I (Still) Believe: Richard Bauckham

Many thanks to John Byron for having Zondervan send me a copy of a new book called, I (Still) Believe. You can pre-order it right now for its September arrival. Because I don't want to be too far into it when it is fully live, I'm only going to sprinkle reviews these next few weeks in the interstices of my schedule.

1. It's a great idea for a book and perhaps quite important, because these are not just evangelical scholars. In fact only three or four might fit easily in that category. They are all prime time scholars who have wielded the sword of the historical-critical method during their careers with world-class excellence. They were scholars in the modernist phase of biblical studies AND they remained people of faith. They have been through the fires of historical study AND they have kept the faith. This is a book of their testimonies, varied as they be.

2. There are 18 testimonies in all, and in alphabetical order, Richard Bauckham comes first. I only want to whet your appetite so you will buy this book, but Bauckham is clearly a genius. He has never thought of himself as a conservative although he is a hero to conservatives. Like N. T. Wright, as a scholar he has always thought of himself as only following normal historical method. And, as a historian, he has never found anything in his conclusions that contradicted his faith.

In that, Bauckham reminds me of something I have heard my colleague Bart Bruehler say repeatedly. Bart has just never been troubled by anything he has studied about the Bible, even though he is fully aware of the history of interpretation and biblical criticism. Indeed, given an allowance for God's involvement in the world, Bart has never seen any contradiction between the historical method and faith... and neither have I.

Bauckham knows just about everything about everything. His doctorate is from Cambridge in history. He taught theology for several years at Manchester. Then he ended his career teaching New Testament at St. Andrews. He reads science. He reads philosophy. He reads literature. He reads everything.

"I couldn't have remained a Christian without being sure that Christianity made intellectual sense in such fields" (20).

3. Here are just a couple more statements to whet your appetite:

• "I would find it more difficult to believe in God if I did not believe that God became incarnate as the man Jesus" (24).
• "I have always loved God... I can't account for it, except (of course) by the grace of God" (23).
• "Nietzsche... is a powerful antidote to the superficiality of the 'new atheists'" (23).
• "The Bible... is normative but not sufficient for theology" (22).
• "I did develop [in my youth] a strong commitment to reading Scripture as the word of God, which I have never lost, though I no longer find it necessary to say that, to be the word of God in human words, it needs to be inerrant. (I would now say that the Bible is trustworthy for the purposes for which God has given it.)" (18).

4. In a Schenck post-note, Bauckham is popular for a number of reasons. He is part of the "early high Christology club," which means that he thinks the early Christians worshiped Jesus as fully divine almost from the very beginning. Also, the older he has gotten, the more he has come to accept early Christian traditions about authorship and other views such as 1) that the titles on the Gospels are original and 2) that the Gospels were originally written for all Christians rather than for specific communities.

But he has not come to these conclusions because he feels that they are necessary for faith. Indeed, there are others in this book with faith who would disagree with every one of those conclusions. Bauckham has come to these conclusions by simply applying the historical-critical method to the texts.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Richard Bauckham, mainstream scholar with faith!

Wednesday Wright - Paul and the Faithfulness of God, chapter 2

Dare I say that I've restarted reading N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God? I finished chapter one in January of 2014! Wright has a book coming out this Fall on the history of the interpretation of Paul that I'm very much looking forward to, but may I find the strength to continue through this Leviathan until then.

So here are some observations from chapter 2 to jump start myself. My last post was here.

1. The title of chapter 2 is, "Like Birds Hovering Overhead." It comes from Isaiah 31:5: "Like birds hovering overhead, so the Lord of hosts will protect Jerusalem; he will protect and deliver it, he will spare and rescue it" (NRSV). So this 122 page chapter is going to be on the Jewish background to Paul.

Wright has already covered much of this territory in the first volume of the series: The New Testament and the People of God (NTPG). So in this chapter, he hopes especially "to bring out the way in which the faithfulness of Israel's God functions as a theme throughout so much of the period" (77) of the New Testament (the Second Temple Period or early Judaism).

2. So how about the Pharisees? Twenty years ago I found Wright's version of the Pharisees compelling. Mind you, if he was cautious to weigh in around greats like E. P. Sanders and Jacob Neusner, you can imagine how foolish I feel to have an opinion.

Nevertheless, I find his sense of them to make good sense. They were very popular and influential. He were active in promoting their perspectives. They were far more than a pure-food club but many were highly active politically. Wright largely divides the active from the non-active between the School of Shammai (active) and the School of Hillel (non-active).

So if we are to see the pre-believing Paul, if we are to see what zeal for the Law looked like, we need only turn to 1 and 2 Maccabees. Ioudaismos meant, "not simply the practice of a 'religion', but the active propagation of the ancestral way of life and its defense against attack whether from outside (as in the case of Mattathias) or inside (as in the case of Saul of Tarsus)" (89).

3. The third section of this chapter is the last I want to hit today. "Torah is a symbol which by its very nature is about praxis" (91).

There's some material on the temple here, which is of great interest to me. Wright goes a little too far, I suspect, when he says that "when you went up to the Temple, it was not as though you were 'in heaven'. You were actually there" (97). That comment just sounds ridiculous to me, at least when it comes to the overwhelming majority of Jews. I'm sure there were some heady Jews like Wright who thought that. But how many farmers or blue collar workers in your congregation would have thought that?

In general, I was disappointed with the next few pages (102-107).

a. Temple = cosmos.
b. Temple is connected with David.
c. Restoration of king = restoration of temple = new Genesis = new Exodus

"To those who pored over Torah night and day, looking for the consolation of Israel, this combination of motifs - Temple, presence, glory, kingship, wisdom, creation, exile, rebuilding, and unfulfilled promise - would be part of their mental and emotional furniture. Touch one and you would touch them all" (107).

Show me the texts. He is filling in too many gaps, seeing too much system. Are these all potentially related themes? Yes. But in reality groups tend to focus on some and not others. People aren't consistent, even thinkers, unless you're N. T. Wright. (P.S. There aren't many of those.)

In short, there seems to be a lot of ahistorical hermeneutic here disguised as a historical one. He is constructing too many connections between ideas in texts and not listening enough to the individual particularity of texts in history. It's not that I don't think there are some Jewish expectations to be found in the literature. It's that he just seems to take it too far, to reconstruct too much "common Jewish expectation" here.

More perhaps next Wednesday.

"Holy Jumpers" to the End

This is my third and final installment reviewing Bill Kostlevy's book called Holy Jumpers: Evangelicals and Radicals in Progressive Era America. Here are the first and second installments. Keith Drury and Bob Black were reading through the book, and Dave Ward and I joined Keith for some lunches to discuss it.

1. The last three chapters of the book were somewhat sad, as we watched this powerful phenomenon of the Metropolitan Church of America (MCA) slowly unravel and wither away. At the same time, we continue to see that it was right there in the mix as some of the most significant Christian movements of the twentieth century were forming.

One of the founders, E. L. Harvey, had been a successful businessman and owner of eleven hotels in the Chicago area. But he came to believe that God demanded Christians to sell all their property if they were to be true Christians. I've already mentioned that this was the point of entire sanctification for Harvey and his wife. He did not "get the victory" until he sold all his hotels and moved onto the Chicago campground.

Of course he believed that Jesus was coming back to earth any day, and this played a significant role in this notion that only those who sold everything could make it to heaven. In about 1922, the debt of the MCA community had risen to about $200,000 (it apparently peeked at $300,000). Harvey was convinced that the debt would be irrelevant because of the return of Christ.

Harvey even kiboshed a great money making/sustaining venture that Frank Messenger had started. Messenger is the one who had once managed the textile industry of North Grosvenor, Connecticut. The MCA was putting out a very successful Scripture Text Calendar, along with its songbooks and magazine, The Burning Bush.

But Harvey came to see the calendar in particular as a money-making venture and in 1913 killed the very thing that might have kept the MCA afloat.

Harvey had a heart attack while preaching in 1922 and would be dead by 1926. Messenger meanwhile became a Nazarene and continued the Scripture calendar elsewhere. The company still exists today in Auburn, Indiana, primarily serving the funeral industry.

He seems to have been a warm-hearted, well-intentioned man. He was just theologically ignorant. The emotion burned brightly for a moment, then it burned out.

2. Messenger's administrative skill kept this communal group going for a while. Keith and I both agree that the real turning point of the group was in 1906 when they left Chicago and set up a commune in Waukesha, Wisconsin. In the old Fountain Spring House, the people lived and worked in common. No one took a wage, and the community sent out evangelists to speak to anyone who asked.

But with the financial woes, the pressure to get people to sell all their property and give it to the community became a distraction. Intentions were good--they truly believed people should sell their farms and move into the community. But family members saw these evangelists as preying on old people and trying to take their farms away from them.

Basically, socialism is almost always a complete failure. It's noble. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." It sounds very Christ-like indeed. It just doesn't work. The MCA is yet another testimony to its utter bankruptcy as an economic system. (Dave Ward called it a Ponzi scheme.)

3. Money increasingly became the central preoccupation of the community, as it became overcrowded with individuals, many of whom could not give anything back. In 1925, W. S. Hitchcock took over to fix the situation.

At least from the description in the book, I don't like the man. Mind you, he had eliminated the community's debt by the early 1930s, in the middle of the Great Depression. That's no mean feat! And of course E. L. Harvey and Duke Farson were ultimately blame for moving the community in a property-less direction in the first place.

Farson went belly up in 1918 because his money was in municipal bonds and the war shifted the market to war bonds. As he tried to make internal changes in Wakesha, the Farsons blocked him and he was expelled. He started a group that died with him in LA in 1929.

Hitchcock did what no doubt needed to be done. He kicked a lot of people out of the commune. What is so disturbing about this move is the fact that some of these were old people who had been convinced God wanted them to sell all their property, give it to the MCA, and then come live in Wakesha. Instead they ended their lives in public homes for the aged.

Hitchcock sent out every able bodied person to go door to door, not as evangelists, but as a sales force. But what I find most detestable about this man is that he humiliated the leaders who had been willing to give everything up for the community. He made the economic troubles of the community a spiritual problem for which they needed to repent rather than what it was--economic and theological ignorance. One leader walked around the service with a teapot on his head.

It had a curious effect. It energized the children of the leaders. High school youths who had been a growing problem were now sold on the mission of the MCA. That's about the only good thing I could see in this man, and that was despite his seeming vileness.

4. Messenger ended up joining the Nazarenes. The Nazarenes feature heavily in these last chapters. They come across as the sane holiness denomination and one of the fastest growing Protestant churches of the day. One of the secrets to IWU's growth is that it hit distance education at just the right time. I wonder if the Nazarenes hit these holiness revivals at just the right time.

They were middle of the road enough to gather the reasonable, leaving these other kooky groups. They were out west and so somewhat removed from these intrigues. And they were perfectly okay with being a denomination for a decade before WW1 hit, two decades before the Great Depression.

The Nazarenes were the targets of a good deal of The Burning Bush's wrath in the teens. Messenger, interestingly enough, would end up setting up the Nazarene pension plan, despite the fact that he had mocked insurance and such things when he was part of the MCA.

The MCA mocked the Nazarenes for allowing the "innocent party" in a divorce to remarry. They believed you were married in God's eyes for life to the first person you married. So even if your spouse divorced you and remarried someone else, if you then remarried, you would commit adultery every time you had sex. You were expected to remain celibate for the rest of your life. This is a position that I have heard even within my lifetime.

The MCA also mocked the Nazarenes and many others on tithing. Because they believed in giving everything to the Lord literally by selling all your possessions and becoming part of their end times community, tithing wasn't giving enough. Under Hitchcock, of course, they would adopt tithing, a tenth, as the least you should give.

There is some fun history on tithing in chapter 6. The practice did not enter American Christianity until after the Civil War as America shifted from a trade economy to a monetary society. This was also, I believe, part of a wave of biblical interpretation that considered Old Testament law as more or less binding on Christians just as much as New Testament instruction. The importance of keeping the Sabbath is another example of this hermeneutical wave.

When I was at SWU in college, churches in the southeast could ask for a team of ministry students to come sing and preach for them. I don't know how the funding worked, whether the church had to pay for gas and lodging or whether the school paid for it. But it was truly one of the highlights of my college days.

I remember one Sunday that a church asked for someone to come preach on tithing from the New Testament, and I was the one sent to preach. I quickly realized that the only text that really mentions a tithe in the NT is in Matthew 23:23 where Jesus commends the Pharisees for tithing their spices but then condemns them for missing the weightier parts of the Law. So you can imagine how difficult a sermon that was!

Tithing was controversial when it was introduced, but those churches that adopted it as a practice found themselves on a much surer financial basis than those that didn't, despite the fact that the NT never indicates that it is part of the new covenant.

5. We also get in these chapters the birth of tongues in America and the Azusa Street revivals. Interestingly enough, both the holiness movement and the MCA intersect with its beginnings (see also Don Dayton's work here). The real spark behind the Azusa Street revivals was a man named William Seymour.

He was an African-American who had studied at God's Bible School and then had gone out to California, stopping on the way at the Pillar of Fire community in Denver. Denver is where Alma White had ended up after she split with the MCA in 1906.

An aside here that I haven't fully managed to work in. These were truly communities where women were fully spiritual leaders. These were in many cases communities where African-Americans could play full spiritual role alongside those of European descent. These were truly egalitarian movements, truly progressive movements. These were radicals.

I want to mention also after last week that God's Bible School is alive and well, probably doing better than it ever has. God's Revivalist is still being published even after all these years.

6. The MCA had dispatched A. G. Garr to LA to work there. But when that work entered difficult waters, Garr closed the doors and sent his congregation to the mission on Azusa Street, where Seymour was preaching that the Acts 2 church included speaking in other languages. By then, tongues had already begun to take place but was not in full force yet. It was a fully integrated experience at that time, blacks and whites worshiping together, with several of the blacks speaking in tongues. The founder of COGIC was part of those days.

Farson had ordered Garr not to go to the mission without permission, but Garr ignored and in 1906 became one of the first white people at the mission to speak in tongues. Kostlevy wonders if the speaking had actually plateaued at that time and if, in effect, the addition of the new MCA worshipers rekindled the fire that would not stop until the whole world was ablaze with Pentecostalism.

Garr himself was convinced that he was speaking in an Indian or Chinese language. But when he actually arrived in India, apparently not. His presence in northern India proved to have a very negative attitude toward tongues in the MCA community there. Eventually he would reinterpret the experience as a heavenly language rather than an earthly one.

Of course the personal dynamics between Farson and Garr led to The Burning Bush going inflammatory, and one wonders if the rest of the holiness movement was poisoned against tongues as a result. It has only been in the last couple decades that holiness churches have even begun to consider the possibility that their members might privately speak in tongues at home.

7. Healing was a major part of the holiness movement at the turn of the century and we still believe in it on paper. And of course it continues to be a major element of the Pentecostal movement to this day. I hope you can see that Pentecostalism grew out of these same waters of the holiness movement.

The MCA did not believe in medicine. Medicine was seen as contrary to faith. There is a story in these chapters about two men who went to India as missionaries. One was secretly inoculated against smallpox, the other wasn't. The one who wasn't inoculated died. The other one didn't.

8. The MCA petered out. Hitchcock was removed as president in 1950. In 1956 it sold its Waukesha property. The last MCA church in North America sold its building in 2004. But there are still perhaps as many as 50,000 members still in India. There are some 1600 members in Africa and twenty churches still in Mexico.

When I was a boy, Arthur Bray was pastor of the Brooksville Wesleyan Church in Florida. Little did I know his story at the time. He was one of those youths who dedicated their life to God under Hitchcock. His father was one of those leaders who went on evangelistic missions teaching people that they needed to give everything they had to the Lord.

Arthur became a Wesleyan Methodist in 1941, and was president of the Illinois conference from 1950 to 1968. His son Don was Secretary of World Missions for The Wesleyan Church for many years, and his son John just retired from pastoring one of the largest churches in The Wesleyan Church.

Monday Philosophy: Preludes to Pragmatism

1. I have entered an interesting phase of my career as a thinker. There are of course endless details to learn, but I have more or less figured out what I think on many subjects. In philosophy in particular, I am sympathetic to Richard Rorty's sense that philosophy has run its course.

There is of course much to learn about the details of what many individual philosophers thought. There are discussions in progress, articles being published. One could no doubt participate in these. New issues arise in history that beg for the philosopher's keen eye (e.g., artificial intelligence). Old issues arise again that beg for reminders.

But it seems to me that all the basic options are there already to choose from. My articulations of a philosophy are crude, but I view them as mature. I do not see philosophy as an area that will ever blow my mind again. I feel that, with some work, I could enter any stream of contemporary philosophical discussion with a defensible position.

I am a pragmatist. I see pragmatism as the telos of philosophy. Pragmatism is the only form of philosophy that can encompass all the others and do so in a way that makes optimal sense of the world.

2. Accordingly, I'm excited that the Monday reading group this Fall has chosen to read Philip Kitcher's Preludes to Pragmatism: Toward a Reconstruction of Philosophy. I'm excited about the book because it promises to get me up to speed with the discussion and fill me in on the particulars of its precedents.

For today's post, I read the introduction (by the way, I discovered that subtracting Roman numerals often can be as simple as crossing out the individual figures in common and seeing what's left). The introduction mostly sets out Kitcher's agenda for the book. He sees the book as a prelude to a more mature presentation of pragmatism, which leads us to think some sort of magnum opus may follow.

Kitcher already in the introduction engages heavily with John Dewey and William James, but he clearly has no plans to follow them slavishly. The term he uses to describe his program is "pragmatic naturalism." Since the introduction is getting us ready for chapters to come, I did not worry too much about getting the finer points of his thought at this stage. But I think these two words capture his agenda well.

On the one hand, he will present an approach that fits with pragmatism. Pragmatism focuses on what "works" for us to function in the world, and thus on ideas being useful. From this perspective, philosophy focuses on what matters to people (xii).

The second word is "naturalism." Here Kitcher does not mean logical positivism or a "stronger, scientistic position" (xvi). He also does not like Rorty's language of "nature's own language." He does, as we find out later in the chapter, mean an approach that brackets out supernaturalism (although he believes philosophy can carve a space for religion).

If he had a crisp definition of this naturalism, I missed it, but I think he largely means a pragmatism that stays close to the "real world," that doesn't posit ideas that are not grounded in what we observe and how we live. He wants, if I apprehend him correctly, to save some form of correspondence principle (that truth is what corresponds to the world), although not in a naive way.

3. The bulk of the introduction overviews the essays in the rest of the book. We can see that he aims in the long term to accomplish his subtitle: reconstructing all of philosophy. He is interested in knowledge as something that promotes the common good (xix). He will address ethics, and social/economic philosophy. He will address religion. He even addresses science and mathematics in the book.

He endorses a sort of pragmatic pluralism. There usually is not one unique right answer. There are multiple true ways to "explain" the world.

It promises to be a stimulating read, and I hope to blog my way through it while we read it in group.

E9. The Church participates in God's mission to the world.

This is the ninth post on the Church in my ongoing series, theology in bullet points. The first unit in this series had to do with God and Creation (book here), and the second unit was on Christology and Atonement.

We are now in the third and final unit: The Holy Spirit and the Church. The first set of posts in this final unit on the Spirit and the Church was on the Holy Spirit.
_______________________________
The Church participates in God's mission to the world.

1. If the Church has as its highest and central task the worship of God, the Church has as its primary mission the reconciliation of the world to God. This task is, ultimately, God's mission rather than the mission of the Church itself. It cannot succeed without the Holy Spirit, who prepares the way for the hearing of the good news. God has made Christ the means of reconciliation. The atoning death of Christ is the ground of reconciliation.

But the primary method by which God is reconciling humanity to himself is through the Church. God has chosen "the foolishness of proclamation" as the normal method to save humanity (1 Cor. 1:21). [1]

2. Paul expresses the mission God had given him in 2 Corinthians 5:20: "We are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us." What is this ministry? Paul and his co-workers had a "ministry of reconciliation" (5:18). In the Great Commission, Jesus charged his disciples to "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations" (Matt. 28:19).

This proclamation of the good news is one of the key tasks of the Church. Within the body of Christ, some are especially gifted to proclaim the good news. Ephesians 4:11 calls them "evangelists," and in the early church this was a primary task of the apostles. The apostles were those "sent" by the risen Jesus to give witness to the fact that he had risen from the dead indeed and been enthroned as king of the cosmos.  

3. What is the good news, the gospel? In Matthew, Mark, and Luke--the "Synoptic Gospels--the good news is the "kingdom of God" (e.g., Mark 1:14-15). [2] While he was on earth, Jesus preached the coming return of God's reign to the earth. This coming reign, which began in his ministry, would set things right in the world.

With the death and resurrection of Jesus, the role of Jesus as the king of the coming kingdom came into focus. It is the kingdom of our God and of his Christ (Rev. 12:10). The heart of the gospel for Paul is the fact that Jesus is the king of the cosmos and that he is coming again to return righteousness to the world. [3]

So the good news includes the implications of Christ's reign. The gospel is the good news that Jesus has been enthroned as king and all that his enthronement entails.

This enthronement includes salvation. The good news includes the possibility of eternal salvation for humanity. It includes good news for the poor who will not be poor in the kingdom of God. It includes good news for the creation, which will be liberated along with humanity.

4. The coming kingdom of God is good news for the poor, certainly when the kingdom is fully here. Christ has inaugurated the kingdom of God, but it is not fully in place and will not be until he returns. Nevertheless, while he was on earth Jesus modeled that the good news is good news for the poor now as well as in the future. [4]

Therefore, the good news that Jesus is king Messiah not only means that individuals can have eternal life and that the Church is called to proclaim this good news to the world. It also means that the Church is called to bring "good news to the poor, liberty to the captives, sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed" (Luke 4:16-21) Evangelism is the practice of proclaiming the good news to the world. That good news in the New Testament is not only that all can be saved. It is also that injustice will cease.

Any view of evangelism that does not have the lordship of Jesus as its primary message is off focus. And any view of evangelism that does not include "social justice" is an anemic understanding of the good news. Social justice is the biblical value of bringing the love of God to bear on the social and economic contexts of society. It is rooted in the Old Testament Law, reiterated in the Old Testament Prophets and Writings, pronounced definitively in the message of Jesus, and empowered in the New Testament by the Holy Spirit.

The Bible nowhere sees these two aspects of the good news in conflict with one another. The Bible never treats the resources of the Church in competition with one another, as if we must make a choice between saving souls and helping people. God calls the Church to do both, and no doubt he calls some more to be ministers of the one form of reconciliation and others more to be ministers of the other.

So while it is true that eternity is more important than our current social and economic circumstances, the Bible leaves no room for the Church to ignore social justice in the name of eternal salvation. And, in any case, those who think they are likely to see souls saved when their life situation is ignored are more likely hindrances to the good news than true evangelists.

5. Romans 8 indicates that salvation will go beyond human eternity, for most of the New Testament pictures eternity taking place on a new earth. The gospel is thus also good news for the creation. In the Garden of Eden, God gave Adam and Eve the task to care for the garden (Gen. 2:15; cf. 1:28).

More than ever in history, humanity is now in a position both to care for God's world and to harm it. It is not the primary task of the Church to take care of the creation, but the Church demonstrates that it is redeemed humanity when it fulfills God's original intention that humanity be good stewards of the earth. Therefore, the authentic Church will be a positive force for the care of God's creation.

6. At any time and place, it will be more or less possible for the Church to influence its surrounding society for good. This is rarely a matter of force. Force does not truly change others, for change is a matter of the heart and the inside rather than the outside. In cases of concrete harm, the Church may exert pressure for change.

Nevertheless, the true Church always influences the world to become better. We should not assume that, at any time and place, our contexts are destined to get worse and worse or better and better. At times the Church will have a significant impact on the world becoming a better place. At others, we will watch the surrounding society deteriorate around us.

In either case, God's mission remains. God's mission is to reconcile the world to himself and then to see a redeemed humanity and creation flourish forever. God calls the Church to participate in that mission as agents of change.

Next Sunday: E10. The Church disciples and nurtures God's people.

[1] We have mentioned elsewhere the possibility that someone might be saved through Christ without having heard his name. Such a person would be judged "according to the light they have." However, this is not the ideal of the New Testament or the normal path to salvation. It cannot undermine the drive to go and preach the good news and surely the likelihood of turning to Christ is greater the more light one has. "Faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ" (Rom. 10:17).

[2] Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the "synoptic" Gospels because they present Jesus in such a way that you can set them side by side and see remarkable similarities in wording and order. It is the consensus of scholars that Matthew and Luke in fact used Mark as a written source.

[3] See Scot McKnight, The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011) and N. T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel is News and What Makes It Good (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2015).

[4] The Gospel of Luke especially emphasizes this dimension of Jesus' earthly ministry (e.g., Luke 4:16-21).

Saturday Novel: An Indian Dinner

It's been a little over a month since I posted any on this year's imaginary novel. I thought I'd shift it to Saturdays. So here's a pulse...
_________________________
The morning run was grueling. Quirk had to be at least ten years older than he was, but he made Alan feel like he was fifty pounds overweight and a chain smoker. He deliberately stayed with Alan the whole time to push him.

The watch that Fox had given him also kept track of how far he had gone. When they passed three miles, he asked Quirk how far they were going to run that morning.

"We all run at least ten kilometers a morning," he said, "a mere six point two miles by uneducated measure."

Alan had a little extra adrenaline, but his time was clearly unremarkable for this group: forty-five minutes. He felt pretty much done for the day by the time he returned, although somehow he suspected there would be more to do that day.

When he got back to his room, he found a book on his bed, Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein. On the front was a sticky note that said, "Lalbagh at 7.30."

"What's the Lalbagh?" he said to himself, looking around the room for someone to listen. The handwriting looked to be Fox's, at least from what little Alan had seen.

A quick search revealed that it was a quaint Indian restaurant. He would have liked greater clarity, but he took from the context that he was expected to read this book and discuss it that evening.

It wasn't a normal book where there's a clear line of thought and chapters that moved from topic to topic. It was more like a collection of thoughts that wandered over a wide range of subjects. It reminded him a little of a book in the Bible he had studied at school: Proverbs.

Some of the book interested him. Other parts didn't. He fell asleep for about an hour after a quick lunch in the Peterhouse Hall. By the time 7 rolled around he at least felt like he had a few thoughts he might share.

He arrived to find one of the women who had run that morning standing just inside the door waiting as well. "Ridley, is it?" he said.

"Yes. Alan, right?" It was a British accent, but it had a hint of something else, maybe Spanish?

End of another Bible class

1. I noticed that Nijay Gupta was talking about teaching Scripture at seminary. I'm just finishing up today teaching the one week "Bible as Scripture" intensive at Wesley Seminary. I second guess myself a lot when it comes to these sorts of things, but am pretty happy with the formula I've been using:

• I start each day with a quasi-devotional that illustrates the learning of the previous day.
• After the devotional and prayer, we discuss the reading of the previous night. I have them read and evaluate Green before they come, then Fee and Stuart during the week. This gives them two evangelical poles to situate themselves between. I've recorded videos to give a little exposure to critical issues and have a little book to fill in some other gaps. 
• After a morning break, I introduce an interpretive tool, which they apply in the early afternoon in groups in relation to a particular passage I have chosen.
• In late afternoon we regroup and the groups present their initial findings, which they finish up in the evening and submit by the next morning.

2. The flow of the week goes as follows:

• Monday and Tuesday work on the skills of observation. This is a focus on the literary context. This is a focus on the "world within the text."
• Monday is on the immediate literary context and they do a "train of thought" assignment. Tuesday is broader literary context and they do a "survey."
• Wednesday transitions to interpretation, the "world behind the text," and historical-cultural context. In particular, Wednesday is word study day.
• Thursday then digs deeper into historical-cultural context and answering other kinds of interpretive questions. This is the first day that we go to the library and engage secondary literature.
• Finally on Friday, we address directly what we have been doing all along in the devotionals and reading discussions--how to discern a biblical theology and appropriate biblical texts.

3. Although I hope eventually to find a better integrating theme, the passages on which the groups work all week (and present on all week) have to do with the Devil (or do they):

• Genesis 3
• Job 2
• Isaiah 14 
• Matthew 4
• Luke 10
• Revelation 12

The reason why these are good passages because they bring out issues like pre-understandings of meaning and sensus plenior. We are, in effect, working toward a biblical theology of the Devil all week, while forcing distinctions between the meanings of each text.

4. I think this works pretty well when I keep on task and have enough caffeine. I do continue to second guess myself.

Is teaching how to do inductive Bible study a little like requiring Greek--just not something everyone is going to be able to do? Would it be better as a capstone after several courses that have more or less modeled the interpretation of biblical texts rather than expected students to do it themselves?

New Testament Use of the OT

For a couple years, there's been a hole in my Bible as Scripture class. I have in the syllabus that there will be a video called, "The NT Use of the OT" to watch on Thursday evening. So far, that video has never been ready.

No one ever complains--one less assignment. My problem is that it is a complex topic, and I want to present it in a clear, convincing, and non-offensive way. I probably spent two hours last night trying to record the PowerPoint in its current form and finally just went to bed and mulled it over some more.

So here's the outline I woke up with:

1. The NT can use allegory.

• Galatians 4:21-31 - Paul uses Sarah and Hagar as an allegory for the heavenly and earthly Jerusalem
• Hebrews 9:6-10 - The author uses the structure of the earthly tent as an allegory of the two ages and the two covenants.
• 1 Corinthians 9:9-10 - The ox in Deuteronomy represents the minister of the gospel, and "treading the grain" means to minister to a community.

2. The NT (almost) uses pesher.
Pesher is a word used to describe the exegesis of some commentaries at Qumran, where verses are applied to contemporary situations in the interpreter's day. Matthew especially comes close to this.

• Matthew 2:15 - "Out of Egypt I called my son" in Hosea 11:1
• Matthew 2:23 - "He will be called a Nazarene" in where?

3. Some Basic Insights
I think that's enough data to draw a very important conclusion. The NT authors did not follow the rules of modern exegesis when they interpreted the OT texts.

4. This makes sense.

• It makes sense because I do not interpret texts in your head, but in mine.
• In revelation, God takes on our flesh. He does not expect us to take on his (which is impossible anyway).

5. Meaning is contextual.

• God revealed truths, promises, and commands to the NT authors within their frame of reference.
• As they read the OT, God met them in how the OT text appeared to them rather than use it as an opportunity to give them a history lesson.

6. In the OT stories, God gave them...

• examples to imitate (Job, Hebrews 11)
• examples to avoid (Esau, Sodom)
• Illustrations of truths (Abraham, Rahab on faith/works)
• These examples stand on their own as true. They don’t have to match the OT exactly.

7. Good Jewish Midrash

• Arguments from lesser to greater
• Verses connected together by catchwords
• Points made out of distinctions in detail, such as the use of a singular instead of a plural

8. Metanarratives

• Paul's Adam-Christ sequence
• Mark's exile-return sequence
• Metanarratives, by their very nature, are extra-textual. They stitch together originally separate stories.

9. The OT Law

• Sacrifices are understood as shadows of Christ.
• Israelite particulars of the Law (circumcision, Sabbath, food laws) are not applicable to Gentiles.
• Christ's law is love God/love neighbor (the filter for applying OT ethics).
• Some laws are continued (sexual laws).

10. Prophecies
Some texts are interpreted "spiritually" (sensus plenior).

• E.g., about events in the life of Jesus
• Some predictions expanded in scope (e.g., return from exile, return of the throne of David)

11. Possible Conclusions

• We can hear God through Scripture, even when we don't know the historical meaning.
• We should not read NT interpretation for historical information on the OT (e.g., authorship).

Quick Bible Answers for the Pastor...

Kelly Hunt, who's in my Bible as Scripture class this week at Wesley Seminary, suggested I put together a little booklet with quick answers a pastor can give when they get a predictable question from someone in their church. So the next thought was, what kinds of questions do you pastors get of this sort? Or if you're not a pastor, what kinds of questions would you like a little "cheat sheet" on?

Here's the question that sparked the thought for him this morning:

Question: Revelation says that you can't add or take away from the Bible. So how can it be good for there to be different versions of the Bible? Either some have verses missing or some have verses added.

Answer: Before getting to the reason why versions are different, this probably isn't what Revelation 22:18-19 was talking about. First, originally it was just talking about the book of Revelation itself, since the other books weren't attached to Revelation yet (at that point it was just on its own scroll). And it probably wasn't talking about individual words like, "star." It probably was talking about adding or taking away from the prophecies of Revelation, not the individual words of Revelation (we ask this question because we come from a literary culture, whereas they thought more in oral terms).

But to explain why some versions have different words, we don't have any of the original "editions" of the Bible. We have lots of copies--more than any other ancient book in fact. They overwhelmingly say the same things. But there are a few--and I mean only a few--famous differences between them.

You shouldn't worry about it though. Every copy has all the basic teachings of Christian faith, and there is no teaching of the Bible that is lost from one copy to the next. There are only a handful of what we might call "big" debates. Was the ending of Mark (16:9-20) in the first copy of Mark? That's the biggest. Was the doxology at the end of the Lord's Prayer in the first copy of Matthew 6:13?

It's important to realize that there's nothing wrong with the ending of Mark, even if it wasn't in the first copy. Everything in it is true. There's nothing wrong with the doxology in the Lord's Prayer, even if it wasn't in the original copy of Matthew.

Scholars aren't trying to cut stuff out. They're only asking the historical question. Does the evidence seem to say that the first copy of Mark had these verses? Or does it seem like the evidence points to them being added later?

The fact that there are minor differences between the copies suggests that God is more concerned with the message than the small details of the wording. God can speak through the King James Version, even if these verses were added later. And God can speak through the NIV, even if these verses actually were in the original versions.

P.S. Would something like this be better in bullet form? In other words, pick the bullets you like.

Life on Other Planets

So James McGrath pointed out a recent article in the Huffington Post called, "Earth 2.0: Bad News for God." I found the point and the tone of the article bizarre.

For one, I am always taken aback at this kind of tone. It's like the person who commented on an old blog post recently that "someone with a religious agenda such as yourself has no business discussing anything other than religion." I am neither a cultural warrior nor a fundamentalist, so it's always sobering when people just lump me in with the Christians who are in the public eye. "My brothers ate sour grapes but my teeth are set on edge."

I seem to remember some of my college professors at SWU raising questions such as this article raises. Did Adam's sin affect the laws of physics in the whole cosmos? If there is life on other planets, did it become fallen as a result of Adam's sin? Did Christ become incarnated on those planets? Did he die for them as well?

I must say that I'm not bothered by these questions and issues in the slightest. But I suppose I've already endured a "questions" phase to my faith in seminary and doctoral work. This article seems like such old news to me. Think C.S. Lewis. To me, Genesis is more profound than some straightforward videotape of creation. And the theological point of view he ridicules is as much Augustine as it is the Bible.

What do you think?

The Ministry of Virginia Wright

I didn't feel like I should let the passing of Virginia Wright go without some mention here. She is of course the mother of David Wright, the president of Indiana Wesleyan University, who is even more to me a long-standing friend. Her life and the life of my family also have intersections that make her very special to my own pilgrimage. But even if there were no personal connection, her life and ministry, alongside that of her husband Wayne, is too significant not to mention.

It is staggering to me to think of the contribution Mrs. Wright and her husband have made to the kingdom and the Wesleyan Church in particular. She was born on the mission field in India in the 1920s. I have to stretch my mind to think of what it was like to go the mission field in those days. Such missionaries had to consign themselves to the real possibility that they would never return to see their families again.

So when Wayne and Mrs. Wright then later left themselves as missionaries for the Philippines in 1951, they rode a ship rather than an airplane. As David mentioned in the service today, there was no Facebook or Twitter then. They came home twice in an 18 year ministry in the Philippines. There were weekly letters. But when they left, she didn't know if she would see her parents again.

I think of the story of the R. K. Storey family who were missionaries to the Philippines in the 1940s. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time when WW2 broke out and the Japanese took over the Philippines. Hiding in the jungle, they lost a daughter from drinking from a stream on the run. Then he was part of the Bataan Death March across the island as a prisoner of the Japanese.

Joanne Lyon was about 12 years old in the same church as Virginia's mother during those years. She gave a vivid sense of how the reports on the mission work in the Philippines stirred her own heart as a child. What would her ministry have looked like if the Wrights had not been part of her formation? Keith Drury was invoked as saying that if Virginia had been born a couple decades later, she might be the next General Superintendent. That was the forceful stuff of which she was made.

On a personal note, my mother and Mrs. Wright both graduated in the same class from Frankfort Pilgrim College, so that was a strong point of connection for my family. Then Wayne and Virginia taught for a brief stint alongside my grandfather at Frankfort until they went to the mission field. Then the parents of my brother-in-law, Eddie Garcia, were nurtured in their ministries in the Philippines under the work of the Wrights. Wayne installed Eddie's father, Saturnino, as the first National Superintendent of the Philippines for the Wesleyan Church.

In her sermon, General Superintendent Lyon today compared Mrs. Wright to Priscilla in the New Testament. What a model for women ministers Mrs. Wright was! She was a model preacher, a forceful leader, a discerning mentor, a teacher and writer, and much more. How many women saw her preach and thought, "If she can be a minister, I can too." How many men saw her preach and thought, "If then God gave her the same gift that he gave us, who are we to hinder God? Praise God who has given even to women the call to ministry.”

What a rich heritage, not only for the Wright family, but for the whole church! May all who come behind us also find us faithful!

Monday Philosophy: Philo and Christianity (8)

Today we reach the end of Reading Philo: A Handbook to Philo of Alexandria, edited by Torrey Seland.

Introduction
Philo the Jew
Philo the Citizen
Philo the Interpreter of the Law and Educated Jew
Philo the Philosopher and how to study Philo
Philo and Society
Philo and Judaism

1. I want to go out of order in this final post on Seland's book. I want to start with the final chapter by David Runia, "Philo and the Patristic Tradition: A List of Direct References." Runia has written extensively on Philo and the early church, most notably in his important work, Philo in Early Christian Literature. He also contributed a chapter on the subject for Kamesar's Cambridge Companion to Philo.

So he only has seven pages of text before giving all the direct references to Philo in Christian literature up until the year 1000. That takes about 12 more pages. A very helpful resource for anyone wanting to do advanced study on Philo in relation to patristic literature.

2. In the text that Runia does provide, he first tells of the survival of Philo's works. Most of the Jewish literature in Alexandria, unfortunately, was destroyed in 115-117 when the Jews revolted against Roman rule in Egypt and lost big time. But Philo's works survived, perhaps because they were valued by Christians in the city.

So when Pantaenus started a Christian school in Alexandria, he quite possibly made sure a copy of Philo's writings were there. But Clement of Alexandria, the successor of Pantaenus in the late 100s, was the first known Christian to quote Philo. Origen, Clement's successor, then took a complete copy of Philo's writings to Caesarea, where eventually Eusebius would know them and write three chapters on them in his famed Ecclesiastical History.

This quote is telling: "Between Josephus in the first century and the Renaissance there is not a single explicit reference to Philo in a Jewish or a non-Christian Greek or Latin source" (270).

3. Runia sees the impact of Philo on the third century Christians largely in terms of his exegesis. Some early Christians found his interpretations of the Old Testament helpful. Also, those who accepted allegorical interpretation liked some of his techniques as well. However, once the church become Trinitarian, his logos approach was less helpful Christologically.

4. So we come to the chapter perhaps of most interest to me. Per Jarle Bekken's, "Philo's Relevance for the Study of the New Testament." There are, I think, some generative ideas tucked in this chapter. It is, by the way, the longest chapter in the book, 42 pages. It had a Borgen feel to it--a very detailed catalog of individual comparisons between rather formal features. So I was not surprised to find that Bekken studied with Borgen.

I would say that the chapter succeeds in two very significant respects. First, if the goal is to give MA or PhD students possible research topics, there are many possibilities to investigate here. There is a long series of possible parallels between Philo and the New Testament in the chapter, especially in John, Galatians, and Romans. Further, Bekken gives parallels that you do not find in my book or the chapter by Siegert in Kamesar's book. That is a strength for the field of Philo introductions.

As an introduction, however, I think you'll do much better to buy my book when it comes to this topic. Bekken's engagement with Hebrews is a case in point. If you were to ask most people where the most likely intersection of Philo and the New Testament is, as far as ideas, I think Hebrews has to be at or near the top of the list. Yet there is nothing of the sort in this chapter. The classic treatment by Williamson, Philo and the Epistle to the Hebrews, isn't even mentioned.

Hebrews is briefly mentioned, however. How? In relation to a possible common exegetical tradition between Hebrews on the idea of God swearing.

So there is a host of possible incidental parallels in the chapter. Philo believed that some proselytes to Judaism were more truly Jews than some who were born Jews. Paul believed that some Gentiles were more truly circumcised than some who were born Jews. Maybe there's common tradition here. Most of the chapter has that general flavor. Some of the parallels seem like possible areas for future research. Some seem rather superficial to me.

You will find nothing on the potential impact of Philo's categories on New Testament Christology. Indeed, even though Bekken focuses heavily on John, there is no discussion of the Logos. The Colossian hymn is not mentioned.

This is, again, a difference in personality. I like to see the big picture. I am interested in ideas. These sorts of almost random, detailed lists of possible but relatively superficial and formal parallels tend to annoy me. I mean no disrespect to Bekken. He obviously is very knowledgeable of Philo and the rabbinic literature--more than I am. And you could criticize my introduction for not dealing with these sorts of potential parallels.

5. In the end, however, I have to consider the book a great success as an introduction to Philo. If you are an undergrad religion major of some kind and are looking to do graduate studies that will intersect with Philo, this is your book. I think this will become the standard text in graduate seminars to come.

It had the desired effect on me. It got me thinking of publishing something on Philo again. Congratulations to Seland and his team for a great introduction to Philo!

E8. The Church has worship as its most important and central task.

This is the eighth post on the Church in my ongoing series, theology in bullet points. The first unit in this series had to do with God and Creation (book here), and the second unit was on Christology and Atonement.

We are now in the third and final unit: The Holy Spirit and the Church. The first set of posts in this final unit on the Spirit and the Church was on the Holy Spirit.
_______________________________
The Church has worship as its most important and central task.

1. It goes without saying that the most important thing in the entire universe is God. Nothing else is possible by definition, for to be the one God is to be the most important thing.

God is the source of the universe. The universe could not exist without God, but God could exist without the universe. Those of us in the Wesleyan tradition, of course, believe that God values the creation. The creation is important because God loves it and wants good for it. Every human being is important because God loves it. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without God's notice because God loves the creation (Matt. 10:29).

Accordingly, to say God is the most important thing in the universe does not mean that we devalue anything in the creation. It is merely to put the creation into proper perspective. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism says, "The chief purpose of humanity is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever."

2. The primary function of both the Church and us as individuals is thus to worship God. It could not be any other way for God is the most important thing. To worship is to give greater honor to something than oneself. To worship God is to give him honor as the most glorious and significant thing in the universe. It is to recognize in our words and actions that God is God. It is to bow before him not only as the sovereign king of the universe, but to give him the honor, glory, and praise that only he has and deserves.

This is a glory and honor that only he has. Nothing can compare. Nothing deserves or should have our loyalty and devotion more than he should. No loyalty or devotion we have can conflict with our loyalty and devotion to him. All other loyalties and devotions must fit within our loyalty and devotion to him. This is the greatest commandment of all, to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30; Deut. 6:5).

Love in this context is not a feeling, but a commitment of intention and action. It is choice to value God above all else. Such love is not possible without the power of God through the Holy Spirit.

Such love is not only individual but corporate. We as the Church commit to honor God in all we do and think. Our corporate worship is a regular recommitment of us as the Church to honor God above all else and to act with love toward him in all we do and think.

3. Accordingly, there is no greater function that the Church has than to worship God. This follows naturally from the fact that God is the most important thing. True, God does not want us just to sit around all the time and just think about him and praise Him. He also wants us also to worship and adore him by the things we do in his name in the church and the world.

However, we cannot lose sight that all the things we may do in the name of God in the church and the world are ultimately expressions of praise to God as God. Our lives, our service, our mission are all expressions of worship to God as the most important thing. And we must regularly stop simply to praise him, both as individuals and as the Church. We must set aside regular time and space, "sacred time and space," to do nothing but to worship him.

4. We can certainly worship God with our minds, but our minds are only part of who we are as human beings. It is from our "hearts," our deepest being, that we most centrally worship God. Are our wills aligned with God? Are we committed to God? Do we adore God? Do we long for God?

Human feelings are fickle, and are not sure indicators of our relationship with God. But it is nonetheless natural that we would feel a longing for God in worship. It is no surprise that music--singing and instruments--have been part of the worship of God for as long as time can remember. Dancing and physical demonstrations have often accompanied the worship of God in history.

The power of ritual is not to be underestimated. The power to tap into the human subconscious by actions that are connected with the worship of God and with our spiritual past goes far beyond mere ideas. This relates not only to our spiritual past as individuals, which in itself is immensely powerful, the emotional memory of previous encounters with God. It also relates to our corporate spiritual past, actions that Christians have done for millennia or even that go back into the distant history of Israel.

5. The Church thus sets aside regular time to meet together in worship. Since the earliest days after Christ, we have primarily met together on the Lord's Day, Sunday, for this is the day that Jesus rose from the dead. Every Sunday when the Church gathers together, it remembers that Christ is risen from the dead in victory and is enthroned at God's right hand as king of all.

This is what the word church means in Greek. It is an assembly, a gathering. We meet to encounter God and to hear any word he might have for us. We meet to fellowship and encourage one another. But the most important thing we gather to do is to worship him. The visible church assembles to worship.

We will gather to worship God and the lamb for all eternity. "You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel" (Heb. 12:22-24).

Revelation pictures a similar scene: "At once I was in the spirit, and there in heaven stood a throne, with one seated on the throne! ... And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and inside. Day and night without ceasing they sing, 'Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come.' And whenever the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks to the one who is seated on the throne, who lives forever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall before the one who is seated on the throne and worship the one who lives forever and ever; they cast their crowns before the throne, singing, 'You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.'" (Rev. 4:2, 8-11)

We thus pray, not only to ask requests of the Lord for ourselves and others. We pray, not only to thank God for the things he has done for us. We pray to glorify God as God. We pray to honor him as the most important thing in the universe. We pray to express our love and longing for him. Praising God is the most important thing we do in prayer. And we pray, not only as individuals, but we pray as the Church assembled together visibly on earth, just as we will pray in assembly in the kingdom of God, just as the angels praise God now around his heavenly throne.

6. We worship God not only in the time we set aside in assembly to worship him. Our entire lives should be an expression of our devotion to God and of him as our first priority in life. We can thus glorify God in all we think and do.

"Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him" (Col. 3:17). "Do everything for the glory of God" (1 Cor. 10:31). Nothing we do should conflict with our devotion to God.

Certainly we glorify and worship God as we participate in the mission of God to redeem the world and see it reconciled to him. Certainly we glorify and worship God as we teach one another and grow in our walk with God. Certainly we glorify and worship God as we fellowship with one another. We worship and glorify God in everything that we do together as the Church.

Certainly we glorify and worship God by presenting our bodies both individually and corporately as living sacrifices to God (Rom. 12:1-2). Certainly we glorify and worship God by not letting the power of Sin rule over our bodies (Rom. 6:12). We glorify and worship God by doing the good we know he wants us to do and by avoiding the evil that grieves him.

But we also can glorify God in the more mundane tasks of our lives by giving him the glory in everything we do. Our work in the world can be an expression of glory to God. Our work can be an act of worship. We can glorify God as we raise our families and invest time in our children and parents. Our relationships in our families can be an expression of worship.

Our relationships with others can be an expression of worship as we serve others and fellowship as God created us to relate to one another as human beings. We can even praise God as we enjoy the pleasures of life and creation that God has made not only for him to enjoy but for us to enjoy as well. Our thanks to God for all the good things we experience naturally lead us to praise him for who he is.

We can thus praise God in everything we do, making our whole life a prayer of thanksgiving and praise.

7. We must also recognize that at times things arise in our lives that can compete with God for our ultimate loyalty. Certainly we cannot let anything in our lives contradict our love of God. We cannot always remove the things that tempt us to act against our love of God, but the Spirit can give us power not to act in thought or deed in a way that violates the love of God. If we can remove the sources of temptation, we of course should. But sometimes we cannot and must rely on the Spirit's power to overcome.

At times, however, other things can become "idols." These things may not in themselves contradict the love of God, but we can let them become more important to us than they should be. In the days of Israel, God commanded them to have no other gods above him (Exod. 20:3-5).

We do not make literal idols any more, but we can have figurative idols in our lives. These are little "gods" than compete with our loyalty to the one true God. They can be our possessions. They can be our ambitions. They can be anything that we value too highly. The proper worship of God demands that nothing in our lives compete with him for our loyalty.

The Church has worship as its most important and central task, as does each individual believer.

Next Sunday: E9. The Church participates in God's mission to the world.

More "Holy Jumpers"

Last Saturday I started reviewing a book Keith Drury and I are reading called Holy Jumpers, by Bill Kostlevy. This book is about "evangelicals and radicals in Progressive Era America," around the turn of the century 1900. It is especially interested in a group called the Metropolitan Church Association (MCA), a radical holiness group based in Chicago at that time.

1. This week I managed to read three more chapters. (Keith reads like lightning, so I imagine he's already finished) Chapter 3 covers a major revival in Chicago, chapter 4 another major one in Boston, and chapter 5 gives us the launching of the MCA magazine, The Burning Bush.

There's a turning point in the middle of chapter 4, perhaps a turning point that is one of those moments where history could have gone a quite different direction. Here we're talking about the death of Martin Wells Knapp.

I don't know if Kostlevy is just a good story-teller, but as you read chapter 3, you get the impression that the radical holiness movement is soundly moving in one direction. Then Knapp dies and in an instant it feels like it is heading in a quite different direction. What if he had not died? What would the holiness movement have looked like instead?

2. But let me backtrack a little. I have three major take-aways this week. The first is how significant the death of Knapp seems to have been. And lest any Wesleyans lose perspective, Knapp is one of the putative founders of the Pilgrim church, which would become the Wesleyan Church in 1968.

Another main take-away is how extensively involved business and entrepreneurial type individuals were in these beginnings. These were smart cookies on a practical level but completely uneducated on a theological level. Indeed, they were generally against education of that sort. They saw it as a hindrance to the fire.

"In a mere seventy-five days, an estimated 2,200 seekers sought salvation or sanctification at MCA altars" in Chicago in the revival of 1901 (63). Duke Farson and E. L. Harvey were successful businessmen and the driving forces behind this revival. Early on, one holiness commentator remarked that, "fully consecrated and anointed business men may be the most effectual preachers of the word" (57).

This is a sobering dynamic to those of us who are idealists. Sure, there wouldn't have been these results if these preachers were not facilitating something quite spectacular. They were scratching a itch, including spiritual itches. But it happened with a significant bank roll. Farson's financial resources were apparently unending. And it happened with business savvy. One of the players in chapter 5, Frank Messenger, had basically organized a town for a major textile company.

Yet there's little question that these men were pretty ignorant theologically. Harvey and Farson would get more and more crazy: "Now I tell you brothers that if you don't get this jumping into you, you will not be saved," Harvey said (84). When they took their revival to Boston in the winter of 1901, they became known as "pentecostal jumpers" or just "jumpers." Jumping was peculiarly becoming an evidence of the Holy Spirit, an outward sign of divine favor.

You'll remember also that Seth Rees was another putative founder of the Pilgrim church and that he was more or less an employee of these MCA men at this time. He was one of the preachers in both the Chicago and Boston revivals. Yet apparently even he was beginning to get concerned about a certain rigidity that was developing around extreme behavior.

3. So here's a sobering claim. Religion is usually more "successful" in the hands of the less educated, and depth has a tendency to squelch the popularity of religion. There is also truth in the other way of putting it. Intellectual answers do not tend to meet people at their deepest desires and needs. We are more emotional than intellectual beings.

I've longed to see both combined. That was my hope when we founded Wesley Seminary. We wanted a seminary that focused on the practice of ministry in a way that hit the most pressing needs of real people in the church. But my hope was also for layers of theological insight to be added to the church.

On the one hand, ministry can be extremely successful with the most basic of sound theological principles, even if they are rather simplistic. I believe part of the success of Wesley Seminary thus far intuitively follows some of the same secrets to the success of these early holiness pioneers and the great revivalists of the 1800s. It has focused on the practical skills of ministry and the basic drives to mission. It has tended to stay near the surface theologically, in what I might call a somewhat parable level understanding of God.

Where the rub always seems to come in theological education is in what I am calling "literal depth." There often seems to be a tendency for theological professors to want to squash what I'm calling a more parable-level understanding. Since faith is often attached to these simplistic parables, some seminaries ironically can have the unfortunate effect of diminishing faith and perhaps even reducing what might have been a more impactful ministry.

By the same token, some of the most popular seminaries right now are those that are more or less superficial (I'll resist naming the one that first popped into my head). Indeed, many fundamentalist seminaries generate enthusiasm by attacking theological depth, just like the "jumpers" at the turn of the century. And, like the jumpers, there are plenty of rich business donors around today who are willing to put their money and business sense behind very practical but relatively shallow faith.

History suggests two things--the practical and shallow tends to win out strongly in the short run. But depth tends to prevail over time within any one movement.

4. Again, I was very struck at the apparently immense impact that Knapp's death had on the trajectory of the movement. Also again, perhaps Kostlevy is just a good story teller.

A week before Knapp's death, Harvey was set to come speak at the 1902 camp meeting in Cincinnati at what is now God's Bible School. Harvey had apparently convinced Knapp at the Chicago revival that he needed to come out of the Methodist Episcopal Church (ME from here on), and Knapp had done so. Indeed, Harvey and Farson would soon preach that you could not be a sanctified minister and stay in these established churches.

Then Knapp died and a series of most curious events would unfold. First, he was said to have written down three names on a piece of paper to indicate who would control the school and mission. They were three women--his wife, Mary Storey (a professor who had remained in the ME Church), and his traveling assistant, Bessie Queen.

Although in the broader society at the time, to name three women might have seemed immensely controversial, we have to remember that the holiness movement was feminist in the strongest of terms in its beginnings. I noticed in Wallace Thorton's telling of the story that he feels the need to explain this prominent role of women to the modern day holiness audience. Is this possibly a sign that contemporary holiness churches have strayed from their roots on this issue?

It seems to me that, in the late twentieth century, the contemporary holiness movement swapped out political and fundamentalist conservatism for its earlier social radicalism. A movement that used to consist of the most radical feminists of the day now in many respects might feel closer to an anti-women in ministry place like Bob Jones University than to somewhere like IWU, which is closer to its roots on these sorts of issues.

I have seen a wedding ceremony in the modern holiness movement that put a strong emphasis on the headship of the husband that would never have entered into the mind of its founding mothers and fathers. Both the wives of Martin Wells Knapp and Seth C. Rees were ordained themselves! This is my third take-away from these chapters--the prominent and unashamed role of women in the roots of the holiness movement. (We will see the near communism among many of these radical types as well in the final post next week.)

5. But again, I'm getting ahead of myself. The entire situation around Knapp's death is bizarre. I could write a couple rather salacious novels out of the data, but I'll leave it to your imagination.

His body was cremated, a BIG no, no for this crowd. Rees doesn't return from the Boston revival to do the funeral, a choice that probably ended any real significant role for him in the future of God's Bible School. Harvey's role in the scheduled revival is immediately revoked. GBS immediately reverses its stand on "comeouterism."

The figure of Bessie Queen is the most intriguing of all. A young, pretty assistant now becomes the dominant figure at GBS. She controls The Revivalist, and thus becomes the dominant controller of the voice of the holiness movement for a brief time. She is said to dominate Mrs. Knapp.

Bessie Queen Standley

Soon Harvey indicates that Knapp had confessed to him an inappropriate relationship with Queen, with whom Knapp had sometimes traveled alone. It is confirmed by another secretary who defects from GBS to MCA. In a personal interview, Arthur Bray in my own Wesleyan circles confirmed to Kostlevy that this was genuinely believed by these figures at the MCA.

But Godbey stands up for her, as does Mrs. Knapp. Within a year of his death, Queen--who had written earlier that she would never marry because she was married to The Revivalist--marries Meredith D. Standley, Knapp's replacement as Bible teacher at GBS (and an original graduate).

There is an afterlife to the Bessie Queen story. Knapp's own son, along with other donors, would take the school to court over financial misappropriation. The suit was not fully resolved until the 1980s, perhaps the longest running court case in Ohio, maybe national history. In 1950, the Standleys were removed from their leadership over the school by the State of Ohio. The general target of these accusations was not Meredith but Bessie Standley.

Again, one wonders what great things might have been accomplished without these distractions. Then again, if Knapp had not died, would the school have gone in a different, more radical direction?

Cartoon showing how the
founder of Asbury College
got what he deserved when
 after turning away the
MCA he found himself
 turned away.

6. The MCA soon found itself isolated from the rest of the holiness movement. Rees would leave and work with The Revivalist for a time instead. (He seems to have moved around a lot. Keith wonders if he was hard to work for. Interestingly, both of his sons more or less left the holiness movement and became somewhat mainline in their approach to Christianity.)

It was during this season that the MCA periodical, The Burning Bush, became a powerful tool. Knapp had also used cartoons in The Revivalist, a sign of his entrepreneurial bent. But Harvey and Farson would bring the muckraker skills of modern yellow journalism to lambaste their opponents.

(I can feel it in my veins, that revivalist blood. You can see it from time to time on the blog. This week I thought of several inflammatory cartoons I could post here if I ever had a meltdown. Pray it never happens. :-)

What is funny is that the cartoonist they hired wasn't even part of the movement. As savvy businessmen, there was a good deal of "the end justifies the means" in their method. Their goal was nothing short of changing the world. And they were willing to use the means of the world to do it.

By the way, Kostlevy gives an implicit shot at Mark Noll when he notes how engaged these holiness people were in the tools and methods of the world. "The ease with which the MCA adopted journalistic expose, the chief weapon of Progressive reform, may surprise those who continue to understand evangelicalism and the Holiness Movement primarily as expressions of a cultural retreat from modernity" (94). Basically, Noll and Marsden are all wet.

7. Had enough? More next week.

Friday Science: Where are we in time?

Review Post #2

As I look to a possible rhythm of posting for this fall, I'm thinking of looking at Fridays as a science/math type day. So today I thought I'd review the second chapter of Max Tegmark's, Our Mathematical Universe. Some thoughts on the first two chapters are here.

1. So if the previous chapter tried to locate us in space, the third chapter tries to locate us in time. I don't think there were many controversial matters in the previous chapter. But when you begin talking about the age of the universe, some do get nervous.

So before I dive in the chapter, it's worthwhile to do a little Christian processing first. My sense is that the real rub here has to do more with the question of evolution than it does the actual age of the earth. So even John Piper himself does not think the question of the earth's age is restricted by the Bible.

Here the "apparent age" theory, I think, opens the door to let science be science. It would be problematic to my faith if we had to "cook the books" when it came to science because of a supposed interpretation of the Bible, especially when 1) there are so many contradictory interpretations of the Bible and 2) as a Bible scholar, I know that those who care the most about these sorts of things are usually the most ill-equipped interpreters of all.

The apparent age theory is the idea that God created the universe to look like it was really old, even though it is actually very young. I am not endorsing this theory. I am simply saying that, if we allow for the possibility that God made the universe to look old--whether it is or isn't. Then we are free to let the chips lie where they fall as we look at the evidence. Faith isn't at stake so we can be honest with the evidence.

"Whew," so we don't have to be worried about how old the evidence seems to suggest the universe is.

2. It was an interesting thought Tegmark suggests at the beginning of the chapter that, for the Romans, the laws governing the skies appeared to be different than the laws governing the earth. For example, why doesn't the moon fall out of the sky to the ground the way things I throw up do? I didn't see a footnote here, so I'd like to hear it from the ancient horse's mouth.

But it does make a little sense. Many Jews at the time of Christ thought of the stars as angelic beings. (Which makes the star over Bethlehem potentially get very interesting) Some Greeks and Romans thought of stars as great heroes from the past. These ideas would at least fit with what Tegmark says because, in such cases, the things in the sky would be beings, not rocks. (although Anaxagoras did think the sun was a very hot rock centuries before Christ... he was kicked out of Athens)

By contrast, Newton assumed that the objects in the sky followed the same rules as things on earth. He calculated how fast something orbiting the earth would have to be moving to stay in orbit. His answer was 7.9 kilometers per second. Friction of tides and such is slowing the spinning of the earth, so things were spinning faster in the past than at present.

Apparently, if you extrapolate back, the earth can't be more than 4 or 5 billions years old, because it would have been spinning too fast then to stay together.

3. I suspect the current theory for how the solar system, the galaxies, and the universe formed fits with a host of data. It is not proven, mind you. It is just impressive in its ability to explain a great deal of evidence. If you have a cloud of hydrogen gas--the simplest of all elements, one proton and one electron--two forces will tug at each other.

The one is the force of gravity. It pulls the gas in on itself. The other is the heat of hydrogen running into itself. This heat pushes expansion.

So what happens in mathematical models of this sort of thing is that you eventually get a swirling pizza with a star at the center. The hydrogen in the middle gets so hot that it fuses to form helium, the second simplest element (two protons, two electrons, and two neutrons). The energy levels are also just right for these to fuse to form carbon and from there all the other elements as this plasma mix cools off.

It is a theory, of course. But it seems to make sense, and I can't think of anything in the Bible that would make it problematic.

4. So how old is the earth? Here we get to radioactive decay. The atomic bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed to suggest that our notions of radioactive decay work pretty well with the evidence. What happens is that certain versions of uranium (we call them isotopes) are unstable and tend to disintegrate into lead. This is a process whose rate we have measured.

The "half life" of a radioactive element is how long it takes for half of that element to deteriorate into a simpler element, lower on the periodic table. So at present, it sure seems like we can date things by seeing, for example, how much lead and how much uranium are in a given rock sample. They have done such with certain rocks in Australia, as well as with meteorites and the result is the suggestion that the earth is about 4.4 billion years old, while the solar system is about 4.5 billion years old.

Now these conclusions are based on theories, but they seem to have consistently great explanatory power. Again, for those who think the Bible absolutely teaches a young earth, there is a release valve. If we allow for the possibility that God created rocks with some of the uranium already decomposed, we don't have to worry about this issue. We can take the science at its face value and say that the earth and solar system at least look to be billions of years old.

5. The universe is expanding. This was a hard won conclusion of twentieth century science. There were several people early on who suggested that this was a natural conclusion of Einstein's general relativity. But they were not popular voices. It is a great example of how peer pressure and popularity contests take place in science too.

So a guy named Fred Hoyle had a winning personality and he was saying what people wanted to hear--that the universe wasn't expanding but was pretty much just going along as usual. Meanwhile, Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest, was ignored when he suggested that the universe was expanding.

And here let me pause to express my confusion as to why some Christians think the idea of a "big bang" at the beginning is problematic. What is a big bang but the indication that the universe had a beginning? It seems to fit very nicely with the cosmological argument for God's existence, that the bang needed someone to trigger it. All I can think of is that people associate a big bang with evolution or assume it means there is no one doing the banging.

On the contrary, you might paraphrase Genesis 1:1 to say, "In the beginning, God caused a big bang, and the heavens and earth were the result." Could it be that the reason so many rejected the expanding universe of Lemaître and Friedmann is precisely because of how well it fit with the idea of a creation?

But the discovery of the "blue shift" of all galaxies we can see (they are all "moving away" from us, like the Doppler effect when an ambulance passes you and the sound gets stretched out) suggests the universe is expanding. When you do the math, it suggests that the universe is about 14 billion years old.

6. So here's a question. If we can see stars that are more than 14 billion light years away (a light year is the distance light travels in a year, going 186,000 meters per second), then doesn't the universe have to be older than that for us to see them?

Here is a key insight from Einstein's general relativity. It's not really that the stars are moving away from us. It's that space--the emptiness itself--is expanding. The space between things is getting bigger everywhere. Fascinating!

Nothing can move faster than the speed of light through space. "But space itself is free to stretch however fast it wants to" (48).

7. Looking into space is like looking back in time. And our telescopes get better and better. Thank the Lord that NASA somehow got money out of Congress to send up telescopes and probes into space.

So the further you look out into space, the older the things you are seeing. We can now see galaxies forming, and what we see looks just like the theory of coagulating gases I mentioned above. The further out you go, you get to the plasma pool of hydrogen atoms. And finally you get background radiation, the afterglow of the beginning. You hear the echo of God's word, "Let there be light."

I'll leave the chapter at that. Tegmark does not believe it all goes back to a singularity, an infinite point. We'll see what he is thinking here in later chapters, I'm sure. But he thinks that the quantum mechanics breaks down about a second before "nucleosynthesis," the formation of nucleuses.

We'll see what that means. By "big bang," he means that "everything we can observe was once hotter than the core of the Sun, expanding so fast that it doubled its size in under a second" (65). Not my definition, but we'll see where he goes with it.