Authority of Scripture

Have you even heard the term “authority of scripture”? It seems to get thrown around a lot, but what do we mean by it?

When you really start to think about it I think some very interesting questions come up. For instance, how can any book be authoritative, much less a book written by Jews and a handful of early Christians who lived some 2000+ years ago…and wrote primarily in narrative (story) form! Do you see the problem we have already? I mean typically when we talk about authority we may picture something like a soldier who stands before his commanding officer and awaits his orders. The commanding officer, no doubt, will say, "clean the mess hall," or "take 2 men and scout that hill" or something like that. But what if, as N. T. Wright once put it, instead of a list of commands the commander begins, “Once upon a time…”

What do you do with that?

Whether or not they would have phrased it like this, this problem has plagued Christians for a very long time. Our rational culture loves to have a list, a system, a matrix, an outline. And so we’ve effectively decided that the Bible was written all wrong, and proceeded to fix it much as a scientist might “fix” a petri dish full of organic material. We must break it down into smaller parts - each book into chapters and each chapter into sections and each section into verses, so that we might scrutinize its fiddley bits. Then we pick apart those small parts and create “systematic theologies” (long boring books) or condense the pieces into the “Four Spiritual Laws” or the “Romans Road” or sum it all up in a “statement of faith” which we can post on our church website.

Speaking of statements of faith, I think Jesus' statment of faith was summed up in a little pamphlet we call the "Old Testament." I'd like to see on a church website's statement of faith page a link to BibleGateway.com - but now having said that, to be more honest, we might have to add links to the writings of the early church father, and maybe for some of us the writings of Calvin or Wesley or Tim LaHaye.

Anyway, have you ever wondered why God gave us this narrative instead of just a list of do’s, don’ts, and how-to’s? I mean surely God could do that, and wouldn’t that solve so many problems? Shouldn’t Paul have just written a 12 step program on how to be saved, or how to do church, or whatever?

But He gave us the Bible, and sorting through the whole thing can get quite messy at times. Ever wonder why He did that? I have.

And how about this – what’s the Bible say about authority. There are some scant references to what we may call “authority of scripture,” but throughout the Bible the scriptures consistently attribute all authority to God. In the beginning God creates all things (now if that isn’t authority…), later we’re told that Jesus is given all authority on heaven and earth, and later we see a transfer of authority to the apostles and then to all Christians via the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. And so perhaps we should be aware that “authority of scripture” is really just short for saying that God has invested His authority into scripture – but then perhaps we must ask if there are other things that He’s invested his authority into (us, for example, via the indwelling of the Holy Spirit) and what that might mean.

Here is an analogy given by N.T. Wright on how we might begin to think about scripture in light of this authority business.

Imagine we find a brilliant Shakespearean play. Everything is amazing: the plot, character development, writing, irony, and so on. The only problem being that we have only found the first 4 acts of what seems to be a 5 act play. What might we do?

Well, likely we'd gather some brilliant actors and perhaps playwrites and such and have them work out a 5th act to finish the play. They’d first need to become extremely well acquanted with the first 4 acts. They’d act it out a number of times, get to “know” their characters, begin discussing subtle meanings and plot lines, etc. Then, in time they could begin to develop a 5th act.

There wouldn't necessarily be just one way to end the play but we'd have the first 4 acts to serve as a type of "authority." We wouldn't want to take a character who had been evil for 4 acts and suddenly make him good for no reason, for example. We’d need to strictly adhear to the guideline the first 4 acts had provided, but then we must, necessarily, take it further in the 5th act. It would do us no good at all simply to try and repeat what happened in act 4 or to repeat lines from act 3 and call it finished.

And another thing, no one could perform Act 5 and say that this is the Act 5. Perhaps the most beautiful part of the play would be seeing how each group of actors finish it. It would be slightly different each time you saw it.

This is, perhaps, one way we could view scripture. Wright divides the first four acts up as 1) Creation 2) Fall 3) Israel 4) Jesus, and we are living out, in our daily lives, 5th act. I love the analogy and the idea that we are actually in the play, for we are the actors. For most of my short Christian life I’ve felt more like a commentator or critic of the play, an outsider. But what if you and I are in the play? Doesn’t that change how we view the Bible? How we view our lives?

Wright goes on to suggest that our predicament is actually somewhat better than the analogy because the New Testament is actually a part of the beginning of the 5th act and some parts of it actually give us hints as to how the 5th act will ultimately end. So we need only to figure out the middle section.

So the point then is that we're a part of God's story. We use the Bible as a guideline of sorts to help us figure out our character and how to develop him further and essentially how we can be the best "character" we can be in God's story. Some may see this as a low view of scripture, I personally think that it is quite a high view of both scripture and of God.



There’s a particular article by Bishop N. T. Wright that got me thinking on this and a lot of what I’ve been talking about is based directly on the article. How Can the Bible be Authoritative

The War on Christmas: I’m with the Atheists on this one

Seriously, the gospel has been commercialized enough in the past hundred years – must we defend the commercialization of Christmas too? Why do I want Best Buy greeters telling me “Merry Christmas”? Christmas isn’t a Christian holiday anymore. At least not in America today. It’s a completely secular holiday based on capitalism and making sure you buy people gifts of an appropriate price range so as not to offend or disappoint.

If anyone cares to celebrate the birth of Jesus on Dec 25th this year, then I’m all for it, but let’s admit that whatever Christmas is – it’s not that. It’s fun, it makes me smile, I get great gifts, the music is joyous, the gift giving is fun. I like Christmas. It’s just that I fail to see the connection with it and Jesus’ birth.

From what I hear, early Christians often gave each other food and other needed provisions. I’m not sure what these “needed provisions” were, but my guess is that they were similar to iPod’s, PSP’s, and PS3’s. They also apparently gave to the poor and needy. Again, I’m not sure what they gave, but I think it’s safe to assume that poor and needy people would have needed a tree with L.E.D. lights and copious amounts of eggnog.

So don’t get me wrong, I celebrate Christmas just like most everyone else. We’ve got the tree and the decorations, and the advent and all that jazz. We give and receive gifts (with a heavy emphasis on the receiving end at my mom’s house). So Christmas is a blast for me. But it’s just not particularly how I’d celebrate Jesus’ birthday if I were going to do that.

That makes me wonder. What would I do if I were going to celebrate the Big Guy’s birthday? Growing up my mom would always ask me to make a list of what I wanted and where I wanted to go for dinner on my birthday. So maybe that’s the question, “Jesus, what do you want for your birthday and where do you want to go for dinner?”

My answer was always something like “a playstation, a remote controlled car, an architecture book, and Alexander’s Steak House.” I'm sure Jesus would say something similar, so this year I’ll get him a remote control car and we’ll go out to Denny’s (after all, it’s all that’s open on His birthday).

Bruce Springsteen

I just ran across this Springsteen song on a webpage by a guy named Doug Pagitt. I can't say I've listened to much Springsteen, but he's a heck of a lyricist.

Land of Hope and Dreams
By Bruce Springsteen

Grab your ticket and your suitcase
Thunder's rolling down the tracks
You don't know where you're goin'
But you know you won't be back
Darlin' if you're weary
Lay your head upon my chest
We'll take what we can carry
And we'll leave the rest

Big Wheels rolling through fields
Where sunlight streams
Meet me in a land of hope and dreams

I will provide for you
And I'll stand by your side
You'll need a good companion for
This part of the ride
Leave behind your sorrows
Let this day be the last
Tomorrow there'll be sunshine
And all this darkness past


Big wheels roll through fields
Where sunlight streams
Meet me in a land of hope and dreams

This train
Carries saints and sinners
This train
Carries losers and winners
This Train
Carries whores and gamblers
This Train
Carries lost souls
This Train
Dreams will not be thwarted
This Train
Faith will be rewarded
This Train
Hear the steel wheels singin'
This Train
Bells of freedom ringin'
This Train
Carries broken-hearted
This Train
Thieves and sweet souls departed
This Train
Carries fools and kings
This Train
All aboard

This Train
Dreams will not be thwarted
This Train
Faith will be rewarded
This Train
Hear the steel wheels singin'
This Train

Cannibal Christians

One thing I find fascinating about Jesus is that he doesn’t make it very easy to follow him sometimes. I can imagine at times some of his followers were like, “easy yoke my foot!” Like this one time (John 6) where Jesus feeds all these people and then just basically leaves. He crosses the lake and goes some 15 miles away or so.

Well, the people back then were poor and there were far fewer McDonald’s in ancient Palestine so cheap food was hard to come by – this made Jesus quite popular. So, the people track him down. After all, a free meal’s a free meal, right? Just ask your neighborhood college student.

Well, when they finally track him down they’re like, “hey, so…when’d you get here?” Which, I suppose was a Jewish way of saying, “fancy meeting you here.” Very smooth. To which Jesus totally calls them out and tells them that they’re just after him for his food (don't act like you didn't have that one friend whose parents always stocked up on Doritos and Snack Packs). Normally we’d expect the people to be like, “ya, you got us, can you do the bread thing again, but this time with chicken?”

But instead, he goes into this spiel about how his body is bread and they should eat him. Errr…what?! Here we are coming for a mid-morning snack and you want us to eat you? Get real! Besides, let's face it, you're all skin and bones and gristle and there are far too many of us; there would never be enough to go around.

Nowadays we read Jesus’ words through this filter where we know the whole story already. And so when we read this business about eating his flesh, we read stuff into it like communion and sacrificial atonement, blah, blah, blah. But you have to take off that filter for a second and realize that these people don’t have the rest of the story yet. If Jesus really is talking about all of those things, his hearers sure as heck don’t know it.

Can you imagine hearing that without all of the context we have now?

Or what about when he told people that they had to hate their father, mother, wife, children, brother, sister, and their own life to be his follower? Now that one, I’d been told, well actually the Greek word that we translate as “hate” really means something more like “love less” or something like that. Um…not true. The word is translated in the NIV as hate, hates, hated, hating, and detestable…never “love less.” It’s the same word in Revelation 17:16 where it says, “The beast and the ten horns you saw will hate the prostitute. They will bring her to ruin and leave her naked; they will eat her flesh and burn her with fire.” 'Love less', my foot.

Now we can explain all this stuff theologically and whatnot, but again, can you imagine hearing that without having the whole picture as we do today?

So, after Jesus talks about how people should eat him, they leave. Can you blame them? Would YOU stay for dinner?

The Bible says that people walk away saying, “this is a hard teaching.”

Now there’s an understatement.

But here’s the thing, Jesus doesn’t say, “no, you don’t understand. It’s a metaphor. You don’t really have to eat me, just follow me around and do what I teach, live how I live and later on, eat some bread and act like it’s my body and we’ll be cool.”

He doesn’t say that though.

He just watches them walk away.

Can you imagine the rumors people began?

I wonder if Jesus said stuff like this for the same reason he told parables instead of giving people a straight answer with a 3 minute Powerpoint presentation with bullet points…and an outline...and a fill-in-the-blank handout. It seems to me that talking to the people in parables promoted relationship with him rather than just giving people answers which they could walk away with.

When you talk in parables people have to keep coming back to figure out what the heck you’re talking about.

But now that I think about it, these statements are like the opposite of this. They actually invite people to walk away, not to come back.

Is that what we need in our sermons; a regular pattern of inviting people into a relationship with Jesus, and a regular invitation to walk away?

Does Jesus know what Eternal Life is?

There’s this really great part in Luke where this guy comes up to Jesus and he’s like, “hey teacher, how do I get eternal life?” That’s a big question, eh? It’s a pretty popular one today and apparently it was pretty popular back then too because actually there are at least two people who asked Jesus that exact same question (Luke 10:25 & 18:18).

What I find truly amazing is that Jesus doesn’t give the same answer to both questions. I mean today we think we have everything nailed down and figured out if we can give someone 3 bullet-points or a little tract or 4 scriptures from Romans or whatever to explain how to get yourself to heaven. But Jesus, who may have understood God even more than ourselves, doesn’t give the same answer to both people.

The first person to ask finds himself at the front of the Good Samaritan story Jesus told. He asks his question and Jesus responds, as he so often does, with a question. Before I tell you his response though, think about how you would respond if I asked you that question. Would you tell me about Jesus’ life and death, and atonement and sacrifice? Would you talk about faith and belief perhaps with a context of repentance and baptism?

Jesus’ response is, “What is written in the Law?”

The law? Can you imagine what would happen if this were the response your minister gave to that question? He’d be looking for a new job before the words left his mouth! Then, Jesus goes on to say that the man should love God and love other people.

Is it just me or does this answer leave you a little unsatisfied – like a Thanksgiving fruitcake from your aunt Maybel? It’s almost like Jesus doesn’t even know what eternal life is! I mean doesn’t he know that you can’t get to heaven by just loving God and people? I mean that’s a part of it sure, but you can’t leave out the really important stuff – faith, belief, repentance, baptism, atonement, sacrifice, blood, etc.

Right?

The other person who asks is the ever popular “Rich Young Ruler,” who is fortunate enough to have a section in the Bible named after him. Jesus’ first response is a total ignoring of the guys question. He responds by asking the rich kid why he called Jesus good. I don’t know. Maybe he was stalling until he could come up with something.

Well, apparently it worked because then Jesus starts listing off some commandments. Wait! Commandments!? Jesus, listen, this is like first day at preacher school stuff! We aren’t saved by obeying the commandments. Everyone knows that. I mean seriously. We were totally with you. It seemed like you had things all together and then you go and get this whole ‘how to get saved’ thing all bassackwards. We really expected more out of you.

It’s almost like Jesus doesn’t even know what eternal life is.

Right?

Well, what if he doesn’t? I mean what if Jesus didn’t realize that eternal life is code for getting to heaven? In fact, in John 17:3 he says, “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”

Well, that screws things up a bit doesn’t it? Eternal life, to Jesus, meant knowing God and himself? So is that why he gave the answers he did?

There are a number of places where Jesus talks about “eternal life.” I’ll let you take a look at some of the other ones on your own. I’m confident it will blow your mind if you let it fester in there for a bit.

For Jesus, eternal life wasn’t something we had to wait for. It begins now, today, whenever. What if this were what we joined in on? What if this was what we invited people to be a part of?

Church in a Postmodern Culture

A lot of people are becoming concerned that many churches are yielding too much to our contemporary culture. Their concern, I think, is that when we combine the church with culture, the gospel becomes watered down or ineffective. I heard an interesting response to this dilemma from a guy named Doug Pagitt the other day.

He impishly agreed with the fear. In fact, he imagined a world in which the church took on the power systems of corporate America so that pastors were required to wear power suits and ties.

Or if we adopted the teaching philosophy of the 16th century, where people stood behind elevated lecterns to deliver their teaching.

Or what if we took on the view that there is 1 person who “knows,” and the masses that don’t and so you lined people up in rows so that they sat still and quiet while the “knowledgeable” person could impart their wisdom to the masses.

Or what if we took on a medieval European understanding of the world so that we built our churches to look like cathedrals?

The point is that the church has always taken on aspects of the culture it’s been a part of, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We can repaint the Christian faith and make it relevant to a postmodern generation without sacrificing the Gospel. In fact, I might argue that we MUST make Jesus’ message relevant to them – it is our responsibility.

So instead of fighting to keep them separate, maybe it’s time to begin looking at what Christianity can add to Postmodernism and what it can add to us. Regarding the latter sentiment, I think it can give us a whole new picture of what faith looks like (flexible, dynamic, changing, ebbs and flows). I think it can reintroduce art back into the church. It can help us understand our own cultural presuppositions and biases which prevent us from looking at Jesus through another lens. I think it can open our minds and hearts to a God who is too big for any box we attempt to contain him in (and be ok with that).

JESUS CHIPS (Now with no Transfat)

SCENE 1: Woman is running frantically around the house in the early morning. She’s obviously strung out, stressed, and her day has hardly begun. Her hair is a mess, her shirt is untucked, and she’s apparently looking for some article of her work clothing with little success. She’s in a terrible spot. She needs a drastic change, not just today but in her whole life. She’s missing something.

What is it?

Shampoo.


SCENE 2: Same woman in the shower massaging Herbal Essence into her hair with a bright smile on her face and sounds of great joy emanating from her mouth.


SCENE 3: Cut to the woman [now 20 pounds lighter] walking into a courtroom in impeccable dress, tossing her lush hair about, and giving a sly glance toward the opposing male lawyer [similarly sexy and attractive] who returns her devious look. Fade to announcer guy...

I think this is a wonderful example of what’s wrong with how we often think of (and sometimes present) the gospel. But we’ll come back to what I mean by that in a moment.

Have you ever heard (or used) a presentation or description of the gospel that goes something like the following:

We all have this circular shaped hole in our hearts. You’ve been trying to fill this hole with the square shaped pegs of sex, school, friends, music, drugs, etc. but none of those can fill the hole. So what you need to do is come to God and He will fill that hole because only He is the right shape and size to fill it.

Sound familiar? I’ve heard this a lot and I guess it works for some people (because they use it so much). I think the problem with it, though, is that it just isn’t true. I mean it’s a complete commercialization of God. It’s based on the same premise as every commercial you see on TV, right?

Commercials tell you that your life is in a horrible mess and if you’d just buy the right shampoo or the right dish soap or the right car, your life would be perfect, your family would be happy, and, of course, a great number of people will want to have sex with you (let's just be honest).

But here’s the problem. What happens when you buy the shampoo and you don’t lose 20 pounds, you don't become irresistible to the opposite sex, and your family life is still crazy? Don’t you feel disappointed? Lied too? Swindled?

Now I think we’ve gotten used to being lied to by the people on TV, but what about when we present the gospel like that to our friends and family?

When we talk about Jesus as if he’s a product isn’t it demeaning to Him and deceptive to our hearers? I mean, since you’ve become a Christian have you ever been hurt, depressed, upset, disappointed, angry? Not that your life hasn't become much better since you've begun following Jesus, but does Jesus live up to the promises of our commercial?

What does this say to people when we present Jesus as if He’s going to magically solve all of their problems (and help them lose 20 pounds)? What do you think about a product that doesn’t live up to its expectations? It’s a bad product, right? You got ripped off.

Is this what we’re conveying about Jesus? That He’s defective merchandise?

What I’m saying is that the gospel isn’t less than all of this, but it’s most certainly more! Is it not?

Heaven isn't the end of the world.

“Heaven is great, but it’s not the end of the world.” – Bishop N.T. Wright

What if we’re missing the whole point?

The argument among Christians today is all about what we need or don’t need to get to heaven. The current Christian argument, as I understand it, goes something like this:

There are some who seem to imply that to achieve salvation we must deal with society's systemic evils, things like injustice, poverty, racism, etc. This is ultimately what determines who will go to heaven. Doing these things is typically emphasized over personal sin. These people are usually called the “Christian Left.”

The other group, called the “Christian Right,” focuses on our personal guilt before a righteous God. This group is split further into two camps. The first group's argument seems to look like this:

We must believe in, and accept, Jesus’ sacrifice for our sin, which He, as our Savior, removed on the cross by dying for our sins. What exactly you “believe” or how you “believe” it varies slightly, but the idea is that there is nothing we can do to earn our way to heaven. We just accept God’s forgiveness.

The other side also claims that we must believe in and accept Jesus’ sacrifice for our sins. But in order to have the type of faith that saves us, we must also intentionally make Jesus Christ the "Lord" of our life and have a proper intention of obeying His commands. This is the determining factor in getting into heaven.

But what if each of these groups is missing the point? Notice that they aren’t disagreeing that the supreme objective is to get to heaven. They simply disagree on how to get there. But what if God is bigger than both "left" and "right"?

What if, instead of looking at heaven as the ultimate goal, we saw things like living in God’s kingdom NOW and living the eternal life NOW as the goal? Then things like salvation and heaven become the types of things that naturally come along with and flow out of living this type of life?

I think when we must first come to understand terms like, “the kingdom of God” to be, not just heaven, but anywhere that God reigns, or “eternal life” to be, not just heaven, but a type of life lived with a proper knowledge of God (as John 17:3 says, “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”)

Rubber Bands and Sticks

So I’m working through this analogy right now, maybe you can help me out.

We each have our views of God – how He acts, what He’s like, what He does, what He isn’t, etc. And there seems to be this part of us that holds all these views together – let’s call that part of us “faith.” Some of these views fit together quite nicely, like the pieces to a 16-piece Sesame Street puzzle. Other views have to be twisted and crammed and forced together (like the pieces to most of the 300+ piece puzzles I’ve attempted).

So, in this light, I’m beginning to see faith much like a rubber band. If all of these views or beliefs about God were like a small pile of sticks, faith would be the rubber band holding them all together. There are a lot of great things about a rubber band. If it turns out one of my sticks isn’t quite right I can just take it out and put in the right one. If I find out I have too many sticks, I can take some out. You see a rubber bands is it’s flexible, it bends, it holds everything in.

But do you know what is holding the sticks together in this picture? Yes, it’s the rubber band but deeper than that it’s the TENSION in the rubber band. I find that this is exactly how faith must work out when it comes to God. God has a certain tension about him which must be embraced else we swing too far one way or another. For a long time now, people have fled from this tension, but I think that our generation has the ability to once again embrace it.

For example, a common question from skeptics (as well as many honest Christians) is, “If God is all powerful and all loving, then how can evil exist? Either he is powerless to end it or he doesn’t want to, either way he’s nothing to be admired.” Now many Christians have wrestled with this and worked it out on their own theologically, that’s not my point. My point is that there is a tension there – God is both all-powerful AND all loving, and yet He also allows evil.

Similarly, God is all merciful, and completely just.

I’ve been in a conversation with someone for about a month now about how baptism relates to salvation. After speaking via email virtually every day for a month now he simply can’t come to terms with the fact that I can believe we are absolutely positively saved by grace through faith in Jesus’ sacrifice AND that we are saved at baptism. The two seem irreconcilable, incompatible, contradictory, incongruent – that’s the tension. And the tension is, so often, where we find God.

And what happens when you release all the tension on the rubber band – when you cut it? It falls apart in a mess. We must embrace the tension, not try to release it.

But let me share my fear here as well. I’m afraid that there are many people out there that don’t have a rubber band faith. Their faith may be more like a string. A string can be great. It still does the job of holding the sticks together just fine. The problem is that there’s no flexibility. I found my own faith to be like this shortly after I began studying the Bible. I learned exactly how and who God was within a few months of studying the Bible, took all of my beliefs and tied a nice tight string around them.

That would have been fine, except I had effectively put God in a nice little box. You can’t box God in when your faith is a rubber band. The problem came when I began to learn that God was bigger than my old sticks. I needed to change out a few sticks here and there and add some sticks, but you can’t do that with a string. If you take one or two sticks out the whole thing is liable to collapse. We can’t take the stick of inerrancy out and inspect it a bit further or the whole thing may come apart. We can’t remove that old stick of hell to replace it with something a bit more precise because we don’t know what may happen.

That’s my fear – that as we question things and try to grow and understand God more completely that some won’t have a faith flexible enough to hold those beliefs in – that the whole thing will collapse.

Of Strings and God

So I read a couple of physics books yesterday that have begun to open a whole new line of thinking for me on God. That's a weird sentence isn’t it?

I’ve been noticing for awhile now how we tend to read the Bible like a textbook or something. Genesis has gotten a lot of attention lately in this regard with the creation thing and floods and all that. There are many people saying we shouldn’t read Genesis as a science textbook. That’s not really what I’m talking about though. I’m talking about the whole thing.

For example, just as science dissects things into smaller and smaller parts and studies them, we break the books of the Bible into chapters, and the chapters into verses, and the verses into parts of verses until we’ve got it all broken down. Then we categorize it and put it into a concordance or a topical Bible so we can find every time it mentions “love” or “baptism” or some other word. And so, unlike most of Biblical history, we begin to read the Bible in little bits. We pull out the “good stuff” and memorize it. None of those things are bad (I love my concordance and I’ve got like 3 topical Bibles and I have looked up both “love” and “baptism”), that’s not my point.

But now it’s gotten to the point where the Bible is this textbook or an answer book or, heaven forbid, an “instruction manual” and we’ve got God it’s this nice convenient box we can put in our purse and pull out when we want to take a peek at him (oops, no that was my eye shadow). Count me among those who are beginning to reject this belittling view of God. And before you ask, I don’t own a purse and I’m not even sure eye shadow comes in a box of any kind, but you get my point. Isn’t God bigger than that?

I think part of the reason we’ve gotten tied up in this mess is because when God is so much bigger and deeper we don’t have a nice little formula to describe him. And when you start to talk to modern people (as opposed to postmoderns who fill our current generation) about God in analogy and metaphor they don’t buy it.

Analogy.

Metaphor.

Stories.

I was talking to a good friend of mine tonight, Kelli Neargarder, and she had the perfect word for this type of talk…poetry. The problem is, if what you’re talking about is poetry, then it can't be packaged up in a nice little 4 point formula, it’s not real in the modern mindset. Poetry is tantamount to mythology.

This is where the physics books I was reading come in. While our generation is quickly developing from modernism to postmodernism, physicists are beginning to learn some revolutionary stuff in quantum physics and string theory and all sorts of other things that just blow your mind off its hinges (what kind of metaphor is that??). So as I was reading these physics books by some of the guys on the front line I was astounded by how they speak of the theories they’re developing (not WHAT they’re saying, but HOW they’re saying it).


For example, there’s this idea that the things that makes up the tiniest bits of things aren’t actually particles like we once thought, but “strings.” Very small strings. If you can imagine how many atoms you could stretch from here to the nearest star, that would be about the same amount of “strings” it would take to stretch a distance roughly equal to the diameter of one atom. That is to say, they’re itsy bitsy teensy weensy…er…small. And what determines what these strings form is somehow determined by their “tune,” so to speak. So if you were able to pluck these strings (which would be difficult because they’re rather little) and change their “tune,” they would basically form something different. So there’s this whole music analogy.

And now some physicists also believe that the universe has 10, 11, or even 26 dimensions of space/time instead of just the usual 4 (3-dimensional space plus 1-dimensional time). But to describe why we can’t see the other dimensions they say they’re really small and “scrunched up.” Another sort of analogy. They describe it like looking at an orange. From a distance it looks smooth (our 4 dimensions are the smooth ones), but as you get closer it has these ridges on its surface (the ridges are the other dimensions). Yet another metaphor (or was that a simile?).

Sometimes they’ll say it’s like looking at a drinking straw. From a distance it looks 1-dimensional (a line), but as you get closer it appears 2-dimensional (a tube), and if you get really close you see it as 3-dimensional (a tube with thickness).

And they go on to describe things like the “fabric” of space/time, and now they think that everything may be, at its most essential, “information” – more analogies.

So what’s this all mean? I think one thing it may mean is that the doors are being reopened for us to take God out of the box again. We may be able, once again, to speak of God in language that begins to express his depth and mystery instead of the alternative- something we can package and sell like toothpaste or friendship bracelets.

Physicists use these analogies because there’s just no way to appropriately describe space, time, dimensions, and matter in any other way. If our language can’t describe these things without elevating to poetic language and imagery, what makes us think we can describe the God of the universe through anything less?

So, like Rob Bell (teaching Pastor at Mars Hill Church) once said, “high-end quantum physicists are starting to sound like ancient Jewish poets.”

I think this may be the beauty of the postmodern church as it begins to develop. Postmoderns are beginning to be raised to embrace depth and mystery instead of fear it or ignore it. God is worming his way out of the box we've put Him in. He’s growing, he’s getting bigger.

I think this fits so well with how Jesus spoke. Jesus didn’t go around handing out tracts with the “4 Spiritual Laws”, or the “Romans Road,” or some other list of how to get saved. He came preaching in parables.

Metaphors.

Stories.

Poetry.

One time, His disciples, his talmidim, asked him why he spoke in parables. His answer, which used to perplex me greatly, was basically “I speak in parables so the people won’t understand me” (Luke 8:10). What? That didn’t compute for me for the longest time. But now, I’m beginning to see, perhaps, why Jesus found this more valuable than giving us a list of rules or an “instruction manual.”

If Jesus would have come and given us a list of do’s, don’ts, how’s, and why’s (which he could have done) we would likely feel like we had God in our own nice little heart shaped box. That’s not what Jesus was after. When you speak in parables it doesn’t promote rightness, necessarily, but it does promote relationship. Don’t the parables intrigue you? They’re deep, complex, mysterious, engaging.

If he gives us a tract with the steps to salvation, we walk away with a profound sense of feeling that we’ve got it all figured out now. The problem with that is the words in the previous sentence, “walk away.” Jesus doesn’t want us to walk away. If Jesus tells us a story, on the other hand, we’re tempted to follow him, to learn more, to get deeper, to further the relationship which ultimately is what he’s after.

May we all be poets following in the steps of our Rabbi.

New Creation 2

[If you haven't read my note New Creation 1 yet, I'd encourage you to read that one first so this one will make more sense.]

So I've been doing some more looking into these connections between John and the Genesis creation account. I'm finding that the further I take the study, the more interesting stuff I'm finding. I'll list all of the major things I've found...

1. John 1:1 vs. Gen 1:1 "In the beginning..."

I guess I never really thought about the words "in the beginning" as being a rather overt connection to Genesis. I wonder if this opening, so obviously taken from Genesis, is almost like a pointer for the Jewish reader to keep the creation account in mind while reading through the book.

2. John 19:5 vs. Gen 2:7 "Here is the man!" or in the KJV "Behold the man!"

Here, on the sixth day of the week Jesus is paraded out by Pilate and presented to the throng as "the man." Similarly on the 6th day of creation "the man" is brought out by God.

3. John 19:30 vs. Gen 2:1-2a "it is finished."

In the evening of the 6th day God finishes his work.

4. John 19:41 vs. Gen 2:8 "there was a garden"

I think it's interesting that John not only mentions that Jesus was laid in a garden but he also throws in another of those "odd little details" that keep seeming to creep in. He mentions that it is a place where "no one had ever been laid." This seems to be another connection with the garden, which was the other place where death had not yet entered.

5. John 19:42 vs. Gen 2:2b "they laid Jesus there..."

On the 7th day, once the work had been completed, God took a Sabbath, a day of rest.

6. John 20:15 vs. Gen 2:8 "the gardener"

I've already mentioned this one in my last note [New Creation 1].

7. John 20:22 vs. Gen 2:7 "breathed"

I mentioned this one too.

Right now I'm looking into some more connections, most of them a bit looser than those above. For example, John 1:13 talks about being "children born not of human descent but of God" (like Adam and Eve). And John 1:14 talks about the Word becoming flesh and dwelling with man which reminds me a lot of God walking with the man and woman in the garden.

I'm wondering if there's any connection implied by the importance of the tree in the two events also, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree Jesus was nailed to, and possibly the tree of life in Revelation. I'm skeptical of this myself though because John doesn't actually call the cross a tree. And I don't think the cross was much of a symbol to the very early Jewish church, not like it is today.

What are your thoughts? What do you think the implications are for us or how we think about things?

New Creation 1

Have you ever felt, when studying and learning the Bible that your head would just explode, and then you'd have to go around for the rest of your life explaining why you've got no head?! That's how I've been feeling the past couple weeks from what I've been learning. It's like things are wizzing around there that want to get out and pretty soon my head will just *pop*

So, I haven't got this all figured out yet and I don't really know what it all means, but here goes. There’s this thing called the “First Mention Principle,” where one way the Jews would interpret scripture was to go back and find the first place a word appears in the scriptures. Well, I've been getting this interesting image appearing from the scriptures lately...

Picture this...in the gospel of John, where Jesus has just resurrected (John 20:15), Jesus asks Mary why she was crying. Before she even turns around and sees Him it says, "Thinking he was the gardener..." And how odd a detail this is! At least to our modern ears and eyes. But when we try to read this as a Jew would in the 1st century I think things clear up a bit. When we use the Principle of First Mention, we are transported all the way back to Genesis to find the first mention of a garden, or gardener.

If we go back to Genesis 2:8 it says, "Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east..." So here we see God in a sense as a gardener, or perhaps more accurately, The Gardener. So there's this strong connection being made in the Jewish mind with Jesus’ resurrection and what God was doing in the first creation. But perhaps it's not quite enough.

And so directly after Jesus talks to Mary, he appears to his disciples. There is a brief 'catching up' discussion (as is customary when your master rises from the dead) and then in John 20:22 it says, "And with that he breathed on them and said, 'Receive the Holy Spirit.'" Now there's another odd little bit, don’t you think? The whole Jesus breathing on his disciples thing has always confused me. I believe this is another one of those odd details that people tend to gloss over (Can you honestly say you didn't gloss over the breathing part just now? Did you have to reread it to catch the breathing thing?), but I don't think it would have been glossed over by a 1st century Jew reading the text. And I think that a 1st century Jew writing a text (John) who was used to using various methods of interpreting to get to deeper layers of meaning in scripture, may just have put some odd little details in there to provide further layers to the story.

So what do we find if we take a crack at the Principle of First Mention again? It takes us back not only to Genesis again, but to exactly one verse before our last verse from Genesis. In Genesis 2:7 the Bible says, "the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and BREATHED into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being."(Emphasis mine) And so John solidifies the connection here. Just as God, in the original creation, breathed the spirit of life into the first man, now Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit of God into these first men, His disciples. Isn't that freakin’ awesome!?

Here's something else...think about how the order of events play out in the whole passion narrative of Jesus compared to the order of creation. Jesus dies on Friday (the 6th day of the week), that is to say that He completes God's work of redemption. On Saturday (the 7th day), the Sabbath, the Shabbat, God rests. There's this sort of disquieting, uncomfortable, yet exciting silence over creation. Then early on Sunday morning, the first day of a new week, Christ raises from the dead. He becomes the first to be resurrected and perhaps this is not just the first day of a new week, but the first day of a New Creation!

And so maybe what John is implying by these links between the first creation and Jesus’ resurrection is that Jesus’ resurrection was somehow like a NEW creation. Maybe Jesus’ resurrection wasn’t just for the forgiveness of our sins, but also the redemption (or restoration) of the world through this new creation. I’m not saying, by the way, that the resurrection was anything LESS than forgiveness, but maybe it is MORE than that.

Like I said, I don't really know what this all means but maybe it does have some implications for us. Maybe it means that our focus shouldn't just be on getting out of this life and this world so we can get to some other world (heaven). Maybe that's not God's plan. After all, Revelation does end with God and heaven crashing into earth (Rev. 21). It says He's going to dwell with US, not vise versa.

Jesus thought we should pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” What would it look like if He really meant that? And I think this makes some sense in light of Jesus' view that eternal life seemed to begin here and now, not after we die. Maybe it has implications for how we focus on the times we're in.

We always tend to look at it as 'we're living in the LAST days of END of time.' That's certainly a valid way of looking at it. But maybe we could be thinking of it more in terms of living in the FIRST days of a NEW creation. Maybe that would affect how we live out God's kingdom on earth.

I heard recently that some people who study world economics believe that with the wealth we have in the world we could end extreme poverty in the world. End it...done...over. Extreme poverty is sometimes defined as the type of poverty that kills. People without enough basic medicine, shelter, food, water. And our generation could end it. Just like we look back on the generations of people who justified slavery through the scriptures, I wonder if 200 years from now people will look back on our generation and see how we really missed the boat. Or if they'll look back on us and see a generation that figured it out, stepped up, and did it.

Kaboom,

What the hell is hell?

So I've been chewing on this hell business for awhile now and the more I think about it, the more I don't get it - and I find that exciting. I guess that's postmodernism for ya.

I feel like we've been handed down so much garbage along with the notion of hell. Now we have to deconstruct the whole thing, break it all down and put it back together again. And what I'm finding is that as I do that, it's like when I took my old Sega Genesis apart.

When I was done putting it back together, I had a perfectly functional streamlined console...but I was also left with all of these fiddley bits. You know what I mean - some plastic pieces that broke off when I was prying the thing apart, a port that connected to some extra feature I'd never bought, some metal dohickies, and a couple little wires.

I think hell is like that. When you deconstruct it and put it back together again you're left with all of these things that the Bible never actually talks about, or things that the Bible never intended.

To get an idea of this, throughout the whole Old Testament hell isn't mentioned once. They just never seemed to nail down a good theology on the afterlife - it didn't seem too important. Instead there's this word Sheol which gets translated as pit, grave, death, etc. It seems to be where EVERYONE went - sort of like a generic underworld I guess. That has some interesting implications.

In the New Testament there are 3 words translated as "hell."

Tartarus appears once (2 Peter2:4) and is where the angels went when they sinned. Back then Tartarus had all sorts of Roman/Greek mythological connotations. For now, the important thing is just that it is like a big pit within hell/Hades.

Hades, then is another word translated as hell. This, of course, was also loaded with all sorts of mythological meanings back then. So when the people heard a Jewish Rabbi talking about "the gates of Hades" for instance, they had a very clear picture in their minds what he was talking about - a picture very different than we picture hell.

Gehenna is the last term and it was a physical place just outside of Jerusalem (as in, "Gehenna? Sure, just take a left at the 7-11 and keep going for 3 blocks, you can't miss it"). It was a place where people used to sacrifice their first born children to the god Molech (2 Kings 23:10). It was this tainted place where it was as though the opposite of God's will had been done for a long time. It wasn't the type of place good little Jewish boys go to take picnics with their girlfriends. So it became a town dump and to get rid of the trash they'd set various parts of it on fire so it was a place where the fire never went out. Wild dogs would come here and fight over scraps of food so that there could often be heard gnashing of teeth (gnashing: "to grind or strike (teeth) together, to bite with grinding teeth" dictionary.com) and loud wailing.

So if we just look at the places where hell is mentioned specifically, that's it. It's only mentioned by name 15 times in the NIV and several of those are in parallel versions (same story in 2+ different gospels). I may get into some other references of punishment and stuff some other time, but this is the streamlined version. It's what the first hearers would have heard specifically about hell.

This is before we got all of the fiddley bits where Satan is this fallen angel figure ruling over hell and he's got cloven hooves, horns, and a spiked tail (and didn't he steal that trident from the little mermaid's dad?). It's before Dante and Milton, much less Frank Peretti and Tim LaHaye all gave us their own ideas of hell.

So then what does this streamlined version tell us? How can we really seperate, in our minds, the fiddley bits made up in the middle ages from what Jesus was talking about? If Jesus was using the language of his day to express some deeper reality, what was that reality? What does IT look like?

Where's heaven?

I've been thinking lately...

Heaven, at least as it's been brought down to us, is a place up in the sky or somehow in another dimension with clouds and harps and angels. It's a place where we go to live with God after we die. But I wonder if that's actually the Biblical view of heaven.

To the Jews it seems like the Temple was like this fusion of heaven and earth. It's like by walking into the Temple, you were actually walking into heaven, the place where God lives and reigns. And then this rabbi comes along and starts saying things like 'the kingdom of God is at hand'-it's right here in front of us, it's available to anyone.

In the Gospels the phrases 'kingdom of God' and 'kingdom of heaven' seem to be synonymous and so I wonder if we misread a lot of Matthew when he says 'kingdom of heaven' and think that means this otherworldly place we go after we die, when he's actually talking about something that's here, right now, at hand.

If a kingdom is a place where the king rules, then maybe Jesus was calling us to make earth this place where God reigns. Maybe Jesus wasn't kidding when he said we should pray that God's will be done "on earth as it is in heaven."

And then there's Revelation. I can make neither heads nor tails of most of the book but there's this quarky part at the end. In all the cartoons and movies and sermons and such, we're always going UP to heaven to live with God, but that isn't the picture Revelation gives. In Rev. 21 it talks about the New Jerusalem "coming DOWN" out of heaven. And then God says, "now the dwelling of GOD is with MEN." Coming at that through modern eyes I'd almost think it were misquoted or that the Bible had it all wrong. Doesn't God realize that at the end of time He isn't suppose to dwell with US, we're supposed to go dwell with HIM!

Like a lot of other stuff I've been thinking about, I'm not really sure what this all means yet, but some scriptures certainly make much more sense to me in this light.

Maybe when God created the world it really was "good"...And maybe God still sees it that way.

Perhaps God really did, "so love the world..."

And maybe God really does want for his "kingdom [to] come" down here and for his will to be done, "on earth as it is in heaven"

Maybe this life isn't just about getting our butts saved and then twiddling our thumbs until we die and get to heaven.

And for me it also raises some new questions. For example, if heaven really will crash into earth at the end of time, what does that mean for us now? If God's planning on living down here, should that affect the way I treat this place? If the "kingdom of heaven" is down here and not up there, is there something I should be doing for His kingdom here and now in preparation?

I think, for me, in some ways, I've been living for a long time as though this world were somehow inherently evil, bad, something to run from. And my job was to stay as far away from this world as possible until God finally takes me completely away from this world and I never have to think about it again. But there was this one rabbi who tried something different. He came eating and drinking with sinners, mixing it up with the world, and he had this nasty habit of associating with the "not-good-enoughs." Maybe I should try something like that...