity: yes, he is evil, an evil neighbor I am called to love so that I might overcome evil with good.

For short daily devotional reading, you could do no better than Against the Tide.

Disclaimer: I don’t need to provide a disclaimer because I actually paid $10 for my copy of the book. So the Fed won’t come after me for this one. But on the other hand, Volf and I are Facebook friends, which, of course, makes him my BFF. I was even in the same room with him once at a reception!

Cross, Cosmos and Consummation: Col 1

June 22, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 2 Comments

The triad of faith, hope, and love, is common fare in the Pauline correspondence. Not only does it appear in 1 Cor 13, from which we’ve all heard it read at weddings, it also appears as the basis of Paul’s celebration of the Thessalonians’ reception of himself and the gospel in 1 Thess 1, and the celebration of the Colossians’ faith in Col 1.

In Thessalonians, the “faith” is specifically associated with “work”. In Colossians, it would seem to be faith that has Christ as its object. “Faith in Christ Jesus,” it would seem, is roughly equivalent to “believing in Jesus.”

But is this so?

The phrasing is πίστιν ὑμῶν ἐν Χριστῷ.

When talking about believing in someone or something, εἰς is more common than ἐν. It raises the question for me as to whether we’re supposed to see ἐν Χριστῷ as the object of our faith (as it’s most often taken) or as the cosmic space within which the believer exists.

In parallel with Paul’s pervasive “in Christ” language, is this about “faith that we have in union with Christ”?

Romans 4:12 uses what might be a parallel expression. Speaking there of Abraham’s faith, Paul says, “The faith which was in uncircumcision,” τῆς πίστεως τῆς ἐν τῇ ἀκροβυστία.

“Faith in the uncircumcision” is not a description of the object of Abraham’s faith, but of his status at the time of belief.

So, perhaps, in Colossians 1: “I’ve heard of the faith that you have as you are in Christ Jesus, the love that you exercise toward the community of saints, and these because of the hope that is awaiting you at the consummation of all things.”

Perhaps…

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