Tag Archive - Ethics

Hermeneutics and Ethics

August 12, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 9 Comments

A day or two ago I talked a bit about how we might think through the human origins question.

To me, the most important issue confronting Christians is not what answers we give to questions but how we handle them. That’s one of the most significant factors behind my “Storied Theology” project: I want us to reconceptualize what Christianity is, so that we will not only interpret the bible differently, but act differently as well.

This is not because I don’t think that answers matter, or because I have some morbid, academic interest in the ways we carry out theological debate and want to write a book on argumentation.

I want us to think, interpret, and act differently because I have high levels of frustration at the pervasive failure of Christians to act Christianly toward one another or toward the world outside the church.

And I do mean that we have not acted like Christians. But of course, this means that I have to have some idea of what defines Christianity, which means that I probably have a different idea about that than the people who are defending their actions in the name of Christ.

And this is where the whole bounded-set, centered-set, river analogy comes in.

For the folks who are demanding that Adam is a do-or-die figure for Christianity, Christianity is a set of persons or beliefs bounded by a string of theological commitments. This means that anyone transgressing those theological borders must either be shot while trying to escape or else sealed off from the sheep whom those borders are erected to protect.

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net


The ethic of bounded-set Christianity is service to, and preservation of, the tradition of the church. This was so when Irenaeus was propagating the rule of truth as the measure for biblical interpretation, and it is so for the Christians who would bite, devour, and consume one another due to variance in theological commitment.

We have to think of the place of Christian theology in more dynamic terms–not so that we can embrace every whim of passing theological fancy, but so that we can act as though (1) variation in theology does not threaten the integrity of Jesus Christ who is, himself, the Truth, and thus (2) conversation about new ideas will not bring the church to ruin.

The church is not doctrine.

The church is the body of the crucified Christ.

Therefore, we do not read scripture to preserve doctrines.

We read scripture to discover what it means that the crucified Christ is the resurrected Lord over all.

Therefore, we do not act as though preserving doctrine is our highest calling.

We act as though the truth of Christ is preserved through a people enacting upon the world the saving narrative of the crucified messiah.

Bounded, Centered, Christ

August 9, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 12 Comments

Yesterday’s post about the Rule of Faith is part of a larger project I’m working on (a life project, really) on how we think about our identity as Christians and how this impacts our understanding of Christian ethics.

At a conceptual level, a Rule of Faith or statement of faith as an identity marker has a bounded-set feel.

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The idea of a “bounded set” is this: if you are within the bounds, you are officially and “insider,” if you are beyond the bounds, you are officially an “outsider.”

Yesterday’s question was, “Is the Rule of Faith / adherence to the Creeds of the church necessary and sufficient for salvation?” That was asking whether the Creeds provide the boundaries around the set of humanity that is or will be saved.

A common alternative to bounded set thinking is centered set thinking.

Image: chrisroll / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In a centered set, the ideal is in the middle, but no one, in all likelihood, actually exists there. We are either closer or farther away. And, we are usually moving closer or farther from the middle.

I think that the centered set idea is closer to how things work in practice, but still wonder if the idea of the “center” in the “centered set” is too static. Is there one core of doctrines or beliefs we are moving toward or away from? Perhaps. Perhaps we could call it something like “Christianity,” but what would we put there?

I prefer a metaphor in which the whole continues to move. For a long time I used the metaphor of rays or trajectories. If two rays start off half a degree separate from each other (i.e., there is some theological diversity from the very beginning in Christianity) then if they continue on their trajectories they will get farther and farther apart. The result? An increasingly large space between the vectors that constitutes Christianity within the tradition; i.e., an increasingly theologically and culturally diverse Christianity that all can lay claim to orthodoxy.

If that doesn’t work for you, perhaps the metaphor of a river.

Image: prozac1 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net


This one I stole from Joel Green. The idea is that a river flows between banks. It is a dynamic thing. It probably gets wider and wider the farther downstream it goes. It is always moving toward its end. Moving together.

It’s that sense of unified motion I like: even as it gets wider, the whole is still in motion in the same direction–toward the eschaton.

Or perhaps there’s a little of all of this. Perhaps there is a “center,” and that would be the Christ in whom we all live, and this Christ is not standing still or defined by or bounded by the creeds of the church, but continuing to march through history, gaining followers, and manifesting all the while an ever richer embodiment of the diversity of God’s creation.

Salvation and the Rule of Faith

August 8, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Church with 20 Comments

Over on my Google+ world a little conversation is unfolding around a question I asked regarding the Rule of Faith, and I thought I’d bring it over here as well.

In his landmark work, The Creeds of Christendom, Philip Schaff says the Ecumenical creeds contain articles of Christian faith “necessary and sufficient for salvation.”

Do they contain what’s necessary?

Are they sufficient?

I incline toward “neither.”

Did Christians without Matthew attain salvation without a virgin birth or is that not really necessary to believe in order to follow Jesus?

If a Jesus follower today believed that Jesus was raised from the dead, that he was the exalted Lord over all things, and devoted himself to serving Jesus, loving his destitute neighbors, and the like, but didn’t believe in a virginal conception and birth, would that person be excluded from the kingdom of heaven at the final judgment because he failed to believe this necessary point of the creed?

If we believe all these things but act like nincompoops our whole lives, is that sufficient for salvation or will Jesus say, “Depart from me, I never knew you, you workers of lawlessness,” thereby showing “belief” in these creeds to be insufficient?

I worry that the whole paradigm of points of doctrine that need to be believed for salvation is misguided. What do you think?

Storied Bible Reading?

August 1, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 12 Comments

For the next couple of weeks, in anticipation of the Colloquium on Theological Interpretation at Laidlaw College, I am turning my attention again to the issue of theological interpretation. The particular question I will be exploring is this:

How does the way that we read the Bible correlate with our own sense of identity and our ethics?

To a certain extent, there seems to be a rising tide of recognition that these three factors are inseparable, even if it isn’t spelled out quite this clearly. The advent of various interested hermeneutical practices, such as feminist or queer interpretation, attest to the fact that identity of some sort, brought to our reading of the text, both assumes and argues for a certain set of acceptable practices.

But does this sort of entanglement of identity, hermeneutics, and ethics apply more broadly?

I’m arguing that it does.

First, the hermeneutics and identity pieces are always closely tied. When the core of our identity is being in a personal relationship with Jesus, we read the Bible as telling us how much God loves us, or how we are called to respond as faithful children. When the core of our identity is belonging to a particular religious community, we read while thinking how that community is shaped or called to respond by what we’ve read. When we read with our Reformed Theologian glasses on, we read in light of the narrative of our theological disputes and what substantiates our unique points of doctrine over against the bad guys.

Because the Bible is central to Christian self-knowledge, how we think of ourselves will impact how we read the Bible, and how we read the Bible will, in turn, impact how we think of ourselves.

But identity does more than provide a road along which the ancient text travels to our own. This same path will continue past construction of identity and into action in the world.

One of my primary concerns for the church is that we too often take alien narratives and make them the core of our identities, and hence the core of our biblical reading strategies and the defining roads for our ethical practice.

Whether it’s grabbing an identity marker that forces one to read against the grain of the text, or taking a theological construct that is ostensibly derived from the text, or even a creed that seeks to faithfully develop the thoughts present or latent in the text, we too often take as our starting points constructs that at very least put the accent on the wrong syllable.

My primary concern, as I tend to move in more or less traditional or evangelical circles, is that we start to think that our later notions and battles are nothing less than the defining markers of Christian fidelity. To take but one example, the Evangelical Theological Society demands adherence to only two points of doctrine: the Trinity and the inerrancy of scripture.

The identity marker of that people is inerrancy, and to a certain extent the Trinity, and so much of its exegetical labor is spent convincing folks that the Bible (which looks to be anything but inerrant) is actually befitting such a label. And, the assessment of who is faithfully following Jesus is often circumscribed by this label.

Friends coming to Duke for doctoral work from one particular evangelical institution were told, “Don’t let them hoodwink you.” Meaning, of course, don’t let them lull you into thinking that you can let go of your more conservative theological tradition (including inerrancy) and still be as faithful to God.

Similarly, I was warned that Richard Hays “is no evangelical” by a pastor who wanted me to make sure I’d taken full stock of his position on scripture before going to study with him.

Identity: inerrantist evangelical.

Hermeneutic: reading to preserve univocality and historical accuracy.

Ethic: keeping people adherent to inerrantist evangelical doctrine as the greatest good we can do before God.

Part of why I named my blog “storied theology” is because I think that the story of Jesus is defining for our narrative. “Jesus is Lord,” is the common Christian confession–one that embraces the narrative that got him there: The crucified Jesus is resurrected Messiah and Lord over all.”

There’s a story that defines all of us as God’s people: we are the people who live in subjection to this Lord and king. And it carries an ethic with it as well. An ethics of the cross. An ethics of a world-wide kingdom. An ethics of an upside down Kingdom.

On Avoiding Loving Neighbor

July 22, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 6 Comments

I have a love/hate relationship with Barth, it seems. I’m plowing through the Dogmatics with all due diligence. §17 was outstanding. I love Barth’s stated theological method. He always begins with what God has done for us, and never acts as though he’s dealing with abstract or philosophical necessities.

But there are times, like §18 where Barth’s theological agenda seems to run roughshod over his stated method and also the scripture he purports to be engaging.

In §18.3 brother Karl alleges that he is discussing the second great commandment–love your neighbor as yourself. The section title is “The Praise of God.”

At the halfway point in the section, Barth has explored the extent to which this is similar to or different from the first great command, and how the two can be related. He has given an interesting, albeit idiosyncratic and highly tendentious reading of the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

In all, it seems that Barth is petrified that Jesus might have said that in order to inherit eternal life we have to not only love God but also engage in acts of love toward neighbor. So there is this complicated reworking of the idea such that neighbor love becomes receiving charity as a sign of God’s gracious provision.

And so salvation by grace alone is preserved. But at the cost of simply and clearly stating that love of God is deficient without love of neighbor.

§18. Not a keeper.

Gentiles and Homosexuals (pt. 6)

July 11, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 16 Comments

Since I will soon be returning from vacation and have to deal with the firestorm created by my position on Christians and gay marriage, this will be the last in the series!

In essence, I have argued that we need to be able to separate what we are called to do as the people of God (the ethical norms God wants us to uphold in our communities) and how to posture ourselves toward those who do not hold to these norms–largely because they are not part of that community. In other words, on this particular issue, to hold to a traditional Christian position that homosexuality is not God’s intention for human sex is not yet to answer the question how do we love our gay neighbor as our heterosexual self?

There is good reason to think that the answer to the latter is to be agents of extending the life-giving blessings of marriage even to those whose marriages do not conform to our understanding of the Christian norm: God’s healing power is freely given to outsiders and even enemies; God’s power to feed the hungry is given to outsiders; Jesus condemns Law-keeping as an excuse for not loving neighbor; Jesus calls us to love and bless the evil and the good even as God our Father does; James warns us that religion is not about believing the right things but a doing of the right things which includes caring for our neighbors’ needs.

Photo: Eastern Illinois University

Let me speak now to those who object to this, and take up a few of the more frequent objections along the way.

First, we should be aware of how much marriage guidance there is in the NT, and how little of it we either follow ourselves or demand to have written into law. For example, Paul says that a Christian can only marry another Christian. Should we demand that the laws of the U.S. fulfill this standard? Note that this is much more significant in terms of the Christian narrative than hetero- versus homosexual sex. This is about whether a person who is a member of Jesus’ own body will join that body to someone who is not in Christ.

If we don’t want the state to enforce other Christian marital standards, why the requirement of heterosexuality?

Second, people have drawn attention to the fact that once gay people can be married, the sorts of opportunities that open up to them include adoption. It seems to me that this should be one of the driving forces behind Christians getting in line to support gay marriage. One of the quintessential characteristics of a just society is one in which the orphan is cared for. The moving of a child into a stable home, rather than being raised in an orphanage of some type, shuttled about to various foster families, or even aborted would seem to be a tremendously Christian reason for supporting gay marriage.

The simple fact is that most of us Christians who are married and capable of having our own children do not adopt. We neglect our duty to love the orphan, and also want to close down an avenue for them to be cared for? The objection to this line of thinking is that being raised by gay parents is somehow inherently bad. But how? I know that the real life challenges of being a heterosexual parent create at times tense environments and moments that will be the subject of my and my friends’ children’s therapy visits. Are committed homosexual couples going to have an inherently more challenging home life? Is there any evidence for such an idea?

Third, what about other moral issues concerning sex and marriage? What about pedophilia or polygamy?

Pedophilia is easy: there is a minor to be protected from the coercive power of the adult. That is an entirely different category.

Polygamy is challenging in that it has some biblical precedent. The idea that two people become one in marriage did not stop Jacob from becoming one with Leah and also becoming one with Rachel. But here I have a similar concern as with the pedophilia case, though it’s not as cut and dry. Polygamy tends to thrive where there is a significant power dynamic in favor of, usually, men who accumulate various wives for themselves. I can see monogamy laws as a form of protection to a wife who has been promised in marriage the affections, care, and single-hearted devotion of her husband (and vice versa).

Finally, I do want to keep asking: Why is this particular Christian standard the one we think our civil society should uphold for all? Is not worship of God more important? Why not mandate church attendance? Is giving to the poor not more important than, or at least equally important as, whom we choose to have sex with? Why not mandate a more extensive system of food banks and extend welfare programs? Why not require people to adopt childless parents?

I know that these are not the kinds of debates in which people’s minds are changed overnight. But at the end of it I want, as much as anything, to ask that we recognize that the issue of gay marriage is difficult, because our calling to live in a certain way does not thereby define whom we are called to love or how. The love of God cannot be contained by laws or within certain communities. And we are called to take that love, and God’s blessings, into all the parts of the world in which God has placed us.

Gentiles and Homosexuals (pt. 5)

July 9, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 16 Comments

Inasmuch as I’m still on vacation, and still not able to get any sort of access to the internet, I figured I’d keep putting up posts on how God’s desire to bless the whole world might mean that Christians should participate in such blessing without requiring, first, that people act like us. The God who causes the rain to fall and the sun to shine on the evil and good alike, I’m arguing, wants us to work toward extension of God’s blessing to all around us–even when we believe they are acting outside of and even against the will and work of God.

In other words, the New Testament itself demands of us that we not only assess what we are supposed to do as God’s obedient and faithful people, but that we not require of others that they so act before they receive God’s blessings from our hand (or God’s). (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.)

In short, the argument has been that if we want to know how we who believe homosexual activity is sinful should treat our gay neighbors, we can do little better than looking at how Jesus treats Gentiles and other outsiders. Jesus enacted, and proclaimed, the love of God that brings rain and sun on the evil and the good alike–without demanding, first, that the evil become good. And he calls us to do the same: to be children of our heavenly Father who so showers His blessings.

A recurring apprehension I hear when I suggest that this applies to advocating gay marriage in the state is that it undermines our responsibility to uphold the standards of God. Is it not our duty to shine our light by living differently and calling people to something different rather than blessing their sin?

Image: Michal Marcol / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

There will be no mercy in judgment for anyone who hasn’t shown mercy. Mercy overrules judgment. My brothers and sisters, what good is it if people say they have faith but do nothing to show it? Claiming to have faith can’t save anyone, can it? Imagine a brother or sister who is naked and never has enough food to eat. What if one of you said, “Go in peace! Stay warm! Have a nice meal!” ? What good is it if you don’t actually give them what their body needs? (James 2:13-17, CEB)

What is the faith that God will approve? It is a faith that puts belief into action by caring for the people who are around us. While we are tempted to spiritualize this, deferring to “taking care” of people by calling them to repentance, the NT consistently looks at material provision, caring for people as they are embodied and part of the social world around us, as the means by which such care is to be extended.

These passages, altogether, frighten me a bit. They tell me that the very things we are most prone to look to as indicating and expressing our faithfulness to God are the things that are most strongly preventing us from exercising the law of love that shows us to be children of our Father in heaven.

Why would I rather approve of homosexual marriage in the state than enforce a Christian heterosexual standard? Because I would rather be found guilty of extending the blessings of divine provision for human flourishing (marriage, stability, comfort, healthcare, inheritance) beyond their proper bounds than of hoarding them for the people of God alone to enjoy. These passages together suggest to me that such indiscriminate dissemination is what it means to be a child of the one true God.

Gentiles and Homosexuals (pt. 4)

July 6, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 5 Comments

Since I’m on vacation and away from internet access, I continue my series on how we should be reading the New Testament and its implications for how we handle issues such as gay marriage. For those of us who believe in Jesus as the revelation of God’s saving power, Jesus as the resurrected Lord over all, taking up the NT is taking up our book, the stories and letters written for our communities, addressing us as the insiders, telling us what it means to faithfully follow God.

Too infrequently do we realize that this means that the characters in the stories with whom we bear the greatest similarity are the Jewish people whose understanding of God’s work is getting reconfigured. Thus, the story of Jesus’ sermon in Luke 4 tells us as much as them that God’s blessing cannot be confined to us as the insiders; Jesus’ healing the centurion tells us as much as them that God’s blessings and Jesus’ authority reach beyond the people of God even to those who could rightly be labelled “enemy”; and the parable of the Good Samaritan warns us that faithful keeping of the Law of God can keep us from seeing the neighbor whom we are called to love.

In all of this, there is something to be learned for Christians who hold to a traditionalist view of marriage as something God has ordained to be between a man and a woman. Once we have said this much, we still have not yet said what it means for our posture toward those who disagree, whom we would see as not practicing what falls within the sphere of God’s instruction for humanity.

Perhaps I can now put it more strongly: these stories together demonstrate that what God wants of us is not to restrict God’s blessings to the people of God, but to participate in showering these blessings indiscriminately among the people of the earth.

And, this blessing does not mean simply calling them to join the people of God, a “spiritual” concern above and before anything else, but means a true extending to them of all the blessings that come from the authority of Jesus, the mercy we have in our power to extend, the food with which we can feed the hungry, the medicine with which we can feed the sick–all the blessings that God bestows upon the world.

Today I want to add one more NT passage to the mix, to show that all this is not merely hermeneutical trickery on my part. Jesus tells us directly: it is not our business to restrict the blessings of God to those whom we love. This is not the character of God whose children we are.

“I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who harass you because of your faith so that you will be acting as children of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes the sun rise on both the evil and the good and sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous… Therefore, just as your heavenly Father is complete in showing love to everyone, so also you must be complete” (Matthew 5:44-48, CEB).

The blessings of God indiscriminately shower down upon the earth. And if we are truly God’s children, we are to be agents of such showering in our own world as well. The gay marriage issue is difficult because it is easy to point to the Bible and say that homosexual lifestyles are wrong. But it is even more difficult because God demands that we not restrict the fullness of life and blessing of God to those who do what is right, to those whom we love, to those whom we can address as brother and sister.

Love is not about demanding that people act like we do or believe like we do before receiving the blessings of God that we can help bring about in the real world. Love is about bestowing the blessings of God so that the people around us will see our good deeds and glorify our Father in heaven–this is exactly what it means to be, as the church, the light of the world. It’s not about keeping God’s Law so people will see how pious we are, it means loving our neighbor, truly, as ourselves, so that they will know themselves loved by our God and Father.

Being part of the in crowd is not, can never be, prerequisite for someone being the recipient of our love, of the blessings of God.

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.

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!

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