Notes Along the Way -- TF4 -- Ichthusman

... continuing my years as a Teaching Fellow at Asbury. Previous post here.
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1. My second year as Teaching Fellow involved two new preps -- Hebrew and Intermediate Greek. At first, I was a little annoyed at Bill Patrick for finageling a second two year term as Teaching Fellow. That meant he would teach the summer Greek intensive, which was money I wanted. But it seems like perhaps I was allowed to teach Hebrew then, which was perfectly delightful for me. Not all TFs got to teach Hebrew.

Lawson Stone had sung the praises of LaSor (although apparently not enough to use it). I loved it. It was my first experiment with teaching biblical languages inductively. It wouldn't be the last.

Teaching a biblical language inductively can require some pastoral skills. With LaSor especially, students had a good deal of miscellaneous information rattling around in their heads before they could see the big picture. And that is highly uncomfortable -- especially the more "J" you are.

Then, all of a sudden, everything comes together. And in a shorter time period than it would have taken otherwise.

But I loved it. It was great for me, having first learned Hebrew from Seow's textbook, to solidify my understanding with LaSor. Maybe a smidge selfish. But to this day, my sense of Hebrew phonetics is far better than it would be otherwise.

I had some really good students. I like to boast that I was Brian Russell's Hebrew teacher. Of course, I couldn't answer half his questions. So let's just say he taught himself.

Jeff Finger stands out to me as a student, not so much because of his Hebrew prowess, although I'm sure he got an A. Rather, he was a quite unique fellow. I remember one class where he was laying on top of his desk on his back holding LaSor up in the air. This is a desk chair I'm talking about.

2. He seemed like just the right person to play "Lust Boy" for Ichthus that summer of 1991. Denise Greenhalgh, as I recall, had asked me to be Ichthusman for the Christian rock festival. Bob Lyon had started the festival way back in the 70s, as I recall, as a Christian alternative to Woodstock. (I would later propose to Angie during the festival in 1998. This was before they moved it to the place where it died.)

As a small taste of what I had become, I made the suggestion in all seriousness of parachuting into the festival. After checking, the response was that the insurance company would drop us like a hot potato if we tried such a stunt.

So I invented the costume myself. Yellow cleaning gloves. Someone sowed a yellow fish (ichthus) on a black turtleneck I got at a Goodwill type store. Black pants. Purple cape. Some (cheap) cool 90s sunglasses. I had some used clothes that we cut up and vecroed so that I could rip them off to the tune of "This looks like a job for Ichthusmannnnnn!" The costume was underneath.

So that summer we vanquished Lust Boy. I think Scott Brown might have been "Sin Man" the next summer.

3. I also taught Intermediate Greek using Brooks and Winbery as a grammar and Metzger's Lexical Aids. Students were supposed to go through Galatians and both do sentence diagrams and give a semantic analysis for each word. 

No doubt, I was not the best teacher for this. That was I believe when I met Jim McNeely. I seem to recall that Bryan Blankenship was in that class as well, but I could be wrong. As usual, I learned a great deal while teaching.

The year after I was teaching fellow, I would take two semesters at UK in Sanskrit. It was a linguistics sequence. I wish I could say I gave it the time it deserved. I mention it because Sanskrit has an 8 case noun system, and Brooks and Winbery analyzed the five Greek cases using that Indo-European model. [1]

The Nominative, Accusative, and Vocative have always stood alone. But the genitive was originally a genitive and ablative. And the dative was originally dative, locative, and instrumental cases. Indeed, this is a curious thing to me. While we are used to thinking of things getting more developed over time, the Indo-European languages have actually become much simpler over time. Modern Greek is simpler than ancient Greek, and ancient Greek was simpler than its Indo-European ancestor.

I have always felt like I was just a step behind. If I knew everything that I have studied, I would be quite a knowledgable fellow.

4. McNeely likes to remind me that I was fined for trespassing on railroad property with a girl I was dating from Asbury College at the time. But I'll let that story pass.

[1] I suppose this is a good place to mention that I sat in on Dr. Stone's Akkadian class too my first year as Teaching Fellow. I didn't find the time to learn it as well as I wished. It was quite a fun deviation, since it used cuneiform for its syllables. He needed my warm body for the class to go, as I recall.

Notes Along the Way -- Asbury 2.4 -- End of the Second Year

Here's the previous breadcrumb.
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1. My second year at Asbury was my first full foray into Hebrew. I had dabbled a little into the letters and some vocbulary when I did my honors project at Central, but CWC had not offered Hebrew. Frankly, I think it was good for me to get my Greek a little more solidified before tackling another language -- although Greek and Hebrew are quite different. It was for this reason that I decided not to take Aramaic my first year as a Teaching Fellow. I didn't want to scramble my Hebrew.

That was Lawson Stone's first year at Asbury, fresh from Yale and a dissertation on Judges. The previous year, Eugene Carpenter had taught Hebrew inductively using Genesis 1. I bought his cassette tapes and had started memorizing his pronunciation. 

I didn't feel too bad to miss Carpenter. Lawson was superb as a teacher. I would run into Carpenter again my first year teaching at IWU in 1997-98. He tried to recruit me to come teach at Bethel in Mishawaka. Perhaps I will tell that tale if I keep writing these memories. Unfortunately, he would drown while fishing on a lake in 2012.  It always seemed strange to me but none of my business.

2. Lawson was enthusiastic his first year teaching, clearly a genius. I seem to recall he was enamored with Barth that year or two. He was full of ideas. In the spring he talked several of us to do a special Isaiah 1-12 in Hebrew class. His goal was to integrate the inductive Bible study method with an original language exegesis course. Very exciting to be a part of that. I think Dave Smith may have been in there too.

We used Seow as a textbook, but he would try LaSor thereafter. LaSor taught Hebrew by starting with Esther 1:1 and proceding through the whole book. When I taught Hebrew as a Teaching Fellow, I used LaSor and loved it. That experience teaching Hebrew from the biblical text itself had a huge impact on me, an impact that has led me to teach biblical language inductively several times.

As someone who was just being exposed to more advanced biblical studies, I found Lawson eye-opening and open-minded. He seemed open to critical theories, although I always wondered if he lived under some peer-pressure from having Dennis Kinlaw and John Oswalt in the neighborhood. I was frankly surprised to find out how traditional Lawson had become in the 2000s, but perhaps I was the one who moved.

3. I also had Minor Prophets English Bible with David Thompson that spring. Thompson's style was quite different from David Bauer's.  Bauer was authoritative and at least felt exhaustive. Thompson was tentative and modeled epistemic humility. One lesson I've learned in the "real world" is that confidence is extremly important if one wants to advance in this world. If there is one humble soul that is tentative and another confident soul that is typically wrong, the second often wins.

It was good to continue exercising these English Bible/Inductive Bible Study skills. I wouldn't have a good bird's eye sense of this method until I taught it online for Asbury a few years later. At the time, it was like a game. You learn how to play the game and don't necessarily ask why the game has the rules it has. I seem to recall that Ruth Ann Reese was a little puzzled by the method when she came to Asbury. She already had a PhD in hand, but what the heck was "particularization with recurrence of filial language"?

4. I would do an independent study with David Bauer that summer on Acts. I hadn't been able to take the class. It was a defining experience, I suspect. I had taken Acts with Ken Foutz at CWC, so I had made a pass at the material already. And Acts had featured significantly in my honors project on sanctification. Now I applied the English Bible study method to the book.

That was also when I reversed my understanding of the Spirit-fillings in Acts. With my honor's project, I had still taken the position that the Spirit-fillings in Acts were events of entire sanctification. But now that I was reading the text inductively and trying to go with the most likely interpretation given the evidence, it just didn't seem to be the case.

If we bracket tradition and listen to the text, nothing about Acts suggests that these baptisms in the Spirit were second works of grace where the heart was cleansed of inbred sin. They seem to be gateway experiences. Chris Fisher, Ed Ross, and I edited a student newspaper called the Short Circuit my last year. I wrote up a piece on this topic. I think it grieved some of my family.

This experience with Bauer in Acts was probably far more future-shaping that I could imagine. It gave Dr. Bauer a chance to see my growing interpretive skills -- something that probably helped me become a Teaching Fellow. It also exposed me to Jimmy Dunn's Baptism in the Spirit, as well as Bob Lyon's classic Wesleyan article on the same subject. That would shape where I did my doctoral work.

5. I took three other courses that spring of 1989. One was Patristics with David Bundy. I was not drawn to the fathers the way Chris Bounds was, whom I think was also in that class. In fact, I quickly came to believe that the fathers were largely incompetent if you judge them by the standards of inductive Bible study. They were "credulous," "pre-modern" interpreters who saw their own theology in the text rather than hearing the text on its own terms.

When I went to Indiana Wesleyan University, I was pushed to develop a "second naivete" about them and the development of doctrine. The end was to have my cake and eat it too. I could read the Bible in context following the rules of inductive Bible study and yet affirm the theology they saw in the text as a fuller sense that was directed by the Holy Spirit in the development of doctrine. Postmodernism and the polyvalence of texts were helpful here. 

6. A second was David Seamands' "Servant as Pastoral Care Giver." Here I was exposed to his books Healing for Damaged Emotions and The Healing of Memories. Although I made fun of the concept of "damaged emotions," I found his basic concept helpful. Like the movie Inside Out (and the approach Scott Makin takes in the Campus psychology course), our memories can be "damaged" in ways that inhibit us from thriving and functioning fully in life. You need to deal with those memories to fully move forward (a bit of Freud peeking through as well).

I believe I've already talked about his concept of "damaged love receptors" (also very cheesy). I came to wonder if my God "antennae" were damaged. Was God beaming his love to me but I couldn't receive the transmissions because my antennae were damaged? In the next few years, a sense of God's silence would plague me.

I believe it was also around this time that I was exposed to the God-concept video, one of which is God as sheriff -- "every move you make, every step you take, I'll be watching you." Another was the absent God, the give you what you want God, and perhaps the party God. Then the right one was the father of the Prodigal.

7. Finally, I took apologetics with Jerry Walls, my second class with him. My biggest takeaway from that experience was James Sire's The Universe Next Door. It was my first real exposure to the notion of a worldview. This book has continued to influence me over the years.

That's a lot. I came across in some bookstore a book that tried to condense an MDIV into one book. Obviously it only aimed to hit the highlights. I would love to write something like that too. On the bucket list.  

The Year in Review (2025)

1. I generally write an end of the year review. It's not been a bad year. When people ask me how I'm doing I often say, "Better than I deserve." What have I done this year? Man, let me do a little research and get back with you.

I did write some books. I sense that my reputation has declined because I have turned so vigorously into self-publishing. I suppose I should get something published with a real publisher just to remind everyone I'm a scholar.

I have been going through a little bit of scholarly withdrawal. I didn't make SBL this year. I missed an opportunity to submit a piece for a Festschrift. I'll do a New Year's Goals post tomorrow, and no doubt these feelings will show themselves there.

2. I think I am getting better and better at self-publishing. I think I could almost start a publishing company. I have a good sense of making covers now. I know how to create ebooks. I know how to work with Kindle Direct Publishing (and Lulu). AI is as good or better at finding spelling mistakes and improving style as a human editor. Kindle will convert to audiobook if you format the ebook properly.

I took a course three years ago that helped me grow in marketing and sales phenomenally. I went through a revised version of the course this year too. Although I am not bringing in the millions, I think I may be breaking even. :-) For example, I used market testing to help me with book titles, cover images, ad images, etc. 

A somber discovery is that you probably won't be very successful if you just write about what you find interesting and give your books titles you like. If you want to sell books, unless you get very lucky, you have to do market testing. And you just don't know what's going to get people to click on your stuff unless you test them.

Two of the books I published were re-titled versions of previous books. I felt like the earlier titles weren't as marketable or at least that I could reach a different market with these titles.

• A Biblical Guide to the End Times 
• What Christians Believe 

After helping create Steve Deneff's holiness course on Wesleyan Learn as well as Chris Bounds' Theology of Holiness course, I thought I would capture my thoughts on the topic. Although I promoted it, I was frankly unsatisfied with the recent book on the subject. This is one that perhaps I should have sought out a real publisher because it is actually a good piece of biblical-theological scholarship. It won't be engaged as a self-published book, but it ranks among other books on the subject, I think.

• A Brief Guide to Biblical Holiness

Like many, I am deeply disturbed by the situation America is currently in. I sense there was a turning point about a month ago. It's like America is done with the current administration and is just waiting for it to end.

In the second half of the year, I tried to express some of my feelings in two books:

• The United States versus Whatever This Is
• The Devil's Apprentice (a C. S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters type look at America right now)

You'll find a deal on a bundle of these either in ebook or paperback format here.

3. As far as sales, I sold 1406 copies of my book on Women in Ministry on Amazon (not including the ebook versions I sold on Shopify). Although it only came out about a month ago, I've sold 70 copies of The Devil's Apprentice on Amazon.

The most viewed blog post I had this year was The Wesleyan Church 2035. It was a pot-stirrer in honor of Keith Drury. It had over 1500 views. A post on Romans 16 was second with over 1200 views.

My Udemy course on learning Hebrew by working through the book of Jonah continues to perform modestly. I've had over 500 students take it during the life of the course, and some 1800 people at least looked at the course this past year.

On YouTube, I'm at over 13,000 subscribers. Over 100,000 views this year (down from the previous year -- I need to up my game in the age of AI). My main views were on a GFCI "how to" video I did a few years back (2800). Other than that, a few Greek and Hebrew videos had around 2000 views. This short from this month came in second with over 2000 views -- that's an eye opener.

4. I've developed a blogging schedule that has resulted in a lot more posting than a year ago. These will eventually be books of some sort.

• Sundays I have been shifting my commentary approach. Few want to buy verse by verse commentary. I keep debating what form might generate interest. I'm currently playing with a storied approach to the books.
• Mondays I've been writing on my life story focusing on my thinking -- "Notes Along the Way"
• Tuesday I've worked some on a book I may try to find a conventional publisher for -- Science and Scripture. But I also think a more popular version might be more helpful for the church.
• Thursday has been philosophy posts. I've taken several runs at this from different angles. The current one parallels the class I teach regularly.
• Saturdays I've been writing on a chemistry novel I started almost twenty years ago. Some interesting angles on this.

5. My work with Campus Edu has continued. We had over 1200 enrollments in our courses this year -- mostly high school. 100 Christian high schools signed up. We have good reason to believe that 2026 is going to be a blow out year.

I helped with the building of an Astronomy course. That was very satisfying.

I taught a lot this year. I think I graded over 1600 individual pieces of work this fall. I taught for about 8 colleges. 

With over 1000 students and so many constituencies, my job as Provost includes a lot of the challenges that a Provost of a college has. Good experience.

6. On a personal level, Angie and I were on our way to Iceland and Belgium when she suddenly felt very bad and I soon followed. We weren't able to go, which was very disappointing. Perhaps we can make a couple trips this coming year. 

We have about 100 chickens and 2 goats, which frankly has made it difficult for us both to go somewhere together. We have three good coops and several crappy ones I built. I suppose one goal for the new year is for us to figure out how to manage this farm.

That gives a fair sense of this past year for me. I am on a common family journey with my sugar. It clouds my mind. It dulls my brain. We shall overcome. Such is life.

Notes of my first Year at Asbury -- Reading the Bible Inductively

This is another Monday, "Notes Along the Way" post. Chronologically, the material here is just prior. My last Monday post is here.
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1. Asbury Seminary introduced me to a whole new level of professors. The professor who most took me under his wing was David Bauer. His intellect was so incisive. His approach so objective, comparatively speaking. He modeled a scientific rigor in pursuing the meaning of the biblical text that I found excilarating.

Teaching at IWU for some twenty years, I often felt the pressure of boundaries -- landmine topics to avoid. Much of this was probably self-inflicted, but I felt like I knew what subjects were most dangerous. I was always amazed at how Steve Lennox could march into a controversial subject with such confidence and emerge unscathed. Bud Bence, with a 1990s Houghton mindset dancing in his head, almost felt like he had to shake you some or you weren't getting your money's worth.

At the same time, he also had the fairly recent David Meade affair in the back of his head. A professor at Houghton, Meade had taken the position that Paul did not write the Pastorals and that several other books of the Bible were not written by the names on them. Harold Lindsell, of the Battle for the Bible fame, had written someone on the board (I think) sounding the alarm that Houghton was deviating from its evangelical glory.

When President Dan Chamberlain went to China for a semester, I understand he left instructions with Bud to fire Meade. (He himself was under pressure from the GBA of The Wesleyan Church, I believe.) Bud was the VPAA at Houghton at the time. Bud carried out the charge. From what I understand, Meade and the faculty fought back under the banner of academic freedom. That's a losing battle at a confessional school where the creed of the school is part of an agreement to come teach there. 

[Admittedly, the Wesleyan Church has no creedal line on pseudonymity. In theory, Meade only needed to affirm that the Pastoral letters were truthful and that it was a genre question not a true/false question. But instead, I understand he took the position "I'm the expert and should be allowed to follow the truth wherever it leads." Lennox, also a Houghton grad, has suggested to me that Meade's attitude tanked him more than his position. I of course was not present for any of those controversies to have a first hand opinion.]

The faculty never forgave Bud for firing Meade, and the next chance they got, they pressured Chamberlain into pushing him out. All the way around, he seemed a scapegoat. Bud felt deeply wounded and betrayed. Of course, IWU was so much the better for it. I apologize if I have massacred any of these details.

So Bud was a little nervous hiring me at IWU. He was the Division Chair of Religion when I was hired at IWU. I had also studied at Durham with Jimmy Dunn just as Meade had. (I've never met Meade. Dunn said he would never write a reference for me if Houghton ever wanted to hire me. It was a little bit of a joke when I went to work there in 2019.) 

Years later, Bud would apologize to me for his fears about me (he of course had no reason to apologize). He indicated it turned out I am much more conservative than he is. :-) 

All of that is to say that, in teaching, my hope was that if I taught students how to read the Bible in context -- how to listen to it and let it tell you what it meant -- then I wouldn't have to make controversial claims about what it meant. It would make all its claims for itself.

In practice, of course, few of my students really became fully inductive. Some did. The bread crumbs I thought I left for them to follow rarely led them anywhere different from where they started. Our paradigms are persistent. We see what our paradigms want us to see. This applies to scholars as well.

2. This "scientific method" approach to the Bible was very attractive to me at Asbury. It fit with my love of science in high school and my first year of college. And the "English Bible" method at Asbury, so ably modeled by Bauer, was quintessentially scientific in its approach.

First, you ask what the text says. You don't ask what it means yet. You absolutely do not apply it yet. You start by simply observing. What does the text say?

Then you ask what the words meant. This is a matter of its first meaning, not what the words seem to mean today. You do a word study, looking at the other places a word is used in the same language (Greek, Hebrew. or Aramaic). On a more general question, you gather evidence. In good Baconian fashion, you create a table with evidence and possible inferences. 

After exhausting evidence from the text itself, you now bring in possible historical background. You need to be careful, because the ancient world was a vast foreign country, and we only have the barest of artifacts from it. It is incredibly easy to see parallels that aren't really parallels. Only after you have done all the inductive work yourself do you bring in commentaries, which are just as likely to cloud your mind.

Now, finally, only after you have some sense of what it meant to its first audiences, do you begin to think about applying the text to today. You look for continuities between that time and our time. You also note the discontinuities. As Hays and Duvall put it, you "cross the principlizing bridge" by identifying biblical principles that you then reapply in contemporary contexts and situations.

This all smacks of modernism. This was the 80s, and postmodernism had not yet really hit. I'm all the more grateful it hadn't. Although I would come to appreciate the hermeneutical chastisement of postmodernism, it provides no real method for determining the meaning of the text. It is an incredibly helpful footnote but shouldn't be the main text. It's a muddle by its very nature. I suppose I'll get to that.

Although the inductive method I just set out is not foolproof -- not by far -- it is consummately reasonable.

3. It was also quite different from the method I grew up with, which I would come to categorize as "pre-modern." My mother's approach to interpretation -- without of course her ever knowing it -- amounted to "How can I make the evidence fit the conclusions I already have?" Her conclusions, of course, were provided by her tradition, the Pilgrim Holiness tradition.

The default for American Christians who have grown up in church is basically the same. How can we argue for the position of our group? It is a tribal hermeneutic, perfectly predictable. It's how if you're a Baptist, surprise, the Bible teaches Baptist things. If you're a Lutheran, the Bible teaches Lutheran things. And yes, if you're a Wesleyan, the Bible teaches Wesleyan things.

Of course in a Google, YouTube, Facebook, Tik Tok age, we hear a lot more than what my mother heard in her bubble growing up. In a world of verse quoting, it's easy to be affected by other traditions. The "non-denominational" church near you is basically Baptist. I always smile when some church naively thinks it's just following the Bible. Such comments simply show that the church is unreflective of its own influences and traditions.

But this would become the most important question of my first year at seminary. Would I read the Bible in a way that tried to make it say what I had grown up hearing it said? Or would I read it inductively and let it tell me what it said?

[Note that the Meade controversy didn't distinguish between the question of truth and the question of politics. Meade thought that teaching at a confessional school was a question of truth. It is -- within whatever the boundaries of the institution are. But the question of an institution is also a question of politics, which he failed at that time.]

4. Going back to college, I was struck by the clash between my pre-modern paradigm and the modernist paradigm that I would adopt at Asbury. While studying to test out of New Testament Survey, I was struck by the way Merrill Tenney's New Testament Survey talked about matters like where Thessalonica was located or what its place in the Roman Empire was. These things seemed completely irrelevant to me.

Why? Because reading the Bible at that time to me was a matter of taking an individual verse and reading the words in the light of my holiness theology. Without realizing, I understood reading the Bible to be a mirror reading of what I already thought. And I read in the King James version, as I'll soon discuss. Each verse was listed by number, not in paragraphs.

This led me to have what you might call a "memory verse" approach to the Bible. Each verse was ripped from its context and made into a philosophical proposition. The definitions I brought to each word were Pilgrim Holiness definitions -- not definitions from the Greek and Hebrew worlds in which those words were first written.

It was a completely sincere question I had back then. What does historical context matter in interpretation? Don't we just read the words and do what they say? If 1 Corinthians 11 says a woman shouldn't cut her hair, then shouldn't women not cut their hair? Funny how I didn't apply that question to greeting one another with a holy kiss!

5. A quick example of the paradigm shift I was about to undergo. My senior year of college, I wrote an honors project on the psychological aspects of holiness. It was quite impressive for the world of my background. I argued that the Spirit-fillings of Acts were second works of grace, experiences of entire sanctification. There was a day when you could still find it in the library at SWU.

At Asbury later on, under an independent study with Dr. Bauer, I would go through those same passages inductively and conclude they were all initial experiences of the Holy Spirit (except in Acts 4 of course). This was my transition from being a sectarian, traditional scholar to a more "objective," inductive scholar. I suspect that study helped me become a Teaching Fellow at Asbury. And it probably set me on a course to study with James Dunn at Durham.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Notes Along the Way: Ten Years of Terror

Some more notes on my life. This content would come after the two posts on God's callings.
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1. In the first chapter, I talked about how my "conscience" suddenly awakened one afternoon at a winter camp meeting in Brookville, Florida when I was 10 years old. What ensued was ten years of terror.

During those years, I prayed constantly for the Lord to forgive my sins. Frankly, I didn't know what sins I was even asking forgiveness for. Sometimes I thought it might be nice if I had deliberately done something wrong. Then I would know what I was praying for and would likely have found peace. 

But there were few moments of peace in my quest to be saved. A couple times. And when I wasn't thinking about it. But if I got to navel gazing -- hyperintrospection -- it was torment.

2. Keith Drury once said there wasn't a moment of his life that he wouldn't have gone to heaven if he had died. As a young child, he had not reached a point of accountability, and the Lord would have received him. As soon as he knew his need for salvation, he prayed to receive it, His sins were forgiven, he became right with God. Every time thereafter, whenever he sinned, he asked forgiveness. As a consequence, there was never a moment that the Lord would not have received him.

What a healthy understanding of God's character! It was not the feel of the preaching of my youth. I grew up with a doctrine of eternal insecurity. Not only did hell loom over you before you came to Christ, but it was "one sin you're out" after you came to Christ. Say a curse word and get hit by a train? It's hell for you. This is just as unbiblical as eternal security.

3. I had always been a compliant person. At school, I was a goody-two shoes. If it was a rule, I followed it. The number of times I had deliberately disobeyed were few. I took a brick home from Hobe Sound. I asked if I could go to 7-Eleven but went to a different one than I knew my mother would think. I didn't correct the lady when she thought I had deliberately given the wrong answer. That's most of the childhood sins I can remember.

I was painfully shy. Perhaps I had sinned because I prayed in the pew rather than going down to the altar. At Frankfort Camp, I might go down to the second or third pew after the altar call was over. Maybe God was testing me to see if I was willing to go to the altar. I did once. 

Again, I didn't know what sin I needed to go to the altar for except that I was constantly unsure if I was saved. 

They sang a song. "It was on a Sunday, somebody touched me." You were supposed to stand. At first I didn't know if I was saved. I stood on Sunday because I didn't want people to think I wasn't saved. Was that lying? I had already asked Jesus into my heart a thousand times. What if I had the wrong day of the week? Thankfully someone added a verse, "I don't know what day it was but somebody touched me." 

Then there was that time going up the stairs I had peace after praying the prayer for the ten thousandth time. I would count that time. I think it was on a Sunday, so I could stand on that stanza the next camp meeting. 

4. Do I think the Lord was testing or tricking me? No. What a petty god would play such games!

If God is love, he wouldn't want someone so desperate to languish on like that in torment. That would be cruel God -- in fact, more likely Satan. I attribute most of my torture to a developing brain and whatever peculiarities there might be to mine. I was born to second guess myself.

Surely the almighty, sovereign God of the whole universe has better things to do than torture overly conscientious twelve year olds.

It's probably no surprise that I'm not too fond of this dimension of revival culture. It hyped up experiences. You got the impression that the Christian walk was fully of these emotional encounters with God.

But I was more like Spock in temperament. I had deep emotions but I tried to suppress them. Be logical. To this day, I feel like I've exposed myself if I let my emotions show. I feel guilty if I get stirred up in a meeting.

John Maxwell used to make us feel guilty for not witnessing to every passing stranger we encountered. I used to keep a Bible out when I was on a plane so that someone could ask me about it -- a subtle attempt to open the door to evangelism mid-flight. In high school, there was a phase where I would put a Bible on my desk as a witness.

But I would later recognize that Maxwell is an extrovert's extrovert. He can talk to anyone at anytime. It's no virtue to do what you're wired to do. Virtue is when you do good when you're not wired to do it.

A extroverted woman in my home church once told me when I was a teen that shyness was a matter of pride -- a person is too proud to put themselves out there, I guess. What a completely stupid thing to think.

5. I don't know why God didn't make himself more evident to me all that time. This is a question that would haunt me into my late twenties. You would think that God would want to be known -- especially to someone so constantly pleading for him to speak to him. Even in seminary, many Sunday mornings in church I would silently plead for him to speak to me in an obvious way.

When I was in England, I read Honest to God by Bishop John A. T. Robinson. He talked about how when he was at theological college, a certain group of students seemed to be constantly blessed, but he didn't feel anything. Man, I identified with that. Why is it that some people seem to have their radios tuned exactly to the divine frequency while others struggle to hear a peep?

I remember a young man at my home church growing up. He seemed to go to the altar every Sunday night. But for whatever reason, he just never seemed to find peace. I don't know, of course, whether he was struggling with some very specific issue.

I have since come to believe that some people have a gift in this area. Call it a gift of faith. They are on the right frequency to perceive God's working. 

Can we all get on that frequency? I've come to think that we can. It's taken me a very long time to think that. I'm not sure how to put it, I think it comes from the assumption that our prayers reach God whether we hear anything back or not. In fact, I suspect for most of us, we won't experience any undeniable response most of the time. 

I almost chuckle when I think of a moment in college when it occurred to me that I should imagine that God is actually there when I pray -- that I am actually talking to someone. I had just suddenly come to realize that my prayers were like monologuing. It was like I was talking to myself.

While this sounds ridiculous, how many prayers had I heard that were really the pastor talking to the congregation. "Lord we know that you are in control." Of course, God knows that. You don't have to tell him. Are you really telling the congregation that?

In many respects, I wonder if my revivalist tradition had set me up for this crisis. I had been led to believe that everyone was a Moses. We were all prophets and prophetesses. The impression I got was that I should be having regular highly emotional zaps and revelations from God.  We were all Elijahs. If those zaps weren't happening, something was wrong.

Then I realized that Moses was eighty years old before he had his first real contact with God. Sure, the encounters came very frequently after that. But I'm not even sixty. 

6. In seminary, I had David Seamands for Pastoral Care and Counseling. In that class, we read his Healing for Damaged Emotions (hate that title). More helpful to me personally was going on to read his Healing for Damaged Memories. 

Although his labels are truly cringeworthy, he talks in that second book about "damaged love receptors." He argues that sometimes our God antennae aren't functioning properly. God is beaming his love to us just fine, but because our antennae are broken, we're not receiving the transmission. And -- here was the hard part for me -- he said God uses relationships and others to help fix our antennae.

As an introvert, I hated that thought. Why can't you just fix me directly, God? I know you can. But Seamands suggested that God just didn't design us that way. He designed us to live -- and heal -- in community.

7. Compounding the torment, as I mentioned in the first chapter, was the fact that I started to experience it at exactly the time that the rapture movies came out. We watched A Thief in the Night one Sunday night at church. Then we watched A Distant Thunder when it followed. Perhaps there was some connection between these movies and my terror. To this day, apocalyptic movies get in my head. Woe that my family got into watching Walking Dead. I started seeing zombies all over Marion.

At K-Mart, I would keep my mother close in sight. I wouldn't stay outside playing too long before going in to make sure she was still here. I clearly had no confidence in my own salvation.

At college, it got worse. I'm sure the girl I was dating thought I was nuts. We would come home from church and I would say, "I need to go pray. I'm not sure if I'm a Christian." I remember one Sunday going round and round the student center at lunchtime asking God for forgiveness for sins I know not what. I don't think it was God. I think it was neurosis of some kind.

One Sunday night, I was struggling again. Somehow I ended up in the lobby of the girl's dorm. Some movie was on. As movies and television always do, it pulled my mind into its story world. When it was over, I felt better.

That was a good insight. Left alone to my own thoughts, I would spiral. If I could be around people, if I could watch something that would pull me out of my own storyline and into another one, it was a kind of reset.

8. I would largely outgrow this bondage, which is part of why I think most of it was developmental. Perhaps it was also a faulty God-concept that I grew up hearing preached. The God of my childhood was a crooked sherrif who enjoyed having an excuse to blow people away. At least that's the way I experienced him. 

To this day, I think there are many sons and daughters of the holiness movement who have a distorted sense of God. I think this is why they are attracted to authoritarian personalities. Punishing the wrongdoer is their primary mode of being. But this is a twisted sense of God. They are drawn more to God frying Uzzah than to God as the one who sent his Son to save rather than condemn the world. 

I will share in the next chapter about the Easter experience that was a definitive turning point in my spiritual walk. Then I would go to seminary, which was pure joy and light and freedom in the Lord. During those next few years I would steadily move from bondage to freedom. 

Please understand that I loved my home and family. But those years in seminary were a spiritual tug of war inside. When I would go to seminary, I would feel genuine freedom in the Lord. It was not a selfish freedom or a rebellious freedom. It was pure joy in the Lord. It was peace and happiness. It was light.

Then I would go home. I would begin to doubt myself again. I would question whether I was going off track even though it felt like my mind was exploding with new insight. I would doubt myself. 

But at seminary, the Scriptures were opening up to me in a way they never had before. I was blown away. I was reading them in the original Greek and Hebrew and entering its worlds like never before. I was beginning to feel the love of the Lord.

Then I would go home, and a darkness would cover the land again, a bondage. It would take a day or two when I returned to seminary. Then it was joy again. But home was darkness.

You can't live in those two worlds forever. Eventually, I would choose the joy of the Lord. I was on a path toward confidence. I would reach a point where I was fully confident in the Lord -- I never worried about what he thought of me anymore. I was not troubled anymore by the doubts that had once enslaved me.

I continued to worry about what other people thought of me. I didn't want to disappoint others. Until my early thirties I pretty much did what everyone else wanted me to do (within reason). In teaching, I worried what others might think. In class, the imaginary presence of my mother sat in the back of the room as an alarm for when I might say something off limits.

I wasn't worried at all about what God thought. He understood all my new understandings. He and I were fine. It was everyone else out there I worried about.

9. Let me be really serious right now. I believe that a significant portion of the evangelical church has never moved out of the bondage to law that I am speaking of. Still living under the God whose primary mode is to destroy, they know neither the true love nor joy of the Lord. A believer in this land is putty in the hands of the Devil. They are not only unaware of their own bondage, but they are an easy instrument of bondage to others.

Lord, lead us out of Egypt to the Promised Land.

10. God's speaking is still a mystery to me. If you are open, you can see his hand everywhere. You can rarely be completly sure of exactly what he is up to. But you can thank him for every good thing that happens. You can rejoice even through the bad times.

As a Wesleyan, I don't think that everything happens for a reason. Well, I believe God either causes or allows everything for a reason. It's the "allow" part that gets a little uncertain. Sometimes, God allows things for reasons much bigger than Ken Schenck, which may mean that he has not directed them for some very Ken-focused reason.

The "everything happens for a reason" way of thinking can get very narcissistic, as if God is trying to teach me something very specific with everything that happens. But the universe is a big place and, most of the time, God is frying much bigger fish than me.

But I can be constantly in prayer. I can be constantly in communication with God. I can be constantly thankful in both good and bad times. "Naked I came into the world, and naked shall I leave." Life gives, and life takes a way. "Blessed be the name of the Lord."

Still, I should pray in confidence that my prayers do affect the outcome of events. And if at some point I sense the Lord speaking to me, fantastic! I must always be listening.

Notes Along the Way -- God's Callings Part II

Last week I posted from some notes I've been making about my life. That post was about my strong sense that God wanted me to go to Central Wesleyan College, now Southern Wesleyan. Here is the second part of that chapter.
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5. Central was a great place for me to grow up a little. Don't get me wrong. I'm not sure I fully reached adulthood until my 50s. But I was another run of the mill immature male in 1984 who had a mother who helicoptered me long before it became the rage. 

To me, Central was FREEDOM! I could set my own schedule. I could order my life in my own time. And in a world before email, cell phones, and texting, I was pretty much on my own.

It was of course a small train wreck. Finals week of my first semester I tried to pull two all nighters in a row to get all my work done. The first was trying to finish reading through the rest of the Old Testament (in the King James) for Herb Dongell. I didn't succeed. 

The second night was in the chemistry lab. Central had graciously -- but unwisely -- given me 8 hours of introductory chemistry for a 3 on the AP test, my lowest score. I knew some chemistry, but I didn't know the full equivalent of a year's worth. So I started college in Inorganic Analytical Chemistry, and I didn't know what the heck I was doing.

Dr. Schmutz was the kindest of men -- I think a former Quaker turned Wesleyan. But expecting us to be responsible adults, our 10 labs were just due by the end of the semester -- a delightful, terrible test of discipline for me. I had five labs still to go coming into finals week.

If I had finished the science route, I would have made a much better theoretical physicist or chemist than an experimental one. I used to sit neurotically trying to balance the scale to weigh something. In weighing, I would take so long doubting my reading that I suspect some of my samples took on water. One of my results that week broke the law that matter cannot be created -- I ended up with more mass than I started.

AI could have helped fill in gaps if it had been around but, alas, I had no idea where to turn for what I didn't know.

6. There were three of us chemistry majors that semester -- something I tried to sell my high school chemistry teacher when I told him where I was going. "There are only three of us and I'll have my own keys to the chem lab and stock room," I told him, trying to be enthusiastic. He was very kind, but I know very disappointed.

Rodney Clark and Micah Travis were good friends. Still friends. Micah was really the only person at Central that I had known before coming to Central, a fellow Floridian. Micah and I had a delightful all-nighter working to finish our experiments. I used a magnetic stirrer to mix my instant tea in a beaker. We cooked mac and cheese with a Bensen burner and then served them on Petri dishes. Micah slept on Dr. Schmutz's office floor.

The next morning we had our last class of Calculus III (Central had given me 8 credits of Calculus for a 5 on the AP test). There were only three of us in there -- me, Micah, and Alan Payne. But I was exhausted. I woke up with everyone gone and the lights out in the room, face on the desk with mouth agape. Apparently, Dr. Mickey Rickman had said to just leave me there -- that I needed sleep more than whatever topic we were covering.

I had to phone the final lab results back to Dr. Schmutz over the phone -- incredibly gracious on his part. The numbers weren't right but there was nothing I could do about it. Someone had taken me to the Greenville airport and I had fallen asleep before the plane left the ground. It was the lowest grade of my college career, what was no doubt a very gracious B-.

7. The spirit was willing. The flesh was week. "I'll work on it tonight." "I'll get up early." "I'll work on it after lunch." In my later years we would say, "Let's get a late key and go do homework at Huddle House." But after eating, "I'm tired. Let's go back and work at the dorm."

I was never diagnosed, but I wonder if I was attention deficit. I could barely read a paragraph without my mind going somewhere else. It took every bit of will to force myself through reading even though I wanted ever so desperately to do it. Later on I would stand to read or read out loud.

Posture matters. In those days, sometimes I would lie in bed with a book on the floor trying to read -- disaster.

I was an idealist and a dreamer in those days. (I would become a pragmatist and a dreamer later on.) I had a 7:50am class in Art Appreciation with Dr. Barbara Bross. She was great, but I just couldn't stay awake. I always shook my head at IWU when Dr. Lennox would tell new students to sign up for a 7:50 class. "Don't set yourself up for failure," I would think to myself.

I slept in an inordinate number of college classes. In a Dr. Marling Elliott's class on the Poetic Books, I sat on the front row to try to stay awake. One day I made a comment and instantly fell asleep. Scott Key asked what I had said from the back, and they had to wake me up to answer.

Dr. Dongell was particularly harsh toward sleepers. But he was always gracious to me. I mostly stayed awake in his classes though. Sometimes in Dr. Ken Foutz's classes, I would line my head up with someone's head between me and the professor so I might at least have a chance of dozing with anonymity.

8. But the biggest event of my freshman year of college was another calling. You could argue that God used my personal struggles to push me in a different vocational direction. As the semester moved forward, I began more and more to feel like God was calling me into ministry. I'm glad to spiritualize it, but you can see the psychological factors in play too. I am philosophical by nature and, although I couldn't have told you at the time, I was deeply attracted to theology more than what ministers do most of the time. What higher study was there than the study of God?

Of course ministry is primarily about people and faciliating God's engagement with people and people's engagement with God. Rev. James Wiggins would be my primary mentor for ministry in those days, and he modeled visitation. I predictably liked preaching. He modeled concrete, down to earth care for people -- and especially their souls.

But, again, for someone whose primary mode was doubt -- even in front of a chemistry balance -- I had an uncanny sense of certainty and clarity at the end of that first semester. I told my parents when I got home. "I think God is calling me into ministry." 

My mother was not surprised and was delighted. I think my father was happy too, but he wisely advised that I continue my second semester in chemistry as planned. "Then if you still feel the same at the end of the semester, you can switch." 

It was a wise plan. Spring semester went much better -- spring always did. The darkness of fall and winter was always depressing for me at Central and later in Wilmore at Asbury. One of the happiest days of the year at Central was when the flowers at Clemson came into full bloom in the spring.

So I did my second semester of math and science -- Differential Equations, Organic Analytical Chemistry, Zoology, Physics II at Clemson. I loved it. Hoped I could still finish chemistry and math degrees too at that point. (I haven't totally given up -- I'm technically a chemistry major at Arizona State University at this moment.)

But I had complete confidence that God was calling me into ministry. It was the second time in my life that I had been absolutely confident about what I thought was God's will. The first was going to Central in the first place. Now the second was to become a minister.

Notes Along the Way 5 -- God's Callings Part I

1. I would say that my junior year of high school was my favorite year. I did pretty well on my SAT so the letters were coming in. I was applying to colleges. The summer after my junior year I did Boy's State and went to a laser camp for two weeks at Rose Hulman. At that time, I thought I wanted to be a surgeon. That would have been a huge mistake.

I was a camp counselor for the district middle school camp with some close friends. One of them was headed for Central Wesleyan College a year behind me. That stuck in my mind. I was a pretty poor counselor. I slept really soundly so the first night the middle school guys all left the cabin after I fell asleep. The rest of the week I put my bunk in front of the door so they would have to crawl over me to get out.

There was a moment when I especially felt the presence of God. A chubby boy ran away saying he was going to walk home. Someone had made fun of his weight. We found him. What impressed me is that he really didn't want to leave. He just wanted someone to come after him. There was a moment when I felt the love of God flowing from us to him in an incredibly rich way.

I was nearly at the peak of physical shape in my life. I remember running across the camp at what seemed like the fastest I had ever run. Those were days when I could easily run a 440 in less than a minute and was somewhere around 5:30 for a mile. I'd never get back to those speeds, although I would run a couple marathons in England 10 years later.

2. I also caught the traveling team from Central at district conference. I don't know what it was about singing teams like that. They were just ordinary students. But I was a singer, and they always impressed me, like they were stars. Irrational, I know.

As an aside, for as long as the special song phase of American church worship took place, I sang solos regularly in every church I attended. As a boy, my mother always accompanied on the piano. But soon were the days when you bought cassette sound tracks at the local Christian bookstore -- which began to be a thing when I was in college. From Fort Lauderdale to Trinity Wesleyan in Central to Stonewall in Lexington, I sang often. That phase of church music was ending by the time I moved to Marion.

I was also in quartets. At Central I was in a mixed traveling group that went everywhere from Florida to Virginia. A highlight was a trip to Florida with Elmer Drury, Keith Drury's brother. He would die of a heart attack less than a year thereafter. I was in quartets at Asbury too. I always sang bass. I also sang in choirs at Central, Stonewall, and at St. John's in England.

3. I applied to several colleges. Since I had been at Boy's State -- and Dirac still had an office at Florida State (he would die the next year) -- I applied there and was accepted. I was accepted at Rose Hulman. I received a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute award for science my senior year, so I applied there and was accepted. Tom Sloan pressured me into applying to Marion College, so I did. I also received the Isaac Bashevis Singer award to the University of Miami. It was a full tuition scholarship into a 5 year med-school program, an early 3 + 2 as I recall.

And I applied to Central Wesleyan College. My dad was on the Board of Trustees at the time, and he thought it would look bad if I didn't at least apply there. So I did. Because I was a National Merit Finalist, as I recall, they offered me a full tuition scholarship.

I had no intention of going there, despite two cute girls whom I knew would be there. As tempting as the University of Miami was, I really didn't want to be an hour from home. I wanted to get further away where I could be my own person (that was probably one of many not too smart impulses I've had in my life). Rose Hulman was still all boys -- NO! RPI was way in New York. 

Marion College offered me a pittance of a scholarship. To be honest, I didn't think much of it academically at the time, although it was probably higher than Central. Florida State was in Tallahassee -- the middle of nowhere. I can't remember if I applied to Johns Hopkins. I know I thought about it.

4. In the fall of 1983, my dad wanted me to visit Central when he went there for the fall board meeting. Again, he felt like it was somewhat of an obligation since he was on the board. But there was no pressure on me to go there. We were a family of duty, and we were performing it.

But something strange happened while I was there. On the one hand, the academics seemed inferior even to my AP high school classes (this sometimes has to do with who you are teaching). I would face the shame of my high school chemistry teacher who would feel like good scholarships and awards were wasted on me. From Key Club to Daughters of the American Revolution to Veterans of Foreign Wars, I would do well on the scholarship night. And to go to Central? 

But Central felt like home. After feeling like an outsider all my public school years. These were my kind of Christian. Although I was still painfully shy, Central felt like church camp to me, a place I might belong. As we left the campus to go home, I said that although I hated it, I felt like God wanted me to go there.

And so go there I did. For the first thirty or so years of my life, I would say I was a doubter about just about everything. An ex-girlfriend once said I was type cast when I played Thomas in a church Easter play. I doubted my salvation for ten years. I doubted whether I loved girlfriends. I doubted decisions to make and often felt like I consistently made the wrong ones.

But I never doubted that God wanted me to go to Central, and that was quite amazing. That was the first of such clear callings in those years of my life.

9. The New Testament and Old Testament Law

 Thus far:

1. The Memory Verse Approach

2. Adventures in Interpretation

3. Adventures in Jewelry
4. Beginnings of Context

5. Adventures in Hair, Part I
6. What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?

7. Keeping the Sabbath
8. The Sabbath as Conviction
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11. This is where we step back and talk about hermeneutics. In the pre-modern, unreflective interpretation of my childhood, the entire Bible pretty much was flattened out in its meaning. Instruction in Deuteronomy might apply directly to today just as much as a verse from Philippians. There was sometimes little distinction between the "old" covenant and the "new" covenant. 

Our tradition did process some verses differently. We could eat pork chops without a thought, for example (Lev. 11:7-8). But a family member once suggested a mustache was inappropriate because of Leviticus 19:27: "Do not mar the corners of your beard." 

Why was one binding and the other not? I don't think the reasons were very well thought out. We were just following our traditions which made sense to us because we grew up with them.

Someone might say, "The prohibition on pork was part of the ceremonial law, which Jesus did away with. We are not under law but under grace" (Rom. 6:14). But then my mother might say, "Jesus said that he did not come to destroy the law. Not one jot or tittle will pass from the law" (Matt. 5:17-18). 

I needed a consistent hermeneutic. How can we tell what still applies directly to us and what doesn't? What is "all time," and what is "that time"?

Sacrifices
12. I have resonated with something that G. B. Caird of Oxford used to teach. Start with what seems clear and then move toward what is unclear. So let's start with sacrifices: Leviticus 1-5. The way for a Christian to apply these chapters to today seems very clear.

I don't know of any Christian groups today that offer sacrifices (although never say never). There are no Jewish groups that offer sacrifices today -- only the Samaritans, who still exist as a people group. I have it on eyewitness accounts that some Jews have accrued some red heifers for a time when the temple is re-constructed. But let's establish with clarity before it happens that there is NO PLACE for reconstituted sacrifices from a Christian biblical perspective.

Why? Because of the book of Hebrews clearly says so. "With one sacrifice, Christ has perfected forever those who are being sanctified" (Heb. 10:14). The chapter begins by saying that the Levitical sacrifices never were able to perfect those who offered them (10:1). If they could have, they would have stopped being offered (10:2). 10:4 goes one step further: "It is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins."

Let that sink in. Hebrews implies that not a single Old Testament sacrifice was actually effective in itself to take away sins! They were rather foreshadowings of the one effective sacrifice of Christ. Without us, none of the people of Israel were able to be perfected -- not even Moses (Heb. 11:40). Similarly, Hebrews 7:19 says, "the Law perfected nothing."

Let's be very clear here in case some kooky Christian group should pop up saying the contrary. To say that sacrifices are still needed or could be valid in some way today would be an affront to Christ. Hebrews is definitive. No other sacrifice was EVER effective in itself to take away sins. NOT A SINGLE animal sacrifice was ever anything but a pointer to Christ. Anything else would be blasphemy because it would negate the sacrificial work of Christ.

13. This issue is pretty easy for Christians, including for those who see a strong continuity between the Old Testament and today. Old Testament sacrifices were symbols of the sacrifice of Christ. They foreshadowed his one offering. They were calls for a raincheck. They were promises, and Christ was the fulfillment. 

In this way, the sacrifices of Leviticus were fully valid, but they were not meant to be permanent. We do not have to literally offer them today because their true meaning was found in Jesus' death on the cross. We "keep" them by trusting in the atoning death of Christ.

However, let me be clear about something else. No one in the Old Testament understood this plan. In fact, I doubt many of the earliest Christians understood Christ's death to be a full replacement of the temple sacrificial system. Paul offers a sacrifice in Acts 21:26. I have argued that it was not until after the temple was destroyed that the scope of Christ's sacrifice really began to sink in. 

I know an Old Testament professor who once suggested that, if you had told the author of Leviticus about Jesus, he would have said, "Of course, that's what these sacrifices were about." Let me say that I cannot imagine that would be the case in the slightest. In fact, the thought seems ludicrous to me. 

Sacrifices were pervasive in the ancient world. While some prophets rightly indicted those who used them as an excuse for unrighteousness (e.g., 1 Sam. 15:22-23; Isa. 1:11-17; Jer. 7:21-23; Hos. 6:6; Amos 5:21-24; Mic. 6:6-8), it's hard to imagine that any of these prophets imagined sacrifices would ever go away.

It makes sense to us that they are no longer necessary because we grew up with this understanding. No one questions it in the church today and not even Jews offer sacrifices. It is an "easy issue" because it isn't debated in our traditions today. But it was not an easy issue in the first century, and it wouldn't have been at all in Old Testament times. However, given Hebrews, it should be an easy issue for biblical Christians.

It does illustrate a fundamental hermeneutical principle. From a Christian perspective, the New Testament provides more final answers and more precise understandings than the Old Testament. In this case, Christ is the fulfillment of the Old Testament instruction, and we no longer need to offer animal sacrifices.

Israel-Specific Law
14. Many Christians make a distinction between the "ceremonial law" and the "moral law" of the Old Testament. Bible scholars regularly point out that this is an anachronistic distinction. Jews did not consider circumcision or the food laws to be "ceremonial." Jews kept the whole Law because it was all part of God's covenant with Israel.

How then can we differentiate the parts of the Old Testament that Paul seems to consider less binding from the parts he considers fully binding? Suffice it to say, there are countless scholarly books written on this subject. I was present at a multi-day colloquium once that tried to solve the question of "Paul and the Law." They failed to come to a consensus.

Here's how I have come to parse Paul on the Law. Paul himself tells us that "to the Jews I became as a Jew that I might gain Jews. To those under the Law I became as someone under the Law (though I am not under the Law) in order that I might gain those under the Law" (1 Cor. 9:20). Similarly he says, "to those without the Law I became as one without the Law (although I am not without the law of God but I am under the law of Christ) in order that I might gain those without the Law" (9:21).

We have to be careful because Paul's words are almost always "vectored," by which I mean he presents his positions to move his audiences in particular directions. He is a good rhetorician. He puts things in a certain way to try to have a certain effect. For example, I suspect that Paul largely observed the Jewish Law himself (cf. Acts 21:24, also vectored in the opposite direction).

But the key is this. For Paul, the mission to the Gentiles had complexified the question of the Law. He was furious at Antioch when Peter wouldn't eat with Gentiles over fears they would defile him (Gal. 2:11-14). These experiences were formative. As long as they weren't sexually immoral, Paul had no time for those Jewish believers who wouldn't associate with Gentile believers. To him, someone who had kept the Law so scrupulously as a Pharisee, they were hypocrites.

The distinction was not between the ceremonial and the moral for him. It was between aspects of the Law that applied to both Jew and Gentile and those commands that got in the way of the Gentile mission. I call the latter "Israel-specific law." Circumcision? It got in the way. It was Israel-specific. Gentiles were justified by faith and didn't need to be circumcised. In fact, he told the Gentile Galatians they would fall from grace if they did it (Gal. 5:4).

I suspect that what Paul was doing was more or less giving full status to those Gentile God-fearers who had faith in Christ. God-fearers didn't need to be circumcised. God-fearers did not need to observe the Jewish food laws. When Paul determined they could be justified by faith, they did not need to do anything more than they had done before as God-fearers. Meanwhile, for Paul, Jews who kept those particulars did not have any greater status before God because faith was the standard.

This became the normative position for Gentile Christianity. Mark 7:19 is a parenthetical remark from Mark that reflects this perspective of the Pauline mission toward Gentiles ("all foods are clean"). (Matthew, by the way, did not include that parenthetical remark if it was in the copy of Mark he used.) Gentiles were not expected to keep the Jewish food laws.

Christ's Law
15. Although Paul does not systematize his thinking, there are clearly parts of the Jewish Law that he considered binding on Gentile Christians. For example, there isn't a sexual prohibition from Leviticus 18 that Paul mentions that he did not consider to be binding on the Gentile church. What makes the difference? He doesn't explain. It may seem obvious to us, but it probably seemed a little arbitrary to some first-century Christians that he would consider the sexual commands binding but the Sabbath commands not.

Paul did see the love command as the essence of all Christian ethics (Rom. 13:10), as did Jesus (Matt. 22:37-40). Perhaps that is what he means by "Christ's law" in 1 Cor. 9: 21. I suspect something of this sort is what he means in Romans 2:14 when he talks about Gentiles who keep the Law even though they don't have the Law by nature like Jews do. They weren't circumcised so by definition they didn't keep the Law, so Paul must have some essence of the Law in view rather than the full Law.

The bottom line is that he does expect all believers to keep a certain core of the Law. He not only considers this core universal, but you will not make it to the kingdom if you persist in not keeping these key elements (cf. 1 Cor. 6:9-10). Most if not all of this core correlates to the love command for him.

16. So what do we make of Matthew 5:17: "Do not think that I have come to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to destroy, but to fulfill." If you read 5:17-20 in isolation from the rest of the chapter, you might come away with the way many have read these verses, namely, that God requires us to keep all the commandments of the Old Testament.

But the rest of the chapter explains what Jesus means. For example, simply not killing doesn't fulfill the commandment. If you hate, you've violated it. Similarly, not doing the act of adultery (or getting together with another woman by divorce) does not fulfill the commandment if you lust in your heart or discard your wife legally because you want another woman.

This is not simply a matter of keeping each commandment even harder. With regard to keeping vows, Jesus says not even to make them. This is not a deepening of the third commandment. It removes the very making of vows in the first place. It changes the assumptions of the command. 

Even further, Jesus contradicts instruction to Israel to take an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (Deut. 19:21). While Deuteronomy tells Israel to show no pity, Jesus tells individuals to turn the other cheek. He contrasts his teaching with the commandment.

It seems clear to me that fulfilling the Law in Matthew 5 doesn't mean keeping every "least" commandment in the Law (like not trimming beards, not eating pork, circumcising). It seems to mean loving your neighbor (and enemy) down to the least matter (Matt. 5:43-48). Once again, the New Testament gives the definitive verdict on how to keep the Old Testament Law.

17. Let me sum up the two big hermeneutical principles that were developing as I processed the Bible in my final years of college. The first is that every word of the Bible was first written to ancient audiences. The first meanings were meanings from their world in their languages and in their contexts and situations. Not a word of the Bible was originally written to me.

That means that I am always forced to process the distance between that time and my time. Doing what they did isn't doing what they did if it has a different meaning today than it did them. Simply applying the words to today blindly can result in everything from the bizarre (veil head coverings) to that which is contrary to the trajectory of the kingdom (slavery).

The second principle is that, from a Christian perspective, the New Testament provides a key lens on the Old Testament, although thus far was have only talked about the Law. This fact suggests that we cannot securely apply the Old Testament directly to today until we have taken the New Testament into account. 

The application of the Bible to today must first "integrate" the biblical material itself into a biblical theology. The application of Scripture should come from "What does the Bible as a whole say?" far more than "What does this individual verse say?"

These insights took time to develop. No doubt as I return to my personal narrative you will see some of the process that led to these fuller hermeneutical conclusions. Let me return now to a key event that took place in my final semester of college.

8. Sabbath as Conviction

 Thus far:

1. The Memory Verse Approach
2. Adventures in Interpretation
3. Adventures in Jewelry
4. Beginnings of Context
5. Adventures in Hair, Part I
6. What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?
7. Keeping the Sabbath
_______________________
7. So should we follow the Seventh Day Adventists and start meeting on Saturdays, the seventh day of the week? 

Here's where we get to the crucial part. In Colossians 2:16, Paul and Timothy tell the Colossians not to let anyone judge them because of their non-observance of laws relating to "food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath." The mention of the Sabbath suggests that the "philosophy" that Paul and Timothy are warning about is a Jewish one or at least a pseudo-Jewish one. From the description, it is more religious than philosophy as we think of it.

What do Paul and Timothy tell this overwhelmingly Gentile congregation (cf. 2:11)? He tells them not to let anyone condemn them if they do not keep the food laws or the Sabbath as the Jews do. That is to say, he does not require Gentile believers to keep the Jewish Sabbath.

Let that sink in. They don't say, "You don't have to observe Saturday specifically, but be sure to take one day of rest to keep the Ten Commandments." They don't say, "Keep the principle of the Sabbath although you don't have to keep the letter." Paul simply tells the Gentile Colossians that they are not obligated to keep the Sabbath.

8. The Wesleyan Discipline used to have a statement in the Special Directions about "merchandizing on the Sabbath." Again, it was moved from membership requirements at some point to this special section so that the values of the traditionalists remained on the books, but the rule was not technically required. Clever politics again. 

(Again, mind you, the Sabbath was never Sunday in the Bible, so we never kept the biblical Sabbath in our history. This rule was about Sunday, which is never the Sabbath in Scripture.)

I was present at the General Conference where that language was completely removed. There was a brief rabbinic moment. A person representing the older holiness wing of the church stood up and said, "I wonder what Nehemiah would say about what we are doing given how strongly he forbid Israel from buying and selling on the Sabbath."

Then someone else stood up and read from Romans 14:5-6: "One person considers one day above another. Another person considers every day the same. Let each be fully convinced in his or her own mind. The one who minds the day minds it to the Lord." The context of this statement is Paul talking about how Christians with different convictions should get along with each other. Clearly, matters of the Jewish Law are under discussion, especially the food laws.

Romans 14 won the day at the General Conference. The prohibition on merchandizing on the Sabbath was removed from The Discipline

9. Paul's instruction in Romans 14 was to 1) operate on the basis of faith and giving glory to God and 2) be fully convinced. You can be wrongly convinced, of course (14:22). 

So one person is truly and fully convinced of what God requires of them. (Some people no doubt fool themselves or try to get away with things, but God is not fooled. That's God's business to sort out.) Then, another person is truly and fully convinced of something else. They both will stand individually before God.

So one person -- probably Jewish -- believes he or she must keep the kosher food laws. No pork. No blood. No eel. Another believer -- probably Gentile -- wants to eat pork. "Let each be fully convinced in his or her own mind." Both are equally spiritual in God's eyes if they are truly operating from faith.

Similarly, one person -- probably Jewish -- believes he or she must set aside sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday as a Sabbath. They will not work on this day. They will not buy or sell on this day. No problem, Paul says. "Let each be fully convinced in his or her own mind." 

But another person -- probably Gentile -- treats every day as God's day. They give every day to the glory of God. They live for the Lord on every day. They do not set aside a Sabbath or a special day of rest without work. Paul considers this person of equal spirituality to the other person if he or she is truly operating from faith.

Romans 14 indicates that two people can do exactly the same thing and one be sinning while the other isn't. The key is whether the action proceeds from faith (Rom. 14:23). One person does not set aside the Jewish Sabbath but does so fully convinced that it is not required of him or her and in full faith, giving every day to the Lord equally. He or she is not sinning. 

Another doubts significantly. He or she also does not keep the Sabbath but deep down really believes they should. He or she is not truly convinced and is actually resisting the Lord. That person is sinning.

10. On a side note, as someone who struggled with doubt, I don't think that Paul had the kind of navel-gazing in mind that I used to do when he talks about not having faith. James' comments on the "double-minded man" were once torture to me (Jas. 1:6-8). However, I believe hyper-introspection is largely a modern phenomenon, perhaps a hangover from the Romantic era of the late 1700s/early 1800s. 

I suspect Paul and James would look at young hyper-introspective Ken as crazy. "What's wrong with you man?" Being double-minded, I suspect, was about having clearly divided loyalties, not about neurotic introspection. Introspective doubts are doubts about yourself, while the doubts Paul and James have in mind are doubts about serving God.

11. I had a Sabbath discussion once with someone from my holiness background and presented what seems to me the clear teaching of Paul. There are no passages in the New Testament that instruct believers to keep the Sabbath. In fact, Jesus himself was criticized for not keeping the Sabbath the way his opponents thought it should be kept. His response was that he was Lord of the Sabbath (Mark 2:28).

Mind you, I assume that most Jewish Christians -- including Paul -- largely continued to observe the Sabbath. But it seems to me that Gentile believers felt less constrained to keep it. And Paul does not seem to have put any pressure on them to keep it.

In the discussion I had with someone, the other person noted that the Sabbath commandment goes back to creation (Exod. 20:11). Doesn't that imply that it is universal, that it is built into the universe?

My response? "I know. Isn't it crazy? Paul doesn't care." 

That is to say, it doesn't seem to be of any concern to Paul that he is telling Gentile believers that they do not have to keep one of the Ten Commandments. It doesn't seem to bother him that, in a real sense, he is making the keeping of the fourth commandment culturally or individually relative. If you are a Jew, keep it. If you are not, it's a matter of personal conviction.

This seems to me the clear meaning of the text. Only our own faulty assumptions make it difficult. Paul doesn't seem to care. Whether Gentiles keep the Jewish Sabbath is a matter of personal conscience and conviction for him.

11. This is where we step back and talk about hermeneutics... 

7. Keeping the Sabbath

 Thus far:

1. The Memory Verse Approach
2. Adventures in Interpretation
3. Adventures in Jewelry
4. Beginnings of Context
5. Adventures in Hair, Part I
6. What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?
_______________________
1. I've already shared a bit about my family's theology of the Sabbath growing up. First, we understood Sunday to be the Sabbath. We certainly went to Sunday School, morning and evening services on Sunday. We did not believe you should have a job on Sunday, and we did not buy or sell on Sunday to cause others to have to work. We didn't have a problem with cooking on Sunday.

In our family, we did not watch TV on Sunday, although exceptions could be made. We didn't generally throw a baseball or do sports on Sunday. It was to be set aside as a fairly serious day. We often took a nap on Sundays, which we called the "Wesleyan hour" after a long-running Wesleyan radio program on Sunday afternoons.

Occasionally, we would travel on Sundays, although this was unusual. We could eat out on such trips because "the ox was in the ditch" (Luke 14:5). After I was married, my dad knew that we did not have any convictions against eating out on Sunday. A couple times when Angie prepared a meal for us all on Sunday we kind of felt like my Dad was disappointed that we weren't planning to eat out. After all, why miss an allowed exemption to eat out on Sunday when you can? We chuckled about that. It's like some family members who didn't believe in having a TV but sure seemed to enjoy watching our TV when they came over.

2. I didn't really struggle too much with this set of rules. I did feel bad to miss the television premiere of Star Wars and Star Trek and other movies when they premiered on TV. You see, we weren't allowed to go to movies, so to this day I haven't seen E.T. or other famous movies of my childhood. In my last year of college, it became possible to rent movies and watch them on VHS. I'm still not sure I've seen the first Star Wars all the way through -- or the first Star Trek. An older lady at church loved Star Trek and somehow got a cassette tape of the first movie from the cinema. I listened to that thing a number of times.

Apart from a class trip to see animated Cinderella in the fifth grade (my mother went with me as a chaperone), the first movie I ever saw in a cinema was The Dream Team in 1989. I felt a little uneasy going to the movies then. I think it had been moved to the Special Directions of the Wesleyan Church by then and had become a suggestion not to go rather than a membership requirement. That was a clever political move the denomination made in those days. Rather than get into a direct fight with ultraconservatives over an old tradition, they just put it in the Special Directions section. That way it still felt like it was a requirement without it really being a requirement.

There obviously isn't a verse in the Bible about not going to movies. It was one of our "traditions of the elders" (cf. Mark 7:3). If many conservatives in my background didn't think you should own a TV, they certainly didn't think you should go to movies. I'm sure it was felt that movies depicted lifestyles that were inappropriate. 

Entertainment itself probably smelled of sin to some. After all, it was pleasurable in a self-oriented way. It could involve comedy, and sometimes I fear it was hard for some to distinguish between seriousness and holiness. Some probably thought it a waste of time when you could be doing something helpful or worthwhile. 

I imagine there were even some who weren't sure whether fiction was appropriate for a Christian. Is fiction lying? After all, it is a story that didn't actually happen. Don't tell Jesus that with his parables. A parable is a short fictional story, after all. Upon posing this fact, I've had some people respond, "How do we know the parables weren't real stories?" 

How do we get off into such craziness? Just because a story did not happen in history doesn't mean it's lying or even that it's not true. Good grief. Everyone knows it isn't something that happened in history. No one is deceived! Fictional stories teach us all kinds of truths. The story Nathan the prophet told David wasn't a story that actually happened, but it told a truth so powerfully that David repented. 

4. It's worth remembering that all these debates were our version of the Jewish traditions of the elders. Like good rabbis, holiness folk debated what made you unclean and what didn't. When VCRs came out, I heard that holiness folk debated whether you could have a TV if you didn't watch anything but good videos using a VCR. For example, if you only used the TV to watch Gaither videos, was it ok to have the equipment then? Was the machine intrinsically unclean or did the things you watch on it make it unclean? Sounds a lot like Romans 14.

Sunday meals at camp meetings were a wonderful example of holiness "Mishnah" (the name for the collection of Jewish oral traditions on keeping the Law first written down about AD200). On the one hand, you weren't supposed to buy or sell on Sundays. But you wanted people to drive in from all over to come to Sunday worship. How would they eat if they didn't know anyone with a cabin there?

The solution was a "free will offering." You were allowed to give on Sunday -- it wasn't actually buying a meal or selling one. So a man would sit there and take "donations" (with a suggested amount). Wesleyan guilt did the rest. People gave a donation for their meals that, coincidentally, was what they would otherwise have been charged.

Another important concept I already mentioned was to "abstain from all appearance of evil." This idea came from the King James of 1 Thessalonians 5:22. The verse was taken to mean that you should not do anything that even could be interpreted as doing the wrong thing. For example, if someone sees you go into the cinema, you might be going to see Cinderella, but someone might think you're going in to see something seedy or violent. 

"Abstaining from the appearance of evil" meant not going at all so no one would even think you were going to the movies to watch something bad. The same with owning a TV. You didn't want to tempt yourself to watch something bad, and the very association of the TV with bad things meant you shouldn't have one.

Or if you go into a restaurant that has a bar (like Applebees), someone might think that you are going in to drink even if you aren't (see also 1 Cor. 8:10). Bowling alleys were frowned on because people smoked a lot in there, and they didn't seem like the right kind of people. People might think you were smoking or drinking, so don't go so they don't see an "appearance" of you doing evil. In more recent times, many bowling alleys have become less smokey, and it was interesting to think of my dad going bowling with other people from his church in Lakeland in retirement.

Of course, 1 Thessalonians 5:22 didn't actually mean anything like this. A better translation would be "Stay away from every form of evil." The idea is to abstain from every kind of evil not anything that even looks like it might be evil.

5. In contrast to all the "traditions of the elders" that were part of my holiness background, there actually is a good deal of biblical teaching on the Sabbath. Exodus 20:8-11 told the Israelites to set the Sabbath day apart as holy. What did that mean? It meant not to work on the Sabbath (20:9). No one in your household was supposed to work either (20:10).

Not working on the Sabbath was a big deal in much of the Old Testament. A man gets stoned to death in Numbers 15 for gathering sticks on the Sabbath. Nehemiah 10 and 13 give stern commands to Israel not to buy or sell on the Sabbath.

It is fascinating to me that, today, everyone in my Wesleyan circles believes that observing a Sabbath is important but 1) it doesn't necessarily matter which day it is, 2) it is often associated with setting aside a day of worship more than a day of rest (although there has been a "rest" movement in recent decades), and 3) it doesn't usually involve any prohibition on buying or selling. Given how many rules I grew up with around the Sabbath -- and my own struggle through them -- I find these contemporary practices hermeneutically sloppy.

6. First, Sunday is never equated with the Sabbath in Scripture. That is to say, Christians are not keeping the Old Testament Sabbath, the Jewish Sabbath, when we worship or set aside Sunday. The Seventh Day Adventists and Seventh Day Baptists are half right. I have always said that the Seventh Day Adventists are often right about something they observe in the biblical text. They're just wrong in the application. They find minority texts and then go with them instead of the ones the majority of Christians have focused on for two thousand years.

Sunday is the Lord's Day. It is the day that Christians gather together to celebrate Jesus' resurrection. Every Sunday is a little Easter. John of Patmos had his vision on the Lord's Day (Rev. 1:10). As far as I can tell, it was a work day in the New Testament. I picture some early Christians meeting at dawn on the Lord's Day, and I picture local assemblies meeting in the evening for a meal together (the Lord's supper, cf. 1 Cor. 11:17-34).

Since the Bible itself never transfers or equates Sunday to the Sabbath, this is an "outside the Bible" interpretation. It is a Puritan development in recent centuries. It is a piece of modern Mishnah, a modern tradition of the elders. The early church fathers did not consider the Jewish Sabbath obligatory (Didache, Justin Martyr) or even rejected it (e.g., Epistle of Barnabas). As we will see, the New Testament did not consider it obligatory either, especially for Gentile believers.

Equating the two reflects a common pattern among Christians where we ascribe something we practice to Scripture when it isn't actually stated in Scripture. It reflects an unreflective of reading of the Bible where we insert our assumptions into the text when the text doesn't state them. We "glue" pieces of the Bible together and say they're the Bible when in fact we are providing the glue from outside the Bible, from our traditions or our minds.

7. So should we follow the Seventh Day Adventists and start meeting on Saturdays, the seventh day of the week? ...

6. What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?

Thus far:

1. The Memory Verse Approach
2. Adventures in Interpretation
3. Adventures in Jewelry
4. Beginnings of Context
5. Adventures in Hair, Part I

4. So what was 1 Corinthians 11 really about? 

We know that the central problem of the Corinthian church was disunity (1:10). They were divided into various factions. Some of the original believers there might be called the "Paul" group because they were loyal to him and his authority. But there were apparently others who used Apollos as an excuse to disregard Paul's instructions. Apollos had come to disciple the community after Paul and no doubt took slightly different approaches to various issues -- just like your pastors vary a little from one to the next.

Here are some of the lines of disunity at Corinth. Some wealthy individuals apparently got drunk at the Lord's Supper while others went hungry. Some were taking others to court. Some may have wanted to use Jesus as an excuse to divorce. Tongues speakers perhaps thought they were spiritually superior to others who didn't speak in tongues. Some had no problem eating at pagan temples while others found this practice highly problematic. 

Welcome to the church at Corinth!

1 Corinthians 11 arguably has to do with disorderly worship at Corinth, a theme Paul will explore in more detail in chapters 12-14. In chapter 14, Paul sets down rules for the exercise of spiritual gifts. One prophecy at a time. One speaking in tongues at a time but only if there is an interpreter. No more than two or three in a gathering.

5. The situation in chapter 11 relates to the social awkwardness of men and women in close quarters -- especially with wives praying and prophesying in the worship. Remember that they gathered in house churches. We can imagine that this was a sexually tense situation, with men and women together in unusual proximity.

Paul's goal in 1 Corinthians 11, I would argue, is not only to reduce disorder but to reduce the sexual tension by making sure everything is "in its place." Because the dynamics have everything to do with the cultural situation, the specifics don't translate directly to today. What translates to today are 1) removing barriers to worship, including the full participation of women in worship and 2) not creating an environment conducive to adultery.

How does he do this? By making sure that the wives in the assembly wear their hair veils. This would likely have been odd to do in a home -- especially for the matron of the house. But the hair veil served as a kind of wedding ring indicating that a woman was "taken." Additionally, it was an instrument of modesty. 

We've already mentioned that different cultures have different thresholds for sexual attraction. Dresses in the 1800s went nearly to the ground. If a woman in a dress going to the knees had walked around Victorian England, she would have raised lots of eyebrows by showing some leg.

Women's hair was apparently quite enticing in certain Jewish circles of the first century. In the Jewish novel, Joseph and Asenath (dating to the first or second century AD), the widow Asenath begins to wear a hair veil when she remarries Joseph. The veil thus indicated that a woman was married.

In the worship at Corinth, the covering put the situation into order. Now, when a wife prayed or prophesied in worship, her hair veil made her modest in the face of the other husbands in the congregation (not to mention God and the angels, who were putatively male -- you don't want angels lusting after you like they did in the days of Noah). "Keep your eyes to yourself," it said. "I'm married."

The hair veil thus gave authority to the wife to pray and prophesy in the presence of other men and the angels. As a quick sidenote, you'll notice that I am speaking extensively about wives rather than women in general. Unmarried women did not wear the hair veil. The word for women in these passages (including 1 Timothy 2) arguably should be translated wives because women were not normally conceptualized as free agents in the culture like they are today. Most of the women in the congregation would have been "women-as-wived."

6. Let's skim the passage with this background in view. First, Paul assumes that Christ is the head of the man and the man is the head of the woman (11:3). He is affirming the cultural pattern of his day to establish order in worship.

There is some debate over whether "head" (kephale) means authority or source in the New Testament, including here. I am sympathetic to the source argument, and it has some evidence in 11:8 and Ephesians 4:15-16. This idea of the husband as the nourisher and origin of the wife thus has some textual basis.

However, the likelihood that this headship imagery has some background in Aristotle pushes me in the other direction. In Aristotle's Politics 1254b10-20, he sets down a structure for the home VERY reminiscent of Colossians 3:18-4:1 and Ephesians 5:21-6:9. There is thus nothing distinctively Christian about the household structure here. It is exactly what everyone thought. It is only when Paul moves in the direction of the value of the wife, slave, and child that he is being distinctively Christian.

(I might add that in Plato's Republic, the head symbolizes the rulers of society, so we can't argue that the notion of the head as authority was not present in the background.)

So the household structure in this passage is just as cultural as the wearing of hair veils. I sense that many egalitarians -- who have not lived as I have under the implementation of the teaching on hair length -- have a subconscious impulse to try to make as much in this passage directly applicable to today as possible. So while the hair length and covering can be assigned to the cultural domain, there is a hesitancy to recognize that the headship language is cultural as well.

Yet, as I have indicated, this structure comes from Aristotle and Hellenistic culture. You won't find it articulated in the Old Testament. More importantly, it pulls against the spiritual equality that is a fundamental implication of the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:17; Gal. 3:28).

Paul is trying to hold both things in tension in 1 Corinthians 11. Women can clearly pray and prophesy in worship -- that's what's driving the instructions in 1 Corinthians 11. Yet this radically new situation of the Spirit is creating some cultural complications too. So Paul reaffirms those cultural patterns so that the Spirit can continue to flow through the wives of the assembly.

7. So a man should not have his head covered (11:4). It needs to be uncovered to reflect Christ. The expression "having against head" hints at what they would have known without having to be told. We are talking about veiling in this passage. Not a face veil as in Muslim culture, but a hair veil like we used to wear during Christmas plays with a towel covering our hair.

In 11:6, Paul pulls out the big guns. If the wife is not going to cover, it's like her shaving her head like disgraced women sometimes are. The audience gasps. No, not that! OK. So put a veil on it.

Our puzzling verse, 11:10 now becomes clear. She is not only engaging the husbands around her when she prays and prophesies. She is engaging the spiritual realm of God and angels too, who are putatively male (for some strange and uncomfortable reading, see Dale Martin's The Corinthian Body). The hair veil "authorizes" her spiritual activity in the presence of all these "males." Its purpose is to enable her to fully participate in the ministry of the church. 

8. I end where this chapter started. By the time I was a boy, most Wesleyans were not too concerned about men and women's hair anymore. In the sixties, some Wesleyan young men had the Beatles cut. And women were at least cutting their hair to shoulder length. Our tradition never wore prayer bonnets like the Quakers and others.

Nevertheless, in my corner of the Wesleyan world, some of these verses in 1 Corinthians 11 were like memory verses. "If a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her" (11:15). "If a woman be not covered, let her also be shorn" (11:6). "Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him" (11:14).

Most Christians at the time basically ignored verses like these. They "deselected" them in their paradigms without much thought. But as someone with a hyperactive conscience, I needed a basis not to see them as binding on men and women today. The basis was the discovery of context. "Doing what they did isn't doing what they did if it doesn't accomplish the same purpose."

A bun doesn't have any meaning today. A hair veil not only has no meaning today -- it would actually be somewhat offputting. Far from saying, "Everything is in order here," it would create unnecessary distance with those we want to lead to Christ. Ironically, a wedding ring performs much of the same function as the hair veil today.

Context is everything. That was a lesson I was only beginning to learn in my late college/early seminary years.