Revelation 8 Explanatory Notes

Albrecht Dürer woodcut,
angel sounding trumpet

I started this pot back in October 2020 when I was doing my "Through the Bible in Ten Years" in the book of Revelation. I'm now trying to finish my Explanatory Notes in the form of a 30 day devotional.
______________________
8:1 And when he opened the seventh seal, a silence came about in the   sky of about a half hour.
In Revelation 6, the Lamb opened six of the seals, beginning the days of judgment that coincide with the end of the great tribulation. Then in Revelation 7, there was an intermission in the opening of the seals. We saw what was happening in heaven as the final judgment was beginning on earth. Revelation 8 then returns to the final seal, the seventh seal, which represents the completion of the judgment.

Again, this is not a literal picture of what will happen. Revelation is an apocalypse. It uses fantastical imagery that gives us the feeling of tribulation and judgment, not a literal movie. For example, the number seven is symbolic. It signifies completion. The half an hour of silence, like the intermission, builds up to the end. We are getting ready for the end. It’s like a runner taking a deep breath before the gun goes off.

2. And I saw the seven angels who have stood before God, and they gave to them seven trumpets.
In Revelation 1, the seven angels are the angels of the seven churches (1:20). There, these angels probably do not just represent the seven churches of Asia Minor. They probably are meant to represent the entire worldwide church. Revelation 8 does not explicitly connect its seven angels with the angels of Revelation 1, but the fact that seven angels are mentioned in both places could imply that they are the same. If so, it would suggest the earth is about to experience judgment not least for the way it has treated the churches of God.

However, other interpreters see them as the seven highest archangels. In Tobit 12:15 (which many Jews at the time considered Scripture), the archangel Raphael speaks of seven holy angels who present the prayers of the saints to God. Similarly, 1 Enoch 20:1-8 mentions seven archangels: Uriel, Raphael, Raguel, Michael, Saraqael, Gabriel, and Remiel. Jude 14-15 quotes from the same section of 1 Enoch, suggesting that at least some early Christians may have considered it Scripture.

It does not have to be one or the other. However, the similarity in the function of the archangels to what happens in this chapter may suggest that we should view the angels of Revelation 8 as different angels from those in Revelation 1.

Just as there were seven seals, there are seven trumpets, blown by these seven angels. When the seventh seal is opened, the seven trumpets commence. And the vindication of God’s church begins.

3. And another angel went and stood upon the altar of incense, having a golden censor. And was given to him much incense so that he will give [it] with the prayers of all the saints upon the golden altar that is before the throne. 4. And the smoke of the incense went up with the prayers of the saints from the hand of the angel before God.
The presence of the altar of incense in heaven implies something that has not been made explicit thus far in the vision. The throne room of heaven is none other than the heavenly Holy of Holies. The vision of Revelation 4-5 is in the heavenly sanctuary.

The sermon we call Hebrews in the New Testament builds on this same common understanding within Judaism. The earthly sanctuary was actually patterned on the true, heavenly one (Heb. 8:1, 5). Interpreters of Hebrews debate how exact a replica it is. I personally believe it is not an exact representation. For example, I do not believe there is an outer room in the heavenly sanctuary and that the heavenly sanctuary is more or less equivalent to the highest heaven. [1]

In both Hebrews and implicitly here in Revelation 8, the altar of incense is inside the Most Holy Place. This is interestingly different from the description in Exodus 30:6 and suggests that both were tapping into a common tradition in the late first century. It is fairly clear here that the altar of incense was associated with the prayers of God’s people.

Although it is perhaps a strange image to us, these verses draw on the common ancient sense that God delights in the smell of sacrifices. In this case, wafts of the smoke from the incense from the altar go up to God. Presumably, they fill his nostrils to his delight. Of course, this is merely a picture. God does not have a literal nose.

What he is smelling is the prayers of the saints, the holy ones set aside to him. Believers, in other words. The content of their prayers is presumably a cry for justice in the face of their persecution. “How long, O Lord?” was the cry of the souls under the altar in Revelation 6:10. The angel burns incense on the altar to initiate judgment finally to the earth for their mistreatment.

5. And the angel has taken the censor and filled it from the fire of the altar of incense, and he cast it to the earth. And thunders and sounds and lightnings and earthquake took place.
What is the result of the burned incense? It has first gone before God. Now, it comes to the earth.

We can see easily enough what is happening here. The prayers of the saints have risen to God for justice. As a result, the fire of justice is cast down to the earth. After all, the seventh seal has been opened. Everything to this point is preparation. Now the final act begins.

Thunder, lightning, and earthquake remind us of God’s descending on Mt. Sinai (Exod. 19:16-18). The audience of Revelation would recognize them as the imagery of theophany. It is not just the fire that is coming down to the earth. God himself is descending.

6. And the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared them in order to sound. 7. And the first angel sounded the trumpet, and hail and fire having been mixed with blood was cast to the earth. And a third of the land was consumed and a third of the trees was consumed and all the green grass was consumed.
Revelation 8 starts with four trumpets. There will be three more trumpets when we get to chapter 9. The trumpets thus follow a similar pattern as the seals. Remember, the first four seals involved the four horsemen, and then there were three more.

Similarly with the trumpets, we have the first four trumpets. Then there is a pause of the first four trumpets at the end of the chapter. Then the final three trumpets come in a group.

And of course, things get worse and worse as it goes along. The events that accompany the trumpets echo the plagues God sent on Egypt. For example, the hail and fire of the first trumpet is like the seventh plague that falls on Egypt (Exod. 9:24). God is delivering his people from the new Egypt, which is Rome.

In verse 6, the seven angels with the seven trumpets get ready to sound. In verse 7, the first angel sounds, and hail and fire fall. These are mixed with blood, again echoing the seventh plague on Egypt.

It is cast upon the land. A third of the land is burned up and a third of the trees is burned up and all the green grass is burned up. This is probably not a literal picture, but we’re getting a clear feel for the great devastation that is coming. The final judgment has begun.

8. And the second angel sounded the trumpet, and [something] like a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea and the third of the sea became blood, 9. and the third of the creatures in the sea died, the ones having life, and the third of the ships was destroyed.
The second angel sounds, and something like a great mountain burning with fire is cast into the sea. Again, given the general nature of apocalyptic, we probably shouldn’t assume that something like a meteor will fall into the sea during the final judgment. While such things are of course possible, that’s probably not how the imagery works. It’s the Gestalt, not the literal image.

The sea turns to blood. Once again, this is a fairly clear allusion to the first plague on Egypt in Exodus 7:20-21. As God judged Egypt, so God will judge Rome.

We are seeing that all the parts of the creation are experiencing a kind of sympathetic judgment. It’s not that the trees have sinned. It’s not that the water has sinned, although water usually does have the connotation of negative chaos in ancient culture.

However, in this case, there is a sympathy between the waters and the plight of humanity. Creation currently groans for redemption with us (Rom. 8:19-22). Soon, there will be a new creation. The old creation will be removed, and that is part of what this sequence symbolizes here.

10. And the third angel sounded the trumpet, and a great star fell from the sky, burning like a lamp. And it fell upon the third of the rivers and upon the springs of waters. 11. And the name of the star is called, "The Absinthe." And the third of the waters turned into absinthe. And multitudes of humans died from the water that was made bitter.
Next, the third angel sounds his trumpet. Now a star falls from the sky, a great star burning like a lamp. It falls on a third of the rivers and upon the springs of the waters. These are now the inland waters rather than the sea.

The name of the star is called “Absinthos.” That is to say, “Wormwood.” Wormwood is a bitter plant, absinthe in Greek, and it turns a third of the waters into absinthe, into wormwood. Many people die as a result from the waters. The bitter water is poisonous.

This time, the imagery is not a plague but may allude to two other Old Testament texts. One is the bitter waters of Marah in Exodus 15. They need to be sweetened before Israel can drink them. Here, of course, God makes the waters bitter.

Alternatively, the wording is very similar to the Greek of Jeremiah 23:15, where God threatens to feed Israel “wormwood” and “poisoned water” as judgment. While Rome is the primary target of the judgment, we might remember that it is quite possible that Jerusalem has also just been destroyed as part of God’s judgment.

The star in Revelation 9 is a heavenly being, possibly Satan. Here, however, there is no clear indication that Wormwood is a demon or a fallen angelic being. The Old Testament passages mentioned above seem more likely background for the image.

12. And the fourth angel sounded the trumpet, and the third of the sun and the third of the moon and the third of the stars was struck. And the third of them so that the third of them might be darkened and the day might not appear--the third of it and the night similarly. 
The fourth angel sounds. Now, a third of the sun, a third of the moon, and a third of the stars are darkened. Day does not appear for a third of its normal time.

Craig Koester notes that some of these objects have already been subject to God’s judgment.[2] The sun was already darkened in Revelation 6:12. The moon has already turned to blood (6:12). He reminds us that the visions of Revelation are not linear. We are getting the same images from different perspectives. And none of them are meant to be taken literally.

The visions are much more like a kaleidoscope, where we get a picture from one side and a picture from another. But none of it is meant to be taken as exactly the way that the judgment will happen. Nevertheless, with the fourth trumpet, all the cosmos has been affected. We’ve seen the seas affected. We’ve had the lands affected.

And now the sky itself has become part of the judgment. The stars, the moon, the lights—we see all the realms of creation are now part of the judgment. This is the destruction of the world as John pictured it.[3]

13. And I saw and I heard one eagle flying in the middle sky, saying with a mighty voice, "Woe, woe, woe in relation to those dwelling on the earth from the rest of the sounds of the trumpets of the three angels about to sound the trumpet."
8:13 is the pause mentioned earlier that comes between the first four trumpets and the last three. The first four trumpets repeat the judgment of the whole cosmos. Now, as the judgment intensifies, three woes will accompany the final three trumpets.

The eagle speaks from the “middle sky” or the “middle heaven.” We remember that Paul once mentioned being taken up into the “third heaven” or the “third sky” (2 Cor. 12:2). We know from the Jewish literature of the time that some Jews thought that there were three layers to the heavens above as you ascended to God in the highest heaven (e.g., The Testament of Levi). God was in the third sky. The first sky was the sky immediately above us, leaving the middle sky for angelic beings.

This will not be the last time that a heavenly being speaks from the middle sky. In the second vision, three angels speak to the earth from the middle sky (Rev. 14).

The eagle can speak. Its words are a preface to the last three trumpets. In effect, it is saying, “You haven’t seen anything yet.” We should note that the word for “eagle” can also be translated as “vulture.” Robert Mulholland argues that vultures might be a better translation because they are associated, after all, with carrion and death. They hover over things that are dying or about to die.

Either way, the imagery is ominous. [1] See Kenneth Schenck, Explanatory Notes on the Sermon of Hebrews (Cascade, 2023).

[2] Craig Koester, Revelation and the End of All Things (Eerdmans, 2001), 97.

[3] John didn’t think of there being galaxies in the universe. Alpha Centauri is not being judged in the book of Revelation. Such an idea would have been completely foreign to John. Distant black holes are not being judged. The whole universe is not being judged. Our earth is the scope of this judgment.

Notes Along the Way: Durham 2.2 -- The Summer of Schindler's List

Continued from the previous post
__________________________
6. The summer of 1994 featured two movies that related to the problem of evil and suffering. I'm sure you know the drill. If God is all powerful, then he is able to stop evil and suffering. If God is all good, you'd think he'd want to stop evil and suffering. Then why does evil and suffering continue to exist?

This question had really begun to trouble me in my final years in Wilmore. It's not that I faced either great suffering or evil. I never have thus far. My mother and father both lived long lives and both passed as peacefully as I would want to. Have I had struggles and disappointments? Of course, but none beyond what is fairly normal for a mortal on this earth.

I have mentioned my struggle with the seeming silence of God. I've mentioned my decade of torture from about the age of 10 to the age of 20. I cried out to God repeatedly for a sense of peace and forgiveness, but most of the time did not sense any clear answer.

In my last couple years in Wilmore, my study of Scripture kept revealing how little my church circles really understood about the Bible. If you have been reading this series, you'll have a sense of that journey. And so, perhaps it is no surprise that I began to long for some sort of direct sign from God of his presence.

7. My final year in Kentucky, I was the facilitator for a small Sunday school class at Stonewall Wesleyan Church in Lexington, where I attended. The two daughters of Gary Cockerill of Wesley Biblical/Hebrews fame were in the small group. Because I had the subject on my mind, we read Philip Yancey's Where Is God When It Hurts. 

To be honest, it just didn't satisfy. Frankly, I have never heard an explanation that entirely satisfies. The two main explanations are the free will theodicy (God gives us freedom, which means some are going to freely do the wrong thing) and the soul making theodicy (suffering gives us the opportunity to grow). They both are helpful but still not entirely satisfying.

Over the years, I've engaged a few books on this topic (even took a shot at writing one). At IWU, our Monday reading group read Satan and the Problem of Evil by Greg Boyd. Steve Horst really likes this book. Its biggest move is to give substantial blame to Satan. In Boyd's view, Satan provides a bigger context for the evil and suffering of the world than just the two main explanations.

I actually found The Shack to be somewhat helpful. However, I've never been able to bring myself to be a universalist. I would say it is the free will theodicy on steroids.

This past year, a reading group I'm in with the Horsts and the Varadmans read Tim Keller's, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering. Again, I didn't find any silver bullets in the book. There was a line that I resonated strongly with. He suggests that all the different explanations taken together help quite a bit, but there is no one explanation that seems to fully satisfy nor do they all add up to a comprehensive explanation.

That final year in Kentucky, I would shout out to God (silently) during prayer. During the pastoral prayers at Stonewall, I was silently screaming to God, begging for some sort of word that was definitively him. I even asked him to punish me somehow just so I would know he was there. I bought Hans Kung's huge book Does God Exist? As usual of course, it didn't hold my attention.

8. So the summer of 1994 seemed like a gut punch. First, there was Schindler's List. As Keller has pointed out, the real challenge is not your run of the mill suffering. Yes, that absolutely can keep us from becoming morally flabby--no pain no gain. It builds character. It shapes our moral muscles

But the Holocaust was "over the top" evil. It is "gratuitous suffering" that is the challenge. Six million Jews--how much character does that build? Yes, Hitler was defeated. But how many times in history were the Hitlers not defeated? How many times--so many times, maybe most of the time--did the "Hitler" in question win?

If that wasn't enough, Shadowlands came out later in the summer. This is the story of C. S. Lewis' struggle with the cancer and death of his wife. That story in itself wasn't so difficult to handle. It was that story as a follow up to Schindler's List that was forceful. It was a one-two punch.

Lewis looks foolish in the movie when he presents the problem of pain. The movie means to portray him that way. I love the look of complete puzzlement on one lady after he talks about suffering as God's chisel whose blows hurt so bad but make a fine sculpture out of us.

In the movie, Lewis is on a journey to knowledge. At the end of the movie, he still has faith, but he is much wiser than when he gave his lectures. He's sure God has his reasons, but he's still the vivisectionist. He shouts at a priest giving him the kinds of responses he himself has given in the past. The son, meanwhile, decides not to believe in God.

"Pain is the megaphone God uses to rouse a deaf world." I'm not sure I like that. Lewis, who accepted evolution most of the time and didn't necessarily see Adam as a literal human, mostly relied on the soul making argument to answer the problem of evil. Like most explanations, it helps a little but still leaves one wanting more.

9. I remember having some friends over to dinner in my flat that summer. One of the friends was an atheist, a PhD student in philosophy. "You know the best answer to the problem of evil and suffering is that God just doesn't exist to stop it." I told him I understood all his arguments. 

"Then why do you still believe," he asked.

"I don't know," I responded. "I just do."

10. To me, most of the core questions about God have fairly easy, rational answers. The cosmological argument, the fine tuning argument--these make a lot of rational sense to me. The resurrection of Christ can be argued for on the basis of historical evidence.

To me, the problem of evil and suffering require more faith. God gave us a choice, so some are going to make the wrong choice. Makes sense. Makes a whole lot more sense than hyper-Calvinism, which makes God responsible for every last evil thing that has ever happened in the world.

Suffering gives us an opportunity to grow and express moral character. Yes, makes sense.

But there is a point where the suffering and evil are so great, that these explanations do not seem satisfying. That's when I have to press the mystery button. We have to believe God is in control. We have to believe that God loves us and is good. As the priest in Shadowlands says, "We see so little here."

We don't see the whole picture. That's the best we can do to fill in the gap between the explanations that make sense and what is left to mystery.

11. After decades of reflection on the question, two insights seem likely to me, although I welcome the Lord or someone else to show me otherwise. One is that death and suffering in themselves don't have any moral significance. Death is not bad. Suffering is not bad. Pain is not bad. The agents that cause them are what can make those events evil.

One of the biggest realizations I've had in the last five years is that not only in Genesis but likely in Paul as well, death was part of God's creation. It wasn't meant to be the end game, but it was the beginning. Eternal life was always a modification, an addition, to our natural state. The tree of life adds eternal life. 

Death was not the intention for humanity, but it was our created state. That suggests that death is not bad in itself.

A second insight is that, while we can see God at work everywhere if we orient ourselves that way, it is highly unusual to receive direct and unambiguous words from him. Again, it is not that we cannot see and hear him continuously. It is that all of these moments could be taken differently. They are a matter of interpretation most of the time. 

If you believe that God is speaking, you will hear him. But rarely will you have a speaking that is direct in an indisputable way. Faith is always involved in hearing God.

I can see God constantly at work in my life. Am I absolutely certain in each case that it is God? No. And that's ok. I'm thankful all the same.

Notes Along the Way: Durham 2.1 -- 1994 Summer Travels

Continued from previous post
_______________________ 
1. I was in Britain for most of the summer of 1994, although it's possible I took a short trip home to Florida to visit. John's did slow down after the exam term, but there still needed to be staff around in case of fires or conferences (I can't remember there being many conferences).

But the summer was a time for exploring. For example, Rachel Leonard talked me into doing a 2000-foot parachute drop. It was a still line pull. You climbed out onto the wing. They turned the propeller off. You let go.

It all looked very easy from the ground. When it was my turn, I wondered why I was climbing out of a perfectly good airplane. But when they said to push off, I dutifully did so. It was nice. The chute opened.

As I descended, I watched as Rachel must have been climbing out on the wing. The engine cut. The engine started back up again. She didn't jump the first time. I guess the second time he shouted and startled her into letting go.

2. There was also a two-day, 200-mile bicycle race from Belfast to Dublin and back the next day. I bought an orange bike for 100 pounds and had been training (gave or sold it to Phil Burns when I left). Several of us flew on a small plane to Dublin with our bikes. I think Ceri Huws was on that trip. She was a Welsh harp player of some skill. Maybe Emma Houghton and David Fox too. 

Those were the days when the unrest in Northern Ireland with the IRA was in its twilight. There were still military vehicles that wandered up and down the streets of Belfast with machine guns pointed at the sidewalks (that was a little startling to me). In the subways, you were warned to report any backpacks or other things sitting unattended on the platforms.  But the violence was pretty much over by then.

It was a fun, exhausting two days. I remember devouring a Snickers bar at the border to Ireland -- and I don't like Snickers. I remember the bus passing a Subway on the way to dorm rooms that night at Trinity College, Dublin (it could have been University College). So close, yet so far away.

3. Another highlight of that summer was a backpacking trip around Scotland with Rachel Leonard and James Quirk. James was doing his degree in Geography, I believe, which was something quite different than what we think when we say that in the US. It involved some pretty serious stuff, including engaging some post-structuralist thinkers like Levi-Strauss. He would eventually become an Anglican priest and is living in Canada.

We went to Edinburgh, then to Inverness, then to the Isle of Skye, and back. Passed Lindisfarne of course on the way up. You can only drive over and back at low tide. At high tide, the road is under water.

I've always thought that Edinburgh was a two-day visit. My daughter Sophie did an MA there and I warned her. But she loved it. Arthur's Seat, the Royal Mile. That cursed John Knox. I went with her over, and then we went to her graduation. All lovely.

Later that summer, Neil Evans and (I think) Alistair Kirk and I went to the Edinburgh Art Festival in August. I tried Haggis and blood pudding (Mark 7:19 permitted me). You just have to. Forgive me but I also tried Guinness. It's Irish (it decreases in quality the farther you get from Dublin, apparently). These all seemed necessary to get the full cultural experience.

I must confess that, after trying beer there, I didn't like it. I get the sense that alcohol is an acquired taste.

4. The bus rides passed some incredibly beautiful mountains, especially from Fort William to the Isle of Skye. There's a castle on a lake when you're almost there. It features I think in some movies. This was before they built the bridge over. We had to take a ferry.

I can't remember at what point of this trip that Rachel declared quite rightly that I was crap. She wasn't too angry, just making an observation. I had a tendency to wing it back then. In the words of Indiana Jones, "I don't know. I'll think of something." But as you know, "assumption is the mother of all screw ups."

When we finally got on the island, it was getting late. I had booked a hostel on the south side of the island, but as it was a Sunday, there was no public transportation to get there. I believe we somehow arranged a taxi, but by the time we got there, they had given away our reservation, which didn't seem very nice to me.

There was a man across the way who apparently wanted to get into the hosting business, and thus began our adventure. It was quite a bizarre experience, and unfortunately, this well-intentioned man, like me, was crap. 

Thinking we were doing Rachel a favor, we let her sleep in the house. But, as it were, the man had her sleep in his daughter's room -- with the unhappy daughter sleeping in the room too! She was not happy.

Meanwhile, James and I slept in some kind of a camper that apparently had at some time been under water. The man managed some cereal or some such in the morning, and we couldn't have been happier to get away.

5. These were precious experiences. By the end of my first year, I had swept a good deal of Scotland. I had been to Ireland from Belfast to Dublin. I had been across London and hit most of the sites there. 

I believe on my way to visit home either that first Christmas or perhaps in the summer, I took a day to visit Oxford. To be frank, I didn't really like the city. For me, it was both too cramped and too ostentatious. As I said in my previous post, Cambridge was much more to my liking, more laid back and rural in feeling.

But I got my pictures of Oxford. I think I was still using a real camera that my father gave me. I think it had been his originally. It had a red strap and all. Soon we would transition to those throwaway cameras that you could get developed at Walgreens and CVS. Man, how times have changed.

NAW Durham 6 -- The Secret to my Genius :-)

Notes from my days at Durham continue...

38. I mentioned that Helen Fox was another one of the Residential Tutors in John's. She was from the Isle of Wight and I forget how far removed she was from the throne. It might have been in the high 90s. They track these things. How many people are in line to the throne ahead of me?

I joked to her once that she had helped me understand the French Revolution. She actually was quite nice and unpretentious. But there was also something about her that made saying she was 98th or something from the throne make a lot of sense to me.

She told me a story about some extended family member on the Isle of Wight that seemed to express it all. Apparently, some men were working on the sewer system that ran in front of this relative's house. But the aunt (or whatever the relation) was afraid that if she used the restroom while they were working, they would see the results.

So she invited them in for tea and "biscuits" (bread sweets) so she could use the restroom in peace.

39. At some point, I believe she had invited Neil and me to her flat up the Bailey. I'm not even sure if I was serious, but I said something like "I'll just make up my own definitions for the words in my own private language."

"Ah, but isn't that exactly what Wittgenstein said you couldn't do -- have a private language? Meanings come from the language games we play in a certain form of life." Something like that.

I'm not sure how much I knew about Wittgenstein at that time. But I didn't really know much about Wittgenstein at the time, and there's nothing like feeling embarrassed to get you to do a little research. I think I may have also had conversations with David Mossley about Wittgenstein after that (PhD student in philosophy).

40. Wittgenstein blew me away. He had lived in the first part of the twentieth century and died in 1951. A very colorful figure. Almost certainly on the spectrum. Think Sheldon.

His early life is quite amusing at points. Wealthy but gave away his inheritance. Had himself put on the front (Austrio-Hungarian) lines of WW1 to see if his philosophy could take it. Argued with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge over whether there was a rhinocerus (in the room?). Wrote a treatise in seven points that he thought had solved all the problems of philosophy. Then wanted to go work in a factory in communist Russia (They would have been glad to take him as a professor, but weren't interested that he work in a factory.)

His seventh point was interesting, "Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent."

At some point, Russell wanted him to come to Cambridge. Unfortunately, he didn't have a doctorate. As an indication of his personality, he suggested that if his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was really that good, they should give him a doctorate for it. OK, fine. Just write a preface. Wittgenstein refused. They gave him a doctorate anyway.

41. It's really his later work, though, that brought such insight. Wittgenstein's earlier work assumed something he called a "picture theory of language." It is essentially the way most people think about language -- including most pastors. Going back to Augustine, it assumes that words picture things. I say "house"; you picture a house.

This works to a point. Words often do relate closely to things. But you might say that's only a portion of our language. For example, what does "is" picture? What does "righteousness" picture? What does a "wild goose chase" picture? (Don't say someone chasing a wild goose, because almost no one pictures that when they use that expression.)

The Wittgenstein story is typical. An Italian friend of his said, "Hey Ludwig, picture this" and playfully gave him a rude gesture. But alas, Wittgenstein couldn't say what the equivalent of giving someone the finger pictured. Its meaning is not some "thing" it pictures.

42. That was the beginning of a revolution, and the secret to much of my insight is that I know it and you don't. :-) The meaning of language is in how words are used. Words don't have meaning "in them" per se. They take on meanings in "language games" we play in different "forms of life."

Take the word fire. You light a fire and your Augustinian picture theory seems to work. I say, "fire," and you picture red stuff.

But what if a solider says "fire"? What if a boss says, "You're fired"? What if I play a song called, "Come on baby light my fire"?

Each one of these expression is playing a different "language game" in a different setting. And the meaning is different. Since Wittgenstein, these insights have been extended. Words don't simply inform. They do things. If I yell "Fire!" I'm probably suggesting that you're in danger and should probably leave the building quickly. If a couple says, "I do," they are marrying each other.

By the way, this is why I always roll my eyes when someone says, "Don't say, 'How are you?' unless you really want to hear the answer." The words "How are you?" perform a social function in most cases. Sure, if someone starts to answer, listen to them. But when that happens, the language game has changed. The normal game for that phrase is social and affective, not cognitive or "logos."

Sheez. 

43. This secret knowledge has tremendous implications for understanding the Bible and all sorts of things. When you take a Bible study course and you learn about word fallacies, they mostly are simply playing out these insights on language. Has anyone ever told you that the church is made up of the "called out ones" because ekklesia comes from ek and kaleo.

Nope. The meaning of ekklesia at the time of the New Testament depended on how people were using the word at the time. It doesn't have to have any obvious relation to the history of the word or the parts of the word (etymological fallacy). Baptizo doesn't have to mean immerse just because its root meant to dip (root fallacy). The meaning of words wanders over time and space.

Frankly, half the things preachers say about Greek and Hebrew words from the pulpit are wrong because they don't understand this principle. Kittel's theological dictionary -- not only spearheaded by a former Nazi but riddled with word fallacies that don't understand how language works. Ironic that the philosophy of a Jewish man would unravel it.

44. You might see how this problematizes a narrow understanding of sola scriptura and explains why there are thousands of Protestant denominations. Words don't have fixed meanings in them. When Luther said, "The authority for Christian belief and practice alone," he set in motion the inevitable fragmentation of Christianity. Since texts can have many meanings, the Bible has taken on countless different meanings not only for all the different Christian groups but all the individuals reading the Bible.

Gödel's incompleteness theorem also comes to mind here. I first learned about Gödel from Paul Herman I think in high school. Certainly didn't understand him then and may not even now. By the way, I saw Paul maybe three years after high school graduation. He told me Kant changed everything in philosophy. As with Helen Fox, I was a bit embarrassed inside because I didn't really understand Kant. I really learned Kant my first year of teaching. 

And I more or less agree with Paul now. Don't tell him. I responded something about Aquinas at the time.

Gödel's theorem suggests to me that no system can internally provide its own foundations. An ideological system requires grounding principles from outside it. 

This is especially true with Scripture. Scripture does not and could not tell me what the canon is. That is a decision that must be made from outside the text. I need a set of language games and at least one form of life to interpret the words of the Bible. "Orthodoxy" presents a set of such. Denominations often do. 

Bible scholars generally try to read each biblical text in relation to its original languages games and forms of life. But this also results in a fragmented text because there are so many of them. This is why some in the past have said that it is not even possible to identify a biblical theology. (It also seriously threatens the idea of a biblical worldview.)

So much is going on under the hood of our Bible reading, and most of us -- including most pastors -- don't have a clue. Again, Wittgenstein is my secret weapon to see such things.

45. These insights also undermine what I have come to call the "Platonic fallacy." This is again the notion that ideological systems are real.

Let me share Wittgenstein's sense of "family resemblance." Let's say you came to a Schenck reunion, and I ask you what the essence of a Schenck is. You say, "Well, some of you have big noses. Some of you have big ears. Some of you talk pretty loud."

But then I push back. "Well, some noticeably have big ears or big noses, but not everyone does. Some are loud but some aren't." What Wittgenstein noted was that there isn't really an essential Schenck here. What there is, is a collection of traits or "family resemblances." Not every Schenck has all the characteristics. Two Schencks might not have the same characteristics at all but have some of the characteristics from the grab back of Schenckness.

When we apply this to Marxism or Wesleyanism, we see that two Marxists might look quite different from one another. Two Wesleyans might look quite different from each other. They each would likely have some features from the common cup, but they might not have all.

You can see how this wreaks havoc with the argument that says, "You have this piece in your thinking that is also in communism; therefore, you are a communist." That doesn't follow at all. Both cyanide and bread have carbon in them, but one is deadly and the other isn't.

Wittgenstein has been my secret weapon, mainly because most people are unreflective in the way they read the meaning of the world. Thanks, Witty.

46. I might note that my first year in England I learned that there was a group of Anglicans who called themselves "non-realists." Don Cuppitt's Sea of Faith was the key work here. The Anglican church was fascinating because it was held together more by the liturgy than by belief system. There were Anglo-Catholics that were high church. There were evangelical Anglicans like St. John's. There were even charismatic Anglicans.

Speaking of the charismatic Anglicans, that was the moment when the "Toronto Blessing" was taking place. An Anglican church in London--Holy Trinity Brompton--was part of the movement. So there were tongues-speaking Anglicans.

The non-realists, on the other hand, didn't believe that God was literally real. Rather, they believed he was real in the "language game" of Christian religion. They took this idea from Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein believed that religious language performed a different function than traditional ontology. God was not "out there" literally.

But God was real! God was real because the idea of the existence of God "did things" among Christians. God existed in the language game in the religious form of life. In that sense, God is real even though they didn't literally believe God was real. I'm not expressing it well, but it was a spin on Wittgenstein.

At the time, I thought, "What's the point of that?" It seemed to me that if you didn't believe God was really real, why even believe in him at all? It seemed like sentiment trying to cling onto something you had lost. I wondered this about many non-realist pastors out there (e.g., some in the United Church of Canada). Why stay with the form of Christianity if you don't believe its heart is real? 

47. In my final year in England, Neil Evans was kind enough to go on a drive about England and Wales to several places One of them was Cambridge. We went down the Cam to the Orchard Tea Garden that Wittgenstein had once frequented. If I could have taught at any unversity in the world, I think I would have picked Cambridge.

NAW Durham 5 -- When McDonalds is a dream

Continued from the last post
________________________
30. Near the end of my first semester in England, I was so desperate for an American hamburger that I walked three miles to north Durham to get a McDonald's. It was wonderful. And I say that as someone who didn't particularly go to McDonald's much in the US.

There's a joke about European cultures that is both funny and pretty accurate. In heaven, the French are the cooks. The Italians are the lovers. The British are the police. And the Germans organize everything.

But in hell, the British are the cooks. The French are the police. The Germans are the lovers. And the Italians organize everything.

I did not find British food to be particularly delectable. There was this "American" restaurant in London everyone always bragged about, Garfunkels. I found their burgers mediocre. Frankly, I found Scottish Angus beef -- again, often bragged about -- pretty mediocre. I even bought hamburger from the store across Framwellgate Bridge and cooked it myself. It just was blah. 

Suffice it to say, although I am a meat eater, I had little craving for British meat. (England was also just getting over "mad cow's disease" at that time too. I wasn't able to give blood for years after I returned. As far as I know, I never developed it.)

I found the meals in John's generally mediocre, although the price was right (free for me). I have since come to believe that really high quality lamb can be tasty. But whatever they served in John's seemed pretty mediocre to me and sometimes gamey. (I'm also no fan of mint sauce.)

31. There was one English food I liked -- Yorkshire pudding. I've recently learned from Payne's -- an English restaurant out toward Upland -- that the Yorkshire pudding is actually the puff pastry. But it always came with a sort of beef stew, and I liked it. I would get it at the Half Moon, I think, across Elvet Bridge.

It was there also, I think, that I was introduced to the croque monsieur and the croque madame. The first was more to my liking, a ham and cheese basically. The latter adds an egg. It was there also that I was introduced to garlic mayonnaise, which I regularly would get with my chips. I was young and could eat such things.

I got to like an English breakfast. The sausages were quite different, tight on the outside and softer on the inside. 

By the way, I will never have a French hot dog again. I tried one in Paris and it was atrocious -- mushy on the inside. I have never understood the rumor that French cooking is the best (although Verzenay's in Chicago is a wonderful boulangerie). Angie and I actually ate at a French restaurant on High Street in Durham after a ceremony on Claypath in 1998. But I don't know what the fuss is all about French food.

32. The foods I loved most in Durham were foreign. I loved getting Chinese with Neil there, usually up on Claypath, I think. The Italian in town was fantastic. It was in Durham that I learned to love carbonara, I believe. The night before a ceremony we had, Angie and a group of us ate at an Italian place that was across Framwellgate. Delicious.

Durham was also the first place that I really tried Indian food. David Fox was particularly fond of Shaheen's on the Bailey. I always got "Bhuna Beef," not realizing that an authentic Indian restaurant wouldn't serve beef. Rachel Leonard and the others usually got far hotter food than me (Vindaloo, a song that came out while I was there, I think). Here I learned of peshwari naan and poppadom and chutney (which I didn't ever eat).

David had also seemed to think that "tak tak" was a euphemism for sex in Hindi. He would always ask the owner if he was going to be having "tak tak" later. Not sure what that was all about. I don't know that tak means anything in Hindi or any Indian dialect.

33. Getting used to British slang was a learning curve for me. For example, I had gathered from several conversations that to be "knackered" was to be exhausted. After one of the Tuesday evening worship services, I remarked to a woman that I was "a bit knackered" when she asked how I was. She grinned.

A little later, her husband informed me that, where he came from, "knackered" had the connotation of being tired from having sex. He grinned that I had told his wife I was knackered. Suffice it to say, even in the same country, there can be different idioms in different regions.

Which reminds me of the time I took a taxi in Newcastle. I haven't a clue what the driver was saying in his thick Geordie accent.

In my final year, a little store up near the viaduct started doing sandwiches. I would often walk there to get a ham with shredded cheese and mayonnaise.

34. I have never been particularly stylish. Rachel Leonard informed me that Doc Martins were all the rage. They were also more than I wanted to spend. I ended up getting a much less stylish pair of boots that I enjoyed nonetheless. Before we did our Scotland tour that summer of 1994, I got a green rucksack that I was quite fond of and used for many years.

I went to one rugby practice in the fall of 1993. The exercise was to get down on my knees (along with others) and then they would run into me. Of course no real padding in rugby. One practice and I thought, "That's going to hurt," and I didn't go back.

I was amazed one year when Phil Burns hurt something or another at football practice and we went to the hospital. In America, we avoided the hospital like the plague because of how much it costs, even with insurance. I think my father might have had a heart attack a few weeks before he died, but he didn't go to the hospital.

But with universal health care in England, when you needed to go, you went. After living in England, I really don't get people's resistance to it here. It seems mostly ignorance on our part to me.

[35. You'll have to buy the book to read this section.]

36. In those days, the fact that I was an American was very amusing to the people in the college. This was before the Iraq War -- and certainly before Trump. The British thought of us as funny, loud, somewhat ignorant people. They didn't yet think of us as dangerously ignorant people.

So, the students wanted me to be in their plays. I sang in the choir. It was all good fun. A German exchange student named Astrid did an American accent that I found hilarious. It was strange to think of Americans having an accent. I certainly never thought of myself as having one. Surprise!

I was Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. I was in Much Ado About Nothing. I also did a two person medieval play with a woman named Elizabeth. There was a suggestion to have a nude scene in it -- I passed.

The choir was particularly enjoyable. I had not known Faure's Requiem before, but it is now one of my favorite choral pieces of all time. I haven't remembered the director. He was a brilliant student named Andrew, I believe. He wrote some pieces and I assume went on to be a composer. 

All of these performances were student led, and they were brilliant.

I hadn't known Andrew Lloyd Webber before England. Or really Queen either, just a couple songs. I hadn't really been aware of British music or of the music I knew in the states that was British.

37. At the end of my first semester, I had to make a formal declaration of what I was going to work on for my dissertation. I had done all my fall work on Hebrews, but I would have proposed something different.

When I came home for Christmas, I thought long and hard about switching to something like the messianic secret in Mark. Did Jesus deliberately downplay a messianic identity because it would have been misunderstood by those around him? Turned out that Dunn had already written an article like that.

But it would have been a weak play. It wasn't a distinctive hypothesis. It wouldn't have been a unique contribution. And I would have been a nobody in a glut of Gospel scholars.

Hebrews it was.

NAW Durham 4 -- Teaching Christology in Cranmer

Continued from last week
____________________
I remembered that the first year of my doctoral program I also waded through L.K.K. Dey's Intermediate Patterns of Perfection in Philo and Hebrews (1975). I didn't feel like I learned much of anything about Hebrews, but it was a baptism by fire into Philo. 

25. I've mentioned that Cranmer Hall in the 1990s was an Anglican training school in partnership with the Wesley Study Centre. I'm having trouble ironing out all the details. John Pritchard had just come as the Warden of Cranmer Hall, and a man by the name of Philip was over the Wesley Study Centre.

On faculty was Bruce Longenecker in New Testament, Robert Fyall for Old. I attended his United Reformed Church while I lived in Durham, and he performed a ceremony for Angie and me in 1998 there. The church was evangelical in the British sense.

Michael Vasey taught liturgy. He published a book called Strangers and Friends during my time there. I believe Robert Song came during my second year as an ethics professor. In 1999 he would join the main Department of Theology. A woman named Liz taught theology. I haven't been able to pull up her last name yet.

I was privileged to be in England when the Anglican Church first ordained women (1994). I don't think Liz was in the first group, but I suspect she was ordained in York in May of that year. I seem to remember us sending her off as she got on the bus to leave. I jokingly made some stupid remark about not being sure that ordination was actually in the New Testament. She said, "Maybe, but I don't want to think about it since I've waited so long for this to happen."

I feel confident that the elements of the previous paragraph are true. I'm just not entirely sure about the combination. The first woman to be a bishop in the Church of England (Libby Lane) graduated from Cranmer the spring before I arrived. [1]

26. It seems to me that, in the fall of 1993, Cranmer was lacking someone to teach theology. So it became a team effort. I was privileged to be asked to cover Christology. There is something implicit about the thinking of the leaders to ask a Biblehead to teach the theology of Christ. It seems to assume that theology is more or less what the Bible says--or should be--which is far from how theology is often approached.

I was mindful of this distinction, although I also indulged myself. I believe there is a gap between the Bible and Chalcedon. My recent reading of Jesus Wars by Philip Jenkens has overwhelmingly confirmed that, unless one has a very strong sense of Providence, the path from the Bible to Nicaea and Chalcedon will seem little more than petty humans fighting each other--often literally.

I believe I gave three lectures. The first was on the quest for the historical Jesus. The second dealt with Pauline and early New Testament Christology. I believe the third focused more on John. Philip and Fiona Richardson were students then. We have kept in contact over the years. They have faithfully served as OMS missionaries over the years.

27. I spent a fair amount of time researching for this teaching. Apart from the New Testament Survey teaching I did for Midway College, it was really my first time teaching Bible. And I was privileged to do it on a high level. Don't get me wrong. I loved teaching Bible at IWU. But this was more like teaching for Notre Dame. 

I used N. T. Wright's sense of the "third quest" for the historical Jesus to frame that lecture. The first quest ended with Albert Schweitzer. Many of the portraits of Jesus in the 1800s were some mixture of antisupernaturalist and romantic. David Strauss threw down the gauntlet of myth. Source criticism whittled Jesus down to Mark and then Wrede took that away. 

Meanwhile, Schweitzer dubbed Jesus an apocalyptic stranger, a foreigner to what we want in a Jesus. Then comes Barth and Bultmann. Stop the quest! It's the Christ of faith that is important, not the Jesus of history. The quest seems to stop for a few decades.

Then comes the New Quest, launched by Ernst Kasemann. Maybe we can know a few things about the historical Jesus. Maybe he is relevant. The criteria come into play: dissimilarity, multiple attestation, coherence. Edward Schillebeeckx writes a 700 page book on Jesus with only a handful of certain sayings from Jesus. The Jesus Seminar perhaps culminates this era with its red letter Bible -- sayings of Jesus in red that came from him, pink if quite possibly, gray if probably not, and black if certainly not.

28. N. T. Wright spoke the third quest into existence. The "Jesus the Jew" quest. He pinned its beginnings to Geza Vermes' Jesus the Jew, The Aims of Jesus by Ben Meyer, Jesus and the Constraints of History by A. E. Harvey, and E. P. Sanders' Jesus and Judaism.

What Wright said distinguished it was the attempt to show the continuity between Judaism-Jesus-and Christianity rather than the dissimilarity. Going for dissimilarity gives you a small subset of what Jesus likely said and did. Wright aimed to find "double similarity."

I was quite enamored with Wright in those days. I couldn't wait for his Jesus and the Victory of God to come out. By the time it finally came out in 1996 I had moved on. But I did find the notion of the contraints of history and E. P. Sanders' approach to Jesus quite helpful. I met Wright in Durham at a conference in 1995. More on that later.

Over the years, I have given a paper for the Historical Jesus (1999) and Q Sections (2000) at SBL. Both had to do with Jewish afterlife traditions. Tom Wright came up after the historical Jesus paper and asked me for a copy. I like to think that it helped inspire some of his thoughts for the early sections of Jesus and the Resurrection of the Son of God. I never finished the work that all that afterlife research was headed toward. More on that later.

There have been some notable points over the years. John Meier's Marginal Jesus series was spectacular, I thought. Dale Allison's Constructing Jesus was a fine volume in its approach that asked more about the kinds of things Jesus certainly said and did rather than specific things. Dunn's Jesus Remembered I also found quite helpful, building off of some of the insights of Kenneth Bailey on oral tradition. 

I managed to drive over to United Theological Seminary when Chris Keith and Anthony LeDonne blew up the quest. The conference volume was published as Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity (2012). Now there's a volume out called The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus also edited by Chris Keith with James Crossley joining in.

29. I'm sure that my next two lectures in Cranmer were thoroughly influenced by Dunn's Christology in the Making. The standard model for approaching New Testament Christology in those days focused on Christological titles. I spent a fair amount of time researching the title Son of Man. Maurice Casey's book From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God had come out in 1992.

There is currently a Waterstone's on Saddler Street that was a prize during my time in Durham. I believe it was a Dillon's back then, but it had a superb used theological section. I bought many biblical studies classics there during my time at Durham.

It's hard to remember where I took my thoughts on the Son of Man. Casey had written a book on the title in 1979. Barnabas Lindars came out with one in 1985. I have Douglas Hare's 1990 volume in my library to this day, but I don't remember being particularly impressed with it. Nor was I impressed with Casey's "I'm just a guy" conclusion.

Somewhere, I synthesized three main uses in the Gospels: 1) self-referential, 2) in relation to Jesus' sufering, and 3) in relation to a Daniel 7 apocalyptic figure. The fact that only Jesus uses the title in the Gospels seems to be strong evidence that he did in fact use the title.

So I played a little hooky from my own dissertation in order to fill in gaps in my knowledge of New Testament Christology. It probably wasn't entirely as much learning as a US doctoral seminar would have given me, but I enjoyed it very much.

[1] I should note that there is some resemblance of Bishop Libby Lane to the Liz of my memory, and Bishop Lane's first name is Elizabeth. But the only way that could have worked was if she commuted back from Blackburn to teach, which seems very unlikely.

100 Core Biblical Values

I asked myself, what are the top 100 biblical values. Here's a shot.

The Pentateuch
1. In the beginning, God (Gen. 1:1).

2. The LORD is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in faithfulness, changes his mind about judgment (Exod. 34:6-7; Ps. 86:15; Jon. 4:2).

3. Love for God is a total demand (Deut. 6:4). 

4. All humans bear God's image and so intrinsically valuable (Gen. 1:26-27).

5. God charged humanity with care for his creation (Gen. 1:28; 2:15).

6. God has a threshold for human wickedness -- particularly when it comes to violence, injustice, and the blood of the vulnerable. He saves what good remains (Noah, Lot) and abandons the rest to destruction (Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah). 

7. God is faithful to those who trust in him like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph (Gen. 12-50).

8. God hears the cry of the oppressed, the slave, and the stranger. He acts to liberate (Exod 2:23-25).

9. God cannot be contained (Exod. 3:14).

10. Care for the poor, the immigrant, and the servant is non-negotiable (Lev. 19:9-10; Deut. 10:18; Ruth; Ps. 10, 72, 82; Prov. 14:31; Isa. 1:17).

Joshua-2 Chronicles

11. God goes with his people wherever they are (Josh. 1:9).

12. Humanity's natural tendency is to deteriorate into idolatry, self-destruction, and chaos (Judg. 2:16-19).

13. We look on the outward appearance; God looks on the heart (1 Sam. 16:7).

14. No one, not even a king, is beyond moral consequences (2 Sam. 11-12).

15. God will let a people self-destruct into ruin if they insist (2 Kings 17, 25).

16. Prophets speak truth to power regardless of the cost (1 Kings 18, 22).

17. Humility leads to restoration; pride to destruction (2 Chron. 7:14).

Psalms-Song of Songs
18. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord (Ps. 150:6). 

19. God welcomes us to share laments, complaints, and sorrows (Ps. 88).

20. God wants to hear our anger and frustrations -- especially at injustice -- but he commands us not to sin in our anger (Ps. 137; Eph. 4:26).

21. The LORD is our shepherd (Ps. 23).

22. We should long for God to create a clean heart and renew a right spirit in us (Ps. 51).

23. The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom (Prov. 1:7).

24. Pride stands at the root of most human folly (Prov. 11:2).

25. Without God, life is empty (Eccl. 2:11).

26. Physical love is a blessing from God (Song of Songs 8:6-7).

Isaiah-Daniel
27. God is utterly holy (Isaiah 6:1-8).

28. God delights in restoring his people (Isa. 40:1-5).

29. God can bring redemption through suffering (Isa. 53). 

30. Outward forms of religion are detestable to God when they mask injustice and exploitation (Jer. 7:1-11).

31. Great is God's faithfulness (Lam. 3:23).

32. Everyone bears responsibility for their choices as an individual (Ezek. 18:20).

33. God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezek. 18:23; 33:11).

34. Human kingdoms are temporary (Dan. 2, 7).

Hosea-Malachi
35. God relentlessly pursues the lost and wayward (Hos. 1-3).

36. God wants genuine repentance, not fake performances (Joel 2:12-13).

37. Let justice roll down like waters. God indicts those who sell the righteous for silver and trample the poor (Amos 2:6-7; 4:1; 5:24; 8:4-6). 

38. God's love knows no ethnic or national boundaries (Jon. 3-4).

39. What the LORD requires of us is to do justice, to love mercy, and walk humbly with our God (Mic. 6:8).

40. Those who are righteous live in faithfulness, regardless of the wickedness and destruction around us (Hab. 2:4).

41. God's purposes are accomplished not by might nor by power but by God's Holy Spirit (Zech. 4:6).

Matthew
42. Jesus did not come to destroy the Law but to fulfill it (Matt. 5:17).

43. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matt. 5:44).

44. You cannot serve God and money (Matt. 6:24).

45. Pray in submission to the Father, recognizing his holiness, inviting his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matt. 6:9-13).

46. Not everyone who says they follow God actually do follow God (Matt. 7:21-23; 13:24-30; 25:45-46).

47. The one who does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. The one who finds their life will lose it, but the one who loses their life for my sake will find it (Matt. 10:38-39).

48. Love God and love neighbor -- all the commandments depend on these two (Matt. 22:36-40).

Mark 
49. The Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many (Mark 10:45).

Luke
50. God scatters the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He puts down the mighty from their thrones. He exalts those of low degree. He fills the hungry with good things, but the rich he sends empty away (Luke 1:51-53).

51. The Spirit of the Lord is on me to proclaim good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, liberty to the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor (Luke 4:18-19).

52. Whoever the Samaritan is in your life, that is the neighbor that you must love (Luke 10:25-37).

53. No matter how far you stray from God, he will take you back with open arms. And those who have remained in his house must not begrudge his grace to sinners (Luke 15:11-32).

John
54. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that whoever trusts in him will not perish but have everlasting life. He didn't send his Son into the world to condemn the world but that the world, through him, might be saved (John 3:16-17).

55. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through him (John 14:6).

56. God has sent us the Spirit of truth, who leads us into all truth and convicts the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment (John 14:16-17; 16:7-13).

Acts
57. God raised Jesus from the dead... and has made him Lord and Christ (Acts 2:32, 36).

58. The appropriate response is to repent of our sins, to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins, and to receive the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38).

59. Believers come together in unity. They share their possessions with those in need. They fellowship and break bread together. They praise God together. Signs and wonders follow, along with evangelism (Acts 2:43-47).

60. We must obey God rather than earthly authorities when the two conflict (Acts 5:29).

Romans
61. All have sinned and are lacking the glory of God. The wages of sin are death. All humanity is accountable before God (Rom. 1:18-20; 3:23; 6:23).

62. The good news of Jesus the Messiah is the power of God that leads to salvation for everyone who has faith. This trust in what God has done in Christ is the basis for our right standing with God (Rom. 1:16-17; 4:5; 10:9).

63. We are baptized into the death of Jesus so that we can be raised to newness of life (Rom. 6:4).

64. Thanks be to God! Through Jesus Christ our Lord we can fulfill the righteous expectation of the Law (Rom. 7:25; 8:1-4).

65. In eternity, all things will end well for those who love God and who have responded to his call (Rom. 8:29).

66. Present your entire bodies as living sacrifices to God. Meanwhile, don't let your mind be conformed to worldly thinking but let it be transformed by God's renewing (Rom. 12:1-2).

1 and 2 Corinthians
67. The center of Paul's preaching was the cross -- Christ defeated death and Sin not through strength but through weakness (1 Cor. 1:23-25).

68. What we do with our bodies matters. Our bodies collectively and individually constitute the body of Christ (1 Cor. 6:19-20).

69. God can give you the strength to bear temptation (1 Cor. 10:13).

70. Do everything to the glory of God. Do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus (1 Cor. 10:31; Col. 3:17).

71. Love is the greatest of virtues (1 Cor. 13).

72. Without the resurrection, Christian faith collapses (1 Cor. 15:14-19).

73. The Holy Spirit is the downpayment that guarantees our future inheritance. He is God's seal of ownership on us (2 Cor. 1:22; 5:5).

74. God made the one who knew no sin to become sin so that we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21).

Galatians
75. In Christ there are no racial, ethnic, social, or sexual boundaries -- we are all of the same value and status to God (Gal. 3:28; cf. Acts 8, 10, 13; Rev. 7:9).

76. Walk in the Spirit and you will not fulfill the desires of your flesh (Gal. 5:16).

Prison Epistles
77. By God's grace we have been rescued, on the basis of our faith. It is a gift of God. We do good works in thanks (Eph. 2:8-10).

78. There is one God, one Lord, one Spirit. There is one body, one faith, one baptism (Eph. 4:4-6).

79. Speak the truth in love (Eph. 4:15).

80. Submit to one another (Eph. 5:21).

81. Have the same attitude as Jesus, who took the form of a servant (Phil. 2:6-7).

82. Strive to make your way toward salvation -- the Spirit is working inside us. Press on toward the goal of that upward calling in Christ Jesus (Phil. 2:12; 3:14).

83. Our citizenship is in heaven, not on earth (Phil. 3:20; cf. Heb. 11:10, 16; 13:14; 1 Pet. 2:11).

84. Do not pursue superficial religion that focuses on the earthly while boasting falsely of the heavenly (Col. 2:8, 16-19).

85. Put to death the ungodly aspects of the earth and put on the new clothes of the heavenly (Col. 3:5-17).

1 and 2 Thessalonians
86. The dead in Christ will rise first. We will assemble with them in the air with Christ, and we will be with the Lord forever (1 Thess. 4:16-17).

87. Those who can work for the mutual benefit of the church should do so if they expect to participate in the fruits (2 Thess. 3:10).

The Pastoral Epistles
88. God would love for everyone to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2:4).

89. Church leaders need to be individuals of character (1 Tim. 3).

90. The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil (1 Tim. 6:10).

91. All Scripture is life-giving and is beneficial for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness (2 Tim. 3:16).

Hebrews and the General Epistles
92. Jesus sympathizes with our weaknesses as a great high priest (Heb. 4:15; 10:14).

93. There is no longer any need for an earthly priest, sanctuary, or sacrifice, for Christ has accomplished all atonement for all time (Heb. 10:14).

94. You can genuinely begin the Christian journey and yet not make it to the Promised Land because of unbelief or falling away (Heb. 3, 6).

95. God does not tempt anyone to do evil. We are responsible for our evil choices, not God (Jas. 1:13-15).

96. Faith without works is useless (Jas 2:14-17).

97. Live such good lives in the world that they may see your good deeds and glorify God (1 Pet. 2:12).

98. Always be ready to witness to the hope that you have (1 Pet. 3:15-16).

99. God is love (1 John 4:7-8).

100. God wins (Revelation).

Notes Along the Way Durham 3 -- Digging into Hebrews

Continued from previous post
________________________
18. I've always felt like I cheated a little by doing my doctorate in the British system. In the US, you do two years of course work and then take comps before you really are set loose on your dissertation. In Britain, you come in as an MLitt student working on your dissertation from Day 1. If you demonstrate sufficient progress that first semester, your work is retroactively deemed the first semester of your doctorate and away you go.

I think most people who are accepted are upgraded. I did have a friend, however, who tried to jump into a PhD program in philosophy without really having the undergraduate or master's background for it. I think he ended up with two master's degrees in the end. Ouch.

You were supposed to fill in gaps as you worked on your dissertation. However, thankfully, between Asbury and UK, I was in good stead. I knew biblical and classical Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and had passed competencies in both reading German and French.

My weakest area was the history of Old Testament interpretation, and no doubt I had some gaps in the history of New Testament interpretation. At some point in the next few years, I would read Stephen Neill's The Interpretation of the New Testament 1861-1986, helpfully supplemented with a robust final chapter by Tom Wright. I think I could do much better by now. :-) In fact, you're picking up pieces if you're reading this series.

19. I hit the ground running teaching Greek. There was a charming old fellow named William Maurice who had taught Greek for years for the Department of Theology. The year I arrived he did what every Greek teacher wants to do at some point -- he wrote his own Greek textbook for a captive audience. I have one sitting around I wrote too.

If I remember correctly, he would give a grammar lecture on Fridays. Then on Monday and Tuesday a cohort would meet with me and we read through Mark 1-8. In three months, we read through all of Mark 1-8. I did that for three years, if I remember correctly.

By then of course I had all sorts of gimmicks, songs, and mnemonics. I remember a Greek Orthodox priest being rather disgusted by my Erasmian pronounciation. I totally agree that modern Greek sounds much more elegant than Machen. I did enjoy doing that trodden path through the first half of Mark.

I seem to remember Maurice presenting a paper. I dare not throw stones for I have given some wild papers no doubt (and plan to give one or two this year). But he argued that since Tatian's Diatesseron meant "through four," there must have been a fifth gospel in the mix. If you have four openings, you have to have five pillars. He suggested that the fifth was the Gospel of Thomas, if I remember correctly.

It was preposterous of course, but every proposal was given respect.

20. A highlight of my time at Durham was the New Testament Seminar. When Dunn was working on a book or commentary, we would work through the material with him. Some terms we would do background literature. For example, an edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls came out in 1994 and we worked through it together. Other semesters were filled with guest speakers.

If I remember correctly, my first semester was a guest speaker semester. Carl Holliday spoke. I think Ralph Martin spoke. I remember thinking that Martin did not have all his thoughts together for the book he was writing. It gave me hope. I mean no disrespect, but I thought, I can have my thoughts better organized than that presentation. But everyone can have an off day too.

It was an intimidating crowd. Jimmy Dunn led the seminar, of course. Sandy Wedderburn was starting his last year there, although we didn't know it yet. Stephen Barton was a regular feature -- also a local pastor.  Walter Moberley was Old Testament but he would join. He was particularly interested in theological interpretation, so just sticking to the Old Testament wouldn't do.

21. While I'm on the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), 1994 was a special moment in the history of New Testament scholarship. When the DSS were discovered in 1947, scholars divided the fragments between them. Some of the big fragments came out fairly quickly. The Habakkuk commentary, for example. The Community Rule.

But there were lots and lots of fragments. Piecing them together was a huge task. And it's perhaps understandable that those scholars who were working on them kept them largely to themselves... for 50 years. At retirement, some of them passed fragments onto their students.

It wasn't a conspiracy. It was perfectionism. It was scholars hoarding fragments to themselves. It was a log jam.

Then a couple scholars from Biblical Archaeology Review took pictures of all the scrolls (Hershell Shanks, Robert Eisenman, with the help of Emmanuel Tov) and a copy of them all was published. The gig was up. The next ten years would be a cornucopia of Dead Sea Scrolls studies and dissertations. And I lived through it.

I think it must have been the spring of 1994 that Helen Fox had a visitor. Or perhaps it was a friend of Eleanor Rance (an Anglican ministry student). She was Catholic and was insistent that the Roman Catholic Church had suppressed the DSS because they showed that Jesus was not actually the Messiah.

I lose my cool much more often these last years than I used to, but it was very unusual in those days for me to lose my cool. But this person was so whack that I lost it. She was so absolutely sure that the church was hiding the scrolls and that it was a papal conspiracy. There were some conspiracy books out -- one in 1991 called The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception and another by Barbara Thiering in 1992.

The scrolls were all public within a year. Guess what? No deep dark conspiracy in them. Sheez.

22. The place to start my work with Hebrews was catching up with the literature. At that time, Hebrews was truly a road less traveled. Today, we have a wealth of monographs. I know because I wrote a chapter on Contested Issues in Hebrews for the Oxford Handbook of Hebrews and the Catholic Epistles a couple years ago. It was an overwhelming task.

Two works in particular seemed like the best place to begin: Lincoln Hurst's vaguely named, The Epistle of Hebrews (1990) and James Thompson's The Beginnings of Christian Philosophy (1982).

Hurst would be important for me. There had been a time in the mid-1900s when most scholars thought that Philo stood fairly significantly in the background of Hebrews. Ceslas Spicq's two volume French commentary on Hebrews was probably the peak. Then Ronald Williamson wrote a book in 1970 that most felt debunked the Philo background. In 2000 I gave a paper at SBL reviewing his work. 

He made the basic point, but thought he significantly overstated his conclusions. But these sorts of works are like inoculations. You don't have to make the argument. You just say, "Williamson" and can leave it at that.

Hurst stood in that stream. He made some good points. For example, events can't happen in a Platonic archetype. His greatest contribution, in my opinion, was his recognition that "copy" is not a good translation for hypodeigma in Hebrews 8:5 and 9:23. "Example" is better. "Illustration." "Sketch."

However, the Platonism that may have influenced Hebrews was not straight Platonism but Middle Platonism. It makes a difference.

23. Thompson's book was probably a little dated but he represented the Philo position in an updated form. His monograph was a collection of essays. He was my only source for the idea that the removal of the created realm in 12:27 was a literal removal, giving a citation from 2 Enoch. I would hold that position until 2011 when I gave a paper in James Thompson's honor at Pepperdine.

It had come home to me over the years that Hebrews would truly be unprecedented to see the created realm completely removed. It just wasn't a concept that existed and I later concluded that 2 Enoch probably doesn't hold that either. Language of creation out of nothing didn't literally mean absolutely nothing. It was about the formation of unseen hyle. 

So why would the removal not be the same -- removal of the world as it appears rather than absolute removal. Think 2 Peter 3:10 where the cosmos is reconstituted. I'm not sure if I've said this in publication anywhere.

24. I believe I gave Dunn two or three papers that fall. One was on the literary structure of Hebrews. Then the second was a review of Hurst. I can't remember if I gave him one on Thompson.

Notes Along the Way Durham 2 -- Settling into St. Johns

continued from here
____________________________

8. St. John's was a delightful place, the kind of place where you want to stay forever. There were three of us Residential Tutors. Neil Evans, who was the Welsh chaplain I mentioned earlier, and Helen Fox of the Isle of Wight, who had just finished her undergraduate work. Her flat was up the Bailey a smidge.

The John's property was really a delightful Frankenstein. There was the principal property. Then there was this random slice of flats a little further down. You had to go out on the Bailey and up to get to them.

Helen only stayed a year, maybe because she was working on a one year master's. Then I believe Neil moved into her flat for the next two years. More on Helen later. She was the one who really set me on to Wittgenstein.

9. These were residences first built in the early 1700s in the Baroque style. The University of Durham itself wasn't founded until 1832 -- a bit of a late comer when you think that Cambridge goes back to the 1200s and Oxford even to the 1000s. Still, Durham is the third oldest university in England. Then again, when you consider that St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and Dublin were all founded in the 1400s and 1500s, Durham was quite a bit down the line.

As a sidenote, I didn't really go in understanding all the distinctions of territory. England is the heart of Great Britain, but Great Britain also includes Scotland and Wales -- both of which were forced to join the merry band somewhat against their wills. And you have to add in Northern Ireland to get the United Kingdom. Ireland proper to the south gained its independence in the 20s. 

These distinctions are bloody obvious to anyone who lives there. But they weren't to me as an American. And I expect James Petticrew to have an Angus for saying England is the heart of Great Britain.

10. Because the innards of John's were repurposed residences, they seemed to be constantly trying to figure out how to maximize the space. There was a lovely set of stairs that ended in a wall. Sometimes it felt a bit like a maze.

We three Residential Tutors were also Fire Marshalls of a sort. If the fire alarm went off, we would spring to action, running to the front office to see where the alarm had gone off. Then we would run to the appropriate location to see if it was a real fire or not.

It almost never was. I can only remember one time in my three years there when it was a real fire. Third year. Someone cooking on the top floor of Cruddas. At least one fire truck always had to come and double check, but if we could ascertain that it wasn't a real fire, we would call and tell them that they didn't have to send multiple trucks.

11. My sense is that most alarms had to do with alcohol. The drinking age is 18 in England, so pretty much all students drank. In fact, John's has a very quaint bar in its basement -- not for the claustrophobic. You went down a very narrow set of winding stairs to get down to it. A student was chosen each year to be head barman.

I was impressed with how many things like this were student led. They really entrusted the students with significant leadership. In fact, as students they didn't think of themselves as pre-engineers or pre-geographers. They called themselves what they were going to become. "I'm an engineer."

A note on drinking. I of course had grown up with a sense that you might become an alcoholic if you had one drink. Certainly, there was plenty of drunkenness among the student body, as is the case among American colleges. I used to marvel at a rugby lad named Hamish who had juvenile diabetes. Yet he would take a shot of insulin and then go on a pub crawl in which he would down a "yard" in one.

But the staff at John's modeled responsible drinking. Every Sunday involved a high meal, a little like you see in the Harry Potter movies. The leaders would sit at the "high table" -- with everyone in a simple black academic gown -- and the students filling the rest of the room. 

The leaders were part of what was called the "Senior Common Room" (SCR). It referred both literally to a room upstairs and figuratively to those who made it up. We would meet before these special meals and those who wished would have a class of sherry. Then after the meal there would be glasses of port available.

Yet I never saw any of those leaders drunk. It really made some of the rhetoric I grew up with seem rather foolish. This august group was far from some collection of out of control Bacchanalian figures, spilling all their secrets and giving into their hidden desires. Nothing of the sort!

It would seem to me that it would be more mature for us to teach young people to drink responsibly than to set up an all-or-nothing proposition where many would fail and then be out of control.

12. The entrance to John's, as I mentioned, had been constructed in the early 1700s and had been Baroque. A few anecdotes. Principal David Day enjoyed telling of how he had recently visited Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Apparently, on the tour, the guide had boasted that the stairs there dated from the 1700s. His remark? "The stairs outside my office are older."

This expanding sense of time was a key feature of my travels. In America, I had been impressed with something from the 1800s being old. The 1700s seemed a very long time ago. I didn't know any buildings in Florida or Indiana that went back to the 1700s.

Now in England, we had Durham Cathedral that dated to the 1000s and 1100s. Absolutely blowing my mind, Hadrian's Wall was about an hour away from me, and it dated to 122 and Roman times. (They said you could tell a road that was built on a Roman road by its straightness for miles and miles.) 

Then you go to Jerusalem and Greece and you're looking at things that are 2000 to 3000 years old -- maybe older. I've never been to Egypt or Iraq, but the scale just gets higher and higher.

I also remember Principal Day saying how overwhelmed they were by choices on their trip to America. In England you ask for an English breakfast and it's going to be much the same anywhere. But in America you have to decide how you want your eggs cooked and whether you want bacon or sausage. My daughters have to text me their Starbucks orders because of how complicated (and counter-intuitive) some of them are.

A fun memory is the brief moment when Principal Day had the opening hall repainted in its original Baroque colors (puke green). It was so awful that he immediately had it repainted back. At least that's how I remember it.

I've already mentioned the chapel -- St. Mary the Less. There was also a magnificent library. These were small buildings with lots of character. St. Mary the Less dated to the 1100s.

13. The oldest colleges of Durham were on the peninsula where the castle and cathedral were. The Bishop of Durham had previously been a Prince Bishop -- half bishop, half soldier, cathedral on one side, castle on the other. That all ended during the time of Van Mildert in the early 1800s, whose support helped to found the university. University or "Castle College" is the most posh of the colleges -- students live in the castle and graduation ceremonies happen there. 

A fun anecdote about the Castle kitchen. When it was constructed around 1499, word has it that Prince Bishop Richard Fox got tired of having to bless all the food coming out of the kitchen. So he put a sign over the pass through with the words "est deo gratia" ("thanks are to God"). That way, the food was automatically blessed when it arrived to those serving it.

The Palace Green is the area between the Cathedral and Castle. The Department of Theology is right there on the Green as well. Dunn's office was the first on the right as you went in the door. It was like a library in itself. 

[I'll put a placeholder here for the second floor window.]

The Cathedral itself was quite inspiring. I much preferred it to the ostentatious Westminster Cathedral in London with all its gold. Durham Cathedral lost most of its gold in the 1500s during the time when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries. It was quite disheartening to see the ruins of former monasteries or abbeys out in the countryside. And you could see stones from them in nearby houses

As you went down the Bailey, you saw Hatfield College, Chad's, John's, and St. Cuthbert's. At the end of the Bailey, the bridge that crosses the river is called Prebends. It has a famous quote by Sir Walter Scott engraved on it: "Grey towers of Durham, yet well I love thy mixed and massive pyles, half church of God, half castle 'gainst the Scots, and long to roam your venerable isles with memories stored of tales long since forgot." C. S. Lewis is said to have taken the idea of the lamp in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe from here.

I guess Oliver Cromwell kept some 3000 Scottish soldiers from the Battle of Dunbar in the cathedral in 1650. The idiot Puritan had closed all the cathedrals and so used the empty building to keep those who survived the march down to Durham. Hundreds would die in there. They would burn anything wooden they could find for heat. 

The Chapel of Nine Altars commemorates them today. They were buried nearby, as was discovered during work on the Palace Green Library in 2013. Then they were reburied at a cemetery nearby.

16. The first trips to Durham involved lugging my books in huge boxes -- the biggest allowance possible. I had two huge suitcases and two huge boxes each trip. It was a lot. The first trip it was my desktop and books, books, books. 

I think I may have tried Heathrow once but quickly Gatwick became the way. Gatwick Express to Victoria. Victoria to Kings Cross on the Tube. Then a three hour train ride to Durham.

By the time the train was past York, I would be fighting sleep with all my might. I wasn't able to sleep on the plane. I was inevitably sucked into one or two movies. Darlington. Stay awake Ken. You have to stay awake. Durham. Then a taxi to John's.

I always would say, "Never call a nerd a weakling. We have to have muscles to carry all those books!"

17. I was on the bottom level of Cruddas. Cruddas was a four story building of student housing on the back of the John's property, situated on the incline leading down toward the river. Indeed, it was very easy to slip down to the river from where I was.

I think I mentioned that I did a little rowing that first year. Christoph Lorentz was a German exchange student that year, very tall. Juan was from Spain. Jonathan was English. Helen Fox served as the cox. We weren't very good (they called us the "crowd pleasers"), but we had a lot of fun.

Just about as soon as I was in my flat. Rachel Leonard and David Fox appeared at my door. Rachel's room was right next to mine. David was the Junior Common Room (JCR) president. Both of them sharp as a whip. Brilliant. Rachel was Psychology. David was Literature. I always felt like my brain was moving in slow motion when I was around them.

I came to consider them some of my closest friends. I still have a gord somewhere that David and I used to hide back and forth for some reason. I have failed to send it back to him now for about 25 years.

Although I was exhausted, they insisted I walk with them and some others to a pub that evening. I couldn't tell you where it was. I had my first Ribena, a non-alcoholic blackcurrent drink.

My impression of the night was that I was in a foreign country. I knew all the English words they were saying. I just didn't know what they meant.

3.2 Loading the Cultural Weapon (radical evangelicalism)

3.1 You're Seeing Things
______________________
3.2 Loading the Cultural Weapon
6. Neo-evangelicalism was birthed in the context of a religious war. You have likely heard of the Scopes Trial in 1925. A teacher was taken to trial for teaching the theory of evolution. It marked a sort of turning point in American culture. From that point on, evolution would be the culturally dominant theory of human origins.

Evolution was just one part of "modernism" that these new evangelicals were responding to. The late 1800s had seen all sorts of theories come out of Germany about the Bible. They questioned everything from the inspiration of the Bible to the divinity of Jesus.

Neo-evangelicalism was founded in part to fight for the Bible. New seminaries like Fuller Theological Seminary would be founded. Christianity Today would be sent free to almost every pastor in America, including a regular diet pushing back on these modern religious ideas. In 1976, the editor of Christianity Today, Harold Lindsell, would call this "the Battle for the Bible." [1] In 1972, Josh McDowell would write a book similar in its feel: Evidence That Demands a Verdict. [2]

The fight against evolution similarly started to ramp back up in 1961 when Henry Morris published a book called The Genesis Flood. [3] I have some friends who just returned from the Grand Canyon, and they overheard a Christian high school teacher presenting some of the ideas from that book to some high school students. "Scientists think the Canyon developed gradually over millions of years of erosion, but it was really created as part of the Flood less than 5000 years ago."

7. These are all part of the battle lines drawn in the second half of the twentieth century. Lindsell would stir up the "inerrancy debates" of the 1980s and 90s. He was strongly disturbed that Fuller removed the word inerrancy from its statement on the Bible. Over time, a purge would ensue among conservative evangelical schools and institutions, with the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978) setting the boundary lines of orthodoxy. Faculty who couldn't sign it found themselves without a job.

A couple observations. While these "fighters" were growing a larger and larger following, they did not hold power in the larger society. Later on, some fought to get "intelligent design" in the public schools but were eventually rebuffed as "religious" rather than "scientific." Similarly, those who ran the biblical studies programs at the most powerful universities and the Society of Biblical Literature largely did not give Lindsell's ideas the time of day.

I would say that, in general, these forces were dismissed by the power centers of culture for fifty years and more. When people feel dismissed and mocked for decades, they don't just look for truth. If they manage to get in power, they often get pay back.

8. The Reagan presidency marked a major shift in the religious culture wars. Reagan was the hero. While Jimmy Carter had been personally religious, Reagan embodied cultural Christianity. He revived the spirit of the 50s, when "In God We Trust" was put on the dollar bill and "One Nation Under God" was added to the pledge of allegiance.

But for our purposes, the most significant outcome was the fusing of evangelicalism with Republicanism. Evangelicals had always leaned Republican. They had overwhelmingly supported President Nixon, for example. Kristen Kobes du Mez has argued that there was always a tendency for evangelicals to like strong men. [4] Reagan embodied the cowboy of evangelical culture.

How did this fusion happen?

It happened in large part through the efforts of fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell. Prior to Reagan, Falwell had spent most of his political energies pushing back against the government's attempt to integrate the South. For example, he weighed in heavily on the IRS' threat to take away Bob Jones' tax exempt status because of its rules against interracial dating and other similar policies.

He framed this opposition to the government as religious freedom. Bob Jones used verses from the book of Ezra to argue that God opposed the integration of the races. Of course Ezra was addressing the mingling of Israelite faith with the religions of the surrounding peoples, not making a manifesto on racial separation.

9. Segregation was not going to be a winning issue. But the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision on abortion in 1973 provided just what the doctor ordered. Southern Baptists like Falwell had not originally been opposed to abortion. Nine days after the decision, the Baptist Press hailed the decision as a win for religious liberty. That year, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, W. A. Criswell, wrote, "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person." He would radically change his position a decade or so later. 

In 1979, Jerry Falwell started the "Moral Majority," and a movement was born. Abortion became the key issue, but the movement also pushed for having prayer in the schools and having the Ten Commandments prominently displayed in schools and courthouses. Clearly, the overwhelming majority of evangelicals today genuinely believe that abortion is wrong. But the birth of this movement did involve some political calculation. [5]

Over time, this would become the issue that made it impossible for the majority of white evangelicals to vote for a Democrat. It also would become a path toward villainizing the Democratic Party as the party of a new Holocaust. Democrats would understandably be thought of as "baby killers" by millions of evangelicals. 

It is easy to see how over time, the Republican Party could virtually have a blank check to do whatever it might want -- evangelicals would never vote for the other side.

10. Another key player in the late twentieth century was D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I grew up in Fort Lauderdale and so spent my teen years in the shadow of his growing influence. Kennedy held to a soft form of what might be called "dominionism." He believed that Christianity should work hard to "reclaim America for Christ." [6]

Note the word "reclaim." There is an assumption here that America was founded as a Christian nation. The Puritans of the 1600s feature large as America's true origins. The Enlightenment influence on the Founding Fathers is largely dismissed as they are portrayed as deep men of faith. A key figure in this interpretation today is David Barton, a popular Christian speaker and writer on the subject.

Much of what is happening currently under the second Trump administration is the enactment of these goals that have been simmering and growing under the surface of American culture within evangelicalism. The famed Project 2025 is a roadmap to see many of these values enacted within American society from the top down. It can be seen as the culmination of fifty years of hoping and planning.

The question for us in this chapter is, how much of these developments was truly biblical, and how much is actually cultural?

11. Evolution, inerrancy, abortion, reclaiming America. The family. Here, the main figure beyond question was James Dobson, whose organization Focus on the Family is still going strong almost fifty years after its founding in 1977. Although he started giving parenting and family advice (e.g., Dare to Discipline, and Love Must Be Tough), he would increasingly wade more and more into the poltical arena, especially on the question of abortion. [7]

Then the Supreme Court would legalize same-sex marriage in 2015. This change in the culture had been percolating in movies and the arts, but it suddenly became the law of the land. Evangelical Christians experienced this as a seismic shift, and the issue would end up ripping several denominations asunder, most recently the United Methodist Church.

The question of transgenderism followed swiftly at hand. Evangelicals felt like the culture was rushing headlong down a cliff like the pigs in the story of the Gerasene demoniac. For those who believed the United States was once a Christian nation, the decline seemed especially precipitous. Now Democrats were not only baby killers but "child mutilators" as well.

The question of gender has awakened another of fundamentalism's earlier streams, namely, the question of what a man and a woman actually are. As early as 1961, Bill Gothard had founded the Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts, which had presented a strongly patriarchal view of the home. [8] Some of these views have come back with a vengeance in this current climate.

They were always lurking. In 1987, the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood was founded. The debate over women in ministry and leadership has become especially acute in these last years. Views that were far out of the mainstream about women in the military or the appropriateness of women in leadership have suddenly come under discussion in the public sphere. 

Pete Hegseth, the current "Secretary of War," for example, has said that women should not be in combat, and his ties to the dominionist pastor Doug Wilson are well known. Wilson was recently asked to preach at the Pentagon at Hegseth's personal invitation. The alignment of the second Trump administration with these fundamentalist streams is striking. For many if not most evangelicals, it is a matter of celebration. For many others, it is very alarming.

Clearly, we are living in a time of an immense cultural torrent. These forces are swirling around us and coming at us from every side. Humans are not good at complexity or nuance. We are prone to group thinking and binary thinking, "us-them" thinking. So we will often find ourselves on one side or the other -- sides whose contours are constantly changing, often without us even realizing it.

But what does the Bible really say? What should a citizen of the kingdom think about these things, rather than a cultural Christian swept away by the tidal forces? 

[1] Harold Lindsell, The Battle for the Bible (Zondervan, 1976).

[2] Josh McDowell, Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Historical Evidences for the Christian Faith (Campus Crusade for Christ, 1972).

[3] Henry Morris and John Whitcomb, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications (P & R, 1961). In 1970, Morris founded the "Institute for Creation Research," which has been sponsoring debates and literature for over fifty years. I've attended or listened to a few. In more recent times, Ken Ham founded Answers in Genesis, the organization that created the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum in Kentucky. 

[4] Kristen Kobes du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (Liveright, 2021).

[5] Francis Schaeffer and Catholic opposition to abortion also played a significant role in turning the tide of religious opinion against abortion. See Schaeffer's Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (Crossway, 1979). 

[6] In this, he was significantly influenced by Rousas John Rushdoony, who thought that America should be governed by biblical law -- including Old Testament law. Rushdoony was thus the father of "Christian Reconstructionism." 

A parallel movement is the "Seven Mountain Mandate," going back to the 1970s. Christianity should not only dominate religion but the family, education, government, media, arts & entertainment, and business.

[7] Almost ten years later in 1986, Randall Terry would found Operation Rescue, which took an even more aggressive stance toward stopping abortion.

[8] Gothard himself was forced to resign from his own organization in 2016 amid serious allegations of sexual harassment and abuse.

_______________________
1. What is Evangelicalism?
1.1 Revivals of the 1700s and 1800s
1.2 The "New" Evangelicalism
1.3 The Poltical Takeover 

2. From Club to Conversion

2.1 The State of Faith in America
2.2 Dunk and Run
2.3 Lasting Conversion
2.4 Joining a Club
2.5 The Mixed Church
2.6 Citizens of the Kingdom