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!

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.

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/

 

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)

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)

 

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)

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

Review: It’s all about the journey

This excellent book is hard to categorise; it straddles the divide between autobiography and spiritual insight. It is

Nomad: A spirituality for travelling light by Brandan Robertson (Darton, Longman & Todd, 2016)

Though still a young man (born 1992), Robertson has had more than his fair share of life’s ups and downs, as he has struggled to find his identity within evangelicalism in his native America. That has included coming to terms with his growing awareness of his own non-mainstream sexuality, which didn’t go down well in that circle, especially as he was in theological training to be a pastor.

He became a ‘nomad’—thrust out from mainstream church life and forced to embark on a journey of spiritual discovery and new alliances. And from these experiences he draws out some life-lessons of great value. These include the need to actually be with people we disagree with; the recognition that Jesus taught and modelled a way of life based on unconditional love; the need to stop trying to force our views on society through legislation; the fact that more of life is grey than black and white; the value of experience over doctrine—and more.

He leads us through some of his own discoveries, including the rich traditions of Orthodox and Catholic faith, and Celtic Christianity. He has found the contemplative approach to prayer of great benefit and has come to see the foolishness of writing off ‘tradition’—especially liturgy and ritual—the way most evangelical churches have done. And he is not alone: he has been surprised to find how many young Christians from charismatic and Pentecostal churches have moved in the same direction.

He tussles with the concept of what it means to be ‘holy’, and concludes that it is to embrace our own uniqueness as the products of an infinitely creative God. For him, of course, that has meant coming to terms with his sexuality—which he wisely refuses to be defined by. There are some challenging insights in this section of the book!

He has a chapter on the Eucharist, or Holy Communion. Here, again, he has found the older traditions hugely helpful in appreciating its significance and depth. His eucharistic journey has also taught him the importance of ‘social justice’: feeding the poor, caring for the environment, and more—aspects which evangelicalism has tended to set over against the ‘important’ job of ‘preaching the gospel’.

He has much to say about grace, as expressed in forgiveness. Raised by a violent, alcoholic father who made his childhood a misery, his experience of putting this into practice is intensely down-to-earth, and I suspect many readers will find this deeply challenging. It was equally difficult for him to forgive his old pastor who, in the name of Christ, had treated him in an appalling way.

This really is a unique book. It is well-written and easy to read, but anything but shallow. And it’s one that will shake every reader out of smug complacency and urge them to get up and journey with Jesus.

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

I began to realise that I ‘struggled’ with same-sex attraction. As a good Evangelical Christian who felt called to be a pastor, I knew that this ‘struggle’ had to be kept quiet, lest I become the recipient of the harsh treatment I had seen the Church dish out to others.  (120)

I received handwritten letters from professors at my Bible college who were ‘deeply grieved’ by my support for same-sex marriage and even called for me to ‘renounce’ my degree, claiming that I received it under ‘false pretences’ as a ‘deceiver’.  (155)

The book you hold in your hand is not primarily about sexuality or gender identity. Instead, it’s about my journey so far from the rigid confines of religion to the vast desert sands of true spirituality.  (215)

Christians often define themselves by what they believe versus what others don’t. There is security in staying in a particular place with people who share our convictions and experiences. And there is nothing wrong with that, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all way of faith. For a growing number of us, this way of having faith is simply unrealistic and inconceivable. We need to move. We want to push the boundaries and traverse in lands where no one has gone before. We’re nomads.  (266)

Many people are leaving the safe confines of the faith of their upbringing and are roaming the streets, looking for and often discovering, new and innovative ways of expressing their devotion to God. This isn’t a symptom of unfaithfulness but is, I believe, a movement of God’s Spirit. As a new generation of Christians are taking to the streets of the world, looking for signs of God’s movement in the most unlikely and unexpected places, we are discovering that the God we worship is much bigger than we once expected. That Jesus is actually ‘alive and active’ as the Apostle Paul says in the book of Ephesians, in places we never thought he would show up.  (330)

What happens when the pat answers that once made so much sense now begin to seem uneducated, ill informed, and archaic?  (341)

Jesus wasn’t worried about giving anyone any answers. He was interested in leading them on a journey. Jesus created spiritual nomads, not doctrinal guards. Jesus stirred up doubt in the minds of those who thought they had it all figured out and honoured the seekers.  (414)

When I was still a Baptist, I believed that any church that used the NIV Bible were sell-outs and heretics. Seriously.  (583)

Fear and demonisation of ‘the other’ is one of the biggest problems with Christianity (and perhaps every religion) today. Anthropologists have long understood that one of the fundamental methods that humans use to create a unified community is to unite against a common enemy.  (620)

There is another means to fostering unity within our communities that brings life and breeds openness. There is a way that disarms both the ‘us’ and the ‘them’ and creates, in the midst of our great diversity and complexity, a ‘we’. And that way is love.  (645)

During my high-school years, I was very involved in inter-faith dialogue. What that really means is that I liked to argue with anyone who wasn’t a fundamentalist Christian like me. Throughout my four years, I spent countless hours debating with Mormons, Muslims, Wiccans, Pagans, Atheists, Non-Religious and of course, the Methodists, trying to convert them from their way of false teaching to my way, or rather, the way.  (675)

Part of loving is sacrificing our ego’s need to be right.  (712)

Even though the average Christian isn’t actually militaristic, this mindset of war does affect the way we interact with the people and culture that surround us. We begin to see everything in our world as increasingly dark and hostile to us and our faith… It’s this impulse to defend our faith against perceived threats that has made Christians more known for what we’re against than what we’re for.  (764)

I was a fan of the Apostle Paul. His words were clear, straightforward, and deeply theological. When Paul wanted to say something, he said it. Jesus, on the other hand, spoke in parables. His words were often cryptic. And most perplexingly, he seemed to have really bad theology. Paul made it clear that salvation was ‘by faith alone, through grace’. But Jesus seemed to suggest that we would be ultimately judged based on what we did, how we lived, and not on what we believed.  (788)

On the cross Jesus put an end to all judgement, condemnation, and war. He revealed that the Kingdom of God would not be established through Christianising our culture but by sacrificing our rights, privileges, and positions of power out of love for our neighbours. For our enemies. This is indeed ‘foolishness’ to the world, but it is the wisdom of God.  (824)

We vocally war against legislation to support same-sex couples’ civil right to be married under the law, claiming that marriage is ‘our’ institution. But when did Jesus, or Paul, or Peter, or anyone ever ask us to do that? As we force our worldview and values on a nation that cannot relate to them, is it any wonder that there are such negative perceptions of Christianity?  (860)

The modern pursuit of winning over the culture is ultimately a pursuit of power and domination… While many great contributions have been made by Christianity because of its position of influence over the centuries, the truth seems to be that whenever Christianity is given power and prominence, it ceases to be authentic Christianity.  (874)

I found myself amazed that at the core of every religious tradition, there seemed to be beliefs and values that aligned with mine. Many of the religions we learned about had similar ideas and practices that seemed to complement my Christian faith in unexpected ways.  (959)

Truth isn’t a set of absolute propositions; rather, it is a person. Jesus Christ. He is Truth and like all people, he is dynamic. He cannot be classified, systematised, and organised into neat little boxes and categories. He defies boundaries and descriptions. And if Jesus is the visible image of the invisible God, as the Apostle Paul claims, then we must assume that God is just as dynamic.  (1033)

When I understood that everything didn’t have cut-and-dried answers, that theology was a complex and imprecise art, and that God himself was dynamic and filled with colour and tension, I began to finally feel … safe.  (1045)

We are told to confess and affirm, rather than to critically think, engage, or seek after a personal experience with God. Many are even told that desiring to experience God instead of mentally assenting to his existence is somehow sinful and untrustworthy.  (1096)

…the Pharisees, a hyper-orthodox, Scripture-centred group of religious leaders who, like many Christians today, valued theological accuracy and moral purity over an intimate relationship with God.  (1120)

The early Christians’ spirituality was far more than reading the Bible and praying every day. It was deeply rhythmic; a well-structured pattern of living that ensured a person would remain aware and connected to the presence of God throughout the day. Many traditions involved some form of meditation.  (1144)

In my journey to experience God, I have found great resonance in the contemplative traditions of the Franciscans.  (1179)

When our theology and language fall short, as they always do, it is our experiential knowledge of God that will ultimately sustain us. As spiritual nomads with an insatiable desire to delve deeper into the depths of the great mysteries of our Universe, we must learn to seek and sense the presence of God.  (1215)

Though many of us may find ourselves in a place where we feel like no one understands our struggle and no church could ever be a comfortable fit for us, it is essential to intentionally commit to a community and to relationships, no matter how much tension or discomfort there may be.  (1396)

To be holy means to be unique or different. So when God calls us to be holy, we’re being called to embrace our ‘True Selves,’ the authentic being God originally created us to be.  (1466)

To be holy is to be like Christ, and to be like Christ is to be rooted and confident in our God-given identity.  (1509)

When a person diverges from the normalised cultural image, we marginalise and demonise them. Those who rock the boat by being their authentic selves are often the ones society despises most. Why? Because in our bondage to our false identities, which we perceive as giving us value and security, we can’t stand to see someone else walking in liberation.  (1522)

Instead of preaching the Gospel, which invites all people to come just as they are, we began to preach a message that required LGBTQ people to conform to our standard of holiness before they were welcome into the body of Christ.  (1634)

I now believe that God blesses LGBTQ marriages, that covenanted same-sex relationships are a reflection of the love and glory of God, and that identifying as both LGBTQ and Christian is not contradictory.  (1646)

The sooner we relinquish our desire to label and classify each other in neat boxes where we can understand and ultimately control each other, the sooner we open up ourselves and our world to true freedom.  (1669)

Growing up as an Evangelical, I never really got what the whole communion thing was all about… It wasn’t until I began to explore the ancient traditions of the Church that the importance of the Eucharist began to radically change the way I viewed Christianity altogether.  (1712)

Jesus seemed less concerned about whether his disciples were exemplary theologians and more concerned with whether or not they embodied grace, forgiveness, and peace to their neighbours, their enemies, and themselves.  (1797)

The ritual of the Eucharist provides the image of what it looks like to be a Christian. Beyond having the right answers or believing the right things about God, being a Christian is first and foremost about following Christ. About being filled with the Spirit of God, and allowing ourselves to be broken and poured out in the world.  (1834)

To the natural mind, it seems absurd to assert that the way to foster healing from a toxic or abusive situation is to return to the situation and offer forgiveness, blessing, and love. But this is the way of the Kingdom.  (1963)

One thing that I have become absolutely confident of is that life is not about achieving goals, gaining notoriety, or reaching a destination. It is about the journey.  (2025)

It seems to me that God has always been more interested in faithfulness to his leading and direction, wherever it may take us, than about reaching a place of certainty and comprehension.  (2037)

Beyond all of our theology, traditions, and practices, to be a Christian means to live every moment consciously aware that ‘in God we live, and move, and have our being’ (Acts 17:28a).  (2087)

This is the goal for which I strive. This is the desire for which I long. For myself, for you, and for the entire world. That we would live lives of wonder, totally amazed at the goodness of God, the complexity of life, the diversity of human experience, and the peculiar reality that it all fits together somehow on to the giant canvas of the cosmos on which God is painting a beautiful masterpiece that defies comprehension.  (2160)

 

Review: How the early church grew

Church history is not everybody’s cup of tea. But some grasp of it, however weak, is better than none and prevents us from becoming rootless Christians. This fascinating book focuses on the first four centuries of the Christian era. It is

The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire by Alan Kreider (Baker Academic, 2016)

It builds its case around the words ‘patient’ and ‘ferment’. The early church never got up-tight about evangelism; it focused on living in line with Jesus’ teaching and example, and patiently trusted God to add to its numbers automatically. And he did just that! The ‘ferment’ idea is that of quiet change going on at the heart of things, like yeast in dough. And that, too, was a notable feature of the early church’s development and influence.

The word ‘habitus’ crops up a lot. It refers to the way of life of the believers in Jesus: their actions and reactions based on their convictions about what it means to live in a truly Christian way. Patience was a key element, in its broad sense that includes aspects like non-retaliation and the acceptance of societal pressure. In an age when violent persecution arose regularly, this was vital.

Their behaviour naturally posed a threat to a society based on military force and where people were entertained by watching gladiatorial combat. The Christians refused to take up arms or to attend the shows in the local amphitheatre. Their quiet resistance to these social pressures both annoyed their neighbours and attracted them.

It will surprise some modern Christians to know that, in these early days of the church, a three-year process of instruction and catechism was required, with many checks, before a would-be Christian was allowed to be baptised and participate in the Eucharist. This meant that the subsequent drop-out rate was low: people knew what they had signed up for. The book looks in some detail at the content of the catechism, then goes on to examine how the Christians worshipped together, once baptised and in full fellowship.

Huge changes touched the church, of course, when the Emperor Constantine became sympathetic to Christianity, early in the fourth century. For believers, respectability now replaced persecution. The book looks at the wide-ranging effects of this change for local churches across the Empire.

Kreider’s book is extremely well documented, with prolific references to the writings of early Christian leaders like Justin, Cyprian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian, Augustine and others, some of whom wrote long treatises on the subject of Christian patience.

We can learn many lessons from the early church, and this book will highlight some of them. At the same time, our twenty-first century world is different in many ways, and we would not want to apply all of those lessons slavishly as the only way forward.

This is one of the most fascinating and thought-provoking books I have read for a long time. If you are in any form of church leadership you will find it particularly helpful.

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

The Christians believed that God is patient and that Jesus visibly embodied patience. And they concluded that they, trusting in God, should be patient—not controlling events, not anxious or in a hurry, and never using force to achieve their ends.  (p1)

When challenged about their ideas, Christians pointed to their actions. They believed that their habitus, their embodied behavior, was eloquent. Their behavior said what they believed; it was an enactment of their message. And the sources indicate that it was their habitus more than their ideas that appealed to the majority of the non-Christians who came to join them.  (p2)

According to the evidence at our disposal, the expansion of the churches was not organized, the product of a mission program; it simply happened.  (p9)

In 256 Cyprian wrote a treatise of encouragement for his people. “Beloved brethren,” he wrote, “[we] are philosophers not in words but in deeds; we exhibit our wisdom not by our dress, but by truth; we know virtues by their practice rather than through boasting of them; we do not speak great things but we live them.”  (p13)

Tertullian urges Christians, who live by Jesus’s precepts, to wear their oppressors out with patience: “Let wrong-doing grow weary from your patience.”  (p23)

French reflexive sociologist Pierre Bourdieu points us to another motivator that he believes is deeper which he calls habitus. Bourdieu contends that the knowledge that truly forms us is more profoundly a part of us than our intellectual knowledge. It is “corporeal knowledge,” a “system of dispositions” that we carry in our bodies.  (p39)

The Christian leaders recognized that, even after catechesis and baptism, there were profound continuities in the social reflexes of their people. Their wiring was almost hard. But not quite. Change was…not impossible.  (p41)

The worship of the Christian community, repeated week by week, shaped the worshipers’ habitus by giving them kinesthetic as well as verbal habits.  (p51)

It was not primarily what the Christians said that carried weight with outsiders; it was what they did and embodied that was both disconcerting and converting. It was their habitus—their reflexes and ways of life that suggested that there was another way to perceive reality—that made the Christians interesting, challenging, and worth investigating.  (p51)

What the outsiders saw was not their worship. It was their habitus. According to Tertullian, the outsiders looked at the Christians and saw them energetically feeding poor people and burying them, caring for boys and girls who lacked property and parents, and being attentive to aged slaves and prisoners. They interpreted these actions as a “work of love.” And they said, “Vide, look! How they love one another.” They did not say, “Aude, listen to the Christians’ message”; they did not say, “Lege, read what they write.” Hearing and reading were important, and some early Christians worked to communicate in these ways too. But we must not miss the reality: the pagans said look! Christianity’s truth was visible; it was embodied and enacted by its members.  (p61)

Christians were uncomfortably aware that pagans often attributed problems to the presence of Christians: “Many are complaining and are blaming us because wars are arising more frequently, because the plague, famine are raging.” This analysis could lead to persecution.  (p64)

[Re the plague]  As Cyprian wrote, some Christians were upset when they observed that “the power of this disease attacks our people equally with the pagans.” Cyprian would have none of this; in his sermon he simply reminds the people that Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, had said that God sends the rain on the just and the unjust, and by extension the plague could also descend on everybody without distinction.  (p66)

Christians followed their business opportunities or the imperatives of their jobs by moving from their home areas to new areas as merchants, artisans, doctors, prisoners, slaves, and (by the third century) soldiers. As they traveled, they often moved in existing networks of family, profession, and faith (not least communities of Jews). Taking their faith with them, in new places they founded Christian cells. One scholar has called this process “migration mission.”  (p75)

As the worldwide Christian movement gained in membership, women played an indispensable part in the story.  (p82)

The significance of women in the early centuries was not in their institutional leadership but in their sheer number. It may be hard to prove this, but I am convinced that from an early date the majority of Christians were women.  (p83)

Christian catechists and writers in other parts of the ancient world also gave prominence to the “swords into plowshares” text. According to Gerhard Lohfink, this is the prophetic passage the early Christian writers cited more often than any other.  (p92)

Michael Green, assessing the apologetic writings for their evangelistic success, has concluded that there is “no example of an outsider being converted to Christianity by reading an Apologetic writing.”  (p93)

In the ancient world, when Christians were at their best, they sensed a dynamic interplay between indigenizing and being pilgrim, between affirmation and critique. They lived in existential tension between being at home and being strangers.  (p98)

Nothing did more to make the Christian communities distinctive than their sheer heterogeneity. Not only were women and men together; so also were children and old people.  (p102)

Even into the third century, their meetings, although structured, seem to have been characterized by emotional intensity and unpredictability.  (p105)

Ancient writers…more often mention exorcism than anything else as a cause of conversion to Christianity.  (p112)

According to Henry Chadwick, “The practical application of charity was probably the most potent single cause of Christian success.”  (p117)

Justin asserted that the church’s growth was a product of the Christians’ distinctive approach to enemies. Why do Christians love and pray for and persuade their enemies? So the enemies will become brothers: “so that they [our enemies], living according to the fair commands of Christ, may share with us the good hope of receiving the same things [that we will] from God, the master of all.”  (p118)

By the late second century many Christian communities had decided that outsiders—non-Christians—could not be admitted to their worship services.  (p134)

It was not Christian worship that attracted outsiders; it was Christians who attracted them, and outsiders found the Christians attractive because of their Christian habitus, which catechesis and worship had formed.  (p135)

Typically the earlier churches held their primary meetings in the evenings, but by the first half of the third century most had their main services in the morning. The churches had moved from being a meal society to being a worship assembly, and their primary meeting had moved from dinner to breakfast.  (p136)

The true prophets were not those who said inspiring things; they were those who “behave like the Lord.” The Didache notes, “It is by their conduct that the false prophet and the [true] prophet can be distinguished.”  (p140)

Christians have renounced their old habitus and entered an alternative, life-giving habitus in each of the four areas: in sex, continence; in place of magic, dedication to God; in wealth, “bringing what we have into a common fund and sharing with everyone in need”; in violence and xenophobia, “living together and praying for our enemies, and trying to persuade those who unjustly hate us.” This new habitus, Justin contends, is rooted in the teachings of Christ, “whose word was the power of God.”  (p143)

Unlike many churches today, the third-century churches described by the Apostolic Tradition did not try to grow by making people feel welcome and included. Civic paganism did that. In contrast, the churches were hard to enter. They didn’t grow because of their cultural accessibility; they grew because they required commitment to an unpopular God who didn’t require people to perform cultic acts correctly but instead equipped them to live in a way that was richly unconventional.  (p149)

Non-Christians were at times attracted by the Christians and interested in exploring Christianity further. The Christians could not take them to Sunday worship services—these were off limits to people until they had been catechized and baptized. But the Christians could invite their friends to go with them early on a weekday to meet the church’s “teachers.”  (p149)

Church leaders of a later age might have said, “Let’s admit them as they do their current jobs and eventually, when they have ‘heard the word,’ they will think their way into a new life.” The church of the Apostolic Tradition says in effect, “No, our approach is the opposite. We believe that people live their way into a new kind of thinking.”  (p151)

The theologian Origen likened the catechumens’ experience to the Israelites’ crossing the Red Sea; in this, they had left their bondage in Egypt but had not yet crossed the Jordan. Like the Israelites, the catechumens were in the wilderness, a place of unlearning and learning, of testing and deciding. In this liminal place, the catechumens had to choose—did they want to go back to their old life, or did they want to take the risk of being immersed in a new life?  (p153)

The catechists knew that people are profoundly formed by the stories they tell; therefore, many catechists made it a priority to present to the catechumens the Bible’s narrative, which would replace the pagan stories as their primary fund of memory.  (p157)

[Re Cyprian on catechesis]  Catechumens are to be nonviolent in their attitudes, words, and physical bearing; they are to be humble, to accept oppression, to overcome anger, to refuse to curse and slander, to accept martyrdom, and to forgive others.173 In five of his precepts, Cyprian specifically enjoins Christians to live with patientia.  (p168)

In North Africa, according to Tertullian, the bishops did allow candidates to discuss theology—at the right time. The right time was the weeks prior to baptism.  (p181)

[Re Origen on those just baptised]  And then for the first time they take part in the Eucharist, in which they receive milk and honey as well as bread and wine. They have entered the promised land.  (p183)

Christians claimed that through their worship services God changed them and strengthened them to cope with the precarious realities and daunting problems of daily living.  (p186)

Christians did not worry that absence of the pagans from their services constituted a lost opportunity. Their worship was not evangelistic; it was not “seeker sensitive.” Their intent in worshiping was to glorify God rather than to attract outsiders.  (p189)

There was encounter with the Bible and teaching by leaders with whom there could be interaction.  (p194)

According to Hermas, prophetic perception and exhortation were a normal part of the evening worship services of the Roman Christians, not the vocation of only one prophet.  (p196)

The early Christian writers gave exceptional attention to prayer, vastly more than to the sermon.  (p204)

There is no explicit record of the Lord’s Prayer being used in eucharistic services until the late fourth century.  (p206)

Origen in Caesarea saw it as natural that believers, rich and poor, would stand so close together in prayer that they would overhear each other; and because of what they heard, they could engage in acts of mutual aid, meeting each other’s needs… A doctor “is standing by one who is sick and is praying for health; . . . it is manifest that he would be moved to heal the one who prays.” A wealthy person “hears the prayer of a poor person who lifts up an appeal to God on account of his necessity. It is obvious that he will fulfill the prayer of the poor person.”  (p206)

Tertullian voiced another concern—the believers’ experience that the God to whom they passionately prayed did not always answer immediately. The church, he wrote, is like the little ship in Matthew 8:24 in which Jesus’s disciples are being tossed about by waves (persecutions and temptations), and the Master does not respond: “In his patience [he] is as it were asleep.” Tertullian urged believers to be patient. At the right time, in response to the prayers of the people, the Master would awaken, “calm the world and restore tranquility to his own.”  (p209)

Scholars have noted in bewilderment that the early Christians did not spend a lot of time praying for the conversion of outsiders.139 Instead, energized by the power of God that they experienced in worship, many of them lived interesting lives. And the rumors got out. Christian worship was a place of empowerment.  (p211)

The kiss of peace also shaped Christian witness. Believers, many of them poor, emerged from worship with the exhilarating knowledge that they had kissed unequals on the level. I, a struggling stoneworker, have kissed a decurion! Whatever others might say about them, the believers knew that they were people of worth, brothers and sisters in Christ. They knew this in their bodies. Outsiders would look at them and wonder what had happened to them in worship that gave them dignity and confidence.  (p220)

The Didascalia’s authors were not particularly concerned about mission. They assumed the churches were growing but didn’t write much about growth. Significantly, they didn’t urge the clergy or laity to evangelize. According to their understanding, spreading the message was God’s work, and it was their calling to be “helpers for God.”  (p226)

Late in the second century the church reached a tipping point. According to Georg Schöllgen, the church’s numbers had grown to the point that their patterns of order and behavior were no longer working well and needed to be changed.  (p231)

[Re the Roman emperor Constantine]  In my view, Constantine became a Christian, but not until just before he died. And his conversion did not come in a moment but was the culmination of a process of conversion. Constantine became a Christian when he, like the Christians for centuries before him, submitted himself to catechesis and baptism.  (p251)

[Re the views of Lactantius]  Religion cannot be promoted by compulsion. The advocates of a religion must make their case by patience. When people seek to defend a religion by bloodshed and torture, the religion is “polluted and outraged.”  (p259)

Constantine was saying to the “saints” that because he wanted life to be governed by reason, there must reasonably be more than one habitual way to be Christian—and that it would be legitimate for some Christians to kill judicially and in battle.  (p262)

These examples indicate an emperor with a short fuse and unreconstructed habitus; he was still reflexively in the thrall of dignitas and violence. So it’s not surprising that in 326, whatever offenses his son Crispus and his wife Fausta may (or may not) have committed, Constantine responded not by forgiving them but by contriving their execution. If Constantine had experienced a conversion of lifestyle and habitus, he could have responded differently to these agonizingly broken relationships—and given a moving Christian witness to the empire.  (p264)

Constantine did not approach religious policy as a baptized believer in the Christian tradition. Instead, he approached it as a traditional Roman with Christian affinities who was convinced that the religious cult played a central role in unifying society.  (p267)

Constantine’s use of state power was not to root un-Christian behavior out of the church but rather to root heresy out of society. This was the aim of the council at Nicaea to which Constantine summoned the bishops in 325, and whose creed and canons he backed up by banishings.  (p268)

The move to crush illicit Christian groupings was rooted in Constantine’s anti-heresy edict of 330, which according to Stuart Hall was “an imperial assault on voluntary Christianity.  (p276)

For earlier Christians patience had been the “highest virtue”; for Augustine it has become an ambivalent virtue: it “might be bad—if not directed to a just cause—or good, if it was.”  (p282)

As Augustine preached his sermons, always open to dialogue, the people repeatedly interjected “their usual cry, ‘One is free to believe or not to believe. With whom did Christ use force? Whom does he compel?’” Augustine knew how to respond to this usual cry. He pointed to Christ who used force, who coerced Paul into conversion by blinding him, as a result of which “the Church, then, imitates its Lord in forcing the Donatists.”  (p288)

Augustine confronted the apparent effectiveness of force; what he repeatedly called exempla—experiences, facts—demonstrated that a just impatience works!66 In light of the evidence, Augustine was convinced that he should turn away from the traditional Christian missional approach that was saturated in patience. His On Patience rationalized his turning.  (p295)

 

Review: Problems with prayer

I have long felt uncomfortable with some aspects of ‘petitionary prayer’—asking God to do things ‘at a distance’ for people and situations around the world.

I used to avoid prayer meetings because they raised too many questions. Like, ‘If God is in control, as most Christians maintain, why does he so seldom step in to heal people and sort things out?’ And, ‘If God is love, why doesn’t he just fix things anyway, without making his action dependent on how many people pray?’

Nobody seemed able or willing to answer those questions. Indeed, some Christians clearly saw me as on the verge of backsliding just for raising them. At last—oh, happy day!—I have found a book that tackles these and related issues head on! It is

Divine Echoes: Reconciling Prayer with the Uncontrolling Love of God by Mark Gregory Karris (Quoir, 2018)

You may already have come across the idea of ‘the uncontrolling love of God’, popularised by theologian Thomas Jay Oord. Love is God’s essential nature (1 John 4:6), and love, by definition, does not control; it ‘does not insist on its own way’ (1 Cor 13:5). That is the central plank in the theodicy of ‘essential kenosis’. In this book, Mark Karris examines prayer in the light of it, and provides some deeply satisfying answers.

He patiently deconstructs the approach to petitionary prayer that is the norm among evangelical Christians, before proposing a reconstructed approach in line with the conviction that God is not ‘in control’ in the sense of causing of all that happens, or even ‘allowing’ things to happen. At the same time, he looks honestly at those Bible passages often used to support petitionary prayer (like Elijah’s prayer for drought in James chapter 5, and Peter’s release from prison in Acts 12), and shows them to be not as simple as we think.

He proposes ‘conspiring prayer’, in which we enter into a dialogue with God. We bring our requests. He hears them and, in response, suggests ways in which we ourselves can become at least part of the answer.

If you consider yourself a ‘praying Christian’, I’m tempted to say, ‘I dare you to read this book!’ It will, I think, make you even more of a praying Christian—but with a modified approach that makes more sense of how God’s love and God’s power interact. It has certainly been a big help to me, and I recommend it unreservedly.

[Here is a selection of quotations. The numbers are Kindle location numbers, not page numbers]

My own experience of unanswered prayers became a haunting ghost of doubt that impelled me to examine more closely just what petitionary prayer on behalf of others really entails.  (175)

We are called to be Divine Echoes—people who intentionally set aside time to prayerfully listen, humbly opening themselves up to receive God’s wavelengths of love and creatively reverberate them out to the world around them.  (236)

While I knew that praying for oneself and for others in close community could be liberating, I began to question the validity of petitionary prayer for others who were not present, as well as for social issues, like poverty, racism, drug addiction, and violence.  (268)

I define the traditional understanding of the typical petitionary prayer as talking to God and asking God to love in a specific manner in which God was not doing so beforehand. For example, if I prayed, “God, please save my uncle Harold from his drug addiction,” I would be assuming that before I started praying, God was not already actively loving in the specific manner requested. In other words, God was not saving my uncle Harold from his drug addiction. I would be offering my petition in the hope that God might hear my prayer and lovingly save my uncle.  (376)

What exactly happens after the words leave my lips or after I speak them silently? Does God instantly hear them, or do they first move through the traffic of heaven where angels and demons are engaged in an epic battle? Some have suggested prayer releases and activates God’s power. Are prayers, then, like magical incantations? When a person prays for God to heal their ill dad, does that give God extra power, energy, or motivation to do so?  (455)

Does God increase his active love because a larger number of people pray? Does God say, “Well, just twenty of you prayed. If thirty of you had prayed, I would definitely have healed him”?  (469)

If an all-powerful God could single-handedly save and deliver loved ones but allows them to get into fatal accidents, become sick, get raped, or experience other tragedies because people did not pray for them, is that consistent with what a loving God would do?  (482)

It is important to remember that while biblical writers and saints of old believed petitionary prayer for others was powerful and brought about miraculous events, they were culturally conditioned. Their understanding was limited to the amount of revelation they could comprehend at their time in history. It is possible they did not think through the nuances, mechanics, and implications of petitionary prayer. They did not consider how other agencies were involved in moment-to-moment events—agencies like free will, lawlike regularities, randomness, and God’s uncontrolling, loving character. They engaged in an ancient social and sacred practice that came naturally and was modeled by generations of spiritual seekers before them.  (493)

One of the biggest conundrums with petitionary prayers for others is that they can unknowingly suggest a diminished view of God’s loving nature. In petitionary prayer, we are asking God to do our will with respect to our loved ones. We ask God to keep them safe, to heal them, to give them success, or to save them from an eternity without him. We want these things for those close to us because we love them. But if God loves them too, and his love far exceeds our love, does he not want these things for them too?  (580)

If our image of God is that of an autocrat, we believe God can do whatever God wants whenever God wants and however God wants to do it. Therefore, we don’t consider human agency and free will in the prayer equation.  (627)

If, on the one hand, God routinely intervenes in people’s lives without specific prayers for them and, on the other, chooses to remain passive and do nothing simply because people haven’t prayed, the logical conclusion is that God is a cruel utilitarian, prioritizing the faith of some over the health of others, rather than a benevolent Father to all.  (702)

The onus is on those who are trying to prove that petitionary prayer is empirically effective. Unfortunately, they have not effectively done so. Second, it would be impossible to scientifically prove whether prayer is solely responsible for any given outcome because there are too many variables.  (891)

If people believe that praying to God in a certain manner, at a certain volume, and with certain words will convince God to single-handedly root out prejudice, reduce hate crimes, solve the problem of homelessness, heal drug addicts, stop people from committing arson, stop rapes from occurring, and so on, they are engaging in magical thinking and superstition of the worst kind.  (930)

How many times throughout our lives have we prayed fervently for those suffering and in distress, placing all the responsibility on God to answer our prayers while those for whom we prayed suffered needlessly because we took no responsibility to be part of God’s answer to our prayer?  (982)

Some prayers in the Bible may be considered petitions, but a closer examination shows they would be more accurately described as wishes. Wishes are not typically addressed to God and do not have an expectation that God will intervene and actively love in a greater measure in someone’s life. They are simply a way of expressing inner longings.  (1027)

If God chose to stop the rain [in answer to Elijah’s prayer], God was simultaneously choosing to ignore other faithful people’s desperate prayers for rain.  (1164)

Why is it that God is able to instantly and supernaturally send angels to break people out of prison without being seen, and yet he is unable (or unwilling) to perform miraculous acts of that nature more frequently? Why doesn’t God send angels more often to prevent people, including young children, from being raped? Since God can instantly flick open a massive iron gate, why doesn’t he use his power to flick a psychopathic gunman in the head before a mass murder?  (1263)

[Re Daniel 10]   While God does use angels to deliver messages on occasion, God is an omnipresent being who can, and does, promptly answer prayers, speak to us, and show us visions. I would think a proper theology of prayer—especially one developed under the New Covenant—would not have us worrying about whether our mail will get stuck in transit due to the heavenly postal workers’ fighting with each other.  (1363)

Forming a theology of petitionary prayer for others based on Scripture requires that we work through some hermeneutical issues. It requires that we separate wishes from prayers. It requires that we separate myth, legend, and metaphorical and symbolic literature from objective history. It requires that we separate event descriptions (this is what happened) from biblical prescriptions (this is what you should do).  (1435)

Recently, I spoke to a professor and well-known speaker on the topic of prayer. He quoted John Wesley, who said, “God does nothing except in response to believing prayer.” I asked him why atheists in, say, predominantly atheistic countries like China or Denmark experience the same “miracles” as praying Christians experience. Why are they shocked to find their cancer has unexpectedly gone into remission? Why do they receive money as a gift at the last minute to pay rent? Why do they find true love, recover from addictions, find great parking spots, reconcile with estranged family members, and recover from depression? In other words, if “God does nothing except in response to believing prayer,” then why do atheists experience many of the things Christians pray for, except without the prayer?  (1471)

God does not step into time and intervene on occasion only when we pray fervently for him to do so. He is always close, always moving, always on mission, always loving, calling, challenging, encouraging, comforting, and convicting, moment to moment.  (1496)

Many Christians believe God can control but chooses not to. We have already seen how this view of God is problematic because a God who can unilaterally stop evil but who instead exercises “self-restraint” is a God who may be morally culpable.  (1561)

For many, humans having agency and free will to make choices in the world makes sense. Bad things happen because people choose to do terrible things. But randomness and lawlike regularities are seldom discussed. Understanding their interaction in everyday events helps us to understand further the complexities involved in human suffering. Understanding God’s inability to control randomness and lawlike regularities helps us understand why some tragic events occur.  (1573)

We often pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). It doesn’t make sense to pray for God’s kingdom to come and his will to be done if God’s reign is already everywhere and his will is always done on earth.  (1598)

One of the pitfalls of the traditional model of petitionary prayer is that it tends to ask God to love or change others without taking into consideration other dynamics and agencies, such as a person’s free will. Conspiring prayer, however, takes free will and a coherent theodicy into perspective.  (1647)

A person without faith or openness to God’s presence limits what God can do in their lives. If a person pushes God away, then no matter how much one may pray for them, God is kept from loving more fully. James reminds his audience that a person who doubts “should not expect to receive anything from the Lord” (1:7). It is not that God doesn’t want to give gifts and blessings to that person, but God has an open-door policy. God’s love does not control and only enters fully when people willfully open their door to him; God doesn’t force doors open.  (1672)

Despite his power, even Jesus was limited. Mark 6:5–6 states, “He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. He was amazed at their lack of faith.” Can you imagine? Jesus, the all-powerful, mighty God, met people he couldn’t heal? It certainly had nothing to do with Jesus’s desire or power.  (1685)

God always performs the most loving acts possible in every moment in every nook and cranny of existence. God can be trusted completely because he would never purposefully or maliciously harm any person, especially not for some grand Machiavellian purpose. This way of thinking about God, alongside an understanding of God’s relationship to human free will and other agencies, is a grand proclamation. Keeping God’s faithful and uncontrolling love in mind radically changes how we think about prayer.  (1697)

If prayer changes God and increases God’s energetic force of love toward people and circumstances, why didn’t the cumulative force of millions of Jews and other believers in God who prayed and cried out to God for mercy keep them from being tortured and executed in the Holocaust?  (1826)

Some would prefer to treat prayer as a ‘drive-thru window’ where they can place their order quickly and one-sidedly, without much engagement with the other party, rather than as an intimate meal in which both parties set the table and cook the food together.  (1905)

God invites us to create sacred spaces where we can be silent and practice the art of listening. A typical prayer meeting consists of people singing a few praise songs, stating their prayer requests, praying them to God, and returning home. There ought to be a time in that mix where the congregation turns down the guitar amps, shuts off the projector, zips their lips, quiets their hearts, and listens for what God might have to share. This old Quaker tradition is needed all the more in our high-tech age, regardless of denomination.  (1991)

I propose we Christians get rid of the phrase “God allows.” If we did, I suspect fewer people would be confused about God’s role or, worse still, would blame God for the horrific events that occur. Eliminating “God allows” could remove an unnecessary cognitive and emotional obstacle that prevents many from having a loving and grateful connection with their Creator.  (2027)

Mother Teresa eventually made the switch from traditional petitionary prayer to conspiring prayer. She is quoted as saying: “I used to pray that God would feed the hungry, or do this or that, but now I pray that he will guide me to do whatever I’m supposed to do, what I can do. I used to pray for answers, but now I’m praying for strength. I used to believe that prayer changes things, but now I know that prayer changes us and we change things.”  (2076)

This “God-is-in-control-of-everything” theology lulls Christians into becoming passive observers and siren-induced sleepwalkers. It can potentially cause people to lackadaisically go about their life and throw up an occasional prayer because, ultimately, “God is in control.” Meanwhile, greed, oppression, poverty, sexual violence, murder, genocide, and other systemic injustices increase. It is theology gone wrong.  (2115)

 

Review: Help on the D/R journey

Lots of one-time keen Christians are questioning many of their long-held beliefs. This can create enormous pressure because those beliefs have previously undergirded their mental and emotional stability. To help navigate a way through that pressure, books have been appearing in recent years, including this one:

Religious Refugees: (De)constructing toward spiritual and emotional healing by Mark Gregory Karris (Quoir, 2020)

The author, who is from a Pentecostal background, is an ordained pastor and licensed therapist, and writes as someone who has himself made the journey successfully. He calls it ‘the D/R journey’ (Deconstruction/ Reconstruction). His book is in three parts. Part 1 identifies and outlines the scale of the problem, which is huge internationally. Part 2 examines the emotional and spiritual pressure people feel in the midst of it. And Part 3 provides some guidelines for moving forward and maintaining faith—though that faith will likely be of a different form afterwards.

The book is substantial and detailed, covering every aspect of the subject. Each chapter ends with questions suitable for group discussion. It analyses the different ‘stations’ of the typical D/R journey, providing honest evaluations of what people feel in each one, before offering pointers to the way forward. I wondered sometimes whether the author’s treatment is too detailed? But he is commendably anxious to cover all the options and so can perhaps be excused.

As part of his suggestions for moving forward, Karris offers some helpful approaches to prayer—including ‘centering prayer’—which go far beyond the routine petitionary approach of most evangelicals. He also offers useful insights from psychology and neuroscience. And he shows himself aware of a range of approaches to God and the Bible currently being publicised by authors like Thomas Jay Oord and his ‘uncontrolling love of God’ conviction.

If you are struggling with some aspects of your own faith right now, this book is guaranteed to shed light on your situation and offer you real hope for a good outcome.

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

The D/R journey is shorthand for those who are going through a seismic shift in their religious and spiritual orientation… I call the signs and symptoms of this disorientation Religious Disorientation Growth Syndrome (RDGS).  (p17)

It’s not your fault that your faith is shaken and your core beliefs about God, the church, the Bible, and yourself are shifting. Life happens. Shift happens. Life changes with or without our gracious consent.  (p23)

You are going through (or have gone through) a profound shift that has catapulted you into a season of doubt, distressing emotions, anxiety-provoking and painful social realities, and existential and identity concerns. You are not alone!  (p26)

Since church politics and bureaucracy are overseen mostly by men, there can be strains of misogyny and patriarchy, interlaced with theology, that are oppressive to women and marginalized people.  (p28)

With the power of the internet, people now have the ability to travel to exotic, cognitive-dissonance-producing, theological places with the click of a button. Stale, simple, myopic, and repetitive Christian teachings on Sunday mornings are no longer going to reach the hearts and minds of many church goers.  (p29)

The problem is, when church is all about positivity, singing solely upbeat music, and hearing shallow responses to complex individual and societal problems, some Christians just can’t stomach it.  (p31)

Some churches are functioning like powerful, foreign occupiers attempting to squash identities, individual desires, and anything that doesn’t fit in with their pathological ideologies that masquerade as divine intentions and holy prescriptions.  (p38)

When people finally awaken and realize how their once-beloved faith has sadly failed them (or worse, mentally or emotionally abused them), the result can be spiritual trauma.  (p40)

We had the answers. We were part of the in crowd and everyone else was on the outside. And, the best part? Because of our denomination’s perfect, unblemished doctrines, I knew I was one of a chosen few who were truly saved.   (p48)

There comes a time…when all of us…have to choose either to go home to what is familiar or to journey ahead toward foreign, potentially perilous, territory.  (p52)

I have heard firsthand from pastors who were in the midst of this kind of internal conundrum. Many have shared with me their terror just thinking about publicly acknowledging their doubts about important doctrines that their church holds dear. Knowing that they would be kicked out of the church, and perhaps be unable to provide for their families, forced them to hide. This is no easy predicament. It’s sad their professional roles don’t allow them to be exactly who they are: imperfect followers of Jesus on a messy spiritual journey just like everyone else.  (p53)

No single, unchangeable label captures the complexity of who anyone is. Labeling others is an attempt to dehumanize and erase the diverse complexities of individuals and groups in order to gain power over them.  (p61)

The more love-filled and inclusive one’s heart becomes, the less at home traditional beliefs, that lack such love and inclusivity, will feel.  (p68)

Years ago, amazingly, I wouldn’t even cringe at the idea of God commanding genocide (Joshua 1:12); flooding the planet and giving sharks a smorgasbord of human entrees (Genesis 6-9); killing precious Egyptian babies (Exodus 11:5); burning people to a crisp (Numbers 11:1); striking down seventy people for being curious and peeking into the ark of the covenant (1 Sam. 16:19); ordering someone to be stoned to death by an entire community for working on the sabbath (Numbers 15:32); being prejudiced against people with disabilities and those who looked different (Leviticus 21:17-24); or committing a host of other Hitleresque monstrosities. I suppose I was just going with the Christian flow.  (p74)

Am I supposed to believe that a God, who is vastly more loving and just than I am, would be less loving and just than me? No matter where you are on the liberal/conservative divide, I am sure we can agree that maiming, burning alive, stoning, and drowning our children, when they selfishly go against our wishes (even if they were our adult children), is not the most compassionate, just, wise, and loving thing to do.  (p79)

Here is my concern with the “God demands justice for sin” motif. It seems to me that God asks us to forgive, without the need for violent physical punishment, when people act unjustly toward us. So, how is it that God demands justice in the form of violent physical punishment if people sin against Him, but God calls us to extend love, mercy, and forgiveness when people sin against us?  (p79)

After many years of reading, wrestling, and reflecting on the biblical text, I cannot with a clear conscience hold to a flat reading of Scripture where all texts fully disclose and reveal the true nature of reality and of God.  (p81)

The Pentalateral Hermeneutic of Love (PHL) is a lens with which I currently look through the Scriptures… The five-part lens consists of:

1. The fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22)
2. The biblical definition of love (1 Corinthians 13:4–7)
3. The only explicit parabolic picture Jesus gave of God the Father found in the story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-31)
4. Perfect love described in Matthew 5
5. The radical self-giving, others-empowering life of Jesus Christ, who is the full revelation of God. (p82)

Even secular researchers are studying this phenomenon called spiritual disorientation, seeking to find a correlation between a person’s mental health, beliefs, and inner wrestling with God—what they call divine struggle.  (p90)

Because of our tribal brains, it’s almost impossible to stop singing the songs, to break the rules, to disobey the religious leaders in our lives, and to become anything different than the docile sheep that we are used to being.  (p92)

Some Christians, on the D/R journey, experience a sense of loss due to the tenuous relationship they now have with the Bible. What was once a comforting sacred text in which every passage of Scripture was God-breathed, is now an ambiguous book that is better left on the table collecting dust.  (p100)

It’s normal to experience strong jolts of emotion in the middle of your faith shift. After all, you loved deeply. You gave your heart to both God and the church. And you are now grieving a profound loss of connections, attachments, intimacy, conversations, rituals, and beliefs. You have every right to feel the way you do.  (p109)

The hardest dynamic of the deconstruction process is the confusion that sets in because of your chaotic emotional experiences. Your level of anxiety and suffering is increased by your inability to understand what is going on.  (p110)

Splitting is a defense mechanism that causes people to label others as either “good” or “bad”. Splitting enables people to steer away from complex feelings of ambivalence which are often uncomfortable. This shock absorber is wired inside of us because, let’s be honest, it is sometimes easier to see the world as black or white than to see in shades of gray.  (p128)

Because we can have so many thoughts—some of which are contradictory—and mixed emotions during our deconstructive process, our mind is on a mission to manage our mayhem and make sense of it all. Telling our story to others helps accomplish that mission.  (p140)

Finding healing in community is not an alternative, or fallback plan, for those who do not have enough faith in God. It is a biological imperative and part of God’s gold standard for successful healing and necessary for living life to its fullest.  (p147)

God loves it when we are truthful, no matter how ugly we think our experiences may be. And God much prefers truthfulness than to see us wearing a mask—pretending and bearing false witness. God can’t heal our masks because they are inanimate objects, but God can heal an authentic hurting soul that is laid bare before God’s presence.  (p152)

I have found Christians to be some of the most self-deprecating people I have ever met. Not only do many of us not love ourselves, we do not even like ourselves.  (p159)

Perpetuating the message of original sin and eternal torture, especially to children, can bring grievous, monumental, pathological ramifications from which a person might take a lifetime to heal.  (p166)

You have the option to relate to yourself as the Father of love (1 John 4:16) relates to you, or as the Father of lies (John 8:44) relates to you. Do I need to tell you which option is best?  (p169)

The descriptive words we use of God are not God. They are placeholders, and imperfect ones at that. They are fingers pointing to that which cannot be fully pointed to or named. I could tell you that God looks like Jesus. And, that is an incredible place to start. Jesus is God fully manifest in the flesh. But, even our conceptions of Jesus are diverse. Our minds, which are our filters that are conditioned by a great number of factors, such as the time and place in which we live, cannot even fully and perfectly conceptualize or reflect him.  (p181)

If it seems you have multiple personalities when it comes to your faith, rest assured, you are not crazy. Science validates our experience. We can have contradictory feelings and thoughts. We can have different parts of ourselves vying for their unique positions. The hope is that we can combine and integrate our head knowledge with our heart knowledge and align them with the truth of who God says we are and move a few degrees closer to who God really is.  (p188)

The primary metaphor Jesus gives us for God is that of a father. Premier New Testament scholar and historian John Dominic Crossan writes, “Despite its male-oriented prejudice, the biblical term ‘father’ is often simply a shorthand term for ‘father and mother.’”  (p191)

I am convinced that to reconstruct our faith, we must have a theology of suffering anchored in the unconventional love of God. This is especially important in a world full of pain, suffering, confusion, sorrow, and death. I believe that the unconventional love of God is shown in God’s perfect, moment-to-moment, uncontrolling, and co-operative love.  (p205)

Many Christians believe God can control but chooses not to. It is a complete paradigm shift (a heretical shift for some) to suggest that God simply cannot control because of God’s uncontrolling, loving nature.  (p208)

As you are in community with God and others, trust in your experience. I know that experience gets such a bad rap. But, unfortunately, the alternative is to trust everyone else’s experience and how they interpret the scriptures, God, and reality.  (p211)

What would we think of a man, watching a child be sexually assaulted, having the power to stop the event from happening, but simply choosing not to help? Our inner spirit captivated by love and justice would passionately rise up and object to the unjust and immoral actions of that man. In the same way, our spirit would also rise up against a view of God as someone with full ability to intervene in horrific events, but who simply chooses not to help (but unfairly decides to help others).  (p214)

Anyone who claims that God is in control of all things is implicitly stating that God is the Grand purveyor of evil.  (p223)

While God can always be trusted, the same cannot necessarily be said to be true of human beings. Creatures big and small, laws of regularity, and spooky quantum anomalies cannot always be trusted to have our well-being in mind. Horrific events occur because randomness, lawlike regularities, and human choices collide.  (p224)

The very fact that we can “grieve the Holy Spirit” (Ephesians 4:30), shows us that God doesn’t always get what God wants.  (p225)

I propose that we Christians need to get rid of the phrase “God allows.” If we did, I suspect fewer people would be confused about God’s role or, worse, blame God for the horrific events that occur. Eliminating “God allows” could remove an unnecessary, cognitive, and emotional obstacle that prevents many from having a loving and grateful connection with their Creator.  (p226)

Your tears are not a sign of weakness but a powerful symbol that shows you were courageous; you took a risk on the unpredictable nature of love and loved anyway. Those who have ceased to cry have ceased to love and participate fully in life.  (p236)

Sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is that which appears faithless. There are times when singing songs of lament, which appear to hyper-religious folk as faithless, would be far more honest than singing today’s all-too-common, upbeat, pop praise songs.  (p239)

Our interactions with those theologically different than us can devolve into the type of religious debates for which Jesus called out the Pharisees. I think Jesus would remind us that, in spite of our differences, what matters most is whether or not we love God and others. Period.  (p262)

When we prioritize love, we make sure we are compassionately present, embodying the gospel for each person we meet.  (p264)

At the end of my life, I don’t want to have regrets because I was afraid of being the unique person God has co-created and co-shaped me to become.  (p274)

Identifying your values, choosing them for yourself and living them out is a part of the reconstruction process. This process can restore authenticity and congruence to your life, propelling you to live the life you are meant to live and to lovingly serve others with more of your authentic self.  (p275)

 

Review: Reading Scripture the Emmaus way

This is the last of a trilogy of related works by Canadian theologian Bradley Jersak, following on from A More Christlike God and A More Christlike Way. It is

A More Christlike Word: Reading Scripture the Emmaus Way by Bradley Jersak (Whitaker House, 2021).

It has a foreword by Peter Enns on five aspects of biblical interpretation.

Jersak’s emphasis in all three of his books is the supremacy of Christ, to whom all other aspects of faith and doctrine must bow, since he alone is ‘the exact representation of God’s being’. The ‘Emmaus’ reference in the title is, of course, to Jesus’ dialogue with two disheartened disciples in Luke 24, where ‘he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.’

The author is wary of calling the Bible ‘the word of God’, in the conviction that only Jesus himself can claim that title. The Bible is a witness to him, no more. In the light of that, some of the notions of biblical inspiration, infallibility and inerrancy common in evangelical circles are open to question. He addresses them all in depth, along with the concept of the ‘canon’ of Scripture. In doing so, the author is open about his personal journey from dispensationalism, via Calvinism, to a more Christ-centred position, and how that has altered his approach to such issues.

He looks frankly at the brutal, genocidal passages in the Old Testament, concluding that God never commanded them, even though his people at the time thought he did. From there, it’s a short step to a critique of PSA (penal substitutionary atonement), where God allegedly killed Jesus, using violence to achieve his ends, and to a different (and now widely accepted) understanding of God’s ‘wrath’. In all this, he leans heavily on patristics (the church leaders of the first few centuries, and their hermeneutics), lamenting the fact that modern evangelicalism tends to ignore almost everything between Paul and Martin Luther.

In addressing his theme, Jersak anticipates the objections that some readers will interject, and he deals with them thoroughly, and with grace. These include charges of supercessionism, eisegesis and the ‘spiritualising’ or ‘over-allegorising’ of Scripture.

In addition to rejecting the ‘flat reading’ of the Bible associated with modern concepts of inerrancy, he questions the ‘progressive revelation’ approach. Instead, he prefers ‘progressive illumination’—spelling out the differences and making a good case for it. He also looks with favour on the Septuagint (LXX, the Greek translation of the Old Testament), which was the version of the OT used by the NT writers. He illustrates how it often undercuts evangelical ideas like God punishing Jesus at Calvary (see the LXX of Isaiah 53:10).

He looks in detail at some literary features of the Bible often overlooked, such as allegory, ‘myth’, rhetoric, diatribe, phenomenology and anthropomorphism, with examples of each. He maintains that without some grasp of how the NT writers, in particular, used these stylistic devices, we cannot hope to get a clear understanding of what they are saying.

Evangelicals have tended to look down on church calendar-based practices revolving round liturgy and the lectionary. Jersak makes a strong case for a return to such approaches as guarantees that we get a rounded picture of God’s redemptive purpose instead of just pecking around the Bible for an interesting sermon-topic or a ‘blessed thought’.

To the huge current discussion about the nature of the Bible this book brings a helpful contribution. It’s not an easy bedtime read, but the effort of working your way through it will be a worthwhile challenge.

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

When we stand firm on Scripture’s central revelation—that Jesus Christ, the Word-made-flesh, is what God finally says about himself—biblicism (the notion that the Bible is our final authority) presents a thousand objections in the form of contrary biblical proof texts.  (p20)

Reading the whole Bible as a testimony of Jesus and as the grand narrative of redemption will require us to revisit our patterns of interpretation and layers of reading—attending to the literal, moral, and spiritual sense described by the early church.  (p24)

The Word of God is inspired, inerrant, and infallible. And when he was about eighteen years old, he grew a beard.  (p26)

The Word is a person. The confusion or conflation of inspired texts with the eternal Son of God is deeply problematic, especially when the Bible displaces Christ as the “Word of God” and “Scripture alone” becomes our “sole and final authority” instead of him.  (p27)

When I reoriented from Bible to Christ as the locus of the Word of God, Scripture became my map—or an inspired compass—rather than my destination, its authors, narrators, and events all employed by God’s Spirit, directing me to pursue the Person.  (p36)

…the difference between reading the Bible as a flat text (where every word has equal authority), progressive revelation (where all the words accumulate in a crescendo of consistent truth), and the Christocentric view (where Christ is the pinnacle of revelation, and every word must finally submit to him).  (p38)

[Re Numbers chapter 31]  Could the Abba Jesus revealed say, “Wipe out the foreigners. Take their women and sort them into virgins and nonvirgins”? (Who checked? How?) “Slaughter the nonvirgins and keep the virgins for yourself. But tithe a tenth of them to the Levites for their use”? (What use?)  (p39)

Following N. T. Wright and others, I no longer capitalize satan. Brian Zahnd says “the satan” is less than a person, more than a metaphor. It is the real phenomenon of evil, rooted in human sin, and verges on self-awareness. Most importantly, the satan phenomenon is undone by Love.  (p42)

“You mean in Eastern Orthodox churches you don’t have to believe in penal substitution?” I asked, hopeful.  “No, I mean in the Orthodox church you are required not to believe in it,” he replied firmly, adding, “And there are 350 million of us who have never believed it.”  (p49)

Once PSA fell, every doctrine related to divine retribution began to topple in turn. If God truly is Love in his essential nature, the necessity of eternal conscious torment, acts of divine genocide, and literalist interpretations of wrath fall too.  (p50)

I read 1 Samuel 15 to Vladika and asked him how the Abba whom Jesus Christ revealed as perfect love and unfailing mercy could possibly issue such a command. Without hesitation, he replied, “He didn’t.” I countered, “But the Bible says he did.” He parried with these surprising words: “No, these are the words of Samuel, a cantankerous old bigot who would not let go of his prejudice, projecting his own malice, unforgiveness, and need for vengeance into the mouth of Yahweh.”  (p51)

What the Bible calls “God’s wrath” is a metaphor for the self-induced consequences or intrinsic judgment of our own turning from Perfect Love.  (p52)

I am especially taken with Pete Enns’s “Christotelic” interpretation, which is why I asked him to explain it in the foreword to this book. In fact, he’s answered one of my most bewildering questions in one sentence: Why does the Bible contain so many bizarre, offensive, and un-Christlike depictions of God? Pete’s answer: “Because God let his children tell the story.”  (p53)

How you see the Bible changes your relationship with it. As I keep insisting, Christ gets the final word, and the Scriptures testify to his authority. I relate to Christ as God’s Word and to the Bible as one (and not the only) venue where I can hear the living Voice.  (p57)

I personally receive the Scriptures as authoritative insofar as they testify to Jesus. But I don’t see them making authoritative claims on matters of history, science, or even religion (e.g., I don’t submit myself to the purity laws of Leviticus). Rather, I ask, “How are the Law and Prophets not abolished but fulfilled in Jesus?” I let the authors say what they say on their own terms and then ask what the message is saying to me about Christ, his gospel, and his call for me to grow in love, by grace, toward God and my neighbors.  (p72)

The canon of faith was established by Christ and his apostles from the beginning, but the canon of Scripture has always been hotly contested. In fact, the canon of Scripture differs from Protestant to Catholic to Eastern Orthodox to Coptic Orthodox to Ethiopian Orthodox and beyond…to this day!…  The ecumenical councils felt it essential to be led by the infallible Holy Spirit to remember the gospel and articulate it infallibly in the first creeds—even before they finalized what books were canonical.  (p74)

[Re 2 Cor 3:5-18]  The veils are not only being removed from our own hearts as we read Scripture. Over the millennia, veil upon veil has been progressively removed within the Bible itself. That is, the authors who produced the Scriptures by the Spirit were themselves subject to temporal veils. Their veils glorified tribalism and nativism, militarism and violence, racism and misogyny, imperial and colonial ambition, and so on. Just like us!  (p79)

Prior even to opening the scrolls, the famous rabbi Philo understood that God is all-good and all-merciful. That understanding became his first interpretive principle. It predetermined how Scripture was to be understood and applied. Where God is portrayed as good, Philo instructs us to read that as a revelation of the good God. Where God is not portrayed as good, he instructs us to read allegorically, because we must never allow a literalist interpretation to negate our understanding of God’s goodness.  (p89)

I would suggest that the liturgical reading of the Scriptures in the context of community worship and the lectionary cycles, with its connections of linked texts, provided an essential medium for understanding the message that preceded the Bible—an understanding that is not as obvious in the printed version. In other words, the “divine liturgy” of the church is a medium that functions to frame the Scriptures within the canon of faith—the message of the gospel—showing how they work together within the drama of redemption that inexorably points to Christ crucified and risen. So, too, the lectionary cycles: these frame the Scriptures within the church calendar precisely in order to lead us to Christ and his gospel.  (p94)

I have often seen people, through a flat reading of the Bible, use particular Scriptures to argue against the very teachings of Jesus Christ, justifying from the idolized text that which the Word himself forbade. When the Bible becomes our final authority, Jesus is demoted to a mere episode in the Good Book.  (p95)

The next time you make eye contact with another human being, look through their eyes to the depths of their heart, to the treasure that is their true self, and then look to the deep joy of Christ’s adoring gaze. Leave behind the worm theology that judges another person’s deepest heart as deceitful and desperately wicked. Value them as you would a priceless gem—because Jesus did.  (p103)

When you compare translations side by side, the question is NOT necessarily which one best represents the first manuscripts, but which one best represents the gospel.  (p108)

[Quoting David Bentley Hart]  Fundamentalist literalism is a modern heresy, one that breaks from Christian practice with such violence as to call into question whether those who practice it are still truly obedient to the apostolic faith at all.  (p112)

Biblical literalism and inerrancy predetermine limits on what the Bible cannot do or say before even reading the text or allowing it to speak for itself. The result is an unwitting assault on the authority of Scripture, which itself is subordinate to Christ the Word. Inerrancy, then, is a modernist ideal that stands over Scripture (and over Christ!), attempting to master the text—to dissect it with the scalpel of literalism.  (p113)

We’ve learned that the Epistles are more than propositional teachings and ethical letters. Ben Witherington III and David deSilva have helped us to see these New Testament Epistles as sermons, written to be preached and crafted by masters of first-century rhetoric.  (p122)

The early masters of Scripture such as Origen in the East and Jerome in the West were simply following Jesus’s own hermeneutic and training us to emulate our Master-Teacher. And while literalists are skittish of allegory, Jesus makes it necessary for an Emmaus-Way interpretation. Contrary to my training, early church fathers didn’t come up with allegorical interpretation—Jesus and his apostolic successors were already adept at using and modeling it to unveil the gospel.  (p134)

Many disillusioned Christians, embittered ex-Evangelicals, and haughty New Atheists denigrate the Bible in the easiest possible way: they continue to read it as fundamentalist literalists—then use their misinterpretation of the sacred Scriptures against it as ammunition.  (p135)

Yes, I believe Jesus actually performed a wedding miracle in Cana, met with Nicodemus under the stars, and sat with a Samaritan woman who had been divorced five times. And I also believe the water-to-wine miracle is a parable of our transformation, that Nicodemus’s born-again transformation and the Samaritan woman’s inner spring are stories about us. I am/we are the morphing water. I am/we are Nicodemus. I am/we are the Samaritan. I am/we are the woman caught in adultery, and the blind man, rescued and healed by Christ. This dual reality of history and allegory is what Lewis meant by “true myth.”  (p151)

We can be liberal in saying, “I see Christ foreshadowed here,” without claiming, “God told me this verse means that.” This is not an “anything goes” hermeneutic. Rather, we’re reading with an open ear for intimations of the gospel itself within the Scriptures.  (p159)

A great many details of our sacred text still surprise and bewilder me. I can’t get my head around great chunks of it. But I trust that God is good, that Jesus is Lord, and that the unsearchable ways I read about are riches to be cherished. For me, being stumped has become an invitation to worship and to perpetual discovery.  (p168)

Hosea is one of our clearest revelations of the radical freedom of God to forgive sin without punishment, payment, sacrifice, or even repentance.  (p174)

[Re Deuteronomy 20-21]  I know Christians who are so hateful to Muslims that if I showed them this passage and said it was from the Qur’an, they would not hesitate to condemn and burn it. But if it’s in the Bible? Does the binding and title on the book suddenly make it defensible?  (p183)

The average Christian is now less biblically literate, and the average atheist is significantly more biblically aware, now than in the twentieth century.  (p190)

Worship precedes theology, often by several decades. As we experience the presence of God in prayer and worship, we begin to compose liturgies and songs that express what we have come to see. Eventually, theologians become observant and follow suit. Teachers may begin to confirm the implications of what the congregation has already been singing and praying (which is to say, believing) over the past decades. Ironically, the first generation of these teachers are often regarded as heretical, sometimes even by the very congregants who spawned the original revelation.  (p191)

The Bible is a revelation about us and about God. What the Bible reveals about the fallen human condition is our “sin.” This includes the depth of our “death anxiety,” the nature of “mimetic desire” and the “scapegoating mechanism,” and our human propensity to demand retributive justice and then sacralize retribution through sacrificial religion.  (p196)

[Re the book of Job]  Would the story have been better if we had simply skipped the first thirty-one chapters? After all, God himself tells us that virtually everything to that point was folly! Then why not just delete it? Why fill our minds with flaws? I used to flip right to the “good stuff” in Job until I started seeing how “good” the foolish counsel seemed to me. Some of it appears to make good sense. Exactly! The important function of the friends’ speeches is to shine a light on our own idiocy. The friends’ speeches are an inspired revelation of our own error, not a divine thumbs-up to their error.  (p203)

When we read the psalmist’s blessing on infanticide in Psalm 137:9, no sane person who has experienced the Father’s love honestly believes this is a revelation of God’s will. We know instinctively that we have here a revelation of the psalmist’s real but misguided demand for justice.  (p204)

We ought to bear in mind that just like Abraham, Moses, and David, so too the apostles of Christ and the authors of the New Testament were people in the process of transformation and discovery, not omniscient angels with magical pens. Their works, too, reveal both the human condition and faith culture of their era…and the divine solution—Jesus Christ, to whom all Scripture (before and after) points.  (p208)

We have often imagined that when we disobey a divine warning, God, rather than our own disobedience, becomes the threat and the source of harm. We confuse the wages of sin (intrinsic consequences) with the wrath (violent anger) of God.  (p221)

God deals with sin through correction, not punishment. That’s Clement, that’s Hebrews, that’s Hosea. The chastisements of God are disciplinary—not because divine justice demands satisfaction, payback, or wrath, but because a patient God is raising beloved children who tend to learn the hard way.  (p226)

I would argue that the number one genre error in biblical interpretation occurs when we mistake epistles for straightforward didactic teaching when, in fact, they are rhetorical sermons, designed to be preached aloud in the congregation.  (p233)

[Re Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats]  We literalize the parable into an eschatology. And since we can’t work out why the criterion of judgment is mercy rather than faith in Christ, we sit around reworking our end-times timeline instead of welcoming the stranger or visiting those who are sick and in prison.  (p244)

The Bible says God DOES change his mind. Some examples are Exodus 32:12–14; 2 Samuel 24:16; Jeremiah 18:8–10; 26:13, 19; 42:10; Ezekiel 7:22; Jonah 3:9–10; 4:2; and Amos 7:3–6. The Bible also says God DOESN’T change his mind. Examples: Numbers 23:19; 1 Samuel 15:29; Isaiah 31:2; 2 Corinthians 1:19; and James 1:17. Does the Bible contradict itself? Yes, these verses are contradictory if we read them literally. If we forget to account for worldviews and phenomenology…  (p251)

What, then, shall we say to those texts that announce God’s wrath? I argue that to avoid regressing to pagan images of God, we must read them as anthropomorphisms—i.e., figures of speech projecting human characteristics onto God.  (p254)

It’s not as though God is some heartless Stoic in the sky or the “unmoved mover” of Aristotle’s philosophy. No, God is LOVE. And God is relational and responsive to us—infinitely so. It’s just that God’s love is not reactive, subject to or contingent upon our drama, shame, or performance. Rather, God’s love flows as the infinite, constant, and unfailing spring of his own nature. Does God grieve with us and rejoice with us? The incarnation reveals God’s limitless empathy. Yes, God sympathizes with our weaknesses and knows the human condition from within—but not as one whose character (love/goodness) is jerked around by external forces.  (p266)

These patristic giants defined orthodoxy and defended it against some of the same heresies that pass themselves off as mainstream Christianity today. Their dogmatic teaching on the Christlike God of unswerving goodness and cruciform love is the gospel through which all Scripture must be read. I commend them to you as the pinnacle of biblical interpretation, without whom we would have no Bible at all.  (p268)

I see the deconstructionists exiting their churches and walking away from faith by the tens of millions. One reason for this is that they’ve been indoctrinated with false images of who God is and what God requires. The wrathful God who threatened to burn them in hell forever if they don’t believe right or behave right is not the Abba whom Jesus revealed—not the gracious and gentle Shepherd who descends into hades to rescue lost sheep, who are too entangled in briars to find their way home.   (p271)

The parable of the prodigal son(s) is the clearest picture we have of what wrath is, how it works, what causes it, and how it is and isn’t “God’s.” The Prodigal Son woke up in a pigpen of his own making and came to his senses. The father did not send him there. Were his days or years or life of misery literally God’s wrath (anger expressed as violence)? No. But his trials were transformed by God’s grace into the big story of the son’s redemption.  (p274)

My reviews of other books by Brad Jersak:

• A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel – here
• Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hell, Hope and the New Jerusalem – here

Review: Open and Relational Theology

Among thinking people today there appears to be a huge surge of interest in what is commonly called ‘open and relational theology’. But what is it? One of its foremost exponents answers that question in:

Open and Relational Theology: An Introduction to Life-Changing Ideas by Thomas J. Oord (SacraSage, 2021).

The book is aimed at ordinary people—and not all of them Christians. So it grounds its message in painful real-scenarios experienced by folk like you and me: a girl raped by friends from church; queries about God’s ‘sovereign plan’ and how it gels with human free will; misgivings about hell as traditionally portrayed; questions about why God answers so few prayers etc.

Surveys show that most people believe God to be in one of four broad categories: authoritative (a sovereign judge who punishes the disobedient), benevolent (empathetic and forgiving), distant (remote and uninvolved) or critical (disengaged now, but will judge at the end), and the book examines each of these in depth. It recognises that we can’t claim to know God in detail, because he is beyond human analysis. Yet he has given certain pointers to his nature.

Oord examines the ‘conventional’ God’s traits and finds them wanting. He then presents open and relational theology as in every way more satisfying, beginning with ‘God is love’. People come to it because it fits with the flow of Scripture, it harmonises with the logic of love, it is intuitive to the seeking heart, it matches the findings of social science and the way we relate in society, it reflects the life and teaching of Jesus, it echoes the findings of science and philosophy, it sits comfortably with trends in art and creativity, and it provides a framework for believing that our lives have meaning and purpose.

Against this background, he describes open and relational theology in some depth under the broad headings that God is: open, relational, ‘amipotent’, present and loving. This is the beating heart of the book, with much to stir both mind and emotions.

The author does not use ‘proof texts’, because he aims to include readers for whom Scripture may not carry a lot of weight. Nor does he use much theologically technical vocabulary, and when he does he explains it in simple terms. You don’t have to be a biblical scholar to grasp the message: it is heart-warmingly accessible to all, and has the ring of truth about it.

For those who want to dig deeper, there is a useful appendix listing some scholars and movements that have embraced some form of open and relational theology, followed by a bibliography suggesting further reading. But you will probably be more than satisfied, and blessed, by this book itself!

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

These ideas align with our deepest intuitions and everyday experiences. They match scripture well, although we must abandon some interpretations people have offered.  (30)

Without believable answers to life’s pressing questions, theology is of little use.  (191)

I believe an open and relational view of God makes the most sense overall. But I’m not certain. I don’t know God fully, so I can’t be 100% sure. I look at reality through limited and sometimes distorted lenses, which means my vision is cloudy. I just don’t know for sure. Open and relational thinkers can’t prove their view is the right one.  (251)

The conventional God exists above or outside time…  is usually thought of as masculine…  God is unaffected by what we do…  is in control…  is large and in charge…  is pristine…  usually keeps a distance, preoccupied with His own glory…  Our actions don’t make a difference to the future that the conventional God already knows as fact…  loves some people, sometimes…  I don’t believe in this God.  (280ff)

It’s common for open and relational thinkers to start with “God is love” as they consider theology, their lives, and existence.  (334)

Open and relational theology offers a framework to make sense of God in light of Jesus.  (375)

Artists and the artistically minded find open and relational theology attractive for how it fits their vision of the creative life.  (389)

The “open” in open and relational theology refers to the ongoing nature of time. Creation and Creator experience time moment by moment with no preordained future.  (434)

If we examine our own experiences, we’ll discover we already live as if the future is open. We live in the forward march of time and experience a relentless flow into the sea of possibilities. We think our decisions partly decide what will be, and already live as if these opportunities are a reality…  God experiences the flow of time too. The past is past for God, and not even God can change it. The present is present, and the future is open.  (449)

In the sacred texts of Christianity and Judaism, writers describe God responding to creation or deciding to do something new. These are time-oriented activities, not timeless ones.  (463)

A God who faces an open future can’t predestine everything. If God pre-decided it all, the future would be closed. This God ordained everything in advance, including torture, rape, disease, tragedy, accidents, violence, and ecological destruction.  (491)

Open and relational thinkers reject the idea that God knows in advance everything that will ever happen. We think God has plans and purposes, and God knows what might happen. But God can’t be certain about what free creatures will decide or what random events will occur until those decisions have been made or events happen…  If God foreknows all, freedom, love, and randomness are myths.  (505)

Does open and relational theology reject what scholars call “omniscience?” Is God not all-knowing? No. God knows everything. Open and relational thinkers say God knows all that can be known. God knows all that happened in the past, all that’s happening in the present, and all possibilities for the future.  (535)

Conventional theologies focus on scripture passages that say God never changes but cannot account for those saying God changes. And those passages are common…  God’s essence is eternally unchanging; it’s stable and steadfast. But God’s experience changes moment by moment; it’s flexible and forming.  (579)

My prayers become new data, pertinent information, relational input, and points of possibility that God can use in the next moments. My prayers are actions that generate new options.  (653)

Whether one relies on scripture, arguments, or intuition, open and relational thought provides a sense of freedom. Those who embrace it step outside confining categories, able to explore a way that reflects their experience of reality. Many feel invigorated. God seems more like a companion. Life seems expansive. Reality becomes a pulsing, living movement into possibilities. Life is open!  (682)

No human or pet connects with us perfectly, and none can feel all our pain. But a God who is always present, in all places, and in all aspects of our minds and bodies can and does empathize in ways that surpass any empathy we receive from others.  (758)

God is concerned about each creature, each entity, and the world. God shows concern without playing favorites. God also gives and receives in relationship like persons do. As one with intentions, plans, memories, and purposes, God is a personal agent. This meaning of “personal” makes sense.  (815)

Open and relational thinkers believe God experiences emotions without thinking those emotions lead to moral meltdowns. God relates intimately with creation and feels all that’s publicly feelable. But God’s emotions never lead to evil.  (830)

In our moment-by-moment experiences, we all make free choices. That’s non-negotiable. Even those who say they’re not free act as if they are.  (995)

Saying freedom or something like it extends to the tiniest things allows open and relational thinkers to say God never controls cells, atoms, or even the simplest entities of existence. Creation includes free processes.2 That helps when explaining evil.  (1040)

Open and relational theology doesn’t rise or fall on the question of free will among quarks and amoebae. But it insists humans and other creatures act freely, although freedom is always limited. Most say free will is a gift from a gracious God who desires loving relationships.  (1054)

While “love” doesn’t sit alongside “open” and “relational” in this theology’s title, open and relational thinkers emphasize it. And most conceive of God’s power in the light of love. An open and relational God exerts open and relational power. God doesn’t predetermine or singlehandedly decide all that happens but works with others in the ongoing adventure of life. As an actor, God convinces other actors who have power to co-labor.  (1068)

God can’t control, because uncontrolling love comes first in God’s unchanging nature. Because God can’t deny the divine nature, God can’t control anyone or anything.  (1123)

God is neither impotent nor omnipotent but what I call “amipotent.” I coined this word by combining the Latin word for power — “potent” — with a Latin prefix for love — “ami.”  (1137)

An amipotent God is active, but not a dictator. Amipotence is receptive but not overwhelmed. It engages without domineering, is generous but not pushy, and invites without monopolizing. Amipotence is divine strength working positively at all times and places.  (1151)

God doesn’t cause evil or control others. And God doesn’t permit evil for some greater good. Consequently, the open and relational God isn’t guilty of failing to stop the pointless pain and unnecessary suffering we endure.  (1191)

God acts to empower, inspire, and lure others in each moment. This is constructive activity on God’s part, because it makes a real difference to creation. As creatures respond, their actions are creative too.  (1284)

Most open and relational thinkers believe the scientific consensus that our universe is billions of years old. They affirm the development of complex life through a lengthy evolutionary process. But they say this process involves more than chance, genetic mutations, and natural selection. Creatures respond to their environments in self-organizing and self-causal ways. Symbiotic relations emerge and ideas pass through cultural forces that influence evolution’s course. And God works in the process as a real creating contributor.  (1311)

If we take seriously our role as co-creators with our Creator, we will live in particular ways. We no longer see ourselves as passive observers, drifting along without contributing to the world. No longer do we accept harmful practices in land management and animal care, for instance. No longer do we sit paralyzed as climate change alters our world for the worse.  (1340)

If we polled open and relational thinkers, I suspect many would say the second most important divine attribute (after love) is God’s universal and experiential presence.  (1405)

Creatures can be in the divine experience without altering the divine nature. Creaturely sin — lust, killing, cheating, and more — can affect God’s experience without altering God’s perfect love.  (1451)

Open and relational thinkers also think big when it comes to atonement. God doesn’t pre-decide that some people go to heaven and others roast in hell. All are invited to a loving relationship. No one is irredeemable. God cares about saving animals and creation too, because God loves everyone and everything.  (1494)

I know of no open and relational thinker who believes God sends people to eternal conscious torment. In other words, they reject the traditional idea of hell. The idea that God sends people to eternal punishment not only contradicts steadfast love, it also has little if any scriptural support.  (1564)

Theoretically, some people, even in the afterlife, may never say “yes” to God. But the steadfast love of God continues inviting them, moment by moment, everlastingly. Consequently, the idea of relentless love provides plausible grounds to believe all will eventually cooperate.  (1591)

I earlier listed reasons many embrace open and relational theology. Those reasons point to its usefulness, truthfulness, experiential fit, consonance with scripture, alignment with science, and more. I embrace them all. But the biggest reason I adopt open and relational theology is… LOVE! In my opinion, open and relational thought provides the best overall framework for understanding and promoting love.  (1612)

Augustine’s God is a complete narcissist. The very heart of how I understand the gospel — that God loves me, you, and all creation in the sense of wanting our salvation/well-being — collapses in Augustine’s logic.  (1669)

If we fail to answer love’s call, God doesn’t retaliate. An open and relational God keeps no record of wrongs and condemns the payback of eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Natural negative consequences come from saying no to love, but God doesn’t dish out those consequences. They’re naturally rendered within the situation. Unlike the God of many conventional theologies, the Faithful Forgiver in open and relational thought doesn’t run a retribution racket.  (1702)

Bad theology expressed in a kind way is still bad theology.  (1781)

Few conventional theologies focus on love or let it be their guide. Most start with God’s power, a sacred book, an ancient creed, particular religious experiences, or a doctrinal issue. Problems follow. Even though Jesus says love is the greatest command, Paul says the greatest of the virtues is love, and John says God is love, few theologies follow their lead.  (1796)

Some say God wants to teach us a lesson by causing or allowing tragedy or abuse. Others say evil is part of a divine plan, mysteriously working for some incomprehensible good. Some say those who suffer are being punished, getting what’s due to them. And others simply appeal to mystery: God’s ways are not our ways. If these were the only answers available, atheism would make better sense!  (1908)

Open and relational thinkers believe God gives and receives in relation to creation. That’s relational. Both God and creatures experientially move into an open future. That’s open.  (2039)

My reviews of other books by Thomas Jay Oord on related topics are:

• God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse and Other Evils: here
• Q & A on God Can’t: here
• The Uncontrolling Love of God: here

Review: Posthumous salvation

Do you believe in hell? If so, what kind? The fire and brimstone of Dante’s Inferno? Hell on earth in the form of war and genocide? Or what?

Of all the topics up for reconsideration by evangelical Christians, this one has risen to the top of the list in the last couple of decades—and not before time. ‘Rethinking Hell’ conferences have taken place on several continents, and a swathe of books have tackled the subject. This is one of them. It is:

Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hell, Hope and the New Jerusalem by Bradley Jersak (Wipf & Stock, 2009).

The author is a scholar in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. He examines the biblical data against its cultural background in astonishing detail, concluding that there are solid grounds for hope that, in the end, everyone will respond to the love of God. The book’s title, of course, comes from the closing chapters of the Bible where, even after the ‘final judgment’, the city of God, the New Jerusalem, stands with its gates wide open, and the invitation to all who are thirsty to come and drink is still being issued.

Jersak has a good grasp of church history, from which he explains the changing views of hell that have marked different periods within it. On the way, he tackles in depth the meaning of the various Hebrew and Greek terms that English versions translate as ‘hell’. He does so within the framework of the three major positions, which he labels infernalism (eternal conscious torment), annihilationism (the wicked will eventually cease to exist) and universalism (all will be saved). He himself refuses to be pressed into any of these moulds, but expresses hope that the third one will be how it pans out.

Don’t attempt this book if you fancy a light read. Such is its degree of detail that it is, in the best sense, heavy. But could dealing in depth with a topic of such seriousness be anything else?

Here are some quotations, with page numbers.

As a sensitive little boy raised in the evangelical church, I was a horrified but Bible-convinced infernalist.  (p2)

Many or even most Christians across the church spectrum are still convinced that to be a good, Bible-believing Christian, they must accept a hell of eternal, conscious torment.  (p4)

The stubborn fact is that Scripture is richly polyphonic on the topic of hell and judgment—as if by design. Thus, if we become dogmatic about any one position, we reduce ourselves to reading selectively or doing interpretive violence to those verses that don’t fit our chosen view.  (p6)

Rather than painting themselves into universalist or infernalist corners, a great many of the Church Fathers and early Christians found refuge in the humility of hope. They maintained the possibility (not the presumption) of some version of judgment and hell and the twin possibility (not presumption) that at the end of the day, no one need suffer it forever.  (p8)

Rather than acknowledge the variety of terms, images, and concepts that the Bible uses for divine judgment, the KJV translators opted to combine them all under the single term ‘hell’.  (p15)

Each of the terms most commonly translated as ‘hell’ in our English translations—Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and Tartarus—all share one thing in common: a potential terminus. That is, the biblical writers declare a definite end to each.  (p17)

The words that we’ve translated as ‘eternal punishment’ and ‘torment’ require close attention, because they are words used unblushingly by the Jesus of the Gospels.  (p28)

Our understanding—or misunderstanding—of the Gehenna tradition(s) shapes our view of hell and judgment… two distinct Gehenna traditions developed within Judaism.  (p34)

Building on N.T. Wright’s work, we can now see that Jesus’ ‘Little Apocalypse’ (Mark 13) functioned as an immediate prophetic warning concerning Jerusalem rather than an eschatological prophecy in the traditional sense. Jesus was not describing the culmination of the universe.  (p58)

Unfortunately, Christian tradition, theology, and translation followed the apocryphal reading of Gehenna rather than the biblical tradition of Jeremiah and Jesus.  (p64)

We ought to note the irony and incongruence of the Church utilizing the very place where God became violently offended by the literal burning of children as our primary metaphor for a final and eternal burning of God’s wayward people in literal flames.  (p65)

Wherever the judged are finally assigned, the spectrum of possibilities warrants pause to those who presume to know its precise nature. It’s not that we have too little revelation on the matter. Rather, the Bible includes too many possibilities to allow for simplistic dogmatism… Our habit is to dismiss the plain teaching of certain texts as not meaning what they say, because they don’t fit the scheme upon which we have already settled.  (p68)

The Eastern Orthodox Church has long regarded hell subjectively, as an existential experience. But rather than a question of inclusion and exclusion, they conceive of heaven and/or hell as two experiences of the same fire. To their way of thinking, God is the fire that we experience as either a blessing or a torment.  (p77)

When referring to ‘the lake of burning sulfur,’ the book of Revelation is not speaking of a traditional post-death hell. John was warning believers that Jerusalem is facing the end of the world as they know it. Armageddon is coming (the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70) for both Jerusalem and her attackers. Their judgment will be to share in the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, as prophesied in the OT.  (p95)

I do not like what I read in the Bible about divine judgment—especially from the mouth of Jesus. Frankly, I worry about those who do. But I am unwilling to discard biblical orthodoxy in favor of some fluffy, self-made spirituality that comforts me with lies.  (p96)

The above texts [John 12:31-32; Romans 5:18-19; Romans 11:32, 36; 1 Corinthians 15:25-28; Philippians 2:9-11; Ephesians 1:9-10; Colossians 1:15-19; 1 John 2:2; 1 Timothy 4:9-10] insist that Christ’s saving, forgiving, reconciling work predates any response on our part. A faith-response is not treated as a way to become saved but rather as a response of hopeful gratitude to Christ’s saving work.  (p109)

Each group says to the other, my verse outweighs yours. Your truth is conditioned by mine.  (p112)

A good number of early Christians saw no contradiction in hoping that non-Christians could also be saved posthumously, if necessary.  (p119)

God deals with sin through correction, not punishment. That’s Clement, that’s Hebrews, that’s Hosea. The chastisements of God are disciplinary: not because divine justice demands satisfaction (Anselm, Cur Deus Homo), payback, or wrath (Calvin, penal satisfaction), but because God is raising beloved children who tend to learn the hard way.  (p122)

Origen…became known for his teaching on apokatastasis from Acts 3:20–21: ‘And he shall send Jesus Christ, which before was preached unto you: whom heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things (apokatastaseos panton).’ Apokatastasis is a theological extrapolation of the final phrase in verse twenty-one. It is the doctrine of ultimate redemption that believes a time will come when all things (the whole cosmos) will be saved by grace.  (p123)

We have a lineage of biblical prophets, Jesus, his apostles, and early church patristics who held forth the real expectation of a fiery judgment of purification—corrective, cleansing, and healing in nature—often identified as the glory and love of God himself.  (p126)

Both the Eastern Orthodox and the Anglican Communion pray for the dead and have theologies of an intermediate state. Yet they resist the term ‘purgatory’, because they do not subscribe to Rome’s old definition. Beyond that, Rome has changed its doctrine of purgatory substantially from the time of Augustine to Benedict XVI.  (p135)

‘He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus’ (Phil 1:6). What? Unless we die first? Or even thereafter?  (p141)

Since the fourth century, via the Reformers and the Revivalists, the Western Church and its Evangelical wing have inherited Augustine’s infernalism as the only biblical view of judgment and hell, typically writing off the early universalist Fathers as heretical and their modern proponents as liberal. But the infernalist doctrine that cured like concrete over the centuries has begun to crumble.  (p142)

The issue at this point becomes free will. We need, even with tongue in cheek, to preserve the possibility that in our humanity one can behold the love of Christ in all its fullness and still reject it. I say tongue in cheek, because it seems to me that absolutely everything in us that says ‘no’ to perfect love and eternal salvation is not based in freedom but in bondage. When every deception and every wound and every worldly, fleshly, and demonic chain has been removed, I hope and expect that the truly free will shall always answer the call with a resounding ‘Yes!’  (p146)

Those who oppose preterism read John’s vision of the new heaven and new earth in Revelation 21–22 as belonging exclusively to the next age, following Christ’s glorious return—that is, until I express my joy that the gates of the city are always open and that the Bride is still inviting the thirsty ones in. At this point, anti-preterists often cut and paste the text out of the next age into our evangelistic present.  (p160)

Don’t think of the world versus heaven in terms of now versus then (consecutive ages) or as here versus there (dual dimensions). Rather, Babylon (the world system) and New Jerusalem (the heavenly system) are two coexistent realities constantly competing for our allegiance.  (p163)

The excluded…are at first seen in the lake of fire (Revelation 21:8) and then later outside the city (22:15). Have the damned been relocated? Or more likely, are the two images synonymous?… Remember Gehenna’s location (Isaiah 66:24): Gehenna is the loathsome place of fire and destruction in the valley just outside the city where the dead bodies of the cursed are burned. The lake of fire (condemnation) is adjacent to the city walls.  (p170)

So much of the activity we read about in Revelation 21–22 involves processes (invitation, cleansing, healing, entry) to which traditional theology has barred the door at death that it is tempting to either ignore or transplant these processes. If we don’t treat them as already realized eschatology, the Bible forces us to consider the possibility that the lost who perish still have hope of eternal life after the Day of the Lord.  (p180)

Many of the more radical Moravians were universalists!  (loc 3871)

If my faith depends on fear of punishment, what will happen to my faith when perfect love (Jesus) comes to cast it out? (1 John 4:18) If God thinks that fear of punishment is something to be ‘cast out’ like a demon, then our Gospel and our preaching better not rest on that foundation!  (loc 3897)

Review: Gay marriage

In Christian circles, gay marriage is a current hot potato. Many evangelicals take the view that the Bible condemns homosexuality in every respect, and that’s the end of the matter. Others, including myself, would want to take a more nuanced view of the Bible and its interpretation, which might open the door to gay marriage. This book is in the latter category. It is

God and the Gay Christian—The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships by Matthew Vines (Convergent Books, 2014).

The author is a Christian with a high view of Scripture. He was raised by Christian parents, and realised he was gay when quite young. He tackles every aspect of the question with openness and integrity, including detailed analysis of the six key Bible passages. But he also addresses appeals to the larger narrative of Scripture. In fact you will be hard pressed to find any anti-homosexuality argument that he doesn’t face up to and examine in depth, and with grace.

In past generations, the church rejected the idea of a heliocentric solar system and accepted the legitimacy of slavery, both on the grounds of ‘the Bible says…’ It has rightly changed position on both those issues, and others. The whole homosexuality issue, the author maintains, is in the same category, for the same kind of reasons.

He concludes that God favours commitment and covenant in human relationships, and that the kind of commitment expressed in a same-sex marriage falls safely within that circle. If your initial reaction to this statement is to snort with derision, you are the very person this book is intended for.

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

My core argument in this book is not simply that some Bible passages have been misinterpreted and others have been given undue weight. My larger argument is this: Christians who affirm the full authority of Scripture can also affirm committed, monogamous same-sex relationships. (p3)

Homosexuality, to the limited extent it was discussed in our church, was little more than a political football, a quick test of orthodoxy.  (p8)

Six passages in the Bible—Genesis 19:5; Leviticus 18:22; Leviticus 20:13; Romans 1:26–27; 1 Corinthians 6:9; and 1 Timothy 1:10—have stood in the way of countless gay people who long for acceptance from their Christian parents, friends, and churches.  (p11)

With most sins, it wasn’t hard to pinpoint the damage they cause. Adultery violates a commitment to your spouse. Lust objectifies others. Gossip degrades people. But committed same-sex relationships didn’t fit this pattern. Not only were they not harmful to anyone, they were characterized by positive motives and traits instead, like faithfulness, commitment, mutual love, and self-sacrifice. What other sin looked like that?  (p12)

Mandatory celibacy for gay Christians differs from any other kind of Christian self-denial, including involuntary celibacy for some straight Christians. Even when straight Christians seek a spouse but cannot find one, the church does not ask them to relinquish any future hope of marriage.  (p17)

Christians did not change their minds about the solar system because they lost respect for their Christian forebears or for the authority of Scripture. They changed their minds because they were confronted with evidence their predecessors had never considered.  (p24)

The trouble starts when we put names, faces, and outcomes to what the traditional interpretation means in practice.  (p28)

For the overwhelming majority of human history, homosexuality was not seen as a different sexual orientation that distinguished a minority of people from the heterosexual majority. It was considered instead to be a manifestation of normal sexual desire pursued to excess—a behavior anyone might engage in if he didn’t keep his passions in check.  (p31)

Prior to 1869, terms meaning “homosexual” and “homosexuality” didn’t exist in any language, and they weren’t translated into English until 1892.  (p40)

The new information we have about sexual orientation actually requires us to reinterpret Scripture no matter what stance we take on same-sex relationships.  (p42)

The account of Eve’s creation doesn’t emphasize Adam’s need to procreate. It emphasizes instead his need for relationship.  (p45)

For gay Christians, the challenge of mandatory celibacy goes far beyond their mere capacity to live it out. Mandatory celibacy corrodes gay Christians’ capacity for relationship in general. But it does something else equally harmful: by requiring gay Christians to view all their sexual desires as temptations to sin, it causes many of them to devalue, if not loathe, their bodies.  (p50)

Decades ago, biblical scholars on both sides of the issue dismissed the idea that homosexuality was the sin of Sodom. Yet that belief still pervades our broader cultural consciousness, fueling negative attitudes toward gay people among Christians and negative attitudes toward the Bible among gay people.  (p60)

No biblical writers suggested that the sin of Sodom was primarily or even partly engaging in same-sex behavior. That interpretation would only arise later, after originally being advanced by an influential Jew named Philo.  (p69)

The Old Testament doesn’t condemn either polygamy or concubinage. On the contrary, it often assumes them…  All this is to say that not all Old Testament sexual norms carry over to Christians.  (p84)

There’s no question that Romans 1:26–27 is the most significant biblical passage in this debate. It’s the longest reference to same-sex behavior in Scripture, and it appears in the New Testament.  (p96)

Paul’s description of same-sex behavior in this passage is indisputably negative. But he also explicitly described the behavior he condemned as lustful. He made no mention of love, fidelity, monogamy, or commitment.  (p99)

…the cultural context in which Paul’s original audience would have read Romans 1:26–27. Paul wasn’t condemning the expression of a same-sex orientation as opposed to the expression of an opposite-sex orientation. He was condemning excess as opposed to moderation.  (p105)

In the ancient world, if a man took the active role in sex, his behavior generally was deemed to be “natural.” But if he took the passive role, he was derided for engaging in “unnatural” sex. The opposite was true for women: sexual passivity was termed “natural,” while sexual dominance was “unnatural.”  (p108)

From the church’s early centuries through the nineteenth century, commentators consistently identified the moral problem in Romans 1:26–27 as “unbridled passions,” not the expression of a same-sex orientation. Furthermore, no biblical interpreter prior to the twentieth century even hinted that Paul’s statements were intended to consign a whole group of people to lifelong celibacy.  (p116)

The bottom line is this: The Bible doesn’t directly address the issue of same-sex orientation—or the expression of that orientation. While its six references to same-sex behavior are negative, the concept of same-sex behavior in the Bible is sexual excess, not sexual orientation. What’s more, the main reason that non-affirming Christians believe the Bible’s statements should apply to all same-sex relationships—men and women’s anatomical complementarity—is not mentioned in any of the texts.  (p130)

Now that many of us recognize that same-sex orientation is both fixed and unchosen, we need to modify one of two Christian teachings: either the voluntary nature of lifelong celibacy or the scope of marriage.  (p134)

In Jesus’s understanding of marriage, covenantal commitment is foundational. The ability to bear children is not.  (p141)

Becoming “one flesh” encompasses much more than the act of sex. It includes the entire covenantal context in which God intends for sex to take place.  (p145)

Because same-sex orientation contains the potential for self-giving, covenantal love, it’s consistent with the image of God in us.  (p156)

If we tell people that their every desire for intimate, sexual bonding is shameful and disordered, we encourage them to hate a core part of who they were created to be. And if we reject the desires of gay Christians to express their sexuality within a lifelong covenant, we separate them from our covenantal God, and we tarnish their ability to bear his image.  (p158)

David Matthew note: My own journey towards being in favour of same-sex marriage is outlined in my free ebook, A Poke In The Faith, chapters 8 and 9. Chapter 8 sets out some principles of biblical interpretation (hermeneutics), and Chapter 9 applies them to aspects of sexuality, specifically gay marriage. You can download the book for free here: Download ‘A Poke In the Faith’ (davidmatthew.org.uk)