Mark: Disciples Don't Get It

Going along with the tone of hiddenness in Mark's Gospel is a pervasive sense that the disciples didn't really "get it."  They don't really seem to get the nature of Jesus' mission or how it is supposed to end. One of the earliest examples of this theme is the Parable of the Soils in Mark 4.

A farmer throws seed out on a number of different soils--a path, rocky ground, soil with weeds, and good soil.  Birds get the seed on the path. The plant on rocky ground gets scorched because it doesn't have root.  Weeds choke the third batch of seeds. But the fertile soil yields an abundance of fruit.

The meaning of the parable, Jesus tells the disciples, is that not everyone has "ears to hear."  Not everyone who hears the good news of the kingdom will respond positively. Some have no interest at all. Some can't stand the opposition that inevitably comes.  The struggles of life choke the faith of others. But some have a faith that endures and yields abundant fruit.

In Mark, this is the parable that explains all of Jesus' parables. While we tend to think of parables as making Jesus' message easier to understand, Mark presents them as riddles.  Only those who have faith will understand and accept them. "The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables" (4:11).

What is then truly ironic is that the disciples don't understand the parable.  The disciples don't understand a parable whose meaning is that only those with faith will understand Jesus' parables. This is how Mark consistently portrays the disciples, even the key disciples Peter, James, and John. They get that Jesus is the Messiah, but they don't get what that means. Since the other Gospels don't have such an emphasis, we have to ask why Mark does.

One suggestion is that the individual or community that produced Mark did not have a completely favorable view of those Jerusalem apostles. On one level, this could make sense. After all, the theology of Mark is closer to Paul than it is to what we know of Peter from Paul's writings.

Take Mark's sense that all foods are now clean (Mark 7:19), a parenthetical comment often thought to point to a primarily Gentile audience for Mark.  Peter did not seem to take that position in AD49 in Antioch, when Paul argued strongly against him (Gal. 2:11-21). In that incident, Peter seemed to defend the Jerusalem position that Jewish believers shouldn't eat with unclean Gentile believers.

In the end, however, I don't think this is the best explanation. And it isn't because Mark is traditionally associated with Peter, as we mentioned above. If traditions come into conflict with a careful reading of the biblical texts, then traditions must yield. The Gospel of Mark itself doesn't tell us who its author or what its key sources were.  Inductively speaking, it is anonymous.  Some connection with Peter remains possible but we can't let this possibility interfere with listening to Mark itself.

A simpler explanation is that the disciples really didn't anticipate that Jesus was going to die.  It is incredibly plausible because no one at that time expected a Messiah to die.  It's just not what Messiah's were for and normally dying would have proved you weren't the Messiah.

Messiah is means "anointed one" in Hebrew and Aramaic.  The Greek word for it is Christ.  It is a royal title.  To say that Jesus was the Messiah was to say that he was the king who would restore the political kingdom of Israel.

Against this backdrop, it was Jesus' death more than anything else that did not compute with the disciples. We often use Peter's denial of Jesus as an example of cowardice, of not having the inner strength to stand up and be persecuted for Christ. My hunch is that Peter was no coward. I bet he was more than ready to fight with Jesus in the Garden to the death. What he wasn't ready for was for Jesus to go quietly with the soldiers and for him to "lose."

To me this is an incredibly significant point.  The disciples did not expect Jesus' death.  Then afterward I don't think they expected his resurrection either.  They didn't get it.

If Mark does in part reflect some of Peter's preaching, might we not in Mark hear a touch of his own regret?  "I can't believe I didn't get it." Again, we shouldn't let later tradition steer our interpretation much, but it is at least possible...

Wesleyan Merger: Black and Drury

I reach chapters 16-17 today from Bob Black and Keith Drury's, The Story of the Wesleyan Church. So far it's been:

Chaps 1-2  About Wesley and the origins of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in abolitionism
Chaps 3-4  About its activist early days that were low church, pro-women (and anti- some other things)
Chaps 5-6  The post-Civil War let down, when the best and brightest returned to the Methodists
Chaps 7-8  Birth of Pilgrim Holiness Church
Chapter 9   Multiple Ministries
Chapters 10-11 Roaring Holiness 20s
Chapters 12-13 Institutional Solidification (30s/40s)
Chapters 14-15 Prelude to Merger

Now chapters 16 and 17 on the merger of the Wesleyan Methodist and Pilgrim Holiness Churches:

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Chapter 16
I was very impressed with the emphasis on parity in the merger. How hard it is for people not to want to come out ahead, but the spirit of the merger was genuinely one of equality.  Two general superintendents from each denomination, very similar numbers of general officials. We now reach my childhood and people I at least met in my first decade or so of life. (My parents, for example, got the idea of Kenneth as a name from J. D. Abbott's son. Having grown up in Florida, I came across many of the old leaders of both churches at Brooksville winter camp meeting)

The new denomination took equal ministerial and lay representation from the WMs, as well as some of the older wording of faith statements, some of which go back to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church.  I'm glad the Pilgrims lost over dispensational language in relation to the end times.  I'm glad the Pilgrims won over a more centralized local church board, as opposed to the scattered boards of the WMs.

Chapter 17
The most painful part of merger beyond question was the closing (although called merging) of three, later four Pilgrim Bible colleges. I think they probably made the right decisions, but having close connections with Frankfort, I know how hard it was (My Dad didn't vote to close Frankfort, but he was on its college board at the time).

This chapter has a lot of interesting details about how merger worked its way out on the local level.  It is interesting in Indiana, for example, sometimes to find Wesleyan churches right down the street from each other.  One of them usually was originally Wesleyan Methodist and the other Pilgrim.

One of the more disappointing aspects of this period--although maybe it was all for the good--is the failure to merge with the Free Methodists.  The two sticking points were initially the FM statement on Scripture, which did not say anything about inerrancy--and the percentage of college board of trustees who had to be members of the church. The FM church was actually willing to change its statement on Scripture, and the Wesleyan Church later went with percentages more like the FMs anyway.

With regard to language of inerrancy, the debate went along merger lines.  The WMs had put inerrancy language in their discipline in 1955 at the urging of Stephen Paine, then president of Houghton and strong participant in the neo-evangelical movement of the fifties.  The Pilgrims didn't have a statement of that sort in their Manual but didn't oppose it in the merger.  After all, who wants to argue that the Bible is errant?

But it is fascinating in the FM merger discussions that Roy Nicholson, the old WM general emeritus, was the one that argued the term was essential for merger. Meanwhile J. R. Mitchell, a Pilgrim, didn't think it should be a sticking point. (I wish I had known this during my Asbury days so I could have picked his brain) It remains a mid-twentieth century artifact in our Discipline that I suspect most Wesleyan scholars consider more problematic than helpful.

But the most fascinating part of this story by far is something Black and Drury omitted.  I suspect that those at the 1976 General Conference actually thought that they had voted to merge with the Free Methodists.  I was there. My father was a delegate. My family had reservations about the merger (I obviously would have supported it in retrospect). At nine years old, I remember leaving Wichita thinking we had merged (and thinking it probably wasn't a good thing ;-).

But the motion on the floor was not a motion to adopt the recommendation of the merger committee, as I suspect almost everyone thought.  It was a motion to receive the report of the committee.  Perhaps in a clever parliamentary move, the General Conference gave a hearty thanks to the committee and, by implication, shelved the recommendation until this day.

God's Speakings 3: The New Testament Church

Now to continue my Sunday work on Biblical Theology.

Chapter 1
Introduction to Biblical Theology

Chapter 2: Revelation
2a From Text to Scripture
2b NT Understanding of Scripture
2c God's Speakings before Scripture
2d God's Speakings in the Old Testament
____________
... Christians believe that God's definitive speaking in all of human history was and is in Jesus Christ.  More than in any writing of any kind, more than any individual oracle, the Revelation of God par excellence was in a person. God's Word for the creation became flesh in Jesus Christ (John 1:14), the consummate Word.

While Jesus was on earth, he revealed what humanity can be.  He demonstrated a life fully pleasing to God and confirmed that love is the whole of God's expectation of humanity. In his death God revealed his identification with human suffering and the healing of a broken universe.  In his resurrection God revealed the ultimate hope for humanity's eternity.

The New Testament and the common Christianity that followed are the unpacking of the central Revelation of Jesus Christ.  This unpacking not only looked to the unfolding of the significance of Jesus Christ but it involved a renewed look at the Scriptures of Israel to see their fulfilled sense.  For example, the Gospel of Matthew shows us how Jesus fulfills the Law, filtering its instructions through the love command.

The books of Paul recognize that Jesus is not just for Israel but for the whole world. Those parts of the Law that were specific to ethnic Israel--circumcision, food laws, sabbath--are not required of these new believers. Hebrews, perhaps in the wake of the temple's destruction, recognizes that Christ's death is the only true sacrifice of history, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. These realizations did not come the day after Jesus' death and resurrection.  It took decades for these revelations, which are central to Christianity, to become obvious.

Some of the most central beliefs of historic Christianity took even longer. The worship of someone who had only recently been alive was unprecedented in Judaism. But from our comfortable vantage point two thousand years later, we are prone to think that they understood what they were doing exactly as we do. A brief look at church history reveals that it took several centuries for the early Christians to unpack our current understanding of the Trinity.

Christians believe that Christ was not merely the firstborn of the creation, but in fact "eternally begotten of the Father."  To say that Jesus was fully divine and fully human took some processing. We see this truth so easily now when we read the New Testament, but it took centuries for this precise understanding to unfold. It is no coincidence that it is about the same time that these insights were finalized that the New Testament canon was finally solidified.

Christianity as it exists today finds its common ground in the understanding of the New Testament Scriptures at this point when the unpacking of Christ reached its mature form in the 400s. When the Protestant Reformation would peel back the further developments of the Roman Catholic Church, it would reset the church to this point. It represents common Christianity. It also reminds us that, for our method to be coherent, we must always be open to reformation of earlier understanding.

Christian Scripture, the Bible read from this mature understanding, is thus the primary witness to the significance of Christ.  To be sure, these moments in God's walk with humanity were moments in history, points in time when God met specific people at specific places through specific prophets. There is thus a tension between the "timeless" reading of these texts and their original particularity.  Discerning the parts where God was meeting and audience in its particularity and those that transcend a moment in time is a difficult and corporate task.  We work out our salvation with fear and trembling.

The ultimate interpreter of Christ is the Spirit. It was the Spirit that unpacked Christ in the writings of the New Testament. It was the Spirit who unpacked the core significance of Scripture in the early centuries of the church. And it is the Spirit that unfolds any truth we might know today.

Any word from the Spirit is as true and authoritative as any other word, including Scripture.  How could it not be so?  The problem is not with the Spirit's authority but the fact that we cannot trust ourselves to know for certain when we are truly hearing the Spirit. No degree of individual certainty, even corporate human certainty, can be trusted absolutely.

But God can and does speak today through reason and experience, as he has in the past. And surely God has spoken in Christian history.  Scripture is our starting point for hearing his words, but Christian tradition, experience and reason are also ways God has spoken and continues to speak. All of them, when we truly hear God in them, are a witness to Christ.

God is thus a God who speaks.  He can speak through our experiences, especially our experiences of the Spirit. He can speak through reason and science.  Scripture is the best starting point to hear his voice, and we join the Christians of the ages in listening to God's voice in them. But the consummate Revelation of God, the image of his substance, is the Son, the person, Jesus Christ.

Two New Devotionals Out!

My two final devotionals in the Paul series are out!  One of them covers the Pastoral Epistles (Our Faith).  The other covers Ephesians and Colossians (Our Purpose).



I've written three books that are life reflections Paul's writings (links are on the right below):

• Paul: Messenger of Grace (over Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians, Philippians, Galatians, Philemon)
• Paul: Soldier of Peace (over Romans)
• Paul: Prisoner of Hope (over 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians, 1-2 Timothy, Titus)

Then I've written six, six week devotional books that go with selected portions:

• Our Joy (Philippians)
• Our Hope (1 Thessalonians)
• Our Righteousness (Romans 1-8)
• Our Relationships (Romans 9-16)
• Our Purpose (Ephesians, Colossians)
• Our Faith (Pastorals)

Jesus, Criteria, and the the Demise of Authenticity

I had a chance to pop over to Dayton yesterday to catch the main day of a mini-conference over the traditional criteria for discerning the historical Jesus...

It was connected to a collection of essays edited by Anthony LeDonne and Chris Keith.  I went because it was only a couple hours away, I wanted to catch up with the subject, and there were a lot of interesting people and friends involved--former students, former teachers, fellow Dunnites, Fulbright acquaintances, notorious bloggers, acquaintances from United Theological Seminary, etc...

The point of the essays--and the conference--was to capture in one place the problems with the traditional criteria for discerning the historical Jesus among the Gospel materials. Missing from the conference was Scot McKnight, whose essay I took basically to say that any quest by an individual for the historical Jesus simply creates a speculative narrative. So he argues that we should just stick to the biblical narratives.

The other presenters systematically dismantled the traditional criteria:

Semitic original: Loren Stuckenbruck indicated that after a number of years in the past trying to uncover a likely Aramaic original behind the Gospel texts, you just can't identify one with any degree of certainty.  The linguistic situation is just too messy.  Even the Aramaic in Mark does not prove Mark is earlier in itself.  And Matthew seems to "semitize" Mark's Greek sometimes.

Dale Allison gave a fun autobiography on his quest, how he eventually abandoned all the criteria and changed his method several times.  His last (or so he says) contribution has incorporated recent studies on how memory works.  But the most interesting thing is his sense that we should not be trying to weigh individual sayings or stories but categories of sayings or events.  It's not so important that we be able to prove that Jesus said one specific saying or did one specific thing.  What is more significant is that we have lots of sayings and events that show Jesus doing something, like helping the poor or getting into conflict with religious leaders.  It's a different kind of multiple attestation.

Coherence: Anthony LeDonne showed how Norm Perrin's version of coherence was really a subset of Bultmann's criterion of dissimilarity.  After you have determined what is likely by its dissimilarity to Judaism or Christianity, you can consider original sayings that cohere to it.  Since dissimilarity is problematic (see below), Perrin's version of coherence was also problematic.

LeDonne had more sympathy for John Meier's version of coherence.  If you can determine that some aspect of Jesus in general is likely to be historical, then other similar sayings or events are quite possibly historic as well.  But LeDonne makes it clear that memory shapes everything. There's no route around the layers between us and Jesus. We can only try to look through them. Coherence of the sort Allison now practices may point us toward the kinds of things Jesus did but it does not prove an individual saying.

Embarrassment: Rafael Rodriguez talked about this criteria and made it clear that you can always find alternative scenarios in which some saying or event might not have been embarrassing initially. So perhaps the best known example is Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist.  When Jesus is the superior, why would someone invent him being baptized by an inferior?

But alternative scenarios are possible. What if, for example, it improved Jesus' status at one point to associate him with John the Baptist and only later his status in the tradition grew so great that his baptism needed to be explained. (For those listening into this conversation, I don't think many question that Jesus was baptized by John. This is a question of historical method.)

Dissimilarity: Dagmar Winter suggested decades ago that it was ridiculous to consider dissimilarity from Judaism and Christianity an appropriate criterion for discerning the historical Jesus. We now talk about double similarity, that Jesus fits exactly between Judaism and Christianity, that the most plausible   Jesus is one on in a path between Jesus' historical context and the Jesus movement that resulted. LeDonne suggested that anti-Semitism played a role in this criterion, the distancing of Jesus from his Jewish background.

Multiple Attestation: Mark Goodacre was an appropriate person to speak on this one, given his rejection of Q.  Without Q, the supposed layers of independent sources tends to collapse.  The bottom line is that when it is quite possible these authors knew of each other's writings, the sources cease to be fully independent.

There was some question of whether the discussion might throw the baby (Jesus) out with the bath water (a Grathianism). I personally think of it more of a correction than a complete abandonment.  I will continue to use these sorts of factors in historical discussion. They are just far from foolproof in terms of historical method.  And maybe John Byron will get Scot McKnight into some conference on the historical Jesus and Christian theology.

Should a Pastor Endorse a Candidate?

This Sunday a number of pastors will observe Pulpit Freedom Sunday, including our own Jim Garlow of Skyline Wesleyan Church.  Here he is on the Stephen Colbert report this week:



The idea is to protest the 1954 law that says that if you are to keep your tax exempt status with the IRS as a church, you can not officially endorse a candidate.  The idea was not to take away the freedom of religion to endorse a candidate, but to insist that if you are receiving tax exempt status, you should not lobby for a political candidate (by the way, none of the freedoms of the Constitution are absolute... terrorists can't express their freedom of religion by blowing up stuff). The churches involved in Pulpit Freedom Sunday are wanting the IRS to try to remove their tax exempt status so that they can take it to court and settle the issue once and for all.

Now I don't know if Jim's right on the argument.  He may be right. Colbert's certainly right that he has some, shall we say, stern stuff to poke the hornet's nest. My point in posting this is not to argue over whether they are right on the principle.  It's to argue that it's not a good idea to endorse a candidate from the pulpit in general.

In fact, it would be appropriate for a church like the Wesleyan Church to officially recommend to its pastors not to be too obvious from the pulpit who you as pastor will vote for and not to let individuals in the congregation use the church to lobby in a way that seems to give them the official sanction of the church.  Now it would be one thing if Hitler were running for President.  Then you should certainly take a stand, assuming you knew what he was doing.  Similarly, I think it is appropriate to raise moral questions about various values expressed in the public sphere. There is a time to speak the truth and be willing to go to jail or die for it.

But there are at least two reasons not to go too far politically in the pulpit:

1. The Christian choice may not be as clear as you think it is.
Some might respond to my paragraph above with something like, "Obama/Romney is pretty much on the level of Hitler."  I doubt God agrees.  There will be respected Wesleyan leaders who vote for Romney and think the choice as a Christian is pretty clear, and there will be respected Wesleyan leaders who vote for Obama and think the choice as a Christian is pretty clear.  The former might mention things like abortion and stealing; the latter might mention things like the poor and equality.

But that is just background to the main reason:

2. If you too overtly play to one side of the political spectrum, you effectively expel half of those to whom God calls you to minister.
Would a Christian Democrat feel comfortable attending your church?  Would a Christian Republican feel comfortable attending your church?  It goes both ways.  There are pastors who would do more than raise questions from the pulpit about the Iraq War, and there are pastors who would do more than raise questions about "redistributing the wealth" from the pulpit.

Frankly, even if you are convinced that the other side is Hitler, why would you present your understanding in a way that would drive Democrat/Republican "sinners" away?  Don't you want to lead them to Christ?  Hitting them over the head with a hammer of condemnation for being morally stupid probably is not a very effective evangelistic tool.

I still think that Richard Mouw is far more right than wrong.  In general, Christians should stick more to underlying values and principles than to endorsing/condemning specific legislation or candidates.  It's not an absolute rule, just a good idea most of the time. The Wesleyan Church has at times gone further. Our leaders endorsed the DREAM Act and the most recent General Conference, while stopping short of talking about specific legislation, clearly took a stand against gay marriage. But I'm glad that, even on the last issue, the General Board wisely took out specific references to Obama and specific legislation that had initially come out of the proposal from its sponsoring district.

So I don't know if the law is constitutional or not, but it's usually a good idea not to endorse a candidate anyway.

Brain Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently.

continuing my review of Brain Rules
__________
The third rule of John Medina's book is fairly straightforward.  Each of our brains is uniquely wired. He spends a bit of time going into the actual physical structure of the brain. A neuron (brain cell) is like a fried egg (53).  The white is like cytoplasm, the yolk like the nucleus.  If you smashed the egg with your foot, the points of the resultant star would be like dendrites. Stretch out one of the points of that star and squish the end and you have an axon with an axon terminal (53-54).

This is a nerve cell, a neuron.  The space between them, the synaptic cleft, is swimming with molecules (neurotransmitters) that float back and forth between neurons (55).  Each of these is part of a dense forest of branches.  "When we arrive at the hippocampal neuron, it looks as if we've landed in an ancient, underwater forest... Everywhere there are submerged jumbles of branches, limbs, and large, trunk-like objects. And everywhere sparks of electric current run up and down those trunks" (54).

Where is he going with this description?  "These branches appear to be moving" (56).  We are observing the brain learning.  "As neurons learn, they swell, sway, and split" (57).  "The brain is constantly rewiring itself."  And the more activity you do, the more complex your brain becomes (58).  For example, the brains of wild animals are 15-30% larger than the brains of their domesticated equivalents.

The human brain grows in neuron density at different points of life.  Babies start with about the same number of connections as adults (58-59).  Then at 3 years old, the number of connections has doubled or even tripled at some points.  Then they reduce to about the same as adult again until puberty.  Then once again, the number of connections spikes.

These connections are unique to every individual.  Even identical twins will wire up differently, even just because they are sitting at a different place on the couch watching TV (61-62). In a fascinating example, Medina tells how one brain surgeon who works with epilepsy has to spend hours at the beginning of surgery "mapping" the brain of the person he's operating on (64-65). Each brain is wired differently, so he has to spend some time probing the patient's brain to find what he needs to cut out.

Medina talks about how a person will have a specific neuron that fires when they look at a picture of Jennifer Aniston 60-61). (On a side note, it may more likely be a specific circuit of neurons that remember Jennifer Aniston rather than a single neuron).  The point is that our memory consists of "experience dependent" wiring that we create as we go through and experience life (60).  This is in contrast to "experience independent" wiring and "experience expectant" wiring that is set up for things like vision and language acquisition.

Here is the fundamental principle: "Learning results in physical changes in the brain, and these changes are unique to each individual" (62).  Our brains are like the United States road network.  "We have the neural equivalents of large interstate freeways, turnpikes, and state highways.  These big trunks are the same from one person to the next" (63).  These parts are predictable from person to person.  "It's when you get to the smaller routes--the brain's equivalent of residential streets, one-laners and dirt roads--that the individual patterns begin to show up."

Howard Gardner is a leader of the Multiple Intelligences movement (63). His sense of the diversity of the brain has led him to suggest seven categories of intelligence: "verbal/linguistic, musical/rhythmic, logical/mathematical, spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal" (64).  Excellence in one area doesn't assure excellence in another.  Indeed, the chapter begins by contrasting how well Michael Jordan, the famous basketball player, was at basketball with how poorly he did at baseball.  His brain was wired to be genius at the one and average at the other.

The take-away of the chapter is that the current set up of education, which expects certain goals at a certain age, does not sufficiently take the uniqueness of individuals into account (67). "For example, about 10 percent of students do not have brains sufficiently wired to read at the age at which we expect them to read."  The solution?  The first is smaller class size.

"Given that every brain is wired differently, being able to read a student's mind is a powerful tool in the hands of a teacher" (67).  Medina believes that the best teachers and communicators are inevitably those who have "advanced Theory of Mind skills," by which he means those who have skills at being able to read other people's minds, as in chapter 2 over survival.  "An advanced skill set in Theory of Mind predicts a good teacher" (68).  But a teacher is going to have more difficulty getting to know the unique make-up of specific individuals if the classes are too large.

Secondly, instruction should be customized to the individual student (68).  This follows naturally from the fact that each person's brain is uniquely wired.  Again, it will be virtually impossible to do anything along these lines if classes are too large.  Increasingly, computer software can help.  Medina suggests that a combination of empathetic teachers with adaptive software that fills in the gaps in an individual's competencies might be optimal for learning.  Ultimately, we might "dismantle altogether grade structures based on age" (69).

Brain Rule 2: The Brain Evolved...

For various reasons I find myself having to read through a book called Brain Rules.  The first two chapters are fascinating, although no doubt many will push back on its evolutionary approach.  The first chapter gives John Medina's first rule: Exercise!  Even a little exercise improves brain power.

He takes an evolutionary perspective.  Humans evolved to move.  That's how we survived as a species, he will say in the second chapter.  We moved 12 miles a day on average in the early days of our ancestors, he says.  It's stupid to cut recess out of public school education, he says.  It's like eating less in order to gain weight. I think this is the chapter where he says it cuts the risk of Alzheimers by something like 60%.

His second rule is that the brain evolved too.  It's a fascinating chapter.  "The brain appears to be designed to (1) solve problems (2) related to surviving (3) in an unstable outdoor environment, and (4) to do so in nearly constant motion" (31-32).  It did this so that we could survive long enough to have sex, have children, and live long enough to protect them to grow up to have more sex and children.  From a Christian perspective, I might add, it's not a particular grandiose view of humanity, but we are at least this much.  We may be more, but we are at least this much.

Later on in the chapter, he has a rather crass, even if possibly accurate sense of how the human womb evolved.  The key to the survival of our species, Medina claims, is not that we got stronger but that we got smarter (32, 37).  This meant that those with bigger brains--and thus bigger heads--survived more effectively than others.  This meant that women with larger wombs survived birth better--and that babies came out sooner.  Now parenting and childhood had to take place for years, unlike species where the offspring come out pretty much ready to go.

Medina has a fascinating version of human evolution.  We should keep in mind not only that his account may be debatable to some Christians but also among evolutionary experts themselves. Medina traces the key to our evolution to fundamental changes in the earth's weather (35).  It knocked our human ancestors out of the trees and onto flat ground that made offspring who stood upright and moved around a lot better suited to survive than those bent over.

Here is one of the take-aways from this chapter. We survived as a species, he says in so many words, because we became a species that improvises and adapts to new environments rather than staying in the same place.  We moved out all over the globe and adapted wherever we went.  His take-away for learning is something called Variability Selection Theory.  Learning is the interaction between two powerful features of the brain: "a database in which to store a fund of knowledge, and the ability to improvise off of that database.  One allows us to know when we've made mistakes.  The other allows us to learn from them" (37-38).

His conclusion is that "any learning environment that deals with only the database instincts or only the improvisatory instincts ignores one half of our ability."  Learning should not err on either extreme.  It should both provide content of knowledge and develop creative skills to be able to improvise and apply knowledge to new situations.

No matter how a person thinks the human brain developed, Medina's evolutionary model helps us picture what the three basic parts of the brain do.  First, we have a "lizard brain," basically our medula, our brain stem.  "The brain stem controls most of your body's housekeeping chores" (40), like breathing, heart rate, sleeping, and waking.

Then we have a second brain sitting on top of it, our mammalian or cat brain.  It is the seat of our emotions and animal functions like fighting, feeding, fleeing, and reproductive behavior.  The amygdala is responsible for emotions and emotional memory.  The hippocampus converts short term into long term memory.  The thalamus is the "control tower of the senses" (41).

But the human brain overshadowing these other parts is the cortex.  It is the part where our ability to fantasize comes from.  Humans can uniquely "attribute characteristics and meanings to things that don't actually possess them" (33).  Medina draws on "Dual Representation Theory" and actually starts off the chapter with the story of his son treating a stick as a sword (31).

This higher function of our brains allows us to "peer inside somebody's mental life and make predictions" (44).  It allows us to pool our strength together in order to survive.  That is the title of the chapter, Survival.  Rather than evolve stronger, Medina says, we decided to cooperate with each other and face that Wooley Mammoth together (43-44).

Accordingly, relationship is important to learning.  In his summary of the chapter, one of Medina's points is that "Symbolic reasoning... may have arisen from our need to understand one another's intentions and motivations, allowing us to coordinate within a group" (47).  And as a by-product, poor relationships between teacher and learner can often sabotage learning.

Brian Bernius on Philistines...

Brian Bernius teaches Old Testament in the undergraduate School of Theology and Ministry here at IWU.  He's about to defend his dissertation at Hebrew Union.  He gave a great presentation on the Philistines in the Latter Prophets at the Theological Research Seminar we have on campus at 4pm on Mondays.

Great stuff!  His work will undoubtedly become the standard "go to" resource on the Philistines.  His main thesis on the Philistines in the Prophets is that references to the Philistines are mostly geographical-political in nature rather than ethnic.  They are the people to the west, the people who live in the five cities.  It is an external rather than internal term.  It refers to the people in a place rather than making a statement about culture or ethnicity, other than the obvious fact that they are non-Israelite.

Catholic Catechism 4: Resurrection, Spirit, Church

Continuing my take-away from our Monday reading group going through the Roman Catholic Catechism to compare it with Wesleyan theology:

Week 1: Introduction and Revelation
Week 2: God the Father
Week 3: Jesus' Birth, Life, Death

This week's reading of the catechism was over Part 1, Section 2, chapter 2, articles 5-9.  This is over Jesus' resurrection, exaltation, as well as the beginning of the third part of the Apostle's Creed relating to the Spirit and the Church.
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1. Keith Drury remarked that if Wesleyans had a catechism this long and filled in all the blanks, we might be definite on a long of things that aren't very central. For example, you will not find any Wesleyan position on what Jesus did in between his death and resurrection.  I am fine with saying "he descended to the dead" in the Apostle's Creed, but would rather not say much more.

Of course I'm not too fond of the frequently heard Calvinist sense that he partook of the punishment of hell, "he descended to hell" in the punitive sense.  But I have no need, as the RC catechism does to distinguish between hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.  According to the catechism, it was apparently Paradise to which Christ descended, the place where the OT saints had gone.

This is a possible way of interpreting a few biblical texts, but not something I would be too concerned to spell out.

2. The catechism makes it clear that Christ's resurrection was literal and physical, not metaphorical or spiritual.

3. Jesus' literal return to earth at some point in the future is also declared.  It actually sounds like it teaches that ethnic Israel will turn to Christ at his return.  In fact, it almost sounds pre-millennial, with mention of an Antichrist and a final trial.  I'm very happy that the Wesleyan Church intentionally does not take a position on how the end will come, except for a general belief in the second coming.

4. Wesleyans often associate baptism with new birth but not in as close a way as RCatholics do.  A person might experience new birth before or after baptism.  Indeed, a person might never be baptized and experience new birth.  If a Wesleyan were to have a child baptized, it would appropriate the symbolism of inclusion without associating the baptism with new birth.  I should note that while I am using the language of symbolism, Wesleyans do consider baptism a sacrament and thus a means of grace, which is something more than a mere symbol.

5. Wesleyans do not associate the revelation of the Holy Spirit with the RCatholic Magisterium or in much of its sacramental liturgy, although we believe it is possible that the Spirit might speak at times through them, just as he can speak through anything.

6. Wesleyans generally do not think of Confirmation as a sacrament, although certainly we do not have a problem with catechetical discipleship or that God can use it as a means of grace.  This section at one point mentions the "seven" sacraments.  Wesleyans really only believe in two, although we believe God can use anything he wants as a means of grace, so he could use the other 5 if he wanted to on some occasion.

7. A lot of material on the way God works and then the anticipation of Christ in the OT that Wesleyans wouldn't have a problem with.  Wesleyans wouldn't have a problem with most of what the catechism says about the Holy Spirit.

8. Wesleyans don't have a problem with the Church being "one," "holy," and "apostolic."  There is almost nothing in this section on the church to which a Wesleyan would object, except perhaps one side comment on Mary, since Wesleyans would not consider Mary to be without sin.

So, out of 43 pages, there were two or three tangential comments we would disagree with.  The rest is pretty much common ground.

Prelude to Merger (1950s/60s): Black and Drury

The review reaches chapters 14-15 today from Bob Black and Keith Drury's, The Story of the Wesleyan Church. So far it's been:

Chaps 1-2  About Wesley and the origins of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in abolitionism
Chaps 3-4  About its activist early days that were low church, pro-women (and anti- some other things)
Chaps 5-6  The post-Civil War let down, when the best and brightest returned to the Methodists
Chaps 7-8  Birth of Pilgrim Holiness Church
Chapter 9   Multiple Ministries
Chapters 10-11 Roaring Holiness 20s
Chapters 12-13 Institutional Solidification (30s/40s)

Now chapters 14 and 15 on the 1950s and 60s:
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Chapter 14
As I look at this chapter, I see two major things that were going on the 50s.  The first were the struggles of both denominations with legalism.  There were those in both churches that didn't believe a Christian should own a TV (hellovision) or a wedding ring.  There were those who treated divorce like an unpardonable sin--even if your spouse left you (innocent party) and remarried, even if you had biblical grounds for divorce (e.g., an affair), you could never remarry until your first spouse died.

My parents always felt that one set of my grandparents wouldn't visit our house for several years because they thought we were hiding a television in our stereo. I've even heard the idea that a divorced and remarried person would ideally divorce his/her second spouse because in God's eyes you're married to the first person you have sex with.

(This view is problematic for more than one reason. First, Deuteronomy 24 actually prohibits a person from returning to a first spouse after you've divorced them.  More importantly, this "ontological" view of sex, where the act itself is what marries you in unbreakable glue, simply doesn't match the way the NT talks about sex.  For example, Paul would never have wanted someone to marry the prostitute of 1 Corinthians 6 if she were the first person you had sex with.

Sexual sin is like other sins.  You repent of the act and move on. In my opinion, any view of divorce that sees it as something like an unpardonable sin implicitly slaps Christ in the face and says, well, his death is strong enough to atone for the sin but it's not powerful enough to restore you.)

Most of those groups would leave the denomination in the lead up to the merger.  The Allegheny Conference in Pennsylvania, the New York Pilgrims, a significant number of churches in Tennessee would leave.  I had one relative tell my father he was in danger of hell if he stayed with the Wesleyans in the merger. These sentiments seem so obviously foolish today, it makes you wonder what about us will make Christians of the future shake their heads.

The second thing going on were improvements in the organizations.  The Wesleyan Methodists would move their HQ to Marion after a fire in NY.  Then in 1965, a tornado people here in town still talk about would destroy that relatively new building.  The fact that the WMs rebuilt almost guaranteed it would end up as the merged HQ.  This was unfortunate, since the Pilgrim HQ in Indy was much better located for access to the airport and to be an international hub.  Unsurprisingly, the WC moved its HQ back to Indianapolis in 1987, less than twenty years later.  Indiana Wesleyan bought the old HQ and uses it as office space to this day.

There were major improvements in children's and youth ministry.  We started having youth camps.  The denomination became associated with Asbury Seminary.  What would later become Oklahoma Wesleyan was moved to its current location in Bartlesville.  (Russ Gunsalus' grandfather is mentioned here for his foresight on how they could have merged even more schools at that time--something they rejected at the time but would eventually end up doing). Skyline Wesleyan was founded also at this time, which would become the largest Wesleyan church.

Chapter 15
This was the lead up to merger chapter.  It almost happened in 59, but the separatist groups in the Wesleyan Methodist Church caused it to come up one vote shy.  In another one of those smart political moves, in the 1966 conference that voted for merger, the conference voted to remove the vote of some of these conferences for not following the rules of the denomination prior to voting on merger.  Of course most of them didn't even come, I guess.

Another wise decision was not to make some of the most contentious decisions until after the merger had already taken place.  What colleges would be closed and merged? (Frankfort would be closed in the early 70s)  What would be the boundaries of the new districts?  Where would the new HQ be located?

Also in 1966, the Reformed Baptist Alliance from Canada merged with the Wesleyan Methodist Church, just prior to the merger with the Pilgrims. Despite the name, they were a holiness denomination who had been the first group to ordain a woman in Canada (1901).  They were granted two exceptions from Wesleyan Methodist polity.  They only practiced immersion and had a more restrictive position on divorce.  (Anybody know if they still have these exceptions?)  Their greatest contribution was Bethany Bible College (now Kingswood).

Both voted for merger, which would happen in 1968.

7 The Sufficiency of Scripture

Continuing my weekly series reviewing Grudem's Systematic Theology: http://cafetutorials.blogspot.com/2012/07/christian-theology.html

This week is chapter 7, "The Sufficiency of Scripture."
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Summary
Grudem defines the sufficiency of Scripture as follows: "The sufficiency of Scripture means that Scripture contained all the words of God he intended his people to have at each stage of redemptive history, and that it now contains all the words of God we need for salvation, for trusting him perfectly, and for obeying him perfectly" (127).

The sufficiency of Scripture for Grudem means that we focus our search for God's words to us on the Bible alone (128) and have confidence that "we will be able to find what God requires us to think or do" on all our doctrinal or moral questions (129).  This sufficiency is now complete, although it unfolded in stages.  So at the time of the death of Moses, Grudem believes the first five books of the Bible were sufficient for God's people at that time (130).  No further central redemptive acts have occurred since the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ (and the unpacking of these events in the New Testament).

Grudem gives several practical applications that come from the sufficiency of Scripture:

1. We should be encouraged that everything God wants to tell us to think or do about an issue is found in Scripture (131).  It may not always speak directly to our questions, of course, but it will at least do so indirectly if it is a matter of concern to God.

2. We are to add nothing to Scripture and to consider no other writings of equal value to Scripture.

3. "God does not require us to believe anything about himself or his redemptive work that is not found in Scripture" (132).

4. "No modern revelations from God are to be placed on a level equal to Scripture in authority" (132).

5. "Nothing is sin that is not forbidden by Scripture either explicitly or by implication."

6. "Nothing is required of us by God that is not commanded in Scripture either explicitly or by implication" (133).

7. "We should emphasize what Scripture emphasizes and be content with what God has told us in Scripture" (134).  There are many topics that receive "relatively little direct emphasis in Scripture" (135), and while the Bible may have things to say about many of these things, these are not the areas that Christians should be focusing on.

Evaluation
The idea of the sufficiency of the Scriptures--like the clarity of Scripture--flows directly out of the Reformation and Martin Luther's debates with the Roman Catholic Church (RCC).  Luther believed rightly that the Roman Catholic Church had added a number of doctrines and practices that are not clearly taught in the Bible.  The Protestant dictum of "sola scriptura," "Scripture only," was thus a battle cry meant to peel back these accretions, things like purgatory and requiring priests to be celibate.

The place of my own tradition--the Wesleyan tradition--in relation to sola scriptura is a little ambiguous.  Perhaps prima scriptura, "Scripture first," would be a little more accurate description of the practice of John Wesley, the father of Methodism.  He is often said to have operated more in terms of a "quadrilateral" consisting of Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience, with Scripture primary.  Nevertheless, the sufficiency of Scripture is taught in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican tradition from which Methodist churches like mine emerged, and the sufficiency of Scripture is in the Articles of Religion of my own Wesleyan denomination. (They are also implied by the Westminster Confession of the Reformed and in Cornelius Van Til's four characteristics that Grudem is building on)

Do I believe that the Scriptures are sufficient?  Absolutely I do, and especially in two ways.  Let me start with the easy one.  The Scriptures are entirely sufficient for any matter of ethics because all of God's expectations are summed up in "Love God and love neighbor," where love of God means that one is completely surrendered to his will as you know it, and love of neighbor includes living lovingly toward one's enemies.  The rest is working out the specifics.

The specifics are where Grudem and I no doubt will get into some disagreements, because it seems inevitable to me that many of the specific commands of Scripture were contextual and situational.  Nor do I think it will be always easy to hone in on specific answers to ethical questions.  In a complex world, love of neighbor can be a complex matter to work out and the Bible may or may not give much help.  What is that verse about stem cell research again?  I strongly suspect that Grudem's idea of finding answers in Scripture will often turn out to be just plain bad interpretation.

Secondly, I believe that Scripture contains "all things necessary to salvation," as the Thirty-Nine articles read.  I would distinguish what God requires of us for salvation from the truths about how salvation works, with God judging us according to our (God-empowered) response to the light we have.  But the fundamentals of how salvation works are even then quite sufficiently laid out in Scripture: God's loving grace, Christ's death, and my faith, all clearly there in Scripture.

But the Protestant sense of sufficiency goes well beyond what I just said.  For example, the sense that the Thirty-Nine articles have is that "whatever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man or woman that it should be believed as an article of faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation." So if the Bible doesn't require celibacy--or complete abstinence from alcohol--then no denomination should either. Groups that forbid having organs in worship because the Bible doesn't mention organs are ruled out of bounds.

As common-sensical as this sounds, the matter may be a little more complicated when we get into the details.  Where, for example, does the Bible prohibit polygamy?  Don't go for "the two shall become one flesh," because Jacob became one flesh with two wives and two concubines.  The Old Testament freely allows polygamy (check out the rule in Deuteronomy 21:15-17), and the New Testament never explicitly prohibits it.  I think it assumes monogamy in 1 Corinthians 7, but never commands it.  No doubt Grudem thinks he can prove it from Scripture but, then again, he practices strange magic.

Similarly, it was about 400 years before most Christians believed in the Trinity in its current form.  The main competition, Arianism, believed Jesus was the first of God's creation, the most exalted of all beings, but not "of the same substance" as God the Father.  The key is that Arians made their arguments from Scripture just like their (winning) opponents did. Sure, we can read a statement like "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30) and fill it with our Trinitarian assumptions.  I think God is fine with us reading it that way now.  But it is not at all clear that John was saying anything related to the Trinity originally.

Although I don't want to get into the weeds, I would claim that when the Protestant Reformers (and when Grudem) speaks of the sufficiency of Scripture in matters doctrinal, they really mean the sufficiency of Scriptures as interpreted once the Trinitarian and Christological controversies of the first five centuries were over.  Basically, the Scriptures are sufficient for Christian doctrine if they are interpreted the way they were once the theology of common Christendom was established.  But one at least might argue that the Reformers did not actually peel back doctrine all the way to the New Testament church but back to the interpretations of the Bible that became dominant by around the year 451 at the Council of Chalcedon, when the Nicene Creed was finalized.

What would you like a post on?

No post this morning... except this one ;-)

What kinds of things do you like me posting on?  What kinds of posts would you like to see going forward?  Any questions you'd like me to dig around on?

The Messianic Secret

One of the features of Mark's Gospel is the fact that Jesus keeps his identity as Messiah a secret.  The demons recognize him as the Holy One of Israel from the beginning but he silences them. But even near the end of his time on earth, when his disciples finally acknowledge him as Christ, he tells them to keep it a secret. It is an issue that's been around for a century: Why does he keep it a secret?

William Wrede famously suggested in 1901 that the reason Mark has Jesus keep his identity a secret is because Jesus never actually claimed to be the Messiah. His suggestion was that the early Christians found themselves in the awkward position of believing Jesus to be the promised king when he himself had never claimed that himself. The solution was to argue that Jesus had known he was the Messiah but had kept it a secret.

There are, however, two strong historical arguments that Jesus did in fact believe himself to be the Messiah. The first is that he designated twelve disciples. [1]The tradition may vary a little on the precise names of the twelve, but all the layers of tradition consistently give the number as twelve. This is true from Paul (1 Cor. 15:5) to John (e.g., 6:70; 20:24) to the Synoptics (e.g., Mark 3:13-19). The number is surely symbolic of the twelve tribes of Israel. And since Jesus does not include himself among the twelve, he is surely the king of the tribes.

Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem seems another strong indication he thought himself king. His entrance at the beginning of Passion Week seems deliberately calculated to echo Zechariah 9:9.  Jesus comes riding into town on a donkey, with the crowd laying palm branches down before him. Certainly there are other possible explanations. Some might say this story is a later invention created from certain verses in the Old Testament. Another might suggest that Jesus was simply mocking the pomp of Herod Antipas' supposed entrance to the city.

But the connection to Herod is highly speculative--Luke is in fact the only Gospel that says he was even there. And in this case it seems far more likely that Old Testament Scriptures would be used to enhance a historical event rather than to invent one. Surely the most likely historical scenario is that Jesus' entrance to Jerusalem on this occasion was memorable. And the fact that Mark, the earliest Gospel, doesn't make the connection with Zechariah, suggests that he did not invent the donkey to make it look like Jesus was fulfilling the Scripture in Zechariah, that Jesus was implicitly claiming to be king.

I might mention a third item of interest.  The Gospel of Mark seems to connect Jesus' baptism with the beginning of Jesus' messianic activity.  The voice from heaven in Mark speaks only to him: "You are my beloved Son" (1:11), where Son of God is a royal title, the title of a king. We get the impression that something changed for Jesus at the baptism. Was it even at this point that Jesus in his human understanding realizes that he was the promised king?

So if Jesus did understand himself to be the promised Messiah, why didn't he publicize it?  A strong possibility is that, at the very least, Jesus had no intention to lead an armed revolt against the Romans. That is of course how the crowds would have understood Messiah.  If Jesus had gone around claiming that he was the coming king, then all the low life of Galilee would have grabbed their swords.

Indeed, it does not even compute for Peter that a messiah would die.  The Messiah won't die.  He'll win.  He'll kick the Romans out of town and restore the kingdom to Israel (Acts 1:6).  In a sense, Jesus wasn't the messiah they were looking for.  It thus made perfect sense for him to keep his destiny close to his chest.

But surely the crowds suspected it anyway.  Indeed, although Jesus also tries to keep his healing ministry somewhat low key, those he heals don't listen to him when he tells them to keep things quiet (e.g., Mark 1:44-45).  Jesus seems to be waiting for God's timing.  He tries to keep his activities and destiny hush hush because he knows the timing the crowds would want.

[1] So E P Sanders, Jesus and Judaism.

Christian Vote Matrix

If you want to decide who to vote for as a Christian mathematically:

1. Go through the list and decide between Obama and Romney on that issue.
2. If one issue is more important to you than another, double or triple that vote.
3. Add up the totals.  That's who to vote for.

I did this in a half hour this morning, so obviously it can be improved... I've tried to word things in fresh ways, rather than using the catch phrases of the respective parties.

1. Moral Issues: Do you think that the federal government should enforce and implement Christian values that are specifically Christian (e.g., no gay marriage)?  If yes, one vote for Romney.  If no, one vote for Obama.
2. Moral Issues: Do you think that the government should be involved in helping those who currently do not have the means to take care of themselves (e.g., those in poverty, certain elderly)?  If yes, one vote for Obama.  If no, one vote for Romney.
3. Moral Issues: Do you think that monetary wealth is the same as personal property and thus that taxing is stealing if such monies are not used to benefit you personally without your permission (one vote Romney) or do you think that economic systems channel monetary wealth in different ways depending on how they are structured and thus that it is appropriate to distribute monies more evenly throughout the system (one vote Obama)?
4. Economy: Do you think that austerity measures and low taxes are more likely to grow the economy and thus help more people (one vote Romney) or stimulus and selective taxes (one vote Obama)?
5. Foreign Policy: Do you think Obama or Romney is more likely to facilitate greater long term peace in the world?
6. Foreign Policy: Do you think an Obama or Romney administration is more likely to see people come to Christ around the world in the long run?
7. Education: Do you think that the overall educational system in America will improve more under Obama or Romney?  Part of this equation is whether you think that the overall education situation will improve more if opportunities for private education are increased (Romney) or whether more attention needs to go to the public school system (Obama).
6. Judges: Do you think that Supreme Court judges need to be appointed who will eventually vote that Roe vs. Wade was inappropriate because the federal government was intruding on an issue that is more properly an issue for the States to decide (vote Romney) or do you think judges need to be appointed who will continue federal priority over the positions of individual states on these sorts of issues (vote Obama)?
7. Immigration: Do you think that law-abiding individuals (apart from their illegal status) who have lived in the US for decades, especially Latinas/os, should be given an opportunity to become legal?  If yes, one vote Obama.  If no, one vote Romney.
8. Abortion: Do you think that the law should do everything within its power to discourage abortion, including requiring intensely physical examinations (then one vote Romney) or do you think it is better to focus on preventing pregnancies and promoting adoption among those who might otherwise have an abortion (then one vote Obama).

Addendum: I have tried to word these in a way that, no matter which way you went, you could be expressing Christian values in your choice.  Here's the most important question of all for pastors out there: Would Christians who go both ways on the choices above feel comfortable in your church this Fall?  If not, are we not harming the church?

Catholic Catechism 3: Jesus' Birth, Life, Death

Continuing my take-away from our Monday reading group going through the Roman Catholic Catechism to compare it with Wesleyan theology:

Week 1: Introduction and Revelation
Week 2: God the Father

This week's reading of the catechism was over Part 1, Section 2, chapter 2, articles 1-4.  This is over most of the second part of the Apostle's Creed, through Jesus' death.
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Most of this section is common Christianity.  There's also some pretty good biblical scholarship that felt very familiar to me.  My real transition toward scholarship took place in the late 80s and early 90s.  I guess the Catechism was written in the 80s, so the approach to Christ that focused on titles was popular.  Think James Dunn's Christology in the Making.

This chapter sets out the doctrine of Christ held by all orthodox Christians, claims that steer away from the classic heresies.  Jesus was fully and truly human, so no Docetism.  Jesus was not two persons joined together, so no Nestorianism.  But Jesus had both a human and a divine nature, so no Monophytism.  He had a genuine human will despite having a divine will as well, so no Monothelitism. Jesus wasn't a physical body with a divine soul, so no Apollinarianism.

Most of the theories of atonement are here.  There is Jesus' death as a sacrifice and satisfaction.  There is Jesus' death as a substitution.  There is Jesus' life as a moral example.  The Catechism even interprets Jesus' fulfillment of the Law as him keeping the Law perfectly, which isn't what Matthew 5 means in my opinion.  Matthew 5:17 is interpreted by the examples in the rest of the chapter.  Fulfilling the law is playing it out in the light of the love command, being complete like our heavenly Fathers is complete (5:48).  Going the whole way, not just half way.

There are of course some elements that are weird to Protestants.  Once you understand it, we don't have a problem with calling Mary the "Mother of God."  It simply means that Jesus was always God, even in the womb (so no adoptionism). But the idea of the perpetual virginity of Mary will be weird to most Protestants--the idea that even throughout the birth process her physical virginity remained intact.  Protestants feel free to interpret the New Testament in its most natural sense, namely, that Mary went on to have more children that were Jesus' biological brothers and sisters.

Our group suspected that the RCatholic aversion to Mary having sex was similar to the way some Protestants feel about Jesus having a wife, that having sex would somehow make Jesus less pure or perfect.  It's a "sex is dirty" subconscious thing. But since having sex isn't dirty in the slightest, there's no need for Mary to remain a virgin forever, even if she were without sin, which Protestants generally don't believe either. Also, we don't say Hail Marys, although we occasionally like them in football.

The tradition that Peter was specifically the rock of the church is also not crucial for Protestants. We are free to follow the historical evidence wherever it lies, which is that the church at Rome was likely there decades before Paul, let alone Peter ever got there. Having said that, I am sympathetic to the suggestion of Brown and Meier that Roman Christianity may have been more "Petrine" in flavor than "Pauline." They are Roman Catholic New Testament scholars. If Hebrews was written to Rome, it along with Romans supports this theory.

But despite these minor exceptions, the overwhelming majority of these 70 pages or so was pretty much the same as what Wesleyans and Protestants believe. We're even celebrating Advent more and more, and I preached an Epiphany sermon once at a Wesleyan Church on the text of the wise men, so we can check that one off the list...

Institutional Solidification (30s/40s): Black and Drury

The review reaches chapters 11-12 today from Bob Black and Keith Drury's, The Story of the Wesleyan Church. So far it's been:

Chaps 1-2  About Wesley and the origins of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in abolitionism
Chaps 3-4  About its activist early days that were low church, pro-women (and anti- some other things)
Chaps 5-6  The post-Civil War let down, when the best and brightest returned to the Methodists
Chaps 7-8  Birth of Pilgrim Holiness Church
Chapter 9   Multiple Ministries
Chapters 10-11 Roaring Holiness 20s

And now chapters 12 and 13.
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Chapter 12
The Pilgrims seemed resistant to centralization, but the Great Depression was the kind of crisis that facilitated the move to one General Superintendent.  Seth Rees died (1933) and Walter Surbrook took over.  It would push Finch out (the man who had so successfully raised money for himself and missions), first out of head leadership and eventually out of the denomination.

In a denomination everyone would consider extreme today, he was even more extreme.  The leaders of the church would push him out of control of the Colorado Springs Bible School and he would leave the denomination to form another that would split into another.  He is a great example of the paradox that was the Pilgrim church.  It was formed by so many mergers and yet so many of these groups were just as quick to pull back out.  The New York Pilgrims, for example, would pull back out in the early 60s over things like wedding rings.

In retrospect, you have to wonder how much damage to the kingdom went along with the good these groups were doing.  How many people they brought to faith left just as quickly in bitterness because of the legalism, "twice as much a child of hell as before."

But the Pilgrim church, and to a lesser extent the Wesleyan Methodists, were growing significantly because of 5 things: 1) revival meetings, 2) camp meetings, 3) Sunday Schools, 4) Church planting, 5) Bible schools.

I was with my mother this weekend and we read this chapter together.  She actually has some candlestick holders that were Walter Surbrook's, bought from his daughter at an auction at Southern Wesleyan.  In the 1930s, Frankfort Pilgrim College closed for a time sending my grandfather Harry Shepherd elsewhere.  First, he taught at an early attempt to start a Bible college in Kernersville, North Carolina (it didn't take the first time--this attempt was by a former president of Central Wesleyan). He pastored a couple churches (at the same time) in Virginia.  Then he taught a year at Kingswood in Kentucky.  Finally he would pastor some churches in southern Indiana before Frankfort reopened in the late 30s.  My father's father also pastored Pilgrim churches around Indiana in the 30s, as he had in the 20s.

The story of the Storey's in the Philippines--the death of his daughter from drinking from a river and their participation in the "death march" led by the Japanese is also one well known to my family.  My mother was a student at Frankfort when they returned after the liberation of their prison camp and my mom recalls how they led a joyful procession to downtown Frankfort.  My grandfather retired from teaching when R. K. Storey was later president of Frankfort.

My sister Juanita was a missionary to the Philippines later in the 70s and married Eduardo Garcia, son of Saturnino Garcia, the first General Superintendent of the Philippines.  And I have childhood memories of Flora Belle Slater and Daisy Buby, a couple of lifelong missionaries who only bring a smile to my face in retrospect.

Chapter 13
In the 40s, the Wesleyan Methodists went to a single General Superintendent in the person of Roy Nicholson, whom I remember from my days at Southern.  At the last General Conference, Lee Haines remarked that he seriously regretted recommending only one General, but those were days before jet setting and serious delegation.  He appears to have been the voice of wisdom in stopping more legalistic districts from having a higher standard than the denomination as a whole on wedding rings and such.

There have been several moments of clever politics and hard decisions in the denomination. One was over wedding rings where, after legalistic groups had fought over and over to prohibit members from having them, the leaders put a stance against wedding rings in a section called "Special Directions."  But the ruling thereafter of the leaders was that this section was not binding on members, only a recommendation.  It was that same section that would later have positions on not going to movies and such, which even denominational officials tended to ignore.  At the General Conference before last, they finally removed the special direction on buying on Sunday.

It's no skin off the Free Methodist's nose, but the Wesleyans have almost merged with them so many times.  More on this to come.  Also, more to come on the rise of neo-evangelicalism in the late 40s.

Grudem: Necessity of Scripture 2

...continued from yesterday
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Not-necessary
Grudem does not consider the Bible necessary 1) for a person to believe God exists or 2) to have a moral conscience. He simply doesn't believe this level of knowledge is sufficient to save a person. By contrast, Hebrews 11:6 came to mind: "Without faith it is impossible to please him, for the one who comes to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who diligently seek him." Can a person who, to the best of their understanding, loves God and loves neighbor be saved through Christ, despite not knowing about him?

I personally, coming from the Wesleyan-pietist tradition, find it hard to see God consigning to hell those who never had a chance, those who do not have the privilege of having the Bible or its message. It is an extension, on the one hand, of the fact that I don't believe in deterministic predestination.  On the other hand, it is an extension of my belief in prevenient grace, that God gives some light to everyone in the world. Christianity otherwise seems incoherent.

So my sympathies here are the logical conclusion of my own Christian tradition's core values, although my own tradition has not necessarily been consistent on the topic.  It is a hope based on big principles in Scripture like the fact that God looks on the heart and wants everyone to be saved. In other words, it comes from an understanding of God's fundamental nature as love. If God consigns the vast majority of humanity to hell for an ignorance that is no fault of their own, it is hard to imagine how he can be considered loving in any normal sense of the word. Similarly, if God consigns people to heaven primarily on the basis of cognitive knowledge, he seems rather shallow.

That is not to say that there are not difficulties with this position. What then am I to do with Romans 10 and the evangelistic enterprise of the early church--or of my own church? It at least helps to realize that words like "gospel" and "evangelism" have been skewed somewhat in their meaning. Once again we see partially why those in Grudem's circles have been scrambling in the face of books like Scot McKnight's King Jesus Gospel and to fight N. T. Wright's version of the new perspective on Paul. It's easy for them simply to decry those like Wesleyan-Arminians with a different theology.  It's another to find some of their own supposed biblical foundations pulled out from under them.

The gospel in Paul is the good news that Jesus has been enthroned king (Rom. 1:1-3) after God raised him victoriously from the dead (1 Cor. 15:1-4).  The gospel in the Gospels has a slightly different focus but it is compatible.  The gospel in the Gospels is the good news that God's kingdom is returning to the earth (Mark 1:14-15), with the resultant good news for the oppressed (Luke 4:18).  Surely the good news includes the whole story, including Jesus' death and the implications in salvation, but the focus is on the reign of God and Christ.

When the early Christians preached the good news (euangelion), they were primarily preaching the lordship of Jesus and the kingdom of God. True, Jesus' atoning death was part of that message (1 Cor. 2:2).  If God's reign is soon coming to the earth and if my sin stands in the way, then Christ's death for my sins is a major concern, and Christ's death is part of the good news.

There is a connection between the rise of modern evangelism and dispensationalism.  In the late 1800s many Christians became convinced that Christ was about to return. At the same time, 2000 years of intervening history was ignored and they saw themselves as the early church of Acts.  Pentecostalism recovered speaking in tongues, as in Acts. While the early church saw the mission to get the good news to the ends of the earth as already accomplished (Col. 1:23), the world had gotten bigger and the reset button was hit on the idea that Christ would return after everyone had heard. Thus the rise of modern missions.

In the early church, the setting was similar but slightly different.  They also, including Paul, thought the Lord would return to earth very soon.  They were preparing the way for this Day of salvation and wrath by preparing everyone for the Lordship of Jesus. They were following the ideal course.  Certainly it's good to be ready for the king's arrival, to have your house in order before he arrives. It thus makes absolute sense to spread the good news of Christ's kingship and the good news of potential salvation.

I won't pretend that this broader understanding of evangelism resolves all the tensions with Romans 10. I'll only point out that the tensions are with other Scriptural principles, not least that God is love and wants everyone to be saved. Paul gives the most normal path in Romans 10, the one built off the fundamental metaphor of the messenger who brings good news from afar that a new king has been enthroned. In this metaphor there is a messenger (like Paul) who brings the good news that Jesus is king.

Is there another option he uses before the messenger arrives?  The path of the patriarchs?  The path of Job?  The path of the Old Testament heroes of faith?  The path of the child or mentally challenged person who does not understand?  I sure hope so.  It's hard to see how Christianity's fundamental claims about God's nature don't disintegrate otherwise.

I end with a final note on the idea of conscience. I do not think that Romans 2:14-15 is about some universal conscience we all have.  Like N. T. Wright and others, I believe the Gentiles in this passage who have the "Law written on their hearts" are Gentile believers who have received the Holy Spirit (cf. Hebrews 10:14-18).  Good thing too, because cultural anthropology has observed that there is very little in the way of a universal conscience around the world.

Most parents protect their children. Most cultures think it wrong to randomly kill someone in your own group. That's about it and there are some "deviant" cultures even on these. The idea of there being a specific moral law built within us doesn't seem to pan out very well in reality. It's a Christian tradition that I'm not sure has much biblical support.

The conscience in the New Testament is one's awareness of sin (Hebrews 10:2-3), which depends on one's understanding and thus one's training. A Jew should be aware of what sin is because they have been taught revelation in the Scriptures. However, a person's "sin knower" can also malfunction (Tit 1:15).

Grudem: The Necessity of Scripture 1

Continuing my weekly series reviewing Grudem's Systematic Theology: http://cafetutorials.blogspot.com/2012/07/christian-theology.html

This week is chapter 6, "The Necessity of Scripture."
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Between last week and this week, I've done a little research on where Grudem gets his "four characteristics of Scripture" from.  Obviously there's no verse in the Bible that says, "Here are the four characteristics of Scripture."  This is the slightly insidious quality of Grudem's approach whereby he thinks he is simply following the Bible when actually there are Christian traditions significantly guiding his interpretive wand.

In this case, it is the Reformed tradition.  The four characteristics of Scripture are a Reformed interpretation of the Westminster Confession (1646).  I don't know if Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987) was the first to summarize its position on Scripture in this way, but one article started me in that direction. To reject some of his theology is thus to reject a particular Christian tradition, not to reject God or the Bible.

Here is what he means by the necessity of Scripture: "The necessity of Scripture means that the Bible is necessary for knowing the gospel, for maintaining spiritual life, and for knowing God's will, but it is not necessary for knowing that God exists or for knowing something about God's character and moral laws" (116).  In a footnote, he explains that a person can hear about this message orally, but that "these oral communications of the contents of the Bible are based on the existence of written copies" (116 n.1).

This seems a rather peculiar doctrine. What, for example, was the fate of Christians in the decades between Jesus' resurrection and the first bits of the New Testament?  The gospel had a fundamentally oral character during that time.  Here we once again see the embarrassingly literary orientation of Grudem (and perhaps the later Reformed) view of the Bible. No wonder Van Til hated Barth, who pulls down the curtain of such a post-printing press charade.

Barth rightly recognized that Jesus was the consummate Word of God, Scripture the witness to Christ as the word of God, and Christian preaching as a word giving witness to the witness of the Word of God. Grudem's approach, by contrast, can't see the history of revelation prior to the 400s when the Bible and Christian theology finally became a written package with an orthodox message. He is a typical pre-modern who can't see the historical development that produced his reading of the Bible.

We also see here why this sort of Reformed folk have been scrambling over the New Testament interpretation of the Old.  If we read the Old Testament inductively, we realize that the Old Testament books on their own terms did not have an understanding of Christ sufficient for the knowledge Grudem needs them to have had.  When New Testament authors see Jesus in the Old Testament, they are largely reading the Old Testament spiritually and figuratively rather than literally.

Genesis in context knows nothing of a coming Messiah, nor does Exodus, Numbers, or Leviticus. [1] The Historical Books don't want a king in the first place and then already have one. When early Christians saw Christ in the Psalms and the Prophets, they were again largely seeing spiritual meanings in words that had other original meanings. The messianic psalms were originally royal psalms, for example. And in so far as some passages may look to a future king, they understand only that Israel will one day have a Davidic king again.  They do not look for God to come to earth. The key text in relation to Jesus' death, Isaiah 53, would not have been understood by anyone to foretell the Messiah's death until after the fact, and of course this is a key element in Grudem's understanding of the gospel.

All that is to say that Jesus was a massive upgrade from anything anticipated by the Old Testament read in context. The Old Testament Scriptures meet Grudem's standard of necessity only when they are read through New Testament eyes.  They would not guarantee any Old Testament saint salvation on Grudem's terms. And of course we look forward to see what he will do with children who die before they reach the supposed age of accountability invented to circumvent such problems.

Necessary
Grudem sees three ways in which Scripture is necessary: 1) It is necessary for a knowledge of the gospel, 2) It is necessary for maintaining spiritual life, and 3) It is necessary for a certain knowledge of God's will.

It is surprising to see someone who used to be involved in the charismatic movement have so little room for direct revelation. What if Jesus were to appear in a dream to someone deep in a Muslim country but who had never seen a Bible or heard of its contents? Is it impossible for such a person to be saved since he or she does not have the written word?

Indeed, even Grudem's key Pauline text, "Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God" (Rom. 10:17) is not a reference to Scripture but to preaching about Christ.  There is no scriptural text in Acts 17 and 1 Thessalonians has almost no Scripture. We can wonder if Paul used Scripture in his preaching when speaking to Jews, but probably didn't so much use Scripture when speaking to Gentiles who weren't associated with the synagogue.

The gospel was the good news about real events that had just taken place in history.  It was "live."  Scripture was brought in secondarily.  The living Jesus was the main event, not a book.

Is the Bible helpful for spiritual life?  Absolutely.  I consider it a sacrament of revelation, a divinely appointed meeting place.  By all means, eat the word for your nourishment.

Can God speak to you directly?  Absolutely.  Can God nourish you through other books?  Absolutely.  God can do whatever he wants. Again, it is fascinating to see how Grudem has chucked this part of his charismatic heritage.

Again, the word of God in Scripture is not primarily a reference to Scripture.  The "word become flesh" in John 1:14 is Jesus, and the background for this word is not the written word but the Logos of Hellenistic Judaism.  The word of God in Hebrews 4:12 similarly is not the Old Testament or the written word but this same logos which is the will of God in action in the creation. This fundamental and pervasive inability for Grudem to read the Bible in its historical context is embarrassing.

The necessity of the Bible for certainty in knowing God's will runs into the problems of the previous chapter. The Bible does not come inserted on our hard drives. It is an object of interpretation.  We have to define the words. We have to fit all the words together. We have to work out the potential difference between "that time" and "this time."  We have to do it.

Grudem's reading of Scripture is that of a pre-modern who can't see himself in the mirror.  His Reformed tradition has already done the defining, the joining, the time-shifting for him and he doesn't even know it.  The clarity he sees--and the certainty he sees--is the clarity of his tradition. His Bible is as certain as attending a Reformed church and the assumption that the people here are elect.  Walk down the street to the 40 other denominational churches reading the same inerrant Bible and we'll see how certain and clear it is practically speaking.

Part 2 to come...

[1] The wonderful Genesis 3:15 was originally about why snakes and humans don't get along. I omit Deuteronomy so as not to get into debates about what Deuteronomy 18:15 was originally about.

Happy Friday and Jesus' Fake Wife

Sitting at an airport on my way to visit my mother in Florida.  She broke her pelvis a few months ago but has now been home for about two weeks.  My sisters have done a fantastic job of being there through the trial and she is doing very well as such things go. We're very thankful to God for the way everything has played out.

Since I need to be grading... here is something much better than anything I would have posted today.  Mark Goodacre has posted a quick paper written by Francis Watson showing how some clever forger likely created the fragment about Jesus' wife that has been in the news.

Fun!

"Brothers and sisters" in translation

I had an "I'm stupid" a-ha moment a week or so ago in relation to the use of "brothers and sisters" to translate the Greek word "brothers" in the New Testament.

Ever since the TNIV, I've been explaining to others that versions like the NRSV, the NLT, the TNIV, and now the NIV2011 only used "brothers and sisters" when they thought Paul already included them.  So when Paul tells the brothers to flee sexual immorality in 1 Thessalonians 4, he was surely not letting the sisters in the congregation off the hook.

That's all true, but I (stupidly) just caught on that this is not just a dynamic equivalent translation.  It actually can be justified grammatically.  Up until recent days, when you were speaking or writing to a mixed group of people in a gendered language, the convention has been to go with the masculine plural ending.  This has previously been true, for example, in Spanish.  If you were speaking to a group of men and women, you would normally say "amigos" and use the masculine plural ending.  You have to pick a gender, so up until recent times you would have naturally used the masculine for a mixed group.

It hit me like a ton of bricks.  It would be normal for a Greek speaker to address a mixed group of men and women with "brothers," fully including the women in the masculine plural ending.  The implication is that in an age where it has become appropriate to be explicit about references to women in one's language, the best translation of "brothers" actually becomes "brothers and sisters."  This is not just because they are implied in Paul's meaning.  They are implied grammatically as well.

So I repent of my stupidity.  Brothers and sisters actually becomes a more accurate translation, and versions like the ESV actually turn out to be inferior translations in this regard.

How will Mitch Daniels do...

I personally like Mitch Daniels. He certainly did well for Indiana budgetarily and has managed not to get caught up too much in the shifting Republican scene of the last four years, the waves that ousted old school Republicans (Lugar, me frankly) or shifted you toward libertarianism to survive (Pence?). 

However, I have wondered how well he'll do as President of Purdue.  I saw a sign of someone at Purdue protesting his appointment.  It said something like, "What experience do you have for this job?"

Being a university President is very much about raising money.  Being a successful politician certainly gives a person a lot of experience in that area.  So Daniels may do very well at that piece of the puzzle.

Daniels has been involved heavily with WGU, the online university (from out of state ;-) that he has promoted on television.  One perk for IWU of his Purdue presidency is that we don't have the governor of the state promoting competition with us. ;-) Whether he will push online education at Purdue is an interesting question. The president of the University of Virginia went majorly cross-ways with her university over this issue.  Daniels is somewhat mild mannered, so it's hard for me to see him being heavy handed with this, although I can see him pushing Purdue in the MOOC direction.

I suspect that working with faculty in shared governance might be a bit like working with a legislature run by the opposition party.  An adversarial college president's days are numbered, but Daniels doesn't seem of that ilk.  These last few years of course he's had a Republican legislature, but he did have some strong resistance at points from the minority Democrats. That is the kind of experience that does prepare a person to be a college president.

Purdue is an engineering school. That might fit with Daniels.  I think in these shifting educational times, having a sense of utilitarianism in knowledge is necessary.  Will this subject help students get a job?  Here is where it will be interesting to see how Daniels does.

Part of a good university is also an element of truth for its own sake, the love of knowledge.  The university that will do well in the future, by contrast, is the one that focuses on truth that will get you a job.  But hopefully they will never abandon the liberal arts entirely.  My knee-jerk suspicion is that Daniels probably wasn't a big friend of the arts or other life-enriching-but not-essential elements as governor (I could be wrong but he racked up a surplus while cutting education significantly).

If he can keep the liberal arts healthy while focusing on the utilitarian subjects that are already Purdue's specialties, he might just do well as its university President.

Coptic Mention of Jesus' Wife

A fragment in Coptic seems to mention Jesus' wife: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/us/historian-says-piece-of-papyrus-refers-to-jesus-wife.html?_r=1.  Everyone else in my blog circles is mentioning it, so I thought I would too.

How does this affect me as a Christian?  Not at all for pretty much every reason.  First, it dates from the 300s, so it does not likely shed any light at all on the historical Jesus.  All it tells us is that some Egyptian Christians in the 300s thought Jesus had a wife, which is interesting in its own right.

But more interesting to you is probably the fact that, while there is no evidence that Jesus was ever married, I don't think it would matter one iota to Christian faith if he had been.  Jesus was fully human, so I think it's fair to assume that he had sexual desires.  I can't think of a single theological issue with Jesus being married, except that children would have been really theologically complicated.

Surely the knee jerk offense some take at this suggestion is some latent sense that sex is dirty. Since it isn't--and since the Bible seems silent on the issue--I can't see any biblical or theological problem with this thought experiment that, alas, is forever a thought experiment.