Shrinking Capital

A politician was ranting about ‘British values’.

Sadly, these are losing their currency as younger Brits seem intent on seeking fun without restriction, he moaned. Gone is respect for the elderly and for authority-figures. Kindness to others has been ditched for ‘looking after number one’. Alcohol and drug abuse are on the rise. Youngsters carry knives. Family life is disintegrating. Sexual mores have hit an all-time low.

Let’s get back to good old ‘British values’, he went on.

But what exactly does that mean? Time was when British society could claim to be based broadly on Christian values. The Ten Commandments and the teaching of Jesus provided the framework for how people lived their lives. Sure, many had no active Christian faith of their own. They were not even churchgoers, but they adhered without question to the broad guidelines of ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ and ‘do to others as you would have them do to you’.

You could say they were living off the ‘spiritual capital’ built up by previous generations whose more active Christian faith had put plenty into the bank. But they no longer talked of ‘Christian values’. Like the ranting politician, anxious not to tread on any toes, they called them ‘British values’.

Lots of folk in Britain continue to live off that capital. Most have never given any thought as to why they live by the standards they do. They just aim to ‘do the right thing’, drawing on the diminishing reserves in the bank with no awareness that the balance is getting ever lower. And one day, unless something is done about it, the capital will run out.

For myself, I want to put something into the account. As far as I can see, the only way of doing that is by living out an active Christian faith, not a passive capital-draining one—being serious about what I believe, putting it into everyday practice, and being proactive in sharing the ‘good news of the gospel’ with others.

I don’t want my epitaph to be, ‘He spent his kids’ inheritance.’

Audiobook versions of my books!

Since my two free ebooks, A Poke In The Faith and Signposts to God, were made available online, I have had quite a few requests for audiobook versions. It seems that a growing number of people now prefer to listen rather than read, often while out walking the dog or driving to work.

I’m delighted to announce that you can now do this with both of the books, which have been narrated by yours truly in his impeccable Yorkshire accent!

It has been a fascinating project. My son Peter, who is experienced in producing podcasts and videos for his Meaningful Money platform, lent me a good-quality Rode microphone and I set it up in my ‘sound studio’. That’s something of a euphemism, as it consisted of a pillow propped up at either side of my PC monitor! I used the amazing free program Audacity for the recording and editing, picking up some tips from YouTube on how to maximise the output quality for audiobook production.

Anyway, the job’s done — to a good standard, I’m assured — and you can access the files here.

Any standard audiobook player can handle the ‘proper’ whole-book file (m4b format). The advantage is that you can rewind, insert bookmarks, change the speed etc. I use Sirin, which is available free for both Android and Apple devices (see the screenshot of my Samsung tablet). I’m not an Audible subscriber myself (that’s the Amazon audiobook subscription service), but the web assures me you can use it to listen to non-Audible m4b format files like mine.

As you will see if you visit my website, I have also made the individual chapter-files of both books available in mp3 format, which any computer or device can play without any problems.

I continue to hear from people who have been blessed and encouraged by both books in their written form, so hopefully these audio versions will enable even more to get some help from them. I’d be grateful for anything you can do to make the books’ availability known. They are entirely free of charge. And I’m always happy to deal with any questions they may throw up — though I can’t guarantee always to have answers!

Happy reading — and happy listening!

God with his feet on the ground

Human beings are all religious—including atheists.

Our yearning for a spiritual ‘connection’ comes out in different ways. Many go in search of deep, universal principles, like ‘oneness’ or ‘balance’, and try to work them out in everyday life. There is a place for those but, as I see it, there’s an inescapable vagueness about them. Principles are, by nature, fuzzy at the edges—and often all the way through. That can’t satisfy us humans who, because we are embodied as well as having a mind and emotions, need something a bit more concrete.

Some try to give the principles a bit of personality by pinning them onto this or that god or goddess. But we all suspect, deep down, that the likes of Vishnu and Freya have no objective existence. They are deity-pegs for human hopes, fears and aspirations, but they remain, like ghosts, always out of focus and beyond our grasp. And we don’t cope well with that level of frustration. A god in the hand is worth two in the ether.

I bumped into a neighbour recently, who told me had had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and had only months, rather than years, to live. ‘Are you a man of faith?’ I asked him. ‘No,’ he replied quickly, ‘but I have my philosophies.’ I haven’t seen him since. I pray for him daily, and wonder how his philosophies are sustaining him through this, the most challenging time of his life.

The Christian God I worship and serve is massively different! He has his feet on the ground. He operates in real places, in real time.

Place-wise, I’m here in my study in Penzance, Cornwall; you’re somewhere else on Planet Earth reading this. If God can’t be real to us where we are, we’re in the dark. Time-wise, we are both in the ‘now’. Some have argued that God is ‘beyond time’, which may be true at one level. But he has set time in motion, and delights to operate within it. That’s because his desire is to relate intimately with human beings, and the earth they live on. And since we are both earth-bound and time-bound, he graciously deigns to operate in the real world and within real time. He’s the God who deals with us where we are now.

He has always been that way. On that basis we can look at human history, see its linear nature, and believe that it is leading somewhere—somewhere good because this God, whose fundamental nature is self-giving love, has declared that to be his aim.

A bird’s-eye view of history shows something like this: God made human beings to live in a close relationship with him, acting as his vice-regents in caring for the good earth he made for them. Their vocation was to export his blessings worldwide. Sadly, they chose to abuse the freedom he gave them, and things turned sour, producing the messed-up world we are all familiar with.

In real time, God began to fix things. He started by revealing himself, around 2000 BC, to a pagan named Abraham, and to his descendants, who became the nation of ancient Israel. They were called to live under God’s benign rule and be ‘a light for the nations’, that is the Gentiles. They were to be God’s shop-window to draw them in and achieve his aim of a whole world living in harmonious relationship with himself. Israel failed, becoming inward-looking and wayward. They ended up exiled and scattered.

But God stuck to his plan of putting the world to rights through them, and did the almost unthinkable: he took humanity on himself in the person of Jesus—Israel’s Messiah and the ‘representative Jew’—and got his hands dirty in the muck of human sin, degradation and cruelty. He did that here, in real time, in the real world! You can’t get more ‘feet on the ground’ than that. To me, this is a daily source of joy and wonder, prompting the occasional ‘Whoopee!’, because it’s a million miles away from airy-fairy ‘principles’, floaty pseudo-deities and vague philosophies. Let’s have a cheer for the incarnation!

The ultimate ‘down to earth’ event was, of course, the crucifixion. It saw all humanity’s dark side of sin and viciousness absorbed by Jesus into himself and fully dealt with. Then, three days later, came the resurrection. And yes, I believe in that wholeheartedly! Right here, in the midst of real people in real situations, it truly happened. Not just ‘in the minds of the disciples’ but bodily, literally and truly, with elements of both continuity and discontinuity with the body in which Jesus died.

The Jews had always believed, taught by God, that there would be a universal resurrection of the dead at the ‘last day’. It would mark the transition from the ‘old age’ of brokenness and sin to the ‘new age’ where God would at last see fulfilled his original goal of a love-filled relationship with his creation. Jesus’ surprise rising—in the middle of history rather than at the end—was the ‘firstfruits of the harvest’, a token that it would indeed happen in due course, and in real time, for the rest of us.

Meanwhile, at his ascension Jesus took the throne, so to speak, and invites you and me to side with him to help mend his broken world as we live under his direction. He gives his powerful Holy Spirit to all who pledge their allegiance to him, along with the deep assurance that their sins are forgiven and that they are at one with the loving Father.

What’s more, because history is linear, we are assured that, in due time, Jesus will intervene personally to complete the mending of God’s broken creation. The promised kingdom of God will arrive at last in its fulness, and we will see the earth bursting into the full beauty, harmony and joy that he always intended for it. Today, we live in the ‘overlap of the ages’. Thanks to Jesus’ death and resurrection, the new age has got its foot in the door and we can savour a foretaste of its banquet here and now. But the ‘old age’ is still active, with all its conflict and pain. Roll on the day when, at Jesus’ coming, it will end forever and the marvellous ‘age to come’ dawn in its completeness.

If we die in the meantime, we can trust God to take care of us. But ‘going to heaven when you die’ is certainly not what being a Christian is all about. It will be just a stopover, a ‘room at the inn’ until the kingdom comes and, with renewed bodies like that of Jesus after his resurrection, we will enjoy what the Bible calls the ‘new heaven and new earth’ forever. God’s dimension and ours permanently united. Endless fulfilment, challenge, fellowship and creativity. What a prospect!

Till then, life goes on for us on this dear old Earth that is our home. Yes, I know; earth is a tiny speck in the vastness of the universe. But God set it up as a home for humankind and made it the incredibly beautiful place it remains in spite of the dark side’s current effects. He operates in it here and now. This is what I mean by ‘God with his feet on the ground’: he works amid the concrete realities of what is. Today is today. This is Earth; you’re alive on it; you’re trying to make sense of it all. God is at work, sorting it all out. It’s God you’re after!

Such is the delightfully down-to-earth conviction that keeps me going. It gives every part of my life focus, purpose and exhilaration. And something concretely positive to share with others—which, I suppose, is one reason I’ve just written this. If you’ve had a bellyful of Christianity’s caricatures, try and look beyond all that to the fundamentals of the faith and see—and hopefully embrace—the feet-on-the-ground ‘good news’ that Jesus truly represents.

If you feel up to exploring it further, you’re welcome to download and read my free ebook, Signposts To God, which is available here.

 

The Lost

I was brought up, in a Christian home and church, to pray for ‘the lost’.

What did that mean? Looking back, I think it was a synonym for ‘the doomed’. In the simplistic ‘heaven or hell’ Christianity prevalent in those days I was taught that all that mattered was what happens when you die. And those were the twin alternatives, with ‘the lost’ being the hell-bound ones. And the single factor governing your destiny was whether or not you had ‘accepted Christ as your personal Saviour’ this side of dying.

Today, in my old age, I consider this an alarmingly simplistic view of things, raising far more questions than it answers and reflecting, in my view, neither the overall scenario of the Bible nor the historic Christian faith. It’s no surprise, then, that I see ‘the lost’ in a different way these days.

Lostness is not about the future; it’s about here and now. It’s simple: if you’re lost, you don’t know where you are.

Here’s a seven-year-old girl in town with her mother, shopping on a busy Saturday morning. She lets go of Mum’s hand at some point and, the next moment, she has lost sight of her. She looks around frantically, but none of her familiar markers is anywhere to be seen. Everything is frighteningly unfamiliar. Crowds of strangers all doing their own thing, nobody she knows, nothing recognisable at all. Panic sets in. That’s what it is to be lost, and it’s horrible.

That’s provided you know you are lost, of course. It’s possible to be lost and not know it. The little girl may, for the first few moments, be attracted by something on display in a shop window and be temporarily caught up in the interest of it. Not until she realises Mum is no longer at her side does the horror of lostness hit her.

In the greater scheme of things, it is God, revealed in Jesus, who is Mum’s equivalent, for all of us. He alone is the ultimate reassurance, the great stabilising factor that give human life meaning, steadiness, peace and direction. Augustine was right: ‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.’

If we know God, we can never be lost. Yes, we ourselves may wander off sometimes, but he has promised, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’ The initiative is his, and he holds us always at his side, safe and secure.

‘The lost’, then, are all those who, sadly, don’t enjoy that assurance. Some of them still don’t know they are lost. They are caught up in the immediate fascination of some focus or other: work, a hobby, travel, their family tree, sport, or whatever. These good and worthwhile things, however, aren’t capable of meeting our deepest needs; they may provide temporary interest, but not lasting security.

Other people come to the terrifying realisation that they are indeed lost—without bearings, meaning, direction or hope for the future—and look around desperately for something to ease the pain. Despairing of ever being ‘found’, they may get into drink or drugs, hoping for the best as they sink slowly towards despair or self-destruction. It’s a tragic scenario and breaks the heart of the Father who longs for them to come to his embrace.

That’s why I still pray daily for ‘the lost’. At the same time, I sensitively seek to let the ones I meet know that there is a God who loves them unconditionally, and I tell them he wants to become the polestar by which they can navigate their lives in confidence. Their ‘eternal destiny’ is secondary; I prefer to leave that in his capable hands.

I just want my heavenly Father—like the one in the parable of the Prodigal Son—to be able to say of each one of them, here and now, ‘This son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’

P.S.  If you yourself feel ‘lost’ and want to find the security of your heavenly Father, reading my free e-book, Signposts to God, might help you. You can download it HERE.

Review: Paul was not a Christian

Yes, the title is clearly meant to prod you into alertness. But the author—who is a Jewish university professor at a Christian university—actually means it, so this book is going to hold your interest, for sure! It is:

Paul Was Not a Christian: The original message of a misunderstood apostle by Pamela Eisenbaum (HarperCollins, 2009)

Eisenbaum maintains, convincingly, that Paul’s encounter with the risen Jesus on the Damascus road, never caused him to renounce his Jewish identity or his adherence to Torah—the Jewish law. By his encounter he was ‘called’, rather than ‘converted to Christianity’, because at the time Christianity as a distinct faith did not yet exist.

What Paul’s experience did was make him realise that God’s time had come for the ingathering of the nations, in accordance with his ancient promises to Abraham and the words of the prophets, and that he himself, Paul, was being called to be God’s instrument, as the ‘apostle to the Gentiles’, to bring it about.

The book chooses to look at Paul only through the seven letters widely accepted by scholars as written personally by him—Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon—and to largely disregard the portrait of him in the Book of Acts whose author, Luke, probably never met Paul.

Several chapters explore various social and religious aspects of the Judaism of Paul’s day, including Jewish sects, notably the Pharisees, because Paul was one. It shows that typical Christian views have become seriously skewed, especially since the Reformation.

Paul’s maintenance of his own Jewish orientation opens the door for the author to re-evaluate some Christian doctrines traditionally seen as core ones, notably justification by faith and original sin. Eisenbaum agrees wholeheartedly, for example, with the conviction of scholars embracing the ‘new perspective on Paul’ that the Greek phrase rendered ‘faith in Jesus Christ’ should be ‘the faithfulness of Jesus Christ’ to his Father’s calling. She looks in similar detail at the phrase ‘the righteousness of God’ and scrutinises key passages like Romans 9-11.

I find her arguments for the most part sincere, clearly presented and persuasive—but I already shared some of them anyway. Some questions remain, however. The ‘two-ways salvation’ she proposes—at least in the form she presents it—must be questioned. And the church canonised what she regards as the pseudonymous letters of Paul, so we cannot ignore them completely. As for the doctrines that emerged from the Reformation, if her rejection of them is news to you, you may need to chew on Eisenbaum’s proposals for a while before you feel able to swallow them.

But, overall, there is plenty that is thought-provoking, and even nourishing, in her work..

[Here is a selection of quotations, with page numbers]

The traditional story of Paul looks something like this: Paul was originally a zealous Jew who was persecuting the church, until something utterly miraculous happened: the resurrected Jesus appeared to him. This revelation led to Paul’s conversion from Judaism to Christianity, from being a zealous Pharisee to being an unstoppable preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Once converted, he realized the futility of Judaism, with its endless demands of the law, and rejected it.  (p2)

Sure Paul was a Jew; he himself said so (see Gal 1:13, 2:15). Virtually any book on Paul that one might pick up in a bookstore will tell you that Paul was Jewish. But it is usually only mentioned in passing, by way of introduction and background perhaps. In fact, Paul is overwhelmingly called Christian by people who write about him.  (p5)

Ironically, Paul is especially emphatic about his Jewish identity in Galatians, the letter often regarded as the most anti-Jewish of Paul’s writings.  (p6)

Paul’s belief in Jesus did not make him less Jewish. Belief in a messianic savior figure is a very Jewish idea.  (p8)

Paul is portrayed as a missionary preacher and teacher in Acts. But his speeches often come at dramatic moments in the narrative—including passionate defenses of himself during trial—thus making the Paul of Acts a larger-than-life character and, ultimately, a more compelling figure for biography than the Paul who can be gleaned from the pieces of information in the letters.  (p11)

[One] problem in reading the apostle’s letters is that Paul sometimes appears to contradict himself. He makes statements about Jewish law that seem to be unequivocal condemnations. At other times, he expresses unmitigated praise for it.  (p27)

How is it that Paul claimed that one cannot be justified by works of the law and yet also said—right there in Romans, the document that contains Paul’s most profound, most influential discourse on the doctrine of justification by faith—that it is the doers of the law who will be justified? Any interpretation that does not make sense of both kinds of claims does not do justice to Paul.  (p30)

Even though there were differing images of Paul in the early church, eventually one biographical portrait of Paul came to dominate the collective consciousness of Christianity: Paul the convert.  (p38)

Paul does not use the language of conversion of himself in his undisputed writings. He never even uses the language of repentance in reference to himself. Paul only uses such language to coax his Gentile followers to repentance. To be sure, Paul refers to his having persecuted the church prior to his encounter with the risen Jesus. But this appears to be the only prior behavior of which Paul feels shame. In all of his autobiographical reflections, Paul portrays himself as sinless.  (p42)

…Augustine, who may be credited more than anyone else with solidifying the image of Paul the convert in Christian tradition.  (p43)

In the twentieth century another trajectory of interpretation began to emerge. Although initially ill formed and still very much a perspective in progress, it has evolved into the great challenge to the existing paradigm—a challenge on two fronts: that Paul did not reject his Jewish identity because Judaism was a religion of works, and that justification by faith is not the gospel Paul preached, both of which undergird the argument of this book.  (p54)

As theologians and scholars began to reflect on the past from a post-holocaust perspective, some called for a critical re-evaluation of Christian anti-Judaism. At the center of this effort were a handful of Protestant biblical scholars who pioneered something that would eventually be labeled the “new perspective” on Paul.  (p59)

Since only Jews are commanded to be circumcised, Gentiles are following the will of God by not being circumcised. I would paraphrase 1 Corinthians 7:19 as follows: “When Jews are circumcised and Gentiles remain uncircumcised, both are following the will of God, so neither group can claim superiority by virtue of the practice (or nonpractice) of circumcision.”  (p62)

P. Sanders’ 1977 book, Paul and Palestinian Judaism… served to demonstrate that when Jewish literature was allowed to speak for itself, unaffected by the polemics of the New Testament and other early Christian writings, Judaism hardly appeared as the legalistic system of works-righteousness that Christian scholars had for so long assumed it to be. (p63)

In spite of the semantic variation, the best way to capture the range of meanings contained in the word “Torah” in English is to understand it as teaching or instruction, that is, God’s instruction… What may be most important for modern Christian readers to understand is that Torah constitutes the covenant between God and the people.  (p75)

Overwhelmingly, Jews did not perceive an irresolvable conflict between “grace” and “works” that would plague Christian theologians of later centuries.  (p80)

The characterization of Jewish law as the expression of virtues to which any human being could or should aspire is an idea expressed in numerous Jewish texts of the era.  (p84)

Ancient Judaism is not what one would call a religion of salvation. This is perhaps the most fundamental misconception that informs the Christian view of ancient Judaism.  P88)

As E. P. Sanders argued thirty years ago, the vast majority of Jewish sources from the time of Paul understand that participation in the covenant is salvation.  (p91)

The idea that early Judaism (or later Judaism, for that matter) promulgated the notion of salvation by works is a Christian misunderstanding. Salvation is not conceived as something earned, but something graciously granted to all who enjoy participation in the covenant.  (p94)

The image of Jewish communities dedicating themselves to maintaining impregnable ramparts and walls of steel so as to keep themselves segregated from the rest of humanity is both historically false and insidious in its stereotyping of Jews and Judaism. Therefore Paul’s interaction with Gentiles should not be seen as the radical step it is typically perceived to be.  (p115)

I suspect that it may come as a surprise when I say that the gospel writers view the Pharisees as too lenient—a surprise precisely because the Christian stereotype of the Pharisees is that they are legalistic and literalistic, following every precept of the Torah to an exacting degree.  (p120)

It is not necessary to see Paul’s Damascus road experience as the point of origin for the apostle’s more creative interpretations of Scripture. His more adaptive teachings on Torah as apostle to the Gentiles were most likely learned while he was a Pharisee.  (p131)

[Re Galatians 1:11-17 and Philippians 3:2-9]  Many anachronistic assumptions are made when reading Paul’s text… most significantly that there exists something called “Christianity” to which Paul had the option of converting. At this point in history, however, Christianity does not yet exist as a separate and distinct religion.  (p135)

If Paul is sincere—and I see no reason to think he isn’t—when he says he counts all his Jewish privileges and credentials as a loss, then they must be things people ordinarily count as valuable. If Paul considered his past life one of sin and degradation, then he would not call giving up that life a loss; on the contrary, giving up that kind of a life would count as a gain.  (p140)

There is no evidence that Paul’s Jewish identity is any less robust, or any less intact after his encounter with the risen Jesus than it was before.  (p142)

As several scholars have recently demonstrated, when Paul subsequently went around proclaiming Jesus as Lord, his message was anti-Imperial. Thus, Paul turned from persecutor to persecutee because he turned from having a complacent attitude toward the Romans to preaching a message of defiance.  (p146)

His perspective is limited by who he is, a Jew whose historical context is the Greco-Roman world, and he holds certain biases based on that identity, some of which are rather distasteful. Even his openness to Gentiles had limits. In his biases toward others, Paul is a typical Jew.  (p150)

Paul maintained a Jewish value system throughout his life. Paul’s belief in Jesus did not lead him to adopt a radically new system of values. It led him to tweak his existing one, but the essential principles of a recognizably Jewish value system are still intact.  (p154)

Readers assume that Jewish Scripture already has effectively become the “Old Testament” for Paul, divested of its authority because of the coming of Christ. Its only purpose is to point to Jesus as the Christ. Nothing could be further from the truth.  (p169)

In extremely simple terms, Paul objects to the appropriation of the Mosaic law by Gentiles, whether that appropriation is motivated by Gentiles who express a heartfelt desire to undertake Torah observance or because of some sort of coercion by other Jewish teachers. There is not a single instance in which Paul condemns circumcision or food laws or any other specifically Jewish laws as practiced by Jews (whether those Jews follow Jesus or not). Every single derisive remark about circumcision, for instance, is a condemnation of any endeavor by Gentiles to circumcise.  (p170)

The question is, if Paul did not write a systematic theology, can one identify a coherent message from reading his letters? Along with Christiaan Beker, I believe the answer is yes and that the framework that provides this coherence is Jewish Apocalyptic.  (p172)

In contrast to the traditional view, I assert that the most important theological force motivating Paul’s mission was a thoroughgoing commitment to Jewish monotheism and how to bring the nations of the world to that realization as history draws to a close. In simple terms, Paul is motivated by his faith in God, whom he believes has charged him with a prophetic mission to Gentiles. Christ is an essential part of the prophetic message, but Christ is not the primary cause from which we can explain all subsequent effects that manifest themselves in the apostle’s life and work; God is. In theological terms, Paul’s theology is fundamentally not christocentric; it is theocentric.  (p173)

Paul’s tendency to refer to God as the God who raised Jesus indicates that the phrase functioned as an explanatory epithet that was helpful in distinguishing Paul’s God—the one, true, living God—from all the other gods floating around in Greco-Roman culture.  (p189)

Every instance in which the phrase “faith in Christ” (or its variants) appears in the undisputed letters would be better translated “faithfulness of Christ.”  (p191)

The most literal translation of pistis iesou christou is “faithfulness of Jesus Christ”… Nevertheless, the phrase is consistently rendered “faith in Jesus Christ” in English translations. Why don’t English translations render the phrase as the “faithfulness of Jesus Christ”? The historical answer is that the tradition of English translation has been deeply influenced by the debates that defined the Reformation. Martin Luther’s German translation has been especially influential here.  (p192)

Paul’s experience of Jesus led him to believe he was witnessing the first manifestations of the eschaton.  (p198)

Paul emphasizes Abraham’s divinely promised role as the father of a multitude of nations, instead of the father of the Jewish people in particular.  (p201)

Through his preaching, Paul makes willing Gentiles legitimate members of Abraham’s family, which is the equivalent of making them children of God. By informing Gentiles of the blessings promised to Abraham and his seed, they become heirs of the divine promises, and Paul, as the bestower of the inheritance, has become their father. Insofar as Paul establishes this newly constituted family of God, he functions as a founding father, just like Abraham.  (p202)

The emphasis for Paul both in Galatians and Romans, is not on the way Gentiles can be like Abraham if they emulate his faith; rather, it is on their existing relatedness to him, which they are now entitled to claim because of Christ. Once they recognize their relatedness, they will in fact display similar characteristics to their father Abraham; they will renounce idolatry and become monotheists.  (p204)

The “doctrine” of justification by faith is a product of the Reformation; it is not inherent in Paul’s letters, even if Reformation theologians are indebted to Paul for the idea.  (p204)

[Re Galatians 3:6-9]  If Paul meant to say “those who believe” are the children of Abraham, surely he wouldn’t have used the obtuse phrase hoi ek pisteos when there are so many common alternatives, which he uses whenever that is what he means. Paul’s choice of words in Galatians 3:7 and 9 indicates that he is not here speaking of the personal belief of individuals but of an external source of faith from which others derive benefit. It is not the believers’ own faith to which Paul refers in this passage but most likely Abraham’s faith. Being a descendant of Abraham entitles one to certain benefits, namely, receiving the blessings God promised to Abraham and his descendants, as Paul reminds his audience in v. 8. This interpretation is corroborated by Romans 4:16, in which the expression to ek pisteos Abraam appears, which means “those descended from the faith of Abraham.”  (p206)

The theological dichotomy between works and faith was taken by Protestant Christians as so self-evidently true that it became a kind of standard of measure for assessing the spiritual value of religion in general, as well as any particular religion.  (p211)

Readers have largely presumed that Paul’s embrace of Christ necessarily involves a rejection of Torah, and so they have read his letters through this lens.  (p212)

The majority of modern readers do not even realize that Paul makes as many positive statements about the law as negative ones, because scholars and religious leaders have largely ignored them.  (p213)

It is difficult for readers to read Paul without the lenses of the Reformation, that is, without assuming that Paul is all about justification by faith and that justification by faith is the theological opposite of justification by (works of) the law. The new perspective has made progress toward seeing Paul differently, but its explanation of the problem as Jewish ethnocentrism still falls short.  (p216)

Paul’s audience is made up of Gentiles, so everything he says about law applies to Gentiles, unless specified otherwise.  (p216)

When Paul says, “It is clear that no one is justified before God by the law, for ‘the righteous one shall live by the faithfulness’” (Gal 3:11, citing Hab 2:4), he does indeed mean all people—Jews and Gentiles alike—are made righteous by faithfulness, but his point is that Jews always stood righteous before God because of God’s faithfulness to the covenant, not because Israel observed the law in perfect obedience.  (p218)

Torah is for Jews but provides a standard for all.  (p219)

For Jewish thinkers, who pondered the nature of cosmic redemption, the status of Gentiles would eventually need to be solved. Typically this vision took one of two forms: either the nations would be condemned for their bad behavior—their worship of other gods and their persecution of Israel—or they would be reconciled to God in the final ingathering of the nations, as we discussed earlier. Paul obviously subscribes to the latter vision.  (p223)

Paul understands Torah to be God’s provision for humanity to be in relationship with God. It is given to the Jews, due to their election, but because it is integral to the natural order of God’s created universe, some Gentiles were able to follow it. Torah thus was God’s answer for how humanity could be in relationship with God. It was a divine system. Since Gentiles could not follow it, God had to find an extrasystemic means of incorporating Gentiles into God’s family. That extrasystemic means was Jesus Christ.  (p224)

The law is not meant to condemn humanity; it serves a positive pedagogical function.  (p224)

The doing of good works is not the opposite of having faith.  (p233)

When Paul claims that justification cannot come from works of the law, it means that the Torah does not benefit Gentiles, at least not in the way it benefits Jews. Whereas once it surely would have been of benefit to them, that is no longer the case because the final judgment is imminent. Put in simple terms, it is too late. So that now, because Gentiles are outsiders to the Torah, it cannot provide the grace they need to stand before God, righteous, at the final judgment.  (p234)

Paul does not literally see in humanity hopeless depravity. Not everyone is the same kind of evildoer. Not everyone has fallen into such moral turpitude as to be incapable of doing anything good. Paul is exaggerating the situation in Romans 3:10–18 much as the psalmists (whom he’s quoting) did.  (p235)

[Re Romans 2:12-13]  If a person’s deeds matter, how do we account for Paul’s saying that one cannot be justified by “works of law”? The broad answer is that Paul thought about faith, works, and grace as part of an integrated theological vision for how one relates to God.  (p237)

When Luther chose to add the word “alone” to Romans 1:17, so that it read “the one who is righteous shall live by faith alone,” he imposed an opposition between works and faith into the theology of Paul that is not otherwise there.  (p238)

The Pauline notion of justification by faith does not mean that one is justified by one’s own faith in Jesus; rather, Jesus’ faithfulness puts right Gentiles and incorporates them into the family of God.  (p240)

Just as Abraham and the patriarchs’ great acts of faithfulness enabled Israel to enjoy God’s grace through the merit of the fathers, so, too, Jesus’ faithfulness means that God will look favorably upon the nations and not hold them accountable for their accumulated sin.  (p241)

The death and resurrection of Jesus has achieved the reconciliation between Gentiles and God that was envisioned by Israel’s prophets. To put it boldly, Jesus saves, but he only saves Gentiles. By that I do not mean that Paul believed that Jesus is irrelevant for Jews. Paul hoped his fellow Jews would eventually recognize the cosmic significance of Jesus as marking the beginning of the messianic age. But the significance was not that Jews needed to be saved from their sins. The efficacy of Jesus’ sacrificial death was for the forgiveness of the sins of the nations.  (p242)

Paul’s point is simply that while Jews’ possession of Torah enabled them to stay in good stead with God, this is not true of Gentiles. What the Torah does for Jews, Jesus does for Gentiles.  (p244)

Paul’s message is that God has now extended grace to Gentiles. The apostle’s pounding on about grace is not because he himself had never experienced God’s grace as a Pharisee and he found it in his experience of Jesus. Paul knew of grace firsthand as a member of Israel, and now that history was coming to its cataclysmic end, Paul wanted to extend the same grace Israel had enjoyed to Gentiles.  (p247)

For those who want an answer to the question, Does Paul really think there are two ways [Torah for Jews, Jesus for Gentiles] to salvation? my answer is yes, for those who see Paul from within the traditional paradigm; it is no for those in the new paradigm.

The starting assumption of the new paradigm is that it is not about personal salvation. Paul’s letter to the Romans is not an answer to the question, How can I be saved? Rather, it is his answer to the question, How will the world be redeemed, and how do I faithfully participate in that redemption?  (p252)

Luther, and millions of Christians since, may have seen Romans as the answer to the question, How can I be saved? But that is not Paul’s question. Paul’s question is, Now that the end of time is at hand, how will God reconcile all people, Jews and Gentiles, collectively?  (p253)

Paul does not collapse Jew and Gentile into one generic mass of humanity. All will be kin; none will be strangers, but the Gentile will not become Jew, and the Jew will not become Gentile.  (p254)

• I have done a synopsis of this book, which you can read here.

Sharing the faith?

Evangelism seems to be slipping out of fashion.

In my youth it was the Number One thing. At church we were regularly reminded of Jesus’ ‘Great Commission’ to ‘go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.’

Looking back, our approach was a bit narrow, in that we saw it exclusively as governing a person’s ‘eternal destiny’. If, through our evangelistic efforts, they ‘accepted Jesus as their personal Saviour’, they would go to heaven when they died and thus be OK. If they didn’t, they would end up in eternal conscious torment in the other place. Our evangelism, therefore, focused on getting them to make that crucial, destiny-shaping ‘decision for Christ’.

Happily, this scenario gradually broadened a bit. Some of us began to see that, for many folk, engaging with the claims of Jesus was no instant decision. It was more of a journey of understanding that might take some years. Others, raised from babyhood in church could honestly say that they had always loved Christ and wanted to please him in everything. All this blurred the edges of the rigid ‘in or out’ distinction, and we came to realise that when the apostle Paul says, ‘The Lord knows those who are his’, he implies that we ourselves don’t.

But the underlying compulsion to introduce people to Jesus remained, and most of the Christians in my circles took every opportunity to make him known. Quite right, too.

That extended to people of other religions. If you had a Buddhist neighbour, a Muslim work colleague or a contact devoted to some pagan goddess, you felt the need to enlighten them. We were assured that Jesus declared, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No-one comes to the Father except through me’, which we took to mean that all these other ‘ways’ were dead ends. Indeed, to most of my Christian friends they were a total deception, demonic in origin. It was all very black and white; no shades of grey at all. There were no glimmers of eternal truth in any of those religious alternatives.

We assumed, too, that before a person could benefit from Jesus as the ‘only way’ to God they had to know about him in detail and deliberately commit their life to him. It never entered our heads that maybe, in the pursuit of their own religion, God might meet them on the strength of what Jesus accomplished, in spite of their being ignorant of it. Nowadays, I’m sure he does just that. I’m happy to see people taking any religion seriously. It shows that they are admitting to the universal human longing to find and know God. And that can be a valuable common ground as I tell them about my own faith in Jesus.

It came as a shock to discover, as the years passed, that some Christians took this principle much further. They insisted we should never try to turn people to Christ, but leave them to find God through their own religion. Can that be right?

I can’t honestly think so. Christianity has always been a ‘missionary’ faith. Spurred by Jesus’ Great Commission, his followers down the centuries have reached out to those of other religions or none and unashamedly taught the truth about Jesus and urged people to embrace him. Paul, preaching to the Athenians in Acts chapter 17, called them to forsake the religion he described as ‘such ignorance’. Elsewhere, he rejoiced that the Thessalonians had ‘turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God.’

But Paul wasn’t ham-fisted about it. He showed himself both sensitive to and respectful of the religions he was steering them away from. His tone with the Athenians was straight but peaceable. He acknowledged their seeking after God. He didn’t bash them over the head with Bible quotations, but instead quoted some of their own poets. He didn’t threaten them with hell-fire. But he didn’t water down the call to respond to God’s love in Christ, and some responded.

Many others have followed in his footsteps down the centuries. As I write this, the Lectio365 morning devotional is following the steps of the seventh-century Celtic missionary, St Aidan, an Irish monk who travelled from Lindisfarne to convert the Anglo-Saxons of Northumbria to faith in Jesus. He did it at great personal cost, all because he believed that true life could only be experienced in faith-union with him. I suspect he was as wise and sensitive as the apostle Paul in his approach, resulting in similar success.

Not all were like that. Years ago I read Melvin Bragg’s great novel, Credo, which tells the story of St Hilda of Whitby. She was a contemporary of Aidan. A key element in the novel is her strained relationship with the local pagan ‘wise woman’ or witch. How true to life Bragg’s portrayal is I don’t know, but I was left with the feeling that Hilda could have been a good deal more accommodating of her and her pagan religion than she was. They both, after all, were seekers after God, and I think they could have found a lot of common ground on which to share their respective ideas. Instead, Hilda maintained a frosty stand-off.

Since her day, Christians in every era have been keen to go and proclaim Christ to people ignorant of him and his claims. Sadly, some got caught up in rampant colonialism or cultural domination, causing the message about Jesus to be polluted. But most missionaries were pure-hearted and self-sacrificial in their enterprise. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a surge. One thinks of John Wesley, David Livingstone (Africa) and Hudson Taylor (China), typical of thousands more whose desire to make Christ known took them to every corner of the world.

So, where does all this leave us? What might sharing our faith mean today?

I would like to see it unlocked from the ‘eternal destiny’ connection. It’s a poor gospel that is just fire insurance for the world to come, and many Christians no longer subscribe to hell à la Dante’s Inferno anyway. I’m convinced that the ‘perishing’ and ‘eternal life’ in John 3:16 are as much to do with this present life as the life to come. We proclaim Jesus to people because he is the key to the most fulfilled life here and now. Coming to know God through him is like the sun coming out on a dull day.

Certainly, heaven and hell as the twin alternatives for the afterlife are up for debate. The New Testament presents the ‘new heavens and new earth’ as the great future prospect to look forward to—the kingdom of God in its full flowering. Dante’s Inferno has no sound biblical underpinning. And I can’t accept that death is the cut-off point after which one’s ‘eternal destiny’ is forever sealed. Christians down the centuries have held that God’s love reaches out endlessly to those who choose to back away from him. At the end of the Bible, even after the questionably-named ‘final judgment’, the gates of the eternal city stand open and the call goes out to the dry and thirsty to ‘come’ and ‘take the water of life without price’. It’s never too late. But how much better to begin enjoying the blessings here and now, in this present life! That’s missionary motive enough.

Then we have to prioritise the ‘respect’ factor. I’ve curled up with embarrassment at some forms of so-called evangelism that have made people feel like inferior outsiders deserving to be smitten by the Almighty. That’s no way to win anybody over. Let’s love and respect them, regardless of who or what they are, just as Jesus himself did.

This needs to extend to their existing beliefs. If you are talking to a Muslim, for instance, you might helpfully concede that Mohammed, in turning the people of his day from polytheistic paganism to monotheism, was in some sense a valid prophet. At the same time, we need to be frank about issues where we know there will be disagreement. As I have written in my book, A Poke In The Faith:

‘…if we meet, say, a Muslim, should we hold back from stating our conviction that Jesus is the eternal Son of God, that he was crucified, and that he rose from the dead—all of which Islam strenuously denies? No, we can’t hold back. We might perhaps be more sensitive than normal in the way we present these things, but present them in due course we surely must.’ (p283)

Yes, we are still called to share our faith. The Great Commission is still in force, and we who love Jesus need to remember that he said, ‘If you love me, keep my commands.’ Evangelism is not optional.

But let’s be sure to share our faith with love, grace, sensitivity and respect. Angry tub-thumping finger-waggers will succeed only in turning people away from the Lord we love and serve.

Review: A major work on deconstruction

In case you didn’t know, huge number of Christians, particularly in the West, are either having serious questions about the faith they have been schooled in, or are ditching it altogether. Many books address the phenomenon—commonly known as ‘deconstruction’—and this is one of them. It is:

Out of the Embers: Faith after the Great Deconstruction by Bradley Jersak (Whitaker House, 2022).

Jersak is a Canadian theologian and one-time pastor, who has been through a harrowing deconstruction of his own, including a nervous breakdown and suicidal thoughts. But he has emerged from it all with a Jacob-like limp, to love and serve Christ with a newfound energy and simplicity. So, intellectual that he is, he writes with depth and passion and not just as a theorist. He is sympathetic to his readers, too, understanding that everyone’s experience of deconstruction in unique.

He chooses to look at the subject under five broad categories: Be-leaving (parting company with one’s church family); Liberation (escaping prison-like restriction); Trauma (suffering serious mental and spiritual injury); Purgation (allowing our experience to rid us of unhealthy attachments); and Illumination (choosing to turn towards the light of God in the midst of the turmoil). Each section is tellingly illustrated with real-life cases.

But, unusually for books on this topic, his focus is not exclusively on personal deconstruction. He is well aware that, across the world, whole societies are undergoing major deconstruction, and he addresses this issue, too, to provide a context for our personal experiences. He does so using the famous story of the ‘seven sleepers’ of Ephesus. The ‘prophets’ he references under this figure are Moses (as a basis for apophatic theology), Plato, Voltaire, Kirkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Simone Weil, all of whom, in their own way, saw into the future to what is happening today in the deconstruction of the worldview of societies, foreseeing movements such as nihilism and existentialism.

The majority of Christians grappling with personal faith-deconstruction may well not be too interested in these broader societal aspects. But their experience will have been touched by them whether they realise it or not, and Jersak’s decision to include a treatment of them will no doubt be of real help to those willing to examine his analysis.

In drawing his work to a close, Jersak draws encouragement from some figures from history who came through a period of deep spiritual adversity, showing the way forward: Ann Roza, Blandina of Lyon, Lydia Grammakova and Howard Thurman. Their stories are inspiring and will give you hope, if you yourself are struggling. In Christ, there is indeed something worth living—and dying—for!

This is a deep and substantial book of 450 pages, but one full of wisdom, insight and love for all who wish to reconstruct a fractured Christian faith. And if you are in any kind of pastoral ministry, I’d suggest it should be required reading!

[Here is a selection of quotations, with page numbers]

The phenomenon of what has been popularly labeled “deconstruction” is not a passing fad but names a genuine crisis of faith that millions of Christians, largely through no conscious decision of their own, are now facing.  (p17 – foreword by Brian Zahnd)

I have coined the phrase “The Great Deconstruction” to describe the current wave of migration out of previous faith forms into new understandings of God (for better or worse) and/or the mass exodus from faith altogether.  (p22)

Jesus uses vine-to-wine imagery in John 15. That metaphor calls to me because it’s more than just “deconstructive”—it’s about growth and pruning, then more growth and plucking, then on to crushing and ferment, followed by enrichment. The whole process is at work in you and me right now. It is occurring in individuals and in faith groups, especially throughout Western civilization. It’s hard and it’s scary and it’s good.  (p25)

I’m not very sympathetic toward unrepentant fundamentalism when I see it disguised in pseudo-enlightened progressive sheepskins.  (p28)

For me, strutting to victory is a lost cause—triumphalism makes me ill. I walk with a spiritual limp. I trust no one who doesn’t.  (p29)

We cannot and must not superimpose our unique experiences on others to minimize their stories of genuine spiritual abuse or to diminish the joy they feel after a prison break from religious bondage.  (p41)

Those who leave their congregations—whether pastors or congregants—frequently go through a first painful stage, passing from communion to alienation, from community to isolation, from relative stability to spiritual vertigo. Panic may ensue.  (p47)

Maybe the reason so much social-media deconstructionism sounds wonderful is that it ignores the broken hearts who not only lost their faith but also their families, meaning, hope, and joy. They feel marginalized and silenced when they don’t meet the expectations of “successful,” happy-clappy deconstructionists.  (p50)

Who knows, Christ may have been the architect of your jailbreak in the first place. Yes, even from cellblocks within Christianity! “Let my people go!” he shouts against whatever social system has become the new Egypt, the new Babylon, the new Rome—regardless of whether his name appears on its marquee. Christ, our great Deconstructionist, has always been about breaking out of damp dungeons and dark tombs—and as he surfaces, he brings a host of captives with him.  (p53)

We shouldn’t quickly jump to judgments about what is happening in anyone’s leaving. Any given departure could be fleeing or following, and, more often than we know, both at once.  (p56)

This is where “shaking the dust off our feet” makes new sense to me. The dust we carry is none other than attachments to our former way of being—the ways our resentments still keep us hooked to who we were and anyone or any group that reminds us of that old self.  (p61)

Many of us have felt our faith metamorphosis as a kind of emergence, like butterflies from the chrysalis. More than merely escaping, we experienced transformation. Old parts of our life—ways of thinking, ways of being, ways of acting—dissolved, and we sprouted wings.  (p68)

Many of my friends describe their deconstruction, even out of Christianity, as a second conversion—not unlike the mainline Protestants who experienced a “second blessing” or the Catholic mystics who “saw the light.”  (p68)

I’m afraid that many progressives are so focused on the first trauma (bad religion) that they are unaware of or undersell how acutely traumatizing, how shattering, deconstruction itself can be.  (p80)

The only prayer I prayed for a very long time was, “Lord, have mercy.” Nothing else came. Nothing else was needed.  (p85)

[My parents] raised me on “Jesus loves me this I know” and urged me to remain open to the Spirit when I was entrenched in dispensationalism, cessationism, and an early form of neo-Reformed Calvinism. I’ve shared how those systems and the revivalists who spread them traumatized me with a fear of hell, Armageddon, and being “left behind.” So, when it comes to toxic faith, I can relate, believe me.  (p93)

Among Simone Weil’s reasons for faith outside the door, the most pressing and persistent that can be noted across her notebooks and letters is her belief that God loves the entire world, and that this good news includes everyone—and yet the church does not.  (p95)

We should not paint the whole Christian movement with one wide, condemning brush. Nor should we imagine Christianity holds the monopoly on love, kindness, inclusion, and healing. It’s not that simple.  (p99)

Deconstruction happens. And then? Whether the water turns to wine, Kool-Aid, or cyanide is not random happenstance. Outcomes are determined by the hope, cynicism, or fanaticism of the spiritual voices, scripts, or herds we follow, whether mindfully or with glazed eyes.  (p102)

Our entire culture is passing through a major period of disorientation, deconstruction, and tumult. Just as individuals break free from a constrictive belief system or experience a colossal collapse, so it is with societies.  (p104)

Thus, Sinai became ground zero for all deconstruction—and the golden calf an archetype for every idolatrous construct thereafter.  (p119)

In the via negativa, knowing God comes as we unknow all that which we thought we knew.  (p121)

The Cappadocians and their spiritual progeny…recognized that apophasis on its own would just dissolve God into a vague, ethereal nothingness. That’s not what they meant. They combined their rigorous apophasis (what God is not, what cannot be said about God) with an equally essential counterpoint: kataphasis (affirmation)—who God is, what God has revealed, and what may be said about God.  (p123)

Is Plato even relevant to us today? Tertullian famously asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” A whole lot, as it turns out. For Christians, certainly, his prophecy of the crucifixion four hundred years before the fact is notable!  (p140)

Let’s examine Socrates’s historic “cave analogy” in Plato’s Republic. After Moses, I would regard this parable, “The Allegory of the Cave,” as the fountainhead of Western deconstruction. In due time, we’ll see how the apostle John subsumes and inverts the “Cave” in the prologue to his Gospel.  (p140)

Metanoia is neither self-loathing anguish nor simply a “change of mind.” Rather, metanoia is the complete reorientation (turning around) of the nous (our minds, hearts, and lives) toward the overtures of divine Love.  (p145)

To paint Voltaire, the great deconstructionist, as either a demon or a saint is simplistic. On the one hand, in his bitterness, Voltaire’s propaganda against Christianity could be unfair, cruel, and misleading… But we ought not to overlook the apparent contraries: that he continued to attend the Catholic Mass throughout his life, became a public defender of religious liberty, and, in February of his final year, allegedly confessed, “I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.”  (p159)

Voltaire’s attacks on Christianity and his wish for it to dissolve are specific to its superstitious fanaticism and sectarian violence, its hostility toward tolerance and human freedom. This is what he’s deconstructing. That these dysfunctions persist make him relevant today.  (p170)

Today, we would regard Christendom as a cultural assumption even in liberal democracies that claim separation of church and state. Christendom exists among any faith group that imagines they live in a nation or culture that was historically Christian, continues to be Christian, or should be Christianized again.  (p184)

What Nietzsche saw was that, having abandoned Christendom’s brittle faith, the fathers of modernity failed to provide adequate resources to create meaning. Modern rationalism, scientific materialism, and social engineering aren’t up to dealing with the BIG questions of love, grief, faith, or death.  (p189)

Nietzsche was not a nihilist. Don’t shoot the messenger. He was the doomsday prophet warning us of nihilism.  (p189)

“God is dead. We killed him. And now we’re god. Watch the bloodbath.” Nietzsche predicted an even greater darkness unleashed in the world, and he was right: those who offered an escape from the human condition, only to worsen it. The deconstruction contracted into a singularity, then erupted as a great and more terrible destruction. Not only would post-theist theories renege on their promise, but, in less than a century, the anti-faith utopian projects would eclipse the body count of every religious genocide in history combined!  (p193)

Affliction (what Simone Weil calls “malheur”—non-redemptive suffering) quickly exposes those aspects of faith that are less than faith or pseudo-faith: benign mental assent to doctrinal creeds, inherited religious rituals, flaccid moralism, or a host of fantastical “god” projections of our own making.  (p208)

If our faith drives us into denial or triumphalism, rather than taking up the cross that Christ has offered, it is toxic.  (p215)

… the Amish and Old Mennonite traditions where the community releases their teens for a season into the wilderness of worldly experiences before they decide whether to be baptized and remain with the colony.  (p218)

Kierkegaard wielded the sharp edge of his literary scalpel (or sword) not to slay Christian faith but to purge and renew it—to make it authentic and relevant, a matter of individual faith and not just a club to join or herd to follow. His agenda was not to slay Christianity but to see it resurrected.  (p221)

For Kierkegaard, nothing is as dangerous as following the crowd and believing that you’re following Jesus.  (p224)

Kierkegaard surely mourns, “How long?” with the martyrs under the altar when he hears “personal relationship”—a phrase I suspect he coined—diminished to a twentieth-century evangelical banality.  (p236)

Dostoevsky’s contribution to our moment is that, like Nietzsche, he prophesies how treacherous the trajectory of cultural deconstruction would become in his time. The path he sees and foresees is necessary, inevitable, and terribly perilous.  (p256)

When protests and pamphlets and lobbying fail to bring about the justice we demanded, someone lights a fire. So, while Kierkegaard writes that Christianity is incendiary, for Dostoevsky, the real arsonists are those progressives whose torches are ignited by disillusionment. Liberal utopian overreach is exposed as just another useless crusty wineskin. It’s a very volatile moment when any social revolution realizes that its dreams are doomed but continues the revolution for its own sake.  (p256)

Today, nationalism fuels the violent cult of Putin and his possessed Orthodox sycophants.  (p260)

Any account of God or humanity that needs to sweep affliction under the rug is worthless.  (p266)

How can Simone Weil—how can we—simultaneously conceive of the absence of God in affliction and the presence of God in mercy? We can’t. We can only behold Christ’s anguish and be held by divine Love, both at once, in the crucifixion.  (p280)

Salvation IS the via dolorosa—not just the first or the last step of the journey, but the whole path, our struggle, our life. Seeing salvation as a becoming is hard for Western minds, which often demand to know who is “in” and who is “out,” when I’m “in” and when I’m “out,” whether I’m secure or whether I can “lose it.” In our insecurity, we lust for certitude about when and how and for whom the hell-for-heaven deal is closed.  (p294)

Wherever ordinary people—as unholy and afflicted as we are—open our hearts to see the pain beneath another’s sin and shed a tear in humble solidarity, we become participants in God’s grace, agents in their salvation and in our own as well.  (p309)

An objective, dispassionate assessment of much of the church today is that it has become mired in compromise and corrupted by politicization, and it is experiencing a freefall of influence—and rightly so. That’s the narrative of embers and ashes, and it’s not wrong. It’s also not the final word.  (p314)

Christendom has had a series of revolutions, and in each one of them, Christianity has “died.” “Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.” [quoting G.K. Chesterton]  (p316)

After deconstruction, after freefall, out of the embers, what? Inexplicable hope. Over and again, I encounter faith in those who had lost their faith and resigned from seeking. It’s hard to describe, but, when it happened in me, it felt like “faith from elsewhere,” a gift of faith.  (p317)

Killing Christians was as effective at stamping out Christianity as trying to eradicate dandelions by blowing their seeds to the wind.  (p338)

Pick a marginalized group—those with a history of oppression as outsiders to privilege and power. It could be women, refugees, racial or sexual minorities, people with disabilities, victims of occupation or genocide—you name it. If they’ve experienced their disadvantage or subjugation as a point of communion with Christ, their gospel is a truth I need to hear.  (p345)

This is and always has been the paradox of the cross and the martyrs—that the Lamb so brutally slain is the gospel’s critique of worldly power and the revelation of true authority: divine love, liberation, and hope.  (p349)

Thurman laments the ways our nations masquerade racial hatred as patriotism during times of war, draping it in a flag to make it respectable and even sacred.  (p354)

Who dares tell the Palestinian refugee or the Black child of enslaved people or civilian victims of a drone attack to imagine their oppressor could, or even should, be considered a fellow child of God? Not me. But Jesus does.  (p357)

Valarie Kaur—a Sikh faith leader and civil rights activist, and the founder of Revolutionary Love Project—has proposed that a vital step toward reconciliation is replacing the word “enemy” (a fixed identity) with “opponent” (a fluid category).  (p358)

While I’m not naïve, I’m also not cynical or hopeless. I believe Jesus is the Lord of history and will not fail in his promise to “make all things new.”  (p375)

While God promises a good end, the journey depends on real people making authentic choices—with help from God, but without interference from him. For real. King Jesus only reigns by the wise persuasion of the cross—by love—never at any point by force or coercion. Those are the actual rules of play. No magic.  (p377)

In the faithfulness of God, there is a new dawn in which Christ restores all things and resurrects all people. But we don’t get there by surviving. We get there by dying. And it’s not only a remnant that’s rescued—it’s everyone. Didn’t Paul say: “For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all” (Rom 11:32 NIV)?  (p380)

Jesus didn’t come to rescue a remnant out of a collapsing universe—he came to mobilize partners in his “Behold, I’m making all things new” movement.  (p380)

Chapter 8 of Paul’s letter to the Romans is our clearest description of the dance between God’s promises and our participation in experiencing them.  (p384)

Maybe the experience of communion is contingent—God awaits our attendance and willing participation. It’s unfair to claim God is absent when we’re the no-show to the banquet.  (p392)

It’s ironic that so many Evangelicals grow up hearing how spiritual disciplines are “works-righteousness,” despite also being encouraged to have an active commitment to “daily devotions.” We preached anti-works and grace alone, yet we frequently became worse than the medieval Catholics in our efforts to achieve relationship with God. I’ve seen the spiritual exhaustion generated in Evangelical revivalism and the charismatic renewal where “religion” was decried, even while the revivalists were driving the herd into a frenzy of “pressing in” to convince God to “show up” (measured by the altar call). The prophets of Baal would have been impressed. Too harsh? No. I led those meetings, urged by host pastors to “make God come”… The premise of revival meetings seemed to be, “God is not here, and we need to get him here. We need to do something to entice him.”  (p397)

… the discussion between Jesus and Nicodemus in John 3:16–21, where Jesus says that he hasn’t come to threaten the world with condemnation but to address humanity’s current dilemma—that we’re already perishing. He’s come to walk us out of perishing and into eternal life, which he defines later not as being in heaven when you die but knowing God now (John 17:3). The question is not so much about life after death as it is, “Is there life before death?”  (p400)

Sadly, whenever the church has fancied itself as God’s kingdom here on earth, it has regularly mirrored capitalistic greed (figuratively and literally) rather than kenotic (self-giving) love.  (p404)

This sense of impotence in the face of general social complexity conspires to lead people to jump on any bandwagon that makes just one thing simpler. [quoting David Goa]  (p407)

While our experience of God (as presence or absence) during liminal seasons is largely involuntary, our orientation and approach to God is not. We can enter the door, exit the door, stand at the door. We do have some agency.  (p426)

I was asked, “How can I have this living communion with God…now?” It’s troubling, isn’t it, that we aren’t even aware that we already have it? … If I am alienated from or inattentive to myself, detached from others, or disconnected from God’s good earth, how will I commune with God when that’s precisely where God lives?   (p433)

Here are my reviews of other books by Brad Jersak:

• A More Christlike God: a more beautiful gospel
• A More Christlike Word: Reading Scripture the Emmaus Way
• Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hell, Hope and the New Jerusalem

Review: A Case for Ritual

Among the ‘new’ churches today, anything traditional or ritual tends to be despised as ‘hindering the Spirit’. It allegedly stifles spiritual creativity and promotes ‘vain repetition’. This book is a robust challenge to that view. It is:

In Defense of Christian Ritual: The Case for a Biblical Pattern of Worship by David R. Andersen (New Reformation Publications, 2020)

While the book looks at the issue from an American perspective, most of its message is relevant to churches elsewhere.

Andersen draws widely on sociological and scientific insights to show how the move in our times from a ‘print culture’ to a TV and web-based culture affects the way we imbibe and process ‘truth’. So if you are looking just for a list of Bible verses supporting the title’s premise, maybe this book isn’t for you. But if you have any concern for the future of the Christian faith, I would urge you to take the sociological aspects seriously. If, as he demonstrates, emotion is today ranked far higher than rationality, and information must be packaged as entertainment, the church could be in serious trouble.

The author defines ‘ritual’ as ‘an ordered sequence of words and actions that are regularly re-enacted in similar situations’. We are all ritualists by nature, he argues, so that if we reject the church’s ancient rituals, others inevitably pop up in their place—and ones that lack their substance. My own experience certainly bears this out.

The broad shape of the book is as follows, each aspect linked, of course, to the author’s premise that ritual is essential to the human condition:

• The place and importance of ritual in human experience.
• What the science of ‘expertise’ has to say about the origins of creativity.
• Epistemology: how we distinguish truth from error.
• How our environment influences our thinking, our beliefs and our behaviour.
• The impact of language on thoughts, beliefs and behaviour.
• The word/table pattern of worship in the Bible, and its ritual context.
• The creeds—and the ‘credal passages’ in the New Testament.
• The value of being able to hold two seemingly opposed ideas in our heads at the same time—which is what the creeds encourage.
• Ritual as a framework for addressing and absolving sin.

I personally found this book helpful as, in my old age, I continue my spiritual journey as a follower of Jesus. For some years I have been slowly finding my way back to some of the ancient treasures, even as I grow disenchanted with some aspects of the evangelical and charismatic church life I was reared in. Andersen’s work has been one further confirmation that, in general, I’m headed in a positive direction.

If your experience even remotely echoes my own—and even if it doesn’t—you will find this book a challenging, worthwhile read.

[Here is a selection of quotations, with page numbers]

This work isn’t about resisting worship innovations simply because they’re new or because they’re different than past traditions. Conversely, it’s also not suggesting that because something is old it’s therefore true.  (p6)

Many Christians today believe that worship is best conceived as a creative, Spirit-fueled experience that any formalized structure necessarily inhibits—a view that’s only been energized by the emergence of our entertainment driven culture.  (p7)

Because the new media is speed-of-light, it’s necessarily present-centered and permits no access to the past. In the age of show business, not only is ideological and theological content absent but so is any sense of history.  (p11)

The trade-off required for amusement over substance has stripped away everything that makes worship an historic, profound, and sacred activity. There’s no longer any ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and no sense of spiritual transcendence. In place of the centrality and mystery of the altar stands the celebrity pastor and rock band. In place of well-defined doctrines and preaching of the Gospel stand practical messages in ethics on how to improve a marriage or be a better Christian.  (p13)

What we find in traditional religions is enchantment, not entertainment—and the distinction is critical. Enchantment is the means through which we access the sacred. Entertainment is the means through which we distance ourselves from it.  (p15)

Whether obvious or not, researchers agree that human beings are inherently ritual creatures… We turn to ritual when facing situations that cause uncertainty and anxiety. Ritual-like activities allow us to better navigate the risks of life by offering a sense of control and a feeling of emotional and physical stability.  (p19)

We can’t properly understand the ritually-laden New Testament without seeing the people of Israel in a ritually mediated relationship with God.  (p27)

The annual Passover liturgy… By commemorating the exodus, the annual ritual transmitted to each generation a belief and experience of the saving power of the God who brought Israel out of bondage.  (p27)

As in Leviticus, our holiness comes only via those means that God established as pleasing to him and which the church understood as being mediated through word (the scripture reading portion of the service) and table (the Lord’s Supper, or eucharist).  (p29)

We need to distinguish between those rituals Christ instituted from humanly devised rituals without scriptural warrant.  (p31)

Hebrews…drips in its ritual descriptions of the angels as “liturgizing spirits” beginning at 1:7, in which the author uses the Greek word for “liturgists” or “ministers.” While the term “liturgy” was originally used in classical Greek for a service performed by a person or group on behalf of a community, the Septuagint used it for the tasks performed by the priests and Levites in and at the sanctuary, especially for the ministry of the priests at the altar.  (p33)

Rooted in the revivalist movement, modern evangelicalism has retained the belief that liturgy alienates people from the spontaneous movement of the Spirit.  (p38)

Far from restricting creativity, frameworks create the space for it to flourish. They do so by providing ritualized processes and specific content, which in turn creates depth.  (p40)

Experts tell us there are no shortcuts to creation. It isn’t a moment of inspiration but a lifetime of endurance, and more monotony than adventure. It’s all about having a framework that focuses attention and a process that allows you to endure through the long hours and the endless failures.  (p42)

It’s those who focus on routine, pay attention to process, that can push through boredom and achieve remarkable depth.  (p44)

Frameworks matter because they put a check on human impulsiveness and force us to look at the data, not our fleeting impressions and feelings.  (p49)

Because so much of our thinking happens under the covers, in the hidden layer, we’re often automatically biased against objective facts. Emotions become a major driver of what we believe, which happens outside our awareness and usually without our recognition.  (p74)

If we face limits in our everyday knowledge, it’s doubly so for theological knowledge; making it critical that we have continual recourse to a biblically based structure that keeps our minds focused on the truly vital.  (p74)

As unimpressive as they seem, checklists are a staple in environments ranging from aviation, software, engineering, all the way to medicine. Functioning as reminders of the most vital factors and the steps that can’t be cut short, checklists serve to correct human weakness, including some of the cognitive biases we’ve seen.  (p91)

Like a checklist, the liturgy steps us through an acknowledgment of sin and reception of God’s grace in Christ—jarring us to attention, refocusing our memory, and establishing the proper benchmark of who God is and who we are.  (p93)

…we’ll focus on the more benign axiom that “praying shapes believing;” meaning that those who pray routinely in a certain way will be formed in the faith according to the language they use.  (p95)

…the pattern of worship we see in Acts 2:42, beginning with baptism as the community-forming event in Acts 2:41. From this early text, we can see believers gathered for the regular reading of scripture (“the apostles’ teaching”) and the breaking of bread at the table and prayer (we’ll refer to this as the word/table pattern).  (p103)

…the historic creeds…  Originally connected with the rite of baptism, their intent was to instruct Christians in the basic content of the faith; and in so doing, they drew a boundary around what was and wasn’t Christian. Given their vital function, it’s tragic that modern churches have abandoned creedal repetition to meet the cultural demand for more abstract language.  (p105)

After a century or more of modern attempts to cast it off as a relic of bygone days, the word/table framework of the historic liturgy remains unsurpassed in its ability to make the biblical language, as Augustine rightly said centuries ago, the daily clothing of our minds.  (p108)

In place of the traditional order, revivalists pared down the service to the three elements of warmup singing, preaching, and conversion. Most notable about this was the fact that the new pattern eliminated the traditional order of the reading of scripture (word), the eucharist (table), and common prayer.  (p110)

During the same period the frontier revivalists were replacing the traditional liturgy, scholars were pushing a Spirit-fueled theory of how Christianity began. From roughly 1860 to 1914 scholars made a sharp antithesis between the Spirit-guided, spontaneous New Testament phase and the second century period of formalism and institutionalism…  It’s now generally agreed that the early Christian assemblies had a definite ordo (a shape or structure of worship) that was adopted from the Jewish roots from which it arose.  (p111)

The Christian adoption of official church lectionaries followed the synagogue custom in which portions of the Law and Prophets were read at the divine service each sabbath.  (p112)

Throughout the New Testament, baptism is connected with the forgiveness of sins which is a sanctifying and cleansing water by virtue of the word connected with it—meaning that it isn’t merely a symbol of the cross, but the power of the cross actualized for those who believe.  (p114)

…Paul’s interpretation of the Passover lamb, the bitter herbs, and the unleavened bread which corresponds to the Passover ritual. That he’s delivering a much older tradition (which he also does elsewhere, such as 1 Cor. 11:23–27 and 15:3–8) we know from the fact that the language is un-Pauline and Semitic.  (p117)

We should note that no orthodox father of the second or third century thought the presence of Christ’s body and blood in the eucharist was just symbolic.  (p124)

The canonical Gospels…all follow exactly the same pattern: baptism, narratives, meal and passion, resurrection and sending. It’s no coincidence that the liturgy has the same basic shape.  (p124)

We can detect the word/table pattern in various places, but particularly in Acts 2:42: “They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.” Based on the verb which means “to attend worship regularly” and the four phrases that are dependent on “devoting themselves,” scholars have noted that the passage describes the early Christian service: first the teaching of the apostles and the table fellowship, then the breaking of bread and the prayers.  (p124)

Despite the popular bias against it, the New Testament itself betrays a preoccupation with doctrinal and ecclesiastical structure.  (p138)

[Re the creeds]  We can see clear traces of the apostolic preoccupation with a more formalized transmission of Christianity’s central doctrines. While this might surprise some, historically it’s the only thing that makes sense given the context of the primitive church. On the one hand, its Jewish roots would have primed it for a formal “passing on” of tradition; and on the other, its placement within a Roman pagan environment would have necessitated careful formulation of beliefs to distinguish truth from error.  (p139)

We have many other examples of formal transmission, but an interesting one involves independent material both Paul and Luke report and its early date makes it worthwhile to highlight. It concerns the ancient tradition of the Lord’s Supper. In 1 Cor. 11:23–25, Paul “hands on” the words of institution he no doubt received directly from Peter during his two week visit to Jerusalem shortly after his conversion. Beyond the fact that it’s extremely early, here’s what’s interesting. Luke and Paul each report the tradition, and although they’re completely independent of one another the verbal similarity between the two accounts is striking (1 Cor. 11:23–25 and Luke 22:19–20). Clearly an instance of formal transmission (here almost word-for-word similarity), the two accounts can’t be explained any other way because they couldn’t have been aware of the other’s text.  (p144)

From the very beginning creeds provided a guardrail to keep believers safely within the bounds of Christian doctrines that needed only a slight touch to turn them into something blasphemous.  (p148)

We know that the singing of hymns was a basic part of the earliest Christian worship and that it was intended to reinforce the church’s doctrinal deposit. In essence hymns were a sung confession of faith, meaning that they resembled creeds and had a similar aim.  (p150)

[Re Colossians 3:16-17]  While Paul uses three terms, “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs,” he’s not referring to three different types of music but uses the most important terms the Greek Old Testament used for religious singing. They all refer to the same type of song, which was the psalm singing typical of the Jewish tradition that was chanted by the congregation and, in Christian circles, interpreted christologically.  (p151)

It’s true that too often we’re fooled into thinking in binary terms—that we have to choose one thing over another or hold one truth at the expense of another…  The trouble is that reality is more complex and resists being forced into artificial categories, even though we may wish it to be otherwise.  (p160)

In contrast to popular culture, Christian liturgy delivers a framework within which we’re compelled to keep seemingly opposite ideas in our minds at the same time.  (p162)

[Quoting G.K. Chesterton]  He [the sane man] has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.  (p165)

While it’s no doubt a mystery and difficult to understand, scripture insists that Christ is true God with all his divine attributes, yet also true man with all the attributes common to all men.  (p168)

Nicea turned out to be a watershed moment for the church, not simply because it settled a dangerous controversy, but because it formulated a brief confession of faith that was so clear, scriptural, and concise that even a child could memorize it with ease.  (p172)

The name Jesus Christ also bars us from drawing a sharp line between “us” and “them,” between those in and those outside. Because if we do, it reminds us that Jesus will always be on the other side of the line; it reminds us that it was the historic Jesus who eats with sinners and outsiders, who is made a curse and sin itself, who justifies the wicked, who himself is the hole in our self-exalting ideologies.  (p174)

Though scripture makes the distinction between the two clear, it’s important to understand that both law and Gospel are essential and the divinely inspired word of God. Their function is simply different: the law drives sinners to the cross and the Gospel offers forgiveness in Christ.  (p177)

Each phase of the liturgy is marked by both praise and lament, thanksgiving and beseeching.  (p179)

Our expectations of the idea of church profoundly impact what we get out of the experience.  (p190)

 

Review: The Death of Omnipotence

The topic of ‘uncontrolling love’ as God’s fundamental attribute has already been widely addressed by, among others, Thomas Jay Oord in several books I have reviewed. This one continues along the same path, but with a particular slant. It is:

The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence by Thomas Jay Oord (SacraSage, 2023).

The author believes that we err in calling God ‘omnipotent’ or ‘almighty’. These words, of course, means slightly different things to different people, but probably most would take them to mean that God can do absolutely anything; his power has no limits. But we all know that God cannot, for instance, lie (Titus 1:2), so immediately we have to qualify omnipotence and, as Oord points out, ‘qualified omnipotence is oxymoronic.’

He addresses the Bible terms commonly translated this way, notably the Hebrew Shaddai and Sabaoth and the Greek Pantokrator, and shows convincingly that ‘omnipotent’ is never a valid translation of any of them. He demonstrates just how, down the centuries, they became bent into that inappropriate shape. But not content with just these terms, he goes on to show that the very concept of omnipotence is alien to the representation of God in the Bible. In doing so he examines the usual ‘omnipotence’ proof-texts, like Jeremiah 32:17, Job 42:2 and Matthew 19:26 alongside the far more numerous texts that say the opposite.

He then moves on to examine the claim to divine omnipotence from a philosophical—or what most of us would call a ‘common sense’ or logical—point of view. It is here more than anywhere that, as soon as we examine what we mean by it, we are forced to start noting exceptions. The result is that omnipotence ‘dies the death of a thousand qualifications’. God is certainly powerful, he maintains, but not all-powerful.

But the real killer of omnipotence, he points out, is the problem of evil. If God is all-powerful, why doesn’t he prevent the horrors that blight our world? If he is loving, he would surely do just that. So he either isn’t loving, or isn’t omnipotent. And that, of course, is the main reason so many reject Christianity outright.

Oord then introduces a term he himself has coined: amipotence. It holds that love takes priority in God, being the root of all his other attributes and governing their exercise. So it takes precedence over power and puts limits on what God can do to express that love. It is ‘maximal divine power in the service of love’.

These are the bare bones of this thought-provoking book, and he fleshes out the implications of all his proposals in great detail, with extensive footnotes for those who want to delve deeper. You should read it. And you should do so not just because it contains some interesting ideas, but because its underlying thesis, if you accept it, will radically alter your approach to God, to people, to rulers, to suffering and a whole host of other aspects of real life.

[Here is a selection of quotations with page numbers]

Believers affirm various meanings of omnipotent, almighty, or all-powerful. In this book, I address three meanings common among laity and scholars. To say God is omnipotent indicates at least one of the following:
1. God exerts all power.
2. God can do absolutely anything.
3. God can control others or circumstances.
Some believers affirm one meaning but not all.  (p6)

While English translators typically avoid “omnipotent” when translating Hebrew and Greek biblical texts, they do refer to God as “almighty.” Consequently, many people believe the Bible portrays God as all-powerful.  (p6)

I will argue that Christian scripture does not support omnipotence… Biblical authors talk about divine action, and they consider God’s power immense. But the Hebrew and Greek words translated “almighty” support neither scholarly nor popular views of omnipotence.  (p7)

“God Almighty” is a mistranslation of el shaddai. The oldest and most likely meaning of shaddai is “breasts.” The Genesis passage and others in which God is linked with shaddai are better translated, “I am God of breasts” or “I am the breasted God.” This makes good sense given the Priestly writer’s reference to Abraham’s descendants; they will be born, and their mother’s breast will nourish them, metaphorically speaking, so they “greatly increase.”  (p15)

The second Hebrew word sometimes translated “almighty” is sabaoth. This is also a mistranslation. Rather than “almighty,” it means “forces,” “armies,” “hosts,” “ranks,” “congregation,” or “council.”  (p19)

God cannot have all power if engaged in combat with opposing forces. This Lord does not control those he fights. While Israel often says their Lord is stronger than rivals, the God of sabaoth leads some but not all.  (p20)

The authors of the Septuagint translate shaddai and sabaoth with the Greek word pantokrator… Pantokrator might best be translated “all-holding” or “all-sustaining.”  (p21)

In the 4th century AD, Jerome translated pantokrator as the Latin word omnipotens when writing the Vulgate version of the Bible… The mistranslation, in turn, affected the writers of the creeds who called God “almighty” (pantokrator/omnipotens).  (p23)

In sum, while New Testament writers describe God as having immense power, they do not use words that mean “omnipotent,” “almighty,” or “all-powerful.” They do not use words that mean God has all power, is able to do absolutely anything, or controls.  (p26)

I consider the popular phrase “God is in control” to be a form of “God exerts all power.” To be in control, God must be the omnicause. But as Anna Case-Winters points out, “when God is seen as totally in control, any credible concept of freedom and autonomy for human beings is relinquished and human actions lose their significance.” I agree.  (p27)

Although many scholars deny God controls humans, they assume God must have absolute control when it comes to less complex creatures and inanimate matter. Scripture does not require this hard distinction, however, between God’s activity alongside complex humans and less complex creatures. In fact, the distinction is based on metaphysical assumptions about creation as dead, empty, or mindless. By contrast, biblical writers often describe creation—animals, plants, elements—as alive, enchanted, or spirited. Perhaps God works alongside and with even the simplest of entities and elements.  (p35)

“Can God make a rock so big even God can’t lift it?”  (p48)

People wanting clarity will qualify omnipotence in countless ways. In fact, the number and types of qualifications make it nonsensical to say, “God is omnipotent.” Ironically, to many people omnipotence means “without qualification.” To qualify repeatedly a word that means “without qualification” is to commit dictiocide: to kill the word.  (p48)

God cannot do activities that entail ontological, mathematical, geometric, or logical contradictions.  (p52)

If God exerts all power whatsoever, nothing else exerts power. Nothing. This conclusion leaves us with two options: 1) we and other creatures do not exist, or 2) we and other creatures are God.  (p56)

God can’t change past events. What’s done is done and cannot be altered, even by God.  (p59)

The amount and extent of creaturely suffering in evolutionary history also raises questions about omnipotence. If God could have created the world we live in without subjecting countless creatures to suffering in evolutionary history, why wouldn’t a loving God skip the lengthy process of pain? Doesn’t God care about animals and their suffering?  (p60)

Rather than embrace omnipotence, it makes more sense to consider the kind of power a loving God might have. God can still be thought to express immense power and be the greatest conceivable being. Divine power can still be considered perfect or maximal. But these legitimate ways to understand God’s power do not require belief in omnipotence.  (p73)

Believing God is both loving and omnipotent is incompatible with the evidence of evil.  (p82)

Many believers would rather play the mystery card than rethink their view of God.  (p84)

When evil is personal, doubt is greatest, because we can easily see better alternatives. “A loving and omnipotent God could and should have stopped what I endured!” we say. And we’re right.  (p85)

If omnipotent, God installs or permits all systems and leaders, including the unjust.  (p85)

Claiming that an all-powerful God differs from powerful kings by being consistently good fails to align with our experience of genuine evil. A benevolent being who can stop evil does stop it.  (p90)

If an omnipotent God ordains the rulers of this world, then resisting them means resisting what God ordained.  (p92)

Omnipotence also supports the false claim that the Bible is inerrant. A loving God would apparently want a crystal-clear revelation of what’s necessary for salvation. The Almighty could also guarantee the writing and safekeeping of that revelation. So it’s not surprising when Fundamentalists insist the Bible is inerrant, despite it being far from error-free. They simply follow the logic of omnipotence and then try to explain away scriptural inconsistencies.  (p93)

Omnipotence is necessary for the traditional view of hell. It requires controlling power to send people against their will to conscious torment and everlastingly keep them there. Only an all-powerful God can detain the damned in misery forever. Because belief in hell so obviously conflicts with the claim that God loves everyone, the absurdity leads many to reject faith altogether.  (p94)

Omnipotence is assumed by those who think God alone decides gender and sexual orientation. An all-powerful God could create clear binaries. The old saw “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” rests on the assumption an almighty Creator singlehandedly decided human nature. Yet the bodies and desires of LGBTQIA+ people attest to nonbinaries and non-heteronormativity. Giving up omnipotence makes it easier to account for gender and sexual diversity, because it means creaturely agency, chance, environment, genetics, experiences, and more contribute to our becoming who we are.  (p94)

Most free will theists think God gives freedom to humans and doesn’t usually control them. But many think God controls lesser creatures, simpler organisms, and inanimate entities of nature. God also sustains but can suspend natural laws. In other words, God does or can control the nonhuman world and interrupt the laws of nature. Believing God controls simpler beings and the natural laws means God is ultimately responsible for pandemics, disease, nonhuman predation, genetic mutation, and harm-causing quantum events.  (p97)

Giving up omnipotence overcomes the problem of selective healing. God so conceived works to heal all who hurt from accidents, disease, self-harm, abuse, or injustice. But healing always requires creaturely cooperation or the alignment of conditions in creation. It never comes through divine control.  (p102)

Those who say evil might be good from God’s perspective rarely acknowledge the opposite: what we think is good may be evil.  (p104)

If an omnipotent God allows injustice, why march against it? It must be God’s plan. If an omnipotent God permits starvation, why feed the hungry? If an all-powerful deity turns a blind eye to racism, genocide, climate change, and more, why should we care about those problems? Why try to improve our lives if an almighty God wills this mess?  (p107)

When we realize omnipotence was not born in the Bible and philosophy qualifies it to death, the problem of evil should bury the corpse for good. Just as former beliefs that the earth is flat or that women are inferior are now dead to us, the belief in omnipotence should likewise be dead to us.  (p113)

We best define the love in amipotence as acting intentionally, in relational response to God and others, to promote overall well-being. This definition applies to both divine and creaturely love. The love God and creatures express, in other words, acts with intention, relates with others, and aims to promote flourishing. And because love is inherently uncontrolling, neither divine nor creaturely love controls. Love can’t be omnipotent.  (p126)

By nature, God must love, but in experience, God freely chooses how to love. These are features of God’s essence-experience binate.  (p129)

The theory of nonsensory perception assumes a robust empiricism, which says we rely upon experiences to know our world and God’s activity. But we gain this knowledge in ways beyond what our five senses provide. In terms of perceiving God, nonsensory perception identifies the activity of what John Wesley called “spiritual senses.” Nonsensory perception detects the actions of the Spirit.  (p138)

God’s everlasting influence + God’s receptiveness + God’s omnipresence + creaturely cooperation = God’s immense power. Amipotence is the maximal power of love.  (p141)

When we witness miracles and mighty acts, God acted, and creatures responded well. Or the inanimate conditions of creation were conducive to God’s working. Or smaller entities and organisms responded well to the Spirit’s activity. Or creaturely environments and societies were aligned for the good God wanted. In other words, we rightly interpret all positive events as the result of God’s initiating and creaturely responses or conducive conditions.  (p145)

[Some believe that] God gives freedom to and respects the agency only of humans and complex creatures. God controls everything else. It assumes simpler creatures and the basic elements of existence are dead matter, devoid of agency, and without autonomous integrity. According to this belief, God does not work synergistically with worms, cells, and atoms…   Fortunately, a growing number of people reject this mechanistic vision of existence. We have reasons to believe creation is animated, spirited, alive, organismic, or enchanted. The idea of an animated world fits the general biblical view too. It provides reasons to think God works alongside and with even the simplest of entities and elements. The Spirit engages an enspirited creation.  (p147)

Love’s ultimate victory will not come through absolute control but through relentless love. Feasting at heaven’s metaphorical banquet is possible through relentless amipotence, which persuades all to join the ways and power of love.  (p149)

Amipotence…provides hope for the victory of good over evil now and in the future.  (p151)

Here are links to my reviews of other books by Thomas Jay Oord:

• The Uncontrolling Love of God
• God Can’t
• God Can’t Q & A
• Open and Relational Theology

Review: Sick Patriarchalism

I remember being staggered a few years back when an American evangelical contact of mine told me that, in the presidential elections, he had voted for Donald Trump. It seemed crazy to me. I would have understood it better had I read this book beforehand. It is

Jesus and John Wayne: how white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020).

This university professor and historian has directed her skills (including excellent writing skills) to surveying the growth of militant white patriarchalism in the evangelical wing of the American church in the twentieth century and up to the present day. She shows how it linked up with rampant Republicanism to bring Christian faith and right-wing politics into an unholy alliance based on a white, militant masculinity. It was an approach to life eptomised by the film-star John Wayne.

She demonstrates how this baneful evangelical influence reached to presidential level and helped mould American domestic and foreign policy. In due course, it was brought forward to justify pre-emptive wars and to uphold almost everything that stood opposite to what Jesus himself modelled and taught.

I left schoolteaching to enter Christian ministry in 1976, and ripples from much of this were already crossing the Pond at that time. Many of the names that figure negatively in the book were exercising some influence in my native Britain, names like James Dobson, C.J. Mahaney, Bill Gothard (I attended his seminar when visiting Detroit), Jerry Falwell, Marabel Morgan, Tim LaHaye, Mark Driscoll, Rousas John Rushdoony, Pat Robertson, John Piper, Ted Haggard and Bill Hybels. Sadly, many of those public figures fell from grace through sexual misdemeanours or lack of financial integrity. Even Billy Graham and his son Franklin got sucked into some dubious connections.

This book really is grim reading. I cringe at some of the episodes and alliances it describes, all of which are methodically documented, with copious footnotes and references. Were I American, I think I would be wanting to renounce any claim to be a Christian of the ‘evangelical’ variety. No wonder it became a New York Times bestseller—this is the kind of stuff that those who oppose Christianity of any kind lap up.

For us who aim to follow Jesus, it is sobering and saddening material. If nothing else, it will hopefully keep us from falling for the same kind of pseudo-Christian hysteria that messed up so many lives in the USA, and encourage us to pray for better things in that country in the future.

Here’s a selection of quotations, with page numbers.

Among evangelicals, high levels of theological illiteracy mean that many “evangelicals” hold views traditionally defined as heresy, calling into question the centrality of theology to evangelicalism generally.  (p5)

For conservative white evangelicals, the “good news” of the Christian gospel has become inextricably linked to a staunch commitment to patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian nationalism, and all of these are intertwined with white racial identity.  (p6)

For [Billy] Graham, a properly ordered family was a patriarchal one. Because Graham believed that God had cursed women to be under man’s rule, he believed that wives must submit to husbands’ authority.  (p26)

Wayne didn’t have a born-again experience. Unlike [Pat] Boone, Wayne could hardly be called the poster boy of “family values.” Thrice married, twice divorced, Wayne also carried on several high-profile affairs. He was a chain-smoker and a hard drinker. Yet despite his rough edges, Wayne would capture the hearts and imaginations of American evangelicals. The affinity was based not on theology, but rather on a shared masculine ideal.  (p30)

In 1968, Richard Nixon knew that conservative evangelicals could hold the key to his victory. A lapsed Quaker, Nixon wasn’t a particularly religious man, but he understood that anticommunism abroad and “moral values” and “law and order” politics at home could woo this coalescing voting bloc. And he knew that one man—Billy Graham—could help him win over this crucial component of his “great silent majority.”  (p44)

Conservative evangelicals…not only supported the war in Vietnam but also held the military itself in high (and often uncritical) esteem.  (p48)

Wayne’s masculinity was unapologetically imperialist. All of Wayne’s greatest hits involved valiant white men battling (and usually subduing) nonwhite populations—the Japanese, Native Americans, or Mexicans.  (p56)

This blending of racism and the perceived sexual vulnerability of white women had a long history in the South, even if historical evidence irrefutably demonstrates that it was black women who had reason to fear white men’s sexual aggression, not the other way around.  (p71)

[R.J.] Rushdoony believed that the disorder of modern society could be remedied with the institution of Old Testament law, and at the heart of this project was the assertion of hierarchical authority.  (p75)

James Dobson encouraged parents to reassert authority over unruly children. Spanking was a good way to accomplish this, and Dobson offered detailed instructions.  (p79)

Tim LaHaye is best known today as the coauthor of the Left Behind books, a fictional series based on the rapture, a premillennialist end-times scenario in which believers are taken up into heaven before an apocalyptic series of events unfolds on earth. LaHaye’s novels are rife with paragons of rugged masculinity and redemptive violence.  (p89)

[Jerry] Falwell fashioned a Christianity that was…anticommunist, pro-segregationist, and infused throughout with a militant masculinity.  (p96)

Falwell’s authority depended on maintaining a sense of vulnerability among his followers. This was achieved through the continual fabrication of new enemies. Danger, discrimination, and disparagement lurked around every corner. Malevolent forces aligned against true believers. Outsiders were likely to be enemies.  (p100)

Accounts of the battles over the SBC [Southern Baptist Convention] commonly focus on the question of biblical inerrancy, but the battle over inerrancy was in part a proxy fight over gender.  (p108)

It was James Dobson who would play the most critical role in cementing ties between evangelicals and the military.  (p129)

Dobson’s Family Research Council ran television ads calling for [Bill] Clinton’s resignation due to his “virtue deficit.” Evangelical theologian Wayne Grudem signed a public letter criticizing Clinton for his “ill use of women” and his “manipulation of truth.”  (p144)

Conservatives continued to mobilize against measures to address sexual harassment and abuse. They opposed the Violence Against Women Act, signed into law by President Clinton in 1994, on many counts.  (p146)

Under the leadership of [Wayne] Grudem and fellow Reformed evangelical John Piper, they crafted a statement affirming what would come to be known as “complementarianism”: God created men and women “equal before God” yet “distinct in their manhood and womanhood.” The statement attested that God had established male headship as part of the order of creation and closed the door to women in church leadership. In 1989, CBMW [Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood] published this “Danvers Statement” in a full-page advertisement in Christianity Today, drawing “a huge response.”  (p167)

Like “servant leadership” and complementarian theology, the purity movement enabled evangelicals to reassert patriarchal authority in the face of economic, political, and social change.  (p171)

At frenzied BattleCry youth rallies, evangelist Ron Luce warned students that communists, feminists, gays, and Muslims threatened to destroy the nation’s morality as surely as Osama bin Laden had destroyed the Twin Towers.  (p183)

In 2002, ordinary evangelical Christians were “the biggest backers of Israel and Washington’s planned war against Iraq”: 69 percent of conservative Christians favored military action, a full 10 percentage points higher than the general population.  (p185)

[In the 1990s] The Christian homeschool movement remained a steady source of teachings on militant patriarchal authority and Christian nationalism.  (p188)

Building on a foundation set by R. C. Sproul, John MacArthur, and John Piper, Driscoll helped fuel the movement of the “young, restless and reformed,” a revival of Calvinism that swept through American evangelicalism—and denominations like the SBC—in the 2000s…   Suppressing the emotive side of evangelical revivalism, they emphasized the existence of hell and the wrath of God, which required Jesus’ substitutionary atonement, his bloody death on the cross to atone for humanity’s sins. Theirs was a properly masculine theology, the story of a vengeful Father-God taking out his rage on his own Son. Strict gender complementarianism was at the heart of this Calvinist resurgence. For leaders of the movement, patriarchal power was at the core of gospel Christianity; in the words of John Piper, God had given Christianity “a masculine feel.”  (p199)

[During the 1990s, Doug Wilson wrote that] …horrific descriptions of slavery were nothing more than abolitionist propaganda. The life of a slave had been a life of plenty, of ample food, good medical care, and simple pleasures, marked by “a degree of mutual affection between the races” that could never be achieved through coercive federal legislation. (p203)

[Re Wilson, Driscoll, Piper]  Within this network, differences—significant doctrinal disagreements, disagreements over the relative merits of slavery and the Civil War—could be smoothed over in the interest of promoting “watershed issues” like complementarianism, the prohibition of homosexuality, the existence of hell, and substitutionary atonement. Most foundationally, they were united in a mutual commitment to patriarchal power.  (p204)

In the wake of September 11, Islam replaced communism as the enemy of America and all that was good, at least in the world of conservative evangelicalism…  Evangelicals’ pro-Israel sympathies had fueled anti-Muslim sentiments even before the terrorist attacks.  (p219)

A 2009 survey revealed that evangelicals were significantly more likely than other religious groups to approve of the use of torture against suspected terrorists.  (p227)

Barack Obama challenged the values—spoken and unspoken—that many white evangelicals held dear. As an adult convert to Christianity, he could speak with eloquence and theological sophistication about his faith, but for many evangelicals this mattered little.  (p233)

In 2010, [Wayne Grudem] published what amounted to a systematic guide to politics; weighing in at over six hundred pages, the book offered an exhaustive guide to the “biblical” view on all things political.  (p239)

No other candidate could measure up to Donald Trump when it came to flaunting an aggressive, militant masculinity. He became, in the words of his religious biographers, “the ultimate fighting champion for evangelicals.”  (p253)

Wayne Grudem, author of the primer on “biblical politics,” had spoken out against Trump in the winter of 2016, but by July he’d penned an essay arguing that voting for Trump was not the lesser of two evils, but rather “a morally good choice.”  (p261)

Three months into Donald Trump’s presidency, three-quarters of white evangelicals approved of his job performance, nearly twice as high as his approval rating among the general public.  (p272)

C.J. Mahaney’s friends were loyal because of a shared stake in a patriarchal “gospel,” and also, it turns out, because Mahaney had been lining their pockets.  (p282)

In 2014, Bill Gothard stepped down from his Institute in Basic Life Principles after more than thirty women—including some minors—accused him of molestation and sexual harassment.  (p282)

Writers on evangelical masculinity have long celebrated the role guns play in forging Christian manhood.  (p296)

Two years into Trump’s presidency, more than two-thirds of white evangelicals did not think the United States had a responsibility to accept refugees. In 2019, nearly the same percentage supported Trump’s border wall. Given that the Bible is filled with commands to welcome the stranger and care for the foreigner, these attitudes might seem puzzling.  (p297)

Despite evangelicals’ frequent claims that the Bible is the source of their social and political commitments, evangelicalism must be seen as a cultural and political movement rather than as a community defined chiefly by its theology. Evangelical views on any given issue are facets of this larger cultural identity, and no number of Bible verses will dislodge the greater truths at the heart of it.  (p297)

In 2016, CBMW’s Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware advanced a theology of the Trinity that made Jesus “eternally subordinate” to God the Father, in order—according to critics—to justify the eternal, God-ordained subordination of women to men. Grudem and Ware might have been following in the footsteps of Elisabeth Elliot, who had written about this notion in the 1970s, but in doing so they were parting ways with roughly two millennia of Christian orthodoxy.  (p298)

Over the past decade, groups like Focus on the Family, the Home School Legal Defense Association, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association have funneled more than $50 million into right-wing European organizations. American evangelicals have also forged ties with Vladimir Putin, who is known for flaunting his bare-chested masculinity, and with conservative elements in the Russian Orthodox Church; in 2014, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s Decision magazine featured Putin on its cover, and Franklin Graham praised the Russian president for standing up to the “gay and lesbian agenda.”  (p301)

If this theme interests you, take a look at this review of a related book: https://dmatthew34.wordpress.com/2023/03/05/review-freeing-women-from-oppression/

 

Dog and God

The picture shows our daughter Rachel’s dog, Reg. We call him ‘two-home Reg’ because he is at our house almost as much as his own, as we look after him when she is working.

The dear old mongrel is—at the time of writing—14 years old. But he remains active and alert, in spite of being fuzzy-sighted, seriously deaf, and on regular meds for arthritis and epilepsy. He still enjoys his three daily walks, a pulling-game with one of his soft toys, and a cwtch on the sofa. We all love him a lot.

He and I have some good conversations—one-sided, I admit, but I like to think that, behind those big brown eyes, he understands every word, whether I speak in English or, as I commonly do to him, in Cornish. I often look at him crashed out on his bed and remind him how lucky he is. He hasn’t a worry in the world. Nothing to be afraid of. His trust in us is absolute. No concerns about where his next meal is coming from. A bed by the radiator. No anxiety about paying the vet’s bills. No fear of being beaten or hurt. No fear of dying either, as dogs don’t have the self-awareness of humans and, as far as he’s concerned, he’ll live for ever.

Sometimes when I look at him snoozing happily on his bed at full stretch, snoring gently, I mentally tweak King David’s imagery in Psalm 23 and say, ‘The Lord is my dog-owner, I shall not want.’ I’m pretty sure the Lord wishes me, as his beloved child, to be as secure in his love as Reg is in ours.

In reality, of course, I’m no more a dog than King David was a sheep. We are humans, not animals, and that comes with responsibilities. But putting those to one side, I can learn a lot from Reg. Most important, his trust in us, and his utter conviction that we can be relied on to do him only good, is the kind of trust in God that I want to perfect. God is for me, never against me. He has a soft spot for me. He is committed to my well-being in spite of the negative factors which, like Reg’s arthritis, constantly challenge the smoothness of everyday life.

Being a human being, I need to be responsible in handling my finances, maintaining the house, eating healthily and guarding my thought-life. But when I’ve done my best at all those things, I move into the realm of trust in God’s fatherly care and provision. I imagine him looking down at me with a fond smile on his face as I snore gently in the small hours, saying to himself, ‘What a lovely lad he is!’

Being a human being, I sometimes have legitimate concerns—worries, even. But when I’ve done everything practical to mitigate them, I can learn to unload them onto his far broader shoulders and drift off into another contented snooze by the radiator.

Being a human being, I’m stuck with self-awareness. I understand past, present and future and their interconnections. So, unlike Reg, I know that one day I shall die. But thankfully the Lord has taken care of that for me, too. In the person of Jesus he has been down into death, removed its sting, and come out victorious at the other side. He assures me, ‘No need to worry about dying, dear boy. Been there, done that, taken care of it all. Just stick with me and you’ll be OK.’ Ah, wonderful. ‘I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.’

So, though I’m now past 80 years old, there’s life in this old dog yet, and it’s definitely a dog’s life that I want to cultivate. A life marked by security, trust, love and rest. Think I’ll just turn myself over and signal to the Lord that I’m ready for a tummy-tickle, some encouraging words, and maybe a bit of squirrel-chasing in the woods later, after tea.

Review: Freeing women from oppression

The title of this book is misleading. Unless you are an American evangelical you are bound to misunderstand it. ‘Biblical womanhood’ doesn’t mean what it says. The phrase should really be in inverted commas because it means ‘the complementarian view of man and woman that has been pushed in recent years, where a woman’s highest calling is to play a domestic role in the home under her husband’s authority, and which forbids her from leading or teaching in the church.’ The book is

The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the subjugation of women became Gospel truth by Beth Allison Barr (Brazos Press, 2021)

It’s the subtitle that tells you where the book is going. The author, herself brought up in the belief that complementarianism (over against egalitarianism) was ‘Gospel truth’, tackles head-on the views popularised by the likes of James Dobson, John Piper, Bill Gothard and Wayne Grudem. She does it with grace, but also with the bluntness and vigour that many of us feel those views deserve, especially in light of the appalling way she and her pastor-husband were treated by complementarian church leaders.

As a university lecturer in mediaeval history, Barr has a solid grasp of the background to patriarchy in society at large and how at different times it has infiltrated the church. She also has a wide picture of the periods when women occupied key roles in the church, before patriarchy again suppressed them and they were ‘written out of history’. In addition, she has a sound grasp of the Bible passages usually touted in favour of complementarianism, from the accounts of creation and the fall to the statements by St Paul. She doesn’t expound these passages in detail—others have done that adequately already—but focuses instead on the broader picture, to powerful effect.

Along the way, she exposes the bias of the English Standard Version (ESV), showing how the editors’ complementarian convictions, rather that the plain sense of the Greek, determined its wording and paragraphing of key passages in certain of Paul’s letters. Alongside this, she exposes the vigorous but unwarranted opposition of its supporters to the gender-inclusive language of translations like the Today’s New International Version (TNIV), and later the NIV itself, and shows how such inclusive language was being used in the English Bible centuries earlier, and with good reason.

The book shows how the debate about the role of women got entangled with two other issues in the twentieth century: the biblical inerrancy question, and Arianism (the view that the Son was subordinate to the Father not just during his incarnation, but eternally).

It’s powerful stuff, and well expressed. If you are comfortable with the way things are in evangelicalism today in respect of women and their roles, this book is not for you. It would seriously rock your boat. But if your only desire is to see this aspect of life come into line with Jesus and his kingdom teaching, I invite you to be tough with yourself and give it a fair reading.

Here’s a selection of quotations, with page numbers.

My husband was fired after he challenged church leadership over the issue of women in ministry.  (p3)

So much textual and historical evidence counters the complementarian model of biblical womanhood and the theology behind it. Sometimes I am dumbfounded that this is a battle we are still fighting.  (p6)

Complementarianism is patriarchy.  (p13)

[Russell] Moore may claim that women only owe submission “to their own husbands,” not to men “in general,” but he undermines this claim by excluding women as pastors and elders.  (p18)

What if patriarchy isn’t divinely ordained but is a result of human sin? What if instead of being divinely created, patriarchy slithered into creation only after the fall? What if the reason that the fruit of patriarchy is so corrupt, even within the Christian church, is because patriarchy has always been a corrupted system?  (p25)

Patriarchy exists in the Bible because the Bible was written in a patriarchal world.  (p36)

The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood may start with Genesis 2 in their overview of complementarianism, but their reading of this creation narrative stems from 1 Corinthians 11 and 1 Timothy 2.4…  So here is my question for complementarian evangelicals: What if you are wrong? What if evangelicals have been understanding Paul through the lens of modern culture instead of the way Paul intended to be understood?  (p40)

Pope John Paul II’s stance in his 1988 apostolic letter…suggests that using Paul’s writings in Ephesians 5 to justify male headship and female subordination in marriage would be the equivalent of using those passages to justify slavery.  (p45)

The subjection of women is highlighted in the ESV translation of Ephesians 5, and the call for husbands to submit is minimized—not because Paul meant it that way but because the complementarian translators of the ESV wanted it that way.  (p51)

Instead of justifying male authority on account of female inferiority, the Christian household codes affirm women as having equal worth to men. Instead of focusing on wifely submission (everyone was doing that), the Christian household codes demand that the husband do exactly the opposite of what Roman law allowed: sacrificing his life for his wife instead of exercising power over her life.  (p55)

Most people who attend complementarian churches don’t realize that the ESV translation of Junia as “well known to the apostles” instead of “prominent among the apostles” was a deliberate move to keep women out of leadership (Romans 16:7).  (p69)

…a favorite quotation from New Testament scholar Ben Witherington: “No, the problem in the church is not strong women, but rather weak men who feel threatened by strong women, and have tried various means, even by dubious exegesis, to prohibit them from exercising their gifts and graces in the church.”  (p87)

While medieval Christians couldn’t forget the truth about female leaders in Christian history—Jesus made certain of that through his interactions with Mary, Martha, and even the Canaanite woman—medieval Christians also couldn’t accept female leadership as normative. Why? Because the medieval world inherited the patriarchy of the Roman world.  (p90)

Despite the significant role women play in church history, and despite clear historical evidence of women exercising leadership, these popular, modern church history texts present a masculine narrative of church history that minimizes female leadership.  (p98)

Before the Reformation, women could gain spiritual authority by rejecting their sexuality. Virginity empowered them. Women became nuns and took religious vows, and some, like Catherine of Siena and Hildegard of Bingen, found their voices rang with the authority of men. Indeed, the further removed medieval women were from the married state, the closer they were to God. After the Reformation, the opposite became true for Protestant women. The more closely they identified with being wives and mothers, the godlier they became.  (p103)

“The heritage of Protestantism for women was deeply ambiguous,” writes Roper. While it could have affirmed women’s spiritual equality with men, the Reformation instead ushered in a “renewed patriarchalism” that placed married women firmly under the headship of their husbands.  (p105)

Some of the evangelical scholars and pastors who are most vocal about male headship and female submission argue that the relationship between husband and wife models the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. Wives follow the leadership of their husbands, just as Jesus follows the leadership of the Father. The marriage hierarchy, like marriage itself, they argue, is embedded in the imago Dei.  (p112)

Reformation theology might have removed the priest, but it replaced him with the husband.  (p117)

As a medieval historian, I know that Christians translated Scripture in gender-inclusive ways long before the feminist movement.  (p133)

Grudem may complain that the TNIV capitulates to non-Christian culture (feminism), but the ESV also capitulates to non-Christian culture (patriarchy). People are products of the world in which they live, and translators are no exception.  (p143)

Early modern biblical scholars found that marriage was puzzlingly absent from the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible), especially for an institution thought to be championed by God.  (p149)

It wasn’t until the early modern world that domesticity became linked with women’s spiritual calling. Instead of just being something that women usually did, domestic prowess in the home (centered on the family) now became something that good Christian women should do because it is what we are designed to do. It is our primary calling in this world. Domesticity, for evangelical women, is sanctified.  (p159)

While the Industrial Revolution certainly created a boom in jobs, and even precipitated the hiring of high proportions of women during the early stages, it didn’t improve women’s wages. Indeed, it seemed to provoke arguments that women deserved to be paid lower wages than men simply because they were women.  (p163)

By the early nineteenth century, the separation of work from home, scientific claims about female distinctiveness and weakness, and Christian teachings emphasizing the role of wife and the natural piety of women melded together. The cult of domesticity was born.  (p165)

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing Christians that oppression is godly. That God ordained some people, simply because of their sex or skin color (or both), as belonging under the power of other people. That women’s subordination is central to the gospel of Christ.  (p173)

Instead of reading Larsen’s article “Evangelicalism’s Strong History of Women in Public Ministry” and Collier-Thomas’s Daughters of Thunder, we are listening to John Piper state unequivocally that it is not okay and never has been okay for women to teach men.  (p181)

Patriarchy within Christianity reasserted itself with a vengeance during the twentieth century. Two significant (but related) shifts happened within evangelical theology that helped seal biblical womanhood as gospel truth: the championing of inerrancy and the revival of Arianism.  (p187)

The early twentieth-century emphasis on inerrancy went hand in hand with a wide-ranging attempt to build up the authority of male preachers at the expense of women…  Inerrancy introduced the ultimate justification for patriarchy—abandoning a plain and literal interpretation of Pauline texts about women would hurl Christians off the cliff of biblical orthodoxy.  (p189)

Throughout church history, what I had just heard come from the mouth of our pastor had been declared heretical over and over and over again. Yet here was a twenty-first-century evangelical pastor boldly stating that Jesus is eternally subordinate to God the Father. This was a heresy so serious that the fourth-century church father Athanasius refused to recognize those who supported it as Christian. Heresy.  (p191)

It should also not surprise us that evangelicals resurrected Arianism for the same reason that evangelicals turned to inerrancy: if Jesus is eternally subordinate to God the Father, women’s subordination becomes much easier to justify. Arianism, like inerrancy, proved the perfect weapon against women’s equality, the perfect prop for Christian patriarchy.  (p195)

Evidence shows me that just because complementarianism uses biblical texts doesn’t mean it reflects biblical truth. Evidence shows me the trail of sin and destruction left in the wake of teachings that place women under the power of men.  (p205)

We can no longer deny a link between complementarianism and abuse. So much evidence now exists that John Piper, Al Mohler, and Russell Moore have gone on the defensive, trying to proclaim how their “Christian patriarchy” is different.  (p207)

Ideas matter. Ideas that depict women as less than men influence men to treat women as less than men.  (p212)

What if we recognized women’s leadership the same way Paul did throughout his letters—even entrusting the Letter to the Romans to the deacon Phoebe? What if we listened to women in our evangelical churches the way Jesus listened to women?  (p214)

Complementarianism is patriarchy, and patriarchy is about power. Neither have ever been about Jesus.  (p218)

Jesus as God’s ‘Yes’

When it comes to the Bible, interpretation—hermeneutics—is everything. The older I get, the clearer I am on this.

I still meet Christians who pooh-pooh the notion. They look at the likes of me with a mix of pity and exasperation and say something like, ‘Oh, I’ve no time for all that fancy stuff. The Bible is God’s Word. He says it, and I believe it—it’s as simple as that.’ In taking this line they are, sadly, trumpeting their naivete and ignorance.

We all agree, of course, about what the Bible says. It says what it says. Even allowing for textual variations in the extant manuscripts, the basic text is pretty solid. But what it means by what it says is another thing altogether. And how we should apply it to our lives is often far from clear. If you say, ‘I just want to be biblical in everything,’ I could reply, ‘OK, then. Go out and commit murder, adultery and genocide, because they’re all in the Bible.’ And that will lead to a discussion that underscores the very point I’m making: that we can’t escape interpreting what we read, even if we do so without realising it.

It gets particularly complicated with the Old Testament. How much should we let it govern the way we live? Should we, as Christians, stop eating pork and shellfish? Lay aside garments made of cotton and acrylic mixed fibres? Should we stone to death our rebellious teenagers? Should we observe Saturday as the Sabbath? Do Jews in Israel have a right to bulldoze the olive groves of the native Palestinians and burn down their houses to build new Israeli settlements on the grounds of God’s promise of the land to Abraham and his descendants?

Biblical scholars agree on one governing hermeneutical principle: that Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God. He himself, including what he said and did, supersedes everything else. The New Testament reveals him as Israel’s Messiah, and thus as the Saviour and Lord of the whole world. He fulfils everything that the Old Testament foretold and, as such, he has the last word. So we should not read the Bible in a ‘flat’ manner, giving equal weight to every part. There is progression from Old Testament to New, with Jesus as the last word. He trumps everything else.

In this respect I was struck again recently by Paul’s statement (in 2 Corinthians 1:20): ‘No matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ’ (NIV).

A quick look at the context shows what prompted this. He had been accused by some of the Corinthians of being fickle with them, saying ‘Yes’, he would come and visit them when, in his heart, he meant ‘No’, he probably wouldn’t. ‘You can’t believe a word he says,’ they were grumbling. So Paul defends his integrity here. Jesus, whom Paul preached, was not fickle, he reminds them. His word can always be trusted. If Jesus says ‘Yes’, he means ‘Yes’. And it’s on Jesus that Paul and his companions modelled their own behaviour.

That line of thought, it appears, then triggered in Paul’s mind a related truth that went much deeper. It concerned God’s own promises—the ones in the Old Testament, like the promise of the land to Abraham & Co. Here’s how the New Living Translation puts the whole passage—2 Corinthians 1:17-20:

‘Do you think I make my plans carelessly? Do you think I am like people of the world who say “Yes” when they really mean “No”? As surely as God is faithful, our word to you does not waver between “Yes” and “No.” For Jesus Christ, the Son of God, does not waver between “Yes” and “No.” He is the one whom Silas, Timothy, and I preached to you, and as God’s ultimate “Yes,” he always does what he says. For all of God’s promises have been fulfilled in Christ with a resounding “Yes!”’

This puts a whole new slant on, for instance, the Jewish ‘land’ issue. More than that, it totally alters the definition of Jewishness. In the Old Testament, ‘Israel’ and ‘children of Abraham’ were synonyms for ‘the people of God’. The New Testament makes it abundantly clear that membership of that community is available now to all on the simple grounds of trust in Christ: ‘Those who have faith are children of Abraham’ (Galatians 3:7), and most of them are ethnic Gentiles. Jesus has now redefined ‘Israel’ to include them.

In the same way, a patch of territory in the Middle East is no longer due by divine right to any particular people. The ‘promised land’, thanks to Christ’s universal saving act, extends to the ends of the earth. The promise of a king of the line of David to sit perpetually on Israel’s throne is fulfilled in Jesus, who is Lord of all. Paul saw it clearly: every single one of God’s ancient promises finds its fulfilment and outworking in him, and we have no business making exceptions. ‘All of God’s promises have been fulfilled in Christ with a resounding “Yes!”’

What practical implications might this have for you and me? I’m thinking hard.

[In my free e-book, A Poke In The Faith, I have gone more fully into the issue of Bible interpretation and its relevance to several controversial issues, including gay marriage. You can download the book at Download ‘A Poke In the Faith’ (davidmatthew.org.uk)]

On the question of whether or not the current State of Israel is a fulfilment of biblical prophecy, you can check out my blog post on it here: https://dmatthew34.wordpress.com/?s=red+herring

Review: Speaking Out

I have a real respect for theologian Walter Brueggemann and his approach to Scripture, and this book has deepened it. It is

Interrupting Silence: God’s command to speak out by Walter Brueggemann (Hodder & Stoughton, 2018)

We all know that whenever we fail to speak out against unjust control, we become collaborators with those who practise it. We usually keep quiet because it is others, not ourselves, who are the victims, and we can’t be bothered, or because we fear possible reprisals. The essential message of this challenging book is the need for those who follow Jesus to break the silence and speak out.

Brueggemann uses a series of biblical scenarios to get his message across. These include the cries of the Israelite slaves in Egypt; prophets of Israel speaking out against tyrannical monarchy; the psalmist’s personal repression of his sins; the Syro-Phoenician woman’s challenge to Jesus; the casting out of the spirit that kept a boy dumb; the crowd who tried to silence blind Bartimaeus; the widow who refused to stop badgering the unjust judge; and the church that imposed silence on its women members.

I particularly like Chapter 4, where a Gentile woman invades traditionally ‘manly space’ to seek Jesus’ help to cure her demonised daughter. He replies that the ‘children’ who he is called to provide for are ‘the entitled Jews of his own population in Galilee’. But she refuses to be content with this and tells him that even the dogs get the crumbs that fall from the children’s table. He responds with the healing she requested. But he has learnt, from her interruption, that his calling goes beyond Jewish bounds and, in line with that, his next move is into the Gentile area of the Decapolis.

Shortly before, he had multiplied the loaves and fishes, with twelve baskets of leftovers—enough for the twelve tribes of Israel. Now he does a similar miracle, starting with seven loaves and ending with seven baskets of leftovers—’an allusion to the “seven nations” that Israel had displaced in the old Israelite tradition’. Silence often protects privilege, and this woman broke that silence to confirm to Jesus that his calling was to provide bread, not just for his own Jewish people, but for the whole world.

The book is full of telling insights of this nature. But it is far more than a mere interesting read; it confronts the readers with their own propensity to remain silent when, as followers of Christ, they should be speaking out. If you’re up for a challenge, this book will provide it!

Here’s a selection of quotations, with page numbers.

Silence is a strategy for the maintenance of the status quo, with its unbearable distribution of power and wealth.  (p2)

The church has a huge stake in breaking the silence, because the God of the Bible characteristically appears at the margins of established power arrangements, whether theological or socioeconomic and political.  (p3)

The wonder of the Exodus narrative is that the role of pharaoh continues to be reperformed in many times and many places. “Pharaoh” reappears in the course of history in the guise of coercive economic production.  (p9)

The royal dynasty of King David, as portrayed in the biblical text, was a tax-collecting, labor-exploiting, surplus-wealth-exhibiting regime.  (p23)

Given the assumptions of the old covenantal tradition, [the prophets] spoke as if the old Ten Commandments were in effect, and as if obeying or not obeying them would determine the future of society, either for good or for evil. Such assumptions deeply contradicted the royal-priestly regimes who assumed that YHWH’s unconditional commitment to the chosen people provided a bottomless guarantee of well-being and security.  (p24)

This tradition of royal authoritarianism and of poetic (prophetic) interruption is a rivalry that permeates Israel’s tradition.  (p27)

Many churches in our own time are simply chapels for the establishment, in which those who speak in church are expected to support establishment claims and so to “show the flag.” No other voice is allowed in the required collusion of liturgy and established interests.  (p32)

In Psalm 32 verse 3 the psalmist declares, “I kept silent.” The speaker does not tell us why. We soon learn, however, that the silence chosen by the speaker is a cover for an acute awareness of sin and iniquity that has alienated the speaker from God and, as a result, from the speaker’s own life. We are given no explanation for silence, but we know from our own experience about this strategy for coping with guilt.  (p37)

[The Syro-Phoenician woman] contradicts Jesus. She exposes his insider mentality.  (p49)

The disputatious conjunction “But,” whereby she contradicts Jesus, suggests that Jesus’ own sense of his identity and ministry was only to Jews. He was from Galilee. He apparently understood himself, in Markan horizon, in the limited provincial categories of Jewish Galilee, and that was the proper scope of his ministry. There had thus far been no challenge to that scope.  (p51)

She re-educates him. Such re-education can never come from those who are comfortable with accepted practices and assumptions. Re-education comes from voices that dissent from the unexamined comfort zone, from those who abrasively shock our comfort zones with voices from outside that violate the consensus that has been silently accepted. Jesus is a child of his place and time. We are led in this text to assume that Jesus, like his neighbors in context, accepted the consensus that God’s “food” was for Jews! She broke that tacit consensus by her insistence, which she managed to articulate within the bounds of his chosen metaphor.  (p52)

Now it is no longer “bread for the chosen people.” Now it is “bread for the world.” Jesus turned out to be an apt student, and the outsider woman was an effective teacher and witness. He was a quick learner and put his new learning to immediate and effective use.  (p54)

Prayer is a refusal to settle for what is.  (p66)

In the Markan narratives many of the interactions between needy people and Jesus turn on the utterance of lament and thus echo the lament tradition of Israel that we know in the book of Psalms (see for example Pss. 6:2; 9:13). Such an utterance, as in the ancient psalms, attests a need and requires a response that will relieve the need. In the ancient psalms most often, but not always, a good response is given. From that old tradition, Bartimaeus dares to hope and expect that his own lament may receive affirmative attention from Jesus, whom he takes to be the bearer of God’s healing capacity.  (p73)

This second time he cried out “even more loudly” (v. 48). He knew, in the face of the crowd, that a vigorous, resolved voice is required to break the silence that has the sanction of both the authorities and the crowd.  (p77)

Jesus tells his disciples the story in Luke 18 so that they do not “lose heart” (v. 1), that is, so that they do not become discouraged and quit hoping. The parable exhibits the relentlessness of refusing silence, the unwavering resolve to continue to speak and to ask.  (p84)

The widow beat the judge! Need overcame imperiousness. The truth of the widow’s situation overwhelmed the imperious power of the court. Justice prevailed because she broke the silence and resolutely continued to break that silence.  (p89)

[Re 1 Cor 14:33-35]  There is no practical area in the life of the church in which reform is more urgent than in the church’s propensity (in all of its manifestations) to silence. Such reform, like every moment of reform, means a return to the core claims of the gospel. In this case, it is the core claim of the baptismal formula of Galatians 3:28 concerning the third element of “male and female.”  (p105)

Our text on the silence of women in the church cannot be read as a flat absolute in the twenty-first century but must be read in context where critical thought tells against any silly judgment that Jesus had only male disciples. For that matter Jesus had only Jewish disciples, not a single Italian, Pole, German, or Argentinian.  (p107)

 

Review: Deconstructing Hell

Up for scrutiny these days are just about all the doctrines of standard evangelicalism, but much of the focus has been on the fraught topic of hell. One of the many books on the topic is

Deconstructing Hell by Chad Bahl, ed. (SacraSage, 2023) 

Subtitled ‘Open and Relational Responses to the Doctrine of Eternal Conscious Torment’, it is a series of essays by fifteen different authors. The essays—all of them from the ‘open and relational theism’ school—cover a variety of angles. These include the history of belief in Eternal Conscious Torment; its philosophical difficulties; pastoral and parenting implications; psychological and emotional effects; biblical imagery on the subject; and, of course, a presentation of some of the common alternatives on offer today. These include universal restoration, the fires of purgation, and annihilationism.

As with all multi-authored books, the essays vary in style and readability and in relevance to the reader’s situation. But it’s a well-rounded collection of relevant and thought-provoking material for anyone grappling with this difficult subject.

Here’s a selection of quotations, with Kindle location numbers.

Does the one who told us to love our enemies intend to wreak vengeance on his own enemies for all eternity? [C. Pinnock] (9)

From Augustine of Hippo to John Calvin to Wayne Grudem, when the afterlife is spoken of, the torments of the sinful have been referenced as though the matter was settled. [C. Bahl] (126)

At least in their origins, neither Sheol nor Hades are the equivalent of hell. Sheol, like Hades, is either a banal nether world where one exists as a disembodied shade or the grave. [R.D. Cornwall] (267)

While there are suggestions in the New Testament of the possibility of forms of eternal punishment, there are also suggestions that annihilation is the fate of those who oppose Jesus. That appears to be the view of Paul who says little if anything about hell. [R.D. Cornwall] (316)

The idea of hell is problematic, but it emerged as an answer to the problem of justice being fully served in this life. [R.D. Cornwall] (479)

There are several different doctrines of hell floating around within the Christian tradition. I will discuss the four most popular. These are Eternal Conscious Torment, Possible Escape, Annihilationism, and Universalism. [R.T. Mullins] (739)

If God lets the damned carry on sinning forever in hell, then God will not ultimately defeat evil. [R.T. Mullins] (755)

On Annihilationism, there is a divergence from all three values of love. First, God cannot be said to value the existence of a person if God eradicates her from existence. Second, God cannot be said to value the flourishing of a person if God eradicates her from existence. After all, a person cannot flourish if she does not exist. Third, God cannot be said to value friendship with a person if God eradicates her from existence. One usually does not put people in the friendzone by annihilating them from existence. I gather that if God annihilates you from existence, He is just not that into you. Hence, Annihilationism diverges from all three values of love. [R.T. Mullins] (786)

Though God frequently speaks of assisting orphans and widows throughout his Word, he almost exclusively exhorts his followers to defend their rights and feed them (James 1:27). Never once does he say to share the Gospel with them or snatch them from eternal flames. If God were planning to send most of the world’s poorest of the poor to hell because they don’t believe in him (or they aren’t “chosen”), why would he care about meeting their physical needs while they’re alive? [J. Ferwerda] (895)

If God is the ultimate Parent, and his ways are higher than our ways, there is no possible outcome in this Story where earthly parents would be able to outperform God in the ways of love and grace toward their children. [J. Ferwerda] (971)

When Jesus quotes Isaiah 66:24 (in Mark 9:43-48) and warns the people of his day about avoiding the fate where “the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched”, they knew what he meant. They understood that by quoting the passage in Isaiah, Jesus was speaking of the exact same sort of judgment that would take place, not in some spiritual reality after they were dead, but in their own lifetime. [K. Giles] (1130)

The Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition imagines the final judgment as a time of purifying during which the final exposure of our darkness lies in the sanctifying light of divine fire, and in the purifying fire of judgment lies our hope for redemption. [S.B. Putt] (1409)

Gregory of Nyssa describes the fire of God as a painful means to a good end, comparing it to a surgeon’s knife, which causes pain, yet heals the ailment. Just as the knife cuts away a tumor and heals the patient, so the divine fire burns away evil, delivering every person from vice with the healing flames of God’s love. [S.B. Putt] (1476)

The traditional annihilation theory of hell, at least one rendering of it, makes the claim that hell, Hades, all demons, the devil himself, and all unsaved people will suffer annihilation in the Lake of Fire after the judgment. With the purification theory, however, I make the claim that annihilation does take place, but the Lake of Fire serves as a metaphor for the total annihilation of evil and only evil—not the persons whom it has infected. [S.B. Putt] (1511)

[Re Gehenna, the valley of Ge Hinnom in Jer 7:32; 19:6; Isa 66:24]  When one observes Jesus’ marriage of Jeremiah’s Gehenna and Isaiah’s valley, the result seems to suggest death and destruction as the controlling motif, not eternal torment. [C. Loewen] (2174)

The idea of Gehenna as a municipal garbage dump…is based on thin evidence. [C. Loewen] (2227)

The point of Romans 9…is not the predestination of each person. It’s an argument for why God includes those outside Israel. [T.J. Oord] (2616)

The annihilation view assumes God quits on some people. God grows impatient and gives up, failing to forgive and offer another chance. In the annihilation view, God’s patience has limits. By contrast, I believe a God of everlasting love never gives up. On anyone, ever. [T.J. Oord] (2669)

We have good reason to hope all creatures will eventually cooperate with this patient God of love. It’s reasonable to think the God whose patience is unlimited and whose love is universal will eventually convince everyone. [T.J. Oord] (2766)

In this chapter, I argue that violent portrayals of God in the Old Testament do not accurately reflect what God, the living God, is actually like. [E.I. Seibert] (2861)

The Old Testament routinely portrays God as being hostile toward the wicked and those who do evil. In Psalm 3:7 the Psalmist says God “break(s) the teeth of the wicked,” and in Psalm 145:20 the Psalmist claims that the Lord “will destroy” the wicked. But Jesus suggests precisely the opposite. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus describes God as one who “is kind to the ungrateful and wicked” (Luke 6:35). Apparently, Jesus had a rather different view of God’s attitude toward the wicked than many Old Testament passages suggest. [E.I. Seibert] (2935)

Rather than defending God’s violent behavior in the Old Testament, we should be deconstructing it. This is accomplished by distinguishing between the textual and actual God, following Jesus in selectively using Old Testament portrayals of God, and affirming that God is love. Because God is love, and love does no harm, we can say with confidence that God, the living God, has never engaged in acts of violence, Old Testament portrayals notwithstanding. [E.I. Seibert] (2989)

God’s love is appalling to some, and it is appalling because of their views of justice and punishment, and those views may lead to a hardening of the heart, they may lead to a strong belief in eternal suffering. But God wants to set his people free. [S.M. Ryan] (3230)

In early Christian hell, women were damned for anything that compromised a household and societal order in which men were dominant. [M.R. Henning] (3346)

The doctrine of Hell is deeply connected to the doctrine of Original Sin and a view that human beings are unclean and repulsive to a holy and perfect God. [M.G. Karris] (3668)

What if God doesn’t take everything we do personally but approaches us with empathy, respect, and understanding? [E. Enns-Petters] (4267)

Punishment is only used as a behavior management tool and is not grounded in and from a place of love, only control. God has no need for it as They cannot control and love us at the same time. My kids are loved, not controlled by God. [E. J. Goetz] (4488)

 

Books: snapshots of the past

A friend mentioned that he was re-reading the first published book I ever wrote. Had I, he asked, changed my views since then?

Most certainly, I have! It was published in 1985, a book about church history entitled Church Adrift (Marshalls). In it I expressed a view of church history—and especially its future—written when the ‘new churches’ I was involved in were on the crest of a wave. I couldn’t imagine any possible scenario but that the church worldwide would adopt the same model as ours, and thus take a huge step forward towards the blessings of the age to come. I was mistaken; it didn’t happen. Today there are some valuable leftovers from that era, but that’s all.

This is why we need to take books with a pinch of salt, especially theological books—the kind I’m most interested in. A Christian leader reaches strong convictions on some topic. He writes magazine articles about it and it stirs up interest. A publisher suggests he expand his material into a book. That’s what happened with Church Adrift. And I reckon that if, in the almost forty years since its publication, I hadn’t altered my views on at least some of its content, that would be a poor reflection on my Christian walk.

Note the word ‘walk’. It suggests that the Christian life is a journey. A journey, by definition, means that you’re on the move. You learn new things along the road, and your views change. So, a book is a snapshot of the past. It tells you the author’s views at the time they wrote it, which are not necessarily their views now.

I wrote another book called A Sound Mind, published in 1987 (Harvestime). I would still stand by most of what I wrote in that one, but the section on ‘meditation’ would need an overhaul. No longer do I regard ’emptying your mind’ as an invitation for the devil to take you over, as the book suggested. I have come to value it as a blessed opportunity just to ‘be’ in God’s presence and enjoy his nearness—an act of worship and contemplation. Then there’s my Christian Manhood, in Harvestime’s ‘School of the Word’ series of study manuals (1985). Since its publication a vast amount of research into gender-related issues has been conducted, and the book would need a complete re-write, I suggest.

When I wrote A Poke In The Faith in 2016, I approached half a dozen Christian publishers, all of whom turned it down. At first I was frustrated, but I’ve since come to see this as a blessing. By making it available in electronic form, I have been able to update it regularly, and it is now in its fifth edition, with downloads all over the world. That has become necessary because I’m still on a journey through the changing theological landscape that it covers. I’m continually reading avant-guard material relevant to its topics, requiring me to tweak the contents to give a more balanced picture.

As you know, when electronic books came on the scene it was forecast that, within a few years, traditional books would become a thing of the past. They didn’t. So you, like many other thinking Christians, probably have bookshelves laden with volumes written at various times over the last few centuries. Wouldn’t it be fascinating to contact the authors at the end of their lives and ask if they had changed their views since publishing the work! I bet the great majority would cry, ‘Yes!’

I myself have long emerged from the ordered landscape of dispensationalism in which I was brought up. I have checked every tree in the straight-lined Calvinist pine-forests, notably the five big ones at the entrance, and have left their shadows for the sunshine of something more open and less tidy. I’m enjoying liturgical landscapes now, I’m admiring creedal monuments, and roaming the surprise-filled hills of God’s steadfast love. I can cover more ground now because I have struck off the chains of unhealthy biblicism that were for the greater part of my life round my ankles.

So my message, I think, is clear: don’t judge me today on what I wrote years ago. And, for that matter, don’t assume that any of your favourite authors died with the views they expressed during their lifetime unchanged.

Ah, yes, you’re thinking, ‘Well, thank God that his truth is unchanging and that I’ve reached a sound understanding of it.’ I would like to suggest—gently—that you may be in danger of getting stuck in a rut. Sure, God is unchanging and reliable, and so is his truth. But dare we, like ants on the floor of St Paul’s Cathedral, stare up at that truth and boast that we’ve got it all sussed? And that’s where the ‘journey’ bit comes in. We are all expected to be pilgrims on the move, and that inevitably means change—in our understanding, and in our prioritising of values—as the Holy Spirit moves us forward ‘from one degree of glory to another’.

One last thing: if, as part of your own journey, you ever feel the need to write a theological book, consider going electronic with it!

[Be sure you have the very latest edition of A Poke In The Faith, available for free here and you can check out all my books, past and present, on my website here]

[Photos: Singapore in 2000 and 2021]

Review: Misunderstanding Paul

More than one Bible scholar has, in recent years, flagged up our propensity to get Paul wrong. If we are to understand him rightly, we need to read him for what he was: a Pharisee steeped in the mindset and outlook of Second Temple Judaism. If, like Luther and Calvin, we read him with a medieval Reformer’s spectacles, we will misunderstand him, as we also will if we read him from a twenty-first century perspective. This book highlights how. It is

The Lost Message of Paul: Has the Church misunderstood the Apostle Paul? by Steve Chalke (SPCK, 2019)

Chalke explains how he comes from a traditional evangelical background, and how his journey of faith has, over the years, introduced him to scholars and writers whose insights have turned his received view of Paul’s message on its head. The chapters of his book develop different aspects of that changed understanding.

Perhaps the most challenging one is that what Jesus achieved through his life, death and resurrection has brought salvation to all. The ancient Israelites never viewed ‘being saved’ as a personal thing, but as a corporate one: God had brought the whole nation out of Babylonian exile, and he remained their God. In due course Paul, that ultra-zealous Israelite, encountered the risen Christ. That life-changing encounter led him to see that the Christ event had redefined Israel, or ‘the people of God’, so that it now embraced all of humanity.

Further chapters deal with such diverse topics as Paul’s alleged misogynistic, anti-sex views; his stance on law and grace; the place of ‘good works’; the meaning of the Greek word pistis as ‘faithfulness’ rather than ‘faith’; how Paul’s Hebrew thought is ‘concrete’ and thus different from modern Western thought with its many abstractions; Christ’s faithfulness as the basis of God’s grace towards us; the wrath of God; the nature of the atonement; the afterlife and eschatology; hell and the notion of everlasting conscious torment; the universal scope of Christ’s reconciliatory work; the end-time judgment; punishment; the nature of sin; the causes of bad and antisocial behaviour; God as a ‘consuming fire’; the parousia of Jesus; the meaning of ‘salvation’; and the nature of ‘the powers’.

Examining Paul’s writings, the author opens up his topics patiently and in detail, drawing on a wide variety of scholarly sources. He shows himself well acquainted with church history. And he deals with complex exegetical issues in a thorough yet simple way suited to non-academic readers. Having said that, you should not expect this book to be light bedtime reading. It will test your concentration and your thinking power.

But most of all, it will challenge you to a new way of working out the faith you profess, moving you irrevocably away from a ‘Jesus and me’ approach to one that engages more robustly with people and with the structures of society, as the Apostle Paul would have wanted. I highly recommend this book to all Christians who are not afraid to ask questions and think deeply about the possible answers.

Footnote: I was encouraged to see that Steve Chalke covers many of the topics that I touch on in my own ebook, A Poke In The Faith, which you can download for free here: Download ‘A Poke In the Faith’ (davidmatthew.org.uk)

I have written a synopsis of Steve Chalke’s book, which you can access here: The Lost Message of Paul synopsis

Here is a selection of quotations, with Kindle location numbers.

Although Paul has been presented as the champion of exclusion, I have come to believe that he was, in fact, the opposite. Paul – the real Paul – was the great includer!  (166)

In the West, on one hand, medieval Catholicism slowly distorted Paul’s words, turning many of them into the source of a system of control, of shame, fear and crippling Catholic guilt. Then, in reaction, Martin Luther and John Calvin, the sixteenth-century ‘protest-ants’, in attempting to ‘reform’ these abuses, turned the meaning of Paul’s words on their heads to power what became a new system of control, of shame, fear and crippling Protestant guilt.  (189)

It is a big mistake to regard Paul as a Christian. Paul wasn’t a Christian, he was a Jew. He never threw away his Jewish heritage; he never abandoned it. He simply came to believe that Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, was the Messiah for the whole world – not just for the Jews.  (432)

Too often we make the mistake of believing that Christianity is about intellect. That it is somehow about believing the right stuff, about having orthodox beliefs that can be written down and stated clearly without hesitation or deviation. But, for Paul, being a follower of Christ is about changing society, it’s about being in a story. It is a societal revolution.  (470)

Luther misread Paul, and what Paul taught about Jews and Judaism, as a direct equivalent to his own struggle against medieval Catholicism. In doing so, he created as many problems as he solved – some of which we are still battling with today.  (582)

For Paul, just like all other Jews, keeping the law was simply a way of living for people who were already redeemed.  (704)

On one hand, Luther rightly recognized that being accepted by God is all about God’s undeserved grace for us, rather than what we do. But then, having made this huge contribution, he misunderstood the nature of ‘faith’ – which ironically he turned back into a work.  (774)

If Luther had grasped that pistis means ‘faithfulness’ in the sense of dogged trust rather than ‘faith’ in the sense of merely ‘believing’ he would have never coined his misleading slogan, ‘by faith alone’.  (811)

The real litmus test of whether pistis means ‘faith’ or ‘faithfulness’ in Paul’s writing is simply to ask about its history – its etymology – and which Hebrew word or words it is translating.  (927)

Biblical ‘faith’ is not intellectual assent to a concept, a commitment to a set of doctrines and theories, or a mystical sense of peace and well-being. Instead it is a risky commitment to a radical way of living; a call to action, a way of walking, a summons to loyalty and allegiance. This, and only this, is pistis.  (979)

What if, rather than reading this statement [Ephesians 2:8-9] the way that it has been translated so often, in context it should actually read: ‘For it is by grace you have been saved, through Christ’s faithfulness – this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast.’  (999)

This ‘revolutionary’ new perspective on Paul’s thought – centred on the ‘faithfulness of Christ’ – is the same understanding that’s been held throughout history by the Eastern Church and, it turns out, the same as that of the old pre-Reformation writers.  (1096)

Once you understand the phrase pistis Christou to be about Christ’s faithfulness, then the amount or quality of our faith is no longer a factor. What is important is that God’s faithfulness always stands firm, even if and when we find ourselves faithless. And this lifts a monumental burden from the shoulders of humanity.  (1225)

Calvin’s logic drove him to see that, on the face of it, salvation by grace (which he wanted to retain at the centre of his system) and salvation by faith were incompatible with each other. He had to find a way of resolving the impossible problem. If it was all by the grace of God, and also by our faith, then our ability to have faith must be a gift of God’s grace. Therefore, he reasoned, that grace must logically be limited to people God chooses and withheld from those God doesn’t. It’s what his followers went on to refer to as ‘limited atonement’.  (1257)

Calvin (unconsciously or not) effectively replaced Jesus’ image of God as a loving parent with that of God as a stern, courtroom judge…  I believe that the results of this giant mistake have been catastrophic, not only when it comes to our perception of God’s nature, but also to the deep sense of guilt and unworthiness that so many practising or former Protestant church people live their whole lives under.  (1269)

The attempt to explain that God is love but that God is also wrathful is wrongheaded and nonsensical. There is no ‘but’. God’s love, and what we have come to refer to as God’s anger, are part of the same whole which consists completely of love.  (1372)

It is only in the light of perceiving God in the way that Jesus taught us, as the perfect parent, that we begin to see that the divine response to our rebellion is always more accurately described as anguish than as anger or wrath.  (1386)

The Eastern half of the Church – what we know today as the Orthodox Church – never did, and still does not, accept the theological construct we take for granted and call ‘original sin’.  (1396)

Rather than a tale of human depravity, Jewish theology has always interpreted the story of Adam and Eve as one of growing up… It is about the loss of innocence; the journey of humankind, as well as that of every individual, into moral responsibility.  (1459)

Seeing God’s primary and first response to humanity as one of condemnation because of our supposed total depravity is neither true nor biblical, but the invention of a misguided theological system. God is not wrath; God is love.  (1471)

Sin is its own punishment…  We are punished by our sins rather than for our sins.  (1496)

The Church’s historic creeds, forged over the centuries, have universally failed to explicitly set out the sublimely simple yet profound biblical statement found in 1 John 4.8 – ‘God is love.’ As a result, the fact that the God of the universe not only claims to love but is wholly defined as love has become one of the world’s best-kept secrets.

For Paul, Jesus’ death and resurrection mark the new exodus, the ultimate exodus, through which the whole of creation is rescued and renewed. The Pharaohs of this world have been defeated once and for all. Because of the cross and the resurrection – which Paul sees as two scenes in one event – a new world order has been launched.  (1639)

The thought that on the cross Jesus is somehow placating God’s anger is completely foreign to Paul.  (1653)

All agree we reach the end of the Old Testament – the Hebrew Bible – with no clear or firm ideas about the nature of the afterlife or what its purpose is, and no depictions of anything much to be dreaded.  (1799)

It was not until the bishops of the Western, Latin-speaking Church gathered in Rome’s Lateran Palace for the fourth Lateran Council, convened by Pope Innocent III in 1215, that they formally committed to the doctrine of ‘perpetual punishment with the devil’ for those unworthy of Christ.  (1842)

The sobering reality is that the understanding of hell for the Western Roman Catholic Church was shaped at least as much by the poetry of Dante and the vivid images of artists such as Bosch and Michelangelo as by any theologian.  (1906)

The Eastern Church teaches that, following his death, Christ has closed hell. He stands on its fallen gates and brings those trapped within it into salvation. Through his death he has defeated hades and emptied hell.  (1946)

Although the sixteenth-century Protestant reformers of the Western Church radically rethought the Roman Catholic view of the basis on which access to salvation took place, its stance on judgement, damnation and the nature of hell was in large measure simply taken as read.  (1958)

The god we serve shapes our responses. When we attack, slander and condemn others in aggressive and toxic tones from our pulpits – be they literal or digital – we reveal our understanding of the god we serve.  (2016)

Why is it that whenever any religious group claims that they understand a way of ‘salvation’, it always includes them and their friends, but excludes their enemies? If God’s grace is real grace – amazing, undeserved, non-discriminatory, uncontainable, extraordinary grace – then why isn’t it available to everyone regardless of their geography, religious beliefs, social background or mental capacity?  (2075)

Hell has no place in Paul’s message. He never uses the term once in any of his writings.  (2087)

Saul, the fundamentalist, nationalist Pharisee has become Paul the great includer and universalizer. He has come to believe that what God has already done for the Jewish people he has now, through Christ, done for the whole world. Jesus the Jewish ‘Messiah’ has become ‘Lord’ of whole world. The badge is no longer circumcision, but it is not faith either, it is simply this – being human.  (2141)

The centrality of the teaching of the universal redemption of all people through Christ was never questioned by any of the great ecumenical councils of the early Church.  (2249)

Let’s be honest. The idea of untold masses of people suffering for ever brings no glory to God. The thought of everlasting acrimony and agony undermines any real discussion of a God of love. Only the promise of restoration and reconciliation can do the opposite.  (2321)

Throughout the Old Testament, God’s coming judgement is thought of as a good thing: something to be celebrated, longed, yearned and hoped for. Why? Because injustice will be corrected. Things will be put right.  (2537)

‘Justification’ is an important word for Paul. But it has suffered hugely in the West from being recruited by Luther and the other reformers as a technical term, and as a result has lost its original meaning.  (2572)

Although our society often writes Paul off as authoritarian and judgemental, the truth is that it’s we who cling to a medieval ‘them and us’ view of the world which too readily demonizes others without understanding their inner story.  (2598)

Although in the sayings of Jesus, the stench of Gehenna was a powerful metaphor for the inevitable consequences of a broken way of being human, it had had nothing to do with everlasting punishment in hell. When Jesus warned his contemporaries about Gehenna, he wasn’t telling them that unless they repented in this life they would burn for ever in the next one. Instead he was warning them that to live out of sync with the values that he was teaching (the values of the kingdom of God) was stupid and self-destructive. Don’t settle for living on life’s rubbish dump – it stinks!  (2675)

A deeper multi-disciplinary conversation between theologians, psychologists and psychotherapists would help the Church into a less ‘black and white’ understanding of ‘sin’, and of what are more complex issues than our current thinking sometimes admits.  (2939)

It is clear that – although it has been dropped from much of Western Christianity – the idea of a final judgement according to the way we have lived our whole lives is as much part of Paul’s thinking, in company with mainstream Second Temple Judaism, as it was of Jesus’ teaching.  (2968)

The vast majority of early Church writers appear to have believed that God’s ‘fire’ was always cleansing; that it would cure those who went through it of the false identities and fallenness they had accumulated during their lifetimes.  (2982)

What if the fire is simply a metaphor for Christ?…  Jesus himself is the purging fire, burning away our dross through the heat of his transforming love.  (2995)

…the popular Protestant myth which assumed that the goal of the Christian life was to avoid God’s anger by making sure you were ‘saved’ and guaranteeing your seat in ‘heaven’.  (3028)

For Paul, the future isn’t about how he – or anyone else – is going to escape Earth. Instead, it’s about what God is doing with the whole earth, the whole of creation.  (3065)

For Paul, the Day of the Lord will see the dimensions of earth and heaven completely integrated. Our earthly realm and God’s kingdom will finally become one and the same. But for now, as we long for that day’s dawn, our challenge, whatever the cost, is to choose to live in sync with the way the universe is heading.  (3132)

Although Paul does not explain, nor does he know, exactly how the presence of the risen Christ will be recognized around the world by all humanity, his use of the term parousia is simply another way of referring to that moment when the dimension of heaven that is already here will become so real and so solid that a new world is born.  (3247)

Personal redemption cannot take place apart from the redemption of our social structures; our institutions, belief systems and cultural norms. Because these ‘manifestations of power’ always have an inner spirituality, any attempt to transform them without addressing the exploitation and control that sit behind them, as well as their outer forms, is doomed to failure.  (3415)

Review: Meditation is good!

I have learnt the value of reading Christian material from denominations and streams other than the one I was brought up in. This excellent one is from the Roman Catholic stable. It is

Contemplative Meditation by Matthew McGettrick ODC (Catholic Truth Society, 2001)

and is a short, 40-page booklet.

There is huge interest in ‘meditation’ these days in society at large. Some explore ‘mindfulness’, while others experiment with Hindu or Buddhist variations. But Christianity has a noble contemplative tradition, and many Christians today are finding that the normal routines of church and Christian activity, including their received patterns of prayer, while fine in themselves, leave a void which only some form of ‘contemplation’ can fill.

Fr Matthew introduces us to the practice of laying aside the chattering of our thoughts in order to just ‘be’ in the presence of God in his infinite greatness. I used to think that ‘emptying the mind’—a key step in that direction—was a dangerous thing that might invite sinister elements to take over. I no longer hold that view. Instead, I have found it immensely helpful to dismiss thoughts with the aim of ‘leaning into God’. It is what some call ‘centering prayer’.

The book is highly practical, with advice on how to deal with wandering thoughts, the value of a ‘mantra’, the practice of self-discipline and giving God priority in all we do. Anyone who has sought to draw ever nearer to a conscious awareness of God will recognise that the author has been treading the self-same contemplative path, and will find his insights and experience helpful.

If this is something new to you and you want to explore it, this little booklet might be a good place to start.

Here’s a selection of quotations, with page numbers.

[Re relaxing for meditation]  Let thoughts come to your mind, let them wander in and wander out but do not lay hold of them. Let your mind gradually subside. This is something one ought to do particularly on going to bed at night.  (p4)

As far as your thinking mind is concerned God means for you simply nothingness because He is the infinite, He is the unbounded, and so you reach out in your heart, in your will, beyond every distinct thought and every distinct mental picture and hold yourself in an attitude of attentiveness to the unbounded indescribable God.  (p6)

The more you give [wandering thoughts] your attention in order to try to get rid of them the worse they get because you are focusing your attention on them and you are distracting yourself from your meditation.  (p10)

Not only can a person use a phrase or a word for a mantra, he can also use a simple thought, so simple that it is not expressed in words, or only in very vague words. The thought, for example, of the presence of God. Just that God is here. God is all around you. God is within you. You are immersed in God. You are enveloped in God.  (p11)

We are being attentive to nothing, to no thing, to nothing we can picture or describe because we are going beyond all that. We are being attentive to a Being that is beyond all thinking and beyond all picturing and therefore we do not try to think or picture, and whatever thoughts or pictures come into our mind we take absolutely no notice of them, we just reach out in love; peaceful, quiet and attentive. That is contemplative meditation.  (p15)

We are not expecting anything to happen for the simple reason that everything is happening. God is working deep in our soul.  (p15)

Through the light and strength that we get in meditation we become enabled to develop a similar harmony throughout the rest of our lives, a harmony by which we keep our attention focused on God and withdraw our selfish desires from everything else.  (p18)

We must find time to give to God alone. Because if we don’t keep ourselves in contact with the source of all goodness, with the source of our being, then we shall not have within us what we should give to others.  (p25)

Because now our selfish desires are very much under control, and because the Spirit of God has got full power in us, we live with the spontaneity that comes from the Holy Spirit. It is the freedom of the Spirit by which we are lifted up above our own selfishness, and we enjoy all the wonder of a life that is spontaneous and joyous in the power of the Spirit of God. That is what we aim at.  (p30)

There is what you might call a force of gravity at work within ourselves, a spiritual weight, that makes us want to fall into the centre of our being, that makes us want to fall into the source of our being, into God, and this double element, God attracting us and our desiring to fall into God, develops in us a strong desire for God, to possess Him and to be possessed by Him. It is when we are in the quietness of contemplative meditation that this attraction exerts its power.  (p32)

Sometimes in the silence of meditation God absorbs our entire attention, He draws us into complete inner silence, but that is God’s doing. It usually only lasts a short time, but for the most part our imagination wanders.  (p34)

If there were no God life would not be worth living for anybody, but because there is God life is worth living for everybody regardless of what it is like because everything can be turned into a means of finding God.  (p36)

Prayer Puzzles

I used to think prayer was simple: ‘Ask, and you will receive.’

Not anymore. Experience tells me it isn’t that simple at all: I often don’t get what I ask for, even when I’m pretty sure I have asked ‘in Jesus’ name’ and in line with what I reckon is the divine will.

I’m talking here, of course, about ‘petitionary prayer’: bringing requests to God. The New Testament writers, including Jesus himself, urge us to do that, and most of us do it regularly. ‘Lord, heal my child.’ ‘Let me get the job I was interviewed for.’ ‘Could you please temper my grandson’s autism.’ ‘Deal with that noisy neighbour who’s making our lives a misery.’ ‘Please stop Mum’s dementia from getting any worse.’

One problem, of course, is that answers to prayer are unverifiable. My child got better, yes, but would she have got better anyway, if I hadn’t prayed? After all, non-religious people often get things they long for. No-one can say for sure. Or if she didn’t get better, was it because I didn’t pray enough, or with sufficient faith (whatever that means)? So many unanswerable questions!

It’s not all bad, however. There have been a handful of occasions in my seventy years as a committed Christian where a prayer of mine has brought such a striking and immediate response that I will never doubt that God did it.[1] But the majority of the many thousands of my everyday requests remain in the grey area.

And a huge number have not been answered, in that I didn’t get what I asked for. Christians have come up with all sorts of clever ways of explaining that. ‘It was answered,’ they say; ‘it’s just that the answer was No.’ Which is not very satisfying at all. Yes, I trust my heavenly Father’s love, and I know that his perspective is far broader than my own little world, but it’s still frustrating and puzzling to hit yet another brick wall or ‘brass heavens’.

This has made me more selective these days about what requests I bring to God. And that, in turn, has made me explore other types of prayer. Praise and thanksgiving is one such type, and no Christian worth the name will be short on offering that to God, so no issue there. But what about ‘set prayers’?

I was raised to look down my nose at these, as examples of the ‘vain repetition’ that Jesus warned against. Even saying the Lord’s Prayer was frowned upon in my circles. ‘Proper prayer’, I was taught, would always be extempore and from the heart, led by the Spirit. What a sad mistake—as if only ‘off the cuff’ prayers are in those categories! I have come to see that the Lord’s Prayer and other liturgical prayers from the church’s long history have immense value. I have learnt quite a few by heart, to my enrichment, and use them daily.

Someone has wisely said, ‘When you can’t pray, say your prayers.’ I have been blessed in using the General Thanksgiving from the Book of Common Prayer, along with prayers from Phyllis Tickle’s devotional series The Divine Hours, and a variety of other sources. I find they keep my communion with God on sound lines and provide a security in that, in praying them, I am one with the countless believers who, down the centuries, have used them to channel the outpouring of their hearts to God.

And the benefits go further than that. Set prayers help shape our thinking and serve to form our character. When our thoughts and ‘talking to God’ are in danger of going off-piste into potentially dodgy territory, the boundaries of these ancient prayers keep us safe. They pull our focus back to the Lord himself, and away from selfish or misguided aspirations.

Along those lines, I am also finding ‘centering prayer’ helpful. This is a ‘contemplative’ practice used by Christians throughout the history of the church and revived in recent times by the Cistercian monk Thomas Keating.[2] It involves coming consciously into God’s presence for a period of, say, twenty minutes, not to ask for things, or even to praise him—in fact not with words at all—but just to ‘be’ before him. It is ‘centering’ in the sense that we pull right back from the chattering of our minds and imaginations to simply rest in his presence.

But back to petitionary prayer. Why does so much of it seem to bounce off the ceiling?

The ‘word of faith’ people put the blame squarely upon us, the pray-ers. We need to have more faith, they say. We should repeat relevant Bible verses till we go all glassy-eyed and ‘break through’ to God. I’m unconvinced, in spite of the fact that some of them are truly godly people. Their definition of ‘faith’ is, I think, open to question and their grip on reality sometimes painfully tenuous.

Others hold that God doesn’t give us what we ask for because he often can’t. His nature, they explain, is love, and love by definition ‘does not insist on its own way’ (1 Cor 13:5), so he needs the cooperation of human and other agencies in order to change things. That doesn’t go down well with Calvinistic types, but it is something to think about. It certainly goes a long way towards explaining all those unanswered petitions.[3]

So those are my prayer puzzles laid bare. Don’t worry about me, please. In raising these issues I’m not backsliding. The fact is, I pray a great deal more now than I ever did before. I ‘seek God’s face’ daily with determination. I love him and trust him wholeheartedly, and I hope you do, too.

And please don’t bombard me with Bible proof-texts on prayer—I’m familiar with them all. I’m just a learner doing my best to grapple with how they work out in practice, and I’ve still a long way to go. So I’ll wind up by echoing ‘one of his disciples [who] said to Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray…”’ (Luke 11:1).

 

1. I relate one of these in my memoirs (p94-95), regarding being stuck with a group of youngsters on a dangerous mountain when darkness fell. Available here: https://www.davidmatthew.org.uk/index_htm_files/DM%20Memories.pdf
2. A ‘how to’ leaflet on centering prayer is here: https://contemplativeoutreach.org.uk/leaflets/MethodLeaflet.pdf
3. More on this in T.J. Oord’s book reviewed here: https://dmatthew34.wordpress.com/2020/07/25/god-cant/ Another book, by M.G. Karris relates the principles specifically to prayer and is reviewed here: https://dmatthew34.wordpress.com/2021/10/07/review-problems-with-prayer/

 

 

Review: When Everything’s On Fire

Brian Zahnd is one of my favourite preachers, so I was looking forward to this, his latest book. It is

When Everything’s On Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes by Brian Zahnd (IVP, 2021)

It has a foreword by Canadian Orthodox theologian Bradley Jersak.

I have not been disappointed. This is one of the most telling, and moving, books I have read for a long time. In an age when hope is scarce and the world in deep turmoil, Zahnd shows how it is possible to maintain a robust Christian faith. It will appeal to the multitude of Christians going through some form of ‘deconstruction’ of their faith, but it also has a preventive aspect that will appeal to a wider readership.

I like the way the author refers to Descartes, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Pascal, Derrida and Dostoevsky, plus other thinkers and writers, to show how their views have shaped modern attitudes, and he skilfully exposes both their strengths and their weaknesses. At the same time, Zahnd recounts some of his own experiences to illustrate his conviction that there is hope for the future, and that we, too, can encounter God in similar ways.

The book is in two parts. The first looks at aspects of the current world situation, while the second points the way forward. The loss of faith being experienced by many is more a reaction to fundamentalism (and especially biblical literalism) than to authentic Christianity. The need is to get away from faith seen as holding to a set of doctrines and to experience God. Modernism frowns on this, but it is central to the way God works. We also need to see the key differences between Jesus, Christianity and the church. The latter two undergo change, but never Jesus himself.

In finding our way forward on the journey of faith, we will need to un-learn some things, just as Paul did after his encounter on the Damascus road. This can be a dark time. But the Jewish day begins at sunset, not at dawn, and ‘dark before light’ is the usual pattern in our own spiritual progress. Happily, God specialises in revealing himself, and he will do that for the earnest seeker. Zahnd encourages professed atheists to step out and approach, by prayer, the God they claim not to believe in.

Modernism is still a factor in people’s awareness today, making human reason the ultimate arbiter of truth and reality. Postmodernism, for all its weaknesses, has at least opened people up to the spiritual dimension, and it’s there where the vital experience of God is to be found. We should seek to be ‘mystics’—people who have such experiences. Contemplative prayer is one avenue of exploration to follow.

On this journey we will likely enter a ‘second naïveté’, particularly in our reading of the Bible. After starting with a childlike approach, we move on to a more analytical, scholarly attitude to Scripture—which is both useful and commendable—but then come back to a more simplistic reading, where God can speak to us.

Zahnd’s conclusion is that the way forward is through an appreciation of the bottom-line fact that ‘God is love’. That enables us to have real hope for the future and be able to dream dreams of better things. The author spells out some of the dreams he has for the church of tomorrow, and they are big ones.

This is a warm and hope-inspiring book. It is deep, and sometimes provocative. But whether we are in a process of faith-deconstruction or not, it has something of value to say to us all.

Here’s a selection of quotations, with page numbers.

Is Christian faith still viable in an age of unbelief? Yes, it is possible. I can bear witness. My own faith has passed through the flames of modernity and is alive and well.  (p14)

Being angry with modern people for losing their faith is like being angry with medieval people for dying of the plague.  (p14)

[Nietzsche] was a towering intellect, a tremendous writer, a savage polemicist, and the most formidable critic of Christianity in the modern era. And if one is offended by his hostile disposition toward Christianity, it should be remembered that his caustic assaults were more of an attack on moribund Christendom as a cultural artifact than on a faith centered on the life and teachings of Jesus.  (p17)

In recent years, we’ve seen believers, pastors, and well-known Christian leaders publicly lose their faith. This phenomenon is happening with increasing regularity.  (p23)

Sometimes biblical literalism and angry atheism are just two sides of the same fundamentalist coin.  (p27)

I do my best to nurture my grandchildren in the rich soil of historic Christian faith, which in its healthiest forms has always been comfortable with mystery and nuance, metaphor and allegory, candid questions and honest doubt.  (p29)

From the very beginning, Christians have understood that faith and reason are not rivals but compatible ways of engaging with the mystery of being. A thousand years ago, Saint Anselm gave us the phrase “faith seeking understanding,” and the phrase still has currency. Advances in cosmology and quantum physics have only increased our sense of mystery, thus inviting faith to join the conversation.  (p30)

I know what it is to let go of anti-intellectual theology, doom-oriented eschatology, ticket-to-heaven soteriology, hyper-individualized ecclesiology and discover that something far, far better had been there all along.  (p31)

I suspect that many who think they are done with Christianity may not be as done as they suppose.  (p41)

The center of the human being is the heart—not the mind. I didn’t think my way to faith, rather I encountered Christ with my heart. Ultimately, the witness of my heart is as credible as the reasonings of my mind. And if you say the heart can be deceived, I will say the mind can also be deceived. A pure heart can be trusted. As Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Mt 5:8). My conversion was mystical, not rational. But that does not make it any less credible.  (p45)

Theories of eschatology, theories of atonement, and theories of final judgment I had inherited or picked up along the way now seemed to clash with the beauty of Christ. An unavoidable eschatological megawar in the Middle East, the cross as the Father’s violent anger inflicted on his Son, hell as God’s eternal torture chamber—these theological ideas had become too ugly to be endured.  (p47)

I believed in Jesus, but in midlife I became aware of how much of my theology was incongruent with the one who was the true object of my faith. I was willing to sacrifice my theology for my Lord.  (p48)

We’re not going to find Jesus in an archaeological dig but in the place of prayer and worship.  (p53)

Passing through periods of doubt is a necessary part of spiritual growth and it’s nothing to be embarrassed about.  (p54)

Within the broad borders of the historic creeds there is plenty of room for creative theology and rigorous debate.  (p60)

Disdain for received religious tradition is more akin to every individual left to discover the wheel and harness fire on their own. Without shared religion, we cannot build on the spiritual progress achieved by those who have gone before us.  (p61)

We train people in prayer by giving them well-crafted prayers because the primary purpose of prayer is not to get God to do what we think God ought to do but to be properly formed.  (p62)

There is a remarkable degree of flexibility and capacity for change within the Christian religion. Among other things, this means that we can rethink and even modify Christianity without losing Jesus.  (p63)

[Re Mark 3]  Losing Jesus. Finding Jesus. Rethinking Jesus. This is the only way we make spiritual progress. Just about the time we think we’ve got Jesus figured out, he goes missing. We may fear that we’ve lost Jesus, nevertheless if we seek him, we will find him. But in the rediscovery we will be required to rethink some things.  (p73)

The sense of being abandoned by God, losing Jesus, is all part of the long spiritual journey. The sixteenth-century Spanish mystic John of the Cross described it as the dark night of the soul. These are the trying times when God plays a mischievous game of hide-and-seek. But it’s all designed to draw us out of our cozy spirituality and onto the hard road of an earnest quest. Christ is found by those who seek him, not those who presume him.  (p74)

In Genesis, the new day doesn’t begin at sunrise or at midnight, but at sunset. Reflecting this, the Jewish Sabbath does not begin at sunrise on Saturday but at sundown on Friday. Each new day begins with new darkness. Newness is not heralded by the rising sun but by enfolding darkness. This is counterintuitive. The new day does not begin with being able to see, the new day begins with being unable to see. Newness is born in nothingness.  (p75)

Complacency, not doubt, is the great enemy of spiritual development.  (p77)

There is a journey of unknowing that is mostly about un-knowing or unlearning. It’s not the learning that is hard but the unlearning. In the first half of life, we tend to think that all we need for spiritual progress is positive addition. Just learn some more God stuff. But in the second half of life, spiritual progress is more often obtained through the apophatic process of negation. We begin to know about God by realizing how very little we know about God.  (p79)

If we think doctrine is more important than love, we already have bad doctrine.  (p86)

The revelation of Jesus Christ cannot be proven (or disproven), it can only be proclaimed. And the proclamation can either be believed or disbelieved. But Paul insists that the capacity to believe is inherently present in the proclamation—the proclamation is self-authenticating because it is the word of Christ. “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ” (Rom 10:17 NASB). The capacity to believe is ontologically present in the proclamation of the gospel.  (p91)

If from the outset you insist that if God doesn’t show up in the telescope like Alpha Centauri or in the microscope like a DNA molecule, then God doesn’t exist, well, guess what, you’re going to “prove” that God doesn’t exist.  (p95)

To begin with the Bible and make that the foundation of faith (instead of Jesus!) is to put more weight on the Bible than the Bible can bear.  (p97)

Since the canon of Scripture is closed, the soil of the Christian faith is unchanging. But that doesn’t prevent the living Christian faith itself from growing, changing, developing, and maturing over time.  (p98)

My Christian faith is bigger than the Bible—and dare I say, better than the Bible. Jesus Christ is the only perfect theology and the only enduring foundation.  (p100)

As modern Christians, we are conditioned to be embarrassed by a claim to know something by a revelatory experience, so we are tempted to pretend that our faith is based on something everyone can agree on. But this is a departure from the apostolic understanding of how and why we believe in Jesus. It’s quite amazing to me that it took me decades to admit what I knew all along: I believe in Jesus because I know him.  (p101)

Most atheists I have had conversations with seem to think about God nearly as much as I do.  (p103)

The rational mind is capable of amazing accomplishments, but it is not an organ suitable for experiencing God. Attempting to use the rational mind as the organ for experiencing God is rather like trying to smell a rose with your ear.  (p110)

Jesus is clear that the only way to know if his teaching is from God is a resolve to act. “Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own” (Jn 7:17). You’ll never know if Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life by sitting all alone upstairs in your head thinking about it. You have to act on it.  (p118)

Mystical experiences are not foreign to scriptural tradition but are the norm within scriptural tradition.  (p130)

The goal of spiritual practices like prayer, worship, scripture reading, and the like is to become properly formed as a being who bears the imago Dei—the image of God. Thus, the primary purpose of prayer is not to get God to do what we want God to do but to be properly formed—to become the person God created us to be.  (p131)

Through practices like disciplined Scripture reading, liturgical prayer, formative prayer, listening prayer, contemplative prayer, spiritual reading, and spiritual direction, we form our soul in healthy ways and increase our capacity to experience God.  (p136)

Forty years ago, I read a book titled Knowing God, but as I look back these many years later, I realize that Knowing God isn’t actually about knowing God but knowing doctrines about God—a presentation of Reformed systematic theology.  (p137)

Today, if I’m reading the Bible in the morning as part of my daily spiritual exercises and I read about the walls of Jericho falling down, I don’t muse upon the fact that archaeological evidence does not support this. I know this fact, but now that I know it, I can set it aside and allow the inspired storyteller to tell the story. Because, although I know what biblical archaeology says about this story, I also know there are walls that need to fall and that the people of God need to march around these walls believing they will fall.  (p143)

I hold the resurrection of Jesus Christ to be a historical event. Though the precise nature of the resurrection may lie beyond our understanding, I believe it happened. I believe it because the living Christ has been revealed to me and because of the witness and creedal confession of the church.  (p145)

I actually believe—though I cannot prove it—that God is in a constant state of intervention in the world. I hold to the seemingly outrageous idea that God is never not intervening in the world! God is love, and God is always loving the world. God’s intervention is God’s love. God’s intervening love may rarely (if ever) be coercive and controlling, but the intervention of love is there nevertheless.  (p149)

In a time when everything is on fire with fear, hatred, and violence, the temptation is to fear the fear, hate the hate, and react with violence to the violence. It’s easy to be seduced into thinking that our fear is warranted, our hate is righteous, and our violence is justified.  (p152)

The house of fear exists only because its inhabitants don’t yet know the single greatest truth of our existence: God is love. The universe is not benign, but God is love. Cruel vagaries abound, but God is love. Harms are hidden among us, but God is love. An awareness of God’s love is the secret to facing the world as it is and still abiding in peace.  (p155)

Our blessed hope is that the Father’s house will finally subsume the entire cosmos—that the universe itself will become the house of love. But the particular good news in our present moment is that Jesus invites us to live in the house of love now.  (p158)

When we follow the Jesus way, embrace the Jesus truth, and live the Jesus life, we are on the road to the Father’s house, the house of love. And do I believe that some, drawn by the Holy Spirit, are on this holy way without yet knowing the name of the way? Absolutely. They are what Karl Rahner called “anonymous Christians.”  (p158)

We need to live with both an anticipation of the imminent return of the Lord and with a suspicion that the parousia might be many millennia in the future.  (p163)

[Re Moses and the burning bush]  Learn to sit in some kind of wilderness until something catches fire.  (p170)

Other books by Brian Zahnd that I have reviewed:

• Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God
• Water to Wine