This is the sixteenth post on Christian ethics 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 was on the Holy Spirit. The second set was on the Church. The third set was on sacraments. This final section is on Christian ethics.
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Sex should be kept within a marriage relationship.
1. When Jesus presented a model of marriage in Matthew 19, he looked to Genesis 2 as the model: "Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate" (19:4-6).
Becoming "one flesh" here is bigger than sex, but it certainly includes it. Paul prohibits visiting a prostitute by reminding the Corinthians that such an individual becomes one flesh with that prostitute (6:16). Paul is not in any way saying such a person is marrying the prostitute. But he is indicating that sex is an act that has dramatic spiritual implications and that it should only take place within marriage. [1]
Today we focus especially on the relational aspects to sex, the way it involves a special bond between two people. In the biblical world, the social implications and the purity implications would have been even more important. Sex was understood to be an act of particular vulnerability for defilement. And unless it took place within marriage, it threatened the social stability of society.
2. There are not many explicit statements in the Bible insisting on sex only in marriage because it was such a strong assumption of the biblical world. It did not need to be said. Women especially were expected to be virgins when they marry. It was not necessary to argue for it.
The older word fornication was often taken to refer to sex before marriage, but the underlying word porneia had a very broad reference to sexual immorality in general. When 1 Thessalonians 4:3 says to "abstain from fornication," it was not likely singling out pre-marital sex from other forms of sex outside marriage, but it was referring to a variety of improper sexual activity, perhaps including adultery. [2] Paul says not to exploit a brother in this area, quite possibly a comment on adultery (4:6).
3. The Old Testament clearly expected a woman to be a virgin when she married. In Deuteronomy 22, a woman who is not found to be a virgin on her wedding night was to be stoned (22:20-21). If a man sleeps with an engaged woman in the country, he is to be stoned but she is spared on the assumption that she screamed but no one was there to hear (22:25-27). If the same takes place in the city both are to be stoned on the assumption that she could have screamed but did not (22:23-24).
If a man sleeps with a woman who is not engaged, he has to marry her (Deut. 22:28-29). Exodus' version of this law also allows that the father may not want the woman to marry this man (Exod. 22:16-17). Both passages reflect the fact that a woman was expected to be a virgin at the time of marriage.
4. 1 Corinthians 7 gives perhaps the clearest instruction on the subject: "To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practicing self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion" (78-9). In other words, if you cannot control your sexual urges, it is better to get married than to be having indiscriminate sex outside of marriage. [3]
This is a very practical approach. It does not give us the lofty theology of man and woman becoming one flesh. It simply states that people should get married if they can't control themselves sexually.
5. We shouldn't be surprised that much of the biblical text focuses on the woman. The woman was seen in ancient patriarchal cultures as a point of vulnerability for shame to one's family. But most avenues for a man to have sex outside of marriage were also closed. He could not have sex with someone else's wife or concubine--that was adultery or porneia. He could not have sex with a virgin, for that wronged her and her family. Israelite men and women were not allowed to be prostitutes (Lev. 19:29; Deut. 23:17).
In short, the biblical text insists that women can only have sex within marriage, and the avenues for a man to have sex outside of marriage were prohibited.
6. In current Western culture, defilement has been transformed into sexually transmitted diseases. Social consequence has largely been translated into the difficulties and disadvantages of single parenting. These are of course real possible consequences of sexual activity outside of exclusive sexual relationships that involve commitment. Any teenager or twenty something whose attitude to sex is casual takes the risk of significantly disadvantaging their lives in these ways.
But there is also a potential cheapening of life. One lives for selfish pleasure, the baser and less noble of human impulses. If love of others is virtue, indiscriminate sexuality is on the love of self side of the equation. Sex can be a high expression of love, or it can be an act of pure self-pleasuring at the expense of others. The latter is incompatible with the values of Christ.
The more one values marriage, the more one will restrict sex to the marriage relationship. And the more one has the values of Christ, the more one will view males and females as equal partners in sexual relationships. Paul shockingly declares these values of mutuality in 1 Corinthians 7:1-5 where he urges that husbands and wives should have sex regularly so that they are not tempted to find sex elsewhere. He shockingly suggests that the wife has claim on her husband's body, just as he has claim on hers.
7. In the end, there can be no question where the assumption of Scripture lies. The Bible assumes throughout that sex is to be practiced within marriage and not outside of it.
Next Sunday: ET17: The Bible prohibits homosexual sex and several other types of sexual act.
[1] We can extend the principle and say that a man in the Old Testament with many wives became one flesh with all of his wives.
[2] One might look to Leviticus 18 for a general sense of the kinds of activities to which porneia refers.
[3] Paul's preference for celibacy here probably had a lot to do with an early expectation that Christ would return rather quickly to earth (e.g., 1 Cor. 7:29-31). 1 Timothy would later encourage marriage as the norm (1 Tim. 4:3; 5:14).
Wednesday, March 09, 2016
Saturday, March 05, 2016
Seminary PM5: There are spiritual disciplines we do in community.
The Seminary in a Nutshell series so far:
Chapter 1: The Calling of a Minister
Chapter 2: The Person of a Minister
Introduction
Ministers have different personalities and strengths
We each experience God best in different ways.
There are certain classic spiritual disciplines for individuals.
Today: There are spiritual disciplines we do in community.
1. In the West we have come to focus on the kinds of spiritual disciplines that we do as individuals. But the biblical world was not a world of individuals. Indeed, in most times and places, human beings have thought of themselves in terms of groups rather than as lone individualists.
What are the kinds of activities that we believers do in community to help form us?
2. Worship and fellowship rank high on the list. We worship together and God forms us. Fellowship is also part of God's plan for the church, and while we may not always sense that God is changing us when we fellowship, he is. He is making us more loving toward each other. He is helping us learn to endure conflict and become better in the process.
In worship of course is regular communion. The Lord's Supper is a reminder of the grace of God toward us and a chance for us to renew our relationship with him publicly. The Lord's Supper was meant to emphasize the oneness of the body of Christ. "Though we are many, we are one body, because we all partake of the one bread" (1 Cor. 10:17).
Baptism is also a corporately formative discipline. Although we have a tendency to lean toward its individual dimensions, baptism is also a heavily corporate event. The community of faith makes a covenant with the individual or child to bathe them in prayer, to surround them with a communion of faith that will help protect them from temptation and sin.
Confession also is often a regular part of public worship. It very much relates to an important function that the body of Christ can play in our spiritual walk, namely, accountability. Our brothers and sisters in Christ help keep us from falling into temptation. They can also play a positive role of encouragement and mutual edification.
3. Finally, we should not underestimate the spiritual good it does us to participate in the mission of the Church and in service to others. These are tasks that we might naturally think are for others and not ourselves, but we do as much or more good to our own walk with Christ as we do for others. The mission after all is God's and we serve because God loves others. We participate in God's mission, and we benefit from it ourselves.
4. Ministers, like all Christian individuals need to participate in these disciplines of Christian community. The pastor is not exempt or in some way apart from the worship, fellowship, means of grace, confession, accountability, mission, or service of the community of faith.
Sometimes it can be more difficult for ministers to participate in some of these disciplines. When you are responsible for the worship service, it can be more difficult to relax and experience worship. Being in the role of the leader can make fellowship awkward or more difficult with individuals in the church. The same goes for accountability.
So ministers need to get away and worship somewhere else occasionally. Every once and a while, they should experience another community of faith. Denominations can create systems where there are pastors for pastors. A pastor should be part of an accountability group that, more likely than not, is made up of individuals from outside the church at which they minister.
The pastor and his/her family also need friends and fellowship. Sometimes the pastoral situation can be isolating within a congregation. This is then another area in which denominations can facilitate fellowship among pastors in an area.
5. There are spiritual disciplines that we do in community, and pastors are not exempt from the need and benefit.
Next Week: Seminary Pastor as Minister 6: Some spiritual reading
Friday, March 04, 2016
Sermon: “Spirit Empowered Humanity”
Preached March 4, 2016 as the final sermon in the Cox Deeper Life Series.
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Recap
So if you were here on Wednesday, the title of the sermon was, “Jesus sanctified humanity.” The basic point of that sermon was that when Jesus came to earth he showed us what it meant to be truly human, to be the kind of human being that God intended all human beings to be. I argued that when Jesus was on earth, he played it by the human rules and did everything he did by the power of the Holy Spirit. The idea was that there was nothing that Jesus did that, in theory, we could not also do through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus showed us how to be human.
So today we want to talk about how the Holy Spirit can empower us to be like God, to be holy as he is holy. What does that look like?
Two aspects to us being holy
There are two basic aspects to being wholly as a person. The first is *being* God-ified.
I don't know if you saw the first of the recent Batman reboot movies. In Batman Begins, there's a scene where Morgan Freeman is showing Christian Bales something he calls memory cloth. Basically when you put an electric current through the cloth it stiffens. So Batman can put the current through his cape and instantly it becomes a glider, like the picture.
[By the way, I guess physics students don’t think this would actually work very well, so don’t try to jump off any of the dorms with something like this.]
What I mean by being “God-ified” is that when we become God’s, he touches us. He electrifies us. He brings us into his force field. I thought of the Iron Man movie where he “electrifies” the hands of people falling from Air Force One so that they can’t help but grab the next person’s hand.
This is a difficult concept for us. Our Western culture doesn’t understand the idea that sin or holiness can be contagious. Take 1 Corinthians 7:14, where Paul says that an unbelieving spouse is made holy when they are married to a believer and that the children are also made holy by this connection. This is a pretty amazing statement. Just by being married to someone who is touching god an unbeliever is brought into the force field of the Holy Spirit. The children are brought into the force field of the Holy Spirit. Like the cape that when electrified takes on the form so in some strange way, and unbeliever in connection with a Christian somehow comes within the power of God!
We have a real tendency to bring comments like this into our modern paradigm. We want to say that they come under the influence of Christianity, the influence of God. And of course that's all true. But there something more than that going on here, something special, something striking. I would go so far as to say that to some small extent an unbeliever who's touching as it were a believer is less likely to sin. They’re a little more likely to do the good or more likely to be protected from evil. again I don't know how it all works. Its mystical, it's divine.
But somehow, even unbelievers are “God-ified” by contact with true believers. It doesn't mean they're going to be saved. Paul is explicit about that. Just because an unbeliever is married to a believer doesn't mean they're actually going to make it in the end of the kingdom of God. Paul saying something different, something very difficult for us modern people to get our head around.
But one aspect to holiness is to be “God-ified.” When we are God’s, God is touching us and that makes us holy.
But there is a second aspect to holiness. not only does God touch us and make us *be* God-ified, but the part I most want to talk about today is that when we are made holy we *live* God-ified. So “being” God-ified is one aspect of holiness, and the second is “living” God-ified.
So we return to the verse we looked at Wednesday in 1st Peter 1. “Do not be conformed to the desires That you formerly had in ignorance. Instead, as he who called you is holy, so be holy yourselves in all your conduct; for it is written, ‘You shall be holy, as I am holy.’”
On Wednesday we talked about how Jesus came and represented us. Today we want to talk about how we need in our lives to represent God in how we live.
Only by God’s Power
We all know the saying by Yoda in Empire Strikes Back. “Try not. Do or do not.” I'm not sure I never really understood what that means. When I hear it I just think man I've got to really try harder. And after all there are some things you just can't do. I grew up in the area where they told you that you could do anything you put your mind to. Do they still say that? it's a load of rubbish. I will never ever be able to run a five-minute mile. When I was in high school I came within 29 seconds of doing it once but I can tell you for a fact I will never ever be able to run it.
So what's up with this try not do or do not stuff?
As I reflect on this sermon, though, I wonder if what Yoda is telling Luke Skywalker is that he actually can't do it. I wonder if he's telling Luke that the kinds of things that he is trying to do are impossible for him to do. In other words, the only way to do them Is for him to surrender himself fully to The Force and let the force do them through him.
No I don't believe in some impersonal force around us that empowers us. But I do believe in the Holy Spirit. I do believe that God wants to take over our lives and do impossible things through his power in us. I believe in the Holy Spirit.
What does it look like?
1. Love God with your all.
So what does it look like to live holy and not just be holy because God is touching you? I think Matthew 22 is a great place to start. Yeah actually it's a good place to end too. Someone comes to Jesus and ask him what God requires of us, what the greatest commandment is. Jesus responds, You will love the Lord your God with all your heart soul and mind. Basically, God expects you to love him with all your being.
This is a pretty tall order. It falls into the category of things you might try to do but you just can't. It's the kind of thing that's going to take some divine power to come anywhere close to.
For one thing none of us are really completely aware of ourselves. I may want to give everything to God but I don't know everything there is about me to give. Let's face it human beings are incredibly complex and we are far more unaware of ourselves than we are aware of ourselves. if other people only see the little bit of our iceberg above the water, we don't really see that much more of ourselves either. The stuff deep down the stuff that really makes us who we are, the stuff that drives us, the stuff that pushes us in certain directions--we aren't that much more aware of a lot about stuff ourselves than anyone else is. In fact, sometimes other people are more aware of those things than we are.
If I don't know all of me, how can I give it to God?
It might help to think of it more like an arrangement we have made with God, a covenant even. Have you ever actually told God that your whole life is his? Now none of us knows really what that all is going to entail. None of us knows the crises we're going to face later in life. In a real sense, none of us knows the complete inventory of this house that we live in, this house that we call our lives.
Did you have a fun attic in your house growing up? Did you have a musty basement in your house or a cluttered garage? My family is, for good or ill, a Harry Potter family. There's this place in Harry Potter that is called the Room of Requirement. It's a place where there is a ton of stuff and a mess of junk, and you never know what you're going to find it. I hate to say that we have an attic a basement and a garage in my house that are a little bit like that. There are things that I've been looking for in our house for over 15 years.
I did my doctorate in England in the city of Durham and the university I was a part of was made up of little colleges and had I think about 12 colleges that made up the university. The one I was part of was called St John's College, and I was something like in RD in St Johns.
One of my jobs--which by the way it was very dubious to give me this job--but one of my jobs was that if the fire alarm went off I had to go find out where in this maze of interconnected houses the alarm has been set off and then go to see if there was an actual fire. And let me say that St John's was a fire trap of amazing proportions. Basically at some time they had taken this row of houses that were built in the 17 hundreds and they had torn down the walls inside between the making this kind of maze of tunnels like that went up and down and around. One of my favorite staircases ended in a wall.
Let's just say that the boy in me loved that maze all of the secret places that you can find in this amazing network of hallways that were almost like tunnels in a mine. There are all sorts of hidden nooks and crannies in those buildings.
In the end, we just don't know everything that's in our lives. we don't have to list every single thing and specifically give it to him in order to love him with all our heart mind soul and strength. Holiness preachers use to use the analogy of signing over the title deed to your house to God. I may not know everything that's in my house. I may not know everything that's going to come through the doors of my house in my life, but I can sign over the house to God
I can make an arrangement as it were. I can make an arrangement that promises God that everything in my house, whatever it is it is his. That doesn't mean that I may not have to struggle at some point in the future.
Maybe someday when I'm wandering through my attic I'll come across something that pulls against God. Maybe I'll encounter something in my attic that threatens to divide my loyalty. And when that moment comes, and it probably will, then I have to stop and remind myself who holds the title to my house who owns the property.
And I won't be able to do it in my own power. There's a good chance that “trying” won't be enough. There's a good chance that I will have to rely on the Holy Spirit to make it a reality. But 1 Corinthians 10:13 promises that the Holy Spirit will make us able to bear up under temptation. Paul implies that there is no temptation that has to win over us.
Have you ever signed over the property of your life to God? Have you ever promised him that whatever you find in your attic or basement or garage, that it is his? Have you ever made that covenant with God for all of the rest of your life, committing your all to him?
It's not something we can do. It's not something we can work out in our minds or figure out. It's a covenant that we give over to him and let him take it from here.
There's a verse in Colossians 3 that has been my personal motto in this area. It says that whatever you do in word or deed do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. What this says to me is that my fundamental motivation needs to be to serve God with all my heart and all my being.
It's a different way of thinking about what I do. I don't approach living as a question of what is right and wrong but I approach what I do with the question of what would be most pleasing to God what would most glorify God.
A teenager once asked me how far he could go with a girl before he would go to hell. I smiled and jokingly said that he had already done it. Why? Because he wasn't approaching the question from the standpoint of what would most please God but from the standpoint of how much sin he could get away with.
In other words he has not given his property over to God he wanted to give just enough of his house to God in order to get to heaven. It's like Jesus said, this people honor me with their lips but their heart is far from me.
So there will always be things in our house that we lose track of, that we don't even know are there. Our lives are not static stuff comes in stuff goes out. I don't know if you've seen the movie inside out, but there's this pit where old memories fall to die, never to be heard of again.
Those things aren't so much the problem for holiness. As the hidden things of our lives come back we simply rededicate them to God we simply remind ourselves that we have committed to love God with all our heart mind soul and strength.
The problem is when there are secret spaces, hidden closets that we full well know are there but that we don't want to give to God. Again, being a Harry Potter family, I thought of that little place under the staircase where Harry Potter is sleeping in the first movie when the story all begins.
There's a campground in Frankfort Indiana that my family used to have a cabin at. And right underneath the top step of the stairs to the second floor, there was a little nook that you could open and I used to keep a can collection there. Don't ask me why I collected cans. But I have a can that had 1976 on it, the Bicentennial anniversary of America's birth. And then I had a can that said 1986 on it and then later one that said 1996 on it, if I remember correctly.
Some of us like to have little secret places in our lives little things that we keep to ourselves, little things that we do not share with others. And of course it's okay to have some things that you keep private to yourselves. That is it's OK as long as you don't keep them from God.
The problem with secret spaces is if we don't give that part of our house to God.
So if you've never actually signed over your property to God that is something you're going to want to do. That is something you must do. There's simply is no other option. We cannot keep our houses from God and be his.
The same thing goes with secret spaces. It may be some little thing at first that we are keeping from God. but if we continue to have parts of our lives where we do not let God go, eventually they go from being little things to becoming quite great things indeed.
A drip of water seems like hardly anything, but over time just that little drip can create large cracks. I mentioned that I was at St John's College in England. When I first arrived there the steps leading up to the front building were quite remarkable. Like I said they were from the 17 hundreds. The principle of the college once remarked when he had visited Independence Hall in Philadelphia how funny it was when the tour guide remarked at how old that building was. He whispered to his wife that his office was in a building that old.
But the steps in front of John's College actually bowed. And you might think wow what incredible force must cause stone to actually curve? but the answer is just the ordinary steps of people like you and me walking up and down and in and out of that building for 300 years. a little step is nothing but a million of them can cause stone to bow.
So it is also with our lives. For both good and bad. Habits of doing good are hard to establish but with each passing time that we do them it becomes easier. good can become a habit. But in the same way, small little things that we keep from God can over time become so great that they smash our relationship with Him. we cannot go into the kingdom with anything other than that which fits with God and small bits of defiance overtime become massive defiance in the end.
2. Choose to love others.
There is a second part to the Great Commandment. When the young man came to Jesus and asked him what God required of him, Jesus not only said that he needed to love God with all his being. Jesus also said that he needed to love others.
You might remember the parable of the Good Samaritan in which the person who comes to Jesus in that instance tries to wiggle out of loving people he doesn't like. in lawyer like fashion this man says but who is my neighbor? in other words can I get by with just loving my friends, the people that I like to call my neighbor?
Jesus answer must have been very very annoying. In the story of the Good Samaritan Jesus makes the hero someone that no one wanted to like, a Samaritan! Jesus was saying as it were that you have to love everyone, even Samaritans.
Jesus says similar things in Matthew 5. Jesus says if you only love the people who are friends with you better than anyone in the world? Don’t even evil people like their friends? No, Jesus says. You must love your enemies just as God loves his enemies. God sends rain and sun not just on good farmers but on wicked farmers as well.
So the command for us to love our neighbor means everyone, both our friends and our enemies.
An interesting observation here is that God does not command us to like everyone. I don't think that loving in this instance is the same as liking. in fact I don't think that what Jesus is talking about here has anything to do with feelings. rather, it has to do with choices.
I tried to word this last slide carefully. Choose to love others. I think there will always be people that you don't like, people who rub you the wrong way. this is specially applies to people who have hurt you in the past.
When we say that God calls us to love our enemies, what we are saying is that God has called us to act lovingly toward them, not to feel loving toward them.
I like to think of it this way. In life we are often confronted with a choice between A and B. Now sometimes we don't know which is the more loving choice. but often we do. Often we know that Jesus would take choice A and not choice B. Sure we can be self-deceived. I am amazed right now at the incredibly different things that American Christians think Jesus would do. Christians often disagree on what the loving thing actually is. God knows, And God is the judge.
As we said on Wednesday God isn't looking for perfection from us. He's looking for commitment. He's looking for our intentions. As Jesus says God looks on the heart.
To love our enemy means that when we are confronted with a choice between A and B that we choose the loving choice. It doesn't mean that were happy about it. It doesn't mean that we enjoy doing it. It means that, by God's grace, by God's power, we trust ourselves to the Holy Spirit and make the right choice.
There are of course all sorts of clarifications here. When it comes to our own morality and eternal destiny, all of a suddenly become good lawyers. We want to wiggle out of doing the right thing so often. But it is true that sometimes the loving thing to do is not to let others have what they want. Sometimes, as one person put it, love must be tough.
For me personally, sometimes I get a kind of gnawing feeling inside of me that what I'm about to do just isn't the right thing. This happens off and on Facebook and Twitter for me. I like to make people laugh, but some things just aren't funny. Sometimes right before I tweet something I'll get this kind of feeling inside that I want to ignore. Some of my friends have suggested that this is the Holy Spirit or my conscience telling me that I really shouldn't tweet that.
But again God is not looking for perfection. He's looking for commitment.
Conclusion
So as we close this holiness series today, I hope that you will make a commitment. it is first of all a commitment to give your house to the Lord. Even though you don't know everything that's in your house, you can sign it over to him. You can say to the Lord, “Lord I'm giving you everything I know that's in my house. I'm giving you all the secret spaces.” You know what they are. Give it all. Give it all to God. Everything that there now. Everything that's there from the past. Everything that's going to be there in the future.
Then commit to choose love when you have a choice. Commit to make the right choice whenever you're confronted with doing the loving thing or not doing the loving thing.
_____________________
Recap
So if you were here on Wednesday, the title of the sermon was, “Jesus sanctified humanity.” The basic point of that sermon was that when Jesus came to earth he showed us what it meant to be truly human, to be the kind of human being that God intended all human beings to be. I argued that when Jesus was on earth, he played it by the human rules and did everything he did by the power of the Holy Spirit. The idea was that there was nothing that Jesus did that, in theory, we could not also do through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus showed us how to be human.
So today we want to talk about how the Holy Spirit can empower us to be like God, to be holy as he is holy. What does that look like?
Two aspects to us being holy
There are two basic aspects to being wholly as a person. The first is *being* God-ified.
I don't know if you saw the first of the recent Batman reboot movies. In Batman Begins, there's a scene where Morgan Freeman is showing Christian Bales something he calls memory cloth. Basically when you put an electric current through the cloth it stiffens. So Batman can put the current through his cape and instantly it becomes a glider, like the picture.
 |
| Arkham video game |
What I mean by being “God-ified” is that when we become God’s, he touches us. He electrifies us. He brings us into his force field. I thought of the Iron Man movie where he “electrifies” the hands of people falling from Air Force One so that they can’t help but grab the next person’s hand.
This is a difficult concept for us. Our Western culture doesn’t understand the idea that sin or holiness can be contagious. Take 1 Corinthians 7:14, where Paul says that an unbelieving spouse is made holy when they are married to a believer and that the children are also made holy by this connection. This is a pretty amazing statement. Just by being married to someone who is touching god an unbeliever is brought into the force field of the Holy Spirit. The children are brought into the force field of the Holy Spirit. Like the cape that when electrified takes on the form so in some strange way, and unbeliever in connection with a Christian somehow comes within the power of God!
We have a real tendency to bring comments like this into our modern paradigm. We want to say that they come under the influence of Christianity, the influence of God. And of course that's all true. But there something more than that going on here, something special, something striking. I would go so far as to say that to some small extent an unbeliever who's touching as it were a believer is less likely to sin. They’re a little more likely to do the good or more likely to be protected from evil. again I don't know how it all works. Its mystical, it's divine.
But somehow, even unbelievers are “God-ified” by contact with true believers. It doesn't mean they're going to be saved. Paul is explicit about that. Just because an unbeliever is married to a believer doesn't mean they're actually going to make it in the end of the kingdom of God. Paul saying something different, something very difficult for us modern people to get our head around.
But one aspect to holiness is to be “God-ified.” When we are God’s, God is touching us and that makes us holy.
But there is a second aspect to holiness. not only does God touch us and make us *be* God-ified, but the part I most want to talk about today is that when we are made holy we *live* God-ified. So “being” God-ified is one aspect of holiness, and the second is “living” God-ified.
So we return to the verse we looked at Wednesday in 1st Peter 1. “Do not be conformed to the desires That you formerly had in ignorance. Instead, as he who called you is holy, so be holy yourselves in all your conduct; for it is written, ‘You shall be holy, as I am holy.’”
On Wednesday we talked about how Jesus came and represented us. Today we want to talk about how we need in our lives to represent God in how we live.
Only by God’s Power
We all know the saying by Yoda in Empire Strikes Back. “Try not. Do or do not.” I'm not sure I never really understood what that means. When I hear it I just think man I've got to really try harder. And after all there are some things you just can't do. I grew up in the area where they told you that you could do anything you put your mind to. Do they still say that? it's a load of rubbish. I will never ever be able to run a five-minute mile. When I was in high school I came within 29 seconds of doing it once but I can tell you for a fact I will never ever be able to run it.
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| Empire Strikes Back |
As I reflect on this sermon, though, I wonder if what Yoda is telling Luke Skywalker is that he actually can't do it. I wonder if he's telling Luke that the kinds of things that he is trying to do are impossible for him to do. In other words, the only way to do them Is for him to surrender himself fully to The Force and let the force do them through him.
No I don't believe in some impersonal force around us that empowers us. But I do believe in the Holy Spirit. I do believe that God wants to take over our lives and do impossible things through his power in us. I believe in the Holy Spirit.
What does it look like?
1. Love God with your all.
So what does it look like to live holy and not just be holy because God is touching you? I think Matthew 22 is a great place to start. Yeah actually it's a good place to end too. Someone comes to Jesus and ask him what God requires of us, what the greatest commandment is. Jesus responds, You will love the Lord your God with all your heart soul and mind. Basically, God expects you to love him with all your being.
This is a pretty tall order. It falls into the category of things you might try to do but you just can't. It's the kind of thing that's going to take some divine power to come anywhere close to.
For one thing none of us are really completely aware of ourselves. I may want to give everything to God but I don't know everything there is about me to give. Let's face it human beings are incredibly complex and we are far more unaware of ourselves than we are aware of ourselves. if other people only see the little bit of our iceberg above the water, we don't really see that much more of ourselves either. The stuff deep down the stuff that really makes us who we are, the stuff that drives us, the stuff that pushes us in certain directions--we aren't that much more aware of a lot about stuff ourselves than anyone else is. In fact, sometimes other people are more aware of those things than we are.
If I don't know all of me, how can I give it to God?
It might help to think of it more like an arrangement we have made with God, a covenant even. Have you ever actually told God that your whole life is his? Now none of us knows really what that all is going to entail. None of us knows the crises we're going to face later in life. In a real sense, none of us knows the complete inventory of this house that we live in, this house that we call our lives.
Did you have a fun attic in your house growing up? Did you have a musty basement in your house or a cluttered garage? My family is, for good or ill, a Harry Potter family. There's this place in Harry Potter that is called the Room of Requirement. It's a place where there is a ton of stuff and a mess of junk, and you never know what you're going to find it. I hate to say that we have an attic a basement and a garage in my house that are a little bit like that. There are things that I've been looking for in our house for over 15 years.
I did my doctorate in England in the city of Durham and the university I was a part of was made up of little colleges and had I think about 12 colleges that made up the university. The one I was part of was called St John's College, and I was something like in RD in St Johns.
One of my jobs--which by the way it was very dubious to give me this job--but one of my jobs was that if the fire alarm went off I had to go find out where in this maze of interconnected houses the alarm has been set off and then go to see if there was an actual fire. And let me say that St John's was a fire trap of amazing proportions. Basically at some time they had taken this row of houses that were built in the 17 hundreds and they had torn down the walls inside between the making this kind of maze of tunnels like that went up and down and around. One of my favorite staircases ended in a wall.
Let's just say that the boy in me loved that maze all of the secret places that you can find in this amazing network of hallways that were almost like tunnels in a mine. There are all sorts of hidden nooks and crannies in those buildings.
In the end, we just don't know everything that's in our lives. we don't have to list every single thing and specifically give it to him in order to love him with all our heart mind soul and strength. Holiness preachers use to use the analogy of signing over the title deed to your house to God. I may not know everything that's in my house. I may not know everything that's going to come through the doors of my house in my life, but I can sign over the house to God
I can make an arrangement as it were. I can make an arrangement that promises God that everything in my house, whatever it is it is his. That doesn't mean that I may not have to struggle at some point in the future.
Maybe someday when I'm wandering through my attic I'll come across something that pulls against God. Maybe I'll encounter something in my attic that threatens to divide my loyalty. And when that moment comes, and it probably will, then I have to stop and remind myself who holds the title to my house who owns the property.
And I won't be able to do it in my own power. There's a good chance that “trying” won't be enough. There's a good chance that I will have to rely on the Holy Spirit to make it a reality. But 1 Corinthians 10:13 promises that the Holy Spirit will make us able to bear up under temptation. Paul implies that there is no temptation that has to win over us.
Have you ever signed over the property of your life to God? Have you ever promised him that whatever you find in your attic or basement or garage, that it is his? Have you ever made that covenant with God for all of the rest of your life, committing your all to him?
It's not something we can do. It's not something we can work out in our minds or figure out. It's a covenant that we give over to him and let him take it from here.
There's a verse in Colossians 3 that has been my personal motto in this area. It says that whatever you do in word or deed do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. What this says to me is that my fundamental motivation needs to be to serve God with all my heart and all my being.
It's a different way of thinking about what I do. I don't approach living as a question of what is right and wrong but I approach what I do with the question of what would be most pleasing to God what would most glorify God.
A teenager once asked me how far he could go with a girl before he would go to hell. I smiled and jokingly said that he had already done it. Why? Because he wasn't approaching the question from the standpoint of what would most please God but from the standpoint of how much sin he could get away with.
In other words he has not given his property over to God he wanted to give just enough of his house to God in order to get to heaven. It's like Jesus said, this people honor me with their lips but their heart is far from me.
So there will always be things in our house that we lose track of, that we don't even know are there. Our lives are not static stuff comes in stuff goes out. I don't know if you've seen the movie inside out, but there's this pit where old memories fall to die, never to be heard of again.
Those things aren't so much the problem for holiness. As the hidden things of our lives come back we simply rededicate them to God we simply remind ourselves that we have committed to love God with all our heart mind soul and strength.
The problem is when there are secret spaces, hidden closets that we full well know are there but that we don't want to give to God. Again, being a Harry Potter family, I thought of that little place under the staircase where Harry Potter is sleeping in the first movie when the story all begins.
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| Harry Potter, Sorcerer's Stone |
Some of us like to have little secret places in our lives little things that we keep to ourselves, little things that we do not share with others. And of course it's okay to have some things that you keep private to yourselves. That is it's OK as long as you don't keep them from God.
The problem with secret spaces is if we don't give that part of our house to God.
So if you've never actually signed over your property to God that is something you're going to want to do. That is something you must do. There's simply is no other option. We cannot keep our houses from God and be his.
The same thing goes with secret spaces. It may be some little thing at first that we are keeping from God. but if we continue to have parts of our lives where we do not let God go, eventually they go from being little things to becoming quite great things indeed.
A drip of water seems like hardly anything, but over time just that little drip can create large cracks. I mentioned that I was at St John's College in England. When I first arrived there the steps leading up to the front building were quite remarkable. Like I said they were from the 17 hundreds. The principle of the college once remarked when he had visited Independence Hall in Philadelphia how funny it was when the tour guide remarked at how old that building was. He whispered to his wife that his office was in a building that old.
But the steps in front of John's College actually bowed. And you might think wow what incredible force must cause stone to actually curve? but the answer is just the ordinary steps of people like you and me walking up and down and in and out of that building for 300 years. a little step is nothing but a million of them can cause stone to bow.
So it is also with our lives. For both good and bad. Habits of doing good are hard to establish but with each passing time that we do them it becomes easier. good can become a habit. But in the same way, small little things that we keep from God can over time become so great that they smash our relationship with Him. we cannot go into the kingdom with anything other than that which fits with God and small bits of defiance overtime become massive defiance in the end.
2. Choose to love others.
There is a second part to the Great Commandment. When the young man came to Jesus and asked him what God required of him, Jesus not only said that he needed to love God with all his being. Jesus also said that he needed to love others.
You might remember the parable of the Good Samaritan in which the person who comes to Jesus in that instance tries to wiggle out of loving people he doesn't like. in lawyer like fashion this man says but who is my neighbor? in other words can I get by with just loving my friends, the people that I like to call my neighbor?
Jesus answer must have been very very annoying. In the story of the Good Samaritan Jesus makes the hero someone that no one wanted to like, a Samaritan! Jesus was saying as it were that you have to love everyone, even Samaritans.
Jesus says similar things in Matthew 5. Jesus says if you only love the people who are friends with you better than anyone in the world? Don’t even evil people like their friends? No, Jesus says. You must love your enemies just as God loves his enemies. God sends rain and sun not just on good farmers but on wicked farmers as well.
So the command for us to love our neighbor means everyone, both our friends and our enemies.
An interesting observation here is that God does not command us to like everyone. I don't think that loving in this instance is the same as liking. in fact I don't think that what Jesus is talking about here has anything to do with feelings. rather, it has to do with choices.
I tried to word this last slide carefully. Choose to love others. I think there will always be people that you don't like, people who rub you the wrong way. this is specially applies to people who have hurt you in the past.
When we say that God calls us to love our enemies, what we are saying is that God has called us to act lovingly toward them, not to feel loving toward them.
I like to think of it this way. In life we are often confronted with a choice between A and B. Now sometimes we don't know which is the more loving choice. but often we do. Often we know that Jesus would take choice A and not choice B. Sure we can be self-deceived. I am amazed right now at the incredibly different things that American Christians think Jesus would do. Christians often disagree on what the loving thing actually is. God knows, And God is the judge.
As we said on Wednesday God isn't looking for perfection from us. He's looking for commitment. He's looking for our intentions. As Jesus says God looks on the heart.
To love our enemy means that when we are confronted with a choice between A and B that we choose the loving choice. It doesn't mean that were happy about it. It doesn't mean that we enjoy doing it. It means that, by God's grace, by God's power, we trust ourselves to the Holy Spirit and make the right choice.
There are of course all sorts of clarifications here. When it comes to our own morality and eternal destiny, all of a suddenly become good lawyers. We want to wiggle out of doing the right thing so often. But it is true that sometimes the loving thing to do is not to let others have what they want. Sometimes, as one person put it, love must be tough.
For me personally, sometimes I get a kind of gnawing feeling inside of me that what I'm about to do just isn't the right thing. This happens off and on Facebook and Twitter for me. I like to make people laugh, but some things just aren't funny. Sometimes right before I tweet something I'll get this kind of feeling inside that I want to ignore. Some of my friends have suggested that this is the Holy Spirit or my conscience telling me that I really shouldn't tweet that.
But again God is not looking for perfection. He's looking for commitment.
Conclusion
So as we close this holiness series today, I hope that you will make a commitment. it is first of all a commitment to give your house to the Lord. Even though you don't know everything that's in your house, you can sign it over to him. You can say to the Lord, “Lord I'm giving you everything I know that's in my house. I'm giving you all the secret spaces.” You know what they are. Give it all. Give it all to God. Everything that there now. Everything that's there from the past. Everything that's going to be there in the future.
Then commit to choose love when you have a choice. Commit to make the right choice whenever you're confronted with doing the loving thing or not doing the loving thing.
Thursday, March 03, 2016
Constance Cherry in Korea
If you do not know her, she teaches worship for IWU in the School of Theology and Ministry and is in great demand to speak on worship around the world. Her book, The Worship Architect has become the worship book to use to train ministers around the country. She has a book on music in worship coming out soon.
Yet another reason to send your young people to IWU to study for ministry!
Wednesday, March 02, 2016
Sermon: "Jesus Sanctified Humanity"
Preached March 2, 2016 in IWU chapel as sermon 1 in the Cox Deeper Life Series. You can hear the audio of the sermon here.
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Introduction
Like Dr. Ward said a few minutes ago, this is the Cox Deeper Life Series. I think it used to be called the “holiness” lectures, but I’m not sure whether too many of us know what that word means, “holiness.” When I was growing up, a lot of people thought it meant this:
I doubt many of you have any idea what I’m talking about. But in the mid-1900s, a lot of people acted like holiness meant that you wore so much clothing that you couldn’t see any skin. You didn’t wear jewelry, not even wedding rings. Some people didn’t even wear watches. Women only wore dresses. That’s what some people used to think about when they heard the word “holiness.”
Of course that’s not what it meant even then and there were plenty of people who knew it. If you don’t get anything else from today and Friday, get this--when Wesleyans talk about holiness, we’re talking about loving God and loving others. It’s about loving God with every part of you that you know about. It’s about choosing to do the loving thing every time you have a choice.
So now you can go to sleep if you have to. In the meantime, I want to talk today about the idea that Jesus himself showed us what it means for a human being to be holy. Then on Friday I want to strategize with you on a way for us to live a holy life like Jesus.
God’s Holiness
There’s a key verse in the New Testament about holiness. It's found in 1 Peter 1:16. In that verse, Peter quotes the OT where God says to “Be holy, for I am holy.” Apparently, whatever this holiness is, it's something that God is and it's something that God expects us to be.
We don't really use the word holy at all in our ordinary conversations. That makes sense because holiness is about God’s stuff. It’s about the stuff that blew up all the Nazis’ heads at the end of Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's about the sacred, and we don't have much of a sense of things being sacred in our world.
When you say God is holy you're basically saying that God is God. At first glance you may say that I'm not saying anything when I say God is God. but think of it this way. What if I were to say watch out that's 10 million volts. Would you behave a little careful around that? Would you be careful about touching it, whatever it was?
That's what it means to say that God is God. it's to say watch out you're dealing with someone who could blow up not just Jupiter or not just the Sun but the whole universe all at once. If I were around an elephant I’d be kind of careful where I stood. God is a lot bigger than an elephant.
Of course God doesn't want to step on me. At least I don't think so. But we probably take God a little too lightly in our day and age. God's pretty important stuff. I don't get to decide whether God exists or not. I think most people here today believe God exists. If God exists, that it goes without question that he is the most important thing, period.
To say God is holy is to say that God is God. And then you fall on your face, like Isaiah did in Isaiah 6.
When I was in middle school there was a bully whose locker was near mine for PE. Let's just say but I generally didn't want to go to my locker when he was there. The space around his locker was special space, “sacred space,” if you would. You're careful when you were entering that space. you didn't play with his stuff.
Of course God's not a bully. But at the same time we probably move on too quickly from the verses that talk about the “fear” of the Lord. There is something fearful about a being that can create a universe with a word. It is really quite amazing how cozy we are with God and at how little a role he plays and so many of our lives, we who claim to believe in him but act as if he doesn't really exist.
What does it mean for me to be holy?
So for God to be holy means for God to be God. What does it mean for me or for us to be holy? It basically means for us to be God’s, for me to belong to God. You might have heard that it means for us to be set apart to God. That means that we’re special.
It also means that we’re “representing.” When you represent something or someone, you’re not just going as yourself. You’re going as the person or group that sent you. I remember a couple years ago when one of the athletic teams of IWU was somewhere or another and someone thought that they had completely torn up a room and made a horrible disturbance in the middle of the night. But the IWU coach knew there was a mistake because the team just didn't do stuff like that. and as it turned out, he was right. It was some other team that it done it.
IWU athletic teams do a great job of, shall we say, “representing.”
To be holy is to represent when it comes to God.
The first glance that sounds rather scary. That sounds like something I'm not sure I want to sign up for. How could I ever hope to do a good job at representing God?
Not to worry, because God doesn't ask of us anything that he doesn't give us the power to do. And even better, God is not looking for perfection. God is looking for our commitment to the task, not accomplishment of the task.
Jesus showed us the way.
On the one hand, it might seem like another scary thought that Jesus showed us how to be holy. After all, is Jesus God? We would expect him to be able to represent pretty well. He's representing himself!
But this morning I would like to suggest 3 reasons why Jesus actually takes the pressure off the thought of us representing God.
1. Jesus sanctified the ordinary
In case you’re wondering what that is in the picture, it's a trash can full of dirty diapers. Have you ever stop to realize that Jesus pooped his pants when he was a baby? In fact they didn't even have pants and diapers. He just pooped. I'm sorry. As a New Testament scholar I should know what they did with baby poop in ancient Israel, but I just don't know. [Actually, I googled it--think swaddling clothes]
Sometimes we have this picture of Jesus that he was just completely different then we are. But that's not how his brothers apparently felt. Apparently, that's not how the people he grew up with felt. I was reading in the Gospel of John this week how the people that Jesus grew up with were completely shocked to see Jesus doing the things that he was doing. Isn't this the carpenter's son? We know this guy. He's just a guy. We grew up with him! There's nothing special about this guy. Or so they thought.
Jesus wasn't born in a palace. They didn't put him in Mensa when he was in elementary school. There are some stories about a boy but they're all made up. From all appearances in Nazareth Jesus was just another boy.
And in fact I think there was scandal concerning this boy. Can't you hear the people of the town gossiping about how Mary got pregnant before she was married to Joseph? Can't you hear the children taunting Jesus as a child, calling him names that I will repeat here?
Jesus sanctified the ordinary. Indeed Jesus sanctified the scandalous.
The word sanctify is like the word holy. It's not something we use very much in the cafeteria. In fact that makes sense because the word sanctify means to make holy. If you knew Greek, you would know that is the same word and the English has just messed us up by giving two words that don't look the same in English.
When I say that Jesus sanctified the ordinary, I'm saying that he showed us how to “represent” as ordinary human beings. The ordinary can indeed represent the holy.
One thing you'll explore when you take theology here is the fact that we often have a faulty view of Jesus. We have this view of Jesus to where he is barely even human. There was a Christian thinker lived around the year 400 who represents the way we act when Jesus very well today. His name was Eutychus. Eutychus believed that Jesus’ divinity was so vast--just think divinity-- but his humanity couldn't possibly compare. it would be like taking a drop of vinegar and putting it in the Pacific Ocean. It just is pretty negligible.
So for Eutychus, We can pretty much just say that Jesus was divine. His humanity is negligible. It doesn't play any real role. We can just ignore it.
Christianity rejected this position. And with good reason. Jesus is humanity counts.
The Gospels do not portray Jesus as all powerful. The gospels do not present Jesus as all knowing. Mark says that there are some things Jesus is not able to do when he is at Nazareth. In Mark 13 Jesus himself says that he does not know when he's coming back.
How do we fit these facts with the fact that Jesus is God? As God of course he can't stop being all powerful and he can't stop being all knowing. This is the theological problem not the question of whether he's human. We can solve it of course. We can simply say that he in some way did not access these aspects of his identity while he was on earth.
Jesus learned stuff when he was on earth. Luke says that he grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and humanity. apparently, he didn't come out of the womb speaking Aramaic. Wouldn't that have freaked Mary out?!
There are some Christian traditions who believe that Jesus had full knowledge as he walked around Galilee. but that's not really the impression we get from the Gospels. Did Jesus ever forget where he left the keys to the camel? I suspect he did.
Jesus sanctified the ordinary. When we say that God calls us to be holy, we are not saying that God has called us to be perfect. This is simply not the standard that the New Testament expects, regardless of what you've been told.
Sometimes our translations even mess us up here. For example, I actually really like the New Living Translation, the one place where I think it really messes it up is in Romans 3:23. in the NLT, Romans 3:23 says all have sinned and fallen short of God's glorious standard, as if what we fallen short of when we sin is absolute perfection. This is a false understanding of what the New Testament has to say about sin. There is and listen to me carefully there is nowhere in the New Testament where sin is equated with anything short of absolute perfection. There is only one place in the entire New Testament where sin is something that is committed in ignorance and in that place it's talking about Old Testament standards for sin.
A much better translation of Romans 3:23 is that all have sinned and are lacking the glory of God. What Paul is saying is that, in accordance with Psalm 8, God created humanity to have glory and honor in the creation. But as Hebrews 2 says, we do not yet see humanity having that glory and honor. Why? Because all have sinned all have sinned and are lacking the glory that God intended for humanity to have.
So it is bad theology and bad New Testament interpretation to think that's in mean something like “to miss the mark.” I'm not sure where that idea even comes from. You certainly won't find any verse in the entire Bible that says that sin is missing the mark. I get the impression that someone who knew a little too much and just not enough found some obscure reference in Homer to someone shooting an arrow in missing a target and then assumed that every place that that word is used everywhere in Greek literature for over a thousand years was talking about archery. That's just plain nonsense from any informed point of view.
It would be like someone taking some obscure example from Shakespeare and assuming that every time I used a word today, I was using the word that way. It's just plain nonsense.
Jesus was a human being like all of us are human beings, and he showed us that you can be human and be holy.
2. Jesus sanctified struggle.
Jesus not only sanctified the ordinary, he sanctified struggle. Indeed Jesus sanctified temptation. You can see that first from Hebrews 4 up on the board, that Jesus was tempted in every way just like we are and yet was without sin.
This verse is meant to be very encouraging to us. It tells us that Jesus knows where were coming from. I don't know if any of you ever had a teacher who is so brilliant that he or she is very unsympathetic when you have trouble getting your work done. Jesus is not that kind of priest.
Of course he has a right to be. Every time he faced temptation he beat it out. But it says that he's a sympathetic priest. We can go to him when we're struggling to do the right thing and he identifies with us. He genuinely struggled in the Garden of Gethsemane and trying to decide whether to go through with the cross or not. He knows what it's like to “learn obedience,” Hebrews says. Hebrews doesn't mean that he ever disobeyed, but that he struggled with what he knew God wanted him to do.
The one thing is very clear. Being tempted, struggling to do the right thing, is not send. After all, Jesus struggled, Jesus was tempted, and Jesus did not sin. you can be holy, you can be God's, and still have to wrestle with temptation.
Again, this is a faulty view that if we wrestle with something, if we are tempted by something, but therefore we have sinned and are not pleasing to God. That's just bad theology.
The book of James in the New Testament says that it's when our desire has conceived and giving birth that temptation becomes sin. I don't think we realize how introspective our culture is compared to the culture of the Bible or pretty much any other time in human history. We are expert navel gazers. We are so focused on ourselves that we we hardly even notice other people.
So some people when they read Matthew 5 where Jesus says if you even look at a woman you've committed adultery in your heart, some of us can mistakenly think that even having a thought is the same as adultery. But that is not the standard that Jesus is saying here. You can't keep thoughts from coming in and out of your head. temptation in and of itself is not yet sin. Temptation has to give birth for it to be come soon. You have to do well on the phone. You have to fantasize about the thought. You have to move in your mind for the thought.
Jesus shows us that you can be tempted, you can struggle, and still be holy. Jesus has sanctified struggle for us and showed us that we can still “represent” and yet struggle. Indeed sometimes we show that we are gods stuff best when we show others how to struggle and yet still do the right thing.
3. Jesus showed us a Spirit-filled life.
The final aspect about Jesus and holiness that I want to mention this morning is the fact that Jesus showed us how to live a Spirit filled life. The verse I have up for Acts 2 has always been a really interesting verse to me. It’s in Peter's sermon on the day of Pentecost. Jesus is risen from the dead. Jesus has appeared off and on to his disciples for 40 days. Jesus has ascended to heaven. Then God sends the Holy Spirit on the disciples for them to begin their part of the mission.
But what is always struck me about this verse from Acts 2 is how ordinary Peter makes Jesus sound. of course, peter is saying that Jesus did miracles. He did signs and wonders. But look how it's worded. Jesus was a man, Peter says. Peter says that God did things through Jesus. If any of us had been saying or writing this, we would have said that Jesus did stuff not that God did stuff through Jesus.
It's as if Peter is telling us that Jesus did things through the power of the Holy Spirit just like God does stuff through us through the Holy Spirit.
I very much believe that this is the case. When Jesus was on earth, he played it by the human rules just show us what it was possible for us as human beings to do through the power of the Holy Spirit. He was not only representing God to humanity. He was representing humanity to God. He was showing us how humanity can “represent.”
There is no miracle that Jesus did while he was on earth that we cannot also do through the power of the Holy Spirit. There is no wisdom that Jesus had while he was on earth that we cannot have through the power of the Holy Spirit. There is no prophecy but we cannot give through the power of the Holy Spirit.
And yes just as Jesus resisted temptation and lived above sin, so we also can live above sin. of course, Jesus had a head start on the same thing. Jesus lived above sin his entire life. None of us have done that. We've already failed at that one. But in theory, we could do it by the power of the Holy Spirit going forward. Yes, perhaps few of us will. But by the power of the Spirit Jesus has shown us how it would be done.
The key here is to realize that the New Testament does not talk about sin in terms of accidents. The New Testament talks about sin in terms of things we know and behave wrongly anyway. John Wesley believed in sins of negligence, sins of weakness. Theologically, we don't believe that Jesus ever did any of those. That is one big difference between Jesus and us. Jesus did not commit what Wesley called “sins of infirmity” or sins of weakness.
But the New Testament doesn't care much about that kind of sin. The kind of sin that the New Testament is concerned with is when you know the good to do and you don't do it or when you know you shouldn't do something and you do it anyway. Wesley said this was sin properly so called, “a willful transgression against a known law of God.”
That’s the kind of sin God is really concerned about, and that’s the kind of sin that Jesus showed us we could “lick” by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Conclusion
Jesus “represented.”
Jesus showed us that you could be human and be holy. He showed us that holiness wasn't this unattainable goal that no human being could ever possibly reach. He brought holiness down to us. On Friday, we'll talk about how God wants to take us above anything we could imagine. God wants to empower us to love more than we could possibly imagine.
___________________
Introduction
Like Dr. Ward said a few minutes ago, this is the Cox Deeper Life Series. I think it used to be called the “holiness” lectures, but I’m not sure whether too many of us know what that word means, “holiness.” When I was growing up, a lot of people thought it meant this:
I doubt many of you have any idea what I’m talking about. But in the mid-1900s, a lot of people acted like holiness meant that you wore so much clothing that you couldn’t see any skin. You didn’t wear jewelry, not even wedding rings. Some people didn’t even wear watches. Women only wore dresses. That’s what some people used to think about when they heard the word “holiness.”
Of course that’s not what it meant even then and there were plenty of people who knew it. If you don’t get anything else from today and Friday, get this--when Wesleyans talk about holiness, we’re talking about loving God and loving others. It’s about loving God with every part of you that you know about. It’s about choosing to do the loving thing every time you have a choice.
So now you can go to sleep if you have to. In the meantime, I want to talk today about the idea that Jesus himself showed us what it means for a human being to be holy. Then on Friday I want to strategize with you on a way for us to live a holy life like Jesus.
God’s Holiness
There’s a key verse in the New Testament about holiness. It's found in 1 Peter 1:16. In that verse, Peter quotes the OT where God says to “Be holy, for I am holy.” Apparently, whatever this holiness is, it's something that God is and it's something that God expects us to be.
We don't really use the word holy at all in our ordinary conversations. That makes sense because holiness is about God’s stuff. It’s about the stuff that blew up all the Nazis’ heads at the end of Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's about the sacred, and we don't have much of a sense of things being sacred in our world.
When you say God is holy you're basically saying that God is God. At first glance you may say that I'm not saying anything when I say God is God. but think of it this way. What if I were to say watch out that's 10 million volts. Would you behave a little careful around that? Would you be careful about touching it, whatever it was?
That's what it means to say that God is God. it's to say watch out you're dealing with someone who could blow up not just Jupiter or not just the Sun but the whole universe all at once. If I were around an elephant I’d be kind of careful where I stood. God is a lot bigger than an elephant.
Of course God doesn't want to step on me. At least I don't think so. But we probably take God a little too lightly in our day and age. God's pretty important stuff. I don't get to decide whether God exists or not. I think most people here today believe God exists. If God exists, that it goes without question that he is the most important thing, period.
To say God is holy is to say that God is God. And then you fall on your face, like Isaiah did in Isaiah 6.
When I was in middle school there was a bully whose locker was near mine for PE. Let's just say but I generally didn't want to go to my locker when he was there. The space around his locker was special space, “sacred space,” if you would. You're careful when you were entering that space. you didn't play with his stuff.
Of course God's not a bully. But at the same time we probably move on too quickly from the verses that talk about the “fear” of the Lord. There is something fearful about a being that can create a universe with a word. It is really quite amazing how cozy we are with God and at how little a role he plays and so many of our lives, we who claim to believe in him but act as if he doesn't really exist.
What does it mean for me to be holy?
So for God to be holy means for God to be God. What does it mean for me or for us to be holy? It basically means for us to be God’s, for me to belong to God. You might have heard that it means for us to be set apart to God. That means that we’re special.
It also means that we’re “representing.” When you represent something or someone, you’re not just going as yourself. You’re going as the person or group that sent you. I remember a couple years ago when one of the athletic teams of IWU was somewhere or another and someone thought that they had completely torn up a room and made a horrible disturbance in the middle of the night. But the IWU coach knew there was a mistake because the team just didn't do stuff like that. and as it turned out, he was right. It was some other team that it done it.
IWU athletic teams do a great job of, shall we say, “representing.”
To be holy is to represent when it comes to God.
The first glance that sounds rather scary. That sounds like something I'm not sure I want to sign up for. How could I ever hope to do a good job at representing God?
Not to worry, because God doesn't ask of us anything that he doesn't give us the power to do. And even better, God is not looking for perfection. God is looking for our commitment to the task, not accomplishment of the task.
Jesus showed us the way.
On the one hand, it might seem like another scary thought that Jesus showed us how to be holy. After all, is Jesus God? We would expect him to be able to represent pretty well. He's representing himself!
But this morning I would like to suggest 3 reasons why Jesus actually takes the pressure off the thought of us representing God.
1. Jesus sanctified the ordinary
In case you’re wondering what that is in the picture, it's a trash can full of dirty diapers. Have you ever stop to realize that Jesus pooped his pants when he was a baby? In fact they didn't even have pants and diapers. He just pooped. I'm sorry. As a New Testament scholar I should know what they did with baby poop in ancient Israel, but I just don't know. [Actually, I googled it--think swaddling clothes]
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| Image credit: Inga Mun, used under Creative Commons license |
Sometimes we have this picture of Jesus that he was just completely different then we are. But that's not how his brothers apparently felt. Apparently, that's not how the people he grew up with felt. I was reading in the Gospel of John this week how the people that Jesus grew up with were completely shocked to see Jesus doing the things that he was doing. Isn't this the carpenter's son? We know this guy. He's just a guy. We grew up with him! There's nothing special about this guy. Or so they thought.
Jesus wasn't born in a palace. They didn't put him in Mensa when he was in elementary school. There are some stories about a boy but they're all made up. From all appearances in Nazareth Jesus was just another boy.
And in fact I think there was scandal concerning this boy. Can't you hear the people of the town gossiping about how Mary got pregnant before she was married to Joseph? Can't you hear the children taunting Jesus as a child, calling him names that I will repeat here?
Jesus sanctified the ordinary. Indeed Jesus sanctified the scandalous.
The word sanctify is like the word holy. It's not something we use very much in the cafeteria. In fact that makes sense because the word sanctify means to make holy. If you knew Greek, you would know that is the same word and the English has just messed us up by giving two words that don't look the same in English.
When I say that Jesus sanctified the ordinary, I'm saying that he showed us how to “represent” as ordinary human beings. The ordinary can indeed represent the holy.
One thing you'll explore when you take theology here is the fact that we often have a faulty view of Jesus. We have this view of Jesus to where he is barely even human. There was a Christian thinker lived around the year 400 who represents the way we act when Jesus very well today. His name was Eutychus. Eutychus believed that Jesus’ divinity was so vast--just think divinity-- but his humanity couldn't possibly compare. it would be like taking a drop of vinegar and putting it in the Pacific Ocean. It just is pretty negligible.
So for Eutychus, We can pretty much just say that Jesus was divine. His humanity is negligible. It doesn't play any real role. We can just ignore it.
Christianity rejected this position. And with good reason. Jesus is humanity counts.
The Gospels do not portray Jesus as all powerful. The gospels do not present Jesus as all knowing. Mark says that there are some things Jesus is not able to do when he is at Nazareth. In Mark 13 Jesus himself says that he does not know when he's coming back.
How do we fit these facts with the fact that Jesus is God? As God of course he can't stop being all powerful and he can't stop being all knowing. This is the theological problem not the question of whether he's human. We can solve it of course. We can simply say that he in some way did not access these aspects of his identity while he was on earth.
Jesus learned stuff when he was on earth. Luke says that he grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and humanity. apparently, he didn't come out of the womb speaking Aramaic. Wouldn't that have freaked Mary out?!
There are some Christian traditions who believe that Jesus had full knowledge as he walked around Galilee. but that's not really the impression we get from the Gospels. Did Jesus ever forget where he left the keys to the camel? I suspect he did.
Jesus sanctified the ordinary. When we say that God calls us to be holy, we are not saying that God has called us to be perfect. This is simply not the standard that the New Testament expects, regardless of what you've been told.
Sometimes our translations even mess us up here. For example, I actually really like the New Living Translation, the one place where I think it really messes it up is in Romans 3:23. in the NLT, Romans 3:23 says all have sinned and fallen short of God's glorious standard, as if what we fallen short of when we sin is absolute perfection. This is a false understanding of what the New Testament has to say about sin. There is and listen to me carefully there is nowhere in the New Testament where sin is equated with anything short of absolute perfection. There is only one place in the entire New Testament where sin is something that is committed in ignorance and in that place it's talking about Old Testament standards for sin.
A much better translation of Romans 3:23 is that all have sinned and are lacking the glory of God. What Paul is saying is that, in accordance with Psalm 8, God created humanity to have glory and honor in the creation. But as Hebrews 2 says, we do not yet see humanity having that glory and honor. Why? Because all have sinned all have sinned and are lacking the glory that God intended for humanity to have.
So it is bad theology and bad New Testament interpretation to think that's in mean something like “to miss the mark.” I'm not sure where that idea even comes from. You certainly won't find any verse in the entire Bible that says that sin is missing the mark. I get the impression that someone who knew a little too much and just not enough found some obscure reference in Homer to someone shooting an arrow in missing a target and then assumed that every place that that word is used everywhere in Greek literature for over a thousand years was talking about archery. That's just plain nonsense from any informed point of view.
It would be like someone taking some obscure example from Shakespeare and assuming that every time I used a word today, I was using the word that way. It's just plain nonsense.
Jesus was a human being like all of us are human beings, and he showed us that you can be human and be holy.
2. Jesus sanctified struggle.
Jesus not only sanctified the ordinary, he sanctified struggle. Indeed Jesus sanctified temptation. You can see that first from Hebrews 4 up on the board, that Jesus was tempted in every way just like we are and yet was without sin.
This verse is meant to be very encouraging to us. It tells us that Jesus knows where were coming from. I don't know if any of you ever had a teacher who is so brilliant that he or she is very unsympathetic when you have trouble getting your work done. Jesus is not that kind of priest.
Of course he has a right to be. Every time he faced temptation he beat it out. But it says that he's a sympathetic priest. We can go to him when we're struggling to do the right thing and he identifies with us. He genuinely struggled in the Garden of Gethsemane and trying to decide whether to go through with the cross or not. He knows what it's like to “learn obedience,” Hebrews says. Hebrews doesn't mean that he ever disobeyed, but that he struggled with what he knew God wanted him to do.
The one thing is very clear. Being tempted, struggling to do the right thing, is not send. After all, Jesus struggled, Jesus was tempted, and Jesus did not sin. you can be holy, you can be God's, and still have to wrestle with temptation.
Again, this is a faulty view that if we wrestle with something, if we are tempted by something, but therefore we have sinned and are not pleasing to God. That's just bad theology.
The book of James in the New Testament says that it's when our desire has conceived and giving birth that temptation becomes sin. I don't think we realize how introspective our culture is compared to the culture of the Bible or pretty much any other time in human history. We are expert navel gazers. We are so focused on ourselves that we we hardly even notice other people.
So some people when they read Matthew 5 where Jesus says if you even look at a woman you've committed adultery in your heart, some of us can mistakenly think that even having a thought is the same as adultery. But that is not the standard that Jesus is saying here. You can't keep thoughts from coming in and out of your head. temptation in and of itself is not yet sin. Temptation has to give birth for it to be come soon. You have to do well on the phone. You have to fantasize about the thought. You have to move in your mind for the thought.
Jesus shows us that you can be tempted, you can struggle, and still be holy. Jesus has sanctified struggle for us and showed us that we can still “represent” and yet struggle. Indeed sometimes we show that we are gods stuff best when we show others how to struggle and yet still do the right thing.
3. Jesus showed us a Spirit-filled life.
The final aspect about Jesus and holiness that I want to mention this morning is the fact that Jesus showed us how to live a Spirit filled life. The verse I have up for Acts 2 has always been a really interesting verse to me. It’s in Peter's sermon on the day of Pentecost. Jesus is risen from the dead. Jesus has appeared off and on to his disciples for 40 days. Jesus has ascended to heaven. Then God sends the Holy Spirit on the disciples for them to begin their part of the mission.
But what is always struck me about this verse from Acts 2 is how ordinary Peter makes Jesus sound. of course, peter is saying that Jesus did miracles. He did signs and wonders. But look how it's worded. Jesus was a man, Peter says. Peter says that God did things through Jesus. If any of us had been saying or writing this, we would have said that Jesus did stuff not that God did stuff through Jesus.
It's as if Peter is telling us that Jesus did things through the power of the Holy Spirit just like God does stuff through us through the Holy Spirit.
I very much believe that this is the case. When Jesus was on earth, he played it by the human rules just show us what it was possible for us as human beings to do through the power of the Holy Spirit. He was not only representing God to humanity. He was representing humanity to God. He was showing us how humanity can “represent.”
There is no miracle that Jesus did while he was on earth that we cannot also do through the power of the Holy Spirit. There is no wisdom that Jesus had while he was on earth that we cannot have through the power of the Holy Spirit. There is no prophecy but we cannot give through the power of the Holy Spirit.
And yes just as Jesus resisted temptation and lived above sin, so we also can live above sin. of course, Jesus had a head start on the same thing. Jesus lived above sin his entire life. None of us have done that. We've already failed at that one. But in theory, we could do it by the power of the Holy Spirit going forward. Yes, perhaps few of us will. But by the power of the Spirit Jesus has shown us how it would be done.
The key here is to realize that the New Testament does not talk about sin in terms of accidents. The New Testament talks about sin in terms of things we know and behave wrongly anyway. John Wesley believed in sins of negligence, sins of weakness. Theologically, we don't believe that Jesus ever did any of those. That is one big difference between Jesus and us. Jesus did not commit what Wesley called “sins of infirmity” or sins of weakness.
But the New Testament doesn't care much about that kind of sin. The kind of sin that the New Testament is concerned with is when you know the good to do and you don't do it or when you know you shouldn't do something and you do it anyway. Wesley said this was sin properly so called, “a willful transgression against a known law of God.”
That’s the kind of sin God is really concerned about, and that’s the kind of sin that Jesus showed us we could “lick” by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Conclusion
Jesus “represented.”
Jesus showed us that you could be human and be holy. He showed us that holiness wasn't this unattainable goal that no human being could ever possibly reach. He brought holiness down to us. On Friday, we'll talk about how God wants to take us above anything we could imagine. God wants to empower us to love more than we could possibly imagine.
Tuesday, March 01, 2016
4. Three Domains of Morality
I'm about three chapters behind in my summaries of Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind. I've blogged on
1. Introduction
2. Intuitive Dogs and Rational Tails
3. Elephants Rule
1. I have been so crazy busy that I haven't had time to blog much lately. Unfortunately or fortunately, my Haidt book is at the office also, so I can't flip through to catch all the notes I've made, but I'm awake so here are a few notes on two more chapters since I last posted.
2. Chapter 4 is called, "Vote for Me (Here's why)." His point in this chapter is that "intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second." This summary line captures it well: "Conscious reasoning functions like a press secretary who automatically justifies any position taken by the president."
I find this to be overwhelmingly true. Facebook proves it. I know that a lot of the people in my world will vote for Trump even though they despise him now. They will find moral justifications when the time comes. Why? Because a Republican always represents their values the most? No, because their elephant is Republican. :-)
In sum, we are mostly irrational elephants with clever press secretaries pretending to be the real drivers of the elephants. There are some partial exceptions. Those of us who grew up prizing objectivity have developed the value of trying to understand opposing points of view and of submitting to opposing perspectives if they have more evidence, even if it is different from our preferred perspective.
3. Unfortunately, our postmodern environment has largely kiboshed the value of objectivity, even in university settings. Liberal or conservative, universities are mostly places of moral indoctrination, be it Yale or Liberty.
I think my classes push back on this trend. To be sure, I represent certain moral points of view. But we discuss alternatives and we try to discuss them objectively. I always say that a student can take any position in class--they just might not be able to get a job teaching at IWU later if they take certain positions. :-) It's not that we can actually be objective. But if we don't try, all is lost.
In a class last week at Asbury Orlando, a student argued rather strongly against a strongly held moral position. There was a good exchange. Nothing got out of control. We all went to lunch together. That's the way it should always be at any educational institution worth its metal. Any program that teaches the truly "enlightened" way, while dismissing other points of view without due consideration, is simply a program for elephants with clever press secretaries. Ironically, such programs of indoctrination can convince themselves that they are programs for the truly intelligent.
4. The fifth chapter is, "Beyond WEIRD morality." WEIRD means, "Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic." Haidt says what I have long taught--the Western way of viewing the world is not the way most people in most places throughout time have viewed the world. Someone from Africa is far more likely to read the Bible with the right intuitions than someone from the USA.
WEIRD Westerners, to put it in perhaps better terms, are hyper-individualists. Our moral muscles in two other areas--corporate identity and the disgusting--are severely atrophied. Other cultures have weak individual muscles and robust corporate or purity muscles.
So it is almost impossible for many of us WEIRD folk to understand the Old Testament when it comes to purity rules. We want to make the food laws into a matter of health concerns because we don't have categories for pork as morally disgusting to Israel, a food brought into the land by those disgusting Philistines with their reprehensible gods.
5. So we largely do not have categories for the morally defiling (our reaction to male homosexuality is sometimes one of the last vestiges of this moral muscle). We similarly lack comprehension of corporate morality. We reduce "the sins of the fathers passed on to the sons" to consequences of sins, because we understand cause and effect, but we do not understand corporate contagion or holiness.
We read, "you are the temple of the Lord" and we think, "I am the temple of the Lord." What Paul said was "Ya'll are the temple of the Lord." "May the God of peace sanctify me holy" is actually, "May he sanctify ya'll." "Work out my salvation" is "work out ya'lls salvation."
We largely do not understand a world of arranged marriages and corporate guilt, even though that is the world of much of the Bible.
6. I find those three categories of morality helpful: individualist, corporate, and disgusting/pure. He calls them (following Schweder) autonomy, community, and divinity.
1. Introduction
2. Intuitive Dogs and Rational Tails
3. Elephants Rule
1. I have been so crazy busy that I haven't had time to blog much lately. Unfortunately or fortunately, my Haidt book is at the office also, so I can't flip through to catch all the notes I've made, but I'm awake so here are a few notes on two more chapters since I last posted.
2. Chapter 4 is called, "Vote for Me (Here's why)." His point in this chapter is that "intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second." This summary line captures it well: "Conscious reasoning functions like a press secretary who automatically justifies any position taken by the president."
I find this to be overwhelmingly true. Facebook proves it. I know that a lot of the people in my world will vote for Trump even though they despise him now. They will find moral justifications when the time comes. Why? Because a Republican always represents their values the most? No, because their elephant is Republican. :-)
In sum, we are mostly irrational elephants with clever press secretaries pretending to be the real drivers of the elephants. There are some partial exceptions. Those of us who grew up prizing objectivity have developed the value of trying to understand opposing points of view and of submitting to opposing perspectives if they have more evidence, even if it is different from our preferred perspective.
3. Unfortunately, our postmodern environment has largely kiboshed the value of objectivity, even in university settings. Liberal or conservative, universities are mostly places of moral indoctrination, be it Yale or Liberty.
I think my classes push back on this trend. To be sure, I represent certain moral points of view. But we discuss alternatives and we try to discuss them objectively. I always say that a student can take any position in class--they just might not be able to get a job teaching at IWU later if they take certain positions. :-) It's not that we can actually be objective. But if we don't try, all is lost.
In a class last week at Asbury Orlando, a student argued rather strongly against a strongly held moral position. There was a good exchange. Nothing got out of control. We all went to lunch together. That's the way it should always be at any educational institution worth its metal. Any program that teaches the truly "enlightened" way, while dismissing other points of view without due consideration, is simply a program for elephants with clever press secretaries. Ironically, such programs of indoctrination can convince themselves that they are programs for the truly intelligent.
4. The fifth chapter is, "Beyond WEIRD morality." WEIRD means, "Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic." Haidt says what I have long taught--the Western way of viewing the world is not the way most people in most places throughout time have viewed the world. Someone from Africa is far more likely to read the Bible with the right intuitions than someone from the USA.
WEIRD Westerners, to put it in perhaps better terms, are hyper-individualists. Our moral muscles in two other areas--corporate identity and the disgusting--are severely atrophied. Other cultures have weak individual muscles and robust corporate or purity muscles.
So it is almost impossible for many of us WEIRD folk to understand the Old Testament when it comes to purity rules. We want to make the food laws into a matter of health concerns because we don't have categories for pork as morally disgusting to Israel, a food brought into the land by those disgusting Philistines with their reprehensible gods.
5. So we largely do not have categories for the morally defiling (our reaction to male homosexuality is sometimes one of the last vestiges of this moral muscle). We similarly lack comprehension of corporate morality. We reduce "the sins of the fathers passed on to the sons" to consequences of sins, because we understand cause and effect, but we do not understand corporate contagion or holiness.
We read, "you are the temple of the Lord" and we think, "I am the temple of the Lord." What Paul said was "Ya'll are the temple of the Lord." "May the God of peace sanctify me holy" is actually, "May he sanctify ya'll." "Work out my salvation" is "work out ya'lls salvation."
We largely do not understand a world of arranged marriages and corporate guilt, even though that is the world of much of the Bible.
6. I find those three categories of morality helpful: individualist, corporate, and disgusting/pure. He calls them (following Schweder) autonomy, community, and divinity.
Sunday, February 21, 2016
ET15. God's ideal is an equal partnership in marriage.
This is the fifteenth post on Christian ethics 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 was on the Holy Spirit. The second set was on the Church. The third set was on sacraments. This final section is on Christian ethics.
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God's ideal is an equal partnership in a one-to-one marriage.
1. This is a conclusion we reach by following the great principles of Scripture. We know that all people are created in the image of God, both male and female (Gen. 1:27). [1] We know that in Christ there is no "male and female" (Gal. 3:28) and that the Spirit fills equally both men and women (Acts 2:17). So men and women are of equal spirituality and value.
We know from experience that men and women are of equal intelligence. We know from experience that the question of who is the wisest or most capable of leadership between any one man and woman is a matter of that man and woman. Some women are wiser than other men, and some women are better leaders than other men.
The logical conclusion is that leadership should be a case by case question. Which person, man or woman is most equipped and capable to lead in this particular instance?
As obvious as this conclusion is, many Christians believe it is biblical for men always to lead, whether in the church or in the home. This is an understandable interpretation from the letter of Scripture. We would argue that this is a point where must carefully discern the spirit of the Scriptures and take into account the context of some of its specific instruction.
2. We might start with the consequences of the Fall. To the woman God says, "Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you" (Gen. 3:16). You might conclude from this punishment that wives must be subject to their husbands.
But there is a theological problem here. Did not Christ die for the sins of Eve as well as the sins of Adam? It may have taken the earliest church a few years to realize that Jesus died for all the sins of all history. Acts 21:24 indicates that some Christians were still participating in the temple almost thirty years after Jesus died on the cross!
In the New Testament, only the book of Hebrews is explicit with a full understanding of atonement. Only Hebrews says that Christ died for all sins, past and present. Only Hebrews indicates that none of the sacrifices of the Old Testament were actually effectual. They were like rainchecks that waited for the solely effective sacrifice of all history--the death of Christ. Not even Paul explicitly makes a statement of this sort. [2]
The bottom line is that Christ's sacrificial death has forever undone the punishment of Eve. Childbearing may continue, because it is physical. But when we can play out the redemption of Eve in relation to subjection to husbands, why wouldn't we? [3] That is the clear trajectory of the kingdom. In the kingdom, women are not "given" in marriage (Mark 12:25). Women and men stand side by side as full equals in the kingdom of God.
3. So why is this issue even a question? It is a question because 1) we are prone to read individual verses more than see the broader principles of Scripture, 2) because we are not aware of the way in which the books of the Bible were incarnated revelation, and 3) we are unaware of our own cultural influences.
For example, polygamy is fully accepted as an option in the Old Testament. Like the full assumption of divorce, Deuteronomy 21:15-17 assumes the practice of polygamy when it insists that the firstborn son of the first wife is the one that must inherit first. Because polygamy is not a live option today, we find it easy to dismiss. I believe we should similarly recognize the notion of husband-headship as a cultural element in some New Testament instruction.
God's ideal in marriage is monogamy rather than polygamy. The ideal is one man and one woman, not one man and multiple wives. Nevertheless, God allowed polygamy in the Old Testament. Even the New Testament does not prohibit it, as it does unbridled divorce.
However, polygamy is a result of the Fall. It certainly made sense in ancient cultures with a large death rate and where the assignment of several women to one man helped those women survive. The move away from polygamy to monogamy is a movement toward the empowerment and equality of women. We complete that trajectory when we consider wives to be full and equal partners in marriage. [4]
4. Several of the letters in the New Testament also assume husband headship. 1 Corinthians, Colossians, Ephesians, and 1 Peter all do. We are arguing that these instructions play out the principle of submitting to authority in a cultural environment where the man was considered the authority in the marriage. The underlying principle is to submit to those who are in authority over you, not the specifics of that authority itself. If the structure itself were part of the principle, we would expect it to play itself out in the kingdom as well.
But it doesn't. Husband-headship is a structure of earth, not of heaven. In the kingdom, wives will not be given to men. The pains of childbirth and our current bodies will be far behind.
There was nothing unique in Paul's world about saying the husband was the head of the house. Aristotle suggested as much in his Politics, some four hundred years before Paul. Aristotle wrote, "The head of the household rules over both wife and children, and rules over both as free members of the household… His rule over his wife is like that of a statesman over fellow citizens… The male is naturally fitter to command than the female, except where there is a departure from nature" (Politics, 1.1259a-b).
So it is at the points where the New Testament modifies the norm that it is being distinctively Christian. For example, when Paul says, "the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife," he was saying something quite striking indeed for his world (1 Cor. 7:4). Ephesians says, "husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies" (5:28), and "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her" (5:25). These are quite striking in Paul's world.
The trajectory of this teaching is thus toward the equal worth and value of wives, not toward husband-headship.
5. In 1 Peter especially, the structures of that age were assumed as a given--slaves under unjust masters, wives with unbelieving masters, nobodies in an evil empire. Peter tells them to conform and not to make waves. Scot McKnight has called this a "defensive strategy." [5]
Paul's letters also increasingly accommodate these structures over time. Although Acts portrays a Pauline mission that knows no distinction between the roles of men and women, a problem first arises at Corinth with wives in close quarters around men who aren't their husbands. 1 Corinthians 11 sets down rules to cope with this situation of the new age. If the wives will wear a veil, their men will not be shamed by the spiritual activity of their wives in a mixed group.
In Colossians and Ephesians, we see that household codes have developed. Again, they assume the household structures of Aristotle. 1 Timothy suggests that the tension created by the new power women were experiencing in the church had grown so strong that Paul needed to make his strongest statement anywhere on the husband-wife relationship. [6] In other words, this structure is not part of God's timeless plan but was first brought on by Adam's sin and continued in the late New Testament as an accommodation to first century culture.
The earthly structure of husband-headship was thus a practical solution to the tensions of a Christianity that had empowered women and wives beyond what many people in the church of that day could bear.
6. If we have the power to make our current world more like the kingdom, why wouldn't we? When we know what the kingdom is going to be like, why wouldn't we? When Christianity is playing out in a patriarchal context, it makes sense for it to operate in those categories. But when the surrounding culture already agrees that men and women are of equal worth, would it not be perverse to continue with the "weak and beggarly" elements of a passing age (Gal. 4:9)? When the broader culture agrees that women are just as wise as men, why would we artificially continue structures that were a consequence of the Fall?
It is sometimes said that someone has to be in charge in the family. If both wife and husband are submitting to one another (Eph. 5:21), it's hard to see why. And even if this dictum were true, would it not make sense for it to be whichever of the two is the wiser or the better leader? Or to make even more sense, shouldn't it be the person that has greater experience or wisdom in the specific area of the decision?
In Christ there is not "male and female" (Gal. 3:28). The way this verse is worded suggests that it is actually echoing Genesis 1:27: "male and female created he them." But in Christ, "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is not, 'male and female.'" The new creation thus undoes stereotypical distinctions between male and female.
The ideal of eternity is an equal partnership between men and women. If we can put it into effect now, why not? That is the trajectory of the kingdom. The only reason for anything less is hardness of hearts.
Next Sunday: ET16. Sex should be kept within a marriage relationship.
[1] Occasionally someone who does not know Hebrew will suggest that only the male is said to be in the image of God in Genesis 1:27. But the Hebrew word 'adam is here generic: "mankind" or "humankind."
[2] 1 Timothy 2:14-15 thus cannot be used to say that women still lack something in relation to salvation because of Eve's transgression. Either these statements mean something else (e.g., that Mary's childbearing redeemed women from the curse of Eve) or 1 Timothy does not yet have the full understanding of Hebrews. These verses are clearly not the center point for a biblical theology of wives or women in general.
[3] It will not do to make the word "helper" in Genesis 2:18 into a subordinate role before the Fall. The majority of instances of this word in the Old Testament refer to God as a helper. For example, "You are my help and deliverer, O LORD" (Ps. 70:5).
[4] There is a tendency to read modern assumptions into biblical texts. Yes, a man becomes one flesh with a wife, but this has nothing to do with how many wives a man has. A man can become one flesh with each of multiple women.
[5] Scot McKnight, 1 Peter (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), **.
[6] It seems fairly obvious to me that 1 Timothy 2:12-15 is not about men and women in general but about husbands and wives specifically. When the Greek words aner and gyne are used in close proximity, it is all the more likely that husbands and wives are in view. Similarly, the arguments of 1 Timothy 2:13-14 have to do with Adam and Eve, a husband-wife couple.
We are now in the third and final unit: The Holy Spirit and the Church. The first set of posts in this final unit was on the Holy Spirit. The second set was on the Church. The third set was on sacraments. This final section is on Christian ethics.
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God's ideal is an equal partnership in a one-to-one marriage.
1. This is a conclusion we reach by following the great principles of Scripture. We know that all people are created in the image of God, both male and female (Gen. 1:27). [1] We know that in Christ there is no "male and female" (Gal. 3:28) and that the Spirit fills equally both men and women (Acts 2:17). So men and women are of equal spirituality and value.
We know from experience that men and women are of equal intelligence. We know from experience that the question of who is the wisest or most capable of leadership between any one man and woman is a matter of that man and woman. Some women are wiser than other men, and some women are better leaders than other men.
The logical conclusion is that leadership should be a case by case question. Which person, man or woman is most equipped and capable to lead in this particular instance?
As obvious as this conclusion is, many Christians believe it is biblical for men always to lead, whether in the church or in the home. This is an understandable interpretation from the letter of Scripture. We would argue that this is a point where must carefully discern the spirit of the Scriptures and take into account the context of some of its specific instruction.
2. We might start with the consequences of the Fall. To the woman God says, "Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you" (Gen. 3:16). You might conclude from this punishment that wives must be subject to their husbands.
But there is a theological problem here. Did not Christ die for the sins of Eve as well as the sins of Adam? It may have taken the earliest church a few years to realize that Jesus died for all the sins of all history. Acts 21:24 indicates that some Christians were still participating in the temple almost thirty years after Jesus died on the cross!
In the New Testament, only the book of Hebrews is explicit with a full understanding of atonement. Only Hebrews says that Christ died for all sins, past and present. Only Hebrews indicates that none of the sacrifices of the Old Testament were actually effectual. They were like rainchecks that waited for the solely effective sacrifice of all history--the death of Christ. Not even Paul explicitly makes a statement of this sort. [2]
The bottom line is that Christ's sacrificial death has forever undone the punishment of Eve. Childbearing may continue, because it is physical. But when we can play out the redemption of Eve in relation to subjection to husbands, why wouldn't we? [3] That is the clear trajectory of the kingdom. In the kingdom, women are not "given" in marriage (Mark 12:25). Women and men stand side by side as full equals in the kingdom of God.
3. So why is this issue even a question? It is a question because 1) we are prone to read individual verses more than see the broader principles of Scripture, 2) because we are not aware of the way in which the books of the Bible were incarnated revelation, and 3) we are unaware of our own cultural influences.
For example, polygamy is fully accepted as an option in the Old Testament. Like the full assumption of divorce, Deuteronomy 21:15-17 assumes the practice of polygamy when it insists that the firstborn son of the first wife is the one that must inherit first. Because polygamy is not a live option today, we find it easy to dismiss. I believe we should similarly recognize the notion of husband-headship as a cultural element in some New Testament instruction.
God's ideal in marriage is monogamy rather than polygamy. The ideal is one man and one woman, not one man and multiple wives. Nevertheless, God allowed polygamy in the Old Testament. Even the New Testament does not prohibit it, as it does unbridled divorce.
However, polygamy is a result of the Fall. It certainly made sense in ancient cultures with a large death rate and where the assignment of several women to one man helped those women survive. The move away from polygamy to monogamy is a movement toward the empowerment and equality of women. We complete that trajectory when we consider wives to be full and equal partners in marriage. [4]
4. Several of the letters in the New Testament also assume husband headship. 1 Corinthians, Colossians, Ephesians, and 1 Peter all do. We are arguing that these instructions play out the principle of submitting to authority in a cultural environment where the man was considered the authority in the marriage. The underlying principle is to submit to those who are in authority over you, not the specifics of that authority itself. If the structure itself were part of the principle, we would expect it to play itself out in the kingdom as well.
But it doesn't. Husband-headship is a structure of earth, not of heaven. In the kingdom, wives will not be given to men. The pains of childbirth and our current bodies will be far behind.
There was nothing unique in Paul's world about saying the husband was the head of the house. Aristotle suggested as much in his Politics, some four hundred years before Paul. Aristotle wrote, "The head of the household rules over both wife and children, and rules over both as free members of the household… His rule over his wife is like that of a statesman over fellow citizens… The male is naturally fitter to command than the female, except where there is a departure from nature" (Politics, 1.1259a-b).
So it is at the points where the New Testament modifies the norm that it is being distinctively Christian. For example, when Paul says, "the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife," he was saying something quite striking indeed for his world (1 Cor. 7:4). Ephesians says, "husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies" (5:28), and "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her" (5:25). These are quite striking in Paul's world.
The trajectory of this teaching is thus toward the equal worth and value of wives, not toward husband-headship.
5. In 1 Peter especially, the structures of that age were assumed as a given--slaves under unjust masters, wives with unbelieving masters, nobodies in an evil empire. Peter tells them to conform and not to make waves. Scot McKnight has called this a "defensive strategy." [5]
Paul's letters also increasingly accommodate these structures over time. Although Acts portrays a Pauline mission that knows no distinction between the roles of men and women, a problem first arises at Corinth with wives in close quarters around men who aren't their husbands. 1 Corinthians 11 sets down rules to cope with this situation of the new age. If the wives will wear a veil, their men will not be shamed by the spiritual activity of their wives in a mixed group.
In Colossians and Ephesians, we see that household codes have developed. Again, they assume the household structures of Aristotle. 1 Timothy suggests that the tension created by the new power women were experiencing in the church had grown so strong that Paul needed to make his strongest statement anywhere on the husband-wife relationship. [6] In other words, this structure is not part of God's timeless plan but was first brought on by Adam's sin and continued in the late New Testament as an accommodation to first century culture.
The earthly structure of husband-headship was thus a practical solution to the tensions of a Christianity that had empowered women and wives beyond what many people in the church of that day could bear.
6. If we have the power to make our current world more like the kingdom, why wouldn't we? When we know what the kingdom is going to be like, why wouldn't we? When Christianity is playing out in a patriarchal context, it makes sense for it to operate in those categories. But when the surrounding culture already agrees that men and women are of equal worth, would it not be perverse to continue with the "weak and beggarly" elements of a passing age (Gal. 4:9)? When the broader culture agrees that women are just as wise as men, why would we artificially continue structures that were a consequence of the Fall?
It is sometimes said that someone has to be in charge in the family. If both wife and husband are submitting to one another (Eph. 5:21), it's hard to see why. And even if this dictum were true, would it not make sense for it to be whichever of the two is the wiser or the better leader? Or to make even more sense, shouldn't it be the person that has greater experience or wisdom in the specific area of the decision?
In Christ there is not "male and female" (Gal. 3:28). The way this verse is worded suggests that it is actually echoing Genesis 1:27: "male and female created he them." But in Christ, "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is not, 'male and female.'" The new creation thus undoes stereotypical distinctions between male and female.
The ideal of eternity is an equal partnership between men and women. If we can put it into effect now, why not? That is the trajectory of the kingdom. The only reason for anything less is hardness of hearts.
Next Sunday: ET16. Sex should be kept within a marriage relationship.
[1] Occasionally someone who does not know Hebrew will suggest that only the male is said to be in the image of God in Genesis 1:27. But the Hebrew word 'adam is here generic: "mankind" or "humankind."
[2] 1 Timothy 2:14-15 thus cannot be used to say that women still lack something in relation to salvation because of Eve's transgression. Either these statements mean something else (e.g., that Mary's childbearing redeemed women from the curse of Eve) or 1 Timothy does not yet have the full understanding of Hebrews. These verses are clearly not the center point for a biblical theology of wives or women in general.
[3] It will not do to make the word "helper" in Genesis 2:18 into a subordinate role before the Fall. The majority of instances of this word in the Old Testament refer to God as a helper. For example, "You are my help and deliverer, O LORD" (Ps. 70:5).
[4] There is a tendency to read modern assumptions into biblical texts. Yes, a man becomes one flesh with a wife, but this has nothing to do with how many wives a man has. A man can become one flesh with each of multiple women.
[5] Scot McKnight, 1 Peter (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), **.
[6] It seems fairly obvious to me that 1 Timothy 2:12-15 is not about men and women in general but about husbands and wives specifically. When the Greek words aner and gyne are used in close proximity, it is all the more likely that husbands and wives are in view. Similarly, the arguments of 1 Timothy 2:13-14 have to do with Adam and Eve, a husband-wife couple.
Saturday, February 20, 2016
Seminary PM4: There are certain classic spiritual disciplines for individuals.
Chapter 1: The Calling of a Minister
Chapter 2: The Person of a Minister
Introduction
Ministers have different personalities and strengths
We each experience God best in different ways.
1. Every believer is a child of God. God is abba, Father, for every Christian. Spiritual disciplines are not only for ministers. They are gifts for every child of God. They are "means of grace." They are instruments that God uses to deepen our walk with him and our strength to love our neighbor as ourselves. Some of them are inward. Some of them are outward. Some of them are corporate.
2. One of John Wesley's sermons was on "The Means of Grace." He defines means of grace as "outward signs, words, or actions, ordained of God, and appointed for this end, to be the ordinary channels whereby he might convey to men, preventing, justifying, or sanctifying grace." Grace is God's undeserved favor, his goodness dispensed to us even though we do not merit it.
In this particular sermon, Wesley especially singles out prayer, searching the Scriptures, receiving the Lord's Supper. Certainly he also considered baptism (normally infant baptism) a means of grace as well. Other means of grace include Christian fellowship, fasting, visiting the sick, helping others, and many more ways by which God communicates grace to his people. For Wesley, communion was a particularly important means of grace, one that he believed should be experienced as often as possible. [1]
3. In his classic work, Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster classifies spiritual disciplines into three categories: inward disciplines, outward disciplines, and corporate disciplines. He does not of course include communion and baptism, the two means of grace that Protestants in particular consider to be sacraments, or means of grace God has especially ordained for the church to administer.
Foster mentions four inward disciplines: meditation, prayer, fasting, and study. Wesley might have called these "works of vital piety."
The primary object of the Christian's meditation is the Scriptures, although God has also provided wisdom through countless others as well. When we read the Bible as Scripture, they become a means for God to change us, not an object of knowledge for us to master. Meditation, though, for Foster, involves filling the mind with thoughts about God.
Fasting is a way of focusing our attention on God, of freeing us from distraction and purifying our spirits. Prayer is both a way for God to meet and change us, as well as an opportunity God gives us to participate in his mission in the world. Study is a matter of worshiping God with our minds.
4. The four outward disciplines Foster mentions are simplicity, solitude, submission, and service. Wesley might have classified these as "works of mercy."
Living simply reminds us that material possessions are a distraction at best, destructive to our relationship with God at worst. Simplicity teaches us to rely on God. Solitude is easy for some of us, hard for others. Those of us who find solitude difficult need it all the more. Busy-ness is sometimes an excuse for us not to stop and listen to God's still, small voice.
Submission is also easy for some, difficult for others. Some of us like to take charge. But submission to those who are in authority is an earthly reminder of the fact that we are all under a heavenly authority. To confess Jesus as Lord is to confess him as the one who has absolute authority over us. Finally, God graces us with his presence as we serve others.
5. These spiritual disciplines are for all Christians, but God's ministers should be models of their practice. Ministers should model prayer and meditation on Scripture. Ministers should fast regularly and study. Ministers should take time for regular solitude, and should actively do acts of service.
"Personal devotions" are a time-honored way of accomplishing these disciplines. Each person finds a rhythm of time set aside to pray and search the Scriptures. Wesley himself fasted every week from the time after a Thursday evening meal until mid-afternoon on Friday. If ministers do not carve out a regular space for spiritual "feeding," they may find themselves turning into starving bakers--individuals who feed others the bread of life, but are starving from lack of spiritual nourishment themselves.
Next Week: Seminary Person of the Minister 5: There are classical spiritual disciplines for communities of faith.
[1] "The Duty of Constant Communion."
[2] Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1978).
Thursday, February 18, 2016
Notes on Marshall's NT Theology
I'm trying to sum up my notes on the first 200 pages of I. Howard Marshall's New Testament Theology. Here we go:
1. How do we do NT Theology?
1. How do we do NT Theology?
- Heikki Räisänen - We don't. It all falls apart. (17-18)
- Approach 1 - Lump the books together as a quarry for the stones. (24)
- Approach 2 - Impose systematic theology on the books.
- Approach 3 - Just look at the individual authors. (25)
- Approach 4 - Trace development of ideas.
- Marshall's hope - Find inherent principles for organizing the mass of teaching. (28)
- He finds a missionary character to all the documents that can serve as an organizing principle. (35-36)
- Jesus is not just a presupposition for NT theology to him (contra Bultmann).
- Matthew and Luke used Mark.
- In general he sides with the idea of Q as a source.
- "There are goo grounds for assuming that the handing down of tradition in the early church was 'controlled'" (53).
- "We have in the Synoptic Gospels a faithful representation of how Jesus appeared to his earliest followers" (54).
- "The traditions behind the Gospels were contemporary with the period of letter writing" (56).
- "The kingdom of God is the main theological theme in the teaching of Jesus" (78).
- "For Mark the Gospel is more about the messenger than the message" (81).
- "Christ," "Son of God," and "Son of Man" dominate as titles for Jesus, the last of which could refer both to Jesus as one who suffers and as one who will come in judgment from the skies.
- "Only after the cross and resurrection does full understanding become possible" (89).
- Looks to the immanent consummation of God's rule (93).
- My additions: 1) focus on Jesus' death and suffering at the center of him being the Messiah, 2) the repeated sense that only those who have ears to hear will hear, 3) the ethic of loving God and neighbor, and 4) this is a Gentile Christian theology (all foods clean).
- "Matthew is more Jewish in outlook" (95). "A strongly Jewish-Christian audience" (125).
- "The law remains in force for his Jewish audience, but in the light of the antithetical teaching that follows it is the law as reinterpreted by Jesus that is now to be kept" (99).
- "Jesus never speaks of God as Father except to his disciples" (99).
- "The historical Jesus did focus his mission on the Jews" (101)... "but the mission of Jesus is not ultimately confined to the Jewish people" (103).
- "The church is in effect the new Israel" (106). [careful]
- Particularly characteristic of Matthew is that Jesus is the Son of David (112). "Lord" is also more frequent, as is the use of "worship" (proskyneo).
- Marshall mentions that some think Matthew equates Jesus with Wisdom. I think so myself.
- Also Jesus is Moses 2.0 - Jesus the teacher in Matthew
- "The law is both internalized and radicalized" (119).
- Importance of Jesus as fulfillment of prophecy. Importance of righteousness in Matthew (119).
- Salvation language is prevalent, understood in some places as the rescue of Israel. Most of Israel has fallen away but not all (142). Jesus the Savior is fairly unique to Luke. (146) Strong Elijah-Elisha typology
- "Jesus' concern was for the outcasts of Jewish society" (136).
- "The task of Jesus is defined in prophetic terms" (147).
- "The character of the career of Jesus is best summed up as mission" (149). The mission is primarily to Israel.
- "The main theme is that God has raised and exalted the crucified Jesus to be the Messiah and Lord through whom forgiveness an the Holy Spirit are offered to all who call on the Lord" (180).
- "Of all the books in the New Testament it is Acts that most clearly exemplifies the relationship of the theology of the early church to its mission" (157).
- "The work of the apostles is a continuation of the work of Jesus whereby the signs of the kingdom of God are manifested and salvation is made effective in people's lives through the preaching of his followers" (160).
- Gentiles do not have to become Jewish proselytes, yet it is not necessary for Jewish Christians to give up their way of life either. (164)
- "Paul's beliefs cannot be regarded as a criminal offense under Roman law" (170).
- Acts has a strong sense of divine necessity, that things happen under God's direction. However, this is not always the case (not completely pre-determined). (171)
- "The establishment of the church and its mission is the object of prophecy" (172).
- Three major events: the Christ event, the coming of the Spirit, and the mission of the church. (174)
- "The fundamental theological question in Acts concerns the relationship of the church to Israel and the Gentiles" (178).
- "Little is said about the function of the death of Jesus in achieving salvation" (181).
Biblical Theology in Orlando
Late notice, but I am teaching biblical theology for two days next week at Asbury Orlando (Friday-Saturday). Then I'll be back April 8-9. Surrounding these two, two day intensives are 10 weeks of reading online. If you want 3 hours of seminary credit (which will transfer into Wesley or any other seminary), I think you could just squeeze in if you jumped on it.
Here's the tentative schedule right now (I may shift some):
Friday, February 26
Here's the tentative schedule right now (I may shift some):
Friday, February 26
- history of biblical theology
- attributes of God
- creation and consummation
- angels and demons
- Satan and the Fall
- sin and atonement
- God's covenant with Israel
- parting of the ways?
- Walter Moberly's Old Testament Theology
- Frank Matera's New Testament Theology
- nature of revelation
- WWJD and Jesus is Lord
- Trinity and pre-existent Christ
- predestination, election, conditions
- Spirit and the Church
- baptism and communion
- Love God with all your heart
- Love your neighbor as yourself
Sunday, February 14, 2016
Candidates for Jewish Worship
I am working through a section of a chapter that first presents various proposals for entities the Jews might have worshiped in some way in addition to or subordinate to God. My earlier delineation of categories is here.
Category 1: Were other beings worshiped alongside YHWH?
Category 1: Were other beings worshiped alongside YHWH?
- Two powers in heaven (Segal)
- Elohim, the Great Angel (Barker)
- Divine consort, etc (Hayman)
- Yahoel (Capes, Apocalypse of Abraham)
- Metatron/Enoch (3 Enoch)
- Son of Man (Bauckham - "exception that proves the rule," 1 Enoch)
- Moses in Ezekiel the Tragedian (Schenck, in a derivative way)
- Adam (Fletcher-Louis, Life of Adam and Eve)
- Very early (Hurtado, Bauckham, current majority)
- Late first century (Dunn, Casey)
- High continuity (Bauckham)
- Early, distinct innovation (Hurtado)
- Significant discontinuity that developed over time (Dunn, Casey)
- Blasphemy (Segal)
ET14: Divorce is usually hostile to God's fundamental values.
This is the fourteenth post on Christian ethics 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 was on the Holy Spirit. The second set was on the Church. The third set was on sacraments. This final section is on Christian ethics.
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Divorce is usually hostile to God's fundamental values.
1. Marriage is a gift of God's love to humanity. Marriage provides a context of security not only in which children can be nurtured and raised in love and security, but where men and women can live lives surrounded by love and security as well. Good marriages thus ideally result in generations of children whose fundamental psyche is healthy. It helps those in the marriage to live longer, healthier lives. And good marriages can help produce a society that is stable, optimistic, and generous toward others.
By contrast, divorce in general undermines this security. Divorce potentially hurts the mental and physical health of all involved. Marriages involving affairs can hurt the health, both mental and physical, of everyone involved. Divorces often result from adultery, which is an act quite the opposite of God's command to love our neighbor.
2. There were no prohibitions whatsoever on a man divorcing his wife in the Old Testament. Deuteronomy 24:1-5 assumes the possibility of divorce, rather than arguing or allowing for it. It simply says that a man who does officially divorce his wife can never remarry her again. Christians today generally consider this prohibition to be a part of the Old Testament law that does not remain in force today. The reasons for the prohibition are connected to the world of the Ancient Near East.
The mention of a "certificate of divorce" is significant, for a wife without such an official divorce might be left without any means of support whatsoever. She would still be attached to a man who had nothing more to do with her. She would be unable to remarry and unable to support herself, left in a limbo similar to that of a widow who had no family to support her. In that sense, a certificate of divorce was more loving than marital limbo.
In Ezra 10, many Israelites repent of marrying foreign wives in the time of the exile and up until the times of Israel's reform. They "send away" their foreign wives and their children (Ezra 10:44). The implied perspective of Ezra 10 seems to approve of this move. If it was truly what God wanted, then we must see it as an unrepeatable, unique event in Israel's history.
By contrast, Malachi 2:13-16, written about the same time, gives the Christian center point of the Old Testament on this topic: "I hate divorce, says the LORD" (2:16). The divorce YHWH has in view is men throwing away the wife of their youth in faithlessness. Indeed, faithfulness is the bottom line of this passage. Marriage is a covenant one makes with a spouse, and one makes that covenant before God. Therefore, to break covenant with one's spouse is to break covenant with God.
The male orientation of ancient Israelite society is overwhelmingly clear, in keeping with the overwhelmingly male orientation of the ancient world. It was only the man who was able to initiate a divorce, and the woman was generally powerless. In such a context, God reminds the men that God made the woman too. All flesh and spirit is his. A man who throws away is wife is thus throwing away something that belongs to God, and God is a witness for the wife against him. This is an important point--it is at those places where God pushed against the norms of the culture that we are most likely to hear his moving, his trajectory.
3. Jesus continues this theme of compassion toward the wife. There is a tendency among some to read Jesus' words on divorce legalistically, which is ironic given that Jesus' entire way of interacting with the Law put people over rules, especially the fine details of the rules. In Matthew 19:4-6, Jesus gives the fundamental basis of marriage: "Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate."
So divorce is the breaking of this fundamental unit of human society. To break a marriage is to undermine this fundamental building block. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus implicitly connects divorce to the desire to commit adultery. Jesus says that it is not only adultery to commit the act but even to covet someone sexually who is not your spouse (Matt. 5:28). He then goes on to speak against divorce, implicitly connecting it with the desire to have someone who is not your spouse, using divorce as a way to commit adultery legally, as it were.
In Palestine at the time when Jesus was speaking, it does not seem that a woman could divorce her husband by law. She could only physically separate herself. Although Mark has broadened the principle for its audience in the broader Roman world (Mark 10:10-11), Jesus original teaching in Palestine would have told the men of Galilee not to divorce their wives. We thus see in Jesus' teaching his characteristic compassion.
4. One of the most striking comments on divorce is in Matthew 5:32: "Anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery." This is a puzzling statement, at first glance. How can a woman commit adultery when she is the victim of a divorce?
It seems that there can be only one answer. This situation must force her to remarry someone else. [1] So Jesus assumes the remarriage of the divorced woman. Like a football, her divorce forces her to be passed around. So the man who divorces her causes her to shame himself by marrying someone else (the original connotation of adultery). And he causes the man who will inevitably marry his ex-wife to shame him.
5. Matthew does give one major exception to the rule: sexual immorality. We should recognize that the default of biblical instruction is to give the universal principles more than to give philosophical absolutes. That is to say, we should expect that most biblical instruction assumes that there will be exceptional situations. Jesus' message overwhelmingly had this character. There are situations where people trump rules, and exceptions must be made on the basis of compassion.
The exception that Matthew mentions repeatedly is sexual immorality. Porneia probably refers to any of the sexual violations of Leviticus 18. Even in these cases, however, Jesus does not command divorce. Indeed, would it not be most fitting with the heart of the gospel if a couple could find healing and forgiveness even for such extreme betrayal?
Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 mentions a situation in which an unbelieving spouse departs (1 Cor. 7:15). The specificity of Paul's instruction here makes us wonder if he had a specific situation in the Corinthian church in mind. Indeed, some have suggested that he was thinking of his own wife departing after he came to believe. "Let them depart" may suggest cooperation with a divorce, perhaps even the man initiating in a situation where the wife could not legally do so.
6. The Bible never claims to address every possible scenario. Indeed, it would be impossible for any book to do so. We must therefore take the basic principles and do our best in communities of faith to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. Some will try to "get away with sin," no doubt, but God is not fooled.
For example, would Jesus really tell an abused spouse to stay in a marriage of unending abuse? It is hard to believe he would, especially when you consider that the children of an abusive marriage are far more likely to grow up to become abusers themselves. Will there be others who will claim abuse when there is none? Certainly. But God is not fooled.
Perhaps we could say that divorce always involves sin, but God does not force people to do the right thing. If one of the partners in a marriage is bent on sin or perversity, then there is a point where it is time to "let the unbeliever depart." God does so with humanity as well, as Romans speaks of God repeatedly "abandoning" humanity to their sin (Rom. 1:24, 26, 28). Will some abuse this allowance? Absolutely. But God is not fooled.
5. The final piece of this puzzle is the question of remarriage. Certainly there is forgiveness for any sin of which we truly repent. Divorce is not an unpardonable sin. There may be cultural contexts where remarriage is difficult. We have seen above that Jesus more or less assumed that a divorced wife would be forced to remarry in order to survive.
Paul speaks to a context at Corinth where a woman might divorce her husband and suggests that she should at worst separate and remain unmarried (1 Cor. 7:11). As in the case of lawsuits (e.g., 1 Cor. 6:5), it seems likely that he has specific individuals at Corinth in mind. [2] Paul does not give his instructions in a vacuum. Each letter shapes the form of the message to meet the needs of each church or churches.
Nevertheless, we should not mistake the exception for the rule. Paul gives us what should be the prevailing principle. When two couples separate because of significant marital difficulty, their bias should be to reconcile. Before they separate, they should seek counsel in hope of repairing their relationship.
The power of God can overcome any obstacle. No marriage would ever end if both believers were completely surrendered to God. But God does not force us to forgive each other. God does not force us to seek his healing. There is a time when God gives up on us.
So divorce is not part of God's plan. All divorce involves sin. [3] But God allows us to sin, and God often allows a marriage partner to sin against another. There are situations where the spouse who has been sinned against should make an exception to the rule.
The exception rule is as follows. When there is no reasonable likelihood that the sinning party will ever stop sinning and the sin is of a great enough magnitude, then the marriage cannot fulfill God's purpose for marriage. It is not only murderous to the wounded spouse; it potentially fosters a life of sin in the children. The spouse should be "given up." Will there be individuals who will abuse this allowance for exception? Certainly. But God is not fooled.
In such cases, when the marriage is ended, it is ended. Presumably it was not ended until such a height of wrong was reached that there was no more hope. The offended party can remarry without sinning. The offender is lost already.
6. Marriage is God's plan for the nurturing and security of human life. It should not be entered lightly. The greatest of care should be part of the decision to become one flesh. Once entered, one must not render asunder what God has put together. All divorce involves sin, although there are exceptions. Some will no doubt abuse the possibility of exception, but God is not fooled.
Next week: ET15. God's ideal is an equal partnership in marriage.
[1] So also Bruce Malina, Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, ***
[2] For one thing, Paul's focus on the woman in this passage is striking when Jesus' own teaching would have focused perhaps exclusively on the man. It makes us think he has specific women at Corinth in mind, quite possibly women of some means. In terms of lawsuits, the mention of a lack of wisdom is surely a slam at those Corinthians who claim to be wise (1:20; 2:6; 4:10) and have knowledge (8:1).
[3] In some cases, the sin of the divorce may have taken place at the beginning, if the conditions of entering the marriage involved heinous deception.
We are now in the third and final unit: The Holy Spirit and the Church. The first set of posts in this final unit was on the Holy Spirit. The second set was on the Church. The third set was on sacraments. This final section is on Christian ethics.
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Divorce is usually hostile to God's fundamental values.
1. Marriage is a gift of God's love to humanity. Marriage provides a context of security not only in which children can be nurtured and raised in love and security, but where men and women can live lives surrounded by love and security as well. Good marriages thus ideally result in generations of children whose fundamental psyche is healthy. It helps those in the marriage to live longer, healthier lives. And good marriages can help produce a society that is stable, optimistic, and generous toward others.
By contrast, divorce in general undermines this security. Divorce potentially hurts the mental and physical health of all involved. Marriages involving affairs can hurt the health, both mental and physical, of everyone involved. Divorces often result from adultery, which is an act quite the opposite of God's command to love our neighbor.
2. There were no prohibitions whatsoever on a man divorcing his wife in the Old Testament. Deuteronomy 24:1-5 assumes the possibility of divorce, rather than arguing or allowing for it. It simply says that a man who does officially divorce his wife can never remarry her again. Christians today generally consider this prohibition to be a part of the Old Testament law that does not remain in force today. The reasons for the prohibition are connected to the world of the Ancient Near East.
The mention of a "certificate of divorce" is significant, for a wife without such an official divorce might be left without any means of support whatsoever. She would still be attached to a man who had nothing more to do with her. She would be unable to remarry and unable to support herself, left in a limbo similar to that of a widow who had no family to support her. In that sense, a certificate of divorce was more loving than marital limbo.
In Ezra 10, many Israelites repent of marrying foreign wives in the time of the exile and up until the times of Israel's reform. They "send away" their foreign wives and their children (Ezra 10:44). The implied perspective of Ezra 10 seems to approve of this move. If it was truly what God wanted, then we must see it as an unrepeatable, unique event in Israel's history.
By contrast, Malachi 2:13-16, written about the same time, gives the Christian center point of the Old Testament on this topic: "I hate divorce, says the LORD" (2:16). The divorce YHWH has in view is men throwing away the wife of their youth in faithlessness. Indeed, faithfulness is the bottom line of this passage. Marriage is a covenant one makes with a spouse, and one makes that covenant before God. Therefore, to break covenant with one's spouse is to break covenant with God.
The male orientation of ancient Israelite society is overwhelmingly clear, in keeping with the overwhelmingly male orientation of the ancient world. It was only the man who was able to initiate a divorce, and the woman was generally powerless. In such a context, God reminds the men that God made the woman too. All flesh and spirit is his. A man who throws away is wife is thus throwing away something that belongs to God, and God is a witness for the wife against him. This is an important point--it is at those places where God pushed against the norms of the culture that we are most likely to hear his moving, his trajectory.
3. Jesus continues this theme of compassion toward the wife. There is a tendency among some to read Jesus' words on divorce legalistically, which is ironic given that Jesus' entire way of interacting with the Law put people over rules, especially the fine details of the rules. In Matthew 19:4-6, Jesus gives the fundamental basis of marriage: "Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate."
So divorce is the breaking of this fundamental unit of human society. To break a marriage is to undermine this fundamental building block. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus implicitly connects divorce to the desire to commit adultery. Jesus says that it is not only adultery to commit the act but even to covet someone sexually who is not your spouse (Matt. 5:28). He then goes on to speak against divorce, implicitly connecting it with the desire to have someone who is not your spouse, using divorce as a way to commit adultery legally, as it were.
In Palestine at the time when Jesus was speaking, it does not seem that a woman could divorce her husband by law. She could only physically separate herself. Although Mark has broadened the principle for its audience in the broader Roman world (Mark 10:10-11), Jesus original teaching in Palestine would have told the men of Galilee not to divorce their wives. We thus see in Jesus' teaching his characteristic compassion.
4. One of the most striking comments on divorce is in Matthew 5:32: "Anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery." This is a puzzling statement, at first glance. How can a woman commit adultery when she is the victim of a divorce?
It seems that there can be only one answer. This situation must force her to remarry someone else. [1] So Jesus assumes the remarriage of the divorced woman. Like a football, her divorce forces her to be passed around. So the man who divorces her causes her to shame himself by marrying someone else (the original connotation of adultery). And he causes the man who will inevitably marry his ex-wife to shame him.
5. Matthew does give one major exception to the rule: sexual immorality. We should recognize that the default of biblical instruction is to give the universal principles more than to give philosophical absolutes. That is to say, we should expect that most biblical instruction assumes that there will be exceptional situations. Jesus' message overwhelmingly had this character. There are situations where people trump rules, and exceptions must be made on the basis of compassion.
The exception that Matthew mentions repeatedly is sexual immorality. Porneia probably refers to any of the sexual violations of Leviticus 18. Even in these cases, however, Jesus does not command divorce. Indeed, would it not be most fitting with the heart of the gospel if a couple could find healing and forgiveness even for such extreme betrayal?
Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 mentions a situation in which an unbelieving spouse departs (1 Cor. 7:15). The specificity of Paul's instruction here makes us wonder if he had a specific situation in the Corinthian church in mind. Indeed, some have suggested that he was thinking of his own wife departing after he came to believe. "Let them depart" may suggest cooperation with a divorce, perhaps even the man initiating in a situation where the wife could not legally do so.
6. The Bible never claims to address every possible scenario. Indeed, it would be impossible for any book to do so. We must therefore take the basic principles and do our best in communities of faith to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. Some will try to "get away with sin," no doubt, but God is not fooled.
For example, would Jesus really tell an abused spouse to stay in a marriage of unending abuse? It is hard to believe he would, especially when you consider that the children of an abusive marriage are far more likely to grow up to become abusers themselves. Will there be others who will claim abuse when there is none? Certainly. But God is not fooled.
Perhaps we could say that divorce always involves sin, but God does not force people to do the right thing. If one of the partners in a marriage is bent on sin or perversity, then there is a point where it is time to "let the unbeliever depart." God does so with humanity as well, as Romans speaks of God repeatedly "abandoning" humanity to their sin (Rom. 1:24, 26, 28). Will some abuse this allowance? Absolutely. But God is not fooled.
5. The final piece of this puzzle is the question of remarriage. Certainly there is forgiveness for any sin of which we truly repent. Divorce is not an unpardonable sin. There may be cultural contexts where remarriage is difficult. We have seen above that Jesus more or less assumed that a divorced wife would be forced to remarry in order to survive.
Paul speaks to a context at Corinth where a woman might divorce her husband and suggests that she should at worst separate and remain unmarried (1 Cor. 7:11). As in the case of lawsuits (e.g., 1 Cor. 6:5), it seems likely that he has specific individuals at Corinth in mind. [2] Paul does not give his instructions in a vacuum. Each letter shapes the form of the message to meet the needs of each church or churches.
Nevertheless, we should not mistake the exception for the rule. Paul gives us what should be the prevailing principle. When two couples separate because of significant marital difficulty, their bias should be to reconcile. Before they separate, they should seek counsel in hope of repairing their relationship.
The power of God can overcome any obstacle. No marriage would ever end if both believers were completely surrendered to God. But God does not force us to forgive each other. God does not force us to seek his healing. There is a time when God gives up on us.
So divorce is not part of God's plan. All divorce involves sin. [3] But God allows us to sin, and God often allows a marriage partner to sin against another. There are situations where the spouse who has been sinned against should make an exception to the rule.
The exception rule is as follows. When there is no reasonable likelihood that the sinning party will ever stop sinning and the sin is of a great enough magnitude, then the marriage cannot fulfill God's purpose for marriage. It is not only murderous to the wounded spouse; it potentially fosters a life of sin in the children. The spouse should be "given up." Will there be individuals who will abuse this allowance for exception? Certainly. But God is not fooled.
In such cases, when the marriage is ended, it is ended. Presumably it was not ended until such a height of wrong was reached that there was no more hope. The offended party can remarry without sinning. The offender is lost already.
6. Marriage is God's plan for the nurturing and security of human life. It should not be entered lightly. The greatest of care should be part of the decision to become one flesh. Once entered, one must not render asunder what God has put together. All divorce involves sin, although there are exceptions. Some will no doubt abuse the possibility of exception, but God is not fooled.
Next week: ET15. God's ideal is an equal partnership in marriage.
[1] So also Bruce Malina, Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, ***
[2] For one thing, Paul's focus on the woman in this passage is striking when Jesus' own teaching would have focused perhaps exclusively on the man. It makes us think he has specific women at Corinth in mind, quite possibly women of some means. In terms of lawsuits, the mention of a lack of wisdom is surely a slam at those Corinthians who claim to be wise (1:20; 2:6; 4:10) and have knowledge (8:1).
[3] In some cases, the sin of the divorce may have taken place at the beginning, if the conditions of entering the marriage involved heinous deception.
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